assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique” tedi rohadi assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique” assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique” tedi rohadi department of english education state institute of islamic studies (iain) syekh nurjati cirebon, indonesia e-mail: triaincrbn@gmail.com apa citation: rohadi, t. (2015). assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique”. english review: journal of english education, 3(2),174-182 received: 11-03-2015 accepted: 22-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: writing section on ielts test is commonly considered one of the most difficult parts of test. the test takers can’t even understand what to do with the tasks provided. they eventually write without clearly knowing the expected direction. therefore, there should be a fastest way to well equip students to successfully cope with such hindrances. this paper is an action research report of how to make students better understand and answer writing tasks on ielts test by employing probing techniques as one of test taking strategies. the paper will preliminarily elaborate the characteristics or nature of ielts test in general and writing section consisting two different tasks in particular including its indicators of what expected kind of writing the testees should be aware of. it will then discuss probing techniques in details. the attack strategies and their sequential implementation will afterward be discussed. the technique will assist students to respectively understand what and how to plan and write effectively on the test. keywords: ielts test, writing section, writing tasks, probing, attack strategies introduction writing section on ielts test is commonly considered one of the most difficult parts of test. the test takers can’t even understand what to do with the tasks provided. they eventually write without clearly knowing the expected direction (jakeman, 2007:23). there should deliberately be a fastest way to well equip students to successfully cope with such hindrances. probing offers a way out of providing a kind of scaffolding (derek and david: 78, 2006; brown, 1994a: 189) that can be used to prepare students to attack the writing tasks on ielts test in the pre-writing stage (brown, 1994a:156). when people really want to learn something, they ask questions. it is not surprising that for many, questioning is at the very heart of learning, the central skill in the teaching-learning process. questions can and have been used for a wide variety of educational purposes: reviewing previously read or studied material; diagnosing student abilities, preferences, and attitudes; stimulating critical thinking; managing student behavior; probing student thought process; stirring creative thinking; personalizing the curriculum; motivating students; and assessing student knowledge (http://changingminds.org/techniques /questioning/questioning.htm). one of the first directions for improving the quality of classroom questions was determining the intellectual level of teacher questions. in 1956 benjamin bloom developed the so english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee called “taxonomies” that included three overlapping domains: the cognitive (intellectual), psychomotor (physical), and affective (attitudes and emotions). the taxonomies have recently been renewed to be three systems ,that is, cognitive systems (retrieval, comprehension, analysis, and knowledge utilization), metacognitive systems, and self-system (marzano and kendall, 2007:45). probing questions are follow-up questions asked after a student responds to the initial question. probing questions require a student to think deeper than the original response, and to integrate new materials. probing as a questioning strategy can also be called scaffolding (derek and david: 78, 2006; brown, 1994a: 189). in probing techniques, the types of questions used are those that belong to cognitive domain/system comprising of knowledge/retrieval, comprehension, and analysis (marzano and kendall, 2007: 34). the following brief definitions are followed by several sample verbs that reflect the appropriate intellectual activity: 1. knowledge: requires that students recognize or recall information. remembering is the key intellectual activity. (define, recall, memorize, name, duplicate, label, review, list, order, recognize, repeat, reproduce, state) 2. comprehension: requires that students demonstrate sufficient understanding to organize and arrange material mentally; demands a personal grasp of the material. (translate, explain, classify, compare, contrast, describe, discuss, express, restate in other words, review, select) 3. application: requires that students apply information, demonstrate principles or rules, and use what was learned. many, but not all, educators believe that this is the first of the higher-level thought processes. (apply, classify, solve, use, show, diagram, demonstrate, record, translate, illustrate, choose, dramatize, employ, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, write) 4. analysis: educators agree that this and all the following categories require higher-level thinking skills. analysis requires students to identify reasons, uncover evidence, and reach conclusions. (identify motives and causes, draw conclusions, determine evidence, support, analyze, deduce, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, justify, distinguish, examine, experiment) method this study is a classroom action research in nature. it is intended to overcome the students difficulties in writing section on ielts. the participants of the study are 15 students of ieduc english course in bandung. the activities involve repeated cycles consisting of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. the result of one cycle is used to determine the need for the following cycle, until the problems get solved by the strategy (kemmis & mctaggert, 1988). results and discussion probing is selected as it is a technique that enables students to accommodate and construct their own knowledge. teachers do not need to explain or answer questions but invite students to probe the writing tasks by providing a series of questions as proposed by constructivism. from students’ point of view, they could tedi rohadi assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique” communicate directly to teachers as well as concentrate fully to prepare the answers of the questions delivered by the teachers. furthermore, the students cognitive aspects are trained by getting used to process their background knowledge, seeking the relationship one another, and applying them in explaining something new. on top of that, students think that they are given a trust to construct their own knowledge and guided to study independently (williams, m. & burden, r. 1997:65). in teaching and learning process in classroom, there are two major interrelated activities in probing: the students’ activities embracing physical and cognitive activities in which they endeavor to construct their knowledge and teacher’s activities who guides the students with probing techniques by employing a series of questions ranging from low level thinking order to higher level thinking order. the expected physical activities of students are observing (observing graph, identify graph variable, or predict the tendency), answering questions, clarifying and disagreeing, and the cognitive activities of students are assimilating, accommodating, and constructing a new knowledge. teacher’s activities in conditioning probing technique consist of seven following stages (wijaya, 1999:34): stage 1: expose the students with writing task 1 and writing task 2 stage 2: wait for 3-5 seconds to give opportunities to students to observe stage 3: probe the questions stage 4: wait for 3-4 seconds to give opportunities to students to formulate the answers. stage 5: point one of students to answer the question stage 6: if the first response from that student is correct and relevant, then ask other students to confirm that all students get involved. provide reward. if not, give subsequent questions related to the first response, guide them up to phase in which the students get the correct answer. stage 7: give the final question to different students to emphasize that all students could obtain new knowledge. those seven stages can be illustrated in the enclosed flowchart (see the appendix 1) ielts academic writing section consists of two writing tasks. in writing task 1, candidates may be asked to describe facts or figures presented in one or more graphs, charts or tables on a related topic; or they may be given a diagram of a machine, a device or a process and asked to explain how it works. this task assesses the candidate’s ability to identify the most important and relevant information and trends in a graph, chart, table or diagram, and to give a well-organised overview of it using language accurately in an academic register or style. in writing task 2, candidates are given a topic to write about. answers should be a discursive consideration of the relevant issues. candidates should make sure that they read the task carefully and provide a full and relevant response. this task assesses the candidate’s ability to present a clear, relevant, well-organised argument, giving evidence or examples to support english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee their ideas, and to use language accurately. the probing strategy is preliminarily commenced by asking the students to analyze the task of writing task 1. the students are also requested to find out what form of facts or figures representation is used whether it is pie charts, graph, table, process diagram or flow chart. afterward the students are probed with a series of questions concerning facts and figures. if it is pie chart, graph, or table, probe with the following a series of questions that are intended to provide a general overview: what are the key words on this pie chart, graph, or table? what are the headings on this pie chart, graph, or table? what rates and measurement are used on this pie chart, graph, or table? what is the most important/significant trends on this pie chart, graph, or table? what is the best example for certain trend on this pie chart, graph, or table? what is the purpose of this pie chart, graph, or table? what changes have occurred over time? what is the most interesting feature on this pie chart, graph, or table? the aforementioned series of questions can also be followed up with more specific questions that are to lead students to outline their writing. the examples are as follows: example 1: pie chart the two graphs show the main sources of energy in the usa in the 1980s and the 1990s. write a report for a university lecturer describing the changes which occurred. write at least 150 words. probing questions: for first paragraph what do the two graphs show? what source of energies seem to remain the same? what source of energies seem to rise dramatically? for second paragraph which source of energy is the largest and how much? which source of energy is the second largest and how much? which source of energy remains constant and how much? which source of energy has the greatest change and how much? tedi rohadi assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique” example 2: graph the graph below shows the differences in wheat exports over three different areas. write a report for a university lecturer describing the information shown below. probing questions paragraph one what does the three line graphs of wheat exports each show? how? paragraph two what changes have occurred over time with australia exports? how much? what changes have occurred over time with canada exports? how much? what changes have occurred over time with european community exports? how much? example 3: table the table below give information about favorite pastimes in different countries. summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. write at least 150 words. from 30 50 years old tv sport reading hobbies music beach sleep canada 60 22 15 40 3 0 2 france / / 30 20 4 / / england / / 30 21 4 / 20 australia 65 30 15 45 5 30 4 korea 22 21 60 45 2 2 4 china 15 25 60 50 0 5 5 usa 60 23 15 42 23 30 2 japan / / 62 / / / / english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee probing questions paragraph one what does this table presents and compares? paragraph two what the comparison among countries based on favorite past times? how much paragraph three what factors might influence those past times? then if it is process diagrams or flow charts, probe with the following series of questions that are intended to provide a general overview: what are key words from task description? what labels and the order of steps can identify? how is the process step by step from the beginning to end? what is the purpose of this process? how does it work? how do you include alternative steps? what is the end result? example: flow chart the flowchart illustrates the production of coloured plastic paper clips in a small factory. write a report for a university tutor describing the production process. write at least 150 words. tedi rohadi assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique” the general overview series of questions can also be followed up with more specific questions that are to lead students to outline their writing. the examples are as follows: probing question: paragraph one how many stages are there? what are they? paragraph two how the sequential stages? paragraph three what is the end result?. the attack strategy is preliminarily commenced by asking the students to analyze the task of writing task 2. the students are also requested to find out the main essay types and what they have to do for each one. afterward the students are probed with a series of questions concerning the topic and the task. there are five common essay types that are given in ielts writing task 2 as shown on table 1 below: problem/solution, agree or disagree, two sides of argument, make choice and justify, and evaluate an argument. each of essay type can be identified by looking at the task words. the task requires certain kinds of essay frameworks. once the students misinterpret the task, they will accordingly lead to misleading essays in which the students fail to fulfill the task requirement. table1. essay type, task words, and meaning (adopted from slater, 2007:13) no. essay type task words this means 1 problem/ solution what can be done to solve…? how can this problem be addressed? what challenges…? what strategies…? explain 2 or 3 aspects of the issue (1 paragraph each) suggest solutions make recommendations 2 agree or disagree do you agree or disagree? why? explain your position justify your opinion take position defend it strongly. give several reasons to support your argument (1 paragraph each) it is useful to acknowledge the opposite view (counter argument) and say why you don’t accept it 3 two sides of an argument discuss compare/contrast advantages/disadvantages give a balanced presentation. this means you should write equally about both sides of the issues. in the conclusion you can indicate your position 4 make choice and justify from option a, b, c, d, e, etc. choose 3 most important justify your choice each of your choice becomes the topic of one paragraph give reasons for choosing in this order 5 evaluate an argument to what extent…? how important…? what do you think? you probably take a position which neither in total agreement (100%) nor total disagreement (0%), but somewhere in between. explain why, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the probing questions towards ielts writing task 2 can be exemplified as follows: example of writing task 2 write about the following topic: as mass communication and transport continue to grow, societies are becoming more and more alike leading to a phenomenon known as globalization. some people fear that globalization will inevitably lead to the total loss of cultural identity. to what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. model probing questions: what is the task words of this essay? what are key words related to the topic? what are key words related to the task? so what type of essay does it belong to? what do you have to do with this kind of essay? what are you planning to write in paragraph 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? despite the effectiveness of probing technique in assisting students to better understand the tasks and know what to do in answering the tasks, it still poses two major currently apparent weaknesses. first, they deal with the precise time planning since the answers given by students often do not meet the expected and planned answers. therefore, teachers leave the prepared ones and design a new series of question which eventually consumes additional time. then, the second weaknesses are the boredom that is resulted from overloaded series of questions and helplessness or even frustration due to their incapability in answering the questions to cope with those weaknesses, the number of questions should be prepared in such a way that they can still anticipate the unanticipated events in line with the time allocated. in addition, teachers need to be more relaxed and humorous to reduce the tense and fear of being questioned. conclusion probing technique has made students better understand what to do with the tasks provided. they can eventually write with clearly knowing the expected direction in the pre-writing stage. therefore, probing technique becomes the alternative fastest way not only to well equip students to successfully cope with writing tasks on writing section on ielts test but also to assist students to respectively understand what and how to write effectively on the test. in spite of its effectiveness, probing technique still deliberately requires a good time management, an exhaustive preparation, and a quality of teaching in a way that still provides a tedi rohadi assisting students to attack writing tasks on ielts test with “probing technique” space for fun and joy so as to get rid off students’ boredom and stress. references brown, h.d. (1994a). principles of language learning and teaching. 3rd ed. englewood cliffs, n.j.: prentice hall. ---------------. (1994b). teaching by principle: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. englewood cliffs, n.j.: prentice hall. bruner, j. s. (1960). the process of education. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. holton, derek, and clark, david. (2006). scaffolding and metacognition. international journal of mathematical education in science and technology, 37, 127-143. http://changingminds.org/techniques/ques tioning/questioning.htm jakeman, vanessa and clara mcdowel. (2007). insight into ielts. cambridge university press, cambridge, uk kemmis, s., & mctaggert, m. (1988). the action research planner.(3rd edition). victoria: deakin university. http://www.stanys.org/rt/action%2 0research%20spiral.pdf. oxford, r. l. (1990). language learning strategies: what every teacher should know. boston: heinle & heinle. robert j. m. and kendall, j. (2007). the new taxonomy of educational objectives (second edition). corwin press. sage publication company. slater, s. (2007). ielts on tract. south wales: center for learning in university of new south wales. williams, m. & burden, r. (1997). psychology for language teachers: a social constructivist approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. willis, j. (1996). a framework for task-based learning. essex: longman. wijaya, m. (1999). pendidikan teknik probing dan pembelajaran benda tegar. unpublished thesis. bandung: upi. wu, b. 1998. towards an understanding of the dynamic process of l2 classroom interaction. system 26, 525-540. http://changingminds.org/techniques/questioning/questioning.htm english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 177 improving english speaking ability through hypnocative speech method ninin herlina universitas trilogi jakarta, indonesia e-mail: nininherlina@trilogi.ac.id apa citation: herlina, n. (2018). improving english speaking ability through hypnocative speech method. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 177-184. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1567. received: 24-08-2018 accepted: 26-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: the objective of this research is to identify the improvement of students’ english speaking ability through hypnocative speech. the research was conducted at mantika language center. this action research was carried out in two cycles in which each cycle consists of four phases of planning, action, observation, and reflection. here, the researcher guided the instructor as students’ collaborators in implementing hypnocative speech method to improve students’ english speaking ability. the data collection techniques used were observation, questionnaire, test, teacher's diary, observer’s daily journal, interviews, and audiotape recordings. the data consist of collected accent, grammar, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. the data have been collected through a critical comparative analysis technique by combining and simultaneously comparing the result of the first cycle until the last cycle. as result, it was found that implementing hypnocative speech in the teaching and learning process can improve students’attitudes and the outcome of their speaking ability. here, the students can communicate fluently, do not feel afraid, and have more courage to speak the language communicatively, harmoniously, and correctly. precisely, the implementation of hypnocative speech method can increase students’ speaking ability, at least 30.31. keywords: action research; speaking ability; hypnocative speech. introduction in an effort to improve the quality and purpose of learning as one of the foreign languages in indonesia, english gets an increasingly interesting space and interest by a number of participants of education. it is evidenced by the development of english training institutions with various methods that are created in supporting the teaching and learning process. the method was created with aims to overcome various challenges faced by students in learning english. the challenge faced by students is related to the lack of methods that train students to improve their ability to speak english. english is not yet a daily language and is still regarded as a foreign language in indonesia that is difficult to practice in everyday conversation. there is a lot of recognition of learners that they are not brave enough to speak english, they need maximum stimulation in order to succeed out words or speak english. unreasonable fear has always been the subject of discourse in the low level of the ability to speak english. fear is something natural and everyone has it. yet, reconciling these fears and believing that fear is a learning process will lead to new awareness that can motivate students to be braver, comfortable, and especially enjoy the process. this condition really shapes the students to relax and become more motivated in learning. speaking is an activity of delivering an information and it is done by speaker to produce a mutually understood information between speaker and speech partner (harmer, 2000). basically, speaking has three purposes, among others, those are to inform something, toentertain, and to attract sympathy. speaking is also defined as the ability to bring the discourse interactively in accordance with the objectives expected by the speaker or who is invited to speak (brown, 2007). moreover, djiwandono (2008) adds the ability to speak is the ability to express one’s thoughts and content through the sounds of language and mailto:nininherlina@trilogi.ac.id ninin herlina improving english speaking ability through hypnocative speech method 178 words composed in complete language arrangements, such as phrases, sentences, and longer verbal discourses such as stories, speeches, etc. speech ability can be enhanced with hypnocative speech method. hypnocative speech stands for hypnosis technology for mastering communicative speech. hypnosis itself comes from the word hypnos which means sleep, but hypnosis itself is not sleep (wong & hakim, 2009). hypnocative speech is found based on the experience in producing speech through hypnosis style. hypnocative speech is english communication training by using hypnosis and nlp (neuro linguistic programming) technology (hidayat, 2013). hypnosis provides enjoy condition in relaxing the feel and mind. hypnosis is a state of focused concentration and natural relaxation, that is how to relax and override the conscious mind (conscious mind, the will) as well as move the subconscious mind (subconcious mind) (goldberg, 2007). figure 1. hypnocative speech procedure (hidayat, 2013) in the level of 'unlocked your potential', a teacher must formulate what positive things are the key to strengthening students to learn english. besides, it also explores various obstacles found when learning english. in subconscious competence, the subconscious will produce more things that are put into the mind. so, suggesting positive, uplifting things for self-development is better. neuro linguistics programming was introduced by bandler physicist and professor of linguistics named dr. john grinder. both combine the concept of language skills in the method of programming the nerves of each individual (ghannoe, 2010). in the same book, nlp is defined as a science that studies the behavior of the human brain and how we use it, either to improve our thinking capacity or to communicate with others. the activity of human thinking is very important in determining the ability of a person to communicate because the balance of real brain work must be combined with the smooth motor in response. while in the process of neuro linguistics programming, students are very important to stimulate themselves into what they want to be. here, there will be anchor stage and modeling. anchoring language can be interpreted as anchoring, tethering, or approach. yet, in the context of this nlp, the anchoring here is only a metaphor of the language used in nlp to refer to one of the methods in nlp. in nlp, anchoring is one method of communication that uses a certain way so that the other person "does not go anywhere", stay focused and pegged to the origin or the base of the conversation. these ways can be words, sounds, smells, mood, view or gestures. this anchoring becomes the formula of each student in learning to manage their own potential in the best way or in accordance with the ability of students in learning. in modeling, the student will determine how he needs to appear to master the situation. the circumstances give effect to the students to be able to master the material to be conveyed, for example when students learn english then he will try to find a suitable subconscious competence unlocked your potential communicative language learner receptive & productive skill neuro linguistic programming english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 179 model, whether a presenter who fluent in english or a fluent lecturer give an explanation in english. the next process embodied in the hypnocative sequence is receptive and productive skill. in this stage, someone is certain to have been able to practice and speak in english. receptive that is all the steps that must be passed by students and continuously programmed subconscious mind to form a special ability, as in the stages of neuro linguistics programming. here, students are really trained and transposed to form the ability of self with full of spirit. only then becomes easy in communication or productive skill formed. mantika is one of the institutions of english course that has been using hypnocative speech method as an effort to improve students’ ability in learning english. in the preliminary observations conducted in mantika as a foreign language training institute, the state of adults who have gained knowledge in formal educational institutions do not have enough ability to speak english in the real world or just make english as a communication tool with friends. hypnocative speech method is used since it can explore the neurological factors which can balance the study with the management of motivation. therefore, this research tries to identify the effectiveness of using hypnocative speech method to improve students’ english speaking ability. method the approaches used in this research were both quantitative and qualitative approach. this research used kemmis and mctaggart model to conduct action research on improving english speaking ability through hypnocative speech method. this action research was carried out in two cycles in which each cycle consists of four phases of planning, action, observation, and reflection. this research involved students of employees’ class in mantika with a total of 15 students consisting of 6 female students and 11 male students. the study was conducted during the course schedule, i.e., tuesday night and friday night. then, the data collection techniques used are: observation, questionnaire, test, teacher's diary, observer’s daily journal, interviews, and audiotape recordings. moreover, the criteria of success in this study is if 80% of the subjects were able to speak english with a total score of at least 70 or adjusted to the guidelines of the institution of the course and the average number determined is 15 points for the minimum score, while for the maximum average score is equal to 20 points, this is adjusted with the determination of success criteria in mantika. results and discussion the pre-test score was obtained from the test given at the beginning of the meeting to the students. in this pre test, the highest score was 15 and the lowest was 10. the results indicated that the students' english speaking ability was still far from the standard of success criteria determined by the researcher based on the mantika institute assessment guide. cycle i the first cycle was done with a total of four meetings. each meeting lasts for 120 minutes consisting of teaching and learning activities, student portfolio (self evaluation, self reflection and impression of teaching and learning process), analysis and reflection. at the end of the first cycle, the instructor described the procedure in hypnocative speech method. as a follow up step, instructors and collaborators inventoried and responded to suggestions provided by students. the suggestions given by the students were used as the basis for planning in the second cycle. improved capabilities were kept in line with the signs which include accents, grammar, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. the first meeting is a continuation of the research process after the researchers made observations. at this meeting, the collaborators and instructors discussed about the lesson plan. collaborators and instructors agreed to enter the classroom together during the learning process. instructors entered the class on time at 07.00 p.m. at this meeting, the instructor opened the meeting with a motivational greeting and ninin herlina improving english speaking ability through hypnocative speech method 180 buzzing passionate phrases in english. instructors encouraged students by introducing hypnocative methods as a suitable method for improving english language skills. the instructor explained that speaking is an important ability in learning english. this meeting is a preliminary meeting in teaching and learning that lasts for approximately 120 minutes. at this inaugural meeting, the instructor delivered the material on 'personal mastery (introduction)'. the instructor asked students to mention the desired target scale from 1 to 10, the purpose of life, used for what, etc. the instructor also explained what is expected to achieve from each level of the elementary until the advanced level (target scale per level). in this session, the instructor performed a placement test to determine the level of ability of each student. students are able to measure their current ability and what will be achieved afterwards. this placement test is conducted by distributing paper questions to all students and students directed to solve a numbered problem. the instructor noted the basic assumption of constraints that are often experienced by english learners. two things to sort out are the constraints of software and hardware. constraints software of english learners consists of shy, unconfident, afraid of making mistake, uncomfortable, able to understand but can not express, etc. in contrast, the constraints of hardware consist of tenses, vocabulary, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. these basic constraints must be solved by using hypnocative speech method in learning english. instructors described how the human brain is very sophisticated (amazing human brain). this knowledge is known as super memory, which explains the theory of brain intelligence and introduces the concept of nlp anchoring over symbols such as yellow flags, red lights, mathematics, and so forth. this explanation is very important to dissect the sophistication of the human brain and give hypnosis to every student that all human beings have great potential to improve english proficiency. after delivering the material at length, students were asked to respond to the basic spirit of learning english. students were required to mention the purpose of learning english by using english as best as they can. each student must also mention the perceived obstacles in each of them as well as mention firmly and loudly the expected target after following the learning by using hypnocative speech method. the instructor listened carefully to what each participant was delivering while giving input or assisting students in expressing ideas in english. after all the students expressed their ideas one by one, the instructor gave feedback and reassurance that the students need not have any doubts or concerns in expressing their ideas because learning the language must be courageous to speak. just speak and practice. the last 15 minutes were used to do relaxation. each student took a special chair and lay down on the chair. the instructor rotated the relaxation music and turned off the lights so as to create a quiet class condition. the instructor started his hypnosis sentence by constantly speaking and directing the subconscious of the students to relax, calmly and instill in their minds that they can speak english fluently. they have tried to speak english well and correctly. the fourth meeting was the same as the previous meeting, lasting for 120 minutes. however, at this meeting, instructors and collaborators tested the capabilities achieved from the first meeting to the third meeting referred to as the first cycle. this is important as it is a benchmark to know the smoothness, accuracy, vocabulary, and mastery in speaking. besides, it was also done to find out how far the progress of students during the teaching-learning process and the extent to which students master the material that has been taught and learned during cycle 1. the results of the assessment were combined between the assessment of the instructor's collaborative assessment. the results of the assessment are depicted in table 1. at the end of the first cycle, the instructor described the procedure in hypnocative speech method. instructors have much to say about the substance that is expected of the hypnosis english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 181 process to improve students’ speaking ability and train them to be truly confident. students also always ask for stimulus and guidance to the instructor to develop more sentences in english and increase their vocabulary in every meeting. table 1. test results of speech capability in cycle i no. name of objects aspects of assessment total a g v f c 1. object x1 3 2 4 3 3 15 2. object x2 3 2 3 2 2 12 3. object x3 3 3 4 2 4 16 4. object x4 3 4 4 2 3 16 5. object x5 4 3 4 4 3 18 6. object x6 3 3 4 3 3 16 7. object x7 3 3 4 3 3 16 8. object x8 3 3 4 2 3 15 9. object x9 3 2 4 3 3 15 10. object x10 3 3 3 3 3 15 11. object x11 3 3 3 2 3 15 12. object x12 4 3 4 2 3 16 13. object x13 4 3 4 3 3 17 14. object x14 3 4 4 3 4 18 15. object x15 4 3 4 3 3 17 total 236 average 15.73 the result of speech test in cycle i showed that the highest score was 18 points and the lowest score was 15 points. from the results of the test cycle i, it was seen that there were five students whose value reaches a minimum standard. there were 10 students whose value has reached above standard. in this cycle, there has been an improvement in students' english speaking ability. however, researchers continued to take action in the second cycle as an effort to strengthen the ability to speak english. based on the quantitative analysis using ttest for non independent samples at the end of cycle-1, it was obtained t-test 7.27. the t-table value at the level α 0.05 with n = 15 was 1.75. thus, since the value of t-test was greater than t-table, then the test result was stated very significant. it can be concluded that there was a difference or an increase between the initial test result and the final test result of cycle i on english language proficiency test in mantika language center. based on the results of reflection in the first cycle, a class action plan was planned for the second cycle. in this action plan, the instructor prepared the lesson plans that were used to carry out the learning in accordance with the steps that had been set. cycle ii based on the results of the reflection on the first cycle, a class action plan was planned for the second cycle. in this action plan, the instructor prepared the lesson plans that were used to carry out the learning in accordance with the steps that have been set. implementation of action in this second cycle is a continuation of the first cycle. learning in the first cycle was not yet reached the set standard. thus, it is considered necessary to continue to the next cycle. learning in the second cycle was held in three meetings and one meeting to conduct test. implementation of action in cycle ii is a re-training of cycle i with different materials and held in two meetings a week. the learning materials were about super memory, the introduction of quick tenses mastery, quick tenses mastery simple past, quick tenses mastery simple present, quick tenses mastery simple future, and practicing quick tenses mastery. at the end of the second cycle, students had been able to conceptualize and up date information with good sentences. students asked for many stimuli that can develop their speaking skills. the instructor was able to manage the class well. ninin herlina improving english speaking ability through hypnocative speech method 182 as a follow-up step, instructors and collaborators inventoried and responded to suggestions provided by the students. the enhanced capabilities were kept in line with the signs mentioned earlier, which include accents, grammar, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. the researchers and collaborators then perform data tabulation as an overview of the student's ability to speak during the second cycle. table 2. test results of speech capability in cycle 2 while the results of speech test in cycle ii showed that the highest score was 22 points and the lowest score was 18 points. from the results of the test cycle ii, it was seen that students had experienced improvement in the ability to speak with the acquisition of test scores reached maximum standards. thus, it showed that the students' condition improved for the better. based on the quantitative analysis, it was obtained t-count 30.13. the t-table value at the level α 0.05 with n = 15 was 1.75. thus, since the value of t-test was greater than t-table, then the test result was stated very significant. it can be concluded that there was a difference or an increase between the initial test results with the final test result of cycle ii on the english language proficiency test in mantika language center. in the second cycle, it was proved that the improvement of students' english speaking ability had increased along with the maximal level of action in combining the learning method by using hypnocative speech method. this step further answers the hypothesis that the application of hypnocative speech method increased the students’ ability to speak english at mantika language institute. conclusion implementation of learning by using hypnocative speech method in improving students' english speaking ability of mantika language center tebet run well and smoothly. initially, it is still experiencing difficulties and has not run effectively. however, after running 4 meetings in cycle i and entering cycle ii, the learning by using hypnocative speech method can run smoothly and interesting. the actions taken in each cycle are performed by students with enthusiasm and full motivation. here, the students began to actively participate in the teaching and learning process. the students have already understood about the benefits of hypnocative speech method in learning. the hypnocative speech method included several techniques that were integrated into it and it can improve students' english speaking ability. this was indicated by an increase in the number of students who had increased their ability to speak from cycle i to cycle ii. the increase occurred in the students' speaking no. name of objects aspects of assessment total a g v f c 1. object x1 3 4 4 4 3 18 2. object x2 3 4 4 4 3 18 3. object x3 3 4 5 3 4 19 4. object x4 3 4 5 4 4 20 5. object x5 4 3 5 4 4 20 6. object x6 4 4 4 4 4 20 7. object x7 5 3 4 4 3 19 8. object x8 4 4 4 4 3 19 9. object x9 5 4 4 4 5 22 10. object x10 3 3 5 4 3 18 11. object x11 4 5 5 3 4 21 12. object x12 5 3 5 4 3 20 13. object x13 5 3 4 4 3 19 14. object x14 3 4 4 4 4 19 15. object x15 5 3 4 3 4 19 total 291 average 19.4 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 183 ability that was from 14.77 percent in the first cycle and reached 17.2 percent in the second cycle. thus, there was a significant increase from cycle i to cycle ii. in the second cycle, it was proved that the improvement of students' english speaking ability had increased along with the maximal level of action in combining the learning method by using hypnocative speech method. this step further answers the hypothesis that the application of hypnocative speech method increased the students’ ability to speak english at mantika language institute. references brown, d. (2007). language assessment: principles and classroom practice. white plains, ny:pearson education. bygate, m. (2001). researching pedagogic tasks: second language learning, teaching, and testing. uk: longman. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of language teaching. white plains, ny: pearson education. harmer, j. (2000). how to teach english. london: longman. heaton, j. b. (1989). writing english language test. london: longman. kember, d. (2000). action learning and action research: improving the quality of teaching and learning. london: biddles ltd. nunan, d. (1992). research methods in language learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. sugandi, a. (2004). teori pembelajaran. semarang: upt mkk unnes. tarigan, h. g. (1985). berbicara sebagai suatu keterampilan berbahasa. bandung: angkasa. valette, r. m. (1967). modern language testing. new york: harcourt brace javanovich. ninin herlina improving english speaking ability through hypnocative speech method 184 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 83 teaching and learning english for visually impaired students: an ethnographic case study susanto english education department, bandar lampung university, indonesia centre for studies in linguistics, bandar lampung university, indonesia e-mail: susanto@ubl.ac.id deri sis nanda english education department, bandar lampung university, indonesia centre for studies in linguistics, bandar lampung university, indonesia e-mail: derisisnanda@ubl.ac.id apa citation: susanto, & nanda, d. s. (2018). teaching and learning english for visually impaired students: an ethnographic case study. english review: journal of english education 7(1), 83-92. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1530. received: 23-08-2018 accepted: 28-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: in this article we report an ethnographic case study of observing the teaching and learning of english at a school for visually impaired students in bandar lampung, indonesia. data collection included student and teacher interviews. it also covered class observation and used a social constructivist framework of disability. the study revealed that the students received inadequate modifications of instruction in foreign language learning. however, the students used a variety of resources with the screen reader technology such as non visual desktop access (nvda) and job access with speech (jaws). these findings suggest that visually impaired students actually can have unique ways of learning foreign language supported by the assistive technology. these abilities should be acknowledged to obtain the perspectives of students who receive disability specific education. moreover, the study might provide a further facet to the research especially on the importance of learning strategies in special education. keywords: visual impairment; language education; learning strategy; special education. introduction for the education system in indonesia, learning english as a foreign language is required in building the global competitive skill focusing on knowledge and performance. communication skill in english can bring more opportunities for the citizens in national and international labor market. therefore, english is one of the subjects being taught in the schools in indonesia. but, the english language course provided in the schools may not be designed properly for visually impaired students who have loss of vision. basically, visually impaired students pose difficulties in learning foreign language since human vision serves as a major stimulus for learning a language (agesa, 2014; arslantaş, 2017). without vision, the students rely on the remaining senses of hearing and motor-kinesthetic feedback in learning. in teaching and learning the language, at least there are two basic barriers found in the classroom. the first is when the teaching materials are sight based lessons. the lessons consist of materials with visual format such as pictures. then, the classroom may face difficulties to avoid pedagogical methods with sight based on visual perception. the second is when the teachers are not aware of the specific needs of the students and the general implications of their visual impairments. they are not aware of how to behave towards the students. also, they are not aware what the cognitive implications of the visual impairments for the students are. this may implicates slowing down the learning process in the classroom and the learning outcome is not maximum. in the mailto:susanto@ubl.ac.id mailto:derisisnanda@ubl.ac.id susanto & deri sis nanda teaching and learning english for visually impaired students: an ethnographic case study 84 study on observing the teaching and learning of english at a school for visually impaired students in bandar lampung, we underline those two basic barriers. we explore the students and teachers‟ experiences in the classrooms and the classroom interaction and pedagogy use. by the constitution, the government of indonesia is required to achieve not only the realization of justice and prosperity, but also the intelligence and welfare of the entire community, including the education for disabilities, e.g. visual impaired citizens. therefore, as ruled in its national education system in the country, we could find special education intended for children with special needs. in the system, the special education is available for the levels of primary and secondary education. the system has the management patterns of sekolah luar biasa (slb) „schools for special education‟ consisting of six types:  slb type a for visual impairment;  slb type b for hearing and speaking impairment;  slb type c for mental retardation;  slb type d for physical disability;  slb type e for the unsociable;  slb type g for multiple disabilities. categorizing the management patterns into the types of disabilities in indonesia may result in discriminatory treatment for the students if the special curriculum is not well prepared and the teachers are not well trained to follow the future trends in inclusive education (florian, 2008). besides, in the special system within all types of the management patterns, the curriculum should not only anticipate the inclusive behaviours, conditions and processes comparing with the exclusive counterparts (nugent, 2018), but also enhance the students‟ access to learning and social opportunities (whitburn, 2014) especially in the context of developing countries (birchler & michaelow, 2016; masino & zarazúa, 2016). in our ethnographic case study of observing the teaching and learning of english at a school for visually impaired students, we adopted a social constructivist framework. the framework approaches disability as a construction of social relations marginalizing those with bodies considered different from the normally functioning body. the social model differentiates between the physical limitation of impairment and the social construction of disability. as the matter of the physical limitation, the impairment involves a diminution of sight, hearing, mobility, and so on. while in the social construction, labelling disability could mean as a social process that turns an impairment into a negative by creating barriers to access. the impairment only becomes a disability when the ambient society creates environments with barriers (depoy & gilson, 2011). the social constructivist thinks that the impairment is not only seen as biological, objective, and static realities. but, it is contextual and linked to access in society (thompson, 1997). therefore, in the study, visual impairment is not a disabling physical limitation in itself, but a limitation placed on individuals by societal rules that define what a norm should be (casper & talley, 2005). this gives rise to the following questions for the study:  in the classroom, what strategies do the teacher and visual impaired students employ for teaching and learning english as a foreign language?  what are the visually impaired students‟ perspectives on their experiences in learning english?  what implications for the research and practice of special education do these findings have? method to answer the questions, we conducted an ethnographic case study of english learning classes at a school for visually impaired students (slb type c) in lampung, a southern part in sumatra island of indonesia. the school was established in 1993 and now it has 33 students in total. the study is from april to june 2108. a total of three teachers (ages 28–45; 1 male, 2 females) and 15 students (ages 9–18; 11 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 85 males, 4 females) were observed in 4 classes. students‟ vision varied from low vision to total blindness. figure 1. the students at the school for visually impaired students in bandar lampung, indonesia. the classroom observations were participant in nature (reason, 1998; cf. burns, 2018; jones, isham, & taylor, 2018). we participated in and occasionally taught some of the classes. the observations and interviews were audio and video-recorded. field notes were also taken. the field notes were written in a notebook. the typed notes were taken on relevant information from viewing the video recordings of classes. in addition to the observations, interviews were conducted with selected participants including the teachers and students. the interviews were semi-structured. in the interviews, we allowed for unwritten followup questions and for the conversation to cover relevant areas. questions for the students included their likes and dislikes of learning english and how it related to their impairments, and their communication experiences at the school. questions for the teachers included their perception on the general abilities and desires of visually impaired students and their instruction in the classroom for the students. table 1 shows the list of the predetermined questions asked to the students and the teachers. table 1. predetermined questions asked to the students and the teachers. interview questions for students  can you tell me about learning english in your class?  what has been your most favorite part of your english class?  what has been your least favorite part of your english class?  do you like learning english? why?  do you think learning english is important? interview questions for teachers  in what ways is teaching visually impaired students similar and different from sighted students?  what skill and knowledge do you want your students to gain in your classes?  how do you communicate with your students?  i noticed that you tried a particular pedagogical technique in class. why did you do that?  did you think it was successful? susanto & deri sis nanda teaching and learning english for visually impaired students: an ethnographic case study 86 we used the data from observations and interviews for themes that pertained to english learning as it relates to visual impairment. the themes were not determined a priori, but instead emerged from review of the data (atkinson & hammersley, 1998; cf. savage, 2013). to verify these themes, we used triangulation (stake, 2005). the data was triangulated in two ways: investigator and methodological triangulations (archibald, 2015; denzin, 2006). for investigator triangulation, we independently analyzed the data, shared initial themes through memos and discussions, and then came to consensus on the emergent themes. for methodological triangulation, we used more than one method to gather data. the themes gathered from the data sources of teacher interviews, student interviews, and observation. we validate one another and provide different perspectives on the same theme. results and discussion two common themes emerged through the observations and interviews, i.e. firstly, students and teachers‟ experiences in the classrooms; secondly, the classroom interaction and pedagogy use. students and teachers’ experiences in the classrooms in interviews, students discussed their struggles in learning english. they described that some of their teachers were unknowledgeable to effectively teach them. they also thought that their teacher was lacking an interest to help them succeed because of the extra effort required to understand and provide for their needs. student rz said, “in english classroom, i had to do a lot of works to learn english but my teacher did not help me much in the classroom.” while student wd said, “my teacher called me to read difficult words and she did not explain the meaning of the words clearly.” student sh described her experiences in the classroom as frustrating because her teacher was insensitive to her needs during her learning english in the classroom. her comments have called attention to an issue that, from her perspective, this lack of care affected badly her learning english in the classroom. however, students sr, ay and nk reported that in spite of having difficulties, they used a variety of resources with the help of non visual desktop access (nvda) and job access with speech (jaws): “all materials are difficult, but we used nvda and jaws to help us”. these students realized that learning materials in the classroom were not easy, but the screen reader technology can help them to get various materials from any resources for learning english. figure 2 illustrates the use of screen reader technology in the classroom. figure 2. the use of screen reader technology by visual impaired students in the classroom. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 87 meanwhile, teacher ek emphasized the strategy of peer learning for studying vocabularies in place of reading braille learning materials, “i don‟t use braille materials for learning new vocabularies because the students would still end up memorizing the words.” further she commented that braille takes a longer time to learn new words in the classroom. and, it creates an added step to the learning process that is not essential to learning the new words for the students. in learning vocabularies, we find that some students did not like using braille. student ag said of his experiences with braille, “i can learn some words with braille. but, i thought it was confusing.” he then added, “if i used it, i would still be memorizing the new words. so why continue with braille if i can learn by my ears and i still have to memorize the words anyway?” students gv, jw and ds found that braille in learning new words was inconvenient. they felt that it was also timeconsuming for them. we noticed that in the classroom, the students learnt and memorized the new words and they preferred to give up using of braille texts completely unless the teacher used the texts. the classroom interaction and pedagogy use when teaching and learning english, the teacher and students worked out various ways of communicating with one another. in the classroom, the students could not rely on visual cues. therefore, communication through spoken language became important. for an example, students nk and st, often said repeatedly to each other during learning new words. and teacher ac, often tried to help them to pronounce and communicate the new words among them and other students in the classroom intensively by tapping their shoulders. she believed that this act of tapping gesture can stimulate the students‟ active participation. figure 3. classroom interaction with visual impaired students. teacher ac often avoided asking her students to match the vocabulary to the abstract meaning as always done by other teachers in the school. for her, it was more important to introduce the vocabulary with the concrete meaning connected with individual student‟s experience. for her class instruction, which typically consisted of four to six students, as a result, she would lead her students to learn the new words with background stories. the stories related susanto & deri sis nanda teaching and learning english for visually impaired students: an ethnographic case study 88 to daily experiences can vary from one student to another student. in another classroom, teacher mt often had his students work in pairs to learn english vocabulary by using braille. unfortunately, his students nv and dt thought that learning the vocabulary in that way failed to help them learn and memorize many words. they also opined that it was not an effective method in the classroom. the students place the blame of the ineffectiveness on the teacher. they believed their teacher neglected to modify instruction and material to be more interesting. the teacher‟s inadequate inclusion of instructional practices might result in the use of ineffective pedagogy and visual impaired students could perceive it as the barrier to access their learning outcome (davis, 2002). figure 4. a braille text book used in learning english for visual impaired students. however, students hd and sf enjoyed their experiences in learning english. in their class, teacher mt used a role-play pedagogy. he asked his students‟ to play a simple drama by memorizing some dialogues. the students were allowed to improvise the dialogues. in the drama performance, the students got new words easily from the dialogues. besides, a braille text book was also used in the classroom (fig. 4). in another classroom, which has only one student, i.e. student st, he also used the braille text book. moreover, learning process in the classroom was accompanied with the musical learning (fig. 5). for him, english can be learnt through songs and he believed it was a good way for his student to learn a foreign language, at least from its melody and prosody. his belief is in line with the empirical studies showing that prosody is one of the critical elements in learning or acquiring language competence (susanto, 2016; weber, braun & crocker, 2006). english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 89 figure 5. musical learning for visual impaired students. for teachers ek, ac and mt, a braille text book should not be ruled out as a resource in the school for visually impaired students. although students can learn english without the aid of braille text, it should be still considered as a necessary skill for teaching students with visual impairment. therefore, they believed that it was compulsory to teach the students how to read and write braille text (see bozic & mccall, 2007). figure 6 illustrates a reglet, the tool for writing braille text, used in the school for visual impaired students. figure 6. a reglet as the tool for writing braille text used in the school. from a social constructivist framework of disability (see also bolt, 2005), the teachers‟ suggestions on the emphasis on using braille text in learning english might create barriers to achieve fast language learning outcome (danforth & gabel, 2006). this could ostracize the maximal use of listening for visual impaired students to learn english. students with visual impairment could well prepared to learn a foreign language relying on their hearing sense. thus, listening skill could be focused for visual impaired students. in our observation, visually impaired students can have unique ways of learning foreign language, for examples by the assistive technology as experienced by students sr, ay and nk (see hersh & johnson, 2008); by role-play pedagogy as experienced by students hd and sf; or by musical instrument as experienced by student st (see goldstein, 2000). these abilities should be acknowledged to obtain the perspectives of students who receive disability specific education (gabel, 2005) that can be incorporated with the perspective susanto & deri sis nanda teaching and learning english for visually impaired students: an ethnographic case study 90 from the teachers or even from the parents (jenks, 2005). the intersection of various pedagogies in learning language for visual impaired students with the ability of reading braille texts might get beneficial. however, we suggest that the experiences of those with disabilities need to be more explored into the research within foreign language education to understand more about disability (siebers, 2006). conclusion in this article, we discussed our observation on the teaching and learning of english at a school for visually impaired students in indonesia. it covered the students and teachers‟ experiences in the classrooms. it also included the discussion on the classroom interaction and pedagogy use. it was found that though the students received inadequate modifications of instruction in foreign language learning, they used a variety of resources with the screen reader technology such as non visual desktop access (nvda) and job access with speech (jaws). moreover, they could learn the language by role-play pedagogy and musical instrument as well. these findings suggest that visually impaired students actually can have unique ways of learning foreign language and these abilities should be acknowledged to obtain the perspectives of students who receive disability specific education. the study might provide a further facet to the research especially on the importance of learning strategies in special education. acknowledgment the work described in this paper was supported by a research grant from the indonesian ministry of research, technology and higher education (pdupt scheme, 2018). the authors also thank the principal, teachers and students in the participating school. references agesa, l. (2014). challenges faced by learners with visual impairments in inclusive setting in transnzoia county. journal of education and practice, 5(29), 185-192. archibald, m. m. (2015). investigator triangulation: a collaborative strategy with potential for mixed methods research. journal of mixed methods research, 10(3), 228-250. arslantaş, t. k. (2017). foreign language education of visually impaired individuals: a review of pervasive studies. ihead: ihlara journal of educational research, 2(2), 95-104. atkinson, p., & hammersley, m. (1998). ethnography and participant observation. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), strategies of qualitative inquiry (pp. 110-136). thousand oaks, ca: sage. birchler, k., & michaelow, k. (2016). making aid work for education in developing countries: an analysis of aid effectiveness for primary education coverage and quality. international journal of educational development, 48, 37-52. bolt, d. (2005). from blindness to visual impairment: terminological typology and the social model of disability. disability & society, 20, 539–552. bozic, n., & mccall, s. (2007). microcomputer software: developing braille reading skills. british journal of special education, 20(2), 58. burns, d. (2018). deepening and scaling participatory research with the poorest and most marginalised. european journal of operational research, 268(3), 865-874. casper, m. j., & talley, h. l. (2005). preface: ethnography and disability studies. journal of contemporary ethnography, 34(2), 115–120. danforth, d., & gabel, s. l. (2006). vital questions facing disability studies in education. new york, ny: peter lang. davis, l. j. (2002). bending over backwards: disability, dismodernism, and other difficult positions. new york, ny: new york university press. denzin, n. k. (2006). sociological methods: a sourcebook. piscataway, nj: transaction publishers. depoy, e., & gilson, s. f. (2011). studying disability: multiple theories and responses. thousand oaks, ca: sage. florian, l. (2008). special or inclusive education: future trends. british journal of special education, 35(4), 202-208. gabel, s. l. (2005). disability studies in education: readings in theory and method. new york, ny: peter lang. goldstein, d. (2000). music pedagogy for the blind. international journal of music education, 35, 35–39. hersh, m. a., & johnson, m. a. (2008). disability and assistive technology systems. in m. a. hersh & m. a. johnson (eds.), assistive technology for visually impaired and blind people (pp. 1-50). london: springer. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 91 jenks, e. b. (2005). parents‟ stories of raising children with visual impairments in a sighted world. journal of contemporary ethnography, 34, 143–169. jones, c. b., isham, l., & taylor, j. (2018). the complexities and contradictions in participatory research with vulnerable children and young people: a qualitative systematic review. social science & medicine, 215, 80-91. masino, s., & zarazúa, m. n. (2016). what works to improve the quality of student learning in developing countries? international journal of educational development, 48, 53-65. nugent, m. (2018). reframing inclusion: an exclusive–inclusive approach. british journal of special education, 45(2), 141–156. reason, p. (1998). three approaches to participatory inquiry. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), strategies of qualitative inquiry (pp. 324-338). thousand oaks, ca: sage. savage, j. (2013). participative observation: standing in the shoes of others. qualitative health research, 10(3), 324-339. siebers, t. (2006). disability theory. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. stake, p. (2005). qualitative case study. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 433–466). new york, ny: sage. susanto (2016). a case study of prosodic phrasal grouping and intonational prominence in language acquisition. english review: journal of english education, 4(2), 289-295. thompson, r. g. (1997). extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in american culture and literature. new york, ny: columbia university press. weber, a., braun, b., & crocker, m. w. (2006). finding referents in time: eye-tracking evidence for the role of contrastive accents. language and speech, 49(3), 367– 92. whitburn, b. (2014). accessibility and autonomy preconditions to „our‟ inclusion: a grounded theory study of the experiences of secondary students with vision impairment. journal of research in special educational needs, 14(1), 3–15. susanto & deri sis nanda teaching and learning english for visually impaired students: an ethnographic case study 92 collaborative strategic reading implementation to improve students’ reading comprehension english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee collaborative strategic reading implementation to improve students’ reading comprehension desy olivia riani department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: oliviadesy309@ymail.com apa citation: riani, d. o. (2013). collaborative strategic reading implementation to improve students’ reading comprehension. english review: journal of english education, 1(2), 231-239 received: 02-03-2013 accepted: 13-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: this collaborative action research is aimed to find out whether or not the implementation of collaborative strategic reading (csr) improves students' reading comprehension and also to identify students' attitude towards the implementation of csr. csr is reading strategy that employs four strategies namely preview, click and clunk, get the gist and wrap up during students’ cooperative learning. a class of eleventh grade students of a public senior high school in majalengka, west java, indonesia is participated as the participant of the study. the required data were collected through the use of questionnaire, observation checklist, and reading test. the data from the questionnaire indicated that 82% students had positive attitude toward the implementation of csr. they feel that csr improves their motivation in learning english and csr brings more fun to the process of learning. moreover, it was found from observation data that the students were actively participated during csr implementation and they were motivated when comprehending a text by means csr strategy. finally, the study proved that csr improved students’ reading comprehension. students’ mean score of reading test in the beginning of the study was 67, meanwhile, after applying csr as reading strategy, their mean scores improved to 88. keywords: csr, reading comprehension, action research. introduction as one of the four language skills, reading plays an important role in enhancing students’ english ability. reading has a function as a tool to access information. according to anderson, hiebert, scott, and wilkinson (1985, p.7), “reading is the process of constructing meaning from written texts. it is a complex skill requiring the coordination of a number of interrelated sources of information.” it means that reading is a complicated process of extracting meaning from written texts and in order to be able to read, information sources are needed. the information sources should be comprehensible and interconnected. teaching and learning of reading process in indonesia have been introduced to students since they were in elementary school. reading has been acknowledged to them from the simplest form e.g. reading words, reading sentences, and reading paragraphs. meanwhile, in senior high school level, students are expected to be able to read a more complex form of reading such as reading text. based on an interview with an english teacher at one of senior high school in majalengka, west java, that conducted on march 19, 2015, it is found kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction that many students still have problems in reading. when the teacher asked students to read, they seemed to be less motivated and some other students are found lack of vocabulary, with the result that these situations make them difficult to understand what they are reading. the other problem from the students is fluency. many students are not fluent in reading. those cases were quite problematical and should be solved because they can cause further difficulties to the next reading lesson. thus, it is important to find out solution for students’ reading problems. concerning the problems, the researcher proposed an alternative reading strategy to be used in teaching and learning reading called collaborative strategic reading (csr). csr is originally designed by klingner and vaughn in 1996 that combines modified reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning (bremer, vaughn, clapper & ae-hwa, 2002). according to bremer, vaughn, clapper and ae-hwa (2002, p.1), “csr consists of four comprehension strategies that students apply before, during, and after reading in small cooperative groups. these reading strategies are: (a) preview (before reading), (b) click and clunk (during reading), (c) get the gist (during reading), and (d) wrap up (after reading)”. elkaumy (2004) in abidin and riswanto (2012) explains the concept of csr as the following: the concept of this strategy is engaging students to work in small cooperative groups (3-5) and apply four reading strategies: preview, click & clunk, get the gist and wrap up. preview allows students to generate interest and activate background knowledge in order to predict what they will learn. click & clunk are selfmonitoring strategy which controls their understanding about words, concepts and ideas that they understand or do not understand or need to know more about. get the gist. students identify the main ideas from reading to confirm their understanding of the information. wrap up provides students with an opportunity to apply metacognitive strategies (plan, monitor and evaluate) for further extend comprehension. in short, csr is a reading strategy that lets the student work in group of three to five students to examine a text by employing preview, click & clunk, get the gist and wrap up strategy. preview creates students’ interest about a topic and makes the students predict the content of the text. click & clunk controls students’ understanding especially towards difficult words they don’t know. get the gist obligates students to know main idea in a paragraph so they can easily proceed to the next paragraph. meanwhile, wrap up evaluates significance of a text and it invites students to make conclusion from the text. by applying csr as reading strategy during reading lesson, students are hoped to have improvement on their reading comprehension. method this present study applied classroom action research (car) method by following kemmis and mc. taggart model (1988). elliot (1991) as cited in burns (2010) maintains that action research is a study of a social situation to improve the quality of the action in it. explaining what action english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee research is, kemmis and mc taggart (1998) as cited in burns (1999, p.32) state “action research occurs through a dynamic and complementary process, which consists of four essential moments: planning, action, observation, and reflection. these moments are the fundamental steps in a spiraling process.” figure 1 an action research spiral proposed by kemmis and mc. taggart (1988) kemmis and mctaggart (2000) as cited in koshy (2005) describe action research as participatory research. in this study, the researchers collaborate with an english teacher, so this study is a collaborative action research. collaborative action research strengthens the opportunities for the practice to be fed back in a more substantial and critical way (burns, 1999). this study is carried out in sma negeri 1 talaga with the participant 40 students. the english teacher recommends this class because there are some reading problems found. not only the students, the researcher and the english teacher are also the participant in this study. the researcher acts as an english teacher who teaches reading to students by using csr strategy, while the english teacher acts as an observer who observes teaching learning process during the study. this action research is carried out within two cycles, cycle 1 and cycle 2. the procedures of the study is begun by conducting pre-research, followed by planning step, action step, observation step, and reflection step. there are several data collection techniques applied in this study such as test, observation, field notes and questionnaire. the test is consisted of three tests, namely pre-test (test 1), posttest in cycle 1 (test 2) and post-test in cycle 2 (test 3). meanwhile, during observation, observer is equipped with an observation sheet adapted from sa’diyah (2011) to observe students’ seriousness, enthusiasm, and participation in the class during the implementation of csr. completing observation, field notes are taken to record classroom situation during the implementation of csr. in addition, questionnaire is administered to the students at the end of action research to find out their attitudes toward the implementation of csr. the questionnaire is adapted from al-roomy (2013), consists of twenty questions. it covers nineteen close-ended questions and one open-ended question. analyzing the data, students’ tests (test 1, test 2 and test 3) were analyzed by calculating their mean score and class percentage which pass minimum score. the assessment of students’ answer of test 1, test 2 and test 3 is as follows: correct answers are scored with two points, as suggested by brown (2003), while incorrect answers and absent or omitted answers are scored with zero. table 1 multiple-choices assessment kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction kind of answer point correct answer 2 incorrect/absent answer 0 meanwhile, in analyzing the data from observation, field notes and questionnaire, the study applied data analysis from miles and huberman (1994) as cited in koshy (2005) that consist of data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing and verification. results and discussion the following are the calculation of students’ improvement in test 1, test 2 and test 3. on each test, students were asked to ask questions related to an analytical exposition text that learnt by using csr strategy. test 1 test 2 test 3 score category score score category score score category score highest score 87 highest score 87 highest score 100 lowest score 47 lowest score 60 lowest score 73 mean score 67 mean score 76 mean score 88 in test 1, students’ mean score was 67. class percentages which passed minimum score was only 7, 5 % with 3 students passed minimum score. meanwhile, in test 2, students’ mean score improved to 76. class percentages which passed minimum score improved from 7, 5% to 52 %. from 31 test takers, 16 students passed minimum score in this cycle and it was a significant improvement. furthermore, students’ reading comprehension was extremely improved in cycle 2. students’ mean score continued to improve to 88 with class percentages which passed minimum score 97 %. from 36 test takers, 35 students could pass minimum score. in this cycle, students’ reading comprehension was extremely improved since the students had understood csr strategy well and they had applied csr strategy to reading in longer period. in addition, in terms of reading comprehension aspects, students’ reading comprehension was also improved. students’ reading comprehension improvement on each reading comprehension aspect was summarized in the following table: students’ improvement on reading comprehension aspects english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in terms of main idea, students mean score before the implementation of csr was 2,3. after csr has been implemented to their reading lesson, their mean score become 3, 0. in terms of supporting idea, students mean score before the implementation of csr was 1, 4. after csr has been implemented to their reading lesson, their mean score become 2, 3. meanwhile, in relation to passage structure, students mean score before implementing csr was 2, 4. after csr has been implemented to their class, their mean score improved to 2, 6. in relation with vocabulary aspect, students mean score before implementing csr was 3, 4. after csr has been implemented to their reading lesson, their mean score become 4, 3. in the last aspect, making inference, students mean score before the implementation of csr was 0, 5 and improved to 0, 9 after the implementation of csr. in addition, in relation to students’ attitudes towards the implementation of csr, students give positive attitudes towards the implementation of csr. the result of questionnaire is explained as follows: based on the data above, mean score of questionnaire (152) passed agree scale. so, it could be concluded that majority of student with percentage 82 % of students were agree towards the implementation of csr and they gave positive attitude towards the implementation of csr. in addition, to know problems faced by the students during the implementation of csr, they were asked to answer questionnaire item 20. the most frequently problem was related to vocabulary. twenty students (54%) from thirty seven students reported that the most difficult problem they encountered was there were too many words they did not understand. the second most difficult issue was the complexity of the structures of the passages. meanwhile, sixteen students (43, 2%) mentioned that the situation of the class which is noisy also disrupt csr implementation. eleven students believed that group members who are not actively participated in group discussion and who sometimes absent affected their group discussions. surprisingly, some of the factors such as shyness, confusion of csr strategies, interest in english and time allocation did not seem to have caused major problems. conclusions this study focuses on the implementation of csr to improve students’ reading comprehension. the purposes of this research are to find out whether or not the implementation of csr improves students’ reading comprehension and to identify students’ attitudes towards the implementation of csr. in this study, the data collected strongly disagree disagree neutral agree strongly agree 37 74 111 148 167 185 152 kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction through reading test, observation, field notes and questionnaires. based on the findings, this study concludes that csr improves students’ reading comprehension. it can be seen from students’ reading test mean score in preliminary study which was 67, and then it is improved to 76 in cycle 1. the mean score is continued to improve to the value of 88 in cycle 2. moreover, after implementing csr to students’ reading lesson, they show improvement on each reading comprehension aspect. in terms of main idea, students mean score before the implementation of csr was 2,3. after csr has been implemented to their reading lesson, their mean score become 3, 0. in terms of supporting idea, students mean score before the implementation of csr was 1, 4. after csr has been implemented to their reading lesson, their mean score become 2, 3. meanwhile, in relation to passage structure, students mean score before implementing csr was 2, 4. after csr has been implemented to their class, their mean score improved to 2, 6. in relation with vocabulary aspect, students mean score before implementing csr was 3, 4. after csr has been implemented to their reading lesson, their mean score become 4, 3. in the last aspect, making inference, students mean score before the implementation of csr was 0, 5 and improved to 0, 9 after the implementation of csr. thus, students’ reading comprehension was increased after csr had been applied in reading lesson. the researcher would relate the research finding with the theory of csr. as stated by abidin and riswanto (2012), the goals of csr are to improve reading comprehension and increase conceptual learning in ways that maximize students' involvement. in relation with that goal, the result of this study had shown that csr had improved five indicators of students’ reading comprehension which covered main idea, supporting idea, passage structure, making inference and vocabulary. firstly and secondly, csr made students to be able to identify main idea and supporting idea from the text. students were able to identify main idea and supporting idea from the text because csr obligizes them to restate the most important ideas and supporting ideas about the person, place, or thing of a paragraph or section of the text through get the gist strategy. thirdly and fourthly, csr made students to be able to identify passage structure and to conclude the text. students were able to identify passage structure and to conclude the text since csr obliges them to review what they already learnt from the text during wrap up strategy. meanwhile, students were able to understand vocabulary from the text because their comprehension is monitored during click and clunk strategy. click and clunk strategy obliges them to find out the meaning of difficult words they found in the text. supporting students’ reading comprehension improvement, csr also were provided by some helpful materials that helped students when comprehending the text. in this study, csr material used consisted from sample csr lesson that outlined the procedures during csr group discussion and csr learning log that record students’ ideas while discussion. in addition, during csr implementation, csr reading materials given had some helpful characteristics such as; providing a clues/ pictures that help students to predict what they would learn and having one main idea in a paragraph of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the text. thus, the researcher claimed that csr strategy and csr materials hold important roles in improving students’ reading comprehension. besides of those findings, the data collected from questionnaire showed that students give positive attitude towards the implementation of csr. majority of students (82%) are agree towards the implementation of csr. based on the result of questionnaire, students’ interest towards english is improved after the implementation of csr and they feel that csr bring more fun to the process of learning. it also can be supported by the findings from observation and field notes that students are actively participated during the implementation of csr. references abidin, m. j. z. & riswanto. (2012). collaborative strategic reading (csr) within cognitive and metacognitive strategies perspectives. international journal of humanities and social science, 2(3), 192-198. retrieved on september 03, 2012 from: www.ijhssnet.com/journals/vol_2_no _3_february_2012/25.pdf alderson, c. j. (2000). assessing reading. cambridge: cambridge university press. retrieved on march 25, 2012 from: http://en.bookfi.org/s/?q=alderson+as sessing+reading&t=0 al-roomy, m. (2013). an action research study of collaborative strategic reading in english with saudi medical students. university of sussex. retrieved on april 10, 2012 from: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/46830/1/alroom y,_muhammad.pdf alsamadani, h. a. (2011). the effects of the 3-2-1 reading strategy on efl reading comprehension. english language teaching, 4(3), 184-191. retrieved on march 09, 2012 from: www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/e lt/article/viewfile/11890/8350 anderson, r. c., hiebert, e. h., scott, j. a., and wilkinson i. a. g. (1985). becoming a nation of readers. washington dc: center for the study of reading, national academy of education. retrieved on march 10, 2015 from: files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed253865.pdf bremer, c. d., vaughn, s., clapper, a. t., and kim, a. (2002). collaborative strategic reading (csr): improving secondary students’ reading comprehension skills. national center on secondary education and transition. 1(2), 1-8. retrieved on february 25, 2012 from: www.ncset.org/publications/viewdesc. asp?id=424 brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principle : an interactive approach to language pedagogy. second edition. new york: longman. brown, h. d. (2003). language assessment principles and classroom practice. new york: longman. retrieved on april 30, 2012 from: http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/65800 0/dddc004fdf305f1c8e4098dbf2576506/ _as/[h._douglas_brown]_language_a ssessment__principle(bookfi.org).pdf burns, a. (1999). collaborative action research for english language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. retrieved on march 02, 2012 from: http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/42100 0/6c2224a811a83882e4128dcff2f3218e/_ as/%5banne_burns%5d_collaborative _action_research_for_eng(bookfi.org). pdf creswell, j. w. (2012). research design qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches:third edition. california: sage publication, inc. fajriyani, t. n. 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(2010). the effect of comprehension strategy instruction on efl learners’ reading comprehension. asian social science, 6(8), 19-29. retrieved on march 08, 2012 from: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/inde x.php/ass/article/download/6841/535 7.pdf fraenkel, j. r & wallen n. e. (2006). how to design and evaluate research in education. new york: mcgraw-hill companies, inc. gerot, l., & wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. sidney: antipodean educational enterprise (aee). harmer, j. (2007). the practice of english language teaching. new york: longman. hikha. (2013). analytical exposition text. retrieved on april 01, 2012 from: http://hikhaz.blogspot.com/2013/12/rpp-bahasainggris-tentang-analytical.html kazemi, m., hosseini, m., & kohandani, m. (2013). strategic reading instruction in efl contexts. theory and practice in language studies, 3(12), 2333-2342. retrieved on march 08, 2012 from: http://ojs.academypublisher.com/inde x.php/tpls/article/viewfile/tpls031223 332342/8159 klingner, j. k., vaughn, s., boardman, a., and swanson, e. (2012). now we get it!: boosting comprehension with collaborative strategic reading. usa: john wiley & sons. klingner, j. k., vaughn, s., dimino, j., schumm, j. s., & bryant, d. (2002). collaborative strategic reading. colorado: sopris west. koshy, v. (2005). action research for improving practice: a practical guide. london: paul chapman publishing. retrieved on march 09, 2012 from: http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/42800 0/65d174b54649cb0e26560f43f3fe5ce3/_ as/%5bvalsa_koshy%5d_action_rese arch_for_improving_practi(bookfi.org). pdf lems, k.., miller l. d. and soro, t. m. (2010). teaching reading to english language learners: insights from linguistics. new york london: the guilford press. retrieved on december 14, 2012 from: http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/45500 0/ecacadaa0518630b9651fbeccbeb304e/ _as/%5bkristin_lems,_leah_d._miller, _tenena_m._soro%5d_tea(bookfi.org). pdf mali-jali, nomfundo. (2007). a genre-based approach to writing across the curriculum in isixhosa in the cape peninsula schools. stellenbosch university. retrieved on may 18, 2012 from: http://scholar.sun.ac.za/bitstream/ha ndle/10019.1/1412/malijali_genrebase d_2007.pdf?sequence=3&isallowed=y mckay, sandra lee. (2006). researching second language classrooms. london: lawrence erlbaum associates publishers. moreillon, j. (2007). collaborative strategies for teaching reading comprehension. chicago: the american library association. retrieved on march 08, 2012 from: http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/54700 0/3747a9bcf134159d63bda8caf19f0103/ _as/%5bjudi_moreillon%5d_collabora tive_strategies_for_teac(bookfi.org).pd f nosratinia, m., mirzakhani, e., & zaker. (2013). toward a humanistic instruction: collaborative strategic reading approach and efl learners’ reading comprehension. international journal of advanced studies in humanities and social science, 1 (8)1119-1138. retrieved on march 19, 2012 from: ijashss.com/upload/ijashss-1141.pdf oskamp, s., schultz, p. w. (2005). attitudes and opinion. new york: psychology press. oxford advanced learners’ dictionary (5th ed.). (1995). oxford: oxford university press. puspita, e. d. (2012). improving students’ reading comprehension using collaborative strategic reading (csr) (a classroom action research study at the eighth grade students of smp negeri 1 ngadirojo in the academic year of http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/download/6841/5357.pdf http://hikha-z.blogspot.com/2013/12/rpp-bahasa-inggris-tentang-analytical.html http://ojs.academypublisher.com/index.php/tpls/article/viewfile/tpls031223332342/8159 http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/428000/65d174b54649cb0e26560f43f3fe5ce3/_as/%5bvalsa_koshy%5d_action_research_for_improving_practi(bookfi.org).pdf http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/455000/ecacadaa0518630b9651fbeccbeb304e/_as/%5bkristin_lems,_leah_d._miller,_tenena_m._soro%5d_tea(bookfi.org).pdf http://scholar.sun.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10019.1/1412/malijali_genrebased_2007.pdf?sequence=3&isallowed=y http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/547000/3747a9bcf134159d63bda8caf19f0103/_as/%5bjudi_moreillon%5d_collaborative_strategies_for_teac(bookfi.org).pdf english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 2011/2012). universitas negeri semarang. retrieved retrieved on july 04, 2015 from: http://digilib.uns.ac.id/dokumen/deta il/26807/improving-students-readingcomprehension-using-collaborativestrategic-reading-csr-a-classroomaction-research-study-at-the-eighthgrade-students-of-smp-negeri-1ngadirojo-in-the-academic-year-of20112012 rozak, r. r., ngadiso, & asib, a. (2012). the effectiveness of collaborative strategic reading (csr) to teach content area reading comprehension viewed from students’ intelligence. english teaching, 1(1), 54-67. retrieved on march 10, 2012 from: http://jurnal.pasca.uns.ac.id/index.ph p/elt/article/viewfile/138/129 sa’diyah, h.(2011). improving students’ ability in writing descriptive texts through a picture series aided learning strategy. the english teacher. 40, 164-182. retrieved on april 10, 2012 from: http://www.melta.org.my/et/2011/1 64_182_halimatus.pdf thompson, s. l. and vaughn, s. (2007). research-based methods of reading instruction for english language learners, grades k–4. alexandria: association for supervision and curriculum development. retrieved on february 27, 2012 from: http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/52200 0/9c5b263cc8449076c40c9f09c8fe75a2/_ as/%5bsharon_vaughn,_sylvia_linanthompson%5d_researchba(bookfi.org).pdf http://digilib.uns.ac.id/dokumen/detail/26807/improving-students-reading-comprehension-using-collaborative-strategic-reading-csr-a-classroom-action-research-study-at-the-eighth-grade-students-of-smp-negeri-1-ngadirojo-in-the-academic-year-of-20112012 http://jurnal.pasca.uns.ac.id/index.php/elt/article/viewfile/138/129 http://www.melta.org.my/et/2011/164_182_halimatus.pdf http://dl.lux.bookfi.org/genesis/522000/9c5b263cc8449076c40c9f09c8fe75a2/_as/%5bsharon_vaughn,_sylvia_linan-thompson%5d_research-ba(bookfi.org).pdf anderson,r.c.,hiebert,e.h.,scott,j.a.,and english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 11 self-assessment of communication skills by management students: an empirical study in indian context kajal srivastava department of business communication, faculty of business communication, jaipuria institute of management, india e-mail: kajal.srivastava@jaipuria.ac.in apa citation: srivastava, k. (2018). self-assessment of communication skills by management students: an empirical study in indian context. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 11-18. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1239. received: 18-02-2018 accepted: 21-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: communication skills are most sought after by the business world and are considered to be vital for personal and professional growth. there have been many researches on the importance of communication skills and how they act as catalysts in getting a job or a dream job. furthermore, employers, institutes and universities also emphasise that an individual apt at communication skills is more likely to get a job in comparison to one who is not. this study is meant to decipher the communication skills of management trainees at the time of joining the institute through a selfappraisal questionnaire. the research design employed was descriptive cross-sectional. 125 students were chosen from five management institutes in lucknow (india) by employing non-random convenience sampling. findings indicated that there is an overall fear of public speaking, respondents fall short of words while writing in english and need to be encouraged to read more english magazines and novels. conclusively, a curriculum may be designed wherein the faculty, along with inputs of the students can build a framework with a view to maximising public speaking activities, and other activities may focus upon reading and writing. moreover, peer-feedback is recommended to enhance reflective learning. keywords: management students, active listening skills, oral communication skills, communication building strategies, public speaking introduction communication skills are one of the most desired factors affecting employability and career progression. it is considered to be an essential trait by the employers as well. hence, the curriculum of every management institute lays proper emphasis on honing communication skills of their students. thus, management institutes also serve as centres where existing communication skills of students are further improved for placement purposes. as it is, prospective employers reiterate the fact that students need to have their listening and speaking skills refined (weldey, & icenogle, 2016). employers seek candidates who have effective interpersonal communication skills (golen, catanach, & moeckel, 1997). communication is a process wherein a message, which may be verbal, non-verbal or both, is transferred orally or verbally by the sender to the receiver. in return, the receiver gives a response or feedback (masri, 1997).communication, in other words, refers to the tact and ability to transfer or convey information effectively and efficiently. yet, for an effective communication, one needs to be skilled in listening, speaking, reading and writing. these four skills happen to be the parameters on which an individual’s abilities to communicate may be evaluated. communication may be done in two ways; orally or written. the former includes speaking and listening wherein the sender delivers the message orally and the receiver listens. this is followed by an oral feedback kajal srivastava self-assessment of communication skills by management students: an empirical study in indian context 12 (examples are; in a meeting, over the cellphone, in an interview, etc.) by the receiver. the latter includes writing and reading wherein the sender conveys a message in a written format (an e-mail, letter, memo, text or fax) and the receiver sends a response after having read/interpreted the message. the skills involved in this process are writing and reading. with specific reference to the business world, managers need to be adept in both written and oral communication in order to facilitate transfer of information between people within an organisation and outside it as well. communication is vital in light of the fact that every managerial role involves one or the other form of oral or written communication or both. communication skills are important for growth and career progression of individuals as well. a research study concluded that recruiters rated communication skills as the most important characteristic of an ideal job candidate (yate, 2009).abundant research has proved that communication skills are essential for managers (bradshaw, 1992; prentice, 1984, margerison & kakabadse, 1984).communicative abilities are crucial for advancement in career and success in the organization (cohen, 1999; messmer, 1999; warner, 1995; roebuck et al., 1995; flatley, 1990; curtis et al., 1989). in earlier studies, bass (1990) and kanter (1983) pointed out a clear relationship between competence in communication and managerial effectiveness. further, communication skills of every individual affect both personal and organizational effectiveness (brun, 2010; summers, 2010). effective communication skills are most essential for personal as well as organizational growth. it is therefore only rational to state that one of the most impeding forces to organizational efficiency is the lack of effective communication (lutgen-sandvik, 2010). in addition to this, special emphasis is laid on oral communication skills during the process of hiring (maes, et al., 1997).another study found that senior hr managers wanted their employees to be effective in interpersonal communication. however, it was found that these managers lacked in the art of listening and taking lead in a collaborative manner (bambacas &patrickson, 2008). therefore, in order to be an effective manager, studies have acknowledged the fact that effective communication skills are an absolute must. furthermore, since the current generation lives in a global village where communication is the key to negotiation, achieving targets and desired goals, managerial students need to hone their existing communication skills in order to carve a niche for themselves. students need to gain expertise in communication skills with specific reference to a milieu of cultures that are existent and in the current workplace scenario (penbuk, yurdakul & cerit, 2009). in addition to this, according to harleket al. (2008), students at university level should participate in activities that are capable of developing their communication skills beginning from the very first year in the university. earlier research on communication skills among university students has been conducted by cleland, foster and moffat (2005) and ihmeideh, ahmad and dababneh (2010). the results of both research indicated that a positive communication environment gives students opportunities to learn how to communicate thereby improving their communication skills. hence, the purpose of this paper is to present an empirical research on the self-assessment of management students associated with lsrw skills. the idea is to gain an understanding of their current proficiency levels related to various communication skills. this research focuses specifically on four communication parameters which are; 1)active listening skills (l), 2) oral communication skills (s), 3) communication building strategies (r), and 4) written communication skills (w). method for the present study, descriptive crosssectional research design was employed. the survey instrument was a closed ended questionnaire. in this research, 125 students of five management institutes in lucknow were given self-assessment questionnaires at the english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 13 very onset of their managerial program. institutes were selected based on the year in which they commenced management education. five oldest management institutes were selected for the study. apart from their age, their occupancy ratio was also taken into consideration and all selected institutes had a history of 100% filled seats as per their allocation by the concerned authorities/agency. within the institutes, 25 students were selected on the basis of their interest for participation in the study. the students were explained about the research, its objective and based on their willingness, 25 students were selected from each institute. non-random convenience sampling has been employed for the selection of the sample. the questionnaire comprised of 20 statements which were meant to evaluate various communication skills. of these, four statements evaluated students’ active listening abilities. these comprised of their comprehension skills related to the spoken word, their responsiveness by asking statements in class after listening and the attention paid to words during conversation. eight statements were based on students’ proficiency in oral communication (speaking). these statements focused on students’ confidence in english speaking ability to communicate their point of view, usage of new words while conversing in english, the fear of public speaking, ability to summarize what is being said, using grammatically correct english, and hesitation while speaking in public. five statements focused on communication building strategies (reading) which students adopted. these included their habit of reading english newspapers, ability to understand the content displayed in english newspapers, their preference to learn and write new words from the newspaper, watching english news channels, other english channels and their inclination in reading english novels and magazines. furthermore, three statements assess students’ clarity in written communication. these statements focus on students’ ability to express their thoughts clearly through the written word, their capability to write grammatically correct english and whether they fall short of words while writing in english. the respondents had to self-assess their communication skills on a five-point likert scale. thereafter, mean analysis was done to capture the self-assessment of the respondents. results and discussion the data was collected from 125 respondents, although only 117 questionnaires were found to be complete and were used for the purpose of analysis. the students were from various cities as summarised below. table 1. state wise representation of respondents no state number of respondent 1 uttar pradesh 87 2 bihar 11 3 jharkhand 03 4 uttrakhand 05 5 west bengal 08 6 assam 03 total 117 majority of the respondents were from uttar pradesh only and amongst them, close to 60% were from lucknow only. others represented cities like allahabad, varanasi, kanpur, sitapur, barabanki, gorakhpur etc. since the sample size was small, hence, state wise differences in assessment of communication skill were not considered. the gender wise representation was as follows. kajal srivastava self-assessment of communication skills by management students: an empirical study in indian context 14 table 2. gender representation in sample no gender number percentage 1 male 76 65 2 female 41 35 of the total sample 65% were male while 35% were female. the gender wise differences in assessment of communication skills were also not considered for analysis. although it may be an interesting research to be carried in future. the sample distribution based on their educational background is as follow. table 3. educational background of respondents no education number of respondents percentage 1 ba/bsc/b.com 78 67 2 bba 27 23 3 b tech. 08 7 4 others 04 3 majority of the respondents had done ba/bsc/b.com during their graduation. 23% of the respondents have pursued management education in their graduation stream. therefore, since the representation of educational background was small, no attempt was made to study the differences in assessment based on their educational background. mean analysis was done on all the statements which were discussed for ease and clarity. first, the results of mean and standard deviation analysis of statements measuring active listening skills (l) are shown below. table 4.mean and standard deviation of statements measuring active listening skills (l) no active listening skills (l) mean sd 1. i pay attention to each and every word said by someone else during conversation 3.84 0.85 2. i listen carefully and full grab the meaning of spoken words. 3.42 0.80 3. i respond to listening by asking questions in class 3.09 0.94 4. i comprehend lectures delivered in english 3.61 0.97 the mean values indicate that the respondents pay attention and are able to grasp the meaning of spoken words as indicated by relatively higher values for these statements. although many of them are not engaged in active discussion or asking questions in the class. second, the results of mean and standard deviation analysis of statements measuring oral communicative skills (s) are presented below. table 5.mean and standard deviation of statements measuring oral communication skills(s) no oral communication skills (s) mean sd 1. i avoid using slang while speaking in english 3.22 0.67 2. i have hesitation in public speaking 2.69 1.1 3. i try to make use of new words while speaking in english 2.93 1.00 4. i speak grammatically correct english 3.61 0.71 5. i feel confident in speaking in english 3.37 0.83 6. i find it easy to communicate my point of view to the other person 3.23 0.90 7. i can easily summarize what i listen to. 3.37 0.84 8. i have a fear of public speaking 2.70 1.1 the mean values listed above are indicative that respondents avoid using slang while speaking in english. it further states that they speak grammatically correct english, they are confident in speaking in english, they communicate views easily and are adept at english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 15 summarizing. however, respondents are hesitant of speaking in public and there is also a fear of public speaking. in addition to this, the usage of new words during conversing is relatively low. the findings may be used to decide the pedagogy and delivery of various courses which may improve effectiveness of the courses and learning of the students. third, the results of mean and standard deviation analysis of statements measuring communication building strategies (r) are presented below. table 6. mean and standard deviation of statements measuring communication building strategies (r) no communication building strategies (r) mean sd 1. i watch english news channels and other english channels 3.15 1.20 2. i am in a habit of reading english newspapers 2.54 1.08 3. i understand the content of english newspapers easily 3.45 0.89 4. i prefer to write and learn new words from the newspaper. 2.80 1.24 5 i read english novels/magazines 2.85 1.29 when referring to mean values related to reading, respondents are adept at watching english news channels and other english channels as well. nevertheless, mean values of other parameters such as the habit of reading newspapers, understanding its content, the interest in writing and learning new words and the inclination towards reading english novels and magazines is relatively low. the findings are indicative that the institute should think about how to improve their reading habits, discussion of contemporary news items from newspaper, book review, etc. may be some tools which may be used by institutes. fourth, the results of mean and standard deviation analysis of statements measuring written communication skills (w) are presented below. table 7. mean and standard deviation of statements measuring written communication skills (w) in the above table, higher mean values are indicative of the fact that respondents place a high emphasis on writing grammatically correct english and are able to express their thoughts clearly in writing. however, the mean value is further indicative of the fact that respondents’ fall short of words while writing in english. looked together since little effort is put by respondents on reading and enhancing their vocabulary it affects their written communication skills as well. this research aims at finding out the lsrw competency skills among management students through self-appraisal at the commencement of management programmes. on the basis of the questionnaire, there are various implications which are as follows; one of the implications of the study is the hesitation among students of public speaking. the study points out a definite fear of public speaking among students. the second implication is that of the students having a relatively low mean value as far as reading english novels and magazines and writing new english words is concerned. the overall idea of the study is to have a self-perception of the students’ lsrw competency skills in order for it to be mapped for further research at the end of the course. the basic aim is to identify the weaknesses of the students at the beginning of the programme. once the students are made aware of their weaknesses, it becomes easier to encourage them to work on these weak areas thereby improving their existing skill no writing (w) mean sd 1. i place emphasis on writing grammatically correct english 4.14 0.95 2. i can express my thoughts effectively by writing in english 3.81 0.90 3. i fall short of words while writing in english. 3.12 1.07 kajal srivastava self-assessment of communication skills by management students: an empirical study in indian context 16 sets. according to sanchez and hynes (2001), students’ perceptions on their existing skill levels provide intricate details on the nature of learning that took place in actuality. their theoretical framework further assumes that students are the best determinants of how much they learnt. hill, mehta and hynes (2014) further state that self-perceptions about competency levels should be included in learning assessment programs. on the basis of these results, a third implication is that communication modules and teaching styles may be modified in order to suit the expectations of both the students and their prospective employers. the utility of the study may also be extended to designing curriculum, selecting most suitable pedagogy and choosing the best assessment tools as well. considering the result of the study as an indicator somehow the students should be encouraged to read more english content either through newspaper or magazine/books. they should also be encouraged to learn new words and their usage while writing. further, it should not be assumed that all these four lsrw operate in water tight compartment, in-fact they are interrelated to each other and will mutually drive effective communication hence they operate in a cyclical manner affecting each other and affecting communication skills in general. conclusion this research is indicative of how management students rated their communication skills with respect to lsrw. on the basis of various statements, students were asked to gauge their skill sets on a scale of 1-5 on their active listening skills (l),oral communication skills (s), communication building strategies (r),and written communication skills (w).the analysis leads to a number of conclusions. first, the results are indicative that respondents pay attention and are capable of grasping the meaning of the spoken words in english. the results are also indicative of the fact that slang is avoided by respondents during communication. second, the results are also suggestive of the fact that while respondents are adept at watching english new channels, the drive towards reading newspapers and understanding content in novels and magazines is relatively low. third, peerresponse may be introduced in the classroom activities. the basic idea is to get learners involved in the learning process through peer response and student feedback. this can resultantly promote reflective learning. according to mezirow (1990, p. 366), reflective learning encourages ‘critical reflection in order to precipitate or facilitate transformative learning in adults’. in a similar way, schon (1991) asserts that reflection can modify traditional learning into an experience. in the process of analyzing their communicative needs, articulating learning preferences, and by giving peer feedback, students become more mindful of what they need to deliver as course participants and develop skills to reflect on their learning process. also, students’ analysis can encourage students by engaging them in thought-provoking and eloquent classroom experiences. references bass, b. m. (1990). handbook of leadership (3rd ed.). new york: bass & stogdill’s press. brun, j. p. (2010). missing pieces: 7 ways to improve employee well-being and organizational effectiveness. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. mccroskey, j. c., & mccroskey, l. l. (1988). self‐report as an approach to measuring communication competence. communication research reports, 5(2), 108-113. kanter, r. m. (1983). the change masters. new york: simon & schuster. lutgen-sandvik, p. (2010).destructive organizational communication: processes, consequences, and constructive ways of organizing. new york, ny: routledge. bambacas, m., & patrickson, m. (2008). interpersonal communication skills that enhance organisational commitment. journal of communication management, 12(1), 51-72. mezirow, j. (1990). fostering critical reflection in adulthood. san francisco: jossey-bass. sanchez, s., & hynes, g.e. (2001). effectiveness of traditional delivery versus online delivery for a managerial communication course. presented at a symposium: assessing the quality of online instruction, naval postgraduate school, monterey, ca. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 17 schon, d. a. (1991). the reflexive turn: case studies in and on educational practice. new york: teachers’ college. masri, s. (1997). media dan komunikasi dalam bahasa melayu. malaysia: fajar bakti. weldey, t. g., & icenogle, m. l. (2016). a managerial perspective: oral communication competency is most important for business students in the workplace. international journal of business communication, 34(1), 67 – 80. yate, m. (2009). hiring the best: a manager’s guide to effective interviewing and recruiting. cincinnati, oh: f & w media. kajal srivastava self-assessment of communication skills by management students: an empirical study in indian context 18 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 147 developing english for tourism materials trough stakeholders’ needs analysis indah puspitasari english diploma program, faculty of humanities, jenderal soedirman university, indonesia e-mail: indahpuspitasari876@gmail.com apa citation: puspitasari, i. (2018). developing english for tourism materials trough stakeholders’ needs analysis. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 147-156. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1534. received: 19-08-2018 accepted: 27-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: banyumas currently grows well in various aspects especially in tourism. tourism plays an important role in this regency because it becomes one of the mainstays of banyumas revenue sector. a phenomenon occurs today is the number of hotels in banyumas arises every year. it is very important to prepare human resources; especially those who have good skills in tourism and english. this paper aims at explaining the stakeholders’ overview of skills needed, topic needed, and difficulties encountered. the stakeholders here are tour agencies, hotels, and youth, sports, culture and tourism office of banyumas regency. this is a qualitative research method which has several research steps. first, library study is a method of collecting data and it is also used to compile research instruments. the second step is to share the questionnaires to the sampling and the last is analysing the results. the results of this study showed that; 1) the required skills are speaking (100%), listening (75%), writing (25%), and reading (25%), 2) 80% of the topics offered in the questionnaire are required by all stakeholders. the topics are about hotels and tourism materials, and 3) difficulties encountered in active cooperating with tourism industry, less practice in explaining tourism city map, and listening different accents such as english speakers from china, japan, and india. in conclusion, these findings regarding the skills and topics needed can be used to develop english for tourism materials. keywords: english for tourism; english for specific purposes; needs analysis; developing materials; tourism; banyumas. introduction a current phenomenon is the shift of public consumption for retail shopping. now, people choose to save their money in banks and use it for vacationing in tourist attractions. as mentioned by kompas daily on november 6, 2017 that there is a shift in consumer behavior patterns from shopping to tourism which is marked by several indicators of household consumption growth in the third quarter of 2017. one of the indicators in question is an increase in public consumption in hotels and restaurants. in the third quarter of 2017, restaurants and hotels grew significantly from 5.01 percent in the third quarter of 2016 to 5.52 percent in the third quarter of 2017. indicators for restaurants, hotels, and recreation continue to increase, although the contribution to household consumption has not seen a significant about just 14 percent to 15 percent. the opinion reinforces data from the ministry of tourism and creative economy of tourism growth in indonesia which tends to increase every year. data in 2015 showed 911.704 foreign tourists coming to indonesia and experiencing an increase in 2016 and 2017 which reached 1.404.664. the growth of tourism and hospitality is also felt in banyumas regency. the number of hotels in banyumas regency which was 182 in 2014 currently reaches 232 hotels in 2017. from the data above, it is very important for banyumas regency to prepare qualified human resources from the tourism sector and one way is through stakeholders’ needs analysis. stakeholders are individuals or groups that can influence and or be indah puspitasari developing english for tourism materials trough stakeholders’ needs analysis 148 influenced by a particular achievement. stakeholders have three categories: 1) main stakeholder: stakeholders who have a direct interest in a policy of the community. 2) stakeholder supporters: do not have a direct link to a policy but have a concern, for example: ngos, universities, institutions. 3) key stakeholder: having legally authorized in decision making, such as government, parliament, office, etc. on the other hand, stakeholders of tourism include tourists, businessmen, governments, communities, universities, communities, and non-governmental organizations (pitana, 2009). thus, the stakeholders referred to by the authors in this study are the main stakeholder of the hotel owner and tour agent and key stakeholders, namely the department of youth, sports, culture and tourism of banyumas regency as policy makers. the institution here is a stakeholder’s supporter who concern to the main and key stakeholders’ needs. universities as one of tourism stakeholder have an important role related to research implementation. the results of lecturers’ research, such as, needs analysis, market analysis, consumer survey and others can be used by tourism industry to develop the tourism resources they have. according to pitana (2009), tourism resources are resources related to tourism development which include: natural resources, human resources, cultural resources, and special request resource. here, the authors choose to develop human resources tourism because every element of tourism requires human resources to move it. moreover, needs analysis is part of curriculum development or known as curriculum and material development. the material development process is a central element in language teaching programs. the development system can be conceptualized into three interrelated processes. first, the planning process includes analyzing the needs of learners, institutional expectations and resource availability, and defining learning objectives and translating needs and objectives into materials and learning activities. second, the learning process (enacting process) includes using teaching materials and conducting teaching and learning activities in the classroom. third, the evaluation process is an assessment the progress of learners toward the achievement of goals. that process is a system of development that should be done by each college. the focus of this research is on the first stage of development that is the planning process which includes the needs analysis. needs analysis is a procedure for gathering information about the learners’ needs. the same opinion is also expressed by richards (2001) that the procedure used to collect information about the learners’ needs is known by the term needs analysis. the main purpose of the needs analysis activity is to prepare a set of learning objectives and material selection. the triangulation approach can be used in performing needs analysis because one source of information may be incomplete or partial. different stakeholders have different perspectives on needs and solutions. needs analysis usually involves the gathering of information from more than one referent group. according to richards (2001, p. 60), information can be obtained from finding relevant theories such as books, journal articles, reports and research results, and collecting information from multiple respondents. there are several studies on the needs analysis of english for specific purposes, i.e. trang (2015), amali (2015), and darrel (2018). in his study, trang (2015) found that the most important need among english language skill of tourism employees is speaking then followed by listening, writing and reading. although the needs analysis of english for specific purposes has been widely done, as far as the author’s observation, banyumas tourism stakeholders’ needs analysis has never been done. therefore, this study tries to explain english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 149 the stakeholders’ overview of skills needed, topic needed, and difficulties encountered. method the study was a qualitative case study. according to merriam in cohen (2005, p. 185), there are three types of case studies, namely descriptive, interpretative, and evaluative. the writer used descriptive method to describe the skill needed, topic needed and difficulties encountered. the participants were the tourism stakeholders of banyumas regency including the youth, sports, culture and tourism office of banyumas regency, hotels and tour agency. the sampling technique was purposive random sampling. based on data from banyumas hotel and restaurant association (phri) and youth, sports, culture and tourism office of banyumas regency, the number of hotels in banyumas in 2017 is 232. there are only 12 star hotels and only three hotels have been certified by the business certification institute (lsu). the author took a sample of 20% of the star hotels population. the samples taken were four star hotels in banyumas. meanwhile, the total number of banyumas tour agency, according to the association of tourism banyumas (asita), was 31 agencies. the author took 20% as sample (six tour agencies). this study applied two methods of collecting data; questionnaire and library study. questionnaires are instruments used to obtain information from respondents, while the library study was used to collect relevant theories to make research instruments in the form of questionnaires and used to analyze the needs. the method of data analysis in this qualitative study is descriptive method. there are more research data found in the field and will be analyzed and supported by the theories that are available and relevant (sugiyono, 2009, p. 13-14). descriptive analysis is used to describe and analyze the needs of stakeholders of english for tourism. then, writer used the results to develop english for tourism teaching materials. for data validation, the authors uses triangulation. the triangulation approach can be used in performing needs analysis because one source of information may be incomplete or partial. results and discussion in this section, the authors explain the curriculum of higher education. this analysis is used to find out the purpose of the education system and to make decisions in syllabus and material design. according to minister of education and culture, law no.232/u/2000 defines the curriculum as; “a set of plans and arrangements concerning the content and study materials and lessons as well as the way of delivery and assessment used as guidelines for the conduct of business or teaching-learning activities in higher education.” the curriculum is a program developed and implemented to achieve educational goals. the curriculum can be viewed as a plan to build a house. the orientation is for the future. thus, curriculum objectives play a major role in achieving program objectives. as we know that currently, there are changes in curriculum conducted by the ministry of education and culture of indonesia. competency-based curriculum changes to kkni (indonesia national qualification framework). on the curriculum of kkni the competence is expected to be able to pair, equalize and integrate (from junior high school to postgraduate level) between the field of education, the field of job training and work experience in the framework of giving the recognition of work competence in accordance with the structure of work in various sectors (ministry of education and culture, 2011). the curriculum is directed to equalize graduate qualifications so as to compete in the world of work. sourced from the ministry of education and culture (2011), description of the competencies achieved for the diploma level means that language teaching at the diploma level focuses on the achievement of learning by students. they indah puspitasari developing english for tourism materials trough stakeholders’ needs analysis 150 must be able to compete in the world of work. based on the above description, the author draws the following conclusions: 1) the type of curriculum used as a reference needs analysis is referring to the indonesian national framework curriculum. this means that language teaching at the diploma level focuses on the achievement of learning that must be mastered by students to be able to compete in the world of work, and 2) the purpose of teaching english in higher education is focused on improving quality and competitive outcomes at local, regional and international levels. the indonesian national framework curriculum is a systemic framework. this means that all competencies should be built. it includes major competencies (understanding the four basic english skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing) as well as supporting competencies such as linguistic competence and communication strategies. developing english for tourism materials curriculum development processes are central elements in language program. according to snow and kamhi-stein (2006, p. v-vi), the system in a curriculum can be conceptualized as three interrelated process: 1) planning processes which include analyzing the needs of learners, the expectation of the institution and the availability of resources, deciding on the learning aims and goals needed to achieve them and organizing them in a principle way, and translating the aims into materials and activities; 2) enacting (teaching and learning) processes which include using the materials and doing the activities in the classroom, and adjusting them according to learners’ needs, abilities and interests; and 3) evaluation processes which include assessing learners’ progress toward and achievement of the aims, adjusting the aims in response to learners’ abilities and needs, and gathering information about the effectiveness of the aims, organization, materials, and activities. this research refers to planning processes which focuses on needs analysis. this is very important because it is the basic research to continue to the next steps, such as enacting process which includes materials design, teaching and learning process at the classrooms. english for specific purposes (esp) is a language teaching approach where content and methods are based on students’ reasons for learning. so, esp’s focus is to make english classes more relevant to the needs of students. esp is a specific learning. english for tourism is a teaching approach in order to achieve the goal or competence of students to mastery of english for professional purposes. here is the position of english for tourism as a branch of esp. figure 1. the position of english for tourism english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 151 pitana (2009) explains a tourism area facility has conditions in terms of development; something to see, something to do (activities that make tourists stay longer), something to buy (shopping area), how to arrive (transportation accessibility), and how to stay (hotel). selection of english for tourism material refers to the above, because stakeholders will see those indicators as a benchmark of their success. in the questionnaire of needs analysis, the authors include the following elements: 1) skill needed (listening, speaking, reading, writing) a) listening it is essential for oral interaction as the students would find themselves talking with professional contacts about computers or in conferences and workshops about computers. the writer takes computer-related topics with exercises to listen for general and specific information, exercises to fill in the gaps with technical vocabulary and note taking. b) speaking it is a necessary skill where the students must focus on the language specific to the fields of knowledge and not on general english. so, the related items such as topics, grammar and vocabularies still must be in line with the field. the students have to practice of grammar points in the specific topics needed. c) reading it is a necessary skill where the students must focus on reading process, such as scanning, skimming, guessing words from context and making inferences in the specific discourse d) writing it is a necessary skill in a context where most jobs in computing are in international companies whose written communication is in english. the materials are computer-related topic. it also focuses on verb agreement, connectors of time, sequencing, structure and organization ideas, such as describing process, describing functions, writing advantages and disadvantages, reporting problems, writing a curriculum vitae, and writing a summary (snow & kamhistein, 2006, p. 47-50). 2) topic needed a) something to see the expected ability is about tour guiding, presenting destination skill, and explaining weather condition. b) something to do (activities that make tourists stay longer) the expected ability is about describing tourism objects. c) something to buy (shopping area) the expected ability is about dealing with money and number d) how to arrive (transportation accessibility) the expected ability is about dealing with transportation and tourist information officers. e) how to stay (hotel) the expected ability is about explaining types of accommodation, hotel facilities, staffing and internal organization, reservation, check in and checkout, hotel and restaurant services, complaints and solution. 3) difficulties encountered stakeholders’ needs analysis stakeholder needs analysis is equally important with student needs analysis. as pitana (2009) notes stakeholder tourism is a tourist, businessman, government, community, college, community and nongovernment organization. the stakeholders consist of the main stakeholders (hotels and tour agencies) and the key stakeholders (the office of youth, sports, culture and tourism banyumas regency as a policy maker). stakeholder needs analysis results are as follows. hotels needs analysis four hotels that filled the questionnaire chose speaking and listening as their skill needed. as it can be seen in table 1, speaking is the most required skill in hotel indah puspitasari developing english for tourism materials trough stakeholders’ needs analysis 152 industry. this is in accordance with the competence of human resources (hr) that they hope, excellence human resources in spoken communication. moreover, table 2 shows the result of stakeholders’ topic needed. the stakeholders chose these topics as their learning materials to improve their english competence. table 1. percentage of hotels’ skill needed skills percentage speaking 100% listening 75% reading 25 % writing 25 % table 2. percentage of hotels’ topic needed to improve their english topics yes % 1. greeting, facial expression and body movement 3 75 2. types of accommodation 3 75 3. hotel facilities 2 50 4. staffing and internal organization 3 75 5. reservation and check –in 4 100 6. hotel and restaurant services 4 100 7. phone calls 4 100 8. money and number 1 25 9. complaints and solution 3 75 10. describing tourism object 3 75 11. tour guiding 3 75 12. presentation skill (presenting destination ) 3 75 13. itinerary and schedule 1 25 14. weather 1 25 15. transportation (understanding information about public transportation) 3 75 16. dealing with tourist information officers 3 75 as it can be seen in table 2, there are some topics required by stakeholders. the writer selected some topics which have 50% or more needed. they hope that they are able to master the following topics: greeting, facial expression and body movement (non verbal communication) types of accommodation hotel facilities staffing and internal organization reservation and check -in hotel and restaurant services phone calls complaints and solution describing tourism object tour guiding presentation skill (presenting destination) transportation (understanding information about public transportation and direction) dealing with tourist information officers in the final column, the author designs a questionnaire regarding the difficulties encountered. some of the difficulties are less practice of english for hotels and tourism, inactive cooperating with tourism industry to strengthen communication and business network from all tourism stakeholders, less practice in reading or explaining tourism city map and less practice in using and listening english materials with different accents such as english speakers from china, japan, india that are sometimes difficult to understand by stakeholders. the human resources head of hotels said that many guests who stay in their hotels are people from those countries. some of them asked about tourism objects in banyumas. they wanted to visit and ask the direction to be there. the staffs are not fluent enough in speaking english especially in asking and giving directions. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 153 tour agencies needs’ analysis six tour agencies filling the questionnaire chose speaking and listening as the skill needed. as it can be seen in table 3, speaking is the most required skill by tour agencies. they use their speaking competence to guide international tourist. moreover, table 4 shows the result of stakeholders’ topic needed. the stakeholders chose these topics as their learning materials to improve their english competence. table 3. percentage of tour agencies’ skill needed skills yes percentage speaking 6 100% listening 4 70% reading 2 25 % writing 2 25 % table 4. percentage of tour agencies’ topic needed to improve their english topics yes % 1. greeting, facial expression and body movement 4 75 2. types of accommodation 4 75 3. hotel facilities 3 50 4. staffing and internal organization 3 50 5. reservation and check –in 6 100 6. hotel and restaurant services 6 100 7. phone calls 6 100 8. money and number 1 25 9. complaints and solution 3 50 10. describing tourism object 3 50 11. tour guiding 6 100 12. presentation skill (presenting destination ) 3 50 13. itinerary and schedule 3 50 14. weather 1 25 15. transportation (understanding information about public transportation) 3 50 16. dealing with tourist information officers 4 75 as it can be seen in table 4, there are some topics required by tour agencies. the writer selected some topics which have 50% or more needed. tourism human resources are hopefully capable of mastering english in the following topics: greeting, facial expression and body movement (non verbal communication) cross cultural understanding types of accommodation hotel facilities staffing and internal organization reservation and check-in hotel and restaurant services phone calls complaints and solution describing tourism object tour guiding presentation skill (presenting destination) itinerary and schedule transportation (understanding information about public transportation and direction) dealing with tourist information officers in the final column, the author designs a questionnaire regarding the difficulties encountered. some of the inputs are: most tour agencies in banyumas only conduct domestic tours. banyumas tourism is still lack of promotion either in bahasa indonesia or english. it makes the foreign tourists rarely visit banyumas. one effort of tour agencies in banyumas is to build networking. they develop tourism networking in indonesia or even with other countries. they also build the network by writing indonesia tourism travel blog which is used to attract international tourists to indah puspitasari developing english for tourism materials trough stakeholders’ needs analysis 154 come to indonesia. they shared a problem of writing a good travel blog in english. they realize their weakness so that they invite the english teacher or lecturer to improve their english. youth, sports, culture and tourism office of banyumas regency needs analysis the writer met mr. d. jatmiko, head of culture and tourism office, to discuss the tourism needs analysis. he said speaking and writing are very important skill for tourism because ability to speak and write is used as a means of communication, promotion and network expansion. through this ability, they are able to promote tourism and activities that can attract and make tourists stay longer, buy something in shopping areas, use the local transportation and stay in hotels. tourism human resources are hopefully capable of mastering english in the following topics: greeting, facial expression and body movement (non verbal communication) cross cultural understanding types of accommodation hotel facilities staffing and internal organization reservation and check -in hotel and restaurant services phone calls complaints and solution describing tourism object tour guiding presentation skill (presenting destination) itinerary and schedule weather transportation (understanding information about public transportation and direction) dealing with tourist information officers all the topics in the questionnaire are needed because according to d. jatmiko, the mastery of the vocabulary of the tour guides in every tourist attraction in banyumas is still very limited. in the final column, the author designs a questionnaire regarding the difficulties encountered. some of the difficulties written in questionnaires and interviews are limitations of vocabulary, limitation of expanding business network through internet media and make overseas market as target, limitation of tourism industry players who use english as a promotional tool on the internet, and limitations in the ability to write travel blogs. from the three stakeholders need analysis above, it can be concluded that; 1) the required skills are speaking (100%), listening (75%), writing (25%), and reading (25%). the writer draws a conclusion from the mean of hotels and tour agencies’ needs analysis then the information from head of banyumas culture and tourism office is used to make data validation trough triangulation; 2) topic needed, all the topics offered in the questionnaire are required by all stakeholders except money, number, and weather; and 3) difficulties encountered in the field are; less practice of english for hotels and tourism, inactive cooperating with tourism industry to strengthen business network from all tourism stakeholders, less practice in reading and explaining tourism city map, and less practice in using and listening english materials with different accents, such as english speakers from china, japan, and india that are sometimes difficult to understand by stakeholders. conclusion improvements will always be made in the development of learning materials because teachers and lecturers are required to be sensitive to the development needs of students and society. banyumas, one of the biggest regency in the south of central java province, also develops in many sectors, especially in tourism industry. number of hotels in banyumas is growing and the consumption of society right now is changing from retail shopping into vacationing in tourist attractions. those phenomena make banyumas and university must be ready to prepare qualified human resources in tourism sector. english diploma program of jenderal soedirman english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 155 university has tourism concentration. it will help banyumas to prepare human resources in this sector. to make in line with the government needs, hotel, tour agency and university, the author conducted this research. the findings related to the skill needed, topic needed, and difficulties encountered. the results of this study are; 1) the required skills are speaking (100%), listening (75%), writing (25%), and reading (25%); 2) 80% of the topics offered in the questionnaire are required by all stakeholders. the topics are about hotels and tourism materials; and 3) difficulties encountered are; less practice of english for hotels and tourism, inactive cooperating with tourism industry to strengthen business network from all tourism stakeholders, less practice in reading and explaining tourism city map, and less practice in listening different accents such as english speakers from china, japan, india that are sometimes difficult to understand by stakeholders. references amali, m. (2015). relevancy of english tourism lesson plan with students’ needs analysis at vocational school 2 padang. padang: stkip pgri sumatra barat. cohen, l. (2005). research methods in education. new york: rutledge taylor & francis group. darrel, h. (2018). analysis of students’ feedback for a tourism english course based on group projects. tokyo: faculty of international tourism, toyo university. retrieved october 19, 2018 from https://toyo.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=pages_view_ main&active_action=repository_view_main_ite m_detail&item_id=10145&item_no=1&page_id =13&block_id=17. kementrian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. (2008). panduan umum pengembangan silabus. jakarta: kemendikbud ri. kementrian pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia. (2011). kerangka kualifikasi nasional indonesia. retrieved october 1, 2018 from http://www.dikti.go.id/files/atur/kkni/penyusu nan-lo-prodi.pdf. pitana, d. (2009). pengantar ilmu pariwisata. yogyakarya: penerbit andi. richard, j. c. (2001). curriculum development in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. snow & kamhi-stein. (2006). developing a new course for adult learners. new york: tesol inc. sugiyono. (2009). metode penelitian pendidikan: pendekatan kuantitatif, kualitatif dan r & d. bandung: alfabeta. trang, b. t. t. (2015). needs analysis of english language use in tourism: a case study of international travel companies in vietnam. unpublished master thesis. college of language arts, i-shou university. indah puspitasari developing english for tourism materials trough stakeholders’ needs analysis 156 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 219 project-based learning in teaching writing: the implementation and students’ opinion ningtyas orilina argawati english education department, faculty of language education, ikip siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: tyas.orilina@yahoo.com lilis suryani english education department, faculty of language education, ikip siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: suryani.lies3@gmail.com apa citation: argawati, n. o., & suryani, l. (2020). project-based learning in teaching writing: the implementation and students’ opinion. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 219-226. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2120. received: 03-01-2020 accepted: 15-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: writing becomes the most challenging skill for the students as it needs more time to develop and tend to raise problem to students. therefore, project based learning is offered to solve the problems in writing. some experts believe that project based learning (pbl) can provoke the students to get new knowledge through their own project. this research reports on the implementation of project based learning in teaching writing. the objectives of the research are to know the implementation of project based learning in elevating the students’ ability on writing and to know the students’ opinion of the implementation of project based learning in teaching writing. qualitative was used as a research method and classroom action research as a research design. the participants of the research were fourth semester students in one university in cimahi, west java. the collected data were obtained through observation, writing test and interview. then, data were analysed based on triangulation. as result, it was found that the implementation of project based learning in teaching writing worked well. it could be seen from the students’ responses during the implementation of this method as they gave positive opinion toward the method used; they actively involved in learning process. pbl was proved on helping the students wrote well. besides, the project given engaged the students in solving a real problem and answering it. in other word, this project could develop the students’ critical thinking and it could be a meaningful project for them. keywords: project-based learning; writing; classroom action research. introduction writing is one of productive skills that should be mastered by the students. as stated by hyland (1996), writing is a way of sharing personal meaning and writing course emphasize the power of individual to construct his or her own views on a topic. it can be inferred that a person delivers his/her own ideas through his/her own writing and everyone can have different perspective about something that they think. through writing, students can express feeling, describe something, discuss an idea, present a point of view, and share experience they have in the form of written product (argawati & suryani, 2017). besides, writing is a means of extending and deepening student’s knowledge; it acts as a tool for learning subject matter (graham & perrin, 2007). moreover, nunan (2003, p. 88) believes that writing is the physical act of committing words or ideas to some medium, whether it is hieroglyphics inked onto parchment or an e-mail message typed into a computer. on the other hand, writing is the mental work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statements and paragraphs that will be clear to a reader. concerning to study in higher education, students are necessary to attain academic writing ability since it influences their academic achievement (oktarina, emzir, & rafli, 2018). students in university level should master the way to write well. it has to be done to fullfill the purpose of learning writing for them as students. bailey (2015) wrote that the purposes of writing, as follow: 1) to report what the writer has done, 2) to answer writer’s questions, 3) to discuss one specific topic and provide writer’s opinions, 4) to synthesize research conducted by someone about one topic. nevertheless, writing is not an easy skill to do, especially for efl students. although they learn english since elementary school but writing is still the biggest problem for the students. this problem is faced by university students too. they ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani project-based learning in teaching writing: the implementation and students’ opinion 220 are in trouble to start writing and to express ideas through writing. this is in line with kim and kim (2005) as cited in agustiana (2017) who say writing is considered to be difficult and challenging for most students. it is supported by heaton (1998) who states writing skill is complex and sometimes difficult to teach, requiring mastery not only grammatical and rhetorical devices but also of conceptual and judgmental elements. therefore, this indicates that writing is hard because there are several components or aspects to consider in writing, and it can cause that the students are afraid to write because they do not want to do mistakes. the components or aspects of writing that need to be considered by the teachers based on jacobson (2003) are covering: 1) content – refers to the substance of writing, the experience of main idea. i.e., group of related statements that a writer presents as unit in developing a subject. content of the paragraph do the work of conveying ideas rather that fulfilling special function of transition, restatement, and emphasis. 2) organization – refers to the logical organization of content. it is scarcely more than attempt to piece together all collection of fact and jumbled ideas. even in early drafts it may still be searching for order, trying to make out patterns in its materials and working to bring particulars of its subject in line with what is still only a half-formed notion of purpose. 3) vocabulary – refers to the selection of words those are suitable with the content. it begins with the assumption that writer wants to express the ideas as clearly and directly as he/she can. choosing words that express his/her meaning is precisely rather than skews it or blurs it. 4) language use – refers to the use of correct grammatical form and synthetic pattern of separating, combining, and grouping ideas in words, phrases, clauses, and sentences to bring out logical relationship in paragraph writing. 5) mechanic – refers to the use graphic convention of the language, i.e., the step of arranging letters, words, and paragraphs by using knowledge of structure and some others related to one another. writing needs process and it will take time for the students to write well. according to harmer (2007), writing is different from speaking; the final product of writing is not nearly instant. it means that process is needed for the students; they have to think the ideas, select vocabulary, write, edit, and then publish it. besides, the teachers have important role to help the students to develop their writing. so, the teachers are expected to implement suitable method or strategy in teaching writing. dealing with the problem, teachers need to continue seek for some methods or approach to implement in teaching writing. process approach seems appropriate to be used to this case. one of the methods belongs to process approach is project-based learning (pbl). pbl is a method that allows “students to design, plan, and carry out an extended project that produces a publicly exhibited output such as a product, publication, or presentation” (patton, 2012; as cited in riswandi , 2018). it is in line with task-based instruction which gives the opportunities for students to feel free doing their task in their ways. the most different thing is dealing with the term “project”. this project is be able to engage students on doing things done based on their own plan, idea, and creativity. in this research, the researchers asked the students to do such a project; it was mini magazine project. they chose their own topic, group, and design. this research aims on describing the implementation of project based learning in elevating the students’ ability on writing and on describing the students’ opinion of the implementation of project based learning in teaching writing. method method of research used on this study was qualitative with classroom action research. there were two objectives of the research, they were, it described the implementation of teaching writing using project-based learning (pbl) to improve the ability of the students on writing. beside, it also revealed the students’ opinion toward the implementation of the method of teaching used. classroom action research is defined as a research that is used to improve better learning (kemmis & mctaggart, 2005) and teachers as researchers in the classroom (mertler, 2009). in other word, teachers know the problems in the classroom and find out the solution to solve the problems. in this research, writing became the problem of the students and lecturer offered project based learning as the solution of the problem that were faced by students. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 221 the classroom action research has four steps to be implemented in the research; they are covering planning, action, observation, and reflection. those four steps are bond together in a cycle which can be repeated based on the researchers’ need. in every cycle, there must be pre-test and post-test to measure the improvement of the students’ ability on writing. on this study, the researchers conducted two cycles to collect the data. the study was already done on the even semester of 2017-2018, during february to april 2018. the participants of this study were the fourth semester students of a university in cimahi. it consisted of 30 students in one classroom. the instruments used were test, observasion and interview. tests were in the form of essay test related to the instruction for the students to build a descriptive text, and given to the students as a pre-test and a post-test. while the observation and interview were done during the action conducted in the classroom. the observation done towards all of the students in the classroom, while the interview was only done toward students to dig in depth information related to their responses on the instruction conducted. the data were then analysed through triangulation. it was used to find out the similarities and differences the data. the result of data would be discussed in the following section of this research. results and discussion the result of the research is divided into two parts; the first is the implementation of project based learning to improve students’ writing ability and the second is the students’ opinions toward project based learning in learning writing. implementation of pbl to improve students’ writing ability the first point of finding reflected the result of students’ learning writing using problem-based learning. the research was conducted using classroom action research which consisted of two cycles. before doing the cycle 1, the researchers began with pre-cycle. in this step, the researchers did the pre-test for the students to know their ability before the pbl was implemented. here is the detail information of the result of implementing car to the students: pre cycle the researchers conducted the research within three months from february – april 2018. every cycle consists of four steps; they are planning, action, observation, and reflection. in the first meeting, the researchers did pretest by asking the students to write two paragraphs regarding to the topic that the students chose. the topic given were related to descriptive text. they were getting the opportunity to choose the topics by themselves to make them felt free to write, so that it could reflect their genuine ability of writing. the result was then used as the beginning score before implementing project based learning as the score of pre-test 1. the mean score of pre-test in this pre cycle was 65 and it was considering as a ‘not good enough’ score regarded to the minimum standart of score. therefore, project based learning was offered to be implemented to solve this problem. then, the next step done was cycle 1. cycle 1 after getting the score from pre-test in the pre cycle, the researchers did a planning step. they discussed about lesson plan and the topics that would be implemented in the classroom. cycle 1 was conducted into three meetings and post-test for the fourth meeting. 1) the first meeting in cycle 1 the lecturer wrote down six topics, they were: healthy, business, mind, education, leisure, and technology. every student could choose the topic based on his/her passion. then, they made a group of 5 and 6. in one group, every student was given a chance to choose subtopic about education and every student could not choose same sub topic, they had to have different perspective but the point was the same, education. they could choose the topic based on real problem in society and find out the solution. the lecturer explained about topic sentences and supporting sentences, she also asked the students to analyse one text in pre cycle. 2) the second meeting the students were introduced about the project and at the end of the project; the students had to submit mini magazines. the lecturer explained the steps in doing project based learning. there are four steps in doing project based learning; they are starting the project, developing, reporting, and assessing the project. the lecturer also explained about editing and proofreading. 3) the third meeting the lecturer asked the students to write a text in a group. they could discus with their friends related to the content, vocabulary, etc of the text. then, the students did peer ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani project-based learning in teaching writing: the implementation and students’ opinion 222 correction. peer correction was based on the criteria of proofreading that the students have already got in the previous meeting. 4) the fourth meeting this meeting was used for conducting posttest 1. the post-test done by giving the students instruction to write down a composition in descriptive text. in this section, they could freely choose the topic with their preference by their own. after the students wrote the text, then the researchers analysed the result based on writing component rubric. the result showed that the mean score of post-test 1 on cycle 1 was 70. it means there was an improvement based on pre cycle result of the students. in the reflection step, the students gained good improvement from pre cycle, 65 to cycle 1, 70. most of the students had good responses and they could discuss actively. critical thinking of the students appeared in learning and it was meaningful for them. it can be seen from peer feedback that they did with their friends in their own group. they could share and analyse text. nevertheless, some of the students were confused and they did not have idea to write. some of them could not develop and write down the topic sentences and supporting sentences when they made the composition. grammar errors and punctuation were still found in the students’ writing. in summary, the activities done by the students can be seen in table 1. table 1. activities on cycle 1 meeting activities lecturer students 1  gave topics to students to be chosen  gave examples of topic sentences and supporting sentences  made group of 5-6 persons  chose the topic given  then analyzed the topic and supporting sentences given 2  explained about the pbl used in the teaching and learning activities  gave them a project (wrote a text in a group)  set their plan and idea on the project given 3  asked the students to finish the text.  peer correction  wrote a text and discussed it with his/her friends in a group  submitted the text  peer correction with another group 4  gave a post-test  did the post-test cycle 2 cycle 2 was conducted in march, 2018. reflection in cycle 1 was used to revise planning in cycle 2. the lecturer tried to explain more to the students about topic sentences and supporting sentences. the lecturer showed some examples of grammar error and punctuation, so the students could revise it. the lecturer gave feedback and correction to the students. cycle 2 was divided in four meeting. here are the meeting conducted: 1) in fifth meeting, the lecturer asked the students to do individual exercises based on the sub topic. in this step the lecturer gave them some topics and the students were having the opportunity to practice and develop their skill on building concept and making composition. they wrote text based on their own topic. 2) in sixth meeting this meeting was conducted to do peer correction. peer correction was done to know the students’ error in writing and they could revise it. it was also be done to give oportunity to students to recognize error from their friends’ work. recognizing error could help them to build a better writing and make a good composition. besides, beeing corrected by their own friends rose less intimidation feeling if compared with corrected by the lecturer. through peer correction, students could study better and could fix their error or mistakes if they had any. 3) the seventh meeting the students designed their own layout of mini magazine containing their coposition they had already made in descriptive text by using some digital apllications like canva, lucidpress, or adobe in design. the students were more creative in using some applications that can be used in designing their mini magazine. every student had to collect his/her own text and compiled in a english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 223 group to attach in mini magazine. the final result of the project was in the form of mini magazine. the students revised their composition and their mini magazine again and made final revision before submitting it in the next meeting. 4) the eighth meeting after doing some revision, the students submitted the complete mini magazines as the unity of their result of writing of all the member in team to the lecturer. then, the lecturer assessed the students’ composition as their score of writing subject. in this meeting the lecturer also conducted post-test for cycle 2. the post-test was individual test which was done in the classrom. the students needed to make their own composition regarded to the mini magazine they made before. they only had thirty minutes on making the composition of descriptive text by their own. after doing the post-test, their final score was revealed. the mean score in cycle 2 was 74. it means that quantitatively there was an improvement for the students from pre cycle to cycle 1, and from cycle 1 to cycle 2. grammar errors and punctuation decreased even though there were some mistakes and errors which were still found. however, it was considering having a good improvement since the mistakes and errors were not as many as in the first meeting. it was as the result of several steps implemented regarded to the project-based learning which had been choosen. beside, this project could develop the students’ critical thinking since they had to work both in group and in individual work. it means that they had opportunity to discuss the material with their friends, then they were given opportunity too to improve themselves individually. in addition, the project done could be a meaningful project for them. 5) the ninth meeting in the last meeting, the students were asked some questions related to project based learning. it was done to reveal their responses toward the use of project-based learning in teaching writing descriptive text in their class. interview was conducted to the students. the result showed that most of the students had positive responses to project based learning. it could happen since they felt that the method use could effectively improve their ability which measured through several test; pre-test, post-test 1, and post-test 2. moreover, the project given engaged the students in solving a real problem and answering it. for an easy checking, table 2 serves the summary of the activities in cycle 2. table 2. activities on cycle 2 meeting activities lecturer students 5  asked the students to write individual text.  wrote a text 6  peer correction  the students read and revised their friends’ writing. 7  design layout  gave a post-test for cycle 2  did the project with their group  collect his/her own text and compiled in a group to attach in mini magazine  revised it again and made final revision  did the post-test on cycle 2 8  gave a post test  students did their writing activities 9  conducted an interview to 6 students related to the their opinion toward the use of pbl  students answered some questions delivered by the researchers as a result of the classroom action research which had been applied, the researchers could analyze the mean score of the students from test to test. here is the detail information of the students’ scores as served on figure 1. ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani project-based learning in teaching writing: the implementation and students’ opinion 224 60 65 70 75 pre cycle cycle 1 cycle 2 65 70 74 mean score figure 1. the mean score of cycle 1 and 2 based on figure 1.1 above, it can be seen that there was an improvement from pre-test in pre cycle, which was 65 became 70 on the post-test 1 in cycle 1. then, it was continued to the second post-test in cycle 2 which gained 74. through this finding, it can be inferred that project based learning applied to teach writing descriptive text to the fourth semester students can help the students in improving their ability on writing measured from their three different test above. besides, the students’ error in writing got decrease from pre cycle into the last cycle, in other words, project based learning could help the students to write well. it can be inferred from peer feedback that the students did in each cycle. students’ opinion toward the implementation of problem-based learning in teaching writing the second objective of the research is to describe the students’ opinion towards the implementation on project-based learning in teaching writing descriptive text. the researchers collected the data regarded to the second aim of study through observation and interview, then analyzed the result through data triangulation. the observation was done during the teaching and learning process of writing activities to the whole class. while the interview was conducted to 6 students represented their groups. table 3 serves the detailed presentation of the data gained through triangulation. table 3. triangulation data finding observation interview result 1 they did the discussion with their friends in group willingly. the interaction was increased from meeting to meeting they stated that they had willingness to do discussion with friends in group. they had many things to discuss with their friends. students felt that the project-based learning they did was good to increase their activeness during learning process 2 they searched some vocabularies on dictionary and some meaning of words in the internet they stated that they needed dictionary to look for the meaning of some words and vocabularies students thought that their motivation was improved from time to time by doing the project in group 3 they found their own way to do the project given by the lecturer and created their mini magazine based on their group idea they said that they had already found their own design for their mini magazine, and the way to make it based on their discussion students’ creativity was overwhelmed during their work on their project of mini magazine. they created their own and made it into something they like the most. 4 they seemed to revise their work due to the new finding of something new. they made some corrections on some errors occured during their work. they fixed the grammatical errors and the incorrect punctuation they felt that they knew something new during their work in group. most of them said that in group they found many grammatical errors which could not be found if they did their work individually. many students admitted that they study more. they sharpened their knowledge during constructing their project. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 225 together in their group corrections they made during the making of their project. 5 they laughed more. they smiled more. they interacted more. they build connection through the project worked. they helped each other and seemed so comfortable being in their group making their mini magazine they answered the questions with smile and said that it was fun during the discussion and work. they said that they could work better with their friends and felt that their mini magazine was great. students seems to be happier during the learning process. their project could raise so much fun. on top of that, they did enjoy their class activity. there were five points that the researchers got highlighted to reveal the information related to the second objective. those five points were also be the issue in the observation list when it was conducted. the result showed that there were several things that could be an improvement during the teaching and learning activity covering: activeness, motivation, creativity, knowledge and they way the enjoy the writing activities. writing activity to the students could be so difficult to master. students had many things to deal with in order to improve their ability on writing. this situation raised the willingness of the researchers to use new method in teaching writing especially in descriptive text. projectbased learning is one method which worthtrying. it is a method which based on the project given to students and let them do that with their own creativity and effort (patton, 2012; as cited in riswandi , 2018). pbl was conducted during the even semester to teach writing descriptive text in university level. the lecturer gave them a meaningful project to do. the project was to make a mini magazine based on the topic given by the lecturer. however, the topic given were so many that they could choose whichever topic they wanted. they did the project in group as they work together to design and create the mini magazine by their own. the implementation of this method to teach writing to the fourth semester students of university level seemed to gain many results. first, the use of pbl could literally improve students’ score of writing assignment. it could be seen from their increasing movement of their score of writing. on the pre-cycle, their mean score was only 65, but they showed their improvement on score on the cycle 1, which was 70. it was then continued to their result of cycle 2. they gained 4 more point to 74. in other word, we could say that they statistically improved on the field of knowledge and ability. moreover, the researchers could tell that they had improved their attitude qualitatively during teaching and learning activity. when they were asked to make a composition in descriptive, they showed their less desire since they felt that writing is difficult. however, by implementing project based learning, their attitude started to move to the good one. they could work and discuss the project with their friends in their group duringthe writing session. working in group to complete the project seemed to make them be more active and increase their motivation to write. it is supported by bagheri & abdullah (2013) as cited in eliana, senam, wilujeng, and jumadi (2016) state that pbl could be more effective result by allowing the students to participate actively in the learning process and allowing the students to produce something in collaborating with others. they also felt enjoy on making new composition related to the description on thing they had chosen. second, the researchers revealed the students’ opinion toward the use of pbl on their writing class. it could be seen from the result of observation and interview conducted during the teaching and learning activity. they had and showed good responses during the activites of writing. the data triangulation showed some points of finding. those findings were: students thought that pbl was able to increase their activeness during discussion in writing class, and the motivation as its effect was also elevated. besides, they felt that the application of pbl was able to improve not only their knowledge but also their creativity during writing activity on creating mini magazine. last but not least, they stated that they were so much happier on joining the lesson. it could be proven from their way of learning in the classroom. they laughed more, they smiled more, and they interacted more. so, project based not only help the students learn well but also the good atmosphere of learning. ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani project-based learning in teaching writing: the implementation and students’ opinion 226 conclusion the research was conducted into eight meetings, from february to april, 2018. pre cycle was conducted one meeting, cycle 1 was conducted into three meeting, cycle 2 was conducted into three meetings, and last meeting for interview. the result showed that there was an improvement before and after implementing project based learning. pre cycle mean score was 65, cycle 1 was 70, and cycle 2 was 74. in addition, they had positive opinion toward the method used; they actively involved in learning process and they were motivated well. pbl was proved on helping the students wrote well and raised their creativity. besides, the project given engaged the students in solving a real problem and answering it. moreover, pbl could make them happily join the writingclass. in other word, this project could develop the students’ critical thinking and it could be a meaningful project for them. it was proved that pbl could be use to improve students writing ability and gained positive opinion from the students. references agustiana, v. (2017). four square writing method applied in product and process based approaches combination to teaching writing discussion text. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 89-98. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.774. argawati, n.o., & suryani, l. (2017). teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ level of risk-taking. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 109-116. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.776. bailey, s. (2015). a handbook for international students. london: routledge. eliana, e. d. s., senam, s., wilujeng, i., & jumadi, j. (2016). the effectiveness of project based elearning to improve ict literacy. jurnal pendidikan ipa indonesia (jpii), 5(1), 51-55. doi: 10.15294/jpii.v5i1.5789. graham, s., & perrin. (2007). writing next: effective strategy to improve writing of adolescent in middle and high school. new york: carnegie corporation of new york. harmer, j. (2007). how to teach english. cambridge: longman. heaton, j. (1998). writing english language test. new york: edinburg gate. hyland, k. (1996). second language writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. jacobson, e., degener, s., & purcell-gates, v. (2003). creating authentic materials and activities for the adult literacy classroom: a handbook for practitioners. retrieved from: mwww.ncsall.net.fileadmin/resources/teach/jaco bson.pdf. kemmis, s., & mctaggart, r. (2005). participatory action research: communicative action and the public sphere. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications ltd. mertler, c. a. (2009). action research: teachers as researchers in the classroom. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications ltd. nunan, d. (2003). practical english language teaching. new york: mc graw hill. oktarina, s., emzir, e., & rafli, z. (2018). students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 69-76. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1256. riswandi, d. (2018). the implementation of projectbased learning to improve students’ speaking skill. international journal of language teaching and education, 2(1), 32-40. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 119 present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes audi yundayani sekolah tinggi keguaran ilmu pendidikan (stkip) kusuma negara, jakarta, indonesia email: audi_yundayani@stkipkusumanegara.ac.id apa citation: yundayani, a. (2018). present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 119-126. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1262. received: 27-02-2018 accepted: 30-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: present situation analysis is considered to be the umbrella that embraces students’ lacks in language proficiencies. the aims of this study were to (1) find out current students’ writing competence level; (2) identify students’ entry behaviors and characteristics; (3) identify students’ perception concerning with writing skill for academic purposes at non-english education study programs of stkip kusuma negara jakarta. the descriptive inquiry was used in identifying students’ present situation. the respondents were non-english education study programs students of stkip kusuma negara jakarta in the academic year 2016-2017 and english lecturers. non-english education study programs students of stkip kusuma negara jakarta had low-level writing competence for academic purposes, in the area of academic styles and genres based on their disciplines. their previous experience in studying english was different with college requirement. they were not interested in studying writing for an academic purpose due to it was difficult and made them confusing. most of them never practiced and learned it seriously but they realized the importance of having competence in writing for academic purposes, especially related with the learning process in the university level. keywords: present situation analysis, writing for academic purposes, descriptive inquiry introduction needs can be seen as the umbrella term that embraces many aspects, incorporating students’ goals and backgrounds, their language proficiencies, their reasons in taking the course, their teaching and learning preferences, and the situations they will need to communicate in. needs will involve what students know, don’t know or want to know, and can be collected and analyzed in a variety of ways (hyland, 2006). in the area of english for specific purposes, need analysis is required in order to know students’ expectation concerning with learning process. it can be seen as the main driving factor to design the whole component of teaching and learning process (yundayani, emzir & rafli, 2017). the result of need analysis will empower the teachers to interpret the language requirement into linguistic and pedagogical terms which in turn develops the suitable course’s curriculum and offers the effective guidance to the learning process (nadzri, 2004). needs analysis should be seen as the earliest action in the area of english for specific purposes approach, and it will be translated into forms of learning component (kardijan, emzir & rafli, 2018). the result of need analysis supports learning designers in identifying the students’ prospective professional needs, students’ needs in terms of language skills, including their deficiencies in the area of language skills (otilia, 2015). kaewpet (2009) stated that students’ needs also involve some areas,  teaching and learning styles with which the students are familiar;  appropriate or ineffective teaching and learning methods;  knowledge of specialized contents that teachers should have;  suitable instructional materials and study location; audi yundayani present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes 120  time of study and status of esp courses;  expectations about what students should achieve in the courses;  how necessary the courses are for the students by perceiving student’s requirement, curriculum designer will be easier in choosing the suitable learning materials and techniques to be applied in the learning process. students’ previous experience in learning english having a big role in influencing the way students will learn. by finding the students’ background, we can realize the students’ learning objective in the area of esp teaching that covers; (1) proficiency; (2) knowledge; (3) affective; and (4) transfer (stern, 1992). the present situation analysis is an analysis of the present condition of teaching and learning situation covering aspects related to students' characteristics, staffing, materials, syllabus and academic records containing data about students' language learning (gusti, 1999). students’ present situation analysis is a means to identify students’ current skills and language use (duddley-evans, 2009), including the way of assessing students’ specific needs. it will inform what can the students do with the language now (hossain, 2013). hyland (2006) stated that present situation analysis concerns with the information about students’ current proficiencies and ambitions; what they can do and what they want at the beginning of the course; their skills and perceptions; their familiarity with the specialist subject; and what they know of its demands and genres. present situation analysis can be seen as the process to find the students’ lacks which cover the discrepancy between necessity and what the students have already known concerning with the subject and related with their current skills and performance. english for academic purposes is believed to be beneficial for students in the pre-tertiary or pre-university level in order to construct a strong academic english language background which will then support them in the effective learning process at a higher level. hampslyons (2001) pledges that the english language skills of non-native english speaking academics will develop as the demand is getting higher. another comment comes from liyanage and birch (2001), they believed that there has been little attention given in eap research which with regard to the problems and complexities of egap instruction in english-speaking contexts. as a part of english general academic purposes, the ability of writing can be seen as a means to identify students’ previous knowledge, their schemata and also their creativity in presenting the ideas, thinking, including the opinion. in the academic purposes, it is a means for extracting the received information, so it plays an important role in transforming knowledge and creating the new one (yundayani, emzir & rafli, 2018). some experts believe that writing is considered as an ability included in core academic skills and also as the most complex skill to be mastered when compared to listening, speaking and reading skill (makalela, 2004; nunan, 1990). as a productive skill, writing has many components that should be mastered by the students. writing for academic purposes having some differences from writing skill at the high school level. it is common for the students to get some difficulties in applying it. most of the problem appears due to students’ failure to understand the difference of learning goal between high school and university level which initiate students into the scope of writing skill for academic purposes (ivanic & lea, 2006; lilis & scott, 2007). based on the preliminary research at nonenglish education study programs of stkip kusuma negara jakarta, it was found that present situation analysis has not been applied in designing writing material for academic purposes. it caused teacher did not have the data concerning students’ current proficiencies including their expectations. teacher tended to predict students’ early ability in writing skill for academic purposes without trying the find the exact data concerning with the students’ perceptions and what they have already known about the subject and the learning goals itself. that findings have an impact on the availability writing material for academic purposes. the given material was not suitable with students’ requirement. teachers’ intuition employed in deciding what kind of material english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 121 that will be used in the learning process and as the consequences the students having low performance in writing for academic purposes, including lack of motivation in taking part in the learning process actively. many studies believed that some factors, including english proficiency level, learning contexts, students’ characteristics, educational backgrounds, culture, and experience are important to be the foundation in designing the suitable learning process, including the learning material (oxford, 2003; deneme, 2008; khamkien, 2010). furthermore, previous research found the connections between the choices of learning strategy and factors that influence language learning strategy use. the results have claimed that the variables of gender, age, motivation, language proficiency, and language learning experience, goals, and style affect students’ selection of language learning strategy (kunasaraphan, 2015). therefore, this study is the development of previous research which focuses on finding the students’ present situation analysis in writing for academic purposes. method in determining the respondents, the purposive sampling technique was applied. 25 nonenglish education study programs students and 3 english lecturers involved in this study. the data was taken through survey questionnaire, non-participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. this descriptive research intended to identify students’ present situation in writing for academic purposes. it covered students’ current writing competence level, their entry behaviors including their perception concerning with writing skill for academic purposes. learning process was observed in order to see the actual condition of students’ performance. it was strengthened by the questionnaire and semi-structured interview to find the deeper information. the collected data were analyzed through an interpretive process, by reflecting personal viewpoints and shaping the data interpretations (clark & creswell, 2015). result and discussion based on the collected data, the research finding described in the following table. table 1. present situation analysis result no information categories data sources students’ characteristics 1 entry skills interviews: twelve students and five head of study programs test data: it was taken from students’ performance record observations: learning process of the english subject performance setting: most of the students having low score and performance in writing for academic purposes and most have no motivation in joining the writing subject. they face difficulties in writing for academic purposes but they do not know how to solve it. learning setting: target students are unskilled students in english subject. they prefer to discuss with peers and do cooperative learning. 2 prior knowledge of topic area same as above students have limited knowledge of writing; started from making sentences and developing paragraph. in fact, they have no experience in writing for academic purposes. they having problems in presenting their idea in writing. 3 attitudes toward content interviews and observations: same as above they have no interest in the material, including the learning content and its’ presentation which was focused only on the structural items, such as grammar subject. audi yundayani present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes 122 4 attitudes toward potential delivery system interviews and observations: same as above there is no guide book. most of the material are given based on lecturers’ decision and intuition without considering students’ situation and needs. 5 a motivation for instruction interviews and observations: same as above questionnaires: sent to fifty students in five non-english education study programs students are lack of motivation because they don’t know the learning goal that should be achieved in writing for academic purposes. the material is not suitable for students’ needs. the way in presenting the material doesn’t make them being active and involved in the learning process. 6 educational and ability levels interviews and observations: same as above records: students’ data from the application form test data: no test data education levels: all students are beginner; they are in the second semester. they have lack of english abilities. they don’t have any experience in english for academic purposes. most of them are fresh graduate from senior high school. ability levels: most of the students have low ability in english. their vocabulary mastery is low. they are not proficient students in applying english. 7 general learning preferences interviews and observations: same as above questionnaires: sent to fifty students in five non-english education study programs students are not experienced with a variety of learning format. they prefer to be a part of cooperative learning. they like to be involved in the active learning process. they prefer to have the direct practice oriented english learning. they require at least an english writing material for academic purposes that can be functioned as a guidance or source, especially for the autonomous learning process. 8 attitudes toward learning organization interviews and observations: same as above students have positive feelings about the english course. all realize that the english subject, especially writing for academic purposes is important for the learning process at a university level. 9 general group characteristics a. heterogeneity b. size c. overall impressions interviews: five head of non-english education study programs and lecturers observations: same as above heterogeneity: most of the students have similar educational background with low english proficiency. size: there will be a total of twenty five students enrolled in the english class. overall impressions: the writing material for academic purposes, as one of the learning components, should be developed based on students’ needs. the above findings were discussed in term of, (1) students’ current competence level in writing for academic purposes; (2) students’ entry behaviors and characteristics; and (3) students’ perceptions. students’ current competence level in writing for academic purposes the findings of this part are important to decide the beginning level of the instructional material that will be delivered to the students. the data showed that most of the students having low ability in english with limited vocabulary mastery. they were not proficient students in applying english. it caused their level of writing competence was under expectation. they had low score and english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 123 performance in writing for academic purposes. they faced difficulties in writing for academic purposes but they did not know how to solve it. students had limited knowledge of writing; started from making sentences and developing paragraph. they had a problem in presenting their idea in writing. this condition emphasized by soliman (2016) who stated that the quality of graduates nowadays needs to be enhanced, as they cannot be just vessels to be filled with information from the teacher, but they should be able to analyze information and conduct research. students’ entry behaviors and characteristics this part was focused on students’ motivation, attitude and interest toward writing for academic purposes. there were approximately twenty-five students enrolled in the english class. the students were first-year students and their age varied from 18-23. the groups consisted of both male and female students from non-educational english study programs. all students were beginner; they were in the second semester. most of them were fresh graduate from senior high school and they tended to have no motivation in joining the writing subject. most of the students had similar educational background with low english proficiency. related to this finding, valli & priya (2016) stated that in most of the schools, students were taught through the traditional way of teaching. where in the teacher dictated the sentences or writes on the blackboard, which the learners were supposed to copy down. on the other hand on college level students are expected to write on their own. target students were unskilled students in english subject. they had lack of english abilities. in fact, they had no experience in writing for academic purposes, including no interest with the material, the learning content and its’ presentation which was focused only on the structural items, such as grammar subject. this condition had an impact on the low level of students’ skill in writing. tevdovska (2015) stated that the textbooks and materials chosen for the eap courses should correspond to the goals and objectives of the designed course. therefore, the materials should address the aforementioned goals and be appropriate in the terms of language level, design, and appropriateness. students were lack of motivation because they did not know the learning goal that should be achieved in writing for academic purposes. the material was not suitable for students’ needs. the way in presenting the material did not make them being active and involved in the learning process. students were not experienced with a variety of learning format. students’ perceptions findings also revealed students’ perceptions concerning with the ability of english writing for academic purposes. students have positive feelings about the english course. all realize that the english subject, especially writing for academic purposes is important for the learning process at a university level. this finding reflects their future role of being a teacher. it is a demand for this profession to master english ability. solak (2016) stated that teachers play one of the most important roles in reaching educational objectives in all areas of education. teacher qualifications directly influence the academic achievements of the learners. on the other hand, the students stated some conditions and expectation concerning with english writing for academic purposes subject. in the learning process, they prefer to discuss in peers and do cooperative learning. they prefer to be a part of team, including peer teaching. they like to be involved actively in the learning process. they tend to have the direct practiceoriented english learning. they require at least an english writing material for academic purposes that can be functioned as a guidance or source, especially for autonomous learning process. as evseeva (2015) observed there is a “transition from “education for life” to “lifelong learning” which is understood as continuous and selfmotivated search of knowledge for different purposes either professional or personal.” thus, there was a need for a new teaching pedagogy that changes the role of the teacher from a knowledge disseminator to a learner coach and helper. unfortunately the ideal audi yundayani present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes 124 condition have not been found in the learning process. one of the learning components, the instructional material, have not been provided as the students’ requirement. most of the material are given based on teachers’ decision and intuition without considering students’ situation and needs. according to jordan (1997, p. 264), a number of variables have to be taken into consideration while designing materials, namely students, teachers, syllabus, methodology, resources, time and finance. the writing material for academic purposes, as one of the learning components, should be developed based on students’ needs conclusion the main aim of this study is to describe students’ present situation as a part of need analysis in the field of english for specific purposes (hutchinson, 1987). this research focuses on the students’ ability in writing for academic purposes. the instruments explored the students’ perceptions and beliefs concerning with their lack in writing for academic purposes. in the area of students’ current competence level in writing for academic purposes, the result described the low level of students’ proficiency in writing skill. most importantly, they encountered problems in vocabulary mastery, presenting ideas in written and difficult in making word formation. students’ entry behaviors and characteristics showed that most of them came from the same background with having no experience in writing for academic purposes. they had low motivation and enthusiasm in taking part actively in the learning process of writing for academic purposes. it caused their proficiency in writing have not caught up the target. in the other hand, students having a good perception on the requirement english mastery. they realized the importance of having writing skill for academic purposes in the university level learning process. it can be seen as a means to know students’ competency, personal interest, and academic performance (yundayani, emzir & rafli, 2017). in addition, students thought that the learning process including the instructional material did not suit their requirement. as the consequences, the condition did not attract them to involve actively in the learning process. by the end, the findings showed us that need analysis, including present situation analysis, should be done first and the results will be the base to design the whole learning components, including the instructional material. in the area of english for specific purposes, present situation analysis should be done together with target and learning context analysis. as hyland (2006) stated that need analysis constructs a picture of learning goals bringing to bear the teacher’s values, beliefs and philosophies of teaching and learning. it might be more accurate to see needs as jointly constructed between teachers and students in order to find the data concerning with the how and what of a course should be applied. this current research is developed from the result of previous research but still possible to be explored more detailed. acknowledgement this work was supported by the research fund provided by directorate of research and community service, directorate general for research and development, ministry of research, technology and higher education. in accordance with the research contract for fiscal year 2018, number: 053/km/pnt/2018, date march 6th, 2018. references deneme, s. 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(2006). english for academic purposes: an advanced resource book. ny: routledge. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 125 ivanic, r., & lea, m. r. (2006). new contexts, new challenges: the teaching of writing in uk higher education. in l. ganobesik williams (eds), teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practice and models. london: palgrave/macmillan. jordan, r. r. (1997). english for academic purposes: a guide and resource book for teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. kardijan, d., emzir, & rafli, z. (2018). target situation analysis in implementation of english for hospitality specific purposes program. international journal of english and education, 7(1). kaewpet, c. 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(2004). needs analysis of malaysian higher national diploma students. unpublished master’s dissertation, university of malaya, kuala lumpur. nunan, d. (1990). designing tasks for the communicative classroom. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. otilia, s. m. (2015). needs analysis in english for specific purposes. annals of the “constantin brâncuşi” university of târgu jiu, economy series, 2(1). oxford, r. l. (2003). language learning styles and strategies: an overview. oxford: gala. solak, e. (2016). english teacher training programs in denmark, sweden and turkey. procedia social and behavioral sciences 232, 439 – 443. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.10.060. soliman, n. a. (2016). teaching english for academic purposes via the flipped learning approach. procedia social and behavioral sciences 232, 122 – 129. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.10.036. stern, h. h. (1992). issues and options in language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. tevdovska, e. s. (2015). selecting and adapting materials in the context of english for academic purposes – is one textbook enough? the journal of teaching english for specific and academic purposes, 3(1), 115120. valli, k. s., & priya, n. s. v. (2016). a task-based approach to develop the writing skills in english of students at college level. international journal of applied engineering research, 11(3), 21452148. yundayani, a., emzir, & rafli, z. (2018). the effectiveness of task-based instructional materials on students’ writing skills for academic purposes. international journal of english and education, 7(1). yundayani, a., emzir, & rafli, z. (2017). need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 59-70. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.771. audi yundayani present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes 126 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 75 cello as a language teaching method in industrial revolution 4.0 era halimah applied linguistics study, postgraduate program, university state of jakarta, indonesia department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of suryakancana, indonesia e-mail: halimah_lt15s3@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id; halimah@unsur.ac.id gufran ali ibrahim national agency for language development and cultivation, jakarta, indonesia e-mail:ibrahim.kakalu@gmail.com ninuk lustyantie applied linguistics, postgraduate program, university state of jakarta, indonesia e-mail: ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id apa citation: halimah, h., ibrahim, g. a., & lustyantie, n. (2018). cello as a language teaching method in industrial revolution 4.0 era. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 75-82. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1497. received: 08-08-2018 accepted: 19-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: cello is derived from community english language learning and orai. it is a new teaching method developed especially in the community of english language learning based on the idea of curran’s work on teaching method. cello is a combination between an innovative teaching method and media technology called orai application that is applied in teaching and learning of speaking especially in fostering students’ fluency. today, all graduates face a world transformed by technology, in which the internet, cloud computing, and social media create different opportunities and challenges for formal education systems. this paper aims to explore the use of cello in assisting student’s speaking fluency. this classroom action research consists of three cycles in which each cycle consists of six stages, namely identify the problem, data gathering, data interpreting, action on evidence, evaluation, and revision. the obtained data showed that cello method could improve students’ speaking fluency. based on the finding, implementing cello method is strongly recommended in teaching speaking especially at fostering students’ speaking fluency. keywords: cello; speaking fluency; technology 4.0; industrial revolution; action research. introduction in the era of globalization and industrial revolution 4.0 in which it is powered by artificial intelligence and it will transform the workplace from task-based characteristics to the human centered characteristics, an ability to speak english in this era is very important to be mastered as a medium of communication between nations and people from various backgrounds. in this era, the ability to speak a second language fluently has become necessary, especially for those who want to advance in certain field of human endeavor. fluency in speaking is known as the natural ability to speak spontaneously, quickly and comprehensibly with few numbers of errors that may distract the listener from the speaker’s message. accuracy and fluency are the two factors which determine the success of english language students in the future. the key to successful communication is to be able to speak effectively and articulately which is linked to one’s success in life as it occupies an important position both individually and socially (amiri, jahedi, & othman, 2017). halimah, gufran ali ibrahim, & ninuk lustyantie cello as a language teaching method in industrial revolution 4.0 era 76 however, english speaking is not an easy thing. leong and ahmadi (2017) say that english speakers should understand important components of speech such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. therefore, problems often arise in learning to speak english. with its complex grammar and morphological systems, stress and intonation patterns, and pronunciation difficulty, many people struggle in achieving fluency. nevertheless, experience shows that with constant exposure and practice, developing fluency in a second language is made possible even with the most difficult languages. individuals who spend time in the country of the target language come back with improved pronunciation and understanding of the mechanics of the language. on the other hand, when individuals do not have constant access to native speakers and practice opportunities, achieving or maintaining fluency becomes problematic. several studies have found problems arising in learning to speak. first, leong and ahmadi (2017) found that students were unable to communicate fluently and accurately due to lack of knowledge about the topic being discussed. fluent refers to the speaking speed and smoothness of the language delivery (srivastava, 2014; hadijah, 2014). meanwhile, fluency refers to a level of proficiency in communication. it is the ability to produce spoken sentences with ease, efficiency, without pauses or a breakdown of communication (yang, 2014). the existence of fillers such as uh, um, well, you know, i mean, like are among the common ones used in spoken language indicating influent (al-khasawneh & huwari, 2014). based on a number of findings, it can be concluded that there are two indicators effecting students’ speaking fluency, namely; 1) too many hesitations and pauses in speaking may obstruct the speaking fluency and also depress the speaker (wang, 2014); and 2) repeating words or phrases during speaking. nowadays, people are standing on the edge of a technological revolution that is called industry revolution 4.0 in which having proficiency to speak in english especially for university students is quite important in order to be able to build a connection with others around the world through the communication. as today’s learners belong to the digital age, teachers also must adapt to use technology and multi-media based learning resources to impart the functional teaching of english (daniel, 2014). there are numerous of researchers conducted research on the issues of the use of media technology in language teaching and learning, such as bahadorfar and omidvar (2014) who proposed some technologies that can be applied in language teaching, namely communication lab speech recognition software, internet, tell (technology enhanced language learning), pod casting, quick link pen, and quicktionary. they said that technology gives learners a chance to engage in selfdirected actions, opportunities for self-paced interactions, privacy, and a safe environment in which errors get corrected and specific feedback is given. feedback by a machine offers additional value by its ability to track mistakes and link the student immediately to exercises that focus on specific errors. godwin-jones (2009) stated that there are a number of tools for speech analysis, many of which can be and have been adapted for language learning. kaypentax (formerly kay elemetrics) markets the widely used visi-pitch, now at version four. the latest release features a waveform editor, auditory feedback and voice games. the games are quite basic, for example, an animated graphic based on pitch and amplitude of the sound input. the company also sells the popular computerized speech lab (csl), a powerful hardware/software speech analysis system. its hardware is used in conjunction with a pc and offers highquality input and output as well as a variety of software add-ons. the latter includes a video phonetics program, which features a english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 77 synchronized display of video and acoustic data. the most widely used option with csl is real-time pitch, which provides extensive analysis capabilities to compare two speech samples. kaypentax also sells multi-speech, a software only speech analysis program, with similar software options to csl. the eduspeak speech recognition system from sri international supports 9 languages and includes program interfaces for use in macromedia director and microsoft activex. for oral language testing, the versant suite of tests (available for english, spanish and arabic) incorporate speech processing and can be taken over the phone or on a computer. a free on-line demo for english illustrates how the 15-minute test works. the speech analyzer from sil international (formerly the summer institute of linguistics) performs frequency and spectral analysis and can be used to annotate phonetic transcriptions. of particular interest to language learning, it also allows for slowed playback and looping of audio. sil international makes available other tools for language analysis and recording including phonology assistant and wincecil, both of which can be used together with speech analyzer. a widely used authoring tool is winpitch ltl, a windows desktop application. teachers create lessons consisting of a sequence of speech models, to be repeated or imitated by the learner, with the model speech displayed in graphic form on the left and the learner's input on the right. the program features unicode word processing and web linking. as with similar tools, winpitch ltl offers powerful capabilities but it is likely the rare language teacher who can find the time to create pronunciation lessons themselves from scratch. teachers who do, like marjorie chan for teaching chinese (2003), find that the flexibility and customizability of such tools, as well, of course, as evidence of student improvement, compensate for the time and effort involved. those researchers used media technology in language teaching. yet, over those researches, the use of orai application in teaching and learning speaking has not ever been revealed by the researchers. cello method promotes the studentcentered learning process and decreased the teacher-centered learning. through the stages of the learning process, the teacher’s role is as a facilitator and a counselor. there are some activities that can be done using cello method in speaking class. first is recording. in this activity, the students record their speech. second, listen. the students listen to their recorded speech. third is correct. the students’ activity is corrected for the error in language occurred on their speech. the fourth activity is repeating the recorder in which the students repeat and record their correct speech. orai is one of the most popular android mobile application (bodana, 2017). it is an application to help people to be better speaker. it is developed by danish dhamani. orai gives people the confidence and skills to speak powerfully when on stage, in front of a room, or in everyday life (chang, 2017). it serves as people speech coach (takahashi, 2017). orai is powered by artificial intelligence which gives immediate, personalized feedback on users’ public speaking prowess (douglas, 2017). orai helps people in preparing a better speaker (olivia, 2018). to use the app, learners must download it for smartphones (figure 1). it is compatible for almost all ios and android mobile devices (bodana, 2017). figure 1. orai application figure halimah, gufran ali ibrahim, & ninuk lustyantie cello as a language teaching method in industrial revolution 4.0 era 78 there are some features in orai application, namely; 1) it gives instant feedback. orai gives feedback on students’ use of filler words, pacing, energy level, pauses, and clarity all in seconds (figure 2); 2) learn through lessons (figure 3). orai worked with over 100 speaking coaches to create fun, interactive lessons to improve the students’ speaking skills (figure 4); and 3) students can practice anytime (figure 5). figure 2. instant feedback from orai app figure 3. lessons available in orai app figure 4. students can practice anytime through the artificial intelligent, as the learners have done recording, this app offers an interesting solution to a common problem (bodana, 2017). orai picks up on filler words like um. for instance, the record app tracks the number of “ums” that is uttered and points them out to speaker as unnecessary filler words that are signs of hesitation (chang, 2017), see figure 5. it tells speaker if she/he is speaking too fast or too slow and provides his/her a transcript of what speaker just said (figure 8) which highlights speaker’s varying energy or lack thereof (figure 6). figure 5. orai detect filler use figure 6. analytic result of orai app it also tells the speaker how clearly speaker is enunciating words and counts the number of words that speaker says in a minute as well as monitoring the pace of her/his speech. besides, orai measures the “energy” of speaker speech, like whether she/he speaks in a monotone that will put people to sleep or whether she/he emphasizes certain words. orai really helps learner to prepare speaking fluency and confidently. accordingly, this article reports the results of the research dealing with the application of the orchestrating orai application into cll method by answering the following research question: how does cello method application improve students’ fluency in speaking practice? english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 79 method the type of the research conducted in this study was collaborated action research. it is a type of action research characterized by the focus on single class or several classes with common issues and the presence of substitute teachers. the subjects were 27 university second semester students studying at english education department in a private university in cianjur. the data of this study were collected through test and observation on the process of teaching and learning using orai and cll method. the tool used was video recorder. the data obtained in this research were qualitative and quantitative data. the data were then analyzed using descriptive statistics and constant comparative method. to know the improvement of students’ fluency, the researcher compared the mean score of post-test 1, post-test 2, as well as post-test 3 in order to know the effectiveness of implementing orai application in cll method to teach speaking fluency. results and discussion statistically, the result of students’ tests is presented in the following graphic. graph 1. students’ score this graphic clearly indicates that there is improvement of the students from cycle to cycle. the minimum score was constant in pre-test and in post–test 1. however, it increased to 1.5 in post–test 2, and increased again to 2 in post–test 3. the maximal score was 2 in the pre-test. it increased to 2.5 in post-test 1, 3 in post-test 2, and it was constant in this score in post-test 3. the improvement also happened on students’ average score. it was 1.6 in pre-test and increased to 1.9 in post-test 1, 2.4 in posttest 2, and became 2.6 in post-test 3. it can be reported that the increasing of students’ speaking fluency score above deals with the score speech rate, articulation, phonation time ratio, and also the total number of pause fillers per minute. here, the students were able to manipulate the time spent for speaking in order to reduce the frequency of silent, pause filler, and also hesitancy that are usually occurred in speaking. the students are also able to produce more units of syllable. by using orai application, the students had the opportunities to make some repetition of their speech. another improvement also happened on the students’ attitude toward learning process. from the observation, the writer found a new formula in using cello method in teaching speaking. this formula consists of four stages, namely record, listen, correct, and repeat. finally, the writer called this formula as rlcr. the stages of the activities are described as follows. the first stage of students’ activity was recording. in this stage, the students recorded their utterances or speaking. hence, before recording their voice, the students were allowed to ask the teacher about what they were going to utter in l1, then the teacher translated the utterances into the target language. the students uttered the utterance modeled by the teacher. the students then practiced in uttering the utterance many times. the purpose of this activity is to get the students’ fluency. it was supported by muhammad (2017) who said that repetition can help students’ fluency. after they were sure about their pronunciation, their intonation, and they were confident enough to record their utterances, then they recorded their halimah, gufran ali ibrahim, & ninuk lustyantie cello as a language teaching method in industrial revolution 4.0 era 80 speaking. only the target language was recorded by using orai application. the second stage was listening. after the students recorded their speeches the device would take a few second to analyze students’ speech. the device then showed the result and gave direct feedback to the students. the feedback covered pronunciation, tone, energy, filler as well as the clarity of the students’ speech as well as the score of the speech. the result of the analysis of pronunciation can be seen in the transcribe sheet. when there was a blank sheet, it means that the students produced incorrect pronunciation. the students’ result of speaking energy was indicated by the graphic of energy. there were two colors in it; yellow color indicated that students’ speaking was monotonous and purple color indicated the students’ speaking energy. the students’ unnecessary filler was also analyzed. at the end, the students were able to get their scores of clarity. the students also got suggestion from the device. based on the suggestions, the students then listened to their recording speech. in this stage, the students would highlight their mistakes. having reading the result or the analysis, the students might make some corrections dealing with the mispronunciation, the tone, the filler, or the energy suggested by the device. in this stage, they discussed with their fellow or consulted to the teacher. by having discussion, it means that they have chance to communicate with their friend and the teacher to build a relationship between students-students and student-teacher. in this stage, the students practiced reading the correct speech. the final stage was repeating. once the students corrected their speech, they might do some repetitions in practicing the speech through the recording. as the score increased and they felt comfort with the score, they might submit the score to the teacher together with the transcription of the text. as the research revealed, being afraid of speaking in front of other is common for the students even for english department students. english teacher should be able to find a better solution to help students to cover their fear of speaking. one of the things than can be done is by applying an appropriate teaching method which not only makes the students active and creative in the teaching and learning process, but also it should pay attention on the students’ psychology. the teacher also should be creative in using a media in applying the teaching method in order to create a joyful teaching and learning process. community language learning (cll) method is an innovative teaching method that pays attention on the students’ feeling, desire, and opinion during the process of teaching and learning. in the application, this method is assisted by a tape recorder. as this device is stay no longer in this era, it is substituted by an application of mobile technology called orai that can be downloaded from google play store to smartphone. then, this application and cll method are orchestrated to be applied in speaking class in order to help students to be better in speaking skill. it is supported by bahadorfar and omidvar (2014) who noted that technological tools have been regarded as ways of helping students improve language skills, such as speaking skill. orai application can help students in increasing their speaking and all aspects of speaking. for instance, the app tracks the number of “ums” that the students utter and point them out to the students as unnecessary filler words that are sign hesitation. as the students are able to manage the use of filler during the speaking, it shows that they can speak fluently. in addition, orai also helps students to fix their pronunciation, intonation as well as their speed of speaking (douglas, 2017). the app uses artificial intelligence (ai), developed by gupta, to track users’ speech and give instantaneous, personalized feedback based on three indicators: use of filler words like “um” and “er”, speed of speech (130-150 words per minute is the optimum), and energy or variation in tone. orai application can be used to practice speaking in the class and out of the class. it english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 81 promotes students’ self-study. moreover, the students suggest that orai application should be applied in other language subject, such as in phonology and reading class. it is in line with statement that the participants’ digital mindsets, comprising assumptions about affordances of digital technologies, shaped the ways in which the participants used digital technologies within and beyond classrooms. research has revealed that second language learners often seem passive and reticent in language classrooms. in the age of globalization, however, there is an urgent need for english as a foreign language (efl) teachers to enhance their reticent students’ confidence to help them take part more actively in classroom oral activities (doqaruni, 2014). cello method is an innovative new teaching method especially for english community learning. it becomes a more effective teaching method assisted by a smart app called orai. the effectiveness of this method could be seen from the stages done by the students in learning speaking in which it promotes the students to learn independently and in joyful environment. orai is a very smart app. for example, if in a uttering the utterances the students too monotonous, the app will give a direct feedback. another interesting characteristic of the app is the playback button that learners can listen to the speech being spoken in the recorder. through this feature, orai offers personalized exercises for each learner, focusing on their weaknesses and improving their skills. despite these good features in orai, there are a few cautionary notes. first, orai’s voice recognition software did not always get it right. in fact, many of the words in students’ transcripts were incorrect or replaced with an underscore, symbolizing that the software did not understand. this made the students frustration. this seemed to skew other areas of feedback as well, such as counting the number of filler words used. in addition, the app would give users more incentive to use it if it provided cumulative feedback over time. for instance, if it kept track of the number of filler words a speaker used over the course of several months, their pace, or energy levels, users would be able to track their long-term progress in specific areas. it must be noted that orai does not provide any grammatical explanations. it only immerses the learner in the target language by offering exercises centered on new vocabulary. to learn the grammar, learners must deduce the principles of grammar on their own and through trial and error. even though orai penalizes the learners for the tiniest of mistakes and points out the most insignificant phase of speech, it does not present the learners with any grammar notes or rules of any kind. yet, in the term of fluency, this app gives some suggestions what the students should do to fix their speech. it also gives the results of unnecessary filler during speaking. through this way, the students will be aware of the use of filler when they speak. conclusion this study was carried out to describe how mobile technology device called orai application was orchestrated into a language teaching method named cll to be used in teaching speaking that helps the students to become better speaker and to report students’ perception on the use of orai application in speaking course. to grab the outcome of teaching and learning effectively, an appropriate teaching method should be considered by the teacher. supporting media in teaching and learning is extremely needed in order to assist student in learning in learning practice. cll method is an appropriate teaching method to be applied in language teaching and learning especially in speaking class. this method sees the students’ as a whole person who has feeling, desire, love, and the desire of sense of belonging. this method suggested the teacher to pay attention of student’s physiological factors. the old recorder equipment used in this method was a tape recorder. hence, this device did no halimah, gufran ali ibrahim, & ninuk lustyantie cello as a language teaching method in industrial revolution 4.0 era 82 longer exist. therefore the writer substituted this device with an application available in a mobile technology called orai, then combining it into cll method in teaching speaking. many researchers reported that cll method was able to reduce the students’ fear to speak. it forced the students-centered learning and reduced teachercentered study. orai application is a unique and excellent app to be used as a supporting media for speaking course. it provokes the students to learn actively and happily in the classroom. they do not to be worry of making mistake during speaking practice since the app gives them feedback directly and gives suggestion what should they do. orchestrating cll method and orai application is strongly recommended for both the teacher and students in order to help them to be better speaker. references al-khasawneh, f. m., & huwari, i. f. (2014). the interference of mother tongue/native language in one’s english language speech production. international journal of english and education, 3(3). retrieved from www.ijee.org. amiri, f., jahedi, m., & othman, m. (2017). a case study of the development of an esl learner's speaking skills through instructional debate. international journal of humanities and social science, 7(march), 120–126. bahadorfar, m., & omidvar, r. (2014). technology in teaching speaking skill. acme international journal of multidisciplinary research, 2(4), 9– 13. retrieved from http://www.aijmr.net. bodana, r. (2017). orai improve public speaking app for android, ios download review & troubleshooting. chang, m. (2017). interview with danish dhamani, co-founder of orai – ai artisan. retrieved from https://aiartisan.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/inte rview-with-danish-dhamani-co-founder-of-orai/ daniel, m. j. 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(2014). investing the problems of english speaking of islamic boarding school program at stain samarinda. dinamika ilmu: jurnal pendidikan, 14(2), 240–247. retrieved from http://journal.iainsamarinda.ac.id/index.php/dinamika_ilmu/articl e/view/16/pdf_17%0ahttps://docs.google.com/ viewerng/viewer?url=http://journal.iainsamarinda.ac.id/index.php/dinamika_ilmu/articl e/viewfile/16/pdf_17. leong, l. m., & ahmadi, s. m. (2017). an analysis of factors influencing learners’ english speaking skill. international journal of research in english education, 2(1), 34–41. doi: 10.18869/acadpub.ijree.2.1.34. muhammad, r. (2017). the importance of teaching reading: emphasize for reading fluency or accuracy in improving students’ reading comprehension in efl context. ethical lingua, 3448, 127–138. olivia, r. (2018). 15 tools to help students improve. retrieved from https://www.bookwidgets.com/blog/2018/09/15 -tools-to-help-students-improve-their-publicspeaking-skills-in-the-classroom. srivastava, s. r. (2014). accuracy vs fluency in english classroom. new man international journal of multidisciplinary studies, 1(4), 2348–1390. retrieved from www.newmanpublication.com. takahashi, d. (2017). orai app uses ai to help you become a better public speaker. wang, z. (2014). developing accuracy and fluency in spoken english of chinese efl learners, 7(2), 110–118. doi: 10.5539/elt.v7n2p110. yang, y. i. j. (2014). is speaking fluency strand necessary for the college students to develop in the efl class? theory and practice in language studies, 4(2), 225–231. doi: 10.4304/tpls.4.2.225-231. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 105 solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy m. fadhly farhy abbas english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas lancang kuning pekanbaru, indonesia e-mail: fadhly@unilak.ac.id herdi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas lancang kuning pekanbaru, indonesia e-mail: herdi@unilak.ac.id apa citation: abbas, m. f. f., & herdi, h. (2018). solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 105-114. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1499. received: 10-08-2018 accepted: 21-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: this research is based on the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay, especially in developing and organizing ideas, using good grammar and diction, and applying correct writing mechanics, such as the use of capital letter, spelling, and punctuation. the purpose of this research is to solve the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy. the design employed in this research was classroom action research. the participants involved in this research were 23 students of english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of lancang kuning pekanbaru, indonesia. the instruments used in this research were writing test, field note, observation checklist, and interview. based on the result of the test, the students’ score had reached the criteria of success set, and it was significantly improved from the result before the research conducted. the mean score of the mid-term test was 54.9, and the mean score of the cycle test was 74.3. in addition, based on the data gained from the field note, observation checklist, and interview, it was found that the students were active, creative, and enjoy the learning process. in conclusion, the use of collaborative writing strategy can solve the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay as well. keywords: writing skill; writing aspects; argumentative essay; collaborative writing strategy; classroom action research. introduction basically, writing is an activity of expressing, developing, and organizing ideas into written form. the more ideas the writers have, the better writing product will be. however, to express, develop, and organize ideas into written form is not easy. there are two aspects in writing that must be considered by the writers. first, writing process, such as pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing (fachrurrazy, 2011). second, micro and macro skills of writing, such as the ability to use word diction , grammar, and writing mechanics including the use of capital letter, spelling, and punctuation (brown, 2015). in accordance with the above statement, both aspects of writing are still difficult to be applied by the students of english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of lancang kuning especially for the students who are already studying academic writing course. in academic writing course, the students are targeted to be able to write essay in the form of argumentative essay. argumentative essay is a scientific paper that contains arguments, explanations, m. fadhly farhy abbas & herdi solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy 106 proofs, or reasons. generally, in an argumentative essay, there is an objective review or information followed by examples, analogies, and cause and effect relationship (housden, 2013). further, bowell and kemp in ibrahim, eljack, and elhassan (2015) explain that the argument displayed with good and right reasons is an attempt to influence, invite someone or lead opinions to certain things. besides, argumentative essay can also contain arguments about pro (supporting ideas) and contra (conflicting ideas) on the issues or topics being discussed (boun, 2009). based on the teaching experience, the researchers found various problems in writing argumentative essays faced by the students. the students felt difficult when developing and organizing ideas, using correct grammar and word choices, and applying correct writing mechanics, such as the use of capital letter, spelling, and punctuation. the difficulty faced by the students in writing argumentative essays can be seen from the results of the mid-term test in which the obtained score was 54.9, and it was categorized into poor level ability. based on the above problems, the researchers want to apply a learning strategy to solve or overcome the problems faced by students in writing argumentative essay. the strategy is collaborative writing. this strategy requires students to write together in pair consisting of helper and writer. the writing activity starts from planning, writing the draft, revising, and editing an article (abbas, fachrurrazy, & wahjudi, 2013). this strategy is expected to help students in solving the problems they face in writing argumentative essay. there are several steps or procedures that must be taken in implementing collaborative writing strategy in learning process (zuhri, 2009). the first step is idea generation. in this step, the students are asked to generate as many as ideas based on the topic assigned or picture provided by the lecturer. the second step is drafting. at this step, the students are asked to write a draft of the topic assigned which has been given based on ideas that have been generated previously. the third step is revising and editing. at this step, the helper is asked to revise the draft that has been written by the writer, and the writer rewrites the revised ideas to become a well-written article. then, the helper and writer edit the revised draft simultaneously. the editing process focuses on the use of grammar, vocabulary or mechanics of writing. the last step is publishing. in this step, the students display the results of their writing in front of the class. then, the lecturer asks other students to check the results of the writing to get feedback. after that, the lecturer gives an assessment towards the students’ work. in accordance with the above description, aim of this research is to solve the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing by considering these two things, namely; (1) measuring the students’ improvement in writing argumentative essay, and (2) identifying the factors that influence the students’ improvement in writing argumentative essay. method the research design used in this study was classroom action research. in this research, the researchers worked collaboratively with other english lecturers as the research collaborator. this research consisted of 4 steps or procedures, namely plan, action, observation, and reflection. this steps was called as the research cycle. the participants involved in this study were the 23 students of english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of lancang kuning pekanbaru, indonesia in the 4 th semester in 2017/2018 academic year who took academic writing course. the students were chosen because of their low ability in writing argumentative essay. the data were collected by using instruments, such as writing test, field note, observation checklist, and interview. after collecting the data, the researchers assessed and analyzed the students’ test results using english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 107 the scoring rubric and final score category provided in table 1 and table 2 below (adapted from abbas, 2015, 2018). table 1. the scoring rubric for argumentative essay assessment aspects criteria scores category content: topic development thorough development of topic 20 very good relevant to topic but lacks detail 15 good inadequate development of topic 10 fair does not show knowledge of topic 5 poor organization: unity, coherence, logical order organize paragraph well and show good coherence and chronological order 30 very good loosely organized but ideas stand out 25 good incoherent ideas and lacks logical sequencing 20 fair does not organize paragraph well and does not show good coherence and chronological order 15 poor vocabulary: word choice/ diction employ accurate and effective choice of words/diction 20 very good employ accurate diction, but not effective 15 good employ lacks accuracy of diction, but meaning not obscured 10 fair errors in applying diction or word form, and meaning obscured 5 poor grammar: sentence structure/ construction use correct grammar (pronouns, subject-verb agreement, etc) 20 very good several errors of tense, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, etc, but meaning not obscured 15 good major errors of tense, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, etc, and meaning obscured 10 fair no mastery of sentence construction and dominated by errors 5 poor mechanics: spelling, punctuation, and capitalization very little errors of mechanics 10 very good few errors of mechanics, but meaning not obscured 9 good many errors of mechanics, and meaning obscured 7 fair dominated by errors of mechanics 5 poor table 2. the final score category range of final scores category 86 – 100 very good 71 – 85 good 56 – 70 fair 10 – 55 poor results and discussion based on the results of field notes, observation checklists, and interviews, the researchers found information that the learning process in the classroom run well. based on the results of field notes, it was found that the students were very active during the learning process through collaborative writing strategy. based on the results of the observation checklist, it was found that every step of collaborative writing strategy was done well by the students. morover, based on the interview, it was found that the students felt active, creative, and enjoyable during the learning process. it was indicated that there were other factors that influence the students’ ability in writing argumentative essay besides the result of the test. in relation to the above statement, the findings from each meeting of teaching and learning process can be described as follows. at the first meeting, the learning process begun with the introduction. before the m. fadhly farhy abbas & herdi solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy 108 introduction activity, the researchers conducted a warming up activity in the form of recalling what students understood about the argumentative essay and how to write it down. this was done to make sure whether the students understood about argumentative essay or not. after the recalling process done, the researchers provided an example of an argumentative essay to students to be analyzed or discussed together. then, the researchers asked the students to look for the main idea of the essay, understood the development of the idea, and determined the language characteristics used, such as tenses and other aspects of writing. then, the researchers asked the students to exchange their worksheets with their friends to get feedback. after the above process was completed, the researchers introduced a teaching strategy called collaborative writing strategy and its implementation in the teaching and learning process. after that, the researchers asked the students to make a group in pairs and determined one student as a writer and other students as helper. furthermore, the researchers provided a topic about education to be written by the students into an argumentative essay. then, the researchers asked the students to find many ideas that should be written into the initial draft. then, the researchers assigned the students to work at home. at the second meeting, the students were asked to submit the assignment given at the first meeting (generating idea and drafting). then, the researchers gave comments on the students’ work both in spoken and written comments. after giving comments on students’ work, the researchers assigned the students to revise and edit again the drafts that have been made. the revising and editing process were focused on the use of appropriate language features, correct choice of words, and correct use of writing mechanics, such as spelling, punctuation, and capital letters. at the third meeting, the learning process focused on publishing stage. at this stage, the students were asked to display their written work in front of the class. this was done so that all students in the class could understand and could give feedback on their friends’ work. at this meeting, the students got good input in learning to write argumentative essay. at the fourth meeting, the researchers gave an assessment toward the students’ work in writing argumentative essay. the assessment focused on aspects of content (topic development), organization (structure of paragraph), vocabulary (diction/word choice), grammar (sentence sturcture), and mechanics (writing mechanism). at this meeting, the researchers assessed in terms of content that can be seen from the topics development capabilities at the argumentative essay writing. then, the researchers assessed in terms of organization which can be seen from the paragraph structure in the writing. then, the researchers assessed in terms of vocabulary that can be seen from the students’ ability in word selection in the argumentative essay writing. furthermore, the researchers assessed in terms of grammar that can be seen from the good grammatical abilities of the argumentative essay writing. finally, the researchers assessed in terms of mechanics that can be seen from the ability of the writing mechanism in the argumentative essay. at the fifth meeting, the cycle test was administered. therefore, the researchers carried out the stage of giving a writing test to students to measure the extent of student achievement in the process of writing argumentative essays. after the test, the researchers assessed the students’ work and the results of the assessment can be seen in table 3. table 3. the result of test cycle test score category cycle 74.3 good based on the result of the test cycle provided in table 3, it can bee seen that the result of test cycle was in good category. it means that this score was in good level of english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 ability. the score achieved by the students was 74.3. in relation to the result of the test cycle, the comparison of the result of the test cycle and mid term test result can clearly be seen at table 4. table 4. the result of the writing tests no test score category 1. mid term 54.9 poor 2. cycle 74.3 good based on the information provided in table 4, it can be seen that the average score of the students mid term test was 54.9 and it was categorized into poor level of ability. however, after conducting the research for 5 meetings (1 cycle), the average score of the students increased significantly. the mean score of the students in this test was 74.3, and it was categorized into good level of ability. referring to the results of the tests showed on the table 3 and table 4, the results of the writing tests obtained by students can be described in diagram 1. diagram 1. comparison of mid results and cycle test based on diagram 1, it can be clearly seen that the score obtained in the mid term test was lower than the score achived in the cycle test. the score for mid term test was 54.9 and the score for the cycle test was 74.3. in relation to the the results above, in the mid term test, there is no students who got the score above the standard score. the score that the students obtained was the score that was in fair and poor score category. furthermore, from 23 students who were participated in this research, 12 students were achieved fair score category, and 11 students got the poor score category. in the cycle test, it was found that the overall score of students was in good category. from 23 students involved in this research, there were 5 people who got very good category, 12 people got good category, and 6 students got fair score category. furthermore, the details can be seen in table 5. table 5. the comparison of participants amount and the score categories achieved no tests amount of participants score category 1. mid term 12 fair 11 poor 2. cycle 5 very good 12 good 6 fair based on the information provided in table 5, it can be seen that there was an improvement from the results of the midterm test. it showed that collaborative writing strategy was effective and beneficial in improving students’ writing skill. it means that the use of collaborative writing can improve the students’ writing skill. in accordance with the above explanations, the five aspects of writing (content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics) became the focus of writing assessment in this research. moreover, the scores obtained for every single aspect of writing can be seen in diagram 2. m. fadhly farhy abbas & herdi solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy 110 diagram 2. the writing aspects diagram 2 shows the criteria assessed were the development of a deep topic (thorough development of topic) in the category of very good, related to the topic but not detailed in the explanation (relevant to topic but lacks details) with good category, inadequate development of topic in the fair category, and does not show a scientific understanding of the topic (do not show knowledge of topic) with a poor category. first, in the aspect of content in the cycle test, the score obtained was 16.5 and it was categorized into good score category. there was no problem in developing the topic of the assigned task. second, in the aspect of organization, the score was 21.7 and it was in the fair category. according to the scoring rubric, the criteria assessed was to compile paragraphs well and show good chronological coherence and arrangement (organize paragraph well and show good coherence and chronological orders) in the category of very good, poorly structured which was very good (loosely organized but ideas stand out) with good categories, there was no idea or coherence and incoherent ideas and lack of logical sequencing in the fair category, and paragraphs were not well organized and did not show good coherence and chronological order (did not organize paragraph well and did not show good coherence and chronological order) with a poor category. third, for the aspect of vocabulary, the score ontained was 15 and it was in good category. the criteria assessed were about the ability in using correct word choice in the category of very good, using accurate but ineffective diction (employ accurate diction, but not effective) with good category, using diction or words that were less precise but the meaning of the word was not too vague (employ lacks accuracy of dictionaries, but meaning not obscured) in the fair category, there was an error in the selection of diction or word form and meaning of the word was unclear (errors in applying diction or word form, and meaning obscured) with the poor category. fourth, for the grammar aspect, the score ontained was 13.5 and it was in the fair category. the criteria assessed were about the ability in using good grammar, such as pronouns, subject and verb agreement, and many others. it covered; 1) the use of correct grammar, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, and so on, with very good category, 2) there were some errors in the use of tenses, pronoun, subject-verb agreement and so on, english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 but the meaning was not vague (several errors of tense, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, but meaning not obscured) with good category, 3) there were many errors in the use of tenses, pronouns, the suitability of the subject and verb and so on and their meaning were vague (major errors of tense, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, and so on, and meaning obscured) in the fair category, and 4) not mastering the sentence structure and dominated by errors (no mastery of sentence structure and dominated by errors) in the poor category. fifth, in the mechanics aspect, the score obtained was 7.6 and it was categorized into fair category. the criteria assessed were; 1) very few errors in the writing mechanism (very little errors of mechanics) with very good category, 2) some errors that occured in the writing mechanics but the meaning was not vague (few errors of mechanics, but meaning not obscured) with good category, 3) many errors occured in the writing mechanics and the meaning was fuzzy (many errors of mechanics, and meaning obscured) with the fair category, and 4) dominated by errors in the writing mechanics with poor category. in other words, if the overall average score was obtained then the score would be in good level ability. the details is presented in table 6. table 6. the students’ writing test results per writing indicator tests aspects content organization vocabulary grammar mechanics mid term 12.6 (fair) 13.2 (poor) 11.9 (fair) 9.8 (poor) 7.2 (fair) cycle 16.5 (good) 21.7 (fair) 15 (good) 13.5 (fair) 7.6 (fair) in accordance with the information provided in table 6, it can be seen that the scores obtained by the students in the midterm test were lower than the scores obtained in the cycle test. the score for content in the mid-term test was 12.6 and it was improved in the test cycle to 16.5. the score for organization in mid-term test was 13.2 and improved in the test cycle to 21.7. the score for vocabulary in mid-term was 11.9, and it improved in the test cycle to 15. for grammar aspect, the score in mid-term was 9.8, and in the test cycle was 13.5. at last, the score for mechanics in mid-term test was 7.2 and it was improved to 7.6 in the test cycle. furthermore, the clear information about the comparison of the writing test can be seen in diagram 3. diagram 3. significant comparison between mid-term results and cycle test results m. fadhly farhy abbas & herdi solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy 112 in line with the information in table 6 and diagram 3, the results of the students’ mid-term test can also be seen in diagram 4. diagram 4. the students’ mid-term test results per assessment aspect the diagrams show the comparison of students’ test results in writing argumentative essay. it can be clearly seen that the students’ achievement improves from mid term results to the cycle test. in other words, the students scores in the cycle test were higher than the mid term scores. it means that there has been an improvement in the students’ ability in writing argumentative essay after conducting the research using collaborative writing strategy. thus, it can be stated that the implementation of the collaborative writing strategy in learning argumentative essay writing could help students in improving their writing skill. based on the results obtained from each research instrument, it can be stated that the ability of the 4 th semester students of english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of lancang kuning in academic year 2017/2018 in writing argumentative essay were categorized into good level of ability. then, the researchers decided to complete the research until cycle 1. it means that the research was not continued to the next cycle. it was because there was a match between achievement and the criteria of success set in this research. the scores achieved by the students were higher than the minimum passing score. in line with the previous explanation, it can be stated that good ability of the students in writing argumentative essays was basically influenced by the students’ good ability in applying the collaborative writing strategy. this research result was in line with previous research conducted by abbas, fachrurrazy, & wahjudi (2013), zuhri (2009), wahyuni (2017), soraya (2016), and lestari, setyowati, sukmawan, and latief (2017) about the implementation of collaborative writing strategy in improving the students’ writing skill. based on the results of this research, it was proven that the implementation of the collaborative writing strategy in the learning process could improve the students’ skill in writing. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 113 in accordance with the above statement, the research conducted by sarmidi (2009) and isnawati (2009) were also related to the results of this research. this was because each stage of writing process was correctly applied by the students in the learning process. therefore, this activity let the students to write smoothly and correctly. in other word, this process let the students to improve their writing skill, especially in writing argumentative essay. pertaining to the above explanation, although the writing skill of the students in writing argumentative essays was good, there were two things became the weaknesses in this research. first, the limited time in the learning process was a bit of a constraint in this research. 90 minutes or 2 credits for writing class was too short and not enough. so, it was recommended that the time allocation for writing lectures to be added at least 3 credits. second, not all students achieved good score category in this research. it was found that 6 students who obtained score below the passing score, and the score was in the fair and poor category. thus, the researchers suggest the 6 students to practice writing harder and more actively so that their writing skill can be improved. the more often the students practice writing, the better writing skill would be. conclusion based on the analysis, there are some points that need to be highlighted. first, in the aspect of content, the score obtained is 16.5 and it is in the good category. from the rubric, this category can be seen from the criteria, such as; develop ideas relevant to the topic but less detail so that they can be categorized into good. second, in the aspect of organization, the score achieved is 21.7 and it is in the fair category. based on the rubric, the criteria for students in this study is there is no coherence on paragraph composition and ideas are also less logical in order (incoherent ideas and lack of logical sequencing) so that they can be categorized into fair level. third, for the aspect of vocabulary, the score is 15 and it is categorized into good. the criteria is that students use accurate but ineffective diction (employ accurate diction, but not effective) so that they can be categorized into good category. fourth, in the grammar aspect, the score obtained is 13.5 and the category is fair. the criteria is that there are many errors in the use of tenses, pronouns, suitability of subjects and verbs and so on and their meaning was vague (major errors of tense, pronouns, subject-verb agreement, and so on, and meaning obscured) so that it can be categorized into fair level. in the fifth aspect, the score obtained for mechanics is 7.6 and it is in the fair category. the criteria is that there are many errors in the writing mechanism and the meaning is unclear (many errors of mechanics, and meaning obscured), dominated by errors in the writing mechanism so that it is categorized into poor level. in addition, the mean score obtained by the students is 74.3 and it is categorized into good level of ability. in relation to the above explanation, it can be concluded that the use of collaborative writing strategy can solve the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay. in other word, the implementation of collaborative writing strategy in the teaching of argumentative essay writing can improve the students’ writing skill. moreover, this improvement is supported by two points, namely; 1) the mean score of the students is 74.3 and it is categorized into good level of ability, and 2) the factors that influence the students’ improvement in writing argumentative essay are; the students are active, creative, and enjoy the learning process by using collaborative writing strategy. acknowledgement in this part, the researchers need to express many thanks to the persons who helped in the research. first, the researchers would like to say thank to ministry of research, technology, and higher education of republic of indonesia (kemristekdikti ri) who gave financial support. second, the m. fadhly farhy abbas & herdi solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through collaborative writing strategy 114 researchers also would like to say thank to lppm and team of universitas lancang kuning pekanbaru, indonesia who provided good service for the researchers during the research. at last, the appreciation goes to the research assistants, head of english education department, and head of up2m of fkip unilak who supported totally during the research. references abbas, m. f. f. (2018). assessing efl students’ ability in developing idea to organize academic essay. iop conference series: earth and environmental science 175(1), 012-074. abbas, m. f. f. (2015). analysis of students' ability in writing a research proposal. elt-lectura, 2(2). abbas, m., fachrurrazy, f., & wahjudi, a. (2013). applying collaborative writing process strategy to improve students’ ability in writing a narrative text. disertasi dan tesis program pascasarjana um. boun, e. (2009). argumentative essay. retrieved june 6, 2017, from www.buowl.boun edu. brown, h. d. (2015). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy (5 th ed.). white plains, new york: pearson education. fachrurrazy. (2011). teaching english as a foreign language for teachers in indonesia. malang: universitas negeri malang press. housden, e. (2013). senior text types: a writing guide for students. farrbooks: quendsland. ibrahim, m. e. e., eljack, n. s. a., & elhassan, i. b. m. (2015). to what extent can argumentative essay writing help develop leaners' critical thinking. sust journal of humanities, 16(4). isnawati, u.m. (2009). improving the writing ability of the 11th grade students of ma hasyim asy’ari kembangbahu lamongan through the implementation of the scaffolding strategy. unpublished thesis. malang: universitas negeri malang. lestari, setyowati, s., sukmawan, & latief, m. a. (2017). solving the students’ problems in writing argumentative essay through the provision of planning. a journal of culture, english language, teaching & literature, 17(1), 87102. sarmidi. (2009). the use of directed writing activity strategy to enhance the students’ skill in writing recount texts at mtsn margoyoso-pati. unpublished master’s thesis. malang: universitas negeri malang. soraya, k. (2016). the effectiveness of collaborative writing strategy (cws) in writing lesson regarded to the students’ creativity. lingua cultura, 10(2), 63-67. wahyuni, s. (2017). improving students` ability in writing through collaborative writing strategy at the islamic junior high school muhammadiyah 01 medan. unpublished thesis. medan: department of english education faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training state islamic university of north sumatera. retrieved from http://repository.uinsu.ac.id/2643/1/cover%20 skripsi%20ciwa.pdf. zuhri, s. (2009). improving the ability in writing a recount text of the first year-students of man wlingi through collaborative writing strategy. unpublished master’s thesis. malang: universitas negeri malang. a multimodal discourse analysis of selected advertisement of malaria drugs ayodeji olowu & susan olajoke akinkurolere a multimodal discourse analysis of selected advertisement of malaria drugs a multimodal discourse analysis of selected advertisement of malaria drugs ayodeji olowu department of languages, rufus giwa polytechnic, owo, ondo state, nigeria e-mail: olowu@gmail.com susan olajoke akinkurolere department of english, obafemi awolowo university, ile-ife, osun state, nigeria e-mail: olujoke2126@yahoo.com. apa citation: olowu, a. & akinkurolere, s. o. (2015). a multimodal discourse analysis of selected advertisement of malaria drugs. english review:journal of english education, 3(2), 166-173 received: 11-04-2015 accepted: 25-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this study identified and analyzed the visual and linguistic components associated with the selected advertisement of malaria drugs. this was with a view to describing the essential communication devices the advertisers of such drugs have employed. data for the study were drawn from both primary and secondary sources. the primary source for the study comprised 4 purposively selected posters, stickers and drugs literature advertisement on malaria. analysis of the data followed the framework of kress and leeuwen’s multimodal discourse analysis. the results showed that such visual resources as colour, pictures, symbols and icons, gaze and posture enhance the semantic quality of the advertisement. in the whole, the study emphasizes the vitality of visual and linguistic elements as important communication devices in advertising. keywords: multimodal discourse analysis, visual elements, communication devices, visual grammar. introduction new drugs are released almost on weekly basis. when these drugs come, the manufacturers will engage in massive advertisement. the reason is to impress the drugs into the consciousness of the people. advertisement of drugs can take a number of forms which include advocacy, comparative, cooperative, informational, direct-mail, outdoor advertisement, persuasive, etc. this type of advertising is commercial. it is basically consumer advertising which pervades our society because it involves the promotion of such drugs to potential buyers. drugs are advertised through several media which include television, radio, print media such as magazines, leaflets, flyers, handbills and periodic reports. other media include billboards, workshops, seminars and other health books television stations usually enjoy much patronage from drug marketers. pharmaceutical companies rely so much on television advertisement to promote their drugs. the reason for this is not farfetched. television is multimodal in nature in that it relies on multiple semiotic modes or resources (language, visual imagery, gesture, movement, colour, music, sounds and so on). woods (2006) describes television advertising as the form of multimodal communication par excellence (i.e communication through various and multiple semiotic modes and resources). it establishes a mailto:olujoke2126@yahoo.com english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee double communicative connection: one between the people represented in the advert, also called represented participants (kress and leeuwen 2006), and one between the sender, that is the advertisement makers or copywriters and the receiver (the viewer) of the advertising message. essentially, we are considering new malaria drugs which have enjoyed heavy advertisement recently. these are coatal tamether, artrin, arenax plus, artecxin, palaxin, camosunate, pemametre, lufart, amalar plus, amatem and lonart. a detailed multimodal analysis of these advertisement will be carried out. visual images: a general overview in every imaginable public space, visuals are presented for viewer’s consumption. the young and old alike are bombarded by a cacophony of imagery in traditional print, books, magazines and newspapers, through totalizing mass media formats and inside the expanding e-work of the internet. on almost every public space available, images confront viewers. kress and leeuwen (2006) assert that: images are produced in the context of real social institutions, in order to play a very real role in social life-in order to do certain things to or for their readers, and in order to communicate attitudes towards aspectsof social life and towards people who participate in them, whether authors and readers are consciously aware of them or not (p. 115). in “rhetorics of the image”, roland barthes writes that “the viewer of the image receives at one and the same time the perceptual message and the cultural message” (barthes 1977: 36). he then explains that the “confusion in reading” stemming from this corresponds to the function and the communicative power of the mass image. this ultimately suggests that images are never innocent. however, their messages often are naturalized by being associated with a given perceptual object. in analyzing images, then, it is necessary to account not only for their cultural norms, but also for their perceptual qualities. visual texts differ from verbal texts because they are communicative across cultural codes while also carrying culturally specific meaning. roland barthes (1977) uses a linguistic approach for the study of visual communication, claiming that visual signification can be articulated into the two separate levels of denotation and connotation. the level of denotation corresponds to the literal meaning of an image, the immediate meaning relating to what is objectively represented by the image. the level of connotation corresponds to the symbolic or ideological meaning of an image, which corresponds to the meaning – or range of possible meanings – inscribed by cultural codes. the same denotative meaning can be associated with different connotative meanings according to the historical, and cultural contexts in which the message is produced and interpreted. theo van leeuwen and gunther kress are pioneers in the analysis of the visual dimension of printed texts. they consider texts from “a multimodal perspective” to include semiotic modes that accompany language or through which language is realized (harrett and bell in fairclough 1995:14). textual analysis must describe the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and effectively analyse visually exposed meaning (kress and van leeuwen 1996:186-7). the trend towards a multimodal appreciation of meaning making centres around two issues: first, the de-centering of language as favoured meaning making; and second, the revisiting and blurring of traditional ayodeji olowu & susan olajoke akinkurolere a multimodal discourse analysis of selected advertisement of malaria drugs boundaries between the roles allocated to language, image, page layout, document design etc. (iedema 2003:58). according to jewitt and oyama (2001:134), who draw heavily on the work of kress and van leeuwen, “social semiotics of visual communication involves the description of semiotic resources, what can be said and done with images (and other visual means of communication) and how the things people say and do with images can be interpreted”. meanwhile, with the late 20th century’s explosion of imaging and visualizing technologies (digitization, satellite imaging, new forms of medical imaging, virtual reality etc.), it is suggested that everyday life has become “visual culture” (lister & wells 2001:62). still on the proliferation of images, castwright & sturken (2001) assert that our modern condition is often characterized as an image saturated society with an intense image flow. indeed, visual components are often more influential than words. messaris and abraham (2001) argue this point: viewers may be less aware of the process of framing when it occurs visually than when it takes place through words. consequently, visual image may have the capacity of conveying messages that would meet with greater resistance if put in words, but which are received more readily in visual form (p. 125) . as a cultural creation, images are often utilized to praise cultural values. michael griffin (1999) explains that images are “celebrated on a more abstract plane as broader symbols of national valour, human courage, etc. (p. 131). hariman and lucaites (2007) note the emotional act of images: the photo’s combination of emotional display and visual interpellation creates a strong sense of moral crises, a point at which the audience must decide where it stands (p. 143). the intensity of emotion within images adds rhetorical richness to texts, resulting in added power within the overall meaning of a text. hence advertisers of drugs make generous use of images to capture audience’s attention. they struggle to minimize the use of words. though most of the advertisment come with verbal anchorages, the images are the centre of attraction and they carry more messages than the verbal expressions. method multimodal discourse analysis (mda) is ‘an emerging paradigm in discourse studies which extends the study of language to the study of language in combination with other resources, such as images, colours, scientific symbolism, gestures, action, music and sound’ (o’halloran 2011:1). multimodal discourse analysis is the study of the ‘intersection and interdependence of various modalities of communication within a given context’ (snyder 2009:1). researchers in this area seek to ‘identify the influence of mode on meaning within a given context, focusing on co-occurrence interaction between multiple semiotic system’ (baldry and thibault 2006:31). multimodal discourse analysis is essentially concerned with the theory and analysis of semiotic resources and the semantic expansions which occur as semiotic choices combined in multicultural phenomena. the ‘‘intersemiotic’ relations arising from the interaction of semiotic choices, known as intersemiosis, is a central area of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee multimodal research (jewitt 2009:14). multimodal discourse analysis is also concerned with the design, production and distribution of multimodal resources in social settings (leeuwen 2008:32). the theory is also concerned with the concept of ‘visual modality’. in bell’s second variable based on the work of kress and van leeuwen (1996), it can be defined as “the represented realism of an image” (bell 2001:30). it concerns also whether an image is portrayed as realistic and lifelike, or as something that can be classified as either a fantasy or caricature. the term ‘modality’ is a linguistic one and refers to the value or credibility of statements about the world. modality is interpersonal rather than ideational in that it does not express absolute truth or falsehoods, it produces shared truths aligning readers and viewers with what they hold to be true for themselves, while distancing from others whose values they do not share (kress and van leeuwen 1996:160). in terms of visual modality, visuals can represent people, places and things as though they are real. here too, modality judgements are social and dependent upon what is considered real in the social group for which the representation is primarily intended. according to kress and van leeuwen (1996:256) modality results from: ......the degree to which certain means of pictorial expressions (colour, representational detail, depth, tonal shades, etc.) are used. each of these dimensions can be seen as a scale running from the absence of any rendition of detail to maximal representation of details or from the absence of any rendition of depth to maximally deep perspective. reality is based upon the frequency of these factors within a specific image, the less they appear the more “abstract” the image, while the more prevalent they are, the more realistic the image can be said to be. however, kress and van leeuwen (1996:256) argue that “modality is context dependent.” the domains they distinguish include scientific/technological, abstract, naturalistic and sensory. this theory is therefore suitable in the analysis of these colour advertisement. result & discussion text a in this image, there is a monsterlike picture of a mosquito. the picture covers substantial part of the image. below the picture, there is a picture of a drug which is being advertised. here the picture of the mosquito is a signifier. it is deliberately presented like a monster. this is also significant. scientists believe that malaria is mainly caused by female anopheles mosquitoes. hence, the picture of the mosquito signifies malaria disease. the picture presents malaria as a deadly monster which can cause death if not attacked. consequently, the image sees artrin as a remedy to the malaria monster. ayodeji olowu & susan olajoke akinkurolere a multimodal discourse analysis of selected advertisement of malaria drugs text b this image has a picture of three people; a woman, a man and a young girl who look like a family. the man appears to carry the girl. this ostensibly shows that the represented participants are a family. below them are the different pictures of the drug being advertised. from the advert, we can see the various presentations of the drug. it is presented as tablets, syrup suspension and drops for infants. above the represented participants, we see the word malaria written on the red background. also, there is a drawing of a mosquito encapsulated in a ‘stopped’ sign. the family presented here looks healthy and happy. it is assumed that they have taken pamametre as their family malaria drug. the advertisers of the drug want us to see the effect of the drug in this family. it is significant that the drawing of the mosquito is encapsulated in a ‘stopped’ sign. the message here is very clear. pemametre stops mosquitoes. if it does, it consequently stops malaria since mosquito is the major cause of malaria fever. text c in text c, there is a picture of some children embedded in a map of africa. the name of the drug is written in bolded letters above them. below the map, we see the picture of the drug. it is significant that these children are embedded in the map of africa. this means that the continent that is worst hit by malaria fever is africa. also, the category of people suffering most from the disease is children. this is very true in consideration of report of world health organisation (who) on the malaria scourge in africa. it is estimated that about 7 million children die of malaria in africa yearly. consequently, who established the programme “roll back malaria in africa”. this project is aimed at eradicating malaria fever in the continent and jointly founded by who and the nations of african continent. the children on our image represent the bulk of several million children who are victims of malaria disease in africa. these children are spread all over the underdeveloped nations of africa. most of these nations cannot boast of adequate health facilities to combat malaria scourge. they lack adequate systems in terms of facilities, infrastructure and english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee trained personnel. hence, they feel highly incapacitated as malaria continues to wreak havoc especially among children. it is also worth of note that the advertisers catch on the programme of who in this advertisement by using the phrase ‘roll back malaria’ adequate health systems in terms of facilities, infrastructure and trained personnel. text d this advert features a woman who is as a celebrity. the woman in the image is patience ozokwo who has held sway many years as an enviable actress in nollywood movies. she holds a packet of the drug advertised, ‘coatal’ in her left hand and thumbs up with the right hand. the use of ozokwo in the advert is intentional. she is well known and admired by millions of nollywood lovers across the globe. the advertiser intends to give real popularity to their advertisement. it is certain that the advertisement will catch the fancies of many people with the picture of this woman in it. moreso, a close look at this image shows that the woman gives her approval to the effectiveness of the drug in combating the malaria scourge analysis of other visual elements colour in text a, the word ‘malaria’ in this advert is written in red colour. this is highly significant. red colour in this part of world means danger. hence, the intention of the advertiser is to present malaria disease as a dangerous phenomenon. in text b, the lexical item, ‘malaria’ is written against a red colour background. also, the ‘stop’ sign is in red colour. as stated earlier, colour red means danger. this ultimately means that malaria is a danger which must not be allowed. in text c, the visible colours in this image are red, green and white. the use of green and white colours in the image is significant. the map of africa is coated in green and white colours. also, the lexical item ‘africa’ is written in green colour. this shows that although the map is that of african continent, the advertisers are particular about nigeria. the colours of nigerian flag are white, green and white. this is highly connoted in the use of colour in this image. it is apparent that the words ‘weapon’ and ‘malaria’ are written in red colour. the red colour, as stated earlier means danger in this part of the world. a weapon is an instrument used either in the defence or offence against enemies. the red colour brings out the semantics of the lexical item. in this case as dangerous as malaria is, artecxin drug is presented as dangerous weapon to attack it. graphology according to olaosun (2001), the graphological features of written texts are carriers of their phonological information of meaning. hence, some aspects of linguistics in the verbal anchorages shall be foregrounded in this section with the aim of seeing how they ayodeji olowu & susan olajoke akinkurolere a multimodal discourse analysis of selected advertisement of malaria drugs have been employed by the advertisers to communicate their messages to the viewing/reading audience. in text d, it is observed that the whole sentence “win the malaria war” is written in block letters. meanwhile, there is semantic importance attached to this sentence. the viewer is made to believe that malaria has declared a war on its victims. hence, if we must win the malaria war, coatal is highly indispensable. the word ‘act’ is written in block letters. this is to lay emphasis on the semantics of the word. also, the name of the drug, artrin is bolded. this is also for emphasis. the whole advertisement centres on the drug. the use of rhetorics is also noticeable in this advert. there is a question mark on the word ’malaria’. the import of this is quite interesting. the advertisers are asking a question which can literally be expressed thus ‘is malaria your problem?’ if it is, you don’t need to worry, just ‘ask’ for pemametre. this message is clear. with pemametre, malaria is no longer a problem. use of compound sentence the advertiser use compound sentence ‘malaria begins with a bite but ends with artrin’. the use of the conjunction ‘but’ which joins the negative part of the sentence with the positive part. the advertisers technically direct the attention of the reader/viewer to the latter part of the compound sentence. posture/gaze: the picture of the mosquito in text a is fearful and dreaded. this signifies the nature of malaria disease. it is presented as a dreaded and destructive disease. in text b, it is deliberate that the participants are gazing directly into the audience. this is to bring the reader\viewer into active participation in the advert. the central image here is this family. the interpersonal system of centrality functioning at the level of relation between sections established the integrity of the image. kress and van leeuwen (1996:206) when discussing the issue of centrality of image suggest that ‘for something to be presented as the central means that it is presented as the nucleus of the information which all other elements are in some sense subservient’. this is true of text a and b. in text d, the posture of mrs patience okonkwo in this advert calls for attention. she really succeeds in involving the audience in this job through her smile. okonkwo’s gaze as the only participant in this advert demands something from the viewer. it demands that the viewer enters into some kind of imaginary relation with her. conclusion multimodal discourse analysis has made it possible to account for visual and linguistic components of this study. this is made possible by the theoretical framework we have used in this study. however it is instructive to note that interpretation of images is by its very nature subjective, and an image can carry multiple messages depending upon the nature of the visually interpreting culture. just as kress and van leeuwen suggest that “……social interactions and social relations can be encoded in images so that we are instructed silently regarding a set of implicit norms” (kress and van leuuwen 1996:153). in all, we hope that this study has contributed to an array of scholarly works in media discourse in nigeria. the study emphasizes the vitality of visual elements as important devices in advertising. it reveals the deployment of various visual resources such as colours, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee gaze, posture, etc. in impressing the messages of the advertisers into the consciousness of readers/viewers and convincing them of the potency and efficacy of the advertised drugs. also, this study reveals very strongly and establishes the potentials of visual images to convey meaning beyond the verbal language in any human society. references ariyo, k. s. (2014). multimodal discourse analysis of panorama pictures in selected editions of tell news magazine. an unpublished ph.d thesis, department of english studies, adekunle ajasin university, akungbaakoko. baldry, a.p. & thibault, p.j (2006). multimodal transcription and text analysis. oakville, ct: equinox publishing. bignell, j. (1997). media semiotics, an introduction. manchester: manchester university press. chandler, d. (2002). semiotics: the basics. london: routledge. davies, s. (2000). semiotic analysis of teenage magazine front covers. retrieved on 20 december 2015 from www.aber.ac.uk/media/students/sid9 901.html. el rafaie, e. (2003). understanding visual metaphor: the example of newspaper cartoons in visual communication. london: sage publication. kress, g. & van leeuwen, t. van (1996). reading images: the grammar of visual design. london/ny: routledge. kress, g. & van leeuwen, t. (2001). multimodal discourse :the modes and media of contemporary communications. london: arnold. kress, g. & van leeuwen, t. (2007). colour as semiotic mode: notes for a grammar of colour. visual communication. 1(3), 343-368. retrieved from www.visculture.files.wordpress.com/2 007/02. 2011. retrieved 12/07/2011 mustafa, r. o. (2001). easier approach to pharmacology. ilorin: adewunmi printing press. olowu, a (2012). a multimodal discourse analysis of christian women mirror magazine. an unpublished m. a. thesis, department of english, obafemi awolowo university, ile-ife, nigeria. http://www.aber.ac/ http://www.visculture.files.wordpress.com/2007/02. 2011. retrieved 12/07/2011 functions of language mixing in a business transaction talk english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee notcareless butweak:language mixing ofmalaysianchinese inabusinesstransaction kuangching hei department of english language, faculty of languages and linguistics, university of malaya, malaysia email: kuangch@um.edu.my mayakhemlani david department of english language, faculty of languages and linguistics, university of malaya, malaysia email: mayadavid@yahoo.com apa citation: kuang, c. h. & david, m. k. (2015). not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 127-138 received: 11-04-2015 accepted: 26-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: language is an inevitable tool for business transactions and regardless of nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, age and social class, interlocutors depend on it to conduct their daily dealings. in multilingual and multicultural malaysia, it is not uncommon to hear a business transaction being conducted in various languages depending on who the participants are and what the context involves. this study focussed on the phenomenon of language (code) mixing within a business transaction that involved four malaysians of chinese descent. the study aimed to detect at what level language mixing occurred and what their functions would be. data were video recorded and then transcribed verbatim. mandarin utterances were documented in chinese and han yu pin yin and provided with translations. utterances containing a mixture of languages were then extracted for analysis. findings suggest that language mixing occurred at the word, phrase, sentential and tag level. language mixing was applied as a strategy to sustain the conversation mainly because of the interlocutors’ weak proficiency in specific languages. it was also employed for various functions such as for distancing or narrowing the social status, making emphasis and projecting a higher personal identity. a follow up interview is required in order to verify the extent of the participants’ low or high proficiency level in the various languages used in this context. keywords: language mixing, malaysian, business transaction, communication introduction language is inherent in human lives and as a tool of communication, it enables human beings to convey their needs and deliver their messages cogently and coherently, wherever possible. in the malaysian context, using many languages within an interaction, hereby also termed as language mixing, is a common phenomenon (see morais, 1995; kuang, 1999; david, 2006; david, kuang, mclellan and faitmah, 2009; jariah, 2009; david and lim, 2009; powell, 2009; david and yoong, 2009). multilingual societies practise this phenomenon more often than kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction monolingual societies because of the existence of the many languages in their linguistic repertoire (holmes, 2001). consequently, language mixing becomes a habitual occurrence for multilingual speakers. malaysia comprises many ethnic groups with various cultural practices but the three dominant ethnic groups are the malays, chinese and indians. each of them has its own respective first language or l1. as a multicultural society, majority of the people in malaysia are also competent in using several other languages, at various proficiency levels, among themselves. of the languages most malaysians have in their linguistic repertoire, malay serves as the official and national language while english serves as the second most important language. both languages are taught and learnt at school from the age of seven until secondary school. this phenomenon helps to explain why many malaysians, particularly the generation between the ages of 20 to 40, are fairly articulate in both languages. nonetheless, malaysian speakers have varying degrees of proficiency ranging from very good and grammatical to poor phonological forms and grammatical structures. in oral communications, most malaysians are not particular about the level of proficiency as long as they can be understood. according to the current 6th prime minister, malaysia is the only multiracial country in the world which allows respective citizens’ vernacular languages like mandarin and tamil to be taught and learnt at school. in this country, parents have the option of sending their children to vernacular schools (primary only) so that their children are able to acquire their native language which may or may not be spoken at home. parents of other ethnic groups have been known to send their children to chinese vernacular schools so that their children can acquire mandarin. in such schools, children also learn malay and english simultaneously. the vernacular languages of mandarin and tamil are not as widely spoken as malay or english in this country probably because of the ethnic imbalance where there are more malays and possibly because english is still a language of prestige in this country. in addition to these four languages, of malay, english, mandarin and tamil, other varieties of malay (kedah, negeri sembilan, perak, johore, kelantan and terengganu) also exist side by side with common chinese dialects (cantonese, hokkien, hakka, teochew, and hainanese) as well as hindi, malayalam, and arabic. however, these varieties are dependent on topics of discussion, participants involved, context, situation and place. among the chinese dialects, cantonese is more widely used in the middle region of peninsular malaysia such as selangor and negeri sembilan whereas penang hokkien is more widely used in penang, kedah and perlis. southern hokkien is more prevalent in the southern towns of klang and johore while hakka, teochew and hainanese are dialects of minority chinese. they can only be heard in specific areas and among certain clans. the multilingual environment of malaysia, as described here, indicates that it is a multilingual society where speakers accommodate the use of many languages at any one time, depending on the participants, context, situation, and topics discussed. nevertheless, as many sociolinguists have indicated, multilingual speakers, i.e. those with more than two languages in their linguistic repertoire, tend to have one english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee dominant language thus, one particular language may prevail over the others at any one time during such interactions. sociolinguists also suggest that when participants use several languages at one time during an oral interaction, it is because they are not proficient in any of these languages well enough to sustain the conversation in just one specific language (hoffmann, 1991). others claim that participants with several languages in their linguistic repertoire do so because of certain reasons including the need to convey their message as effectively as possible. nonetheless, it is also possible that language mixing occurs because participants are careless (nortier, 2011) that is, unmindful, to the point of polluting their language by mixing it with other languages unwittingly. method for the purpose of extracting spoken data, this study uses a video camcorder as well as an audio recorder to record the business transaction which had occurred in a chinese tea shop in a major shopping mall in penang city. participants were told of the purpose of the recording and consent was given verbally. data were then transcribed verbatim with chinese and han yu pin yin. they were then translated into english. only data which contain mixing of languages are used for analysis. this paper attempts to locate two facets of language use: levels of language mixing and the functions of language mixing. the participants were three malaysian chinese adults between the ages of 25-30. the participants include one female from kuala lumpur, a city that uses more cantonese, one female from klang, a town which uses more southern hokkien and a male from kuala lumpur. the other participant is p, a male young person from penang city which uses mainly penang hokkien. resultsanddiscussion data extracted indicate that several levels of language mixing had occurred. these were classified accordingly. language mixing at the word level word level implies a change of language occurring through a change in the lexical item. examples are illustrated. example 1 turn speaker content 271 p 里面有 15 包咯 [li mian you shi wu bao lo]。(lit. there are 15 packets lor.) 272 m 15 包 [shi wu bao]。so… 你们 packing 这样是因为 package 吧了 hor? [ni men packing zhe yang shi yin wei package ba le hor]? (lit. 15 packets. so, you pack like this because of this package only hor?.) in example 1, p had begun the conversation in mandarin and it was continued in the same language by the subsequent speaker, m. in between her utterance, however, an english adverb ‘so’ was inserted into m’s utterance at 272, after ‘shi wu bao’. this was used as a strategy to buy time (note the slight pause) before she asks in mandarin again ‘ni men’ (you all) and again, m uses the english word, ‘packing’ followed by ‘package’. m then ended the utterance with a hokkien tag ‘hor’. in this example, ‘so; was inserted to buy time whereas ‘packing’ and ‘package’ were interjected because of m’s low kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction proficiency in mandarin. m did not possess the mandarin equivalent for these two words. additionally, the hokkien tag ‘hor’ was inserted as a question form because of m’s habit as a hokkien speaker from klang. this use could depict m’s hokkien identity or it could be used as a means of narrowing the distance between herself and p who is also a hokkien speaker from penang. example 2 turn speaker content 328 p 洗杯 [xi bei]。 (lit. washing cups.) 329 m 哦 [o]。。。有什么 reason 的吗 [you shen me reason de ma]? (lit. oh, any reasons?) in this example, m asked p, the tea seller, his ‘reason’ for placing the used tea bags in a cup in 329. this is probably because m did not have the word in mandarin thereby indicating her weak proficiency. clearly, the word ‘reason’ was inserted so that m can convey her meaning more specifically to p, who is assumed here to be capable of understanding some words of english in this case. example 3 turn speaker content 305 m po an is going to er… give us some sample of the tea where you can try the detoxin flower tea and auto-de… we are going to try the…. 306 all (interrupted utterances) 307 g 叫他找你的那个做 sample， 然后 [jiao ta zhao ni de na ge zuo sample, ran hou…]。(lit. ask him to make yours as the sample, and then….) in example 3, the conversation commenced in english as is shown in 305 but when g responded, she had to use mandarin first, suggesting that it is her dominant language. however, the english word, ‘sample’ was introduced midway by g and this is probably because g is weak in mandarin and does not have the chinese equivalent ‘样本’ [yang ben]. in line with this, even if g had used the mandairn equivalent, she would not be understood by p, the salesperson, for two reasons: one it is not a commonly used term as most people would use ‘sample’ and two, p’s proficiency level in mandarin may not be adequate enough for him to understand the word. consequently, ‘sample’ is easier to use because it is also efficient and convenient. example 4 turn speaker content 308 p … 星期日 [xing qi ri]，(tr. sunday,) saturday, sunday lor. 309 m … saturday, sunday la. in example 4, the salesperson, p, spoke in mandarin possibly because it is his dominant language and possibly because he is not as confident in speaking english. however, in wanting to make an emphasis for his customers whom he knew were from kuala lumpur, p, somehow inserts two english words, ‘saturday’ and ‘sunday’ at the end of his utterance. it implies that as a weekend terminology, it is commonly understood. in this context, p appears to english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee be emphatic in his meaning. it is also possible that p was trying to raise his own social status among his customers who were from the capital city of kuala lumpur, thus more revered in status by those living in smaller cities like penang. example 5 turn speaker content 360 g 不要买一个这样的杯 [bu yao mai yi ge zhe yang de bei]？ (lit. don't want to buy this type of cup?) 361 p ah… 你冲那杯 [ni zhong na bei]。。。家里的 cup 也可以啊 [jia li de cup ye ke yi a]。。。不要破裂出来吧了 [bu yao po lie chu lai ba liao]。 (lit. ah, you make, cup at home also can ah. just don't want a broken one only.) likewise in example 5, the conversation was conducted in mandarin as g uses mandarin in 360. speaker p then introduced a common chinese tag of ‘ah’ as an opening before he proceeded to using mandarin in 361. in this context, ‘ah’ is a common time staller used by speakers and within the same utterance, p also inadvertently usesd the english word, ‘cup’. as has been mentioned in the previous example, it is possible that p was aiming for solidarity so as to close this business transaction thus, he accommodated to the language dominance of his customers (m and g) by using some words of english. it is also possible that ‘cup’ was a much easier reference than a mandarin equivalent although this could not be ascertained without an interview. nonetheless, it is very likely that by using some english words, p had commanded the attention of his customers from kuala lumpur. example 6 turn speaker content 370 g 这个杯比较 [zhe ge bei bi jiao] elegant。 (lit. this cup is more elegant.) 371 m 这里有 [zhe li you] crack。 (lit. here has a crack.) in example 6, speaker g employed the same strategy as p did in example 5. g inserted the english word ‘elegant’ to describe the cup. her intention was clear, she did not have the proficiency level in mandarin thus, she relied on her dominant language, english. it is obvious that mandarin was used to some extent because g had some competence and this was more or less to ease the business transaction since it is very likely that p did not speak good english. while mandarin enabled g to engage p and to get closer and establish goodwill and support with p, the english insertion allowed her to convey her meaning more clearly. thus, the word ‘elegant’ was used as a reference to describe the package instead of the chinese equivalent “高贵” [gao gui]. similarly, m, who appeared to be less proficient in mandarin also posed some simple utterance in mandarin in 371 but due to her inadequate mandarin, m had to rely on an english word, ‘crack’ to convey what she meant exactly. language mixing at the phrase level where a speaker inserts an expression or anything that is more than two words, it is classified as a phrase. this may occur within an utterance or at another turn. a number of instances were detected. kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction example 7 turn speaker content 413 m the smell… bau meh? takbau? (lit. the smell, got smell? no smell?) 414 g 有 [you] meh? takbau. (lit. got meh? no smell.) 415 m 我 [wo] scared 倒掉 [dao diao]。 (lit. i'm scare it'll spill.) in example 7, there were instances of language mixing appearing at word, phrase and tag level. however, in the context of this analysis, only mixing of two words or more were extractesd for analysis. clearly, the conversation had begun at 413 in english by m who seemed more proficient in english than in mandarin as the earlier analysis suggests. however, midway in her utterance, she inserted a malay word ‘bau’ which she appeared to be asking as a question through ‘meh’. as if talking to herself, m then asked in malay, the national language, ‘tak bau’ which means ‘didn’t smell?’ in this instance of language mixing, it appeared that m was trying to distance herself and her friend, g, from the salesperson p, who was in the vicinity of the business transaction. this was done by referring to a third language, malay. it is as if m was asking her friend, g in secrecy through malay, ‘tak bau’ in relation to the aroma/smell of the tea. when g heard this, she responded first in her dominant language, mandarin, ‘you meh’ before she replied ‘tak bau’, accommodating to m. this strategy suggests that g was accommodating m as well as distancing p. example 8 turn speaker content 312 p 如果有 public holiday 的话，有 public holiday 的价咯 [ru guo you public holiday de hua, you public holiday de jian lo]。 (lit. if there is public holiday, then use public holiday rate lo.) 313 g 一百吗 [yi bai ma]？ (lit. one hundred?) in this example, speaker p introduced the english phrase ‘public holiday’ within an utterance that had begun in mandarin. the same phrase was repeated. this occurrence signified that ‘public holiday’ was a catch phrase that anybody would know and understand. thus, the language switch may have been an unconscious effort developed by p. in this context, it had probably occurred as a result of habitual use. example 9 turn speaker content 371 m 这里有 [zhe li you] crack。 (lit. here has a crack.) 372 g 是 [shi] meh?... 不是 crack来的是吗 [bu shi crack lai de shi ma]。 (lit. ya meh? not crack, isn't it?) 373 m 这个比较 [zhe ge bi jiao] low quality。 (lit. this is a little low quality) (looking at the camera person) we're still waiting. in this example, speaker m began the utterance in mandarin then inserted an english word, ‘crack’. the conversation was picked up by g who asked for the assurance of the ‘crack’ in 372 and by the next turn (373), m intercepted the conversation by adding that the cups in discussion were of ‘low english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee quality’ in comparison to others. this insertion was clearly an indication of m’s weak proficiency in mandarin because she did not know the mandarin equivalent for the phrase ‘low quality’. it is possible that m was trying to assert her higher status as a buyer of the tea as well as her regional origin, kuala lumpur. it may also be possible that it was a ploy to carry on a ‘secretive dialogue’ with g. this needs to be verified further through an interview. example 10 turn speaker content 377 g wait huh… 378 h 我们做 kei le fei 是不是要给钱 [wo men zuo kei le fei shi bu shi yao gei qian]？ (lit. we should be paid for being screen actresses right?) 379 g 是咯 [shi lo]。。。 (lit. ya lor.) malaysian speakers of chinese descent seem to be linguistically diverse. in this example, speaker g used english as a simple caution to request m to wait and m inserted an entire phrase from cantonese, ‘kei le fei’ which means small supporting actors in cantonese, to indulge in being ‘sarcastic’. in this regard, h initiated a new topic of discussion in 378 by using cantonese which was also a common dialect most chinese people from kuala lumopur would use. it is possible that since the interlocutors m, g and h were from kuala lumpur, they were simply making efforts to feel at home by using cantonese. in other words, speaker h may have used it because there was no equivalent word for ‘kei le fei’ in mandarin or even english. the term ‘kei le fei’ was borrowed from hong kong dramas and movies. it is a commonly used term to refer to small and unimportant people. example 11 turn speaker content 427 m slimming tea… 瘦身茶 [shou shen cha]。 (tr. slimming tea.) 428 h 你还不够瘦啊 [ni hai bu gou shou a]？ nak kurus lagi? (lit. you're not slim enough ah? want to slim more?) in this example, it is noted that three languages were used simultaneously by the two speakers, m and h. speaker m started the conversation in english, her dominat language and she repeated the term in mandarin which was then picked up by h who asked m in mandarin ‘ni hai bu gou shou a?’ for some reason, h asked m in malay the same question, ‘nak kurus lagi?’ which means “you want to be slimmer?” the turn where h shifted to malay was considered a communicative strategy that was deployed as humour. clearly, m also understood the malay reference and so when h was aiming to exclude p, the salesperson, h teased m in malay to make fun of her and to attract her attention and reaction. while this was going on, it is probable that p, the salesperson was in the dark. this indicates that a change in the language was to distance the salesperson, p. kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction example 12 turn speaker content 492 h smell? 493 m yeah, 对 [dui], the aroma 香味比较香 [xiang wei bi jiao xiang]。 那个就 [na ge jiu]。(lit. yeah, right.) in example 12, speaker m was connecting the english phrase, “the aroma” to the previous speaker’s language choice of “smell” possibly, to convey a more exact meaning. m repeated the same phrase in english and later in mandarin as a way to reiterate her point. her intention was to correct h’s language choice but she wanted to do it without imposing too much offence. example 13 turn speaker content 548 p 这种比较好咯。。。因为 teh boh，它是有 caffeine 的 [zhe zhong bi jiao hao lo… yin wei teh boh, ta shi you caffeine de]。 (lit. this type is better lor, because boh the, it has caffeine.) 549 m 那边卖 tea，那边也是 natural tea 嘛 [na bian mai tea, na bian ye shi natural tea ma]。 (lit. there sells tea also natural tea mah.) in this example, speaker m used the english word, “tea” and “natural tea” due to habit. she inserted the word or the phrase that had been predominantly used in her family at home (she admits to this in a casual talk). m claimed that she had not been aware of the mixing of languages. nevertheless, in this example, it is possible that the mandarin equivalent for ‘tea’ may be varied as it is more natural to say “tea leaves” 茶叶 [cha ye] or “natural tea leaves” 天然茶叶 [tian ran cha ye] unlike in malaysia, where people tend to just say “tea” or “natural tea”. from this example, it is deduced that m used the english phrases for her own convenience. example 14 turn speaker content 628 m second choice 呢 [ne]？ (lit. how about second choice?) 629 p second choice, 如果没有钱就换了 [ru guo mei wei qian jiu huan liao]。 (lit. second choice, if no money will change.) in example 14, speaker p was converging to the language choice of speaker m who had begun the utterance in english. this was possibly done to accommodate to his customer, as a means of establishing goodwill and support, knowing that the customer would be more inclined towards using english, as they were from kuala lumpur. the switch thus developed by p contained a mixture of mandarin and english. this is done probably because mandarin was p’s dominant language. this occurrence suggests that language mixing took place to help sustain p’s low proficiency in english. example 15 turn speaker content 635 p 除非我成绩很好 [chu fei wo cheng ji hen hao]。。。 (lit. unless my result is very good.) 636 m spm result 拿多少 [na duo shao]？ (lit. how was the spm result?) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in example 15, p was referring to his academic results ‘spm’ (a major secondary examination in malaysia) in 635 where he said that his result was not up to expectations, i.e. not good. in her desire to know more, m then asked p in english, ‘spm result’ ‘na duo shao’ which means how well did you do in your spm. this shift from english to mandarin was to accommodate p’s language choice. however, in using the english phrase of ‘spm result’, it appears that m had used it as an inevitable choice as there was no other way of saying it as malaysians know what ‘spm result’ refers to. in this case, spm refers to a particular examination which all malaysians high schoolers need to take before they proceed to pre-university level. language mixing at the sentential level in a conversation including a business transaction where speakers take turns to talk, language mixing may also occur at the sentential level where a speaker changes from speaking language a to using language b with another speaker. this may also occur when a speaker uses language a but his/her interlocutor responds in language b. example 16 turn speaker content 290 g 是要买一个 20 set 的哦 [shi yao mai yi ge 20 set [sets] de o]。(lit. need to buy 1 whole 20 sets oh.) 291 m 够了啦。这个啦 [gou liao la. zhe ge la]。(lit. enough lar. this one lar.) 292 h are you sure want to buy ah? 293 m yes. this is for slimming actually, and according to the shopkeeper, not only... in this example, speaker g and m were discussing in mandarin when h interjected by switching to english. it was a way to distance the salesperson, p, from understanding their conversation. speaker m used english because h was using english, so speech convergence is happening here. example 17 turn speaker content 298 p 这个排毒的茶 [zhe ge pai du de cha]。 (lit. this is a detoxifying tea.) 299 m 这个花茶 [zhe ge hua cha]。。。 (lit. this is a flower tea.) (negotiating with the salesperson) we are now trying to er… what is your name ah? 姓什么啊 [xing shen me a]? (lit. surname ah?) in this example, speaker m wass probably trying to garner support from her friends as well as to obtain more information. m was possibly also trying to assert her authority as someone who is older than p by using english and here, she used the pronoun, ‘we’ to display her desire. example 18 turn speaker content 349 p 100磅大概。两个月啦 [yi bai bang da gai… liang ge yue la]。 (lit. 100 pound about… 2 months time lar.) 350 m smell like chrysanthemum… smell like chrysanthemum… 351 g 会很难讲的 [hui hen nan jiang de]。 (lit. will be very hard to say.) 352 p 会难讲 [hui nan jiang]… 那个是 [na ge shi] uh… (lit. hard to say that…) kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction example 20 turn speaker content 367 p 等到有味道出来 [deng dao wei dao chu lai]。。。 (lit. wait until the smell comes out.) 368 m oh… for the smell to come out. example 21 turn speaker content 386 g 应该跟她讲钱 huh [ying gai geng ta jiang qian]… (lit. should ask her for money.) 387 m ya la! 388 m charge, charge! extra charge! in examples 18, 20 and 21, language mixing was apparent as the switch was made very clearly by the subsequent speaker in the conversation. in example 18 for example, when speaker m spoke in an english utterance in 350, she was doing it to project her own identity since she was from kuala lumpur. the same strategy occurred in example 20 when m again used an english utterance to elevate her personal status in p’s eyes. however, in example 21, when g asked in mandarin whether she shoud ask for money, m reiterated the stand by validating with ‘ya la’ which was neither english nor malay because the ‘ya’ could mean english for yes or it could be a malay ‘ya’ which means yes while ‘la’ is just a particle malaysians use to assert a meaning. it also seems that a switch from mandairn to english allowed the speakers to express their attitude about a sensitive matter such as money, thereby making the issue less sensitive. from the previous analysis shown above, it had been revealed that speaker m seemed to have english and southern hokkien as her dominant languages thus, in her moment of appreciating the tea, she had just broken into english to convey her meaning as is shown in 368, 387 and 388. example 19 turn speaker content 363 p ah… 大概 3 分钟、4 分钟这样 [da gai 3 fen zhong, 4 feng zhong zhe yang]。 (lit. ah, about 3 minutes, 4 minutes this way.) 364 m we have to wait for 3 to 4 minute… likewise in example 19, speaker m soke in english after a mandarin utterance was initiated by p. this occurrence seems to suggest that m was trying to ease the communication by talking to herself in english in 364. conclusion analysis of data suggests that language mixing constantly occurs within utterances made by malaysian participants of chinese descent, particularly those from kuala lumpur. data illustrate that the participants used more chinese which encompass mandarin, hokkien and cantonese in their conversations. however, despite that, they were generally weak or have low proficiency in their chinese, hence, they were prone to mixing their conversations which had started in mandarin with other languages like english and malay. this was accomplished either by inserting single english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee lexical items which may appear at the beginning, middle or end of the utterances or by inserting phrases or complete sentences within the conversation. generally, tags taken from cantonese or hokkien served as a language mixing feature too but usually at the end of the utterance. where necessary and when incapacitated by a lack of their own proficiency in mandarin or due to habitual usage, these participants may also insert phrases within a predominantly mandarin utterance. nonetheless, where sentential mixing occurs, it appears that the participants were clearly switching languages such as by using mandarin then mixing it with a complete utterance in english or malay and vice versa. while some instances were meant to project an individual’s personal status other instances seemed like a thinkaloud strategy. as a final analysis, the functions executed by the language mixing instances suggest a number of things. first and foremost language mixing is a common phenomenon in malaysian interactions as seen in a business transaction involving malaysian speakers of chinese descent. in fact, among chinese speakers, malay could serve as a common language of use too. the other functions of language mixing seem to indicate that speakers mix their languages not because they were careless or unaware of their mixing. in fact, malaysian speakers of chinese descent mix their languages for the following reasons: 1) when they were less competent in one language; 2) when they want to convey their message more clearly and more significantly; 3) when they want to exclude or include solidarity; 4) when they want to make an emphasis, 5) when they want to display their social status as higher, 6) when they want to create a certain communicative effect and 7) when it suits their convenience such as thinking– aloud. . this paper has presented the findings of one episode of a business transaction talk where four speakers of chinese descent were involved. the analysis indicates that language mixing occurs frequently and often involves three to four levels encompassing the word, phrase, sentential and tag level. this paper has also highlighted that malaysians of chinese descent mix languages involving mandarin, english, cantonese, hokkien and malay. it is possible that malay, as a language learnt at school, was more accessible but tamil was clearly, a language that was not in their repertoire. nonetheless, this study is restricted to only four speakers and one business transaction. this gap can be widened in future studies in order to be able to make generalisations. moreover, to validate the analysis, that the speakers were weak in their respective languages, an interview should be conducted. acknowledgement we would like to thank ms ng siok hiong, a former masters student, for her data. references david, m.k. (2006). language choices in sindhi family. in m. k. david (ed.). language choices and discourse of malaysian family: case studies of families in kuala lumpur, malaysia. petaling jaya: strategic information and research development centre. 3-21. david, m.k. and lim c.y. (2009) language choices of malaysian youth in and out of the classroom. in m.k. david, j. mclellan, s. rafik-galea and a. n. abdullah (eds). code-switching in kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction malaysia. frankfurt: peter lang. 97108. david, m.k. and yoong, d. (2009). code switching in eldercare. in m.k. david, j.mclellan and a. n. abdullah (eds.). code switching in malaysia. frankfurt: peter lang. 135-168. david, m.k., kuang, c.h., mclellan, j. and fatimah h. (2009). functions of code switching in the family domain in malaysia. in m.k. david, j. mclellan, s. rafikgalea and a. n. abdullah (eds.). code switching in malaysia. frankfurt: peter lang. 3-28. hoffmann, c. (1991). an introduction to bilingualism. london: longman. holmes, j. (2001). introduction to sociolinguistics. london: pearson education limited. jariah, m.j. (2009). code-switching for power wielding: children’s discourse in a malaysian family. in m.k.david, s. rafik-galea, j. mclellan and a. n. abdullah (eds.) code-switching in malaysia. frankfurt-am-main, germany: peter lang. 29-48. kuang, c.h. (1999). factors affecting code switching: a case study of a chinese family in petaling jaya. jurnal bahasa moden, 13, 77-90. morais, e. (1995). codeswitching in malaysian business and its roles in the management of conflict. jurnal bahasa moden, 9, 29-48. nortier, j. (2011). code switching is much more than being careless. multilingual living. retrieved july 6, 2015 from http://www.multilingualliving.com/ wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2011/05/257462843 8_34acc2840f.jpg powell, r. (2009). ‘adr in multilingual context: language policy and language choice in malaysian mediation and arbitration’. paper presented in law and society association annual conference, may 28-31, 2009. denver, colorado. http://www.multilingualliving.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2574628438_34acc2840f.jpg english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 167 needs analysis in efl reading class: a study to promote learner autonomy through selfassessment taufiqulloh english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of pancasakti tegal, indonesia e-mail: taufiqkayla@gmail.com sri wardhani english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of pancasakti tegal, indonesia e-mail: sriwardhani2010@gmail.com anin eka sulistyawati english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of pancasakti tegal, indonesia e-mail: aninekas@gmail.com apa citation: taufiqulloh, wardhani, s., & sulistyawati, a. e. (2018). needs analysis in efl reading class: a study to promote learner autonomy through self-assessment. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 167-176. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1538. received: 30-08-2018 accepted: 29-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: teaching efl reading to the students at colleges or universities requires an appropriate technique that enables students to enhance their achievement as well as to develop their sense of independent learning. this is also to respond to the current trend of that the focus of elt today is creating learners who are not only competent but also dependent or autonomous in learning. this study is aimed at exploring the needs of both lecturers and students on efl reading class. the method used was descriptive-qualitative. it was conducted at the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, pancasakti university tegal, from april to june 2018. the participants of this study were 64 students of the fourth semester in the department attending efl reading class and 4 efl lecturers. the data were collected using triangulation. the instruments used were a questionnaire, classroom observation, and interview. the results showed that the instruction and assessment were still teacher-centered, the learning materials and the method did not meet the students’ needs, the selection of the materials was not in line with the students’ level of competence, the students were given fewer opportunities to explore and share their ideas with others, etc. the result also showed that both students and lecturers agreed that learning efl reading through self-assessment could be an alternative learning model or technique to cope with the situations. keywords: needs analysis; efl reading; learner autonomy; self-assessment. introduction reading is considered as an essential skill for students in the higher education context. therefore, the purpose of teaching reading skill to the students of colleges or universities, efl learners, in particular, should lead the students to be able to collect, analyze and synthesize information from any academic texts. however, the current phenomenon shows that many efl reading instructions end with failure due to some factors, including limited time of reading practices for students in the classroom, inappropriate method, ignorance of the students’ needs, teacher-centered assessment, less motivated students, etc. mailto:taufiqkayla@gmail.com mailto:sriwardhani2010@gmail.com mailto:aninekas@gmail.com taufiqulloh, sri wardhani, & anin eka sulistyawati needs analysis in efl reading class: a study to promote learner autonomy through self-assessment 168 one of the tasks of efl teachers or lecturers today is to make some efforts to encounter such situations. finding an appropriate strategy or technique is one of the alternative solutions that may help with the problems. o'malley (1996, p. 95) stated that there are four components that can lead to successful reading instruction, namely; 1) extensive amount of time in class for reading, 2) direct strategy instruction in reading comprehension, 3) opportunities for collaboration, and 4) opportunities for discussion. effective reading is one of the determining factors of academic literacy at tertiary level, as this has a direct effect on students’ academic writing and ultimately academic performance (adjoa, yeboah, & mai, 2016). moreover, an effective reading instruction may occur when it meets learners’ needs. needs analysis is a prerequisite for teachers to succeed the instructional reading programs. according to feez and joyce (2002, p. 39-40), needs analysis strategies are used to enable students to express their personal language learning goals, priorities, and aspirations, and to enable teachers to collect background information about the learners, to identify their obstacles in learning, and to diagnose the language learning needs for the learners. in line with that, the needs analysis in this study was carried out to find out the information about the students’ goals in efl reading, their obstacles or barriers, and its alternative solutions. it was also to explore the comprehension of both lectures and students on self-assessment. assessment can happen at any point in a lesson. it can be a planned and carefully thought-out procedure. yet, it can also be unplanned. sometimes the unexpected situation occurs. a teacher or coach who knows the goal of the lesson can use the unexpected as an added assessment tool. assessing reading ability does not usually end with measurement of reading comprehension. in general, the effectiveness of assessment in efl reading class depends on some factors including the curriculum, syllabus and also learning development, knowledge in collecting, recording, interpreting, and analyzing multiple sources of data, as well as the ability to try out multiple assessment procedures. according to brown (2004), strategic pathways to full understanding are often important factors to include in assessing learners, especially in the case of most classroom assessments that are formative in nature. an inability to comprehend may thus be traced to a need to enhance a test-taker’s strategies for achieving ultimate comprehension. for example, an academic technical report may be comprehensible to a student at the sentence level, but if the learner has not exercised certain strategies for noting the discourse conventions of that genre, misunderstanding may occur. in the reading assessment, in particular, a teacher or lecturer should consider some components (caldwell, 2012). the first component is identifying good reader behaviors and areas of weakness. a teacher or lecturer should be able to identify the behavior of students in reading class. he/she should look for and assess the developing literacy of the students. besides, he/she should be able to find out the area of weakness of students to plan for instruction and assessment. the second is determining reading level involving two tasks. one of them is to determine whether a student can successfully read a specific selection. the third is noting student progress. all too often, we assess students by comparing them to their peers. the last is choosing evidence for assessing reading performance. many different measures can provide evidence of a student’s reading performance. a teacher or coach can use published instruments or can construct his or her own instruments. in teaching efl reading class nowadays, teacher or lecturer more emphasizes on the use of assessment activities to increase students’ reading comprehension. a number of exercises are set up for the students to gain a deeper comprehension of the reading passages in the classroom. according to caldwell (2012) such assessments, in english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 169 general, have 4 (four) purposes. first, a teacher or coach uses the assessment process to identify the good reader behaviors a student displays. second, a teacher or coach must identify areas of weakness with regard to the good reader behaviors, in order to align instruction with student needs. third, teachers and coaches need to know how to determine whether a specific book is too difficult for a student. last, teachers and coaches need to document evidence of progress on the part of the student. moreover, a number of implications of assessment can be drawn in efl reading instruction to increase reading comprehension of the students. these include the importance of determining students’ prior knowledge, making students accountable for how they use reading time in class, assessing student’s progress in acquiring both decoding skills and reading comprehension strategies, observing how students collaborate in groups as well as how they work individually, and reviewing students’ personal responses to reading (o'malley & pierce, 1996). according to o'malley and pierce (1996), authentic assessment of reading needs planning and organizing. a teacher or a lecturer begins with identifying the purpose of reading assessment and matching instructional activities to that purpose. after that, it is important to plan time assessment, involve the student in self-and-peer assessment, develops rubrics, and/or scoring procedures, set standards, select assessment activities, and record teacher observations. implementing self-assessment practices in the efl classroom enables teachers or lecturers to promote learner autonomy. the task of language education is then to help learners develop self-reliance and autonomy, which will enable them to communicate successfully in international settings. learner autonomy is, therefore, one of the issues that need to be addressed when the focus is on the learner in present-day elt (illés, 2012). one of the key arguments for self-assessment is that it provides an effective means of developing critical selfawareness (nunan 1988, p. 116) cited in (bullock, 2011). a resulting advantage of this is that learners are better able to set realistic goals and direct their own learning. in self-assessment of reading, teacher or lecturer usually designs and/or develops some instruments of self-assessment in order to facilitate the students to do reflective practices in reading class. the practices are implemented in terms of self-assessment instruments integrated into the teaching methods or techniques in the classroom. throughout this, students are actively involved in the learning process. as lianisya (2014) stated that the process of assessing students by using self-assessment will give students a chance to get involved in the learning process. students are involved deeply in the evaluation of work. besides, the teacher can give some immediate feedback which can be used to improve learning. this study focuses on finding out the needs of both lecturers and students in efl reading class to design a learning model which is able to promote learner autonomy through self-assessment. it is a key issue in autonomous learning to enable students to set goals and to monitor and evaluate their learning (taufiqulloh, yuvita, & sulistianingsih, 2018). self-assessment helps both teachers and students to do reflective practices in efl reading class. such practices lead students to reveal their problems faced during attending the class and find out ways to cope with them. according to o'malley and pierce (1996, p. 100), to implement self-assessment practices in the reading class, modeling is important. a teacher or a lecturer could demonstrate to employed any kind of self-assessment instruments in the reading classroom. the instruments could be about students’ reading activities, strategies, or other cognitive and metacognitive aspects of learning. method this study was a descriptive-qualitative. it aimed at revealing both teachers’ and students’ needs in efl reading class in order taufiqulloh, sri wardhani, & anin eka sulistyawati needs analysis in efl reading class: a study to promote learner autonomy through self-assessment 170 to develop a learning model or technique on the bases of self-assessment which can promote learner autonomy. it was conducted at the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, pancasakti university tegal, from april to june 2018. the participants of this study were 64 students of the fourth semester in the department attending efl reading class and 4 (four) lectures whose expertise is reading course instruction. the data were collected by using triangulation. the instruments used were a questionnaire, classroom observation, and interview. the questionnaire was distributed to both lecturers and students. it was intended to figure out the students’ and lecturers’ perceptions and their responses or evaluation on the efl reading classes they attended. it consists of 10 statements of the affective aspect, 10 statements of reading materials and comprehension, and 10 statements of the linguistic features. the questionnaire for the lecturer consists of 10 statements to gather information about lecturers’ evaluation of the reading classes they conducted. then, the last part of the questionnaire contains some questions regarding self-assessment in efl reading. moreover, an observation was also conducted to figure out how the reading instructions worked out in the class, and also the role of both lectures and students in doing the teaching and learning process. a survey interview was also conducted to both lectures and students to reevaluate the results of the questionnaire and observation emphasizing on their perceptions and needs in efl reading classes they attended and the role of self-assessment in classes. the data were analyzed using editing and tabulation. editing was utilized to check and observe the data gathered from the questionnaire, classroom observation, and interview. then, the data were also tabulated with frequency level of each category or aspect to draw the findings of this study. results and discussion this part presents the results of the questionnaire, observation, and interview. the results of the questionnaire relating to the student’s perceptions and responses on the efl reading class attended in terms of effective aspect, reading materials and comprehension, and language, are described in the following tables. the questionnaire also contains some questions relating to the self-assessment of efl reading. the result of the questionnaire for students table 1 presents the students’ selfassessment on the efl reading class they attended. students evaluated the efl reading instructions in terms of their interest and motivation to read, the method, and the role of both lecturers and students in the classroom. table 1. the results of the questionnaire (affective aspect) (1=strongly agree 2= agree, 3= disagree, and 4= strongly disagree) no statements n percentage (%) 1 2 3 4 1 it is easy for me to start reading 60 6 43 49 2 2 i am a quick reader 60 9 38 46 7 3 reading class is fun 60 39 10 11 40 4 i have good self-motivation to read 60 41 4 2 53 5 i read more at campus than elsewhere 60 29 52 17 2 6 i like reading texts of any kind 60 28 3 30 41 7 i like the class because it was interactive 60 5 47 40 8 8 i like the way or method my lecturer used in the class 60 27 2 10 51 9 i was encouraged to read better 60 31 9 18 42 10 i shared problems with others and found ways to cope with them 60 12 5 31 52 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 171 as drawn from the table, 43% of the students agreed that it is easy to start reading but 46% disagreed that they were quick readers. 40% of students strongly disagreed that the class is fun. this happened since the class was teacher-centered. 82% of students read more at the campus. they were also given fewer opportunities to explore and share their ideas in the classroom. moreover, 53% disagreed that they were wellmotivated as well. the lectures did not identify the students’ problems or difficulties during learning in the classroom and give the solution to cope with them. 47% agreed that the class was interactive. yet, it was not organized as well, students did not like the method applied in the classroom and they were not encouraged better to read. in general, the result showed unsatisfactory responses of the students in attending reading class and less interest and motivation of the students in attending the class. meanwhile, regarding the course materials and comprehension, the result is figured out in the table 2. table 2. the results of the questionnaire (learning materials and comprehension) table 2 shows the perceptions and feedback of the students on the learning process of efl reading materials and comprehension. 72% of the students agreed that finding the main ideas of a text is a difficult task to do because most reading texts taught in the classroom contain some implicit main ideas. finding meaning behind sentences becomes a problem for them. 69% of students read long but lack of understanding due to the complexities of teaching materials provided by the lecturers with the ignorance of the students’ needs. good teaching materials are teaching materials that can be used and help students in the learning process. to that end, teaching materials should be prepared based on the needs of students and lecturers (salam, 2017). therefore, most of the students were unable to interpret and process the information from the given texts and read critically. moreover, 68% of the students did not make use of their prior knowledge to comprehend a text. those who make use of their prior knowledge still find a lot of difficulties in comprehending texts as they are difficult to understand. even though the learning materials do not contain much weight, but their complexities lead to their failure in comprehension. the materials, then, should be simplified relating to their level and competence. to sum up, the result of this questionnaire also shows the negative responses of the students in terms of the learning materials and comprehension. table 3. the results of the questionnaire (language) no statements n percentage 1 2 3 4 1 finding main ideas of a text is difficult 60 21 51 23 4 2 i read long but lack of understanding 60 52 17 9 22 3 it is difficult to interpret, and process 60 23 47 20 10 4 i read critically 60 31 11 14 44 5 i used prior knowledge to comprehend a reading text 60 22 10 31 37 6 the goals were presented thoroughly 60 27 19 15 39 7 the concepts were presented in depth 60 7 34 39 20 8 the materials contain much weight 60 14 38 37 11 9 the materials content is difficult 60 49 21 4 26 10 the texts are difficult to understand 60 50 29 3 18 (1=strongly agree 2= agree, 3= disagree, and 4= strongly disagree) no statements n percentage 1 2 3 4 1 the texts use authentic english 60 1 57 39 3 2 the texts are difficult due to vocabulary 60 58 10 4 28 taufiqulloh, sri wardhani, & anin eka sulistyawati needs analysis in efl reading class: a study to promote learner autonomy through self-assessment 172 (1=strongly agree 2= agree, 3= disagree, and 4= strongly disagree) table 3 shows the results of students’ responses on the linguistics aspects (language) of the learning materials. the table indicates that 58% of the students agreed that the texts materials taught are authentic. the word authentic here refers to the high level of english that contain a lot of complexities to comprehend. 68% considered that the texts are too difficult to understand because of unfamiliar vocabulary. moreover, most of them stated that the grammar is too complex, as well as the sentence structures are. it is suggested that a reading teacher or lecturer should select the reading materials in the classroom based on the students’ level and needs. the selection of such materials will raise the interest and motivation of the students in learning to read. according to adjoa et al. (2016), the relationship between language and the ability to read and think critically in a specific discipline are directly linked to students’ academic success at higher education or tertiary level. the result of questionnaire for lecturers this questionnaire was distributed to 4 (four) lecturers who teach efl reading at the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, pancassakti university. the result of the questionnaire is figured out in the followings. table 4. the results of the questionnaire (affective aspect) (1=always 2= frequently, 3= rarely, and 4= never) table 4 shows the result of lecturers selfassessment when teaching efl reading. drawn from the table, all teachers presented the goals of the instruction at the beginning of the class. however, 75% of them did not develop learning materials. they used the materials from the existing reading books. at the beginning of the lesson, they did not implement brainstorming as warming up activities to attract or stimulate the students, to raise their awareness and motivation, and to do reading activities. all of them did not use the materials and the method of instructions that meet students’ needs. they did not encourage their students to read better and seek help from others. a group work was rarely implemented in the class, either. besides, they did not use icebreaking during the lesson so that the class was not interesting. to conclude, the results of both questionnaire of the students in terms of their effective aspect, learning materials and comprehension, as well as linguistic aspect, and that of the lecturers, show that the efl reading instruction in the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, pancasakti university, did not meet the goals of the instruction itself. the instruction and assessment were still teacher3 there are too many new words i am not familiar with 60 57 9 4 30 4 the grammar is too complex 60 47 15 6 32 5 the sentence structures of texts are complex 60 49 13 5 33 no statements n percentage (%) 1 2 3 4 1 i presented the goals of instruction at the beginning of the class 4 100 0 0 0 2 i developed my own materials 4 25 0 75 0 3 i used brainstorming in my class 4 0 25 25 50 4 i used the materials based on the students’ needs 4 0 0 25 75 5 i used the method which fit in the students’ needs 4 0 0 25 75 6 i encouraged students to read more 4 0 25 50 25 7 i helped to solve students problems 4 0 0 25 75 8 i made the class work in group 4 0 25 50 25 9 i provided supplementary materials 4 50 50 0 0 10 i used icebreaking during the lesson 4 0 0 50 50 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 173 centered, the learning materials and the method used did not meet the students’ needs, the selection of the materials was not in line with the students’ level of competence, the students were given fewer opportunities to explore their ideas, share with others in the classroom, etc. as a result, an alternative method or approach should come into being to cope with the students. a model of efl reading learning through selfassessment would be developed on the bases of the results of the needs analysis. selfassessment is a type of assessment which enables learners to raise their interest and awareness in learning. according to bullock (2011), a resulting advantage of selfassessment is that learners are better able to set realistic goals and direct their own learning. it is also a learner-centered approach. the major assumption underlying the learner-centered philosophy is that it is impossible to teach learners everything they need to know and learning does not stop outside the classroom. therefore, it is of value to teach learners skills that they can transfer to other learning situations. the conceptual descriptions of self-assessment and the existing studies that claimed the effectiveness of self-assessment in efl learning are considered to be the bases of developing a model of self-assessment in efl reading class to respond to the various problems as previously described. the results of observation the classroom observation was conducted at the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, pancasakti university, in the odd semester of the academic year 2017/2018, from april to june 2018, and involved both lecturers and students attending efl reading class. the results are figured out in the following: the instructional objectives were not presented in details at the beginning of the class. the method was teacher-centered. the assessment was teacher-centered. the materials contained much weight. students’ comprehension of texts was weak. students were not well motivated to learn. students rarely gathered feedback from the lecturers on the problems they encountered during the learning activities. the results of survey interview the result of the survey interview was conducted along with the classroom observation period. it aimed at finding out the efl reading class in the future which can result in enhancing students’ achievement in reading. the results are described as follows: the instructional objective should be presented thoroughly at the beginning of the course the instruction should be studentcentered. the method should be fun and attract the students to attend the class. students should be given more opportunities to cooperate with others in the classroom that enables them to gather feedback from both their lecturers and peers. the course materials should be more selective and meet students’ needs. students should be continuously motivated in some ways. survey on self-assessment in efl reading regarding the establishment of the selfassessment model of efl reading class, a survey was conducted to a group of lecturers about their perceptions, knowledge, and expectation on the use of self-assessment in the classroom. the results of the survey are described in the following table. taufiqulloh, sri wardhani, & anin eka sulistyawati needs analysis in efl reading class: a study to promote learner autonomy through self-assessment 174 table 5. the result of the survey on self-assessment of efl reading (lecturers) table 5 presents the results of the survey to the lecturers about self-assessment in efl reading. as drawn from the table, 75% of lecturers of reading course less comprehend the concepts of self-assessment and 25% have no ideas about it. all lecturers have never implemented self-assessment practices in the classroom. however, 50% lecturers agreed that self-assessment should be implemented in the efl reading classroom and the others do not respond. meanwhile, a survey on self-assessment of reading was also conducted to the students and the results are figured out in the followings. table 6. the result of the survey on self-assessment of efl reading (students) as shown in table 6, there are only 10% of the students who know self-assessment in efl reading instruction in terms of definitions and descriptions. 90% of the students do not understand at all the concepts of self-assessment in reading and had no experience in using self-assessment practices in the classroom. none of the students comprehend the types of selfassessment in efl reading class. the result of the survey interview to both lecturers and students show that they comprehend the concepts of self-assessment in terms of its definitions or descriptions which is similar to self-editing. yet, they never implemented self-assessment practices in the classroom. however, both agreed that self-assessment model of efl reading could be an alternative technique in reading instruction. regarding the results of the questionnaire, survey interview, and classroom observation as previously described, the efl reading instructions in the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education of pancasakti university, did not end with satisfactory outcomes. the interest and no questions responses n percentage 1 what do you know about selfassessment in efl reading? i know a little bit about selfassessment, it is self-editing on students’ works i know nothing about it 4 75 25 2 did you ever implement selfassessment technique in your reading class? i never implemented selfassessment in my class 4 100 3 do you think that selfassessment will be useful for your students in learning to read? if yes, state your reasons? i agree with that i have no ideas about it 4 50 50 4 what kinds of self-assessment do you need in learning reading self-assessment to deal with not only cognitive but also metacognitive aspects of the students in learning i have no ideas about it 4 50 50 no questions responses n percentage 1 what do you know about selfassessment in efl reading? i know it is self-editing technique i don’t know anything about it 60 10 90 2 did you ever learn self-assessment in reading? never 60 100 3 do you think that self-assessment will be useful for you in learning to read? if yes, state your reasons? i hope so i have no ideas about it 60 75 25 4 what kinds of self-assessment do you need in learning reading i don’t have ideas about it 60 100 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 175 awareness of the students to learn efl reading was low due to the method applied in the classroom was teacher-centered and the selection of the course materials ignored their level of competence. thus, the learning materials were too complex so that the students faced a lot of difficulties in comprehending the reading texts provided by the lectures in the classroom. the linguistic features of the texts were also too complex. the reading texts use authentic english which contains unfamiliar words and requires a high level of comprehension. the grammar and the sentence structures in the reading texts are also too complex. moreover, the students are given fewer opportunities to explore and share their ideas with others. the result also showed that both students and lecturers agreed that learning efl reading through self-assessment could be an alternative learning model or technique to cope with the situations. throughout model, the instruction should be student-centered, the method should be fun and attract the students to attend the class, students should be given more opportunities to cooperate with others in the classroom that enables them to gather feedback from both their lecturers and peers, etc. the development of the model or approach is intended to enhance students’ achievement in reading and to promote learner autonomy. creating learner autonomy is one of the goals of elt in the present day. according to illés (2012), autonomous learners are independent language users capable of problem-solving and decision making. throughout self-assessment, the students are expected to monitor and regulate their learning which can enhance their sense of dependence in learning and their reading achievement. conclusion to sum up, as drawn from the results of the questionnaire to both students and lecturers, the efl reading instruction in the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education of pancasakti university, did not result in successful learning outcomes. some problems are found such as low interest and awareness of the students, less comprehension of the reading texts due to its complexities, teacher-centered method, and instruction, the complexities of linguistics features, etc. the result also shows that both lecturers and students agree that an alternative approach or method of efl reading based on selfassessment should come into being to cope with the situations in order to enhance students’ achievement in reading and to promote learner autonomy. acknowledgment the authors are the teaching staffs of english education department, pancasakti university tegal central java indonesia. this is one of the research outcomes supported under the funding scheme “penelitian terapan unggulan perguruan tinggi (ptupt) 2018” from the directorate of research, technology, and higher education, republic of indonesia. references adjoa, n., yeboah, n., & mai, m. m. (2016). a needs analysis for a discipline-specific reading intervention. english language teaching, 9(3), 235–247. doi: 10.5539/elt.v9n3p235. brown, h. d. (2004). language assessment: principles and classroom practice (1 st ed.). new york: longman. bullock, d. (2011). learner self-assessment: an investigation into teachers’ beliefs. elt journal, 65(2), 114–125. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccq041. caldwell, j. s. (2012). reading assessment: a primer for teachers and coaches. guilford press. saudi med j, 33. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0703993104. illés, é. (2012). learner autonomy revisited. elt journal, 66(4), 505–513. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccs044. lianisya. (2014). the use of self-assessment towards students’ reading behavior (a case study). journal of english and education, 2(2), 26–35. retrieved from http://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/le/article/view/4606. salam, s. (2017). developing needs analysis basedreading comprehension learning materials : a study on the indonesian language study program students. advances in language and literary studies, 8(4), 105–113. retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1153681.pdf. taufiqulloh, sri wardhani, & anin eka sulistyawati needs analysis in efl reading class: a study to promote learner autonomy through self-assessment 176 taufiqulloh, yuvita, & sulistianingsih, e. (2018). analysis of student attitudes to develop a selfassessment model of genre-based writing class. lingua cultura, 12(august), 253–258. doi: 10.21512/lc.v12i3.4064. o’malley j. m., & pierce, v. l. (1996). authentic assessment for english language learners. new york: longman. 209 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee pictures for improving indonesian efl students’ speaking competence muhammad aprianto budie nugroho department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education the university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: aprianto_uniku@yahoo.com apa citation: nugroho, m. a. b. (2014). pictures for improving indonesian efl students’ speaking competence. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 0-0 received: 01-03-2014 accepted: 30-03-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: the purpose of this study is to investigate whether to what extent pictures can improve students’ speaking competence. it was carried out at sman in cigugur for three months. the subject of the research was the students of sman in cigugur in the academic year 2012/2013. the research method was classroom research and it was conducted in two cycles. the data was collected through interview, observation, diaries, document and test. the qualitative data were analyzed by using constant comparative method. while the quantitative data were analyzed by descriptive statistic to calculate the mean scores of pre-test, test, and post-test. the research findings show pictures can improve the students’ speaking competence by indicating their speaking fluency, appropriate vocabularies, grammatical sentences, and good pronunciation. the advantages of pictures were also shown by the classroom situation, i.e.: during the speaking class the students can answer teacher’s questions; the students had courage to express their idea freely; the speaking activities was not limited in the written way; and their attention in speaking class. keywords: speaking, pictures, students’ competence introduction of all languages, speaking competence plays necessary role in learning and understanding the language. widowson (1978) says that speaking has two meanings. first, it refers to the manner in which language is manifested. second, it refers to the manner in which language is realized in communication. to acquire of speaking skills of language, motivation is really needed (finochiro 1976). students come to study of foreign language in high school in strong convictions that “language” means “an instrument of communication”. students who are able to speak the language feel great sense of satisfaction and his attitude toward language learning is more enthusiastic. according to richard (1994: 182), the competence on listening and speaking deals with the skills sound of discrimination, extracting information, and prediction, in order to specific functions. the skills also included those of determining and using register to suit different audiences, and for different purposes, so that students are able to fully participate in conversation and discussions. based on richard’s (1994) idea, good speakers are ideally defined as those who speak nicely, efficiently, and articulately, as well as using effective voice projection. furthermore, speaking is linked to success in life, as it occupies an important position both individually and socially. therefore, speaking is the most common and important means of providing communication among human beings. based on the observation toward students of sman cigugur, kuningan, there are several problems arise the low ability in speaking which is indicated as follows: (1) the students encountered difficulties in using appropriate words muhammad aprianto budie nugroho pictures for improving indonesian efl students’ speaking competence 210 for their monologue; (2) students could not pronounce the english word well; (3) students had problems with their fluency, especially they experienced ‘communication breakdown’ in performing monologue and; (4) students produced ungrammatical sentences. the classroom situation in speaking class showed that the atmosphere was not alive this situation was indicated by the following situations: (1) the students cannot answer teacher’s questions. when the teacher asks questions to the students, they just smile and keep silent. (2) the students shy and unwilling to speak, they always avoid the speaking turn by pointing to others to speak. (3) the speaking practice was limited with many activities in the written form. (4) the students have difficulties to focus their attention on speaking class, they usually busy talking each other. there are so many problems causing their difficulties in achieving speaking competency. based on the interview, found some causes: firstly, english language is considered as foreign language. most of students think that they do not need to learn it further. most of the students come from sub-urban and rural area, their parents’ job are farmers, private sectors such as seller or businessman, and civil servants. most of them do not continue their education to the higher level, only less than 50 percents who continue their study to the university. secondly in teaching speaking, the teacher tended to teach text comprehension monotonously. for example, when teaching the teacher just explains the expression related to the topic while the students listen to the teacher’s explanation, and takes a note. then, the teacher will ask the students to look at the structure of dialogue which had been stated in packet book to read together after him. after that he asked the students to practice the dialogue in front of the class. this method will make the student bored, because what they did only read and learn the dialogue by heart. in this case, interest becomes crucial factor to consider in deciding teaching learning activities for the students. in other hand, teacher should be able to apply the right technique and approach which can increase students’ interest in the learning process in the classroom. this means that the technique and approach used by the teacher in teaching english encourage the students to create an interesting atmosphere and enthusiastic learning process. in teaching english, the teachers have to be able to make students participate in discussing the material actively, so they will not only be able to understand what they are learning in the class but also express their own english rally. the most important thing to carry out the english teaching is that the teachers have to be able to use appropriate approach, design and procedures. here the teacher has very important role in managing and creating their class lively. consequently, the class possibly chaos but it is enjoyable. one of the techniques suggested for developing speaking competence is by using pictures in teaching speaking. picture is a mean of expressing ideas, which captures slices of reality and tell language in a story. pictures encourage students to think up clearly and telling the truth (wittich and charles 1953: 59). according to gerngrose, gunter and puchta (1992: 3), teachers can use pictures in order to make communication in the foreign language class more lively, natural and stimulating. the activities focus on interaction in the classroom and combine learning language with practising social skill. finally, experience has shown that more senses are involved in the learning process, the better memory works. with most learners, the visual sense is very important; as the saying a pictures is worth than thousand words. 211 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee wittich and charles (1979: 34) state that flat pictures have some unique advantages, they are: low cost and ready availability, meaning that it can be taken from magazine, newspaper, and advertising brochure. secondly, pictures are easy to use. if they are large enough, they can be held up in front of a class. it can be used for a variety purposes. third, pictures are easy to make. both teacher and students can draw simple pictures or graphic or photograph. he further states that picture can motivate the learners and focus the learner’s mind on likely content and mood of the massage. in addition, he states that picture might add extra information which allows the learner to infer what is intended but not clearly stated in the text. finally, a picture is a valuable resource as it provides (1) a shared experience in the classroom, (2) a need for common language form to use in the classroom, (3) a variety of tasks, and (4) a focus of interest for student. pictures are more realistic to show the main problem if they compare with other media, they overcome the limitation of our observations since they clarify the problem and prevent misunderstanding. every teacher can use pictures since they are cheap and easy to implement without some addition devices (sadiman, 1986:31). method this study applied an action research which is usually carried out by practitioners to improve their understanding of events, situations, and problems so as to increase the effectiveness of their practice. action research is a way of reflecting on teaching done by systematically in collecting data on everyday practice and analyzing them in order to come to some decisions about what the future practice should be (wallace, 1998: 4). the research was applied to the students of the second grade of sman in cigugur, kuningan in the academic year 2012/2013. the students have ability in english in general, but most of them have difficulty in speaking. to collect the data, teacher’s diary, students’ interview and speaking test to get the students’ speaking score. after collecting data from class action research, the data were analyzed by calculating the mean of the post test of the cycle 2. then, the mean score resulted in the post test of the cycle 2 is compared with the mean score of the post test of cycle 1. results and discussion there were two things that i wanted to compare between previous situation and cycle 1. they were the mean of score that the student achieved and the process of teaching and learning that occurred in the classroom. the comparison among the students’ score of preliminary research, the post score of cycle 1, and the mean can be described in table 1. table 1. the comparison among the students’ score of preliminary research no explanation pre-test scores test 1 1 the highest score 79.00 90.00 2 the lowest student 40.00 55.00 3 the average scores 49.72 71.38 furthermore, the comparison of average scores of each element of preliminary scores and the test scores of cycle 1 can be seen in table 2. table 2. the comparison of average scores of each element of speaking no elements of speaking pre-test post-test scores 1 fluency 12.23 16.80 2 vocabulary 12.75 18.59 3 grammar 12.69 18.58 4 pronunciation 12.00 17.80 muhammad aprianto budie nugroho pictures for improving indonesian efl students’ speaking competence 212 i also compare between the cycle 1 and cycle 2. they were the mean of score that the students achieved and the process of teaching occurred in the classroom. the comparison among the students’ scores of the test of cycle 1 and the post-test of cycle 2, and the mean are described in table 3. table 3. the comparison among the students’ scores of the test , and the pos test no elements of speaking test 1 post-test scores 1 highest scores 90.00 92.00 2 lowest scores 60.00 70.00 3 average scores 70.00 79.87 from the table above, it can be concluded that here was improvement between the test scores of cycle 1 and the post test of cycle 2.. furthermore the comparisons of average of each elements of test score and the post-score 2 can be seen in table 4. no elements of speaking test score post-test score 1 fluency 16.80 19.65 2 vocabulary 18.59 20.45 3 grammar 18.58 20.21 4 pronunciation 17.80 19.53 total 71.77 79.84 the students were successful in their learning because they were actively involved to participate in the teaching learning process in the classroom. the students’ success of learning could not only be determined by themselves but also the role of teaching which was done by the teacher. their success in learning english especially in speaking activity depends on he teacher’s role in managing the class and using the teaching media in the classroom. pictures were media which can be used to develop the students’ fluency, to promote interaction among students in the classroom, and to increase motivation to the students’ learning. in addition, teaching learning process could run more interactively and actively than the previous situation. the teacher gave opportunity to interact with other students and to develop their creativity. they had more time to learn and practice speaking. being taught using pictures, the students could improve their fluency, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, so they were confident and free to practice speaking. teaching speaking by implementing pictures gave many benefits to the students. the action research which implemented pictures in order to improve students’ speaking competence has yielded some improvement on students’ language competence in speaking and classroom situation. based on the result of the research, it can be proposed a theory which says that pictures can improve students’ speaking competence. this finding is supported by the research result stated in pre-test and post-test 2, that the students’ average scores of each element improved. the evidences of this action research are as follows: a. the students’ fluency improved. the average score of fluency increased from 12.23 to 19.65. b. the students’ vocabulary improved. the average score of vocabulary increased from 12.75 to 20.45 c. the students’ grammar improved. the average score of grammar increased from 12.69 to 20.21. d. the students’ pronunciation the average score of pronunciation from 12.00 to 19.53. 213 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the students could tell their story fluently, because by optimizing pictures, students’ confident will increased, because when they draw their pictures their construct a story based their own mind. it is supported by wittich and charles (1953: 59) that picture is a means of expressing ideas, which captures slices of reality and tell language in a story. pictures encourage students to think up and clearly and telling the truth. by suing pictures also make the students speak naturally. gerngrose, gunter and puchta (1992:3) confirm that the use of pictures are functional and beneficial to make communication in the foreign language class more lively, natural and stimulating. the activities focus on interaction in the classroom and combine learning language with practicing social skill. finally, experience has shown that more senses are involved in the learning process, the better memory works. with most learners, the visual sense is very important; as the saying a picture is worth than thousand words. second theory being proposed says that implementing pictures in teaching activities can improve classroom situation. pictures emphasize students’ active learning. the students can do many activities in implementing pictures, such as (1) finding their source from the internet, (2) deciding story they will choose, (3) constructing their story based on their perception, (4) having freedom to determine how the story will be told, (5) choosing appropriate vocabularies based on their pictures, (6) understanding the content of the story, (5) sharing or discussing the phrases or sentences they had written in their notebook, in shorts, the students are actively involved in teaching and learning process. the students also involved to avoid them from boredom, passiveness, laziness, and being sleepy because they can also share knowledge and experience among the members of the groups when they draw and arrange their story. so, they do not only listen to what teacher says and write down on their book what teacher explains. pictures can also improve students’ motivation, as stated by sudjana and rivai (1997: 12) that using picture is effective teaching technique for the beginners. since it can help the students in understanding the meaning and the content of the text. conclusion after conducting the action research by implementing pictures to improve the students’ speaking competence at sman 1 cigugur, kuningan, found that there was improvement of the students’ speaking competence. the scores of all four elements of speaking competence that covered fluency, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation increased well. it showed that the use of pictures in teaching speaking could improve the students’ speaking ability for. furthermore, when the steps and the activities of implementing pictures were carried out in the speaking activities, teaching and learning process could run more lively and attractively. the classroom situation was also improved, the teacher did not dominate the class, but he gave more opportunity to the students to involve and active in his class activities. by implementing pictures in his class, the teacher tended to be facilitator. the teacher was always ready when the students faced difficulties. being taught using pictures, the students were neither ashamed nor afraid of making mistakes in practicing speaking. they had courage when they were asked to do the task in front of the classroom, they did it. the students had been active too do exercise in groups. they did not talk to one another about their problem again. furthermore, the students showed their interest in speaking class. muhammad aprianto budie nugroho pictures for improving indonesian efl students’ speaking competence 214 references breitkruz h. (2006). pictures stories in language teaching. retrieved from http//eltj.oxfordjournal.org/cgi/ pdf_extract/xxvi/2/145. brown h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. new york: addison wesley longman inc. a pearson education company. burns, a. (2010). doing action research in english language teaching: a guide for practitioners. new york and london: routledge taylor & francis group. gunter, g. & herbert, p. (1992). pictures in action. london: prentice hall international. hughes, r. (2002). teaching and researching speaking. london: pearson education. ikhwan. m. m. (2009). improving the studenst’ writing capability using pictures in smp negeri 2 baron. surakarta: sebelas maret university. yi, j. 2007. the use method of “describe and draw in teaching speaking. retrieved from www.gcjy.info/yxzx/ uploadfiles/2007112165647281. doc havriye, k. (2006). teaching speaking: activities to promote speaking in second language. retrieved from http://unr.edu/homepage/ hayriyek. lincoln, y. s. & guba, e. g. (1985). naturalistic inquiry. london: sage publications littlewood, w. (1981). communicative language teaching an introduction. cambridge: press syndicate of the university cambridge. mcniff, j. (1992). action research: principles and practice. new york: routledge. mckernan, j. (2003) international encyclopaedia of higher education. new delhi: crest publishing house. nurkamto, j. (2002). problematik pengajaran bahasa inggris di indonesia. surakarta. universitas sebelas maret surakarta. ___________. (2008). penelitian tindakan kelas: konsep dasar dan prosedur pelaksanaanya. surakarta. sebelas maret university. pekoz, b. (2006). integrating grammar for communicative language teaching. available at ttp://iteslj.org/ techniques/pekoz-grammar.html purwatiningsih. (2008). using pictures in teaching narrative to improve students’listeninf capability (unpublished thesis). surakarta. sebelas maret university. rahayu, m. m. s. (2007). improving students’ reading comprehension using comic books. unpublished thesis. surakarta. sebelas maret university. richards s. j. & rodgers s. t. (2001). approaches and methods in language teaching. cambridge. press syndicate of the university cambridge. ______ . (2001). curriculum development in language teaching. melbourne: cambrige university press. _______ . (1997). reflective teaching in second language classroom. melbourne: cambridge university press. hughes, r. (2002). teaching and researching speaking. london: pearson education. saptono. (2009). the use of eight dexterous systems to improve students’ ability in writing recount text. unpublished thesis. surakarta: sebelas maret university. smaldino e. s, et al (2005). instructional technology and media for learning. new jersey: pearson education inc. sudarwati, th m and audia, g. (2006). look ahead book 2: an english course 215 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee for senior high school students year xi. surabaya. penerbit erlangga. thornburry, s. (2002). how to teach vocabulary. harlow: longman. _______ . (2005). how to teach speaking. new york: longman. wallace j. m. (2000). action research for language teaching. cambridge: press syndicate of the university cambridge. weir, c. j. (1998). communicative language testing. london: prentice hall. whitehead, j. and mcniff, j.. action research living theory. london: sage publications. wright, a. (1997). pictures for language learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. ________ .(1984). 1000 +pictures for teacher to copy. cambridge university press. research and development for english usage through speaking in a larger school environment english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee analysis of barriers in listening comprehension among junior high school students setia muljanto department of english education, stkip garut, indonesia e-mail: tanto_sm@yahoo.com apa citation: muljanto, s. (2012). analysis of barriers in listening comprehension among junior high school students. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 97-103 received: 09-08-2012 accepted: 22-10-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: this research paper identifies barriers and difficulties in listening comprehension faced by junior high school students. the research questions were what barriers did students encounter and how did they used strategies to overcome those barriers. this study used a qualitative method and was a case study involving 40 students and one english teacher. the data were obtained by ways of conducting a test of listening taken from toeic test. the tests indicated that the results scores were not quite satisfactory. this is primarily caused by speech delivery of the native speaker which was too fast. this means that students faced listening barriers especially in processing information. the data also indicated that students were also nervous when doing the test as habitual barrier. strategies used to overcome these barriers are by msaking students get used to listen and use english and making them familiar with certain contexts in real life. keywords: listening barriers, listening comprehension, toeic test. introduction english is one of important subjects to study for junior high school students in indonesia. indonesian decree no. 20, 2003 on national education system verse 37 states that english is an international language which is essential for international communication. hence, the government of indonesia includes english as one of the subjects to be tested in the national examination for junior high school, along with mathematics and the indonesian language. the school-based curricullum for junior high school also states that english teaching is conducted in 4 lesson hours in a week which consists of 40 minutes teaching and learning in each hour. but there is no exact time allocation for each listening, speaking, reading and writing skill. on the whole for each 7th through 9th grade, english teaching spends about 36 weeks of effective schooling period. the sum of lesson hours for english is the same with those allocated for mathematics and indonesian language. in a study about listening comprehension by suryanti (2002), it was indicated that listening was indeed a difficult subject for students to learn. another study by chen (2005), explored the barriers confronted by the efl (english as a foreign language) learners while comprehending listening during a training program. the findings indicated that the obstacles confronted by the learners were multi faceted (chen, 20051). she found out that listening barriers were associated with the internal factors of learners such as their affective statuses, listening habit, information processing capacities, mailto:tanto_sm@yahoo.com setia muljanto analysis of barriers in listening comprehension among junior high school students english proficiencies and their beliefs about their listening abilities. other barriers were concerned with the nature of listening strategies and the listening material used. this research explored the barriers in listening comprehension experienced by 9th grade students identified as the source of obstacles the hearer experiences in getting the right message from the spoken language. spoken language has distinct characters from writen language. these differences may cause barriers in listening comprehension. eight characteristics of spoken language which are adapted from several sources (dunkel, 1991; richards, 1983; ur, 1984; in brown 2001:252-254) are as follows. the first characteristic of spoken language is clustering, that is breaking down speech into smaller groups of words. the second is redundancy like rephrasing, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of “i mean” and “you know.” the third is reduced forms like phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic reduction (brown, 2001: 253). the fourth is performance variables such as hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections. the fifth is colloquial language like idioms, slang, reduced forms, and shared cultural knowledge. the sixth is rate of delivery which indicates number and length of pauses used by a speaker. the seventh characteristic is stress, rhythm, and intonation which are very important because english is a stress-timed language. and the eighth characteristic is interaction which rules include negotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn-taking, and topic nomination, maintenance, and termination. chen’s study concerned with barriers in learning strategies in listening comprehension. she categorized listening barriers into seven categories; affective, habitual, information processing, english proficiency, strategic, belief, and material barriers (chen, 2005). these barriers are the foundation to conduct this research. method the focus in this research is students’ barriers in listening comprehension. to find out their listening barriers the research used qualitative research. as mentioned by denzin and lincoln, qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. this means that qualitative research studies things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them (denzin and lincoln in gall, gall and borg, 2003, p. 24). the primary data in this research were obtained from two kinds of sources. they were questionnaire and interview. the first source of data came from the questionnaires followed by the second source that was in-depth interview with the students and their teacher to explore insight toward this research. the interview also served as a tool to cross check the data from questionnaire. the data from questionnaire and interview were the primary data which would be used as a mechanism of analysis of the barriers and the toeic test serves as secondary data to support the questionnaire. this research was conducted in a private junior high school in bandung, west java. meanwhile the participants of this research were one english teacher english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee and one class of 9th grade students which consisted of 40 students in a private junior high school in bandung in academic year 2006-2007. those students were chosen from five classes of ninth grade students. from each class there were eight representatives which were recommended by their english teachers. the 40 students were expected to represent the number of population of each class. questionnaire used in this research was a written questionnaire which consisted of thirty three items and two open ended questions. respondents were expected to record a written or typed response to each questionnaire items to find out their perception towards listening comprehension. those options are given according to likert scale (attitude scale) procedure which elicits informants’ subjective responses (wray, trott and bloomer, 1998:175). interview used for this study was a semi structured interview (gall, gall and borg, 2003) in which questions by the interviewer were based on a list of questions prepared. in this research the interviews were conducted following the interview guidelines which had been set before. six respondents were taken as sample for interview. there were fourteen pairs who were consistent with their result from toeic test 1 and 2. a pair of students who joined in consistent groups, higher, middle and lower level, were chosen for the sample. the first two students belonged to the consistent groups taken as sample for interview in this study. results and discussion from the data collection involving toeic test, distribution of questionnaire and interview to the respondent, the analysis for those data was using reflective analysis method. reflective analysis is a process in which the researcher relies primarily on intuition and judgment in order to portray or evaluate the phenomena being studied (gall, gall and borg, 2003). the primary data from the questionnaire obtained from the respondents were presented in the form of table. those tables were arranged according to listening barriers categories. eight tables of those categories were used to present data in a form of frequency distribution of the responses by using percentage formula: f p = --x 100% n p in this formula means the result of percentage, f means the number of responses, and n means the number of the whole responses (sudjana, 2001:129). identifying listening barriers concern with recognizing the obstacles or difficulties in listening comprehension found in the data from the respondents. in this case recognizing categories of listening barriers are identifying those as mentioned in chen (2005) and janusik (2006). after the process of identification, “each data was categorized into eight major categories of barriers, either affective, habitual, information processing, english proficiency, strategic, material, belief” (chen, 2005, p. 9-10) or distraction barriers (janusik, 2006). the eight categories of barriers were distributed into thirty three questionnaire statements. to obtain data from those statements, students chose the most appropriate answer according to their condition during the listening comprehension test from five options. setia muljanto analysis of barriers in listening comprehension among junior high school students the result of toeic test which was far from satisfactory indicated several barriers which might be encountered by students in listening comprehension. barriers in listening were shown by result of toeic test which was not quite satisfactory. from twenty items in toeic listening section given during the first test, on the average students could only answer about 8.5 or 42.5%. on the second test the average number of the items answered correctly on the test was 8.75 or 43.75% . the questionnaires were distributed to 40 respondents on 28th of november 2006. data from questionnaire indicated that there were several barriers students encountered in listening comprehension.to follow the classification of listening barriers, the listening barriers students encountered will be classified into; affective, habitual, information processing, english proficiency, strategic, belief, material barriers and distraction barriers. the followings are findings from questionnaires which are put into categories of listening barriers. they are put that way so that it is easier for the researcher to explain the findings. affective barriers are defined as students’ attitudes such as anxiety, distress, frustration and resistance which can influence their listening comprehension. students’ responses to affective barriers’ statements were recorded as follows. table 1. respondents’ answer to affective barriers’ item questions item s no. questions range of options 1 2 3 4 5 f % f % f % f % f % 1 i feel nervous when listening to questions in english 2 5 7 17.5 24 60 6 15 1 2.5 2 i just want to give up when listening to questions in english 7 17.5 14 35 17 42.5 2 5 0 0 3 i don’t like english lesson 11 27.5 18 45 10 25 1 2.5 0 0 4 i’m not optimistic in facing national examination because there will be listening section on the test 4 10 16 40 11 27.5 7 17.5 2 5 based on the table above, 33 out of 40 respondents seemed to be nervous during listening comprehension test (77.5%). this is in line with the affective dimension as mentioned in mac intyre and noels (1996, in chen 2005) that puts forward affective variables including anxiety, motivation, attitude, etc as aspects that affect students’ performance in listening comprehension. despite nervousness, the surprising fact was that 95 % of respondents or 38 pupils did not want to give up easily in doing the listening test. the results from the questionnaires showed that, 92.5% of respondents often lost their concentration when listening to verbal question. with regard to students understanding of individual word, the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee data from questionnaire indicated that they still had some difficulties in this aspect. the result showed 95% of respondents were having trouble in understanding every word in listening test though they had listened carefully to the text. concerning vocabulary practice, 75% of respondents stated that if they had vocabulary practice, their burden during listening would be lessened. information processing barriers deals with students’ ability to process the information from the utterances they have heard from the speaker. the respondents found that the speaker spoke too fast. the ability in guessing the context in listening comprehension was one of important parts in listening, there were 90% of the respondents who tried to guess the context of questions by pictures during the test. this is in line with richard (1990) and rost (1994) taxonomy of general listening skills (in rost, 2002:119). english proficiency barriers concern with what students’ think of their english competences and whether these competences help them during listening test. it was found that 87.5% of respondents felt unfamiliar with the speaker’s accent in the listening test. this was also shown in chen study which indicates some of her respondents’ problems with the accent of native speaker (2002:10). in this study all respondents were having difficulties in remembering the words that the speaker was saying. there were also 100% of the respondents who recognized the words in listening test but forgot their meaning. the followings are findings from interview which are put into categories of listening barriers. they are put that way so that it is easier for the researcher to explain the findings. during the interview the teacher expressed her difficulty in teaching listening. this is mrs. saa’s excerpt of interview: “in my opinion, emm… teaching listening is so difficult because i have to emm… what is it… i have to teach to the students of how to concentrate, how to receive information, to focus on the sound while they are listening to the sound, listening (to the) material itself.”she said clearly that there are a lot of factors which caused difficulties in teaching listening materials to the students. despite barriers mentioned by respondents during the interview above and barriers stated in the questionnaire, one of the students, elr still showed her optimism in facing listening in the up coming english national examination because for her it was a challenge. the barriers related with material of listening were expressed in these following interview excerpts by san and res. san : “yes… i think (the material taught in listening classes) help a little.” res : “emm… it’s good. there’re loudspeakers (in the lab), everything that students need to listen and to speak is very complete.” apart from separate hours for listening and speaking lesson, res suggested more hour lesson for practicing listening. san added that listening material given in the language lab has proven to be useful for the students in facing listening test. the following is the example of distraction barriers that indicates that agg distracted when there were a lot of noises from other students who didn’t setia muljanto analysis of barriers in listening comprehension among junior high school students pay attention during listening test, while other student, des often lose his concentration when some students around him were asking for answers. agg : “i feel distracted when there are a lot of noises from other students who didn’t pay attention (to the listening test)” spoken english materials are actually abundant. there are tv programs like news, quizes, films, songs or other activities that use english. this is also supported by students’ answers in the questionnaire. students can actually learn from them as well as be entertained by them. chen respondents also trained themselves by listening to the news and watching movies to increase their skill in listening (chen, 2005:10). from the interview of six respondents found the applied strategies such as using music when they were practicing listening at home (res, fit and yuy). songs in english are useful for practicing english pronunciation, tone, recognizing slang words, etc. conclusion with regards to the first research question, this study supports the findings of the previous research in listening barriers. there are eight barriers that students encounter during listening comprehension. first, affective barriers, most students seemed to feel nervous but were optimistic when listening to questions in listening comprehension. second, habitual barriers, students often lost their concentration when listening to the spoken question, though they always tried to listen carefully, but they still had trouble in understanding every word. third, information processing barriers, students believed that the speaker spoke too fast during listening comprehension test and as a result they got low scores in the listening comprehension tests. english proficiency barriers, students did not understand the accent of the speaker and they agreed to the assumption that they have trouble in memorizing the words that the speaker said, they weren’t familiar with some english words, sometimes forgot the meaning of the words and felt that their english grammar knowledge is not good enough. fourth, the strategic barriers, most respondents stated that they sometimes forgot to apply the knowledge of answering listening comprehension questions and they also thought that there were a number of rules and methods to be remembered when they tried to answer the listening comprehension questions. fifth, belief barriers, some of the students felt that even though they knew they have a weakness in listening, they did not know how to overcome the problems. so, they agreed if listening comprehension test was taken out of the national examination test rather than taking a risk of failure during national examination test. sixth, material barriers, students felt difficult in getting the main idea from the text, they felt they couldn’t remember the words because they unfamiliar with the spoken text’s topic or theme, the level of the test was difficult, the text was long. but they did not feel that the materials given during listening lesson was the cause in the failure of understanding listening comprehension. seventh, distraction barriers, students agreed that handphone rings or noises from other english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee students often made them lost concentration. and further the students think that the limited school equipments as a barrier in a listening comprehension. references brown, h.d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. second ed.; longman press. chen, y. (2005). barriers to acquiring listening strategies for efl learners and their pedagogical implications. tesl-ej, vol. 8 no. 4. depdiknas. (2003). competence standard for english subject. jakarta: indonesia ministry of education. ________. (2006). guidelines of curricullum in educational unit level (kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan). jakarta: indonesia ministry of education. gall, m. d., gall, joyce p., and borg, walter r. (2003). educational research: an introduction, seventh ed., boston:allyn bacon. janusik, l. (2006). listening facts. rockhurst university, international listening association (ila) journal. maxwell, j. (1996). qualitative research design: an integrated approach. thousand oak, ca: sage publication. oxford practice test for the toeic test 2. (2000). oxford: oxford university press. richards, j. c., and rodgers, theodore s. (1996). approaches and methods in language teaching. forum vol. xxv no. 4, bandung: tarsito rost, m. (1990). listening in language learning, new york:longman inc. ______ .(2002). teaching and researching listening. london: edinburgh gate, england, pearson education. sudjana, n. and ibrahim. (2001). penelitian dan penilaian pendidikan. bandung: sinar baru algesindo suryanti, y. (2002). exploring students’ difficulties in the listening class. unpublisheb thesis. bandung: indonesia university of education. rixon, s. (1986). developing listening skills. london: mac millan publisher limited underwood, m. (1989). teaching listening, london: longman. ur, penny, 1984, teaching listening comprehension. cambridge: cambridge university press. wray, alison, trott, kate and bloomer, allen, 1998, projects in linguistics: a practical guide to researching language. london: arnold references english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 77 commitment, community and bravery: the core activities in endorsing speaking skill by english camp program nanan abdul manan elementary teacher education, teacher training and education stkip muhammadiyah kuningan, indonesia e-mail: nanan@upmk.ac.id apa citation: manan, a. m. (2018). commitment, community and bravery: the core activities in endorsing speaking skill by english camp program. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 77-84. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1255. received: 14-02-2018 accepted: 23-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: speaking skill is the prominent thing in verbal communication due to most students of university got the difficulties in practicing it. english camp program becomes a way out to boost students’ speaking performance. hence, this research is aimed to know the english speaking competence by means of english camp program (ecp). by applying a case study, some students of mathematic education of stkip muhammadiyah kuningan were chosen as the participants. the research concerns on the three categories of ecp activities; commitment, community, and bravery. those factors are so simple but they are very important to lead the students to practice english speaking, to create natural situation in practice and to strengthen their english speaking performance. this study revealed that ecp gives a positive impact on students’ speaking skill. ecp can give a new experience of students who join the english program without any obstacles in practicing; many chances, free topics and experience exploration. ecp is a simple activity that can create a big result in speaking english skill. keywords: english camp program, speaking skill, commitment, community, bravery introduction teaching and learning process in formal situation is the usual activity of university students. they have a high awareness to attend the class and allow to some academic regulations on it. in case of learning english as the second language, a learner should use some strategies willingly. their willingness is then indicated by means of exercises. the learner should have a high motivation to communicate and have a positive attitude to the target language. the motivation, itself, doesn’t appear apparently without any intervention of other factors. lectures or teachers are part of factors to give a support. because motivation appears as interaction between students and teachers/lecturers, it is essentially aimed to develop the students’ competence in learning (zaikina, et al., 2017). motivation indicates the stability situation in learning process (davoudia & parpouchi, 2016). english learning in higher school or university has a different concept and understanding. the university students, of course, have been in adult condition. the ultimate purpose of language practice tends to communicative language teaching. it means that language is used for communication effectively (akdemir, barin, & demiroz, 2012). communicative competence relates to communicative language proficiency that is the most important thing in language practice. communicative language proficiency, at least, has two parts of language divisions; language knowledge and language strategies (srikaew, tangdhanakanond, & kanjanawasee, 2015). it implies teaching speaking relates to other skills and objectives. as an english teacher, one should combine some skills interwined in practicing of english speaking. assessment is an important step that must be done in a process of teaching and mailto:nanan@upmk.ac.id nanan abdul manan commitment, community and bravery: the core activities in endorsing speaking skill by english camp program 78 learning. this assessment will provide information about the condition of the students related to the understanding of the context of a particular discussion. speaking is a productive skill that can be directly and empirically observed (brown, 2004). this means that students’ speaking activities can be observed by a teacher from their speaking activities in the class. in this case, assessment is used for ensuring the classroom activities. so, classroom assessment needs the test provider that is required to ensure the use of the test is appropriate for its stated purpose and target population (fulcher & davidson, 2007). for more understanding, assessment is meant as the activity that one hope to get the information about students’ performance in one competence. related to this, the researcher relates it with speaking competence. assessment in the pursuit of a language is a series that is not integral to the process of language teaching. assessment will be a barometer as a means of information about developments in the understanding of language learners. assessment, test, evaluation and measurement have the same goal, which is to get an understanding of the development of learners in the learning process. the general evaluation (in this case also related with assessment) in the implementation of learning is understood as an effort to gathering information about the implementation of learning as the basis for making decisions (djiwandono, 2008). such information is not limited to matters directly related to the progress and results of learning by the learners in achieving learning objectives, but can also be related to the learning organization as a whole. speaking skill assessment means assessment on one aspect of language skills, namely speaking. however, in the assessment of english speaking skills, there are several criteria that can be used as a basis to conduct assessment. the assessment tasks itself are classified into several tasks; imitative speaking, responsive speaking, interactive speaking, and extensive speaking (brown, 2004). here, the researcher chooses the assessment tasks in interactive speaking task related to discussion and conversation, and extensive speaking task related to oral presentation. both types of tasks in speaking assessment will be continued into evaluating and scoring speaking tasks. in this research, the scoring involves accuracy and fluency. accuracy involves clear in speaking, articulation, phonologically and grammatically correct. meanwhile, fluency is classified into flowing explaining and natural language as a custom of english in a daily. the practice of english communication was conducted in english camp program. it has a core purpose that the students can concern in one place, one theme and one goal, exactly, improving english communicative competence. it has the same purpose what another academic camp has. academic camp, actually, is an approach for improving the students’ learning problems in the class, improving self confidence and understanding advance knowledge (yusop, et al., 2015). method this research applies a case study design. the case study design is based upon the assumption that the case being studied is a typical of cases of a certain type and therefore a single case can provide insight into the events and situations prevalent in a group from where the case has been drawn (kumar, 2011). the researcher explores an area where little is known about ecp. the situation of ecp was carried out, episode of ecp was scheduled, and community were gathered at ecp. in this case study, the data were collected through interview and observation. gaining information from secondary records were also conducted as the completing data. the secondary records were gained from the data that instructors had. the data was about the progress of students’ speaking skills, especially in accuracy and fluency categories. results and discussion clear and articulation in speaking performance the students of mathematic education joined ecp with many reason. some of them wanted to be better in english for presenting the english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 79 students of university contest carried out by public university coordination of jabar banten in 2018 and some others wanted to develop their knowledge relating to english for mathematics. in a term of clear and articulation, the students indicated the good speakers. they could start and finish conversations well. some students still used the common sentences in opening the communication as the researcher found out through observation as indicated in the following simple conversation between ato (boy) and intan (girl). a : hello, how are you today? i : i am fine, and you? a : fine. by the way, you have eaten? i : not yet. a : i have breakfast with nasi uduk not lontong sayur. i : why? not lontong sayur? a : i don’t like it, yes i don’t like. i : yes, why? a : because, there is lemak. what lemak in english? i : o, lemak is fat. hehe, lontong sayur is very delicious, i like it. a : but i don’t like, hehe. from the simple converstion, ato as the first speaker tried to open the conversation to intan (the second speaker). they talked about kinds of sundanese food for breakfast. actually, it was the same as other places if talking about nasi uduk and lontong sayur. and, of course, nasi uduk and lontong sayur were kinds of morning foods in several places in java or especially west java. clear articulation of this communication indicated that speaker 1 and speaker 2 could understand the purpose of converstaion one another. eventhough, ato had a difficulty to say ‘lemak’ in english but the communication partner, intan, responded and gave its translation in english. on the other situation, there were discussion about the preference places for carreer in the future. they responded in many reasons. every student gave an opinion about their career. the following as the result of their discussion. moderator : hello every body, this time, we are going to open our discussion by reciting basmallah. in this opportunity, i am anggi as moderator, i will guide you to discuss about our future after we have finish our study in stkip muhammadiyah kuningan. i will give you time to speak about your opinion. for the first, i give a time to cika, please. cika : ok, thank you, i will explain my plan for future. actually, i want to continue my study to strata 2 or s2. i will take test in upi bandung. because, there, mathematic education there is. i am believe that i can pass the test. after that, i will become lecture. i think enough from me. moderator : ok, thank you cika for your opinion. i am agree with you that we must to have plan for future. and for next opinion, i give time to vera. vera : ok, thank you moderator. in my opinion, after i finish my study from stkip muhammadiyah kuningan, insha allah, i will apply to sd islam terpadu al-istiqomah, al multazam or husnul khotimah. why i choose it. because, i think, in there i can have many experience with many teacher who have many knowledge in teaching. i want to the best mathematic teacher. from the simple sight of their discussion, they had a good and clear articulation. every speaker could convey their opinion as they found from their mind and their experiences. they had a good understanding in speech production; conceptual preparation in term of lexical concept, lexical selection morphological encoding, phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, articulation, and sound wave (traxler, 2012). they had produced their language into a good utterance. yet, there were still found mistakes in using some words, phrases and sentences. they forgot the crucial things about verb in past participle, verb without to be additional, article use, and countable and uncountable nouns. they got lost of understanding in a crusial thing because it was a simple case of them. nanan abdul manan commitment, community and bravery: the core activities in endorsing speaking skill by english camp program 80 phonological and grammatical competence in phonological competence, the students had practiced an english conversation promptly. they imitated the sound vocal and consonant as they got from their instructors. eventhough, they still found the sundanese dialect. it was so difficult to practice english conversation with native english perfectly. the influence of sundanese language as a source language was difficult to be omitted. moreover, the big problem of sundanese people was how to differ from ‘f’, ‘p’ and ‘v’. they took many times to exercise the better phonology differently and distinctly. the following table figured the exercises relating to phonologycal competence. table 1. the difficult words for practice vacation fly play veil funny pardon vegetable forget peace violin four pump violet from promptly vehicle some sundanese got difficulty in pronouncing the three alphabets; ‘f’, ‘p’ and ‘v’. they were accustomed with ‘p’ in many communication. then, english was inflected with their habit in communication. in ecp, the students used to use many different words. they used several sentences containing the three words. in this case, they got a good phonology step by step. in other side, grammatical competence was one of the targets in ecp. one activity was ended by one correction of grammar. to avoid boring, the instructors practiced the grammar with many interesting topics. in this case, the instructor has function in a source of competences; cognitive, affective and psychomotor (usman, silviyanti, & marzatillah, 2016). the three important competences relate his capacity as the intructor, balance the feeling and emotion, and how to act speaking. the students are lead to understand the grammar without a burden in communication. for the first time, the students found difficult to combine between grammar competence and conversation skill. they got lose of parentheses of grammar while speaking. even simple present tense was the lose one. flowing explaining and natural language some findings of this research view the situations of students’ speaking skill. they enjoyed with their topics choosen. what we call as flowing and natural language is when practicing without scandal. they practiced their language had been contructed on their mind. they conversed with daily theme or topic. they found relax situation. some topics they discussed well were related with their english learning experinces, something they prefered, some perceptions about the current issues and other interesting topics. the speaking situation was carred out in some mixing words and sentences between indonesian and english. the practice had a well running. eventhough, they still used mix languages. in the view point of this case is that some students could share some information in their discussion flowing and natural language. they were easy to express or deliver into language communication. ecp guided them to practice more and more without getting a strick regulation in speaking. the important target was practice. they were free to practice without considering some tenses and structures. the correction of their grammar and structure were explained in the end of their speech in every section of individual opportunity. in this research, the researcher find a good achievement of english speaking skills. the students of mathematic education indicate the progressiveness in speaking skill. they have joined the english camp program (ecp) in the some place where the concentration of learning is carried out. the english camp program is conducted to sharpen speaking skill. ecp was carried out in the special place. the place was divided into two houses, for men and women. the schedule in ecp had three sections; morning, afternoon and evening. in the morning section was started from 06.00 am to 09.00. afternoon section was carried out at 04.00 pm to 06.00 pm and evening section started from 08.00 to 10.00 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 81 pm. the discussion of the three sections had the discussion about grammar materials (morning) and presentation (afternoon and evening sections). on the other hand, the experience of students’ learning in english is when they attend at english course program (ecp). ecp is one of the choices of the students of university to join twice or three times in a week for english. many places or courses carry out the english course. the program is various; basic grammar, speaking, reading, toefl and all related with the english comptences. ecp is chozen by students who do not have any satisfaction in achieving english mark at university. they enrich their knowledge and skill of english at ecp. ecp gives many offers to whom enriching their english. it has been an alternative study to overcome the difficulty in english, either grammar or speaking. to know more about the english speaking skill, the resercher observes english camp program (ecp). this program is conducted by the learning basedcommunity. the program is carried out in the certain place where the students can enjoy and keep calm from the crowded situation. they can develop and enrich their english speaking skill by means of gathering. this program as the response from the difficulty of students’ learning is intended to focus on the language learning vision. the vision means that the students have the same time and place, opportunities to speak, topic to practice and wishes to be good in english speaking. combining both grammar and speaking competences are rarely difficult. the students sometimes get lose of grammar understanding while they are practicing speaking. and they have problems in adapting speaking topic related with grammar. ecp has given the different study experience of the students. they step by step start to combine the grammar and speaking competences. that’s way ecp can give more satisfaction of the students commitment the students of ecp formerly do not accustom to live together with others in the same place for more than one day. ecp was carried out in one week. they live in the same house, study together, make the same commitment in increasing english speaking skills and share one another to make progress. one of the students’ learning experience is the same vision. vision of this is only to increase speaking skill and grammar as the basis understanding to support the speaking practice. there are 10 boys and 10 girls who join this program. of course, they have various competences and skills in english. they have different background of learning culture. they have to adapt for a while to be stay together. but, they are tied by one vision to be in the sameness vision, namely increasing english speaking skill. in this program, for 1 month, they concern to broader their knowledge in english. mostly, they haven’t got english course before joining ecp. they got the difficulty in understanding related with english. whereas they had finished some english materials when they were at junior high school and senior high school. the materials that are given in ecp are about the grammar and speaking. those materials are the same as the materials that were got earlier. but, they still don’t have any understanding much. even, they forget all as if they never learn about it. ecp focuses on the materials given with the concsiousness of themselves. they can enjoy the program as they want and they determine their discipline for supporting it. one vision, in this case, is the same as a ‘commitment’. a commitment means that how the students can lead their learning as good as possible. they determine their target in speaking skill by sharing one another. it is accordance with the learning conception and learning orientation; personal goals, intentions, motives, expectations, attitudes, concerns, and doubts with regard to their studies (negovana, sterianb, & colesniucc, 2015 ). they have only one purpose in this program, being a good speaker in english. they support one another. they have a high responsible to get a good english speaking skill together. so, they nanan abdul manan commitment, community and bravery: the core activities in endorsing speaking skill by english camp program 82 support and drive one another to be actively engangement in english class. they realize that to achive the better one in english should be in togetherness.mostly students in this program have a good schedule to practice english. they have many preparation before presenting topics choosen, make an activity matrix to do and not to do. of course, the prohibition in english time is to speak another language but english. this one is the big reason that they have a high ambition to be better one in english either in grammar or in speaking. the commitment above is implemented to in some ways that the researcher finds. the students have a good management in english practice; english time, punishment with various ways like memorizing vocabularies or making a speech as they want, and reward for whom full practicing by means of getting free activities in a half day as an obligation of ones in a day. english time is a schedule made of the students themselves. they make some regulation to be followed by all members. the regulation is agreed for implementing. all regulations related with improving their english; building vocabularies, tenses practicing, chatting, speaking, discussing, and so on. meanwhile, reward and punishment are the anticipation for members in practicing english. those are intended to lead the members in order to keep a commitment to some regulations agreed. community the second one the researcher finds at ecp activities is enganging among the students. they had a close relationship, like a family. they were in the same place creating the same custom and habitual activity. from the morning to the evening, they were in an english place. they were forced to the situation and condition forming them to be able to practice english. an english circumstance had shaped the students principle of english. the comfort place had lead the students to open their mind. developing their language competence and skill was influenced with a good place. the good place where the students were at home was the calm situation, not noisy and of the distance. to focus on english skill derived from supporting a good situation. the next part of community reason is a partnership. having a partner in communication supports the students sharing and increasing their speaking skills. the process of practicing (speaking, discussion, presentation) is carried out with partners. they can share strange vocabularies bay means of discussion or presentation. buiding vocabularies is a difficult one for whom being more than 20 years old. in this age, they aren’t easy to memorize news vocabularies in english. they need some tricks or strategies to memorize vocabularies in practicing. the tricks or strategies were sharing and receiving vocabularies in some discussions and presentations. everyone performed in many occasions and used english language step by step. the first meeting, the regulation of practicing was 30% in english and 70% in indonesia. the second meeting and next were determined with more english practice than indonesian practice. the students had many inputs of new words while discussion and presentation section. in many discussion and presentation sections, not all members of those practice could start it with a perfect sentence or full english sentences. in every sentence, they found problems in conveying english words. they used indonesian language when they got lose the english word and the members of discussion directly gave a noticed to translate it into english. the presenters or speakers who had an speaking occasion repeated the indonesian words delivered into english words and so on. in this practice, the students wrote the strange words they found in many communication activities. they had a small book for stange words. the strange words lead them to make some sentences using the new words. from moment to moment, they could use the words in accordance with the topics discussing. the more the students did the repetation stange words the more they cought the words. they could easily practice with many vocabularies. this activity was apparently as a good practice for building english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 83 vocabularies. even they didn’t realize their progressiveness in speaking skills. by practicing time to time and sharing in a community, they found many words to be contructed into some sentences perfectly. they were difficult to demonstrate some words memorized before into sentences if they didn’t start to participate in discussion or presentation section. there were different competence between mastering vocabulary and practicing speaking. some of them tried to memorize words before performing in presentation but they often got difficult to create in speaking. of course, ‘community’ culture was a good construction in ecp. it had bridged vocabulary building and practicing speaking. this condition indicates that the students can encourage their english competence one another by means of collaborative competence (jinesh, 2014). bravery the next findings in ecp was ‘bravery’ attitude. bravery was a bridging between commitment and community. it was more difficult to figure out how the two cases (commitment and community) went together. ecp forced the students being confident to speak. the difficult performance of students in speaking was how to start. how to start was not about how to open the speaking activity but more than it. one who joined in ecp felt shy speaking in front of their instructors and their friends. a lack confident of some one had disturbed the preparation having been made before. they lose of words to be presented because of lack of bravery. ecp lead the students to be brave. many factors had influenced to the students better in speaking, namely many occasions to practice, interesting topics, and every time corrections. the occasions the students got were speaking and conversation activities wherever they wished. this is to avoid the students get unpleasant emotional condition characterized feelings of tension and apprehension (karatasa, et al., 2016). ecp activities contingented to the informal situation. the students didn’t feel awkward as formal situation, they flew and spoke naturally. the occasions were creatively contructed in many different places; in front of home, in the terrace, on the street beside the house. they underwent happily and full inspirations. the next factors of bravery was interesting topics. the topics could be determined as the agreement of the members of ecp. different members had different preferences in choosing the suitable topics of them. the instructors gave the free choices of the topics. mostly topics choosed were life style and common activities they had found easily. before starting to practice, the instructors, firstly, constructed the understanding of language concept in source language. it wasn’t directly practiced in englih language. the students were guided how to open their mind, open the imagination, construct their concept in indonesian. after catching the things of minds, the students could convert the concept of source language into english utterances. most english practice always forced students to practice more and more without giving an opportunity to the students in order to fill their mind in source language formerly. it was very difficult for them to find out which words and sentences would be delivered. but, by means of filling and strengtening the language concept of mind in source language, it was easy to practice step by step. in this ecp, the students captioned a quite simple trick to practice english; finding ideas, maping ideas, selecting ideas, converting ideas into english to be practiced. their bravery in practicing arouse from time to time because of mastering their topics, knowing to make a step and mixing language for the strange vocabularies. bravery was the most important thing for ecp students. bravery was as if an urgent instrument to unite a commitment and a community to be real in english group. the more advantages of bravery was all time corrections. the students could easily get the corrections from their friends and their instructors while practicing. but, the correction, in this case, was not directly done while practicing. many methods were agreed in this ecp. the students could get the correction by writing on white board and by audience movement (right or wrong statement nanan abdul manan commitment, community and bravery: the core activities in endorsing speaking skill by english camp program 84 had different movement). so, the students speaking repeated the correct sentences given from audience. this happy activities made the situation relax and high input. conclusion ecp is a program giving the progressivenes of students’ speaking skills. there are some good keys in this program, they are one vision, commitment, community and bravery factors. those factors are so simple but they are very important to lead the students to practice english, to create natural situation in practice and to strengthen their english speaking practice principles. the difficulty of english speaking practice derives from the missperception of english learning goals. some students have perceptions that english is a science not a custom. english as science gives a strengtening in some languages regulation that must be obeyed. meanwhile, english as a custom gives the students enjoy with their practice. exploring their experiences, enganging the english partner, articulating their minds, converting their ideas into language practice are some process that are in this ecp activities. ecp has created the students gain one vision, commitment, community and bravery. those factors are the important things in supporting their speaking skills. they have realized the difficult one in english is how to practice. before practicing, they have got a good commitment. making one vision to increase speaking skill, having a gather commitment, staying in the disciple community, lead the students to be better one in english speaking skill. ecp is a simple activity that can create the big result in speaking english skill. references akdemir, a. s., barin, m., & demiroz, h. (2012). broadsheet english: teaching speaking through newspaper articles. procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 46(2), 3967-3971. davoudia, a. h. m., & parpouchi, a. (2016). relation between team motivation, enjoyment, and cooperation. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 230(4), 184-189. brown, d. h. (2004). language assessment-principles and classroom practices. new york: pearson longman. usman, b., silviyanti, t. m., & marzatillah. (2016). the influence of teacher's competence towards the motivation of students in learning english. studies in english language and education, 134-146. srikaew, d., tangdhanakanond, k., & kanjanawasee, s. (2015). development of an english speaking skill assessment model for grade 6 students by using portofolio. procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 191(2), 764-768. djiwandono, m. s. (2008). tes bahasa: pegangan pengajar bahasa. jakarta: pt. indeks. fulcher & davidson. (2007). language testing and assessment and advanced resource book. new york: routledge. karatasa, h., alcia, b., bademcioglub, m., & ergin, a. (2016). an investigation into university students’ foreign language. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 382 – 388. yusop, h., foo, f. y., jumadi, a., mahadi, s., ali, m. n., & johari, n. (2015). the effectiveness of excellence camp: a study on paired sample. procedia-economics and finance, 31(3), 453461. jinesh, j. j. (2014). enhancement of speaking skills: a collaborative learning perspective. international journal of english: literature, language, skills, 284-287. kumar, r. (2011). research methodology: a step-bystep guide for beginners. london: sage publication inc. zaikina, o., malinowskab, m., bakhtadzec, n., & żyławski, a. (2017). motivation and social aspects of competence-based learning. procedia computer science, 112(3), 1092-1101. traxler, m. j. (2012). introduction to psycholinguisticsunderstanding language science. uk: wileyblackwell. negovana, v., sterianb, m., & colesniucc, m. h. (2015). conceptions of learning and intrinsic motivation in different. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 187(3), 642 – 646. communicative competence relates to communicative language proficiency that is the most important thing in language practice. communicative language proficiency, at least, has two parts of language divisions; language knowledge and language strategies... in this case, assessment is used for ensuring the classroom activities. so, classroom assessment needs the test provider that is required to ensure the use of the test is appropriate for its stated purpose and target population (fulcher & davidson, 20... assessment in the pursuit of a language is a series that is not integral to the process of language teaching. assessment will be a barometer as a means of information about developments in the understanding of language learners. assessment, test, eval... the general evaluation (in this case also related with assessment) in the implementation of learning is understood as an effort to gathering information about the implementation of learning as the basis for making decisions (djiwandono, 2008). such in... english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 47 efficacy of methodological practices undertaken by saudi english teachers in public schools during their formative phase majed othman aba hussain college of education, majma’ah university, kingdom of saudi arabia email: m.abahussain@mu.edu.sa muhammad iqbal department of english, college of education, majma’ah university, kingdom of saudi arabia email: m.iqbal@mu.edu.sa imran khan department of english, college of education, majma’ah university, kingdom of saudi arabia email: imkk2020@mu.edu.sa apa citation: hussain, m. o. a., iqbal, m., & khan, i. (2019). efficacy of methodological practices undertaken by saudi english teachers in public schools during their formative phase. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 47-54. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1774. received: 28-01-2019 accepted: 30-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: the main focus of this article is to evaluate the practices involving various approaches and methods that the novice saudi english teachers (sets) employ in classrooms, and to see how far these are successful in attaining the desired results. it also takes into cognizance the chasm between the measures taken by saudi ministry of education to modify the curriculum to develop “communicative competence” and the actualization these measures in the classroom pedagogy. the dichotomy eventually brings to bear upon the learning outcomes of the students who fail to achieve the required proficiency in communicative skills. the study necessitated a qualitative approach (grounded theory) in which previous literature was ransacked. data was gathered through structured interviews, surveys and documents analysis. the rudimentary results showed that sets rely more on conventional teaching methods despite the state’s thrust on communicative language teaching (clt) that tends to be more student-centered, cooperative and collaborative. keywords: communicative competence; grounded theory; teaching approaches; teaching methods. inroduction the importance of teaching english in saudi schools has grown tremendously over the last two decades. this impetus largely emanates from the process of globalization in which communication by means of english dominates commerce, trade, social media, research and publications (flowerdew & peacock, 2001). saudi government is also very keen to give incentives to both learners and teachers by allocating a huge amount in the budget exclusively for teaching and learning english (sama, 2015). however, despite all the efforts, saudi schools are not able to yield the desired learning outcomes. one of the major reasons for this problem is ascribed to the infirmities in the method and practices of teaching and learning english. inadequate training of the teachers, flawed inappropriate teaching methods and teacher-center environment in the classroom hamper the process of attaining proficiency in english for communicative purposes (fareh, 2010). taking cognizance of these challenges, saudi ministry of education (moe) has taken multiple drastic measures to bring about reforms in the existing education system, specifically in teaching english as a foreign language (tefl) elaborating its general goals and targets in saudi arabia (alhajailan, 2006). the reforms included the designing of news textbooks based on communicative teaching method (clt), training the teachers abroad, improving the process of english teaching and learning in saudi schools under english development project (eldp) in 2007, and collaborating with british and american publishing companies (alabdualkarem, 2007). besides, seminars and conference were also held to address the problem of inadequacy in tefl (rahman, 2011). nevertheless, the problem persists for lack of employing communicative language teaching (clt) by the english language teachers who continue to rely more on traditional methods. hence, it is worthwhile to explore the prevailing majed othman aba hussain, muhammad iqbal, & imran khan efficacy of methodological practices undertaken by saudi english teachers in public schools during their formative phase 48 situation for finding the facts to tackle the stated problem in a better way. the introductory phase alesghayer (2011) alludes to the fact that teaching and learning of english language had been in practice in some areas prior to becoming a component of scholastic curriculum in 1944. the same is marked by the introduction of efl to saudi educational curriculum. the thrust of the prescribed textbook had been on reading, writing, grammar and translation. the teachers, therefore, resorted to grammar-translation method (gtm) combined with rote learning of english words translated in the first language (alhajailan, 2006). however, in late 1950s, gmt began to receive harsh criticism, and resultantly, the saudi educationists responsible for policy making shifted to develop oral skills through teaching and learning english (alseghayer, 2011a). the reformative phase this phase commenced around 1958. again, alhajailan (2006) makes an overview of the changes that occurred onward. school system was reorganized. in order to improve the oral skill of the students, new textbooks – ‘living english for the arab world’, ‘a traveller’s cheque’, ‘the pearl’, and ‘round the world in eighty days’ – were introduced. these books had been used for two decades mainly using audio-lingual method (alm). all this got inspiration from the efl/esl theories that emerged during the world war ii, largely emphasizing oral practice, pronunciation and mechanically teaching and learning a new language (richards & rogers, 2001). according to hall (2011), at that time, alm was a popular method as it offered an amalgam structuralism and behaviorism. however, the validity of this method embraced questioning during 1970s in saudi arabia as well exactly in line with criticism of this method the world over. linguists like chomsky came up the conviction that imitation and drilling cannot enable children to speak a language outside the classroom as it is imbibed with gross irregularities in practical life (karunakran & babu, 2013). the communicative phase once again, the studies conducted by alhajailan (2006) and alseghayer (2011a), show a shift in saudi ministry of education policy when “a new textbook entitled ‘saudi arabian schools english’ was introduced in collaboration with macmillan press in 1981 onward, adopting communicative language teaching (clt) approach in the curriculum” (howatt 1984). the textbook contents dealt with some theme, function or notion with a variety of interactive activities (pairing and sharing, group tasks and discussions) to enable the learners to communicate in real life situations. in 2004, another text book ‘say it in english’ with more interactive activities was prescribed in the syllabi. the same year, english was introduced as a compulsory subject in the elementary section. the year 2008 witnessed the launching of new program namely “english language development project” (eldp) that aimed to streamline the existing english curriculum in collaboration with macmillan, mcgraw hill, pearson longman and oxford university press (british and american textbook publishers for efl and esl). this was in pursuance of principles devised for clt, i.e. “a language is a system for communication; it should have an integration of communicative activities in all the units and all such activities should emanate from the contents, function and meaning” (howatt, 1984; berns, 1990; brown, 2007; hadley, 2001). riyadh, saudi ministry of education (2015) did say that the new textbooks, if handled professionally by the teachers, can give a boost to the confidence of the students and enable them to use english to communicate competently with people in real life. communicative language teaching approach and communicative competence a peep into already available literature on the subject reveals that communicative language teaching (clt) evolved in the 1970s visualizing language as a system for communication leading the learner to attain communicative competence (hymes, 1971; halliday, 1973; richards & rodgers, 2001). two components – “what to teach” and “how to teach” – are emphasized in clt (harmer, 2001). littlewood (1981) also impressed upon the need of systematic focus on functional as well structural dimensions of language. then, chomsky came up with a distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ – the former referring to the grammatical system for generating infinite sentences, and the latter referring to the communication of knowledge that underlies (newby, 2011). chomsky’s concept was further rationalized by canale and swain (1980) to encompass four elements i.e. grammatical competence, socio-linguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence. the mastery of all these concepts is, therefore, essential for the teachers to implement in the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 49 classroom and also regulate the role of the learner for that matter. teacher’s and learner’s role in clt breen and candlin (1980) envisages the role of a teacher in clt as a facilitator, a guide, and an organizer. rather than being authoritative, the teacher should work as a “co-communicator, an analyst of needs, an organizer of resources, a facilitator of activities and a learner (larsenfreeman, 2001). the learner in clt is, however, expected to be a negotiator of meaning, a discoverer as well as contributor of knowledge and information (hu, 2002). brown (2007), too, thinks that “the learner in clt classes should actively participate in the classroom proceedings based on leaner-centered, cooperative and collaborative learning processes. method “which methodological practices do saudi english language teachers in their formative year in state schools use in their classrooms?” and “how successful are these?” are the questions that warrant two-pronged investigation; i) exploring and describing the existing situation, and ii) interpreting why this happens (punch, 2009). according to birks and mills (2011), such a research inquiry has to understand “reality” in terms of ontology (what is the nature of reality?), epistemology (what is the relationship between the researcher and the participants?) and methodology (how can the knowledge be gained?). out of multiple methodologies handling naturalistic and interpretive inquiry, grounded theory (glaser & strauss, 1967) has been chosen as rigorous and systematic methodology of data collection and data analysis. the population of this study comprises schools of education, schools of arts, and schools of language and translation. as for sampling, a strong group of 114 saudi english language teachers from the above mentioned three channels was targeted. besides, the supervisors who monitor the sets performance and the lecturer who teach teaching methods in teachers’ training program have been consulted for building a comprehensive picture of the reality. employing the procedure of grounded theory, data was gathered by two means – i) data generation and ii) data collection. for generating data, interviews were conducted with participants in close proximity. this gave a better understanding of what goes on (birk & mills, 2011). for collecting data, “elicited materials such as questionnaire” were used. besides, documentary sources like official documents, reports and textbooks ransacked to dig out the facts relating to the issue that is under scrutiny in the study. in order to ensure the reliability of the questionnaires, a preliminary survey was conducted by sending them to a small segment of the sample comprising only ten teachers with an interval of two months to check if the items in the questionnaire yielded the identical responses showing consistency irrespective of the time passage (punch, 2009). for internal reliability, independent variables were limited to the preparation that saudi english teachers make before joining the public schools just to focus on their formative years. content validity was also ensured by covering all the dimensions and getting them vetted by a set of experts. results and discussion the evaluation of a change necessitates an appraisal of the existing practices carried out by the people responsible for introducing new measures (bowers et al., 2007). it is also debated that the implementation of a new teaching method is dependent upon the teachers’ role played in the classroom (chowdhury, 2012). the data gathered during the research demonstrated that sets were primarily transmitter of knowledge in the formative phase of their career. thirty-six teachers who responded to the questionnaire and 8 who were interviewed, admitted their role as knowledge transmitters. for instance, one of the responders said: “i think i am mostly doing the transmitter role. i spend most the lesson time in lecturing and explaining grammatical rules.” while doing so, not only did they turn out to be the most trusted source of knowledge, but also become the determiners of classroom activities. the statement of one teacher goes as follows: “i have to prepare and execute most of the classroom activities……myself, and i rarely share this job with my students because i believe they are not capable of doing such a job with their limited english.” another fact that came to the fore in the collected data deals with the massive dependence on text books for transmitting knowledge. the transcription of one of the interviewee goes like this: “i abide by what is in the text book, and most of my activities are also around the textbook material and my questions also most test what students have acquired from the text book.” majed othman aba hussain, muhammad iqbal, & imran khan efficacy of methodological practices undertaken by saudi english teachers in public schools during their formative phase 50 heavy reliance on lectures by the teacher was found in the responses of the questionnaires and interviews. forty-two teachers while responding to a question as well as to an inquiry in the interviews related to their role as a lecturer avowedly admitted to have followed lecturing style whatsoever. as an instance, the reply of a teacher is reproduced below: “generally, for the most of the class time, i have to use lecturing or demonstrating as a teaching style. i present the main topic, write the important words on the board, explain grammar rules, translate the new words, read the text and ask some questions for verification.” managing the class by a teacher is highly challenging in schools, in particular (fantilli & mcdougall, 2009). six years of experience of the researcher in saudi school as a supervisor, exhaustive discussion with the colleagues, and the date gathered (91% of samples of the interview) revealed that the authoritative role of the teacher is a ‘must’ to control the students in saudi schools. a slight latitude on the part of the teacher in the class resulted in chaos and a noise. so, even pair and group activities are avoided as the administrators of the school lay stress on strict discipline and quietness. surprisingly, only 5% of the interviewees acknowledge their role as a facilitator. as outlined in table 1 below, the questionnaire results show that 41 saudi english teachers (sets) resorted to teacher centered approach at the outset of their career in efl classroom, whereas only 4 teachers preferred to adopt student-centered approach in their teacher practices. similarly, the percentage of teachers’ interviews turned out to be the same. table 1. dominant teaching practice sample teacher-centered approach student-centered approach total teachers’ questionnaire 41 4 45 teachers’ interview 11 1 12 in addition, “traditional structured based approach” is followed in saudi schools english classes primarily aiming at meaningful language (maria, 2006). the information derived by means of questionnaire and interviews displays a routine that is repeated in the classroom, i.e. the teacher presents the lesson as a lecturer, reads the text, translate the difficult words, writes the new words on the board, pronounces them, teaches grammatical structures, and gives some exercises for practice. finally, a few questions are asked by the teacher to get feedback about what has been taught. the number of students participating in the proceedings is also very limited, devoid of any conversation for that matter. the remarks given by a teacher in the interview are worth mentioning here: “generally teaching techniques have more reliance on using the board for writing and presenting information. my thrust remains on providing the learners with adequate information and asking them to jot down the key points in their notebooks. much of the lesson is devoted to teaching grammar and new or difficult words as it my conviction that the skills improve students’ writing ability.” (transcription) the answers also indicate that only one skill or sub-skill (such as grammar, translation, vocabulary, pronunciation etc.) as illustrated in figure 1 is focused during the lesson. figure 1. skills or sub-skills give more emphasis in teaching practice english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 51 as per the above figure regarding the weightage received by main skills and sub-skills like grammar rules (6 out of 7), explaining textbooks and translation into arabic language (5.5 out of 7 respectively) got the highest priority whereas the main skills of communication, i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing receive less importance (1.9, 1. 2, 3.9, and 4.9, respectively). likewise, the replies to question 1 in the interview and question 9 in the questionnaire, demonstrate that majority of the participants (around 95%) use deductive method in which grammatical rules are explained by the teachers and notes are passively taken by the learners. translation of new words into arabic language is also resorted to drive the meanings home. the aforementioned findings clearly show that grammar-translation method (gmt) is largely practiced by the saudi english teachers (sets). this fact is accentuated by the data gathered wherein 42 teachers as participants in the questionnaire and 11 out of those who were interviewed declared explicitly or implicitly the massive use of gmt as a teacher practice. similarly, reading and writing skills get greater weightage for the sake of the final exam. listening and speaking, however, receive the least weightage for want of language labs and authentic material, and also because the final exam assessment ignores them. the teacher’s responses to question 10 (questionnaire) and question 1 (interview) reveal the integration of oral skills not communicative objectives but for structural reinforcement of the language. this also involved mainly the audio-lingual method (alm) for repetition and controlled-drilling for accurate pronunciation of individual words rather than expressions, as is termed by richards and rodgers (2001). as such, saudi english teachers (sets) blindly rely on the textbook contents, repetition, memorizing, drilling, and rote-learning just to make the students get through the exams, making the whole process teacher-centered. a critical analysis of the findings simply leads one to conclude that methodological teaching practices undertaken by saudi english teachers (sets) largely revolve round transmitting knowledge. what the sets do in the classrooms is set to achieve this objective. even, roles played by the teachers and students, materials for teaching and assessment methods are directed to transmission of knowledge only. so to say, the concept of “education as a product” rather than “as a process” is in vogue (welker 1992; nunam 1988). in other words, “mimetic teaching” as termed by jackson (1986) cited in (christopher, 2012) is focused more wherein one person (the teacher) endeavors to transmit knowledge to another person (learner) with precision and smoothness by means of drilling, controlled practice, rote-learning and deductive methods. as the flow of knowledge is fully controlled by the teacher and the student has to tap it passively on the other end, broughton (1994, p.22) terms it “teacher-dominated interactions” as a kind of practice. then, transmission of knowledge is coupled with grammar-translation method (gmt) as the meanings of words and the explanation of grammatical structures are rendered in arabic language. now this knowledge is worthless unless it is memorized through drilling and oral repetitions that fall within the purview of audio-lingual method (alm). moreover, since the main concern of sets’ teaching practice is the amount of knowledge that has to be transferred to students, the process is confined to teaching isolated skills what is termed as ‘synthetic approach’ by wilkins (1976). although the language skills are taught by sets separately, they also vary in terms of importance. the skills pertaining to grammar and translation are focused more as compared to listening, speaking, reading, and writing. this goes in line with alseghayer’s (2011b) findings showing that english teachers who teach in saudi schools devote their teaching practices as follows: 32% to grammar, 30% to translation, 17% to reading, 12% to writing, and 9% to speaking. this could be referred to the traditional approach in which first priority is given to grammatical competence for the sake of laying foundation of language proficiency, and then the four basic skills are introduced (ozsevik, 2010). in summary, the aforementioned practices undertaken by saudi english teachers (sets) in saudi schools pertain to the methods that are traditional in their approach assigning a dominant role to the teacher and marginalizing the interaction of learners, concerning more with the ultimate product of teaching rather than focusing on teaching-and-learning process in which cooperative and collaborative learning plays a key role leading to a student-centered environment. figure 2 below gives a clear picture of the current teaching practices that the sets adopt in the classrooms during their formative years. majed othman aba hussain, muhammad iqbal, & imran khan efficacy of methodological practices undertaken by saudi english teachers in public schools during their formative phase 52 figure 2. the current sets’ teaching practice the size of the circles on the left in the above figure shows the amount of emphasis given to various skills. grammar (g) and translation (t) as discrete skills are given more weightage by the teachers as compared to oral skills which receive less importance. the gaps in oval circle on the left also allude to the fact that the skills are taught in isolation without any integration. the presenter of these skills is the teacher who plans and organizes them in teaching process arbitrarily. the students’ role seems to be peripheral in the classroom like empty containers waiting for tapping the flowing knowledge and information about the targeted language. hence, the eventual outcome is the accumulation of knowledge as the final product. one may raise a question hare as to how saudi english teachers (sets) tend to employ traditional teaching practices and methods in the classroom for teaching english. the answer lies in the fact that various factors involving teachers’ belief and experiences shape their cognition concerning the process of teaching (borg, 2003). as efl learners at school, sets had been watching the teaching style of their own teachers – lortie (1975), lavoire and roth (2006) term it as “apprenticeship of observation” following the cannons of traditional and behavioristic methods. even the findings about pre-service programs aiming to change the existing practices of teaching and introducing innovative techniques for making language learning easy in the saudi school classrooms could not produce the desired results (hong & pawan, 2015). the models followed by sets led them to evolve their own theories which do not correspond with modern demands of teaching and learning a foreign language like english in saudi arabia (molina, cañado, & agulló, 2013). conclusion saudi english teachers (sets) in the formative phase of their career largely use traditional methods while practicing teaching in efl classrooms. though marked with diversification, these methods mainly revolve round grammartranslation method (gmt) and audio-lingual method (alm). communicative language teaching (clt) methods as ambitiously driven by the ministry of education, saudi arabia, are seldom practiced by sets despite having undergone several training programs. as a result, communicative purpose of efl learning is not materialized. however, what the saudi english teachers do in efl classrooms, do have some positive indicators. as clt is flexible enough to embrace certain segments of traditional methods, deductive teaching of grammar (gmt) does develop ‘linguistic competence’. simultaneously, developing oral skills by means of controlled practice and repetitive drills (alm) for teaching discrete skills could help the learners to enhance their communicative competence at a later stage. after all, linguistic competence is a concomitant of communicative competence. even the preservice programs do contribute as the building blocks of the teaching process for communicative purpose. it is also concluded that reluctance on the part of the saudi english teachers (sets) to implement clt as teaching practice is not merely because of their perceptions and past experience but other formidable socio-cultural factors also hamper this pursuit. a formal study to explore such factors is also recommended. references alabdualkarem, m. (2007). teaching english as a foreign language in saudi arabia. riyadh: obekan press. alseghayer, k. (2011a). english teaching in saudi arabia: status, issues, and challenges. riyadh, saudi arabia: hala print co. alseghayer, k. (2011b). scatter views about english language learning and teaching. riyadh, saudi arabia: hala print co. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 53 berns, m. (1990) context of competence: social and cultural considerations in communicative language teaching. new york: plenum. birks, m., & mills, j. (2011). grounded theory: a practical guide. london: sage. bowers, b., nolet, k., roberts, t., & esmond, s. (2007). implementing change in long-term care: a practical guide to transformation. new york city, ny: commonwealth fund. breen, m. p., & candlin, c. (1980). the essentials of a communicative curriculum in language teaching. applied linguistics, 1, 89-112. broughton, g., brumfit, c., flavell, r., hill, p., & pincas, a. (1994). teaching english as a foreign language (2nd ed.). london: routledge. brown, h. d. (2007). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. new york: pearson education inc. canale, m., & swain, m. (1980). theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. applied linguistics, 1(1), 147. chowdhury, m. k. (2012). communicative language teaching approach at higher secondary level in bangladesh – teachers’ perceptions and classroom practice. language in india: strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, 12 (2). christopher, d. (2012). the routledge international handbook of teacher and school development. london: routledge. fantilli, r. d., & mcdougall, d. e. (2009). a study of novice teachers: challenges and supports in the first years. teaching and teacher education, 25(6), 814-825. fareh, s. (2010). challenges of teaching english in the arab world: why can’t efl programs deliver as expected? procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 2(2), 3600-3604. flowerdew, j., & peacock, m. (2001) research perspectives on english for academic purposes. cambridge: cambridge university press. glaser, b., & strauss, a. (1967). the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. chicago: aldine. hadley, a. o. (2001). teaching language in context (3rd ed.). boston: heinle & heinle. hong, p., & pawan, f. (2015). the pedagogy and practice of western-trained chinese english language teachers: foreign education, chinese meanings. london: routledge. howatt, a. (1984). a history of english language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. hu, g. (2002) potential cultural resistance to pedagogical imports: the case of communicative language teaching in china. language, culture, and curriculum,15(2), 93-105. hymes, d. (1971) competence and performance in linguistic theory. in r. huxley and e. ingram (eds.), language acquisition: models and methods (pp. 3-28). london: academic press. larsen-freeman, d. (2001). techniques and principles in language teaching. new york: oxford university press. littlewood, w. (1981). communicative language teaching: an introduction. cambridge: cambridge university press. lortie, d. (1975). schoolteacher: a sociological study. chicago: university of chicago press. maria, j. (2006) classroom l2 vocabulary acquisition: investigating the role of pedagogical tasks and form-focused instruction. language teaching research, 10(3), pp.263-295. molina, g. t. cañado, m. l. p, & agulló, g. l. (2013). current approaches and teaching methods. bilingual programmes. university of jaén, faculty of humanities and education, 4, 156. newby, d., (2011). competence and performance in learning and teaching: theories and practices. proceedings of the 19th international symposium on theoretical and applied linguistics. ozsevik, z. (2010). the use of communicative language teaching (clt): turkish efl teachers’ perceived difficulties in implementing clt in turkey. unpublished master thesis, university of illinois, urbana, usa. punch, k. f. (2009). introduction to research methods in education (1st ed.). london: sage. rahman, m. m. (2011). english language teaching (elt) in saudi arabia: a study of learners’ needs analysis with special reference to community college, najran university. language in india, 11(4), 367-461. richards, j. c., & rodgers, t. (2001). approaches and methods in language teaching (2nd ed.). new york: cambridge university press. riyadh, saudi ministry of education. (2015). english language teaching, development initiative. retrieved from http://elt.tatweer.edu.sa/ welker, r. (1992). the teacher as expert: a theoretical an historical examination. new york: suny press. wilkins, d. a. (1976). notional syllabuses. oxford: oxford university press. majed othman aba hussain, muhammad iqbal, & imran khan efficacy of methodological practices undertaken by saudi english teachers in public schools during their formative phase 54 133 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee linguistic features analysis of the english electronic commerce websites siti nurani department of english education, faculty of language & art university of indraprasta pgri, indonesia e-mail: nurani_city@yahoo.com risa mufliharsi department of english education, faculty of language & art university of indraprasta pgri, indonesia e-mail: rsmufliharsi@gmail.com larisa yohanna department of english education, faculty of language & art university of indraprasta pgri, indonesia e-mail: larisayohanna@gmail.com apa citation: nurani, s., mufliharsi, r. & yohanna, l. (2014). linguistic features analysis of the english electronic commerce websites. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 133-144 received: 11-03-2014 accepted: 27-04-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract : this research aims at identifying linguistic features used in the english electronic commerce websites used in correlation with the field, tenor and mode of discourse as parts of systemic functional linguistics (sfl) approach. findings have shown that in the field of discourse, the linguistic features are largely appeared in the experiential domain analysis which shows that all terms of registers function as technical terms, of which the two major forms of nouns and verbs were the most frequent categories among other kinds of technical terms. the goal orientation is considered to be as a long term and the social activity is exchange. in the tenor of discourse, the linguistic features are highly appeared in the social distance analysis which shows that the social distance between participants is considered minimal. the agentive role is said to be equal and the social role is considered as non-hierarchic. in the mode of discourse, the linguistic features are excessively occurred in the language role analysis which exists equally of both constitutive and ancillary. the channel is in graphic mode. the medium is in written with a visual contact as its device. key words: systemic functional linguistics, register, discourse environment. meanwhile, trudgill (1992) prefers to restrict the term jargon as specialist language used by member of particular professions or interest. the term jargon could also be defined as “a standard variety of english characteristic of occupational sub-societies primarily” (stojicic, 2004: 32). in short, they define the term jargon as a variety of language that is shaped by the work environment. the present research basically introduction each field provides specific variety of linguistic feature which is used to convey information. this variety is normally referred to as the term register or jargon. the term register is defined as “a variety of language associated with particular groups of people or particular circumstance of use” (holmes, 2007: 259). here, register is defined as a variety according to use in the particular siti nurani, risa mufliharsi & larisa yohanna linguistic features analysis 134 aims at identifying two main levels of linguistic features, that is, lexical features and grammatical features that characterize the language of the english electronic commerce found in the various websites which involves a situation in which it is used. for the purpose of this study, the writer adopts the theory of register as developed by halliday and hasan (1989) who define register as a variety according to use which includes three parameters of context of situation which it is used, that is, field, tenor and mode of discourse. the first variable, ‘field of discourse’, refers to “what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking place: what is it the participants are engaged in, what is the text about?” (1989: 12). for example, legalese of lawyers, the language of auctioneers, the language of commerce, baby-talk, journalese of journalists, and so forth. the discussion of nouns and verbs are largely belongs to the category of this field of discourse. second, ‘tenor of discourse’, refers to “who is taking part, to the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles: what kinds of role relationship obtain among the participants, including permanent and temporary relationships” (1989: 12). this variable functions as a marker of formality of relationship between the speaker matters that commonly affects phonology, and accent, such as when a teacher talking to the student and so forth. the intimacy of relationship between participants is also largely discussed in this category. third, ‘mode of discourse’, refers to “what part the language is playing, what it is that the participants are expecting the language to do for them in that situation: the symbolic organization of the text, the status that it has, including the channel and the rhetorical mode” (1989: 12). the role of language, channel and the medium are the aspects of this mode of discourse category. in certain respect, the use of register is intended to meet communication needs among specialists in the field. in the electronic commerce field, for instance, the terms of registers used by the sellers function as technical terms which mean that the terms are specific to the field and may be used in other fields but have different meaning in the current field. electronic commerce is a buying-selling transaction via internet where the computer website is employed as the media to do the process. as stated by turban et al. (2012: 38) that “e-commerce is an electronic trading transaction which involves the process of buying, selling, transfer, or product exchange, services or information through computer websites, including internet.” similarly, wong (2010: 33) also affirms that “e-commerce is the process of buying, selling, and marketing of goods and services via electronic system, such as radio, television and computer website or internet.” from the two points of view above, it can be concluded that e-commerce eases us to do the buyingselling transaction which is done by the computerized system and register is importantly used as the media of communication. as stated above, the choice of register is intended to give some particular groups an ease to communicate with each other. as in the language of electronic commerce which has some functions to give an ease the communication between the sellers and their buyers, such as to increase the market exposure as all the people over the world could have a global reach at the same time with only using computer media. the operating cost will also be decreased. the customer loyalty will be increased as the availability of the information as well as the supply management provided effectively. thus, the use of register tends to be important acknowledged by all the specialists. 135 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee electronic commerce can be divided into several classifications, such as: 1) “e-tailing” or “virtual storefronts” on websites with online catalogs, sometimes gathered into a “virtual mall”; 2) buying or selling on various websites and/or online marketplaces; 3) the gathering and use of demographic data through web contacts and social media; 4) electronic data interchange (edi), the business-tobusiness exchange of data; 5) e-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospective and established customers (for example, with newsletters); 6) business-to-business buying and selling; and 7) the security of business transactions. meanwhile, according to turban et al. (2012), electronic commerce is categorized into several types, namely: business to business, collaborative e-commerce, business to consumer, consumer to consumer, consumer to business, intra-organizational (or business to its employees), government to citizen, and mobile commerce (m-commerce). the operating system used in the e-commerce is already computerized. the buyers and sellers can do the transaction via internet or even webcam to chat each other. some of those online devices might help them to communicate directly. as the medium of communication, the use of register in doing the transaction between the seller and buyer is considered important to ease the communication. thus, it seems significant for the writers to identify linguistic features in the english electronic commerce websites. method the linguistic features analysis on this study is based on the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis methodology which deals with the examination of some linguistic features by employing the descriptive method in analyzing the data. this is due to the fact that the purpose of this study is describing the phenomena systematically and accurately. qualitative methods in this present study involve description and analysis whereas quantitative methodology used only to count the recurring features analyzed in the data. the data analysis in this present research will be based on the framework of systemic functional linguistics (sfl) as developed by halliday and hasan (1989) who identify three variables of situation that affect the way people use register, namely: field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse. the data will be analyzed as follows: 1. field of discourse which includes: a. experiential domain b. goal orientation (short term vs. long term) c. social activity 2. tenor of discourse which involves the role relationships among the participants which varies according to: a. agentive role b. social role (hierarchic vs. nonhierarchic) c. social distance (minimal vs. maximal) 3. mode of discourse which consists of three main concepts, namely: a. language role (ancillary vs. constitutive) b. channel (graphic vs. phonic) c. medium (spoken vs. written) results and discussion field of discourse the field of discourse refers to the topic of the linguistic exchange. the field of discourse analysis in this present study will include three main discussions, namely: 1) experiential domain, 2) goal orientation, and 3) social activity. experiential domain the attention of this experiential siti nurani, risa mufliharsi & larisa yohanna linguistic features analysis 136 domain analysis is only given to the numbers of recurrent specific lexis which are commonly used in the english commerce websites due to the fact that lexis features analysis is one of the most salient features of the register. the analysis of the lexis of the english commerce websites discusses the four major types of word classes, that is, noun, verb, adjective, as well as acronym. (1) www.ebuy.com/appliances/n technical details: § shipping: free standard int’l postage. § shipping is by priority mail. § international items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges. § delivery: varies for items shipped from an international location. § seller ships within 1 day after receiving cleared payment. § payments: paypal. § returns: 14 days, buyer pays return shipping. § expedited flat-rate shipping with tracking number 2-5 days. note: · bold indicates single-word nouns. · underline indicates compound nouns. one of the most important categories of words that occur in the data is nouns which serve the function as the chief or head in the structure of a sentence. as seen in the example (1), there are two vast majority categories of nouns, that is, single-word nouns and compound nouns. in total, there are three hundreds and twenty four (324) nouns identified in this study which consist of two hundreds and sixteen (216) single-word nouns and one hundred and eight (108) compound nouns. in the category of single-word nouns, it is found that there are two forms defined, namely: singular form, such as price, sale, warranty, brand, item, shipping, product, delivery, seller, and so forth; and plural form, such as policies, payments, returns, and so on. in addition, there is also found the category of compound nouns, such as one-day shipping, a-to-z guarantee, paypal, flat-rate shipping, and many others. the amount of nouns found in the analyzed data functions as the technical terms which are commonly used in the commerce field. the meaning of each feature might be distinctively interpreted by two different communities (i.e., common people vs. commerce community) as those two communities have their own interpretations. the table below provides the numbers of nouns that appear in the analyzed data. these numbers are only distributed from the recurrent specific nouns which are commonly used in the commerce field. table 1. occurrences of nouns no category of nouns occurrences 1. single-word nouns 216 2. compound nouns 108 instance (2) is also exemplified to illustrate how types of verbs in the category of field of discourse can describe the context of situation. (2) www.amazon.com/grocery & gourmet food/v technical details: § shipping on orders over $35. § ships from and sold by amazon.com. § order within 15 hrs 19 mins from now. § pay as low as $10.19 and never run out with subscribe & save. § save 5% when you subscribe to regular deliveries of this item. § no commitments, no obligations, and shipping is free. 137 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee § buy one lipton tea, get one 50% off. § for a limited time, save up to 50% on your second purchase. note: · bold indicates single-word verbs. · underline indicates phrasal verbs. like noun, the other most important categories of words are verbs, which is the most complex part of speech since it has crucial function in determining the different forms of sentences (i.e., interrogatives, statements, questions, imperatives, exclamations) when it is linked with noun. in the category of verbs, there are two major types of verbs defined in this study, that is, single-word verbs and phrasal-word verbs. in total, there are two hundreds and ninety eight (298) verbs identified, which consist of one hundred and eighty six (186) single-word verbs and one hundred and twelve (112) phrasalword verbs. the high frequency of the specific recurrent verbs used in the analyzed data largely indicating the technical action process which are commonly used in the commerce field. the language use functions mostly in the form of statements and least in the form of imperatives. in the category of singleword verbs, some terms are found such as order, pay, purchase, save, buy, consume, and so on. accordingly, some verbs found in the category phrasal-word verbs are shipping on, shipping from, run out with, get off, save up, and many more. the following table provides the number of verbs that occur in the analyzed data. these numbers are only distributed from the recurrent specific verbs which are commonly used in the commerce field. table 2, occurrences of verbs no category of verbs occurrences 1. single-word verbs 186 2. phrasal-word verbs 112 illustration (3) is given to show how adjective in the category of field of discourse can be used to analyze the context of situation. (3) www.ebuy.com/clothing & accessories/adj technical details: § retails for $32.00. shipping: free standard int’l postage. § if for some reason a color or size is unavailable you will be notified right away so you can pick another color or receive a refund. § shipping is by us priority mail and only $6.95 and $2.99 for an additional item. § buy used and save 42% off the $19.99 price in limited time. § international buyers: import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping cost. from the illustration above, the use of adjectives in the form of both positive and negative is also identified. the negation mark of prefixes uses two kinds of prefixes, for example the prefixes (un-) as in ‘unavailable’ and (not-) as in ‘not included’. some of the adjectives found in the analyzed data are available, unavailable, confidence, detailed, substantial, subtle, fit, limited, precise, additional, not included, new, original, unused, regular, resistant, free, standard, and so forth. the table below shows the numbers of adjectives occurred in the analyzed data. these numbers are only distributed from the recurrent specific adjectives which are commonly used in the commerce field. siti nurani, risa mufliharsi & larisa yohanna linguistic features analysis 138 table 3. occurrences of adjectives no category of adjectives occurrences 1 adjectives without negative prefixes 67 2 adjectives with negative prefixes 25 example (4) is also given to describe how acronym in the field of discourse plays its role in identifying the register within the context of situation being used. (4) www.ebuy.com/electronics/acr technical details: § shipping: $20.15 (approx. idr 220,170.73) usps first class mail intl/first class package intl service. § seller ships within 1 day after receiving cleared payment. product details: § model info and item model number: syd-55a § asin: b008xm3caw § upc: 041000326654 § item model number: laps 110 product description: § weighing about 35 pounds, the etl/ cetl-approved, with rear-venting. § connects to any 120-volt outlet. acronyms are other instances of feature found in the register which recur in the commerce field. both sellers and buyers will share the same frame of reference of pointing the objects they involve with and have the same commerce knowledge in defining the reference of each acronym. some acronyms identified above are asin, laps, upc, idr, usps, syd, etl/cetl, and many other. the table below shows the numbers of acronyms that recur in the analyzed data. table 4. occurrences of acronyms occurrences acronyms 53 goal orientation the purpose of doing the technical action process in such buying-selling transactions in the commerce field is considered high since the transactions need an immediate attention to be done. therefore, the purpose of giving instructions or technical commands as well as technical information is also considered high in order to make the technical action process well completed. thus, the goal orientation is mostly considered as a long term goal orientation. the instance below shows the connection among those three goal orientation of language associated by sellers and buyers in communicating their transaction. (5) www.ebuy.com/grocery & gourmet food technical details: § price: $11.99 ($45 / count) § gift-wrap available. § shipping: $12.15 (approx. idr148,170.73) usps first class mail intl/first class package intl service. § international items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges § seller ships within 1 day after receiving cleared payment.. § in stock. § please note the delivery estimate is greater than 9 business days. § please allow additional time if international delivery is subject to customs processing. § payments: paypal § returns: hassle-free returns. 30 days money back, you pay return shipping, 10% restocking fee may apply. § view shipping rates and policies. 139 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee note: · underline indicates the technical information. · bold indicates the technical commands. · italic indicates the technical action process. social activity the participants in the data analyzed (i.e., sellers and buyers) are involved in the exchange of the transactions when they are communicating such particular topic of transactions dealt in the commerce transactions which function as technical information, technical commands, and technical action processes. all the activities socially represent the communicative need from each transaction, both for sellers (i.e. to promote, to sell, to offer, etc) and for buyers (i.e., to buy or to purchase, to order, to book, etc). tenor of discourse the tenor of discourse refers to the role relationship between the participants. the tenor of discourse analysis in this present study will involve several discussions, such as agentive role, social role, and social distance. agentive role the agentive role among participants is said to be equal as they are business clients between seller (or supplier) and buyer (or customer). all participants share the same reference of words that are specific to the field which function as technical terms used as their communicative tool, such as the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and acronyms. social role in this social role analysis, the attention is given to the analysis of the level of hierarchic and non-hierarchic of the participants (i.e., seller and buyer) as one of the important factors in determining the participants select the language. illustration (6) shows how tenor of discourse plays its role in defining register within the context of situation being used. (6) www.ebuy.com/clothing & accessories technical details: § if for some reason a color or size is unavailable you will be notified right away so you can pick another color or receive a refund. § please note the delivery system within workdays. § international buyers: import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping cost. these charges are the buyer’s responsibility. § please check with your country’s customs office. § first class international on average takes 4 weeks, however it can be longer, it depends on your country and on customs. § please allow additional time to customs processing. § item will be shipped immediately on the same or next business days. note: · bold indicates the use of politeness marker. · underline indicates the use of formal address form. · italic indicates the use of formal form of pronoun. · bold-italic indicates the use of formal form of modal verb. in this situation, the participants have the same level of understanding in communicating the transaction. the seller seems to be dominant in promoting and giving the advantages toward the products they offer within the text analyzed. whereas the buyer siti nurani, risa mufliharsi & larisa yohanna linguistic features analysis 140 seem to be given privilege to choose the particular product of many options available. from data analyzed above, the social role between participants is considered non-hierarchic as the language role used highly promoting some products where the participation from buyer is extremely welcomed. the language role tends to be formal as seen in such sentences, namely: the use of politeness marker ‘please’; the use of formal address form ‘buyer’; the use of formal form of pronoun ‘you’ instead of saying ‘guys’, ‘dude’, etc; as well as the use of formal form of modal verb ‘will’ which is not contracted into (‘ll). social distance the social distance of participants within the interaction as illustrated in (10) tends to be formal as influenced by the communicative need from each participant. for instance, the seller communicating the promotion uses formal expressions, such as the use of politeness marker ‘please’ as defined in the sentence “please note the delivery system within workdays”, and so forth. the use of formal address form ‘buyer’ also represents the formality of language role, as in the sentence “……..these charges are the buyer’s responsibility.” also, the use of formal form of pronoun ‘you’ as well as the use of formal form of modal verb ‘will’ which is not contracted into (‘ll) identify the formality of its language role. in conclusion, the social distance relied between participants (i.e., seller and buyer) is considered to be minimal as they communicate each other intensively and with no boundary of time and distance since they can communicate easily via internet connection where the websites as its medium of communication. mode of discourse the mode of discourse refers to the way in which the exchange is transmitted. the mode of discourse analysis in this present study will include three main discussions, that is, language role, channel, and medium. language role the attention given to this language role analysis will be on the occurrences of tense and voice identified in the data. in the tense analysis, as far as tense is concerned, present tense may be regarded as the ‘unmarked’ form of the analysis, as it represents a high frequency of all the occurrences of verbs marked for tense. in the voice analysis, the active voice would be regarded also as the ‘unmarked’ form of the analysis since it serves high amount of occurrences of verbs marked for voice. example (7) shows how mode of discourse describes the register within the context of situation being used. (7) www.ebuy.com/industrial and scientific technical details: § if for some reason a color or size is unavailable you will be notified right away so you can pick another color or receive a refund. § international items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges. § international buyers: import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping cost. please check with your country's customs office to determine what these additional costs will be prior to bidding or buying. § first class international on average takes 4 weeks, however it can be longer, it depends on your country and on customs. § priority mail international takes on average 10 business days, 20% restocking fee may apply. 141 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee note: · bold indicates the future simple. · underline indicates the present simple with modal verbs ‘can’ and ‘may’. in example (7) above, the tense analysis focuses on the analysis of the ‘marked’ tenses except present tenses. the tense analysis defines two kinds of major forms, that is, future simple and present simple with modal. the first form is the future simple form which is indicated by the use of modal ‘will’ and excessively used in the language role of technical commands. second form is the present simple with modal verbs which is marked by the form of modal verbs ‘may’ and ‘can’. the modal verbs are directly followed by either the copular verb of ‘be’ or ‘present form of verb’. this second form is mainly used in the language role represents technical action process. in conclusion, the language role used in this tense analysis is said to be constitutive in the technical action process and tends to be ancillary in the technical command. the table below shows the occurrences of “non-present” tenses. table 5. occurrences of “non-present” tenses occurrences future simple 35 present simple with modal verbs ‘can’ & ‘may’ 27 instance (8) also shows how mode of discourse describes the register within the context of situation being used. (8) www.amazon.com/health and personal care technical details: § ships from and sold by amazon. com. § item can be shipped only within the u.s. § item will be shipped immediately on the same workdays. § holidays are excluded from the shipping service with tracking number 2-5 days. § international buyers: import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping cost. § you will be notified immediately as soon as your request. § qualifying items offered by amazon.com when you purchase 2 § delivery can be delayed because of customs in your country. note: · bold indicates the present simple. · underline indicates the present simple with modal verb ‘can’. · italic indicates the future simple. the voice analysis in the above instance focuses only on the discussion of passive voice analysis. thus, the active voice is regarded as the ‘unmarked’ voice. as seen in instance (8), the voice analysis identifies three kinds of passive voice tenses forms, namely: the present simple; the present simple with modal verb ‘can’; and the future simple. all of the forms are also excessively indicated the technical action process. both of constitutive and ancillary language role play in the technical action process. the table below shows the occurrences of passive voice in the voice analysis. table 6. occurrences of passive voice occurrences present simple 27 present simple with modal verb ‘can’ 20 future simple 25 channel the channel in this present research is all on the graphic mode which is then analyzed. the graphic mode of siti nurani, risa mufliharsi & larisa yohanna linguistic features analysis 142 the register in the commerce field is taken from the two biggest electronic commerce websites, that is, www. amazon.com and www.ebuy.com which english is used as its basis of the medium of communication. those websites are then analyzed from several categories, such as appliances, clothing and accessories, grocery and gourmet food, automotive, electronics, industrial and scientific, as well as health and personal care. medium the medium of the register of the english electronic commerce websites is in written, with a visual contact and excessively characterized by the use of endophoric reference (this, the, and it); and the use of pronouns (you and your). it is observed that language role used in communicating among others reflects and expresses the aspects of the context in which the language is used. one of the differences is certainly the vocabulary. with respect to the field of discourse, findings in the experiential domain analysis have shown that the use of lexis is a vast major occurred in the data. it is mentioned that all terms of register which are commonly used in the electronic commerce websites function as technical terms used in discussing its specialty. there are six types of technical terms found in the analysis, namely: 1) the single-word nouns; 2) the compound nouns; 3) the singleword verbs; 4) the phrasal-word verbs; 5) the adjectives; and 6) the acronyms. the goal orientation found in the data is mostly considered as a long term goal orientation with the purpose of the language selected by participant appears in three major kinds of goal orientations, that is, the technical action process, technical command, and technical information. the social activity is exchange for both sellers (i.e. to promote, to sell, to offer) and for buyers (i.e., to buy or to purchase, to order). with respect to the tenor of discourse, the agentive role between participants is said to be equal as they are seller (or supplier) and buyer (or customer). in the social role analysis, the social role between participants is considered non-hierarchic. the language role used by the seller is highly promoting some products where the participation from buyer is extremely welcomed. the seller excessively uses formal expressions, such as the use of politeness marker ‘please’ in communicating the promotion. the social distance between participants is considered minimal as they communicate each other intensively and with no boundary of time and distance since they can communicate easily via internet connection. with respect to the mode of discourse, the language role selected by participants is largely in the formal form which functions as both constitutive and ancillary language role. there are two major forms of ‘non-present’ tenses identified in tense analysis, that is, future simple and present simple with modal verb. in the voice analysis, there are three major forms of passive voice, namely: present simple; present simple with modal verbs; and future simple. the channel is all on the graphic mode. the medium of the register of the english electronic commerce websites is in written, with a visual contact, and excessively characterized by the use of endophoric reference (this, the, and it); and the use of pronouns (you and your). conclusion with respect to the three variables of situation used to analyze the register, the following are several conclusions drawn from the findings and discussions in the previous chapter: 1. in the field of discourse, the linguistic features are largely appeared in the experiential domain analysis 143 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee which shows that all terms of registers which are commonly used in the english electronic commerce websites function as technical terms used in discussing their specialty, of which the two major forms of nouns and verbs (i.e., single-word and compound/phrasal word forms) were the most frequent categories of technical terms identified among other kinds of technical terms. the goal orientation is considered to be as a long term goal orientation and the social activity is exchange. 2. in the tenor of discourse, the linguistic features are highly appeared in the social distance analysis which shows that the social distance between participants is considered minimal and largely exists in the formal language. the agentive role is said to be equal and the social role is considered as non-hierarchic. 3. in the mode of discourse, the linguistic features are excessively occurred in the language role analysis which exists largely in the formal form of both constitutive and ancillary language role. the channel is in graphic mode. the medium is in written with a visual contact as its device. the present research only stresses on the analysis of register in the english electronic commerce websites where the identification of linguistic features which are used in correlation with the field, tenor and mode of discourse becomes its main focus. it is recommended for those interested in investigating the role of conversational discourse study related to understanding and addressing cross-cultural communication to do some more research on register by identifying some other linguistic features which are used in correlation to the variables of situations. for further research, it is advised specifically to scholars in indonesia to do some more investigations on register in such other fields or interests by looking at the theoretical underpinnings of an interactional sociolinguistic approach. it is aimed as they can have more understanding of how language works to create and communicate meaning in interaction of particular groups of people. this study only takes account of the parameter of register in relation to the context of situation in sociolinguistic point of view. hence, it is suggested for further researchers to also link other perspectives, such as translation methodology, esp angles, corpus-based approach and so forth. references anderson, w. j. (2006). the phraseology of administrative french: a corpus-based study. international journal of corpus linguistics, 13(1), 128-134. berglin, i. t. (2009). “really? you’re gonna say ‘tunes’?”: the functions of register clashes in the television drama series “gilmore girls”. (thesis). malardalen university. biber, d. & edward f. (1994). sociolinguistics perspectives on register. new york: oxford university press, 104-135. brunelle, m. (2009). contact-induced change? register in three cham dialects. journal of the southeast asian linguistics society, 2, 1-22. halliday, m. a. k. & hasan. r. (1989). language, context and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. london: oxford university press. holmes, j. (2007). an introduction to sociolinguistics. london: longman. jankowski, b. (2006). the s-vs of-genitive in standard canadian english: grammatical change or register change? university of toronto, 1-12. legrier, o. v., bernicot, j., & bert, e. a. (2009). electronic mail, a new writtenlanguage register: a study with frenchspeaking adolescents. british journal of developmental psychology, 27, 163–181. olateju, m. a., & yusuf, y. k. (2006). backchannel communication in ola rotimi’s our husband has gone mad siti nurani, risa mufliharsi & larisa yohanna linguistic features analysis 144 again. nordic journal of african studies, 15(4), 520-535. romaine, s. (2000). language in society: an introduction to sociolinguistics. oxford university press. stojicic, v. (2004). sociolinguistic stimuli to development of the english lexicon– language contact and social need. linguistics and literature, 3(1), 29-36. trudgill, p. (1996). sociolinguistics: an introduction to language and society. harmondsworth: penguin. turban e., david k, lee j., liang t. p., turban d. (2012). web inteligence and e commerce. new jersey: prentice-hall. wong, j. 2010. internet marketing for beginners. indonesian edition. jakarta : pt. elex media komputindo. wardhaugh, r. (1997). introduction to sociolinguistics. oxford: blackwell publishers. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 211 pronunciation learning, participation, and attitude enhancement through mobile assisted language learning (mall) alfi hidayatu miqawati department of english study program, language, communication and tourism, politeknik negeri jember, indonesia e-mail: alfi_hidayatu@polije.ac.id apa citation: miqawati, a. h. (2020). pronunciation learning, participation, and attitude enhancement through mobile assisted language learning (mall). english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 211-218. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2118. received: 29-01-2020 accepted: 20-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: a mobile application, tflat english pronunciation, is proposed in the teaching of pronunciation for it possesses features that can assist students when learning how to enunciate english words and identify english phonemic symbols. thus, this study presents the results of the implementation of tflat english pronunciation mobile courseware to gain the ability of the first semester students of english study program politeknik negeri jember in pronouncing english words. this study is a collaborative classroom action research. thirty students enrolling in pronunciation class at english study program politeknik negeri jember were taken as the source of data. the result showed that the materials and practices in tflat courseware could enrich students' pronunciation learning, improve their participation, and nurture a positive attitude toward technological learning. the findings of this study also depict the potential and power of mobile assisted language learning (mall) to encourage students to engage in classroom activities and monitor their learning. hence, it can be concluded that mall is pivotal and can be one alternative to facilitate students’ pronunciation learning. keywords: pronunciation; participation; positive attitude; tflat english pronunciation; mall. introduction mastery of a language, including foreign languages and in this case english provides many benefits in various aspects and fields. moreover, globalization encourages everyone to be able to speak good english to create smooth and meaningful communication. however, to possess communication skills, one needs to go through contextual learning and training activities because communication itself involves complex processes including understanding, speaking, and listening systematically and continuously (ahmad, 2016). many experts have highlighted the importance of pronunciation in communication. pronunciation becomes a major aspect of understanding and interpreting speakers' intentions and spoken language and speakers can be considered unintelligible if they have poor pronunciation (reed & lewis, 2019; pennington & rogerson-revell, 2019; nair, krishnasamy & de mello, 2017). in the teaching of english as a foreign language in indonesia, many teachers still focus more on teaching grammar than pronunciation. the students are exposed to master lexical aspects and construct linguistic structure flawlessly but not to pronounce english expressions accurately and the teaching of pronunciation is overlooked, implicitly taught and often neglected (silalahi, 2016; haryanto, 2015; widagsa, wiyanah, & wahyuni, 2019) to investigate learners' proficiency in english pronunciation, the researcher conducted a preliminary study on the first-year students of the english study program at politeknik negeri jember. it was found out that the students’ english pronunciation ability was unsatisfactory. most of them could not achieve the minimum standard passing criterion, 65 (c). furthermore, in the teaching and learning process, the students showed a low degree of participation and motivation in pronouncing english words and utterances. the difficulties were due to several factors including students' low interest, limited vocabulary storage, first encounter with studying a language component (pronunciation) separately, and diffidence, colorless teaching strategy, and monotonous instructional media. among those factors, the instructional media were considered one of the most vital problems since the teaching of pronunciation needs instructional media so that the students can contextualize what they are learning and acquire it better and faster. to make the learning of pronunciation more mailto:alfi_hidayatu@polije.ac.id alfi hidayatu miqawati pronunciation learning, participation, and attitude enhancement through mobile assisted language learning (mall) 212 effective and interesting and to strive for intelligible and comprehensible speech, afshari & ketabi 2016) emphasize the need for teaching pronunciation to gain full communicative competence and the importance of incorporating the findings of other disciplines, such as psychology, nlp, and technology. the use of many technological devices and softwares in the teaching of english has gained much attention in the recent decade. the implementation of mobile assissted language learning (mall) has contributed siginificantly toward students’ success in learning. according to kumar, wotto, & bélanger (2018), mall is a powerful method for engaging learners on their own terms. klimova (2019) also stated that studying by using smartphones is effective in the enhancement of university students’ performance and can be a complementary method to other forms of course delivery. more advantages of mobile learning are also highlighted by hosseini, ezzadeen, & alhazmi (2015) that it can promote an enhanced understanding of material content, costeffectiveness, game learning, and informal learning. students also perceive mobile learning as a challenging and motivating activity (novawan, aisyiyah, wijayanti, miqawati, indrastana, 2019). many studies have also addressed the effectiveness of mobile phones in language teaching and learning. liu, lu & lai (2016) analyze 24 journal articles in order to examine developments and trends in mall. they claimed that mall approach is beneficial present some challenges to users, academics, and teachers. however, they suggested that more research is needed to further investigate the communication that occurs among learners with the use of various mobile devices, and their developments of various cognitive learning domains. in relation with the use of mobile phones, android-based applications or platforms have provided empirical results for assisting students’ in learning english pronunciation. arashnia & shahrokhi (2016) conducted an experimental study about the use of mobile learning application and they found out that students taught english pronuciation using mobile phone application outperformed those who were taught using ordinary methods (without mobile phones). liu, xu, li, han, chen, mo, chen & liu (2019) carried out a study about automatic speech recognition (asr) technology in english pronunciation correction. the findings showed that asr technology can help chinese english learners improve their english pronunciation. sufi & shalmani (2018) also found out that one courseware namely “tflat” could improve greatly the pronunciation ability of the students. the courseware contains complete materials and exercises for students to practice and assess their english pronunciation. in the recent five years, more applications are implemented and developed to increse students’ the motivation and make learning easier and more enjoyable, cure and prevent their fossilization of english pronunciation errors. and improve their overall english pronunciation and intonation (liu, zhu, jiao & xu, 2019; cavus, 2016; mutqiyyah & muhammad, 2016). considering the positive effect and complete features of tflat to the teaching of pronunciation and the need of the students to improve their english pronunciation, the researcher conducted a study on the implementation of tflat english pronunciation mobile courseware to enhance the ability of the first semester students of c-class english study program politeknik negeri jember in pronouncing english words. method after identifying the problem through the preliminary study, the researcher conducted a collaborative classroom action research (ccar) in c–class (semester 1) of english study program politeknik negeri jember which has 28 students. this design is called ccar because 1) is done by teaching practitioners or lecturers who teach in class, 2) is applied collaboratively, and 3) aims to change a thing/overcome the problems of students in the classroom. the collaborator in this study was a lecturer who teaches pronunciation course. the lecturer was equipped with explanations and training before the teaching media implementation. during the learning process, the researcher filled in the field notes and the list of observations with factual data of what happened during and after the learning process. the research aims to provide a new and practical way for elf/esl learners to improve english pronunciation as well as provide a new mode of english pronunciation teaching for relevant educators. planning at this stage, the researcher and collaborator jointly designed lesson plans, handouts, worksheets, and instruments dealing with the implementation of tflat english pronunciation. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 213 the application was chosen because it has complete activities that cover many language skills and provides ample information on how to articulate each vowel, diphthong, and consonant. besides, once the application is downloaded, it can be accessed anytime and anywhere without any internet connection (offline android application). implementing the procedure of teaching was implemented in cclass of english study program (first semester) – politeknik negeri jember. there were several steps covered during the teaching and learning process. first, the students were explained how to articulate the vowels and consonants while checking the detail information and examples in tflat english pronunciation mobile courseware. second, they practiced pronouncing the words. in this step, the teacher checked each student’s accuracy in articulating the sounds and helped the students to overcome their difficulties when learning. third, they had the sound details and checked whether they pronounced the words accurately or not while identifying their problems when pronouncing the words. fourth, they recorded their voices and identified the pronunciation accuracy in the application. to gain optimum mastery, they also did the reading, writing, and listening parts in the application. the implementation stage was conducted in seven meetings. observing in this step, the researcher observed the results of tflat english pronunciation implementation. two kinds of data were collected; numerical data and verbal data. the numerical data were obtained from the students' pronunciation scores. meanwhile, the results of the observation checklist, field notes, and open-ended questionnaire represent the verbal data. there were four instruments implemented in this study; questionnaire, observation checklist, field notes, and a test. the questionnaire was used to know the students’ opinions toward the implementation of tflat english pronunciation. in addition, the field note was used to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the application implementation. meanwhile, to monitor the students’ the students’ participation and performance during the teaching and learning process, the observation checklist was employed. the last instrument employed was a test administered after the students were taught using an android-based application. table 1 shows the students’ involvement description while table 2 shows the pronunciation scoring rubric. table 1. students’ involvement description no categories description 1 very poor < 20% participate 2 poor 20% 40% participate 3 fair 41% 60% participate 4 good 61% 80% participate 5 very good 81% 100% participate table 2. pronunciation scoring rubric aspects poor (0-1 point) fair (2-3 points) good (3-5 points) dimension student makes little or no effort to enunciate and articulate in the target language. the student has errors in pronunciation, some effort in articulation in the target language. the student makes minor or no errors in pronunciation, great articulation in the target language with expression. (adapted from http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?code=f6w345&sp=true) reflecting this stage involves a result analysis of the action implemented in the first cycle. the analysis was conducted by analyzing the students' learning performance and the teaching and learning process. the results were compared with the predetermined criteria of success. if one of the indicators of the criteria was not reached, the researcher would carry out the second cycle by revising the planning stage. however, if the results were appropriate, the researcher would immediately conclude the research results. table 3 contains information about the criteria of success in this study. alfi hidayatu miqawati pronunciation learning, participation, and attitude enhancement through mobile assisted language learning (mall) 214 table 3. criteria of success components criteria of success data source instrument participation 90% of the students are engaged actively in the teaching and learning process. 90% of the students have positive attitudes. the students’ involvement in the classroom activities questionnaire observation checklist field notes learning performance 100% of the students obtain a minimum passing score of 66 (c) the scores of pronunciation accuracy pronunciation test results and discussion the findings of the study include the students’ involvement, the students’ opinion toward the implemented media, and the students’ pronunciation score. students’ involvement in the classroom activities to obtain data about the students’involvement in the implementation of tflat english pronunciation mobile courseware, the observer used observation checklists and fieldnotes. the findings showed a satisfying result for the expected outcome. the summary of the students’ involvement is presented in table 4. the information about the students’ involvement was obtained from analyzing the observation checklist and field notes. from the data obtained, the observer also pinpointed some findings related to the students'involvement. in meeting 1, two points were considered as the strengths and one point as the weakness. the students were enthusiastic to pay attention to the lecturer and directly downloaded the application. since it was their very first time learning pronunciation, they were amazed at the features provided in the application. the students admitted that they have never known the application. when they opened the application, they could find buttons for short vowels, long vowels, double vowels (diphthongs), voiced and voiceless consonants. all students explored every single feature in the application vivaciously. the weakness found was that two students used iphone and could not download the application. the lecturer lent him her mobile phone so that he could get engaged in the classroom activities. they identified their problems after the class and succeeded in downloading and operating the application. table 3. summary of the students’ involvement meeting activity % of ss’ involvement interpretation 1 exploring the application features and manuals 93 very good 2 utilizing the application (short vowels) 97 very good 3 utilizing the application (long vowels) 93 very good 4 utilizing the application (voiced consonants) 93 very good 5 utilizing the application (voiceless consonants) 100 very good 6 utilizing the application (other consonants) 100 very good 7 pronunciation test 100 class’ average involvement 96,6 very good several more strengths were also noted in meetings 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. when utilizing the application, students learned the materials provided in the application like understanding how the sounds are articulated and practiced articulating the sounds accurately. in each meeting, all students are involved except students who did not attend the class. since the application does not need any internet connection after being downloaded, the students could access it smoothly. in addition, the students adapted themselves fast with the application. the problem found in the meeting was several students hardly succeeded in articulating the intended sounds because they are not accustomed to articulating them or got confused as they sound similar to them. they also got difficulties in identifying and distinguishing symbols of the vowels, diphthongs, and consonants, especially when they did the listening and writing parts in the application. the observer suggested the lecturer tell the students to have more practice at home or every time they have spare time. before the test, the students were given information related to the test to be administered so that they were prepared for the english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 215 test. the observer did not find anything to pinpoint during the administration of the test. huang, yang, chiang, & su (2016) noted that mobile learning tool gain more superior results in term of students’ participation and motivation. in other words, it can be concluded that mall provides opportunities for students to actively participate in every classroom activity. students’ opinion toward the implementation of tflat english pronunciation the students expressed their opinion through the distributed questionnaire that showed that all of them enjoyed learning using the application. they also mentioned that the application was very useful in assisting them to learn how to pronounce words. it also gives them a new way of learning and optimizes the use of their gadgets. it corresponds positively with findings of studies conducted by ghounane (2019); saidouni & bahloul (2016); thomas & munoz (2016); and white & mills (2014) that students showed positive attitudes towards the introduction and integration of mobile technology in language learning and any classroom activities. students’ achievement the last criterion of success determined was the students’ learning performance. all students (30 students) needed to gain scores of more than 66. when converted, the needed to gain at least a c. c score was also the minimum requirement to pass the pronunciation class. after the test administration, the data obtained from the writing test showed that 30 students achieved the target score, 66. thus, it had met the criterion of success related to the students’ learning achievement. the findings showed that the use of tflat english pronunciation courseware could promote the students' ability in pronouncing english words. the improvement was gained through the materials in the application and the teacher’s guidance during classroom activities. each menu in the courseware provides an ample overview and practices to help students pronounce words accurately. the finding of this study is in line with those of arashnia & shahrokhi (2016) and kim & kwon (2012) that giving instruction through mobile phones can help students learn pronunciation effectively and mobile applications are also effective to provide students individualized and student-centered learning opportunity. that mobile assisted language learning (mall) can enhance students' language skills and knowledge has been proven by other findings in the previous studies. in line with what the researcher found regarding mobile learning and language proficiency improvement, burston (2015) pinpointed the learning outcomes of the implementations of mall are unquestionably positive. the optimum result of the implementation is also supported by the teacher’s roles during the teaching and learning activities. in this study, the teacher actively aided the students in their effort of enunciating english words. thus, the fact that mobile learning does not work solely to enhance students’ language ability cannot be neglected. burston (2015) supported this notion that the implementation of mall should focus more on how technology is manipulated to affect achievement, not attribute learning gain to the technology. ample models and examples are given to help students identify the sound and practice of pronouncing vowels and diphthongs. the screen display is attractive and the navigation buttons are simple and easy to access. cavus (2016), who developed an intelligent mobile application for english pronunciation teaching, also mentioned that this kind of mobile application features can make learning easier and more enjoyable than the traditional learning methods. during learning, students could access the mobile application and asked questions whenever they found problems and difficulties and the teacher addressed them directly. every learning activity utilizing the courseware required students' active engagement. passive students could be more active and engaged in the learning process without any hesitance and anxiety and it is in line with miqawati and wijayanti (2017) argument that mall enables students to be actively involved in the classroom pronunciation activities. besides being more involved in the teaching and learning process, the students perceived positively toward the implementation of tflat courseware. thus, it can be concluded that the implementation of mobile-assisted language learning can promote the students’ participation and positive attitude toward learning and it pointed out what is suggested by kukulska-hulme (2006) that mobile devices are representative for language learning purposes, two of which are for personal engagement and interaction as well as communication. alfi hidayatu miqawati pronunciation learning, participation, and attitude enhancement through mobile assisted language learning (mall) 216 conclusion the implementation of tflat english pronunciation courseware can enhance the students' learning performance, boost their involvement in classroom activities, and promote a positive attitude toward the potentials of mobile technology in language learning. the findings of the study presented here showed a promising model of language teaching to adult learners using a mobile application. the findings of this study also depict the potential and power of mobile assisted language learning (mall) to encourage students to engage in classroom activities and monitor their own learning. more exploration and experiment on the potentials of mobile-assisted learning media are eminently encouraged. references teaching of pronunciation in the esl classroom afshari, s., & ketabi, s. (2017). current trends and future directions in teaching english pronunciation. international journal of research studies in language learning, 6(2), 83-91. arashnia, m., & shahrokhi, m. (2016). mobile assisted language learning: english pronunciation among iranian pre-intermediate efl learners. journal of applied linguistics and language research, 3(4), 149-162. burston, j. (2015). twenty years of mall project implementation: a meta-analysis of learning outcomes. recall, 27(1), 4-20. cavus, n. (2016). development of an intellegent mobile application for teaching english pronunciation. procedia computer science, 102, 365-369. ghounane, n. (2019). the attitudes of second year efl students at dr moulay tahar university towards learning english pronunciation through mobile assisted language. arab world english journal (awej), 5(special issue on call), 110123. haryanto, e. (2015). teachers’corrective feedback on students’pronunciation at the daffodils english course kampung inggris pare indonesia. linguists: journal of linguistics and language teaching, 2(2), 78-82. hosseini, ebrahim s., ezzadeen, k., & alhazmi, a. (2015). acquiring knowledge through mobile applications. international journal of interactive mobile technologies, 9(3), 71-74. huang, c. s., yang, s. j., chiang, t. h., & su, a. y. (2016). effects of situated mobile learning approach on learning motivation and performance of efl students. journal of educational technology & society, 19(1), 263-276. kim, h., & kwon, y. (2012). exploring smartphone applications for effective mobile-assisted language learning. multimedia-assisted language learning, 15(1), 31-57. klimova, b. (2019). impact of mobile learning on students’ achievement results. education sciences, 9(2), 90. doi: 10.3390/educsci9020090. kukulska-hulme, a. (2006). mobile language learning now and in the future. in svensson, p. (ed.), from vision to practice: language learning and it. sweden: swedish net university, 295-310. kumar, b. s., wotto, m., & bélanger, p. (2018). elearning, m-learning and d-learning: conceptual definition and comparative analysis. e-learning and digital media, 15(4), 191–216. liu, g. z., lu, h. c., & lai, c. t. (2016). towards the construction of a field: the developments and implications of mobile assisted language learning (mall). digital scholarship in the humanities, 31(1), 164-180. liu, x., xu, m., li, m., han, m., chen, z., mo, y., chen, x., & liu, m. (2019). improving english pronunciation via automatic speech recognition technology. international journal of innovation and learning, 25(2), 126-140. liu, x., zhu, c., jiao, j., & xu, m. (2018, july). promoting english pronunciation via mobile devices-based automatic speech evaluation (ase) technology. international conference on blended learning (pp. 333-343). springer, cham. miqawati, a. h., & wijayanti, f. (2017). optimalisasi penggunaan flashcards melalui mall (mobile assisted language learning) pada pengajaran pronunciation (optimizing the use of flashcards through mall (mobile assisted language learning) in teaching pronunciation). prosiding. mutqiyyah, r., & muhammad, a. f. (2016). developing mobile app of english pronunciation test using android studio. 2016 international electronics symposium (ies), 487-492. nair, r., krishnasamy, r., & de mello, g. (2017). rethinking the. the english teacher, 14. novawan, a., aisyiyah, s., wijayanti, f., miqawati, a. h., & indrastana, n. s. (2019). investigating students’ mall experience in light of an ecological perspective. journal of english in academic and professional communication, 5(2). pardede, p. (2018). improving efl students’ english pronunciation by using the explicit teaching approach. jet (journal of english teaching), 4(3), 143-155. pennington, m. c., & rogerson-revell, p. (2019). english pronunciation teaching and research. londres: palgrave macmillan, 10, 978-988. reed, m., & levis, j. (2019). the handbook of english pronunciation. new york: john wiley & sons. saidouni, k., & bahloul, a. (2016). teachers and students’ attitudes towards using mobile-assisted language learning in higher education. arab world english journal (awej), 3(special issue on call). english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 217 sharples, m., & spikol, d. (2017). mobile learning. in: duval e., sharples m., sutherland r. (eds), technology enhanced learning. springer, cham. silalahi, r. m. p. (2016). pronunciation problems of indonesian efl learners: an error analysis. journal of english language and culture, 6(2), 163-176. sufi, e., & shalmani, h. b. (2018). the effects of tflat pronunciation training in mall on the pronunciation ability of iranian efl learners. european journal of foreign language teaching, 3(2), 87-103. thomas, k., & munoz, m.a. (2016). hold the phone! high school students’ perception of mobile phone integration in the classroom. american secondary education, 44(3), 19-37. white, j., & mills, d. j. (2014). examining attitudes towards and usage of smartphone technology among japanese university students studying efl. call-ej, 15(2), 1-15. widagsa, r., wiyanah, s., & wahyuni, p. (2019). the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress production. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 77-84. yudhiantara, r. a., & saehu, a. (2017). mobileassisted language learning (mall) in indonesian islamic higher education. ijeltal (indonesian journal of english language teaching and applied linguistics), 2(1), 21-31. alfi hidayatu miqawati pronunciation learning, participation, and attitude enhancement through mobile assisted language learning (mall) 218 maya nurmayanti the use of pair composition method 158 the use of pair composition method on students’ descriptive writing skill maya nurmayanti galileo english course, indonesia e-mail: nurmaumarro@yahoo.com apa citation: nurmayanti, m. (2014). the use of pair composition method on students’ descriptive writing skill. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 158-166 received: 01-04-2014 accepted: 27-04-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: this research was aimed to find out roles of pair composition method on students’ behaviour in learning processes and their writing assessment, and also to find out students’ attitude toward learning process of pair composition method in writing descriptive text in the classroom. descriptive qualitative method was used in this research. the participants were 33 students of x grade of senior high school. the data were collected from observation, the result of analysis showed that 66% of the seriousness of students during learning process was high, 78% of enthusiasm of students in doing task was high, and 58% of students’ participation was high. the increasing of students’ assessment was 18,7 from the average score before. the data collected from interview and questionnaire indicated that pair composition method provided the opportunities for sharing ideas, developing text, corresting writing errors, motivating students being active, and 50% students strongly agreed that pair composition method on writing descriptive text was lively and enjoyable. keywords: active learning strategy, cooperative learning, pair composition method, descriptive writing, descriptive text. listening, speaking, reading, and writing. those four skills are explored in the classroom activities using active learning strategy. from active learning strategy, teachers used various techniques and methods depends on the goal of teaching. one of active learning techniques is cooperative learning. however, the strategies used must give the effect and change for every language skill of students, and pair composition method as one of cooperative learning techniques focuses on the desire outcome for the participants group and individual as a result of learning activity, especially on students’ writing assessment. writing as one of productive skills is a set of thinking, expressing the feeling, proposing idea and knowledge, creativity in words processing are included of writing development learning process. brown (2001: 335) writes that “written product is often the introduction teaching strategies that teachers apply in the classroom support students learning process emphasizing to be more responsive and active in the classroom by various methods. also, to make teaching and learning aimed on the planning lesson in order to achieve the goal of teaching and learning. brown (2000: 131) states that “teachers can benefit form an understanding of what makes learners successful an unsuccessful and establish in the classroom a milieu for the realization on successful strategies.” many teaching strategies have been applied in teaching process. teachers choose various techniques of teaching strategies as specific ‘attack’ on given problem (brown, 2000: 122). one of teaching strategies is active learning strategy, where students do everything in learning process from 159 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee result of thinking, drafting, and revising procedures that require speacialized skill, skills that not every speakers develop naturally.” in the process of writing some text at school, students may be get a little problem, it can be from theirselves or from the other factors out of them. the ability to write depends on the ability to think creatively and put it into written text. this research focused on students’ writing descriptive text which one of materials in english lesson for ten grade students at one of senior high school in kuningan. it is using pair composition method that part of cooperative learning techniques, where students doing exercises in pairs, giving idea each other, giving feedback, and correcting each other their text composition included of content, structure, error analysis, and completing the compotion of the text. students sometimes get difficulties when starting to write, they got stuck to develop their ideas in writing how to describe person, thing or place detailed, or writing something in particular structures such as orientation and description. pair composition as a method of cooperative learning is used to solve the difficulties writing the text. in order to get good writing, pair composition method was important in the learning process of writing than independent learning. teaching and learning language process is not the simple sets, both of them have own characteristic and relationship each other. communication, interaction and other activities built in this learning and teaching language, between teacher and students. scarino and liddicoat (2009: 41) states that “in planning for interaction, teachers plan the sorts of things that students will be able to say, whether in speaking or in writing.” learning and teaching language is the complex activities that influence on teacher and students’ skills. many factors appearance guide teacher and students to be mastered in learning and teaching language, aspecialy english as the foreign laguage. two of language skills in learning english are speaking and writing. both of the skills called productive skills. according to bashrin (2013: 3), the productive skills consist of speaking and writing, because learners need to articulate words and write to produce language. teaching writing means guiding the students to explore their idea, feel, and knowledge in written. heaton (1990: 135) states that “the writing skills are complex and sometimes difficult to teach, requiring mastery not only grammatical and rethorical devices, but also of contextual and judgement element.” in order to measure the students ability in any language skills, included writing skill, need to be examined and take the students assessment. pinter (2006: 131) notes “assessment refers to the process of data analysis that the teachers use to get evidence about their learners’ performance and progress in english.” method of scoring composition included some components, those are; content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics (heaton, 1990: 146). teacher needs some strategies in order to support teaching and learning process. activities in the classroom must be planned as good as possible and being effective activities to achieve the goal of teaching and learning language. brown (2000: 113) note “strategies are specific methods of approaching a problem or task, modes or operation for achieving a particular end, planned design for controlling and manipulating certain information.” learning is an active process, when children are motivated to do something, they will try the new thing and doing the experiment of their ideas or discussing maya nurmayanti the use of pair composition method 160 with adults and teachers (pinter, 2006: 5). according to prince (2004: 1), active learning is generally one of instructional method that engages students in the learning process. in short, active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing, learning by doing. one of active learning technique is cooperative learning. cooperative learning focuses on grouping study, but the target is comprehension of students in applying the assigment individually. one of cooperative learning methods is pair composition that guides students to be more active to make some composition in pair. according to johnson, johnson, & smith (1998) in felder and brent (2004: 4), pair composition works when students work in pairs to complete individual writing assignments such as summary of article, research paper, position or reflection paper. using pair composition method, students can change their idea each other, analyzing and correcting in pair to get the good result in writing descriptive text. descriptive text is defined as “domain writing that develops images through the use of precise sensory words and phrases and through devices such as metaphor and the sounds of words.” gerot and wignell (1994: 208) notes “the social function of descriptive text is to describe particular person, place, or thing.” there are some criteria for assessing the task of genre of text based on appropriate generic structure and grammatical features, those are: genre based criteria deal with generic features of the text, textual criteria deal with the way that the text is held together, the way that the text is held, syntactical language criteria deal with the internal structure of the sentence used (knapp and watskin, 2005: 119). there will be several stages of pair compossition method provided. firs, the teacher devided students into pair groups; one class consists of 34 students. second, the teacher doing review by giving some questions about descriptive text to the students, and ask them to making summary of descriptive text. third, the teacher explain what the students to do and how students must do their assignment in pairs but for individual descriptive writing assessment. fourth, student a describes to student b what he or she is planning to write related to descriptive text (describing person, thing or place). after asking probing and clarifying questions, student b outlines student a’s composition and gives it to student a. then the procedure is reversed. each student researches the topic. fifth, the two students together write the first paragraph of each composition. then each student writes his or her composition individually. sixth, when completed, the students read each other’s compositions and make suggestions for revision included generic structure (identification and description) and language features (using specific participant, using noun phare, using relational process, using adjectives, using simple present tense). seventh, after individual revision, students proofread both compositions and sign them to indicate there are no errors. this process of learning using pair composition is important to investigate in order to know about the roles of the method in students behaviour during learning processes, and then finding out the good outcomes from the learning process in writing skill, especially in descriptive writing assessment, and also to know the students’ attitude toward learning processes of pair composition method. 161 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee method the research conducted was descriptive qualitative research design. qualitative method investigated the quality of relationships, activities, situations, or materials (fraenkel and wallen, 2009: 422). in this descriptive qualitative method, data analyzed was described and explained in detail. creswell (2009: 175) states that, “description involves a detailed rendering of information about people, places, or events in a setting.” this research was conducted in a class that consists of 33 students at one of senior high school in kuningan in the academic year 2013/2014 from april until may. this research used some techniques to collect the data to be analyzed then, those are documentation, observation, interview, and quesionare. creswell (2009: 164) write, “qualitative researchers collect data themselves through examining documents, observing behavior, or interviewing participants.” using documentation in collecting data was private document to obtain result of participants’ language and words (creswell, 2009: 168-169) , in this research was students’ descriptive writing. students’ descriptive writing was taken before and after implementing pair composition method (pre-test and post-test), in order to get data would be investigated to know students’ descriptive writing assessment. in learning processes, the actions of the students are the important thing to be observed, it could be their behaviour or their productive skill. according to fraenkel and wallen (2009: 440), “certain kinds of research question can best be answered by observing how people act or how things look.” during the observation, this research used an observation sheet for taking the data during learning processes. the observation sheet applied was checklist table of students’ behavior in the learning processes (sa’diah, vol. xl : 171-172). the following step to collect data in this research was interviewing. fraenkel and wallen (2009: 446) state “the purpose of interviewing people is to find out what is on their mindwhat they think or how they feel about something.” the interview conducted in order to get more information about students’ attitude toward the use of pair composition method that the teacher used in the classroom. not only using interview, but also quesionnaire for students was used in this research to know students atittude toward the use of pair composition method. according to oskamp and schultz (2005: 9), there are three components of person’s attitude about something. those components are affective, behavioral, and cognitive component. results and discussion the findings of this research were about roles of pair composition method on students’ behaviour in learning processes and their writing assessment, and about the students’ attitude toward learning process of pair composition method on writing descriptive text in the classroom. the roles of pair composition method on students’ behaviour in learning processes the data analyzed showed that pair composition method had roles on increasing students’ behaviour in learning processes, included of seriousness of students, enthusiasm students in doing task, and their participation in the classroom during learning processes. it was drawn by the seriousness of students that can be observed from the data analyzed that 50% in the second and third meeting was high, and in the fourth meeting was 100% maya nurmayanti the use of pair composition method 162 table 1. the observation result of students’ behaviour in learning processes learning process 2nd meeting 3rd meeting 4th meeting h m l h m l h m l 1. the seriousness of students during learning process: a. giving attention to the teacher explanation and instruction √ √ √ b. making comments or asking question about explanation and instruction √ √ √ c. *giving attention to the material, examining them seriously √ √ √ d. *making comments or asking questions about the material (to the teacher or their friends) √ √ √ 50% 0% 50% 50% 50% 0% 100% 0% 0% 2. the anthusiasm of the students in doing the task a. trying to understand the instruction by using various learning aids (dictionary, text book, etc., asking the teacher or their friends whenever they do not understand) √ √ √ b. moving to form small group √ √ √ c. taking notes on whatever they think important √ √ √ d. using various aids to accomplish their task, for examples: dictionary, text book, work-sheet, etc. √ √ √ e. actively observing the material to elicit idea √ √ √ f. actively having discussion with the teacher and friends √ √ √ 50% 20% 30% 83% 17% 0% 100% 0% 0% students’ participation 1. the students’ participation in asking question √ √ √ 2. the students’ participation in suggesting idea √ √ √ 3. the students’ participation in group work a. taking the initiative to do the task √ √ √ b. helping their friends to understand the instruction √ √ √ c. helping their friends in examining the material √ √ √ d. helping their friends to generate idea and to find the vocabulary needed to do the task √ √ √ e. actively involved in group discussion √ √ √ f. helping motivate their friends √ √ √ 50% 0% 50% 50% 38% 13% 75% 25% 0% note: h = high m = medium l = low 163 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee high. it meant that almost all students gave attention to the teacher’s explanation and instruction, and gave attention to the material, examining them seriously, or at least not more than five students who were reluctant to pay attention. the enthusiasm of students increased when the pair composition method was implemented; second meeting was 50%, third meeting was 83%, and in the fourth meeting was 100%. it was indicated by the observation data showing that the enthusiasm of students was in the high level. almost students tried to understand the instruction by asking the teacher or their friends whenever they did not understand, and using some learning aids such as dictionary, text book, etc. also, there were some students actively having discussion with the teacher and friends, and observing the material to elicit their ideas. implementing pair composition method in writing descriptive text also could activate the students’ participation. from the data analyzed showed that in the second meeting the students’ participation was 50% high and 50% low, there were half students being high participation, and half students were less of their participation. then in the fourth meeting the students’ participation was getting increased tobe 75% high. the observation data showed that there were several students participate in giving ideas, and in group working there were many students who participated in taking initiative to do the task, helping their firends to understand the instruction, to generate idea in pair to make good descriptive writing, to find vocabulary needed to write descriptive text, and actively having pair discussion. the students were supported to find help of their friends each other to complete their writing, share idea, and correct errors analysis each other. they tried to understand how to write descriptive text well, construct the text by good identification and description. the students tried to find out the difficult words to translate from bahasa indonesia into english using dictionary, or asking teacher or friends. it was caused pair composition method was done to build the cooperation between two students (pair) in form of cooperative learning that members held accountable for doing their share of the work and mastering all materials (felder and brent, 2004: 2). the role of pair composition method on students’ descriptive writing assessment pair composition method had the role as a method that can be applied to improve students’ descriptive writing skill. it was showed by the data analyzed of students’ assessment before implementing (pre-test) pair composition method and after implementing (posttest) pair composition method. the data clearly could be seen as below: table 2. result of students’ descriptive writing assessment stage average of total score pre-test 63,8 post-test 82,5 increase in score 18,7 from the above table, the average of students’ score in pre-test or before implementing pair composition method is 63,8 and the students’ score after implementing pair composition method was getting increased with the average score was 82,5. the increasing of students’ assessment was 18,7 from the score before (pre-test). the result of students’ score before implementing pair composition method was classified into four categories. there were 6% students’ score that was categorized as excellent, 24% students’ score categorized as good, 12% students’ score categorized as fair, and students’ score dominated 58% as poor category. maya nurmayanti the use of pair composition method 164 before implementing pair composition method, almost students’ assessment were poor, because there were some students who have not known the construction of descriptive text detail, especially description part on generic structure, and there were some errors on their language features. there were still several students using simple past, and incorrect in using simple present tense. the students’ descriptive writing skill improved after implementing pair composition method. it could be described from the students’ descriptive writing post-test assessment. the score of students were increased. there were 17 students (more than a half of students in the class) got score more than 85, 12 students got score for about 71-84, 2 students got 68 and 70, and 2 students got score less than 65. the students’ score after implementing pair composition method was classified into four categories. there were 52% (more than a half of students in the class) students’ score that was categorized as excellent, 36% students’ score categorized as good, 6% students’ score categorized as fair, and 6% students’ score categorized as poor. here, excellent category was dominated than in the result of students’ score before implementing pair composition method. then, when they tried to make good descriptive writing using pair compoosition method, they also tried to understand what the descriptive text is and how to write it well by implementing generic structure and language feature of descriptive text that they have learnt, it regarded doing by learning in active learning, such as prince (2004) said that active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they were doing, learning by doing. so, after implementing pair composition method in writing descriptive text, they were getting more understand how generic structure and language feature construct the descriptive writing. the students’ attitude toward learning process of pair composition method this research found that the students gave positive attitude toward learning process using pair composition method in writing descriptive text. more than a half of students strongly agreed that they felt enjoy learning descriptive text using pair composition method and they were interested in implementing it. the students’ attitude toward learning process was observed from the data collected using interview and questionnaire. table 3. categories of students’ score before implementing pair composition method no interpretation score student % 1 2 3 4 excellent (85-100) good (71-84) fair (66-70) poor (0-65) 86, 86. 77, 77, 79, 78, 75, 76, 72, 83. 70, 69, 68, 70. 57, 52, 50, 52,58, 52, 52, 51, 49, 56, 59, 58, 55, 58, 51, 62, 62, 61, 61. 2 8 4 19 6% 24% 12% 58% table 4. categories of students’ score after implementing pair composition method no interpretation score student % 1 2 3 4 excellent (85-100) good (71-84) fair (66-70) poor (0-65) 88, 89, 97, 98, 89, 95, 91, 87, 89, 89, 86, 87, 86, 89, 89, 96, 88. 80, 83, 73, 84, 74, 76, 78, 73, 79, 84, 75, 77. 68, 70. 61, 63. 17 12 2 2 52% 36% 6% 6% 165 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee based on the interview, the students have never learn descriptive text using pair composition where they could write the descriptive text in pair, giving ideas, correcting, and evaluating each other to complete the writing. pair composition method had several advantages for students in writing descriptive text; (1) providing the opportunities for sharing ideas, developing the text, giving and asking the vocabulary (2) correcting the writing errors each other (3) increasing the knowladge in writing descriptive text, how to write the descriptive text well based on the generic structures and language features (4) to motivate students being active to write and understand about descriptive text (5) to make easy finding the difficult vocabulary because the students were able to ask and share each other. almost all the students who were interviewed stated that pair composition method had no disadvantages, and only one student stated that sometimes it made the atmosphere of class noise. from ten statements of questionnaire presented by researcher, the students’ attitude toward learning processes using pair composition method was dominated strongly agree and agree. it meant the students gave positive attitude toward pair composition method. 70% students strongly agreed that learning english increase the knowledge in learning foreign language, 64% students strongly agreed that learning english aspecially in writing descriptive text using pair composition method made students more active in pair group work, so that could help students to develop their descriptive writing. 55% students strongly agreed that pair composition method made students understand how to write descriptive text well, and agreed that students felt enjoy learning english and they could focus to the material given by teacher. and only 6% students stated that they disagreed that pair composition method can make them brave to write descriptive text in english. these happened because pair composition method creates alive and enjoyable condition and increases participation among the students demanded to be more active in learning, moreover having discussion with their partner, felder and brent (2009: 5) said “instructors who switch to active learning and follow those recommendations almost always say that their classes are much more lively and enjoyable and the quality of learning goes up dramatically”. conclusion the research objectives of this research were to find out and describe the roles of pair composition method on students’ behaviour in learning processes and their descriptive writing assessment, and to know students’ attitude toward learning processes of pair composition method. the data was collected from observation data of students’ behaviour, students’ descriptive writing asessment, interview and questionnaire for students. based on the data processing and discussion, the roles of pair composition method are increasing students’ behaviour in learning processes and their descriptive writing assessment, as drawn on data that 66% the seriousness of students during learning process was high, 78% the enthusiasm of students in doing task was high, and 58% the students’ participation was high. the increasing of students’ assessment can be seen when before implementing pair composition method there were 58% students categorized poor and after implementing there were 52% students’ score categorized as excellent. from students’ attitude along with interview and questionaire found that more that 50% students gave positive attitude as strongly agreed that pair composition method on writing maya nurmayanti the use of pair composition method 166 descriptive text was lively and enjoyable, supporting the students to be more active and understand how to write descriptive text well. references bashrin, s. d. (2013). productive skills: teaching beginners in english medium school. unpublished report, brac university, dhaka, bangladesh. brown, h. d. (2000). principle of language learning and teaching. fourth edition. new york: addison wasley longman, inc. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principle: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. second edition. new york: longman creswell, j. w. (2009). design qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approach, third edition. united states of america: sage publication inc. felder, r. m. and brent, r. (2004). cooperative learning. national effective teaching institute, 2004, pp. e-1 – e-22. felder, r. m. and brent, r. (2009). active learning: an introduction. asq higher education brief, 2(4), pp. 1-5. fraenkel, j. r. and wallen, n. e. (2009). how to design and evaluate research in education, seventh edition. new york: mcgraw-hill companies, inc. gerot, l. and wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. sydney: gerd stabler. heaton, j. b. (1990). writing english language tests. england: longman group (fe) ltd. johnson, d. w., johnson, r. t., & smith, k. a. (1998). active learning: cooperation in the college classroom (2nd ed). edina, mn: interaction book co. knapp, p. and watkins, m. (2005). genre, text, grammar: technologies for teaching and assessing writing. sydney: university of south wales press. oskamp, s, and schultz, w. p. (2005). attitudes and opinions (third edition). new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates, inc. pinter, a. (2006). teaching young language learners. new york: oxpor university press. prince, m. j. (2004). does active learning work? a review of the research. j. engr. education, 93(3), 223-231. sa’diah, h. improving students’ ability in writing descriptive text through a picture series-aided learning strategy. the english teacher, vol. xl: 164-182. scarino, a. and liddicoat, a. j. ( 2009). teaching and learning languages: a guide. australia: geon impact printing pty ltd. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 77 the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress production rudha widagsa english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pgri yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: widagsa@upy.ac.id sri wiyanah english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pgri yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: wiyanapbi@gmail.com primasari wahyuni indonesian language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pgri yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: sariprima87@gmail.com apa citation: widagsa, r., wiyanah, s., & wahyuni, p. (2019). the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress production. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 7784. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1647. received: 19-01-2019 accepted: 15-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: generally, word stress tends to be ignored and is not considered a serious problem in indonesian efl; most teachers only focus on lexical and grammatical aspects of english. in fact, the prosodic features existing in english greatly affect meaning. this research, therefore, is intended to find out how indonesian learners of english (ile) produce the english word stress. the stressed syllables were identified by using the highest pitch in each word. this research involved 20 respondents whose mother tongue is indonesian. praat software was applied to analyze the recordings, including measuring the pitch of each word. word stress is indicated by the highest pitch of each word. the lowest pitch indicates weak stress. the result illustrated that ile produces inappropriate word stress in second language learning. most of them are not able to distinguish between strong and weak stressed syllables. this is because in their native language, prosodic features, such as word stress, do not prevail. thus, english word stress production was heavily influenced by indonesian features of stress. from the 36 words that become the instrument of this research, less than 50% were pronounced correctly, in most cases, and the highest pitch fell on last syllables. the absence of prosodic features in indonesian language and limited knowledge on english phonetics drive the ile to pronunciation error. keywords: acoustic measurement; indonesian efl; phonetics; pronunciation; prosodic features; word stress. introduction the “sound of a language”, which is primarily transmitted by prosodic features, does not only convey the content of the utterance, but also other important communicative information. it marks the emotional state of the speaker and can have the effect of being calming, detesting, encouraging, warm, cold, intimate or strange. moreover, individual way of speaking is a key feature of a speaker’s personality, an audible “business card”. for these reasons, prosodic features should be taught in the first line when teaching pronunciation. in indonesia, pronunciation and the other aspects of english phonetics have not been a major concern in english language teaching (elt). almost all english teachers get students to study grammar and vocabulary, practice functional dialogue, take part in productive skill activities and become competent in listening and reading. yet, some of these teachers make little attempt to teach pronunciation in any overt way and only give attention to it in passing (harmer, 2001). however, pronunciation is crucial in communication. it helps students to solve serious intelligibility problems. pronunciation not only makes students aware of different sounds and sound features, but can also improve their ability in using spoken english properly. understanding spoken english involves more than the ability to pronoun individual words correctly. it also rudha widagsa, sri wiyanah, & primasari wahyuni the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress production 78 involves an ability to hear and produce stress of english words. on the other hand, students of english tend to ignore stress patterns when they learn pronunciation or vocabulary which consequently leads them to serious pronunciation problems, the problem with comprehension and intelligibility. communication in spoken english is organized by suprasegmental features. these suprasegmental features are similar to musical signals. thus, for the purposes of teaching pronunciation, the teacher needs to understand these musical signals work. kelly (2001) notes suprasegmental features, as the name implies, are features of speech which generally apply to groups of segments or phonemes. the features which are important in spoken english are stress, intonation, and how sounds change in a connected speech which is called the rhythm. the features of these musical signals are usually bound up in the first language. it means that the features are deeply rooted in the minds of students. thus, it is common for indonesian students of english to find it difficult when they hear themselves speak with these suprasegmental features of english. some features of english prosody nearly always lead to difficulties for language learners: typical melodic contours (e.g. the accomplishing of the final low at the end of utterances), assignment and production of lexical stress, structuring and realization of rhythm. depending on their first language or prior acquired foreign languages, speakers exhibit different problems with their english l2 prosody (hirschfeld, 1994). looking more closely at that problem, a teacher can help overcome this barrier and other challenges by thinking of the goal of pronunciation instruction not as helping students to sound like native speakers, but as helping them to learn the core elements of spoken english so that they can be easily understood by others. it can be said that the main concern in teaching pronunciation is intelligibility. clearly, some pronunciation features are more important than others. pronouncing the word ‘water’ with /wɔ:tə/ or /wɑdər/ may not cause a lack of intelligibility and it is less significant rather than stressing words and phrases inappropriately. in the case of intelligibility, students may have their own accent or retain their first language accent. they do not have to sound exactly like an american or a british. therefore, speaking english with a native accent, such as indonesian accent is acceptable. although students are allowed to retain their accent when speaking english, they may not be intelligible if they use inappropriate stress in communication. hence, stress is admittedly crucial in spoken english. learners have to be able to put the proper stress in english words. stress is applied in individual words in phrases, and in sentences. shifting it around in a phrase or a sentence causes change emphasis or meaning. all english words will contain one syllable that has primary stress: a syllable that is more prominent than the other syllables in the word (meyer, 2002). in the word ladder, for example, the primary stress lies on the first syllable because of the two syllables in this word, the first syllable is more prominent than the second one. many other variations in stress can be associated with the grammatical structure of the words. english words with more than one syllable mostly have a fixed stress alternation pattern. there are not many rules to show which syllable of a word will be stressed, learners of english usually have to learn the stress alternations of a word along with its meaning, spelling, and pronunciation. meanwhile, in indonesia, stress is considered an unimportant subject to be taught. correspondingly, students of english in indonesia barely perceive english word stress alternation. this misunderstanding of stress can cause vital intelligibility problem. there are previous research related to second language production in accordance with suprasegmental features, one of them is roosman (2010) who investigated the influence of indonesian on the production of dutch word stress. he found that the realization of dutch stressed vowels by the indonesian students is probably influenced by the durational structure of their mother tongue. the indonesian students of dutch realized stressed vowels with more lengthening than the dutch native speakers did. this may be because the length is not a distinctive feature in indonesian; it does not differentiate one vowel from another, as is the case with the lax (short) vowels and their tense (long) counterparts in dutch. the other one is adam (2013). he writes about how prosodic elements have abilities to improve pronunciation in english language learners. he states that second language pronunciation can improve to be near native-like with the implementation of certain criteria, such english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 79 as the utilization of prosodic elements. with the emphasis on meaningful communication and the understanding that speech production is affected by speech perception, there is a need to integrate prosodic with communicative activities providing situations to develop student pronunciation through listening and speaking. this short overview examines such elements. however, research on word stress, more specifically in english word stress by english-l2 speakers especially indonesian students has not been done. thus, this research intend to investigate the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress. the research question proposed is how does the indonesian prosodic feature affect the english word stress? the nature of stress some languages are said to have fixed stress or to be fixed-stress languages. for example, in indonesian and javanese, stress normally found at the last syllable (si’ji, lo’ro, te’lu or sa’tu, du’a, ti’ga). in a general sense, stress is variable in english. if a person still learning english as a new language says ‘beginner instead of be’ginner, those who already know the language consider it a mispronunciation, even though the meaning is probably clear enough. in english, words stress is not fixed – but does that mean that it is not predictable? stress in english is produced by; (1) increased activity of the respiratory muscles, producing loudness, as well as by (2) exaggeration of consonant and vowel properties, such as vowel height and stop aspiration, and (3) exaggeration of pitch so that low pitches are lower and high pitches are higher (ladefoged, 2001). the pitch of a sound itself is an auditory property that enables a listener to place it on a scale going from low to high, without considering its acoustic properties. english is a language with variable stress rather than fixed stress. determining syllable can be difficult. english words with more than one syllable mostly have a fixed stress pattern. there are not many rules to show which syllable of a word will be stressed, learner of english usually has to learn the stress pattern of a word along with its meaning, spelling, and pronunciation. stress also has a function in distinguishing between a noun and a verb or an adjective and an adverb. many other variations in stress can be associated with the grammatical structure of the words. in english morphological derivation word, there are kinds of alternation in stress that can occur. it is not easy to define stress from a listener’s point of view. a stressed syllable is often but not always, louder than an unstressed syllable. roach (1991) added that every syllable is said on some pitch; pitch in speech is closely related to the frequency of vibration of the vocal folds and to the musical notion of low and highpitched notes. it is essentially a perceptual characteristic of speech. it means that if one syllable of our “nonsense word” is said with a pitch that is noticeably different from that of the others, this will have a strong tendency to produce the effect of prominence. for example, if all syllables are said with low pitch except for one said with high pitch, the high-pitched syllable will be heard as stressed and the others as unstressed. method to analyze the stress alternation patterns in ile, the writer randomly chose 20 students from indonesian language education study program of university of pgri yogyakarta. the twenty students came from different background. since they are student-teachers, they should be able to pronounce every single english word correctly and manage to convey the actual meaning in conversation. the object of this research is the highest pitch in each of instrumental words in order to draw the stress patterns produced by the participants. the data were obtained from the recording of participants. the research applies sound wave and pitch diagram. here, the praat software was used to describe the sound of language then converted to sound wave or pitch. there were two steps in collecting the data, firstly, the students are asked to listen to the instruments (5 morphological derivation words). secondly, the students are asked to produce what they exactly heard while the researcher records them one by one. after the listening and recording process is done, the sounds are converted to soundwaves and pitch graphs using praat free software. the soundwaves and pitch graphs are segmented syllable by syllable to analyze the movement of the pitch then the stress pattern can be drawn and seen. results and discussion every word in english has major stress (primary stress) that is stronger than the others. there are several ways to measure the word stress, such as loudness, syllable length, pitch, and vocal rudha widagsa, sri wiyanah, & primasari wahyuni the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress production 80 quality. this research does not use all of these parameters, only the pitch contours will be used as a reference point of word stress. here are the instrumental words and the result of the measurement. table 1. instrumental words primary stress on first syllable phonetic transcription primary stress on second syllable phonetic transcription primary stress on the third syllable phonetic transcription accident /ˈaksɪd(ə)nt/ acceptance /əkˈsɛpt(ə)ns/ afternoon /ɑːftəˈnuːn/ strawberry /ˈstrɔːb(ə)ri/ vanilla /vəˈnɪlə/ absolute /ˈabsəluːt/ seventy /ˈsɛv(ə)nti/ examine /ɪɡˈzamɪn/ seventeen /sɛv(ə)nˈtiːn/ analyse /ˈan(ə)lʌɪz/ analysis /əˈnalɪsɪs/ analytical /anəˈlɪtɪk(ə)l/ diplomat /ˈdɪpləmat/ diplomacy /dɪˈpləʊməsi/ diplomatic /dɪpləˈmatɪk photograph /ˈfəʊtəɡrɑːf/ photography /fəˈtɒɡrəfi/ photographic /ˌfəʊtəˈɡrafɪk/ politic /ˈpɒlɪtɪk/ politician /pɒlɪˈtɪʃ(ə)n/ political /pəˈlɪtɪk(ə)l/ monotone /ˈmɒnətəʊn/ monotony /məˈnɒt(ə)ni/ monotonic /mɒnə(ʊ)ˈtɒnɪk/ yesterday /ˈjɛstədi/ tomorrow /təˈmɒrəʊ/ recommended /ˌrɛkəˈmɛndɪd/ president /ˈprɛzɪd(ə)nt/ policeman /pəˈliːsmən/ guarantee /ɡar(ə)nˈtiː/ salary /ˈsaləri/ employer /ɪmˈplɔɪə/ employee /ɛmplɔɪˈiː/ personal /ˈpəːs(ə)n(ə)l/ repairman /rɪˈpɛːmən/ personel /pəːsəˈnɛl/ translating /transˈleɪt/ translation /transˈleɪʃ(ə)n/ gasoline /ˈɡasəliːn/ elephant /ˈɛlɪf(ə)nt/ gorilla /ɡəˈrɪlə/ kangaroo /ˌkaŋɡəˈruː/ february /ˈfɛbrʊəri/ december /dɪˈsɛmbə/ overlook /əʊvəˈlʊk/ looking at table 1, it is clear that every word in english has specific stress. if the word only consists of one syllable then there is only one primary stress, if the word consists of more than one syllable then there will be major stress (primary stress) and the other syllables have a lower stress level and even none. in this research, the instrumental words consist of three categories of words based on the location of stress, namely the first, second and third syllable. unlike english, indonesian does not have word stress. indonesian speakers generally do not know the position of word stress in english. the following is the result of taking the data of speakers of indonesian in pronouncing the english word. in taking the data, 20 respondents in this research first listen to the word to be pronounced. respondents were asked to listen to native english speakers audiofile then practice the instruments, every instrumental word is inserted in a carrier sentence in order to make it sound more natural. in the data analysis, the recording of the respondents was analyzed by using praat software to find out the highest pitch position. this position is the reference that word stress falls on a particular syllable where the highest pitch is located. figure 1. the illustration of pitch contour measurement english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 81 figure 1 is one example of data retrieval in this research. in figure 1, the dashed vertical red line is the highest pitch marker of the word 'accident'. the highest pitch lies in the final syllable whereas in english the word ‘accident’ is a word with the word stress on the first syllable. further, the results of data recapitulation of all respondents were presented in three tables. the first table (table 2) is a table in which the first syllable gets more stress than the other syllables, the second table (table 3) is the word category with the word stress on the second syllable, and the third table (table 4) is the word instrument that has the stress of the word on the third syllable. table 2. english word stress on first syllable it can be seen from table 2 that less than 50% of respondents say the word instrument with the correct word stress. 57% word stress falls on the third or last syllable. only 24% of respondents put stress on the first syllable. the words ‘elephant’ and ‘translating’ occupy the top position where less than two respondents pronounce correctly. in those two words, most respondents put stress on the third syllable. it can be concluded that more than 75% of respondents put stress words in the wrong position. in indonesian, generally the last syllable gets more emphasis than the other syllables (zanten & goedemans, 2009; zanten & heuven, 1998). in this case, since word stress does not exist in indonesian phonological system, the speakers tend to ignore the existence of word stress in english phonological system. in other words, the production of english word stress by indonesian native speakers was greatly influenced by the prosodic system of indonesian language. apart from this, li, zhang, li, lo, & meng (2010) also mentioned that chinese learners of english produced inappropriate english word stress due to the influence of chinese prosodic features. table 3. english word stress on second syllable words number of responde nts actual data recorde d correct percentage variety of stressed syllables 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th accident 20 20 4 20% 4 7 9 0 0 strawberry 20 20 10 50% 10 0 10 0 0 seventy 20 20 7 35% 7 3 10 0 0 analyse 20 20 2 10% 2 4 14 0 0 diplomat 20 18 7 39% 7 2 9 0 0 photograph 20 20 5 25% 5 8 7 0 0 politic 20 20 5 25% 5 2 13 0 0 monotone 20 20 3 15% 3 2 15 0 0 yesterday 20 20 6 30% 6 5 9 0 0 president 20 20 4 20% 4 3 13 0 0 salary 20 20 7 35% 7 1 12 0 0 personal 20 20 4 20% 4 1 15 0 0 translating 20 20 1 5% 1 1 18 0 0 elephant 20 20 0 0% 0 4 16 0 0 february 20 20 7 35% 7 6 1 6 0 total 72 49 171 6 0 24% 16% 57% 2% 0% words no. of responde nts actual data recorde d correct percentage variety of stressed syllables 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th afternoon 20 20 7 35% 3 10 7 0 0 absolute 20 20 8 40% 5 7 8 0 0 seventeen 20 20 5 25% 10 5 5 0 0 analytical 20 20 6 30% 0 2 6 6 6 diplomatic 20 18 1 5% 7 7 1 3 0 rudha widagsa, sri wiyanah, & primasari wahyuni the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress production 82 table 3 shows that the majority of respondents placed word stress on the third syllable with 39%, while the second position occupied by the first syllable with the percentage of 24%, 19% in the second syllable, and 18% in the fourth syllable. the primary stress is supposed to be in the second syllable. since most indonesian words has primary stress on the last syllable, respondents unconsciously make mistakes by placing the word stress on wrong syllables. table 4. english word stress on third syllable table 4 surprisingly shows a different result in which the highest percentage of word stress fell in the first syllable instead of the last syllable. however, indonesian learners of english still put inappropriate stress. it was supposed to be in the third syllable. in this experiment, only 27% of respondents were correctly put stress on the right syllable. figure 2 shows the total result of the measurement of english word stress produced by indonesian learners. photographic 20 20 1 5% 7 4 1 8 0 political 20 20 4 20% 2 4 4 10 0 monotonic 20 20 4 20% 5 2 4 9 0 recommended 20 20 2 10% 4 4 2 10 0 guarantee 20 20 10 50% 8 2 10 0 0 employee 20 20 7 35% 8 5 7 0 0 personnel 20 19 6 30% 6 7 6 0 0 gasoline 20 20 8 40% 7 5 8 0 0 kangaroo 20 20 5 25% 11 4 5 0 0 overlook 20 20 6 30% 6 8 6 0 0 total 89 76 80 46 6 30% 25% 27% 15% 2% words number of respondent s actual data recorde d correct percentage variety of stressed syllables 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th afternoon 20 20 7 35% 3 10 7 0 0 absolute 20 20 8 40% 5 7 8 0 0 seventeen 20 20 5 25% 10 5 5 0 0 analytical 20 20 6 30% 0 2 6 6 6 diplomatic 20 18 1 5% 7 7 1 3 0 photographic 20 20 1 5% 7 4 1 8 0 political 20 20 4 20% 2 4 4 10 0 monotonic 20 20 4 20% 5 2 4 9 0 recommended 20 20 2 10% 4 4 2 10 0 guarantee 20 20 10 50% 8 2 10 0 0 employee 20 20 7 35% 8 5 7 0 0 personnel 20 19 6 30% 6 7 6 0 0 gasoline 20 20 8 40% 7 5 8 0 0 kangaroo 20 20 5 25% 11 4 5 0 0 overlook 20 20 6 30% 6 8 6 0 0 total 89 76 80 46 6 30% 25% 27% 15% 2% english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 83 chart 1. total result of measurement the graph shows that most respondents did not pay attention to english word stress. the percentage is not higher than 50 percent. the words ‘seventy’ and ‘employee’ occupy the highest number of correct. the word ‘employee’ has similar characteristics with most indonesian words, the primary stress falls on the last syllable. on the contrary, the word ‘seventy’ is also indicated the highest number of correct, yet its stress is on the first syllable. it is because the word ‘seventy’ is more familiar than the word ‘employee’. indonesian learners used the identical word of ‘seventeen’ which has similar primary stress. influence of indonesian prosodic system on english word stress from the findings, it can be seen that the success of indonesian speakers in the production of english word stress was very low in which from 36 words that become the instrument of this research, less than 50% was pronounced correctly. second language acquisition (sla) experts argue that the absence of certain phonological features causes an influence on the production of second language pronunciation (adisasmito-smith, 1999; munson & solomon, 2004; baker, 2005). in addition, zanten & goedemans (2009) also mentioned that the inexistence of prosodic features in the indonesian language affected the production of second language acquisition. the absence of prosody in indonesia causes a negative transfer to learning english since english has prosodic features. english learning in indonesia does not consider pronunciation as an important part. the success of learning english is measured from the results of written exams, such as national examinations, the teachers of english do not pay attention to the feature. furthermore, english is only a subject in schools, it is not used as a tool of communication, the teachers do not even use the language as a medium of instruction in teaching english subject. as a result, pronunciation becomes neglected and it certainly affects the less sensitive english learning outlook with english sounds including the prosodic features in english. the features of a language as prosodic features that differ from one language and other languages can affect the production of each other (mcallister, flege, & piske, 2002). the error of pronunciation of the word stress spoken by the respondents in this research is caused by the influence of the indonesian prosodic system which is different from the english language. indonesian word stress is not a distinguishing feature, while word stress in english is a distinguishing feature (zanten & heuven, 1998). it can be concluded that the factors that most influence the success of native-like pronunciation are knowledge and awareness about prosodic features in learning english both in the traditional classroom and in the online classroom. otlowski (1998) also added that the pronunciation of the second language should be taught by being integrated with prosody, communicatively in order that the learner is able to communicate effectively. rudha widagsa, sri wiyanah, & primasari wahyuni the influence of indonesian prosodic features on english word stress production 84 some efl experts place more emphasis on learning outcomes in native-like areas, while some other efl experts like adams-goertel (2013) emphasized orientation on an understandable approach that develops clear pronunciation styles and easily understood by both native and non-native speakers, native-like is not a primary goal. the “understanding” is also not oriented to the perfection of pronunciation; most of the efl learning cannot achieve this goal. however, word stress is a crucial feature in english, it determines meaning. many identical english words which have various meanings are only distinguished by the word stress. this is due to the prosody. therefore, if english learners do not pay attention to the existing prosodic features in english, it could be a misunderstanding. conclusion from the analysis, it can be concluded that indonesian speakers do not consider the stress of words in english as an important feature in communication. this is because in the phonology system of indonesian, prosodic feature is not a distinctive feature. thus, indonesian speakers are unaware of the importance of such features in the mastery of spoken english. this was proved by the error pronunciation of the word instruments in this research. english learners may retain their indonesian accents when speaking english, but not stress. error production of stress words will cause misunderstandings in communication. english learners in indonesia should be able to put english word stress appropriately since such mistakes can lead to shift and 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(2009). prominence in indonesian stress, phrases, and boundaries. wacana, 11(2), 197–225. zanten, e. v., & heuven, v. j. v. (1998). word stress in indonesian: its communicative relevance. nusa, 53, 1-20. adjacency pairs taufiqulloh a self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for indonesian efl learners a self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for indonesian efl learners taufiqulloh department of english education, tegal university of pancasakti, indonesia email: taufiqkayla@gmail.com apa citation: taufiqulloh. (2014). a self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for indonesian efl learners. english review: journal of english education, 3(1), 50-58 received: 19-10-2014 accepted: 02-11-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: this self-assessment model is developed to help efl students improve their achievement in academic writing, more particularly essay writing. in english department of pancasakti university tegal, academic writing is the course subject which develops models and practices of essay writing in order that students are actively engaged in rhetorical problem-solving. the development of this self-assessment model was derived from the analysis of both theoretical and empirical studies of self-assessment in efl writing. the self-assessment model developed in this study consists of four kinds of selfassessment instruments: self-edit checklist of writing dimensions (cwd), checklist of writing strategies (cws), survey questionnaire of writing interest and awareness (swia), and questionnaire of learning monitoring strategies (qlms). this self-assessment model can be an alternative model in teaching academic writing to efl students at university level, more particularly the students of english department, pancasakti university tegal. keywords: self-assessment model, academic writing, indonesian efl learners introduction it is generally acknowledged that in the field of efl learning, students of any english department in indonesian colleges or universities should be able to pursue good performance in writing as producing a piece of scientific work is a part of the crucial requirements in completing their study. it has been widely known that writing in foreign language teaching has become more important today as it is not only an object of study but a system of communication (weigle, 2000). writing is different from spoken language in form and use. in essay writing, for example, learners are required to not only invent, express and organize ideas as well as translate them into readable texts, but also to make use of correct grammar and sentence patterns. in higher education, assessment plays an important role to the success of the teaching and learning process. it shapes the experience of the students and influences their behavior more than the teaching they receive. (bloxam & boyd, 2007 and orsmond, merry and reiling, 2000:24). in other words, selecting effective assessment method or model is of value to the teaching itself. the self-assessment model developed in this study is considered as alternative technique in teaching academic writing to university students which is more student-centered. through this model, students are expected to do effective self-editing strategies in writing, figure out their writing interest and awareness, learning monitoring strategies which result to better writing achievement. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee this self-assessment model was developed on the basis of metacognitive theory in which metacognitive skills are important in developing autonomous learning skills. the metacognitive skills cover self-regulation, self-monitoring and self-assessment. metacognition essentially means cognition about cognition; that is, it refers to second order cognitions: thoughts about thoughts, knowledge about knowledge or reflections about actions (eleonora and louca, 2008:15). self-assessment encourages the learners to recognize their strengths and weaknesses in learning, and cope with various learning problems. it promotes learning, raises learner’s awareness of their own learning, improve the goal orientation of individual learners, reduces teacher’s burdens of assessment and entails a long-term effect on the learner’s autonomy (oscarson, 1989:62). brown (2004:270) defines self-assessment as one of the primary foundation stones of successful learning. the ability to set one’s own goals both within and beyond the structure of a classroom curriculum, to pursue them without the presence of an external prod, and to independently monitor that pursuit all keys to success. according blanche and merino (1989:313) cited in oscarson (2009:63), selfassessment accuracy is a precondition for learner autonomy. students need to be able to appraise their performance accurately for themselves so that they themselves understand what more they need to learn and do not become dependent on their teachers. illes (2012:509) defines learner autonomy as the capacity to become competent speakers of the target language who are able to exploit the linguistic and other resources at their disposal effectively and creatively. in writing, self-assessment enables learners to monitor their progress in learning to write and set their own learning goals. in other words, it encourages the learners the reflection needed to gain increased control as writers (o’malley and pierce, 1996:151). self-assessment is a process through which students must be led (o’malley and pierce, 1996:39). teaching students to evaluate their progress begins with realizing that students will be learning new skills and it can be carried out with these four steps: setting criteria, applying criteria, setting and working towards goals. some empirical studies claimed the effectiveness of self-assessment in english language learning. sadek (2011) investigated the effect of self-assessment on the efl-learners’ expository essay writing. birjandi (2010) also explored the role of journal writing as a selfassessment technique in promoting iranian efl learners’ motivation. taufiqulloh (2010) conducted a classroom research with two learning cycles on implementing the model of self-editing checklist in the writing process of essay from oshima and hogue (2006). moreover, oscarson (2009) explored a study on how upper secondary school students perceived their own general and specific writing abilities regarding syllabus goals and whether these perceptions were affected by self-assessment practices. wang and wang (2007) introduced both affect test and self-assessment into the traditional assessment scheme of non-english major post-graduates esl writing classes. brown (2005:85), conducted a small study of students on an independent learning program.in addition to that, ferris (1995) developed and used a semester-long editing process approach to help advanced esl writing students become more self-sufficient as editors. taufiqulloh a self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for indonesian efl learners the results of the study showed that self-editing contributed a positive effect in improving student’s ability in writing. developing self-assessment model this self-assessment model was developed on the basis of needs analysis and the results of theoretical and empirical review on self-assessment practices in the context of efl learning, particularly in academic writing instruction. the needs analysis was conducted at the english department of pancasakti university tegal, intended to gather information relating to the teaching and learning process of academic writing. empirical review was also conducted to develop the model of this study. it was found that there was a model of self-assessment practices in essay writing instruction developed by oshima and hogue (2006). they developed a model of self-editing instrument which can be applied in the polishing stage of the writing process of essay. this model was then tested using a classroom action research to the students of english department, pancasakti university attending academic writing class. the result showed that such a model was effective in teaching essay writing: students’ writing achievement improved from pre-cycle to the last cycle. instead, some drawbacks were found regarding the implementation of the model. teacher didn’t set criteria before students were involved in selfpractices in the classroom. another problem found that such self-assessment instrument contains more general information about assessing the aspects of essay such as format, mechanics, content, organization, grammar and sentence structures, so that teacher worked hard on providing more detailed information on it. moreover, the form of self-edit checklist was dichotomous. students were only asked to write yes or no in the checklist without giving further explanation to their answers as they were supposed to do in responding to such checklist. according to youngman (1984) cited in cohen, et.al., (2005 ) youngman (1984:163) suggests that it is a natural human tendency to agree with a statement rather than to disagree with it; this suggests that a simple dichotomous question might build in respondent bias. the similar phenomenon was also found in research conducted by sadek (2011). she developed a model of self-editing instrument that was associated with the polishing stage of the writing process.. this instrument doesn’t provide detailed information about assessing all aspects of essay. she also developed another self-assessment intended to measure students’ attitude during academic writing instruction. in its implementation, it was not measured for its validity and reliability that resulted in biased evaluation. criteria was also not set before implementing self-assessment practices. considering some phenomena previously described, this selfassessment model in teaching academic writing for efl learners was developed. components of the model the components of self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for efl learners is described in the following figure: english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee figure 1: self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for efl learners mini lesson standard competence learning materials instructional objective formative assessment survey of writing interest and awareness (swia) questionnaire of learning monitoring strategies (qlms) checklist of writing dimensions (cwd) self-assessment checklist of writing strategies (cws) reflection learning indicators basic competencies writing process planning writing first draft assessing revising writing final copy editing -modeling -reviewing essay writing assignment summative assessment writing test self-assessment learning outcome feedback taufiqulloh a self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for indonesian efl learners drawn from the figure, this model encompasses twelve components: standard competence, basic competencies, learning indicators, instructional objective, learning materials, mini lesson, self-assessment instruments, feedback, writing process, formative assessment, summative assessments, learning outcome, and reflection. mini lesson (criteria) is an important part in self-assessment. teacher should provide criteria or standards students must follow in order that they can make judgment on their own. this is a key element of self-assessment. according to boud (1986:1) criterion is a requirement of self-assessment to be able to engage with and if possible involve students in both discussion and understanding of criteria and/or formulating the criteria used in assessment. while o’malley and pierce (1996) added that in order to carry out self-assessment, students must be led. this mini lesson is carried out by two activities: modeling and reviewing. teacher presents some models of essay to be critically reviewed in terms of strengths and weaknesses. three selfassessment instruments developed are checklist of writing dimension (cwd), checklist of writing strategies (cws), survey of writing interest and awareness (swia) and questionnaire of learning monitoring strategies (qlms). cwd was developed from the model of self-edit checklist from oshima and hogue (2006). through this checklist, students learn to self-edit several aspects of their essay writing including format, mechanics, content, organization, grammar and sentence structures. they self-edit their essay draft to have good format, correct spelling, punctuation and other mechanical skills. they also learn to assess whether their writing is interesting or not to read, and whether their writing is produced with care and thought or not, and whether or not their essay has a good organization. furthermore, students are able to recognize their mistakes on several grammatical aspects in their writing such as tenses, conjunctions, etc. in addition, since writing is an art, using various types of sentences in writing is artful. cws was developed from materials produced by the georgetown university evaluation assistance center (eac) east (1990) cited in o’malley (1996:154) cited in o’malley and pierce (1996). through this checklist, students assess their strategies before, during and after writing. pre-writing strategies focus on topic review and organization. students learn to recognize the strategies in generating ideas about the topic and making outline or semantic map of the topic. strategies used during writing focus on the content. after writing, students identify their strategies in rereading, editing and revising their essays. meanwhile, swia was developed from materials produced by the georgetown university evaluation assistance center (eac) east (1990) cited in o’malley (1996:154). it is employed to determine the students attitude toward academic writing. students are asked to identify their interest and awareness which include their perceptions, care, and seriousness in learning to write essay. simply, students are asked to indicate their attitudes in learning academic writing and gauge their improvement as writers. and qlms is employed to find out the ways the students monitor their own learning after they accomplish a certain task. feedback is another important part of self-assessment. it is merely an approach which determine the effectiveness of self-assessment practices. tutor feedback and student learning are inseparable (osmond., et.al., 2000). it is an essential component of virtually of every model of the writing process as it english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee motivates the writers to improve their next draft (hall, 1990:43). feedback during writing process improves not only student attitude to writing but writing performance if students are given unlimited opportunities to respond to teacher feedback and continue writing. (ferris,1995). thus, students do not rely on themselves in coping with their learning problems. the writing process in the model consists of planning, writing the first draft (drafting), assessing, revising, editing, and writing the final draft. relating to formative assessment, it includes all activities that provide information that is used as feedback to adapt teaching and learning in the classroom. brown (2004:6) said that formative assessment refers to a process assessment which is given during the course of instruction to show which aspect of the materials the students have mastered and where the remidial work is necessery. it is also called assessment of learning, used to improve learning by giving the student information on his or her learning progress while still learning. self-assessment plays a very important role in this kind of assessment. assessment is also called learning itself. the teaching and learning process of academic writing class in this study is more about assigning the students to practice writing essays on some given topics using the steps of writing process in this model. using self-edit checklist of writing dimensions (cwd), they practice editing and revising their essays by gathering feedback from their peers and teacher. through this activities, students are able to recognize their problems or barriers in writing and figure out the ways to cope with them. meanwhile, summative assessment in this model is conducted by giving writing test at the end of instruction to see overall progress of learning during learning to write through selfassessment practices. students’ writing strategies, interest and awareness as well as monitoring strategies, are also figured out through this type of assessment. finally, reflection should be carried out by both teacher and students regarding the learning outcome to set up the next instructional objectives. model implementation procedure the part presents a set of activities of both teacher and students in implementing self-assessment model in academic writing class. (see figure 2). as shown in figure 2, both teacher and students are involved in the following activities in implementing self-assessment model in academic writing class: lecturing at the beginning of instruction, teacher delivers the instructional objective of academic writing which was developed from the standard competence and basic competencies in the existing syllabus so that it enables students to figure out what to be achieved in learning academic writing, particularly essay writing. teacher also prepares the materials of essay writing as the subjects matters taught in academic writing class. regarding the instructional objective, the learning materials of essay embrace several aspects of essay writing such as the development of essay, types of essay, unity and coherence, sentence types and grammatical features in essay, rhetorical strategies, etc. taufiqulloh a self-assessment model in teaching academic writing for indonesian efl learners figure 2: implementation procedure of self-assessment model conducting mini lesson teacher plays a central role in applying mini lesson. this is about setting criteria with the involvement of the students so that self-assessment practices in the classroom can be worked out successfully. defining characteristics of self-assessment is the involvement of students in identifying standards and/or criteria to apply to their work and making judgments about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards (boud 1995: 12). through mini lesson, teacher presents some models of well-organized essays which have clarity in meaning, accuracy in format, mechanics, grammar and sentence structures, and clarity in content and organization. another form of mini lesson is reviewing. teacher provides sample essays to be reviewed with students in the classroom to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. conducting formative assessment after mini lesson, teacher assigns students to develop essay within a number of topics. using the steps of writing process developed in this model, teacher facilitates students to work in pairs or group to plan, and write, assess, revise, and refine their draft. teacher also monitors the progress of students’ works after doing self-revising and editing their draft and provides feedback for their writing problems. feedback is mainly addressed to refine students’ writing in terms of clarity in meaning (content and organization), accuracy in format, mechanics, language functions, unity and coherence. conducting summative assessment at the end of the writing instruction, teacher administers essay writing test to the students to find out the effect of self-assessment practices during the teaching and learning process teacher lecturing delivering objectives presenting learning materials mini lesson modeling reviewing formative assessment facilitating monitoring summative assessment assessing evaluating reflection facilitating identifying the instructional objective comprehen ding the product knowledge of essay writing reviewing sample essays (assessing and polishing) planning and developing essay assessing essay polishing essay using cwd identifying problems searching for feedback doing essay writing test filling out selfassessment instruments of metacognitive aspects (cws, swia and qlms) identifying strengths and weaknesses in writing making plans for improvement students english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee of academic writing. this summative test is timed based in which students develop essay on the given topics. teacher also distributes three types of self-assessment instruments: checklist of writing strategies (cws), survey questionnaire of writing interest and awareness (swia) and questionnaire of learning monitoring strategy (qlms). facilitating reflection learning outcome is then analyzed for reflecting or giving a meaning toward academic writing instruction with self-assessment practices. things that have not been passed or achieved would be recognized. the strengths and the weaknessess of the students in learning academic writing will be the reference to reset the instructional goals. conclusion this self-assessment model was developed from the results of needs analysis, theoretical and empirical review. it is different from the existing models in terms of content and implementation. the content embraces more self-assessment instruments that can be used to apply self-assessment practices in academic writing class in a wider domain, covering both cognitive and metacognitive learning aspects of the students. through this model, students not only learn to produce wellorganized essays, but also to figure out their attitude in terms of writing strategies, interest and awareness and learning monitoring strategies. finally, this model is addressed to be implemented in academic writing class of english department, pancasakti university tegal. instead, it can be implemented widespread through adaptation or adjustment. references birjandi p, (2010). the role of self-assessment in promoting iranian efl learners’ motivation. elt journal, 3(3). blanche, p. & merino, b. j., (1989). self assessment of foreign language skills: implications for teachers and researchers. language learning, 39. 313340. bloxam s, & boyd p, (2007). developing effective assessment in higher education: a practical guide. london: mcgraw hillopen university press boud, d. 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(2002). the writing process and process writing. in jack c. richards, willy a. renandya (eds.) methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice (pp.315-320). cambridge, new york: cambridge university press taras, m. (2001). the use of tutor feedback and student self-assessment insummative assessment tasks: towards transparency for students and for tutors. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 26(6), 289–306. wang, h., & wang, y. (2007). the addition of an affect test and self-assessment into esl writing assessment: process and effect. asian efl journal, 20. weigle (2000). assessing writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 metadiscourse markers written in introduction section of final project of unimus efl learners siti aimah english education department, faculty of foreign language and culture universitas muhammadiyah semarang, indonesia e-mail: siti.aimah@unimus.ac.id dodi mulyadi english education department, faculty of foreign language and culture universitas muhammadiyah semarang, indonesia e-mail: dodi@unimus.ac.id muhimatul ifadah english education department, faculty of foreign language and culture universitas muhammadiyah semarang, indonesia e-mail: muhimatul@unimus.ac.id apa citation: aimah, s., mulyadi, d., & ifadah, m. (2019). metadiscourse markers written in introduction section of final project of unimus learners. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 109-118. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1717. received: 04-01-2019 accepted: 13-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: metadiscourse marker is one of determining indicators of the quality of the writers’ writing. metadiscourse markers enable the writers to interact with the readers effectively. what commonly happens to many undergraduate students studying english as a foreign language is that they are not able to develop an engagement between themselves, their texts, and their readers. thus, this study investigates the types of metadiscourse markers used by unimus efl learners in final project introduction sections, and markers that are frequently used by them in their writing. by using qualitative and quantitative research method, seven introduction sections of final project of unimus efl learners focusing on qualitative and qualitative research methods were chosen purposively. as result, the study revealed that in writing introduction sections, the students used various metadiscourse markers, including interactive resources (transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, and code glosses) and interactional resources (hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mensions). among those categories, interactive resources were found to be frequently used by the learners rather than interactional resources. it means that the writers tended to give attention to and guided the readers through the text by establishing their interpretations explicitly rather than involving the readers in the argument through the use of markers in interactional dimension. keywords: final project; interactional metadiscourse; interactive metadiscourse; introduction section; marker; metadiscourse; writing. introduction writing final project is crucial for undergraduate students as the fulfillment in obtaining their bachelor degree. it is undeniable for them to write their english report and paper in which their text should be understandable to the readers. in order to be understandable, their text should be coherent. hence, it demands them to have the awareness on the text in order to make it comprehensible. writing a final project for efl learners is regarded as a challenging activity in which the language used in the text is quite different from those coming from the other departments in which they have to present it in english. it demands them to provide the text that is easily recognized by the readers. therefore, they should understand that there is a communication between the writer (through the text) and the readers in understanding the meaning/content. in fact, efl learners are commonly not aware that in writing, it is required a good interaction between the writer and the readers in order the messages that the writer would like to convey could be understood by the readers. this condition happens even though writing course has been studied intensively from the early semester. yet, their writing is commonly found incomprehensible to the readers. in writing, the learners, in this case, should build a communication through a cohesive and coherent text that enables the readers to have a better siti aimah, dodi mulyadi, & muhimatul ifadah metadiscourse markers written in introduction section of final project of unimus learners 110 understanding of what the writer’s intention. in order to understand the writer’s intention, it is required metadiscourse markers which are basically used to negotiate meaning (hyland, 2010). metadiscourse, which is principally used in both spoken and written texts, allows the writer to show the readers about the different parts of the text which are related and should be interpreted (hyland, 2010). it is emphasized on the use of language which is not only simply used to convey information about the fact, but also to present information to others through the organization of the text. it means that in writing, the writer needs not only to express his/her feeling and/or experience, but also to interact intimately with the readers explicitly and implicitly through a cohesive and coherent text which enables the readers to grasp the writermeaning. it is in line with hyland & tse (2004) who state metadiscourse is recognized as an important means of facilitating communication which support a writer’s position and build a relationship with an audience through their texts. by using metadiscourse, besides making easier in organizing the texts, it could also be intended to help the readers decode the message (dafouzmilne, 2008), and engage the readers through the texts themselves (hyland & tse, 2004). in engaging the readers, the writer should make a communication. metadiscourse is not only about the exchange of information, good or services, but also involves characters and attitudes of those who are communicating (hyland, 2015). it means that language is an outcome of interaction of different people who express through language, and metadiscourse is the way to verbalize and construct the interaction. in communicating through the text in which the writer should involve in both creating and sharing meanings, the writer should write in two levels: on one level he/she should provide information about the subject matter of the text. it means that it is needed for expanding propositional content. on the other level, the writer needs not to add anything to the propositional content but he/she should help the readers to organize, interpret, evaluate, and react to such material through the use of metadiscourse (hyland, 2010). in a very recent study, rustipa (2014) investigated metadiscourse in indonesian efl learners’ persuasive text. it revealed that the occurrences of textual marker types in efl learners’ persuasive texts were similar to those considered as standard proficient writing (extract from bawe corpus), while those of interpersonal marker types were different from the standard proficient writing. kuhi and mojood (2014) conducted a research about metadiscourse in newspaper genre: english and persian editorials. it showed that the predominant metadiscourse category in editorials genre was interactional category and the predominant metadiscourse feature was attitude markers (a subcategory of interactional category). the differences between two editorials were attributed to cultural/linguistic backgrounds of both groups of editorialists. in this study, two levels of metadiscourse markers proposed by hyland (2015) were used: interactive and interactional metadiscourses. the list of the categories, their functions, and the examples are presented in table 1. for investigating the use of metadiscourse markers in efl learners’ final project of unimus, particularly in writing introduction section, the study is limited on the writing of background of the study. in writing background of the study, the writer should clearly describe to the readers what is being researched and why in which it enables to have a communication intimately between the writer and the readers through the text. hence, some research questions are proposed as follow: 1. what kinds of metadiscourse are used by unimus efl learners in writing introduction section? 2. what are metadiscourse markers frequently used by unimus efl learners in writing introduction section? table 1. interactive and interactional metadiscourses adapted from hyland (2015) category function examples interactive metadiscourse transition express semantic relation between main clauses in addition / but / thus / and frame markers refer to discourse acts, sequences, or text stages finally / to conclude / my purpose is endophoric markers refer to information in other parts of the text noted above / see fig / in section 2 evidentials markers refer to source of information from other according to x / (y, 1990) / z states english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 texts code glosses help readers grasp meanings of ideational material namely /e.g. / such as / in other words interactional metadiscourse hedges withhold writer’s full commitment to proposition might / perhaps / possible / about boosters emphasize force or writer’s certainty in proposition in fact / definitely / it is clear that attitude markers express writer’s attitude to pro-position unfortunately / i agree / surprisingly engagement markers explicitly refer to or build relationship with reader consider / note that / you can see that self-mentions explicit reference to author(s) i / we / my / our method this research was employed by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. the quantitative data were tabulated to explicate the use of metadiscourse markers, while qualitative data were analyzed to describe the types of metadiscourse markers found in the texts. the present research focuses on the use of metadiscourse markers in quantitative and qualitative method academic text written by english undergraduate students. there were seven introduction sections of four qualitative methods and three quantitative methods from different topics, including language teaching, translation, and language assessment written by different efl learners. these final projects were selected from english department of universitas muhammadiyah semarang (unimus) who successfully graduated in 2017. the unit of analysis was metadiscourse markers in both interactive markers which covered transition, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, and code glosses, and interactional markers which comprised hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions. the data were taken by identifying the use of metadiscourse markers proposed by hyland (2015) from the students’ writing. the markers found from the students’ writing consisting of 5.363 words were classified by categorizing them into transitions, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, and code glosses which were categorized into interactive dimension, and those which were hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions were categorized into interactional dimension. those markers were then analyzed in detail to interpret based on some considerations of functional meaning and calculated to derive the frequency and percentage of using them in those words in which its function was to support the description. table 2. titles of final project from which data were selected no authors research method title year of completion 1. haque, s. qualitative a content analysis of english textbook related to contextual teaching and learning 2017 2. kumala, b. p. qualitative an analysis of grammatical errors on students’ writing 2017 3. paramitha, d. qualitative students’ difficulties in translating idiomatic expressions from english into indonesian 2017 4. zulfa, a. qualitative the analysis of “bahasa inggris” textbook seen from its quality 2017 5. ariyani, d. n. f. quantitative the implementation of explicit instruction (ei) and self-directed learning (sdl) to teach students writing 2017 6. saputri, e. a. d. quantitative the effectiveness of peer feedback technique and magic cards to improve students’ speaking skill 2017 7. solikhatun quantitative the influence of using textless comics and make a match on students’ writing of recount text 2017 siti aimah, dodi mulyadi, & muhimatul ifadah metadiscourse markers written in introduction section of final project of unimus learners 112 results and discussion types of metadiscourse markers used by unimus efl learners the finding reveals that metadiscourse markers, either interactive dimension or interactional dimension, perform in the students’ writing introduction sections. in the use of metadiscourse markers, the markers of interactive dimension mainly dominate in the students’ writing rather than interactional dimension. interactive resources help to guide the readers to interpret the text correctly (suhono & haikal, 2018). it means that the writer needs to organize a text in anticipating the readers’ needs and facilitating the readers by guiding them through the text itself (cao & hu, 2014; wei, li, zhou & gong, 2016). the result of metadiscourse markers found in the students’ writing of introduction sections could be seen in table 3. from table 3, it could be seen that there are 637 metadiscourse markers found in 5.363 words produced by 7 students’ writing of final project introduction sections which consist of 524 markers (82.3%) in interactive dimension and 113 markers (17.7%) in interactional dimension. it means that the use of metadiscourse markers in interactive dimensions which are dominated by the use of transitions (374 markers) is higher than interactional dimensions in which the highest marker used is hedges with the occurrence of 39 times. the use of metadiscourse markers by the learners are realized to help the writers in connecting the clauses and/or emphasizing what they have written through the texts. it means that metadiscourse markers are very important for the learners in organizing the sentences into a cohesive and coherent text so that the readers get easier in grasping the meaning. table 3. metadiscourse in introduction section writing category occurrence percentage category occurrence percentage transition 374 71.4% hedges 39 34.5% frame markers 20 3.82% boosters 21 18.6% endophoric markers 27 5.15% attitude markers 15 13.3% evidentials 33 6.30% engagement markers 17 15.0% code glosses 70 13.3 % self-mentions 21 18.6% interactive 524 82.3% interactional 113 17.7% metadiscourse markers frequently used by unimus efl learners in the efl learners’ introduction section writing, particularly in the interactive marker, the most frequent category of metadiscourse is transitions markers which comprise 374 markers (71.4%). the use of transitional markers in writing, according to wei, li, zhou & gong (2016) can be classified into three types, namely addition (e.g., moreover, in addition), comparison (e.g., similarly, in comparison) or contrast (e.g., however, by contrast), and inference (e.g., therefore, consequently). however, hyland (2015) argues that transitions are commonly used to emphasize on the use of any conjunctions which are used to express the semantic relation between main clauses, such as in addition, but, thus, and, etc., and help interpret the intended information through the texts (cao & hu, 2014). at this point, transitions are the most frequently used by the learners considering that the use of conjunctions are usually taught by the english lecturers in teaching writing so that they are so familiar and used to practice with the use of them. it means that the learners have a good knowledge of transitions to be applied in their writing. the use of transitions in selected introduction sections writing could be seen in the following examples. (1) therefore, students are demanded to earn spoken and written products, such as short functional texts, transactional texts, essay, etc. (2) yet, it also requires knowledge and understanding to choose the closest and the most proper equivalence in target language to properly convey the message contained in source language into target language. (3) however, the translator which in this case is students often encounters some difficulties during the translation process. those bold words, in the sentences (1), (2), and (3) indicate the use of transitions in the students’ writing of introduction sections. the use of and and yet is a part of the example of transitions commonly used by the learners for expressing the relation between words, phrases, sentences, and clauses. therefore and however which appear at the beginning of the sentence indicate result and contrast. the use of those transitions seems to be effective and good flow english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 113 of communication between the writer and the readers through the text in order to be sensible and comprehensible. the use of code glosses is in the second position of using the metadiscourse markers with the occurrence of 70 (13.3%). it helps the readers to grasp the appropriate meanings of elements in the texts (hyland, 2015). it also provides the information clearly about definition that is needed by the readers and/or gives the examples that refer to the things to be emphasized. in other words, code glosses are used to clarify what actually the writer’s communicative purposes are. the markers represent a number of basic communication strategies used in the negotiation of meaning in different context. the markers usually used are namely, such as, for example, in other words, etc. the use of those markers is to explain and elaborate on meaning, and help readers in grasping the information (wei, li, zhou, & gong, 2016). the followings are the examples of using the code glosses by the learners. (4) however, figurative language is also used in formal writing such as article or news in magazines and newspaper. (5) teaching english must cover four language skills namely: listening, speaking, reading and writing. from the sentences (4), and (5), it could be seen the use of code glosses such as and namely is intended to rephrase, explain and elaborate what has been said by the writer so that the readers are able to recover what the writer’s intended meaning is (hyland, 2015). code glosses are also required by the readers as guidance in interpreting, elaborating, and clarifying the examples needed (dehghan & chalak, 2015). the use of code glosses makes the readers easier in getting their understanding about what they are reading through the text. it could be seen from the sentence (4) which describes clearly to the readers about the figurative language which is commonly used in formal writing by emphasizing such as article or news in magazines and newspaper. the other example could be seen in sentence (5) in which the writer mentions that teaching english must cover four language skills by emphasizing the use of namely for mentioning the skills covered. the third one is evidentials which present source of information from other texts (cao & hu, 2014; hyland, 2015). according to wei, li, zhou, & gong (2016), there are two types of evidential markers: the integral and non-integral. integral relates to a cited source as part of the reporting sentence, and the non-integral places a cited source within parentheses or via a superscript number leading to a footnote, endnote or bibliography. the use of evidentials is basically to strengthen what they argue referring to the source of information from other texts. in using the source of the information through the markers, the occurrence is 33 (6.30%). it means that the learners have the knowledge for strengthening the information/statement written through the source of textual information by encoding them with the writing of according to x, (y, 2017), z states, etc. (6) according to alufohai (2016: 62), grammar at the sentence level is fundamental for the writing of compositions in english language. (7) as mentioned by wright (2002: 10), translating idiom is considered to be difficult, since idiom cannot be translated as word for word. (8) some evidences of the positive role of the incorporation of comics into school reading practices in the early years is provided by the results of marsh’s study in two sheffield schools in the united kingdom (marsh & millard 2000: 110). the sentences (6), (7), and (8) are categorized into non-integral markers in which it refers to the use of a cited source within parentheses. the evidentials markers are used to express the evidence that the writers have for their statement. those markers are required by the writers to refer to the information in other parts of the text. with the occurrence which achieves 6.30%, it indicates that the learners do not use many of them to strengthen their statement. their weakness of using evidential markers commonly deals with their knowledge of how to interpret what the sources state by relating to their own statements. it is understandable considering that the activity of writing is not much explored by them. that’s why it is frequently found that the evidential markers used by the learners do not refer to the things that they mention. the next rank is endophoric markers. according to hyland (2015), endophoric markers refer to information that could be found in other parts of the text. the use of endophoric markers in introduction sections could be found as much as 27 (5.15%) which are categorized into cataphoric and anaphoric (wei, li, zhou & gong, 2016). cataphoric refers to announcement, advance labelling, preview; and anaphoric deals with reminder, recapitulation, and review. siti aimah, dodi mulyadi, & muhimatul ifadah metadiscourse markers written in introduction section of final project of unimus learners 114 (9) the statement above is reinforced by the description of pre-observation in english education department of university of muhammadiyah semarang in the academic year 2016-2017. (10) based on that condition, the students need a stimulus to improve their english speaking performance. (11) based on the fact above, i would like to find out the difficulties encountered by students in translating idiomatic expression from english into indonesian by first knowing the quality of their translation product. from sentences (9), (10), and (11), mostly the writers want to emphasize on the use of endophoric markers referring to reminder, recapitulation, and review. the writers commonly have collected the information required to strengthen their arguments. therefore, the use of based on that condition and based on the fact above shows that the writers would like to make their readers sure with the intended data and/or information in which it is also to provide/strengthen their supporting arguments (suhono & haikal, 2018). the use of frame markers such as finally, to conclude, my purpose is, first, etc. is in the last position in which they are only used 20 times (3.82%). frame markers are used to organize the texts for the readers (cao & hu, 2014). the use of them enables the readers to understand clearly about the items used to sequence, label text stages, announce discourse goals, and indicate topic shift (hyland, 2015). those are needed by the writers in order to make their writing good in order/shift. frame markers can be further classified into four subtypes according to their functions: sequencers, topicalizers, discourse-labels, and announcers. sequencers (e.g., first, second) are used to structure the text into sequences; topicalizers (e.g., in regard to, concerning) to signal the shift from one topic to another; discourse-labels (e.g., in summary, thus far) to mark the stages of textual development; and announcers (e.g., aim to, seek to) to indicate discursive purposes (cao & hu, 2014; wei, li, zhou, & gong, 2016). (12) the first category is grammatical category which related to the form, aspect, and genus of any unit of language. (13) finally, teachers have responsibility to choose a textbook for students to fit with appropriate teaching and learning model. (14) the purpose of this research is to find out the importance of the correlation between content to contextual teaching and learning. those markers (see (12), (13), and (14)) help the readers to comprehend the writers’ emphasis of their writing through the sequences, goals, and/or topic shift. it is not easy for the learners in using those markers. it could be seen from the frequency of using them in their whole writing in which the most frequently used is when they mention the purpose of conducting their research. it indicates that their understanding of using the markers is still low. meanwhile, in the interactional marker, hedges are the most frequently used by the learners in writing their introduction sections with the frequency of 39 times (34.5%). hedges play an important role in conveying the writer’s message. it involves readers collaboratively in the argument by alerting them to the author’s own perspective toward both information and readers themselves (hyland, 2010; hyland & tse, 2004; wei, li, zhou, & gong, 2016). the use of hedges in academic writing is to present propositional information categorically (hyland, 2015). it means that there is a relationship and interaction between the writer and the readers through the use of certain expressions. it is essentially intended to evaluating and engaging, influencing the degree of intimacy, the expression of attitude, the epistemic judgments, the commitments, and the degree of reader involvement. in detail, wei, li, zhou, & gong (2016) mention that hedges can be realized by such lexico-grammatical forms as epistemic modal verbs (e.g., might, could, may), lexical verbs (e.g., suggest, appear, claim), adjectives and adverbs (e.g., plausible, probably, perhaps), nouns (e.g., likelihood, possibility), and other linguistic expressions for marking qualification (e.g., in general, to some extent). the followings are the examples of using the hedges commonly used to mark the writers’ reluctance. (15) if the teacher does not realize about students’ mistakes and errors, those mistakes and errors may occur repeatedly because they do not have the correction. (16) translator should understand the meaning first before translating the whole meaning. (17) besides that, she also applied self-directed learning (sdl) in which the users have a role as decision makers to determine their own learning and accept their responsibility intact, though they may need help and advice from the teacher. from (15), (16), and (17), it could be seen that there are some types of hedges used by the writers. the use of hedges shows the degree of tentativeness, possibility, and/or politeness used english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 by the writers in their texts (rustipa, 2014). the possibility is built by the writer through the text, such as the use of may (see sentence (17) in which the writer is not sure whether or not the users need help and advice from the teacher. the use of should which is frequently used by the learner in their writing, is intended to give suggestion to the readers dealing with certain information. in sentence (17), the writer intends to give advice to the translator in which it is important for him/her to know the meaning before translating the text. meanwhile, about presents the information emphasized by the writers about what they are writing. the next one is the use of boosters that can only be found as much as 21 times (18.6%) by encoding the use of in fact, definitely, it is clear that, etc. in which the point is to emphasize and/or to express the writer’s certainty (hyland, 2015). the use of boosters can be realized by epistemic modal verbs (e.g., must), lexical verbs (e.g., show, demonstrate, prove), adjectives and adverbs (e.g., undisputed, undoubtedly), nouns (e.g., fact, certainty), and other emphatic expressions (e.g., without a doubt). the use of boosters also allows the readers to find out about the writer’s opinion (rustipa, 2014). the use of boosters in writing introduction section in which it is the second position of using the markers in the interactional dimension is to emphasize their certainty. those markers indicate that the writers are assertive enough in expressing the certainty. (18) it means that writing requires capability at organizing and combining information into cohesive and coherent paragraphs and texts in order to be understandable. (19) on the other hand, the fact in class showed that the students had problems with their writing skill and difficulties to generate and organize their ideas in the written-form. (20) from the phenomena above, it showed that the second and fourth semester students of english education department of university of muhammadiyah semarang had problems in grammar. sentence (18) which uses the marker of it means that refers to the affirmation toward what the writer has. she/he would like to emphasize of something that she/he has by making a conclusion of the explanation given. it makes the readers easier in understanding of what she/he has written in the text. the use of marker the fact (sentence (19)) is also used by the writer to present the condition in real (contrary term). by using the marker, it will help the readers to wonder the two different things compared. sentence (20) with the use of it showed that emphasizes on the writer’s proposition. the writer wants the readers know that the evidence to support her/his statement before. meanwhile, self-mentions in which they explicitly refer to the author(s) are more frequently used by the learners in asserting their position with the occurrence of 21 (18.6%). they are used to show the extent to which the author presence in terms of first-person pronouns (e.g., we, i) and possessives (e.g., our, my) (hyland, 2015). the use of self-mention markers could be seen in the following examples. (21) based on the fact above, i would like to find out the difficulties encountered by students in translating idiomatic expression from english into indonesian by first knowing the quality of their translation product. (22) i use textless comics as a media and make a match as a model of learning. (23) the reason above encourages me to do evaluation toward the worthiness of content that is containing in english textbook contextual teaching and learning. self-mentions which are used by the learners are to show their self-affirmation from the readers. it could be seen clearly from the firstpronoun used of i and me in the sentences (21), (22), and (23). the use of the markers shows explicitly their position/their function as the authors in their writing. the next is the engagement markers, such as consider, note that, you can see that, etc. at this point, the writers do not want to involve more the readers as participants in the text through second-person pronouns, imperatives, and questions forms (hyland, 2015). considering their difficulties in using those markers, the occurrence in their writing of introduction section is only 17 times (15%). (24) we cannot deny that most of material commonly used by teachers in learning process is taken from textbook as an instructional media. (25) considering the importance of translation, this subject is included as a course that has to be taken by english department students in the university level. engagement markers which are intended to build relationship with the readers (hyland, 2015) could not be found easily in the learners’ writing. it is clearly seen from the total of 5.363 words produced, only 5 learners who use the markers, while the rest, 2 learners do not use the markers in their writing. in sentence (24), the siti aimah, dodi mulyadi, & muhimatul ifadah metadiscourse markers written in introduction section of final project of unimus learners 116 writer uses we cannot deny that in his sentence means that he would like to involve the readers as the participant in the text through secondperson pronoun we in which both the writer and the audience cannot avoid the use of materials in the process of learning which are taken from textbook. the marker considering is used by the writer to make the readers focus their attention on the importance of translation to the english learners as a course to be taken. the frequency of using attitude markers which is used to express writer’s attitude to proposition: conveying surprise, obligation, agreement, importance, etc. (hyland, 2015) is the lowest among others. the markers can adopt the form of deontic verbs (must, have to, should...), attitudinal adverbs (interestingly, surprisingly...), adjective constructions (it is difficult, impossible, desirable, unfortunate...), cognitive verbs (i think, i believe...), and other expressions conveying stance or evaluation (e.g., what is important, it is necessary) (wei, li, zhou, & gong, 2016). the use of obligation such as must is mainly used by the learners in which it is emphasized to do something. dealing with this point, the occurrence of using the markers in their writing is 15 times (13.3%). (26) the learners must apply the five general components of the writing process, they are content, form, grammar, style and mechanic. (27) it is not surprising that textbook often becomes the only supporting instrument for the teacher to run the lesson in classes. (28) first, textbook are relatively easy to get in the market, provide a guide or road map for the learner which offers expected behaviors that he had to perform to find and are commercially provided. numbers of (26), (27), and (28) indicate the variety of using attitude markers in the text. however, among the presence of those markers, the learners dominantly use obligation, such as must, have to, and had to rather than the others as seen in sentence (26) and (28). meanwhile, for indicating surprise, only a few of them use the marker in their writing. from those findings, it is clearly seen that the total occurrence of metadiscourse markers in introduction sections of unimus efl learners is 637 in which the interactive metadiscourse usage is higher (524) than interactional metadiscourse one (113). this finding is an alignment with the previous findings (anwardeen, luyee, gabriel & kalajahi, 2013; zakaria & malik, 2017) which showed that undergraduate students tended to use interactive metadiscourse (textual metadiscourse) rather than interactional metadiscourse (interpersonal metadiscourse). it means that the learners, in this case, tend to interpret the messages explicitly through the text rather than involving the readers through the arguments given. it is understandable in which culture might influence the use of the metadiscourse in their writing. unimus efl learners are familiar with the use of interactive metadiscourse, such as transition markers and code glosses in which the frequency of occurrence could be clearly seen in table 3. it is different from interactional metadiscourse in which the number of it is only about quarter of the use of interactive metadiscourse. conclusion based on the data analysis, metadiscourse markers used by efl learners of unimus in writing introduction sections happen with the illustration of 1 discourse marker is used in 8.42 words. the most frequently use of metadiscourse markers happens in the interactive dimension in which there are 524 markers (82.3%) which are mainly dominated by the use of transitions with the amount of 374 markers (71.4%) and followed by code glosses with 70 markers, evidentials (33 markers), frame markers (20 markers) and endophoric markers (27 markers). in the interactive dimension, from the total of 5.363 words produced by the learners, it could be said that 1 discourse marker is used in 10.23 words. conversely, in the interactional dimension, only 113 markers (17.7%) could be found in the learners’ writing which comprises hedges with the highest occurrence of 39 markers, and it is followed by self-mentions with 21 markers which are equal with boosters (21 markers), attitude markers achieve 15 markers, and engagement markers have 17 markers. it means that in the interactional dimension, 1 marker is used for 47.5 words. from both interactive and interactional dimensions, the frequent use of metadiscourse markers happens in the interactive metadiscourse. it means that the writers tend to give attention to and guide the readers through the text by establishing their interpretations explicitly rather than involving the readers in the argument through using markers in interactional dimension. considering the importance of metadiscourse markers in academic writing, the lecturer of writing subject should give more english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 117 attention to the teaching and applying the use of metadiscourse markers including interactive and interactional resources in writing class. the interactional markers should also be taught to the students in order to help them in conveying and strengthening their own argumentation. without giving knowledge of metadiscourse markers, the learners will get difficulties in building communication and making negotiation with the readers through the texts created, and determining their judgment in their writing. by recognizing metadiscourse markers, it is expected that the students understand better the distinction between old and new information in sentences so that they would have better understand writing. the students are also expected to be able to guide the readers by providing their interpretations explicitly and involving the readers through the text. the further research is also expected to be conducted by other researchers in other fields to have a distinction between the use of metadicourse markers in qualitative study and quantitative study. references anwardeen, n. h., luyee, e. o., gabriel, j. i., & kalajahi, s. a. r. (2013). an analysis: the usage of metadiscourse in argumentative writing by malaysian tertiary level of students. english language teaching, 6(9), 83-96. doi: 10.5539/elt.v6n9p83. cao, f., & hu, g. (2014). interactive metadiscourse in research articles: a comparative study of pragmatic and disciplinary influences. journal of pragmatics, 66, 15-31. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.007. dafouz-milne, e. (2008). the pragmatic role of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers in the construction and attainment of persuasion: a cross-linguistic study of newspaper discourse. journal of pragmatic, 40, 95-113. doi: 0.1016/j.pragma.2007.10.003. dehghan, m., & chalak, a. (2015). code glosses in academic writing: the comparison of iranian and native authors. ijrelt, 3(2), 21-29. hyland, k. (2010). metadiscourse: mapping interactions in academic writing. nordic journal of english studies, 9(2), 125-143. hyland, k. (2015). metadiscourse. the international encyclopedia of language and social interaction. retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/ken_hyla nd/publication/285591598_metadiscourse/links/ 59ddf79d0f7e9bec3bae06ad/metadiscourse.pdf. hyland, k., & tse, p. (2004). metadiscourse in academic writing: a reappraisal. applied linguistics, 25(2), 156-177. doi: 10.1093/applin/25.2.156. kuhi, d., & mojood, m. (2014). metadiscourse in newspaper genre: a cross-linguistic study of english and persian editorials. procedia, social and behavioral sciences, 98, 1046-1055. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.515. rustipa, k. (2014). metadiscourse in indonesian efl learners’ persuasive texts: a case study at english department, unisbank. international journal of english linguistics, 4(1), 44-52. doi: 10.5539/ijel.v4n1p44. suhono, & haikal. (2018). interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse categories of students’ international program school based on gender. ijee (indonesian journal of english education), 5(1), 81-91. doi: 10.15408/ijee.v5i1.5505. wei, j., li, y., zhou, t., & gong, z. (2016). studies on metadiscourse since the 3rd millenium. journal of education and practice, 7(9), 194204. zakaria, m. k., & malik, f. a. (2017). metadiscourse in academic writing of pre-university arab students at the international islamic university malaysia (iium). matec web of conferences. doi:10.1051/matecconf/201815005086. siti aimah, dodi mulyadi, & muhimatul ifadah metadiscourse markers written in introduction section of final project of unimus learners 118 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 17 promoting foreign language learners’ writing: comparing the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing mania nosratinia islamic azad university at central tehran, iran email: mania_nosratinia@yahoo.com niousha nikpanjeh islamic azad university at central tehran, iran email: nioushanikpanjeh@yahoo.com apa citation: nosratinia, m., & nikpanjeh, n. (2019). promoting foreign language learners’ writing: comparing the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 17-26. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1772. received: 17-01-2019 accepted: 25-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: this study is an attempt to compare the effect of oral conferencing alongside collaborative writing on writing skills of english as a foreign language (efl) learner. for this purpose, a piloted sample of the preliminary english test (pet) was administered to 90 intermediate female efl learners, between 20 and 32 years old (mage = 26). the results of this test enabled the researchers to select 60 homogenous individuals who were then randomly assigned into two experimental groups of 30 named “oral conferencing group” and “collaborative writing group”. to ensure the homogeneity among the participants in terms of their writing ability before the treatment, their scores on the writing section of the pet test were analyzed in isolation and it was considered as the pretest of the study. oral conferencing included the discussions and negotiations among the participants and the teacher before and after writing activities followed by live teacher-student as well as student-student feedbacks. in the collaborative writing group, the participants wrote compositions in groups based on the same topics introduced in the oral conferencing group. at the end, both groups were given another piloted writing section of the pet test as the posttest. the analysis of the test scores using an independent sample t-test and analysis of covariance (ancova) revealed that there is a significant difference between the effect of oral conferencing and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing skills. finally, it can be concluded that efl learners’ writing skill was more affected by applying oral conferencing rather than collaborative writing. keywords: collaborative writing; efl learners; oral conferencing; writing skill. introduction writing is regarded as an instrument through which people communicate with one another in time and space, transmitting their culture from one generation to another. writing as one of the main and productive language skills, which was once considered as the domain of well-educated people, is becoming an essential tool for everyone in today’s community (cushing weigle, 2002). in this perspective, writing as a significant requirement for efl learners is regarded as one of the most important communicative skills in english language learning (biria & jafari, 2013; goodlet, & pymberton, 1989; hayes & flower, 1986). researchers have found that foreign language learners find it painstaking to write in the target language, producing less fluent sentences and encountering difficulties in the revisions of their written work (fatemi, 2008; hyland, 2003; mccoy, 2003; tan, 2007). however, these difficulties are not only attributed to their linguistic abilities, but they mostly lay in the nature of writing process itself (chih, 2008). rooted in the ideas introduced in the process approach to writing, the provision of second party feedback, usually by the teacher, on learners’ drafts is now given a higher level of attention (williams, 2002). accordingly, the provision of written corrective feedback on second/foreign language writing has been regarded as an integral component of writing programs (mirzaii, 2012). oral conferencing is considered as one type of corrective feedback (mirzaii, 2012). according to bayraktar (2009), oral conferencing is identified and “referred to as response sessions, assisted performance, face-toface interaction, one-to-one teaching, conversation about the student’s paper, and mania nosratinia & niousha nikpanjeh promoting foreign language learners’ writing: comparing the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing 18 meaningful contact” (p. 11). oral conferencing is advantageous in a way that teachers can foster learners’ reflection on their own learning process; elicit language performances on particular tasks, skills, or other language points as well as helping them to develop a better selfimage (brown & hudson, 1998). besides, oral conferencing is believed to assist teachers in creating a collaborative atmosphere, encouraging learners to actively engage in practicing writing (ewert, 2009). collaboration in writing has been drawing an increasing attention in language teaching and assessment (dicamilla & anton, 1997; storch, 2005; swain & lapkin, 1998). according to reither (1989), “thinking of writing as a collaborative process presents more precise ways to consider what writers do when they write, not just with their texts, but also with their language, their personae, and their readers” (p. 624). collaborative writing requires learners to utilize a range of social skills that can help foster a sense of accountability, cooperation, and community (murray, 1992; savova & donato, 1991; villamil & de guerrero, 1996). moreover, collaborative writing, like any other collaborative activity, provides learners with the opportunity to give and receive immediate feedback on language, an opportunity which, as claimed by vanderburg (2006), is “missing when learners write individually” (p. 378). learners’ working in groups, particularly in collaborative groups, constructs new ways of understanding and develops greater skills (web, 1989). however, writing is generally considered as an individual activity through which ideas are transferred from the writer’s mind to the reader’s. therefore, quite few research has been conducted to examine the impact of corrective feedback on productive english skills, particularly writing. hence, this study aimed to investigate the comparative effect of oral conferencing, as a type of corrective feedback, and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing ability. to fulfill this objective, the problem raised in this study was formulated into the following research question: “is there any significant difference between the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing ability?”. accordingly, the following null hypothesis was formulated: h0: there is no significant difference between the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing ability. method the 60 participants involved in this quasi experimental study were chosen from hermes institute in tehran. they were female efl learners at the intermediate level whose mother tongues was persian and their age was between 20 to 32 years old (mage = 26). they had been exposed to english courses for about 5 years in average. these participants were selected conveniently and homogenized through a piloted pet test among 90 learners. they were randomly assigned into two experimental groups of 30 named “oral conferencing group” and “collaborative writing group”. to ensure the homogeneity among the participants of the two groups in terms of their writing ability before the treatment, their scores on the writing section of the pet test were analyzed in isolation and were used as the pretest scores of the participants. both groups received the same amount of instruction. the course consisted of 10 sessions of 90 minutes spanning over a period of five weeks. before administrating the pet test, a group of 30 students with almost similar characteristics -age, gender and proficiency levelto the target sample were used for the piloting of this test and the writing posttest. here, one of the researchers (functioning as the teacher) tried to teach the relevant grammatical points as well as the essential vocabularies alongside of language skills with special focus on the writing skill. participants were also given the same topics for their compositions and they were taught how to write a composition including introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. compositions were rated according to the jacobs et al.’s (1981) esl composition profile by the one of the researchers (the teacher) and the other rater. in order to accomplish the purpose of the study, the following instruments were utilized: 1. the preliminary english test (pet) is now internationally recognized as a reliable test calibrated for the elementary level of english language proficiency. being created by the university of cambridge esol examinations in england, the exam intends to be unbiased regarding test takers’ linguistic backgrounds and nationalities. in addition to the knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, the pet test deals with all of the four skills of language, namely reading, english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 19 writing, listening, and speaking. the pet test contains 125 items, and it takes 125 minutes to take the whole test. in the present study, however, the speaking section of the pet test was not used due to the limitations imposed by the institute officials. 2. the writing scale of pet – the employed rating scale for rating the pet test’s writing section in the present study was created by cambridge, called the general mark schemes for writing. using the criterion stated in this rating scale, the writing scores ranged from 0 to 5. 3. writing pretest – in order to make sure that the participants in the two groups belonged to the same population in terms of writing ability, the participants’ scores of the writing section of the pet test were analyzed in isolation and used as the writing pretest. this section consisted of three parts followed by 7 questions. the participants were required to fulfill the tasks of the test by using their lexical and syntactic abilities, such as writing letters, stories, and short messages. 4. touchstone 3 – touchstone, by michael mccarthy, jeanne mccarten, and helen sandiford (2005) has been published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge. this textbook is argued to offer an innovative and novel approach to efl learning and teaching. focusing on the north american english, this textbook has employed the cambridge international corpus which is composed of a huge amount of conversations and written texts. this book contains all language skills and sub-skills, and offers exciting ideas for personalized, learner-centered interaction. in this study, the students dealt with three units of the textbook, units 6, 7, and 8. 5. compositions – the participants were asked to write six compositions during the treatment sessions. they had 40 minutes to write about each predetermined argumentative topics. the topics of the compositions were the same across two experimental groups. the compositions consisted of 150 to 250 words and had to be written in descriptive voice. the compositions should have three parts; introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. in oral conferencing group, each student should write her composition at home. in each session, four or five students read their compositions in classroom. contrary to oral conferencing group, the students in collaborative writing group were asked to write their compositions collaboratively in classroom. 6. oral conferencing checklist – this checklist is designed by moradan and hedayati (2011). it contains a set of questions to be asked to all participants in oral conferencing group regarding pre and post writing activities during the treatment period. it is the result of discussions between the aforementioned researchers and their five coworkers in their study. it starts with some general questions regarding the participants’ opinions about their writing abilities prior to the writing activity, and it ends with some questions about participants’ ideas regarding their weaknesses and strengths in writing activity. 7. jacobs, zinkgraf, wormuth, hartfiel, and hughey’s (1981) esl composition profile – this instrument is an analytic scoring scale and consists of five subcategories of content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics. each subcategory is in detail and the scoring system is clearly defined. the total score is calculated from 100 and the proportions of scoring are predetermined in the scale according to participants’ performance in each part. 8. writing posttest – the posttest administered at the end of the study was the writing section of another version of pet. it was piloted in advance. this test was given to the participants for comparing the participants’ writing ability in terms of the effect of both oral conferencing and collaborative writing. oral conferencing group oral conferencing in this study included the discussions and negotiations among the participants and the teacher before and after writing activities followed by live teacherstudent as well as student-student feedbacks. to do this, the anderson model (2000) and oral conferencing checklist designed by moradan and hedayati (2011) were used. anderson (2000) as cited in (bayraktar, 2009) states that teacher-student writing conferences generally fall into the following four types: 1) rehearsal conferences which help students find idea to write about; mania nosratinia & niousha nikpanjeh promoting foreign language learners’ writing: comparing the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing 20 2) drafting conferencing which assists students develop their ideas and determine which genre and style they want to write in; 3) revision conferences which help student improve their initial drafts; and 4) editing conferences whose main focus lies in helping students become better editors. here, students should write their compositions at home. based on the feedback they had already received regarding the conferences in the class, they would revise their writings. after completing the writing tasks, the students were asked to conference regarding their ideas, weaknesses, and strengths during the writing task. the students in oral conferencing group were concentrated on the overall meaning and organization of their writing, and also on the vocabularies, language use, and the mechanics of writing. all the conferences conducted orally. oral conferencing checklist designed by moradan and hedayati (2011) were used for this purpose. the teacher asked questions and gave students enough time to speak about their problems and to provide students with appropriate feedback. collaborative writing group whether to have students choose their own partners or they should be assigned at random into groups is the first major consideration in applying collaborative writing method (mulligan & garofalo, 2011). although instructors may present a better idea for matching students in groups, if the students choose their own partners themselves, it would be more effective for cooperative learning as a basic goal of collaborative writing (cote, 2006). based on this, the students were divided into 5 groups of 6 in order to write the assigned compositions and provide each other with feedback regarding their weaknesses and strengths. contrary to oral conferencing group, the students in collaborative writing group were asked to write their compositions collaboratively in classroom. in other words, all members of a group were responsible for making a final piece of writing. the same procedure which was used for familiarizing students in oral conferencing group with how to write a composition was also used for students in collaborative writing group. the teacher had to provide them with topic then they should go through the process of writing collaboratively which was based on the proposed steps of mulligan and garofalo (2011). based on the requirements of this study and limitations which were imposed on the researchers by the institute officials, some modifications on the mulligan and garofalo’s model (2011) was done as follows: 1) students chose their partners themselves; 2) all the members of a group brainstormed ideas about the target topic and organized the information into coherent groupings; 3) all the members of a group did outlining, planning, and crafting; 4) the whole writing (composition) was read in the classroom by one of the members of the group; 5) the teacher checked the compositions based on jacobs et al.’s (1981) esl composition profile, and pointing out structural and organization errors, and providing the related group with comments and suggestions. at the end of the treatment phase, the participants of both groups sat for the posttest which took about 55 minutes. the results of the test were then evaluated by the two raters based on the pet rating scale. results and discussion this quasi experimental study was set out to compare the effect of oral conferencing and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing ability. the independent variable has two modalities, oral conferencing and collaborative writing. the dependent variable is writing ability. the two control variables are the language proficiency and gender of the participants. in order to answer the research question proposed in this study, both descriptive and inferential statistics were taken in the piloting phase and administration, respectively. following the piloting of the pet test, the mean scores, the standard deviation of scores, and the reliability indices were calculated. this calculation demonstrated that the mean score was 53.24 and the standard deviation was 8.74. the item analysis revealed that there were two malfunctioning items in the test. after the deletion of the 2 malfunctioning items, the reliability of the test using cronbach alpha was .94. the inter-rater reliability was calculated using the pearson correlation coefficient, showing the existence of a significant correlation. accordingly, the same raters could be used for rating the following administrations of the test. after the procedure of piloting the pet test, it became an instrument to homogenize the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 21 students for this study. 90 efl learners took part in the test administration. following the administration, the descriptive statistics were calculated. this showed that the mean was 55.24 and the standard deviation was 9.20. the reliability of the pet test in this actual administration was .89. in the next phase, the scores of the participants on the pet writing section were analyzed in isolation in order to inspect the homogeneity of the participants in the two groups before the treatment. the two groups’ mean scores were almost the same (oral conferencing = 10.6000, collaborative writing = 10.0033). thus, one can conclude that there was no noticeable difference between the means of the two groups at the outset of the study. also, according to the results of a t-test, there was not a significant difference between the two experimental groups regarding their writing ability (t (58) = .77, p > 0.05) which confirms their homogeneity (table 1). table 1. t-test results of experimental groups on writing pre-test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pretest equal variances assumed 2.85 .096 .779 58 .439 .56667 .72727 .88913 2.02246 equal variances notassumed .779 55.296 .439 .56667 .72727 .89065 2.02398 the results of the pearson correlations indicated that there were significant agreements between the two raters who rated the subjects’ writings on the posttest (r (58) = .94, p < .05 representing a large effect size) for the writing part 2 and posttest of writing (r (58) = .96, p < .05 representing a large effect size) for the writing part 3. testing assumptions in this study, the data were analyzed through an independent t-test and analysis of covariance (ancova) which have two common assumptions; normality and homogeneity of variances. the latter will be discussed below when reporting the main results. as reported in table 2, the skewness and kurtosis ratios were within the ranges of +/1.96, confirming the normality of the data. table 2. descriptive statistics of pet of the two experimental groups group n skewness kurtosis statistic statistic std. error ratio statistic std. error ratio conferencing reading 30 .177 .427 0.41 -.560 .833 -0.67 prewr 30 -.234 .427 -0.55 -.140 .833 -0.17 lc 30 .005 .427 0.01 -1.153 .833 -1.38 postwr 30 -.559 .427 -1.31 .380 .833 0.46 proficiency 30 .148 .427 0.35 -.733 .833 -0.88 collaborative reading 30 .479 .427 1.12 -.558 .833 -0.67 prewr 30 .098 .427 0.23 -1.149 .833 -1.38 lc 30 -.188 .427 -0.44 -.317 .833 -0.38 postwr 30 -.080 .427 -0.19 -1.405 .833 -1.69 proficiency 30 .069 .427 0.16 -.470 .833 -0.56 the results of the independent t-test (t (58) = .16 p > .05, r = .021 representing a weak effect size) showed that there was not any significant difference between two groups’ mean score on the pet test (table 3). as a result, it can be concluded that the two groups were homogeneous regarding their general language proficiency prior to the treatment. mania nosratinia & niousha nikpanjeh promoting foreign language learners’ writing: comparing the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing 22 table 3. independent samples test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper equal variances assumed 2.151 .148 .158 58 .875 .267 1.689 -3.11 3.64 equal variances not assumed .158 55.826 .875 .267 1.689 -3.11 3.65 as reported in table 3, it should be pointed out that: a) the assumption of homogeneity of variances was met (levene’s f = 2.15, p > .05). therefore, the first row was reported; and b) the negative lower bound value of 95 % confidence interval, i.e. -3.11 indicated that the difference between the two groups’ means on the pet can be zero. to address the research question, an analysis of covariance (ancova) was run to compare the oral conferencing and collaborative writing groups’ mean scores on the writing posttest while controlling for the potential effects of participants’ initial writing ability (the pretest). the ancova has two main assumptions; homogeneity of regression slopes and linear relationship between the dependent variable and the covariate. the assumption of homogeneity of regression slopes assumes that the relationship between the dependent variable (posttest of writing) and covariate (pretest of writing) shows the same regression slopes across the two groups. the regression line for collaborative writing group and oral conferencing group did not show any interaction, i.e. they did not cross each other (figure 1). based on these results, it can be concluded that the assumption of homogeneity of regression slopes was met. figure 1. homogeneity of regression slopes; posttest of writing by groups controlling for pretest the linear relationship between the dependent variable and covariate can be tested by examining the spread of dots around the diagonals. if the dots spread around the diagonal, it can be concluded that the second assumption is also met. the spread of dots for both groups were close to the diagonals (figure 2). english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 23 groups collaborative writing oral conferencing figure 2. assumption of linear relationship between dependent variable and covariate before discussing the results of the ancova, it should be stated that the assumption of homogeneity of variances was not met (levene’s f = 8.93, p < .05). as noted by bachman (2005), filed (2013) and pallant (2011) in case the sample size is equal, there is no need to worry about the violation of this assumption. as displayed in table 4, the oral conferencing group (m = 11.61, se = .19) had a higher mean than the collaborative writing group (m = 10.58, se = .19) on the posttest of writing after removing the effect of pretest. table 4. descriptive statistics, posttest of writing by groups controlling for pretest group mean std. error 95% confidence interval lower bound upper bound conferencing 11.612 a .193 11.225 11.998 collaborative 10.588 a .193 10.202 10.975 a. covariates appearing in the model are evaluated at the following values: prewr = 9.35. the results of ancova (f (1, 57) = 13.93, p < .05, partial η 2 = .19 representing a large effect size) confirmed the existence of a significant difference between the mean scores of the two groups on the posttest (table 5 and figure 3). thus, the null-hypothesis stating that “there is no significant difference between the effect of oral conferencing and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing ability” was rejected. table 5. tests of between-subjects effects; posttest of writing by groups controlling for pretest source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. partial eta squared pretest 315.761 1 315.761 284.608 .000 .833 group 15.455 1 15.455 13.930 .000 .196 error 63.239 57 1.109 total 7810.000 60 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) mania nosratinia & niousha nikpanjeh promoting foreign language learners’ writing: comparing the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing 24 figure 3. posttest of writing by groups controlling for pretest regarding the question posed in the present study and based on the statistical analysis of the data, there is a significant difference between the effect of oral conferencing and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing ability. the results of an independent samples t-test and analysis of covariance (ancova) revealed that the ability of efl learners’ writing was more affected by applying oral conferencing rather than collaborative writing tasks. this finding supports previous research. goldstein and conrad (1990), for example, examined learner input and negotiation of meaning through oral conferences between one teacher and three learners of an advanced level writing class. they came to the conclusion that learners who negotiated the meaning in the conferences could make better revisions in their drafts, which in turn improved their writing. on the contrary, those learners who were not encouraged to negotiate meaning were inclined towards not making revisions or making very perfunctory revisions that did not result in improved drafts. the finding was also in line with the results of bitchener, young, and cameron (2005) and wallis (2010) which revealed that a better achievement in writing can be gained through oral conferencing effective feedbacks between the teacher and the student. furthermore, pathey-chavez and ferries (1997) found that the quality of the writing can be enhanced by oral conferencing sessions which supports the outcome of this study. besides, this outcome is in line with the findings of mirzaii (2012) who conducted a study to inspect the impact of providing written corrective feedback through oral conferencing on the writing performance of iranian intermediate-level efl learners. in spite of the significant improvement of participants in the oral conferencing group, the learners who received collaborative writing, also had a better performance in their writing in the posttest (as shown in table 4), albeit insignificantly. therefore, this result suggests that collaborative writing can also be useful in teaching writing in some contexts. this result is in line with the finding of a study by storch (2011), indicating that collaborative tasks are more accurate compared to the tasks carried out individually. in addition, kuiken and vedder (2002) investigated the role of group interaction in l2 writing in a cross-sectional study. the result showed that collaborative writing had an overall significant effect on students’ l2 writing. conclusion based on the statistical analysis, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference between the effect of oral conferencing and collaborative writing on efl learners’ writing ability. the results of an independent samples ttest and analysis of covariance (ancova) revealed that the ability of efl learners’ writing was more affected by applying oral conferencing rather than collaborative writing tasks. it should be noted that the aforementioned advantages identified for the use of oral conferencing can only be realized when the teacher can effectively carry out the task, i.e. offering encouragement, making specific suggestions, establishing a positive rapport, and having abilities and strategies, such as appropriate interaction, effective monitoring, and supportive evaluation. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 25 considering the provision of feedback through oral conferencing, the students can be capable of recognizing their own errors and erroneous areas, planning their learning, and finally evaluating what they have acquired. also, being engaged in the conferences, students needed to maintain the conversations in order to reflect on the points made by the teacher and the peers; consequently, the speaking ability of the students can be enhanced as well. further studies can be carried out to investigate the longer effects of instruction types on writing enhancement. in other words, future studies can adopt a longitudinal design rather than a cross-sectional one. in future research, there is a need to have a larger subject sample size. the more subjects, the greater reliability and validity will result. besides, the effect of oral conferencing can be investigated on other language skill and sub-skill performance. apart from corrective feedback some other feedbacks, i.e. electronic feedback’s effect can be investigated on writing ability. learners’ individual differences, such as learning styles, creativity, critical thinking, learning strategies, learning aptitude, age, gender, cultural background, background knowledge, and the affective domain are believed to play an important role in learning and using foreign or second language (nosratinia & zaker, 2013, 2014, 2015; zaker, 2015). due to some restrictions, these variables have not been taken into account in the present study. further studies are suggested to investigate these different variables. references bayraktar, ş. (2009). pre-service primary teachers’ ideas about lunar phases. turkish science education, 6(2), 12–23. biria, r., & jafari, s. (2013). the impact of collaborative writing on the writing fluency of iranian efl learners. journal of language teaching and research, 4(1), 164-175. bitchener, j., young, s., & cameron, d. (2005). the effect of different types of corrective feedback on esl students. journal of second language writing, 12(3), 191-205. brown, j., & hudson, t. (1998). the alternatives in language assessment. tesol quarterly, 32, 653675. chih, h. k. (2008). designing an online writing system: learning with support. elc journal, 39(3), 285-299. cote, r. (2006). peer collaboration in the esl writing classroom: a literature synthesis. retrieved on may, 2015 from www.u.arizona.edu/~rcote/slat596o/term%20 paper.pdf cushing weigle, s. (2002). assessing writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. dicamilla, f. j., & anton, m. (1997). repetition in the collaborative discourse of l2 learners: a vygotskian perspective. canadian modern language review, 53(4), 609-633. ewert, d. e. (2009). l2 writing conferences: investigating teacher talk. journal of second language writing, 18(4), 251-269. goldstein, l. m., & conrad, s. m. (1990). student input and negotiation of meaning in esl writing conferences. tesol quarterly, 21, 443-460. hayes, j., & flower, l. (1980). identifying the organization of writing processes. in l. gregg & e. steinberg (eds.), cognitive processes in writing (pp. 45-57). hillsdale n. j.: lawrence erlbaum associates. hyland, k. (2003). second language writing. new york: cambridge university press. mccoy, m. k. (2003). language, math, social studies, and … worms? integrating the early childhood curriculum. dimensions of early childhood, 31(2), 3-8. mirzaii, m. (2012). implicit vs. explicit vocabulary learning: which approach serves long-term recall better? the southeast asian journal of english language studies, 18(2), 1-12. murray, d. e. (1992). collaborative learning as literacy event: implications for esl instruction. in d. nunan (ed.), collaborative language learning and teaching (pp. 100-117). cambridge: cambridge university press. nosratinia, m., & zaker, a. (2013, august). autonomous learning and critical thinking: inspecting the association among efl learners. paper presented at the first national conference on teaching english, literature, and translation, shiraz university, shiraz, iran. retrieved from http://www.civilica.com/paper-telt01telt01_226.html. nosratinia, m., & zaker, a. (2014). metacognitive attributes and liberated progress: the association among second language learners’ critical thinking, creativity, and autonomy. sage open, 4(3), 1-10. doi: 10.1177/2158244014547178. nosratinia, m., & zaker, a. (2015). boosting autonomous foreign language learning: scrutinizing the role of creativity, critical thinking, and vocabulary learning strategies. international journal of applied linguistics and english literature, 4(4), 86-97. doi: 10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.4n.4p.86. reither, j. a., & vipond, d. (1989). writing as collaboration. college english, 47, 620-628. storch, n. (2005). collaborative writing: product, process, and students’ reflections. journal of second language writing, 14(3), 153–173. mania nosratinia & niousha nikpanjeh promoting foreign language learners’ writing: comparing the impact of oral conferencing and collaborative writing 26 storch, n. (2011). collaborative writing in l2 contexts: processes, outcomes, and future directions. annual review of applied linguistics, 31(1), 275-288. swain, m., & lapkin, s. (1998). interaction and second language learning: two adolescent french immersion students working together. modern language journal, 82(3), 320-337. vanderburg, r. m. (2006). reviewing research on teaching writing based on vygotsky’s theories: what we can learn. reading and writing quarterly, 22, 375-393. williams, j. (2002). undergraduate second language writers in the writing center. journal of basic writing, 21(2), 73-91. zaker, a. (2015). efl learners’ language learning strategies and autonomous learning: which one is a better predictor of l2 skills? journal of applied linguistics-dubai, 1(1), 27-39. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 101 developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders sopian english language education, faculty of training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: sopian80.s8@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) english language education, faculty of training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id ismail petrus english language education, faculty of training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com apa citation: sopian, s., inderawati, r., & petrus, i. (2019). developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 100-112. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.1813. received: 24-09-2019 accepted: 21-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: the aim of this study was to develop e-learning based local-folklores application. this study was conducted based on addie (analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation) development research design. the formative evaluation was done through one to one evaluation, small group evaluation and field trial. the subjects of this study was eighth graders at one of junior high school in indonesia. there were three students involved in one to one evaluation, nine students in small group evaluation and a real class in a field trial. the validity was reviewed by expert of content, expert of instructional design and expert of developing e-learning based local-folklores. the mean validity score of the developed product was 3,67 which was categorized as very highly valid level. the practicality was conducted in one to one evaluation and small group evaluation. the practicality of one to one was 3,40 which was at very highly practical level and the practicality in small group evaluation was 3,58 which was at very highly practical level. the reading test material was categorized as effective. it showed that there were 19 students (76,93%) out of 26 students in reading test exceeded mmc (minimum mastery criterion) which was 75. keywords: e-learning; local-folklores; addie model. introduction reading is mainly considered as an essential element of language aptitude and the assessment of reading performance is generally used to assess linguistic ability. in english instructing, particularly reading skill in indonesia has been considered as one of the principle english language abilities that ought to be mastered by students. in accordance with this, sadeghi, kasim, tan, and abdullah (2012) express that until now, reading comprehension is one of the unmistakable parts in second language tests and examinations and it assumes a fundamental role in the educational and professional of numerous students since reading plays a role as an incredible source of knowledge on the other hand, students who do not like reading are in accordance students' reading ability in indonesia. reading literacy in indonesia is known at unsatisfactory level. pisa – a program conducted by organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) which tests basic reasoning in math, science and reading to 15-year-old students in 65 countries, regardless of grade, achievement, and socioeconomic status–reported some unsatisfactory results of indonesian adolescents’ reading literacy. in 2009, indonesia was positioned in the 57th out of 65 countries with mean score 402 compared with oecd mean which was 493 (oecd, 2010). indonesia, then, was ranked in the 60th out of 65 countries participating in pisa 2012 with mean score 396 while the oecd mean was 496 (oecd, 2013). the data clearly revealed that adolescents’ reading literacy in indonesia is still poor contrasted with those of different countries. the skill of reading is available the 2013 curriculum, the eighth graders of junior high school are going to learn some english texts which include a report, recount, and narrative which have to be mastered by them. herlina sopian, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders 102 (2012) state that narrative text has a social function to amuse, entertain, and deal with the actual and vicarious experience. it focuses on specific and usually individualized participants. this is in line with the reality in the field, most of junior high school students have difficulties in learning narrative text. difficulties faced by students among of them is to understand the language features contained in the narrative text. in general, reading material in school uses textbooks while technological developments are very rapid, especially in industry 4.0. in the industrial era 4.0, the use of technology plays a role in education in the learning process. considering on the textbooks problems, the researcher integrates textbooks with technology in the learning process. one part of technology is ict (information and communication technologies). ict can be as one of the solutions to solve the problems. these developments have probably had an impact on teachers, students, and schools particularly school curricula, including the teaching and learning process. in line with these advancements, more recently many developing countries regarded the use of ict in education as a prominent leverage to accomplish educational transformation (aydin, gurol, & vanderlinde, 2016; cetinkaya, 2017), improve the quality of instruction, overcome a number of critical problems that many educational systems face in the 21st century, such as educational equity and students’ obtainment of 21st century ability (celik & kahyaoglu, 2007). today the utilization of information and communication technology (ict) in learning is developing. one of them, namely internet assisted learning through e-learning. e-learning is the premise and consistent outcome of the advancement of data innovation and correspondence. ict–based learning media designed in the form of e-learning based localfolklores. e-learning can be seen as an innovative approach for delivering well-designed, learnercentered, and facilitated learning environment to anyone, anyplace, anytime by utilizing the attributes and resources of various digital technologies along with other forms of learning materials suited for open, flexible and distributed learning environment (khan, 2005). by utilizing e-learning, students can access various subject areas in one website address. another advantage in using e-learning is that students can learn independently because the material and assignments are available on the web so they can download the material and send assignments and can see the feedback given by the instructor (teacher). e-learning is a learning media. e-learning is a tool in narrative text material about local folklore. the local folklore planned based e-learning is gainful not only to entertain but also, to show students in an alternate manner. it offers a fun and important educating and learning knowledge. however, making e-learning based local folklore which changes over a text material to become local folklore isn't as straightforward as illustration pictures. planning e-learning based local folklores for instructing and adapting needs some fundamental procedures and standards. as time passes by, e-learning based local folklores is likewise utilized as one of the media in educating. designing local folklores as a valuable material to comprehend about narrative text. numerous researches have been conducted regarding teaching by utilizing narrative text such as folklore, comic, picture story, and movie, as the teaching aid. the studies demonstrate some inspirational demeanors toward students’ performance in language learning, especially in their structure ability (mina & putranti, 2015, p. 116). in this research, e-learning based localfolklores is very attractive for them. indonesian government gives a big chance for local content to be integrated on various school subjects either in the curriculum of primary (basic) or in secondary education (dharma, 2008). national resource governance institute (2015, p. 1) states, “local content is the value that an extraction project brings to the local, regional or national economy beyond the resource revenues. the researcher used palembang local content in the form of palembang folklores. the example of folklores like the legend of kemaro island, the bitter tongue, and origins name of palembang. researcher uses supplementary book entitled “dongeng 3d nusantara: legenda pulau kemaro” (dian, 2018) and “seri cerita rakyat 34 provinsi: si pahit lidah” (hu, 2018) published by bhuana ilmu populer kelompok gramedia and “bahasa inggris: when english ring’s a bell” for eighth graders used books from the government as a compulsory book in 2013 curriculum revision 2017 (wachidah, asep, diyantari & yuli, 2017). as the common structure of narrative shows that this story has the opening which shows the setting and introduces the characters. the researcher tried to develop local-folklores based e-learning by using local folklores from english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 103 south sumatera for the eighth graders to (1) preserve the local culture of south sumatera; (2) introduce students’ local folklores in form of narrative text; (3) grow students’ sense of belonging and confidence for sharing about their surroundings. therefore, the researcher used south sumatera local folklores. they are the legend of kemaro island, the bitter tongue, and the origins name of palembang. as the basic structure of narrative demonstrates that this story has the opening which shows the setting and presents the characters. the research for eighth graders were chosen as the targeted subject because narrative texts have to be taught in grade eighth based on curriculum 2013. local-folklores based elearning designed in this study was a combination of texts, pictures, audio, and animation created by using computer programs such as html 5, css 3, php, mysql, and javascript. winarno, et al. (2015, p. 27) html is a language for displaying content on the web.html itself is a free programming language which means it is not owned by anyone, its development is done by many people in many countries and it can be said a language that developed together equally globally. html uses two kinds of file extensions: .htm and .html (saputra, 2012, p. 1). according to saputra (2012, p. 27), css is a web programming language that is designed specifically to control and build various components in the web so that the web look more neat, structured and uniform. according to arief (2011, p.43), php (php: hypertext preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language that integrates with html to create dynamic web pages. php is a programming language, in making a website or web-based applications, not just php code that we need, but we will also use html code to design the display, which set the text, tables and also create a form (nugroho, 2013, p.155). mysql is one type of database server that is very popular and widely used to build web applications using the database as the source and data management (arief 2011, p.151). according to sidik (2011, p.1-2), most javascript programs are embedded into web pages, so the web page becomes an application running inside a web browser. there were some previous related studies about the research. the first was a study done by yaumi (2012) who tried to develop an ict-based which was used in english for specific purposes program. in her study, the sixth-semester undergraduate students of english education study program, uin alauddin, makasar were involved as the subjects of the study and ictbased materials was developed ict-based materials was more effective compared to the use of printed materials. wulanjani (2012) also conducted another development study in which she developed an interactive multimedia cd for enhancing the fifth grade students’ listening comprehension. asih (2013) found that (1) the developed materials, reading interactive multimedia, were considered appropriate to be implemented to the students based on the results of the assessment both from the content expert and the media expert; and (2) the target needs of the eighth grade students of smp n 1 puring were able to read, understand english text, and master the vocabulary. research conducted by loeas (2011), the implementation of e-learning learning with sandwich patterns raises the joy of learning, fosters high interest or motivation because students can learn independently to master the competencies required in the course. in addition, based on the results of e-learning research through the warsihna (2011) home learning portal, it was found that with the presence of e-learning home learning portals adding to the source of learning for the world of education in indonesia. syafri, zainal and emzir (2018) found need of learning model of introduction to linguistics by using online is done by capturing input from participants of pbi program even semester 2016/2017 who have followed the course of introduction to linguistics by using questionnaire. the difference between the previous studies and my study are that media used e-learning based local-folklores and online system by using the website. so, students can access it using the password and username provided by the researcher. e-learning based local-folklores designed by researcher with video about localfolklores from south sumatera. in addition, elearning based local-folklores is equipped with examples and evaluation to test students' abilities in narrative text. based on the description above, researchers are interested in developing elearning based local-folklores for eighth graders especially in english subjects with narrative text material. method method of the study was development research. the development research method is applied to sopian, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders 104 develop local-folklores based e-learning. according to gay, mills and airasian (2012, p. 17), development research in education is the process of researching students need and then developing products to fulfill those needs. akker (1999, p.10) state formative evaluation holds a prominent place in development research, especially in formative research. he likewise expresses that during advancement processes, the accentuation in criteria for quality usually shifts from validity, to practicality, and effectiveness. validity refers to the extent that the design of the intervention is based on state of the knowledge (content validity) and that the various components of the intervention are consistently linked to each other (construct validity). practically refers to the extent that users (and other experts) consider the intervention as appealing and usable in ‘normal’ conditions. effectiveness refers to the extent that the experiences and outcomes with the intervention are consistent with the intended aims. in developing e-learning based local-folklores, this study uses addie model of instructional design with five phases: 1) analysis, the phase is the foundation in investigating, knowledge, skill, learner needs, instructional goal and learning objectives; 2) design, the phase creates blue print how the draft of instructional can be delivered effectively; 3) development, the phase shows creating and organizing actual material that uses during the instruction; 4) implementation, the phases actual delivery of instructional design and promoting developed instructional design; 5) evaluation, the phase was to measure and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of developed instructional design (mcgriff, 2000; aldoobie, 2015; cheung, 2016). figure 1. design and development stages in addie model this research conducted at one of junior high school in indonesia. the population of this study was the eighth graders consisting of three classes in academic year 2018/2019. the subject of this study was described in table 1. table 1. stage of formative evaluation no staged by formative evaluation number of students description of the students 1 one-to-one evaluation 3 1 student for each category, i.e.: low, medium, and high english proficiency 2 small group evaluation 9 3 students for each category, i.e.: low, medium, and high english proficiency 3 field test 26 all the students in a real class total 38 each stage used different class the subjects of this study were selected based on their english proficiency which are low, medium and high proficiency (dick, carey & carey, 2005). every stage of formative evaluation used a different class with cluster random sampling since there is no purposive students’ distribution. purposive students’ distribution meant school distributed students with high proficiency in one class. their english proficiency was determined based on their teachers’ evaluation. the procedure uses in this development is addie model in instructional design. aldoobie (2015, p. 68) stated addie model is one of the most common models used in the instructional design field a guide to producing an effective design. addie model of instructional design with five phases: analyze, design, develop, implementation and evaluate. in this study, the activities carried out during the three phases were described in figure 2. this research aimed to develop local-folklores based e-learning, which was valid, practical, and had potential effect. therefore, to determine its validity, practicality, and potential effect, instruments used in this study were questionnaires and reading material test. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 105 figure 2. the synthesize of addie’s development procedure questionnaires were given to the experts in expert review and the students in one-to-one and small group evaluation to get information about their opinion and comment after reviewing and using the developed product which in form of likert scale ranging from 1 to 4 which illustrates sa (strongly agree), a (agree), d (disagree) and sd (strongly disagree). the questionnaire is one of the instrument which can be used to elicit stakeholders’, teacher’ and students’ comments (richards, 2005, p.301). the specification of the questionnaire (validation sheets) in expert review (kubiszyn & borich, 1993) was described in table 2, 3, 4 and 5. table 2. specifications of validation sheet of content aspect (s) number(s) of statement the appropriateness of contents with students’ characteristics (currency) 1, 2, 3 the accuracy of the contents 4, 5 the presentation of contents 6, 7 linguistics aspects of the contents 8, 9, 10 exercises and evaluation aspects 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 table 3. specifications of validation sheet of design aspect (s) number(s) of statement the appropriateness between materials and curriculum 1, 2 material presentation 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 the appropriateness of materials with the students’ character 8, 9 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 the appropriateness between exercise and standard competence and learning goals 15 the number of exercises 16, 17 and 18 table 4. specifications of validation sheet of product design aspect (s) number (s) of statement software/application 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 usability 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 table 5. specifications of students’ questionnaire aspect (s) number (s) of statement the appropriateness between materials and students’ characteristic 1, 2 and 3 content presentation 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 exercise aspect 9 10, 11 and 12 attractiveness of content 13, 14, and 15 sopian, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders 106 technique for analyzing data consist of: 1) validity, to know whether the product valid or not, the validation sheets from the expert review related to the content and instructional design of local-folklore based e-learning was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. the data which were collected tabulated and the result of each instrument was calculated and classified based on validity level as follow in table 6. table 6. validity categorization average score category 3.26-4.00 very high 2.51-3.25 high 1.76-2.50 low 1.00-1.75 very low 2) practicality, the material was evaluated in one to one evaluation and small group evaluation to find out whether the product developed was practical. the category of the practicality of materials developed was determined by the result of the questionnaire in one to one evaluation and small group evaluation. all the collected data were analyzed by using tabulation. the category of practicality as in table 7. table 7. practicality categorization average score category 3.26-4.00 very high 2.51-3.25 high 1.76-2.50 low 1.00-1.75 very low 3) potential effect, to find out whether elearning based local-folklores developed had potential effect, the result of students’ reading test was considered to determine of potential effect. the developed materials were classified to be effective if the students had already reached and passed the criterion. the criterion was the minimum mastery criterion (mmc). standard score of english in this school was 75. results and discussion analysis phase document review & existing material analysis three local-folklores were used in developing elearning. the reading level of three localfolklores analysed by using the flesch-kincaid grade level. by using it, the researcher got three results, they were: 1) reading level of the legend of kemaro island were analysed by using flesch-kincaid grade level. the grade level of the legend of kemaro island was 5 and the reading level was easy to read. it meant the folklore was suitable for fourth and fifth graders; 2) reading level of the bitter tongue were analyzed by using flesch-kincaid grade level. the grade level of the bitter tongue was 6 and the reading level was fairly easy to read. it meant the folklore was suitable for fifth and sixth graders; 3) reading level of the origins name of palembang were analyzed by using fleschkincaid grade level. the grade level of the origins name of palembang was 8 and the reading level was fairly difficult to read. it meant the folklore was suitable for seventh and eighth graders. students’ need analysis there were 35 questions and there were 26 students who participated in answering the questionnaires. the outcomes were: (1) students’ reading skill was low but on the opposite side, the students concurred that having capability in reading english texts was very important; (2) students’ interest in reading was low and it was shown by students’ frequency in reading activity was seldom; (3) teacher of english used lecturing teaching method and seldom even never used innovative one; (4) students’ eagerness in reading was high; (5) students’ opinion in easy question was very high; (6) students agreed that reading with media technology was more interesting; (7) students never used e-learning based localfolklores as learning media; (8) students received that reading materials on the website online were difficult to comprehend and were not reasonable to students’ reading level. design and development phase the content of developed e-learning based local-folklores in the design and development phase, there were three local-folklores developed as reading materials in a set of e-learning based localfolklores. the selected narrative texts for reading practice were adjusted to students’ reading localfolklores consist of simulation and evaluation for each local-folklores. then, the question text were tested to the website (www.animatedlocalfolklore.com). e-learning based local-folklores in this phase, the developed e-learning based local-folklores was an online website with wifi access. the admin and user page of developed elearning based local-folklores as follow in figure 3 and figure 4. in developing this product, by using a lot of programmes as coding such as html 5, css3, php, and javascript. besides the coding, the database uses my sql in the database of application. e-learning based local-folklores http://www.webpagefx.com/ english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 107 guiding question was followed the narrative texts. there were three parts of questions in the form of multiple choice, true false, and essay. multiple choice question consists of fifteen questions. the true-false question consists of ten questions. meanwhile, the essay question consists of ten questions. local-folklores based e-learning used the online website by using hosting. the name of hosting is rumah web indonesia. figure 3. admin page figure 4. user page implementation expert validation in validating this product, three experts validated this product in content, instructional design and product design. there were some suggestions which needed to be paid attention were as follow table 8. table 8. suggestions for expert review no expert review judgement suggestion 1 application/ production design if possible, the media is made separately and not included in the test/application test 2 instructional design be sure in your teaching procedure (lesson plan) you follow what scientific approach deals with 3 validation sheet of content good job table 9. recapitulation of expert review (content validity) sopian, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders 108 table 10. recapitulation of expert review (construct validity) table 11. recapitulation of expert review (construct validity) the average score content validity (i.e: english) was 3.86 showed in table 9 which was at very highly valid level. it can be concluded that a set of local-folklores based e-learning was valid in content and categorized as very highly valid level. then, in term of construct validity (i.e.: instructional design), the expert reviewing the product was a lecturer of english education study program with expertise in instructional design including the 2013 curriculum. the average score construct validity (i.e.: instructional design) was 3.67 shown in table 10 which was at very highly valid level. it can be concluded that a set of localfolklores based e-learning was valid in instructional design and categorized as very highly valid level. after reviewing the product design, the expert of local-folklores based e-learning application declared that the product was valid without revision. the obtained score was calculated and interpreted into validity categorization. the average score of the validity of product design was 3.50 showed in table 11 which was at very highly valid level. it can be concluded that a set of local-folklores based e-learning was valid in product design, categorized as very highly valid level and deserve to publish. before validation, the researcher designed prototype 1 (e-learning for user) in figure 5. figure 5 showed e-learning in prototype was very simple without video. the expert explained that if the video could not be seen by students repeatedly only on certain numbers, it is likely that students will have difficulty in doing the test. figure 5. product revision english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 figure 6. final prototype revision based on suggestion from the expert, the researcher added the video menu on prototype 2 in figure 6. in figure 6, the researcher added a video menu in e-learning on prototype 2. so, the students could see the video repeatedly before they answered the questions. students watched the video repeatedly. the addition of videos in e-learning aims to facilitate students on the test. level of validation based on the result validity level of the product, it was concluded that in term of content validity, the average score of content validity was 3.85 which was at very highly valid level. then, in term of construct validity, the average score of the construct was 3.67 which was at very highly valid level. the last was product design validity, the average score of local-folklores based elearning application validity was 3.50 was at very highly valid level. to determine the overall validity of content validity, construct validity and product design construct validity, the average score of each validity were used. it was determined that the overall validity was 3.67 which was in a very highly valid level. in conclusion, a set of local-folklores based elearning was valid and categorized as very highly valid level. one to one evaluation the one-to-one evaluation was held on monday, february 25th, in 2019 at one of junior high school in palembang. the time allocation of one to one evaluation was two meetings and every meeting was 80 minutes. based on results, from the total 15 items of the questionnaire, the average score of practicality in one-to-one evaluation from the three students’ score was 3.40 showed table 12 which was at a very highly practical level. it can be concluded that local-folklores based e-learning was practical and categorized as very highly practical level. small group evaluation the small group evaluation was held on wednesday, february 25th, in 2019 at one of junior high school in palembang. time allocation of small group evaluation was two meeting and every meeting was 80 minutes. based on results, from the total 15 items of the questionnaire, the average score of practicality in small group evaluation from the three students’ score was 3.58 showed table 13 sopian, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders 110 which was at a very highly practical level. it could be concluded local-folklores based elearning was practical and categorized as very highly practical level. table 12. result of questionnaire in one-to-one evaluation table 13. result of questionnaire in small group evaluation evaluation/field trial there were 26 students followed the field trial. the field trial in this study was conducted on friday, february 29th, 2019. from the result of reading test material, the developed product was effective. it showed that 19 students (76.93%) out of 26 students in the reading test achieved the minimum mastery criterion was 75. the result of the field trial could be seen in the following figure 7. figure 7. test results the developed product was a set localfolklores based e-learning in relation to narrative text material exactly the local-content of south sumatera for eighth graders. there were some phases that exams to be done in the process of developing reading simulation material and reading evaluation material. the phases were a sequence of addie model: analysis, design and development, implementation and evaluation. in the analysis phase, document review showed that the eighth graders should be able to analyse, understand, capture and represent the values from narrative texts. the core competence and basic competence of narrative demanded students to response narrative texts actively and established students become an active reader. hans and hans (2015, p.65) state a good reader interacts actively with text and good reader strategies are predicting, connecting, inferring, summarizing, analysing and critiquing. it was in line with guiding questions to stimulate and invite students’ response actively about character values inside the text. local-folklores based elearning invited students understanding in appreciating narrative text by using an online website. therefore, students were able to attain learning objectives in capturing and representing values from the narrative text after they actively appreciated the narrative text. in teacher side, it was a chance to teacher to develop reading material by using e-learning. in term of students reading the level analysis, this study portrayed that there were some necessities, lacks and wants. the students’ necessities were having good competence in reading english was important because the national examination questions were predominantly reading texts and students’ ability in appreciating texts was important because english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 students should be able to represent values inside the texts orally and in writing. students’ lacks in this study were students reading competence was low, students’ interests in reading were low because learning media wants, students wanted to learn reading english text with innovative ways and to have a guidance strategy to enrich students’ comprehension including english text. the framework of this study was narrowed by students needs analysis and the framework was to fulfill students’ needs in having innovative learning with mobile technology based on students’ characteristic. need analysis should be in line, relevant to the course and satisfying the learners need (nation & macalister, 2010). implementation phase described expert validation, one-to-one evaluation and small group evaluation. in expert validation, the validity of developed local-folklores based e-learning was measured. the validity of the product was very highly valid level. it meant that the developed local-folklores based e-learning were suitable for content, instructional design and product design was proper to reach learning objectives. one-toone evaluation and small group evaluation conducted practicality of developed localfolklores based e-learning as reading practice material. the practicality was a very highly practical level where the local-folklore based elearning was practical to use for students and teacher. the advantages of local-folklore based elearning were practical, efficient and paperless. in the other side, the limitation local-folklores based e-learning application need wifi access to process the online website. the importance of the review process in the evaluation was to ensure the product design was adequately designed (richards, 2005). the last stage was the assessment stage. the potential impact of nearby e-learning based localfolklores was a reading test material was estimated in the assessment stage. the e-learning based local-folklores was effective since the vast majority of the students passed the minimum mastery criterion. duration in conducting the assessment stage was obviously limited since field trial was conducted at once. it indicated data about the potential effect of develop e-learning based local-folklore as a reading test material. “teaching material and tests are high quality, have been carefully selected and developed and regularly reviewed and revised” (richards, 2005, p. 204). it indicated narrative texts with education values accompanied by e-learning based localfolklores guiding questions were able to help students known about local-folklores from south sumatera. ideally, students increasingly comprehended about narrative text. conclusion this study aimed to develop a set of valid, practical and effective e-learning based localfolklores for eighth graders. there were some conclusions written as follows: first, developed the product of e-learning based local-folklores was valid in term of content validity, construct validity and product design validity after reviewed by three experts of english, instructional design and application. the obtained score was (3.85) which was in a very highly valid level. second, the developed product of e-learning based local-folklores was practical after giving the reading material to the students in one to one evaluation with the average score was (3.67) and small group evaluation with the average score was (3.51). the last, developed product of elearning based local-folklores was effective as reading assessment. it was conducted by the result of students’ reading test was (76,93%) covered by the intended learning of the 2013 curriculum. references akker, j. v. d. 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(2012). pengembangan bahan ajar english for specific purpose berbasis tik. lentera pendidikan, 15(2), 144–160. an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class nunung nurhasanah department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia. e-mail: nunungnurhasanah17@yahoo.co.id apa citation: nurhasanah, n. (2014). an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class. english review: journal of english education 3(1), 103-113 . received: 14-10-2014 accepted: 23-10-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: this paper concerned about how criteria of mediator applied in role of the teacher in efl class and what the most dominant criteria of mediator done by the teacher in efl class. it was limited to analyze the role of teacher as mediator based on feuerstein’s mediated learning experience criteria (1980) in xiongyong et al., (2012). the method was qualitative research by using techniques structured observation and questionnaire that the process of teaching and learning was recorded by video then it was transcribed to identify the existence of criteria of mediator in the class. it also used observation worksheet to show the existence of criteria of mediator during three times observation. based on the findings of the research, the teacher applied all criteria of mediator well which shared intention was the most dominant criteria that was done by the teacher in the class with percentage 87%. it means that the teacher made instructions clearly during the learning so that the students could understand about the lesson and present their tasks well. keywords: role of teacher, mediator, mediated learning experience, efl class. introduction english is international language and used in many aspects such as science, technology, and culture (aprijal, 2012: 1). it has big role in transferring information in the world for example in indonesia. in indonesia, english also influences aspects in human life. the presence of english in indonesia from independence to the present has played in society at large, and in particular in business, politics, education and the media (lauder, 2008: 10). as previous explanation that education has large role in indonesia. the opinion is also supported by lauder (2008: 10) that says that english is a compulsory subject in schools and it can not be denied about the role in university which learning process can not occur without some readings in english. as we know that in indonesia, english is not first language or second language. it is a foreign language. according to brown (2000: 116), foreign language context occurs when the students can not communicate beyond their classroom with society by using english because it is not language that is used in the environment. beside in school, students can get it by language clubs, special media opportunities, books, or an occasional tourist (brown, 2000: 116). it is difficult enough to learn it and need much efforts to master it. moreover, english was first mentioned formally in 1955 at conference of teacher trainers by mr. wachendorff who is the first head of the central inspectorate of english language instruction in the ministry of education. he says that english is never used in daily life in indonesia, or even be the nunung nurhasanah an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class second language, but it should be the first foreign language (komaria, 1998: 24-25 in lauder, 2008: 16). it means that english as foreign language has established since long time ago. furthermore, it has also had rule of law that can strengthen previous statement and exact time to start learning english. komaria (1998: 29) in lauder (2008: 16) states that the 1989 law renders english as first foreign language and compulsory subject at the secondary level, but it is also given in primary four. moreover, in producing the learner that is good in english, teacher has also role to make it true. brown (2001) in xiongyong, samuel and hua (2012: 118) says that teachers are decision-makers in facing learning process and must be able to handle whatever educational setting, potentials, and problems. besides, tseng (1999) in xiongyong et al., (2012: 118) states that teacher is place where students learn about the world of work and prepared to be successful persons through collaborating with people around them. the statements explain that role of teacher influences in teaching and learning process and gives big contribution for education. teacher also has wide role in future life of students. in addition, good teacher must produce effective learner. it means that the role of teacher should be realized. but, there are many things that must be fulfilled so that it happens. researchers in cognitive education considered that children can become effective learner through teaching fundamental principles of thought, perception, learning, and problem-solving (feuerstein, 1980 & haywood, 1986 in seng, 1997: 1). the perspective is based on the three assumptions that two assumptions stated that the learning of effective cognitive processes occurs and more efficient cognitive functioning can be taught through mediated learning experience (samuel, 1987 in seng, 1997: 1). therefore, a teacher should be a good mediator in order to effective learning can be achieved. william & burden (2000) in xiongyong et al., (2012: 118) states that mediation gives chances for learners to practice english in communication and make the language learning more effective. it means that mediation is important in teaching and learning process and should be applied. because of that, role of teacher should use mediator to reach effective learning. it also should be priority in language instruction (feuerstein, 1990 in xiongyong et al., 2012: 118). furthermore, in social constructivist framework, theory of mediation is a main role (sun, 2005: 6 in xiongyong et al., 2012: 119). it means that mediation has big role. mediation help learners to become autonomous, to control their own learning, to become independent thinkers and problem-solvers (williams & burden, 2000: 68 in xiongyong et al., 2012: 119). as we see, mediation is very helpful to be independent learners and appropriate to apply. moreover, in mediation, mediators are the people around learners. seng, pou, & tan (2003: 11) in xiongyong (2011: 230) say that they may be the parent, facilitator, teacher, or some significant other who plays the intentional role of explaining, emphasizing, interpreting, or extending the environment so that the learner builds up a meaningful internal model of the context or the world experienced. this present study limits teacher as mediator. in classrooms, teachers should interact and assist learners for using language themselves not only providing english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee them with the language knowledge (fisher, 2005 in xiongyong, 2011: 230). besides, if they interaction each other constantly, they learn using language and making sense of the world (vygotsky, 1978 in xiongyong 2012: 233). it means that teacher help learners to understand using language in real life and the context. in addition, seng et al., (2003) in xiongyong (2012: 230) says that current education reforms imply that teacher role as mediator is important not only as disseminator of value of adult mediation but also in children’s learning can never be overstressed. for the explanation, mediation help learner to enjoy their lesson without being stress of it. after knowing that teacher as mediator is important for education, we should know what mediated learning experience is that becomes basic from teacher as mediator. seng (1997: 1) states mediated learning is the process that a mediator manages and interprets the world to child. it occurs when a person gives meaning to occurence, assists children to choose relevant variables, and try to improve children’s abilities to think that individual is involved in mediated learning. besides, seng (1997: 5) stated “mediated learning is the second and vital approach that ensures effective learning”. it is explained with statement from seng (1997: 5-6) as follows: feuerstein develops piaget’s formula of s-o-r further to include a human mediator between the world of stimuli, the organism and the response. his new formula for mediated learning is then s-h-o-h-r, where h is the human mediator. the human mediator interposes himself between the learning organism and the world of stimuli to interpret, guide and give meaning to the stimuli. one of feurstein’s program developments mediated learning experiences is instrumental enrichment. samuel (1987) in seng (1997: 2) states that teachers that apply the program are very enthusiastic toward its effect on the children’s thinking and their own teaching skills and then teachers’ ability increase after teaching this program. in addition, it is a facilitator to create effective learning through the teacher/mediator and which keep independent learning and thinking in children (seng, 1997:2). therefore, it is important for the teacher to apply mediated learning experience in the class. but, “as not every interaction with a task, learner, and a mediator has a quality of mediated learning experience (mle), feuerstein (1980), developed a system of the mle criteria to identify mediation interaction” (xiongyong et al., 2012: 119). they were 1) significance: the teacher makes students realize the importance of a learning task so that they can look at the significance of the task to their own and in a broader cultural context, 2) purpose beyond the here and now: explains to learners how conducting a learning activity will help them in the future beyond the moment and situation at present only, 3) shared intention: makes instructions clear and ensure the intention is understood and reciprocated by learners in presenting a task, 4) a sense of competence: fosters learners’ feelings of competence and capability of learning, 5) control of own behavior: encourages students to become autonomous by self-controlling their learning procedure, 6) goal-setting: teaches learners how to establish achievable targets and to locate approaches for realizing them, 7) challenge: helps learners to develop an internal need to confront challenges and nunung nurhasanah an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class to seek for new challenges in life, 8) awareness of change: urges learners to monitor changes in themselves and to understand that humans are changeable all the time, 9) a belief in positive outcomes: stimulates learners to assume that there is always the possibility of finding a solution, even when faced with an apparently intractable problem, 10) sharing: invites learners to share behaviors among themselves and to perceive that it is advisable for some problems to be addressed collaboratively, 11) individuality: helps learners realize their individual characteristics in terms of unique aspects, 12) a sense of belonging: aids learners to establish a consciousness of pertaining to the whole class community in the process of completing a learning task. method in this research, the researcher used a qualitative research method which aims to explore and understand the social phenomenon (creswell, 2009: 22). a case study is a strategy that the researcher used. it is used to explore activity in one or more individual deeply (creswell, 2009: 30). in this research, the phenomena explored and understood was about the teacher as mediator in efl class. the research was undertaken at a junior high school in kuningan, indonesia. the participant involved in this research was an efl teacher and the data collected through structured observation, and questionnaires. in collecting data, an observation worksheet as suggested by feuerstein’s mediated learning experience criteria (1980) in xiongyong et al., (2012) as variables in analyzing the teacher as mediator. the researcher also determines one of junior high schools in kuningan that is favourite school to research. questionnaire contains 12 feurstein’s (1980) mle criteria in xiongyong et al., (2012) that teacher does in the class. there are twelve statements which one statement consists of one criterion. in analyzing the observation, the researcher used via guttman scale (yes or no) for analyzing the existence the 12 criteria of feuerstein’s mediated learning experience. feuerstein’s mediated learning experience is assessment rubric to analyze the applying mediated learning experience by the teacher in the class. the teaching was also video-recorded and fully transcribed to identify the existence with criteria of mediated learning experience in the class. for analyzing the questionnaire, the researcher used likert scale. it is instrument to measure how often teacher has role as mediator. the researcher uses checklist form with four variables answer of the statements (always, often, seldom, never). for the result of questionnaire, it will be counted each number which one number show one criteria to measure what the most dominant criteria of mediator in efl class. results and discussion criteria of mediator that occurs in role of the teacher in efl class to know how the teacher taught in the class, the writer did observation three times and recorded it to watch and analyze how the teacher applied the criteria. the writer also provided observation worksheet to know the existence of the criteria of mediated learning experience during learning. the observation worksheet consisted of two choices (yes or no) in analyzing 12 criterias of mediated learning english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee experiences by feuerstein (1980) in xiongyong et al., (2012). during three times observation, the topic that teacher taught was “asking and showing ability and willingness”. based on the observation in the class, the writer found the difference of existence of feuerstein’s mediated learning experience criteria (1980) in the class for three times of observation, but during observation the teacher applied all of the criteria as follows: significance in this criteria, the teacher connected between the task and the importance of learning the lesson. the teacher wanted the students to realize that the task was important to themselves and their life. she appointed the task for the first after that she involved and explained about the content and the function. it showed with the dialogue below: t : “so what do you think about this one?” (appoint table of activity 2 in the white board). “what we are talking about today? kira-kira apa sih yang akan kita pelajari hari ini?” ss : “he can, i can.” t : “yes about he can, she can, do you can? what is expression? ini ekspresi apa” ss : “ability, giving ability.” t : “giving ability? it is expression of asking and showing ability” (teacher wrote in the whiteboard). “kita akan belajar tentang kemampuan seseorang dan menyatakan kemampuan seseorang.” (observation video recording 1, september 29th, 2014) in the dialogue above, the teacher wanted to make students realize that the the task that had given (activity) was important and useful for them. for the first she gives the task after that she asked to the students that the task is about what and stated what it is for and the importance of it. purpose beyond here and now in this criteria, the teacher explained that the learning had benefit in the future for the students. it was not only useful for now but also when the students grow to be adult. it was not just useful in the school for english learning but also in the real life. in the observation, the teacher taught about “asking and showing ability and willingness”. in there, the teacher explained that the lesson about ability had benefit when they want to show about their ability in daily life. she said that they will need it in the real life if we want to work to show their ability that is match with criteria of work. she said, “learning about it is not only useful for english lesson but also you can need it in daily life such as in the job. you can show your ability by the expression when you want to apply for job or job interview”(observation video-recording, september 29th, 2014). shared intention in three times of observation, each day the teacher always ensured whether the students understand what the teacher said and explained. she never forgot to say, “do you understand?”, “any questions?” in the middle of lesson or in the end of lesson. by saying them was expected no misunderstanding in lesson and task so that students could present task well. moreover, she also often gave them questions to ensure that the students understand about the lesson. the criteria is showed by the dialogue below: nunung nurhasanah an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class t : “sampai di sini. any questions?” ss : “no.” t : “are you sure?” ss : “yes.” t : “kalo gitu ibu yang nanya ya? what about this sentence? can’t ben swim?” (teacher wrote in the white board). “bisa ga pertanyaan ini?” for the first and the second underlined sentences, she ensures that the lesson is understood well. and for the third underlined sentence, she gives question to measure how far the students’ comprehension about the lesson. a sense of competence to make the students confidence and feel capable in studying, the teacher never forgot to say, “ thanks”, clapped the hands and asked students to clap their hand for the students that become volunteers to do the task, and stimulated someone to says more about something. we can see from the dialogue above: t : “sudah itu saja raja?” (teacher wrote it in the white board) s : “i’m pretty good at it, i think.” t : “ok ada lagi?” s : “i love chess and i often joined the tournament.” t : “what else?” s : “swim”. (recording#1, september 29, 2014) the underlined word above showed that the teacher stimulated the students to more about the task. beforehand the students just said little and was not confidence to speak but with the help of teacher, the students spoke more. according to williams and burden (2000: 73) in xiongyong et al., (2012: 123), if learning is to be successful, it is crucial that teachers establish in their classrooms a climate where confidence is built up, where mistakes can be made without fear, where learners can use the language without embarassment, where all contributions are valued, and where activities lead to feelings of success, not failure.” control of own behavior in applying these criteria, the teacher guided the students to assess their lesson and the task. the teacher directed the students to asses their task by themselves such as teacher asked students to correct the answer together and asked what it is right or wrong. it is showed by the dialogue: t : “kira-kira what do you think about this answer? this is right?” ss : “no.” t : “so, we would like to listen one more time and check what it is wrong or what it is right.” (observation video-recording 1, september 29th, 2014) the dialogue is showed after the students did the task from listening to the audio. the teacher asked students to come forward and write the task in the whiteboard. after that she asked to students to check the answer in the whiteboard. as skuy (1991) in seng (1997: 7) states, “mediation of selfregulation and control of behavior involves helping the child analyse the task in order to adjust his behaviour appropriately”. she also made students to be responsible with their behavior. she ordered the students that came late to explain about their tardiness and promise not to come late again. she says, “please come forward to tell why you come late and promise not to come late again” (observation video-recording 1, september 29th, 2014). moreover, she also emphasized the importance of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee doing homework. she gave punishment if the students did not do the homework. she said, “do it and don’t forget! you have to sing a song in front of the class if you don’t do the assignment!” (observation video-recording 1, september 29th, 2014 ). williams and burden (2000: 73) in xiongyong et al., (2012: 123) said, “feelings of competence are necessary but not sufficient for learning to be effective; learners also need to become competent, that is, they need to learn the necessary skills and strategies in order to take control of their own learning.” goal-setting to reach goals in learning, the teacher had a way that was students’ reflection paper. every meeting the students had to make a reflection about the learning in the class. the teacher reminded the students about the reflection, “yang reflectionnya belum hari ini bisa?.....ini adalah refleksi termin ke-1 dengan hari ini berarti 2. jadi jangan tanya lagi ibu buat refleksi ya? itu mah wajib setiap pertemuan.” (recording#2, october 10, 2014). it consisted of the summary, the difficulty, and what they caught about the material. it was individual task and handwriting. they had to made it by themselves and by using english. it was collected every daily tests. by using the method the students was hoped to be able to understand the material and practice their english. besides, the teacher made the class to be life. she was friendly and delightful. she made the students not to be awkward and fear to ask and share about the lesson. it made the goal of the lesson to be easy to reach. there was always little conversation between students with teacher about the lesson and the material which have nor been understood. challenge in applying this criteria, the teacher offered students to be volunteers to involve in lesson and task or she appointed the students directly to be volunteers. she asked them to come forward, to write in the whiteboard, to raise the hands for showing that they could do the task and destroy all obstacles. she said, “siapa yang mau ke depan and write down the information you get from the audio. listen! you can give checklist for the right answer”). and she also said, “habil, would you like to try? or who wanna try number 5?” she also appointed the students directly to do the task, it was hoped the students could face the challenges and the fearness. she said, “ok next, rio for doing number 10”. related to such method of teacher, williams and burden (2000: 75) in xiongyong et al., (2012: 124), confirms that: no matter how much information a teacher may have about a group or even individual learners, it is virtually impossible to match each learner with the right level of task without involving the learners themselves in the process. since the ultimate goal of mediated learning experiences is to produce independent learners and problem solvers, increasing the involvement of the learners in all aspects of the learning process should be encouraged at every opportunity. awareness of change the teacher noticed the learning process in the class. she realized each of change happened with the students. she ordered students to monitor changes in themselves in learning, attitude, or body condition because humans are nunung nurhasanah an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class changeable all the time. it happened in the third observation when there was a student that was sick. he seemed lethargic in learning in the class. the teacher asked to him, “are you sick? be better for you to take a rest in uks, please for his friend to accompany him to there”. she also said, “important for you all to monitor your condition so that the lesson can be understood well.” besides, the teacher also asked to students to monitor their progress about english in the class where it increases or decreases by making notes about what the ability/progress that students got in every meeting. she said, “for you all, to know and measure you progress in english, you can write in your book every change in positive side in english”. a belief in positive outcomes the teacher was never angry or snapped the students when the students made a fault in task/ learning. she always smiles and supports the students to do the task though it feels difficult for them. she always gives belief to what the students did whether it was right or wrong. it would make the students believe that there was a solution in every difficulty and a positive outcome in every matter. she said to a student that felt difficult to do task, “please, you can do it. it was easy for you, believe me. just try!” sharing in the class, there was good cooperation between teacher and students or fellow students. teacher often moves around in the class and shares about lesson. the students were active to ask if they did not understand about the lesson. the english learning in the class was not only presented with individual task but also group task. in the second and third observation, the teacher involved cooperation among the students. in the second observation, the teacher gives the task about friends’ ability so that the students had to ask to four friends, two girls and two boys, so they had a little conversation by english to complete the task. then, in the third observation, the teacher ordered the students to make a group 2 or 3 person to make a simple dialogue about asking and showing ability and willingness. she said, “work in pairs. kerja berdua/bertiga ya. make a simple dialogue, just it’s easy, right? jadi jangan yang susah-susah silahkan percakapan sehari-hari yang sering kalian buat. ok. ada asking ability, ada juga willingnessnya”. according to williams and burden (2000: 77) in xiongyong (2012: 124) stated, “sharing and working cooperatively are a vital part of our social existence, the absence of which can result in cognitive difficulties and a very idiosyncratic view of the world”. individuality in the class, the teacher gave the task to the students that showed their uniqueness. she ordered students to ask to four friends about the ability. the students had to asked it by using english. they made a table about ten abilities that teacher gave and they asked it to four friends, two boys and two girls. they had to gave checklist if the friend had ability about it. the students had to asked by using, “can you do math? can you play chess? can you swim? can you.......?....... ” until ten abilities that the teacher gave. by the task, the teacher hoped that the students realized their uniqueness that distinguished with the others. they realized that they had something more than the others. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee besides, the teacher also appreciated the difference of students’ characteristics, different opinion, and ability in the class. it made the students not to be shy and fear to show themselves as a whole. according to williams and burden (2000: 79) in xiongyong et al., (2012: 125), “the language classroom is a place where this sense of individuality can be fostered in various ways through the task given, the teacher’s actions and the climate created. learners can be encouraged to express their own individuality through the foreign language.” a sense of belonging sense of belonging in the class was strong. the teacher could make the students comfortable in learning english. every one was enthusiastic when the teacher explained and gave the task. she could make the class to be cheerful. he said, “are you with me so far?”(observation video-recording 1, september 29th, 2014 ) to ensure that the students focused in learning english, and had a sense of belonging in the class. he also said, “ok silahkan perempuan, tadi laki-laki udah” (video-recording 3) to show their sense of belonging when the teacher wanted a girl to represent their group. it showed that a girl had a sense of belonging in the class community. the most dominant criterion of mediator in efl class to know the dominant criteria of teacher as mediator, the writer used criteria of mediated learning experiences by feuerstein (1980). there were twelve criteria. the writer used questionnaires to know the dominant criteria of a teacher in a class of junior high school. there were twelve statements which one statement consisted of one criterion of mediated learning experiences. then, the questionnaire consisted of four choices (never, sometime, often, always) that must be given checklist as match as the way of teacher in teaching english in the class. based on the questionnaire given to the students, the writer found that the teacher applied all criteria of mediated learning experience. it means that the teacher played the role as mediator well, as illustrated by diagram below: nunung nurhasanah an analysis of teacher as mediator in efl class based on the diagram above, it showed that the most dominant criterion was shared intention (87%). the other criteria were significance (74%), purpose beyond here and now (77%), a sense of competence (76%), control of own behavior (79%), goal-setting (72%), challenge (78%), awareness of change (67%), a belief in positive outcomes (65%), sharing (70%), individuality (81%), and a sense of belonging (81%). from all criteria, shared intention was the most dominant criterion teacher applied in the class with 87%. according to feuerstein (1980) in xiongyong et al., (2012), making clear instructions will ensure the intention may be understood and reciprocated by learners in presenting a task. it means that the teacher always ensures whether or not the students understand about what she explained in the class. in the observation he often said, “do you understand” or “any questions?” in the middle or in the end of the lesson to make sure about their comprehension. she also often gives questions to them to check their comprehension about the lesson but the researcher did not focus in the kinds and patterns of the questions. by analyzing teacher as mediator in efl class, it could be concluded that teacher played role as mediator well with the most dominant criterion was shared intention (87%). conclusion in the perspective of mediation, teacher played the role well. in the three times of observation that the writer did, the teacher applied all of the criteria of mediated learning experience as basic role of teacher as mediator in the efl class. they are significance, purpose beyond the here and now, shared intention, a sense of competence, control of own behavior, goal-setting, challenge, awareness of change, a belief in positive outcomes, sharing, individuality, and a sense of belonging. she could direct the learning well and made students reaching the goal of the lesson for being effective learner. from all criteria of mediated learning experience, shared intention was the most dominant criterion of mediator done. the teacher made the instructions clearly during the learning so that the students could understand about the lesson and present their tasks well. references aprijal, j. (2012). teaching narrative text using grammar-translation method to improve writing ability at the tenth grade students of smk al-fathonah cilaku-cianjur. retrieved on march 25, 2014, from http://publikasi.stkipsiliwangi.ac.id/fil es/2012/09/09220498-julius-a.pdf brown, h. d. (2000). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd ed.). california: longman. creswell, j. w. (2009). research design (3rd ed.). california: sage publications inc. fraenkell, j r., & wallen, e n. (2009). how to design and evaluate research and education (7th ed.). new york: mcgraw-hill higher education. lauder, a. (2008). the status and function of english in indonesia: a review of key factors. makara, sosial humaniora, 12 (1), 9-20. retrieved on september 10, 2014, from http://journal.ui.ac.id/index.php/hum anities/article/viewfile/128/124 seng, s. (1997). using mediated learning experience to enhance children’s thinking. 1-11. retrieved on august on 30, 2014, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed406 052.pdf sugiyono. (2012). metode penelitian pendidikan. bandung: alfabeta. xiongyong, c. (2011). performance of mediation and situational constraints of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee china’s secondary school efl teachers. international journal of english linguistics, 12 (1), 230-240. retrieved on august 30, 2014, from doi:10.5539/ijel.v1n2p230 xiongyong, c., samuel, m., & hua, c. (2012). evaluation on efl teacher roles from the perspective of mediation: case studies of china’s secondary school classroom practices. international review of social sciences and humanities, 3 (1), 117-134. retrieved on august 26, 2014, from http://irssh.com/yahoo_site_ admin/ assets/docs/13_irssh-239v3n1.131230957.pdf xiongyong, c. (2012). cognition of mediation among secondary school efl teachers in china. international journal of business and social science, 3 (14), 223244. retrieved on august 30, 2014, from http://ijbssnet.com/journals/vol_3_n o_14_special_issue_july_2012/25.pdf english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 39 methods for teaching speaking skill at thamar schools and their impacts on learners’ oral competency jameel alghaberi education college, department of english, thamar university, yemen e-mail: abujamaljameel@gmail.com apa citation: alghaberi, j. (2019). methods for teaching speaking skill at thamar schools and their impacts on learners’ oral competency. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 39-46. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1732. received: 07-01-2019 accepted: 15-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: in the republic of yemen, english is taught as a foreign language (fl) in schools and universities. it is a compulsory subject in the curriculum of yemeni schools and universities and it is the only foreign language that is taught in all yemeni public schools. however, teachers and educators complain about students’ lack of oral competency. hence, this paper attempts to evaluate the current teaching methods, approaches, techniques and activities used for teaching english speaking skill at thamar secondary public schools. besides, it also investigates the utilization of instructional aides as well as technological resources and facilities available at schools in thamar city. three different data collection techniques were used, namely observation, questionnaire, and interview. the results revealed that english teachers in thamar still follow the traditional teaching methods. above all, speaking skill is almost neglected. the lack of proper teaching methods and activities coupled with the absence of instructional aides stand behind students’ deficiency in english speaking. thus, it is recommended that several training sessions for in-service teachers to be held in order to familiarize them with the methods, techniques, and activities used for teaching english speaking skill. keywords: communicative approach; instructional aides; oral competency; speaking fluency; teaching methodology; thamar public schools. introduction the teaching and learning of english as a foreign language has grown enormously. more specifically, the focus has recently been on how to speak and use the language effectively. the concern is not only about ‘knowing english’, but also significantly about ‘speaking english’ and using it for communication. accordingly, the teaching and learning of english as a foreign language gives priority to speaking skills. for this purpose, several methods, approaches, and techniques were innovated. the most popular and recognized approach is the communicative approach (ca) which stresses the development of communicative skills. it is revealed that communicative activities force learners to activate their linguistic repertoire and increase the possibility of integrating the new forms of the target language. however, more failures have always marked the english teaching worldwide when attempts are made to communicate. many learners know about the language, but only some of them understand how to use it in daily conversation. of course, there is a good deal of unanimity of views that the teaching and learning of speaking skills could only succeed by having good learning facilities, such as competent teachers, various english books, teaching aids and teaching media as well. in transferring language to students, appropriate techniques are needed in order to create a new and effective atmosphere for classroom interaction. in other words, by implementing various techniques and activities, teachers will be able to stimulate students in the teaching and learning process. brown and lee (1994, p. 63) state: techniques should cover the spectrum of learners needs, from language-based focus on accuracy to message-based focus on interaction, meaning and fluency. technique use should also encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful context; provide appropriate feedback and correction; capitalize on the natural link between speaking and listening; give the students opportunities to initiate oral communication; and encourage the development of speaking strategies. from the statement, it can be assumed that english teachers are required to be well-prepared before performing the lesson through supported activities in order to arouse the students’ motivation so as to achieve the desired objectives. mailto:abujamaljameel@gmail.com jameel alghaberi methods for teaching speaking skills at thamar schools and their impacts on learners’ oral competency 40 as reported by fareh (2010), efl programs in the arab world still fail to deliver as expected and the efl learners’ proficiency in english remains inadequate and below expectation which are caused by several factors, such as improperly trained teachers, inadequate teaching methodology, use of teacher-centered rather than learner-centered activities, and lack of exposure to english. thus, communicative approach is believed to run more effectively and efficiently. integrated and multi-skill instructions usually follow the principles of communicative approach with various pedagogical emphases, goals, instructional materials, activities, and procedures playing a central role in promoting communicative language use (hinkel, 2006). in addition to the revolution in teaching methods, the waves of technology have also affected the teaching and learning of fl to a great extent. computers have proved their pedagogical worth in foreign language classroom. learning technologies have given the students and teachers unparalleled access to authentic written and spoken english. as state by dede (2002), there is a world of teaching materials available in the internet that can enliven any lesson. hence, educational technology has a positive impact on students’ attitudes and on teacher’s teaching practices towards more cooperative group work and less teacher-centered. technology has really become an inseparable element of learning a foreign language as it enhances students’ achievements. al-mekhlafi (2004) also remarks that teaching english in the arab world has been characterized by the use of traditional and grammar-oriented approach with limited information resources (e.g. the teacher, the textbook and the chalkboard), but recently, several studies have been conducted and their findings have confirmed that the introduction of computers into efl classroom enhances language learning as well as enriches the teaching and learning environment. in the yemeni context, the improvement of language teaching has not done much for the learner who nowadays faces so many challenges. using the old-fashioned method of teaching can cause frustration, insecurity, and low self-esteem in the learners. the latter is thereby bound to be vulnerable and incapable of not only passing tests but is also coward enough not to face any challenge in his/her life. in addition, technology has not yet found its way to the yemeni classroom. this situation is not satisfactory for the development of yemen and needs more improvement to keep pace with the technological development in the world (shan’a, 2009). the yemeni english language teaching (elt) reformation was, as noted by bataineh and thabet (2008), merely confined to the replacement of the syllabi. reportedly, no beneficial orientation has been held on the principles of clt and, thus, teachers and supervisors have kept on using conventional teaching strategies with eccfy (english crescent course for yemen) making no reference to most of the communicative techniques of classroom activities, language teaching aids and teacher questioning proposed by clt and widely touted for enhancing learners’ foreign language proficiency (murshid, 2001). generally, it seems that english teachers in yemen focus on grammar and structures, and that is what makes students almost “deaf and dumb” and show little ability to speak and understand english. students are not learning enough realistic and whole language so that they do not know how to communicate using appropriate social language, gestures or expressions. in brief, students are not able to communicate in the target language. it is felt that the current teaching techniques applied by teachers do not produce satisfactory teaching results which mean that they probably have not achieved the objectives of teaching english in yemen. along with different studies carried out all over yemen, it is the purpose of this research to dwell on and investigate the currently applied methods and techniques as well as technological resources utilized for teaching spoken english at thamar secondary public schools, reporting and providing the concerned bodies and institutions with adequate information and well-framed picture about the situation of teaching english in order that actions of remedial intent are to be taken. despite the fact that yemeni students learn english for six years, starting from grade seven and up to grade twelve, there have been several complaints about the weaknesses in spoken english of secondary public school graduates who join universities as english majors or as english language learners. thamar secondary school graduates are not exempted. the majority of thamar secondary public schools’ graduates find it difficult to hold a conversation in english for even five minutes. this can be attributed to english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 the nature of teaching or the lack of appropriate educational and technological resources. according to al-sharafi (2010), elt in yemeni public schools has been suffering from a serious problem. it is the same problem that widdowson (1978, p. 117) had recognized for efl, where he says: the problem is that students, and especially students in developing countries, who have received several years of formal english teaching, frequently remain deficient in the ability to actually use the language, and to understand its use, in normal communication, whether in the spoken or the written modes. al-sharafi (2010) describes this problem as serious since it means that yemen has not yet been able to achieve its goal of teaching english in its public schools despite the fact that it spends a lot of money in this regard. a little bit closer, rashed (2009) drives home the fact that large classes is a major problem for teaching spoken english in yemen. as he points out, “most students sit passively for 45 minutes and only the teacher speaks explaining the lesson, without giving a chance to the students to practice or think” (rashed, 2009, p.94). due to the importance of communicating in the target language, the exercise of speaking skills has received increasing attention among educators during the past two decades. the need for communication has been relentless, leading to the emergence of the communicative language teaching (clt). in reaction to the grammartranslation and audio-lingual methods which did little in promoting communication skills, clt came to existence, emphasizing communicative activities which involve real use of language in real day-to-day life situations. because of its merits, communicative approach has dominated english language teaching; it has firmly established itself on a worldwide basis and there are good historical reasons for this (jarvis, 2005). the adoption of this approach was based on several factors that obliged linguists, psychologists, and educationalists to provide it with applicable techniques, procedures and theories as well. communicative language teaching (clt) makes use of real-life situations that students are likely to encounter in real life. here, students’ motivation to learn comes from their desire to communicate in meaningful ways about meaningful topics. in common consent, students’ ability to engage in meaningful conversational interaction in the target language is considered an important, if not the most important, goal of fl education. in connection with this aim, hass (2000) assures that students need opportunities to be active participants in tasks requiring them to negotiate meaning and practice language in communication with their teachers, their peers and others. today, a number of creative language learning software exist and is quite accessible from any part of the world. the aim is to engage the learner with interactive content to facilitate learning. in addition, multimedia is integrated into the newly emerging software which makes learning process more interactive. recently, computer technology has become more available and more affordable to learners and schools (liu 2005). many instructors have become better aware of the great potential computer software has for english language learning. liu (2005) states that attention has been recently moving away from computer software technology toward methodology and therefore teaching has become more elevated, and research has begun to focus on english language learning through the use of interactive software. it has been argued that computer technology has made language learning and teaching more effective because it can provide various repeatable stimuli which are not available in a single package in the past. zhong and shen (2002) indicated that the use of technology in efl has gained a great deal of momentum in china. they have labeled the process of technology integrated english instruction as “multimedia efl teaching”. in yemen, there have been some initiatives regarding integrating computer technology into schools. in february, 2005, a workshop was held in sana'a by iearn to introduce secondary school teachers to how they can apply the connective power of the internet and other technologies to their classroom curriculum subjects. having the same purpose, intaleq (innovation in technologyassisted learning for education quality) project, sponsored by usad, ministry of education and other organizations, was launched in 2009, targeting mukla, taiz, aden and sana'a. this program aimed at measuring the effects of teaching by using technological means on students’ achievement. thus, it was agreed between edc (henceforth, educational development centre), intel and moe (henceforth, ministry of education) that the moe would endeavor to select items (largely from the egyptian digital content) that would not jameel alghaberi methods for teaching speaking skills at thamar schools and their impacts on learners’ oral competency 42 need extensive adaptation for use in yemen, both for time and budgetary reasons. the yemeni moe has made a solid start on compiling a library of authentically yemeni digital materials, keyed to the yemeni curriculum, which can be used by teachers and students, yet there is still a long way to go. in yemen, the environment and family background are very important factors that determine the success of learning english. as stated by al-sohbani (2015), the opportunity to learn english in yemen through natural interaction with native speakers is rare and english is merely taught as a subject. such situations negatively affect students’ oral competency as the need to communicate in english in daily lives is not fulfilled. it can be stated that socio-economic prestige is a crucial factor behind the strong integrative tendencies and the high motivation levels of the yemeni efl students (attamimi & rahim, 2011). in thamar, we cannot say that secondary schools are fully equipped with modern technologies. according to the manager of instructional aides and educational technology at the office of the ministry of education, thamar branch, there are eight schools in thamar city out of eighty which are equipped with educational and technological facilities, such as computers, data shows, and other variants of visual aids. one of these equipped schools is ogba school which has been visited by the researcher several times. this school has 20 computers connected to the internet plus a science lab. yet, no real advantage is driven from the availability of these technological facilities. the english language teachers at this school grumble that one of the reasons preventing them from using computer lab in teaching english speaking is the problem of large classes. in reality, the problem of large classes is a critical one, but this does not mean that these teachers should give up and remain blind followers of the old traditional methods of teaching. they should think of possible solutions and cooperate with the concerned persons to tackle such problems. method this study involves teachers and students of thamar secondary public schools. from the list of school names obtained from the office of ministry of education in thamar, four schools were selected in a stratified random way (including both boys’ and girls’ schools). the boys’ schools are ogba bin nafa and haile saeed educational complex and the girls’ schools are al-methaq and al-shaima'a. in each of the boys’ selected schools, two teachers from each grade were selected as respondents. meanwhile, from girls’ schools, only one teacher from each grade was selected as respondents, i.e., three teachers from each school of the selected girls’ schools. for collecting data, the researcher used some instruments, ranging from closed ended questionnaire, open-ended questionnaire, observation checklist, and interview. open and closed ended questionnaires were constructed, developed, and then administered to 18 teachers. moreover, a number of 120 students were also given closed-ended as well as open-ended questionnaires. to ensure better understanding of the nature of teaching speaking, the researcher developed and made use of observation checklist, noting down some points about the teachers’ performance while teaching speaking. the observation checklist was constructed on the basis of the pertinent literature, and then reviewed by an expert at education college, thamar university. regarding the educational facilities and aids, the researcher arranged some interviews with the head of the department of educational technology and visual aids, the office of the ministry of educations, thamar branch. these interviews sought to obtain official data about the facilities offered to schools. results and discussion the guiding question is whether the methods, techniques and activities used by english teachers at thamar secondary public schools are effective to enhance students’ oral competency. to answer this question, an observation checklist was prepared. actually, six teachers of tenth grade were observed during the teaching of four periods, i.e., four lessons were observed. the observed teachers were not from a single school but they were selected from three schools. the observation showed that the performance of the observed teachers is very poor. it is to be drawn here that those observed teachers do not give any priority to the teaching of english speaking skills, nor do they give it any consideration or significance. in their classes, the teaching of english speaking skills is largely ignored. clearly, the absence of the simple and common methods, techniques and activities in the teaching of this skill is evidence english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 to the deficiency of students in communicating in english. besides, tenth grade teachers do not make any use of instructional aides or technological resources. it was also observed that no one of the sample employed any of the out-put oriented activities, such as role-play, simulation, debate, etc. this condition has a negative influence on students’ oral competency. in other words, this is one of the reasons that lie behind the deficiency of thamar secondary public school students in english speaking skills. grouping techniques are popular in the teaching of speaking skills. however, none of the observed teachers made use of any sorts of grouping. all of the teachers were observed teaching the whole class as one single group. about learning from and with peers, 16.7 % of the teachers were observed encouraging such a way of learning, while the other teachers did not do so. it was also observed that 33.3% of the teachers were able to create a non-threatening environment by being tolerant, ongoing, friendly and above all not meticulous about making mistakes. similarly, 33.3% of the observed teachers prompted cooperative group work, practicing exercises in the class, answering some questions, etc. on the contrary, none of the teachers was observed requiring his students to work cooperatively with each bother. coming to the extent of using english in the classroom, it was observed that only 16.7% of the teachers used english fairly well in the classroom. the other teachers were all observed using arabic most of the time. in this area, the researcher has been aware about teachers’ presence that they may exhibit during the observation process, so he questioned some other teachers who were not observed. in addition, the students were also asked to measure the extent to which their teachers use english in the classroom. as speaking class (or specifically oral production) requires many motivational cues to be used so as to motivate the students and stimulate them to speak, it was found that 33.3% of the observed teachers took advantage of such a technique, whereas the other teachers did nothing of this type. as it was observed, only 16.7% of the teachers of the observation sample were seen sequencing their speaking lesson according to ppp (presentation, practice, production) procedure, whereas the other teachers were observed focusing only on presentation from the beginning to the end of the teaching session. regarding class participation, there were no activities held or performed to see to what extent the teachers allow class participation. thus, as there were no activities, there was nothing to be observed with respect to class participation. the same thing recurred with directed discussions. there were no directed discussions, so there was nothing to be observed. collaborative learning, also called peer learning, is considered one of the established, popular and effective approaches, and active class participation is considered an essential element of this type of learning. peer learning refers to the acquisition of knowledge and skills through active help and support among status equals or matched companions (topping, 2005). with reference to this, students’ interaction was also limited. only 33.3% of the teachers were observed allowing and activating students’ interaction, but the other teachers were seen dominating most of the time. it was also observed that no one of the teachers cared about students’ involvement, nor did the researcher observe any teacher teaching speaking english with the help of instructional aides. in this regard, both the teachers and the students were also asked about the use of instructional aides in the classroom. this situation creates anxiety as the students remain constantly silent. dewaele and al-saraj (2015) studied the correlation between self-perceived oral proficiency in english and the frequency of use of english. they also investigated the socio-biographical variables and five multicultural personality traits that reflect the classroom anxiety. their investigation revealed that participants who felt more proficient in oral english and used the language frequently were significantly less likely to suffer from foreign language classroom anxiety. generally, it is advisable to minimize the use of students’ l1 during speaking classes. what was observed is not in harmony with the principles of clt, which require decreasing the use of l1 during speaking classes. the observer did not see any teacher trying to limit the use of l1 so as to push the students to struggle to communicate in the target language. in short, the results of the observation conducted on tenth grade teachers indicated clearly that the teaching practice adopted by them is not compatible with the techniques, methods, and activities used for teaching spoken english. it can be said that tenth grade teachers’ way of teaching is among the factors that do not jameel alghaberi methods for teaching speaking skills at thamar schools and their impacts on learners’ oral competency 44 contribute to the improvement of students’ speaking skills, but conversely to limiting and discouraging the students to have good speaking skills in english. all in all, the majority of the teachers are not familiar with the methods, techniques and activities which are commonly used for teaching english speaking skills. this is really one of the major causes that lie behind the deficiency of thamar secondary school students in english speaking skills. none of the teachers employed speaking techniques and activities, such as simulation, role-play, discussion, prepared talk, and story-telling. while observing, the researcher found no one of the observed teachers initiating any activity or using any common technique used for teaching speaking, nor were their students satisfied with their way of teaching. this is in accordance with the results of the study done by thabet (2002) and bataineh and thabet (2008). with respect to the instructional aides and technological facilities, it is actually another depressing finding. only six teachers said that they have the cassettes that accompany the textbooks. when coming to using them for teaching purposes, it was found that only two teachers of the sample claimed to use them in teaching speaking skills. however, this is not only the problem with the teachers, but it is also the result of the negligence exhibited by the concerned persons at the office of the ministry of education, thamar. when these concerned bodies were interviewed by the researcher, they disclosed the bitter fact that they had nothing to support english language teaching at schools. this is an indication of the apparent negligence from the part of the teachers, inspectors and the higher bodies as well. information and communication technologies have given the students many opportunities to practice english in and out the classroom and they have time and freedom to understand, reflect and analyze what have been exposed (ibrahim, 2010). thamar public schools seem to be stuck in traditional methods and the teachers have not been able to shift their classrooms into the digital age. although some schools are equipped with some computers, yet no single benefit is driven from the presence of these magical tools. those sets are just for decoration and no one knows when they might be used in teaching english, particularly english speaking skills. the suffering of the other schools is even worse. they are not even supplied with the basic instructional aides, and this has its direct influence on the students’ achievements in general. undoubtedly, the burden is all put on the students. such a situation-with poor performance of the teachers in the classroom and the lack of instructional aides and technological facilities-deeply impacts on the final oral attainment of the students. in general, yemeni students encounter difficulties that hinder mastering the basic skills of english as a foreign language. as the study reveals, the adherence to traditional methods of teaching remains a detrimental factor in student’s poor competency. in addition, the unavailability of the advanced technological facilities and the scarce of well-designed instructional aides impact the students’ attempt to improve their fluency in english. besides, the currently civil war that broke out has paralyzed the educational system in the whole country. since 2011 till today, public schools in yemen have been struggling to remain open regardless of maintaining educational standards. what remain are individual attempts by students themselves. some students who are well off go to language institutes in thamar city, while many others lose interest in the subject as a whole. conclusion from the analysis, it is concluded that the widely recognized methods, approaches, techniques and activities used for teaching english speaking skills have no place at thamar secondary public schools. teachers still adhere to the traditional teaching methods. above all, speaking skill is almost neglected by a large number of teachers, if not by all of them. in all the observed lessons, students were not interacting cooperatively with their teachers, nor were their teachers using any productive activities that may enliven the lesson and arouse the students’ motivation. lack of proper teaching methods and activities is among the factors that stand behind students’ deficiency in spoken english. beside, lack of instructional aides and technological facilities is also one of the main factors leading to the poor performance of secondary school students in speaking english. english teachers at thamar secondary public schools are aware of the significance of instructional aides and technological facilities for improving their students’ ability to use english. however, they are not bold enough to adopt any. this can be ascribed the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 45 organizational hierarchy in the education system, lack of funding, and motivation. in the light of the findings, certain recommendations are proposed. teachers at least should use and read the teacher’s guide thoroughly and try to apply the instructions and methods mentioned in it. teachers should not only teach grammar and isolated words most of the time because english is a language and not a course of mathematics. they should give space in their teaching for the other learning skills, particularly speaking skills. it is hoped that teachers would move their focus to helping students to understand and speak the language they learn. more importantly, the use of arabic in the classroom should be decreased and more attention should be given to the interactions among learners and with their teachers. urgent in-service training courses are needed for english teachers in order to familiarize them with the recent concepts and latest development in english teaching. schools should be provided with supplementary materials, such as posters, pictures, flashcards, journals, short stories, dictionaries cassettes and recorders, video tapes, well-designed software, data shows, language labs, etc. there is urgent need for teachers to change their teaching methods and strategies to be in harmony with clt, the one which is largely recommended for teaching speaking skills all over the globe. school authorities are expected to implement measures that lead english teachers to provide the opportunity for students to use english for real communication. references al-sohbani, y. (2015). the role of attitudes and motivation in learning english as a foreign language among yemeni rural secondary school students. journal of teaching and teacher education, 3(1). al-mekhlafi, a. (2004). the internet and efl teaching: the reaction of uae secondary school english language teachers. journal of language and learning, 2(2), 88-113. al-sharafi, e. (2010). the extent to which english language teachers in sana'a schools use communicative activities. unpublished ma thesis. sana'a university. attamimi, r. a., & rahim, h. a. (2011). socioeconomic orientations in foreign language learning motivation: the case of yemen. asian efl journal, 13(4), 167-197. bataineh, t., & thabet, s. s. (2008). obstacles of using communicative techniques in yemeni efl classes. logos papers in english studies, 3(1), 14-27. brown, h. d., & lee, h. (1994). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall regents. dede, c. (2002). six challenges for educational technology. project science space, 1-12. dewaele, j., & al-saraj, t. (2015). foreign language classroom anxiety of arab learners of english: the effect of personality, linguistic and sociobiographical variables. studies in second language learning and teaching, 5(2), 205-228. fareh, s. (2010). challenges of teaching english in the arab world: why can’t efl programs deliver as expected? procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 2(2), 3600-3604. hinkel, e. (2006). current perspectives on teaching the four skills. tesol quarterly, 40(1) 310-323. ibrahim, a. (2010). information technologies in elt. journal of language teaching and research, 1(3) 211214. jarvis, h. (2005). technology and change in english language teaching (elt). the asian efl journal quarterly, 7(3), 213-229. liu, j. (2005). english language teaching around the globe: methods and concepts. tesol journal, 33(1), 85-102. murshid, y. (2001). the crescent series: an evaluation with reference to its appropriateness to the yemeni context. unpublished thesis. sana'a university. shan’a, s. (2009). teaching english as a foreign language to primary students of grade (4-6) in yemeni public schools: a survey study. unpublished ma thesis. sana'a university. thabet, s. s. (2002). obstacles of using communicative techniques in yemeni english foreign language classes. unpublished ma thesis, yarmouk university, jordan. topping, j. (2005). trends in peer learning. educational psychology, 25(6), 631645. widdowson, h. (1978). teaching language as communication. oxford: oxford university press. zhong, y. & shen, h. (2002). where is the technology‐induced pedagogy? snapshots from two multimedia efl classrooms. british journal of educational technology, 33(1), 39-52. jameel alghaberi methods for teaching speaking skills at thamar schools and their impacts on learners’ oral competency 46 vina agustiana pre-service teachers’ anxiety during teaching practicum 174 pre-service teachers’ anxiety during teaching practicum vina agustiana department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, the university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: v.agustiana08@gmail.com apa citation: agustiana, v. (2014). pre-service teachers’ anxiety during teaching practicum. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 174-182 received: 19-03-2014 accepted: 30-03-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: teaching practicum is an obligatory task for students of faculty of teacher training and education to fulfill their graduation requirement. based on pre survey, this study aimed to find out the level of foreign language teaching anxiety (flta) experienced by english students and teachers throughout the teaching practicum. by using qualitative methods, 50 preservice teachers completing their teaching practicum as part of their graduation requirement at english department, faculty of teaching, participated in the study. the research tools were close-ended questionnaires filled by pre-service teachers and semistructured interviews conducted with 5 of the participant pre-service teachers. the analysis of the data revealed eight main categories as the foreign language student teacher anxiety: when the cooperative teacher and/or supervisor observe their teaching activity (3.6 mean rate), lack of teaching experience (3,4 mean rate), got stressed when they face the first day of teaching practicum (3,4 mean rate), conducting practicum assessment (3,1 mean rate), having a big class (2,9 mean rate), teaching grammar (2,8%), feeling worry if their students ask them questions (2,7 mean rate), and catching up students’ attention (2,6 mean rate). lack of teaching experience and less of mastering the material caused the anxiety during teaching appeared. therefore, before conduct teaching activity, it is a must to the techer to comprehend the material in order to avoid to make mistake and support our confident during teaching activity. keywords: foreign language teaching anxiety, pre-service teachers, teaching practicum introduction as the students of faculty of teacher training and education, teaching practicum is an obligatory task to do. teaching practicum is the activity of teaching practice held in real classroom. it involves the activities of preparing the lesson plan, teaching at class, and assessing the students’ achievement. besides, teaching practicum is the opportunity given to the pre-service teachers to do teaching trials in school situation. pre-service teachers refers to a college student who is engaged in an assigned student teaching experience (johnson and perry, 1967). based on pre survey, found out that most of preservice teachers feel anxiety to face the teaching practicum. there are a number of perspectives taken as theoretical bases of the study. first, oxford (1989) states that a certain amount of anxiety sometimes helps learners to reach their peak peformance levels, but too much anxiety block language learning. harmful anxiety presents itself in many forms, such as worry, self doubt, frustation, helplessness, insecurity, fear, and physical appearance. in addition, scovel (1991) defines anxiety as a state of uneasiness and apprehension or fear caused by the anticipation of something threatening. furthermore, horwitz and cope (1991) state that foreign language teaching anxiety (flta) is a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors related to 175 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee classroom language teaching that arises from the uniqueness of the language teaching process. language teaching anxiety is a confrontation that must be taken into account as a different but related concept to language learning anxiety as well as general teaching anxiety (merç, 2004). according to horwitz and cope (1991), foreign language teaching anxiety (flta) is a distinct complex of self-perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and behaviours related to classroom language teaching that arises from the uniqueness of the language teaching process. therefore, horwitz (1996) stated that “even if this anxiety had no impact on the effectiveness of the language instruction, it would seem to be a substantial detriment to the mental well-being and job satisfaction of foreign language teachers”. in addition, shrestha (2009) stated language teachers should be sensitive to foreign language teaching anxiety in their classrooms so as to make their teaching ecologically sound. a number of researchers investigated the notion of language teaching anxiety. such as numrich (1996) investigated anxiety as a part of problems experienced by language teachers. the researcher analyzed the diary entries by non-native esl teachers and found out that teachers were feeling anxious in times of feeling insufficient for effective grammar teaching, time management in class, and giving instructions for classroom activities. el-okda & al-humaidi (2003) conducted a study to investigate the relationship between the level of anxiety experienced by pre-service teachers of english and their language teaching selfefficacy beliefs. for the aim of the study, the researchers developed a scale to measure foreign language anxiety called foreign language student teaching anxiety scale. the scale has 34 items subsumed under six dimensions with a reliability value of .8779. the scale consists of the following dimensions as the factors causing foreign language student teaching anxiety: interaction with students (8 items), interaction with peers (5 items), interaction with other language teachers (5 items), interaction with supervisors (5 items), planning and written work checking (5 items), and classroom management (6 items). the study also employed a “student teaching self-efficacy scale consisting of 30 items including four dimensions. the results of the quantitative analyses showed that pre-service teachers of english experienced a moderate level of language teaching anxiety. moreover, it was found that there was a statistically significant negative correlation between their level of language teaching anxiety and their perceived language-teaching efficacy. the researchers conclude that some measures be taken to alleviate the pre-service teachers anxiety levels; and this responsibility is loaded to the preservice teachers themselves and the ones who supervise practice teaching. kim & kim (2004) found that most anxiety-provoking situations for pre-service teachers were as follows: when they have to teach english through english; when they are asked unexpected questions; when they have to teach speaking; when students are not motivated or are not interested in their english classes; when they cannot control students; when they have to teach students who have lived in english-speaking countries; when someone observes their english classes; when they teach english listening; and when they teach english culture. the sources of foreign language teaching anxiety were listed as limited english proficiency, lack of confidence, lack of knowledge about linguistics and education, insufficient class preparation, being compared to native teachers, fear of negative evaluation, and lack of teaching. vina agustiana pre-service teachers’ anxiety during teaching practicum 176 merç (2004) studied on the problems of preservice efl teachers. the researcher identified that anxiety was one of the most frequently reported problems of preservice teachers completing their teaching practicum. the sources of anxiety reported by the preservice teachers were: anxiety because of the previous experience, anxiety caused by a big class, anxiety caused by feeling of incompetence in teaching, anxiety caused by supervisor/being observed, anxiety due to being recorded, anxiety due to using a new teaching technique, anxiety due to using the time effectively, anxiety in the pre-active stage, anxiety of being observed by the cooperating teacher, anxiety of being unfamiliar with students, anxiety of teaching a new/different level, anxiety of using a new/different device, first-day anxiety, negative attitude of pre-service teachers toward the class, and anxiety of not achieving the objectives. i̇pek (2007) conducted a study to device a valid and reliable instrument to measure the level of foreign language teaching anxiety. data were collected from nonnative teachers of english with daily kept diaries and semi-structured interviews. the analyses of the data, first, revealed six categories of sources of anxiety: making mistakes, teaching a particular language area, using the native language, teaching students at particular language levels, fear of failure, and being compared to fellow teachers. second, the qualitative data collected led to the development of a valid and reliable scale for measuring foreign language teaching anxiety. yuksel (2008) conducted a study to investigate the pre-service language teachers‟ teaching anxiety in relation with their language learning anxiety. the study also aimed to find out the strategies for coping with teaching anxiety. sixty three (63) pre-service teachers of english answered three questionnaires: the flcas, the fltas, and an open questionnaire. the quantitative analysis of the data showed that preservice english teachers were experiencing anxiety on a scale between rarely to sometimes. teaching a particular language skill such as grammar, listening or speaking skills was found to be the highest concern to preservice teachers. the analysis also revealed that female and male pre-service teachers did not differ in terms of their level of teaching anxiety. the results also showed that foreign language learning anxiety was not correlated with the foreign language teaching anxiety. these findings suggest that foreign language pre-service teachers feel anxious from time to time, the reasons of which are sometimes based on the language they are teaching and their teaching skills and strategies at some other times. the nature of the student teaching with all elements of teaching practicum included (e.g. supervisors, students to be taught, peers) are also effective factors in the anxiety experienced by pre-service teachers. this research was conducted to find out the foreign language teaching anxiety (flta) level of pre-service teachers during their teaching practicum. the scope of this research was limited to analyze the foreign language teaching anxiety (flta) level among english students teachers during their teaching practicum. method in order to find out the answer of the research questions, the researcher used some procedures. in accordance with it, the research methodology covers research design, data collection and data analysis. this research uses a descriptive method. according to gay (1987) a descriptive method is a method of research that involves collecting data 177 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in order to test hypothesis or to answer questions concerning the current status of the subject of the research. the descriptive method was used since this researcher was not for search for something or make the prediction. it only described the situation or phenomenon within the research. therefore this research used descriptive method to describe phenomenon about foreign language teaching anxiety (flta) among english pre-service teachers during their teaching practicum. fifty pre-service teachers of english department, faculty of education, participated in the study. they were enrolled in the “teaching practicum” course as a part of their graduation. during the teaching practicum, the preservice teachers were observed by the cooperating teachers each time they deliver a lesson and by the university supervisors at least two times during the practicum for the evaluation of their performance. this research uses two main instruments in tha data collection process, such as close-ended questionnaires and interview. both instruments were held at the end of teaching practicum. questionnaire is the most common instrument used in descriptive research. it is extensively used to collect data about phenomena that are not directly observable such as inner experience, opinions, values, interests, and the like (gall et al, 2003). it is used to obtain specific information data gathered from the participants. all participants were asked to fill the 20 items of close-ended questionnaires. after filling the questionnaires, they were collected to the researcher in order to be analyzed. in order to triangulate the data collection, and to provide further information to the collected data, the interview was held. as stated by fraenkel and wallen (1993), the purpose of interview is to find what is in their mind, what they think or how they feel about something. semi-structured interviewes were conducted with 5 participants who were chosen randomly. a set of questions were prepared by the researcher to lead the conversation during the interviews. all the interviews were audio-recorded with the permission taken from the interviewees. the participants were not informed about the aim of the study until the interview was done (ipek, 2007) to avoid biased utterances during the interview. each interview lasted between 7 – 13 minutes based on the interviewees’ stories and explanations. there are some steps of collecting the data. first, distributing the questionnaires to respondents. sets of close-ended questionnaires were administered after teaching practicum. the pre-service teachers were asked 20 questionnaire items. there were some aspects adapted from the related research embracing problem regarding insufficient for effective grammar teaching, time management in class, giving instructions for classroom activities (numrich, 1996), teach english through english; be asked unexpected questions; teach speaking; motivate the students; control students; someone observes their english classes; teach listening, lack of confidence, insufficient class preparation, fear of negative evaluation, and lack of teaching experience (kim and kim, 2004). respondents were asked to put a checlist under the scale which best describe how they experienced the teaching practicum. second, sollecting the result of questionnaires. after answering the questionnaires, respondents collected it out to the researcher. third, sorting out the questionnaires. if the whole items were not filled, so the data were not taken, avoiding the unvalid data. fourth, scoring the questionnaires answer. those vina agustiana pre-service teachers’ anxiety during teaching practicum 178 items employed a five-point likert scale. the scales were strongly agree (5/1), agree (4/2), uncertain (3/3), disagree (2/4), and strongly disagree (5/1). it means that for odd numbers (1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19) the score was sa (5), a (4), un (3), da (2), sda (1). on the other hand, for even number (2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20) the score was sa (1), a (2), un (3), da (4), sda (5). fifth, classifying the score by using microsoft office excel into groups in order to simplify their tabulation and interpretation based on the percentage statistics. sixth, recording the interview with the respondents. after the questionnaires were administered, the researcher conducted interview with 5 pre-service teachers. the interview was intended to seek additional information as to pre-service teachers’ teaching anxiety. seventh, transcripting the interviewe of each respondents. as the interviewes done, the research transcripted the interview in order to avoid misunderstanding within conversation. the last, presenting the result into a coherent description. the result of questionnaires filled by respondents were collected. the researcher sorted out the questionnaires. if the whole items were not filled, so the data were not taken. it is done to avoid the unvalid data. then, the researcher classified the score into groups in order to simplify their tabulation and interpretation based on the percentage statistics. data from the questionnaires will give the specific informations about level of foreign language teaching anxiety (flta). out of 50 questionnaires distributed to students and whole items were filled, so whole data were used to be analyzed. in the tabulation, the researcher recorded the score of each aspect into table in microsoft excel. the table contains number of respondents, statements and score for each statement. the item socre was put under the number of statement. having put the score into the table 1, the researcher reported the data in the form of mean rating. the rating was obtained by summing all sccore given by respondents then divided by number of respondents. since likert scale was used in this study, the researcher also consulted the mean rating of each aspect with descriptive analysis criteria by muhidin and abdurrahman (2007: 146). table 1. descriptive analysis criteria range description 1.00 – 1.79 very relaxed 1.80 – 2.59 relaxed 2.60 – 3.39 mildly anxious 3.40 – 4.19 anxious 4.20 – 5.00 very anxious as the other data source, the semistructured interviews that were audiotape recorded were transcribed by the researcher. the transcribed interviews were not taken for content analysis. however, as an important research tool, the interview result were used to provide first-hand evidence and samples from student teacher’ own words. the interviews were used to shed more light onto explanations of foreign language student teacher anxiety, and the possible increases or decreases in certain aspects of the anxiety experienced. the data collected through interview were explained by narrating the respondents’ answers. by means of interview, reconfirmation toward pre-service teachers’ responses were attained. results and discussion based on data analysis on table 1, there are three anxious things appeared during teaching practicum. the fisrt is when the cooperative teacher and/ or supervisor observe their teaching activity. it has 3,6 mean rate. the interviewe also found that when pre179 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee service teachers would conduct the practicum assessment, because they would be observed by both cooperating teacher and supervisor. altough, some of them felt normal when the cooperating teacher came to their class, but not for being observed by the supervisor. pre-service teacher #1 stated that “ya waktu pertama saya ngajar, saya takut kalo guru pamong ke kelas, tapi lama2 biasa, cuma waktu dpl datang, gugup lagi bu.” (at the first time i taught, i worried if the teacher observed my class, but it didn’t take a long time. this worry also appeared when the lecturer came.) the second is lack of teaching experience (3,4 mean rate). 4 out of 5 interviewees stated that altough they had experience in teaching but not to teach in the formal school before they had teaching practicum. so, they lack of teaching experience. pre-service teacher #2 stated “ya, saya pernah mengajar, walaupun cuma ngasih les private anak sma.” (yes, i have ever taught. i taught a private class for senior high school students.) the pre-service teacher #3 got stressed when they face the first day of teaching practicum. it has 3.4 mean rate. it has correlation with the most anxiety level, that pre-service teachers were lacking of teaching experience so they did not know how the real class would be. as pre-service teacher 4 stated “iya bu, saya cemas banget. belum pernah saya ngajar di kelas beneran, ya maksudnya di sekolah formal...” (well mam, i felt so worry. i have never taught the real class, i mean the formal one.) besides, it is also five the mildly anxious things appeared. the first is conducting practicum assessment (3,1 mean rate). pre-service teachers felt that time allocation in practicum assessment was longer than the usual. it is also described in the interview interpretation that they felt that the time seemed longer than the usual. as pre-service teacher #1 said that “waduh bu, kayaknya 2 jam pelajaran tuh kayak ngajar seharian bu, ga bel-bel.” (well, i felt that 2 hours time allocation seemed a day along, the bell didn’t ring.) and pre-service teacher #3 stated “keringet dingin keluar bu, lamaaaa banget nunggu bel dipencet.” (i got stressed. it seemed that it’s longer waiting the bell was rung.) the second anxiety is having a big class. it has 2,9 mean rate. it is correlated to being familiar with the students they would teach. as the interviewe, it found that all of the interviewees did not know the student they would teach. as pre-service teachers #2 said “gak bu, ga tau. ada berapa banyaknya juga ga’ tau, mudah-mudahan mah ga’ terlalu banyak bu.” (i don’t know how many the students are. i hope, it won’t be too many students there) then, teaching grammar also becomes the anxiety of pre-service teachers which has 2,8 mean rate. then, pre-service teachers would feel worry if their students ask them questions. it has 2,7 mean rate. it is correlated to pre-service teacher 4’s statement that “ga’ selalu bu, ada juga yang kurang saya pahami, tapi ya saya juga berusaha untuk tanya temen atau googling bu. takutnya ada yang nanya terus ga’ bisa jawab, ya vina agustiana pre-service teachers’ anxiety during teaching practicum 180 saya malu bu.” (sometimes i don’t master the material well enough, but i tried to master it by asking friend, or somehow, by searching on the internet. it was done because i worry if there is a student who asks a question to me, but i can’t answer it. so, it will embarasse me.) the last is pre-service teachers felt it was difficult to catch up students’ attention (2,6 mean rate). based on interviewe, pre-service teachers always used different technique to catch up students’ attention. as pre-service teacher #4 stated “ya games bu, kadang dalam kelompok anak disuruh membuat kalimat berantai, satu per satu maju dan diwaktu, jadi rame kelasnya bu,” (it were games. sometime, i grouped them. then each students of a group was asked to make chain writing with their groupmates, and it was being timed. and it worked. i made the active class.) from 20 anxiety tested to respondents, actually, 11 out of 20 anxiety are felt relaxed by the preservice teachers. the are data no. 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20. it means that they were not so worry of those things. however, one did not appear, it is being confident (1,7 mean rate). the respondent were confident of themselves that they could to the best in their teaching practicum. in data analysis of questionnaires, pre-service teachers always made lesson plan before conducting teaching activity. it has the lowest anxiety level which took 1,7 mean rate. but, not all the material were mastered by the pre-service teachers. as student teacher 1 said “ya atuh bu, biar ada persiapan sebelum ngajar.” (of course i did, i made a lesson plan before i teach). based on the interviewe, there is negative correlation between make the well-prepared lesson plan with mastery the material. as pre-service teacher #3 said “ya bu, saya sering keseleo lidah, salah ngucapin kata, eeehh, ada murid yang tau kalo saya salah, ya saya bilang aja lagi ngecek, he he...” (it’s right. i often made a mistake when speaking in front of my students. there was student who knew that i had made a mistake. then i avoided by saying i purposed to be false, to check your understanding on the material, ha ha…) also, they still felt worry of face the day they would taught. as preservice teacher 3 stated “cemas banget bu, banyak banget pikiran2 jelek bu…”. (i felt so worried. there were negative thingking on my mind). based on these, the researcher may state that the wellprepared lesson plan will not guarantee that the pre-service teachers will be ready to face the day they are teaching. besides preparing the lesson plan, all of the interviewees paid attention of their appearance before teaching. in data analysis of questionnaires, being confident of appearance is felt relaxed (2,6 mean rate) by the pre-service teachers, but in fact, they prepared their appearance, too, before teaching activity. as pre-service teacher #2 said “iya donk bu,, masa mau ngajar saya pake baju sembarangan. jadinya minta mamah saya buat nyetrika baju yang mau dipake besok. biar rapih.” (yes, i do. i always prepare my clothes by ironing them a day before i teach. it’s done to keep my performance). they did this in order to support their teaching performance, as student teacher 4 stated “ya bu, mulai dari kerudung, blazer, celana, sepatu, sampe tas saya setel, biar pd, hi hi. ga’ lupa juga pake make-up ma minyak wangi.” (i have prepared my appearance, starting from the veil, blazer, trousers, and bags. i matched them well.) table 1,5 shows data of respondents. it is found that respondents were 12(24%) males and 38(76%) females. only 9(18%) respondents who had teaching experience before they conduct 181 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee teaching practicum, and 41(82%) respondents had no experience. 28(56%) of them were at mildly anxiety level, 18(36%) were at relax level, and 4(8%) were at very relaxe level. it means that more than a half of respondents feel the anxiety of teaching. conclusion based on data questionnaires and interview, it is found that there are eight categories appeared during teaching practicum among pre-service teachers of english department, faculty of teacher, kuningan university, such as when the cooperative teacher and/or supervisor observe their teaching activity (3.6 mean rate), lack of teaching experience (3,4 mean rate), got stressed when they face the first day of teaching practicum (3,4 mean rate), conducting practicum assessment (3,1 mean rate), having a big class (2,9 mean rate), teaching grammar (2,8%), feeling worry if their students ask them questions (2,7 mean rate), and catching up students’ attention (2,6 mean rate). from 20 anxiety tested to respondents, actually, 11 out of 20 anxiety are felt relaxed by the preservice teachers. the are data no. 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20. it means that they were not so worry of those things. however, one did not appear, it is being confident (1,7 mean rate). the respondent were confident of themselves that they could to the best in their teaching practicum. table 1. shows data of respondents. it is found that only 9 (18%) respondents who had teaching experience before conducting teaching practicum, and 41 (82%) respondents had no experience, 28 (56%) of them were at mildly anxiety level, 18 (36%) were at relax level, and 4 (8%) were at very relaxe level. it shows that more than a half of respondents feel the anxiety of teaching. based on the findings, the researcher may recommend to the readers that practice more is better. lack of teaching experience and less of mastering the material caused the anxiety during teaching appeared. therefore, before conducting teaching activity, it is a must for teachers to comprehend the material in order to avoid making mistake(s) and support our confident during teaching activity. it is also found the positive things of the flta, that is flta compels teachers to make well-prepared before conducting teaching activity. references aida, y. (1994). examination of horwitz, horwitz, and cope’s construct of foreign language anxiety: the case of students of japanese. the modern language journal. anderson, n. a., barksdale, m. a., & hite, c. e. (2005). pre-service teachers’ observations of cooperating teachers and peers while participating in an early field experience. teacher education quarterly, vol 32(4), page 97-117 damayanti. (2009). foreign language anxiety in junior high school. (unpublished thesis). bandung: upi el-okda, m., & al-humaidi, s. (2003). language teaching anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs of pre-service teachers of english. paper presented at the 3rd national conference of elt in squ, oman. gebhard, j. g. (1990). interaction in a teaching practicum. in j. c. richards & d. nunan (eds.). second language teacher education. new york: cambridge university press. horwitz, e. k., m. b. horwitz and j. a. cope. 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(1991). the effect of affect on foreign language learning: a review of the anxiety research in e. k. horwitz and d. j. young. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall young, d. (1991). creating a low anxiety classroom environment: what does language anxiety research suggest? the modern language journal, vol 75 page 426-437. yuksel, i. (2008). pre-service teachers’ teaching anxiety: its reasons and coping strategies. proceedings of the iask international conference: teaching and learning 2008. realization of disagreement strategies english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee realization of disagreement strategies by indonesian speakers wildan nurul aini english education program, school of postgraduate studies indonesia university of education, indonesia email: wildan.nurul.aini@gmail.com apa citation: aini, w. n. (2015). realization of disagreement strategies by indonesian speakers. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 239-246 received: 10-04-2015 accepted: 25-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this study investigates the realization of disagreement strategies employed by indonesian speakers. the strategies are then related to the interlocutor’s level of power. the data is collected using dct type b adapted from azis (2000) and analysed using adapted disagreement strategies from muntigl and turnbull (1998) and chen (2006). the results shows that indonesian speakers tend to use different disagreement strategies to different level of power of the interlocutor. to the interlocutor with the higher power (the superior), the speakers tend to use counterclaims and no disagreement strategies. in addition, to the speakers with the same level of power, the contradiction strategy is preferred. in the meantime, to the interlocutor with the lower level of power, the speakers are likely to choose challenge. these various selections of disagreement strategies are also influenced by concept of ftas of brown and levinson (1987). keywords: disagreement, power, face, ftas introduction disagreement is mentioned as an expression performed as the opposite view from the speakers (sifianou, 2012). pomerantz (1984, as cited in fernández, 2013) asserts that this act happen when assessment is initiated by a speaker to achieve one more action. the action will be realized in forms of either agreement or disagreement. in this case, disagreement is regarded as dispreferred action since it usually is being linked to impoliteness or face-threatening condition. therefore, it is usually mitigated and avoided by the speaker (siafanou, 2012). since the use of disagreement is quite risky, speakers tend to use disagreements in various strategies. then, in selecting the strategies, the speakers tend to consider several factors such as context, face and politeness (siafanou, 2012). several studies about disagreement related to these two factors have been conducted by many researcher (e.g. han, and liang, 2005; xuehua, 2006; fernández, 2013). besides context, face and politeness factors, level of power is also usually taken into account to determine several disagreement strategies. it is since sometimes the speakers, especially indonesian, tend to agree with the statement of the interlocutor with the higher power, although, in fact, s/he actually disagrees with it. therefore, this study is intended to investigate the realization of disagreement strategies employed by indonesian speakers in relation to the interlocutor’s level of power. mailto:wildan.nurul.aini@gmail.com wildan nurul aini realization of disagreement strategies by indonesian speakers realization of speech acts are frequently characterized by the presence of strategies in conveying the speech acts. in many speech act studies, several classifications of strategies are proposed by the researchers (e.g., cohen and olshtain’s, 1981; blum-kulka and olshtain, 1984, in apologizing; blumkulka and olshtain, 1984, in requesting; azis, 2000 in refusing; al-omari and abu-melhim, 2013, in promising). chen (2005) believes that these classifications are generally made based on semantic formulas used to respond the interlocutor’s statement. hence, the speaker’s strategies in a certain speech act might be identified from several features within his/her utterances. especially in realization of disagreement speech acts, a number of classifications of disagreement strategies have been created by several researchers (e.g. beebe and takahashi, 1989; dogancay-aktuna & kamisli, 1996; muntigl and turnbull, 1998; lin, 1999 as cited in chen, 2006). however, in the current study, muntigl and turnbull’s (1998) and chen’ (2006) frameworks are adapted and utilized. this adaptation is intended to accommodate strategies which are not covered by one of frameworks, e.g. the absence of opt-out in muntigl and turnbull (1998). thus the strategies used in the investigation consist of no disagreement (nd), irrelevancy claims (ic), challenges (ch), contradictions (ct) and counterclaims (cc). no disagreement strategy or nd (chen, 2006) is used by the speaker when he/she chooses to opt-out (silent) or using particular verbal strategies, such as agreement and avoidance, to avoid disagreement or arguing with the interlocutor. chen, furthermore, explains that there must be some reasons for the speaker to use no disagreement strategies especially when keeping silent. he mentioned the reasons are in connection with six aspects, namely: both the interlocutor’s and the speakers’ positive face (brown and levinson, 1987), conditions for the act of disagreement (e.g. unimportant, respect, inappropriate context), relationship of the act with the speaker’s goal, relationship of the act with social goals (e.g. for maintaining relationship), and contextual factors (e.g. status, social distance, and gender). irrelevancy claims or ic (muntigl and turnbull, 1998), on the other hand, refer to strategies in which the speaker asserts that the interlocutor’s statement is out of topic or irrelevant to the present discussion. this strategy is usually performed in overlap or without pauses from the previous statement. besides, this strategy is regarded as the most face-threatening strategies. the next strategy is challenges (ch) in which the speaker shows reluctance and doubt in expressing disagreement by utilizing an interrogative form, such as when, why, who, where, whom, and how. challenges are typically accompanied by inquiry regarding the proof of the prior statements. muntigl and turnbull (1998) also propose contradiction strategies (ct). in this strategy, the speaker performs an opposed statement from the interlocutor’s. this is usually preceded by negations or opposition markers such as no, i disagree, i do not agree, not at all, i don’t think so etc. however, chen (2006) claims that contradictions are not always preceded by a negation, but it also occasionally start with contradictory statement, such as “i thought it was so boring.” the last strategy is counterclaims (cc), in which the speaker uses token or partial agreement using but (yes, but…). this way is considered as english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the least face threatening strategy (muntigl and turnbull, 1998) since it is initiated by pauses, prefaces and mitigated devices, such as hedges (orfano, 2012). similarly, fernández (2013) asserts that this mitigated device is to soften the treat to the hearer’s face. in short, the counterclaims is used to indirectly disagree with the interlocutor by agreeing the proposition first to minimize the ftas, and then followed by the speaker’s claim. the use of strategies in the speech acts, e.g. disagreement, is usually affected by social distance, power differential, and ratio of imposition (brown and levinson, 1987). these elements affect the degree of face-threat to be redressed by appropriate linguistic strategies. however, in this study, the disagreement strategies will be discussed mainly in relation to the different level of power. method this research involved four male (40%) and six female (60%) postgraduate students from of one state university in bandung. the participants’ age ranges from 23 to 26 years old. besides, they come from different origins in indonesia with different language background. the details of the information can be seen as follow: table 1. information details of the participants variables categories origins west java(30%) east java(10%) west sumatra(10%) tidore(10%) lampung (20%) medan(10 %) aceh(10%) first language bahasa indonesia (60%) sundanese (10%) minang (10%) javanese (10%) aceh (10%) daily language bahasa indonesia=60% bahasa indonesia and sundanese= 30% bahasa indonesia and minang=60% a survey design was employed in this study. bell (2005) asserts that a survey is generally aimed at attaining information from a representative sample of certain population by asking the same questions to them. in this study, the respondents were asked the identical information about their disagreement strategies by using a discourse completion test (dct). to obtain the strategies of disagreement from the respondents, a discourse completion test (dct) is used. first adapted in 1982 by blumkulka for a speech act investigation, the dct is a questionnaire consisting several discourse or situation in which the respondents of the study are required to write the response of the given situation (varghese and billmyer, 2011). however, nurani (2009) indicates that the use of the dct frequently gets criticisms because of its disadvantages, such as unnatural data (huock and gass, 1995), oversimplification of complex interaction (brown and levinson, 1987), and wildan nurul aini realization of disagreement strategies by indonesian speakers inability to get emotional information from the response in depth (beebe and cummings, 1995). nevertheless, the dct is still widely used to examine several speech act strategies (aziz, 2000) since it allows researchers to “collect large amount of data in a relatively a short time” (nurani, 2009: 670) and applicable for respondents with different cultural background (huock and gass, 1995). the dct employed here was adapted from the dct type-b developed by aziz (2000). this kind of dct provides multiple choice and openended questionnaire which allows the respondent to select one of given strategies then fill possible responses for the chosen strategy. in this study, the dct consists of three different situations in bahasa indonesia which indicated setting and level of power of the interlocutors. the given situations were designed to elicit the respondents’ disagreement, which is also in bahasa indonesia. after being collected, the data from the dct were analyzed using categories of disagreement strategies adapted from muntigl and turnbull (1998) and chen (2006). based on this adapted categories, disagreement strategies can be divided into: no disagreement (nd), irrelevancy claims (ic), challenges (ch), contradictions (ct) and counterclaims (cc). no disagreement strategies as mentioned by chen (2006: 41) are the situation where the speaker prefers to be silent (nds) or to use verbal strategies, such as agreement (nd: ag) and avoidance (nd: av), rather than disagree with the interlocutor’s statement. then, irrelevancy claims refer to a disagreement strategy in which the speaker claims that the interlocutor’s statement is irrelevant to the present discussion. on the other hand, challenge strategy is for the one where the speaker questions and/or asks for proves the interlocutor’s statement by using interrogative words (e.g. what, why, when, where, who, and how). another strategy is contradictions. here, the speaker bluntly disagrees with the interlocutor statement by saying no, i don’t or i disagree. the last is counterclaim strategy in which the speaker partly agrees by expressing agreement at the beginning yet being followed by alternative claims (e.g. yes, but…). next, after being categorized, the data will be discussed with regard to the level of power or superiority. the level of power involved in this study are higher power (superior), equal power and lower power (subordinate). considering this superiority levels, it can be seen whether or not the disagreement strategies chosen by the participants for those categories different each other. furthermore, it will also discuss the “why” of the participants’ preferences in expressing certain disagreement strategies. results and discussion the collected data from the dct are then classified and analyzed using adapted classification of disagreement strategies from muntigl and turn (1998) and chen (2006). after the classification and the analysis, the realization of disagreement strategies used by indonesian postgraduate students in this present study is obtained. the general results of the data analysis are presented in the following table: english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 2. disagreement strategies employed by the indonesian postgraduate students strategies level of power higher power (superior) equal power lower power (subordinate) total contradictions (ct) 1 5 3 10 counterclaims (cc) 4 1 4 challenges (ch) 2 4 6 irrelevant claims (ic) no disagreement (nd) silent (nds) 2 2 1 5 avoidance (nd:av) 3 1 4 agreement (nd:ag) 1 1 total 10 10 10 30 in the following section, the findings and discussions will be presented in relation to the level of power or superiority of the interlocutor. disagreement strategies used to the superior (higher power) from the analysis results, it is found that the strategies utilized by the participants are: contradiction (10%), counterclaims (40%), no disagreement: silent (20%), and no disagreement: avoidance (30%). looking at the data, it seems that the participants prefer choosing strategies which possess less face threatening acts, such as counterclaims (muntigl and turnbull, 1998) and no disagreement: silent and avoidance. counterclaims can be easily identified from its structure (yes, but…) and its features such as mitigating devices (orfano, 2012). one of the mitigating devices used in this strategy is hedges. for example: counterclaims r1: mungkin benar yang bapak sampaikan tadi, tapi menurut saya keduanya memiliki kelebihan dan kekurangan, … (perhaps, what you have just said is right, but i think both of them have strength and weaknesses…) the word “mungkin/perhaps” and “menurut saya/i think” are the hedges or mitigating devices utilized in the counterclaims strategy. the use of hedges here seems an indicator of the participants’ caution in expressing disagreement to the interlocutor. this might happen since the interlocutor is his/her lecturer who has the higher power. so, there is no place for the participant to exercise the power. this cautious action is also visible by the use of another strategy, no disagreement. so, rather than disagree with the lecturer, the other participants choose to perform silence and avoidance, as the safer strategies. apparently, this is intended to avoid conflicts with the lecturer. as r9 who chooses silence, she expresses that the choice of being silent is to avoid arguing with the lecturer. this is due to, as fairclough (2001) states, the ability of more powerful participants to control and constrain the contribution of the less powerful participants. similarly, with respect to this, chen (2006) suggests that one of the reasons of speakers’ silence in a conflict talk is contextual factors, such as higher status, social distance, and unfamiliarity. wildan nurul aini realization of disagreement strategies by indonesian speakers the last is in the contradiction strategy. although the strategy is basically used to directly disagree, in this case, the statement used is also still carefully expressed. for instance: kalau menurut saya keduanya punya sisi kekurangan dan kelebihan. tapi, calon x tersebut dirasa lebih banyak sisi positifnya pak/bu. (i think both of them have positive and negative sides, but, i feel the x candidate has more positive sides.) although the example above is a contradict strategy, the hedges “i think” is still used. the may be seen as speaker’s effort to minimize the ftas or as speakers’ respect to the one with the higher power. in this case, fernández (2013) asserts that this mitigated device is to soften the threat to the hearer’s face. this kind of effort is essential especially for the disagreement to the higher power since the bigger gap between the speaker’s and the interlocutor’s power, the higher the face-threat is (brown and levinson, 1987). disagreement strategies used to interlocutor with equal power in the meantime, when facing the interlocutor with the same level of power, such as classmates, the participants use different composition of disagreement strategies. the strategies consist of contradictions (50%), challenges (20%), no disagreement: silent (20%) and no disagreement: avoidance (10%). different from the strategies used to the superior, the use of contradictions by the participants seems dominant. another strategy employed is challenges in which the speaker feels doubt about the proposition so that s/he asks for proof (muntigl and turnbull, 1998). these two strategies are classified by chen (2006) into direct disagreement. it means that the speaker bluntly refute others’ opinion by stating the opposing statement. for example: contradiction belum tentu, elektabilitas itu naik turun. dengan visi misinya saya yakin presiden pilihan saya akan terpilih (not really, electability is dynamic. with his vision and mission, i believe my choice will win.) challenge wah, iya ya? kata siapa tuh lebih unggul? ada surveynya ga? (was it? who said he is winning? is there any survey?) unlike contradiction in the previous context (disagreement to the superior), the contradiction strategies in the first example shows blunt disagreement device –belum tentu/not really—and expression of certainty—saya yakin/i believe. besides, in the second example also it is apparently that there is no doubt of the speaker to “attack other’s competency” (muntigl and turnbull, 1998 as cited in orfano 2012) by asking the proof of the statement—‘is there any survey?’ these elements, somehow, express the speaker’s tendency to aggravate the interlocutor’s face. that is no wonder that orfano (2012) mentioned challenges as ‘moderate cost of face.’ this, again, might be caused by the power factor. in this occasion, the power of the speaker and the interlocutor is equal. this power equality, furthermore, allows both of the speaker and the interlocutor to directly and frankly disagree with any of their statement. it is english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee since they have the same chance to exercise their power, so they cannot control or hinder contribution of one another (fairclough, 2001). disagreement strategies used to the subordinate (lower power) meanwhile, the result shows that various strategies also employed by the participants to disagree with the one with the lower power, e.g. younger brother/sister. the strategies include contradiction (30%), counterclaims (10%), challenges (40%), no disagreement: silent (10%) and no disagreement: agreement (10%). the most frequently used strategies in disagreeing with the subordinate are contradictions and challenges. basically, those dominant strategies are the same as those which are used to the equal power. but, in this context, challenges strategies has a bigger number than contradictions. as it has been mentioned previously, challenges are so called moderate cost of face (orfano 2012) since the possibility of interlocutor’ losing face is bigger than the counterclaims strategies (low cost of face) but smaller that the irrelevancy claims strategy (high cost of face). in relation to this, muntigl and turnbull (1998) also state that challenge is an undesirable perception, attitude and action which are attributed to addressee. so, it means that in disagreeing with the subordinate, the participants tend to sacrifice the interlocutor’s positive face. for this situation, level of power is not the only factor. the choice of challenge strategies is also in association with social distance or closeness of the speaker and the interlocutor. as mentioned by brown and levinson (1987 as cited in grundy, 2008: 197), there are three aspects in determining the degree of face-threatening acts, namely social distance, power differential, and ratio of imposition. it means that the lesser the gap between social distance and power differential, the smaller degree of facethreat to be redressed by appropriate linguistic strategy. thus, although the power of the speaker is higher than the interlocutor and the nature of challenge strategy is ‘moderate cost of face’ (orfano, 2012), this strategy would not really cause a high degree of face-threat since the interlocutor—participants’ sister/brother—has close social distance, conclusions it can be concluded that the indonesian speakers tend to use different disagreement strategies to different level of power of the interlocutor. to the interlocutor with the higher power (the superior), the speakers tend to use counterclaims and no disagreement strategies. in addition, to the speakers with the same level of power, the contradiction strategy is preferred. in the meantime, to the interlocutor with the lower level of power, the speakers are likely to choose challenge. these various selections of disagreement strategies are also influenced by concept of ftas of brown and levinson (1987). references al-omari, s. k., & abu-melhim, a.-r. (2013). promising as a speech act in jordanian arabic. international forum in teaching and studies, 9(1). aziz, e. a. (2000). indonesian speech act realization in face-threatening situations. monash university linguistics papers, 2(2), 15-41. beebe, l., & cummings, m. c. (1995). natural speech act versus written questionnaire data: how data collection method affect speech act performances. in s. gass, & j. neu, speech acts across wildan nurul aini realization of disagreement strategies by indonesian speakers cultures (pp. 65-86). berlin: mouton de gruyter. bell, j. (2005). doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers in education, health and social sciences (4th ed.). berkshire: mcgraw-hill international. blum-kulka, s., & olshtain, e. (1984). requests and apologies: a crosscultural study of speech act realization patterns (ccsarp). applied lingistics, 5(3), 196-213. brown, p., & levinson, s. (1987). politeness. cambridge: cambridge university press. chen, m.-t. (2006). an interlanguage of the speech act of disagreement made by chinese speakers in taiwan [thesis]. kaohsiung: national sun yat-sen university. cohen, a. d., & olshtain, e. (1981). developing a measure of sociocultural competence: the case of apology. language learning, 31(1), 113-134. fairclough, n. (2001). language and power (2nd ed.). london: longman. fernández, s. s. (2013). the linguistic realization of disagreement by efl egyptian speakers [thesis]. madrid: universidad complutense madrid. grundy, p. (2008). doing pragmatics. london: hodder education. han, j., & liang, g. (2005). a contrastive study on disagreement strategies for politeness between american english and mandarin chinese. asian efl journal, 7(1), 155-166. huock, n., & gass, s. m. (1995). non-native refusals: a methodological persperctive. in s. m. gass, & j. neu, sppech acts across cultures (pp. 54-64). berlin: mouton de gruyter. muntigl, p. a., & turnbull, w. (1998). conversational structure and facework in arguing. journal of pragmatics, 29(3), 225-256. nurani, l. m. (2009). methodological issue in pragmatics research. jurnal sosioteknologi, 17(8), 667-678. orfano, b. m. (2012). you're so not talking to me like that: anaylsing conflict talk in a corpus of sitcom discourse. proceedings of the viith gscp international conference: speech and corpora, pp. 331-334. siafanau, m. (2012). disagreements, face, and politeness. journal of pragmatics, 44, 1554-1564. varghese, m., & billmyer, k. (1996). investigating the discourse completion tests. working paper in educational linguistics, 12(1), 39-58. xuehua, w. (2006). a study of strategy use in showing agreement and disagreement to other opinions. celea journal, 29(5), 55-65. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 151 pragmatic transfer in apology employed by english education students of islamic state university (uin) raden fatah tiara eliza english education study program, faculty of economy, palembang university, indonesia e-mail: tiaraeliza90@gmail.com apa citation: eliza, t. (2019). pragmatic transfer in apology employed by english education students of islamic state university (uin) raden fatah. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 151-158. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1631. received: 23-01-2019 accepted: 26-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: this study intends to find out and to describe apology strategies made by the sixth and eighth semester students of english education study program of islamic state university (uin) raden fatah palembang, and to explain how the pragmatic transfer interferes the apology strategies. this study used a qualitative descriptive design. written discourse completion tasks and observation by doing a role play were used as the instruments to obtain the data. there were 66 students selected as the subjects of study. the data obtained were analyzed based on the classification of apology strategy proposed by olshtain and cohen (1983). as result, it was found that there were five apology strategies made by the students, for example, using the word „sorry‟ to express „regret‟ was considered the most frequently used strategy. then, the result also showed that the speakers who have low social status tend to use polite strategy in all levels of social relationships (strangers and acquaintances). for the speakers who have high social status and equal tend to use less polite and casual expressions, respectively. moreover, some students use some pragmatic transfers in expressing apology strategies influenced by their l1 (mother tongue) or l2 (indonesian) culture. keywords: apology strategies; interlanguage; pragmatics; pragmatic transfer; speech act. introduction apology plays an important role in community as human beings live in a social group. apology is a fundamental speech act which is part of human communication that occurs in every culture to maintain good relations between interlocutors (brown & levinson, 1987; olshtain & cohen, 1983). thus, an apology is a compensatory action for the offense that has been done by someone in order to maintain social harmony among the speaker and hearer. apology is one of the most frequently used expressing among the speech acts employed in daily communication (qorina, 2012). then, if it refers to the apology terms in indonesian, the expressions of apology tend to make a request for forgiveness. that is why, the term of „i apologize‟ do not exist. expressions of regret exist, but are not generally used for apologizing (wouk, 2006). moreover, sometimes, there is a repetition in expressing apology used by indonesian. it means that they repeat their apology expressions to emphasize their offense, hence, reducing threat on the hearer and hopefully making their expression can be received by the hearer (syahri & kadarisman, 2007). for example, (1) please forgive me, i did not attend to your party yesterday. i have something to do. once again forgive me. (2) sorry, my friend. i do not come to your birthday party. once again i beg your forgiveness. the repetition shows the regret to their offense, so that is why they repeat it in order to get the hearer‟s forgiveness and show a kind of speaker‟s politeness as an offender. it is assumed that if they minimize the cost to the hearers, the requests for forgiveness will probably be fulfilled. the speakers attempt to minimize the cost to hearers by repeating apology expressions or at least reducing the unexpected consequences from their offense (wouk, 2006). if it refers to target language culture, there was no repeating in expressing their regrets. those transfers have occurred by the effects of social conditions in language using. in this case, apology strategies are obviously significant in social life to get an excuse for any inappropriate action done. there are a number of strategies that the apologizer chooses to perform an apology. goffman (1971) states that for an apology to be successful, the apologizer has to consider three factors: acknowledging of an offense, taking responsibility for the offense, and offering compensation. in order to know how to express apology appropriately, the speakers must tiara eliza pragmatic transfer in apology employed by english education students of islamic state university (uin) raden fatah 152 have pragmatic competence to understand what they are talking about in order to make the interaction successful. moreover, moghaddam (2012) states a learner having good grammatical competence may not be pragmatically competent in communication. sometimes, there is misunderstanding that occurs among the learners. they are sometimes not able to understand the utterances pragmatically. thus, to avoid misinterpreting, pragmatics plays an important role. that is why pragmatics is indispensable to be taught. further, some second/foreign language learners have been claimed to make errors in using speech acts to communicate with native speakers of the target language because of the complexity of speech acts since they are conditioned by social, cultural, situational and personal factors (cohen & olshtain, 1993). related to this, since english is a foreign language in indonesia, the speakers/learners generally apply the rules of their l1 when they speak in l2. hence, the result is communication breakdown or communication conflict occurs (istifci, 2009). the problem which occurs in their communication is called a negative transfer from l1 to l2 when they speak in english. then, to solve this problem the learners must know the social and culture in l1 and l2. that may make the learners aware and familiar with how they should understand the meaning of the utterance or expression, and social cultural aspect of l2 based on its context and function. hence, pragmatic transfer takes an important role in this study. it facilitates the students to learn cross cultural understanding and cultural norms in english context. pragmatic transfer is the way to produce the utterances in l1 which is not applied sufficiently in producing utterances in l2. in this case, the learners tend to transfer their native social and cultural norms into the target language (bu, 2012). in line with this, franch (1998) states that pragmatic transfer refers to the influence of the first language (l1) in communication when the speakers use l2. transfer occurs in two ways: 1) negative transfer or interference occurs when the two languages do not share the same language system, resulting in the productions of errors, and 2) positive transfer or facilitation, when the two languages share the same language system and the target form is correctly transferred. related to this, interlanguage takes an important part in this study. interlanguage can be defined as the type of language produced by second and foreign language learners who are in the process of learning a language (richards & sukwiwat, 1983) as cited in (franch, 1998). by discussing apology speech act realization in interlanguage pragmatics, it is positive for teacher to facilitate the students to learn cross cultural understanding and cultural norms in english context, such as how english native speakers perform apology in various context and situations, so it can help them to communicate in english appropriately and naturally. most of research in pragmatics has investigated the speech act of apology in different languages employed by native and nonnative speaker (olshtain & cohen, 1983; sugimoto, 1998; nureeden, 2007; jebahi, 2011; tamimi sa‟ad & mohammadi, 2014; syahri & kadarisman, 2007). related to this, the writer investigated pragmatic transfer potentially occurs due to cultural or language differences. that is, the transfer occurs due to the norms derived from their native cultures. therefore, this study aims at explaining how the pragmatic transfer interfere the apology strategies and finding out the apology strategies of english education students as efl learners. this study employed the apology strategies provided by olshtain and cohen (1983) as cited in ellis (2012). there were five categories of the apology strategies. in the first category is divided into three sub strategies while the second category is divided into four sub strategies. 1) an illocutionary force indicating device (ifid). a. an expression of regret. e.g. i'm sorry b. an offer of apology. e.g. i apologize c. a request for forgiveness. e.g. excuse me 2) an expression of the speaker‟s responsibility for the offense. a. explicit self-blame. b. lack of intent. c. expression of self-deficiency. d. recognizing the other person as deserving apology 3) explanation or account. e.g. i was trapped in the traffic jam. 4) an offer of repair. e.g. i'll pay for the damage. 5) a promise of forbearance. e.g. it won't happen again. method the study used a qualitative analytical method. it was indicated by the characteristics of the techniques of collecting and analyzing the data. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 153 the subjects of this study were the students of english education study program of islamic state university (uin) raden fatah palembang. they were at the 6 th and 8 th semesters in academic year of 2013/2014. there were sixty six students selected as the subjects of study, thirty five students are in the sixth semester and thirty one are in the eighth semester. there were two types of instruments used in collecting data. the first was discourse completion test (dct). gass and slinker (2001) stated that the dct had been used in a number of studies to gather data for native and non-native speakers concerning particular speech acts (apologies, compliments, refusal, request etc). that is a set of written questionnaire accompanied by brief situational descriptions. the dct used for this study consisted of 25 apologizing situations which were adapted from tuncel (2011) and distributed to the samples. since there were 25 apologizing situations, it was observed in 25 times. the second instrument was observation by using a role play. there were 40 students (20 students for each semester and they were divided into 10 pairs) was selected as the participants for the role-plays. they were asked to produce dialogues based on the scenarios written in the role-plays. the scenarios were taken from dct questionnaire. the procedures were conducted carefully to maintain continuous participation of all the participants. in order to prevent repeating other participants‟ utterances, the researcher put each scenario on a piece of paper and rolled the papers into coupons. they were given opportunities to take two coupons randomly and produce dialogues in front of the class with their fellow students. they practiced the role-play in pairs. these stages were done several times in several meetings until every subject played the scenarios provided, it depends on the student. as a result, there were 40 dialogues that were recorded and transcribed. in analyzing the data, firstly, the participants‟ responses were identified and then coded according to the strategies adopted from olshtain and cohen (1983) as cited in ellis (2012). secondly, the researcher identifies the development strategies used by the students. after that, the researcher identifies the context of pragmatic transfer in expressing apology. the data were then tabulated based on the classification and were interpreted. finally, the conclusion was drawn based on the findings. results and discussion it was found that the respondents use many strategies in expressing their apology, such as an expression of regret, a request for forgiveness, explanation, and offering repair. table 1. the frequency of the occurrences of apology strategies in dct questionnaire apology strategies frequency percent valid percent cumulative percent an expression of regret (1a) 386 27.8 27.8 27.8 an offer of apology (1b) 27 1.9 1.9 29.8 a request for forgiveness (1c) 85 6.1 6.1 35.9 explicit self blame (2a) 39 2.8 2.8 38.7 lack of intent (2b) 75 5.4 5.4 44.1 expression of self deficiency (2c) 246 17.7 17.7 61.8 recognizing the other person as deserving apology (2d) 5 4 4 62.2 explanation or account (3) 277 20.0 20.0 82.1 offer of repair (4) 217 15.6 15.6 97.8 promise of forbearance (5) 31 2.2 2.2 100.0 total 1388 100.0 100.0 table 1 presents the total percentage of apology strategies used by the participants. the result reveals that an expression of regret is the most frequent apology strategy used with total of 386 (27.8%). expression of deficiency and explanation are the other strategies which are used extensively (from 17.7 to 20%). no other strategy is found for more than 27% of the data. table 2. the frequency of the occurrences of apology strategies in role play apology strategies frequency percent valid percent cumulative percent an expression of regret(1a) 1 2.5 2.5 2.5 tiara eliza pragmatic transfer in apology employed by english education students of islamic state university (uin) raden fatah 154 an offer of apology (1b) 0 0 0 0 a request for forgiveness (1c) 2 5.0 5.0 7.5 explicit self blame (2a) 2 5.0 5.0 12.5 lack of intent (2b) 0 0 0 0 expression of self deficiency (2c) 8 20.0 20.0 32.5 recognizing the other person as deserving apology (2d) 0 0 0 0 explanation or account (3) 19 47.5 47.5 80.0 offer of repair (4) 5 12.5 12.5 92.5 promise of forbearance (5) 3 7.5 7.5 100.0 total 40 100.0 100.0 table 3 shows the total percentage of apology strategies in all situations by using role play. the result reveals that there are differences between the total percentage of apology strategies by using dct and role play. an explicit expression of apology, particularly the strategy of explanation or account, is the most frequent apology strategy used with total of 19 (47.5%). expression of self-deficiency and offer of repair strategies are the other strategies which are used extensively (12.5%). no other strategy is found for more than 47% of the data. the followings are the analysis and discussion of the strategies and expressions used by the sample students. explanation or account it is an expression that gives a reason of the cause of the offense. in other words, the speaker explains why violation or damage happened. it shows that justifying the offense by explaining the reason. situation 25: coming late at friend’s birthday party (8) i am sorry darling. i was late because of traffic jam. there are some factors that need to be considered in analyzing discourses or expression used in society, namely, age, gender, time, place, and social status which is divided into three levels: high, equal and low (holmes, 1989), and social distance which is divided into three levels: stranger, acquaintance, and intimate (brown & levinson, 1987). this situation explained that a speaker invited to come to his/her friend birthday dinner at a restaurant but s/he was late. this situation took place at a restaurant. it was used by the speakers because the speaker had equal social status. beside social status, the aspects of social distance also have influenced the speaker in using that expression because the speaker uses the word “darling”. it is a kind of endearment expression which indicates that the speaker has known the hearer well. thus, they are intimates in terms of social distance. the endearment markers are often used when the speaker and hearer have close relationship in terms of social distance. in the aspects of age, they are in the same age as friends. then, the aspects of gender and time are not known in this context. furthermore, at the end of this utterance, the speaker says the reason why he/she comes late. in this case, the speaker does not only express his/her intimacy but also an explanation for the offense. it indicates that the speaker does not intend to come late. the speaker embedded his/her apology expression with utterances aiming to minimize hearer‟s wrathfulness because of the speaker‟s carelessness. expression of self-deficiency it indicates that the offender attributes the reason of the offense to herself/himself, such as i was confused, i was not thinking, i forgot, etc. situation 1: a speaker forgets to get-together with a friend. the speaker calls him to apologize. this is the second time the speaker forgot such a meeting. (15) i am sorry, i really forget to our meeting (16) i am so sorry darling, i really forget to inform you, actually i have promised with my mom to accompany her to go the market. i will not do it again. in analyzing an expression, there is one thing that needs to be considered, namely context. the context includes age, gender, time, place, social status, and social distance. expression (15) was used by the speaker because the speaker and hearer have equal social status. this utterance is incorrect. it should be “i am sorry. i really forget to come to our meeting.” besides social status, the aspects of social distance also influence the speaker to use the expression (15) because the speakers have known each other. in other words, they are acquaintances in terms of social distance. in the aspects of age, they are in the same age as friends. meanwhile, the aspects of gender and time are not known in this context. then, the speaker uses an intensification expression as s/he english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 155 uses the word “really”. in english, intensification is mainly achieved through the use of adverbs, such as terribly, really, so, awfully, please, etc. to upgrade the impact of the utterances/apologies on the hearers/offended. in other words, the speaker attempts to reduce the hearer‟s dissatisfaction because s/he forgot the meeting twice. it means that the speaker shows regret and request for forgiveness for his/her mistake. expression (16) was used by the speaker with the same purpose (with #15). that is, to show that the speaker forgets the meeting twice, but it sounds more different as s/he uses the word “darling”. in this context, the speaker should not say „darling‟ because it is just used for those people who have close relationship, such as parents and children, husband and wife, and lovers. this is inappropriate. the speaker should not have said „darling‟ because they are just friends. it is also a kind of endearment expressions which indicates that the speaker has known the hearer well. in other words, they are intimates in terms of social distance. the endearment markers are often used when the speaker and hearer have close relationship in terms of social distance. in this case, the speaker does not only express the endearment expression, but also a compensatory action, such as “i will not do it again”. it designates the speaker‟s responsibility to the hearer. the speaker embedded his/her apology expression with utterances aiming to minimize hearer‟s wrathfulness because of the speaker‟s carelessness. offer of repair it is an expression used by the speaker attempting to repair or pay for the damage caused by his/her offense. some utterances used are “i will pay for the damage”, and “i promise to repair it.” situation 13: the speaker has broken his/her friend’s motorcycle. (28) i am sorry. i get the accident and your motorcycle was broken because of us, but i promise to you. i will repair it soon may be tomorrow. i am sorry. thank you, friend. (29) sorry bro, i have broken your motorcycle and i do not have money to repair it. expression (28) showed the speaker and hearer were equal in terms of social status. in addition to social status, the aspects of social distance also influence the speaker to use the expression (28) because the speaker uses the word “friend”. it is a kind of solidarity markers which are often used when the speaker and the hearer have intimate relationship. this expression has a function as a flattery to diminish the hearer‟s wrathfulness. it shows that the speaker feels so close to the hearer. thus, they are intimates in terms of social distance. in the last statement, the speaker expresses about a compensatory action by saying that the speaker will repair it soon. it is clear that the speaker shows his/her responsibility for that accident. then, this situation takes place in a campus corridor. in the aspects of age, they are equal, while the aspects gender shows that they are males. the information of all these aspects was gotten by role play which was recorded and transcribed. moreover, expression (29) was used by the speaker with the same purpose (with #28), that is, to show that the motorcycle was broken but it sounds more impolite as s/he uses the word “i do not have money to repair it”. it indicates that the speaker does not care with his/her friend‟s motorcycle, it is a contradictory with expression (28) in which the speaker just says that the motorcycle has been broken by him/her and s/he has not money to repair it. it designates that the speaker is irresponsible. pragmatic transfer in apology strategies used by the students pragmatic transfer refers to the influence of the first language (l1) in communication when the speakers use l2. generally, pragmatic transfer occurs in two ways that is negative and positive transfer. a negative transfer causes an error in communication, while positive transfer or facilitation facilitates a communication. further, kasper (1992) proposes two kinds of pragmatic transfer, pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic transfer. pragma-linguistic transfer occurs when the utterances from the l1 speakers are not applied insufficiently in l2 utterances. meanwhile, the socio-pragmatic transfer occurs by the effects of social conditions in language using. it contains many variables, such as social status and social distance relationship. the following utterances produced by the respondents can be some examples on how the pragmatic transfer interferes the strategy in expressing apology. situation 9: a speaker and a friend have arranged to go to a concert together. he/she promised to buy the tickets. but, when his/her friend comes round in the evening of the concert, he/she realizes that he/she has forgotten to get the tickets tiara eliza pragmatic transfer in apology employed by english education students of islamic state university (uin) raden fatah 156 (11) ya allah, really sorry. i forgot to buy it because i have something to do. situation 6: a speaker went to friend’s apartment. accidentally, he/she was broken friend’s small ornament. (12) astaghfirullah, i am so sorry. i did not mean to break your ornament. situation 18: a speaker was late to submit an assignment. (13) assalamualaikum, excuse me sir. i have mistake with you because for being late to return your book. situation 25: a speaker was late to come to his/her friend’s birthday party. (14) oh my friend, hbd barakallah, sorry for being late, i am so sorry. in examples (11, 12, 13 and 14), the underline words show the religiosity of the respondents because some indonesian people tend to be religious, especially for moslem and it often appears in their utterances. the utterances above “ya allah”, “astaghfirullahal’adzim”, assalamualaikum and barakallah” are identical with islam and often expressed by moslem in their daily conversation. the utterance “ya allah” is almost the same with “oh my god”, while “astaghfirullahal’adzim” is usually said when someone forget about something. however, the semantic meaning of “astaghfirullahal’adzim” is actually “asking for apology to god”. meanwhile, “assalammualaikum” in the example (13) shows a greeting action which is expressed by the speaker when he/she meets to other moslem, in this case the speaker wants to return lecturer‟s book. then, the speaker looks his/her lecturer in corridor. so, that is why the speaker expresses greetings to start the conversation. moreover, the word “barakallah” is an expression to pray someone. many indonesian people have used it in their daily conversation. those transfers have occurred by the effects of social conditions in language using. situation 23: a teacher asks the student to help her but at the same time the student has an appointment for job interview. (15) i am sorry, miss. i cannot help you. i have job interview today once again i am sorry. situation 3: the speaker was late to return friend’s book. (16) i am so sorry, i was late to return it, guys. it is my indecency. i am really sorry, sorry i will return that book to you. situation 5: the speaker was bump into an older lady in department store. it caused her packages spilled all over the floor and her leg was hurt. (17) i am sorry for my mistake. let’s go to the hospital. once again please, please and please apologize me. in examples (15, 16, and 17), the underline utterances show the respondent was repeating their apology expressions. sometimes, indonesian people have used it in their daily conversation. it shows the regret to their offense, therefore, they repeat it in order to get the hearer‟s forgiveness. if it refers to target language culture, there was no repeating in expressing their regrets (wouk, 2006,). those transfers have occurred by the effects of social conditions in language using. situation 10: a speaker at a restaurant with friends. the waiter takes the speaker’s order. a few minutes later, the speaker calls the waiter to change the order. (18) i am sorry. i want to change my order (19) sorry may i change my order other pragmatic transfers were in the form of politeness expressions. as syahri (2013) state pragmatic transfers can be a politeness motivated form where the ways the speaker initiated the request realizations. these expressions were the ways the subjects request to change the order. many of them used sorry or i am sorry instead of excuse me as the attention getters, meanwhile, native speakers of english would never start a request by saying, i m sorry. in this context, the speaker should not say “sorry” as it is not needed because s/he does not do anything wrong. the uses of sorry here were inappropriate in the context in which the speakers did not mean to express sorrows or regrets. in fact, they transferred the term maaf in indonesian to their requests. the natives of indonesian often used the term maaf to avoid ftas (termed by brown & levinson, 1987) or at least to reduce the impositions to others when doing things with words. then, the other pragmatic transfers were a form of intensification expressions, such as „please and really‟. the student/speaker tends to use these words to upgrade the impact of the utterances/apologies on the hearers. these words are frequently used by the speaker. furthermore, the endearment and solidarity expressions are often used when the speaker and hearer have close relationship in terms of social distance. example of endearment expressions are “my beloved friend, i am really sorry for being late to return your book”. it shows that the speaker and hearer have intimate relationship. the endearment markers are often used when the speaker and hearer have close relationship in english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 157 terms of social distance. the speaker embedded his/her apology expression with utterances aiming to minimize hearer‟s wrathfulness because of the speaker‟s carelessness. “i am so sorry darling, i really forget to inform you, actually i have promised with my mom”. in this context, the speaker should not have said „darling‟ because it is just used for those people who have close relationship such as parents and children, husband and wife, and lovers. this is inappropriate. the speaker should not have said „darling‟ because they are just friends. the other utterances are “my beautiful mom, i am sorry. i really forget to buy your order”, “sorry bro, i have been busy this morning”, “sorry, friend, i have broken your motorcycle”. these examples are a form of solidarity expressions. the speaker embedded his/her apology expression with utterances aiming to minimize the hearer‟s wrathfulness because of the speaker‟s carelessness. it was done in order to maintain harmonious relationship between both of them. furthermore, there is an honorific expression. it is usually used when the speaker has lower social status than the hearer, such as „sir, mr., boss, miss and professor. it is used to show the speaker‟s respect. for instance, „i beg your pardon professor, it‟s my own mistake”, “i am sorry miss, i was late”. conclusion there are five apology strategies used in this study, that is, ifids, taking on responsibility, explanation or account, offer of repair, and promise forbearance. the strategy of an expression of regret is the most frequent apology strategy used by the participants. meanwhile, expression of self-deficiency and explanation are the other strategies which are used extensively. furthermore, there are some different ways to express apology due to the social status and distance of the speakers and hearers. the speakers who have low social status tend to use polite strategy. it means that the speakers used appropriate and positive responses in three levels of social distance (intimate, stranger and acquaintance). those people who have equal social status tend to use casual expression of apology. meanwhile, those people who have high level of social status tend to use less polite expressions. then, the result of the combination realization in expressing apology strategies from the 6 th and 8 th semesters showed a similar pattern. it means that they used similar pattern of combination in expressing of apology strategy. after comparing and analyzing the data, the students of english education study program of islamic state university raden fatah palembang use some pragmatic transfer in expressing apology. pragmatic transfer occurred when the speakers are influenced by socio-cultural aspects like social status and distance. it would give a positive and negative effect in pragmatic transfer. in this case, the negative transfer was the most frequent pragmatic transfer used by the participants/students. acknowledgement i am deeply grateful to professor diemroh ihsan, ma., ph.d. and professor dr. indawan syahri, m.pd. for their invaluable comments and suggestions on this article. all errors that remain are my own. references brown, p., & levinson. (1987). some universals in language usage. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. bu, j. (2012). a study of relationships between l1 pragmatic transfer and l2 proficiency. english language teaching, 5(1), 32-43. doi: 10.5539/elt.v5n1p32. cohen, a. d., & olshtain, e. (1993). the production of speech acts by efl learners. tesol quarterly. 27(1), 33-56. doi: 10.1177/026553228500200103. ellis, r. (2012). the study of second language acquisition. usa: oxford university press. gass, s. m., & slinker, l. (2001). second language acquisition an introductionary course. marwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates publisher. goffman, e. (1971). relations in public: microstudies of the public order. new york, ny: basic books. holmes, j. (1989). sex differences and apologies: one aspect of communicative competence. applied linguistics, 10(2), 194-213. istifci, i. (2009). the use of apologies by efl learners. journal of english language teaching, 2(3), 15-25. jebahi, k. 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(1998). norms of apology depicted in us american and japanese literature on manners and etiquette. international journal of intercultural relations, 22(3), 251-276. syahri, i. (2013). resemblance of indirectness in politeness of efl learners‟ request. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 3(1), 148-165. syahri, i., & kadarisman, a. e. (2007). pragmatic transfer in request realization. teflin journal, 18(2), 123-147. tamimi sa‟d, s. h., & mohammadi, m. (2014). a cross-sectional study of iranian efl learners' polite and impolite apologies. journal of language and linguistic studies, 10(1), 119136. tuncel, r. (2011). apologizing and speech act realizations of turkish efl learners. paper presented at international conference on management, economics and social sciences (icmess) bangkok. retrieved from http://psrcentre.org/images/extraimages/121179 9.pdf. wouk, f. (2006). the language of apologizing in lombok, indonesia. journal of pragmatics, 38(6), 1457-1486. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2005.09.011. http://psrcentre.org/images/extraimages/1211799.pdf http://psrcentre.org/images/extraimages/1211799.pdf english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 the use of web-based exam (wbe) to optimize students’ testing result abdul ngafif english education program, teacher training and education faculty, purworejo muhammadiyah university, indonesia e-mail: abdulngafif@gmail.com apa citation: ngafif, a. (2018). the use of web-based exam (wbe) to optimize students’ testing result. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 41-50. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1241. received: 11-02-2018 accepted: 23-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: this research was conducted based on the problems found during the mid and final test by using paper and pen test; those are the students tend to do cheating, the sleepy supervisors, the inconsistency of test time, and the risk of losing the answer sheet. therefore, the goals of the research are; 1) to make an appropriate wbe testing system, 2) to know the cheating rate of the students, 3) to find out the effectiveness of the system, and 4) to inform the benefits that might be taken by the wbe testing system’s users. by applying rnd research model, the researcher applies a concept called webbased exam system which uses three main tools to run the system (teacher’s laptop as the server, wbe software, and access point to communicate the server and the user). the results indicated that the system reduces the students’ cheating rate 100%. then, from the questionnaire given, the teacherstend to likeusing wbe testing system because they can monitor the whole process of the test from his own laptop and the result of the test will be analyzed and be saved automatically in his laptop. moreover, it reduces time consumption and paper use. keywords: web-based exam, testing system, testing result, cheating, software introduction the widespread use of e-exam as a tool to measure students’ ability has risen to wide area of education. as williams (2007) do to test pre-hospital students at monash university, it is found that the students found wbe experience to be very positive, preferred wbe to pbe and preferred to receive their test results automatically. furthermore, rutkowski, et al. (2007) developed a close-ended computer assisted exam which is go online in the form of web-based assessment and based on the questionnaire spread out to the students, it is found that the students have low difficulties to operate it, it has a direct result, and it is much better than pbe. in line with those, chang and ming (2012) had compared platform pattern of various web examination system and they use asp.net as the programming language with the background database is sql server version 2000. they use three basic layers in the system namely data layer (database), application layer (the software used), and user layer (the students). the system provides a good condition for organizing all kinds of tests and also has a great reference value for other colleges and universities. web-based exam refers to a situation in which a student accesses questions and submits answers by a web browser and in which the exam results (partially or completely) determine the final grade for the subject (sessink, et al., 2004). meanwhile, wang, et al. (2004) defines web-based exam as an exam works over internet and utilizes web browsers as its interface. it is not only provide online real-time tests and online construction of items, but also enable teachers to check answer sheets rapidly and record scores over the internet. related to the use of web-based exam, kuzmina (2010) points out that the benefits of using web-based exam are effective, efficient, safe, instant scoring, professional time, reducing time lag, greater availability, accuracy, standardization, control, and longabdul ngafif the use of web-based exam (wbe) to optimize students’ testing result 42 term cost saving. rice (2003) states that the pros of using web-based test are it is effective for testing students’ knowledge and attitudes, it is user-friendly, love to have direct result, less time to prepare, and the data are save and easy to be managed and to be analyzed. from the report of prometric (2012), it is found that the benefits of using computer-based test are flexible, data-rich test result, enhanced security, consistency and reliability, availability of immediate scoring, streamlined logistic, multiple item types, and engaging navigation and presentation. during the final test in english department of muhammadiyah university of purworejo in the academic year of 2015/2016, the researcher did an observation to the students and to the supervisors using an observation sheet. during the observation, he divided the observation based on two kinds of subject namely non skilled subject and skilled subject. the result shows that from six nonskilled subjects (al islam dan kemuhammadiyahan ii, pendidikan kewarganegaraan, al islam dan kemuhammadiyahan iv, introduction to literature, ccu, and ppbi) followed by 810 students from semester ii vi, the total students did cheating is 253 (31%). meanwhile, from the eight skilled subjects (pre-intermediate grammar, english varieties, writing for formal communication, english morphology, modern english grammar, genre-based reading, and reading comprehension v) followed by 978 students from semester ii vi, the total students did cheating is 163 students (17%). besides grouping the students based on subjects, he also did grouping the students did cheating based on the type of the questions that is multiple choice test, essay test, and mixed test (mc and essay). the result shows that for mc test, there are 362 students among 780 students or 46.4%. then, for essay test, there are 69 students (12.9%) among 534 students did cheating. meanwhile, for mixed test question type, there are 179 students (40.7%) among 440 students did cheating. for the supervisors of the test, from 16 supervisors there are 8 of them (50%) did chatting outside of the class during the test, 6 supervisors (37.5%) did other job while waiting for the test, and only 2 supervisors (12.5%) just focus on the test they supervised. from the findings above, it can be seen that the dominate students did cheating is on non-skilled subject and mc test type. then, to overcome those problems, the writer develops a testing system called web-based exam. the researcher is interested in developing that testing system because he sees that the test will be easier to be handled if there is a system which helps the teacher/lecturer in conducting the test included testing, analyzing, and saving the result. meanwhile, it will be a transparent test if the students and the teacher are able to see the result of the test and they can discuss the test together. the other goal of the research is to reduce the weaknesses of the manual test such as cheating habit, the main role of the supervisors, the inconsistency of time, and the risk of losing/broken answer sheet. in developing the system, the researcher did collaboration with the lecturer, students, the stakeholders, and it practitioner so that the system will be good. then, after the system got ready, he needs three main tools to run the system those are the laptop which function as server, the web-based exam software, and the access point which functions to spread out the signal which is caught by the students’ laptop to do the test. for the server, the teacher may transform his own laptop to be a server using wampserver software. the basic requirements of the laptop server are the clock should be higher than 1.5 ghz and the ram installed at least 4 gb. after the server is ready, then the next is the web-based exam software. here, the researcher with his team make software of computer based test and he named it with webbased exam 1.0. this software is easy to operate because it is windows-based and we have made the manual book so that the teachers can use it easily. the last tool is the access point which functions to communicate between the server and the users (the students’ laptop). in holding the test, the teacher just needs to plug the access point to his laptop and he needs to activate his laptop as server by clicking wampserver software. then, he has to english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 open the web-based exam software and set the test open so that it can be seen by the students. after that, he asks the students to do the test using any web browser installed in their own laptop and they must log in using username and password set before. when the students have already done the test, the result will be appeared both in the teacher and the students’ laptop screen. by the time, the students can see which number answered correctly and incorrectly. by applying this system, the researcher can measure the students’ real competence. in doing the research, the researcher has two questions to be answered. those are; 1) how is the development of wbe testing system? 2) is wbe effective in overcoming the paper and pen problems? method this research uses research and development (rnd) method developed by richey (2007).this research is done in english department of muhammadiyah university of purworejo. in running the research, the researcher takes three main steps namely exploring (research), developing (design and development), and evaluating (design research). in this report, the researcher discusses exploring stage or preliminary study as the first stage of the research. meanwhile, the second stage is on progress. the subjects of the research are the students of english education program purworejo muhammadiyah university in the academic year of 2016/2017. there are 99 students from 3 classes and 3lecturers (listening, grammar, and vocabulary) as the subject of the research which uses the researcher himself as the instrument and the researcher uses two supporting instruments namely observation and questionnaire. the researcher takes the data for about 6 months since august 2016 till february 2017. the observation is chosen as a method to dig up problems arises during the test and the researcher uses the result of the early observation to plan up the solutions of the problems. qualitative analysis is a technique used to analyze the data. here, the researcher analyzes the data from the observation and the questionnaire given to the students and the teachers of the three subjects. for additional information, the researcher also considers the validation result f expert judgment from the it and from the testing. for it, the researcher asks the it expert to do validation from the side of technology, system users, and the application in classroom. for the test, the researcher asks the expert of test to analyze the questions made by the teachers whether it has fulfilled the validity and the reliability of a good test. result and discussion the way in developing web-based exam testing system step 1. observing at the very beginning of the research, the researcher did an observation to get the early data. the observation was done during final exam in english education program of purworejo muhammadiyah purworejo. in observing the students’ activity in the test, the researcher observed them from a little hole in the door. the researcher categorized the students who do cheating if they see their friends’ work, opening books, opening their phone cell, and asking the answer to their friends. moreover, the researcher categorized the result of the observation into two category namely non-skilled subject and skilled subject. table 1. the observation’s result of non-skilled subject non-skilled subject total students number of cheating students percentage of cheating students aik ii 99 63 63.64% pend. kewarganegaraan 99 22 22.22% aik iv 138 61 44.20% intro to literature 138 14 10.14% cross cultural understanding 168 25 14.88% ppbi 168 68 40.48% abdul ngafif the use of web-based exam (wbe) to optimize students’ testing result 44 table 2. the observation’s result of non-skilled subject skilled subject total students number of cheating students percentage of cheating students pre-intermediate communicative grammar 99 13 13.13% english varieties 99 45 45.45% writing for formal comm. 99 0 0.00% basic listening 99 14 14.14% english morphology 138 16 11.59% modern eng. grammar 138 23 16.67% genre-based reading 138 20 14.49% reading v 168 32 19.05% the goal of observing is to get the early data so that the researcher knows the weaknesses of the testing system at the present. here, the researcher divides the observation into two terms namely non-skilled subject which consists of 6 (six) subjects and skilled subject consists of 8 (eight) subjects. from the observation, the researcher found that the rate of the students’ cheating is quite worse seen from the percentage table 1 and 2 in which the highest cheating is on aik ii (63.64%) and english varieties (45.45%). from the observation, the researcher then got the idea to use wbe in order to reduce the cheating habits of the students. step 2. drafting the system from the observation, the researcher did early data. the next step is drafting the system by consulting it with it expert to make a computerized testing system which can handle the problems found in conventional testing system. the main features of the system are login/registration, question bank, inserting media (picture and sound), time controller, auto correction, monitoring, and users. figure 1 shows the draft of the system. from a series of activities done in the research, the process of the test using webbased exam can be seen in figure 2. figure1. draft of wbe testing system figure 2. diagram of wbe testing system english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 45 the figure shows the process of test using web-based exam in which the tester upload the questions into server and then it is spread out through access point. then, the students do the test using their own device. after the time finished, the score will be sent to the server automatically. to run the system, the writer uses software named web-based exam 1.0. knowing that the rate of cheating habit is quite high, the researcher then drafts the system. by using ajax language program and xampp (server software) combined with access point, the researcher makes the offline web-based exam. it consists of main menu, login, quiz form, and so on. the figure of the pages can be seen below. figure 3. main menu figure 4. form login figure 5. making new quiz/test figure 6. page of question and answer when the early draft of the system was ready, the researcher then asks the expert of it to check the system and the it expert gives the following advices; 1) to smoothen the page to be more user friendly, 2) database php mysql is good, 3) the access point used should be changed to handle 30 students, and 4) the aspect of security should be paid attention more so that only administrator may handle the whole process of the test. step 3. running the system in running the system, the researcher did the following steps; 1) testing the system and evaluating it, 2) asking for expert to give comments and advices, 3) developing the system means the researcher overcomes the weaknesses of the system from evaluation and the advices of the expert, 4) re-testing the system which goals to know the system works well or not, 5) re-evaluating, and 6) asking for users to give assessment to the system. abdul ngafif the use of web-based exam (wbe) to optimize students’ testing result 46 holding the test and evaluation i since all the system got ready, the researcher then held the test to know the system and later the researcher will have some evaluation on it. from the test, it is known that this system still has some weaknesses, including; 1) audio are not clear enough, 2) it has long transferring data (delay of one question and next question), and 3) sometimes the picture did not shown up. then, the system cannot be applied when the laptop has low specification, so that the teacher (administrator) should use middle specification of laptop with minimum ram 3 gb with processor which has clock speed 1.30 gb. this system requires no internet connection, so it will be no problem for them who have no internet connection in their school. fixing the problems knowing the weaknesses of the system, the researcher fixes it with the bug. the researcher then tests the system by himself to make sure that the weaknesses are already fixed up. re-test the system and evaluation ii in order to know the system is ready to be used, the researcher asks the lecturer and the students to have the test by using the system. from the test, it is known that the weaknesses as it is found in test i was already fixed. students’ cheating rate the subjects of the research are 99 students and 3 lecturers who take listening, grammar, and vocabulary subject. in test ii, the researcher with the lecturer did observation to know the students’ cheating rate, and from the observation, it is known that there is none of them did cheating because the lecturer set the questions to be answered just in a very limited time and when the time ends, the question will be closed automatically so that the students must answer the next questions. the result of observation can be seen in the table below. table 3. the observation’s result of the research subject subject total students number of cheating students percentage of cheating students listening for everyday communication 99 0 0% intermediate communicative grammar 99 0 0% english vocabulary 99 0 0% seeing from the observation at test ii, there is no students who did cheating because their movements indicating to cheat are limited by the time. furthermore, it is a fun for the researcher and the lecturers finding their students try to cheat by opening the dictionary or google in their laptops but when they found what they are looking for, the time to answer the question in that number ends so that they have to answer the next question. seeing the situation, the students just focus in answering the questions and afraid that the number of the question will close automatically if the time ends. that is a big progress. the effectiveness of the system in reducing the students’ cheating habit in order to know the effectiveness of web based exam testing system, the researcher did statistics computation by employing test of normality, test of homogeneity, and test of z. before counting the statistics, the researcher determines the hypothesis that are the use of wbe testing system is ineffective to reduce the students’ cheating habit (ho) and the use of wbe testing system is effective to reduce the students’ cheating habit (ha). in counting test of normality, the researcher employs chi square test for independence formula, it is known that the data of the students are abnormal because the x2value(listening, grammar, and vocabulary) is higher than the x2table with degree of freedom 5% (228.52, 25.16, and 35.65 > 11.070). to count the test of homogeneity, the researcher uses f formula and from the computation, it is known that the fvalue is lower than ftable (1.137 < 1.822) means that the data are homogenous. because the data have abnormal distribution so that the researcher uses mann-whitney u test to english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 47 compute the effectiveness of the system and from the computation, it is known that zvalue is higher than ztable (5.438 > 1.96) meaning that the use of web based exam testing system is effective to reduce the students’ cheating habit (ha is accepted). below is the result of statistics computation in a brief. table 4. statistics computation result computation subjects statistics results meaning test of normality listening chi square 228.52 > 11.070 abnormal grammar 25.16 > 11.070 abnormal vocabulary 35.65 > 11.070 abnormal test of homogeneity ftest 1.137 < 1.822 homogenous test of hypothesis mann whitney u test 5.438 > 1.96 effective to know whether the use of wbe testing system is effective or not, the researcher used two methods (observation and test result) in recognizing the effectiveness of the system in overcoming the students’ cheating habit. from the observation, it can be known that there are no students did cheating because they have full concern to answer the questions in front of them. furthermore, when they try to see their friends’ work or when they want to see dictionary, they must be in rush due to the limitation of time and when they did it, they will miss the questions. secondly, from the statistical computation, it shows that the zvalue is higher than ztable which indicates that the use of wbe testing system is effective to reduce the students’ cheating habit. from those two methods, it can be known that the use of wbe testing system is effective to reduce the students’ cheating habit. assessment from the users the researcher made questionnaire to know the effectiveness of the system. the researcher made two questionnaires for the lecturer and for the students. with the 110 students as its population, the questionnaire was given to 30 random students as respondents taken from 2 (two) different classes which is taught by the same lecturers. after the students answer all the statement in the questionnaire, the result of those can be seen in the chart below. figure 7. the result of students’ questionnaire from the result of questionnaire above, it can be known that; 1) most of the students prefer to have web based exam than paper based exam, 2) they face no difficulties in abdul ngafif the use of web-based exam (wbe) to optimize students’ testing result 48 operating it due to it is windows-based, 3) they may see the result directly after the test ends, 4) they are hard to cheat because the questions are shown randomly, 5) they feel that it is more comfortable and focus in doing listening test because they use their own headset so that they pay more attention on it, and 6) some of them ignore the timer so that they got disappoint to have unfinished test. the second questionnaire was given to the 3 (three) lecturers in english education program as the subject of the research. the result of teacher’s questionnaire shows that; 1) they like the auto correction feature because it helped them much in correcting the answer of the students, 2) this software is only appropriate for multiple choices test, not for essay, 3) they need to transfer the questions from ms. word to the system manually, it takes time, and 4) the system reduces the chance for students to cheat. figure 8. the result of teachers’ questionnaire benefit of the wbe testing system from the questionnaire, the benefits that can be taken by the teachers by applying this testing system, are; 1) no paper needed because all has been handed by the system, 2) the efficiently of time for doing and scoring the test, 3) scoring transparency, 4) the low cheating chance due to the questions appear in random, and 5) low cost of test due to no more paper needed. by using the same source, there is a significant influence of the system used toward teachers’ testing model especially the teacher of the listening course. those influences are; 1) it helps the teacher much in scoring and grading, 2) for the multiple choice test, this system appropriates much, and 3) it only appropriates to measure the students competence for knowledge and comprehension. conclusion from a series of research findings and discussions, the researcher draws the following conclusions. first, the researcher succeeds in making the wbe testing system which is userfriendly, practical, and low cost. moreover, the system can be applied in a middle specification of laptop (as server) and it requires no internet connection so that it will be no problem for the teacher and the students who have low fund to get internet connection. second, from the observation and the statistical computation, it can be seen that the use of wbe testing system is effective to reduce the students’ cheating habit. there is no english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 49 students did cheating in the test and their movements to cheat are limited by the time so they will have no benefits to do cheating. third, there are benefits that can be got from the usage of wbe testing system such as low chance to cheat, no paper needed, and efficiency of time. moreover, by applying wbe testing system, the students’ real competencies in taxonomy range 1 and 2 (remembering and understanding/comprehending) will be measured with great accuracy. references chang, l., & ming, x. g. (2012). application research of web examination system based on college. energy procedia, 17, 528-533. kuzmina, i. p. (2010). computer-based testing: advantages and disadvantages. вісникнаціональноготехнічногоуніверситетуу країникиївськийполітехнічнийінститут. філософія. психологія. педагогіка, (1), 192-196. prometric. (2012). converting to computerized testing: the benefits and best practices of computer-based testing. industry report, 1st quarter. rice, g. (2003). designing online tests. journal of adventist education april/may, 31. rutkowski, j., moscinska, k., & jantos, p. (2007). web-based assessment and examination system– from experiment to practice. in proc. 10th iasted int. conference on computers and advanced technology in education (cate), beijing–china (pp. 206-211). sessink, o., beeftink, r., tramper, j., & hartog, r. (2004). securing web-based exams. journal of universal computer science, 10(2), 145-157. wang, t. h., wang, k. h., wang, w. l., huang, s. c., & chen, s. y. (2004). web-based assessment and test analyses (wata) system: development and evaluation. journal of computer assisted learning, 20(1), 59-71. williams, b. (2007). students’ perceptions of prehospital web-based examinations. international journal of education and development using ict, 3(1). abdul ngafif the use of web-based exam (wbe) to optimize students’ testing result 50 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 121 translation of the relational values of euphemistic expressions into english from indonesian literary work ahdi riyono department of language education, postgraduate studies, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: ahdariyono_pb13s3@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id emzir department of language education, postgraduate studies, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir@unj.ac.id ninuk lustyantie department of language education, postgraduate studies, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id apa citation: riyono, a., emzir, & lustyantie, n. (2019). translation of the relational values of euphemistic expressions into english from indonesian literary work. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 121-128. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2092. received: 21-09-2019 accepted: 26-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: this research is to describe the forms and translation techniques of euphemism in the rendering of the dancer novel by rené ta lysloff. the researcher used a qualitative method with a content analysis technique. the data of research are in the forms of clauses containing expressions of euphemism. the data source was taken from ronggeng dukuh paruk (rdp) novel and its translation of the dancer. the result showed that there were 35 data (83.3%) of the euphemism forms of translated into euphemisms, and only 7 data (16,7%) of euphemisms were translated into other forms. the techniques used include single, duplet, and triplet techniques. the conclusions of the research showed that there were shifts in ideological forms and values of the translated novel. keywords: translation; euphemistic expressions; ronggeng dukuh paruk; the dancer. introduction at present, translation research does not only focus on lexical or grammatical equivalences but also focuses on factors that can influence the translator to make decisions when having difficulties in the translation process. one of these factors is ideology. hatim & mason (1997) say that some factors, for instance, politeness, power, and ideology have roles in the selection of decisions emerging from the smallest element of language to the largest element of language. the ideological term has two contradictory understandings. positively, ideology is perceived as worldviews that state the values of certain social groups to defend, maintain and advance their interests, whereas negatively, ideology is viewed from false consciousness, namely a need to commit fraud by distorting people's understanding of reality. in a discourse, ideology is usually manifested or coded in linguistic elements, including lexical, grammatical, and textual elements. in the lexical aspect, ideology can be realized in relational values related to euphemistic expressions. these expressions aim to refine the real reality. euphemism is used to avoid something directly with educational goals. but it can also be misused to cover up the lack of political expression (darma, 2009; fairclough, 1989). there have been several previous studies that were used as references in this study, including mansourabadi and karimnia (2012) this research had a purpose to reveal differences in ideology between hoseini’ s novel a thousand splendid suns and the novel and two translations in persian by ganji and soleimani, and ghebrai. fairclough maintained that ideology in discourse is encoded in the lexical, grammatical, and textual items and changes in these items indicate different ideologies. hence, lexical choices of the sourcebook and the two translations were analyzed based on fairclough's approach to investigating the differences of ideology between them. the results of chi-square showed that there were no ideological differences between the original text and its two translations. furthermore, the translator selected similar ahdi riyono, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie translation of the relational values of euphemistic expressions into english from indonesian literary work 122 vocabularies for representing the ideology of the source text author. another study is written by anggraini & himmawati (2017) entitled “translation equivalence of swearword in the walking dead comic”. this study by using the theory of bell (1991) was to analyze how the equivalence of swearwords translation based on its translation technique proposed by davoodi (2009). this research found that all of the techniques are used to translate swearword, they were censorship technique, substitution technique, taboo for taboo technique, and euphemism technique. the translation result also has a shift of form, the shift of meaning, and the theme. the study of shehab, qodan, & hussein (2014) examines the role context plays in determining the translation strategies pursued by translators of arabic euphemisms into english. due to different cultural backgrounds, adherence to the employment of euphemism in a social context may differ in both arabic and english. while some situations call for the use of euphemism in one culture, the other culture finds no point in using such euphemisms for such situations; preserving the original arabic euphemisms when rendered into english, in this case, could lead to misunderstanding and may deprive the source language (sl) from a cultural trait. the study derives evidence from 11 arabic euphemistic expressions taken from five literary masterpieces written by the egyptian novelist and noble prize winner najib mahfouz, and it looks into the english translation of these euphemisms. the present study attempts to advance the proposition that arabic euphemisms in their context exhibit fluctuating, unstable meaning, which emanates from various contextual factors such as speakers, addressees, shared knowledge and background information, and hence, these factors combined dictate on translators the chosen transference strategies. then the study of meilasari, nababan, & djatmika (2016) entitled translation analysis of euphemism and dysphemism expressions found in online bbc news. this research is descriptive qualitative in nature with a single embedded case. the data of the research are all euphemism and dysphemism expressions found in 20 bbc news texts and their translations. the data collecting method applied in this research are document analysis, questionnaire, and focus group discussion. while the data analysis technique used in spradley’s ethnographic method. most of the euphemism dan dysphemism expressions are translated by maintaining those expressions in the target text. english dysphemisms rendered into indonesian ones are 50% data, and 25% data of euphemism expressions transferred into indonesian euphemism. the established equivalence technique is the more translation techniques used. based on previous research conducted by researchers, there are some gaps or problems that can be examined more deeply than previous research. some of the previous studies examined euphemism from political discourse, regional language, and stylistics in political and novel news discourses. however, the study of euphemism on the indonesian novel and its english in terms of fairclough’s ideological is more interesting than the previous studies. because it explores a euphemism in the context of local culture. a novel is a work in which it uses beautiful language. in adult novels, there are often found refinement of words that have vulgar meanings and taboos that can affect the acceptability of a novel. refinement also often occurs in translations of novels that are related to the existing culture. in this study, researchers chose the ronggeng dukuh paruk novel (2012) and its translation (2012). several things make researchers interested in examining the euphemism in the novel. first, the novel is a reflection of the author's ideology. ahmad tohari's novel rdp is famous for its portrayal and defense of the lives of small people, especially in rural areas. besides, the rdp novel has received many awards from literary lovers in indonesia and internationally. second, this novel has been published in various languages in the world, including in english. after reading the rdp text and the translation it was found that there were many euphemisms used to express certain meanings. moreover, according to (fairclough, 1989), the use of euphemism can be used to uncover the ideology of writers and translators. therefore, this is where researchers are interested in researching more about the ideology that is reflected in the use of euphemism and the way it is translated. from the use of euphemism, the theory says that ideology is seen from the use of lexical choices, especially its euphemism and its translation, as well as the translation of euphemisms and their equivalence. then, this research explores the kinds of euphemistic expression forms rendered into english, and how to achieve correspondence as well as equivalence chosen by the translator. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 123 euphemism term comes from the greek word the meaning of euphemizein is the use of words with appropriate senses or good-faith (keraf, 2004). the euphemistic expression is an expression of language that softens the actual reality. according to larson (1984, 1989), euphemism is a figure of speech that is similar to metonymy, namely the replacement of a word or phrase with another word or phrase. however, as beekman and callow (1974) cited by larson ( 1984, 1989); anita, nababan, santosa, & wibowo (2019) that euphemism used to avoid expressions that may offend people, who are not socially acceptable, or unpleasant. correspondingly keraf asserts that like the style, the language of euphemism is a reference in the form of expressions that do not offend or suggest something unpleasant (keraf, 2004). also, allan and burridge (1991) define euphemism as alternatives to dispreferred expressions and is used to avoid possible loss of face. the dispreferred expression may be taboo, fearsome, distasteful, or for some other reason has too many negative connotations to felicitously execute a speaker's communicative intention on a given occasion. the above definition, it should be noted, takes an explicit account of the face loss, the basic to euphemism. concerning this point, farghal (1995) cited by (shehab, qadan, & hussein, 2014) said that the face notion is the main factor to comprehend the speaker's meaning and subsequently the lexical correlates in his/her utterances. hence, it is not only important in choosing our utterances, but also in understanding the meaning of these utterances. with another language, the expression is euphemistically used to avoid anything directly with the goal of educational value. however, this euphemistic expression is often misused in political discourse to cover the shortfall expressions. it is also revealed by wijana that euphemism usage of the word or other forms to avoid any form of restrictions or taboo in the language (wijana & rohmadi 2008). all languages in the world have euphemistically expressions, especially in the realm of sexual activities, death and the supernatural (larson, 1984, 1989), for example; (1) ayahnya sudah tak ada di tengah-tengah mereka (= mati). her father was not there in the middle of them (= death). (2) pikiran sehatnya semakin merosot akhirakhir ini (= gila). his senses slump lately (= mad). jews, for example, uses the word of surga (heaven) to avoid using the name of allah or god directly. most languages have a way to say mati/ die, without using words that have a primary meaning of death. english uses the word pass away, indonesian uses the word death, passed away, back to the bosom of god, etc., using the hebrew language to the father gone, gone to sleep or is sleeping (larson, 1984, 1989). the speaker's choice for euphemism is seemingly meant to soften their face, that of the audience or some third party by softening negative connotations or including positive ones, as allan and burridge (1991) indicate. it should be emphasized that the use of euphemistic language reveals much about the speaker relations among speakers, addressees or some third parties. this may be true mainly because the speaker’s choice for euphemism is deliberate. for instance, a speaker may intentionally resort to using emotive euphemistic expressions to highlight the intended meaning to be conveyed through codes, since euphemism is generally associated with positive emotiveness. in the rendering of euphemism, the translator must also choose a phrase that in the form of euphemism is also comparable (larson, 1984, 1989; suryawinata & hariyanto, 2003), euphemism in this sl can be a literal translation of euphemism of sl if it has a figurative meaning closeness. only if he had any, euphemisms can be replaced with words that have the same literal meaning. the following are examples of translating sentences that use euphemisms (suryawinata & hariyanto, 2003); bs: ibunya telah berpulang tiga tahun yang lalu. bt: his mother passed away three years ago. (tl changed to euphemism.). bs: putra pak bupati terganggu jiwanya bt: the regent's son is mentally imbalanced. (euphemism bs euphemism replaced with the equivalent of bt). bs: he is a little slow. bt: ia sedikit lambat (euphemism bs translated literally to bt.). bs: she is not feeling well. bt: ia sedikit tak enak badan. the linguists of the summer institute of linguistics provides an important record if translated phrase euphemism (barnwell, 1980); a) keep alert to recognize when a euphemism is being used in the source text. if the source ahdi riyono, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie translation of the relational values of euphemistic expressions into english from indonesian literary work 124 language is not your mother tongue, make sure that you have understood the actual meaning, as distinct from the surface meaning of the words. b) be sensitive to the cultural conventions of the receptor culture. sometimes euphemism in the original text (st) can be transferred directly into the target language. sometimes euphemism in st must be translated into the target language euphemism (tt), but different in the forms despite having a meaning in line with tt. sometimes something that is referred to by st may be translated into the tt euphemism to avoid sensitive phrases in the reader’s culture. in the same expression larson (1984) explains that euphemism will often need to be translated by a comparable euphemism in the receptor language. the important thing is for the translator to recognize the euphemism nature of the source language expression and then translate with an appropriate and acceptable expression of the receptor language whether euphemistic or not. method this research focuses on describing the forms and techniques of translation of euphemism in the translation of the dancer novel by rené ta lysloff. this study used qualitative methods with the content analysis technique. the data in this research was taken from clauses containing euphemistic expressions of the dancer, an english version (tohari, 2012b), and the original one, ronggeng dukuh paruk (rdp) (tohari, 2012a). the note-taking technique was employed in collecting the data, in which firstly, they were read several times. secondly, the euphemistic expressions were noted and finally classified into types of translations. results and discussion the use of euphemisms in the literary text of the ronggeng dukuh paruk novel is closely related to the ideology adopted by the text writer, namely ahmad tohari and the translator, lysloff. tohari wants to show his appreciation for humanity universally by replacing taboo, rude, or disrespectful words with a form of euphemism. however, in translating the text into english, sometimes, lysloff is contrary to the ideology of the source text writer. this is evidenced by the existence of several shifts in number and form of euphemism expressions in the tt. these indicated that there are some ideological shifts in the tt. table 1 explains that the translation of euphemisms into euphemisms in english is 35 data (83.3%). this shows that there are some forms of euphemism in source languages that are not rendered into euphemism in the target text (tt). the forms consist of 7 data (16.7%). the existence of these differences indicates that there is a shift in the different forms of st. the following is a discussion of each translation form of euphemism. table 1. relational values of euphemistic expressions in rdp and translated novel of the dancer relational values of euphemistic expressions frequency ∑ percentage % euphemism->euphemism 35 83,3% euphemism-> non-euphemism 7 16,7% total 42 100% translating euphemism into euphemism [sample 1] st : tanpa terganggu oleh jerit dan tangis, maut terus menjemput orang-orang dukuh paruk. (p. 29). tt : undeterred by screams and mourning, death called upon the people of paruk. (p.27). the clause 'maut terus menjemput orangorang dukuh paruk in the [sample1] of st is a form of expression of euphemism. the verb of menjemput with the subject of maut, a form of smoothing meaning of the death continuing to fall due to the eating of tempe bongkrek. it showed that the association of menjemput has a positive meaning. the word of menjemput on [data 1] was translated into english by the word called upon. in the cambridge advanced learner's dictionary, the word call upon is to visit someone, especially to sell them something. this implies that the word call upon also associated with something positive. thus, the use of the word call upon in the tt inline in the form of a menjemput word in the expression context. it is in conjunction with what larson maintains that the translator must also choose a phrase that in the form of euphemism is also comparable https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/visit https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/especially https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sell english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 125 (larson, 1984, 1989; suryawinata & hariyanto, 2003). [sample 2] st : dalam tempat tidur ini kelak srintil akan diwisuda oleh laki-laki yang memenangkan sayembara (p. 52). tt : in this bed, srintil would be deflowered by the man who won the contest. (p.52). the word of diwisuda contained in the [sample 2] of st is derived from the root word wisuda. the lexical meaning of the wisuda, according to big indonesian dictionary (kamus besar bahasa indonesia) is the dedication or inauguration with a solemn ceremony. in the context of the sentence in [data 2] the word of wisuda is a kind of euphemism of those who win the virginity contest to have a sexual intercourse with the candidate of ronggeng dancer, srintil, in the eve of bukak-klambu. while the words to diwisuda in st translated by lysloff into english being deflowered. the word deflowered in longman dictionary of english language and culture is defined as to have sex with a woman who has not had sex before. thus, the translation of the word form, deflowered with the word of diwisuda has been equivalence because it was the same form of a euphemism. it is also in line with larson (1984), and barnwell (1980). translating euphemism into non-euphemism [sample 3] st : di sana, di dalam kurung kelambu yang tampak dari tempatku berdiri, akan terjadi pemusnahan mustika yang selama ini kuhargai (p. 53). tt : there, inside the cage of mosquito netting, which was visible from where i stood, the destruction of something that i'd always valued, would take place. (p.53). the word of mustika on [sample 3] in the st is a euphemism form of keperwanan. the use of perusahaan and mustika words showed that tohari appreciated women. the word of pemusnahan in the context of the [sample 3] showed that bukak-klambu, an event that must be endured by srintil as the requirement to become a ronggeng is a tragedy for a woman's self-esteem in general. as said by fairclough that text writers often use strategies to avoid values of expressive words for relationship reasons. euphemism is a form of words used to replace other words, with the aim of making it more convenient and more known as a remedy effort to avoid negative values (fairclough, 1989), as for the target text (tt), the translator is difficult to find the equivalent word of mustika in st such as context, so he used a form of the clause to describe the purpose of the mustika word, ie something that i'd always valued (sesuatu yang selalu saya hargai). in terms of form, the word is not equivalent, on the other hands, it’s equivalent in terms of it’s meaning. the translation clause actually was not a euphemism, but it’s the usual description. it has been in connection with the theory of barnwell (1990). he said that sometimes, euphemism of st could be rendered onto the tt, different at the form but similar with the meaning. [sample 4] st : srintil hanya ingin disebut sebagai perempuan utuh. dia sungguh-sungguh ingin melahirkan anakku dari rahimnya. (p. 105). tt : but just as a woman, she truly wished to have my child in her womb. (p. 110). the phrase perempuan utuh on the [sample 4] of st has a connotation meaning, ie women who have a legitimate husband and have children. a javanese woman is not considered as a true woman when it is time for her to get married and to have children, she was still alone, and no man who proposed to her. the phrase perempuan utuh is a form of euphemism. namely, the smoothing to the meaning of the woman who has a husband. as for the phrase of perempuan utuh which was translated into english by lysloff just as a woman is not the connotation, but denotation. it is also in line with larson’s theory (1984). translation method and technique in a translated novel of the dancer the total data containing euphemistic expressions is 42 data (n = 42). referring to the results of the analysis, it was concluded that euphemistic expressions were translated using a single, duplet, and triplet translation techniques. the single translation technique used by the translator is a literal technique, the total of data is 15 (36%), descriptive equivalent techniques of 2 data (5%), modulation techniques of 8 data (19%), transference techniques of 2 data (5 %), naturalization techniques of data (2%), functional equivalent techniques of 2 data (5%), reduction techniques of 1 data (2%), and cultural equivalent techniques of 2 data (5%). then duplet translation techniques are literal + reduction techniques 4 data (10%), literal techniques + modulation 1 data (2%), naturalization + generalization of 1 data (2%), and literal techniques + additions 1 data (2%). then the triplet translation technique is transference + literal + addition of 1 data (2%), and the ahdi riyono, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie translation of the relational values of euphemistic expressions into english from indonesian literary work 126 technique of transposition + literal + add 1 data (2%). of the many singles, duplet, and triplet translation techniques used, the translator tends to be more dominant using translation techniques that are oriented to the target language (tl) with a percentage of 78%. the dominant method of translation used is communicative with a percentage of 78%. thus, it can be concluded that the translator is more oriented to the domestication translation ideology. table 2. translation methods and techniques frequency in the dancer novel ttranslation of euphemistic expressions (n = 42) technique single literal 15 36% descriptive equivalence 2 5% modulation 8 19% transference 2 5% naturalization 1 2% functional equivalence 2 5% reductions 1 2% cultural equivalence 2 5% duplet literal + reduction 4 10% literal + modulation 1 2% naturalization + generalization 1 2% literal + addition 1 2% triplet transference + literal + addition 1 2% literal transposition + + addition 1 2% method literal 17 40% semantics 3 7% communicative 21 50% idiomatic 1 2% ideology foreignization literal 17 40% semantics 3 7% domestication communicative 21 50% idiomatic 1 2% single techniques literal literal translation is often demostrated as interliniear translation, with the tl immediately below the sl words. the sl word-order is preserved and the words translated singly by their most common meanings, out of context. in another word, is can be said that literal translation is a word for word one to express the meaning of a single word (moentaha, 2008; newmark, 1988; suryawinata & hariyanto, 2003). the single technique used by the translator reaches 15 data (36%). so that , the most dominant technique of all the techniques used is literal translation. this also leads to the conclusion that t the semantic method is quite widely used as well. if it is summed up overall it reaches 47%, and this is a significant number showing that the ideology of foreignization is quite widely used by translators. [sample 1] ts : dalam tempat tidur ini kelak srintil akan diwisuda oleh laki-laki yang memenangkan sayembara. (p. 52). tt : in this bed, srintil would be deflowered by the man who won the contest. (p. 52). the word for diwisuda in the st sample was a form of euphemism from sexuality activity when srintil underwent the open-door ceremony as a condition to become a ronggeng. the word of diwisuda translated by lysloff becomes deflowered. the word of deflowered is also classified as the word euphemism in the tt. in terms of denotation, the word of deflower has the meaning of picking flowers. whereas according to the definition of web, deflower is the act of taking the virginity of a girl (u-dictionary). virginity is the person who has never engaged in sexual intercourse (someone who has never had sexual relations). the translation of euphemisms into euphemism is in line with those suggested by larson (1984, 1989) that the translation of the euphemism from the source language usually must be translated with euphemism in the target text (tt) as well. thus, the translation using the literal technique is commensurate with the meaning referred to in ts. this technique finding differs from those of meilasari’s finding that there was no literal technique employed by the translator (meilasari et al., 2016). this shows that not all euphemism could be transfered into euphemism literally in the tt. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 127 modulation technique modulation is a translation technique by looking for an equivalence in tt by changing the perspectives that have the same meaning (machali, 2000; newmark, 1988; suryawinata & hariyanto, 2003; venuti, 2000). the modulation technique is the second technique applied by the translator occurring for 8 times of the amount of data (19%). meanwhile, the dominant method employed by the translator is the communicative method. there are 21 data or (50%) showing the use of communicative one in the translation of euphemistic expressions. accordingly, the ideological orientation of the translator tends to use domestication. [sample 2] st : rasanya, sebagai anak laki-laki tak ada yang salah pada tubuhku. (p. 67). tt : i believed that i was a normally functioning male. (p. 67). the expression of euphemism on st sample tak ada yang salah pada tubuhku translated into tt with the expression of euphemism as well, namely the normally functioning male. the source text writer (ts) uses the point of view that there is nothing wrong as a man arises passion when rasus sees srintil naked (external viewpoint). while the translator uses the viewpoint as a normal man rasus naturally feels a tremendous lust when he sees srintil naked (internal perspective). this shows that the difference in semantic viewpoint between ts and tt does not cause differences in meaning or message between the two texts. translation with a different perspective in translation is called modulation (machali, 2000; newmark, 1988; suryawinata & hariyanto, 2003; venuti, 2000). translation with these modulation techniques has been in line with what was suggested by barnwell (1980) in the book introduction to semantics and translation from the summer institution of linguistics and also the same as the research’s result of meilasari et al. ( 2016), and arifin et al. (2017). couplets technique couplets are translation techniques using two different techniques in translating a speech or a sentence (newmark, 1988; ordudari, 2013). there are four duplet techniques applied by the translator, but the most widely used is the duplet of literal + reduction technique, which is 4 data (10%). the dominant method applied is the communicative method with a tendency to side with the target text reader or ideologically translation tends to domestication. the following is an example of the dominant duplet method; literal + reduction [sample 4] ts : di sana, di balik pusar, aku pernah bersemayam selama sembilan bulan dalam rahimnya. (h.67) tt : i had resided for nine months in her womb (p.67). the euphemism in the st is there, di balik pusar is translated into in her womb using the direct form in the tt. the translation techniques used by translators are literal and reduction techniques because the expression of di balik pusar is literally translated into non euphemistic form. triplet technique triplet is a way that translators do to combine three different techniques in translating speech or sentences (ordudari, 2013). there are two triplet techniques used by translators in translating euphemistic expressions, namely transference + literal + addition, and transposition + literal + addition. the following is an example of one of these techniques; [sample 5] ts : di sana, di dukuh paruk, aku juga tahu ada obat bagi perempuan-perempuan mandul. obat itu bernama lingga; kependekan dua kata yang berarti penis tetangga (h. 86). tt : i also knew of treatment for childless women which was common in the village. the treatment was called lingga: a combination of the abbreviation of two javanese words “neighbor’s penis. (p.88). the word acronym lingga is a short form of euphemism of two words, namely the neighboring penis. the word of lingga has ideological content, which is a symbol of virility, strength, and fertility. in javanese culture, lingga is always combined with the word of yoni, a symbol of femininity, motherland. for married women who are barren in the dukuh of paruk, it is not as a taboo if they have an affair with a neighbor so they have children because that's the medicine that works in overcoming infertility according to their ideology. dukuh paruk people have a loose norm because they are not bound by any religious norms and values. their belief was only focused on the spirit of their ancestors, namely ki secamenggala. the word of lingga is translated by the transference technique into lingga in the tt. then an additional description of two words, kependekan dua kata yang berarti penis tetangga which means the neighbor's penis, is translated by a literal technique and the ahdi riyono, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie translation of the relational values of euphemistic expressions into english from indonesian literary work 128 technique of addition with the word of the combination becomes a combination of the abbreviation of two javanese words "neighbor’s penis. conclusion this paper has examined kinds of euphemistic expression forms and the translation techniques used to render the euphemism in the st into the tt pursued by the translator. from the discussion on the research findings above, it can be concluded that there are 42 data of euphemism used in st. the relational values of euphemistic expressions which are translated into tt with the same form of euphemism are 35 data (83,3%), and only 7 (16,7%) data translated into noneuphemism forms. this shows that there are some shifts in the forms of euphemism in the tt. the shifts must be taken by the translator since there are socio-cultural differences in the tt. this is in line with larson (1984) maintains that all human codes have terms of expressing euphemistic utterances that substitute for certain words, especially in the area of sex, death, and the supernatural. euphemism often needs to be rendered by a comparable euphemism in the receptor language. the study reveals that the relational values of euphemistic expressions were translated into tt using single, duplet and triplet techniques of translation. the most dominant of a single technique used is literal technique, and the most dominant of duplet technique is the literal + reduction. on the other hand, there are two kinds of triplet techniques, namely transference + literal + addition and literal transposition +addition. the use of translation methods oriented to the source and target languages by translators is almost balanced. because of the overall method used, the source language-oriented method is around 47% and the opposite is around 52%. thus, in transferring the source text (tt) into the target one, the translator remains oriented towards the target language reader, so there are several cultural expressions of st that are translated into tt that used source-oriented techniques and there are also some which are oriented to the target language. from those discussions, it could be concluded that the translator, in this case, rené t.a lysloff tried to have a balance in the translation of literary texts, especially ahmad’s novel of rdp. references allan, k., & burridge, k. (1991). euphemism and dysphemism: language used as shield and wapon. new york: oxford university press. anita, nababan, m. r., santosa, r., & wibowo, a. h. (2019). the indonesian translation of english sexual euphemistic expressions in desperate duchesses by eloisa james. ellic proceedings, 3, 368–373. arifin, d. z., wiratno, t., linguistik, m., pascasarjana, p., sebelas, u., & maret, u. s. (2017). analisis terjemahan eufemisme organ dan aktifitas seksual dalam novel fifty shades of grey. prasasti: journal of linguistics, 2(2), 190– 204. barnwell, k. g. l. (1980). introduction to semantics and translation. horsleys green: summer institute of linguistics. fairclough, n. (1989). language and power (1 st ed.). london and new york: longman. hatim, b., & mason, i. (1997). the translator as comunicator. london and new york: routledge. keraf, g. (2004). diksi dan gaya bahasa. jakarta: pt. gramedia pustaka utama. larson, m. l. (1984). meaning-based translation: a guide to cross-language equivalence (1 st ed.). boston: university press of america. larson, m. l. (1989). penerjemahan berdasarkan makna: pedoman untuk pemadanan antarbahasa. jakarta: penerbit arcan. machali, r. (2000). pedoman bagi penerjemah. jakarta: pt. grasindo. meilasari, p., nababan, m. r., & djatmika. (2016). analisis terjemahan ungkapan eufemisme dan disfemisme pada teks berita online bbc. prasasti journal of linguistics, 1(2), 336–358. moentaha, s. (2008). bahasa dan terjemahan (2 nd ed.). jakarta: kesaint blanc. newmark, p. (1988). a textbook of translation (1 st ed.). new york: prentice hall. ordudari, m. (2013). translation procedures, strategies and methods. theory and practice in language studies, 3(5), 781–789. shehab, e., qadan, a., & hussein, m. (2014). translating contextualized arabic euphemisms into english: socio-cultural perspective. crosscultural communication, 10(5), 189–198. doi: 10.3968/4546. suryawinata, z., & hariyanto, s. (2003). translation bahasan teori & penuntun praktis menerjemahkan. yogyakarta: penerbit kanisius. tohari, a. (2012a). ronggeng dukuh paruk. jakarta: pt. gramedia pustaka utama. tohari, a. (2012b). the dancer. jakarta: yayasan lontar. venuti, l. (2000). the translation studies reader (1 st ed.). london: routledge. wijana, i. d. p., & rohmadi, m. (2008). semantik teori dan analisis. surakarta: yuma pustaka. audience awareness in the written discourse english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee audience awareness in the written discourse of sudanese efl university learners ali ahmed osman zakaria department of linguistics, university of kassala, sudan e-mail: haddad_31970@hotmail.com abdel rahim hamid mugaddam institute of african & asian studies, university of khartoum, sudan e-mail: sudan_98@hotmail.com apa citation: zakaria, a. a. o., & muqaddam, a.r. h. (2014). audience awareness in the written discourse of sudanese efl university learners. english review: journal of english education 3(1) 1121 received: 03-11-2014 accepted: 12-11-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: the study investigates the written discourse of the sudanese efl university learners to evaluate and assess their awareness of the audience to whom they write. the analytic descriptive approach is adopted to achieve the aims of the study. the subjects of the study consisted of 50 sudanese efl students drawn from faculty of arts at alneelain university. three tools were employed for data collection: a writing test, a questionnaire and an interview with the students. results showed that the written discourse produced by sudanese efl students did not reveal an awareness of the audience with whom they communicate. the students did not succeed to make assumptions of what their audience already know and what they expect to find in the texts being written. they held fragmentary knowledge on the concept of audience awareness. accordingly, the students were not able to prepare and edit texts which keep and stimulate their audience – they were not able to depend on lexical and structural variation to produce proper and effective writing. furthermore, results indicated that students were not able to attach unity and coherence to the texts they produced. their organizational skills were very poor. to help the students develop the concept they hold on audience awareness, writing instructors and syllabus designers need to put special emphasis on the importance of audience awareness as a factor which is essential for effective writing. keywords: audience awareness, communicative setting, language proficiency, discourse competence introduction many theorists contend that the purpose of writing is to communicate with an audience, which can be defined as actual readers or as the writer himself. scholars also seem to agree on another point: "no matter who/what the audience is (from real people to fictional construct), writers adjust their discourse to their audiences. in other words, writers do things to bring their readers into their texts, to establish a community that includes themselves and their reader" (wildeman, 1988). audience awareness is a very important aspect in discourse intelligibility. students need to have a thorough knowledge of their potential audience. to write to particular audience is far better than to write with no audience in mind. writing to known audience means having a predisposed knowledge of who students wish to write mailto:haddad_31970@hotmail.com mailto:sudan_98@hotmail.com ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam audience awareness in the written discourse of sudanese efl university learners to. this gives the students an advantage when preparing the content of the message they wish to convey. thereafter, students can adopt the strategies that enable them to produce a meaningful and comprehensive piece of writing. sudanese efl students have a little knowledge of the nature of the audience to whom they write. accordingly, they fail to make the right lexical and grammatical choices to formulate the message they wish to convey. for this reason students' writing results in a vague and less comprehensive piece of writing which makes mutual understanding difficult, if not impossible. writing, as stated by zemach and islam (2006), is an important form of communication in day-to-day life. writers put their ideas on paper to be read later by particular readers. one of the many things a writer needs to consider when completing a written task, according to bull & shurville (1999), is the requirements of the intended audience. hinds (1987) assumes that the writer provides the information required by the intended audience and prepares the written task through dialogic construction. that is, the writer has to make assumptions of what the audience know and what they do not. this makes writing as one of the most difficult skills to master in both first language and a second/foreign language. writing abilities are not naturally acquired (liberman and liberman, 1990). they must be culturally (rather than biologically) transmitted in every generation, whether in schools or in any other environments. since the command of writing entails mastery of language, students need to be guided on how to view writing as a tool through which they communicate meaning to particular audience. taking account of readers as reported by edwin & grundy (1996) is an important factor in effective writing. so, as stated by hyland (2003) the goal of writing instruction can never be just raising in explicitness and accuracy because written texts are always a response to a particular communicative setting. however, control over surface features is crucial and students need an understanding of how words, sentence and large discourse structures can shape and express the meaning they want to convey. writing programme should foster and enhance students' ability to generate ideas, organize and transmit information to the readers. grabe and kaplan (1996) contend that writing is usually undertaken to communicate with one or more readers for a variety of purposes. even when writing for oneself, there is a likelihood that the writing will, at some point, be used to communicate with others. the teaching of writing needs to meet students' communicative needs. that is, students should be taught how to write for effective communication which means the goal of teaching writing is to develop students' communicative competence. cooper (1999), faigley (1986), and witte (1992) argue that writing can only be understood from the perspective of a social context and not as a product of a single individual. writing instruction also needs to highlight the importance of the form of the message being transmitted to the audience. so, writing is not a process which puts emphasis only on the form of language, or the end product of a particular writing event. writing is a process which emphasizes both form and function in order to convey a particular meaning to the intended readers. hedge (1988) assumes english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee that knowing who the reader is provides the writer with a context without which it is difficult to know exactly what or how to write. and yet it is possible to find a writing task in one teaching material which does not specify a context to help the student. breiter and scardamalia (1987) emphasize the need to develop a "reader-based" approach to writing in order to ensure the communicative power of the text. it is this reader-based approach that places special focus on the link between reading and writing – an approach that leads to producing a text that can be "read successfully". the writer needs to use the appropriate language content in order to help readers understand the intended meaning. the writer also needs to use a clear style and abide by the conventions of writing. in order to be successful in this enterprise, the writer must develop evaluation and reformulation strategies as part of the writing process that continually assesses the potential reader's position. zakaria (2013) reported that sudanese efl students are unable to think of the readers while they are planning for the writing task. this makes them unable to think of the sort of the difficulties readers are likely to encounter when reading up the texts the students have produced. chang (2005) examined how two efl college students represented their audience in the writing process and how they adopted their writing to assigned audience. the results indicated that the more proficient writer was more capable of analyzing and making inferences of the assigned audience than less proficient writer. fontaine (1988) suggested that high school student writers were more apt than elementary students to adjust writing to meet audience needs. previous studies show that students only take their teachers as their potential readers. this is not surprising since writing is usually done in the classroom environment. britton (1975) found that the audience that students most frequently addressed in a school environment was the teacher. after accumulating almost 2,000 writing samples from british students comparable to fifth graders and above in american schools, britton categorized the writing samples as addressing oneself, the teacher, a wider audience, or an unknown audience. a large majority of the scripts, 85 percent, were written for the teacher or the teacher as the examiner. previous studies imply that appeal to particular audience is a very important factor in writing. if writers succeed to adapt their writing to suit their readers, this is an indicator of successful writing. students need to be taught how to think of their potential audience while writing. writing without having an audience in mind results in a type of writing where there is a large gap between students' knowledge and attitudes and those of the audience. this means, students produce writing in which they fail to guess what readers already know about the topic and what they expect to find in the texts being written. method the participants in this study included 50 efl students who are taking english as their major at alneelain university. the students belong to and represent different parts of sudan. this means they can be taken as a sample for the sudanese efl university learners' community. the students represent the future practitioners of the english language in the sudanese society. investigating their learning habits is ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam audience awareness in the written discourse of sudanese efl university learners believed to be with great value in the field of education. the participants are taught how to develop their writing skills which means they are equipped with the strategies necessary in a serious writing. they also study syntax and morphology which means these students are taught how to form words and structures in english. in addition, they are taught how to join structures together to create meaning. furthermore, the participants study semantics and this entails that the respondents are taught how to deal with the different kinds of meaning that a word or a sentence has. they also study the varied and complex relationship that holds between individual lexical items. considering the nature and sort of the activities in which the participants engage during their learning life, one assumes that they must possess the knowledge that enables them to produce correct, meaningful and interpretable english. this suggests that the students are good enough to write on different topics in english. however, research indicates inadequacy in their written language; and that their writing is less informative exhibiting a great deal of incorrect language forms. they even lack the techniques necessary for effective writing. some researchers attribute this to the fact that the students learn english primarily through formal education and as a result, they have little opportunity to use english for communication outside the classroom. some researchers emphasize assuming that the materials produced by the students seem to be invalid. the data of this paper were collected through a test, a questionnaire, and an interview. having a variety of tools for data collection helps the researcher to get a comprehensive view on the responses provided by the respondents. what cannot be seen adopting one tool may be obvious adopting another tool dealing with students responses. not all students usually admit that they have problems dealing with a particular aspect of language. their responses to the questionnaire and the interview may be different from the fact obtained examining their actual written product. so, the reason of having these tools for data collection is to have reliable data that can yield reasonable results. the test was prepared to collect the data that could be used to evaluate and assess students' actual writing. the students were given three topics and each student was to choose a topic to write a composition of about 200 hundred words. the students were given one hour to accomplish the task. the topics given to the students to write about are as follows: 1write to a pen friend telling him/her about the rainy season in your town. tell him/her when the season begins and ends and how you prepare for it. 2tell your friends how you usually spend your holiday. 3describe the sort of the problems you encounter when communicating in english. the questionnaire was prepared to obtain information about students' appraisal of the knowledge they hold on the concept of audience awareness. it was also prepared to collect information about students' ability to produce texts which could stimulate their audience and keep their attention. the questionnaire consists of five section. the first is about students' writing proficiency. the second section tackles students' knowledge of the nature of their audience. section three english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee deals with discourse competence. the fourth section involves developing students' communicative competence. section five is about students' strategies for effective writing. the interview was conducted with the participants to reveal some of the facts about students' written performance which could not be obtained through the questionnaire or the writing test. the items of the interview are as follows: (1) how do you view writing? (2) what do you think of when you decide to write? (3) how do you plan for your writing? (4) what do you know about your audience? (5) state the sort of the problems you think your audience will encounter interpreting your writing. (6) what strategies do you depend on to deal with these problems? (7) do your audience know something about the topic you discuss in your writing? (8) what makes you think so? (9) what difference does this make in your writing? (10) do you think that your writing stimulates your audience? (11) what makes you think so? results and discussion students' evaluation of their own writing proficiency table 1. students' writing proficiency no item often always sometimes rarely never median 1 i know that writing to particular audience is a complex process which requires conscious effort. 12% 74% 8% 4% 2% 16 37 4 2 1 2 i believe that writing to a reader requires a high language proficiency 14% 80% 6% 17 40 3 3 writing for effective communication entails the ability to weave words and structures into a meaningful discourse. 20% 70% 8% 20% 1 10 35 4 0 1 4 i believe that effective writing implies a comprehensive knowledge of the discourse community. 34% 46% 14% 6% 117 23 7 3 5 i am aware of the techniques necessary for the production of effective writing. 48% 16% 16% 10% 10% 224 8 8 5 5 6 i know that writing with audience in mind requires a high cognitive ability. 98% 2% 149 1 statistical analysis shows that most of the sudanese university students were aware of the complexity associated with writing for particular audience and that this process requires a conscious effort. 86% of the students claim that they take writing as a process that requires conscious effort. nearly all students 94% report that it is important to be knowledgeable about writing in order to communicate effectively with readers. 90% of the students state that writing implies the ability to produce different linguistic patterns which result ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam audience awareness in the written discourse of sudanese efl university learners in meaningful discourse. the students also report that it is very crucial to know the nature of the discourse community in which one performs. 64% of the students contend that they are aware of the techniques required for the production of effective written discourse. the students also report that they view writing as a highly cognitive process. examining students' writing, one will find that the results obtained analyzing the questionnaire and that of the interview are different. the result of the interview coincides with that of the questionnaire in the sense that the students assume that they are able to produce writing which entails the ability to anticipate their readers' needs and expectations. but their writing is poor to the extent that it is difficult to believe that it is done for particular audience. this can be illustrated by the following sample of students' writing: extract 1 dear ali, how are you and how are your family i want to tell you about my holiday. how i spend it and how i engoy with it. i spend it with some frind in field. we fawond their more interesting places. i had spend “3” weeks with them and i sorry i becom deprst i cant compleat. the extract above does not reveal the proficiency that students claimed to possess. the students also reported that they knew the techniques required for the production of effective discourse. this also is not likely to be observed in the above extract. students' assessment of their audience awareness table 2. knowledge of the nature of the audience no item always often sometimes rarely never median 7 i am taught how to write with audience in mind. 30% 46% 16% 8% 1 15 23 8 4 8 i know the nature of the audience to whom i write. 34% 36% 14% 10% 6% 1 17 18 7 5 3 9 i prepare my writing with necessary assumptions about my audience. 40% 14% 26% 8% 12% 2 20 7 13 4 6 10 i guess the sort of the problems my audience are likely to encounter interpreting the text i produce. 36% 40% 14% 6% 4% 1 18 20 7 3 2 11 i find it easy to guess how my audience will react to my writing. 36% 28% 18% 14% 4% 2 18 14 9 7 2 12 i know that my writing stimulates my audience. 80% 6% 6% 8% 1 40 3 3 4 13 i know what my audience already know about the topic on which i am writing. 74% 12% 4% 6% 4% 1 37 6 2 3 2 the table above shows that the students were taught how to write with audience in mind; and that they knew what these audiences expect to find in any piece of written discourse. 54% of the students reported that they developed necessary assumptions about their audience before getting started to english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee write. results in the table 2 state that 76% of the students thought of the sort of the problems their readers were likely to encounter when dealing with the students' writing. 64% of the respondents mentioned that they knew how their audience react to the discourse these students produce. 86% of the subjects assumed that their writing could certainly stimulate readers/their audience. 86% of the students under study stated that their audience experienced no problem when dealing with the discourse the students produced. this is because the students already know the degree and depth of the knowledge their audience possess. the results obtained from the questionnaire and the interview revealed that the students knew the nature of the audience to whom they wrote. but analyzing students' actual writing makes it obvious that the students do not know what their audience wish to get dealing with the texts being written. it seems that the students write with no audience in mind. this can be seen in the following sample of students' writing. extract 2 as you my friend these days we are witnessing a very rainy season, which rains daily in a variety degree. by the way the season starts from the first of autumn and last to four monthes without stopings. so we always when the season starts we preper for it, by manting the roofs of our houses and mak the walls very thik as not to fall in the rain. actually we do enjoy the season very much because if brings life for all the univers as well human and animals. students' appraisal of their own discourse competence table 3. students' discourse competence no item always often sometimes rarely never median 14 i organise my writing in such a way that makes understanding easier for my audience. 90% 10% 1 45 5 15 i adopt different strategies to produce more effective written discourse. 60% 12% 14% 8% 6% 1 30 6 7 4 3 16 i spend a considerable time thinking of the nature of the topic i wish to write about before getting started. 64% 20% 10% 6% 1 32 10 5 3 17 i think of the content i am likely to use in my writing. 82% 12% 2% 2% 2% 1 41 6 1 1 1 18 i think carefully of the first sentence i use to address my audience. 96% 4% 1 48 2 data analysis reveals that all the students adopted a style which made understanding easier for their audience. the way they prepared their writing helped their audience interpret the message conveyed by the students through their writing. 72% of the respondents claimed that in order to produce more effective written discourse, they adopted different writing strategies. for example, 84% of the students assumed that they spent a considerable ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam audience awareness in the written discourse of sudanese efl university learners time thinking about the nature of the topic they wish to write about. 94% of the students mentioned that they thought of the content of their writing. all the students reported that they thought carefully of how to initiate their writing. the same claim is made by students in their response to the interview. but examining their written samples, it is obvious that the students do not have any organizational strategies. that is, their writing is very poor. their writing makes it clear that the students do not spend much time thinking of their audience, the content of the topic being discussed or how texts have to be produced. this is revealed in the following sample of students' writing. extract 3 when i was in bara, the cloudy start to collect and soon the raain pegain to full, befor three hours the street became full of water. usually we prepare to rainy seasons by buing a sitable clouthes. assessment of the students' communicative competence table 4. developing students' communicative competence no item always often sometimes rarely never median 19 i read a lot of authentic materials to be familiar with the culture of the discourse community. 70% 14% 8% 8% 1 35 7 4 4 20 my reading results in having an insight into what is socially and culturally accepted by the native and other users of english. 88% 4% 2% 6% 1 44 2 1 3 21 my knowledge of the world enables me to guess what my readers expect. 76% 12% 6% 2% 4% 1 38 6 3 1 2 22 reading authentic materials provides me with insights into the skills necessary for effective writing. 90% 8% 2% 1 45 4 1 23 i write to pen friends to improve communicative writing abilities. 14% 42% 20% 16% 8% 2 almost all the subjects 84% claimed that they read a lot of authentic materials to acquaint themselves with the culture of the target language discourse community. the reason behind this is, of course, to produce a sort of discourse which is likely to be accepted by the native speakers and other users of the target language. a discourse which is communicative in nature. 92% of the students contended that their reading results in having a clear and deep image of the kind of writing that matches with the culture of the target language discourse community. 88% of the students assumed that their knowledge of the world made it easier for them to speculate what their audience expect to find when treating the message woven english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in the students' writing. 98% of the subjects claimed that reading authentic materials equipped them with the skills needed to be involved in effective written communication. to improve and develop these skills, 56% of the students assumed that they often wrote to pen friends. the results in the table above state that the students had the ability to produce texts which are effective and communicative in nature. the students also reported in the interview that their writing was proper enough to stimulate their audience. but result obtained from their actual writing did not reveal this claim. evaluation of students' strategies for effective writing table 5. strategies for effective writing no item always often sometimes rarely never median 24 i assess and reassess my writing to make it clear for my audience. 84% 12% 4% 1 42 6 2 25 i compare my writing with that of my peers to see how well i write. 24% 50% 14% 4% 8% 1 12 25 7 2 4 26 i support the claims i make with effective data to help my audience grasp what i weave in my writing. 62% 18% 12% 8% 1 31 9 6 4 4 27 i depend on lexical variation to write in an affective style. 94% 4% 2% 47 2 1 28 i use different grammatical patterns in my writing to make it more stimulating. 100% 50 29 i abide by the social rules while writing to produce an accepted piece of writing. 98% 2% 49 1 30 i view writing as a social process for negotiating meaning to particular audience. 60% 28% 6% 6% 6% 30 14 3 3 3 results in the table 5 reveal that 96% of the students kept assessing and reassessing their writing to make it much easier for their audience. 74% of the target subjects stated that they compared their writing with that of their peers to see how well they perform. when it was necessary for any modification, the students did it immediately. in order to make their writing more effective and appropriate, 80% of the students reported that they supported the claim they made by effective data. 98% of the subjects contended that they depended on lexical variation to make their writing appear more stimulating. all the subjects 100% assumed to use different grammatical patterns in their writing to produce an accepted piece of written discourse. 88% ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam audience awareness in the written discourse of sudanese efl university learners of the respondents stated that they viewed writing as a social process dedicated for the transmission of meaning to particular audience. the results obtained from the interview show that the students assessed their writing before editing the final version. but examining the actual written performance of the students reveal that this is not true. the following students' actual writing makes this point very clear. extract 4 dear my friend i hope that you are here becouse the season is unplivable the manson is coming after a weks you don’t know how is the vilige. the season start at april and the land covered by green wods so the wather is very beutiful evry thing is beutiful. in the season people work at the farms and it is the season at merige. conclusion the results of the study showed that the written discourse of the sudanese efl learners did not reveal an awareness of the audience with whom they communicate. the students did not show the ability to make assumptions of what their audience already know and what they expect to find as new. the students held fragmentary knowledge on the concept of audience awareness. accordingly, the students did not manage to produce the texts that could help them keep and stimulate their audience. they were not able to employ the strategies of writing to produce proper and effective writing. furthermore, results indicated that students were not able to attach unity and coherence to the texts they produced. their organizational skills the students possess were very poor. to help the students develop the concept they hold on audience awareness, writing instructors and syllabus designers need to put special emphasis on the importance of audience awareness as a factor which is essential for effective writing. they need to motivate the students to produce texts which address a wide range of audience and not restrict their writing to teachers as their potential audience. this can help students to be acquainted with the different sorts of writing genre. references bereiter, c. & scardamalia, m. (1987). the psychology of written composition. hillsdale: erlbaum barnet, s., bedau, h. (eds.) (1993). current issues and enduring questions. boston: bedford books. britton, j. (1975). the development of writing abilities (11 – 18), schools council research studies. london: macmillan. bull, s., & shurville, s. (1999). cooperative writer modeling: facilitating readerbased writing with scrawl. in r. morales, h. pain, s. bull & j. kay (eds.), proceedings of workshop on open, interactive and other overt approaches to learner modeling, international conference on artificial intelligence in education (pp. 1-8). retrieved from http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/bull/pap ers-pdf/aied99-ws-scrawl.pdf. chang, f. (2005) audience strategies used by efl college writers. journal of panpacific association of applied linguistics (paal), 9, 2, 209-225. issn, 1345 – 8353. cooper, m. (1999). ecology of writing in marilyn m. cooper and michael holzman (eds), writing as social action (pp. 1-19) portsmouth. nh: boyton. edwin, l. & grundy, p. (1996). writing about writing: teaching the process and achieving a product. asian journal of english language teaching, 6, 45-60. faigley, l. (1986) connecting theories of process: a critique and a proposal. college composition and communication 46: 527-42. http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/bull/papers-pdf/aied99-ws-scrawl.pdf english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee fountaine, s. (1988). using what they know: 9-, 13-, and 18year-olds writing for different audiences. in b. rafth & d. rubin (eds.) the social construction of written communication (pp. 99 – 116). norwood, nj: albex publishing corp. grabe, w. & kaplan, r. (1996). theory and practice of writing: an applied linguistics perspective. london: longman. hedge, t. (1988). writing. oxford: oxford university press. hinds, j. (1987). reader versus writer responsibility: a new typology. in u. connor and r. kaplan (eds), writing across languages: analysis of l2 text (pp. 141-152). reading, ma: addisonwesley. hyland, k. (2003). second language writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. liberman, i. & liberman, a. (1990). whole word vs. code emphasis: underlying assumptions and their implications for reading instruction. bulletin of the orton society, 40, 51-76. witte, s. (1992) context, text, intertext: towards a constructivist semiotic of writing. written communication 32, 189204. wildeman, j. (1988). defining audience negatively: one way the writers keep readers from their texts. paper presented at the 39th annual meeting of the conference on college composition and communication pp.4 zakaria, a. (2013) an assessment of the written performance of sudanese efl learners: a communicative approach to writing. world journal of english language; dec2013, vol. 3 issue 4, p1 zemach, d., & islam, c. (2006). writing in paragraphs. macmillan. endang darsih indonesian efl teachers’ perception 192 indonesian efl teachers’ perception on the implementation of 2013 english curriculum endang darsih department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, the university of kuningan, indonesia email: she_n2@yahoo.com apa citation: darsih, e. (2014). indonesian efl teachers’ perception on the implementation of 2013 english curriculum. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 192-199 received: 15-03-2014 accepted: 27-03-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: since 2014-2015 academic year, the ministry of education and culture of republic of indonesia finally decided to implement the 2013 curriculum. restoring character education and improving students’ creative thinking are the main reasons of the new curriculum development. this study employed teachers’ understanding and perception on the implementation of 2013 english curriculum and identified problems encountered by the teachers in implementing the 2013 english curriculum. through qualitative design, the study was conducted at one of vocational high schools in kuningan, west java. this study reveals that the teacher’s understanding toward 2013 curriculum is quite close to the basic principles of the curriculum and most of teachers claim that the new curriculum cannot be easily implemented at the moment since they find several problems in implementing 2013 english curriculum. they got difficulties in applying new learning revolution, developing assessment rubrics and the shortage of english duration at school will not ensure to improve students’ competence. it also recommended that the teachers should put more efforts on applying the 2013 curriculum in the teaching and learning process by joining any training, workshop and improve their creativity and adapt to the advance of knowledge and technology. keywords: 2013 english curriculum, teachers’ understanding, teachers’ perception this 2014-2015 academic year, government finally decided to implement the new designed curriculum, the 2013 curriculum. thousands of schools, ranging from elementary (sd), junior high (smp), and senior high (sma) schools have participated in the try out. this curriculum was officially launched on 15 july 2014 starting with first, fourth, seventh and 10th graders. the main reasons to justify the implementation of the new curriculum is because the government wants to restore character education and improve students’ creative thinking. the 2013 curriculum is still new for our society because it has just been implemented this year, so there is not yet research reports related to the 2013 curriculum. however, the 2013 curriculum is the development introduction the indonesian ministry of education and culture has made some curriculum adjustments which consider certain points such as what students should learn, how is the content and learning sequences given to the students, and how will the lesson started (hartoyo, 2011). this adjustment consequently changed the previous curriculum called kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan (ktsp) or school based curriculum (sbc) with the new one called the 2013 curriculum. here, curriculum is a set of plans and rules about goals, contents, and learning materials as well as the way of using it as guidance for implementation of learning activities aimed at a specific goal national education standardized institution (bsnp, 2006). 193 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee or perfection of ktsp or school-based curriculum, therefore some previous research on school-based curriculum are taken in this study. one of the studies was conducted by the indonesian curriculum research centre, which is a government agency under the department of the national education (pusat kurikulum, 2007 in sulfasyah, 2013). the purpose of the study was to monitor the implementation of the ktsp in primary, junior high and senior high schools at the national level. the study was conducted in the capital cities of 33 provinces across indonesia. data were collected from four different sources: the department of education both at the provincial and district level, school principals, teachers, and parents from school boards. using questionnaires, interviews, observations and document analysis, this study revealed that most of the schools involved had not implemented the ktsp effectively. in addition to this research, several teacher researchers (jayani, 2008; rochminah, 2008 in sulfasyah, 2013) have investigated the use of new teaching approaches, which reflect some of the underlying pedagogical concepts outlined in the ktsp, such as contextual teaching and learning, cooperative and collaborative work and discovery learning. these studies were undertaken in senior high schools and focused on particular subject areas, such as mathematics and science. they found that where teachers had used the new teaching approaches, there was evidence of improved learning outcomes for their students. thus, this research suggests there may be some areas and disciplines where implementation of the schoolbased ktsp has been relatively effective. the last, the research conducted by directorate general of teacher quality improvement (dirjen pmptk), ministry of national education on the school-based curriculum (ktsp) implementation in schools in central java year 2010, it was found that there were a number of obstacles in the implementation of ktsp. they are : (1) the insufficient number of media and instructional aids to support the implementation of ktsp; (2) teachers do not sufficiently and thoroughly understand ktsp; (3) insufficient numbers of workshops, guidance, and reference in developing ktsp; (4) insufficient time allocation and students’ study load; (5) too many variations of materials given by trainers in ktsp training; (6) training for teachers in rural areas need to be intensified (hartoyo, 2011). the ministry of education and culture states that 2013 curriculum, a means of integrating values systems, knowledge and skills, has orientation on developing the learners’ competencies, the changing of teaching-learning methodology towards teachinglearning process which gives priorities on the learning experiences through observing, inquiring, associating, and communicating so as to enhance the values of competitiveness and build prime characters. to achieve all of these, the teaching methodology involves not only exploration, elaboration, confirmation, but also observation, inquiry, analysis, reasoning, description, inference, evaluation and creation (kemendikbud, 2012: 25 in srijono, 2013: 59). according to richards (1985: 70) curriculum is an educational program in which it is: (a) the educational purpose of the program (the ends); (b) the content, teaching procedures and learning experiences which will be necessary to achieve this purpose (the means); (c) some means for assessing whether or not the educational ends have been achieved. brown (1995: 19) defines curriculum as a series of activities that contribute to the growth of consensus among the staff, endang darsih indonesian efl teachers’ perception 194 faculty, administration, and students. this series of curriculum activities will provide a framework that helps teachers to accomplish whatever combination of teaching activities is most suitable in their professional judgment for a given situation, that is, a framework that helps the students to learn as efficiently and effectively as possible in the given situation. the question is whether this 2013 curriculum can fulfill public’s needs and expectation or not. whether it can play a role in improving the quality of education in indonesia or not. again, although curriculum is an essential element in determining the education quality, there are other factors that we should consider like teachers’ professionalism, supports of society and environment, as well as media. it is impossible to achieve high quality education by solely depending on a good curriculum without the support of those other factors. considering the explanation above, therefore, the writer has investigated one of vocational high schools in kuningan. it intends to portray the implementation of the 2013 english curriculum. this study was sought to do the following: 1) to find out teachers’ understanding toward the 2013 english curriculum, 2) to find out teachers’ perception on the 2013 english curriculum, and 3) to find out problems faced by teachers in implementing the 2013 english curriculum. the result of the study provides teachers and administrators as well as government with empirical evidence on the implementation of 2013 curriculum and its benefits. further, the result of the research is expected to give a valuable contribution in developing the teaching of english based on 2013 curriculum. it is also expected to be a foundation of making policies for the school’s authorities to improve the quality of their professions. method the research is conducted in qualitative design because it investigates a phenomenon which is described by cresswell (1994) as an approach which inquires often makes knowledge claims based primarily on constructivist perspectives. the researcher physically goes to the people, setting, site or institution to interview or record in its natural setting. the research was conducted in one of state vocational high schools in kuningan because this school is trying out this curriculum. besides, the writer has an easy access to the school; she was graduated from this vocational high school so she is interested in doing the research. two english teachers are chosen as the sample of the research because they teach the first graders in which 2013 curriculum is tried out. in collecting the data, the research used two instruments. they were questionnaires and interview. the questionnaire was distributed to gain the data about the teachers’ perception on the implementation of 2013 english curriculum. there are ten closed questions which were answered by the teachers. it used likert-scale which consists of a group of statements that should be marked by the teachers. there are three responses category: s (setuju/ agree), n (netral/neutral), ts (tidak setuju/diagree) if he does not agree. for more detailed of the statements, it can be seen in appendix. the researcher asked feedback from the colleague in the school to get the validity of the questionnaire. the interview format used was open-ended questions which allow the respondents to give totally free answers. two english teachers of the first graders are interviewed by using indonesian language and english. they were asked several questions related to the implementation of 2013 english curriculum. 195 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee interview and questionnaires were administered at the same time; on the first of may 2014. the data of interview is then transcribed which is finally analyzed and interpreted. so does questionnaire. most of the interviews were conducted in english. nevertheless there were a number of occasions whereby bahasa indonesia is used as the respective respondents felt more comfortable using the language. each interview took approximately 30 minutes, was audio-tapped and then transcribed by the interview as soon as possible. the data taken from interview and questionnaires were analyzed qualitatively. since the topic is about 2013 curriculum, so the focus of analysis is on its components; how teachers comprehend goals or objectives, content, method and evaluation or assessment based on 2013 curriculum. the writer also analyzes the problems faced by teachers in implementing this 2013 curriculum. results and discussion the purpose of this study is to portray the implementation of 2013 curriculum in teaching of english. the following are the findings of this study: teachers’ understanding based on the interview, it is found that teacher’s understanding about 2013 curriculum is quite close to the basic principles of 2013 curriculum. their answers to the questions are closely related to the extant theories of the curriculum. regarding definition and objectives of 2013 curriculum, from the interview, reveals that teachers know well about 2013 curriculum including the objectives of the curriculum. it is also found that the implementation of 2013 curriculum has its purpose to build a prime character of learners as well as knowledge and skills in order to encourage and prepare the learners to play their roles in society positively and meaningfully because both teachers think that the previous curriculum only focuses on improvement of knowledge and skill or cognitive aspect and not pay more attention on attitude and students’ creative thinking. background of 2013 curriculum based on the interview, it is found that both teachers have same understanding about background of 2013 curriculum implementation. it is revealed from the interview: “sebetulnya tidak hanya pada degradasi moral saja, menurut penelitian bahwa keberhasilan seseorang di kemudian hari sangat dipengaruhi oleh penanaman sikap dan pola asuh yang ditanamkan sebelumnya. misalnya orang yang secara akademik dia bagus, tapi ternyata tidak memiliki sikap kreatif, sikap kreatif itu tidak bisa hanya diperoleh dengan transfer knowledge, sikap baik ditanamkan tidak ujug-ujug atau tiba-tiba, tapi butuh proses, sehingga sejak awal pemerintah berupaya untuk menciptakan warga yang kreatif, inovatif, dan produktif. itu landasan filosofisnya yang saya tahu. pendidikan terlalu menitikberatkan pada pengetahuan atau aspek kognitif dan kurang bermuatan karakter yang mendalam”. “actually, not only the moral degradation, according to research that person’s success in later life is strongly influenced by the cultivation of attitudes and parenting is implanted previously. for example, people who are academically good, but he did not has a creative attitude that can not be obtained only by the transfer of knowledge, good attitude instilled not suddenly, but it takes the process, so that from the outset the government is attempting to create a creative, innovative, and productive citizen. it was a philosophical foundation that i know. education is too focused on cognitive aspects and knowledge or lack of character depth charged”. endang darsih indonesian efl teachers’ perception 196 it indicates that the background of 2013 curriculum is the importance of good character of students; therefore the 2013 curriculum is aimed at preparing students who are creative, innovative, productive and “berakhlak mulia”. students who are academically good do not ensure that they have good attitude and excellent characters. this attitude is not coming immediately, it needs process. good attitude and characters can’t be taught just by transferring knowledge, but it need the real model, therefore it is a must for teachers to have four important competencies namely pedagogical competence, social competence, professional competence, and personality competence. teachers should be a good model for their students. approach and method according to permendikbud no. 81a tahun 2013, it is stated that the process of learning in 2013 curriculum is conducting by concerning five main learning experiences: observing, questioning, collecting information, associating, and communicating. what teachers said in the interview is in line with this principle as stated in the following: “...dari konten tidak ada perbedaan yang signifikan, cuma yang lebih menonjol dalam kurikulum 2013 adalah scientific approach itu. selama ini ketika mendengar ktsp tidak diekplisitkan anak itu harus mengalami observing, questioning, exploring, associating, communicating or networking”. (“... of the content no significant difference, just more prominent in the curriculum of 2013 is the scientific approach. during this time when listening ktsp, does not explicitly have to go through observing, questioning, exploring, associating, communicating or networking”.) assessment based on the interview, revealed that both teachers have similar understanding about assessment. they comprehend that assessment must be authentic. it means that teacher must observe, assess a real student’s ability, not only in the end of the process of learning, but while the process, even in the pre activity. teachers’ perception perception in this study is defined as what teachers think and feel about the 2013 curriculum based on their experiences in implementing it. it is found from the questionnaire; teachers think that although the 2013 curriculum is just a modification from a previous curriculum, 2013 curriculum and its implementation are still confusing so it is hard to be implemented at the moment. they have such a perception since they rarely join a kind of training or workshop dealing with the 2013 curriculum. it is revealed from the interview: teacher: “untuk pelatihan tentang kurikulum 2013 pernah, saya pernah mengikuti sosialisasi kurikulum 2013 kalau tidak salah baru sekali.” (“for the 2013 curriculum training ever, i’ve followed the socialization of 2013 curriculum i think it was only once.” it is also found from the questionnaire that both teachers agree that socialization is a prominent effort to determine the success of the 2013 curriculum. this implies that though 2013 curriculum is not a new curriculum, it is still confusing especially for those who are lack of understanding of this curriculum. it indicates that socialization of the 2013 curriculum is crucial to conduct frequently. in other words, the socialization of the 2013 197 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee curriculum is an urgent need to conduct to make teachers familiar with the new features which do not exists in the previous curriculum. nevertheless, the two teachers think that 2013 curriculum is most appropriate curriculum to be implemented in indonesia nowadays regarding the recent conditions of indonesia. it is revealed from the interview: teacher: “i do agree with the implementation of 2013 curriculum, but it must be adjusted in some things. i don’t think by available textbook it will kill teacher’s creativity as many people said, because the team writing the book is eligible. but i think that the textbook is not the only source for the teacher, teacher must enrich their knowledge, for example they can download the material from internet to adjust with the real life. mastery of technology is a must for teacher.” from other questionnaire’s items, it is found that pre-service teacher #1 and pre-service teacher #2 have the same opinion. both agree that curriculum is a compulsory reference or guidance in the teaching-learning process. however they think that 2013 curriculum cannot be used to solve any problem of education in indonesia. these indicate that curriculum is an absolute requirement for education at school. it cannot be apart from education or instruction. since education is a deliberate effort, a plan is needed to guide the effort and the term ‘curriculum’ generally refers to this plan. the last is about assessment. from the questionnaire’s item number eight it is found that both teachers agree that they find it hard to apply authentic assessment. they were accustomed to assess the final product by giving students tests, assignments and so on. now, based on 2013 curriculum they are pushed to assess students’ competency comprehensively, they not only assess students knowledge but also their attitude, behavior and performance through observations and rubrics. this is quite difficult for teacher because of lack of preparation. probably when the format or rubrics are provided by school or government it will help teachers in applying authentic assessment. it is revealed from the interview: teacher: “in 2013 curriculum assessment must be authentic. it means that teacher must observe, assess a real students ability, not only in the end of the process of learning, but while the process, even in the pre activity, for example we have to prepare material, state the objective or goal, teacher process must be met with the objective that he/she want to accomplish. in short, both teachers have similar perception on 2013 curriculum. in general, their perception indicates that the two teachers agree but still doubtful in implementing 2013 curriculum. in addition, most of teachers face difficulties in applying authentic assessment. in one side, they agree that applying 2013 curriculum, as a reference and guidance in teaching-learning process, is appropriate in indonesia nowadays regarding the recent conditions of indonesia. problems based on the interview, it is found that there are three problems faced by the teachers in implementing 2013 curriculum. first, it is quite hard to apply authentic assessment because teachers tend to assess final product of students competency. as we know that in 2013 curriculum english learning is assessed by authentic assessment or alternative assessment which gives students opportunity to apply not only knowledge but also skill and attitude inside the classroom and outside the endang darsih indonesian efl teachers’ perception 198 classroom. it is aimed at giving feedback on any students’ language ability in the real situation. it indicates that teachers must assess students competency comprehensively, teacher must observe, assess the real student’s ability, not only in the end of the process of learning, but also during the process. authentic assessment not only assess final product but also respects students’ thinking ability behind assignment and learning process. therefore it pushes teachers to develop assessment rubrics. rubric is developed for every assignment and should describe competency that must be achieved by the students. for those who have not become accustomed to this kind of assessment find it difficult to develop the rubrics especially for assessing students’ attitude. second one, teachers need to adapt with the learning revolution based on 2013 curriculum. as we know that the 2013 curriculum emphasizes a modern pedagogical dimension in the learning process by using scientific approach. scientific approach covers five steps namely observing, questioning, associating, experimenting, and networking (syahmadi, 2013: 35). by using this approach, the teachers are pushed to use multimedia to support their teaching and to be creative in arranging short questions for the students. it is found from the interview that the role of teachers in this case just as facilitator, they let their students to solve the problems and do not help students much in the teaching-learning process. students-centered learning should be achieved in the learning process to make them independent. however english teachers find it hard to apply scientific approach. for example, when observing, teacher asks students to watch a video between about making a reservation. ideally after watching or observing a video, students should ask question and discuss what they watch and listen on the video with others by using english. the problem is students especially the first graders find it difficult to express their ideas, their opinions and their findings in english because they tend to use their mother tongue therefore teachers play an important role in this step to guide their students for examples by giving some clues in order to make students speak english. another problem related to learning approach is teachers’ competency. this scientific approach demands teacher to be creative, master technology and enrich their knowledge. nevertheless, some teachers are not able to operate more advanced-technology tools/instruments as their media in teaching english in class. the last, in english 2013 curriculum, the duration of english is very short, only two credit hours, so it’s hard for teachers to provide or improve students’ competence by giving them exercises and opportunity to practice english. the shortage of time does not only influence ideal objective of education, but also politically and economically on the teachers. conclusion considering the results of data analysis, some points can be concluded. first, the teachers’ understanding toward 2013 english curriculum is quite close to the basic principles of the curriculum. second, dealing with the teachers’ perception on 2013 curriculum, this study revealed that 2013 curriculum is still not easy to be implemented at the moment. third, teachers find several problems in implementing 2013 english curriculum which are difficulties in applying new learning revolution, developing assessment rubrics and shortage of english time at school will not ensure to improve students’ competence. 199 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee it is recommended that the teachers put more efforts on applying the 2013 curriculum in the teaching and learning process. in other words, the teachers have to improve their various teaching methods, improve their creativity and adapt to the advancement of knowledge and technology. as a result, the teaching and learning process will be enjoying and make the students more motivated in learning. the teachers should also improve their language competence and performance since they become the “model” for the students in acquiring the language competencies besides the other sources of learning. it is also important for the teachers to join any training, workshop and socialization of this 2013 curriculum to get deep understanding since such activities will help them to implement the curriculum well. references badan standar nasional pendidikan. (2006). panduan penyusunan kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan jenjang pendidikan dasar dan menengah. jakarta: bsnp. brown, j. d. (1995). the elements of language curriculum – a systematic approach to program development. heinle & heinle publishers. boston. united states of america. creswell, j. w. (1994). research design qualitative and quantitative approaches. london: sage publisher. hartoyo. (2011). a handout about curriculum and material development in english language teaching. panduan penguatan proses pembelajaran sekolah menengah pertama. kemendikbud dirjen dikdasmen. 2013 salinan peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia nomor 65 tahun 2013 tentang standar proses. salinan peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia nomor 66) tahun 2013 tentang standar penilaian. salinan peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia nomor 68 (smp), 69 (sma) tahun 2013 tentang standar proses. salinan peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia nomor 81a tahun 2013 tentang implementasi kurikulum. sulfasyah. (2013). investigating the implementation of the indonesian ktsp (school-based curriculum) in the teaching of writing in year two. thesis. edith cowan university. perth, western australia richards, j. c. (2001). curriculum development in language teaching. cambridge university press. united kingdom. syahmadi, h. (2013). bedah kurikulum 2013 bagi guru bahasa inggris. bandung: cv. adoya mitra sejahtera srijono, d. (2013). principles of english instructional design – modul plpg english language teaching and learning theory and practice. badan pengembangan sumber daya manusia. pendidikan kebudayaan dan penjaminan mutu pendidikan (bpsdmp-pmp). indonesia. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 the implementation of jumbled-sentences toward students’ skill in writing report text fatmawati setia utami english education department, faculty of education, universitas teknologi yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: fatmatami73@gmail.com mustaqim pabbajah guidance and counseling department, faculty of education, universitas teknologi yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: mustaqim_pabbajah@uty.ac.id juhansar english education department, faculty of education, universitas teknologi yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: juhansar@uty.ac.id apa citation: utami, f. s., pabbajah, m., & juhansar, j., (2018). the implementation of jumbledsentences toward students’ skill in writing report text. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 115-124. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1501. received: 19-08-2018 accepted: 25-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: this study aims at describing the implementation and the effectiveness of jumbledsentences as a technique to enhance students’ skill in writing report text and finding out the factors influencing students’ skill in writing report text. this study was conducted in man 2 yogyakarta that involved 24 tenth graders of ipa 3 in academic year 2018/2019. this study was a classroom action research. to collect the data, observation checklist, structured interview, and tests were used. the result showed that most of students could understand the subject easily and involve actively during the technique implementation. besides, the test results showed students’ mean improvement in writing report text from pre-test (3.00), post-test i (3.36), and post-test ii (3.78). it means that jumbled-sentences technique is effective to enhance students’ skill in writing report text. moreover, the factors influencing students’ writing skill were having lack of vocabulary, getting anxiety in making grammar errors, getting difficulties in understanding and translating words or sentences, and having limited classroom for learning-teaching process. keywords: implementation; jumbled-sentences; students’ skill; writing; report text. introduction writing is an activity of expressing and developing idea in a written form. writing is also known as a recursive process involves a series of steps to create a good and a correct text. pestaria, et al. (2014) said that writing is one of the four skills that has always formed part of the syllabus in teaching english. it means that no one can deny writing as the part of syllabus in english subject. in english education, learning to write is a must. through writing, students can write the words by arranging them into a correct order of a sentence. the words in a sentence should be meaningful and understandable by the readers. therefore, words in english writing cannot be written in any way without following the rules and the structure as the way it should be. related to the rules and the structure in writing, some students think that writing is more difficult than other skills because it has certain rules and takes long time to think the words in correct order and to make the readers understand it easily. there are particular structures of texts which usually written in a form of paragraph or essay. those texts are descriptive, narrative, recount, and report text. descriptive text describes about someone or something such as place, picture, or people. narrative text and recount text are kinds of text which tell fatmawati setia utami, mustaqim pabbajah, & juhansar the implementation of jumbled-sentences toward students’ skill in writing report text 116 about story in the past time, but narrative and recount have different generic structure in which narrative text has a conflict in the middle of story while recount text does not. besides, narrative text usually tells about the fictive story such as fable, fairy tale, legend, etc. meanwhile, recount text tells about true story which comes from the past event or the real experience of the writer. indeed, report text is a text that gives factual information to the reader. to write a text, students have to know first the definition and the elements of a paragraph. a paragraph is usually written in logical order from the introduction to the conclusion which consists of topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence. in writing a paragraph, the sentences should be arranged orderly and connected each other in explaining the topic of the paragraph. in writing an english paragraph, the students may get difficulties to develop the idea. according to richards (1990) in al-gharabally (2015, p. 44), learning to write well is a difficult and a lengthy process; one that induces anxiety and frustration in many learners. it means that students need to understand first the process of writing in appropriate way. to learn writing a paragraph, students should be able to organize the sentences in a right place. in organizing the sentences, the students have to know the process of writing to achieve the best result. based on the researchers’ experience when teaching and observing praktik pengalaman lapangan (ppl) at man 2 yogyakarta, it found that most students were unable to write and organize a good and a correct english paragraph because they have less willingness to focus and to enjoy the learning process. besides, most students tend to be passive and bored when they were learning writing. some studies have found some common problems in writing including content, organization, vocabulary, and grammar. sari (2013) described that the common problems would be; students cannot formulate the main ideas and provide the supporting sentences to write a good and a correct paragraph; students are lack of vocabulary so they could not express the ideas and the opinions. furthermore, students also found difficulties in grammatical aspect where they cannot write the text in a good and a correct sentence structure. accordingly, the researchers realized that there should be an appropriate technique to use in overcoming the students’ problems in writing an english paragraph. therefore, the researchers try to implement jumbledsentences technique to help students overcome their difficulties in writing english paragraph. besides, this technique can also be used to develop students’ understanding and participation in the learning-teaching process of report text writing. jumbledsentences is a technique of teaching writing in which the students are asked to rearrange a group of scramble sentences into a good and a correct order. jumbled-sentences which is known as jumbled texts is cooperatively sequencing piece of jumbled texts by at first skimming for a meaning to establish a quick order, then scanning for detail to confirm its accuracy (wright et al., 2006, p. 87). jumbled-sentences technique helps the students to think creatively and logically to determine the sentences appropriately to be the topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence. jumbled-sentences technique is important to be practiced because through practicing this technique, it can help the students to generate the ideas, to enrich the vocabulary, and to emphasize their writing skill (mardiana, 2017). the implementation of jumbledsentences does not only involve the students, but the teacher who has an important role in the learning-teaching process. to connect with the roles of teacher in the learningteaching process, barnawi (2016) wrote some teacher’s roles such as teacher as a facilitator, teacher as a learning conceptor, and teacher as an evaluator. as a facilitator, a teacher should be able to help students in developing and initiating their idea and creativity. furthermore, the students are also english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 117 asked to be independent in the learningteaching process. by analyzing the students’ need and condition, a teacher as a learning conceptor is required to design a good lesson plan to be implemented the learningteaching process and also a good classroom management (juhansar, et al., 2016). a learning conceptor also should decide the appropriate media to set a conducive classroom and to increase the students’ learning-teaching interest. indeed, when a teacher acts as an evaluator, he or she should measure the objective and the learningteaching achievement based on the information that he has. the information can be collected through an observation or an exercise given to the students. it can be guidance for a teacher to continue, to fix, to change, or to evaluate the method or technique which has been implemented. murray (2011, p. 157) said that there are two learning-teaching instruction strategies, namely gradual release practice and independent practice. gradual release practice is a strategy of teaching where a teacher guides the students practically and gradually till they could understand and practice the work by themselves or in pair. otherwise, independent practice means that a teacher gives an opportunity to students to practice and to explore their understanding based on the material that they have learnt without teacher’s guidance and assistance. all in all, to overcome students’ problems in writing report text and to enhance students’ writing skill, the researchers explore the following research questions to be answered: 1) what is the implementation of jumbledsentences toward the students’ skill in writing report text?; 2) what is effectiveness of jumbled-sentences technique toward students’ writing skill?; and 3) what factors are influencing students’ skill in writing report text?. method this research was conducted on 24 tenthgraders of ipa 3 in man 2 yogyakarta in academic year 2017/2018 for two weeks. this research was classroom action research using qualitative and quantitative data. this research design consisted of two cycles. each cycle had two meetings. it means, there were four meetings in two cycles. in collecting qualitative data, the researchers used structured observation and structured interview, while tests used to get the quantitative data. to get data concerning the implementation of jumbled-sentences technique, the researchers used structured observation, while the data concerning the factors influencing students’ writing skill were collected through structured interview which was supported by structured observation. moreover, tests were used to find out the effectiveness of jumbledsentences in improving students’ writing skills. the tests consisted of pre-test, posttest i, and post-test ii. to know the students’ initial writing skills, a pre-test conducted. in analyzing qualitative data, the researchers set paragraph scoring criteria which consisted of some aspects, namely topic sentence, supporting sentences, coherence, organization, and generic structures. when the paragraph scoring criteria has been set, the researchers decided the technique of analyzing the result of structured observation and structured interview data. to analyze the structured observation data, the researchers described it by mapping, reviewing, and exploring the data during the implementation of jumbledsentences. after analyzing the structured observation data, the researchers also analyzed the structured interview data by reporting and interpreting what the researchers got from the research. when the interview data reported and interpreted, the researchers described the result of the analysis based on the relevant theories. furthermore, to analyze the quantitative data, the researchers used statistic descriptive method by calculating the mean of writing aspects and the mean of improvement percentage. indeed, to decide the students’ mean, the researchers determined the criteria as follows: 5 (very good), 4 (good), 3 (fair), 2 (poor), and 1 (very poor). fatmawati setia utami, mustaqim pabbajah, & juhansar the implementation of jumbled-sentences toward students’ skill in writing report text 118 after deciding the technique of data analysis, the researchers measured students’ writing skill and pre-understanding about report text by giving pre-test. here, the students were asked to write the text which consisted of 2 paragraphs contained topic sentence, supporting sentences, coherence, organization, and generic structures. after giving pre-test, the researchers made lesson plans and prepared the report text material, jumbled-sentences texts, and students’ worksheets as the next task for post-test i and post-test ii to be conducted in cycle i and cycle ii. moreover, the researchers prepared the structured observation sheets and structured interview questions. after preparing those items, the researchers implemented jumbled-sentences as the treatment during the learning-teaching activity about report text in the first meeting of cycle i. the researchers did not only implement technique, but also observed the implementation and learning-teaching activity in the first meeting. in the second meeting of cycle i, the researchers gave post-test i to measure the students’ writing skill improvement after receiving the treatment. in giving post-test i, the students were asked to write a report text about technology around them in 40 minutes. after conducting cycle i, the researchers evaluated result of jumbled-sentences implementation including the result of observation and posttest i, whether it needs development or not. in addition, the researchers also determined the minimum mean as the consideration for conducting the creativity and innovation in cycle ii to achieve the better result. the creativity and innovation were necessary to do when the students got mean less than 3. the creativity and innovation were in the form of changing the setting of learning-teaching process and changing the teaching strategy as well as the way of jumbled-sentences technique implementation. after deciding the creativity and innovation, the researchers conducted cycle ii which had similar activity in cycle i. furthermore, the activity in cycle ii might be different based on creativity and innovation as the result of the reflection in cycle i. in cycle ii, the researchers re-explained the material and implemented jumbledsentences as the individual task in the third meeting to make the students understand more about the report text. the researchers also changed the teaching strategy from independent practice to gradual release practice. in the fourth meeting of cycle ii, the researchers gave post-test ii by asking the students to write a latest report text on technology in 40 minutes. when the learning-teaching process was done, the researchers interviewed some students. after conducting those cycles, the researchers analyzed the whole results to consider whether the cycle should be continued or stopped. results and discussion the implementation of jumbled-sentences technique in teaching report text as the results of the implementation, it was found that students were enthusiastic and active in the learning-teaching process. the script below shows that the student tried to be confident to ask the material that they have not understood yet. the script was taken from observation during the jumbledsentences implementation in cycle i. student a : pak, kalau misal di bagian general classification itu dideskripsikan dulu penemunya baru definisikan bisa gak? (sir, could i describe the inventor first then define the general classification? [free translation]) researcher(s) : ya bisa, atau lebih baik definisi dulu baru deskripsikan penemunya. (yes, it could be or it is better to define first then describe the inventor. [free translation]) observation; april 26 th , 2018 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 119 based on that script, even though there was a student who asked about the general classification of report text, there were some students who felt difficult to rearrange the jumbled-sentences because there were some vocabularies that they did not understand, such as since, bulb, filament, and crockery. in addition, when students wrote a report text, some of them were still confused to decide what they want to write and how to develop the idea as it is shown in the following script: student b : pak, aku mau nulis apa ya pak? kalau tentang teknologi, biasanya apa aja? (sir, what should i write? if i write about technology, what technology is it about? [free translation]) researcher(s) : kamu bisa menulis tentang teknologi yang ada di sekitarmu, seperti handphone, kipas angin, dan lain-lain. (you could write about technology around you, such as handphone, fan, etc. [free translation]) student c : pak, setelah menulis definisi dan ciri-ciri, terus apa lagi pak? (sir, what should i write after writing the definition and characteristic of the topic? [free translation]) researcher(s) : kamu bisa menuliskan tentang fungsi dan jenis-jenis dari teknologi yang kamu tulis. (you could write about functions and kinds of the technology. [free translation]) observation; april 28 th , 2018 based on the script, it could be said that the use of jumbled-sentences could make the students be active and enthusiastic in learning-teaching process and help them in writing report text. yet, there were some students who still found difficulties to decide what they want to write and how to develop the idea. therefore, the researchers needed to revise the planning creatively and innovatively to achieve the better result and to overcome students’ difficulties in the next cycle. based on the result in cycle i, there was unsatisfied result which made the researchers should revise some aspects related to the learning-teaching process such as students’ participation and understanding. therefore, the researchers revised the planning. in cycle ii, the researchers conducted the learning-teaching process based on the creativity and innovation. in the third meeting of cycle ii, the researchers asked the students to rearrange jumbledsentences individually using gradual release strategy. the changing of rearranging sentences individually aimed at making students understood more about the report text and the basic organization of paragraph such as topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence. it also made them be able to create a good organization and a coherence text. the changing of gradual release practice also meant to make the students be more active and confident to ask the material that they did not understand yet. mushola is also chosen as the setting of learning-teaching process to make the learning-teaching process be more conducive. in the fourth meeting, cycle ii, the researchers taught the students in the third floor of library to make them be more focus and concentrate to the learningteaching process especially when they were writing a report text about the latest technology as the post-test ii. after conducting cycle ii, the researchers found that the observation result in this cycle increased from the result of cycle i. the students were more active in the learningteaching process. they were also enjoyed and understood more about report text and the basic organization of a paragraph. those improvements were proved in this following script: fatmawati setia utami, mustaqim pabbajah, & juhansar the implementation of jumbled-sentences toward students’ skill in writing report text 120 student e : pak, gimana sih cara membedakan kalimat-kalimat yang masuk ke general classification sama bagian description? (sir, how to differentiate the sentences which are included in general classification and description? [free translation]) researcher(s) : kalau kalimat-kalimat di general classification biasanya menjelaskan topik secara umum, seperti definisi dan penemu suatu teknologi. sedangkan kalimat di bagian description merupakan kalimat-kalimat khusus yang menjelaskan bagian general classification. (the sentences in general classification usually explain the topic generally such as definition and the inventor of technology. in description, the sentences explain the general classification specifically. [free translation]) observation; may 3 th , 2018 student f : pak, topic sentence itu biasanya yang di awal paragraf kan? (sir, the topic sentence is usually put in the beginning of the paragraph, isn’t it? [free translation]) researcher(s) : ya, tapi kadang ada juga yang letaknya di akhir paragraf. (yes, it is. but, sometimes there is also topic sentence which is put in the end of paragraph. [free translation]) student g : pak, kalau bagian deskripsi di report teks itu biasanya jelasin tentang ciri-ciri dan fungsi apa bukan? (sir, does the description part of report text explain about the characteristics and the function of the text? [free translation]) researcher(s) : ya. (yes, it does. [free translation]) observation; may 5 th , 2018 after implementing the creativity and innovation toward the jumbled-sentences implementation in both cycle i and cycle ii, most of students were no longer confused to decide what they wanted to write, how to develop the sentences, and how to organize the sentences related to the generic structures of report text. in addition, the observation result showed that the students’ participation, understanding, and writing development on the report text using jumbled-sentences were better than previous one. the students became more aware about report text and its generic structures. moreover, students enjoyed practicing jumbled-sentences because they got intensive guidance from the researchers. it meant that the implementation of jumbledsentences as the teaching technique for writing report text could help the students in developing the idea and organizing sentences into a good and a correct paragraph. the choosing of place for learning-teaching also supported the students to be more focus to the learning-teaching process because it helped the researchers to create the classroom atmosphere to be more conducive. the cycle i and the creativity and the innovation in cycle ii drove the researchers to end the cycle because there were students’ better participation and students’ better understanding during the learning-teaching process. it meant that students were aware to be actively involved in the learning-teaching process. the effectiveness of jumbled-sentences technique toward students’ skill in writing report text the researchers was not only describing the result of observation but also providing the analysis result of students’ writing tests. based on the result of data analysis, it was found that there was students’ mean improvement on each aspect. from the result, the students got mean 3.00 (pre-test); english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 121 3.36 (post-test i); and 3.78 (post-test ii). it means that the use of jumbled-sentences could help the students to understand the report text better. in addition, it also proved that jumbled-sentences could improve the students’ writing skill on each aspect. to make it clear, the researchers showed the mean improvement in table 1. table 1. the improvement of students’ mean table 1 shows the mean improvement of students’ pre-test (3.00), post-test i (3.36), and post-test ii (3.78) on each aspect. in the column of pre-test, there are two aspects which belong to category poor (2), namely topic sentence and supporting sentences. the table also shows the mean in both topic sentence and supporting sentences are more than 2 and less than 3. it means that jumbled-sentences implementation is needed to practice for increasing the students’ mean in those aspects. when the jumbledsentences was practiced, the researchers gave post-test i to measure the students’ result and improvement in writing skill, whether it needs to do the creativity and innovation or not. based on the result in the column of post-test i, there is no aspects which belong to category poor (2). there is good improvement in all aspects in the result of post-test i. in the result of post-test i, all the mean on each aspect belongs to fair (3) category. it means that jumbled-sentences technique helps the students to improve their writing skill, not only in topic sentence and supporting sentences aspects but also in other aspects. although there is an improvement in all aspects, it does not mean that the result is satisfied and no need to do creativity and innovation. from the result of post-test i, there is similar mean in the aspects of topic sentence (3.25) and supporting sentences (3.25). it means that the researchers should do the creativity and innovation in cycle ii before conducting post-test ii. after practicing jumbledsentences and applying the creativity and innovation in cycle ii, the researchers gave post-test ii to measure the mean improvement of students’ writing skill and the effectiveness of jumbled-sentences technique. the result of post-test ii shows better improvement than post-test i. in the column of post-test ii, there is no mean which less than 3 even more than 4 in aspect of generic structures. besides, there is no similar mean in all aspects as the previous result in post-test i. furthermore, there is also mean improvement percentage among the aspects of writing about 12% (from pretest to post-test i) and 13% (from post-test i to post-test ii). in short, the use of jumbledsentences is effective to help the students in understanding the material, developing the idea, and improving their writing skill. factors influencing students’ skill in writing report text after analyzing the result of observation and tests, the researchers described the result of interview with the students to see the factors influencing their skill in writing report text. from the interview, there were at least four common problems faced by the students, they are: no aspects mean pre-test post-test i post-test ii 1 topic sentence 2.96 3.25 3.79 2 supporting sentences 2.75 3.25 3.71 3 coherence 3.17 3.33 3.46 4 organization 3.13 3.42 3.75 5 generic structures 3.00 3.54 4.17 overall mean 3.00 3.36 3.78 % improvement 12% 13% fatmawati setia utami, mustaqim pabbajah, & juhansar the implementation of jumbled-sentences toward students’ skill in writing report text 122 lack of vocabulary and information when the researchers interviewed students, they said that their obstacle in writing report text were lack of vocabulary and information. it was proved by the interview data below. researcher(s) : kendala apa yang kalian alami saat menulis report text? (what is your obstacle in writing report text? [free translation]) student 1 : kurang data atau informasi bu. (i have less data or information, mom. [free translation]) student 2 : kurang vocabulary bu. (i am lack of vocabulary, mom. [free translation]) student 3 : sama bu, kurang vocabulary. (i have the same problem with student 2, mom. i am also lack of vocabulary. [free translation]) interview; may 5 th , 2018 the researchers also found this factor during the observation when implementing jumbled-sentences as a technique in learning-teaching process. when implementing the technique, some students were confused to rearrange the sentences. they also did not bring pocket dictionary then asked the researchers. the following is the script. student h : bu, filament artinya apa? (mom, what is filament? [free translation]) researcher(s) : filament itu artinya kawat pijar. (filament in bahasa indonesia is kawat pijar. [free translation]) observation; may 26 th , 2018 based on those results, it means that lack of vocabulary and information influenced students’ skill in writing a report text because without having enough vocabulary and information, they could not develop their idea. being afraid of making grammatical errors besides vocabulary and information, students’ anxiety also could be the factor influencing students’ writing skill. when they were afraid, they were not able to focus and concentrate in writing their ideas. below is student statement about anxiety. researchers : kendala apa yang kalian alami saat menulis report text? (what is your obstacle in writing report text? [free translation]) student 4 : takut pola grammarnya salah bu. (i am afraid of making mistake in grammatical pattern, mom. [free translation]) interview; may 5 th , 2018 based on that statement, it means that students who were afraid to make mistake would think more and more to avoid making a mistake. finally, it would make them be longer to write and it of course influences the result of the task. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 123 understanding and translating words or sentences to write an english report text, the students are obligated to be able to understand and to translate words or sentences from bahasa indonesia to english. based on the result of interview, a student said that his/her obstacle in writing report text is difficult to understand and to translate the english words. it was proved by the script below. researchers : kendala apa yang kalian alami saat menulis report text? (what is your obstacle in writing report text? [free translation]) student 2 : susah memahami dan menerjemahkan kata dan kalimat, bu. (it is difficult to understand and to translate the words and sentences, mom. [free translation]) interview; may 5 th , 2018 based on several statements before, besides lack of vocabulary and information, and students’ anxiety in making grammatical errors, the students’ difficulties in understanding and translating english words also affected the students’ work in writing report text. in other words, students’ difficulties to understand and to translate words or sentences made them took several minutes to continue their report text writing. limited classroom for learning-teaching in this factor, the students moved from one classroom to another according to the subject that they learnt. from this situation, sometimes it influenced the students’ concentration in learning-teaching process. for example, in class of x ipa 3, the learning-teaching process was conducted in class of x ips 3, as a consequence, when the learning-teaching process was still running, there were some other students of x ips 3 came to that classroom before the lesson done. this situation automatically disturbed the focus and concentration of tenth-grade students ipa 3 to finish the work. as a result, some students were not able to finish the work by on their best. conclusion based on the results of study, the researchers conclude that the implementation of jumbled-sentences in learning-teaching process can help students to develop their report text writing skill performance on the tenth year students of man 2 yogyakarta, class x ipa 3, in academic year 2017/2018. besides, jumbled-sentences also can attract students’ enthusiasm in learning-teaching report text. in addition, the result of students’ test also shows the mean improvement percentage from pre-test to post-test i (12%) and post-test i to post-test ii (13%). it proves that the use of jumbledsentences is effective to help the students in understanding the material and improving the students’ writing skill performance to develop the idea to write report text about technology. furthermore, the researchers also find and sums up some factors influencing students’ skill in writing report text. those factors are lack of vocabulary and information, students’ anxiety in making mistakes at grammar, understanding and translating words or sentences, and limited classroom for learning-teaching process. references al-gharabally, m. 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(2015). using jumbled sentence games to improve the writing ability of the seventh grade students of mts muhammadiyah 6 bayat klaten. unpublished thesis. yogyakarta: university of muhammadiyah yogyakarta. wright, a., et al. (2006). games for language learning (3 rd ed.). new york: cambridge university press. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 93 conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy nani ronsani thamrin english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: nanironsani.thamrin@gmail.com silvia agustin english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: silvia.nitsuga@gmail.com apa citation: thamrin, n. r., & agustin, s. (2019). conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 93-100. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1777. received: 22-01-2019 accepted: 16-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: thinking capability is the most significant aspect in educational process. as every student has his own distinctive method of thinking, he will then possess his learning concepts. being a critical thinker means they have to be able to think more critical than any other people, by practicing their skills through comprehending the material and the content of the text. therefore, this paper discusses the phenomenon of conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skill (hots) strategy in universitas kuningan and describes how the hots strategy improves the students’ skills in comprehending the academic reading text. the data collected from a classroom observation and interview were analyzed qualitatively by using categories formulated based on theories related to hots strategy. as a result, it was found that various concepts on reading comprehension are seen from the c1-c6 phase of hots strategy and critical reading. this indicates that most students have higher order thinking skills in comprehending t he text in critical reading class. finally, the findings are expected to be references for english teachers in implementing various teaching strategy. keywords: critical reading; higher order thinking skills; reading comprehension. introduction the need of learning reading is increasing along with the needs of students to acquire information during their study. the mutual relationship between students’ academic reading skills and educational achievements involves the four basic skills. these include reading, writing, critical thinking, oral presentation, and media literacy, which involve receptive and productive skills of students (tinto in hermida, 2009). as receptive skill, reading becomes the most necessary skill to get information for students since the reading courses which are explained by teachers in classroom is not enough. there are benefits of teaching reading that provide good models for english writing (harmer, 2007). however, to teach this skill, teachers need to improve methods instead of lots (lower order thinking skill) to enhance students thinking skills. anderson and krathwohl (2001) categorized level of reading and cognitive development into six level and changed the terms from lots to hots which is started with remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. the implementation of hots in classroom would be beneficial for both students and teachers as well. this research proposed the description of students’ conceptual variations on reading comprehension through hots strategy as well as the improvements of the skills in comprehending the academic reading text using hots strategy. this research also deals with critical reading (cotrell, 2005), the steps of hots strategy (anderson & krathwohl, 2001), and the concepts related to hots. hots strategies usually required for those who want to develop their thinking skills. therefore, good readers need higher order thinking strategies to think of, and direct their perception before, during and after reading the passages. beneath all, students need to acquire the hots strategy to improve their abilities in thinking process instead of thinking simply of the passage they read. upon even strategies of hots, here is a detail information on how the strategies of hots is applied according to seif (2012). first, giving high questions during reading activity. giving questions is defined by nani ronsani thamrin & silvia agustin conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy 94 hendricks et al. in seif (2012) as a strategy in order to help students to improve their reading skills to deeper thinking and learning for grasping the content of the text. thus, teachers should give higher-order questions related to the text during reading activities in the classroom. the questions are prepared by the teachers and given to the students during the reading activity by stopping at intervals and proposing the questions directly to the students. this activity is in line with the theory of directed reading proposed by haggard in seif (2012) that questioning can be facilitated with the directed reading-thinking activities approach (drta). this strategy is believed as a way on how to improve students’ thinking skills in reading activity. as supported by raphael in seif (2012) that “a question-answer relationship (qar) technique has been linked to improve students’ reading comprehension after reading.” second, making inference related to reading between lines strongly. students could be trained to utilize the illustrations, graphs, and headline from the text to create inferences. generating conclusion is closely to the description of making inference. according to doff in seif (2012), we can engage our experience to the reading passage based on our experience, otherwise we can imagine ourselves being on the stories that serve much experience, so that we can feel and grasp the meaning that author’s mean from the text. third, teachers take very important role in every single program of education. seif (2012) stated that teachers expose the student to be more aware of the material they learn from the very first place, should not talk too much, improve certain strategies to cultivate thinking behavior, use media, ask question regularly, and break the classroom into the small groups to work on the more specific task. therefore, this is perhaps an effective way to train students to think without noticing it. cotton in seif (2012) suggests that teachers need to utilize various instructional approaches to develop thinking skills and to enhance students’ knowledge and thinking skills by using generating questions, redirection and reinforcement in order to achieve the goal. besides, the questions proposed by the teachers must be higher-order questions and of course teachers need to be patient to wait to the students’ responses. furthermore, anderson and krathwohl (2001) developed the bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives by categorizing it into six phase, starting from c1 to c6 – remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. the name of these six major categories were changed from noun to verb forms. as the taxonomy reflects different forms of thinking of every individual regarding the problems they have. besides, thinking is an active process so that verbs are used rather than nouns. this is one of the reason why anderson made an adjustment to bloom’s taxonomy terms. figure 1 describes the change of the bloom’s taxonomy into anderson’s. bloom’s taxonomy anderson’ taxonomy figure 1. the comparison of bloom’s taxonomy and anderson’s taxonomy english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 95 the c1 phase, remembering, includes recalling information, recognizing, listing, describing, retrieving, naming and finding which all belong to the input process (receptive skills). the students commit this phase in the first time they get information by listening or reading. after they have been exceeded the c1 phase, they go through the next phase, c2, understanding. this phase presents the process of explaining ideas or concepts, interpreting, summarizing, paraphrasing, classifying and explaining the content of the information. c3, applying, represents the using of information in another familiar situation. it includes implementing, carrying out, using, and executing the information got in any other particular situation and conditions in appropriate ways. c4, analyzing, is going to break the information into parts to explore their understandings and the relationships of the information they received. this phase includes comparing, organizing, deconstructing, interrogating, and finding. c5, evaluating, reviews the justification of decision or course of an action. it includes checking, hypothesizing, critiquing, experimenting, and judging every information they received from any sources. finally, c6, creating, is the process of generating new ideas, products, or ways of view things. it includes designing, constructing, planning, producing, and inventing. the phase of c1 to c3 belong to lower order thinking skills, meanwhile the rest, c4 to c6 is higher order thinking skills. in short, the main purpose of hots is that the students are able to collect the information, categorize it, and generating new ideas to be implemented in any other situations they have, beyond the classroom or any other occasions. method this study intends to find out students’ conceptual variation and to describe the improvements of students’ skills in reading comprehension through hots strategy in critical reading. it is largely qualitative descriptive meaning that this study is fully describing the phenomenon that happened in the classroom. this study was conducted in a critical reading class in universitas kuningan. two class of fourth semester students were involved in this study. 28 students in class a consists of 8 male students and 20 female students; they are in range of 18-25 years old. meanwhile, 27 students in class b consists of 9 male students and 18 female students; they are also in range of 18-25 years old. the students were selected since they have taken reading subject in the previous semester. thus, the students have known the basic knowledge about being a good reader and the function of reading activity along their study as well. the data collected by applying a classroom observation and interview were then analyzed qualitatively by using categories formulated based on theories related to hots strategy. there are 8-10 meetings observed and 37 students were interviewed by using burke’s reading interviews’ guidelines (2005), ifanc and wales (2010), and burns, maki, and karrich (2013). the interview guidelines depict the information on how students’ behavior in reading the passages and how they comprehend the content as well as how they implement higher order thinking skills on reading comprehension in critical reading class. in assessing student’s capability in higher order thinking, the researcher uses the indicator of assessment adapted from lewy and aisyah (2011) as presented in table 1. table 1. categories for assessing higher order thinking skills student’s mark level of students’ higher order thinking 100 76 excellent 75 51 good 50 26 enough 25-1 poor (adapted from lewy & aisyah, 2011) the level of students’ higher order thinking is categorized by the result of the test conducted during the mid-term and final exam. the researcher has got the permission from the lecturer to take the result of the test to be the standards of determining students’ hots. in analyzing the data, the researcher uses steps of analyzing qualitative data proposed by yin nani ronsani thamrin & silvia agustin conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy 96 (2011) which include; compiling: the researcher sorts the collected data from observation, interview and filed-notes; disassembling: the researcher breaks the data into more specific or smaller pieces. in this case, the research tries to classify the data into several aspects of hots level and critical reading skills; reassembling: the researcher depicts the data and serves it into graphic or tabular forms; interpreting: the researcher describes the collected data and analyzed it by using her own interpretation and assumption supported by theories; and concluding: the research concludes the result of the research which is proven by the data and theories. results and discussion from the observation, it is found that the lecturer has already implemented the hots strategy in critical reading class and made the students have the conceptual variation on reading comprehension. there are two types of major cases of the students along the learning activities in the classroom, they are the steps related to the critical reading and the concepts related to the hots. these two major cases involve the hots implementation in order to create good atmosphere and to achieve the learning goal effectively. students’ conceptual variation of reading comprehension based on the observation and interview, it is found that students were able to apply the hots strategy in their critical reading activities in the classroom. students’ conceptual variation can be seen in the following. the critical reading applying critical thinking in reading activity is a very important aspect to develop the students’ capability in catching the sense of the text. critical reading is not the same as the other kinds of reading, like skimming or scanning the text, but rather using the higher thinking skills. this is the useful strategy to the information placement and enhance a general feel of the subject. anyhow, it is usually found in narrower reading material. critical reading, as cotrell (2005) stated, “requires the students to focus their attention much more closely on certain parts of a written text, holding other information in mind”. thus, it is obvious that the students need to pay more attention and focus on what their reading order to get the meaning of the context of the reading passage by holding the information. it not only relies on the students’ reading capability, but also involves the analysis, reflection, evaluation and making judgements (cotrell 2005). it means that the students are expected to be able to analyze the text, reflect it to their life, evaluate and make judgement based on their opinion and life experiences which need higher order thinking skills. the implementation of hots strategy can be proved since the lecturer conducted some prominent characteristics of critical reading in her teaching activities. those were in the first activity on march 13th, 2018 at 01.00-02.30 p.m. to the last meeting on may 15th, 2018. first, the student can predict what the text was about and also gave their logical reason although the prediction was not the same as the content of the text and reconnect it with their prior knowledge and previous experiences which help them in making prediction. it is in line with rauch et al. (1968) in seif (2012) who stated that prerequisite knowledge or prior knowledge would be helpful for someone to get started to read the text; conversely he would get some trouble along the reading activity, such as being confused and strange. the difference of prediction and the content of the text was also shown in following interview script. interviewer : now, we’re beginning to the predicting, summarizing, etc. for prediction, do you ever try to predict of what will the text talk about before you read the text? student 3 : i am more likely to the story, for example emmmm the disney story was all about the happy ending right? if the disney, the middle of the story was like this, for example, so the ending must be happy ending. so, the prediction about the film was not really far from that, that will be happy ending. but, not all of them like that nowadays.” however, the different prediction and the content of the text was shown in different class in which the meeting was conducted on tuesday, march 20th, 2018 at 01.00-02.30 p.m. the text was about the chitchen itza, a historical place in mexico which was taken from the internet. the student predicted that the place was in asean country, but it is located in mexico. they also found some difficult words and it became a barrier to them in grasp the content of the text, such as the word of “settlement”, “tribes” & “sculpture”. they need more time to understand the content of the text as well as to identify the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 97 text because they need to find the meaning of those difficult vocabularies. second, the students used their skills in constructing meaning from instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communication (c2-phase 2) and applying a procedure to a familiar task (c3-phase 3) by summarizing the text and retell it to their friends in the classroom in two or three sentences. the article about developing tourism spot in jogjakarta was taken from jakarta post entitled “four destinations in yogyakarta to be revamped”, posted on sunday, march 25th 2018 at 08:01 a.m. here, the students presented to their friends that “indonesian have to develop and increase the number of the tourists to visit the other spot in jogjakarta, beside borobudur temple as the popular icon, so that indonesia can promote its natural tourism sites that spread in all of the region.” most of the students could summarize the content of the text and retell their summary to their friends in two or three sentences. this is shown in the following interview script. interviewer : could you re-explain to your friends about what have you read? student 1 : it depends on the text, if it is easy to understand so i can do it. interviewer : for example? student 1 : ya, for example the news that i have knew before. so, because i understood, i can directly retell the news to my friends. but, if the news was unfamiliar, i don’t dare to do so. interviewer : if you are asked to re-explain the text in one or two sentences, could you do that? student 1 : insyaallah i can. the illustration is in line with the purpose of the critical reading through hots strategy that is to improve students’ skills to conclude the text using their own words and perceptions. according to anderson and krathwohl (2001), after exceeding the c1 phase, students go through the next phase, c2, understanding. this phase presents the process of explaining ideas or concepts, interpreting, summarizing, paraphrasing, classifying and explaining the content of the information. third, the students tend to generate questions by asking themselves about 5w1h related to the text they have. in generating question, the students are asking themselves why something is happened during their reading activity. they explore the reason why anything happened or how the events are happened in the story by putting their prediction and anything they knew beyond the text, such as experiences and ideas to the text. “yes, of course. for example, what was the text talking about. the 5w1h question must be used, because the question was all about the 5w1h. what is the content of the text, we should be able to explain it, we have to know where the case is happened.” (student 8) the illustration represents the theory of anderson and krathwohl (2001) who stated that in c3, applying, represents the using of information in another familiar situation. it includes implementing, carrying out, using, and executing the information got in any other particular situation and conditions in appropriate ways. besides, c4, analyzing, is going to break the information into parts to explore their understandings and the relationships of the information they received. this phase includes comparing, organizing, deconstructing, interrogating, and finding. on the other hand, generating question by asking themselves is happening as the result of the curiosity as depicted in the following script. interviewer : now we’re going to the generating question. when you are reading, do you ever ask yourself, who is planning this kind of action, for example, or why this is happened? student 11 : sometimes, yes. if i saw an accident for example, so i am asking myself who is that? why this is happened? just like want to know, just feel curious. fourth, the students use quotation and evidence based on the paragraph of the text to answer their generating questions. for example, in class meeting on tuesday, may 8th, 2018 at 02.08-03.30 p.m., the students clarify their answer by giving proof based on the text where the statement were supported by the evidence in the text and quotations. this is in line with the 5th phase proposed by anderson and krathwohl (2001) who stated that c5, evaluating, reviews the justification of decision or course of an action. it includes checking, hypothesizing, critiquing, experimenting, and judging every information they received from any sources. it means that the students are evaluating their ideas and thoughts by finding supporting information. nani ronsani thamrin & silvia agustin conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy 98 students’ ways of thinking the first concept related to hots is procedural knowledge which means how to do something, manners of investigations and the standard for utilizing abilities, algorithms, techniques, and methods (pickard in seif, 2012). it emerges as a type of knowledge and a prerequisite for higher order thinking since it includes manners of investigations and utilization of the abilities based on the standards. in addition, the capability to presents a numbers of rules and provisions is called as “information learning”; meanwhile the capability to implementing a numbers of rules and provisions in a single collection is called as “application”. hots is usually perceived as the procedural knowledge. for instance, on tuesday, march 13th, 2018 at 09.30-11.00 a.m., the students were asked by the lecturer to analyze the organizational structure of the text which includes definition, classification, examples, comparison, summarization, time order, elaboration, contrast and illustration. they were capable to analyze the text following the procedure given by the lecturer. besides, they present the result of their analysis to their friends. interviewer : first question, if you read something, did you get any useful information for your own? student 8 : of course. there must be a useful information in the text. for example, in the magazine and in kuningan news. there is a lot of information about the weather in the area of kuningan. from the script, we can conclude that the procedural knowledge is not only used for presenting the result of our perception to the other people, but also to inform others about alternative solution or any other information that might be useful. every information from the text are useful, otherwise they did not apply it to their daily life. as quoted from the interview, the information in the text might be useful for everyone, but not all can be applied. it depends on the condition and situation which require the information to be applied. the second concept is comprehension which is a part of bloom’s taxonomy. it is deemed to be one of the lower order thinking skills and integrated to the hots foster. although it is such an important component, it does not belong to higher order thinking skills. the new “schemata” and information is created from the individual’s comprehensions using particular activities (crowl in seif, 2012), including, but not limited to, arousing and answering questions that prosecute higher order thinking about effete and recent ideas, encountering contradictory ideas and information, problems, or dilemmas, exploring and making discoveries, conducting systematic inquiries, summarizing, reciting, and discussing new ideas and their relationships, relating new understandings to other concepts, applying new ideas and information in basic problem-solving activities, or reflecting and verbalizing about cognitive processes involved in comprehension. instead of perceiving the meaning of a difficult word in a text, they tend to ignore the difficult words or vocabulary as presented in the following script. interviewer : for example, when you are reading then suddenly you found difficult vocabulary, but actually you know that it belongs to which class-word. is that helping you to understand the content of the text? student 15 : to be honest, if i found difficult word, i just ignore it. i don’t care. but yeah, we can use our logic. the last concepts related to the hots is creativity and intelligence. students’ creativity and intelligence can be seen on how they could give alternative solution for every single problem or case they found on the text. the solution was not only seen in a single point of view, but also in various point of views. naturally, the creativities do not belong to higher order thinking resolutely. it has a strong relationship with the process. the concepts and principles need to be solved by arousing new ideas and a good problem solving. it took an important role in higher order thinking process as pasteur observes that “chance favors only the prepared mind” because “only a trained mind can make connection between unrelated events, recognize meaning in a serendipitous event, and produce a solution that is both novel and suitable” (crowl cited in seif, 2012). meanwhile, the meaning of intelligent is not merely about the capability to mean something. it concerns to seven kinds of intelligences or the natural capability of human. it includes linguistic-verbal, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities. every student has several intelligences which differs them from one to another. exercises, learning and experiences are the things that may help individual to foster their abilities substantively. in this point of view, gardner in seif (2012) declares that every english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 individual is “capable to fostering their intelligence and some particular intelligence might be more developed than any other intelligence”. likewise, every individual can arouse their intelligence by education, particularly the moment when they start to train their intelligence at the early ages. for example, in the class meeting on monday, april 16th, 2018 at 11.00-12.30 a.m., there were students who bring an article entitled “10 die, dozens hospitalized after drinking bootleg liquor” posted on tuesday, april 3rd 2018 at 07.02 p.m. at jakarta post. the lecturer asked them for the solution in three point of views, including from the government’s point of view, the seller’s point of view and the last from the parents’ point of view. automatically, the students answered that question by saying: “the things that should be done by the government is that conducting the preventive action and regulation on how people can consume the alcoholic drinks. for the seller, it would be better if they do some more positive business rather than selling the alcoholic drinks. for the parents, they should pay more attention in watching their children in case they do negative things, so this kind of case would be never happened again in the future.” (researcher’s note) students’ improvements in comprehending academic reading text through hots strategy from the analysis towards the interview and observation data, the researcher found some tendencies of the students which show the improvements from lots to hots in critical reading comprehension. first, the students could actively retrieve knowledge from their long-term memory (c1phase 1) by predicting the text talks about, by analyzing the picture, headline and supporting ideas, as well as by involving their prior knowledge and their previous experience. in this case, anderson (2001) stated that the c1 phase, remembering, includes recalling information, recognizing, listing, describing, retrieving, naming and finding which all belong to the input process (receptive skills). the students commit this phase in the first time they get information by listening or reading. second, the students used their skills in constructing meaning from instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communication (c2-phase 2) and applying a procedure to a familiar task (c3-phase 3) by summarizing the text and retell it to their friends in the classroom in two or three sentences. third, the students were able to break the reading material into its constituent parts and determine how the parts relate to one another and to overall structure or purpose (c4-phase 4) by analyzing and grasping the content of the text. here, the students tend to generate questions by asking themselves about 5w1h related to the text they have. lastly, the students were able to detect inconsistencies or fallacies within a process or product; determine whether a process or product has internal consistency; detect the effectiveness of a procedure as it is being implemented (c5phase 5); put elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; and reorganize elements into a new pattern or structure (c6phase 6) by creating alternative solution for every single problem they found on the text they read. conclusion based on the analysis, the researcher can draw conclusions as follows. there were two major types of conceptual variation in reading comprehension through hots strategy in critical reading class which involved the steps of hots strategy (remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating) and critical reading (predicting, summarizing, generating question and clarifying). the students tend to begin to involve their prior knowledge, experience, and logical reason after they had known about the steps of critical reading and hots strategy delivered by the lecturer during the classroom activities. in this case, the students were classified as the lots and hots students based on the consideration of how much the students involved their critical thinking in responding to the text that given by the lecturer. references anderson, l., & krathwohl, d. (2001). a taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: a revision of bloom’s taxonomy. new york: longman publishing. burns, m. k., maki, k. e., & karrich, a.c. (2013). using performance feedback to increase reading comprehension strategy use. minnesota: university of minnesota. cotrell, s. (2005). critical thinking skill: developing effective analysis and argument. new york: palgrave macmillan. harmer, j. (2007). how to teach english. england: pearson education. hermida, j. (2009). the importance of teaching academic reading skills in first year university nani ronsani thamrin & silvia agustin conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy 100 courses. the international journal research and review, 3, 21-31. ifanc, c., & wales, y. (2010). guidance on the teaching of higher-order reading skills: inset opportunities for teachers of all subjects across the curriculum at key stages 2 and 3. uk: crown. lewy, z., & aisyah, n. (2011). pengembangan soal untuk mengukur kemampuan berpikir tingkat tinggi pokok bahasan barisan dan deret bilangan di kelas ix akselerasi smp xaverius maria palembang. jurnal pendidikan matematika, 3(2), 14-28. seif, a. (2012). evaluating higher order thinking skills in reading exercises of english for palestine grade 8. disertation. gaza, the islamic universities. yin, r. k. (2011). qualitative research from start to finish. new york: guildford press. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 147 teachers’ attitudes and problems of using ict in teaching efl arif aminullah department of english education, sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia e-mail: arifaminullah1994@gmail.com bambang apriady loeneto department of english education, sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia e-mail: loenetobambang@gmail.com machdalena vianty department of english education, sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia e-mail: vianty.unsri@gmail.com apa citation: aminullah, a., loeneto, b. a., & vianty, m. (2019). teachers’ attitudes and problems of using ict in teaching efl. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 147-156. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2324. received: 10-10-2019 accepted: 13-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: the implementation of ict is very important in education. by using ict, the process of teaching and learning is more effective and efficient. the objectives of this research were (1) to find out the attitudes of english teachers of public senior high schools in palembang towards the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english, and (2) to find out the problems that commonly faced by english teachers towards the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english. this research was conducted at 16 public senior high schools in palembang. there were 19 respondents who were selected by using ‘purposive sampling’ technique. the data were collected by using questionnaire, interview, observation and documentation. the obtained data were analyzed in descriptive statistics. the statement checklist which used likert scale was presented in the form of percentage while the results of answering descriptive questions was reported descriptively. the results showed that the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english were positive. however, some of them still faced many problems such as lack of ict equipments, lack of competency, and also unsupported regulation from institution. therefore, the facilities and infrastructures in each school and also the teachers’ ability and knowledge about the use of ict need to be increased. keywords: information and communication technology; attitudes; problems. introduction teachers’ life in the 21st century was marked by easy access to an abundance of information and technology. to be able to survive in the life in the 21st century, people who involved in the educational sectors must be able to acquire a range of skills that were functional to utilize information, media, and technology. teachers must be able to evaluate information critically and must be able to use the information to solve problems at hand. “although english has been taught as a foreign language in indonesia since the 1950s and was formally mandated as the first foreign language in 1967, efl teaching in indonesia has never achieved satisfactory outcomes” (eryansyah, 2017, p. 77). “in the 21st century, technology should be part of the solutions to be introduced. the idea of using technology to improve efl teaching and learning was not considered a novelty for it was already established in academia as well as in the literature that proves its efficacy and positive impacts” (cf. barr, 2004; chapelle, 2003; chapelle & douglas, 2006; dudeney & hockly, 2007; lewis, 2009). information and communication technology (henceforth, ict) has become more and more popular used in education field, including in english classroom. previous studies found that the use of ict were effective in learning english. for example, sharndama (2013) argues that icts are indispensable tools that facilitate the teaching and learning of english in large classes. in addition, al-munawwarah found that teachers’ perceptions towards the utilization of ict in english teaching were positive. thus, she recommended to use ict in english teaching and learning process. mailto:vianty.unsri@gmail.com arif aminullah, bambang apriady loeneto, & machdalena vianty teachers’ attitudes and problems of using ict in teaching efl 148 in indonesia, ict for education was first introduced at the end of 1990 (adimphrana, 2005). likewise, english as a subject taught in schools in indonesia could be presented in the classroom by using multimedia. it will support the development of students’ competence in english. ict becomes more integrated into most aspects of school affairs. administration works, teaching program and evaluation, and even classroom learning were programmed and done using ict appliances. adopting the current movement and educational trend, the regulation of minister of national education number 103 in ministry of education and culture (2014) mentions that teachers should utilize ict in order to achieve the standard quality of the curriculum. it indicates that teachers need to be able to use ict in designing their english teaching, finding materials needed to be applied in their teaching, finding and applying ict-based assessments which give positive backwash to students as well as to themselves. efl teachers may use an innovative way in teaching and learning process. the teachers can integrate or apply technology in elt classroom. “technology has been applied for centuries in language teaching areas” (dudeney & hockly, 2007). indonesia government also emphasizes the integration of ict in teaching and learning process (indonesia ministry of education and culture, 2013). as stated in 2013 curriculum, the teachers are demanded to apply technology for all of subjects to support teaching and learning process. “the influence of technology innovation forces educators to be more creative to utilize the technology as instructional media” (vianty & palmi, 2014). jager and lokman (1999) state that a teacher must have some competencies such as a great pedagogical, didactical and educationally psychological craftsmanship, s/he must be a professional on the subject matter, s/he must have knowledge and skills of modern educational tools. a teacher must have a skill in guiding students such as formulating assessment and structuring the instructional design. the teacher’s knowledge and skills of modern educational tools mean that the teacher must know well about the use of multimedia or ict in the field of education. the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning at school helps teachers and students to do their jobs easier (reeves, 1998). moreover, inderawati (2011) argues that ict can be valuable and comfortable media for the learners to express their opinion through reading and writing. the use of media and technology is expected to encourage learners to establish their literacy. in other words, the main advantage of using ict in school is making the process of teaching and learning run more effectively and efficiently. unesco (2005) highlights that ict can play a major role in ensuring quality in view of improving access and promotes equity in education, quality of teaching and learning, management and efficiency of education. the implementation of ict in the classroom still faces some problems as explained by dudeney and hockly (2007). they identified some problems of using ict at schools such as lack of ict tools, lack of knowledge and also negative attitude towards technology was usually the result of a lack of confidence, lack of facilities or a lack of training, resulting in an inability to see the benefit of using technologies in the classroom. it was also often the case that teachers may not fully control their work situations. a teacher may want to use more technology in their teaching process, but the school may not have the facilities. on the other hand, a teacher may be instructed to start using technology for which she/he feels unprepared or untrained. in relation to teachers’ skill and knowledge in ict, unesco (2005) divides four levels of ict usage in education. they are emerging, applying, integrating, and transforming. the use of ict in indonesia is still low, it is relevant to the statement by unesco (2009) that categorized the use of ict in this country in the level of learning to use ict, not in the level of using ict. ict can give a major boost of every field of life, including the teaching of language. the implementation of ict in the process of teaching and learning takes significant roles in enhancing and developing students’ comprehension towards subjects being taught at the school. inderawati (2011) argues that the use of technology in the classroom importantly increases and will become a part of english language teaching (elt) practice in the coming years. this fact was supported by diknas sumsel that noted the increasing of the use of technology at school year by year. unfortunately, because of some problems in the use of ict or multimedia at school, especially at public senior high schools level in palembang, seems not to run maximally and faces many problems. that is why, to find out the implementation of ict in schools, the english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 149 attitudes of english teachers towards ict and problems faced by them in using ict in the process of teaching and learning language in the classroom are considerably pivotal. method this study applied survey research design to present the data that was found during the research. creswell (2005, p. 376) defines survey research designs as procedures in a research in which investigators administer a survey to a sample or population by using questionnaires or interviews to described the attitudes, opinions, behaviors, or characteristics of the population. survey can be conducted either privately or in groups. this research was aimed to find out the attitudes and problems which were faced by teachers in applying ict in english classroom. this study was conducted to english teachers in public senior high schools in palembang. there are 24 public senior high schools in palembang. the samples were the english teachers. the sample was chosen using purposive sampling technique, since the writer determined the sample by determining specific characteristics that were appropriate to the purpose of the study so that it was expected could answer the research problem. fraenkel et al (2012, p. 100) defines purposive sampling as a non-random sampling technique where the researchers rather use their judgement to select a sample that they believe, based on prior information, will provide the data they need. in choosing the participants, the writer determined 3 criteria. first, the writer chose those who have mastered in education. second, the writer chose those who have already certified. third, the writer chose those who have work experience >10 years. sitinjak (2014) argues that standards of foreign language teachers should be fulfilled by the certified teachers. table 1. site and participants no. school names the total number of english teachers the total number of english teachers who met the criteria 1. sman 1 palembang 5 1 2. sman 2 palembang 5 1 3. sman 3 palembang 5 1 4. sman 4 palembang 6 1 5. sman 5 palembang 6 1 6. sman 6 palembang 3 7. sman 7 palembang 3 1 8. sman 8 palembang 5 1 9. sman 9 palembang 4 10. sman 10 palembang 9 1 11. sman 11 palembang 4 1 12. sman 12 palembang 4 13. sman 13 palembang 6 1 14. sman 14 palembang 5 15. sman 15 palembang 4 1 16. sman 16 palembang 4 17. sman 17 palembang 6 2 18. sman 18 palembang 6 1 19. sman 19 palembang 7 3 20. sman 20 palembang 5 21. sman 21 palembang 4 1 22. sman 22 palembang 4 1 23. sman sumsel 4 24. sman olahraga sriwijaya 3 total 117 19 in collecting the data, the writer used questionnaire, interview, observation and documentation. the questionnaire were distributed to the participants in order to get the informations about their attitudes and problems towards the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english in the classroom. this study used two questionnaires. first questionnaire consisted of four categories, focusing on teacher’s attitudes and knowledge about the ict equipments and their applications in teaching and learning english at schools. first category asked about the attitudes arif aminullah, bambang apriady loeneto, & machdalena vianty teachers’ attitudes and problems of using ict in teaching efl 150 on the use of ict in the aspects of planning. the second category asked about the attitudes on the use of ict in the aspects of teaching process. the third category asked about the attitudes on the use of ict in evaluation aspects, and the last category asked about the attitudes on the use of ict in evaluating and reflecting aspects. second questionnaire identified teachers’ problems on using ict at schools, it consisted of 2 categories. the first category asked about the problems deal with school policy, and the second category asked about teachers’ internal problems in using ict tools. these two questionnaires were adapted from integrating literacy and technology by susan watts taffe and carolyn b. gwinn. copyright 2007 by the guilford press. and british educational communication and technology agency (becta). 2005. using ict to support students who have english as additional language: guide for ema coordinators and teachers and students information technology use and skills in higher education: 2005 survey questionnaire, was developed by educase center for advanced research (ecar). likert scale method was used in this research. this method prevents a number of positive and negative statements regarding to the use of ict. in responding to the items on these scales the subjects indicate whether they strongly agree, agree, slightly disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree with each statement. another method used by researcher to collect the data was by interviewing selected individuals. interview is an important way for a researcher to check the accuracy of-to verify or refute-the impressions he or she has gained through observation (fraenkel et al., 2012). the purpose of interviewing people is to find out what is on their minds, what they think or how they feel about something. furthermore, punch and oancea (2014, p.182) define interview as the most well-known data collection tool in qualitative research and it is a very effective method to explore people perceptions, meanings definitions of situations and construction of reality as well as to understand others. this interview was formed as semi-structured interviews. semi-structured interviews mean the researcher has some list questions, to elicit a specific answer or if the answer is not satisfying, the researcher can dig it more to get the deeper information through improvised questions that depend on the answer given by the interviewee (fraenkel et al., 2012). the researcher also used one-on-one interview. it means that the researcher asked questions and recorded the answers from only one interviewee in the study at the time (creswell, 2012). in this research, some questions were asked to the respondents while conducting the interview related to the ict usage. the interview only administered if the researcher need further informations or to confirm unclear informations gained from the questionnaires and the observation, or if the researcher needed additional informations related to the implementation of ict in one school. in this research, observation was also used by researcher to collect the data. observation is an activity done by researchers to participate in the situation or settings they are observing about how people act or how things look (fraenkel et al., 2012). furthermore, creswell (2012) explains that observation is the process of collecting openended, original information by observing participants and place at a site of research. an observation was administered as a supportive data. in this research, the observation was conducted to all respondents (19 english teachers). it was aimed at getting real informations about the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning done by english teachers in the classroom. the observation used check list adapted from integrating literacy and technology by susan watts taffe and carolyn b. gwinn. copyright 2007 by the guilford press. and british educational communication and technology agency (becta). 2005. using ict to support students who have english as additional language: guide for ema coordinators and teachers and students’ information technology use and skills in higher education: 2005 survey questionnaire was developed by educase center for advanced research (ecar). there were three aspects of observation with 100 checklists. the researcher scored the observation checklist not by the items but by the thick given, one point for each thick. the possible lowest score was 0 and the highest one was 100. as stated before that this checklist was divided into three aspects: teachers’ knowledge and the availability of ict tools, teachers’ knowledge and the availability of the supported software, and teachers’ capability in integrating ict tools in teaching and learning process. those aspects belong to teachers’ understanding about ict, in terms of this understanding the scores were 0-100. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 151 table 2. the score categories for observation checklist no. score range categories score categories 1. 81-100 excellent 4 2. 61-80 good 3 3. 41-60 average 2 4. 0-40 poor 1 the last method used by researcher in collecting the data was documentation. it was used to get the additional data about site and participants, the ict equipments that schools have and also to find the number of english teachers and other data from public senior high schools in palembang. some photos about ict equipments at those schools were taken by the writer. in this study, data analysis means the process of systematically arranging all the data that accumulated after the process of collecting the data. data analysis was done to build an understanding of the data and to enable the researcher to report the results of the study to the readers. the data from questionnaires were analyzed in descriptive statistics. the distribution of all items on the questionnaire was categorized by the researcher. the statement checklist which used likert scale was presented in the form of percentage while the results of answering descriptive questions was reported descriptively. finally, it would be interpreted generally and specifically to answer the research questions. results and discussion results of questionnaires teachers’ attitudes this questionnaire consisted of 4 categories deal with teacher’s attitudes and knowledge about the ict equipments and their applications in the process of teaching and learning. each category consisted of 4 to 7 questions. first category focused on the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in planning the lesson. the second category discussed the attitudes of the teachers on the use of ict in teaching and learning process in the classroom. the third category focused on the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in evaluation aspects. the last category of this questionnaire asked about the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict on evaluating and reflecting aspects. all of the statements in this questionnaire were positive. this questionnaire was given to 19 english teachers of 16 public senior high schools in palembang. teachers’ attitudes in the aspect of planning there were six statements focusing on teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict in terms of planning. the result showed that the dominant answered were point 4 and 5. this fact showed that almost all respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire in this aspects. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of planning were positive. teachers’ attitudes in the aspect of teaching process there were seven statements focusing on teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict in the aspect of teaching process. the result showed that the dominant answered were point 4 and 5. this fact showed that most of respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire in this aspects. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of teaching process were positive. teachers’ attitudes in the aspect of evaluation there were six statements asked to gain information about teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict in terms of evaluation. the result showed that the dominant answered were point 4 and 5. this fact showed that almost all respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire in this aspects. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of evaluation were positive. teachers’ attitudes in the aspect of reflection there were four statements asked to gain information about teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict in terms of evaluation and reflection. the result showed that the dominant answered were point 4 and 5. this fact showed that almost all respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire in this aspects. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of evaluation and reflection were positive. teachers’ problems this was the second questionnaire for teachers. there were two categories deal with teachers’ problems and knowledge about the ict equipments and their applications in teaching and learning english at school. each category consisted of 10 statements. first category focused arif aminullah, bambang apriady loeneto, & machdalena vianty teachers’ attitudes and problems of using ict in teaching efl 152 on the problems of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of school policies. the second category discussed about the internal problems that the teachers face on using ict in the teaching and learning process in the classroom. all of the statements in this questionnaire were negative. similar to the previous questionnaire, it was given to 19 english teachers of 16 public senior high schools in palembang. teachers’ problems in the aspect of school policy this aspect was asked to find out teachers’ problems towards the use of ict at school. there were ten statements about the schools’ ict policies and schools’ ict tools. the result showed that the dominant answered were point 1, 2 and 3. this fact showed that most of respondents disagreed with the statements of questionnaire in this aspects. in other words, we can say that most of the teachers do not have problems towards the schools’ policies on the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning in the classroom. teachers’ internal problems on the use of ict there were also ten statements asked about the teachers’ internal problems on the use of ict tools in the process of teaching and learning english. those statements state about teachers’ ict competency and capability and also teachers’ weaknesses in using ict. the result showed that the dominant answered were point 1, 2 and 3. this fact showed that most of respondents disagreed with the statements of questionnaire in this aspects. in other words, we can say that most of the teachers do not have problems towards the internal aspects on the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning in the classroom. results of observation the observation was conducted to all respondents (19 english teachers). the aims were to find out the real facts about ict tools at schools, teachers’ ict competence and knowledge, and also the use of ict by english teachers in the process of teaching and learning in the classroom. to record the observation, a checklist which consisted of 100 items was used. as stated before, this list was counted based on the number of checklist, not based on the number of questions. table 3. results of observation checklist to the teachers no. names of the teachers total number of thick score category category 1. teacher 1 82 4 excellent 2. teacher 2 71 3 good 3. teacher 3 84 4 excellent 4. teacher 4 82 4 excellent 5. teacher 5 70 3 good 6. teacher 6 64 3 good 7. teacher 7 78 3 good 8. teacher 8 62 3 good 9. teacher 9 74 3 good 10. teacher 10 73 3 good 11. teacher 11 51 2 average 12. teacher 12 63 3 good 13. teacher 13 59 2 average 14. teacher 14 86 4 excellent 15. teacher 15 70 3 good 16. teacher 16 66 3 good 17. teacher 17 83 4 excellent 18. teacher 18 75 3 good 19. teacher 19 61 3 good the results showed that from 19 english teachers, only 5 of them were in an excellent category in all aspects of using ict at schools. meanwhile, 12 of them were in good category. furthermore, the rest of them, 2 english teachers were in average category. from the explanation above, it can conclude that the use of ict by the english teachers in the process of teaching and learning was in good level. nevertheless, the facilities and infrastructures in each school and also the teachers’ ability and knowledge about the use of ict need to be increased. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 153 results of interview one method of data collection is by interview. the interview was conducted to all respondents (19 english teachers) from public senior high schools in palembang. the aims of interview were to find out the real fact about ict tools at schools, teachers’ ict competence and knowledge, and also their attitudes and problems towards the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english in the classroom. the implementation of ict is very important since it improves the quality of learning and expands access to education. in the era of globalization, teachers and students will deal with technological devices. it cannot be denied that technology is very helpful in teaching and learning process. this statements is supported by teacher 1 and teacher 3. teacher 1: “in the process of teaching and learning, technology really helped me, especially in the aspect of planning, aspect of teaching process, and also aspect of evaluation and reflection.” teacher 3: “by involving technology in the process of teaching and learning, the students could find many informations from certain sources that could be used in learning activities.” the integration of ict in language education has become a major interest of topic in language educational realm. some research findings provide some evidence as to the positive effects of the use of ict on students. this statements is supported by teacher 2, teacher 4 and teacher 5. teacher 2: “by using technology, the process of teaching and learning was more interesting and practical. in addition, the students could provide opportunities that trading of today was not the same as what it was in the past.” teacher 4: “there were many advantages of using ict in the process of teaching and learning. in integrating technology in the classroom, i used online learning applications, such as edmodo, ruangguru, and quipper video.” teacher 5: “nowadays, learning resources do not only depend on books, but we could find additional materials from internet that can be adjusted to the students’ needs.” in the era of industry 4.0, teachers and students were required to be technology literate. they must be able to operate technology devices especially in the learning process. nevertheless, there were some teachers who complain because the ict devices in their schools are inadequate, as stated by teacher 5, teacher 10 and teacher 13. teacher 5: “the most common problem that i and other teachers often face in using ict devices was when power failure.” teacher 10: “i have problems in using ict in this school. there were no multimedia and language laboratory.” teacher 13: “i have problems in using ict related to school policies. the problem that i face was the lack of lcd. in this school, many of the lcds were broken.” based on the findings of the study, the general interpretations towards the teachers’ attitudes and problems on the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english at schools can be described based on the results of questionnaires, interview, observation and documentation. first questionnaire was to find out teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning. this questionnaire consisted of four aspects deal with teachers’ attitudes and knowledge about ict equipments and their applications in teaching and learning english at school. first aspects were teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict in planning of teaching english at schools which consists of six statements. in this aspects, almost all respondents chose point 4 and 5. this fact showed that almost all respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of planning were positive. second aspects discussed about the teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict in the process of teaching at schools which consisted of seven statements. in this aspects, most of respondents chose point 4 and 5. this fact showed that most of respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of teaching process were positive. third aspects discussed about the teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict on evaluation aspects which consists of six statements. in this aspects, almost all respondents chose point 4 and 5. this fact showed that almost all respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of evaluation were positive. the last aspects discussed about teachers’ attitudes on the use of ict on evaluation and reflection aspects which consists of four statements. in this aspects, almost all respondents chose point 4 and 5. this fact showed that almost arif aminullah, bambang apriady loeneto, & machdalena vianty teachers’ attitudes and problems of using ict in teaching efl 154 all respondents agreed with the statements of questionnaire. in other words, the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the aspect of evaluation and reflection were positive. second questionnaire was to find out teachers’ problems on the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english in their schools. there were two aspects had been asked in this questionnaire. first aspects were about teachers’ problems on the use of ict in the aspects of schools’ policies which consists of ten statements. in this aspects, most of respondents chose point 1, 2 and 3. this fact showed that most of respondents disagreed with the statements of questionnaire. in other words, we can say that most of the teachers do not have problems towards the schools’ policies on the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning in the classroom. second aspects were about teachers’ problems on the use of ict in the aspects of teachers’ internal in using ict equipments which consists of ten statements. in this aspects, most of respondents chose point 1, 2 and 3. this fact showed that most of respondents disagreed with the statements of questionnaire. in other words, we can say that most of the teachers do not have problems towards the internal aspects on the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning in the classroom. the next findings showed the results of observation. from 16 english teachers observed, only 5 of them were in an excellent category in all aspects of using ict at schools. meanwhile, 12 of them were in good category. furthermore, the rest of them, 2 english teachers were in average category. from the explanation above, it can conclude that the use of ict by the english teachers in the process of teaching and learning english were in good level. nevertheless, the facilities and infrastructures in each school and also the teachers’ ability and knowledge about the use of ict need to be increased. lam (2000) also emphasizes that teachers’ personal beliefs of the advantages of using technology for language teaching influence teachers’ decision regarding technology use. similarly, kim (2002) points out that critical factors affecting successful integration of technology into the classroom are associated with teachers themselves, such as teachers’ perceptions and attitudes. the last findings showed the results of interview. from all respondents interviewed, they agreed that the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning was very important. moreover, technology really helped them in the process of teaching and learning, especially in the aspects of planning, aspects of evaluation and aspects of reflection. from 19 english teachers interviewed, some of them have problems related to aspects of school policies. they stated that there were no computer laboratory, language laboratory and multimedia laboratory at their schools. another problems were the lack of lcds and the unavailability of free internet access. besides that, there were 9 english teachers who said that computer training for teachers or staffs was very rarely. there were even those who do not understand how to operate ict devices properly. in the globalization era, the involvement of technology in the process of teaching and learning is very important. as stated in 2013 curriculum, the teachers are demanded to apply technology for all of subjects to support teaching and learning process. in addition, the rapid evolution of ict has made great changes in societies and education. technology not only gives learners the opportunity to control their own learning process, but also provides them with ready access to a vast amount of information over which the teacher has no power or control (lam & lawrence, 2002). conclusion this study aimed at investigating the attitudes and problems of teachers in using ict in teaching efl using descriptive survey methods. the locations of a research were in all public senior high schools in palembang. the findings of this study indicated that the attitudes of the teachers towards the use of ict in the process of teaching and learning english at schools were positive. however, some of them had problems in applying technology in their teaching. these constraints came from the institutions or schools and also from the teachers themselves. their schools did not have an ideal regulations towards the use of ict, especially for english subject, and some schools also did not have enough ict facilities to support the teachers’ teaching and learning activity. references adimphrana, k. 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(2014). the use of instagram to promote reading interest and build student characters. palembang: sriwijaya university. http://www.naldic.org.uk/does/resources/documents.ealdocumentguideforemagcoordinators.pdf http://www.naldic.org.uk/does/resources/documents.ealdocumentguideforemagcoordinators.pdf http://www.naldic.org.uk/does/resources/documents.ealdocumentguideforemagcoordinators.pdf http://www.athensacademy.org/instruct/media_tech/reeves0.html http://www.athensacademy.org/instruct/media_tech/reeves0.html http://www.naldic.org.uk/does/resources/documents/ealdocumentsguideforemagcoordinators.pdf http://www.naldic.org.uk/does/resources/documents/ealdocumentsguideforemagcoordinators.pdf http://www.naldic.org.uk/does/resources/documents/ealdocumentsguideforemagcoordinators.pdf arif aminullah, bambang apriady loeneto, & machdalena vianty teachers’ attitudes and problems of using ict in teaching efl 156 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 51 the practice and challenges of implementing critical thinking skills in efl teachers’ questioning behavior ahmad zainudin department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ahmadzain04@gmail.com machdalena vianty (corresponding author) department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: vianty.unsri@gmail.com rita inderawati english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ritarudisaid@yahoo.com apa citation: zainudin, a., vianty, m., & inderawati, r. (2019). the practice and challenges of implementing critical thinking skills in efl teachers’ questioning behavior. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 51-58. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2112. received: 14-09-2019 accepted: 11-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: the development of critical thinking is closely related to the questions asked by teachers as the teachers’ higher-order questions are cognitively demanding to promote students’ critical thinking. the purposes of this study are to investigate how critical thinking was implemented in efl teachers’ questions in the classroom and the challenges faced by efl teachers in integrating critical thinking questions. in addition, this study also investigated students’ reasons for non-response to particular questions asked by teachers. applying mixed-method research design, the data were collected from classroom observation, interview, questionnaire and documentations. the research participants were two english teachers and 229 number of students of year 8. the results showed that the most dominant questions asked by the two english teachers were in lower-order questions (78,8%), while the higher-order questions were only (21,2%) questions. second, the challenges faced by teachers were students’ intelligence has yet to reach the level of higher-order thinking, unconducive-classroom environment, teachers’ creativity itself, parental involvement and students’ lack of vocabulary. third, dealing with the reason for students’ non-response in particular questions asked by teachers, there were some reasons, such as students are afraid of making mistakes, they could not put ideas into words, and lack of vocabularies. in conclusion, the teachers faced various challenges in implementing critical thinking questions in the classroom. keywords: critical thinking; critical thinking questions; lower-order questions; higher-order questions; the challenges; students’ non-response. introduction critical thinking is a significant topic in one of the primary goals of education in the 21st century. national education association of the united states (2012) reveals that teachers should prepare students for the new global society by incorporating the ‘four cs’, including critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. yet, this study was focused on critical thinking. national education association of the united (2012, p. 8) states, “teaching critical thinking and problem solving effectively in the classroom is vital for students. learning critical thinking leads students to develop other skills, such as a higher level of concentration, deeper analytical abilities, and improved thought processing.” the development of students’ critical thinking is related to the questions asked by teachers because the teachers’ questions are important features in the classroom. richards and schmidt (2010) state that questioning behavior is one of the most frequently used teaching techniques to encourage classroom interaction. moreover, bloom (1956) asserts that asking questions that are cognitively demanding is an effective means to enhance students’ critical thinking. in line with bloom’s theory, peraturan ahmad zainudin, machdalena vianty, & rita inderawati the practice and challenges of implementing critical thinking skills in efl teachers’ questioning behavior 52 menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan indonesia no. 22 of 2016 about standard process states that 2013 curriculum also adopts a learning approach based on the taxonomic theory that includes three competency domains, namely affective, cognitive, and psychomotor (indonesia ministry of education, 2016). critical thinking is instilled in the 2013 curriculum that can be seen from the adoption of bloom’s theory from the least to most difficult cognitive domains as teachers need to promote critical thinking by asking questions in order to encourage students to produce creative and contextual work, both individually and in groups (indonesia ministry of education, 2016). the 2013 curriculum has also done efforts to answer the challenges of global citizenship education in which it is also associated with 21st century characteristics, namely critical thinking, since 2013 curriculum is implemented by using the scientific approach. in addition, scientific approach covers the following steps: (1) observing – identifying problem, (2) questioning – formulating the problems to develop critical thinking, (3) collecting – collecting materials or data in various learning ways, (4) associating – to analyze and make conclusions, and (5) communicating – developing students’ knowledge and skill in delivering ideas clearly (indonesia ministry of education, 2013). in line with the objectives of the indonesia national education, the government has also included critical thinking as a necessary skill in every level grade of education, especially for junior high school level (indonesia ministry of education, 2010). teachers are supposed to develop students to think critically, share an idea, and make better judgments. the accreditation instrument of public high school (ban s/m, 2017) clearly states in item no 41 the specific standards for teachers as follows: teachers should have pedagogical competence to which is in relation to promote critical thinking skills that include the rule of learning principles, the design and the implementation of learning, and communication skills with students. in addition, learning activities such as involving group discussion, reading articles or watching videos, then answering questions are designed to encourage the development of critical thinking and social skills by exploring values, supporting content knowledge and developing practical skills (unesco, 2015). in terms of teachers’ competency, indonesia government has already done uji kompetensi guru (ukg) in 2015. unfortunately, based on the ukg results, most teachers were still below standard required. mean score for pedagogical competence was 48.94, meanwhile, the passing grade should be 55 (indonesia ministry of education, 2015). by looking at the data, pedagogical competence needed to be updated by teachers towards content knowledge and skills. teachers might also join the seminar, in house training, mgmp (musyawarah guru mata pelajaran), or ppg (pendidikan profesi guru) in which these forums help teachers to discuss the latest issue of education system and as a place to share idea how to teach students in the 21st century, especially to promote critical thinking. based on the observation of one of the researchers (functioning as the teacher) in joining mgmp group 7 of junior high school of palembang, most of the teachers involved in mgmp group 7 got difficulties in promoting critical thinking through questioning. it could be seen from the lesson plan they made that they were a lack of knowledge to fulfill the indicator of higher-order thinking skills. they only fulfilled c2: comprehension. furthermore, based on the discussion during the training, most of the teachers claimed they had not applied higherorder questioning yet. it was assumed that teachers were still a lack of understanding to promote critical thinking in the classroom. similarly, there was a discrepancy between what should be done and what had been practiced teachers' questioning behaviors to promote critical thinking in the language classroom. some studies related to teachers' questions were conducted in indonesia context. for example, yuliawati, mahmud, and muliati (2016) found out in makasar that teachers mostly asked 85.18% knowledge questions and never asked synthesis and evaluation questions as higherorder thinking levels in the classroom. katemba and marie (2016) also did research in bandung with six different english teachers, reported that the most type of the questions that had been used is under lower-order questions with 67.3% and 46.53% belongs to knowledge level which teachers only asked about the definition of the topics, the meaning, and the translation. in terms of document analysis of lesson plan, purnawarman, ratnaningsih, and gunawan (2017) found out in bandung regency that teachers were lack of understanding to decide learning indicator, in the same way, they only fulfilled the indicators by using c2: comprehension. it was focused on lower-order english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 53 thinking might not give a contribution to the development of students' cognitive skill in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. as a result, in classroom observation teachers kept asking related questions trying to have active learning and develop students' thinking skills but it was not achieved well. matra (2014) reported in pekalongan that students were faced with problems in understanding difficult words of questions, therefore, teachers needed to repeat their questions to clarify the meaning or translated it into bahasa indonesia. it is in line with international education company english first (ef, 2017) reports that indonesia students’ english proficiency were still low level. they found out that indonesia was in the 39th rank out of 80 countries participated in the survey. unfortunately, indonesia had fallen seven spots from the previous year, when it was ranked 32nd out of 72 countries. in relation to the explanation above, the aim of this study was to investigate how critical thinking was implemented in efl teachers' questions in the classroom and the challenges faced by efl teachers in integrating critical thinking questions. in addition, this study also investigated students' reasons for non-response to particular questions asked by teachers. method applying mixed-method research design, the research site was at smpn 20 palembang. the research participants were two english teachers who are the members of mgmp (musyawarah guru mata pelajaran) group 7. however, the two english teachers were selected based on the following criteria: first, the teachers who hold a master degree majoring in english education study program; second, the teachers who have been certified and graduated from s1 degree majoring in english education study program, and third, the teachers who have been teaching more than 10 years. this study also involved 229 number of eighth-grade students consisting of eight classes in academic year 2018/2019 where the english teachers as the participants in this study taught. the data were collected from classroom observation, interview, questionnaire and documentations. to investigate how critical thinking was implemented in efl teachers’ questions in the classroom, observation sheet given by wilen (1991) that consists of six levels of questions in the original bloom taxonomy which categorized based on four levels of questions classification; (1) level 1 of low order convergent in knowledge level, (2) level 2 of high order convergent in comprehension and application levels, (3) level 3 of low order divergent in analysis level, (4) level 4 of high order divergent in synthesis and evaluation levels. the convergent questions are to assess lower-order thinking process. while, divergent questions are to promote higher-order thinking process. the observation was recorded and the data was analyzed into percentages and interpreted descriptively. interview schedule face to face was constructed to the two english teachers. this study provided one prompt question to know the challenges faced by the english teachers in integrating critical thinking questions in the classroom. in addition, the questionnaire was distributed to the students to get information about the reasons why students did not respond to teachers' questions. the questionnaire was adopted from natthanan (2009) which were classified into three different categories, as follows: (1) the students understood teachers’ questions but they could not answer them, (2) the students understood teachers’ questions, knew the answers but they did not answer them, (3) the students did not understand teachers’ questions and they could not answer. the students were only required to select one category that matched their reason for their nonresponse, then the students were only required to answer one cause and write their comments to enhance discussion of the result of their reason for non-response within the category they selected. the data was analyzed into percentages and interpreted descriptively. to support the data, document checklist was used to be the available information in relation to critical thinking questions applied by the two english teachers. results and discussion the research findings showed that four levels of questions classification (wilen, 1991) appeared in questions asked by the two english teachers namely; level 1 of low order convergent (knowledge level), level 2 of high order convergent (comprehension and application levels), level 3 of low order divergent (analysis level), and level 4 of high order divergent (synthesis and evaluation levels). however, the percentages at each level of questions asked by the two english teachers are different. from the total of 405 questions, the ahmad zainudin, machdalena vianty, & rita inderawati the practice and challenges of implementing critical thinking skills in efl teachers’ questioning behavior 54 highest percentage is in lower-order questions (78,8%), while the higher-order questions were only (21,2%) questions. it can be concluded that the most dominant questions asked by the two english teachers were in lower-order questions. table 1 presents the findings in detail. table 1. the classification of teachers’ questions based on the observation no levels of lower-order questions total percentage 1 level 1 – low order convergent 199 49,13% 2 level 2 – high order convergent 120 29,62% total 319 78,8% no levels of higher-order questions total percentage 3 level 3 – low order divergent 56 13,82% 4 level 4 – high order divergent 30 7,40% total 86 21,2% total of all questions 405 100% in relation to the questions asked by the teachers in four levels of questions classification, the following data provides information about it: most dominant questions were in level 1 (49,13%) which refers to knowledge level questions. at this level, the students are expected to store and remember certain information in the learning process as presented in data 1. data 1: give an example of things that can be compared? he is tall, isn’t he? and the next? what did you do at 6 this morning? what is the meaning of the event? in addition, there were (29,62%) level 2 in comprehension and application levels questions. these levels require students to perform better understanding then apply the knowledge to the appropriate situation as presented in data 2. data 2: what is ‘tinggi' in english? indicate to pronounce words tall, taller, and tallest find the past tense in this text and underline the words! we have three dictionaries, make a sentence which one is ‘lebih tebal’ or ‘paling tebal’ i give you one verb ‘wake up’ find out the v2 and make sentence by using that verb for past tense lesson furthermore, there were (13,82%) level 3 in synthesis level questions that require students to analyze a problem, give reasoning and support the argument as presented in data 3. data 3: how do you explain the relationship between suffix –er and -est? what is the relationship between suffix –more and –most? classify the text based on daily activities in the form of past tense? the last, there were (7,40%) level 4 in evaluation and synthesis levels questions. this level demands students to come up with better solutions for certain problems then produce innovative ideas to act as presented in data 4. data 4: what would happen if the adjective had only three syllables, not two syllables? then, create the sentence to compare something in our school context give me the right form or what can we combine in making past tense with verb and be? please, create your activity yesterday in front of the class by using past tense? what do you think of the lesson today? give some summary or conclusion the finding of this research is similar to research conducted in indonesia by katemba and marie (2016) who did a research in bandung with six different junior high schools english teachers. they reported that the most type of the questions asked by english teachers grouped into lower-order questions (67.3%). moreover, khan and inamullah (2011) who conducted study in pakistan secondary school by involving twenty teachers also found that the ratio of higher-order questions asked by the teachers was very low (20%). the two english teachers still focused on lower-order questions because based on results of the interview, the teachers state that the level of students’ intelligence has yet to reach the level of higher-order thinking. teacher 1: “first student intelligence itself as initial input besides that there is another thing that is whether or not english is one of their favorite lessons.” teacher 2: “inviting students to think critically is difficult because there are only a few children who are smart and they like asking questions. most students are asked whether or not they understand, they answer yes. are there any questions? no. most of them.” english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 55 this finding coincides with the result of the study conducted by sholikhati, mardiyana, and saputro (2017), they found that high personal intelligence students can achieve analyzing thinking level, students with moderate personal intelligence being able to reach the level of applying thinking, and students with low personal intelligence able to reach understanding level. it can be assumed that most of students’ participants in this study were in moderate intelligence. however, the teachers still asked a higher-order question even if a little. this means that the teachers have already known and implemented higher-order questions although the percentage was very low. in terms of teachers’ implementation, the two english teachers started with the basic level of questions, for example, the definition of the lessons, the meaning of the words, translation and ended questions which can be simply answered by saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (see data 1 and data 2). most of the students were enthusiastic to answer questions even they were asked to open a dictionary because they did not need more explanation. as stated by bloom (1956) that lower cognitive questions represent the lowest level of understanding which required students to recall previous knowledge directly instead of any process of manipulating knowledge. however, it does not mean that the role of teachers' asking questions in lower-order thinking could not promote students' critical thinking, because it could drive students to think critically. teachers gave repetitive questions, feedback and promoted follow-up questions after they asked basic questions to lead students' critical thinking (see data 3 and data 4). it was also stated in an interview that the two english teachers firstly asked lower-order questions to check students' basic knowledge then lowerorder questions could lead to higher-order questions. as stated by wilen (2001) that lowerorder questions can prepare learners for higherorder questions. it is similar to a study conducted by sano (2014) who found that lower-order questions tended to be focused on basic questions while higher-order questions seemed to focus on follow-up questions. from the students’ point of view, based on observation students is silence when asked in higher-order questions because teachers invited students to have discussion to relate the material in deep and meaningful way. it is supported by the result of questionnaire that the cause of students’ silence because they were afraid of making mistakes (32,31%). the result of questionnaire is presented in table 2. table 2. the causes of students’ responses to the questionnaire n no why did not students respond to teachers’ questions? causes student’s response to questionnaire n percentage (%) 1 students understood teachers’ questions, knew the answers, but they did not answer students were afraid of making mistakes 74 32,31% students were shy 22 9,60% students were having difficulty concentrating in class or occupied with a personal problem 10 4,37% students waited for answers from the teachers 9 3,93% students did not like speaking english. 7 3,05% students did not like to talk in class 6 2,62% 2 students understood teacher’s questions, but they could not answer students could not put ideas into words. 31 13,53% students did not know the vocabulary. 17 7,42% students did not know the grammar. 13 5,7% students did not have the knowledge required by the questions. 9 3,93% the teachers did not give sufficient time to formulate the answer. 3 1,31% 3 students did not understand teachers’ questions, and they could not answer the content was too difficult and complex 20 8,73% the teacher used vocabulary that was too difficult 8 3,5% total 229 100% in relation to the students’ comments after indicating cause they chose, the result found that most of the students were not convinced of their answer. the students showed their friends instead of directly answer questions. it is also possible if the classroom-environment could lead them to be not confident with their english and fear to be joked by the other friends. based on the statements above, it could be pointed out that the lack of confidence could ahmad zainudin, machdalena vianty, & rita inderawati the practice and challenges of implementing critical thinking skills in efl teachers’ questioning behavior 56 affect students’ exposure to speak in the class that can lead thinking critically. the students must have an opportunity to talk without feeling afraid to do some mistakes. especially, they are in language class which encourages them to deliver what were on their mind. this can be done by building a good classroom-environment. it was supported by the interview, both teachers said that the unconducive-classroom environment was also a factor that influenced teachers to promote students’ critical thinking. therefore, a good classroom environment must be available to make the students feel positive emotions. the following are the statements from the teachers: teacher 1: “in promoting critical thinking also depends on the classroom environment. for example, the class that begins the lesson in afternoon 10.40-12.00, they have not been focus to study. therefore, the teacher plays a role to improve their mood, through work up activities to make them feel welcome in the class.” teacher 2: “actually, all the classes i teach are active, but there are two classes 8.8 and 8.7, they are rather noisy so i sometimes have to control the class.” according to slameto (2003), to achieve a good command in english for students is caused by two factors that can be divided into internal and external. internal usually comes from the students themselves like lack of self-confidence. while external comes from the classroom environment. the unconducive-classroom environment like being laughed by their friends who gave incorrect answers that this such atmosphere would make them afraid to answer the teachers’ questions. the researchers assumed that this can be associated with the culture of the city where this study conducted. this finding is in line with the result of study conducted by rahmi and diem (2014) who did research in palembang with 55 state junior high schools. they reported that classroom environment is correlated positively to students’ english achievement. therefore, a good classroom environment must be available in every school, especially for junior high schools whose students are in the age of growing not only physically but also psychologically, they are sometimes being confused about what they have to and not to do. this also can be supported by the way of the teacher to make the atmosphere more positive to argue something. teachers are supposed to make the english lesson more interesting, for example, use some media pictures or videos and raise questions that demand students to come up with problems and solutions. therefore, teacher’s creativity plays a role as stated in interview. teacher 1: “the most important thing is teacher’s creativity. how the teacher creates a good atmosphere. using facilities to support the use of digital, such as gadgets or the internet. it can also be through music or videos that students observe and how the teacher raises questions that lead students to think critically.” teacher 2: “some students are also quiet, understand or not, they are just being quiet. typical students like that we have to ask questions. if they are confused, we ask again. if they don't understand, we just explained. so it is important by giving them critical questions to make them open, from those who do not know to be aware and those who are not active become active.” it was also stated in an interview where the other challenges to promote critical thinking was parental involvement. as stated by both teachers, parents must establish good communication with children, be directly involved with their education by having efforts to communicate, behave openly and being democratic. the following are the statements from the teachers: teacher 1: “parental involvement has a very important role in influencing students from an early age so they can think critically in problem solving at home. if the father/mother behaves openly to communicate, hears complaints and the willingness of their child or the term is to be democratic. the child will get used to think critically otherwise, if dictatorial parents impose children’s will, they will not be able to grow critical thinking.” teacher 2: “parents must guide their children to be openminded towards anything so as to lead their children to ask questions about everything” if there was a problem at home, it caused that the students would have not been focus in the class and make their mood unpleasant. this situation where the role of parental involvement is very important. parents must establish good communication with children, and be directly involved with children's education. marzano (2003) claims that one of five key factors that influence school achievement is parental involvement. seeing parents involved in the education of their children is a good thing because it improves academic performance. students become more focused on their school work (kwatubana & makhalemele, 2015). the use of english and bahasa indonesia was english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 57 also applied in the process of teaching and learning. the teachers tended to use english in lower-order questions. while, if the teachers promoted higher-order questions they tended to switch from english into bahasa indonesia. based on the interview, the two english teachers also realized that lack of vocabulary of students as one of the challenges that they faced to promote students' critical thinking. the following are the statements from the teachers: teacher 1: "indeed the higher the level of the question the more students take time to answer the question. for example, students give a wrong example even though the aim of the teacher is to make students think. then they realize it is wrong mam, it should be like that. so, the process of learning cannot be just spoonfeeding.” teacher 2: “the students who are being frightened mostly scared to ask and answer critical questions. i do not have a problem if their answers are in indonesia or english, the important thing is for us as a teacher to translate it later. therefore, if the students’ english background is good, it is easy to ask and respond to teachers’ questions. it is hard if the students do not understand and not interested in english.” it was also supported by the result of questionnaire that the cause of students’ nonresponse was the students could not put ideas into words to answer the questions (13,53%) and thought the content of questions was too difficult and complex (8,73%). (see table 2) it could be inferred that students were confused to convey words correctly, especially if they were asked for higher-level questions because they needed to think deeply and they were a lack in a number of vocabularies in english to express their idea. moreover, based on the observation, the lessons taught were comparison degree and past tense which means asking students to know the correct vocabulary and grammar. it is in relation with study conducted by arjulayana and srikandi (2019) who state that the lack of mastery vocabulary is the obstacle by students to communicate by using english. the teachers knew that the problem is students were afraid to say because they were in lack number of vocabularies related to what level they should behave. efl school students would need an active vocabulary at least 3000 highfrequency words of english or an average rate of seven words per day (renandya, 2013). as a matter of fact, how could students elaborate answers that are cognitively demanding to enhance students’ critical thinking if students commonly got difficulties in vocabulary and considered vocabulary as difficult aspects. as we know that indonesia uses efl (english as foreign language), therefore, efl learners only practice english in the classroom not formed as natural behavior since primary school. the last due to observation was conducted in two lessons; comparison degree and past tense in 16 meetings, the researchers found out there was no relationship between the lessons teachers taught and the number of higher-order questions asked. therefore, no matter the material was, the two teachers remained higher-order questions to inject students’ critical thinking although only a few questions. to sum up, the fact that there were lowerorder questions and higher-order questions asked by the two english teachers although the percentage of higher-order questions was very low. this was understandable because the two english teachers in this study have been accomplished curriculum 13 training and hots (higher order thinking skills) training so they had been familiar with it. therefore, the teachers have already known which is lower-order questions and higher-order questions although during implementation at the observation the teachers asked dominantly lower-order questions because the teachers state that the level of students’ intelligence has yet to reach the level of higher-order thinking. however, from the students’ perspective, the causes why they did not answer the higher-order questions were they afraid of making mistakes and lack number of vocabularies in english. conclusion this study examined how critical thinking was implemented in the questions asked by english teachers, the challenges faced by the teachers in integrating critical thinking questions in the classroom, and the students’ reasons for nonresponse to questions asked by teachers. concerning the levels of questions adapted to bloom's taxonomy based on wilen (1991), the result indicated that two english teachers have promoted critical thinking although most of the questions asked by them were in lower-order questions. it does not mean much dominant lower-order questions could not facilitate students’ critical thinking, but it could lead students to think critically. dealing with the challenges faced by the two ahmad zainudin, machdalena vianty, & rita inderawati the practice and challenges of implementing critical thinking skills in efl teachers’ questioning behavior 58 english teachers in integrating critical thinking questions were students’ intelligence has yet to reach the level of higher-order thinking skills, unconducive-classroom environment, teachers’ creativity itself, parental involvement and students’ lack of vocabulary. in the reason for students' non-response in particular questions asked by teachers, there were some reasons behind it. such as students are afraid of making mistakes, they could not put ideas into words, and lack of vocabularies. references arjulayana, & srikandi, c. n. 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(2015). global citizenship education: topics and learning objectives. paris: united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization. wilen, w. w. (1991). questioning skills, for teachers: what research says to the teachers. washington, dc: national education association. wilen, w. w. (2001). exploring myths about teacher questioning in the social studies classroom. the social studies, 92(1), 26-32. doi: 10.1080/00377990109603972. yuliawati, y., mahmud, m. & muliati, a. (2016). teacher’s questioning and students’ critical thinking in efl classroom interaction. elt worlwide, 3(2), 232-246. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 51 fostering language learner autonomy: indonesian efl lecturers’ voices endang darsih department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: endangdarsih@gmail.com apa citation: darsih, e. (2018). fostering language learner autonomy: indonesian efl lecturers’ voices. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 51-60. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1495. received: 21-08-2018 accepted: 30-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: studies reported that education in indonesia has not been promoting learner autonomy as the main goal of the learning process. in fact, it could be one of the solutions to improve the quality of indonesian students and a key goal for tertiary english learning. this explorative study was conducted to find out lecturer’s beliefs about learner autonomy and the activities done by the lecturers to foster learner autonomy. seventeen lecturers from english education study program were voluntarily investigated and interviewed. questionnaires about teachers' beliefs about learner autonomy compiled by borg and al-busaidi (2012) were also employed in this study. the study revealed that majority of students were assessed to be not autonomous yet and there were various efforts and activities done by the lecturers to improve learner autonomy, such as providing a project based assignment, recommending a specific web and english mobile applications to assist their learning, keep motivating the students, fostering reading habit, involving students to select materials, and applying various teaching methodology. keywords: learner autonomy; teacher’s beliefs; fostering learner autonomy; efl; tertiary education. introduction autonomous learning is considered the pedestal of individuals’ self-study, whereby, the individuals are largely responsible for their learning (holec, 1981) as cited in halil (2018) and learner autonomy has become a central ability to develop for a fruitful language learning/teaching process in efl classes. however, based on researcher’s observation in the teaching and learning process, it can be said that the context of higher education in indonesia has not been too promoting learner autonomy as the main goal of the learning process. moreover, some education practitioners have not been too familiar with the term “learner autonomy”. in fact, as lengkanawati (2014) said that learner autonomy is a vital factor in creating effective learning. practice in the field shows that students have not shown high level of learning autonomy. this can be seen from students who tend to learn just before the exam or when the lecturer asks them to do so. besides, there were always excuses from university students to postpone the assignments. the absence of strong awareness from within the students about the importance of learner autonomy becomes the common problem here so it is necessary once there is a paradigm shift that learning is not only a transfer of knowledge to the students, but also to provide space for students to explore the information and knowledge needed by themselves. besides, low motivation of the students is also the serious problem that needs to be solved. students tend to participate and involve passively in the classroom activities, only some students participating actively in the classroom activities, and some are not enthusiastic in interacting with the lecturer and other students. learner autonomy has become a trend for researchers in the last 10 years, but in endang darsih fostering language learner autonomy: indonesian efl lecturers’ voices 52 indonesia, the concept has yet to be thoroughly researched. there are several definitions of learner autonomy. holec (1981) in barilaro (2011) states that learner autonomy focuses on student involvement in their own learning process; namely in the determining of learning objectives, the content or materials, choosing the methods and techniques of learning, monitoring procedures of understanding and evaluating learning outcomes. in other words, learners are responsible in the learning process. learner autonomy has been the focus of teachers, educators, and researchers in various contexts (balcikanli, 2010; benson, 2012; borg & al-busaidi, 2012; lengkanawati, 2014). it has an important role in improving student self-reliance so that it will give positive implications to the students in everyday life. if today the students still need help, he or she will become independent later on. as stated by vygotsky (1934) in barnard (2015) that “what the learner can do with help today, will be able to do independently tomorrow.” this concept also assumes that the independence of students in learning will affect the independence in life. it is in line with what barnard (benson, 2012) proposed that “learner autonomy means being independent in learning and life.” in the same vein, barnard (2015) said “the ultimate goal of learner autonomy is independence.” moreover, lengkanawati's study (2014) indicates that autonomy in learning has not been a common occurrence in the context of education in indonesia, in contrast to the educational context in australia that has applied learner autonomy in learning. since learner-centered approach is crucial in language learning, the endeavors to increase the learners’ involvement in designing their language learning process should be prioritized (yigit & yildirim, 2018). in this case, teacher or lecturer is the one who has substantial and important role in developing and fostering learner autonomy. a study conducted by alonazi (2017) revealed that english language teachers often encouraged autonomous learners in their classrooms. they usually implemented different teaching strategies, which demonstrated the four roles: facilitator, counselor, resource and manager. with reference to the importance of learner autonomy in creating successful english learning and the role of teacher in fostering learner autonomy, a few researchers focused on teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding language learner autonomy in asian context, such as in vietman (loi, in barnard & li, 2016), in philippines (ranosa, in barnard & li, 2016), in thailand (tapinta, in barnard & li, 2016), in brunei darussalam (haji, et al., in barnard & li, 2016) and in indonesia (lengkanawati, in barnard & li, 2016). however, there have been limited studies concerned on the efforts done by university teachers in developing language learner autonomy. therefore, this research intends not only to find out lecturers’ beliefs about learner autonomy, but also efforts done to foster learner autonomy. method this study was conducted by using a qualitative method, namely explorative research design. all lecturers at english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education of universitas kuningan with the total number of 17 lecturers are regarded as the participants of this study. they are voluntarily involved in the present study. in this study, data was collected by two means: questionnaire and interview. the questionnaire used in this study was adopted from a questionnaire about teachers' beliefs about learner autonomy compiled by borg and al-busaidi (2012). the statement in the questionnaire is divided into four categories: technical, political, psychological and social. the measurement used likert scale with five options, they are strongly disagree, disagree, unsure, agree, and strongly agree. the questionnaire was modified, translated as well as cross-checked by researcher, and then piloted with colleagues. delivery was english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 53 conducted in a bilingual version both online and through hard copies, which generated a total number of 17 respondents. all lecturers were asked to fill the questionnaires to find out their beliefs about learner autonomy, but not all lecturers were interviewed. the interview participants comprised eight teachers, who were selected from the questionnaire respondents who have expressed interest in further participation, with consideration of the years of teaching, gender and the type of students they taught. the interview was conducted in both english and indonesian to get a better result. results from questionnaires distributed to all lecturers of english education study program were analyzed initially through ms. excel and using descriptive statistics to calculate frequency and percentage which would then be interpreted with data obtained from interviews. results and discussion profile of research participants participants of the present study are all lecturers in english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education in universitas kuningan with a total number of 17 lecturers. the lecturers of the english education study program who are respondents have diversity in gender, the highest educational attainment, the teaching experience (elt experience), and the experience at language center. these characteristics are presented in graphs below. figure 1. profile of participants based on gender figure 2. profile of participants based on educational background figure 3. profile of participants based on teaching experience figure 4. profile of participants based on experience at language center lecturers’ beliefs about learner autonomy based on the results of questionnaire data processing to 17 participants, it was obtained some items or statements in which almost the majority of participants agree (agree/a) and strongly agree (strongly agree/sa) with statements number 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 25, 28, 29, 35 and statement number 36. the majority of participants (88.2%) believe in some things. first, that student autonomy can be improved through routine activities where they perform individual tasks. second, autonomy means that students can make choices about how they learn (82.4%). thirdly, the majority of participants (64.7%) believe that involving students in determining materials or teaching materials endang darsih fostering language learner autonomy: indonesian efl lecturers’ voices 54 can improve student autonomy. fourth, 82.3% of participants believe that students who have a high level of confidence will have better autonomy of learning than the less confident. fifth, the autonomy of learning makes students learn more effectively (70.6%). sixth, cooperative activities (co-operative group work activities) can help improve learner autonomy (82.3%). the seventh, studentcentered learning is the ideal situation in improving learner autonomy (82.3%). to eight, learning how to learn something is a key in improving learner autonomy (58.8%). to the nine, teachers have a very important role in helping students improve their learning autonomy (76.5%). finally, the majority of participants (82.4%) believe that learner autonomy has a positive influence on the success of language learning. in the meantime, the questionnaire also shows that the majority of participants still doubt their beliefs about several things especially for items number 1, 5, 9, 15, 20, 24 and item number 34. the majority of participants doubt some things. first, students at all age can improve their learning autonomy. second, students with low learning autonomy tend to be ineffective. thirdly, the majority of participants doubt that it is difficult to improve learner autonomy with good language skills compared to those with less ability. fourth, the autonomy of learning cannot be developed in lecturer-centered learning. sixth, learning autonomy is only possible applied to adult students. the seventh, learner autonomy requires students to be totally independent of the lecturers. finally, the participants’ doubt can be seen from the statement that the students' skills do not affect their ability to improve their learning autonomy. from the result of the questionnaire, it is also seen the belief of participants to some statements where the majority of respondents disagree (disagree/d) and strongly disagree (strongly disagree/sd) such as on item statement number 8, 18 and item statement number 23. this disagreement seen in 76.5% of participants belief that student learning autonomy means learning without lecturer. furthermore, the majority of participants (59%) also disagree that learner autonomy does not develop without being assisted by lecturers. finally, majority of participants (76.5%) disagree and strongly disagree that student learning autonomy is a concept that is not suitable for non-western learners. efforts in fostering learner autonomy based on interviews with eight participants, it is revealed that the majority of participants concluded that the students of english education study program are not fully autonomous; they are not fully independent, especially the first grade students due to the nature of his high school that is not independent and accustomed to the pattern of spoon-fed principle. having analyzing the result of interview, it is revealed that there are several efforts or activities which are undertaken by lecturers in fostering learner autonomy in university, such as: 1. providing a structured task (project based or research based assignment) that should be done individually. 2. recommending some specific internet, web or mobile applications as learning resources in accordance with the course. 3. motivating the students to compete between campuses at various levels. 4. growing and fostering reading habit for students by making chapter report or learning log at every meeting. 5. applying various learning methods, such as project based learning and problem based learning to improve learner autonomy. 6. involving the students to choose the material they will read according to their interest and ask them to write selfresponse for what they have learned and what results they will get from the reading. 7. encouraging students to perform activities outside the campus, such as joining the debate club to improve the ability to speak and think critically. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 55 based on data analysis, it can be concluded that the students of english education study program are still not fully autonomous. there are several activities or efforts done by lecturers to foster learner autonomy. first, provide structured tasks (project based or research based) that should be done individually and apply various learning methods, such as project based learning and problem based learning. this project based assignment is also proven by loi (2017) that the students gained a higher degree of learner autonomy after participating in project work. the following is statement taken from interview results: "in my opinion, our students are still not autonomous. the efforts are like giving a structured task such as project that must be completed outside the class both individually and in group "lecturer 5 one of ways in measuring students’ comprehension and ability is by providing tasks. task provided to students must be proportional or in accordance with the ability of students, so that the task given does not become a burden for students. providing structured tasks will make students become more active, trying to find a solution to the problem or tasks that he/she faces. by doing that, the student will be a hardworking person, never give up and students' thinking ability to find a way out of the problem will be increasing. students who are active in completing their tasks will have a positive impact on students' affective, cognitive and psychomotor abilities. this is in line with what benson proposed in barnard & li (2016) that students can often contribute to the design of task and it can heighten their involvement in the classroom. besides, the next effort done by the lecturer in fostering learner is applying various teaching methods. one of the methods, namely project based learning, is chosen because it is believed to improve students’ higher order thinking skills and foster learner autonomy. it is also suggested by the most national curriculum in indonesia because it is expected to create studentcentered learning and enable the students to find the information by themselves. the following is statement taken from interview results: "the efforts will vary, depends on the lecturers, i think our students have not been independent. therefore, i apply the pbl (project based learning) and problem based learning method with the development of hots (higher order thinking skills) so they can become autonomous. in this way, they can be autonomous, because basically they are capable and have potential; they just need help and our role as a lecturer to develop it ". lecturer 4 project based learning is a teaching method in which students can gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge. project based learning is believed to make classroom more engaging to students; a project engages their hearts and minds, and provides real-world relevance for learning. project based learning also can improve students’ learning. after completing a project, students understand content more deeply, remember what they learn and retain it longer than is often the case with traditional instruction. because of this, students who gain content knowledge with this type of methods are able to apply what they know and can do to new situations. if we review indonesian government regulation number 65 year 2013 on process standards, then it is stated that the learning process must use a scientific approach by applying research-based learning (discovery or inquiry learning). to encourage learners to produce creative and contextual work, both individually and in groups, it is recommended to use a learning approach that produces project based learning and/or problem based learning tailored to the endang darsih fostering language learner autonomy: indonesian efl lecturers’ voices 56 characteristics of competence and level of education. based on the above statement, the expected learning is 'student-centered learning'. so that lecturers do not dominate the learning process. asking the students to find out things for themselves rather than teaching them is very crucial as the basic strategy for student involvement in the classroom activities. it can also allow students to pursue their own interests (benson, 2003) in barnard and li (2016). the students must acquire knowledge, attitudes, and skills, majorly by interacting among themselves and information. the students can get information from various sources, such as education facilities, media, and help from their tutors. autonomous learning, therefore, enhances students to actively learn unlike the traditional mode of learning that promotes passive learning (halil küçükler, 2018). the next effort done by the university teachers in fostering learner autonomy is to recommend the internet, specific web or english mobile applications as sources of learning in accordance with the course. as suggested by the latest curriculum in indonesia that teachers are not the only source of learning. the internet is a network of people and information, connected by telephone lines connected to a computer. even more than 100.000 independent networks public and private are joining together to form this vast global communications system. in line with the widespread internet access, the effort to integrate the internet into english language teaching (elt) and expand its various forms of use in teaching is also higher. this means that more teachers (lecturers or english instructors) and learners will use the internet as a learning medium. the following is statement taken from interview results: "in my opinion the english education program students are not autonomous. moreover, i teach the first graders; most still want to be fed. whatever the instructions should be very clear. assigned tasks such as by depositing vocabulary, learning diary and following activities outside the classroom. i also recommend the web and mobile applications, such as oxford dictionary, hello english, etc. to learn english so that children can also learn outside of school hours. i release them to open gadgets or the internet, browse about the topic to be discussed. besides, in this campus, free wifi can be a good solution for the students to download and install many free english mobile applications which are very beneficial for their learning and their achievements " lecturer 3 nowadays, technology is growing rapidly and as if the world is in the grip that is by accessing the internet via smartphone, even all people in this world including in indonesia mostly have. this condition must become the chance for the students to use it for not only communication but also for learning. they can browse much information easily, whenever and wherever they want as smartphone is portable. smartphone has become an idol and something very important until most students cannot be separated from the smartphone or mobile phone. this is an opportunity to take advantage of smartphones and android as a source and media that help the learning process. there are many free android and smartphone applications designed to assist students’ learning and improve students’ english skills, such as oxpord dictionary, listen and speak, busuu, cartoon free english, speak english picture, fluent english, english podcast for learners, language verb trainer, pvp-phrasal verb, english conversation practice, hello english, etc. motivating and supporting the students to compete between campuses at various levels is also an important effort to foster learner autonomy. the following is statement taken from interview results: "in the classroom i teach, i think only a small part of students is autonomous, the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 57 syllabus is rarely read and they do not know what direction to learn on that day, far from preparing for themselves what they will learn that day, let alone the first graders who are still accustomed to be fed by teachers. to solve the problem, i usually provide tasks that will train them to become autonomous learners. for example, in the basic prosaic study class, i release students to choose literary works that they will read, make project literature response without any intervention of my own project and then presented in the class. i also assign students to write a chapter report for a syntax class and write self-response to what they have learned and what they can get ... "lecturer 1 all teachers and lecturers already know the importance of learning motivation for students. a strong motivation to learn will encourage students to want and try to learn earnestly. this makes sense and is reasonable. there are goals and desires that will be achieved by students through learning activities. therefore, the learning activities that are run should not only meet the interests of teachers. the priority is the fulfillment of the wishes and needs of students in learning. this is in line with what benson (2003) in barnard and li (2016) stated that supporting learners can foster autonomy in classroom. the important role of motivation in the teaching and learning process needs to be understood by the lecturers so that they can perform various forms of action or assistance to the students. motivation in learning is very important in the process of teaching and learning activities to improve the ability or learning outcomes. this is in accordance with the opinion of wagman (2005) who said that motivation is one of factors that affects the ability of students in learning a foreign language. learning process will be successful when students have motivation to learn. therefore, teachers need to cultivate students’ learning motivation. to obtain optimal learning outcomes, teachers are required to generate students’ motivation to learn, so that effective student learning behavior will be formed. several ways can be done to improve students’ motivation to learn, such as clarifying goals to be achieved, creating a fun atmosphere in learning, generating students’ interest in learning, giving feedback, reward and assessment to students’ works, creating competition and cooperation among students. growing and fostering reading habit for students by making chapter report or learning log at each meeting is also believed to improve learner autonomy. the following is statement taken from interview result: “i usually ask students to create a chapter report or learning log before the material begins. therefore, they have a provision and certainly read in advance about the material to be delivered. in this way, they can actually learn on their own, and the class activity will talk more about what material they do not understand after reading and making chapter report” lecturer 2 & 8 from the result of interview above, it is found that teachers can also let the students to write about what they have learned, what they will do next or the direction of their learning. this way is believed to play an important role in heightening student involvement. the last effort done by the lecturers in fostering learner autonomy is by giving freedom to the students to choose the material they will read according to their interest and write self-response for what they have learned and what results they will get from the reading. as we know that autonomy involves a willingness on the part of the learner to take responsibility for their own learning. therefore students should be given a chance to define and select the materials and learning sources based on their interest. by using authentic materials and involving students to select the materials, this heightens involvement and personal endang darsih fostering language learner autonomy: indonesian efl lecturers’ voices 58 relevance. the following is statement taken from interview result: “to improve learner autonomy, i ask them to choose and select reading material according to their own interests. for example, in reading for general purpose subject, students are asked to read the text of their choice and apply the reading strategy i teach to the text of their choice” lecturer 7 autonomy need to be given to the students or learners so that they have the responsibility in organizing and disciplining themselves and in developing their own learning skills. these attitudes need to be possessed by students/learners because they are characteristic of the maturity of the learned person. in line with this, moore (in keegan, 1983) argues that the main feature of learner autonomy is the opportunity given to students or learners to participate in determining the objectives, sources, and evaluation of learning. therefore, independent learning programs can be classified based on the size of the freedom (autonomy) given to students or learners to participate in determining the learning program. findings of this study have two important implications: 1) learner is the key of successful learning process in a learnercentered teaching, 2) lecturers’ efforts as the optimization of students’ learning. to begin with, in tertiary education level in which students centered teaching is emphasized, learner is the first one who is responsible so much for their learning. they are entrusted to determine what, how and why to learn. the more autonomous they are the bigger possibility they have to be more successful in learning. majority of learning activities conducted in this university are centered on students, therefore learner autonomy is a crucial factor in creating effective and successful learning. secondly, lecturers are the second ones who are responsible for maximizing students’ learning experience and for fostering students’ participation in different learning activities. students and lecturers are inseparable determiners in effective teaching and learning process. there must be awareness from not only learner but also lecturer to complete each other. learner centered teaching does not mean learning without teacher; again, there must be facilitator in assisting learners, improving learner autonomy and promoting learner autonomy in university is a desirable goal (borg & alshumaimeri, 2017). conclusion learner autonomy plays a very important role in creating effective learning based on the most recent curriculum in indonesia which centers on learner. learner should be the one who do the messy works and the one who actively participate in the classroom activities. however, learner autonomy cannot be interpreted as learning without teachers. teachers still become the second vital factor to make effective learnercentered classroom. in addition, benson in barnard and li (2016) acknowledged that commitment of the teacher is the key to make a successful pedagogical task work. based on data analysis, two quite interesting findings have been revealed in this study especially regarding lecturers’ beliefs about learner autonomy and efforts done to foster learner autonomy. the first finding is the majority of participants believe in some conceptions and aspects about learner autonomy. the second finding is efforts done by lecturers in improving learner autonomy vary based on the students needs, such as; 1) providing a structured task (project based or research based assignment) that should be done individually, 2) recommending some specific internet or webs and english mobile applications to enhance their learning in accordance with the course; 3) motivating and supporting students to compete between campuses at various levels; 4) growing and fostering reading habit for students by making chapter report or learning log at each meeting; 4) applying various learning methods, such as project and problem based learning to english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 59 improve learner autonomy; 5) involving students to select the material they will read according to their interests and write selfresponse for what they have learned and what results they will get from the reading; and 6) encouraging students to perform activities outside the campus, for example joining the debate club to improve the ability to speak and think critically. references balcikanli, c. (2010). learner autonomy in language learning: student teachers’ beliefs. australian journal of teacher education. barnard, r., & li, j. (2016). language learner autonomy: teachers’ beliefs and practices in asian contexts. phnom penh: angkor thom printer co, ltd. barnard, r. (2014). learner sutonomy: a hand-out at two-day workshop at upi bandung, indonesia. benson, p. (2012). autonomy in language learning: learning and life. a paper. hong kong institute of education. borg, s., & al-busaidi, s (2012). learner autonomy: english language teachers’ beliefs and practices. elt reseach paper. london, england. borg, s., & alshumaimeri, y. (2017). language learner autonomy in a tertiary context: teachers’ beliefs and practices. language teaching research. doi:10.1177/1362168817725759. doğan, g., & mirici, i̇. h. (2017). efl instructors’ perception and practices on learner autonomy in some turkish universities. journal of language and linguistic studies, 13(1), 166-193. halil, k. (2018). graduate students’ proficiency strategy attitudes on autonomous learning in foreign language learning. english language teaching, 11(7). lengkanawati, n. s. (2014). making efl learners autonomous: can language learning strategies help? paper presented at 2014 alak international conference on applied linguistics in the era of multiculturalism. loi, n. v. (2017). promoting learner autonomy: lesson from using project work as a supplement in english skills courses. can tho university journal of science, 7, 118-125. moore, s. (2011). the struggle to develop a “research culture” in a developing country. tesol quarterly. endang darsih fostering language learner autonomy: indonesian efl lecturers’ voices 60 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1 an evaluation of technical report writing syllabus at the preparatory year program soada idris khan the preparatory year program, najran university, najran, king of saudi arabia e-mail: khan.soada@gmail.com apa citation: khan, s. i. (2018). an evaluation of technical report writing syllabus at the preparatory year program. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 1-8. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1528. received: 28-08-2018 accepted: 30-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: the current study aims to critically analyze the contents of the technical report writing syllabus as well as identify whether the syllabus meets course objectives or not. the study also suggests some remedies to improve the contents of the syllabus. as part of the study, twenty efl teachers from preparatory year program were selected for this study. a quantitative questionnaire containing 10 statements was administered to gather data from the participants. in addition, an interview session with a set of 5 questions based on the key elements on the current syllabus was also conducted with the teachers to have their expert opinion and suggestions. the analysis of data revealed that textbook is appropriate for the students and needs not be replaced. however, syllabus should include some more activities that may address to the needs of weak students. the study also suggests teachers to exploit other resources (from internet or library) in order to give an extra push to the learners. keywords: course objectives; syllabus analysis; technical report writing. introduction syllabus is a very important document in an academic setting. it usually covers the proposed topics to cover in a semester/academic year. the institution/department provides syllabus as a kind of official and professional document. moreover, it also works as a personal copy of instructors that are usually kept in their begs to consult the taught and to be taught items. the syllabus is, thus, both a professional document as well as a personal document. it reflects the instructor‟s feelings, attitudes, and beliefs about the subject matter, teaching, learning, and students, as well as setting out the “nuts and bolts” of the course. when so constructed, the syllabus can serve as a guide to the instructor as much as a guide to the class (parkes & harris, 2002). however, a syllabus is also speculated as a "summary of the content to which learners will be exposed" (yalden, 1987, p. 87). a syllabus is often thought of as that apparently benign document instructors assemble and distribute to students at the start of the semester. whether it is intended or not, the quality of the syllabus is a fairly reliable indicator of the quality of teaching and learning that will take place in a course (woolcock, 2003). the process of developing a syllabus can be a reflective exercise, leading the instructor to carefully consider his or her philosophy of teaching, why the course is important, how the course fits in the discipline, as well as what topics will be covered, when assignments will be due, and so on (eberly, newton, & wiggins, 2001; grunert, 1997). a syllabus lets students know what the course is about, why the course is taught, where it is going, and what will be required for them to be successful in the course (altman & cashin, 2003). the welldesigned syllabus provides a solid beginning to the semester, sets the tone for the course, provides a conceptual framework for the course, serves as a “virtual handshake” between the instructor and students, and soada idris khan an evaluation of technical report writing syllabus at the preparatory year program 2 becomes a resource that is referred to over the course of the semester. it also shows students to take teaching seriously (davis, 1993). the syllabus is usually prepared keeping in mind certain course objectives. the activities, tasks, exercises under different topics are considered parts of syllabus and a replication of course objectives. as syllabus is a very important document and a primary means to carry out the business of teaching in the classroom, it is obligatory to evaluate the contents of the syllabus (from time to time) to ensure it meets course objectives. course evaluation helps to identify how successfully course objectives were met and what amendments the designer should introduce to achieve better results in the future (ismagilova & polyakova, 2015). the importance of the needs analyses for syllabus design is indisputable. it acts as terminus a quo for materials selection, assessment criteria and activities that the course will be based on. many articles were published about this problem by alderson (1980), berwick (1989), brindley (1989), crocker (1981), and hawkey (1980). as far as needs analyses definition is concerned, it could vary but it will be based on the learner as the central part of the analyses anyway. widdowson (1983) distinguishes “goaloriented” and “process-oriented” definition of needs. the key feature of this approach is the importance to evaluate the present language ability of the learner and to recognize the target situation where the learner will use the language. the “goaloriented” definition is correlated to the objectives set while designing the syllabus whereas the “process-oriented” definition relates to pedagogic aims. language needs of the learner should be the bases for course development. information on his or her language needs will help in drawing up a profile to establish coherent objectives, and take subsequent decisions on course content (mcdonough, 1984). now the question is how to evaluate a syllabus based on particular course objectives and who can be good evaluators of the syllabus. alderson and waters (1980, 1987) point out four main aspects to consider while developing course evaluation programme: 1) what should be evaluated? 2) how can the course be evaluated? 3) who should be involved in evaluation? and 4) when (and how often) should evaluation take place? keeping in mind these four important aspects of evaluation, the present study evaluates the contents of the syllabus of technical report writing at preparatory year program, najran university. technical report writing course has certain objectives; like, by the end of the course students will be able to: write a simple and technical paragraph with an effective topic sentence; support the topic sentence with appropriate details; take effective notes and write concise summaries; write a covering letter and cv tailored for a particular job; write a formal letter for different situations; write memos and reports for various contexts; comprehend and use esp vocabulary for different professional fields. questionnaire and interview methods are used to evaluate the contents of the syllabus. teachers are the main evaluators of the syllabus as they practically use it in the classroom and are well familiar with its effectiveness. syllabus evaluation should be done periodically, possibly after every new book, is selected and implemented. the present syllabus is in operation for last two semesters. therefore, it is obligatory to ensure the effectiveness of the syllabus, having evaluated its contents. thus, the objectives of this study are to critically analyze the contents of the syllabus, to identify whether the syllabus meets course objectives or not, and to suggest some remedies to improve the contents of the syllabus of technical report writing at pyp, najran university. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3 method to ensure the validity of the survey questionnaire, it was first piloted to 10 efl instructors; their feedback was useful for modifying some items. the survey was also given to four assistant professors to examine its validity. some items were modified as per their suggestions to meet the content validity. twenty efl teachers from pyp were selected for this study. participants‟ age ranges 28 to 47 years old. their experience of teaching of english varies between 2-20 years. most of the participants‟ experience of teaching technical writing course ranges from four years to one semester. a quantitative questionnaire (containing 10 statements) was administered to gather data from the participants. the aim of the questionnaire was to measure how teachers perceived and rated the current syllabus of technical report writing at pyp. the contents of the questionnaire are based on course objectives, using 5-point likertscales of agreement. the researchers circulated the questionnaire to forty participants and thirty were returned. finally, twenty questionnaires given serious attention were selected as a sample of this study. to interpret the level of means, the authors applied ariffin and salbiah‟s (1996) model of explaining means as it is summarized in table 1. in addition, an interview session was also conducted with the teachers to have their expert opinion and suggestions. the interview included 5 key statements on the current syllabus. twenty teachers teaching technical writing were also interviewed and their suggestions and opinions were taken into consideration. table1. score category breakdown adopted from ariffin and salbiah (1996) means corresponding level 1.0 1.80 very low 1.81 2.60 low 2.61 3.40 moderate 3.41 4.20 high 4.21 5.0 very high results and discussion questionnaire analysis questionnaire is one of the methods used to collect the data. the questionnaire uses 5point likert-scales of agreement. reed (1989) is of the opinion that likert-type rating scale should be used to generally gather data. jung, osterwalder and wipf (2000) support the likert scale: “this was the only assessment instrument i found that was practical for the classroom” (p.2). the result of the questionnaire analysis is presented in table 2. table 2. descriptive statistics of the survey’s statements and result discussion s. no.↓ scales → statements ↓ 5 strongly agree 4 agree 3 can`t say 2 disagree 1 strongly disagree mean 1. the textbook enables students write a simple and technical paragraph with an effective topic sentence 0 0% 11 55% 9 45% 0 0% 0 0% 3.55 2. the textbook enables students support the topic sentence with appropriate details 0 0% 16 80% 4 20% 0 0% 0 0% 3.8 3. the textbook enables students take effective notes and write concise summaries 7 35% 8 40% 5 25% 0 0% 0 0% 4.1 4. the textbook enables students write a covering letter and cv tailored for a particular job 7 35% 10 50% 3 15% 0 0% 0 0% 4.2 5. the textbook enables students write a formal letter 4 20% 14 70% 2 10% 0 0% 0 0% 4.1 soada idris khan an evaluation of technical report writing syllabus at the preparatory year program 4 for different situations 6. the textbook enables students write memos and reports for various contexts 4 20% 10 50% 6 30% 0 0% 0 0% 3.9 7. the textbook facilitates students‟ writing their personal blog on everyday situations and topics 4 20% 12 60% 3 15% 1 5% 0 0% 3.95 8. the textbook helps students comprehend and use esp vocabulary for different professional fields 1 5% 14 70% 4 20% 1 5% 0 0% 3.75 9. the textbook enables students to produce coherence and cohesion in their writing pieces 5 25% 10 50% 5 25% 0 0% 0 0% 4 10. the textbook enables students form different types of complex and compound sentences independently 4 20% 13 65% 3 15% 0 0% 0 0% 4.05 the first statement in the questionnaire „the textbook enables students write a simple and technical paragraph with an effective topic sentence‟ reveals that there is none who strongly agreed to the statement. 55% participants (a majority) felt the textbook enables students write a simple and technical paragraph with an effective topic sentence. 45% of the participants had no idea. there was none with disagreement. the mean of the statement is 3.55 that lies in the category of „high‟ as per the breakdown adopted from the scale of ariffin and salbiah (1996). the second statement in the questionnaire „the textbook enables students support the topic sentence with appropriate details‟ displays that there is no one who strongly agreed to the statement. however, 80% of the participants opined the textbook enables students support the topic sentence with appropriate details. there was none with disagreement. the mean is categorized as high. the third statement in the questionnaire „the textbook enables students take effective notes and write concise summaries‟ shows that there are 35% of the participants who strongly agreed to the statement. 40% of the participants are of the opinion that the textbook enables students take effective notes and write concise summaries. 25% of the participants had no opinion. there was none with disagreement. the mean is high. the fourth statement in the questionnaire „the textbook enables students write a covering letter and cv tailored for a particular job‟ exhibits that 35% of the participants strongly agreed. there are 50% of the participants who agreed that the textbook enables students write a covering letter and cv tailored for a particular job. 15% of the participants had no opinion. there was none with disagreement. the mean is ranked as high. the fifth statement in the questionnaire „the textbook enables students write a formal letter for different situations‟ divulges that there are 20% of the participants who strongly agreed to the statement that the textbook enables students write a formal letter for different situations. 70% of the participants agreed with the statement.10% of the participants did not express their opinion. there was none with disagreement. the mean is high. the sixth statement in the questionnaire „the textbook enables students write memos and reports for various contexts‟ discloses that there are 20% of the participants who strongly agreed to the statement. 50% of the participants concurred that the textbook enables students write memos and reports for various contexts. 30% of the participants english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 5 were not sure about it. there was none with disagreement. the mean is high. the seventh statement in the questionnaire „the textbook facilitates students’ writing their personal blog on everyday situations and topics‟ shows that there are 20% of the participants who strongly agreed to the statement. 60% of the participants concurred that the textbook facilitates students’ writing their personal blog on everyday situations and topics.15% of the participants were not sure about it. there were 5% with disagreement. the mean is high. the eighth statement in the questionnaire „the textbook helps students comprehend and use esp vocabulary for different professional fields‟ unveils that there are 5% of the participants with absolute agreement to the statement that the textbook helps students comprehend and use esp vocabulary for different professional fields. 70% of the participants agreed, while there 20% of the participants who did not state an opinion. 5% of the participants did not agree with the statement. there was none with disagreement. the mean is high. the ninth statement in the questionnaire „the textbook enables students to produce coherence and cohesion in their writing pieces‟ reveals that 25% of the participants thought that the textbook enables students to produce coherence and cohesion in their writing pieces. 50% of the participants agreed with the statement though 25% (a significant percentage) of the participants had no opinion. there was none with disagreement. the mean is high. the tenth statement in the questionnaire reveals that 20% of the participants strongly agreed with the statement stating that „the textbook enables students to form different types of complex and compound sentences independently‟. 65% of the participants agreed to the statement. 15% had no idea. there was none with disagreement. the mean is high. the analysis shows that most of the key elements in the syllabus fall in high category. as a result, the prescribed syllabus for pyp is well designed though none of the statement falls in the category of very high. it shows that it does not meet its objectives completely however, they do meet largely. this is also fact that no textbook is perfect. if this syllabus (textbook) is replaced, there is no surety whether another selected book can meet all the course objectives completely or not. according to grant (1987), "the perfect textbook does not exist, but the best book available for you and your students certainly does" (cited in mcgrath 2002, p. 41). the statements of the teachers based on the key elements of syllabus, course objectives, pedagogy, etc. show their satisfactory response. most of them agree with the statements. it shows that the syllabus is perfect. despite the sincere efforts made by the teachers, some of the students are not able to demonstrate a good progress in technical report writing. they still face problems in formal letter writing, cv writing, memos writing, reports writing, etc. the teachers and students should develop a common understanding on what activities should be used in the classroom and what skills they have to develop respectively. as jung, osterwalder & wipf (2000, p. 5) are of the opinion that "we realized that students needed lessons and activities that would introduce them to the language and terminology associated with the skills they would be expected to learn." as it is technical report writing course, terminology (esp vocabulary) plays an important role here. syllabus should include some more activities that may address to the needs of weak students. as for the writing skill, harmer (1991) suggested the following exercises might be useful: 1) relaying instructions, 2) writing reports, 3) cooperative writing, 4) exchange letters, and 5) writing journals. these kinds of activities (especially cooperative writing and writing journals) may be incorporated into syllabus as syllabus has least exercises to develop these skills. moreover, other pedagogical issues must be taken into consideration. for example, soada idris khan an evaluation of technical report writing syllabus at the preparatory year program 6 teachers should try to engage learners more in writing activities. it is imperative for students to become responsible for their own learning. they need to see themselves as active members of the learning process. students must be assigned peer evaluation so that they can learn from the mistakes of each other. through involvement in evaluation, they can see their performance more clearly. they are not victims at the mercy of the teacher‟s red pen. instead, they are encouraged to realistically assess their own skills and compare them with others (jung, osterwalder & wipf, 2000). interview analysis another method used to collect the data was interview. twenty samples were selected out of 30 which were filled in with complete information. the participants responded to the following questions in the interview: 1) teachers rate (on a scale of 1-5) the students‟ proficiency in technical report writing. 2) mention some common learning difficulties students (in teachers' opinion) face during technical report writing class! 3) mention some pedagogical (teaching) problems teachers face during teaching of technical report writing! 4) suggestions for improving students‟ general language proficiency in technical report writing. 5) is the course designed in accordance to the learner-based approach? comment briefly! table 3. results of interview question no. 1 q.1. number of teachers scale 4 2 10 3 6 4 as shown in the table, in response to the first question, 4 teachers rated the proficiency of the students as 2 on a scale of 3-5. 10 teachers rated students as 3 and 6 other teachers rated as 4. students' overall proficiency was rated 1-4s. the scale shows that students' proficiency is good but still needs improvement. teachers can improve their proficiency by providing them more assignments, classroom learner-cantered activities, essay-writing competition, quiz competition, etc. table 4. results of interview question no. 2 q.2. number of participants some common learning difficulties students (in teachers' opinion) face during technical writing class 5 inadequate use of audio-visual technologies 8 complex and compound sentences 7 connecting related sentences to make a paragraph as shown in table 4, in response to question number 2, there were varied responses, only common responses were placed in the table. most of the teachers agreed that students had problems in complex and compound sentences and writing a paragraph. they should be given more practice as writing skill needs a lot of practice. table 5. results of interview question no. 3 q.3 number of participants mention some pedagogical (teaching) problems teachers face during teaching of technical writing 5 less access to multimedia and equipment 8 low academic standard of students 7 students are not motivated as shown in table 5, in response to question number 3, there were some common difficulties faced by the teachers. a majority of teachers believe (as shown in english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7 responses) that students' low academic standard was a serious issue. moreover, they are not much motivated to improve themselves. thus, a placement test must be conducted in order to have a filter in admission/selection process of students. students should be oriented to motivational talks by the experts in this field. table 6. results of interview question no. 4 q.4 number of participants suggestions for improving students’ general language proficiency in technical writing 4 more exposure to english activities 7 task based exercises 9 more resources other than textbook must be provided students must be given exposure to target language as shown in table 6, in response to question number 4, there were some common suggestions proposed by the teachers. the common suggestions were; 1) to include more learning resources other than the textbook; 2) students must be exposed to target language, and 3) task based exercises must be included in the syllabus. since there is hardly an environment to target language, it is suggested that students must be sent on a tour to english speaking countries to have an exposure to target language. table 7. results of interview question no. 5 q.5. number of participants is the course designed in accordance to the learnerbased approach? comment briefly! 18 the course is learner centred. 02 the course is not learner-centred. as shown in table 7, in response to question number 5, 18 teachers completely agreed that the course is learner-centred while the rest of 2 (a minority) teachers accepted that the course is not learnercentred. it shows that textbook is learnercentred and is doing well. there is hardly any need to replace it. conclusion an overall analysis of teachers' questionnaire and interview result affirms that teachers are quite satisfied with the present syllabus. this book is in operation for last one year. before this, teachers used to collect teaching materials from different resources, like internet. as a result, the materials lacked coherence and cohesion and course objectives were also partially fulfilled. the present syllabus is designed and textbook is selected after a careful introspection of course contents by a committee of experts of materials development in the university. students also demonstrate a better progress than last few years. therefore, the study wholeheartedly approves present syllabus and does not recommend replacing the textbook. however, teachers can exploit other resources (from internet or library) in order to give an extra push to their learners. references alderson, j. c. (1980). a process approach to reading at the university of mexico: projects in materials design. london: the british council. altman, h. b., & cashin, w. e. (2003). writing a syllabus. retrieved from http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/academics/te aching/teaching_excellence/res ources/upload/altmansyllabus.pdf. ariffin, s. r., & salbiah, m. (1996). pemikiran guru cemerlang: kesan teradap prestasi pengajaran. kertas kerja seminar isu-isu pendidikan negara. fakulti pendidikan, universiti kebangsaan malaysia, bangi. berwick, r. (1989). needs assessment in language programming: from theory to practice. in r. k. johnson (eds.), the second language curriculum. new york: cambridge university press. brindley, c. (1989). the role of needs analysis in adult esl programme design. in r. k. johnson (eds.), the second language curriculum. new york: cambridge university press. soada idris khan an evaluation of technical report writing syllabus at the preparatory year program 8 crocker, t. (1981). scenes of endless science: esp and education. london: the british council davis, b. g. (1993). tools for teaching. san francisco: jossey-bass. eberly, m. b., newton, s. e., & wiggins, r. (2001). the syllabus as a tool for studentcentered learning. journal of general education, 50(1), 56-74. grunert, j. (1997). the course syllabus: a learningcentered approach. bolton, ma: anker. harmer, j. (1991). the practice of english language teaching. london: longman. hawkey, r. (1980). syllabus design for specific purposes: projects in materials design. london: the british council. ismagilova, l. r., & polyakova, l. r. (2015). the role of course evaluation and needs analyses for syllabus design: an application to “english language” course for master-degree students in economics. mediterranean journal of social sciences, 6(1s3), 346–351. jung, t., osterwalder, h., & wipf, d. (2000). teaching and assessing middle-year students’ speaking and listening skill: teaching and learning research exchange. retrieved from: http://www.mcdowellfoundation.ca/main_mcdow ell/projects/research_rep/52_teaching_assessing. pdf. mcdonough, j. (1984). esp in perspective: a practical guide. london: jo mcdonough. mcgrath, i. (2002). materials evaluation and design for language teaching. edinburgh. parkes, j., & harris, m. b. (2002). the purposes of a syllabus. college teaching, 50 (2), 55-61. reed, v. (1989). adolescent language disorders: general strategies for teaching language comprehension/listening. eau claire, wi: thinking publications. widdowson, h. g. (1983). learning purpose and language use. new york: oxford university press. woolcock, m. j. v. (2003). preparing a syllabus: practical exercises. the harriet w. sheridan center for teaching and learning brown university. retrieved from https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/sher idancenter/sites/brown.edu.about.administration.sheri dancenter/files/uploads/constructingasyllabus.pdf. yalden, j. (1987). principles of course design for language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_general_education/v050/50.1eberly.html http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_general_education/v050/50.1eberly.html http://ctlt.jhsph.edu/resources/views/content/files/69/purpose%20of%20a%20syllabus.pdf http://ctlt.jhsph.edu/resources/views/content/files/69/purpose%20of%20a%20syllabus.pdf english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee *english education study program, fkip universitas bengkulu, indonesia. 85 needs analysis for english grammar learning model from students’ perspectives wisma yunita* doctoral candidate in applied linguistics, postgraduate program, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail:wisma.yunita@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id emzir universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail:emzir.unj@unj.ac.id ilza mayuni universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail:ilza.mayuni@unj.ac.id apa citation: yunita, w., emzir & mayuni, i. (2018). need analysis for english grammar learning model from students’ perspectives. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 85-94. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1258. received: 25-02-2018 accepted: 28-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: need analysis is required to take place before developing a model for learning so that results meet the needs of the students who will use the model. this descriptive study aims at finding out the needs in learning english grammar from students’ perspectives at the eesp of the university of bengkulu. the data was taken through a questionnaire with 65 questions given to 44 students who took structure i course in the 2016-2017 academic year and analyzed quantitatively. the results of this study reveal that the students need a clear goals of learning english grammar, learning approaches that uses the story-based, the deductive, and the inductive approach, a friendly and meaningful learning atmosphere, a learning model that incorporates the uses of stories and current technology for the teaching and learning process and has a complete support system especially the learning materials, and has an attitude, a final assignment and an individual learning process result assessments. keywords: needs analysis, model, grammar learning. introduction needs analysis is an initial step conducted before developing a learning model and it aims at finding out the current condition of learning in a particular learning context. richards (2001) describe needs analysis as a process taken to seek for the real demands of the learners in a learning process. similarly, nation and macalister (2010) argue that needs analysis is a process to examine the current condition of learning from learners’ point of view. the process should be done by using instruments that hit straight to the needed information. as the initial step required in developing, take for example an instructional model for learning grammar, the information related to the students’ present knowledge (lacks), the required knowledge (necessities) and their subjective needs (wants) as proposed by nation and macalister (2010) should be known. this information can be gotten from the needs analysis which is required in developing an instructional model. dick, carey, and carey (2009) put this needs analysis at the second and third place, after identifying the instructional goal, in developing an instructional model for learning. several studies have been conducted by practitioners in english language teaching on needs analysis. however, those studies are mostly related to developing learning material for general english (cunningham, 2015; moiinvaziri, 2014; nooria, & mazdayasnab, 2014), english for specific purpose (yundayani, emzir, & rafli, 2017; bartnikait & bijeikien, 2017; boroujeni & fard, 2013; wismayunita , emzir, & ilzamayuni needs analysis for english grammar learning model from students’ perspectives 86 chovancova, 2014), language skills (andi & arafah, 2017; tjalla, et al., 2015; ulum, 2015) and syllabus (al hamlan, 2015). there is a study conducted in the area of grammar by fitrawati (2016), but it is not a needs analysis study for developing grammar learning model but for grammar learning material. the current study was a need analysis which was done in the area of grammar learning in order to develop a complete learning model that has the syllabus and lesson plans which are in line with the current curriculum in indonesia, and the learning material that matches the current condition of learning english grammar for indonesian university context. in indonesian context, english grammar tends to not getting as much attention in language learning as the language skills such as speaking or reading. in fact, grammar knowledge is important and needed in language learning and support the language skills. savignon (2001) named it grammatical competence and it is one of four communicative competence that the language users need in communication. this grammatical competence is needed more by students who take the english education study program as their major and will become future teachers of english. in further, the english grammar learning is still considered by students as a boring course (yunita, 2013) and the teaching process is mostly done in a conventional way by using the deductive approach. this approach, even though it is one basic approach to learning grammar, it is more teacher-centered and does not make the students arrived at acquiring procedural knowledge of grammar and be able to communicate well. it tends to make students to reproduce the same pattern of language and does not provide the place for more creative uses of language. meanwhile, nunan (2015) mentions that the teaching of english grammar should have four key principles so that it will be ended at a meaningful english language learning. the four principles for the teaching of grammar are: incorporating the integration of deductive and inductive approach, using tasks that make clear between grammatical forms and communicative function of language, focusing more on the procedural knowledge of using language rather than the descriptive one, and encouraging students to use language creatively rather than reproductively. these key principles in line with the grammar instruction that focus on form proposed by ellis (1997) that is a learning instruction that takes forms and meaning or fluency and accuracy into account. english grammar teaching and learning ideally should also be started from its basic knowledge. this basic knowledge covers the parts of speech or word classes (harmer, 2003) that consisted of nouns, verb, adjective, adverb, article and preposition, conjunction and interjection (parrot, 2004; dykes, 2007; de capua, 2008). once a learners master these parts of speech, they will have enough knowledge to communicate well in written and spoken. this is true to the fact that all texts in english mostly consist of those word class. to develop a learning model, there should be a theory that needs to be used as the guidance in the process of developing it. kilbane and milman (2014, p. 18) define models of learning as “specialized methods for facilitating learning”. in addition, joyce, weil, and calhoun (2009) suggest that a model of learning should have four components a syntax, a social system, principles of reaction, and a support system. the syntax is a general description of a model or how the structure of a model of learning. next, the social system is the condition or the atmosphere of a classroom learning that related to the roles of the teacher and the learners. then, the principles of reaction are responses shown by the teacher in responding the learners’ actions and learners in responding their teacher in a classroom learning process. last, the support system is materials or tools used by teachers in the teaching and learning process which can be in the form of a syllabus, lesson plans, and learning materials. in further, a learning model should also be developed in accordance with the steps of developing it. for the instructional model, dick, carey, and carey (2009) suggest these english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 87 ten steps to be followed so that the model can be used widely. these ten steps are used as the guidance in developing a grammar learning model and they are: 1) identifying instructional goals, 2) conducting instructional analysis, 3) analyzing learners and context, 4) writing performance analysis, 5) developing assessment instrument, 6) developing instructional strategy, 7) developing and selecting instructional materials, 8) designing and conducting formative evaluation, 9) revising instruction, 10) designing and conducting summative evaluation. based on the reasons related to the practice of grammar learning above, the theories of learning grammar, and to our knowledge, there is no research that has been carried out on needs analysis for developing grammar learning model, therefore, a study on needs analysis for grammar learning should be carried out especially from the students’ perspectives. needs analysis study designed scientifically to address the gap and develop a model that meets the learners’ needs for grammar learning in a foreign language context such as indonesia. method the current study aimed to reveal the needs for a grammar learning model from students’ perspectives. this descriptive study involved 44 students of the 2nd semester at the eesp, the university of bengkulu. the data was taken through a questionnaire consisted of 65 questions with four options (the most needed, needed, not yet needed, not needed) covering the goal of grammar learning, the syntax, social system, the material, the approach, the support system and evaluation of a model. the data from the questionnaire was analyzed quantitatively by using percentage formula. results and discussion the needs analysis results will be described based on the goal of grammar learning, the syntax, the social system, the material, the approach, the support system and the assessment uses in the model. the results of the numerical calculation from the students’ responses to the questionnaire indicate that the students need clear goals of learning english grammar, learning approaches that use the deductive, inductive and story-based approach, and a friendly and meaningful learning atmosphere. a learning model that also incorporates the uses of stories particularly indonesian stories or folktales, uses current technology for teaching and learning process, has a complete support system (the syllabus, lesson plans, and the learning material), and has the assessment that covering attitude assessment and clear final assignment assessment for the learning. a clear description of the needs analysis results will be explained in detail based on each part of the learning model attributes in the following sections. the goal of grammar learning the goal of learning is determined at the initial steps of developing a model. this is in line to dick, carey, and carey (2009) who proposed 10 steps of developing a systematic design of instruction model and determining the goals of learning is the initial step that needs to be taken. in terms of the goals of learning english grammar, the students point out that they need the knowledge on the goals of learning english grammar, the definition, position, function, and forms of the word classes, the tenses and the ability to use the word class and the tenses in english sentences. those results of the students’ needs in numerical are shown in table 1 below. table 1. the results of needs analysis on the goals of learning english grammar no. statement in your opinion, how important is each of these indicators in learning english grammar? percentage of needs category 1. the understanding of the goals of learning english grammar. 97.73% needed 2. the understanding of the definition of a word class (e.g. noun, verb, etc.) in english grammar. 100% needed wismayunita , emzir, & ilzamayuni needs analysis for english grammar learning model from students’ perspectives 88 3. the understanding of the types of a word class in english sentences. 100% needed 4. the understanding of the position of a word in english sentences. 100% needed 5. the understanding of the function of a word in english sentences. 100% needed 6. the understanding of the changing function form of a word (e.g. the changing form of a word from a noun to an adjective) in english grammar. 97.73% needed 7. the understanding of the changing form of a regular or irregular verb into a noun in english grammar. 97.73% needed 8. the understanding of the tenses on english grammar. 97.73% needed 9. the ability to use various types of words in english sentences. 97.73% needed 10 the ability to use various tenses in english sentences. 100% needed this finding somehow implies that the students do aware of the need to learn english from its basic knowledge the parts of speech or word classes and the english tenses. both of them can be said as the foundation of materials of english grammar that need to be mastered before the other rules in english grammar. this is due to the fact that in a sentence, in a paragraph, in a text or even in a book, the parts of speech will be the most frequent words to be found. they exist in every sentence. the syntax (the steps of learning) the syntax of a model is the structure or the steps of learning in an instructional model. the students’ responses results show that they prefer to be taught by using the steps of learning in the story-based approach with its four steps. then, followed by the deductive approach -an explicit instruction that requires students to practice using the rules after the teacher taught them the rules, and inductive approachan explicit instruction which requires students to establish their own comprehension of the grammar rules from given examples (ellis in jean & simard, 2013). the results of those students’ responses on the syntax of the model are described in detail in the following table. table 2. the results of needs analysis on the model syntax (the steps of learning) no. statement percentage of needs category in your opinion, are the following steps of activities in an approach important in the process of earning english grammar? 1. deductive approach with the following learning activity steps: a. presentation: students listen to the teacher’s explanation of english grammar rules. b. practice: students do the english grammar exercises in a book or a learning module. c. production: students write an example of their own english sentences and present it to other students in the class. 93.18% needed 2. inductive approach with the following learning activity steps: a. presentation: students are introduced to english grammar rules through examples of the language use in sentences. b. practice: students find out the grammar rules and try to understand the rules by themselves. c. production: students write new english sentences by using the rules they have learned. 93.18% needed 3. story-based approach with the following learning activity steps: a. presentation: students listen to a text (short story, legend, anecdote, or conversation) that have the grammar rules, for instance, the parts of speech rules. b. attention: students find out and try to understand the parts of speech individually or in a group and highlight the rules. c. co-construction: students construct explanations on the rules they have learned from the text and get help from the lecturer if it is 97.73% needed english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 89 this result which puts the story-based approach in the first position among the choices, taught grammar rules through four phases namely presentation, attention, co-construction and extension (adair-hauck & donato, 2010) and uses texts (e.g. short story, legend, anecdote, or conversation) as the materials for learning the language rules. the students’ preferences to be taught by using the stories could probably because they have accustomed to being taught by using stories in their high schools through a genre-based approach which is currently applied in indonesian curriculum in high school level. the next two approaches they are in favor of are the deductive approach and inductive approach. in deductive approach, the students are usually fed by the teacher with explanations on the grammar rules and inductive approach in which the students should find out the grammar rules from examples given to them (nunan, 2005; nesic & hamidovic, 2015). the deductive approach is somehow time-saving for the teacher in teaching process but it limits students’ participation and creativity in the learning process and given no opportunity for critical thinking as well as (nesic & hamidovic, 2015). meanwhile, the inductive approach makes the lesson being learned more memorable for the students but it is time-consuming (hinkle & fotos in nesic & hamidovic, 2015) and may bring frustration for the students who commonly preferred to be told the rules (nunan, 2005). the social system the social system is the interaction activities taking places between the teacher and the students (t-s interaction, s-t interaction) and among the students (s-s interaction) in the learning process, for instance, getting chances to ask for the teacher helps if the students encounter problems in understanding the grammar rules, getting motivation and clear instruction and feedback on their learning from the teacher, and getting the chances to use the learned grammar rules through conversation with other students. in the interaction during the learning process, the teacher and the students’ play their own roles. the teacher can be the motivator, the facilitator, and evaluator of the learning, meanwhile, the students’ roles are mostly as the learners in the learning process in which they, for instance, will do discussion, conversation and ask a question to their teacher or other students in the classroom. the students’ responses related to t-s, s-t and s-s interaction are shown in the table 3 below. table 3. the results of needs analysis on the social system of the model no. statement percentage of needs category in your opinion, do the following roles of the teacher and the student important in the process of teaching and learning english grammar? 1. the lecturer gives explanations on the learning goals. 90.90% needed 2. the lecturer motivates students in their learning (motivator). 97.73% needed 3. the lecturer facilitates the learning so that the learning goal can be achieved (facilitator). 100% needed 4. the lecturer evaluates the students’ learning and provides feedback on their learning results (evaluator). 100% needed 5. the students do a discussion with their peers to understand the learning materials. 88.64% needed 6. the students with their peers work together in doing the grammar exercises. 77.27% needed 7. students do conversation with their peers by using the grammar rules they have learned. 100% needed needed. d. extension: students use the rules they have learned in activities that are integrated (e.g. writing a conversation, a drama or a short story) so that the activities can ignite students’ creativity and independence. wismayunita , emzir, & ilzamayuni needs analysis for english grammar learning model from students’ perspectives 90 8. the students ask the lecturer if they encounter problems in understanding the learning materials. 100% needed the table above shows that the highest percentage of responses from the students are; 1) for teachers, as the facilitator and evaluator of the learning process; and 2) for the students, as the ones who do discussion and ask questions whenever encountering problems in the learning process. this results could be predicted to come out because somehow, commonly the teachers do have those roles in a classroom and the students do too. these roles of the teachers and the students are in line with richards (2005) who states that in this era of communicative language teaching the roles of a teacher are more as the facilitator and monitor of a learning process while the students are the doer who actively participates in the learning and responsible for their own success of learning the new language. the learning approach in a new language teaching and learning process, a teacher will definitely use an approach or a method for the learning. in this needs analysis study, the approaches or methods that are included to be the options in the questionnaire are the deductive and inductive approaches (chalipa, 2013), the story-based approach (adair hauck and donato, 2010), product-based approaches the text-based learning and the competency-based learning, and process-based approach -the content-based learning and the task-based learning (richards, 2005), project-based learning (bender, 2012 cited in amaros and dos santos, 2018), and problem -based learning (ng chin leong, 2009). the results of the students’ responses on the needs analysis of the approaches for the learning model are presented in table 4 below. table 4. the results of needs analysis on the approach for the learning model no. statement percentage of needs demand in your opinion, do the following approaches needed in learning english grammar? 1. deductive approach the lecturer gives explanations on grammar rules and then ask students to do grammar exercises in a book or module. 90.90% needed 2. inductive approach the lecturer gives examples of the language uses and students work by themselves to understand the grammar rules. 90.906% needed 3. story-based approach the lecturer reads a story for the students and ask them to catch, for example, nouns from the story.next, the students highlight the nouns in the story, try to understand the grammar rules in a group and prepare an explanation of the rules they found, then use the rules they have learned through writing a conversation or a short story. 97.73% needed 4. text-based learning the lecturer introduces a text, students find out the text structure, create a new text and connect the text which has a similar structure. 79.54% needed 5. competency-based learning learning english for a specific competence and result of learning-oriented. 86.36% needed 6. project-based learning -an english learning which demands students to do a project, for example making a video of conversation in english. 79.54% needed 7. content-based learning learning english which focuses on specific topics or information. the grammar, vocabulary, and language skills are designed related to the topic. 84.09% needed 8. task-based learning learning english which focuses on tasks (pedagogical tasks and real-world tasks). 72.72% needed 9. problem-based learning learning english by giving students a problem to be solved collaboratively, monitored by the lecturer and the students are assessed based on their performance in solving the problem. 86.36% needed english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 91 based on the table, it can be summed up that the highest percentage of option from the students’ responses was the story-based approach, meanwhile, the lowest one is the task-based learning. this result shows that the students are in favor of being taught by using stories. this might be caused by their familiarity with stories which is in line with the implementation of genre-based approach in the high school curriculum in indonesia. in further, the lowest responses from students were the task-based learning, which could probably be less preferred because the students are afraid of being given a lot of tasks during the learning process. in fact, richards (2005, p. 33) states that “advocates of tbi argue that grammar and other dimensions of communicative competence can be developed as a byproduct of engaging learners in interactive tasks”. the support system the support system of a model is the material or the data the teacher utilizes in a learning process (joyce, weil & calhoun, 2009) which can be in the form of a syllabus, lesson plans, and the learning materials. the students’ responses related to the support system of the model are illustrated in the following table. table 5. the results of needs analysis on the model support system no. statement percentage of needs category in your opinion, do the use of these sources, media, and tools for learning needed in the process of learning english grammar in structure i course? 1. the syllabus and lesson plans 97.73% needed 2. lcd projector 100% needed 3. laptop/netbook 100% needed 4. tape recorder 81.82% needed 5. video player 77.27% needed 6. speaker laptop 95.45% needed 7. internet connection 95.45% needed 8. social media ‘facebook’ 52.27% needed 9. teacher’s book 93.18% needed 10. learning materials for students that are designed by the lecturer himself. 95.45% needed 11. commercial learning material for students 88.64% needed 12. learning materials that have english grammar exercises 97.73% needed 13. learning materials from grammar learning websites on internet. 72.73% needed 14. learning materials of english grammar that are compiled from many sourcebooks 95.45% needed 15. supplementary material/handouts 84.09% needed the table above shows that the students need the learning media or technology that usually used in a teaching and learning process in a classroom for instances the lcd projector, laptop and laptop speaker that got the highest percentage of responses from the students. it implies that the students need the process of learning a new language that does not only use chalks/board markers and black or whiteboards, but they also need the current technology for the learning process. this technology could enhance the learning experiences, provide more experiences and access to the language being learned (larsen-freeman & anderson, 2011). related to the material for learning, the students point out that they need the learning materials that have grammar exercises and are compiled from many sourcebooks. this finding implies that the students possibly aware of the broad scope of grammar knowledge so that they need to learn it from the exercises and many sourcebooks. the materials for learning the materials for learning are topics to learn in the teaching and learning process. for english grammar learning materials, especially wismayunita , emzir, & ilzamayuni needs analysis for english grammar learning model from students’ perspectives 92 the basic knowledge of english grammar, the common ones usually refer to english tenses. however, learning the tenses can be included in the learning of parts of speech or word classes (harmer, 2003: dykes, 2007). the following table 6 will illustrate the results of needs analysis on the materials for learning english grammar that the students need. table 6. the results of needs analysis on the learning materials no. statement percentage of needs category in your opinion, how important are the following materials in the process of learning english grammar in structure i course? 1. nouns (e.g. abstract, concrete, singular, and plural nouns). 97.73 % needed 2. verbs (e.g. infinitive, present participles, past and past participles). 100% needed 3. adjectives (e.g. common, possessive, comparative and superlative adjective, etc.). 100% needed 4. adverbs (e.g. adverb of time, manner, frequency, places, etc.) 97.73% needed 5. articles (e.g. definite ‘the’ and indefinite ‘a’, ‘an’) 93.18% needed 6. prepositions (e.g. prepositions of movement ‘from, into, across, etc.) 95.45% needed 7. pronouns (subjective ‘she’, objective ‘me’, possessive pronounmine, etc.). 93.18% needed 8. conjunctions (e.g. and, but, or, for, so, either..or, not only…but also…, if, until, etc). 93.18% needed 9. english tenses (e.g. past, present, continuous and future). 97.73% needed from those students’ responses above, it can be seen that the highest needs from the students’ point of view are the verbs and the adjectives then followed by nouns, adverbs, and english tenses. this finding could be understood because the parts of speech that have many rules to be understood are the verbs, the adjectives, the nouns and the adverbs. in addition, the english sentences, grammatically at least have to have a subjectmostly nouns, and a predicate in the form of verbs or auxiliary verbs (chew & choy, 2009). meanwhile, the english tenses are parts of the language that are usually considered difficult for english language learners particularly in the context of english as a foreign language. this tenses actually can be included in the process of learning the verbs. the assessment of learning assessment refers to any actions taken to gain information on the result of the students learning performance. brindley (2001) highlights that it can be in the form of tests or any ways of activities or tasks given to students in assessing learning in a course. the result of the students’ responses to the types of assessments and tests they need in grammar learning are displayed in table 7 below. table 7. the results of needs analysis on the assessment of learning no. statement percentage of needs demand in your opinion, are the following assessment/test needed in the process of teaching and learning english grammar in structure 1 course? 1. assessment of attitude (honesty, obedience, responsibility, self confidence, etc.). 100% needed 2. assessment of learning participation during the learning process. 95.45% needed 3. informal assessment by observing the students’ grammatical mistakes during the learning process. 90.90% needed 4. assessment of the individual learning process result (e.g. doing the exercises) 97.72% needed 5. group work result assessment 90.90% needed 6. weekly assignment assessment 88.63% needed 7. final assignment assessment 100% needed 8. discrete point test (partial assessment of the english grammar by 86.36% needed english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 93 using multiple-choice items) 9. oral and written elicitation test on a partial part of english grammar. 79.54% needed 10. error analysis test. 93.18% needed 11. closed-ended test (multiple choice, information gaps activities, transformation, matching sentences, rewriting sentences and revising sentences) 90.90% needed 12. open-ended test (completing sentences and writing sentences in english). 86.36% needed 13. translation test. 88.64% needed table 7 above illustrates that in terms of learning assessment, the highest percentage of responses are given by the students to the attitude assessment and a final assignment assessment. meanwhile, for the test, they prefer to have an error analysis test. their fewer preferences are the tests in the form of oral and written elicitation tests. this finding shows that the students’ awareness of the importance of attitude in learning is still highly appreciated. hence, it can be inferred that the students are still aware of the important roles of attitude in the teaching and learning process in indonesian educational context. this attitude component exists in the current curriculum being employed in all indonesian educational context. in addition, they also regard final assignment as one important part of the whole process of learning. this is probably due to fact that they think the roles of final assignment will give greater contribution to their final scores of the course they took. conclusion this present study set out to determine the students’ needs in learning english grammar at the eesp of the university of bengkulu. it has shown that the students need clears goal of learning english grammar, learning approaches that uses the story-based, the deductive, and the inductive approach, a friendly and meaningful learning atmosphere, a learning model that incorporates the uses of stories and current technology for a learning process in a classroom and has a complete support system especially the learning materials, and has an attitude, a final assignment and an individual learning process result assessments. further research regarding the need analysis on grammar learning in a wider context involving more students from more universities would be a great help for the improvement of english grammar teaching and learning in an efl context such as indonesia. references adair-hauck, b., & donato, r. (2010). using story-based approach to teach grammar. in j. l. shrum & e. w. glisan (eds.), teacher’s handbook: contextualized language instruction (4th ed.). boston: thomson heinle. andi, k., & arafah, b. (2017). using needs analysis to develop english teaching materials in initial speaking skills for indonesian college students of english. the turkish online journal of design, art and communication (tojdac), special edition, 419-436 boroujeni, s. a., & fard, f.m. (2013). a needs analysis of english for specific purposes (esp) course for adoption of communicative language teaching (a case of iranian first-year students of educational administration). international journal of humanities and social science invention, 2(6), 35-44. brindley, g. (2001). assessment. in r. carter & d. nunan (eds.), the cambridge guide to teaching english to speakers of other languages. cambridge: cambridge university press. chalipa, s. 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(2014). a triangulated study of target situation needs of iranian undergraduate students of english language and literature. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 98, 1374-1379. nunan, d. (2005). practical english language teaching: grammar. new york: mcgraw hill. nunan, d. (2015). teaching english to speaker of other languages: an introduction. new york: routledge. parrot, m. (2004). grammar for english language teacher. cambridge: cambridge university press. richards, j. c. (2001). curriculum development in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. richards, j.c. (2005). communicative language teaching today. singapore: market asia distributors pte ltd. savignon, s. (2001). communicative language teaching for the 21st century in marianne celce-murcia (eds), teaching english as a second or foreign language (3rd ed.). boston: heinle and heinle. tjalla, m., akil, m., hamra, a. & haryanto. (2017). the analysis of efl students’ needs for writing materials development. international journal of science and research (ijsr), 6(8), 313-317. ulum, o.g. (2015). a needs analysis study for preparatory class elt students. european journal of english language teaching, 1(1), 14-29 yundayani, a., emzir, & rafli, z. (2017). need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 59-70. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.771. yunita, w. (2013).using task-based language teaching (tblt) to improve students’ mastery of english tenses at the english education study program of universitas bengkulu. proceeding of the 60th teflin international conference, 2013. 41(4 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 33 preponderant modality in students’ engaging argumentative essays marwito wihadi department of linguistics, faculty of cultural science, universitas padjadjaran, indonesia e-mail: marwito16001@mail.unpad.ac.id eva tuckyta sari sujatna department of linguistics, faculty of cultural science, universitas padjadjaran, indonesia e-mail: eva.tuckyta@unpad.ac.id apa citation: wihadi, m., & sujatna, e. t. s. (2019). preponderant modality in students’ engaging argumentative essays. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 33-40. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.1930. received: 07-09-2019 accepted: 15-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: expressing modality in appraisal is cordially expected to be prevalent in argumentative writings in that writers in the engagement system set up negotiation or alternative points of views. three conveniently selected student-writers’ hortatory argumentative essays in english in which they were courseinstructed in an accredited language institution were linguistically analyzed as to pinpoint their aptness to employ particular modality, furthermore to discuss the feasible resource factors on their employment. it was found out that they were prone to be lack of commitment as they delivered their stances, therefore attempting the readers to be engaged in an argumentative discourse to construe the meanings. subsequently, they had difficulty in manipulating epistemic and deontic modality, owning mundane syntactic constructions and imparting limited device ranges. therefore, applicably explicit genre-based instructions are in the need, bearing in mind the factual functions of modality in arguability of the utterances as well the resourceful linguistic features of modality. keywords: appraisal; engagement; modality; argumentative; essays. introduction there have been a number of research on modality in which they investigated its employment and how writers used it to evaluate, adopt stances, and express attitudes on their particular value positions (biber, 1999; mcenery & kifle, 2002; kong, 2006; qun, 2010). writing in hortatory exposition genre, an argumentative essay, feature appraisal devices, for instance semantic realizations of modality recurrently, are worth expecting to occur numerously (martin, 1989). modality, a resource for presenting the degree of probability, usuality, obligation and inclination, is notified as an essential strand in appraisal (martin, 2000). this study textanalyzing three argumentative essays was aimed at pinpointing modality employed as learners completed a seven paragraph hortatory essay in one of full-fledge language institution. pursuing them linguistically, it was intended to find out the scatter of its use in practice and to impart probable reasons for current combined classifications of modality (halliday’s and palmer’s) that writers/learners utilized in the reality. modality refers to as saying the world of realities, the speakers judge the probabilities or obligation in them (halliday, 2000). it is considered that modality and polarity are closely related in which they are inseparable in the mood system; polarity is “the choice between positive (yes) and negative (no)”, later modality has something to do more with “intermediate degrees” between the positive and negative poles, such as sometimes or maybe (halliday, 2000). the mere distinction halliday’s modality system relative to study is modalization: probability and usuality, and modulation: obligation and inclination. sensibly, modality is employed as construction of social relationship as well as recognized by communication parties as in an appraisal: a system of interpersonal meaning to evaluate, adopt stances, and express attitude, alongside resources for amplifying and engaging with these meaning (martin, 2000). stances that the speakers or the writers adopt primarily rely on the modality employment. in a similar vein, it is relative to one of social language functions, namely interpersonal meta-function in which its meaning is delivered in a modality system delicately. in so-doing, ‘meaning-potential’ mailto:marwito16001@mail.unpad.ac.id marwito wihadi & eva tuckyta sari sujatna preponderant modality in students’ engaging argumentative essays 34 denoted in proposition is possibly doubted or contradicted, affirmed or denied, insisted on or accepted with reservation. as an important strand in appraisal, in essence, modality used indicates attitudinal resources, a source of negotiation and a sign of heteroglossia. the study of mood and modality in typological way was much fundamentally undertaken by f. r. palmer, emphasizing the lexical forms of modality and diverse modal expression across languages (palmer, 2007). in a broad sense, on the basis of his previous research, it is pointed out that two major classifications of modality: propositional modality, comprising epistemic and evidential modality and event modality, making up deontic and dynamic modality. epistemic modality deals with the writers’ commitment, in divergent levels, that they put on their proposition expressed in their writing. furthermore, it is indeed obviously relevant that they produce the language normally (coates, 1983). it is being concerned with how they asses or assume the possibilities, in most cases, indicating their confidence as well as lack of confidence in the truth that they take for granted (coates, 1983). likewise, it is shown that epistemic modality is concerned with the speaker’s “judgments about factual status of the preposition”, whereas evidential modality reflects “the evidence” the speaker has for its “factual status” as exemplified in the up-coming examples: perhaps this book will be useful (propositional; epistemic; judgment), and he is said to be extremely rich (propositional; evidential; evidence) (palmer, 2007). on the other hand, event modality makes up: (1) deontic one accounting “obligation or permission” – a force from external world, and dynamic modality delivers the “ability or willingness”one of the inner feelings. let’s see the following utterance examples: jhon must come in now (deontic; external conditions) and mary can speak french (dynamic; internal conditions) (palmer, 2007). writing an argumentative essay, a hortatory type for an instance, expects the student-writers to corroborate the importance of both language competence and rhetorical skills in expressing their arguable propositions. to contribute the quality of their argument, modalities is one of the crucial elements, apart from claim, grounds, warrants, backing and rebuttals (toulmin et al., 1979 in mcenery & kifle, 2002). in fact, it is argued that negotiating views and qualifying claims at a suitable commitment grade is substantially bailed out as the writers’ mastery of epistemic devices is profound (long, 1995). such appropriate requirements are of difficulty to be applicably attained by both native and non-native ones, though (holmes, 1988 in mcenery & kifle, 2002). despite this fact, expository, argumentative, essays should contain ample numbers of modality expressions with various semantic realization (reilly, zamora & mcgivern, 2005 in kong, 2006). regarding typology of argument genres, it is proposed that there are four argument genres construing the reflection of both the writer’s purposes as and his/her argument about the world: analytical exposition genre, hortatory exposition genre, analytical discussion genre and hortatory discussion genre (coffin, 2004). genre itself is termed as grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations (hyland, 2007). in details, the term “analytical” is divergent from “hortatory” in that the earlier is an exposition persuading the readers that the thesis is adequately stated, and the latter is an exposition encouraging the readers to execute as the thesis formulated (martin, 1985 in promwinai, 2010). socially “exposition “genre, additionally, is set up to aim at persuading the readers to a particular point of view where the social goal of a discussion is to hold up two or more points of view not mention to argue for one point over the others. the four arguments constitute different phases in accordance with their purposes, accordingly. likewise, the hortatory exposition generates its own goal to impart a point of view and recommend a course action as well as comprise a typical staging: thesis (recommendation) + argument plus evidence + (counterargument plus evidence) + (reinforcement of thesis) + recommendation (coffin, 2004, p. 236). explicitly presented coming along with its elements, rhetorical structures for an argumentative essay are detailed as follow: (1) thesis makes up (gambit), (information), proposition, (evaluation) and (marker); (2) argument comprises marker, (restatement), claim and support; (3) conclusion owns (marker), consolidation, (affirmation) and (close) (hyland, 1990). in sfl tradition, thesis stage is labeled “elaboration” phase, the optional marker in the stages is termed the “preview” phase, and an obligatory marker in argument stage is referred to the “hyperclaim”. modality, appraisal theory and a particular genre of english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 35 argument in an essay, therefore, are more or less adequately elaborated. method the study was a descriptive-qualitative employing the researcher to interpret the real data to construe their meanings (creswell, 2009). essentially, this was one of three-dimensional frameworks for discourse study, namely textanalysis stemming from critical discourse analysis in which language is critically viewed as a form of social practice (fairclough, 1995; janks, 1997). one of the core techniques to collect and analyze the data is the content analysis enabling researcher to study human behavior in a direct way, i.e. the analysis of communication forms: (argumentative) essays (fraenkel & wallen, 2009). in addition, the text was analyzed to depict the employment of modality in three convenient argumentative essays-seven paragraph ones-pursued by three intermediate students in 2 a term writing course as one of their final completion level in a language course. the only three argumentative essays entitled being a single parent: gains behind grief, powerpoint as a reliable friend to study, and the risk on young children in about 3000 words completed in about 2 months in midst of high intermediate level completion course as researcher’s own construction of corpora were designed so that the institutional context in non-formal settings was appropriately addressed (paltridge, 2006). the participants, high school students aged 17 years old, had undergone writing conferences conducted outside of their class responding to meet the minimal quality standard before being presented in front of their classmates and their teacher and a language supervisor at the end of the course as one of written test fulfillment. particularly, to employ the classifications of modality, halliday and palmer’s ones were, as theirs are overlapped, intentionally incorporated so as to construct four types of modal expressions displayed in the below table. however, it was also essential to be come complete with an outline the semantic realization of modality (martin, matthiessen & painter, 1997, p. 70). table 1. modality classifications classsification function modal expression group epistemic modality probability perhaps e1 usuality usually e2 deontic modality inclination can, might d1 obligation must, have to a2 the above collaborated modality classification was inspired by the study conducted by qun (2010), still relevant to this study originating from two broad typologies promulgated by halliday and palmer. then, finding out the complexity of modality structure that the writers realized was then figured by referring the exhaustive sketch. the method of analysis was initiated to focus on the body of the essays, the argument stages in which they held up hyperclaims to support writers’ proposition (the 2nd-6th paragraphs) to read a number of times in order to grasp the writers’ stance that was intentionally stated in and its supporting clauses; mere sentences having clausal structures as well as contributing to maintain and develop stance were sorted to be both modality and semantic realization analysis. they were tallied as stanceenhancing clauses, thus included in total clause count differed from non-functional ones. certainly, the text should be writer’s goaloriented and readers intended-effects so that any parts of the text, the clauses, are excluded from the linguistics analysis; they are not contributive to the central purpose (palsmaekers, braecke, & geluykens, 1998 in qun, 2010). the selectcounted clauses were then scanned of the modality and their semantic realizations. results and discussion natures of modality prevalence relative with the first purpose of this study, the three essays were five-times read to grasp the nuances of writers’ conveyed stances in depth. in spite of prior examined by their instructors, it was necessary that any ill-supporting clauses logically of no arguability towards the macrotheme as well as hypertheme be deliberately discarded. the encountered kinds of modality after being well comprehended, scrutinized and classified as follow. marwito wihadi & eva tuckyta sari sujatna preponderant modality in students’ engaging argumentative essays 36 table 2. the tapestry of prevalent modality group number of occurrences percentage e1 43 39.81% e2 8 07.41% d1 36 33.33% d2 21 19.44% e1= epistemic modality (em) probability e2= epistemic modality (em) usuality d1= deontic modality (dm) inclination d2 =deontic modality (dm) obligation it was found out that the clauses containing epistemic modality in which the writers conveyed the probable arguments denoted by their propositions was predominant over the three other modality types (39.81%). the writers still thought of other alternatives that the readers perceived towards their stances. in further analysis in depth, it was will asserting probability encountered preponderant, dominating to deliver the writers’ viewing of possibility of ‘factual status’. as a matter of fact, under the heading em probability, will outnumbered the other modalities, such as can, it is possible, there is a possibility, certainly, etc. it covered 58.13%, while can, perceived denoting possible upcoming states/conditions, was on the second place at 29.91%. it was, moreover, pinpointed that the writers more or less neglected the basic function of may related to possibility (swan, 2006). it was an interesting fact that the altered function of will intentionally replaced can in which the writers lowered their commitment level, thus yielding less arguability of stances. similarly, referring to the term arguability, the use of epistemic modality to report claims in an academic argument or in an argumentative essay is one of the features that have been explored in research articles written by nnes scholars, which did not achieve the conventions of required discourse communities in various fields of study or disciplines (he & wang, 2013; ngula, 2017). will itself functions as prediction (make predictions that are not completely certain or definite) as in “gas prices will drop soon” or volition (express immediate decisions or intention) as in “and then i’ll take you home to get it” (beiber et al.,1999). subsequently, may and can respectively have functional meanings to possibility (expressing agent’s doubt in the truth of proposition or slight possibility) or permission (refers to present or future time when used to ask for permission or to make a polite request and giving permission to the agent) and permission (evidence of some condition that determines whether an agent is or is not permitted to do something) or possibility (express the degree to which something is possible: inanimate noun/dummy it + can + linking verb + adjective/ noun phrase; or inanimate noun + can + main verb) expressed in spoken and written modes (beiber et al.,1999). the l2 writers’ confusion to ascertain the precise functions of (epistemic and deontic) modalities as putting forward the arguability of stances definitely occur, in congruent with their delicate comprehension in that the same modals at times are employed to express divergent functions, such as that of “probability”, “possibility” and ‘certainty’, and of “inclination”, “ability”, “permission” and “obligation’. it was affirmed that malaysian learners were disclosed to be uncertain about which modals to make use of expressing modality in their clauses, possibly easy to be figured out in the inaccurate employment of modals at the levels of semantic in particular (khojasteh & rainer, 2013). additionally, advanced iranian efl learners were interpreted that they were competent to use some modals due to the fact that several meanings were overly used (like “ability” meaning of can) and some of them were not really like the “possibility” meanings of can and could; as modals’ interpersonal meanings were not fully grasped, they might deal with problems in social circumstances, like convincing their stances over interlocutors (torabiardakani, khojasteh, & shokrpour, 2015). in a similar vein, referring to metaphorical realizations of mental clause and/or attributive clause, such as i think and i guess (explicit subjective), it is possible and it is certain (explicit objective), such clauses were rarely come across due to the fact that there were two clauses identified, that was it is possible and there is a possibility, rarely found in learner corpus (qun, 2010). similarly, the usage of adverbs functioning as modality of probability was much barely taped: there were only two adverbs (adjuncts) recognized, namely probably and english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 37 certainly. it is possibly drawn into conclusion that they lacked of repertoire of semantic realizations of modality, particularly mental and attributive clauses as grammatical metaphors, i.e. expressions as well as linguistic negligence of fundamental function of may and adverbs. it was probable that one of the principles of stages in genre-based course design, genre sample analysis, was overlooked (hyland, 2007). pedagogically advocated, the inclusion of devrim’s intergraded model shall be taken into account. this is integrated sfl-inspired martin and rose’s genre theory, bernstein’s sociology of education and vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, particularly focused on how students develop their grammatical metaphor, among other things metaphor of modality (devrim, 2015). afterwards, the employment of em usuality was the least in number, just reaching 07.41%, displaying a surprising fact: mere two adverbs of usuality (adjunct, mood), usually and always and methaporical realization of usuality was not of prevalence. in addition, in line with the deontic modality (dm) inclination, it was the second most frequent modality activated by the writers to argue their propositions (33.33%) in which can was the most often used one, achieving 72.22%. it was obvious that adverbs (adjunct/mood) and metaphorical realizations (mental and attributive clauses) of inclination didn’t prevail at all, whereas two predicators of inclination were encountered, be inclined. interestingly, could whose tone is to negotiate proposition occurred only once. it functions as possibility, expressing the degree to which something was possible, exemplified in “that could be her or it could be anything you choose” (beiber et al., 1999). it was identical in chinese learners’ argumentative essay in a corpus, proven it is not yet acquired in their interlanguage (qun, 2010). concerning dm obligation, it was shown that it reached 19.44 where should dominated in its use (71.43%). the other dm modality must was counted 19.05%, the 0.95% of have to. the deliberate use of adjuncts, predicators (congruent realizations) and metaphorical realizations was not functionally manipulated. the word think semantically serving as probability in i think was not vividly located in the texts, even discerned to delegate the responsibility of the writers’ arguments to other parties, such as some parents think, parents think and many people think, without any profound stance-enhancing references. rationale of prevalent modality critically analyzing the data findings, some perspectives were purposely referred. modalities like will and can as elements of grammatical metaphors, i.e. interpersonal metaphor of modality, were frequently used in the three argumentative essays. they comprised 69 tokens over 108 (63.88%). especially referring to can, this finding was similar to previous corpus research (qun, 2010; torabiardakani, 2015). its overuse was owing to two probable reasons: (1) it is attained by the learners easily that can is followed by base forms of verb; and (2) possibly, it deals with learners’ ego to begin their ability to write a long enough essay in l2 (qun, 2010). in addition, the writers, as considering their frequently used indices of stance reflected by can, imparted the commitment about a person or proposition in the appraisal system referred; hence, they can align or misalign the stance taker with another person or proposition (biber et al., 1999). in other words, taking a stance (writers’ arguments) via metaphors of modality is one of the essential things people do with words (du bois, 2007 in gales, 2015). in line with the stance, the writers were unlikely get aware of various repertoire of transmitting the authority of the authors’ as well as demanding the credibility, and engagement, through its sub-category, namely entertainment ‘– a sub category of engagement in appraisal system can and will’, is the required instrument entailing readers. then, it prompts co-agents of the discourse in an interactive, in this case, argumentative genre. related to linguistic metafunction, interpersonally stance is the foci of language aspect, realized through strewn linguistics markers, modality for an instance, in a text – an essay (martin & rose, 2003). pertaining bahktinian’s (1986) sense, every “utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterance,” hence the writer simply attempted to be engaged with the presence of the readers (speakers) by anticipating their alternative point of views. no utterances are classified into monolossic or heteroglossic, accordingly. however, the heterogloss use of can and will denoted the possibility of being dialogically expansive or entertain in that a range of potential opinions are possibly available regardless of how strong they are committed to particular viewpoints (martin & white, 2005). feasibly, the excessive employment of modality can and will relative to the insights of the polyfunctionality of modal markers, marwito wihadi & eva tuckyta sari sujatna preponderant modality in students’ engaging argumentative essays 38 seemingly geared by the complex communicative strategies of the speaker/writer and their coparticipants. as for speakers/writers, it is observed that in verbal dialogsm via the composed text, where participants are attempting to achieve simultaneously the goals of (a) saying something on the topic under discussion; (b) being sensitive to the face-needs of the various addressees; (c) qualifying assertions to avoid total commitment to a point of view which they may want to withdraw from; (d) qualifying assertions to encourage the flow of discussion; (e) creating cohesive text, then it does not seem feasible to conclude “this form expresses x and that form expresses y” (coates, 1983; voloshinov, 1995). the writers took the above aspects of dialogism into consideration, retrieving their surviving level of modality metaphor at hand. obviously encountered in the argumentative essays, it was feasible for them to have difficulty in expressing the semantic realizations of modality in further than finites (can, could, might) as the other parts of realizations (adjunct(mood)/adverbs), predicators, mental clauses and attributive clauses were barely localized in the texts. the prevalent fact possibly rested to explicit teaching on such modality as stated that learners should have the knowledge of “what is socially and culturally appropriate in terms of the writer roles, audience expectations, rhetorical and stylistic conventions, and situational or contextual features of written” (reid, 1990). in other words, it is argued that it is supposed to be promulgated in the course design (hyland, 2007; kong, 2006). according to devrim (2015), an integrated model shall be pedagogically cultivated as a rhetorically oriented approach to teaching grammatical metaphors like that of modality. likewise, an integrated model positions the metaphor of modality within english as a second/foreign language (esl/efl) contexts and concentrates on the text types – argumentative genre, for example, that diverse cohorts that occurred in the study were required to compose. juxtaposing the modal expression, it was notified that the frequent appearance of deontic modality was a bit higher than that of epistemic modality. this was then explained by sweetser’s cognitive perspective confirming that deontic modality is the root of modality whose semantic extension is epistemic one; hence, deontic modality acquisition and exercise is easier than epistemic modality one. moreover, learners who are exposed to particular language will build cognitive systems that can be activated any time when a stimulus is provided. this issue relates to the fundamental notion in second language acquisition: automaticity-linguistic knowledge and restructuring-internalized representations as a result of new learning (gass & selinker, 2001). in other words, exposure to the various metaphor of modality as an input in a specific writing genre ought to be ample, then followed up by meaningful metafunctions so as to pursue the application of certain linguistic features, turning into intake activated later on given situations. such interaction, therefore, indeed promotes the language acquisition substantially so that language aspects are linguistically and socially developed. the more recurrent interaction that entails cognitive and social domains, the better the language performance of the use of modality and the nearer to second language acquisition are. the discussed research findings shall be, subsequently, wrapped up to infer. conclusion critically analyzing the discourse on the three argumentative-hortatory-essays, it is succinctly drawn a conclusion that in general deontic modality is slightly higher in frequency than epistemic modality. the monotonous use of finite modals is overused and scattered in the texts, highlighting the fact that other semantic realizations of modality are overlooked, or much probably not yet adequately exposed so as to get acquired by the learners. furthermore, the solid insights of metaphor of modality are not well ingrained, leading the confusion employment in context. dialogism sense corroborates the low level of arguable stances, while considering participants’ potential viewpoints. on the other side, finite modals may and might are less favored to be employed, voicing writers’ realization of probability and inclination. exposing further functions and realizations of modality in a specific genre meeting discourse community features and conventions, then exercising them in the real contexts is in the need of applications in explicit genre-based teaching in the integrated model on-line and tutor-assisted to promote metaphor of modality. acknowledgement i thank lpdp (lembaga pengelola dana pendidikan) for financial support and prof. dr. eva tuckyta sari sujatna, m.hum. for academic supervision. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 39 references biber, d., johanssson, s., leech, g., conrad, s., & finegan, e. 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(1995). marxism and the philosophy of the language. translated by l. matejka & i. r. titunik, cambridge, ma: harvard university press. http://www.uv.es/gimenes/recursor/criticaldiscourse.pdf http://www.uv.es/gimenes/recursor/criticaldiscourse.pdf http://hdl.handle.net/10497/495 http://www.reserachgate.net/publication/3 marwito wihadi & eva tuckyta sari sujatna preponderant modality in students’ engaging argumentative essays 40 i english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee developing students’ knowledge from the results of scaffolding in english teaching diah gusrayani department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesia email: gusrayanidiah@yahoo.com apa citation: gusrayani, d. (2014). developing students’ knowledge from the results of scaffolding in english teaching. english review: journal of english education 3(1), 31-40 received: 13-10-2014 accepted: 20-10-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: some issues of the difficulties of teaching english in indonesia have significantly revealed and analyzed by some researchers (nurweni, 1997; moedjito and harumi, 2008) and the issues have provoked some studies to anchor several solutions for teachers to consider (supriadi and hoogenboom, 2004; thalal, 2010). in indonesia, the issue has also been thoroughly investigated. this paper attempts to reveal the problems of teaching english experienced by 2 junior high school teachers in sumedang along with the alternative solution namely scaffolding concept which has been widely investigated and believed as appropriate tool mediation for children to learn english with particular difficulties hampered: culture, teachers’ background, quantity and quality of teaching and similar causes (vygotsky, 1962; tudge, 1992; stone, 1998; kong, 2002; donovan and smolkin, 2002). this concept of scaffolding is considered in this research as a bridge to a better understanding of the requirements of curriculum 2013 that students have to possess knowledge (k3) specifically factual, conceptual and procedural knowledge having experienced the learning. as students are conditioned to achieve these skills: remembering, understanding, implementing, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating and producing, at that pinpoint the presence of scaffolding concept in english teaching is an inevitable strategy to be applied. keywords: scaffolding, students’ knowledge (k3), curriculum 2013, tool mediation, metacognitive. introduction issues of teaching english in a cultural context as a case of indonesia have been widely investigated by some researcher (erlenawati, 2002; bradford, 2007; cahyono and widiati, 2008). same topics have so long been a concern to many researchers all over the world started from the influence of different cultures affect students’ mastery of language (li, 2004; baker, 2003; chen, 2006; englebert, 2004; nault, 2006; yanpu, 2004; darren, 2006 in faridi, 2008) to the impact of different sociocultural background to different learning strategies and different results in language learning (lengkanawati, 2004; erlenawati, 2004; astini, et. al, 2002 in faridi, 2008). these issues reveal not only indonesian students’ difficulties in learning english but also teachers’ difficulties in teaching english. the causing factors come from both the teacher and the students. the problems originated from students’ characteristics in their learning, that they are often shy, silent and passive (exely, 2005); unreflective (pikkert and foster, 1996); adopt memorization that they tend to adopt what teachers note down in the blackboard (lengkanawati, 2004); motivated only by immediate needs diah gusrayani developing students’ knowledge from the results of scaffolding in english teaching (bradford, 2007). the problems rooted from teacher are various. socioeconomic factor that teachers are among the underpaid profession in indonesia (jalal, et.al, 2009) so that they have to double shift their earnings by doing, too often, low status occupation. this kind of life cycle impact their quality of teachings (supriadi and hoogenboom, 2004) and even their attendance at school (thalal, 2010). english teachers in indonesia also experienced ‘malpractice’ as it is in medical term, that they ‘did not undertake sufficient educational degree (firman and tola, 2008). more than 60 percent of the total 2.78 million teachers did not hold undergraduate degree in education (thalal, 2010). this has becoming another crucial issue that can hamper english teaching and learning in indonesia. another problem comes from the tasks and learning materials. meanwhile tasks and learning materials should be carefully thought and selected by teacher as an adult whose assistance is prominently needed in teaching young learners (mcdevitt and ormrod, 2002), many indonesian teachers ignores the fact (gusrayani, 2011). the selecting and leveling of the teaching materials, designing the teaching steps and evaluating the whole performance are activities included in the design of lesson plans. teachers find students are dissatisfied of their language learning (li, 2004; baker, 2003; chen, 2006 in faridi, 2008), students master language competence faster and more accurate as they are mingled with sociocultural issues (englebert, 2004; nault, 2006; yanpu, 2004; darren, 2006 in faridi, 2008), students with different sociocultural background have different learning strategies and therefore achieve different results in language learning (lengkanawati, 2004; erlenawati, 2004; astini, et. al, 2002 in faridi, 2008). the consideration of choosing the tasks, teaching materials, teaching strategy, teaching tools and many others is one significant factor contributes to what could simply be described as good teaching. teacher is the most prominent actor in its execution. how teacher could provide adequate support in order to enable students to learn effectively, deals with tasks, strategies, teaching materials that facilitate students to move towards new skills, concept or understandings. but, as hammond (2001) pointed out that the support and assistance should be also designed to ‘help learners to work with increasing independence—to know not only what to think and do, but also how to think and do, so that new skills and understandings can be applied in new contexts. knowledge is constructed in the midst of our interaction with others and is shaped by the skills and abilities valued in a particular culture (vygotsky, 1978). the vivid picture of how knowledge is constructed with the help of others is the illustration of parents and their children. parents shape the skills and abilities of their children since earlier stage of life by talking to them. children learn how to do simple thing like producing alphabetical sounds to a more complex one as problem solving, by the assistance of their parents, peer or adults around them. children solve problems by their speech as appropriate as they do with their hands. they talk aloud indicating the beginning of thinking process. as they grown up, it is internalized as part of their repertoire of strategies for problem solving. language helps children be strategic in their english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee approach to complex problems (vygotsky, 1962). hammond et.al (2001) argues that children are influenced by their parents, peers, and adults in developing their language which supports their thinking. the interaction between a child and his parents, peers and/or adults provides feedback and assistance that supports ongoing learning. it finally forms the basis of the understanding that eventually become internalized in the individual. from this point of view, there are 2 main points drawn about how learning occurs. first, learning becomes real when there is assistance from others. second, interaction between a learner and his surrounding becomes very prominent, so the quality and quantity of the interaction should be assured. the scaffolding concept that will be elaborated below is framed by this twofold. since the term scaffolding was coined in 1976 (earlier than zpd concepts), there has been a great deal of discussion and debate about what the concept of scaffolding actually means. many experts assume that scaffolding is an operational term for zpd. zpd is defined as a distance between two levels of child’s performance: the lower level that reflects the tasks the child can perform independently and the higher level reflective of the tasks the same child can do with assistance. zpd is the distance between students current and potential development. vygotsky assumes that learning takes place before development. connection between learning and development: what develops next (proximally) is what is affected by learning (through formal or informal instruction). consequently, the concept of zpd is only applicable to development only to the degree in which development might be influenced by learning. in the area of zpd, scaffolding falls into practice. the assistance of adults in children’s zpd awakens and rouses to life the mental capacities of learners of all ages (tharp and gallimore, 1991). scaffolding is no longer associated with interactions between individuals only. these days, artifacts, resources, and environments themselves are also utilized as scaffolds (puntabekar & hubscher, 2005). put differently, scaffolds can consist of tools, strategies, and guides which support students so that they can achieve a higher level of meaning making; one which would be impossible if students worked on their own (gale, stewart, & steel, 2007; vygotsky, 1978). hotlon and clarke (2006) propose more concrete tools be used as scaffolds. according to them, “scaffolding may also be provided in book form, over the internet, by telephone, and so on” (p. 130). more importantly, scaffolding can be provided through supplying hints, prompts, probes, simplifications or other similar learning supports (ronen & langley, 2004). in terms of practice, some theorists propose ideas of put the concept into practice. mercer, et.al (2004) proposes to implement scaffolding, teacher should consider this. 1. children can be enabled to use talk more effectively as a tool for reasoning; 2. talk-based activities can have a useful function in scaffolding the development of reasoning and scientific understanding; real teaching, according to tharp and gallimore (1991) is understood as assisting the learner to perform just diah gusrayani developing students’ knowledge from the results of scaffolding in english teaching beyond his/her current capacity. a teacher who stops by a student’s desk to ask questions to determine her progress and then provide hints, subtle suggestions, and guidance to move the students along, that is instructional scaffolding (hogan, 1997). meanwhile, roehler and cantlon (1997) argue that scaffolding can also be performed as teacher offer explanations, invite students’ participation, verify and clarify students’ understandings and model desired behaviors. learners are given the opportunities to act like they know how to complete a task before they actually do (rommetveit, 1978). scaffolding developed to help students internalize information and it best occurs where the learners have opportunities to communicate their thoughts. teacher should converse the students and vice versa. martin (1985) suggests that a good conversation is neither a fight nor a contest. circular in form, cooperative in manner, and constructive in intent. it is an interchange of ideas by those who see themselves not as adversaries but as human beings come together to talk and listen and learn from one another. the knowledge required from the students covers three domains: process, object and subject. students are urged to have these specific competences: know, understand, apply, analyze, and evaluate. the range of knowledge students has to mingle in such a way that represents their competence is: factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive. for the level of elementary school and junior high school, the level of knowledge students should acquire is factual, conceptual and procedural. curriculum 2013 with its scientific approach urges teachers to create students’ self-strategy in learning by facilitating them with various real life experiences. teacher demonstrates many actions instead of merely explaining. at this pinpoint, teacher hold significant role in creating assistance to the students meanwhile at the same time teacher is obliged to establish students’ individual initiative to learn many things so that at the end they can analyze, synthesize and evaluate their learning. teacher should ensure that students are significantly assisted so that they can continuously grow and make progress even one step from what they have already known. this is called scaffolding. teacher should think of any possibilities that create movement of the students from their assisted performance to their individual one. an important aspect to effective scaffolding is that teacher should understand and develop the timely support. teacher needs to plan and provide support at the point of need. no need to be excessive yet it can scaffold students in the knowledge that they have already seen factually, achieved conceptually, performed procedurally and analyzed in a metacognitive way. this is how students are urged to be leveled in 2013 curriculum. the research is specifically designed to answer the questions: (1) how teachers understand and perceive the concept of scaffolding?; (2) how is the scaffolding concept reflected in their teaching? (3) in what way does the scaffolding concept help or hinder students from their language mastery? method considering the objective of this study that is to reveal teacher’s understanding and perception on scaffolding concepts and the reflection of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the concept in their english teaching as teacher builds students’ knowledge i decide to conduct a mixed method studies where the qualitative component had priority and the researchers identified themselves primarily as qualitative researchers (brannen, 2005). creswell (1998: 15) argues that qualitative research needs interpretive and naturalistic approaches to the subject matter and multiple sources of information. this research will be a case study because the characteristics of genre are embedded in a certain community communication. since the research will typically describe an entity and the entity’s action, the how and why the entity acts as it does, this research took case studies as the method qualitatively (thomas, 2003). the entities investigated are the teaching (process and product). a case study in qualitative research requires a natural setting and purposeful sampling (creswell, 1998:14, 62; maxwell, 1996: 70-71; miles and huberman, 1994: 27). the general aim of this study is to explore and describe the reflection of scaffolding concepts in the teachings of english in junior high schools in sumedang along with their teaching practices. investigation were drawn upon teachers in terms of their understanding on the concept, how they implement it in their classroom teaching and how they perceive it. the results were framed and discussed in the light of curriculum 2013. given this objective, it is imperative to find junior high schools in sumedang that has implemented or trained the teachers with curriculum 2013. it is critical also to consider that the schools have facilitated the teaching with supportive teaching materials sufficient and relevant to the subject matters to support the english teaching activities to their students. it is considerable also—to certain amount— to involve teachers who have been actively participated in some improvement programs in teaching english for sumedang district at least. having considered above reasoning, the participants of this study are two teachers who have been reviewed thus far based on the requirements. they were interviewed, observed, and requested to be engaging and mingling into the establishment of the new model of scaffolding teaching. their opinion, assumption and teaching practices were triangulated with interview, questionnaires, observation, focus ground discussion and other necessary instruments. they interviewed purposely and had their english teaching observed thoroughly. the process were carefully recorded and documented. mixed method and qualitative research needs multiple techniques to collect data from multiple sources (creswell, 1998). in general, the data were taken from the following techniques. the data were collected through both questionnaires and interview. the questions asked were about scaffolding concepts: how far teacher understands the concept, apply and perceive it in curriculum 2013? questionnaires were given first, and interview was served as the confirmation and elaboration of what had been sounded in the questionnaire. the data to answer this question were collected from classroom observation, field note and interviewing teachers and students. the data were triangulated and collected thoroughly and continuously guided by some purposively designed formats. the diah gusrayani developing students’ knowledge from the results of scaffolding in english teaching interview was targeted to teachers and students and structure of interview is subject to change accordingly. the points to which teachers reflect scaffolding in particular ways were deeply elaborated. the data were gathered from classroom observation triangulated with interview and test results. the interviews were conducted both to the teachers and the students. having observed the teaching, the teacher was asked about the scaffolding they have planned and implemented and how significant it is to help students’ mastery. the framing of the questionnaire was: does the concept help the students in acquiring new skills or the opposite? how far and significant does the help or hinder created? how can it help or hinder students and why? what is the reasoning? the interviews were continued with discussion. interview to students was in regard to their impression during the teaching. whether or not they were helped by the teaching were elaborated. test results were also analyzed to support the opinions. results and discussion teacher’s understanding and perception about scaffolding both teachers were interviewed with several open questions regarding their understanding about scaffolding and whether they perceive the concept empowering or the opposite. teacher a explained that he heard the scaffolding term written in many scientific books. it is written mostly in a positive encouragement, as in the title of the book. nevertheless, he admitted that he did not aware about the meaning and the ‘magical effect’ it has on the teaching. he thinks that that scaffolding might be associated with a good teaching. this is relevant to what hammond (2001) says that assume scaffolding as good teaching is common among teachers. teacher b is the opposite of teacher a. she understood the concept, believed it as a good teaching strategy and even was able to mention the theorists. teacher b thinks scaffolding is what a teacher should learn and apply. reflection of scaffolding in the teaching teacher a the observation was conducted twice for two meeting schedules, each of which has 2x35 minutes. the very prominent artifact used by the teacher as the scaffold is the slides projected contain some pictures which were very attractive and familiar to the students. explaining the date and time, the teacher brought the real birthday date of the famous celebrities students were well recognized. students were very enthusiastic and they tried hard to answer each of the question proposed by the teacher, as their eyes were glued to the pictures. even one student which is firstly failed on answering correctly, tried to re-answer by requesting the teacher to play on the picture of the celebrities she likes. the slide has successfully attracted their attention and forced them to think harder. this kind of assistance falls into students’ mental capacity (tharp and gallimore, 1991, gale et. al, 2007). unfortunately, there is rarely framed another meaning-making strategy used by the teacher as it should be able to work with, as to teacherstudent talk (merceret.al, 2004). the students have not given enough time and space to use the tool for reasoning, that is, a talk. teacher provides almost all answers if they failed to point it english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee correctly. meanwhile, students’ participation whether they are answering or correcting others, that is a crucial thing teacher need to boost and invite, as it is a ‘useful function in scaffolding the development of reasoning and scientific understanding (ronen and langley, 2004). teacher rarely used understandable hints, probes or simplification. he often showed hints by nodding his head or pausing. students were less directed to understand the ‘subtle suggestions and guidance to move along’ (hogan and pressley, 1997) and ‘frame the intended meaning’. after explanation in the first 10 minutes, students were not provided by ‘point in need scaffolding’ as suggested by hammond (2001) that students were not only prompted to their mistakes but also invited to clarify themselves of what they are thinking at that time being and guide those thinking into the correct path. for example, one student mispronounce the date and month in reverse, the teacher reacted only by shaking his head instead of guiding by sentences like: ‘what did you say again? which one is the date? are you sure? is month more than 12 in a year? so 15 means? a month or a day? this is what martin (1985) argues as ‘conversation’. teacher should converse his student. circular in form, cooperative in manner, and constructive in intent; this is a desired model of explaining things or examples. if students do not ‘talk’ his mind ‘aloud’, it would be difficult to measure the beginning of the thinking process because no correction, assimilation, or accommodation of the new learning (vygotsky, 1978). teacher b the teacher also performed two teachings in different days, with the same minutes. she applies task division in teaching reading. she selected two different reading texts. as i interviewed before she started the class, she argued that the two texts has different level of difficulties. the first one is easy; the second one is a bit difficult. it is performed in purpose so that the students ranging from lower to upper level of competencies can be measured and appropriately treated. this assistance reflect ‘contingency’ in scaffolding (hammond, 2001) in which teacher assures students’ recent capability in order to move along to one step higher. teacher tried to give an anchor for all the students by giving them the easier one to depart on students zone of proximal development (zpd) and later on landed on students farthest zpd (brunner, 1984). at this point, teacher made simplification as her teaching support (ronen and langley 2004) and provided the students with something to trigger their potential development. teacher also communicates well; performed a lot of interactional scaffolding by providing many teaching media beside the textbook. the media are then successfully played the role as teaching catalyst (tharp and gallimore, 1991). the interaction between teacher and students were clearly patterned as the teacher seized the students’ answer and used them to develop their higher thinking ability. the teacher used point in need scaffolding (hammond, 2001). for example, as the teacher asked: t: so why she (the main character) felt so sad? s: because she lost her earrings (pausing)..err..and..but.. diah gusrayani developing students’ knowledge from the results of scaffolding in english teaching t: yes? but what? s: but also her husband did not care about that… t: about her? about her earring? or what? s: about her lost. not the earring. the lost. her lost. her husband ignore. t: her husband ignored the fact that she lost her earrings? that what makes her so sad do you think? s: yes. the effect to students’ understanding teacher a and b can actually move along the path of students’ further distance of their zpd by the scaffolding applied. teacher a, with the interactivity built by the slides, the pictures, the vivid explanations (roehler and canton, 1997), his stopping in each student’s desk (tharp and gallimore, 1991) has already succeeded in building students’ mental capacity (gale, 2007) as students were attached and concerned. students moved from remembering to understanding level of conceptual knowledge. they rarely moved from their chair, yet their mind moved the higher point. nevertheless, the level of knowledge the students reach was still in conceptual phase. teacher b, with her skillful interactional scaffolding and teacher’s talk has also succeeded in developing students’ internalized and strategic way of thinking. she has also created a conducive learning atmosphere. she brought the students from the level of remembering to applying. teacher moved around and mingled with the students, the interaction gave meaningful contribution to the mastery of the learning. students reached procedural knowledge level as they are asked to make their own text and successfully made it with significant themes and development of the themes. conclusions in the class where teacher a taught, students are mostly less capable of answering questions from the textbook and the teacher. even if they can answer, the level of understanding measured is in the point of remembering the fact and understanding the issue. those who are able to analyze further were only five persons. but some of the students, who were initially shown less interest and understanding, were able to catch their outstanding students finally. class tended to be quiet, even if the teacher asked, they looked very reluctant to answer. the hesitation of the teacher to give sufficient assistance or to lead the path for the students to move along create the hesitation for the students to answer almost all questions. some of the students were scaffold, but most of the rest were only stayed there, in their previous condition. in teacher b’s class, the atmosphere tended to be pleasurable. even though not all of them can answer the questions correctly, they looked distressed, they learned happily. students who were initially given the easier task can also finish the more difficult ones at last. teacher knew when to scaffold and when to let them go. but still, both of them were applied scaffolding techniques in their teaching and succeeded in lengthen their students’ zpd. references bradford, a. 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(2020). understanding learners’ need of esp for accountancy program at vocational school. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 273-282. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2002. received: 18-01-2020 accepted: 28-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: the main objective of vocational high school (smk) is to prepare learners to specific job. at this school, learners are trained the major skills as well as the supportive skills. language, in this case english, must support the hard skills for the communication at work. however, based on the preliminary research, most teachers use general english as teaching materials. hence, this study aims to describe the learners‘ target need of learning english at accountancy program at vocational high school and to identify english skills needed by students of accountancy program. there were 124 evelenth graders involved in this study which consisted of students of smk 2 purworejo and smk 1 wonosobo. to obtain the data, a questionnaire was used. the findings showed that 63.8% of the students want to look for a job after graduated, while 36.2% of them want to continue their study. further, speaking is the most important skill and vocabulary related to the technical terms are needed by students. another necessity is the availability of textbook containing esp materials to support learners to develop their communication skill. keywords: esp; learning need; need analysis; smk; target need. introduction the 21st century skill framework is popular with 4cs including critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and creativity and innovation (forum, 2018). learning international language particulary english is related one of the important skills in global communication. the language is used in communication at work for sharing thought, asking questions, conveying ideas and giving solution. communication skills are related to the term communicative competence in learning a language which cover four competence as it is explained by canale and swain as cited in calce murcia & olshtain, 2000, p.16 there are (1) linguistic and grammatical competence which consists of basic elemens of communication: sentence patterns, morphological inflection, lexical resources, and phonological system; (2) sociolinguistic competence, which consists of social and cultural knowledge require to use language appropriately such as formality, politeness; (3) discourse competence, which involves the selection, sequencing, and arrangement of words, structure to achive a unified spoken or written whole with reference to a particular message or context; (4) strategic competence, which includes the strategies and procedure relevant to language processing and production. it activates knowledge of other competencies and help the language users compensate for gaps and deficiencies in knowledge when they communicate. in the basis of these communicatice competence the language learners must be exposed to the use of language aspects in various contexts in different language events. to achieve a good communication skill, institution must have an appropriate curriculum and instruction. as this study is focuses at vocational high school, the school must have curriculum sets including the syllabus and materials which are needed by prospective graduates. related to the act of the republic of indonesia no. 20 of 2003 on national education system article 15 as cited in mahbub (2018) states that vocational education is secondary education program for preparing learners for a specific job. to respond this statement, vocational high school should provide the english skills which related to the specific skill achieved by the gradutes. however, up to now in practice, there are no differences of english syllabus which used by senior high school and vocational high school.the materials contained in the syllabus of english subject are taught to students of senior high school and vocational high school. this matter, semi sukarni understanding learners’ need of esp for accountancy program at vocational school 274 in fact, had been emphasized in kusni, syaamawi and refnadi‘ finding that english for vocational high school students should be carefully redisigned and reconsidered before it is widely used throught the nation. related to sukarni‘s research finding on need analysis viewed by english teachers at vocational high school it was found that all teacher in the study taught english by using textbook that was required by government based on 2013 curriculum namely bahasa inggris sma/ma/smk/mak written by kementrian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. the content of the book is general english, it is not specifically written for vocational school. the general english does not specifically promote learners with language skills needed in the prospective work (sukarni, 2019). similar research finding showed that the teaching materials in vhs was not appropriate with the concept of esp because it was too general, it didn’t close to the students’ field study (ronaldo, 2016). general english, henceforth (ge) is different from english for specific purpose, henceforth (esp). esp involves teaching and learning specific skills and language needed by particular learners for particular purpose-a set of skills that learners currently need in their work or will need in their professional career, whereas, ge is aimed at a very wide range of learners (day & krzanowski, 2011). the different between esp and ge or general english language teaching, (henceforth general elt) in term of external and internal goals for language teaching, cook as cited in (basturkmen, 2010). external goals is related to the uses of language outside the classroom. internal goals relate to educational aims of the classroom. esp teaching generally more concerned with external goals. in esp learner engaged either in academic, professional or occupational pursuits. meanwhile esp according to dudley-evans and st john as cited in (basturkmen, 2010) focuses on when, where and why learners need the language either in study or workplace contexts. decisions about what to teach, or how to teach are informed by descriptions of how language is used in the particular context where learners will work or study. in order that the teaching materials in esp syllabus meet with the learners‘ need in the prospective work, need analysis must be carried out. need analysis is the process for the course developer to investigate what the learners need to know or be able to do in the targetr language in order for them to be able to use the language effectively in the chosen profession, work or study area (basturkmen, 2013). richards, (2001) had emphasized the purpose of need analysis, among them are to find out what the language skills a learners needs in order to perform a particular role, such as sales manager, tour guide, accountant, engineer; to identify a gap between what students are able to do and what they need to be able to do. related to the purpose, hutchinson & waters, (1991) as cited in nation and macalister (2010) divide needs into target needs (what learner needs to do in the target situation) and learning need (what learner needs to do in order to learn). the target needs include necessities (what necessary the learners‘ use of language), lacks (what the learner lacks) and wants (what the learners wish to learn). the need analysis must be carried out in order the course developer has information about the learner need to construct an english for specific materials. it is done commonly using questionnaire and interview to elicit the perception of learner needs as seen by stakeholders such as (learners, teachers and employers). the result of need analysis are generally used to determine the objective for the esp course and to specify the sequence of instruction or content (language, tasks, activities, and skills) to be covered in the course. need analysis is seen as a key process in the development and revision of language for specific purpose (lsp) as emphasized by dudley-evans and st john (1998), baturkmen and elder (2004) and kim (2008) in basturkmen (2013). she further explains that course developer investigates what learners need to know or be able to do in the target language in order for them to function effectively in the chosen profession, work or even study. a need analysis for students of accounting may indicate that the learners need to be familiar with vocabulary on topical areas such as loan and asset management and written genre such as financial statements and market reports and will need to draw on linguistic skills such as making notes while listening to telephone. these all to make the most of their accountancy studies (basturkmen, 2013) several studies had carried out need analysis to determine the course contents for esp in higher education such university in kusnawati (2017); lee (2016); peodjiastuties and oliver, (2017); suyadi (2015) studies but limited studies conducted in treshold level or vocational high english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 275 school. there were few studies such as kardijan, emzir, & zaenal rafli, (2017); khusni, syamwil, & rifnaldi, (2014) and mahbub, (2018). however, none of the three studies focused on esp for accountancy program at treshold level. lee’s and poedjiastuti and oliver’s study explored the perception of esp course in university level. the difference is that lee‘s study only involved the students perception of esp course, while poedjiastuti & oliver involved the stakeholders which included employers, teachers and students. the finding suggested on the important and useful of esp course for the future job and the stakeholders acknowledge the important of english as global and international language. earlier studies on need analysis for esp for accountancy in higher education did by kusnawati (2017) and suyadi (2015). these studies involved the students of accountancy program. the difference between the two studies were that kusnawati’s study explored the students‘ perpective on their target and present english needs, while suyadi’s study aimed at improving materials for accounting program needed by students. the result suggested the target communication needs were english conversation skills for social interaction, whereas, their occupational disciplinary need was accounting terminology mastery. meanwhile, suyadi (2015) had suggested that the students of accounting program need a special materials in learning english which has relationship with study program of accountancy: reading, vocabulary and writing report. need analysis should be done by multiple stakeholders which include teacher, students, the current/future employesrs, the administration of the educational institution, etc. in designing the course syllabus as it emphasized by huhta et al. as cited in chovancova (2014). sice there were no earlier studies as far as the writer found focusing on the need analysis of esp for vocational high school for accountancy program viewed from the learners, this study aims: (1) to describe the learners target need of learning english at accountancy program of vocational high school; (2) to identify english skills needed by students of accountancy program. method the research belongs to qualitative research. it also belongs to exploratory research as the writer explored the information about target needs which include necessities, lacks and wants and learning needs. the result of the need analysis can be used to develop a new syllabus and finally a new textbook which meets with the learners‘ needs. this study was conducted at the chosen vocational high school (vhs/smk) business and managemen in purworejo and wonosobo regencies of central java. the participants were the students in accountancy program of the eleventh grade. questionnaire was used to collect the data about the need analysis viewed from the students. the questions in the questionnaire covers both closed-ended and open-ended questions. an openended question requires participants in any way that they please and provide primarily qualitative data. on the other hand, closed-ended question requires participants to choose limited number of responses which are predetermined by the researcher and it primarily provides quantitative data (johnson and christensen, 2012, p. 169). there were 12 likert-scale items to obtain the data on lack and 1 item on necessity and three items/open-ended questions. a four-point likert scale response includes strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. thematic data analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data about the learners’ needs for esp teaching materials. descriptive quantitative data was used to analyze the quantitative data by using descriptive statistics in a form of simple percentage calculation for the item analysis. results and discussion learners‘ target need of learning english to explain about learners‘ target need of learning english, there were three questions had to be answered by the students. the questions were related to the importance of learning english viewed by the learners; the sequence of the important language skills viewed by the learners and the sequence of the important language aspects viewed by the learners. the findings from research data were presented below. target need for learning english viewed from the learners the target need for learning english here means the learners’ reason for learning english whether they learn english for preparing further study in higher institution or for looking for a job after the learners graduate. the finding is presented in the table below. semi sukarni understanding learners’ need of esp for accountancy program at vocational school 276 table 1. target need for learning english viewed from the learners no target need for learning english total percentage (%) 1 preparing for further study 45 36.2 2 looking for a job 79 63.8 124 100 table 1 shows the comparison of the number of students for the reason of learning english. it shows that looking for a job is more than preparing for further study (63.8 >36.2). it shows that students in vocational school tend to have aim to work rather than to further study. it implies that the content of the english teaching materials needed by students of vocational school is not only general english (ge) but also materials which are related to the working situation in the future job, in this case is esp related to accounting or financial matters. if the schools only teach students with ge, it means that they only accommodate the students who want to continue studying in higher institution, however, they do not accommodate the students who want to work after graduate. the sequence of the importance of language skills needed by learners the second point about the target need is related to the sequence of importance of language skills which include listening, speaking, reading and writing which is needed by learners. in the learners‘ view which language skill they think is most important among four skills, which one the second, the third and the fourth. this information is important in order to provide learning experience which skill should receive emphasis than other skills which related to the learners‘ need. the finding is presented in the table below. table 2. the sequence of the importance of language skills needed by learners no language skill total percentage 1 listening 22 17.7 2 speaking 69 55.6 3 reading 20 16.1 4 writing 14 10.4 124 100 table 2 shows that the most important language skill needed by learners is speaking as it is seen that speaking has the highest percentage compare to other skills. it is possible that the learners had an assumption that speaking is for communication with other people particularly in working situation. it is seemed that the learners had already known that communication is needed for the prospective graduates in relation with one of the 2st century skills related to 4cs 21st century skills framework. however, communication skills here which refering for sharing thought, questioning, conveying ideas and giving solution is not only practice in speaking but also in writing. at the same time to be able to speak well, learners have to be exposed with listening in order for the graduates meet the job requirements they need to learn and practice during vocational school education. this finding support the earlier research finding from kusnawati (2017) that the target needs was english conversation skills for social interaction. the sequence of the importance of language aspects the third point is about the target need related to the sequence of importance of language aspects which include vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation which is needed by learners. the researcher would like to know, in learners view which one they think is the most important or urgent among the three language aspects. as this information is also important to provide learners learning materials which meet with the learners‘ need. the finding is presented in the table below. table 3. the sequence of the importance of language aspects needed by learners no language aspects total percentage % 1 vocabulary 71 57.2 2 grammar 37 29.8 3 pronunciation 16 12.9 124 100 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 277 table 3 shows that the most important language aspect needed by learners is vocabulary. this answer related to the answer for the most important language skill – speaking. the learners had already had assumption that in order to able to communicate in english, the learners need to have large number of vocabulary and the frequent practice in speaking. this is the resason why vocabulary is the most important. this finding supports the earlier research finding from kusnawati (2017) about the need of accounting terminology or technical term of vocabulary. however, other aspectsgrammar and pronunciation are also important. without the language three aspects learners cannot involve in english communication either active or passive. the three questions had given information about the target need viewed by learners. this information is important for the stake holders of vocational school educationl in order to provide learning materials which are needed by learners in order to meet the future need. as it related to the lenard and pintaric‘s study on students and employeers and it resulted that it was imperative need for communicative competency at the workplace. it is advised that schools design and implement a specialized course aiming to develop listening, writing, teamwork and presentation skills (lenard & pintaric, 2018). the lacks in the present textbooks used by vocational high school there are some questions in the questionnaire which try to analyze the textbook used at present by vhs students in order to understand real condition about the textbook. the information is presented below. table 4. questionnaire result of students’ response of textbook quality no statement teacher response (%) sa a d sd 1 english textbooks for smk in general relevant to the students’ need of english 18.5 36.2 43.5 1.6 2 the exposure in textbook is very relevant. 13.7 40.3 45.2 0.8 3 the content of vocabulary in textbook is relevant to the students’ skill 16.1 38 42.7 3.2 4 the content of grammar related to the students’ skill. 4 42.7 50 3.2 5. communicative expressions in textbook is related to the students’ skill 18.1 36.2 44.3 3.2 6 reading text in textbook is related to the students’ skill 13.7 40.3 42.7 3.2 7 context for speaking practice in textbook is related to the students’ skill. 16.1 38.7 43.5 3.2 8 textbooks contain various learning activities. 18.1 36.2 46.7 0.8 9 learning activities provided make students participate actively. 16.1 32.2 50 1.6 10 textbooks contain various evaluation types including authentic assessment. 13 33.8 51.6 1.6 11 textbooks stimulate students to learn english according to their skill. 16.1 16.1 50 3.2 there are eleven questions for textbook analysis which asked about the condition of textbooks that used at vhs at present viewed from the students. the students had to give response to 11 items related to quality of the textbooks used at present by giving response strongly agree (sa), agree (a), disagree (d) and strongly disagree (sd). based on the data analysis it was found that the percentage of response disagree (d) had highest among other responses, particulary strongly agree (sa) or agree (a). question 1: english textbooks for smk in general relevant to the students’ need of english. there were 45.1 % students answer in disagree. it means that the textbook at present is less relevant to the students’ need of english in specific areas of accounting. question 2: the exposure in textbook is very relevant. there were 46 % students answer disagree. it means the exposure in textbook is not really relevant to the target needs – for example the exposure related to the communication in the financial institution. semi sukarni understanding learners’ need of esp for accountancy program at vocational school 278 question 3: the content of vocabulary in textbook is relevant to the students’ skill. there were 45.9 % students answer disagree. it means many students feel that the content of vocabulary in textbook is less relevant to the students’ skill related to the technical terms used in accountancy. question 4: the content of grammar related to the students’ skill. there were 53.2 % students answer disagree. it means the majority of students feel that the content of grammar is not related to the students’ skill. in other words, the grammar which contained in the textbook is not relevant with the grammar/sentence construction for english for accountancy. question 5: communicative expressions in textbook is related to the students’ skill. there were 47.5 % students answer disagree. it means that many students think that the communicative expressions in textbook is not related to the students’ skills for conveying ideas, question and solution. question 6: reading text in textbook is related to the students’ skill. there were 45.9 % students answer disagree. it means many students feel that reading texts in textbook are related to the students’ skills in accountacy for example text for explaining account, management accounting, job in accounting, etc. question 7: context for speaking practice in textbook is related to the students’ skill. there were 46.7 % students answer disagree. it means that many students think that the context for speaking practice in textbook is little related to the students’ skills in more specific field of accountancy. question 8: textbooks contain various learning activities. there were 47.5 % students answer disagree. it means that many students think that textbooks do not contain various learning activities for students to learn and practice english. question 9: learning activities provided make students participate actively. there were 51.6 % students answer disagree. it means that majority of students feel that the learning activities provided do not make students participate actively to develop their communication skills. question 10: textbooks contain various evaluation types including authentic assessment. there were 53.2 % students answer disagree. it mean that the majority of students think that the textbooks contain do not various evaluation types including authentic assessment such as performance, oral practice, port folio, etc. question 11: textbooks stimulate students to learn english according to their skill. there were 53.2 % students answer disagree. it means that the majority of students feel that the textbooks do not stimulate students to learn english according to their skill needed in the specific area of accountany. based on the analysis above it can be stated that the textbooks used at present are a bit far from what students expected. for example: the exposure, content of vocabulary, communicative expressions reading text, context for speaking practice and learning activities are not related to the speacific field of study-accountancy. based on the data analysis the lack in learning need shows that the quality of the published textbooks in the market which are used at present are not enough to provide the students communicative competence needed in the specific field of accountancy. as there are some weaknesses like irrelevant with the students’ skills in terms of vocabulary, context, grammar, functional expression, reading texts; lack of relevant exposure, less various evaluation types, less learning activities, unstimulated learning activities. this finding is in line with mahbub‘s research finding that the english teaching and laerning were lack of opportunity to develop oral communication skill, lack of quality textbook and small quantity of english related to the study program. this result is also in line with sukarni’s (2019) earlier research on textbook quality analysis viewed from teacher. the group of teachers in the study acknowledged the weakness of textbook used at present. the learner target need on “want“ a question in the questionnaire was given to respond the lack in the learning need by asking students to what extend they need of publishing a textbook containing esp. the students had response by either sa for strongly agree, a for agree, d for disagree and sd for strongly disagree. the calculation and percentage were made and presented in the chart below. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 279 figure 1. students‘ need of publishing textbook containing esp the chart shows the students‘ percentage of the want: to publish textbook containing esp with the highest response percentage on strongly agree (sa)= 54%, the agree (a) 44%. while response disagree was only very small portion = 2% and strongly disagree was none. if the response for sa and a is combined = 98%. it can be said that 98% students agree to have a textbook containing esp. it is in line with lee’s finding that 80% students thought esp course are useful for the future job. english skills needed by students of accountancy program the next questions of the learning need related to want was about the textbook items and skills needed by the students to respond to necessities. the respondens had to give a tick mark on the items provided by the author for the future esp textbook. the responden responses was counted and made into the percentage. the response was presented below. table 5. textbook esp items viewed by students no textbook items total response percentage (%) 1 contexts in the textbook contain situation used in english for accountancy program. 112 90 2 vocabulary related to in english for accountancy program. 119 96 3 it contained language expressions needed in working environment. 121 98 4 it contained grammar or text structure which are used in oral and written communication. 116 93.5 5 it contained various learner-centered learning activities. 91 73.3 6 it contained both formative and alternative assessment. 90 72.5 table 5 shows the response about the textbook items which are expected by students in the learning needs. based on the total response it shows the high percentage for each question in the questionnaire. it means to response the lack fond in the textbooks used at present. the students expected that the textbook for accountancy program contains (1) contexts of situation used in english for accountancy program; (2) vocabulary related to english for accountancy program; (3) language expressions needed in working environment; (4) grammar or text structure which are used in oral and written communication; (5) various learner-centered learning activities; and (6) formative and alternative assessment. in the second want analysis, the author provided materials and skills related to the accounting matters to provide the esp-content material for the vhs accountancy program. the students are assigned to give a tick mark for the skills and materials they think are appropriate to be learned in english in accountacy program. a calculation and percentage were made and presented in the table below. sa 54% a 44% d 2% sd 0% students' need percentage of publishing textbook containing esp semi sukarni understanding learners’ need of esp for accountancy program at vocational school 280 table 6. esp materials and skills needed by accounting students no materials and skills percentage (%) agree percentage (%) disagree 1 understanding cultural diversity and socilizing 85 15 2 dealing with numbers 95 5 3 banking 100 0 4 accounting and financial statements 100 0 6 central banking and money 100 0 7 job in accounting 100 0 8 accounting principle 100 0 9 explaining account 100 0 10 tax accounting 100 0 11 management accounting 100 0 12 retail banking 100 0 13 foreign exchange 100 0 14 writing report 98.3 1.7 15 exchange rate 94.3 4.8 16 investment 99.2 0.8 table 6 shows the students‘ response about the materials and skills needed by the students of accounting program. based on the percentage in the table the least percentage of agree is 85% and the highest is 100%. it can be stated that the students agree with all topics offered by the author. the students believed that the topics must be learned and covered in esp-based textbook of accounting program. by learning these topics they will be exposed to the accounting context and situation, they will learn vocabulary related to accounting, practise language skills that have relevance with accounting. this finding is accordance with guerid and mami’s finding who suggested that the participants in their study who consisted of finance and accounting staff that esp should provide some topics like financial reports, accounting, auditing, etc., skills like reading and understanding financial report, grammar items like tenses, repoted speech, etc. and authentic and relevant materials like earning per share, account payable, dividents, etc. (guerid & mami, 2017). conclusion based on the finding and discussion, there are conclusion that can be drawn as follows. the target needs viewed by learners as the necessities showed that vocational high school prospective graduates tend to find a work compared to continue studying. as the majority prospective graduates preaparing to work, they perceived speaking is the most important skill in order to communicate in working situation. the students chose vocabulary was the most important language aspect in order they will be able to carry out communication. the students perceived the lack in the target need was the textbook used at present. as the school used bahasa inggris for sma/smk which contained ge. the book does not equip enough english aspects and skills needed in the working situation. the want analysis in the target need shows 98% of the students need an english textbook containing esp materials in order that they can practice both written or oral communication for preparing job requirement. the students expected that the esp textbook contain items which cover good criteria for textbook such as having language aspects vocabulary, grammar, skill activities, learning experience and assessment. the students perceived that the esp textbook contained materials and skills which are related to accountancy to support their specific competence. the implication from the findings of this study is related to the course plan and teaching practice at vocational high school. in planning the lesson, the teachers of english language should understand the learners‘ target need: preparing for work. so, lessons should accomodate the needs. besides teaching ge, teachers should supply esp materials which are taken from different sources from the internet covering the language aspects such as vocabulary related to the technical terms of accounting and the balance language skills for developing both spoken and written communication skills to equipt the students‘ target need. this is in line with the implication suggested by dahbi (2016) that esp teacher as a researcher to be in constant touch with the students. they should try to diagnose the learners‘ need and evaluate its english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 281 effectiveness of the language course (dahbi, 2016). for the policy maker in smk curriculum developer, it is necessary to add teaching hour for english subject so that learners have more learning period to learn and practice english for communication. references basturkmen, h. (2010). developing courses in english for specific purpose. new york: palgrave macmillan. basturkmen, h. (2013). needs analysis and syllabus design for language for specific purposes. the encyclopedia of applied linguistics, 1–8. doi: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0861.pub2. chovancova, b. (2014). needs analysis and esp course design: self-perception of language needs among pre-service students. study in logic, grammar and rhetoric, 38(51), 43–57. doi: 10.2478/slgr-2014-0031. dahbi, m. (2016). toward an esp course for engineering students in vocational schools in morrocco: the case of the national school of applied science. arab world english journal, (december), 72–81. day, j. &, & krzanowski. (2011). teaching english for specific purposes: an introduction. singapore: cambridge university press. forum, w. e. (2018). the future of jobs report 2018. geneva: world economic forum. guerid, f., & mami, n. a. (2017). designing an esp syllabus for finance. the journal of teaching english for specific and academic purposes, 5(1988), 771–780. doi: 10.22190/jtesap1704771g. hutchinson, & waters. (1991). english for specific purposes. new york: cambridge university press. kardijan, d., emzir, e., & rafli, z. (2017). the gap between learning need and its implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program, 6(1), 125–136. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.779. khusni, syamwil, & rifnaldi. (2014). diagnosing the need for english at vocational school: redesign the curriculum 2013? (pp. 4–5). kusnawati, a. (2017). assessing english language needs through the lens of esp – efl students’ perspectives. conaplin 9, 82, 52–57. lee, c. (2016). principles and practices of esp course design — a case study of a university of science and technology. international journal of learning, teaching and educational research, 15(2), 94–105. lenard, d., & pintaric, l. (2018). comparison of employers’ and students’ perceptions regarding communication skills. the journal of teaching english for specific and academic purpose, 6, 63–82. mahbub, m. (2018). english teaching in vocational high school: a need analysis. jeels, 1(29), 229–258. nation, i. s. p., & macalister, j. (2010). language curriculum design. london: routledge. peodjiastuties, d., & oliver, r. (2017). english learning needs of esp learners: exploring stakehoder perception at an indonesian university. teflin journal, 28(january 2017), 1–21. richards. (2001). curriculum development in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. ronaldo, o. (2016). teaching material for english subject in vocational. proceeding of the fourth international seminar on english language and teaching (iselt-4), 170–179. sukarni, s. (2019). a need analysis for esp-content materials for accountancy programme at vocational high school. ellic. doi: 10.4108/eai.27-4-2019.2285343. suyadi, s. (2015). english for specific purposes for accounting students. proceedings of iselt fbs universitas negeri padang, 3, 467–473. semi sukarni understanding learners’ need of esp for accountancy program at vocational school 282 multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome ida zuraida supri multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome ida zuraida supri department of english, widyatama university, indonesia email: ida.zuraida@widyatama.ac.id apa citation: supri, i. z. (2015). multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 210-222 received: 10-03-2015 accepted: 27-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this research aims at investigating how multimedia facilitates young learners’ learning english. the study utilized a descriptive method. this comprised observing, collecting data, classifying data, and analyzing data. observation to the multimedia is carried out to seek for steps of lessons and the steps are facilitating young learners leaning. the subjects in this study were series of multimedia programs. the results showed that the multimedia programs have presented to five young learners’ learning traits in designing the lessons. those traits were transferred in terms of activities presented into stages, time allotment/duration, having specific topic, providing songs and funny cartoon characters and scenes, and materials recycling in the lessons. thus, it can be concluded that the use of multimedia program is beneficial and recommended either in a classroom as a supplementary activity, at home for home learning or watch for fun. keywords: multimedia, young learners, learning traits introduction young learners are categorized into generation who are aware of technology at a very young age. in learning english, then, it is obvious that multimedia such as computer, internet and video are advantageous to be used in children classroom. on the other hand, english mastery is important in preparing learners for better achievement in all levels of education and future career. this has made educators both in formal and non-formal schools try to facilitate the best way of teaching and learning english. in some big cities in indonesia, english has been introduced to young learners starting elementary level of education. many parents send their children to english courses to learn english. they do this with the assumption that if their children are introduced to english since early stage of life they will get sufficient exposure (mustafa, 2002). with sufficient exposure they are expected to be successful language users in the future. of course, this can be realized if the children get good quality of exposure, such as good pronunciation; and sufficient frequency and volume of contact with the target language (mustafa, 2002). the challenges above should be well observed and solved. they may be solved by providing young learners suitable, good and interesting materials. in accordance with good and interesting material, using multimedia in teaching young learners are beneficial (harmer, 2002; ellis and brewster, 2002; stempliski, 1990). therefore, the present study seeks to explore whether multimedia program, 210 mailto:ida.zuraida@widyatama.ac.id english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee specifically me were designed by attending to young learners’ learning traits and also to find young learner’s response towards them. following are young learners’ learning traits that are synthesized from different sources. according to brown (2002) and shin (2006) another characteristic which should be noted is that young learners have limited attention span; unless activity are extremely engaging they can easily get bored, losing interest after several minutes of the activity. because they are centered to here and now, on the functional purposes of language, activities should be designed to capture their immediate interest (brown, 2000). shin (2006) emphasizes, “one way to capture their attention and keep them engaged in activities is to supplement the activities with lots of brightly colored visual, toys, puppet, or objects to match the one used in stories that you tell or songs that you sings”. young learners learn best when learning is kept whole (whole language approach), meaningful, interesting and functional; as opposed to adult who learn from parts to whole; they learn words, phrases, sentence constructing, (brown, 2002). in line with brown’s words, musthafa (2002) also states that they tend to learn things holistically in the form of script (such as going to a market, going to school, family, etc.). building on this theory, in the case of learning english as a foreign language, children will find it easy if it is embedded in play, such as story lines, or real life conversation. providing them video may be useful because generally they are presented in topic (ishihara and chi, 2004, ambrose, 2002). young learners are able to deal with one thing at a time without much difficulty. teaching or presenting a lot of things to them at once may cause frustration and failure, both to the children and the teachers. sinaga (1997) in his article proposes when teaching ‘likes and dislikes’, for example, a teacher does not have to use all the subjects at once as it is possible to be done in adult classes. he should limit based on their timely need (i and you first then next session followed by he and she). shin (2006) highly recommended teach the lessons in themes. it is obvious that young learners pick up new things easily and quickly, but at the same time forget them quickly. this is because they have a relatively weak long-term memory. to facilitate this learning character, shin (2006, p. 4) proposed: “moving from one activity to others that are related in content and language helps to recycle the language and reinforce students’ understanding and use of it”. this is in line with sinaga (1997) that lesson should be recycled and children should be reminded frequently of what they have learned. well (1997) as quoted by ashworth and wakefield (2005), also stated that knowledge cannot be transmitted in isolation, but must be reinvented as the learner brings to each new situation his own previous experience and background and interprets new information from that perspective. moreover, young learners’ learning is a process, not merely a product. the process of learning can be accelerated or enhanced by breaking learning into stages and providing building blocks which connect these together (bruner, 1983 as cited from ellis and brewster, 2002) young learners cannot be expected to sit down and do a certain activity for a long time. activities should be designed 211 ida zuraida supri multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome to capture their interest, short, and varied to allow a change of mood on the part of the children. according to ellis and brewster (2002, p. 162) song is an ideal vehicle for language learning because young learners love songs and sing songs are fun for them. they also added that letting young learners watch video or film also is another way to vary activities in order to capture and maintain their interest. on the other hand, instructional materials play an important role in english learning. appropriate instructional materials should be carefully selected based on the instructional objectives and children‘s interest. teachers may choose book appropriate for the children. suyanto (1997) writes that there are various kinds of materials, which can be used for children in english program, such as songs, stories, games, flashcards, and reading texts. as mentioned earlier that learner learns better through fun activities. teaching techniques for them should vary so that they will not feel bored. clapping hands, playing games, chanting rhymes, singing, and drawing real objects can also be done to create fun atmosphere english class. the role of instructional media is very important in a foreign class. according to richards (1988) as cited from suyanto (1997) good instructional media should have, at least, three roles i.e. attentional role, communicational role and retentional role. using media, particularly multimedia, is to attract children’s attention and heighten their curiosity while the teacher is delivering the message. in this case, using pictures, and realia are very helpful for teacher to do his activity. this is in line with wright (1989, p. 23) who stated “… pictures are not just an aspect of method but through their representation of places, objects, and people, they are an essential part of the overall experiences which we must help our students to cope with”. it does not only provide them the sound of the language but also facial expression and gesture which can give them better overall understanding of the use of the language in particular context. another benefit is it allows children to look at situation far beyond their classroom, for example, in greeting besides shaking hands, people can also greet by taking off their hat or nodding their head a little. from video, children can also learn food eaten or apparel worn by people in other countries. in terms of motivation, children show an increased level of interest when they have a chance to see language in use as well as hear it, and if this is coupled with interesting tasks. as quoted from harmer (2002) one of the main advantages of video is that learners do not just hear the language, they see it too. this greatly aids comprehension, as for example, in actuality general meaning and moods are often conveyed through expression, gesture and other visual clues. it does not only provide them the sound of the language but also facial expression and gesture which can give them better overall understanding of the use of the language in particular context. another benefit is it allows children to look at situation far beyond their classroom, for example, in greeting besides shaking hands, people can also greet by taking off their hat or nodding their head a little. from video, children can also learn food eaten or apparel worn by people in other countries. in terms of motivation, children show an increased level of 212 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee interest when they have a chance to see language in use as well as hear it, and if this is coupled with interesting tasks .thus, children observe how intonation can match facial expressions. stempleski (1990) also adds that the introduction of the moving picture component as a language teaching aid is a crucial addition to the teacher’s resources. through video children feel their interest quicken when language is experienced in a lively way. the combination of moving picture and sound can present language more comprehensively than any other teaching medium. video can take students into the lives and experiences of others. the use of video sequence in class makes students more ready to communicate in target language. ellis and brewster (2002, p. 205-206) also state that there are three main reasons for viewing. the first is global viewing or viewing for general understanding. this means young learners need to see a whole video sequence or extract shown straight to the first so that they can follow and understand the global meaning. after that the teacher may go back over the sequence or extract and exploit it in order to focus on particular aspects of language and content. the second is viewing for detail. this usually requires young learners to focus on something very specific and they may require a physical response such as putting up a hand each time they see a specific item or hear a specific word or structure. the third is viewing for pleasure. young learners are given opportunities to absorb language presented and practiced through the video in order to accomplish particular tasks assigned, like comparing information, writing instructions or recipes, questionnaires, etc. after completing their tasks, they are rewarded by viewing the video again for pleasure. gersten and tlustý (1998) cited in amato (2003) found out that the use of video program would have a positive effect on their students’ performance and participation. interviews with students afterwards revealed that they had all found the experience helpful in developing english proficiency and in using english to communicate. amato (2003) also adds that the use of interactive multimedia program in the classroom serve as an excellent tool for developing communicative skills in a language. it can be concluded that armed with the knowledge of the reasons of video viewing, teachers can be highly assisted in designing kinds of activities in the class in which video are used. teachers may confidently decide what pre and post viewing activities given. using multimedia in teaching english is beneficial. since it is audio visual, young learners can see and listen the use of language displayed. therefore, they have an opportunity to get exposed the target language used in context and performed by native speakers. there have been numerous studies on the use of multimedia in teaching english language (mayora, 2006 and ishihara and chi, 2004) in informing how useful the use of multimedia in teaching english. although these studies are different in terms of participant, the studies are considered relevant. mayora (2006) conducted a research on integrating multimedia technology in high school efl program in caracas, venezuela. the results show that all those students felt that it provided them with substantial opportunities to listen to 213 ida zuraida supri multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome authentic language, which is a key element for the acquisition of english. a large majority of the students also felt positive about the opportunities the multimedia provided to increase their vocabulary and practice grammar. in addition, most students indicated that computerand video-based activities had a positive effect on their process of learning english. it can be said that the results indicates that the students regard the use of multimedia, particularly computerand video-based, in general as motivating, productive and advanced way to learn english. from the elaboration above it can be seen that studies on the use of multimedia in teaching english with different participants have had positive responses and outcome. the use of multimedia indicates many benefits (mayora, 2006), such as it is more appealing and entertaining; it exposes students to authentic language in natural situations; it provides a situational and visual context to language interactions; and it exposes students to authentic nonverbal (body language, cultural tradition) and verbal (register, colloquial speech) elements of language. me released by the walt disney to provide children with an interesting way in learning english through multimedia, which is called magic english. table 1.topics in me series 1. hello 2. family 3. happy houses 4. friends 5. animal friends 6. it’s delicious 7. happy birthday 8. tick tock time 9. night and day 10. let’s play 11. numbers 12. at home 13. my body 14. party time 15. cooking 16. the forest 17. the sea 18. let’s travel 19. colors 20. wild animals 21. funny faces 22. country life 23. music 24. mountains method this study aimed at unearthing young learners’ learning traits attended to by me and how those characteristic are presented in me. strauss and corbin (1990, p. 75) state that “it was largely qualitative which could be used to uncover and understand what lies behind any phenomenon about which little is yet known”. to gather the data, observation is conducted to me. there are three series under focus: happy birthday, tic toc time, and night and day. observation on the above series is to see the flow of the lessons in each series. this activity essential to see whether me’s contents attended to young learners’ learning traits or not. descriptive inductive analytical approach is applied in this study. the general patterns of data analysis were a simultaneous action during the data collection stage. in the observation method it is suggested that the analysis is carried out as soon as the observation finishes (maxwell, 1996), otherwise it will lose visual details that might be important and they might be forgotten if it waits to be analyzed at a later time. since this study applies largely qualitative, so the findings would only be true to the subjects involved in it. therefore, there will not be an attempt of generalization because there might be other possible interpretation to the issues raised in this study. 214 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee results and discussion data from observations reveal that me series have presented to five young learners’ learning traits. they were learn when kept as a whole, limited attention span, one thing at a time, fun learning, and learn fast forget quickly characteristic. this can be indicated by having its own topic; almost the same; duration: around twenty five minutes; presenting the topic into stages with different kinds of activities the flow; and focusing on one topic in each series. the flow of lessons of me is summarized into a table (see table 2). table 2. flow of lessons series#1 series#2 series#3 stages duration stages duration stages duration opening 1.50 opening 1.50 opening 1.50 presentation 1 6.05 presentation 1 2.51 presentation 1 5.24 practice 1 1.19 song 1.29 song 1.16 song 0.46 practice 1 1.02 presentation 2 6.13 presentation 2 5.24 presentation 2 2.18 practice 1 0.34 practice 2 1.24 practice 2 2.20 presentation 3 1.26 presentation 3 5.32 presentation 3 2.32 practice 2 5.04 practice 3 1.34 practice 3 1.23 presentation 4 2.32 closing 2.29 presentation 4 4.11 practice 3 2.11 practice 4 4.18 closing 2.24 closing 2.08 total 25.03 total 25.02 total 25.10 * duration is in minute. * opening and closing are presented through a song entitled magic english. * presentations are stages where the materials of the lesson are explained. * practices are stages where viewers should do exercises, such as repeating words or expressions, answering questions. * song is a song related to the topic is presented. viewers are invited to sing along. the first young learners’ learning characteristic facilitated by me is limited attention span. young learners find it difficult to stay focus on a lesson discussed in a long period of time unless the activities are really engaging. they can easily get bored and lose their interest after several minutes of activities. me try to facilitate the above characteristic. it was observed in terms of activities presented and time allotted. in terms of activities, looking at the table presented earlier on the flow of lessons of me (table2) shows that each series applies similar flow of lesson; opened by a song me followed by several presentations and practices, a song related to the topic is also inserted, then closing. it can be inferred that the flow of lesson in me facilitates young learners to focus on the show and to follow what is given easily. with the nature of young learners which cannot stand doing one activity for a long time, the design of the lesson of me may engage them to keep watching because it is not monotonous. the activity changed; from presentation, in which they should listen, watch, and understand what is presented, then they should actively involve with the practice activities, such as repeating some words or expressions, answering questions and singing. furthermore, the appearance of 215 ida zuraida supri multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome popular cartoon characters that they may already know helps to draw and maintain their attention to keep watching until the end of the show. in terms of time, it was observed that the duration of each series is around twenty five minutes; series#1 25.03 minutes, series#2 25.02 minutes, and series#3 25.10 minutes. . it is quite short for a show. the duration of each stage ranges from two to five minutes. it relates to the characteristic of limited attention span mentioned by brown (2002), and shin (2006). furthermore, the duration of each series is approximately twenty five minutes which are divided into several stages of presentations and practices allow learners to maintain their attention during the watching. the explanation above is in line with what is stated by holden (1980) quoted by brewster (1991) quoted by sinaga (1997) to limit one activity to ten minutes maximum. it can be interpreted that with the flow of lesson of me learners may have no chance to do other activities but watch. the appearance of disney’s cartoon characters may keep them watch and enjoy slides of stories or films presented on the screen. even tough, the stages in the multimedia follow the same patterns. in accordance with the characteristic of young learners, who respond easily to particular theme they have already known, this pattern helps them to predict what they are going to find in the next stage. however, there is an element of surprise since the song is not inserted in the same sequence. sometimes it comes right after presentation 1 like in series#2 and series#3 or after practice, like in series#1. therefore, it can be concluded that the flow of the lesson facilitates the limited attention span characteristic. secondly, me facilitates young learners whose learning traits is holistic learning. they learn best when learning is kept whole (whole language approach), meaningful, interesting and functional; as opposed to adult who learn from parts to whole; they learn words, phrases, sentence constructing, (brown, 2002). in line with brown’s words, musthafa (2002) also states that young learners tend to learn things holistically in the form of script (such as going to a market, going to school, family, etc). this characteristic is facilitated in me. it can be observed in terms of having specific topic in each series. ; series#1 happy birthday,series#2 tic toc time, and series#3 night and day. packed in a specific topic, the series facilitates young learners whose learning characteristic is learning holistically to learn better. since the lesson is kept as a whole, they may find it meaningful, functional and interesting. slides of pictures and stories/films related to the topic help learners to understand what is being presented. words and expressions are not only presented in verbal form but also in written form. therefore, learners can listen how the words and expressions are pronounced and also see the spellings. it can be said that when young learners find the lesson meaningful to them they would be interested to pay attention to what is given in the show. when attention is obtained, the process of learning is expected to take place. as mentioned earlier that words and expressions were given either in written or spoken. this is good because they are not only exposed to the spelling of the word but how the native speakers of the 216 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee language pronounce them. this relates to what is stated by ashworth and wakefield (2005, [p. 4) young learners need to hear the language model. furthermore, since in this stage of life they experience what brown (1991, p. 12) called “critical period” for language acquisition, they are expected to be able to absorb a lot of simple vocabulary, say and write them correctly. hopefully, in the future they will be good language users. moreover, slides of pictures and stories or films related to the topic help learners to understand what is being presented. this condition is in line with what is stated by stempleski (1990) that children feel their interest quicken when language is experienced in a lively way. the combination of moving picture and sound can present language more comprehensively than any other teaching medium. in addition to that, the availability of slides of stories or films greatly aid comprehension, as for example, in actuality general meaning and moods are often conveyed through expression, gesture and other visual clues. thus, children observe how intonation can match facial expressions (harmer, 2002). words and expressions are not only presented in verbal form but also in written form. this way, learners not only can listen how the words and expressions are pronounced but also see the spellings. because english words are spelled and pronounced differently from that of indonesian, this is quite difficult to handle for most indonesian students. the display of the spelling of the words or expressions may help them recognize and remember them. moreover, the words and expressions presented in each topic is meaningful and functional, for example in series#1 cake, presents, party, birthday party, singing, dancing are things and activities that they commonly encountered in birthday party. the word birthday is something that learners may know. they celebrate their birthdays and sometimes are invited to birthday parties. and in birthday party they sing happy birthday. therefore it can be said the vocabulary in this topic is meaningful and functional to them. in series#2, the following expressions such as what time is it? it’s eight o’clock, wake up!, seven o’clock, breakfast, it’s breakfast time, school, it’s school time, it’s lunch time, it’s play time, it’s dinner time, it’s bed time are things and activities that they routinely do. since the words and expressions are presented with slides of stories and pictures, learners may find it easy to understand. for instance, they can understand wake up from the movement of the cartoon character and the background of the picture. the cartoon character is in bed sleeping then the clock is ringing and he opens his eyes. then a voice says wake up! seeing this fragment, it is expected that the learners understand the meaning of the expressions. series#3 which discusses day and night is also presented in the same way. words and expressions like: the moon. look at the moon. the stars. look at the stars. it’s morning. good morning. what a beautiful morning! the sun. it’s a new day. what a beautiful day! it’s night. what a beautiful night! the above vocabulary would be meaningful to them because they are parts of their daily life. they are presented in slides of stories or films which help them understand the meaning of words and expressions 217 ida zuraida supri multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome written on the screen. in presenting the moon, a picture of a moon in a dark night is displayed. by looking at the picture, learners are facilitated to understand the word. judging from the discussion on the topics presented, we can see that it has catered the principle of learn when kept as a whole principle. fun learning is the third traits attended to by me. young learners’ willingness to learn emerges when the lessons are presented in interesting ways (brown, 2000; shin, 2006). this characteristic can be observed in terms of providing songs and funny cartoon characters and scenes. each series was opened by a song titled magic english. the song is relatively easy and interesting to listen to and to follow. it is not long; the duration is around one minute fifty seconds. the lyric of the song is about activities that students can participate during watching the series. the following is the song: magic english, magic english magic english, magic english have fun with disney every day, have fun with disney everyday come along and discover english listen well, watch carefully you can singyou can play and you can have fun with disney magic english, magic english look and speak and sing and play magic english, magic english have fun with disney everyday have fun with disney everyday look! when you see this, it’s your turn to play play time! if you see this ♪it’s your turn to sing play time! if you see this ☺ it’s your turn to repeat play time! if you see this?it’s your turn to answer besides me song which can be found as the opening in each series, there is also one song related to the topic presented in each series; series#1 happy birthday song, series#2 tic toc time song, and series#3 night and day song. it can be said that fun learning characteristic is attended because of the availability of the songs. this relates to ellis and brewster (2002) who mentioned that song is an ideal vehicle for language learning. young learners love songs and sing songs are fun for them. me multimedia provide songs in each series. if what is preferred by young learners is facilitated, they are expected to learn better. ellis and brewster (2000) also mention the benefits of songs in language learning, such as they allow new language to be introduced and structures and vocabulary to be reinforced and recycled and are motivating and fun to help develop positive attitudes toward the target language. therefore when they listen to the song they are exposed to how words in english are said. when it comes to their turn to sing, their pronunciation skill is being trained. the song uses certain terms in asking students to do activities while watching it. instead of using a term “do exercises”, it invites students to do exercise by saying “play time”. it can be inferred that the instruction is given that way to attract students’ interest because play is something fun. play is children’s part of life. from the last verse of the lyric of the song it is clear that the exercises or “play time” involve singing, repeating and answering questions. not only do the songs make the multimedia fun but also the display of disney’s cartoon characters, which young learners may know or recognize in some funny scenes such as, donald 218 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee and daisy duck, mickey and minnie mouse, snow white, and others may attract them to watch and listen to it. for instance, when explaining how to ask someone’s age and how to respond to it a funny scene below is presented: a smiling cute baby only wearing a diaper crawls in a cute way. then, a voice asks “how old is she?”. there is pause for few seconds, then that voice responds “she is one year old”. after that, a character of an old fat man with long white beard looks like a santa clause, walks in a funny way. again a voice asks, “how old is he?” the response is “he is a hundred years old”. the above evidence shows what ellis and brewster (2002) propose that the advantage of using multimedia is because it combines sound and vision and provide a full context for language so children see language in use making it more accessible and memorable. furthermore, it shows all factors of communication, including non-verbal communication. therefore, young learners may find the content of the multimedia meaningful. me also facilitated young learners in terms of learning traits is to learn fast but to forget quickly. this is observed in terms of presenting the lessons into stages and recycle. it is obvious that young learners’ learning is a process, not merely a product. bruner (1983) as cited from ellis and brewster: (2002) mentioned that the process of learning can be accelerated or enhanced by breaking learning into stages and providing building blocks which connect these together. in terms of presenting the lessons into stages, looking at the flow of lesson previously presented in table 4.1, the presentations are given in several stages. some vocabulary given in presentation 1 may reappear in the next presentations, for example #1, in presentation 1 vocabulary like present, surprise, party, cake, a dress are reappeared in presentation 2 . in #2 words and expressions like, what time is it?, wake up!, it’s breakfast time, it’s school time, etc are presented in presentation 1 and practice 1 are reused in practice 2, presentation 3 and practice 3. recycle of material is also found in #3. for instance, the use of yes/no questions and how to respond to them related to the topic night and day can be found practice 1, presentation 3, and practice 3. following are some examples, is it night? yes, it’s night; is it day?, no, it’s night; what a beautiful day. so, it is clear that the multimedia recycle materials of the lesson. the above examples show that the materials taught are not only divided into stages but also recycled. it can be concluded, the flow of lesson, which is divided into stages, interprets the scaffolding of learning. the series have applied the theory mentioned by bruner (1983) to accelerate students’ learning. reappearance of vocabulary presented in the earlier presentation in the next presentation is a method to recycle the materials. in practice stage, vocabulary to be repeated and questions to be answered by learners are those which appear in presentations stages. therefore, learners may find practice stages fun because the questions given are things that they have heard, seen, and they are not overwhelming. in short, young learners, whose learning characteristic is learn fast and forget quickly, are facilitated. this may help them to learn better. young learners learn one thing at a time is also catered by me. it can be 219 ida zuraida supri multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome observed in terms of giving specific topic to discuss in each series. topic of #1 is happy birthday. it discusses things and activities related to a birthday. #2, tic toc time, discusses time; how to ask and tell the time, activities done in particular point of time, like in the morning, the activity is breakfast time, school time, etc. in #3, night and day is the topic. since each has its own topic, it can be said that the design of me adopted one thing at a time principle. young learners learn one thing from each series. this may help them deal with the materials presented. they may not find the materials overwhelming because they learn specific thing at a time. having a specific topic in each series, me multimedia has adopted the one thing at a time principle. each series focuses on one thing or one topic. learners are exposed to expressions, and activities related to a birthday in #1. they learn how to say happy birthday and to tell the age. they also learn words, expressions and activities related to a birthday party, like presents, cake, sing, and, dance. therefore, the adoption of one thing at a time principle may facilitate learners to learn the target language easier as mentioned by brown (2000), and harmer (2000) who state that young learners are able to deal with one thing at a time without much difficulty. teaching or presenting several things at once may cause frustration and failure, both to the learners and teachers. from the discussions above, it can be concluded that since five traits of young learners learning have been attended to, they may be facilitated when learning english using me multimedia. the lessons were designed to assist children’s learning characteristic. therefore, this may result in positive learning outcome. conclusions this research is completed as the answers to the two questions posted earlier were obtained. based on the findings and discussions in the previous chapter, it can be concluded that firstly, this multimedia programs facilitate young learners’ to learn english. apparently, the making of them were carefully designed. this can be observed in terms of attending to five young learners’ learning traits in designing the series of multimedia. those traits were limited attention span, learn when kept as a whole, fun learning, learn fast forget quickly, and one thing at a time. those traits can be observed in terms of presenting activities into stages and allotting relatively short time, having specific topic, providing songs, funny cartoon character and scenes, and recycling materials in the lessons. secondly, with respect to young learners’ responses, all data obtained indicate that in general all multimedia under focus gained positive responses. this can be observed from their positive attitude when they watched them and their willingness to actively take part in the activities provided, namely repeating some words or vocabulary, answering questions, and singing. positive responses were obtained because multimedia alone is interesting for young learners and when it is designed in an interesting way it may obtain positive responses. in addition, in terms of young learners’ traits the affective factor is also noticeable in me. so, through the use of me warm, supportive and safe atmosphere in learning the language may be created and this may lead to 220 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee lessen the above potential barriers in learning. the efforts can be observed in the multimedia from the availability of cartoon characters, colorful pictures, funny show fragments, and interesting songs. finally, it provides authentic and meaningful language. the topics discussed in each series are within young learners’ world. happy birthday, night and day, family, and so on (see table 3.1). therefore, they may be willing to learn the language if it can be used for here and now. because the series were designed by attending to some young learners’ learning traits, the use of them in young learners’ classes would be recommended. it is useful to use as a supplementary lesson in the class. since young learners are easily get bored, giving them as a variation of learning english would be fun and enjoyable. they would find learning english is fun not monotonous. before the it is played, teachers need to explain what learners are going to watch, and what they have to do during the watching, especially, when they watch it for the first time. they might not know what the teachers expect them to do. by doing so, they will not feel confused what to do and they may feel ready with the watching activity. however, as it is mentioned earlier that they can be used as supplements. teachers still hold the important roles in a class room. multimedia could not replace teachers’ roles. there may be some questions or comments from learners after watching them that teachers should answer or explain. finally, the series can be given to the class as pre or post activity. when it is given as pre activity, learners should get the core explanation from the teacher after watching them. if it is given as post activity, teachers should have explained the lesson before they watch them. by doing so, they aid learners to focus on what they are learning. to summarize, the use of multimedia programs as supplementary activity is recommended because their lessons are designed by attending several young learners’ learning traits. this can vary the learning activity so that learners may find learning english is fun and enjoyable. however, multimedia cannot replace teachers’ roles. teachers still have to explain when learners ask question after watching. references alwasilah, a. c. 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(1996). qualitative research design: an interactive approach. california: sage publication, inc. 221 ida zuraida supri multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome musthafa, b. (2002) efl for young learners. bandung: crest. musthafa, b. & wachyu, s. (1993). teaching efl learners sociolinguistics concepts for intercultural understanding. retrieved on 23 february 2015 from files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed397661.pdf. paton, j. (2002). fostering second language development in young children. esl articles collection. retrieved on 10 may 2015 from http://www.1-language.com pinter, a. 2006. teaching young language learners. oxford: oxford university press. suyanto, k, k. e. (1999). teaching english to young learners in indonesia (p. 164-171). presented in national seminar: the development of tefl in indonesia. 1999. shin, j. k. (2006). ten helpful ideas for teaching english to young learners. english teaching forum, 44 (2). sinaga, m. (1994). teaching english to children (as opposed to adults) (p.173-178) presented in national seminar: the development of tefl in indonesia, 23 1994 strauss, a & corbin j. (1990). basic qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques. new york: sage publication. amato, r. & patricia, a. (2003). making it happen: from interactive to participatory language teaching. new york: longman stempliski, s & barry, t. (1990). video in action: recipes for using video in language teaching. london: prentice hall. 222 references english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 29 item analysis of reading comprehension test for post-graduate students ari arifin danuwijaya english education department, faculty of language and arts education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia e-mail: aridanuwijaya@upi.edu apa citation: danuwijaya, a. a. (2018). item analysis of reading comprehension test for postgraduate students. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 29-40. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1493. received: 14-08-2018 accepted: 23-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: developing a test is a complex and reiterative process which subject to revision even if the items were developed by skilful item writers. many commercial test publishers need to conduct test analysis, rather than trusting the item writers‟ judgement and skills to improve the quality of items that need to be proven statistically after trying out was performed. this study is a part of test development process which aims to analyse the reading comprehension test items. one hundred multiple choice questions were pilot tested to 50 postgraduate students in one university. the pilot testing was aimed to investigate item quality which can further be developed better. the responses were then analysed using classical test theory and using psychometric software called lertap. the results showed that item difficulty level was mostly average. in terms of item discrimination, more than half of the total items were categorized marginal which required further modifications. this study suggests some recommendation that can be useful to improve the quality of the developed items. keywords: reading comprehension; item analysis; classical test theory; item difficulty; test development. introduction tests have been widely used to demonstrate level of proficiency of the students, and at the same time function as policy instruments to implement educational standards (phakiti & roever, 2011). in many universities, tests have become the tools used to complete the requirements in the process of admission. however, in other universities, the policies have changed in which tests play a significant role to determine not only student admission, but also graduation from their academic programs (ma & cheng, 2015; mustafa & apriadi, 2016). with the increasing demand of proficiency test for postgraduate students in indonesian universities, many universities locally develop testing instrument that assess students‟ proficiency level in which most of the tests were in the form of multiple choice questions. however, studies on investigating item characteristics, such as item difficulty, item distractors, and others, in reading test are not widely exposed by the test developers or language centres in indonesia. item analysis is a crucial part in a test development process as it functions to provide information about items that should be improved in terms of quality for later tests or even be eliminated due to misleading (quaigrain & arhin, 2007). this part is often used in the creating item banking, and its iterative nature in analysing items could help test developers to examine whether one test is a sound test both pedagogically and psychometrically and to achieve better teaching and learning (tarrant, ware, & mohammed, 2009; ananthakrishnan, 2000). for the use of english language learners, it is suggested that the characteristics of a test should be carefully reviewed and analysed (abedi, 2002). several studies have been conducted to examine the processes of test development, ari arifin danuwijaya item analysis of reading comprehension test for post-graduate students 30 such as item analysis in multiple choice questions in the field of education (boopathiraj & chellamani, 2013), medical science (hingorjo & jaleel, 2012; mehta & mokhasi, 2014; patil, palve, vell, & boratne, 2016), and social work (qaqish, 2006); and the processes of item writing in language studies (kim et al., 2010; spaan, 2006, 2007). spaan‟s study (2006), for example, provides a practical approach of test development and item specifications. some steps were proposed to be taken by test developers, such as test purpose writing, study analysis and construct analysis, test design, and task and item specification development. another study conducted by kim et al. (2010) recounts personal journey in the process of item writing which reveals the issues and dynamics in item writing processes. as the item analysis is hardly found in english language testing, particularly in reading, this present study aims to provide an analysis of multiple choice items in reading test. reading comprehension reading comprehension can be defined as the ability to understand vocabulary in order to paraphrase and make a summary of information from the text (manarin, carey, rathburn, & ryland, 2015). it is the activity to reconstruct a message from written symbols to a form of a language, and it involves many cognitive processes and combines both decoding process and inferential activity so that readers can really comprehend the text (feng & chen, 2016; grabe, 1997; kendeou, muis, & fulton, 2011). the process is divided into two categories: lowerand higher-level processes (grabe & stoller, 2002; grabe, 2009). according to grabe (2009), lower-level processes involve word recognition, syntactic parsing and semantic-proposition encoding, while higher-level processes require text comprehension, in which good readers summarize important information from the text (grabe & stoller, 2002). in the context of english as a foreign language, reading english textbooks becomes a big issue, particularly for students with non-english background. in thailand, for example, reading skills seems to be the big problem to the students because most of them find reading english texts is difficult (phantharakphonga & pothithab, 2014). within the context of university setting, reading comprehension is part of critical reading that can be a determinant to academic success. lowes, peters, and turner (2004) argue that reading is essential to understand basic concepts of a subject, to gather information for completing assignments, and to improve english skill, particularly to increase vocabulary. one of many characteristics of reading at higher education is critical reading which involves such features as identifying patterns of textual elements, distinguishing main and supporting ideas, making credible evaluation and arguments, and making relevant inference about the text. turner, ireland, krenus and pointon (2011) further explains in university setting, extensive and careful reading is required in order to examine some different competing theories, for example, that leads to different ideas and information. there are a number of skills that can be assessed in reading comprehension. davis (1968), as cited in alderson (2000), suggests eight reading skills, including recalling word meanings, drawing inferences about meaning of a word in context, finding answers to questions answered explicitly or in paraphrase, weaving together ideas in the content, drawing inferences from the content, recognizing a writer‟s purpose, identifying a writer‟s technique, and following the structure of a passage. reading comprehension test (rct) a test is a tool that serves to make decisions related curriculum and other areas (brown, 1995; carr, 2011; spaan, 2006). brown (2004) points out that a test is a way of measuring one‟s ability, knowledge, or performance in a given domain. in language testing context, most tests measure test takers‟ competence, such ability to perform language skills to speak, write, listen, or read to one subset of language. these performance-based tests sample the testenglish review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 31 takers‟ actual use of language which infers general competence. a test of reading comprehension, for example, may consist of several short reading passages each followed by a limited number of comprehension questions. from the results of the test, the examiner may infer a certain level of general reading ability (brown, 2004). reading comprehension test (rct) is an instrument that measures university students‟ abilities in reading a wide array of texts. this high-stakes test is developed to assess reading skills of postgraduate school students, in which its result can be used as the requirement for students to have thesis examination. students need to obtain a certain score to have the examination. if the score cannot be reached, students are not allowed to take the exam. thus, rct can be viewed as a high-stakes test in the university. it consists of 100 multiple choice questions which test some skills in reading, such as the ability to understand main information in the text, scan detailed information, get the meaning of words, understand pronoun reference question, make inferences from the text, identify not-explicitly-stated information, and locate information in the text. constructing a test is not a simple task. it involves a science and art of many complex tasks, such as planning, test preparation and administration, scoring, statistical analysis, and test result report (brown, 2004; downing, 2010). one of crucial stages in test development is statistical analysis of a test. statistics are beneficial in language testing. during the first trial of the items, statistics can inform an analysis of each tested item. for example, a test designer can take the advantage of statistics to examine if the distractors work well in a multiple choice or the item is too difficult to answer. in addition, according to kunnan and carr (2013), statistical analysis functions to provide a summary of test takers‟ performance in a form of test scores. it informs the test developer about the descriptive statistics of the test takers‟ performance, such as the average score (mean), the most occurring score (mode), and the overall variation from the average (standard deviation value) (kunnan & carr, 2013). classical test theory one of essential statistical tools in the analysis of language test is classical test theory (ctt). ctt has given a significant contribution to the area of language testing. according to brown (2012), many university courses and textbooks in language testing discuss the general idea of ctt. besides, most language teachers and practitioners use ctt in their practice in language testing. thus, ctt appears to serve as the foundation for understanding all aspects of language testing, and understanding ctt becomes vital for a language test designer because ctt is a precondition for comprehending and using more forms of analysis (brown, 2012). brown (2012) suggests that there are main methods in ctt including item analysis (item facility, item discrimination, and distractor efficiency analysis), reliability estimates, the standard error of measurement, and various validity analysis. item analysis is a crucial procedure to improve the quality of objective test by investigating how effective an item is. the result of the analysis informs which item needs to be included, modified, or eliminated in the test. there are three procedures in test analysis: item facility, item discrimination, and distractor efficiency. item facility (if), often called as item difficulty, describes the proportion of test takers who correctly answered the item (brown, 2012; carr, 2011). brown (2012) argues that if 95% of the test takers answer an item correctly, then the item is categorized as very easy; on the other hand, an item is viewed as very difficult if it is answered by 11% of the test takers. in addition, carr (2011) suggests that the values of item facility range from 0.0 to 1.0 indicating none of the students answered correctly and every test taker answered it right respectively. ideal items would be items of intermediate facility – the items that ari arifin danuwijaya item analysis of reading comprehension test for post-graduate students 32 30-70% of the test takers answered correctly or within the range of 0.3 to 0.7 (brown, 2012; carr, 2011). items with if below 0.30 are usually deemed to be too difficult, and items with if above 0.7 are considered too easy (carr, 2011). in addition to item facility, an item can be analysed in terms of how well the given item distinguish between test takers with high and low ability, or commonly called as item discrimination (id) (carr, 2011; thorndike & thorndike-christ, 2010). there are two ways of calculating discrimination. one way is by “subtracting the number of students who got the item correct in the lower group (nl) from the number who got it correct in the upper group (nu) and dividing the difference by the number of the group (n)” (thorndike & thorndike-christ, 2010, p. 308). another way to estimate item discrimination is using a correlational approach, in which a correlation coefficient is calculated between the item score and the total score, known as point-biserial correlation coefficient (brown, 2012; carr, 2011). with the existence of scoring machine or psychometric software, the value of correlation computation can be easily performed. the value of id ranges between 0.00 and 1.00 and it can be positive or negative. items with the highest values (more than 0.5) need to be retained, the ones with the lowest (below 0.2) need to be eliminated, and the ones between 0.2 and 0.5 should be consider for modification (thorndike & thorndike-christ, 2010). according to brown (2012), it is desirable to include the items with high discrimination indexes in the revised test because including the high discrimination index items will lead to more reliable measurement overall, whereas including items with low discrimination will lead to less reliable measurement. the last item analysis is distractor efficiency analysis or distractor analysis. according to brown (2012), the distractors are essential parts of an item and function to show a relationship between the total test score and the distractor chosen. low scoring students should choose the distractors more often while students with high scores choose the correct option. thus, the function of efficiency analysis is to investigate how efficient the distractors are to divert test takers from the correct answer (brown, 2012). according to quaigrain and arhin (2017), if there is a distractor chosen by less than five per cent of the test takers, the distractor is called as a non-functioning distractor (nfd). by analysing the distractors, it is easier for test developer to make a decision whether the distractors are revised, replaced, or removed. the rationale for the development of the reading test is the needs to construct up-todate language test aiming to investigate postgraduate english reading skills in the university. the main objective of the study is to investigate item difficulty, discrimination, and distractor efficiency of multiple choice test items in reading comprehension. method this study aimed to examine the process of test development, particularly in the process of analysing multiple choice questions in reading skills, to improve item quality. the study was conducted at one language centre in one public university in indonesia. the centre was chosen because its availability to provide items for try-outs and analysis. as this is a trial test, only a small subset of target population involved in this study to provide useful information about the items (spaan, 2007). fifty postgraduate students from different majors (educational management, science and mathematics education, social sciences, and non-formal education) who aged from 20 – 45 years were involved in this study. the students were invited to take part in the pilot testing of the items in december 2016. a hundred of multiple choice questions had been written in 2016 but not yet pilot tested to get the evidence on item quality. these questions were written to provide information about reading proficiency among postgraduate students. the items were developed by five english language english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 33 teachers having more than three years of teaching experience. the items were constructed based on ten reading passages with the topics ranging from education, literature, social sciences, and others. the questions for each passage, as shown in table 1, aim at assessing reading skills, including skills in skimming for main idea, scanning for stated detailed information, deducing meaning of unfamiliar words, pronoun resolution, making inference, understanding unstated information, and scanning to locate specific information (alderson, 2000; shirvan, 2016). table 1. reading skills in multiple choice questions reading skills number of questions item number skimming for main idea 6 1,11,21,51,61,90 scanning for detailed information 29 2,4,6,9,15,16,19,27,28,32,39,47,50,55,57,62,65,66,6 8,74,77, 80,84,85,86,89 ,96,97,100 deducing the meaning and the use of unfamiliar lexical item 32 3,8,10,13,14,18,23,24,26,31,36,37,45,48,49,53,56,5 8, 59,63,64,67,70,72,73,75,78,82,87,93,94,98 pronoun resolution 10 5,25,29,33,35,42,46,54,71,83 making inference 10 7,20,22,30,41,43,69,76,81,88 understanding information when not explicitly stated 7 12,34,38,44,91,92,99 scanning to locate specific information 6 17,40,52,60,79,95, total questions 100 the items were one-correct answer type, having a stem and four options, one of them being correct and the other three being „distractors‟. the test takers were required to select the correct choice and fill the answer on a separate answer sheet. each correct response was awarded 1 mark. no mark was given for blank response or incorrect answer. there was no negative marking. the maximum possible score was 100 and the minimum 0. based on students‟ responses, the test items were then analysed using laboratory of educational research test analysis package (lertap) psychometric software (nelson, 2001). lertap is a computer program to process and analyse results from tests and surveys. with the use of microsoft excel interface, the program and manual are user-friendly making teachers, instructors, and researchers easy to perform classical item, reliability, and dependability analyses of raw test or survey data (carr, 2004). the program can also be used to score and perform reliability analysis for both affective and cognitive subtests. each question was analysed in terms of its level of difficulty, which was measured by the difficulty index (p-value), power of discrimination, and distractor analysis. the cut-off values for item difficulty used carr‟s (2011) guideline with three categories: easy, average, and hard level of difficulty with difficulty index of less than 0.3, between 0.3 and 0.7, and more than 0.7 respectively. for item discrimination index, there are four categories of items based on its discrimination index: poor (di < 0.15), marginal (0.15 < di < 0.24), good (0.25 < di < 0.34), and excellent (> 0.35) (hingorjo & jaleel, 2012). results and discussion in the development of test instrument, there are some crucial steps that should be conducted to ensure the high quality of newly developed items. one of the crucial steps is to conduct pilot testing, or also called as pre-testing or trialling. carr (2011) argues that pilot testing is vital to ensure that the constructed items produce responses that are expected from the test takers. besides, pilot testing helps test developer to estimate the reliability of the test and to examine whether each item is appropriately written and, in multiple choice items, the distractors ari arifin danuwijaya item analysis of reading comprehension test for post-graduate students 34 can work well to discriminate lower and higher ability of the test takers. thus, item can be analysed for further improvement. after the pilot testing was administered to the respondents, the item responses were analysed by using statistical descriptive. the results showed that the scores of 50 test takers ranged from 23 to 68 with the mean score of 47.06 and the standard deviation was 10.05. the median score was 47 and the inter-quartile range value was 45. the skewness and kurtosis values for the scores were -0.15 and -0.18, respectively. as the values between -2 and +2, it is acceptable to prove normal univariate distribution. the test takers were divided into three groups. the mean scores of lower, middle, and upper groups were 35.6 (sd = 5.3), 47.3 (sd = 2.8), and 58.2 (sd = 4.8), respectively. based on the analysis, the cronbach‟s alpha index to measure the test reliability was 0.80. the value was categorized as a large alpha value indicating “that the items are tapping a common domain” (wells & wollack, 2003, p. 4). however, for a test that functions as a high-stake standardized test, it has a certain criteria in test reliability. wells and wollack (2003, p. 5) argue that standardized tests should have higher reliability coefficient as the test is given only once and function “to draw conclusions about each student‟s level on the trait of interest”. they further suggest that the internal consistency coefficients in a highstake standardized test should be at least 0.9, and for lower-stake test should have at least 0.80 or 0.85 (wells & wollack, 2003). item analysis one-hundred multiple choice items were processed using lertap. another result shows a brief statistical report as illustrated in a plot of item difficulty by discrimination in figure 1. the plot suggests that even though the test was high in reliability (coefficient alpha = 0.80) with some items were found to have average difficulty (ranging from 0.3 to 0.7), more than half of the items were categorized marginal to poor (62%) even having minus discrimination index. figure 1. the plot lot of items based on item difficulty and discrimination index english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 35 item difficulty the results of analysis showed that the average value of item difficulty was 0.47 and standard deviation of 0.19. figure 2 illustrates the proportion of the items based on the level of difficulty: easy, average, and hard. it is found that majority of items (71%) were of average difficulty. some items were outside the desired range of 0.3 to 0.7. out of 100 items, there were 16 items below 0.3 indicating more difficult items and seven items above 0.7 indicating easier items. hingorjo and jaleel (2012) suggest that items with average level of difficulty is more desirable, items with easy category can be placed at the beginning of the test as „warm up‟ questions, and difficult items should be reviewed for language confusion or even incorrect key. figure 2. the proportion of items based on item difficulty level table 2 below shows the item classification based on the reading skills. items with easy level were mostly dominated by questions related to scanning for detailed question skills. for items with average level of difficulty, items related to deducing meaning and the use of unfamiliar lexical items had the highest proportion accounting for 24%, followed by questions related to scanning for detailed questions (18%). meanwhile, items with high level of difficulty were dominated by items related to deducing meaning and the use of unfamiliar lexical items (6%), scanning detailed information (5%), and making inference (3%). table 2. classification of items based on reading skills reading skills item difficulty level easy average hard skimming for main idea 1 5 scanning for detailed information 6 18 5 deducing the meaning and the use of unfamiliar lexical item 2 24 6 pronoun resolution 1 9 making inference 7 3 understanding information when not explicitly stated 1 5 1 scanning to locate specific information 2 3 1 total questions 13 71 16 item discrimination item discrimination has a significant role to examine if an item is of low or high quality. items that function well to discriminate between students with different abilities are desirable and will increase reliability (nelson, 2001; wells & wollack, 2003). according to nelson (2001), discrimination index can be calculated in two approaches, called as the correlation and upper-lower method. measuring item discrimination with correlation approach is known as pointbiserial correlation or pb(r), which is the correlation between students‟ scores on the ari arifin danuwijaya item analysis of reading comprehension test for post-graduate students 36 item and the student‟s overall score. the analysis of items using lertap displays a full statistics that consist of point-biserial correlation, as shown in table 3. table 3. samples of the statistical analysis on test items 1 (c3) option wt. n p pb(r) b(r) avg. z a 1,00 32 0,64 0,01 0,02 47,53 0,05 b 0,00 18 0,36 -0,06 -0,08 46,22 -0,08 c 0,00 0 0,00 0,00 0,00 0,00 0,00 <-no d 0,00 0 0,00 0,00 0,00 0,00 0,00 <-no 2 (c4) option wt. n p pb(r) b(r) avg. z a 0,00 0 0,00 0,00 0,00 0,00 0,00 <-no b 0,00 3 0,06 -0,19 -0,39 39,33 -0,77 c 1,00 43 0,86 0,30 0,46 48,40 0,13 d 0,00 4 0,08 -0,25 -0,46 38,50 -0,85 table 3 shows the samples of item statistical analysis that has pb(r) value in two items (question 1 and question 2). the values of point-biserial in question 1 and question 2 were 0.01 and 0.03, respectively. according to wells and wollack (2003), a large positive pb(r) shows that test takers with higher scores tended to answer the item correctly, while lower score test takers responded incorrectly. in addition, item with small positive pb(r) does not significantly improved the test reliability, but even it can cause to reduce the reliability in some cases. in contrast, item with negative pb(r) will reduce test reliability, and it is preferable that an item has pb(r) more than 0.20 (wells & wollack, 2003). to conclude, question 1 has a low positive pb(r) and question 2 has a desirable pb(r) that can improve reliability. on the other hand, the index of item discrimination also describes the ability of an item to discriminate test takers with high and low scores. according to hingorjo and jaleel (2012), there are four categories of items based on its discrimination index: poor (di < 0.15), marginal (0.15 < di < 0.24), good (0.25 < di < 0.34), and excellent (> 0.35). figure 3 shows the percentage of item classification based on discrimination index. it is found that more than half of the total items had poor and marginal discrimination index, accounting for 39% and 23%, respectively. meanwhile, there were only 20% of good items and 18% of excellent items found in the test. figure 3. the proportion of items based on discrimination index english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 37 table 4 shows the proportion of items based on reading skills. based on the table, there were 14 items related to deducing the meaning and the use of familiar lexical items that were categorized as poor items, followed by scanning detailed information (18 items). for marginal level, most items were related to scanning for detailed questions. items related to scanning for detailed information and deducing the meaning and the use of familiar lexical items were mostly found in the category of good and excellent. table 4. classification of items based on reading skills reading skills item difficulty level poor marginal good excellent skimming for main idea 3 2 1 0 scanning for detailed information 8 11 6 4 deducing the meaning and the use of unfamiliar lexical item 14 3 5 10 pronoun resolution 4 2 3 1 making inference 7 1 2 0 understanding information when not explicitly stated 2 3 1 1 scanning to locate specific information 1 1 2 2 total questions 39 23 20 18 distractor analysis according to hingorjo and jaleel (2012), distractor analysis is essential to examine whether the distractors function well – low scoring students chose the distractor more, compared to higher scoring students. with the analysis, it makes possible for the test developer to revise, replace, and even remove the distractors. the test analysed consists of 100 questions with four options each; thus, the total number of distractors were 300. the analysis found that 39 out of 300 (13%) of the distractors were categorized as nonfunctioning distractors. non-functioning distractors were defined as distractors that were chosen by less than five per cent of the test takers or even those which were not selected at all by the test takers (hingorjo & jaleel, 2012). a distractor was categorized as working distractor when it was chosen, or some of lower examinees chose it. however, a distractor which was not chosen by anyone or fooling higher ability examinees does not function well (qaqish, 2006). this type of distractor is not contributing to test ability to discriminate the good students from the poor students, and thus it should be replaced or eliminated (kehoe, 1995). table 5 shows some samples of items with non-functioning distractors. table 5. samples of questions with non-functioning distractors q1 q2 q4 option n /50 option n /50 option a 32 64.0% b 3 6.0% a 4 8.0% b 18 36.0% c 43 86.0% c 45 90.0% d 4 8.0% d 1 2.0% for question 1, 50 test takers answered the question, and 32 of the test takers chose the right answer (option a). this question is in average difficulty level. however, the rest of the test takers (n = 18) chose b, leaving option c and d being not chosen by anyone. in this case, option c and d failed to function as good distractors. options c and d were categorized as non-functioning distractors. another sample for question 2, 43 out of 50 test takers answered the correct answer (option b). option b and d worked well as distractors because the options were chosen by some test takers. however, no one ari arifin danuwijaya item analysis of reading comprehension test for post-graduate students 38 answered option a, and thus, it is called as the non-functioning distractor. this case was similar to question 4, in which option b and d were the non-functioning distractors. according to carr (2011), some problematic items can be improved by revision, and the items that require revision are those having negative item pointbiserials, particularly items with large magnitudes. based on the analysis, there were 17 items out of 100 which had negative item point-of biserials, two of which had large magnitude. an item with negative point-biserial and high magnitude can be exemplified by question 22 (-0.22). this reading comprehension item had item difficulty of 0.28 and a point-biserial of 0.22, which was problematic. the item was in difficult category and had negative discrimination. the question can be seen in figure 4, and the passage was about the incan empire. 1. it can be inferred that pharaoh . . . a. referred to the name of an empire in egypt b. possessed powerful supremacy in egypt c. was an egyptian god d. lived for hundreds of years figure 4. example of an item with problematic distractors table 6 shows the distractor analysis of the example item. based on the responses of the item, it can be concluded that the distractors functioned well, as all three distractors were answered by the test takers. however, it can be seen that item c was more attractive that item b (the correct answer). the important detail of the response was shown in the value of pointbiserial. any distractors should have negative point-biserial coefficient, indicating that test takers who chose a wrong answer tended to have lower scores and vice versa (carr, 2011). based on table 5, option b, the correct answer, has a high negative point-biserial, which was highly problematic. it indicated that the option was more attractive to low-ability test takers than high-ability test takers. in contrast, option c was attractive to higher-ability test takers. therefore, the item required further changes, particularly the options. if the answer is b, then option c should be modified. table 6. distractor analysis results for the example item option n p pb(r) a 7 0,14 -0,34 b 14 0,28 -0,22 c 25 0,50 0,51 d 4 0,08 -0,21 conclusion item analysis has provided useful information about the characteristics of items in one test. some items, after the analysis, might be revised, changed, or even removed. based on the analysis above, it is found that the test had high reliability with cronbach‟s alpha coefficient of 0.8. as the nature of the test was high-stakes which function to make decision of the graduation for postgraduate school students, the reliability of the test needed to be improved, and one of them was by improving item quality. items should function to discriminate between students with different abilities. based on the findings, many items were categorized as marginal and poor category in terms of discrimination index. thus, these items should be treated for better development by either modification or deletion from the test set. based on the difficulty level, most of the items (71%) were categorized in the average level of difficulty, which was desirable for a test. the analysis showed that item with very easy and very difficult level needed further treatment. based on the above findings, there are some recommendations that can be put into consideration for future development. constructing high-stakes test takes about one english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 39 to two years to complete and involves staff from many different capabilities, such as experts in subject matter, test specialist, editors, psychmetricians, and many others. as a result to this, the first recommendation to improve the quality of item development is to ensure that items were written based on the test purpose and by experienced test writer. writing good items required knowledge and practice, and thus it is essential to have experienced colleagues share the process of item writing. second, it is quite appropriate to provide training materials for teachers to learn how to write better items. thorndike and thorndikechrist (2010) suggest that writing good items is a learnable skill and there are some principles of making an item. however, the construction of the questions is not simple as it requires certain skills and it has rules of writing the item. thus, it would be beneficial to provide training to ensure that the items written can discriminate properly and all the distractors function well. references abedi, j. 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(2006). developing multiple choice tests for social work trainings. in b. johnson, m. henderson, & m. thibedeau (eds.), eighth annual national human services training evaluation symposium (pp. 91–111). berkeley, california: california social work education center, university of california. quaigrain, k., & arhin, a. k. (2017). using reliability and item analysis to evaluate a teacher-developed test in educational measurement and evaluation. cogent education, 12, 1–11. doi: 10.1080/2331186x.2017.1301013. shirvan, m. e. (2016). assessing and improving general english university students‟ main subskills of reading compression: a case of university of bojnord. sino-us english teaching, 13(4), 245–260. doi: 10.17265/15398072/2016.04.002. spaan, m. (2006). test and item specifications development. language assessment quarterly, 3(1), 71–79. doi: 10.1207/s15434311laq0301. spaan, m. (2007). evolution of a test item. language assessment quarterly, 4(3), 279–293. doi: 10.1080/15434300701462937. tarrant, m., ware, j., & mohammed, a. m. (2009). an assessment of functioning and nonfunctioning distractors in multiple-choice questions: a descriptive analysis. bmc medical education, 9(1), 40. thorndike, r. m., & thorndike-christ, t. (2010). measurement and evaluation in psychology and education (8th ed.). boston: pearson education. turner, k., ireland, l., krenus, b., & pointon, l. (2011). essential academic skills. melbourne: oxford university press. wells, c. s., & wollack, j. a. (2003). an instructor’s guide to understanding test reliability. madison: university of wisconsin. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 105 e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis frimadhona syafri english language and literature department, universitas negeri semarang, indonesia e-mail: frimadhona_lt15s3@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id zainal rafli applied linguistics, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: zainal.rafli@unj.ac.id emzir applied linguistics, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@.ac.id apa citation: syafri, f., rafli, z., & emzir. (2018). e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 105-118. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1260. received: 14-02-2018 accepted: 23-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: the study focuses a need analysis towards the use of elena basis on calla approach as a media in enhancing learners’ comprehension in introduction to linguistics course. universitas negeri semarang has website for e-learning that is named elena (electronic learning aids). using elearning by web to provide information of the course will be real time and interactive. the subjects of the study were learners in fifth semester in academic year of 2016-2017 in english department in universitas negeri semarang. the semi-structured interview, observation, and descriptive survey were done to gather the data. the data were transcribed, identified, classified, analyzed, and interpreted to gain the answer of the research problem. the problem posed in the research is to analyze a need analysis towards the use of online learning: elena basis on calla approach as a media enhance learners’ comprehension in introduction to linguistics course. based on the overall data analysis and interpretation, a need analysis towards the implementation of elena basis on calla approach as a media can provide learners’ comprehension in learning linguistics concepts. the result showed that; 1) learners need to gain knowledge at a glance about the scope of linguistics; 2) learners need to be stimulated to observe and analyze the development of the language around it; 3) learners need media and means of communication forums and discussions both offline and online; 4) learners need to be facilitated with adequate bandwidth and infrastructure for internet use; and 5) learners are strengthened by e-learning and there are assessments in the use of e-learning. it can be concluded that need analysis is necessary in designing the instructional model, due to it is a process to determine the learners’ needs based on their wants, lacks, and necessities. keywords: a need analysis, e-learning, introduction to linguistics introduction this study aims to analyze a need analysis towards using e-learning for introductory linguistics course in english language and literature department, universitas negeri semarang. a need analysis is a process to assess students’communicative needs in order to achieve specific learning objective. hutchinson et al. (1987, p. 19) declare that an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and methods are based on the learner’s reason for learning. as brown (1995, p. 25) states that in terms of goals and objectives which, in turn, can serve as the bases for developing tests, materials, teaching activities and evaluation strategies. it is assumed that needs analysis (also known as needs assessment) has a vital role in the english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 107 process of designing and carrying out any language course. one of the basic assumptions of curriculum development is that sound education programs should be based on the needs analysis of learners. the basic procedure used to gather information about the needs of the student is known as needs analysis. according to seels and glasgow in sanjaya (2010, p. 93), needs analysis is a plan to gather information about gaps and use that information to determine priorities for existing gaps to find a solution. information is important to know the language skills that have been mastered by learners, and language skills that must be taught to them to achieve the target. meanwhile, hutchinson and waters in the nation and macallister (2010, p. 24) divide the need into the needs of the goal (i.e. what the learners need to do in the target situation) and the learning needs (what the learners need to do in order to learn). therefore, the needs of learners are divided into three namely lacks, wants, and necessities. figure 1. three types of needs 1) necessities: what does the learner need in language usage? 2) disadvantages (lacks): what are the learner deficiencies? 3) wants: what do learners want to learn? needs analysis should be in accordance with the characteristics of learners. in general, students who follow the course introduction to linguistics in the department of english language and literature universitas negeri semarang are 20 years and over. this means that learners are adults who learn selfawareness. essentially, adult learning is a nonauthoritarian, more informal, lesson-based learning that essentially aims at finding understanding and/or thought-seeking in order to formulate a standardized attitude (lee & owen, 2004). therefore, adult learning is how to make the learning program in harmony with real life.there are some components of adults that must be observed in the planning of learning, that is the relationship between the information obtained with the real world, involvement in tasks, and the needs to be achieved. the process of learning at the university is a series of process activities by teachers and learners on the basis of reciprocal relationships that take place in educational situations to achieve certain goals. interaction or mutual relationship between teachers and learners is a major requirement for the ongoing learning process. therefore, one of the ways pursued by universitas negeri semarang in intensifying the online learning process. therefore, a review of the characteristics of each course offered in each department, so that the management and learning process can be presented appropriately and achieve the learning objectives. english language and literature department as part of universitas negeri semarang look at the characteristics of each course given to the students. one of the subjects that need to be examined is introduction to linguistics because this subject is a prerequisite subject for subsequent linguistic courses, such as morphology, syntax, and semantics. understanding of linguistic concepts becomes the main foundation for learners to study linguistic-oriented courses for higher levels. in line with the report of seminar on evaluation of linguistic teaching in higher education compiled by kridalaksana (1978), that introductory linguistics course aims to learners have basic knowledge about the nature of language, its function, and its relation with other sciences. this course, in addition to providing a basis for further study in linguistics, also provides sufficient insight into the field of linguistics for those interested in other disciplines this study explores learners’ perceptions and examines their point of views in studying linguistics and how to comprehend basics of linguistics. this analysis will be concerning in developing model of learning in frimadhona syafri, zainal rafli, &emzir e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis 108 introduction to linguistics course. besides, it will inform to lecturer about what strategies, design instructional, and media that are appropriate to encourage the learners’ knowledge in study introduction to linguistics course. method referring to this research, the right method of research is descriptive method. in carrying out this research, in general, it has taken several steps to obtain data related to the descriptive analysis that includes, (a) analysis of online learning model needs for introductory linguistics course and (b) learning conditions introduction to linguistics. descriptive method is used to describe characteristics of a population or phenomenon being studied. it does not answer questions about how/when/why the characteristics occurred. rather, it addresses the "what" question (what are the characteristics of minnesota state population or situation being studied?)the characteristics used to describe the situation or population are usually some kind of categorical scheme also known as descriptive categories. thus, descriptive research cannot be used as the basis of a causal relationship where one variable affects another. dulock (1993) stated that descriptive research to describe sistematically and accurately the facts and the characteristics of a given population or area of interest. results and discussion the need of learning model of introduction to linguistics by using online is done by capturing input from participants of pbi program even semester 2016/2017 who have followed the course of introduction to linguistics by using questionnaire. the results of the questionnaire analysis consisted of several aspects, namely (1) the identity of the participants of the pbi program in the even semester of 2016/2017 that followed the course of introduction to linguistics; (2) content requirement/course subject introduction to linguistics; (3) learning needs introduction linguistics using the principles of calla approach; and (4) the need of electronic learning aid (elena) learning model to support learning process of introduction to linguistics, and (5) open question to the need of online learning implementation using electronic learning aid (elena) based on calla approach in introduction to linguistics course. the identity of the participants of the pbi program in the even semester of 2016/2017 that followed the course of introduction to linguistics the survey was conducted by distributing questionnaires to students of english education study program (pbi) even semester of 2016/2017 department of language and english literature universitas negeri semarang. the results of the questionnaire show the identity of learners viewed from the age and sex, as shown below. figure 2. age description students aged less than 20 years consists of 26.67% and learners aged between 20 to 25 years consisting of 73.33%. based on the age of learners then the learning used is adult learning (andagogy). figure 3. sex description meanwhile, the sex of the men who collected the survey consisted of 6.67% and the female sex collecting survey consisted of 93.33%. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 these data suggest that female learners are more involved in the study. content requirement/subject material introduction linguistics course in analyzing the needs of the content /subject matter of linguistic introduction, the researcher uses twelve aspects contained in the questionnaire. as a reference, these aspects refer to the subject matter contained in the rps (semester learning plan) of introduction to linguistics. these aspects consist of (1) a statement that refers to the extent to which the learners need for the statement, (2) learners understand the subject of the structure of human language, (3) learners understand the subject of phonetics, (4) learners understand the subject of phonology , (5) learners understand the subject of morphology, (6) learners understand the subject of syntax, (7) learners understand the subject of semantics, (8) learners understand the subject of pragmatic, (9) learners understand the subject language change, (10) learners understand the subject of the nature of human language, (11) learners understand the subject language variation, and (12) learners understand the subject of language acquisition. the twelve aspects are chosen by learners based on options that are not required, less needed, needed and much needed. for clarity can be seen in the figure below. *green = no needed *dark blue = less needed *yellow=needed *light blue=required is needed figure 4. needs analysis of the subject matter of linguistic introduction the first statement, that learners understand the linguistic scope. the data in the graph above shows that 57.14% of the respondents are urgently needed, 35.71% of the respondents are needed, and 7.14% of those who answered are less needed. this illustrates that over eighty percent of learners consider this material as very important and indispensable to be developed and reviewed in more detail. the second statement, namely learners understand the subject of the structure of human language. the graph above explains the percentage of choices to the statement of learners to understand the subject of the structure of human language. the data indicate that 21.43% choose is needed, 71.43% stated required, and 7.14% stated less needed. this illustrates that most of the learners consider this material as important and necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. the third statement, learners understand the subject of phonetic. based on the graph above, there are 35.71% who choose the option is much needed, 57.14% choose required, and 7.14% of learners choose less needed. it illustrates that most of the learners consider this material very important and very english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. fourth statement, learners understand the subject of phonology. the graph above shows that 35.71% of learners say it is urgently needed, 64.29% of them claim that the material is needed and none of them says it is unnecessary and unnecessary. this condition illustrates that all learners think this material is very important and very necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. fifth statement, learners understand the subject of morphology. the above figure explains that 57.14% of learners choose the option very much in need, 42.86% of them stated that the material is needed and none of them stated less needed even not needed. this condition illustrates that all learners think this material is very important and very necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. sixth statement, learners understand the subject of syntax. the graph above illustrates that 50% of learners choose the option is much needed and the other 50% choose the required option. none of them stated less and not needed. this condition illustrates that all learners consider this material as very important and indispensable to be developed and reviewed in more detail. the seventh statement, learners understand the subject of semantcs. the graph above illustrates that in the statement there were 42.86% of learners opting for the much needed option, 57.14% of them stated the option was needed and none of them stated less needed and unneeded. this condition illustrates that all learners think this material is very important and very necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. eighth statement, learners understand the subject of pragmatics. the graph above explains that this statement was chosen for 42.86% of the students for the needy option, 57.14% with options required and none of them stated less needed and unnecessary. this condition illustrates that all learners think this material is very important and very necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. the ninth statement, learners understand the subject of the language change. for this statement, the graph above illustrates that 35.71% of learners who choose the option are urgently needed, 50% of them stated that the material is needed, and the remaining 14.29% stated that the material is less needed. this illustrates that most of the learners consider this material as important and necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. the tenth statement of the learner understands the subject of the nature of human language. the above graph clarifies that 21.43% of learners choose the muchneeded option for this statement, 57.14% of them stated voting is required, and 21.43% of them stated that the statement is less needed. this illustrates that most of the learners consider this material as important and necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. the eleventh statement of the learner understands the subject of language variation. the graph above explains that there is a 21.43% option badly needed for this statement, 78.57% say that the statement is needed, and none of them says it is unnecessary and unnecessary. it illustrates that all learners consider this material important and necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. twelfth statement, learners understand the subject of language acquisition. the graph above shows that 35.71% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement, 57.14% of them stated required, and 7.14% of them stated less needed. it illustrates that most of the learners consider the content /subject matter of this subject important and necessary to be developed and reviewed in more detail. from the twelve aspects of the above statement it can be seen that six aspects explain that all learners desperately need the subject to be developed and reviewed in more detail. six subjects are phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language variation. five of the six subjects are major branches of linguistics. therefore, the subject matter of this subject becomes the starting point as an introduction to advanced linguistics courses such as morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. frimadhona syafri, zainal rafli, &emzir e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis 110 learning needs introduction to linguistics using the principles of calla approach to analyze needs of the introduction of learning introduction to linguistics using the principles of the calla approach, there are nineteen statements that largely adopt calla principles. to facilitate the elaboration of these nineteen aspects are grouped into three elements, namely learning objectives, learning process, and evaluation. 1) learning objectives is reflected in the following graph. *green = no needed*dark blue = less needed *yellow=needed *light blue=required is needed figure 4. analysis of learning implementation needs (learning objectives) the first statement, the course lecturer provides the linguistic introductory lecture contract at the beginning of the lecture. based on the data on the charts, 28.57% of learners choose the much-needed option of availability of lecture contracts at the start of the lecture, 64.29% of learners choose the required option, and 7.14% of learners choose the less-needed option. it proves that most learners assume the availability of lecture contracts at the beginning of the meeting is essential to know the purpose and coverage of the introductory linguistics course. the second statement, the lecturer of the course lecturer provides the linguistic introduction lecture unit (sap) at the beginning of the lecture. the data in the graph shows that 21.43% of learners choose the most needed option for the statement, 50.00% of learners choose required, and 28.57% of learners choose less needed. this explains that most learners consider sap as important to know what topics and subtitles of linguistic introduction material will be learned at each meeting. 2) learning process is described in the following figure. *green = no needed *dark blue = less needed *yellow=needed *light blue=required is needed figure 5. analysis of learning implementation needs (learning process) the third statement, the course lecturer provides subject matter in the form of a ppt and a summary of material topics introduction to linguistics at each meeting. the data on the graph shows that 50% of learners choose the option is very necessary, 50% of learners choose the required option, and none of the learners who answered less need and did not need this aspect. it proves that all learners argue that the availability of subject matter in the form of ppt and the essence of introduction to linguistics at every meeting is very urgent. fourth statement, the presentation of lecture material at each meeting must be in order of course with linguistic introductory english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 lecture at the beginning of the lecture. the data on the graph shows that 50% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement, 42.86% of learners choose the required option for this statement, and 7.14% of learners choose the less needed option. it proves that most learners assume the suitability of lecture materials with lecture contracts at the beginning of the meeting is important to understand the relevance of one subject to another. the fifth statement, the lecturer in the course gives a greeting at every meeting. the data on the graph shows that 28.57% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement, 42.86% of learners choose the required option for this statement, and 28.57% of learners declare the option less necessary. it proves that most learners assume the greeting at the beginning of every meeting is very important to provide stimulus and readiness of participants in receiving learning. the sixth statement, the lecturer develops the metacognitive awareness of the learner by giving the introduction of learning objectivity and introducing new vocabulary as well as the function of academic language according to the subject matter /subject which will be studied. the data in the graph illustrate that for that statement, there are 64.29% of learners choosing the option is urgently needed, 21.43% of learners choose the required option, and there are 7.14% of learners choosing less needed and 7.14% unnecessary. it proves that three quarters of learners assume that this aspect is essential to understanding linguistic concepts. the seventh statement, the lecturer explains new information, new skills, and learning strategies. the data on the graph shows that 64.29% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement, 21.29% of learners choose the required option, and 14.29% of learners choose the less needed option. this explains that most learners assume that the teaching professor explains new information, new skills, and learning strategies in varying ways is essential to accommodate different learners' learning styles. eighth statement, active learners practice new concepts, skills and learning strategies such as cooperative learning activities. the data in the graph shows that 28.57% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement, 57.14% of learners choose the required option, and 14.29% of learners choose the less needed option. this explains that most learners argue that cooperation and discussion with peers is important for exchanging opinions and checking understanding of the material learned. the ninth statement, the course lecturer provides structured and timely assignments. the data in the graph shows that 14.29% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement, 64.29% of learners choose the required option, and 21.43% of learners choose the less needed option. it explains that most learners assume that this aspect is important to train organized learners in performing tasks and sequences in understanding linguistic concepts. the tenth statement, the task given in accordance with the competence of skills to be achieved. the data in the graph illustrates that 21.43% of learners voted indispensably for this statement, 71.4% of learners voted required, and 7.14% of learners chose less needed. this explains that most learners assume that understanding of the material needs to be done with the exercises and tasks assigned so that they can self-assess the mastery of the material learned. eleventh statement, lecture material presented communicatively. the data in the graph explains that 64.29% of learners choose the much-needed option for this statement, 35.71% of learners choose the required option. it shows that all learners need presentation of lecture material presented communicatively. twelfth statement, how to present interesting and communicative material by using video/ppt/link to other sources. the data in the graph illustrates that 64.29% of learners choose the much-needed option of this statement, 35.71% of learners choose the required option, and no learner who chooses is less needed and does not require. it explains frimadhona syafri, zainal rafli, &emzir e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis 112 that all learners desperately need an interesting and communicative learning media. the thirteenth statement, the lecturer on the subject, poses high-level questions that encourage students to do. the data in the graph shows that 64.29% of learners choose the required option for this statement, 35.71% of learners choose less needed. it explains that three-quarters of learners need the lecturers' lectures to provide high-level questions that encourage students to do. however, there are one-third of learners expressed less need for such statements. fourteenth statement, learners are actively involved in the discussion forum provided by the teaching lecturer either group or classical. the data in the graph shows that 7.14% of learners choose the option is much needed for this statement, 78.57% choose the required option, and 14.29% choose less needed. this explains that most learners desperately need their active involvement in discussion forums both group and classical. the fifteenth statement, the lecturer of the course lecturer gives feedback or comments in the class discussion. the data in the graph shows that 64.29% choosing the option is urgently needed and 35.71% selecting the required options against this statement. it explains that all learners desperately need the actions of lecturers to give feedback in class discussion. the seventeenth statement, the lecturer of the course learner provides the learning that produces the work of the learner. the data in the graph shows that 7.14% of learners voted indispensable for this statement, 64.29% of learners chose the required option, 21.43% chose the less needed option, and 7.14% chose the unnecessary option. it explains that the various opinions of learners on this aspect. however, most of them require that lecturers provide subjects that produce the work of learners. eighteenth statement, the topic on discussion forums allows learners to construct their own ideas or knowledge. the data on the graph shows that 15.38% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement, 76.92% of learners choose the required option, and 7.69% of learners choose less needed. this explains that most learners desperately need topics in discussion forums allow learners to construct their own ideas or knowledge. 3) evaluation of learning is illustrated in the following graph. *green = no needed*dark blue = less needed *yellow=needed *light blue=required is needed figure6.analysis of learning implementation needs (evaluation of learning) nineteenth statement, learners conduct self-evaluation by filling out evaluation blogs and conducting discussions with groups to review their understanding of the material being mastered. the data in the graph shows that 7.14% of learners voted indispensable for this statement, 57.14% of learners chose the required option, 28.57% of learners chose the less needed option, and 7.14% chose unnecessary option. it explains that learners are different opinions in this regard, but the option requires still more than in part requiring this aspect. twentieth statement, learners integrate what is learned in the learning including the knowledge framework, edit the previous knowledge needed, apply the knowledge, study the situation in the real context. the data in the graph shows that 21.43% of learners choose the much needed option for this statement and 78.57% of learners choose the required option. nobody chooses less and unneeded options. it explains that all learners desperately need the skills to integrate what is learned in the learning including the knowledge framework, edit the prior knowledge needed, apply the knowledge, learn the situation in the real context english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 113 broadly speaking, it can be seen that learners need the learning principles contained in calla, starting from the preparation stage up to the evaluation stage. these calla principles provide skills in the learning process of learners in developing metacognitive, cognitive and social capabilities. if the principles of calla are implemented properly and appropriately, then learners will be able to construct the knowledge they learn. the need of online learning facilities by using electronic learning aid (elena) for introduction to linguistics course the following needs analysis is an electronic learning aid (elena) learning analysis found in universitas negeri semarang to support the introduction to linguistic learning process. the data used to conduct the survey consists of twelve statements namely, (1) elena facilitate learners with the desired speed level so that learners can learn with the intelegent quotes (iq) owned, (2) elena facilitate learners to learn on difficult subjects as often as the learners wish, (3) elena facilitates learners without time limitations. whenever students learn and how long they want to study, there are no problems and no limitations (when compared to regular regular classes), (4) elena facilitates learners to increase knowledge outside of class time, (5) elena facilitates repeat learners, (6) elena facilitates learners to assist in improving supervision of the use of learning materials, (7) elena facilitates learners to monitor, (8) elena facilitates students to conduct online discussions in order to provide feedback to learners, (9) systems contained in the elena helps lecturers to monitor the progress of learners by assessing the understanding of learners who participate in the discussion online, (10) assignment through elena makes my material sense, and (11) participation and liveliness of learners at question and answer sessions in online discussions help students understand better the material being studied. these conditions can be seen in the following graph. *green = no needed*dark blue = less needed *yellow=needed *light blue=required is needed figure 7. learning analysis of electronic learning aid (elena) the first statement is the elena facilitates learners with the appropriate level of pace that is desired so that learners can learn with intelegent quotes (iq) owned. the data contained in the graph shows that 21.43% of learners choose the option is much needed and 78.57% of learners choose the need, even no learners who choose the less option and do not need this aspect. the data explains that all learners assume elena facilitates learners with the desired speed level so that learners can learn with their own intelegent quotes (iq). the second statement is that elena facilitates learners to learn on difficult subjects as often as the learners want. the data contained in the graph shows that 35.71% of learners choose the option is much needed, 57.14% of learners choose the required option, and 7.14% of learners choose the less needed option. the data explains that most learners desperately need elena as a facility to learn on difficult subjects as often as students want. frimadhona syafri, zainal rafli, &emzir e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis 114 the third statement is that elena facilitates learners without time constraints. whenever students learn and how long they want to study, there are no problems and no limitations (when compared to regular regular classes). the graph data above explains that 28.57% of learners choose the option is much needed and 71.43% of learners choose the required option. the data explains that all learners desperately need elena as a facility for learning without time constraints. whenever students learn and how long they want to study, there are no problems and no limitations (when compared to regular regular classes). the fourth statement is that elena facilitates learners to increase their knowledge beyond class time. based on the data on the charts it is clear that 21.43% of learners choose the option is much needed and 78.57% of learners choose required. the data explains that all learners desperately need an elena that facilitates learners to gain knowledge outside of college hours. the fifth statement is that elena facilitates learners to repeat the newly learned knowledge. based on the data on the charts, it is clear that 58.71% of learners choose the option is much needed, 57.14% of learners choose needed, and 7.14% choose less needed option. the data explains that most learners desperately need elena as a facility for learners in repeating newly learned knowledge. the sixth statement is that elena is a learning tool available whenever it is accessible and everywhere. based on the data on the graph explains that 50% of learners choose is needed and 50% of learners need it. the data explains that all learners desperately need elena for available learning tools whenever accessible and anywhere. the seventh statement is that elena facilitates learners to assist in improving the supervision of the use of the subject matter. based on the data on the graph explained that 28.57% of learners choose the option is much needed and 71.43% of learners choose the required option. no learner chooses less needed and unneeded options. the data explains that all learners desperately need elena to facilitate learners in order to assist in improving the supervision of the use of the subject matter. the eighth statement is that elena facilitates learners to assist in improving the supervision of the use of the subject matter. the graph data explains that 21.43% of learners choose the option is much needed and 64.29% of learners choose the required option. furthermore, 14.29% of learners who choose less options are needed. the data explains that most learners desperately need elena to facilitate learners in order to assist in improving the supervision of the use of the subject matter. the ninth aspect of elena facilitates learners to conduct online discussions in order to provide feedback to learners. based on the data in the graph above, it is clear that 14.29% of learners choose the option is much needed, 71.43% of learners choose the required option, 7.14% of students choose the option is less needed and 7.14% is not needed. the data varies options, but most learners need elena as a facility for online discussion in order to provide feedback to learners. the tenth statement, the elena system helps lecturers monitor the progress of learners by assessing the understanding of learners who participate in online discussions. based on the data in the graph above it is explained that 7.14% of learners choose the option is much needed, 71.43% of learners choose the required option, 21.43% of learners who choose the option less needed. the data illustrates that most learners need a system in elena to help lecturers monitor the progress of learners by assessing the understanding of learners who participate in online discussions. the eleventh statement is the assignment through elena makes the understanding of the lecture material more effective. based on the data on the charts it is clear that 7.14% of learners choosing the option is urgently needed, 35.71% of learners choose the required option, 57.14% of learners who choose the option are less needed. the data explains that only some of the learners need the assignment through elena to make the understanding of the lecture material more effective. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 the twelfth statement is the participation and participation of learners at a question and answer session in online discussion to help students understand better for the material being studied. based on the data in the above chart 21.43 it is shown that learners choose the option is much needed, 64.29% of learners choose needed, 14.29% of learners who choose the option less needed. the data explains that most learners need the participation and participation of learners in a question and answer session in online discussions that help students understand better for the material being studied. the above data summary can be stated that use and availability of elena can facilitate learners to learn on difficult subjects as often as the learners wish. elena facilitates learners to repeat newly learned knowledge. elena is a learning tool that is available anytime can be accessed and anywhere. open question to the need of online learning implementation using electronic learning aid (elena) based on calla approach in introductory linguistics course for an open question, there are four questions asked, namely (1) what do you think needs to be improved from the material? (2) what do you think needs improvement from the introduction to linguistics? (3) what do you think needs to be improved from the media used in the current introduction to linguistics? (4) what resources/tools should you use in your introduction to linguistics? the four open questions were responded by respondents with various opinions and suggestions related to introduction to linguistics. the response of respondents to four open questions indicates that learners need the presentation of simplified material to be easily understood. in addition, the media used are expected to be more varied. that is, not only using ppt, but the sampling can be a video or image related to the topic. meanwhile, there are also learners who want online discussions, blogs, or other sources in the form of links. it shows the sincerity of learners in achieving a maximum understanding of the concepts and scope of linguistics. besides questionnaire and observation, taking interviews with lecturers and learners, there are some obstacles to material tackling. the lecturer tries to complete the twelve subjects of agreed upon in sixteen meetings. however, lecturers find it difficult to explain each subject in one or two meetings. as an alternative, the lecturer gives the task to check the understanding of learners. the same thing is also subject to completion of discussions on the matter. they also complained about the narrow time constraints. the tasks given by the lecturer can not do well because the material understanding introduction to linguistics course has not been properly understood. learners want a solution, one of them with linguistics. for more details, the following table describes want (what they want learners), lack (the weaknesses in learners), and necessity (things or items that learners need) as illustrated by nation (2010). in this diagram below, as the result of need analysis of the pbi study program of the semester four 2016/2017 which has been in introduction to linguistics courses by using interviews, questionnaire, and observation. frimadhona syafri, zainal rafli, &emzir e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis 116 elena basis on calla approach for learners’ comprehension linguistics: a need analysis material method learning support system: elena · materials “simple” · using module · some topics are reviewed and developed · course materials are presented in a communicatio n manner · lectures provide subject matter at every meeting · elena facilitates learners to learn on difficult subjects as often as the learners’ wish · elena is an available learning tool whenever it is accessible and everywhere. · learners are not familiar with the use of e-learning (elena) · learners hampered the availability of bandwidth (quota) for interest usage · students are facilitated with adequate bandwith and infrastructure for internet use · learners are strengthened by e-learning and there are assessment in the use of elearning. · learners do not read other references related to the subject · learners are not used to doing critical analysis of the development of the language around them · learners need media interactive to learn linguistics · learners are stimulated to observe and analyze the development of the language around it. · materials too broad and long-winded · textbook is complicated · lack of knowledge and information on linguistics · learners need simple material linguistics · learners need to gain knowledge at a glance the scope of linguistics want lack necessity want lack necessity want lack necessity figure 7. the result of need analysis towards the the participants of the pbi study program of the semester four 2016/2017 based on the chart, there are three aspects that were analyzed to fullfil the need analysis of the learners in taking introduction to linguistics course; (1) material, (2) method, and (3) learning support system: elena. the result of the respondents' responses indicate some considerations. first, learners lack learning time in the classroom to explore concepts and examples in order to better understand the basic concepts of linguistics presented. second, most learners do not read the material before the teaching and learning process so they are not ready to accept many new terms. third, the majority of learners tend to depend on the lecturer's explanation because it is difficult to understand the linguistic concepts of the reference booksthat learners need a simplified presentation of the material for easy understanding. fourth, the media used are expected to be more varied. that is, not only using ppt, but the sampling can be a video or image related to the topic. meanwhile, there are also learners who want online discussions, blogs, or other sources in the form of links. it shows the sincerity of learners in achieving a maximum understanding of the concepts and scope of linguistics. internet facilities provided by the university have not been used optimally by lecturers and learners for the process of teaching and learning activities. conclusion to sum up, the results of the needs analysis are necessary for lecturer to identify the learners’ professional needs, the learners’ needs in terms of language skills and the learners’ deficiencies in the area of language skills. after analyzing the students’ needs and determining the objectives of the language course, continue to select a material that meets the needs of the learners. thus, needs analysis is the foundation indeveloping curriculum content, teaching materials and methods that can lead to increasing the learners’ motivation and success. in implementation of elena english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 117 basis on calla approach for learners’ comprehension in linguistics is a need of learners to enhance their knowledge about linguistics by using media online (elena) as blended learning. references brown, j. (1995). the elements of language curriculum: a systematic approach to program development. new york: heinle & heinle publishers. dulock, h. l. (1993). research design: descriptive research. journal of pediatric oncology nursing, 10(4), 154-157. hutchinson, t., & waters, a. (1987). english for specific purposes: a learning-centered approach. new york: cambridge university press nation, i.s.p., & macalister, j. (2010). language curriculum design. new york: routledge. frimadhona syafri, zainal rafli, &emzir e-learning for learners’ comprehension in linguistics: a need analysis 118 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 137 improving the tenth grade students’ english speaking ability through storytelling firdayanti firdaus english department, faculty of politics and education, university of potensi utama, indonesia e-mail: firdayanti.firdaus95@gmail.com dwi suci amaniarsih english department, faculty of politics and education, university of potensi utama, indonesia e-mail: amaniarsih86@gmail.com apa citation: firdaus, f., & amaniarsih, d. s. (2018). improving the tenth grade students’ english speaking ability through storytelling. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 137-146. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1533. received: 13-08-2018 accepted: 21-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: the purposes of this research are to find out; 1) how to improve english speaking ability of the tenth grade students at harapan-i medan through the application of storytelling method, and 2) how the students’ responses to storytelling as a learning method. this research was a classroom action research applying kemmis mctaggart model. the research was done in two cycles in which each cycle consists of four stages: plans, actions, observations, and reflections. the subjects in this research were students of grade x-6 of senior high school harapan-i medan. the object of this study was the application of the storytelling method to improve the students’ english speaking ability. based on the results of the research, it was found that the percentage of completeness from pre-action, cycle-i, and cycle-ii increased at senior high school harapan-i medan. the percentage of student’s completeness in pre-action was 27%, in the cycle-i was 47%, and in the cycle-ii was 70%. there was a significant increase (43%) from pre-action, cycle-i, and cycle-ii. in addition, students’ enthusiasm, courage, and activity have also increased. thus, it can be concluded that storytelling method has improved the speaking ability of the tenth grade students of senior high school harapan-i medan and increased their response, enthusiasm, courage, and activity to speak english. keywords: speaking ability; english; storytelling; folklore; classroom action research. introduction english is the main medium of communication in europe, america, australia and oceania, africa, and become an international language in asian. in indonesia, english has been the first foreign language. as the first foreign language, it makes english become one of the compulsory subjects taught at schools in indonesia ranging from high school to university. this is stated in the republic of indonesia law number 20 of 2003 (uu ri no. 20/2003) that the basic and secondary education curriculum must contain language education. in addition, mendikbud (2013) notes that “english is the second language subject that must be learned after bahasa.” according to the 2013 curriculum, english language learning aims to make language learners able to use the language being learned in oral and written communication (uu ri no. 20/2003). in learning english, there are four skills that must be mastered, namely: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. speaking skill is the functional skill because it is used to communicate, to obtain and to convey information in daily life. speaking is the ability to produce speech sound of the words to express and convey thoughts and feelings. the general objective of speaking is to inform, entertain, and persuade. in teaching context, teaching english speaking skills is to teach english learners to be able to; 1) produce english speech sounds and patterns; 2) use sentence, word stress, firdayanti firdaus & dwi suci amaniarsih improving the tenth grade students’ english speaking ability through storytelling 138 intonation, and english rhythms; 3) choose words and sentences that are appropriate to the social context, the listener, and the subject matter (deixis); 4) organize mindset meaningfully and logically; 5) use language as a tool to express values and express opinions; and 6) use language fluently and confidently without a lot of pauses (nunan, 2003). basically, there are at least 13 types of speaking activities, namely: 1) discussing, 2) describing images, 3) telling stories, 4) reporting news, 5) simulations, 6) interviews, 7) brainstorming, 8) completing stories, 9) finding differences, 10) telling pictures, 11) information gaps, 12) playing cards, and 13) role playing. speaking assessment in language learning is based on two factors, namely: linguistic and non-linguistic factors. linguistic factors include pronunciation, vocabulary, and structure, while nonlinguistic factors include material, fluency and style (haryadi & zamzani, 1997). further, nurgiyantoro (2001) divided the task of speaking skills in several forms, namely: 1) speaking based on pictures, 2) interview, 3) storytelling, 4) speech, and 5) discussion. nurgiyantoro (2001) adds that the assessment tool consists of the accuracy of information, the relationship between information, the accuracy of structure and vocabulary, fluency, the reasonableness of the discourse sequence, and the style of pronunciation. based on several opinions and theories, the assessment of speaking skills used in this research is presented in table 1. table 1. the assessment of speaking ability no the aspect assessed scale level 1 linguistics factor: 1. pronunciation and 1 2 3 4 articulation clarity 2. accuracy of intonation, 1 2 3 4 pressure, and volume. 3. accuracy in the use of 1 2 3 4 structure,vocabulary, and expression 4. fairness of discourse 1 2 3 4 sequence 2 non-linguistic factor 1. information accuracy. 1 2 3 4 2. relationship between 1 2 3 4 information 3. fluency. 1 2 3 4 4. style of speaking, attitude, 1 2 3 4 appearance, face expression, body movement. total …….. yet, for indonesian people, speaking english fluently is considered difficult since the language is not used in daily communication and social interaction. it is supported by the results of the observations and interviews conducted with english teachers at senior high school of harapan-1 medan in which many students were not able to speak english. it was proved when the teacher invites them to communicate in english. many of them cannot respond and do not understand what is being conveyed. this disability is suspected because they are not used to communicating in english and inappropriate of teaching methods. in addition, many students think that speaking english is a very complex task to fulfill. therefore, this research attempts to analyze the use of storytelling method to improve students’ speaking skills. storytelling is a creative process that can activate not only the intellectual aspects but also the aspects of sensitivity, refinement, emotion, art, power of fantasizing, and children right and left brain (asfandiyar, 2007). storytelling is not just mere entertainment, but also has a higher purpose, such as the introduction of the natural environment, character, and encourage children to behave positively. the purpose of storytelling is to develop several aspects, namely aspects of language, social, emotional, cognitive, and moral development (musfiroh, 2005). besides, storytelling also aims to convey moral lessons without patronizing or imposing opinions (mal, 2012). moreover, the ministry of education and culture (2018) states that storytelling aims to: 1) improve students’ literacy skills, 2) develop creativity and critical thinking skills in interpreting english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 139 story content, developing stories, and appearances in public speaking, 3) develop storytelling abilities, and 4) increase selfesteem, mutual respect, totality, the spirit of hard working, and cooperating. one of the texts which is important for the character development of next generation is story. the story used in storytelling consists of: fables, legends, sage, myths, parables, fairy tales, and panji stories/wira cerita (hidayani, 2013). indonesia, which consists of various ethnicities, cultures and customs, has so many stories and this should be maintained and preserved so that students as the next generation keep familiar with their cultural roots. thus, to maintain indonesian stories, legend is used in this research. method this classroom action research was carried out collaboratively. in this research, the english teacher of grade x carried out the action, while the researcher was the observer. this research used kemmis and mctaggart classroom action research model. according to kemmis and mctaggart, there are four stages in this research, namely: planning/plan, actions, observations, and reflections. this research was presented in two cycles. this research was conducted at senior high school harapan-1 medan in the even semester of 2017/2018 academic year. the subjects in this research were all the students of grade x-6 in senior high school harapan 1 medan, while the object of this research was the application of storytelling to improve students’ ability to speak english. the data used were qualitative data, in the form of primary and secondary data. the primary data was obtained directly from the results of observations and interview, while the secondary data was obtained from documentation of the relevant institution or organization. data analysis techniques used were data reduction. it is the activities of selection, simplification and transformation data of field note results. the validity and reliability of data was examined by using triangulation techniques and member check. triangulation is a combination of various data collection techniques and sources that already exist. in this research, triangulation was carried out by observation, interviews and field notes. moreover, the member check was done by repeating the outline that was revealed by the informant at the end of the interview to ensure the data obtained and to correct the errors or deficiencies. results and discussion the results of this research were obtained from pre-cycle, cycle i, and cycle ii. the results of pre-cycle activities are the students’ english speaking skills before the research actions being taken. the aim was to find out the initial conditions of students’ english speaking skills. pre-cycle activity to see the students’ ability to speak, they were orally pretested by using several narrative text stories. they were free to choose one of the stories to be retold in front of the class using their own words with duration of approximately 3-5 minutes. the result of pre-cycle can be seen in table 2. table 2. the students’ speaking ability on pre-action no respondent pre-cycle kkm = 70 score value complete incomplete 1 1.1 23 72 √ 2 1.2 17 53 √ 3 1.3 15 47 √ 4 1.4 10 31 √ 5 1.5 23 72 √ 6 1.6 17 54 √ 7 1.7 12 38 √ 8 1.8 12 38 √ 9 1.9 16 50 √ firdayanti firdaus & dwi suci amaniarsih improving the tenth grade students’ english speaking ability through storytelling 140 10 1.1 17 53 √ 11 1.11 17 53 √ 12 1.12 23 72 √ 13 1.13 19 59 √ 14 1.14 12 38 √ 15 1.15 19 59 √ 16 1.16 25 78 √ 17 1.17 16 50 √ 18 1.18 10 31 √ 19 1.19 18 56 √ 20 1.2 24 72 √ 21 1.21 16 50 √ 22 1.22 23 72 √ 23 1.23 17 53 √ 24 1.24 23 72 √ 25 1.25 16 50 √ 26 1.26 23 72 √ 27 1.27 17 53 √ 28 1.28 13 41 √ 29 1.29 17 53 √ 30 1.3 16 50 √ total 1642 8 22 average 55 percentage 27% 73% based on the table above, it can be seen that the average value of speaking skills of students in english only reaches 55. of the 30 students, only 8 students (27%) completed, while as many as 22 students (73%) were not completed with a 70 minimum completeness criteria. the results of these tests can be identified and summarized as follows: 1. students’ speaking ability in english still looks very faltering, more passive and silent. 2. there are still many students who have difficulties in describing and telling the story. 3. many students still do not understand the storyline. 4. there are still many students who have not been able to express stories with good gestures, so students look very stiff and awkward. 5. the students have not been able to play the intonation properly. 6. the students’ vocabulary mastery is still poor and inadequate. 7. there are still many students who have not prepared themselves well, sometimes they even seem ashamed. the analysis can be seen in the following table. table 3. the analyses of students’ speaking ability on pre-action category value range frequency percentage very good 85 – 100 good 75 – 84 1 3.4% sufficient 60 – 74 7 23.3% poor 50 – 59 15 50% very poor 0 – 49 7 23.3% 30 100% the results showed that there were no student in very good category, there was only 1 student (3.4%) who had the ability to speak english in good category, 7 students (23.3%) in the sufficient category, 15 students (50%) in the poor category, and 7 students (23.3%) in the very poor category. thus, the cycle-i action was needed to english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 141 improve their speaking ability by applying storytelling method. description of cycle-i cycle-i action was done in two meetings. each meeting consisted of 2x45 minutes. in this cycle, the storytelling method was applied. the basic competence is “analyzing social functions, text structures, and linguistic elements in simple narrative texts in the form of folklore in accordance with the context of use”. the folklore used in this research is the lake toba legend at the first meeting and tangkuban perahu at the second meeting. the students sat in group to make the stories based on the theme and main ideas that had been given and then retold it in front of the class in 3-5 minutes. the results can be seen in table 4, while the analysis can be seen in table 5. table 4. the students’ speaking ability on cycle-i no respondent pre-cycle kkm = 70 score value complete incomplete 1 1.1 23 72 √ 2 1.2 23 72 √ 3 1.3 17 53 √ 4 1.4 10 31 √ 5 1.5 25 78 √ 6 1.6 17 53 √ 7 1.7 22 69 √ 8 1.8 23 72 √ 9 1.9 16 50 √ 10 1.1 23 72 √ 11 1.11 17 53 √ 12 1.12 23 72 √ 13 1.13 19 59 √ 14 1.14 17 53 √ 15 1.15 19 59 √ 16 1.16 25 78 √ 17 1.17 16 50 √ 18 1.18 23 72 √ 19 1.19 18 56 √ 20 1.2 24 75 √ 21 1.21 16 50 √ 22 1.22 25 78 √ 23 1.23 17 53 √ 24 1.24 24 75 √ 25 1.25 23 72 √ 26 1.26 23 72 √ 27 1.27 17 53 √ 28 1.28 13 41 √ 29 1.29 17 53 √ 30 1.3 16 50 √ total 1846 14 16 average 62 percentage 47% 53% table 5. the analyses of students’ speaking ability on cycle-i category value range frequency percentage very good 85 – 100 good 75 – 84 5 17% sufficient 60 – 74 9 30% poor 50 – 59 14 46% very poor 0 – 49 2 7% 30 100% firdayanti firdaus & dwi suci amaniarsih improving the tenth grade students’ english speaking ability through storytelling 142 the results showed that there was still no student in very good category. yet, there were 5 students (17%) who had the ability to speak english in good categories. although it is still very poor, but this number has increased compared to the results of precycle that was only 1 student in a good category. there was an increase in the sufficient category from 7 to 9 students. besides, there were decreases in poor and very poor category; from 15 to 14 students in poor category and 7 to 2 students in very poor category. based on the observation, there has been a little progress on students’ attitude and ability in speaking. they have begun to show their courage to ask and answer questions to/from teachers and friends by using english. however, in the first cycle there are still many obstacles encountered, such as: 1) some students were still awkward and ashamed to speak, especially in front of the class. 2) the time constraints in speaking practice. 3) the teacher must prepare learning carefully like the facilities, tools, time, and energy. 4) the students seemed to get difficulties in arranging ideas, composing sentences and expressing their thoughts well. this is because they do not have much vocabulary and practice in speaking. the results showed that there has been an increase on students speaking ability but it was not significant yet. therefore, this research should be continued to cycle-ii as an advanced stage of cycle-i by planning the things to be improved. description of cycle-ii the cycle-ii was conducted in two meetings, by 2x45 minutes for each meeting. this cycle is a revision of previous cycle. the things that need to be improved for this cycle are about the technique and time use and management. here, the activities are more varied and effective. the time allocation was managed to be as effective and efficient as possible. students were asked to sit in their group in which the students composed a story based on the theme and picture. after writing the stories, they practiced to tell the story in their own group. then, the listeners asked the storyteller some questions related to the story. each group member has the same chance to practice it in group for 5 minutes. after practicing in group, , they performed storytelling in front of the class randomly. the material which was presented in this second cycle was still folklore with different theme or story. the theme used in this cycle was malin kundang and roro jonggrang. thus, the learning process became more interesting and gave students the opportunity to practice a lot in groups before they performed the story in front of the class. the results of student learning activities in cycle ii can be seen in table 6, while the analysis can be seen in table 7. table 6. the students’ speaking ability on cycle-ii no respondent pre-cycle kkm = 70 score value complete incomplete 1 1.1 27 84 √ 2 1.2 25 78 √ 3 1.3 19 59 √ 4 1.4 23 72 √ 5 1.5 25 78 √ 6 1.6 19 59 √ 7 1.7 23 72 √ 8 1.8 25 78 √ 9 1.9 23 72 √ 10 1.1 23 72 √ 11 1.11 23 72 √ 12 1.12 23 72 √ 13 1.13 23 72 √ english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 143 14 1.14 23 72 √ 15 1.15 19 59 √ 16 1.16 27 84 √ 17 1.17 19 59 √ 18 1.18 23 72 √ 19 1.19 19 59 √ 20 1.2 24 75 √ 21 1.21 19 59 √ 22 1.22 25 78 √ 23 1.23 19 59 √ 24 1.24 24 75 √ 25 1.25 23 72 √ 26 1.26 23 72 √ 27 1.27 19 59 √ 28 1.28 15 47 √ 29 1.29 23 72 √ 30 1.3 23 72 √ total 2085 21 9 average 70 percentage 70% 30% table 7. the analyses of students’ speaking ability on cycle-ii category value range frequency percentage very good 85 – 100 good 75 – 84 8 27% sufficient 60 – 74 13 43% poor 50 – 59 8 27% very poor 0 – 49 1 3% 30 100% the table showed that there was still no student (0%) in very good category, 8 students (27%) in good category, 13 students (43%) in sufficient category, 8 students (27%) in poor category, and 1 student (3%) in very poor category. in connection with the results in the second cycle, the following important things were obtained: 1) the students’ english speaking ability has increased. 2) almost all students seemed enthusiastic and even very enthusiastic in storytelling. 3) all students have begun to be active in learning using storytelling. 4) some students have started more confident and courageous to tell and express stories with good gestures, although sometimes they still look stiff and awkward. 5) many students have started to speak with a good articulation. 6) some students have been able to play their voice intonation, so that it attracted other students to listen and pay attention. 7) students’ vocabulary and grammar have shown an increase. the comparison of students’ speaking ability in pre-cycle, cycle-i, and cycle -ii can be seen in table 8 and chart 1. table 8. the comparison of students’ speaking ability in pre-cycle, cycle-i, and cycle -ii no research category student percentage 1 preaction complete 8 27% incomplete 22 73% 2 cyclei complete 14 47% incomplete 16 53% 3 cycle-ii complete 21 70% incomplete 9 30% firdayanti firdaus & dwi suci amaniarsih improving the tenth grade students’ english speaking ability through storytelling 144 chart 1. the comparison of students’ speaking ability in pre-cycle, cycle-i, and cycle -ii based on the chart, it can be seen that the completeness result percentage of the students' speaking ability in the pre-cycle, the first cycle, and the second cycle has increased. then, the incompleteness decreased. in the pre-cycle, the percentage of students’ completeness was only 27%. in the first cycle, the percentage of students’ completeness increased to 47%. there were 20% increases. in the second cycle, the percentage of students’ completeness was 70%. there was 23% of increase from cycle-i to cycle-ii. then, there were 43% increases between pre-cycle to cycle-ii. moreover, the class average has increased too, from 55 in pre-cycle, 61 in cycle-ii, and 70 in cycle-ii. finally, this research showed that there was a significant increase in the ability of speaking after applying the storytelling method. generally, the findings of this research indicated that storytelling method can be used to improve the students’ learning outcomes and the minimum completeness value in speaking english. this is because this method offered many opportunities for students to practice speaking in class. however, there were some obstacles faced by the teacher in applying this method, such as inadequate time for english lessons, large classes, and the target of material achievement determined by the curriculum and syllabus make the teacher less flexible in applying this method. therefore, the addition of lessons, small class, improving facilities, and active participation of students are expected to maximize the application of the storytelling method. conclusion based on the results, it can be concluded that; first, the use of storytelling method can improve the students’ ability to speak english. there was 43% increase of the students’ speaking ability after applying the storytelling method. in the initial condition, the percentage of students’ completeness was only 27%. in the first cycle, the percentage of students’ completeness scores increased to 47%, then in the second cycle has a significant increase to 70%. if a comparison is made between students’ speaking ability at the initial conditions and after the storytelling method is applied, there is an increase in students’ speaking skills by 43%. second, storytelling with variations in storytelling and discussion techniques in small groups can improve students’ response and enthusiasm so that students become more active because they have the same opportunity to practice speaking. yet, some obstacles are still faced by teachers in applying this method, including inadequate time for english lessons, large classes, and targets for material achievement determined by the curriculum and syllabus which make teachers less flexible in applying this method. acknowledgments i would like to thank: 1. drpm (directorate of research and community service) of the general directorate of research strengthening and development, kemenristekdikti (ministry of research, technology and higher education) for funding this research in english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 145 accordance with the research contract for fiscal year 2018. 2. university of potensi utama for supporting and giving attention to this research. references asfandiyar, a. y. (2007). cara pintar mendongeng. jakarta: mizan. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. san fransisco: longman. depdiknas. (2003). undang-undang ri. no 20 tahun 2003 pasal 37 tentang sistem pendidikan nasional. jakarta: depdiknas. harmer, j. (2001). how to teach english. england: longman. haryadi & zamzani. (1997). peningkatan keterampilan berbahasa indonesia. jakarta: dirjen dikti. hidayani, f. (2013). mengenal sastra indonesia. bandung: talenta pustaka indonesia. mal, k. (2012). the miracle of storytelling: mencerdaskan anak dengan dongeng dan cerita. jakarta: zikrul. musfiroh, t. (2005). cerita dan perkembangan anak. yogyakarta: navila. nunan, d. (2003). practical english language teaching. boston: heile & heinle publisher. nurgiyantoro, b. (2001). penilaian dalam pengajaran bahasa dan sastra. yogyakarta: bpfe. pellowski, a. (1991). the world of storytelling. laramie: wilson. firdayanti firdaus & dwi suci amaniarsih improving the tenth grade students’ english speaking ability through storytelling 146 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 143 implementing advertisement for improving students’ understanding of politeness and gender vina fathira english letters department, stiba persada bunda pekanbaru, indonesia email: vinafathira@gmail.com; vinafathira@persadabunda.ac.id silvia utami english letters department, stiba persada bunda pekanbaru, indonesia email: silvia.utami@persadabunda.ac.id apa citation: fathira, v., & utami, s. (2019). implementing advertisement for improving students‟ understanding of politeness and gender. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 143-150. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1460. received: 29-01-2019 accepted: 22-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: this research was based on students‟ difficulties in understanding the concept of politeness and gender. advertisement can be one of the alternative techniques to improve students‟ understanding on the concept of politeness and gender. this study aims at improving students‟ understanding of politeness and gender and finding the factors influencing the improvement. this classroom action research involved ten third-year-students at stiba persada bunda pekanbaru. the data collection techniques used were tests, fieldnotes, observation, and interview. the results showed that students‟ understanding of politeness and gender significantly improved after applying advertisements in the teaching and learning process in which the students‟ understanding which were at the low level category increases to the good level category. some factors affecting the students‟ improvement were students‟ active participation in obtaining information and students‟ enthusiasm during the learning process. in conclusion, the implementation of advertisements can improve students‟ understanding of politeness and gender concepts. keywords: advertisement; negative and positive face; politeness and gender; politeness strategies; sociolinguistic; women’s language. introduction media like advertisements are familiar to the students nowadays. as the technology is growing, the social media has become the routine to everyone; the students are seen addicted to the gadget (siddiqui & singh, 2016). in advertisement, advertising can be divided in animation, videos, and moving pictures (harfoushi et al., 2016). in this research, the researchers took internet advertisements, since advertisements related to electronic items were more factual than non-electronic items (bansal & gupta 2014). advertsing language is the language that can persuade and provoke society‟s opinion to certain purposes of an advertisement (stamatelou, 2015). sociolingustics is a branch of linguistics that studies a relationship between language and society (holmes & wilson, 2017). meanwhile, literally, sociolinguistics is the study of the way language is affected by differences in social class, region, sex and so on (hornby, 2018). actually, sociolinguistic is a subject which is easy to understand since it is related to the social environment. however, the students always felt difficult to understand such definitions and examples given in the text book. one of the materials in sociolinguistics that is considered difficult is the concept of politeness and gender. according to holmes and wilson (2017), polite includes talking to others in an appropiate way. politeness is the basic point to asses‟ someone‟s habit to others to be accepted and approved by others as part of habits of norms (culpeper, haugh & kádár, 2017). in politeness concept, there is a concept of face proposed by brown and levinson. according to them, face consists of two parts, namely positive and negative face (pangestuti, 2015; wardhaugh & fuller, 2014). positive face is a concept of politeness theory that relates to someone‟s willingness to be approved and admired by others (hameed, 2010; wardhaugh & fuller, 2015). meanwhile, negative face is a term of politeness theory that relates to someone‟s unwillingness to be approved and admired by others (wardhaugh & fuller, 2015). in brown and levinson‟s theory, there are some strategies used in politeness, namely bald vina fathira & silvia utami implementing advertisement for improving students’ understanding of politeness and gender 144 on-record strategy, positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy, and off-record indirect strategy (karimkhanlooei & vaezi, 2017; pangestuti, 2015). different from the concept of politeness, the concept of gender cannot be easily defined as a social construction of identity that relates to the thought of biological category of “sex”, but it frequently discussess about „masculinity‟ and „feminity‟ that in opposite with „male‟ and „female‟ (meyerhoff, 2018; strumska-cylwik & ibrahim, 2014). however, the concept of gender related to linguistic aspect is defined as linguistic features in conncetion with the way of a group or certain gender in speaking (wardhaugh & fuller, 2015). in line with this, culpeper, haugh and kádár (2017) define gender as an assumption or thought about the differences of men and women habits. the term gender is social and cultural category (hornby, 2018). as stated by holmes and wilson (2017), the concept of gender focuses on description of habitual utterances of masculine and feminism, in certain scale not in absolute category. the differences of it can be seen in the features of women‟s language by lakoff‟s theory. based on lakoff‟s theory, there are 10 features of women‟s language (2013). thus, the aims of the research were to find out the improvement of students‟ ability and to identify the factors affecting the improvement of students‟ ability at stiba persada bunda pekanbaru in understanding politeness and gender concept of sociolinguistic subject by implementing advertisement as media in the teaching and learning process. method this classroom action research was started by preliminary study, such as gaining information concerning students‟ understanding of politeness and gender concept. after doing the preliminary study, the researchers did some stages, including planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. this research was conducted at stiba persada bunda. the participants of this research were the third year students of stiba persada persada bunda in the academic year of 2017/2018 attending sociolinguistic subject. the data collection techniques used were tests, fieldnotes, observation, and interview. to obtain data related to students‟ understanding of politeness and gender concept, the students were asked to answer a set of multiple choice questions after watching two videos of advertisements relating to politeness and gender. the test aims to evaluate the improvement of the students‟ ability in understanding politeness and gender concept by using media of advertisement. then, the researcher and collaborator wrote students‟ activities by using fieldnotes and obeservation checklist. after that, the researchers conducted interview to all students to obtain data about the factors affecting the improvement of the students‟ ability in understanding politeness and gender concept. after collecting the data, the researchers evaluate and analyze post-test by counting the number of correct answers and calculating it to the final score (post-test) of each student. table 1. score range and category no. range score category 1 80-100 very good 2 65-79 good 3 55-64 fairly good 4 <55 poor (taken from: persada bunda score range) results and discussion this section generally describes the aforementioned stages done which include planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. the stages were done in 5 meetings. besides, there was 1 meeting for pre-test and 1 meeting for post-test. meeting for pre-test in this meeting, the researcher did a pre-test to the students. the test aims to know the students‟ ability in understanding the concept of politeness and gender. the test showed that the students‟ ability in understanding the concept of politeness and gender was in poor category in which the students‟ score was 51.49. the result of the 1 st meeting previously, the researchers had been looking for information about the students‟ ability in understanding the concept of politeness and gender. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 145 then, at this first meeting, the teaching-learning process was preceded by an introduction to the students about the concept of politeness and gender. here, the researchers asked questions related to the concept of politeness and gender. after that, the researchers gave the examples of the concept of politeness and gender to the students. moreover, the students were asked to give other examples of politeness and gender. the researchers asked students to write down everything that belongs to the features of women‟s language from lakoff theory. the result of the 2 nd meeting in the second meeting, the researchers explained the concept of politeness and gender by using advertisement. first, the researchers introduced the advertisement media in the form of videos with duration lenght about 2-3 minutes which consisted of linguistic feature of women‟s language. after that, the researchers asked students in pairs to watch carefully and take a note as much as possible indicating politeness and gender. besides, the students were also asked to determine the linguistic features of women‟s language, negative or positive face, and the politeness strategy appeared in the first advertisements. then, the researchers asked students to watch again the advertisement and another advertisement at home as individual assignment by focusing on the aspects, like women‟s language, negative face or positive face, and politeness strategy existed in the advertisements. the assignment must be written per point by showing the utterances that met the features of women‟s language based on lakoff's theory. the result of the 3 rd meeting in the third meeting, the students were asked to submit the assignments given at the previous meeting. after that, the researchers gave response to the results of students‟ assignments by explaining the fetaures of women‟s language of each point that students found, the existence of negative or positive face on the advertisements, and the politeness strategy. after giving comments and inputs towards the students‟ assignments, the researchers instructed students to think of their mistakes by watching the advertisement back, paid attention to the utterances, and the politeness and gender concept well. this process aimed to eliminate misunderstandings in understanding the features of women‟s language, the existance of negative or positive face on the advertisement, and the politeness strategy appeared in advertisement. the result of the 4 th meeting in the fourth meeting, the teaching-learning process focused on showing the results of the two advertisements that had been observed previously. it could be an overview to make students more understand about what they did. in this meeting, the students were asked to show their assignments in front of the class. the result of the 5 th meeting in this meeting, the researcher and collaborator grade the students‟ work related to their understanding of the ten features of woman‟s language, namely; a) lexical hedges or fillers, b) tag questions, c) rising intonations on declaratives, d) „empty‟ adjectives, e) precise color teams, f) intensifiers, such as just and so, g) „hypercorrect‟ grammar, h) „superpolite‟ forms, i) avoidance of strong swears words, and j) emphatic stress. in addition, the advertisement was analyzed to find out the positive face, negative face and politeness with regard to some strategies, such as: a) bald on-record strategy, b) positive politeness strategy, c) negative politeness strategy, and d) off-record indirect strategy. based on these points, the students had obtained enough information regarding the politeness and gender concept existed in advertisement. from these components, the researcher grade and convert the students‟ result by looking at the score range category. meeting for post-test in the last meeting, the post-test was conducted by asking the students to to analyze two different advertisements with longer duration (3 minutes). this test was conducted to measure the students‟ imporvement in understanding the concept of politeness and gender. the post-test result is presented in table 2. table 2. the post test result no. score category 1 65,4 good 2 69,2 good 3 69,2 good 4 61,5 good 5 69,2 good vina fathira & silvia utami implementing advertisement for improving students’ understanding of politeness and gender 146 6 73,1 good 7 73,1 good 8 73,1 good 9 88,5 very good 10 88,5 very good mean = 73,08 good students’ achievement based on the analysis, it was found that the mean score from the pre-test was 51.49 which belonged to the poor category. however, after conducting the research by using advertisements for five meetings (1 cycle), the students‟ mean score was significantly increases. the mean score was 73.08 which belonged to the good category. figure 2. the result of post-test moreover, the researcher found that the students have lack of understanding about the concept of politeness and gender that could be seen from the resut of pre-test. most students got low score that categorized as poor with percentage of 90%. meanwhile, one student was categorized as fairly good with percentage of 10%. the result can be seen in table 3. table 3. the result of pre-test no score category 1. 61,5 fairly good 2 46,1 poor 3 53,8 poor 4 46,1 poor 5 53,8 poor 6 53,8 poor 7 53,8 poor 8 46,1 poor 9 53,8 poor 10 46,1 poor mean score =51,49 poor the scores obtained from the correct answer is divided by the number of questions then multiplied by 10. from the data above, it can be seen that only one student who got fairly good with score 61.5. meanwhile, nine students were categorized as poor, as depicted below. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 147 figure 3. the result of pre-test from figure 3, it can be seen that there were four students who got 46.1 and five students got 53.8. then, the cycle test found that the students‟ mean score was categorized as good. it showed that 8 out of 10 students had good category and 2 students had very good category. it was significantly increases than the pre-test in which one student had fairly good result out of 10 students, while 9 students were categorized as poor. the comparison of students‟ score in the pre-test and post-test is shown in table 3. table 3. the comparison of students’ score referring to the table, the result of cycle test after using advertisement to improve students‟ understanding towards the concept of politeness and gender based on the components can be seen clearly in the following diagram. in this diagram, the researchers described both tests and the improvement of the cycle test compared to the pre-test. figure 4. the result of students’ post-test in each component no test total of participant category 1. pre-test 1 fairly good 9 poor 2. post-test 2 very good 8 good vina fathira & silvia utami implementing advertisement for improving students’ understanding of politeness and gender 148 figure 4 showed that the result of students‟ cycle test was satisfactory. the components assessed are politeness strategy, positive or negative face that represented the concept of politeness, and the features of woman‟s language that represented the concept of gender. figure 4 showed that the score from these components was fairly good. the cycle test result from the features of woman‟s language that represented the concept of gender was categorized as very good with the score of 72.5. then, the two components, politeness strategy and positive or negative face, that represented the concept of politeness showed fairly good scores. on the positive or negative face components, the score of cycle test was categorized as very good with the score of 85. then, in the component of politeness strategy, the score of the cycle test was 55 which categorized as fairly good. figure 5. the result of students’ pre-test in each component the two figures above showed the students‟ improvement that can be seen from the score of each component. on the component of the features of women‟s language (gender), the score in the pre-test showed 52 with "low" category (poor). this score was significantly increases with a better score of 72.5 on the "very good" category in the cycle test. on the positive face and negative face components, the score of the pre-test showed 50 with "low" category (poor). this score was also significantly increases with a better score of 85 categorized as “very good”. on the component of politeness strategy, the score in pre-test showed 30 with “low” category (poor) and significantly increased to 55 with “fairly good” category. based on the data, it was clear that the scores from each component showed significant increases. the increase was a student achievement from the pre-test results to the cycle test. the students‟ cycle test score was much higher than the pre-test score. thus, it can be concluded that there has been an increase in students‟ ability in understanding the concept of politeness and gender by using media of advertisement. in other words, it can be argued that the implementation of media of advertisement can help students to better understand the concept of politeness and gender. factors influencing students’ improvement furthermore, based on observation, it was found that every stage of this research was well done by students. then, during the interview, information was found that most students were active in obtaining information and enjoyed during the learning process. however, there was one student who was bored due to the length of time in the advertisement and the topic of advertisement that the student did not like. it showed that there were other factors that influence the student's understanding in the concept of politeness and genders and the factors that affected the student in the activity during learning process other than the test results. based on the results obtained in this first cycle, the researcher stated that the students‟ ability in understanding the concept of politeness and gender with the implementation of media of advertisement in sociolinguistic class was english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 149 categorized into good category. therefore, the researcher decided not to continue the research into the next cycle because of the discovery of the suitability between the achievement and the specified successfull criteria. conclusion based on the data analysis, it can be concluded that the implementation of advertisement media can improve students‟ understanding of the concept of politeness and gender. first, the students‟ mean score was 73.08 is categorized into the good category. this is based on ranges of 65-79 that categorized as "good". second, the factors that influenced the improvement of students in understanding the concept of politeness and gender are the students feel interested by using this advertisement. in addition, the students are active and enthusiastic in determining the concept of politeness and gender in sociolinguistic studies which are usually boring. third, only a few students get bad scores. this happened due to the duration of the advertisements that was too long causing a small number of students feel tired dan being sleepy when watching the advertisements on cycle tests with a duration of 2 (two) minutes and 3 (three) minutes. fourth, in this research, only some features of lakoff's theories of women‟s language are found in advertisements so that students sometimes still feel hesitant about the results. this is in line with the research conducted by aini (2016). fifth, generally, media of advertisement often use a similar strategy, like a positive politeness strategy which is in line with the findings of pangestuti (2015), elmianvari and kheirabadi (2015), and wambui (2014) which used a positive politeness strategy. sixth, in relation to the results of the above points (point 5), the researcher then conduct a qualitative research that focuses on the concept of politeness with deeper analysis. seventh, the future researcher needs to explore non-video media of advertisement regarding to the same concept of politeness and gender. acknowledgments the team is very grateful to kemenristekdikti which in this occasion gives researchers the opportunity to publish the research findings to an accredited journal. the findings of this study are part of hibah dikti, namely penelitian dosen pemula 2018. in addition, researchers thank the team member and research assistants who have been actively involved in the completion of this research. references aini, l. m. (2016). women language used by the main characters of “mockingjay” movie. unpublishedthesis. english language and letters department: maulana malik ibrahim state islamic university of malang. bansal, m., & gupta, s. (2014). impact of newspaper advertisement on consumer behavior. global journal of finance and management, 6(7), 669674. culpeper, j., haugh, m., & kádár, d. z. (eds). (2017). the palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness. london: palgrave macmillan. elmianvari & kheirabadi. (2015). the study of efl students‟ requests based on politeness theory. journal of language teaching and research, 4(2), 375-385. hameed, w. q. (2010). the impact of gender in determining politeness strategy with reference to iraqi students of english. journal of the college of arts, 54(2), 38-56. harfoushi o., alfawwaz, b., obeidat, b., obeidat, r., & faris, h. (2013). impact of internet advertisement and its features on e-commerce retail sales: evidence from europe. journal of software engineering and applications, 6, 564570. holmes, j., & wilson, n. (2017). learning about language: an introduction to sociolinguistics. essex: pearson education ltd. hornby, a. s. (2018). oxford learners’ dictionary (online). retrieved from https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/defi nition/english/a-s-hornby. karimkhanlooei, g., & vaezi, n. (2017). politeness strategies in written communications: the issue of iranian efl learners. jolace: journal of language and cultural education, 5(3), 108126. doi: 10.1515/jolace-2017-0031. meyerhoff, m. (2018). introducing sociolinguistics (3 rd ed.). new york: routledge. pangestuti, w. (2015). politeness strategies used by deddy corbuzier in interviewing entertainer and nonentertainer in “hitam putih” talk show. unpublished thesis. english department: university of diponegoro. siddiqui, s., & singh, t. t. (2016). social media and its impact with positive and negative aspects. international journal of computer applications technology and research, 5(2), 71-75. stamatelou, m. (2015). a reflection on the use of advertisements in enabling language learning in the efl classroom. elted, 17, 27-34. strumska-cylwik, l., & ibrahim, f. (2014). gender relationship and media language: a comparative study of print media in poland and malaysia. vina fathira & silvia utami implementing advertisement for improving students’ understanding of politeness and gender 150 international journal of arts & sciences, 7(5), 647–682. wambui, n. s. ( 2014). linguistic politeness strategies in bank advertisements: a case study of kenya commercial bank. unpublished thesis. department of linguistics and languages: university of nairobi. wardhaugh, r., & fuller, j. m. (2015). an introduction to sociolinguistics (7 th ed.). oxford: wiley blackwell. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 19 comparison of nouns reduplication in indonesian and japanese language stephanus mangga university of nanzan e-mail: mangaa@nanzan-u.ac.jp apa citation: mangga, s. (2018). comparison of nouns reduplication in indonesian and japanese language. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 19-26. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1240. received: 28-02-2018 accepted: 29-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: this article is a qualitative description of the nouns reduplication comparison in indonesian and japanese language. nouns are restricted to the category on the noun which can be counted (kbk). the data were taken from library source and analyzed by comparing the elements of similarity and difference. as result, it was found that there are similarities and differences between kbk’s reduplication of indonesian and japanese language. the equations include three items, namely; a) it has simple type without affixes, b) it has complex type with changes of consonants, and c) it functions to declare the indefinite category of the group. while the differences consist of four items and they are not found in japanese language. those four items are: a) it is in the form of simply affix, b) it is in the complex form with the repetition of consonants, c) it functions to show group category indefinite, and d) it functions as types of category indefinite. those differences prove that reduplication of kbk in indonesian language are more productive that reduplication of kbk in japanese language. keywords: reduplication, noun, indonesian language, japanese language introduction reduplication is one of linguistic reality which can be found in many languages. as gómez and voort state that “reduplication is a phenomenon that occurs in the majority of the world’s languages….” (gómez & voort, 2014, p. 1). hence, reduplication between languages can be compared to see and find any differences and similarities. this is not only useful for documentation in the field of structural linguistics, but also practically useful for teaching and learning of both languages which are compared. this study is a qualitative description of noun reduplication comparison of indonesian and japanese language. the somparison is made since it is assumed that there are similarities and differences in terms of function or type noun reduplication in both languages. for example, in reduplication of japanese language, word 人 [hito] which means `person` becomes [hito-bito] `people`. there is vowel change of /h/ become /b/ in the first syllable. the reduplicative word [hito-bito] can be categorized as reduplication with sound change. in indonesian language, there is also reduplication with vowel change like lauk becomes lauk-pauk; sayur becomes sayurmayur. those examples of reduplication in indonesian and japanese language functions to state “indefinite” meaning. it is called jamak in indonesian language, while in japanese language is called 複数 [fukusū]. however, according to takayama (2012) and ōsato (2013), there is few number of noun reduplication in japanese language or it can be said that the amount of it is rare. based on the above introduction, there are three objectives to be achieved in this paper. first, it describes the similarities and differences of noun reduplication type in indonesian and japanese language. second, it describes similarities and differences of noun reduplication function in indonesian and japanese language. third, it explains why noun reduplication in japanese is quite limited than in indonesian language. stephanus mangga comparison of nouns reduplication in indonesian and japanese language 20 in addition, this study will use size and function of reduplication theory proposed by rubino (2005) to analyse the data. rubino (2005) states that the systematic repetition within a word for semantic or grammatical purposes is known as reduplication. according to rubino (2005), reduplication is divided into two major types those are full reduplication and partial reduplication. full reduplication is reduplication from stem word. while partial reduplication appears in many form like in the form of double consonant or vowel lengthening. moreover, based on the existence and inexistence of phoneme change and/or additional in reduplication, rubino divided into simple reduplication and complex reduplication. simple reduplication is reduplication without changes of particular phoneme. complex reduplication is reduplication with changes of phonology materials like changes or additions vocal or consonant or the reversal of the phonemes order (rubino, 2005). moreover, the reduplication which relates to noun functions to describe number, distribution, indefinite, association, diminutive, and augmentative (rubino, 2005). method this study can be classified as descriptive qualitative. as stated by flick (2009), qualitative research is of specific relevance to the study of social relations, due to the fact of the pluralisation of life worlds. qualitative research can be done using written or spoken data. the data used in this study were library data. those data were collected from several sources which discussed reduplication in indonesian and japanese language. they were takayama (2012), ōsato (2013), ferawati (2013), simatupang (1983), ramlan (2012), yu (2015), olson (2015), kobayakawa (2004), tamura (1991), matsumoto (2009), takayama (2013), and ta (2014). the data in this study were analyzed by using dividing technique. it means that the data will be divided to several parts (sudaryanto, 2015). the first part was classifying the existence-inexistence of similarities and differences in type of reduplication. the second part was categorizing the existenceinexistence of similarities and differences in type of function. the last was explaining why noun reduplication in japanese is quite limited than in indonesian language. in addition, there is data limitation in this study. it aims to get accurate analysis, so this study only discusses about noun reduplication. moreover, the noun in this study was bounded into concrete and/or countable noun (kbk). kbk was chosen because the use of it in indonesian language is more productive than in japanese language. results and discussion types and functions of kbk reduplication in japanese language there are two types of kbk reduplication in japanese language which will be explained below. simple reduplication rubino (2005) said that simple reduplication means duplicating fixation phoneme. in other words, it is reduplication without sound changes. the simple reduplication can be seen in table 1 below. table 1. simple reduplication of kbk reduplication in japanese language root word gloss reduplication gloss 家 [ie] house 家々[ie-ie] houses, housing 町 [machi] city 町々[machi-machi] cities, urban 村 [mura] village 村々[mura-mura] villages, rural 山[yama] mountain 山々[yama-yama] mountains, highland 道 [michi] street 道々[michi-michi] streets, pathway from the table, it can be seen that simple reduplication of kbk in japanese language occurs in noun which cannot move and have the design of group. as a result, the function english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 21 of reduplication shows indefinite of noun category of shūdan/dantai `group.’ it can be seen in examples below. 1) ie-ie ga tachi narabu house-red. ps. in line stand the houses is lined up stand. (red: reduplication, ps: subject marker) the reduplicative form of ie-ie in example (1) shows that the number of house is more than one. however, it cannot be said as ‘uncountable’, but it is said as a group. in indonesian language, it can be translated into word perumahan. the similar thing can be seen in example below. 2) arupusu no yama-yama ga mieru alpes pm. mountain-red. ps. visible ‘highland of alpes is visible.’ (pm: possession marker) the reduplicative form of yama-yama in example (2) shows that the number of mountain is indefinite. as a result, it can be expressed with highland (alpes). therefore, reduplicative of yama-yama shows that yama is more than one, but it shows ‘a group of mountain.’ it is similar to olson’s statement (2015), from japanese people’s statement that the reduplicative form of yama-yama means “yama hitotsu janakute, sanmyaku no you na yama ga itsumo aru no arawasu kotoba.” those quote means ` yama-yama words not only express existence of a mountain, but it shows a group of mountains.’ 3) michi-michi ni hijō-sen ga harareru pathway-red. in emergency strip ps. installed `emergency strip is installed in pathway `. the reduplicative form of michi-michi shows that the number of michi is more than one, but it cannot be classified as `uncountable`. consequently, form of michimichi functions to express `group`. those reduplications function to show indefinite meaning which means the number is more than one, but it creates a shūdan/dantai special `group`. complex reduplication rubino (2005) said that complex reduplication is reduplication with some phonological changes like changes or addition of vocal or consonant or inversion of phoneme order. it can also be said as reduplication with sound changes (verhaar, 2008). table 2 below shows complex reduplication data of kbk in japanese language. table 2. noun complex reduplication in japanese language table 2 shows that kbk reduplication in japanese marked with changes of root initial consonant. these changes happen in root initial consonant which have one or two syllables. based on those changes, complex reduplication form of kbk in japanese language is divided into three types. first, type /h/ > /b/. root form of initial consonant /h/ will become /b/. it can be seen in reduplicative form of hito > hito-bito and hi > hi-bi. second, type /k/ > /g/. root form of initial consonant /k/ will become /g/. it can be seen in reduplicative form of kami > kami-gami dan kata > kata-gata. it is also happens in reduplication form of kuchi > kuchi-guchi, kuni > kuni-guni, ki > ki-gi, koe > koe-goe. root word gloss reduplication gloss 人 [hito] person 人々 [hito-bito] people, a group of person 日 [hi] day 日々 [hi-bi] days, a group of day 神 [kami] divinity 神々 [kami-gami] divinity-deity 方 [kata] master 方々 [kata-gata] masters, a group of master 国 [kuni] country 国々 [kuni-guni] countries 木 [ki] tree 木々 [ki-gi] tree, trees 島 [sima] island 島々 [sima-zima] islands, archipelago 品 [sina] item 品々 [sina-zina] items stephanus mangga comparison of nouns reduplication in indonesian and japanese language 22 third, type /s/ > /z/. root form of initial consonant /s/ will become /z/. it can be seen in reduplicative form of sima > sima-zima, sina > sina-zina, and sumi > sumi-zumi. similar to simple reduplication in table 1, complex reduplication group in table 2 runs to show indefinite. indefinite refers to `uncertain` in number which can be `many`. however, the meaning of `many` is not associated with `uncountable` or `infinite`, but it relates to `grouping`. grouping means the group number is more than one. then, in table 2, it functions to show group indefinite of a dantai (group). it can be seen from the examples below. 4) asoko de hito-bito ga tabeteiru there in people-red. ps. eat `people are eating over there. ` the reduplicative form of hito-bito explains about `the existence of people’s group`. since it creates dantai `group`, so it can be said that there are many members of group. the expression may become different if people on that sentence is not in a group. it will become asoko de hito ga tabeteiru `person is eating over there `. 5) watashi wa kami-gami wo shinjimasu i pt. divinity-red. po. believe `i believe in divinity-deity `. (pt: topic marker, po: object marker) the form of kami-gami explains `group of divinity` and the group contains divinity and deity. indefinite which is in the form of kamigami means divinity that is believed, and the number of it is more than one. the expression will be different if the belief is only one thing. it will become watashi wa kami wo shinjimasu `i believe in god`. therefore, either simple or complex reduplication of kbk in japanese language serves to declare indefinite in terms of the number of noun categories for group/collection. thus, in japanese language, the noun which is not categorized as groups/collections and/or it is not potentially forming groups/collections cannot be reduplicated. this is in accordance with what is said by kobayakawa (2004) that in noun japanese language which is not potentially form a group/collection is difficult to be reduplicated. as stated by takayama (2012) and olson (2015), reduplication of nouns in japanese language does exist, but it is very limited in its use. types and functions of kbk reduplication in indonesian language simple reduplication kbk in indonesia language is almost can be reduplicated as simply (total). in indonesian language, basic noun or noun derivative with [+count] can be reduplicated totally. because all can be reduplicated completely, then there are much numbers of kbk reduplication in indonesian language. the following table shows some simple reduplication of kbk in indonesian language. the data which were given category i was basic nouns, whereas category ii was noun derivative. table 3. simple reduplication of kbk in indonesian language root category reduplication orang i orang-orang sepeda i sepeda-sepeda mobil i mobil-mobil motor i motor-motor toko i toko-toko tokoh i tokoh-tokoh buku i buku-buku kursi i kursi-kursi meja i meja-meja gunung i gunung-gunung sawah i sawah-sawah jalan i jalan-jalan rumah i rumah-rumah pertempuran ii pertempuran-pertempuran english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 23 pertemuan ii pertemuan-pertemuan perundingan ii perundingan-perundingan pengeluaran ii pengeluaran-pengeluaran pendapatan ii pendapatan-pendapatan makanan ii makanan-makanan minuman ii minuman-minuman the table shows that the simple reduplications of kbk in indonesian language can be basic words without affixes (category i) and basic words with affixes (category ii). basic words with affixes of kbk are divided over three types. first, root morpheme + affix per-an. this can be seen in the form of pertempuran, pertemuan, and perundingan. other forms which can be added into this type are pertikaian > pertikaian-pertikaian, perumahan > perumahan-perumahan, perkebunan > perkebunan-perkebunan, perusahaan > perusahaan-perusahaan, perbaikan > perbaikan-perbaikan, and others. second, root morpheme + affix pe(n)-an. this can be seen in the form of pengeluaran and pendapatan. other forms which is similar to this type is penyamaran > penyamaranpenyamaran, pemotongan > pemotonganpemotongan, pemalsuan > pemalsuanpemalsuan, pengerusakan > pengerusakanpengerusakan, and others. third, root morpheme + affix –an. this can be seen in the form of makanan and minuman. other forms which are similar to this type are pakaian > pakaian-pakaian, tumbuhan > tumbuhantumbuhan, lukisan > lukisan-lukisan, manisan > manisan-manisan, and others. the use of kbk reduplications such as those on table 3 functions to declare indefinite in terms of numbers. according to simatupang (1983), reduplication with nouns as basically serves to proclaim 'plurality' referent of related noun. it is a bit different with that term, ramlan (2012) stated that one of the meanings of the process of repetition (noun) was declared the meaning 'many'. in this paper 'plurality' and 'many' are melted into the term offered by rubino (2005) that is 'indefinite'. based on the table 3 above, the indefinite can be distinguished into two categories, those are category of groups and category of types/kinds. consequently, it can be said that simple reduplication of kbk in indonesia language serves to proclaim: a) group category indefinite, and b) types/kinds category indefinite. function of group category indefinite is found in the form of kbk reduplicative which is given category i. meanwhile, the functions of types/kinds category indefinite are found in the form of kbk reduplicative which is given category ii. the following examples may be able to clarify the division. 6) a. pak tono sedang mengumpulkan sepeda-sepeda bekas di gudang. b. pak tono sedang mengumpulkan sepeda-sepeda di gudang. 7) a. ibu sedang menghitung pengeluranpengeluaran bulan lalu b. ibu sedang menghitung pengeluaranpengeluaran the reduplicative form of sepedasepeda in the example (6a) above stated groups of sepeda with its speciality is bekas (older). even if such specificity is removed, the reduplicative form of sepeda-sepeda still shows group category indefinite as stated in the example (6b). meanwhile, the reduplicative form of pengeluaranpengeluaran in the example (7a) declares the types or kinds of pengeluaran with its specificity in time that is bulan lalu. even if such specificity is omitted, the form of pengeluaran-pengeluaran still declares the types or kinds as stated in the example (7b). complex reduplication complex reduplication of kbk in indonesian language is distinguished into three types; 1) type a – kbk reduplication with changes of consonant, 2) type b – kbk reduplication with repetition of consonant, and 3) type c – kbk reduplication with affix –an. the following table shows the detail of them. stephanus mangga comparison of nouns reduplication in indonesian and japanese language 24 table 4. complex reduplication of kbk in indonesian language root reduplication type sayur sayur-mayur a laki lelaki b mobil mobil-mobilan c table 4 shows that the form of sayurmayur establishes type a. it is marked by the changes of consonant /s/ becomes /m/. the changes of consonant occur at the initial consonant. it includes the same type like lauk > lauk-pauk. in the form of lauk-pauk, the changes is consonant /l/ becomes /p/. type b is represented by form of lelaki. the changes of consonant occur at the initial consonant and the addition of vocal /e/. it can be formulated with red. k/e/ + morfem dasar (k= consonant). words reduplication included into this type are tamu > tetamu. another forms which can also be grouped into this type are jari > jemari, tali > temali, daun > dedaunan, and pohon > pepohonan. type c is represented by form mobil > mobil-mobilan. there is repetition with affix –an. it can be formulated with red. root morpheme + affix –an. words reduplication included into this type are kereta > kereta-keretaan, orang > orang-orangan, kera > kera-keraan, gunung > gunungan, and others. function of types a and b are the same that is stating indefinite. nevertheless, the remains can be distinguished over; a) indefinite of type/category for type a, and b) group category indefinite for type b. whereas type c serves to reveal similarities with what is referred to in the basic form. as result, it can be said that the complex reduplication of kbk in indonesian language has several functions in accordance with the type of the reduplicative form. comparison of kbk reduplication in indonesian and japanese language based on the above description, it can be seen that the kbk reduplication in indonesian and japanese language have similarities and differences. the similarities are: a) both languages have kbk reduplicative of simple and complex type, and b) both languages have function that stated indefinite (not singular, plural). then the difference are: a) there is no affix kbk reduplication in japanese language as in indonesian language, b) there is no kbk reduplication with repetition of consonant in japanese language as in indonesia, and c) in japanese language, kbk reduplication only serves to state group category indefinite, whereas in indonesian language of indonesia, it is not only states group category indefinite but also it states types category indefinite. the following table shows those similarities and differences. table 5. the similarities and differences of kbk reduplication of indonesian and japanese language no item indonesian language japanese language 1 simple non-affix + + 2 simple with-affix + 3 complex with consonant changes + + 4 complex with consonant repetition + 5 complex with-affix + 6 group category indefinite + + 7 types category indefinite + based on the table, it can be said that the use of language in indonesia kbk reduplication is more productive than in japanese language. what proves it, on indonesian language column, all items is positive (+), whereas japanese language only has three positive (+). this was reinforced by a statement of matsumoto (2009) that though japanese language has a form of nouns reduplication, however the scope of its use is very limited. the reduplicative form of ‘many’ in japanese language is not as productive as the use of the form reduplicative in indonesian language, because japanese language has its english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 25 own system to declare the meaning of 'many' or 'plural' or 'single'. there are two ways to produce ‘many’ in japanese language those are: a) noun + tachi and b) sorera no + noun. the first formulation, nomina + tachi is usually used for the noun category 'animate' (living things). the word tachi is ‘plural’ maker which is specific to the lifeless beings (yu, 2015). consequently, in japanese language, there is expression hito tachi 'people' (group of people), inu tachi 'dogs' (group of dogs), neko tachi 'cats' (group of cats), hana tachi 'flowers' (group of flowers). as a result, kbk japanese language reduplication is not as productive as in indonesian language because japanese language has formulation noun + tachi which is to declare the category indefinite of group. the second formulation, sorera no + noun is used for all animate the lifeless adjective. the word sorera is actually the plural form of the word sore which means 'that'. while for 'this' is used the word kore, with the plural form is korera. for example, hito 'person' > sorera no hito 'that people', korera no hito 'these people'; or hon 'book' > sorera no hon 'that books', korera no hon 'this books'. hence, in japanese language, kbk reduplication is not as productive as in indonesian language because japanese language has formulations sorera no + noun atau korera no + noun to indicate category indefinite of types/kinds. conclusion indonesian and japanese language has the kbk reduplication form. the equation encompasses three items namely a) simple type without affixes, b) complex type with changes of consonants, and c) function to declare the category indefinite of the group. the difference is in the four items, namely a) indonesian language has affix simple form while japanese language does not have it; b) japanese language does not have the form of complex with the repetition of consonants whereas indonesian language have it; c) indonesian language have affix complex form whereas japanese language does not have it; and d) japanese language only have group category indefinite whereas indonesia language have it and have function of category indefinite of types/categories. finally, it can be said that kbk reduplication in japanese language is not as productive as in indonesian language. however, it does not mean that japanese language have 'less' expression to declare the meaning of 'plural' or 'singular', because it has another expression those are noun + tachi dan sorera no + noun (korera no + noun). acknowledgments this work was generously supported by a research grant from nanzan university pache research subsidy i-a-2 for the 2017 academic year. references ferawati, l. (2013). analisis kontrastif reduplikasi bahasa indonesia dan bahasa jepang. unpublished thesis, universitas brawijaya. flick, u. (2010). an introduction to qualitative research. london: sage publication inc. kobayakawa. (2004). nihongo no fukusū hyōgen. mind and language, 3, 35-50. matsumoto, j. (2009). nihongo ni okeru jōgo fukusūgata no seisei kanōsei ni tsuite. bulletin of toyo gakuen university, 17, 243-249. tokyo: universitas toyo gakuen. olson, l. (2015). form and function of reduplicated nouns in japanese. unpublished thesis, universitas stockholms. ōsato, a. (2013). jōgo no kenkyū. studies in language and culture, xxii(22), 1-16. ramlan, m. (2012). morfologi suatu tinjauan deskriptif. yogyakarta: cv karyono. rubino, c. (2005). reduplication: form, function and distribution (pp. 11-29). in b. hurch (ed.), studies on reduplication. berlin: walter de gruyter. simatupang, m. d. s. (1983). reduplikasi morfemis bahasa indonesia. jakarta: djambatan. sudaryanto. (2015). metode dan aneka teknik analisis bahasa: pengantar penelitian wahana kebudayaan secara linguis. yogyakarta: duta wacana university press. ta, u. (2014). gendaigo jōgo, jōgo keiyōshi no kōzō ni tsuite: gendai chūgokugo, nihongo no jōgo, jōgo keiyōshi. journal of higher education, 11, 76-87. takayama, r. (2013). nihongo sho hōgen no shi mōra jōgo o hikaku suru kokoromi” (an attempt at cross-dialectal comparison of 4-mora reduplicated words in japanese dialects). departmental bulletin paper, 34, 143 – 183. tokyo: universitas tokyo. tamura, y. (1991). gendai nihongo ni okeru jōgo ni tsuite: sū gainen kara mita jōgo. bulletin of the international student center, i, 41-47. universitas hiroshima. stephanus mangga comparison of nouns reduplication in indonesian and japanese language 26 verhaar, j. w. m. (2008). asas-asas linguistik umum. yogyakarta: gadjah mada university press. yu, k. (2015). jōgo no sho kinō. departmental bulletin paper, xxiv, 25-27. universitas gakushuin. a study of english intonation in indonesian efl learners english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee a study of english intonation in indonesian efl learners roni nursyamsu department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: roninursyamsu@gmail.com lukluk argita munif department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: luklukargita94@gmail.com apa citation: nursyamsu, r. & munif, l. a. (2013). a study of english intonation in indonesian efl learners. english review: journal of english education, 1(2),223-230 received: 12-02-2013 accepted: 03-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: this study examined the patterns of intonation and kinds of information structure that occur in efl learners. the objectives of this study were: (1) to know the patterns of intonation that occur in efl learners; (2) to know kinds of information structure that occur in efl learners. the method used in this study is descriptive qualitative and the subjects of this study is a debater and also a student in english department at one of private university in kuningan, west java. techniques of collecting data used in this research were library research, observation and interview. halliday’s theory and praat software analysis use in this research to analyze the data. based on the data analysis, it can be known that: (1) there were 5 kinds of intonation pattern used by the speaker: fall, rise (final), rise (nonfinal), fall-rise (final), fall-rise (non-final); (2) there were 158 clauses with 25 independent clauses and 133 dependent clauses from the respondent’s performance; (3) there were three systems from information structure: tonality, tonicity, and tone; (4) in tonality system, hts-t with the percentage 18% was the most pattern used by the respondent; (5) given-newgiven (g-n-g) with the precentage 36% was mostly used in her performance based on tonicity system; (6) incomplete information (rise non-final) was the most dominant intonation pattern used by the respondent with the precentage 33%. keywords: intonation, information structure, efl learners introduction phonology is the study of the organization of sounds in language (marlett, 2001, p. 2). it is different from phonetics, which is the study of the production, perception, and physical properties of speech sounds; phonology attempts to account for how they are combined, organized, and convey meaning in particular languages. only a fraction of the sounds humans can articulate is found in any particular language. in phonology, speech sounds are analyzed into phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can change the meaning of a word. a phoneme may have several allophones relating to sounds that are district but do not change the meaning of a word when they are interchanged. in a brief explanation, phonology is the study of sound structure in language, which is different from the study of sentence structure (syntax) or word structure (morphology), or how languages change over time (historical linguistic) (odden, 2005). kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction as the part of phonology, intonation is the kinds of pitch modulation found in whole utterances (carr, 2008). the term of intonation refers to mean for conveying information in speech which is independent of the words and their sounds. intonation is also often referred to in everyday language as speech melody or sentence melody, terms that focus on pitch variations and modulation (chun, 2002). central to intonation is the modulation of pitch, and intonation is often thought of as the use of pitch over the domain of the utterance. however, the patterning of pitch in speech is so closely bound to patterns of timing and loudness, and sometimes voice quality, that we cannot consider pitch in isolation from these other dimensions. the use of an inappropriate intonation pattern may give rise to misunderstandings. the misunderstanding can be major or minor depending on the context in which the intonation pattern is used. as there is no one to one correspondence between intonation and meaning, an appropriate meaning can often be found when it fits with the ‘wrong’ intonation pattern. the aim of this research, for that reason, is not to find fault, but to find out information functions such as the segmentation of discourse that represents the speakers’ management of the total message into separate pieces of information and then after that it is located on the most prominent word in organization of information then the last is decision of status in each unit of information, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction. the interaction of intonation and stress — the patterns of relative prominence which characterize an utterance — are particularly close in many languages, including english. for those who prefer to reserve ‘intonation’ for pitch effects in speech, the word ‘prosody’ is convenient as a more general term to include patterns of pitch, timing, loudness, and (sometimes) voice quality. in recent years, “the focus has been on generative models of intonation, also form-based, that rely on metrical representatives of text, indications of stressed vs unstressed syllables, and on phrasal tunes represented by strings of two discrete tones, high (h) and low (l)” (chun, 2002 , p. 15). in linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. stress is typically signaled by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in pitch. from the perceptual point of view, all stressed syllables have one characteristic in common, and that is prominence; stressed syllables are recognized as stressed because they are more prominent than unstressed syllables (roach, 1991). stressed syllables are often louder than non-stressed syllables, and may have a higher or lower pitch. they may also sometimes be pronounced longer. there are sometimes differences in place or manner of articulation – in particular, vowels in unstressed syllables may have a more central articulation, while those in stressed syllables have a more peripheral articulation. stress may be realized to varying degrees on different words in a sentence; sometimes the difference between the acoustic signals of stressed and unstressed syllables are minimal. an important role of intonation is as the ‘punctuation’ of spoken languages, marking the division between grammatical units and more generally helping the listener to follow the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee utterance. the function is brought sharply into focus on occasion when the words used allow more than one grammatical parse. intonation in english is organized in units halliday calls tone groups. halliday (1970, p. 3) says of the tone group: the tone group is one unit of information, one “block” in the message that the speaker is communicating; and so it can be of any length. the particular meaning that the speaker wishes to convey may make it necessary to split a single clause into two or more tone groups, or to combine two or more clauses into one tone group. tench (2005) summarized the major contribution in triple systems which is express information structure, those are: tonality, tonicity and tone. the pattern by which tone groups are distributed throughout speech, called tonality, is crucial to the sense of an utterance. the speaker divides up the stream of spoken words into groups, and this reveals to the listener how to mentally organize the information. almost always, tonality follows a predictable course, with tone groups basically corresponding to grammatical clauses. tone group is one of the intonation feature of intonation that has three primary system, those are unit of information, focus of information and status of information. it is related to the number of tone group in utterance and each such tone group is seen as one ‘move’ in a speech act. tonality, the segmentation of discourse into individual units of intonation in sequence, represents the speaker’s perception of the number of units of information. we use clauses to convey information in grammatical terms in order to represent situation and we use intonation units to convey that information in phonological terms. each tone group has a tonic syllable, a place of prominence that the speaker seeks to mark as most important and that carries the most pronounced pitch change. it often carries the burden of “new information” in the clause and, as such, the normative place of a tonic syllable is on the last word in a clause. placement of the tonic syllable in places other than this is understood to be contrastive. the placement of tonic prominence is referred to as tonicity. tonic segment is the most prominent stress (= tonic syllable) and carries the most significant pitch movement of the whole unit. the location of the tonic syllable relates to another sub-system, known as tonicity. in english, there is a very high level of expectation that the tonic syllable will be found on the last lexical item in each intonation unit (unit of information – tonality). this expectation is in the order of 80% probability. it usually means that all the information in the intonation unit is new; thus the focus of information is broad. the tonic segment is usually preceded in the intonation unit by a stretch of sound known as the pre-tonic segment. in traditional terminology, the pre-tonic segment comprises a head, which consists of the first stressed syllable (the onset syllable) and all other stressed and unstressed syllables up to, but not including, the tonic syllable. any unstressed syllables preceding the head are called the pre-head. the tonic segment comprises the tonic syllable, often also called the nucleus or nuclear syllable, and any following stressed or unstressed syllables, called the tail. tonality reflects the experiential function, tonicity at least one aspect of the textual function. tone also reflects kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction textuality in the sense that it represents the speaker’s perception of the status of information the relative importance of each successive piece of information (status of information). it marks the kind of activity involved, by a complex pattern built out of a simple opposition between certain and uncertain polarity. if polarity is certain, the pitch of the tonic falls, if uncertain, it rises. halliday (as cited in roach, 1991) has identified five basic tones, or pitch contours, in english. tone interacts with tonality (distribution of tone groups) and tonicity (placement of tonic prominence) to create meaning in english intonation. following are the tones identified in halliday’s system: simple tone groups: tone 1 falling tone 2 high rising, or falling-rising (pointed) tone 3 low rising tone 4 falling-rising (rounded) tone 5 rising-falling (rounded) (roach, 1991, p. 143) in segmentation of tonality, there are some divisions of intonational contour. roach (1991, p. 145) was the first one to divide the structure of toneunit into four main segments: 1. head is all that part of a tone-unit that extends from the first stressed syllable up to the tonic syllable. 2. pre-head is composed of all the unstressed syllables in a tone-unit preceding the first stressed syllable. 3. nucleus or tonic syllable is the most prominent syllable in the utterance or major pitch movement. 4. tail is any syllables between the tonic syllable and the end of toneunit. nucleus also has another name called tonic syllable. roach (1991, p. 145) states that: a syllable which carries a tone will be called a tonic syllable. it has been mentioned several times that tonic syllables have a high degree of prominence; prominence is, of course, a property of stressed syllables. chun (2002, p. 19) states that tone is “the major pitch movement within the tone unit or it can be said that the overall behavior of pitch is tone”. the total tone system to signal status of information is as follows: 1. low fall : polarity (truth value or validity) is known, stated or yes/no question. the voice falls during the word from a medium to a very low pitch. 2. high rising: the polarity is unknown and information is desired. the voice rises during the word from a medium to a high pitch. 3. rise fall : not doubt in order to dismiss it. the voice first rises from a fairly low to a high pitch, and then quickly falls to a very law pitch. 4. fall rise : something is known, but there is some doubt or reservation. the voice first falls from a fairly high to a rather low pitch, and then, still within the word, raises to a medium pitch. 5. low rise : imply uncertainty and that the assertation is conditional or something else. the voice rises during the word from a low to a medium pitch or a little above. halliday drew attention to differences between major information signalled by a falling tone and minor, signalled by a low rising tone. in this case, the theme is highlighted, as if the speaker wished to say something like this present visit (is, in fact, my first visit to india). thus the total tone system to signal status of information is as follows : fall : \ = major information (but i saw him yesterday in the \library) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee (final) rise = minor information (but i saw him yester \day | in the /library) (non-final) rise : / = incomplete information (but i saw him yester /day | in the \library) (final) fall-rise : \/ = implication (but i saw him yesterday in the \/library) (non-final) fall-rise : \/ = highlighting of theme (but \/ i | saw him yesterday in the \library) (tench, 2005, p. 10) in this context of the research, the respondent is joining debate competition that uses british parliamentary debate as the system of the debate competition. debate is a formal discussion on a particular matter in a public meeting or legislative assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward and which usually ends with a vote (simpson & weiner, 2010, p. 2). debaters they who do debate challenge ideas, they do not attack each other. as in other sports, the fair play is crucial. on the basis of the background to the present study mentioned above, the research attempted to address the following research questions: what are the patterns of intonation that occur in efl learner? and what are kinds of information structure that occur in efl learner ? method this study uses qualitative method to discover deep and whole comprehension on the information structures that occur in efl learner and the patterns that exist in learner's speech when she used intonation for delivering the message. the goal of qualitative research is to discover and develop the new and to develop empirically grounded theories (flick, 2009, p. 15). qualitative method is used for exploring, understanding and analyzing unstructured data. this method is considered appropriate since this study attempts to find out the kinds of information structure that occur in efl learners and to know the intonation patterns of the learners for delivering their messages. the respondent in this research was purposively chosen because she is in the 3rd grade who has followed the 4th semester of listening and speaking classes in university of kuningan. she also is a debater who followed english debate competition in iain syekh nurjati cirebon. three data collection techniques were employed in this study, which were library research, observation, and interview. however, in collecting the data, the researchers have to employ appropriate instuments such as library research, observation, and interview. all data collection was recorded in order to keep authenticity of the data. in the library research, the researchers found some theories to support the data in this research from many references (printed book, e-book, journal, and online reading). in the observation, the data was analyzed in several steps. first, the researchers transcribed the transcription of audio recorder when the respondent followed english debate competition. then, analyzing the data based on intonation patterns and kinds of information structure by using halliday’s theory and praat software analysis to analyze the data. next, identifying the data and interpreting the findings of the data analysis. in the interview, the data and information were gained from the respondent. the interview was conducted to clarify the result of data analysis from praat in order to know the respondent’s aim in delivering her speech. kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction results and discussion the findings of the study are described in three categories. the first category is unit of information. the second category is about the focus of information, and the third is the status of information. all of them complete each other reaching the objectives of the research. in first step, the respondent’s speech will be divided into different clause segmentations based on grammar level and marking the stress syllable using praat software analyses. in clause segmentation, these clauses are differentiated into two units of information using grammar level. it is because we use clauses to convey information in grammatical terms as we use intonation units to convey information in phonological terms. there are 16 % or 25 independent clauses and 84 % or 133 dependent clauses, with the total clauses are 158 clauses. in stressing, the discussion can be noted that the respondent put 279 stresses that draw 222 amounts of time in a whole discourse. there are some words that did not get any stresses in that utterances. it is because the speaker decided to encode the message with stress placing. languages differ, however, in what might be termed their prominence gradient, the steepness of change between prominent and nonprominent elements. it is because the prominence of information has relation to stress. as chun (2002, p.148) states that “stress is the linguistic means of marking syllables or words as prominence or perceptually silent in relation to others no matter how prominence is achieved”. based on halliday’s theory, there are three kinds of information structure: tonality, tonicity, and tone. tonality is the chunking of speech into intonational phrases or tone unit. the finding of this division uses praat software for accurate analysis. it is because we cannot make decision about how high the pitch or how loud the intensity with human’ hearing as we know that every human has different ability to hear clearly. there are eight common patterns of unit of information that are coded by different colour. the first pattern is ph-ts with 10% or there are 16 units of information, the second pattern is h-ts-t with 18% or 29 units of information, the third pattern is ts-t with 17% or 27 units of information, the fourth pattern is ph-hts-t with 10% or 16 units of information, the fifth pattern is ts with 17% or 27 units of information, the sixth pattern is ph-ts-t with 18% or 28 units of information, the seventh pattern is h-ts with 7% or 11 units of information and the last is ph-h-ts with 3% or 4 units of information. the second system to organize information is focus of information (tonicity). focus of information is signaled by student’s stressing in the form of speech. speech is produced in batches of segments that are hierarchically ordered: within any such batch except the lowest a smaller batch can be identified (gussenhoven, 2002: 276). in the discourse, it is found four patterns of focus of information. in the first patterns is given-new (g-n) with 20 % or 31 units of information, the second pattern is new-given (n-g) with 21 % or 33 units of information in that monologue, the third pattern is givennew-given (g-n-g) with 36 % or 58 units of information and the last pattern is only new in the utterances with 23 % or 36 units of information. the last system to organize information is status of information (tone). tone reflects textuality in the sense that it represents the speaker’s perception of the status of information english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the relative importance of each successive piece of information (status of information). there are five status of information in whole utterances in form of speech. the first is incomplete information (/) with 33 % or 52 incomplete information in whole utterances. the second, is major information (\) with 15% or 23 major information in whole utterances. the third, there are 13% or 21 implication information (\/) in whole utterances. the fourth status information is highlighted theme (\/) with 32 % or 51 in whole utterances and the last is minor information (/) with only 7 % or 11 minor information. conclusions from the results and discussion in the previous chapter, there are several conclusion that can be drawn. first, there are 5 kinds of intonation pattern used by the respondent: fall \ , rise (final) / , rise (non-final) / , fall-rise (final) \/ , fall-rise (non-final) \/. second, there are three kinds of information structures: unit of information (tonality), focus of information (tonicity), and status of information (tone). in tonality, h-ts-t, the percentage was 18% . it was the most dominant pattern used by the respondent to deliver the information. it means that the respondent wanted the listener to know and understand the information from her speech, because head (h) and tonic syllable (ts) themselves are the stressed syllables which have more prominence and major pitch movement. the most unit of information used by the respondent was dependent clause. it was because the respondent didn’t prepare any written text when she delivered her speech, even she didn’t give much attention on her tone which influenced the information. given-new-given was the highest formula in tonicity with the precentage 36%. it means that the respondent delivered the information in the simplest way, so that the listener would get the information easily, given means known or at least knowable by the listener at this point in the discourse, new means unknown or non-recoverable. the respondent mostly used incomplete information [ / : rise (non-final)] as her tone means that the information is not final or needs other information to make it complete with the precentage 33%. it happened because she could not control over the content of her speech. third, from the interview, it can be concluded that the respondent’s aim of her speech was to convince all of the participants and audiences that presented in debaters’ hall when the debate competition began. the placement of pauses and the use of intonation that inappropriate with the aim of the respondent happened because she was in spontaneous speech and did not use any prepared text (impromptu speech). it made her very nervous so that she could not use appropriate intonation and place the stress incorrectly. references carr, p. (2008). a glossary of phonology. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. chun, d. m. (2002). discourse intonation in l2. california: jhon benjamin publicing company. clarisse. (2008). debating : a brief introduction for beginners. canada: debating sa incorporated. creswell, j. w. (2007). qualitative inquiry & research design: choosing among five approaches. 2nd edition. california: sage publications. flick, u. (2009). an introduction to qualitative research. 4th edition. california: sage publications. kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david not careless but weak: language mixing of malaysian chinese in a business transaction gussenhoven. (2002). state-of-the-article glot international, 6(9/10), 276 halliday, m. a. k. (1970). a course in spoken english: intonation. london: oup halliday, m. a. k. (1985). an introduction to functional grammar. london: arnold. harmer, j. (2002). the practice of english language teaching. 3rd edition. cambridge: pearson education ltd. lacy, p. (2007). the cambridge handbook of phonology. cambridge: cambridge university press. marlett, s. (2001). an introduction to phonology analysis. dakota: university of north dakota. mcmahon, a. (2002). an introduction to english phonology. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. odden, d. (2005). introducing phonology: cambridge introductions to language and linguistics. cambridge: cambridge university press. parker, r. and tim g. (2002). the phonology of english: an introduction for teachers of esol. london: elb publishing quinn, s. (2005). debating. brisbane: act. roach, p. (1991). english phonetics and phonology: a practical course. 2nd edition. cambridge: cambridge university press. simpson, j. & e. weiner. (2010) the oxford english dictionary. 3rd edition. oxford: clarendon press. tench, p. (2005) talking intonation in speak out! 34: 3-15 issn: 1026-4345 investigating turntaking strategies in class discussions among esl adult learners english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee investigating turntaking strategies in class discussions among esl adult learners noor hanim rahmat academy of language studies uitm johor branch, pasir gudang campus, malaysia e-mail: patanim@gmail.com sharifah amani bte syed abdul rahman academy of language studies uitm johor branch, pasir gudang campus, malaysia e-mail: shari348@johor.uitm.edu.my d rohayu mohd yunos academy of language studies uitm johor branch, pasir gudang campus, malaysia e-mail: droha932@johor.uitm.edu.my apa citation: rahmat, n. h., rahman, s. a. b. s. a,., & yunos, d. r. m. (2015). investigating turntaking strategies in class discussions among esl adult learners. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 139-144 received: 10-04-2015 accepted: 03-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this quantitative study looked into class discussion strategies used by adult esl learners. findings revealed several benefits of class discussions for adult learners. among some of them are, adult learners practice turn-taking skills in a non-combative environment. the sharing of ideas allowed freedom of thoughts among the learners. on the other hand, adult learners also learn to agree or disagree politely using turn-taking strategies. finally, the benefits of class discussions may go beyond classroom needs such as improving critical thinking skills among learners. this ability is seen when learners participate in group work and discussions. learners gain accessibility to participate comfortably in discussions when they are pun in a non-combative environment. this will thus give them the freedom to discuss any topics openly. this freedom will further enhance their general participation in the discussion. however, in a normal conversational process, speakers need to learn to speak up and also to give others space to voice their opinions. learners need the knowledge of turn-taking skills in order to participate actively in the discussion. this turntaking skills can be taught in esl classrooms through class discussions. keywords: esl classroom, adult learners, class discussion strategies, general participation introduction according to bagaric and djigunovic (2007), outlined communicative competence models and concluded that the “competence to communicate” can be seen from many angles. with regards to malaysian esl learners, being able to communicate competently would be the ability to hold a conversation and be understood by the listener. hence knowing how to speak and successfully participating in class discussions may require different set of skills in the esl classroom. the objective of this study is to explore how adult learners behave during class discussions. the researcher will look into how students are influenced by class mailto:patanim@gmail.com mailto:shari348@johor.uitm.edu.my mailto:droha932@johor.uitm.edu.my noor hanim rahmat, sharifah amani bte syed abdul rahman & d rohayu mohd yunos investigating turntaking strategies in class discussions among esl adult learners discussion, and also how their agreement and disagreement influence their participation. this study is based on the following questions: (1) is there any significant difference between gender for class discussion and general participation? (2) in what ways are students influenced by class discussion? (3) in what ways do students’ general participation influence class discussion? figure 1: class discussions general participation figure 1 above shows the theoretical framework of the study. during class discussions, esl learners are reported to use turn taking strategies to participate in the conversation. this research explores the turn taking strategies employed during general participation, when the learners want to show their agreement, as well as when they want to voice out their disagreement. according to barnes (2014), adults’ learning can be influenced by two factors and they are (a) the control factor and (b) the diversity factor. when faced with the control factor, adults have an innate need to have some mastery or control over their own lives. they need to be self-directed and take responsibility for themselves. they tend to strongly resent not being able to make choices. they want to take an active, rather than a passive role in their education. we need to seek ways to include them in the planning of their educational experience. we need to consider giving them choices in assignments and projects that will offer a variety of ways to show that learning has occurred. next, according to the diversity factor, adult learners vary greatly from one another in terms of experiences and age. the variety they bring to the classroom can greatly enhance the learning environment. by using collaborative efforts and group discussion or projects, adult learners can all benefit from their shared experiences. interactive dialogue facilitates increased solutions and options over simple private reflection. as educators, we must allow more time for networking among adult learners to share perspectives and experiences. in addition, we need to prepare our presentations to meet the needs of every learning style in the classroom. according to weimer (2011), there are several benefits of class discussions. firstly, class discussions with peers allow learners accessibility. learners are comfortable talking about issues with their peers no matter how serious or trivial the topics are. next, class discussions can be done in noncombative environment. for, example, when students answer or try to explain, teachers can see the extent of their english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee understanding. they can correct (or help the students correct) what the students haven’t got right or don’t see quite clearly. in addition to that, when teachers ask questions or otherwise seek student input over a topic, they are letting students know something about the importance of certain ideas and information.during class discussions, teachers may allow diversity of ideas when he/she picked controversial topics for discussion. planned class discussion can also allow students to practice cohesion and focus. participation gives students the chance to practice using a different vocabulary.finally, the academic yet friendly environment, may give the students a sense of trust that whatever they discussed openly was only done for the sake of discussion. the learners can feel safe in general discussions, or when they agree with certain issues or disagree over some controversial matters. class discussions allow real-world communication to take place. bagaric and djigunovic (2007 defined communicative competence as the ability to communicate in real life situations; instead of just the classroom settings. this does not only refer to the informal mode of communication, but also the use of different turn taking strategies for communication. firstly, the informal atmosphere during the class discussion encourage general participation among the learners. they learn certain skills like introducing a topic, bringing other people into a conversation, and if they are not capable of doing so, they learn from their group members how these skills are done. next, learners also learn to keep the discussion moving, give their opinion, or even get further information. the study by carlson (2006) looked at “honour”level 10th grade world history class at a public school in st. paul,minnesota. the research focused on students’ participation in classroom discussions. a survey was carried out and the data is compared with the learners’ grades to see if there were any relations participation, learning styles and overall assessment. findings suggested that the students with higher assessment scores were found to participate more in class. there were little correlation between learning styles and teachers’ participation ratings. davis (2013) looked at adult learners’ ability to participate in strategic classroom discussion. he explored the use of classroom discussion for extending critical thinking and content comprehension among students. the findings suggested that adult learners are self-directed and independent, with a wealth of experience from which to draw when learning, and a need to see immediate relevance in their education as it relates to their current social roles. they also found brainstorming of ideas useful as the activity could help them highlight key issues. they benefit from being directly involved in the development of their learning activities, and often seek help from others they see as more knowledgeable when they approach new tasks. method this is a qualitative research. participants are taken from adult distance learning degree classes. a questionnaire is used as the instrument. it has four sections: section a is the demographic profile, section b is the general participation, section c is the agreement and section d is the disagreement. analysis of data is done by spss to reveal significant differences and frequency of responses by the participants. noor hanim rahmat, sharifah amani bte syed abdul rahman & d rohayu mohd yunos investigating turntaking strategies in class discussions among esl adult learners results & discussion research question 1-is there any significant difference between gender for class discussion participation, and general participation? class discussion table 2results of independent ttest comparing male and female in class discussion results independent t-test n x sd t p class discussion male 13 2.01 .66 .34 .74female 34 1.94 .62 *t-test significant is at .05 (2 tailed) table 2 indicates the result of mean score and standard deviation between male and female on class discussion. (x = 2.01) for male and (x = 1.94) for female. the independent t-test comparing between male and female reported that there is no statistically significant difference in the mean score (t (45) = .34), p = .74) at the 0.05 level. this means the participation of male or female learners will not influence the flow of the discussion. general participation table 3-results of independent ttest comparing male and female in general participation results independent t-test n x sd t p general participation male 13 2.00 .50 -1.91 .06female 34 2.28 .46 *t-test significant is at .05 (2 tailed) table 3 indicates the result of mean score and standard deviation between male and female in general participation. (x = 2.00) for male and (x = 2.28) for female. the independent t-test comparing between male and female reported that there is no statistically significant difference in the mean score (t (45) = -1.91), p = .06) at the 0.05 level. research question 2-in what ways are students influenced by class discussion? figure 4. percentage for class discussions english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee figure 4 above shows the percentage for class discussions for adult esl learners. the highest frequency among the participants is that they felt the topic that they discussed would be useful to them later (always-40.4%). this is followed by “listen to different to different opinion of others” (always34%). next, the participants agreed that class discussions allowed them to understand issues around them (very often-55.3%). they also felt that the discussions allowed them to discuss issues openly (very often-53.2%). these findings are agreed by barnes (2014) who also felt that adult learners benefit from the shared experience, hence, they value a variety of opinions and they felt topics brought up could be useful for them in the future. research question 3in what ways do general participation influence class discussion? figure 5. percentage for general participation figure 5 shows the percentage for general participation. this finding reveals that the adult participants felt that in a class discussion, introducing the topic is always (53.2%0) important. next, they also felt that the introduction of the topic at the beginning of the discussion, always (57.4%) helped them highlight key topics to be discussed. in addition to that, they felt very often (59.6%) allowed others to give their opinions. they also felt that by doing so, they allowed their peers to brainstorm ideas (very often57.4%). the study by davies (2013) also reported similar findings where adult learning used brainstorming activities to help them focus on key issues. conclusion figure 6 shows the summary of findings. this study reveals that very often, class discussions encourage learners to trust group members to listen to their opinions of issues, and allow the cohesion of many different opinions. it also encourages the introduction of a diversity of ideas in a non-combative environment. this non-threatening environment thus allows the accessibility of opinions among group members. in addition to that, through general participation, participants learn to bring in the opinion of other people. they also learn to seek clarification when they noor hanim rahmat, sharifah amani bte syed abdul rahman & d rohayu mohd yunos investigating turntaking strategies in class discussions among esl adult learners were unclear about certain issues. they also learnt to give opinions, introduce topics or even get further information in the group setting. subsequently, they also learn to interrupt conversations to get their opinion heard, or to keep their discussion moving. finally, they learnt to paraphrase another person’s idea as well as close the discussion. figure 6-summary of findings references barnes, l. (2014). achieving success with adult learners. retrieved from http://emarketing.delmarlearning.co m/milady/milady_news_fall05_classr oom.asp bagaric, v. & djigunnovic, j. m. (2007). defining communicative competence. metodika, 8(1) 94-103. retrieved from htt:// hrcak.srce.hr/file/42651. carlson, t. (2006). research on strategies to encourage greater discussions. retrieved from http://www.macalester.edu/educatio nreform/actionresearch/tommyc.pdf davis, h.s. (2013). discussion as a bridge: strategies that engage adolescent and adult learning styles in the postsecondary classroom. journal of the scholarship of teaching and learning, 13(1), 68 – 76. retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej101 1682.pdf howard, j. r. (2004). what does research tell us about classroom discussion?” pages 2-8 in jay r. howard (editor). 2004. discussion in the college classroom: applications for sociology instruction. washington, dc: american sociological association. retrieved from http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi /viewcontent.cgi?article=1163&contex t=facsch_papers murphy, p.k., wilkinson, a.g., soter,a.o. hennessey,n. and alexandar,j.f. (2009) examining the effects of classroom discussion on students’comprehension of text: a meta-analysis. journal of educational psychology, 2009, vol. 101, no. 3, 740 – 764 octavio, l. (2012) turn-taking: whose turn is it anyway? retrieved from http://www.luizotaviobarros.com/20 12/02/turn-taking.html weimer, m. (2011). 10 benefits of getting students to participate in classroom discussions.from “uses for participation. the teaching professor, 23(9). retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles /teaching-and-learning/10-benefits-ofgetting-students-to-participate-inclassroom-discussions/ class discussion 1. trust 2. cohesion and focus 3. diversity 4. non-combative 5. assessibility general partcipation 1.bringing in other people 2. seeking clarificaction 3. giving an opinion 4. introducing a topic 5. getting further information 6. interrupting 7. keeping the discussion moving 8. paraphrasing another person's idea 9. closing the discussion http://emarketing.delmarlearning.com/milady/milady_news_fall05_classroom.asp http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1163&context=facsch_papers http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/10-benefits-of-getting-students-to-participate-in-classroom-discussions/ investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information su you investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information su you school of humanities, beijing university of posts and telecommunications e-mail: suyou@bupt.edu.cn apa citation: su, y. (2015). investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 230-238 received: 11-04-2015 accepted: 26-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this study aims to explore how chinese efl students perceive the advantages and disadvantages of prompts providing different amount of information, namely prompt with more information and prompt with less information. both qualitative and quantitative data were collected through questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview. research results indicate that: 1) respondents hold a mixed attitude towards the prompt effect on their task accomplishment. 2) students believe that prompt type can affect their expression in writing; 3) students generally agree that prompt with more information facilitate their writing in terms of content and organization; 4) students’ preference for the prompt type differs across different english proficiency level. keywords: prompt effect, english writing, testing writing, perceptions introduction since the role of writing in second language education increases, there is also a greater demand to test writing in a valid and reliable way. in writing assessment, writing prompts are designed with a view to providing an adequate sample of written discourse to make appropriate and reliable assessments of the linguistics skill of the candidate (o’loughlin & wiggleworth, 2007). however, there is also the risk of “construct-irrelevant variance” (messick, 1996) or what jenning, fox, graves, and shohamy (1992:456) have called a “prompt effect”. in other words, in writing performance assessment, prompts are systematically varied for different students, raising the possibility of a prompt effect and thus affecting the validity, reliability and fairness of these tests. however, the question of the extent to which the specific task prompt affects writing in a foreign language is “a vexed one” (o’loughlin & wigglesworth, 2007:380). weigle (2011:69) also points out that it is still not clear in terms of which specific differences in writing prompts affect examinee’s performance and in what ways. testing specialists (bachman and palmer, 1996; alderson et al, 2000; weigle, 2011) point out the usefulness of task specifications in terms of test objectives and test takers’ interpretation. meanwhile, some scholars (li, 2001; wu, 2008; gu & gao, 2007) worried that too much amount of information in chinese provided in the prompt might result in test takers’ direct translation of the prompt and it might deduce the validity of the writing test. this raises the question that whether the prompt with or without an outline will affect test takers’ writing performance and how prompts with different amount of information affect test takers’ english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee performance. besides, one of the objectives in developing assessment prompts is to ensure comparability across different administrations. in order to achieve this, it is crucial that we understand better about the effects of prompts, how test takers approach them, and what affect the difficulty of a prompt. whether the changes to the task specification affect test takers’ performance, has received some amount of attention. according to hinkel (2002), prompt wording affect test takers’ writing performance since they insert language from the prompt into their essays. in brossell and ash’s (1984) study, they examined the possible effect of the wording of essay topics by looking at whether phrasing the task as a question or as a statement make a difference in test takers’ writing performance. they also analyzed whether it matters when a topic is addressed to the writer in personal way (“you”) or is addressed in impersonal or neutral terms. this study provided no evidence to support the claim that small changes in the wording of essay test topics affect test takers’ outcomes. studies have also dealt with the amount of information given in prompts and the extent to which task difficulty and test takers’ performance will be affected by it (kroll and reid,1994; brossell, 1983; o’loughlin and wigglesworth, 2007). o’loughlin and wigglesworth (2007) investigated the extent to which the difficulty of ielts academic writing task 1 is affected by the amount of information provided to the candidate and the extent to which the difficulty of the task is affected by the presentation of the information to the candidate. analysis revealed that there were no substantial differences in difficulty between the tasks and it appears that tasks providing less information actually elicit more complex language. brossell (1983) discovered that the information load apparently can affect a test taker’s tendency to begin writing purposefully by helping or hindering the focusing and organizing of a test taker’s thoughts. another investigation conducted by oh and walker (2007) evaluated whether new scholastic assessment test’s essay prompt type (either a simple one-line prompt or a prompt including a short passage) affects test-takers’ essay production. research findings indicated that the one-line prompt and the prompt with a passage providing more information have a similar impact on the test-takers’ essay performance. other studies have revealed that test takers do take the generality and specificity of prompts into their consideration when it comes to decide which one to choose (polio & glew, 1996; powers & fowles, 1998). chiste and o’shea (1988) found that esl writers preferred the shorter prompt but esl writers studied did not perform significantly better on short questions because such questions may limit writers’ range of topic choices and offer less insight into an essay’s development and structure. thus, it is claimed that prompt should be phrased as succinctly as possible and prompts should be comparable in length (chiste and o’shea, 1988). besides, brossell (1983) claims that a medium level of specification and information load is the best choice for prompt design as this facilitates examinees focus without overloading them with information or narrowing their thoughts. based on the review of theoretical concerns on writing and writing assessment, one can see that prompts su you investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information can be systematically varied for different test takers, raising the possibility of a prompt effect and thus affecting the validity, reliability and fairness of writing performance tests. however, research on the designing of writing prompts, specifically, the prompt effect, has not been well addressed. as prompt with necessary content and structure support is the format frequently used in the writing assessment in china(gu, yang & feng, 2009), there is the necessity to investigate chinese efl students’ perceptions of different writing prompts. considering the issues and problems mentioned above, this study aims to explore how test takers may perceive the relative advantages and disadvantage of writing prompts with different amount of information. to achieve the research purpose, the research questions of this study are: 1) what are students’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of the prompts that provides more information (specific-points prompts)? 2) what are students’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of the prompts that provides less information (basic-points prompts)? method participants a total of 102 chinese efl students took part in this study. among the 102 participant, 61 of them were male while 41 were female. they are all non-native speakers of english and speak chinese as their mother tongue. the average age of these participants is 17. all the participants started to learn english when they entered junior high school and they have just started the third year’s study of the senior high school at the time when they participated in the present study. as third-year senior high school students, they were required to write coherent and well-structured short essays to express their opinions and attitudes (necs: 2001). to prepare them for college entrance examination, prompt with necessary content and structure support is the format frequently used by the teachers. data collection method to serve the purpose of the present study, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected through questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews. the questionnaire was designed in the form of likert scale, which is adapted from xu (2006) whose research was on identifying and controlling writing task difficulty factors in english tests. the questionnaire intends to extract students’ perceptions in terms of task fulfillment, vocabulary use, structure organization, cohesion, expression and grammar use. participants were asked to number from 5 to 1 to indicate the degree they agreed with each statement (5=strongly agree, 4=mostly agree, 3=not sure, 2=mostly disagree 1=strongly disagree). for the accuracy of responses, the questionnaire was designed in chinese. the reliability of the questionnaire was reliable with a cronbach alpha of .8127. based on the results of the questionnaires, it was intended to use interviews to gain deeper insight into participants’ conceptions of some specific issues related to the advantages and disadvantages of the amount of information provided in the prompt. interviews with the students were conducted after the questionnaire survey. six students across three proficiency levels, basic, intermediate, and advanced, were chosen as the participants for the interview. the average time length of the interviews was about 15 minutes. all interviews were recorded and later transcribed by the researcher. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee results and discussion questionnaire responses on the liker scale were presented after data processing with spss (16.0). one thing worth noting here is that we combine “agree” and “strongly agree” on the scale in the following discussion. the specific areas under investigation were: language use, writing process, and writing quality. as for the writing quality, it includes content, structure and organization, cohesion, expression and word choice, and grammar. perceptions of the specific-points prompt language use data from the questionnaire survey showed that only 35% of the students felt that their writing on the specific-points prompt can reflect their english writing ability objectively (no. 1). for a closer examination of the statistics on language use, one can see that less than 20% of respondents felt that prompts with specific points could make their expression more native-like (no. 6) and around 40% of them believed that this kind of prompt hindered the variety of vocabulary in their writing (no.7). however, around half of the respondents to the questionnaire felt that the specific-points prompt enabled them to write more (no.3). table 1 presents the specifics of statistics including the frequency, mean score, and standard error. table 1. students’ perceptions of specific-points prompt: language use i think the prompt with more information: frequency (%) n=102 sd d n a sa m s.d. 1 reflects my english writing ability objectively. 6.0 13.0 46.0 24.0 11.0 3.21 1.01 3 enables me to write more. 5.2 16.7 31.3 36.5 10.4 3.30 1.04 6 makes my expression more native-like. 4.0 28.7 47.5 15.8 4.0 2.87 0.87 7 hinders the variety in vocabulary. 7.9 24.8 26.7 25.7 14.9 3.15 1.19 note: sa = strongly agree; a = agree; n = not sure; d = disagree; sd = strongly disagree writing process more than half of the respondents to the questionnaire felt that they were more familiar with the prompt with specific points and had inherent routines to complete the task (no.5). for a closer examination of the statistics on the writing process, one can see that 75% of the respondents agreed that specific-points prompt made them tend to directly translate the chinese prompts into english (no.8). this echoes some scholars’ (li, 2001; wu, 2008; gu & gao, 2007) assumption that too much amount of information in chinese provided in the prompt might result in students’ direct translation of the prompt and it might deduce the validity of the writing test. besides, more than half of the respondent felt that the prompt with more information restricted their thoughts and hindered the performance of their wiring ability (no. 4). additionally, we are surprised to find that there were still 44% of the respondents felt that the specific-points prompt actually restricted their writing in terms of the content (no.9). the interview indicated that students thought sometimes they found it hard to cover all those information provided in the prompts while some others held that they could nor write other things that they would really want to write if the prompt gave too much information. this could be the reason why many students still felt this kind of prompt challenging (no.2). table 2 presents the specifics of statistics. su you investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information table 2 students’ perceptions of specific-points prompt: writing process i think the prompt with more information: frequency (%) n=102 sd d n a sa m s.d. 2 is not challenging, decreasing my interest in writing. 18.8 38.6 30.7 8.9 3.0 2.39 0.99 4 restricts my thoughts, thus hinders the performance of my writing ability. 8.0 21.0 12.0 40.0 19.0 3.41 1.24 5 makes me more familiar with this mode of writing and i have inherent routines to complete the task. 2.0 17.8 23.8 48.5 7.9 3.43 0.94 8 makes me tend to directly translate the chinese prompts. 5.0 12.0 8.0 51.0 24.0 3.77 1.10 9 restricts my writing in terms of the content. 5.0 26.0 25.0 32.0 12.0 3.20 1.11 writing quality as for writing quality, the investigation focuses on students’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of specific-points prompt from the perspectives of organization, coherence, and grammar. table 3 presents the specifics of statistics. table 3. students’ perceptions of specific-points prompt: writing quality i think the prompt with more information: frequency (%) n=102 sd d n a sa m s.d. 10 helps me develop the overall structure. 2.0 6.9 17.8 62.4 10.9 3.73 0.82 11 enables me to pay more attention to the transition between sentences. 1.0 18.8 33.7 37.6 7.9 3.33 0.91 12 makes the writing structure more complete. 4.0 17.0 24.0 47.0 8.0 3.38 0.99 13 makes my writing more coherent and logical. 3.0 17.0 43.0 31.0 6.0 3.20 0.90 14 promotes the accuracy of grammar. 5.0 24.0 46.0 22.0 3.0 2.94 0.89 15 reminds me of constant checking of the accuracy of grammar while writing. 2.0 32.3 42.4 21.2 2.0 2.89 0.83 16 promotes the variety of grammatical structures. 5.0 26.7 49.5 16.8 2.0 2.84 0.83 17 promotes my accuracy of tense. 2.0 21.8 42.6 29.7 4.0 3.12 0.86 the questionnaire survey indicated that another advantage of the specific-points prompt is that it facilitates students in writing in terms of organization and structure. around 80% of the respondents believed that prompt with more information helped them develop the overall structure (no.10) and more than half of the respondents agreed that it made their writing structure more complete (no.12). this result echoes with the findings of the empirical study conducted by xu (2006) which indicated that providing stimulus may help students with idea generation. in addition, 45% of the students felt that specific-points prompt enabled them to pay more attention to the transition between sentences and 37% of them believed it made their writing structure more complete. however, one can see that respondents hold very neutral attitude towards the advantages and disadvantages of prompt with more information from the perspective of grammar use (no.14, no.15, no.16, and no.17). perceptions of the basic-points prompt the specific areas under investigation were: language use, writing process, and writing quality. as for the writing quality, it includes content, structure and organization, cohesion, expression and word choice, and grammar. language use data from the questionnaire survey indicated that more than 63% of the respondents believed that their writing on the basic-points prompt reflected their english writing ability more objectively english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee (no. 1). this is a sharp contrast with respondents’ perceptions of specific-points prompts (35%). in other words, in the test takers’ eyes, prompt with less information is a better way to measure their english writing ability. besides, 34% of the students thought that prompt with less information enabled them to write more (no.3). table 4. students’ perceptions of basic-points prompt: language use i think the prompt with more information: frequency (%) n=102 sd d n a sa m s.d. 1 reflects my english writing ability more objectively 5.0 5.0 26.7 37.6 25.7 3.74 1.06 3 enables me to write more 5.0 25.0 36.0 28.0 6.0 3.05 0.99 6 makes my expression more native-like 5.0 21.0 53.0 14.0 7.0 2.97 0.92 7 promotes the variety in vocabulary 5.0 6.0 31.0 50.0 8.0 3.50 0.92 for a closer examination of the statistics on language use, we can see that more than half of the respondents felt that the basic-points prompt promoted the variety of word choice in their writing (no.7). this might because it is possible for students to avoid direct translation of the chinese prompt. follow-up interviews revealed that students usually found it hard to choose the exact word to translate the prompt if there were too much information, but it would be easier for them to try other ways of expression or other similar words to directly express their opinions when dealing with the prompt with less information. as for the expression, it seemed that students held a neutral view on whether basic-points prompt made their expression more native-like (no.6). table 4 above presents the specifics. writing process another advantage of the basic-points prompt students considered was that it broadened their thought and thus promoted the performance of their writing (no.4, 69.3%). besides, around half of the respondents thought that basic-points prompt is more challenging and increases their interest in writing (no. 2). this might be the reason why many students believed that their performance on the prompt with less information reflected their writing ability more objectively. however, there were 59% of responses showed that the missing of outline in the prompt made it difficult to complete the writing task (no.5). this is different from students’ perception of the prompt with more information which was believed to be easier for students in terms of task fulfillment. table 5 below presents the specifics. table 5 students’ perceptions of basic-points prompt: writing process i think the prompt with more information: frequency (%) n=102 sd d n a sa m s.d. 2 more challenging, increasing my interest in writing 5.9 6.9 36.6 33.7 16.8 3.49 1.05 4 broadens my thought, thus promotes my writing 4.0 4.0 22.8 48.5 20.8 3.78 0.96 5 makes it difficult to complete the task since the outline is missing 8.0 21.0 12.0 53.0 6.0 2.98 1.10 8 makes it possible for me to avoid direct translation of the chinese prompts 4.0 12.9 14.9 49.5 18.8 3.66 1.05 9 makes my writing more free and open in terms of content 4.0 2.0 16.0 58.0 20.0 3.88 0.89 su you investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information by examining the statistics closely, we can see another obvious advantage of basic-points prompt was that it made students’ writing more free and open in terms of content (no.9, 78%). besides, most students felt that it is possible for them to avoid direct translation of the chinese prompt (no.8). this result is consistent with participants’ perception of specific-points prompt where 44% of the respondents felt that prompt with more information restricted their writing. the interview also revealed that students, especially those of high english proficiency, felt that there was more flexibility in terms of what to write instead of being limited by the information provided in the prompt. table 18 below presents the specifics. writing quality as for the quality of students’ writings, respondents to the questionnaire felt that it was difficult for them to organize the structure and make the writing coherent and logical when responding to the basic-points prompt. only 28% of the students felt that basic-points prompt helped them develop the overall structure and 16% of them believed that this kind of prompt made their writing structure more complete. besides, around 30% of the students thought that basic-points prompt enabled them to pay more attention to the transition between sentences. however, we can see that students held a neutral attitude towards the advantages and disadvantages of basic-points prompts from the perspective of grammar use (no.14, no.15, no.16, and no.17). table 6. students’ perceptions of basic-points prompt: writing quality i think the prompt with more information: frequency (%) n=102 sd d n a sa m s.d. 10 helps me develop the overall structure. 3.0 20.0 49.0 20.0 8.0 3.10 0.92 11 enables me to pay more attention to the transition between sentences. 2.0 19.8 46.5 23.8 7.9 3.16 0.90 12 makes the writing structure more complete. 3.0 21.0 60.0 13.0 3.0 2.92 0.76 13 makes my writing more coherent and logical. 3.0 23.8 51.5 16.8 5.0 2.97 0.85 14 promotes the accuracy of grammar . 2.0 28.0 48.0 18.0 4.0 2.94 0.84 15 reminds me of constant checking of the accuracy of grammar while writing.. 3.0 20.8 46.5 22.8 6.9 3.10 0.91 16 promotes the variety of grammatical structures. 3.0 20.8 41.6 27.7 6.9 3.15 0.93 17 promotes my accuracy of tense. 3.0 22.8 53.5 15.8 5.0 2.97 0.84 the prompt type that students preferred participants were also asked which prompt type they prefer. results indicated that perception of students differed across different english proficiency level as they self-rated. in the interview, the interviewee of advanced english level expressed that the prompt with less information gave them more freedom to write and they felt that the choice of words was not limited so that the accuracy of their writing was ensured. as for the reason why they preferred the prompt with less information, some students also thought that it gave them opportunity to write something of themselves instead of writing things that shared high similarity with other students. when asked why they preferred the prompt english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee with more information, some students responded that they didn’t have to generate ideas and this saved much time in a time-controlled testing situation while others thought that more information provided in the prompt could enable them to write long sentences and have a better control over the structure of their essay. the reason for the difference is that student of lower proficiency have more demand for content and outline support than those of higher proficiency who don’t want to get restricted by the information provided in the prompt. this is also in line with previous studies which revealed there is interaction between prompt preference and proficiency level (chiste & o’shea, 1988; jennings, et al., 1999). this indicated that students’ language ability can be an important factor that determines their perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of the two different prompt types. conclusion this study investigated into participants’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of writing prompt with different amount of information. the areas explored include students’ general opinions on task accomplishment, and factors considered important in writing such as content, structure and organization, cohesion, expression and word choice, grammar, and mechanics. research results indicated that respondents held a mixed attitude towards the prompt effect on their task accomplishment. students also felt that prompt type can affect their expression in writing. they agree that translation effect may appear when they are taking the prompt with too much information. besides, students agreed that prompt with more information facilitates their writing in terms of content and organization. most students believed that the prompt providing structure and content support made their writing more free and open in terms of content. it also reveals that students’ preference for the prompt type differs across different english proficiency level. students of advanced level preferred the prompt with less information while many students of the basic level would like to write on the prompt with more information. in terms of future research, quantitative and qualitative analysis of students writing performance on different prompts could be conducted to further examine the prompt effect. acknowledgements this paper is supported by the fundamental research funds for the central universities (2014rc0703) and 2014 research projects for national college foreign language teaching (s2014175). references alderson, j. c., clapham, c., & wall, d. (2000). language test construction and evaluation. beijing: foreign language teaching and research press. bachman, l., & palmer, a. (1996). language testing in practice. oxford: oxford university press. brossell, g. (1983). rhetorical specification in essay examination topics. college english, 45(2), 165-173 brossell, g., & ash, b. h. (1984). an experiment with the wording of essay topics. college composition and communication, 35(4), 423-425 chiste, k. b., & o'shea, j. (1988). patterns of question selection and writing performance of esl students. teachers of english to speakers of other languages, 22(4). gu, x., & gao, x. (2007). an investigation into the writing tasks of nmet 2007. china examinations, (12), 28-36. su you investigating chinese efl students’ perceptions of writing prompts of different amounts of information gu, x., yang, r., & feng, n. (2010). a study on the quality of the writing tasks of nmet. educational measurement and evaluation , (12), 47-50. hinkel, e. 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(2007). investigating task design in academic writing prompts. in taylor, l. (ed.), ielts collected papers: research in speaking and writing assessment. 379-418. cambridge: cambridge university press. polio, c., & glew, m. (1996). esl writing assessment prompts: how students choose. journal of second language writing, 5(1), 35-49 powers, d. e., & fowles, m. e. (1998). test takers' judgment about gre writing test prompts (rr 98-36). nj: princeton: ets. qi, l., (2004). a study on the washback of nmet. foreign language teaching and research, 36(5), 357-363. weigle, s. c. (2011). assessing writing. beijing: foreign language teaching and research press. wu，z. (2008). theory and practice of english language testing. beijing: foreign language teaching and research press. xu, y. (2006). identifying and controlling writing task difficulty factors in english tests. unpublished phd dissertation, shanghai international studies university. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 69 students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction santi oktarina faculty of education and teaching, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: santiokarina@yahoo.com emzir postgraduate program, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id zainal rafli postgraduate program, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id apa citation: oktarina, s., emzir, & rafli, z. (2018). students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 69-76. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1256. received: 21-02-2018 accepted: 29-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: the aim of this research is to gain the perception of students and lecturers toward academic writing instruction indonesian language classes in universitas sriwijaya. this current research was a part of research and development study on moodle-based teaching model for academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes. this research and development model was carried out using survey and content analysis. the research was conducted in universitas sriwijaya. questionnaire, interview and focus-group discussion (fgd) were instruments to collect data. meanwhile, both quantitative and qualitative data analysis was used to analyze the collected data. after analyzing data from questionnaire, both students and lecturers perceived that academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes are good and proper. however, the data from interview and fgd showed that there were different views between students and lecturers regarding to academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes. keywords: perception, instruction, academic writing introduction academic writing is writing activity in the classrooms conducted by one institution to communicate one subject of field using linear thoughts, which is scientifically thinking and reasoning and applying scientific variety of languages based on a set of scientific requirements (hoque, 2008; oshima & hoque, 2007; greane & lidnrky, 2012). furthermore, bailey (2015) wrote that the purposes of writing, as follow: 1) to report what the writer has done, 2) to answer writer’s questions, 3) to discuss one specific topic and provide writer’s opinions, 4) to synthesize research conducted by someone about one topic. from the writing purposes above, it can be academic writing ability especially in higher education is very complex and difficult; therefore, indonesian languageclasses, in which academic writing is taught and assessed, cannot be seen as solely an additional subject. concerning to study in higher education, students are necessary to attain academic writing ability since it influences their academic achievement. on the other side, writing activity is inseparable aspect in entire learning process in higher education. saberi and rahemi (2013) and silva (2014) stated that writing has the most important role in academic success. the similar idea was also expressed by akhadiah (2015, p. 15)that “writing for scholars is a mandatory task to support academic career”. writing also brings many advantages for college-students mailto:santiokarina@yahoo.com santi oktarina, emzir, & zainal rafli students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction 70 (akhadiah, arsjad, & ridwan, 2003; oktarina, 2014). teaching writing has to meet the standard of national education qualification framework; the process of teaching should follow a set of principles in writing instruction (brown, 2001) and the technical guidance of personality subject groups in each institution. however, in fact, several lecturers are able to understand the principles of teaching writing, standards in process of teaching writing, and the guidance; yet, they fail in doing and implementing what they understand. moreover, in this current technological and science era, professionalism is one of required aspects for lecturers in higher education. to support the sight, alwasilah (2014) stated that, based on some research findings, indonesian languageclasses are still far away from success to enhance academic writing skill; moreover, teaching indonesian languageespecially for academic writing in some faculties/universities can be considered a failure. this encounter is something common in teaching indonesian language. the same thought was brought by oktarina (2014, p. 2), she noted that “students’ levels in writing academic paper are relatively low.” a view from teaching process, it can be concluded that students find difficulty and effort in writing. this indicates that they feel uneasy to brainstorm and compose ideas in written language. this barrier ends with demotivation of writing. furthermore, from writing product presented in the class, only a few students are actively and creatively write in the classroom; meanwhile, the rest of them is still struggle. there are many strategies that can be applied to improve academic writing. at first, the use of teaching model can enhance writing skill (elola & eskoz, 2010; grani, 2012; kuiper, smit, wchter, & elen, 2017). secondly, the use of technology can also increase academic writing skill (adas & bakir, 2013; wulandari, 2016, joseph & ghazali, 2013). the lecturers can use these strategies based on the needs of writing instruction in their classrooms. with their professionalism, they can wrap and deliver the effective writing lesson in the line with the students’ needs. to have these sights in mind, a teaching model particularly for academic writing in indonesian language classes is necessary in universitas sriwijaya. before designing a model for academic writing, need assessment is firstly conducted to gain information from students and lecturers. their perception concerning to academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes is one of aspects collected in this research. this present study addressed to get lecturers and students’ perception related to academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes in universitas sriwijaya. method the research was carried by research and development design. meanwhile, this current study was part of moodle-based academic writing instruction for indonesian language classes universitas sriwijaya. within this phase, survey and content analysis, as methods used in research and development (richey & klein, 2007, p. 40), were used as research methods. according to emzir (2013, p. 39), survey is a method that applied sampling and the result for describing entire population by using a set of questions in questionnaire. moreover, content analysis is a set of technique to systematically analyze a text involving one type of communication (conversation, written text, interview, photography, etc.) which is then categorized and classified (emzir, 2012, p.285). this present research was conducted in universitas sriwjijaya from february 2016 to june 2016. to collect data, questionnaire, interview and focus-group discussion (fgd) were selected as instruments. at first stage, questionnaire was distributed to the students in semester two and students in semester 4; they both entered indonesian language classes. the students, as entire population, were 1.278 student-respondents from semester 2 and 1.255 student-respondents from semester 4 who were following indonesian language classes in upt university personality subjects. as a result, there were 2.503 student-respondent taken a part in this research as population. meanwhile, sample of the research, 10-15% of the population, was approximately 360 studentenglish review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 71 respondents. nonetheless, only 324 papers of questionnaire were put back to the researcher and considered valid. from interview session, 3 lecturers who taught indonesian language from upt mpk universitas sriwijaya were interviewed related to the teaching process of academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes they have experienced. the third instrument was fgd in which was followed by 7 studentrespondents as representative of 7 faculties in universitas sriwijaya. in analyzing the gathered data, both quantitative and qualitative data analysis were used to get more comprehensive data and presentation. the gathered data from fgd and interview was analyzed qualitatively by organizing, reading, memoing, describing, classifying, and interpreting data into several codes and themes; then the process of analyzing data was continued by presenting and visualizing the gathered data. moreover, the gathered data from questionnaire of lecturers and students was scaled using likert scale. the table below is the category of perception concerning to academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes in universitas sriwijaya. tabel 1. criteria of perception range category 1.00—1.72 not suitable 1.73—2.48 less suitable 2.49—3.24 suitable 3.25—4.00 very suitable results and discussion based on the research findings gathered from questionnaire, interview and fgd, the presentation of result of the research is as follow. questionnaire was distributed to the lecturers and students. 18 lecturers were asked to fill the questionnaire sheets; while there were 360 student-respondents to fill the sheets. however, only 324 sheets were registered back and called valid. there are 3 aspects of teaching academic writing asked and assessed on the questionnaire; namely: planning the lesson, implementing the lesson, and evaluating the lesson. the table shows the perception on both parties of respondents. table 2. lecturers’ and students’ perception on academic writing instruction from questionnaire planning the lesson no. components of planning the lesson perception students lecturers 1. competence and objectives meet the student needs 3,26 vs 3,56 vs 2. the existing teaching model is suitable for the characteristics of the subject/lesson 3,07 s 3,50 vs 3. the assessment points are clear 3,07 s 3,39 vs 4. the use of reference and literature is novel and recent (at least 5 years) 2,87 s 3,28 vs 5. the lesson is equipped by module/ppt slides/dictates 2,87 s 3,67 vs 6. the lesson is supported by web-learning facility 2,43 ls 1,00 ns note: very suitable= vs, suitable= s, less suitable= ls, not suitable= ns from the questionnaire, it can be stated several conclusions related to academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes in the term of lesson planning. firstly, either lecturers or students mostly agree that competence and teaching objectives, the existing teaching model, assessment points, references and literature, and facility used in the classroom are relatively suitable and very suitable. nevertheless, the students-respondent thought that they had never experienced learning academic writing using web-learning facility in indonesian language classes. santi oktarina, emzir, & zainal rafli students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction 72 table 3. implementing the lesson no. components of implementing the lesson perception students lecturer 1. the lesson begins and ends on time 3,06 s 3,44 vs 2. the learning materials are based on the syllabus of teaching 3,26 s 3,61 vs 3. it conducts student-centered learning 3,09 s 3,44 vs 4. the existing teaching model can motivate students 2,94 s 3,44 vs 5. the existing teaching model improves the interactions between students and lecturers 3,21 s 3,44 vs 6. the lesson leads the students to build ideas and new knowledge from various learning resources 3,21 s 3,39 vs 7. the lesson fosters the students to analyze many ideas and lot of experiences and to develop profound reasoning ability 3,14 s 3,50 vs 8. the lesson pushes the students to synthesis and discuss concepts of writing in the front of the class for group work activity 3,08 s 3,44 vs 9. the lesson integrates and combines inter-discipline, even multidiscipline of knowledge field 2,89 s 3,22 s 10. the lesson applies and emphasizes scientific approach 2,88 s 3,44 vs 11. the students plan before they write 2,97 s 3,50 vs 12. the students in group work activity produce writing based on the required genre 2,73 s 3,11 s 13. the students in individual activity produce wiring based on the required genre 2,22 ls 3,22 s 14. peers in the classroom provide comments to student writing product 2,77 s 3,17 s 15. the lecturers give feedbacks to students’ writing products 3,14 s 3,44 s 16. the students edit their writing based on comments and feedback given by peers and lecturers 3,13 s 3,28 vs 17. the students revise their writing based on comments and feedback given by peers and lecturers 3,06 s 3,28 vs 18. the given tasks are discussed and evaluated in classroom discussion 2,99 s 3,44 vs 19 the lesson uses various teaching media, such as whiteboard, lcd projector, props. 3,48 vs 3,78 vs 20. the lesson uses social media sites, such as facebook or blog as teaching media 2,35 ls 2,11 ls 21. the lesson applies web learning -based teaching such as moodle 2,31 ls 1,00 ns note: vs= very suitable, s= suitable, ls= less suitable, ns= not suitable from the table above, it can also be summarized some conclusions about academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes in the term of implementing the lesson. the first point is both students and lecturers generally perceive that the process and implementation of academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes are relatively good and effective. it has proven by the scores from item 1-19 gain in the range of very suitable and suitable. secondly, on the item no.20, stating the use of social media sites for teaching media, both parties fall to disagree. the third conclusion is, from item no. 21, students view that the existing teaching model is rarely using web learning facility; moreover, the lecturers claim that they had never conducted it in their classrooms. table 4. evaluating the lesson no. components of evaluating the lesson perception students lecturers 22. peer-evaluation is conducted for each writing product 2,40 ls 2,83 s 23. lecturer’s evaluation is organized for each task given 3,19 vs 3,39 vs 24. self-evaluation is arranged for each writing product 2,62 s 2,89 s 25. self-evaluation, peer-evaluation and lecturer’s evaluation are presented directly and manually to the students 2,81 s 3,00 vs 26. self-evaluation. peer-evaluation and lecturer’s evaluation are 2,29 ls 1,00 ns english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 73 presented through web learning facility 27. evaluation points are based on the indicators that have been approved in the first meeting 3,20 s 3,39 vs 28. objective evaluation is applied 3,23 s 3,50 vs 29. evaluation is in the form of manual portfolio assessment 3,00 s 3,28 vs 30. evaluation is in the form of portfolio assessment 2,49 s 2,56 vs 31. quiz and tests (mid and final) are held in the classroom and scored and assessed by clear, definite and concise criteria 3,18 s 3,39 vs 32. quiz and tests (mid and final) are given through web learning facility and scored and assessed by clear, definite and concise criteria 2,37 ls 1,00 ns note: vs= very suitable, s= suitable, ls= less suitable, ns= not suitable the questionnaire above shows perception from students and lecturers toward academic writing instruction specifically in evaluating the lesson of indonesian language. the first encounter isthe students think that the evaluation process using peer-review was infrequently undertaken for each writing product; in contrast, the lecturers revealed that peer-review process had once conducted. the second conclusion shows that both lecturers and students fall to suitable and very suitable for these following items: 1) evaluation is mostly done by lecturers, 2) self-evaluation had once conducted for each writing product, 3) peer-review and lecturer review have directly and manually implemented for the given tasks, 4) evaluation is based on a set of indicators approved in the first meeting, 5) evaluation is in objective form, 6) manual portfolio assessment and 7) portfolio assessment are used, and 8) quiz and tests are given in the classroom, and assessed by a clear, definite and concise criteria. on the third conclusion, the students stated that selfevaluation, peer evaluation and lecturer’s evaluation are rarely conducted through web learning facility. on the other hand, the lecturers revealed the opposite ideas. they have never used web learning facility in the classrooms. in addition to evaluation, students declared that quiz and tests are often given in the classroom through web learning facility and scored using clear criteria. nonetheless, the lecturers said that this kind of activity has never been done in their classrooms. for getting data, fgc was conducted by seven student-respondents. they were as representatives from seven faculties of universitas sriwijaya; the faculty of law, medicine and health, politics and social sciences, mathematics and sciences, agricultures, technical engineering, and teaching and education. fgd purposes to gain students perception, opinion and perspectives concerning to academic writing instruction they have experienced. from fgd, some findings were revealed and presented into several items. the first finding shows that, from competence and teaching objective, the teaching and learning process was mostly discussed and practiced language materials and contents instead of implementing genrebased instruction. from the second finding, in the form of lesson structure, learning activity was delivered by lectures and class discussion that mostly applied teacher-centered learning with limited student-lecturer interaction. writing activity does not depict the application of writing process approach and procedure, such as pre-writing, whilst-writing, and postwriting. then, the third finding proves that, from the principles of reaction, the lecturers do not sufficiently motivate to learn and write in the classrooms. moreover, from the view of social system, the process of teaching does not provide high and full interaction between students and lecturer. at last, in the supporting system point, some components are concluded as follow: 1) the materials are limited, 2) materials are various from class to class, 3) the lecturer uses only one reference/course book, 4) references are limited, 5) the lesson is not web-learning based. interview is one of the instruments to collect data related to lecturers’ perception, opinion, experiences, and perspectives upon academic writing instruction they have taught. then, three lecturers who taught indonesian language in universitas sriwijayahave been santi oktarina, emzir, & zainal rafli students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction 74 interviewed. as a result, some findings are described below. the first finding reveals that academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes has based on the principles of teaching writing, the standard of national education qualification framework (kkni), and the guidance in implementation of personality subject at higher education. however, the implementation of these principles and standards is still need improved. in addition, other constraints in academic writing instruction are also apparent, such as students’ lack of motivation, large classes, ineffective class rules. the second item is that several lecturers said that they do not use web learning facility provided by the institution. it can be assumed that one of the constraints in academic writing instruction is caused by lecturers’ incapability to use technology, particularly web learning facility. based on the findings revealed on this study, there are some similarity and differences perception among students and lecturers. both students and lecturers are in the side related to the situation encounters on academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes. to be more specific, they agree that the instruction still needs improved and is not yet completed by web learning facility that provided by institution. furthermore, the students are expecting that the lecturers teach them with technology provided by institution. the similar ideas has been also proposed by adas and bakir (2013), wulandari (2016), andjoseph and ghazali (2013). they had experienced using technology in teaching academic writing. not only that, this research also found some different point of views between lecturers and students. the lecturers perceived that they have effortfully taught academic writing to the students although they modestly admitted that some aspect in the implementation of teaching writing still needs improvement. on the other side, what the students perceived is slightly different. they think that a lot of aspects in academic writing instruction are necessary to develop. this finding is consistent to what was proposed by alwasilah (2014; oktarina, 2014) that teaching indonesian language especially in higher education is out of its track. the process is not yet improving student performance in academic writing skill. conclusion after collecting and analyzing data from students and lecturers concerning to academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes in universitas sriwijaya, it can be drawn some conclusions. the first is that the academic writing instruction in indonesian language classes is relatively good and suitable for recent situation. however, in fact, some aspects in implementation of teaching academic writing need improvement. this can be proven by the different perception among lecturers and students regarding to the quality of the existing academic writing instruction. references adas, d., & bakir, a. (2013).writing difficulties and new solutions: blended learning as an approach to improve writing abilitiy. international journal of humanities and social science, 3(9), 254-266. akhadiah, s., arsjad, m. g., & ridwan, s. h. (2003). pembinaan kemampuan menulis bahasa indonesia. jakarta: erlangga. akhadiah, s. (2015). bahasa sebagai sarana komunikasi ilmiah. bekasi: paedea. bailey, s. (2015). academic writing: a handbook for international student. london: routledge. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching approach to language pedagogy. new york: longman. elola, i.,& oskoz, a. (2010). collaborative writing: fostering foreign language and writing conventions development. language learning and technology, 14(3), 51-71. emzir. (2012). metodologi penelitian kualitatif: analisis data. jakarta: rajawali pers. emzir. (2013). metodologi penelitian pendidikan: kuantitatif dan kualitatif. jakarta: pt raja grafindo persada. grani, m. a. (2012). online collaborative writing for esl learners using blogs and feedback checklist. english language teaching, 5(10), 43-48. greane, s., & lidnrky, a. (2012). from inquiry to academic writing: a text and reader. boston: bedford/st. martin. kuiper, c., smit, j., de wachter, l., & elen, j. (2017). scaffolding tertiary students’ writing in a genrebased writing intervention. journal of writing research, 9(1), 27-59. oktarina, s. (2014). the use of creative and productive facebook-based model to increase the quality of writing course. journal of teaching and education, 3(1), 137-149. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 75 oshima, a., & hogue, a. (2007). introduction to academic writing. new york: pearson. richey, r. c., & klein, j. d. (2007). design and development research: methods, strategies, and issues. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. saberi, e., & rahimi, r. (2013). guided writing tasks vs production writing tasks in teaching writing: the impact on iranian efl learners' paragraph writing. modern journal of language teaching methods, 3(2), 129-142. silva, r. d. (2015). writing strategy instruction: its impact on writing in a second language for academic purposes. language teaching research, 19(3), 1-15. wulandari, m. (2016). moodle-based learning model for paragraph writing class. jurnal on language and language teaching, 18(2), 73-90. santi oktarina, emzir, & zainal rafli students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction 76 code switching analysis in classroom interactions in husnul khotimah islamic senior high school yuli yulyana code switching analysis in classroom interactions in husnul khotimah islamic senior high school code switchinganalysis inclassroom interactionsinhusnul khotimahislamicsenior highschool yuli yulyana husnul khotimah islamic senior high school, kuningan, indonesia e-mail: ummudinda85@gmail.com apa citation: yulyana, y. (2015). code switching analysis in classroom interactions in husnul khotimah islamic senior high school.english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 104-113 received: 01-09-2012 accepted: 03-10-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract : this study examines types, functions, teacher’s reasons and students’ responses of code switching in classroom interactions in school context at husnul khotimah islamic senior high school. this study focuses on analyzing english teacher’s utterances at eleventh grade and their students’ utterances by using poplack and gumperz theory. the method of this study is descriptive qualitative. the data of the study is in the form of written recording utterances during teaching and learning process in the classroom, interview and questionnaire. based on the analysis of the data, this study concludes that the teacher used code switching in order to give particular purpose in delivering the teachers’ feelings during teaching and learning process. the language change often makes the teacher and the students feel better and more meaningful in conveying and obtaining their feelings. concisely, code switching not only represents teachers’ competence but also shows particular purposes. keywords: code switching, classroom, interactions introduction code-switching, the alternate use of two different languages is situated in the field of bilingualism and is seen as a common feature of those who speak two or more languages. code-switching is usually approached from two different perspectives: linguistic and social, and it is thus defined differently. exploring the phenomenon of code-switching in bilingual and social settings, many researchers place their focus mainly on its types and its functions (e.g., gumperz, 1982; myers-scotton, 1993; poplack, 1980). their studies set a good background for later researchers in other settings, in particular education. in the classroom context, this phenomenon has attracted more and more educational researchers in their investigation into the different types of code-switching, its function, its effect on the speakers who employ it, and the reasons for code-switching. it occurs commonly in language classrooms around the world where teachers are teaching a foreign language (fl) or a second language (sl). here, this research investigates a sociolinguistic phenomenon called code switching in classroom interactions at ma husnul khotimah. this study attempts to identify the forms of code switching, the functions of codeswitching used by teacher’s and students’ classroom interactions, and to describe the teachers’ reasons for doing the code-switching in classroom interactions. in the conversational code switching, a speaker may switch codes within a single sentence and may even mailto:ummudinda85@gmail.com english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee do so many times. code switching emphasizes the creative performance that offers tentative structural constraints on code switching. it means that conversational code switching rather focuses on the creative process of different language in words, phrases, even sentences when the occurrence of code switching does not accompany a change in topic or participant. there have been many attempts to give a typological framework to the phenomenon of code-switching. one of the most frequently discussed is that given by poplack. poplack’s theory about code switching as citted by jingxia (2010: 10-11) identified three different types of switching occured in her data, namely tag, inter-sentential and intrasentential switching. tag switching is the insertion of a tag phrase from one language into an utterance from another language. it seems that the fixed phrases of greeting or parting are quite often involved in switches. since tags are subject to minimal syntactic restrictions, they may be inserted easily at a number of points in a monolingual utterance without violating syntactic rules. tag switching is merely tags such as you know, ya or yes and it usually consists of one or two words. intra-sentential switching takes place within the clause or sentence and is considered to be the most complex form of switching. it seems most frequently found in the utterances, though it involves the greatest syntactic risk since the switching between languages occurs within the clause or sentence boundries. intra-sentential switching may be avoided by all but the most fluent bilinguals. inter-sentential switching occurs at a clause or sentence boundary, where each clause or sentence is in one language or another. according to romaine (1996: 160), inter-sentential switching could be considered as requiring greater fluency in both languages than tag-switching since major portions of the utterance must conform to the rules of both languages. code-switching performs several functions; firstly, people may use codeswitching to hide fluency or memory problems in the second language. secondly, code-switching is used to mark switching from informal situations (using native languages) to formal situations (using second language). thirdly, code-switching is used to exert control, especially between parents and children. fourthly, code-switching is used to align speakers with others in specific situations. code-switching also functions to announce specific identities, create certain meanings, and facilitate particular interpersonal relationships. gumperz in gardner-chloros (2009: 67), gives possible functions of code switching, such as the reinforcement of an important message or the introduction of specific connotations linked to the other language. furthermore, albrecht (2004: 47) gives other functions of code switching in conversation, namely quotations, addressee specification, interjections or sentence fillers, reiterations, message qualification, and personalization or objectification. quotation means that switching is used to draw a stretch of direct speech in other language which is different from the main narrative. the function is as quotation mark when bilinguals report and present a direct speech by using its original language, for example, person a wants to report something that has been said by person b; person a is talking in english but inserts the reported words of person b in indonesian language. yuli yulyana code switching analysis in classroom interactions in husnul khotimah islamic senior high school addressee specification is to draw attention to the fact that the addressee is being invited to participate to the conversation, for example, a : sometimes you get excited and then you speak in hindi, then again you go on to english. b : no non-sense, it depends on your command of english. a : [shortly after turning to a third participant, who has just re-turned from answering the doorbell] kən hai bai (who is it)? code switching serves to mark interjection or sentence filler. here, a piece of sentence from one language is inserted or injected to the other, for example, the insertion of the english filler “you know” in an otherwise completely indonesian language utterance. reiteration, frequently a message in one code is repeated in the other code either literary or in somewhat modified form. it means to clarify what is said or to emphasize a message, for example, a spanish/english bilingual mother may call her children who are playing on the street first in spanish, but if they do not listen, then in english. message qualification, the speaker simply tries to demarcate a distinction between two parts of the discourse, a topic is introduce in one language and then commented or further qualified in the other, for example, the oldest one, la grande la de once anos (the big one who is eleven years old). the function of code switching can be used to mark personalization or objectification. by switching to the other codes, a speaker tries to express his knowledge or expertise about the discussed topic. for example, person a is talking about quitting smoking to person b; person a is code switching between spanish and english. in other words, person a talks about her problem (how to quit smoking) in english but acts out her problem (how the cigarettes run out in the night) in spanish. codes switching in regular social context and code switching in language learning classroom have separate and distinct functions though sometimes some functions are common in both the situations. classroom code switching is a common phenomenon in many multi lingual and multicultral classes. chowdhury (2012, p. 40) states that “…in monolingual country such as bangladesh, classroom code swicthing as a part of the global transformation in the methods and techniques of english language teaching”. we need to consider classroom code switching as a fact which cannot be ignored in any way especially in indonesia where english is taught as a foreign language. in english language teaching, students tend to switch code but is also common in teachers’ discourse. modupeola (2013, p. 93) says “teachers’ employ code switching strategy as a means of providing students with opportunities to communicate and enhance students understanding”. it further helps to facilitate the flow classroom instruction since the teachers do not have to spend much time trying to explain to the students or search for the simplest words to clarify any confusion that may arise. the teacher use code switching by starting the lesson in the english language and may move into the second language and back. code switching help the students to enjoy their learning due to their ability to comprehend the teachers input. the comprehensible input also allows them to fell less stressful and to become more comfortable to learn. according to simon in yletyinen (2004, p. 30), “a typical feature of bilingual or multilingual language english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee classroom interaction is that code switching has been thought of as a forbidden practise, or if not forbidden then to be avoided at all costs”. she continues to state that teachers who have employed code switching have felt guilty of doing this, so it has not been considered as good practise. simon in yletyinen (2004) proposes that foreign language classrooms are a specific code switching context since, firstly, foreign language classrooms can be considered as a multilingual community to the effect that the participants share knowledge about the pedagogical contract which governs code choice in different pedagogical situations. secondly, the learners have limited knowledge of the foreign language whereas the teacher knows it well; this may increase the occurrences of code switching. thirdly, teacher and the pupils have socially and institutionally predetermined roles: teacher-status is associated with the use of foreign language and learner-status is associated with the implicit obligation to use the foreign language. method this study aims to identify the forms and functions of code switching used by the teachers in classroom interactions, and to identify the teachers’ reasons for doing it. the researcher observes one of the english teacher and two classes of second grade students. the number of students are 49 students. the population of this study is the eleventh grade students of senior high school in kuningan. the population is taken from 2 classes, they are xi ipa 3 and xi ipa 5 classes. the writer uses descriptive qualitative method. techniques of collecting data are observation, questionnaire and interview. the observation was conducted on 1 teacher and 49 students from two classes chosen. the main purpose is to find out the types and the functions of code switching that are used by the teacher and students’conversations in classroom interactions. after recording the teacher and the students’ activities, the researcher makes video transcripts, then analyzes the types and the functions of code switching. the interview is recorded by using tape recorder. then the researcher listens and transcribes it. the researcher analyzes the result of transcribing process to find out the teachers’ reasons for doing the code switching in making conversations with their students and drawing the conclusion from the english teacher’s answers. the researcher distributes the questionnaire to the two selected classes of the eleventh grade. resultsanddiscussion the classification of code switching in the conversation between the teacher and the students in classroom interactions is based on poplack in jingxia (2010: 10-11) divides three types of conversational code switching: tag switching, intrasentential switching and intersentential switching. the results are discussed in the table below: table 1. types of teacher’s code switching occurrences no types of codeswitching frequency percentage (%) 1 tag switching 23 16% 2 intrasentential switching 94 67% 3 intersentential switching 24 17% total 141 100% yuli yulyana code switching analysis in classroom interactions in husnul khotimah islamic senior high school table 1 indicates on the types of code switching from teacher’s utterances in classroom interactions. the researcher concludes that there are three types of code switching employed by the teacher in classroom interactions. the type of intrasentential switching is the most dominant used by the teacher with 94 occurrences. on the other side, the type of intersentential switching is more dominant used by the teacher with 24 occurrences than tag switching with 23 occurrences. thus, the researcher concludes that the number of frequency from teacher’s code switching is 141 occurrences. the types of code switching from the students utterances in classroom interactions are discussed in the table below: table 2. types of students’ code switching occurrences no typesof codeswitching frequency percentage (%) 1 tag switching 1 1% 2 intrasentential switching 66 94% 3 intersentential switching 3 4% total 70 100% based on the table 2, the researcher concludes that there are three types of code switching employed by the students in classroom interactions. the type of intrasentential switching is the most dominant used by the students with 66 occurrences. on the other side, the type of intersentential switching is more dominant used by the students with 3 occurrences than tag switching with 1 occurrences. the number of frequency from students code switching is 70 occurrences. the result of code switching types occurrences between teacher and students in the classroom interactions, are discussed in the table below: table 3. types of code switching occurrences used in classroom interactions no typesof codeswitching frequency percentage (%) 1 tag switching 24 11% 2 intra-sentential switching 160 76% 3 inter-sentential switching 27 13% total 211 100% based on the table 3, the researcher concludes that there are three types of code switching employed by the teacher and students in classroom interactions. the type of intrasentential switching is the most dominant used by the teacher and their students with 160 occurrences. on the other side, the type of intersentential switching is more dominant used by the teacher and their students with 27 occurrences than tag switching with 24 occurrences. thus, the researcher concludes that the number of frequency is 211 occurrences. to find out the function of code switching employed in the conversation, the analysis is mostly based on gumperz’s theory that classifies the discourse function into six classifications, namely code switching as quotation, addressee specification, interjections, reiteration, message qualification and personalization. the results are discussed below: english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 4. functions of teacher’s code switching occurrences no functionsof codeswitching frequency percentage (%) 1 quotations 0 0% 2 addressee specification 64 45% 3 interjections or sentence fillers 23 16% 4 reiteration 33 23% 5 message qualification 21 15% 6 personalization or objectification 0 0% total 141 100% table 4 indicates on the functions of code switching from teacher utterances in classroom interactions. the researcher concludes that there are four functions of code switching employed by the teacher in classroom interactions. the function of addressee specification is the most dominant used by the teacher with 64 occurrences, reiteration with 33 occurrences, interjections is more dominant with 23 occurrences than message qualification with 21 occurrences. thus, the researcher concludes that the number of frequency is 141 occurrences. the functions of code switching from the students utterances in classroom interactions are discussed in the table below: table 5. functions of students’ code switching occurrences no functions ofcodeswitching frequency percentage (%) 1 quotations 0 0% 2 addressee specification 37 53% 3 interjections or sentence fillers 1 1% 4 reiteration 7 10% 5 message qualification 25 36% 6 personalization or objectification 0 0% total 70 100% from table 5, it can be concluded that there are four functions of code switching used by the students. addressee specification is the most dominant with 37 occurrences, message qualification is more dominant with 25 occurrences than reiteration with 7 occurrences, then interjections with 1 occurrence. thus, the researcher concludes that the number of frequency is 70 occurrences. in this research, it is revealed that the teacher used code switching for several reasons. the teacher told in the interview that her reasons doing code switching in classroom interactions are to help the students understanding the material well and some occasion the students can’t catch what the teacher said about the material or instructions for doing exercise. the students ability or their understanding in mastering english can become another reasons for doing code switching. the reasons employed by the teacher is related to the functions of code switching as reiteration in observation. there are 23% or 33 occurrences reiteration occurs in the teacher’s utterances. the teacher uses code switching to repeat words or sentences in one language to other language. it means yuli yulyana code switching analysis in classroom interactions in husnul khotimah islamic senior high school to give clear explanation about the instructions, or to give the clear information about the material. in this research, researcher finds out the students’ responses on the classroom interactions using code switching to measure the effectiveness of code switching used in the teacher’s and students’ conversations. frequency of code switching to indonesia it indicates the ideas of the students on the frequency of code switching to indonesia in english class. 34 students (69%) responded that the teacher occasionally used code switching when the teacher interacted with the students. table 6. ‘how often does your teacher use indonesian language in the classroom?’ responses frequency percentage always 0 0% sometimes 13 27% occassionally 34 69% never 2 4% consciousness using code switching it indicates that the most students (35%) are sometimes or occasionally conscious of code switching to indonesia. it implies that the students didn’t notice the switching from english to indonesia. thus, they are unclear about the situations where the teachers make the switches. table 7. ‘are you conscious of teacher’s code switching to indonesian language in the classroom?’ responses frequency percentage yes, always 11 22% yes, sometimes 17 35% yes, occassionally 17 35% no, never 4 8% attitudess towards code switching answering to question 3 ‘what’s your attitude towards the use of indonesian language in the classroom?’ there are 25 students (51%) who agrees with the use of indonesia. at the same time, 20% of the students have the neutral views. only a small percent of the students (18%) disagree with the use of indonesia. however, we can see that most of the students hold a positive attitude towards code-switching to indonesia. ideal frequency of code switching it shows that most of the students prefer their teacher to use indonesia occasionally. it indicates that the students really want to improve their english competence as much as possible. however, they think it is important for their teachers to use indonesia sometimes or occasionally to meet their needs as we know their textbooks are generally a little beyond their comprehension. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 8. ‘what’s the ideal frequency of teachers’ use of indonesian language in the classroom?’ responses frequency percentage always 1 2% sometimes 18 37% occassionally 29 59% never 1 2% code switching as effective strategy in efl class answering question 5 ‘do you think code switching to indonesian language is an effective strategy of learning and teaching english?’ there are 41 students (84%) who responded that code switching to indonesia as a good strategy to make an effective efl class. the students think code switching is an easier and helpful way to learn a foreign language like english. influence of code switching on indonesia it shows that the majority of the students (73%) believe that code switching to indonesia benefit in the efl class. on the other hand, a small number of students 2% consider code switching to indonesia to be harmful. it means that the students are able to communicate her knowledge of the subject matter to the teacher through the use of two languages clearly. table 9. ‘how does code switching to indonesian language influence the classroom?’ responses frequency percentage greatly beneficial 12 24% beneficial 36 73% no influence 0 0% harmful 1 2% situation of code switching we can see that as regards code switching to indonesia, the students have different choices. the results go in the following order: to translate unknown vocabulary items, to introduce background information, to check comprehension, to give grammar instruction and to manage class. the students’ view on the situation of code switching to indonesia may reflect the functional categories of code switching to indonesia. table 10. ‘in what situations does your teacher switch to indonesian language?’ responses frequency percentage to manage class 4 4% to translate unknown vocabulary items 46 47% to introduce background information 20 20% to check comprehension 14 14% to give grammar instruction 8 8% others 6 6% yuli yulyana code switching analysis in classroom interactions in husnul khotimah islamic senior high school conclusion the researcher concludes that english teacher and the students in eleventh grade of husnul khotimah islamic senior high school occasionally switch their language in the beginning, middle and end of sentences during teaching and learning process. the teacher and the students often switch their language from english to indonesian or vice versa. there are three types of code switching in classroom interactions: firstly, intrasentential switching. it occurs when the teacher or the students switch the words or phrase of indonesian language within their english conversation or vice versa. secondly, intersentential switching. it occurs at a clause or sentence boundary, where each clause or sentence is in one language or another. thirdly, tag switching. here, the teacher or the students insert indonesian words into english conversations. the tag being inserted are the words ‘ya’ and ‘iya’. there are four functions of code switching in classroom interactions. they are interjection, reiteration, message qualification and addressee specification. there is a phenomenon that code switching can also function as speaking habit, but it is more or less similar to the function of code switching as interjection or sentence filler. the teacher uses code switching to help the students understanding the material and the instructions well. on the other hand, when the students have less capability and understanding in mastering english, the teacher also uses code switching in classroom interactions. code switching may be used by the teacher to develop student’s skill to catch what the teacher said. the students respond positively on the use of code switching used by the teacher. they believe that code switching can help them understanding well about what their teacher said. code switching used by the teacher in classroom interactions is a good strategy to create an effective efl class. in this research, the researcher concludes that the teacher use code switching in order to give particular purpose in delivering the teachers’ feelings during teaching and learning process. the changing of the language often makes the teacher and the students feel better and more meaningful in conveying and obtaining their feelings. concisely, code switching not only represents teachers’ competence but also shows particular purposes. references astuti, m. (2007). an analysis of code switching performed by the staffs and the foreigner guests of “istana griya” homestay in surakarta sociolinguistic study. unpublished paper: sebelas maret university. auer, p. (1998). introduction bilingual conversation revisited, in auer. p (1998). code switching in conversation: language, interaction and identity (ed). london & new york: routledge. chaika, e. (1994). language: the social mirror. boston: heinle & heinle publishers. chloros, p. g. (2009). code-switching. melbourne: cambridge university press. chowdhury, n. (2012). classroom code switching of english language teachers at tertiary level: a bangladeshi perspective. stamford journal of english 7, 40-61. clyne, m. (1991). community languages: the australian experience. melbourne: cambridge university press. corbin, j. m. & strauss, a. l. (2008). basic of qualitative research: techniques and english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee procedures for developing grounded theory (eds). los angeles: sage publication. inc. creswell, j. w. (2012). educational research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research 4th edition. boston: university of nebraska–lincoln. dagarin, m. (2004). classroom interaction and comunication strategies in learning english as a foreign language. ljubljana: slovene association for the study of english. fraenkel, j. r. and norman e. w. (2009). how to design and evaluate research in education. new york: mcgraw-hill. gumperz (1982). discourse strategies. in esther albrecht, geb. liebner (2004): the development and use of codeswitching among simultaneous and successive english-german bilingual children. hanover. healey, j. f. (2010). the essentials of statistics: a tool for social research, second edition. wadsworth: cengage learning. iqbal, l. (2011). linguistic features of code-switching: a study of urdu/english bilingual teachers’ classroom interactions. international journal of humanities and social science, 1(14), 188-194. jingxia, l. (2010). teachers’ codeswitching to the l1 in efl classroom. the open applied linguistics journal, 3, 10-23. .khadidja, k. (2010). the effect of classroom interaction on developing the learner’s speaking skill. department of foreign languages. mentouri university-constantine. lin, a. m. y. (1990). teaching in two tongues: language alternation in foreign language classrooms. research report. 3 mckay, s. l. and nancy h. h.. (1996). sociolinguistics and language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. modupeola, o. r. (2013). code-switching as a teaching strategy: implication for english language teaching and learning in a multilingual society. iosr journal of humanities and social science, 14(3), 92-94. myers & scotton. (2006). multiple voices: an introduction. melden: blackwell publishing. nguyen, t. h. (2013). englishvietnamese bilingual codeswitching in conversations; how and why. hawaii pacific university tesol working paper series 10. romaine, s. (1994). language in society. an introduction to sociolinguistics. oxford: oxford university press. sugiyono. (2013). metode penelitian pendidikan: penelitian kuantitatif, kualitatif, dan r & d. bandung: alfabeta. trudgill, p. (1992). introducing language and society. london: penguin book ltd. wardhaugh, r. (1992). an introduction to sociolinguistics, second edition. oxford: blackwell publishers inc. weng, p. (2012). code-switching as a strategy use in an efl classroom in taiwan. us-china foreign language. 10(10), 1669. yletyinen, h. (2004). the functions of codeswitching in efl classroom discourse. jyvaskyla: university of jyvaskyla. directive speech acts realization of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee directive speech acts realization of indonesian efl teacher yulianti wulansari department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: yulianti.wulansari30@gmail.com cucu suhartini madrasah tsanawiyah negeri sindangsari, kuningan, indonesia email: syifaunnida.annaqita@yahoo.co.id apa citation: wulansari, y. & suhartini, c. (2015). directive speech acts realization of indonesian efl teacher. english review: journal of english education, 3(2),223-229 received: 10-04-2015 accepted: 27-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this research examines the types and functions of directive speech act performed by an indonesian efl teacher in one senior high school in kuningan, indonesia. this study uses qualitative method. the data of this research were taken from the video transcription which contains directives spoken by the efl teacher and analyzed based on kreidler’s (1998) theory. the findings show that there are three types of directives used by the teacher. they are commands, requests, and suggestions. the most frequent type of directives performed is commands with 233 occurrences (94.8%). it was also found that there are five functions seized by the directives, they are elicitation, instruction, advice, threat, and attention-getter. the most frequent function of directives used is elicitation with 108 occurrences (44%). from the findings, it is concluded that the using of commands shows teacher’s dominance. yet, this type of directives is not easily understood by the students. therefore, it is suggested that the teacher should use other types of directives more, such as requests and suggestions, to encourage students’ participation. keywords: pragmatics, speech act, directive speech act. introduction communication is an essential part of humans’ life. by communication, people can send their messages, such as ideas, feelings, or thoughts to others. in delivering their messages, people can also request others to do things which they want through particular utterances. by doing so, the utterances that the speaker produces are not for describing the request, but to carry out the act of ‘requesting’. furthermore, austin (1962: 6) states “to utter the sentence in appropriate circumstances is to do it, not to describe the act nor state that the speaker is doing it”. it means that people can perform some kind of actions, such as ordering, promising, refusing, thanking, etc, by uttering certain sentences in appropriate circumstances. austin (1962: 6) proposes these kinds of utterances as “performative”. this idea is supported by searle (1969: 22) who mentions that ”talking is performing acts according to rules”. those uses of language are commonly classified as “speech acts”. concerning speech acts in particular context, such as classroom, searle (1969, in merdana, seken, & putra, 2013) states that directives is a speech act that is frequently used in a classroom interaction. the teachers use it to make the students do something. the types of cucu suhartini & yulianti wulansari directive speech acts realization of indonesian efl teacher speech act used are command, request and suggestion (kreidler, 1998: p. 190191). the use of the speech acts is related with a teacher’s role, because when the teacher commands the student, he/she is carrying out his/her role as a leader in the class. besides being a leader, a teacher has other roles to fulfill in their class, such as being “authority figure, knower, director, manager, counselor, guide, and even such roles as friend, confidante, and parent” (brown, 2001: 200). to perform those roles, the teacher surely will use the speech act that functions to get the hearer to do (or not to do) something, namely directives. according to austin (1962), directives are used by the speaker to get the hearer(s) to do or not to do something and it can be in the form of ordering, warning, urging, directing, and advising. in this context, the speaker is the teacher, and the hearer is the students. kreidler (1998: p. 190-191) classifies directives into three kinds, namely commands, requests, and suggestions. each type of directive has different purpose and function. furthermore, directives performed by a teacher have some functions, such as elicitation, instruction, attention-getter, suggestion, tactfulness, advice, conditional and threat (amalsaleh et al., 2004). amalsaleh et al. (2004) states that the same form of directives may imply different functions or conversely, the same function may be expressed via a variety of forms. for example, imperative form has functions as attention-getter and instruction. meanwhile, the directive’s function as instruction can be done not only by imperative, but also by interrogative, declarative, modals, and passive. based on the explanations, the researcher is interested to find out what kinds of directive speech act commonly performed by an efl teacher in one senior high school in kuningan and what functions are held by those directives. the main issues addressed in this study are the kinds and functions of directive speech acts performed by an efl teacher in one senior high school in kuningan. the enquiry towards these issues is formulated in the following research questions: 1. what types of directives are commonly performed by an efl teacher in one senior high school in kuningan? 2. what are the functions of the directives performed by the efl teacher? method the study is conducted in kuningan, west java, in august 2014. in this study, an efl teacher of one high school there is involved. she is chosen because she already has more than five years experience of teaching english in the senior high school. she also has multi-lingual competence in sundanese, indonesian, and english so that she can communicate with her students not only in the national and target-language, but also in their mother’s tongue. it emerges more interaction between the teacher and the students, so hopefully the teacher can provide the data for this study. the data of this research consists of the efl teacher’s directive utterances that are collected by using video recording and observation. the recording is done to help the researcher to find out the directive speech act thoroughly, while the observation is done to see the whole situation of research site and to take notes on important things occurred there. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee according to creswell (2009: 181), “qualitative observations are those in which the researcher takes field notes on the behavior and activities of individuals at the research site”. in the observation, the researcher is the complete observer. it means that she presence at the scene of action but does not interact or participate in the activity of the class. this is done so that the teacher as the main participant can focus on her teaching activity. the researcher also uses wray et al. (1998) method of transcribing speech orthographically. the transcribing process is done to gain the written document of what the participants in the research site said. the phonetic details of the speaker’s accent will be omitted, because it is not relevant with the study. therefore, the transcription only consists of the utterances uttered by the participants. after collecting the data through observation and data recording, the data will be transcribed and read closely to find the utterances included to directive speech act which are used by the efl teacher. the procedure of the study are conducted as follows: (1) identifying and classifying the utterances which contain directives, such as commands, requests, and suggestions (kreidler: 1998); (2) analyzing the functions of the directives based on the researcher’s own interpretation and ground theory found by amalsaleh et al. (2004); and (3) quantifying the occurrences of the types and functions of directives to see the trend in their use. in the identifying stage, the data are identified and classified based on the kinds of directives found by kreidler (1998), while to identify the functions of the directives, it will be based on the researcher’s interpretation and eight functions of directives proposed by amalsaleh et al. (2004), namely elicitation, instruction, attention-getter, suggestion, tactfulness, advice, conditional, and threat. in the stage of analyzing the data, the researcher counts the frequency and percentage of each kind of directives performed by the efl teacher, so it will be known what type of directives mostly used by the participant. then, the researcher also will count the frequency and percentage of each function of the directives. finally, the distribution of directive forms and functions will be tabulated and discussed thoroughly. results and discussion according to kreidler (1998), there are three types of directives, namely commands, requests, and suggestion. commands are the utterances that express the speaker’s wish that the hearer should act as the speaker wants him to act. requests are the utterances that express the speaker’s want that the addressee doing or not doing something. furthermore, suggestions are the utterances used by the speaker to give his opinion to the addressee as to what the addressee should or should not do. the general finding of types of directives is summarized in table 1. table 1. the types of directives performed by the efl teacher types frequency percentage (%) command 233 94.8 suggestion 10 4 request 3 1.2 total 246 100 cucu suhartini & yulianti wulansari directive speech acts realization of indonesian efl teacher the data that are collected in this study include 246 utterances. commands are the most frequent type which occur 233 times (94.8%), followed by suggestion with 10 occurrences (4%) and request with 3 occurrences (1.2%). the definition of each type and some examples are given below for further clarification: 1. command in issuing a command, “speaker, in authority, expresses a wish that addressee should <not> act as speaker wants addressee <not> to act” (kreidler, 1998: 190). in making command, the speaker has some degree of power over the actions of the addressee. it is the most compulsive kind of the directives. a. okay . . . i will ask you ((pause)) i will push you to speak english. b. write down what i say. 2. request “a request is an expression of what the speaker wants the addressee to do or refrain from doing” (kreidler, 1998: 190). the speaker who utters a request does not have a control or authority towards the addressee. a. other question maybe? b. other question please? 3. suggestion “suggestions are the utterances we make to other persons to give our opinion as to what they should or should not do” (kreidler, 1998: 191). in making suggestions, the suggestee or the person whom we give suggestion has the choice of performances whether to do or not to do the act. a. nah (.) yang di sini pun (.) ketika punya hobi dikit(.) terus digeluti di situ. nah(.) the people here as well, when you have a hobby, keep doing it. b. kita tetap harus mencoba menggeluti sesuatu ya. we still must try to keep doing something consistently okay. the main function of directives is to get the hearer to do something. however, the directives which are performed by the efl teacher have more specific functions. the functions mentioned here are based on the researcher’s own interpretation and supported by amalsaleh et al. (2004) study. in amalsaleh et al. (2004), directives have 8 functions, namely elicitation, instruction, attention-getter, suggestion, tactfulness, advice, condition, and threat. however, there are only 5 functions found in this study. they are elicitation, instruction, advice, threat, and attention-getter. the general finding of the functions of the directives is summarized in table 2. table 2. the function of directives performed by the efl teacher function frequency percentage (%) elicitation 108 44 instruction 106 43 advice 22 9 threat 8 3.2 attention-getter 2 0.8 total 246 100 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the data collected in this study include 246 utterances. elicitation is the most frequent function which occur with 108 occurrences (44%), followed by instruction with 106 occurrences (43%), advice with 22 occurrences (9%), threat with 8 occurrences (3.2%), and lastly, attention-getter with 2 occurrences (0.8%). the definition of each function and some examples of directive functions are given in the following for further clarification: 1. elicitation elicitation is the function of directives which makes the hearer provides the required information for the speaker (amalsaleh, 2004: 34). the main objective of this function is to get the required information and sometimes to test the students’ knowledge about the subject a. yes? that’s enough? b. why we have to learn english? 2. instruction instruction is the functions of directives which “refer to utterances which are issued to get the addressee to perform an action” (amalsaleh et al., 2004: 34). the main difference between instruction and elicitation is the thing that the speaker wants from the hearer. in elicitation, the speaker requires information, while in instruction, the speaker wants action. a. be brave to ask question if you want to know more about me. b. find out from internet(.) from book(.) from your brother from your sister fromanywhere(.) from anyone. 3. advice advice is “an opinion or a suggestion about what somebody should do in a particular situation” (hornby, 2003: 20). a. nah (.) yangdi sini pun (.) ketika punya hobi dikit(.) terus digeluti di situ. nah(.) the people here as well, when you have a hobby, keep doing it. b. english is not difficult but english is very easy(.) asalkan tadi you have to study hard.english is not difficult but english is very easy, as long as you study hard. 4. threat threat is “a statement in which you tell somebody that you will punish or harm them, especially if they do not do what you want” (hornby, 2003: 1408). a. jadi kalau kamunya tidak siap untuk active (.) untuk belajar cepet (.) . . . pasti minimal poinnya akan dapetnya c terus. so if you are not ready to be active, to learn quickly . . . you will certainly keep getting c. b. saya paling tidak suka (.) i don’t like someone who like cheating. i don’t like the most, i don’t like someone who like cheating. 5. attention-getter attention-getter refers to utterances which are used “to attract students’ attention” (amalsaleh et al., 2004: 34). a. and then ((pause)) hello(.) i’m here! ((flicks her fingers to warn the students who are chatting in the back)) b. okay next (.) number ten! this study finds that the functions of directives used by the efl teacher are elicitation, instruction, advice, threat, and attention-getter. in addition, it is noted that one function of directives can cucu suhartini & yulianti wulansari directive speech acts realization of indonesian efl teacher be realized through various types. for example, elicitation can be realized through commands and request. the distribution of directives’ types and functions is summarized in table 3. table 3. distribution of directives’ types and functions elicitation instruction advice threat attentiongetter command 107 104 12 8 2 suggestion 10 request 1 2 total 108 106 22 8 2 as shown in table 3, elicitation and instruction are realized by command and request, whereas advice is realized by command and suggestion. meanwhile, the two last functions, threat and attention-getter, are only realized through command. the findings of the functions of directives and its distribution may be different for each research, depending on the data that are collected. conclusion it is found that there are three types of directives performed by the efl teacher. three types of directives performed by the efl teacher are commands, requests, and suggestions. the most frequent type is commands with 233 occurrences (94.8%), followed by suggestion with 10 occurrences (4%), and lastly requests with 3 occurrences (1.2%). from the first findings, it is concluded that the teacher is very dominant in teaching the students. it is noticed from the way the teacher mostly uses command in directing the students. yet, the teacher uses command for the benefit of the students themselves, which is so that the students can do their task as a learner well. it is proven from the findings that the commands used by the teacher have the purpose to give instruction for the students’ learning activity. the teacher also does not hesitate to give the students suggestions which often function as advice. it can be understood because the teacher is usually perceived as someone who is wiser and have more knowledge than the students. the lack of using requests in the class is probably caused by the context of culture in indonesia, in which a teacher is seen as the leader in the class, so that almost every utterance that is said by the teacher is considered a command. meanwhile, for the second findings, this study finds that there are five functions of the directives that are performed by the efl teacher. the most frequent function is elicitation with 108 occurrences (44%), followed by instruction with 106 occurrences (43%), advice with 22 occurrences (9%), threat with 8 occurrences (3.2%), and lastly attention-getter with 2 occurrences (0.8%). from the second findings, it can be concluded that the teacher tries to make the students speak out by producing utterances which act as elicitation. the teacher also uses instruction to make the students perform an action, such as to speak in english, to change their mindset about english, and sometimes to forbid them from doing something bad, like cheating. advice is produced mainly to make the students not only focus on their academic point, but also on their attitude and behavior, while threat is english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee used as a reinforcement to motivate the students to be more active and to behave. lastly, attention-getter is only used when the students start getting loud while the teacher is explaining something. references amalsaleh, e., yamini, h. & yarmohammadi, y. (2004). directives used in university classrooms. journal of literature and language 5 (1) p. 1-27. retrieved january 28, 2014 from: www.ensani.ir/storage/files/20120506 112631-5138-96.pdf austin, j. (1962). how to do things with words. cambridge: cambridge university press. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd ed.).white plains, ny: longman. creswell, j.w. (2009). research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). thousand oaks, california: sage publications, inc. hornby, a. s. (2003). oxford advanced learner’s dictionary of current english. oxford: oxford university press. kreidler, c. w. (1998). introducing english semantics. london: routledge. merdana, seken, k., putra, n.a.j. (2013). an analysis of speech acts produced by elementary school teachers and students to facilitate teaching and learning at sdn 10 pringgasela east lombok. e-journal program pascasarjana universitas pendidikan ganesha program studi pendidikan bahasa inggris 1. retrieved july 5, 2014 from: pasca.undiksha.ac.id/ejournal/index.php/jpbi/article/downl oad/.../508 searle, j. (1969). speech act: an essay in the philosophy of language. cambridge: cambridge university press. wray, a., trott, k., bloomer, a. (1998). projects in linguistics. new york: oxford university press. introduction method resultsanddiscussion conclusion references english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 157 exploring cognitive process of research topic selection in academic writing fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan & ph.d candidate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia email: fahruszaman_pb15s3@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id emzir postgraduate program, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id ninuk lustyantie applied linguistics, postgraduate program, university state of jakarta, indonesia e-mail: ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id apa citation: fadhly, f. z., emzir, e., & lustyantie, n. (2018). exploring cognitive process of research topic selection in academic writing. english review: journal of english education 7(1), 157-166. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1535. received: 29-08-2018 accepted: 30-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: the purpose of this research is to explore and reconstruct the cognitive processes experienced by indonesian scientific writers in selecting research topic in academic writing. by using grounded theory approach, this research explored the indonesian scientific writers’ cognitive processes and revealed eleven ways or approaches in finding and selecting research topics, i.e: institutional research road map, literature review, search before research, research trends in the world, national topics of research, interpretation of regulations, court decisions, pros and cons of actual cases or topics, discussion and research sharing method, exposure of controlled data, and looking for possible space for existing papers. each expertise background dicipline has its own ways and approaches in research topic selection, but there is ‘red thread’: the selection and determination of research topics rests on literature review. this research endorses practical approaches to find out research topics containing novelties and state of the art of the research in each discipline. keywords: cognitive process; academic writing; research topic selection; indonesian scientific writers; search before research. introduction facts show that indonesia already has several reliable scientific writers, as shown through data from scimago. scimago (2018) shows that indonesia only has 75,220 articles with h-index 196. this acquisition places indonesia ranked 11th, below pakistan which has 127,817 articles with hindex 217 ranked 10th. thailand has 156,829 articles, with h-index 289, making it ranked 9th. indonesia is even far away from malaysia which has 24,8457 articles, with the h-index 249, ranked 8th. hong kong was ranked 7th with 263,602 articles, h-index 479. 8th position belonged to singapore with 265,452 articles, h-index 492. ranks in the top five in a row were occupied by china (5,133,924 articles, hindex 712) in the first place, japan (2,539,441 articles, h-index 920) came second, india (1,472,192 articles, h-index 521) in third place, south korea (1,004,042 articles, h-index 576) fourth, and taiwan (614,487 articles, h-index 437) in fifth place. at this level, there is a gap to be able to contribute to language education through a review of proven processes and results of writing. the gap is an opportunity that this research will take advantages of this present fahrus zaman fadhly, emzir & ninuk lustyantie exploring cognitive process of research topic selection in academic writing 158 research. it is a manifestation of efforts to construct the cognitive process of academic writing----selection of research topics in particular. it was also formulated as an effort to contribute to the development of science especially in language education study through the context of proven academic writing. various studies related to academic writing competence in foreign languages, especially english, generally take the context of the formal education environment as the realization of language teaching. these studies generally revolve around the achievement of teaching writing, related evaluations, to the utilization of certain models in teaching writing. at this point, the realm of research actually provides a broad space to be directed at other contexts that can also contribute to language education. various studies related to academic writing competence in l2 generally take the context of the formal education environment as the realization of language teaching. this can be seen in several recent studies from silva & matsuda, hinkel, kahraman (2012), paris said, hamsa & mahmudah (2015) and rahimi, kushki & nassaji (2015). these studies generally revolve around the achievement of teaching writing, related to evaluations and the utilization of certain models in teaching writing. at this point, the realm of research actually provides a broad space to be directed at other contexts that can also contribute to language education. previously, several studies had tried to compare the results of academic and nonacademic writing, from several circles as a realization of cognitive processes. for example, white and cheung (2015) once made comparative studies regarding the results achieved by professional writers and amateurs in composing compositions. research related to the ability to write scientific papers needs to pay attention on aspects of results and processes in the same proportion. in this case, studies related to the importance of writing skills need to look at aspects related to direct results, as well as the process. reviewed from perspective of the creative process, the works of short stories, novels and poetry, there are five creative processes of fiction writing namely: incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration (nuraeni & fadhly 2016). the relevant study also explored the mental processes carried out starting from brainstorming, planning, drafting, revision, editing, to proofreading. this study reveals the ways in which authors develop their writing in terms of producing long compositions without losing essence, how writers overcome attachments in their writing process, author-specific writing features and what they expect from readers after reading their writing (fadhly, hasanah & agustiana, 2017). it also reveals that the differences experienced by participants at each writing stage are strongly influenced by their areas of interest, writing behavior and writing style. fadhly and ratnaningsih (2018) also confirmed the cognitive processes involved in popular article writing. several different ways in which the author gets inspiration to write, what values underlie the author to give their arguments on a particular topic, how the author decides the point of view of their argument, starts writing, develops the argument, and closes the writing. this present research is expected to bring novelty in identifying the cognitive processes experienced by reputable international journal writers who can take important lessons for other indonesian scientists. cognitive models existed are still very limited to explain comprehensively how the true cognitive processes of research topics selection experienced by the author who have been tested. this study is expected to present novelty in the subject area. this research has the urgency to describe the cognitive processes experienced by indonesian scientific writers whose writings are published in reputable international journals. by identifying cognitive processes that take place in the writing process, so that it can be a guide for other writers in writing scientific articles in reputable international english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 159 journals. another is to boost the quantity and quality of scientific publications of indonesian researchers/scientists in reputable international journals as part of efforts to increase national competitiveness from the scientific publications sector. method in the flowchart, this research shows the specific purpose of this research, which is breaking down cognitive processes in writing articles in reputable international journals since the topic selection, problem formulation, expressing tentative goals (thesis), selecting, collecting and determining bibliography, making notes and making the outline of the writing, pouring ideas into written language so that it became a coherent, systematic and reasoned initial draft composition, review, to edit academic writing and make it a final draft. this research was conducted in bandung based on the place of residence and/or campus teaching resource. data collection starts from july december 2017. this research uses grounded theory research design. referring to the purpose of this study, which is to reconstruct the cognitive process in academic writing experienced by 3 indonesian scientific writers, the grounded theory research design is deemed appropriate to be applied in this study. as stated by creswell (2012) that grounded theory research design is used when researchers need a theory or explanation of a process. the activity of writing as a cognitive process is also explained by using a grounded theory approach. creswell (2012, p. 440) details eight procedures in grounded theory research, i.e.: “determine whether grounded theory research design is in accordance with research problems; identify the cognitive processes that want to be studied; obtain permission and access to conduct research; conduct theoretical sampling; data coding; using selective coding and developing theory; validating theory; develop a grounded theory research report”. the techniques for collecting cognitive process data in this academic paper are carried out through (1) observation, (2) interviews, (3) documents. observation is done by directly observing the writing process of the scientific writings of the informants/speakers so that the whole construction of the cognitive process phenomena that occur/is done by them is obtained. interviews were conducted in-depth (indepth interviews) with (3) selected informants from a number of state universities in indonesia from universitas pendidikan indonesian (upi) and universitas padjadjaran (unpad). the three indonesian scientists included: didin saripudin, atip latiful hayat (alh) and dr. fitri khaerunnisa (fk). the selection of the three indonesian scientists was taken based on considerations, among others: (1) the performance of research and scientific publications that stood out especially their research works published in reputable international journals; (2) the ease of accessing them for the purposes of observation and in-depth interviews and obtaining the necessary written documents; and (3) the diversity of informants/resource persons with diverse scientific clusters is intentionally conducted to see whether there are variations in cognitive processes as reflected in the interview process and their academic writings. interviews are conducted informally so that the informant feels comfortable and goes on intimately. high technical language will be avoided and researchers should optimally be able to provide a sense of comfort so that informants feel free in responding to each researcher's questions in their own way (sunstein & chiseri-strater, 2012; marshall & rossman, 1999, holstein & gubrium, 1995). results and discussion of the three informants interviewed, i.e.: ds with a background in sociology of education, indigenous education & multicultural education, alh with a fahrus zaman fadhly, emzir & ninuk lustyantie exploring cognitive process of research topic selection in academic writing 160 background in international law and telecommunications law, and fk with a background in nanomaterial carbon, adsorption, nanocomposite polymer. as their different experiences in choosing and determining research topics. research topic selection based on research road map in choosing and determining research topics, ds followed a road map that had been designed with those who have the same expertise. in accordance with his background, ds researches teaching aspects such as approaches and methods, learning resources including textbooks, learning media, learning evaluation, etc. subsequent research topics follow the path of the research road map designed together with his colleagues in the same department and with the same research expertise. ds says that his research had followed the stages of the road map designed. a research topic that is still in a cluster is carried out in a systematic and continuous way. it includes in basic research type. ds elaboratively describes that basic research is usually oriented on producing new scientific findings. that is to produce new concepts, theories, or models. if the basic research topics are running according to the initial planning, then it continues to applied research. likewise, if the applied research topics have run well, it will continue to development research. development research usually produces a product that is known in upi as a teaching industry. so, development research produces products in learning that can be massively produced and sold it to the market. like me, research on learning resources has been done, an approach is taken to research textbooks and learning media." (interview with ds, april 5, 2018) the following is an illustration of the research road map conducted by ds so that the research direction runs systematically and continuously. the research road map designed by ds with his colleagues can be described in the diagram below. figure 1. the research road map designed by ds with his colleagues in the road map, ds with his team designed a research in the field of evaluation. the time range is from 10 to 20 years. every year, a detailed research topic plan is created. this detailed research topic plan then produces new topics each year so that the research road map designed encourages members of the research team to be able to produce areas of expertise. from the research road map, a number of scientific publications can also be created and can be divided into scientific publications in reputable international journals. in detail, ds states: basic research applied research development research field of expertise research road map 5-10 years 10-20 years 20-30 years producing new scientific findings (new concepts, theories, models) producing learning models, learning media, etc. developing concepts, theories, models and learning media, etc. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 161 for example, in about a few years, 10 or 20 years, what research in the 1st to 20th year. later, it will become an expert in educational field. it is similar to write in a journal which is the results of those researches. thus, my writings published in journals are the results of the research that i have done, such as the wayang golek as a learning media and i have also written a textbook entitled "history of indonesia based on multiculturalism". a research can be extracted into several journal articles, not always one research for one article; it can be more than two or three journal articles. yet, of course, the journal title is not the same as the research title, the journal title must be more attracted, not too long, and not too locality especially if it is an international journal. there is no need to state which junior high schools or senior high schools.” (interview, 17 august 2018) research topic selection based on previous studies by conducting literature review the role of scientific articles published in reputable international journals/nationally accredited journals is recognized by ds to be very influential in selecting research topic. based on cognitive experience experienced by ds, it is very important for researchers to read previous studies in order to select research topic. ds sees the importance of reading previous studies by saying: it has a great effect. sometimes, i look for ideas after reading previous studies, especially in international journals. for example, i want to see historical learning media, so i read research on historical learning media. there are journals that specifically discuss learning media, such as tujet (turkish online journal educational technology).” (interview with ds, april 5, 2018) research topic selection based on "search before research" activity based on cognitive experience of fk as an expert in the field of chemical engineering and nano technology, the research topic was obtained from the "search before research" activity which is a process of reading scientific works in reputable international journals. through this "search before research" activity, fk gets inspiration to choose and determine research topic. similarly, from "search before research" activity, the research gap will be found so that the research topic will always contain novelty. fk says that the “search before research” activity is very useful for a scientific writer. fk describes several important reasons why it is necessary to conduct searching activities before conducting research. first, related to the target of the manuscript publication to a particular journal. the data collected by researchers must be potential to be published in certain journals. fk notes that it is fatal for a researcher to collect data that is not potential to be published. the data collected must be in line with existing research trends. these research trends can be seen from searching activities. in more detail, fk explains the importance of this “search before research” as follows: search before research” activity is actually important for me. why do we have to search before conducting research? first, related to the final target, how our data is still potential to be published and how our data is still in line with the trend that people are working on. the final target can be international or national journals. second, this is the most feared when we write, there is replication, duplication, and even plagiarism. if i select a research topic, it will be based on my expertise. for example, since i am concerned in the field of environmental chemistry and advanced material, so that the topics i choose are around it. i might not research, for example, about superplasmon because it is out of my expertise. (interview with fk, may 15, 2018) the flow of this finding can be described as follows: fahrus zaman fadhly, emzir & ninuk lustyantie exploring cognitive process of research topic selection in academic writing 162 figure 2. research topic selection based on "search before research" activity research topic selection based on observations of "research trends" in the world according to fk's cognitive experience, research topics can be explored from research trends that are taking place throughout the world. global issues that become world’s trending topics inspired him to design research with actual global topics or issues. for example, local issues related to global warming, food security, etc. nevertheless, according to fk, from the existing global issues, we must look for more specific issues that people have not researched yet, because even though the research topic has been raised as a world trend, we must still take into account the more specific issues. to convince us how important it is to pay attention to these research trends, fk explains that by reading the developing trends in the world, a writer/researcher is able to select a research topic. reputable international journal publishers will consider 'business aspect', namely looking at research trends that are happening. if author does not pay attention to the aspect of research trends, it will be difficult for a manuscript to be published. regarding this research trend, fk describes as follows: because business aspect is considered in the world, the publisher company will also consider it. if they want to sell, the topics loaded must be in the trend. for example, people are concerned about energy, so we have to find out the topics about energy. or about the global warming issue, then anything related to the solution of how to prevent global warming will be more attracted. this aspect then becomes the reason why an article can be quickly published, why it is this long, why it is being rejected, and why it is accepted. (interview with fk, may 15, 2018) then, how do we find the research gap so that it has an element of novelty? fk explains that a researcher needs to have sensitivity and foresight on any topics that might be raised. the important thing is not to duplicate or replicate the previous works. in the context of searching this gap, the key word is "looking for the possibilities that exist in that trend." following is fk’s explanation related to the gap of a trend: first, looking for possibilities that exist in that trend; which part that has not been researched by others. for example, a person in america has been doing it and another person is working on it. if we just follow what they are doing, it is duplication so that it will be difficult to publish. it can be done if we just to get the knowledge of how a research works, but if we want to run into publications, it cannot be done. thus, novelty is actually easy, just by searching. (interview with fk, may 15, 2018) research topic selection based on national research topics of indonesian ministry of research, technology and higher education as an authoritative institution as well as sponsors of various types of research, the indonesian ministry of research, technology, and higher education (kemenristekdikti) carries out certain themes every year. every year, there are no less than 10 (ten) research topics offered by kemenristekdikti. researchers utilize english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 163 research topics offered by kemenristekdikti. following is fk's explanation regarding the importance of designing a research topic by referring to the research topics offered by the indonesian ministry of research, technology and higher education. in national scale, kemenristekdikti always issues ten national themes. as long as our proposal concerns among the ten themes, our proposal will be accepted. there are possibilities to be accepted, depending on how we propose our ideas in the proposal. so, the publication is the same, every journal has its scope, this journal coverage is about this, another journal about this, so when i want to publish an article, i always see the target journal and consider its scope. if the scope is suitable, then the data i have can be submitted to the journal.” (interview with fk, may 15, 2018) research topic selection based on interpretation of regulations as a researcher in the field of law, alh explained his cognitive experiences that research topic were obtained through interpretation of a regulation. the novelty of a research topic was derived from the process of understanding and interpreting the existing regulations. in detail, alh explains the importance of interpretation as the main source of research topic that has a high novelty element as follows: for the legal articles writing, it can be from an interpretation of one provision, for example in law, international conversions or international agreements. how we understand and interpret it can become a research question. since every provision or rule whether domestic or international is made for the future, there will be situations and practices that are different from when the rules were made. that is where the problem can be revealed. (interview with alh, june 7, 2018) research topic selection inspired by court decisions based on alh’s experience, a research topic also usually comes from an analysis of court decisions that are often referred to as case studies. it is especially related to the research question of how a court applies the law in a case. he also analyzes to criticize whether a court decision is true or not. the research question often arises from the court decisions. “we criticize whether the judgment is true or not" (interview with alh, 7 june 2018). research topic selection inspired by the presence of actual cases or topics that are becoming public discourse research topic selection is inspired by the emergence of pros and cons of a case or a regulation. alh explains his cognitive experience as follows: if outside the field of law, they refer to it as an article review. we analyze the experts’ writings, then we have different opinions and understandings. it can also be a debate between pros and cons, for example writing one stance and then it is debated. that is normal in legal articles. sometimes, it is not enough to just reply, sometimes reply again and again. that is like such polemics. it is one of the sources of ideas to write. (interview with alh, june 7, 2018). research topic selection through research discussion and sharing intensive discussions with experts, lecturers and teachers inspired writers to select a research topic. ds acknowledges that through discussions with teachers as education practitioners inspired him to find research topics that have a high element of novelty. ds said: the inspiration can also come from discussions. like my experience that after having discussions with teachers in mgmp, it turns out that the history teachers need historical learning media while the available ones were science learning media. then, we talk with the company that produces the media. incidentally, they said that the historical learning media do not yet exist, so we make proposals on how to make historical learning media in the form of replicas of historical objects and electronic maps. it was responded well by the company because it might be profitable in terms of economy. there is a good market nation. (interview with ds, april 5, 2018) in addition to colleagues, indonesian scientific writers are also inspired to get new topics through discussion with teachers. from ds’s experience, when discussing directly with history teachers, they need learning media specifically for historical subjects that are not yet available. from this need, then there is an opportunity to become an industry. ds says that the need for historical learning media inspired him to fahrus zaman fadhly, emzir & ninuk lustyantie exploring cognitive process of research topic selection in academic writing 164 design a research project by collaborating with industry. regarding this cognitive experience, ds explains that: the inspiration can also come from the journey. like my experience that after having discussions with teachers in mgmp, it turns out that the history teachers need historical learning media while the available ones were science learning media. then, we talk with the company that produces the media. incidentally, they said that the historical learning media do not yet exist, so we make proposals on how to make historical learning media in the form of replicas of historical objects and electronic maps. it was responded well by the company because it might be profitable in terms of economy. there is a good market nation (interview with ds, april 5, 2018). determination of research topics resulting from exposure to controlled data so that novelty is found based on fk's cognitive experience, the determination of research topics can also be raised from the exposure of new data found. however, exposed data is verified (crosscheck) with scientific articles that have been published by leading journals throughout the world. the novelty element can also be identified from the activity of exposing the data. when exposing data generated from certain methods or equipment is found element of novelty, the research topic can be identified. regarding data exposures, the novelty and topic of this research, in more detail the fk describes it as follows: when they expose the data to show that the research activities carried out are in mind so with planning. if we are tested once a week, for example, "you are testing this again, how can you get the data?" it is proven that this crystallization of the structure is not like this, if it does not mean changing the method. for example "you don't research here anymore, because people have already researched", so we lose opportunity, we have changed here. so the process is also escorted in such a way as to ensure the data is published or not. the japanese are not very good at english, but why they can penetrate into nature, can penetrate into science not because of their english skills. but why can it be? because they have the ability in the data, in the data they are advanced who are better at revealing something new (interview with fk, may 15, 2018). determination of research topics as results from the search for the possibility of the existing papers finding possibilities from published articles in line becomes an important way of determining research topics that have novelty elements. the intelligence of a researcher with long hours of flying reading will easily identify the possibility space so that the data to be explored also has a high element of novelty. such is the fk experience as a scientist who has been involved in a number of prestigious studies with japanese scientists. however, according to the fk, the possibility of in line space must be tested first to ascertain whether there is an opportunity to get new data that can be published. the following are fk's explanations regarding the determination of research topics resulting from the possibility of the possibility of existing papers: if we do searching, we will meet you, so my habit outside of that time (japan) is when we want to work on the article, not "let's give a presentation!" but i'm doing a journal. if in the searching context, the professor gave 50 journals. and he's already directing it to the journal we're going to work on. then he told me to read, and told me to write down what you got what you got. then what are the possibilities that can still be done, sometimes the ones who can make it acceptable are novelty of ideas, or for example like the others who researched it, they just got a (interview with fk, may 15 2018). broadly speaking, the determination of research topics that are cognitively experienced by three indonesian scientific writers with different scientific backgrounds can be classified as follows: table 1. research topics selection their variety and characteristics based on the background of the field of expertise no expertise background of the author ds fk alh sociology of education, nanomaterial carbon, international law and english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 165 determination of research topics indigenous education & multicultural education adsorption, nanocomposit e polymer telecommunicatio ns law 1 institutional research road map √ √ 2 literature review √ √ √ 3 search before research √ √ 4 research trends in the world √ √ 5 national research topics (ministry of research, technology and higher education) √ √ 6 interpretation of legislation √ 7 court decision √ 8 pros and cons of actual cases or topics √ 9 discussion and research sharing method √ 10 exposure of controlled data so that it is found novelty √ 11 looking for possible space for existing papers √ conclusion from the research conducted it was concluded that the reconstruction of cognitive processes writing reputable international journal articles experienced by a number of indonesian scientific writers had very important benefits for the development of cognitive models in writing especially academic writing. reconstructing the cognitive processes experienced by indonesian scientific writers is a fairly long cognitive journey and their cognitive experience will inspire other scientific writers and indonesian researchers to increase the productivity of their publications. this research has been able to explore how indonesian scientific writers in various disciplines express their cognitive experience so that their scientific works can be published in reputable international journals indexed in web of science (wos) and scopus. aknowledgement this research was supported by the directorate of research and community service, general directorat of research and development, the ministry of research, technology and higher education (kemenristekdikti), republic of indonesia. we thank our colleagues from universitas kuningan who provided insight and expertise that greatly assisted the research. references corbin, j., & strauss, a. 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(2015). communicatio n of fantasy sports: a comparative study of user-generated content by professional and amateur writers. professional communication, ieee transactions on, 58(2), 192-207. woolston, c. (2000). writing for therapy helps erase effects of trauma. cnn. zangwill, o. l. (2004). the oxford companion to the mind. new york: oxford university press. https://web.archive.org/web/20041120093458/http:/archives.cnn.com/2000/health/03/16/health.writing.wmd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041120093458/http:/archives.cnn.com/2000/health/03/16/health.writing.wmd/ english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 73 real teaching: anxiety and solution vina agustiana department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: vina.agustiana@uniku.ac.id apa citation: agustiana, v. (2019). real teaching: anxiety and solution. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 73-80. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2068. received: 20-09-2019 accepted: 05-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: anxiety in dealing with real teaching is experienced by preservice teachers. this anxiety can certainly disrupt the process of implementing real teaching. if anxiety can be detected early, various efforts can be made to reduce the anxiety. thus, this study seeks to explore the anxiety faced by preservice teacher in dealing with real teaching and their efforts to reduce such anxiety. in order to achieve the research objectives, the researcher applied qualitative research through a case study strategy using structured interviews of 238 preservice teachers at one of indonesia’s private universities. based on the results of the study, it can be seen that there are 14 anxiety faced by preservice teachers in carrying out real teaching which is divided into 5 factors causing anxiety, namely schools, teachers, students, lecturers, and the preservice teachers themselves, as well as 9 attempts by preservice teachers in order to deal with this anxiety. broadly speaking, good communication between preservice teachers and stakeholders of real teaching activities that includes schools, teachers, students, and lecturers is an effort that can be done so that the teaching anxiety can be reduced. keywords: teaching anxiety; real teaching; preservice teachers. inroduction every preservice teachers must carry out real teaching activities (ekşi & yakışık, 2016). in real teaching, preservice teachers integrate theory and art in teaching (schoeman & mabunda, 2012). this activity involves the preparation of lesson plans, classroom teaching, and assessment of student learning processes. however, given the many demands that must be met by preservice teachers in conducting real teaching, not a few among the preservice teachers who experienced various anxiety during the activity (boadu, 2014). in addition, the lack of experience in teaching can also be a problem for preservice teachers (agustiana, 2014). given that teaching in real schools can be their first experience, so anxiety in teaching is a natural thing faced by them (agustiana & rahmatunisa, 2018). in the past 30 years, there have been a number of studies focusing on teaching anxiety. merç (2015) summarizes the things that cause teacher anxiety in teaching, such as lack of time, heavy workload, poor student behavior, and inadequate resources. in addition agustiana and nurhayati (2019) added that the highest level factor was a factor related to teaching preparation. teaching anxiety is the anxiety arises before teaching is implemented. if anxiety in the face of real teaching is not addressed, it will affect the appearance of the preservice teachers during the activity. researchers have found that the preservice teachers’ perceptions about the causes of anxiety in teaching vary greatly. knowing the root problems faced by them in the process of becoming a teacher is certainly the first step in preparing a qualified teacher. therefore, the reflection of the implementation of real teaching activities is an appropriate effort to overcome the problem. thus, this study explores in depth the teaching anxiety experienced by the preservice teachers in various disciplines of teachers faculty as well as solution they do as the effort to overcome the anxiety. the result of this study is expected to enrich the literature related to the real teaching and also to reduce the problem that may arise before, during and after the real teaching is held. method based on the research objectives that will explore the things that can be a cause of teaching anxiety expeienced by preservice teachers in carrying out real teaching activities in various disciplines as well as students’ efforts to overcome these anxieties, this study uses qualitative method. qualitative research is a method for exploring and understanding the meaning that comes from social problems (cresswell, 2014). to achieve vina agustiana real teaching: anxiety and solution 74 the research objectives, the researchers used a case study research strategy in which the researcher carefully investigated an activity that was limited by time (cresswell, 2014). this research involved 8th semester students of the teaching and education faculty at one of private universities in indonesia. respondents came from 6 (six) education study programs: indonesian language and literature, biology, economic, english language, elementary school teacher, and mathematics. the number of respondents was 238 students. data was collected through structured interviews with respondents. interviews were conducted before the respondent carried out real teaching activities. interviews were conducted using a voice recorder. furthermore, the collected data was analyzed and interpreted, then it was described to describe the conditions that occur in the research object to find out what things can be the cause of teaching anxiety experienced by preservice teachers in carrying out real teaching activities, and their efforts in overcoming their teaching anxiety. in analyzing interview data, researcher used some steps, namely transcribing the data, reducting the data, presenting the data and drawing conclusions. in transcribing the data, the researcher poured the results of the interview into the written form. this was done so that researcher can be more easily in analyzing further data. next, in reducting the data, the researcher summarized the main points of research. in this case, the researcher identified things that cause the emergence of teaching anxiety in real teaching activities. furthermore, the researcher presented the data in the form of table to present data that has been grouped based on the subject matter. finally, the researcher drew the conclusions in order to carry out continuous verification throughout the research process. the researcher generalized from specific things presented in the research data. this is certainly the result of research findings that are consistent with the original purpose of the study. results and discussion this section presents research data derived from interviews related to the findings regarding anxiety faced by preservice teachers in carrying out real teaching activities in various disciplines education study programs and their efforts to overcome these anxiety. in addition, obstacles and solutions in carrying out real teaching activities were also explained. this will be discussed in several sections according to the purpose of the study. broadly speaking, there are 14 anxiety faced by preservice teachers in implementing real teaching. these 14 things are divided into 5 factors that cause anxiety, which are schools, teachers, students, lecturers, and preservice teachers themselves. meanwhile, there were 9 attempts by preservice teachers to deal with anxiety. these are summarized in table 1. table 1. the anxiety faced by preservice teachers in implementing real teaching and the efforts to overcome it no anxiety factors solution 1. students, tutors and school officials are not friendly. school, teacher, students study the character and situation of the school. 2. assessment and observation by tutors and lecturers. teacher, lecturer discuss with senior level. 3. indifferent tutor. teacher discuss with colleagues or study independently. 4. students who cannot be managed. students study the character of students, 5. students have no enthusiasm in learning. 6. low student evaluation results. discuss with the tutor teacher about teaching material. 7. do not have experience in teaching. p re se rv ic e t e a c h e rs 8. teaching is not in accordance with the lesson plan. preparing matters related to teaching and learning process, which include lesson plans, teaching strategies, games and ice breaking, teaching media as well as teaching material and practice questions. 9. do not master teaching material. 10. could not convey the material properly. 11. boring teaching. 12. poor time management. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 75 13. abandoned other work. time management. 14. financial savings anxiety related to school anxiety related to school factors arises when preservice teachers think that the school will treat them unfriendly. the school here includes the principal, teachers, school staff, as well as students who are in the school where the students carry out real teaching. preservice teachers feel that with their status as pre-service teachers, stakeholders will treat them unfriendly. thus, if you find that the school is not friendly, it can lead to the idea that the school will not support the course of real teaching activities. so, they worry they will get other difficulties during the real teaching process. anxiety about this can certainly affect the initial steps in carrying out real teaching activities. in this regard, preservice teachers may conduct pre-observations to the school where they will conduct real teaching to study the situation and condition of the school. in addition, students also ask permission to the school principal and vice-principal, especially the viceprincipal in the field of curriculum, who is responsible for the implementation of real teaching in the school. thus, anxiety about this factor can be overcome before the real teaching activities begin. anxiety related to the teacher there are 3 things related to anxiety related to the teacher. the first is about the teacher’s attitude towards preservice teachers. the preservice teachers feel anxious when they find a teacher who is not friendly. this certainly can affect students’ sense of trust in dealing with real teaching. tutor teacher is a colleague who will always be associated with preservice teachers in implementing real teaching. by finding tutors who are not friendly, then they think that the real teaching process will not run smoothly. with the emergence of anxiety about this, it will lead to fear for preservice teachers in carrying out real teaching, indeed. in an effort to overcome this anxiety, preservice teachers could keep in touch with the tutor through introduction so that when the real teaching begins, both preservice teachers and tutor teachers have interacted with each other. with the interaction, it is hoped that a good relationship will be created between the tutor teacher and the preservice teachers. thus, disappointment will find that the tutor teacher who is not friendly can be overcome. the second is related to the assessment and observation of the tutor teacher on preservice teachers’ performance in carrying out real teaching. in his study, paker (2011) states that 100% preservice teachers feel anxious when they will be observed by tutors. as preservice teachers who are carrying out a teaching practice, indeed, they have to face the moment when they will be assessed by the tutor so that the assessment process and the results can be a source of anxiety faced by students. in addition, criticism from teachers also contributed to the anxiety of preservice teachers (marais, 2013). in addition, the assessment of the tutor teacher influences the final value of the implementation of real teaching (sammephet & wanphet, 2013). no doubt that the assessment of tutor teachers is one of the things that worries preservice teachers in carrying out real teaching activities. to overcome this, preservice teachers can discuss with other students who had experienced real teaching in the previous years at the same school and with the same tutor regarding the assessment standards applied by the tutor teacher. this can include what the tutor teacher expects the student to do or do not do. thus, preservice teachers can have a picture of the assessment process that will be applied by the tutor teacher. meanwhile, the third is the indifferent tutor teacher. preservice teachers feel worried if they meet a tutor teacher who cannot be invited to discuss the implementation of real teaching. as tutors, of course they should be made role models in the implementation of real teaching and a source of experience for preservice teachers. this is considering that real teaching is the first experience for preservice teachers in carrying out real class teaching. if preservice teachers find tutors who are indifferent to the implementation of real teaching, this can certainly hinder the course of real teaching activities. at the time, the preservice teachers need suggestion or feedbcak from the tutor teacher, but it is ignored, then they will feel confused to carry out further activities related to real teaching. this is in line with paker (2011) in which the absence of feedback from teachers on the performance of preservice teachers can cause them anxiety. thus, preservice teachers will do other activities according to what they think is good even without the suggestion or vina agustiana real teaching: anxiety and solution 76 feedback from the tutor teacher. however, of course, it will be another problem if this happens to preservice teachers who are not creative. in which without the suggestion or feedback of the tutor teacher, the student does not know what activities to do. thus, this can be a concern for them in the face of real teaching. regard with this, efforts that can be made by preservice teachers in implementing real teaching are having discussions with peers or doing independent study by using the internet. peer is one of the important aspects in implementing real teaching. generally, in one school, there are several students who come from several study programs so that each preservice teacher can exchange ideas about learning both with colleagues from the same study program or those from different study programs. furthermore, the use of the internet, such as google, can also help students find ideas related to learning. thus, preservice teachers need not worry about the presence of tutor teachers who are ignorant of real teaching activities because preservice teachers can still find another information related to real teaching activities by the presence of peers and other sources. anxiety related to students there are 4 things relating to the anxiety related to students. the first is when preservice teachers find students who are not friendly and do not appreciate the preservice teachers. they are anxious if with their status as a practicing teacher, students will not obey or appreciate them, so they worry they will have problems in carrying out teaching. this is in line with mapfumo, chitsiko, and chireshe (2012) that given their status as a practicing teacher, students are less respectful to the preservice teachers. in the absence of respect or respect for them, they feel that they will not be recognized for their presence in class, so they will have difficulty in teaching. regarding this matter, preservice teachers can do interaction to the students in the beginning of real teaching activities through doing introduction. preservice teachers introduce themselves about who they are and their position in the school. thus, students can understand the position of them as preservice teachers in the school. if the first impression is good, then the student’s view of preservice teachers will be good too. thus, anxiety about students' unfriendliness towards preservice teachers can be overcome. the second thing is when the preservice teachers have to deal with students who can not be arranged. students are the teaching objects that will be faced by preservice teachers while implementing real teaching. thus, they must be prepared with all possibilities in dealing with a variety of student characters. if they have to deal with students who can not be arranged, of course this can be a challenge for them in completing it. however, if preservice teachers feel they are not ready to face these challenges, they will feel anxious that they will not be able to master the class where they teach. especially considering that the students they encounter when doing teaching practice on microteahing are their peers, so preservice teachers do not have experience in dealing with students at the elementary, junior high, or senior high school levels (sammephet & wanphet, 2013). thus, class management with regard to students is one of the anxieties faced by preservice teachers (aydin, 2016). this is supported by goh and matthews (2011) that class management with regard to students is the most worrying by the history preservice teachers. another anxiety related to students is when students are not enthusiastic in learning. low motivation is one of the teaching anxiety faced by preservice teachers (aydin, 2016). in addition to dealing with a variety of student characters, they must also be able to control the class in order to ensure that teaching materials are well conveyed and the learning process runs pleasantly. when faced with a situation like this, preservice teachers will certainly experience a decrease in self-confidence in teaching in which they assume that they cannot make the class more attractive. in overcoming these two things, preservice teachers must be able to learn the character of students. by understanding the character of students, preservice teachers will certainly be easier to carry out the learning process. in addition, the existence of good communication between students and preservice teachers can facilitate the real teaching activities so that classroom management related to students can be overcome by understanding students’ character and communication. next, the fourth thing is the low student evaluation results. this is intended when the results of student work in doing exercises related to the material that has been taught by preservice teachers is low. thus, preservice teachers assume that if students cannot do the exercises correctly, then they have failed in delivering teaching english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 77 material so students do not understand the material that has been taught by them. in this regard, one of the efforts that preservice teachers can do is to discuss with tutors about learning. considering that tutor teacher has experience in teaching in the class. therefore, preservice teachers can discuss effective learning strategies to be implemented in that class. thus, anxiety about low evaluation results can be overcome. anxiety related to the lecturer anxiety related to lecturers is the assessment and observation of lecturers on preservice teachers’ performance in implementing real teaching. this is closely related to lecturer expectations in which preservice teachers must be able to deal with teaching pressure in a way that is good and right (boadu, 2014). not only the pressure from the tutor, but also from the field supervisor. to overcome this, preservice teachers can discuss with others who have experienced real teaching activities regarding the assessment criteria applied by the lecturer. this can include what lecturers expect or not do by preservice teachers. anxiety related to the preservice teachers’ own problem the fifth factor is related to the individual problem of the preservice teachers which includes 8 things. this is certainly a factor that has a great influence on teaching anxiety possessed by preservice teachers in implementing real teaching given that this factor raises more anxiety associated with the implementation of real teaching. this is in line with sammephet and wanphet (2013) and aydin (2016) that the preservice teacher’s own problems can be a source of anxiety in teaching. besides, sudtho and singhasiri (2017) states that belief plays an important role in the process of becoming a teacher the first thing is not having experience in teaching. real teaching activities are teaching practices in the real class. only a small percentage of preservice teachers have real classroom teaching experience. in other words, most of them have no experience in teaching. thus, they do not know anything that must be done in implementing real teaching. of course, without directives from related parties, they will face difficulties in implementing real teaching so that in the absence of teaching experience it makes anxiety for students. this is also in line with agustiana (2014) who states that the lack of teaching experience is one of the concerns faced by preservice teachers. meanwhile aydin (2016) found that the lack of experience in teaching was the highest factor related to teaching anxiety. surely, it is natural that preservice teachers do not have experience in teaching and then worry about everything regarding the implementation of real teaching (paker, 2011). the second thing is when preservice teachers teach is not in accordance with the design of the lesson plan. as preservice teachers, they certainly must prepare lesson plans before learning activities are carried out. the preparation of the lesson plan must of course be mastered by them given that in previous semesters, they had received lectures regarding the preparation of the lesson plan. thus, preparing the lesson plan is considered not to be too difficult for them. however, despite the existence of lesson plans that have been arranged neatly and with careful planning, in fact, the implementation of learning in class can be different. this certainly can cause anxiety for preservice teachers about what they should be doing in class. without teaching experience, coupled with learning to go beyond what has been compiled in the lesson plan, can be a concern for preservice teachers in implementing real teaching. the third thing that can cause anxiety in teaching is when preservice teachers do not master the teaching material that will be delivered in class. teachers as a person who is considered the professional one, should master what they will convey in class. by not mastering teaching material, then of course the readiness of preservice teachers in teaching can be said to be non-existent. especially when they cannot answer questions from students about teaching material. certaintly, besides getting embarrassed in class, their confidence will also decrease. no doubt this kind of thing can cause anxiety in carrying out real teaching. the fourth thing is when preservice teachers cannot deliver teaching materials properly. this is certainly different from the previous case when preservice teachers did not master the teaching material which meant they were not ready to face learning. in this fourth case, preservice teachers have prepared themselves in teaching by mastering teaching material that will be delivered in class. however, they feel anxious if they cannot make students understand what they are teaching. this is certainly related to teaching strategies. if preservice teachers are not able to implement teaching strategies that are appropriate vina agustiana real teaching: anxiety and solution 78 to the character of students, then it is likely that this anxiety will arise. the fifth thing is that when learning which is carried out feels boring. the teacher as the captain in the class must be able to make the atmosphere of teaching and learning enjoyable. if students feel bored with learning in class or when the preservice teachers think that they are not able to make learning more fun, it will certainly reduce the enthusiasm and confidence of them. this is certainly related to the teaching strategies or techniques chosen and the use of teaching media. when preservice teachers feel anxious about not being able to choose the right teaching strategies or teaching materials, the learning process becomes boring. as preservice teachers, they must be able to form effective classroom management, which creates conducive classroom situations and conditions (chamundeswari, 2013). to overcome these five problems, the preservice teachers may do some things, such as preparing matters related to teaching and learning process, which include lesson plans, teaching strategies, games and ice breaking, teaching media as well as teaching material and practice questions. by doing these activities, the anxiety may reduce as well. the sixth thing is not being able to manage time properly, such as the case when preservice teachers arrive late to school. if preservice teachers arrive late, surely they will get shame either towards students, tutors, and the school. not only that, time management in class can also cause anxiety. for example, all teaching materials have been delivered, but the school hours are still long over. thus, the preservice teachers feel confused about what to do in class until class ends. in addition, even the opposite case happens when class time is over but the material has not yet been conveyed all, this can certainly cause anxiety for them as they fail to make effective time in class. the next thing is the neglect of other jobs. this is intended when preservice teachers have other obligations besides conducting real teaching, such as conducting lectures on campus, working, or taking care of the household. considering that there are not a few preservice teachers who are married or who have worked either as teachers or work in other fields, if students cannot manage their time well, surely this will greatly affect the course of real teaching. in addition, with the burden of many obligations, preservice teachers will not be able to carry out real teaching activities effectively. thus, time management can be a concern for preservice teachers in implementing real teaching. to overcome these two problems, the preservice teachers may manage their time effectively. the last concern related to the individual problems of preservice teachers is financial. preservice teachers are worried about the possibility of spending large sums of money in carrying out real teaching. in addition to the costs that must be incurred before the implementation of real teaching that must be paid to campus, they also feel anxious about other expenses during this activity, such as transportation costs, accommodation, preparation of materials and teaching media, as well as the preparation costs for closing the real teaching activities that will be held at school. real teaching lasts for 3 months. during that time, each preservice teacher must come to the school where they practice teaching. in addition, they also have to do lectures on campus, so that the allocation of expenses for transport and accommodation will increase. besides, preparation of teaching materials and teaching media sometimes requires money, especially when preservice teachers use realia as teaching media or when they have to multiply teaching materials to be distributed to students. thus, they have to spend more their own money. besides, at the end of the implementation of the real teaching activities, preservice teachers also had to hold a farewell event with students, teachers, and schools. in this activity, sometimes preservice teachers have to create events for students, such as performing arts, or other competitions which of course require costs in its implementation. besides, it is a common to give a gift to the tutor teacher. not only that, they also have to provide lunch for every school members, namely the principal and his staffs, tutor teacher, other teachers, and also school staffs. this activity is quite expensive. to make it happen, the students have to hold a joint venture so that the costs for the parting activities feel lighter. this happens every year, so that finance appears as one of the anxieties students face in implementing real teaching. to overcome this, savings money is one solution they may do. conclusion anxiety in dealing with real teaching is the main topic of education practitioners. by knowing the root of the problems faced by preservice teachers in carrying out real teaching, the efforts to overcome anxiety can be detected earlier. based english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 79 on the results of interviews with 238 preservice teachers, it can be seen that there are 14 anxiety faced by preservice teachers in implementing real teaching which is divided into 5 factors that cause anxiety, namely schools, teachers, students, lecturers, and students themselves, as well as 9 efforts made by preservice teachers to deal with this anxiety. schools, teachers, students, and lecturers are external factors that cause anxiety in the real teaching. it is undeniable that these stakeholders play an important role in the implementation of real teaching so that preservice teachers naturally feel concerned about the role of stakeholders regarding the course of real teaching activities. thus, the existence of good communication between students and stakeholders can reduce anxiety in implementing real teaching. in addition to external factors, anxiety in carrying out real teaching can arise due to internal factors. preservice teachers also feel anxiety that comes from themselves. in this regard, experience and openness are efforts that can reduce anxiety in dealing with real teaching related to this factor. the preservice teachers can search for experiences related to real teaching either through their own experience, or ask about the experiences of others (lecturers, teachers, senior, and other sources that can be obtained via the internet). in addition, openness about the anxiety faced by preservice teachers can also be a good effort. through the openness conveyed to both stakeholders and other parties, then indirectly, the anxiety faced by these students can be reduced. thus, through this research, it is expected that the anxiety faced by preservice teachers in implementing real teaching can be addressed properly so that real teaching activities can run well. references agustiana, v. 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(2014). research design: pendekatan kualitatif, kuantitatif, dan mixed. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar. ekşi, g. y., & yakışık, b. y. (2016). to be anxious or not: student teachers in the practicum. universal journal of educational research, 4(6), 13321339. goh, p. s., & matthews, b. (2011). listening to the concerns of student teachers in malaysia during teaching practice. australian journal of teacher education, 36(3), 92-103. marais, p. (2013). feeling is believing: student teachers’ expressions of their emotions. journal of social science, 35(3), 207-216. mapfumo, j. s., chitsiko, n., & chireshe, r. (2012). teaching practice generated stressors and coping mechanisms among student teachers in zimbabwe. south african journal of education, 32(1), 155-166. merç, a. (2015). foreign language teaching anxiety and self-efficacy beliefs of turkish pre-service efl teachers. the international journal of research in teacher education, 6(3), 40-58. paker, t. (2011). student teacher anxiety related to the teaching practicum. eurasian journal of educational research (ejer), 42, 207-224. sammephet, b., & wanphet, p. (2013). pre-service teachers’ anxiety and anxiety management during the first encounter with students in efl classroom. journal of education and practice, 4(2), 78-87. schoeman, s., & mabunda, p. l. (2012). teaching practice and the personal and socio-professional development of prospective teachers. south african journal of education, 32, 240-254. sudtho, j., & singhasiri, w. (2017). exploring preservice teachers’ professional identity formation through the lens of critical incidents. the asian efl journal, 99, 38-60. vina agustiana real teaching: anxiety and solution 80 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 119 higher order thinking skills among english teachers across generation in efl classroom mursyid english education magister program, faculty of arts and language, state university of jakarta, indonesia e-mail: mursyid_pb17s2@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id nia kurniawati english education study program, suryakancana university, indonesia e-mail: nia@unsur.ac.id apa citation: mursyid, m., & kurniawati, n. (2019). higher order thinking skills among english teachers across generation in efl classroom. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 119-124. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1775. received: 25-01-2019 accepted: 22-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: higher order thinking skills are the next cognitive ability to evaluate, analyze and create. it is a must for english teachers across generation (baby boomers, generation x, and generation y) to grasp and implement the idea of hots in their classrooms. teaching english in efl setting certainly forces the teachers to have expertise in planning the learning activities that would foster students’ thinking skills, especially their hots. this study aims at investigating the perceptions, the practice, and the constraints in endorsing higher order thinking skills in teaching foreign language. this case study involved seven senior high school english teachers from three generations (baby boomers, generation x, and generation y). data were collected through open-ended questionnaire, classroom observation, and document analysis for triangulation purpose. data were then categorized and classified to form themes for the study. the results showed that teachers from all generation are aware of hots and they are applying it in their teaching in a different way. however, some obstacles are still found in incorporating hots in their classroom. keywords: efl; english teaching strategies; generation theory; hots. introduction the demand of 21st century in education comes with the need of thinking ability which is called as higher order thinking skills. many experts have mentioned that higher order thinking skills (hots) and students’ academic performance are interrelated. in this sense, students who learn with critical thinking skills often perform well in their education (tam & linh, 2017). the use of hots is significant for educational process especially in teaching and learning. learners’ thinking ability in learning can affect the effectiveness of learning itself. the skills cover all kind of ability of the abstract skills, including critical thinking skills and problems solving skills (nourdad, masoudi, & rahimali, 2018). those thinking skills are needed in nowadays situation in which students are forced to use their critical thinking skills to solve their problems. as for example, students can use their thinking skills to analyze and choose correct information from the internet and students can also create new idea to write a report or to present their finding about a social phenomenon at school. that is why higher order thinking is urgent for students. the urgent needs of critical thinking skills has been stated by reid (2014) that students become self-conscious and self-monitoring to what they think about strategies to solve the problem. self-conscious means students aware of what they are learning and self-monitoring means that students reflect about their ability and barrier to solve the problems. the ability to solve the problem is one of the thinking skills that human need in current situation. the theory of human thinking skills was classified by benjamin bloom in the beginning of his publication entitled educational objectives: the classroom of the educational goals. it was the original version explaining the learning objectives and thinking ability. according to weay, masood, and abdullah (2016), bloom divides the educational objectives into three, namely cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domain. in the bloom taxonomy, cognitive domain is classified into six levels, namely knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. affective domain is classified into five levels, namely receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and characterizing. meanwhile, psychomotor domain mursyid & nia kurniawati higher order thinking skills among english teachers across generation in efl classroom 120 is classified into seven levels, namely perception, set, guided response, mechanism, complex over response, adaptation, and origination. those three educational objectives are then popularly known as bloom taxonomy. on the other hand, anderson and krathwohl (2001) as cited in harris et al., (2014) declare the new cognitive domain which include remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. the differences between the original and revised version are on the analyzing, evaluating and creating that previously are analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating. thus, the new version states creating is the highest thinking ability and remembering is the lowest thinking ability. further, the thinking skills are not only categorized based on cognitive domain, but also based on cognitive levels. basically, there are three categories of cognitive levels including lots, mods, and hots. in this sense, remembering is categorized as lower order thinking skills (lots); understanding and applying are categorized as middle order thinking skills (mods); and the next cognitive ability to evaluate, analyze and create are categorizes as higher order thinking skills (hots). as stated by rajendran and idris (2008) in chidozie (2014), higher order thinking skills involve the need of analysis, evaluation, and creation or production as thinking skills. as parts of hots, analyzing is an ability to break information into parts and to arrange the useful information; evaluating is the ability to reflect to something and make judgment; and creating is the highest ability to generate new ideas or concepts. the process of learning and gaining new knowledge should pass the lower order thinking before goes to the higher order levels. therefore, learner should remember, understand, and apply the knowledge to reach the next cognition (rosli & maarof, 2016). thus, it means that thinking is an order sequence process and it is not a sudden process. higher order thinking skills always become hot issue in education (latief, pabbajah, & karim, 2016). the importance of those thinking skills has been acknowledged since decades ago. thus, it can be assumed that hots should not have become a problem for teachers from all generation to incorporate it in their classroom. basically, there are three generations of teacher nowadays. first, whoever born between the years 1945 and 1964 is typically called baby boomers. they who were born between 1965 and 1979, the smallest generation, are called digital immigrants or gen x. the newest generation, gen y, is whoever born between 1980 and 1999. other names for this generation include millennial, echo-boomers, and net gen (gibson, greenwood, & murphy, 2009). in the teaching and learning process, teachers should have the ability to design and execute hots integrated with subject matter (sutarto, 2017). basically, hots can only be activated when individuals encounter unfamiliar problems that need to solve in complex, non-routine and non-structured solution. yet, as revealed by margana and widyantoro (2017), students in indonesia are developed under the basis of lots cognitive level. hence, this study intends to find out: 1) the teachers’ perception towards hots, 2) the implementation of hots in the classroom, and 3) the constraints faced by teachers in implementing hots in efl classroom. method this descriptive qualitative study was conducted at sman 2 cianjur, a public senior high in the center of cianjur, by involving senior high school teachers from different generations. the teachers are members of english teacher association in cianjur. it is an organization where teachers from various schools gather together as forum communication among english teachers. the data in this study were collected through open-ended questionnaire, document analysis, and interview. first, the open-ended questionnaire consists of 16 questions which explore the teachers’ perspective, the application, and the constraints faced by teachers in implementing hots. questions numbers 1-5 ask about the teachers’ perception and understanding on higher order thinking skills. questions numbers 6-10 ask how teachers apply the concept of higher order thinking skills on students’ learning. then, questions number 11-16 try to analyze constraints faced by teachers in implementing higher order thinking skills in the classroom. second, documents are in the form of teachers’ lesson plan. finally, the interview is conducted to teachers participated in this study. the data were then analyzed descriptively. results and discussion the discussion will be divided into three subsections following the central themes of this study, namely the teachers’ perception towards english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 121 hots, the implementation of hots in the classroom, and the constraints faced by teachers in implementing hots in efl classroom. to make relevant comparison, the study compares only two generations which are mostly active on teaching in current years; they are teachers from generation x and y. basically, there are three elements assessed, namely comprehension to theory, point of view on hots, and perception based on importance. teachers’ perception toward hots to explore teachers’ perspective and understanding, questions number 1-5 in the questionnaire covers what teachers know about the theory of hots, teachers’ opinion about students having hots, teachers’ understanding on preparing the teaching, etc. when a teacher from generation baby boomers (gen bb) is asked about what s/he knows about hots, the teacher states: “it is the way where thinking is levelled. higher order thinking skills refer to the ability to evaluate, analyse and create.” the teacher has been teaching for years so that s/he really knows about the definition and the importance of hots for students. the teacher knows that the ability to evaluate, analyse, and create are strongly needed by students. then, when two teachers from generation x are asked with the same question about what they know about hots, both have same answers: “hots (higher order thinking skills) are the ability of thinking in high level in order to help students to prepare their future.” the teacher from generation x seems to know the definition of high level thinking. teachers from this generation want to prepare their students for better life in the future. it implies that they were focusing on students’ life. more description on teachers’ perspective came from gen y teachers as the youngest generation. they were teachers who just started teaching so that they have less than five-years experiences of teaching. one of them provides the following response: “i personally don’t know much about hots. but i ever heard that in curriculum material development (cmd) subject in my college.” from the statement, it can be seen that the gen y teacher does not know about hots since s/he has lack of experience in teaching. the next finding is related to teachers’ opinion on students with higher order thinking skills. there are two teachers who gave clear response concerning their view on their critical students: (#1) students can perform in higher order thinking skills such as in creating text. (#5) i assume that students with hots will be more active, have higher understanding, and become creative thinkers. teacher #1 is from gen bb and teacher #5 is from gen y. from the statement, it can be clearly seen that the gen bb teacher tends to see hots as the highest level on the result of thinking that is creating. meanwhile, the gen y teacher sees the general view on their students. from the discussion, it is revealed that teachers from generation bb and x have well understanding about hots. this generation is senior teachers. they are capable on pedagogical theory, including blooms’ taxonomy. regarding their understanding about hots, they know that hots covers the ability to evaluate, to analyse and to create something. the data of the teachers’ perception towards hots are depicted at the following tables. table 1. gen bb teachers’ perception towards hots elements teacher: generation bb comprehension to theory teachers understand the definition and theory related to hots. they also know that hots covers the ability to evaluate, to analyse, and to create. point of view on hots teachers view students who have higher order thinking skills can create or product something like create a text, for example. perception based on importance hots are important for students and their future. from table 1, it was clear that teachers from generation bb completely comprehend the concept of hots. it was because they have experience on teaching for years. however, they will be retired for some next years, so that teachers from newer generations should learn more about thinking skills from the gen bb teachers. mursyid & nia kurniawati higher order thinking skills among english teachers across generation in efl classroom 122 table 2. gen x teachers’ perception towards hots elements teacher: generation x comprehension to theory teachers know that higher order thinking skills used as the way for levelling the thinking ability. teachers know that hots include the ability to evaluate, to analyse, and to create. point of view on hots students can perform by using higher orders, such as creating and explaining concept both in written and oral text. perception based on importance hots are important for students to understand such concepts. from the table, it can be seen that the generation x teachers have already known hots concepts as the highest level in thinking skill. furher, they realized that it covers several stages such as evaluating, analysing or synthesizing and creating. they also consider it as important skill to be mastered by the students. teacher has implemented the theory on the practice of learning reading and writing, such as in creating a text about certain theme. teachers from generation y have enough understanding on hots, but they still find difficulties to use the theory in practice. because of the lack of experience, the teachers from this generation have perception that students’ higher order thinking skills will develop depending on situation. the gen y teachers’ perceptions on hots are presented in table 3. table 3. gen y teachers’ perception towards hots elements teacher: generation y comprehension on hots teachers only know that thinking ability with high levels is called as hots. point of view related to hots it can help the students, but they still face various difficulties to use it on that way. perception based on importance hots demand students to create something. the data shows that the teachers from generation y only recognize hots as thinking ability. they mentioned that hots is important, but it is still very difficult to be implemented in efl classroom since it demands students to create a product. finally, the analysis reveals that each generation perecieved hots differently. surprisingly, generation x exceed the expectation that they have no sufficeient understanding on hots concept. they even understand hots concepts much better than gen y teachers. this finding has proven that different age and experience of teachers affect the teachers’ perception on the implementation of hots. in short, teachers’ perceptions are strongly influenced by experience. the praxis of hots in efl classroom this study reveals interesting data regarding the practice of hots in efl classrooms by the english teachers from two different generations. the data is gained from questionnaire and teachers’ lesson plans. the questionnaire covers the teacher perceptions and their daily teaching experience on teaching language by levels. the lesson plan is then used as a comparison. the result of the analysis is summarized in the following table. table 3. the practice of hots in efl classroom hots implementation gen xs gen ys teacher preparation develop lesson plan, prepare the teaching material, prepare the multimedia and learning activity with various text. read a lot and prepare media or materials to be given to the students. classroom practice involving students in such activities that demand them to evaluate collaboratively stimulating the students by observing the activity related to text. multimedia usage yes yes students’ activity discussion, presentation, discovery, project and problem based learning. activities are designed to make students use their optimum thinking skills. reading speaking writing listening english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 123 it is interesting to know that there are some similarities as well as differences among english teachers accross generations in implementing hots in their classroom. there are several points used as the indicator to see similarities or differences between the two generation; preparation, implementation, and evaluation to the students. regarding the preparation, basically, all of the teachers develop lesson plan and prepare the materials comprehensively. the teachers from gen x also read before teaching and the teachers from gen y practice the teaching technique beforehand. these two activities show the teachers’ professional competence. as professional, preparation is an important key to provide aligned learning and assessment for students. next, in practice, the analysis shows a different way of practice. first, the teachers from gen x involve the students in such activities that foster collaboration among students, such as project based learning and problem based learning. then, the gen y teachers prefer to stimulate the students through observation activity. the observation is the very beginning process of learning. the activity designed by the teachers from gen y is still at the low cognitive level, including remembering until applying. however, surprisingly, the gen y teachers admitted to not implement hots in their classrooms, but they focus on text exploration on understanding level. moreover, teachers from both generations have utilized multimedia in their teaching and they have varied the students’ activities. the gen x involve discussion, presentation, discovery, project based learning and problem based learning for the students’ activity. meanwhile, the gen y teachers choose the language comptence-based activities; they prefer discussion, watching english movie or listening to english songs for their classroom activities. the different practice among them might appear due to teaching hours and experience. the gen xs, in this case, have more teaching hours and experience compared to gen ys. constraints faced by teachers in implementing hots in efl classroom implementing hots in the classroom is not an easy task. teachers must be encountering many obstacles. from the interview, it is found that teachers face various constraints in implementing hots in efl classroom as the following. 1) teachers’ limited knowledge in choosing operational words. 2) lack of experience in developing lesson plan based on thinking skill that is suitbale with basic competence. 3) teachers’ lack of ability in infusing creativitities to classroom activities. 4) teachers too focus on transferring the knowledge rather than practicing students’ metacognitive and thinking skills. conclusion from the analysis, it can be concluded that the gen x teachers have shown more understanding on hots concepts compared to gen y teachers. they also applied it in their classroom in various ways and have utilized multimedia. meanwhile, the gen ys admitted to not implement hots in their classroom yet. this condition might appear due to different experience among them. the baby boomers who have more teaching hours are benefitted to have more knowledge and skills from their experience. conversely, the gen y teachers only have the basic theories of teaching and lack of practice in teaching. however, implementing hots in efl classroom is not an easy task. teachers from the three generation adimtted that they often face some constraints since many of them are lack of understanding and experience in developing lesson plan based on thinking skill that is suitbale with basic competence. they also need to change the paradigm from transferring the knowledge into training the students’ metacognitive and thinking skills. references chidozie, c. c., yusri, k., muhammad sukri, s., & wilfredo, l. h. (2014). implementing higher order thinking skills in teaching and learning of design and technology education. international seminar proceedings on technical and vocational education. gibson, j. w., greenwood, r. a., & murphy, e. f. (2009). generational differences in the workplace: personal values, behaviors, and popular beliefs. journal of diversity management, 4(3), 1-8. doi: 10.19030/jdm.v4i3.4959. harris, g., stone, k. b., mayeshiba, t., componation, p. j., & farrington, p. a. (2014). transitioning from teaching lean tools to teaching lean transformation. journal of enterprise transformation, 4(3), 191-204. doi: 10.1080/19488289.2014.930545. latief, j. a., pabbajah, m., & karim, s. a. (2016). the implementation of higher order thinking mursyid & nia kurniawati higher order thinking skills among english teachers across generation in efl classroom 124 skills at universitas teknologi yogyakarta in indonesia: opportunities and challenges. proceeding of international conference on education and higher order thinking skills (ice-hots), 1, 80-90. margana, m., & widyantoro, a. (2017). developing english textbooks oriented to higher order thinking skills for students of vocational high schools in yogyakarta. journal of language teaching and research, 8(1), 26–38. doi: 10.17507/jltr.0801.04. nourdad, n., masoudi, s., & rahimali, p. (2018). the effect of higher order thinking skill instruction on efl reading ability. international journal of applied linguistics & english literature, 7(3), 231-237. doi: 10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.3p.231. reid, g. (2014). assessing higher-order thinking (hot) skills in icas tests. sydney: unsw global, the university of new south wales. rosli, m. f. m., & maarof, n. (2016). the effects of higher order thinking skills (hots) questions in improving esl pupils’ writing performance. sutarto, h. p. (2017). articulation of high order thinking skills in competency-based instruction in indonesia vocational and technical high school. advances in social sciences, education, and humanities research, 102, 211–217. tam, n. t. m., & linh, n. t. t. (2017). influence of explicit higher-order thinking skills instruction on students’ learning of linguistics. thinking skills and creativity. doi: 10.1016/j.tsc.2017.10.004. weay, a. l., masood, m., & abdullah, s. h. (2016). systematic review of revised bloom taxonomy, solo taxonomy and webb’s depth of knowledge (dok) in assessing students’ historical understanding in learning history. malaysian journal of higher order thinking skills in education, 1-27. 167 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee applying cognitive code towards indonesian efl learners’ writing competence improvement ita juita department of research and development, the association of indonesian scholars of english education (aisee), indonesia e-mail: itajuita2@gmail.com apa citation: juita, i. (2014). applying cognitive code towards indonesian efl learners’ writing competence improvement. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 167-173 received: 15-03-2014 accepted: 27-03-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: this classroom action research (car) presents a research for solving the student’s problems in writing class by using two cycles of kemmis and mctaggart. in this car, there are three crucial instruments. they are students’ learning journal to know what the student’ map thinking which is related to the cognitive code and the writing material, researcher’ journal and questionnaire. the students’ problems in writing subject happen in one class of english department of the university of kuningan, west java – indonesia. the learners find it difficult to process words into sentences. applying cognitive code in this car is the strategy, with the purpose to know what the students need by asking them to use some tools such as student’s learning journal, thus the students are able to tell their difficulties based on their learning experiences in class. cognitive code looks students or learners as thinking being and learn based on their learning experience. the students’ writing competence in the beginning of this research is 40, meanwhile, after applying cognitive code as the method of teaching learning process, the class average gets 64.5 in the post test. thus, the normalized gain to measure the students’ writing development is on number 0.7, it means the students’ writing improvement is moderate. the students’ attitude toward cognitive code is taken from rating scales is 82%. based on the data, it can be concluded that cognitive code is effective method in teaching writing. keywords: cognitive code, writing competence, learners’ errors cognitive code looks students or learners as thinking being and learn based on their learning experience (hutchinson and waters, 1991). this definition is also explained by heo, et al (2011), a cognitive approach is a way to learn and human development emphasizes on mental or internal factors. a cognitive aspect also has greatly influenced on understanding of factors in language learning. by knowing the students’ mental and knowing their needs, it is able to help the teacher in helping students’ lack especially in writing as a focus of this study. olson and land (2007) stated that in teaching a language especially how to write, the teacher should use a cognitive introduction learners’ errors in english as a foreign language in indonesia is encountered by them in using the language. these errors in writing subject happen in one class of english department, the university of kuningan, indonesia. the learners find difficulties to process words into sentences, so the researcher needs a strategy to solve the problem. applying cognitive code in this class room action research (car) is the strategy, with the purpose to know what the students need by asking them to use some tools such as student’s learning journal, thus the students are able to tell their difficulties based on their learning experiences in the class to the teacher. ita juita applying cognitive code towards indonesian efl learners’ writing competence improvement 168 strategy and the strategy is explicitly learned. providing a lot of discussion, modeling, guided practice and metacognitive reflections are implemented. these strategies will also apply in the researcher’s object research, in one class at private university above. according to alwasilah (2011), the teaching learning process (tlp) will not be successful if the teacher just masters the materials but not masters the practice of learning process it self, such as in choosing a suitable method or technique in tlp in the class room. thus by using cognitive approach in this research, the teacher is able to create a great opportunities for students to think creatively and freely in their writing. learning is cognitive and linear area in which a learner processes an input, an interaction, and produces a language (kite, 2009). thus, researcher assumes that cognitive code is a suitable learning theory which is able to apply in teaching language, especially in writing subject because in this approach, the researcher is given technique how to face a class and how to transfer new knowledge by knowing cognitive process of the students which explained in cognitive code. actually, the key to sucessful language learning and teaching lies not in the analysis of the nature of language but in understanding the structure and processes of the mind (hutchinson & waters, 1991). so that seeing the characters of this nss at the university who are passive and have low potential in improving their foreign language acquisition, researcher uses cognitive code as the approach. the appropriate theory of learning that can be applied based on the problems is theory of cognitive code. in this theory, a teacher takes the students to be an active information processor or we can call it student centre learning, the basic teaching technique in cognive code will apply in object of research is the problem solving task (hutchinson & waters, 1991). writing is not an easy activity (pinter, 2006). a writer needs a fresh state of mind to be able to pour all their writing skills. so with cognitive code method, students have a great opportunity in writing in accordance with their creativity. it is chozen because not only students’ writing skill which is still poor, but also their interest is still poor in writing english. by applying cognitive code the teacher in this research does not force students to write what the teacher wants but just give a genre and simple explanation of it before, so that about the content it is back to the students’ interest. writing is a text (halliday & hasan, 2004). text refers to any instance of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who know the language (halliday & hasan, 2004). the text is used in this research is arguing or argumentative text. text can be formed becomes an essay. an essay is a short collection of paragraphs that describes facts, opinions, and ideas on a topic, and an essay also usually has three to ten paragraphs (folse et al., 1999). so, by applying cognitive code as a method or approach in tlp at class, the students are hoped to be able to master english especially in their writing competence by using theory of learning cognitive code actively. method the type of action research in this researcher is practical action research. practical action research is intended to adress a specific problem within a classroom, school, or other comunity. it can be carried out in a variety of setting –educational, social service, or business (fraenkel & wallen, 2006). in this case, the researcher focusses on educational or more specifically is class room action research (car). 169 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee car is examined the impact of learning theory of cognitive code toward students’s writing competence. a pretest and post-test use to determine subject’s achievement growt. design or model in this classroom action research uses design action research of kemmis and mctaggart. the design can be seen on figure 1. figure 1. a cycle of action research (adapted from kemmis & mctaggart, 1992 as cited in fraenkel & wallen, 2006). the students in this object of research is in one class consist of 25 students of english department of the university of kuningan, indonesia . writing is a subject which is focused to be improved. according to design car of kemmis & mctaggart, the duration of the research is done in at least two cycles. one cycle is obtained from three to four meetings. so to finish this research, the researcher takes at least seven meeting. the data resource of this research is from primary data. besides, both quantitative and qualitative, the data is also collected during this research by using some journals. the researcher uses two kinds of data collection instrument in this research, those are researcher completes and subject completes (fraenkel & wallen, 2006). in the researcher completes, there are rating scales, interview schedules or questionnaire and observation form. whereas, the subject completes are taken from pre-test and post test. in these test, the teacher uses the same instruction. it is asking the students in writing class to make an argumentative text in one hour with at least consist of three paragraphs. the students do not allow to take any sources in the book or even in the internet. in scoring and correcting both pretest and pot-test the researcher does it with the team. there are two assessors. they are the lecturer in this university. the writing assessment which used the team, adopted of heaton (1990): table 1. format of writing assessemant 55 44 33 22 11 generic structure xx grammar xx vocabulary xx mechanics cx fluency xx relevance xx total 17 for pairing both pre-test and posttest, the researcher uses the normalized gain which developed by hake (meltzer, 2002) to see the percentage of the students’ writing improvement. see the following formula: table 2. the normalized gain gain score interpretation g > 0,7 high 0,3 < g ≤ 0,7 moderate g ≤ 0,3 low results and discussion the following are the calculation of students’ achievement in the pre-test by asking all of students in one class to make an argumentative text in one hour. the writing assessment of the test is taken from heaton (1990). ita juita applying cognitive code towards indonesian efl learners’ writing competence improvement 170 table 3. the recapitulation of pre-test average 440 min 223 max 660 median 440 modus 45 according to the table, it shows that the students’ writing competance in pre-test is still low because the average or mean only 40, median 40 and the mode is 45. while the minimum score for getting c-a in writing 2 of this university is 65-75. so the data shows almost students in this class are not able to write an argumentative text well. the assessor considers of generic structure, grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, fluency and the relevance of the text. the following are the calculation of the scores of the students in the post test. in this post test, the researcher or the teacher uses the same direction with the pre-test, asking the students to make an argumentative text. the teacher also uses the same evaluation of it, focus on the generic structure, grammar, vocabulary, mechanics, fluency and the relevance of the text. table 4. the recapitulation of post-test average 664.5 min 447 max 881.5 median 663 modus 663 the data above shows that the students’ competition in writing is getting better than the pre-test. it looks from the score enhancement which is increase 38% of the pre-test. the average of this post test is 64.5 with the higher score is 81.5, it means, it is better than the pre-test. the improvement of students’ achievement also can be proven by using the normalized gain (g) with is compared the pre-test and the post-test: according to the table 3.3, if g > 0.7, it means the improvement of teaching learning process to get the goal of learning is high, meanwhile if 0.3 < g ≤ 0.7, it means moderate in improving students’ ability in getting the target score. and the last, if g ≤ 0.3, it shows the improvement of students’ quality with using the teacher’s method is low. so that, according to the normalized gain criteria in table 3.3, the improvement of students’ writing skill after getting treatment by using cognitive code as the teacher’s method in tlp is moderate. because of the g is 0.7 or 0.3 < g ≤ 0.7. so, the researcher is able to state that cognitive code is a good enough method in improving students’ writing skill. in this classroom action research, the researcher provides questionnaire as one of instrument is used to get the students’ attitude toward the researcher methods in tlp. this questionnaire consists of five questions with 5 intervals and it is examined by using rating scale method. these questions divide into two kind of attitude aspect, it is cognitive and affective aspect. the researcher gives the questionnaire to the 19 students in researcher’s class, with the aim for responding the researcher’s method (cognitive code) in teaching learning process toward the students’ writing improvement. here is the table of the students’ attitude result: table 5. table of the students’ attitude total respondent 19 total question 5 option/ question 5 result from all questions 399 171 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee option in each question and the score: 1. strongly agree 5 2. agree 4 3. uncertain 3 4. disagree 2 5. strongly disagree 1 table 6. class interval interval class number interval 1 95 – 171 2 172 – 248 3 249 – 325 4 326 – 402 5 403 – 479 95 172 249 326 403 – 479 strongly disagree disagree uncertain agree strongly agree according to the data, the result of the students’ attitude toward cognitive code which the researcher uses in the teaching writing is 399. it means the students’ attitude toward cognitive code in improving their writing skill, is agreed of the students or 82% of respondents of this questionnaire agree because the score is 399, it means the result of the questionnaire is in interval 326 – 403 with the statement “agree”. this result is based on the students’ cognitive and affective aspect. however, the researcher is also going to explain every aspects of both influence of cognitive code toward the student’s cognitive and the student’s affective below: in the questionnaire, the researcher inserts three questions (no 1, 2, 3) related to the students’ cognitive aspect. if all of students give highest point in the three questions, so the total is 284. but according to the data, total for the students’ cognitive attitudes cognitive code method is 239. it means that the students’ cognitive increase 84% after the teacher applies cognitive code as the method in tlp. meanwhile, for measuring the students’ affective the researcher gives two questions in the questionnaire (no 4 and 5). based on the data scoring for improving the students’ affective attitudes cognitive code as the researcher method in teaching writing is 160. while, the maximal score if all of students give the highest score for each question the total is 190. thus, the percentage of improvement the students’ affective after the teacher applies cognitive code as the method in improving the students’ writing is 84%. this percentage is the same with the students’ improvement in their cognitive aspect. conclusion in applying cognitive code, the teacher provides opportunities to the students in expressing their opinions, critical thinking, and shows the students’ prior knowledge related to the material be discussed. thus, in addition to opening big opportunities to the students to be active learners, these ways also help the teacher to measure the students’ ability in the subject and assist the teacher to find out the solutions of the students’ problem in tlp. in this car the researcher uses some instruments research related to the cognitive code in writing class. they are students’ learning journal and the researcher journal. it is effective to help both students and the teacher in achieving objectives of learning in the class, in particular argumentative writing competence. beside that, the researcher ita juita applying cognitive code towards indonesian efl learners’ writing competence improvement 172 provides the other instruments such as questionnaires and tests. after about 2 cycles of the research, learning outcomes can be seen from the figure obtained through the acquisition of the post-test. in the post-test, the average grade has improved from 40 in the pre-test to 64.5 in post test. to see the percentage of students’ writing improvement, the researcher uses normalized gain. therefore, the normalized gain in comparing the pretest with the post-test is 0.7. it means that the percentage of the students’ writing is moderate. this number can be proven that the method enables students to improve their writing competence. the success of this method is also directly proportional to the questionnaire given to the students, based on the questionnaire that has been processed. it is stated that more than 82% of the students like the techniques or methods of this research in improving the quality or competence of the students in writing. it means that almost of the students interest the cognitive code as a method of tlp in the class. moreover, by using the method of cognitive code there is good improvement in students’ activeness in class discussion. it is caused of process and strategy in cognitive code approach. the strategies are asking a lot of questions, monitoring, discussing and reflecting the tlp to the students. in conclusion, after applying cognitive code there is good improvement in students’ writing, in that they are able to produce an english writing better. in addition, the students’ enthusiasm gets improving, caused by the cognitive code approach making the students to be an active processor. they also explained that to successful language learning and teaching is in understanding the structure and processes of the mind. this research provides a lot of discussion and many tools to monitor the students’ thinking way. the improvement of students’ ability in writing and the enhancement of the students’ attitude have proven that the cognitive code is good method to be applied in writing class. references alwasilah, a.c. (2011). pokoknya action research. bandung: pt kiblat buku utama. folse, et al. (1999). great essay. new york: hougthon mifflin company. fraenkel, j. r & wallen n. e. (2006). how to design and evaluate research in education. new york: mcgraw-hill companies,inc. halliday, m. k. et al. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar. new york: oxford university press inc. heaton, j. b. (1990). writing english language test. new york: longman inc. heo, et al. (2011). piagets egocentrism and language learning: language egocentrism (le) and language differentiation (ld). finland: academic publisher manufactured in finland. vol 2, no 3, pp. 733-739. retrieved on 7 january 2014 from http://www.google.co.id/ url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=w eb&cd=1&ved=0ccsqfjaa&url=htt p%3a%2f%2fojs.academypublisher. com%2findex.php%2fjltr%2farticle% 2fdownload%2f0204733739%2f3204& ei=_pesu6ogdtc uateoygqbq&usg =afqjcnfnwhdx0amxjsjr4si3yizn ua-x0w&bvm=bv.68445247,d.c2e.. hutchinson & waters. (1991). english for specific purposes. new york: cambridge university press. meltzer, d.e. (2002). the relationship between mathematics preparation and conceptual learning gains in physics: a possible “hidden variable ”in diagnostic pretest scores. a journal of american association of physics teacher. retrieved from http://o jps.aip.org/a jp/. retrieved on may,11th 2014. olson, c.b & land, r. (2007). a cognitive strategies approach to reading and writing instruction for english language learners in secondary school. a journal of research in the teaching of english: volume 41, no 3. online [available]: http:// www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/ 173 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee nwp_file/8538/booth_olson,_carol,_ et_al.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d. retrieved on january, 24th 2014. ormrod, j.e. (2009). psikologi pendidikan. jakarta: erlangga. pinter, a. (2006). teaching young language learners. new york: oxford university press. sundem, g. (2007). improving student writing skills. hungtinton beach: shell education. yuko, k. (2009). language learning perspectives: language and cognitive models. retrieved 7 january2014 from: http:// www.chat.kansai-u.ac.jp/publications/ tr/v6_2.pdf. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 93 problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development: a study in the internship program in eastern indonesia yakob metboki english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education science, artha wacana christian university, indonesia e-mail: jacobmetboki@ukaw.ac.id apa citation: metboki, y. (2018). problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development: a study in the internship program in eastern indonesia. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 93-104. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1498. received: 03-08-2018 accepted: 13-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: in the sense of running qualified teaching and learning, teacher education institutions place their student teachers at schools to experience real teaching practices through the internship program. this study aims to give a comprehensive portrait of problems the student teachers of english have when they develop elt materials and how the problems vary according to different areas. the present study applied qualitative method. it utilized survey as data collection technique. twenty-five student teachers are recruited as participants. having conducted the survey, the results showed that most student teachers have several problems in developing elt materials during internship program. the biggest problem lies on developing material for practicing grammar elements (2.98 level of difficulty). the participants simply felt it easy to develop material for grading and recycling, and supporting materials with ranging from 3.22 and 3.10 level of difficulty. the following problem lies on how the material promotes the development of language skills and communicative abilities. overall, the present study indicates that the student teachers are still lacking of grounded concepts on what and how to develop elt materials that fit to students’ needs. keywords: english language teaching; materials development; internship program; studentsteachers’ problems; survey. introduction the issue of having well-developed good material for mostly teaching and learning practices has received considerable critical attention in the mainstream platform of endeavor to prospective teachers’ quality improvement, in that, it embraces such an all-inclusive aspects. far weighting on the complexity the teachers face in preparing learning program is an issue. in 2015, bolitho undertook a study that attempts to find out the attainment of the educational quality of a teacher-training institute. he emphasized the importance of understanding the key issues that encapsulating the entire educational system in every program of activity is a very important element. the research results show that most of the teacher's students seem not ready. their teaching performance simply portrays the model of their language teachers. he also suggested that educational institutions should undertake more in-depth study to find out the preparation of prospective teachers and a number of aspects that affect the quality of education. the internship program or ppl (praktik pengalaman lapangan) is organized by most teacher centers at the faculty of teachers training and education sciences of higher education institutions in indonesia. generally speaking, this program aims to train prospective teachers to develop full and holistic teaching skills (parveen & mirza, 2012). while regular training nurtures student teachers with theoretical and technical knowledge from the first year up to the third year studying, the process of yakob metboki problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development: a study in the internship program in eastern indonesia 94 humanizing prospective teachers at teachertraining program will last with teaching placement, where they have real experiences ahead of getting into their own classrooms (kulkarni & hanley-maxwell, 2015). viewed through the basis of legal foundation of developing well-prepared materials of teaching that accounts for learning has been concerned in the indonesian government regulation (peraturan pemerintah) year 2005 number 19 on the national educational standards, particularly, on the standard of content. having this basis, teachers training faculties attempt to design the internship program for training student teachers beyond holistic mechanism. commonly, internship program covers several activities, such as field observation, the formation of skills, and real teaching practices. to undertake the internship program activities, there are requirements for the student teachers to have a set of basic teacher skills that would enable them to reflect tasks and roles of teachers from different unit level, starting from primary school up to high school level. as they are placed at the unit levels, there must be common internship program activities such as field observation and micro skill formation, then, prior to real classroom teaching applications. more extensively, most mentor teachers believe that the student teachers are more capable helpers to whom a number of task are obligated to do, including curriculum and materials development. their knowledge and skill will also enable them to prepare not only instructional plan, but also classroom teaching applications across the length of period of an internship program at schools. taking into account the efforts to improve the quality of graduates in higher education in indonesia, creating competent prospective teachers in their fields requires every teacher training institution to raise the quality control, including efforts to improve the capacity of student teachers according to academic profile. bearing this motion in mind, it is an essential need to keep this study into two parallel views. on the one hand, being a student-teacher (so called a prospective teacher), having experience in material development is, of course, one of the keys to successful field practice. on the other hand, teachers’ (also supervisor) experiences and understanding of their students is very important in materials development (patel, 2017). these understanding lay on the fact that good materials are needed for teaching, in that, teachers’ involvement in materials selection and development is necessary (richards, 2001). theoretically speaking, materials development refers to “all the processes made use of by practitioners who produce and/or use materials for language learning, including materials evaluation, their adaptation, design, production, exploitation and research” (tomlinson, 2012, p. 143144). while teachers are all required to cope with all these processes, it seems clear that considering them of practice must sound complex for non-native teachers of english, though. long before, there has been a report on indonesian english teachers at tertiary to utilize internationally published coursebooks as part of their supplementary materials (zacharias, 2005, cited in tomlison, 2012). mohammadi and abdi (2014) affirmed that “using only textbooks, from cover to cover, without any supplemental material is not the most satisfactory method for meeting students’ needs.” it can be assumed from this report that the teachers’ dependency on the books is high. to put it another way, their creativity in efl materials development and/or design is certainly challenging. as recommendation, teachers need to utilize more selected textbooks with adaptation in order to answer learner’s expectation in classroom teaching and learning chunks (badea & iridon, 2015; khodabakhshi, 2014). turning now to view on the education curriculum framework of indonesia, there is a number of documents contained in an instructional plan. two popular documents that hinder most teachers’ nights and days english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 95 teaching practice might be syllabus and lesson plan. in addition, they must prepare learning materials that are appropriate to their students’ needs. considering the importance of understanding to develop learning materials, especially english, becomes important for the writer as a supervisor to conduct an indepth study of the guidance behavior of the student teachers to prepare a comprehensive instructional plan, including learning materials development for efl classroom teaching practices. in this sense, pardo and téllez (2009, p. 174) summarized that “materials development requires designers to be reflective, resourceful and receptive (rrr) agents with regard to their teaching practice.” this is the premise that promotes this study to presents an instrument for a supervisor to know the readiness of the student teachers in every single internship program. once the student teachers are in charge of practicing what they have learnt in their home campus, there is always high tendency of expectation from their mentors and supervisors that they would establish good real teaching practices at school, covering good planning of instructional documents as well as successful teaching practices. in this sense, mentoring and advising shapes the student teachers’ teaching practicum plans. in so doing, both mentor and supervisor must work hand in hand in scaffolding student teachers’ projection. long before, richards (2001) claims that today’s researchers are much more cautious about the kinds of advice they give. what is more alarming from this claim is stemmed from the fact that there have been numerous amount of general disciplines that most researchers present which might not make the same practice for different others. the present study, therefore, attempts to personalize the problems the student teachers face in elt materials development and to provide a reliable source of information to the teacher education institution, teachers, supervisors, and in reflecting student teachers’ readiness in taking the internship program at school. initially, it characterizes an enquiry research under the umbrella of self-study as proposed by kells (1988) and carkin (1997) (cited in richards, 2001) with its main concern in the quality control of a running education program by teacher, students and administrators. previous studies on complexes in material development have treated student teachers across education settings. the complexes are vary, for example lacking of understanding on teaching materials development, limit amount of time the student teachers spent to consult to both their mentor and their supervisor (rahayuningsih, 2016; parveen & mirza, 2012). the need for survey in this respect is determined by the fact that most student teachers simply focus their teaching practicum on the range of time they would have passed through teaching practices in the classrooms rather than how their instructional material development are wellprepared. to put it another way, this study seeks to shape teacher education institution’ view of agenda to move up from technical to essential and significant maters that hinder student teachers’ professional growth. it is, therefore, the present study aims to demonstrate the problems faced by student teachers in efl materials development and how the problems are vary according to two different ranks (easy and/or difficult). stemmed from the background and the overview in relation to student teachers’ material development, this study aims to answer the following research question, “what are the problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development in the internship program?” method this study applied qualitative research (state, 2010), as it puts into importance the participants’ judgment and understanding of the core subject of the study – problems of efl materials development. yakob metboki problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development: a study in the internship program in eastern indonesia 96 the participants of the present study consist of 25 student teachers of english education study program of artha wacana christian university of kupang, east nusa tenggara province, indonesia. they are purposively recruited based on their homogeneity of taking the internship program in the even semester year 2017, where fourteen of them are placed at the secondary level, while eleven others are at senior high level. in an attempt to make each participant feel as comfortable as possible, they are, personally, approached and being convinced with significant aim that is to present a reflection about the underlying problems which attach to their internship projections. data collection technique is survey, which contains of statements adapted from the checklist for evaluating teaching materials prepared by cunningsworth (1995) cited in tsiplakides (2011). the survey required the participants to determine the statements, and how they are virtually vary by range of complexity according to aspects given. bearing this in mind, the participants marked their choices on likert scale ranging from 0 (very difficult), 1 (fairly difficult), 2 (difficult), 3 (fairly easy), 4 (easy), 5 (very easy). every chosen score represents the participants’ personal judgments on their level of complexity in regards of initiatives they might have planned in order to develop english material. having collected the data, there was a computation on each aspect to gain the average value. the value describes the level of difficulty as figured out in the form of charts. the datum seen from the charts are then analyzed qualitatively (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2007). results and discussion having conducted the survey, the results of the present study were shown in the form of charts and discussed according to eight main aspects. first, language content the first aspect embraces four areas, namely: 1. language form 2. language function 3. patterns of communicative interaction 4. use of various references or sources. the following chart depicts the trend of the participants’ response on language content. chart 1. language content the result shown in chart 1 indicates that the participants have no difficulty in developing language content on the materials. the problem they face simply falls on how to create materials with various references to cope with language elements. second, grading and recycling on this section, the participants give their response on how they develop materials under two headings, namely: 1. learning steps 2. students’ average level of language skills chart 2 depicts the result. chart 2. response on grading and recycling the trend seen from chart 2 traces that the participants found it moderate to grade and recycle elt material. third, presentations and practices of language elements the third aspect contains of two components, namely: english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 97 a. approach of learning material development. 1. the behaviorism theory of learning 2. the cognitivism theory of learning 3. combination of both underlying theories. 4. other influences. the survey result on this component is shown in chart 3. chart 3. features of approach of the material the result displayed on chart 3 shows that to some extent the participants are about to find it easy in internalizing learning approach beyond material development; somehow, the complexes seemed to reveal the fluctuation. b. characteristics of learning process. in this part, the participants are asked to judge on three areas, namely: 1. developing learning materials inductively (specific to general) 2. developing learning materials deductively (general to specific) 3. combination of the two ways above. chart 4 figures out the result. chart 4. making materials for learning process the easy motion of materials development peaks on only deductive process, while the other two components are turning down. fourth, practice grammar elements there are three areas to seek for the evidence on how students face problems in developing materials for practicing grammar elements, namely: a. material management 1. connecting material with previous learned one 2. making meaningful material (meaningful in context) 3. develop systematic material 4. introducing grammar rules 5. adapting the needs and interests of students 6. regular and easily controlled of its progress in accordance with allocated teaching time (sufficiently controlled) having the six statements above, the participants’ responses are drawn in chart 5. chart 5. material management the trend of the result shown above figures out two critical points among the statements. this infers that the participants’ complexes in motions related to management of materials development is intertwining. b. create material for practicing new language structures: 1. making sufficient material based on the scope 2. creating material that promotes various learning activities 3. make meaningful material 4. developing material in systematic way yakob metboki problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development: a study in the internship program in eastern indonesia 98 5. introducing grammar rules in the material 6. adapting the context in the material 7. adapting the material to the needs and interests of students 8. preparing material in organized way to easily control the teaching progress. the chart below describes participants’ present ability in material development for practicing new language structures. chart 6. practicing new language structures c. develop material for practicing new words: 1. develop material that introduces the way of learning english word 2. develop material that introduces the meaning of new words 3. develop learning materials that students can use words in several activities 4. develop material that introduces new words in unit obviously, the participants found it easy to develop material for practicing new words as shown in the chart below. chart 7. practicing new words developing material for pronunciation 1. that introduced the sound 2. that practice sounds 3. that introduces stress and intonation 4. to practice stress and intonation it seems clear from the chart below that participants felt it difficult to develop materials, which introduce sound and practicing micro skills of speaking. chart 8. developing audio based-materials fifth, develop language skills and communication skills the fifth area contains of three minor components, namely: a. freely using english 1. develop learning materials that encourage students to produce the language in a conversation 2. develop material due to time allocation for language production and practices. chart 9 figures out the participants’ present ability in developing materials for students to use english as the target language. chart 9. material for language production b. develop material with each single skill: 1. that meets to the nature of reading and its practice 2. that meets to the nature of listening and its practice 3. that meets to the nature of writing and its exercises chart 10 displays the participants’ choices. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 chart 10. material with one skill c. develop material with four integrated skills with: 1. summary of the four skills 2. introduction of real english use 3. exercises for students to recognize english use in immediate context. the trend in chart 11 shows how hard the participants faced in developing efl materials with four language skills. chart 11. materials with four integrated skills sixth, supporting materials there are four components under this area, namely: a. creating material that 1. introduces visual (visible) 2. introduce the recording 3. introduce native speakers 4. utilizes teacher's handbook 5. contains of grammar loads 6. contains of vocabulary list the result is shown in chart 12 chart 12. creative based-authentic materials b. create material for: 1. test before the material begins 2. progress tests 3. achievement of learning outcomes the result shows that the participants felt it easy to develop test-based materials. chart 13. test based-materials c. creating learning materials for assessment 1. assessing students’ need of english communication 2. assessing what has been learnt before the result appears in the chart 14. chart 14. evaluation based-materials d. other considerations to material development 1. fit to the standards 2. appropriate to the teacher's ability 3. fit to the ability of native teachers 4. addresses all shortcomings in the classroom. 5. figure out its characteristics 6. has summaries chart 15 exhibits the result with such an unsteady trend. chart 15. materials with other considerations yakob metboki problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development: a study in the internship program in eastern indonesia 100 seventh, create motivational material in this area, the participants are asked on how complex they face in developing materials that, 1. fit to the background of age, ethnicity, culture, student learning objectives, etc. 2. answer students’ expectations 3. has an interesting layout 4. encourage student participation in private 5. gives students sense of responsibility in person or group. 6. promote competition 7. introduce a particular culture 8. characterizes british or american culture the trend of participants’ choices is given in chart 16. chart 16. motivation based-material eight, conclusions and overall evaluation the last area comprises five statements from which the participants have in developing material that: 1. has learning objectives 2. answers learning objectives 3. has advantages for students 4. introduce problem solving 5. fits to a particular learning situation. chart 17 points out the trend. chart 17. material for conclusion the participants felt that they got difficulty in developing english materials when taking the internship program. the overall data is shown in table 1. initially, this study set out with the aim of demonstrating the problems faced by student teachers in efl materials development and how the problems are vary according to two different ranks (easy and/or difficult). there are several possible explanations for this result. on the aspect, the participants have difficulty in developing language content on the materials, particularly, how to create materials with various references to cope with language elements. if we now turn to the second aspect, grading and recycling, the participants felt it easy to develop efl materials that revealed the target students’ average level of competence. the next aspect of the survey was concerned with presentations and practices of language elements. it is somewhat surprising that no data was noted in this aspect to show the participants’ theoretical and pedagogical understanding in developing english materials prior to efl teaching and learning applications. leading to the fourth aspect, practice grammar elements, out of the four subaspects, the participants simply felt one subaspect is easy that is to develop material for practicing new words (easy), while the three other ones are considered difficult. on the fifth aspect of the survey, developing language skills and communication skills, the results of this study did not show any positive remark. while sts found it easy to develop material with each single skill (3.15), it is difficult for them to develop efl material for freely using english (2.98). the reason must rest heavily on that fact they are unable to integrate four integrated skill on materials development (2.77) in order to promote factual english practices. the next aspect is supporting materials. overall result shows that the average level of participants’ ability in developing english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 101 supporting materials is relatively easy with level of difficulty of 3.08. however, the trend shows that the other two sub-aspects, respectively, range at difficult level with 0.32 points between the lowest easy level and that of difficult level. the study survey on the seventh aspect concerns in participants’ ability in creating motivational materials. the most striking result to emerge from the data is that the participants are familiar with the target learners’ needs; however, they are lacking of ability in introducing cross-cultural barriers; for example, the materials with british and american culture. it is, therefore, the overall response to this aspect was difficult. in the final part of the survey, when the participants were asked to pose their judgments on their complexity in developing materials for conclusions and overall evaluation, the majority of participants responses ranged at the average level of 2.93, which is, of course, difficult. returning to the question posed at the beginning of this study, it is now possible to state that in general the participants encountered it as of an existing problem if they had to create well-developed materials for contextual efl teaching applications at schools, mainly, those in the south eastern part indonesia. the overall data of the current study is shown in table 1. table 1. overall result aspects level legend c. presentations and practices of language elements 2.62 difficult e. develop language skills and communication skills 2.77 difficult g. create motivational material 2.83 difficult h. conclusions and overall evaluation 2.93 difficult a. language content 2.96 difficult d. practice grammar elements 2.98 difficult f. supporting materials 3.08 easy b. grading and recycling 3.22 easy it is clear that overall aspects are felt difficult in terms of materials development. rooted from this view, the present study, then, provides additional evidence with respect to the trend of the overall conclusion with a range of fluctuation as shown in the chart 18. chart 18. trend of students’ problem rooted from the trend above, overall response to this survey was negative. the biggest problem is on materials for presentation and practice of new language items with their level difficulty of 2.62, followed by the next five aspects ranging between 2.77 and 2.98 or 36 points upper than the biggest problem. the participants simply felt it easy to develop supporting materials as well as those for grading and recycling. despite these findings, an empirical study indicated that st’s unpreparedness of teaching material with solely 8.5% brings problematic source for the classroom management (merç & subaşı, 2015). the study, then, described sts’ reflective repent on what they should have been aware of the problems prior to teaching practices. for holguín and morales (2014), having dept understanding on student teachers’ problem on materials development provides reliable input to enrich them in materials development for their professional extension. this result may be explained from different factors. one of the influencing factors is their lack of the grounded concepts on elt materials development. the most yakob metboki problems hindering student teachers’ elt materials development: a study in the internship program in eastern indonesia 102 striking result to emerge from the data is that student teachers need an alternative approach to personalize themselves as the ones with ground knowledge and skills, and so, mentoring and/or supervising might manipulate them through such a constructive pedagogic negotiation. it is believed that the negotiation would figure out such an encouragement between supervisors and student teachers to have collaborative planning (parven, 2012) and appropriateness of instructional materials (van den akker, 1998; ottevanger, 2001) cited in (gakki, 2012). the second factor is caused by lack of time they spent to share their ideas with both mentor and/or the supervisors. the other supporting factor is the number of incidental tasks from mentors that corrupt their time to work out of their organized instructional. in the same vein, materials design may take time and, so does, the cost to spend for; therefore, course books selection is necessary (nikoopour & farsani, 2011); of course, selecting the recommended books and/or materials from schools. the results of this current study, also, brings a reflection of the stated constraints they face prior to develop efl materials. more importantly, the reflection shapes a picture of need in engagement with strategy (s) that enable the student teachers in decision making processes when planning and/or creating english materials in appropriate to their target students’ need under the atmosphere of teaching practicum settings. conclusion this study found that generally the participants felt that they got difficulty in developing english materials when taking the internship program. the evidence from this study suggests that sts need more scaffolding from both their mentor teachers and supervisors. findings in this study are subject to at least three limitations. first, these data apply only to needs analysis on student teachers’ competence in efl materials development for internship program during the period. second, the sample size is purposively limited. third, it was not specifically designed to evaluate factors related to academic competences. the current study has gone some way towards enhancing our understanding of equipping the sts with theoretical as well as empirical view about curriculum and materials development that could make noteworthy contributions to efl materials development. the findings of this study suggest that mentor and supervisor should bring into form of negotiation that help guiding the student teachers to come away with a new perspective on the internship program as whole set of education practices in the mainstream of their placement period at school. conversely, there would chance to hold a hearing with the student teachers on what short of knowledge and skills they still need and/or what they really want to put into their classroom teaching and learning practices. it is believed that the hearings would account much for such a worth of doing professional adjustment of ideas while preparing instructional documents prior before their teaching practices. more practically, those of sts may be partnered with more capable others to work for materials design and/or development. by way of illustration, augusto-navarro (2015) exemplified that joining sts with graduate students, more capable others, brings about development in material designs. acknowledgment the author would thank the twenty-five participants of this study, and to the mentors who have shared their inspiring ideas to support this study. the author addresses his sincere gratitude to english education study program of teachers training and education science of artha wacana christian university for the grant to conduct the study. also, the author would appreciate the conelt 2018 conference for selecting this article for publication. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, 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(2014). promoting incidental vocabulary learning through verbal dramatization of words. english review: journal of english education, 3(1), 1-10 received: 12-10-2014 accepted: 29-10-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: despite the fact that explicit teaching of vocabulary is often practised in english as a second language (esl) classrooms, it has been proven to be rather ineffective, largely because words are not taught in context. this has prompted the increasing use of incidental vocabulary learning approach, which emphasises on repeated readings as a source for vocabulary learning. by adopting this approach, this study aims to investigate students’ ability in learning vocabulary incidentally via verbal dramatization of written texts. in this case, readers’ theatre (rt) is used as a way to allow learners to engage in active reading so as to promote vocabulary learning. a total of 160 diploma students participated in this case study and they were divided equally into two groups, namely classroom reading (cr) and rt groups. a proficiency test was first conducted to determine their vocabulary levels. based on the test results, a story was selected as the reading material in the two groups. the cr group read the story through a normal reading lesson in class while the rt group was required to verbally dramatize the text through readers’ theatre activity. then, a posttest based on vocabulary levels was carried out and the results were compared. the findings revealed that incidental learning was more apparent in the rt group and their ability to learn words from the higher levels was noticeable through higher accuracy scores. although not conclusive, this study has demonstrated the potential of using readers’ theatre as a form of incidental vocabulary learning activity in esl settings. keywords: incidental vocabulary learning, readers’ theatre, language learning introduction in a traditional classroom of english as a second or foreign language, it is common for teachers to adopt a translation approach in teaching vocabulary to the learners. translation is seen as a direct and explicit approach in introducing more words to novice learners. however, problems often exist in this method of teaching since translation may lead to problems in miscommunication (meidasari, 2014). despite that, more implicit approaches in teaching vocabulary are introduced in order to facilitate the comprehension of words, one of which is repetitive reading. research in second language learning has indicated that repetitive reading is responsible for vocabulary learning. repetitive reading would encourage the exposure of the vocabulary that would then enhance the word recognition (elis, 1995; schmidt 1993, 1995, 2001) of the targeted language for language learning. apart from that, it also exposes the use of vocabulary in context as to assist learners to get the meaning across. indirectly learners pick up the looi-chin ch’ng promoting incidental vocabulary learning through verbal dramatization of words vocabulary from the written text. this incidental vocabulary learning (dowhower, 1994) is best achieved when learners read aloud (fisher, flood, lapp, & frey, 2004; hickman, pollarddurodola,& vaughn, 2004; santoro, chard, howar& baker, 2008) story based text (mason, 2004; mcmaster, 1998; rashidi&ganbari adivi, 2010). in short, repeated oral reading of story based text in particular is highly favourable in driving learners to learn the language via incidental vocabulary learning. therefore, readers’ theatre (rt) would be the best way to achieve this as it certainly fulfil all the criteria mentioned above for language learning, particularly in terms incidental vocabulary learning. based on the review of previous studies, rt has shown to give impacts towards the improvement of learners’ fluency, reading motivation, reading attitude and reading comprehension. however, the impact of rt towards vocabulary learning in the language classroom has yet to be explored, albeit the pivotal role of vocabulary in oral reading has been recognized as lexical knowledge (srichamnong, 2009) and critical in language mastery (schmidt, 2008). despite that, previous research has pointed the significant impact of rt in terms of language learning, they are mainly focused on the impact of rt towards young children, elementary students and students with learning disabilities. not many studies have been dwelled into the possible students' educational level differences in explaining vocabulary learning via rt in the light of the second language classrooms among the university learners. in addition, without a satisfactory account of the vocabulary learning in the higher learning institution, the impacts of incidental vocabulary learning among the university students is “bound to end up stranded in an explanatory void” (cameron, 1997: 59). studying the vocabulary learning of the university students offers empirically-driven explanations that would inform the status of syllabus planning and would assist in the syllabus planning in the future, apart from enhancing the teaching and learning experience in the classrooms. eventually, incidental vocabulary acquisition via rt may also be applied across discipline which is not merely confined in language learning. studies also indicated that students who have poor academic performances particularly in english language learning is largely resulted by the fact that they are lacked in the interest in reading, poor reading habit and negative attitudes towards reading (akabuike & asika, 2012). the key for students not to read is perhaps they are demotivated by the challenges of decoding the meaning of vocabulary while reading. researches shown that oral reading and story based reading may assist vocabulary learning and comprehension, nevertheless, few studies explore the impact of rt in offering rooms for them to achieve better learning of vocabulary and comprehension orally, especially for students who are lacked of confidence and are have weak command of english. besides that, mraz et al. (2013) conducted a study on struggling readers by using rt in enhancing their fluency. the results were very encouraging that the leaners also showed greater interest in reading since they can inject some elements of drama in their rt. relevant studies in the field also inform that read-aloud narrative or story based text and repeat reading would be fundamental for incidental vocabulary english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee learning and comprehension. nevertheless, jenkins, stein and wysocki (1984) found that vocabulary is not usually taught in the classroom nowadays even though learning vocabulary helps in the comprehension of the reading texts. they also found that more frequent presentation in context increased the learning of vocabulary. therefore, it is hypothesised that rt can really help in vocabulary learning as compared to classroom reading as the exposure to the vocabulary in context is repeated; and students in the rt group should learn better from the students in the classroom reading group who are only exposed to the text once, regardless of whether they have any prior knowledge of the vocabulary. this study aims to investigate the use of rt (verbal dramatization of written texts) in promoting incidental vocabulary learning as compared to conventional reading lessons in the esl classrooms. the study was conducted to answer the following research questions: (1) what are the differences in the students’ accuracy scores between the use of conventional reading lessons and readers’ theatre? (2). to what extent readers’ theatre can promote students’ incidental vocabulary learning? in second language learning, research indicates that there is a strong bond between language learning and vocabulary learning. vocabulary learning enhances vocabulary knowledge and thus enables language use for the performance of language skills such as reading and speaking by the learners (nation &waring, 1997). on the other hand, learners’ vocabulary learning starts from ‘notice’ the vocabulary (elis, 1995; schmidt 1993, 1995, 2001). the more exposure given to learners to ‘notice’ new words would better enhance their vocabulary learning capability. since this word repetition is a favourable condition for vocabulary learning especially it is in contextualised manner (cain, 2007; jenkins, stein, &wysocki, 1984) and also playing a very important role in promoting incidental vocabulary learning (matsuoka & hirsh, 2010) thus, reading is accepted as a rich source for vocabulary learning. it is mainly because it provides learners the opportunity to ‘notice’ the words used in the different context repetitively in the reading text. it is also said the learning of vocabulary is incidental when they read extensively as the learners learnt the vocabulary that appear in the text even though the main purpose of reading is not to learn the vocabulary (swanborn &de glopper, 2002). incidental vocabulary learning is essential particularly in tertiary education. studies from koda (1989) shown that, an increase of reading proficiency is strongly attributed to increased proficiency in vocabulary (in matsuoka & hirsh, 2010). therefore, learners need to attain an adequate amount of vocabulary in assisting reading comprehension (hwang & nation, 1995; laufer 1991), in which it is one of the basic skills in academic settings for them to attain the world knowledge. another research done by rashidi and ganbari adivi (2010), also agrees with the notion of when the students get into the habit of learning words incidentally, wide range of genre may be incorporated in maximizing students' interest in reading. apart from that, cameron (1997) explains the vocabulary learning in the light of the second language classrooms among the university learners have been rudimentary. without a satisfactory account of the vocabulary learning in the looi-chin ch’ng promoting incidental vocabulary learning through verbal dramatization of words higher learning institution, the impacts of incidental vocabulary learning among the university students is “bound to end up stranded in an explanatory void” (p. 59).therefore, in short, vocabulary knowledge is strongly related with reading comprehension especially when the knowledge of vocabulary is acquired incidentally. studies have shown that, in most cases, oral reading is recognised to be more effective in terms of promoting reading comprehension and improving incidental vocabulary learning. recent studies have established that effective read-aloud contributes to students’ comprehension development (fisher, flood, lapp, & frey, 2004; hickman, pollard-durodola,& vaughn, 2004). meanwhile beck, mckeown, hamilton, and kucan (1997), suggests that textbased discussions as part of read-aloud may increase vocabulary learning besides improving comprehension particularly for students who struggle with decoding skills or who are just learning to read fluently, it would seem reasonable that comprehension strategies be taught through oral language opportunities (e.g. read-aloud). in the other studies, learners seem to have better incidental vocabulary learning and comprehension via oral reading when the genre of text is story based. rashidi and ganbari adivi (2010) reported from their study on the incidental vocabulary learning through reading short stories that the high school students demonstrated positive vocabulary learning when they were engaged in extensive reading. leaners’ interest grows greater when they are involved in various oral activities, such as storytelling (mason, 2004) and dramatic play (mcmaster, 1998). results from the studies done by santoro, chard, howard and baker (2008) strengthen the point that vocal reading enhances incidental vocabulary learning in assisting students to comprehend the text, narratives or story based texts. their studies reveal that students who gone through the read-aloud lessons are able to make a longer retellings specifically in narrative texts as compared to those who did not. besides, they also demonstrated a depth of text comprehension in their retellings and vocabulary knowledge, even though the main purpose of their readings are not learning the vocabulary. thus, it would be true that silent reading , which is commonly practised in most of the classroom reading lessons might not be able to help students to achieve good comprehension as it leaves no space for them to express what they have read and understood orally (young & rasinski, 2009). with that said, when comprehension is challenging normal reading classrooms, it also means it would be difficult for learners to learn the vocabulary incidentally in this context too. hence, it is believed that utilising readers theatre (rt) in the reading classroom would encourage incidental vocabulary learning and thus promotes better comprehension as learners need to go through repeated readings (dowhower, 1994) which facilitates the recognition skills of the words in the context of a narrative and enable them to express their reading vocally. rt is an approach that has been extensively used in the language classrooms, especially in the esl/efl classrooms, and it successfully worked on the young children, elementary students and students with learning disabilities. recent studies suggest that rt gives a great impact towards language learning english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in various areas. it contributes towards the improvement of learners’ fluency, reading motivation, reading attitude and reading comprehension. for example, among the middle school students, allinder, dunse, brunken and obermiller-krolikowki (2001) found that the comprehension scores for students (including students with learning disability) who were exposed to daily oral reading increased. similarly, chard, vaughn, and tyler (2002) found that the reading fluency of the elementary students with learning disability significantly improved after repeated reading interventions. a lot more studies have proved the success of rt in improving the attitudes (morris, 2011; rees, 2005; smith, 2011), confidence, word recognition (rinehart, 1999), fluency (rasinki, 2006) and motivation to read (carrick, 2001; rinehart, 1999). these researches have consistently shown that rt is a successful approach for language learning. rt is able to link reading comprehension and vocabulary learning as it improves reading fluency, accuracy, automaticity, prosody which further leads to good comprehension (rasinski, 2006). through rt, students are able to recognize the words and pronounce it without error (accuracy), and this is the first step of language learning. when students have the ability to read the words correctly, effortlessly and meaningfully via their finite cognitive resources (automaticity), they are able to perform a successful rt. on top of that, rt requires students not only merely read their script but with the ability to render the text with appropriate expressions and phrasing (prosody). this allows the readers to reflect their understanding of the script semantically and syntactically (comprehension). lastly, rt also helps students to become a more fluent speaker (fluency). since the key step to language mastery would simply start from vocabulary learning, reading is accepted as a rich source for vocabulary learning in a contextualized manner; and rt is much encouraging, especially for students who are lacked of confidence and are of lower proficiency in english. method the study involved 160 diploma students of various disciplines in a public university. they were divided equally into two groups – classroom reading (cr) group and readers’ theatre (rt) group. only those who have given their consent to participate in the study were selected for the study as the willingness of the participants were valued in order to avoid dishonest responses for the data collected. a proficiency test was conducted on both groups to determine their vocabulary level. the test items were adopted from laufer and nation (1999) database. based on the results, a suitable story was selected as their reading material. the cr group read the story through a normal reading lesson in class while the rt group was required to verbally dramatize the text through readers’ theatre activity. then, a posttest based on vocabulary levels (vocabulary test) was carried out. in general, laufer and nation (1999) have categorised words from frequently seen to least encountered into 5 categories (1k word level, 2k word level, 3k word level, 5k word level,10k word level and academic words level). thus, this test adopted 10 question items for each category of word level making it a total of 50 question items looi-chin ch’ng promoting incidental vocabulary learning through verbal dramatization of words from the database of laufer and nation (1999), http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/levels/ 2kc.html. participants were requested to only complete the spelling of the word instead of filling in the blank as the main purpose of the test is to examine the participants’ familiarity of the words of different levels instead of the proficiency of the language as a whole. the procedures in collecting the data needed for this study is illustrated in figure 1. proficiency test laufer& nation (1999) (to measure current vocabulary proficiency level) readers’ theater (rt) vocabulary test selected words from text by 30 classroom reading group (cr grp) (80 students)  (before reading activity) x  (to measure the effects of classroom reading in esl incidental vocabulary learning) readers’ theatre group (rt grp) (80 students)  (before rt performances)   (to measure the effects of readers’ theatre in esl incidental vocabulary learning) figure 1.data collection procedures. the results from the proficiency test for all 160 participants revealed the following accuracy percentage for each level (10 words for each level) as shown in table 1. table 1.accuracy percentage of each word level (n=160) levels accuracy 1k 92% 2k 66% 3k 56% 5k 35% 10k 27% in general, the proficiency level of the participants were largely between 1k to 3k word levels. only a small number of them were able to identified words beyond 3k level and the accuracy was also very low. based on this, it has provided a good indicator on the choice of texts to be used in this study. the most frequently encountered words in the story are to be chosen from the texts upon the majority agreement of the researchers as to enhance the common agreement of the most frequently encountered words in the story. the word form of the selected words from the story were ensured to be the same in the vocabulary test as a means to fulfil the criteria of contextualisation. for instance, the chosen word “pursue” is a verb in the written text, its word form remained in the vocabulary test while constructing the question items. the amount of words or test items for the test is not limited, all majority agreed words chosen are to be taken into the test. a frequency count on the correct items for the vocabulary test was done for both cr and rt groups. during the marking, minor spelling and grammatical mistakes are ignored as the participants tests /instruments english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee main purpose of both tests is to test their familiarity of the words instead of the proficiency of their language as a whole. the total scores of the vocabulary test of both cr and rt groups were then compared. results and discussion table 2. overall performance of the two groups scores non-rt group (n=80) rt group (n=80) total 933 1544 average 12.4 19.3 table 2 shows the scores obtained by the two groups of students. for the non-rt group, the total score obtained is 933 with an average of 12.4 for each student. as for the rt group, the total score obtained is higher with 1544 and an average of 19.3 per student. it means that out of 30 words in the vocabulary test, the non-rt group only managed to correctly use 12 words (40% accuracy) while the rt group managed to get 19 words (63% accuracy). the difference in the scores obtained by the two groups provides an initial positive outcome on the use of rt as a technique to increase vocabulary learning. table 3.students’ performance byword levels 1000 word family lists categories no. of words used in the test no. of words non-rt group scored higher than rt group 1k-3k high-frequency 16 words 0 4k-10k low-frequency 14 words 1 the 5 word levels were grouped into two main categories: highfrequency and low-frequency to allow clearer comparisons since only 30 words are used in the vocabulary test. for the high-frequency level (1k-3k words), the rt group outperformed the non-rt group in all 16 words while they only scored lower for 1 word in the lowfrequency level (3k-10k). the clearer breakdown of the scores obtained by the two groups are shown in table 4. the rt group managed to score significantly higher for low-frequency words such as eerie, snarled and quiver. clearly, verbal dramatization of the words during rt actually promote learning of words in context since most of the low-frequency words related to the similar “family” seemed to be retained by the participants in the rt group more than those in the non-rt group. this finding echoed the outcomes reported schmidt (2001) and rashidi and ganbariadivi (2010) in which repetitive readings allows better attainments of vocabulary and rt allows a greater active reading process since the learners need to learn to verbally dramatize it as well (rinehart, 1999). however, the word that the rt group scored lower than non-rt group is the word “scared”. 38 students from non-rt group managed to answer the word correctly as compared to 27 students from the rt group. interestingly, both groups scored lower than expected for the word. upon close checking, the participants used mostly “scary” which gives a different meaning. this somehow indicates the common confusion that students have in relation to the use of “scary” and “scared”. looi-chin ch’ng promoting incidental vocabulary learning through verbal dramatization of words based on the scores reported earlier, students in the rt group has shown greater grasp of the words in context. the accuracy scores of the rt group are also higher. this indicated the usefulness of readers’ theatre in encouraging learners to be more aware of the words they read. they do not merely memorise the words but the verbal dramatization of the words actually assist them in understanding the usage of the words. table 4.total cores obtained by the participants for each word words scores scores differences non-rt group rt group shake shadows blood pointy dark midnight died frightened roared fright thundered spell tombstones graveyard haunted willies giant creaked groaned howled scared skull shiver piercing eerie snarled skeleton quiver quake gripped 9 25 57 10 75 53 70 44 55 12 11 55 26 24 71 57 12 30 28 9 38 17 42 3 16 9 53 13 0 2 48 42 79 21 78 67 77 55 77 23 31 76 57 60 80 70 20 53 63 36 27 34 65 22 66 52 63 49 33 16 39 17 22 11 3 14 7 11 22 11 20 21 31 36 9 13 8 23 35 27 -11 17 23 19 50 43 10 36 33 14 * negative sign indicates non-rt group did better. conclusion thus far, vocabulary learning has been explored using different methods. however, little research has been done on using rt for vocabulary learning in the esl context. the findings revealed that incidental learning was more apparent in the rt group and their ability to learn words from the higher levels was noticeable through higher accuracy scores. this study has highlighted the potentials of rt to be included as part of the teaching pedagogy in order to enhance incidental vocabulary learning for beginning level students, comprehension for intermediate students and promoting language mastery for intermediate and english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee advance level students. the results may not be conclusive since it only involved the use of a small set of words, but it provides an apparent glimpse on the usefulness of verbal dramatization in the form of rt. it not only enables students to engage in active reading and learn new words, but also increase their motivation in 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(doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest dissertations and theses. (accession order no: aat 3483738) swanborn, m. s. l., & de glopper, k. (2002). the impact of reading purpose on incidental word learning from context. language learning, 52, 95-117 young, c., & rasinski, t. (2009). implementing readers theatre as an approach to classroom fluency approach. the reading teacher, 63(1), 413. person deixis in usa presidential nanda anggarani putri & eri kurniawan person deixis in usapresidential campaign speeches person deixis in usa presidential campaign speeches nanda anggarani putri study program of english language and literature, faculty of language and literature education, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: nanda.anggarani@student.upi.edu eri kurniawan department of english education, faculty of language and literature education, indonesia university of education, indonesia email: eri_kurniawan@upi.edu apa citation: putri, n.a. & kurniawan, e. (2015). person deixis in usa presidential campaign speeches. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 190-200 received: 10-08-2014 accepted: 03-02-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this study investigates the use of person deixis in presidential campaign speeches. this study is important because the use of person deixis in political speeches has been proved by many studies to give significant effects to the audience. the study largely employs a descriptive qualitative method. however, it also employs a simple quantitative method in calculating the number of personal pronouns used in the speeches and their percentages. the data for the study were collected from the transcriptions of six presidential campaign speeches of barack obama and mitt romney during the campaign rally in various places across the united states of america in july, september, and november 2012. the results of this study show that the presidential candidates make the best use of pronouns as a way to promote themselves and to attack their opponents. the results also suggest that the use of pronouns in the speeches enables the candidates to construct positive identity and reality, which are favorable to them and make them appear more eligible for the position. keywords: person deixis, presidential campaign speeches, barack obama, mitt romney introduction during the election year in a country, especially during the time to elect a new president of the country, the candidates for the presidential election will try to campaign in order to introduce as well as to promote themselves to the public. many ways can be used to do political or election campaign, one of them is through political campaign speeches. political campaign speeches can be an effective tool to achieve particular goals in an election. in addition, political campaign speeches can also be a way for bridging the gap between the speaker, or in this case the presidential candidates, and the audience or the electorate. furthermore, political campaign speeches can also be used to create particular effects, shared feelings, or connections between the speaker and the audience. the main aim of political campaign speeches is to persuade people to vote for a particular party or a presidential candidate (beard, 2000, p. 57). to achieve this goal, a politician or a presidential candidate usually tries to create a positive self-image by presenting himself positively and his opponents negatively (allen, 2007, p. 2). besides, the way the politician or the candidate refers to the audience can also be a very effective tool english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to achieve this goal (pearce, 2001, cited in allen, 2007, p. 2). related to this, a variety of ways can be used by the politician in order to present his identities by referring to himself, his opponents, and his audience. one of the ways is by carefully choosing person deixis that the politician or the candidate will use in their political campaign speeches. in political campaign speeches, person deixis plays a very important role. it can be used to represent the speaker’s identity through the way the speaker refers to himself, his opponent, and his audience. furthermore, person deixis can also be used to assign any positive aspect to oneself and negative aspect to the other which results in “positive selfpresentation and negative otherpresentation” or “the polarization of us versus them” (van dijk, 1995). therefore, person deixis can be a significant part of the speech and can have persuasive as well as strategic political functions. among the researchers who investigated the use of person deixis in political discourse are allen (2007), brozin (2010), gocheco (2012), inigomora (2013), and jarjeis (2006). they have found that politicians manipulate their use of person deixis or pronominal choice based on the context and the topic of their speeches, as well as their intentions or goals that they want to achieve through their speeches. the politicians manipulate the use of pronouns to create good effects on the audience, such as to highlight their achievements, to shorten the distance with the audience, to deny or distance themselves from the responsibility for particular political action, and to encourage solidarity. in understanding utterances, it is important to see the relationship between the language used and the context in which the utterances occur. by looking at the language used and the context in which utterances occur, people can understand the meaning of a particular utterance when they are communicating with each other. one of the examples which reflects the relationship between language and context is through the phenomenon of deixis. the term ‘deixis’ comes from the greek word deiktikos which means ‘pointing’ or ‘indicating’. deixis is one of the most basic things that people do with their utterances (yule, 1996). richards & schmidt (2002) defines deixis as a term for a word or phrase that enables language users to ‘point’, refer or relate their utterance to a particular time, place, or person (p. 147). in the same vein, finnegan (1992) defines deixis as “the marking of the orientation or position of objects and events with respect to certain contextual points of reference” (p. 140). according to those definitions, deixis may be understood as any linguistic form that enables language users to point, refer, relate, or anchor their utterances to a particular time, place, or person. according to grundy (2008), there are three fundamental criteria of deixis that are an essential part of every context of people experience: person, place, and time deixis. person deixis may be understood as any linguistic forms that can be used to identify the participants or other persons involved or mentioned in an interactive situation (strazny, 2005, p. 260). place deixis indicates the location of an entity referred to in an utterance relative to a particular point of reference in the context in which that utterance occurs. time deixis may be understood as “the orientation or position of actions and events in time” (finnegan, 1992, p. 144). the main focus of this study is person deixis. therefore, person deixis will be further elaborated in the following section. nanda anggarani putri & eri kurniawan person deixis in usapresidential campaign speeches person deixis is most commonly conveyed through personal pronoun. the most basic distinction in person deixis involves the distinction between the speaker, known as the first person (i), the addressee, known as the second person (you), and other important participants in the speech situation, neither the speaker nor the hearer, known as the third person (he, she, it, they) (cruse, 2000; yule, 1996). pronouns that refer to the speaker or to a group of people that includes the speaker, for example i and we, are called first person pronoun. meanwhile, pronouns that refer to the addressee or to a group of people that includes the addressee, for example you, are called second person pronoun. pronouns which refer to an entity other than the speaker and the addressee, for example pronoun he, she, it, and they, are called third person pronoun. first person plural pronoun which is represented by pronoun we often times has vague meaning. that’s why, most researchers and linguists made a distinction between exclusive we and inclusive we (see o'keeffe, clancy, & adolphs, 2011; yule, 1996). exclusive we is a first person pronoun which does not include the person being spoken or written to (richards & schmidt, 2002, p. 190). in contrast, inclusive we is used to refer to the first person plural pronoun which includes the persons who are being addressed (richards & schmidt, 2002, p. 190). the present study aims to investigate the use of person deixis in the presidential campaign speeches of two presidential candidates for 2012 u.s. presidential election: barack obama and mitt romney. method the study employs a descriptive qualitative method because the nature of this study is to unearth how person deixis is used in presidential campaign speeches and what indications or effects it has on the audience. however, this study also incorporates a simple quantitative method to calculate the number of each type of person deixis and its percentages. the data for the study were collected from the transcription of six presidential campaign speeches of barack obama and mitt romney during the campaign rally in various places across the united states of america in july, september, and november 2012. there are three speeches for each candidate. the full texts or the transcriptions of the speeches were downloaded from the website of the american presidency project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu. table 1 below shows the list of the speeches which were investigated in this study: table 1 the list of the speeches presidential candidate title of the speech date label barack obama remarks at a campaign rally in sandusky, ohio july 5, 2012 speech 1a remarks at a campaign rally in boulder, colorado september 2, 2012 speech 2a remarks at a campaign rally in lima, ohio november 2, 2012 speech 3a mitt romney remarks at the naacp convention in houston texas july 11, 2012 speech 1b remarks to the u.s. hispanic chamber of commerce 33rd annual convention in los angeles, california september 17, 2012 speech 2b remarksinwest allis,wisconsin:“realchangefromday one” november 2, 2012 speech 3b english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee obama and romney did their campaign rally simultaneously in july until november 2012. those three speeches are chosen as the samples in this study representing the beginning, middle, and the end of the campaign rally. those three speeches chosen as the samples are the first speeches which were delivered in each month during the campaign rally. the data are in the form of person deixis found in the speeches conveyed through the use of pronouns referring to obama, romney, and their respective parties. pronouns that were analyzed in this study are only pronouns indicating the subject of a sentence. the collected data are then calculated using some elements of quantitative methodology. the calculation includes the numbers of each person deixis and its percentages. then, each occurrence of person deixis is analyzed in order to see the indications behind its use by the presidential candidates. results and discussion person deixis in obama’s speeches table 2 below shows the frequency and the percentage of each type of person deixis found in obama’s presidential campaign speeches. table 2. the frequency and percentage of each type of person deixis found in obama’s speeches pronoun speech 1 speech 2 speech 3 total i 97 (55.75%) 66 (35.3%) 70 (44.3%) 233 we 73 (41.95%) 89 (47.6%) 77 (48.7%) 239 they 4 (2.3%) 20 (10.7%) 5 (3.2%) 29 he 0 12 (6.4%) 6 (3.8%) 18 total 174 (100%) 187 (100%) 158 (100%) 519 from the table, it is shown that obama mostly uses pronoun we in his speeches even though the frequency of the use of pronoun we is just slightly higher from the frequency of the use of pronoun i. based on this fact, it may be inferred that obama uses pronoun i and we in a quite balanced way. obama uses pronoun i and we to refer to himself, his family, his party, his campaign team, his administration during his first term as the president of the united states of america, the audience, and the whole nation of the united states of america. on the other hand, obama uses pronoun they and he to refer to his opponent, mitt romney, and his party. pronoun i mostly collocates with the verb want in obama’s speeches. in general, obama uses pronoun i to show his desires to make the country better as the presidential candidate in the election. obama tries to persuade the audience or the public that he is eligible to be the president for the second term by showing his sincerity which is implied in the statement of his desires. here are some examples of the use of pronoun i that indicates such meaning. 1. it's the reason that i'm running again for president, because i want to keep on fighting for families all across america .... (speech 1a, line 67-69) 2. i'm running because i want to make sure that every child gets a high-quality education, and that means i want to hire new teachers in our classrooms, especially in math and science. (speech 1a, line 124-125) 3. and i want to give 2 million more people the opportunity to get trained at a community college for jobs .... (speech 1a, line 125-127) 4. and i want to make college more affordable for every young person .... (speech 1a, line 127-129) nanda anggarani putri & eri kurniawan person deixis in usapresidential campaign speeches 5. that's why i want to cut the growth of tuition in half over the next 10 years. (speech 3a, line 125) 6. that's why i want to recruit 100,000 math and science teachers so our kids don't fall behind the rest of the world. (speech 3a, line 125-126) 7. i want to train 2 million americans at our community colleges with the skills that businesses are looking for right now. (speech 3a, line 126-128) meanwhile, the domination of the use of pronoun we shows that obama uses pronoun we with either exclusive or inclusive sense. obama uses exclusive we, which refers to himself and his administration during his first term as the president of the united states of america, in order to show that he and his administration have done the good deeds in the last four years. by employing exclusive we, obama wants to highlight his achievements in his first term as the president. it can be seen from the examples below. 1. i'm running because the health care law that we passed was the right thing to do. (speech 1a, line 146) 2. and you know what, we fought so hard to make that happen, and now the supreme court has ruled. (speech 1a, line 152) 3. we know families aren't going to be better off if we undo wall street reform that we fought so hard to pass, and that can prevent another financial crisis. (speech 2a, line 59-60) 4. governor romney wants to end the tax credit that we created to help families save up to $10,000 over 4 years on their college tuition. (speech 2a, line 116117) 5. we fought to pass that law for families like ryan's. (speech 2a, line 146) however, such use of exclusive we as seen in the examples above may also indicate that obama wants to share the responsibility of the actions that have been done with his administration during his first term as the president. the use of exclusive we that implies such meaning is mostly found when obama talks about some actions regarding the health care law and the tax law. obama uses pronoun we instead of pronoun i when talking about those things because he wants to state that the decisions regarding the health care and the tax were based on a consensus in his administration. he does not want to take the blame by himself if there is anything wrong with these issues because these issues are the issues that have been the debate between obama and romney. in addition, these issues are always being the main topics in the speeches of obama and romney during the campaign rally, and romney often uses these issues to attack obama in his speeches. meanwhile, obama uses pronoun we with inclusive meaning when he wants to refer to and include the audience and the americans in general in his speeches. in the inclusive sense, pronoun we is mostly used to indicate that there are many things, problems or challenges that should be done and solved, and that the americans can do, solve or achieve these things if they work together. in this sense, obama wants to act as the spokesman of america and wants to unite the people to achieve their shared goals. besides, he also wants to convince the audience that if he is elected president, he and the audience can work together to make the country better. here are some examples of the use of inclusive we in obama’s speeches. 1. but for all the progress we've made, we've still got a long way to go. (speech 1a, line 81) 2. but we've got to start working on it right now. (speech 1a, line 87) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3. we've got to move on that right now. (speech 1a, line 87-88) 4. that's the challenge we face. (speech 1a, line 88) 5. …, there are some things we have to do together. (speech 1a, line 122) 6. we could rebuild our roads, our bridges, our schools, renovate our buildings so that they're more energy efficient, …… (speech 1a, line 137-139) 7. we've got more good jobs to create. (speech 2a, line 207) 8. we've got more homegrown energy to generate. (speech 2a, line 207-208) in his speeches obama also talks about his opponent in the 2012 presidential election, mitt romney. obama uses pronoun they and he to refer to romney and his party. obama employs pronoun they and he to attribute negative things to romney and his party. here are some examples of the use of pronoun they and he found in obama’s speeches. 1. they have tried to sell us this tired, trickle-down, you're-on-your-own snake oil before. (speech 2a, line 65-66) 2. they spent millions to try to stop us from reforming health care, …. (speech 3a, line 176) 3. they engineered a strategy of gridlock in congress, refusing to compromise even on ideas that they used to support. (speech 3a, line 178-179) 4. governor romney promised that on his first day of office, he's going to sit right down and grab a pen and end obamacare. (speech 2a, line 140-141) 5. now, what that means is right away, he'd kick nearly 7 million young people off their parent's plan. (speech 2a, line 143-144)) 6. he'd take hope away from tens of millions of americans with preexisting conditions by repealing reform. (speech 2a, line 144-145) 7. yes, he hasn't offered a plan for the 33,000 troops who will have come home from this war by the end of this month. (speech 2a, line 168-169) overall, the analysis of person deixis in obama’s speeches has found that pronoun we is the pronoun which is mostly used even though there is only a slight difference in the frequency of the use of pronoun we and i. obama consistently uses pronoun i, we, they and he throughout all of his speeches in order to show his sincerity by explaining his desires or his future plans if he is elected president, and to attribute positive things to himself and his administration during his first term as well as to attribute negative things to his opponent, romney and his party. person deixis in romney’s speeches table 3 below shows the frequency and the percentage of each type of person deixis found in romney’s presidential campaign speeches. table 3. the frequency and percentage of each type of person deixis found in romney’s speeches pronoun speech 1 speech 2 speech 3 total i 71 (74.7%) 69 (57%) 64 (42.4%) 204 we 19 (20%) 41 (33.9%) 40 (26.5%) 100 they 0 0 1 (0.7%) 1 he 5 (5.3%) 11 (9.1%) 46 (30.4%) 62 total 95 (100%) 121 (100%) 151 (100%) 367 from the table, it can be seen that pronoun i is the pronoun which is mostly used in romney’s presidential campaign speeches with 204 occurrences. unlike the slight difference in the frequency of the use of pronoun i and we nanda anggarani putri & eri kurniawan person deixis in usapresidential campaign speeches in obama’s speeches, the frequency of the use of pronoun i and we in romney’s speeches shows a significant difference. there are 100 occurrences of pronoun i in the speeches or only a half of the frequency of pronoun we. romney uses pronoun i and we to refer to himself, his campaign team, his administration when he was governor of massachusetts, the audience, and the whole nation of the united states of america. in addition, romney also uses pronoun he to refer to his opponent, barack obama. there are 62 occurrences of pronoun he which refers to obama found in the speeches. there is also one occurrence of pronoun they which is also used to refer to obama and his party. romney uses pronoun i with two main purposes. first, romney wants to show what he has done when he was governor of massachusetts. he wants to attribute positive things to himself by showing that he has done plenty of good deeds when he was governor. besides, he also wants to highlight his achievements when he was governor in his speeches. by doing so, it may be understood that romney wants to brag that it is he who has done plenty of good deeds and therefore he wants to emphasize that he will do the same things if he is elected president, and this is related to the second purpose of the use of pronoun i which will be explained later. the examples below show the use of pronoun i which is used to indicate the good deeds romney has done when he was governor. 1. i promoted math and science excellence in schools, and proposed paying bonuses to our best teachers. (speech 1b, line 130-131) 2. … — i added a science requirement as well. (speech 1b, line 133) 3. and i put in place a merit scholarship for those students who excelled: … (speech 1b, line 133-134) 4. as governor, i vetoed the bill blocking charter schools. (speech 1b, line 149150) 5. so i joined with the black legislative caucus, and their votes helped preserve my veto, … (speech 1b,, line 151-152) 6. i helped put an olympics back on track. (speech 3b, line 45) 7. i helped turn my state from deficit to surplus, from job losses to job growth, and from higher taxes to higher takehome pay. (speech 3b, line 46-47) 8. accomplishing real change is not something i just talk about--it is something i have done. (speech 3b, line 49-50) second, romney uses pronoun i to reveal his future plans if he is elected president. romney states that he will do the same things as he did when he was governor if he is elected president. in this sense, romney often uses sentences with the pattern if i am elected president…, as president…, and when i am elected…. the examples below show the use of pronoun i to indicate such meaning. 1. as president, i will promote strong families — and i will defend traditional marriage. (speech 1b, line 80) 2. as president, i will show the good things that can happen when we have more — … (speech 1b, line 89-90) 3. on day one, i will begin turning this economy around with a plan for the middle class. (speech 1b, line 92) 4. should i be elected president, i'll lead as i did when i was governor. (speech 4, line 163) 5. from day one, i will go to work to help americans get back to work. (speech 3b, line 57) 6. on day one, i will act to increase the number of leases and permits to drill on federal lands. (speech 3b, line 59-60) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7. when i am elected, i will work with republicans and democrats in congress. (speech 3b, line 89) just like obama, romney also uses pronoun we with either exclusive or inclusive sense. romney uses pronoun we exclusively to refer to himself and his administration when he was a governor of massachusetts. romney uses exclusive we to highlight the achievements when he was governor. here it can be seen that pronoun we is, again, used to attribute positive things or qualities to the presidential candidate. here are some examples of the use of exclusive we found in romney’s speeches. 1. when i was governor, not only did test scores improve — we also narrowed the achievement gap. (speech 1b, line 137) 2. a significant achievement gap between students of different races remained. so we set out to close it. (speech 1b, line 128-129) 3. we balanced our budget in my business and at the olympics and every year i was in my state. (speech 2b, line 88-89) besides to refer to himself and his administration when he was governor, romney also uses pronoun we exclusively to refer to his campaign team. in this sense, romney uses pronoun we to ask the audience to stay with him and his campaign team, and to trust them in this campaign. here are some examples of the use of exclusive we which refers to romney and his campaign team. 1. we have to make our case to every voter. (speech 1b, line 11-12) 2. we don't count anybody out, and we sure don't make a habit of presuming anyone's support. (speech 1b, line 12) 3. we are so very grateful to you and to people across the country, for all that you have given of yourselves to this campaign. (speech 3b, line 8-9) 4. we thank you, and we ask you to stay at it all the way — all the way to victory on tuesday night. (speech 3b, line 1011) 5. we ask you to look beyond the speeches and the attacks and the ads. (speech 3b, line 16) in contrast, romney uses inclusive we to refer to himself, the audience, and the whole nation of america. romney uses inclusive we to encourage the audience that together they can make the country better. the examples below show the use of pronoun we to indicate this meaning. 1. let me note, if we do those five things, if we take advantage of our energy resources in full and we fix our schools and we open more trade and we cut the deficit and we truly champion small business, our economy is going to come roaring back. (speech 2b, line 142-144) 2. we can do better than this lackluster economy. (speech 2b, line 144) 3. we can create 12 million jobs and rising takehome pay again. (speech 2b, line 144-145) 4. together, we will put the nation on track to a balanced budget, .... (speech 3b, line 91-93) 5. we can do anything. (speech 3b, line 142) 6. four more days and we can get to work rebuilding our country,.... (speech 3b, line 153-154) romney also refers to his opponent, barack obama, in his speeches by using pronoun he. when using pronoun he, romney attributes negative things or aspects to his opponent, obama. romney associates pronoun he that refers to obama with some negative things, such as the ‘bad’ things obama did and the promises that obama could not fulfill during his first term as the president. the use of pronoun he to attribute negative things to obama is mostly found in the third sample of the speech of mitt romney which was delivered in nanda anggarani putri & eri kurniawan person deixis in usapresidential campaign speeches november 2, 2012. it may be understood as one of the ways for romney to attack his opponent and to convince the audience to vote for him since the speech was delivered just four days away from the election. here are some examples of the use of pronoun he which is used to serve this purpose. 1. he said he was going to cut the federal deficit by half; then he doubled it. (speech 3b, line 23) 2. he did not; rather, he raided $716 billion from medicare for his vaunted obamacare. (speech 3b, line 27-28) 3. he has not met on the economy, or on the budget, or on jobs, with either the republican leader of the house or the senate since july. (speech 3b, line 3132) 4. instead of bridging the divide, he has made it wider. (speech 3b, line 33) 5. in part, it is because he has never led, never worked across the aisle, never truly understood how jobs are created in the economy. (speech 3b, line 34-35) 6. he will send billions more dollars to his favorite solar and wind companies. (speech 3b, line 95) 7. he's offering excuses, i've got a plan. (speech 3b, line 148) the analysis of person deixis in romney’s speeches has shown that romney mostly uses pronoun i in his speeches. romney uses pronoun i to attribute positive things by highlighting the good deeds and achievements that he has done when he was governor of massachusetts. he also uses pronoun we as a way to attribute positive things to himself and his administration when he was governor. romney also makes the best use of pronoun they and he as a way to attack his opponent and to attribute negative things to him. comparison of obama’s and romney’s speeches from the analysis of person deixis in the speeches of obama and romney, it can be seen that the most noticeable difference lies on the type of person deixis which is mostly used in the speeches. obama mostly uses pronoun we, while romney mostly uses pronoun i. this is related to the different ways of highlighting their achievements and revealing their plans to the audience. in highlighting his achievements, obama uses exclusive we which refers to obama and his administration during his first term as the president. he does not claim that the achievements and the good deeds that have been done are the results of his works alone. he attributes the good and positive things not only to himself but also to his administration in his first term. this also indicates that obama strategically uses pronoun we in order to spread the responsibility of the works that have been done. he wants to share the responsibility if something goes wrong with the decisions or the works that have been done with his administration. in revealing his plans, obama mostly uses inclusive we which includes the audience and the whole nation of america. he wants to encourage the audience to work with him to make the country better. this use of inclusive we may make the audience feel that they can contribute to making their country a better place. it may also make the audience feel that obama appreciates their contribution to make the country better. therefore, obama may get more respect and sympathy from the audience and the whole nation of america, and this may contribute to obama’s victory in the election. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in contrast, romney mostly uses pronoun i to highlight the achievements that he has done when he was governor of massachusetts. romney wants to claim the achievements as the results of his works alone. he also wants to attributes positive things only for himself. in addition, romney also uses pronoun i to reveal his future plans if he is elected president. in this sense, romney uses pronoun i to state that he will work to make the country better if he is elected president. it makes him appear as if he did not need the help of the audience or the whole nation to make the country better. the domination of the use of pronoun i in romney’s speeches makes romney appear as an egotistic politician, who only thinks about himself. conclusion this study has shown that the presidential candidates make the best use of pronouns as a way to promote themselves and to attack their opponents. this study also shows how pronouns enable the candidates to construct positive identity and reality favorable to them and make them appear more eligible for the position. in addition, the use of person deixis can also be used to reveal the candidates’ attitude towards particular issues. furthermore, the way the candidates shift the use of pronouns according to the context in which they are used may serve as a way to appeal to various audiences and helps their ability to persuade the audience to vote for them. references allen, w. (2007). australian political discourse: pronominal choice in campaign speeches. in m. l. mushin. (ed.), conference of the australian linguistic society., (pp. 1-13). beard, a. (2000). the language of politics. london, england: routledge. brozin, m. (2010). the intentions behind barack obama's strategic use of personal pronouns. cruse, a. (2000). meaning in language: an introduction to semantics and pragmatics. oxford, england: oxford university press. finnegan, e. a. (1992). language: its structure and use, australian edition. australia: hartcourt brace jovanovich. gerhard, p., & woolley, j. t. (2012, september 2). barack obama: "remarks at a campaign rally in boulder, colorado". retrieved january 20, 2014, from the american presidency project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=102004. gerhard, p., & woolley, j. t. (2012, november 2). barack obama: "remarks at a campaign rally in lima, ohio". retrieved january 20, 2014, from the american presidency project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=102593. gerhard, p., & woolley, j. t. (2012, july 5). barack obama: "remarks at a campaign rally in sandusky, ohio". retrieved january 20, 2014, from the american presidency project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=101323. gerhard, p., & woolley, j. t. (2012, july 11). mitt romney: "remarks at the naacp convention in houston, texas". retrieved january 20, 2014, from the american presidency project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=101443. gerhard, p., & woolley, j. t. (2012, november 2). mitt romney: "remarks in west allis, wisconsin: "real change from day one". retrieved january 20, 2014, from the american presidency project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=103104. gerhard, p., & woolley, j. t. (2012, september 17). mitt romney: "remarks to the u.s. hispanic chamber of commerce 33rd annual convention in los angeles, nanda anggarani putri & eri kurniawan person deixis in usapresidential campaign speeches california". retrieved january 20, 2014, from the american presidency project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=102451. gocheco, p. m. (2012). pronominal choice: a reflection of culture and persuasion in philippine political campaign discourse. philippine esl journal, 4-25. grundy, p. (2008). doing pragmatics. london, england: hodder education. inigo-mora, i. (2013). pronominal choice as an interpersonal strategy. american international journal of contemporary research, 22-37. jarjeis, s. m. (2006). the distribution of pronominal selection of political speeches: pragmatic implications . college of basic education researchers journal, 254-282. o'keeffe, a., clancy, b., & adolphs, s. (2011). introducing pragmatics in use. london, england: routledge. richards, j. c., & schmidt, r. (2002). dictionary of language teaching & applied linguistics (3rd ed.). london, england: pearson education. strazny, p. (2005). encyclopedia of linguistics (vol. i). new york, ny: fitzroy dearborn. van dijk, t. a. (1995). what is political discourse analysis? in j. blommaert, & c. bulcaen (eds.), political linguistics (pp. 11-52). amsterdam, netherlands: benjamins. yule, g. (1996). pragmatics. oxford, england: oxford university press. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 125 teaching practicum: investigating efl preservice teachers’ self-efficacy fika megawati english education program study, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah sidoarjo, indonesia e-mail: fikamegawati@umsida.ac.id yuli astutik english education program study, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah sidoarjo, indonesia e-mail: yuliastutik@umsida.ac.id apa citation: megawati, f., & astutik, y. (2018). teaching practicum: investigating efl pre-service teachers‟ self-efficacy. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 125136. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1500. received: 19-08-2018 accepted: 27-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: self-efficacy is influential in determining someone's future competence. identifying self-efficacy towards pre-service teachers provides significant information about how competent they are in applying theoretical concepts of teaching in the real school. it also becomes reflection for the institution on the quality of courses related to tefl carried out in the implemented curriculum. accordingly, this study aims to investigate pre-service efl teachers' self-efficacy during the teaching practicum. this study involved 27 efl teacher candidates who conducted teaching performance in some different schools. to collect the data, online likert scale questionnaire was disseminated to the informants. the responses were interpreted through percentage and analyzed descriptively. the results indicated that generally the pre-service teachers' self-efficacy in terms of teaching skill, constructing and applying lesson plan, assessment, and classroom management, was quite high although some of them seemed to find difficulties in carrying out some classroom activities with the students. self-efficacy analysis towards efl learners‟ practicum gives implication to any institutional parties for preparing the better quality and program of future generation teachers. keywords: competent; teacher candidate; self-efficacy; reflection. introduction in certain situation, the following expressions perhaps ever appear to our mind or our students‟ "can i do it well? does my performance make my students understand? can i do better than him or her?" these expressions deal with self-efficacy. selfefficacy refers to people's belief that the specific target they have set can be reached successfully. as stated by sharp, brandt, tuft, and jay (2016) that self-efficacy is not based on one‟s actual ability to do a task, but rather on that person‟s perceived ability to complete that task. to know "how competent i am", self-efficacy is the right term to use or measure. it potentially becomes a determinant for someone's success in their future career including for teacher candidates. research on self-efficacy with various development and analysis gives a crucial contribution. plenty of studies have shown its effect and positive correlation. students' motivation in the classroom is a part of its influence (jaengaksorn, ruengtrakul, & piromsombat, 2015; ersanl, 2015). in addition, investigating self-efficacy can also give information regarding adolescents' variation in future education and future career orientation (mclennan, mcilveen, & perera, 2017). considering its great significance, self-efficacy becomes a neverending topic in scientific research. fika megawati &yuli astutik teaching practicum: investigating efl pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy 126 in the area of english language teaching, yazici & sur (2017) have investigated selfefficacy and epistemological beliefs between pre-service and in-service teachers related to problem-solving skill. in the same vein, jimenez-silva, olson, & jimenez hernandez (2012) found with the foundational knowledge through the use of meaningful and engaging pedagogical practices, the preservice teacher can increase their selfefficacy in teaching english language learners. in addition, çakır and alıcı (2009) compared pre‐service english teachers' self‐efficacy beliefs with their instructors' views of the teaching competence. the results indicated that the pre-service teachers' judgement is higher than the instructor. furthermore, in relation to teaching english reading, begum and hamzah (2018) give insight that policy to increase teacher efficacy is significant in order to improve student reading comprehension. the studies proved that selfefficacy closely relates to the pre-service teachers‟ life, and the result can be used for significant evaluation to provide better performance. from the previous studies, it appears that self-efficacy has the strength, and it needs to be explored more. however, the existing discussion has not talked much about selfefficacy during facing the most determining experience as teacher candidates, namely teaching practice program. in indonesian context, based on the curriculum of teacher education program, the institution applied teaching practice in the new platform. it is called internship program, and has three sessions with different credits to get in touch with school, magang i, magang ii, and magang iii. before the pre-service teachers face internship iii, they have to pass the previous two internships. the two programs have equipped the prospective teachers with the basic principles about school life and teacher' activities and responsibilities. in internship i, the teacher candidates have observed and analyzed school environment, officials, and facilities. internship ii assigned the students to conduct observation on how the teacher constructs the learning instrument and implement it in the classroom with full of activities and evaluation. with the two programs, it is expected that the pre-service teachers can build positive communication and adaptation with the school. consequently, when they take the internship iii (the biggest credits), they can perform more confidently and can manage the situation better. in short, the last magang has big role for the practitioners in shaping their teaching competence (professional, pedagogical, personal, and social) since they have to teach in front of the real students with the lesson plan consulted and with school mentor and institutional advisor. becoming efl prospective teachers is something challenging, especially when they face teaching practicum program in the real school with the real students and community. during this period, the student teachers share their knowledge in teaching situation according to the theories and the best practice they had ever read or seen (riesky, 2013). furthermore, the teachers need to comprehend the theoretical concept of teaching as well as english language. unfortunately, not all of the exposure is from the direct source of language. the knowledge about the language comes from non-native speaker teachers which some time has a different substance from what is expected. in another side, they need to transfer the english concept to the students that are supposed to be accepted in the community using the standard of the target language. therefore, the role of self-efficacy is crucial. when the pre-service teachers have moderate to high self-efficacy, they tend to be highly motivated and more creative in teaching (moradkhani, raygan, & moein, 2017). they will be less stressful when facing teaching time. however, it turns out to be a problem when they believe that their teaching competence is low. it affects not only the teaching performance but also to the respondents in that class. considering the urgency of understanding students‟ english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 127 competence belief to the quality of teaching, this paper presents the results of a study that examines self-efficacy of pre-service teachers in carrying out teaching practicum in internship iii program. exploring students' perception related to their teaching performance is also discussed to give some clarification regarding the findings. method the design used in this study was survey. the researchers selected pre-service english teachers purposively who became practitioners to teach english subject in school partners around sidoarjo, indonesia for accomplishing their internship iii. the program was implemented in several schools varied from junior high school, senior high school, and vocational high school. some of the institutions are state schools, while the others are private schools. the participants of this study consisted of 6 males and 21 females, and they were aged between 22-23 years old in their seventh semester. it was observed that only a few of student teachers had experience in teaching, particularly in english course. for data collection, online likert scale questionnaire was initially distributed to 30 prospective teachers of universitas muhammadiyah sidoarjo majoring in english education study program. nevertheless, only 27 student teachers responded. it was conducted on october 2017, mainly in the odd semester of academic year 2017/2018. from four main variable questions, the researchers elaborated it into 15 questions with 5 possible responses: strongly agree; agree; i don't know; disagree; and strongly disagree. agree statement indicates that i am capable to do the item, i don't know means the respondent is in doubt or not really sure that the activity is finished successfully, and disagree refers to i am not capable to do the item. the word strongly facilitates the response with high certainty. the items of question are adapted from kinnunen (2012). the data analysis was conducted by finding the percentage of the students' response in each question. afterwards, the response was classified based on the variable – teaching competence, lesson planning, classroom management, and assessment to know the general self-efficacy information of the students. results and discussion this part outlines results taken from the questionnaire responses. the questionnaire consists of fifteen questions in which six questions deal with teaching competence, two questions discuss learning instrument construction, particularly lesson plan, five questions deal with learning assessment capabilities, and two questions explore the classroom management. each part is connected to the related literature for discussion. self-efficacy in teaching english language skill, grammar, and culture teaching competence in demonstrating particular language skill at secondary school level takes a pivotal part in shaping an english pre-service teachers‟ performance. although in the curriculum it is not explicitly stated that the students need to master all english skills separately (it is more integrated), the student teachers who conduct teaching practicum have to perform the best to train the students how to use the language appropriately that can reflect the function of each skill. it is undeniable that when someone teaches language, the concept appears first in mind is how to make the students recognize the new language so that later they will be able to listen, speak, read, and write the target language for effective communication. language component such as grammar and cultural aspects also something that can be introduced to the students to strengthen their target language development. thus, question number 1 until number 6 exposed the students‟ efficiency in teaching english skills as well as grammar and culture. the detailed questions are described as follow. 1) i can efficiently teach oral communication in english (speaking) fika megawati &yuli astutik teaching practicum: investigating efl pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy 128 2) i can efficiently teach written communication in english (writing) 3) i can efficiently teach grammar in english (english component) 4) i can efficiently teach listening comprehension in english (listening) 5) i can efficiently teach reading comprehension in english (reading) 6) i can efficiently introduce and teach about different english speaking cultures (cultural aspect) 0 20 40 60 80 100 q1 q2 q3 q4 q5 q6 strongly agree agree don't know disagree strongly disagree figure 1. students' responses towards questions related to teaching competencies figure 1 shows that the students mostly agree with the statement. in other words, self-efficacy to teach english language skills, grammar, and english culture was relatively high. the top point is in response to number 5, namely the self-efficacy related to teaching reading comprehension. this response is in line with the most activities set in the curriculum that the students are exposed to learning based on the texts oriented first. even, in many assessments, the teachers tend to assign the students to read and answer reading comprehension questions. therefore, the pre-service teachers seem to have a lot of exposure from reading activities. from reading, they can create many activities in the learning process as well as develop learning materials from various references. through these programs, the pre-service at the same time have tried to enrich english literacy for the secondary level students. however, in figure 1 it also appears that there were respondents who mention disagree for question number four and six. in addition, strongly disagree was selected to answer number 6. this response indicates that listening and english culture information is not mastered quite well to be transferred to the students in the school. the pre-service teachers seem to have found difficulties in comprehending listening and cultural issue when they took the courses. thus, for them, the better decision is not to teach what they are not really capable of. competence in constructing lesson plan the next part is related to the capabilities of the pre-service teachers in developing their lesson plan and modifying the materials based on the students‟ need and the school curriculum. the two questions are formulated as follows. 1) making lesson plans is easy for me 2) i can modify my teaching materials to suit the student‟s need composing a lesson plan is a crucial activity in a pedagogical context. composing lesson plan involves many aspects for consideration. understanding the implemented curriculum and syllabus in the school become ones of the determinants to set the lesson plan format and content. thus, it is not something strange if in one area, the schools apply different curriculum. it depends on the readiness and human resources to support the selected curriculum to the school life. surprisingly, the response of competence in constructing lesson plan shows almost 20% of the respondents are incompetence. the self-efficacy was found at the moderate level. several factors were identified for this problem. based on the supplementary data, the participants admitted that they were still confused in comprehending how the lesson plan is english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 129 constructed. they just knew about promes (semester program) and prota (yearly program) in making a schedule for each lesson, and need more time to understand the concept before they make their own lesson plan to be applied in the classroom for specific meetings. next, the tendency of teaching too many grammatical theories make them eliminate time to train the students‟ english skills. from the lesson plan they developed, it seems that to build more interactive situation, the pre-service teacher could not show variation during the instruction. meanwhile, the ability to integrate the target structure into english language skill is significant to create meaningful learning as suggested by clark (2010) in the form of integrating grammar as a whole, not only writing skill. in addition, arikan (2009) promotes the importance of giving context in grammar course such as learning english grammar in relation to environmental peace education. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 q1 q2 strongly agree agree don't know disagree strongly disagree figure 2. the result of students' responses towards questions related to lesson planning to get more information about the lesson plan production process, the students were asked a question after expressing their competence through fulfilling the questionnaire. the result shows various ideas since the students relate this point with several aspects, yet the researchers have limited the relevant points dealing with how they worked with their lesson plan. question: "reflecting the teaching performance during micro teaching class, can you give me your opinion about the things that you find similar, different, or even new in the school?" response 1 “i found many differences in the lesson plan. i cannot apply my "previous" lesson plan, because the teacher has her own style and rule. also, i got problem while consulting with the school mentor because we were not taught clearly about the method, model, technique, and assessment that are suitable with k13." response 2 “the similar is the use of lesson plan in the teaching and learning in the classroom. the difference is the lesson plan because the school uses the revised k13. so, the teacher makes a lesson plan based on the revision of education ministry. the condition and situation are even new in the school.” response 3 “the similar is: in teaching-learning process, a teacher must have a lesson plan before he/she teaches or the class management to make the class enjoyable and give the students motivation.” “the different: in a real situation, they are many characteristics of students. this is the job for teacher on how to manage them and still make the class comfortable and enjoyable.” the responses indicate that there is no congruence in students‟ background knowledge to implement the applicable lesson plan. having clarified with the fika megawati &yuli astutik teaching practicum: investigating efl pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy 130 respondents, it is found that in their micro teaching classroom, they had used two different curriculums, ktsp and k-13 since at that time some schools in the regency have not been ready yet to shift their curriculum to the new one automatically. a year later, the condition changed. thus, in the field, the students had a different experience in developing the lesson plan. to face this condition, some pre-service teachers had been active in confirming the changes to their teacher based mentor as well as supervisor for the guidance. to achieve the good communication with those important people in this program, building good attitude becomes a pivotal consideration. in some pre-service teachers‟ reports, there was a statement that their communication with internship iii supervisor was not good, and it influenced the impression in conducting the whole activities, especially making a report. to know the appropriate materials for students, the ability to predict the students‟ need for learning is crucial. however, this ability is not that easy. mostly, the preservice teachers depend on handbook used in the class since they think that it will be beneficial for them in facing the exam. in addition to textbook adaptation, the preservice teachers had already implemented their classroom activities with media. most of them agree that visual media and audiovisual media can attract students‟ attention. self-efficacy in assessment the following classification in the questionnaire is about assessment. teaching practice does not complete without measuring the output of learning whether it is in the form of test or not. one of the ways to examine the students‟ progress is through assessment. therefore, in this study, the researchers asked the informants to share their opinion regarding the following statements: 1) i can use different types of evaluation methods in teaching 2) i can easily notice mistakes in spoken english 3) i can easily notice mistakes in written english 4) i know many different ways to correct students‟ mistakes 5) i can correct a student‟s mistake without lowering his or her motivation 6) 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 q1 q2 q3 q4 q5 strongly agree agree don't know disagree strongly disagree figure 3. the result of students' responses towards questions related to assessment the responses that need to be highlighted are agree, don't know, and disagree. although the general ideas go to the positive competence through their selection in agree and strongly disagree, there were several pre-service teachers felt that assessing students‟ english proficiency in the class is something difficult. thus, don't know and disagree option still appear. furthermore, familiarizing to some different types of evaluation becomes their problem in teaching. so far, a written test is often implemented. textbook-based evaluation is the best option to adapt or adopt. they just substituted the subject or the verb of the questions for adapting. consequently, it english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 131 provided ineffective test impact for teachers and learner. the principle of assessment itself is washback that provide interactive feedback for both teacher and the students. one thing to enhance washback effect is in the form of discussing and reconstructing the test performance for improvement. ren (2011) and pan and newfields (2011) put their similar concerns on washback effect on english test of the tertiary level students, but they took different kind of test. there is another kind of assessment, such as alternative assessment in the form of portfolio or performance. focusing on the portfolio, to get the optimal result, of course, a lot of sources are needed. for some school condition, it perhaps needs a long period to realize. facing the fourth industrial revolution, education also feels the impact. the existence of mobile devices influences the way teachers and students search for any related information for classroom activities. in this case, teachers do not need to be afraid of losing the opportunity to know the students' learning progress, and they can implement the alternative assessment in the form of e-portfolio (hung, 2012). self-efficacy in classroom management classroom management covers many things such as the concept of the physical environment of the class, teacher‟s voice and body language, mind stream lesson changes, teaching under adverse circumstances, and creating a positive classroom climate. the last part, there are two questions related to classroom management. the researcher focuses on the capabilities in handling the problems both from students and others that influence the learning process. 1) i can motivate even the most troublesome students to learn 2) i can efficiently solve problematic situations in the classroom 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 q1 q2 strongly agree agree don't know disagree strongly disagree figure 4. the result of students' responses towards questions related to classroom management the thing that can alter the pre-service teachers‟ mood when they conduct a teaching practicum is the students‟ behaviour. in line with this, riesky (2013) mentioned that student teachers spent their time to solve the students‟ problem in their teaching practicum in addition to managing their main job (teaching) during the program. with various ways of learning and personalities, the students of secondary level education still need much attention. although at their age they seem to be independent, changing condition in their environment sometimes hinders the success of learning. it forces the teacher to give a good example through their way of overcoming the problems. fortunately, based on the responses in this study, most of the pre-service teachers have quite high efficacy to handle any unexpected situation happening in the schools which have a big number of students in one class. ideally, one class consists of at most 2025 students in order to obtain a conducive situation. however, this regulation cannot be implemented in all areas in indonesia. even, to some schools which have limited classes, the number of students can be overloaded, fika megawati &yuli astutik teaching practicum: investigating efl pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy 132 around 40-50. in addition, if there is no rule in the classroom, the students normally decide their self-selection location to sit. sometimes, in their pattern, there is an unfair collaboration of a group. therefore, giving variation in seating arrangement probably gives an alternative way to bridge effective communication between the students and the teacher. the position the students usually select tends to influence their learning performance as well as teacher‟s perception toward the students (zhang, 2018). this case can be paid attention by the pre-service teachers to be more creative in controlling the class through seat location modification. from the pre-service confirmation, seating arrangement for conducting group work in english class is strongly needed since the students can mobile and share to each other in accomplishing english tasks. the results also indicate that the students work better and more confident during the activities done in a group. to give different idea, aliakbari and bozorgmanesh (2015) mention that teacher‟s assertiveness in managing classroom has positive relationship with the students‟ performance. based on the result of self-efficacy level in this research, the researchers comprehend that there were diverse obstacles in performing teaching practicum during internship iii that potentially make them unconfident to select the option i agree in certain teaching competencies. it is true that the most difficult student to teach is the learner who believes he or she cannot succeed. inconvenience they found during the program cannot be easily forgotten from their mind. this indicates that the lecturers of english teacher education study program have big homework to approach those who have low self-efficacy to have positive belief that they can teach better in the future through a lot of exercises and experiences. to make them have a high level of selfefficacy is not adequate if it is merely provided from tefl related courses taken before the program. the reinforcement is still highly needed during the practice especially from lecturer assigned as a supervisor in giving guidance for their better teaching performance. this can help the preservice teachers move a step higher in passing the bridge of self-efficacy. accordingly, an opportunity for educators to fix the unexpected situation dealing with low self-efficacy is through implementing the concept of a continuum of self-efficacy covering four important aspects, namely cautious, self-esteem, self-confidence, and perseverance (bray & mcclaskey, 2016). the role of internship iii supervisor also takes a pivotal point during that process. supervisors are expected to be a model in all conditions. they also need to be able to utilize methods and strategies or techniques that put the student teachers and their pupils at the centre of learning. being knowledgeable in subject matter and versatility in the facilitation of learning is also important. a supervisor is also a prudent manager of time and resources. therefore, in selecting the lecturers to be a supervisor, the faculty needs to select the candidates based on appropriate criteria in order to give maximum assistance to the student teachers during the practicum. it is also possible to open recruitment for the ones who are willing to implement their teaching knowledge in managing the preservice teachers. in addition, the supervisor is expected to be able to be a program planner and designer that will accommodate effective teaching practice. next, they need to have skill in using appropriate resources to stimulate and facilitate the development and assessment of teacher trainees during teaching practice. finally, after giving optimal guidance, at the end of the program, the supervisors are observers as well as assessors for student teachers. being an objective assessor is a challenging duty. for some period of being together with the student teachers, they can easily predict the quality of each trainee during accomplishing their teaching practice activity. besides, the progress will appear clearly if there is a good communication. thus, interact with student teachers about english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 133 their teaching experience needs to be maintained. supervisors in internship program have core tasks in completing their responsibilities. the first one is, of course, providing regular on-site observation of student teachers‟ teaching performance. through this direct visit, it is expected that the pre-service teachers will have more preparation. it will be better if the whole student teachers join seminar classes to prepare them and evaluate the success of teaching practice before they go to school. second, it is suggested that the supervisors also help student teachers to develop lesson plans which encourage an activity-based approach. to do this activity, they need to ensure that the concept of the syllabus and lesson plan construction is quite similar to the school concept. if it is too different, it will hinder their reporting process. assessing the student teacher‟s performance based on pre-established teacher performance standards is the big core task for internship supervisors. however, to encourage the student teachers to understand what they have done to identify the strengths and weaknesses, the supervisors can implement self-reflection or sometimes it is called self-evaluation in the form of student teacher‟s logbook/diary/journal. it is believed that student teachers logbook/diary/journal is meaningful media to obtain information on how prospective teachers think about and engage in the evaluation of their teaching performance. using teacher logbooks is also a tool for assessing transformative learning process in professional development (van meerkerk, 2017) in addition to developing adequate teaching competencies. to get visual performance, another study suggests to use video to support reflective teaching practice (impedovo & cheneval-armand, 2016). the second key player in teaching practicum is a school-based mentor. without the mentor‟s support, the prospective teachers will get many difficulties in the school. mentors are designed as the closest person in the school. everything dealing with the technical problems and implementation in the classroom setting is discussed with mentors. responsibilities of mentors vary, but the main goal is the same, namely sharing the practical knowledge of teaching profession to the student teachers. the responsibilities are assisting the student teachers to obtain competence in the various elements of the institution functioning, lesson planning, and classroom management (maphalala, 2013). furthermore, to gain effective mentoring process, adequate support service such as in-service training, mentor handbook, department of teacher education assessment/grading scale, regular communication and incentives is highly recommended (tshuma & shumba, 2014). conclusion to sum up, this present study shows that identifying pre-service teachers‟ selfefficacy when they conducted teaching practicum in internship iii is beneficial for faculty reflection in determining the content of supporting courses as well as selecting supervisors and communicating with schoolbased mentors. the responses clearly state that most of them agree to say capable of doing activities related to teaching english language skills as well as grammar and culture, lesson plan construction, assessment, and classroom management. however, there were also pre-service students who claim that they have moderate until low self-efficacy from their opinion that they don't know or disagree to answer the questions. of course, the factors varied based on their proficiency level and teaching experience. furthermore, this feedback can become the evaluation for the lecturers as well as the implemented curriculum to find appropriate strategies in assisting pre-service teachers to survive in the school for accomplishing teaching practicum program. this also reminds lecturers to be professional in transferring knowledge to prepare them in the field experience through updating information from scientific publications and fika megawati &yuli astutik teaching practicum: investigating efl pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy 134 attending some conferences to get broad insight in the scope of english language teaching. strengthening any courses related to teaching english as a foreign language theory and giving supportive guidance in shaping the teaching competence are truly needed for building a quality performance. for future researchers, it is important to have deeper investigation in another side of the implementation of internship (magang i, ii, and iii) as the response or feedback for the implementation of the current curriculum in indonesia. seeking the information of preservice teacher development models through an internship program in good universities is also recommended in order to encourage teacher education program in developing universities to enrich their knowledge and improve the model for gaining better prospective teacher quality. acknowledgment we would like to express our deepest gratitude to universitas muhammadiyah sidoarjo for the support through the institution grant in the scheme of basic institution research. references aliakbari, m., & bozorgmanesh, b. 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(2019). leech’s politeness principle in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka”. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 133-142. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1731. received: 08-01-2019 accepted: 11-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: lenong betawi is one of community theatrical performance that still exists. it has a significant role in criticizing current social life. this paper aims to find leech’s politeness principle in the lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka.” a story staged by sanggar surya kencana group and held by betawi culture institute. the method used was a content analysis by using politeness principle of leech. the percentage results of fulfillment politeness maxims obtained 12.28% for agreement maxim, 10.52% for tact maxim, 8.11% for sympathy maxim, 2.41% for generosity maxim, 1.97% for approbation maxim, and 0.87% for modesty maxim. it means that agreement maxim as the highest and modesty maxim as the lowest fulfillment politeness maxims in lenong betawi humorous dialogue. meanwhile, the percentage results of violation politeness maxims obtained 9.21% for agreement maxim, 2.63% for tact maxim, 13.81% for sympathy maxim, 4.16% for generosity maxim, 20.83% for approbation maxim, and 13.15% for modesty maxim. it means approbation maxim as the highest and tact maxim as the lowest violation politeness maxims in lenong betawi humorous dialogue. finally, it can be concluded that the violation politeness maxims is more found than fulfillment politeness maxims in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka.” keywords: fulfilment politeness maxims; humorous dialogue; leech’s politeness principle; lenong betawi; pragmatic; violation politeness maxims. introduction in pragmatics, there is two focus of attention, namely language use and speech context. one of speech context is humor which has a fairly central role in human life. humor is not merely as entertainment to release someone psychological burden, but also as a vehicle for social criticism of all forms of inequality that occur in the community. matwick (2017) said that humor and jokes are instruments for how social control is given and where self-identity is displayed. petraki and ramayanti (2018) argue that humor in the workplace is a tool for negotiating relationships and gender identity. the function of humor in indonesian business meetings reflects socio-political changes, including increasing women’s leadership positions and global influences. a unique form of inequality that occurs in society revealed in a humorous language and intrigued readers or listeners. according to dynel (2013), conversation humor is divided into two criteria, namely stylistic figures (e.g., metaphor, irony, paradox, punning or figurative) and pragmatic figures (e.g., jokes, banter, humor or humiliation). recently, the flow of modernization that hit indonesia cannot be stopped. many foreign cultures threaten indonesian native culture. one of them is lenong betawi as an asset of betawi culture. lenong is a part of the folk theater that still survives in globalization era. the use of humor in lenong betawi cannot separate from the stressful life of the betawi community. humor expressed as a manifestation of social criticism of the pressure that afflicts them. in general, humor in betawi culture is a manifestation of emotional expression and social criticism. therefore, humor serves as a counterweight to the souls of the betawi people. lenong betawi as a folk theater which is a mellow drama and contains traditional elements especially betawi culture. this performing art mailto:ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id mailto:f.indradewi@yahoo.com ninuk lustyantie & figiati indra dewi leech’s politeness principle in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” 134 developed in jakarta and surrounding small towns, such as tangerang and bogor. according to ayudia and yakti (2016), the existence of lenong betawi is currently endangered. despite its diminishing presence, lenong betawi still exists on several occasions. it cannot be separated from its fans. the following are some of the reasons that make lenong betawi endangered: (a) people in urban areas are more appreciative of modern art than traditional; (b) government actions that are considered inadequate to help preserving lenong betawi; and (c) lack of public awareness to preserve lenong betawi so as not to disappear over time. to preserve lenong betawi, the following steps can be taken, namely (a) lenong betawi inheritance must remain smooth from generation to generation and people’s understanding of art can be understood carefully; (b) the community must have an awareness of their sense of responsibility in maintaining their identity; (c) the government’s role in lenong conservation is also important through a more intense regulation on lenong betawi performances; and (d) the government can realize the lenong betawi inheritance scientifically, for example, in school lessons in the form of local content, or establish an arts senior high school. for this case, the researchers conducted content analysis by using politeness principle of leech to analyze the existence of lenong betawi in indonesia. according to tarigan (1990), pragmatics is closely related to the language use and speech acts. pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that examines the relationship between language and context encoded in the structure of language. pragmatics help humans speak and act in speech. pragmatics used to send a message or desire intended by the speaker can be conveyed precisely because it reaches a mutual understanding without having to violate the principle of politeness. misunderstandings and ambiguities can occur if the speech partner does not understand the signs and context in the ongoing conversation. therefore, speakers and speech partners need to examine the context of the conversation to determine what is the purpose of a sentence. it also indirectly explains that the existence of pragmatics is very closely related to context. hymes in pangaribuan (2008) argues that a speech act has background components, participants, goals, keys, topics, channels, genres or message content, and message forms. the speech acts have binding components so that the conversation can be more directed. heatherington in nadar (2009) states that pragmatic theories is divided into three types of speech principles, including illocutionary force, conversational principles, and presuppositions. regarding the politeness principle, lakoff in jaszczolt (2002) tends to unite politeness with the cooperative principle of grice and two rules of pragmatic competence, namely clear and politeness. the three rules of politeness include do not drop, give choices, and make opponents say feel good or friendly. leech in bousfield (2008) states that all things can be equal if speakers can minimize feelings of impoliteness and maximize a sense of politeness. the leech politeness principle is complementary to grice’s cooperative principle because it helps principle application in realizing social goals. the intended social goal maintains relationships and feelings with the partner. leech in jaszczolt (2002) proposed politeness theory combined with the cooperative principle of grice. it was found six maxims of politeness, namely agreement maxim, tact maxim, sympathy maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, and modesty maxim. nadar (2009) states that tact maxim demands participants to participate in minimizing the loss of others or maximizing benefits for others. according to leech (1984), tact maxim is based on the category of searle speech acts, namely directives and commissives. the element of humor in lenong betawi dialogue can be done by breaking the tact maxim, namely maximizing the loss of others or minimizing benefits for others. maxim generosity requires speakers to maximize losses for themselves and minimize benefits for themselves. the element of humor in lenong betawi dialogue can be done by breaking the maxims of generosity, such as maximizing self-benefits and minimizing losses to oneself. an approbation maxim requires speakers to minimize disrespect for others and maximize praise for others. the element of humor in lenong betawi dialogue can be done by breaking the approbation maxim, such as minimizing praise for others and maximizing disrespect or criticism for others. according to chaer (2010), a modesty maxim requires speakers to minimize praise to themselves and maximize disrespect to oneself. the element of humor in lenong betawi dialogue can be done by breaking the modesty maxim, such as maximizing praise for yourself english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 135 and minimizing disrespect or criticism for yourself. in agreement maxim, speakers and partners are required to maximize the compatibility between them and minimize incompatibility between them. the element of humor in the lenong betawi dialogue can be done by violating the agreement maxim, such as minimizing the compatibility between speakers and the speech partner and maximizing the incompatibility between the speaker and the speech partner. according to rahardi in supriyana (2012), cutting or even directly denying the words of the partners is an impolite act. a sympathy maxim demands each participant to maximize sympathy and minimize the sense of antipathy to the partner. the element of humor in the lenong betawi dialogue can be done by breaking the sympathy maxim, such as minimizing sympathy for the speech partner and maximizing the antipathy for the speech partner. thus, this study focused on the culture of jakarta (lenong betawi) and emphasized content analysis by referring to leech’s politeness principle. this analysis consists of six types of maxims, namely agreement maxim, tact maxim, sympathy maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, and modesty maxim to conduct this study, researchers tried to extract data from a lenong betawi performance held at the 2016 lenong betawi festival. there were 10 lenong betawi groups who participated in the lenong betawi performance parade. however, researchers chose a group called sanggar surya kencana with his play entitled “anak durhaka’ which was allegedly liked by the audience. it was shown from the enthusiasm of the audience who followed the story to be involved in dialogue with the climbers. the lenong betawi play entitled “anak durhaka” indicated to have fulfillment and violation politeness principle language. the fulfillment politeness maxims consider as a quiet conversation because it adheres to the basics of politeness maxims themselves. whereas, the violation politeness maxims create funny aspects and make the audience laugh because of the deviation in the rules of politeness that are not obeyed or violated. method this study aimed to examine the use of the politeness principle which includes the fulfillment and violation maxims in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka.” this qualitative research adopts a descriptive qualitative design. according to bogdan and biklen (2003), descriptive research is the characteristic of data in qualitative research because it was taken from documents, audiovideo recordings, transcripts, words, pictures, etc. the qualitative research implied a description of data that aimed to understand a social situation, events, roles, as well as interactions that are around us. bodgan and taylor in moleong (2002) defined qualitative methodology as a research procedure that produces descriptive data in the form of written or oral words from people and behaviors observed. this study used content analysis method. according to pamungkas (2010), content analysis is applicable to various studies including language studies which concern with analyzing content of certain matter through classification, tabulation, and evaluation. the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” which contain humor and other utterances was the primary data source. in addition, the data were also collected through observation, interview, and document analysis. the transcription results were then analyzed using work tables and analysis criteria based on the leech’s politeness principle. results and discussion lenong betawi entitled “anak durhaka” tells about a child named kimung from a respected family in the south tangerang area. even though his parents were very respected, kimung had a disrespectful nature. he and his friends rob his parents’ house several times to steal money that would be used for having fun. at the end of the story, kimung’s disgraceful act was discovered by his family and made him end up at the police station. the performance art has a duration of 53 minutes 9 seconds with a conversation context of 43 findings with 912 number of speech pairs. based on those data, the fulfillment and violation maxims got 465 findings. ninuk lustyantie & figiati indra dewi leech’s politeness principle in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” 136 figure 1. recapitulation results of the fulfillment and violation of maxim politeness in lenong dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” based on figure 1, it can be seen that the fulfillment maxims got 165 findings and violation maxims got 191 findings. the following is the acquisition findings of each maxim which is accompanied by examples of conversations that contain the fulfillment maxims. the fulfillment of politeness principle in the lenong betawi the fulfillment of agreement maxim in agreement maxim, speakers are required to maximize agreement with the partner and minimize disagreement with the partner. besides, if a speech partner feels disagree, then a statement that contains a partial agreement is needed. based on the findings, the fulfillment of agreement maxim got 56 findings or 12.28% of the overall appearance in the fulfillment of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 13, speech pairs 30: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan’s house. the situation became chaotic because kimung went and asked for money. then, there was a conversation between haji burhan, mother, and kimung on the topic of kimung who threatened his parents to give him money. (30) kimung: saya mau senang-senang ama tementemen saya pak. (31) ibu: iya tapi gak begitu caranya, tong… masya allah. in the utterance (31), there is a partial agreement to minimize disagreement with the partner. the agreement contained in the sentence, "yes, but it does not work that way ...". it can be interpreted that the word "yes ..." means that mother allows kimung to ask for money and have fun with his friends, then the word "...however,..." is an expression of disagreement because kimung’s goal of asking for money is to get drunk. thus, in the speech context 13 and speech pairs 30, there is the fulfillment of agreement maxim because the mother does not agree with kimung’s intention to ask for money to minimize the disagreement by using part of the agreement statement. the fulfillment of tact maxim in a tact maxim, speakers are required to minimize the loss of others or maximize benefits for others. besides, the tact maxim is also expressed in impositive or directive and commissive utterances. impositive speech or directive is intended to produce actions from the partner according to the direction of the speaker, such as ordering, asking, advising, and recommending. commissive speech is intended for the participants to take some actions in the future, such as promising and swearing. based on the findings, the fulfillment of agreement maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” got 48 findings or 10.52% of the overall appearance in the fulfillment of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 13, speech pairs 42: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan’s house. the situation became chaotic because kimung went and asked for money. then, there was a conversation between haji burhan, mother, and kimung on the topic of kimung who threatened his parents to give him money. (42) kimung: ah! ngapain pesantren kagak pinterpinter! (43) haji burhan: eh, belajar biar pinter. biar contohin ke orang sini yang baik. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 137 in utterance (43), haji burhan maximizes the benefits for kimung by advising kimung to study diligently to become an excellent example for residents. in other words, haji burhan uses directive utterances to convey his intentions to kimung. thus, in the speech context 13 and speech pairs 42, there is the fulfillment of tact maxim because haji burhan maximizes the benefits for kimung by using directive speech. the fulfillment of sympathy maxim in a sympathy maxim, speakers are required to maximize sympathy and minimize the sense of antipathy to the partner. it represents feelings of happiness and sorrow or joy. therefore, the sympathy maxim uses assertive and expressive speech. based on the findings, the fulfillment of sympathy maxims in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" got 37 findings or 8.11% of the overall appearance in the fulfillment of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 43, speech pairs 49: this conversation happened in the morning at haji burhan's house. the police appeared to disperse the fight; then, there was a conversation with the topic of the arrest of kimung and his friends by the police. abang, haji burhan, and the police agreed to bring kimung and his friends to the police station. the situation which had stiffened became more controlled by the police. (49) kimung: maaak… tolongin aye maaak…! (50) ibu: huhuhu… (mengangis melihat kimung) in utterance (49), mother maximizes sympathy for kimung who is captured by the police by crying over his son who is about to be imprisoned. in this speech, mother expresses her grief by using expressive speech. thus, in the speech context 43 and speech pairs 49, there is the fulfillment of sympathy maxims because mother maximizes sympathy to kimung by using expressive speech. the fulfillment of generosity maxim in a generosity maxim, speakers are required to maximize losses for themselves and minimize benefits for themselves. it contains the value of cooperation or mutual assistance between speakers and speech partners. based on the findings, the fulfillment of generosity maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” got 11 findings or 2.41% of the overall appearance in the fulfillment of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 37, speech pairs 10: this conversation happened at night at haji burhan's house. gedor, boy, and kimung entered the house sneaking up. mother and haji burhan who did not realize the appearance of the three people talked to the topic of an uncomfortable feeling. (10) ibu: oh gitu ya? (11) haji burhan: lah duit udah bapak siapin, kalau dia minta baek-baek pasti bapak kasih. in utterance (11), haji burhan minimizes profits for himself by preparing money to give to kimung. in this speech, haji burhan intends to give money to kimung on the condition that kimung asks for it in a good way. thus, in the speech context 37 and speech pairs 10, there is a fulfillment of generosity maxim because haji burhan minimizes the benefits for himself by intending to give money to kimung. the fulfillment of approbation maxim in an approbation maxim, speakers are required to minimize disrespect for others and maximize praise for others. it contains expressions of praise and politeness to the speech partner. based on the findings, the fulfillment of approbation maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” got nine findings or 1.97% of the overall appearance in the fulfillment of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 5, speech pairs 10: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. haji burhan met with mother; then, there was a conversation between haji burhan and mother on the topic of haji burhan which tempted mother. (10) ibu: buset, bapak… (11) haji burhan: lah iyalah ama preman… buset dah ibu mah dulu banyak yang ngelancongin lagi jaman ono mah. in utterance (11), haji burhan maximizes praise to mother by complimenting her because there were many people who liked mother until haji burhan competed with thugs to get mother. thus, in the speech context 5 and speech pairs 10, there is a fulfillment of approbation maxim because haji burhan maximizes praise to the mother. the fulfillment of modesty maxim in a modesty maxim, speakers are required to minimize praise for themselves and maximize self-disrespect or criticism. it contains expressions of euphemism (subtle), humble, and paradox. based on the findings, the fulfillment ninuk lustyantie & figiati indra dewi leech’s politeness principle in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” 138 of modesty maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” got four findings or 0.87% of the overall appearance in the fulfillment of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 30, speech pairs 30: this conversation happened at night in front of gedor's house. kimung wants to leave soon but boy and gedor block kimung's path. then, there was a conversation that boasted to each other that they were the rulers of the village. (30) kimung: oh… lo jago? (31) gedor: lah bukannya jago gua mah orang biasa. in the utterance (31), gedor minimizes praise for himself by lowering his heart which is considered a champion by kimung. in this case, gedor who was a village thug and famous for the silat champion humbled his heart by saying that he was just an ordinary person. in the speech context 30 and speech pairs 30, there is a fulfillment of modesty maxim because gedor minimizes praise for oneself by humbling himself. the violation of politeness principle in the lenong betawi beside the fulfillment maxims, there are violations of maxims in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka.” the violation maxims got 191 findings. the following are examples of findings and discussion of the analysis. the violation of agreement maxim in an agreement maxim, speakers are required to minimize the match between the speaker and partner and maximize the discrepancy between the speaker and speech partner. in other words, the partner becomes the party given the disagreement, incompatibility, and objection. this violation has the characteristic of using utterances that do not lead to approval if they feel disagree, reduce agreement by using expressions that do not contain remorse or agreement, and utterances that cut off the speech of their partner are also a violation of the maxim of consent. based on the findings, this violation of the agreement maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" got 42 findings or 9.21% of the overall appearance in the violation of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 27, speech pairs 7: this conversation happened at night in front of gedor's house. the boy pulled gedor slightly back. then, there was a conversation between boy and gedor with the topic boy asking whether kimung was gedor's brother. (7) boy: tanya dong, hai coy! gitu… (8) gedor: lah lu tanya orang mabok mah ora ngerti! in the utterance (8), gedor minimizes agreement with boy by refuting the suggestions given by boy. this is done because kimung is drunk, so he cannot give the right answer. thus, in the speech context 27 and speech pairs 7, there was a violation of agreement maxim because gedor minimized agreement with boy. the violation of tact maxim in a tact maxim, speakers are required to maximize the loss of others or minimize benefits for others. in other words, speakers become the beneficiaries. the utterance that occurs usually uses speech that does not contain the value of politeness and has the intention that the speaker does not give an option to take action. based on the findings, this violation of tact maxims in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" got 12 findings or 2.63% of the overall appearance in the violation of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 15, speech pairs 1: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. the situation returned to chaos because of a conversation with the topic of kimung who asked haji burhan and his mother for more money by encouraging haji burhan. (1) kimung: bapak, serahin duit buat gua. (2) haji burhan: kagak dah, bapak gak kasih dah, kemaren baru dikirim sejuta tujuh ratus ke mana?! in utterance (1), haji burhan minimizes benefits for others by not giving other choices because he does not want to give money to kimung. thus, in the speech context 15 and speech pairs 1, there is a violation of tact maxim because haji burhan minimizes benefits for others. another finding found in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" is that there are fulfillment and violation of maxims in one pair of speeches. there are nine speech contexts with ten speech pairs that have fulfillment and violation of maxims in one speech pair. to english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 139 complete the data information, the following is a discussion of speech findings. speech context 10, speech pairs 45: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. kimung went into the house drunk. then, there was a conversation between mother and haji burhan on the topic of trying to resuscitate kimung. (45) haji burhan: udah biarin jatoh ama anaknya biarin dah. (46) ibu: iya udah ah biarin bodo amat mau jatoh apa nggak. in utterance (46), mother maximizes the compatibility with haji burhan who agrees not to help kimung and maximize antipathy to kimung with a cynical expression. thus, in the speech context 10 and speech pairs 45, there is fulfillment and violation of maxims, namely fulfillment of agreement and sympathy maxims. speech context 13, speech pairs 26: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. the situation became chaotic because kimung went and asked for money. then there was a conversation between haji burhan, mother, and kimung on the topic of kimung who threatened his parents to give him money. (26) ibu: eh eh eh. (memelas kepada haji burhan) pak… duit katanya… (27) haji burhan: gak. jangan dikasih, jangan dikasih. (melepaskan ibu dari tangan kimung) dari pada lu minta-minta duit mending lu tidur dulu dah tidur… (terputus oleh kimung) in utterances (27), haji burhan maximizes antipathy and maximizes disagreement by prohibiting mother from giving money. besides, there is also the fulfillment of maxims because it maximizes benefits by suggesting kimung sleep. thus, in the speech context 13 and speech pairs 26, there are three findings of linguistic phenomena, namely violations of the agreement, sympathy, and tact maxims. speech context 13, speech pairs 32: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. the situation became chaotic because kimung went and asked for money. then there was a conversation between haji burhan, mother, and kimung on the topic of kimung who threatened his parents to give him money. (32) haji burhan: bapak lu, ini bapak lu… (menunjuk dirinya sendiri) (33) kimung: bapak saya orang baik! orang yang paling kaya se-tangerang selatan! in utterance (33), kimung maximizes praise for others by praising his rich father. while on the other hand kimung satirized his rich father but did not want to give him money. thus, in the speech context 13 and speech pairs 32, there is fulfillment and violation of maxims, namely the fulfillment of approbation maxim and violations of sympathy maxim. speech context 17, speech pairs 3: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. kimung again whined asking for money, so there was a conversation with the topic kimung asked mom and haji burhan for money for a spree. (3) kimung: (diam) (4) haji burhan: (menepuk bahu kimung) jangan malu-maluin orang tua, orang tua lu pan terkenal di daerah sini. in utterance (4), haji burhan maximizes benefits for others by giving direction to kimung. besides, there are also violations because it maximizes praise for himself for calling himself as a famous person. thus, in the speech context 17 and speech pairs 3, there is fulfillment and violation of maxims, namely the fulfillment of tact maxim and the violation of modesty maxim. speech context 38, speech pairs 19: this conversation happened at night at haji burhan's house. gedor, boy, and kimung were caught red-handed by haji burhan and mother. then there was a conversation with the topic of kimung and his friends threatening mother and haji burhan to surrender their property. (19) kimung: (berjalan mendekati haji burhan dengan sempoyongan) (20) haji burhan: buset, lu nyebut dah jangan mabok mulu! in utterance (20), haji burhan maximizes the benefits for kimung by asking him to be aware and not get drunk again. besides, haji burhan maximized criticism for others using the degrading utterances of kimung. thus, in the speech context 38 and speech pairs 19, there is fulfillment and violation of maxims, namely the fulfillment of tact maxim and the violation of approbation maxim. the violation of sympathy maxim in sympathy maxim, speakers are required to maximize the sense of antipathy to others and minimize sympathy for others. it contains expressions of antipathy or cynicism to the speech partners. based on findings, this violation of sympathy maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" got 63 findings or 13.81% of the overall appearance in the violation of politeness maxims. the ninuk lustyantie & figiati indra dewi leech’s politeness principle in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” 140 following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 12, speech pairs 5: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. the situation returned because kimung fell several times. then there was a conversation between haji burhan, mother, and kimung on the topic of advising kimung. (5) ibu: eeeh eeeh… aduh jangan begitu pak… (6) haji burhan: biarin dah lagian gua jadi sewot ama ni anak. gua sekolain tu anak dari tk sd smp sma ampe pesantren. in the utterance (6), haji burhan minimizes sympathy for kimung for being annoyed with his son's increasingly uncontrollable behavior. this was stated by leveraging his services as a father, but kimung responded with bad behavior. thus, in the speech context 12 and speech pairs 5, there is a violation of sympathy maxim because haji burhan minimized sympathy for kimung who increasingly behaved badly. the violation of generosity maxim in generosity maxim, speakers are required to maximize benefits for themselves and minimize harm to themselves. in other words, the partner becomes the loser. besides, the emergence of this violation is marked by the use of speeches that do not contain the value of cooperation or mutual assistance between speakers and speech partners. based on findings, the violation of generosity maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" got 19 findings or 4.16% of the overall appearance in the violation of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 17, speech pairs 4: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. kimung again whined asking for money, so there was a conversation with the topic kimung asked mom and haji burhan for money for a spree. (4) haji burhan: (menepuk bahu kimung) jangan malu-maluin orang tua, orang tua lu pan terkenal di daerah sini. (5) kimung: saya pengen foya-foya beh… pengen senang! ahahahaha… in utterance (5), kimung maximizes profit for himself by utterances that do not contain the value of cooperation by rejecting what has been expected from haji burhan and expressing his desire to have fun for himself. thus, in the speech context 17 and speech pairs 4, there is a violation of generosity maxim because kimung maximizes profit for himself. the violation of approbation maxim in approbation maxim, speakers are required to minimize praise for others and maximize disrespect or criticism for others. in other words, the speaker becomes the party given the praise. besides, utterances in violations of these maxims contain expressions of ridicule and condescension towards the partner and other parties. based on findings, violations of approbation maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" got 95 findings or 20.83% of the overall appearance in the violation of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 25, speech pairs 4: this conversation happened at night on the terrace of gedor's house. boy and gedor who were talking about how to make money were silent for a moment because they heard kimung singing while drunk. then, there were conversations between the three on the topic of asking for money to kimung. (4) gedor: justru itu gua ga punya duit! (5) boy: wah, orang kere nih. in the utterance (5), boy minimizes praise for gedor by calling him a man of kere. even if you see the previous statement, boy also has no money. thus, in the speech context 25 and speech pairs 4, there is a violation of approbation maxim because boy minimizes praise for gedor. the violation of modesty maxim in modesty maxim, speakers are required to maximize praise for themselves and minimize self-disrespect or criticism. in other words, the partner becomes a party given a sense of ignorance. besides, the emergence of this violation is characterized by the use of speech that contains expressions that are mocking, criticizing, and demeaning others. based on findings, the violation of modesty maxim in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" got 60 findings or 13.15% of the overall appearance in the violation of politeness maxims. the following is an example of findings and discussion of the analysis. speech context 1, speech pairs 2: this conversation took place at noon on the terrace of haji burhan's house. haji burhan entered the family room, then had a conversation with the audience on the topic of haji burhan who introduced himself arrogantly. (2) penonton: waalaikumsalam warohmatullahi wabarokatuh… english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 141 (3) haji burhan: alhamdulillah… (terdiam sejenak sembari menggeserkan kursi) saya yang disebut haji burhan. saya orang yang paling kaya di daerah tangsel. in the utterance (3), haji burhan maximizes praise for himself by revealing to the audience that he is the wealthiest person in south tangerang. thus, in the speech context 1 and speech pairs 2, there is a violation of modesty maxim because haji burhan maximizes praise for himself. from the analysis, the fulfillment and violation maxims got 465 findings. the percentage results of fulfillment politeness maxims obtained 12.28% for agreement maxim, 10.52% for tact maxim, 8.11% for sympathy maxim, 2.41% for generosity maxim, 1.97% for approbation maxim, and 0.87% for modesty maxim. it means agreement maxim is the highest and modesty maxim is the lowest fulfillment politeness maxims in lenong betawi humorous dialogue. the percentage results of violation politeness maxims obtained 9.21% for agreement maxim, 2.63% for tact maxim, 13.81% for sympathy maxim, 4.16% for generosity maxim, 20.83% for approbation maxim, and 13.15% for modesty maxim. it means approbation maxim is the highest and tact maxim is the lowest violation politeness maxims in lenong betawi humorous dialogue. it can be concluded that the violation politeness maxims is more found than fulfillment politeness maxims in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka.” the type of violation of humor consists of two forms, namely schematic (ontological) violations and content (reproach or not reproach) (purzycki, 2011). based on the analysis, violations of agreement maxims included in the form of schematic (ontological) violations, violations of tact maxims included in the form of schematic (ontological) violations, violations of sympathy maxims included in the form of content violations (reproach), violations of generosity maxims included in violations schematic (ontological), violations of approbation maxims included in the form of content violations (reproach), and violations of modesty maxims included in the form of violations (not reproach). conclusion in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka," there are 912 speech pairs and 456 findings for the fulfillment and violations of politeness maxims. it means that not all speech pairs have fulfillment or violation of modesty maxims because some of them are thought to be part of principle application maxims. an agreement maxim is the highest number of findings in the fulfillment politeness maxims. it showed from the percentage results of 12.28%. an approbation maxim is the highest number of finding in the violation politeness maxims. it showed from the percentage results of 20.83%. thus, it can be concluded that lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" contains expressions of ridicule, jokes, and degrading speech partners. therefore, lenong betawi dialogue entitled "anak durhaka" has many findings in the violations of approbation maxim. based on the conclusions, the researchers recommended for various academics to conduct further research on the principle of politeness in the lenong betawi dialogue. it implicated in learning to write a comedy-drama script by paying attention to the use of fulfillment and violation of politeness maxims. besides, this research can be followed up as a source of new information regarding the principle of politeness found in the lenong betawi dialogue entitled “anak durhaka.” reference ayudia, e. t., & yakti, r. p. (2016). eksistensi lenong sebagai aset kebudayaan betawi. retrieved on june 22, 2016, from http://mediapublica.co/2016/06/22/eksistensilenong-sebagai-aset-kebudayaan-betawi/. bogdan, r. c., & biklen, s. k. (2003). qualitative research for education: an introduction to theories and method (4 th ed.). new york: pearson education group. bousfield, d. (2008). impoliteness in interaction. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. chaer, a. (2010). kesantunan berbahasa. jakarta: rineka cipta. dynel, m. (2013). humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse. the european journal of humour research, 1(1). doi: 10.7592/ejhr2013.1.1.dynel. jaszczolt, k. m. (2002). semantics and pragmatics. great britain: pearson education. matwick, k. (2017). self-deprecatory humor on tv cooking shows. language & communication, 56. doi: 10.1016/j.langcom.2017.04.005. moleong, l. j. (2002). metodologi penelitian kualitatif. bandung: pt. remaja rosdakarya. nadar, f. x. (2009). pragmatik dan penelitian pragmatik. yogyakarta: graha ilmu. http://mediapublica.co/2016/06/22/eksistensi-lenong-sebagai-aset-kebudayaan-betawi/ http://mediapublica.co/2016/06/22/eksistensi-lenong-sebagai-aset-kebudayaan-betawi/ http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/ejhr2013.1.1.dynel http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/ejhr2013.1.1.dynel https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2017.04.005 ninuk lustyantie & figiati indra dewi leech’s politeness principle in lenong betawi humorous dialogue entitled “anak durhaka” 142 pamungkas, d. a. (2010). the quality of the english textbook used by international standard junior high school. unpublished thesis. malang: faculty of letters, state university of malang. pangaribuan, t. (2008). paradigma bahasa. yogyakarta: graha ilmu. petraki, e., & ramayanti, i. (2018). navigating the indonesian workplace hierarchy: manager's use of humour as a rapport building strategy. journal of pragmatics, 134. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2018.06.010. purzycki, b. g. (2011). humor as violation and deprecation: a cognitive anthropological account. journal of cognition and culture, 11(2). doi: 10.1163/156853711x568752. supriyana, a. (2012). prinsip kerja sama dan prinsip kesantunan dalam wacana humor mahasiswa. unpublished thesis. program studi pendidikan bahasa universitas negeri jakarta. tarigan, h. g. (1990). pengajaran pragmatik. bandung: angkasa. http://doi.org/10.1163/156853711x568752 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 159 id efl learning: an implication for learning internalization saniago dakhi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kristen indonesia, indonesia e-mail: saniagonias@gmail.com erni murniarti educational management, universitas kristen indonesia, indonesia e-mail: ernims3@gmail.com noh ibrahim boiliu prodi pendidikan agama kristen, fkip, universitas kristen indonesia, indonesia e-mail: boiliunoh@gmail.com mila falma masful prodi ilmu komunikasi, fikom, universitas sahid jakarta, indonesia e-mail: mila.falma88@gmail.com apa citation: dhaki, s., murniarti, e., boiliu, n. i., & masful, m. f. (2019). id efl learning: an implication for learning internalization. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 159-168. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1560. received: 20-01-2019 accepted: 29-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: it is plausible that the psychoanalytic approach holds an important role in exploring people’s personalities, the world of conscious drives. the human personality is categorized into id, ego, and superego, while consciousness is divided into three different provinces, namely unconscious, subconscious, and conscious. however, limited language teachers’ interest in exploring such beneficial approach to learning is found. to respond to such gap, a systematic literature review was employed with following phases: identification, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis. results revealed that four id efl learning characteristics are primitive personality, biological identity, an instinct to seek pleasure, and automaticity. hiding, covering, and undressing are the indicators of the primitive personality and are human biological responses to danger. on the other hand, the human senses, cognitive process, and speech organs define the efl learners' biological personality. as for the automaticity learning, it seems to be achievable by unconscious learning and good learning culture. the basic assumption is that a higher-level skill cannot be acquired unless a lower one has been automatized. applying such concepts, the characteristics of seeking pleasure to learn language, needs the creativity of efl teachers, delightful teaching, good teaching culture, and facilities as once efl learning automatized or internalized, enormous impact will be gained. keywords: automaticity; efl internalization; id; psychoanalysis; unconscious drive. introduction defining an internalization of english as a foreign language (henceforth efl) learning directs us to logan’s findings (1985). it was stated that the internalization is a process of learning something so that it can be used as a basis for production. to this view, the internalization is characterized as a step efl learners do for their language productivity and proficiency. it is based on the assumption that once the language is internalized, it can then be retained and retrieved when needed for communication. having internalized learning, so-called inner learning, requires an unconscious process. logan (1985) termed it as automaticity. the automaticity is defined as a control of one's internal psychological processes by external stimuli and events in one's immediate environment, often without knowledge or awareness of such control. such argument obviously implies two crucial concepts in the efl learning. these are ‘what’ and ‘how’ to control the efl learning process for entirely achieving intended learning objectives. the ‘what’ refers to psychological aspects which have to be controlled, and the ‘how’ refers to procedures to apply towards achieving it. there has been a strong relationship (believed by psychologists since the last century) between saniago dakhi, erni murniarti, noh ibrahim boiliu, & mila falma masful id efl learning: an implication for learning internalization 160 the automaticity and skill. logan (1985) stated that automaticity is a necessary component of skill as a higher-level skill which cannot be acquired unless a lower one has been automatized. in this regard, learning efl has to be started from the easiest material to the most complicated one. since the efl learning is not merely concerned with material, media and facility, curriculum, and learning policy, an account for approach to the efl learning is suggested to be considered. one of the classical theories from which the efl learning internalization discussed is psychoanalytic approach. such approach comprises three basic domains: id, ego, and superego. studies on psychoanalytic approaches to learning have been a longstanding topic to scholars across countries (gilmore & anderson, 2016; drakulić, 2014, passone, 2015, andrade, 2016). gilmore and anderson reported that psychonalytically-improved learning was achieved through a defensive behaviour performed by students and teachers in reducing enxiety. drakulić provided a summary of initial stage of a psychoanalytic development established by a viennese physician. it was concluded that a child must learn to control intrinsic as it provides a possibility to gain freedom. summarized by passone, it revealed that linkage between an assessment and incentives has made the education an even tougher event since it reinforced an effect of hegemonic educational discourse and reduced conditions for education to happen for a large portion of the brazilian population. finally, andrade studied a specificity of language in psychoanalysis. he argued that rationality and verbalization language exceeding its semantic function and representation system are not restricted to the field of the rationality and verbalization. aforementioned studies explored the connection between the education and psychoanalysis in general, an initial stage of psychoanalytic development, the psychoanalytic description on brazilian education assessment, and the specificity of language in psychoanalysis; however, no founded research is on an implication of psychoanalysis in general and id in particular for the efl learning. different from the previous studies, therefore, the present article aims at describing the conceptions of id. it also provides an account for considerations when they are applied in an efl teaching and learning process. method the present report is a descriptive-reflective study applying a systematic literature review method on the substance of id, one of the sigmund freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, and its implication for the efl learning. source of data was online documents indexed by scopus and google scholar. another important criterion of the selection of the data is citation. the four phases of the systematic literature review employed to analyze the data were identification, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis. however, a conceptcentric method was used to ‘identify and comprehend’ the published document, and a systematic matrix of literature review (murniarti et al, 2018) was administered to display findings. after that, they were synthesized, discussed, and interpreted using previous studies and related theories. though researchers acted as a key instrument to the study, establishing trustworthiness of the finding is obliged. to meet it, a twice-cycliccomprehension step toward the data was used to assure a result dependability. finally, a peer scrutiny of project and member check by applied linguists and psychologists was conducted to gain credibility of the finding. results and discussion human mental life is a longstanding study among scholars (lapsley & stey, 2012; schetz & szubka, 2012). a well-known study on such field was reported by sigmund freud. he argued that the mental life consists of three agencies such as id, ego, and superego. furthermore, those mentioned provinces are core centers of psychoanalysis, both a set of psychological theories and a group of techniques, each of which emphasizes the unconscious as an essential factor in human adaptation and behavior (lipner, mendelsohn, & muran, 2017). id as primitive personality the id is the oldest and most primitive psychic agency of human beings (lapsley & stey, 2012). it represents a biological foundation of personality. furthermore, it is a reservoir of basic instinctual drives motivating an organism to seek pleasure (lapsley & stey, 2012). supported by schmetz and szubka (2012), it was stated that the id is an unconscious repository of the basic instincts. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 161 such arguments indicate some fruitful implications. first, the id is primitive psychic agency of personality. hiding, covering, undressing, and other behavioral elements of minor relevance like confusion, fumbling, and screaming are credited to primitive behavior. he argued that those behaviors seem to originate from early developmental stages of human instinctive behavior as a reaction pattern in response to danger and stress. though avoidance is viewed as the primitive response, it was believed that it was applied as a technique to reduce a potentially detrimental impact of harmful situations. thus, the avoidance can indicate two contradictory interpretations in the efl learning. negatively it can be a primitive reaction of learning process, and partially reduces harmful feedback of a certain dangerous situation. moreover, contextualizing them in the efl learning, hiding is characterized by avoiding english class, english question-answer interaction, and cheating-in-exams. though there is a limited number of studies on avoiding english classes, it appears to cause students’ absenteeism (trotman, 2016). he reported, 109 students and 43 teachers had varying reasons and perceptions of why students were absent from language lessons. he argued that the absenteeism of turkish state university students (participants of the study) was largely due to logistical and personal problems. avoiding the english question-answer interaction is predicted by emotionality, conscientiousness, lower openness, and extraversion. accentuated by oosterhoff, shook, and lyer (2018), it was discovered that diseaseavoidance traits were correlated with greater emotionality (r = 0.19), conscientiousness (r = 0.08), lower openness (r = -0.110), and extraversion (r = -0.04). furthermore, francis and oliver (2018) who pointed out that the emotional responses are central to communicative decision-making, and the emotions reflect a conscious interpretation of affective responses explain reasons and functions of emotion in communication and interpretation. the cheating-in-exams refers to achieving a result by a dishonest method. the aforementioned unlawfulness is exhibited by both male and female students as it is not associated with socio-demographic characters (mcclain, gulbis, & hays 2018). confirmed by yaniv, siniver, and tobol (2017), it was discovered that there was no significant difference in cheating levels based on the students’ genders. however, they concluded higher achievers are bigger cheaters as the cheating of both genders was found to significantly increase with each achievement measure. additionally, the frequency of academic dishonesty across students' friends indicates that a closer friendship of efl learners with low grades increases the probability of cheating. similarly, the dressing and undressing are very interesting topics in the efl learning. a phenomenon of being undressed is rarely experienced in the classroom as it is a violence against teacher-student professional boundaries. interesting reports on undressing student during the efl learning, however, are discovered. reading whitbourne's (2016) work arguing that cloth functions to cover up human naked body defines a functional role of the cloth. it was also stated that desire for recognition is behind choices people make in their clothing, and striking individual differences in dress color perception is positively determined by their different interpretations of illumination cues to achieve color constancy (witzel, o’regan, & hansmann-roth, 2017). such views indicate two crucial implications in the efl learning. firstly, dressing is fruitful for socially avoiding a negative image, or unexpected audience’s reaction, towards the naked body during the efl learning. this is because the naked body, erotic body (knott, impey, fisher, delpero, & fedoroff, 2016), will interrupt efl participants’ attention and attitude on studying. secondly, efl students’ and teacher’s cloth types are mainly influenced by their purpose to be known sexy. more broadly, the primitive man tries to be rational, but he fails to be systematic; or he is systematic, but not rational. an implied meaning appears to be drawn then that the cognitivelyprimitive people fail either the systematicity or irrationality. the rationality is defined as a relation of conformance (efficacy) between preestablished ends of communication, and a means to reach them and to genuinely understand a thought related to other thoughts termed as the systematicity (symons & calvo, 2014). id as biological personality secondly, the id refers to a biological personality. farooq (2011) points out biological factors of personality are very important for a formation of human personality. as asthon (2018) believes that the personality is influenced saniago dakhi, erni murniarti, noh ibrahim boiliu, & mila falma masful id efl learning: an implication for learning internalization 162 by various fluids in the body, it also reminds us about biological bases of personality in learning. bringing them into the efl learning highlights that the efl learning is closely related to a biological capability that includes courage, coward, intelligence, and weakness (farooq, 2011). those so-called biological traits predict an achieved language learning. this is supported by hussel and laing (1967). they accentuated that an individual appears to hope to become capable only by processing a basic understanding of functions of body and ability to comprehend facts of a biological nature of learning. it means a basic ability to help the efl learners study the language skills is through an awareness of their five senses, brain, and organ of speech as those are functional to communication. there are five human senses: vision, touch, hearing, taste, and smell (macpherson, 2011). however, two senses are dominant over the others vision and hearing in the language skills. the vision received by sense organ of eyes, particularly the retina, is biologically treated to read a written discourse and perceive nonverbal language including physical appearance (i.e. attractiveness, clothes, ornaments, body shape, etc.), face and head (i.e. facial expressions, head nods, head shakes, gaze, etc.), gestures and posture (i.e. orientation of the body with respect to others, self-touching, arm folding, spontaneous hand movement), vocal (prosody, intonation, vocalizations, pauses, voice quality), and space and environment (i.e. mutual distance, spatial formation, pattern of movement, etc.), vinciarelli (2017). on the contrary, hearing helps the language users listen to and comprehend spoken language. the brain disputably holds a fundamental function to efl acquisition, production, and comprehension. though brain structure does not necessarily predict differences in language task performance (etchell et al., 2018), the brain is exclusively used to acquire and learn the language. it is rooted from a view that language is a reflection of the brain. as a reflected brain, there is no language acquisition without the brain function. the brain in language production is traced through a concept that it is a stored reference or linguistic concepts (borghi, barca, binkofski, & tummolini, 2018). this is to say that linguistic meaning exists in the human mind. in other words, the only means to associate referent, existing world of concept, and sign, and linguistic symbol is the brain. another account for brain and language is that language learning, for the first time in adulthood, has marked effects on brain language processing (mayberry, davenport, roth, & halgen, 2018). this suggests, therefore, that language also influences the brain development. lastly, the awareness promoting language users’ biological personality is the organ of speech. this is in conjunction with what has been explained by johar (2016) that sound uniqueness, a drive to distinguish one personality from another, is caused by size and shape of vocal cords. such argument indicates at least two fruitful implications. firstly, the sound uniqueness produced by the efl learners characterizes their biological personality and forms their speaking efficiency. secondly, the only instrument to make oral communications happen is speech organ. id as instinctual drive to seek pleasure human instinctual need is to be well-being. though the individual still does complicated and painful work, his or her strength is usually grounded from an expected satisfaction. it is interesting to note that a displeasure is a basic need to avoid. stated by xu and du (2018), it was reported digital libraries’ quality in chinese universities significantly affected user’s satisfaction and loyalty. it indicates that being delightful, by library's quality that may include teaching atmosphere and attractive learning materials, to learn efl probably makes students satisfied and continue to learn. another equally important indicator of the pleasure in the efl learning context is welldesigned schools that has a correlation with learning achievement. reported by raj et al. (2015), it was emphasized well-designed school, a novel schooling intervention in the state of karnataka in india, had a positive impact on learning outcomes of poor rural children and those with socially-disadvantaged backgrounds. referring to tews, michel, and noe's (2017) finding that fun activities were significantly related to learning from others and noninterpersonal sources testifies the previous argument. conversely, it is important to notice that an increasing experience will weaken the delight and satisfaction (ahrholdt, gudergan, & ringle, 2018), a nature of the human mind which needs dynamic external stimuli. in the same way, motivation (carreira, 2011; dakhi & damanik, 2018) and attitude towards learning are two english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 163 crucial attributes to the id efl learning. it is in line with alhodiry’s argument (2016) that motivation is an inseparable aspect in the efl learning. the previous concept suggests that efl teachers be creative, a response to avoid boredom and maintain a stable joyful learning environment (raj et al., 2015). however, a notion of creativity and motivation are still debatable. most notably, the creativity, so-called making (giannakos, divitini, & iversen, 2017), is not merely to be a new name, but required to be problem-solving, design thinking, collaboration, and innovation. on the other hand, özütürk and hürsen’s (2014) report supports the debate on the notion of motivation by female and male english learners. more precisely, the female students’ belief for english language learning motivation score was higher (m=4.16, sd=.727) than that of the male students’ (m=3.82, sd= .538). moreover, the results show that there is a significant difference between female and male students’ motivation in english language learning environment (t=40.623, p<0.05). the dynamic of efl learning was also supported by alhodiry’s argument (2016), which concluded that most students had an intrinsic motivation, meaning distinctive degrees of internal motivation found, whereas there were some variations in the level of extrinsic motivation among the students. id as automaticity unconscious learning the language learning internalization and automatic (logan, 1985) process of learning, to some extent, are interchangeable. two fundamental things to understand in the internalization and automaticity are unconsciousness and culture. the automaticity is predicted by unconsciousness as the internalization is an instinctual property of language learners, and the automaticity is understood as a predictor of skill advance mastered (logan, 1985). in a medical study, cooksley and holland (2017), and holt, sarmento, and goodman (2017) stated that unconsciousness is a medical emergency. another equally important report by sanders, tononi, laureys, and sleigh (2012) is that the consciousness, connectedness, and responsiveness are three distinctive physical and psychological reactions of mankind. it was emphasized that awaken people are those who are conscious, connected, and responsive, and no ‘non-rapid eye movement' are experienced by conscious, connected, and responsive people. finally, only a conscious learner can have a ‘rapid eye movement’. table 1. consciousness, connectiveness, and responsiveness in wake and sleep states consciousness connectedness responsiveness awake nrem sleep rem sleep yes no yes yes no no yes no no *nrem = non-rapid eye movement sleep, or a low-wave sleep in the night when subjects are often unconscious; rem = rapid eye movement asleep contextualizing it in the efl learning, therefore, the unconscious drive holds an important role in learning. more broadly, it was argued that the non-consciousness influences the perception and interpretation of the social world. awan (2017) supports this view saying there is a teachers' dire need to be aware of the more powerful nature of unconscious drives of the efl learners than a surface power of their conscious selves. this is caused by the fact that the unconscious drive is the source of all psychic energy and a primary component of personality. more precisely, an account for an unconscious is a process in which the motivation and emotion, decision making, and social psychology are determined. this process has been a longstanding focus on educational researcher studies. some of these are kuldas, ismail, hashi, and bakar’s (2015) work. they concluded that all leaners did not always have a conscious awareness, control, and intention to learn. though it is plausible that there is no efl learning goal achieved without conscious process, the previous argument strengthens that subliminal efl learning is powerful. it means the learning automaticity and unconsciousness are enormously useful to meet a natural learning, a technique to thoroughly achieve an intended goal, as once it is internalized, it can then be retained and retrieved when needed for learning. saniago dakhi, erni murniarti, noh ibrahim boiliu, & mila falma masful id efl learning: an implication for learning internalization 164 in addition to the previous account, it was also concluded that the social interaction, evaluation and judgment, and the operation of international goal structure seem to be achievable without an intervention of conscious acts of will and guidance of process. this seems to conduct when we judge someone through his or her face. bargh et al (2012) suggest that a powerful form of preconscious automaticity for the impressions and other important judgments we make about other people concern the immediate appraisal of faces. in this regard, the efl learning as a social interaction of both student-student and studentteacher, to some extent, is probably to be conducted unconsciously. this means highfrequency words are more likely automatic than low-frequency ones. similarly, logan (1985) also confirmed that the automaticity is a necessary component of skill as higher-level skill cannot be acquired unless the lower one has been automatized. wang et al. (2018) claimed that in addition to the challenges of highly variable of non-native, learner, speech and noisy real-world recording conditions, spontaneous spoken english requires any automatic system to handle disfluent, non-grammatical, spontaneous speech with the underlying text unknown. three effects of automaticity on language are reduction in reaction time, load effect, and dual-task interference. therefore, creating unconscious teaching atmosphere of efl is likely to be functional and influential. consequently, efl teachers have to consider practical procedures of teaching for which learning internalization is accessible to any language learners. the learning automaticity can be achieved by controlling one’s internal psychological processes through external stimuli and events in one's immediate environment without knowledge or awareness of such control. additionally, it was suggested automaticity is produced by training subjects under consistent mapping conditions. secondly, both internalization and automaticity are formed by culture and traditional behavior. it is because culture can shape automatic mental processes as well as controlled reasoning. the shaped automatic, reflective, mental processes by culture according to corr (2010) are fast, coarse-grained, ballistic (implicit/procedural learning), and prenonconscious. unlikely, controlled processes are slow, fine-grained, deliberative (explicit/declarative learning), and often accessible to conscious awareness. the table 2. differentiates between automatic and controlled processes. referring to it, some implications for efl teaching determining natural learning (amstrong, 2011) are then drawn. firstly, the automatic efl learning runs fast in a non-conscious mode of process which suggests that the implicit knowledge and instruction, and procedural teaching method are the finest content and procedure of automatic efl learning. the implicit leaning proceeds without making demands on central attentional resources. a contribution of the implicit learning on reading reported by drouillet, stefaniak, declercq, and obert (2018) is that the implicit learning facilitates the understanding of literal expressions. on the contrary, controlled both cognitive and learning process are slowly conducted as it is a conscious process. on the other hand, the explicit language learning is necessarily a conscious process and is generally intended as well. table 2. dual-process models of behavioral control (modified from corr, 2010) models indicators automatic fast coarse-grained ballistic (implicit/procedural learning) pre/non-conscious controlled slow fine-grained deliberative (explicit/declarative learning) conscious learning culture another equally important implication of culture is the understanding of language meaning. shimizu, lee, and uleman (2017) reported that culture functions as an automatic procedure for making meaning. to schoenmakers (2012, p. 67) culture is a web of meaning. aforementioned arguments result in two implications for language, i.e. procedure and treasure. first, culture is a systematic and automatic procedure for which language meaning is communicated. it is systematic as making an inference is formed through receiving, identifying, comprehending, and responding, and it is automatic since a retrievable mental concept of words is used to comprehend the received messages. secondly, english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 165 culture appears to be a treasure of references, stored concepts, in the human mental process due to human experiences are entirely stored in the human web of thought. ten considerations that appear central and critical in culture are symbolism, value, authority, order, ceremony, love, honor, humor, beauty, and spirit. it is known that daily actions are the symbolic culture. moreover, as studying language at symbolic level is inseparable, there are two basic senses of symbols in language specifically when we are reading, namely sign and image. the sign is a representation of a thing the pattern of words, a centrifugal direction of the words and the things they mean. the image is a symbol of sense realized in the words, a centripetal movement of the words to a larger pattern of context. the value, an everyday practice embedded in the stream of social interaction (thornberg & oğuz, 2013), in efl learning is very substantial since the taught and learned teaching materials are derived from recorded social values. it means the fewer values the education offers, the sooner teaching and learning culture ends. intrigued by the urgency of value in education, it is then suggested that the values have to be imparted by either teacher and parents (kaur, 2015). another crucial predictor of culture is authority of efl teachers. the authority is related to power, but not equivalent to it, and is opposed to violence, coercion, argumentation, and laughter (haugaard, 2017). despite the fact that argument and laughter, a powerful signal of social acceptance (ritter et al., 2015), will lower the authority, the argumentation is likely central to cognitive reasoning and laughter holds a key role to joyful learning. supported by kim and ho (2018), it was stated that humor and laughter influenced learners’ interactions with the game, the teacher, and classmates. moreover, an order is likely identical to graded efl learning. to this view, mohd and saiden (2015) claimed that students have received increased reading skills after they were taught with graded reading materials. rare to find a relation between ceremony and efl teaching, two previous studies conducted by hewson and rowold (2012) and wang (2015) shed light on them. the ceremony, discovered by hewson and rowold (2012), did not enhance participant’s physical and emotional quality of life, but it had a positive effect on spiritual and mental one. on the other hand, it signifies ideology, morality, and faith of the efl learners (wang, 2015). as learning is obliged to be fun, it is expected to be a fear-free process for which relationship among participants of efl learning and connections among disciplines are thoroughly protected. having harmonious connections result in love (karandashev, 2015) of learning. the love of learning is ‘wanting to learn’ with a certain tolerated degree of joy and enthusiasm. in addition to the previous concept, code of ethics is understood as truth, justice, honesty, right, and fairness used as a standard of ethical behaviors (mchaney, cronan & douglas, 2016). the honesty, more specifically, affects many aspects of life. two of them are usefully determining the economic growth and efl learning. concluded by hugh-jones (2016) regardless of large cross-country differences in honesty perception, honesty correlated at country level of gross domestic product (gdp). increasing the integrity of teacher and student, ma’s et al (2018) argument that ‘observational learning can be used to promote moral value, honesty’, promotes the alternative strategy to build honesty among efl learning participants. the seventh central to culture is humor, a multidimensional ability including production, recognition, and appreciation (scheel, 2017). an account for humor and culture has been recorded by many scholars. most notably, mireault and reddy (2016) stated that humor, so-called comedy, is dependent on culture as it varies enormously in their appreciation of attitudes toward playfulness. a successful sense of humor, therefore, is obliged to be culture-based. one simple basic reason why it is identical to culture is its fundamental influence on communication. producing and understanding, in this case, an appreciation of an effective humor is totally an accumulation of a humor teller's knowledge of the current trend of an intended audience. the beauty posits in the ninth central thing to culture, an overwhelmingly significant issue in modern life (dambrin & lambert, 2017). an account of what beauty and its impact on culture and efl learning is another interesting topic to discuss. hamermesh and abrevaya (2013) concluded that ‘the relationship between happiness and beauty were subjective’ testifies an urgency of beauty in people’s happiness and its various impact across countries. such subjectivity is mainly influenced by the culture. in different terms, madan, basu, sharon ng, and saniago dakhi, erni murniarti, noh ibrahim boiliu, & mila falma masful id efl learning: an implication for learning internalization 166 lim (2018) stated that the impact of interdependence on usage of appearanceenhancing tools is moderated by strength of norms. last but not least, it is the spirit in culture and efl learning. there is no consensus on spirit and culture, and their implication for efl learning. it was accentuated that the spirit of learning is not nurtured or encouraged in schools because the spirit of teaching is absent. however, it was explained that spirit is the potentiality of thinking as it accesses the truth and the universal. implying this to language skills and teaching, it suggests that spirit is a macro-level of language and teaching. it is supported by keane (2013) who said that spirit writing needs an affordance which depends on the nature of people's experience of language and writing. such experience is mediated by particular linguistic and semiotic ideologies. regarding the significance of the culture, frank (2013) suggested some strategies to make language leaners aware of the culture. this is through (1) web quests, (2) playing a role, (3) observing the cultural practices, and (4) studying the documented culture. conclusion it is plausible that the psychoanalytic approach holds an important role in exploring people's personalities, the world of conscious drives, as well as learning. the human personality is categorized into id, ego, and superego, while consciousness is divided into three different provinces, namely unconscious, subconscious, and conscious. furthermore, four interpretations of the id in efl learning are described in this article, such as primitive personality, biological personality, seek pleasure, and automaticity. hiding, covering, and undressing are indicators of primitive personality and are human biological responses to danger. on the other hand, human senses, cognitive process, and speech organs define efl learners' biological personality. to meet such goals, therefore, there are needs for the creativity of efl teachers, delightful teaching, good teaching culture, and facilities as once efl learning automatized or internalized the enormous impact will gain. the previous account suggests some further works. firstly, as the present study is a purely theoretical review, observing efl learners' personality in the context of indonesia, and studying efl teachers’ pedagogical knowledge (moradkhani, 2017) and its characteristics will be challenging. secondly, the present study generally focusing on id efl provides an opportunity to explore id for learning to listen, speaking, reading, and writing. thirdly, the study is limited on id in efl, so it suggests further studies on ego and superego in efl learning. acknowledgements the present article was completed with an indepth review from lyndall edmonds, evi deliviana and eustalia wigunawati, and was entirely funded by the english education department (eed), faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kristen indonesia (uki) in 2018. references ahrholdt, d. c., gudergan, s. & ringle, c. m. 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(2019). improving students’ speaking skill by using multimedia presentation strategy. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 125132. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1690. received: 21-01-2019 accepted: 20-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: multimedia presentation strategy is one of strategies that can be used for developing students’ speaking skills. therefore, this research is intended to describe how multimedia presentation strategy can improve the eighth graders’ speaking skills. a collaborative classroom action research design was employed in this research. this action research was conducted in four main steps, namely planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting. to collect the data, some instruments, i.e. students’ oral performance test, the observation checklist, field notes, and questionnaire, were used. the result showed that the students’ speaking performance improved from 64.29% in cycle 1 to 100% in cycle 2. meanwhile, the students’ involvement has achieved the criteria of success (100% of students) in cycle 1. here, they could fulfill at least 2 out of 4 indicators in cycle 1 and cycle 2. in addition, the students’ perception towards the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy was 94.29% and only 5.71% of students who were not interested in the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy in teaching speaking skills. hence, it can be concluded that multimedia presentation strategy can improve students’ speaking skill. keywords: action research; multimedia presentation; speaking skill; students’ involvement. introduction the objective of teaching english in indonesia based on the 2006 standard of content is that the students can develop their communicative competence, both in oral or written forms, to achieve a certain functional literacy stage. hence, the four language skills including listening, speaking, reading, and writing should be taught integratedly (pusat kurikulum, 2006). speaking is a productive skill that involves using speech to express meaning to other people (spratt, pulverness, & williams, 2005). here, teachers can develop students’ speaking skills by focusing regularly on a particular aspect of speaking, e.g. fluency, pronunciation, grammatical accuracy, etc. burns and joice (1993) argue that one of the most important aspects of speaking is that it always occurs within a context. when someone speaks, he/she is both using language to carry out various social functions and choosing forms of language which relate in a relevant way to the cultural and social context. a large percentage of the world’s language learners study english in order to develop proficiency in speaking (richards & renandya, 2002). it shows that many people are aware of the importance of mastering speaking skill in order to make the students able to communicate in english with other people from other countries. especially if they want to go abroad, it is an obligation for them to be able to communicate in english since english is used as the first international language in countries all over the world. in addition, mastering english for the students of junior high school level is very important since they want to continue their study to a higher level or they want to get a job. yet, in fact, students face a lot of problems in mastering the speaking skill. the lack of practice of the language both inside and outside the classroom is the main cause of the students’ mailto:s.muhammadlukman@yahoo.com mailto:sugiantoalip@gmail.com mailto:nanangcendriono@gmail.com muhammad lukman syafii, alip sugianto, & nanang cendriono improving students’ speaking skill by using multimedia presentation strategy 126 failure in mastering speaking skill. besides, the very limited time is also considered to support the failure of the students’ speaking skill since the english lesson at school is usually held just for four hours per week which is divided into two meetings. one meeting lasts for 80 minutes. schools apply the integrated teaching of english consisting of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. consequently, the proportion of teaching speaking is very limited because it is integrated with the other three language skills. since the time for teaching speaking is very limited, the english teacher is expected to be able to make use the available time more effectively and efficiently by applying a certain strategy that can encourage students to actively participate in the speaking class. this seems to be a real condition faced by most students in indonesia. this condition is also faced by the students at islamic junior high school in learning english, especially in mastering speaking skill. dealing with this reality, the english teacher is supposed to try to apply a different way in teaching speaking in which one of them is by using technology. as stated by parveen (2016), technology helps and encourages the playfulness of learners and involves them in a different way of learning. technology gives learners a chance to engage independently, provides opportunities for self-paced interactions, privacy, and a safe environment where mistakes are corrected and exact feedback is given. feedback helps the learners to exercise and focus on particular error which adds additional value by its ability. one of the technologies that can be used by teachers is multimedia presentation hence, this study focuses more on using multimedia presentation in the form of powerpoint slides to improve students’ speaking skills in the form of recount genre. male (2003) says that the use of the computer as a learning tool makes or influences students’ focus, engagement, and product during the teachinglearning process. in the same vein, wang and gearhart (2006) state that visuals are often more effective than words to express an idea or arouse emotion. method the design of this study is categorized into collaborative classroom action research (car) since it meets the criteria of classroom action research. in classroom action research, initially, a researcher identifies problems which happen in teaching-learning process, then sets the plan, designs a way to solve problems, and implements the plan. therefore, the researcher focuses on a particular classroom aiming at finding the solution for the problems occur. in conducting the study, the researcher is helped by one of the english teachers of islamic junior high school as a collaborator. kemmis and mctaggart (1988) assert that action research is collaborative when the researcher works together with his colleague from the beginning until the end of the research activities. the design of the present study follows the procedure of action research proposed by kemmis and mctaggart which stated that action research involves selfreflective spirals of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. this classroom action research (car) is conducted at mts al-islam nganjuk regency – east java, indonesia. the subjects are eighth graders consisting of two parallel classes, class a and class b. the subject of this study is 14 students of class a. the school is facilitated by one multimedia room. the data were collected through questionnaire, observation sheets, interview, and field notes. the use of questionnaire helps the researcher to gather clear and concisely structured feedback from the students about their attitude toward the strategy implemented. the type of questions used in the questionnaire is multiple choice questions in which each item provides four different alternative options (a, b, c, d) to choose. there are five items on the questionnaire which may lead the researcher to come to a conclusion about the students’ attitude. the result of the questionnaires is to reinforce data on the students’ active involvement gained from the observation sheets. the observation sheets are used to gather data about the students’ involvement in the teaching and learning activities. the technique of observation used are participant observation in which the researcher as a part of the action involved in doing observation and nonparticipant observation means that the observation is done by a collaborator who is sitting somewhere in the classroom, silent, but attentive to observe the students’ involvement in the action. in this case, the observer fills in the observation checklist by putting a tick (√) on one of the four indicators. moreover, the use of field notes is also very helpful for keeping a record of what happens, of why and where ideas evolved and the research process itself. thus, field notes refer to written english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 127 account of what the researcher hear, see, experience, and think in the course of collecting, evaluating, and reflecting on the data which might not be covered in the observation sheets, the students’ self-assessment sheet, and the questionnaires. there are three points covered in field notes, namely general point, good point, and point to improve. results and discussion since this study is conducted in two cycles, the discussion of the findings will be divided into two sections, namely cycle 1 and cycle 2. cycle 1 cycle 1 was carried out and conducted in three meetings with the time allotted 2 x 40 minutes for each meeting. the text given was a recount entitled “recreation, sport, and my sister’s activity”. the topic was chosen since it suited to the topic taught based on the regular schedule. here, the researcher used multimedia presentation as the instructional media. the researcher used the scoring rubric as the instrument to measure the students’ speaking performance. meanwhile, the observation checklist was used to get data about students’ involvement during the teaching-learning process. in addition, questionnaire and field notes were used as supporting data related to those two criteria above. students’ speaking performance in analyzing the students’ speaking performance, the researcher used an analytic scoring rubric adapted from ur (1996). the students’ speaking performances scores are presented in table 1. table 1. students’ speaking performance score no score range number of students percentage 1 80 – 100 1 7.14% 2 70 – 79 1 7.14% 3 60 – 69 3 21.43% 4 50 – 59 4 28.57% 5 0 – 49 5 35.72% total 14 100% based on the data, it can be seen that one student (7.14% of the students) achieved a score range of 80-100. there was one student (7.14% of the students) who achieved the score in the range of 70-79. there were three students (21.43% of the students) who achieved the score range of 60-69. there were four students (28.57% of 14 students) who achieved the score in the range 50-59. meanwhile, there were five students (35.72% of the students) who achieved the score in the range 0-49. table 2. students’ speaking performance score in each aspect aspect indicator number of students percentage fluency little or no communication 2 14.28% very hesitant and brief utterances, sometimes difficult to understand 6 42.85% get ideas across, but hesitantly and briefly 4 28.57% effective communication in short turns 2 14.28% easy and effective communication, uses a long turn 0 0% accuracy little or no language produced 3 21.43% poor vocabulary, mistakes in basic grammar, may have a very strong foreign accent 3 21.43% adequate but not rich vocabulary, makes obvious grammatical mistakes, slight foreign accent 7 50% good range of vocabulary, occasional grammar slips, slight foreign accent 1 7.14% wide vocabulary appropriately used, virtually no grammar mistakes 0 0% muhammad lukman syafii, alip sugianto, & nanang cendriono improving students’ speaking skill by using multimedia presentation strategy 128 in the aspect of fluency, two students (14.28 % of 14 students) were in “little communication” category. there were six students (42.85 % of 14 students) who were in “very hesitant and had brief utterances, sometimes difficult to understand” category. there were four students (28.57% of 14 students) who “got ideas across, but hesitantly and briefly”. then, there were 2 students (14.28 % of 14 students) in “effective communication in short-turn” category and no student was in “easy and effective communication” category. in addition, in this cycle, one student was absent (ts) in the first meeting. in terms of accuracy, three students (21.43% of 14 students) produced “little language”. there were three students (21.43% of 14 students) was “poor vocabulary, mistakes in basic grammar, may have a very strong foreign accent”. there were seven students (50 % of 14 students) who had “adequate vocabulary, made obvious grammatical mistakes, slight foreign accent”. also, there was one student (7.14 % of 14 students) had a “good range of vocabulary, occasional grammar slip, slight foreign accent”. meanwhile, no student spoke with wide vocabulary appropriately used, virtually no grammar mistakes. the score on each student’s speaking performance is obtained from the indicators of both fluency and accuracy. the score is summed up and then divided by maximum score and multiplied by one hundred. from the data, it was known that there were nine students out of 14 students who passed the minimum passing grade (kkm). it means that the percentage of the students’ speaking performance in this cycle was 64.29%. this means that the first criterion of success in this cycle has not been achieved yet and the research was necessary to continue to cycle 2. students’ involvement in obtaining the data on the students’ involvement in the teaching-learning process, observation checklist and field notes were utilized. the observation checklist consisted of four indicators or items which should be done by the students, they are: 1) asking questions for clarification frequently; 2) responding to and or answering the teacher’s instruction and questions; 3) doing the task(s) by making brief notes actively; and 4) helping and or asking for help from each other. meanwhile, field notes were used to cover things which were uncovered in the observation checklist. the observation was done during the implementation of this strategy. the criterion determined for the students’ involvement was 100% of the students achieve at least the “active enough stage”. in this case, the students are considered as active if they do two out of four indicators in the observation checklist. table 3 shows the students’ involvement based on the indicators of the observation checklist. table 3. students’ involvement no indicator number of students who fulfilled the indicators percen tage number and percentage of students who get category not active active enough active very active 1. asking questions for clarification frequently 8 57.14% 0 6 6 2 2. responding to and or answering the teacher’s instruction and questions 13 92.86% 3. doing the task(s) by making brief notes actively 10 71.43% 0% 42.86% 42.86 % 14.28 % 4. helping or and asking for help from each other 7 50% as presented in table 3, the result of the data analysis showed that there was no student who was “not active” (0% of 14 students). there were six students (42.86% of 14 students) who were categorized as “active enough”. there were also six students (42.86% of 14 students) that fell into the “active” category and two students (14.28 % of all students) were categorized “very active”. furthermore, in this cycle, there were eight students (57.14 % of 14 students) that fell into the category of “asking questions for clarification” frequently. 13 students (92.86% of 14 students) were responding to and or answering the teacher’s instruction and english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 129 questions. there were 10 students (71.43% of the students) who were doing the task(s). only seven students (50% of the students) were helping and or asking for help from each other. field notes revealed some points, general points, good points, and points to improve in the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy in the teaching and learning of speaking. in the pre-teaching activity, the teacher explained what was going to be done and all the students could easily understand the instruction. this is a general point. in the post-teaching, some of the students could do the task(s) well. besides, they were brave to speak louder and did not care when their friends laughed at them. this is a good point. in whilst-teaching, the male students played much and sometimes they did not understand the teachers’ instruction. this is a point to improve. to sum up, the result of the data analysis from the two sources of data, especially the observation checklist, indicated that the second criterion of success was not been achieved yet. it was not achieved been yet since the percentage of the active involvement (active + very active+ active enough) in the observation checklist was not 100%. thus, the researcher needed to continue to the next cycle because the first criterion of success has not been achieved yet. cycle 2 this section presents the findings found throughout cycle 2. it covered the data of the findings on the students’ speaking performance and the students’ involvement. the same as that in cycle 1, the researcher used the scoring rubric as the instrument to measure the students’ speaking performance. meanwhile, the researcher employed observation checklist to achieve the data about students’ involvement during the teaching-learning process. in addition, questionnaire and field notes were used as supporting data related to those two criteria. students’ speaking performance from the analysis of the students’ speaking performance, it was found that there was a significant improvement of the students’ speaking performance, although some of them still made mistakes on some language elements being observed, namely fluency and accuracy. the score of the students’ speaking performance in cycle 2 can be seen in table 4. table 4. students’ speaking performance score no score range number of students percentage 1 80 – 100 6 42.86% 2 70 – 79 1 7.14% 3 60 – 69 3 21.43% 4 50 – 59 4 28.58% 5 0 – 49 0 0 % total 14 100% based on the data, it can be seen that six students (42.86% of the students) achieved a score range of 80-100. there was one student (7.14% of the students) who achieved the score in the range of 70-79. there were three students (21.43% of the students) who achieved the score range of 60-69. there were four students (14.29% of 14 students) who achieved the score in the range of 50-59. meanwhile, there were no students (0 % of the students) who achieved the score range in the range of 0-49. the data in table 5 construed that in term of fluency in this cycle; no student fell into the category of “speechless or did not talk anything”. three students (21.43 % of 14 students) fell into the category of “very hesitant and brief utterances, sometimes difficult to understand”. there were four students (28.57% of 14 students) who fell into the category of “got ideas across, but hesitantly and briefly”. then, there were five students (35.71 % of 14 students) who fell into the category of “effective communication in short turn” and there were two students (14.28% of 14 students) who fell into the category of “had easy and effective communication”. in addition, in cycle 2, no student was absent. table 5. students’ speaking performance score in each aspect aspect indicator number of students percentage fluency little or no communication 0 0% very hesitant and brief utterances, sometimes 3 21.43% muhammad lukman syafii, alip sugianto, & nanang cendriono improving students’ speaking skill by using multimedia presentation strategy 130 difficult to understand get ideas across, but hesitantly and briefly 4 28.57% effective communication in short turns 5 35.71% easy and effective communication, uses a long turn 2 14.29% accuracy little or no language produced 0 0% poor vocabulary, mistakes in basic grammar, may have a very strong foreign accent 3 21.43% adequate but not rich vocabulary, makes obvious grammatical mistakes, slight foreign accent 5 35.71% good range of vocabulary, occasional grammar slips, slight foreign accent 4 28.57% wide vocabulary appropriately used, virtually no grammar mistakes, 2 14.29% in terms of accuracy, no student was in “little or no language produced” category. there were three students (21.43 % of the students) were in “poor vocabulary, mistakes in basic grammar, may have a very strong foreign accent” category. there were five students (35.71 % of 14 students) in “adequate vocabulary, made obvious grammatical mistakes, slight foreign accent” category. then, there were four students (28.57 % of 14 students) in a “good range of vocabulary, occasional grammar slip, slight foreign accent” category. in addition, there were two students (14.28% of 14 students) in “spoke with wide vocabulary appropriately used, virtually no grammar mistakes” category. since the percentage of the students who got a score in the rank of 50-100 was 100%, it can be said that the first criterion of success in this research was achieved and the cycle of the research was stopped. students’ involvement in obtaining the data on the students’ involvement in the teaching-learning process, observation checklist and field notes were utilized. the indicators used in observation checklist were the same as in cycle 1. meanwhile, field notes were used to cover things which were uncovered in the observation checklist. the observation was done during the implementation of this strategy. the criterion determined for the students’ involvement was 100 % of the students achieve at least the “active enough” category. in this case, the students are considered as active if they do at least 2 out of 4 indicators in the observation checklist. table 6 shows the students’ involvement based on the indicators of the observation checklist. table 6. students’ involvement no indicator number of students who fulfilled the indicators percen tage number and percentage of students who get category not active active enough active very active 1. asking questions for clarification frequently 10 71.43% 0 3 9 2 2. responding to and or answering the teacher’s instruction and questions 12 85.71% 3. doing the task(s) by making brief notes actively 14 100% 0% 21.43% 64.29 % 14.28 % 4. helping or and asking for help from each other 5 35.71% as shown in table 6, the result of the data analysis showed that there was no student who was not active. there were three students (21.43% of 14 students) who were categorized “active enough”. there were nine students (64.29% of 14 students) who were categorized” active and two students (14.28 % of all students) were categorized” very active”. furthermore, in this cycle, there were 10 students (71.43 % of 14 students) that are asking english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 131 questions for clarification frequently. 12 students (85.71% of 14 students) were responding to and or answering the teacher’s instruction and questions. there were 14 students (100% of the students) doing the task(s). only five students (35.71% of the students) were helping and or asking for help from each other. field notes revealed some points, general points, good points, and points to improve in the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy in the teaching and learning of speaking. in the pre-teaching activity, the teacher explained what was going to be done and all the students could easily understand the instruction and they pay attention to the teacher’s explanation. this is a general point. in the whilst-teaching, the students were enthusiastic in accomplishing the task(s). this is a good point. some students complain to create monologue many times. this is a point to improve. from the data, it was known that the percentage of the active involvement (active + very active + active enough) in the observation checklist was 100%. it was the same as the first cycle. basically, there are three aspects discussed, namely students’ speaking achievement, students’ involvement, and students’ perception. first is students’ achievement. the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy is used to increase students’ achievement. in this case, the students’ achievement is about the students’ speaking skill, especially in recount genre. the strategy is used to improve students’ speaking skill by following its procedure. the procedures are: (1) the teacher explained the form of activities that will be conducted in the speaking class, (2) the teacher showed a set of powerpoint slides to the students, (3) the teacher told a story based on a set of powerpoint slides, (4) the teacher asked questions to the students to check students understanding, (5) the teacher divides students into group of three, (6) the students make a story based on the powerpoint slides in group, (7) one of the students told a story in front of the class , and (8) the students made their own story. in addition, in analyzing students’ speaking performance, the researcher used analytic scoring rubric adapted from ur (1996). the score on each student’s speaking performance is obtained from the indicators of both fluency and accuracy. the score is summed up and then divided by maximum score and multiplied by one hundred. from the data, it was known that the percentage of students’ speaking performance was 64.29% (9 students of 14 students) in cycle 1 and it became 100% (all students) in cycle 2. the second is the students’ involvement. the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy can also increase students’ involvement during the teaching-learning process. in obtaining the data on the students’ involvement in the teaching-learning process, observation checklist was utilized. the observation checklist consisted of 4 indicators or items which should be done by the students. the criterion determined for the students’ involvement was 70% of the students achieved at least the active category. in this case, the students are considered as active if they do 3 out of 4 indicators in the observation checklist. from the data, it was known that the percentage of the students’ involvement was 100% (all students) in cycle 1 and it was also 100% (all students) in cycle 2. in addition, the researcher and his collaborator made an improvement and revision of the lesson plan and the media for the second cycle. there were some changes in the lesson plans and the media in cycle 2 than that in cycle 1. related to the lesson plan, the teacher explained the importance of multimedia in daily life in pre-teaching and the teacher explained the characteristic of recount text in whilst-teaching in cycle 1. these two learning activities were not done anymore in cycle 2. the time allotment was used to discuss related vocabulary. it was done because, during the implementation of cycle 1, the researcher and his collaborator noticed that one of the students’ difficulties in speaking was caused by limited vocabulary. another reason is that most of the students have understood the importance of multimedia in daily life and the characteristic of recount text because it has been explained during cycle 1. that is why the researcher and his collaborator thought it was not necessary to explain it anymore in cycle 2. meanwhile, in relation to the media used in cycle 1, the researcher and his collaborator used one or two animations in one slide. yet, in cycle 2, the researcher and his collaborator used more than two animations in one slide. it was done because it seems that the students were getting bored soon during the implementation of the strategy. thus, using only one animation in one slide can be called not accurate and not well designed yet. that is why the researcher and his muhammad lukman syafii, alip sugianto, & nanang cendriono improving students’ speaking skill by using multimedia presentation strategy 132 collaborator tried to use animation accurately and well designed by adding the number of animations in a slide. then, in cycle 1, the researcher and his collaborator did not use sound as media, but in cycle 2, the researcher and his collaborator used sound as additional media in implementing the strategy. the sound was related to the animation, for example when the animation was about a woman sang a song and musical equipment, we equipped with related sound during the implementation of this strategy. the third is students’ perception. in relation to the students’ perception, the data were collected by using a questionnaire distributed to the students. the questionnaire consists of 5 questions in which there were four options provided for each question. table 7 shows the students’ perception of the use of multimedia presentation strategy in teaching speaking. table 7. the result of students’ perception no. questions interesting (a and b) not interesting (c and d) frequency percentage frequency percentage 1. item 1 14 students 100% 0 student 0% 2. item 2 14 students 100% 0 student 0% 3. item 3 12 students 85.72% 2 students 14.28% 4. item 4 12 students 85.72% 2 students 14.28% 5. item 5 14 students 100% 0 student 0% average 94.29% 5.71% based on table 7, it was found that the students gave positive responses towards the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy in teaching english, especially teaching speaking. conclusion on the basis of the findings of the action research conducted in two cycles, it can be concluded that multimedia presentation strategy can improve the students’ speaking skills in terms of their skill in pronouncing english words and can increase the students’ involvement during the teaching-learning process as well as students’ interest. based on the results of the data analysis, it was shown that the multimedia presentation strategy was successful to improve students’ speaking skills. besides, multimedia presentation strategy also gives positive impact on the students’ involvement in the instructional process in which multimedia presentation implemented. the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy in speaking class can increase the students’ involvement in the teaching-learning process. it is proven from the result of the research which shows that the percentage of the students’ involvement during the implementation multimedia presentation strategy increases after the implementation of multimedia presentation strategy. references burns, a. & joice, h. (1993). focus on speaking (2 nd edition). sydney: macquarie university. kemmis, s., & mctaggart, r. (1988). the action research planner. gee long: deakin university press. male, m. (2003). technology for inclusion. usa: pearson education group. nunan, d. (1989). designing tasks for the communicative classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. parveen, b. w. (2016). use of technology in improving speaking skills. journal of english language and literature (joell), 3(2). pusat kurikulum (puskur). (2006). standar isi bahasa inggris (content standard for english). jakarta. richards, j. c., & renandya w. a. (eds). (2002). methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. spratt, m., pulverness, a., & williams, m. (2005). the tkt (teaching knowledge test) course. cambridge: cambridge university press. ur, p. (1996). a course in language teaching: practice and theory. cambridge: cambridge university press. wang, h., & gearhart, d. l. (2006). designing and developing web-based instruction. new jersey: pearson education inc. applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian efl learners’ descriptive writing performance fahrus zaman fadhly & nurendah applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian rfl learners’ descriptive writing performance applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian efl learners’ descriptive writing performance fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: wahidah_fzf@yahoo.com nurendah department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: zukhruffa22@gmail.com apa citation: fadhly, f. z. , & nurendah. (2014). scientific approach to enhance indonesian efl learners’ descriptive writing skill. english review: journal of english education 3(1), 114-124 received: 05-09-2014 accepted: 23-09-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract : this study investigated the use of scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptive writing skill of seventh grade students in one of junior high schools in kuningan, indonesia. the use of scientific approach was examined based on cuff and payne (1979), educational staff development center of ministry of education and culture (2013), and syahmadi (2014) while students’ attitude was examined using a theory of wenden (1991), and gardner (1985). the writer used mix method study. two instruments were used to get the data needed: test of descriptive text and questionnaire. the result showed that the ha was accepted and the ho was rejected as the t observed was higher than t table. students’ descriptive writing skill in the experimental class enhanced since they were treated throughout scientific approach. it could be seen from the result of posttest (7.89) which increased significantly from pre-test result (3.697). this study also revealed that students’ attitude toward the approach was positive during the treatment. moreover, this study proved that scientific approach enhanced students’ descriptive writing skill in one of junior high schools in kuningan, indonesia and gave positive impact to the students. keywords: scientific approach, descriptive text, attitude introduction everyonecanwrite, but not all people canproducea great text. as lenneberg (1967) inbrown (2000: 334) noted that humanbeingsuniversally learn towalkand to talk, but that swimmingandwritingare culturally specific, learnedbehaviors. as far, brown(2000: 339) stated that in school, writing is awayof life. it is caused writing is subject that shouldbe masteredby students. so, the teachers want students towrite and train it. students alsoneed toknowhowto express their idea, feeling, opinion, critical thinking inwritten text. without someabilities to express themselves in writing, theydon’t pass the course (brown, 2000: 339). writing is alsouseful tokeepourknowledge. students often find it useful towrite sentencesusing new language shortly after theyhave studied it (harmer, 2001: 79). it relates to learning styleof students whoare pickedup language throughwriting. writing is alsobasic language skill as englishreview: journal ofenglisheducation issn2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee important as speaking, listening, and reading. sincewriting is an important aspect for students tobemastered, teachers should choosean appropriate approach in teachingwriting.tomake students interesting inwriting, teachers need to presentmaterial in an interestingway. so, in this study, thewriter chooses scientific approach to teachwriting. scientific approach is implemented in curriculum2013 (nuh, 2013). in this approach, the learningprocess covers threedomains, namely: attitudes, knowledge, and skills (alawiyah, 2013). theoutcomesof learning, productive, creative, and innovative students throughstrengtheningof affective attitudes, skills, and integrated knowledge. in theotherhand, syahmadi (2014:37) assumedscientific approach covers attitude, cognitiveaspect, and english skills. this approach is thebasis in choosinganddeciding steps in learningactivity. it is started from observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, andcommunicating. scientific approach is anapproach in teaching-learningprocess inwhich learners aregiven the chance to construct theirunderstandingbasedon the stepsof observing, questioning, experimenting, associatingand communicating (kemdikbud, 2013). genreofdescribing is oneof the fundamental functions of any language system(knapp&watkins, 2005: 97). according todjuharie (2009: 153) descriptive text is a text which functioned todescribeperson, thing, and place, animal specifically. social function ofdescriptive text is todescribe particularperson,placeor thing (gerot &wignell, 1994: 208). it describes the features of someone, something, or a certainplace. according togardner (1985) attitude is thus linked toaperson’s values andbeliefs andpromotes or discourages the choices made inall realmsof activity,whether academic or informal.healso affirmed the learners’ attitudes towards learninganother languageplayakey role in enhancing andmotivating themto learn that language. this effects on their performance too. wenden (1991) classifiedattitude into three components namely cognitive, behavioral, and emotional. method this researchusedmixedmethod. as saidbykuhn (1961) inoyarzo et al. (2008), thequantitative researchwas used todevelopandemploy mathematical models. thewriteruseda quasi-experimentaldesign, inwhicha quasi experimentwas theexperimental design inwhichall the elements of the true experiment (itmust achieve its results throughcomparisonof at least twogroups, itmust assignpeopleor subjects togroups randomly, and itmust be constructed to the researcherhas control over, or is able to evaluate, the timingof theexperimental treatment) arepresent except for the random assignmentsof people togroups (gray, et al, 2007: 275).creswell (2009) stateda designdefinedas quasi experiment when individuals arenot randomly assigned.thewriter alsoused qualitative research. itwasused to analyzeand identified students’ attitude. thepopulationof studywasall the studentsof the seventhgradeofoneof juniorhighschools inkuningan, academic year2013-2014. total number of seventh grade students is 387 students, from11classes. the sample takenwas 76 students fromtwoclasses andeach class consistedof 38 students. fahrus zaman fadhly & nurendah applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian rfl learners’ descriptive writing performance thewriterused test ofdescriptive text as instrument. test ofdescriptive textwas carriedout as oneof the instrumentsused to findout the enhancementof students’ descriptive writing skill. pre-test was conductedat thebeginningof the lesson,whileposttest held in theendof the lesson. inboth of test studentswere asked towrite descriptive text. thewriter instructed the students tomake simpledescriptive writing skill basedon students’ interest inpre test,whereas inpost test they were initiated towritedescriptive text whichdescribes thewriter. thewriter alsousedquestionnaire in collecting the data toknowstudents’ attitudeof experimental classwhohadbeengiven treatment. it wasused to identify students’ attitude towards theuseof scientific approach toenhance students’ descriptivewriting skill. the questionnaire consistingof ten items of open-closedquestions used five level likert scale from completely disagree to completely agree andscore fromone to five (fraenkel &wallen, 2009:124). thewriter started it from composing the lessonplan fromthe beginninguntil the endof the study. it wasused togive the instructional process in enhancing students’ descriptivewriting skill. at the first meeting, thewritergavepre-test to control class andexperiment class. in pre-test, thewriter askedstudents to makea simpledescriptive text basedon their interest. thepre-test givenwas to measure students’ prior knowledgeand abilityofwritingdescriptive. after givingpre-test, thewritergave treatment to experimental class inwhich thewriterused scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptivewriting skill,while the control classwasnot. the learningactivitieswithin scientific approach started fromobserving, questioning, experimenting, associating, andcommunicating.after giving the treatment, thewritergavepost-test to control andexperimental class to measure their enhancement.the items of pre-test andpost-test were same forms; the students were asked tomake descriptivewriting text. post testwas used tomeasurewhether therewere differencesbetween control and experimental class ornot. itwas also used to see the improvement of experimental class. thewriter alsoused questionnaire in collecting thedata to knowstudents’ attitudeof experimental classwhohadbeengiven treatment. thedata collectedwereprocessed statisticallybyusingcertain formulations (t test formula) tomeasure theenhancement of students’ descriptive writing skill throughscientific approach, analyzeddata taken fromthe result of pre-test andpost-test of control and experimental class. thewriter also foundout test ofnormality, and homogeneity. results and discussion havingdata collected, thewriter analyzed, identifiedandclassified the data frompre-test andpost test of experimental andcontrol class usingliz hamp-lyons formative feedbackprofile (lyons &heasley, 2006:211).after checking students’ workandclassified it basedoncriteria in formative feedback, scoreof each student’sworks scoredby dividedscoregottenandmaximum score, timed ten.then, the result of data gainedwouldbecounted throughout ttest formula. this studyhas counted the normality andhomogeneity test of the sample taken. thewriter took the sample fromthepopulation through purposive sampling inwhicheveryunit was included in the sample. twoclasses englishreview: journal ofenglisheducation issn2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee of seventhgrade students inoneof juniorhigh schools inkuninganhad beenchosenby thewriter as a sampleof this study. each class consistedof 38 students, so thenumberof the sample was76 students.although thewriter usedpurposive sampling, thewriter counted thenormalityandhomogeneity of the sample. fromthedatagainedof thepre-test, the countof control andexperimental class≤ table.the control class’ was 5.21908 and theexperimental class’ was 1.82234 while tablewithdb= k-3, andα =0.05was 7.81472.normality test of post test also showed that lower than table.thevalueof in the control class was3.1935while experimental classwas 0.6606. thedatagatheredwas lower than table inwhich thevaluewas 7.81472.both of the tests explained that samplewas fromnormaldistribution. thewriter alsodetermined homogeneity test which wasused to detectwhether the sampleusedby the writerhomogenyor not (sugiyono, 2011: 275). thewriter calculated the test of homogeneity to seekhomogeneityof the sampleused in this study. thefvalue gained, and thencomparedwith thef tablewith level of significance 5%. from thevariants gotby thewriter, variant of pre test in control classwas1.044 and experimental class was0.702, thewriter thendivided thehighest variant to lowest variant, and the result was1,487. thevalueoff tablewith the level of significance5%was1.6928.the result of homogeneity test showed that the samplewashomogeny. because thef counts (1.487)was lower thanf table (1.6928), so the samplewashomogeny. the result of homogeneity inpost test showed that the samplewasalso homogeny.thef countedwas1.435, while thef tablewas1.6928. it explained that thef counted< f table, so the samplewashomogeny. fromthedata collected, result of pre-test, it was established, therewasno significant differencebetweencontrol andexperimental class. itmeantbothof control andexperimental class had the samebackgroundknowledgeandability inwriting.tomake it clear, see the table 1. table 1. control and experimental class’ pre-test result no. criteria offormative feedback controlclass experimentalclass 1. communicative quality 82 89 2. ideas andorganization 73 78 3. grammarandvocabulary 54 57 4. surface features 64 56 total 273 280 the table 1 explainedassessment criteriagainedbycontrol and experimental class. basedon the table it canbe summedup, experimental class got thehigher score in communicative quality thancontrol class, 89 and82. it meant experimental class’works more communicative thancontrol class. the control class’works conveyed the messagewithdifficulty. itwas showed fromthepointwhichwasmostly appeared in communicativequalitywas two. in theotherhand, although the most appearedscore in communicative qualityof experimental class was two, but therewasnoonepoint appeared in experimental class scorewhereas in the control class, theonepoint appeared seven times. next standardassessmentwas ideas andorganization. it discussed organizational structureof students’ fahrus zaman fadhly & nurendah applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian rfl learners’ descriptive writing performance worksandhowtheyorganized their ideas intoparagraph. fromthe table 4.1 it discussed theexperimental class got thehigher score thancontrol class. the resultwas73 and78. itmeant that experimental class’ worksmore organized thancontrol class’ works. meanscoreof students’ workof control classwas two, means their ideas was inadequateand/orpoorlyorganized. theexperimental classwas alsobetter thancontrol class ingrammarand vocabulary criteria. theygained 57 score, while the control classgot 54 score.but bothof themwere stillweak in grammatical structures and theywere limitedandnot mastered rangeof vocabularies. for themeantime, the control class got thehigher score in surface features standard. it explained fromthe table 4.1 the control classgot collected64 score and the experimental classwas56. it intended the control classbetter in handwriting,punctuationandspelling. fromtheexplanationabove, it can besummeduptheexperimental class well again incommunicativequality, ideasandorganization,andgrammar andvocabularystandard,while the control classwasbetter insurface featurescriteria.even though experimentalwasgoodin threecriteria but theresult ofdatacomputationpre testofbothexperimental classand control class showed, therewasno significantdifferencesbetweencontrol andexperimental class (seeappendix5). thedatacomputationofpre test result explainedbothofexperimental classand control classhad thesamebackground knowledge. itdiscussed fromtheresult of t observedandt table,where the t observedofpre test experimentaland control class’ result lower than t table. thevalueof t observedwas0.245while the t tablewith thedegreeof freedom74 was2.000withcriticalvalue0.05. so, it canbe terminated, theexperimentaland control classhad thesamebackground knowledge. fromthepost-test found that the enhancementof experimental group since itwas treated through scientific approachandsignificancebetween control andexperimental class. this treatment meant to enhance students’ descriptivewriting skill. inpost test, studentswereasked todescribe the writer. the result of post testwouldbe countedusing t test formula. the result ofpost-test of control and experimentalwouldbediscussedat the table 2. table 2.control and experimental class’ post-test result no. criteria offormative feedback control class experimentalclass 1. communicative quality 126 162 2. ideas andorganization 110 152 3. grammarandvocabulary 91 139 4. surface features 99 147 total 213 300 the table 2 is the result ofpost test gainedbycontrol andexperimental class. fromthedataachieved, the experimental classbetter in all assessment criteria. for communicative quality theexperimental classgot 162, while control class 126. from thepre test conductedbefore theexperimental class alsowell again in this standard. the result ofpost test showed thegreat improvement in communicativequality. most of students at experimental class createda communicative text, andonly causes a fewdifficulties. somestudents englishreview: journal ofenglisheducation issn2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee alsoproduced text whichpleasure tobe read. thenext standardassessment was ideasandorganization. in this field, the experimental class improved.they madedescriptive text withgood organizational structure, some arguments alsowell presentedand relevant, but therewere fewstudents whocreated the text clear but limited organizational structure, andsome argumentsunsupported. but, overall the students couldorganize the text and support their ideas in theparagraph. the result ofpost test explained, sample in experimental classwell enhanced ingrammarandvocabulary, and surface features standard. they usedanadequate rangeofvocabulary andgrammatical structures. it was better thanpre test results inwhich theywere notmasteredgrammatical structures and limited rangeof vocabulary.the students in experimental groupalso just didoccasional faults inhandwriting, punctuation, andspelling.they could write thewordcorrectly, andused appropriatepunctuation. theexperimental class improved theirdescriptivewriting skill frommean of pre testwas3.697andmeanof post test was7.89. theexperimental class showed the significant improvement after they treated throughscientific approach. fromthe result of post test andexplanationabove, it canbe concluded theexperimental classwell improved indescriptivewriting skill wherein sumofpre test result of experimental class was140.5 increased to 300.the improvement couldbe seen at the chart below. table 3. pre test and post test improvement of control and experimental class for the statistical computation, it used thenull hypothesis (ho)which readsas follows: scientific approach doesnot enhance students’ descriptive writing skill of the seventhgrade students at oneof juniorhigh schools in kuningan, academicyear 2013-2014.the alternatehypothesis (ha)of this study is as follows: scientific approachenhanced students’ descriptivewriting skill of the seventhgrade students at oneof junior highschools inkuningan, academic year 2013-2014. thewriterprovedhypothesis by computed the result ofpre test andpost test of experimental class. first, the writer foundout meanofpre test and post test of experimental group. then, thewriter countedstandarddeviation of each test.next step, thewriter computed the standarddeviation combinedand foundout thevalueof t observed. after the t observedgot, thewriter fahrus zaman fadhly & nurendah applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian rfl learners’ descriptive writing performance determined thedegreeof freedomto knowthevalueof t table. the last step was thewriter compared tobservedand t table. if the t observedhigher than t table, sonull hypothesis of the research was rejected andha was accepted.but if the t tablehigher than t observed, the nullhypothesiswasacceptedandha was rejected. fromthedata computation, it explainedmeanof pre test in experimental classwas3.697,while meanof post testwas7.89. standard deviationofpre test andpost test of experimental classwas0.874and0.067. bothof standarddeviationvalueswould becalculated throughdeviation standardcombined. the result of deviation standardcombinedof experimental classwas0.847.this result wasused toget thevalueof t observed. the t observedgainedbyusing t test formulawas22.58, and it wouldbe comparedwith thevalueof t table throughdegreeof freedom, inwhich the degreeof freedomwas74 and it is closer to line 60 with the t tablevalue 2.000. after the t observedand t table gathered, thewriter analyzed, the t observedwashigher than t table. it meantnull hypothesis; scientific approachdoes not enhance students’ descriptivewriting skill of the seventh grade students at oneof juniorhigh schools inkuningan, academicyear 2013-2014was rejected. and the alternatehypothesis; scientific approach enhancedstudents’ descriptivewriting skill of the seventhgrade students at one of juniorhigh school inkuningan, academic year2013-2014 wasaccepted. fromthe explanationand calculationdoneby thewriter it canbe summedup, the scientific approach enhancedstudents’ descriptivewriting skill of seventhgrade students at oneof juniorhighschools inkuningan. thedataof questionnaireswere gathered fromthe students’ attitude in experimental class. fromthe questionnaires’ result, thewriterhas calculatedeachof attitudes below: students’ behavioralattitudes toward theuseof scientific approach toenhance students’ descriptivewriting skill. the statementswhichpresent the students’ behavioral attitudes toward theuseof scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptivewriting skill are innumber 2, 3, 7, and8. that result is shown in the table 4: table 4. students’ behavioral attitudes toward the use of scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptive writing skill no statements opinions % criteria sa a d sd 2. i alwaysdoenglish tasksgiven. 16 21 1 0 68.42% most of 3. if i havedifficulty in comprehendingenglish lesson, i will ask to the teacher directly. 22 13 3 0 88.42% generally 7. i needcertain approach to writedescriptive text easier. 9 26 3 0 81.57% generally 8. oneof approach used to write descriptive text easily is scientific approach. 15 21 1 1 85.26% generally mean 80.91% generally students’ cognitive attitudes thestatementswhichpresent the students’ cognitiveattitudes toward the useof scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptivewriting skill are in number6, 9, and10.thepercentageof each statement is shown in the table below: englishreview: journal ofenglisheducation issn2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 5. students’ cognitive attitudes toward the use of scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptive writing skill no statements opinions % criteria sa a d sd 6. i havedifficulty to express ideas inenglish written text. 10 17 11 0 73.68 % most of 9. i ameasier to elaborate ideas andwrite descriptive textusing scientific approach. 15 19 4 0 83.68% generally 10. scientific approach is goodapproach to enhance students’ descriptive writing skill andother learning. 21 16 1 0 90% generally mean 82.45% generally students’ emotional attitudes statements whichpresent the students’ emotional attitudes toward the useof scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptivewriting skill are in number1, 4, and5. the result is shown in the tablebelow: table 6. students’ emotional attitudes toward the use of scientific approach to enhance students’ descriptive writing skill no statements opinions % criteria sa a d sd 1. i like learningenglish. 13 24 1 0 85.78% generally 4. i likeenglishbecause it isuseful formy real life andcanbe applied indaily life. 16 21 1 0 87.36% generally 5 i preferwrite english text than read it. 10 15 12 1 71.57% most of mean 81.57% generally thedata gathered fromstudents’ questionnaire sheet explained behavioral, cognitiveandemotional attitudeof students’ during treated through scientific approach.generally students likeenglish, and87.36%of students agreedenglish isuseful for their life and canbeapplied indaily life. mostof students (71.07%) said theyprefer writing than readingenglish text. inbehavioral aspect of attitude, mostof students alwaysdoenglish task given. it looked fromthepercentage counted thatwas 68.42%students in experimental classdid taskgiven. they alsowoulddirectly ask to teacherwhen they faceddifficulty in learning descriptive text. thepercentage showed 88.42%students will askdirectlywhen faceddifficulty. in theexperimental class, 81.57%students told theyneededcertain approach tomake themeasier inwriting descriptive text.as 85.26%of respondent in experimental class stated oneof approachused towrite descriptive text easilywas scientific approach. fromthequestionnaire administered to students’ at experimental class, thewriter gotdata that 73.68%of students felt difficulty in expressing their ideas inenglishwritten text. when thewriter applied scientific approachat experimental class 83.68% students explained theywereeasier in writingdescriptive text when thewriter used that approach.theyalso stated scientific approachwasgoodapproach fahrus zaman fadhly & nurendah applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian rfl learners’ descriptive writing performance to enhance students’ descriptivewriting skill andother learning. itwas looked frompercentagewhichwas showed90% students agreed scientific approachwas goodapproach toapply in learning descriptive text andother learning. fromthedataanalysis of questionnaire, it canbe summedup students at theexperimental class gave positive attitude towards theapproach usedby thewriter. their aspects of attitude showed thepositive response andconfirmed that scientific approach gavepositive impact for them. fromthe result above, theuseof scientific approachgives some implications for enhancing student’s descriptivewriting skill, theyare: (1) scientific approachappropriates in teachingwritingdescriptive text; (2) using scientific approach helps student in learning,understandingandwriting descriptive text; (3) scientific approach makes teacher easily to create the interesting teaching-learningprocess of writingdescriptive text; (4)theuseof scientific approachmakes students construct theirunderstandingabout descriptive text actively; (5) it also motivates students towrite andexpress their ideas, imagination, thus their writing skill enhanced; (6) scientific approachmakes studentsmore interested tomaterial taught and they givepositiveattitudes toward the approachused. it canalsobeaccomplished scientific approachgave somepositive impacts in teaching-learningdescriptive text at school. it canbeusedas an approach in learninggenreof text or other learning. scientific approachalso gavepositive influence to students. through this approach studentswere easier in composingdescriptive text and expressing their ideas inenglishwritten text. this approachalsomade teaching learningprocess more interestingand createpositiveatmosphere in the classroom. studentswouldshare their own ideasactively andused all their senses in learningprocesses. conclusions afterhavingdone the study, the writer alsoproved thehypothesis of this research. after collecting, calculating, analyzingand identifying thedata gathered, thewriter concluded the alternatehypothesisproposed was accepted,while thenull hypothesiswas rejected. thealternatehypothesis was readas follows, “scientific approach enhancedstudents’ descriptivewriting skill of seventhgrade students inoneof juniorhighschools inkuningan”. so, it canbe summedup that scientific approachmayenhance students’ descriptivewriting skill. fromthe study completed, the writerknewstudents faceddifficulties in sharing their ideas andopinion in englishwritten text. theyactually neededanapproachwhichmade them comfort, enjoy in expressingandsharing their ideas freely.this scientific approachwas fit for students’ needs. this approachhelped students at the experimental class in enhancing their descriptivewriting skill andmake them easier in composingandelaborating ideas through this approach. references abidin, m. j.z., mohamadi, m. p.,alzwari, h. 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(1990). metode-metode penelitian masyarakat. jakarta: pustaka jaya. http://www.smkn4jkt.sch.id/ fahrus zaman fadhly & nurendah applying scientific approach to enhance indonesian rfl learners’ descriptive writing performance kuhn, t. (1961). the function of measuremnet in modern physical sciences. isis 52, 161-193. lenneberg, e. h. 1967. the biological foundations of language. new york: john wiley and sons. lyons, liz hamp. &heasley, b. (2006). study writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. marczyk, g., dematteo, d., festinger, d. (2005). essentials of research design and methodology. new jersey: john wiley & sons, inc. munawaroh,m. (2014). analisis literasi kuantitatif siswa sma dalam konsep pertumbuhan dan perkembangan tumbuhan (skripsi, universitas pendidikan indonesia, 2014).retrieved june 24, 2014 from repository.upi.edu. montano, d e.& kasprzyk, d. (2008). theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behaviour, and the integrated behavioralmodel. health behavior and health education: theory, research, and practice , 67-97. nuh, m. (2012). wawancara dengan mendikbud terkait kurikulum 2013. (sidiknas, interviewer). retrieved february 18, 2014 from www.kemdikbud.go.id. references english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 55 the local-global innovation of an indonesian toefllike game: a cultural hybridity model ekawati marhaenny dukut english department, faculty of language and arts, soegijapranata catholic university, indonesia e-mail: ekawati@unika.ac.id apa citation: dukut, e. m. (2019). the local-global innovation of an indonesian toefl-like game: a cultural hybridity model. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 55-66. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1605. received: 07-01-2019 accepted: 15-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: the door to globalization for an indonesian product is believed possible only when fulfilling some characteristics of other nation’s culture. to ensure the global popularity of a product, therefore, there is a need of mixing the local with a global culture. the cultural hybridity strategy of mixing local-global scenes is evident in the invention of a toefl-like game software, which based itself on a mobile application for its platform. with the platform, the game becomes easily downloadable through google playstore. it is innovative as it accommodates the generation z’s characteristics who are digital savvy. in the game, an animation is created for listening section which takes in some forms of javanese culture that are made hybrid with some american and japanese ones. in finding out how successful the game is in fulfilling the needs of toefl-like game players, a technology accepted model questionnaire is given to students from indonesia and japan. japanese players, who are english department students, were chosen on the assumption that they are more digital savvy. this article reports that the game is useful and beneficial in raising the english competence of both indonesian and japanese students. with the cultural hybridity strategy in creating the animation, the players agree that the game is a good model for learning about the english language in a fun and innovative way. keywords: cultural hybridity; digital media; google playstore mobile application; local-global innovation; popular culture. introduction the generation z (gen-z) in indonesia are claimed as those born in between the years 20002010 (putri, 2016). the gen-z, according to the 2017 nielsen total audience report from the u.s., is, however, born much earlier, i.e. from 1997. as the youngest generation in the planet, it is reported to make up as the largest population with the percentage of 26% as shown in figure 1 (sterling, 2017). figure 1. a general composition of today’s generations as a generation who by the year of 2018 ranges from 8 to 21 years old, means that the gen-z are currently in primary school and up to a tertiary level of education. acknowledging the gen-z as being the “click’n’go kids, the i-gen, or digital integrators, upagers, screenagers, and the global gen” as well as “double wrap generation” (kompasiana, 2016) entails that the generation is characterized by the easiness of consuming ready-made packaged meals from fast food ekawati marhaenny dukut the local-global innovation of an indonesian toefl-like game: a cultural hybridity model 56 restaurants and also having a wide range of electronic gadgets as their main means of survival. according to seemiller and grace (2016), if the previous gen-y or the millennials had to be given lessons on how to make use of the computer or mobile phone to surf the internet to find information which is globally valid and reliable, the gen-z are known to have an inborn quality with gadgets, hence are often labelled as digital natives or ebay babies as products are easily made available and paid online. the genz as "information curators" often depend on their “google reflex” for the source of information (cited in mohr & mohr (2017, p. 86) and enjoy instant rewards. they are also characterized as “loyal” to their friends, “thoughtful, compassionate, open-minded, responsible, entrepreneurial, excited,” yet “not creative” and “fearful about the future” as they are “suffering from fear of missing out (fomo) anxiety” (mohr & mohr, 2017, p. 87). one of the effects of having fomo anxiety is that, in education, the gen-z still needs an educator to help narrow resources for the completion of their coursework (buchanan & murray, 2018, p. 2). with this kind of condition and situation, as an educator, there is a challenge to equip the burning need of the gen-z with educators that can innovate suitable education materials for them. the sorts of materials gen-z like the most are electronic gadgets that are easily accessed around the globe. one such particular gadget is the popular mobile smartphone. as a popular culture product, the phone always has something to please its consumers by providing ways to satisfy its consumers, like being readily availabale at any place, yet constantly changing its features, in order to suit consumers’ needs from all over the world. the internet facility that it has, not only functions as a notepad and media for communication through email or social media, such as whatsapp, twitter, instagram, and facebook; but it is also a gadget to save whatever information needs to be saved in the data storage facility. previous research from the vision critical announces that the gen-z are using 15.4 hours on the smartphone each week (kleinshmit, 2015) to daily surf the web, make interactions with their social media friends, play online games and listen to live streaming music (lubis, 2016). the small yet compact smartphone is, thus, a gadget that not only provides games for entertainment but also for serious games that can help students excel in their education. derakhshan and khatir (2015) believe that games by nature are created to make players feel they have achieved something by playing something they enjoy doing. as implied above, games are not made purely for fun but also to support some aims of education. consequently, serious educative games are created to entertain and educate student players, in order to have a positive attitude to learning as the games would increase the student player’s motivation to do class work. surati (2014, p. 9) informs that educative games have the mission to develop student players’ problem-solving ability by taking advantage of their desire to learn and enthusiasm to play (donmus, 2010). surati (2014, p. 11) continues to explain that an educative game has the following swot analysis: it has a (1) strength, because it can increase learning motivation, (2) weakness, because not all schools have a computer lab or allow students to use game gadgets in class and some children still prefer to play games outside, (3) opportunity, because it is played by all ages in the evening at home or at school to support learning activity, (4) threat, because it is easily distracted with other gadgets, like interesting tv channels. in addition to frequent game playing, the gen-z also frequently uses the internet that relies on the english language for global communication. this condition, therefore, forces the gen-z to master the english language. viewing through an education perspective, therefore, the researcher believes that an educative game material like the toefl (test of english as a foreign language) exercise is relevant to produce as it is a gateway to further education or work. in indonesia, the ministry of foreign affairs sets a minimum of 550 pbt (paper based toefl) for employment. although not dealing much with english during their daily conversation, the ministry of stateowned enterprise, national archives, and bureaucracy reformation of the republic of indonesia have also set a minimum of 450 pbt (hamdani, 2018). according to nurhayati and nehe (2016, p. 10), a mastery in english is “extremely needed” because most indonesian schools and employers believe the high toefl score shows how globally prepared a person is. the toefl game to be discussed in this article is created by a team of indonesian researchers from the english department and the information system of game technology from english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 57 soegijapranata catholic university of semarang, indonesia. in creating the test materials, the team adheres to the criteria of gaming that provides entertainment. usually, students have to prepare themselves for the toefl by studying about the u.s. history, culture and academic life. even though the questions are presented in multiple choice format like the toefl, the contents are not about u.s. history nor academic life. instead, it is about a general knowledge that can be enjoyed by university as well as elementary and high school students. as head researcher, there is the intention from the beginning that the toefl game should help indonesian gen-z youngsters to increase their english competence in an entertaining way with a topic that is not far from the local scene yet also give some knowledge about the global scene. therefore, in designing the game, there is a deliberate purpose of inserting globalization and cultural hybridity concepts from the popular culture of gaming. paying attention that gen-z’s favorite gadget is the smartphone, the educative toefl game is set to have the phone as its platform. as a product of popular culture, the contemporary gadget meets the needs of the gen-z people who want to communicate with each other from a distance. as a popular culture, the mass production of smartphones makes it available in the market with a reasonable price for people to buy. this becomes the reason why the phone is never off from the gen-z’s fingertips. purcell et al. (2010) exclaim that “along with the widespread embrace of mobile technology has come to the development of an apps culture”, hence, a phone is no longer just a voice device but it is a multi-channel device that functions like a mobile mini-computer. gen-z loves to use smartphones because alongside entertainment facilities, such as games and music, the informative apps are equipped with sending and receiving email, seeing maps and navigation, weather, news, and doing banking activities. according to pew research center that did a national survey to 1.917 cell phone users; as much as 82% of american adults are cell phone users. out of the 82% of adults, there are 43% of them that have apps in their phones. compared to the 30-49-year-olds, who are the x generation, the young adult users who are within the range of 18-29-year-olds have more app facilities. the average number of apps for the youngsters is 22, meanwhile for the adult is only 8. the numbers prove that the gen-z really is a digital savvy generation. in indonesia, according to statista.com (2018), in the year of 2017, there were 173.3 million phone users. this increased to 184 million in 2018 and is predicted to be even higher in 2019 as it will reach up to 193.4 million. as the fourth most populous country on earth, with 87% of households in indonesia owning a mobile phone, it is an ideal place to popularize smartphone apps. a research on mobile games trend in indonesia 2017: behavior of mobile games usage (nusaresearch, 2017) reports that 518 samples of 17-49 year-olds citizens enjoy their free time playing mobile games are reported to rely on android platform. only 3.7% users prefer an ios. part of the reason for this occurrence is because the apple-branded phone, which has the ios, is a more expensive gadget to use. in using the gadget, 100% of the people taken as sample respond that they play games in their free time. indonesians also devour over free or cheap games with rp 3.000 to rp 15.000, which is equivalent to a us $1 per download. the preferred method of download is through google playstore and the purchase is by phone credit. games preferred are those that have an interesting storyline (69.1%), great graphics (68.5%), many levels (67.07%), less memory usage (60.68%), is responsive (55.6%), and others (1.4%). this lets the researcher see that the toefl-like game app she and her team created and provided for free in google playstore as a model for learning english is a correct decision to do. by using google playstore, the game is easily downloaded by anyone with an internet facility. nalliveettil and alenazi (2016, p. 264) informs that mobile phones with internet connectivity, however, give disadvantages, such as (1) almost replacing reference books that the library is no longer visited, (2) hinder students from activating cognitive skills like brainstorming and re-calling that are necessary for creativity, (3) make students believe that storing information in the mind is not important, and (4) affect classroom performance due to social networking chatting and browsing nonacademic websites. by comparison, the advantages of having mobile phones are, it is (1) helpful for vocabulary retention, (2) reliable to learn english, (3) dependable to understand english words and phrases, (4) a medium of communicating for whatsapp messenger and email, and (5) helpful to enhance speaking, writing, translation, spelling and english ekawati marhaenny dukut the local-global innovation of an indonesian toefl-like game: a cultural hybridity model 58 language skills (nalliveettil & alenazi, 2016, p. 265-268). these advantages are supported by dehaan (2011) who, after completing two projects, i.e. on game design and game magazine creation, finds that the games have improved his students’ spoken and written english language skills. language games are thus, not only a motivation for students to learn english in an entertaining way, but are also a media for authentic discussion about english. the researcher sees that the toefl-like game should be popularly globalized. becoming global means that there should be some western elements in it because “globalization is tied up with [the] modernity” of the western culture (pieterse, 2006, p. 658). further, pieterse (2006) informs that, economically, globalization refers to the economic internationalization and capitalist market relations. culturally, it focuses on global communications, where worldwide cultural standardization arises, such as in the american mcdonaldization and cocacolonization. sociologically, globalization concerns also with the increasing worldwide social densities. thus, in a sociologist’s mind, it is inferred that the usa’s modernity is a key to globalization. in devising the mobile smartphone game software, therefore, the concept of the local and global space becomes one of those important factors to ensure the continued attraction of the game played by anyone from the gen-z community. for this reason, the researcher deliberately mixes indonesian local culture with usa’s culture, thus adhering to the concept of cultural hybridity. just like the cultural hybridity of the dutch culture that has influenced the indonesian bestik; likewise, the american kentucky fried chicken that became the javanese indonesian’s kentuku fried chicken; the making of the toefl-like game has some local javanese indonesian culture that are made hybrid with the usa and other globalized countries’ culture as a strategy of continually popularizing the game globally. reflecting on the above description, the problems raised in this study are formulated into the following research questions; 1) how successful is the game in the viewpoint of local javanese indonesian players and japanese players as a representative of global players in increasing their english skills? and 2) what kinds of local and global aspects were evident in the game? method in formulating a teaching learning model for english, the researcher has designed a two-year toefl-like game software project. the first year was to create the software on a pc (personal computer) platform (dukut, 2018), whereby the second year was on a mobile smartphone. the choice of transforming the game onto a smartphone is due to the aim of having the game becomes more globally popular. in the first year, the game players as participants of the research were 8 th grade junior high school students in semarang, indonesia who has a computer lab with at least 20 computers. the three schools who agreed to have their students try out the game were from smp kebondalem (a catholic-based school), smp eka sakti (a moslem-based school), and smp permata bangsa (a school for foreign students). in the second year of the research, the targeted players were elevated for the 11 th grade of senior high school and first-year university students of some universities. the schools that agreed to have their students as participants were chukyo high school in japan, the english department and game technology students of soegijapranata catholic universitty in indonesia, and the english department students of chukyo university, japan. the instrument to find out how successful the game is in providing an experience to do the game was a close-ended questionnaire with some open-ended questions as a follow-up. the questionnaire was based on a technology acceptance model (tam) theorized by bargozzi et. al., which consist of statements dealing with (1) peou or perceived ease of use, which is the degree to which a person believes that the use of a particular system would be free of effort, (2) pu or perceived usefulness which is the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance job performance, (3) atu or attitude toward using, which is a summary evaluation of a psychological object captured in such attribute dimensions as good-bad, harmful-beneficial, pleasant-unpleasant, and likable-dislikable, and (4) bi or behavioral intention, which is the degree to which a person has formulated conscious plans to perform or not perform some specified behavior. the data collection procedure consists of an observation of the gen-z community. after mapping out that the generation is digital savvy, english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 59 a toefl-like software is made to enhance english language competence. once the game is paled by the participants, the questionnaire is distributed. answers from the tam modeled questionnaire using a likered scale of 5 are then analyzed. the responses are categorized and interpreted as a finding for the research. results and discussion tommy & pokina toefl-like app games can be used to enhance a teachinglearning experience in english. the toefllike mobile game application named tommy & pokina is created and is downloadable from the google playstore with the aim of increasing as many indonesian gen-z students’ english ability through a fun yet serious educative game. there are four kinds of english skills being used in the game. having an integrated-based toefl (ibt) as a model, the game offers thematic exercises which test players’ listening, reading, writing and speaking ability. in the game, players are firstly, offered the choice of either playing with tommy or pokina. in the game tommy, players are given an animation for the listening section about a tomato character named tommy who is a movie actor. tommy shows that as a tomato, he benefits from his routine of using tomatoes as a facial mask, in addition to having it as the main menu for his diet because tomatoes have nutrients and vitamins that will keep him healthy. details on the kinds of nutrients and vitamins tomatoes have are elaborated in the reading section. a tomato pudding recipe is then shared as the topic for players to write about in the writing section, and lastly for the speaking section, players are given a poster on tommy to describe in detail who he is, what he does, what kinds of nutrients and vitamins he has and what other factors help him become a popular movie actor. by comparison, in the game pokina, players are given an animation for the listening section about a pakchoy character named pokina who is a talented chef. pokina shows that as a pakchoy, she benefits from her daily consumption of pakchoy that is often seen in the indonesian meal: bakso and capjay. as a green vegetable, the pakchoy also has certain nutrients and vitamins that can support someone’s health. details on the kinds of nutrients and vitamins a pakchoy has are elaborated in the reading section. a pakchoy ice cream recipe is then shared as the topic for players to write about in the writing section, and lastly for the speaking section, players are given a poster on pokina to describe in detail who she is, what she does, what kinds of nutrients and vitamins she has and what other factors help her become a popular chef. understanding that a thematic game is much easier to do, thus, the game based its theme on the advantages of consuming tomatoes and pakchoy vegetables. the idea of using this theme is due to the researcher’s concern that the gen-z prefer to consume some franchised usa food that is popularly shown in magazine advertisements and tv commercials, rather than locally home-made food. in indonesia, more gen-z consume kentucky fried chicken, the macdonald’s burger and the pizza hut products, which rely heavily on meat and carbohydrate and very little or even no vegetable salad nor vegetable soup as a compliment of the menu. with only seeing some tomato sauce on the indonesian’s plates rather than fresh cut tomatoes, or only one slice of lettuce and one ring of onion to put inside a king burger product, it shows that the young indonesian generation is lacking vegetable consumption. for this reason, in incorporating a cultural hybrid culture in the animation used for the toefl-like game, the researcher not only provided vocabulary and grammar exercises in the game to improve the student players’ english skills, but also put in the idea that having a fresh cut tomato and pakchoy in the daily diet is importatnt. actually, in the pizza hut restaurant, a consumer can enjoy a bowl of healthy green salad or a vegetable pizza to fulfill the vegetable diet someone needs. however, most indonesian gen-z prefers to consume the american favorite pizza, which only has beef and chicken meat on top of its cheesy pizza crust that is made from flour. this diet choice needs to be corrected, if indonesian gen-z wants to grow with better health. this becomes the reason why the toefl-like game has a dual aim: (1) to improve the student players’ english, and (2) to improve a healthier diet for the gen-z. unlike the real toefl where the pbt lasts for around 110-120 minutes, or the thematic based ibt which lasts for around 240 minutes, the tommy & pokina toefl-like app game is created for only 45 minutes to play with. although only 45 minutes, the apps offers exercises for listening, reading, writing, and speaking. tommy & pokina toefl-like app game can be played for those in the middle (junior & senior high school) and tertiary ekawati marhaenny dukut the local-global innovation of an indonesian toefl-like game: a cultural hybridity model 60 schools (university level). without the questions, the animated movie, which is within the listening exercise is applicable for elementary school students to play with. the reading section is also easy for elementary school players because the concentration is on how to make use of the english tenses correctly. it is difficult for some players to do, however, because there are only a few seconds allocated to choose the right answer for the multiple choice questions provided. the writing section is also timed and is limited to only 1000 words to narrate the process of cooking the tomato pudding or pakchoy ice cream menu. depending on the vocabulary used in the writing, a teacher who evaluates the result can assign different marks for either elementary, high school or university students of english. finally, the speaking section just gives out a poster with the vegetable cartoon character on a poster. with a limited time, the players are to describe in as much detail about what they see, hear and read about the character. as a teacher, he/she can decide on what kind of speech should receive a high score that is based on how complex the vocabulary is produced in the recorded speech. indonesian vs japanese viewpoints on the game one of the questions asked in this study is “how successful is the game in the viewpoint of local indonesian players and japanese players as a representative of global players in increasing their english skills?” this question is answered by (1) taking into account the answers made in the game, and also (2) through the answers collected from the questionnaire. ever since the beginning, students have asked whether or not the answers they fill in the game would affect their regular school or course scores because they are given the explanation that it is far important to know that the game can be played well. it is assumed that students do not do the game seriously. it was then proven by the result of test takers from the english department students in soegijapranata catholic university who were in the second semester. out of 83 students that did the test, especially for the listening and reading test which had multiple choice questions, focused on their structure competency (see chart 1). as revealed in the result, only 3 students (7.89%) scored an a, 4 students (10.53%) scored a b, 7 students (18.42%) scored a c, 5 students (13.16%) scored a d, and 19 students (50%) of them scored an e. the 50% of the students who were not doing the test seriously is most likely because they knew from the beginning that the recorded answers would not affect their school performance. it is revealed from the answers given in the questionnaire. in the questionnaire, 24 close-ended statements were given with a 5 scale likert score to reflect the respondents’ opinions. the statements were based on tam’s guidelines. chart 1. listening and reading section test result first, statements dealing with peou were reflected in the following statements with the results in percentage (see table 1). with all of the highest percentage shown within the agree column, it shows that the student players perceive the game as easy and entertaining to do, as well as easy to download when needed. second, statements dealing with pu were reflected in the following statements with the following results in percentage (see table 2). table 1. peou percentage result no. peou statements sd d n a sa 2 the english language in the toefl-like game exercises are easy to understand 6.06 6.06 18.18 54.54 15.15 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 61 10 the time provided in each section is enough for me to complete the exercises 9.09 15.15 39.39 27.27 9.09 13 the toefl like app instructions in each section is easy to follow 3.03 12.12 27.27 36.36 21.21 14 the button symbol for back, next, record, stop in the game application are easy to follow 12.12 9.09 21.21 39.39 18.18 15 the navigation in the app is easy to follow 9.09 3.03 33.33 36.36 18.18 16 the multiple choice questions in the exercise are easy to do 9.09 0 18.18 66.66 6.06 22 searching toefl-like app tommy & pokina in google playstore is easy 3.03 9.09 24.24 48.48 15.15 table 2. pu percentage result no. pu statements sd d n a sa 1 learning english with an animation is more interesting than learning in a classroom with no digital media 3.03 9.09 15.15 42.42 3.03 5 i learn about different culture in the animation 6.06 9.09 33.33 36.36 15.15 6 i learn more about the benefits of vegetables in the animation of the listening section 9.09 9.09 21.21 48.48 12.12 7 i found new information about vegetable consumption in the reading exercise 9.09 9.09 27.27 33.33 21.21 17 the application works well 6.06 24.24 18.18 45.45 6.06 21 toefl like app tommy & pokina meets the needs of learners having various learning styles 6.06 3.03 24.24 57.57 9.09 similar to the result of peou, all of the statements receive a high percentage of agreement. this is gratifying to find, as it means that not only is the game helpful to elevate students’ mastery in english through playing a toefl-like game, but the students also acknowledge that they learned something new about the culture of the west as well as east, in addition to the importance of consuming vegetables to keep them in good health. the aim of creating an educative game that gives benefits is successfully met. third, attitude toward using (atu) the game, by means whether it is regarded as good-bad, harmful-beneficial, pleasant-unpleasant, and likable-dislikable is shown the following statements with the results in percentage (see table 3). it shows that most of the players agree that the game is beneficial. proof of this is seen in statement numbers 3, 4, 9, 18 and 20 having the highest percentage in the agree section. table 3. atu percentage result no. atu statements sd d n a sa 3 learning english in class is more fun than learning through an animated digital media 6.06 12.12 39.39 36.36 6.06 4 the culture-based characters in tommy and pokina animation is interesting 6.06 3.03 33.33 36.36 21.21 8 i like the vegetable recipe 3.03 9.09 39.39 33.33 15.15 9 i enjoy playing interactive digital media that challenges my knowledge of english grammar 6.06 9.09 18.18 54.54 12.12 12 i like doing the integrated based toefl like app exercise 3.03 6.06 42.42 36.36 12.12 18 the audio recording in the animation is clear 12.12 9.09 30.3 42.42 6.06 19 the visual images are excellent and vivid 3.03 15.15 39.39 33.33 9.09 20 the color used in visualizing tommy and pokina is appealing 9.09 9.09 21.21 39.39 21.21 lastly, the behavioral intention (bi) component of tam, in which a conscious plan of promoting or re-doing the game to enhance english skills, is revealed through the responses for the statements below (see table 4). ekawati marhaenny dukut the local-global innovation of an indonesian toefl-like game: a cultural hybridity model 62 table 4. bi percentage result no. bi statements sd d n a sa 11 the speaking exercise encourages me to use my english more actively 6.06 3.03 30.3 54.54 6.06 23 i will recommend my friend to use this application to learn english 3.03 9.09 45.45 33.33 9.09 24 i will play this english language interactive learning game again to get the best result 3.03 16.16 30.3 33.33 15.15 in the behavioral intention, although in one of the statement a high percentage is in neutrality, the other two statements receive a high percentage in the agree section. this shows that the game will likely be enjoyed by others as it enhances the active use of english in speaking. to give opportunities for the game testtakers to reflect back about the answers they have given through a likert scale, four openended questions were asked. the questions not only confirmed tam’s questions on pu, atu, and bi; but they also help the researcher have a better idea on what to do if there is a chance to modify the game. the questions dealing with pu were questions number 2 and 3. first, in response to question 2, “what kind of feature can be added to make the toefl-like app more interesting”, the responses from the indonesians were to: add music, add similar mini-games for iphone users, add a help button, add a back button, modify the game into an adventure game where a multiplayer can come to play, add longer conversations, add more entertaining gestures, add more character interaction with the players, add questions with pictures, and use native speakers as the voice over. to see how popular, the game can be for people outside of indonesia, the researcher also tested the game to japanese students from chukyo high school and chukyo university in nagoya. the japanese students gave additional suggestions such as to: prolong the animation story, add more questions on the main idea of the story rather than on grammar, add a highlighter for the reading section, more difficult questions are needed, and the game should give a bonus to correct answers given. second, in response to question 3 that also deals with pu, the question, “which toefllike section (listening, reading, writing, speaking) is the most beneficial to learn english? why?” the responses of the most beneficial from indonesian students (see chart 2) were for: listening (37.83%), reading (27.02%), speaking (24.32%), and writing (0.10%). whereas, the japanese (see chart 3) regarded the most beneficial in listening (50%), speaking (31.25%), reading (0.10%), and writing (0%). the responses show that both indonesian and japanese students nowadays feel that listening exercises need to be more facilitated, and becomes a logical explanation to why in the questionnaire, the students as players mostly agree that the animation feature in the toefl-like game is what makes the game interesting. the bi is shown through question 4 “if you could design an animation, what kind of animation do you want to make, so english learning is fun?” as an answer to the question, the indonesians suggest: making an animation about animals, flowers, scrabble, vocabulary, word connect, grammar, landmark, artist, hangman, puzzle, daily lesson, and quiz up games. the japanese also have similar suggestions, but added that an interesting game should deal more with issues on family relationship, animals, sweets, disney characters, translation, and classroom interaction between teacher and students. for the researcher, the answers all mean that students see the game as influencing them to be creative and imaginative, thereby, raising their english competency. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 63 chart 2. the toefl-like game app’s benefits for indonesian students chart 3. the toefl-like game app’s benefits for japanese students lastly, the atu is reflected in question number 1, “in your opinion, what are the disadvantages of the digital media that makes use of animation?” students reported that the disadvantages lie in some of the unclear picture and audio quality, the restricted time to do the test, the continual handling on the mobile phone, the incomplete feeling because there is no teacher intrusion, the non-auto orientation of watching the animation, the small writing area in the mobile phone, and the unfortunate game capability, which is only for the android and not for the iphone. whereas, the advantages of the game were reported as helping students learn english better, giving a good learning method, making students more imaginative and creative, interesting and colorful characters in the animation were met, and facilitating beginner’s need for studying toefl. they also reported that not many toefl games are available, so this game is beneficial for them because the game is easy to play with, and the animation was advantageous for them to help understand quickly with what they have heard. the cultural hybridity and identity of the local and the global aspects of the game in this study, another question has been formulated: what kinds of local and global aspects were evident in the game? the reason for this questioning is because the researcher understands the toefl as being usa made with usa facts and history inserted in the questions. with this kind of condition, the researcher assumes that not many asians, unless already knowing about usa history and campus life and courses well, will have difficulty in understanding the topics and questions put forward in toefl tests. by the use of cultural hybridity in designing the animation, it is believed that the toefl can be enjoyed more by people, particularly asians, such as the indonesians and japanese who became the main respondents of the study. the hybrid of the local to the global is believed to better attract the targeted test-takers’ interest and enthusiasm in using english actively. therefore, the researcher comes with the idea that there is a need to create a toefl-like exercise, which will not only increase the test-takers english competence but also make the test-takers feel that taking an english competency test can be fun. the insertion of the locality within the toefl, which has been accepted globally as the best way to test someone’s english competence, is seen clearly in the animation created for listening section. in the scene of tommy, the tomato actor, he is given a western suit and is seen showing his mastery of being an mc in the middle of a theater and exercising his muscles by going to a gym in order to show a global scene often shown up in popular media. this is made hybrid with the scene of tommy being a tomato with a white towel on his head that would cleanse himself as though immersed in a local japanese jacuzzi bathtub (see figure 2). ekawati marhaenny dukut the local-global innovation of an indonesian toefl-like game: a cultural hybridity model 64 figure 2. tommy in a jacuzzi figure 3. tommy with tomato facial mask figure 4. pokina with her wok figure 5. a bakso seller with his bowl another scene is with tommy still in his white towel but using the local indonesian's way of using the tomatoes as a facial herb to clean his face. indonesians believe that the tomatoes can make the face become brighter, so whatever dark blemishes were there can be reduced. in one of the answers of the japanese test-takers, this particular scene (see figure 3) is a new culture learned for them. in the animation of pokina the pakchoy chef, the global scene of the western environment is having pokina with a white uniform in a kitchen with an electric stove near a cupboard full of hanging kitchen utensils with plates and cutlery inside. this is made hybrid with the local javanese indonesian batik design on the white chef uniform. another locality of the asian’s habit is also seen with pokina preferring to use a chinese wok (see figure 4), or frying pan to stir fry her pakchoy vegetables with broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. in another scene, the pakchoy is informed as to the vegetable used to consume with bakso, a meatball soup favorite for many indonesians. the scene of bakso sellers using a wheel cart pushed around indonesian streets also adds onto the local scene. in the animation, the sound of spoons hitting the bakso bowl (see figure 5) is also deliberately added to point out the indonesian environment. conclusion this article brings forth the result of a research done to enhance the english competence needed by english department students in indonesia and japan. by the use of cultural hybridity which makes possible the mixture of local with global scenes, the researcher made a toefl-like mobile game application that accommodates the local and global scenes of popular culture. this strategy is deliberately used in the design to popularize the local into a global culture, just like how the global culture gets into the local one. in making hybrid the local into the global or vice versa, each of the culture’s identity is not troubled, instead they complement each other. the innovation of having the toefl as a game software that provides both entertainment and education has fulfilled the wish of the gen-z people, who are currently within their years of elementary, secondary and the first year of tertiary level. using tam as a guideline to a questionnaire that seeks to see how acceptable the gen-z are towards the product, this article shows that the study has answered the question of how successful the game is in increasing students’ english skill. as seen by the results shown in the previous chart 2 and 3, both indonesian and japanese test-takers see the tommy and pokina toefl-like mobile game app that can be downloaded from google playstore as being useful and beneficial. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 65 in answer to the second question about the local and global aspects, this article has also put forth the researcher’s innovation of providing animated scenes and characters in the toefl game, which are touching the indonesian and japanese culture. this is different from the usual scenes used in toefl tests that would focus wholly on just the american culture. to conclude, therefore, the toefl game software as a product made by an indonesian researcher does prove itself to be an appropriate model to increase students’ english competency as the students who agreed to become test-takers have had the opportunity of exercising their english in a fun and creative way. acknowledgement the researcher is thankful to the republic of indonesia’s ministry of technology, research and higher education who has provided a grant via the 2018 psni scheme to realize the creation of tommy & pokina toefl-like game mobile app. the app is a product of the research she leads, which is entitled “model pembelajaran bahasa inggris interaktif dengan cergam animasi berbasis budaya” (an interactive english language learning model using a culturally based animated picturebooks). the app has become a model for a better interactive english teaching-learning environment that culturally hybrids a local into a global culture. acknowledgement is also given to the 1st american studies international conference, where the initial paper draft was presented in 2526 october 2018, at soegondo room, faculty of cultural sciences, gadjah mada university, yogyakarta, indonesia. 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(2014). strategi pembangunan game edukasi berbasis desktop untuk anak usia 4-6 tahun. journal speed-sentra penelitian edukasi dan engineering, 6(1), 8–17. 145 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014 lin dunlai school of foreign languages and literature; collaborative innovation center of national assessment and improvement of basic education quality, beijing normal university, china e-mail: lindunlai@bnu.edu.cn apa citation: lin, d. (2014). a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 145-157 received: 01-04-2014 accepted: 27-04-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract : the national matriculation english test (nmet) is a high-stakes test compulsory for those aspiring to entering higher education institutions in china. the test is designed by the national education examinations authority (neea) and some local examination authorities. the final section of this test is generally a writing task. in this paper, the author examines the 21 writing tasks that were used in the nmet 2014. using content analysis, and a priori validation components of weir’s (2005) socio-cognitive validation framework, namely test taker characteristics, cognitive validity and context validity, the paper finds out the merits and demerits of these 21 writing tasks. it is concluded that these writing tasks are generally well designed and are valid in helping select talents. but more empirical research must be done to investigate how the writing tasks function for students when taking these writing tests. keywords: nmet, socio-cognitive validation framework, cognitive validity, context validity, china institution directly under the supervision of moe of p. r. china, and local institutions (the provincial admissions office). it normally includes compulsory subjects chinese, mathematics and english, and other subjects which depends on what type of university the candidate is applying for. for 28 out of 31 provinces, those other subjects like chemistry, physics, politics and geography are integrated into two tests of science or liberal arts. the national matriculation english test (nmet) was designed in 1991 (liu, 2010:38). its predecessor, the matriculation english test (met), was replaced by it in 1996 in accordance with the educational reform (see li, 1990 for the met; see cheng & qi, 2006 for an overview of the nmet). in 2014, three forms of nmet were in application. the first and second one were based on the national english curriculum standards introduction examinations play a crucial part in chinese people’s life. for chinese students to become successful in schools or even in their life, they have to perform very well in numerous tests, especially the university entrance examination to higher education (ueehe). the ueehe is the largest examination system in china, which is administered annually between june 6th to 8th for most provinces, and into 9th for a few provinces. its purpose is for general higher educational institutions to grant admission to those talented for higher education nationwide (liu, 2010). according to chinese ministry of education (moe), the candidature for 2014 was 9.39 million. the university entrance examination is administered by the national education examinations authority (neea), which is an lin dunlai a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014 146 (necs) (moe, 2001). the two differ in the weighting of scores in reading comprehension and use of english sections (see table 1 for an overview of the nmet based on necs). these two tests are informed by lyle bachman’s 1990 model of communicative competence. the first test was used in henan, hebei and shanxi, while the second test was used in qinghai, xizang, gansu, guizhou, inner mongolia, xinjiang, ningxia, jilin, heilongjiang and yunnan in 2014. the third test was based on the teaching curriculum of english with a listening section. this test, however, is expected to die out, and was used only in guangxi zhuang autonomous region this year. besides these tests, since 2004, several provinces or municipalities have been required to develop their own matriculation tests. as of 2014, 17 provinces and municipalities are developing their own test. these provinces or municipalities are beijing, tianjin, shanghai, chongqing, liaoning, table 1. overview of the nmet based on the national english curriculum standards (moe, 2001) section part input lang. of rubric task focus item types num. of items raw score i. listening comprehension a 5 short dialogues (heard once) chinese simple factual information mc (3 options) 5 7.5 b 5 dialogues & monologues (heard twice) chinese simple factual information mc (3 options) 15 22.5 ii. reading comprehension a 4 texts (over 900 in total) chinese general and detailed information mc (4 options) 15 45 (30) b 1 text (about 300 words) chinese relationship between sentences and paragraphs gap filling (7 options) 5 15 (10) iii. use of english a 1 text (about 200 words) chinese vocabulary and comprehension mc cloze (4 options) 20 40 (30) b 1 text (about 150 words) chinese grammar use in context gap-filling (no more than three words) 10 15 iv. writing a 1 text (100 words) chinese error correction error correction 10 10 b prompt (in chinese) chinese writing a short text guided writing 1 80+1 25 180 (150) jiangsu, zhejiang, anhui, fujian, guangdong, jiangxi, shandong, hunan, hubei, sichuan, shaanxi, hainan. please mind that not all these provinces or municipalities developed all the tests of all subjects. they may file a request to use some of the tests developed by the neea. every year, months before the ueehe is administered, examination syllabus for admission tests to institutions of higher education is issued to guarantee all teachers and candidates are well-informed of what is tested in the ueehe. a look through the past papers since 1978 showed that the writing task made its debut in 1989, and it has stayed there ever since then. the direct measures of writing assessment, which assess a student’s ability to communicate through the written mode based on the actual production of written texts, is conducive to the validity of the test. the neea emphasizes that all tests should test what necs requires and what is taught 147 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in schools. in light of this, the writing task should reflect what necs band 8 says about what students should be able to do to achieve the proficiency required. the necs band 8 requires that students should be able to: write a coherent and well-structured essay to narrate or express their views or attitudes; write a summary of a text; write an essay or report on information about written texts or graphs. it also stipulates that students should have an awareness of rhetorical pattern and achieve fluency in writing. hyland (2002) argues that the design of good writing tasks involves four basic elements, namely, rubric (the instructions), prompt (the task), expected response (what the task intends test takers to do), post-task evaluation (assessing the effectiveness of the writing task). in china, many research papers have been published about the nemt writing tasks. for instance, gao and gu (2008) examined the writing tasks set by local examination authorities from 2004 to 2007, and found problems with rubrics and communicative needs of the writing tasks. other cross-year studies include dong et al. (2011), feng and gao (2012). zhang (2013) did a concurrent study of the nmet 2014 writing tasks. he examined the tasks from content and test design, and gave some suggestions to writing task development and classroom teaching of writing. other similar studies are gu and gao (2007), ding (2012). but we have to point out that few studies so far have used a well-established validation framework to investigate the nmet writing tasks. the objective of this paper is to first provide a profile of what is tested in the 2014 nmet writing section across the country, and then based on weir’s (2005) socio-cognitive approach to test validation, especially test taker characteristics, context validity and cognitive validity, the paper examines the quality of these writing tasks and give suggestion where improvements could be made. in dealing with these aspect, we only focus on what weigle (2002: 77-78) called the design stage and operationalization stage. method as mentioned above, administered by neea, the nmet is a compulsory subject that every candidate aspiring to entering higher education institutions should take. neea is not responsible for developing all tests that are administered across the country. in 2014, 17 provinces and municipalities developed their own tests, including the nmet. there are two versions of tests developed by the neea, based on the necs. the third test based on the teaching curriculum of english, used in guangxi, shared the same writing task as one of the tests based on the necs. besides, the nmet of beijing, guangdong, chongqing includes two writing tasks each. hainan used the second test developed by the neea. put together, there are 21 writing tasks in the nmet of 2014. these 21 tasks are the samples for analysis for this paper. table 2 gives us a profile of general information about these 21 writing tasks. according to coombe et al. (2007: 73), writing prompts can be divided into three types: base prompts, framed prompts and text-based prompts. as is shown above, framed prompts are most frequently used in the nmet 2014. base prompts only appeared in fujian paper, hubei paper, shandong paper, chongqing paper task1. text-based prompts appeared in jiangsu paper and guangdong paper. how well does these writing tasks function in such a high-stakes national test? in order to answer this question, we should seek a test validation framework to analyze the above 21 writing tasks. we believe that the socio-cognitive framework proposed by weir (2005) and refined later through the experience of lin dunlai a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014 148 applying it to operational cambridge esol tests to be both theoretically sound and extremely useful. for the current paper’s purpose, we find test taker characteristics, cognitive validity (originally named theory-based validity) and context validity proposed by weir (2005) and exemplified in shaw and weir (2007) to be relevant. this part of the socio-cognitive framework is presented in figure 1. as shown in figure 1, a priori (before-the-test event) validation components, as named by shaw and weir (2007: 3) include test taker characteristics, cognitive validity and context validity. the three crucial research questions that we can pose are: how are the physical/physiological, psychological and experiential characteristics of candidates catered for by the nmet writing tasks? (test taker characteristics) are the cognitive processes required to complete the test tasks appropriate? (cognitive validity) are the characteristics of the test tasks and their administration appropriate and fair to the candidates who are taking them? (context validity) table 2 a profile of 21 writing tasks in nmet 2014 name number of items raw score length topic necs1 1 25 ~100* a letter of inquiry about study in the uk necs2 guangxi 1 25 ~100 an essay about what life will be like in ten years beijing 2 15 >50 a letter of apology and further arrangement of travel 20 >60 an essay about how a problem was solved tianjin 1 25 >100 an email to an exchange students about local life shanghai 1 25 120-150 an email giving suggestion and explanation chongqing 2 15 >60 an essay expressing views about a saying 20 >80 a post about the best gift you received liaoning 1 25 ~100 a written announcement about an activity on campus jiangsu 1 25 ~150 a summary and an argumentation about word borrowing zhejiang 1 30 100-120 a letter to a librarian to recommend books anhui 1 25 ~120 a response letter to a worried person fujian 1 25 ~120 an essay of views about a quotation about success guangdong 2 15 n/a a report of five sentences to a local english paper 25 ~150 a summary and students’ views about donation jiangxi 1 25 ~120 a speech about what to learn in senior high school shandong 1 30 120-150 an essay about a proverb (choose one from two proverbs) hunan 1 25 >120 an introduction to your innovation for a daily item hubei 1 30 >120 an essay about “small things make a difference” sichuan 1 35 ~120 a letter to a pen pal about college entrance exam shaanxi 1 30 >100 a welcoming speech to a foreign delegation * ~stands for “approximately”, >stands for “more than” 149 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee figure 1. a priori validation components for conceptualizing writing test performance (adapted from weir, 2005:47)figure 1 a priori validation components for conceptualizing writing test performance (adapted from weir, 2005:47) test taker characteristics physical/physiological psychological experiential context validity cognitive validity setting: task response format purpose knowledge of criteria weighting text length time constraints writer-reader relationship setting: administration physical conditions uniformity of administration security linguistics demands: (task input and output) lexical resources structural resources discourse mode functional resources content knowledge cognitive processes macro-planning organization micro-organization translation monitoring revising results and discussion in this part, we will examine the quality of the 21 writing tasks that appeared in the nmet 2014. we will follow the three research questions as we discuss about the quality. for each question, a brief introduction to the contents of the validation components will be put forward, followed by a discussion about the 21 writing tasks. response results and discussion in this part, we will examine the quality of the 21 writing tasks that appeared in the nmet 2014. we will follow the three research questions as we discuss about the quality. for each question, a brief introduction to the contents of the validation components will be put forward, followed by a discussion about the 21 writing tasks. test taker characteristics shaw and weir (2007:17) argue that it is the test taker, rather than the test task, that is at the heart of the assessment event. while test takers’ success in the test depends primarily on an individual’s ability in the intended construct, there are many other variables which are likely to impact on test takers’ performance. one of these variables is test takers’ personal characteristics, which includes factors such as age, interests, experience, knowledge and motivation. bachman (1990) argues that test taker characteristics are either systematic in the sense that they influence test performance continually, and unsystematic in the sense that they are more difficult to predict. the systematic attributes referred to by bachman (1990:164) include cognitive style, content knowledge, and gender. o’sullivan (2000) listed the following test taker characteristics, as presented in table 3. as for physical/physiological aspect, test takers for the nmet are mostly of the same age, around 17 to 19 years old. these school-leaving students were born around 1995, when multimedia, such as computers and the internet, are becoming an important part of their life. this was reflected in some writing tasks in the nmet of 2014. for instance, the two writing tasks in chongqing paper were about phone and posting information on the internet. the first task use a popular saying “my friend falls, i laugh; my phone falls, i cry” to lin dunlai a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014 150 arouse consensus of a generation of nomophobia. the jiangsu paper gave a text about the intrusion of english words like “pk” (meaning to compete), “out” (meaning ill-informed) into the latest dictionary of contemporary chinese, causing a heated discussion. students at this age are most active in using these new words, and they have their views about it. as for psychological aspect, test taker’s interest or motivation may influence the way a task is dealt with (berry, 2004). test developers should make efforts to make test events as positive as possible. there was a bad example. for such a high-stakes test, students and parents alike are suffering a lot of anxiety. but the sichuan paper asked test takers to write a letter to a pen pal about college entrance exam. it may arouse more anxiety and cause construct irrelevant variance. to cater for the candidates with different cognitive style, necs1 paper, liaoning paper, guangdong paper task i used a diagram, and beijing paper task 2 used pictures. as for experiential aspect, test takers should be informed of the demands of the writing tasks. this is annually explained in examination syllabus for admission tests to institutions of higher education (neea, 2013). an examination of the 21 writing tasks show that all these writing tasks should be familiar to test takers. experiential characteristics also includes students’ past learning experiences. the nmet 2014 was paper-based and students spent a long period of time revising, table 3. test taker characteristics (based on o’sullivan, 2000) physical/physiological psychological experiential short term ailments longer term disabilities age sex personality memory cognitive style affective schemata concentration motivation emotional state education examination preparedness examination experience communication experience target language country residence so there is confidence that they were familiar with what was tested in the writing tasks. but we have to bear in mind that china is such a large country, even within a province, the situations for students could be dramatically different. students in cities may have communication experience with english speaking people, while students in the countryside might not have the chance to come across a foreigner. cheng and qi (2006) provide a good example about a writing task requiring the candidates to describe an experience of violating traffic regulations, thus biasing against the candidates from the countryside. an examination of these 21 writing tasks shows no obvious bias against the candidates from the countryside in the nmet 2014. cognitive validity the cognitive validity of a writing task is a measure of how closely it represents the cognitive processing involved in writing contexts beyond the test itself, i.e. in performing the task in real life (shaw & weir, 2007: 34). scholars have proposed many frameworks of writing, especially for l1 writing (hayes & flower, 1980; bereiter & scardamalia, 1987; kellogg, 1994, 1996; field, 2004; eysenck & keane, 2005). grabe and kaplan’s (1996) work is part of a limited literature available for cognitive processing in l2, but as shaw and weir (2007) points out their model does not distinguish adequately the resources stored in long-term memory from the operations of short-term memory. field 151 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee (2004:329-331) provides an account of information processing which shows the operations a writer performs when engaged in the writing process. it was adopted by the above weir (2005) model, and we will use this model here, and as we use content analysis to analyze the writing topics, we focus on macroplanning, organization, translation and monitoring and revising. macro-planning: gathering of ideas and identification of major constraints (genre, readership, goals) (shaw & weir, 2007:38) scardamalia and bereiter (1987) argue that different processing models exist at different developmental stages of writing and describe two major strategies, knowledge telling and knowledge transformation. in knowledge telling, the writer does not plan much and only focuses on generating content from within remembered existing resources in line with task, topic or genre. knowledge transforming entails a heightened awareness of problems as and when they arise. the writer considers the complexities of a task and analyze and solve problems of task achievement in terms of content, audience, register and set goals (hyland, 2002:28). an examination of the 21 writing tasks show that the planning, processing, retrieval and evaluation demands upon the nmet candidates are generally simple and largely involve knowledge telling. take necs2 which was most widely used for an example. the writing task requires the candidates to write an essay about “my life in ten years” for an english newspaper. they were required to follow three points, namely, family life, work, entertainment. the first sentence is given as “i often imagine what my life will be like in the future”. macro-planning of this task may entail: an assessment of the context (the need for an essay to the local english newspaper for publication); appreciation and understanding of the three points in the input text (family life, work, entertainment); a preliminary representation of the writing outcome (a 100-word essay); an evaluation of the potential problems in understanding the task (understanding input text, coverage of content bullet points, appropriate essay for publication); an initial activation of certain aspects of the genre; perhaps also strategic considerationsavoiding what they cannot express. the other framed prompts are similar to necs2. however, those base prompts and text-based prompts required more planning and involved knowledge transformation. one example is from hubei paper, which asked the candidates to write an essay based on the following statement “small things make a big difference. the small things we do can make us a responsible member of the society.” macro-planning for this task may entail: an assessment of the context (an essay about small things, should include specific events of the candidate); an initial choice of the genre, whether it is to narrate or to argue; a preliminary representation of the writing outcome (a 120-word essay); an evaluation of the potential problems in undertaking the task (understanding input text, choosing an appropriate event to support the idea); an initial activation of certain aspects of the genre: how narrative is structured. organization: ordering the ideas; identifying relationships between them; determining which are central to the goals of the text and which are of secondary importance(shaw & weir, 2007:38) skilled writers plan the writing in relation to the overall text and points within the writing at the initial stage of the writing process, while unskilled l2 writers experience a heavy cognitive load in encoding their thoughts in linguistic form so that they normally can’t manage lin dunlai a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014 152 to pay attention to organizing the idea. in the nmet 2014, most prompts are framed prompts, so the demands on the test takers to organize their thoughts is low. for instance, in necs1, a letter of inquiry to study in the uk in summer holiday is required. the points that need to be included were given: start date? class size? hours per week? how much? types of accommodation? the candidates only needed to follow these points to come up with the letter. not much attention should be paid to organization. however, with base prompts, the story could be different. in chongqing1, the candidates are asked to make comments on “my friend falls, i laugh; my phone falls, i cry.” no points were advised in the prompt, and the candidates should plan for the organization by themselves. translation: propositional content previously held in abstract form is converted to linguistic form (shaw & weir, 2007:39) at this stage, the propositions in the candidates’ mind is transformed into linguistic forms. this is basically automatic and is generally not subject to direct investigation. however, we can infer from the marking schemes provided by some writing tasks to know the requirements. again we use necs1 for example. the marking scheme shows that for those skilled writers, they should use various grammatical structures and a wide range of vocabulary. they may make a few mistakes, but these mistakes result from a good attempt to use advanced grammatical structures and vocabulary. they should also need to use cohesive devices to make the text hinge together. the marking scheme also shows that for those who are not able to achieve the task, they use very simple grammatical structure and very limited vocabulary. they make many mistakes in grammar and vocabulary, making it impossible to communicate and they are not able to use cohesive devices. but we need to keep in mind that even for skilled l2 writer, for students at this level of proficiency, they are encouraged to be ambitious in their use of language, thus good attempts with minor mistakes in language generally do not lead to punishment. d. monitoring and revising: a basic level of checking mechanical mistakes, and a higher level of checking task fulfillment, and make some modifications accordingly. in test preparation period, english teacher would make efforts to ask the candidates to check their writing before handing in. for unskilled writers, they normally focus on checking spelling, punctuation and syntax. for more skilled writers, they may consider whether their writing is fit for the situation, and may go back to those aspects of dissatisfaction, and make some adjustments. context validity context validity relates to the linguistic and content demands that must be met for successful task realization (shaw & weir, 2007:63). weir (1993) argues that the sample of communicative language ability selected for a test should be “as representative as possible” and the test tasks should be selected in accordance with “the general descriptive parameters of the intended target situation particularly with regard to the skills necessary for successful participation in that situation”. based on the model proposed in figure 1, this section will examine the nmet 2014 writing tasks from setting: task, setting: administration and linguistic demands: task input and output. setting: task rubrics and prompts. in writing tasks, test developers must make sure that any production demands on the test 153 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee takers are made clear. bachman (1990: 118) suggests three characteristics of task rubrics: test organization, time allocation and instructions. later, bachman and palmer (1996: 121) offer three essential guidelines for instructions. they argue that instructions should be a) simple enough for test takers to understand; b) short enough so as not to take up too much of the test administration time; c) sufficiently detailed for test takers to know exactly what is expected of them. from figure 2, we can see that most rubrics plus prompts do not exceed 150 words. the candidates using necs2 only needed to read 100 words in chinese, thus the reading load was kept to minimum. the two longest were jiangsu paper and guangdong paper. these two papers used text-based prompts, with the length of the texts being 168 and 208 respectively. authenticity. the authenticity of a test is of paramount importance for the validity of it. authenticity must necessarily be seen as a relative, rather than an absolute, quality, since the context of a testing situation is greatly different from that of typical real-life situations (elliott & wilson, 2013:154). lewkowicz (2000) states that authenticity can be a function of both the input and the output, and it is possible for a test to have a high level of authenticity in one but not the other. bachman (1991:690-691) proposed two notions of authenticity. one is situational authenticity, which means “the perceived relevance of the test method characteristic to the features of a specific target language use situation”. the other is interactional authenticity, which means “the interaction between the test taker and the test task”. the interactional authenticity is later renamed as interactiveness in the test usefulness framework proposed by bachman and palmer (1996). an examination of the 21 writing tasks show that four tasks violates situational authenticity. the first one appeared in zhejiang paper, which asked the test takers to write a letter to the school librarian mr. wang (a typical chinese) to recommend two categories of new books. this simply could not happen in chinese campus where it is rare to have an english speaking person to be a school librarian. besides, when it comes to recommendation, it is more efficient to write in chinese. another is anhui paper which asked the candidates to write a response letter to the worried person. although it is a column in the campus english newspaper, rarely do figure 2. word count of rubrics and prompts of the nmet 2014 num. of words lin dunlai a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014 154 chinese students express their concerns through the campus newspaper. the third is liaoning paper, which asked the candidates to write an announcement about innovation on campus. as this activity has nothing to do with english, it is not necessary for students to write an english announcement about it. the fourth is hunan paper, which asked the candidates to write about their innovation for a daily item with the title “my magic ___”. as innovation would necessarily involve something creative, and it is very difficult for the candidates with this level of language proficiency to describe it well and use it for a competition. response format. alderson et al. (1995) suggest that a test should include a range of response formats in order to ensure that all candidates will have an opportunity to perform at their best. in table 1, we know that the writing section normally have two items, one is error correction and the other is a writing task. when we examine the nmet 2014, we see that a few provinces and municipalities such as beijing, chongqing and guangzhou used two tasks. and in shandong paper, two proverbs were offered, “a friend in need is a friend indeed”, or “where there is a will, there is a way.” the candidates are required to choose one of the two proverbs and make comments. purpose. the rubric must give the candidates clear and precise information about the purpose for completing the writing task. weir (2005) argues that there is a close relationship between the choices we make in relation to purpose and the processing that results in task completion. in this regard, all the 21 writing tasks are doing a good job, as they state very clearly what is expected from the candidates, either it is a letter of inquiry, a welcoming speech or an essay to be published. knowledge of criteria. weir (2005) also emphasized the importance of letting candidates know which criteria are used in the marking. only two papers state explicitly the marking criteria on the test paper. one is jiangsu paper and the other is guangdong paper. for instance, jiangsu paper states that scores will be awarded for content completeness, language, discourse coherence and text length. weighting. weighting should be stated clearly on the test paper so that candidates will arrange their time in the testing process. all papers are doing very well in this regard except the shanghai paper. the test paper only shows that the second section with a translation test and a writing task is worth 47 points without indicating clearly the weighting for the writing task. text length. as is shown in table 2, all writing tasks show the requirement of text length except the guangdong paper task1. but the wording for text length varies across different writing tasks. the words “approximately” and “no less than” are frequently used. zhejiang, shanghai and shandong papers give a range of the text length. we think that the word “approximately” is more confusing, as there is not an exact word number to follow. giving a range of text length requires test takers to have a better planning for their writing. time constraints no paper indicates time constraint for the writing task. the whole test paper is supposed to be finished within 2 hours. it gives students freedom to make decisions on how much time to spend on each section. this also makes great demands on the candidates’ test taking strategies. writer-reader relationship writing is a kind of social interaction, and there should always be an audience for a certain piece of writing. in the 21 writing tasks, we find that the distance between the writer and the audience are different, thus making the tasks different 155 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in difficulty. 13 of the tasks use an open audience, and the candidates need to consider how their writing can convey their ideas properly. the rest of the tasks involved a specific person who is not very familiar to the candidates, thus calling for proper formalities. setting: administration security is very tight for the administration of the national college entrance examinations. test papers are confidential until they are put into real use. in the writing tasks, a sentence suggesting “no information should be stated about your name and school name” often appears in the rubrics. out of the 21 writing tasks, 10 tasks stated requirement. an imaginary name is used where necessary. 7 test papers use li hua as an imaginary name for the test candidate to guard against possible release of the candidates’ real names. the other names are “li jin”, “jamie”, “li yue”, “li xia”, “joe”, “cheng fei”. all these measures are taken to guarantee the validity of the test. linguistic demands: task input and task output as for linguistic demands, including lexical resources, structural resources, discourse mode, functional resources and content knowledge, it is clearly stated in the syllabus for the nemt (neea, 2013) in five attachments to the test specification. an examination of the 21 writing tasks shows that in terms of text types, genres and topics, the tasks were developed strictly based on the syllabus. any new words that appeared in the writing tasks were indicated in the instruction, such as “accommodation”, “innovation”, “literary book”, “quotation”. the language of input, including rubrics and prompts, differs in the writing tasks. necs1, fujian paper, hubei paper, shandong paper and chongqing paper task1 used chinese rubrics and english prompts. shanghai paper, and hunan paper used english rubrics and chinese prompts. necs1, liaoning paper, anhui paper, jiangxi paper, shaanxi paper, zhejiang paper, sichuan paper, beijing paper task 1 and chongqing paper task2 and guangdong paper task1 used only chinese input. jiangsu paper and guangdong paper task2 used english text plus chinese input. liaoning paper and beijing paper task2 used chinese input with pictures or graphs. conclusion adopting a priori validation components from weir’s socio-cognitive framework for test validation, we have found that the 21 writing tasks are generally valid in selecting university entrants. the analysis from the perspective of test taker characteristics shows that the candidates’ cognitive style, content knowledge and their age have been catered for, though a few tasks may arouse anxiety. the analysis from the perspective of cognitive validity shows that framed prompts normally require knowledge telling while base prompts and text-based prompts are more likely to entail knowledge transformation. the analysis from the perspective of context validity shows that test developers have made a lot of efforts to make the prompts briefly and clearly. some tasks suffer from situational unauthenticity. a few writing tasks give candidates freedom to make the choice of topics. as regards audiences, the 21 writing tasks have great difference in light of the imaginary writer’s familiarity with the audiences, thus leading to different difficulty. security in test administration is guaranteed to avoid construct irrelevant variance. task input and output are strictly based on necs and within the lin dunlai a study of writing tasks in the nmet 2014 156 candidates’ ability to tackle. however, the current paper only adopts content analysis, and nothing has been done as to how the candidates process these writing tasks. future research should focus on this to find out more evidence to validate the writing section in the nmet. references alderson, j. c., clapham, c., & wall, d. 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(2000). towards a model of performance in oral language testing. unpublished phd dissertation, university of reading. scardamalia, m. & bereiter, c. (1987). knowledge telling and knowledge transformation in written composition. in s. rosenberg (ed.). advances in applied linguistics, vol. 2, reading, writing and language learning. cambridge: cambridge university press, 142-175. shaw, s. d. & weir, c. j. (2007). examining writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. weigle, s. c. (2002). assessing writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. 157 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee weir, c. j. (1993). understanding and developing language tests. new york: prentice hall. weir, c. j. (2005). language testing and validation: an evidence-based approach. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 61 undergraduate students’ perspectives in using edmodo as an educational social network hikmah nur insani english education department, school of postgraduate, indonesia university of education e-mail: hikmahinsani@student.upi.edu didi suherdi english education department, school of postgraduate, indonesia university of education e-mail: suherdi_d@upi.edu gin gin gustine english education department, school of postgraduate, indonesia university of education e-mail: gustine@upi.edu apa citation: insani, h. n., suherdi, d., & gustine, g. g. (2018). undergraduate students’ perspectives in using edmodo as an educational social network. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 61-68. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1254. received: 23-02-2018 accepted: 27-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: the integration of technology in education and the need to meet the requirements of the 21 st century learning lead educators to use online learning platforms. edmodo is offered as one of learning platforms that could be used in efl classroom. this research aims to investigate perception of undergraduate students on the use of edmodo as an educational social network which has been implemented in the classroom. this study employed mix method design by involving 50 undergraduate students from a university in bandung, indonesia. the data were collected through closed-ended and open-ended questionnaires. as results, it was found that undergraduate students showed positive response and attitudes towards the use of edmodo in their learning process. besides, some obstacles of using edmodo were also revealed, such as lack of experiences in using technology and how to manage the time allocation. finally, it is suggested that edmodo should be implemented in undergraduate efl classroom. keywords: edmodo, undergraduate students’ perception, educational social network, online learning platform introduction information and communication technology (ict) has been integrated into education in indonesia in the recent years. nowadays, second and foreign language teachers have the options to use technology in the classroom. therefore, technology is indicated as one of factors in the 21st century education. as a result, teaching and learning approaches have changed to suit the digital age by adopting technology or incorporating e-learning into classrooms (cowie & sakui, 2013). in general, the 21st century world requires individuals who can achieve success in their learning, work and life (suherdi, 2010). moreover, one of ways to integrate technology in education is the use of an educational social network. social networking is known as a service that enables users to interact with others, share information and make an active continuous virtual community through the creation of system profiles and online groups (brooke, 2013). related with educational context, it means that social network could provide students to be more creative and attractive during the teaching and learning process. furthermore, talking about educational social network, edmodo is offered as an online tool that can promote individual to join and interact with each other, especially in the learning process (prasad & prasad, 2012). edmodo has been widely used by many top universities as an alternative space wherein mailto:hikmahinsani@student.upi.edu hikmah nur insani, didi suherdi, & gin gin gustine undergraduate students’ perspectives in using edmodo as an educational social network 62 students can adapt easily through daily activities and interactions with peers and faculty. it is supported by enriquez (2014) who declares edmodo as one of the top learning tools by five hundred plus professionals from 48 countries around the world. according to hourdequin (2014), edmodo is described as a free online learning management system that offers a secure virtual space for students and teachers to share and discuss texts, images, audio files, and videos. thus, edmodo could be accessed through web browser or smartphone application (ios and android). the teachers could create communities or classes for specific groups of students on edmodo. when a teacher creates an edmodo group, he or she receives a group code that could be used by students. besides, not only teachers and students but also parents are able to have a code of their own. it is aimed to allow them to check, support, and work together with their children (batsila, et al., 2014). by this system, parents, students, and teachers could be a good teamwork to support the teaching and learning process inside or outside the classroom. furthermore, it is claimed that students who are already facebook users can use edmodo without difficulties (çankaya et al., 2013). by using edmodo, teachers can create some quizzes and assignments, give feedback, receive complete assignments, assign grades, store and share content, maintain a class calendar, conduct polls and send alters to individual students or to the entire class (alkathiri, 2014). in that case, looi & yusop (2011) provides some benefits of using edmodo in the teaching and learning process. first, the students could post any comments regarding to the assignments. second, students are able to get reward badges that could increase their learning motivation. as we know that, by giving such rewards, sometimes students will put their high motivation to the teaching and learning process. third, edmodo allows students to get along with their friends through sub-groups. it means that students could discuss anything when they feel confused about the assignments. fourth, edmodo could develop learner autonomous and self-directed learning as students receive instant comments and reviews on their posts which assist them in constructing new knowledge (al-khathiri, 2014). thus, edmodo could provide students to give feedback to each other. fifth, edmodo as an educational social network put contributions in increasing an effective communication and engagement between the students and their teacher at the right time. the effectiveness could be provided by looking to the benefits of using technology, especially educational social network (looi & yusop, 2011). sixth, edmodo provides authentic materials that relates to real life situations which applicable in daily life. it means that the teacher could choose actual topic relating to the current situation and feelings of students. it is also supported by laurillard (2005) who states the conventional teaching and learning process through lectures, whole-class teaching and books should be supplemented with technology to serve and give more opportunities for learners to get involved in the process. despite the above-mentioned advantages, using edmodo in education could raise some challenges. first challenge is low internet speed and internet connection problems as highlighted by alkhathiri (2015) and enriquez (2014). second challenge of using edmodo as an educational social network is the small-sized screen of the phones which makes it difficult for students to view all the course materials on the phone (alkhathiri, 2015). some students may not always access edmodo from their laptop. it is also supported by addison (2011) who notes that small-sized screen is one of barriers in implementing edmodo as an educational social network. in the context of english as foreign language, a number of recent studies towards the use of edmodo as an educational social network has been growing since it relates to 21st century learning process. a big scale study affirmed a considerable number of benefits of using edmodo in efl classes (enriquez, 2014). the findings show that edmodo is viewed as an effective social media application that can improve students’ ability through an english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 63 active participation in online discussions and tasks (enriquez, 2014). while in indonesian context, muhfidin (2013) states the use of edmodo as the supplementary learning tool is effective and applicable for students. furthermore, edmodo also could be used in teaching writing in a blended learning setting since it facilitates students’ engagement cognitively (purnawarman et al., 2016). reflecting on the previous elaboration, this study aims at undergraduate students’ perceptions towards the use of edmodo as an educational social network in the learning process. therefore, this paper reaffirms the benefits of edmodo as an educational social network which relates to the integration of technology in the teaching and learning process. furthermore, this study also aims to find out some problems and challenges from the undergraduate students’ perceptions when using edmodo in their learning process. this would be beneficial to create a suitable language online learning tool that suits learners’ needs. to achieve those purposes, the study attempts to address the following questions: 1. what are the undergraduate students’ perceptions about the use of edmodo as an educational social network for efl classes? 2. do undergraduate students see edmodo as an effective educational social network for efl classes? method in order to achieve the purpose of the research in exploring undergraduate students’ perspections in using edmodo as a social network, a mixed method approach is selected as the research design by combining qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures with two main reasons. firstly, cresswell (2009) states mix method utilizes the strength of both qualitative and quantitative research. the study adopted the concurrent triangulation design which allowed the researcher to collect both qualitative and quantitative data to figure out if there is convergence, differences, or some combinations. secondly, the research will get better understanding when combining both qualitative and quantitative data (hamied, 2017). moreover, the projected research uses triangulation design since it belongs to the types of mixed method design. the participants of the study were 50 undergraduate students (female = 30 students, male = 20 students) in an indonesian university majoring english education department in the 6th semester of the academic year 2017. they have been experienced in using edmodo in their classroom guided by their lecturers. furthermore, in collecting data, the study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to identify undergraduate students’ perceptions on using edmodo. to answers the research questions, the questionnaires created in the form of google docs that have been sent to all participants. here, to obtain a quantitative data, a closed-ended survey questionnaire with 11 statements was made based on the existing survey developed by enriquez (2014) with some modifications made by the researcher in order to address the first and second research questions. the questionnaire was in 5 pointlikert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). moreover, qualitative data was gained through open-ended questionnaires. it was grouped to see students’ experiences, advantages, problems, and suggestions to address the second research question. results and discussion the discussions of the findings are divided into two subsections following the central themes appeared from closed and open-ended questionnaires. the central themes are students’ perceptions about the use of edmodo as an educational social network and undergraduate students’ perceptions about the effectiveness of edmodo as an educational social network. students’ perceptions about the use of edmodo as an educational social network regarding the first research question, the findings from the questionnaire relating to students’ perceptions about the use of edmodo as an educational social network are presented in the following table. hikmah nur insani, didi suherdi, & gin gin gustine undergraduate students’ perspectives in using edmodo as an educational social network 64 table 1. undergraduate students’ perceptions of using edmodo as an educational social network no questions strongly agree agree neutral disagree strongly disagree 1 edmodo allows me to easily interact/participate with my classmates and lecturer about assignments, group tasks and other course activities. 10% 56.5 % 28.3% 4.3% 2 edmodo procedure is difficult to follow 10.9% 17.4% 60.9% 3 assignments, quizzes, and other online tasks given by the lecturer in edmodo help me improve my learning and comprehension skills 47.8% 37% 8.7% 4 online activities and discussions in edmodo motivate me to learn more about the course 4.3% 39.1% 43.5% 13% the table shows that most participants (sa= 10%, agree = 56.5%) agree that edmodo allows them to interact and participate easily with their classmates and teachers through some assignments, group tasks, and other course activities. here, the participants (disagree = 60.9%) do not think that the procedures of using edmodo is difficult to follow since some of the participants were currently using it at their classroom. moreover, most half of participants in this study (agree = 48.7%) agree that assignments, quizzes, and other online tasks given by the lecturer on edmodo helped them to improve the learning and comprehension skills. although there are some participants (neutral = 43.5%) who are neutral and disagree with the statement stating online activities and discussions in edmodo motivate them to learn more about the course. in line with this, the high gap between agree and neutral or disagree could indicate that participants still give positive response to the implementation of edmodo in the teaching and learning process. table 2. undergraduate students’ experiences of using edmodo no questions strongly agree agree neutral disagree strongly disagree 1 i prefer to ask questions using edmodo rather than face-to-face 4.3% 15.2% 28.3% 43.5% 8.7% 2 i enjoy the practice quizzes uploaded on edmodo. 6.5% 43.3% 32.6% 13% 4.3% 3 i am satisfied with edmodo 6.5% 54.3% 39.1% 4 edmodo allows me to easily access reference materials on the course provided by the teacher. 15.2% 43.5% 21.7% 15.2% 4.3% 5 the reference materials (e.g. internet articles, online videos, power point files, etc.) posted by my teacher are useful in understanding the contents/topics of the course better 13% 39.1% 26.1% 17.4% 4.3% 6 edmodo required more time and effort. 6.5% 26.1% 30.4% 34.8% 2.2% 7 i have trouble using the technologies in this subject. 2.2% 4.3% 19.6% 58.7% 15.2% table 2 shows that participants (agree = 43.3%, neutral = 32.6%) enjoyed the activity through practice quizzes uploaded by their lecturer in edmodo. thus, more than half of participants (agree = 54.3%) satisfied when they were using edmodo in their learning process. furthermore, majority of participants strongly agree (15.2%) and agree (43.5%) that edmodo allows them to easily access reference materials on the course provided by the lecturer. it is in line with the statement stating edmodo could provide students with authentic english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 65 materials that help them to improve their skills. moreover, participants agree (39.1%) and strongly agree (13%) that the reference materials (e.g. internet articles, online videos, power point files, etc.) posted by the lecturer are useful to better understand the contents of the course. although there are participants (neutral = 30.4%) who are neutral and disagree (34.8%) with statement number 6 stating edmodo requires more time and effort. undergraduate students’ perceptions about the effectiveness of edmodo as an educational social network as stated previously, edmodo has been widely used and offered as one of effective online learning platforms in educational context. therefore, the participants in this research mostly understand how to operate or access edmodo. the participants also comprehend its purposes to facilitate teaching and learning process. thus, the data revealed from the questionnaire is closely related to its purposes to help the interactions of teachers and students outside the classroom. therefore, it is worth to say that students give a good response towards the effectiveness of using edmodo as an educational social network. relating to edmodo’s potential to make learning more effective, the participants expressed a variety of positive views in the questionnaire. firstly, edmodo could facilitate teachers and students’ interaction through indirect or virtual class. it is revealed from the open-ended questionnaire data below. p2 : it is effective because we can communicate with lecturer and our friends in discussing some material resources and result of assignments. p4 : yes, it is very effective since we can get some feedback and give some comments directly via edmodo. p17 : edmodo can be very effective when lecturer and students interact to each other outside the classroom through e-learning material. the finding is in line with the purpose of edmodo that is offered as an online tool which can promote individual to join and interact with each other and especially in the learning process (prasad & prasad, 2012). it means that the students could interact easily with their friends through edmodo. furthermore, the participants thought that virtual class sometimes really helpful and effective because they were not brave enough to deliver their opinion in the real classroom situation. it could be happened since each student has different characteristics when they need to talk or deliver their ideas. their enthusiast to integrate technology in the classroom also revealed in the data. p29 : edmodo seems like a good choice for students like me now. i like to use edmodo because it’s just like we use facebook. it’s easy to follow and modern. secondly, since edmodo is offered as an effective learning tool, it also helps students to submit assignment and share any information. in this 21st century learning, students could also easily access some materials from their lecturer, not only from the printed book sources. this finding is revealed in the openended questionnaire. p40 : i can access some materials on edmodo since sometimes lecturer doesn’t have enough time to explain the material in the classroom. p36 : i don’t need to meet the lecturer when submitting assignments. it’s all on our hand. click and send. so easy anyway. p24 : it makes the process of learning easy, especially when we have to submit assignments. we can submit it wherever we want as long as it has internet connection. relevant to the findings, hourdequin (2014) supported that edmodo is a free online learning management system that offers a secure virtual space for students and teachers to share and discuss texts, images, audio files, and videos. furthermore, some participants stated that by using edmodo, the learning process is very efficient, paperless, and ecofriendly since they do not need to print the assignments. moreover, the findings from qualitative data indicates positive perceptions of incorporating edmodo as educational social network into the classroom and some frequently used keywords to express hikmah nur insani, didi suherdi, & gin gin gustine undergraduate students’ perspectives in using edmodo as an educational social network 66 participants’ opinion like “easy”, “efficient”, “practical”, and “accessible”. by using edmodo, a teacher can create and share multimedia resources to support students’ learning and provide learning tasks to scaffold students’ learning (wallace, 2014). it is clearly stated that edmodo can encourage active participations between lecturer and students in online class and students could access some materials easily. thirdly, edmodo is indicated as a good choice online learning platform to promote and develop self-regulated learning and learner autonomous that closely related to 21st century learning education. thus, the main philosophy of 2013 curriculum in indonesia encourages students to become independent learners. students could have like virtual discussion after the learning process in the classroom. it is revealed in the following transcript. p18 : sometimes, the lecturer creates an open discussion about the following assignments. in my opinion, it is very democratic and i like the way my lecturer gives the next assignments based on class discussion on edmodo. p33 : edmodo help students to manage the time to complete many online assignments. for example, i can easily upload my files, give feedback, and communicate with my friends also lecturer conveniently. p49 : i can still do the tasks even there is no class that day. based on those findings, edmodo is contributed and supported self-regulated learning and develop learning autonomy. autonomous learning classroom is a place where learners and teachers have constructive interaction with each other and learn from each other. the teacher is responsible for helping learners become aware of alternative strategies and learning styles (camilleri, 1999). in line with this, lengkanawati (2014) states that in the indonesian contexts autonomous learning refers to a situation where students use learning strategies to make themselves become autonomous learners. it is relevant to the findings that participants need to manage their time since the lecturer give the allocation time and due date in most of the tasks. moreover, it is well stated on the findings that integrating technology into the teaching and learning process will give some benefits. yunus (2010) supported that teachers need to synchronize themselves with technology and take advantages of the possibilities provided. furthermore, positive response is also revealed in the findings that participant prefer to use edmodo rather than spot (an institutional online program in campus). one of the participant stated that edmodo is easier and more applicable than spot in supporting their learning process. nevertheless, there were some participants who criticized the use of edmodo in the classroom. it is revealed in the following transcript. p18 : in my opinion, edmodo is less exploration. lecturer should explore and use more edmodo in the learning process. p27 : sometimes, the lecturer did not give full feedback to all students. p8 : i never use edmodo before, so it’s quite confusing for me at the first time. p35 : i feel nervous when submitting the task with such allocation time since the internet connection still unstable sometimes. the data indicates that some of the participants lacked confidence and less experience with the new technologies. thus, by learning and doing in the same time, the students can easily comprehend how to use edmodo. yet, the internet connection still becomes a problem in indonesian classroom. however, one of the participants stated that there are some wifi corners at campus which can be accessed freely anytime. hence, the students should be able to find and know which location at campus that provides internet access. in reflecting on edmodo’s potential to create an effective learning, the participants expressed a variety positive response. it includes how edmodo could increase students’ motivation and provide better learning process. furthermore, although the findings stated that edmodo was considered as a good educational social network and user-friendly learning tool, some comments from the participants showed that edmodo should get some improvements in order to make it more english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 67 updated. the participants’ responses and comments relating to this issue can be seen below. p18 : i hope edmodo can be more mobile friendly p6 : i think, lecturer needs to explain clearly about the procedure of using edmodo at the beginning of the lesson. so, students will not get confused. p44 : i demand for a personal chat feature so i can easily text my lecturer towards some materials and assignments p31 : it is interesting when students and teacher can communicate through video conference. p19 : lecturer should improve their ability in using and exploring edmodo since students expected the lecturer to utilize it appropriately. p37 : not all lecturer uses edmodo in the learning process. i think edmodo should be used in this modern era. p50 : i need more time for the quiz and tasks the data indicates that the institution should provide students with training about how to use edmodo. thus, the lecturer should guarantee that students understand the system and employ its features easily to accomplish the tasks given. furthermore, apart from the training, the lecturer should provide clear information towards the time allocation, the due date, and step by step instructions. thus, the nature goals of advantages of using edmodo can be achieved in the teaching and learning process. based on findings, it can be concluded that the participants showed positive responses towards the use of edmodo as an educational network in the teaching and learning process. moreover, it could be used as an effective learning tool in the classroom since it has suitable features. edmodo provides lecturer and students to have a virtual communication relating to the teaching and learning process. students can access to all their online classes in one platform, and this helps to promote learning in any location and at any time via computer, tablets, or smartphones (hammonds et al., 2013). on the other hands, some technical problem like time allocation and lack of experiences in integrating technology in the teaching and learning process become obstacles in its implementation. thus, those obstacles could be solved by providing some training from the experts or lecturer in the beginning of the academic year. by this case, students will not get confused when they should access and keep and touch with edmodo. it is supported by thongmak (2013) that a teacher should train their students who are not familiar enough with edmodo in order to reach the learning objectives and outcomes. in addition, from the effectiveness of edmodo, it offers a blended learning since students could get lots of benefits like interpersonal and teamwork skill development (garrison & kanuka, 2004). furthermore, technology could satisfy their interest in the teaching and learning process since digital native students can be interested by utilizing technology (mustafa, 2015). conclusion based on the findings, it is concluded that undergraduate students generally show positive attitude towards the use of edmodo. it was revealed that undergraduate students get some benefits of using edmodo such as learners’ creativity, learner autonomy, integrating technology, preparation of 21st century learning and developing their own learners’ strategies. therefore, based on those findings, it is suggested that edmodo needs to be implemented in efl classroom. moreover, students may be involved in the training related to the 21st century learning which also integrate technology in the learning process, especially to use edmodo. for further study, since this present study only focus on undergraduate students’ perception, the same topic could be replicated in real teaching practice through direct observations to get real and deep information of using edmodo as an educational social network. references addison, m. 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(2005). e-learning in higher education. in changing higher education (pp. 87-100). london: routledge. lengkanawati, n. s. (2014). learner autonomy in the indonesian efl settings. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 6(2), 222-231. looi, c. y., & yusop, f. d. (2011). potential use of social networking tool to assist reading comprehension: implications for practice and future research. jurnal pendidikan, 31(1), 1–16. prasad, e. n. a. g. a. n. d. u. l. a., & prasad, r. (2012). social media in teaching and learning. international journal of computer science and communication engineering, (icetie), [special issue], 10-13. purnawarman, p., sundayana, w., & susilawati. (2016). the use of edmodo in teaching writing in a blended learning setting. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 5(2), 242–252. suherdi, d. (2012). towards the 21st century english teacher education: an indonesian perspective. bandung: upi press. thongmak, m. (2013). social network system in classroom: antecedents of edmodo© adoption. journal of e-learning and higher education, 3(1), 1-15. wallace, a. (2014). social learning platforms and the flipped classroom. international journal of information and education technology, 4(4), 293296. yunus, m. m., hashim, h., embi, m. a., & lubis, m. a. (2010). the utilization of ict in the teaching and learning of english:‘tell me more’. procediasocial and behavioral sciences, 9, 685-691. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 113 storytelling in teaching literacy: benefits and challenges intan satriani english education department, faculty of language education, ikip siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: intan.satriani@yahoo.co.id apa citation: satriani, i. (2019). storytelling in teaching literacy: benefits and challenges. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 113-120. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.1924. received: 13-09-2019 accepted: 25-10-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: literacy has become a crucial position in education, especially in indonesia. it is used as one of ways to develop education through developing the culture of reading, writing, and counting. the study aims to find out benefits and challenges of implementing storytelling in teaching literacy. the study employed a qualitative descriptive research design. the data were obtained from students’ interview and observation. the findings found some benefits in implementing teaching program which include using two languages as the medium of interaction, providing suitable learning materials and various media, using of dramatization to show a character’s expression, asking moral value of the story as an evaluation instrument, developing students’ literacy ability, arousing students’ imagination, enriching students’ vocabulary, and developing students’ reading awareness and interest. meanwhile, some challenges found in implementing teaching program are students’ proficiency and length of texts. based on those findings, it is suggested to provide more times to truly explore students’ literacy ability and their preference in story. keywords: storytelling; teaching literacy; benefits; challenges; efl classroom. introduction storytelling is an activity to pass the information from person to person and from one generation to the next generation (mcdrury & alterio, 2003). storytelling is simple and practical because stories, which are used as the media, are easily obtained (wajnryb, 2003). hence, the use of storytelling as a teaching tool has been conducted in the areas of teacher education, higher education, early childhood education, and nursing education. storytelling shows some benefits, especially storytelling as a pedagogical tool. it can motivate students (wright, 2008), help children in memorizing words learned (arietawati, 2011), improve their vocabulary mastery (widiastika, 2011), encourage children to learn english (slattery & willis, 2001), increase their moral value (rusdi, 2006), provide inexpensive media in teaching rich language experience (wright, 2008), and enhance students’ interest in reading (slattery & willis, 2001). moreover, storytelling is categorized as one of teaching techniques that enable asian efl students in elementary and secondary school to enjoy reading and writing (paul, 2003) and to build students’ interest in literacy and learning english. it means that storytelling can be an alternative way to enhance student’s literacy in an efl classroom. not only in efl setting, storytelling is also substantial in esl setting. storytelling is able to stimulate esl students to be more enthusiastic during learning process in england (mcclelland, n.d in hana, 2011). furthermore, storytelling is important to improve students’ listening and writing skills (mcgrath, 2000). it means that storytelling is a part of literacy practice that may influence students’ language proficiency. literacy practice has some important characteristics, such as to develop language and brain, to practice logical and critical thinking (metcalfe et al., 2013), and to apply value or moral (taylor, 2000). relating to efl context, english should be a medium to develop students’ literacy in indonesia. thus, it is essential for efl educators to reconceptualize the teaching of english in order to bring the betterment and improvement of students’ literacy in indonesia. one alternative way to increase literacy in indonesia is through the use of storytelling in the classroom. basically, there are several benefits that can be gained by secondary students and teachers through storytelling in teaching literacy, including reading and writing. the benefits and challenges are described as follow. incorporating to the benefits of storytelling, firstly, through storytelling teacher can enhance students’ interest in reading (slattery & willis, 2001) and make students enjoy learning language (rusdi, 2006; mackinney, 1996 in al-mansour & al-shorman, 2011). moreover, it also motivates intan satriani storytelling in teaching literacy: benefits and challenges 114 students to read and improve their reading comprehension (scott & ytreberg, 1990). besides, storytelling can also be used to prepare students to write their own stories (scott & ytreberg, 1990). the example of students’ writing development through storytelling can be seen from students’ writing journal. in that activity, teacher does not only obtain the data of students’ writing, but also their development of analytical and reasoning skills. in this case, storytelling can develop students’ writing ability as it provides opportunities to discover some important dialogue and to understand stories and story elements (campbell & husek, 2009). in line with literacy, storytelling promotes expressive and receptive language development, namely written composition and reading comprehension (peck, 1989). second language learners who share personal experiences through storytelling are able to demonstrate linguistic growth. the text of the story also provides the potential for comprehensible input. this input can be achieved in multi ways, for instance individual reading, a number of group sharing, groups of students working on a core text and taking it in different directions according to their own imaginations (wajnryb, 2003). in increasing students’ novels word comprehension, vocabulary eliciting questions and noneliciting questions also can be used in storytelling activity (walsh & blewitt, 2006). students’ interest in reading story can be enhanced when students have heard a story once. teacher can tell the students that each time they read a book, they will become more familiar with the language of the story and will be able to participate more in different ways (slattery & willis, 2001). the way teachers observe reading behavior is linked to different reader purposes which are linked to situational context and also to social expectations, for example what kind of reading behavior is expected in classrooms, families, or particular religious’ settings (wallace, 1992). secondly, storytelling using local legends can help teacher to set values and to introduce cultural identities to the students (pahl & rowsell, 2005). there are different kinds of literacy practices within communities, through cultural, social and educational experiences, such as read story books as children, read to our children as parents, communicate with distant friends or relatives through reading (hood, solomon, & burns, 2005). third, learning literacy through storytelling can help students to get sense or meaning of text (metcalfe, et al., 2013). understanding meaning of text has a relation with the comprehension of vocabulary and grammar. in using storytelling to teach reading and writing, it can help learners to use vocabulary and grammar correctly. learning to tell and write effective stories is an effective language learning application for students to increase their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar (nicholas, rossiter, & abbott, 2011). fourth, storytelling allows students to increase their imagination (wright, 2008). in case of picture books, the narrative nature of picture books invites readers or viewers to see how artistic elements act as a form of visual communication. through illustration, illustrator shows the relationship a character has with other characters or further extends a character’s intentions in the plot through movement, performance and gesture (pahl & rowsell, 2005). needlman (2004 in al-mansour & al-shorman, 2011) adds that reading aloud through storytelling can build students’ imagination. thus, although there are various research on storytelling in teaching literacy, there is still lack of studies investigating the benefits and challenges of implementing storytelling in teaching literacy. addressing this gap, this study focuses on obtaining perception from students’ point of view about teaching literacy through storytelling. method this present study employed a qualitative descriptive method. this method is used to examine questions that can best be answered by verbally describing how participants in a study perceive and interpret various aspect of their environment (crowl, 1996). qualitative research provides opportunities for researchers to study social phenomena in relation to people’s everyday lives. through a process of data interpretation, qualitative research provides information about what, why and how a phenomenon in a society happens. this is in line with what denzin and lincoln (2005) say that qualitative research also involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world. in addition, yin (1994) also elaborates that employing qualitative method provides researchers with opportunities to represent the views and perspectives of the people/participants in a study. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 the study was undertaken at a private junior high school in cipatat, rural part of west bandung, west java province, indonesia. the school is a suburban school with a student enrolment drawn predominantly from disadvantaged families which had lower motivation in continuing their study to senior high school. most of them are prefer to work after they graduated from their junior high school. the participants of this study consisted of six eighth grader of junior high school. they were selected as the representative of a group which is appropriate with one of case study features (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2007). the six students were divided into three categories, namely two students from high level achievement, two from middle level achievement, and two from lower level achievement based on their performance in previous reading lesson and diagnostic writing. all participants were all sundanese who have bahasa sunda as their mother tongue. bahasa indonesia is their second language. english and arabic are thus their foreign language. upon the chosen steps of an observation classroom, this study conducted a preliminary observation to the classroom and made a consultation with the prior english teacher (it was taken one term). students attended individual interview which run about 15 minutes and was audio taped. this interview attempted to find out students’ perceptions about the implementation of storytelling (the strengths, weaknesses, and what students think they have obtained in their classroom). prior to the interview, the researcher informed the participants that the interview was audiotaped and their names was not mentioned to keep their identity confidential. results and discussion this section delineates the depiction of research findings of the study and the discussion dealing with the data investigated and collected from the observation and interview. the presentation of this section is divided into two sections. the first section discusses the benefits of the implementation of storytelling technique in developing students’ literacy skill and the second section elaborates the challenges of implementing the technique in teaching literacy to the students. the discussion of this teaching program is incorporated with the instruments used and theory to support the study. benefits of implementing storytelling in teaching literacy this study found eight benefits of implementing storytelling in teaching literacy. the benefits cover using two languages as the medium of interaction, the provision of suitable learning materials and various media, using dramatization to show a character’s expression, asking moral value of the story as an evaluation instrument, developing students’ literacy skills, arousing students’ imagination, helping students to share their experiences, improving students’ vocabulary mastery, and increasing students’ reading awareness and interest. the aforementioned benefits are described below. using two languages as the medium of interaction before implementing storytelling activities, the researcher informed the students about the teaching program. this activity was intended to realize that what is to be learnt should be made clear to the students (feez, 2002). the medium of interaction at all stages throughout the teaching program was english and bahasa indonesia. the two languages were used during the implementation of the program because of some reasons. first, bahasa indonesia was used especially when the students or the teacher found difficulty in expressing their ideas, explaining the meaning, or discussing the main ideas in reading and writing in english (see willis, 1981 cited in emilia, 2010). second, bilingualism was expected to affect positively both students’ intellectual and linguistic progress and allow for their greater sensitivity to linguistic meanings and more flexibility in their thinking (cummins, 1996 cited in emilia, 2005). meanwhile, the use of bahasa indonesia was expected to avoid the silence of the class so the students could participate actively in the teaching program (emilia, 2005). the provision of suitable learning materials and various media the selection of suitable materials was considered important in the teaching program especially the implementation of storytelling. with regard to the learning materials, this study focused on two main materials, namely narrative text and the stories itself. firstly, related to narrative text. due to narrative text is the focus of storytelling, teacher should make students aware about the content of the text. students were firstly introduced to the description of narrative text which include the definition of narrative text, the social function of narrative text, the schematic structure of narrative text, the language features intan satriani storytelling in teaching literacy: benefits and challenges 116 of narrative text, and the example of narrative text. in addition, another component in learning material is stories for students. those stories were selected based on the characteristics of the best or interesting stories for children. derewianka (1990) states that to introduce the author who would be sure to grab students’ interest can be one of ways to make students love of books and enthusiasm for good children’s literature. the selection of the stories based on several points; 1) students’ familiarity with the story; 2) the colored picture series of the stories; and 3) teacher’s performance skills in telling the stories. rahmawati (2014) suggested that it will be better if the story is the local one with good values. using dramatization to show a character’s expression the observation data showed that the students enjoyed the story started from the beginning until the end of the story. it was because the teacher used interesting media and explained the story expressively. by showing and telling the story expressively, they seemed more motivated to know the content of the story. in this activity, the teacher also used some dramatization to show a character’s expression or emotion. according to scott and ytreberg (1990), character’s expression or gesture can attract students’ interest in comprehending the story. during telling the story, the teacher located the storybook in the location that was visible by the children and moved around so that everyone could see. it can be seen through students’ expression below that they could respond to the story. t : “look at the picture! can the horse catch the gingerbread man?” s#3 : “no, ibu. gingerbread man run from horse.” then, in the process of storytelling, the teacher invited the class to visualize the vocabulary and to understand the basic vocabulary by using tpr (total physical response). the students responded the vocabularies in a physical way by carrying out the instructions, for example “he did some gardening and fishing in his daily life.” in addition, in facilitating good visualization of the story, the teacher displayed a huge picture in front of the classroom. after that, she put up the pictures of the characters on the board. asking moral value of the story as an evaluation instrument at the end of the second unit, the students were asked to think of the moral value of the story. one student said that the moral value of the story was “we have to be honor to our mother.” the other said that “we must love our family like sarah, percy and bill.” fable is s proper example of fictitious story that teach moral lesson (sherman, 2008). the instrument of the evaluation used was cloze procedure. this test was chosen as test instrument in this research because it can support students’ understanding of grammar, spelling, and sentence construction (hancock & leaver, 2006). in line with the data, the result presented that through ten questions given to the students, students showed their development. in the first section, their vocabulary was developed. all students were able to put some proper words into the provided boxes. furthermore, in the second section, they knew what they should do, because it was the second time for them to meet that type of questions. since they are interested in the story, they easily found the correct partner of the blank sentences. developing students’ literacy skill based on the data of students’ interview, it was found that students developed their literacy capacity and skill. the development of students’ literacy skill can be seen in the following excerpt: i understand the story, because when teacher tells the story, she gives me a text of the story so that we can understand the plot of that story. (s5) (interview, translated version) the above excerpt also showed that through storytelling, students can explore their writing ability. mcdrury and alterio (2003) support the data that through storytelling in the field of education and teaching learning, learners can be encouraged to tell stories by their own words using their complex ideas, concepts or information which they had obtained before. besides, the selection of the story is important in implementing storytelling in the classroom. as stated by wright (2008), through the closest story from students, it can be the best activities for them in obtaining the gist of the story. the statement relates with students’ perception below. i like the ginger bread man’s story. (s5) (interview, translated version) the story is easy to be understood. i understand with the story, because there are some interesting pictures in the book. (s3) (interview, translated version) students #1 and student #4 understand the story because they have good first impression toward the story. furthermore, they also have english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 117 prior knowledge of the story given. related to the literacy, in implementation, students do not only feel interesting and enjoyable with the story, but also their thinking skills can be developed (slattery & willis, 2001, p. 96). i like the part when we read using big book, because the picture is clear and big. (s5) (interview, translated version) in addition to the story itself, in developing students’ literacy skill, the media of telling story also should be noticed. the use of visual tools are also important as one of supporting media that supports storytelling activities (sprenger, 2010, p.101). arousing students’ imagination students in junior high school (from 13-14 years old) tend to enjoy some variation of story, such as complex story, adventure story, and romantic story (phillips, burwood & dunford, 1999; pinter, 2006; wright, 2008; hana, 2011). students need pictures, expressions, and visual tools in exploring story. visual tools are able to facilitate learners in understanding the meaning of the story. those can also dig students’ imagination, as supported by students’ perception below. because telling the story using gesture and expression, the story is easy to be comprehended. this is the first time for me to know the story. first, i do not understand the meaning of the story in english. however, because teacher tells the story using body movements and pictures, i can imagine the story. (s1) (interview, translated version) i like babies owl story, mam. the story is funny. the picture is big. then, i can see big font size. the most important, i like animal story. (s2) (interview, translated version) based on the result of students interview, tooze (1959) supports that stories can inspire students in developing their imagination. the selection of fable also influences students in arousing their imagination. it means that students from elementary up to secondary level put their huge attention to the animals characters (pinter, 2006) or fictitious story. improving students’ vocabulary mastery in teaching vocabulary to secondary students, teachers do not only use one technique or method, but they can also apply storytelling as the main technique in increasing students’ vocabulary mastery. stories can be utilized as good sources of learning vocabulary and structure (pinter, 2006, p.122). the previous theory is supported by result of student’s interview below. before i learn using storytelling, i did not know what the meaning of that story is. through this activity, i feel my vocabulary increased. (s1) (interview, translated version) the activity of telling stories can add my vocabulary, because teacher tells different kind of stories. (s1) (interview, translated version) related to student one’s perception, she felt that her vocabulary was increased through learning using storytelling. in the activities of storytelling, teacher does not only focus on the story itself, but also he or she can focus on the specific lesson, for example building students’ vocabularies (zaro & salaberri, 1995, p. 9). increasing students’ reading awareness and interest reading is a part of daily life for people who live in literate communities that much of the time they hardly consider either the purposes or process involved (wallace, 1992, p. 5). because of reading is the primary to any definition of literacy before writing, it is important for teacher to assist students to be interested in reading comprehension. learning using storytelling make me want to learn more and to try reading and writing in english. i am more interesting in learning english. (s1) (interview, translated version) incorporating with the student’s interview result, learning reading and writing through storytelling made student’s engagement in learning increased. it is supported by scott and ytreberg (1990, p.69; hana, 2011, pp.15-16) who state in teaching storytelling, teacher can integrate both reading and writing. that is because reading and writing is the example of learning consolidation. telling stories using expression and using interesting book to be read make me enjoy and understand the story. (s3) (interview, translated version) challenges of implementing storytelling in teaching literacy in implementing storytelling in teaching literacy, there were two challenges that can disturb the effectiveness of teaching program. the challenges had something to do with students’ proficiency and length of texts as described in the following subsections. students’ english proficiency intan satriani storytelling in teaching literacy: benefits and challenges 118 the first challenge mainly deals with the students’ english proficiency. all students admitted that the lack of language proficiency, such as vocabularies, grammar, and pronunciation, was their obstacle in implementing this teaching program. consequently, it made students hard in comprehending the text comprehensively and in expressing their opinions, as stated by student below. i found some difficulties, when teacher asks me to write a sentence that read by her, for example i still confuse with the meaning of those words. (s2) (interview, translated version) to facilitate students in understanding difficult words, the teacher should let them to write their stories in indonesian first (wright, 2008) before they translated the story into english. after that, teacher also facilitated students to use english-indonesian or indonesianenglish dictionary to make them easier in writing a story and in comprehending a text. it is supported by interview result of student below. from storytelling, i do not like writing, because i do not know yet the words. luckily, teacher asks me and my friends to read the story first, after that we understand the story using dictionary so that, i easier in writing a story. (s1) (interview, translated version) the students’ reading and writing results in the beginning also indicated that the students with better language proficiency were able to have higher score. it was because the students with better language proficiency can comprehend the text better and write their own text properly. thus, this challenge should be considered by teacher in selecting teaching materials to facilitate all students’ english proficiency levels. the length of the texts in addition to students’ english proficiency, the length of story is also one of the important things to be considered in implementing storytelling to develop students’ literacy skills. as supported by wright (2008, p. 10), the story should has the right length which is easy to make students comprehend the text. incorporating to the above statement, students perceived that long stories made them getting bored. statement of student can be seen below. i a little bit do not like the story, because some stories are too long, so i am getting bored. for instance, the story of little red riding hood. (s1) (interview, translated version) the length of the text also impacted on students’ language learning and their reading comprehension. by taking the theory and student’s perspective into account, it was suggested for the teacher to select appropriate texts or materials before conducting teaching and learning process in the classroom. accordingly, it was expected that the students’ literacy skill can be developed optimally. in relation to the aforementioned findings, it can be concluded that storytelling is possible to be implemented in the teaching literacy. after conducted preparatory stage, ten meetings were applied. the meetings consisted of three phases. they were activities before reading the story, activities during reading the story, and activities after reading the story. the ten meeting were divided into seven units. the first until fifth unit explained the data and discussion of storytelling in reading. on the other hand, the sixth and seventh unit focused on writing skill. in the implementation of unit one until unit seven, it can be obtained that there were several appropriate steps to be implemented by teachers in conducting storytelling. the steps included activities before reading the story, activities during reading the story, and activities after reading the story. first was related to activities before reading the story. before telling the stories to the students, brainstorming was the selected activity. the objective of selecting the activity was to find out more about students’ existing knowledge and attitude. the activities were begun with showing the picture of the book cover to the students. it was aimed at increasing students’ predictive skills. the activity was also conducted based on results of storytelling questionnaire filled by students that students prefer to learn using picture as part of a story. in the beginning, based on the observation sheet in the classroom, students paid their attention and actively participated in answering teacher’s questions related to the main story. in this activity, the students were asked to read the title of the story. after introducing title of the story to the students, they were introduced to some unfamiliar vocabularies that often appeared in the story. the activity was applied as a good source of learning new vocabulary and structure. in the implementation, it can be seen that students enjoyed the story because they had known the meaning of difficult words. the second stage of implementing storytelling was the activity of telling the story. this stage was conducted to encourage students to be active english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 119 and reflective readers. the students were not only expected to be passive readers, but also actively interact with the text. moreover, in the middle activity, students were expected to comprehend the meaning of the story. the appropriate activity were the use of dramatization to show character’s expression or emotion that can attract students’ interest in comprehending the story. besides, the use of several guided questions was appropriate to be implemented. in the process of asking questions, the students also looked at the setting and characters portrayed through language in the book. thus, it is important for students, especially low proficiency students, to know whether they were still focus on the story or not. furthermore, there were activities after reading the story. the activities were divided into three activities. they were giving some exercises related to reading comprehension, performing the story, and creating their own story. first, some exercises were given to the students to know their comprehension of the story. the effective instrument of the evaluation in reading was cloze procedure. second, students’ performance in storytelling was aimed at checking their comprehension and building their self-confidence in doing presentation in a public area. the last, students reflected their knowledge of the story to a piece of writing. finally, from five stories implemented in this study, the story of “the owl babies” was categorized as the chosen story based on students’ interest. it was chosen because students attracted with very short folktales about animals as the main characters. related to the observation sheet, it was found that the story is appropriate to students’ ages and understanding. besides, based on the result of questionnaire, most of students were preferred to be taught by using picture. on the point of that, the story was selected based on the quality of the book. this is a big book which has proper quality seen from font size and sharpness of pictures inside the book. moreover, big book helped students to see the pictures clearly. in addition, story book was applied as visual tool to support storytelling activities in teaching and learning process. conclusion based on data of classroom interview, the data indicated that although there are some restrictions, the incorporation of storytelling to the teaching program had assisted students to increase their reading comprehension ability and to develop their writing skill. on the basis of the data obtained, this research revealed that the teaching program spawned some benefits. firstly, in the process of implementing storytelling, it was found that students’ literacy skill was developed. secondly, the selection of story and quality of book also gave an impact on arousing their imagination. moreover, students’ vocabulary, reading awareness, and interest also increased. nevertheless, the attainment of those benefits might be constrained by some challenges found in this teaching program. the challenges had something to do with students’ proficiency and length of texts. accordingly, it can be concluded that the result of the research confirmed possibility of the teaching program which incorporates storytelling in supporting junior high school students to have good awareness in literacy, both reading and writing. it indicated that storytelling can be applied in efl junior high school in indonesia, especially in suburban area, because there are limited facilities that can support students learning. furthermore, the use of media and teacher as an actor can help students to develop their literacy skill which is highly required in facing globalization era. based on the findings, it is suggested to implement storytelling that has been proved to have various positive impacts on students’ learning. nonetheless, this teaching program will be more effective when applied in the regular teaching using classroom action research. it is suggested to obtain deep data of the research and to modify new teaching practice. by considering the suggestion, it is expected that the teaching process can optimize students’ reading and writing ability. at last, this program should be tried out in a variety of level of education, especially young learners to check whether it can develop students’ literacy skills or not. references al-mansour, n. s., & al-shorman, r. a. 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(2008). storytelling with children. oxford: oxford university press. yin, r. k. (1994). case study research design and methods (2 nd ed.). thousand oaks, california: sage publications. zaro, j. j., & salaberri, s. (1995). storytelling. oxford: macmillan publishers. the effect of iranian female efl learners’ politeness strategies awareness on their letter writing ability faezeh yousefian dastmalchi the effect of iranian female efl learners’ politeness strategies awareness on their letter writing ability theeffectofiranianfemaleefllearners’ politenessstrategiesawarenessontheirletter writingability faezehyousefiandastmalchi english department, islamic azad university, torbat-e-heydarieh branch, iran email: faezeh.yousefian2013@yahoo.com apa citation: dastmalchi, f. y. (2014). iranian female efl learners’ politeness strategies awareness on their letter writing ability. english review: journal of english education 3(1), 2230 received: 03-11-2014 accepted: 12-11-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: this research examines the effect of teaching politeness strategies based on the models proposed by brown and levinson (1987) and leech (1983) to intermediate english learners on their ability in writing more polite letters. the instrumentation includes an ielts test, used as a placement test, an inventory, used to measure learners’ awareness of politeness strategies, and a letter-writing test, used as a measurement of learners’ ability in using politeness strategies. among all the participants, twenty of them were put in the control group, and twenty-four of them in the experimental group, who went under the treatment. they were taught how to write politely based on the politeness strategy models proposed by brown and levinson (1987) and leech (1983). after the treatment, learners wrote letters to the same people with the same situations. comparing the twenty learners in the control group with the twenty-four learners in experimental group, the researchers concluded that the treatment had a significant effect on the learners’ ability in writing more polite letters. they selected to use more formal strategies with those who they saw further distance with, and more informal strategies with more intimate people. furthermore, the answers the learners provided to the questions of the inventory offered more awareness of politeness strategies. this implies that they were more aware of various choices of polite language that were available for them to use in the given situations. keywords: politeness strategy, face, face threatening act introduction according to wardhaugh (2006), as we speak, we choose what to say, how to say it, and the best way to unite the what with the how. this how and what are both two important and inseparable aspects of speaking. social relationship between the speaker and the listener determines the linguistic choices a speaker makes. in watts (2003: 29) words, “language and forms of language behavior are at the heart of social communication and the reproduction of social structure. so the study of politic behavior and linguistic politeness lies at the heart of socio-communicative verbal interaction.” as coulmas (2007) puts it, speakers have to make choices, because things may be formulated in a different way. all people have strong feelings about what they say and what they mean and they say what they believe they should, although sometimes they seem not to believe in their own words. coulmas (2007) also believes that “sociolinguistics is the linguistics of choice”, so there will english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee be “freedom of the will, human action and language”, and this “presupposes and agent rather than an automaton.” what is considered polite, gumperz (1987) suggests, may differ among various groups, situations, and individuals. if we can find a grammatical and social rule for it, according to this variation and the recurrent patterns used, we will be able to demonstrate the social nature of human language. brown & levinson (1987) believe that the key problem in the area of sociolinguistics is to determine the nature and origin of the social power of linguistic forms. some linguists see this as based on the social value of the group who use that linguistic form. some others believe that it is the social characteristics of the participant and settings that determine the social valence of the form. they claim that linguistic form of messages should be seen as tools for doing things in order for their social values to be ascertained. brown and levinson introduce two important sources for the social valence of linguistic forms; first, the intrinsic potential impact that a communicative intention has on social relationships, and second, the modification of that intention by the participants in order for that to have a specific impact. for brown & levinson (1987), “communicative intentions have builtin social implications, often of a threatening sort” (p. 281). these communicative intentions are constrained to pragmatic resources of the language in order to show the construction of messages. various uses of such pragmatic resources in different situations are the special interest of sociolinguistics, and this has made brown & levinson’s slogan: “sociolinguistics should be applied pragmatics” .nature and distribution of the constraints give the social structures its form. these constraints are more on form than on content (brown & levinson, 1987). linguistic politeness involves verbal strategies to keep social interaction friction free (nwoye, 1992). there are many studies that touch on the issue of the relationship between politeness and other factors such as gender (see for example gharaghani, rasekh, dabaghi, tohidian, 2011, dus and franch, 2003, kaul, kurkarni, 2010, gomez, 2000), cultural norms (see for example le ha, 2001, salom & monreal, 2009, bargiela-chiappini, kádár, 2011, song, 2012), power (locher, 2004, hendry, 1995, holmes, stubbe, 2003). in the following, some of these researches have been mentioned. in a research done by gharaghani, rasekh, dabaghi, tohidian (2011), cross gender differences in the degree of politeness in greetings of efl learners were examined. the results show that gender has a significant effect on the degree of formality in persian greetings. in addition, iranian learners transferred their persian greeting styles into english situations. they tended their greetings to be polite, but they were inappropriate according to american norms. generally, it seemed that they were not equipped with appropriate tools to express greeting according to the status of the interlocutors, situational context and native culture. biesenbach-lucas (2007), in his research on e-politeness among native and non-native speakers of english, found that native speakers demonstrate more politeness strategies in their messages to their professors than nonnative speakers. native and non-native speakers preferred different politeness http://www.google.com/search?sa=n&biw=1366&bih=632&tbm=bks&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22sooho+song%22&ei=btwhue7nbcsq4asx9ihoaw&ved=0cd8q9agwazgu http://www.google.com/search?biw=1366&bih=632&tbm=bks&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22janet+holmes%22&sa=x&ei=tdahuyd-gksn4aswmodycg&ved=0ce8q9agwbg http://www.google.com/search?biw=1366&bih=632&tbm=bks&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22maria+stubbe%22&sa=x&ei=tdahuyd-gksn4aswmodycg&ved=0cfaq9agwbg faezeh yousefian dastmalchi the effect of iranian female efl learners’ politeness strategies awareness on their letter writing ability devices for their requests. this can be due to the fact that non-native speakers are not taught enough of politeness strategies in order to use in their messages. he shows that students use more direct strategies for lower imposition requestsi.e. for making appointments and asking for feedback on their work, in contrast with higher imposition requests such as extension of the deadlines. this suggests that students are aware of situational factors and do not consider all email requests of faculty equal. also, they used more politeness devices with direct request strategies and fewer politeness strategies with indirect request strategies. dus and franch (2003) investigated spanish and british undergraduates’ perceptions of appropriate requests in different situations in terms of gender and politeness. on the whole, no significant differences were found in males and females use of alerter (formal/informal attention getters and greetings, naming strategies and terms of endearment). however, there were some differences in cross-gender speech in particular situations such as opening elements, which were used more by females than males. also, men used more attention getters than women. spanish participants frequently used involvement strategies which confirm that spanish is a “positively politenessoriented culture”. male and female british participants used similar number of alerters. the difference was in the type of alerters males and females used. british females used twice as many thanking responses as males, and so they were considered as showing deference more than males. as a conclusion, this research questions the stereotypical correlation between males and impoliteness and females and politeness. both males and females showed politeness in their speech and the difference was in situations where solidarity and deference was considered. gender cannot be an independent variable in determining language use. le ha (2001) studied how vietnamese culturally situated notions of polite forms influence english writing styles of four vietnamese postgraduate students who were studying in australian universities. it was found that cultural differences as well as socio-political factors and educational factors were the reasons influencing how students write. in his paper, he suggested that australian academics make students with different backgrounds aware of how they were expected to write based on australian socio-political practices. he found that as soon as the students were aware of this, they were able to adjust. chen (1999) has studied selfpoliteness in contrast to other-oriented politeness. by self-politeness, he means the cases in communication where the speaker’s need to protect his own face influences what she says and how she says it. “self” does not only refer to the speaker herself, but to those aligned with her such as her family, friends, colleagues, clients, and even her profession. likewise, “other” refers to not only the hearer but also those aligned with the hearer. he states that in the studies on politeness the researcher includes self-politeness in addition to other-oriented politeness and this is because the face of the speaker is as vulnerable as the face of the hearer. fukushima and iwana (1985: 12) studied japanese students to see whether they use politeness strategies english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee while speaking english and how much they are successful in using them. they concluded that “a better understanding of politeness features in english will help efl students to communicate more effectively as competent speakers”. different aspects of letter writing has been discussed and taught to students in writing classes. however, there seems to be a lack of attention to the sociolinguistics aspects of letter writing (schmidt, 1993; rose & kasper, 2001), including politeness strategies use. learners are supposed to have already acquired politeness strategies sociolinguistically; however, most second language learners are not sufficiently exposed to the related contexts in order to acquire those strategies. this research seeks to contribute to the field of second language writing. it aims at testing students’ politeness strategy use in letter writing. having analyzed the data, the results can be applied to explore learners’ problematic areas of politeness strategy use. method the study used a quasiexperimental design to examine politeness strategies awareness of iranian higher-intermediate female students and their ability in letter writing. this study focused on a randomly selected population of 75 learners of upper-intermediate level studying english in two english schools in mashhad, iran. as the participants were chosen among the learners of two different english institutes, they were studying different upper-intermediate books. thirty-eight of them were studying the upper-intermediate book american english file 4 (by oxenden & latham-koenig, 2008, oxford university press), and the other thirtyseven were studying passages 1 (by richards & sandy, second edition, 2008, cambridge university press). all of them were female students in an age range of 17-25. the researchers in this study investigated the effect of politeness strategies awareness of iranian higherintermediate female students on their letter writing ability. they were asked to write a letter to four people: their friend, their teacher, an unknown english-speaking person, and an unknown persian-speaking person, all of whom were supposed to be females. there were 24 learners in the experimental group and 20 in the control group. the learners were homogenized using an ielts test as the placement test. among all of the 75 learners who took the test, 48 learners got the band score of 6 or above and were chosen for the study. before the treatment, both control group and experimental group were given an inventory to test their awareness of politeness strategies, and a letter-writing test in order to test their current ability in the performance of politeness strategies use in letter writing. the participants filled out the inventory, which checked their awareness of politeness strategies. it was designed based on the criteria used in the study as politeness strategies awareness. in the letter-writing test, they faced four different situations. in the first situation, participants were asked to write a letter to one of their female friends and ask for help with their english language proficiency. in the second letter, they wrote to their female teacher and requested her to faezeh yousefian dastmalchi the effect of iranian female efl learners’ politeness strategies awareness on their letter writing ability help them with their reading skill improvement. the third situation was writing a letter to a female university student studying in harvard university, whom they did not know; someone they have never seen, talked or written to. they asked her for information about the university she is studying at. in the last situation, participants wrote a letter to the supervisor of an institute to ask for some information about the job vacancies. the treatment took eight sessions of about 30 minutes. all that was taught was based on the politeness strategy models of brown and levinson (1987) and leech (1983). the first session learners were introduced to what would happen in the course. the inventory and the letter-writing test were given to the learners in this session. during sessions 2-7 learners got familiar with the politeness strategies based on brown and levinson’s and leech’s models. there were some exercises designed by the researchers in order for the learners to practice the new strategy they had just learned. in the last session, the participants filled in the inventory again to be checked for any rise in the awareness of politeness strategy use. in addition, the same writing test was given to the learners in order to see whether there was any improvement in the use of politeness strategies in their letters after comparing them to the letters they had written before the treatment. at the same time, the participants in the control group were attending their english classes, being taught the usual materials of their book, without receiving any additional treatment on polite language. the participants’ pre-tests and post-tests were analyzed by two raters in terms of politeness strategies they had applied in each situation and then scored. the scores of the two groups, control group and experimental group, were compared to see if the two groups had performed in the same way before the experimental group had undergone the treatment. meanwhile, the scores of the participants in each group before and after the treatment were compared to seek any improvement as a result of receiving the treatment in the experimental group and the lack of the treatment in the control group. on the one hand, the letter writing tests were scored based on the criteria used in scoring writing section of ielts test. on the other hand, to measure and score the use of politeness strategies in the participants’ writing tests, the frameworks based on the “matrix criteria of politeness strategy” by brown and levinson (1987) and the politeness maxims of leech (1983) were used. furthermore, the inventories answered by the participants are scored and compared in the same way that the letter writing tests were compared. resultsanddiscussion in order to decide whether the treatment has improved the participants’ awareness of politeness strategies, politeness questionnaire results are analyzed in this part. the questionnaires learners in both control and experimental groups had filled in and those completed after the treatment were compared to observe any improvement of the learners’ awareness of different politeness strategies. as table 1 reveals, the results of the questionnaire in pretest for the control (=59.7000) and experimental (=59.5833) group confirm that there is no significant english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee difference between the participant’s scores in politeness awareness in control and experimental groups in the pretest phase. in other words, the participants in both groups were in the same level of awareness of politeness strategies before the treatment of the study. table 1. pre-test and post-test results of politeness awareness questionnaire groups p-value control experimental no. 20 24 pre-test scores 59.7000 59.5833 .961 post-test scores 59.8500 75.3333 .0001 according to table 1, in the significant level of %5, there was a significant difference in the participants’ scores in control (=59.8500) and experimental (=75.3333) groups in post-test of politeness strategies awareness, and this means that the treatment has improved participants’ awareness of politeness strategies. the raise of the participants’ scores in the post-test letter-writing tests can prove this result. in order to confirm the findings of the questionnaire, the researchers provided seven open-ended questions at the end of the inventory. these questions were designed to elicit responses that showed the participants’ level of awareness of polite language. the responses the participants made before and after the treatment revealed that the treatment had had a significant effect on the awareness and hence the use of politeness strategies by them, which confirmed the findings of the whole survey. after the treatment, the participants tended to use more and a wider variety of politeness strategies in the responses they made to the openended questions. in the following, the first question of the qualitative part of the questionnaire is brought as an example, along with the replies the learners tended to give before and after the treatment: what phrases or words do you use when you want to speak or write politely in english? replies before the treatment: please, could you, can you. repliesafterthetreatment:please,could you,canyou,i’msorrytobotheryou,you mustforgiveme,i wonderifi could as the learners’ replies in this example show, before the treatment, they had in mind just three of politeness strategies, but after the treatment, they showed awareness of more choices of polite language. in order to explore any effects of the treatment on participants’ ability in politeness strategies use, the results of letter-writing tests were analyzed. learners’ letter-writing papers in both control and experimental groups were corrected and scored by two raters with a focus on general appropriateness of cohesion and coherence and politeness strategies use. the pre-test scores of both groups as well as their scores of post-test were compared to find out whether the treatment had had an effect on learners’ ability in using politeness strategies. table 3.2 summarizes the scores of learners in control (n=20) and experimental (n=24) groups in both pre-test and post-test of faezeh yousefian dastmalchi the effect of iranian female efl learners’ politeness strategies awareness on their letter writing ability letter-writing. p-values are also shown in this table. as the results of table 2 shows, there is no significant difference between the participants’ letter-writing test scores in pretest in control (=22.3500) and experimental (=24.4500) group, which confirms the homogeneity of the participants before the treatment. table 2. pre-test and post-test scores of letter-writing of control and experimental groups groups p-value control experimental no. 20 24 pre-test score 22.3500 23.0417 .253 post-test score 24.4500 31.2500 .0001 using t-test method, the participants’ letter-writing scores in post-test in both control (= 24.4500) and experimental (=31.2500) groups are compared, and it can be seen that in the significant level of %5, there is a significant difference in the scores of the control and experimental groups. as it was already stated, in evaluating the letters, a part of the score was given to the correct use of politeness strategies. in addition, as the p-value was smaller than 0.5 (0.0001) for the post-test of letter-writing, the first null hypothesis was rejected and it was confirmed that the treatment on the experimental group has had a significant effect on the participant’s ability in using politeness strategies in writing letters. the pre-test and post-test given to both control and experimental groups required learners to write letters to a close friend and to a teacher. afterwards, they were corrected by two raters and scored to investigate any effect of the treatment on the learners in experimental group. the scores are shown in table 3. table 3. pre-test and post-test results of letter-writing to a teacher and a friend groups p-value control experimental no. 20 24 pre-test scores 11.2000 11.5833 .389 post-test scores 13.4500 15.7500 .0001 here, the t-test is about the scores of letter-writing to a close friend and a teacher in the pretest phase for both control and experimental groups. according to table 3, there is no significant difference between the scores obtained by participants in experimental (=11.5833) and control (=11.2000) groups in the pretest in writing a letter to a close friend and to a teacher. in addition, as illustrated in table 3, p-value = 0.0001, which means in the significant level of %5, there is a significant difference between the scores of control (=13.4500) and experimental (=15.7500) groups in posttest of letter-writing to a close friend and a teacher. therefore, because of the raise of their scores as well as the pvalue being smaller than 0.5 (0.0001) for the post-test of letter-writing, the second null hypothesis was rejected and it can be concluded that the treatment has improved the participants’ ability in using politeness strategies use in english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee writing letters to a close friend and a teacher. the next t-test is for the participants in both control and experimental group writing to an unknown native speaker of english and an unknown native speaker of persian in the pre-test and post-test phase, the results of which are shown in table 3.4. learners’ scores in both pre-test and post-test were determined by two raters and were compared for any improvement in the learners’ ability in experimental group in using politeness strategies in letter-writing. table 4. pre-test and post-test results of letter-writing to an unknown native speaker of english and to an unknown native speaker of persian groups p-value control experimental no. 20 24 pre-test scores 11.2000 11.3750 .654 post-test scores 11.2000 15.6667 .0001 as table 4 illustrates, there is no significant difference between the scores of control (=11.2000) and experimental (=11.3750) groups in pretest letter-writing to a native speaker of english and a native speaker of persian, as the p-value= .654. the results shown in table 3.4 also suggest that there is a significant difference in the scores obtained by the participants in control (=11.2000) and experimental (=15.6667) groups in posttest letter writing to a native speaker of english and a native speaker of persian. . in addition, as the p-value was smaller than 0.5 (0.0001) for the post-test of letter-writing, the third null hypothesis was rejected. therefore, it can be concluded that the treatment had improved the ability of the participants to use politeness strategies while writing a letter to an unknown native speaker of persian and an unknown native speaker of english. results of both the inventory and the letter-writing test revealed in the previous part determined that the mentioned null hypotheses of the study were rejected. this means that the treatment had improved the participants’ scores in post-test letterwriting test, which means they used correct and enough of politeness strategies in their letters. furthermore, the results of the inventory indicated that the participants’ awareness of the study had improved by going under the treatment. conclusion as observed by the obtained results, the treatment, i.e. teaching learners what strategies they can use to seem more polite culturally (and globally), had a significant effect on their behavior. the answers the learners provided to the questions of the inventory offered more awareness of politeness strategies. this implies that they were more aware of various choices of polite language that were available for them to use in the given situations. they tended to use a more variety of replying politely to those situations, whereas they used to pick up more or less the same way of responding. furthermore, the letter-writing post-tests suggested that the participants’ ability in using politeness faezeh yousefian dastmalchi the effect of iranian female efl learners’ politeness strategies awareness on their letter writing ability strategies had improved to a great degree and they used more polite language. learners were taught that not every strategy was appropriate for every situation. the result of teaching them this point was noticeably seen in the post-test they were given, as they had a tendency to use a strategy they already knew for nearly all the situations they were given in the pretest phase. they selected to use more formal strategies with those who they saw further distance with, and more informal strategies with more intimate people. references brown, p., & levinson, s. c. (1987). politeness: some universals in language usage. cambridge university press. new york. us. biesenbach-lucas, s. (2007). students writing e-mails to faculty: an examination of e-politeness among native and non-native speakers of english. journal of language learning & technology, 11(2),. 59-81. retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol11num2/biesen bachlucas/ coulmas, f. (2005). sociolinguistics: the study of speakers’ choices. cambridge university press. new york. us. fukushima, s., & iwata, y. (1985). politeness in english. jalt journal. vol. 1 (1). gharaghani, z., eslami rasekh, a. , dabaghi, a., tohidi, i. (2001). effect of gender on politeness strategies in greetings of native speakers of persian; english and efl learners. cypriot journal of educational sciences, 6(3), 93117. leech, g. n. (1983). principles of pragmatics. longman publishing group. new york. us. maier, p. (1992). politeness strategies in business letters by native and nonnative english speakers. journal of english for specific purposes, 11(3), 189– 205. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s08894906(05) 80009-2. watts, r. j. (2003). key topics in sociolinguistics: politeness. cambridge university press. uk. wardhaugh, r. (2006). an introduction to sociolinguistics. backwell publishing. usa, uk, australia. le ha, ph. (2001). how do culturally situated notions of `polite' forms influence the way. vietnamese postgraduate students write academic english in australia? australian journal of education. 45. lorenzo-dus, n. bou-franch, p. (2003). gender and politeness: spanish and british undergraduates’ perceptions of appropriate requests. de la mujer. 187199. chen, r. (2001). self-politeness: a proposal. journal of pragmatics. 33, 87-106. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/08894906/11/3 183 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee teaching communicative translation: an active reception analysis between the translation and reader’s reception venny eka meidasari department of english education, faculty of language & art university of indraprasta pgri, indonesia e-mail: venny_xiaofen@yahoo.com apa citation: meidasari, v. a.(2014).teaching communicative translation: an active reception analysis between the translation and reader’s reception. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 183-191 received: 15-03-2014 accepted: 27-03-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: literary theory sees reception theory from the reader response that emphasizes the reader’s reception of a literary text. it is generally called audience reception in the analysis of communications models. in literary studies, reception theory originated from the work of hansrobert jauss in the late 1960s. communication only means that the original message will be clearly sent in its equivalent context to the target receptor. similarly, the main role of translators is to send the message across without any form of distortion or emphasis. it is delivering the genuine context of the message to the language that the active receptor understands. a single mistake in a context translation can result to offensive message that can eventually lead to misunderstandings between active receptors. this paper proposes on the role of translator as the mediator between a writer of the original text and the active target language receptors of translated version in the course of communication which definitely affects the process and result of translation practice. it also reveals the emphasis on the creation text of the translation theories originated from the strategic communication theories, which hopefully leads to a dream of the most equivalence between the text and the translated version. keywords: translator, active receptor, mediator, strategic communication, equivalence. literary theory sees reception theory from the reader response that emphasizes the reader’s reception of a literary text. it is generally called audience reception in the analysis of communications models. reception theory focuses on the role of the audience in the interpretation of a text, instead of on the text itself. in other words, the theory suggests that audiences play an active role in reading texts, that each person has the ability to interpret the same text differently, and that a text by itself – i.e. without a reader – has no specific meaning. in this paper, i try to explore the role of translator as the mediator between a writer of the original text and the active target language receptors of translated introduction most people learn a foreign language to communicate. through communication, they send and receive messages and negotiate meaning (rubin and thompson, 1994: 30). translation is considered an act of communication. to translate most effectively, the translator should analyze the messages; to do so, he/she should have some tools at hand; such tools can be the well-known communication strategies which prevents a communication from disruption. this is what turns communication strategies into a very important issue in translation studies and attracts the attention of many teachers, scholars and foreign language learners. venny eka meidasari teaching communicative translation 184 version in the course of communication which definitely affects the process and result of translation practice. it also reveals the emphasis on the creation text of the translation theories originated from the strategic communication theories, which hopefully leads to a dream of the exact equivalence between the text and the translated version. as a teacher and also a translator, i see that schools as institutions and all professional translators have to react to the emergence of this active reception theory as a new perspective on discourse since is a literary work is neither completely text nor completely the subjectivity of the active receptor, but a combination or merger of the two. the work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the receptor. holub (1984) characterizes reception theory as “a general shift in concern from the author and the work to the text and the reader.” reception theory reflects a paradigm shift in the history of literature, and it is considered “a reaction to social, intellectual, and literary developments in west germany during the late 1960s.” according to holub (1984), reception theory was a revolutionary approach to contemporary literary criticism. this new paradigm of literary criticism pays attention to the function of the reader in a process of literary experience. jauss (1982), one of the main contributors to reception theory, published an essay, “the change in the paradigm of literary scholarship” in 1969. in this essay, jauss (1982) points out that the rise of the new paradigm and emphasizes the importance of interpretation by the reader, replacing the obsolete literary scholarship methodology which involved the studies of accumulated facts. jauss’ (198)2 theory views literature “from the perspective of the reader or consumer” and treats literature “as a dialectical process of production and reception.” in his article “literary history as a challenge to literary theory,” jauss (1982: 15 ) states the following: …the relationship of work to work must now be brought into this interaction between work and mankind, and the historical coherence of works among themselves must be seen in the interrelations of production and reception. put another way: literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject—through the interaction of author and public. iser (1926), who is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in reception theory, points out the importance of this literary process, as well. iser takes a phenomenological approach to reception theory and he “decontextualizes and dehistoricizes text and reader.” iser (1926: 274-5) argues that the reader’s involvement coincides with meaning production in literature: “…the convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader”. this suggests that reception theory defines literature as the process of how the reader and the text interact with each other, and it was a revolutionary way of looking at the history of literature and literary criticism. reception theory introduces the necessity of the reader’s involvement in the interpretation to be included in the process of literary experience. 185 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee translation competence the concept of translation competence has existed but has had different labels; there are some definitions of translation competence, which are the following: bell (1991: 43) defines translation competence as “the knowledge and skills the translator must possess in order to carry out a translation”. wilss (1982: 58) says translation competence calls for “an inter-lingual super-competence based on a comprehensive knowledge of the respective sl and tl, including the textpragmatic dimension, and consists of the ability to integrate the two monolingual competencies on a higher level;” and finally, the other definition is that of pacte research. according to pacte, translator competence which is the underlying system of knowledge needed to translate includes six interrelated and hierarchical sub-competencies: 1) communicative competence in two languages, hymes (1971) first used the term “communicative competence” to denote an integrated concept accounting for both underlying knowledge of a linguistic code and language use for communicative purposes within a community. the goal of language teaching is to develop what hymes (1972) referred to as communicative competence (richards and rodgers, 2002: 159). hymes’ multidimensional concept of communicative competence includes elements of linguistic, cultural, and sociolinguistic knowledge, as well as cognitive, physical, and environmental constraints on communication, extralinguistic competence as implicit or explicit knowledge about the world in general and specific areas of knowledge: knowledge about translation (its ruling premises: types of translation unit, the processes required, etc); bicultural knowledge; encyclopedic knowledge and subject knowledge in specific areas (pacte, 2000). another definition of communicative competence can be: communication competence is the ability to send messages which promote attainment of goals while maintaining social acceptability. competent communicators attempt to align themselves with each other’s goals and methods to produce a smooth, productive, and often enjoyable dialogue. 2) transfer competence (difficulty in finding the dynamic equivalence). 3) instrumental/professional competence (deriving from the translation brief, or documentation difficulties). 4) psycho-physiological competence (relating to creativity, logical thought). 5) strategic competence (all the individual procedures, conscious and unconscious, verbal and nonverbal, used to solve the problems encountered during the translation process). all these the above mentioned sub-competencies make up translation competence and they are integrated in every translation act, establishing interrelations, hierarchies and variations. the inter-relations are controlled by the strategic sub-competence because its role is to monitor and compensate for the other sub-competencies, as it makes up for weaknesses and solves translation problems. communication strategies as richards and rodgers (2002: 160) maintain, strategic competence refers to the coping strategies that communicators employ to initiate, terminate, maintain, repair, and redirect communication. according to richards and schmidt (2002: 91), strategic competence is venny eka meidasari teaching communicative translation 186 defined as knowledge of communication strategies that can compensate for weaknesses in other areas or an aspect of communicative competence which describes the ability of speakers to use verbal and non-verbal communication strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication or to improve the effectiveness of communication. this sub-competence plays an essential role in relation to all the others, because it is used to detect problems, make decisions, and make up for errors or weaknesses in the other sub-competencies (pacte, 2000). rubin (1981, 1987) defines communication strategies as those strategies used by a learner to promote and continue communication with others rather than abandon it. they are strategies used by speakers when they come across a difficulty in their communication because of lack of adequate knowledge of the language. bialystok, in her book communication strategies, cites four definitions relating to the strategies of second-language learners (bialystok, 1990: 3): systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his ideas when faced with some difficulty (corder, 1977); a mutual attempt of two interlocutors to agree on a meaning in situations where requisite meaning structures are not shared (tarone, 1980); potentially conscious plans for solving what to an individual presents itself as a problem in reaching a particular communicative goal (faerch & kasper, 1983a); and techniques of coping with difficulties in communicating in an imperfectly known second language. methodology: equivalence in translation through communication strategies methodology: equivalence in translation through communication strategies rechecking meaning analysis re-express meaning meaning founded transfer meaning the process of translating a text larson (1984) lexicon grammatical structure communication situation cultural context communication situation cultural context grammatical structure lexicon source language text meaning/ message translated text larson (1984) asserts three main reasons: “when doing a process of translating above, the translator wants to be sure his translation is accurate, clear and natural.” these are three determining and widely accepted criteria in assessing the quality of any translation as explained below: a) accuracy: conveys all the information that is in the source text. sometimes 187 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the translator struggles with reformulating the message and may include information that is not in the source text or meant in the source text. this information should be removed from the translation. b) clarity: the translation must be understandable to the people who are depending on it for information. a translation may be accurate without being clear. it tends to contain ambiguity. ambiguity is when a phrase or sentence could have more than one meaning in a specific context so the target audience is not sure of the intended meaning. c) naturalness: a translation can be accurate and clear and still not be natural. a natural translation is idiomatic and uses the grammatical forms ordinarily used in the target language. to test for naturalness, does the translation flow easily? does it sound right to speakers of the language or does it sound foreign? ideally the translation does not sound like a translation, instead it sounds like a text originally created in that language. design and procedure here is a check list design for having equivalence in translation through communication strategies based on tarone’s (1977) typology of conscious communication strategies (tarone, 1977 cited in bialystok, 1990: 39) and translation criteria proposed by larson (1984). see the procedure below the checklist for what should be considered at each stage. communication strategy type translation criteria equivalence frequency (%) avoidance a. topic avoidance b. message abandonment paraphrase a. approximation b. word coinage c. circumlocution conscious transfer literal translation language switch appeal for assistance mime analysis: an active reception analysis between the translation and reader’s reception in literature, the interaction between text and reader occurs within a framework that controls and limits the interaction, through genre, tone, structure, and the social conditions of the reader and author. cultural theorist, stuart hall, is one of the main proponents of reception theory, having developed it for media and communication studies from the literary-and history-oriented approaches mentioned above. this approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for “negotiation” and “opposition” on the part of the audience (procter, 2004). this means that a “text”—be it a book, movie, or other creative work—is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the reader/viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their venny eka meidasari teaching communicative translation 188 individual cultural background and life experiences. in essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader. reception theory suggests the new role of the reader in the literary process and categorizes the term “reader” into “implied reader” and “actual reader.” holub (1984) argues that the concept of the “implied reader,” introduced by iser (1926), was one of the most controversial ideas that he adapted from other theorists. holub (1984) defines the implied reader “as both a textual condition and a process of meaning production.” iser (1926) makes a point that the concept of the implied reader is fundamental to reception theory. iser (1926) states, “this term [implied reader] incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential meaning by the text, and the reader’s actualization of this potential through the reading process. it refers to the active nature of this process.” the term implied reader is defined as “the reader whom the text creates for itself and amounts to a network of response-inviting structures, which predispose us to read in certain ways.” in contrast, the actual reader is defined as the reader who “receives certain mental images in the process of reading; however, the images will inevitably be colored by the reader’s existing stock of experience.” realizing the importance of understanding how the reader’s interpretation is produced, jauss introduces the concept of “horizon of expectations” in order to reveal the way in which the text interacts with the reader’s interpretation. as to have the same response as the first target language reader, communication strategies remain an important element in translation. compensatory strategies, in particular, will undoubtedly promote learners’ communicative competence. teachers can play an important role in conveying communication strategies to students and thereby assisting them to practice the target language. neubert (2000: 3-18) claims that the practice of translation and, hence, teaching translation requires a single competence that is made up of or could be considered to integrate a set of competencies that include, for instance, competence in both the source and the target languages. the work of the translator is, undoubtedly, somewhat thankless. as opposed to the conference or business interpreter (in some cases), he hardly ever obtains public acknowledgment for his efforts. his place remains in the shadows, buried in dictionaries, glossaries, in the labyrinths of large or small libraries or within the endless branches of the internet. therefore, the main quality of a good translator is his endless love of his profession, which is characterized by continuous search and non-stop work. and this quality, whose absence will inevitably lead to poorquality translations, should be inculcated in the mind of the would-be translator. the student who simply arrives in the classroom, makes his translation merely paying attention to language, then goes back home and returns next class to work with whatever material his professor has decided to bring to class, without any sort of preparation or conscious work, will never go beyond the limits of mediocrity. if a professional translator must go from the field to the text, and vice versa, countless numbers of times, then that is precisely the order we should give to our students’ tasks. right from the start, the future translator should acquire the habit of insatiable research and learn to look for any piece of information necessary for his work. these habits and skills will develop only as a result of the professor’s guidance, orientation, instruction, and encouragement. 189 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee accordingly, the teacher should first guarantee that his students get hold of extralinguistic notions, a background on the field, the subject matter at hand. this stage of “familiarization” with the field or subject matter may be developed either in the target language (tl), the source language (sl), the translator’s mother tongue—should it be other than either the sl or the tl—in any other language known by the translator, or in all of them. the essence of this process is that our translator acquires a background that will allow him either to know the content of the text or, at least, grasp the elements that will facilitate his understanding thereof. the process as such should not be viewed as a linguistic analysis of the subject but rather as a cognitive approach to the notions it comprises. the inversion of the dynamics of this process would result in the apprehension on the part of our students of just a few phrases, collocations, and terms only in the form of equivalents. the processes and notions they identify, however, will never be understood, which in turn will probably lead to lexical misuse and loss of reference. if, on the other hand, the professor focuses his work on the learning of sciences and not merely on their nomenclature, the result will be that students will understand the whats, hows, whens, wheres, and whys of the processes and, implicitly, the terms that denote them, the ways to say things, the style, i.e. the linguistic means specialists like the author they translate employ to convey messages like his. in order to have a qualified translation, the teacher must teach his students some procedures that used as a tool in the process of translating. these procedures will help him as a guidance to create an equivalent meaning in the receptor language. whatever the difficulty in the translation process, procedures must aim at the essence of the message and faithfulness to the meaning of the source language text being transferred to the target language text. in theory, communicative translation addresses itself solely to the second reader who does not anticipate difficulties or obscurities, and would expect a generous transfer of foreign elements into his own culture as well as his language where necessary, communicative translation is likely to be smother, simpler, clearer, more direct, more conventional, conforming to a particular register of language and tending to under translate. basically, communicative translation emphasize the sift of massages. this method, pay attention to the reader or listener of target language that hope there is no difficulties and unclearly in text of target language and also effectiveness of target language for example: “awas anjing galak!” it can translate become: “beware of dog!” rather than “beware of the vicious dog!” because the first sentence was beckon that the dog is vicious. in the communicative translation of vocative texts, equivalent effect is not only desirable, it is essential; it is the criterion by which the effectiveness, and therefore the value, of the translation of notices, instructions, publicity, propaganda, persuasive or eristic writing, and perhaps popular fiction, is to join the party, to assemble the device-could even be quantified as a percentage rate of the success of the translation. in information texts, equivalent effect is desirable only in respect of their (in theory) insignificant emotional impact; it is not possible if sl and tl culture are remote from each other since normally the cultural items have to be explained by culturally natural or generic terms, the topic content venny eka meidasari teaching communicative translation 190 simplified, sl difficulties clarified. hopefully, the tl reader reads the text with the same degree of interest as the sl reader, although the impact is different. however, the vocative (persuasive) thread in most informative texts has to be rendered with an eye to the readership, i.e., with an equivalent effect purpose. communicative translation being set at the reader level of language and knowledge is more likely to create equivalent than is semantic translation at the writer’s level. in communicative as in semantic translation, provide that equivalent effect is secured, the literal to word for word translation is not only the best. it is the only valid method of translation, there is no exercise for unnecessary synonyms or elegant variations, let alone for a phrase, in only type of translation. there is no one communicative or one semantic method of translating a text. these are in fact widely overlapping hands of methods; a translation can be more or less, semantic, more, or less. communicative even a particular section or sentence can be treated more communicatively or less semantically. given these assumptions, a translator must know about the nature of meaning, possible adjustments, the nature of text, and sl decoding and rl encoding. meaning: translators are required to study semantics—to learn about different types of meaning and how to investigate meaning. considerable attention is given to lexical semantics while little (if at all) is given to pragmatics, and none to formal semantics. considerable attention is given to possible adjustments: a passive may be changed to an active (possibly explicating the subject), a metaphor may be changed to a simile, a rhetorical question may be changed to a statement, and so forth. students are taught to recognize the conditions under which each adjustment might be made. this instruction is reinforced with exercises, sometimes to the point that the trainee acquires a natural reflex. text: the concern to know about text has fueled enthusiasm for the study of discourse. this enthusiasm, however, has been larg ely directed toward approaches that are text-centric (e.g., ones that look for structures, ones that take co-text to be the context); little has been directed at approaches more oriented toward the social, pragmatic, or cognitive aspects of discourse. conclusion like any communicative activity, translation has its own set of communication strategies, which are chosen (whether consciously or unconsciously) in order to achieve communicative goals. some strategies are well-established in translators’ repertoires and are deployed deliberately, while others are used less consciously, more instinctively. therefore, translation is a problemsolving activity, and communication strategies are used to address problems at all levels of linguistic representation in order to deliver the genuine context of the message to the language that the active receptor understands. communicative translation attempts to reproduce the exact contextual meaning of the sl text. but both content and language should be acceptable and comprehensible to the readership. it is a usual practice in translation to render expressive texts very freely and informative texts very literally. but if we consider the above functions we find the expressive texts more author-centered, informative texts more content-centered and vocative texts more reader-centered. moreover, the unit of translation in expressive texts is always smaller compared to other text-types. the finest 191 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee nuances of meaning are contained in words rather than sentences. as translators we should note this and attempt to retain the beauty of the original. care should be given to transfer the cultural components of an expressive text intact. in case of informative texts they may be transferred and explained whereas replaced by cultural equivalents in vocative texts. the informative and the vocative texts are more suitable for a communicative translation. reception theory enables a text not simply passively accepted by the audience, but also allows the receptor interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. the revolutionary of reception theory approach to the role of the reader in relationship to the notion of interpretation was one of the most important contributions to the history of literature, and its new perspective on the literary experience established a new paradigm for writers and theorists. although it is difficult to fully understand how powerful and revolutionary this paradigm shift was at that time, it is easy to see that the concepts which came out of reception theory are now part of how we try to understand literature, art, and the world. in fact, we still function in the same paradigm, so to speak, and it is mind boggling to imagine how exciting it will be to witness the eruption of new paradigm. references bell, r. t. (1991). translation and translating: theory and practice. london: longman bialystok, e. (1990). communication strategies: a psychological analysis of second language use. london: blackwell. holub, r. c. (1984). reception theory: a critical introduction. london: routledge. hymes, d. h. (1971): on communicative competence. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. hymes, d.h. (1972). on communicative competence. in j.b. pride and j. holmes (eds.). sociolinguistics: selected readings. middle sex: penguin books. iser, w. (1974). the implied reader: patterns of communication in prose fiction from bunyan to beckett. baltimore and london: the johns hopkins university press. jauss, h. r. (1982). toward an aesthetic of reception. trans. timothy bahti. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. larson, m. l. (1984). meaning-based translation: a guide to cross-language equivalence. lanham: university press of america. neubert, a. (2000): “competence in language, in languages and in translation,” in b. adab and c. schaffner (eds.). developing translation competence. amsterdam: john benjamins. pacte (2000). acquiring translation competence: hypotheses and methodological problems of a research project. in a. beeby, d. ensinger, m. presas (eds.). investigating translation. 99-106. amsterdam: john benjamins. procter, j. (2004). stuart hall. london: routledge. richards, j. c. and rodgers, t. (2002). approaches and methods in language teaching (2nd edition). cup: united kingdom. richards, j. c. & r. schmidt (2002). longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics, london: london group uk limited. rubin, j. (1981). the study of cognitive processes in second language learning. applied linguistics, 1, 117-131. _______. (1987). learner strategies: theoretical assumptions. research history and typology. in a. wenden & j. rubin (eds.). learner strategies in language learning. cambridge: prentice-hall. rubin, j. and thompson, i. (1994). how to be a more successful language learner. boston: heinle & heinle publishers wilss, w. (1982). the science of translation. problems and methods. tübingen: gunter narr. ayang winda sw apologizing strategies realization of indonesian 200 apologizing strategies realization of indonesian: a case study of the university of kuningan students ayang winda sw galileo english course, indonesia email: ayang.yasha@yahoo.com apa citation: winda, a. (2014). apologizing strategies realization of indonesian: a case study of the university of kuningan students. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 200-208 received: 01-03-2014 accepted: 30-03-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: this study examines the apologizing strategies used by 20 indonesian students of the kuningan university. a 8-item discourse completion task and interview are used to collect the data to know the apologizing strategies and the dominant strategies they used. this research applied the apologizing speech act of indonesian in apologizing which is analyzed by using blum-kulka (1984). the findings show that there are various strategies used by then when apologizing. that strategies including ifid, addressed, an explanation or account of situation, acknowledgement of responsibility, offer of repair and promise forbearance, phatic and interjection. ifid was used by them as a favorite strategy. generally, they used different ways when apology depend on power, social distance and ranking of imposition. keywords: apology, strategy, indonesian students apology is an action used to create a better situation, especially a bad situation created due to someone’s mistake. this apology is a social custom that takes place in the community. smith (2008: 19) defines that apology is a speech act addressed to b’s face needs and intended to remedy an offense for which a takes responsibility, and thus to restore equilibrium between a and b (where a is the apologizer, and b is the person offended). searle (1979) assigns appologies as the category of “expressive” which further includes: thanking, congratulating, condoling, deploring, and welcoming. apologies as transactions involving “a bid to change the balance-sheet of the relation between s and h” (leech, 1983: 125). people in most cultures would probably agree that an apology is needed when an offence or violation of social norms has taken place. deutschmann (2003) in ogeirmann (1984) says that apology can be negative introduction language can not be separated from culture as they are assumed as two sides of the same coin (fatimah, et al: 2011). language is a result from what the person has taken from the culture. language is used as a tool of communication in doing activities in social life. in other words, language is a unifying every culture in the world that serves as a medium of communication between one culture with another culture. in addition to cultural differences, language can also be used by an individual who are in the same culture and so it can be said that language is an important part of a culture. by using language, people can interact, communicate and also they can express their thought and feeling to another. one of indonesian culture that shown through the use of language is apology. apology shows our feeling of regret, so we can apologize to another by using language. 201 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee face but larina (2003) thinks that it can be positive face. based on two opinion above, the writer can say that apology can be positive and also negative depend on where we see. it can be negative because it is focussing on the damage caused by the offence that done by the speaker to the hearer without focussing on s’s face when apologizing. also it can be positive because in this point, we can see the function of apology is to repair s’s mistakes to the addressee. so we can see the s’s respect and s try to maintenance the better relationship with the addressee. by apologizing, the speaker recognizes the fact that a violation of a social norm has been committed and admitted to the fact that s/he is at least partially involved in its cause. hence, by their very nature, apologies involve loss of face for both interlocutors. according to leech’s classification of illocutionary functions (1983), apologies can be assigned to the convivial speech act type, in which the illocutionary goal similar to the social goal. in the case of apologies, it is the goal of keeping harmony between speaker and hearer, which makes them inherently polite. there are some strategies (blumkulka, 1984) used by indoneisan students such as (a) ifid, (b) an explanation or account of situation, (c) acknowledgement of responsibility, (d) offer of repair, (e) promise forbearance. the following example illustrates the five strategies (blum-kulka, house and kasper 1989: 290) in jucker (2008: 231). “ i’m sorry (ifid), i missed the bus (responsibility), and there was a terrible traffic jam (explanation). let’s make another appointment (repair). i’ll make sure that i’m here on time (forbearance).” in indonesia, the people used some strategies (choer 2010: 97) to express their apology such as addressed, phatic and interjection. owing to the fact that sometimes the speakers use more than one strategy. they can merge one strategy with another. mostly, they used ifid followed by addressed like “maafkan saya bu”. but when they know to whom they apology, they will more pay attention their politeness which can be seen from power, distance and ranking of imposition. they will use formal situation when apologizing to the higher power like their lecturer, and they usually use informal situation when apologozing to their friends which is in same power or have close social distance. they mostly add phatic or interjection to express their apology in informal situation like ‘ wah maaf ya hehe”. like in most cultures, indonesian students has been familiar with apologetic expression which is said by person after doing a mistake. when indonesian apologizing, it can make the speaker behaves impolite just because of a smal thing like “maaf” or sometime they say in english “eh, sorry ya” or just “sorry” which isn’t reveal the explicit meaning when the speaker asking for apologizing. aziz & lukmana (2006) argue that the indonesian people behave likes that may be because of their ignorance, unconscious and their coincidence. the culture of apologizing in indonesia is influenced by other factors out of linguistics such as gender, age, sosial distance and imposition. this is a case study which aims to analyze indonesian students strategies in asking for apology in the university of kuningan. this research talks about speech act, in which apology strategy types are dealt with. to make clear about apologizing used by indonesian students, this study involved 20 respondents of indonesian language and literature students to get the answer of two research questions: (1) what are the apologizing strategies used by indonesian students? and (2) what are the dominant apologizing strategies they use? ayang winda sw apologizing strategies realization of indonesian 202 method this study was conducted in the university kuningan, west java, indonesia. this study involved twenty students of indonesia language and literature, the university of kuningan as respondents. they have a same ethnic, sundanese indicating the same opportunity to get ‘bahasa indonesia’. the participants are chosen by using purposive sampling. sugiyono (2012: 124) defines purposive sampling is a technique of determining a sample with certain consideration. in this study, the disparity of student’s ability in mastering speaking and writing are selected in hope to extend important information and also give a qualified data because it can show the influence of the performance in asking for apology. the respondents are chosen purposively from the first level of this department in hope the researcher know the capability of using apologies speech act of indonesian students in this university of kuningan. the participants are chosen based on some considerations. discourse completion task (dct) and interview were used to collect data. dct is a form of questionnaire making use of some natural situation in which the respondents are expected to respond by making apology. items in a dct include a situational description and a brief dialogue which has one turn as an open slot (oatey, 2000: 292). they are given eight apologetic expressions in ‘bahasa indonesia’ which a university student is likely to encounter in his/her daily language interactions in the classroom activities. the students are asked to relate to the situation and express their normal language reaction in such situations. according to ogeirman (2009: 68) dct can be translated in other language because this intrument is very ideal to be changed into other language for comparing speech act produced in the balance situation in different language. besides dct, the interview was also held to know their reason about apologizing in depth when they were selecting the strategies, but the interview was held for some respondents based on their respond in questionnaire. these interviews involve unstructured and generally open-ended questions that are few in number and intended to elicit views and opinions from the participants (creswell, 2009: 181). interview can provide additional information that was missed in observation and can be used to check the accuracy of the observation (maxwell, 1996: 76). on the other end of the continuum, collecting data might involve visiting a research site and observing the behaviour of individuals without predetermined questions or conducting an interview in which the individual is allowed to talk openly about a topic (creswell, 2009: 15). in interviewing the participants, the interviews will be taped. creswell (2007) states in his book (2009: 183) that an interviewing process should use interview protocol for asking questions and recording answers. results and discussion based on the data, from eight situations which is spread to the 20 participants, there are 160 utterances consist of 558 strategies appeared. the 558 strategies are classified into 8 general strategies. the 8 general strategies are illocutionary force indicating device (ifid), an explanatiion or account of the situation, an acknowledgement of responsibility which has three subcategories like accepting responsibility, explicit self blame, denial of fault. the forth category is an offer of repair which has two sub categories, there are specified and unspecified offer of repair. then, a promise forbearance, addressed, phatic and the last is 203 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee interjection. the most dominant category used by indonesian students is ifid with the frequency is 169 or it can reach 30,3 table 1: the description frequency of apologizing strategies no types of apologizing strategies frequency % 1. ifid 169 30,3 2. an explanation or account of the situation 48 8,6 3. an acknowledgement of responsibility a. accepting responsibility b. explicit self blame c. denial of fault 114 20,4 75 13,4 28 5 11 2 4. an offer of repair a. specified offer of repair b. unspecified offer of repair 36 6,4 25 4,5 11 2 5. promise of forbearance 28 5 6. addressed 116 21 7. phatic 37 6,6 8. interjection 10 1,8 frequency 558 100 illocutionary force indicating device (ifid): the formulaic expression of regret (performative verb). ifid was the most frequent strategies used by indonesian students both to their lecturer and their classmates in the teaching learning process. choer (2010) says that the most utterances which is used by indonesian people is “maaf” or it can be called in english language as performative verb like (be) sorry, apologize, pardon, regret, etc. because of that, this utterance can be easily to use by people for indicating their apology because that utterance is really well-known by the hearer. the indonesian are never rare with “maaf” because in this present era, we can see or we can say “maaf” directly as a tool in asking for apology. they use that words easily because it is their habitual language which is used in their daily activities. the following are utterances of ifid situation employed by the participants: maaf, saya enggak akan ngobrol lagi. (i’m sorry, i will not chat again) maaf pak, saya akan mencoba membuat yang baru. mohon maaf, ini kesalahan saya (i’m sorry sir, i will try to create a new. i’m sorry, this is my fault) aduh maaf ya teman – teman. aku juga bingung. maaf ya. (oops sorry my friends. i am also confused. sorry) sometimes, ifid used in double time in an utterance. it may happened when the speaker really sorry for making an offence to the hearer. it shows that they are feeling regret for what they are having done. an explanation or account of situation: an explanation may be explicitly related to the offence or it may present the ‘state of affairs’ in a general way, thus relating implicitly to the offence (blum kulka, 1984: 208). explanations are indirect apology strategies (ogeirmann, 2009: 134). these following utterances are the example of what the participants said when answering an explanation or account of situation: %. the detail description of apologizing strategies will be shown in the table below : ayang winda sw apologizing strategies realization of indonesian 204 maaf pak, kemarin saya dapat info kalau bapak tidak akan hadir hari ini dan saya tidak mendapat info lagi. (i’m sorry sir, yesterday i got information that you will not come today and i didn’t get the information again) most of indonesian were using an explanation or account to show their reason why they made an offence or it said to imply apology in affair or indirectly apology especially when they were coming late to the class. it can be seen in the third situation that there are 15 utterances showed explanation or account of the situation. the other data showed that the indonesia students explained uncontrolled situation. they force to make an offence because they could not control the situation for avoiding the mistakethe strategy of explanation has been defined as a form of “self-justification by explaining the source of the offence as caused by external factors over which the speaker has no control”. this case mostly presented in the first situation. and these are the following utterance said by the respondents in explanation situation: iya pak maaf, saya lapar soalnya tadi belum sempat sarapan (yes sir, i’m sorry. i am hungry because i had not yet had breakfast) maaf bu, saya lupa tidak membawa tugas saya, tadi saya buru – buru (sorry mom, i forgot to bring my task, i had to rush) but there are some students who answered the situation using an account and the lecturer can accept their reason because it can cause unexpected risk like the following utterance employed by the respondents: maaf pak .............. karena saya sakit perut kalau tidak makan soalnya saya punya maag (i’m sorry sir.............because my stomach will be sick if i don’t eat because i have stomach disorder) saya lapar takut maag saya kambuh (i’m hungry. i’m afraid my stomach disorder will be relapse) an acknowledgement of responsibility: in this data, there are 20% or 114 strategies of acknowledgement. the most obvious strategy termed ‘acknowledgement of responsibility’ is that it presupposes some degree of responsibility acceptance. the speaker realizes their responsibility of the offense. based on blum – kulka et al (1984), this strategy consist of three sub categories called accepting responsibility (s expresses trait of self-deficiency), explicit self-blame, and denial of fault. accepting responsibility: show the admission of the speaker for what he had been done. they accept it as their fault. olshtain in ogeirmann (2009: 134) states that an expression of s’s responsibility“could realize an apology in any situation” (1989: 157). in the three sub categories of acknowledgement, accepting responsibility showed the highest frequency 13,2%. it shows that the indonesian students are not shy in acknowledging their fault. this strategy can show the speaker’s deficiency in doing a mistake. the following are utterances of accepting responsibility situation employed by the participants : maaf pak, saya salah (sorry sir, i was wrong) maaf, saya sudah mengacaukan presentasi anda (sorry, i stir your presentation up) the data show that the respondents used accepting responsibility after using ifid to insist their apology. beside that, there are some students who used accepting responsibility before using ifid but it has same meaning that they wants to insist their apology. this strategy can show the speaker’s 205 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee deficiency in doing a mistake. the following are utterances of accepting responsibility situation employed by the participants : kami sadar kami salah, kami meminta maaf (we realize we were wrong, we are sorry) kami salah dan khilaf. kami minta maaf (we were wrong and erroneous. we are sorry) explicit self blame: shows that the speaker explicitly acknowledges the fact that he or she has been at fault (blum kulka et al, 1989: 291). we can see that in this strategy, the speaker’s face threatening is occured in accepting his blame. the following are utterances of explicit self blame situation employed by the participants. maaf pak / bu, ini kesalahan saya (sorry sir/mom, this is my fault) maaf, itu semua salah saya (sorry, that’s all my fault) ini murni keteledoran saya (this pure my negligence) those data above show that the speaker really blamed their self for what they having done. they were judging their own self. they judged that all of the confusion was done by them, it was their fault. the word “keteledoran” is a judging word that they means as their boner and thought that only they who did a mistake. denial of fault: shows the speaker’s refusal to acknowledge guilt. the speaker completely rejects responsibility for the offence. this strategy includes all the utterances negating the speaker’s involvement in the offence and shifting the blame to other people or the hearer (ogeirmann, 2009: 139). this strategy can be found both in questionnaire and interview. these are the following utterance said by the respondents in denial of fault situation: maaf saya telat, saya dengar bapak tidak akan masuk jadi bukan salah saya (sorry i came late, i heard that you will not come so it was not my fault.) maaf tapi kan saya sudah menjelaskan sebisa saya (sorry but i have explained as much as i can) the data show the explicit denying of speaker’s mistake. they directly said that “jadi bukan salah saya” or it can be translated “it’s not my fault”. even, they were wrong because they were coming late but they can’t realize that they were wrong. they served a reason which support that they were right. the word “tapi” can be a key for denying. s/ he indirectly deny their mistake. when interviewing, the researcher found some students who said that they couldn’t apology because they think that they were right. here are the following utterances employed by the respondents: mmmmmm, saya pernah sih gamau minta maaf hehe. ya soalnya saya ngerasa kalo diri saya paling benar. apapun yang saya lakukan saya ngerasa bener, jadi saya rasa tidak perlu minta maaf. gengsi dong hehe. (mmmmmm, i’ve still not want to apologize hehe. because i feel that i am always in the righteous. whatever i do i feel right, so i feel no need to apologize. it’s so prestige hehe) another respondent said: pernah sih gamau minta maaf hehehe, soalnya saya males buat minta maaf. apa yang dia tuduhkan kan tidak semuanya benar jadi kenapa saya yang harus minta maaf, harusnya dia dong yang minta maaf ke saya kan dia sudah menuduh saya. (i ever does not want to apologize hehehe, because i am lazy to make apologies. what he accused to me, it was not right at all so why should i apologize, he should apologize to me because he had accused me). ayang winda sw apologizing strategies realization of indonesian 206 the interview result shows that the speaker chose this strategy because of their ego. they are saving their face and deny their mistake. implicitly, they didn’t want that the hearer know their fault so they act as if they were always right. an offer of repair: show that the students compensate to repair their fault. as blum kulka et al (1989: 293) said that if the damage or inconvience which affected the hearer can be compensated for, the speaker may choose to offer repair, this offer must be directly related the offence perpetrated. here are the following utterances employed by the respondents in offer of repair situation: maaf bu saya meminta waktu untuk mengerjakan kembali tugas saya (sorry mom i ask for the adding to rework my task) maafkan aku. aku yang akan bicara pada dosen itu agar mau menerima tugas kamu (i’m sorry. i will talk to the lecturer in hope she would like to receive your task) maaf pak, saya akan mencoba membuat yang baru (i’m sorry sir, i will make a new) from the above example, the respondent showed that they served their repairment specifically. they pointed out what will they did to correct their mistake. here are the following utterances that employed by the respondents in the offer of repair situation: kami bersedia menerima apapun untuk menebus kesalahan kami (we are willing to accept anything for changing our fault) apapun yang bapak minta, kami akan melakukannya asalkan bapak mau memaafkan kami. (whatever you ask, we will do it in the hope you want to forgive us) from both data above show that the speaker wants to repair their mistake but they didn’t know what to do. they believed to the offended for the the repairment for their fault. they accept their fault and they want to repair. they ask for the repairment because they wanted to make sure the hearer that they were really sorry promise forbearance: the speaker promise that the offence will never happen again. promises of forbearance are generally offered in potentially recurrent offensive situations, which makes them highly context-specific (ogeirmann, 2006: 196). these are the following utterances that employed by the respondents in the promise forbearance situation: pak, mohon maaf atas kesalahan kami. kami berjanji tidak akan mengulanginya lagi (sir, sorry for our fault. we promise that we will not do it again) untuk kali ini saja pak, selanjutnya saya berjanji tidak akan mengulangimya lagi (only for this moment sir, for the next time i promise that i will not do it again) kami janji kami tidak akan mengulaginy lagi (we promise will not do that again) the word “saya janji”or “i promise” indicates that they will never do the same fault again. in the strategy of promising, the speaker promise to the hearer to change his or her behavior and showed their intention not to repeat the mistake. they ensured to the hearer that their bad behavior will never do again in the future. addressed: showed to whom they apologize. generally, they used addressing in formal situation or they used it when they apologized to the person who has higher power than them, like to the lecturer. these are the following utterances that employed by the respondents in the addressing situation: 207 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee ibu, mohon maaf (sorry mom) pak, maafkan saya (sir, forgive me) kami minta maaf pada bapak (we are sorry to you sir) the adressing above addressed to the higher age or higher power. it can show their politeness when they were apologizing. it is the way to maintain social relationship betwenn people in a society. phatic: serves to seek approval or opinion from the opposed speaker. the use of phatic “ya” implies the meaning that the apologizing is accepted by the opponent (choer, 2010: 97). these are the following utterances that employed by the respondents in the phatic situation: iya maaf. maafin atuh ya (yap sorry. forgive me yeah) aduh mohon maaf ya (ouch, i’m sorry ya) iya bu maaf (yap mom, sorry) wah maaf ya (oouch, i’m sorry yeah) interjection: shows emotive (eg.: expressed pain, sadness, regret , disappointment ). the use of interjection “wah” and “aduh” imply a sense of sorrow. these are the following utterances that employed by the respondents in the interjection situation: aduh mohon maaf ya (ouch i’m sorry) waduh maaf ya hehehe (ouch i’m sorry hehe) wah maaf ya (ow, i’m sorry yeah) aduh maaf pak hehehe (ouch, i’m sorry sir hehe) conclusion indonesian students were used 8 general apologizing strategies to express their sorry like illocutionary force indicating device (ifid), an explanation or account of the situation, an acknowledgement of responsibility which has three subcategories like accepting responsibility, explicit self blame, denial of fault. the forth category is an offer of repair. then, a promise forbearance, addressed, phatic and the last is interjection. the dominant strategies used by indonesian students is illocutionary force indicating device (ifid) which reached 169 frequency or 30,3%. the second highest strategy is addressed with 116 or 21%, the third is an anckowledgement. and the forth strategies used by indonesian students is an explanation or account of the situation which the frequency is 48 or 8,6%. phatic is the fifth highest frequency used by the indonesian students with reach 37 or 6,6. and the sixth strategy used by indonesian students is an offer of repair. for the seventh and the last strategies are promise and interjection with the frequencies are 28 and 10 or 5% and 1,8%. the indonesian students used ifid when they are asking for apology. they say “sorry” followed by addressing to make sure their apology are addressed to whom. beside that, they also can accept their fault by giving an explanation of the situation why they did the mistake. generally, they offered a repair to correct their fault. they made a promise that they will not do the wrongdoing again in hope the hearer will be sure with their apologizing. but they also used phatic and interjection. for all the strategies that used by indonesian students, it can be called that indonesian students have a politeness enough when they were apologizing. they can realize their fault and accept their fault by giving a repair. ayang winda sw apologizing strategies realization of indonesian 208 references achmad, s. (2012). strategi kesopanan berbahasa masyarakat bugis pinrang provinsi sulawesi selatan. bahasa dan seni, tahun 40, nomor 1, februari 2012. austin, j. l. (1962). how to do things with words. oxford: oxford university press. aziz, e. a. (2000). refusing in indonesian: strategies and politeness implications. unpublished dissertation in department of linguistics. australia: monash university aziz, e. a. & lukmana, i. (2006). realisasi pertuturan meminta maaf dan berterima kasih di kalangan penutur bahasa indonesia: sebuah kajian kesantunan berbahasa. jurnal linguistika, vol 13, no. 25, 122-142. barron, a. (2003). acquisition in interlanguage pragmatic: learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context. thesis doctoral at universitat hamburg: john benjamins. blum-kulka, s & olshtain. (1984). request and apologies: a cross cultural study of speech act realization patterns (ccsarp). applied linguistics,5(3), 196213. blum-kulka, j. house & g. kasper. (1989). cross cultural pragmatics: request and apologies. norwood, nj: ablex publishing corporation. brown & levinson. (1987). politeness: some universal in language usage. cambridge: cambridge university press. choer, a. (2010). kesantunan berbahasa. jakarta: rineka cipta creswell, j. r. (2009). research design: quantitatie, qualitative and mixmethod approaches (3rd edition). california: sage publications ltd. fatimah, a. et al. (2011). strategi-strategi meminta maaf yang digunakan oleh penutur asli bahasa indonesia dalam berbahasa inggris. makasar: universitas hasanuddin. gunawan, i. (2013). metode penelitian kualitatif: teori & praktik. jakarta: bumi aksara. jucker, a. h. & taavitsainen, i. (2008). speech act in the history of english. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. leech, g. (1983). principles of pragmatics. new york: longman group limited. maros, m. (2006). apologies in english by adult malay speakers: pattern and competence. the international journal of language, society and cultures. 19 (pp.114) mey, j. l. (2009). concise encyclopedia of pragmatics. oxford: elsevier. oatey, h. s. (2000). culturally speaking: culture, communication and politeness theory. london: continuum international publishing group. ogiermann, e. (2009). on apologizing in negative and positive politeness culture. amsterdam: john benjamin publishing company paltridge, b. (2006). discourse analysis an introduction. london: mpg books ltd. searle, r. j. (1979). expression and meaning: studies in the theory of speech acts. newyork: cambridge university press. smith, n. (2008). i was wrong: the meaning of apologies. newyork: cambridge university press. subana, et al. (2000). statistik pendidikan. bandung: pustaka setia sugiyono. (2012). metode penelitian pendidikan. bandung: alfabeta. thomas, j. (1995). meaning in interaction: an introducing to pragmatics. newyork: longman publishing. yule, g. (1996). pragmatics. newyork: oxford university presss. problems faced by indonesian efl learners english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay wulan rahmatunisa department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: wrahmatunisa@yahoo.com apa citation: rahmatunisa, w. (2014). problems faced by efl learners in writing argumentative essay. english review: journal of english education, 3(1), 41-49 received: 20-10-2014 accepted: 05-11-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: this study aims to find out problems in writing argumentative essay faced by indonesian efl learners. it is carried out in a qualitative research design as it attempted to describe the problems and their ways out. the data were taken from university students’ writing task and interview. the participants are the second year of university indonesia students who enrol their study in english department. results of the data indicated that indonesian efl learners faced the problems in three categories, those are linguistics problems, cognitive problems, and psychological problems. mostly, students faced problems in linguistics related to the grammatical structure (23.2%), formatting words (30.2%), words classes (16.3%), error in using words (9.3%), and the use of article (21%). second, cognitive problems are related to organizing paragraph, difficulties in remaining word classes, getting lost the generic structure, making a conclusion, and putting punctuation. last, psychological problems which included laziness, egoism, bad mood, and difficulties to start writing also faced by indonesian efl learners. data analysis also indicated the problem solving which hopefully will be beneficial for efl teachers in writing class. it is strongly recommended that the efl class should strengthen all the language skills in general and writing in particular, motivate the students to use english with the teachers, introduce pair work, peer-correction, and use dictionaries frequently etc. keywords: argumentative essay, linguistics problems, cognitive problems, psychological problems introduction this study investigates problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay. the reason for choosing this topic is triggered by some efl students’ opinion that writing is the most difficult skill in studying foreign language. writing is not merely a skill we employ to record our knowledge, but the very moment at which we confront what learning and understanding are all about (taylor, 2009). some researchers have argued that writing can be experienced as one of the most difficult of all skills, requiring an intricate combination of neurological, physical, cognitive, and affective competencies (murray et.al, 2006). it means that writer should analyze whether his/her writing is good and understandable or not. they have to arrange the words into good order, and make them aware that writing is different from speaking. that makes people said that writing is difficult activity. in this study, writing argumentative essay is taken because it deals with set of assumption towards the issue. wulan rahmatunisa problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay argumentative essay is also a challenging writing. when people start to make argumentative essay, they will ask to themselves what will the topic be and how they will organize it in words. moreover, the goal of argumentative writing is to convince audience, and it is done in a situation where there exists a conflict between the beliefs and attitudes of the writer/speaker and reader/audience (hyland, 2002). thus, argumentative essay needs critical thinking and also great opinion so that readers will argue the writer’s argument or believe that the opinion is true. there are some studies conducting the issue about argumentative essay. zhu (2001) investigated teachers in mexico who identified process and strategies in writing argumentative essay. his study revealed that writing was the most complicated activity in language class and it became more difficult when came to foreign language class. the other study was conducted by saito (2010). his research aimed to find out the major characteristics of students in third-year english in composing argumentative essay which were instructed by integrated-genre approach. from the explanation above, a fundamental conclusion can be drawn: writing argumentative essay is highly important to be continuously and consistently done. by carefully considering this, in relation to critical efl teaching, this study attempts to uncover problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay. the formulations of this study are as follows: (1) what are the problems faced by efl students in writing argumentative essay? (2) what do the students do to overcome the problems in writing argumentative essay? since this study is about problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay, the weight and relevance are drawn. when students write an essay in their mother language, they do not find any significant difficulties such writing essay in foreign language. that is because english language learners have limited vocabulary. therefore, students end up repeating the same words; this hinders creativity. al-khasawneh (2010), clarified that students couldn’t give voice to their thoughts because lack the adequate stock of vocabulary. moreover, english language learners don’t use invented spelling and their written texts are restricted to words which they know. therefore, by this study, new information can be proposed in efl teaching in order to sharpen students’ writing abilities. writing is an activity in which people transfer their ideas into written form. kroll (1990) stated that writing is a complex, recursive, and creative process or set of behaviours that is similar in its broad outlines for first and second language writers. writing also is a cognitive process because the process of writing is influenced by the taskenvironment and the writer’s long term memory. writing is a long term activity. generally, when people start to build the topic, they actually faced by some problems. byrne (1995) stated that there are three problems raised; first, psychological problems, that writing is essentially a solitary activity and the fact that we are required to write on our own, without the possibility of interaction or the benefit of feedback, in itself makes the act of writing difficult. second, linguistic problems, that in writing we have to compensate for the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 www.englishreview.web.id absence of the features, keep the channel of communication open through our own effort and to ensure both through our choice of sentence structure and by the way our sentence are linked together and sequenced, that the text we produce can be interpreted on its own. last, a cognitive problem, that writing is learned through a process of instruction. it means that we have to master the written form of the language and to learn certain structures which are important for effective communication in writing. mostly, we can write an essay easily when we write it in the mother tongue. identifying and structuring the data are the easy process. but how do if we write in foreign language? it will be the different cases. any problems will occur when we try to write in foreign language. daly (1997) mentioned that argumentative essay is built around a specific statement (or main premise) that is debatable within the field in which people are studying. moreover, bazerman (1985) stated that argumentative essay is responding to a text, the conclusion might recall the original idea to which people are responding, reminding the reader exactly what are agreeing or disagreeing. the content of argumentative essay is also has to be reasonable. writer should organize their emotion when they attempt not too judge others. there are two kinds of argumentative essay as stated in gerot and wignell (1995). those are analytical exposition and hortatory exposition which have different function. analytical exposition gives explanation to readers or listeners that something is the case, meanwhile hortatory has social function to persuade readers or listeners that something should or should not be the case. in fact, the fundamental problem in writing essay is we do not know how we can take the first statement. thus it is important to organize first before we start to write. in argumentative essay there are three outlines used in writing including introduction (hook and thesis statement), body (argument 1, argument 2, argument 3), and conclusion (restated thesis statement) no matter how writers organize the essay, they should make reader have same opinion to the essay and understand what the writers mean. this is one of the reasons why indonesian efl learners say that argumentative essay is difficult. feedback is needed then, because it can help l2 writer get the best composing in the text. hyland (2002) stated that feedback is important in acknowledging in process-based classrooms, where it forms a key element of the student’s growing control over composing skills, and by genreoriented teachers employing scaffolding learning techniques. editing is other problem solving in writing. it also important because editing can help writer to know how if he/she is as reader from their writing. writers are able to invite his/her friend to look at their work, or they can edit it by themselves. there are three previous studies underlie this present research. the first research was done by bakir, al-quds open university in nablus, palestine, which title is “writing difficulties and new solutions: blended learning as an approach to improve writing abilities” that study found that if a teacher keeps on teaching following the traditional method, the classroom activities become passive and monotonous. therefore, the wulan rahmatunisa problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay teacher should try new methods other than the traditional methods of teaching and make the students better achievers. bakir (2013) describes the teaching and learning context, and how the writing activities were integrated as part of the blended learning outcome. it discusses the extent to which students were able to achieve from the intended outcomes and the processes involved in achieving those outcomes. he reports findings from research into the benefits of integrating blended learning into traditional methods in developing writing abilities for second and third year undergraduates at a conventional university in palestine. while this present study will focus on problems appeared in writing an argumentative essay which is responding to a text, the conclusion might recall the original idea to which people are responding, reminding the reader exactly what are agreeing or disagreeing. moreover this present study also examines the types of problems in term of linguistic, cognitive, and psychological problems. another related research report is conducted by zhu (2001). he investigated teachers in mexico who identified process and strategies in writing argumentative essay. his study revealed that writing was the most complicated activity in language class and it became more difficult when came to foreign language class. the other study was conducted by saito (2010). his research aimed to find out the major characteristics of students in third-year english in composing argumentative essay which were instructed by integrated-genre approach. from the explanation above, a fundamental conclusion can be drawn: writing argumentative essay is highly important to be continuously and consistently done. by carefully considering this, in relation to critical efl teaching, this study attempts to uncover problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay. method this study is going to be conducted in qualitative research design because it investigates a phenomenon described by cresswell (1994) as an approach which inquires often makes knowledge claims based primarily on constructivist perspectives. the researcher physically goes to the people, setting, site or institution to interview or record in its natural setting. the data sources of this study were taken from university students’ writing task and interview. the participants are the second year of four university students who enrol their study in english department and precisely they are efl students in undergraduate study. normally, they have learned argumentative essay and have ever written it. the writing test was conducted to see students’ argument towards a poem entitled ‘funny face’. here is the short poem written by calvin miller: funny face by calvin miller suppose my nose were upside down: in any rainstorm i might drown. the sun would shine into my eyes because my glasses sat so high. one morning i’d hop out of bed to find my mustache on my head. and every time i’d sneeze or cough the blast would blow my ball cap off. the data collection procedures of the qualitative method involve: (1) setting the boundaries for the study, which lead to classify the participants in specific area. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 www.englishreview.web.id (2) collecting information through observation, and (3) establishing the protocol for recording information. participants’ written task is the main data in this study. the data were taken at november 2013. the problems were analysed and classified based on the theory proposed. it will then be descriptively interpreted. in this study, a ten-point scale was developed to evaluate each aspect, then the average of the scores was calculated. the breakdown of the marks of the areas covered is given below: 1. structure: (2 points). 2. spelling: (1 point). 3. punctuation: (1 point). 4. coherence: (2 points). 5. cohesion: (1 point). 6. strength of argument: (2 points). 7. aesthetic dimension: (1 point). in analyzing linguistic problems which occur in efl students’ writing, the percentage information will be drawn in a table in order to enrich the data presentation. the table will be as follow. no. linguistics problems frequency percentage (%) 1. tenses 2. word class 3. word formation 4. the use of article 5. word error total moreover, interview is used as the supporting instrument in collecting data. the semi-structured interviews were used in this study because they allow for standardized but in-depth probing of and elaboration on the original response. it enables one to follow a line of inquiry (punch, 2001). the questions were prepared in advanced based on the theme being investigated. most of the interviews were conducted in english. nevertheless there were a number of occasions whereby bahasa indonesia is used as the respective respondents felt more comfortable using the language. each interview took approximately 20 minutes, was audio-tapped and then transcribed by the interview as soon as possible, as suggested by osborne and freyberd (1985). immediate transcription allowed the interviewers to improve technique of asking questions for the next interview. result and discussion this chapter presents the results of the study and discussion result. it elucidates the writer’s data analysis and discussion of the whole research. the chapter is divided into two major sections. the first section presents the findings of the study which answer what problems are faced by efl learners and what they usually do in solving those problems. then second section is about discussion. the data, as outlined in chapter iii, were obtained from writing test in order to see students’ argument towards a poem entitled ’funny face’ and from the interview. the data from the writing test are first presented and analyzed preceding by the data from the interview. based on the result of investigation, it is an evidence that there were found students who faced any difficulties in writing. to prove this fact, this study is provided by data analysis and interview wulan rahmatunisa problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay transcription to reveal the problems. the findings showed the coherence with byrne (1995) who classified the problems in writing into three; those are psychological problems, linguistics problems, and cognitive problems. the following table shows the types of linguistics problems occur in students’ writing. no. linguistics problems frequency percentage (%) 1. tenses 10 23.2 2. word class 7 16.3 3. word formation 13 30.2 4. the use of article 9 21 5. word error 4 9.3 total 43 100 linguistics problems occur within structuring sentences such as tenses, word class, using articles, word formation, and word error. these problems typically can arise when l2 writer transfers his/her idea into l1 writer. the result of the investigation showed that different background is the main factor when students who learn l2, write their argumentative writing. to solve those problems, students said they usually ask for feedback from teacher, do editing and revising, outlining, ask friends for being prove-reader, and read for improving their vocabulary. those findings are consistent with harmer (2007) who stated that the process of writing involves planning what we are going to write, drafting it, reviewing and editing what we have written and then producing a final (and satisfactory) version. it indicates that most efl students have already done those principles. however, in order to maximize the result of learning process, they need to organize the problem solving in appropriate way and need more guidance from teachers. discussion cognitive problems relate to how to organize our ideas, using punctuation, addressing topic, following topic, following instructions and directions. the result of data analysis show that putting punctuation is the most problem faced by efl students. this fact occurs because writing is not just expressing the idea but also organizing words. as mentioned before in bakir (2013) who reports how the writing activities were integrated as part of the blended learning outcome. truly, word classes and word formation are the complicated one when writing an essay. this finding is also in line with the rabab’ah (2003) who informed that the students are unable to express them appropriately in their writings due to their limited vocabulary: the result is that they cannot find appropriate and necessary vocabulary to express themselves. in fact, students still confuse when they have to compose complex sentences, especially if it comes to verbs plus appropriate preposition. #25: is on the same age with me students still do mistakes in putting the appropriate preposition for each verb. the same mistake also happened in other student, who wrote: #31: similar with the title... the words which are bold should be replaced by ‘as’ and to, because the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 www.englishreview.web.id appropriate preposition the word for the word ‘same’ is ‘as’ and ‘to’ for the word ‘similar’. in using grammar, students also found difficulties. they still confuse in determining which one is noun, verb, adverb, and adjective, as exemplified in students’ writing test #23 and other sentences below. #23: it make him think positive #29: the writer seems like talking to... from students’ writing also found that they usually forget in mentioning a subject for each sentence. they merely mention a subject for a paragraph as exemplified below. #9: when talking about familiarity, build and make a familiarity to the readers more appropriately listeners by asking the listeners the listeners to suppose her or his funny face. the sentence above proved that students still use spoken form in writing essay. it also strongly indicates that most efl mostly think as in their first language concept rather than think as native. as suggested by harmer (2007) that many nationalities do not use the same kind of script as english, so for students from those cultures, writing in english is doubly difficult: they are fighting to express themselves at the same time as trying (when they are not using a computer keyboard) to work out a completely new writing system. data from the interview revealed some problems students faced in writing argumentative essay. they mostly agree that organizing paragraph is difficult as expressed by 4 students exemplified below. students#4: ‘i do not like to write a draft because when it comes to my real writing i usually write out of the draft’ these findings are in line with the causes of writing problems reported by al-khasawneh (2010) who concluded that insufficient opportunities of using english and inappropriate teaching methods were the major causes identified by the participants of the study as the major factors of their writing problems. the least important reasons identified by the participants for their weak writing were their low english proficiency, teachers’ lack of interest in writing tasks and insufficient use of dictionaries. basically, writing a draft firstly can help writer in writing an essay. draft is a map for writers. when writer lost their way, the draft will help them to come back to the topic. the statement above also indicates other psychological problem in writing that is laziness. difficulty to start writing is another problem related to psychological problem in writing. this is expressed by all participants as they stated that writing basically needs a lot of time to prepare. they said it covers plan, draft, re-plan, draft, edit, re-edit, re-plan, etc before they produce their final version. students do not write very often and most of what they write is classroom-bound. as bakir (2013) mentioned the most important factor in writing exercises is that students need to be personally involved in order to make the learning experience of great value. encouraging student participation in the exercise, while at the same time refining and expanding writing skills, requires a certain pragmatic approach. the teacher should be clear on what skills he/she is trying to develop. next, the teacher needs to decide on which type of exercise can facilitate learning of the target area. once the target skill areas and means of implementation are defined, the teacher can then proceed to focus on what topic can be employed to wulan rahmatunisa problems faced by indonesian efl learners in writing argumentative essay ensure student participation. by pragmatically combining these objectives, the teacher can expect both enthusiasm and effective learning. conclusion this study examined the problems which are faced by some efl students in writing argumentative essay. results of the data indicated that students faced the problems in three categories, those are linguistics problems, cognitive problems, and psychological problems. mostly, students faced problems in linguistics related to the grammatical structure (23.2%), formatting words (30.2%), words classes (16.3%), error in using words (9.3%), and the use of article (21%). second, cognitive problems are related to organizing paragraph, difficulties in remaining word classes, getting lost the generic structure, making a conclusion, and putting punctuation. last, psychological problems which included laziness, egoism, bad mood, and difficulties to start writing are also faced by efl students. this study also answers the second research question of what the students do to overcome the problems in writing argumentative essay. the interview session revealed students usually ask for feedback from teacher or lecturer, do editing and revising, outlining, ask friends for being prove-reader, and read more for improving their vocabulary. those findings are consistent with harmer (2007) who stated that the process of writing involves planning what we are going to write, drafting it, reviewing and editing what we have written and then producing a final (and satisfactory) version. what this recent study shows, then, is that the current reality in efl classes still falls far short of the goal of english language teaching. even though most of efl classes use the standard criteria of efl teaching, it cannot serve as a resource for improving language education as it exists now for shaping our thinking as we design curriculum and materials for the future. teachers need to identify the learning preferences and learning styles of their students. the understanding of how best the students learn then is matched with pedagogical approaches deemed appropriate for learning to take place at optimal level. moreover, students should be challenged with tasks and projects of varying level of difficulty. they need to discover issues and uncover answers by themselves. furthermore, teachers should understand what motivates the students in class, because students need to be motivated to keep them alert. references al-khasawneh, f. (2010). writing for academic purposes: problems faced by arab postgraduate students of the college of business, uum. esl world, 9 (2). bakir. (2013). writing difficulties and new solutions: blended learning as an approach to improve writing abilities. international journal of humanities and social science 3(9). bazerman, c. (1985). the informed writer: using source in discipline. new york: houghton mifflin company. byrne, d. (1995). teaching writing skills. singapore: longman publisher. creswell, j. w. (1994). research design qualitative and quantitative approaches. london: sage publisher. daly, b. (1997). writing argumentative essay. retrieved from http://www.eslplanet.com/teachertool s/argueweb/preface harmer, j. (2007). the practice of english language teaching. malaysia: pearson education limited. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 www.englishreview.web.id hyland, k. (2002). teaching and researching writing. london: pearson education. krappels. (1999). an overview of second language writing process research. new york: cambridge university press. kroll, b. (1990). second language writing. new york: cambridge university press. murray, r. & moore, s. (2006). the handbook of academic writing. new york: open university press. osborne, r. j., & freyberg, p. s. (1985) learning in science: the implications of children's science. auckland: heinemann. punch, k. f. (2001) introduction to social research quantitative and qualitative approaches. london: sage publications. rababah, g. (2003). communication problems facing arab learners of english: a personal perspective. tefl web journal, 2(1). saito, s. (2010). an analysis of argumentative essay of thai third-year english majors instructed by integrated process-genre based approach. a thesis: bangkok. taylor, g. (2009). a student’s writing guides. new york: cambridge university press. zhu, w. (2001). performing argumentative writing in english: difficulties, processes, and strategies. tesl canada journal 19 (1). english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 27 native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner's english proficiency tariq elyas european languages department, faculty of arts & humanities, king abdul-aziz university, saudi arabia e-mail: telyas@kau.edu.sa noor motlaq alghofaili english language institute, king abdul-aziz university, saudi arabia e-mail: noor.alghofaili@gmail.com apa citation: elyas, t., & alghofaili, n. m. (2019). native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner’s english proficiency. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 27-38. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1773. received: 23-01-2019 accepted: 25-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: in the field of tesol, the perception that native english speaking teachers (nests) are better than non-native english speaking teachers (nnests) has influenced language schools, recruitment policies and institutional leadership practices. the tendency to recruit more nests and achieve improved learning outcomes can be seen in english as a foreign language (efl) and english as a second language (esl) contexts. this paper aims to investigate whether nests or nnests have any impact on the efl learners’ language proficiency in saudi efl context. this quantitative study adopts pretest-posttest experimental and ex post facto designs to determine students’ achievement in two language skills, namely speaking and listening. the two groups of participants are efl students in a foundation year program at a saudi arabian university. one group was taught by a nest and the other by a nnest. the quantitative data were analyzed by using spss. the findings indicated that teachers’ nativeness and backgrounds have no significant effects on the saudi efl learners’ speaking and listening skills. here, saudi efl learners can equally perform in classes taught by nests or nnests. in the light of the findings, the study suggests that recruitment policy should not be influenced by the employers’ belief that nests possess better teaching skills than nnests. keywords: efl learners; experimental research; ex post facto design; language proficiency; nests; nnests. introduction there has been a debate over the past few decades to determine whether native english speakers or non-native english speakers are better language teachers. teaching of english in different contexts have been linked to the teacher native or native speaking abilities, and it is believed that teachers who speak english as their first language can be more effective classroom practitioners than those whose first language is not english. however, research on the phenomenon of native english-speaking teacher (nest) and non-native english speaking teacher (nnest) indicates the fact that the latter can be more effective owing to their experience of being a language learner. as the debate continues in the field of tesol, this paper considers the matter from the efl learners’ perspective in the saudi context. the last two decades have seen exponential growth in the number of research studies that aimed to determine the characteristics of an ideal language teacher (al-nawrasy, 2013; alghofaili & elyas, 2017). it is commonly believed that nests are ideal language teachers (moussu, 2010). phillipson (1992) even labels the notion of idealizing nests as the ‘native speaker fallacy’ (cited in braine, 2013). this belief has shaped the idea of hiring nests in schools, language centers, and even universities regardless of their teaching qualifications and experience (alseweed, 2012). moreover, the employers prefer nests over nnests believing the formers have knowledge of how language works (larsen-freeman & anderson, 2011). this preference for nests is evident in most job advertisements around the world, especially in non-english speaking context, such as arabian gulf, korea and china (selvi, 2010). according to li-yi (2011), in taiwan, parents consider nnests incompetent due to their lack of overseas experience, regardless of their qualifications. the impact of the employers’ tariq elyas & noor motlaq alghofaili native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner’s english proficiency 28 choice of nests can be seen in fewer job opportunities for nnests, whereas there is a big demand for nests around the world. for example, in thailand in 2010, there were 500 native-speaker teaching job vacancies (grubbs, jantarach, & kettem 2010). similarly, anya, avineri, carris, and valencia (2010) argue that hiring decisions might be influenced by the perception that some people speak the language “correctly” while others do not. these evidences raise a question of whether native speakers are employed for the sake of their nativeness, irrespective of their teaching experience or training. in this case, chun (2014) suggests that native speakers should not be employed for simply being native and should not be preferred over nnests. as there is no solid empirical evidence to show whether nests or nnests can contribute to the learning outcomes of efl learners, more investigation is required. saudi government invests a large amount of budget in efl education, as english language has a significant role in the development of business, science and technology. according to mahboob and elyas (2014), english fluency has economic value in saudi arabia due to the large number of foreign companies that contribute to the economy of the kingdom. as a result, the number of english language learners has rapidly increased the demands for qualified efl teachers. due to its importance in various fields and mandatory consideration at school and university levels, both nests and nnests are recruited by public and private sector universities for the preparatory year programme (pyp). although most of the saudi efl institutes prefer to employ nests, nnests from different arab and asian countries also teach at pyp. the large number of language teachers in saudi higher education institutions gives rise to a question whether instructional practices of nests or nnests have any impact on the language profanely of saudi efl learners. since learning english has become a requirement in higher education, saudi students’ attitudes about nests have evolved to the point where many consider learning from a nest an ideal way to attain english language proficiency (alseweed & daif-allah, 2012). despite its significance, there is dearth of empirical evidence on the issue of nests and nests in the saudi efl context. therefore, this study aims to bridge that research gap. listening skill listening is one the most important skills that language learners acquire in a classroom environment which also contributes to their speaking abilities. for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners, it is essential to apply listening strategies and provide listening practice in authentic situations. research shows that language learners generally prefer nests to teach listening, considering them an ideal model of the authentic language in a classroom setting (al-omrani, 2008; lasagabaster & sierra, 2005; mahboob, 2004; nam, 2010). in mahboob’s (2004) view, the possible reason behind this preference could be that nests acquire a “natural” pronunciation that might help students improve their listening and contribute to their speaking ability. in a similar way, lasagabaster and sierra (2005) believe that the nests’ ability to speak better english than nnests may offer learners opportunities to acquire authentic language and improve their listening skills. speaking and pronunciation skills many language learners regard speaking ability as an indicator of knowing a language. these learners consider fluency more important than the ability to read, write, or comprehend oral language. as they regard speaking the most important skill that needs to be acquired, their preference is always to have a fluent teacher of english. given these presuppositions, it would not be surprising if learners show interest in nests owing to their accents and backgrounds. in fact, this could be one major reason for idealizing the native-speaking teacher. research in this direction shows that language learners prefer nests over nnests in teaching speaking skills (e.g. al-omrani, 2008; kelch & santana-williamson, 2002; lasagabaster & sierra, 2005; mahboob, 2004). according to alomrani (2008), nests are rated higher in teaching speaking skills due to their accurate pronunciation and fluency. similarly, benke and medgyes (2005) reveal that nests are good sources of inspiration for language learners to use english well; they are considered as perfect models for imitation. nevertheless, such claims of idealizing nests in teaching speaking are largely based on students’ perceptions, the reliability of which can be difficult to assess. since students prefer nests as speaking teachers, the impact of nests on learners’ speaking skills is an important consideration for researchers. al-nawrasy (2013) used an ex post english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 29 facto design to investigate the impacts of a teacher’s nativeness on students’ achievement in speaking skills. the results show that there is no significant difference in speaking skill achievements between students taught by the two types of teachers; nest and nnest. although the nests’ learners display better performances with respect to pronunciation, the nnests’ students were better in terms of accuracy. research in this direction indicates that both nests and nnests can have impact on the english language learners’ pronunciation. levis, sonsaat, link and barriuso (2016) investigated the effects of teachers’ l1 on learners’ pronunciation. even though many learners stated their preference for native teachers, their actual results offer encouragement to nonnative teachers in teaching pronunciation. this suggests that instruction on pronunciation skills is dependent on knowledge and teaching techniques than on the native pronunciation of teachers. these two experimental studies have led to new findings that run counter to the results typically found when comparing nests and nnests in teaching speaking and pronunciation skills and using students’ perceptions as the basis of study. a plethora of research shows that nests are perceived as being superior in teaching english language and helping learners to improve their pronunciation skills (e.g. alseweed, 2012; chun, 2014; grubbs, janatra, & kettem 2010; ma, 2012a; walkinshaw & dungo, 2012; walkinshaw & oanh, 2014). on the other hand, some studies argue that nests are difficult to understand since they speak too fast and use words that are often difficult for the level of their students (e.g. ma, 2012; sung, 2010). although learners show preference for nests, interestingly, the teachers’ background and nativeness have no significant impact on students’ achievements in speaking and pronunciation skills (e.g. al-nawrasy, 2013; levis, et al. 2016). method when investigating the impact of nests and nnests on students, using different methods can offer useful insights to provide a comprehensive picture of the research problem. two instruments were used in this study: pretestposttest and ex post facto. the quantitative methods—pretest/posttest and ex post facto designs—were used to investigate the influence of the teachers’ nativeness, background, and accent on their students’ achievement. students were given a pretest to ensure comparability of the participant groups prior to their exposure to nests or nnests and a posttest to measure the effects of that exposure. to ensure comparability, the same test was given in both pretest and posttest, since the time elapsed between the two tests was long enough (7 weeks) that the students were unlikely to remember their answers in pretest. the reading part was an achievement test taken from the teacher’s version of the english unlimited special edition b1, which is assigned to intermediate level students. the reading part included two reading passages: the first was a message posted on a website that offers job and career advice to young people and the other was an email posted on a website about hotels. each passage included five truth-value judgment sentences, which have been extensively used with second-language learners to eliminate fatigue and avoid compromising the reliability of the study (mackey & gass, 2005). as for listening part, it was also an achievement test taken from the teacher’s version of english unlimited special edition b1. due to the time limitation and to avoid students’ boredom and fatigue, the listening part was a radio interview with two people. similar to the reading questions, it included five true judgment sentences. further, in ex post facto design, also called causal-comparative design, the independent variable or variables have already happened and the investigator starts with the observation of a dependent variable or variables (kerlinger, 1970) cited in (cohen, manion & morrison, 2007). here, the researcher investigates possible relationships to and effects on the dependent variables by studying the independent variable, which in this case is teacher nativeness (cohen, manion & morrison, 2007). in other words, the researcher is examining retrospectively the effects of a naturally occurring event on a subsequent outcome with a view to establishing a causal link between them. this design focused first on the effect and attempted to determine what caused the observed effect. due to the difficulty of using pretest/posttest design to measure the impact of nest and nnest on students’ writing and speaking skills, ex post facto design was used. as stated by cohen, manion and morrison (2007), it can be useful to employ an ex post facto design in tariq elyas & noor motlaq alghofaili native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner’s english proficiency 30 situations where conducting experimental research is not possible. this design was chosen for various reasons. first, the pretest/posttest approach is time-consuming when evaluating such skills. second, since the eli offers an intensive english language course in six weeks, it would be difficult to test the students individually, particularly in speaking skills. moreover, the eli students are obliged to take highly valid and reliable final speaking and writing tests at the end of the module to pass the course. finally, students might be unwilling, anxious or too tired to participate in taking tests in these two skills. these factors might affect the results of the test. this study was conducted at the english language institute (eli) of a saudi arabian university. at the eli, more than 8000 students are enrolled in a preparatory year program (pyp) every year, during which they have to complete four levels of english courses as follows: table 1. english language courses at the eli eli course code course level cefr level credits 101 beginner a1 0 102 elementary a2 2 103 pre-intermediate b1 2 104 intermediate b1+ 2 eli helps students in their pyp to achieve an intermediate level of english proficiency, equivalent to the common european framework reference of b1 threshold level (cefr b1). all participating students were homogeneous in terms of age (they were either 18 or 19 years old), native language (arabic), nationality (saudi), and cultural background. two participant groups were included in this study. the first group included the participants who participated in the quantitative approaches. in this group, stratified sampling was used, in which, as creswell and clark (2017) indicate, researchers divide (stratify) the population on some specific characteristic (e.g., gender) and then, using simple random sampling, sample from each subgroup (stratum) of the population (e.g., females and males). this guarantees that the sample will include specific characteristics that the researcher wants to include in the sample.” in this study, two classes were chosen to take pretest and posttest of reading and listening skills: the first one was taught by a british nest and the other one a saudi nnest. these two classes were also used for the ex post facto portion of the study. both classes were at intermediate level, which falls under the b1 threshold level according to the cefr scale. the second group had 18 student participants, eight in intermediate and 10 in upper intermediate. all students were taught by both types of teachers, nativeand non-nativespeaking. the participants’ names were given pseudonyms to protect their privacy. background information of participated students is presented in table 2. table 2. students' background information participants’ pseudonym level number of nests taken courses with nationalities of nests taken courses with number of nnests taken courses with nationalities of nnests taken courses with wajd 103 3 american, british, canadian 2 saudi, malaysian maryam 103 2 american 4 saudi, indian, pakistani ahlam 103 2 american, british 2 saudi, egyptian basmah 103 1 american 4 saudi, pakistani, jordanian mona 103 2 american 4 saudi, india maha 103 1 american 2 saudi laila 103 1 british 2 saudi, indian iman 103 2 british, canadian 2 saudi, malaysian samirah 104 1 american 4 saudi, indian sanaa 104 1 american 3 saudi boshra 104 1 american 4 saudi, pakistani, english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 31 jordanian bodour 104 1 american 4 saudi syrian shayma 104 1 american 4 saudi, malaysian, egyptian hana 104 1 american 3 pakistani, saudi kholoud 104 1 american 4 saudi, syrian, turkish, jordanian wafaa 104 1 american 5 saudi, jordanian amal 104 2 american 5 saudi, jordanian, syrian asmaa 104 1 american 3 jordanian, egyptian, syrian the eli uses a modular system of four quarters per academic year. the quantitative data for this study were collected during the third module of 2015–2016 academic year. approval to conduct the study was obtained from the head of the research unit at the eli. consent forms were signed by all students participated in the study. the participants knew their participation was voluntary and they could withdraw from the study at any time. confidentially and anonymity were assured to all participants. as noted above, the pretest and posttest were conducted during the third module of intermediate level students. the test was piloted on the first day of the module with three eli students at that level to determine the time needed for answering the questions. during the first week of the third module, the pretest was given to 18 students who attended a nest class and 20 students who were present in an nnest class. the test had to be completed within 40 minutes. six weeks later, with a high absenteeism range, the posttest was given to 14 students who took the pretest and attended both the classes. the pretest and the posttest in both classes were printed, distributed, invigilated, and collected by the teacher to ensure the safety of the data. as for the ex post facto design, the students’ grades of the same nest and nnest classes in speaking and writing skills from module two were collected. the eli grading sheets were provided by the academic coordinator, which were compared with their current third-module grades of speaking and writing skills. the number of students whose grades were accessible was 18 students in nnest class and 17 in nest class. the statistical package for social studies version 20.0 (spss, ibm) was used to calculate and find any significant statistical difference between the mean scores of the students who were taught by nests and those who were taught by nnests. the questionnaire data were translated by the researchers and coded to identify common themes. to achieve the highest degree of accuracy in comparing the two groups’ grades, several statistical analyses were applied, including descriptive statistics and tests of normality. paired sample t-test analysis was also applied to determine whether there was statistical evidence that the mean difference between paired observations pretest and posttest for each group was significantly different from zero (i.e., that both means were not equal). additionally, pearson’s correlation was used to measure the strength and direction of the association that existed between two variables measured (pretest, posttest) for each group in the study. for further investigation, an independent samples t-test was applied to check if there was a significant difference between the pretests of both groups and if there was a significant difference between the posttests of both groups. results and discussion this section which reports on the data obtained from the two quantitative methods used is divided into two subsections; listening skill and speaking skill. listening skill table 3 shows descriptive statistics for students’ achievements in listening skills of both nest and nnest groups. in addition, figure 1 shows the histograms (pre-test and post-test) of the grade distributions of each listening group. tariq elyas & noor motlaq alghofaili native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner’s english proficiency 32 table 3. descriptive statistic for students’ achievement in the listening skill listening group pre-test post-test nest n valid 14 14 missing 0 0 mean 6.1429 4.7143 std. error of mean .64499 .77338 std. deviation 2.41333 2.89372 variance 5.824 8.374 range 6.00 8.00 minimum 2.00 .00 maximum 8.00 8.00 nnest n valid 14 14 missing 0 0 mean 3.0000 5.7143 std. error of mean .58366 .65824 std. deviation 2.18386 2.46291 variance 4.769 6.066 range 8.00 8.00 minimum .00 2.00 maximum 8.00 10.00 figure 1. grade distributions of nest and nnest groups in the listening pre/post tests the above curves display the normal distribution, and the shapiro-wilk test showed that the data is normally distributed for most listening groups (p>0.05). the pre-test of the nest group is not normally distributed (p>0.05) (table 4) but that would be accepted as the data displayed above in the histograms is accepted. table 4. test of normality for the listening skill test listening group kolmogorov-smirnova shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. statistic df sig. nest pre-test .351 14 .000 .741 14 .001 post-test .229 14 .045 .853 14 .025 nnest pre-test .248 14 .020 .892 14 .087 post-test .257 14 .013 .882 14 .061 a. lilliefors significance correction english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 33 this part of the study is based on the following null hypotheses:  nh3: nest has no impact on student achievement in listening skill.  nh4: nnest has no impact on student achievement in listening skill. to test the above hypotheses, a dependent ttest paired sample was applied to determine whether there is any statistical evidence that the mean difference between paired observations pre-test and post-test for each group is significantly different from zero. table 5, table 6 and figure 2 show that for the nest group, the difference between the pretest and the post-test (1.43) is not significantly different from zero. that is, both grades are approximately equal in pre-test (6.14±2.41) and post-test (4.71±2.89). therefore, the difference between the mean of the two grades is not large enough to reach the significant level (t(13)=1.408, p=0.183). however, the post-test mean is slightly lower. the third null hypothesis is accepted. as for the nnest group, the difference between the pre-test and post-test (2.714) is significantly different from zero. that is, both grades are not equal pre-test (3.00±2.18) and post-test (5.71±2.46). therefore, the difference between the mean of the two grades is significant (t(13)=-2.723, p=0.017), and the post-test mean is significantly higher. therefore, the fourth null hypothesis is rejected. table 5. paired sample statistics for students’ achievement the listening skill listening group mean n std. deviation std. error mean nest pair 1 pre-test 6.1429 14 2.41333 .64499 post-test 4.7143 14 2.89372 .77338 nnest pair 1 pre-test 3.0000 14 2.18386 .58366 post-test 5.7143 14 2.46291 .65824 table 6. paired sample test for students’ achievement the listening skill listening group paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) mean std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper nest pair 1 pre-test post-test 1.42857 3.79705 1.01480 -.76378 3.62092 1.408 13 .183 nnest pair 1 pre-test post-test -2.71429 3.72989 .99686 -4.86786 -.56071 -2.723 13 .017 figure 2. paired sample test for students’ achievement in the listening pre/post tests pearson’s correlation (table 7) was used to measure the strength and direction of the association between the two variables measured (pre-test, post-test). the following table shows that r=-0.016 and p=0.957 for the nest group, and r=-0.286 and p=0.322 for the nnest group, indicating that the correlations are weak and insignificant. tariq elyas & noor motlaq alghofaili native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner’s english proficiency 34 table 7. paired samples correlations for students’ achievements in the listening skill listening group n correlation sig. nest pair 1 pre-test & post-test 14 -.016 .957 nnest pair 1 pre-test & post-test 14 -.286 .322 for further investigation, the independent samples t-test was applied (table 8) to check whether there is a significant difference between the pre-tests and the post-tests of two groups. the test reveals that there is a significant difference between the pre-test means of both groups ((6.14 and 3.00 for the nest and nnest group, respectively), p=0.001). moreover, there is no significant difference between the post-test means of both groups ((4.71 and 5.71 for the nest and nnest group, respectively), p=0.334). table 8. independent samples test for the listening skill levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pretest equal variances assumed .905 .350 3.613 26 .001 3.14286 .86987 1.35482 4.93090 equal variances not assumed 3.613 25.745 .001 3.14286 .86987 1.35395 4.93176 posttest equal variances assumed 1.218 .280 -.985 26 .334 -1.00000 1.01558 -3.08755 1.08755 equal variances not assumed -.985 25.352 .334 -1.00000 1.01558 -3.09015 1.09015 according to the analysis above, student achievement in the nest group did not show any improvement in the listening part so that the third null hypotheses is accepted. on the other hand, studentd’ achievement in the nnest group showed significant development in listening skill. therefore, the fourth null hypothesis is rejected and nnest appears to have a positive effect on students’ achievement in listening skill. speaking skill table 9 shows descriptive statistics for the nest group and the nnest group in speaking skill. in addition, figure 3 shows the histograms for module 2 and module 3 grade distributions of each group. table 9. descriptive statistic for students’ achievement in the speaking skill speaking group module 2 module 3 nest n valid 15 15 missing 0 0 mean 9.1067 8.6133 std. error of mean .30402 .36172 std. deviation 1.17745 1.40095 variance 1.386 1.963 range 3.10 4.00 minimum 6.90 6.00 maximum 10.00 10.00 nnest n valid 16 16 missing 0 0 mean 8.8250 9.1563 std. error of mean .31563 .33726 std. deviation 1.26254 1.34906 variance 1.594 1.820 range 3.50 4.50 minimum 6.50 5.50 maximum 10.00 10.00 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 35 figure 3. grade distributions of nest and nnest groups in the speaking pre/post tests the above curves (second and third) display the normal distribution, but the shapiro-wilk test shows that data are not normally distributed for each group (p<0.05) (table 10). table 10. test of normality for the speaking skill speaking group kolmogorov-smirnova shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. statistic df sig. nest module 2 .297 15 .001 .751 15 .001 module 3 .196 15 .127 .871 15 .035 nnest module 2 .305 16 .000 .780 16 .001 module 3 .297 16 .001 .703 16 .000 a. lilliefors significance correction the study null hypotheses are:  h5: nest has no impact on student achievement in speaking skill.  h6: nnest has no impact on student achievement in speaking skill. to test these hypotheses, a dependent t-test paired sample was applied to determine whether there is statistical evidence that the mean difference between paired observations for module 2 and module 3 grades for each group is significantly different from zero. table 11, table 12 and figure 4 show that for the nest group, the difference between module 2 and module 3 grades (0.493) is not significantly different from zero. that is, both grades are approximately equal (module 2: 9.11±1.18, module 3: 8.61±1.4). therefore, the difference between the mean of the two grades is not large enough to reach the significant level (t(14)=2.145, p=0.05). however, the module 3 mean is slightly lower. the fifth null hypothesis is accepted. as, for the nnest group, the difference between module 2 and module 3 grades (-0.331) is not significantly different from zero. that is, both grades are approximately equal (module 2: (8.83±1.26), module 3: (9.16±1.35)). therefore, the difference between the mean of the two grades is not large enough to reach the significant level (t(15)=-0.975, p=0.345). however, the module 3 mean was slightly lower so that the sixth null hypothesis is accepted. tariq elyas & noor motlaq alghofaili native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner’s english proficiency 36 table 11. paired sample statistics for students’ achievement speaking skill speaking group mean n std. deviation std. error mean nest pair 1 module 2 9.1067 15 1.17745 .30402 module 3 8.6133 15 1.40095 .36172 nnest pair 1 module 2 8.8250 16 1.26254 .31563 module 3 9.1563 16 1.34906 .33726 table 12. paired sample test for students’ achievement the speaking skill speaking group paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) mean std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper nest pair 1 module 2 module 3 .49333 .89080 .23000 .00002 .98664 2.145 14 .050 nnest pair 1 module 2 module 3 -.33125 1.35878 .33970 -1.05529 .39279 -.975 15 .345 figure 4. paired sample test for students’ achievement in the speaking pre/post tests pearson’s correlation (table 13) was used to measure the strength and direction of the association between the two variables measured (module 2 and module 3 grades). the following tables show that r=0.775 and p=0.001 for the nest group and that r=0.46 and p=0.073 for the nnest group, indicating that the nest group displays a strong positive correlation, whereas the nnest group displays an insignificant correlation. table 13. paired samples correlations for students’ achievements in the speaking skill speaking group n correlation sig. nest pair 1 module 2 & module 3 15 .775 .001 nnest pair 1 module 2 & module 3 16 .460 .073 for further investigation, the independent samples t-test was applied (table 14) to check whether there was a significant difference between the module 2 grades of both groups and to test whether there was a significant difference between the module 3 grades of both groups. the test revealed that there was no significant difference between the module 2 grade means of both groups ((9.1 and 8.61 for the nest and nnest group, respectively), p=0.525). in addition, there was no significant difference between the module 3 grade means of both groups (8.83 and 9.16 for the nest and nnest group, respectively), p=0.281). english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 37 table 14. independent samples test for the speaking skill levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper module 2 equal variances assumed .007 .933 .641 29 .526 .28167 .43926 -.61671 1.18004 equal variances not assumed .643 29.000 .525 .28167 .43824 -.61463 1.17796 module 3 equal variances assumed .424 .520 -1.099 29 .281 -.54292 .49394 -1.55314 .46730 equal variances not assumed -1.098 28.687 .281 -.54292 .49456 -1.55489 .46906 in conclusion, for both groups, module 2 and module 3 grades means were not significantly different. neither group had a significant increase or decrease in grades. thus, neither the nest nor the nnest had any effect on student achievement in the speaking skill. therefore, the fifth and sixth null hypotheses are accepted. conclusion this study concludes that teachers’ nativeness and backgrounds have no significant impact on the saudi efl learners’ achievement in the four skills. overall performances in the pretest and posttest results show that nests and nnests can be equally effective as language teachers. these findings should be a convincing factor in shaping the hiring policy in the arabian gulf and the native speaker fallacy (phillipson, 1992) should not have any impact on efl/esl students, administrators, recruiters, and nonnative teachers’ self-recognitions. this study shows no significant influence of nest or nnest on the efl learners’ achievement in reading, listening, speaking and writing skills. the findings indicate that many students prefer nest in teaching the reading skills, which is contrary to al-omrani (2008) and mahboob (2004) who state that nnests are considered more effective in teaching reading skills. the data do not shed light on the learners’ preference for nest as a reading teacher; however, nnests are favored for using reading strategies and techniques. this is in line with the results of al-omrani (2008), who reveal that nnests can teach students reading strategies that are required to overcome their reading challenges. similar to lasagabaster and sierra (2005), few participants believe that teachers’ nativeness has no influence on their achievements in the reading skill. this point was also proven in the quantitative data indicating that being taught by either a nest or nnest has no effect on students’ achievements in the reading skill. besides, the findings also show that there is no difference between nests and nnests in teaching listening. this is in contrast with the literature, which indicates that nests are better at teaching listening as they are the ideal models for authentic life (e.g. al-omrani, 2008; kelch & santana-williamson, 2002; lasagabaster & sierra, 2005; mahboob, 2004; nam, 2010). however, results indicate that nests have no influence on students’ achievements in listening skill, whereas nnests have a remarkable positive influence on students’ achievements in listening skills. further, the quantitative data of this study show that there is no significant difference among students’ achievements in speaking skills whether taught by nests or nnests. the teachers’ backgrounds and nativeness have no significant influences on students’ achievements, based on the results of this experimental study. this finding agrees with al-nawrasy (2013) and levis et al., 2016), whose experimental studies yielded the same findings. finally, it can be inferred from the findings that teachers’ nativeness has no significant effect on students’ achievements in speaking and listening skills. as part of the quantitative data of this study, the efl students’ results on the writing skills show a negative influence of a nnest on their achievements, whereas no influence has been noted in the learners’ progress who were taught by a nest. this finding contradicts literature that nnests are favored by students in teaching writing skills as they learn better from their tariq elyas & noor motlaq alghofaili native english speakers versus non-native english speakers: the impact of language teachers on efl learner’s english proficiency 38 teaching strategies (al-omrani, 2008; alseweed & daif-allah, 2012; mahboob, 2004). references alghofaili, n. m., & elyas, t. (2017). decoding the myths of the native and non-native english speakers teachers (nests & nnests) on saudi efl tertiary students. english language teaching journal, 10(6), 1-19. al-nawrasy, o. (2013). the effect of native and nonnative english language teachers on secondary students’ achievement in speaking skills. jordan journal of educational sciences, 9(2), 243-254. al-omrani, a. h. (2008). perceptions and attitudes of saudi esl and efl students toward native and nonnative english-speaking teachers (doctoral dissertation). indiana university of pennsylvania, usa. retrieved from proquest dissertations and theses database. (umi no. 3303340) alseweed, m. a. (2012). university students’ perceptions of the influence of native and nonnative teachers. english language teaching, 5(12), 42-53. doi:10.5539/elt.v5n12p42. alseweed, m. a., & daif-allah, a. s. (2012). university students’ perceptions of the teaching effectiveness of native and nonnative teachers of english in the saudi context. language in india, 12(7), 35-60. anya, u., avineri, n., carris, l. m., & valencia, v. (2010). languages, identities, and accents: perspectives from the 2010 linguistic diversity conference. issues in applied linguistics, 18(2), 157-169. braine, g. (2013). non-native educators in english language teaching. london: rutledge. chun, s. y. (2014). efl learners’ beliefs about native and non-native englishspeaking teachers: perceived strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 35(6), 563–579. doi: 10.1080/01434632.2014.889141. creswell, j. w., & clark, v. l. p. (2017). designing and conducting mixed methods research. thousand oaks: sage publications. cohen, l., manion, l., & morrison, k. (2007). research methods in education (6th ed.). london: rutledge. grubbs, s. j., jantarach, v., & kettem, s. (2010). studying english with thai and native‐speaking teachers. teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 16(5), 559-576. doi: 10.1080/13540602.2010.507966. kelch, k., & santana-williamson, i. e. (2002). esl students’ attitudes toward nativeand nonnativespeaking instructors’ accents. the catesol journal, 14(1), 57-72. larsen-freeman, d., & anderson, m. (2011). techniques and principles in language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. lasagabaster, d. & sierra, j. m. (2005). what do students think about the pros and cons of having a native speaker teacher? in e. llurda (ed.), nonnative language teachers: perceptions, challenges and contributions to the profession (pp. 217-241). new york: springer. levis, j. m., sonsaat, s., link, s., & barriuso, t. a. (2016). native and nonnative teachers of l2 pronunciation: effects on learner performance. tesol quarterly. doi: 10.1002/tesq.272. li-yi, w. (2011). taiwanese pre-service english teachers' attitude towards native-and-non-nativeenglish-speaking-teacher team teaching. english teaching & learning, 35(2), 1-46. mackey, a., & gass, s. m. (2005). second language research: methodology and design. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. mahboob, a. (2004). native or nonnative: what do students enrolled in an intensive english program think? in l. d. kamhi-stein (ed.), learning and teaching from experience (pp. 121-148). ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. mahboob, a., & elyas, t. (2014). english in the kingdom of saudi arabia. world englishes, 33(1),128-142. doi:10.1111/weng.12073. moussu, l. (2010). native and non-native englishspeaking as a second language teachers: student attitudes, teacher selfperceptions, and intensive english program administrator beliefs and practices (unpublished doctoral dissertation). purdue university, west lafayette. nam, h. h. (2010). the pedagogy and its effectiveness among native and non-native english speaking teachers in the korean efl context (unpublished doctoral dissertation). state university of new york at buffalo, buffalo, ny. phillipson, r. (1992). linguistic imperialism. oxford: oxford university press. selvi, a. f. (2010). all teachers are equal, but some teachers are more equal than others: trend analysis of job advertisements in english language teaching. watesol nnest caucus annual review, 1, 156-181. sung, c. c. m. (2010). native or non-native? exploring hong kong students’ perspectives. the lancaster university postgraduate conference in linguistics & language teaching, 4, 243. walkinshaw, i., & oanh, d.h. (2012). native or nonnative english speaking teachers in vietnam: weighing the benefits. tesl-ej, 16(3). walkinshaw, i., & oanh, d. h. (2014). native and non-native english language teachers: student perceptions in vietnam and japan. sageopen,4(2). doi: 10.1177/2158244014534451. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12073 http://sdl.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.dym=false&s.q=author%3a%22walkinshaw%2c+i%22 http://sdl.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.dym=false&s.q=author%3a%22oanh%2c+d.+h%22 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 85 teachers’ creativity in designing learning activities: sustaining students’ motivation lailatul khikmah department of english education, school of postgraduate studies, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia e-mail: lailatulkhikmah@upi.edu; lailatulkhikmah1993@gmail.com apa citation: khikmah, l. (2019). teachers’ creativity in designing learning activities: sustaining students’ motivation. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 85-92. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1639. received: 13-01-2019 accepted: 19-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: sustaining students’ motivation during teaching and learning process, unquestionably, is considered as the most challenging task. therefore, the teachers have to be mindful and creative in designing an activity as it is the core of the lesson. however, in practice, some teachers are sometimes found to aimlessly use an activity as they run out of idea. thus, this study is conducted to serve as a reference for the teachers in designing a specific activity that helps the students stay motivated. a descriptive qualitative was employed as the research design to gain deeper analysis on types of activity that encourage the students to learn english. the data were collected through interview which involved 5 professional english teachers as participants. the result revealed that the design of the activity should be appealing and correspond to the students’ interest, age, level of proficiency, school policy, materials and media availability. thus, it is suggested that the teachers should be brave to try out new activity and attend some teachers’ training, such as celta or delta, to improve their teaching skills. keywords: designing learning activity; learning activities; students’ motivation; sustaining students’ motivation; teachers’ creativity; teachers’ perspective. introduction motivation, undeniably, plays as one of significant aspects determining the success in language learning. yet, in fact, motivating the students to learn is considered as one of the greatest challenges because motivation itself has complicated definition or concept. according to vroom (1964), motivation is seen as the force that stimulates goal oriented actions. meanwhile, locke and latham (2004) stated that motivation refers to internal and external factors influencing individual to acquire and extend their skills and abilities. even though these two experts stated quite different definition of motivation, both parties stated the same factors that might discourage the students to learn, such as the students’ mood, peer-conflict, family problem or dislike the design of the activity. these factors then make the students have different level of motivation. therefore, the teachers have to fully understand various concept of motivation which includes definition and ways in assisting the students to accomplish their goals. by doing so, it is expected that the teachers could come up with solutions in sustaining students’ motivation during teaching and learning activity. further, as motivation is fluctuated, so it is possible for the students to feel discourage to learn at a certain point. therefore, the teachers should play their role as a motivation builder and keeper. in other words, teachers should know how and what to do if their students’ level of motivation is decreasing. in this case, harmer (2000) suggested five stages to build students’ motivation which include affect, achievement, attitude, activities, and agency. ferlazzo (2015), on the other hand, also added some strategies to sustain students’ motivation that include giving the students freedom in choosing final project, giving constructive feedback, developing a positive teachers-students relationship, and designing meaningful task. however, this study only focuses on the activities designed by the teachers to maintain students’ motivation. it is believed that teachers’ choice in using specific activities in teaching and learning can provide a positive impact on students’ motivation. some researchers have conducted studies on strategies to sustain students’ motivation. winston, train, rudolph, and gillette (2018), for example, conducted a study concerning faculty motivations to use active learning among pharmacy educator in united states. the result of the study suggested that the faculty members who are intrinsically motivated are more likely to use various active learning strategies. furthermore, another research conducted by vibulphol (2016) found that most students have mailto:lailatulkhikmah@upi.edu mailto:lailatulkhikmah1993@gmail.com lailatul khikmah teachers’ creativity in designing learning activities: sustaining students’ motivation 86 a high level of motivation since the teachers employed various strategies such as autonomysupport and controlling. this finding is in line with lai and ting (2013) who state the teachers should use various strategies to enhance students’ motivation. referring to the aforementioned studies, it can be discovered that it is important to implement a specific activity in order to sustain students’ motivation. the teachers will not know whether the activity they used can really help the students stay motivated unless they try it out. some studies may suggest that to deal with passive students, the teachers can use learning contract. however, this may not work in another classroom context as each student is unique. therefore, the teachers can also adjust the content or the way they implement the procedures. for instances, when a teacher tries to use youtube during teaching and learning, he firstly has to know whether his students are familiar with the use of it or not. if they are already familiar, so the teacher may adjust the project by asking them to create a video, for example about commenting a well-known youtubers or making a video about the trick to learn an idiom. furthermore, the teacher should also be able to identify whether the students are motivated intrinsically or extrinsically. for example, the teacher can design an activity that includes rewards, such as gaining more points for an active student. thus, the primary concerned of the study is to find out teachers’ creativity in designing activities to sustain students’ motivation. this study specifically investigates the types of activity used by some professional teachers who have gained celta or delta certificate or at least have more than 5 years of teaching experience. by investigating this issue, it is expected that teachers can know various activities that can be implemented in the classroom and consideration made by some professional teachers in choosing specific activities. the study delimited the aspect of sustaining the students’ motivation proposed by harmer (2000). specifically, this study only investigates the way the teachers enhance the students’ motivation through designing a fun and engaging activities. the activity is taken into account since the success of learning majorly depends on the way teacher design the activity. if the teacher carelessly designs the activity, the students might feel discouraged to learn as they found that the activity is too easy or boring. therefore, this study is also useful to be served as references when the teachers are out of idea. method as previously describe, the purposes of this study are to explore the activities that the teachers use to sustain students’ motivation. considering the purpose of the study, qualitative research is considered to be the appropriate research design for this study since it will help in gaining more specific and deeper analysis on a kind of activity that actually works in making the students stay motivated during teaching and learning. furthermore, the investigation was about the detail description of english teachers’ creativity in designing activity that can sustain students’ motivation. as paris and winn (2013) points out that qualitative research helps to conduct in-depth analysis and acquire detail description of current phenomenon and be highly engaged in current issues. in conducting this research, five efl teachers who have gained celta (certificate in teaching english to speakers of other languages) or delta (diploma in teaching english to speakers of other language, advanced tefl qualification) certificate or at least have more than 5 years of professional teaching experience were involved. these certificates are internationally well-known and hard to attain so it is assumed that the respondents are qualified to share more creative ideas in designing an activity that make students be motivated during teaching and learning. additionally, teachers who have more than five-years experiences were also included because they have encountered many experiences in teaching and know how to deal with it. the data of this study were collected through face-to-face interview. the interview consisted of five questions designed based on the research needs. after collecting the data, the researcher analyzed the collected data in order to find the result. the steps of analyzing the data that are; transcribing the interview sessions from audiotape recording, reading and analyzing the transcription relating to teachers’ creativity in designing the activity in order to sustain students’ motivation, interpreting the data, categorizing the data based on the relevant theory aiming to answer the research question and drawing conclusion from the interview data analysis. after the interview analysis, the researcher then takes a brief look on the lesson plan to know the teachers’ detail plan. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 87 results and discussion the data were collected from five respondents who are all teachers either from private or public school by using interview. before the interview, the researcher also asked for approval and notified them about the major core of the questions, then asked them to bring one lesson plan. the name of the respondents will be replaced by using r1 until r5. from the result of the interview, it is found that the teachers adjusted the learning steps which have been stated at the lesson plan that suit to the students. moreover, four out of five teachers suited the learning activity to the time allotment. however, this phenomenon is a common since the time allotment may influence the process of teaching and learning. this is in line with brandvik and mcknight (2011) who state the students take longer or shorter time to do the activity that the teacher thought. furthermore, it is found that one of the teacher chose to change the plan when the students are less motivated and feel asleep. it can be seen in the following excerpts: “there were some changes happening in the class, mostly because the timing is a little bit off, especially in the guided discovery part. however, most of the plan went out as planned”. (r1) “yes, there were some changes. the changes mostly depend on the condition. for instances, the time allotment. if the time is a bit off then automatically, some activities are being cut off or adjusted if in the implementation the students found it too hard to do the exercises”. (r2) “yes mostly because of the time is a little bit off”. (r4) “yes. sometimes, i have to omit some activities because of the time is a little bit off’. (r5) “there is because some students in the beginning of the lesson found out to be discourage to learn and feel sleepy”. (r3) referring to the aforementioned answer, it can be inferred that most of them have experienced making incorrect time prediction and they (r1, r2, r4, r5) decided to omit it from the lesson. as during the lesson, the students need more time in doing some exercises. therefore, it is suggested for the teacher to select the most important thing to do during teaching and learning. besides, it is also suggested to choose the best task for students that suit to the time allotment. therefore, the teachers have to select the appropriate material, activity and task which suit to the class situation and the time allotment. other than that, it bears in mind that there is no divine standard on how to make an adjustment step in teaching and learning. generally, the teachers make some adjustment step that is based on types of problems that the teachers encounter, such as the students’ and teachers’ readiness, students’ competency, teachers’ skills, and classroom situation. it is not necessarily that the changing in lesson plan should be highly sophisticated and eye-catching. the most important thing is to make sure the second plan is running. andy (2013), however, provides some suggestions about the things that the teachers can do if their plan does not work well including listen to feedback and act on it, use group work, pause for a minute, simplify the complicated activities, have some back up activities, provide ice breakers, or trim the fat that is move on to the meatier task if teachers find the task they provide is too easy for the students. in addition, one of the teacher decided to add some activities, such as warming up activities that involve physical activity in order to stimulate students to be more active, like doing hockey pokey dance. this happened when the students were passive at class. this is good as teaching young learners needs some physical activity in order to attract their attention and motivate them to learn. as mentioned by some experts, hokey pokey dance can captivate the students’ attention and help them to develop concentration, sequence skills, cultural competencies, and improve grammatical skills regardless of the teachers’ teaching approach and style (shehadeh & farah, 2016). in conclusion, there are many things that the teachers can do to replace the activity that is no longer serving as they plan, such as adjusting, omitting, or adding. thus, the teacher should always be prepared for the worst condition and be calm and confident because their positive energy will also make the students’ attitude towards learning be positive. the second finding is about the teacher’s consideration on choosing specific activity to be implemented at class. the activity is the core of the lesson which can be used to make the students grasp the materials. besides, the clear reason for choosing an activity will enable the teacher to connect it with a specific goal. as lailatul khikmah teachers’ creativity in designing learning activities: sustaining students’ motivation 88 stated by woolfolk (2013), the activity that the teachers use should be able to clearly fulfill one of the four types of goals that are learning goals, performance goals, work-avoidance goals, and social goals. based on the result of the intwerview, it is found that all the professional teachers can elaborate the reason of choosing a specific activity even though they do not specifically mention the activity they use is in line with a specific of goal. however, at least, the teacher know why they pick up a certain activity. this can be seen in the following excerpts: “there are some considerations why i chose the topic and the activities. generally speaking, i chose the topic of astrology because i knew they were interested in that, so i felt that choosing this topic would improve their engagement to the activities done in the class. i chose the topic of suffixes to differentiate word class because (1) i found students mixing their word class especially in writing and (2) knowing the suffixes can help them become more aware of different word classes which can help them in reading (to guess the meaning of words) and the productive skills (speaking and writing, to become more accurate)”. (r1) “it purely be based on the students’ ages. if i teach younger learner, i used a lot of games. but when i teach adult learners, mostly i used the activity that involved problem solving. other than that, the level of difficulty also has to be taken into account. for example, if we teach adult learners we also have to make sure about their competence level. if they have an elementary level, so the activities that we used should not be too difficult for them to follow. the words choice also should be in reading for example the number of words should be a little compared to the advanced learners”. (r2) “i added the "the hokey pokey dance" to make the students physically active but also having fun as they are required to sing along. this activity also will make them gaining new vocabulary. the hockey pokey dance is used because it has appealing rhythm and the lyric also not too difficult to follow. additionally, the move is also easy to imitate”. (r3) “the first is topic. learning activities should enable them to blend in with the topic of the lesson. the second is students' proficiency. i have to make sure students can accomplish the learning activities, which means the activities should not be too easy or too hard to do. the third is time allocation. activities fit the time allocated. the fourth is availability of facilities. let's say i want them to open an exercise online. if internet access is not something they have, it would be impossible.” (r4) i mostly design an activity which involve active communication such game based activity like finding culprit or commenting on their friends’ work or performance like what we commonly see on indonesian idol. but, i change it into indonesian best debaters or best story teller”. (r5) from the excerpts, it can be clearly seen that they have various reason for applying or choosing a specific activity. r1, specifically, choose the topic about astrology as this topic is very appealing in teaching teenagers. it is agreed that teaching teenagers is difficult because they are in the transaction age between adulthood and childhood. therefore, it is better for us to choose a topic that can stimulate their curiosity, such as astrology that can be both appealing and controversial. meanwhile, r2 and r5 claimed to adjust the activity based on the students’ age for example he will used a lot of games to teach young learners as they are easily distracted. thus, it is a good idea for teachers to involve games during teaching and learning so that the students will not feel bored. game-based learning itself is any types of educational game that is used during the teaching and learning activity which can entertain and make the students’ behavior towards learning changed (connolly, boyle, macarthur, hainey, & boyle 2012). usually, the focus of the approach is to make the students unaware that they are actually learning and to create a joyful learning environment. additionally, they added that teachers also have to consider the students’ level of competence. accordingly, it is suggested to design an activity that is not too difficult for students to follow. the most important thing is designing activity that could work or run in the classroom because if the activity designed is too difficult, the students will feel discouraged to learn. r3 and r4, on the other hand, proposed to include some physical activity such as hokey pokey dance. he stated that physical activity is needed to refresh the students’ mind. to teaching young learners, a lot of movement is necessary. basically, the design of the activity should be based on the students’ interest, students’ age, students’ level of proficiency, time allotment, and classroom situation. besides, the teacher english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 89 also has to consider the gender. as mention by broophy (2010) that an activity which relate to the real world will encourage the students to learn because they have a background knowledge on that and it is easy for them to remember as they can make a correlation with the real world context. moreover, he further suggested that the activity that the teachers used should have a clear instruction, directions, and significant of the task because unclear instructions will lead to decreasing the students’ motivation in learning. the third finding is about whether the activity used motivates students to learn. this can be found only after the teachers evaluated their teaching and learning activity. kulczycki and rozkosz (2017) point out that the evaluation helps the teacher to assess whether the learning has been successful and to clarify the teachers’ expectation. the findings can be seen in the following excerpts: “at that time, definitely, students were engaged throughout the lesson. however, i couldn't take full credit for that as they were naturally active students as well. i could give them any topics, and they would devour them.” (r1) “it depends. usually before teaching, i analyze what types of students that i am going to teach. if the students like game-based learning, i will design an activity that full of games. but, if they like project then i will design an activity that involved so many project. in a nutshell, the design of the activity i used is based (r2) “yes. definitely, they feel more motivated to learn”. (r3) “not always because to pay attention to the students’ individually sometimes it is hard especially when you have to teach more than 40 students. however, i mostly design an activity which involves classroom discussion so that it makes a contribution individually within a small group”. (r4) “yes, because they do not feel like they are actually learning but they can gain something from it.” (r5) it can be inferred that the activity that r1 to r5 used successfully make the students stay motivated. r1 specifically mentioned that the choice of the activity or topic for astrology that he used has flourishingly motivated the teenagers to learn. however, he added that their students are naturally active students so the choice of activity does not really matter. however, the activity that the teachers used still have the greatest impact on the students’ performance in the classroom because if the teachers just carelessly design activity even an active student would heartlessly follow the lesson, an active student can stay active because the teachers used appropriate activity that match with their level of competence and interest. in this case, bissengayeva, aigerim, zinagul and zhanar (2013) suggested the teachers to involve competence-oriented tasks (the topic should be based on real-life problem) in teaching and learning. he believed that by learning problem the students can be more independent learners and interested in learning. moreover, nicolaides (2012) added that in designing activity, the teachers should consider the students’ language ability, the educational content, the content standard, the content objective, the language objectives, the details of teaching strategy and learning activity as well as the methods to assess and evaluate the students’ learning achievement. additionally, r2, r3, r4, and r5 added that involving many physical activities, such as hokey pokey dance to teach young learners and designing problem-based activity and gamebased activity to teach adults learners can help teachers in sustaining students’ motivation to learn. choosing astrological topic for teenagers that include interview, group project, finding truth and involving activity which makes the students actively participate during classroom activity can also be done. besides, using technology-based teaching, such as creating blog or video in youtube can be an effective way. as stated by ghavifekr & rosdy (2015) and jamienson et al. (2013) that using technologybased teaching will enable the teachers to provide various appealing activities and help them to design a creative learning. however, wang (2015) suggested that the teachers need to pay attention on the content that they decided to use. one mistake can lead to a total failure in teaching and learning, such as the students feel addicted to a certain social media. therefore, the teachers really need to pay attention on all aspects that related with technology. wholly, all the professional teachers do not always use a sophisticated activity, but use the activity that can make the teaching and learning run smoothly. they all agree that it will be wasting time if they used the most-popular activity which the students are not familiar with lailatul khikmah teachers’ creativity in designing learning activities: sustaining students’ motivation 90 because the main purpose for teaching is to successfully transfer the knowledge and to successfully make the students comprehend the lesson. in addition, the activity used by all of the teachers has proven to sustain the students’ motivation. therefore, the teachers out there can use it as references if they are out of idea. however, the teachers have to make some adjustment based on their own situation and condition. the fourth finding is about the teachers’ point of view towards some suitable activities to improve students’ motivation in learning. the respondents stated their opinion as follows: “i would definitely suggest teachers to find topics students can relate to, either to their interest, or state explicitly why it can be useful for them in their life (maybe it can be useful for the test they might face, or when they enter university/working environment). the use of different types of activities can also become useful to avoid boredom in the classroom (think stirring-settling activities, pair work-individual work-class discussion, reading-writing-speaking-listening). if it is not possible to choose topic because of the constraint of materials from the school, think of different ways to make it relatable for them (for example, when they are learning personal recount text, rather than just asking them to write a composition, maybe ask them to write a postcard for a friend abroad, or when they are asked to write a narrative text, ask them to write for a competition in a magazine that has good prices). make the activity rewarding and meaningful for them. also, this is not related to the activities, but i find that building good rapport with students are also a must! when you have good relationships with the students, most of the time they will be more motivated and used multimodality and technology if it is possible because students are usually happy when they do some research from the internet. and also don't forget the power of reward”. (r1) “design a fun activity which matches with the students’ preferences. it does not mean that the teachers always follow what the students’ want. but mostly, students will feel motivated if they are given a chance to work independently. so, we as a teacher should not feed the students all the time but we should let them be an independent learner. additionally, we should give them reward by giving compliments and do not apply punishment, but we should make the students aware of the consequences for not doing their best in completing the task given”. (r2) “because the students have different level of concentration, i suggest not using a monotone activity but choosing more lively activity, especially for teaching young learners”. (r3) “one, use interactive and engaging activities, such as using a new technology like aengisup for deleting some lyrics. two, collaborative or group work is a good option. three, consider the level of difficulty or complexity of the task. four, use technology. five, use reward system”. (r4) “explicitly tell the objectives to the learners so that they know what they are going to learn and they know that the lesson is important”. (r5) from abovementioned result of interview, it can be concluded that there are many activities that the teachers can use to sustain students’ motivation, such as using various activity which correspond with the students’ interest. as stated by r1 and r2 that the teachers need to be really up to date about hot topic that suits to the students because this kind of topic usually makes them feel interested in teaching and learning process. however, it does not always mean that the topic should be really new, but teachers can also use topic that enables students to connect it with their knowledge. if they can find the connection, they will feel that the lesson is beneficial and meaningful so that they will pay more attention and follow the activity well. further, r1 added that if it is impossible to choose other materials because of the constrains of the school, just think another simple way when the students supposed to learn. for example, when learning personal recount, the teachers can ask students to write a letter for their friend or teachers can make a competition with the rewards, such as asking them to write for a magazine which have a good price, gaining more points, etc. the point is the teachers should not be discouraged or stressful about the school policy. the teachers have to stay professional and think another way. on the other hand, r2 mentioned that it does not always mean to design the activity that the students want because it will be overwhelming as the students have different preferences. however, r3 and r5 added that the activity should not be monotone and have a clear objective. thus, in teaching a text, the students do not always have to independently write a full text in the end of the lesson, the teachers can vary their activity, such as by conducting writing games or designing group project. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 91 if it is also possible, r4 suggested that the teachers can also design the activity that involve the use of technology because they also need to teach the students about what is new and make them to be technology expertise. in a nutshell, teachers have to be confident in using a specific activity because teachers’ positive attitude can also influence the students’ performance. other than that, the teachers should get feedback about the activity that they used from the students because it is really important to hear their opinion. from the abovementioned result of interview, it can be concluded that there are many activities that the teachers can use to sustain the students’ motivation, such as using various activity which correspond with the students’ interest. if the teachers know well the students’ interest, the teachers are expected to better relate the subject to the students’ life and know what to do in the class. conclusion there are numerous activities that can be used to sustain students’ motivation. in the practicality, the teachers should not be afraid of implementing new activity because the teachers do not know if the activity can work unless they try it. in doing so, however, they should consider some factors, such as school policy, students’ preferences, objectives that they have set, students’ level of proficiency, and students’ age. additionally, the important thing in designing activity is making sure that it can run smoothly and can facilitate the students to grow their ability and competence to their fullest. if teachers run out of idea, they can try to use some activity that proven to work. however, teachers should also make some adjustment because they have different condition and situation. also, teachers should be readily prepared for the worst and be confident because their positive attitude can also affect the students’ motivation in learning. this study provides some suggestion for the teacher and for the future researchers. firstly, for the teachers, it is suggested to discuss with the fellow teachers if they are unsure about implementing or using a new activity. additionally, the teachers can follow some training, such as tesol, tefl, celta, or delta to improve their creativity and skill in designing activities. lastly, for the future researchers, this study can be served as references for conducting similar study. acknowledgment my highest gratitude belongs to my beloved lectures prof. dr. nenden sri lengkanawati, m.pd. for her insightful feedback. besides, i am compelled to mention the following people for their kindness, chance and corporation in conducting the study, opel, aim, tika, wildan, vera, and fany. references andy. 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(2013). educational psychology. upper saddle river, nj: pearson. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cptl.2017.11.015 an analysis of the translation of metaphors in the novel harry potter and english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the translation of metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets from english to indonesian khairuddin department of medical record and health information health polytechnic of malang, indonesia e-mail: fadilkhairuddin@yahoo.com apa citation: khairuddin (2015). the translation of metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets from english to indonesian, english review: journal of english education 3(2),201-209 received: 11-03-2015 accepted: 12-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: translation is undoubtedly an important but at the same time difficult work. metaphors are among the potential areas of translation problem. this study aimed at describing how metaphors in the novel harry potter and the chamber of secrets are translated from english to indonesian, and evaluating the appropriateness of the translation results. findings showed certain strategies were applicable and determinant to the appropriateness of the english metaphor translation to indonesian: adoption or reproduction, adaptation or replacement with indonesian metaphors, conversion to simile, adoption plus sense, conversion to sense, and deletion. metaphor translation appropriateness shall be arrived if it qualifies referential and contextual accuracy. missing one or either two of the accuracy kinds may result in less and inappropriate metaphor translation respectively. keywords: translation, metaphorical expression, translation appropriateness, metaphor translation strategies . introduction that translation work is of great importance but at the same time difficult and complex is a two-face of a coin which most translators share a view. on the delighting face, there is a mouthful significant importance of translation in transmitting culture, revitalizing language, interpreting texts, disseminating knowledge, suggesting the relationship between thought and language, and contributing towards understanding between nations. it is also a unique source of knowledge and wisdom for mankind (newmark, 1988). it enriches the intellectual life in the target communities and introduces new linguistic structures or new genres into the target language and culture (stiffener in malkmajaer, 1988). on the discouraging face, it is an inconvenient and difficult work even before a translator begins his work, more difficult than a writer doing his own composition; because a translator is tightly possessed of the content of the source text. the difficulty is folded when the translator's source and target language mastery is not of an advanced level. the difficulties lie on making decision which principle to refer to; whether the translation should incline to the source or the target language, to be faithful or beautiful, literal or free, and whether to attempt to and struggle for the form or the content. mailto:fadilkhairuddin@yahoo.com khairuddin the translation of metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets from english to indonesian translation is the reproducing in the receptor language or target language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and second in terms of style (nida and taber, 1982). in translating process, some areas may appear to be potential problems for a translator in transferring the content and the structural form of the source to the target text. among the commonest problem of content transfer in translation are idioms and figurative meanings (nida & taber, 1982). the translation of idioms and figurative meaning is more problematic since they contain metaphorical expressions. metaphor is an indirect speech act of word, expression or sentence whose meaning is what a speaker might utter it to mean, in a way that departs from what the word, the expression or the sentence actually means. in other words, a metaphorical meaning is made up of the speaker's meaning and the word or sentence meaning (searle in orthony 1982). the purpose of metaphor is to describe an entity, event or quality more comprehensively and concisely in a more complex way than is possible by using literal language, not just for the purpose of coloring language, but more important is of sharpening it in order to describe the life of the world or the mind accurately (newmark, 1988). because of its nature of using a figurative word to denote meaning, a metaphor or expression with metaphorical meaning is difficult to translate between languages. they are more difficult to translate compared with words with mere literal meanings. in fact, metaphor is at the center of all problems of translation (newmark, 1988). however, not rarely we have found that sentences are used in perfectly ordinary contexts with other than their literal meanings. indeed, almost every sentence produced by any human being contains importantly metaphorical or other figurative elements. we use or hear hundreds of metaphors in everyday speech, in slang, in news reporting, in novels, etc. (wales, 2001). in fact, (as stressed by de man, 1979 in wales, 2001), they are part of the fabric of language, even of thought. the translation of literary forms such as novels and short stories between languages are not easy to work out. even, the translation of novels and short stories is the second most difficult after the translation of poetry (newmark, 1988). this is truly so in greater part because the existence of metaphors in such writings is ubiquitous. in fact, metaphors in novels and short stories are often boldly translated to literal language, which thus unwittingly sacrifice their language features that function for coloring or sharpening the author's description in their writings. consequently, readers of the translated texts may not be able to have equal enjoyment as felt by the readers of the original novel or short story. to transfer successfully the equivalent metaphors from the source language to the target language text, it requires a translator to have knowledge to identify and interpret the metaphor itself. without such knowledge, it is difficult to work out the interpretation of the metaphor and to represent the metaphorical meanings in the source language text to the target language text. the blend of the above-mentioned importance of translation in nation development, the challenging problems of translation works, the power of metaphor, the difficulties of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee metaphor translation, and its ubiquity in novels were the attraction calling for this study. this study described the strategies of metaphor translation and evaluated the appropriateness of metaphor translation from english to indonesian as found in the novel harry potter and the chamber of secrets. method two types of textual data served as the data source: (1) the original j.k. rowling's novel harry potter and the chamber of secrets (2000), published by bloomsbury, in order to obtain the english metaphors and (2) the indonesian version of the novel, harry potter dan kamar rahasia (2000) published by gramedia pustaka utama jakarta. the researcher first read the original novel harpy potter and the chamber of secrets in order to figure out the intention of the writer, and the function and type of the text. then, he identified all the english metaphors in the original novel and their translation in the indonesian translation version. next, he made comparison of the english metaphors with the indonesian translation in order to describe and analyze the various strategies used by the translator. lastly, he performed an evaluation of the appropriateness of the translation of the english metaphors in the original novel to the indonesian translation concerning with the referential accuracy and the contextual accuracy. judgment or evaluation of the appropriateness of metaphor translation was based on the researcher-made standards referring to referential or semantic and contextual or pragmatic accuracy (newmark, 1988, p 188). the evaluation result is classified into appropriate, less appropriate and inappropriate metaphor translation. a metaphor translation is marked appropriate when it has both qualities of referential and contextual accuracy. referential accuracy bears the quality of faithfulness of the translation to the source language text, and contextual accuracy bears the smoothness, naturalness, thus, acceptability of the translation in the target language text. a metaphor translation is marked less appropriate when it has referential or semantic accuracy, but is lacking of contextual or pragmatic accuracy, which is necessary for making natural, and thus, acceptable translation in the tl context a metaphor translation is also marked less accurate when the translator drops or gives up the metaphorical image too easily, while actually there is still alternative attempt to be made for conveying both the image and the metaphorical meaning and the interpretive meaning of the metaphor to the target language. an english metaphor translation to indonesian is marked inappropriate if the translation is referentially or semantically defiant or corruptive which signals the unfaithfulness of the translation to the original text. this unfaithfulness may be due to inaccurate addition or subtraction of information, misinterpretation of the metaphorical meaning, or inaccurate deletion due to the translator's incompetence. results and discussion analysis and evaluation of the metaphor translation the novel harry potter and the chamber of secrets bears more saliently the expressive, emotive, creative and aesthetic functions of language, which takes serious imaginative literature text type. in such a text type, metaphor plays much a part to make strong expressive impression of the language. it is also the link between the expressive and aesthetic khairuddin the translation of metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets from english to indonesian functions. through images, metaphors connect the extra-linguistic reality with the world of the mind through language. thus metaphor, being both an expressive and aesthetic component, has to be preserved intact in translation. therefore, the translator should strive to transfer the metaphorical expressions to the tl text in order to preserve the expressive and aesthetic components of the original. dropping or giving up the metaphorical images that exist in the original novel in the translation would mean lessening or corrupting the expressive and aesthetic functions which in turn would lessen the value of the novel translated. there are 224 metaphors identified in the 366 pages novel harry potter and the chamber of secrets. these english metaphors are translated to indonesian through various metaphors translation strategies (see table 1).the strategy taken by the translator determines the success or appropriateness of the metaphor translation. a suitable metaphor translation strategy may bring to appropriate metaphor translation. below are representative examples of the analysis and evaluation of the metaphor translation. appropriate metaphor translation a metaphor translation is marked appropriate when it has both qualities of referential and contextual accuracy. referential accuracy bears the quality of faithfulness of the translation to the source language text, and contextual accuracy bears the smoothness, naturalness, thus, acceptability of the translation in the target language text. the following are representative examples of appropriate english metaphor translation to indonesian. (1) 'they gave me a nice, shiny engraved trophy for my trouble and warned me to keep my mouth shut.' ("mereka memberiku trofi bagus, berkilau dan berukir, dan memperingatkan aku untuk tetap tutup mulut. ") the secondary meaning of this complex metaphor keep my mouth shut is to keep secret of something. it is translated tutup mulut in indonesian. in this strategy, the translator has reproduced the original image of the metaphor in the indonesian translation. the image tutup mulut is similarly a standard and popular metaphor in indonesian culture which the translation readers will not fail to understand. by adopting or reproducing the metaphor, he has maintained faithfulness to the original and has kept the figurative or metaphorical aspect in the indonesian translation. (2) he promised harry he would flay him within an inch of his life when the masons had left. (la mengancam akan menghajar harry sampai nyawanya tinggal seujung rambut.) the secondary or interpretive meaning of the metaphorical utterance flay him within an inch of his life is `to flay very severely.' the metaphor is translated to indonesian to menghajarnya sampai nyawanya tinggal seujung rambut. the english metaphor cannot be adopted or reproduced directly to indonesian to menghajarnya sampai setiap inci hidupnya, as it does not read smooth and natural, therefore not acceptable. dealing with this problem, the translator's strategy is to adapt or replace the english metaphorical image with the indonesian image which has similar interpretive meaning to the original. by replacing with the standard and popular metaphorical image in english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee indonesian, the translation can be both faithful to the original and acceptable in the receptor's language. (3) `we've been here nearly four hours! i'd never have believed it-time has flown, hasn't it?' ("kita sudah disini hampir empat jam. aku tak percaya, waktu berlalu bagai terbang ya?”) the metaphor time has flown in the original text has the secondary or interpretive meaning `time has passed very fast.' the metaphor is translated to indonesian to waktu berlalu bagai terbang. the translator's strategy is to translate the english metaphor to a simile in indonesian. the translator may not adopt or reproduce the english metaphor to waktu telah terbang, as it will read strange and awkward. by translating it to a simile, it succeeds the referential and contextual accuracy for being faithful to the original and acceptable in indonesian context. (4) harry told them all about dobby. `very fishv. 'said fred finally. (harry menceritakan kepada mereka semua tentang dobby. "sangat mencurigakan, kata fred akhirnya.) the metaphor very fishy has the interpretive meaning `very suspicious' in the original text. it is translated to indonesian to a sense or literal language sangat mencurigakan. although the translation does not bear the metaphorical aspect of the english metaphor, its meaning is similar to the metaphor's interpretive meaning. the translator cannot adopt the metaphor to berbau ikan or berbau amis, as it will not be understood correctly by the tl text readers. therefore, she should literalize the translation. by literalizing it, the translator maintains the faithfulness of the translation to the interpretive meaning and enables the readers to understand the translation correctly and easily. less appropriate metaphor translation a metaphor translation is marked less appropriate when it has referential accuracy which qualifies faithfulness of the translation to the original primary meaning, but it lacks contextual accuracy which is requirement of acceptability of the translation in the tl context. a metaphor translation is also marked less appropriate when the translator drops or gives up the metaphorical image too easily, while actually there is still alternative attempt to be made for conveying both the image or the metaphorical meaning and the interpretive meaning of the metaphor to the target language. the following are some examples. (1) `harry! what d'yeh think yer doin down there? harry's heart leapt. ("harry !" sedang apa kau disini?jantung harry melompat.) the metaphorical utterance harry's heart leapt has the interpretive meaning `extremely shocked' in the original text. it is translated to indonesian to jantung harry melompat. the translator has adopted or reproduced the metaphor to indonesian. this strategy has made the translation faithful to the original, and therefore referentially accurate. however, it does not read smooth and natural in indonesian. in other words, it is not acceptable in indonesian, and therefore, contextually not accurate. it will be appropriate if the metaphorical utterance is replaced with an indonesian metaphor jantung harry mau copot in order to make it more acceptable in the tl context. (2) `why would anyone want to celebrate the day they died? ' said ron. `sounds dead depressing to me.' khairuddin the translation of metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets from english to indonesian ("kenapa ada orang ingin merayakan hari kematian naereka? " tanya ron. "kedengarannya suram bagiku.”) the metaphor dead depressing in the original text has the interpretive meaning `extremely frightening and sad.' the metaphor is translated to suram inindonesian. this translation, not only that it has lessened the meaning of the english metaphor in the original text, but it also does not have clear meaning and may not be understood clearly in indonesian. the researcher suggested that it is translated to kedengarannya menyeramkan sekali, in order to make the meaning clear and understood by the tl text readers. (3) "yeh should've ignored him, arthur, 'said hagrid `rotten to the core the whole family, everyone knows.' ("ku seharusnya jangan acuhkan dia, arthur, ' kata hagrid. jahat sekali seluruh keluarga, semua tahu.“) the metaphorical utterance rotten to the core has the interpretive meaning `extremely or acutely bad or mean' in the original text. this metaphor is translated to a sense or literal language jahat sekali in indonesian. the translator has dropped or given up the original metaphorical image too easily in the indonesian translation. consequently, the translation has lost its self-expressive and aesthetic function. therefore, the researcher marks it as less appropriate translation. actually, in order to this metaphor can be translated sudah busuk sampai ke tulang seluruh keluarga itu in order to keep the metaphorical image and be more faithful to the original which is the suggestion to make appropriate translation. inappropriate metaphor translation the researcher marks an english metaphor translation to indonesian as inappropriate if the translation is not referentially accurate, which signals the unfaithfulness of the translation to the original text. this unfaithfulness may be due to inaccurate addition or subtraction of information, misinterpretation of the metaphorical meaning, or inaccurate deletion due to the translator's incompetence. for this inappropriateness, the translator suggests his own translation in order to fix the problem. the following are some examples. (1) ... as he allowed to be swept out of his office, leaving them alone with prof mcgonagall. (...sebelum dia keluar dari kantornya, meniggalkan mereka sendirian dengan prof mcgonagall.) the interpretive meaning of the metaphor to be swept out in the original text is to involuntarily leave, or to feel compelled to leave. the metaphor is translated to a literal language keluar in indonesian. the word keluar in indonesian is not adequately representative to the interpretive meaning of the original metaphor swept out. translated as such, not only the translation has given up the metaphorical aspect too easily, but also it has not been faithful to the original. it has not been successful to convey the interpretive meaning full in the indonesian translation; it has subtracted the meaning inaccurately. therefore, the researcher marks this translation as inappropriate. the researcher suggests that it be translated to sebelum dia harus terusir keluar dari kantornya in order to make an appropriate translation. (2) riddle watched him out of sight, and then, moving quickly, headed straight down the stone steps to the dungeons with harry in hot pursuit. (riddle menunggunya lenyap dari pandangan, dan kemudian bergerak english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee cepat menuruni tangga batu menuju jeruang bawah tanah. harry mengejarnya.) the english metaphor in hot pursuit in the original text has the interpretive meaning `to follow curiously or eagerly.' it is translated to indonesian to mengejar. the translator has given up the metaphorical element hot in the translation. this metaphor actually has important meaning, i.e. to describe how harry, the subject, has run to follow riddle. hence, the deletion has corrupted the complete interpretive meaning of the metaphor. therefore, the researcher marks this metaphor translation inappropriate. to make it appropriate, the researcher suggests that it be translated to harry mengejarnya bersemangat. (see table 2 for translation evaluation result) table 1: metaphor translation strategies applied in the translation of english metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets to indonesian table 2: percentage of evaluation result of english metaphor translation in harry potter and the chamber of secrets to indonesian conclusions from the data analysis and discussion, the research has reached some conclusions. the writer's intention for writing the novel is the realization of her self-expression, creative thinking, and imagination. the novel bears more saliently the expressive, emotive, creative and aesthetic functions of language, which takes serious imaginative literature text type. in such a text type, metaphor plays much a part to make strong expressive and aesthetic impression of the language. therefore, the translator should strive to transfer the metaphorical expressions to tl text for preserving the expressive and aesthetic component of the english metaphors in the original text. the metaphorical expressions in harry potter and the chamber of secrets are translated to indonesian through various metaphor translation strategies: (1) english metaphor is adopted or reproduced when it is also a common or popular metaphor in indonesian language or culture. (2) the english metaphor is adapted or replaced with indonesian metaphor if the metaphor cannot be appropriately reproduced, translator's strategies total percentage metaphor reproduced 69 31% metaphor replaced with tl metaphor 18 8% metaphor changed to simile 9 4% metaphor changed to simile plus sense 1 0.4% metaphor reproduced plus sense 3 1% metaphor converted to sense 118 53% metaphor deleted 6 2.6% total 224 100 % evaluation total percentage appropriate metaphor translation 194 85% less appropriate metaphor translation 25 12% inappropriate metaphor translation 5 3% total 224 100% khairuddin the translation of metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets from english to indonesian and if the indonesian metaphor is not defiant or corruptive to the meaning of the sl metaphor. (3) the english metaphor is changed to simile in the indonesian translation to retain the metaphorical image of the original. (4) the english metaphor is reproduced and combined with sense or the interpretive meaning of the metaphor. (5) the english metaphor is also changed to simile and combined with sense or the interpretive meaning of the metaphor in its original text; in the specific englishindonesian metaphor translation case, the sense may come first before the simile. (6)the metaphor is converted to sense or translated to literal language. ((7) the english metaphor is deleted when the metaphorical meaning is redundant. the translation of english metaphors in harry potter and the chamber of secrets to indonesian has been done relatively successfully. this conclusion is inferred from the evaluation results which show that 85 % of the english metaphors are marked appropriate metaphor translation. only 12% and 3% are marked respectively less appropriate and inappropriate metaphor translation. these findings give hint that the translator is familiar with the metaphor translation strategies commonly found or written in translation textbooks or other translation references. familiarity or knowledge of the metaphor translation strategies has proven to help solve problems of metaphor translation from english to indonesian. although there are several word-forword translation when the metaphor is a simple or one-word metaphor, for most metaphor translation, word order or syntactical structures seem to be least considered when priority is focused on balancing referential or semantic and contextual or pragmatic accuracies of metaphor translation from english to indonesian. references ary, d., jacobs. l., & razavieh, a. (2002). introduction to research in education. belmont: wadsworth. bell, r. t. (1991). translation and translating: theory and practice. london: longman. brislin, r. w. (ed). (1976). translation application and research. new york: gardener press, inc. carford, j. c. (1974). a linguistics theory of translation. new york: oxford university press. ching, m k.l., haley, michael c., & lunsford, ronald f. 1980. linguistics perspectives on literature. london: routledge & kegan paul ltd. davidson, d. (1978). what metaphors mean. in martinich, a.p., 2001. the philosophy of language. new york: oxford university press. fraser, l. (2004). wawancara dengan j.k. rowling si pencipta harry potter. jakarta: penerbit gramedia pustaka utama. gibbs, raymond w., & steen, gerard j. 1999. metaphors in cognitive linguistics. amsterdam: john benjamin publishing company. lakoff, g. & johnson, m. (1980). metaphors we live by. chicago: university of chicago press. larson, m. n. (1984). meaning-based translation: a guide to cross language equivalence. boston: university press of america, inc. leezenberg, m. (2001). contexts of metaphor. amsterdam: elsevier science ltd. lycan, w. j. (2000). philosophy of language: a contemporary introduction. london: routledge. malkmkjer, k. (1998). translation and language teaching. manchester: st. jerome publishing. martinich, a.p. (1984). a theory of metaphor. in martinich a.p (pp. 447-457). 2001. the philosophy of language. new york: oxford university press martinich, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee a.p. 2001. the philosophy of language. new york: oxford university press. miles, m. b. & huberman, a.m. (1984). qualitative data analysis: a source of new methods. california: sage publication, inc. mooij, j. j.a. (1976). a study of metaphor. amsterdam: north-holland publishing company. murtadho, n. (1999). metafora dalam alqur'an dan terjemahannya dalam bahasa indonesia. unpublished dissertation. jakarta: graduate program university of indonesia. newmark, p. (1988). approaches to translation. london: prentice hall. newmark, p. (1988). a text book of translation. london: prentice hall. nida, e. a. & taber, charles r. (1982). the theory and practice of translation. leiden: e.j. brill nida, e. a. (2001). contexts in translating. amsterdam: john benjarnins publishing company. pedoman penulisan karya ilmiah. (2003). malang: universitas negeri malang. rowling, j.k. (2000). harry potter and the chamber of secrets. london: bloomsbury. rowling, j.k. (2000). harry potter dan kamar rahasia. (translation version). jakarta: gramedia pustaka utama. sadtono, e. (1985). pedoman penerjemahan. jakarta: depdikbud, pusat pembinaan dan pengembangan bahasa. schaffner, c. (1998). qualification for professional translators. inmalkmajaer, kirsten. (pp. 117-133). translation and language teaching. manchester: st. jerome publishing searle, j. (1982). metaphor. in orthony, andrew, metaphor and thought (pp. 92-123). cambridge: cambridge university press. suryawinata, z. & hariyanto, s. (2003). translation: bahasan teori dan penuntun praktis menerjemahkan. yogyakarta: penerbit kanisius. veale, tony. 1995. metaphor, memory and meaning: symbolic and connectionist issues in metaphor interpretation. dublin: ireland wahab, abdul. 1986. javanese metaphors in discourse analysis. unpublished dissertation. urbana: university of illinois. students’ oral skill improvement as revealed english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learning-based performance didik rinan sumekto department of english education, widya dharma university, klaten, indonesia e-mail: didikrinan@unwidha.ac.id apa citation: sumekto, d. r. (2014). students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learningbased performance. englishreview: journal ofenglish education, 3(1), 91-102 received: 5-10-2014 accepted: 23-10-2014 published: 01-12-2014 abstract: this classroom-based research investigates how interaction and individual performance by means of classroom learning participation has contributed the undergraduate students’ oral skill improvement. this study observes six speaking course meetings which involves 27 sophomore undergraduate english education. data collected through classroom activities involving students’ performance analysis, observation and oral test technique. data analyzed through carr and kemmis’ classroom action research model examination in two phases. the findings prove that during the interaction and individual-based performance investigation, some students’ oral skill performance increase in the point level. the improvement gains from .25 to .50 points as shown in the second phase. the average score gained in the first phase is 68.30 and 71.12 in the second phase, which indicate that the average achievement is 9.7%. overall, out of 27 participants, there are 74% or 20 participants gaining an improvement in speaking course iv, whilst other 7 participants do not increase their oral skill performance. keywords: adult and independent learners, individual participation, oral skill achievement introduction speaking instruction approach is concerned with the user(s) apply it in multiple purposes, refers to individual possession and its most important aspect is the speakers’ knowledge of using it, whereas linguistic approach is concerned with the world outside the speakers and people’s relations with each other (brumfit and mitchell, 1990). from the instruction performance, a lecturer’s responsibility is initially to ensure that students must learn. somehow, the lecturer’s role is diverse and challenging when instructing and developing the curriculum in terms of subject teaching, session planning, setting and marking of assignments, assessing students’ progress in a variety of ways including marking end-ofmodule assignments and examination papers, writing reports for a variety of audiences including exam boards and external examiners, recording students’ achievement, working as part of a subject team, curriculum development and planning, undertaking visits and field courses when appropriate, feedback to students, and evaluating the programme and teaching scheme (nicholls, 2002). participating in oral skill competence will be widely accommodating for many different purposes, and each purpose involves different skills required (richards and renandya, 2002). kumpulainen and wray (2002) point out that how exploratory and argumentative talk can be more effective in cultivating students’ mailto:didikrinan@unwidha.ac.id didik rinan sumekto students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learning-based performance critical thinking than procedural or reutilized interactions. an important element in the learning situations is about the possibility of communicating ideas and thinking through versatile tools. according to lumsden (1994) students’ motivation increase when learning is linked to their background knowledge. if students can relate learning to prior knowledge, they will be more inclined to engage in the learning process. students learn when they are able to make sense of their environment and when they are engaged. some studies confirmed that motivation and interaction were identified as important factors in the development of students’ oral skill proficiency within a potential role for explicit instruction in speaking strategies and approaches (hernandez, 2010), where fluency came first and followed by accuracy (zhang and wang, 2012). yet, communication competence emphasized interactional knowledge which consisted of social conventions and regulated the use of language and other communication devices in particular settings (yueqin, 2013). other studies proved that participative instruction could be integrated into regular english language teaching, not only would higher education students’ speaking proficiency improve, but their attitudes towards class would also become more positive. it was especially important to those who come from a passive group participation background and provided an opportunity for lecturer and students to talk about the differences in their classroom expectations and also directed students towards expected classroom participation behaviors, which they feel more comfortable and confident in classroom participation as well (wenli, 2005). herein, the proficiency in the speaking domain was dependently attributed to the supportive lecturer who maintained open lines of communication which eventually catered to the students’ needs in learning. lecturer who was at the warm, approachable, friendly, helpful and supportive, and strict yet with compassion was mostly regarded to create a positive classroom climate (narzoles, 2013). realizing the reality, however, some difficulties might still occur amongst internal college or university students and between lecturer and students relationship in the learning engagement. consciously or not, sooner this condition would be contributing towards learning ineffectiveness. the ineffectiveness contributes a desire to improve student learning, to improve curriculum, to adapt instructional or assessment strategies, a desire for one’s own professional development or to search for connections and meaning in one’s work, and issues in the larger class or community context in learning (ary, jacobs, and sorensen, 2010). the interaction is mostly lecturerdominated, and learners are called upon primarily to provide factual responses, which is not genuine and authentic. this critical issue relates with the lack of lecturers’ understanding on how to design speaking activities during practice and production (bilasha and kwangsawad, 2004) and the lecturer has difficulty in selecting materials and activities that would match the learners’ oral skill competence individually and content (kanoksilapatham, 2007). furthermore, khamkhien (2010) outlines three major problems faced in english speaking instruction: (1) pronunciation; (2) authentic or natural communication; (3) communication breaks down; and (4) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee conceptual and pedagogical orientations to the teaching of speaking. through these empirical facts above, this study attempts at investigating sophomore undergraduate students among their interaction and individual-based performance as part of its oral skill contribution. as gibbons’ (2002) thinking highlights that students will involve learning perspective, the relative importance of things, and how forces interplay to create dynamic situations, that show the major subsystems of a situation and how the subsystems interact with each other to create force fields of influence (gibbons, 2002). teaching styles will vary from group to group and from individual to individual that require creative thinking and problem solving (nicholls, 2002). various independent learning models have been developed with the intention of facilitating, self-directed, reflective and critical learning on the part of individual learners (wallace, 2007). herein, there are eleven frequently and empirically deployed the students-centred group methods discussed in strengthening an adult learning mechanism, namely: brainstorming, buzz-groups, debate, fishbowl, group discussion, interview, listening and observing, problem-based learning, projects and case studies, role play, simulation and gaming, and therapy groups (jarvis, 2004). this study investigates how interaction and individual-based performance through the classroom learning participation has contributed the sophomore undergraduate students’ oral skill. to comprehend the objectives, this study attempts to reveal the carr and kemmis’ model with the research questions in the following: (1) how do the students gain their interaction and individual-based performance in oral skill; and (2) can interaction and individual-based performance among the students trigger their learning interest? method this classroom-based research was conducted in collaboration with two senior students as peer observers in july 2012. the participants were 27 sophomore undergraduate students focusing on their speaking interaction analysis through observation on physical, interactional and program setting (morrison, 1993; cooper and schindler, 2001) to view situations unfold and connections, causes and correlations that could be an experience over time (cohen, manion, and morrison, 2007), and individual-based performance technique which compared different types of data on participants’ perceptions and documents or works analysis (arhar, holly, and kasten, 2001; lodico, spaulding, and voegtle, 2010) participating during the existing semester in speaking course iv, weighted as two credits with 1 hour and 40 minutes weekly within 6 meetings at english education department, widya dharma university, klaten, central java. data analysis defined as a descriptive form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in order to improve the rationality of their own learning practices. their progress upon these practices were carried out by carr and kemmis’ action research spiral model (1986) as shown in figure 1 and also comprised to another a-four-step on planning, acting, observing and reflecting which incorporated the improvements (kemmis and mctaggart, 1988). the evaluation results would be considerably brought about the further action. didik rinan sumekto students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learning-based performance figure 1. carr and kemmis’ action research model (1986) results and discussion this part described and analyzed the activity phases of the empirical interaction and individual-based performance conducted within six topics on speaking course in the classroom. generally, the meetings began and drilled with the apperception step regularly, for instance what the previous topic had been discussed together through the reflective evaluation. overall, the interaction and individual-based drilling scheme was to investigate the sophomore undergraduate students’ speaking performance conducted during six meetings within six different topics. the study adopted carr and kemmis’ action research model which consisted of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting phase. both first and second phase were applied to analyze the participants’ oral skill competence. action impact upon students’ improvement the findings would describe some empirical experience on first and second phase that had been found. in general, the oral skill competence of sophomore students of english education had reached the moderate academic requirements as prescribed in the syllabus and or lesson plan. the concepts of analyzing the case study, applying the concept, and creating specific case initially categorized as moderate level; but after having more particular drilling session during the meetings within 100 minutes in each meeting conducted in the first and second phase, there were 20 participants out of 27 participants showed their increase in oral proficiency better or the increase percentage reached 0.74%. subsequent to the drilling and acts by increasing the frequency of opportunities to talk, especially by revealing the personal opinion and responded to ideas of other participants, the student's ability to understand the ongoing theme of the lecture became improved. the participants’ ability of applying the concepts was to increase after researchers sometime provided examples of a concept application. by comparing between first and second phase results, thus, they could be explained that there were some improvements on students’ oral proficiency revealed in both phases. overall, the speaking score in the second phase is 0.74% higher than in the first phase. in particular achievement there was 0.67% increase at the level of .25 point and 0.04% increase at the level of .50 point, whilst 0.26% or 7 participants did not show an increase in students’ oral english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee proficiency. the achievement indicators specifically referred to the individuals’ learning performance, since this study merely emphasized on students’ individual-based performance method. however, the results cluster might be also ranked into its categorization. acting the first meeting was conducted on tuesday, 6th march 2012 with the discussion session about ‘using it in education and learning’. the exploration was engaged in-depth understanding how they learning process then attempted to obtain an advanced and cooperative understanding and competence of relevant materials delivered during the presentation and discussion amongst the undergraduate students of semester iv. good presentation and discussion were highly desirable to support and improve the natural study towards students’ learning experience and style. on the other hand, the lecturer briefly explained about the rationale of the topic to participants in order to give a collectively desired understanding and active participation during the discussion. regularly the standard procedure upon this discussion began with the questions: ‘what’ and ‘how’ do the students accommodate their learning by using some it devices or facilities? these standard questions upon the participants’ awareness were also broadened by the problems that might arise among the learners and how the solutions might follow their learning problems in particular circumstances as well as the parental roles in children learning participation at home. then, this study implemented the first phase into the instruction activity. next, the second meeting conducted on thursday, 8th march 2012 exploring about the professional career planning which took tasks and responsibilities and excellent integrity. the topic focused on introduction, somebody’s dream, personal strengths, professional skills, career information, and present plan. the topic illustrated the participants about what they would like to do with their great ideas entirely the life, what kind of passion did they have, and concerned about how participants had modified the career direction, based on what turned them on, or something they had found success in doing. eventually, the third meeting the discussion focused on parents involvement in their children education which had been conducted on thursday, 13th march 2012. this topic bridged and reminded parents how they took responsibility within children education issues at schools. the mainstream underlined that parents could participate in their children's schools by joining parent teacher associations (ptas) or parent teacher organizations (ptos) and getting involved in decision-making about the educational services received by their children at schools in appropriate roles. another kind of involvement was home-based and focused on activities that parents could greatly do with their children or on the teacher's visits to the pupils’ home. they were all conducted within the similar instruction method as implemented before as well. however, the action stage had involved three meetings for different themes in every session as scheduled in table 1. the action was carried out in (1) giving apperception in the beginning and explaining the topic to the students; (2) stimulating students to share their experience and ideas by arguing and discussion; (3) dividing the students into group works. participants in a group consisted of 4-5 members and they worked collaboratively; and (4) facilitating the participants to discuss with the relevant supporting and relevant issues. didik rinan sumekto students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learning-based performance table 1. first phase meeting schedule day and date duration topic discussed tuesday, 6th march 2012 07:30 09:10 am using it in education and learning thursday, 8th march 2012 07:30 09:10 am professional career planning tuesday, 13th march 2012 07:30 09:10 am involving parents in their children education after implementing the first activities done in the first acting, this study was attempted to continue and to improve the next phase in the second acting by effectuating the instruction method and technique in order to increase the participation amongst the participants effectively. the first meeting was conducted on tuesday, 20th march 2012 within 100 minutes allocation, either the second or the third meeting conducted in the second phase as well. the session began with discussion on ‘misunderstanding between generations’. the theme issue explored and understood ideas comprehensively through a good presentation and discussion relating with the influencing factors badly between the older and younger generations, any matters which involved them, and better solutions. the learning scheme or illustration was about a generation gap or a conflict between the old and the youth was often heard today. the dispute commonly appeared when elders advise them, young generations felt annoyed, murmur and complain. youth were sensitive by nature, whilst old order had lost its charm for them. however, they are today living in the age of enquiry and experiment. when the elder dictated to them and imposed their will upon them, the youth became sometimes defiant and rebellious. they felt frustrated and discontented, when their wishes were not fulfilled. therefore, this condition faced a new problem and a new challenge. again, in the meeting, the lecturer briefly explained about the rationale of the topic and study to participants in order to give a standard understanding and active participation during the discussion. the regularly standard procedure upon this discussion during the instruction began with the questions: ‘what’ and ‘how’ did the students accommodate their learning activity by understanding some differences, similarities, and gaps or barriers among younger and older generations if they gave an experience with this condition? these standard questions upon the participants’ awareness were also broadened by the problems that might arise among the learners and how the solutions might follow their learning problems in particular circumstances as well as the parental roles in children learning participation. then, the second meeting was conducted on thursday, 22nd march 2012. it talked about ‘what is wrong with our education system’, which explored on education is what is retained in your mind after you finish writing or conducting the examinations and why should be the spoon feeding, on the long run teaches nothing but the shape of the spoon ironically. in this phase, the discussion began with an educational system which ought to test the understanding of the relevant subject, and this did not regard how much students were able to reproduce from the text books or even otherwise from either the lesson plan or the syllabus. during the primary and immediately after, it was used to even mug-up questions and answers, in fact. if students had memorized the text book or the questions, they would have surely failed. other leading sub-topics also emphasized on ‘we can buy education, but not wisdom’ and ‘your mind is like a parachute, it works when you open it’. however, the ‘impact of free trade in asean countries’, conducted on thursday, 27th march 2012 engaged as the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee third meeting. this topic was mainly explored and hopefully understood through the students’ good presentation and discussion relating with the opportunities, benefits, and positive and negative impacts. it was understandable that free trade in asean, or called by afta, could enhance the process of economic integration in east asia, which was primarily being driven by trends. afta's impact on investment flows was likely to be positive for asean, particularly if it encouraged corporations to replace country-specific strategies with regional plans. afta's success would also be enhanced by extending its product coverage to include other sectors in addition to the current list of manufactures, embarking on reduction of non-tariff barriers in accordance with the mutual agreement, and welcoming additional participants, particularly those with a high degree of complementarities in terms of production output and trade. they were also conducted within the similar instruction method as implemented before. this learning scheme (discussion-based) was definitely designed with the adult learners concepts. one of them was how to maximize their individual competence in the oral skills (speaking iv for pre-service teachers). however, the action stage had involved three meetings for different themes in every session as scheduled in table 2. the action was carried out in (1) giving apperception in the beginning and explaining the topic to the students; (2) stimulating students to share their experience and ideas by arguing and discussion; (3) dividing the students into group works, but the current group works were different from the previous ones. this condition attempted to verify a new learning situation and to increase their performance; where the learners in a group would be randomly selected upon new members initially. participants in a group consisted of 4-5 members and they worked either individually or collaboratively; and (4) facilitating and observing the participants within discussion session during the meetings with the relevant themes. table 2. second phase meeting schedule day and date duration topic discussed tuesday, 20th march 2012 07:30 09:10 am misunderstanding between generations thursday, 22nd march 2012 tuesday, 27th march 2012 07:30 09:10 am 07:30 09:10 am what’s wrong with our education system the impact of free trade in asean countries observing either the first or the second phase in observation had empirically observed, recorded, and analyzed towards all major learning activities that had been conducted during the classroom session with pre-, whilst-, and post-teaching and learning activity. activity was normally begun with any apperception to review the previous meetings in order to gain the lesson-learnt refreshment. again, the activity continued with the core teaching and learning process due to its three different topics presented in upcoming meetings. in whilst-teaching and learning or core activity, there were three main approaches of learning applied– exploration, elaboration, and confirmation. all participants were given opportunities to share their opinion regarding the topics, active participants were mainly expected to show their high thinking skills stimulate and support others’ ideas, keep control upon conducive and active learning, and emphasize problem-based solving rather than show excessive competition amongst the participants. thus, to deepen the results-oriented, classroom observation consisted of collecting information, observing activities, discussing theme(s), analyzing the problem, considering didik rinan sumekto students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learning-based performance students’ thinking skills level, making inferences, and presenting the results of the discussion aspects were designed into mature interaction within 100 minutes and nevertheless, the final results still determined to students’ individual-based performance. in this stage, the same activity was still done repeatedly through the recordings and observation. the action implementation on the second phase was based on the reflection results that had been conducted in the first phase. three different topics had been under precise consideration, since they achieved unsatisfied enough applied in the first phase. the results of the observation and recordings were to determine as the final output how far the first and second phase significantly contributed to english education undergraduate students’ speaking performance, and students’ involvement and motivation in teaching and learning process as well. reflecting this stage was aimed at examining the strengths and weaknesses experienced in the first phase. this report organization included the strengths inventory and remedial weaknesses of speaking competence by accommodating individual-based performance approach amongst participants; and recommendation emphasis after the learning session was successfully done. table 3 showed students’ oral proficiency performance obtained within the first phase (e.g.: plan, act, observe, and reflect) implementation. table 3. first phase of students’ oral skill performance participant (n = 27) aspect evaluated score convertedscore1 2 3 4 5 student 1 65 63 70 67 68 66.6 2.50/ c+ student 2 68 68 70 68 68 68 2.50/ c+ student 3 68 67 68 69 67 67.8 2.50/ c+ student 4 67 68.5 68 67 67 67.5 2.50/ c+ student 5 60 60 63 62 60 61 2.0/ c student 6 73.5 73 73.5 73 73 73 3.0/ b student 7 84 83 85 87 86 85 3.75/ astudent 8 68.5 67 68 67 67 67.5 2.50/ c+ student 9 62 62 63.5 63 62 62.5 2.0/ c student 10 63 63 63 63 63 63 2.0/ c student 11 71 69.5 69.5 69 68.5 69.5 2.75/ bstudent 12 62 62 63.5 63 62 62.5 2.0/ c student 13 74 72.5 72.5 72 71.5 72.5 3.0/ b student 14 63 63 63 63 63 63 2.0/ c student 15 84 84 83.5 83 83 83.5 3.50/ b+ student 16 60 60.5 61 61 60 60.5 2.0/ c student 17 68 67.5 68.5 67.5 66 67.5 2.50/ c+ student 18 68 68 69 68 68 68 2.50/ c+ student 19 82.5 82 84 82 80 82 3.50/ b+ student 20 64 64 64 64 64 64 2.0/ c student 21 73 73 73 73 73 73 3.0/ b student 22 65 65 60 58 59 61 2.0/ c student 23 67 67 67 67 67 67 2.50/ c+ student 24 79 78 81.5 78 75 78 3.25/ b+ student 25 63 63 70 60 60 63 2.0/ c student 26 63 63 63 63 63 63 2.0/ c student 27 65 63 63 67 62 64 2.0/ c average score 68.30 key to grading: 3.86 to 4.0 means a; 3.75 to 3.85 means a-; 3.25 to 3.74 means b+; 3.0 to 3.24 means b; 2.75 to 2.94 means b-; 2.25 to 2.74 means c+; and 2.0 to 2.24 means c remarks: 1–pronunciation; 2–grammar; 3–vocabulary; 4–fluency; and 5–comprehension english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee based on the descriptive analysis result presented on the table 3, there was noted that 0.04% or only 1 respondent reached 3.75/ aas the highest score; 0.11% or 3 respondents gained 3.25 to 3.50/ b+; 0.11% or 3 respondents also gained 3.0/ b; only 0.04% or only 1 respondent achieved 2.75/ b-; 0.30% or 8 respondents showed their performance with the score achievement of 2.50/ c+; and 0.40% or 11 respondents performed their oral skill with the score achievement of 2.0/ c in the first phase of oral skill performance. the average score achieved in the first phase of the performance was 68.30. table 4. first phase result towards participants’ oral skill summary category frequency (f) percentage (%) excellent (ato a) 1 0.04 good (bto b+) 5 0.26 moderate (cto c+) 19 0.70 this stage was aimed at examining the strengths and weaknesses which experienced in the first phase. the second phase also gave a reflection towards report organization that included the strengths inventory and remedial weaknesses of oral skill by adopting individual-based performance; and recommendation emphasis after the learning session was successfully done as revealed in table 5 through plan, act, observe, and reflect implementation. table 5. second phase of students’ oral skill performance participant (n = 27) aspect evaluated score convertedscore1 2 3 4 5 student 1 72 27 74 72 70 72 2.75/ bstudent 2 71 71 71 73 69 71 2.75/ bstudent 3 72 72 75 78 68 73 2.75/ bstudent 4 72 727 72 72 72 72 2.75/ bstudent 5 70 67 70 61 67 67 2.25/ c+ student 6 72 72 75 78 68 73 3.25/ b+ student 7 92 92 96 90 90 92 4.0/ a student 8 70 70 72.5 70 70 70.5 2.75/ bstudent 9 62 64.5 62 62 62 62.5 2.0/ c student 10 70 67 70 61 67 67 2.25/ c+ student 11 78 77 77.5 73 72 75.5 3.0/ b student 12 62 64.5 62 62 62 62.5 2.25/ c+ student 13 72 78 77 75 73 75 3.25/ b+ student 14 63 63 63 63 63 63 2.25/ c+ student 15 85.5 83 83 85 81 83.5 3.75/ astudent 16 60 60 62 60.5 60 60.5 2.0/ c student 17 71 70 72 71 71.5 71.5 2.75/ bstudent 18 72 27 74 72 70 72 2.75/ bstudent 19 84 84 90 82 80 84 3.75/ astudent 20 64 66 67 62 61 64 2.0/ c student 21 72 72 75 78 68 73 3.25/ b+ student 22 61 61 61 61 61 61 2.0/ c student 23 71 71 71 73 69 71 2.75/ bstudent 24 84 84 88.5 83 83 84.5 3.75/ astudent 25 62 66 69 64 59 64 2.0/ c student 26 65 65 70.5 65 62 65.5 2.0/ c student 27 70.5 67.5 71.5 61 67 67.5 2.0/ c average score 71.04 didik rinan sumekto students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learning-based performance based on the descriptive analysis result presented on the table 5, there was described that 0.04% or only 1 respondent reached 4.0/ aas the highest score; 0.11% or 3 respondents gained 3.75/ a-; 0.11% or 3 respondents also gained 3.25/ b+; only 0.04% or only 1 respondent achieved 3.0/ b; 0.30% or 8 respondents showed their performance with the score achievement of 2.75/ b-; and 0.15% or 4 respondents performed their oral skill performance with the score achievement of 2.25/ c+; and 0.26% or 7 respondents proved their academic achievement in oral proficiency with the gained score of 2.0/ c in the second phase of speaking performance. the average score achieved in the second phase of students’ oral skill performance was 71.04. table 6. second phase result towards participants’ oral skill summary category frequency (f) percentage (%) excellent (ato a) 7 0.15 good (bto b+) 16 0.45 moderate (cto c+) 11 0.41 in terms of legibility of teaching materials, the use of short sentences were preferred and more easily assimilated by participants compared to the readability in the form of long sentences and other forms of legibility. meanwhile, learning techniques used in this study included: (1) lecturing: discussion between lecturer– students, and students–students by sharing information usually, ideas development and problem solution; (2) demonstration or drilling with some thematic themes; and (3) providing experiments and/or empirical experience amongst participants. the topics should be shared, discussed, academically argued/ debated amongst individuals, groups (inter and intra). meanwhile, the use of demonstration and experimental approach had made more participants’ interest in arguing and discussion rather than applying tutorial-based approach. however, the use of these approaches required more time than the use of the classical lecture method initiated by lecturer. the time consuming was getting increased for the discussion opportunity when the experimental and demonstration approach used amongst individuals and groups, but, on the other hand, the gradual development of oral proficiency amongst participants certainly increased and be effective when they were willing to realize and maximize the concept of implementing oral proficiency and accuracy in relating to pronunciation, grammar/structure, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. conclusions interaction and individual-based performance engaged in speaking iv is 1 hour and 40 minutes weekly within six meetings among sophomore english education have concluded two main aspects. first, the natural way used in students’ interaction and individual-based performance approach may, in variance results contribute their oral skill. after conducting a series of assessment process–planning, acting, observing, and reflecting in each phase, the speaking competence results are empirically identified to improve better as recorded in the second phase. out of twenty seven participants, there are 0.74% or 20 participants obtaining an improvement while participating within six meetings in speaking course, whereas other seven participants did not show their performance improve. second, interaction and individual-based performance approach as the learning culture can also trigger a though competition amongst english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 1, december 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee adult learners. they individually achieve the multiple benefits in their learning experience and consciousness since the learning approach used fits to upgrade some supporting activities. facilitating sophomore students to improve legibility of instruction materials, teaching methods, and obtaining equal and frequent opportunities during the meetings, particularly when the lectures focus on the interaction and individual-based performance approach, will open an opportunity to prove their competence since the oral skill needs the supporting contribution in the domain of asking and answering dialogue, situational dialogue, communicative dialogue, discussion and debate, retelling, storytelling, free talk style, short play and speech contest, and english corner possibly. references arhar, j. m., holly, m. l., & kasten, w. c. (2001). action research for teachers: travelling the yellow brick road. new jersey: prentice hall. ary, d., jacobs, l. c., & sorensen, c. k. (2010). introduction to research in education (8th ed.). belmont: wadsworth, cengage learning. bilasha, o & kwangsawad, t. (2004). factors influencing thai teachers’ abilities to adapt clt in their classrooms: a collaborative action research study. thaitesol bulletin, 17, 1-10. brumfit, c & mitchell, r. (1990). research in the language classroom. in brumfit, c & mitchell, r, the language classroom as a focus for research, pp. 3-15. hong kong: modern english publications and the british council. carr, w., & kemmis, s. (1986). becoming critical: education, knowledge and action research. london: deakin university press. cohen, l., manion, l., & marrison, k. (2007). research methods in education (6th ed.). new york: routledge. cooper, d. c. & schindler, p. s. (2001). business research methods (7th). new york: mcgraw-hill. gibbons, m. (2002). the self-directed learning handbook: challenging adolescent students to excel. san francisco: john wiley & sons, inc. hernandez, t. a. (2010). promoting speaking proficiency through motivation and interaction: the study abroad and classroom learning contexts. foreign language annals, 43(4), 650-670. jarvis, p. (2004). adult education and lifelong learning: theory and practice (3rd ed.). london: routledgefalmer. kanoksilapatham, b. (2007). navigating pathways to success in elt. journal of english studies, 3, 6-25. kemmis, s., & mctaggart, r. (1988). the action research planner (3rd ed.). geelong: deakin university press. khamkhien, a. (2010). teaching english speaking and english speaking tests in the thai context: a reflection from thai perspective. english language teaching, 3(1), 184-190. kumpulainen, k., & wray, d. (2002). classroom interaction and social learning: from theory to practice. london: routledgefalmer. lodico, m. g., spaulding, d. t., & voegtle, k. h. (2010). methods in educational research: from theory to practice (2nd ed.). san francisco: john wiley & sons, inc lumsden, l. s. (1994). student motivation to learn (eric digest no. 92). eugene: eric clearinghouse on educational management. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 370 200). morrison, k. r. b. (1993). planning and accomplishing school-centred evaluation. dereham: peter francis. narzoles, d. t. g. (2013). classroom communication climate and communicative linguistic competence of efl learners. theory and practice in language studies, 3(3), 404-410. nicholls, g. (2002). developing teaching and learning in higher education: london: routledgefalmer. richards j, c., & renandya w. a. (2002). methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice. in shumin, k, teaching speaking, pp. 201. cambridge: cambridge university press. wallace, s. (2007). teaching, tutoring and training in lifelong learning sector (3rd ed.). exeter: learning matters ltd. didik rinan sumekto students’ oral skill improvement as revealed in learning-based performance wenli, t. (2005). improving speaking skills through instruction in oral classroom participation. foreign language annals, 38(1), 46-55. yueqin, h. (2013). research on fostering intercultural communication competence of foreign language learners. crosscultural communication, 9(1), 5-12. zhang, y., & wang, j. (2012). the elaboration of cultivating learners’ english communicative competence in china. english language teaching, 9(12), 111-120. didikrinansumekto the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee thearabicoriginsofenglishand indo-european"urbanterms":aradical linguistictheoryapproach zaidanali jassem department of english language and translation, qassim university, saudi arabia e-mail: zajassems@gmail.com apa citation: jassem, z. a. (2015). the arabic origins of english and indo-european urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 145-165 received: 10-04-2015 accepted: 25-04-2015 published: 01-06-2015 abstract: this paper traces the arabic origins of english, german, french, latin, greek, and sanskrit "urban terms" from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. the data comprises 130 such terms like abide, building, city, construction, courtyard, hotel, house, live, mansion, mason, palace, metropolis, residence, road, rural, sedentary, sojourn, stay, structure, tent, town, urban, villa, village, zoo, and so on. the results clearly show that all such words have true arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change. moreover, the results support the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which, unlike the comparative method and/or family tree model, arabic, english, german, french, latin, greek, and sanskrit are dialects of the same language or family, renamed eurabian or urban family, with arabic being their origin all for sharing the whole cognates with them and for its huge phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and lexical variety and wealth. also, they indicate that there is a radical language from which all human languages stemmed and which has been preserved almost intact in arabic as the most conservative and productive language, without which it is impossible to interpret its linguistic richness and versatility on all levels. keywords: urban terms, arabic, english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit, historical linguistics, radical linguistic (lexical root) theory, language relationships introduction jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-g) has shown in forty one studies so far that arabic, english, german, french, and the so-called indo-european languages in general are genetically related very closely phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and semantically or lexically to such an extent that they can all be regarded as dialects of the same language. more precisely, the arabic origins or cognates of their words were successfully traced in twenty six lexical studies in key semantic fields like numerals, religious, love, democratic, military, and legal terms (jassem 2012a-d, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-f); in three morphological studies on inflectional and derivational markers (jassem 2012f, 2013a-b); in nine grammatical papers like pronouns, verb 'to be', wh-questions, and case (jassem 2012c-e, 2013l, 2014c, 2015d); and in one phonetic study about the english, german, french, latin, and greek cognates of arabic back consonants (jassem 2013c). furthermore, zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach the theory was extended to the examination of the arabic origins of pronouns in chinese (jassem 2014h) and basque and finnish (jassem 2014i) as well as demonstratives in eleven major (and minor) language families, making up 95% of the total world population (jassem 2015h). finally, two papers applied the approach to translation studies (jassem 2014e, 2015b). the above studies have been initially based on the lexical root theory (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-g, 2015a-g) and subsequently on its slightly revised and extended version, called radical linguistic theory (jassem 2014 h-k, 2015a-g), both deriving their name originally from the use of lexical (consonantal) roots or radicals in retracing genetic relationships between words in world languages. the theory first arose as a rejection of the family tree model or comparative method in historical linguistics for classifying arabic as a member of a different language family than english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit, and the so-called indo-european languages (bergs and brinton 2012; algeo 2010; crystal 2010: 302; yule 2014; campbell 2004: 190-191; crowley 1997: 22-25, 110-111; pyles and algeo 1993: 61-94). in all the above forty one studies, the tightly-knit genetic relationship between arabic and such languages was, on the contrary, categorically established phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and semantically or lexically so much so that they can be really considered dialects of the same language, where arabic was found to be their source or parent language for several reasons (jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-g). in other words, arabic, english, german, and french words of all types and sorts, for example, were shown to be true cognates with similar or identical forms and meanings, whose apparent differences are due to natural and plausible causes and diverse routes of linguistic change. this entails that all such languages developed, in fact must have developed, from an earlier single, perfect, suddenly-emerged radical language from which all human languages emanated in the first place, and which could never have died out but rather has fully, though variably, survived into today's languages, to which they can all be traced, with arabic in particular being the closest or most conservative and productive descendant. to aptly capture the close genetic linkage between european and arabian languages in general, a new larger language family grouping has been proposed, called eurabian or urban (jassem 2015c: 41; 2015d). this paper examines the arabic origins and/or source cognates of urban terms in english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit, and the so-called indo-european languages. the remainder of the paper includes four sections: (ii) research methods, (iii) results, (iv) discussion, and (v) conclusion. method the data the data consists of 130 urban terms like abide, building, city, construction, courtyard, hotel, house, live, mansion, mason, palace, metropolis, residence, road, rural, sedentary, sojourn, stay, structure, tent, town, urban, villa, village, and so on in english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit, and indo-european languages as well as arabic, now all generally called eurabian. their selection has been based on the author's knowledge of their frequency and use in today's fully english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee natural english, german, and french conversations and/or texts as well as english dictionaries and thesauri. for ease of reference, the data will be arranged alphabetically together with brief linguistic comments in the next results section. as for etymological data, all references to english and indo-european languages are for harper (2015). however, this etymology is not, like all other similar dictionaries, without its severe drawbacks owing to the many unknowns, uncertainties, and the seemingly illogical derivations or meanings of many words such as alley, castle, county, dwell, farm, head, house, mansion, office, pen, road, dining room, street, track, etc. which make more sense if derived straight from arabic as shall be seen in section (3) below. therefore, it has to be used with care and discretion. concerning arabic data, the meanings are for ibn manzoor (2013) in the main, ibn seedah (1996: 13/79-120), altha3alibi (2011), albabidi (2011), e-dictionaries like mu3jamalama3ani (2015), and the author's knowledge and use of shami (syrian) arabic as a native speaker. all the genetic linkages between arabic, english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit and so on are exclusively mine, unless otherwise stated. in transcribing the data, normal romanized spelling is used for all languages for practical purposes. nonetheless, certain symbols were used for unique arabic sounds: namely, /2 & 3/ for the voiceless and voiced pharyngeal fricatives respectively, /kh & gh/ for the voiceless and voiced velar fricatives each, /q/ for the voiceless uvular stop, capital letters for the emphatic counterparts of plain consonants /t (t), d (d), dh (dh), & s (s)/, and /'/ for the glottal stop (jassem 2013c). long vowels in arabic are usually doubledi.e., /aa, ee, & oo/. data analysis theoretical framework: radical linguistic theory data analysis utilizes the radical linguistic theory (jassem 2014h-l, 2015a-g), a slightly revised and more generalized version of the original lexical root theory (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-g). for the sake of economy and brevity, the inquisitive reader is referred to any earlier work for a fuller account (e.g., jassem 2015a-c, 2014a, 2013a, 2012a-b). in short, the most appropriate procedure for genetically relating english and arabic words to each other can be summed up as follows: (i) select a word (in any given semantic field), e.g., abide, dwell, live, (ii) identify the source, daughter, or sister language meaning (e.g., english or latin) on the basis of especially word history or etymology. it is essential to start with meanings, not sounds or sound laws as the former are more stable and change less than the latter which do so extensively; for example, all the sounds of a given word might change beyond recognition while meanings very much less so and in a rather limited way; so the meaning will lead you to the cognate naturally whereas the sounds will get you lost definitely, (iii) search for the equivalent meaning and form in the target, parent, or reference language (e.g., arabic), looking for cognates: i.e., sister words with the same or similar forms and meanings, and zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach (iv) finally explain the differences in form and meaning between the cognates lexicologically, phonetically, morphologically, and semantically as indicated. as a matter of fact, finding the right cognate on the basis of its meaning first often leads you to the resultant changes automatically. that is the whole story simply and truly. no fuss, no mess. for example, consider abide, live, dwell below. statistical analysis the percentage formula will be used for calculating the ratio of cognate words or shared vocabulary (cowley 1997: 173, 182), which has been fully described in earlier papers (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k). results&discussion the results will mainly focus on the arabic lexical (consonantal) radicals or roots of english, german, french, latin, greek, and sanskrit urban words and the changes that involved them. the exact quality of the vowel is, therefore, of generally secondary importance for having little or no semantic impact whatsoever on the final output (jassem 2012-2015). abide (abidance, abode) via old english abidan, gebidan 'remain, wait, dwell', from arabic 'abada 'dwell, stay', 'aabad 'place'; or baata 'remain, dwell', bait (n) 'house' where /t/ became /d/ (jassem 2015g). accommodation (accommodate) via french, from latin accommodatio(nem) 'lodging', from accommodare 'make fit, adapt', from (i) ad'to', from arabic ta'derivational affix' via reversal and turning /t/ into /d/ and (ii) commodore 'make fit', from commodus 'fit', from (a) com'intensive prefix; together; like', from arabic kama 'as, like' and (b) modus 'measure, manner', from arabic madd(at) 'extension; lying' via lexical shift; or, as a whole, from arabic jathama 'to stay' or makatha 'to stay' via reordering and turning /j & th/ into /k & d/. agrarian (agriculture, grow) via old english æcer 'a field', from latin agrarius 'of the land', from ager 'a field', from greek agros ' a field', from arabic 3aqaar 'a field, earth' or 2aql 'a field' via /3 (2)/-loss and passing /q & l/ into /g & r/; or qira2 'farm; unbuilt and unplanted area', qira2i (adj.) 'city dweller' via /2/-loss and passing /q/ into /g/. see cultivate. alley (alleyway) via old french alee (modern allée) 'a path, passage; a going', from aler 'to go', possibly short for latin ambulare 'to walk', or from gallo-roman allare, from allatus 'having been brought to', direct from arabic 'alla 'go, speed up', 'aala return', or lai(at) 'a bending; a bent (road)'. see way. apartment (apart, part, depart, partition) via french, from latin partem (nom., pars) 'part, division', related to portio 'a share, portion', from arabic batr, 'abtar (adj.) 'cutting' via reordering and lexical shift (jassem 2013m-n). architecture (architect) via middle french, from latin architectura, from architectus, from greek architekton 'master builder, director of works', from (i) arkhi'chief', from arabic ra'ees 'head' where /s/ became /kh (k)/ (jassem 2015e) and (ii) tekton 'builder, carpenter', from arabic taqqa(t) 'beat, knock, break', daqqa(t)/dakka(t) 'beat, dig, knock, hammer', or takhkh(at) 'build, knock, dig', turning /t (d) & q (kh) / into /t & k/. area via latin area 'level ground, open space', direct from arabic 3araa' 'open space' via /3/-loss. attic 'top story under the roof of a house' via latin atticus, from greek attikos 'athenian, of attica', direct from arabic taaqa(t) 'a small, narrow window; a ventilation wall opening' via lexical shift and turning /t & q/ into /t & k/. avenue (venue) via old and middle french avenue 'way of access, arrival', from latin advenire 'to come to', from (i) ad'to', from arabic ta'derivational affix' via reversal english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee and turning /t/ into /d/ or al'definite article' via /l/-merger into /v/ (jassem 2013a, 2015d) and (ii) venire 'to come', from arabic faana 'to go' or fanna 'drive away (camels)' via lexical shift; or direct from arabic fann, afnan (pl.) 'straight tree branches' or fanaa' 'courtyard' via lexical shift. bathroom (bathe) via old english bæth 'immersion in water, mud; bathing water', german bad, from arabic saba2, sibaa2a(t) (n) 'bathe, swim' via reversal and turning /s & 2/ into /th & ø/; or batha 'to sweat' or baththa 'to mix (food) with water' via lexical shift. see room. bedroom (bed, bedding, embed) via old english bedd 'bed, couch, garden plot', german bett, from arabic bait 'house; plot' via lexical shift and turning /t/ into /d/; bitaa2/bat2(at) 'flat, low land', bata2 (v) 'lie/lay down', turning /t & 2/ into /d & ø/; or, more properly, from arabic mahd 'bed', merging /m & h/ into /b/. see room. booth via old danish both 'temporary dwelling', from bold (old saxon bodl) 'house', german bude 'booth, stall', from arabic bait, al-bait 'house, the-house' via lexical shift and turning /t/ into /th/. bridge (-burgh; burg, borough, cambridge, hamburg, edinburgh, loughborough) via old english brycge 'causeway over a river' and german brücke, from arabic burj 'tower; a high structure'; /j/ became /g (ø)/. see burg. build (building) via old english byldan 'construct a house', from bold (old saxon bodl) 'house', direct from arabic ballata 'build with stones', balaat (n) 'rock; roof' via lexical shift and passing /t/ into /d/; or balad 'village; earth; stay' via lexical shift. see booth. burg (-burgh; borough,hamburg,edinburgh, loughborough, berg, iceberg) via old english burg, burh 'a dwelling with a fortified enclosure' and german burg 'castle', from arabic burj 'tower; a high structure'; /j/ evolved into /g (ø)/. see bridge. bury (canterbury) via old english byrgan 'bury, raise a mound' from arabic qabara 'to bury' via reordering and /q & r/-merger or burj 'tower; a high structure' via lexical shift and turning /j/ into /g (y)/ (jassem 2013c, 2015a). see burg. capital (capitalization, capital city, money) via old french, from latin capitalis 'of the head', caput 'head', from arabic jabhat 'forehead' via lexical shift and passing /j & h/ into /k & ø/; qubbat 'top, dome', turning /q/ into /k/; or qabad 'hold, catch, capture' in which /q & d/ passed into /k & t/. see city. castle via old english castel 'village; stronghold', from french and latin castellum 'castle, fort, fortified village', diminutive of castrum 'fort', perhaps related to castrare 'cut off', direct from arabic qasr, qasar (v) 'palace; shortening, cutting'; /q & r/ evolved into /k & l/ while /s/ split into /st/. ceiling via middle english ceil 'put a cover or ceiling over; cover wall with panels', probably from middle french celer 'to conceal, cover with paneling', from latin celare 'conceal', straight from arabic kallal/jallal 'to put a top over, to cover', turning /k (j)/ into /s/. citadel (city) via middle french citadelle, from italian cittadella, diminutive of cittade 'city', from latin civitatem (nom. civitas) 'city', straight from arabic as for city. city (citizen; civic, civil, civilization, civility) via old french cite, citet (modern cite) 'town, city', spanish ciudad, german stadt, from latin civitatem, citatem (nom., civitas) 'originally citizenship, rights of a citizen; community, state', from civis 'townsman', direct from arabic jidda(t) (judd, jaddat, juddat) 'river side; a place; city; a ksa sea port and city' or related jaadda(t) 'road' via lexical shift and turning /j & d/ into /s & t/ (cf. civic and arabic jifs/jafees/jibs 'weak, coward, vicious; lowly person, bastard'; civil from arabic fisl/fishl 'coward, rascal, lowly' via reordering and lexical shift (jassem 2015e)). close (closure, enclosure) via old french, from latin clausus, claudere (v) 'to shut, close, confine, put an end to', direct from arabic qalas 'close, shut' or khalas 'finish, end'; /q (kh) & s/ became /k & s/. zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach condominium (condom, dominate, domain) via latin condominium 'joint sovereignty', from (i) com'together', from arabic jamee3 'all, together' via /3/-loss and turning /j/ into /k/, kama 'like' via lexical shift or ma3a 'with' via reversal and turning /3/ into /k/ (jassem 2013a, 2014c) and (ii) dominium 'right of ownership', dominari (v) 'dominate' from arabic deen(un) 'control, domination', turning /n/ into /m/ (jassem 2014e, 2015e-f). corridor (current, concur, occur, recur) via french 'long hallway', from italian corridore 'a gallery; lit., a runner', from correre 'to run', from latin currere 'to run, move quickly', from arabic karra 'to roll, run'; or jara 'to run', jaria(t) (n) 'stream', turning /j & t/ into /d/. cottage (cot) via old english and french cote, cote 'hut, cottage', from arabic koot/kuwat (kuwait) 'an opening in a house/wall' via lexical shift; kookh 'a shed' where /kh/ became /t/; 2atta(t) 'a hut', turning /2 & t/ into /k & t/; or khushsha(t) 'a petty house' via reordering and turning /kh & sh/ into /k & j/. county (count, countess, viscount; account, recount, discount) via anglo-french, from latin comitatus 'jurisdiction of a count', from latin comitem (nominative comes) 'companion, attendant', from (i) com'with' above and (ii) ire 'to go', from arabic raa2 'go' via /2/-loss; however, it comes, as a whole, from arabic naaqit (naqeet) (n) 'a slave's master; slave; count/countess' or nitaaq 'scope, area, belt' via reordering, lexical shift, and turning /t & q/ into /t & k/ (jassem 2014g, 2015e). country (countryman, contra, contrary) via old french, from latin terra contrata 'land lying opposite or spread before one', from contra 'opposite', straight from arabic qutr 'country; side' via lexical shift, turning /q & t/ into /k & t/, and inserting /n/. as to terra, it comes from arabic thara 'earth', passing /th/ into /t/ (jassem 2013f). countryside (countrysider) see side. court (courtship, courtyard, royal court) via old french cort (modern cour) 'king's court or residence', from latin cortem, accusative of cors (earlier cohors) 'enclosed yard', from arabic qasr 'palace; lit., shortening, enclosure' via reordering and turning /q & s/ into /k & s/. therefore, it may be incorrect to derive it from (i) com'together' above and (ii) hort, hortus 'garden', from arabic 2arth 'farming; garden' where /2 & th/ became /h (k) & t/; arabic works both ways, though (jassem 2013q, 2015e). see yard. cultivate (cultivation, agriculture) via latin cultivatus, cultivus 'tilled', from cultivare (v) 'till, cultivate', from cultus 'lit., cultivated, tended; care, labour, cultivation, culture, worship, reverence', from colere (v) 'to till', from arabic qal3 'uprooting, removing plants', qulla3 'a good plant; dry mud' via /3/-loss and changing /q/ into /k/; 2arth, 2iratha(t) 'cultivation', turning /2, r, & th/ into /k, l, & t/; 2aql(at) 'growth, plantation; farm' via /2 & q/-merger into /k/; kala' 'herbs, grass; pasture' via lexical shift; ka2l 'grass turning into green' via /2/-loss and lexical shift. see agrarian. design,urban (signal, insignia; signature; design; designate, designation; consign; resign) via latin designare 'mark out, devise, choose, appoint', from (i) de'out', from arabic ta'derivational affix' where /t/ became /d/ and (ii) signum 'signal, mark, token, symbol', signare (v) 'mark out, mark with a stamp, adorn', from arabic naqsh 'sign, decoration', tanqeesh (n) to which reversal and turning /t, q, & sh/ into /d, g, & s/ applied; or sana3, tasnee3 (n) 'make' via reordering and turning /t, s, & 3/ into /d, s, & g/ (jassem 2013c, 2014g). see urban. digital (digital camera (chamber), digit, digitalization, index, indexical, ten, decimeter, decameter) via latin digitus 'finger', from greek deka 'hand, finger, ten', from arabic dija(t) '(food-filled) fingers, hand' (jassem 2012a, 2014g). as to –al, it derives from arabic al'the' via morphological shift (jassem 2013a, 2015f-g). dining room (dinner, dine) via old english disner (mosern diner) 'to eat, dine', direct from arabic 'idam 'food', passing /m/ into /n/; or ta3am 'food', turning /t, 3, & m/ into /d, ø, & n/ (jassem 2014a). see room. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee direction (direct) via latin directio(nem), from dirigere 'set straight', from (i) dis'apart', from arabic taash 'apart, afloat, spread out' or shatta 'diverse, apart' via reversal and turning /t (t) & sh/ into /d & s/ and (ii) regere 'to guide', from arabic raqa 'to ascend, straighten', changing /q/ into /g/; or direct from arabic tareeqat(un) 'a way', tarq (adj.) 'straight', passing /t & q/ into /d & k/. district (restrict, string) via old french, from latin districtus 'restraining of offenders; jurisdiction', from distringere 'hinder, detain', from (i) dis'apart' above and (ii) stringere 'draw tight, press together', from arabic tareeq(at) 'road, way', taraq, intarq (v) 'knock, hit', via lexical shift and turning /t & q/ into /st & k/; or zarnaq 'a wall' via lexical shift and splitting /z/ into /st/. door (doorway) via old english dor/duru 'large door, gate', german tür (old high german turi), from arabic daar 'house', dawwaar 'lit., turning; door' via lexical shift; or radda(t) 'a shutter; a door's half; door' via reversal and lexical shift. see way. dwell (dwelling, dweller) via old english dwellan 'mislead, deceive; originally lead astray', dwale 'nightshade', old high german twellen 'to hinder, delay', from arabic dalla 'to mislead, deceive', dhalla 'stay, remain', and/or dhill 'shade, shadow'; /d(h)/ became /d/. thus, the different senses come from formally similar but semantically different arabic words, merged into one. electronic (electricity, light, leuk-) via latin electrum, from greek electron 'amber', direct from arabic 'alaq(atun) 'brightening, shining' via lexical shift, turning /q/ into /k/, and /r/-insertion. embankment (bank, riverbank) via old english 'slope, edge of a river', from old norse banki, danish banke 'sandbank', from arabic banak 'stay', nabk 'high land' via reordering and lexical shift; or janib 'side' via reversal and changing /j/ into /k/. estate (station, stand, estate realty) via old french estat, from latin status 'state, condition, place, position', from stare (v) 'to stand', from arabic sat2(at) 'place, flat surface', sata2 (v) via /2/-loss and turning /t/ into /t/. see realty. farm (farming, farmer) via old french ferme 'a rent, lease', from latin firma 'fixed payment', firmare (v) 'to fix, strengthen', from firmus 'firm', direct from arabic thamar 'fruit; farming; orchard', thaamir 'farmer' via reordering and changing /th/ into /f/. feudal (feud, feudalism, feudalist) via latin feudalis, feudum 'feudal estate, land granted to be held as a benefice', from gothic faihu 'property', old high german fihu 'cattle', middle english feodary 'land renter', from arabic faddad 'rich landlord' or related faddan 'cultivated land; farming cows' and fadad 'loud or low voice'. flat via old english flett 'a dwelling; floor, ground; level, smooth', old high german flaz/flezzi 'flat, level; floor', from arabic falta2 'sloping (land); flat (foot)' via /2/-loss and turning /t/ into /t/; falaat '(grazing) ground' or balad 'village, country; earth; dwelling' via /b & d/-mutation into /f & t/. gang (gangway, go, ago) via old english gang 'a going, journey, way', german gang, gothic gagg, german gehen 'go', from arabic jaa'a 'come', majee' (n) via lexical shift (divergence) and turning /j/ into /g/; or hajja 'escape', merging /h & j/ into /g/. garden (yard) via old french gardin/jardin 'garden, palace grounds', from latin hortus gardinus 'enclosed garden', from old high german garto (german garten) 'garden', old english geard 'fenced enclosure, garden, court; house', gothic gards 'enclosure; house', direct from arabic jidar, judran (pl.) 'wall; garden' via reordering and passing /j/ into /g/ or jannat 'garden' via reordering, turning /j & t/ into /g & d/, and /r/-insertion. see zoological. -gart (stuttgart; -grad, leningrad) from arabic qariat 'village, town'; /q & t/ developed into /g & d/. see -grad. gate via old english geat 'gate, door, opening, hinged framework barrier', old saxon gat 'eye of a needle, hole', old zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach norse gat 'opening, passage', german gasse 'street', from arabic qaati3 'a barrier, crossing' via lexical shift and turning /q, t, & 3/ into /g, t, & ø/; or waseed/sad 'gate; shutting' via reordering and turning /s (s) & d/ into /g & t/. -grad (leningrad, -gart, stuttgart) from arabic qariat 'village, town'; /q & t/ developed into /g & d/. see -gart. habitat (habitation, inhabit, inhabitant) via latin habitat 'flora and fauna; lit; it inhabits', from habitare 'to live, dwell', frequentative of habere 'to have, posses', direct from arabic bait, 'abiat (pl.) 'home, house', bee'at 'environment' where /'/ became /h/; or habat 'to live, sit; lit., descend, go down', habeet(at) (n) 'low-lying place', turning /t/ into /t/. hall via old english heall 'spacious roofed residence, house; temple; law-court', hell 'hell', german halle 'hall', direct from arabic 2all, ma2all 'home, house; living' or 3illia(t) 'lofty house'; /2 (3)/ became /h/. headquarters (headship, heading, behead) via old english heafod 'top of the body or slope; chief person, ruler', german haupt, latin caput 'head', from arabic jabha(t) 'forehead' via lexical shift, turning /j/ into /h (k)/, merging /b & h/ into /ø (p)/, and turning /t/ into /d/; qubbat 'top, dome', turning /q, b, & t/ into /h, f (= h), & d/; otherwise, straight from arabic haadi 'head, chief, guide'. see capital & quarter. highway (height) via old english heh/heah 'lofty, tall, exalted', old high german hoh (german hoch), from arabic shahiq 'high', merging /sh & h/ and turning /q/ into /g (ø)/; or hiah (haih, haihat, 'aiha) 'far, away' via lexical shift and turning /h/ into /gh (ø)/. see way. home (homing, hamburg, birmingham) via old english ham 'dwelling, house, estate, village', german heim, greek kome, from arabic 'umm 'home, residence; country; road; origin; mother', passing /'/ into /h/; 2ima 'protected (land); property' (cf. 2awm 'flying around') or khum 'petty house', turning /2 (kh)/ into /h (k)/. hostel (hospital, host) via old french hostel 'inn, lodgings', from latin hospitale 'inn, large house', from hospes (genitive hospitis) 'guest, host; lit., lord of strangers', direct from arabic 3azzab, 3izba(t) 'offering food to guests; such a place'; /3 & z/ became /h & s/ while /b/ was lost. otherwise, straight from arabic hadhal 'stay', splitting /dh/ into /st/. hotel (hostel, hospital, host) via old french hostel (modern hôtel) 'inn, lodgings', from latin hospitale 'inn, large house', direct from arabic as in hostel. house via old english hus 'shelter, house', german haus, perhaps connected to the root of hide (v), from arabic 2awsh 'house; courtyard; den' or 2awza(t) 'property, possession, enclosure' via lexical shift and turning /2 & sh (z)/ into /h & s/. hut via old french hotte 'cottage', from middle high german hutte 'hut, cottage', perhaps related to old english hydan 'to hide', direct from arabic 2atta(t) 'a shelter; a temporary station' and/or related 2oota(t) 'enclosure', 2atta (v) 'to live in; stay', or 2a'it 'wall' via lexical shift and passing /2 & t/ into /h & t/. impasse (pass, passage, pace) via french, from latin (i) in 'not', from arabic in 'not', and (ii) passare 'pass, walk', from arabic as in pass. industry (industrialist, structure) via old english, from latin industria 'activity, zeal, diligence', from (i) indu 'in, within', from arabic 3inda 'in, at' via /3/-loss or hinat 'here' via /h/-loss, turning /t/ into /d/, and lexical shift, and (ii) struere 'build' as in structure. infrastructure via latin (i) infra 'below, later, than, smaller than', english under, german unter, and sanskrit adnah, from arabic adna 'lower' via reordering and /d & n/-mutation into /f & r/; or naafir 'going up, bulging' via lexical shift or divergence; and (ii) structure below. inn (in) via old english inn 'lodging, dwelling, house', probably from inne (adv.) 'inside, within', direct from arabic 2aana(t) 'a bar' via lexical shift and /2/-loss; or 3an 'in, on, about' via lexical shift and /3/-loss (jassem 2014c). kitchen via old english cycene, from germanic kokina, old high german english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee chuhhina, german küche, from latin cocina/coquina 'kitchen', from coquinas 'of cooks', from coquus 'cook', coquere (v) 'cook, ripen, digest', from arabic sawa, istawa 'to cook, ripen', sawi (n) or shawa, shawi (n) 'to roast, grill, barbecue'; /s (sh)/ split into /k & tch/ besides lexical shift (jassem 2014a). live (life, alive, living room) via old english lifian/libban 'to live, have life, to be, experience', german leben, old norse lifa 'to remain, to live, to continue', greek liparein 'to persist, persevere', from arabic 'alabba, labba 'to stay, live; love; escape' via reordering, turning /b/ into /f/, (and /r/-insertion in greek); 'alfa (alfa'a, lafi'a) 'stay alive'; lafa 'come, stay' (cf. love & elope from the same arabic root as well; also leave via old english laefan 'to remain; have left, bequeath' from the same root or arabic falla 'leave' via reversal (jassem 2013n); leaf from arabic riff 'tree leaves' where /r/ became /l/; peel from arabic lafa'a 'peel' via reversal and turning /f/ into /p/ (jassem 2013m, 2015a). lodge (lodging, lodger) via old english loge 'arbor, covered walk; hut, cabin', (german laube 'bower, arbour; shelter of foliage'), from arabic walaj (v) 'to enter home' and its derivatives wilaj 'door, vague land', walja(t) 'a passerby's shelter from rain or cave', wulj 'area, narrow or sandy roads', and dawlaj 'a small house inside a larger one; inner room' via reordering. mansion (manse) via old french, from latin mansio(nem) 'a staying; night quarters; station', manere (v) 'to stay', greek menein 'to remain', direct from arabic manzil 'mansion, house', turning /z & l/ into /s & n/. mason (masonry) via old french masson, probably from old high german steinmezzo (modern steinmetz) 'stone mason' or latin machio, matio, machina 'machine; device', straight from arabic musawin 'mason; builder', sawan/saan (v), turning /s/ into /s/. metropolis (mother, maternal; police, politics, political, politicking, polity, polis, metropolis, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, tripoli) via latin metropolis, from greek metropolis 'mother city, capital city', from meter 'mother', from arabic 'umm(at) 'mother' or 'ama(t) 'maid' via /r/-insertion and (ii) polis 'city' below. modern (modernity, modernism, modernize) via middle french moderne, from latin modernus 'modern', from modo 'just now, in a certain manner', from modo 'to the measure', from modus 'measure, manner', from arabic madd(un/at) 'extension' and related mudda(t) 'time' via lexical shift; or, as a whole, from arabic madeena(t), mudun (pl.) 'city, town', madani (adj.) 'urban' via lexical shift and /r/-insertion. moor (mooring, morass) via old english mor 'swamp', old high german muor (modern moor) 'swamp, sea; moorland', direct from arabic marr 'water, rain, sea', maraa2 'water area; den' via lexical shift and /2/-loss; or direct from arabic mar3a, maraa3 (pl.) 'grazing land' via /3/-los or boor 'disused land' by passing /b/ into /n/ (jassem 2013n). motorway (move, movement, motion) from latin motor 'lit., mover', from movere (motare) 'move, set in motion, remove, disturb', from arabic as in move. mount (mountain, surmount) via old french and english munt 'mountain', from latin mons (genitive montis) 'mountain', direct from arabic amt 'height' or matn, mutoon (pl.) 'mount' via reordering or matiat(un) 'a mounting animal', imtata (v) 'ride' via reordering and passing /t/ into /t/ (jassem 2013f, 2013n). move (movement, motion, motor) via old french, from latin movere (motare) 'move, set in motion, remove, disturb', from arabic mada 'go, move' where /d/ became /v (t)/; maada 'move', turning /d/ into /v (t)/; maa2a, mai2 (n) 'of camels, walk, move', turning /2/ into /v (t)/; or math3 'a woman's walk', merging /th & 3/ into /v/ (cf. remove from arabic ma2a 'erase' where /2/ became /v/). mundane (monde, le monde) via old french mondain 'earthly, worldly; elegant, clean', from latin mundanus 'of this world', from mundus 'world; lit., elegant, clear', from arabic madina(t), mudun (pl.) 'city', madani (adj) 'urban; civilized' via reordering and zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach lexical shift. see modern. office (office, official, officiate) via old french ofice, from latin officium 'service, kindness, favour; official duty, business', direct from arabic fisfis 'a decorated house' and related fasfaas 'stupid, foolish, weak' via syllable reduction and lexical shift (see jassem 2015e-g). palace (palate) via old french palais, from latin palacium 'a palace', from palatium 'the palatin hill; a palace', from arabic balaat 'rock, marble; palace'; /t/ became /s/. park (parkville, hyde park) via old french parc 'enclosed wood or heath land used as a game preserve', probably from germanic *parruck 'enclosed tract of land', old english pearruc, german pferch 'fold for sheep', from arabic barak 'sit down; rest', barka(t) 'pool, lake; low flat land' via lexical shift; bar2a(t) 'open space, area' or boor(at) 'uncultivated, grassy land' where /2 (t)/ changed into /k/; bars 'a group of trees; village', turning /s/ into /k/; or busr, busra, basr 'good red earth; good stony mud; white limestone; side' via reordering and passing /s/ into /k/. see village & villa. pass (passage, impasse, pace) via old french passer, from latin passare 'to step, walk, pass', from passus 'step, pace', from arabic baws 'pass, advance', turning /s/ into /s/; saab 'to go, to pass' and related sabsab 'walk quickly; flow' via reversal (cf. piss from arabic sab(sab) 'go, pass, flow', sabb 'pour' via reversal or bazz 'of liquids, to come out' (jassem 2013d & h)). pastoral (pasture, pastor) via latin pastor 'shepherd', pastus, pascere (v) 'to lead to pasture, cause to eat', from arabic bassa(t) 'pasture, growth', turning /s/ into /s/; bassa(t) 'eat'; or baseeta(t), basat (v) 'flat land; eating', passing /t/ into /t/. path (pad) via old english path 'path, track', german pfad 'path', from arabic batha' 'soft, easy earth', baatha (v) 'to mix with dust; dig, dissipate, search' via lexical shift; or wati'a 'to tread', mawti' (n) 'foothold' where /w & t/ passed into /p & th/. pavement (pave) via old french paver, pavement 'pave', from latin pavare/pavire 'to beat, ram, tread down', from arabic baa2a(t) 'a space' via lexical shift and turning /2/ into /v/; baatha 'to dig, mix with dust', batha' (n) 'soft, easy earth', passing /th/ into /v/. pavilion (pappilon) via old french paveillon 'large tent; butterfly', from latin papilio(nem) 'butterfly, moth; tent', from arabic bahw(un), albahw 'house (front or back); any houselike structure; pelvis' via reordering, lexical shift, and turning /h/ into /v/. peasant (peasantry, pagan) via old french paisent (modern paysan) 'local inhabitant', from pais 'country, region', from latin pagensis inhabitant of district', from pagus 'country, rural district', from arabic baaj 'vast sand area; road' via lexical shift and passing /j/ into /g/, jubb 'a well, good grass land' and related juboob 'earth, land' reversal and lexical shift, jabbaana(t) 'desert, flat upland, graveyard' via reordering and replacing /j/ by /g/; alternatively and more logically, straight from arabic bustani 'a gardener' via reordering or baseet(un) 'simple (person)' via reordering and passing /t/ into /t/. pen (combine, compound, bone, banana) via old english penn, penne 'enclosure, pen, fold', perhaps related to old english pinn 'peg, pin', straight from arabic bina', bana (v) 'building; hut' or banan 'finger' via lexical shift. polis (police, politics, political, politicking, polity, polis, metropolis, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, tripoli) via old french policie, from latin politia, from greek politeia 'the state, civil administration', from polites 'city, citizen', from polis 'city; the state, citizens', from arabic balad, balda(t) 'village, city, town'; /d (& t)/ turned or merged into /s/ (jassem 2015e-f). see metro. port (deport, porter, report; purport) via middle french, from latin portus 'port, harbour; lit., entrance, passage', porta 'gate, door', greek poros 'passage, journey, way', from arabic bu'ra(t) 'opening', boor(at) 'uncultivated land', or barr(at) 'outside; the wild' via lexical shift; bawaba(t), from baab 'gate, door' via /r/-insertion; rabwat/rabiat 'water-surrounded, raised ground' via reordering; or rabd 'to stay, park, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee station' via lexical shift, reordering, and passing /t/ into /t/. quarter (quart, quartet, quadrant, quadri-, quarantine, square, carat, headquarters) via french quatre, latin quattuor, and greek tessares or tettares 'originally, fourth of something or something cut', from arabic qeerat, qarareet (pl.) 'a quarter, a measurement unit', qarat (v) 'cut', qartat (n) 'a cutting' via reordering (and turning /q/ into /t/ in greek) (see jassem 2012a, 2014g). see head & square. railway (railroad, regulation) via old french reille 'bolt, bar', from latin regal/regula 'straight stick', regere (v) 'straighten, guide', straight from arabic rijl 'foot, leg' via lexical shift and /l & j/-merger (see jassem 2015e-g). see way & road. realty (estate realty, reality, realtor, real esate) via old french, from latin realitatem, realitas, from realis 'real, actual', from res 'matter, thing', from arabic 'ard 'earth, land' via lexical shift and replacing /d/ by /s (l)/; or ra'i, al-ra'i, al-ru'ia(t) 'seeing' via lexical shift and reordering. see estate. remain (remnant; mansion) via old french, from latin remanere 'remain, stay behind; abide, last', from (i) re'back', from arabic rai3 'back' via /3/-loss (jassem 2013a, 2014f) and (ii) manere 'stay, remain', straight from arabic naam 'sleep' via lexical shift and reversal. see mansion. reside (residence, resident) via old french, from latin residere 'reside, dwell', straight from arabic raqad 'stay, reside' or rasad 'to sit-observe'; /q (s)/ became /s/. riverside (residence, resident) via old french (i) riviere 'river, river bank', from latin riparia 'river, riverbank, seashore', straight from arabic nahar 'river' where /n & h/ evolved into /r & v/ and (ii) side below. road (ride, raid) via old english rad 'riding expedition, journey, hostile incursion', direct from arabic rawd 'road'. roof via old english hrof 'roof, ceiling, top; heaven, sky', middle dutch roof/rouf 'cover, roof', and middle high german rof 'penthouse', straight from arabic raff, rufoof (pl.) 'shelf, roof' or rafee3 'high' via /3/-loss and lexical shift. room (rural, rustic) via old english and high german rum 'space (extent, time); scope, opportunity; roomy, wide, long, spacious', german raum 'space', latin rus 'open land, country', from arabic maraa2 'a space for resting or going to' or mar3a 'grazing place, moorland' via reversal and /2 (3)/-loss. see rural. round (roundabout, around) via old french roond, german runde, from latin rotundus 'round, circular', related to rota 'wheel', straight from arabic raddat(un), dawrat(un), dawaran 'turning' via reordering. rural (rustic) via old french rural, from latin ruralis 'of the countryside', from rus (genitive ruris) 'open land, country', from arabic rass 'a well' via lexical shift; rawd 'garden' by turning /d/ into /s (r)/; reef 'countryside; rural', passing /f/ into /s (r)/; or ra3i 'grazing, shepherding' via lexical shift and /3/-loss or mutation into /s (r)/. saloon (salon) via french salon 'reception room', from italian salone, sala 'large hall, hall', from old high german sal (german saal) 'hall, house', russian selo 'village', direct from arabic qal3a(tun) 'castle' via lexical shift and turning /q & 3/ into /s & ø/; 2illa(tun) 'house, stay' via lexical shift and turning /2/ into /s/; or saala(t), saalon 'dry earth; hall' where /s/ became /s/. sedentary (sit, session) via middle french, from latin sedentarius 'sitting, remaining in one place', from sedentem/sedens, sedere (v) 'to sit, remain; be fixed', greek ezesthai 'to sit', sanskrit a-sadat 'sat down', sidati 'sits', old english sittan 'sit', from arabic qa3ad 'sit', turning /q & 3/ into /s & ø/; sada2 'sit, set' via /2/-loss; or jatha 'sit', turning /j & th/ into /s & d/. shelf via middle low german schelf 'shelf' or old english scylfe 'shelf, floor' and scylf 'peak, pinnacle', straight from arabic raseef 'a pavement, layer' via lexical shift, reordering, and changing /s & r/ into /sh & l/; or saff, al-saff 'row, line' via reordering or /l/-insertion and turning /s/ into /sh/. shire (cambridgeshire, oxfordshire) via old english scir 'administrative office, zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach jurisdiction, authority, country, province', from arabic soor 'wall; walled-in area' via lexical shift and turning /s/ into /sh/; jeera(t)/deera(t) 'neighbourhood, area' where /j (d)/ became /sh/; or sharee3a(t) 'a water-bound area; a jurisdiction' via /3/-loss. sidewalk via old english side 'flanks of a person, the long part or aspect of anything', sid (adj.) 'long, broad, spacious', german seite, direct from arabic sadd 'side, blockage', judd (jadd, jidd) 'side, road, shore', jida' 'side' where /j/ became /s/, or sadaf 'side', mutating /s/ into /s/ and merging /d & f/. see countryside, riverside & walk. square,trafalgar (quarter, quartet, quadrant, quadri-, quarantine, square, carat, headquarters) via old french esquire from latin exquadrare of (i) ex'out', from arabic aqsa 'far' where /q & s/ became /k & s/ (jassem 2012f, 2014c) and (ii) quadrare 'to make square', quadrus 'a square', from arabic qeeraat 'quarter', qarat (v) 'cut' via /t/-loss and /s/-split from /q/ (see jassem 2012a, 2014g). see head, quarter,& trafalgar. stay via old french estai/estare, from latin stare 'to stand (still); be upright; stand firm; remain, tarry', (italian and spanish stare/estar 'to stand, to be', from arabic jatha 'sit', turning /j & th/ into /s & t/; or istanna, ta'anna 'wait' via lexical shift and mutating /n/ into /r (ø)/. street via old english stret 'street, high road', german straβe, latin strata 'paved road', sternere (v) 'lay down, spread out, pave', from arabic siraat 'road, way' or shareet 'a narrow road', splitting /sh/ into /st/ and turning /t/ into /t/; or tareeq(at) 'road' via reversal, /q/-split into /st/, and turning /t/ into /t/. sojourn via old french sojorner 'stay for a time', from latin subdiurnare 'to spend the day', from (i) sub'under, until', from arabic sawb 'under, toward' and (ii) diurnare 'to last long', from diurnun 'day', from arabic dahr(un) 'time, day' or dhuhr(un) 'noon' via lexical shift, /h/-loss, and turning /d (dh)/ into /j/; or nahar 'day' via reordering, merging /n & r/, and turning /h/ into /j/. however, as a whole, it seems that (i) soderives from arabic saa3a(t) 'hour' via /3/-loss and (ii) journ, jour from nahaar 'day, daylight' above: i/e., 'lit., a day's hour'. stair (stairs, staircase, upstairs, downstairs) via old english stæger 'stair, staircase, flight of steps', dutch steiger 'a stair, step', german steig 'path', straight from arabic daraj 'steps, stairs; walk' via reordering and changing /d & j/ into /s & t/; or jidar 'wall' via lexical shift and passing /j & d/ into /s & t/. as to down and up in downstairs/upstairs, the former comes from arabic doon 'below' while the latter from arabic 3abab 'up' via /3/-loss (jassem 2014c). story (storey) via old french estorie, estoire 'story, chronicle, history', from latin storia, shortened from historia 'history, account, tale; story, floor of a building; picture', from arabic 'ustoora(t) 'tale, story', soora(t) 'picture', or soor/soora(t) 'fence, walled-in enclosure', turning /', s, & t/ into /h, s, & t/. thus, the different meanings derive from formally similar and semantically different arabic words, merging into one in english. structure (structural, construction) via latin structura 'a fitting together; a building; fig., order', from struere (v.) 'to pile, place together, build, assemble, arrange', from arabic sar2 'a high building' and related sar2at ' a land' via reordering and turning /2/ into /k/; satar, satra(t) (n) 'to pile, arrange in lines', turning /t/ into /t/; or soor(at), sawwar (v) 'wall; a building' via /t/-split from /s/. subway via latin sub (ub) 'under, at the foot of; close, up to, toward, within, during' and greek hypo 'under', from arabic sawb 'falling; towards' via lexical shift and turning /s/ into /s/; ka3b 'lit', ankle; bottom, below' via /k & 3/-merger into /s/; 3ubb 'breast, within, inside, under', turning /3/ into /s (h)/; or shi3b 'branch, gap, sub' via lexical shift and /sh & 3/-merger into /s/ (jassem 2014c). see way. tent via old french tente 'tent, hanging, tapestry', from latin tenta 'a tent; lit., english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee something stretched', tendere (v.) 'stretch', direct from arabic tamdeed, from madda(t) 'stretching, mattress', turning /m & d/ into /n & t/; thania(t) 'a fold, something bent', thana (v.) 'bend, fold' via lexical shift and passing /th/ into /t/; or tawia(tun) 'a fold', tawa (v) via lexical shift, reordering, and turning /t/ into /t/. toilet (toiletry) via middle french toilette 'a cloth, bag for clothes', diminutive of toile 'cloth, net', from arabic taali, tuwali (pl.) 'of clothes, tails or rags'; tuwala(t) 'lengthening (of a dress)', tawila(t) 'table', or dhail 'tail (of dress)' via lexical shift and changing /t (dh)/ into /t/ (cf. toil from old french toellier 'pull at, drag about; later struggle, hard work', from arabic talla 'pull'). tower (turret) via old english torr 'tower, watchtower', from old french tor (modern tur), spanish and italian torre, from latin turris 'a tower, citadel, high structure', direct from arabic daar, door (pl.) 'house; world; abode' via lexical shift and passing /d/ into /t/; or toor 'mountain' via lexical shift and turning /t/ into /t/. town (townsman, town centre) via old english tun 'enclosure, garden, field, yard; farm, manor; homestead, mansion; group of houses', old high german zun (modern zaun) 'fence, hedge', from arabic teen, 'atyan 'village; farming area; mud; mud houses', passing /t/ into /t/; or siwan 'a walled-in enclosure' via lexical shift and turning /s/ into /t (z)/. track (trek) via old french trac 'trac of horses, trace', possibly form middle low german treck 'drawing, pulling', direct from arabic tareeq 'road'; /t & q/ turned into /t & k/. trafalgarsquare commemorates a british 1805 naval victory over the french, from arabic taraf al aghar 'lit., side/end (of) the spotted (white, glorious)', or taraf al agharb 'side/end (of) the west (in gibraltar)', turning /gh & b/ into /g & ø/ (harper 2015). see square. tube (tubular) via middle french, latin tubus 'tube, pipe', direct from arabic qadeeb 'stick', or qasab 'reed', merging /q & d (s)/ into /t/; or bawaba(t) 'gate, doorway' via reordering and lexical shift. underground railroad (grind) via (i) old english under 'under, among', latin infra, and sanskrit adnah 'under', from arabic 'adna 'lower', comparative of doon 'below, down' via reordering and /r/-insertion; or 'in2idar 'going down' via /2/-loss (see infrastructure) and (ii) grund 'bottom, foundation, surface of the earth; abyss, hell; sea bottom', german grund 'ground, soil, bottom', from arabic jurd(un) 'unplanted land' via reordering and passing /j/ into /g/. urban (urbanity, urbanize, urbane, conurbation) via latin urbanus 'lit., of a city; refined, courteous', from urbs 'city, walled town', from arabic bina', bunian 'building; built areas' via reordering and passing /n/ into /r/; rab3 'a home and its occupants; residential area; a group of people', turning /3/ into /s (ø)/; 3arab 'arabs; city dwellers; villagers' and related 3arab(at) 'village; a current', 3areeb 'soft land; a person' via /3/-loss and passing /t/ into /s/; bars, barnusa' 'people; a group of trees; village' via reordering; ribs 'brave, courageous; beating with hands; go; fill up with water' via lexical shift and related ribsa(t) 'ugly, dirty; mixture', rabeez/rabees 'nice, good, polite; big; full' via lexical shift, reordering, and passing /z (s)/ into /n/; busr, busra, basr 'good red earth; good stony mud; white limestone; side' via reordering and passing /s/ into /s (n)/. u-turn (tour, detour) via old english turnian 'rotate', from old french, from latin tornare 'to round off, turn on a lathe; polish', tornus (n) 'lathe', from greek tornos 'lathe, a tool for drawing circles', from arabic dawaraan 'turning round'; /d/ became /t/. vault (evolve, revolve, volvo) via old french voute 'arch, vaulting', from latin volta, contraction of volvita, from volotus, from volvere (v) 'to turn, roll', direct from arabic laffa, laflaf (repetitive), laffa(t) (n) 'to turn' or lawa, lawia(t) (n) 'to turn' via reordering and passing /w/ into /v/; or 2awta, 2a'it, al-2a'it 'wall, the-wall', turning /2 & t/ zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach into /v & t/. villa (villain, villain, village) via italian, from latin villa 'country house, farm', related to vicus 'village, group of houses, direct from arabic fila2a(t) 'farming', fala2 (v) 'to farm' via /2/-loss and lexical shift. village (villa, village, ville) via old french vilage 'houses in a group', from latin villaticum 'farmstead', from villa above, where /2/ became /ge/. villain (villainy, village, villa) via old french vilain 'farmer, commoner', from latin villa 'country house, farm', direct from arabic falla2(in) 'farmer', fala2 (v) 'to farm' via /2/-loss and lexical shift. see villa. walk via old english wealcan 'to toss, roll, move round', from arabic walaq 'walk'; /q/ became /k/. see side. way (away; always, anyway; deviate, deviation, deviance) via old english 'road; room, space; freedom of movement', old high german weg (weg) 'way', from latin via 'way, road, channel, course', from arabic wajh, wijha(t) 'face, way, direction', merging /j & h/ into /y/. see highway, motorway, alleyway. wild (wilderness) via old english wilde 'in the natural state, uncultivated, uncontrolled, undomesticated', german wild', direct from arabic falaat 'the wild; grazing land; being out of control'; /f & t/ became /w & d/. window (wind, eye) via old norse vindaya 'lit., wind eye', from vindr 'wind', from arabic nada, nadwa 'wetness, dew' via reordering and/or changing /a/ to /w/ and (ii) auge 'eye', from arabic 2ijaj 'eye bone' via lexical shift and /j/-mutation into /y/; alternatively, from arabic 3ain daw' 'lit., eye (for) light', turning /3 & d/ into /w & d/. yard (garden) via old english geard 'fenced enclosure, garden, court; residence, house', old high german garto (german garten) 'garden', gothic gards 'enclosure; house', direct from arabic jidar, judran (pl.) 'wall; garden' via reordering and passing /j/ into /g/; or 2ujrat 'room, (stone) house', merging /2 & j/ into /y (g)/ and passing /t/ into /d/. see garden. as 'a measurement unit', it comes from old english gerd/gierd 'rod, staff, stick, measure of length', from arabic qarta(t) 'rod; a cut', turning /q & t/ into /g & d/. zigzag via french, perhaps from german zickzack 'tooth, prong; military siege', direct from arabic 3awaj, i3wijaj 'bent, bending' or siaj 'siege, fence'; /3 (s) & j/ passed into /z & g/. zoologicalgardens (zoology, zoo) via greek zoion 'animal', direct from arabic 2aiwan 'animal', passing /2/ into /z/ and deleting /n/. see garden. in short, the total number of urban terms in this study amounted to 130, all of which have true arabic cognates: i.e., 100%. the results show clearly that urban terms in arabic, english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit, and all indo-european languages are true cognates for sharing identical or similar forms and meanings, with their differences, however, being all due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and semantic change. since the percentage of shared urban words between arabic, english, latin or greek, for example, amounted to 100%, this indicates their membership to the same languagei.e., dialects, for which a much lower 60-80% ratio is usually set according to cowley's (1997: 172-173) 100-word list-based classification. therefore, the results are in full agreement with the findings of previous studies (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-g) in which english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit and arabic were all found to be not only members of the same family but also rather dialects of the same language. more precisely, they lend further support to the radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory on all levels of analysis. theoretically, the main principle which states that arabic, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee english, german, french, and the so-called indo-european languages are not only genetically related but also are dialects of the same language is, therefore, verifiably sound and empirically true. thus they make up a larger language family, which has been termed eurabian or urban as a blend of european and arabian languages (jassem 2015c: 41, 2015d). furthermore, this implies by necessity that all the above languages descended from an earlier, perfect, suddenly-emerged language, called radical (world) language from which all human languages initially came and which has incessantly and variably survived into today's languages, though getting simpler and simpler over time. in other words, the radical language could never have died out beyond recognition. with proper methodology, it can be easily recovered as shown in this work. as this work demostrated, it seems that its closest or most conservative and productive descendant is arabic for having preserved almost all its features (jassem 2014h-k, 2015a-d). in fact, all indo-european languages descended directly from arabic for reasons outlined earlier (jassem 2015a-b, 2015d: 131-132; 2014a-b, 2014e). the exact time and place of the split-up between arabic and the so-called indo-european languages is immaterial (for details, see jassem 2015e-f). as a consequence, reconstructing an old world language is needless; rather that proto-language, called radical language here, is still very much alive, having variably survived into today's languages, with arabic being its closest descendant as the above data clearly shows (for detail, see jassem 2014h: 254-256, 2014i: 116-117; 2014k, 2015a-b). thus the quest should focus on relating those languages to it instead of reconstructing hypothetical, fictitious languages. as to the analytical plane, the procedures of the theory all operated neatly and smoothly on all levels. phonetically, the whole changes were natural and plausible, cyclic and multi-directional, including processes like substitution, deletion, reversal, merger, split, reordering, reduction, and so on. morphologically, the affixes, whether inflectional or derivational, had true arabic cognates as well. for example, the commonest affixes –n (-an, -en, -ene, in-, -ine, -ing, -ness, -ar), -t (-ate, -ette, -ite, -ity; ad-, de-, -ed; -s, -ess, -ous), -tion, and –al (-eal, -ile, -elle) are true, identical cognates in arabic and english as well as all indo-european languages as shown above (for detail, see jassem 2012f, 2013a-b, 2013l, 2015d). semantically, lexical stability was the common pattern where most urban terms preserved their basic meanings across the languages, e.g., abide, live, reside, home, house, mansion, court, palace. the recurrence of lexical convergence in the data was due to formal and semantic similarity between arabic words, on the one hand, and their english, german, french, latin, and greek cognates, on the other. for instance, abide, alley, architecture, design,move, pen, reside, stay, urban might each derive from several arabic words, all formally and semantically similar (see 3 above). although only one cognate might be the ultimate source in the end, no need is presently felt to specify which one it might be; the reader may judge. likewise, semantic multiplicity (polysemy) was recurrent, where some english words had more than one meaning, which might just as well have more than one likely arabic cognate; for example, abide, zaidan ali jassem the arabic origins of english and indo-european "urban terms": a radical linguistic theory approach cultivate, dwell, live, mount, story have different meanings, every one of which derives from formally and semantically similar arabic words (see 3 above). as a matter of fact, almost all arabic words are polysemous in nature. lexical shift occurred frequently as in apartment, avenue, bed, booth, park, path, village, the last of which, e.g., moved from its original or radical meaning 'farm' to 'village' currently. lexical divergence is rare, which took place in gang and infra from arabic naafir 'bulging, protruding' (see 3. above). lexical split affected bridge, burgh, borough, resulting from arabic burj 'tower; a high structure'; track and trek split from arabic tareeq 'road, way'; pen, banana, combine, compound, bone all split from arabic bana 'to build' and related derivatives. lexical change affected villain, which originally meant 'farmer'. finally, lexical variability recurred in the data, whether at the level of the different forms of the same words within the same language such as english city or across the languages like english city, german stadt, french cite/citet, spanish ciudad, latin civis (citatem/civitas), and arabic jiddat (jaddat, juddat) 'city; river side' (see 3 above). arabic, in particular, is replete with linguistic variability of all types such as jiddat and haih 'far' which has over sixty variants (ibn manzoor 2013). finally, a word on methodology is in order. although tracing the arabic origins of english, german, french, latin, greek, and sanskrit words works well by, actually cannot be carried out without, following the routes outlined in their etymologies such as harper (2015), yet there are countless instances of uncertain or unknown etymologies and implausible, complicated, unnecessarily lengthy, and/or erroneous derivations. in many cases like abide, alley, castle, county, dwell, farm, head, house, mansion, office, pen, road, dining room, street, track, etc. a direct derivation from arabic is not only shorter but also more logical, which, at the same time, preserves both the form and meaning of cognate words. conclusion the main findings can be recapitulated as follows: i) the 130 urban terms in arabic, english, german, french, latin, greek, and sanskrit are true cognates, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change. ii) the radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory has been adequate for genetically relating urban terms in the above languages to one another, according to which they are all dialects of the same language and which comprise one large language family that may be called eurabian or urban, for short. phonetically, the main changes included substitution, reversal, reordering, deletion, split, and merger; morphologically, the changes centered around –t, –n, and –al which behave in similar ways in all; lexically, the recurrent patterns were stability, convergence, multiplicity, shift, split, and variability. iii) the radical or root language, or early prehistoric language, was real and perfect, which has variably survived into today's languages. as arabic is phonetically, morphologically, and lexically the most complex of all, it can be safely said that it has inherited almost all the radical language features, thereby showing its incessant permanence as the most conservative of all. iv) finally, the current work supports english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 3, issue 2, june 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee earlier calls for further research into all language levels, especially lexis (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-h); it also calls for similar research in other world languages or their families (jassem 2014h-i, 2015h); also the application of such findings to language teaching, lexicology and lexicography, translation (jassem 2014d, 2015a), cultural (including anthropological, historical, social, religious) awareness, understanding, and heritage is badly needed to promote cross-cultural understanding and cooperation in all aspects of human life. acknowledgements sincere thanks are warmly extended to everyone who contributed to this research in any way worldwide. i'd like to thank fahrus zaman fadhly, editor-in-chief of english review, for the timely and kind invitation to contribute to their esteemed journal. for my supportive and inspiring wife, amanie m. ibrahim, i remain indebted as ever. references albabidi, a. m. a. 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(5th ed). cambridge: cambridge university press http://www.almaany.com/ altha3aalibi,a.m.(2011).fiqhuallughatwaasra english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 169 investigating the effect of canva on students’ writing skills audi yundayani english education study program, stkip kusuma negara, indonesia e-mail: audi_yundayani@stkipkusumanegara.ac.id susilawati english education study program, stkip kusuma negara, indonesia e-mail: susilawatitoro@stkipkusumanegara.ac.id chairunnisa english education study program, stkip kusuma negara, indonesia e-mail: chairunnisa.khis@stkipkusumanegara.ac.id apa citation: yundayani, a., susilawati, s., & chairunnisa, c. (2019). investigating the effect of canva on students’ writing skills. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 169-176. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1800. received: 28-01-2019 accepted: 30-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: a growing number of language teaching studies have started to consider the role of technology in teaching writing. moreover, recent work in english as a foreign language (efl) class has highlighted the importance of introducing visual media in an effort to help students improve their writing skills. the present study aims at investigating the effect of canva on students’ writing skills. to this end, forty-four indonesian efl students were selected and assigned randomly to two writing classes, namely control and experimental groups. before the treatment, both groups had a pre-test. during the sessions of instruction, both classes were taught by adopting communicative language teaching (clt) approach. however, in the experimental group, in order to help students to explore their writing ideas, they were asked to use canva as media of writing. after the treatment, both groups had a post-test. then, the number of writing errors made by students from both groups were compared using ancova. the results showed that students in the experimental group had a significantly lower number of writing errors compared to the control group, which confirmed the positive effect of canva in improving students’ writing skills. keywords: canva; communicative language teaching; visual media; writing skill. introduction the mastery of writing skill in english is a priority for many higher education students including in indonesian context. writing in english is considered to be a skill included in the core academic skills and the most complex skills to master compared to reading, listening and speaking (makalela, 2004). writing, a communicative skill, can be seen as a mechanism to experience students’ knowledge by developing and presenting their ideas. in addition, zamel (1982) viewed writing as a meaning-created process. it means that writing requires a recursive process for being able to deliver meaning. further, hyland (2003) believes that writing instructions had a process model covering; 1) selection, 2) pre-writing, 3) composing, 4) replying to drafting, 5) editing and proofreading, 6) evaluation, 7) publishing, and 8) follow-up tasks. the process itself requires students to discover and reformulate their thoughts as they try to approximate meaning. in order to support that condition, language teachers need to not only teach english, but also simplify the complex writing process for their students. thus, to facilitate students’ writing skill, proper learning media to writing should be introduced in efl class. learning writing, however, is not an easy task for many efl students who have insufficient vulnerability outside of class to the authentic language. previous studies have indicated that such factors as lack of writing experience, language deficiency, and low motivation may cause efl students face difficulties in writing (ying, 2018; yundayani, 2018; zhang, 2018). although almost all scholars in the field generally accept that writing difficulties are an integral part of the efl learning process and that students should be supported in overcoming their difficulties, the audi yundayani, susilawati, & chairunnisa investigating the effect of canva on students’ writing skills 170 same consensus has not been shared on how to treat the difficulties of students. in this current situation, college students prefer to participate in their activities using technology. several researchers (hernandez, 2017; wiyaka, mujiyanto, & rukmini, 2018) point out that technology is an important language teaching tool in this sense since the use of technology can increase students’ motivation. they are equipped with digital age literacy, inventive thinking, high-order thinking and sound reasoning, effective communication and high productivity (tinio, 2002). students need those to develop their language skills, including writing skills. one of the controversial issues in foreign language teaching was the level of technology use required in writing classes, including media formats. media formats, the physical forms in which content is incorporated and displayed, facilitate the learning process. visual media is a type of media used for language learning. it can be diagrams on a computer screen, whiteboard drawings, photographs, book graphics, cartoons, etc. (smaldino, lowther, mims, & russell, 2015). this media provides a learning experience that is consistent with students’ character as digital native. the visual media also supports the creation of efl students, expressing themselves to communicate with others. canva, a graphic-design tool website, is a visual technology media with a drag-and-drop format and provides access to over a million photographs, graphics, and fonts. it has millions of images, photo filters, free icons and shapes, and hundreds of fonts (canva, n.d.). canva as a website is a source of visual media that can be used as a window into the wider world outside the language class and is, of course, a collection of authentic material that is easily accessible. canva can be integrated to promote learning. smaldino et al., (2015) stated that visuals in the classroom, including canva, can serve multiple purposes, such as; 1) to make abstract ideas concrete; 2) to motivate students; 3) to give direct attention; 4) to repeat the information; 5) to recall previous knowledge; and 6) to reduce learning effort. canva is believed to be a tool for moving in just a few clicks from an abstract idea to a concrete site map. in addition, it can create a positive learning environment through any provided facilities, thus affecting the concentration, memory and attitude of the students. if students feel positive about their situation, they will also feel more positive about what they are doing and will be more willing to participate through direct attention in the learning process. the best way in learning is when the students get experience through the meaningful learning process and it becomes easier to recall. canva provides moment experience for students to engage in creative process, so they can repeat the information through recalling their previous knowledge. all in all, most research studies in technology media conducted in efl classes rarely take the application of canva specifically to the writing process into consideration. we can refer to wahyuni and thohiriyah (2018), who reviewed canva as the infographic tool in presenting the teaching materials, among the existing research studies in this field. the study results showed that canva offers different themes and professional layouts to create the compelling infographic for presenting the teaching materials. it is also a simple tool that is extremely userfriendly. it should be noted that their research only focused on infographics and they did not incorporate the use of canva as a language learning media. therefore, this study intends to find out whether there were any statistically significant differences between the use of canva and noncanva on the students’ writing performance. besides, this study also tries to find out the students’ voices towards the implementation of canva in teaching writing. method this study applied a mixed method design which is started by collecting the quantitative data. after analyzing the quantitative data, the qualitative data were then collected and analyzed. 44 mid-intermediate college students were randomly assigned to two intact groups, namely control and experimental group. each group consists of 22 students. the data collection procedure included pilot testing, homogenizing participants, administering writing test, conducting treatment, and conducting a semi-structured interview. here, a writing pre-test was administered before the treatment in which the students were asked to write a paragraph of 200 words for about 30 minutes. following the pre-test, treatment was conducted to the experimental group. to achieve the study’s goal, canva has been provided to the students with orientation session and how it english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 171 helps them perform their writing activities. then, during the term, the experimental group participants were asked to use canva in writing process, including selecting the topic, composing, and publishing. on the other hand, the control group received no treatment. here, the teaching and learning process was done by applying conventional instruction in which the teacher gave the writing topic and asked students to write directly without any use of ict media. further, the same writing test was performed after the treatment in both experimental and control group to compare and figure out whether their writing performance improved. here, a scoring rubric was provided for the three raters to grade students’ writing test. in addition, a semi-structured interview was also conducted. through convenience sampling, four participants were selected to be interviewed to find out their perceptions of using canva in the writing process. mackey and gass (2005) believed that convenience sampling was a nonrandom method of sampling used to select individuals for study. it is important to note that the researchers designed the interview items and two raters reviewed them. each interview lasted for about 20-30 minutes were recorded. finally, all recordings were transcribed and then coded for analysis. finally, the pre-test and post-test data were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics and analysis of covariance (ancova). the test normality assumptions were examined before running the ancova. since the three raters had their own scores, the correlation coefficient of the pearson product moment was used to measure the reliability of the inter-rater to determine to what extent the raters agreed. in addition, to explore the merits and demerits of applying canva in the writing process, the researchers tabulated the responses of the students from a semi-structured interview and provided the frequency and percentage by means of descriptive frequency. content thematic analysis was applied to analyze the qualitative data covering the concepts and the texts. results and discussion as we had 4 sets of scores, including the experimental and control groups’ pre-test and post-test, ancova is the best statistical test as it can take into account the pre-tests score too. correlation analysis was used to test null hypothesis. since all written scores in both groups were rated by three raters, all these ratings in both groups were correlated to check reliability between raters. all these coefficients of correlation indicated high agreement among the raters. the descriptive statistics of the two groups in terms of their writing scores were calculated after assuring inter-rater reliability. tabel 1. descriptive statistics (control class) tabel 2. descriptive statistics (experimental class) the findings showed that there was an improvement of the students’ writing performance in the experimental group. yet, to confirm whether the improvement is significant compared to the control group, the post-test of the two groups was compared through analysis of covariance (ancova). in order to run ancova, it is necessary to check several assumptions. the assumption of normality should be firstly confirmed, found to be met on the basis of the ratios of skewness and kurtosis. audi yundayani, susilawati, & chairunnisa investigating the effect of canva on students’ writing skills 172 the next assumption is related to the homogeneity of variances which was found to be met by levene’s test results in table 3 (p>.05). the levene’s score test of error variance is expressed by statistics f = 3.96 with df = (1.42) and p-value = 0.053> 0.05 or h0 accepted. thus, the mean parameter of the three sample data groups has the same or homogeneous variance. table 3. levene’s test of equality of error variancesa the assumption of homogeneity of regression slopes and the ancova results are shown in table 4. the table indicates that the assumption of homogeneity of regression slopes is met; interaction f(1,43) = 9.5, p>.05. moreover, the table also shows that the pre-test effect was f(1,43) = 15.69, p<.05, and the post-test effect was f(1,43) = 1.422, p<.05, eta squared = .03 small to medium size. further, the fcount = 15.69; df= (1, 41); with p-value = 0.00 < 0.05, which means that there is a difference in the average writing skill between students using and not using canva. in other words, there are statistically significant differences on students’ writing skills in experimental and control group. table 4. ancova results the ancova test revealed that there are statistically significant differences on students’ writing skills in experimental and control group. this finding is consistent with those suggesting technology media as a perfect way to promote students’ writing skills (beaufils & duarte, 2018; erguvan, 2015; franco-camargo & camacho-vásquez, 2018; lam, n.d.). the improvement of students’ writing skill in experimental group can be seen as a result of the use of canva since this kind of visual media can stimulate students to develop their writing ideas. as stated by suhartono and laraswati (2016), the application of visual media can help students to get ideas easily. the findings contributed a significant change that was expected since the teacher provided a visual media, canva, that could motivate students to write by providing the stimulus through photographs, graphics, images, photo filters, free icons, shapes, and hundreds of fonts (canva, n.d.). canva, the visual media provided through technology, was seen as the potential means to increase the opportunities for students to be actively involved in writing processes. as noted by tinio (2002) that information and communication technology (ict) provides students with digital age literacy, inventive thinking, higher-order thinking skills, effective communication, and high productivity. further, the findings support a study by dunkel (as cited in liu, moore, graham, & lee, 2002) which notes that technology enhances students’ self-esteem, vocational preparedness, english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 173 language skills, learning autonomy and, in particular, immediate feedback. these may be some reasons why technology has contributed positively to the language learning process. it was believed to be the essential and effective tool in writing process for students to feel more creative, including feeling more autonomous in their learning. in general, with regard to the advantages and disadvantages of using canva in writing skills, all students admitted that writing experience through canva is satisfying and fruitful; none of them thought it was inappropriate for writing learning. in the following excerpts, canva’s benefits mentioned by the experimental group students are presented. participant 4: i found that the use of canva helped me to develop my ideas in writing. this media provided many images and color. participant 2: the use of canva gave me interested experience in writing english. i was motivated. participant 2: i became very anxious the first time i was about to start writing, but after experiencing the canva, i become more confident in learning how to write. participant 3: the use of canva was so helpful in writing. it made me easier to write by exploring the idea through the provided images. participant 1: i could create my own writing and the canva images reinforced my idea of writing. participant 1: the reader was interested in reading my text. converesely, the following excerpts focused on the disadvantages of using canva as stated by the participants. participant 2: the use of canva cannot give feedback on my writing. participant 4: the use of canva has not corrected my errors in grammar and parts of speech. participant 1: this software did not provide a tool for interactive writing. participant 2: i was confused how to use this canva to write collaboratively. the qualitative results of the students’ voice regarding the advantages of using canva on students’ writing revealed some elements, namely helping to develop the idea, motivating, being confident, being creative, as well as making readers interested in reading the text and making it easier for them to understand the meaning of the written text. these findings are consistent with national student education technology standards (nets-s) which specifically outlines expectations for students who use technology to guide their learning. the expectations included creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration, fluency in research and information, critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making (smaldino, et al., 2015). the use of canva use was believed to support learning process, including in writing class. research finding showed that as a visual media, canva focused on learning activity centered on students to explore ther creativity. this finding is in line with yuyun (2018) who suggested that student-centered teaching learning activities can be done to deepen students’ understanding as well as explore their creativity by integrating it with the implementation of the online application, namely canva. yet, this study also found some disadvantages mentioned by the students in using canva. the participants indicated that during the writing process, canva is unable to provide feedback and to correct writing errors. they believed that getting feedback and correction are important when they write. feedback could be given on the exact point in the text, namely incorrect spelling, incorrect word order, incorrect tenses, concord, incorrect form, singular or plural writing (hyland, 2003). feedback and correction are seen as the best way to respond to the students’ work and have an impact on the quality of their writing. furthermore, both feedback and correction tell how the text appears and how it can be improved. the third and the fourth drawbacks are related to canva which does not provide an interactive writing tool. students were therefore confused about how to use this canva collaboratively to write. these findings contrast strongly and sharply with other related studies. most of them believed that in order to work collaboratively, technology conditions students. lee (2000), for example, found that computer assisted language learning (call) provide audi yundayani, susilawati, & chairunnisa investigating the effect of canva on students’ writing skills 174 the situation for students to work collaboratively in pairs or groups. furthermore, haring-smith (as quoted in suwantarathip & wichadee, 2004) stated that technology could be the main source of collaborative learning and writing. in addition, alsubaie and ashuraidah (2017) considered the good impact of integration in english as a foreign language (efl) contexts between collaborative learning and technology. they said that collaborative and technological skills can be used to develop students with different learning styles, the same tools that offer collaboration can also enhance individual learning. therefore, it is basically possible to determine the successful learning process through collaborative learning. in general, the quantitative data analysis described the use of canva as having a positive impact on the students’ writing performance. the students also highlighted some of the advantages, including the disadvantages of using canva in the writing process. all in all, the research results admitted the valuable effects of using canva on students’ writing process. conclusion the results of the ancova test showed that students’ writing performance on the post-test was significantly higher than the pre-test. besides, the study also showed a statistically significant difference between the two groups. thus, the null hypothesis formulated is rejected. with regard to the students’ voices towards the use of canva, it can be noted that students appreciate the use of canva and believe that canva offers great advantages in improving their writing performance. basically, most students mentioned that the use of canva in writing supports them by providing pictures, color, images, photos, font, and graphics. they were equipped to develop their idea of writing. they believed the use of canva made them more creative in english writing. by using canva, they also found the writing process easier. it became effortless to deliver their ideas through canva as well as making it easy for readers to understand the messages. finally, students said they were more motivated to write and the use of canva can lower their anxiety. using canva as a technology media helps students improve the quality of their writing performance. they also get to know how to apply technology to language learning. furthermore, learning foreign language is believed to be a fun activity for the students. overall, students view canva as a useful and practical learning tool to promote their writing. acknowledgements this work was supported by the research fund provided by directorate of research and community service, directorate general for research and development, ministry of research, technology and higher education of republic of indonesia. in accordance with the research contract for fiscal year 2019, number: 49/akm/monopnt/2019, date march 27, 2019. references alsubaie, j., & ashuraidah, a. 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(n.d.). evaluation of using ict in teaching tertiary english writing. doi: 10.5353/th_b4413937. lee, k. (2000). english teachers’ barriers to the use of computer-assisted language learning. the internet tesol journal, 6(12). liu, m., moore, z., graham, l., & lee, s. (2002). a look at the research on computer-based technology use in second language learning: a review of the literature from 1990-2000. journal of research on technology in education, 34(3), 250-273. mackey, a., & gass, s. m. (2005). second language research methodology and design. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. makalela, l. (2004). differential error types in second-language students’ written and spoken texts: implications for instruction in writing. written communication, 22(4), 368-385. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 175 smaldino, s. e., lowther, d. l., mims, c., & russell, j. d. 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(2018). students’ perception on the usefulness of ictbased language program. english language teaching, 11(2). doi: 10.5539/elt.v11n2p53. ying, z. (2018). exploring construction of college english writing course from the perspective of output-driven hypothesis. english language teaching, 11(2), 188. doi: 10.5539/elt.v11n2p188. yundayani, a. (2018). present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 119-126. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1262. yuyun, i. (2018). curriculum and technology design: a course to explore technology applications in efl curriculum design. journal of elt research, 3(1), 78. doi: 10.22236/jer_vol3issue1pp78-86. zamel, v. (1982). writing: the process of discovering meaning. tesol quarterly, 16(2), 195-209. zhang, y. (2018). exploring efl learners’ selfefficacy in academic writing based on processgenre approach. english language teaching, 11(6), 115. doi: 10.5539/elt.v11n6p115. audi yundayani, susilawati, & chairunnisa investigating the effect of canva on students’ writing skills 176 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 bridging technological gap among english teachers through digital squad project nia kurniawati english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, suryakancana university, indonesia e-mail: nia@unsur.ac.id apa citation: kurniawati, n. (2018). bridging the technological gap among english teachers through digital squad project. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 41-50. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1494. received: 07-08-2018 accepted: 13-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: the technology advancement has forced the teachers ignoring their generation to migrate from off line into digital platform since the use of technology in education has changed the face of education massively. this project tried to capture an effort in bridging the technology gap among teachers across generation by forming a digital squad to provide digital teaching media assistance to teachers. it consists of several english education pre-service students in a private university who have high interest and skill on technology. this study explored the facts on the squad activities, the teacher participants‟ responses to the events organized by digital squad, and the obstacles in conducting the project. the results showed that the workshops organized by the squad gained positive feedback from the teacher participants. however, the classic problems frequently appear during the activities involving technology are the internet connection and the various technological competence among the participants. finally, it is suggested to employ younger generation to bridge the technology gap among language teachers across generation in education setting, since the younger generation is usually techno savvy and the older generation should be willing to embrace the technology development in order to survive in millennial classroom. keywords: digital squad; workshop; language teachers; generation; technology; teaching media. introduction undoubtedly, technology has impacted the lives of everyone more or less. in recent years, advancement and ease of using technology has made everyone wonder how technology can improve the way they do things. the key is awareness and to determine how technology can add value. the impact of technology on education has been tremendous recently and teachers have no choice that to follow the currents and familiarize themselves with technology used in the classroom. further, technology has always been at the forefront of human education. from the days of carving figures on rock walls to today, when most students are equipped with several portable technological devices at any given time, technology continues to push educational capabilities to new levels. in looking at where educational methods and tools have come from to where they are going in the future, technology‟s importance in the classroom is evident now more than ever. as technology advances, an educator‟s abilities will grow by leaps and bounds, and without the knowledge of these changes and capabilities, an instructor has a good chance of being left behind. due to ict‟s importance in society as well as in the future of education, identifying the possible challenges to integrating these technologies in schools would be an important step in improving the quality of teaching and learning although teachers appear to acknowledge the value of ict in schools, they continue encountering obstacles during the processes of adopting these technologies into their teaching and learning (ghavifekr, 2016). mailto:nia@unsur.ac.id nia kurniawati bridging technological gap among english teachers through digital squad project 42 a career in education requires hard work and dedication, but, for the diligent educator, can prove very rewarding (kennedy, 2016). for those who are serious about success in the education field, staying well-informed of current and changing technologies is imperative. as the world of technology evolves, the learning environment, both oncampus and online, will equally progress, and the need for teachers who are educated in technology and design will continue to grow. in line with the technological development, teaching media also changed. if previously most of teachers use conventional teaching media such as book, magazine, newspaper, picture, flashcard, etc. in their class, now some of them move to technology-based teaching media. technology-based teaching media is a media that integrated with computer and internet. for examples, social media, mobile application, software, etc. globalization has made both teaching and learning intricate and the transformation in part has been driven by technological innovation (lam, 2010). with internet technology, people have access to available information quickly. together with this technological revolution is the emergence of one of the most viable technological reforms in education, the use of information and communication technology (rosa, 2016). ict become a potential tool to increase learner‟s motivation and engagement in classroom learning, for example ict in english class. both english and ict have become essential literacy skills for a growing number of non-native speakers of english to ensure full participation in the information society (tanang, djajadi, abu, & mokhtar, 2014). in the present scenario, there is an easy access to information with technology. the teacher here takes on the role of facilitator and guide so as to facilitate students with the right approach of managing abundant information to their optimum benefit and in taking right decisions in this technologically complex world (jan, 2017). in the technosavvy society, teachers‟ role becomes very essential as they make students learn how to evaluate the abundant information available critically, to identify facts from propaganda, to understand the real ethical, legal and moral issues with respect to the access and use of information, and to create meaning from data. all these questions view education in the larger context of today‟s society and thus, it makes students capable of solving the real world current problems and prepare for a future of unknowns. the information bloom and the subsequent knowledge explosion have led to tremendous changes in the life of the individuals today and its effect is also witnessed in the field of education. with global connectivity facilitated by ict, searching for any information today has become a child‟s play. in this digital era, the coming generations are quite adept at handling, managing and working with technology. even the younger kids and toddlers, probably by way of their genetic inheritance are able to operate the smartphones and other modern gadgets. thus, these gadgets have been embedded with the daily routine of the modern lives. tylor (2017) in her article explains five generations from 1900 until now. the first generation is the traditionalist/veteran, who was born between the years of 1900 to 1945. the second is the baby boomers, this generation was born between 1946 and 1964. the third generation is individuals born between the years of 1965 and 1980 called generation x or also known as gen x-er. x-er is a generation that witnessed the miracles of technological advancement and the horrors of man-made disasters. they obsessed with email, they like to communicate concisely. the next generation is the millennials, they were born between 1981 and 2000. the rapid diffusion of the internet as a technological innovation occurred in this generation‟s youth, allowing them to experience this exciting new medium‟s explosion at about same time the front wave of this generation was learning to read. the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 last generation is generation z, born after 2000. the characteristics of this generation are almost the same as millennial generation, but generation z has a multi-tasking skill. they can apply all activities that integrated with technology at the same time (kraus, 2008). most of the teachers are still digital migrants that are born after 19th century whereas the young learners are the digital natives who are born after 19th century when the technological revolution came. that is why using technology comes so naturally and easily to them. there are numerous challenges faced by teachers in using ict. society demands a higher level and different set of skills than schools were ever designed to teach. ict brings with various challenges that teachers need to face. first of all, there is a need for adequate availability of technology in the schools which includes huge costs incurred on acquiring, installing, operating, maintaining, and replacing ict‟s. the basic infrastructural requirements suited for making adequate provision of ict are required. secondly, it is imperative to make all teachers ict literate and effective in handling ict tools for teaching-learning processes (ekberg, 2017). another challenge is that the teachers need to develop their own capacity so as to efficiently make use of the different icts in different situations. they need not be apprehensive that icts would replace teachers. another challenge faced by teachers is that english being the prominent language associated with modern technology. this causes problems as in many states people are not comfortable with english. the very electronic devices that have become an extension of our children are an enigma to many of us in the older generation. technology has brought some sort of alleviation for the teachers from one another which we call as „digital divide‟ (onye, 2016). teachers are not comfortable in handling these modern gadgets and technological devices. rather than having students use computers, say, to better understand a math equation through a virtual hands-on activity, teachers may limit the use of that tool to word processing, in the similar manner as the typewriter was used a generation ago. the challenge for educators is not to dismiss or keep up with students‟ latest technological know-how, but to create meaningful learning experiences in which students are taught how to apply their knowledge to solve real-world problems (wissiak, 2013). the reality is in our country, the english teachers varied from different generations. some of them are baby boomers, some of them are digital immigrant, and small amount of them are millennials with their own characteristics. those different generation teachers however, deal with the same generation in their classroom, that is generation z. it is certainly problematic when some teachers cannot answer the demand from the students who were born with technology and are used to live with technology (cilliers, 2017). the problem becomes bigger when teachers, who have willingness to improve their professional development, in this case upgrading their ict skill, face the reality that there is rarely chance to have workshop, let alone the teachers who work in rural area (rahman, 2016). this issue has triggered the author to form a group of millennials who would serve the teachers in ict workshops for free. therefore, the goals of this study are: 1. to investigate how the digital squad project is initiated and implemented. 2. to find out the teacher-participants‟ responses to the project. 3. to get deeper understanding on the response from the digital squad members in joining the project to bridge the tecnogap among english teachers. method the case study design was employed for this research. a case study is a variation of an ethnography in that the researcher provides an in-depth exploration of a bounded system (e.g., an activity, an event, a process, or an individual) based on extensive data nia kurniawati bridging technological gap among english teachers through digital squad project 44 collection (cresswell, 2009). this design allows the researcher to concentrate on a single group of subjects and the use of multimethod data collection strategies to identify the implementation of digital squad project in bridging the technology gap among teachers. secondly, it is to find out the teachers‟ response to the project, and to investigate the obstacles during conducting the project. this design is an appropriate way to illustrate those phenomena which are not very well understood and need to be examined very closely and also has the potential to provide an in-depth understanding of process rather than outcome (creswell, 2009). to ensure the internal validity in the research design, several methods of data collection should be used for triangulation purposes (yin, 2009). in this research, some instruments were used to collect the data, i.e., observation, questionnaire, and interviews. the research was conducted in english education study program of surykancana university. in a qualitative inquiry, the intent is not to generalize the findings, but to develop an in-depth exploration of a central phenomenon. thus, to best understand the phenomenon, the reseracher purposefully or intentionally selects individuals and site. cresswell (2009) states that the research term used for qualitative sampling is purposeful sampling. in purposeful sampling a researcher intentionally selects individuals and sites to learn or understand the central phenomenon. the standard used in choosing participants and sites is whether they are information rich. the participants in this study are 10 students of english education of suryakancana university and senior high school english teachers who join mgmp of english lesson in cianjur regency. qualitative data analysis is done primarily by using the data collected through observation, questionnaire, and interview. these will be analyzed qualitatively where a case study is emphasized. analyzing case study evidence is especially difficult because the strategies and technique have not been well defined (yin, 2009). moreover, yin (2009) also suggested that the main point of data analysis in a case study is defining priorities for what to analyze and why. in a qualitative study, a researcher needs to analyze the data to form answers to the research questions. this process involves examining the data in detail to describe what the researcher learned and developing themes or broad categories of ideas from the data (cresswell, 2009). describing and developing themes from the data consists of answering the major research questions and forming an in-depth understanding of the central phenomenon through description and thematic development (cresswell, 2009). results and discussion this part presents the findings in the current study, followed by the discussion on three issues. the issues are about the implementation of the digital squad project, the teacher participants‟ response to the digital squad project, and the response from the digital squad members in implementing the project in bridging the tecno-gap among english teachers. the implementation of digital squad project the idea of forming digital squad was actually rooted from the reality that many teachers are unable to keep up with technology advancement to be applied in the classroom. it becomes one of the concern in our study program as the institution dealing with future teachers‟ education. this concern has lead the study program to organize some events to enhance the teachers with ict skills to be applied in the classroom. however, this kind of event is very costly and a bit difficult since the experts on ict on education field are not always available. this has triggered the idea of “cloning the expert” and using the clones to train the teachers with the ict skills that have been absorbed by the clones. the clones are called digital squad. they are university students who have high interest on ict as well as self-confidence to english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 45 share their skills to others. in a nutshell, there are six steps in implementing the digital squad project as it is displayed in figure 1. it covers the needs analysis, the recruitment, the training with the experts, maintaining and strengthening, teachers workshop, and evaluation. figure 1. steps in implementing digital squad project the first step conducted in forming the ds squad is doing needs analysis. the needs analysis is an effort in recognizing the real situation in this case the situation in english classrooms with the teachers who handle them. as it is acknowledged that nowadays technology has been part of human life in every aspect, including in education. teachers are demanded to follow the advancement of technology and applied it within classroom. this is because the students that the teachers deal with come from different generation that technology has been in their dna, therefore the way they live, and learn of course so much different from their teachers‟ era. the students who are mostly come from generation z expect their teachers to involve technology in the teaching. however, the students‟ expectation is not answered by the teachers. from the prior study to analyze the way the teachers deal with media in the classroom, most teachers (70%) are observed still rely on paper and pencil, and 30% of them have started to apply technology-based media in their teaching, as it can be seen in figure 2. this data was gained from a prior study conducted involving english teachers of senior high school in cianjur who join mgmp. they were given questionnaire to evaluate the media and techniques they use in their english classroom. after they returned the questionnaire, their classes were then observed to crosscheck their answer to the questionnaire. figure 2. the needs analysis from the prior study, it was found out that the teachers mostly still rely on paper and pencil in their english classroom. they prefer to stick to their comfort zone rather than challenge themselves with ict use in their classroom. they ignore the demand from their students to involve technologybased media in the teaching. however, there are still some teachers who come from younger generation and have involved more advanced media and willing to improve themselves, but the chance for professional development is still scarce. the teachers should spend much to attend workshop in other cities. it is of course discouraged them to continue their professional development. those two issues, the teachers‟ lack of skill in ict and the scarce chance of professional development for teachers in town, have inspired the author to form media for teachers‟ professional development especially in ict. the media would be forum or coaching sessions for teachers that would improve their skill on ict use in the classroom with reasonable or even free of charge. after recognizing the teachers‟ need that is forum or coaching clinic to improve their ability on ict in education but with achievable cost, the next step is recruiting the digital squad members that would be involved in workshop project with the teachers. the members of digital squad would be assigned to share their knowledge and skills nia kurniawati bridging technological gap among english teachers through digital squad project 46 of ict on education to the teachers. they would assist the teachers during and after the workshop. regarding the tasks that would be given to the members of ds, there are at least three categories of prospective ds members. it includes the age and the skills. for age factor, it is decided to choose members from generation y. they are usually university college students at the moments. they are chosen, since y generation or millennial are more skillful in technology and have more intense experience with technology than generation x. the other qualifications are the ds prospective members should have strong interests on technology and also have good presentation skill. it is because they are going to share their ict skill to the teachers who are much older than them. therefore, they have to be good at presenting and elaborating the technology use to the teachers who are commonly in their comfort zone and do not want to move on. the next step after selecting the prospective members of digital squad is providing them with the knowledge and skills needed to be used later in the workshop. in order to equip them with the proper skills, experts on ict in english teaching were invited to give the members of ds some trainings. the trainings were conducted several times to make sure that the members of ds comprehend the targeted skills. in this case, the ds got the opportunity to be trained by famous ict trainers from two prominent universities. they shared many applications that can be used in english classroom. at least, fifteen applications were introduced and practiced to the members of ds. those applications are padlet, kahoot, lyrics training, schoology, powtoon, screen cast o‟matic, canva, breakingnews.com, ello, cartoon story maker, ar, vr, and many more. the training with the expert gave the opportunity to the ds members to improve their knowledge and skills on ict. by the end of the training, the ds members have enough skills to be the coach in the workshop with the teachers. it is true that the ds members who come from generation y have better technology skill. however, to make sure that they are qualified to be the coach at teacher workshop, their skills should be maintained and strengthened. therefore, after the training with the expert, they were given some assignments to summarize the applications they were practicing during the training in focus group discussion regular meeting. the meeting is held weekly and the members should share the application they learnt to the other members. when the ds members are ready to share their ict skills to the teachers, then some workshops were organized. collaborating with local english teachers‟ organization, the members of ds were assigned to be the tutors during the teachers‟ workshops. the ds members assisted the teachers in using the applications introduced at the workshop. the first workshop was conducted on december 2017. the participants were english teachers of senior high school in cianjur. there were 40 participants who joined the workshop. the applications introduced at the workshop were lyricstraining, padlet, and quizlet. the second workshop was conducted in the university. the participants were language lecturers. the applications introduced were edpuzzle, powtoon, and padlet. the third workshop was conducted for english teachers of junior high school. the applications introduced were padlet, quizlet, and canva. in order to see the possibility of the continuity of the digital squad program, the evaluation was conducted. in the evaluation, the program is examined thoroughly. whether it has possibility to be continued, what are the strengths and the weaknesses of the program. it was conducted by discussing the matter with the ds members after each workshop. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 47 the teacher-participants’ response to the digital squad project the second issue of the current study is to find out the teacher participants response to the project. they were given questionnaire after the workshop. the questionnaire consists of seven items related to the use of ict in the teacher classroom, and their response to the workshop assisted by the ds members. the issues asked in the questionnaires are as follow: a. the use of media in the classroom before the workshop. b. media they prefer to use in teaching c. response to the project d. the benefits of the workshop e. the applications they use in the classroom after the workshop f. obstacles in applying the applications. from the questionnaire, it was found that the teachers have used media in their teaching. however, the media they utilize is still conventional that relies on paper and pencil. even some of them have also used a bit modern media such as ppt or video, but the use of them is still quite rare. at the workshop, the teachers were introduced to different kinds of application that can be used in efl classroom, such as kahoot, padlet, powtoon, lyricstraining, etc. table 1. the response from the teachers to the ds project no. categories responses 1. the use of media in the classroom before the workshop. often 2. common media they prefer to use in teaching ppt, video, pencil and paper 3. the most interesting apps in the workshop kahoot, padlet, powtoon 4. response to join the project very beneficial 5. the benefits of the workshop new media to be applied in the classroom 6. the application they use in the classroom after the workshop padlet, kahoot, powtoon 7. obstacles in applying the apps internet connection the response from the teacherparticipants is very promising. before the workshop held by ds members, they often rely on paper and pencil media, even some of them have used ppt occasionally. during the workshop, they are introduced to many applications to be used in their english classrooms such as kahoot, padlet, canva, schoology, ello, etc., and they even have their favorite apps, in this case kahoot, padlet, and powtoon, since they consider these three apps are easier and more interactive to be used with their students. they view the ds project that involves students who come from y generation as very beneficial project because most of the ds members are still very young, yet resourceful and helpful in handling their questions during the workshop. however, the teachers face classic problem when they want to apply the apps they learned from the workshop at school. not many schools have provided good internet connection. so, the teachers should spend more budgets to provide themselves with modem and pay for the internet connection. it has been very common, that there are numerous challenges faced by teachers in using ict. in one side, the teachers are demanded to equip the students with a higher level and different set of skills, but the school do not provide them with adequate facilities. it has to be admitted that ict brings various challenges that teachers need to face. one of them is the need for adequate availability of technology in the schools that covers high costs incurred on acquiring, installing, operating, maintaining and replacing ict‟s. nia kurniawati bridging technological gap among english teachers through digital squad project 48 the response from the digital squad members to the project at the beginning, this project is unintentionally initiated. yet, after the members of the projects were involved in the workshop, the members of ds share their responses toward the project. in digging the data on the members of ds members, an interview was conducted. from the interview, there are some interesting facts uncovered. most of them were satisfied to be involved in the project because they think that by joining the project, they learn new things earlier than others. they also learn how to work as a team. their favorite applications are padlet, kahoot, lyrics training, canva, and quizlet. since they are generation y, they do not need much time to comprehend an application, most of them only need 1 hour up to 1 day to fully understand an application since most of them are interested in using technology in classroom. they are used to utilize laptop, mobile phone, and application to assist them in learning at daily basis. however, they also find some problems in joining the project. the biggest issues are time allotment and internet connection. the ds members mentioned that the time allotment for the workshop needs to be added, since many teachers they were training could not absorb their explanation quickly. in one session, the teachers can comprehend one app, while the workshop usually offered more than one app. besides, the issue of internet connection again becomes one of the obstacles in integrating ict in the classroom. the workshop often did not run as it is planned for the internet connection was not available for every participants. even, it has been anticipated by asking all the participants to bring their own modem, but sometimes it takes time to connect and set the modem to the computer, since many teachers even do not know how to use the modem. in brief, the response from the members of ds are summarized in following table. table 2. the response from ds members to the project no. categories responses 1. interest to technology used in the classroom all students within the project are highly motivated in using technology in the classroom 2 familiarities with the apps introduces in the project some apps are new and they just know them in the training session. 3 common media they prefer to use in learning laptop, mobile phone, application, 4 time to learn each apps 1 hour to 1 hour 5 the most interesting apps padlet, kahoot, lyric training, canva, quizlet 6 response to join the project positive 7 benefits the benefits in joining this project are: learning digital teaching media earlier; learning how to work as a team; exploring more than one applications; getting more information about another application by sharing each other. 8 obstacles time and internet connection conclusion from this study, there are some important points to be concluded. regarding the first issue of the current research about how to implement digital squad project in bridging the techno-gap among english teachers, there are six steps within. the six steps include the needs analysis, recruitment, training, maintaining, workshop, and evaluation. from this project, it was found out that most teachers still rely on paper and pencil and avoid technology use in their classroom since not many chances of professional development for teachers available in small cities. university students who are mostly generation y are very suitable to be involved in this kind of project, since they are more adept with english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 49 technology. therefore, they can learn quickly from the expert on applications that can be utilized in english classroom. there are lots of free applications that can be introduced to the teachers to be used in the classroom, such as kahoot, quizlet, powtoon, etc. small scale workshop that involves teachers and the digital squad as the coach is a possible effort to upgrade the teachers‟ ict skill. for the second issue, the teachers respond very positively to the digital squad project, since they can learn many applications to be used in the classroom by the help of young generation in the squad. they also started applying some application in their classroom, such as padlet, and kahoot. yet, they face classic problem in applying them, i.e. internet connection, since not all school provide proper internet connection. as the third issue, the students who joined the digital squad projects get lots of advantages; they can learn many new apps for studying, they also build team work in this project. they basically face significant problem in learning the apps that would be shared in the workshop. they only need 1 hour to 1 day to learn the apps. however, as the problem faced by the teachers who followed the workshop is the internet connection, it also becomes one of the problems faced by the students. this is only small-scale project that only touch the english teachers in cianjur. however, this small project has gained positive feedback both from the teachers who became the workshop participants, as well as positive response from the students who joined the project. they mentioned that they are very excited to join the project, since it gives them many benefits. therefore, it is suggested to form bigger squad that could spread the digital virus to english teaching more massively. acknowledgement this study was funded by my institution. therefore, i would thank the faculty of education and teacher training of suryakancana university for the support. my appreciation also goes to the digital squad members who willingly join the project and do whatever they are assigned. references cilliers, e. j. (2017). the challenge of teaching generation z. people: international journal of social sciences, 3(1), 188 198. doi: 10.20319/pijss.2017.31.188198. creswell, j. w. (2009). research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (2 nd ed.). california: sage publication. ekberg, s. g. (2017). understanding challenges of using ict in secondary schools in sweden from teachers‟ perspective. the international journal of information and learning technology, 35(1), 43-55. doi: 10.1108/ijilt-01-2017-0007. ghavifekr, s. t. k. (2016). teaching and learning with ict tools: issues and challenges from teachers‟. malaysian online journal of educational technology, 4. jan, h. (2017). teacher of 21st century: characteristics and development. research on humanities and social sciences, 7. retrieved october 22, 2018, from https://www.iiste.org/category/www-iiste-orgacademic-journal-news/. kennedy, m. m. (2016). how does professional development. review of educational research, xx, 1–36. doi: 10.3102/0034654315626800. kraus, s. s. (2008). teaching for the millennial generation: student and teacher perceptions of community building and individual pedagogical techniques. the journal of effective teaching, 8(2). retrieved october 20, 2018, from https://www.uncw.edu/jet/articles/vol8_2/index. htm. lam, y. y. (2010). impact of globalization on higher education: an empirical study of education policy & planning of design education in hong kong. international education studies, 3, 73-85. retrieved october 23, 2018, from www.ccsenet.org/ies. rahman, a. (2016). teacher professional development in indonesia:the influences of learning activities, teacher characteristics and school conditions. university of wollongong thesis collection1954-2016. wissiak, k. s. (2013). bridging the gap between educational research and school practice through cooperation of university and primary school teachers. 4th international conference on new horizons in education. ljubljana: elsevier. yin, r. k. (2009). case study research: design and methods (4 th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. nia kurniawati bridging technological gap among english teachers through digital squad project 50 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 289 a case study of prosodic phrasal grouping and intonational prominence in language acquisition susanto english education study program, bandar lampung university, indonesia e-mail: susanto@ubl.ac.id apa citation: susanto. (2016). a case study of prosodic phrasal grouping and intonational prominence in language acquisition. english review, 4(2), 289-295 received: 23-02-2016 accepted: 28-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 introduction in the acquisition of a language, children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances and they are sensitive to prosody’s rhythmic and melodic patterns (ito, 2002). they can discriminate between two spoken languages on the basis of their prosody (mehler et al., 1988), and use various aspects of prosody to determine the location of words in the stream of running speech (morgan & saffran, 1995; morgan, 1996; johnson & jusczyk, 2001). children are also sensitive to correspondences among the acoustic aspects of prosodic phrasing when they listen to sentences, and they tend to pronounce their own utterances with appropriate affective and phrasal prosody (mandel, jusczyk & pisoni, 1995; katz et al., 1996). as the children’s knowledge of their native language becomes more adult-like, they eventually develop the use of the full complement of prosodic functions such as focus prosody. children are capable of processing prosodic prominence that express focus or contrast in a discourse (ito & speer, 2006; weber, braun, & crocker, 2006). in the research, i analyze two particular aspects of prosody in a child’s language acquisition, i.e. prosodic phrasal grouping, and intonational prominence. in the first aspect, i investigate whether the child uses prosodic phrases to group words together into interpretable units. in the second aspect, i analyze whether the child uses intonational prominence to focus marking prosody. method for the data, a monologue spoken a child (r, 6;01) was recorded by using sony ic recorder icd-px720 in shq (super abstract: in language acquisition, children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances. in line with that, as a case study in this research, i analyze two particular aspects of prosody in a child’s language acquisition, i.e. prosodic phrasal grouping and intonational prominence. in the first aspect, i investigate whether the child uses prosodic phrases to group words together into interpretable units. in the second aspect, i analyze whether the child uses intonational prominence to focus marking prosody. the result indicates that both aspects are used by the child. keywords: language acquisition, prosody, intonation, phonetic cues. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 290 high quality) recording mode. the child is bilingual (indonesian and english). in the monologue, the child was explaining in english how his toy worked. the sound is in a wave file with 120,4 seconds in length. the sound is analyzed acoustically in praat (boersma & weenink, 2012). for analyzing the prosody, i use a systemic phonological approach for tonality – chunking of speech into tone groups; and tonicity – identifying tonic syllable in a given tone group (halliday & greaves, 2008). results and discussion from investigating the speech of the child, the analysis shows that the child used prosodic phrases to group together words that should be comprehended together as coherent units. the using of prosodic phrases is exemplified in fig 1, 2, and 3. to some extent, utterances of the child are not grammatically wellformed. fig. 1 shows that the child chunks his utterances into three tone groups: // there’s a people on it // and // this is for //. the clause with existential process ‘there’s a people on it’ is uttered in unmarked tonality. the tone groups are separated by appreciable pauses. mostly, clear pauses also separate the child’s tone groups as observed in fig. 2 and fig. 3. fig. 1: the child’s utterance ‘there’s a people on it here’ // there’s a people on it // and // this is for // in fig. 2, it is seen that the child chunks a clause into two tone groups: // this is for // the sound wave //. it is interesting to note that the child does not make the prepositional phrase ‘for the sound wave’ club together. it can be interpreted that the child takes time to think the content for the circumstance. but, in fact, the child has anchored the information by attaching the preposition ‘for’ with participant + relational process ‘this is for’. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 291 fig. 2: the child’s utterance ‘this is for the sound wave’ // this is for // the sound wave // the child does the same for another clause ‘well, everyone, thanks watching my tv’, i.e. two tone groups for the clause: // well everyone // thanks watching my tv // as exemplified in fig. 3. in the utterance, the child club ‘everyone’, functioning as vocative, neither together with mental process + participant ‘thanks watching my tv’ nor in a separate tone group. the child clubs it together with ‘well’, functioning as continuative, instead. fig. 3: the child’s utterance ‘well, everyone, thanks watching my tv’ // well everyone // thanks watching my tv // from the analysis, it is also examined if the child uses prosodic prominence for expressing information focus. the finding shows that it is noticeable and the child does as exemplified in fig. 4, 5, and 6. as seen in fig. 4, the focus is antenna in the utterance ‘it has antenna’ since the tonic syllable is on *ten. the tonic syllable is more salient than the other syllables referring to amplitude, duration and change of pitch. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 292 fig. 4: the child’s utterance ‘it has antenna’ // it has an*tenna // (silence threshold (st) is 0.04; voicing threshold (vt) is 0.6 in praat settings) other examples also show that the child highlights the portions in utterances to indicate the prominence. see fig. 5 and 6 in which the foci are on *that and *this* respectively. the marked tonic syllables are in the determiners ‘that’ and ‘this’, which are non-lexical words. fig. 5: the child’s utterance ‘like that’ // like *that // (silence threshold (st) is 0.04; voicing threshold (vt) is 0.4 in praat settings) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 293 fig. 6: the child’s utterance ‘like this for the fire’ // like *this for the fire // (silence threshold (st) is 0.04; voicing threshold (vt) is 0.5 in praat settings phonetic analyses demonstrate that the child reliably used prosodic cues to convey the meaning of the utterances. the child used prosodic phrases in terms of tone groups in uttering words as coherent and interpretable units. in addition, the child used prosodic prominence for expressing information focus. conclusion from the analysis of this case study, it can be concluded that the child uses prosodic phrases and intonational prominence. the prosodic phrase is to group words together into interpretable units coherently. meanwhile, the intonational prominence is to focus marking prosody. in other words, the child has used prosody in language acquisition especially in producing utterances. it supports the previous researches that children use prosody in their production of utterances and use various aspects of prosody. more specifically, it is on prosodic phrases and intonational prominence in the stream of running speech. further research will be conducted to see whether the child uses prosody for utterances to convey the intended meaning with disambiguating situational contexts. references boersma, p., & weenink, d. (2012). praat: doing phonetics by computer [computer program]. version 5.3.24, retrieved 9 september 2013 from http://www.praat.org/. ito, k. (2002). the interaction of focus and lexical pitch accent in speech production and dialogue comprehension: evidence from japanese and basque. phd dissertation, university of illinois at urbanachampaign. ito, k., & speer, s. r. (2006). using interactive tasks to elicit natural dialogue. in augurzky, p., and lenertova, d. (eds.). methods in empirical prosody research. leipzig: mouton de gruyter. halliday, m. a. k., & greaves, w. s. (2008). intonation in the grammar of english. london: equinox. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 294 johnson, e., & jusczyk, p. w. (2001). word segmentation by 8 month olds: when speech cues count more than statistics. journal of memory & language 44(5), pp. 48 – 67. katz, w. f. et al. (1996). duration and fundamental frequency correlates of phrase boundaries in productions by children and adults. journal of the acoustical society of america 99, pp. 3179– 3191. mandel, d. r., jusczyk, p., & pisoni, d. (1995). infants’ recognition of the sound patterns of their own names. psychological science, 6, pp. 315–318. mehler, et al. (1988). a precursor of language acquisition in young infants. cognition 29.143 –78. morgan, j. l. (1996). a rhythmic bias in preverbal speech segmentation. journal of memory & language, 35, pp. 666 – 688. morgan, j. l., & saffran, j. r. (1995). emerging integration of sequential and suprasegmental information in preverbal speech segmentation. child development 66(9), pp. 11– 36. weber, a., braun, b., & crocker, m. w. (2006). finding referents in time: eyetracking evidence for the role of contrastive accents. language and speech 49(3), pp. 367– 92. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 295 appendix 1: transcript of the child’s monologue. welcome to the adventure from below. now we are … let a closer look. the new … can you see? there’s a people on it for here and this is for … this is for scanning. ei… ya this is for the scanning. for scanning and we can inside. it has scannning for here body stuff. e... not much because this is for… this is inside of this is. now now now, it down because it broke. because it’s animal on it. that’s why because this is for a gun...wheeeeeuchchh. like this… like this for the fire...wheeeeeuchchh. like that. this is not fire lighting. we can see over it for this. like this... tiiing. this is antenna. this is for the sound wave… ding ding ding. die. it has antenna. well everyone thanks watching my tv. appendix 2: some screenshots when the child was explaining in english how his toy worked. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 283 the use of ict in learning process by vocational teachers of english resty wiranda english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: restywirandabayumi@gmail.com ismail petrus (corresponding author) english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com machadalena vianty english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: vianty.unsri@gmail.com apa citation: wiranda, r., petrus, i., & vianty, m. (2020). the use of ict in learning process by vocational teachers of english. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 283-290. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2617. received: 19-02-2020 accepted: 21-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 introduction in the 21st century, there have been many changes in several areas such as technology, culture, society, and education. in the era of modernization, people are very dependent on technology, in education itself technology has important role in teaching and learning process, information communication technology (ict) is defined as ‘any technology used to support information gathering, processing, distribution and use’ (beckinsale & ram, 2006). in the 21st century the development of information technology is very rapid so that it has a very significant impact on the world of education. one of the most vital contributions of ict in the field of education is-easy access to learning. it is in line with what inderawati, sofendi, purnomo, vianty, &suhendi (2019) had conducted to the pre service efl teachers’ engagement in utilizing technology for learning supports. it showed that there were many things to be included: the place, class management, equipment used by students, application used, instructional material used, supporting crew, and instructors’ relation in learning activities. with the help of ict, students can browse information through e-books, sample examination papers, previous year papers etc. and can also have an easy access to resource persons, mentors, experts, researchers, professionals, and peers-all over the world. this flexibility has heightened the availability of just-in-time learning and provided learning opportunities for many more learners who previously were constrained by other commitments (young, 2002). in addition to flexibility in usability, ict is also considered flexible in time space, as explained by julio and carmen (2013), the flexible time space accounted for by the integration of ict into teaching and learning processes contributes to increase the interaction and reception of abstract: in the era of modernization, people are very dependent on technology, information communication technology (ict) in education itself has important role in teaching and learning process. the purpose of this study was to investigate the kind of ict used by the teachers, the utilization of ict in learning process, the problems and solutions in teaching by using ict, and the role of schools in assisting teachers to overcome the problems at vocational high schools in sekayu. this study applied descriptive qualitative research design. the data were collected by using questionnaire, interview, observation, and document review. the participants of this study were the teachers of english, the vice-principal of facility and infrastructure, and the students. the findings of this study showed that the teachers of english at vocational high schools in sekayu used hardware such as projector, laptop, speaker, headset, and smartphone, while software such as internet, dictionary application, e-book, microsoft office, and browsing application. the teachers used discovery learning to utilize ict in the syntax of the learning model. the main problem faced by the teacher was the unavailability of students’ personal ict devices. the school also had the role to assist teachers in overcoming the problems. the conclusion was the teachers had applied ict in the learning process however they did not fully apply ict in each syntax of the learning model used. keywords: ict; the use of ict; learning process, teachers of english; vocational high school. mailto:restywirandabayumi@gmail.com mailto:ismailpetrus@yahoo.com mailto:vianty.unsri@gmail.com resty wiranda, ismail petrus & machadalena vianty the use of ict in learning process by vocational teachers of english 284 information. ict also can be used in various ways where it helps teachers and students to learn about their respective subject areas, as stated in the 2013 curriculum, information and communication technology (ict) is integrated into learning. inderawati (2017) put forward that modern classroom must become technology as the essential key component in the 21st century learning. unesco (2016) stated that there are five competencies for the teacher in the 21st century, one of them is the use of ict in the process of teaching to prepare and to support the learning competencies in their classroom. this makes a teacher obliged to master ict in learning. the role of icts becomes very important in the learning process because it can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of learning so that it can increase the attractiveness and attention of students. the global expectation to ict in education from ministrial regulation of national education and culture of republic of indonesia no. 22 year 2016 chapter i explained that the use of information and communication technology is to improve efficiency and effectiveness of learning. inderawati, agusta, &sitinjak (2018) found that mobile learning as one of the modes of learning had a potential effect on students’ reading achievement. however, it is not relevant with the facts from weaver and pier (2011) explained that entering the 21st century which is full of technology does not make students more creative and energetic, instead it decreases student communication skills. weaver and pier's research was strengthened by a survey conducted by nace (national association of colleges and employers) in 2017 indicating that as many as 67.5% of students had low communication skills. some studies related to the use of ict by the teacher, such as the study conducted by fitriyadi (2012). the results of this study showed that the vocational high school productive teachers’ ict skills in general are in the low category, the ict implementation in productive teaching in vocational high school in general is in the moderate category, and the constraints in the ict implementation in productive teaching in vocational high school are related to the local government’s policies, program funding, professional development in ict, availability of ict resources, and ict utilization in schools. other study by miraj (2017) showed that the use of ict (computers, internet) has been used by students of vocational high school, however usability of ict does not fully support the learning process. the government’s expectation on ict has not been achievable because there are some obstacles found from some research results. these results show that there are many obstacles faced by both teachers and schools in implementing ict in schools. nevertheless, some previous researchers have investigated the important roles of technology in learning english to enhance students’ literacy (inderawati, 2011; fajri, inderawati, mirizon, 2015; inderawati, petrus, & jaya, 2019). according to djojonegoro (1998) a good vocational high school is responsively and anticipatory to technological progress. based on the observation the researcher did at three vocational high schools in sekayu, the schools had implemented ict in the teaching and learning process. technology-based education is also supported by the muba government with the vision and mission of the muba regent as follows: “realizing the smart musi banyuasin regency with the entire opd digitalization program. the service is integrated in realizing optimal, efficient and transparent governance in providing information access”. in addition, the data obtained by researchers from the three schools are that there are three majors in vocational high schools in sekayu related to technology, such as: multimedia, technology of science, and computer engineering and networking. one of the objectives of this study is to find out what media are used by teachers in the teaching and learning process, considering the students in this majors have a background with the ability in the field of ict. in relation to the explanation above, the aims of this study were to find out the kind of ict used by the teachers of english, the utilization of ict used by teachers of english in learning process, the problems and solutions in teaching by using ict, and the role of schools in assisting teachers to overcome the problems. method this study was a descriptive qualitative research conducted through data collection in field through interview, questionnaire, observations and document review, to find out the kinds of ict used by teachers of english in vocational high schools in sekayu, the utilization of ict by teachers of english in the classroom, the problems faced by teachers of english in teaching by using ict and the solution to overcoming the problems, the role of schools in assist teachers of english in english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 285 overcoming the problems faced by teachers of english towards ict. this study was conducted at three vocational high schools in sekayu: vocational high school 1 in sekayu, vocational high school 2 in sekayu, and vocational high school 3 in sekayu. these three schools are selected because they have received to ict facilities, such as: free internet access, electric power, lcds, laptops from the government. the participants of this study were the teachers of english, the vice-principal of facilities and infrastructure each school and students. the five teachers of english selected in each school based on the observation the writer did on vocational high school in sekayu there were five teachers who teach in major related to ict who are willing to be participants in this study. to collect the data, the researcher used four instruments. the instruments included interview, questionnaire, observation, and document. after the data was collected, the writer analyzes for answer the research questions. questionnaire was analyzed by a simple statistical analysis that is by calculating the respondents’ answers from each item and putting the answer in the form of percentage. the results of questionnaire are transcribed descriptively used for showing the problems faced by teachers of english in teaching by using ict and the solution of the problem. while, for the interview is transcribed descriptively. in order to obtain supporting information for interview results, observation technique was conducted. the researcher took some pictures and writing a comment in observation paper during teaching and learning process, after obtaining the results, then the transcribed descriptively in order to strengthen the interview results. lastly, the documents collected from lesson plan that used during the observation analyzed by responses to the research question. this study used triangulation to determine validity by analyzing from various perspectives. denzin (2006) stated that triangulation is the process of corroborating evidence from different individuals. based on the types of triangulation, the study used methodological triangulation. therefore, data triangulation helped the writer to justify the findings and results of this study. results and discussion the results of this study cover four areas. they are the result of questionnaire to the teachers, interview to the teacher of english, the vice principal of facilities and infrastructure in each vocational high school in sekayu, and students, observation in classroom during learning process, and document collected from lesson plan that used during the observation. hardware and software used by the teachers the results of interviews conducted by researchers showed that all the teachers at the vocational school in sekayu had applied ict in the learning process. the ict they use also varies. the following are the statements from the teachers. “i utilized a smartphones for browsing and access to the google translate application, and i have received permission from the school to allow students to use their smarphones during my lessons.” (ey) “…and i used the language laboratory for the study room where i can access some electronic learning media, such as: e-books, videos, audio and visuals. and for the hardware i used to use computers, projectors, and speakers.” (ag) “sometimes i use laptops and projectors to display material on power point. although i didn't use in every teaching because at school only provides one laptop and lcd for one major. while laptops and lcds were more prioritized for teachers from productive subjects” (i) “ict facilities available at the school are wifi for, lcd and laptop and from that facility i used lcd and wifi” (nma) “at vocational high school 3 in sekayu, it provides a language laboratory equipped with computers, projectors, tvs, speakers, headsets, and wifi even though wifi can only be used by teachers and students cannot use it because many users are feared to slow down internet connections. sometime i use a laptop and lcd available in the language laboratory, and wifi.”(sh) the data of interview was relevant to the data of observation and the lesson plan that used during the observation. the table 1 shows the results of hardware and software used by the teachers. resty wiranda, ismail petrus & machadalena vianty the use of ict in learning process by vocational teachers of english 286 table 1. ict used by the teachers of english at vocational high school in sekayu ict used by the teachers of english schools teachers hardware software vocational high school 1 in sekayu ey smartphone internet and applications (dictionary application and browsing application) ag laptop,projector, speaker, and headset internet and e-book vocational high school 2 in sekayu i projector and laptop microsoft office (power point) vocational high school 3 in sekayu nma projector and laptop internet sh projector and laptop internet the kinds of ict used by the teachers of english at vocational high school in sekayu are divided into hardware and software. in line with anderson and glend (2003) defined information and communication technology (ict): ict generally relates to those technologies that are used for accessing, gathering, manipulating and presenting or communicating information. the technologies could include hardware e.g. computers and others devices, software applications, and connectivity e.g. access to the internet, local networking infrastructure, and video conferencing. in conclusion the hardware used by teachers of english at vocational high schools in sekayu includes: projectors, laptops, computers, speakers, and headsets. while for software including: internet, e-book, and electronic dictionary. in line with the study by prasanea (2017) the finding showed the use of hardware such as: television, computers and sound systems make students more easily understand the material presented. the utilization of ict the kinds of ict chosen by the teachers is utilized in assisting the learning process, one of the ict is smartphone. in line with wastiau et al. (2013) note that laptop and tablet computers as well as cell phones are increasingly seen as useful in education as they offer portability and choice as to when and where to use them.from the results of observation and document, the all of the teachers who participated in this study used discovery learning as a learning model, however each teachers used ict only part of the syntax in discovery learning and every teachers have a different method in utilizing ict in learning process. it was also stated in an interview, the table 2 were describe the result of interview. table 2. the utilization of ict by the teachers of english at vocational high school in sekayu schools teachers learning media syntax ict use ey discovery learning data collection smartphone and internet vocational high school 1 in sekayu ag discovery learning stimulation and data collection stimulation: laptop, projector, speaker, and headset data collection: internet and e-book vocational high school 2 in sekayu i discovery learning stimulation projector and laptop vocational high school 3 in sekayu nma discovery learning stimulation and data collecting stimulation: projector and laptop data collecting: internet stimulation data collection, and generalization stimulation: projector and laptop data collecting: internet sh discovery learning english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 287 in conclusion, the all teachers utilize ict in the core activities where all teachers use discovery learning as a learning model but ict is only used for a few syntaxes, such as: stimulation, data collection, and generalization. the utilization of ict in the learning process could be seen from the learning model used by the teachers. the syntax of the learning model would show the teacher's activities in teaching using ict. there were several learning models that are used in the learning process and involve the role of ict as a learning media. there are 4 learning models that are generally used based on ministry of education and culture number 22 year 2016 stated that learning model that brings out activity and creativity, inspiring, fun and initiative, centered on students, authentically, contextual, and meaningful to daily student life. the learning models are developed, among others: discovery learning, inquiry learning, problem based learning, and project based learning. the problem and solution in using ict from the results of the interview and questionnair, the teachers in each school found several problems in applying ict in the learning process. in addition, they also have their own way of dealing with the problem. the problems faced by the teachers of english at vocational high school in sekayu as shown in table 3. table 3. the problem and solution of the problems faced by the teachers of english at vocational high school in sekayu the data conducted by interview and questionnaire to the teachers. the most common problem faced by the teachers of english at vocational high schools in sekayu were unavailability of students’ personal ict devices. the teachers’ statement to support this data is below. “…i find problems where students do not have personal’s ict devices to work on tasks using ict for example: typing papers, making discussion material using power points, discussions on facebook”. (i) “i have a plan to create a study group on social media to become their members for discussion and sharing because in my opinion the school time is only two hours of study and it is still very lacking, i also want students to do independent assignments at home using the edmodo application because this application is automatic correct and score so it is very effective. but not all of my students can access the internet or have their own laptop.”(nma) “the problem i faced was that not all students at vocational high school 3 in sekayu had ict devices to use outside of school hours so that i sometimes chose not to give assignments that needed ict devices.”(sh) the most common problem faced by the teachers of english at vocational high schools in sekayu were unavailability of students’ personal schools teachers problems solutions vocational high school 1 in sekayu ey school regulation asking permission from the school to students are allowed to use smartphones during english lessons ag the awareness of students in maintaining school facilities. unavailability of technicians 1. giving advice and punishment to students 2. repairing the damage by themselves or asking student for help vocational high school 2 in sekayu i unavailability of students’ personal ict devices to giving homework giving students more time to collected assignment (homework) nma unavailability of students’ personal ict devices to make learning group in social media only use the english lesson time to discussing and sharing sh unavailability of students’ personal ict devices to access the internet dividing students into groups resty wiranda, ismail petrus & machadalena vianty the use of ict in learning process by vocational teachers of english 288 ict devices as discussed in the study from around the world about ict in education, young (2003), the students identified three negative reasons were also given. computer access to those students who did not have computer at home. lack of home computer access to those students at disadvantage because they can only use class time and class breaks to access computers in the computer lab. although the problems they faced were the same namely unavailability of students support ict devices, each teachers faced this problem in the application of ict with different goals, as shown in the table 3, so that three out of five teachers who faced this problem have their own ways in overcome the problem. how the schools assist teachers the results of interview were gained from the teachers and the vice-principal facility and infrastructure. the results showed that the role of each schools in assisting the teachers’ problems. the following are the statements of the vice principal facility and infrastructure. “we always coordinate with the teacher to ask what ict equipment is needed and then we will submit it to the principal so that the facility is immediately provided if from the results of discussion and consideration of the principal that the device is indeed needed and the lack of awareness of students in maintaining school facilities, we always support every teacher's policy during the learning process. for teachers who face problems related to school regulations, we have coordinated with these teachers and have given permission for students to use smartphones during english lessons.”(ad) “for this problem i can only advise the teacher to give another alternative task to these students or can divide students into groups so that students who do not have ict devices can join students who have ict facilities because the school does not facilitate students to use laboratories outside school hours”. (dm) “so it is true that at vocational high school 3 not all students come from capable families, so there are only a few students who have laptops and other ict devices. but in schools students can use laptops and the internet in the laboratory”. (ms) the role of schools in assisting teachers in overcoming the problem is presented in table 4. table 4. the role of schools in assist teachers of english in overcoming the problem faced by the teachers schools teachers problems the role of schools in assist teachers of english in overcoming the problems vocational high school 1 in sekayu ey school regulation giving permission for students to used smartphones during english lessons ag 1. the awareness of students in maintaining school facilities. 2.unavailability of technicians 1. support teachers and repair damaged facilities 2. asking teachers to report to the vice-principle of facilities and infrastructure if there are facilities that need to be added or damaged. vocational high school 2 in sekayu i unavailability of students support ict devices to giving homework the school only appealed to the teacher to give another alternative task to these students or can divide students into groups vocational high school 3 in sekayu nma unavailability of students’ personal ict devices to make learning group in social media only use the english lesson time to discussing and sharing sh unavailability of students support ict devices to access the internet internet access for students is being submitted to the principal to increase the capacity of the internet connection in conclusion, schools have an important role in facilitating teachers to utilize ict as a learning medium given that these three schools have used the 2013 curriculum where technology is a english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 289 learning medium that must be applied to learning media as coincides with the result of the study conducted fitriyadi (2012), the constraints in the ict implementation in productive teaching in vocational high school are related to the local government’s policies, program funding, professional development in ict, availability of ict resources, and ict utilization in schools. in the era of modernization, people are very dependent on technology, in education itself technology has important role in teaching and learning process according to ministrial regulation of national education and culture of republic of indonesia no. 22 year 2016 chapter i, it states that the use of information and communication technology is to improve efficiency and effectiveness of learning as of the role of schools in facilitating and assisting teachers in dealing with problems during the application of ict in the learning process is very needed. conclusion this study investigated the kind of ict used by the teachers, the utilization of ict in learning process, the problems and solutions in teaching by using ict, and the role of schools in assisting teachers to overcome the problems at three vocational high schools in sekayu. this study concluded that the kinds of ict used by the teachers divided into hardware such as: projector, laptop, speaker, headset, and smartphone, while program such as: internet, e-book, microsoft office, dictionary application and browsing application. the teachers had utilized ict in the learning process however the teacher did not fully utilized ict in each syntax of the learning model used. moreover, the descriptive analysis of the results showed that the main problem is the unavailability of students’ personal ict devices was important problem. the main solution proposed by teachers was asking student to used smartphone. the schools also had different ways in assisting teachers in overcoming the problems related to ict. the conclusion was the teachers have applied ict in the learning process however the teacher did not fully apply ict in each syntax of the learning model used. moreover, the unavailability of students’ personal ict devices was another important problem in giving assignments, motivating students to prepare material for the next meeting, and for accessing the internet. references anderson, j. & glenn, a. (2003). building capacity of teachers facilitators in technology-pedagogy integration for improved teaching and learning: final report. bangkok: unesco, asia and pacific regional bureau for education. retrieved from: www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ict/e book/ictbuilding_capacity/buildingcapacity.pd f. beckinsale, m., & ram, m. (2006). delivering ict to ethnic minority businesses: an actionresearch approach. environment and planning c: government and policy, 24(6), 847 – 886. denzin, n. (2006). sociological methods: a sourcebook (5th ed.). aldine transaction. isbn 978-0-202-30840-1. djojonegoro, w. (1998). pengembangan sumber daya manusia melalui sekolah menengah kejuruan. jakarta, indonesia: pt. jayakarta agung offset. fajri, h, m., inderawati, r., & mirizon, s. (2015). the implementation of peer editing technique to improve writing achievement. the journal of english literacy education: the teaching and learning of english as a foreign language, 2(2), 48-57. fitriyadi, h. 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(2019). students’ engagement in utilizing technology for learning support. english franca: academic journal of english language and education, 3(2), 181-195. julio, a., & carmen, l. (2013). application of expert judgment as an evaluation technique for information and communication technologies (ict). eduweb revista de tecnología de http://www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ict/e resty wiranda, ismail petrus & machadalena vianty the use of ict in learning process by vocational teachers of english 290 información y comunicaciónen educación, 7(1), 11-22. ministrial regulation of national education and culture of republic of indonesia. (2016). government regulation no. 22 tahun 2016. retrievedfrom: bsnp indonesia.org/.../permendikbud_tahun2016_no mor022_l... miraj, y. z., rohendri. d, yanuar, nurhabibah, & wendi, h. f. 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(2013). the use of ict in education: a survey of schools in europe. european journal of education, 48(1), 11-27. weaver, k.d., & pier, p.m. (2010). embedded information literacy in the basic oral communication course: from conception through assessment. public service quarterly, 6(3), 259 270. young, s. c. (2003). integrating ict into second language education in a vocational high school. journal of computers assisted learning, 19, 447-461. young, j. (2002). the 24-hour professor. the chronicle of higher education, 48(38), 31-33. http://naceweb.org/about-us/press/2017/the-keyhttp://sastra.um.ac.id/wp resty wiranda ismail petrus (corresponding author) machadalena vianty introduction method results and discussion the utilization of ict the problem and solution in using ict how the schools assist teachers conclusion references english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 27 teachers’ attitude towards peer observation at najran university: a case study soada idris khan the preparatory year program, najran university, king of saudi arabia e-mail: khan.soada@gmail.com apa citation: khan, s. i. (2019). teachers‟ attitude towards peer observation at najran university: a case study. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 27-32. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2350. received: 08-10-2019 accepted: 10-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: the present research paper aims to analyze teachers‟ attitude towards peer-observation and suggest remedies to improve practice of peer-observation. as part of the methodology, the researcher selected twenty questionnaires as a sample of this study. twenty teachers involved in peer-observation (as observer and participants) were also interviewed and their suggestions and opinions were taken into consideration to improve practice of peer-observation at pyp, najran university. the analysis of data showed that teachers do not whole-heartedly support peer-observation. the study also found that most of the teachers are not well familiar with the concept and application of peer-observation. they often consider evaluation as an excuse to termination. the study accomplishes that a teachers‟ performance/ability cannot be judged in 20-30 minutes. therefore, the study recommends that there must be many peer-observations for the same class and the best one must be assessed. the study also suggests organizing seminars and workshops to orient teachers to the process and advantages of peer-observation. keywords: teachers’ attitude; evaluation; teaching practices; peer-observation. introduction teachers usually do not like their classes to be observed especially when the observee is more qualified and experienced than the observers. they do not wholeheartedly welcome feedback form their juniors. moreover, remaining completely unbiased, honest and true is also a big challenge for the observers. richardson (2000), in a study designed to improve teaching methods in his teaching establishment, found that requests to visit another teacher‟s classroom were met with suspicion and mistrust. observees get more anxious and tense while someone comes to observe their classes though they are very good teachers. a psychological fear does not allow observee perform in a natural way. it is observed that some of the observees get so furious and tense that they cannot even speak properly. fear of being terminated, even in formative evaluation, does not let them perform well. it is attributed to teachers‟ fear of being judged since any kind of observation is synonymous with evaluation. it seems it is not so much a matter of being watched that causes the uneasiness about peer observation, but the fear of being evaluated (richardson, 2000). some novice teachers are more nervous as they have never been observed. often, it is seen, that observers themselves are not well trained for the job. they participate in the process just to obey administrative orders, not willingly. however, various teachers expressed their utmost satisfaction with the practice of peer-observation. they admitted peer-observation helped them reflect on their own teaching and feedback was quite rewarding for them. in this regards, richards and farrell (2005, p. 85) defines peer observation as “a teacher or other observer closely watching and monitoring a language lesson or part of a lesson in order to gain an understanding of some aspect of teaching.” it is such a collaborative practice that offers opportunity for interchange and whose power resides in its collegial orientation and its exposure of colleagues to a variety of experiences through exchange of ideas (marshal, 2004, cited in donnelly, 2007, p. 29). moreover, hammersley-fletcher and ormond (2005), in a study of teachers‟ views on peer observation, found a number of areas for concern: anxiety over giving and receiving feedback, the possibility of collegial relationships being damaged, not knowing what was required of them and the time involved in the process were all areas perceived by teachers to present difficulties. however, one teacher did acknowledge that, in time, peer observation could be effective and another that it could lead to improved relationships with colleagues they previously had little contact. peer observation is presented as a developmental mode of observation that aims at soada idris khan teachers’ attitude towards peer observation at najran university: a case study 28 improvement of performance by identifying strengths and weaknesses through reflection and provision of feedback in a collaborative environment (cosh, 1999). as far as reflection is concerned, the peer observation process promotes a more systematic and focused approach to it. scrivener (1994) states that teachers are expected to demonstrate the ability to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, to take steps to remedy the latter, and to carry out effective selfevaluations of their own teaching (cited in brandt, 2008, p. 43). the feedback received will help identify ill practices, resulting in improving teaching skills, while persuasive feedback on a teacher‟s ability to teach well will also result in enhancing teacher self-efficacy, thus, leaving teachers more confident to implement more groundbreaking techniques (donnelly, 2007). thus, there is no doubt in the fact that peer-observation is a very important practice and it must be continued. teachers usually advocate the importance and positive aspects of peer-observation. however, there are also some doubts, fears that must be taken into account. the present study attempts to take into account teachers‟ attitude (positive and negative) towards peer-observation as well as to suggest remedies to improve practice of peerobservation. method this action research analyses teachers‟ attitude towards peer-observation. wallace (1998, p. 4) defines action research as “… systematically collecting data on your everyday practice and analyzing it in order to come to some decisions about what your future practice should be.” the study, thoroughly, analyzes data collected from teachers, especially to find out teachers‟ attitude towards peer-observation and provide some suggestions, based on the findings, to improve practice of peer-observation. as wallace (1998) states, “action research involves the collection and analysis of data related to some aspect of our professional practice; this is done so that we can reflect on what we have discovered and apply it to our professional action” (p. 16). this process is followed in this research. at the core of this process was a sincere effort to eliminate psychological fear of observee and improve the practice of peer-observation at pyp, najran university, by bringing changes where needed. to collect the data, the researchers circulated the questionnaire to forty participants and thirty were returned. finally, twenty questionnaires given serious attention were selected as a sample of this research. twenty teachers involved in peer-observation (as observer and observee) were also interviewed and their suggestions and opinions were taken into consideration to improve practice of peer-observation at pyp, najran university. results and discussion the discussion of the findings is divided into two parts; the first contains a detailed analysis and discussion on the statements of the questionnaire and the second one contains a detailed analysis and discussion on the responses of interview. questionnaire analysis reed (1989) is of the opinion that likert-type rating scale should be used to generally gather data. jung, osterwalder and wipf (2000) support the likert scale by stating: “this was the only assessment instrument i found that was practical for the classroom” (p.2). to interpret the level of means, the authors applied rahaya and salbiah‟s (1996) model of explaining means as summarized in table 1. table 1. score category breakdown adopted from rahayu and salbiah (1996) means corresponding level 1.0 1.80 very low 1.81 2.60 low 2.61 3.40 moderate 3.41 4.20 high 4.21 5.0 very high table 2. descriptive statistics of the survey’s statements and discussion result s. no.↓. scales → statements ↓ 5 strongly agree 4 agree 3 can`t say 2 disagree 1 strongly disagree mean 1. peer-observation increases nervousness/anxiousness of the observe 3 15% 12 60% 4 20% 1 5% 0 0% 3.85 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 29 2. observee is more qualified and experienced than the observers 5 25% 10 50% 3 15% 2 10% 0 0% 3.9 3. observers usually tend to compare, a natural phenomenon which can potentially be beneficial to teachers if used in a positive way 2 10% 13 65% 2 10% 3 15% 0 0% 3.7 4. observers and observees are reluctant giving and receiving feedback 5 25% 6 30% 4 20% 5 25% 0 0% 3.55 5. observers' evaluation is influenced when they find observee using same methodologies and techniques in the classroom that they usually do 2 10% 7 35% 8 40% 3 15% 0 0% 3.4 6. the feedback given by observers was helpful in improving teaching instructions 0 0% 12 60% 8 40% 0 0% 0 0% 3.6 7. observers are biased when observing the observee because of individual differences 4 20% 10 50% 1 5% 5 25% 0 0% 3.65 8. peer-observation is an essential activity to bring professional development 6 30% 6 30% 2 10% 5 25% 1 5% 3.55 9. the opportunity to observe, compare and reflect allows to absorb new ideas and encourage questioning our own teaching and values and, leading to selfevaluation. 0 0% 8 40% 8 40% 4 20% 0 0% 3.2 10. it is essential that the two observers who go to observe a class must have mutual respect and trust 2 10% 12 60% 2 10% 4 20% 0 0% 3.6 the first statement in the questionnaire peerobservation increases nervousness/anxiousness of the observe reveals that there are 15% participants who felt peer-observation increases nervousness/anxiousness of the observee. 60% of the participants admitted to it, though (20%) of the participants did not express their opinion. 5% of the participants disagreed. the mean of the statement is 3.85 that lies in the category of „high‟ as per the breakdown adopted from the scale of rahaya and salbiah (1996). the second statement in the questionnaire observee is more qualified and experienced than the observers displays that there are 25% of the participants who opined that the observee is more qualified and experienced than the observers. 50% of the participants agreed, though (15%) of the participants had no idea. 10% of the participants did not accept the statement. the mean is categorized as high. the third statement in the questionnaire observers usually tend to compare, a natural phenomenon, which can potentially be beneficial to teachers if used in a positive way, shows that 10% of the participants are of the opinion that observers usually tend to compare, a natural phenomenon, which can potentially be beneficial to teachers if used in a positive way. 65% of the participants agreed to the statement, though 10% of the participants had no opinion. 15% of the participants dissented. the mean is high. the fourth statement in the questionnaire observers and observees are reluctant giving and receiving feedback exhibits that there are 25% of soada idris khan teachers’ attitude towards peer observation at najran university: a case study 30 the participants who strongly agreed that observers and observees are reluctant giving and receiving feedback. 30% of the participants also admitted to it. 25% of the participants disagreed to the statement. 20% had no response, while there was none who strongly disagreed. the mean is ranked as high. the fifth statement in the questionnaire observers’ evaluation is influenced when they find observee using same methodologies and techniques in the classroom that they usually do divulges that there are 10% of the participants who strongly agreed to the statement that observers’ evaluation is influenced when they find observee using same methodologies and techniques in the classroom that they usually do. 35% of the participants agreed with the statement, though (40%) of the participants did not express their opinion. 15% of the participants disapproved. the mean is moderate. the sixth statement in the questionnaire the feedback given by observers was helpful in improving teaching instructions discloses that there is none who strongly agreed to the statement. 60% of the participants concurred that the feedback given by observers was helpful in improving teaching instructions. 40% of the participants were not sure about it. there is none with disagreement. the mean is high. the seventh statement in the questionnaire observers are biased when observing the observee because of individual differences shows that 20% of the participants stated that observers are biased when observing the observee because of individual differences. 50% of the participants accepted the statement and 5% of the participants had no opinion. 25% of the participants did not accept the statement. the mean is categorized as high. the eighth statement in the questionnaire peer-observation is an essential activity to bring professional development unveils that 30% of the participants were in absolute agreement to the statement that peer-observation is an essential activity to bring professional development. an equal number (30%) of the participants agreed, while 10% of the participants did not state an opinion. 25% of the participants did not agree with the statement and 5% were in absolute disagreement. the mean falls in the category of high. the ninth statement in the questionnaire the opportunity to observe, compare and reflect allows to absorb new ideas and encourage questioning our own teaching and values and, leading to self-evaluation reveals no participant thought that the opportunity to observe, compare and reflect allows to absorb new ideas and encourage questioning our own teaching and values and, leading to self-evaluation. 40% of the participants agreed with the statement, though the same number (40%, a significant percentage) of the participants had no opinion. 20% of the participants disagreed with the statement. the mean is placed as moderate. the tenth statement in the questionnaire it is essential that the two observers who go to observe a class must have mutual respect and trust reveals that 10% of the participants strongly agreed with the statement that it is essential that the two observers who go to observe a class must have mutual respect and trust. 60% of the participants agreed to it, while 10% of the participants did not express their opinion. 20% of the participants did not agree with the statement. the mean is ranked as high. interview analysis another method used to collect the data was interviewing teachers. twenty samples filled in with complete information were selected for the study. the participants responded to the following questions: 1. how was peer-observation helpful in improving teaching instruction? 2. what are the barriers in the practice of peer-observation? 3. please provide suggestions for improving practice of peer-observation! table 3. results of interview question no. 1 q.1. number of participants how was peer-observation helpful in improving teaching instruction: 5 it helped reflect on our own teaching it helped us develop professionally peer-observation promotes collaborative work 8 it helped develop confidence evaluation affirmed that teaching methodologies and techniques were successful for a particular class it exposed to different teaching styles english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 31 7 feedback was helpful in improving teaching it makes feel good when colleagues appreciate good points of teaching instructions as shown in table 3, in response to question number 1, there were varied responses. only common and recurrent responses are listed above. many teachers agreed that peer-observation helped boost their confidence level and affirmed their teaching methodologies, techniques and style were appropriate for the particular classroom. meanwhile, feedback helped improve teaching further and develop professionally. table 4. results of interview question no. 2 q.2 number of participants what are the barriers in the practice of peer-observation 5 observers are not qualified enough to comment on colleagues' teaching it is too much time consuming in planning and executing 8 it often leads to biased commentary because of individual differences the department doesn‟t always provide stress free environment for peer-observation 7 peer-observation is not always reliable because observee often loses his natural style of teaching out of fear and nervousness observers and observees reach to an understanding of favoring each other in their respective session as their roles are often mutually switched as shown in table 4, in response to question number 2, there were some common barriers in the practice of peer-observation. a majority of teachers believe (as shown in responses) that peer-observation often becomes victim of individual differences. the department does not always provide stressfree environment. peer-observation cannot be reliable as observee often gets nervous and loses his natural style of teaching. table 5. results of interview question no. 3 q.3 number of participants suggestions for improving practice of peer-observation: 8 observers must be especially trained for peer-observation there must be workshops and seminars on peer-observation to orient faculty to its concept and advantages 6 external faculty should be called to evaluate to eliminate the fear of biasness there must be a follow-up session on the feedback of peer-observers 6 observee must be rewarded for good performance classroom teaching must be recorded and then evaluated by a committee of expert as shown in table 5, in response to question number 3, there were some common suggestions by the teachers. the common suggestions were that observers must be specially trained for peer-observation. respondent should also be oriented to the benefits of peer-observation by conducting workshop and seminars. external faculty should be called for peer-observation to make the evaluation more reliable. conclusion the results of the questionnaire exhibit that most of the statements fall in the category of high as per the breakdown adopted for the study. it proves that most of the teachers are in favor of peer-observation. 8 out of 10 statements score high, while the rest two fall in the category of moderate. however, none of the statements scores very high. it shows that teachers do not whole-heartedly support peer-observation. the study also finds that most of the teachers are not well familiar with soada idris khan teachers’ attitude towards peer observation at najran university: a case study 32 the concept and application of peerobservation. they often consider evaluation as an excuse to termination. that is one of the reasons that teachers (observee) get nervous as soon as observers enter the classroom. they lose their natural style of teaching. peer-observation does more harm than good for these anxious/nervous teachers. a teachers‟ performance/ability cannot be judged in 20-30 minutes. therefore, the study recommends that there must be many peerobservations for the same class and the best one must be assessed. observeee must be given sufficient time to feel comfortable with the practice of peer-observation. students should also be allowed to participate in the evaluation as they are the real evaluators and often unbiased. the best way is to provide teacher/observee a camera and record his/her lecture to be subsequently evaluated by a committee of expert on peer-observation. it is also not a good practice that observers, without prior training, are commanded to evaluate teaching performance of an observee that is highly technical in its nature and requires a considerable amount of training. besides, there should be some arrangement to reward (a financial one) a good performer, as it will motivate him to do better. moreover, it will encourage colleagues to compete with each other and thus improve their performance in a healthy competitive environment. feedback should be given in a healthy and non-judgmental way. the data gathered through the observation tool are analyzed and, during the ensuing discussion, explicit feedback is provided in a nonjudgmental manner (edge, 1992; gosling, 2002; hendry & oliver, 2012). further, there should be seminars and workshops to orient teachers to the process and advantages of peer-observation. kotsiomyti (2010, p. 264-265) has asserted that “the overwhelming majority of teachers have never participated in a peer observation process, while those having participated in one have done so only once, thus leading to the formation of attitudes based on little or no experience on the subject, accounting for the creation of the association aforementioned. moreover, peer observation is considered to have been executed poorly, with the preand poststages of the observation being inadequately realized or entirely absent from the process.” references brandt, (2008). integrating feedback and reflection in teacher preparation. elt journal, 62(1), 37-46. cosh, j. (1999). peer observation: a reflective model. elt journal, 53(1), 22–27. donnelly, r. (2007). perceived impact of peer observation of teaching in higher education. international journal of teaching and learning in higher education, 19(2), 117-129. gosling, d. (2002). models of peer observation of teaching, learning, and teaching support. network, 2-5. hammersley-fletcher, l., & orsmond, p. (2005). reflecting on reflective practices within peer observation. studies in higher education, 30(2), 213224. hendry, g. d., & oliver, g. r. (2012). seeing is believing: the benefits of peer observation. journal of university teaching and learning practice, 9(1), 1-9. jung, t., osterwalder, h., & wipf, d. (2000). teaching and assessing middle-year students’ speaking and listening skills. teaching and learning research exchange. retrieved from: http://www.mcdowellfoundation.ca/main_mcdo well/projects/research_rep/52_teaching_assessin g.pdf. kotsiomyti, m. (2010). teacher observation and greek state teachers of english: current practices and suggestions for improvement. language learning/teaching – education, 1, 197–214. rahaya, s. a., & salbiah, m. (1996). pemikiran guru cemerlang: kesan teradap prestasi pengajaran: kertas kerja seminar isu-isu pendidikan. fakulti pendidikan, universiti kebangsaan malaysia. reed, v. (1989). adolescent language disorders: general strategies for teaching language comprehension/listening. eau claire, wi: thinking publications. richards, j. c., & farrell, t .s. c. (2005). professional development for language teachers: strategies for teacher learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. richardson, m. (2000). peer observation: learning from one another. the nea higher education journal, summer. wallace, m. j. (1998). action research for language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the use of hedges in tertiary efl students' presentation ihsan nur iman faris department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: ihsannif@gmail.com apa citation: faris, i. n. i. (2015). the use of hedges in tertiary efl students' presentation. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 111-121 received: 02-09-2015 accepted: 12-10-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract the main objective of language education is to enable students to communicate effectively. in order to achieve that objective, students need to master pragmatic competence. one of the pragmatic competences which needs to be mastered by students is the ability to use hedging devices. this ability is even more essential for students in tertiary level of education due to the some conventions which need to be followed. failures in using hedges properly can threat the face of students and other stakeholders in academic contexts. this research aims at investigating how hedges are used by the tertiary students when addressing questions in a discussion session of a presentation. this research is a qualitative research employing interaction analysis method. the participants in this research were nine students of language in use course of master of english education program in a state university in bandung. the findings demonstrate that hedges were found in all questions addressed to the presenters and the lecturer. introductory phrases were the most frequently-used forms used to hedge and hedges function mostly to attenuate epistemic commitment in addressing questions. although hedges were used when addressing questions in a discussion session of a presentation, some findings indicate that the hedges were not entirely in line with academic conventions. based on the findings, the recommendations given are 1) that further research on the use of hedges in academic contexts be conducted, 2) teachers and lecturers raise students’ awareness of the importance of pragmatic competence, and 3) teachers and lecturers give more concerns to provide students with pragmatic competence. keywords: pragmatic competence, hedges, questions, academic contexts. introduction in order to be able to communicate effectively, students need to master pragmatic competences. one of the pragmatic competences that need to be mastered is the effective use of cautious and polite language or hedging device (hyland, 1996a), defined as a linguistic form intended to dilute or weaken the certainty of an assertion; for example: sort of, like, i think and kind of (wearing, 2004; cruse, 2006). since the use of languages is related to the context where the languages are used, communication breakdown occur most-frequently because of lack of pragmatic competences (byram, 1994; kramsch, 1998) such as the lack of ability to use hedges. as the main objective of language education is enabling students to communicate in various contexts (brown, 2000; harmer, 2007), investigations of students’ pragmatic competences need to be conducted. however, research investigating pragmatic competences of students is 111 ihsan nur iman faris the use of hedges in tertiary efl students' presentation still scarce (neary-sundquist, 2013). the scarcity may due to the characteristic of pragmatic research which is more closely related to the field of linguistic instead of the field of education. hence, this research aims at investigating the use of hedging in an academic context. in a tertiary education, the ability to use hedges is one of determinative factors to achieve success. students in the tertiary level of education are required to use hedges properly when putting forward a statement both in spoken and written communications (hyland, 1996a). statements need to be delivered carefully, because a false statement can threat the credibility of students/academicians asserting the statements and also other students/academicians having different points of view related to issues concerned (hyland, 1996a and 1996b). in a similar vein, alwasilah (2015) asserts that tertiary students need to avoid making over-claimed statements. the over-claimed statements can be avoided, for instance, by using hedges in the form of citing properly theories or reports put forward by other academicians (emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015). however, due to the limited exposure and use of english in daily interactions (judd, 1999), tertiary students in efl countries tend to have difficulties in acquiring pragmatic competences such as the ability to use hedges. plethora of research on the use of hedges in academic contexts has been conducted. the research focused on investigating the use of hedges in academic writing has been employed by hyland (1996b). he reported that english students in hong kong tend to underuse hedges in their writing. underusing hedges in academic writing makes the precision of their writing frequently-questioned. the other research investigating the use of hedges of students was conducted by nearysundquist (2013), reporting that nonnative secondary school students tend to use fewer hedges in their spoken interaction compared to native students. hedging in the two previous investigations was found mostfrequently in the forms of modal lexical verbs (e.g. to think, to believe, etc.). the two researchers have depicted how hedges are used by non-native secondary students in written and spoken interactions. however, research on the use of hedges by tertiary students in efl countries such as indonesia, especially, in a specific context such as in a discussion session of a presentation is still scarce. this research aims at filling the gap by investigating the hedges practiced by students of a state university in indonesia. this research is geared toward revealing how the tertiary students hedge when addressing questions in the discussion session of a presentation and the function of hedges in the questions addressed by the tertiary students in the discussion session of a presentation. the results of this research are expected to enrich the theories of pragmatics especially in terms of the use of hedges. this research reveals the forms and functions of hedges the students use when addressing a question in a discussion session of a presentation. hence, the results of this research can be used to depict the pragmatic competence of the tertiary students especially in terms of using hedges. moreover, by learning from this research, teachers and students can evaluate the teaching of pragmatic competence in their class. in general, hedging is defined as an expression weakening a speaker’s commitment to some aspects of a 112 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee statement (cruse, 2006). when statements uttered by speakers are hedged, speakers demonstrate that the information contained in the statements is limited. hedging serves as metalingual glosses to grice’s conversational maxims, namely maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of manner, and maxim of relevance (grundy, 2008). the use of hedges indicates that speakers to some extent modify the conversational maxims. however, despite being scrupulous, speakers tend to be unaware of the hedging practiced in the conversation (grundy, 2008). categorizing hedges based on linguistic forms utilized tends to be a difficult task. the difficulty is due to the use of hedges bound to the context where communication occurs (hyland, 1996a). linguistic forms used in hedging cannot be defined unequivocally and universally. for instance, humor which tends to be different across culture to some extent can be categorized as hedging device as well (murata, 2014). nonetheless, referring to a particular theory of categorization can be helpful to portray how hedges are used by the tertiary students. this research takes the categorization of hedges proposed by salager-mayer (1994, cited in alrashady, 2012) due to its wide and extensive categorization. generally, the linguistic forms categorized as hedges in this research are 1) modal auxiliary verbs such as may, might, can, could, would, should), 2) modal lexical verbs such as to seem, to appear, to believe, to assume, to suggest, to estimate, to tend, to think, to argue, to indicate, to propose, to speculate, 3) adjectival, adverbial and nominal modal phrase 4) approximators of degree, quantity, frequency and time such as approximately, roughly, about, often, occasionally, generally, somehow, a lot of, 5) introductory phrases such as i believe, to our knowledge, it is our view that, we feel that, 6) if clauses, and 7) compound hedges or phrases made up of several hedges such as would appear, it seems reasonable, etc. as for the function of hedging, the general explanation can be accounted to hyland (1996b) explaining that hedging functions to avoid facethreatening behavior and demonstrate politeness in particular situations. since hedging is related to politeness, the use of hedges tends to be related to the universal notions of politeness, namely, power, distance, and imposition (grundy, 2008). in the education field, ha (2010) states that teachers or lecturers in the eastern part of the world tend to have bigger power and wider gap with the students. hence, hedges will tend to be used more-frequently when addressing questions to teachers or lecturers. similar with the categorization of forms of hedging, the functions of hedging are also context bound (hyland, 1996a). the function of hedging needs to be interpreted based on the context where the communication takes place. nonetheless, to ease the identification of functions of hedging in the context of this research, theories underpinning the categorization of function of hedging need to be employed. this research employs the categorization proposed by jallifer and alavi-nia (2012), categorizing the function of hedging into 15 distinctive categories. the functions of hedging referred in this research are modulation (modifiers used to modulate the impact of an utterance, or to introduce fuzziness into the propositional content), evasion (withholding some of the information the interlocutors expect the speaker to give, thereby making statements without giving information) attenuating epistemic commitment, hesitation 113 ihsan nur iman faris the use of hedges in tertiary efl students' presentation (deliberately employed malfunctions, used to indicate that the speaker has qualms), covering up one’s views and facts, de-emphasizing a claim (a clarification strategy used as a policy of appeasement), expressing conditions (expressing the conditions under which an event may or may not happen), counter-expectation (disclaiming some expected rather than a directly negated position), bounding downtoners (linguistic devices for achieving intratextual cohesion which may be used to de-emphasize or play down the importance of the speech act they introduce), expressing possible incompleteness of an action which is in progress at a specific time, agent avoiding (using devices which impersonalize and create social distance), source-tagging: deresponsibilizing devices, limiting generalizability (modifying a claim in such a way that its effect will be narrowed down to some specific situation or condition), seeking solidarity (the speaker invites the hearers to adopt his/her point of view), and miscellaneous hedges (hedges which are so sporadically used that they do not form an outstanding class). the category of functions and forms of hedging elaborated above can be extended as hedging can be found differently based on the context where communication occurs. different forms and functions of hedges found in this research may not belong to any categories mentioned. new categories of hedging may be proposed. this session aims at portraying how hedges are used differently in various contexts. elaborating how people hedge in various contexts can give a clearer portrayal of how hedging in an academic context is distinctive, yet may have similar characteristics with hedging in other contexts. hedges used in a presidential debate, for instance, have a similar characteristic with hedges in a tertiary student presentation in terms of discussion session provided. the gender issue in the use of hedges can also be found in an academic context, as men and women tend to have more equal positions in academic contexts. in political situations such as a presidential debate, the use of hedges is pervasive. the technique used to deliver facts and argument is one of the important factors to gather votes (tenorio, 2002 cited in jallifar and alavinia, 2012). hedging can also be used to cover contrasting ideologies cautiously and to portray presidency candidates as reserved but honest politicians (alrashady, 2012). the ability to use hedges is one of the crucial aspects to survive in a political competition since images of politicians tend to be constructed through the language used. moreover, in daily interactions, men and women tend to use hedges. some scholars (e.g wareing, 2004; bloomer, griffths, and merrison, 2005; and guendouzi, 2005) suggest that women tend to use hedges more frequently than men. the claim is grounded by the argument stating that women prefer to avoid conflict and confrontation by using less direct form of communication (wareing, 2004). additionally, hedging is seen as one of the features in women’s talk especially in the talk involving painful self-disclosure (psd). this feature is used morefrequently by women to seek solidarity in interactions with other women (guendouzi, 2005). in academic contexts, the ability to use hedges is one of determinative factors to achieve success. students in an academic context such as in a tertiary level of education are required to use 114 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee hedges properly when putting forward a statement both in spoken and written communications (hyland, 1996a). statements need to be delivered carefully, because a false statement can threat the credibility of students/academicians asserting the statements and also other students/academicians having different points of view related to issues concerned (hyland, 1996a and 1996b). in a similar vein, alwasilah (2015) asserts that tertiary students need to avoid making over-claimed statements. the over-claimed statements can be avoided, for instance, by using hedges in the form of citing properly theories or reports put forward by other academicians (emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015). however, due to the limited exposure and use of english in daily interactions (judd, 1999), tertiary students in efl countries tend to have difficulties in acquiring pragmatic competences such as the ability to use hedges. method this research is qualitative research employing interaction analysis method. interaction analysis method is perceived suitable to be employed in this research due to its set of characteristics. according to nunan (1992) the method of generating data in interaction analysis is naturalistic and the mode of data collected is in the form of spoken language. the method then suits the type of data collected in this research. the utterances in a discussion session were not interrupted by the researcher; therefore, the data are natural. furthermore, this method allows researchers to have the interpretative type of analysis on linguistic and nonlinguistic unit of analysis (nunan, 1992). allowing the researcher to have interpretative data on linguistic and nonlinguistic unit of analysis opens the space to reveal new findings or categorization different from previous investigations. nonetheless, a categorical type of analysis is also employed to ease the identification of forms and functions of hedges practiced by the tertiary efl students. the students taken as participants in this research are nine students of language in use course of master of english education program of a state university in bandung. the participants were selected purposively since they are considered able to elicit the necessary data for this research (malik and hamied, 2014). students in tertiary level, especially in postgraduate studies, are required to produce academic works (alwasilah, 2015). the students in this research then are assumed to have mastered pragmatic competences related to academic context such as in writing and presenting research reports. moreover, the class taken as the sample is the language in use class discussing issues related to pragmatics. the researcher assumes that the class tends to require students to practice their pragmatic competences; hence hedges are predicted to be used by students. moreover, a presentation in academic contexts, especially in the discussion sessions, is considered a suitable setting to collect data. the researcher considered some aspects in a presentation setting similar to presidential candidates’ debate settings where hedges are frequently used. the data used in this research were collected from the presentation sessions of the “language in use” class held on may 18, 2015. to be more precise, the data collected in this research are questions uttered by students in the discussion session of two presentation 115 ihsan nur iman faris the use of hedges in tertiary efl students' presentation sessions. the questions were addressed to the two speakers presenting the topics related to pragmatics. the questions were also addressed to the lecturer giving elaboration and clarification to the topics presented by the speakers. the questions addressed to the lecturer were collected since they are related to the topics presented. questions which are not related to the topics presented, such as questions asking the class schedule and deadline of assignments submission, were not collected as data. the questions count in this research are based on the turns taken by each student. questions which are similar, elaborated or paraphrased count as one question. the questions collected as data were taperecorded and then transcribed before being analyzed. data analysis is divided into two main steps. firstly, to reveal how the students use hedges when addressing questions in the discussion session of a presentation, the data were transcribed and coded. the coding and categorizing processes were conducted by using bottom-up approach (jalilifar and alavinia, 2012; lange, 2014), where the data are categorized based on the context and the researcher’s interpretation, and also top-down approach, where the coding and categorizing processes were based on theories (lange, 2014). in the case of this research, the categorization of hedges generally was based on salagermayer (1994, cited in al-rashady, 2012) categorizing linguistic forms indicating the use of hedges into seven distinctive categories. secondly, to unearth the functions of hedges when the tertiary students addressed a question in the discussion session of a presentation, the bottom-up and top down approaches were also employed. after the linguistic forms indicating the use of hedges in the research site had been revealed, those linguistic forms then were analyzed in terms of functions. the theories of function of hedging devices proposed by jallifer and alavi-nia (2012) and the researcher personal interpretation were used as the grounds for codification and categorization. results and discussion hedging by using particular linguistic forms from nine students taken as samples, only seven students addressed questions in the discussion session of a presentation. hedges were found in all questions addressed by the students. totally, there were 16 questions addressed to the presenters and lecturer. four questions were addressed to the presenter a, eight questions were addressed to the presenter b, and four questions were addressed to the lecturer. mainly, the students hedge the questions by using introductory phrases, approximator, modal lexical verbs, modal auxiliary verbs, if clause, adjectival, adverbial, and nominal phrases, and other linguistic forms such as “err” and “what is it”. there are 73 linguistic forms indicating the use of hedges in the questions addressed by the students. generally, the forms of linguistic found in the research are categorized based on salager-mayer (1994, cited in alrashady, 2012) categorizing linguistic forms indicating the use of hedges into seven categories. however, linguistic forms perceived to be indicators of hedging, yet does not fit any proposed category, were recorded and then categorized as “uncategorized forms”. the linguistic forms indicating the use of hedges in this research are as follows: 116 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the occurrence of linguistic forms indicating the use of hedges in questions addressed in the discussion session of a presentation no. linguistic form presenter a presenter b lecturer total occurrence 1 introductory phrases 7 7 7 21 (28.77%) 2 approximators 8 3 2 13 (17.81%) 3 modal lexical verbs 2 8 1 11 (15.07%) 4 modal auxiliary verbs 5 4 1 10 (13.70%) 5 “if” clause 0 4 0 4 (5.48%) 6 adjectival, adverbial and nominal modal phrase 0 1 1 2 (2.74%) 7 uncategorized forms 4 1 7 12 (16.43%) total occurrence 26 (35.62%) 28 (38.36%) 19 (26.03%) 73 (100%) the linguistic forms categorized into the uncategorized forms are “err”, “what is it”, and “for example”. those linguistic forms do not fit any general categorization proposed in this research. however, those linguistic forms are considered possible indicators of hedging since they indicate uncertainty or doubt. moreover, as shown in the table above, hedging is used most frequently in the form of introductory phrases such as i believe, to our knowledge, and we feel that. the example of the use of introductory phrases can be seen in the following excerpts: from what i understand, the reaction is more important to see if something is polite or impolite. for example if the imposition or the content are bad but the reaction is okay it is still polite. so the reaction is more important. what do you think? the utterance “from what i understand” indicates that what is stated by the student is limited to personal feeling or opinion. this finding is in a similar vein with grundy (2008) asserting that the use of hedging indicates the information conveyed by a speaker is limited. on the other hand, the finding that introductory phrases is the most frequently used forms to hedge is not in accordance with some experts (e.g salager-mayer, 1994, cited in al-rashady, 2012; neary-sundquist, 2013) stating that modal auxiliary verbs and modal lexical verbs are the mostfrequently used linguistic forms to hedge. the possible reason is due to the characteristic of tertiary education, especially postgraduate program, requiring the students to put forward assertions with supports from theories or research reports (emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015). introductory phrases tend to be used as ground of the questions addressed since addressing ungrounded or unsupported questions may end up threatening face of the students (hyland, 1996a and 1996b). the findings demonstrate that hedges are used both in addressing questions to the presenters and the lecturer. interestingly, the findings demonstrate that hedges are more frequently-used when the students address questions to the presenters (presenter a: 35.62% and presenter b: 38.36%) who are their classmates, instead of to the lecturer (26.03%). hedging is related to save facing strategy and politeness (hyland, 1996a and 1996b), therefore, it is related to the underpinning notions of politeness, 117 ihsan nur iman faris the use of hedges in tertiary efl students' presentation namely imposition, distance and power (grundy, 2008). according to ha (2010), teachers or lecturers in the eastern part of the world tend to have bigger power and wider distance with their students. the wide gap in terms of power and distance then should have encouraged students to use more hedges in addressing questions to the lecturer in order to be considered polite. however, the findings in this research demonstrate irrelevancy with that notion. the use of hedges indicating politeness was found less when the students address questions to the lecturer. the possible reason triggering this finding is the closeness of the lecturer and the students. distance and power do not create a wide gap between them, encouraging the students tend to think that using hedging to show politeness was not necessary. moreover, the lecturer seem not to be offended by fewer hedges used by the students, indicating that the students are not considered impolite although they might trespass the boundary of power and distance. the reasons can account to lange (2014) explaining that being polite or impolite are defined by people involved in the communication. although to some extent not using hedges in an academic context can be acceptable, teachers need to provide students with pragmatic competence such as the ability to use hedge properly since students will encounter various contexts of communication (hyland, 1996a and 1996b; al-rashady, 2012). function of hedging in the discussion session of a presentation after the forms had been revealed, those forms are categorized into the categorization proposed by jallifer and alavi-nia (2012), categorizing the functions of hedging into 15 distinctive categories. overall, hedging in the context of this research served five functions: to attenuate epistemic commitment, to tag source, to approximate, to show hesitation, and to express particular conditions. in details, the functions of hedging in the questions addressed in the discussion session of a presentation are as follows: the functions of hedging in questions addressed in the discussion session of a presentation no. functions presenter a presenter b lecturer total occurrence 1 attenuating epistemic commitment 10 15 6 31 (42.47%) 2 source tagging 4 6 4 14 (19.18%) 3 approximators 8 3 2 13 (17.81%) 4 hesitation 4 0 7 11 (15.07%) 5 expressing conditions 0 4 0 4 (5.48%) total occurrence 26 (35.62%) 28 (38.36%) 19 (26.03%) 73 (100%) the linguistic forms not fitting the categorization proposed by salagermayer (1994, cited in al-rashady, 2012) can fit the categorization of functions proposed by jallifer and alavi-nia (2012). the forms “err” and “what is it” are categorized into hesitation and the form “for example” is categorized into attenuating epistemic commitment. the finding that linguistic forms not fitting a particular categorization can fit other categorization demonstrates that categorizing linguistic forms as hedging device unequivocally is a difficult task. furthermore, as shown in the table above, hedging is used most frequently 118 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to attenuate epistemic commitment which is usually indicated by the use of sentence introductory phrases, tentative cognitive verbs, framing statements expressing doubt and uncertainty, and epistemic modal verbs, adverbs, nouns and adjectives. the examples of the use of hedges to attenuate epistemic commitment in the questions addressed by the students are as follows: from what i understand, the reaction is more important to see if something is polite or impolite. for example if the imposition or the content are bad but the reaction is okay it is still polite. so the reaction is more important. what do you think? can you explain more about intercultural communication? i am still confused about it. i am still confused about intercultural pragmatics. what is it actually? as tertiary students are required to be cautious and precise in making a statement (hyland, 1996a and 1996b; emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015), the use of hedges to attenuate epistemic commitment seems reasonable. by attenuating the questions, the students tend to indicate that the information regarding the issues addressed was limited. addressing questions without hedging may threat the students’ face since statements or questions without supporting theories or data tend to be rejected in academic contexts although the statements or questions may correct to some extent (emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015). the students in this research tend to use source tagging (19.18%) less frequently compared to attenuating epistemic commitment (42.47%). ideally, in academic contexts, hedges functioning as source-tagging should be used more frequently compared to attenuating epistemic commitment. in academic contexts, students should put forward statements based on academic conventions. one of the conventions is the requirement to cite reliable and valid references when making statements. the statements without any clear reference will be considered weak or to some extent the students will be deemed plagiarizing (emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015). the use of source-tagging cover the lack of information possessed by students with theories and research reports. if the statements or questions uttered by the speakers are imprecise, the facethreatening acts tend to be altered to the theories or reports cited, instead of to the speakers personally. on the other hand, functioning hedges as attenuating epistemic commitment tends to be less strategic in academic contexts. imprecision of information in statements or questions is covered by the individual personally and tends to be seen as an excuse instead of argumentation. nonetheless, the examples of the use of hedges to tag sources in the questions addressed by the students are as follows: people say that err you have to be you have to be what is it you have be consistent with what which where you are in american english british english or what, some just err some people say some people say about that, what do you think about that? so, i have a question actually. we know that actually pragmatics will be embedded to the language that we teach then as we know that as english has become international language not only owned by native speaker and we know that there is a notion of intercultural 119 ihsan nur iman faris the use of hedges in tertiary efl students' presentation pragmatics, then err in teaching english whose pragmatics context we should teach to students? do we have to teach people excuse me as the form of punten do we have to teach like duluan go first, that something related to culture right? how do we have to teach the language related to our context? according to the academic conventions, the hedges functioning as source-tagging in the excerpts above may be seen irrelevant. the process of citing or tagging sources in academic contexts should follow some conventions such as mentioning the source specifically in terms of name and year published (emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015). the hedges functioning as source tagging used by the students in addressing questions do not mention any specific information of the source. further research revealing the reasons behind this finding needs to be conducted. however, the possible reasons can be due to the distinctive characteristics of spoken interaction different from written interaction (nation and newton, 2009) and the students’ limited information regarding the sources tagged. different with written interactions, the violation of academic conventions in spoken interactions tend to be tolerated due to the characteristic of spoken interactions which is unrecorded (nation and newton, 2009). however, if the finding accounts to the latter possible reason, then it means the students should read more references (emilia, 2009; malik and hamied, 2014; alwasilah, 2015). nonetheless, the finding can be the impetus for teachers and lecturers to teach pragmatic competence, especially the use of hedges in spoken academic contexts. conclusion this research investigated the use of hedges by the tertiary students in addressing questions. the findings demonstrate that hedges were found in all questions addressed by the students. the hedges were found most frequently in the form of introductory phrases and in the function to attenuate epistemic commitment. the finding that introductory phrases are predominant in hedging practiced by the students may due to the characteristic of academic context requiring students to support their statements with theories or data. however, other findings tend to be not in accordance with characteristics of academic contexts. hedges were found less frequent in questions addressed to the lecturer having bigger power and wider distance and source-tagging function of hedging similar to citing references in academic conventions was found less frequent. hence, the conclusion which can be drawn is that although the students use hedges when addressing questions in a discussion session of a presentation, the hedges do not fit completely some conventions of academic contexts. based on the findings, the recommendations are 1) that further research on the use of hedges in academic contexts should be conducted, especially in different academic settings and in terms of how specific forms and functions of hedges are more related to academic contexts 2) that teachers and lecturers should increase students’ awareness of the importance of pragmatic competence, especially in terms of using hedging devices, and 3) that teacher and lecturers should provide students with more pragmatic competence, especially in terms of using hedging devices. 120 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee references al-rashady, f. (2012). determining the role of hedging devices in the political discourse of two american presidentiables in 2008. tesol journal, 7, 30-42. alwasilah, a. c. (2015). pokoknya studi kasus: pendekatan kualitatif. bandung: kiblat. bloomer, a., griffths, p., & merrison, j. (2005). introducing language in use: a coursebook. london: routledge. brown, h. d. (2000). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. new york: longman. cruse, a. (2006). a glossary of semantics and pragmatics. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. emilia, e. (2009). menulis tesis dan disertasi. bandung: alfabeta. grundy, p. (2008). doing pragmatics 3rd ed. london: hodder education. guendouzi, j. (2005). language and gender. in m. j. ball, clinical sociolinguistics (pp. 26-35). oxford: blackwell publishing. ha, p. l. (2008). teaching english as an international language: identity, resistance, and negotiation. clevendon: multilingual matters. harmer, j. (2007). the practice of english language teaching (4th ed.). new york: pearson longman. hyland, k. (1996a). writing without conviction? hedging in scientific research articles. applied linguistics, 17(4), 433-454. hyland, k. (1996b). nurturing hedges in the esp curriculum. pergamon, 24(4), 477490. jalilifar, a., & alavi-nia, m. (2012). we are suprised: wasn't iran disgraced there? a functional analysis of hedges and boosters in televised iranian and american presidential debates. discourse and communication, 6(2), 135161. judd, e. l. (1999). some issues in the teaching of pragmatic competence. in e. hinkel (ed.), culture in second language teaching and learning (pp. 152-166). cambridge: cambridge university press. kramsch, c. (1998). language and culture. oxford: oxford university press. lange, p. g. (2014). commenting on youtube rants: perceptions of inappropriateness or civic engagement? journal of pragmatics, 73, 53-65. malik, r. s., & hamied, f. a. (2014). research methods: a guide for first time researchers. bandung: upi press. murata, k. (2014). an empirical crosscultural study of humour in business meetings in new zealand and japan. journal of pragmatics, 60, 251-265. nation, i., & newton, j. (2009). teaching esl/efl listening and speaking. london: routledge. neary-sundquist, c. (2013). the use of hedges in the speech of esl learners. elia, 13, 149-174. nunan, d. (1992). research method in language learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. wareing, s. (2004). language and gender. in i. singh, & j. s. peccei, language, society, and power: an introduction (2nd ed.) (pp. 75-92). new york: routledge. 121 susanto a systemic functional study on the conversational structure of an indonesian spontaneous dialogue a systemic functional study on the conversational structure of an indonesian spontaneous dialogue susanto english education study program, bandar lampung university, indonesia email: susanto@ubl.ac.id apa citation: susanto (2015). a systemic functional study on the conversational structure of an indonesian spontaneous dialogue. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 122-129 received: 15-09-2015 accepted: 23-10-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: spontaneous dialogue is an example of spoken text in which its potential can be observed through its conversational structure. as an attempt to interpret the language in spoken text, the paper investigates a spontaneous dialogue in bahasa indonesia (indonesian). the discussion focuses on its conversational structure within systemic functional framework. the structure is built up in the semantic stratum by looking at its exchange and commodity for its speech function. the exchanges are realized by initiate/respond moves and the commodity could be either knowledge or action oriented. since a spontaneous dialogue is a contextual phenomenon in experiencing language use, the finding of conversational structure can bring further discussion on connections among individuals bearing cultural identities realized by their experiences through languages. keywords: conversational structure, exchange, commodity, systemic functional linguistics. introduction conversational structure for spontaneous dialogues can be constructed within the social context to catch a realization of language use as a potential (halliday, 1978, 1994; halliday & matthiessen, 2004). to look at the potential, we should realize that any language develops with its uniqueness covering the socially contextual factors in which the language functions in its own ways. the social context interrelates with the context of culture. these contextual factors altogether, then, influence the production and interpretation of the language itself (halliday, 1978). hence, it is arguable that in language study, the context should be considered (halliday & matthiessen, 2004; cf. matthiessen, 1995). language is realized in a text either spoken or written. a spontaneous dialogue is a spoken text in which its potential can be observed through its conversational structure. certain rules and patterns could be there in building a good conversation. but, contextually it flows as it is. as an attempt to interpret the language in spoken text, the paper investigates an indonesian spontaneous dialogue. the study focuses on its conversational structure in which the exchanges are realized by moves of initiating and responding. also, the orientation of the commodity being exchanged is considered in the structure. the analysis on the conversational structure is presented in systemic functional framework. systemic functional linguistics (sfl) is a model 122 mailto:susanto@ubl.ac.id english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee of language study developed by michael halliday in the 1960s. the theory views a language as a network of systems and it contains interrelated sets of options for making meaning. the theory is also concerned with the contextualized and practical uses of a language. this theory conceives of language as a resource for meaning, a network of relationships, rather than as a set of rules (butt, et al., 1995; halliday & matthiessen, 2004). in contextual conversation, one of the meaning resources which can be described is its structure. in the present study, the conversational structure in an indonesian spontaneous dialogue is observed by discussing the commodity which is being exchanged and the moves which are proposing the commodity. method as the data, a spontaneous dialogue between two females (dn and vq) of indonesian native speakers was recorded at the phonetic laboratory, efl university, hyderabad, india. the speakers are citizens of indonesia with the age from twenty one to thirty two years old when the recordings were conducted. they were all brought up in indonesia. the dialogue belongs to an argument type. the topic is about “vacation”. the first speaker (dn) initiates the topic by asking whether the second speaker (vq) wants to spend the vacation in indonesia, their home country, or not. in response to the question, the second speaker prefers staying in the university to going back to indonesia. she argues that there is no point spending vacation in indonesia. by staying in the university, she could and prepare the study materials well for the next semester. in the data, there are 211 clauses. those clauses are various in mood (declarative, interrogative and imperative) and some are moodless. the clause number is maintained to track down the structure indexical in the data. results and discussion as a meaning resource, language is studied as a whole phenomenon consisting of a number of interrelated sets of choices in creating meaning. these choices relate the language user‟s intentions to the concrete forms of language. in systemic functional framework, language is viewed with many strata, which is called language stratification: context (of culture and situation), semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology and phonetics. context of culture is the context of the overall linguistic system and context of situation is the context of a text. the content expanding into semantics and lexicogrammar allows the meaning and structure potential of a language in terms of the function that language serves. the expression constitutes the organization of speech sound into sound system (phonology) and the resource for speech and hearing (phonetics). fig. 1: stratification (from halliday & matthiessen 2004: 25). the exchange structure in conversation is built in one part of the contents as its speech function; i.e. 123 susanto a systemic functional study on the conversational structure of an indonesian spontaneous dialogue semantics. it construes its own contexts (context of culture and context of situation). fig. 2: exchange: role and commodity (halliday & mattiessen, 2004). the commodity which is exchanged could be (a) good&service or (b) information and the role in the exchange could be (i) giving or (ii) demanding (see fig. 2). it brings the idea of the orientation in commodity being exchanged in a conversation. it can be knowledge-oriented and actionoriented. in the potential of the exchange structure in a conversation, there are two possible orientation; i.e. knowledge and action. it resonates with the commodities being exchanged whether the commodities are information or goods&service. in the process of exchanging, some possible moves are available. the move can be initiate, follow-up or respond (fawcett, mije and wissen, 1988). see fig. 3. fig. 3: potential in exchange structure within stratification concept in the data of a spontaneous dialogue in bahasa indoensia which is observed, various exchange structures are found. the two orientations are also available with the pattern of initiate (i) – follow up (f) – respond (r) – follow up (f). when the orientation is information, the exchange structure may have the 124 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee initiation of demanding information. it can be asking a polarity of the proposition or a lexical inquiry in it. this structure is available in the data as shown in fig. 4 and fig. 5 respectively. fig. 4: exchange structure with information orientation (a) fig. 5: exchange structure with information orientation (b) 125 susanto a systemic functional study on the conversational structure of an indonesian spontaneous dialogue when the orientation is action, the exchange structure may have an initiation of demanding goods&service: an action. in its response, the move of giving information is found with its follow-ups as the support as shown in fig. 6 and fig. 7. fig. 6: exchange structure with action orientation fig. 7: exchange structure with action orientation in observing the orientation in exchanges, terms of primary and secondary for knower in knowledge orientation (k1 and k2 respectively) and for actor in action orientation (a1 and a2 respectively) are introduced in 126 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee systemic functional linguistics (see ventola, 1988). in the exchange structure exemplified in fig. 8, k1 is following k2. but in spontaneous dialogues, it may not happen steadily. k1 as the alternative move given by the actor may also follows a2 instead of a1 (see fig. 9 below). a follow-up move (e.g. a2f and k1f) is available for either action or knowledge orientation. fig. 8: structure with knowledge exchange oriented fig. 9: structure with compact exchange oriented in the data, initiate and respond spreads unevenly (see fig. 10). from the first turn to the fourth one, respond occurs after initiate closely. in the fifth, initiate is expanded to the sixth. further, respond comes up not only in one turn but also in more than one turn as in the seventh, eighth and ninth turns. these successive responds are also found from the eleventh to the fourteenth turn, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, from the twentieth to the twenty third, from the twenty fifth to twenty sixth and from the thirtieth to the thirty second (the last turn). 127 susanto a systemic functional study on the conversational structure of an indonesian spontaneous dialogue fig. 10: initiate-respond distribution in the data (with 32 turns) uniquely, in the data, one turn may have both initiate and respond, i.e. in turn iv, viii, xvi, xvii and xxxi. even, there are two moves which are same in nature. but in the data, it occurs only for initiates; in turn iii, there are double initiates. statistically, in exchange structure in the conversation, respond is dominant in the data with 22 occurrences while initiate is 16 (see fig. 11). fig. 11: initiate-respond dominance in the conversation, commodity (i.e. information and goods & service) which is being exchanged and initiate/respond paradigm in exchanging its commodity are structured in their own ways in a given context. these can be the meaning resource in language use. this brings up an understanding that its structural meaning within the semantic stratum plays role in its context. knowledge-oriented and actionoriented exchanges in the data are quite complicated in the interaction. secondary actor (a2), for example, does not end with primary one (see fig. 9 above). but it is responded with primary knower (k1) instead. also within primary knower, there is another primary knower. in this case, there is compact knowledge orientation in the conversation. moreover, initiate and respond paradigms are also various in terms of their occurrences in exchanging one commodity to another commodity. it 128 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee reveals that respond in the data is dominant in exchanging transaction. having the concept of stratification (see fig. 1) in which language is stratified in content and expression strata and the stratum of context (situation and culture) covers them, the finding of conversational structure can bring further discussion on connections among individuals bearing cultural identity involved in the conversation with the ways of the language they are using. their cultural identity is realized by their experiences through languages. conversation is one contextual phenomenon in experiencing language use. levy (2009) points out that culture may be conveyed through receptive and productive means. it can be seen through the interaction in the conversation; initiate and respond. initiate can be considered as one way to propose a commodity. it produces initiatives to exchange the commodity (knowledge and goods & service). respond can be seen as another way to propose a commodity by receiving the initiative move. the present data then shows that receptive nature in conversational structure is dominant in the conversation. conclusion the conversational structure in bahasa indonesia with not only the knowledge and action oriented commodity but also the move paradigm (initiate/respond) in exchanging the commodity has been presented in systemic functional framework. in the data, it is observed that there are various exchange structures with the pattern of i – f – r – f. further, it is found that k1 may follow a2 instead of a1, and there are follow-up moves: a2f and k1f, for both action and knowledge orientations. by looking at the initiaterespond dominance in the data, it is found that the conversational structure is receptive nature. with the data of spontaneous dialogue in bahasa indonesia, the analysis has presented an example of the conversational structure in the language. the structure can be built up within the semantic stratum by looking at its commodity and exchange for its speech function. however, more studies on the structure and other aspects in the conversation certainly should be done to unfold other resources of meaning in the text. references butt, d. g., fahey, r., spinks, s. and yallop, c. (1995). using functional grammar: an explorer's guide. sydney: nceltr, macquarie university. fawcett, r.p., mije, a. and wissen, c. (1988) towards a systemic flowchart model for discourse structure. in fawcett, r.p. and young, d.j. (eds.) new developments in systemic linguistics. london: pinter. 116-143. halliday, m.a.k. (1978). language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. london: edward arnold, halliday, m.a.k. (1994). an introduction to functional grammar. london: arnold. halliday, m.a.k., & matthiessen, c.m.i.m. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar. london: arnold. levy, m. (2009) technologies in use for second language learning. the modern language journal 93, 769-782. matthiessen, c.m.i.m. (1995) lexicogrammatical cartography: english systems. tokyo: international language science publishers. ventola, e. (1988) „text analysis in operation: a multiple approach‟. in fawcett, r.p. and young, d.j. (eds.) new developments in systemic linguistics. london: pinter. 52-77. 129 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1 teaching english through youtube: grammar video analysis of three brazilian youtube channels dedicated to efl teaching aline fay de azevedo school of humanities, pontifical catholic university of rio grande do sul, rio grande do sul, brazil e-mail: aline.azevedo@pucrs.br juliana matias school of humanities, pontifical catholic university of rio grande do sul, rio grande do sul, brazil e-mail: juliana.matias@acad.pucrs.br apa citation: fay, a. a., & matias, j. (2019). teaching english through youtube: grammar video analysis of three brazilian youtube channels dedicated to efl teaching. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 1-10. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2351. received: 03-10-2019 accepted: 15-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: the objective of this research is to analyze grammar lessons of three brazilian youtube channels of english as a foreign language. it compares the approaches applied by each teacher in their videos and investigates if the lessons approach the explanation of meaning, use, and form of the grammar. it also aims to find out if the lessons are hackneyed regarding the online learning environment. the analysis consisted of watching two videos of the youtube channels english in brazil, inglês compartilhado and mairo vergara. the results showed that out of the six videos, five contained a grammar explanation that addressed meaning, use, and form of the language. they also adopted the deductive approach to grammar teaching. only one video did not explain the grammar (quantifiers), but a trick to memorize the use of quantifiers. as for technology, the main tool teachers used was captions to illustrate example sentences of the grammar. other tools consisted of the use of the software „notepad‟ and animation. thus, there was not an innovation on the videos regarding technology. future research is needed to understand if there is the necessity to apply cutting-edge tools to teach on youtube and if it is mandatory to review and to adapt the pedagogical practices for language learning youtube videos. keywords: english grammar; videos; youtubers; technology; deductive approach. introduction the education 3.0 along with technology has provided more tools and opportunities for english language teachers (gerstein, 2014). the interactive whiteboard, for instance, allows the teacher to save notes and send them to students. there are also official and unofficial blogs dedicated to english language teaching with several resources for all levels. such tools become accessible due to the computer assistance language learning (levy, 1997). besides, call has also provided online platforms, such as teacher‟s personal courses and moodle to teach english online. lately, youtube has provided minicourses and a guideline for teachers who want to start an education channel or who want to improve their existent one. thus, it is not a surprise that there is an increasing number of youtube channels specialized in teaching english to non-native speakers. in brazil, the number of efl youtube channels are up to 38 (youtube education project, 2018). apparently, students have been using youtube as a complementary tool of learning english. the platform has also allowed free access to learning, which leads people who cannot afford a regular course to study by watching the videos. however, students may not be able to identify the quality of the lessons and many ask teachers to suggest efl youtube channels. hence, the origins of this paper lie on this issue. deductive approach vs. inductive approach there are two different ways of teaching a given grammar point in english: the deductive and inductive approaches. the former is traditional teaching whereas the latter considers the student as the center of learning. both approaches have contributed enormously to elt, but there is still discussion about their application in class since teachers have different point of views about their efficiency. the deductive approach, also addressed as rule-driven learning, consists of presenting a rule, along with showing examples in which the rule is applied and finally, a written exercise practice of that rule (thornbury, 1999). aline fay de azevedo & juliana matias teaching english through youtube: grammar video analysis of three brazilian youtube channels dedicated to efl teaching 2 this approach is also recognized as a traditional one since it is teacher-centered and focuses on rules rather than the use of the language. its use, however, appears to rely on the teacher‟s personal beliefs and teaching habits. some may feel more comfortable providing the examples themselves rather than engaging students to observe the rules independently. different from the deductive approach, the inductive approach consists of providing examples and inferring rules afterwards. according to thornbury (1999), the typical inductive approach is: 1) the teacher provides example sentences; 2) the teacher asks the students to identify the grammar, speculate it and come up with hypothesis; 3) the students exchange ideas and show their findings to the class; 4) the teacher explains the grammar briefly and may ask students to reproduce the language providing some keywords; and 5) the students do a controlled-practice exercise. not surprisingly, many also call this approach discovery learning since it engages students to find rules themselves before hearing any formal explanation from the teacher. the three dimensions larsen-freeman, et al. (2016) suggest that it is important to give attention to the three dimensions: form, meaning and use. according to them, if there is a change in one of the dimensions, then a change in another one happens as well. figure 1. the three-dimensions chart form concerns the sequence and constructions of grammar within a sentence. for instance, in a class focusing on the simple past with regular verbs, the teacher might provide the following information to students (not necessarily, using the same words and terminologies): we create regular verbs in the past by adding –ed to the base form. for verbs that end in –e (like), we add –d (liked). if the verb ends in a consonant + y, we change y to –i and add –ed (study – studied). we double the consonant and add –ed if it has one syllable and ends in consonant + vowel + consonant (stop – stopped). meanwhile, meaning refers to the denotation of a particular grammar construction. as an example of meaning, the teacher could approach time expressions. they inform when an event occurred in the past and might mean a different time. in the sentence “i played soccer yesterday,” the time expression yesterday means the previous day. the event in the past can also refer to something that endured for a certain period: “i played soccer for five years.” in this sentence, the subject specified the duration of the action by using the time expression for. since it may be too much information for students, especially beginners, the teacher should analyze which ones are more relevant for the class and teach them with context. in addition to form and meaning, use is an essential aspect of language that students need to understand. it is curious that even though books for efl teachers provide information about the use of a grammar aspect, grammar-teaching researches do not mention it (parrot, 2010; scrivener, 2010). on the other hand, larsenfreeman (1991) and larsen-freeman et al. (2016) discuss this issue. thus, use approaches the way such a construction works in a certain context. an example of language use in the simple past the teacher can adopt is emphatic statements (scrivener, 2010). when the speaker wants to emphasize something that occurred in the past, it is possible to use did + the base form of the verb: “i did keep your secret, i swear!” in this example, the person wants to make sure that the action happened, even though someone says the contrary. youtube and education the contribution of youtube to education did not go unnoticed. oliveira and viggiano (2018) claim that according to youtube, 65% of users access the platform when they want to learn something. furthermore, educational content is watched 500 million times a day every day and is watched four times longer than cute kitten videos. not surprisingly, on november 11th, 2013, google launched youtube edu (ytedu), a special part of the platform exclusive for learning. according to galastri (2013), youtube edu is a complement to the traditional class and its aim is to provide content that students and teachers can use inside and outside the classroom. it contains reliable channels of different school subjects as well as internet safety tips. in brazil, if a teacher wants to english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3 be part of youtube edu, he/she must fill an application form and professionals of fundação lemann, unicamp and curso poliedro will analyze the channel. if it matches their criteria, the channel is included in the platform. regarding english teaching, there are numerous studies about the use of youtube to teach listening and writing (kelsen, 2009; mayora, 2009; silviyanti, 2014; watkins & wilkins, 2013). in addition, the website lyricstraining (lyricistraining.com) uses music videos from youtube on its game, which consists of filling the gaps of popular song lyrics. another website that features youtube is youglish (youglish.com) which dedicates to demonstrate the pronunciation of english words in american, australian and british accent. nowadays, educators are also using ted-talks from ted (ted.com) in their classes in order to work with different english skills. in fact, the website also provides a section called teded (https://ed.ted.com/lessons) in which educators can make lesson plans based on talks and share on the platform. it seems that most educators see it only as an auxiliary tool to include in the language classroom. thus, there is little is discussion in the literature about youtube as a potential tool to teach english. in fact, there is still a lack of studies regarding teaching english on this platform. this may be partially dangerous since anyone could upload a video explaining something about the english language in a wrong way or without providing enough input to make learners understand the content. thus, apart from youtube edu, there is no control about the quality of lessons on the platform. that being said, the present paper intends to provide a little demonstration of what teachers are creating on brazilian youtube regarding grammar teaching. based on the background previously described, the guiding questions of this paper are: 1. is there anything ingenious being produced by the brazilian efl teachers on youtube? 2. which grammar approach(s) do the teachers apply? 3. do teachers approach form, meaning and use in their lessons? how do they illustrate these three dimensions? method one of the aims of this paper is to analyze three grammar lessons of three (3) brazilian youtube channels: mairo vergara, inglês compartilhado by tainá alves and english in brazil by carina fragozo. although youtube is one of the most accessed types of media and teachers have been using it for educational purposes, it is important to mention that there is little literature dedicated to this phenomenon. alhamami (2013, p. 4) supports this statement and claims, “language teachers might not find clear guidelines that help them use this technology in their careers.” the analysis will consist of watching the videos carefully and take notes of the lessons‟ steps according to the evaluation guideline designed by alhamami (2013). the author made the guideline focusing on youtube language learning videos (youtube llvs), therefore it does not focus on grammar teaching exclusively. since the objective of this research is to analyze how teacher explain grammar, it adapts the guideline by adding specific questions regarding grammar teaching. that being said, the evaluation guideline will consist of questions that analyze the youtube videos in general and the grammar content. results and discussion videos about quantifiers much/many/a lot of: aprenda a regra! (countable/uncountable nouns) english in brazil by carina fragozo carina starts the lesson by saying that “much” and “many” have the meaning of “a large amount of something” in many contexts. the fact that she explains it orally gives evidence that the grammar approach is deductive (thornbury, 1999). figure 2. english in brazil's video about quantifiers the teacher approaches the form of the quantifiers by saying that “many” goes with countable nouns and “much” goes with uncountable nouns. for “many”, she uses the example of apples. a short animation of three apples shaking appear on the video and then, she counts in brazilian portuguese and english “one apple, two apples, three apples” and say that they aline fay de azevedo & juliana matias teaching english through youtube: grammar video analysis of three brazilian youtube channels dedicated to efl teaching 4 are countable and that it is possible to transform the noun “apple” in the plural form. by mentioning that countable nouns have the plural from, she provides important information of the grammar aspect. figure 3. animation to illustrate that the noun "apple" is countable following the explanation of countable nouns, carina explains that “much” is for uncountable nouns. in other words, nouns that you cannot quantify. she considers “water” as a classical example because similar to brazilian portuguese, it is not possible to say, “there are many waters here”. she then provides the example “how much water do you drink every day?” that appears in the video in the same colors as the previous examples. the meaning she provides is an explanation in her native language of the sentence. as for the form of questions with uncountable nouns, there is not any explanation. a reason for not approaching the question forms in the video might relate to larsen-freeman‟s (1991) claim that it is not necessary to explain everything in one lesson. the steps of explanation are the same for the sentence “i don‟t drink much juice” and the teacher says that, according to grammar books, liquids, in general, are uncountable. example sentence only for the first one ( i drank too much coke yesterday). the next example sentences are “can i have two cokes?”, “two cokes, please” and “two cans of coke.” again, she provides extra information about the grammar, following the claims of larsenfreeman et al. (2016) and larsen-freeman (1991). after the explanation of “much” and “many”, carina reviews the grammar points by revisiting the examples that appeared before: a) how much water did you drink? b) how many bottles of water did you drink? c) how much money do you have? d) how many dollars do you have here? finally, she introduces another use of quantifier: a lot of. the first example sentence is “i made a lot of mistakes in my test” in which she says that it was possible to exchange for “i made many mistakes in my test.” in addition, she says it is more common and more informal to say “a lot of”. carina also presents the form “lots of” and the example sentence “there are lots of people here” and says that this form is also informal and it is more common to appear in affirmative sentences rather than “much” and “many”, which corresponds to the use of the three dimensions (larsen-freeman et al., 2016). furthermore, the teacher says that “much” and “many” are more common to appear in questions and negative sentences. she finishes the grammar explanation with the example “how much is it” and says that it is used to ask for the price of something. based on this video, it seems that carina opted for a deductive approach. she first explains the grammar and then gives the example afterwards. she talks about the form generically by giving its definition in oral form. the examples sentences were not authentic and there was not any contextualization before approaching the grammar topic. the meaning she provided was a translation of every example sentence she used. for the use of the grammar, she mentioned “a lot of” and “lots of” but she did not give a satisfying explanation of the difference between the two; she only mentioned that the second one is even more informal. for the technology, the use of animations to illustrate the counting of nouns might be good for students who are able to understand a concept better with a visual aid. furthermore, the scene of a tv show showing a person alone right after a sentence that says, “i don‟t have friends” was a good idea to elicit the example, besides being a good source of authentic material (bernardo, 2006). the use of captions with a different color on the grammar topic is also interesting to make student visualize the concept and focus on it. there was no interaction with students, but it is worth to mention that on the day the video was uploaded, she posted a quiz about the quantifiers on her instagram stories. however, it only stays for 24h so it was not possible to check the exercises. much and many não erre mais!| #videotododia by inglês compatilhado the teacher did not specifically clarify the reason for her video. she said that she struggled with memorizing the use of “much” and “many” and english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 5 that the she needed a “trick” in order to apply the correct quantifier. after that, she said that “much” contains the letter “u” of uncountable, and that every time she would use a quantifier she would remember that letter. for “many” she said that it was used with the “rest”, with the countable, although she did not elaborate on its meaning. as the video was short, there was no review or conclusion on the topic. thus, it is dubious if there was any approach since she did not explain the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. thornbury (1999) says that grammar lessons consist of working the grammar a rule, providing examples in which the rule is applied, doing written exercises and, if possible, putting the content in speaking practice. since there was not interaction with students, it was not possible to consider the grammar video as inductive as well. in fact, this video cannot stand-alone and depends on another one that provides such information. there is another video on the teacher‟s channel, she gives examples of countable and uncountable nouns, but she does not mention the quantifiers. if a student watched both videos, she or he might have difficulties linking the two ideas together, especially because there is not exposure to examples and illustrations of the two ideas together. the only example provided is on the comment of the channel of this video and consists of two decontextualized sentences: one to illustrate “much” and another to illustrate “many.” figure 4. inglês compartilhado's video about quantifiers regarding technology, the teacher only used the letter “u” in orange color in the word “much”, while the rest of the word was in purple. to sum things up, the title of the video might be misleading since there was no approach of meaning, use or form of the grammar topic, which might be the reason students decided to watch it. furthermore, the approach does not correspond to the deductive or inductive one since both require a deeper contact with the grammar point (larsen-freeman et al., 2016; thornbury, 1999). finally, the technology was minimum but quite relevant for explanation the teacher provided on the video. much x many: qual a diferença e como usar? by mairo vergara mairo starts the explanation with the quantifier “much”: “think about much as a large amount… like much water… which literally means “muita água”. he then gives a similar explanation with “much money” and says that anything that you cannot count goes with much. he orally provides examples of form as “too much” and “how much” and quickly gives their translation in brazilian portuguese. he continues the explanation and provides the context of the importance of drinking water, which comes with the example on the video: “how much water should i drink per day?” next, he admits that the example sentence “there‟s too much water in the bucket” does not make much sense, but he uses it to illustrate even so. this whole part of the video corroborates with the deductive approach since most of the contextualization of the grammar is done orally (thornbury, 1999). although he claims that thinking about the grammar rules of countable and uncountable nouns confuses people‟s mind, he clarifies the grammar form of much by saying that you use it with words that you cannot count. thus, so far, he addresses one of the dimensions: the form (larsen-freeman et al., 2016). figure 5. mairo vergara's example sentence of much after that, he starts the explanation of “many”. in order to contextualize the first example, he mentions a person that is popular on facebook and shows the sentence “i have many friends on facebook.” for the meaning of the sentence, he translates it. he also uses the camera aline fay de azevedo & juliana matias teaching english through youtube: grammar video analysis of three brazilian youtube channels dedicated to efl teaching 6 that is recording the video, his computers and his table to illustrate the phrases “many cameras”, “many computers” and “many tables” and says that you use many with things that you can count. moreover, he approaches the question form with the example “how many friends do you have on facebook?” and addresses that like “too much”, it is possible to use “too many”, even though he does not explain its use and meaning. figure 6. mairo vergara's example sentence with many he reviews the content again by saying that “much” is for things that you cannot count and “many” is for things that you can count. there is no mention of the form of nouns (singular and plural) which is an important part of the grammar if you follow the three dimensions by larsenfreeman et al. (2016). there are also exercises, but there is a link to his website with extra explanation and download of a pdf and audio file. although he did not explain the form of the quantifiers deeply, it is undeniable that the teacher used the deductive approach to explain the quantifiers, since he first mentions the rule and provides an example sentence (thornbury, 1999). in the end of the video, mairo says that if the students expose to the language naturally, they will learn the difference between “much” and “many” better. he then claims that his video is to enhance their learning by giving a notion of the two quantifiers. videos about phrasal verbs phrasal verbs que você precisa saber em inglês! by english in brazil carina defines phrasal verb as a combination of a verb and a preposition; a verb and an adverb; and a verb, an adverb and a preposition. this was the only approach to the form of phrasal verbs during the video. she then explains that she decided to talk about 10 phrasal verbs that she finds useful and common. in general, the meaning the teacher gives consists of a brazilian portuguese word equivalent to the phrasal verb and a translation of the example sentences. the only phrasal verb for which she gives the meaning only in english was “carry on”. a reason for that may be that “to continue” is similar to brazilian portuguese, so it is not necessary to translate it. as larsenfreeman (1991) considers meaning as the denotation of a grammatical aspect, we can consider the meaning carina provides as enough for students‟ understanding. she also addresses synonyms for the phrasal verbs in english, but she does not explain the difference between them. for the phrasal verbs, “come up with”, “find out”, “get away”, “go on” and “make up”, she provides more than one meaning. since the number of phrasal verbs is quite lengthy, table 1 shows all the phrasal verbs. table 1. english in brazil example sentences of phrasal verbs phrasal verb meaning example sentence(s) call off to cancel the strike has been called off. she called off the wedding. carry on to continue carry on! you‟re doing fine! i gotta carry on my work. come up with to propose, to contribute, to emerge, and to give an idea. he finally came up with a great idea. don‟t worry! i‟ll come up with a solution. find out to find, to discover that‟s what i‟m trying to find out. we may never find out the truth. the police is going to find out who killed her. i don‟t want anybody else to find out about it. get away (with) to escape, to run i can‟t wait to get away from this town. the thieves managed to get away. how to get away with murder. go on to continue, to happen we can‟t go on like this anymore. go on, go on, … just walk away. what‟s going on? i wonder what‟s going on next door. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7 look for to search (for) i‟m looking for my keys. i‟m searching for something on google. make up to invent, to make piece with someone he made up a very interesting story. why don‟t you make up? she made up with tom. run out of to be out of they‟re running out of money. we‟ve run out of sugar. watch out to pay attention watch out! you‟re gonna hit the car! you‟d better watch out. out of the ten phrasal verbs of the video, carina only provides the use of “look for”. she says that it is possible to use “search for” as well. however, she does not clearly explain the appropriate situation in which the speaker should use it, which does not match larsen-freeman‟s (1991) view about the approach of use. in fact, she said, “i‟m searching for something on google” and moved on to the next phrasal verb. with reference to the description of the teacher‟s explanation, it is conclusive that her approach was deductive, since it corroborates with thornbury (1999); she firstly introduced the topic of the video and then she explained the content, and finally provided examples. the examples were not in context excepted for the phrasal verb “watch out”, where pictures of sign appear to illustrate that the verb means caution. in fact, it was the only extra technology appeared on the video. figure 7. pictures of signs to illustrate the phrasal verb "watch out" phrasal verbs i always use by inglês compartilhado the video is completely in english and tainá provides the form of phrasal verbs: two or three words that together have one meaning. furthermore, she specifies that they consist of a verb and an adverb or a verb and a preposition. we can say that this is a good attempt to „form‟ according to larsen-freeman‟s et al. three dimensions (2016). tainá also mentions that the phrasal verbs can be separated. although she acknowledges there are grammar rules regarding it (separable and inseparable phrasal verbs), she does not explain them. she believes students do not need to think about them since they probably learn phrasal verbs by watching movies or reading articles. contrary to that, she says that if the words “something”, “someone” or “somebody” appear, it means that the phrasal verbs are separable. such explanation might not be enough for students, though. as thornbury (1999) claims, apart from being a set of rules and a question of correctness, grammar is also a tool for conveying meaning and this meaning is important when the context information is not explicit. she addressed the meaning by providing its meaning with an alternative word. thus, she taught a formal word that is the equivalent to the phrasal verb. an example was the phrasal verbs “get back” and “go back” that mean “to return”; but “go back” specifically means "to return to a place.” as for the use, she said it was the students‟ choice to use one or another. hence, she misses the opportunity to clarify the difference in formality between the phrasal verbs and words that derive from latin. figure 8. inglês compartilhado's example of phrasal verbs' meaning regarding technology, the video has subtitles in english and captions to illustrate the grammar. however, the subtitles were delayed and sometimes they did not correspond with what the teacher was saying. in particular, the teacher says, “to get back means to return” but the subtitles showed “right gasps back many years to regard so”. for a video that did not specify the target level of english, it probably misled many viewers, which might make understanding it more difficult. aline fay de azevedo & juliana matias teaching english through youtube: grammar video analysis of three brazilian youtube channels dedicated to efl teaching 8 the teacher mentioned the phrasal verb, provided its meaning and example sentences. the examples were not in context except when she uses “find out” since she always loses things. she repeats the examples sentences and the phrasal verbs individually, but they are not authentic. regarding content review, the teacher did not provide any. the lesson was deductive, although there were not exercises. table 1 presents the examples sentences appeared on the video. table 2. inglês compartilhado's example sentences of phrasal verbs phrasal verb meaning example sentence put up with to tolerate why do you still put up with/tolerate this situation? call sth off to cancel i‟m sorry but i have to call off/cancel the party. i‟m sorry but i have to call the party off. fall down fall to the ground. hey! caution! it‟s gonna fall down/ fall to the ground again. find sth out to discover i found it out yesterday morning. i need to found out/discover where my keys are. i found it out/ discovered yesterday morning. get back to return do i need to get back/return? go back to return to another place do i need to go back/return to the party? mini-aula de inglês | phrasal verbs #001 | fall down by mairo vergara mairo recalls that a verb represents an action (walk, talk, write, run) and in english, it is possible to have until three words together to represent an action, but two words is more common. grammatically, that combination of words forms the phrasal verbs (he selects “phrasal verbs” on the notepad he projects from his computer on the video). that was his approach to the form of the grammar which did not mention what type of words form a phrasal verb. regarding larsen-freemans et al. (2016) view on grammar, this explanation might not be enough for students, since they can imply that any word put together with another word can be considered a phrasal verb. figure 9. mairo vergara's video about phrasal verbs then, he says that he is going to start with the phrasal verb “fall down” because it has two different meanings. the first meaning is “to fall to the ground”, whereas the second one is similar to the brazilian portuguese expression “cair por terra”. he exemplifies it by saying that when a theory is no longer able to sustain its thesis, it is possible to say that it fell down. for the use of the phrasal verb, he said that it was possible to use “fall” of “fall down” since both mean the same and did not provide a difference between the two. overall, he shows two example sentences with their respective translation in his native language to illustrate “fall to the ground” and one example to illustrate something that is not true anymore. although his example sentences did not contain a context and were not authentic, the teacher provided translation sentences for them. he used the software notepad on his computer to select the sentences in real time which permitted the students to focus on what he was saying. table 3 shows the example sentences of phrasal verbs appeared on the video. table 3. mairo vergara's example sentences of phrasal verbs phrasal verb meaning example sentence fell down to fall to the ground i feel down and hurt my knee. eu caí e machuquei o meu joelho. fall down to fall to the ground walk carefully on this ice or you will fall down. ande cuidadosamente nesse gelo ou você vai cair. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 9 falls down does not sustain its claim their argument falls down on several important points. o argumento deles “cai por terra” em muitos pontos importantes. conclusion regarding the grammar approach, the deductive one was unanimous among the videos that contained grammar explanations (inglês compartilhado‟s video about quantifiers did not have grammar, only a trick to memorize the use of “much” and “many”). broadly speaking, the videos about quantifiers and phrasal verbs followed a similar pattern of addressing the grammar topic, mentioning some grammatical form, meaning and use of the grammar and providing example sentences. as for the form, teachers tended to explain the concept of quantifiers and phrasal verbs orally which probably required more cognitive effort from the students. this corroborates with the fact that there were no specific tags for the level of the audience and carina fragozo was the only one to mention in the video about quantifiers was for basic levels. although the form of the grammar topics consisted of affirmative examples, there was a short mention of the question form of quantifiers but the teachers did not provide further explanation on how to construct questions. the meaning of the grammar on carina fragozo and mairo vergara‟s videos did have a translation of the example sentences they provided. both mentioned that “a lot of” meant “much” and “many”, respectively. as for the phrasal verbs, carina particularly provided many meanings in her native language for “come up with”. she also provided two different meanings for “make up”. mairo vergara did also provide more than one meaning for “fall down”. taina‟s video resulted in providing formal words that share the meaning of the phrasal verbs since it was entirely in english. as for the use of the grammar, carina fragozo and mairo vergara focused on different use for the quantifiers. while carina said that “a lot of” and “lots of” were an informal way to substitute “much” and “many”, mairo vergara opted for mentioning that it was also possible to use “too much” with further explanation. he also claimed that it is possible to use the quantifiers to make questions. the approach of use with the phrasal verbs had difference among the teachers. since taina‟s video was in english, she said that it was the student‟s choice if they wanted to use the phrasal verb or the words that derived from latin. mairo vergara said that students could use the verb “fall” or the phrasal verb “fall down” since both mean the same. he also addressed that it was possible to use “fall down” when someone needed to say that a theory did no longer sustain its claim. carina only mentioned the use of “look for”, in which she claims that it was possible to use “search for” as well, meaning “looking for answers”. captions were the prevalent technology that teachers used in order to illustrate the three dimensions and carina was the only one who used a different color to highlight the grammar. besides the use of captions, other technological tools were part of the teachers‟ videos. taina used subtitles in english on her phrasal verbs video, but it presented some delay and its description frequently did not match with her speech which would possibly confuse viewers. carina used pictures of caution signs to illustrate the phrasal verb “watch out”, whereas mairo vergara projected the software notepad from his computer to highlight the example sentences he prepared to address the phrasal verb “fall down”. all things considered, although these technologies are not cutting-edge, they are practical, since they are not time-consuming and usually appeared on time of the teacher‟s explanation. all in all, in terms of the pedagogical approach, this paper found that the grammar videos, in general, followed a traditional teaching that is similar to what happens in physical classrooms. the main difference regards technology tools. the captions and notepad that appeared on the videos substitute the markers on the whiteboard or the slide presentation. furthermore, they are not as time-consuming because they appear at the moment of the teachers‟ speech. for further investigation and future studies, it is important to evaluate the student‟s comprehension of the llvs through exercises. what is more, it is important to interview the teachers in order to understand their choices about their approaches and beliefs in teaching. this information is vital to investigate if there should be some type of modification regarding teaching practice for online videos and if it is aline fay de azevedo & juliana matias teaching english through youtube: grammar video analysis of three brazilian youtube channels dedicated to efl teaching 10 necessary to innovate in terms of pedagogical approach and technology. references alhamami, m. 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(2013). using youtube in the efl classroom. language education in asia, 2(1), 113-119. retrieved on sept. 28 th , 2018 from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9367/8536235 9166c33467e3e48d0242188cfe31d.pdf/. youglish. (2018). retrieved on sept. 28 th , 2018 from https://youglish.com/. https://ed.ted.com/lessons https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9367/85362359166c33467e3e48d0242188cfe31d.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9367/85362359166c33467e3e48d0242188cfe31d.pdf english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 165 technological pedagogical and content knowledge (tpack) perception of english education students mitha septiyanti english education study program, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: mithaseptiyanti.yoko@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) english education study program, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id machdalena vianty english education study program, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: vianty.unsri@gmail.com apa citation: septiyanti, m., inderawati, r., & vianty, m. (2020). technological pegadogical and content knowledge (tpack) perception of english education students. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 165-174. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2114. received: 25-01-2020 accepted: 21-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: technological pedagogical and content knowledge, abbreviated as tpck or tpack, is the interdependent, situated knowledge needed to integrate the use of digital tools and resources effectively in curriculum-based teaching. this study aims to find out the tpack perception of english education students at lampung university, the way the students obtain tpack in learning, and the role of lecturers in assisting the students to obtain tpack in learning. by applying a mixed method, questionnaire and interview were used to gather the data. 225 english education undergraduate students in academic year 2018/2019 and 3 lecturers participated in this study. as result, the tpack perception of the students was generally good as the score of all domains measured (technological knowledge/tk, technological content knowledge/tck, technological pedagogical knowledge/tpk, technological pedagogical content knowledge/tpck, and technology-related learning experiences/tle) was 722.1. moreover, the students obtained tpack by observing lecturers teaching in the classroom and doing self-learning with internet as media. further, it was found that there were five roles of the lecturers in assisting the students to obtain tpack in learning, namely provider, model, controller, facilitator, and motivator. keywords: tpack; english dducation students; role of lecturers; students’ learning; ict. introduction the role of lembaga pendidikan tenaga kependidikan (lptk) or teachers’ education institution is vital as it is the institution holding the responsibility to form and prepare professional teachers. article 1 paragraph 14 of law no. 14/2005 states lptk is a university assigned by the indonesian government to organize teacher procurement programs on early childhood education of formal education, basic education and/or secondary education, and to organize and develop education and noneducation. there are various forms of lptk in indonesia, including fakultas keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (fkip) or faculty of teacher training and education within state universities, private universities, universitas terbuka (ut) or open university, institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) or former state of teacher training and education institute, private ikip, and sekolah tinggi keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (stkip) or teacher training and education academy (ganefri, 2017). lptk plays an important role to provide english education students, pre-service teachers, with knowledge and skills to teach english. according to hudson and nguyen (2008), efl pre-service teachers are those who learn to teach english as a foreign language (henceforth, efl). the pre-service teachers refer to efl student teachers who have no previous experience in teaching english. in addition, pre-service is a stimulating experience that requires the application of theory to practice, or praxis, as preservice teachers transform and construct identities within often unfamiliar, fast-paced, and intense practicum environments. however, pre-service teachers (psts) and also inexperienced in-service teachers (ists), who are in the first year of their teaching profession, use information technologies mailto:mithaseptiyanti.yoko@gmail.com mailto:vianty.unsri@gmail.com mitha septiyanti, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty technological pegadogical and content knowledge (tpack) perception of english education students 166 in their classrooms in a very narrow manner and have limited knowledge about technology integration and utilization (dawson, 2008; ertmer, 2005; ottenbreit-leftwich, glazewski, newby, & ertmer, 2010; vanderlinde, van braak, & tondeur, 2010). therefore, it is now very important for english education students as preservice teachers to possess technology knowledge as one of 21st century skills. twenty first century skills refer to 12 abilities that today’s students need to succeed in their careers during the information age. one of those abilities is technology literacy. this is one of the important considerations for teachers to bring technology into the classroom nowadays. some previous researchers have investigated how technology had important roles in learning english to enhance students’ literacy (inderawati, 2011; fajri, inderawati, & mirizon, 2015; inderawati, petrus, & jaya, 2019). then, a specific term about integrating technology in education came up. technological pedagogical content knowledge, abbreviated as tpck or tpack (thompson & mishra, 2007-2008), is the interdependent, situated knowledge that is needed to integrate the use of digital tools and resources effectively in curriculum-based teaching. tpack framework provides a theoretical model for studying the ways in which teachers use information and communication technology (ict) in education. ict in education refers to computer based communication that is inserted into daily classroom instructional process. the ict has strength to give a contribution to the refinement of indonesian students’ english proficiency. however, the strength of ict will be more realized if the utilization of ict in the classroom is also guided by principles of good curriculum design and qualified pedagogy to teach english. voogt, fisser, roblin, tondeur and braakt (2013) believe that teachers must be familiar with various pedagogical approaches and appropriate ways to use ict to support the development of their students’ 21st century skills. this is also strengthened by inderawati (2017) that modern classroom must apply technology as the essential key component in the 21st century learning. it is because expanding learning opportunities through technology is a necessary skill for english teachers today. english teachers who do not have the skills to integrate technology in their teaching practices will be out of date (bugueño, 2013). thus, these previous studies proved that 21st century skills especially technology literacy must be invested by the lecturers in teacher education and tpack can be a term to achieve that goal. previous studies on tpack resulted in different findings. for example, yan and yuhong (2012), who examined how the pre-service english teachers could benefit from the inclusion of icts both as english language learners (ells) and would-be teachers in china, found that no matter how much the teacher knew about ict, it could not be automatically utilized in teaching. yan and yuhong (2012) also reported that the integration of icts on pre-service english teacher education impacted on changing focus from the teaching knowledge to teaching competence, from teacher-centered to student-centered learning facilitating learners to construct knowledge. another study conducted by öz (2015), who carried out a research aimed to assess pre-service efl teachers’ tpack by involving 76 preservice efl teachers at the end of four-year teacher education program at a major state university in turkey, found a highly developed knowledge of tpack. whereas the analysis of qualitative data revealed that faculty members used more tpack in the courses than cooperating teachers at practicum schools. in indonesian context, an example of research study on tpack was conducted by mahdum (2015) who investigated the use of tpack among senior high school efl teachers in pekanbaru by using self-assessed questionnaire. the result showed that overall tpack of english teachers in pekanbaru was in good category. it implies that they have been able to integrate ict, content and appropriate approach in english teaching and learning process. another study was done by inderawati, sofendi, purnomo, vianty, and suhendi (2019) about pre-service efl teachers’ engagement in utilizing technology for learning supports in palembang. it showed in the first year research that there were many things to be included: the place, class management, equipment used by students, application used, instructional material used, supporting crew, and instructors’ relation in learning activities. this present study is crucial within the recent context of education in indonesia. the indonesian ministry of education (mone) has stated that indonesian teachers need to integrate ict in the teaching and learning process (ministry of national education, 2007a; ministry of national education, 2007b; ministry of national education, 2009). in order to support the ict integration, mone has embedded on the provision of ict infrastructure at schools by english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 167 providing schools with computers, internet connection and online learning content (ministry of national education, 2010). mone has also embedded in various ict related teacher professional developments (unesco, 2007). based on the explanation and facts above, the researcher was interested in conducting a research towards english education students as pre-service english teachers. therefore, this study aims to find out the result of tpack perception of english education students’ at lampung university, the way they obtain tpack in learning, and the roles of the lecturers in assisting them to obtain tpack in learning. method this study applied a mixed method. related to the purpose of this study, the researcher took english education undergraduate students and some lecturers in academic year 2018/2019 in lampung university as participants. the researcher used questionnaire as quantitative data and interview as qualitative data. first, this study used a questionnaire to collect the data. in this case, the researcher distributed a set of questionnaire to be filled up by 225 students consisted of 72 in the second semester, 72 in the fourth semester, and 81 in the sixth semester in order to get perception of their current tpack. the questionnaire about survey of technology use, teaching, and technologyrelated learning experiences among pre-service english language teachers was adopted from ready-made one by ciptaningrum (2017). it was developed in accordance with the contexts of english as a foreign language in indonesia and pre-service english teachers. the questionnaire consisted of twenty-nine questions as the main part which were divided into five domains: (1) technological knowledge (tk), (2) technological content knowledge (tck), (3) technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk), (4) technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck), and (5) technology-related learning experiences (tle). as long as the researcher took the data, there were 187 out of 225 students from the second till sixth semester who got involved in filling out the questionnaire. second, there were two sets of semi-structured interview conducted in order to support the first data. the first interview was constructed to some students of english education. it consisted of six questions which aimed to find out the way they obtained tpack in learning. meanwhile, the second interview was administered to get information from some lecturers. it consisted of five questions related to the roles of the lecturers in assisting english education students to obtain tpack in learning. it was held after distributing questionnaire. there were 25 students, who were chosen by employing random sampling technique and 3 lecturers by using snowball sampling technique, participated in the interview session. the researcher took likert scale form in the questionnaire as the main data. the category for each domain (five domains) was determined by its total and mean score (sd=1, d=2, n=3, a=4, sa=5). meanwhile, the results of answering descriptive questions on the questionnaire were reported in the form of percentage as supporting data. the last, it was interpreted generally and specifically to answer the first research question. for the interview, the researcher began the analysis from the transcription of interviews. codifications of the transcription were done to identify which data could connect to answer research questions, especially the second and third research questions. next, the researcher displayed the data from participants (english education students, and some lecturers) thematically in order to get a clear explanation, create meaning, and reduce overlapping and repetitive data. results and discussion the result of english education students’ tpack at lampung university the questionnaire items were devided into five domains: technological knowledge (tk), technological content knowledge (tck), technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk), technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck), and technology-related learning experiences (tle). there were 29 items on a 5point likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree) which covered information about english education students’ tpack. the following section presents the results of the analysis of the questionnaire. students’ technological knowledge (tk) the first domain was technological knowledge (tk). it focused on students’ knowledge of new technology or digital technology, such as internet, smart phones, computers, laptops, and software programs. there were 3 items which students had given responses to. the result showed that the total score of responses on 3 items of technological knowledge (tk) domain was 2163 and the mean score was 721. mitha septiyanti, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty technological pegadogical and content knowledge (tpack) perception of english education students 168 students’ technological content knowledge (tck) the second domain was technological content knowledge (tck). it focused on the relationship between students’ knowledge on how to use technology and their knowledge on non-teaching topics they studied at university. there were 10 items which students had given responses to. the result showed that the total score of responses on 10 items of tck domain was 7854 and the mean score was 785.4. students’ technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk) the third domain was technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk). it focused on the relationship between students’ knowledge on how to use technology and their knowledge on teaching topics they studied at university. there were 6 items which students had given responses to. the result displayed that the total score of responses on 6 items of tpk domain was 4465 and the mean score was 744.17. students’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck) the fourth domain was technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck). it focused on the relationship between students’ knowledge on how to use technology and their knowledge on english language topics (both teaching and non-teaching topics) they studied at university. there were 6 items which students had given responses to.the result revealed that the total score of responses on 6 items of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck) domain was 4075 and the mean score was 679.17. students’ technology-related learning experiences (tle) the last domain was technology-related learning experiences (tle). it focused on the practice of using technology in the classroom. there were 4 items which students had given responses to. the result informed that the total score of responses on 4 items of technologyrelated learning experiences (tle) domain was 2723 and the mean score was 680.75. five domains of technological pedagogical and content knowledge (tpack) as previously described, there were five domains of tpack measured by likert scale in this study. the mean score was presented in table 1. table 1. mean score of five domains domains mean score category tk 721 good tck 785.4 good tpk 744.17 good tpck 679.17 good tle 680.75 good the whole domain 722.1 good the first data was obtained from the students’ questionnaire to answer the first research question. according to the result of questionnaire which used likert scale, the highest mean score (785.4) was tck domain. then, it was followed by tpk domain (744.17), tk domain (721), tle domain (680.75), and tpck domain (679.17). all domains got good category. therefore, the mean score of the whole domain was 722.1 with good category too. generally, english education students at lampung university had good perception towards tpack. it implied that the students believe that they are able to integrate technology both on content and pedagogical subject in english learning. specifically, the results pointed that the students’ perception on technological content knowledge (tck) was the best among other domains. according to koehler, mishra, kereluik, shin, and graham (2014), tck refers to inter-relationship between technology and content. then, richards (1998), as cited in van olphen (2008), stated that english language content knowledge includes an understanding of linguistics components (phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, socio-linguistics, and pragmatics), second language acquisition, cross-cultural awareness, and language proficiency skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). the assumption meant almost all english education students in that campus were able to relate their knowledge on how to use technology and non-teaching topics (content knowledge) they studied at university. moreover, the reason of the students’ tck was higher than their tpk was most of the students were in the first and second years of learning (2nd and 4th semester). they were still english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 169 studying about non-teaching topics and had not passed teaching topics at the university yet, such as curriculum and syllabus design, lesson plan and material development, english teaching (et) method, et assessment, teaching english for specific purposes (tesp), teaching english to young learners (teyl), micro teaching, etc. it could be assumed that they prefer using technology to learn than to teach. in addition, based on the students’ interview, they claimed that they always used technology daily to search for learning materials related to the content subject, such as listening and reading practice through youtube and goodreads with or without guidance from their lecturers. the students also confirmed that they could access technology for learning purposes because they had the facilities to support their learning either at campus or at home. furthermore, the lowest two mean score of all was technology-related learning experiences (tle) in the classroom which was done by the lecturers and technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck). although those were the lowest percentage, it still pointed good perception from the students. tpck was the lowest because most of the students did not know how to combine technology, content, and pedagogy subjects. in other words, they have no experience in teaching english by using technology. it was in line with dawson (2008), ertmer (2005), ottenbreit-leftwich, et al. (2010) and vanderlinde, et al. (2010) who stated that preservice teachers (psts) who are in the first year of their teaching professions use information technologies in their classrooms in a very narrow manner and have limited knowledge about technology integration and utilization. another lowest was tle. based on the lecturer’s interview, the head of study program said that it was because not all of the lecturers in that university integrated technology in their teaching. therefore, the students did not get full learning experiences to use technology in all subjects in the classroom. there were certainly many reasons behind it all. according to the students’ interview, the reasons of a few lecturers did not use technology in teaching were age factor, lack of knowledge and skill in operating technology, the lecturers were very busy to prepare supporting technology, the lecturers thought that technology, especially internet, brought more negative effects to the students, or it was only their alternative way to deliver materials more effectively. this finding was supported by newhouse (1999) who discussed the common barriers associated with the adoption of technology and found that the barriers preventing teachers from integrating technology were poor computer literacy, lack of time, lack of confidence, and hardware malfunctions. the way of english education students obtain tpack in learning according to the result of students’ interview, there were two themes which were related to the second research question; by observing their lecturers and doing self-learning. observing the lecturers there were several answers from students in several questions which showed that they obtained tpack by observing the way their lecturers taught in the classroom. it was proved by students’ statements below. “from the beginning i enter this campus until now (sixth semester), the lecturers always use technology in almost every subject. the media used are different, such as power point, email, youtube, until edmodo.” (question 3, student 10) “yes. some lecturers applied google classroom in their subjects. they teach us how to discuss in it, know the tasks given, collect, even see our score there.” (question 4, student 6) most of students agreed that their lecturers had integrated and involved them to use many kinds of technology and its application, such as using power point, whatsapp, email, youtube, even google classroom. it is very important for teachers to have a full knowledge of technologies in teaching language skills (pourhosein gilakjani, 2017; solanki & shyamlee1, 2012). it was because technology had an important role in promoting activities for learners and a significant effect on teachers’ teaching methods. similarly, inderawati, agusta, and sitinjak (2018) found that mobile learning as one of the modes of learning had a potential effect on students’ reading achievement. doing self-learning in addition to observing the lecturers in campus, other data revealed that the students obtained tpack by doing daily self-learning. it was proved by students’ statements below. “it helps me a lot in learning, because i often use several applications like goodreads for practicing my reading skill and youtube for my listening skill.” (question 5, student 12) mitha septiyanti, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty technological pegadogical and content knowledge (tpack) perception of english education students 170 “technology is really helpful for me. it is because i learn english by myself (autodidact) through game, film, and also music from the internet. moreover, because of technology, i have some friends from some continents. i often sharpen my english skills with them via message, phonecall, or even videocall.” (question 5, student 19) in this case, the students admitted that they got tpack in learning more because of their own learning by using internet. they were accustomed to browse material in google, open video in youtube, watch english film, listen english song, play online game with english subtitle, etc. according to lam and lawrence (2002) and gilakjani (2017), technology assists learners in adjusting their own learning process and they are able to have access to a lot of information that their teachers are not able to provide. in other words, the students could explore many things related to learning english by using technology freely. the roles of the lecturers in assisting students to obtain tpack in learning the result of lecturers’ interview showed that there were five themes which were related to the third research question. the themes were as provider, model, controller, facilitator, and motivator. provider the first role was provider some facilities and infrastructures related to the technology. it was pointed by two lecturers’ statements below. “yes. this campus provides some facilities and infrastructures related to the technology. there are lcd, projector, computer, sound system, wifi, etc. besides that, this campus has two language laboratories; university level that we call language centre (upt bahasa) and department level that is usually used for listening subject.” (lecturer 2) “yes. coincidentally unila especially fkip is now developing blended-learning. the lecturers are suggested to prepare, present, evaluate, and even communicate with the students through blended-learning (offline and online). it is supported by the campus by providing some facilities and infrastructures, such as server (internet access) in fkip. although it is not available in all buildings, it can still be served adequately. then, there are university and fkip language laboratories with all facilities inside. the last, there is a micro teaching laboratory for all departments in fkip.” (lecturer 3) in this case, all lecturers declared that the campus especially fkip had provided some facilities related to the technology, such as lcd, projector, computer, sound system, and internet server. moreover, there were also some infrastructures related to the technology to support their teaching, such as two language laboratories (faculty and university level) with all facilities inside, and a micro teaching laboratory. besides, the best condition of teachers for integrating ict were the teachers had good knowledge in technology, they were confident and eager to do the technology integration, and they were fully supported by facilities and infrastructures in the institution. this was in line with the research conducted by bingimlas (2009) who elaborated that one of the major barriers in integrating ict into teaching and learning process was lack of access to resources. thus, it was necessary for the institution such as university to provide adequate facilities and infrastructures related to the technology in this era. model the second role was model in demonstrating tpack to the students. it was pointed by two lecturers’ statements below. “yes. i always use lcd every meeting when i teach students in the classroom. it is because in my opinion, technology can be integrated in almost all english subjects. i usually share and accept students’ tasks through email and whatsapp. there is also google classroom which is officially used in this year. it is for all grades but not all lecturers apply that due to each other’s activities.” (lecturer 1) “yes, i do. i have integrated technology in my teaching since ten years ago. i always do it for almost all subjects which i hold. for example, in qualitative research data analysis and second language acquisition (sla), i always use videos from youtube about the learning theories from some experts. so, the students’ insight can be broader.” (lecturer 3) based on the result of interview, it approved the results in previous questions. the lecturers had already integrated technology to teach their subjects, although the way and the frequency were different. lecturers needed to show the ability in using new technology like the internet and digital video in order to give example directly to the students about the utilization of technology in education, especially in english. the ability included teachers’ skills in sharing and accepting students’ tasks through email and whatsapp, english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 171 teaching students through web-based technology, such as virtual class, and using videos from youtube about learning theories from some experts. it was supported by the statement from murphy, depasquale, and mcnamara (2003) that teachers should model the use of technology to support the curriculum so that learners can increase the true use of technology in learning their language skills. controller the third role was controller for the utilization of technology in the classroom. it was pointed by two lecturers’ statements below. “i prefer to use technology in teaching due to some reasons; it will be more interesting for students, data can be stored by all students for a long time, and it opens chance for indirectly teaching and learning when it is needed.” (lecturer 1) “there are 2 considerations when i use technology; the availability of facility and infrastructure in faculty (e.g. lcd is ready, projector is in good condition, or even internet server does not get down at that time) and readiness of human resources in this case students in accepting material through technology.” (lecturer 2) in fact, every lecturer had different considerations in using technology when they were in the classroom. based on lecturers’ interview, the considerations were divided into 3 categories; the readiness of lecturers, students, and environment. the lecturers’ readiness included their knowledge and skill in using technology in the classroom. the students’ readiness included their mental readiness in receiving learning material through technology. whilst, environment readiness included the availability of facilities and infrastructure, condition of server, electricity, etc. on the other hand, technology was used in teaching and learning process regarding to its advantages, such as it was up-to-date, interesting, could be long lasting data, opened indirectly teaching and learning process, etc. moreover, koehler and mishra (2008) asserted that teachers should also need to decide whether the technology supports or hinders the attainment of the purpose of the lesson. it was done because the lecturers’ decision would influence students’ learning directly or indirectly. facilitator the fourth role was students’ facilitator in getting tpack. it was pointed by two lecturers’ statements below. “yes. i always give tasks which force them to use technology. for example, in pragmatic subject, i asked them to search a film and then analyse the utterances inside. so, the students would learn how to download a film, present it in power point, cut the segments needed, etc. the point is giving the students tasks about technology will indirectly make them think how to use technology for learning. in this case, the students who have ability to do it will help the others in his/her group because it is a group work.” (lecturer 1) “yes. i like to challenge my students to use technology as learning media. for example, in oral translation subject, i ask them to make a video about the translation and then they must upload it in their own youtube channel. the last, they do not need to burn the video in cd, they just have to send their video-link to me.” (lecturer 2) the lecturers recognized that they were used to invite their students to use technology actively in learning with many kinds of activities, such as giving tasks which forced them to use technology, challenging students to use technology as learning media, and enriching the learning material. the goal was to get the students and technology engaged. moreover, the use of technology has changed the teaching method from teachercentered to learner-centered. therefore, teachers should be facilitators and guide their learners’ learning and this change is very useful for learners to increase their learning (riasati, allahyar, & tan, 2012). motivator the last role was motivator in encouraging students to integrate technology in their learning. it was pointed by two lecturers’ statements below. “yes, it is really helpful in enriching and presenting material. moreover, it can make the students be more active inside and outside classroom.” (lecturer 1) “yes. it is not only lecturers who get the benefits of using technology, but also the students. through technology, the students can learn and get material needed from many sources faster, easier, more directed, and more interesting.” (lecturer 3) mitha septiyanti, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty technological pegadogical and content knowledge (tpack) perception of english education students 172 the three lecturers who had been interviewed were optimistic about the good impact of technology in their students’ learning. the lecturers always encouraged their students to use technology because they assumed many benefits of technology for students’ learning. for example, the students could learn, get, and enrich material needed from many sources in the internet faster, easier, more directed, and more interesting, present material through technology, and also give their best performances in the classroom. it was in line with mishra’s and koehler’s (2006) point of view that technology is able to provide access to explanations, representations, analogies, and demonstrations that make the subject matter more accessible to the learner. conclusion first, the tpack perception of english education students at lampung university in academic year 2018/2019 is generally in good category. it implies that the students believe that they are able to integrate technology either on content or pedagogical subject in english learning. the mean score of all domains measured (technological knowledge/tk, technological content knowledge/tck, technological pedagogical knowledge/tpk, technological pedagogical content knowledge/tpck, and technology-related learning experiences/tle) is 722.1. the highest mean score is on tck domain (785.4), while the lowest one of all is on tpck domain (679.17). second, there are two ways how english education students obtain tpack in learning. the first is by observing lecturers when they teach in the classroom. the second is by doing self-learning with internet as media. third, it was found that there are five roles of the lecturers in assisting english education students to obtain tpack in learning. the roles are provider of facilities and infrastructures related to the ict, model in integrating ict in the classroom, controller whether the learning material needed ict or not, facilitator between students and technology, and motivator to encourage students to use ict wisely. references bingimlas, k. a. 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(2008). tpck an integrated framework for educating world language teachers. in aacte (ed.), the handbook of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck) for educators. new york: routledge. vanderlinde, r., van braak, j., & tondeur, j. (2010). using an online tool to support school-based ict policy planning in primary education. journal of computer assisted learning, 26, 434–447. voogt, j., fisser, p., roblin, n. p., tondeur, t. j., & braakt. (2013). technological pedagogical content knowledge: a review of the literature. journal of computer assisted learning, 29, 109121. yan, c., & yuhong, j. (2012). integration of icts into subject teaching in preservice english teacher education. proceedings of 2012 international conference on information technology based higher education and training (ithet), (pp. 15). istanbul, turkey: ieee. mitha septiyanti, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty technological pegadogical and content knowledge (tpack) perception of english education students 174 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 95 the effect of cooperative language learning and personality types towards essay writing bejo sutrisno foreign language high school (stiba) iec jakarta, indonesia e-mail: bjs_sutrisno@yahoo.co.id yumna rasyid applied linguistics, postgraduate program of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: yumna.rasyid@unj.ac.id aceng rahmat applied linguistics, postgraduate program of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: acengrahmat@gmail.com apa citation: sutrisno, b., rasyid, y., & rahmat, a. (2018). the effect of cooperative language learning and personality types towards essay writing. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 95-104. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1259. received: 19-02-2018 accepted: 29-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: this study is aimed to find out the effect of cooperative learning techniques and personality types on english essay writing skill. this study was conducted at stiba – iec jakarta for the fourth semester in the academic year 2016/2017. it was an experimental study with the factorial design 2 x 2 at 0.05 significant level. the sample was 32 students and divided into two groups which each group was 16 students. the research reveals that: (1) students’ english essay writing skill taught with think-pair-share (tps) technique was higher than with student team achievement division (stad) technique; (2) english essay writing skill on introvert personality type was higher than extrovert personality types; (3) there was interaction effect between learning techniques and personality type toward english essay writing skill; and (4) students with introvert type taught with tps technique was higher than those taught with stad technique. there is an interaction effect between learning techniques and personality types on english essay writing skills. keywords: cooperative learning, essay writing skill, learning technique, personality type. introduction an essay is definitely a set of paragraphs. an essay is composed of several long paragraphs with a topic as well as some paragraphs. however, since the topic of the essay is too complex to be discussed in a paragraph, the author needs to divide it into several paragraphs, with one core discussion of each paragraph. then the author needs to link the paragraphs by adding introductory sentences at the beginning of the paragraph and the sentence of conclusion at the end of the paragraph. english essay writing skill is one of the language skills to be mastered by the fourth semester students after they got the lesson of how to write a paragraph, how to identify and create the topic sentence, how to identify and make the thesis statement in the first paragraph and how to arrange conclusion paragraph on a written english in previous semester. english essay writing skill is also an academic writing that needs to be mastered by every student to build their skill in writing scientific papers especially when the students have to do the final task in the form of thesis writing. two learning techniques are implemented in this research, they are learning techniques of think-pair-share (tps) and learning technique of student teamachievement divisions (stad) for two groups of students that have the personality type of extrovert and introvert. then, the mailto:bjs_sutrisno@yahoo.co.id bejo sutrisno, yumna rasyid, & aceng rahmat the effect of cooperative language learning and personality types towards essay writing 96 results of the two groups are compared after the treatments of several meetings. english writing is not a new subject for the students. they have started learning writing since they were in the first semester certainly with the different level of knowledge and skill in the set of process during the study with the different results. basically, english essay writing has the objective to train students expressing their creative ideas in composition which cover the criteria of the essay writing such as format, mechanics, content, organization, grammar and sentence structure. techniques of think-pair-share and student team-achievement divisions are two learning techniques of cooperative learning. in this cooperative learning model, students are expected to work together in one group or other group members so that they will be more motivated to improve their writing skills in english. unfortunately, this cooperative learning model has not been widely applied by english lecturers in the classroom. the obstacles arose in learning with cooperative learning model is the students are accustomed to using the conventional learning patterns so it is not easy to form students’ character to be able to apply cooperative learning model well and smoothly. it certainly takes time and process to familiarize the students of semester iv especially in order to apply cooperative learning model well and smoothly. with the cooperation in essay writing skills is expected to increase each member in each group. by working groups of each member will get the benefit from the exchange of ideas and knowledge among the members. what is already understood by a student is not necessarily understood by the other students and what is not understood by the student may have been understood by other students so that they can help each other. baradaran and alavi (2015) stated that cooperative writing is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning. in this way students will interact with each other and the teacher during the instructional session. there are various techniques found in cooperative learning. from a variety of techniques in cooperative learning, they have different strategies and ways of teaching but they have similarities in the learning objectives that involve team rewards, individual responsibility, and equal opportunities to get success. meanwhile, according to sonthara and vanna (2009), teaching practices that provide opportunities to students to learn together in small groups are known as cooperative learning. cooperative learning is children learning together in groups, which are structured so that group members have to cooperate to succeed. students work together to learn and are responsible for their team-mates' learning as well as their own. astuti and baratt (2018), in their research, stated their findings that opportunities for student-student interactions in cooperative learning (cl) activities, absent in the conventional group work, may have contributed to the efl learners’ communicative competence. however, teachers new to cl should follow the preset procedures for cl strategies to promote individual accountability and understand how these activities benefit students. it is simply inferred that in cl, teacher should set and follow the procedures to conduct the teaching and learning activities using techniques of cl to make the activities run successfully. sharan (2015) breaks down some cooperative learning techniques, such as (1) think-pair-share (tps); (2) student teamachievement divisions (stad); (3) team assisted individualization (tai); (4) jigsaw; and (5) cooperative integrated reading and composition (circ). from the several learning techniques in cooperative learning mentioned above, basically they have the same concepts but different ways of teaching. the writer applied two techniques for two different classes, they are all cooperative learning methods contribute to the idea that students who work together in learning and accountable to their teammates are able to make themselves learn equally well. application of think-pair-share (tps) technique is a strategy which has been designed to let students think about the topic given to be formulated the ideas from every student, and then the ideas are distributed to english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 97 the group members. when the teacher gives lessons to the class, the students sit in pairs with their teams. the teacher asks the class questions. students are asked to think of an answer from themselves, then pair up with their partner to reach an agreement on the answer. finally the teacher asks the students to share the answers they have agreed with the whole class. on the other hand, according to sharan (2015), in the tps technique, the core group is divided into two pairs. the pairs are given a problem and they think about it. thinking time is given to think (at least three to ten seconds). students work in pairs and share their opinions. the pairs then share the answers to the whole students. this technique has three phases in application, namely (1) think; (2) pair; and (3) share. think-pair-share technique which is part of cooperative learning besides giving opportunity to students to work alone and cooperate with other students also has other advantages that are student participation optimization, with classical method that allows only one student to go forward and share the result to the whole class. student team achievement division (stad) is a type of cooperative learning that emphasizes the existence of activities and interactions among students to mutually motivate and help each other in a learning task to get maximum results. similarly, according to sharan (2015) that student team achievement division (stad) is a cooperative learning method which is the most studied by researchers. this method is also very adaptable that has been used in math, science, social sciences, english, engineering, and many other subjects, from the secondary school to college level. based on the recent study conducted by mahmoud (2014) related to his research finding that as for the attitude scale, the results obtained proved that the students developed positive attitudes towards using the cooperative learning approach to develop language skills in general and to develop their writing skills in particular. every individual has a distinctive personality that is not identical with others and cannot be replaced or substituted by others. there are characteristics or individual traits on the psychical aspects that can differentiate themselves with others. personality includes structures and processes that reflect innate traits and experiences. with regard to the various definitions of personality, there are some scholars who have formulated the personality based on the paradigm of the theory they have developed. first, sinha and fatima (2013) stated that extraversion–introversion dimension forms the core of human personality theories. it was carl jung who popularized the terms introversion and extraversion. extraversion is the act, state, or habit of being predominantly concerned with and obtaining gratification from what is outside the self. while introversion is the state of or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one’s own mental life. extraversion and introversion are part of a single continuum. thus, a person who is high on extraversion is low on introversion and vice versa. second, qurrar-ul-ain and sadia saeed (2017) stated that, “in the eyes of many language teachers, the personality of their students is a major factor contributing to success or failure in language learning. in order to determine how important, they rated personality and two other individual differences”. and they added the statement that, “according to carl jung every individual has both personality traits introversion and extroversion but one trait is more prominent than the other. the terms are bit archaic as extraversion is not about being loud and introversion is not about being shy. it is about where people get their energy and motivation from, other people or themselves.” in relation to the personality types, kayaoglu, in his journal titled impact of extroversion and introversion on languagelearning behaviors, gave his explanation of the extroverted and introverted types of learning that although introverted and extroverted personality types have been identified in studies as significant factors in other areas of educational and psychological research, they have received only sporadic attention in studies of language learning bejo sutrisno, yumna rasyid, & aceng rahmat the effect of cooperative language learning and personality types towards essay writing 98 strategies, which are very often associated with success in language learning. by contrast, introverts are regarded as quiet and calm, with a tendency to be alone. according to condon and sahd (2013) that introversion and shyness can affect students’ social life on campus and influence strongly the ways in which students prefer to receive and process information in the classroom. there is no question that introversion confers valuable strengths: introverts tend to be better than extroverts at thinking before they act, taking in and processing information thoroughly, remaining on task, and working more accurately. their non-combative nature and willingness to listen make them easy to get along with. while zafar and meenakshi (2012), through their research, conclude that while extroverts enjoy an advantageous position with regard to winning more opportunities for putting language into use, introversion is not thought to put learners in an inferior position, as this latter trait empowers learners to act better in terms of certain other skills including writing and reading. yet, as risk-taking, which is a positive strategy in learning, is mostly associated with extroversion, extroverts in this study are regarded as more efficient learners in that they are said to be more actively involved in classroom process in relation to the relevant research results that have been conducted by mahmoed (2014), akbar, roohani, & hasanimanesh (2015), and farrokhi, nourelahi & elahi (2015). mahmoed investigated about the effectiveness of using the cooperative language learning approach to enhance efl writing skills among saudi university students. akbar, roohani & hasanimanesh (2015), explored the impact of extroversion and introversion personality types on efl learners’ writing ability. the results of this study are students who have introvert personality type is significantly better in writing skills than students who have extrovert personality type; third, the research conducted by farrokhi, nourelahi, and elahi (2015) with the title “investigating the relationship between personality type and writing performance of iranian efl learners.” the results of this study are statistically indicated that there is a significant relationship between personality type and descriptive and argumentative writing skills, but the lack of a significant relationship between personality type and narrative writing skill and gender differences is not a significant factor in writing skills. there were some previous researches about the extroversion and introversion towards the students’ skill in writing and the difficulties of instruction to facilitate students in improving students essay writing. most previous researchers tried to investigate the possible effect of extroversion/introversion personality traits on different features of efl writing, such as content, organization, language, mechanics, and vocabulary. here the writer investigates the students’ essay writing skill on format, mechanics, contents, organization and grammar and sentence structure. the results of this study can help the lecturers to employ teaching strategies which fit different characteristics of extrovert and introvert learners. in relation to the above explanation, the research questions and hypothesis posed in this study are as the following: (1) is there any statistically significant difference in english essay writing skill between groups of students taking classes with tps learning techniques and group of students taking classes with stad learning techniques?; (2) is there any statistically significant difference in english essay writing skills between groups of students with introverted and extroverted personality types?; (3) is there any statistically significant interaction effect between learning techniques and personality types on english essay writing skills?; and (4) for groups of students who have introverted personality types, is there any statistically significant difference in english essay writing skill between the students who take the lecture with the tps learning techniques and the students who take the lecture with stad learning techniques? based on those research questions it can be understood that the objectives of the research are to find out if there are significant differences in english essay writing skill between groups of students taking classes with english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 tps and stad learning techniques, to find out if there is statistically significant difference in english essay writing skills between groups of students with introverted and extroverted personality types, and to know if there is significant interaction effect between learning techniques and personality type. method this study applied experimental research method which is a quantitative research using 2 x 2 factorial design which aims to determine the presence or absence of causal relationships between learning techniques and personality types towards students’ skill in english essay writing skill. the participants of the study were 32 undergraduate foreign language school students of semester four majoring in english literature at stiba-iec jakarta. they were divided into two groups of experiment class. in order to homogenize the participants in terms of their language proficiency a free writing test was given. the participants were asked to write an essay of four paragraphs about 250 words on the topic “do you prefer living in a big city or small town?” because the researchers thought it was a general topic which made it possible for almost all of the students to write about it. the second instrument used was about personality type test. this type of test asked students to answer some questions listed by choosing ‘a’ or ‘b’. then the results were calculated and classified based on the criteria for being introvert or extrovert. as explained previously, two sets of data were needed to conduct the present study: a composition test of essay writing performance and a questionnaire to determine personality type. the researcher explained to the participants that their responses would be used only for research purposes. then each participant was given the instruments. it should be mentioned that all the participants were told not to write their names on the instruments, because it may affect their honesty in responding. each data had a code, s1, s2, s3, s4, etc. for completing the personality type questionnaire, 75 minutes were given to write an essay writing and 15 minutes were given for answering the personality type questionnaire. among the participants who took the test, only sixteen students from each group, from the higher scores to the lower scores were selected as the sample for the study. to deal with the data collection procedure, firstly, the personality type questionnaire was administered to be completed by the participants to decide the personality of each student. secondly, they were asked to write an essay of four paragraphs on the presented topic within the time limit of one and half hour. the data collected were subjected to a two-way analysis of variance (two-way anova) by the researcher, using spss (version 22) to answer the research questions. results and discussion based on the data analysis, the hypothesis testing, there were some findings. first, based on the measurement using liliefors test, eight groups of the data came from the population that had normal distribution and based on barlett test, all data groups have homogeny variance. second, based on the anova two lines measurement, it was known that there was significant difference between essay writing skill of students who were taught using tps and students who were taught using stad. tps learning technique from both personality types, introvert and extrovert, with n = 16, the lower score is 67; the higher score is 91; and the average score is 76.28; second, stad learning technique from both personality types, introvert and extrovert, with n = 16, the lower score is 62.7; the higher score is 83; and the average score is 72.4; third, introverted personality type students with n = 16, the lower score is 65; the higher score is 91; and the average score is 76.8; fourth, extroverted personality type students with n = 16, the lower score is 62.7; the higher score is 83; and the average score is 71.9; fifth, group of introverted personality type students with tps learning technique with n = 8, the lower score is 74; the higher score is 91; bejo sutrisno, yumna rasyid, & aceng rahmat the effect of cooperative language learning and personality types towards essay writing 100 and the average score is 82.1; and last, group of introverted personality type students with stad learning technique with n = 8, the lower score is 65; the higher score is 80.3; and the average score is 71.5. the calculation of descriptive statistics for score data of the english essay writing skill can be seen in the following recapitulation table. table 1. descriptive statistics of english essay writing skill score based on the calculation of spss 22 a1 a2 b1 b2 n valid 16 16 16 16 missing 0 0 0 0 mean 76.2750 72.4000 76.7563 71.9188 std. error of mean 1.78294 1.38678 1.83196 1.21096 median 74.0000 71.7000 76.5000 70.8500 mode 69.00a 70.00a 72.70a 69.00a std. deviation 7.13176 5.54713 7.32784 4.84386 variance 50.862 30.771 53.697 23.463 range 24.00 20.30 26.00 20.30 minimum 67.00 62.70 65.00 62.70 maximum 91.00 83.00 91.00 83.00 sum 1220.40 1158.40 1228.10 1150.70 a. multiple modes exist. the smallest value is shown a1b1 a2b1 a1b2 a2b2 n valid 8 8 8 8 missing 0 0 0 0 mean 82.0500 71.4625 70.5000 73.3375 std. error of mean 1.87245 1.69421 1.76742 2.26289 median 81.3500 71.5000 70.6500 72.8500 mode 79.70 72.70 69.00 70.00 std. deviation 5.29609 4.79194 2.17058 6.40043 variance 28.049 22.963 4.711 40.966 range 17.00 15.30 7.00 20.30 minimum 74.00 65.00 67.00 62.70 maximum 91.00 80.30 74.00 83.00 sum 656.40 571.70 564.00 586.70 before conducting the research hypothesis testing, the writer tested the requirements of the normality test and homogeneity test to determine whether the data is normal or homogeneous. the normality test is conducted to find out whether the sample used in this study is from a normally distributed population or not. there were 32 respondents in this study with the sample consisting of 16 respondents of introverted personality type and 16 respondents of extroverted personality type which were divided into two classes of research using think-pair-share (tps) technique and student team achievement division (stad) technique. table 2. the summary of normality test result recapitulation group number of sample lvalue ltabel results tps (a1) 16 0.188 0.213 normal distribution stad (a2) 16 0.120 0.213 normal distribution introvert (b1) 16 0.110 0.213 normal distribution extrovert (b2) 16 0.181 0.213 normal distribution tps and introvert (a1b1) 8 0.171 0.285 normal distribution stad and introvert (a2b1) 8 0.148 0.285 normal distribution tps and extrovert (a1b2) 8 0.130 0.285 normal distribution english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 101 stad and extrovert (a2b2) 8 0.160 0.285 normal distribution the next requirement test is homogeneity test to determine whether the population variance is homogeneous or not. homogeneity test is done for group with the treatment (a) and attributed group (b) using f-test. table 3. homogeneity test variance between group tps (a1) and stad (a2) group db s 2 log s 2 dk log s 2 tps 15 50,86 1,71 25,60 stad 15 30,77 1,49 22,32 total 30 47,92 based on the calculation of barlett test gained x2value = 1.65, compared with x 2 table for α=0,05 and db = 1 is gained x2(0,05)(1) = 2.41. the result showed that x2value < x 2 table. in indicated that ho is accepted. thus, essay english writing skill from the two groups are derived from homogeneous sample. homogeny test of variance between group introvert (b1) and extrovert (b2) is done using barlett test with the significance level α = 0.05. the hypothesis testing are: ho : σ2b1 = σ 2b2 h1 : not ho the criterion of rejection and acceptance of ho is if x 2 vlue > x 2 table, ho is rejected and if x2value ≤ x 2 table, ho is accepted. the calculation of both groups testing at the significance level α = 0.05 is presented in the following table. table 4. homogeneity test of variance between group introvert (b1) and extrovert (b2) sample group db s 2 log s 2 dk log s 2 introvert 15 53.70 1.73 25.95 extrovert 15 23.46 1.37 20.56 total 30 46.51 based on the calculation of barlett test gained x2hit = 2.29 compared with x 2 table for α=0.05 and db = 1 gained x2(0,05)(1) = 2.41. the result showed that x2value < x 2 table. it means that ho is accepted. thus, essay english writing skill from the two groups are derived from homogeneous sample. from the data analysis above, the hypothesis testing, there were some findings. first, based on the measurement using liliefors test and based on barlett test, all data groups has homogeny variance. second, based on the anava two lines measurement, it was known that there was significant differentiate between essay writing skill of students who were taught using think-pair-share (tps) and students who were taught using students team achievement division (stad) (f value > f table = 4.20). besides, there was an interaction of learning techniques and personality type (fvalue = 14.19 > ftable = 4.20). so that, the result of analysis result and hypothesis testing fulfill the criteria, and the next activity was hypothesis test using tukey test to know the strength of the fourth hypothesis. the following are the answers of the four research questions which have been stated previously. apparently, the first hypothesis was significant after the analysis using anava test. the average score of essay writing skill of students who were taught using tps (76.28) was higher than students who were taught using stad (72.4). fvalue (= 4.970) > ftable (= 4.20). so that, it can be concluded that essay writing skill of students who were taught using tps technique was higher than students who were taught using stad technique. theoretically, groups of students treated with tps technique gained a more active, creative, and persuasive learning experience with members in their respective groups. this is evidenced by the mutual input, especially by some students who feel having higher level of understanding of certain components in essay english writing than other members during the learning process. tps learning technique bejo sutrisno, yumna rasyid, & aceng rahmat the effect of cooperative language learning and personality types towards essay writing 102 provides many benefits in the learning process such as the creation of interaction between members in the group and the interaction between groups in one class. the second hypothesis was significant after the analysis using annova test. the average score of essay writing skill of students who have introvert personality type (76.76) was higher than students who have extrovert personality type (71.92). fvalue (= 7.745) > ftable (= 4.20). so that, it can be concluded that essay writing skill of students who have introvert personality type was higher than students who have extrovert personality type. groups of students with extroverted personality types have higher sociability and more interaction than students with introverted personality types who are more intent to the territorial nature and prefer concentration rather than interaction. it is what has been described in previous theories about the difference between extroverted and introverted personality types where extrovert personality type is more on the condition of sociability, interaction and multiplicity of relationship while introverted personality type is more in concentration condition, has depth in thinking to pour his ideas and interests on internal reactions. although students with introverted personality types have more concentration than interaction, they were able to run cooperative learning well in discussion and gave each other explanation and understanding to members in group. the third hypothesis was significant. it was showed by the result of anava testing, which fvalue= 14.190 > ftable (0.05) = 4.20. so that, it can be concluded that there was interaction between the use of learning technique with personality type toward essay writing skill of students. it can be inferred that learning techniques will affect student learning outcomes if the selection of learning techniques in accordance with learning objectives and student characteristics. to achieve the learning objectives, lecturers must be able to apply various appropriate teaching techniques in accordance with the characteristics of students. in addition, to achieve the learning objectives, the lecturers must also master the models and teaching strategies and they should be able to master a variety of teaching techniques. the summary of the results of each hypothesis can be seen in the table below. table 5. summary of two-way variance analysis test hypothesis fvalue ftable (ɑ = 0.05) conclusion first 4.970 4.20 significant second 7.745 4.20 significant third 14.190 4.20 significant the fourth hypothesis was significant after being analyzed using tukey test. the average score of essay writing for introverted students who were taught using tps and stad with the qvalue (6.091) was higher than qtable (0.05:4:8) = 4.53. it can be concluded that essay writing skill of introvert students who were taught using tps was higher than taught using stad technique. thus it can be concluded that on the score of the result of the english essay writing skill test students who have introverted personality type who were given the tps learning technique is higher than the group of students who were given stad learning technique. in this case the group of introverted personality type students who were given the technique of tps learning got better learning outcomes and increased from the group of students who were given stad learning technique. by referring to the average score of extroverted students with the tps learning technique (ῡ = 82.05) is better than those who were given the treatment with the stad technique (ῡ = 71,46) towards english essay writing skill. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 103 table 6. the result of tukey test hypothesis qvalue qtable (ɑ = 0.05) conclusion fourth 6.091 4.53 significant conclusion at this conclusion some results of data analysis which have been presented in the above analysis result are explained. first, english essay writing skill in groups of students who attend lectures with tps learning techniques is higher than the group of students who attend the lectures with stad learning techniques. second, english essay writing skill in groups of students with introverted personality types is higher than that of students with extroverted personality types. third, there is an interaction effect between learning techniques and personality types on english essay writing skills. this shows that there is a very significant interaction effect between learning techniques and personality types on english essay writing skills. fourth, the english essay writing skill of the group of introverted personality type students who attended the lectures with the tps learning technique is higher than those who attended the lectures with the stad learning technique. it can be concluded that the application of learning technique of english essay writing skill which is based on the students’ personality type can influence to the improvement of english essay writing skill. the group of introverted students who follow the lectures with the tps learning techniques can affect to the english essay writing skill. similarly, in groups of extroverted students who have lectures with stad learning techniques can affect the skills of writing an english essay. so it can be concluded that both learning techniques and personality types affect the students’ skills in english essay writing. references ain, q. u., & saeed, s. (2017). relationship of personality traits and writing skills among efl learners at post-graduation level. asian innovative journal of social sciences and humanities, 1(1), 12-25. akbar, j. b. a, roohani, a., & hasanimanesh, a. (2015) the impact of extroversion and introversion personality types on efl learners’ writing ability. journal of theory and practice in language studies, 5 (1), 212-218. astuti, p., & barratt, l. (2018). individual accountability in cooperative learning in efl classrooms more opportunities for peer interaction. the journal of asia tefl, 15(1), 116. baradaran, a., & alavi, reza, m. (2015). the differences between extrovert/introvert efl learners cooperative writing. international journal of language and applied linguistics world (ijllalw), 8(2), 13-24. condon, m., & sahd, r. l. (2013). responding to introverted and shy students: best practice guidelines for educators and advisors. open journal of nursing 3(1), 503-515. farrokhi, nourelahi, g., & elahi, m. h. n. (2015). investigating the relationship between personality type and writing performance of iranian efl learners. journal of literature, language and linguistics, 13(1), 35-46. kayaoglu, m. n. (2013). impact of extroversion and introversion on language-learning behaviours. social behavior and personality journal, 4(5), 819-826, doi: 10.2224/sbp.2013.41.5.819. mahmoed, m. w. (2014). the effectiveness of using the cooperative language learning approach to enhance efl writing skills among saudi university students. journal of language teaching and research, 5(3), 616-625. oshima, a., & hogue, a. (2006). writing academic english. new york: pearson education inc. sharan, s. (2015). handbook of cooperative learning method. kirjastaja: marston book dmarsto orphans. sonthara, k., & vanna, s. (2009). cooperative learning: theory & practice. cambodia: usaid. sinha, a., & fatima, s. (2013). impact of extrovertintrovert personality on individually’s level of creativity: an emperical study. indian journal applied research 3(12), 524-526. zafar, s., & meenakshi, k. (2012). a study on the relationship between extroversion-introversion and risk-taking in the context of second language acquisition. international journal of research studies in language learning, 1(1), 33-40. bejo sutrisno, yumna rasyid, & aceng rahmat the effect of cooperative language learning and personality types towards essay writing 104 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 157 incorporating cultural factors in efl context aam alamsyah technocrat school of foreign language, tangerang, indonesia e-mail: alamsyah_expert@yahoo.com mutaat technocrat school of foreign language, tangerang, indonesia e-mail: mutaat@gmail.com radik darmawan technocrat school of foreign language, tangerang, indonesia e-mail: radik.darmawan@yahoo.co.id apa citation: alamsyah, a., mutaat, & darmawan, r. (2019). incorporating cultural factors in efl context. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 157-164. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2620. received: 02-06-2019 accepted: 10-08-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: this study highlighted the issue of the incorporation of english cultures, cultural preference and diversity in relation to the students’ english program. the need to analyze the students’ perception is imperative since the students are considered as one of the most important factors in determining the success or failure of their own learning process. the respondents recruited for the present study were 80 part-time college students of different departments (i.e., literature, informatics, and accounting). the use of mixed method aimed to elicit more elaborate data on the students’ perceptions toward the above issues. the instruments used in the present study were questionnaires and semi-structured interview. during the data collection, the questionnaire, and interview were administered within the same day. the results indicated that the students’ perception toward the incorporation of english culture was ambivalent. of the 80 participants, there were only 48 students who voiced to agree and to strongly agree with the exposure; while the rest of the participants did not seem to agree. it was also found that most of the students preferred to learn asian cultures instead of western ones. the most noticeable determinants affecting their preference were mainly the popularity of asian cultures exposed on various media as well as their jobs which mostly involved asian employers (japanese, korean, etc.). they were also found to appreciate the exposure conducted by the teacher as one of the relevant activity when learning foreign language. english grammar and vocabulary are skills to prioritize when speaking with asians, and they did not find pronunciation important to support communication among them. keywords: incorporating cultural factors; cultural preference; cultural diversity, asian cultures; efl. introduction the importance of incorporating culture has been widely acknowledged by numerous scholars. the need to incorporate english culture in efl is basically driven by the perceived connection between language and culture (brown, 2001; brown, 2007; dema, & moeller, 2012; nguyen, 2017). in the same notion, the other scholars such as doob (1985) and schaefer (2011) postulated that language belongs to one of the cultural elements, thus indicating the close connection between language and culture as well. however, with the growing awareness of the studentscentered paradigm in pedagogy the attempt to incorporate english-only cultures in efl learning process has become the subject of criticism (slavin, 2009). this is because the children, who enter their first learning process, will usually have absorbed their own cultural aspects as a result of their own parental upbringing (2009, p. 98). with this concept, exposing different culture to those who adhere to certain cultural beliefs may result in unfavorable responses or rejections. in sum, scholars consider that the differences exposed to the students can possibly trigger cultural conflicts which leads to the students’ rejection in learning english (see e.g., palmer, 2013). the present study aimed to investigate the students’ perceptions toward the incorporation of english cultures into their efl program in order to allow the educators to have more complete pictures on how to incorporate cultural factors within the students’ learning process. specifically, the present study aimed to provide those involved in higher education with more sound arguments for incorporating cultural aspects as well as serving their students better. mailto:radik.darmawan@yahoo.co.id aam alamsyah, mutaat, & radik darmawan incorporating cultural factors in efl context 158 the research questions were formulated as the followings: a) what are the students’ perceptions toward the incorporation of english cultures during the class? b) what are the most noticeable determinants affecting the students’ perceptions? c) which cultures do the students prefer to learn during their english class? d) what are the most noticeable determinants affecting the students’ preference? e) what are the students’ perceptions toward the issue of cultural diversity with regard to their english learning? there are numerous definitions of cultures leading to different concepts. the present study refers only to the definition of culture offered by tylor (2008, p. 43) as “the complex whole including knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities, and habits acquired by man as a member of society” scholars believe that language and cultures are naturally inter-connected (see e.g., brown, 2007). in the same vein, other scholars reinforced that language is basically part of cultural elements (doob, 1985; schaefer, 2011). more specifically, the argument for incorporating culture in language learning is mainly due to fact that the ability to communicate in a language requires knowledge of seeing, explaining and acting properly in line with the culture of the language (omaggio & hadley, 1986). with the increasingly important role of bilingualism, cultural diversity, and the studentcentered paradigm, the need to accommodate students’ cultural background has also been highlighted by numerous scholars. larsenfreeman (as cited in griffiths), for instance, postulated that learners are not merely passive recipients of a customized native-speaker input (2003). therefore, it is certainly impossible for second language learners to simply get rid of their culture when learning the second language (byrams & morgan as cited in hinkel, 2012). atkinson as cited in palmer 2013) reinforced that students’ cultural background is an important component of esl/efl teaching. therefore, he believes that the teachers will face it whenever they conduct the teaching process the teachers who ignore such differences will probably face “frustration, misapprehensions, intercultural conflict, and ultimately school failure” (le roux as cited in palmer, 2013, p. 4). likewise, alpetkin (2002) has long argued that the concept of native speaker itself is “shaky”. therefore, the concept of teaching english based on native speakeristic paradigm is not always necessary. specifically, alptekin (2002) elaborated that the instances of speaking practice in the future will probably occur more in non-native english context instead of in english speaking context. empirically, the perceived incompatibilities or differences between the students’ cultural background and the newly exposed english cultures have also been reported. in pakistan context for instance, some pakistani students who learned english were found to bear negative attitudes toward learning english due to the perceived differences (jabeen & shah, 2011). the teaching of english in the kingdom of saudi arabia have also been marred with some criticisms due to the perceived improper cultural presentation in their teaching materials (osman, 2015). the relatively current research on the teaching english in saudi arabian cultural context has also indicated slightly disheartening challenge, in that most of the learners of english language at jazan university admitted to having some sociocultural limitations, such as the fear of practicing english language, the paradigm that speaking english is not the part of the culture at jazan, westernization, and so forth (ullah, 2017). hopkyn’s (2017) current research, alike, has also found some relatively discouraging responses. for instance, while the influence of english toward the respondent’s identity was deemed as positive changes, the impact of english toward arab cultures was still considered harmful since it could probably incur negative changes to cultural identity such as arabic loss, the emergence of domestic rifts between generations adopting traditional and modern point of views, more modern clothing changes and the desires to behave like english nativespeakers (hopkyns, 2017). unlike the above disheartening reports, the study conducted in indonesian efl context revealed different results. murtisari and ma’s finding (2017), for instance, found that indonesian students tended to view the existence of english positively in terms of enriching their language and culture. more specifically, murtisari and ma (2017) indicated that there were more than half of the respondents who disbelieved that the existence of english could erode their cultures. in sum, scholars believe that the intercultural conflict arising between the students and the newly cultural exposure is generally caused by english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 159 the perceived or real incompatibility of goals, values, expectations, processes, or outcomes between two or more interdependent individuals or groups (see e.g., martin, & nakayama, 2008, p. 211). triandis (2009, p. 18), alike, corroborates that the intensity of conflict will usually depend on “how far the distance occurs”. method basically mixed method is generally considered as a study which employs both written and verbal means (frankel, wallen, & hyun, 2012; schoonenboom, & johnson, 2017). the use of written means as the data collection is due to the potentially simple and efficient way of collecting the data (bohner & wanke as cited in chung 2006). the data collected through questionnaire is therefore perceived very suitable to measure someone’s perception/attitudes (bohner & wanke as cited in chung 2006). in terms of eliciting someone’s perception, the use of likert scale-like option, for instance, enables the participants to categorize their thought on certain aspect easily (sinno, 2008; yu, 2010). in order to support the validity of the data collection, the use of interview can be administered in order to help validate the participants’ perception (yu, 2010; frankel, wallen, & hyun, 2012; schoonenboom, & johnson, 2017). this is because the use of questionnaire, which is solely administered without other means, can possibly prevent the participant to describe their thoughts further and the reasons behind their choices. some of the scholars even perceive that the use of sole questionnaire will allow the participants to conceal the truth about their perceptions (sinno, 2008). therefore, the use of interview which is conducted almost at the same time (concurrently) will possibly provide the participants with more chances to figure out the reasons behind their perception, thus making the data become more valid (schoonenboom, & johnson, 2017). the study was conducted in a privately funded university located in a suburban area. the university has been accredited and operating some majors at the moment. the recruitments of the students was not solely based on their majors but mainly based on their availability to support the study. in addition, the management of the university also required the researcher to obtain the participants’ consents prior to the commencement of the study. scholars such as frankel, wallen, and hyun (2012) perceived that it is possible for the researcher to select the subjects of research based on their availability due to several constraints such as the limited number of participants who are able to participate in the projects, etc. the participants were conveniently recruited based on their available time and their willingness to participate voluntarily (frankel, wallen, & hyun, 2012). there was no reward given to those attending the project. the research was conducted merely based on voluntary basis and only conducted for a day in order not to disturb the students’ learning process. the participants recruited were mostly the first semester students, while the rest were in their second semesters. the first data collection was taken from the questionnaire administered to the students in their own classes. the second data collection was taken from the random interview conducted to the students one by one in order to provide more elaborate data and much more relaxing atmosphere. since the present study was scheduled for only one day, the researcher did not interview the whole students. on the other hand, the researcher offered the students who were willing to be interviewed right after the process of eliciting written data. there were only 8 students who were interviewed after the administration of questionnaire. the followings are the data of the students participated in the study. table 1. the participants of the study department number occupation written data oral data english literature 20 yes yes yes informatics 20 yes yes yes accounting 40 yes yes note: not all of the students of the two departments were interviewed since the present study aimed to analyze students’ perceptions, some instruments were employed to elicit the data. in sum, the analysis of the research data was based on both written and oral data. the use of written instrument (i.e. questionnaire) was administered for the first time aam alamsyah, mutaat, & radik darmawan incorporating cultural factors in efl context 160 in order to allow the researcher to get the preliminary data indicating the participants’ perceptions toward the incorporation of english culture in their efl context. further, the oral/verbal data were used so that the researcher could get more complete reasons supporting the participants’ perceptions. the use of verbal data supporting the written data is also in line with patton’s concept suggesting the use of interview as the means for identifying the participants’ thought, idea, or perception. patton (as cited in frankel, wallen, & hyun, 2012), for instance, defended the use of interview in order to elicit someone’s mind instead of the other instruments e.g. observation. “we interview people to find out from them those things we cannot directly observe. the issue is not whether observational data is more desirable, valid, or meaningful than self-report data. the fact of the matter is that we cannot observe everything. we cannot observe feelings, thoughts, and intentions. we cannot observe behaviors that took place at some previous point in time. we cannot observe situations that preclude the presence of an observer. we cannot observe how people have organized the world and the meanings they attach to what goes on in the world. we have to ask people questions about those things” (p. 451). the followings are the brief steps of collecting the data: 1. the students were informed about the planned research which would be conducted in their classroom. 2. the students were given some brief information regarding the research, the procedures, and the confidentiality regarding the research. 3. the students were asked to fill in the questionnaire based on the students’ classrooms (i.e., literature, informatics, and accounting). 4. after handing in their questionnaires, the students were requested to attend the interview session for approximately 10 to 15 minutes. 5. the interview was offered to the whole participants and conducted in semi-structured manner. 6. the participants were selected to attend an interview session. 7. the interview aimed to identify more elaborate data on the students’ perceptions. 8. the interview was conducted in bahasa/students’ native language in order to allow the students to express their perceptions freely. results and discussion the section presents the findings from written data (i.e. questionnaire) taken from the first phase. for the sake of simplicity, the oral/verbal data elicited during the interview are presented partially in the discussion section. only certain relevant statements will be presented in the discussion. the verbal data are translated into english (muamaroh, 2013, p. 64). the students’ perception toward the incorporation of the english culture in efl table 2. students’ perceptions toward the incorporation of english culture the most noticeable determinant affecting students’ perception table 3. the most noticeable determinant affecting students’ perception english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 161 the cultures that the students prefer to learn during their class table 4. the culture that the students prefer to learn during their english class the most noticeable determinants affecting the students’ preference table 5. the most noticeable determinants affecting the students’ preference the students’ perception toward the issue of cultural diversity table 6. the students’ perception toward the issue of cultural diversity 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 cultural diversity is as important as the english that i learn cultural diversity is less important than english i don’t think that cultural diversity and english learning are related my own choice (learning english will not incur negative impact to my cultures) what are students' perception toward the issue of cultural diversity with regard to their english learning? n=80 the students’ need for learning english based on the finding of the first research question (please refer to table 2), it can be inferred that the english cultural exposure during the class was not fully supported by the whole participants. in fact, there were only 48 students (40 agrees and 8 strongly agrees) who voiced their agreement. in fact, the rest 32 students (approximately 40 % of the whole participants) were found to disagree with such exposures. one of the participants (a) who voiced his unfavorable written responses, openly stated: well, i think english is still important but i think presenting english cultures too much is not important anymore for us, as you see that i am not living abroad and i think there is not much benefit to my work at all (interview). similarly, another participant (b) who admitted to have voiced his favorable written response in the questionnaire indicated relatively the same perception i think my focus is now …how to find a better employment, so whether the teaching of english culture is important, may be, if one day i go to america or australia …but the most important thing that i have to do now is i have to be more aam alamsyah, mutaat, & radik darmawan incorporating cultural factors in efl context 162 prepared to apply my english in asian communities since my boss is japanese (interview) when being asked about the english skill was very important for him, he simply stated. what i need is, off course, the ability to communicate well, may be grammar, you know that asian doesn’t really care about pronunciation but they simply have accurate grammar to communicate, but again it doesn’t mean that they hate english pronunciation, but they just simply focus more on jobs (interview) the most noticeable determinants affecting students’ perception the ambivalent responses on the incorporation of english cultures was found relevant to the verbal utterances elicited by the researcher, in that the participants basically learned english for a mere practical reason; thus they did not focus much on cultural aspects as the followings. respondent c, for instance, simply stated: i think english is important, as we know that english is an international language, however, in this difficult time, we need to know what to do first in our study, so i think communication is the first (interview) based on the analysis, it could also be inferred that the students still indicated their appreciation toward the incorporation of the english cultures, despite the fact that they did not plan to travel or migrate to english speaking countries, as simply stated by respondent e: [i think it is logical if we are supposed to learn english cultures since we are english literature students; thus it is quite reasonable if we learn english culture so that we can appreciate things about english] (interview) the newly emerging cultural preference: the asian cultures and their business power based on the findings, it could also be inferred that students’ contacts with many non-native english speakers (chinese, koreans, japanese, etc.) have significantly increased the participants’ interest toward learning the cultures as firmly stated by respondent f: as you know that we, mostly college students, even teenagers, are now frequently exposed to asian cultures, such as tv’s drama, k-pop, or the other asian cultures or songs, in fact, one of my superiors is also a chinese, so i think we have no reason for not learning these cultures (interview) when being asked about the english of asian who sometimes produces many grammatical errors or improper pronunciation, she simply stated (f): certainly, it is very common for us to make some mistakes, even though we try to speak english, we admit that we sometimes make mistakes, but i don’t think that our communication is disturbed, in fact, we manage to get along well, for instance, my boss keeps using english when he talks to me and the other workers, this is mainly because i cannot speak chinese, and secondly because it is the language that we understand [interview] with reference to kachru’s circles, it could be interpreted that the participants were getting more interested in learning cultures from the expanding circles such as korean, japan, and china rather the ones coming from the inner or the outer-circles (pung, 2009). despite the potential mistakes which emerge during their english daily practices, they keep using their english to support their communication. this finding also confirms alptekin’s (2002) hypothesis in which the number of non-native english speakers will far exceed native speakers, thus resulting in the varieties of english usage. another participant (g), likewise, expressed the same idea when being questioned on the asian english which tends to indicate some deficiencies, such as less proper grammar or pronunciation: yes, i understand that speaking with asian or like my boss, they just use english for communication practice in my workplace, so i don’t think that pronunciation is important for us, since we communicate among asian, but so far we have no problem with our communication (interview) when being questioned further on the skill that the participant chiefly depends on when communicating his asian boss, respondent g firmly stated [i think we focus on accuracy, so i focus on grammar and vocabulary, we don’t really care with english pronunciation, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t appreciate it] (interview) based on the written and verbal data, it could be inferred that the participants tended to focus more on communication practices, thus focusing more on some aspects of accuracies such as grammar and vocabulary. the action which tends to ignore english-like pronunciation is somewhat relevant to yu’s (2010 finding that the chinese college students analyzed by her indicated strong wishes to be identified as chinese while learning english, thus partially indicating that englishnative like pronunciation is not really important for them. the students’ awareness toward cultural diversity based on the finding (see the last figure), it can be interpreted that basically the students are still aware of the importance of preserving their own culture, thus indicating the importance of english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 163 preserving their own cultures as well as the other cultures. another important finding from the questionnaire is the participants’ perception on the absence of potentially harmful impact due to the english learning process. in short, the present study confirms the previously conducted study in indonesian efl context indicating relatively positive responses toward learning english (murtisari & ma, 2017). this finding also confirms the studies conducted in some asian countries such as china (yu, 2010) in which the students that she analyzed indicated favorable responses/attitudes toward learning english and considered that english did not pose any harm to their cultures. the present study, whatsoever, disconfirms the other study conducted in the middle-eastern countries and pakistan in which some of the students of certain geographic regions tended to indicate strong disagreement toward learning english (jabeen, & shah, 2011; ullah, 2017; hopkyns, 2017). conclusion due to the increasing interest toward asian cultures indicated by the students, it is certainly important for the teachers/lecturers to incorporate asian cultures during the class. the need to accommodate the students’ interest is reasonable since the students recruited for the present study are the ones working for asian owned companies (japanese, koreans, chinese, etc.). based on the findings, it could also be found that basically the students’ interest to learn more asian culture is due to the fact that they will not permanently live in english speaking countries, or simply stated that the students tend to learn english for instrumental motives and not for integrative motives (dornyei, 1996; al-shamy, 2012). this finding also confirms the increasingly important role of the expanding circles since there will be more english communication practices which occur in this region (alptekin, 2002). references alptekin, c. 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(2011). the role of culture in elt: learners’ attitude towards the teaching of target language culture. european journal of social sciences, 23(4), 613-604. kneale, p. (2009). teaching and learning for employability. in fry, h., steve, k., & stephanie, m. (eds.) a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: enhancing http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/2449 https://www.academia.edu/3642866/how_to_design_and_evaluate_research_in_education https://www.academia.edu/3642866/how_to_design_and_evaluate_research_in_education https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/2292/9/02whole.pdf https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/2292/9/02whole.pdf https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/40444 aam alamsyah, mutaat, & radik darmawan incorporating cultural factors in efl context 164 academic practice. (pp. 99-111). new york: routledge. kottak, c, p. (2008). cultural anthropology. new york: mcgraw hill. martin, j, n. & nakayama, t, k. 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(master thesis). american university of sharjah. college of arts and science. retrieved september 2 2015 from: https://dspace.aus.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11 073/5989/29.232-2013.06%20%20bridget%20palmer.pdf?sequence=1. pung, c. s. (2009). beyond the three circles: a new model for world englishes. (master thesis of nus). retrieved december 10 2019 from: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/48631539.pdf. schaefer, r.t. (2011). sociology. new york: mcgraw-hill. schoonenboom, j., & johnson, r. b. (2017). how to construct a mixed method design. ncbi. retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ pmc5602001/. sinno, z. s. (2008). the impact on language learning of lebanese -students’ attitude toward english in the context of globalization and antiamericanism. (doctoral dissertation). university of leicester, uk. slavin, r. e. (2009). educational psychology (8th ed.). new york: pearson. triandis, h, c. (2009). culture and conflict. in larry a, samovar, richard e, porter & edwin r, mcdaniel. (eds.). intercultural communication. (pp. 18-27). boston, ma: cengage-learning. omaggio, a. c., & hadley, a. o. (1986). teaching language in context: proficiency-oriented instruction. boston: heinle & heinle. osman, h. a. (2015). investigating english teachers’ perceptions of intercultural communicative competence in the kingdom of saudi arabia. (doctoral dissertation). university of san fransisco, usa. retrieved april 12 2016 from: http://repository.usfca.edu/diss. ullah, f. (2017). socio-cultural constraints in learning english language at jazan university, kingdom of saudi arabia. international journal of language and linguistics, 5(2), 29-33. yu, y. (2010). attitudes of learners toward english: a case of chinese college students. (doctoral dissertation). ohio: the ohio state university. https://espace.cdu.edu.au/eserv/cdu:38908/thesis_cdu_38908_muamaroh_a.pdf https://espace.cdu.edu.au/eserv/cdu:38908/thesis_cdu_38908_muamaroh_a.pdf https://dspace.aus.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11073/5989/29.232-2013.06%20-%20bridget%20palmer.pdf?sequence=1 https://dspace.aus.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11073/5989/29.232-2013.06%20-%20bridget%20palmer.pdf?sequence=1 https://dspace.aus.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11073/5989/29.232-2013.06%20-%20bridget%20palmer.pdf?sequence=1 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/48631539.pdf http://repository.usfca.edu/diss english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 81 the use of ict in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills wardah zahra english education department, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: wzahraa@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) english education department, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id ismail petrus english education department, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com apa citation: zahra, w., inderawati, r., & petrus, i. (2019). the use of ict in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 81-90. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2110. received: 24-09-2019 accepted: 19-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: making use of ict and applying authentic assessment in the teaching and learning activities represent an obligatory from indonesian ministry of education and culture. this study aimed at finding out types of ict used in the authentic assessment of the productive skills, describing the implementation of ict in the authentic assessment of the productive skills, explaining the possible problems faced by the english teachers in the implementation, and explaining the solution used by the teachers to solve the problems. this study was a descriptive study with qualitative approach. the data were collected through interview, observation, and documentation to three english teachers, a curriculum coordinator, a facility and infrastructure administrator, and three students, were validated through methodological triangulations and were analyzed using miles and huberman’s analysis model (1994), namely data reduction, data display and conclusion, and verification. the results discovered that there were three types of ict in the authentic assessment of the productive skills, the teachers had different methods in implementing the three types of ict tools based on the types of authentic assessment concerning aspects of productive skills, they encountered three main problems in the implementation, and they were educated and motivated to have their solutions to overcome the difficulties. keywords: ict; authentic assessment; ict-based authentic assessment; speaking skill; writing skill. introduction an unprecedented revolution in information and communication technologies (ict) has been changing the standard and nature of the english language by imposing new practices that have been influencing how the students are evaluated in the current years. for the students growing up in a culture of technology integration, ict provides relevant new learning and assessment chances that are in related to their real-world activities. similarly, jonassen, howland, and marra (2009) point out that the use of technology to support assessment is not only done by converting traditional forms of assessment into a digital format, but it can also be used to assess higher-order learning outcomes based on the realbased situation as students have chances to demonstrate what they learn. mueller (2014) agrees that authentic assessment as a form of assessment which requires the students to achieve real-world tasks as a purposeful implication of knowledge and skills. categorically, luo and lei (2012) confirm that there are four different common types of ict in educational purposes, those are, (1) educational networking: an educationally focused network which is accessed by online (ning), (2) web-based learning: an internet-based instructional delivery tool or online application or services allowing those who access the platform to have interactively collaboration in searching, accepting, organizing, and delivering educational content (wiki, social bookmarking, blog, and podcast), (3) mobile learning: means of technologies conducted by portable devices aiding in educational activities (smartphones and laptop), and (4) classroom equipment: any facilitation in the form of devices to support the interaction between the teachers and the students in classroom (projectors and speakers). thus, the mailto:wzahraa@gmail.com mailto:ismailpetrus@yahoo.com wardah zahra, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus the use of ict in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills 82 applicable achievement of the language learning activities would help the students to bestow their knowledge into the real-life situation. productive skills—speaking and writing skills have relation to authentic assessment since they may occur the opportunities to develop real-life activities relevantly. according to harmer (2015), productive skills are the skills in a language produced by the students. in other words, the students need to articulate and write words to generate language. aspects of speaking include fluency—the involvement of the speakers to be able to keep maintaining the utterance spontaneously and accuracy—vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. in writing, the aspects are handwriting, correct spelling, punctuation, and layout. (harmer 2015; nunan 2003). specifically, authentic assessment involving ict in the speaking practices can be in the form of oral practice or presentation using computers, movie-based description, digital story or text retelling, radio broadcasts, voice or video conferences, web-based video clips and digital oral directed report. in another productive skill, writing skill practices, the assessment is classified into computer-based writing practices, a website learning and online publication, and written presentation. (thanyalak, 2012; zhang & han, 2012). indonesia, one of the non-english-speaking countries, emphasizes on productive skills measured by authentic assessment together with the use of ict in its latest curriculum. according to the regulation of the ministry of education and culture numbers 27 and 22 years 2017 and 2016 about graduate competency and process standards, teachers of english should specifically focus on productive skills of english and emphasize on the implementation of ict to improve efficiency and effectiveness in teaching and learning activities. in reality, there are still several constraints in educational practice. the most common problems in relation to the use of ict in assessing the students of non-englishspeaking countries are the teachers are lack of sufficient skills and knowledge about ict, limited to ict facilities, accessibilities, network connection, time, and training. (unesco, 2011). in terms of ict development, indonesia is ranked 111 out of 176 countries worldwide (international telecommunication union, 2017). badan akreditasi nasional (2018) shows that the standard of educators and education personnel are grouped in the three lowest standards. identically, zaim (2013) in his study found out that english teachers faced difficulties in constructing appropriate assessment instruments to evaluate oral and written language skills. he found that teachers were not confident in describing the theory of authentic assessment as they merely do not understand the authentic assessment. trisanti (2014) also discovered that some teachers did not have enough basic theory of authentic assessment. the application of scoring rubrics was unclear for them. thus, the low level of english proficiency probably comes from lack ability of the teachers in administering and evaluating the materials that would be responsible to low scores of the students’ productive skills. in line with the rationales, the writer decided to have sma ligm as the further observed school in discovering types of ict in authentic assessment of productive skills in the academic year 2019/2020, describing the implementation the assessment to measure the students’ english productive skills, elaborating the difficulties in implementing it and the solution used by the teachers to overcome those difficulties. based on the vision and mission of the school, the implementation of authentic assessment together with ict is highlighted. likewise, the curriculum development of the school standardizes that teaching and learning activities must be based on scientific approach and evaluated by conducting authentic assessment involving learning, motivation, and attitudes. additionally, the school intends to consider ict in every aspect of teaching and learning activities aiming to create conducive learning situation. the utilization of ict is expected to result in the students to be globally qualified in the workplaces. method this study was a descriptive qualitative study concerning the use of ict in the processes of authentic assessment. fraenkel and wallen (2012) state that a descriptive method is a method used to explain, analyze and classify something through various techniques, survey, interview, questionnaires, observation, and text. the qualitative approach resulted organized and authentic descriptions of the investigation of relationships, activities, situations and materials in descriptive phenomena such as words, sentences, and utterances. this study involved three english teachers at sma ligm, a curriculum coordinator, a facility and infrastructure administrator, one student of science grade xi taught by teacher 1 (student a), english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 83 one student of social grade xi taught by teacher 2 (student b), and one student of grade x taught by teacher 3 (student c). the students that were chosen were the representatives who got actively involved in the classroom activities of the teachers. in the data collection, the teachers of english, were interviewed (semi-structured) and observed. similarly, the curriculum coordinator, the facility and infrastructure administrator, and the students were also interviewed with the unstructured questions. the last, some documents related to the activities during the investigation were reviewed. to validate the data, a methodological triangulation technique was used. cohen, manion, and morrison (2011) determine this technique as the use of more than one instrument in collecting data. it may involve interviews, questionnaires, observations, and documents. after the data were obtained, they were analyzed by using three steps of miles and huberman’s (1994) analysis model, which include; data reduction: focusing on the specified objectives of this study to make a detailed interpretation; data display and conclusion: displaying the analyzed data covering credible data in text and or tables to confirm the conclusion; and verification: examining through reference to the writer existing field notes and further data collection. results and discussion the results of interviews, classroom observation, and documentation were analyzed into four main objectives to draw conclusions. types of ict used in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills mobile learning in the productive skills, all the three teachers operated mobile learning—laptop and smartphones and involved the students in the classroom assessment as the subject of the assessment. in the interview, teachers 1 and 3 frequently benefited smartphones and laptops to document and ask the students to do assignment in the speaking and writing skills assessment activities. teacher 3 specifically said that she utilized some functions in students’ smartphones such as social media like in whats-app group and email to conduct the assessment in writing skill. additionally, although teacher 2 did not mention about the implementation of the smartphones as the media in the assessment activities during the interview, the observation found out that she utilized the smartphones in assessing speaking skill assessment. she recorded the students’ performance through her smartphone and she shared the files to the students. later, the students had peer assessment about the recordings. moreover, teacher 2 involved the students to get in charge of designing both speaking and writing materials in the form of powerpoint through laptops to be authentically assessed by the teacher 2. however, there was only one lesson plan (about caption text) stated that mobile learning (smartphones) as one of the learning media. it could probably because the teachers were not aware about the detailed lesson plans. throughout the authentic assessment activities enabled the teachers to design innovative creation of certain tasks on the basis of the students’ reallife activities, sharples et al. (2014) state that mobile learning allows the teachers to have innovative practices and social learning environment. therefore, it can be said that by applying mobile learning as devices in measuring the students’ productive skills through authentic assessment, the teachers creatively varied their kinds of means of authentic assessment focusing on the students’ outcomes. classroom equipment since classroom equipment refers to any supporting devices in the classroom used by both the teachers and the students to construct interaction between them, all the findings showed that the three teachers run the provided classroom equipment in their assessment activities for the productive skills. in most assessment activities, the teachers frequently applied classroom equipment that was available in every classroom. the teachers engaged the students into both speaking and writing materials and stimulate them to demonstrate the materials that then would be assessed by the teachers. identically, all of the teachers also listed the utilization of projectors in their lesson plans as one of the supporting tools in the classroom activities. likewise, according to the facility and infrastructure administrator, the projector in each classroom was in good quality as the projector was completed by its supporting equipment. she also mentioned about any other equipment that can be used by both the teachers and the students in the assessment activities such as the smart board and the language laboratory that could be used in turns. in relation to this, american library association (1998) states that the practical use of available technologies around the students motivate the students to learn faster, wardah zahra, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus the use of ict in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills 84 become problem-solvers and more self-regulated. through the availability of the technologies around the students discovered in the findings, therefore, the students would certainly get positive contribution to their achievement. web-based learning in authentic assessment for writing skill, the three teachers integrated the materials through internetbased instructional delivery tool or internet services. as concerns to the results of the teachers’ interview, the teachers mainly focused on the internet-based materials in their authentic assessment activities which purposely involved the students in the activities. teacher 1 applied the internet to stimulate the students to do some practices regarding their writing tasks. besides, both teachers 2 and 3 accounted for the sources of their writing skill assessment from the internet. particularly, teacher 2 asked the students to browse the materials by themselves through the internet such as blog and wiki and designed the sources into some powerpoint files to be projected that were authentically assessed by the teacher. similarly, the findings of the observation resulted that all the teachers browsed some sites on the internet to look for materials to the students. the teachers used internet-based materials browsed from blogs and wiki. likewise, the teachers also asked the students to browse additional information about the materials. after searching the materials, both the teachers and the students had brief discussions and assessment activities. in the lesson plans, the sources of websites as sources of learning were listed. by means of this tool and the teachers’ method, the students became more independent—not waiting the materials only from the teachers and they would have critical minds and this made the teachers focus on what the students were doing. it is in correlation with wasim et al. (2014) has discovered in their study. they said that web-based learning helps the teachers to easily control the students to be more independent in learning. furthermore, it also connects with the regulation in 2013 curriculum. according to ministry of education and culture number 27 the year 2016 about graduate competence standard, it says that active learning should be centered to the students. the implementation of ict in the authentic assessment of productive skills of sma ligm students the implementation of mobile learning according to the interview and observation, smartphones were applied by both teachers 1 and 2 in the same way. these two teachers asked the students to record their performances of the authentic real-based material by means of the students’ smartphones into videos. they engaged the students to get involved in teaching and learning activities as advised by sharples et al. (2014)—they said that mobile learning helps the students to be more active. specifically, the teachers recorded the students’ performance through her smartphone and they shared the files to the students. in the assessment activities, the teachers measured the students’ speaking skill based on the criteria or rubrics they have prepared. the benefits of mobile learning applied by both the teachers and the students certainly facilitated them in having comprehendible materials which were accessible and manageable. in the writing skill, teacher 3 used the smartphone to facilitate her in sending the students’ tasks. she asked the students to submit the tasks through e-mail and whats-app group after the students finished demonstarating what teacher 3 asked during the assessment activities. the tasks mostly about the students’ writing results of narrative text. moreover, laptops were also chosen by the teachers to be one of ict tools used by the students in typing the writing tasks about narrative and explanation text. however in the lesson plan, the only material stated mobile learning (smartphones) was about caption text. in the activities, the students were asked to upload and send the tasks through social media. therefore, although the teachers properly applied mobile learning, they were still not able to detail their appropriate method and media in the activities to be put in the lesson plans. the implementation of classroom equipment according to the all findings of the instruments, the ict that was available and utilized by the english teachers and the students at each classroom of sma ligm was multimedia projector. the materials mostly were conferenced through the projectors. after having the knowledge from what the teachers have taught, the students were asked to design their own powerpoint that would be shared in front of the class through the projectors. during the presentation, the teachers assessed both the students’ speaking and writing skill. the english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 85 students’ speaking skill was assessed while the students were having presentation and discussion by means of projectors. the writing skill was measured by the teachers through the powerpoint that they had designed before the presentation. the materials chosen during the investigation were based on their real-life activities such as designing announcement and caption texts, describing certain objects around them to be critically analyzed in analytical exposition, and singing song lyrics. furthermore, as the teachers constructed the innovative environment of the classroom by having attractive materials or slides and engaging the students to make ones, the students seemed to easily understand the materials. it is in line with what ozaslan and maden (2013) have found in his study. they discovered that the interactive learning materials could help the students to learn better. related to this finding, it happened in the school since all the teachers were not bounded in accessing classroom equipment and they were aware of the benefits from integrating their teaching and learning activities including assessment. the implementation of web-based learning learning through websites means that the participants in the classroom require internet and appropriate websites as the sources of learning in the classroom. according to the findings of the interview, observation, and documentation, the teacers considered that the students have to look for additional sources to be compared that would be beneficial for their learning activities and it would bestow their knowledge into the real-life situation. the teachers’ efforts in integrating web-based sources to the students were successfully make the students be more independent and critical as they have to look for other sources and try to have their own perspectives. these were in coherence with what wasim et al. (2014) found in their study. according to them, as the teachers introduce the students to integrate web-based learning in the teaching and learning activities, the students would be encouraged to be more very involved in the activities and it would lead them to learning which are centered to the students. in the factual implementation, all of the english teachers at that school involved all their students to enrich the knowledge of the students about the real-based mateials that they delivered both in speaking and writing skill. the teachers asked the students to obtain many resources, discuss all of them in group, and design the materials designed by the students themselves. then, the teachers would measure whether the sources were appropriate to the material or not. ict and authentic assessment are requisite the significance of ict and authentic assessment has been noticed by the curriculum coordinator and three english teachers at sma ligm. according to the curriculum coordinator in the interview, the necessity of ict and authentic assessment in the teaching and learning activities has been regulated and the mandatory of 2013 curriculum was also implemented in the school’s curriculum development. she also said that sma ligm put 2013 curriculum as its fundamental base of teaching and learning activities. explicitly, she also mentioned that all of the teachers at sma lti indo global mandiri had understood the concept of the authentic assessment. three teachers of english at sma lti indo global mandiri also acknowledged in the interview that the importance of ict and authentic assessment in their teaching and learning activities. the statements are also in line with the documentation and observation parts. according to the curriculum development of the school, every member of the school should emphasize on the use of ict and the involvement of authentic assessment involving learning, motivation, and attitudes in each aspect of the teaching and learning activities. in the observation, the teachers perceived the significance of ict and authentic assessment. during their classroom activities, the teachers not only engaged the students with ict but also assessed the students with real-life materials. therefore, these findings are in agreement with the minister of education and culture regulation no. 23 (2016) which rules that the teachers or educators, school (satuan pendidikan) and government or private institutions have to organize authentic assessment. the teachers concerned aspects of productive skills in the authentic assessment according to the results of the interview and observation, it was found that the teachers considered aspects of productive skill in the authentic assessment activities. it is summarized into table 2 below. wardah zahra, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus the use of ict in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills 86 table 1. aspects of productive skills concerned by the teachers productive skills teachers aspects of productive skill results of interview results of observation speaking skill teacher 1 content pronunciation and vocabulary use teacher 2 fluency and pronunciation fluency and pronunciation teacher 3 grammar writing skill teacher 1 opening, body and closing opening, body and closing teacher 2 she could not mention the aspects spelling teacher 3 grammar, words selection, spelling, punctuation, and layout grammar, punctuation and spelling. table 1 shows that all the teachers stated that they should consider four sub-aspects of speaking as suggested by nunan (2003) in designing authentic assessment. besides, teacher 1 in the interview indicated that she was more into the content limitation of the materials which is similar to theory of gower, philips, and walter (1995). they suggest that the teachers should limit what should be assessed in their classrooms. therefore, it can be concluded that all the teachers involved the appropriate aspects of speaking skill. in writing skill, the results of the interview and observation of teacher 1 and 3 highlighted the aspects as suggested correspondingly, these aspects were involved in fundamental aspects of writing skill recommended by harmer (2015). besides, teacher 2 could not mention the aspects of writing skills in the interview session. it could be the results of unawareness of the teacher about what she needs to fill unless for filing. although teacher 2 could not remember about the aspects of writing in the interview, she considered certain aspects of writing in taking authentic assessment in her classroom. in the observation, she considered the students’ spelling and punctuation while having authentic assessment integrated with ict and she was frequently measured the students’ writing skill through self and peer review. in a like manner, four lesson plans, rubrics, and the students’ works were analyzed. first, lesson plans listed the same aspects of both speaking and writing skills. in speaking skill, all of the teachers of english concerned intonation, pronunciation, fluency, content, and vocabulary as indicators of aspects of speaking skill. moreover, in terms of writing skill, the teachers put layout, grammar, words selection, structure, and punctuation. table 3. scoring rubrics and instrument from the lesson plans competency domains main focus productive skills speaking writing affective the students’ growth in emotional field observation checklist observation checklist cognitive knowledge in the learning process scoring guideliness psychomotor physical skills intonation, pronunciation, fluency, content and vocabulary coherence, grammar, accuracy and content ict simplifies teaching, learning, and assessing activities in reference to teachers’ interview, all the teachers said that the classroom activities supported by ict would very sure simplify nowadays pedagogy. peculiarly, teachers 1. 2 and 3 believed that the simplified ict-integrated materials were properly functioned and accessible as a means of authentic assessment practices. unesco (2011) also supports that ict and internet can improve the effiency and effectiveness of education and they increase the better changes of educational transformation. correspondingly, the convenience brought by the ict is proven by the documentation and observation. the teachers’ assessment instruments integrated by the ict tools became more practical to the students as the teachers could simply deliver the assessment instruments to the students with a few problems and ict positively affected the students’ products. the products implied the sophisticated outcomes of the students. further, the benefits experienced by the teachers are similar like what selwyn (2003) has been stated that ict applied nowadays is currently being used to make the all the activities of teaching and learning activities become more effective and efficient. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 87 the use of ict in authentic assessment influences the students’ performances all of english teachers at sma ligm in the interview agreed that integrating ict in authentic assessment would positively motivate the students to strive for valuable performances. according to interview, the teachers stated that could the students provide reliable sources to smarten their performances as a part of authentic assessment in the classroom, the students would get additional scores. during the process of the observation which were in line with the interview sessions, the teachers attempted to positively stimulate the students with ict integrated into the assessment materials in the classrooms by connecting every aspect of the assessment with their real-life and integrating it with ict. the teachers carried out specific indicators with the help of some strategies written in their lesson plans to direct the students in getting additional information with curiosity. also, the students’ works showed that the teachers’ efforts in stimulating the students with certain assessment activities integrated with ict influenced the students’ works. as the teachers involved the students into activities which required the students’ higher order thinking skill through productive skills’ assessment integrated with ict in such a way, it surely influenced the students’ performances. dudeney (2000) states that the use of ict tools have potency to benefit the students in developing their english skills. the problems limited time insufficient time becomes one of the major issues in integrating ict to the materials. unesco (2011) agrees that limited time in the classroom would affect the teachers’ readiness in their preparation. sicilia (2005) revealed in her study that most of her participants were struggled by adequate time. in relation to this, two from the english teachers at sma ligm expressed in their interview that ict limited their time. teachers 2 and 3 in the interview compared that the integration of ict for either teaching or assessing activities in her classroom took more time and the integration of ict for the teaching, learning, and assessing activities was shortened their effective time in delivering the materials in the classroom. specifically, they stated that sets of the ict preparation in the classroom needed a lot of time. regardless of the two teachers mentioned above, teacher 1 was certain in her interview that ict supported her activities in the classroom on the whole without any problems including the lack of time. further, the lesson plans depicted that all of the teachers have allocated exact time while having ict as one of their teaching, learning, and assessing aids. surprisingly, the observations held to all of the teachers revealed that all of the teachers faced the same problems—lack of time when integrating ict in their classrooms. all of them indicated that they did not follow the time allocation they arranged in their lesson plans. in addition, during the observation, teacher 1 seemed to be difficult to manage her time when it came to applying ict in her classroom. afterward, she frequently exceeded the time allocation regulated by the school. she often took the students’ break time to continue her activities with the students in the classrooms. network connection based on the observation done, it was found that the issues on the network connection was one of the problems faced by the teachers. moreover, according to unesco (2011), network and connection failure is included to one of possible variables that could be considered in the use of ict at the classroom. during the observation, all the tree teachers were found that they had troubles in connecting their and the students’ devices to internet or network available at the school. teacher 1 discovered that she could not turn on the available multimedia projector in the classroom. it was assumed that there was any failure in the connection related to the cables or the electric socket. teacher 2 observed that as she sent the materials through email, some of the students didn’t have internet connection. moreover, teacher 3 also experienced in disconecting to internet network. the website showed by teacher 3 cannot be frequently loaded. lack of ict awareness during the interview, teacher 2 admitted that she got inadequate awareness of ict integration to teaching, learning and assessing materials as she confessed that she was not an innovative teacher. she mentioned that she would prefer choosing traditional methods than developing new ideas in having sophisticated materials in her classroom and she planned to have her resignation soon. further, she was observed that she was mostly unprepared to the activities which should be integrated into ict as she stated in her interview session at the first. it is assumed that teacher 2 was not aware of what technology brings to education even though the facilities and infrastructures have surely supported the teachers wardah zahra, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus the use of ict in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills 88 to be aware and have knowledge about ict. moreover, teachers who are lack of ict awareness would negatively impact the students’ concept of learning as stated by thakur (2014) in his study. the solutions some barriers related to ict resulting from lack of training activities have been noticed by an expert. according to unesco (2011), insufficient training activities is one of major causes of teachers’ problems in using ict. the first solution disclosed by the curriculum coordinator and the teachers in the interview was that the school set up training which was specialized to ict to all teachers of the school. the training involved the school’s it teachers to be the professional instructor in the training and who are responsible to help other teachers who would face certain problems in using ict in their classrooms. through the training, the teachers had an appropriate understanding of ict. in the observation, it seemed that the teachers purposely managed the students to purposely get involved in the assessment activities that were integrated with ict. as all of the teachers of english dealt with a limited amount of time when they integrated assessment materials with ict, they lengthen their activities in the classrooms into one or two additional meetings and added their duration in each meeting to cover all the activities she arranged in her lesson plan. certainly, this made some discrepancy between the allocated time in the lesson plans and in the real implementation. however, teacher 2 claimed that it would perhaps negatively influence the students’ performances in certain aspects; therefore, she decided to assign the students with tasks that would balance the students’ performances with the materials that were skipped. according to unesco (2011), failure in network connection could be included as several barriers dominantly faced by the teachers. through this theory, teachers using ict in their classroom activities should pay heed to the available network connection. in relation to this, it is proven that teachers of english at sma ligm run into inadequate network connection while having ict during their assessment activities. according to the findings of the interview and the observation, it was found that the three teachers uttered that they would innovate the drawbacks happened in their classroom while applying assessment integrated by ict in the classroom. preferably, the teachers prefered to provide internet connection by themselves rather than letting the students learning without any connection. by covering up the network by themselves, the teachers could incorporate ict to their assessment and prevent the minor problem in the classroom. conclusion this study conducted to describe the types and the implementation of ict used on the authentic assessment of the productive skills of the students, the problems faced by the english teachers and the solutions from the teachers in using ict in the authentic assessment in the productive skills. first of all, it is determined from the results of the study that the teachers made use of three types of ict which were mobile learning, classroom equipment, and webbased learning creatively based on their specific purposes. second, most of the teachers had a significant understanding about authentic assessment and they were mostly ict literate since both authentic assessment and ict are necessary. with these intentions, the teachers had various methods in implementing the three types of ict tools based on the types of authentic assessment concerning aspects of productive skills that they were teaching for the purposes of simplifying assessment activities and influencing the students’ performances. third, they went through three main difficulties in using ict and constructing authentic assessment by the integration of ict. the last, they were educated and motivated to have their solutions to overcome the difficulties. references badan akreditasi nasional. 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(2013). asesmen otentik: implementasi dan permasalahannya dalam pembelajaran bahasa inggris di sekolah menengah. proceeding of the international seminar on _languages and arts. padang: state university of padang. http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htm http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htm http://dx.doi.org/10.7763/ijssh.2012.v2.164 wardah zahra, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus the use of ict in authentic assessment of the students’ productive skills 90 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 9 criteria used by proficient vs. less proficient efl teachers in pragmatic assessment: the case of request speech act misagh hosseini english department, isfahan (khorasgan) branch, islamic azad university, isfahan, iran e-mail: mishoseini2000@gmail.com ehsan rezvani english department, isfahan (khorasgan) branch, islamic azad university, isfahan, iran e-mail: rezvani_ehsan_1982@yahoo.com apa citation: hosseini, m., & rezvani, e. (2018). criteria used by proficient vs. less proficient efl teachers in pragmatic assessment: the case of request speech act. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 9-16. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1529. received: 29-08-2018 accepted: 30-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: the issue of efl teachers’ rating criteria and patterns in interlanguage pragmatics (ilp) assessment is new and needs rigorous analysis. the purpose of this study was to reveal important variables such as raters’ criteria and rating patterns by analyzing the ilp assessment process of iranian non-native english speaking raters (nnesrs) of both high and low proficiency levels based on the request speech act. the data for this study was collected through a discourse completion test (dct) and a rating questionnaire from 40 iranian efl teachers and were later analyzed through descriptive analysis-test and chi-squares. the results showed that raters considered 9 criteria, including pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic components of language which raters noted differently through eight request situations. the results showed that raters considered nine criteria, including pragma linguistic and socio-pragmatic components of language which were noted differently through eight request situations. among the considered criteria, the highest frequencies belonged to the criteria of authenticity, query of preparatory and softness, and interlocutors’ relationship used by high proficiency teachers, whereas low proficiency teachers used the highest frequencies of accuracy, style, and directness. the result of the study can have important connotations for teachers to consider teaching l2 pragmatics in language classes and in teacher training courses. keywords: interlanguage pragmatics; request; speech act; pragmatic assessment. introduction interlanguage pragmatics (ilp) is regarded as the study of the development and use of strategies for linguistic action by non-native speakers. incorporating l2 pragmatics into language teaching programs, especially in assessment area, plays a major role in second language process. pragmatic assessment has been a salient theme in second language process and pragmatic instruction for years. according to oller (1979, p. 39), “pragmatic proficiency test is any procedure or task that causes the learners to process sequences of elements in a language that conforms to the normal contextual constraints of that language, and which requires the learners to relate sequences of linguistic element via pragmatic mapping to extra linguistic context.” the popularity of speech act studies in pragmatic is evident. different categorizations associated with pragmatic studies are in both acquisitional areas, which deal with efl learners’ developmental issues, and comparative areas, which are dominantly of cross-cultural studies (alconsoler & martinezflor, 2008). besides, pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic division of language knowledge (leech & mailto:mishoseini2000@gmail.com mailto:rezvani_ehsan_1982@yahoo.com misagh hosseini & ehsan rezvani criteria used by proficient vs. less proficient efl teachers in pragmatic assessment: the case of request speech act 10 thomas, 1983) are another classifications in which linguistic and social dimensions of pragmatic knowledge are dealt with respectively. social norms and politeness, for example, stand for the socio pragmatic knowledge; while considering various linguistic resources to produce a speech act are pragma-linguistic understandings. nevertheless, the point is that the issue of pragmatic assessment is relatively new. pragmatic assessment mainly focuses on contextual relevance of l2 learner’s language use (oller, 1979). several studies carried out in developing pragmatic tests. brown (2001) used six types of tests. the instrument used was: written discourse completion tasks (wdct), multiple-choice discourse completion tasks (mdct), oral discourse completion tasks (odct), discourse role play tasks (drpt), discourse self-assessment tasks (dsat), and role-play self-assessments (rpsa). in the domain of socio pragmatics, hudson, detmer, and brown (1992) used different methods in testing politeness and degree of directness of learners’ apology, and request and refusal competences. they developed six types of tests: oral dcts, written dcts, multiple choice dct, role plays and self-assessment. in the domain of pragma linguistic issues of language, roever (2005-2006) developed web-based test of esl pragmatics. roever’s instrument was more appropriate for both asian and european test taker. finally, bachman (1990) claims pragmatic performances can be assessed through either rating on scales or counting the correct responses. a new branch of pragmatic assessment is related to the issue of rating and rater criteria. current research on pragmatic assessment focuses on the importance of rating criteria. taguchi (2011) explored the rater variation in the assessment of speech act of request. he center on issues, such as “politeness markers”, “amount of speech”, “strategies”, “directness” responses of efl learners. also, he found out that native raters had some inconsistencies in their rating. lee (2012) studied rating behavior between korean and native english-speaking raters (nes) in which the study showed that korean raters were more serious in scoring to linguistic component (grammar, sentence structure), while the nes raters emphasized the content and total scores. moreover, walter (2007) investigated rater variation in pragmatic assessment. in his study, 42 learners of english attended a baseline activity with a native englishspeaking tester for 10 to 15 minutes. three oral pragmatic prompts were in the activity (an assessment, a compliment, and a presequence) were embedded within three larger topic discussion. after each topic discussion, the prompts were delivered unconsciously. two raters, a native and nonnative speaker of english, assessed the baselines based on a four-point holistic rating scale. dialogues between the raters were recorded when they determined differences in scoring and then analyzed. the results revealed that raters analyzed examinees’ performance differently which caused different scoring. for instance, in the pragmatic target of compliment responses, the high proficient speaker emphasized his knowledge of normative patterns of compliment and compliment response in american english, while the low proficient speaker considered l1 transfer as possible source of non-normative compliment response. examinee’s fluency and clear pronunciation influenced low proficient speaker which leaded to a higher score. moreover, there are a number of studies in other area of assessment that investigated raters’ variations of perspectives orientations (e.g., brown 2000, 2003, 2005; ducassee & brown 2009; johnson & lim 2009; may 2006, 2009: mcnamara & lumely 1997; o’loughlin 1996; polit & murray 1996). using reflective verbal etiquette, these studies examined how raters’ characteristics, gender, language background, experience, and competence affected their evaluation of l2 oral interviews, writing samples, and paired dyads. after rating learner’s performance, raters were asked to summarize their reasons for awarding the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 11 rating. aspects of learners’ performance that raters focused on a review of verbal reports revealed (e.g., linguistic features, discourse management, rhetorical organization, and listening behaviors). there is general agreement from the body of literature. this general consensus is that raters bring their own values and criteria in assessment, after training and they cohere to both criterion and non-criterion features. in a more recent study, tajeddin and alemi (2013) focused on the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic competence by native english raters’ criteria. they investigated the criteria of native and nonnative english teacher for the speech act of apology in l2. their analysis of raters’ remark manifested five criteria such as: apology, situation explanation, politeness, irrelevancy of speech act, statements of alternatives. for several years, great effort has been devoted to the study of request in speech acts. according to trosborg (1995), request occurs when the speaker states his (her) wants to the hearer and want him (her) to do something for his benefits. in making a request, the speaker infringes on the recipient’s freedom from imposition. the recipient may feel that the request is an intrusion on his/her freedom of action or even a power play (blum-kulka, house, & kasper, 1989). in recent years, request is analyzed in forms of cross-cultural and interlanguage studies. some researchers indicated the developmental pragmatics by comparing data from l2 learners at different levels of proficiency (francis, 1997; paren, 2002). other researchers just compared nonnative and native speakers (roose, 2000, p. 29). several studies have revealed that differences in performing and realizing speech act demand teaching and testing it for efl learners. these studies demonstrate the existence of differences in performing and realizing request speech act necessitate teaching and testing it for efl learners. thus, more studies are necessary in order to inform efl teachers about different aspects of request speech act in teaching and assessment processes. in view of this need in the literature, this study aimed at investigating what criteria inform non-native english speaking teachers’ rating criteria with a focus on the speech act of request. method forty non-native iranian english teachers in the 25-35 age range were selected. the group of non-native english speaking raters (nnesrs) included english teachers from different languages institutes in isfahan with various teaching experiences (classified into two levels of 1-5 and 6-11). these teachers were m.a holders or m.a students of tefl (teaching english as a foreign language). therefore, they were familiar with the concept of l2 pragmatics and language testing. in order to make sure in objective terms that the teachers were truly homogenous with regard to their english proficiency level, an oxford placement test (opt) was given to them. after obtaining the opt results, it was decided to divide those teachers into high and low proficiency level. this being so, 40 teachers who met this homogeneity criterion were selected and assigned to two group (high and low proficient) involved in the study (20 teachers each). in addition, ten iranian efl learners from intermediate levels were selected for administrating the dct. the study was accomplished through 3 phases. the first phase was selecting 40 nonnative english speaking teachers from language institutes in iran with various teaching experiences and ten iranian efl learners from intermediate groups. in the second phase, (opt) test as a placement test was used to check the subjects’ english proficiency. it was administrated to divide teachers into two groups of high and low level of proficiency. in the third phase, a dct test was employed based on various degrees of formality, power, and distance to test the request speech act performance of efl learners. finally, both high and low proficient teachers were asked to assess the learner’s performance with dct test. for the misagh hosseini & ehsan rezvani criteria used by proficient vs. less proficient efl teachers in pragmatic assessment: the case of request speech act 12 sake of convenience in rating, likert scale is placed after every response for raters. through the qualitative phase of data analysis, the criteria noted by nnesrs were analyzed and categorized. thus, the frequency of each criterion was calculated through quantitative procedures in order to find the dominant criteria. descriptive analyses including mean and sd reveal the pragmatic assessment of teachers. nnesrs analyzed and categorized the criteria through the qualitative way of data analysis. therefore, the frequency of each criterion is calculated through quantitative procedure in order to find the dominant criteria. furthermore, t-test and chi-square were used to determine if there are any significant differences between nnesrs’ rating scores and rating criteria. results and discussion nnesrs use various criteria during pragmatic assessment of efl learners’ requests. the following criteria were found in raters’ comments: 1) directness: this request criteria deals with the directness and indirectness of the efl learners’ productions. example: “leave me alone.” an indirectness example is “it is too hot.” 2) politeness: this criterion refers to the degree of politeness of the efl learners’ request. example: i think it’s not very polite. the teachers should respect the students, especially in front of other students. 3) language usage accuracy: this criterion is mainly about the accuracy of the structures, grammar, and lexical items of the produced sentences. example: there are some grammar mistakes, such as “it” should be replaced by its reference “the book”. 4) authenticity and cultural errors: this criterion reflects the naturalness of the produced responses, as well as their cultural appropriateness regarding l2 society. example: this sentence seems odd and unnatural. english people would never say that, especially the “go ahead” part. 5) style and register: this criterion refers to the use of formal or informal style. example: asking your teacher informally might lead to misunderstanding. 6) explanation: this criterion refers to brief explanation or introduction before making request. example: i think it’s better to add an introduction and clarify the request. 7) statement of optimal example: this criterion refers to supplying various examples of the ideal request for the specified situations. example: she/he could say: “i need that doll for my daughter. please let me borrow it for a few days if you don’t need it”. 8) query preparatory and softeners: this criterion refers to the importance of the use of preparatory expressions, such as could you, would you, etc., as well as words or phrases which can moderate the request (i.e. please, thank you, if it’s ok with you). example: “pardon me” followed by the word “excuse me” is more favored. 9) conversers’ relationship: this criterion refers to social relationships, as realizing, establishing, sustaining, and changing social relations. example: it depends on the closeness of the relationship. if it is an employee boss relationship, then the sentences are informal and not proper for this situation, whereas, it is considered proper between 2 friends. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 13 table 1. frequencies of responses to the dct items by high proficiency teachers i te m d ir e c tn e ss p o li te n e ss a c c u r a c y a u th e n ti c it y s ty le e x p la n a ti o n s ta te m e n t o f o p ti m a l e x a m p le q u e r y p r e p a r a to r y & s o ft n e ss c o n v e r se r s r e la ti o n sh ip e x p e c te d f r e q u e n c y c h is q u a r e d f s ig . (2 -t a il e d ) 1 4 6 6 9 2 8 8 8 9 6.70 6.90 8 .54 2 8 8 8 6 8 8 2 10 8 7.30 5.44 8 .70 3 4 5 2 8 6 6 10 7 6 6.00 7.00 8 .53 4 8 10 5 9 8 5 4 10 9 7.60 5.58 8 .69 5 5 10 7 9 6 7 8 4 10 7.30 4.90 8 .76 6 1 4 2 7 8 6 1 8 8 5.00 14.80 8 .06 7 5 8 9 9 8 8 8 10 8 8.10 1.83 8 .98 8 2 8 3 6 6 6 5 6 4 5.10 5.26 8 .72 total 37 59 42 63 52 54 46 63 62 53.10 14.02 8 .08 regarding the first dct item and the frequencies it received from the high proficiency teachers, there were no statistically significant differences among the nine assessment criteria in as much as the p value under the sig. (2-tailed) column for this item equaled .54. in fact, a p value less than the significance level (i.e., p < .05) signifies a significant difference, whereas a p value above .05 indicates that the difference failed to reach statistical significance. the highest frequencies belonged to the criteria of authenticity (f = 63), query of preparatory and softness (f = 63), and converses’ relationship (f = 62), whereas the lowest frequencies were those of directness (f = 37), accuracy (f = 42), and statement of optional example (f = 46). however, as it was observed in table 1, the differences among the nine assessment criteria by highproficiency teachers did not reach statistical significance. table 2. frequencies of responses to the dct items by low proficiency teachers it e m d ir e c tn e ss p o li te n e ss a c c u r a c y a u th e n ti c it y s ty le e x p la n a ti o n s ta te m e n t o f o p ti m a l e x a m p le q u e r y p r e p a r a to r y & s o ft n e ss c o n v e r se r s r e la ti o n sh ip e x p e c te d f r e q u e n c y c h is q u a r e d f s ig . (2 -t a il e d ) 1 6 0 10 0 6 2 8 6 8 6.60 5.73 6 .45 2 8 2 6 2 8 6 6 8 6 5.80 7.53 8 .48 3 2 6 2 2 8 4 6 4 2 4.00 10.00 8 .26 4 8 6 6 4 6 6 2 6 6 5.60 4.00 8 .85 5 6 6 8 6 8 4 4 3 6 5.70 4.23 8 .83 6 4 2 8 6 4 6 6 2 4 4.70 6.85 8 .55 7 4 6 8 6 8 6 8 4 4 6.00 4.00 8 .85 8 4 6 6 0 4 2 6 2 2 4.00 6.00 7 .54 total 42 34 54 26 52 36 46 35 36 40.10 16.67 8 .03 for low-proficiency teachers, the sig. values in the rightmost column of table 2 show that for the eight individual items of the dct, the differences among the nine assessment criteria were too small to reach statistical significance. however, adding up the frequencies of the criteria for all the dct items yielded total frequencies for the assessment criteria, and the differences among the total frequencies, as is shown in the lowest row of the table, reached statistical significance due to the fact that the p value in this row was found to be .03 (p <.05). this means that, on the whole, lowproficiency teachers used significantly different criteria to assess the request speech act. misagh hosseini & ehsan rezvani criteria used by proficient vs. less proficient efl teachers in pragmatic assessment: the case of request speech act 14 table 3. frequencies of responses to the dct items by highand lowproficiency teachers it e m t e a c h e r s d ir e c tn e ss p o li te n e ss a c c u r a c y a u th e n ti c it y s ty le e x p la n a ti o n s ta te m e n t o f o p ti m a l e x a m p le q u e r y p r e p a r a to r y & s o ft n e ss c o n v e r se r s r e la ti o n sh ip c h is q u a r e d f s ig . (2 -t a il e d ) 1 high 4 6 6 9 2 8 8 8 9 20.85 8 .008 low 6 0 10 0 6 2 8 6 8 2 high 8 8 8 6 8 8 2 10 8 7.11 8 .52 low 8 2 6 2 8 6 6 8 6 3 high 4 5 2 8 6 6 10 7 6 5.48 8 .70 low 2 6 2 2 8 4 6 4 2 4 high 8 10 5 9 8 5 4 10 9 2.98 8 .93 low 8 6 6 4 6 6 2 6 6 5 high 5 10 7 9 6 7 8 4 10 3.47 8 .90 low 6 6 8 6 8 4 4 3 6 6 high 1 4 2 7 8 6 1 8 8 15.89 8 .04 low 4 2 8 6 4 6 6 2 4 7 high 5 8 9 9 8 8 8 10 8 2.45 8 .96 low 4 6 8 6 8 6 8 4 4 8 high 2 8 3 6 6 6 5 6 4 10.95 8 .20 low 4 6 6 0 4 2 6 2 2 total high 37 59 42 63 52 54 46 63 62 26.61 8 .001 low 42 34 54 26 52 36 46 35 36 the results presented in table 3 revealed that high-and low-proficiency teachers differed significantly with respect to the criteria they used to assess the first item in the dct (p=.008). this might have occurred because of the fact that high-proficiency teachers and low-proficiency teachers differed with respect to the politeness (6 vs. 0), authenticity (9 vs. 0) and explanation (8 vs. 2) criteria. in addition, highand low-proficiency teachers were found to be significantly different in relation to their responses to the 6 th dct item (p = .04). this difference might have been caused by the difference between the highand low-proficiency teachers’ responses to the accuracy (2 vs. 8), statement of optional example (1 vs. 6), and query preparatory and softness (8 vs. 2) criteria. more importantly, the highand lowproficiency teachers differed significantly in terms of the total frequencies of their responses to the dct items (i.e., in terms of their overall assessment criteria) since the p value in the bottom row of the table was found to be .001. the highand low proficiency teachers were probable significantly different in terms of their responses to the politeness (59 vs. 34), authenticity (63 vs. 26), query preparatory and softness (63 vs. 35), and conversers’ relationship (62 vs. 36) criteria. although efl teachers’ rating criteria and patterns in ilp assessment has great impact on the process of teaching and testing of second language, this issue has remained understudied. the study examined whether higher and lower proficient teachers differed in assessing efl learners’ request, and what features of efl learners’ requests nnesrs used during pragmatic assessment. the primary objective of this study was to explore the criteria employed by nnesrs in request rating process. the criteria were both socio-pragmatic and pragma-linguistic categories among both high and low proficient teachers. as an example, criteria like linguistic appropriacy or query preparatory and softeners belong to pragmatic aspect of language, while formality and social relationship or politeness fit into socio-pragmatic category. according to rasekh (2008) and roever english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 15 (2007), the importance of both aspects in either teaching or testing pragmatic knowledge in previous researches. regarding the scoring of efl learners’ production, iranian nnesrs acted differently, as their minimum and maximum scores in most situations. the deficiencies in high and low proficient raters’ evaluation and the significant differences between them emphasize the inadequacy of some of the low proficient teachers’ pragmatic knowledge and the necessity of developing teacher training courses, especially pragmatic training for nnes teachers (alemi, 2012; harlig & hartford, 1997; rasekh, 2005; rose, 2005). for the third questions, quasiexperimental design producer was carried out. based on the achieved results, there was significant difference between high and low proficiency teachers regarding pragmatic assessment of speech act request. teachers in the high proficiency group could more successfully enhance pragmatic competence compared to the low proficiency group in pragmatic assessment. conclusion the present research was an attempt in which pragmatic assessment considered to be the ideal method for pragmatic assessment of speech act request. so, the homogenized participants were divided into two groups of high and low proficiency. in this study, nine different criteria are employed by nnesrs in rating request productions. high proficient teachers apply certain criteria in evaluating the request speech act of efl learners more frequently. these criteria include authenticity, politeness, query preparatory and softness, conversers relationship, while low proficient teachers use some criteria such as directness, accuracy, style, and statement of optimal example, more frequently. these differences could be due to lack of pragmatic knowledge on the part of nnesrs in which there is cultural difference between l1 and l2 causing pragmatic misunderstanding. the study also indicates the important of l2 pragmatic and the need for pragmatically appropriate learning materials. in countries like iran, teachers and learners do not have any easy access to native speakers or authentic learning materials. in fact, learners need pragmatic instruction as a part of their language education while most of the textbooks for language learning lack sufficient l2 pragmatic exercises and do not consider cross-cultural differences between l1 and l2 societies (alemi & irandoost, 2012; alemi, roodi, & bemani, 2013; safa, moradi, & hamzavia, 2015). finally, it is hoped that research in l2 pragmatics will not only improve our understanding of pragmatic development in speech act realization and of the nature of strategies, but further studies will be done to find efl teachers’ rating criteria in assessing understudied speech acts such as criticism, congratulation, etc. references alemi, m., eslami-rasekh, z., & rezanejad, a. (2015). iranian non-native english speaking teachers’ rating criteria regarding the speech act of compliment: an investigation of teachers’ variables. journal of teaching language skills, 6(3), 21-49. byon, a. s. (2004). socio-pragmatic analysis of korean requests: pedagogical setting. journal of pragmatics, 36, 1973–1704. chen, s. (2007). interlanguage requests: a crosscultural study of english and chinese. the linguistics journal 2(2), 32–52. cohen, a. d. (2014). towards increased classroom assessment of pragmatic ability. iranian journal of language testing, 4(1), 4-25. retrieved from http://ijlt.ir/journal/images/pdf/420-2014-41.pdf. jalilifar, a., hashemian, m., & tabatabaee, m. (2011). a cross-sectional study of iranian efl learners' request strategies. journal of language teaching and research, 2(4), 790-803. doi:10.4304/jltr.2.4.790-803. koosha, b., & dastjerdi, h. v. (2012). investigating pragmatic competence: the case of requests in interchange series. asian social science, 8(1), 45-61. plough, i. c., briggs, s. l., & van bonn, s. (2010). a multi-method analysis of evaluation criteria used to assess the speaking proficiency of graduate student instructors. language testing, 27(2), 235-260. misagh hosseini & ehsan rezvani criteria used by proficient vs. less proficient efl teachers in pragmatic assessment: the case of request speech act 16 rezanejad, a. (2013). rating efl learner's interlanguag pragmatic competence by native and non-native english speaking teachers (unpublished master's thesis). sharif university of technology, tehran, iran. roever, c. (2010). effects of native language in a test of esl pragmatics: a dif approach. in g. kasper, h. thi nguyen, d. r. yoshimi, & j. yoshioka (eds.), pragmatics and language learning (vol. 12, pp. 187–212). honolulu, hi: national foreign language resource center. safa, m. a., moradi, m., & hamzavia, r. (2015). iranian efl teachers and learners perspective on potentiality of top notch series for intercultural competence development. iranian journal of language teaching research, 3(2), 47-66. retrieved from http://www.urmia.ac.ir/sites/www.urmia.ac.ir/fil es/(4).pdf. tajeddin, z. (2014). interlanguage pragmatics and language teaching. tehran, iran: jungle publications. trosborg, a. (1995). interlanguage pragmatics: requests, complaints, and apologies. berlin: mouton de gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110885286. walters, f. s. (2004). an application of conversation analysis to the development of a test of second language pragmatic competence. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of illinois at urbana-champaign. walters, f. s. (2007). a conversation-analytic hermeneutic rating protocol to assess l2 oral pragmatic competence. language testing, 24(2), 155–183. walters, f. s. (2009). a conversation analysisinformed test of l2 aural pragmatic comprehensions. tesol quarterly, 43(1), 29– 54. woodfield, h. (2008). interlanguage requests in english: a contrastive study. in m. pütz & j. n. v. aertselaer (eds.), contrastive pragmatics: interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 231-264). berlin/new york: mouton de gruyte. youssef, a. m. (2012). study of request strategies employed by libyan and malay postgraduate students at usm. international journal of learning & development, 2(2), 144-151. http://www.urmia.ac.ir/sites/www.urmia.ac.ir/files/(4).pdf http://www.urmia.ac.ir/sites/www.urmia.ac.ir/files/(4).pdf english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 59 impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? didik rinan sumekto english education department, widya dharma university, indonesia e-mail: didikrinan@unwidha.ac.id riyanto chemistry education department, islamic university of indonesia, indonesia e-mail: 006120101@uii.ac.id avin fadilla hilmi psychology department, gadjah mada university, indonesia e-mail: avinpsi@ugm.ac.id nursya’bani purnama management department, islamic university of indonesia, indonesia e-mail: nursyabanipurnama@yahoo.co.id apa citation: sumekto, d. r., riyanto, r., hilmi, a. f., & purnama, n. (2019). impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 59-72. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2146. received: 23-09-2019 accepted: 20-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: the trend of facilitating technological devices for students in the classroom still becomes controversial among teachers, whether these devices can be effectively applied or conversely. this study aims at revealing students’ collaboration effectiveness using smartphones. 528 teachers of primary and secondary schools in sleman district, indonesia involved as the respondents. data collection used self-rated questionnaire indicating teachers’ perceptions and was analyzed by descriptive and factor analysis tests. the results confirmed that learning and discussion with peer, comfortableness with learning activity, dynamic learning atmosphere, mutual appreciation when giving feedback, mutual respect with peer, and collective usage encourages a good habit of learning descriptively engaged students’ collaboration effectiveness, whereas one factor, peer’s social relationships with teachers gain better showed its ineffectiveness. further, the principal component sequentially adjudged the position of seven perceived factors with the eigenvalue and the factorial analyses affirmed two rooted components with a total factor of 72.97%, where component 1 gained 67.16% and component 2 gained 5.81%. using smartphones coherently need an exploration and an engagement through the social mechanism to support students’ learning activities. keywords: collaboration; learning effectiveness; smartphones facilitation. introduction recently, efforts of facilitating mobile digital devices as one of the technological-based learning in schools become the considerable concern among media, schools (griffiths & williams, 2018), policy-makers, ngo’s, educator specialists, and teachers to obtain students’ well-being achievements. documented empirically from the early sixties, the new technological developments have inspired and supported the innovative learning cycles. the early generations of mobile phones, so-called by smartphones, facilitate great multimedia and high technology contents to heighten students’ pleasure and encouragement (gheytasia, azizifara & gowhary, 2015). the vogue of smartphones has hugely been worldwide for a few years. this actual establishment indicates smartphones usage and high average expectations among students (kétyi, 2013), as the daily use of smartphones had better contain the benefits, such as ubiquity, portability, interactivity, and teachers’ feedback and comments (kacetl & klímová, 2019). teachers have an important role to engage in students’ mobile learning (pedro, barbosa & santos, 2018) and to follow the existence of smartphones is enormously popular among students (salzer, 2018). however, as one of the communication strategies; the information tools, dispersion, and advancement will widely implicate positive and negative impacts (zinaida & havivi, 2019). mobile technology aims to support any innovative learning strategies on pedagogical mailto:didikrinan@unwidha.ac.id mailto:006120101@uii.ac.id mailto:avinpsi@ugm.ac.id mailto:nursyabanipurnama@yahoo.co.id didik rinan sumekto, riyanto, avin fadilla hilmi, & nursya’bani purnama impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? 60 effectiveness (lee, min, oh & shim, 2018). teachers become more amenable to campaign the mobile learning initiatives in their classrooms (farley, murphy, johnson, carter, lane, midgley, hafeez-baig, dekeyser & koronios, 2015), as smartphones attempt to connect students with the contents of social media, recording practical presentations and teachers’ talks, and producing videos for scientific purposes (barnwell, 2016). therefore, mobile technology can be applied in the classroom chiefly and energize the splendid-notso-splendid impacts of smartphones usage (pedro, barbosa & santos, 2018). conversely, the learning advantages with smartphones will be conditionally welldocumented, although some teachers still disincline to facilitate their classes with the technological-based learning (alrasheedi & capretz, 2015). teachers need to think harder modify their mobile-based learning classes, although they are not experts in dealing with smartphones that mostly become a distraction (barnwell, 2016) as citing time pressures as if restricting their mobile learning adoption (crompton, 2013) mainly. heading teachers to the technology-adapted teaching in the classroom refers to the pedagogical practices that can be circumscribed by its functions and lead difficulties for them to modify their persevering faiths and behaviors (sung, chang & liu, 2016). regarding these discrepancies, gheytasia, azizifara and gowhary (2015) took tertiary students’ perceptions of using smartphones, whose the responses are unsatisfactory. most students express negative impacts overbalancing the positive impacts of using smartphones. they also support prohibiting the use of smartphones in classroom. although some students agree there must be a limitation to access smartphones collectively. griffiths and williams (2018) testify evidence that smartphones usage in schools has created students’ well-being in both limited and mixed achievements. smartphones widely distract students’ learning, particularly at the tertiary level. pointedly, smartphones usage can embarrass students’ social interaction. however, smartphones will be encompassed gradually within the existence of school regulations. previous studies addressed students’ engagement in the classroom collaboration in which the use of smartphones supported their class activities. aljaloud, gromik, kwan, and billingsley (2019) proved that smartphones facilitation promoted the progressive teacherstudent and student-student relationships to gain and evaluate the knowledge, although this promotion did not guarantee students’ learning improvement. the collaboration was apparent in students’ knowledge gaps, barriers, sharing, mutual communication among peers to raise interactive learning qualities (bere & rambe, 2019). smartphones operation greatly dealt with students’ collaborative classroom activities which involved social interactions between group members whereas working with regular tasks (chang, chatterjea, goh, theng, lim, sun, razikin, kim & nguyen, 2012). its effectiveness conveyed students’ creativity matters, increased collaboration factors, provided difficulty decrease in learning, strengthened the learning organization, and oriented to problem-solving (sumekto, 2017a). smartphones openly developed knowledge, shared facts, emotions, and expanded peer’s social relationships towards panel discussion, mating and noting peer’s ideas, and other online sources (gatti, brivio & galimberti, 2017). nevertheless, teachers should knowledgeably understand some patterns of technological devices that engaged students’ mobile learning (jin, kim & baumgartner, 2019). however, groups’ working and interconnectedness towards shared objectives of positive interdependence characteristics became pieces of evidence regarding inputs and outputs through the portraits of togetherness among learners. students would be ready for peer's effective communication processes and collective workings hand-in-hand (mckinney & cook, 2018). other studies constructed students' collaboration might apply for classroom-based technological devices. they believed smartphones purposefully guided students’ communication and collaboration to predict the effectiveness of the endogenous aspects towards their creativity, elaborate problem-solving, and meta-cognition (lai & gwang, 2014), and affordability (kukulska-hulme & viberg, 2018). they found that collaboration complied with flexible usage, sustainability, well-timed feedback, socialization, self-reflection, total involvement, inspirational source, and peercoaching. pointedly, smartphones-based application promoted students’ motivation and satisfaction in learning activities, although its application would not guarantee students’ clinical skills and knowledge (lee, min, oh & shim, 2018). https://www.theatlantic.com/author/paul-barnwell/ https://www.theatlantic.com/author/paul-barnwell/ english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 61 this study pursues research questions in terms of classroom’s mobile learning and students’ collaboration effectiveness, as follows: (1) does smartphone facilitation in the classroom engage students’ collaboration? (2) can students’ collaboration become effective learning when using smartphones? as contextualized in the background, this study aims at engaging students' collaboration effectiveness when smartphones are facilitated in the classroom during their learning activities. method this study undertook 528 teachers who still actively served themselves at public and private schools in sleman district, indonesia to be the respondents. the reason for choosing the respondents was empirically undertaken as if they were the role models for the classroombased instruction issues. they were active teachers in 2019/2020 academic enrollment at their schools. as recorded into the database, 57% (n = 301) primary teachers and 43% (n = 227) secondary teachers respectively participated in fulfilling the questionnaire. respondents’ age profile set from 20 to 65 years old, which meant that mean age was 42.5 and standard deviation was 31.819 when the questionnaire is completed using the google form. of 528 respondents participated in this study, .4% (n = 2) teachers had educational background in arabic, 5.8% (n = 31) in indonesian, 6% (n = 32) in english, 2.6% (n = 14) in javanese, 2.3% (n = 12) in counseling, 45% (n = 238) in class teacher, .4% (n = 2) in history, 1.9% (n = 10) in information & communication technology, 2.5% (n = 13) in arts, 5.1% (n = 27) in science, 3.8% (n = 20) in social science, 1.3% (n = 7) in life skills, 7% (n = 37) in mathematics, 5.1% (n = 27) in islamic religion, .4% (n = 2) in christian religion, .1% (n = 1) in hindu religion, 6.3% (n = 33) in physics, sports, and health education, and 4% (n = 20) in civics education. data were collected from the self-rated questionnaire that indicated teachers' perception of facilitating smartphones in the classroom with a 4-likert scale. data were collected through the self-rated questionnaire of teachers’ perception upon students’ collaboration effectiveness determining seven perceived factors. these factors were to align cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient test (cronbach & shavelson, 2004). the factors had the internal consistency results upon teachers’ perception with cronbach’s alpha, as follows: .928 for students' learning and discussion with peer, .926 for students' comfortableness with their learning activity, .926 for students' dynamic learning condition, .927 for mutual appreciation among students when giving them feedback, 9.25 for students' mutual respect with peer, .931 for using collective smartphones encourages a good habit of learning and .935 for peer’s social relationships with teachers gain better. meanwhile, the scale mean ranged from 15.23 to 15.60. overall, the value of alpha gained .938. data analysis used descriptive and factor analysis tests (ary, jacobs & sorensen, 2010), which confirmed the results about principal components analysis of seven perceived factors with the eigenvalue (pallant, 2011) to gain the effectiveness of facilitating smartphones as one of the technological-based devices in the classroom learning. results and discussion first, the effectiveness of learning and discussion with peer referred to the descriptive and frequencies statistics results (table 1 and figure 1). the results were recorded teachers’ perceptions in the following: 78 (14.8%) of students’ learning and discussion with peer were not very effective, 174 (33%) was not effective, 217 (41.1%) was effective, and 59 (11.2%) was very effective if the smartphones were facilitated in the classroom for assisting students' learning activities. the highest score of the effectiveness of learning and discussion with a peer gained 3.00 (m = 2.49; sd = .878; n = 528). the overall effectiveness of learning and discussion with the peer was effective, with 41.1% and put this category in the fifth rank based on teachers’ perception. meanwhile, the score distribution was shown in figure. didik rinan sumekto, riyanto, avin fadilla hilmi, & nursya’bani purnama impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? 62 table 1. learning and discussion with peer figure 1. scatter with smooth lines & markers of learning and discussion with peer teachers showed their perception of accommodating students' learning with smartphones in the classroom. undertaken from the results, teachers perceived the effectiveness of students’ learning and discussion with peers was very effective as if the smartphones were facilitated for assisting students' learning activities. these facts are consistent with bere and rambe’s (2019) persistence in which the benefits of allowing the use of smartphones shall be accordingly relevant with the contextual functions of supporting disruptive behaviors. showing participation time and learning strategies can create a substantial role in engaging students’ mutual communication, solving complex problems, and supporting creativity that deal with students’ collaborative learning and higher-order-thinking skills efforts (lai & hwang, 2014). students’ initial collaboration emphasizes and entrusts a number of learning and discussion with peers’ creativity, communicative competence, critical thinking, problem-solving, and autonomy and confidence. these constructive interactions lead to chang, chatterjea, goh, theng, lim, sun, razikin, kim and nguyen’s (2012) findings relating to the benefits of smartphone for students’ collaboration as if these are appropriately best applied to facilitate the learning activities. moreover, sue and chrissi (2015) believed in students’ communication that is naturally conveyed by a two-way process with sharing ideas, thoughts, and experiences in turns that will construct meaningful learning and engage in multi-directional voices and perspectives. second, the effectiveness of students’ comfortableness with their learning activity was established through the statistical descriptive and frequency analyses (table 2 and figure 2). teachers perceived that students’ comfortableness with their learning activity proved in the following: 46 (8.7%) was not very effective, 122 (23.1%) was not effective, 259 (49.1%) was effective and 101 (19.1%) was very effective when teachers facilitated their students to learn with smartphones in the classroom. students’ comfortableness results also confirmed the highest score was 3.00 (m = 2.79; sd = .852; n = 528). the overall effectiveness of students’ comfortableness with their learning activity was effective, with 49.1% and placed in the first rank based on teachers’ perception. meanwhile, the score distribution was shown in figure 2. table 2. students’ comfortableness with their learning activity english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 63 figure 2. scatter with smooth lines & markers of students’ comfortableness with their learning activity students’ comfortableness with learning activity relates to class circumstances whilst the teacher conditionally allows students to use smartphones. the sophisticated use of the technological device may maintain a daily learning habit, in which smartphones challenge the individual efforts and social supports (jin, kim & baumgartner, 2019). this situation possibly becomes more comfortable since the frequency of using smartphones can be controlled by most students (kétyi, 2013) in learning activities. students’ collaboration is conceptually formatted as the learning habit towards groups' respectfulness and collegiality. the collaboration may conditionally share students' existing experiences in authentic and fair ways to increase the learning processes and meaningful outputs (sumekto, 2017b). of the determinants, sung, chang, and liu (2016) trust the suitable applications and software are wellinstalled in smartphones. the impact will be more effective than getting along with the lessons and self-directed study. third, the effectiveness of students’ dynamic learning atmosphere was found through the descriptive and frequencies analyses (table 3 and figure 3).the results showed that 54 (10.2%) students’ dynamic learning atmosphere was not very effective, 144 (27.3%) was not effective, 249 (47.2%) was effective, and81 (15.3%) was very effective if teachers took a decision to allow their students used smartphones in the classroom during classes for learning assistance. the highest score of its effectiveness was 3.00 (m = 2.68; sd = .855; n = 528). the overall analyses could be confidently withdrawn that the effectiveness of students’ dynamic learning atmosphere was effective, with 47.2% and gained the second rank based on teachers’ perception. meanwhile, the score distribution was confirmed in figure 3. table 3. students’ dynamic learning atmosphere figure 3. scatter with smooth lines & markers of students’ dynamic learning atmosphere didik rinan sumekto, riyanto, avin fadilla hilmi, & nursya’bani purnama impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? 64 students’ dynamic learning atmosphere comply with the use of smartphones. this takes up with students’ deep collaboration and engagement. dynamically, smartphones are still debatable among students conveying with low and high groups’ abilities. some are possible to perform better than other peers in any learning circumstance (tay, 2016). so, facilitating and integrating smartphones in the classroom are the challenging matter. a teacher needs to integrate the use of smartphones becomes attractive and inspiring class (anshari, almunawar, shahrill, wicaksono & huda, 2017). in this respect, clayton and murphy (2016) provide that smartphones can replace functions of papers, pencils, and textbooks to enhance students’ knowledge and learning experience as well as rapidly become an amused and alternative learning source. meanwhile, admiraal, kester, jansen, jonge, louws, post and lockhorst (2018) emphasize the personalizing learning with smartphones may develop teachers’ convergent and divergent teaching approaches and create students-control advocacy through the surface things of striding, practicing, concluding with a certain limitation directed by the teacher. fourth, the effectiveness of mutual appreciation among students when giving the feedback was summarized through the descriptive and frequencies statistics (table 4 and figure 4). the analyses indicated that 54 (10.2%) students’ mutual appreciation when giving the feedback was not very effective, 144 (27.3%) was not effective, 249 (47.2%) was effective, and 81 (15.3%) was very effective if students were given opportunities to work with their smartphones in the classroom to assist their learning activities. the highest score of the effectiveness of mutual appreciation among students when giving the feedback was 3.00 (m = 2.68; sd = .855; n = 528). this factor attained an effective category with 41.1% and raised the sixth rank based on teachers’ perception. meanwhile, the score distribution was set up in figure 4. table 4. mutual appreciation among students when giving feedback figure 4. scatter with smooth lines & markers of mutual appreciation among students when giving feedback this factor corresponds with mutual appreciation when giving feedback. it addresses social constructivist perspectives in measuring students’ interpersonal learning impacts conveying peer feedback, oral communication performance, and communication. so, smartphones are allowable to facilitate students’ engagement in group discussion assignments and carrying out peer feedback (fang, cassim, hsu & chen, 2018). the collaboration strategy allows for developing the adaptive expertise and deepening an understanding among students when using one-to-one smartphone enhances the scope of discussion and solves problems (masukawa & endo, 2013). students reflect their practical ways with the device and identify opportunities for the collaborative learning as well as express themselves creatively. this english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 65 relevant experience is playful-making on one to another (sue & chrissi, 2015). students share their constructive criticism and are ready to receive any feedback, whilst hard works and mutual respects are prioritized (furrer, skinner & pitzer, 2014). smartphones appropriately supports collaborative learning engagement more active, creates the growth of learning, and provides the significant inputs to encourage students (hashemi & ghasemi, 2011). fifth, the descriptive and frequencies statistics analyses of students’ mutual respect with peer (table 5 and figure 5) were not very effective. this was proved by 62 (11.7%) teachers who perceived this factor and 197 (37.3%) teachers answered that students’ mutual respect with peer was not effective when smartphones are allowed to use during the classes. on the other hand, 220 (41.7%) teachers’ perceived that the effectiveness of students’ mutual respect with peer was effective and 49 (9.3%) was very effective when smartphones are facilitated in students’ learning activities. the analyses also recorded that the highest score of the effectiveness of students’ mutual respect with a peer was 3.00 (m = 2.48; sd = .819; n = 528). however, the effectiveness entirely gained an effective category with 41.7% and took up the fourth rank based on teachers’ perception. meanwhile, the score distribution was indicated in figure 5. table 5. students’ mutual respect with peer figure 5. scatter with smooth lines & markers of students’ mutual respect with peer this factor deals with mutual respect with peers. in the case of enhancing mutual respect with peers, students may control an oral production and accept the corrective feedback heightening the communication skills (fang, cassim, hsu & chen, 2018). smartphones can be an advantageous device for a pair-study approach, collaborating corrective feedback for the subject matters, verifying students about contents misinterpretation, and supporting teachers to modify and adjust the subject matters (salzer, 2018). for example, a teacher can set up an online mind-map that is simultaneously editable to students work collaboratively with peers. in this case, a geography subject can be exemplified on how students can watch the mute imovie animation about the tectonic plate movements, then they work in groups to tape a voice-over to facilitate the imovie (tay, 2016). herein, students’ collaborative learning may gradually indicate the progresses involving enjoyment, social media usage, and learning satisfaction and successes (al-rahmi & zeki, 2017). sixth, the effectiveness of smartphones’ collective usage that encourages a good habit of learning (table 6 and figure 6) shown the result in the following: 51 (9.7) smartphones’ collective usage that encourages a good habit of learning was not very effective and 171 (32.4%) was not effective. but, 242 (45.8%) teachers’ perceived that the effectiveness of smartphones’ didik rinan sumekto, riyanto, avin fadilla hilmi, & nursya’bani purnama impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? 66 collective usage that encourages a good habit of learning was effective and 64 (12.1%) was very effective, in condition as if teachers allowed students' to use smartphones to support their learning activity in the classroom. the highest score of the effectiveness of the smart phones’ collective usage that encourages a good habit of learning was 3.00 (m = 2.60; sd = .822; n = 528). the effectiveness of students' mutual respect with peers was effective, with 45.8% and gained the third rank based on teachers’ perception. meanwhile, the score distribution was shown in figure 6. table 6. smartphones’ collective usage that encourages a good habit of learning figure 6. scatter with smooth lines & markers of smartphones’ collective usage that encourages a good habit of learning smartphones’ collective usage encourages a good habit of learning conditionally. it adopts mobile-based learning become prospective students’ learning opportunity. kacetl and klímová (2019) believed that the benefits flow students’ cognitive enlightenment, encouragement to learn both formal and informal settings, autonomy, and confidence, promotion of personalized learning, assistance for slow learners to fulfill their learning objectives. the use of smartphones encompasses a change in students' learning since the interactive mobile device contains the media-rich features. hence, technical and pedagogical elements facilitate teachers and students’ understanding to adapt the high technology device (montrieux, vanderlinde, schellens & de marez, 2015) as part of the effective e-learning innovation (burns & kurtoğlu-hooton, 2016). students’ selfexploration and ideas sharing build an autonomy-supportive context collaboratively (beiswenger & grolnick, 2010) and an appropriate occupation of instruction strategies regarding the interactive online learning (lin, chen & liu, 2017) with the relevant applications (school technology branch of alberta education, 2012). seventh, the effectiveness of peers’ social relationships with teachers that gained better dealt with the descriptive and frequencies statistics as shown in table 7 and figure 7. the results confirmed in the following: 79 (15.0%) teachers perceived the effectiveness of peer’s social relationships with teachers that gained better was not very effective and 205 (38.8%) was not effective. meanwhile, 186 (35.2%) teachers’ perceived the effectiveness of peer’s social relationships with teachers that gained better was effective and 58 (11.0%) was very effective. the highest score of the effectiveness of peer’s social relationships with teachers was 2.00 (m = 2.42; sd = .874; n = 528). therefore, the overall effectiveness was not effective, with 38.8% and proved in seventh rank based on teachers’ perception. meanwhile, the score distribution was shown in figure 7. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 67 table 7. peer’s social relationships with teachers that gain better figure 7. scatter with smooth lines & markers of peer’s social relationships with teachers that gain better peers’ social relationships with teachers gain better when the sophisticated use of the technological device is needed to maintain a daily learning habit either individual efforts or social supports (jin, kim & baumgartner, 2019). in creating peers’ social relationships, a teacher motivated to adopt the factual mobile-integrated education program and to gradually modify the program into students’ personalized program (sung, chang & liu, 2016). meanwhile, students can customize the technology contents complying with a more efficient learning (gheytasia, azizifara & gowhary, 2015). peers’ social relationships can flexibly be accommodated using accessible smartphones (anshari, almunawar, shahrill, wicaksono & huda, 2017) with the right situation for successful learning and teaching, and positive attitudes, where students stay with inclusiveness, appreciation, and enjoyment, and secure (aps group scotland, 2013). relationships create the objectives of building a loveable learning atmosphere (furrer, skinner, & pitzer, 2014) since the relationships and interactions are the point of leading an understanding commitment (pianta, hamre & allen, 2018). alternatively, smartphones will not only bother teachers and peer, but also annoy those who are willing to pay attention (ictech, 2018). in this case, baker, lusk and neuhauser (2012) confirm that nearly half of their respondents trust smartphones usage become harmful to the learning processes. text messaging from smartphones detracts students who are willing learn, blemishing the class session for those who are bothered (tindell & bohlander, 2012). further, jesse (2015) believed that the downside of increased number of using smartphones causes anxiety among students since they tend to have their smartphones with them. a nuisance or inconvenience to other classmates and teachers as this situation shows a lack of participation and teacher-students relationships when sharing personal and academic issues (sánchez, gonzález & martínez, 2013). based on the empirical result, the number of 38.8% shows that peer’s social relationships with teachers that gains better is not effective. furthermore, the analysis corresponded with seven perceived factors influencing in students’ collaboration effectiveness. the significant correlations were r = .743, n = 528, p<.000. the highest level of effectiveness of students’ comfortableness with learning activity associated with the lowest level of peers’ social relationships with teachers. however, the effectiveness of these factors was accordingly positive and significant with p<.01 level for 2-tailed prediction. table 8 showed the pearson correlations coefficients in the following orders: .743, .698, .728, .729, .633 and .595. didik rinan sumekto, riyanto, avin fadilla hilmi, & nursya’bani purnama impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? 68 table 8. pearson correlations coefficients among students’ collaboration effectiveness by aligning the coefficients outputs, the independent-samples t-test was next determined to generate primary and secondary teachers’ perception upon students’ collaboration effectiveness that compared a significance difference. there were no primary teachers’ significant difference (m = 2.06, sd = .789) and secondary teachers (m = 2.25, sd = .561; t (.757) = 27, p = .456 using two-tailed). the weightiness of the mean difference was -.193%; cl: -.718 to .331. seven perceived factors referred to the principal components analysis (pca) outputs. before indicating the pca, factor analysis suitability was examined through the correlational matrix that exhibited the existence of obtainable coefficients of .107 above. therefore, the kaiser meyer-olkin gained .612, reaching the entrusted value of .6 or above, whilst bartlett’s sphericity test was significant (p = .000). therefore, factor analysis was appropriate (pallant, 2011). this examination contended with the significance of the statistics and performed the factorability of the correlational matrix. the pca’s outputs inferred the existence of seven factors with the eigenvalue transcending 1, indicating 73%, 7.2%, 5.4%, 4.5%, 4%, 2.9%, and 2.7% of the factors correspondingly (table 10). the scree plot examination defined a bounded part afterward granting seven factors. after that, the scree plot was determinable to decline two axes for an analysis beyond (figure 8) and endorsed by the comparable analysis outputs. moreover, the scree plot demonstrated two axes with the eigenvalue that exceeded the corresponding criterion values for bringing about the accessible size of matrix data [7 factors x 528 primary and secondary teachers] at random. table. 10. total variance explained upon students’ collaboration effectiveness english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 69 figure 8. scree plot of seven perceived factors influencing students’ collaboration effectiveness the factorial analysis continuity extracted two substantial components with a value of 72.97%. this value was derived from component 1 that contributed 67.16%, whilst component 2 resulted in 5.81%. in determining seven perceived factors, the rotated oblimin consecutively reflected the results (table 11). this rotation confirmed the presence of a simple structure conveying component 1 and component 2. the components indicated the number of squared loadings with the factors partially emphasizing on component 1. the exposition of both components was reasonable with the experimental outputs of students’ collaboration effectiveness. herein, component 1 resulted a positive effectiveness, whereas component 2 complied with a negative effectiveness (r = .718) that separately scaled these factors. table 11. pattern & structure matrix for pca with the oblimin rotation of two-component of collaboration effectiveness conclusion the effectiveness of students’ interrelationships between the smartphones facilitation and the collaboration constitutes the potential strategy of learning performance by increasing students' participations. smartphones facilitation support the effectiveness of students' collaboration in the classroom within teachers' supervision. this condition relies on recognizing substantial collaborative learning qualities and integrating the purpose of smartphones facilitation insights. upon teachers' guided use of the smartphone, students’ collaboration effectiveness will continually provide their learning responsibility and maturation. nevertheless, students’ collaboration effectiveness somehow needs an exploration and an engagement through the social constructivism conveying their learning activities. conversely, teachers’ open-minded instructions may be still far-reaching options, carrying most teachers on retaining the conventional didactic approaches, and poorly lacking day-to-day implementable supports from the authorities. this study is also aware of students’ socio-cultural increase for the mobilebased learning implementation. acknowledgments the authors would like to address their gratitude to dewan pendidikan, sleman district, indonesia for financing this research. didik rinan sumekto, riyanto, avin fadilla hilmi, & nursya’bani purnama impacts of classroom’s mobile learning: can smartphone support students’ collaboration? 70 references admiraal, w., kester, l., janssen, c., jonge, m., louws, m., post, l., & lockhorst, d. 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(2019). understanding the communication strategy of women’s rights protection in the digital era through website. jurnal the messenger, 11(2), 244-256. doi: 10.26623/themessenger.v11i2.1194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.11.008 https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2015.1127308 https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2015.1127308 https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2011.604802 https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2011.604802 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 255 applying digital storytelling to improve indonesian high school students’ visual memory and writing skill imam sudarmaji department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas islam syekh-yusuf, indonesia e-mail: isudarmaji@unis.ac.id agus mulyana department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas islam syekh-yusuf, indonesia e-mail: amulyana@unis.ac.id karsiyah department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas islam syekh-yusuf, indonesia e-mail: karsiyahvl@gmail.com apa citation: imam, s., mulyana, a., & karsiyah (2020). applying digital storytelling to improve indonesian high school students’ visual memory and writing skill. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 255-264. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2987. received: 12-02-2020 accepted: 02-04-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: this study investigated the use of digital storytelling in improving students’ visual memory and writing skill of tenth grade students in one of senior high school in tangerang, indonesia. a total of 72 students are taken as the sample in the current study. the randomized pretest posttest control group design was used in the study. using quasi experimental research-non-equivalent control group design, the students in the experimental groups completed the process through digital storytelling. the students’ test and questionnaires were used to collect the data. in order to test whether there was an improvement within groups and to see if there were differences between groups, the hypotheses were tested using the t-test and obtaining gain scores. the result showed that the visual memory and writing skill of students undergoing digital storytelling technique and of those undergoing conventional teaching but no significant differences were found between the two conditions. they had same proficiency, focused and same concentration during the learning process, and the students had many opinions in experimental class. based on the percentages, students’ post-test showed that students’ visual memory was more dominant than students’ writing skill after applying digital storytelling. moreover, this research also found that students’ learning motivation was very good and created a good of class atmosphere in experimental class during the learning process by using digital storytelling. keywords: digital storytelling; visual memory; writing skill. introduction in the acquisition and fluency of language skills may be directly involved visual memory. magnussen (2009), said that memory is retain stimulus information in memory which is assessed in term precision. visual memory is one of the ability to remember or recall such as images, scenes, words, and other information which presented visually. visual memory is important to develop, because according to phillips & christie (2013), visual memory has a role in a wide variety of everyday tasks. it has also been considered fundamental on every type of academic learning. the students should be able to visualize the stimulus in their mind. visual memory is a complex process for students. current theory of visual working memory involving capacity and resolution as the two important aspects of visual working memory storage (yao, chen, and qian 2018). the memory storage system of working memory includes subsystems. they maintain verbal, spatial, and visual information. the feel is so hard to remember with what they have seen, so the students should learn and understand the ability to store and recall mental images in the memory efficiently to help their learning a foreign language (michel et al. 2019). this memory will store in short-term memory, as many as students should remember with the duration is briefly to mailto:isudarmaji@unis.ac.id mailto:amulyana@unis.ac.id mailto:karsiyahvl@gmail.com imam sudarmaji, agus mulyana, & karsiyah applying digital storytelling to improve indonesian high school students’ visual memory and writing skill 256 see. according to baddeley et al., (2015) that short-term memory is able to store limited quantities of information for limited periods of time. so if the students’ did not pay attention, they will feel difficult in placing visual which means that they need stimuli for be able to visualize. the students may have difficulty during several operations such as remembering general view of words in reading and writing, also sequencing the letters if such skills have not improved. while, writing is one of the four skills in english. the students felt that writing is as more complicated than the other skills and became challenging area of language learning (jabali 2018). javed et al., (2013) said that even native speakers of english can feel difficulty in demonstrating a good of writing. the students often feel confused when they are using the rules of writing such as grammatical and they also lack of vocabulary. according to ma’azi & janfeshan (2018) and nik et al., (2010) said that writing has an important role which is assumed as the most complex process. sylvester & greenidge (2009) stated that writing has difficulty to start and it is a very complex process to write, although after the teacher assists the students for prewriting activities such as brainstorming to generate the ideas or supports an upcoming writing assignment. learning to write is a difficult and complex process because it concerned with the knowledge about the structure of language rusinovci (2015). students also need to know how to express their idea, feeling, opinion, critical thinking in written text (fadhly 2014). the students still do not understand how to write in english and they don’t know their mistakes on their writing. the technique or strategies to teach writing may not be interesting for the students. klimova (2014) claimed that if the teacher uses appropriate technique/strategies to teach the students, it can be more interesting and considers students’ personality. writing instruction in language teaching and learning can improve students’ writing skill (coker et al. 2018). teacher should pay attention to the students’ writing strategies and the types of writing instructions (bai 2018; palermo and thomson 2018) the current advancement in the information and communication technology (ict) or digital era has provided the learners with various tools with the form of computer-based or internetbased resources. many teachers now use digital tools in addition to other instruction methods and not as a substitute learning (hillmayr et al. 2020). digital learning can help students take charge of their own learning and make them fun (schmoelz 2018; zwart et al. 2020). the use of digital technology can amplify this experience and provide a concrete support in the development of language and communication skills (rubegni and landoni 2018; thang et al. 2014). one of the technique in language teaching is digital storytelling (dst). dst technique helps students develop their better language skills and this technique can be considered as an essential tool in foreign language learning and teaching (razmi, pourali, and nozad 2014). dst which combines the characteristic of storytelling with different interactive media tools can benefit language learning in a variety of ways. it was found to encourage and motivate students and at the same time enhance their communication skills (ciğerci and gultekin 2017; thang et al. 2014). dst helps students to find, apply, learn, and share each other various amount of vocabulary and moreover helps them to think critically due to the limitation of script writing and presented digitally (tajeri, syal, and marzban 2017). teachers can provide students a sharing experience to enhance learning through seeing, hearing, and feeling (beck and sitzman 2019). dst is also a good technique that suitable for the students to teach visual memory and writing, also can help the students to improve their visual memory capacity and writing skill (sarica and usluel 2016). some researchers said that digital storytelling gives positive effect for the students. according to gallets (2005) that through storytelling, students can be more thinking and imaginative skill. also their mental process played more active role. story will influence memory, and the storytelling can facilitate students’ cognitive changes (schank and abelson 1995). besides visual memory, digital storytelling can be used as an effective learning tool to improve students’ writing skill (xu et al., 2011; campbell, 2012; yang & wu, 2012; sarica & usluel, 2016; yamaç & ulusoy, 2016; tarigan & liana, 2018). abdel-hack & helwa (2014) also said that through digital storytelling, narrative writing and critical thinking skills were developed. in the latest decade, many researcher conducted the research to investigate the use of digital story telling in language learning. first, eman mohamed & hasnaa sabry, (2014) had a research which investigated the effectiveness of using digital storytelling and weblogs instruction english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 257 in enhancing efl narrative writing and critical thinking skills among efl majors at faculty of education. the result showed that using digital storytelling and weblogs instruction is effective in enhancing the efl narrative writing and critical thinking skills among efl majors at faculty of education. second, sarica & usluel, (2016) investigated the effect of digital storytelling on the visual memory capacity and writing skills of students in primary school. then, tarigan & liana, (2018) conducted the research to examine the effectiveness of using digital story telling in teaching writing skill of students in higher education or university. the result showed that the students’ writing skill are improved after implementing digital story telling as the teaching media. the study showed that digital story telling is effective to enhance students’ writing skill. the previous research focus on the subject in primary school and university. the current study intend to confirm the use of digital storytelling as a language teaching technique in foreign language class in senior secondary school. the focus of the study is to know whether there is any significant effect of digital storytelling on the students’ visual memory and writing skill, to know which one is more dominant between students’ visual memory and writing skill, and to know how the students’ learning motivation and class atmosphere through applying digital storytelling. method this study used experimental method. the design of this study was a quasi-experimental research non-equivalent control group design. the researcher chose this design, because according to fraenkel et al., (2012) there were two different classes’ treatment, namely experimental class and control class, and do not include the use of random assignment. this study was conducted by the researcher who taught in two different classes, namely experimental class and control class. where experimental class was the class that applied by using digital storytelling, and control class that applied by using conventional teaching (gallery walk). table 1. research design class test treatments test ec pre-test o1a x1 post-test o1b cc pre-test o2a x2 post-test o2b source: processed primary data (2019) information: ec = experiment class cc = control class o1a = pre-test at experiment class o2a = pre-test at control class x1 = dst technique application x2 = conventional technique application o1b = learning outcomes of experiment class after treatment o2b = learning outcomes of control the population of this study was all of students in tenth grade in one senior high school in tangerang in academic year 2019/2020. while, the sample was students in mipa (science class) 1 as the experimental group and mipa (science) class 2 as the control group. the researcher chose the sample based on the previous information, their proficiency, and their relevancy with the study purpose. the data of this study was quantitative data. the quantitative data were obtained by the scores of students’ task from pre-test and post-test. writing test instrument and questionnaire are used to collect the data. after the students’ visual memory and writing scores had been collected, the researcher analyzed the data using one paired t-test to see the comparison between pre-test and post-test mean scores and to see the effect of using digital storytelling on students’ visual memory and writing skill. it also enabled the researcher to know the dominant between visual memory and writing skill after applying digital storytelling. while, questionnaire were used to know the added value that wanted to be known in the achievement of students’ learning outcomes was the students’ learning motivation and class atmosphere. results and discussion the classroom observation data showed that the result of experimental class and control class. in experimental class, the researcher started by giving materials about narrative text and how to write narrative text by using digital, it such as by power point. then, show the videos of the stories including with the sound system. after students watched, some pictures of the stories showed to them. they have to remember and understand of the story and can re-write the story of narrative text that they remembered. while, in control class the researcher gave the material about narrative text and how to write it by using conventional teaching (gallery walk). they have to remember imam sudarmaji, agus mulyana, & karsiyah applying digital storytelling to improve indonesian high school students’ visual memory and writing skill 258 and understand on it. the researcher rewrite the sample of story by written on the whiteboard. then, asked the students to rewrite the story of narrative text that they remembered. this research also measured the level of motivation of students after learning by using digital storytelling technique. questionnaire of learning motivation that has been given to the students in experimental class during the learning process. besides measuring of the learning motivation, researcher also measured the level of the class atmosphere. the score of class atmosphere was obtained from questionnaire that has been given to the students in experimental class during the learning process by using digital storytelling technique. students’ score of visual memory the students’ score in experimental class and control class are increased. as the minimum mastery criterion (kkm) at the tenth grade is 67. based on the result that there was no students not pass on visual memory in experimental class that taught by using digital storytelling technique. 100% students can pass kkm values means the students got the score than 67 as kkm values. while, based on the visual memory test that was given in control class the researcher got the total score was 11% students could not pass kkm values and 89% students could pass kkm values. it means, almost all of students in control class have score more than 67. even though there are several students got the score gain with kkm values. students’ score of writing skill the students’ score in experimental class and control class are increased, but many students have a score below the minimum criteria (kkm). in experimental class 42% students could not achieve kkm values and 58% students could achieve kkm values. while, in control class 56% students could not achieve kkm values and 44% students could achieve kkm values. it can be seen from graphic below: figure 1. students’ post-test in experiment and control class students’ learning motivation in experimental class in this research, the students’ learning motivation which measured by criteria that is consists of 1% 20% = bad, 21% 40% = not good, 41% 60% = sufficient, 61% 80% = good, 81% 100% = very good. this research analyzed by obtaining the total score of learning motivation, and got the total was 2321. so, based on the criteria of percentages that can be categorized that the students’ learning motivation was very good during the learning process by using digital storytelling with percentages 81%. class atmosphere in experimental class the questionnaire of class atmosphere has six statements which is given by the researcher to know the students’ perception and participation about class atmosphere during the learning process. the result of every statements can be explained as follows: class atmosphere the criteria of class atmosphere can be categorized by successive interval became 3 points with the higher score was 4,204 means the students answered good, 2,621 means the students answered sufficient, and the lower was 1,000 means the students answered bad. this research got the students’ answer as the following table: table 2. atmosphere class in experimental class categories total of students percentages answer 1 – 1,40 4 11% bad 1,42 – 2,81 26 72% sufficient 2,82 – 4,22 6 17% good source: students’ questionnaire data 0 % 10 % % 20 30 % 40 % 50 % % 60 ec cc higher than kkm lower than kkm 42 % 58 % % 44 56 % english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 259 based on the table above, it can be explained that the students who answer bad was 4 students with the percentages 11%, 26 students who answer sufficient with the percentages 72%, and the last, the students who answer good was 6 students with the percentages 17%. it can be concluded that the students are more dominant answer sufficient. so, the researcher find out during the learning process by digital storytelling was sufficient. the students do not understand during the learning process figure 2. students’ participation of class atmosphere the students who do not understand the material during the learning process would: 1) raise their hand and asked for more explanation was 53% can be categorized as the students active, 2) went to teacher after class to ask for more explanation was 25% can be categorized as the students initiative, and 3) did nothing was 22% can be categorized as the students silent. time passed most quickly during the learning process during the learning process, time passed most quickly for students. the answer from the statement contained of 3 answers were: 1) the teacher was teaching him/herself was 25%, 2) students solved the problem by themselves was 56%, and 3) the students did the exercise individually was 25%. students disagree with the teacher or they have a comment the answer from the statement contained 3 answers were: 1) students said that immediately was 61% can be categorized as an active students, 2) students waited until after class and told it to the teacher was 25% can be categorized an initiative students, and 3) students remained silent was 14%. the following graphic explained about the students disagree when they have an argument during the learning process: figure 3. students disagree in learningprocess the teacher who teach with the conventional learning the answers from the statement contained 3 answers were: 1) students can easily follow without having friend disturbing them was 44%, 2) students talked to fellow students about how they experienced the course after class was 42%, 3) there was at least no turmoil as we don’t have to work together was 14%. the process during learning in class the criteria of the process during learning in class categorized by successive interval became 3 points with the higher score was 3,530 means the students answered lot, 2,214 means the students answered sufficient, and the lower score was 1,000 means the students answered nothing. the process during learning in class got the students’ answer as the following table: table 3. the process during learning in class categorizes total of students percentage s answer 1 – 1,18 5 14% nothing 1,19 – 2,37 16 44% sufficient 2,38 – 3,56 15 42% lot source: students’ questionnaire data from the table above explained that the students who answered nothing was 14%, the students who answered sufficient was 44%, and the students who answered lot was 42%. based on analyzed from sixth statements above that has been explained one by one can be 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % total score 53 % 25 % 22 % active initiative silent 61% 25% 14% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% total score active initiative silent imam sudarmaji, agus mulyana, & karsiyah applying digital storytelling to improve indonesian high school students’ visual memory and writing skill 260 concluded overall by obtaining the total score with the criteria of class atmosphere were 1% 33% = bad, 34% 67% = sufficient, and 68% 100% = good. this research got the total score from the questionnaire data was 439,744 that can be categorized was 68% which means the class atmosphere using digital storytelling was good with the students were active during learning process such as students ask to the teacher for more explanation, also when they have an argument and disagree about the material with at least of students remained silent. after knowing that the data was normal and homogeneous because the significance was more than 0,05, for the further testing the researcher testing hypotheses test (t-test). table 4. independent sample test assumption levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper equal variances assumed .605 .439 -1.425 70 .159 -6.389 4.484 -15.331 2.554 equal variances not assumed -1.425 68.439 .159 -6.389 4.484 -15.335 2.557 source: statistical result spss 25 in this research, the researcher used statistical calculating of t-test formula to find out the effect of using digital storytelling in teaching narrative text on the students’ visual memory. the researcher analyzed the result 72 of the differences score experimental class and control class. the alternative hypotheses (ha) stated that there is no significant differences between experimental class that using digital storytelling and control class that using gallery walk. in this data analyzed, the researcher used t-test and the result of them consulted with the t-table. based on the table above, it is know > (-1,425 > -1,994) with sig = 0, 159 > 0,05, it can be concluded that ho is accepted and ha is rejected, it means there is no significant differences of visual memory between experimental class and control class at the tenth grade of high school in tangerang. table 5. independent sample test assumption levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper equal variances assumed .431 .513 -1.639 70 .106 -4.556 2.779 -10.099 .988 equal variances not assumed -1.639 69.291 .106 -4.556 2.779 -10.100 .989 source: statistical result spss 25 in this research, the researcher used statistical calculating of t-test formula to find out the effect of using digital storytelling in teaching narrative text on the students’ writing skill. the researcher analyzed the result 72 of the differences score experimental class and control class. the alternative hypotheses (ha) stated that there is no significant differences between experimental class that using digital storytelling and control class that using gallery walk. in this data analyzed, the researcher used t-test and the result of them consulted with t-table. based on the table above, it is known (-1,639 > -1,994) with sig = 0, 106 > 0,05, it can be concluded that ho is accepted and ha is rejected, it means there is no significant differences of writing skill between > english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 261 experimental class and control class at the tenth grade of high school in tangerang. so, digital storytelling that applied by the researcher has no difference to improve the students’ writing skill at the tenth of high school in tangerang. from the students’ analysis of visual memory and writing skill taught by using digital storytelling in experimental class and by using gallery walk in control class, the researcher has found the result of students’ visual memory and writing skill. the researcher have just given the pre-test, treatment, and post-test in order to know the students’ visual memory and writing skill. the result of teaching visual memory and writing skill taught by the researcher using digital storytelling technique was good, because the students’ scores are increased between pre-test and post-test score. so, their visual memory and writing skill had improved. the score of post-test was higher than pre-test. in visual memory 100% students can pass kkm values and in writing skill 58% students can pass kkm values. based on the percentages, students’ post-test of visual memory is more dominant than writing skill after applying digital storytelling technique. the testing of research hypotheses indicated that ho is accepted and ha is rejected, it means there is no significant difference of using digital storytelling on the students’ visual memory and writing skill. this research is related with the previous research such as from sarica & usluel (2016) about visual memory that is no statistical difference was found that the students less interaction with visuals in experimental class than control class. but, this research did not correspond to sarica & usluel (2016) for writing skill that can be said the significant result to improve writing skill of students in experimental and control class. also from yamaç & ulusoy (2016) stated that through digital storytelling could successfully result in improvement students’ writing skill. tarigan & liana (2018) said that the students’ writing skill after using digital storytelling technique was significantly higher than before their used. although fundamentally that visual memory need to take a long time to develop, because the development of memory capacity begins in infancy and continues through early adulthood (terry, 2009). while, also for writing is assumed the most difficult to be learnt by the students. as brown (2007) stated that there are many aspects that can be assessed when the teachers measure the students’ writing skill such as content, organization, grammar, vocabulary, mechanic and the score of writing test was taken based on proficiency categories. in this research, there is no different between experimental and control class. although there is no activities related to the digital storytelling were conducted in control class, because the condition of the students were same and had same proficiency. they focused and had concentration when researcher/teacher taught the students either by digital storytelling or gallery walk, but the students have many opinions in experimental class. so that the learning outcomes obtained almost same or have no different. based on this matter, the researcher conducted by giving questionnaire to get the students’ learning motivation and atmosphere class during the learning process in experimental class by using digital storytelling technique. the result showed that the application of this technique had proven to have a very good effect in increasing learning motivation. in addition, this technique also could create a good and conducive classroom atmosphere, students active to ask and students able to solve problem. witte & rogge (2014) stated that if the students are active during the learning process, so the technique has positive effect and it can believe the students’ learning motivation and class atmosphere were better. conclusion the students’ score of visual memory in experimental class are increased after applying digital storytelling. the students’ score of posttest was higher that pre-test, it was 100% students can pass kkm (minimum mastery criterion) values. while, the students’ score of writing skill in experimental class also increased after applying digital storytelling. the score of posttest was higher than pre-test, it was 58% students can pass kkm values. so, the level of achievement of the kkm values from these had improved. based on the percentages of students’ posttest score that visual memory was more dominant than writing skill after applying digital storytelling at the tenth grade students of higher school in tangerang in academic year 2019/2020. the result of statistic which obtained by analyzing data through t-test of statistic calculation, it indicated that ho is accepted and ha is rejected which means that there is no significant difference of using digital storytelling on the students’ visual memory and writing skill at the tenth grade of higher school in tangerang. imam sudarmaji, agus mulyana, & karsiyah applying digital storytelling to improve indonesian high school students’ visual memory and writing skill 262 some factors influenced no statistical difference between experimental class and control class due to the condition of students were same proficiency, and from both of classes that the students focused and had concentration when the teacher giving the materials either by digital storytelling or gallery walk, also the students in experimental have many opinions during the learning process. so, that the learning outcomes were same or no have different. although there is no statistical different, digital storytelling can contribute in experimental class. it can be proved from the students’ questionnaire showed that 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(2020). effects of digital learning materials on nursing students’ mathematics learning, self-efficacy, and task value in vocational education. nurse education in practice, 44, 102755. imam sudarmaji, agus mulyana, & karsiyah applying digital storytelling to improve indonesian high school students’ visual memory and writing skill 264 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 247 the implementation of write-around plus strategy to improve students’ writing skill muziatun department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: muziatun@ung.ac.id thalia miranda virginia department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: thalyavirginia96@gmail.com ansar tario jusuf department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: ansartario@gmail.com apa citation: muziatun., virginia, t. m., & jusuf, a. t. (2020). the implementation of write-around plus strategy to improve students’ writing skill. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 247-254. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.3001. received: 29-01-2020 accepted: 20-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: writing ability is one of english skills that need to be mastered by students. it is because students must express their idea well in order those readers can easily understand what students write. moreover, many students’ problems are found in writing such as generating idea, lack of vocabulary, grammatical mistakes and so on. regarding the occurrence of problem in mostly students’ writing, the researchers want to improve students’ writing skill in descriptive text by implementing write-around plus strategy. the purpose of conducting this research is to investigate whether the implementation of write-around plus strategy can improve students’ writing skill or not. this study is conducted by a pre-experimental study with measurement as the technique of collecting the data and written test as the tool of collecting the data. the research participants were 25 students as the eighth grade students in junior high school smp negeri 1 gorontalo in academic year 2018/2019. the result of this study shows that there were improvements in all writing aspects such as fluency, grammar, vocabulary, content and spelling. the improvements of students’ writing can be shown by data analysis, namely the average result of the research for pre-test got 9.04 score and it currently has been increased in post-test about 13.4 score. keywords: write-around plus strategy; descriptive text; pre-experimental study. introduction students need to master writing skill because they can communicate and express their idea well so that the teacher will understand easily what those students write (bakeer, 2018; kusna, 2019; maolida & salsabila, 2019; namasivayam, singh, mostafa, janoory, & abdullah, 2017). this idea is also supported by nunan (2003) that writing is the mental work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statements and paragraph that will be clear to a reader. although mostly students feel writing is a complicated skill (karademir & gorgoz, 2019; setyowati & sukmawan, 2016; ximenes, guterres, & pereira, 2019), but in fact both education curriculums in indonesia between curricuum 2013 and kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan (ktsp), the curriculums require those students are expected to have extensive knowledge in writing task. however, it is hard to teach in the beginner level students about how to write (alharbi, 2019; teng, 2019), because teachers should consider many components in teaching writing such as structure, vocabulary, content and spelling as the requirement of curriculums. moreover, many problems were found in teaching and learning writing (astrini, ratminingsih, & utami, 2020; haerazi & irawan, 2019; xie, 2020), such as generating idea, lack of vocabulary, grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes etc. the same problems also found by researchers during teaching practice at smp negeri 1 gorontalo as the junior high school in gorontalo city. mostly students at eighth grade were found difficulties in writing. first, the muziatun, thalia miranda virginia & ansar tario jusuf the implementation of write-around plus strategy to improve students' writing skill 248 students have limited vocabularies to expand their sentences. second, they found difficulties in generating ideas when they start writing a text. third, they have a problem to use grammar well in formulating descriptive text. the last, the students have lack of motivation in learning writing because of inappropriate strategy and learning media in teaching process. this study wants to apply one of the elaboration appropriate learning strategies that have been believed to be able to increase students writing skills ability. to overcome the problems of students’ writing, more appropriate learning strategies in teaching writing should be implemented in junior high school. one of learning strategies is cooperative learning. based on piaget’s theory, cooperative learning is an active and participatory learning strategy. this theory needs students’ participation in learning activity. therefore, it will make students more active and work in group (kimmelmann & lang, 2019; yusuf, jusoh, & yusuf, 2019), so students will understand the learning material easily. one of the strategies from cooperative learning that useable to teach writing descriptive text is write-around (munnisa, 2015). this strategy will improve students’ skill and they can organize or arrange the sentence step by step as per the instruction of that strategy itself. by applying write-around as a learning strategy in a writing activity, the students will not only can learn how to write and organize the sentence in english, but they also can cooperate and communicate each other during the process of teaching and learning. as the strategies explained before, cooperative learning means student’s learning together in groups (strom, hendon, strom, & wang, 2019), which are structured that group members have to cooperate succeed. students learn their material in-group; also they will find and solve the problem of the material together. the concept of cooperative learning is teamwork (asrori & tjalla, 2020; salim, abdullah, haron, hussain, & ishak, 2019; strom et al., 2019). students will interact with others and make small groups to be motivated and help one another to gain objectives of the study. according to mandal (2009) cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught, but also for helping teammates learn. thus, it is creating atmosphere of achievement. based on mandal’s research, there are many types of cooperative learning. they are think pair share, three steps interview, jigsaw, round robin, threeminute review, numbered heads, buzz groups, talking chip, critical debate, write-around and praise question polish. one of cooperative learning type that will be use is write-around strategy. the advantage of write-around strategy is that students will be easier to produce a text because they are not work individual but they will work in-group. write-around plus strategy is a development from previous research and modification of writearound strategy. the researchers make a new innovation in this strategy. this makes the previous study unique. some studies that apply techniques and strategies in teaching and learning sometimes do not make some adjustments when applying such techniques and strategies. however, this study is different by doing some modifications to accommodate students’ necessities. therefore, the implementation of the new strategy could improve students’ writing skill ability. the researchers try to teach from base of writing for beginner level. there are how to make simple sentence and learn word classes such as noun, adjectives and verbs that related to descriptive text and also how to make descriptive text complete. in learning and teaching process, there are some steps that can be used by teacher in this study, in order to make students be more active. following steps of write-around plus strategy: • teacher splits students into several groups; it will be 4-5 members in each group. • teacher chooses the topic that will write it • teacher gives starter sentence for all of the groups. • each student in-group will read a sentence and add another sentence to finish the text. the strength of write-around plus strategy is beside this strategy has the concept of teamwork; this strategy also can help students to stimulate their mind to generate their idea in writing a sentence creatively. the weakness of this strategy is taking a time a lot for student to understand what they want to write, because they need to understand the starter sentence or their friend’s opinion before they write their own sentence. the reason why the researchers proposed this strategy was because of the purpose of write-around plus strategy as a bridge for students to share their idea. in order to create an interesting way to learn descriptive text, it is also so much fun strategies for students, english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 249 because they do it in-group. based on the background presented earlier, the research question for this paper is: can write-around plus strategy improve students’ writing skill in formulating a descriptive text? method this study has been conducted at smp negeri 1 gorontalo as one of educational institutions in gorontalo city. it is pre-experimental design one group pretest and posttest design which is to be used in order to see the use of write-around strategy to improve students’ writing skill in descriptive text based on the score before applying the strategy and the score after applying the strategy. the research participants were selected based on purposive sampling which is a technique to determine the sample of research with some consideration to make the data will be more representative. so the researchers consider the participants of this study were students at eighth grade at smp negeri 1 gorontalo in academic year 2018/2019. based on curriculum 2013, one of the materials learned by students in eighth grade is descriptive text. in this case, students in this level need to be able to make a descriptive text. so, there are some specific requirements are needed to filter the objectives for this research. in smp negeri 1 gorontalo academic year 2018/2019, there are nine class of eighth grade. the researchers choose one class as the participants of this research, which is viii-2 because the students are selected based on the requirement of primary observation with their english teacher at the school itself. there are 25 students selected as samples. those 25 students have major problems in writing, such as lack of generate idea, grammatical errors, lack of vocabularies etc. the researcher collected the data b using a test as the main method. the details of each instrument will be described next: test the researcher used test as the main method in collecting the data because the researchers measured students’ ability in writing. as mentioned earlier, students’ ability can be measured by doing the test (munnisa, 2015). because brown (2004) states that a test can be defined as a method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, or performance in a given domain. as the main method, it is an instrument – a set of techniques, procedures, or items that require performance on the part of the test taker. overall, test will be conducted in order to know the students’ achievement in learning process. there are two kinds of test that would be conducted in this study. they were pre-test and post-test, both tests will be explained further below. pre test pretest is preliminary test administered to determine a student’s baseline knowledge or preparedness for an educational experience or course of study (hamzah, 2016). it can be used before the teacher extends the material of learning. in this test the researchers gave the students a written test about descriptive text. the students would choose one topic and describe the topic itself. treatment treatment is activities from teacher to the students by giving teaching learning material in the class (hamzah, 2016). this strategy is kind of way that can improve students’ writing skill. the researchers taught in learning process during eight times of treatments by using write-around strategy. it is because eight times of treatments were suitable for students in order they can make an appropriate paragraph of descriptive. besides that, it is also related with their schedule of academic for material about descriptive text. post test post-test was given after a lesson or a period of instruction to determine what students have learned. the researchers gave a written test again for the students in order to know how the improvement those students get after they have a treatment. this research used quantitative data analysis. it is because the researcher used analyzing and assessing the students’ work in pretest and posttest and give the score based on rubric assessment. in this way, each student score in pre-test and post-test would have been compared in order to see the improvements of students’ writing skill. in scoring their work, the researchers used the scoring rubric in writing taken from heaton grid and his categories (1975) in five areas, there are fluency, grammar, content, vocabulary and spelling. the researcher used heaton’s grid because some researchers used his grid as guide to assess test of writing. subsequently this study used statistical analysis, because the aim of this study was to see the comparison scores of pre-test and post-test. in analyzing the data the researcher used t-testing. muziatun, thalia miranda virginia & ansar tario jusuf the implementation of write-around plus strategy to improve students' writing skill 250 it analyzed the hypothesis of this study as described below. notes: t = the value of t for correlated sample = the amount of average differences divide with the amount of sample sd = deviation standard differences divide with the amount of sample statistic hypothesis h0 : write-around strategy cannot improve students’ writing skill h0 : µ1 = µ2 it means rejected h1 : write-around strategy can improve students’ writing skill h1 : µ1 ≤ µ2 it means received results and discussion pre-test in the first meeting, the researchers conducted pre-test in order to find out students’ ability in writing description text. the researcher asked students to choose one topic about one of family member, favorite place in gorontalo or favorite thing to make simple descriptive text. after calculating the students’ worksheet, the researcher found that the students’ score of pretest data as follow: table 1. students’ score in pre-test students’ score in pre-test the lowest score 5 the highest score 17 the range of interval class (r) 12 the amount of interval class (k) 6 the wide of interval class (p) 2 the mean of score 9.04 table 2. students’ components of writing score in pre-test no components of writing the score of pre test 1 fluency 46 2 grammar 36 3 vocabulary 42 4 content 41 5 spelling 61 total 226 based on the tables presented earlier, it shows that the highest interval class in 5-6 consisted of eight students. it means there were eight students who got 5-6 score in the pre-test. furthermore, the lowest interval class was 13-14, 15-16 and 1718 consist of one student which means only one student who got score 13-17 score. students’ problem in pre test the result of pre-test show that many students were still confused to write descriptive text, students made some mistakes, dealing with the organization problems that students did not understand about the generic structure of descriptive text. for example, some students did not write clearly both identification and description. one of students in viii-2 did not write clearly both identification and description. especially in identification part, the student only mentioned the name of his favorite things without writing more information about his favorite thing while in the part of description, the student only wrote the general information and not the specific information of the thing that he described. in this case, student was expected to be able to write more information about his favorite thing. students also made some grammatical problems, such as the using of simple present tense as the main tense in descriptive text. for the example, the student wrote “i was use my computer”. the word “was” is inappropriate because it is past participle. in this case the student is expected to be able to write “i use”. students also got problem in using of vocabulary. the student had lack of vocabulary and also made some errors in expressing his idea such as “television shape, television color”. it should be changed become “the color of television” and “the shape of television”. the last aspect of writing is mechanic. some students of the second grade of smp negeri 1 gorontalo have problems in spelling the words. they understood to use the words but they got some errors to spelling it into written form. the english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 251 words “thirteen five years old, thirteen nine years old, and fother” were incorrect spelling. it should be changed “thirteen five years old” become “thirty-five”, “thirteen nine years old” become “thirty-nine” and “fother” become “father”. the description of treatments in pre-test, students faced several problems in their writing forms. during the treatments, students have improved their writing form. there are some explanations of the situation when the researchers did the treatments in the classroom: in the first meeting, students learned about definition of descriptive text and the example of descriptive text. this meeting students only paid attention to what the researchers had explained and the students understood about descriptive text. the second meeting, the researchers explained more about descriptive text such as the generic structure of descriptive text and the language features of descriptive text. from first meeting until second meeting some students confused about the material, because when the researcher asked to the students to give another example of descriptive text, some of them did not give the answer. then, the researcher explained more about descriptive text and the students understood about that. next to the third meeting, the researchers started applying write-around plus strategy in classroom. before that, the researchers split students into several groups and the researchers explained about the rule of write-around plus strategy. then, the researchers separated the students into five groups. after that, the researcher explained about word class as the use of adjective in descriptive text. by using writearound plus strategy, the researcher gave them the first task in group to write a simple sentence using adjectives each person in group. all students in viii-2 felt enjoy when they did their task because they could discuss how to make a simple sentence using adjective with their friends in group or the researcher as teacher in the class. then fourth treatment, the researcher explained about grammar that use in descriptive text, it was about simple present tense. students were divided into same group and the researcher explained about simple present tense. the researcher gave them task to make simple sentence based on simple present tense by using write-around plus strategy. some students confused about the use of simple present tense and they asked to the researchers. after the researchers explained more about simple present tense, they understood and they finished their task. fifth meeting, the researcher explained again about simple present tense. besides that, the researcher reviewed about the generic structure of descriptive text, because students started making a simple descriptive text about favorite place in gorontalo. the researchers asked students in each group to discuss about the place that they want to describe. then, the researcher gave them sentence starter: my favorite place in gorontalo is…” then, the first person in group wrote name of place and continue wrote his/her opinion in a sentence about that place. the second person continued to write her/his opinion in a sentence and until last person to finish the task. actually, some students had lack of ideas to write their opinion in a sentence. so, the researchers tried to help them to guide what they need to write in their simple descriptive text. next in the sixth meeting, the researches explained about the use of have/has. students paid attention with the researchers’ explanation. the students were still in their groups. after that, the researcher gave the topic to the students about my friend/classmate. the researcher gave sentence starter “i have a friend, my friend’s name is”. the way to finish their task was same with the one in the fifth meeting. in sixth meeting, some students in group understood what they want to write. so, the researcher did not to guide them again. some students also sometime asked to the researcher about some words that they did not know. students in each group could finish their task well. come to the seventh meeting, the researcher reviewed and explained about the use of have/has. it made students still understand about how to use have/has. in this meeting, students were still in their group and made simple descriptive text about favorite thing. for this topic, students in group choose the thing that they need to describe. the researcher gave them some pictures about things; there were bag, doll, shoes, clothes, book and pencil. every group chooses a thing that they want to describe. as usual, the researcher gave a sentence starter “i have a…” then, the students continued to give their opinion in a sentence until the last person in group. in this meeting, all of students felt enjoy when they did their task, because they know what they wrote for that thing. each group did their task well done. the last meeting, the researcher rechecked again their previous tasks. when doing muziatun, thalia miranda virginia & ansar tario jusuf the implementation of write-around plus strategy to improve students' writing skill 252 rechecked, the researcher found significant improvement on students’ tasks. it can show that there was one of group, their tasks were developed their simple descriptive text. then, the researchers gave appreciation to all of students viii-2. after that, the researchers did brainstorming and reviewed all material about descriptive text to prepare students for post-test. the description of post-test data after scoring the students’ worksheet in post-test, the researchers found that the students’ score of post-test have been improved. the lowest score of post-test was six score. the highest score was 20 score and the mean of score was 13.4 score. furthermore, the results of post-test in each component of writing have improved the result of pre-test. there were for fluency and vocabulary aspect was 64 score, the grammar aspect got 60 score, the content was 69 score and for spelling aspect got 78 score. based on explanation about the result of pretest and post-test, students’ ability in pre-test and post-test have been improved. the significant differences came from content aspect. in content aspect, students only got 41 score but in post-test students got 69 score. content aspect becomes increase because they paid attention with the generic structure of descriptive text and they can generate their idea to make descriptive paragraph. grammar aspect and vocabulary aspect also have significant differences. in grammar aspect students only got 36 score in pre-test, but in posttest students got 60 score. grammar aspects also increase because they put their attention about simple present tense as the language feature of descriptive text. the effect of write-around plus strategy in students’ writing descriptive text in last meeting, the writer gave post-test to students and it showed that there was a significant improvement especially in organization, grammar and vocabulary aspect compared the score result of pre-test and post-test. it was clearly different. for example, in student’s answer, the student already understood about the generic structure of descriptive text because he could organize it well. in this following student’s answer, he only made an error in the use of word “is”. this word should be “are”, because the favorite food of character that he has been described was plural. from this example, in student’s written form, only a few errors that contain in this paragraph, for example the word “things” should be “thing”, because it is singular and then words “searching, chatting, playing and listening” should be “search, chat, play and listen”, because descriptive text use simple present tense. based on some example of students’ answer, it can be concluded that by applying write-around plus strategy, students could understand and know how to make a descriptive text well. the students had given sentence starter then they were continuing to produce a text by making sentence by sentence in their group. then, they were combined the sentences to be good descriptive text. munnisa (2015) stated that write-around strategy could help students learn how to write descriptive text and make it enjoyed in class. write-around strategy is very useful for students to help them in process of writing. descriptive text is a text with a purpose to describe particular thing, animal, person or other. the generic structure of descriptive text divided into two: identification and description (gerot and wignel, 1994). besides the generic structure, descriptive text also has own language features that should be mastered by the writers. the language features of descriptive text are: focus on specific participant, the use of adjectives and compound adjective, the use of linking verb, the use of degree comparison, the use of simple present tense (munnisa, 2015). based on pre-observation, all of students in viii-2 cannot write an appropriate descriptive text, they faced the difficulties to generate their ideas about the generic structure of descriptive text. they also have lack of vocabularies and difficulties in expressing their idea by using simple present tense. therefore, in order to solve the problem, the researcher gave the treatment to students by using write-around plus strategy. as we concern that the education in indonesia applying 2013 curriculum, which is emphasizes to the students to learn contextually. in a class, there are many kinds of students’ ability. teacher should have a learning strategy to teach students contextually, however students in a class have many kinds of students’ ability. therefore, cooperative learning strategy can fulfill the aim of 2013 curriculum. as stated by (mandal, 2009) cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding ofa subject. one of strategies in cooperative learning is write-around strategy. by applying the strategy, the students could understand and remember how to write english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 253 descriptive text. the students choose the topic that they want to write in group. after that, the students are given a starter sentence then they continue producing a text by making sentence by sentence with their group. then, they combine the sentences to be a good paragraph. after making the descriptive text, the students discussed with their group and memorized what they would write in producing descriptive text. the impact of this implementation is the students can increase their group learning activity. after researcher gave the treatment by using write-around plus strategy during the eight meetings, students have shown significant improvement on their writing ability. it has been proved in the result of post-test. in post-test, the researcher gave in the last meeting, which showed that there were significance improvements of the students’ work especially in organization, grammar and vocabulary aspect. the comparisons of the result of pre-test and post-test were clearly different. based on munnisa (2015) stated that write-around is appropriate strategy in teaching writing. therefore, write-around plus strategy is suitable for teaching writing descriptive text. the result of ttest from pre-test and post-test also have shown the difference that between tcount and tlist. tcount is more than tlist 6,79 ≥ 1,711. based on the data above, it can be said that writearound plus strategy can improve students’ ability in writing descriptive text. this statement also has been supported by munnisa (2015) who stated that write-around strategy could improve students’ writing skill, because the result can make students mastering vocabulary, adjective and structure in descriptive text. students also have ability to gain their idea. write-around strategy promotes group learning activity that can make students enjoyable when using write-around strategy. conclusion using write-around plus strategy is an effective way to teach students in improving students’ writing in descriptive text. it is because students become more encourage in writing, will being motivated to each other, paying more attention during the learning process, students will have so much fun and even the teacher will have enthusiasm in teaching process. it can be proven from the result of pre-test and post-test that presented earlier. the result of students’ improvement in writing ability to write descriptive text can be seen from the increasing of students’ mean writing score from 9,04 in the pretest to 13,4 in the post-test. the use of writearound plus strategy as a teaching strategy that is applied in teaching descriptive text considers as an effective strategy. it can be seen from the result effect of treatment phase. write-around plus strategy using teamwork in learning process makes students will be more 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(2019). cooperative learning strategies to enhance writing skills among second language learners. international journal of instruction, 12(1), 13991412. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 139 practicing contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation haerazi mandalika university of education, indonesia email: haerazi@ikipmataram.ac.id zukhairatunniswah prayati smpn 1 jonggat, central lombok, ntb, indonesia email: prayati@gmail.com rully may vikasari smpn 4 praya, central lombok, ntb, indonesia email: momvika@gmail.com apa citation: haerazi, h., prayati, z., & vikasari, r. m. (2019). practicing contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation . english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 139-146. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2011. received: 12-10-2019 accepted: 17-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: the need to acquire reading skills is increasing along with the needs of students to attain information. therefore, this study aims at improving student’s reading comprehension viewed from the motivation level using the contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach at smpn 1 jonggat. to this end, a classroom action research consisting of two cycles was applied. each cycle consisted of four stages, namely plans, actions, observations, and reflections. the subject of this study was the second-grader of smpn 1 jonggat, while the object of this study was the use of contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation. the observation sheets, questionnaires, and reading tests were employed to collect the data. as result, the study showed that the use of ctl approach was effective to improve students’ reading comprehension and motivation to learn. students’ achievement was 75 meaning that the passing grade enacted in the school was achieved. meanwhile, the students’ motivation to learn was at the high level as proven by the percentage of students’ motivation which was at the standard value. thus, it can be concluded that contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach can improve students’ motivation to learn as well as their reading comprehension. keywords: ctl approach; reading comprehension; motivation. introduction english has been becoming one of the compulsory subjects subjected to students at junior and upper secondary schools in indonesia. indonesian ministry of education and culture has also enacted english as one of the subjects examined in the national examination for junior and upper secondary school students. in so doing, it is important for the students to acquire english competences. according to bsnp (2013), english learning in indonesia was focused on the development of the four language skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. reading is one of the two receptive skills after listening. the need for reading is increasing along with the students’ needs to acquire new information. reading is even regarded as a primary source of efl input that can improve the students’ knowledge and discourse structure (nation, 2009; haerazi et al., 2018). in this case, reading comprehension is defined as the ability to understand the content of a text through utilizing critical thinking and critical reading (sultan et al., 2017; alqatanani, 2017; camp & camp. 2013; tsai et al., 2013), the ability to understand the language of the text at word level, sentence level, and whole-text level (par, 2018; sprat et al., 2005), and the ability to comprehend texts using a set of schemata or their knowledge about the world while reading. thus, comprehending a text is different from reading a text. further, one of the aspects that need to be considered in reading classes is students’ motivation. motivation is a kind of internal drive, pushing someone to do activities, such as reading or writing, in order to achieve the learning goals (surastina & dedi, 2018). it is ‘a set of cognitive arousal’ which provokes a ‘decision to act’ as a haerazi, zukhairatunniswah prayati, & rully may vikasari practicing contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation 140 result of which there is ‘sustained intellectual and/or physical effort’ so that person can achieve some ‘previously set goal’. hence, motivation is closely related to the achievement of students in learning as it becomes the determinant factor determining the success and failure of learning (nugrahani, 2018). referring to those facts, english teachers are demanded to find an appropriate learning approach to develop reading comprehension. one of the learning approaches that can be applied in attaining the learning goals is contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach. this approach emphasizes the process and content of reading (satriani & emilia, 2012). teaching reading skills through contextual learning is promising to help students improve their vocabularies, linguistic features, and intellectual capacities. thus, students may attain a deeper understanding so that they can contribute to their emotional development, intelligence and higher-order thinking skills (thamrin & agustin, 2019; mursyid & kurniawati, 2019). contextual teaching and learning is an approach which aims to help students understand the meaning of teaching materials based on the context of personal, social and cultural so that they have the knowledge/skills to actively construct their own understanding regarding the material given (wandasari, 2011; satriani & emilia, 2012). the contextual teaching and learning approach is one of the learning approaches reflected in the student-centered approach. syahid and tuharto (2013) state the ctl approach is based on the constructivism philosophy. therefore, contextual teaching and learning (ctl) is a theory which is based on the notion that learning can only occur when students are able to connect between content and context. by relating content and context from the inside and outside the classroom, the learning process becomes more relevant and meaningful for the students (hosnan, 2014). in this regard, nurhadi (in hosnan, 2014) elaborate five elements that should be taken into consideration while applying ctl approach in the class; namely 1) activating knowledge, 2) acquiring knowledge, 3) understanding knowledge, 4) applying knowledge, and 5) reflecting knowledge. these elements direct students to be more active to learn in the class. contextually, reading activities based on these approach help students to develop their ideas from the text being read. in short, the ctl approach can be used to create learning activities to be more meaningful and real. accordingly, this study follows the components of ctl approach proposed by hosnan (2014), namely constructivism, inquiry, questioning, learning community, modeling, reflecting, and authentic assessment. these components are then designed into teaching steps in a different order for teaching reading comprehension. referring to the background previously described, this study focuses on finding out the effectiveness of ctl approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation to learn at the secondary schools of smpn 1 jonggat, lombok tengah. the novelty of this study lies on the use of contextual teaching and learning approach by applying some learning strategies in teaching reading comprehension viewed from the students’ motivation to learn. the teaching strategies include the content of a text as a critical component that can be applied in group or individually. besides, the learning strategies can engage students in the active language learning. method this research adapted classroom action research (car) proposed by cohen, manion, and morrison (2018). based on the car model, each cycle of the actions consists of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. here, the researchers worked collaboratively with the english teachers in the school to explore their own context through a self-reflective, critical, and systematic approach. this research was conducted at the eighth-grade of smpn 1 jonggat, lombok tengah, west nusa tenggara (ntb). basically, there are six classes of the eighth-grade. yet, the research chose one class (8a class) to apply contextual teaching and learning (ctl). the data of this research are qualitative data supported by quantitative data. the qualitative information presented the findings obtained from the learning processes during the implementation of the contextual learning and teaching (ctl) approach. these data were gained from the observation sheets reported in the form of field notes and interview transcripts. meanwhile, the quantitative data come from the reading comprehension test and questionnaire dealing with the students’ motivation. regarding the two types of data, a phone-camera record was operated to record the classroom activities english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 141 through photographs to provide a clearer picture of the actions. the data collection techniques and instruments used in this research can be seen in table 1. table 1. data, technique, and instrument data technique instrument a. qualitative data field notes reporting the instructional processes that are focused on the teacher’s performance and students’ activities. observation observation sheets interview transcripts dealing with the teacher’s and students’ opinions and expectations relating to research instructions. interview interview guidelines b. quantitative data reading comprehension tests in the form of pretest and post-test. tests reading comprehension tests the data were then analyzed by using some steps proposed by cohen, manion, and morrison (2018). those steps consisted of reducing, displaying, drawing, and concluding. the researchers firstly sorted out the important and relevant data using coding technique. then, the researchers displayed the result of the reduced data. at the end of these steps, the researchers drew conclusions based on the analysis. to validate the research data, the data coming from observation were cross-checked with the data collected from interview. the quantitative data were analyzed by conducting descriptive and inferential statistic. the descriptive statistic was used to find out the means of students’ reading comprehension scores obtained from the pre-test and post-test. results and discussion the action research applied the cyclical model that consisted of two main activities, namely preliminary and action. the action phase has four steps, namely planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. in the planning step, the researcher identified the teaching problems at smpn 1 jonggat. here, the researchers worked collaboratively with the teachers to identify reading problems and determine which problems to solve. then, the researchers designed the appropriate actions, lesson plans, and critical and standard competences. following the planning step, the researchers employed the actions. during the actions, the researchers acted as the observers, while the english teacher in the school acted as a teacher. throughout the action, the observation process was happening. the contextual teaching, actions, students’ activities and opinions, and teachers’ performance were documented. the teacher and the students were then interviewed to know their responses towards the use of contextual teaching and learning approach. after the action and observation are done, the researchers and the teacher collaborator conduct reflections which aim to decide whether or not the research cycle is continued. in this part, the researchers and teacher collaborator analyzed the qualitative and quantitative data obtained. based on the result, the researchers and the english teacher determine whether the action work well in solving the reading problems. the discussion of the action results is allotted in two sections, namely identification of the reading problems and the determination of actions to be taken. in the identification of the students’ problems, this research was started by collecting initial information from the english teacher and some students. it was done by conducting interviews. based on the result of the reconnaissance process, the field problems in the english teaching and learning process can be seen in table 2. table 2. field problems in english teaching and learning at the 8 th grade of smpn 1 jonggat items problems reading skills o students felt difficulties in comprehending english texts. o students still had lack of vocabulary acquisition. o students lacked the english grammatical knowledge to understand english texts. o instead of making reading strategies, students tented to translating every single word of the texts. haerazi, zukhairatunniswah prayati, & rully may vikasari practicing contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation 142 attitude, motivation, and participation o a few of students had low motivation to learn. o students felt bored with usual learning activities of increasing reading skills. o in the discussion session, some students looked passive and simply wrote the answer down to each comprehension tasks. o a few of students did not focus on the teacher’s explanation and they looked busy chatting with their tablemate. o some students did not accomplish the tasks given by the teacher. instructional activities o the learning activities were less interesting. o sufficient teaching media is not used in the learning and teaching activities. o the interaction among students and between the teacher and the students was limited. o the instructional strategies applied were not suitable for the students’ interest. considering these problems, the researchers and the teacher decided the students’ feasible problems to be taken. as the focus of this study was to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation to learn, therefore the selected problems are difficulties in comprehending english texts, lack of vocabulary acquisition, lack of english grammatical knowledge to understand english texts, minimizing the translation of every single word in the texts, and improving the interaction among students and between the teacher and students. besides, the students’ problems relating to motivation were students had low motivation to learn and the discussion session does not make students be more active. the next step is the determination of the action to be applied to tackle the selected problems to be solved. the researcher and the english teacher agreed in using contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach with certain learning strategies that consisted of modeling, questioning and inquiry, learning community and constructivism, authentic assessment, and reflection. the main component of the learning strategy is the content of the text provided for students should direct them to learn actively. the complete instructional stages of the ctl approach are illustrated in table 3. table 3. the teaching steps of the ctl approach for teaching reading teaching steps learning activities modeling o the teacher shows the model text, an example of text, and/or realia media that can be seen by the learners. o the learners are encouraged to construct and build their knowledge dealing with the content of the model text presented. o the learners are involved to discuss the content of the text to find out new knowledge and relate it to the initial experience in their lives. questioning and inquiry o the teacher and the learners conduct the question-answer sessions to confirm the knowledge or information about the text that has been learnt. o the learners are asked to perform what they have understood in line with the content of the text to inquiry their understanding. o the learners are assessed in the form of the authentic assessment in presenting their motivation to learn. learning community and constructivism o the learners are divided into 3-4 students of each group to learn together and help each other dealing with sharing ideas or information. o the learners are provided problems to solve together in order to cultivate their curiosity in learning. o the learners are asked to convey the tasks given in front of other groups. authentic assessment o the students are asked to summarize their reading comprehension based on the content of the text provided. o the learners are assessed during the learning process at the end of the learning. reflection o the teacher conducts the reflection for what the students have learned. o the teacher may give homework for the students about the topics which are reading to strengthen their understanding. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 143 the teachers and students’ roles in employing ctl are discussed by the researchers and the collaborator. the researchers gave chances for the english teacher and the students to express their point of views related to english instruction. thus, the validity was reached by working collaboratively to determine problems for reading skills and the solution was found in line with the research problems. the action consisted of two cycles, cycle 1 and cycle 2. this study followed the cyclical action research consisting of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. in addition, the instructional approach applied in this action was ctl approach. during the actions, the researchers acted as observers, while the english teachers acted as the teacher. besides, the researchers involved their fellow university students to document the research process. in this phase, the researchers provide an analysis of the findings from cycle 1 and cycle 2. cycle 1 was done in four meetings and cycle 2 was also carried out in four meetings. each cycle had different problems to be solved. the aim of this study is to find out whether or not the implementation of ctl approach is able to improve students’ reading comprehension viewed from motivation to learn at the 8 th -grade students of smpn 1 jonggat. based on the result of the observation sheet, the students’ reading achievement was 64. this result was at the sufficient level. the passing grade is 70. it means that the students’ reading comprehension was lower than the passing grade. the researchers and the teacher agreed to apply the existing curriculum employed in the school. the teams work collaboratively to create the lesson plan, teaching materials, teaching media, and the time schedule of english learning. in the actions, the instructional materials are adopted from the course-book used by the 8 th grade students of smpn 1 jonggat. the teams modified some topics in line with the elt instructional and teaching goals. in cycle 1 the students are involved to build their knowledge. they are asked to notice and analyse some modelling texts. it is aimed at building students’ knowledge of the text. in addition, the learners are involved to discuss the content of the text to find out new knowledge and relate it to the initial experience in their lives. it is in line with surdin (2018) who states that giving contextual clues is important to facilitate students to comprehend unfamiliar words from the texts. the first stage of ctl is oriented to build students’ background knowledge. the topic of the reading text is made to be as familiar as possible for them before they are asked to do more learning activities. to help students carry out learning activities in this step, teachers provide some unfamiliar vocabularies. besides, students are asked to write some phrases or idioms existing in the text. this learning activity motivates students to read more and more. it is in line with marinak, malloy and gambrell (2010) and ilahiyah et al. (2019) who state that motivated readers are curious and anxious readers to talk more what they are reading. after students have the background knowledge of the text, they are asked to create questions relating to contents of the text. it is the second phase of ctl approach, namely the phase of questioning and inquiry. in this phase, students are directed to conduct a discussion concerning the text. the teacher and the students conduct the question-answer sessions to confirm the knowledge or information about the text that has been studied. to strengthen the students’ information, they are asked to perform what they have understood in line with the content of the text. then, the students used the context as clues in predicting unknown vocabularies. although the students are not told the meaning of the words immediately, the students guessed their meaning. at the same time, the students are assessed in the form of the authentic assessment in presenting their motivation to learn. in cycle 1, the questioning and inquiry phase was not really effective to build students’ background knowledge. it looked effective in cycle 2. to improve students’ vocabulary acquisition and grammatical knowledge, the students are involved in analyzing the content of the text being read. these activities are done in the phase of the learning community and constructivism. learning community is designed by the researchers to facilitate students to express their opinions concerning the text. in doing so, the students are divided into 3-4 students to learn together and help each other. in the class, the students are provided problems to solve together in order to cultivate their curiosity in learning. it was in line with what fadhilah, effendi, and ridwan (2017) and sufianto (2019) found that this stage involves students to learn actively. at the end of learning activities in this phase, the students are asked to convey their tasks given in front of other groups. these activities helped students to cultivate their understanding of the haerazi, zukhairatunniswah prayati, & rully may vikasari practicing contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation 144 text. the acquisition of vocabularies through learning communities was improved in cycle 2. in cycle 1, the students are directed only to discuss the content of the text, while the students’ problems in vocabularies and the grammatical knowledge are solved in cycle 2. dealing with the students’ motivation to learn, students looked keenly to learn reading tasks in cycle 1. the students’ motivation can be improved by providing them with different texts that make them curious about the content of the text. the motivation has a positive effect on elt learning process (sebet, tahriri, & haghi, 2014; hayes, 2009) for instance, in the phase of authentic assessment the students are asked to summarize their reading comprehension based on the content of the text provided. students are able to summarize the text given in the class. besides, the result of the interview showed that the students’ response was positive in attending the reading class using ctl approach. nevertheless, in cycle 1 the students are assessed during the learning process at the end of the learning. it may lead students to have high motivation to accomplish and learn the reading tasks given by the teacher. in the phase of reflection, students are asked to reflect what they have learned. the texts are reread more than once so as to have a good understanding of its content and context. at the end of the learning phase, the teacher gives homework for the students in order to strengthen their understanding. it is very useful for them to build their knowledge and enrich their information dealing with the topic being read (khaefiatunnisa, 2015). it is also applied in improving grammatical knowledge and has a positive effect (hasani, 2016). further, the researchers did an evaluation which aims to analyze students’ reading achievement and motivation. in cycle 1, some students’ problems were solved and others were handled in cycle 2. for instance, the interaction between students and the teacher and among students occurred in cycle 1, but it was not so effective. based on these findings, the researchers and the teacher decided to solve this problem in cycle 2. lastly, the use of contextual teaching and learning was effective to improve students’ reading comprehension. this approach directed students to comprehend texts based on the content. the role of text in ctl also provides students with activities to train their metacognitive awareness (al-mekhlafi, 2018). in comprehending an english text, translating every single word is not a sole strategy. instead, they should utilize their background knowledge and metacognition to predict the content of the text. in addition, ctl approach is able to connect between students’ background knowledge and their ability to identify and analyze the implied meaning from the text. it is in line with what haryati (2017) found that prediction served as students’ reading purpose and promoted the students’ critical thinking in the reading class. fostering reading purposes and critical thinking reading is assumed to be one of the strategies to improve comprehension. conclusion from the analysis, it can be concluded that the use of contextual teaching and learning (ctl) is able to improve students’ reading comprehension and motivation. this approach has five teaching phases, namely modeling, questioning and inquiry, learning community and constructivism, authentic assessment, and reflection. in cycle 1, the researchers and the teacher carry out actions in four meetings. the fifth meeting was conducted for the final test of reading comprehension. the effect of contextual teaching and learning approach in the 1 st , 2 nd , and 3 rd meetings was not yet effective. the effect of the ctl approach can be seen in the fourth meeting. the average score of students’ achievement was 75. it means that the minimum achievement criteria (kkm) were attained. the important change in each cycle was that students were able to reduce their learning difficulties through reading activities based on the context and content. besides, it was also able to influence students’ motivation to learn. the research findings show that contextual teaching and learning (ctl) is useful and fruitful to enhance students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation to learn. therefore, it is suggested that english teachers who intend to improve reading skills can apply and explore more deeply ctl approach. the english teacher can keep going to apply this approach in elt classes at the junior secondary schools because it can help students to minimize their learning problems. the important thing for english teacher is that ctl approach cannot be employed only within a group as what this study did but also in pairs or individually considering the students’ english reading proficiency. during the research, the researchers and the english teacher found the difficulties to provide english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 145 students with various interesting materials to read in relation to themes of the reading texts. therefore, it is suggested that other researchers prepare more interesting and various themes. references alqatanani, a. k. 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(2018). the effect of contextual teaching and learning (ctl) models on learning outcomes of social sciences of the material of forms the face of the earth on class vii of junior high school. international journal of education and research, 6(3), 57–64. syahid, u., & tuharto. (2015). studi komparasi model pembelajaran matematika dengan pendekatan saintifik dan pendekatan kontekstual ditinjau dari kemampuan pemecahan masalah, jurnal pendidikan matematika dan sains, 4. thamrin, n. r., & agustin, s. (2019). conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy. haerazi, zukhairatunniswah prayati, & rully may vikasari practicing contextual teaching and learning (ctl) approach to improve students’ reading comprehension in relation to motivation 146 english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 93-100. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1777. tsai, p., chen, s., chang, h., & chang, w. (2013). effect of prompting critical reading of science news on seventh graders’ cognitive development. international journal of environmental & science education, 8(1), 85-107. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 127 implementing constructivism approach in online writing course: learners’ need analysis lidwina sri ardiasih english education study program, universitas terbuka, indonesia e-mail: lidwina@ecampus.ut.ac.id emzir applied linguistics, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id yumna rasyid applied linguistics, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: yumna.rasyid@unj.ac.id apa citation: ardiasih, l. s., emzir, & rasyid, y. (2018). implementing constructivism approach in online writing course. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 127138. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1261. received: 14-02-2018 accepted: 23-04-2018 published: 01-06-2018 abstract: learning a new language is inevitably working on activities in relation to the four language skills, namely reading, listening, speaking and writing. reading and listening are categorized as receptive skills, while speaking and writing are productive skills.differing from the other skills, in developing writing skills learners do not merely focus on the writing products, butmore on its process in which they have to follow certain steps.it is the teacher’sresponsibility toguide the students to develop excellence in writing. universitas terbuka (ut), as a higher education institution applying distance learning, has provided an online tutorial (tuton) to enhance students’ writing skills. in this study, the writer focuses on students’ skills in writing essays, particularly argumentative essays. furthermore, constructivism is taken as tutor’s point of view to evaluate the materials as well as the learning process in the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii course. this research aimed at analyzing the students’ perceptions about the needs of writing iii course, regarding both the materials and the learning process, particularly the implementation of the constructivism approach. the descriptive qualitative method was applied in this research. an online survey was carried out to gain some information on the perceptions of the students regarding the learning materials as well as the learning approach needed in this course. from the online survey, it showed that more than 50% students find difficulties in writing. however, they shared their opinions about the needs of the materials appropriate for writing iii course as the basic information for further development of the materials. moreover, this research also resulted in some learning activities to be designed based on the constructivism approach. keywords: constructivism approach, online tutorial, writing skills, argumentative essay introduction writing is categorized aproductive skill that learners must master in learning a language. in learning a second language or a foreign language, writing skills are considered complex. learners must be able to put their ideas into the writing products. this requires a lot of practice, which should be done continuously. brown (2001) explains that for half a century the paradigmin the teaching of writing skills shifted from product-oriented to process-oriented. this is in line with the student-centered learning paradigm in which the teaching of writing skills needs to address the needs of the real learners, including their progress. therefore, it is expected that learners are accustomed to perform the process of writing with correct procedures and trained in producing and reviewing the results of their writing in order for it to be feasible for the readers. lidwina sri ardiasih, emzir, & yumna rasyid implementing constructivism approach in online writing course: learners’ need analysis 128 the main purpose of practicing writing skills for learners is that they can produce pedadogical writing by focusing on how to generalize their own ideas to the phase of producing the final products (brown, 2001). related to this purpose, it is obvious that there is a close relationship between the process approach and the student-centered learning paradigm. writing involves complex skills such as focusing on spellings, punctuation, word choice/diction, and other aspects of writing. in addition, the learners’ writingis the result of their thoughts, concept development, and revision procedures that require the special skills not naturally possessed by learners. learners cannot obtain these instantly, butmust go through a process. the principles of the constructivism approach are appropriate to be applied inthe learning of writing skills in line with studentcentered learning principles that are fully focused on learners’needs. by implementing the process-oriented principle, this constructivism approach supports learners in developing their own ideas through the process of writing with the help of teacher’s feedback and the revision process to obtain optimal writing results. universitas terbuka (ut) as a distance learning institution offers several courses that train students in writing skills. the pbis4313/writing iii course is one of the writing skills courses that give students learning experiences in writing various kinds of essays. the online tutorial service or tuton for writing skills is expected to deliver learning materials and activities that are appropriate to the characteristics of ut learners who belong to the adult learning category through their independent as well as autonomous learning process. the discussion of material in this paper focuses on one of the topics in this course i.e. writing argumentative essays.the aim of this paper is analyzing the students’ perceptions ofthe needs of the writing iii course, particularly in writing argumentative essays, in terms of both the materials and the implementation of constructivism approach. method this study was a needs analysis that applied a descriptive method with the aims at analyzing the learners’ perceptions towards the needs of the writing iii course, particularly in writing argumentative essays, and including both the materials and the learning approach based on the constructivists’ point of view. the data collection was conducted through a questionnaire to obtain data and information related to the learners’ needs of the materials and the learning methods to be applied in the writing iii course. the questionnaire consists of two forms of questions that are multiple choiceselections and open questions. the questionnaires were distributed during two months from march to may 2017. the population in this study was ut learners who registered and attended the online learning of the writing iii course provided by ut. the purposive sampling method was used to determine the respondents. the sample selected is the participants of the online tutorial of the writing iii coursefrom the period 2016.2 held from august 29, to october 23, 2016. the data obtained from the questionnaire were analyzed by summarizing in a graph and applying descriptive analysis. all comments or qualitative information obtained from the respondents were coded to determine the category of answers. the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods through questionnaires and observation results of online learning have been processed to support the data triangulation. results and discussion this section discusses the results of the survey describing the learners’ perceptions towards the needs of teaching materials and the learning approach to be applied in the tuton of the pbis4313/writing iii course. the process of the data collection using a questionnaire is presented on the following report. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 129 figure 1. the process report of the online survey figure 1 illustrates that during the eight weeks after the questionnaires were sent, the number of respondents who filled out the questionnaire through the online survey was 17 out of 86 respondents, or 20% of the respondents living throughout the country. the first part of the questionnaire discusses the respondents’ identity which is very important to describe their characteristics. however, in this paper the discussion focuses on the second and the third part as the core parts of the overall information gathering, which discusses the content or teaching materials and the learning process (including the approach to be applied) of the pbis4313/writing iii course. participants were asked to determine the level of the material needs which is divided into four categories, namely "badly needed", "needed", "not needed" and "totally unnecessary". learners’ perceptions towards the needs of the materials for pbis4313/writing iii the following graph illustrates the analysis of the results of the survey conducted in relation to the needs of learners of the content or subject matter of the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii course. figure 2. the learners’ needs of the contents of pbis4313/writing iii course the first material discussed in the questionnaire was about "the definitions of argumentative essay". the results showed that 28.57% of participants stated this material is badly needed and 42.86% thought that this material is needed, whereas 14.29% stated that the material is not badly needed and another 14.29% thought it is absolutely not needed. the second material wasabout "the characteristics of argumentative essay". forty percent of participants stated that the material is badly needed and 40% said it was needed. however, as much as 20% of participants thought that this material is not very necessary. lidwina sri ardiasih, emzir, & yumna rasyid implementing constructivism approach in online writing course: learners’ need analysis 130 the next statement relates to the material on how to "identify topic sentences". a total of 25% of participants stated that the material is badly needed and the remaining 20% of participants agree with the discussion of this discussion. furthermore, the fourth statement item was related to “analyzing the coherence of the argumentative essay” and a total of 25% of participants stated that the material is badly needed and 75% said it is needed. the fifth item was discussing the material about “the schematic structure of an argumentative essay”. there were 40% of participants who thought that the discussion of the structure of the essay is urgently needed and another 40% of the participants who supported the opinion by stating that this material is needed. nevertheless, there were 20% of participants who stated that the discussion of the material on the argumentative essay structure is not necessary. the sixth item raised in this survey is about “identifying the components of an argumentative essay” (the introductory paragraph, the body paragraph(s), and the concluding paragraph). in this section, as much as 66.67% stated that the discussion of this material is badly needed and the remaining 33.33% chose the options needed. furthermore, in relation to “the outline development of an argumentative essay”, the survey results were dominated by 75% of participants who stated that this material is needed, and supported by the remaining 25% of participants who stated that this material is badly needed. the eighth material is “the development of paragraphs of argumentative essay with the correct schematic structure”, as much as 20% of participants stated that this material is badly needed, and 80% said this material is needed. the “availability of argumentative essay examples” is an important statement raised in this survey and the participants’ responses were very positive. the results were dominated by 75% of participants who believed that the availability of these examples is badly needed and another 25% said this material is needed. furthermore, the results in relation to the “explanation of the self-assessment components of the argumentative essay” remained dominated by as much as 42.86% of the participants who stated that the explanation of this material is needed. a total of 14.29% stated that this material is badly needed, while 28.57% stated they do not really need this material. at the point of this statement, participants who assume that the material explanation of the component of independent assessment is not required at all, number as much as 14.29%. the last material raised in this survey was the “availability of tips or how to write argumentative essay in video programs”. this statement received a positive response from 55.56% of participants who stated that the availability of this video is badly needed, 33.33% said the video is needed, and as much as 11.11% thought that the video is not needed at all. based on the survey results, it is evident that the survey of content/learning materials for the pbis4313/writing iii course, especially the material given in the online tutorial, got very positive responses. the results were dominated by more than 50% of participants choosing ‘badly needed’ and ‘needed’ options against the eleven subject matters discussed. it is indicated that the most needed material is the discussion of “how to identify topic sentences in the argumentative essay”, followed by the participants’ needs for the argumentative essay examples. the next most desired material is that which discusses how to identify the components of the argumentative essay (introduction, the body of paragraphs, the concluding paragraph). the development of paragraphs of an argumentative essay with the correct schematic structure is ranked four thin terms of the highest needs of learners in this course. furthermore, the materials that discuss “how to analyze the coherence of the argumentative essay” and the material on “the outline development of the argumentative essay” are the next most favored requirement of the participants. basically, the results of this survey imply that the eleven subjects or subject matter offered in this survey are needed by participants inthe learning process ofthe online tutorial pbis4313/writing iii courses. these english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 131 results are important as underlying factors in the development of online learning models in research in terms of content/material discussion. learners’ perceptions towards the implementation of constructivism approachin the tuton of the pbis4313/writing iii the next part of the questionnaire discusses the learners’ perceptions towards the learning process needed in the tuton of the pbis4313/writing iii course. some information was collected from the participants in relation to their needs towards the implementation of a constructivism approach (collaborative learning method) in the tuton activities. the following is the results of the participants’ information obtained through the implementation of a constructivism approach in the tuton of the pbis4313/writing iii. figure 3. the learners’ needs of the implementation of constructivism approach in the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii in the previous section, the results were dominated by groups of participants who stated ‘badly needed’ and ‘needed’ in most of the statements given. in this section, researchers collect information related to the implementation of a constructivism approach (collaborative learning methods) and the participants’ opinions vary widely as shown in figure 3. there are seven issues raised in this section in relation to what the tutor has to consider. here are the details. the first issue raised is the need for tuton participants to interact with each other. a total of 20% of participants stated that giving participants the opportunity to interact to each other in tuton activities is badly needed and 40% of participants stated needed. however, 40% of participants thought that the interactionin the tuton is not necessary. the second statement is related to dividing the participants into several small groups. as much as 50% of participants responded very positively by declaring that dividing participants into several groups of interaction is badly needed. on the contrary, there were 16.67% who stated that the dividing participants into interaction groups is not very necessary and even the remaining 33.33% stated it is not needed at all. the third statement raises an issue of providing learning activities with a ‘dialogue journal’ for taking notes of ideas to be exchanged with other members for comments or statements. this writing learning technique is categorized as a method of collaborative learning. in this activity the participants record ideas or ideas in a journal and exchange with other participants for comments or questions. on this issue, participants’ responses vary greatly, i.e. 20% stated that this technique is badly needed, another 40% said it is needed. in contrast, there were also participants who were less supportive of this technique. as much as 20% of participants thought that the technique is not very necessary and remaining 20% stated that this technique is not needed at all. statement four raised in this section is the need for “providing instructional activities with dyadic essays techniques”. this technique consists of an activity in which learners are given a reading text and write lidwina sri ardiasih, emzir, & yumna rasyid implementing constructivism approach in online writing course: learners’ need analysis 132 essay questions and model answers, then they exchange those answers for use as a model. in addition to a dialogue journal, “dyadic essays techniques is another component of collaborative learning methods in which participants write each essay question and answer model, exchange questions, and compare the answers to be used as a model. participants are quite enthusiastic about this technique. this can be seen from their response to the survey that as many as 20% said this technique is badly needed and supported by 40% of participants who declared this technique is needed. however, as much as 40% thought that this technique is not needed. in the fifth statement, the researchers raised another technique called peer editing. peer editing of writing involves critically reviewing and preparing editorial feedback for other participants’ essays, reports, arguments, research reports or other writing assignments. in this technique the participants critically review the writings of other participants based on groups that have been made by researchers. in addition to critically reviewing, participants practice preparing editorial feedback for other participants’ essays, reports, arguments, research reports or other writing assignments. in this section, the participants’ responses were quite good. based on the percentage of survey results on 28.57% of participants, it was revealed that the technique is needed, while 28.57% thought that the technique is not very necessary. the sixth statement discusses the learners’ perceptions towards the needs of another technique called the collaborative writing technique of essay. the learners write essays together for practice and display the writing stages more effectively. the participants’ responses regarding this technique is very positive in that 57.14% stated that this technique is badly needed and the remaining 42.86 stated that this technique is needed. the last statement discussed by the researcher is a self-assessment for writing to conduct independent evaluations and revise the learners’ writing results up to the final results. in this research it was expected that self-assessment guidelines were developed as one of the products. the main purpose of these guidelines is for the participants to conduct independent evaluations and to revise the results of their writing into the final stages by going through the right process. on the issue of providing self-assessment guidelines, the participants showed an excellent response in which as much as 40% of participants stated that these self-assessment guidelines are badly needed and supported by 40% of other participants who stated that these are needed. on the contrary, there were 20% of the participants thought that the self-assessment guidelines are not necessary. the survey results related to the application of interaction and the constructivism approach, especially the method of collaborative learning, show high enthusiasm of the participants. figure 3 shows that of the seven issues raised, more than 60% of participants stated that the application of interaction and the use of collaboratvie writing techniques as the embodiment of the constructivism approach is really needed. the results of this data analysis become the basis for the researcher to consider the collaborative writing techniques in the process of developing the online learning model. one of the most needed techniques by the participants is the collaborative writing technique in which they can work together and practice writing witheach other through more effective stages. in addition, the participants’ enthusiasm towards the use of peer editing techniques in which they can do a critical review of the other participants’ writings and give feedback to each other for improving their writing, is quite high. utilization of self-assessment guidelines or self-assessment has also taken the highest priority for participants in which as much as 40% of the participants stated that selfassessment guidelines are urgently needed and the remaining 40% of the participants stated that these guidelines are needed. therefore, in the process of developing online learning for argumentative essay writing skills the researcher needs to develop such selfassessment guidelines to assist participants in their writing process. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 133 learners’ perceptions towards the overall learning process of the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii the open questions are the last parts of the questionnaire which aim at finding out the participants’ responses regarding four important things: 1) the frequency of english essay writing, 2) obstacles in writing argumentative essay, 3) obstacles during the tuton pbis4313/writing iii, and 4) the importance of pbis4313/writing iii course in supporting the participants’ professions. the open questions came with explanatory columns that are open or free of participants. the participants’ answers comments, or recommendations are useful to strengthen the options chosenby the participants in the previous parts. the following is the detailed explanation of the results of the open questions. the first open question is whether the participants frequently write essays in english. here is the result. figure 4. learners’ practice of writing english essays regarding the learners’ practice of writing essays in english, the survey results show that only 26.67% were accustomed to writing english essays and as much as 73.33% stated that they were not used to writing essays in english. the percentage of the participants who were used to writing english essays is very small and there were four participants who put additional explanation of the types of the essays they used to write. the types of essays they normally write are: 1) storytelling, 2) description and narrative (the reason is because it is easy to get), 3) personal experience story, and 4) grammar (additional writing skills). in terms of the writing process conducted by the participants, the researchers also obtained some information about the constraints faced by participants in their writing process. there are five academic obstacles mentioned by the researcher on the questionnaire and participants have the option to choose more than one obstacle. these constraints are: 1) difficulties in getting ideas to be developed in the writing, 2) lack of information about the characteristics of an argumentative essay, 3) lack of knowledge about appropriate argumentative essay structures, 4) lack of knowledge about appropriate argumentative essay components, and 5) difficulties developing ideas in the form of paragraphs/essays. the results of the survey can be seen in the following figure. lidwina sri ardiasih, emzir, & yumna rasyid implementing constructivism approach in online writing course: learners’ need analysis 134 figure 5. the students’ academic obstacles in following the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii figure 5 shows that the biggest obstacle experienced by participants in writing argumentative essays is the lack of knowledge about the appropriate components of an argumentative essay. a total of 46.67% of the participants claimed that they encountered these constraints and this directly pointed to the needs for individual emphasis on material discussion of the appropriate components of the essay. moreover, the next two obstacles that the participants experienced most were the lack of knowledge about the characteristics of the argumentative essay and the difficulty of finding ideas. in this section, there are two participants who commented to clarify the obstacles they experienced especially in relation to the ideas. first, one of the participants stated that “ideas become an important part of essay writing. if the idea is not assembled well it will create difficulties in describing and writing essays” (respondent 7). second, another participant reinforced the previous opinion regarding the importance of ideas in the writing process by sharing his experience as follows. “every time i wrote essays, i always got problems in getting the main ideas as well as developing them. so, sometimes i had to delete and repeat it again because the writing that has been made is not appropriate or even out of the context” (respondent 5). the difficulties in getting ideas for this form of writing has been an obstacle that was experienced by 40% of participants and supported by another 33.33% who expressed their difficulties in developing their ideas in the form of paragraphs or essays. the results of this survey demonstrate the importance of providing more knowledge to the participants about how to identify ideas and develop them into broader forms. in relation to the learning process of participants through the tuton of the pbis4313/writing iii course, some technical obstacles were presented by researchers in the questionnaire to find out about other constraints most experienced by the participants in addition to academic ones. the obstacles offered are: 1) time to follow the tutorial, 2) access of learning resources, 3) cost of the internet subscription, 4) difficulties of writing (e.g. writing assignments), 5) understanding the tutorial material, and 6) limited bandwidth/internet network. participants may choose more than one option. here is the description of the survey results obtained by the researcher about the constraints experienced by participants. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 135 figure 6. learners’ technical obstacles during following the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii figure 6 describes the technical obstacles experienced by most participants. as much as 57.14% of the participants experienced time constraints to follow the tutorial. this is very understandable since most of the participants are in-service teachers so they have difficulties arranging time for routine activities at home, workplace, and learning activities in ut. this was confirmed by one of the participants who stated that “due to insufficient time to access the tuton, i was late in following the instructions and even it was untouched” (respondent 5). the next most cited technical obstacle is the bandwidth/internet access, which is experienced by as much as 42.86% of the participants. this problem has become one of the main obstacles of some participants in following the tuton, especially those living in remote areas and far from internet access. furthermore, and no less important, the constraint experienced by as much as 35.71% of the participants is the difficulty of writing. the participants experienced this at the time of submitting the assignments of writing. a total of 14.29% of the participants stated they had problems with learning resources. one of the participants explained that “since i do not have writing iii modules i have difficulties in getting references in accordance with tuton writing iii, but i often looked for other information related to the material by browsing the internet” (respondent 7). this is very relevant to the purpose of the tuton as a means of enriching the material given in printed materials that help participants enrich their knowledge through the online activities available in the tuton. furthermore, there were participants who mentioned other obstacles related to the technical implementation of the tuton as follows. “i could not submit the assignments because there is no 'submission column' available. i've often experienced this in my account” (respondent 4). in this part, the researcher also collected information about the extent to which the pbis4313/writing iii course has supported the participants’ professions. the following figure shows the result of the survey. figure 7. learners’ opinions about the extent to which pbis4313/writing iii course has supported their professions lidwina sri ardiasih, emzir, & yumna rasyid implementing constructivism approach in online writing course: learners’ need analysis 136 figure 7 shows the participants’ positive response towards this matter in which as much as 86.67% of the participants stated that this course has supported their professions, whereas the rest 13.33% stated that this course did not support their professions. some participants who argued that the pbis4313/writing iii course supported their professions provided their explanation as follows. table 1. learners’ explanation about the extent to which pbis4313/writing iii course has supported their professions no respondents explanations 1. r 1 to practice writing and composing in correct english sentences 2. r 2 as an english teacher, i was supported in my teaching ability especially for text and compose 3. r4 it helps me understand the kinds of essay and how to develop them 4. r 6 not only support the professions, but in this modern era i learn how to use such passive and active english communication is common practice 5. r7 as an english language teacher in high school, writing iii course is very helpful for me in giving examples of good writing in english 6. r 8 use as a learning material 7. r 9 able to improve my competence as a teacher 8. r 10 support the teaching and learning activities in schools 9. r 11 this course can help me to have better understanding about the characteristics and components of writing 10. r 17 for the development of the profession of teachers, then make the essay a means to develop the talent of writing and developing ideas. in a service, the users’ satisfaction becomes the main goal to be achieved. in this study the researcher also looked at the participants’ satisfaction with the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii course as a whole. here is an overview of the survey results. figure 8. learners’ opinions about their satisfaction with the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii course the survey results showed that most participants were satisfied with the tuton service in this course that is as much as 86.67% and only 13.33% who expressed dissatisfaction with the tuton service they have followed. in this section, the researcher gives a recommendation, suggestion, and feedback column about the participants’ reasons of being satisfied with the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii course as described in the following table. table 2. learners’ comments and recommendations in relation to pbis4313/writing iii course no respondents explanations 1. r 1 it's pretty good english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 2, june 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 137 2. r 2 yes, because there is a guide in the form of material and material analysis 3. r 6 because i can find out how the arrangement of the writing and pronunciation of english which is good and correct 4. r 7 i am very satisfied with the material given in tuton writing iii especially on the material in the form of video because the material can be delivered properly 5. r 8 should be presented more communicatively 6. r 10 more lectures should be given 7. r 11 sometimes i do not understand the material presented 8. r 17 materials composed starting from writing i should be sustained and starting at a simple stage since vocabulary constraints are a classic problem for beginners based on the results of the survey, there are some important things related to the presentation of teaching materials and online tutorials in the tuton of pbis4313/writing iii. re-examining the theoretical studies discussed earlier that the process of selecting instructional materials should be tailored to the needs of the learners as well as the learning objectives, has resulted in several criteria that the instructor has fulfilled. one of the important items that has been implemented is the selection of topics on the tuton that match the material discussed so that learners can gain a meaningful learning experience. the responses of the participants are good and they are active in responding and interacting with both the tutor and the learners themselves. in the beginning, learners had difficulties in understanding the teaching materials they obtained, but they were greatly helped by the tuton support services. it is shown by their satisfaction statement in which over 60% of the respondents stated that they were very satisfied and felt very supported in understanding the teaching materials with the tuton service. in addition to the selection of topics, the types of essays raised in the tuton also has described the ability of tutors in determining the material in accordance with the needs of learners. however, there are several forms of essays that need to be replaced for learners’ learning outcomes to be more meaningful. reviewing the survey results from the constructivism approach points of view, the participants have implied their experiences of practicing this approach though it was not optimum. this can be determined from their opinions about their interests in being able to express their opinions, ideas, knowledge, and even share experiences with tutors and other participants. through the discussion forum or other online facilities, there is an opportunity for learners to collaborate with other participants if needed. thus, the learners have an opportunity to build their own knowledge. furthermore, the discussion on the assigned tasks have represented a constructivism approach in which tutors are not limited to asking questions to answer, but rather on assigning tasks to learners to produce their own writing through the construction of their ideas or knowledge. the disadvantage found in this process is the lack of opportunity for participants to receive feedbacks from the tutor for the improvement of his/her writing. conclusion it is important for educators to evaluate some aspects of the teaching and learning, including the materials, the strategies, as well as the assessments, by conducting a learner need analysis. this paper has delivered the result of a study in order to obtain some information about the learners’ perceptions about the materials related to writing argumentative essays and the implementation of a constructivism approach in an online writing course. from the overall discussion, it is concluded that some topics be taken as the highest priorities to discuss in a writing course for advanced level learners, i.e. how to identify some main ideas as well as how to develop them into a good argumentative essay by considering some appropriate writing aspects in its process. moreover, there is a possibility to offer a collaborative writing technique in an online writing course. this lidwina sri ardiasih, emzir, & yumna rasyid implementing constructivism approach in online writing course: learners’ need analysis 138 technique is the embodiment of the constructivism approach in which the learners can build their own knowledge about the subject based on the prior knowledge, learning experiences, as well as the new knowledge they get from the learning process. therefore, it is another challenge for a language instructor to create an online course by applying a constructivism approach, particularly the online collaborative writing technique, in order to enhance the learners’ writing skills. references badger, r., & white, g. (2000). a process genre approach to teaching writing. english language teaching journal, 54(2), 153-160. doi: 0.1093/elt/54.2.153. barkley, e. f., cross, k. p., & major, c. h. (2005). collaborative learning techniques. san fransisco: jossey-bass. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. new york: pearson education inc. knapp, p., & watkins, m. (2005). genre, text, grammar: technologies for teaching and assessing writing. sidney: university of new south wales. mason, r., & rennie, f. (2006). e-learning: the key concepts. new york: routledge. oshima, a., & hogue, a. (1999). writing academic english (3rd ed.). usa: addison-wesley publishing company. renkema, j. (1993). discourse studies: an introductory textbook. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing co. richardson, v. (1997). constructivist teacher education: building a world of new understandings. london: falmer press. simonson, m., smaldino, s., & svacek, s. m. (2012). teaching and learning at a distance: foundations of distance education. boston: pearson education inc. wang, p. (2011). constructivism and learner autonomy in foreign language teaching and learning: to what extent does theory inform practice. theory and practice in language studies, 1(3), 273-277. doi: 10.4304/tpls.1.3.273-277 . zuhairi, a., adnan, i., & thaib, d. (2007). provision of student learning support services in a large-scale distance education system at universitas terbuka, indonesia. turkish online journal of distance education-tojde, 8(4), 44-64. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 101 digital comic: an innovation of using toondoo as media technology for teaching english short story asri siti fatimah english education, faculty of teacher training and education, siliwangi university, indonesia e-mail: asrisitifatimah@unsil.ac.id santiana english education, faculty of teacher training and education, siliwangi university, indonesia e-mail: santiana@unsil.ac.id yuyus saputra english education, faculty of teacher training and education, siliwangi university, indonesia e-mail: yuyussaputra@unsil.ac.id apa citation: fatimah, a. s., santiana, s., & saputra, y. (2019). digital comic: an innovation of using toondoo as media technology for teaching english short story. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 101-108. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1526. received: 24-01-2019 accepted: 23-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: this study investigates the use of toondoo as media technology for teaching english short story. toondoo as the newest technology for creating comic or picture story is very beneficial helping teacher to creatively provide innovative strategy providing better classroom environment for the english learners, especially for those studying english short story. as the invented prose narrative shorter than a novel dealing with a few characters, short story can give an important content raising cultural awareness, linguistic awareness, motivation, and is claimed to improve all four skills. therefore, this study aims at knowing how the implementation of toondoo in teaching english short story and finding out the benefits of this tool for teaching performance. to gain the data, reflective journal created by a pre-service teacher who becomes the participant of the study and interview were used to reflect the process of creating toondoo and the process of teaching english short story using this tool. the findings showed that this tool can be used to promote students’ speaking skill. toondoo is very helpful to facilitate students’ imagination promoting their speaking ability, producing better learning experience, and creating a good classroom atmosphere. keywords: english short story; pre-service teacher; reflection; technology; toondoo. introduction the use of instructional media for teaching is really important helping teachers to deliver the material and create interesting activities in the classroom. teachers may not only use traditional media such as pictures, cards, authentic materials and boards for teaching english, but they can also use song, audio visual, and instructional technology for helping them give instruction to the students. today, there are so many instructional media for teaching english which have been introduced by several experts. it is certainly proven that technology used for teaching english grows very fast so that teachers are really helped to provide better classroom experience for the student (fatimah & santiana, 2017). thus, they will be very easy to find the media technology provided on mobile application and web-based internet that give different environment. as a result, teachers are encouraged to creatively give the suitable instructional tools in the classroom in order to guide students to achieve the learning objectives. toondoo as one of the web-based applications provided on the internet is known as easy and appealing application which can be used as instructional tool the teachers to create picture and use it for teaching. kirchoff and cook in fatimah and santiana (2017) point out that toondoo is a free, fully online comic creator, one that offers many options for comic strip creation through a user-friendly interface. this web-based application tool is really beneficial allowing teachers to create cartoon by only choosing comic strips components, such as setting, characters, props, clip, art, and text bubble provided on its application. its component is categorized to help users find what they are looking for and select just the right image. moreover, they can upload pictures taken from internet or their own if they want. this feature is useful and easy to use. asri siti fatimah, santiana, & yuyus saputra digital comic: an innovation of using toondoo as media technology for teaching english short story 102 similar to other web-based technology, teachers need to create an account by submitting name and email address to use toondoo. it provides fifteen options for panel layout, from one to four panels of equal or varying sizes. it also has option to create individual comic strips or to combine panels to form books (i.e., collections) of multiple strips (kirchoff & cook, 2015). moreover, this tool also consists of sharing options allowing the users to share their comic on internet. students can select from public (where anyone can view), private (where only they can view), and shared (where they can select who views) for their product. this can create different setting and experience for the students which can increase their motivation to study. gonzalez (2016) has found that the elaboration of the comic in toondoo was something very motivating for the students. the use of comics in efl setting is not new since it provides chronological images that provide narrative to their audience. this media is useful to stimulate students’ ideas. comics are art form that features a series of static images in fixed sequence, usually to tell a story. typically, comics are printed on paper and text is often incorporated into the images (yunus, et al., 2012). however, the use of comics in education context has surprisingly long history. since the early 1940s, many scholars in the usa have investigated that the use of comic books did not give meaningful benefits. it was also stated that comics were a harmful literacy tool. in the 1970s, however, teachers began to dare to use comics books again and it becomes influential when art spiegelman’s comics book, maus, won the pulitzer prize in 1992. it proves that it can be artistically mature and literate works (retalis as cited in yunus et al., 2012). actually, there are many strengths of using comics in teaching english. comics consist of pictures which are usually interesting for the students. children have a natural attention to comic because of its elements. comics can intrisically motivate the students to learn and take advantage from the extraordinary motivating power of this media. furthermore, comics are known as a permanent, visual component, in contrast to film and animation, where the medium dictates the pace of the viewing process. the text medium is similarly permanent, but not ‘pictorial’. ‘visual permanence’ is distinctive to comic, as time within a comic book progresses at the pace of a reader (willian & yang, as cited in yunus et al., 2012). garcia cited in gonzalez (2016) argues that there are some advantages of using comics in the classroom, specifically in the foreign language classroom in which comics can provide different content: phonetic-phonological, language or grammatical, lexical-semantic, functional and communicative, cultural or strategic. however, although comics only provide several pictures and a few words, but teacher can use this kind of media to teach elements of language. in addition, teacher is also allowed to use comics for teaching five skills: listening, understanding reading, oral interaction, speaking, and writing. as a medium used to express idea by pictures, comics can be used for teaching both receptive and productive skills. finally, it is also interesting for people in which its playful component favors the teachinglearning through playing. therefore, it really motivates students to study using this media. therefore, the use of cartoon created by this web 2.0 technology is really appropriate to use for teaching english short story. as the invented prose narrative shorter than a novel, short story can give important content raising cultural awareness, linguistic awareness, motivation, and are claimed to improve all four skills (parkinson & reid thomas, cited in khatib & nasrollahi, 2012). the use of toondoo for teaching english short story can allow teachers to facilitate their imagination in which they can create unfamiliar story for the students. in addition, it also makes students learn easier and provides permanence. toondoo can reduce repetition and make remembering words easy, promote creative skills and motivate students to learn (jylhä-laide cited in wilujeng & lan, 2015). previous research conducted by gonzalez (2016) has found that comic in toondoo provides the opportunity for doing collaborative learning and becomes a visual literacy resource to evidence vocabulary learning with emphasis in action verbs. this study proves that toondoo provides the possibility of articulating technology and english contents promoting the creativity, positive perception of english classes, and interest for showing good results. pictures produced by toondoo can provide visual platform engaging the students to learn and promote their interest on the material given. especially for teaching english short story, toondoo is very suitable to give a chance for the teachers to creatively design pictures by themselves. teaching english short story by using toondoo will also be more interesting english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 103 because the students will not be familiar with the story given. in addition, students also have the opportunity to create cartoon books in a group and publish it in any social media. as a result, their imagination and ability to create english short story will be enhanced. considering the previous background, therefore this study aims to answer the following questions: 1. how is the use of toondoo for teaching english short story? 2. what are the benefits of using toondoo for teaching english short story? method this study applied reflective practice to investigate the use of toondoo in teaching english short story. boud in lewis (2013) argues that reflective practice is a generic term for those intellectual and affective activities in which individuals engage to explore their experiences in order to lead to a new understanding and appreciation. forty-two students coming from the fourth semester in one of universities in indonesia are the participants of the study. they have guided to teach short story by using toondoo in efl classroom. however, one of the students was chosen as the sources of the data. he was asked to reflect his teaching performance when using toondoo in teaching english short story. to collect the data, reflective journal and interview were used. he was asked to write his reflective journal three times; after the lecturer introduces toondoo; after he creates toondoo; and after he teaches using it for teaching english short story. to help him do reflection, reflection template proposed by smith adapted by widodo and ferdiansyah (2018) is used. the template is shown in table 1. table 1. reflection template a. describing write what you felt when you began your teaching or what you taught from the previous lesson b. informing explore what the theme/topic you were teaching, in what ways you taught it c. confronting describe how you reacted to it and also how you performed the task. d. reconstructing highlight the idea as a result of your self-reflection on and for action that you believed would be useful for your next teaching the collected data were then analyzed by using thematic analysis proposed by braun, clarke, and rance (2014). firstly, the data taken from reflective journal and interview were transcribed. in this phase, the data were read and re-read in order to be familiar with the depth and breadth of the content. after being familiar with the data, the data were classified into several codes. in this phase, important points related to research objectives were colored and identified whether they were relevant or not. then, the codes were grouped which possibly have the same theme. then, the themes were also colored differently in order to ease the process of including the codes into the appropriate theme. furthermore, the themes were reviewed to ensure whether the themes were appropriate or not. in addition, if the themes were not appropriate, it was omitted or replaced. finally, the themes were named as the representation of its following sub-themes. those became the findings of this study. at the end, the data were reported in a way which can convince the reader of the merit and validity of the analysis. results and discussion as one of the free comic-creating websites, toondoo allows teachers to easily make cartoon strips or comics and share them to their students. however, the use of comics for teaching english is not new and can be used for developing all language skills. comics consists of pictures combined with text and other visual information which facilitate the students not only to receive information but also express ideas from those elements. in this study, the use toondoo in efl setting is investigated in order to find out the use of it for teaching english short story. from the reflective journal and interview, it is found that in this study, comics are used for teaching english speaking skill. in process of teaching english short story, i use picture that i created using toondoo to stimulate the students to speak. i firstly show the pictures without inserting any words. i instruct the students to discuss what expression which is probably given by the characters on the picture in this study, the participant uses his imagination to create the cartoon strips without any text and bring it to the classroom. asri siti fatimah, santiana, & yuyus saputra digital comic: an innovation of using toondoo as media technology for teaching english short story 104 figure 1. toondoo furthermore, the students are asked to guess the story and try to mention the expressions given by the characters. by using this activity, the students are encouraged to give their arguments about the expressions given by the characters on the comics. the findings also show that this activity engages the students to be active in the classroom. since the goal of teaching english as a foreign language is to help students increase their communicative skills, short story provided on comics is really effective to stimulate them to speak. in the next activity, the teacher divided the students into several groups and asked them to discuss and guess the story on the comics. at the end of the activity, the students are given the opportunity to stand in front of the class to retell the story in the group. the use of toondoo as free online cartoon maker gets positive response from the participant as depicted in the following excerpt. .... i am so excited to create cartoon by using toondoo.... i really enjoy creating comic using this tool... ...using toondoo for creating cartoon story is really simple creating comics using this app is really easy. as the free cartoon maker, the participant can create free account by submitting username, password and email (figure 2). toondoo consists of hundreds characters, backgrounds and clip art which can be chosen easily by the participant (figure 3). as stated by tahsaldar and seeman (2018), toondoo comics to wiki books is a great way to assess students’ comprehension of story lines, and main ideas as it allows them to easily create cartoons by dragging hundreds of ready-made backgrounds, props, text boxes, and characters into the cartoon panel chosen by them. figure 2. how to create toondoo figure 3. characters on toondoo figure 4. background on toondoo toondoo also provides several features which are interesting for the participant. he does not need to have a skill of drawing to create the characters. in addition, the facial expressions and body positions also can be changed easily using this tool. there are several emotions provided on the app, such as happy, angry, sad or disappointed (figure 5). english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 105 figure 5. facial expressions on toondoo moreover, there are also some benefits of this tool found based on themes on the data analysis. the benefits are as follows. stimulating imagination to promote speaking skill the use of literature in teaching english has been previously a great debate since it provides unrealistic nature which is rarely found in daily activities. however, nowadays it has been noticed that this kind of material gives the authenticity which provides cultural augmentation and promotes linguistic awareness of the students (parkinson & reid thomas cited in khatib & nasrollahi, 2012). especially in teaching english short story, teacher can use this kind of material as the media to improve english language skill especially speaking ability. in process of teaching english short story, i use picture that i created using toondoo to stimulate the students to speak. i firstly show the pictures without inserting any words. i instruct the students to discuss what expression which is probably given by the characters on the picture. the students look so enthusiastic to do these tasks. almost all of the students give their arguments about the expressions from the characters. the statement shows that actually teacher can use literature as media to facilitate students enhancing their language skills, especially speaking. it is supported by khatib and seyyed (2013) who state “short stories are claimed to improve all four skills. it can, if selected and exploited appropriately, provide quality text content which will greatly enhance elt courses for learners at intermediate levels of proficiency.” furthermore, the use of digital comic created by toondoo provides the opportunity for the students to express their ideas by guessing the story on the pictures. as stated on the participant’s reflection, the comic was created without any words in order to stimulate the students to guess the story and expressions which are probably given by the characters. on the other hand, it is stated by kibedi varga cited in conard (2016) that comics are defined as a form where images and words are received simultaneously and in series. comics usually consists of pictures providing visual narrative and the words as the textual narrative. comics are frequently characterized by the combination of pictures with a relatively small number of words, organized into graphically separated units in sequential order. some researchers also agree that balloons on comic are the essential or crucial feature containing speech, text, or a caption that presents the character’s voice, giving the story or ‘life’ to the comic. without the text in the balloons, the reader is unable to follow the narrative of the comic. in this situation, by not providing the words on the bubbles, the students are encouraged to give their arguments to guess the expressions and also the story on the media. it is really appealing because the students can use their imagination to express their opinion about the story. to teach english story to the students, the participant believed that using student-centered learning should be used in the classroom. this approach is known as innovative method promoting learning in communication which takes the students as active participants in their own learning. in this meeting, i try to make the student active in the class. i do not like if they only listen to what i explain. as my lecturer says that i should use student-centered learning when teaching in the class. therefore, this media really helps me to engage the students. after the students give their opinion about the expressions which probably occur, i ask them to guess the story of the pictures. some of the students can guess the main idea of the story. after that, i show the expression which i previously made and tell what the story is. i also appreciate the students who can guess the story of the picture. the students look so happy and classroom situation is managed well. finally, i ask the students to retell the story orally and write it on their handbook. as shown on the excerpt, it is essential to use student-centered learning in the classroom. especially when using cartoon created by toondoo, student-centered learning becomes asri siti fatimah, santiana, & yuyus saputra digital comic: an innovation of using toondoo as media technology for teaching english short story 106 effective since the students are encouraged to be the main characters of the classroom tasks. by providing situation in which the students express their ideas about the picture, toondoo helps teacher to engage the students behaviorally. as it is seen on the excerpt that almost all of the students give their argument about the story. these visual images provide textual information adding attractiveness on the atmosphere of the classroom. wright in lavalle and briesmaster (2017) asserts that using pictures encourages students to use their imaginations. thus, their ideas will be expressed easily. exploring illustration to create better learning the use of toondoo for teaching english short story is appropriate since it facilitates teacher to easily create cartoon without having skill of drawing. toondoo consists of several features, such as background, characters, props and emotions which can be chosen effortlessly. when my lecturer firstly introduces toondoo as one of technological tool for teaching, i am so interested. i like cartoon and in my opinion, it will be interesting for me to teach using this media. i am so excited to create cartoon by using toondoo. i do not need to draw pictures for creating this cartoon. i only need to choose the background and characters on this application. when my lecturer shows me the way to create cartoon by using toondoo, i feel happy because it is very easy and simple. i hope that i can create interesting cartoon by using this application and use it for teaching in the future. as it is shown in the excerpt, the pre-service teacher feels excited to use this tool for teaching. this kind of application allows her to easily create the appealing instructional media for teaching. bustamante, hurlbut and moeller (2012) argue, “toondoo proved be a valuable feature of the technology as students who are not so good at drawing their ideas with paper and pen, because they feel more comfortable creating their comic using characters from the online library located in toondoo”. however, this tool forces her to be creative on creating the story. this application consists of several features which allow the participant to freely create her own story. to create cartoon using toondoo, my obstacle is only about the story that i made. i am a perfectionist person. so that i want to create a very good story. i change the story several times because i feel not satisfied with the story. i am sometimes difficult to put my story on my cartoon because there are no character’s activities that i want. therefore, i am perforce to change the story which is suitable with the characters and its activities provided on toondoo. this situation forces the participant to reflect and learn how to use this tool in order to provide a good story for the students. ramos in tahsaldar and semaan (2018) highlights the importance of planning properly when using toondoo comic so that students can achieve better results in learning. for more details, he added that the outline of the balloon indicates the intonation of the voice and the shape of letters indicate feelings or actions, while a larger letter indicates a screaming character and the shaky handwriting resemble a scared character and so on. as the pre-service teacher who has less experience in teaching, the participant frequently feels anxious before coming to the class. she usually feels afraid of making mistake in teaching and cannot manage the classroom well. however, this tool helps her to be confident because it is new for the students so that it can increase their’ curiosity. this web 2.0 technology allows the participant to be creative producer providing a chance to explore illustrations to create a good instructional media. by using tool, the students can also learn language well by integrating new ways of communication and expression. ramos in tahsaldar and semaan (2018) explains that, if used properly and planned, the comic “can achieve concrete results in learning, such as instigating the debate and reflection on a particular theme” creating appealing classroom atmosphere creating a good classroom atmosphere becomes essential since it has a big effect on the students’ behavior and motivation to learn. in this situation, teacher is encouraged to usually provide innovative strategy and tool which can make appealing classroom situation. especially in the process of teaching short story using toondoo, teacher can provide unique pictures which can give different flow of the story increasing the students’ curiosity and engagement in learning. teaching using picture especially cartoon is usually interesting. especially when i provide story that i create by myself, the students feel english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 107 curious. it will be different if i give the famous story, such as fable story, legend or fairy tale that are familiar for the students. they will easily know the story and will not be interested with the material that i give. as it is shown in the previous excerpt, toondoo can help pre-service teacher to create new story based on her imagination. by using the media, students’ emotions are easily provoked because of the flow of the story. crumbley and smith in saka (2014) state that short stories connect education with entertainment in order to make learning easier and interesting. it provokes emotions, informs how people can behave and teaches something about human psychology. furthermore, it cannot be denied that the use of pictures created by toondoo is really appealing. there were so many researches previously investigated the use of picture on teaching english and findings are frequently similar that it usually motivates the students and create a good classroom atmosphere (wright in lavalle & briesmaster, 2017; mokarrama, 2017). especially in the use of toondoo, sequence of pictures can add attractiveness to the classroom’s atmosphere since it provides learning in a fun situation. gonzalez (2016) argues that the elaboration of the comic in toondoo was something very motivating for the students as far as learning, not as significant to use it in their free time but indeed to recommend it to other students and professors as well as to use it for other subjects; also to use it as a technological tool and learn through a more fun way. ....this tool can help me to create a good classroom atmosphere... additionally, it has been found from the reflective journal that the classroom atmosphere is appealing since the students are engaged and active in the class. the use of toondoo which is new and innovative influences the students’ curiosity and it develops interaction and communication in the classroom. ramos in tahsaldar and semaan (2018) also added that toondoo comic can be used for several education purposes, such as producing knowledge, enhancing creative writing skills, developing foreign language skills, motivating students to participate, and making classes more attractive. conclusion toondoo as one of the applications to create cartoon is very beneficial helping teachers to provide different platform and appealing media in teaching english short story. as the newest technology provided on the internet, teacher can easily create cartoon using toondoo by only choosing background, characters and clipart provided on application. however, different with the use of picture on the book or internet, this tool encourages the teachers to be creative creating the content of the story in which the students will not be familiar with the plot of the cartoon. a student-teacher, the participant of the study, argues that this tool is really appropriate to be used for teaching english short story. to use it for teaching, bubbles on the pictures are empty in order to stimulate the students to speak by guessing the expressions which is probably given by the characters. here, the students look so enthusiastic to give their arguments about the characters’ words and also the story from the cartoon. the findings prove that literature can also be used to facilitate the students enhancing their language skill. furthermore, the classroom situation is also interesting in which the students are engaged with the activities given by the teacher. on the other hand, teacher’s professional development is also promoted in this study. it is proven form the way the teacher learns to avoid his teaching anxiety and improve creativity on creating digital comic. by using this app for teaching, she is encouraged to provide innovation in her teaching performance to create better students’ language competence and ground breaking classroom situation. references braun, v., clarke, v., & rance, n. (2014). how to use thematic analysis with interview data (process research). in a. vossler & n. moller (eds.), the counselling & psychotherapy research handbook. london: sage. bustamante, c. hurlbut, s. & moeller, a. (2012). web 2.0 and language learners: moving from consumers to creators. university of nebraskalincoln. retrieved march 14, 2018, from http://www.csctfl.org/documents/2012report.pd f#page=125. conard, s. (2016). lively letters and the graphic narrative: revisiting comics theory on word and image through the lens of two avant-garde children’s books. image & narrative, 17(2). fatimah, a. s., & santiana, s. (2017). teaching in 21st century: students-teachers’ perceptions of technology use in the classroom. script journal, 2(2), 125-135. http://www.csctfl.org/documents asri siti fatimah, santiana, & yuyus saputra digital comic: an innovation of using toondoo as media technology for teaching english short story 108 gonzalez, a. m. v. (2016). comic in toondoo and collaborative learning: a visual literacy resource to evidence vocabulary learning with emphasis in action verbs in an efl group of seventh graders in a cajicà school. unpublished thesis. universidad santo tomás. khatib, m., & nasrollahi. (2012). enhancing reading comprehension through short stories in iranian efl learners. theory and practice in language studies, 2(2), 240-246. doi:10.4304/tpls.2.2.240246. khatib, m., & seyyed, h. s. (2013). short story based language teaching (ssblt): a literaturebased language teaching method. international journal of basic sciences & applied research, 2(2), 155-159 kirchoff, & cook. (2015). overviewing software applications for graphic novel creation in the post-secondary and secondary classroom. sane journal: sequential art narrative in education, 2. lavalle, p. i., & briesmaster, m. (2017). the study of the use of picture descriptions in enhancing communication skills among the 8th-grade students—learners of english as a foreign language. inquiry in education, 9(1). lewis, a. v. (2013). reflective practice: what is it and how do i do it? journal of clinical practice in speech-language pathology, 15(2), 70-74. saka, ö. (2014). short stories in english language teaching. international online journal of education and teaching (iojet),1(4), 278-288. tahsaldar, & semaan. (2018). the impact of toondoo comics on undergraduate students taking creative writing and children literature courses at the lebanese university faculty of pedagogy. international journal of humanities social sciences and education (ijhsse),5(8), 203-226. doi: 10.20431/2349-0381.05080019. widodo, h. p., & ferdiansyah, s. (2018). engaging student-teachers in video-mediated selfreflection in teaching. in k. j. kennedy & j. ck. lee (eds), the routledge handbook of schools and schooling in asia. london: routledge. wilujeng, & lan. (2015). online comic in mandarin chinese’s vocabulary learning: a case study of budi utama multilingual school in yogyakarta, indonesia. the iafor journal of education, iii(ii). yunus, et al. (2012). effects of using digital comics to improve esl writing. research journal of applied sciences, engineering and technology 4(18), 3462-3469. fauzi miftakh investigating indonesian efl students’ responses of the implementation of intercultural language learning investigating indonesian efl students’ responses of the implementation of intercultural language learning fauzi miftakh department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education university of singaperbangsa karawang, indonesia e-mail: miftakh.fauzi@yahoo.co.id apa citation: miftakh, f. (2015). investigating indonesian efl students‟ responses of the implementation of intercultural language learning. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 66-74 received: 06-01-2015 accepted: 07-03-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: this study aimed at discovering the students‟ responses to the implementation of intercultural language learning at the sixth semester students of the english education department, university of singaperbangsa karawang, indonesia. the focus of the study was on 1) the students‟ general attitudes toward the course, 2) the students‟ attitudes toward the implementation of teaching and learning and 3) the students‟ responsibility as an intercultural person. this study was designed as a descriptive qualitative study that involved 31 participants. the data were collected through questionnaire and interviews. based on the findings, the students gave positive responses to the implementation of intercultural language learning and they showed a greater interest in participating in the course. the intercultural language learning also proved that the students were given the opportunity to become intercultural speakers either during the teaching and learning process or in their daily life. finally, it recommends that the intercultural approach should be implemented by other english teachers in any subject and at all levels of students. keywords: interculural language learning, intercultural competence, english as a foreign language. introduction teaching culture has been commonly known in english language teaching. however, in learning english at school and university, there is not necessarily a guarantee to implement an intercultural approach that the cultural aspects of the target language are also studied, or at least inserted in each lesson including in the materials. damen (1987) states that the curriculum of esl (english as a second language) and efl (english as a foreign language), or any language classroom are not usually involved in the cultural guidance of the stated curriculum. byram (as cited in liddicoat and kohler, 2012) states that cultural understanding has been included in such programs. it has typically been separated from the learning of language. in the current indonesian education policy, the government tends to consider that foreign languages will diminish the people‟s sense of nationality (sukarno, 2012). it seems that the government assumes that the foreign culture in the english language teaching possibly can give bad effects to the indonesian culture. tantri (2013) also adds that many schools are reluctant to accept english culture in teaching english at the school although it has positive attitudes 66 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to the need and necessity of teaching and learning of the english language. another crucial problem is derived from the english teachers themselves who do not quite understand the concept of the target language culture (rodliyah & muniroh, 2012). they usually do not know how to convey the cultural aspect of target language in teaching english. this misunderstanding is a complex issue because a teacher is a primary source of information and a mediator in the classroom. in addition, ho‟s study (2009) suggests a shift from a traditional to intercultural stance in efl classrooms that contribute to teachers‟ professional development. thus, the awareness of the inextricable relationship between language and culture and teaching culture as an integral component of language teaching can be more improved by english teachers. therefore, teachers should understand the cultural knowledge and likewise they also understand the knowledge of english language in general. as stated by gu (2005), intercultural understanding enables teachers to preserve an open yet critical mind to look for differences and similarities in pursuit of appropriate pedagogy. ideally, a non-native english teacher who has lived or studied in english speaking countries or any other country will be easier to understand the culture of the target language because they have communicated directly with native speakers. however, it is not the reason to not understand the target culture because through the advancement of technology and the availability of many books they could learn the cultural differences by themselves. as stated by byram et al. (2002), a teacher does not need to know everything about the target culture, but his role is to help learners to understand how intercultural interaction takes place. however, to implement the method, a teacher must understand the basic concept of intercultural language learning itself as well as incorporate culture and knowledge of the target language. derived from the background of the study above, this study attempted to investigate some issues of the students‟ response of the implementation of intercultural language learning. the research questions are then formulated as 1) what are the students‟ general attitudes toward the course, 2) what are the students‟ attitudes toward the implementation of teaching and learning and 3) how does the intercultural language learning affect them to be an intercultural person? to discuss intercultural language learning, firstly we have to know the difference between cultural and intercultural learning. there is a main difference between a cultural and an intercultural perspective as stated by liddicoat (2005c) that a cultural perspective emphasizes the culture of the other and leaves that culture external to the learner, whereas an intercultural perspective emphasizes the learners‟ own cultures as a fundamental part of engaging with a new culture. lucas (2003) and kim & goldstein (2005) add that intercultural communication involves people from different cultural backgrounds interact with each other that includes language by encompassing the background of the participants, stereotypes or prejudices they may hold of the other cultural group. in language teaching, liddicoat (2005b) explains that a cultural perspective implies the development of knowledge about a culture, which remains external to the learner and is not 67 fauzi miftakh investigating indonesian efl students’ responses of the implementation of intercultural language learning intended to confront or transform the learner‟s existing identity, practices, values, attitudes, beliefs, and world view. he clarifies that an intercultural perspective implies the transformational engagement of the learner in the act of learning. the goal of learning is to „decenter‟ learners from their preexisting assumptions and practices and to develop an intercultural identity through engagement with an additional culture. the outcome of intercultural learning is intercultural competence, a long term change of a person‟s knowledge (cognition), attitudes (emotions), and skills (behaviour) to enable positive and effective interaction with members of other cultures both abroad and at home (bennett, in otten, 2003). the concept has a strong correlation to the intercultural communicative competence that was formulated by byram and zarate (1994) as cited in liddicoat et al., (2003). guilherme (2002) cited in corbett (2003), stated that intercultural communicative competence is the ultimate goal of an intercultural approach to language education, and not so much „native speaker competence‟. intercultural communicative competence includes the ability to understand the language and behavior of the target community, and explain it to the members of the „home‟ community and vice versa. these competences lead the students to be intercultural speakers or mediators that are defined as someone who are able to deal with complexity and multiple identities and to avoid the stereotyping which accompanies perceiving someone through a single identity (byram et al, 2002; bredella, 2003) furthermore, an important dimension of intercultural language teaching is that it is possible to understand another culture only by comparing it with one‟s own (champagne & bourdages, 2000). as a result, in order to learn about another culture we need to learn about our own culture at the same time by comparing our own culture with the target culture. in order to achieve this, intercultural language teaching argues for a set of principles for developing an overall approach to teaching culture within language (crozet & liddicoat, 2000). the principles include: 1. culture is integrated into language macroskills not a separate macroskill and the culture needs to be taught simultaneously with and integrated into language teaching; 2. culture is taught from the beginning of language learning and is not delayed until learners have acquired some of the language; 3. the bilingual speaker is the norm and learners are expected to become competent users of a complex linguistic repertoire involving multiple languages; 4. language acquisition involves intercultural exploration: it is an active interaction with other attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, not a passive reception of facts; and 5. culture learning primarily involves learning how to discover new information about the culture while engaging with the culture. in addition, liddicoat et al. (2003) and liddicoat and scarino (2013) develop a set of principles of intercultural language learning. the principles consist of five general principles of learning, which are also fundamental to teaching and learning languages. these principles are intended to guide the curriculum design and classroom interaction to promote effective intercultural language learning. the principles consist of 1) active construction; this principle generally 68 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee involves the purposeful and active construction of knowledge within a sociocultural context of use in learning activities. learning also involves active engagement in interpreting and creating meaning in interaction with others, and continually reflecting on one‟s self and others in communication and meaningmaking in variable contexts, 2) making connection; learning is based on previous knowledge and requires challenges to initial conceptions that learners bring. it emphasizes to the ability to relate and view the connections between cultures. it occurs when relevant bridges are built between home language / culture and target language /culture, with existing knowledge positioned in light of new input, 3) social interaction; recognizing that learning and communication are social and interactive that means we communicate with people around us by using language that constructs an interaction. there are many ways of communications between different people, including their age, status, relationship, and etcetera, 4) reflection; it is fundamental to any teaching and learning process that focuses on interpretation. it involves learners having response and doing reflection of other cultures as well as concepts such as diversity, identity, experiences without stereotyping, and 5) responsibility; a learner should be responsible. in the intercultural language learning, responsibility is a principle that recognizes that learning depends on the learner‟s attitudes, dispositions, and values, developed over time. method this study employed a descriptive qualitative research design. descriptive study is designed to describe a picture of situations, characteristics of groups and phenomena as it naturally happens. (fraenkel & wallen, 1993; ary et al., 2002). the data collection techniques used were questionnaires and interviews where the data analysis was done qualitatively without statistical analysis. this study was undertaken at a tertiary level of the english education department at a state university in west java. the subject taken was students at the 6th semester level who had taken cross-cultural understanding subject. in addition, the participants involved one single class out of 9 classes in the 6th semester students of the english education department that consists of 31 students. results and discussion the discussion of the students‟ responses to the implementation of intercultural language learning is divided into three parts. the first part is the students‟ general attitudes toward the course, the second is the students‟ attitudes toward the implementation of teaching and learning and the third is the students‟ responsibility as an intercultural person. the questionnaire consists of 11 numbers. the finding of the questionnaire can be seen in the table below. table: the summary of questionnaire of the students‟ responses no statement very disagree disagree agree very agree 1 learning english with intercultural approach is interesting. 3.22% 77.41% 19.35% 2 i like learning english both the language and culture. 6.45% 64.52% 29.03% 69 fauzi miftakh investigating indonesian efl students’ responses of the implementation of intercultural language learning 3 my understanding about english language and its culture is improved. 3.22% 74.19% 22.58% 4 learning culture means learning the habit, tradition, values, norms etc. 3.22% 61.29% 35.48% 5 i am more active to give my ideas and opinion in the discussion in this course. 3.22% 61.29% 35.48% 6 i am more critical to see a case or problem among cultures at the classroom. 3.22% 48.38% 45.16% 7 i like when the teacher supported and stimulated us to think about new knowledge of english language and culture 9.77% 70.96% 22.58% 8 i like when i could have an interactive talk and discussion both with students and teachers about a case among cultures. 3.22% 80.64% 16.12% 9 i like when teacher guided conversation to include students‟ views, judgments with students. 6.45% 70.96% 19.35% 10 i should be responsible to be an intercultural person, by not judging a culture wrong and believing my culture as the best one. 77.41% 22.58% 11 i think that i should appreciate any differences in our society and view it positively. 3.22% 80.64% 16.12% percentage of responses 0% 4.17% 69.97% 25.85% the students’ attitudes toward the course the data obtained from the questionnaire and interview with students show various responses. there are three points that can be highlighted based on the finding that is: 1) the students‟ interest in learning english and its culture, 2) the students‟ understanding of english and its culture, and 3) the students‟ problems in learning english with intercultural language learning. the first, the students showed a great interest in learning english with an intercultural approach. they admitted that they enjoyed the course and participated in every meeting. it can be seen in the data from questionnaire that shows most students (77.41%) are very interested and the other 19:35% of students enjoy learning in the classroom. they also said that they liked to not only learn the language, but also to learn the culture. they said that learning of english and its culture is interesting, so they could find new knowledge about culture. it is also supported by the students‟ statements during interview, such as from the student 1 and student 2. student 1 said that “i very enjoyed this course because i learned a culture that in fact we also learned the language, so they are interrelated, and it's very important to be studied”. while the student 2 mentioned that “i enjoyed because i did not study in a formal setting. i also could improve some of my skills”. as mentioned by brown (1994) language is part of a culture and culture is part of the language. furthermore, student 2 mentioned that he enjoyed because he experienced an informal setting of teaching and learning. it is known that in the principle of intercultural language learning, students should be engaged in an interactive discussion and conversation (liddicoat & scarino, 2013; corbett, 2003) additionally, the second, the students claimed that their understanding about english and its culture has improved. they understand that there is correlation between language and culture, so they think that 70 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee they should learn a language and its culture. based on the result of the questionnaire, a total of 74.19% of students admitted that intercultural language learning improves their understanding towards english and its culture while the other 22:58% of students claimed that they have improved their understanding. the students‟ statements from interview also support the data from the questionnaire. for example, the student 2 said that “i personally know both the language and its culture. from the culture, i know new knowledge that some of foreign cultures are similar to our culture”. while the student 6 said “i more understand the culture itself, because there were not too many language differences that were taught, although there is interconnected between language and culture”. however, this students‟ understanding of the relationship between language and culture cannot be stated as an accurate and comprehensive understanding because the information is only taken from the interview. for a more comprehensive understanding, the students are needed to give a test and evaluation through their personal attitudes and behaviors. the third, although most students enjoy learning english with intercultural language learning, they still have some problems in participating in the course. the students admitted that they found difficulties in expressing their opinion in a discussion. as the answer from student 4 in the interview, who said that the discussion was too often, so sometimes he was bored, although he actually like discussion. it is known that in every meeting, there was always discussion that involved all students and the teacher. the students sometimes canceled to convey their opinions because they could not speak english fluently. some students said that they were still afraid of making mistakes, so when they finally speak, they prefer to speak in indonesian. this problem, actually, has been anticipated by the teacher by always encouraging them to speak and share their opinions. therefore, it becomes a challenge for the teacher to make sure that every student is able to interact and communicate in the classroom. it is known that one of the principle of intercultural language learning is social interaction (liddicoat & scarino, 2013) when the students should get involved in conversation that discuss about cultures. the students’ attitudes toward the implementation of the teaching and learning this section is more emphasized to two points that is the students‟ competence and their perspectives of the teacher related to the principles of intercultural language learning. based on the data taken from the questionnaire and interview, the students claimed that they have positive progress as well as good improvement of learning. the first, the students stated that they become more active in expressing their opinions and perspectives in a discussion or conversation. they also said that they think more critically when seeing a case or problem among cultures in the classroom. their critical thinking can be seen from activities, especially in discussions where they could work with the other students in a group. they also listened to the other opinions and gave response as well as providing solutions. as stated in data from questionnaire, 61.29% of students and 35.48% of students extremely agree that they became more active to argue and give their opinions in the class discussions. besides, as many as 48.38% and 45.16% of the students also found 71 fauzi miftakh investigating indonesian efl students’ responses of the implementation of intercultural language learning intercultural language learning to make them think more critically to see cases, or the differences among cultures. the most important thing is that they do not easily judge a problem found as a bad or good, rather they view it from the other people‟s view, so they can act and speak properly. therefore, it indicates that the students have critically seen a thing from a different point of view. it is, of course, in line with the principle of intercultural language learning (liddicoat et al, 2003; liddicoat & scarino, 2013) that the students should have critical thinking toward the differences of language and culture. regarding the students‟ active participation in the classroom, moloney and harbon (2010) also found that in intercultural language learning classroom, the students used target language in social interaction to express opinions, problem-solving, use highorder thinking. students were also actively tested and engaged their prior knowledge, that is, their existing cultural knowledge and expectations. this is in line with the data found in the questionnaire where the students claimed that they have developed to perform interactive participation as well as to be an independent person by using their existing or prior knowledge about the target culture that they discussed in every meeting. the students’ responsibility as intercultural persons this last section discusses the students‟ responsibility as intercultural persons. it means that they are assumed have followed all meetings of the courses and they have received knowledge related to the principle of intercultural language learning. this responsibility is how their attitudes and behavior toward diversity and difference are implemented not only in the classroom but also in their environment. therefore, the responsibility is also the students‟ prolonged engagement as responsible persons in their environment in the future. there are two important points that are highlighted in this section, namely the students‟ responsibility to value the other cultures and the students‟ perspective towards the diversity and difference among cultures. in general, the students claimed that they have become intercultural persons and they do not judge other cultures are worse than their own cultures. they also believed that they more appreciate the diversity and differences in their environment. they think that the diversity is a good thing as long as it gives a positive impact to people and it does not disrupt the harmony of people. as stated in data questionnaire, a total of 77.41% of students believed that they have been being intercultural persons, and 80.64% of students also believed that they can appreciate the diversity and differences in society regardless of it as something wrong. on the other hand, students‟ statements in the data interview also support that they have been responsible as intercultural persons. for example, student 1 said that “every opinion should be respected, although it may be different from mine”, and a statement from student 3 that is “after following this course i became increasingly aware that we should be able to see someone's opinion from different views. we do not become a selfish person”. in conclusion, the students‟ responses above show that the teaching and learning that they have participated have met the objective of the intercultural language learning that creates them to be intercultural persons and intercultural speakers or mediators, as mentioned by byram et al (2012), 72 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee corbett (2003) and liddicoat and scarino (2013). it will create studentswho are able to deal withcomplexity and multiple identities and to avoid the stereotyping whichis accompanied by perceiving someone through a single identity. conclusion based on the results, the conclusion can be drawn as 1) the students‟ general attitudes toward the course. the students showed a greater interest in participating in the course. they were also impressed to some activities in the classroom, including teacher‟s role in the discussion. they said that learning english and its culture was interesting, and they experienced interesting activities to find new knowledge about language and culture. however, they still have some problems in participating in the course. they admitted that they found difficulties in expressing their opinion in a discussion. it had been anticipated by the teacher by always encouraging them to speak and share their opinions. 2) the students‟ attitudes toward the implementation of teaching and learning. the students had positive progress as well as good improvement of learning. they appreciated the teacher who had given greater involvement and guidance during the teaching and learning. they also enjoyed the activities done by the teacher in the classroom. they mentioned that they became more active and critical in expressing their opinions and perspectives in a discussion or conversation to see some cases and differences among cultures. the most important thing is that they do not easily judge a problem found as a bad or good, rather they view it from the other people‟s view, so they can act and speak properly. 3) the effect of intercultural language learning to students as an intercultural person. the students claimed that they had become intercultural persons where they did not see and easily judged a cultural difference as a bad thing rather seeing it in different point of views either during the teaching and 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(2013). english as a global language phenomenon and the need of cultural conceptualizations awareness in indonesian elt. international refereed & indexed journal of english language & translation studies, 1(1), 37-49. 74 http://file.upi.edu/direktori/fpbs/jur._pend._bahasa_inggris/197308062002122rojab_siti_rodliyah/the_importance_of_incorporating_the_target_culture_in_englis.pdf http://file.upi.edu/direktori/fpbs/jur._pend._bahasa_inggris/197308062002122rojab_siti_rodliyah/the_importance_of_incorporating_the_target_culture_in_englis.pdf http://file.upi.edu/direktori/fpbs/jur._pend._bahasa_inggris/197308062002122rojab_siti_rodliyah/the_importance_of_incorporating_the_target_culture_in_englis.pdf http://file.upi.edu/direktori/fpbs/jur._pend._bahasa_inggris/197308062002122rojab_siti_rodliyah/the_importance_of_incorporating_the_target_culture_in_englis.pdf http://file.upi.edu/direktori/fpbs/jur._pend._bahasa_inggris/197308062002122rojab_siti_rodliyah/the_importance_of_incorporating_the_target_culture_in_englis.pdf http://lppmp.uny.ac.id/sites/%20lppmp.uny.ac.id/files/8sukarno%20fbs_.pdf http://lppmp.uny.ac.id/sites/%20lppmp.uny.ac.id/files/8sukarno%20fbs_.pdf http://lppmp.uny.ac.id/sites/%20lppmp.uny.ac.id/files/8sukarno%20fbs_.pdf english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 175 developing students’ reading skill through making multimodal inferences vina nurviyani department of english education, faculty of language and literature, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: vinanurviyani19@gmail.com didi suherdi department of english education, faculty of language and literature, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: suherdi_d@upi.edu iwa lukmana department of english education department, faculty of language and literature, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: iwa.di.bandung@gmail.com apa citation: nurviyani, v., suherdi, d., & lukmana, i. (2020). developing students’ reading skill through making multimodal inferences. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 175182. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2998. received: 10-03-2020 accepted: 18-04-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: this present study investigated the development of students’ reading skills through making multimodal inferences. moreover, the students’ difficulties in making multimodal inferences were explored. this study applied a classroom action research by involving twenty students studying at english education program in west java. three instruments covering reading tests of making multimodal inference, classroom observations, and questionnaire were conducted as data collections of this study. the results of this study indicate that the students’ reading skills improved significantly after making multimodal inferences. in the first cycle, sixty three percent of all students achieved the score more than seventy. meanwhile, in the second cycle, eighty five percent of all students reached the score more than eighty-seven. it is reflected on the data gained from reading tests, classroom observations, and questionnaire. the findings show that almost all students achieved meaningful progress of reading skills through making multimodal inferences that they were able to make inferences visually and verbally by using the clues of the texts and integrating it with their background knowledge, creating mental images in their minds, distinguishing between literal and implied meanings, implementing some reading strategies before, during, and after reading the text, and manifesting their inferences visually and verbally on canva application. thus, they were able to master micro and macro skills of reading comprehension and comprehend the multimodal texts completely. however, in making multimodal inference, some students got troubles in integrating visual and verbal aspects because of incomplete background knowledge in their minds. therefore, the manifestation of their multimodal inferences was presented partially. keywords: reading skills; multimodal inferences; canva. introduction reading is one of important skill in foreign language learning (yu, 2015). it is generally defined as the process of recognition and comprehension of written materials (heriyawati, saukah, & widiati, 2018). in similar vein, kasımi (2012), pearson and cervetti (2013), and alyousef (2005) argue that reading is a complex process integrating some cognitive processes, skills, text knowledge, strategic knowledge, and contexts to construct meaning from a reading material and interpret the information. in the similar vein, it is stated that the primary purpose of reading is to interpret or comprehend a text (namaziandost, fadhly, & solihat, 2019) and comprehension is the core of reading (kitson, 2011). in digital era, comprehension of english texts is inevitably. however, it is challenging activities for several efl students. the comprehension of reading is influenced by text, task, reader, and contextual variables (afflerbach, pearson, & paris, 2008; kitson, 2011). incomplete vocabulary knowledge (nurjanah, 2018; qarqez & rashid, 2017), and inability to recognize text types (al-jarrah & ismail, 2018), low reading interest, less culture background knowledge (yu, 2015), have become parts of reading difficulties vina nurviyani, didi suherdi, & iwa lukmana developing students’ reading skill through making multimodal inferences 176 in efl contexts. the reading difficulties are getting complex as reading materials are presented as an integration of various modes. it is a combination of written text with images, colour, space, sound, movements and gestures. the images cover photos, pictures, emoticons, and graphics; and cyber links connecting texts in a single display (suherdi, 2015). it is called as multimodal texts (walsh, 2015). reading materials can be monomodal or multimodal texts. the reading material conducted by students as readers can be personal or academic reading. the personal reading covers newspapers, magazines, letters, emails, greeting cards, invitations, messages, notes, lists, blogs, schedule (e.g. train, bus, plane, etc), recipes, menus, maps, calendars, advertisement (commercials, want, adv), novels, short stories, jokes, dramas, poetry, financial documents (e.g. checks, tax forms, loan application), forms, questionnaires, medical reports, immigration documents, comic strips, and cartoons (brown & abewickrama, 2010). meanwhile, academic reading covers general interest articles such as magazine, newspaper; technical reports such as lab reports, professional journal articles; reference material such as dictionary, online encyclopaedias’ textbook; thesis; essay; papers; test directions; editorial and opinion writing. either personal or academic reading material is presented in various types, forms, graphic features, topics, styles, intended readerships, lengths, readabilities or difficulties, range of vocabulary and grammatical structures (hughes, 2003). the reading difficulties effect low reading comprehension skills. in the meantime, multimodal texts become more popular in education particularly in reading materials (cahyaningati & lestari, 2018) and advanced reading skills are essential for success of students (marschall & davis, 2012). in this case, a reading skill is a cognitive ability which a person is able to use when interacting with the written texts (bojovic, 2010). in digital era, students as reader should master the micro kills and macro skills of reading comprehension to comprehend multimodal texts totally. the reading skills cover micro skills and macros kills of reading comprehension (brown & abewickrama, 2010). the micro skills of reading comprehension consist of: 1) discriminate among the distinctive grapheme (letter or letter combination the produce a phoneme) and orthographic patterns of english; 2) retain chunks of language of different lengths in short term memory; 3) process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose; 4) recognize a core of words and interpret word order patterns and their significance; 5) recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc), system (e.g. tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms; 6) recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms; and 7) recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signalling the relationship between and among clauses (brown & abewickrama, 2010; gail, 2017). meanwhile, the macro skills of reading comprehension cover: 1) recognize the rhetorical conventions of written discourse and their significance for interpretation; 2) recognize the communicative functions of written texts, according to form and purpose; 3) infer context that is not explicit by activating schemata (using background knowledge); 4) from described events, ideas, etc, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization. and exemplification; 5) distinguish between literal and implied meanings; 6) detect culturally specific inferences and interpret them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata; and 7) develop and use a battery of reading strategies, such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts (brown & abewickrama, 2010). their reading comprehension skills can be developed by implementing some reading strategies (kucukoglu, 2013). one of the reading strategies is making inference (harvey & goudvis, 2017; block & israel, 2005). making inference means readers guess the writer’s massage of the text by referring some clues presented in the texts with their own experiences (harvey & goudvis, 2007; serafini, 2004). kispal (2008) proposes some types of inferences, such as 1) coherence inferences; 2) elaborative inferences, it is also known as gapfilling inferences; 3) local inferences; 4) global inferences; 5) on-line inferences; and 6) off-line inferences. each types of inference is elaborated below. concerning coherence inference, is known as text-connecting or inter sentence inferences. it is a type of inferences that readers maintain textual english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 177 integrity. for example, in the sentence peter begged his mother to let him go to the party. in process of conducting the type of inference, the reader has to realize that the pronouns ‘his’ and ‘him’ refer to peter to fully understand the meaning. regarding elaborative inferences, it is also known as gap-filling inferences. in conducting this kind of inference, readers enrich the mental representation of the text, e.g: katy dropped the vase. she ran for the dustpan and brush to sweep up the pieces. moreover, the reader would have to draw upon life experience and general knowledge to realize that the vase broke to supply the connection between these sentences. discussing local inferences, in this session readers create a coherent representation at the local level of sentences and paragraphs. regarding global inferences, in implementing this inference, readers make a coherent representation covering the whole text. in this case, the reader needs to infer overarching ideas about the theme, main point or moral of a text by drawing on local pieces of information. concerning on-line inferences, readers draw inferences automatically during reading. in offline inferences, readers drawn inferences strategically after reading. regarding reading skills, works on the issues have been developed for many years. some authors have explored the impacts of some aspects to develop students’ reading skills. sporer, brunstein, & kieschke (2009) explored the effects of strategy instruction and reciprocal teaching to improve students’ reading skills. moreover, kucukoglu (2013) examined the improvement of student comprehension skills through instruction of reading strategies. besides, yang (2014) explored the effective methods to improving reading skills in english study. similarly, nhapulo, simon, & herreweghe (2017) investigated southern african linguistics and applied language studies enhancing academic reading skills through extensive reading. besides, ismail, syahruzah, & basuki (2017) examined the improvement of the students’ reading skill through translation method. furthermore, it is becoming increasingly influential as one of aspects should be mastered by students as readers to comprehend multimodal texts completely. cote & milliner (2014) investigated l2 micro-skills to english reading comprehension for adult community college ell students. in the similar vein, boshrabadi & biria (2014) explored the efficacy of multimodal vs. print-based texts for teaching reading comprehension skills to iranian high school third graders. moreover, cahyaningati & lestari (2018) explored the use of multimodal text in enhancing reading skills. with respect to making inference, some studies exploring the inferences have been carried out, such as the research of implementation of multimodal inferences in vehicle-driver interaction (sezgin, davies, & robinson, 2009); effects of making reading inference on selfesteem (wilson, kim, raudenbush, & kim, 2017), implementation of inference strategy (jumiaty, 2014; attaprechakul, 2013; rieskamp, 2008); and effectiveness of teaching making inferences in reading (kispal, 2008). referring to the studies, the study investigating the development of students’ reading skills through reading strategies, especially multimodal inference strategy is still rare. in this case, making multimodal inference means the readers predict writer’s intention of text by referring to some text clues, before, during and after reading process by integrating some modes such as visual, verbal, spatial, and gesture, presented digitally or non-digitally. in line with the background above, this research attempts to address the following questions: 1) how is the effectiveness of making multimodal inferences in developing students’ reading skills? and 2) what are students’ difficulties of making multimodal inferences in developing students’ reading skills? method this study implemented classroom action research consisting two cycles and conducted in a class of reading. the classroom action research was implemented to improve students’ reading skills in making multimodal inferences and to explore students’ difficulties in making multimodal inferences. each cycle covered four stages namely a) plan, b) act, c) observe, and d) reflect as proposed by costello (2007). each stage is explained in detail below. the first stage, plan, is finding a problem of reading by carrying out a preliminary investigation of students’ reading skills, then forming a hypothesis and taking a number of strategies for conducting the next stage, actions. the second stage, act, is conducting teachinglearning processes to improve students’ achievement of reading skills. in this stage, the students got some guidance to foster their reading skills by making multimodal inference. the third vina nurviyani, didi suherdi, & iwa lukmana developing students’ reading skill through making multimodal inferences 178 stage is observing the teaching –learning processes of implementing multimodal inferences to improve students’ reading skills, whether the instruments run well or need some revisions. the last stage is reviewing, evaluating and comparing the results concerning the improvement of students’ reading skills by making multimodal inferences, and planning the next cycle. when the findings of the first cycle show insignificant results, the next cycle had to carry out (see costello, 2003; nunan, 2002). in conducting classroom action research, some data collections techniques covering reading tests of making multimodal inferences, classroom observations, and questionnaire were applied. all instruments were implemented to investigate the development of students’ reading comprehension skills through making multimodal inferences and to find out their difficulties in composing the multimodal inferences. in collecting each data, the participants were twenty students studying at english department program of a private university in west java, indonesia. thus, in this study each student played three roles. concerning reading tests, brown & abewickrama (2010) explain that one of interactive reading assessments is information transfer conducted by reading charts, maps, graphs, diagrams. the graphic features include: tables, charts, diagrams, cartoons, illustrations (hughes, 2003). in this case, information transfer is an act of comprehending graphs from reading verbal and or non-verbal information. furthermore, brown & abewickrama (2010) recommend some tasks for assessing the interpretation of graphic information, namely: a) reading a graphic by answering simple, direct information questions; b) reading a graphic by describing or elaborating information; c) reading a graphic by inferring or predicting information; d) reading a passage by choosing the correct graphic for it; e) reading a passage with an accompanying graphic by interpreting both; f) reading a passage by creating or using a graphic to illustrate. in line to the description, nation (2009) categories the task types of post-reading comprehension into four levels, namely: a) literal comprehension, in this level students have to answer some questions after reading section to measure their understanding concerning what the text explicitly says; b) drawing inference, this type of task is conducted to examine students’ reading comprehension skills in implementing reading between the line, using text information that is not explicitly stated but which can be justified by reference to the text; c) using the text for other purpose, this level of task is implemented to explore students’ reading comprehension skills in applying information in the text to some problems, reflecting on personal experiences, comparing with ideas from other sources, and extending information beyond the text; d) responding critically, in conducting this type of task, students’ reading comprehension skills are examined by evaluating adequacy of content, quality of evidence, author bias, quality of expression, agreement or disagreement with ideas in the text, and satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the text. referring to the theory, the reading tests of this study were reading a graphic text by inferring or predicting information of texts (see brown & abewickrama, 2010). the tests were conducted as post-reading comprehension tasks (see nation, 2009). in this case, the students read between the line of report texts presented as a multimodal text. then they used the text information that was not explicitly stated but which could be justified by reference to the text. finally, the manifestation of their multimodal inferences was presented visually and verbally in canva application. concerning a report text, it is one of text types containing a fact of a subject, a description and information on its parts, behavior, and qualities (anderson & anderson, 2003b, 2003b; feez and joyce, 1998; cited in nurviyani, 2012). meanwhile, canva is a tool making possible designs of anything and publish anywhere. it is operated in smartphone and desktop. over 400 million designs from more than 10 million users across 179 countries have been created with canva. moreover, canva is available in 100 languages and can be accessed in desktop browsers and mobile apps. it makes canva accessible to everyone with internet connection. in addition, by implementing canva, a creative beautiful designs and documents are created for any occasions and purposes (canva, 2019). in this study, canva is one of digital applications applied as a digital instructional media in making multimodal inferences. in this research, the reading tests were conducted twice and presented on canva application by using similar material, concerning report text but in different theme for the first and the second cycle. the reading tests were posed to students at the end of the third stage of each english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 179 cycle. the tests of making multimodal inferences were held for ninety minutes for each test. concerning observations, it was conducted for five meetings, namely three meetings for the first cycle and two meetings for the second one. in these sessions, the researcher positioned herself as the lecturer who immediately saw and heard what was happening as recommended by nunan (2002). it means that in this study the researcher observed what was going on during the teaching-learning process of making multimodal inferences by applying the canva application to develop students’ reading comprehension skills. moreover, the researcher also interacted with participants during the teaching-learning process of making multimodal inferences. regarding questionnaire, this study employed open-ended questionnaires. the students got the questionnaire at the end of the second cycle. in this session, the students as the research participants had to fill the blank space to answer ten questions in detail because there are no options in each question. the questions of the questionnaire explored the students’ reading comprehension skills through making multimodal inferences and the students’ difficulties in making multimodal inference (see dornyei, 2007). in this case, the data gained from the questionnaire were applied to explore the verbal and non verbal information presented in graphic features, concerning reading skills developed through making multimodal inference, and students’ difficulties in composing the inferences. the questionnaires were presented in indonesian to make the students free in expressing their ideas and comprehend the questions more easily. furthermore, the data gained from the questionnaire, reading tests, and classroom observations, were analysed qualitatively, categorized, and then interpreted into two categories based on the research questions. results and discussion this study applying classroom action research investigated the development of students’ reading skill through making multimodal inferences. moreover, the students’ difficulties in making multimodal inferences were examined. the data collection techniques implemented for both research purposes were reading tests, questionnaire, and classroom observations conducted in two cycles. in the first cycle, the classroom action research was begun by conducting the first stage of classroom action research, it is plan. the plans covered the stating the problem and conducting preliminary investigation of students’ reading skills. the problem was many college students have trouble in comprehending multimodal texts particularly in making inferences, either personal reading or academic reading. moreover, the lesson plans were designed for the first cycle, then all documents and some devices needed for teaching making multimodal inferences such as smart phones and canva application were prepared. next, the students were recognized to canva application as the digital tool for making multimodal inference. then they installed the canva application in their smartphones or laptop and learnt how to operate the application for presenting something. afterword, they practiced making something on canva application in pairs. next stage, action and observation. in these stages, the students learnt making multimodal inferences through three steps namely prereading, while reading and post-reading (see marschall & davis, 2012). in the step of prereading or before reading, the students identified the purpose and type of reading. this study focused on report texts presented in an online newspaper. in while reading session, the students explored the social function, the grammatical structure, and linguistics features of report texts. besides, the students explored topic sentences and supporting sentences related to the topics of the texts. next, the students as the readers learnt making inferences as one of reading strategies and the types of making inferences as recommended by kispal (2008) as well, such as 1) coherence inferences; 2) elaborative inferences, it is also known as gap-filling inferences; 3) local inferences; 4) global inferences; 5) on-line inferences; and 6) off-line inferences. before learning making inferences at the session, the students had learnt other reading strategies such as making connection, visualizing, summarising, and synthesizing in the previous meetings (see harvey & goudvis, 2007). then, the students got some models of making multimodal inferences. next, the students made continuous prediction about the content of the report texts and what would happen next in the texts. in post-reading session, the students practiced making multimodal inferences verbally and visually by creating some pictures on their minds. it was as the results of integration between the students’ background knowledges with some vina nurviyani, didi suherdi, & iwa lukmana developing students’ reading skill through making multimodal inferences 180 visual and verbal information as clues presented on the report texts they had read. their manifestations of the multimodal inferences were presented on canva application. next, the students and the lecturer shared and discussed it together. the last, the students got reading test of making multimodal inferences individually. the test was conducted to evaluate and measure the students’ reading comprehension skills through making multimodal inferences and students’ difficulties in making multimodal inferences in the first cycle. in the test, the students had to make inferences verbally and visually based on the clues of a report text derived from an online newspaper. then their manifestations of multimodal inferences were presented on canva application as the previous session. the last stage was reflection. it was carried out to review, evaluate and compare the results and the plan of the first cycle. this stage was conducted after all data gained from reading test and classroom observations were collected completely. it was conducted to evaluate the students’ reading comprehension skills through making multimodal inferences and the students’ difficulties in making the multimodal inferences. referring to the data obtained from the reading test and the classroom observations of the first cycle, it was found that the learning outcome of making multimodal inferences for developing students’ reading comprehension skills had not been achieved significantly. the results of the reading test show that only sixty three percent of all students achieved score of more than seventy. it means that some students were able to make verbal and visual inferences on canva application and comprehend the report texts completely. meanwhile the other ones got confused in making multimodal inferences, such as some students got troubles in making visual and verbal inferences in their minds and on canva application, and had difficulties to integrate the information of the texts with their background knowledge in making inferences. it can be seen from incomplete verbal inferences and irrelevant images inserted to verbal inferences on canva application. therefore, they comprehended the report text partially. due to the students’ reading skill through making multimodal inferences had not shown meaningful progress, the second cycle of the classroom action research was conducted. the second cycle of the classroom action research was implemented similarly as the first one. it consisted of four stages, namely plan, act, observe and reflect (see costello, 2003; nunan, 2002). in the second cycle, the classroom action research was begun by implementing a plan as the first stage of classroom action research. in the stage, the problems based on the achievement of students’ reading comprehension skills through making multimodal inferences in the first cycle were stated. referring to the reflection stage of the first cycle, the results show insignificant. thus, there should be some improvements and revisions to be applied in the second cycle. the next stages were action and observation. in this stage, the teaching methodology was designed differently and remedial teachinglearning process of making multimodal inferences was conducted to improve students’ reading comprehension skills. the material of this cycle was similar to the previous one. it was report text derived from an online newspaper. besides, the students got more practices integrating verbal and visual aspects of the texts and creating mental images in their minds in making multimodal inferences. moreover, they got remedial reading test of making multimodal inferences presented on canva application. having getting the reading test, the students got questionnaire investigating their improvement of reading comprehension skills through making multimodal inferences and their difficulties in making the inferences. referring to the results of reflection as the last stage of the second cycle of the classroom action research, the findings gained from the reading test show that the students’ reading comprehension skills improved meaningfully. it can be seen from the students’ scores of reading test that eighty five percent of all students achieved the score more than eighty-seven. it showed the significant difference, compared with the first cycle. moreover, the results gained from classroom observations and questionnaire showed that the students were able to apply micro skills and macro skills of reading comprehension before, during and after reading report text, such as inferring context that is not explicit visually and verbally by activating their background knowledge, distinguishing between literal and implied meanings, and implementing some reading strategies before, during, and after reading the text. thus, they were able to comprehend the report texts completely and make visual and verbal inferences in their minds english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 181 and their manifestations were presented on canva application totally. it means that almost all students achieved meaningful progress of reading skills through making multimodal inferences. therefore, the difficulties encountered by students in making inferences through canva application had been overcome totally. conclusion by drawing on the data analysis, the findings show that making multimodal inferences is an effective stretegy to improve students’ reading comprehension skills. their reading skills develop significantly, either micro skills or macro skills of reading comprehension. the development of students’ micro reading comprehension skills are indicated as students as readers recognize grammatical word classes, word system, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms; recognize particular meaning expressed in different grammatical forms. it is relevant to the statement proposed by brown and abewickrama (2010) and gail (2017). regarding students’ macro reading comprehension skills, the findings show that they recognize the purpose of the text; infer explicit context by connecting with their background knowledge; describe events, and ideas; infer links and connecte between events; deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization and exemplification; distinguish between literal and implied meanings; detect culturally specific inferences and interpret them in a certain social cultural context. moreover, they use some reading strategies, such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context, and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts. it it is relevant to the statement proposed by brown and abewickrama (2010). referring to the statement, it can be assumed that making multimodal inferences is an assimilation and integration processes of some reading strategies such as the integration between readers’ background knowledge with the information of the texts, visualization, summarizing, scanning, skimming, and making inference. in this case, visualization strengthens inferential thinking. it is relevant to the statement of harvey & goudvis (2017). by creating multimodal inferring, students are able to draw 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(2017). the effects of making reading inferences on mastery goals, self-esteem and the effects of making reading inferences on mastery goals, self-esteem and toeic reading comprehension. north american journal of psychology, 19(1), 41–50. woolley, g. (2010). developing reading comprehension: combining visual and verbal cognitive processes. australian journal of language & literacy, 33(2), 108–125. yang, z. (2014). effective methods to improving reading skills in english study. international conference on education, language, art and intercultural communication (icelaic), 284– 286. atlantis press. yu, j. (2015). analysis of critical reading strategies and its effect on college english reading. academy publication, 5(1), 134–138. doi: 10.17507/tpls.0501.18. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee second language acquisition and linguistic freedom through drama peter e. r. jordan department of english, city university of hong kong e-mail: pejordan@cityu.edu.hk apa citation: jordan, p. e. r. (2015). second language acquisition and linguistic freedom through drama. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 15-24 received: 05-03-2015 accepted: 08-10-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: the important part played by drama in second language acquisition has long been appreciated. an active and inter-active teaching environment facilitates learning in a number of ways, by motivating and sustaining attention, as well as offering a secure environment for experimentation. drama offers students a pro-active approach to learning, promoting a collective feeling of being in a shared enterprise. this paper discusses how drama can make a significant contribution to second language acquisition. in particular, i focus on the techniques of the italian commedia dell’arte, the first truly professional theatre form to emerge in europe in the mid-sixteenth century. its core elements of improvisation and mask are highly effective tools in language learning, empowering students and allowing them to take ownership of the unfamiliar. improvisation provides a dramatically engaging forum for experimentation that can help to overcome cognitive blocks and prioritise communication as the ultimate imperative. masks which leave the mouth free for speech can help students overcome the natural inhibitions that often come with attempts to express oneself in an unfamiliar linguistic code. keywords: language acquisition, drama, improvisation, mask introduction the important part played by drama in second language acquisition has long been appreciated. there is no doubt that an active and inter-active teaching context facilitates learning in a number of ways, but principally by motivating students, sustaining their attention and stimulating discourse. drama offers just such a pro-active approach to learning, promoting a collective feeling of being in a shared enterprise and offering a secure environment for experimentation and role play. this is a crucial element as language is primarily a tool of communication with others. also, the role of enjoyment should not be underestimated. students who are fully engaged and taking pleasure in participating in a drama exercise will find they have all the natural resources of concentration and imagination at their disposal. furthermore, the deployment of language combined with physical action harnesses visual memory and the body‟s natural muscle memory in the process of spontaneous recall. this is well understood in the theatre. professional actors will often not be able to make sense of and secure their spoken text until it has been firmly linked to their actions and those of others in the play. the emotional component of language is best explored in drama, which depends on a sense of „inner truth‟ 15 peter e. r. jordan second language acquisition and linguistic freedom through drama in order to induce „the willing suspension of disbelief‟ in any given audience. „truth‟ in the dramatic sense equates with emotional truth, not literal truth. one does not have to kill people or urge others to kill in order to understand the jealousy of othello or the ambition of lady macbeth. one does not have to kill oneself in order to appreciate and give voice to the intense all-consuming love between juliet and romeo. this paper is the product of my more than thirty years‟ experience as both a theatre professional and a teacher, during which time i have come to understand that the skills associated with drama are inherently transferrable to language acquisition. having frequently acted in foreign languages (italian, german, swedish, french and cantonese), i have learned, at first hand, how the performance process can enhance linguistic skills in many ways. this is true of all theatre genres, but in particular i argue that the many techniques and traditions of the so-called commedia dell’arte provide the most comprehensive tool-set for facilitating second language acquisition. my long association with performing, directing and teaching the specific skills of this urgenre of western drama has prompted deep reflection about its applicability to the complex process of second language acquisition. drama training the first systematiser of the acting process as understood in the european canon that originated with the ancient greek theatre, roughly 2500 years ago, was the russian actor and director, konstantin stanislavsky at the turn of the twentieth century. he proposed that actors should draw on their „emotional memory‟ in order to portray characters with a verisimilitude, known colloquially as „realism‟. any given individual has a repository of past experiences, and a memory of the emotions generated by those experiences. according to stanislavsky and his later interpreters, actors can draw on this reservoir of past experience in order to infuse their character‟s speech with emotional authenticity. thus dramatic interpretation can assist in the delivery of speech with all the natural emphasis, intonation and cadence of everyday locution. for a detailed overview of stanislavsky‟s theories and those of his later interpreters, a good starting point is jean benedetti‟s the art of the actor: the essential history of acting, from classical times to the present day. actor training also involves intense voice coaching that includes the technical aspects of voice production: diction, articulation and projection. a strong grounding in phonetics enables the student of acting, as much as the student of language, to master unfamiliar sounds and combinations of sounds through rigorous drilling and regular practice to train the vocal instrument (tongue, teeth, lips and vocal folds). actors are often required to study a range of accents, both regional and national. with the help of a qualified accent coach, unfamiliar rules of pronunciation can be learned and reproduced with confidence and fluency. opera singers routinely receive such training in order to be able to sing naturally and easily in various languages, despite not necessarily being conversant in the language. the process is almost identical to that of students of second languages, who have to learn an unfamiliar pronunciation and accent, in order to express themselves intelligibly and with authenticity. whilst the audio-lingual method of language teaching, inspired by 16 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee behaviourist psychological theories, has been much criticised, it continues to be applied successfully in schools, such as the shenker institutes, based in italy. the method involves intensive drilling in the accurate reproduction of english pronunciation, breaking the sound of the language down into its component phonemes, even before the student understands the words being uttered. the rationale behind this approach is that speech in a second language can never be fully achieved if the sounds made are so distorted that the listener is unable to understand what is being said (brown, 2000). this process is underscored by the former leading voice coach for the united kingdom‟s national theatre and the royal shakespeare company: the process we call speech is simply one of physically breaking up the voice into identifiable units called words. this process is done in the mouth with the lips, jaw, tongue, soft palate and facial muscles. it is very precise physical work and speech is one of the most balanced and complex muscular exercises the body performs (rodenburg, 1998, p. 104). understanding the physical and muscular nature of speech can then help the actor (and student) to appreciate the inherent communicative qualities of the sounds produced. thus, learning to work with consonants and vowels teaches you about the physical properties of words and how your articulation of them brings verbal strength… a common postulate you can make is: consonants = clarity of thought; vowels = emotion. pause, pace and intention are all embedded in the word. remember that language is only partly intellectual. speaking words clearly opens many more doors to the world of the mind, heart and soul (p. 106). obviously, the speaker must also understand what he or she is saying and must also understand the other person‟s reply. however, reaching a full and nuanced understanding of pronunciation and inflexion will greatly enhance comprehension. the truth of this has been confirmed to me indirectly on numerous occasions, when i have slipped into speaking english with a local accent, making the typical pronunciation mistakes made by the people i am talking to at the time, be they italian or chinese. invariably, i have found that my interlocutor will compliment me on the „clarity‟ of my english! commedia dell’arte the above italian phrase literally means „comedy/theatre of the profession‟ or „professional theatre‟. it was originally coined by the eighteenthcentury playwright, carlo goldoni, as a rather dismissive term for the most popular form of theatre at that time. this genre of masked theatre originated in the mid-sixteenth century and is generally considered to be the first manifestation of a truly professional theatre, at least in europe. prior to its emergence, drama was performed exclusively by amateurs, either for their own private pleasure, or as part of religious ritual in celebration of specific festivals or, in the christian era, to portray biblical events to a largely illiterate public. as a result of collaboration between educated members of the italian elite and lowly entertainers, a distinct form evolved that became fantastically popular and famed throughout europe at all levels of society. william shakespeare and his contemporaries 17 peter e. r. jordan second language acquisition and linguistic freedom through drama during the „golden age‟ of elizabethan drama in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were aware of the early italian professionals and it is very likely that they took inspiration from them to create drama that had a truly mass appeal. the transition from amateur to fully professional drama involved a fundamental shift of focus. the priority of these actors was to induce spectators not only to watch and enjoy their performances, but also to pay for the privilege. without income, they could not eat, and thus drama became predicated on communication over and above aesthetic or religious concerns. typically, actors formed themselves into companies, who then travelled extensively from town to town in search of new audiences. the luckiest of these professional troupes received patronage from the nobility and from royalty, but the vast majority of acting companies depended on a peripatetic life, passing from one jurisdiction to another ever in quest of new sources of income. in the process of providing popular entertainment, they often took risks with their use of language. ribald wordplay, frequently including scatological references, was an immensely popular form of wit that amused the masses, but angered some of those in authority. the catholic church was especially critical of the early professional actors, not only because of the frequent use of vulgar language, but also because the actors were so popular that they were drawing the punters away from their religious devotions. in a sense, they were stealing the church‟s audience; such was the enthusiasm they generated among their audiences, by speaking the everyday language of the common people. incidentally, it is worth noting that the word, „vulgar‟, comes from the italian „volgare‟, which originally signified „vernacular‟, rather than the more pejorative sense that it has in english. at that time, all religious rituals were conducted in latin, which was also the language of scholarship and diplomacy, whereas vernacular speech was the language of the people, the language of everyday interactions and conversations. the commedia dell’arte was famed in particular for its improvised dialogue and masked stock characters, which conformed to three basic types: masters, servants and lovers. of the masters, pantalone is the most wellknown, just as harlequin is the most famous of the servants. typically, the young lovers would be the children of pantalone and other master characters. this simple three-way categorisation of roles has echoes in the dramatic traditions of china, bali, japan and elsewhere. the use of masks also harks back to ancient forms of theatre to be found throughout asia. the masks of the commedia dell’arte were moulded in leather to fit comfortably on different facial contours. they were always „halfmasks‟, that is, the mouth was not covered, so that the actor could speak freely. unlike more stylised forms of drama, the masks of the commedia dell’arte were particularly verbose. dialogue was either improvised or delivered as monologues and duologues, often in forms of rhyming verse. the available evidence from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, indicates that venice, a polyglot melting pot of nationalities, was crucial to the development of the professional theatre. in a sense, the republic was a microcosm of the multilingual, or at least multidialectal, composition of the italian peninsula at that time. multilingualism and contemporaneity were undoubtedly 18 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee at the forefront of the development of secular theatre in the early modern era, when multi-tasking actors had to forge a recognisable and socially acceptable profession which was both a valid art form and remunerative. it is precisely this linguistic diversity coupled also with mask work, physicality and reality-based comedy that lends the commedia dell’arte to language acquisition through drama. in spite of the obvious artifice of masks and stylisation, the characters of the commedia dell’arte were drawn from elements of real contemporary types. many of them were associated with specific professions and specific cities and regions of italy, and often expressed themselves in the local dialect. pantalone was a rich old venetian merchant, whilst harlequin was depicted as an impoverished porter from the border town of bergamo. other characters included: the doctor, a pedantic academic from bologna, home of the oldest university in europe; the captain, a flamboyant, marauding spanish mercenary; and pulcinella, a slow-witted but often devious and belligerent citizen of naples. the lovers typically expressed themselves in the tuscan dialect of florence, the language of dante, which ultimately became the official language of italy after the country‟s unification in 1871. the ability to adapt to a variety of spaces and conditions, coupled with the need to communicate to a wide range of audience tastes, would have involved considerable forward planning that prioritised the technical demands of presentation, and a profound understanding of the differing perspectives of all the people that made up the complex social fabric of a culturally diverse cosmopolitan city, such as venice. small wonder then, that the professionals were subsequently able effortlessly to ply their trade throughout polyglot europe and to communicate to people of different nationalities and cultures. i shall now discuss in more detail the component elements of the commedia dell’arte – some of which have been mentioned briefly above – and the ways in which they can enhance second language acquisition. improvisation the use of improvisation and game playing stimulates spontaneity and the creative application of speech, with the added benefit of allowing the learner to take ownership of personal dialogue, even before grammar, syntax and vocabulary have been completely mastered. moreover, the natural interactive flow of dialogue can be more easily reproduced in playing a role than in the dry call and response of a mechanical classroom exercise. in particular, classroom drama is most useful in exploring topics when there are no single, correct answers or interpretations, and when divergence is more interesting than conformity and truth is interpretable (dervishaj, 2009, p. 55). giving students the opportunity and permission to mediate reality through their own observations and experience will enhance their ability to manipulate the linguistic tools at their disposal. simple rote learning certainly has an important part to play in the process, particularly in mastering unfamiliar cadence, intonation and stress. this is perhaps especially so for learners of english whose first language is not part of the indo-european family. mothertongue speakers of tonal languages, such 19 peter e. r. jordan second language acquisition and linguistic freedom through drama as chinese, vietnamese and thai are more likely than most to encounter difficulty in grasping the nuances of intonation, as used in english, where the slightest change of inflection can indicate a range of attitudinal positions. for example, the infusion of irony, scepticism or dismay into a commonplace phrase may hinge on the slightest of pauses, a barely perceptible rising tone, or a gentle stress on an operative word. repetition of routine phrases in a dramatic setting can often help to elucidate and tease out these subtleties and sensitise the ear of the learner. on the other hand, more freeform script-less acting exercises will enhance and encourage a greater degree of flexibility that allows for the natural improvisation of informal conversation. in a drama context, since the publication of keith johnstone‟s seminal impro, such improvisation is nowadays almost universally considered to be essential to the building of a character, or role. extemporisation instils the sink-or-swim imperative to take the discourse forward in a meaningful way. a mutual commitment to maintaining the natural momentum of a conversation is essential in generating active complicity between interlocutors. actors are taught to nurture this sense of „give-and-take‟ as a discipline and a responsibility, without which communication breaks down. it is important to emphasise that failure, inaccuracy and even occasional incoherence are all permissible as part of the learning process. similar to sherlock holmes‟ dictum „when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth‟, actors often have to go through a sometimes painful journey of experiment and exploration before finally making sense of their roles, understanding their relationships to others and to the play as a whole. however, once this exhaustive exercise is complete, the performer will usually enjoy a feeling of assurance, a feeling that is mirrored by the language student in the throes of decoding the alien rhythms, phonemes and sentence structure of a second language. the experience, for both actor and student, can certainly be fatiguing, at times dispiriting, but with persistence even those who initially display little natural flair can begin to express themselves with confidence, if not aplomb. furthermore, improvisation naturally reproduces the spontaneity of real language with all its non-sequiturs, pauses, bridging words and phrases (e.g. „well‟, „actually‟, „you know‟), and sounds (e.g. „um‟, „er‟, „hmm‟). the actors of the commedia dell’arte frequently used a form of nonsense language known as „grammelot‟, which can perhaps best be characterised as a vocal stream of emotionally meaningful, onomatopoeic but lexically dubious chatter. nobel laureate dario fo, who has named the commedia dell’arte as one of his principal literary and performative influences, has deployed grammelot to great effect, particularly in his comic monologues. english is peculiarly rich with examples of onomatopoeia. imitative vocalisations such as „sizzle‟, „hiss‟, „bump‟, „bang‟, „crash‟, „smash‟ and „hiccup‟ have all now been graced with entries in the major dictionaries, having first entered the language as imitative sounds. similarly, english has a long history of permitting the entry of neologisms into the language, from shakespeare to lewis carroll and beyond to the contributions from other cultures. in addition to the ancient languages of greek and latin, modern english has also acquired, and continues 20 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to acquire, much vocabulary from more distant linguistic sources around the world (e.g. arabic, hindi, chinese, japanese). it is important to emphasise this fact to students, in order to encourage them to „take ownership‟ of a truly global language, which is in reality a hybrid of many original languages, including norse, danish, french and german. one has only to look at its idiosyncratic spelling to appreciate this fact. mask the commedia dell’arte half-mask has two principal uses: to conceal and to transform identity. it also serves to amplify facial characteristics in order that these can be recognised from a distance. the act of concealing and thus transforming identity can often be of great benefit to language students, particularly those who are shy and reserved, either for personal or for cultural reasons. this is particularly the case in an asian context where frightened of losing face, any students from the confucian-heritage cultures (chc) dare not volunteer personal ideas, either for fear of being considered silly or for fear of making others feel humiliated … allowing a person to save face is more important than telling the truth (nguyen, terlouw and pilot, 2006, p. 7) . masks can confer the freedom to transgress cultural norms and pressures. by literally „losing face‟ – concealing it under a mask – many students experience a feeling of empowerment, a sudden freeing from self-consciousness and a lack of confidence. in the process, they can discover a fluency and articulacy that eluded them previously. i have often encountered students who were painfully inhibited in their speech for various reasons, perhaps because they perceived their english to be less proficient than their classmates, or because they were embarrassed to utter a sentence without being absolutely certain that what they were saying was grammatically correct. yet, once such students don a mask covering the face and, to a certain extent, the identity, they are frequently liberated from their selfconscious and self-imposed restraints. the mask confers permission to speak in any way you like, without concern for accuracy. obviously, the ultimate goal of language teaching is precision and fluency, but exercises with masks can help some students to overcome their inhibitions and learn to express themselves meaningfully and with emotional authenticity. in this way, the imperative to communicate can be instilled and they can make english „belong‟ to them as it already does to so many others around the world. indeed, it is only with this flexibility that english can keep its place as a global language. in the anglophone world, there is no equivalent of the french académie française, which oversees the use of the language in order to preserve its supposed purity. only recently has the académie relented on its ban of borrowings from english, such as, „le week-end‟. in the english-speaking world, there is no such institution to decree what we can or cannot say. it therefore follows that we can say anything, as long as successful communication is achieved in the process. this fact, once fully understood in all its implications, should be deeply empowering for all students of the language. 21 peter e. r. jordan second language acquisition and linguistic freedom through drama realism in addition to the core elements of the commedia dell’arte: improvisation and mask, there are several other key components that are worth discussing briefly. despite the artifice, stylisation and simplification that is evident in the commedia dell‟arte, the characters and narrative situations are grounded in reality. obviously, the reality of asia today will differ from that in sixteenthcentury italy, but essential relationships of power, status and affection are recognisable the world over and throughout time. the realities of making one‟s way in the world, negotiating one‟s position in the social hierarchy, attempting to fulfil desires and to strive for contentment have not changed much over the millennia, even while the external contours of civilisation have been in a ceaseless state of flux. physicality as already mentioned, from the outset, the commedia dell’arte practised multilingualism. pantalone would express himself in the venetian dialect; the doctor in bolognese; the servants in bergamese; pulcinella in the neapolitan vernacular; and the lovers in the tuscan dialect. the latter became the official italian language in 1871, just as putonghua was formally adopted as the official chinese national language in 1932, or bahasa indonesia was declared indonesia‟s official language in 1945. nevertheless, the people of all three countries continue to use their local dialects. as a result of this historical situation, the commedia dell’arte has a strongly mimetic element that both traverses language barriers, and underlines, complements and facilitates speech and communication. the use of gesture to underpin spoken language differs from culture to culture. with the mélange of italian patois to be found, even to this day, the actors of the commedia dell’arte necessarily placed greater emphasis on other methods of communication, in particular through costume, movement and gesture. present-day italians are justly famed for their vigorous language of gesture that often convey very specific meanings (e.g. „i„m hungry‟, „that tastes good‟, „i don‟t care‟, „watch out!‟, „let‟s get out of here‟, „nothing‟, „boring!‟, „what are you talking about?‟, „money‟, „you‟re scared‟, „i‟m not sure if you get my meaning‟ etc.). conversely, the british or chinese are typically less physically effusive, yet they too will underpin the meanings conveyed in speech with occasional gestures and other forms of body language. gesture can provide attitudinal nuance and amplification to verbal speech, and aids memorisation. the use of gesture, freed up by the disguise of the mask, can not only enhance speech, but also help to relax the speaker. nervousness and fear paralyse the mind. all actors have to overcome the fear of performance. similarly, language learners are in a very real sense performing a role, when they attempt to speak in the language of an alien culture, and fear is a natural product of that attempt. so it follows that anything which relaxes will free up the mind and facilitate recall. audience interaction the modern theatrical notion of a „fourth wall‟ – the pretence that the actors are unaware of the audience and are speaking as if they were alone on the stage – was unknown in the theatre of the commedia dell’arte, just as it is in many traditional asian theatre forms. the actors were thus free to talk to and 22 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to interact directly with the audience. also, by demolishing „the fourth wall‟, actors have the twin possibility of being part of the action or stepping out and commenting on it. this is rather akin to the workings of process drama, sometimes used in language learning. the actor both lives in the moment of the scene, interacting with emotional commitment, or he/she may narrate diegetically, ever aware that the audience can answer back at some point. this is not unlike the linguistic and presentational skills required of the public speaker who may also have to deal with the interventions of hecklers. thus, even speeches learned by rote can acquire a spontaneity and flexibility that exercises the speaker and gives him or her greater mastery of language and its application. ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture the literature of the commedia dell’arte is an eclectic mix of literary sophistication and ribald speech. it celebrates both popular and elite culture. the irreverence that is everywhere apparent in this material, provides a broad palette of permissible behaviours and locutions. it is certainly true that “literary texts are often rich in multiple levels of meaning, and demand that the reader/ learner is actively „teasing out‟ the unstated implications and assumptions of the text” (lazar, 1993, p. 19). however, language arts should also be a means to achieving greater fluency in everyday speech and the mundanities of many everyday interactions. music and song in keeping with its determination to entertain and delight as many people as possible, the plays of the commedia dell’arte contain many moments of song and dance. song, in particular, is an extremely useful means for learning language, at least key phrases thereof. through melodic connections, rhymes, rhythms and repetition, large tranches of text can be absorbed, retained and regurgitated at will. this is true of rhyming, metered verse in general, but song adds a further musical mnemonic element. comedy the early professional actors were driven by a need to attract and to hold the attention of a paying audience. originally, they performed in a variety of genres, even tragedy, but most popular by far was comedy with its power to evoke the pleasurable effects of laughter, which is not only enjoyed by the individual, but also as a collective act. thus, in time, the commedia dell’arte became associated exclusively with comedy. common intuition, supported by many sociological and psychological studies, has confirmed the positive, healthful and pleasurable effects of humour and laughter. a comic event, such as a particularly amusing role-play or improvisation, is not only intellectually stimulating, it will also lodge more easily in the memory along with details of the actions and speech used. conclusion a multi-modal approach – as can be found in the techniques and practices of the commedia dell’arte – undoubtedly facilitates and enriches the learning experience, increasing our ability to recall, adapt and interact in a wide range of contexts. whilst drama, in all its forms, can certainly enhance and facilitate language teaching in the ways outlined above, a word of caution should be sounded. many students will enjoy role-play, improvisation, singing and 23 peter e. r. jordan second language acquisition and linguistic freedom through drama movement, but there is nevertheless no guarantee that language will be acquired and consolidated in the process. all that can be said for sure is that the many tools encompassed by the rubric „drama‟ are just that: tools. their effective use is still subject to the expert application and guidance of the teacher, who will preferably also have a solid and complementary grounding in drama. when efficaciously deployed, drama can bring profound and lasting benefits in the acquisition, retention and expression of a second, and even third or fourth, language. drama is, in a very real sense, a „language art‟. in the words of a respected hong kong educator, commentator and theatre practitioner: engaging in the activities of language arts helps enhance the motivation of learning english, both within and outside the classroom. if students find the activities rewarding and they are learning the language at the same time, they will be willing to spend more time on them. … thus with language arts activities, many more conditions for interesting and creative language learning and use can be created (mok, 2001, p. 6). the creativity and inspirational qualities of the teacher in facilitating this process is paramount. references benedetti, j. (2005). the art of the actor: the essential history of acting, from classical times to the present day. london: methuen. brown, h. d. (2000). principles of language learning and teaching (4th ed.) new york, ny: longman. dervishaj, a. (2009). using drama as a creative method for foreign language acquisition. linguistic and communicative performance, 2(1), 53-62. johnstone, k. (2012). impro: improvisation and the theatre. london: routledge. lazar, g. (1993). literature and language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. mok, a. (2001). task-based learning, language arts and the media: a resource book for secondary english teachers. hong kong: university of hong kong. nguyen, p. m., terlouw, c. & pilot, a. (2006). culturally appropriate pedagogy: the case of group learning in a confucian heritage culture context. international education, 17 (1), 1-19. rodenberg, p. (1998). the actor speaks: voice and the performer. london: methuen. 24 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee utilizing peer and teacher feedback in academic writing class taufiqulloh department of english education, pancasakti university tegal e-mail: taufiqkayla@gmail.com yuvita department of english education, pancasakti university tegal e-mail: yuvieta@rocketmail.com imam yuliarto department of english education, pancasakti university tegal e-mail: imamyuli@yahoo.com apa citation: taufiqulloh, yuvita, & yuliarto, i. (2016). utilizing peer and teacher feedback in academic writing class. english review, 4(2), 161-170 received: 10-02-2016 accepted: 13-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: a process approach is usually employed in the classroom instruction of academic writing, particulary essay writing, in the indonesian colleges or universities. this study investigates the role of teacher and peer feedback inserted in the steps of writing process on students’ writing achievement. it is an experimental research conducted at the english education department of pancasakti university tegal central java indonesia, in the seven semester of the academic year 2015/2016. the participants of this study are 40 students who attended essay writing class. the instrument is essay writing test which was administered before and after treatment to both experimental and control group. by using paired-sample t-test and f-test, it was found that the use of teacher and peer feedback were effective to teach essay writing. such a technique contributed a significant improvemental to the students writing achievement in the experimental group. the result also showed that the writing achievement of the students in the experimental group was better than that of those in the control group. to conclude, utilizing teacher and peer feedback is considered to be one of the effective ways for the students in learning essay writing. however, some drawbacks were found that need to be taken into account in the next related researches. keywords: teacher feedback, peer feedback, essay writing introduction in the efl context of higher education, writing is considered as an important skill since it is not only an object of education, but it is also a skill leading to professional development. students must produce academic writing works as part of their study. carolina c, et.al. (2003, p. 9) stated that at the university level, disciplinary knowledge, and understanding are largely exhibited and valued through the medium of writing. students can begin to understand the significance of writing by becoming aware that writing takes particular conventional forms in different contexts. however, it is undeniable that writing is assumed to be the most the difficult skill for learners to master. the complexity lies not only in inventing, expressing, and organizing ideas but also in translating or 161 mailto:taufiqkayla@gmail.com mailto:yuvieta@rocketmail.com taufiqulloh, yuvita &imam yuliarto utilizing peer and teacher feedback in academic writing class interpreting them into texts which are readable. as nunan (2003, p. 88) highlighted that writers typically serve two masters: themselves and their own desires to express an idea or feeling, and readers who need to have ideas in certain ways. in the process of teaching and learning of academic writing at schools or universities in indonesia in particular, teacher always plays an important role. teachers assign students to write a number of topics and then assess the substantive information contained in the message conveyed, and the mechanics of writing (spelling, capitalization, and punctuation). teachers typically define the topics for writing, establish the criteria for evaluating the writing and grade the writing themselves. this teacher-centered approach is not surprising given that many teachers have origins in a transmission model of learning and instruction, in which teachers provide the basic knowledge to be imparted to students. the transmission model isolates content areas in teaching and emphasizes mastery of component skills in sequential order. meanwhile, the current trend of in elt teaching in international context today focuses on creating competent and autonomous learners (illes, 2012, p. 506). therefore, to create such learners, the elt instruction must be student-centered. moreover, students should be more facilitated in searching feedback from their peers or teachers. this study presents peer and teacher feedback as a techique in teaching academic writing, particularly essay, to university students. it is intended to find out whether or not teacher and peer feedback are effective to teach academic writing (essay writing) to the students and to figure out the difference in the writing achievement between the students who are taught using teacher and peer feedback and those who are not. as we know that the need for designing specific support for student writing processes has received much attention in writing research in elt today. two specific support mechanisms that can be used are teacher feedback and peer feedback, which have been studied in different domains and educational levels (i.e., gielen, tops, dochy, onhema, & smeets, 2010). in writing instruction, feedback is usually given by the teacher when writing process is implemented. teacher gives comments or suggestions on the students’writing relating to various aspects of writing such as format, mechanics, content, organization, grammar and sentence structures. according to keh (1990) and hedgcock and leftkowitz (1996) cited in purnawarman (2011, p.21) suggest at least four teacher’s roles in providing feedback for students’ writing: a reader or respondent, a writing teacher or guide, a grammarian, and an evaluator or judge. in students’ writing assessment, teacher feedback gives contributions to evalute students’ writing quality. peterson (2013) states that teacher feedback should be both criterion-based and reader-based. criterion based feedback indicates how well the writing meets the criteria on scoring guides or rubrics. this feedback refers to features such as the appropriateness of the ideas and information, the level of detail and the chosen point of view. criterion-based feedback also addresses the clarity of communication through the organization of ideas and use of writing conventions and effective language. this type of feedback is most useful when students have previously been given the 162 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee assessment criteria and have a clear understanding of the expectations. indeed, students gain a deeper understanding of the expectations when they have an opportunity to participate in determining the assessment criteria. relating to peer feedback, it is a type of assessment performed by equal status learners. the assessor finds and discussess the strengths of weaknesses of students’ writing performance for further improvement. it is done during the process of writing. peer feedback, when guided by teacher modeling and assessment criteria, is a useful assessment for learning tool that has been shown to support students’ writing development and contribute to students’ revisions to improve their writing (boscolo & ascorti, 2004; graham & perin, 2007). there are some beneficials of using peer feedback according to gielen (2010); firstly, peer feedback can increase the social pressure on students to perform well on an assignment. this way, regardless of the actual output of the peer feedback, a mere announcement that it will take place might suffice to raise performance. secondly, research in higher education shows that students often perceive peer feedback as more understandable and more useful because fellow students ‘are on the same wavelength’ (topping, 2003). a third argument of peer feedback beneficials is that it increases the students’ ability to understand feedback. when a learner sees what happens behind the curtains of an assessment and participates in it, learning goals are clarified and internalised. fourthly, peer feedback is quicker. as teacher feedback often has a considerable delay after the submission of an assignment or test, feedback sometimes is not available until after the curriculum has passed to another topic. in that case, ‘imperfect feedback from a fellow student provided almost immediately may have much more impact than more perfect feedback from a tutor four weeks later’ (gibbs and simpson, 2004, p. 19). fifthly, peer feedback can be part of an increase in the frequency or amount of feedback. gibbs and simpson (2004) emphasise that only giving feedback at the end of the learning process is not enough to support learning effectively and may provoke frustration in the learner. another advantage is the individualisation of feedback. if teachers try to provide more timely and more frequent feedback, they often organise it collectively to make this feasible. thus, peer feedback on writing develops students’ self assessment abilities through providing opportunities to learn and apply scoring criteria. it also provides helpful information to guide revisions that improve students’ writing (peterson, 2013). to draw the findings of this study, some hyphotheses were made. hypothesis is a provisional or tentative judgment whether or not a certain technique, method, or model is effective regarding the problem researched. there are two kinds of hypotheses in this research: null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis. srinagesh (2006, p. 337) stated that in the context of experimental research, the null hypothesis is used when the experimental data (which is represented by a sample) does not necessarily warrant a generalization (which represents the entire population) that an intended improvement in the dependent variable did not occur. the null hypotheses of this research are formulated in the followings: h01 teacher and peer feedback are not effective to teach academic (essay) writing to high achievers 163 taufiqulloh, yuvita &imam yuliarto utilizing peer and teacher feedback in academic writing class h02 teacher and peer feedback are not effective to teach academic (essay) writing to low achievers h03 there is no significant difference in the writing achievement of the students who are taught using teacher and peer feedback and those who are not. method an experimental research was conducted to test whether or not teacher and peer feedback were effective to teach academic writing to the students, particularly essay writing. it was conducted at the english department of pancasakti university tegal central java indonesia, in the seven semester of the academic year 2015/2015 from march to july 2016. the participants of this study are the fourth semester students of english education department who attended academic (essay) writing class. the total number of population is about 40 students from four classes. the population was then identified in terms of two kinds of individual differences: high and low achievers. the identification was conducted through an essay writing test. regarding the results of identification, 40 students were taken as the participants of this study: 20 students as the experimental group (10 high and 10 low achievers) and 20 students as the control group divided in the same way. the intsrument of this study is an essay writing test. students were asked to write an essay of about 300-600 words by choosing one of the suggested topics that interested them. each essay is scored on the basis of how effectively it communicates a whole message for the stated purpose. it is also considered in terms of five characteristics: format and mechanics, content and organization, word/sentence use, and grammar. and to the test the hypotheses as the findings in this study, t-test and f-test were conducted. paired sample t-test was intended to examine whether or not teacher and peer feedback were effective to teach essay writing to the students. while f-test was to figure out the difference in the writing achievement of the students who were taught using teacher and peer feedback and those who were not. results and discussion presented in this part are pretesting analysis, hypothesis testing (findings) and its interpretation. lavene test was employed to test the homogeneity of the research sample. using one way anova in spss 22, the result of the statistic calculation of the test was figured out in the following table: table 1. the result of homogeneity test table 1 shows that the gained coefficient (sig.) correlation is 0.185. as it is greater than 0.05, it can be drawn a conclusion that the research sample is homogeneous. thus, the further analysis (hyphotheses testing) can be carried out. the results of null hypotheseses testing of this small scale research were figured out in the followings: levene statistic df1 df2 sig. 1.819 1 38 0.185 164 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1) the first null hypothesis (h01) said that “teacher and peer feedback are not effective to teach academic (essay) writing to high achievers.” using spss 22, paired sample ttest was utilized to test such a hypothesis. it was conducted by comparing the scores of pre-test and post-test of field independent students taught using self-assessment model. if the significance value (sig.) of the 2tailed test drops below the level of significance 0.05, the null hypothesis (h0) is rejected. otherwise, it retains. the results are described in the followings: table 2. paired sample statistics mean n std. deviation std. error mean post-test 86.60 10 1.776 0.562 pre-test 83.60 10 2.066 0.653 table 2 describes the statistic summary of the scores of essay writing test of the high achivers before and after treatment. the result shows that there is a difference on the mean scores of two variables. the mean score of post-test (86.60) is greater than that of pre-test (83.60). table 3. paired samples test paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) mean std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper posttest & pretest 3.000 1.333 0.422 2.046 3.954 7.115 9 0.000 drawn from table 3, with the degree of freedom 9, the significance value (sig.2 tailed) is 0.000 which drops far below the significance level 0.05 meaning that there was a difference in essay writing achievement before and after the field-independent students were taught using self-assessment model. therefore, it can be concluded that the null hypothesis (h01) is rejected: teacher and peer feedback are not effective to teach academic (essay) writing to high achievers. 2) the second null hypothesis (h02) said that “teacher and peer feedback are not effective to teach academic (essay) writing to low achievers.” to prove this hypothesis, the same statistics analysis procedure as that of the first hypothesis was also utilized. the results are described in the following tables: table 4. paired sample statistics mean n std. deviation std. error mean post-test 72.30 10 3.529 1.116 pre-test 68.80 10 3.615 1.143 165 taufiqulloh, yuvita &imam yuliarto utilizing peer and teacher feedback in academic writing class the difference between the mean score of pre-test and post-test of the field dependent students taught using selfassessment model is figured out in the table above. as drawn from the table, the mean score of post-test is greater than that of pre-test (72.30>68.00). table 5. paired sample t-test paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) mean std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper posttest & pretest 3,500 1.080 0.342 2.727 4.273 10.247 9 0.000 it was found from the table 5 that the significance value (sig.2 tailed) is 0.000. referring to the value, it can be drawn a conclusion that there is a difference between the scores of pre-test and those of post-tests due to the conducted treatment. thus, the null hypothesis (h02) is rejected: teacher and peer feedback are not effective to teach academic (essay) writing to low achievers. 3) the last hypothesis (h03) said that “there is no significant difference in the writing achievement of the students who are taught using teacher and peer feedback and those who are not.” to prove this hypothesis, f test was conducted. if the significance value (sig.) drops below the level of significance 0.05, the null hypothesis (h0) is rejected. otherwise, it retains. the results of the statistic calculation using two way anova in spss 22 were figured out in the following table: table 6. test between subject-factors (the result of anova) tests of between-subjects effects dependent variable: essay writing achievement source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. corrected model 1802.475a 3 600.825 63.152 0.000 intercept 244766.025 1 244766.025 25727.232 0.000 individual difference 1729.225 1 1729.225 181.758 0.000 learning method 60.025 1 60.025 6.309 0.017 individual difference * learning model 13.225 1 13.225 1.390 0.246 error 342.500 36 9.514 total 246911.000 40 corrected total 2144.975 39 a. r squared = .401 (adjusted r squared = .351) drawn from table 6, it terms of learning method, it was found that the gained the sig.value is 0.001. as the value drops below 0.05, it can be said that there is a significant difference in the writing achievement between between the students who were taught using teacher and peer feedback and those who were not. thus, the last hypothesis (h03) that said “there is no significant difference in the writing achievement of the students who are taught using teacher and 166 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee peer feedback and those who are not, ” was rejected. further difference is described in the following table: table 7. estimates (learning method) 95% confidence interval learning method mean std. error std. deviation std. error mean peer & teacher feedback 79.450 0.690 78.051 80.849 non peer & teacher feedback 77.000 0.690 75.601 78.399 the table above shows that the mean of students taught using teacher and peer feedback is greater than that of those taught without using the method (79.450>77.000). thus, it can be said that students taught using teacher and peer feedback received more improvement on their writing ability than those who were not. from the data analysis described above, it was found that this experimental research has drawn three findngs: teacher and peer feedback were effective to teach the students with high achievement (high achievers), teacher and peer feedback were effective to teach the students with low achievement (low achievers), and there was a difference in the writing achievement between the students taught using teacher and peer feedbak and those who were not. students who learned to write by gathering feedback from their teacher and peers experienced more improvement in their final achievement. at the beginning of this research, from the result of pre-test, some problems were found in students’essays that were not well formatted, containing innacuracies in the use of mechanical skills of writing, poor in content, unorganized, in errors in grammar and sentence structures. then, the treatment was conducted for one semester for both experimental and control group. in the experimental group, students learned to write essay by gathering feedback from their teacher and peers which were inserted in the steps of writing process of oshima and hogue (2006) that consists of creating, planning, writing the first draft, polishing (revising and editing), and writing the final draft. the use of teacher and peer feedback worked after the students wrote their first draft. this collaborative works contributed significant improvements on the students’ essays before they submitted their final copy to the teacher. these can benefit both teacher and students involved in the use of collaborative writing as a learning pedagogy (cerrato & rodriguez, 2002; onrubia & engel, 2009). using the checklist of writing dimensions (see appendix), students gathered written feedback from their peers and teacher. they let their peers edit and revise their essays. this activity encouraged the students to get enganged in reflective criticism of other students’ products and provide feedback, usually using previously defined criteria in rubrics (falchikov, 1986; prins, sluijsmans, kirschner, & strijbos, 2005). after gathering feedback from their peers, the students submitted their works to the teacher for gathering further feedback using the checklist. through the instrument, teacher assessed the students’ first texts in terms of format, mechanics, content, organization, grammar and sentence structures. this really worked well as the students considered writing teacher has reliable expertise in the classroom as 167 taufiqulloh, yuvita &imam yuliarto utilizing peer and teacher feedback in academic writing class guasch, et.al, (2013) said that teacher feedback acquires special significance for the student due to the teacher’s expert status. this is also strengthened by what is stated by alvarez et. al. (2011), that there is a significant correlation between text improvement and students’ discussions about the comments received from the teacher. at the end of the treatment, it was found that the use of teacher and peer feedback contributed a significant improvement on students’ essays that were well formatted and utilized accurate meachanical aspects such as capitalization, punctuation, etc. the essays were also rich of ideas, more interesting to read, and well organized since each of which contained introduction, body and conclusion. in addition to that, few mistakes were found in their essays in the use of grammar and sentence structures. conclusion to conclude, utilizing teacher and peer feedback is considered to be one of the effective ways for the students in learning essay writing. however, some drawbacks were found. getting involved frequently with others in working on their essays, the students became dependent. this is really in contrast with the current situation that the english language teaching today should lead the students to be more independent. poor quality of feedback from their peers and the increased workload became crucial problems that need to be considered in the next related researches. acknowledgement the authors are the teaching staffs of english education department, pancasakti university tegal central java indonesia. this research was supported under the funding scheme “penelitian dosen pemula (pdp)” from the directorate of research, technology, and higher education, republic of indonesia. references alvarez, i., espasa, a., & guasch, t. (2011). the value of feedback in improving collaborative writing assignments in an online learning environment. studies in higher education, 37, 387– 400. doi:10.1080/03075079.2010.510182 boscolo, p. & ascorti, k. (2004). effects of collaborative revision on children’s ability to write understandable narrative texts. in l. allal, l. chanqouy, & p. largy (eds.), revision: cognitive and instructional processes (vol. 13, pp. 157-170). boston, ma: kluwer. carolina, c., curry. m. j., goodman, s., hewings, ann., lilis, t.m., & swann, j. (2003). teaching academic writing: a toolkit for higher education. london: routledge cerrato, t., & rodriguez, h. (2002). studies of computer supported collaborative writing implications for systems design. in m. blay-fornarino, a. pinna-dery, k. schmidt, & p. zaraté (eds.). cooperative systems design (pp. 139–154). amsterdam: ios press. gibbs, g. & simpson, c. (2004). conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. learning and teaching in higher education, 1, 3–31. gielen, sarah et al. (2010). a comparative study of peer and teacher feedback and of various peer feedback forms in a secondary school writing curriculum. british educational journal, 36,1. februari 2010: 143-162. gielen, s., tops, l., dochy, f., onhema, p., & smeets, s. (2010). a comparative study of peer and teacher feedback and of various peer feedback forms in a secondary writing curriculum. british educational research journal, 36, 143–162 doi:10.1080/01411920902894070 168 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee graham, s., & perin, d. (2007). a metaanalysis of writing instruction for adolescent students. journal of educational psychology, 99, 445-476. guasch t., espasa a., alvares, i., kirschner. (2013). effects of feedback on collaborative writing in an online learning environment. distance education. vol. 34, no. 3, 324–338, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2 013.835772 illes, e. (2012). learner autonomy revisited. elt journal, 66(4):505-513 keh, c. l. (1990). feedback in the writing process: a model and methods for implementation. elt journal, 44(4), 294-304. nunan, david. (2003). practical english language teaching. new york: the mcgraw hill. onrubia, j., & engel, a. (2009). strategies for collaborative writing and phases of knowledge construction in cscl environments. computers & education, 53, 1256–1265. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.06.008 onrubia, j., & engel, a. (2009). strategies for collaborative writing and phases of knowledge construction in cscl environments. computers & education, 53, 1256–1265. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.06.008 oshima a., & hogue, a. (2006). writing academic english. new york: longman peterson, s. s. (2013). peer feedback on writing: an assessment for learning. research for teacher. university of toronto. prins, f. j., sluijsmans, d. m. a., kirschner, p. a., & strijbos, j. w. (2005). formative peer assessment in a cscl environment: a case study. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 30, 417–444. doi:10.1080/02602930500099219 purnawarman, p. (2011). impact of teacher feedback on esl/efl students’ writing: blackburg va (dissertation). november 29,2011 srinagesh, k. (2006). the principles of experimental research (first edition). massachusetts: butterworthheinemann topping, k. j. (2003). selfand peer assessment in school and university: reliability, validity and utility, in: m. segers, f. dochy & e. cascallar (eds.). optimizing new modes of assessment: in search of qualities and standards (dordrecht, kluwer academic). 169 taufiqulloh, yuvita &imam yuliarto utilizing peer and teacher feedback in academic writing class appendix: peer/teacher editing checklist of writing dimensions name of peer/teacher : day/date: format the essay is correctly formatted (title centered, first line of every yes no paragraph indented, margins on both sides) mechanics the essay was checked for punctuation, capitalization and spelling yes no content and organization the essay has all three parts ; introduction, body and conclusion yes no introduction : type of introduction used (funnel, historical background, surprising statistics, dramatic story, etc) __________________ the introduction ends with thesis statement yes no body : the body has _____ paragraphs. the topics of the body paragraphs are as follows : 1. _____________________________ 3. _____________________________ 2. _____________________________ 4. _____________________________ (if there are more or fewer paragraphs, add or delete the lines.) unity : each paragraph discusses only one main idea, yes no and there are no sentences that are “off the topics.” coherence : each paragraph has coherence. the essay flows smoothly from beginning to end. yes no repetion of key nouns transition signals are used to show yes no relationship among ideas transitions are used to link paragraphs yes no conclusion : the conclusion (a) summarizes the main points or (b) paraphrases the thesis statement (circle one) grammar and sentence structure number found and corrected the essay has been checked for ………………….errors _____________________ the essay has been checked for ………………….errors _____________________ the essay has been checked for ………………….errors _____________________ the essay has been checked for ………………….errors _____________________ (adapted from oshima and hogue (2006:325) 170 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 95 the influence of means ends analysis (mea) model on grammar achievement tri rositasari english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah palembang, palembang, indonesia e-mail: tri_rasyid11@yahoo.com finza larasati english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah palembang, palembang, indonesia e-mail: finzalarasati@yahoo.co.id dwi rara saraswaty english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah palembang, palembang, indonesia e-mail: rara_filan89@ymail.com apa citation: rositasari, t., larasati, f., & saraswaty, d. r. (2020). the influence of means ends analysis (mea) model on grammar achievement. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 95-102. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3782 received: 27-06-2020 accepted: 29-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction english is a language that is closely related to many aspects of life today. almost all aspects such as technology, education, business, and others use english as a medium for communication. therefore, it is very important for us to learn english language. however, there are various aspects that the learners need to comprehend in order to master english language. thus, grammar is included as one of the important aspects of learning english as it is seen as the language framework to support the context and message in any form of language to be conveyed smoothly. this is in line with ganjoee & narafshan (2016) who explained that grammar is like a vehicle that enables the students to communicate effectively. according to bastone (1994, p.3), “language without grammar would certainly leave us seriously handicapped”. inferring from bastone, we know that grammar is an integrated part of language used by the learners in daily communication. to be an effective language user, learners should study grammar because grammar abstract: the objective of this study was to find out the influence of mea learning model on students’ grammar learning achievements. the participants were the third semester students of english study program, um palembang in academic year 2019/2020 which amounted to 40 students. this study was a quantitative research. this study used pre-experimental method. the research design used two groups pretest post-test design. the researcher conducted several steps to analyze the data; first, data from preand post-test results were analyzed to find averages obtained from the control and experimental group. second, the data obtained by the control and experimental group were compared statistically to determine differences in grammar test scores between the two groups using paired sample tests. third, the data obtained from the second step were compared statistically to find the significant differences in the grammar values between the two groups by using paired sample t-tests. based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that the experimental group before the treatment was carried out in the learning process based on the pretest value was still not good, but when the treatment has been carried out, the student post-test results showed a very good improvement. for the control group, there were no favorable changes (significant) between the preand post-test result scores, because both of them showed the same results, which were not good. keywords: means ends analysis (mea) model; advanced grammar; english education study program students. mailto:tri_rasyid11@yahoo.com mailto:finzalarasati@yahoo.co.id mailto:rara_filan89@ymail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3782 tri rositasari, finza larasati & dwi rara saraswaty the influence of means ends analysis (mea) model on grammar achievement (english education study program student of um palembang) 96 skills help learners to organize words and messages and make them meaningful. this is in accordance with the opinion of mafisa and walt (2003), stating that mastering grammar will affect someone in achieving their language competence. thus, knowing more about grammar enables the learners to arrange better sentences in speaking and writing performances. a good knowledge of grammar helps learners to make sentences clear enough to be understood. the statement is supported by huegle (2008) which stated that the purpose of learning grammar is to organize words and messages so their meaning is clear and can be understood. as nunan (1998) stated that the function of grammar is not only to form words into sentences, grammar also gives an overview of language structure so it will be easier to form sentences. moreover, improper use of grammar will not convey meaningful messages. tabbert (1984) stressed the importance of grammar simply as it frequently points out students’ confusion in word choice; lie and lay, who and whom, saying infer instead of imply, mismatch of subjects and verbs, mixing up pronoun reference, using double negatives, etc. these mistakes are evidences of their need to study grammar. language acquisition without grammar is confusing as it will be a failure to use the language correctly without grammar skills. people now agree that grammar is too important to be ignored, and without a good knowledge of grammar, learners’ language development will be severely constrained (richards & renandya, 2002). although most of the english learners are aware of grammar essential role in conveying the form of language, they also believe that grammar can be the most complicated aspect to be learned due to the difficulties of understanding the use of tenses and the word arrangement. in addition, learners often feel uncomfortable in learning such kind of materials due to the boredom caused by the monotone and traditional teaching model in classroom. as the result, learners tend to be passive recipients in the learning process which leads to the lack of understanding about the grammar material that is being taught by the teacher. students tend to take examples that are already exist often that they cannot apply their knowledge on consistent and appropriate contexts. moreover, learners often feel that by learning grammar in traditional model, the grammar they learned are not able to be used in real life communication (hashemi & daneshfar, 2018). this greatly affects the outcome and the process of writing the thesis later. on the other side, the problems faced by the learners also become the teachers’ concern. due to the fact that a good teachers in grammar learning process should assist the learners to reach the three goals of learning that are stated by thao (2019): students should be able to communicate both in spoken and written english language; students should acquire basic knowledge as well as the advanced one in grammar field; and students should attain their goals for studying. it is an obstacle for the teachers to discover the teaching model that fit those three goals in order to teach grammar without making the students bored. based on the observation and interview conducted to the third semester students of 20172018, this problem arises due to the lack of creative teaching/learning model. the teachers tend to use deductive strategy in which they start the lessons by giving the rules of grammar accompanied with examples of rule application in sentences. thus, the teachers tend to lecture a lot during the learning process that leads to the problem of students’ perspective toward grammar. according to flight (2003), a lecture is an oral presentation intended to present information or teaches people about a particular subject, for example by a university or college teacher. this kind of routine instruction may cause students’ boredom which gradually dishearten them. however, nurusus, samad, rahman, noordin, & rashid (2015) believed that the teachers’ effectiveness in delivering the grammar lessons may be affected by their beliefs on how to teach grammar. this leads to a conclusion that students need an interesting method. this model meets the researcher’s perspective as the researcher believes that the interesting method is a method which will emphasizes on the context of how grammar is used and support the students to be more active in learning process. as a result of analyzing the grammar teaching phenomenon, the researcher wants to solve the problem in handling the grammar lessons by applying the means-end-analysis (mea) model. according to simon (1981), means-ends analysis (mea) is a problem solving technique used commonly in artificial intelligence (ai) for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/artificial_intelligence english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 97 limiting search in ai programs. kaciak & cullen (2006) added that it is also a technique used at least since the 1950s as a creativity tool, most frequently mentioned in engineering books on design methods. mea is also related to means-ends chain approach used commonly in consumer behaviour analysis. efuansyah and wahyuni (2019) believed that means ends analysis is a learning model that can give the students opportunities to be active and give a contribution in mathematics. this is in line with prihatiningtyas and nurhayati (2017) that stated means-ends analysis (mea) can facilitate students’ problem-solving ability. however, this has been proved in previous studies; in ratnasari (2018) research result, as the students’ activeness in the classroom increased from 24% on circle 1 into 60% on circle 2; in lestari, mahayukti, & mertasari (2020) research finding as mea model successfully increased the students’ activeness in learning and problem-solving ability; in mulasari, wulandari, & putra (2020) research as means ends analysis has a positive effect on students’ learning outcome. aside from that, the model also can optimize the problem-solving activity through heuristic approach by questions sequence which can be clues to help students in problem-solving. moreover, supendi, jamiah, & ahmad (2017) showed that the students’ problem-solving with means ends analysis model is better than in direct instruction model. similarly, palupi, suyitno, prabowo (2016) also showed that mea model is more effective than expository model. besides, means-ends analysis also has a privilege of students becoming familiar with problem-solving questions which makes them easier in solving the problems (shoimin, 2016). as stated by huda (2014), means ends analysis separates the problem and goal that needs to be achieved. as a whole, means-ends analysis (mea) is a strategy to analyze a problem through various ways in order to achieve the needed goal (qusyairi & watoni, 2017). juniyarti (2014) also added that means end analysis is seen as learning strategies to enhance analytical skill. moreover, a good analytical skill is intertwined with problem-solving skill needed by people nowadays. this statement is in line with what suherman (2010) argued that means end analysis is a mix of learning method and problem-solving method. pratama, sariyatun, & joebagio (2017) also believed that mean ends analysis is needed to be the solution for innovative learning model in the current teaching process that is expected to help the teachers by combining with the value approach. căprioară & daniela as cited in aras (2020) believed that learning process in classroom depends on the learning model differences which effect the students’ problemsolving ability. thus, by using means ends analysis model, it is expected to improve the ability of high-order thinking that leads to the ability of identifying problems, analyzing problems, finding conclusions from a problem and, being able to design a way to solve the problem. moreover, means ends analysis is proved to be effective in improving the ability of high-order thinking of students in ips learning in riana, jupri, and abdulkarim (2017) research. similarly, the result in solikah and himmah (2019) research also showed that means ends analysis learning model with a heuristic learning strategy is effective in enhancing the mathematical problemsolving ability of students of class vii smp n 2 bringin. furthermore, heryani & aptiani (2016) also showed that students’ learning motivation of learning with means ends analysis (mea) model are in high level. from the description above, the researcher is interested in conducting the research by using mea learning model in advance grammar courses with the aim that the material given will be truly understood by students. the research problem in this study is “was it effective to use mea learning model to improve learning achievements of the third semester students of english education study program, universitas muhammadiyah palembang?” based on the research problem above, the objective of this study is to find whether there is an increase in grammar learning achievements of the third semester students, english education study program, universitas muhammadiyah palembang by using mea learning model. hypothesis h0: there is no significant influence of mea learning model on the grammar learning achievements of the third semester students of english education study program, universitas muhammadiyah palembang ha: there is a significant influence of mea learning model on the grammar learning achievements of the third semester students tri rositasari, finza larasati & dwi rara saraswaty the influence of means ends analysis (mea) model on grammar achievement (english education study program student of um palembang) 98 of english education study program, universitas muhammadiyah palembang the scope and research limitation are written below: a. the subjects of this study are the third semester students of the english education study program, fkip um palembang in academic year of 2019/2020, amounting to 40 students. b. this research is conducted in an advanced grammar course with toefl material. c. the learning model used in this study is the means-ends analysis (mea) learning model. the operational definitions in this study are as follows: 1. learning models can be interpreted as a systematic procedure in organizing learning experiences to achieve learning goals. 2. learning achievements are the results that have been achieved or obtained by students from the experiences and exercises which include knowledge (cognitive), attitude (affective), and psychomotor during the learning process takes place. 3. means ends analysis (mea) is a learning model that requires planning to achieve overall goals and problem-solving by using syntax or steps in the concept. method this research is a quantitative research which used a pre-experimental method design and this design is "two groups pretest posttest design". there are two variables in this study, namely the independent and the dependent variable. the independent variable is the mea learning model and the dependent variable is students’ learning achievements. in this study, researchers used pre-test and posttest for the control group with no special treatment, while for the experimental group, the researchers used pre-test and post-test with special treatment which used the mea learning model. for more details, see table 1 below: table 1. treatment for experimental group using mea learning model subject pretest treatment posttest sk o1 o2 se o1 x o2 remarks: s : research subject (s control / s experiment) x : treatment o1 : giving pretest o2 : giving post-test technique for collecting the data test the test used by researchers is to include students’ learning achievements, while the form of the test is multiple choices questions which amounts to 50 questions which are used to find out how far the students' understanding of the material that has been learned. non-test observation the direct observation of an activity carried out in order to find out the condition or a condition that would be observed. documentation the documentation used to obtain data directly from the research site, the teaching material used and the class learning process before the study, photographs during the research, and videos where all of this data is relevant to the research. technique for analyzing the data to analyze the data of this study, researchers conducted several stages. first, data from the pretest and post-test results were analyzed to find averages obtained from the control and experimental group. second, the data obtained by the control and experimental group were compared statistically to determine differences in the results of grammar test scores between the two groups using paired sample tests. third, the data obtained from the second step, were compared statistically to find out the significant differences in the results of grammar values between the two groups using paired sample t-tests; to find significant differences from each criterion measured from the value of the test results obtained by each group and to find which criteria that affects the achievement of understanding of grammar by using paired sample t-tests. the last step taken by the researcher was to find a significant difference from the results obtained by each group using paired sample t-test in order to prove how significant the difference is and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 whether the difference is caused by the given treatment. all calculations were analyzed by using spss 21.0 for windows. in this study, researchers used t-test statistical procedures. this t-test formula was used to prove the hypothesis in this study, to find out whether there is a significant increase between the pre-test and post-test students’ scores. results and discussion description of the score pretest and posttest of the experimental group this is described as a statistical result regarding to the score of students’ learning result before treatment (pre-test) in the experimental group. the class was treated in the form of the application of means-ends analysis (mea) learning model and the value of students’ learning result after the treatment (post-test) can be seen in the following table below: table 2. description of the score pretest and posttest student learning achievements of the experimental group no. total scores gain pretest posttest 1 8 15 7 2 8 18 10 3 10 20 10 4 10 19 9 5 10 24 14 6 13 28 15 7 13 32 19 8 16 35 19 9 18 38 20 10 18 39 12 11 18 35 17 12 20 35 15 13 20 30 10 14 20 38 18 15 24 41 17 16 24 43 19 17 26 40 14 18 28 45 17 19 31 40 9 20 34 45 11 total 369 651 282 mean 18.45 32.55 14.10 based on the table above, it can be concluded that out of the 20 students in the experimental group, the average pretest score is 18.45, the lowest value is 8 and the highest value was 34. after applying mea learning model, it can be seen that the results of the post-test is increased with the average value is 32.55, while the lowest value is 15 and the highest value is 45. it showed the advance grammar learning using the mea learning model can affect learning achievements. the distribution of the pretest and post-test scores in the experimental group can be seen in table 3 below: table 3. score distribution in the experimental group internal value categ ory pretest post-test frequ ency percen tage (%) frequ ency perce ntage (%) 26-50 good 4 20 15 75 16-25 fair 9 45 4 20 5-15 poor 7 35 1 5 based the results of the pretest on the table above, there are 20% or 4 students in the good category, 45% or 9 students in the fair category and 35% or 7 students in the poor category. and the score results of post-test after the treatment of using tri rositasari, finza larasati & dwi rara saraswaty the influence of means ends analysis (mea) model on grammar achievement (english education study program student of um palembang) 100 mea learning model, there are 75% or 15 students in good category, 20% or 4 students in the fair category and 5% or 1 student included in the poor category. description of the score pretest and post-test of the control group statistical result with regards to the value of the original test (pretest) of students in the control class where the class is not given the treatment of meansends analysis (mea) learning model implementation and the value of students’ learning results after the treatment (post-test) can be seen in the following table: table 2. description of the pretest and post-test students’ learning achievement scores of the experimental group no total scores gain pretest posttest 1 8 10 2 2 8 10 2 3 10 8 -2 4 10 14 4 5 10 10 0 6 13 15 2 7 13 16 3 8 16 16 0 9 18 19 1 10 18 20 2 11 18 20 2 12 20 24 4 13 20 21 1 14 20 20 0 15 24 23 -1 16 24 20 -4 17 26 24 -2 18 28 24 -4 19 31 32 1 20 34 34 0 total 369 380 11 mean 18.45 19.00 0.55 based on the table above, it can be concluded that of the 20 students in the control group, the average pretest score is 18.45, the lowest value is 8, and the highest value is 34. after the learning process was done without the mea learning model treatment, it can be seen that the results of the posttest have increased slightly with an average value of 19.00, the lowest value is 8, and the highest value is 34. it showed that advance grammar learning without special treatment (without using the aec learning model) has a very little difference or in other words the pre-test and post-test values are almost the same. the distribution of the pretest and posttest scores in the control group can be seen in table 5 below: table 3. value distribution in the control group inter val valu e categ ory pretest posttest freque ncy percen tage (%) freque ncy percen tage (%) 26-50 good 4 20 2 10 16-25 fair 9 45 12 60 5-15 poor 7 35 6 30 the table above showed the results of the pretest, there are 20% or 4 students ae in the good category, 45% or 9 students are in the fair category and 35% or 7 students are in the poor category. while, in the results of post-test without treatment, there are 10% or 2 students in good category, 60% or 12 students in the fair category and 30% or 6 students are in the poor category. to find out whether learning by using the mea learning model can contribute to students’ grammar advance learning achievements can be seen in table 6 below this: table 6. descriptive statistics of variables based on pretest and post-test results means-ends analysis (mea) experimental group control group pretest posttest pretest posttest mean 18.45 32.55 18.45 19.00 sd. 7.660 9.310 7.660 6.943 df 19 19 t-table 2.093 2.093 t-obtained 15.467 1.078 significance 0.000 0.295 the table above showed a very significant difference in student grammar. it can be seen that the acquisition for the experimental group is 15,467 with a significance level of 0,000. because tobtained is higher than t-table (t-obtained 15.467 > t-table 2.093) with a significance level of p <0.05, therefore, it showed that h0 is rejected. it means that there is significant influence in student grammar english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 101 before the treatment and after the treatment of using the mea learning model. meanwhile, t-obtained from the control group is less than t-table = 2.093 (tobtained 1.078 > t-table 2.093) with a significance level of 0.295 is p > 0.05. it showed that using the mea learning model in advance grammar courses can improve student learning achievements so it can be said that the mea learning model really works well for the experimental group. conclusion from descriptive statistics, it can be seen that the experimental class with the use of means-ends analysis (mea) learning model has a higher score than the control class. the result of inferential statistics in the hypothesis test is that h0 is rejected. the null hypothesis (h0) which is rejected was concluded that there is an influence of the implementation of the means-ends analysis (mea) learning model on the enhancement of statistical learning as a result of third-semester students of english study program, fkip ump. also, it is expected that the implementation of the means-ends analysis (mea) learning model can enhance student statistical learning results in data interpretation material. the suggestions that can be presented are as follows; 1) the means-end analysis (mea) learning model can be used to improve advance grammar learning achievements, 2) it is expected 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(2009). grammar practice activities: a practical guide for teachers. cambridge: cup. conference full paper template english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 english teacher professional development in indonesia: the challenges and opportunities anchieta ave avillanova the english education master program, sanata dharma university, indonesia e-mail: anchieta.ave@gmail.com paulus kuswandono the english education master program, sanata dharma university, indonesia e-mail: kus@usd.ac.id apa citation: avillanova, a. a., & kuswandono, p. (2019). english teacher professional development in indonesia: the challenges and opportunities. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 41-50. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.1972. received: 02-10-2019 accepted: 10-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: this study investigates the challenges and opportunities of junior high school english teacher professional development in indonesia. the objectives of the study are to examine the english teachers’ challenges and needs to develop their tpd. this qualitative study employed questionnaire and in-depth interview as the main instruments for data collection. the findings revealed that the challenges of tpd related to, firstly, program timing as the program was carried out during working hours; and, secondly, lack of information about workshop schedule from the government (education office) because, geographically, some schools are located in remote areas. the study also explored the teachers’ needs for tpd concerning student assessment, classroom management, knowledge and understanding of english, content of performance standards, giving instruction, ict skills for teaching, teaching students with special learning needs, and school management and administration. suggestion for further study concerns with the bottom-up approach of carrying tpd based on the teachers’ real needs as opposed to given programs. keywords: junior high school; english teachers; teacher professional development; challenges; needs. introduction studies on teacher professional development (tpd) have been an essential part of educational discipline as it is closely associated to improve the quality of education (bank & mayes, 2012; darling-hammond, hyler, & gardner, 2017; tanang & abu, 2014). besides, tpd is often linked to learning opportunities for teachers who have different background, level of confidence, and motivation to develop themselves (whithworth & chiu, 2015). however, the practice of teacher professional development program can pose some extensive challenges. in their study, whithworth and chiu (2015) argue that teachers’ background experiences may substantially affect the decision as to whether or not they wish to attend professional development programs. if teachers realize that they do not have enough experiences on teaching, they are aware of the need to attend professional development programs to learn new educational experiences to develop themselves. in contrast, for those who assume that they have already got adequate professional experiences, they may not aspire to participate in the tpd program anymore. teacher professionalism means “an approach to educational reform – as improving teacher quality became viewed as the key to student achievement….” (oecd, 2016, p. 8). thus, improving teachers’ quality as one of the fundamental factors in education directly affects the students’ learning attainment. in fact, every country all over the world has its own way to develop teacher professionalism. in indonesia, starting from 2006, the ministry of education establishes a program named teacher certification in order to develop teacher professionalism and to produce more qualified teachers. nonetheless, teacher certification is indeed only one of the means to develop teachers’ professionalism in indonesia. the goals of the teacher certification program are, among others, to ensure that the teachers perform their job properly, to improve the quality of education, to improve teachers’ professionalism, and to show that the teachers already have obtained sufficient competency to perform as teachers. article 1 of indonesia’s teacher and lecturer law number 14 year 2005 states that a teacher is a professional educator who should master four competencies, namely: 42 pedagogy, professionalism, social, and personality. the most interesting benefit for the teachers who have got the certification is that they get financial incentives to support their professional and daily needs. this becomes one of the motivations for teachers because, in fact, the teachers’ salary in school tends to be small (kuswandono, 2014, p. 2). it is also in line with fahmi, maulana, and yusuf (2011) who argue that the certification can improve teachers’ welfare. since the teacher certification is found to be beneficial for the teachers, many teachers who meet the requirements in following teacher certification register themselves in the program. nevertheless, the teacher certification can be highly laborious for many teachers as this requires reliable teachers’ professional portfolio and sufficient cognition on most recent pedagogy. there have been some previous studies on teacher certification in indonesia which investigate the program outcome. wahyudi, supranoto, and suji (2012) argue that although not yet satisfactory, the teacher certification gives positive results. another study by kuswandono (2014) reveals that there are some problems in the teacher certification programs, namely, “the problematic nature of standardization as a result of ‘deficit model’ approach of pd, an elusive link between performance and reward, an external motivation, ‘one shot program’, and limited resources and facilities” (p. 5). indeed, it is difficult to standardize all of teachers in indonesia. however, this may become a way to improve and make the education in indonesia equal. within the contexts of teacher certification and professional development, continuous professional development done after the certification is also needed to improve the quality of the teachers. it can also promote improvements in teaching (kennedy, 2016, p. 1). however, the continuous professional development is found limited as kuswandono (2014) states in his study that “after the teachers receive their educator certificate, there is no clear, continuous support for professional development (pd) to maintain any learning they did during the certification process or to improve the quality of their teaching” (p. 8). therefore, this current study intends to explore better understanding about professional development in terms of experiences and challenges experienced by english teachers in junior high schools in indonesia, especially in cilacap regency, central java, indonesia. to make the research setting clearer, cilacap regency is a small city which is located in the southern part of central java, indonesia. this study is urgent for indonesia and other countries where the top-down education becomes the fundamental element in education. besides, there have not been many studies focusing on the tpd in a smaller area such as cilacap regency, central java, indonesia. in this study, there are two main points used as the underlying theories. the first one concerns with the definition of tpd; while the second relates to the factors that influence tpd. those theories are elaborated as follows. as previously described, teachers need professional development to develop themselves in terms of teaching and learning. it is equally important to have professional development because, based on the study by taylor, yates, mayer, and kinsella (2011), it is not prudent for teachers to stagnate in their current roles without developing themselves through new learning opportunities. in the same vein, frost (2012) mentions that having continuous professional development is productive for the teachers. salleh and dimmock (2012) are more specific on the purposes of tpd in their study. they argue that the policy of tpd concerns mostly on improving teachers’ competency to meet academic objectives and students’ development. this idea is also reinforced by banks and mayes (2012) who argue that tpd is “the acquisition or extension of the knowledge, understanding, skills and abilities that will enable individual teachers and the schools…” (p. 12). from this arguments, it is clear that teachers are advised to continuously enhance their knowledge and skills in teaching. teachers usually attend professional development programs to develop their pedagogical practice, reflect on their teaching experience, research, and practice, to “contribute to the professional life of the school” (banks & mayes, 2012, p. 12). besides, banks and mayes (2012) also state that professional development allows the individual teachers to uphold and develop the educational practices that have been done well, to be critically aware of the educational policy, and to develop the teachers’ understanding of changes in the society, for example in terms of technology. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 the above idea is significant because the number of studies as such is still limited in indonesian contexts. a few of the studies are, among others, a study by sari (2012) that examines the issues of online learning community to improve teachers’ professionalism. next, tanang and abu (2014) examine the effects of effective tpd towards continuous pd based on some factors, such as pedagogic skills and various learning activities. meanwhile, zein (2015) focuses on how to overcome the deficiency of teacher’s quality in indonesia and also what teachers need in the professional development. understanding the contexts and findings of those studies, the researchers propose a different angle as it focuses on the variety of tpd activities and programs provided by the government and also the challenges faced by the teachers. to this date, such focus of tpd study is still underrepresented. there are several factors of tpd programs as discussed in previous studies which can be used to build on more comprehensive knowledge. banks and mayes (2012) believe that by having professional development program, teachers can reflect on their commitment to teaching. reflecting on teachers’ commitments in their profession is imperative as it can affect what they want to do later in their teaching career development. in accordance with the tpd program, whitworth and chiu (2015) in their study mention three factors that affect professional development, namely, teachers’ motivation, school culture, and working conditions (p. 132). teachers’ motivations become the first factor because this aspect plays an important point. next, school culture, which substantially stems from collegial atmosphere in school, may affect teachers’ decisions in continuing their profession and developing themselves by attending professional development. the third factor relates to the teachers’ working conditions and job satisfaction in school. it may be caused by the time they spent in the school, the salary they received, the students, and other aspects in the school (whitworth & chiu, 2015). slight different from the previous tpd research, a study by misbahuddin (2013) demonstrated that the factors inhibiting the development of teacher profession in south sulawesi are related to the lack of awareness of teachers in developing the profession continuously, the lack of confidence in the training, the lack of opportunity to develop skills, and the lack of attention from local government to the teacher network’s activities. from the background previously described, the following two research questions are proposed: 1. what have the english teachers in junior high schools in cilacap done to develop their teacher professionalism? 2. what are the challenges for the teachers’ professional development they experienced? method this study was a qualitative study using a small survey and in-depth interview as the methods of data collection. the researchers focused on the respondents’ points of view regarding their professional development program. all data collected in this study were elaborated in the form of narrative account in order to get a better understanding about the results. the data collected were also analysed inductively to make sure that the researchers captured the responses of the respondents accurately. due to the time available, the researchers used purposive sampling. according to wahyuni (2012, p. 33), purposive sampling is one of the strategies to collect data by selecting the respondents based on specific criteria relevant to the research question. the purposive sampling here was used to choose the schools, not the respondents. therefore, since there are 258 junior high schools in cilacap regency, the researchers limited the study to seven junior high schools from four sub-districts (out of 24 sub-districts) in cilacap regency, namely, center cilacap, south cilacap, jeruklegi, and kawunganten. those seven schools, consisting of three state junior high schools and four private junior high schools, were chosen because the researchers wanted to know the tpd in two different types of schools (state and private schools) in two different parts of the region: rural and urban areas. meanwhile, the respondents were nineteen in-service junior high school english teachers. sixteen female teachers (84.2%) and 3 male teachers (15.8%) participated in this study. the age range of the respondents was between 25 and 59 years old and the teaching experiences range from 3 to more than 20 years. initially, the researchers contacted the respondents whether or not they consented to participate in this study voluntarily. the background information of the respondents could be seen in the following figure. 44 figure 1. the background information of the respondents for data collection, a questionnaire was used as one of the research instruments. the questionnaire was adapted from oecd teaching and learning international survey (talis) by the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd, 2016). oecd questionnaire model was used in this study as the questionnaire enquired information about school education and policy which suited indonesian context. this was also to investigate the professional development activities carried out by the respondents. after getting and analysing the result of questionnaire, the researchers did indepth interviews with five english teachers to get a better understanding about their experiences in attending tpd program in cilacap regency. the interviews lasted for about 30-90 minutes. the discussion covered some areas about teaching and tpd program. in choosing the interviewees, the researchers also used purposive sampling based on the questionnaire responses which really met the criteria for answering this study. in this study, the quantitative data from the questionnaire were analysed using descriptive statistics. the researchers focused on the total responses of each question in numbers and percentage. then, the researchers analysed the qualitative data in a form of descriptive narrative to better understand the respondents’ answers. results and discussion from the results of the questionnaire and interview, the researchers classified those results into two parts which examine teachers’ experiences in pursuing tpd programs and how they perceived the programs. the first part analyses the programs carried out by the teachers to develop their professionalism. the second was about the challenges they faced in following the programs. each of them is elaborated as follows. tpd programs in cilacap regency based on the interview done with one employee of department of education and culture in cilacap regency, there were some programs provided to develop teacher professionalism. they were technical training, workshop, and continuous professional development through mgmp which covered professional development and teacher’s competency. those programs were done through full online learning and blended learning for continuous professional development. in doing those programs, the government provided financial supports from the center of government budget through pusat pengembangan pendidik dan tenaga kependidikan (the centre of education staff development) for every subject. figure 2. teachers’ participations in tpd 18 18 18 15 17 1 1 1 4 2 workshop conference teacher network (mgmp) individual or group research peer mentoring r e sp o n d e n t( s) programs teachers' participations on programs provided yes no 2 7 3 7 25 – 29 30 – 39 40 – 49 50 – 59 age (years old) age 1 4 5 4 5 3 – 5 6 – 10 11 – 15 16 – 20 >20 teaching experience (years) teaching experience english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 45 the results of questionnaire revealed that most of the respondents experienced the programs or activities provided by both teacher network and government during their teaching. 91% respondents have experienced tpd programs, namely, workshop, conference, teacher network, individual or group research, and peer mentoring. they remarked that tpd programs gave meaningful impacts for them. however, from the above figure, it could be seen that the respondents had less interest in doing individual or group research. only 15 respondents clearly indicated that they conducted individual or group research. the following is the interview excerpt from betty, explaining the reason and the consequence of doing an educational research: “doing a classroom action research consumes so much time. therefore, this limits teachers to do the research. teachers should have enough time to do it. (in addition), if there is no further action in doing the research, it will not do any good.” (betty, interview) here, betty thought that doing a classroom action research should not be done halfway. betty realized that the results would not be useful if she did not do the research well. however, when it was done well and thoroughly, the teachers did not have time to do it. betty added that in doing the research, she did not have any other options to choose. therefore, she had to conduct a research because the government asked her to do so. it was a kind of dilemma for teachers. from those tpd programs in figure 2, 11 respondents (57.89%) said that they did not need to pay for the programs. however, 8 respondents (42.11%) said that they should top up the fee to follow the programs. as what one of the teachers said, for teacher network (mgmp) programs, they needed to pay some amount to follow the program. however, the teacher did not literally pay it by themselves as it is often organized by their schools. only sometimes did they use their own professional incentives to join the tpd activities. most of the teachers in this study shared more or less the same tpd programs, such as technical training, curriculum 2013 and graduate competence analysis to prepare for the national examination. the challenges of tpd in cilacap regency in doing the programs to develop english teachers’ professionalism in cilacap, there were some challenges faced by the english teachers. based on the questionnaire results, the challenges that were found to have prevented teachers to participate more in professional development in cilacap were classified into seven challenges. they were conflicting schedule, limited time because of family responsibility, inadequate prerequisites for tpd, lack of employer support, expensive program, no suitable program offered, and lack of information. meanwhile, zein (2015) reported a study about professional development in indonesia had some affecting factors, such as inadequate in-service education, inadequate teacher educators, issues with training management, and ambiguous selection of training participants. however, compared to this study, he did not mention that program timing became one of the challenges of tpd. moreover, those factors were in line with a study by tanang and abu (2014) which indicated that “time management, cost, bureaucracy system, and the internal factors of teachers, such as personality, motivation, and commitment are still the main impediment challenges of teaching profession” (p. 31). furthermore, as it can be seen that the biggest challenge faced by the respondents in following professional development programs in this study was about the conflicted schedule. ten out of nineteen respondents (52.63%) agreed that they were hindered by the time of the programs. 46 figure 3. challenges of tpd from figure 3, it is clearly seen that there are two crucial factors influencing the respondents to take part in the tpd programs. the first challenge concerns with program timing. the researchers saw that program timing was the most crucial thing because this could affect other factors, for example the family responsibility. next, another challenge was about the lack of information received. although there was only one respondent revealed that she had a lack of information, the researchers saw this as a serious problem to discuss because the information about tpd programs was the very first thing the teachers needed to develop themselves. program timing in his research, zein (2015) argues that the only matter regarding to time management for the teachers was the deliberately shortened duration by the administrator of the tpd program. the government usually reduced the time of tpd, for example from three-day program into just one day, which certainly disadvantaged them. meanwhile, in this research, the crucial problem was the conflicted schedule as tpd programs were usually held during the school working hours. thus, in order to follow the programs, those teachers had to leave their students. as a substitute for being absent, the teachers should give assignments for the students for one day or even more (up to 10 days), depending on how long the programs were planned. this became a big problem because after the teachers returned from the programs, they were faced by students’ enormous tasks which should be checked and evaluated. the following is one of the respondents’ comments on this experience: “tpd program is usually held exactly at the same time of my teaching schedule. my students felt abandoned because i left them. moreover, i cannot deliver the materials to my students effectively.” (steve) from this point, it is obvious that the program schedule became the biggest barrier. however, this problem did not only happen to the respondents in cilacap regency, but also those teachers in south sulawesi (indonesia) as tanang and abu (2014) have mentioned earlier. this shows that this problem did not only occur in one particular area in indonesia. in addition, it would seem that this program timing also affected the respondents’ responsibilities in their families. it was because when the program was done in 10 days, the respondents should leave their families for that long. apart from the problem above, those teachers felt divided from their concern to improve their professionalism and to accompany their students’ learning process, as well as their families as an integral part of their life responsibility. meanhwile, the teachers understand how important it is to participate in tpd programs, they have already had enough understanding of the consequence, which often cannot be easily resolved. the teachers were faced with the tough discernment on their intrinsic motivation as a teacher against extrinsic motivation, for example to get incentives or a duty obligation. indeed, zein’s (2015) study discloses that tpd implementation in indonesia needs to be evaluated as teachers’ participations in tpd programs were often not professionally oriented. lack of information cilacap regency consists of 24 sub-districts with 275 junior high schools. although the 3 1 2 10 4 1 1 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 i did not have the prerequisites the program was too expensive. there was a lack of employer support. the program conflicted with my work schedule. i did not have time because of family responsibilities. there was no suitable program offered. i have a lack of information about the program. the challenges of tpd responses english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 47 department of education and culture of cilacap already distributed information about tpd programs through letters for every school or facebook and whatsapp group, the information given by the government may not be received and informed well by the teachers in the rural areas of cilacap regency. in this study, two teachers from the rural areas (jeruklegi and kawunganten) revealed that they often did not get enough information about tpd programs held by the teacher network in cilacap regency. moreover, this problem has a similarity with zein’s (2015) study which mentions that there were very limited and not widely accessible programs in rural areas (p. 8). a teacher shared an experience about one of her problems as follows. “state schools perhaps often get the information about mgmp; but, in this school we rarely get the invitation to follow mgmp. i think they prioritize the state schools rather than the private schools. i do not know whether this also happens to another school or not. however, this school hardly received the invitation.” (diane) diane saw that there was a gap between state schools and private schools in terms of information about tpd programs. in short, the information given by the teacher network was not distributed well. diane also described that if the teacher network meeting was done regularly, it would give some benefits since teachers could share about the teaching practices and materials that were used as a standard in the regency. indeed, as what soebari and aldridge (2016) mentioned in their study, the teacher network is expected to help teachers to obtain various models of teaching and learning materials. thus, they can prepare the students to be more creative, critical, and skilful. having lack of information about the teacher network meeting was found as disadvantaging her in teaching. for example, she said that she did not know the limitation (scope) of materials used for the mid semester test or even for the final test. she was just guessing and trying to look at the last year questions of the test. it could be inferred that the teachers needed tpd programs to support their teaching. however, in cilacap regency, some of the schools still required the printed invitation letter for the purpose of teacher network administration. when the distance of schools was quite far from the central government, it would also be quite difficult to send teachers the printed letters. this situation connects well with the findings from tanang and abu (2014), arguing that “the level of participation and motivation of teachers to share and disseminate the experience is interrupted by communication” (p. 29). tanang and abu (2014) are right in saying that the teachers’ motivation, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, were often compromised by the information distribution problems. whereas, teacher motivation is indeed one key factor that affect professional development (whitworth & chiu, 2015, p. 132). based on previous discussion, it is necessary to evaluate how the information of tpd programs is disseminated. it is because there are some teachers who do not have enough information of tpd programs so they cannot take a part on it. whereas, widodo and riandi (2013) argue that the success or failure of tpd programs depends on the participations of the teachers. when the teachers do not participate in tpd programs because of the lack of information, it leads to the failure of tpd programs and delays teachers’ professional development. as what rahman (2016) also mentions, the schools with low levels of social and economic conditions (those which are in the rural areas) should get the same information and assistance in tpd practices as the schools which have high levels of social and economic conditions. therefore, the government should pay attention to all the schools without exceptions. the government should also try to close the gap between teachers in rural and urban areas and also between state and private schools. opportunities to improve tpd programs after understanding the challenges found in tpd programs, the researchers tried to assess the opportunities in terms of teachers’ needs on the materials of tpd programs which were expected to be beneficial for them. eight classifications of materials are identified as the english teachers’ needs, namely, student assessment, classroom management, knowledge and understanding of english, content of performance standards, giving instruction, ict skills for teaching, teaching students with special learning needs, and school management and administration (see figure 4). 48 figure 4. needs assessment for tpd from figure 4, it could be seen that most of the teachers wanted to have more knowledge about students’ assessment and classroom management. this is partially in line with tanang and abu’s (2014) findings arguing that tpd programs are expected to focus on specific training for pedagogy, subject content knowledge, and classroom management which are appropriate to teachers’ current needs (p. 36). it was because in following tpd programs, the respondents usually only received materials about how to make lesson plans and general knowledge about the 2013 curriculum. this problem also occurred in zein’s (2015) research which depicts the situation when the teachers mostly got learning theories and had limited chances to learn the practical input. referring to the government tpd programs, which more often than not concerned with technicality and general knowledge, the respondents expected to have more practical training or workshop to develop their teacher professionalism. therefore, rather than predominantly focusing only on the theories, the participants infer that they should focus more on the real teaching practices. the other topic that did not catch the teachers’ interest was about teaching students with special learning needs; and, school management and administration. for the latter, only 11 respondents thought that it was necessary to learn about school management and administration. the following interview result gave clearer insights why learning about student assessment was important. “i was asked by a supervisor from the education office what remedial test was. i replied that for those who have already got scores above the average, the remedial test is used as enrichment. i usually divide the scores, but the supervisor said that it was wrong. instead, the supervisor said that we should only use the student’ highest score, without dividing the score.” (betty) it could be inferred that before betty was informed by the supervisor, she did not know how to assess students’ remedial tests correctly. thanks to tpd programs, betty is provided with feedback on how to assess students’ works and minimize such misunderstanding. the other teachers’ need for tpd relates with classroom management as it is expressed by marie. “as far as the classroom management is concerned, students’ misbehaviour in class has now also taken different forms. in the past, the students did not have smartphones. now, the students have smartphones, even for those living in the distant village. this really affects the teaching process in negative ways. therefore, we as teachers should be trained how to use smartphones for learning in the classroom. besides, we should be given a lesson how to handle the students to use smartphones properly. if there is such a workshop, we will know how to handle students” (marie). from this point, it is necessary for teachers to learn how to manage the classroom because that kind of problem does not only happen to one teacher. students may see gadgets or smartphones as tools which are exceptionally exciting. however, it can disturb the teaching and learning process if the students do not know how 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 2 3 4 3 1 4 1 7 1 7 1 5 1 4 1 2 1 0 1 1 4 2 2 4 3 3 2 3 c o n t e n t a n d p e r fo r m a n c e s t a n d a r d s s t u d e n t a s s e s s m e n t c la s s r o o m m a n a g e m e n t k n o w le d g e a n d u n d e r s t a n d in g o f e n g li s h g iv in g in s t r u c t io n ic t s k il ls f o r t e a c h in g t e a c h in g s t u d e n t s w it h s p e c ia l le a r n in g n e e d s s c h o o l m a n a g e m e n t a n d a d m in is t r a t io n te a c h e r s ' n e e d s 1 (strongly disagree) 2 (disagree) 3 (neutral 4 (agree) 5 (strongly agree) english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 49 to use the gadgets properly. besides, given the fact that the teachers also do not have enough opportunities to get the knowledge of how to cope with technology in the classroom, the teachers will always find the difficulties in managing the students. lazar (2015) clearly reveals that a teacher should be able to provide interesting and effective classroom activities using technology to motivate students in learning. tanang and abu (2014) are more comprehensive in seeing this classroom learning problem. workshop may be important, but more importantly is the teachers taking a good time to reflect about their educational practices. besides, they need “initial preparation in their methodologies, language fluency for teaching instruction, instructional materials, and strategy for classroom management before entering the class” (tanang & abu, 2014, p. 36). therefore, having peer mentoring or supervision from the principal was important so that the teachers do not only learn about the technicality, but also practicing and experiencing by themselves. thus, the teachers could learn more to develop themselves from the feedback given. from the above exploration regarding teachers’ needs for tpd, it is essential to understand the teachers’ needs first (bottom up) rather than simply providing trainings (topdown). this may not be simple as teachers’ needs may be different from one another, from one regions to different regions. in the same vein, zein (2015) explains that tpd programs designed by bureaucrats “often did not match the needs of the teachers as well as the contextual situations in which their work demonstrates the administrators’ narrow understanding of the depth of english language teaching” (p. 12). it is in line with the study by utami (2015) arguing that the government should do a little research regarding the teachers’ need so that the teachers can get expected materials from the programs offered. therefore, the government should be more aware of this situation and be able to provide programs suitable to teachers and students’ needs especially about classroom management and also how to integrate ict to the classroom discussion. conclusion this paper has demonstrated challenges and opportunities of tpd programs of the english teachers of junior high school in one of indonesia’s regencies. nonetheless, there are still some challenges facing the program implementation. the challenges are about the program timing, lack of information, and limitation of the programs. most teachers encountered a lot of challenges when the programs are organized during the working days due to family problems as well as additional workload problems for checking students’ assignments. therefore, it is critical for the government to understand what the teachers need and feel in following tpd programs. these measures can engender more meaningful tpd programs for the teachers in general. in terms of the research scope, this study investigated limited number of participants in one small region. therefore, other researchers can use this study as a reference to do further studies by including larger respondents and schools to accommodate richer data in different parts of indonesia. as an integral part of this study, the bottom-up approach by looking into the teachers’ needs to participate in tpd is also a key factor which requires further investigation in a larger scale. references banks, f., & mayes, a. s. 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(2015). factors affecting the professional development of elementary english teachers. professional development in education, 1-18. doi: 10.1080/19415257.2015.1005243. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee using cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading anit pranita devi department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: anit.pranita.d@gmail.com bachrudin musthafa department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: dinmusthafa@yahoo.com gin gin gustine department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: ggg@deakin.edu.au apa citation: devi, a. p., musthafa, b., & gustine, g. g. (2015). using cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 1-14 received: 16-02-2015 accepted: 01-04-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: this study investigates how cooperative learning facilitates students in learning critical thinking in reading and to find out the benefits and challenges during the implementation of cooperative learning in one vocational school in cimahi. a case study is utilized by using instruments of classroom observations, questionnaires, semi structured interview and students’ written tests. the findings show that the implementation of cooperative learning facilitates students develop their critical thinking and enhance critical thinking dispositions in reading. three features which contribute to the development of students’ critical thinking in reading are: the encouragement of student-student interaction; the provision of group purposes; and the provision of stimulus to the students’ development of thought and ideas. the aforementioned features promote benefits which involved higher motivation and involvement, increased opportunity for language use, and developed interpersonal relationship. nevertheless, these benefits are constrained by the availability of time, students’ english proficiency, and students’ contribution to the groupwork. it is recommended that further researchers conduct the similar study in a longer period to make sure that the key elements of cooperative learning are well-structured. keywords: cooperative learning, critical thinking in this 21st century as the age of information technology, there is a significant requirement of critical thinking skills in selecting and evaluating the reliability of the information (halpern, 1999; see also grabau, 2007; oliver & utermohlen, 2007). the ability to think critically is also considered essential in a democratic society (beyer, 1985) and thus pertinent in indonesia in which democratic era is now encountered. however, based on research, south-east asian (including indonesian) students are considered lacking of critical thinking skills and unaware of the importance of skills of analysis and critiques (egege & kutieleh, 2004; djiwandono, 2013 & wallace, 2003). this might be due to the 1 mailto:anit.pranita.d@gmail.com anit pranita devi, bachrudin musthafa & gin gin gustine using cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading fact that the basic skills essential to critical thinking is not typically taught in schools. therefore, questions on the subject of how to teach critical thinking skills in reading have been queried. since years ago, cooperative activities have been used for developing learners’ critical thinking (sharan, 1980). from an extensive literature review, it is found that cooperative learning is beneficial not only for developing students’ language acquisition, academic achievement, and social skills, but also may foster critical thinking skills (ghaith, 2003; sadeghi, 2012). this is linked to the characteristic of instruction that can improve critical thinking which promotes studentstudent interaction (see ten dam & volman, 2004). the essence of this interaction for learning is obviously approved by sharan (1980, p. 242) who states that “through the medium of this interaction and communication process within small groups cooperating on academic tasks that these team-learning methods strive to influence pupils' cognitive learning" (see also fahim & eslamdoost, 2014). in this sense, cooperative learning which promotes greater interaction between students (webb, 1982) has been frequently used to foster students’ critical thinking (cooper, 1995; johnson, johnson & smith, 1991; sharan, 1980). in line with the aforementioned statement, bligh (1986) mentions that discussing in groups is effective to stimulate thoughts and develop ideas (cited in dennick & exley, 1998). further, dennick & exley (1998) affirm that working in cooperative groups allow students to share divergent point of views, discuss ideas and communicate an issue with their peers. these activities could lead students to enhance their thought and ideas. moreover, elder & paul (2001) suggest a way to help students develop their critical thinking skills by introducing the idea about “purpose” into their classroom experiences since they believe that “critical thinking is thinking to some purpose”. it seems to be relevant to cooperative learning since when the students work in cooperative learning groups, they have group purpose to be achieved e.g. to make decision on the best response to the teacher’s questions. from this point of view, cooperative learning tasks may be one of the ways in developing students’ critical thinking as the students work in cooperative learning groups to achieve same goals. it is also supported by paul (1995) that many students do not read well because they do not think deeply about the purpose or the logic of it. specifically speaking, cooperative learning refers to the classroom instruction that involves students working in small groups to achieve same goals and optimize their own and each other’s learning (brown, 2001; johnson & johnson, 1999). however, cooperative learning is not simply making students work together in groups (jacobs & hall, 2002; johnson & johnson, 1999; murray & christinson, 2010). there are several key elements that make cooperative learning groups different from other types of group work. the elements need to be fulfilled. to implement a successful cooperative learning. these elements are (johnson, johnson, holubec & roy, 1984; jollife, 2007; johnson & johnson, 1999; johnson & johnson, 2009a; see also sadeghi, 2012): 1. positive interdependence exists when there is a positive correlation among individuals’ goal attainments; individuals perceive that they can attain their goals if and only if the other individuals with whom they are 2 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee cooperatively linked attain their goals” (johnson & johnson, 2009a, p. 366). positive interdependence can be established through mutual goals, division of task, division of materials, assigning roles, and giving joint rewards (johnson, johnson, holubec & roy, 1984). 2. face-to face (promotive) interaction occurs when students are taking action in responsible and honest ways, giving help and positive influence to other group members and making effort effectively to gain benefit and shared goals, providing feedback each other to improve their performance, challenging each other’s reasoning and conclusion, and exploring different perspectives of others. johnson & johnson (2009a) 3. individual and group accountability means that the members of a group learn together (slavin, 1988; johnson & johnson, 2000; see also ning, 2011) but they actually perform individually so that they are responsible for their own learning. to build this key element, teacher can use three methods (johnson, et al., 1984; johnson, johnson, & smith, 1998): providing individual test for the students; selecting randomly group members to present their group’s response to a question orally; and giving opportunity for student to present what they have learned to a classmate. 4. interpersonal and small group social skills exist when students learn how to work effectively in a group which has students with different level of knowledge and learning styles. they should have skills in leadership, decision-making, trust building and conflict management (ghaith, 2001; see also johnson & johnson, 2009a; sadeghi, 2012). 5. group processing takes place when group members are given time and procedure to evaluate the groupwork process that include deciding which actions were supportive and unsupportive and which actions to carry on or change (johnson & johnson, 2009a; see also johnson & johnson, 1999). through the five key elements of cooperative learning, students’ critical thinking could be facilitated. as a matter of fact, cooperative learning promotes critical thinking through dialogical instruction in which students are involved in a dialogue by arguing on different points of view (see paul, 1995). students have a lot of opportunities to brainstorm their insights and ideas, to express different points of view, to synthesize different information and to evaluate the solution. at the same time, discussing in cooperative groups also assist them become better listeners, speakers, readers, and writers. in this sense, cooperative learning has significant influence on the development of critical thinking. students could enhance their critical thinking as they share their learning in discussion and take responsibility for their own learning (totten, sills, digby, & russ, 1991, cited in gokhale, 1995). with respect to critical thinking term, it is defined in many ways. one of the most eminent definitions of critical thinking is mentioned by ennis (1991, p. 6). he defines critical thinking as “reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (see also ennis, 2011). he mentions that critical thinking, here, includes acts such as formulating hypotheses, different perspectives of viewing a problem, questions, possible solutions, and plans for examining something. 3 http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/jte/v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html?ref=sawos.org#totten, et al. anit pranita devi, bachrudin musthafa & gin gin gustine using cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading from another point of view, ryan (2003) suggests a definition of critical thinking as “the ability to collect, judge, and ultimately use information in an effective manner” (p.170). this includes analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. this statement is in the same vein with what reichenbach (2001, p.19) states that critical thinking is “the careful, deliberate determination of whether we should accept, reject, or suspend judgment about the truth of a claim or a recommendation to act in a certain way”. he mentions that it involves reasoning, reflection, and being practical. in the light of the aforementioned explanation about the definition of critical thinking from some experts, it can be affirmed that critical thinking is ability to identify, analyze, synthesize, examine, communicate and evaluate ideas in effective manner to make decision about what to believe or do. from that point of view, the concept of critical thinking seems to be relevant to the cooperative learning since cooperative learning activities may assist students to develop their critical thinking by having same group purpose, identify and analyze plenty of ideas from other group members, deciding important information for their groups, making decision of their group’s agreement, synthesizing information, and changing perspectives in the groups to make decision. furthermore, critical thinking also involves particular dispositions (ennis, 1991; 1996; 2011; reichenbach, 2001; emilia, 2005). “a disposition is a tendency to act or think in a certain way” (reichenbach, 2001, p.14). this study focuses on six critical thinking dispositions which mainly proposed by ennis (1991; 1996), reichenbach, (2001), and chaffee (2009) namely: 1) be openminded; consider other points of view than their own; (ennis, 1991; 1996; reichenbach, 2001); 2) take and change position when evidences are sufficient (ennis, 1991; 1996; reichenbach, 2001); 3) care to understand and present a position honestly and clearly including to discover and listen to others' view and reasons, be clear about the intended meaning of what is said, written, or otherwise communicated (ennis, 2011); 4) take into account others' feelings and level of understanding (ennis, 2011); 5) view situations from different perspectives (chaffee, 2009; cottrell, 2005); and 6) identify the argument and communicate author’s intended meaning of what is said and what is written (chaffee, 2009). method this study was aimed to answer two research questions: 1) how does the implementation of cooperative learning facilitate students in learning critical thinking in reading? 2) what are the benefits and challenges of the implementation of cooperative learning? this study employs qualitative case study design. a case study design has been considered appropriate, as this study, in line with one main characteristic of a case study, is concerned with a case on the implementation of cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading and the benefits and challenges found in the implementation of cooperative learning. moreover, like a case study, this study is carried out to investigate one particular instance of education (merriam, 1988; nunan, 1992) which is an eleventh grade classroom of english in a state vocational school in cimahi, west java. the classroom has 33 students as participants of this study. regarding 4 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the choice of the level, secondary level, it seems appropriate because the students will already have basic critical thinking skills from the perspective that they have more conceptual thinking than young learners do. the students were given treatment of three types of cooperative learning techniques (think-pair-share, jigsaw, and structured controversy) in six sessions and their critical thinking in reading was examined by critical reading tasks. these three techniques were used in order to represent the basic principles of cooperative learning mentioned previously and in conjunction with their benefits in developing students’ critical thinking in reading based on previous studies. triangulation technique by means of classroom observation, questionnaire, semi-structured interview with participants, and students’ written tasks were employed for collecting the data in this study. classroom observation was employed to gain data about the process of cooperative learning implementation in the classroom and to assure that the five principles of cooperative learning are conducted. the close-ended questionnaire was intended to find out the students’ point of view regarding the benefits and challenges of cooperative learning. interview was employed to elicit students’ opinions about the effects of cooperative learning on their critical thinking in reading and the benefits and challenges of cooperative learning in their perspectives. students’ written tests were employed to find out whether there is improvement of students’ critical thinking results and discussion the implementation of cooperative learning in facilitating students’ critical thinking in respect of the first research question, the result of data collection showed that students benefitted from the implementation of cooperative learning techniques used in this study since the three techniques (think-pair-share, jigsaw, structured controversy) helped them develop critical thinking and promote critical thinking dispositions in reading through the steps and through the five key elements of cooperative learning. the dispositions which are appeared and promoted in this study were be open-minded, consider other points of view than their own; take and change position when evidences are sufficient; present a position honestly and clearly; take into account others' feelings and level of understanding; and view situations from different perspectives. cooperative learning elements in facilitating students’ critical thinking positive interdependence positive interdependence was built mainly by role interdependence, resource/material interdependence, and goal interdependence. in think-pairshare technique, it was established by assigning different roles (roles interdependence) for students (e.g. as problem solver and listener). in jigsaw technique, it was structured by dividing materials to the group members (materials interdependence). meanwhile in structured controversy, it was established when students were given different texts regarding one topic (materials interdependence). goal interdependence was structured in the implementation of the three techniques by giving mutual goal for each group. the mutual goal in this context was to answer the teacher questions regarding the texts given or to write a group report containing the group’s agreement based on the discussion. by structuring positive interdependence, the students 5 anit pranita devi, bachrudin musthafa & gin gin gustine using cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading actively participated in the group discussions and were responsible for learning the materials. from the interview with the students, it was also found that all students contributed to the work of the cooperative group which automatically makes all students involved. this is in line with ryan (2003) who states that the development of students’ critical thinking can be promoted by leading the students to actively engage and involve in classroom activities. face-to-face promotive interaction face-to-face promotive interaction was established in the lesson by giving mutual goal for every group so that they could discuss their ideas to support and assist each other on the topic in their efforts in learning and to achieve their shared goal (johnson et al., 1991; johnson & johnson, 2009a). providing group purpose could bring promotive interaction out as well as promote students’ critical thinking. this is in line with a suggestion from elder & paul (2001) that a way to help students develop their critical thinking skills is to introduce the idea about “purpose” into their classroom experiences since they believe that “critical thinking is thinking to some purpose”. in the discussion process, it could be seen from the observation that each member of the group supported and assisted each other in their efforts in learning the topic and in achieving the same goal (johnson & johnson, 2009a). in think-pair-share, the mutual goal was to answer the teacher’s questions and to meet an agreement about the best response or solution to the teacher’s questions. in jigsaw, the mutual goal was that each member of the group had to understand the divided text so that all members tried to teach each other by explaining the materials clearly. meanwhile in structured controversy, the group goal was to meet a consensus and the best agreement with the justification in the end of the controversy activity. in the process of cooperative group discussion to achieve the mutual goal, the students tried to give help and positive influence to other group members and made effort effectively to gain benefit and shared goals, provided feedback each other, challenged each other’s reasoning and conclusion, and explored others’ different perspectives. individual accountability this element was built by giving the students individual task. individual accountability would be established when each individual performance is assessed (johnson & johnson, 2009a). furthermore, to increase individual accountability, the students were asked to jot down their ideas before turning to a partner and discussing the ideas. the importance of taking notes from the critical thinking point is to foster students’ metacognition or the control of their own thinking (costa, 2003 as cited in emilia, 2005). by structuring this element, each student was actively engaged in the discussions and contributed to the groupwork. small group and interpersonal skills small group and interpersonal skills element was built when the students were discussing and sharing ideas. students learned how to work effectively in a group which has different students with different level of proficiency and ideas. in the discussion process, the students learned to listen carefully and critically to each other in presenting their point of views and taking turns in presenting ideas. the 6 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee skills are essential in facilitating the student’s critical thinking development since a critical thinker has to see an issue not only from one single perspective but from multiple perspectives (chaffee, 2009). other than that, in the discussion to achieve their shared goal, the students also used their interpersonal and social skills such as decision-making which appeared when they decided to choose the best answer to the teacher questions and also conflict management when they have different opinion regarding the issue being discussed (ghaith, 2001; see also johnson & johnson, 2009a; sadeghi, 2012). this element was also structured when students challenged each other's perspective and defending their own position. they learned how to agree with another’s ideas. group processing this key element was established by giving the students time to write a reflective learning journal regarding things they learned from the teacher, from their friends, and from the groupwork, and things they need to improve (kagan & kagan, 2009). this element was essential for students to practice students’ critical thinking particularly on critical evaluation. it was also revealed that students’ critical thinking was developed gradually in every meeting evidenced by the quality of students’ responses in the reflective form. the assistance to students’ critical thinking it was revealed that the assistance of students’ critical thinking in reading development was achieved through three ways. the encouragement of student-student interaction one of characteristics of instruction that can improve critical thinking is one which promotes student-student interaction that (sharan, 1980; ten dam & volman, 2004; see also fahim & eslamdoost, 2014). in this study, the cooperative learning techniques (thinkpair-share, jigsaw, and structured controversy) were found effective in increasing the interaction between students. interaction between students was increased when they had more opportunities to share with peers, when they accomplished task together and when they expressed their ideas and share what they had learned to their friends. accordingly, the active participation of the students was also enhanced. in think-pair-share, for example, the students had to share their thoughts on the given questions with their pairs before sharing to the whole class. this kind of interaction can help to sharpen their thinking and problem solving skills. furthermore, in structured controversy technique, the students interacted when they learned their position with their partner, presented their position to the opposing view, discussed the issue, and reached a decision for their group. in these interactions, conflict among their ideas, opinions, perspectives and conclusions are unavoidable and further could enhance students’ thinking skills (johnson & johnson, 1993; see also johnson & johnson, 1988). the following interview excerpts show that the students felt their active participation and critical thinking were improved. 7 anit pranita devi, bachrudin musthafa & gin gin gustine using cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading s1: we participated more actively so i could solve the problems. s2: in my opinion, i was more active. because we had our own role. the excerpt illustrates that cooperative learning gave the student opportunity to participate actively in classroom instruction since all students were given roles. the provision of group purpose as mentioned previously, one of characteristic of instruction which can foster students’ critical thinking is providing purposes. in cooperative learning, every cooperative group has its own mutual goal such as making decision on the best answer or responses to the teacher question, writing group report regarding group position on the issue being discussed. in this context, the teacher structured the cooperative instruction so that the students were aware of their common goals. the following example was taken from students’ reflective learning journal. i have learned to collaborate with my group, even though my group divided by two, we must respect to our opponent in debate. after we do the debate, we must find the conclusion and become one group again. i think it is fun and make solid the group. the excerpt above illustrated that the student was aware of the goal of the group which was to find the conclusion and to meet an agreement in the group even though they had to argue and attack each other’s ideas beforehand. the stimulus to the development of thought and ideas students who are engaging in cooperative learning lesson will be stimulated to develop their thinking (see johnson & johnson, 1988; 1993). bligh (1986) mention that discussing in groups is effective to stimulate thoughts and develop ideas (cited in dennick & exley, 1998). the development of thought and ideas in cooperative learning is inevitable. in this study, students were encouraged to develop their ideas as the students interacted, shared opinions, solved problems, synthesized information, rebutted position, questioned different perspectives, and made decision on an issue. from the questionnaire, 100 % of the students stated that their thinking and development of ideas were honed through cooperative learning techniques. in addition to that, by listening to other’s ideas on an issue, the stimulus to the development of ideas was also increased since the students were able to see other alternatives of solving a problem or respond to a question. in this view, the students could also refine their thinking and decision making. it was also reported from the questionnaire that 86 % of students thought that cooperative learning techniques could develop their problem-solving skills and 90 % of the students stated that they also could develop their decision making skills through cooperative learning. it could be confirmed by students’ statement from the interview. s4: in my opinion, in the groupwork, we could be braver to express or give opinions based on our thought. we were able to know other’s perspectives. so we do not see an issue from only one side) s5: …we could understand other’s view point on an issue finally, 95 % of the students stated that their critical thinking was also developed through cooperative learning techniques the result of students’ written tests the students’ written test was intended to reveal the development of students’ critical thinking in reading. the 8 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee students’ written test involves pre-test and post-test. the students were given a text and they had to answer critical reading questions regarding the text. in calculating the data, paired t-test was employed to reveal the significance of the difference between the means of pretest and posttest. the following table shows the statistical computation of the scores. table 1 paired samples test paired differences t df sig. (2tailed) mean std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 pretest posttest -19.091 5.976 1.040 -21.210 -16.972 -18.352 32 .000 the paired t-test, as presented in table 1 above, shows that there was difference between pretest and posttest scores for sig 0.00 < 0.05. the t-value (t=18.352, df.= 32, p= .000) was more than the alpha (.05). it indicates that the null hypothesis (h0) was rejected, meaning that there was significant difference between the students’ critical reading ability between pretest and posttest scores. in other words, the students’ critical reading abilities were improved after the students were taught by using cooperative learning techniques. however, the overall results of the statistical value could not be claimed as the effect of the instruction since this study only involved one single group and there was an absence of control group (hatch and farhady, 1982). the results of students’ written tests were only used for descriptive purpose only, that is to show the description of how the cooperative learning techniques could facilitate students’ critical reading abilities in general, not as the core of main findings to be exposed. nonetheless, to reduce the issue of the internal validity in this particular data, the research had employed multiple sources of data as discussed earlier. the figures appeared in the result of the written tests were not interpreted in isolation. benefits of and challenges to the implementation of cooperative learning in relation to the second research question, this study revealed that the implementation of cooperative learning had given some benefits and challenges. the benefits  higher involvement and motivation based on the findings of this study, it was revealed that the students were more motivated in learning and involved more actively in the teaching learning process. firstly, based on the questionnaires, 94 % of students stated that they were more motivated in teaching learning process by cooperative learning techniques. regarding this, all interviewees also thought that they were motivated by cooperative learning. moreover, regarding students’ active involvement, it was found from the questionnaire that 97% of the students stated that they had more active participation in cooperative learning lessons. these findings support numerous research studies which suggest that cooperative learning leads to higher motivation and active participation. (see dorneiy, 1997; johnson & johnson, 2009b). 9 anit pranita devi, bachrudin musthafa & gin gin gustine using cooperative learning in teaching critical thinking in reading increased opportunity for language use besides promoting higher motivation and involvement, it was found that the implementation of three cooperative learning techniques was likely to increase the opportunity for students to use english. based on the questionnaire, 97% of the students agreed that their language skills were improved in cooperative learning. this improvement was unavoidable since the students have to use english in the interaction in their groups. in this context, the students not only practiced the language in reading but also in their language skills particularly speaking and listening. during their groupworks, the students were always encouraged to use english in their interaction. in addition to that, based on classroom observation, it was found that the students mostly used english in their interaction in the cooperative learning groups. in this sense, they speak, listen, read, and write in english during their interaction. thus, the exposure to english is subsequently increased in the instruction. this interaction is useful for language learning since it contributes to second language acquisition (pica, young, & doughty, 1987). developed interpersonal relationship the development of interpersonal relationships through cooperative learning can be established through building and maintaining friendship between peers and learning from others (johnson & johnson, 1999). with respect of the development of interpersonal relationship, two main categories of interpersonal relationship were revealed. they were 1) maintaining groupwork by positive interdependence; and 2) listening and appreciating other’s point of view. based on questionnaire, 97% of the students agreed that in cooperative learning, they always supported and helped each other in learning the material. this finding showed that the positive interdependence among them was built. the challenges availability of time the first challenge found in the implementation of cooperative learning was the time of learning. based on the questionnaire, 69 % of students stated that they lack of time in cooperative learning lesson. 100 % of interviewee also confirmed this in the interview. in indonesian vocational school, the time of learning english for tenth grade students is 2 x 45 minutes in a week. as a matter of fact, this time of learning was considered less to have students master all critical reading skills well. students’ english proficiency the second challenge in this study dealt with students’ english proficiency. four students in the interview admitted that the lack of language proficiency such as limited vocabularies, grammar, and pronunciation was their obstacle in the instruction. this challenge hindered the students in understanding the text comprehensively and in expressing their opinions. students’ contribution to the groupwork the third challenge dealt with the students’ contribution to the work of the group. students may not know what to do in their groups (jacobs, 2006). based on the questionnaire, 22% of the students stated that they did not know how to work in their groups. furthermore, the students contributed little or nothing to the group work. this might happen due to unclear instruction from the teacher. thus, it was also revealed that the 10 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee teacher's role as a facilitator has not been optimal since the teacher should facilitate students to work effectively in the groups. conclusion on the basis of classroom observation, students’ written tests, questionnaire and interview, the data indicated that, despite some limitations, the cooperative learning appeared to facilitate students’ to learn critical thinking in reading and promoted students’ critical thinking dispositions. the facilitated students’ critical thinking dispositions were be open-minded, consider other points of view than their own; take and change position when evidences are sufficient; present a position honestly and clearly; take into account others' feelings and level of understanding; and view situations from different perspectives. data from students’ written tests also gave evidence that students’ critical reading abilities improved during the teaching learning process in the classroom. this study also revealed three features which contributed to students’ critical thinking development. firstly, the implementation of cooperative learning encouraged student-student interaction. secondly, cooperative learning provided group purposes that the students could work in their groups and structured positive interdependence to achieve their common goals. thirdly, the students’ development of thought and ideas was also stimulated in the implementation of cooperative learning as they are engaging in discussions, sharing their thoughts and present their ideas. finally, it was also indicated in this study that the teacher’s role as a facilitator in cooperative learning has not been optimal to get the students to work in groups effectively. there were still some unclear instructions that made some students confused about what to do and reluctant to contribute the work of the group. the limited time was also regarded to cause teacher’s lack of monitoring. due to the fact that the teacher had limited time to monitor all groups, some students also used their native language in the group discussion whereas they were encouraged to use english. based on the findings of this study, which may not be generalized to other settings, it is suggested for teachers that the teaching of cooperative learning and critical thinking is intensively implemented in all levels of study from primary to tertiary levels. for further researchers, it is suggested to conduct similar studies in longer period to make sure that the key elements of cooperative learning are well-structured and in larger scale to gain more various and detailed data. references beyer, b. k. 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(1982). student interaction and learning in small groups. review of educational research, 52(3), 421-445. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/00346543052 003421 14 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 61 language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis saniago dakhi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kristen indonesia email: saniagonias@gmail.com horas hutabarat english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kristen indonesia email: anggiat.mananda@yahoo.co.id apa citation: dakhi, s., & hutabarat, h. (2018). language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 61-74. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1496. received: 17-08-2018 accepted: 23-10-2018 published: 01-12-2018 abstract: the linguistic feature distinction between written and spoken discourse, like scientific writing, narrative text, discussion text, oral speech, etc. has been a longstanding discussion among scholars. however, there is limited number of studies on indonesian undergraduate thesis context. this article reports the language effectiveness, i.e. lexical density and grammatical complexity of undergraduate thesis using the flesch’s analysis of the readability of adult reading materials (1974) and the determinant factors influencing them. this descriptive study, applying online system application, was conducted in an indonesian pseudonym university. forty-two undergraduate theses were used as data source of lexical density and grammatical complexity, and four english lecturers participated on interview. results showed that the average lexical density ratio was 42.14 and the grammatical complexity was 14.54. on the other hand, the determinant factors of academic writing holistically encompass; (1) psychological factors including identity awareness, motivation, and conceptual competency, (2) sociocultural factor covering personal experience, and (3) linguistic factors, namely linguistic awareness and application, and mechanical competency. to sum up, three important conclusions are drawn. firstly, there is no exactly the same lexical density and grammatical complexity across chapters of the undergraduate theses. secondly, the undergraduate theses are lexically acceptable, but grammatically are not as they are interpreted as american students’ slick fiction product. finally, variables affecting academic writing are not only linguistic factors, but also psychological and sociocultural ones. keywords: lexical density; grammatical complexity; undergraduate thesis; indonesian context; academic writing; language effectiveness. introduction language effectiveness has been a longstanding study among scholars as it is believed that written and spoken discourse, caused by the characteristics and dynamics of living language (dakhi, 2011), are two different linguistic entities (halliday, 1989; zhang, 2013; ghasemi & jahromi, 2014; & thanh, 2015). functionality discrepancies and linguistic features (ghasemi & jahromi, 2014) define their similarity. the undergraduate thesis, a writing product in which language effectiveness necessitates as it has its own typical features (pan, 2016), is simply defined as a communicative, efficient, and effective occurrence since textuality standards and grammatical complexity/intricacy, lexical density, nominalization, explicitness, contextualization, spontaneity, and repetition-hesitation and redundancy are met. additionally, it generally contains a mailto:saniagonias@gmail.com mailto:anggiat.mananda@yahoo.co.id saniago dakhi & horas hutabarat language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis 62 generic structure, i.e. introduction (pardede, 2012). literature review (levy & ellis, 2006), methodology, research finding, discussion, conclusion, and suggestion. moreover, it requires a complexly-integrated skill (deane, et al., 2008) as it is a metacognitive process drawing an individual’s knowledge, basic skill, strategies, and ability to coordinate multiple processes (huy, 2015) and expressive, receptive, and reflective capabilities. a number of empirical studies testify the urgent need of the language effectiveness of undergraduate thesis, a new defined linguists' focus. it, for instance, is evidenced by stegan (2003) investigating the lexical density in oral and versus written rangi texts, seyabi and tuzlukova (2014) reporting the post-basic school and university students’ lexical items and content, chokwe (2013) researching academic writing skills, and huy (2015) confirming the student’s writing problems, i.e. lexical item and grammar. more specifically, signes and arroita (2015), marques (2008), and biber, gray, and stamples (2016) studied lexical density and investigated grammatical complexity. in indonesia, studies on lexical density and grammatical complexity have been only reported by nesia and ginting (2018) and adawiyah (2015). however, nesia and ginting (2018) focused their study on the lexical density in english reading texts for indonesian senior high school, and adawiyah (2015) differentiated the lexical density in scientific and narrative texts. a study exploring the thesis quality in accordance with written discourse characteristics, therefore, has to be taken into account. the present study is to provide such need. it was designed to objectively describe the lexical density (halliday, 1985; flesch, 1974), grammatical complexity (halliday, 1985; flesch, 1974) and factors influencing scientific writing (muchemwa, 2015) of english undergraduate theses of an indonesian pseudonym private university. method to answer objectively the research questions, 42 undergraduate theses of a pseudonym private university in indonesia were used as the data source of lexical density and grammatical complexity. the reason for selecting these 42 theses, consisting of 2015 and 2016's undergraduate theses, is because those are the only softcopies of project reports available. in addition, 4 informants participated on an interview, a technique to collect the data regarding the factors affecting undergraduate thesis. the selected four informants were all full-time english lecturers with different time teaching experiences. their experience teaching english as well as supervising the undergraduate theses were other reasons for the selection of the respondents. the full texts of undergraduate thesis containing five chapters, namely introduction, literature review, research methodology, research finding and discussion, and conclusion and suggestions, were entirely analyzed using online system application at http://textalyser.net/index.php?lang=en#anal ysis (for lexical density) offered by the bernhard huber internet engineering company and http://www.readabilityformulas.com/freetest s/six-readability-formulas.php (for grammatical complexity). the introduction section is the chapter i (henceforth c1), the literature review is the chapter ii (henceforth c2), the research methodology is the chapter iii (henceforth c3), the research finding and discussion is the chapter iv (henceforth c4), and the conclusion and suggestion is the chapter v (henceforth c5). scores taken and descriptively analyzed were mean length of sentence (henceforth mls) for grammatical complexity and flesch’s reading ease score for grammatical one. furthermore, both lexical density and grammatical complexity scores were tabulated according to what year, 2015 and 2016, the english undergraduate theses completed. at last, they were interpreted http://www.readabilityformulas.com/freetests/six-readability-formulas.php http://www.readabilityformulas.com/freetests/six-readability-formulas.php english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 63 using flesch’s (1974) analysis of the readability of adult reading materials and related theories. table 1. flesch’s analysis of the readability of adult reading materials style flesch reading ease score average sentence length in words average no. of syllable per 100 words type of magazine estimate school grade completed estimate percent of u.s. adults very easy 90 to 100 8 or less 123 or less comics 4 th grade 93 easy 80 to 90 11 131 pulp fiction 5 th grade 91 fairly easy 70 to 80 14 139 slick fiction 6 th grade 7 th or 8 th grade 88 standard 60 to 70 17 147 digests some high school 83 fairly difficult 50 to 60 21 155 quality high school 54 difficult 30 to 50 25 167 academic high school or some college 33 very difficult 0 to 30 29 or more 197 or more scientific college 4.5 an in-depth interview data was analyzed using thematic technique, a process to analyze the classifications and present themes (alhojailan, 2012) of obtained qualitative data. three steps were conducted, namely data reduction, data display, and verification/conclusion drawing. to establish the trustworthiness of the research finding, some techniques were employed. for the lexical density and grammatical complexity, repeated measures on the manuscripts, three times, were conducted to assure dependability of the data. on the other hand, for interview data verification by repeating a similar question to the participants during the interview was conducted. at last, a peer scrutiny of project and member check by the peer review members who were officially assigned has been applied to meet the credibility of the finding. results and discussion lexical density table 2. lexical density of 2015’s thesis c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 max 57.20 60.00 61.50 46.70 68.20 min 44.20 33.50 32.40 21.90 40.50 mean 51.32 43.73 39.48 26.33 53.53 as shown in table 2, the c1 mean lexical density of 2015’s thesis is 51.32. this is 7.59 higher than c2’s, 43.73 (difficult), 11.48 higher than c3’s, 39.48 (difficult), and 24.99 higher than c4’s, 26.33 (very difficult). regardless of that, c5’s mean lexical density is the highest one. it is 53.53 (fairly difficult) or 2.21 higher than c1’s. referring to the flesch’s table, specifically to what grade they are interpreted in american student’s writing, those 5 units can be categorized into three different groups. the first and fifth chapters are american high school category, meant written by american high school students. the second and third chapters, respectively literature review and research methodology, are estimated as american high school or some college learners’ product. furthermore, the research finding and discussion section is grouped into their college students’ writing. this is to say that the literature review, research methodology, and research findings and discussion sections according to genre of flesch’s table are lexically accepted as academic and scientific discourse. table 3. lexical density of 2016’s thesis c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 max 59.90 61.20 53.10 53.70 64.60 min 21.30 33.30 30.30 12.20 23.40 mean 48.03 43.75 39.55 22.70 53.01 saniago dakhi & horas hutabarat language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis 64 though the 2015’s and 2016’s lexical density are academically acceptable, they show a slight difference. the 2015’s lexical density is 42.88, or 1.47 higher than 2016’s (41.14). moreover, the introduction, literature review, and conclusion and suggestion sections of the 2016’s got improved. hence, this indicates that the 2016’s undergraduate theses lexical density got better. the previous description has made two crucial implications of the findings. they are dealt with the highest and lowest lexical density, and the diversity of lexical density across the writers and undergraduate thesis chapters. it can be stated that both the 2015's and 2016's literature review sections possess the lowest lexical density, the best, and their introduction sections, a piece of discourse which introduces a lengthy discourse, a project report, a laboratory report or even student essay (stapa, maasum, & aziz, 2014), own the highest ones, the worst. thus, this implies twofold. firstly, regardless of the systematic procedure of literature review (supriya et al., 2018), theories and previous studies, sources of literature review, primarily predict indonesian efl undergraduate's lexical density. it was caused by the fact that the literature synthesis helps the writers develop a knowledge base (apostolou, dorminey, hassell, & rebele, 2018) in writing the undergraduate thesis. secondly, the position of the introduction section at the beginning of the scientific report, presumably reviewed more frequently and intensively, does not affect lexical density. finally, the diversity of lexical density indices across the writers and undergraduate thesis chapters obviously approves the dynamics of any living languages (dakhi, 2016). it means that words have widely varying frequencies of use. thus, it is natural to have different lexical density across the writers and undergraduate thesis chapters. a similar finding strengthens the nature of that lexical density. reported by demir-vegter, aarts, and kurvers (2013), it was claimed that there was also a lexical diversity in maternal input to turkish preschoolers in the netherlands. more importantly, a report by nesia and ginting (2018) on lexical density of english reading texts for indonesian senior high school showed a difference with the present report. they reported that the lexical density of explanative texts were 58.42% and 52.05%; review texts were 55.73% and 53.51%; narrative texts were 48.96% and 43.97%; and discussion texts were 47.79% and 42.57%. discussing the different realization of the lexical density among the data sources is interesting. it is assumed that the difference is mainly caused by genres of the data source. naturally, academic genre is lexically densed. the data source of the present report was the undergraduate theses, academic genre, while their sources were the english reading texts for senior high school in indonesia. an additional report confirming the lexical density of the academic text is adawiyah (2015). her/his study was to differentiate lexical density between scientific and narrative texts. it was discovered that the lexical density of scientific texts (49.4% and 50.2%) were higher than the narrative ones (41.0% and 40.8%). grammatical complexity table 4. grammatical complexity of 2015’s thesis c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 max 18.72 20.32 16.88 16.45 17.05 min 13.25 11.51 9.47 8.00 10.21 mean 15.93 15.58 12.89 11.75 14.64 as shown in table 4 that the mean mls index of the c1 of the 2015’s thesis is 15.93 (fairly easy), received the most grammatical complexity. respectively, c2, c5, c3, and c4 are 15.58 (fairly easy), 14.64 (fairly easy), 12.89 (easy), and 11.75 (fairly easy), the least grammatical complexity. the data implies that, firstly, grammatical complexity of the chapter of the 2015's english undergraduate theses is standard, fairly difficult, difficult, and very difficult category. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 65 secondly, the mlses of c1, c2, and c5 are categorized as fairly easy, and the mlses of c3 and c4 are easy. consulting the flesch’s table, therefore, the introduction, literature review, and conclusion and suggestion sections of the 2015’s equal to the 6th-8th american graders’ writing. on the other hand, the mlses of the 2016’s english undergraduate theses are displayed in table 5. it shows that the mlses of c1, c5, c2, c4, and c3 are respectively 16.86 (fairly easy), 16.45 (fairly easy), 16.06 (fairly easy), 12.64 (easy), and 12.56 (easy). it means the introduction section, educational writing genre (kawase, 2015) received the most grammatical complexity, and the methodology section was the least one. table 5. grammatical complexity of 2016’s thesis c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 max 20.36 20.11 16.45 19.23 19.82 min 13.68 13.34 8.66 7.01 11.65 mean 16.86 16.06 12.58 12.64 16.45 the average mls of c1, c2, c3, c4, and c5 of both 2015 and 2016’s mls is respectively 16.40 (fairly easy), 15.82 (fairly easy), 12.74 (easy), 12.20 (easy), and 15.55 (fairly easy). comparing the mlses of both 2015 and 2016’s english undergraduate theses suggests some important implications. firstly, both the introduction sections of 2015 and 2016’s theses had the highest grammatical complexity. secondly, the entire mls of 2016’s undergraduate theses, except c3, are greater than those of 2015’s, statistically evidenced by the deviated mean mls of 2015 (14.16) and 2016’s (14.92) theses, 0.76. thirdly, such finding syntactically testifies the graduate’s english writing growth. though the current study did not focus on reasons for the grammatical complexity growth in 2016’s english undergraduate theses, it is obvious that sentence length is a robust measure of sentence structure (vieira, picoli, & mendes, 2018). this means that the growth of the mls predicts undergraduate’s improved writing. furthermore, such mls growth confirms that language is basically systematic and learnable (dakhi, 2016). additional factor making the finding reasonable is learners' cognitive diversity. obviously, students have different abilities. in this regard, it is normal that mlses of 2015 and 2016’s graduates’ writing ability are different. some similar findings showing the learners’ different skill. muslim (2014) reports that efl students’ writing ability was significantly different and bauerly and gottwald (2009) find that the complexity level of fluent and stuttered utterances produced by children was significantly different exemplify it. however, the grammatical complexity growth of the 2016’s theses did not meet mls standard of academic discourse. consulting table 1, the 2016’s undergraduate theses are identical to the 6th graders of american products. therefore, this strengthens pan’s claim (2016) that academic writing is grammatically complex. similar evidence of the complexity of the writing was reported by javed, wu, and nazli (2013) that the overall performance of all their research respondents was better in comprehension as compared to other subskills, namely word completion, sentence making/syntax, tenses/grammar, and handwriting. in a different context, ling and ling (2008) confirmed the writing complexity by arguing that international students in a canadian university passed twe (test of written english) after repeatedly doing it. relating lexical density and grammatical complexity relating the lexical density and grammatical complexity shows the 2015's language effectiveness of undergraduate thesis, i.e. lexical density (42.88) and grammatical complexity (14.16) and the 2016’s i.e. lexical density (41.41) and (14.92). the 2015’s lexical density consulted with flesch’s theory shows that they are fairly difficult and are estimated written by some american high school students. on the other hand, its mls index (14.16) is fairly easy, saniago dakhi & horas hutabarat language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis 66 produced by the sixth american graders. the 2016’s lexical density is difficult and estimated written by high school or some college american students, and its mls index is identical to the 2015’s. averagely, the lexical density is 42.14 and grammatical density is 14.54. interestingly, lexical density interpreted as a high school or some college of american student’s product, deviating the mls, is a sixth american grader’s product. one of the reasons what mls makes low is what saaristo (2015) reported. he argued grammar understood as a metalinguistic set of (also normative) statements of regularities in language, which is the way most students think of grammar, results in the bad grammatical complexity of the undergraduate thesis. this is due to the fact that in writing process, grammar is obliged to be a skill, that is something that we have to do and practice, not a knowledge. however, some techniques to improve the mls, though it lowers the lexical density, is the use of direct speech, frequent use of opening and closing devices, of connectives, of copula and of pronouns (stegan, 2003). conversely, an effective way to improve lexical density is through vocabulary mastery. regardless of l2 lexical density proficiency has a differential impact on efl learners' summary writing (baba, 2009), lexical items still hold a crucial role in language proficiency. it is because vocabulary is a basis for communicating either in verbal or nonverbal forms. referring to this, meeting the received lexical density requires lexical sophistication, diversity, and richness. factors influencing language effectiveness identity awareness it was reported personal consciousness and awareness as english lecturers, professional identity, led to a complete comprehension of some academic efforts developing teaching skills, particularly language skills, language teaching, and ict. the academic activities, the action, including conducting research, attending scientific seminars, workshops, and conferences, reading, and designing teaching equipment make the lecturers’ responsibilities concrete. a similar research finding reported that the participants, in the process of gaining self-awareness and selfknowledge, experienced themselves as approaching professional situations in new ways, gained theories and methods, which they consider as useful in understanding their every-day professional practices and showed a change in their experience of “who they are” as professionals. this, defining the role of identity awareness in a workplace, can be seen in the themes “awareness of personal resonance”, “awareness personal point of reference”, and in “situational awareness,” (andrén, 2012). importance of self-awareness in learning has been a longstanding study. oscarson (2009) discovered both teachers and students considered student self-assessments as contributing valuable additional information to ordinary tutoring and testing. ghamari and khatib (2011) reported that there was a mutual and dynamic relationship between identity and language learning. furthermore, in chemistry teaching, alkan and erdem (2014) also confirmed that there was relationship between metacognitive awareness, competency perception, and teacher self-efficacy. oyserman, elmore, and smith (2012) stated identities are the traits and characteristics, social relations, roles, and social group memberships. in this regard, the personal identity awareness and profession as english lecturer, playing a central role, define the roles, consequently determine the efforts saving the lecturer’s face. the core definition of identity, furthermore, is manifested into three main domains. it consists of the past-what used to be true of one, the present-what is true of one now, or the future-the person one expects or wishes to become, the person one feels obligated to try to become, or the person one fears one may become. the past refers to efl learners' learning quality from which they acquire the true knowledge. the english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 67 present is concerned with students' current efforts in efl learning either in classrooms or at home. finally, the future is defined as the efl learners’ dreams and expectations. personal experience no denies that experience as the best teacher; therefore is a final and validated truth shared to any individuals’ frame of reference. in learning language context, more specifically writing, experience is viewed as a schemata. the schemata is a pre-existing knowledge of the world, a collection of a concept including background knowledge of content, text structure, and hierarchical organization of the text (fushan, 2014). the schemata is enormously useful in efl learning. there have been many scientific studies testifying it. according to ferdipour and delavar (2011) the schemata, parts of macrostructure of text, have a significant effect on written communication. still about the schemata, radzi and aziz (2014) discovered that content schemata had influenced the learners’ text comprehension. on efl teaching, conversely, the experience deals with teaching experience. efl teachers’ various experiences hold a key role in influencing efl learners' behavior. thus, an account for types of experience and teacher professionalism is interesting since different teachers have different experiences and then different orientations in teaching. reported by louws, meirink, veen, and van driel (2017), an evidence of different experiences resulting in different teaching orientations, earlyand late-career teachers showed greater preference to learn about classroom management compared to mid-career. however, only insightful and useful teaching is needed to accomplish efl learning objectives. the insightful and useful teaching experiences are products of reflective thinking. supported by afshar and farahani (2015), they claimed there was a significant positive correlation between reflective teaching and reflective thinking. it indicates that the insightful and useful efl teaching experience are positively obtained through teachers’ reflective thinking. according to the present study, attractiveness, revision, feasibility, and practicality of literacy skills result in the teaching and learning interest, consequently becoming stored into a longterm memory forming the teaching english writing. some related studies support such findings. the attractiveness predicted well-being and social connectiveness (plaut, adams & anderson, 2009); subsequently influenced the great physical and psychological health, student-student interaction and studentteacher interaction. views on revision or reversibility role in writing have, although, changed dramatically over the last two decades, revision and its strategies still hold a vital role in writing process. this is in line with woo, chu, and li’s (2013) argument that peer-feedback sheds light on influence of peer-feedback, one of the strategies of revision, on the writing process. automated writing evaluation (awe), another strategy on revision, is helpful for esl writers to improve linguistic accuracy (li, link, & hegelheimer, 2015). however, an account for reviewer and peer-feedback provider has to be considered as only experienced writers can do it. reported by calkin (2018), it was explained since the writing is an inner behavior, only the writer could observe and review it. moreover, feasibility study on language learning, a procedure to predict outcome of an investigation examination, or assessment of a planned schema along with possible gain (mukherjee & roy, 2017), holds an important role in deciding whether there is possibility to achieve the learning outcomes. study on the importance of feasibility studies has been conducted by wuest et al. (2015) and by organisation for economic co-operation and development or oecd (2013) reminding that feasibility is not an end in itself, but rather a stimulus to deeper professional dialogue on desired learning outcomes and the teaching approaches needed to achieve them. learning feasibility saniago dakhi & horas hutabarat language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis 68 adopted from mukherjee and roy (2017) comprises technical, economic, legal, and operational feasibility. finally, practicality is assumed as a determinant factor of the well-planned execution of writing project in efl context. pouliot (2008) explored three dimensions of practicality: instrumental rationality (logic of consequences), norm-following (logic of appropriateness), and communicative action (logic of arguing). motivation it is believed something getting done is highly influenced by the degree of the needs possibly met (maslow, 1954), a psychological factor (dwihandini, marhaeni, & suamajaya, 2013). rasekh and barati (2014) confirmed that motivation contributes to the learning environment, teachers, techniques, and the material. according to dakhi and damanik (2018) curiosity (92.22%), challenge (83%), compliance (77.67%), competition in reading (77.50%), reading importance (73.33%), reading involvement (72.50%), recognition (68.33%), reading for grades (67.08%), reading efficacy (59.44%), avoidance (59.17), and social reason (55.56) are motivation variables of tenth graders at sma negeri 55, jakarta. another factor making someone motivated to do something is feedback. feedback provision through teaching, a need for improving the hard skill and pedagogic skill, motivates the teacher of english writing. the feedback is viewed as an information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, experience) regarding aspects of one’s performance or understanding. although feedback has a powerful influence on learning and achievement, its type produces different output (hattie & timperley, 2007). three factors predict an evaluative feedback, tested by azzam and whyte (2018), are delivery strategy, accuracy, and type (positive/negative). therefore, strategy on how to provide the feedback has to be taken into account by english teachers. one of the strategies enhancing the feedback quality is by applying a web application, the minute feedback system (mfs). barrett, et al. (2018) reported that about 98.6% of students (138 women, 140 men) used mfs. they asked the feedback more from faculty (26.3 requests per individual) compared to trainees (16.4 requests per individual). on the contrary, a responsibility being a lecturer and of course learner, the duty, has driven the teaching writing. it is viewed as a bundle of obligations associated with a job or function, like teacher and leaner of writing teaching, as narrowly defined as a role, job description, by which function is described. as francis (2012) stated teachers have the charge to set environmental conditions for the learner, the teacher is the key external component, collaborating with the student to encourage, cultivating and drawing out the student’s motivation to learn, the responsibility is clearly defined. thus, teaching and learning writing is a social responsibility (sihem, 2013). furthermore, teaching boredom, another motivation variable, on the other hand, puts an action on the meaningless and unattractive struggle of process of a possible background of the undergraduate thesis lexical density and grammatical complexity. though boredom is defined as an interrelated and inseparable emotional, motivational, perceptual and cognitive concomitants, it serves to encourage people to seek new goals and experiences and provides a valuable adaptive function by signalling its time to pursue a goal of a writing project (bench & lench, 2013). lastly, an experience, problem-solving, and role model to be an objective examiner have totally met the needs in teaching and learning writing. according to the present study, it revealed, surprisingly, no negative external motivation implying the threat absence as the positive external is practiced, but positive internal and negative internal ones exist. the feedback provision, responsibility, duty, loyalty, and good team-work function english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 69 as the positive external motivation, and experience, role model and objective examiner are treated as positive internal motivation through which positive motivation dominates over the negative one. moreover, the boredom, e.g. meaningless and unattractive teaching and learning academic writing meets the negative internal motivation. linguistic awareness and application any living languages have vocabulary and system of structure, a theoretical background language learnability claim as learning by system has made teaching possible, a basic element of language teaching and language production. linguistic awareness consists in the mental recognition, a state of knowing the cultural features of both spoken and written discourse hidden in linguistic manifestation, the acceptable application and its mutual connection with the other studies. ideally, a good theoretical concept understanding is definitely appropriately interpreted into an acceptably correct application, i.e. spoken and written discourse linguistic features differ. consequently "learning language" and "learning about the language" are obviously traced for which grammar as skill application in the scientific undergraduate thesis, not as science, is entirely executed. mahadouche (2010) confirms writing awareness difficulty contributes on the writing skill supports the urgency of linguistic awareness and application to some extent and strengthens linguistic proficiency as a dominant factor on the students' research report (dwihandini, marhaeni, & suamajaya, 2013). conceptual and mechanical competence a conceptual competence requiring a creativity to conceive ideas and transmute them into an observably physical object (egiri & wuritka, 2016) is highly identical to the very beginning process of language production ability including writing as it precedes the formulation, articulation, and self-monitoring phase. a syntactic thinking process of language production, a nonsyntactic or imaginary one definitely proceeds a logical and socially acceptable idea with formal form according to the frame of social reference. human language conceptualization, some are universal and others are language-specific, is defined in different physical and cultural environments. even though language conceptualization is complex since content selection, syntactic form selection, and sound sequences are human problem, a study on how to conceptualize and communicate conducted through the use of drawing evidence that language conceptualization can be trained. in this study, mastering the topic and research methodology defines conceptual competence. a holistic view on the topic of the writing puts the writer on the right access to the writing success, and research methodology frames the nature of the question and establish a path along which research (jonker & pennik, 2010) and its report can be directed. competency in choosing the topic is required as it functions to establish a well-defined task environment dimension of the writing, a process-based approach to writing (bayat, 2014). on the contrary, the mechanics and coherence application to the writing completes the mechanical variables. an emphasis on perceived grammar, spelling, and usage including mechanics and coherence application is product-based. the product approach to writing according to palpanada, salam, and ismail (2014) completely encompasses familiarization, controlled writing, guided writing, and free writing. regarding the previous research finding and discussion, some implications are provided as follows: a. the distinction of lexical density and grammatical complexity index of undergraduate thesis according to its unit of chapter and time written confirms the writing skill improvement, the dynamics of language, an altered output driven by the context of the writing purpose and strengthens the writing as a complex integrated skill. saniago dakhi & horas hutabarat language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis 70 b. the lexical density interpretation, a high school or some college of american student’s product, deviates the mls, a sixth american grader’s product. ideally, mls index is not an obstacle increasing the syntactic complexity since in this study grammatical complexity is merely an average word length in sentence, a non-structurally and semanticallysentence-based index. an unrecognized characteristic of english language sentence by the undergraduates, therefore, is obviously captured. c. although the fifth chapter is the core unit of the research report providing the scientific answer of the problem and is presumably frequently revised and reviewed by thesis advisors, it is lexically the most ineffective part compared to the others since. this is to confirm a negative attitude on research finding and to predict a mental boredom of the writer. d. elaborating motivation of teaching and learning english writing, the feedback provision, responsibility, duty, loyalty, and good team-work function as the positive external motivation, and experience, role model and objective examiner are treated as positive internal motivation through which positive motivation dominates over the negative one. moreover, the boredom, e.g. meaningless and unattractive teaching and learning academic writing meets the negative internal motivation. this surprisingly shows that no negative external motivation practiced, a threat. e. regardless of the low grammatical complexity index, conceptual and mechanical competency as a determinant factor of the writing success, an integration of process and product-based writing approach is the finest model. conclusion three important conclusions are drawn in this scientific study. firstly, the diversity of lexical density realization in the undergraduate thesis according to its unit of chapter and time composed is averagely 42.14, to some extent, it is acceptable as an american student's academic product. secondly, the writing quality improvement assessed through grammatical complexity, 2015's mls index is 14.16 and 2016's mls score is 14.92, still defines its syntactical complexity mean index, 14.54, as slick fiction product of the sixth american students. finally, determinant factor of academic writing holistically encompasses psychological factors, i.e. identity awareness, motivation, and conceptual competency, sociocultural factor, i.e. personal experience, and linguistic factors: linguistic awareness and application and mechanical competency. to acquire a sustainable research project and improve linguistically academic acceptance of the undergraduate thesis, more generally english writing, some suggestions and recommendations are listed: 1) the tolerated index of undergraduate thesis lexical density does not guarantee the academic and technical content as this research employed a calculation on-line system; thus, for its pure acceptance, it has to be further studied through semantic-based analysis. 2) since the research interpretation was consulted with the flesch's theory, an indonesian language text readability index is an urgently needed for linguists’ research. 3) the lexical density index decrease and the grammatical complexity increase have to be seriously taken into account by english lecturers and students of pseudonym university. a well-defined, planned, and conducted both process and product-based approach to writing are the appropriately finest model. a detailed concept and well-trained writing syntactically constructing a practical, academic and scientific thesis product are advisedly to be executed. acknowledgement this research was entirely funded by the english education department (eed), english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 1, december 2018 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 71 faculty of teacher training and education, 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(2013). an analysis of spoken and written language and how they affect english language learning and teaching. journal of language teaching and research, iv(4), 834-838. saniago dakhi & horas hutabarat language effectiveness and factors influencing scientific writing of indonesian undergraduate thesis 74 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah omowumi bode steve ekundayo department of english and literature, university of benin, benin city, nigeria email: ekuns20@yahoo.com abiola olubunmi akinbobola department of english, university of lagos, nigeria email: abiola.akinbobola36@gmail.com apa citation: ekundayo, o. b. s., & akinbobola, a. o. (2016). symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah. english review, 4(2), 181-194 received: 19-02-2016 accepted: 23-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: this essay discusses achebe’s delineation of characters, events and use of language in anthills of the savannah (as) as symbolic and prophetic syntagmas which later manifested in some real life personalities and socio-political phenomena in africa and nigeria, the setting of the novel. the primary source of data is anthills of the savannah. secondary source and the internet were also consulted for the theoretical background and literature review. grammatical structures and literary features were extracted and analyzed to show their associative and symbolic links with real life events which occurred after 1987, the year as was published. the symbolic and prophetic syntagmas identified and their manifestations are presented with annotations in tables. the essay established that achebe uses syntagmas of utterances, events, settings and characters to symbolize and foreshadow imminent events in the novel and socio-political occurrences in nigeria and africa, a feat which stands him out as a novelist with great prophetic insight and clairvoyance. keywords: achebe, as, syntagma, prophetic, symbolic. character introduction albert chinua achebe, who died on the 21st of march, 2013, is africa’s most celebrated novelist till date. as is achebe’s fifth novel. it is set in kangan, an imaginary west african country, where sam, “his excellency,” a sandhurst-trained military officer, has ceased power in a military coup. achebe portrays the political anomy through the ordeals of three friends: chris oriko, the commissioner for information, beatrice okoh, chris’ girlfriend who is also an official in the ministry of finance, and ikem osodi, a newspaper editor, critic and activist. other characters include elewa, ikem’s girlfriend, and major “samsonite” ossai, a military officer who is notorious for stapling his victims’ hands with a samsonite stapler. tension and conflicts culminate in the assassination of ikem, toppling of the military junta, death of sam and finally the sudden and unnecessary murder of chris in a police check-point. the novel ends in the creative naming ceremony of elewa and ikem’s one-month-old daughter organized by beatrice. the girl is named ‘amaechina,’ a male name imposed on a female child, meaning ‘may the path never close.’ the essay sets out to answer the following questions: 181 omowumi bode steve ekundayo & abiola olubunmi akinbobola symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah (i) are there utterances in as that symbolize and forebode futurity and preempt future events? (ii) are there characters in as whose facsimiles later emerged in real nigerian and african life after the publication of as? (iii) are there events and scenes in as which later manifest in real nigerian and african life after the publication of the novel? (iv) what are the implications of the symbolic and prophetic syntagmas for creative writing in general and achebe in particular? the essay is based on ferdinard de saussure’s concept of syntagma and the literary concept of symbolism. saussure (1966, p. 123) asserts that “in discourse,…words acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together… and that “combinations supported by linearity are syntagm(a)s.” saussure further says that “the syntagmatic relation is… based on two or more items that occur in an effective series”(p. 123). saussure says that “the notion of syntagm(a)s applies not only to words, but to group of words, complex units of all kinds, lengths and types (compounds, derivatives, phrases, whole sentences)” (p. 124). even though some terms in the definitions above are similar to syntax; for example, “combination of words” and “linear,” syntagma is not the same as syntax. saussure says that “not every syntagmatic fact belongs to the syntactic class” (p.137) because syntax deals with how units combine in linearity. syntagm(a)s do the same but they can be extended, as in the following extract: when you hear ikem osodi! ikem osodi! everywhere, you think his head will be touching the ceiling. but look at him, how simple he is… (as, p. 121)… ‘i never meet you before in person sir’ said the superintendent springing out from behind his massive wooden desk. ‘very pleased to meet you sir. i was expecting a huge fellow like this’ and he made a sign sideways and upward. ‘no, i am quite small. anyone who feels like it can actually beat me up quite easily.’ (as, pp. 130-131) it is impossible to analyze this text as a whole syntactically except we fragment it into individual sentences and then analyze them one after another; for instance: s v c s v o i / am / quite small…, /anyone who feels like it/can beat/me…’/, etc. however, in syntagmatic analysis, the whole structure can be analyzed as a syntagma, such that all the sentences in the text merge to form one unit, which delineates ikem, as in the schema below: 182 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee figure 1.a schema of the analysis of a character syntagma because many linguistic units which are normally the limits of syntactic analysis can be found in one syntagma, saussure states that syntactic facts fall under syntagmatic classifications. there is another part of syntagma which relates with meanings that derived from the structures or combinations of linguistic elements. saussure calls them ‘associative relations’ (p.123). richards, platt and platt (1992, p. 369) defines syntagma as “a structurally significant combination of two or more units in a language.” crystal (2009) says that “in psycholinguistics the term is sometimes used to refer to a set of associative response which people make when hearing a stimulus word…a syntagmatic associative response would be… car, …sheep following black” (pp. 470-471), as in ‘a black sheep,’ ‘a black car,’ ‘a black man,’ etc. because the structure ‘---sheep,’ ‘---man’ can be collocatively or associatively completed with the words ‘black’ or ‘white’ respectively. saussure and crystal make it clear that a syntagma can stand as a symbol which calls to mind other meanings or associations. here, the syntagmas have been given symbolic associations with historical events in real life, as shown in figure 2 below: when you hear ikem osodi… you will think his head will be but look at him, how simple he is. i was expecting a huge fellow like this… no, i am quite small. syntactic unit 1 syntactic unit 2 syntactic unit 3 syntactic unit 4 all together generate a syntagma of ikem, a character 183 omowumi bode steve ekundayo & abiola olubunmi akinbobola symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah figure 2. a schema of associative relations of syntagmas prophetic syntagmas in the sense of this essay are combinations of linguistic units and literary features in as that correspond with events that occurred after as was published. sometimes, the meaning of syntagmas can be derived by reinterpretation, juxtaposition and association with something else. for example, in this essay, some symbolic syntagmas are identified based on a consideration of history, so that they are analyzed as prophetic syntagmas not necessarily because the structures on the surface depict them as such, but because they happened many years after they had been written in as. there is a sense in which linguistic syntagma dovetails with symbolism. as a syntagma denotes or connotes something, a meaning, so does symbolism or symbol stand for something else. an on-line source (http://literarydevices.net/symbolism/) defines symbolism as follows: symbolism is the use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities by giving them symbolic meanings that are different from their literal sense. symbolism can take different forms. generally, it is an object representing another to give it an entirely different meaning that is much deeper and more significant. sometimes, however, an action, an event or a word spoken by someone may have a symbolic value. for instance, “smile” is a symbol of friendship. similarly, the action of someone smiling at you may stand as a symbol of the feeling of affection which that person has for you. symbols do shift their meanings depending on the context they are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . syntactic unit 1 syntactic unit 2 syntactic unit 3 syntactic unit 4 syntagma of ikem, character in (a,s) syntagma of a true-life character: ken saro-wiwa. associative relationship 184 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee used in. “a chain”, for example, may stand for “union” as well as “imprisonment.” thus, symbolic meaning of an object or an action is understood by when, where and how it is used. it also depends on who reads them. this definition agrees with abrams and harpham’s (2009) definition of symbol as ‘a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or suggests a range of reference, beyond itself… often, they do so by exploiting widely shared associations between an object or event or action and a particular concept…’ accordingly, in this paper certain linguistic structures: words, phrases and sentences, and some literary features: characters, events and settings are identified and analyzed as symbolic of a number of post-as socio-political events and personalities in nigeria and africa. now, we review some views related to the discussion of syntagmatic relation in language and art works, critical comments on as and the deployment of language in as. in a work on the syntagmas of cinema, adrian miles (2000, p. 1) quotes christian metz, who is a pioneer in the use of this method, as follows: christian metz argued that the major mode of analysis for cinema (and by implication, hypertext) was based on syntagmatic relations, that is, meaning is principally developed and articulated through the expression of a partially autonomous temporary chain. ‘autonomous temporal chain’ here reminds us of the coming together of individual linguistic units in syntagmas; “for the significant narrative unit identified by metz is not the shot (the hypertext node) or the relation of one shot to another (the edit), but is in fact the larger sequential units produced by the combinations of shots” (1). miles underscores the aspect of associative relations which relates to meanings. according to him, “metz’s work demonstrates the strongly contextual nature of these syntagmatic series… the success of metz’s categories for hypertext lies not so much in their direct applicability but in allowing us to cast light on the role of syntagmatic segments in the production of meaning in hypertext” (1). miles’ essay establishes that syntagmas have a context of usage; that is, their environment or situation. syntagmatic segments have a role in the production of meanings. metz and miles’views of syntagmas correspond with our analysis in this essay, which shows that syntagmas are combinations of linguistic units and meaninggenerating segments. anita silvers (1991) applies “revisionism” to analyze as.” revisionism “is the view that in valuing art, it is essential to understand (some) historical events which occur after a work was made…” (211). silvers establishes that the knowledge of historical events could reveal that language has been used by a writer to discuss some events that will happen later. accordingly, this essay shows how achebe has used language and literary features to present some events that happened later. achebe’s literary prowess in this regard became established with his a man of the people (1996). the novel chronicles series of socio-political anomies that culminate in a military coup. indeed, shortly after its publication, the first military coup was executed in nigeria. umukoro (2009, pp.16, 22, 24) likens the incidents in a man of the people to some real political events in nigeria. ekundayo and iyayi 185 omowumi bode steve ekundayo & abiola olubunmi akinbobola symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah (2012, p. 90) discuss the prophetic nature of achebe’s as: in anthills of the savannah, for example, achebe presents the shape of things to come… the killing of ikem, the hero, forecasts the hanging of ken saro-wiwa ten years later…the birth of amaechina, which in ibo means ‘may-the-path-never-close’, foreshadows and symbolizes the rise of women to the foreground of politics and leadership in africa and nigeria. this literary forecast is being fulfilled in real african politics in the emergence of johnson sirleaf as the first female african president of liberia (p. 90). it is noteworthy that their essay briefly presents the fulfilment of achebe’s prophetic syntagmas. little did festus iyayi, a fellow writer, activist, intellectual and ken saro wiwa’s friend, know that he himself was going to be killed a year after his paper quoted above in about the same way in which chris, a major character in as, was killed. ekundayo and iyayi’s essay only makes passing comments on the prophetic nature of as using examples of two characters, ikem and amaechina while this study exemplifies ten characters and carries out an in-depth analyses of all of them in addition to those of settings, events and utterances. in a newspaper review, a critic says that anthills of the savannah is “a vision of social change that strikes us with the force of prophecy…” (usa today). here, there are clear references to the prophetic deployment of language by achebe in as. however, the article did not go further to identify and analyze the specific prophetic structures in the novel and how they have come to pass, as has been done in here. ogiovoh (2005, p. 41) establishes that achebe delineates beatrice to give readers “prophetic insight into future events and issues”, but no mention of the events are made, as in this paper. this paper analyzes the syntagmas of utterances, events, settings and characters for their prophetic relevance, paying attention to how these syntagmas have come to pass in the novel and in the larger society. in as, achebe’s deployment of utterances, events, settings and characters later correspond with the emergence of distant socio-political occurrences and personalities in nigeria and africa, a feat that marks achebe out as a novelist with great prophetic insight and clairvoyance. method the paper is basically qualitative. the primary source of data is as from which language and literary features were extracted, analysed and juxtaposed with post-as events and people in nigeria and africa in order to underscore their uncanny resemblance to each other. secondary sources and the internet were also consulted for literature review and comments on achebe’s works. the method of analysis is descriptive and explanatory. some of the syntagmas identified are presented in tables, matched with events and personalities that emerged on the nigerian and african socio-political scene after the publication of the novel. results and discussion the prophetic and symbolic utterances are identified and analyzed from morphological and collocational or syntactic perspectives. the morphological angle looks at individual lexical items and utterances that are prophetic while the collocational or syntactic deals with phrases, clauses and sentences, in addition to a discussion of events and characters as symbolic syntagmas. 186 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee name and lexical items as prophetic syntagmas some names in as possess prophetic qualities and undertones. many of these names are in the igbo language, a major nigerian language. they are presented in the table below. table 1: a table of names as prophetic and symbolic syntagmas s/n name page meaning context prophetic relevance 1 nwayibuife 87 ‘a female is also something.’ beatrice’s name at a time when her parents desired a male child. it underscores the importance of females who also possess the ability to rise up in the future. 2 nkolika 124 recalling is greatest. ikem says that the name is sometimes given to daughters for the importance of the symbolic ‘story’: “because it is only the story that can continue beyond the war and warrior.” it is a call on a people to retrace their steps, look back and re-chart the course for progress. “for the story of a people outlives the people and will have to be told at any rate.” 3 shearjashub 222 the-remnantshall-return this is a biblical allusion to the book of isaiah 7:3. the statement is a futuristic one depicting hope for israel captives and now an indictment of nigeria. 4 amaechina 22 may-the-partnever-close (structurally, it is a future wish presented in the subjunctive present). amaechina is the male name of elewa and ikem’sdaughter. ikem stands for the struggle, truth and equality. the name forecasts the rise of women in politics: the path ikem trod will not close. 5 agbata 208 this is the land where chris was killed. “…the land of droughts…the famous dusty and bustling market town of agbata.” it foreshadows drought, lawlessness, anomy and political disorder as seen to exist in nigeria in the past, present and in the future. collocational/syntactic prophetic syntagmas table 2.a table of utterances as prophetic syntagmas s/n example page structural pattern symbolic relevance 1 “we shall never be favoured with such an undeserving blessing as a ruthless dictator.” 3 there is the use of ‘shall’ in the first person to depict futurity. the verb phrase ‘shall never be favoured’ is the focal point of futurity. the statement is an irony. it is a prayer that underscores the possibility of the emergence of dictators in future, which the prayer forbids. 187 omowumi bode steve ekundayo & abiola olubunmi akinbobola symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah 2 “the future she saw unfolding so relentlessly before them would demand brutal courage not squeamishness, from the likes of elewa and herself from now on.” 170 the verb phrase ‘would demand’ denotes strong possibility and necessity. ‘from now on’ is a cataphoric reference to the continuum of the present and future. this anticipates the future active and courageous involvement of women in politics and the struggle for social change. 3 “don’t give up, whatever is hot will become cold.” 199 it is presented in analytic truth, which is truth according to nature. modal auxiliary (will) + lexical (become). the ‘mother bed-bug’ tells her children this when hot water was poured on them and they were about to give up. it symbolically or proverbially announces hope and imminent change from chaos to peace, from discomfort to comfort. 4 “after the anthem shall have been played backwards.” it is rendered in the future perfect to denote possibility. it forebodes a disruption or reversal of social and national order. 5 “you young people, what you will bring this world to is pregnant and nursing a baby at the same time.” 227 the above extract uses ‘will’ to predict the future. it is a symbolic charge to the people not to underrate the young generation, a paradoxical utterance showing the unpredictable nature of the youths. 6 “i want to remind you of that little discussion we all had after the entebbe raid. you remember? you all said then, what a disgrace to africa….remember…i said it could happen here. right here.” 15 it is presented in a conversational structure. the use of ‘could’ depicts futurity and possibility. here, achebe’s character remembers a past event and says that it can happen again and it did happen, for history often repeats itself. syntagmas 4, 5 and 6 are noteworthy here. the world that was ruled and controlled by a body of elders before has now come to be controlled by the youths who have become so innovative and trendy that they have succeeded in phasing out many stringent traditions. on the negative side, the youths have become restless, restive, violent, inordinate and unpredictable these days. hence they are likened to a woman breastfeeding and yet pregnant at the same time. the national anthem of nigeria seems as though it is being played backwards. the next section examines symbolic and prophetic events and settings. events and settings as symbolic syntagmas syntagmas of events, settings and characters are interwoven because events take place in a particular place and at a particular time, which is known as setting or locale. characters instigate or initiate events which they complete or abandon in a literary work. however, character syntagmas are examined in sub-section (3.5). 188 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 3.a table of events and settings as prophetic syntagmas s/n events page setting symbolic/prophetic implications 1 a rich lady vomits on the back of a man and cleans it up with her expensive damask head tie. 41 the beach where criminals are being executed before an excited crowd. it is symbolic and prophetic of the rich and wealthy people who have come to watch the downfall of the lowly ones being executed. the rich will also clean their mess at the expense of their wealth in public. 2 the birth and naming ceremony of amaechina. 222 beatrice okoh’s house before his friends. it symbolizes/foreshadows the rise of women in politics and activism, as it is happening now all over africa. 3 aina, buraimoh’s wife, a moslem, dances to agatha’s christian song, saying “dem talk sey make moslem no dance when christian de sing? 224 beatrice’s house, around the time amaechina is born. this foreshadows the unity of muslims and christians. it is a rhetorical question that has future significance. it may come to pass one day. 4 the coups in the novel. 222 contexts of sociopolitical power and national leadership. the coups foretells coup in africa. after 1987, the year as was published, many coups took place and are still taking place in nigeria and some other african countries. characters as prophetic/symbolic syntagmas achebe in as delineates characters whose facsimiles emerged later in contemporary events in nigeria and africa. first, we look at the major characters. major characters as symbolic syntagmas in this sub-section, major characters in the novel are analyzed for evidence of associative relationships with other personalities that have played up in real life after the publication of as. table 4. a table of major characters as prophetic syntagmas s/n character page setting/context prophetic relevance 1 sam many pages. in many scenes and events. sam is a prophetic archetype of tyranny, visionless leadership and corruption for which african military and political leaders are notorious. 2 ikem many pages. many scenes and events. he is a symbol of truth, boldness, selflessness, martyrdom, etc. he has associative relations with the late ken saro-wiwa. (see comments below). 3 beatrice many pages. many events and scenes. she symbolizes the rise of women. she has associative relations with ellen johnson sirleaf, first female president in africa, and many other great women emerging in africa. 4 chris many pages. many events and scenes. chris is a symbol of courage and martyrdom. he has associative relations, for instance, with the dastardly manner in which professor festus iyayi was shot dead in a so-called road accident. 5 amaechina 222 she was born after the death of her father, the amaechina foretells the rise of women. the name has associative relations with great african female leaders like dora akunyuli, johnson sirleaf and 189 omowumi bode steve ekundayo & abiola olubunmi akinbobola symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah protagonist of the novel, at a time kangan is in anarchy. many women who are now playing active roles in african politics and leadership. comments on major characters as symbolic syntagmas sam, the first character, is also known as ‘his excellency,’ a military tyrant and president of the republic of kangan. sam symbolises the past, present and future nigerian and african so-called leaders. many military and political leaders of africa later on exhibited sam-ism that is the concept, belief of and the fight to remain in power for ever. according ekundayo (2002, p. 41): general sanni abacha wanted to become life president and he was doing everything possible to achieve his ambition until god abbreviated his life and then abdul salami took over from him. the tactics of ‘his excellency’ in the novel is prophetic of this later ambition by babangida and abacha. apart from babangida and abacha in nigeria, we also see facsimile of sam in samuel doe, the first indigenous president of liberia. doe did all he could to force his reign on his people, but he was also murdered like achebe’s sam in the liberian civil war in september 1990. achebe prophetically reveals through sam the tragedy of leadership in present-day nigeria and africa. “his excellency came into power without any preparation for political leadership” (as, p. 12). similarly, many of our current leaders just happen upon their positions. they do not know the right step to take towards effective leadership. the same lackluster ideology, myopia, corruption at its acme and brigandage characterize/d all african military juntas and so-called democratic governments. ikem in the text has an uncanny resemblance to ken saro wiwa physically and ideologically. as at 1987, achebe creates a character that foreshadows the emergence of another personality in nigerian history in 1995. in ikem, achebe prophetically delineates ken saro wiwa. both ikem and ken saro wiwa share some physical features and professional attributes. for example, saro-wiwa is as short as ikem. ikem is a blunt and bold writer and a journalist who is on the side of the masses. similarly, ken saro-wiwa is a creative writer, television producer and activist who was bold and fearless in his attack on political anomalies. achebe’s ikem bears uncanny resemblance to ken, a man who is selfless, embodying the marxian direction of social change. he “satisfies the marxist demand that intellectuals should follow their example and lose themselves amidst the masses… he champions the common cause in his editorials, keeps an affair with an illiterate woman and rides a decrepit car” (owomoyela, 2002, p. 2) to associate with the masses. “it is through ikem osodi that achebe explores the true role of the artist in the contemporary african society” who should have vision and “direct their society in the path that it should be heading” (ojinmah, 1991, p. 99). again, the way ikem was eliminated in as in 1987 forebodes and pre-describes ken saro-wiwa’s death in nigeria. for example, ikem is first arrested and taken away: “in the early hours of this morning, a team of security officers effected the arrest of mr. osodi in his official flat… and were taking him in a military vehicle for questioning at 190 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the src headquarters….”(as, p. 169). similarly, “saro-wiwa was arrested, hastily tried by a special military tribunal” (wikipediaonlinekensarowiwa).subsequ ently, ikem is killed unjustly in baffling and inscrutable circumstances:“ikem was not just wounded but dead. he was convinced that the drafters of the government statement had deliberately chosen a phrase which was popularly misunderstood” (as,p. 170). ken sarowiwa, like ikem, was also hanged precipitously on 10th november 1995. “mr. saro-wiwa’s body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave” (reuters, 2013) in the same way ikem’s body is not found to be given a befitting burial. both the extermination of ikem in as and saro-wiwa in nigeria generated internal and external ferment and disaffection. for ikem, achebe writes that “before evening both systems, foreign and local, seemed set to start buzzing in the interest of the abducted man” (as, p. 168). also, for saro-wiwa, it is said that his “execution provoked international outrage and resulted in nigeria’s suspension from the commonwealth of nations for over three years” (wikipediaonline).in the light of this, ikem is a prophetic and symbolic syntagma who showed up seven years later in ken saro wiwa. beatrice at different instances takes up male roles and succeeds in them: “she is possessed by a need to deliver her people… and in part to fulfill her own destiny within the new dispensation that she undertakes the naming of ikem’s child” (echeruo, 2013). in liberia, a beatrice emerged in ellen johnson who “set up the truth and reconciliation commission to promote national peace, security, unity and reconciliation by investigating more than twenty years of civil conflict in the country” (wikipedia). she was able to resolve the unrest in liberia and even won a nobel peace prize for her efforts. achebe in as remarks about women thus: “let us keep her in reserve until the ultimate crisis arrives and the waist is broken and hung over the fire and the palm bears its fruit at the tail of its leaf. then as the world crashes around man’s ears, woman in her supremacy will descend and sweep the shards together” (as, p. 89). this is exactly what happened in liberia and nigeria with the likes of professor dora akwuyili who at huge risk reformed the pharmaceutical industry in nigeria. achebe’s chris is symbolic of a leader that would readily lay down his life for the helpless masses. as ojinmah (1991, pp. 98-99) puts it “chris was willing, even at the risk of his own life, to do the things he thought should be done such as protecting innocent civilians from the excesses of guntrotting men in uniform.” achebe uses him to symbolize the past, the present and the future life of courage and martyrdom that most freedom fighters, government critics and activists live. the fate of chris in the novel keeps recurring at police and army road blocks in nigeria. a recent manifestation is the catastrophic killing of professor festus iyayi, former asuu president and commonwealth literary prize winner, in a similar circumstance on the lokoja-abuja road on the 12thof november, 2013. a police van in the kogi state governor’s convoy deliberately left its lane and rammed in on the asuu (academic staff union of universities) bus in which festus iyayi and three other asuu officials were travelling. according to ebhomele (2013) in an online news report, “iyayi died at 66, in lokoja, the kogi state capital, on his way to kano for a meeting of the 191 omowumi bode steve ekundayo & abiola olubunmi akinbobola symbolic and prophetic syntagmas in chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah asuu national executive council concerning the over-four months old strike embarked upon by the union”(n.pag). iyayi died in the motoring accident as claimed; however, his mortuary pictures later printed in the news magazine showed that he was mercilessly shot in the heart at close range just as chris was shot too. furthermore, amaechina, the girl child newly born towards the end of the novel, embodies a deep prophetic and symbolic syntagma. since traditionally, there are some roles which females are either not allowed to perform or presumed as not having the capacity to, achebe creates a situation in which a female child is given amaechina,a male name in the igbo language meaning “may the path never close,” thereby conferring on the girl child all the attributes and potentials of a man. minor characters as symbolic syntagmas few minor characters are identified and analysed as prophetic and symbolic syntagmas in table five. table 5: a table of minor characters as examples of prophetic syntagmas s/n names page setting/context associative relations 1 mad medico many pages. he is a friend of chris, ikem and sam who was deported in by the military junta in the novel. he has associative relations with patrick wilmot, the sociology scholar whom general babaginda (nigeria head of state, 1985-1993) claimed to be a spy and teaching subversive doctrines and so deported him in 1988, a year after as was published. 2 elewa many pages. she is the illiterate girl friend of ikem and mother of amaechina. she is a prophetic symbol of courage having associative relations with the masses and women coming into power. 3 agatha many pages. she is the beatrice’s housemaid who refuses to serve elewa. she has associative relations with the masses at loggerheads with one another and hardly able to unite against bourgeois oppressions. 4 elewa’s uncle 226 he is the elder to name the newly born girl child, but before he could arrive, the youths had named her. he is a prophetic symbol of dying traditions and the rise of youths and modernism. 5 the masses many pages, they are the students, taxi drivers, etc. who support ikem and chris. they are prophetic character symbols from whom good leaders, support, love and loyalty will be drawn. conclusion the essay examined the prophetic syntagmas in as using ferdinard de saussure’s concept of syntagma and the literary concept of symbolism as theoretical framework. the paper identified and analyzed some linguistic and literary syntagmas as symbolic and prophetic. the associative analysis of the syntagmas reveals striking replicas that manifested later in real life. the paper established that literature has the inherent power to predict and foreshadow with the apt deployment of language and literary features and that achebe is a literary prophet who deployed his clairvoyant literary prowess to invest his characters, events, settings and grammatical structures with prophecies and symbolisms for nigeria and africa. the prophetic syntagmas used in the novel portray and confirm achebe’s literary clairvoyance and prophetic insight. 192 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee references abrams, m.h, & harpham, g.g. (2009). a glossary of literary terms. 9th ed. boston: wadsworth. achebe, c. (1987). anthills of the savannah. ibadan: heinemann. achebe, c. (1966). a man of the people. london: heinemann. ademosun, f. (2013). festus iyayi: assassination or accident?. sahara reporters: news and reports. 3 nov. 2013. retrieved from the web. 13 mar. 2014. chandler, d. (2007). semiotics for beginners. retrieved from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/docu ments/54b/semiotic.htm. 13 feb. 2013. crystal, d. 2009. a dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. oxford: blackwell. ebhosele, e. (2013). outrage over killing of festus iyayi by police escort truck in kogi governor’s convoy. retrieved from sahara reporters. 13 mar. 2014. echeruo, m.j.c. (1998). chinua achebe’s anthills of the savannah: post-history and biblical example. theoria: a journal of social and political theory. 91, 66-86. ekundayo, s. b. (2002). total literature in english (2nd ed). benin: nobel publishers. ekundayo, s.b., & iyayi, f. (2013). the place of literature in individual and national development. journal of the literary society of nigeria (jlsn).5, 83-93. miles, a. (2000). hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links. journal of digital information 1.7, 1-2. ngara, e. (1990). the place and significance of anthills of the savannah, pp. 247-263. in edith ihekweazu ed. eagle on iroko: selected papers from the chinua achebe international symposium 1990. ibadan: johnmof. ogiovoh, e. e. (2005). multiple points of view and the fight against oppression in achebe’s anthills of the savannah. long essay. university of benin, ojinmah, u. (1991). chinua achebe: new perspectives. ibadan: spectrum. okafor, k. (1990). the quest for social change: reformation or revolution. eagle on iroko: selected papers from chinua achebe international symposium 1990. ed. edith ihekweazu. ibadan: johnmof. owomoyela, o. (2002). discourse on gender: historical contingency and ethics of intellectual work. west african review, 1-12. reuters. (2009). ken saro-wiwa. the new york times. capital one 360. retrieved from the web march, 2013. richards, j.c., platt, j., & platt, h. (1992). longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics. london: longman. saussure, de f. (966). a course in general linguistics. trans. wade baskin. new york: mcgraw hill. silvers, a. (1991). the story of art is the test of time. the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 49(3),211-224. usa today. 20072013. product description. amazonfresh. retrieved from the web. 4 feb. 2015. umukoro, s.o. (2009). literary criticism, scholarship and national development. 18th inaugural lecture of the delta state university. abraka: delta state university press. wikipedia: ken saro-wiwa. retrieved from <http://en.m.wikepedia.org/wiki/ke nsarowiwa>12 march, 2015. wikepedia: ellen johnson sirleaf. retrieved from wikepedia <http://en.m.wikepedia.org/wiki/ell en_johnson_sirleaf>12 mar. 2015. 193 194 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee literary teaching and its constraints: paradigms and problems ali mustofa english department, surabaya state university email: ali_mustofa2012@yahoo.co.id apa citation: mustofa, a. (2016). literary teaching and its constrains: paradigms and problems. english review, 4(2), 219-230 received: 12-02-2016 accepted: 19-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: the paper will explore the nature of the literary teaching and its constraints. in language teaching, literary teaching has been promoted influential and approved effective to encourage the students’ character building in terms of some issues: historical, philosophical, cultural, social, and psychological contexts. historically, literary teaching will provide students and learners of the ancients’ way of life and learn from the best in the past for their life experience. some constraints may arise in language teaching due to the cultural and the philosophical boundaries. the constraints may be put into some categories; philosophical, cultural, social, and psychological. to generalize the idea, literary teaching needs efforts to boost the students’ skills to creatively launch themselves to a higher level of thinking order to achieve the goals of literary teaching and the demand of curriculum. keywords: literary teaching, humanity issues, constraints, critical thinking, competency introduction there are many studies which confront literary teaching. to mention a few there are khatib, rezaei, and derakhshan (2011), yeasmen, azad, and ferdoush (2011), mujumdar (2010), cruz (2010), yueh wu (2008), abdullah, zakaria, ismail, mansor and aziz (2007), buttler (2006), hismanoglu (2005), saviddou (2004), mc kay (1982), and de riverol (1991). they have contested the teaching of english and literature into a package which will generate the issues on developing the new method in language teaching. to them, literature is an object to be observed as a medium of learning a language. besides, they also found out that teaching a language through literature will also generate another advantages for both teacher and students. most of them suggested that literature is an interested resource to bridge the gap of students’ language problems with their language proficiency. khatib, rezaei, and derakhshan (2011) have completed their findings that, “… literature is a promising tool for language learning purposes”. at the same time they have cited some important figures who have recalled the return of literature into language teaching such as carter & burton (1982), maley & moulding (1985), brumfit & carter (1986), collie & slater (1987), carter, walker, brumfit (1989), carter & long (1991), and also bassnet & grundy (1993). they have been recalled to resurrect the function of literature in language teaching after being neglected for some period of times in 70s to 80s language teaching curriculum. yeasmen, azad, and ferdoush (2011) focused on designing appropriate classroom activities using literary work to ease students’ anxiety in developing their 219 mailto:ali_mustofa2012@yahoo.co.id ali mustofa literary teaching and its constraints: paradigms and problems language competency in classroom setting. they asserted that teaching language using literary text through appropriate classroom tasks is an effective way to teach efl learners. mujumdar (2010) also found out that teaching literature in language teaching curriculum can also elevate the students’ learning demand of ideal language performance. mujumdar also suggested that the teacher of literature should have a complex skill and knowledge of the language being communicated in the teaching of literature. it includes the linguistic and non linguistic skills as well as literary horizons. mujumdar’s findings are not far different to what has been generated by cruz (2010) and yueh wu (2008). cruz (2010) has studied that literature will also enrich students’ knowledge of linguistics elements and culture of the language being studied. it also enriches the students’ understanding on how to interact with other people from different culture and learn their ways of life, beliefs, values and attitudes. meanwhile, yueh wu said that the use of multiple teaching techniques in the teaching of literature will make the students feel interested in studying literary work and hence their language performance will also increase significantly. other researchers such as abdullah, zakaria, ismail, mansor and aziz (2007), buttler (2006), hismanoglu (2005), saviddou (2004), mc kay (1982), and de riverol (1991) have more or less the same ideas, that using literature in language learning classrooms will provide better atmosphere in language teaching and learning. their ideas have sought a response that teaching language using literary work as a tool to elevate the students’ understanding of the elements of language and culture being studied is approved effective and interesting. however there are some constraints which those researchers did not pay much attention to, in which in the teaching of language and literature some issues of difficulties may arise and distract the objective of language and literature learning. it is because these two entities are different in some matters. the paper will seek to evaluate the problems in literary teaching. it overviews the paradigms and problems which are usually taken into consideration by literary teachers and language practitioners. therefore, it firstly discusses the in-between language and literary teaching. secondly, it exposes the constraints or problems in literary teaching, and the proposed solutions are also suggested as well. method the paper overviewed the constraints of the literary teaching, in a more specific ways, while at the same time it also tried to give solutions over the problems faced by teachers and curriculum developers. the method used to discuss the problems is problem solving discussion by which the data were cross checked and reviewed eclectically from different sources and opinions. the results of the discussion were validated and evaluated by using the previous studies and research of the same topics. results and discussion the in-between language and literary teaching it is widely known that in language teaching, the process of acquiring new knowledge of language being studied is gained through the practices and the skills to apply the rule of language construction. every day use of the studied language will foster the acquisition of the language. it is, then, generating the ideas of language 220 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee teaching methodologies which state that language is acquired through series of practice. it is quite different with what is called as literary acquisition. literary acquisition is nothing more than literary experience. the ability to understand literary sense is nonetheless an intuition. therefore, there is no any fixed method in literary teaching. since it is an intuition which plays an important role in it, the series of practices are directed to understand the elements and values of the works being studied. the students are introduced to the concepts and theories of literary works’ principles, and they are suggested to write what they have in minds about the works they have read and understood. khatib, rezaei, and derakhshan (2011) note that eventhough literary works cannot provide direct needs of courses in eap or esp, it can be considered as, “... a caralyst for quickening language learning process”. the role of literature in language teaching has been admitted crucial and influential. it is shown by the government’s concern in this field by launching the curricular support to it seriously. one of the singapore’s governments’ projects in this response is of literature in english teaching syllabus 2013: lower and upper secondary. the syllabus grabs the ideas of literary teaching and its methodological problems. one of the statements of the book says that “literature also builds in students socio-cultural sensitivity and awareness, as well as a global outlook, by offering opportunities for them to explore a wide range of literary texts written in different contexts and from various parts of the world, connecting them to other ages and cultures. it develops empathy and stimulates thinking about beliefs and values” (2013:2) it means that it has been realized the function of literature in educational place is influential, and it also determines the development of sensitivity and awareness of the students in global contexts. it is because most of literary works discuss about global issues. this is in line with what has been perpetuated by van (2009), tayebipour (2009), and maley (1989a) as cited by khatib, rezaei and derakhsan (2011) that literature offers universal concepts so that it promotes cultural and intercultural sensitivity and awareness. by understanding those issues in literature, it can further add students’ understanding of the whole wide world. when the above demand is compared to the objectives of literary teaching, the following objectives will give other insights into the nature of literary teaching: discover the joys of reading literature and become aware of new ways perceiving and world around them; appreciate the aesthetic value of language; engage personality with a variety of texts and draw connections between self, texts and the world in order to develop intellectual, emotional, socio-cultural and global awareness; articulate perceptive and analytical thinking when discussing and writing about literary texts; explore how the elements of different genres function in literary works to achieve specific effects; and appreciate the importance of the contexts in which literary texts are written and understood (2013:6). looking at the above objectives, it is an urge to promote literary teaching in schools and universities in order to make 221 ali mustofa literary teaching and its constraints: paradigms and problems the students of both institutions to be more aware of global issues contextually. it is because literature also offers cultural and contextual issues. however, it should be taken into consideration that according to maley (1989a) that literary teaching should also be put together with the demand of language teaching. he proposes language-based model which concerns literature for language development and awareness purpose. though, maley’s model of literary teaching is not much well applicable to literary teaching, but his suggestion is an example of models in literary teaching which was adopted several years ago included in teaching model for language learning methodology. an approach which lends itself well to the range of strategies used in language teaching common approach to literature in the efl classroom is what carter and long (1991) refer to as the ‘language-based approach’. such an approach enables learners to access a text in a systematic and careful way in order to demonstrate specific linguistic characteristics e.g. literal and figurative language-cloze procedure, guess exercises, mixed up sentences, summary writing, creative writing and role playwhich all form part of the selection of efl and activities used by teachers to deconstruct literary texts in order to provide specific linguistic goals. mcrae (1996) describes this model as taking a ‘reductive’ approach to literature. these activities are disconnected from the literary goals of the specific text in that they can be applied to any text. there is little engagement of the learner with the text other than for purely linguistic practice; literature is used in a rather pointless and mechanistic way in order to present for a series of language activities motored by the teacher. what has been suggested by long & carter (1991) and mcrae (1996) as well, is only to help the language learners and teachers in evaluating the texts (literary works) in order to make them engage well in making use of language for teaching purpose. literary work is used purposeless. it is only used as a cultural site to be discussed for certain other objective. as a matter of fact, literary teaching should achieve the goal to teach the concepts and primary means of literary aspects. it must go through some methodological investigations to grab a certain and complex ideas on how to make it sociable to students. the point is to make the students become more aware and more sensitive toward issues of humanity. it should be accompanied by the appropriate use of language instruction, so that the students will grab the whole idea of the teaching learning process. to make use of literary work for other purpose of other than to investigate the contents of it is only to make fun of it. the students only get what is to be communicated rather than to discern the insights of it. the constraints in literary teaching: historical, philosophical, cultural and social, and psychological contexts when discussing about literary teaching, it is not without some constraints. there are some problems which arise related to the teaching of literature as follows: historical, philosophical, psychological, and social problems. however, those matters can be accommodated and re-evaluated by the teachers and curriculum designers to ease the problems of literary teaching practically and methodologically. 222 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee historical context historical background refers to the social and historical contexts in which a certain work of literature was produced. it also includes relevant facts of the author’s life and works. therefore, historical background of english literature is quite vague and broad. however, in order to provide an example, beowulf in the 8th century, which was considered as the greatest old english poem of about 3200 lines, the first english epic, whose author is unknown, is an interesting example. it is composed of lined verses which tell a story. the story is about hrothgar, king of the danes, and beowulf, a brave young man from sweden, who goes to help the king. the poem provides an interesting picture of life in those days and also of speech (since old english is of course a foreign language). english, as known before, descends from the language spoken by the north germanic tribes who settled in england from the 5th century a.d onwards. they had no writing system (except runes, used as charms) until they learned the latin alphabet from roman invaders. the earliest written works in old english (as their language is now known to scholars) were probably composed orally at first, and may have been passed on from speaker to speaker before being written. old english literature is mostly chronicle and poetry-lyric, descriptive but chiefly narrative or epic. by the time, literacy becomes wide-spread, old english is effectively a foreign and dead language. and its forms do not significantly affect subsequent developments in english literature. by the way, from this kind of history, students learn where and when the language develops, who spoke the language, and who wrote the language, and how the language developed after some period of time. the problems often arise when the students are asked to understand literary work which uses old version of language, old english version for an example. they seem to be frustrated in understanding the elements of the work because they do not have any idea of the words or sentences they must encounter. however, the students learn how to understand the language carefully in order to grab the sense of the work. it means that the students will be exposed to complex difficult problems. they have to understand the ingredients of the work, and at the same time they have to understand the language. by this, they will learn of the development of language use historically. the role of the teachers in this way is crucial and important. he/she should be able to explain the problem of the language use in the work which encountered some changes both historical and cultural. the teacher should function himself/herself as literary specialist as well as a linguistic expert. philosophical context philosophically, students are supposed to learn humanity essence through the philosophical teachings inside literary works they read. as a philosophical site of life, literary works provide ample of moral teachings and values as well. “literary theory” is the body of ideas and methods used in the practical reading of literature. by literary theory, it is referred not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which one attempts to understand literature. all literary 223 ali mustofa literary teaching and its constraints: paradigms and problems interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. it is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. the problem which often arises is that students do not really understand literary theory as an influential part to understand the body of a literary work. literary theory is a philosophical foundation for students to understand the work well. how can a student understand the problem of christianity problems in a work of literature when they did not ever read the explanation of christian religion before? in this matter, teachers should be able to bridge the gaps of students’ need to understand some conceptual features of literary works and some theoretical frameworks which can be used to evaluate the works. by this sense, teachers should be able to function themselves to be theorists who are really expert in conceptualizing the features of the works and relate them with the issues outside the works. the philosophical constraints may be considered as the most complex problems compared to the other problems. they include other aspects of competences for both language learners and their teachers. they also incorporate some methodological problems and conceptual features which must be put forward by the teachers before starting the classes. the preparation should be made in order to make the classes run well. another thing is that the teacher should take a look at the syllabus as well as the curricular guidance before executing the conceptual frameworks in literary studies to be understood by students. cultural and social contexts the word “culture”, in one hand, is used because it implies the integrated structures of human behavior that incorporates thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions of racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups. the word “competence”, on the other hand, is used because it suggests having the capacity to role in a specific way: the capacity to function within the context of culturally integrated patterns of human behavior defined by a group. being competent in cross–cultural functioning means learning new patterns of behavior and effectively applying them in the appropriate settings (thomas, 1981). being culturally competent means having the capacity to function effectively in other cultural contexts. cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life. cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. particular meanings attach to the ways people in particular cultures do things. when considering cultural competence; a concise, practical definition, and some explanation of relevant ideas are needed. cross, bazron, dennis, & isaacs (1989) explored the concept of cultural competence in the system of care, and developed the definition and framework used here. they are appropriately applied in the school–based programs. cultural competence is defined as a set 224 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross–cultural situations (cross et al., 1989; isaacs & benjamin, 1991). operationally defined, cultural competence is the integration and transformation of knowledge about individuals and groups of people into specific standards, policies, practices, and attitudes used in appropriate cultural settings to increase the quality of services; thereby producing better outcomes. it is important, however, to make the students understand of the cultural and social contexts of literary works they read on. cultural and social contexts will bridge them to really aware of issues in time and space when the works were produced. they could easily relate those issues toward the contemporary problems in their own time. to understand the practices, beliefs, values, laws, policies and standards inside the works of literature, will give them chances to figure out the contextual issues which then enable them to give response and to give respect of others’ cultural issues. it is the reason why a literary teacher should be able to acknowledge the values and systems of different cultural contexts in works of literature with the ones in his own time, as well as his students’ time, in order to enable the students to think more clearly of cultural and social contexts. psychological context psychologically, students are to be exposed to the contextual teaching materials which make them feel secure to access humanity problems in the works, while at the same time they also learn how to give response to psychological problems the characters in the works have. in literary analysis, psychological approach contends that literary characters behave according to the same psychological consistencies and probabilities as real people, and that the motives for their behavior can be discovered and a psychological evaluation derived from the text itself. this frame of reference is concerned primarily with behavior, either or a character or an author, as it is symbolically reflected in the literary work. literary works provide access to think and to behave psychologically, especially when the students must react against the idea that contradicts their common beliefs. in the meantime, students often find difficult to understand the psychological problems the characters in the works have. it is sometimes because the teachers have seldom given them access to learn how to act and to give response psychologically. sharing and discussing over a certain case in the class, is an example to train students to think and to react over something psychologically. that there are similarities between what is done in language arts and in science or other subject is not so surprising. but it occurs that one might also draw a parallel conclusion between teaching any academic subject and teaching morality. it is widely accepted that, in order for young people to learn to be good people, they should be shown how to act. teachers, in particular time and chance, try to set an example by the way they treat others over a certain case. and, indeed, some studies suggest that children or young people are more likely to imitate if they have watched someone else does so. part of the problem is that modelling is a concept rooted in behaviorism. it began as a refinement of 225 ali mustofa literary teaching and its constraints: paradigms and problems the principles of operant and classical conditioning. those principles could not account for the fact that people sometimes learn from what they have observed, acting in ways for which they themselves received no reinforcement. but modelling, like reinforcing, is just another technique for getting someone to behave in a particular way; it does not necessarily promote a dedication to, or an understanding of, that behavior (meyers, 1986). literary teaching methodology by making use of those real life contexts, the accessible social and psychological affairs, the students are prepared to explore their very nature of communicating the ideas of humanity. it means that they are also prepared to have and to understand philosophical, psychological, and social skills. simultaneously, the students are also equipped with the competencies in language skills; their ability to develop their oral skills to defend their critical thinking argumentatively, their positive and critical judgement which are manifested in their argumentative writing skills, their active involvement in sharing and understanding of a discussion over the subject matters the teacher and the students have in class, and attentively listen to any kind of problematic issues which are generated from the materials they share among their own peers. thoughtful assignments can be designed specifically to encourage a sharper, more active response to authors. it is possible to dispense with the tired practice of asking students whether they agree or disagree with what they have read. teachers of course want to teach by doing so valuable to students. it may make sense not only to use explanation as a separate strategy alongside modelling, but to combine the two approaches into what might be called “deep modelling.” here, it does not only set an example for students but try to make it clear to them what the teacher is doing and why he is doing it. verbalizing is a familiar strategy to many of teachers that is intended to help students comprehend more of what they read. exactly the same thing happens when students encounter a series of finished products, whether they are books, scientific laws, or ethical precepts. thus, one solution is to allow them to watch something being written, or proved, or decided, in order to make the activity in question more accessible and less intimidating. watching movies together with their teacher and friends may also add up to the conclusion over this discussion. to watch the finished product such as a movie is an interesting experience for students to react over some matters contextually. reliability of the students’ evaluation in literary teaching, the teachers are suggested to apply democratic assessment practices because it will involve the teacher and the students to act out together to evaluate their learning process. any time that students are involved in evaluating performance, whether their own or that of their classmates, the validity and reliability of their assessment is called into question. this kind of fear should not be accommodated. without guidance, students have a distorted view of their performance (oscarson 2009; zakian, moradan, & naghibi, 2012). the same research shows that with practice, training, and regular feedback from their teacher, the students’ assessment of their performance agreed with that of their teacher. 226 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee involvement in a democratic process of assessment allows students to gain knowledge, experience, and understanding of how to judge oral and written expression. through dialog, the students and teacher can negotiate the meaning of the objectives stated in the curriculum or mandated by the curriculum designer. for assignments that challenge students to create with language, whether orally or through written composition, the teacher and students can collaborate in creating a rubric or checklist that outlines what will be assessed. feedback from the teacher after each performance will help students understand whether or not they have mastered the skill or concept. allowing students a voice in the assessment process compels them to analyze their own performance. through analyzing their performance, students sharpen up critical thinking skills and develop autonomy (tully, 2009). in time, students regard themselves as knowledgeable, and rightly so, which empowers them to be competent, independent learners. allowing students a voice in the assessment process compels them to listen to their classmates (iberri-shea, 2009). an honest teacher will acknowledge that there are many styles of speaking or of writing for which he and his students may hold opposite, but equally valid opinions. by giving the students the opportunities to freely express their opinion about issues such as how a paper looks or how their classmate’s gestures distracted the audience from the message, and by valuing those opinions, the teacher models the democratic process of respecting other’s opinions. this respect empowers students to find their voice and to fearlessly use it. in doing so, students are expected to have their own evaluation. it means that the class should carry out a peer assessment. with this, the students are given a free chance to develop and express their own ideas about peer evaluation. peer evaluation offers a mutual and beneficial supervision both students and teachers to gain an objective result of an evaluation. teachers can adopt this kind of assessment with respect to students' point of view over other's weakness and strengths in mastering a skill. in a classroom presentation carried out by a group of students discussing a topic, for example, can promote peer-assessment. the rest of the students will give their own judgment toward the problems risen in the discussion. this will promote a democratic nuance since other students will give witness to others’ competence and performance. teachers’ feedback should be delivered in the end of the presentation, either in appraisal or criticism, in order to exhibit the openness of the value and judgment. however, curiosity and resourcefulness are not the only casualties of this kind of teaching; students’ inclination to object, to resist, to refuse to be cowed by authority is also affected. the teacher should reject a focus on right answers and conventional methods, in other words, not only because it promotes shallow learning but because it promotes passive acceptance. these are the model of assessment which can be used in measuring the students’ learning outcome. the following models of assessments are strongly suggested to encourage the students to attend the classes creatively and critically, and involve in a democratic assessment in every part of the project; they are projects, open-ended response questions, performance based, portfolios, quiz or pop quiz, end of chapter or unit test, and mid or final term test. basically, those 227 ali mustofa literary teaching and its constraints: paradigms and problems forms of tests are commonly acknowledged and generally applied by language teachers in schools and universities. however, the form and model of tests are of course chosen in accordance with the need of the assessment for each of the learning outcome the teachers wish to obtain. project based task, first and foremost, can be done individually or in a group. by giving a student a project and a length of time in order to do it, a teacher can assess how the student organizes time, generates problems, and solves those problems. by doing the project in a group, the teacher can also assess how students interact with others and how they participate in group settings. in order for the project to be a success in terms of assessing the student, the teacher must give clear instructions and deadlines. open-ended response questions, secondly, involves the teacher or evaluator asking the student a question and the student giving the answer orally or by writing it down. this is an excellent way to evaluate the student’s critical thinking process. performancebased type of assessment requires students to perform actions such as answering questions or doing specific activities. the most common way to do this is to ask students how they came up with the answers to a question and asking them to explain their thought processes orally or by writing short essays. thirdly, a portfolio is an excellent way to assess a student’s progress. the teacher will collect examples of the student’s work over a period of time, and place it in a file. sometimes a school has a portfolio of the student’s work that spans several years. the teacher can have a look through the portfolio to see if the student is improving, staying the same, or regressing. this is also an excellent way to show the parents how their children are doing in school. during a conference, a teacher can simply pull the students’ portfolios with the proof of what they have or have not been doing in class. fourth type of test is quiz or pop quiz. this assessment is usually done in the middle of a unit to see how students are doing with the material. a pop quiz is an excellent way to see if students paid attention in class that day or read the materials assigned to them. fifth, end of chapter/unit test, it is the test which teachers mostly use in their assessment. this usually involves a multiple choice, short answer, essay, true/false, fill in the blank or matching test to show how much the students learned from the materials that were just covered in the class. finally, mid or final term test in which it is the common used test in schools or universities in order to measure the students’ progress during their length of time to study in a period of time. the test is given either in the middle way of lesson or in the end of the lesson. mid and final tests are given to state whether the students can go up to the next level of study or not. conclusion literature is a source of authentic material, which conveys the use of linguistics by those who have mastered it. it contains an aesthetic representation of the spoken language, which enriches students’ language and culture unconsciously. culture, on the one hand, offers an interdisciplinary field that includes artistic discourses, social conventions, and reflexive impacts. it open doors for students to increase their knowledge of the target culture as they can contemplate and critically comment on people’s way of life, values, attitudes, 228 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee and beliefs, standards, laws, religions and regard how these elements manifest into some different categories and forms in it. it is true then that literature provides a motivating drive for language learning and teaching due to its spectacular features not readily found in any other texts. therefore, some methodological issues on literary teaching have been perpetuated and promoted in the field of language and literature teaching in efl/esl’s scopes. this will also generate some issues of some practical classroom techniques. however, with respect to the teaching and learning methodology over literary teaching, there must be some constraints that the students, the teachers, and syllabus designers must aware of. there are some problems they have to encounter not to overcome them but to work on them so that the teaching and learning process become more bearable. the constraints are mentioned earlier in the discussions: historical problems, which are more closely related to the historical background of literary work that the students must understand in order to discern the structure of the society and the cultural context in which the work was produced. philosophical constraints involve the difficulty of the students to master the conceptual framework to understand the work. it is because the students are of course lack of some information on literary theories so that they find some complicated issues which they cannot grab in mind. cultural and social problems are mainly on the situation and context of cultural awareness the students must encounter when understanding a work of literature. this problem may produce another difficulty for the students that they could not imagine the condition of the social culture in the work they read. it is because there is a gap between their cultural knowledge with what had been intended by the author of the social and cultural condition of a certain society in a work. the last problem is a psychological context. it challenges the students to think and give response over a certain psychological phenomena in the work they are reading. the students often find difficulty to investigate the psychological problems in the work they encounter. those constraints may arise some mechanisms to act against them in response to develop some methods in literary teaching. the teachers are suggested to develop their critical views and orientations when giving classes. they also are suggested to vary the techniques in literary teaching so that the students will not get some boredom during the classes. they are also strongly encouraged to be able to maintain a democratic model of teaching as well as model of assessment. references (2013) literature in english: teaching syllabus 2013 lower and upper secondary. curriculum planning and development division, ministery of education, singapore abdullah, t, zakaria, m.h, ismail, f, wan mansor, wan fara a, azis, m.a. (2007). a new teaching model to teach literature for the tesl pre-training service programme in universiti teknologi malaysia (a research). malaysia: jabatan bahasa moden fakulti pengurusan dan pembangunan sumber manusia, universiti teknologi malaysia buttler, i. (2006). “integrating language and literature in english studies: a case study of the english 100 course at the university of north west” (a ph.d thesis in the subject of english). the university of south africa (unpublished). 229 ali mustofa literary teaching and its constraints: paradigms and problems carter, r., & long, m. (1991). teaching literature. harlow, essex: longman carter, r., & mcrae, j. (eds). (1996). language, literature and the learner. harlow: addison wesley, longman cross, t.b, dennis, k., & isaacs, m. (1989). towards a culturally competent system of care, volume i. washington, d.c.: georgetown university child development center, cassp technical assistance center. cruz, j. h. r. (2010). the role of literature and culture in english language teaching, journal of linguistica aplicada, (7), available online: http://relinguistica.azc.uam.mx/no00 7/no07_art09.htm de riverol, j. e. (1991). literature in the teaching of english as a foreign language, in revista alicantina de estudios ingleses 4, pp: 65-69. hismanoglu, m. (2005). teaching english through literature, journal of language and linguistics studies, 1(1), april 2005, pp. 53-66. iberri-shea, g. (2009). using public speaking tasks in english language teaching, english teaching forum, 47(2), pp. 18-36. khatib, m., rezaei, s., & derakhshan, a. (2011). literature in efl/esl classroom, english language teaching, 4(1), march 2011, www.ccsenet.org/elt khatib, m., & hossein, a. r. (2012). literature and language teaching, journal of academic and applied studies, 2(6), pp. 32-38. lytovchenko, i. (2009). how to make upperlevel university english classes more interactive, english teaching forum, 47(2), pp. 24-29. oscarson, a. d. (2009). self-assessment of writing in english as a foreign language. goteborg, sweden: acta universitatis gothenborgensis. eric drs ed505960. maley, a. (1989a). down from the pedestal: literature as resource. in r. carter, r. walker & c. brumfit (eds), literature and the learner: methodological approaches. modern english publications and the british counsel, pp. 1-9 mckay, s. (1982). literature in the esl classroom, tesol quarterly 16(4), december 1982, pp. 529-536. mcrae, j. (1991). literature with a small “l”. london: macmillan. meyers, c. (1986). teaching students to think critically (san francisco: jossey-bass, 1986), p. 47. mujumdar, s. (2010). teaching english language and literature in non-native context, language in india: strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, 10, june 2010. savvidou, c. (2004). an integrated approach to teaching literature in the efl classroom, the internet tesl journal, x(12), december 2004, published in http://iteslj.org/ short, m. (1996). exploring the language of poems, plays and prose. london: longman. short, m. h. & candlin, c. n. (1986). teaching study skills for english literature. in c. j. brumfit & r. a. carter (eds.), literature and language teaching (pp. 89-109). oxford: oxford university press. thomas, g. c., batson, c. d. & coke, jay, s. (1981). do good samaritans discourage helpfulness?, journal of personality and social psychology, 40, pp. 194-200. tully, m. (2009). mind mirror projects: a tool for integrating critical thinking into the english language classroom, english teaching forum, 47(1), pp. 10-17. wu, s. y. (2008). teaching the three little pigs to efl young learners in taiwan, the internet tesl journal, xiv(1), january 2008 yeasmin, n, azad, md. a.k, ferdoush, j (2011). teaching language through literature: designing classroom activities. asa university review, 5(2), july-december 201, pp. 283-297 zakian, m., moradan, a., & naghibi, s. e. (2012). the relationship of self-, peer-, and teacher assessments in the speaking of efl learners. eric drs 530967. 230 http://www.ccsenet.org/elt http://iteslj.org/ english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s the railway children adam anshori universitas islam indonesia email: adam.anshori@uii.ac.id apa citation: anshori, a. (2016). the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s “the railway children”. english review, 4(2), 243-254 received: 16-02-2016 accepted: 25-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: this research is aimed at describing the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s the railway children. the problems formulated in the research will be answered in the descriptions consisting of thoughts, actions, and feelings of the main characters in the novel and presenting other characters’ comments dedicated to the main characters. the main source of the research data was edith nesbit’s the railway children. it is considered as a children’s literature. the focus of the research was events in the novel which showing the empowerment of the main characters. the data consist of thoughts, actions, and feelings of the main characters and presenting other characters’ admirable comments dedicated to the main characters. the data were analyzed inductively by using qualitative content analysis. the instrument of the research was the researcher himself. to get trustworthiness of the data, the researcher used four criteria, namely: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. the findings of the research showed that the novel contains of children’s empowerment, which can be divided into three categories. they are thought empowerment, action empowerment and feeling empowerment. as empowerment of children is considered as an important aspect in children’s story and it has great influence to enrich children’s intelligence and emotion in their growing period, the railway children can be categorized as a good novel. keywords: children’s literature, children’s empowerment introduction childhood is seen as a crucial formative period in life to gain basic education (stephens, 1994:8). it is a time to learn about the nature of the world, how to live in it, how to relate to other people, how to face and solve problems, how to think, and what to believe. children need something to teach them how to deal with life properly and honestly. for this reason, they need fair education. fair education is education which is governed of excellence, and not orthodoxy, timidity, or intolerance, to encourage children’s growing mind and critical thinking and to shape their future (west, 1998: viii-ix). unfortunately as one of the most influential subject in children’s life, children’s literature seems to have difficulties to be fair to children about the real facts in life. it is due to the fact that children’s literature has a unique condition involving a conflict of interests between children and adults. children, with their specific characteristics, interests, and knowledge, intentionally need to enrich themselves with lots of experiences from their readings. they want books that capable to challenge their critical thinking and empowering their growing mind. children are also eager to have honest books about life, though it may be a bitter fact of life. on the other hand, most adults 243 adam anshori the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s the railway children use and see children’s literature from different point of view. they judge the value of a book, whether it is good or not, based on their own judgment. they feel that they have a right and better understanding to decide whether a book is suitable for children or not. moreover, adults have authority and capability to do that. many children consume children’s reading and books which are brought and chosen by the adults. furthermore, adults treat children as ones who are innocent and need protection. most authors of children’s books do not explore the truth of life which is considered by adults dangerous and inappropriate, such as sexuality, poverty, and death, whereas children actually need fair stories about the real condition of life. adults actually can tell children everything. however, adults must be aware of the way to present those things. the right way should be in children’s range of understanding. adults also use stories to inscribe their own judgments, wisdoms, beliefs, and norms. those values will provide them with adults’ approval of or hatred of something. nodelman (1992: 1) said that children’s literature is a form of adult style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over childhood. so, it is obvious that children are victimized in their own reading materials because there are many stories which are not standing in their side. fairy tales, which are believed and assumed as children’s literature, usually have values that may not consider children in particular (tolkien, 1980: 113). snow white and seven dwarfs, for example, contain value that a good kid is a child who never gazes and fights against her stepmother even though her stepmother is cruel. she took for granted to all things that her mother did to her even when her mother tried to kill her. fortunately, the soldier, who is ordered to kill her, saved her life. then she hid in the jungle and depending her life to the kindness of the seven dwarfs. it shows that she is powerless and speechless. as a child, she depends and submits her whole life to adults, i.e., her stepmother, the soldier, and the seven dwarfs. this story will construct children’s mind to be passive. children are not stimulated to think critically and act bravely when they deal with adults. it also shows that adults dominate children. children are filled with values for adults’ benefit, so adults will be easier to handle children in their passive willingness. this story does not empower snow white, as the main character, who should have authority to decide her own life. this story also depicts that a girl is weaker than a boy. when a charming prince suddenly appeared, he easily broke down the curse and saved her life. then, as usual, the story ends happily ever after. it builds a frame of thought that children in their obedient and docile attitudes will get a happy life as her suffering repayment. so it will persuade children to believe that in their passive willingness, children will be blessed in their life. there is no argument or chance for them to fight against adults though actually the adults are wrong. many fairy tales also inscribe unequal position between boy and girl. girls are judged to be inferior to boys, whereas in fact it is untrue. they may do a lot of things as boys can. this value is dangerous because it can lead children’s way of thinking into wrong belief or perception. realizing this situation, adults should start to concern and be aware of their children’s reading material. children books may contain values that can endanger and harm them. it is seen in fairy tales as snow white and seven dwarfs, which is considered as children’s 244 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee story. so, it is important for adults who have great authority and power toward children to pay more attention to this problem. fair and wise adults must consider the need and desire of children who are longing for good books. children want books that stimulate their critical thinking and growing mind and are able to answer their curiosity about life. on the other hand, children deserve every ounce of their talent, intelligence, inventiveness, and care (hunt, 1995: 18). children need to learn about life from the right spectacles. they crucially need fair education and guidance. children are only inexperienced. they are not innocent or speechless at all and actually they have their own wisdom to judge something. however, they need adults’ guidance to figure out the hidden or profound values, and to stimulate them in developing an alert enjoyment in stories. adults must be honest with them. children may in their real life deal with situations that can be hard for them. therefore, an opinion that children have to keep away from the bitter of life is unnecessary. children experience the bitter of life from the everyday life instead of books. hence, literature can be a mean to transfer knowledge and understanding to children to get a better preparation to deal with the real life. a great value in children’s literature is that it can help children recognize their feelings and be aware of things they do or not to do to cope with their feelings. literature will also help children to be more apt to accept themselves if through stories they see other children with similar problems, worries, and conflicts (jones, 1988: 27). a book must enlighten child’s eyes and provide space for exploration, which extends their experiences, enjoyments, satisfaction and morality. considering the role of literature towards children, it seems necessary to conduct a research study concerning the influence of children’s literature as a means of educating and exploring emotions and also as agent of socializations. character generally means the aggregate of mental, emotional, and social qualities that distinguish a person. in children’s literature, the term character is used to mean a person, a personified animal or object that inhabits in a story (lukens, 1999: 80). in the story, the importance of a character determines how fully the character is developed and understood by the readers. character development means showing the character – whether a person or an animal or an object-with the complexity of human being (lukens, 1999: 80). a character may be presented mainly through description and discussion or, in a more dramatic manner; the author simply reports the character’s speech and action. in other words, the readers may reveal the character through the action, speech, and appearance, others’ comments and by author’s comment. these methods of characterization can be used together (little, 1981: 89). one extreme of dramatic method is the modern device of interior monologue or stream-ofconsciousness technique, in which all that is recorded is the flow of impression and thought passing through some character’s mind from moment to moment. characters are divided into two, namely: dynamic and static character (lukens, 1999: 86). dynamic character is one who changes in the course of action. the character demonstrates a new realization about himself or herself, or 245 adam anshori the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s the railway children about his or her personal values. static character is one who does not change in the course of the story. the conflict does not influence the character to make any impact upon personality or outlook. children have keen interest in character (lukens, 1999: 94). they want stories that its characters especially child characters involved in action and making decisions. children are intent on the way characters’ decisions solving the problems. children like to follow characters and their motives through their emotions and their reasoning as they face decisions and make choices. they are also excited by the possibility of the accidental and also inevitable situations. these descriptions show the importance of characterization in children’s literature in drawing meaning and messages and pleasing the children. the railway children, as one of children’s novels, is interesting to be studied from many perspectives, such as plot, characterization, point of view, and setting. in order to be focus on the research, the research will be restricted to the description of the main characters’ thoughts, actions, and feelings and others’ comments appraising them, showing their efforts to deal with their life and the empowerment characterization of the children. the limitation of the problems is mainly based on the relevance of the research question, which is “what kinds of children’s empowerment appear in the novel?” method this research uses qualitative method. qualitative method is a research procedure which produces descriptive data results in the form of written or oral words from people and their behavior that are observed (bogdan and biken, 1982: 5). this method is concerned with the process rather than consequences, with organic wholeness rather than independent variables, and with meaning rather than behavioral statistics. it emphasizes a holistic interpretation. the main source of the research is the novel entitled the railway children by edith nesbit who is best known for her family stories. the penguin group firstly publishes this novel in england in 1906 and through the time this novel was being revised and reprinted in 1995. the data are analyzed by using content analysis. according to holsti (in lincoln and guba, 1985: 337-338), content analysis is an objective, systematic, and general description of the manifest content of a text. this analysis has five major characteristics. firstly, the process of analyzing the data follows certain formulated rules and procedures. however, it conforms that the rules do not need to be finally formulated until the end of the research. secondly, it should be systematic. it deals with forming categories, which have to be done according to determined procedures. thirdly, content analysis is a process that aims for generality by gaining theoretical relevance as the result of the analysis. theoretical relevance produces relevant and theoretical perspectives in relation to the context. fourthly, content analysis concerns manifested content. it will draw the conclusion based on the content of manifested context. finally, although content analysis emphasizes more on quantitative research, it also can be carried out with qualitative research. the qualitative content analysis procedure which is used in this research is inductive category development. its procedure formulates a criterion of definition derived from theoretical background and research question which determine the aspect of the textual 246 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee material taken into account (mayring, 2000: 4). the data of the research are events occurred in the railway children by edit nesbit that describe the empowerment of child characters to cope with their problems and feelings. the empowerment of children is shown through the capability and sensibility of children in solving their problems and others’ problems and also understanding others’ feelings. beside the characterization of the child characters, children’s empowerment is also strengthened by the praise of other characters for children’s kindness. the focus of the research is events, which show the empowerment of the main characters, roberta, peter, and phyllis to deal with their problems of lives and feelings. according to moleong the criteria to check the trustworthiness are credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (lincoln and guba, 1985: 300). credibility is aimed at achieving the validity of the data. the researcher can achieve credibility through carefully and comprehensively reading and re-reading the selected data in accordance with the research question so that the data can be considered credible. this criterion is done until the researcher gets certainty and could not find any other significant variation in the data. the researcher also applies triangulation technique to gain credibility of the data. triangulation utilizes something outside the data to verify the data itself or to compare them (moleong, 2011: 178). kinds of triangulation technique are sources, methods, observers or researchers, and theories. the researcher applies one technique of triangulation that is another observer. in this technique, the researcher asks another person to discuss the valuable data to know the correct interpretation about the events whether they are relevant to the children’s empowerment or not. the person who became the observer is widyastuti purbani. she earns a doctorate degree from universitas indonesia majoring in children’s literature. therefore, her capability in analyzing children’s literature will be in accordance with the research. in applying transferability, the researcher should provide all the information needed by the readers in understanding the findings. this information that called thick description presents the detail and empirical findings, which describe the context of the research. the thick description is obtained through reading and analyzing the railway children comprehensively. to fulfill dependability, the researcher reads the data carefully and frequently in order to understand the content of the novel and to make correct interpretation. triangulation technique is also used to reach this criterion. the researcher asks the observer as the second reader and has some discussions with her. in some discussions, the observer states that she has the same perspective as the researcher about the novel. results and discussion there are many books written for children. through this research, however, it will be impossible to analyze all of the books. the researcher only focuses on one book in order to have detailed analysis. the researcher chooses the railway children by edith nesbit because the main characters in the novel are children who get misfortune in their life. it shows the struggle of children in facing and solving their own problems. according to neufeldt (1996: 445) ‘to give authority or power or ability to’ 247 adam anshori the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s the railway children is similar to the word “empower”. empowerment is the noun form of empower that is defined as giving authority, power, or ability to someone. in accordance with the situation of children’s literature and the importance of good book for children, it is obvious that empowerment of children is crucial. empowerment becomes a significant role in children’s literature because children are eager to portray themselves in the story and tend to imitate what the characters do, especially the main character. when a story presents an empowerment spirit, it is expected that the readers are stimulated to think critically and do the same things as the empowering characters in order to draw the meaning of that story. nodelman sees the similarity frame of thought in orientalism to the frame of thought used by adults over children. in orientalism, said reveals that western (the occidents) tends to dominate, restructure, and have authority over the east (the orients) whereas in children’s literature nodelamn figures out the domination of adults (the authors) toward children (the readers). nodelman borrows said’s orientalism to make a brief description of the condition of children’s literature. nodelman (1992: 1) states: “children’s psychology and children’s literature can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with childhood, dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short, children’s psychology and children’s literature as an adult style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over childhood” the quotation above shows that adults (the authors) have power to control children (the readers) through the stories. an exploration of parallel insight between said’s description of orientalism and the representation of childhood in children’s literature reveals a number of characteristics not empowering children. knowing the disempowerment characteristics in children’s stories will help to figure out the empowerment values as the contrary side. those characteristics are explained below. 1. inherent inferiority inherent inferiority deals with adults’ way of thought that posit themselves as superior, having more knowledge and ability, over children, the inferior one who are incapable to speak for themselves (nodelman, 1992: 1). in children’s literature, this characteristic is viewed from the author’s way in treating their readers. they restrict themselves to create a complex story because of their lack of vocabulary and knowledge as a means to understand the story. another form of inferiority is that the authors place child characters in a weaker side. this is obviously seen in fairy tales. child characters in fairy tales, though they are the main characters in the story, are described powerless and speechless. they tend to depend on and entrust their life to adults. 2. inherent femaleness this characteristic in children’s literature manages to suggest something traditionally feminine about childhood and on the contrary something traditionally masculine about childhood (nodelman, 1992: 2). this situation subordinates children to an inferior position. adults, in this case, plant the seed of their wisdom to children. they 248 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee gaze and talk about how charming or cute children are in passive willingness. children’s happiness is about pleasing them, bending their will, or doing what they want. adults will give reward for obedient children and give punishment whenever children dare to disobey or gaze back. 3. inherent adult-centered it mainly concerns the assumption that the authors of children’s books write the stories to provide the children with values and images that adult approve of or feel comfortable with. by large, this effort is aimed to give values and behaviors that make children easier to handle: more passive, more docile, and more obedient. as a result, children will need adults’ guidance and more willing to accept the need for it (nodelman, 1992: 2). 4. silencing and inherent silence silencing and inherent silence deals with adults’ effort to hide things, which are considered dangerous and inappropriate for children (nodelman, 1992: 2). adults want to protect children from the bitterness of life and taboo matter. for example they try to hide the matters of poverty, sexuality, and divorce, in order to believe that children are truly as innocent as they claim and that children’s life are devoid from bitterness of life. they would rather have to lie than be forced to confront children as they really are or as they really speak, whereas children crucially need the truth. in fact, the over-protective behavior from adults and the writers of children’s books precisely uneducated them. thought empowerment the railway children presents thought empowerment that is thinking ability of the children through its child characters’ knowledge or idea and understanding others feelings. the thinking ability here means the ability of children; roberta (bobbie), peter (pete), and phyllis, to develop their critical thinking and growing mind in order to overcome the situations or problems, which happened around them. thought empowerment is divided into two parts. they are thought empowerment through children’s knowledge or idea and through understanding others feelings. 1. thought empowerment through children’s knowledge and idea children have their own intelligence in the form of their knowledge and idea. knowledge includes their ability to understand something, familiarity gained by their experiences and information achieved, whereas, idea is about their plan, opinion, or conception of something. the position of children, both in reality and story, is inferior. it is because adults assume children as innocent and docile. however, in the railway children, bobbie, peter and phyllis are presented as an open mind and intelligent children. they quickly learn and understand new information that they achieved. the information, for children, will answer their curiosity and need of knowledge. it takes an important role in children’s growth. because of that, children crucially need fair and honest information of the description of life. in this story, bobbie, peter and phyllis accept new information about the equality position between boys and girls. when peter ask father whether girls can help to mend engine or not and father explains that girls are able to do all the things that boys can. 249 adam anshori the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s the railway children ‘can girls help to mend engines?’ peter asked doubtfully. father: ‘of course they can. girls are just as clever as boys…(nesbit, 1995: 5). they learn this information first by comparing it with the fact in their daily life. in their reality, those three children mostly do their activities together. they never face any conditions that show imbalance ability between boys and girls. children then understand that the girls – bobbie and phyllisactually can do all the things that boy – peter – can do. this influences them to belief the truth of the information. the belief of equality position will construct children’s frame of thought. it empowers children to have self-confidence. bobbie and phyllis believe that they can do all things; on the other hand, peter never doubts his sisters’ capability. this will convince children that they can develop their ability and creativity to reach whatever they want in life without restricted by gender. 2. thought empowerment through understanding others’ feelings adults often assume that children are innocent, naïve, and weak. from that belief, adults think that it will be unnecessary to share or inform them about something considered difficult or complex. adults, in daily life, usually try to hide the problems and bitterness of life, such as poverty and sadness in order to keep the children away from misery. however, children can feel and see what actually happened, and may understand the situation better than what adult’s expected. “bobbie said,’ come on phil; i’ll race you to the gate.’ and she started the race, though she hated doing it”. (nesbit, 1995: 111) mother does not realize that bobbie knows her sadness. she thinks that bobbie is only tired of walking slowly. mother never expects that bobbie can do something to lift her burden up by giving her a chance to be alone. bobbie asks phyllis to race to the gate so she has her own little time to release her misery without any attentions and disturbances from her kids. bobbie’s capability to think of a way to show her affection for mother is a form of children empowerment. action empowerment the action empowerment mainly describes children’s action, behavior, and attitude in dealing with incidents in their daily life. it is divided into two parts. they are action empowerment through children’s bravery and through doing favor for others. 1. action empowerment through children’s bravery one of brave attitudes that should be learned by everybody is the willingness to confess his or her mistakes. it is important to learn because this action may require nerve to do and to accept any following consequences. peter can act and answer the station master’s greeting as usual like nothing happened before. however, he realizes that if the station master greets him first, it is plausible that the station master has not recognized him by daylight. peter does not want to feel uncertain about it. he takes a risk when he decides to inform the station master who he really is. he believes that it will be easier for both of them to make clear of this problem out. ‘i thought perhaps you didn’t know it was me that took the coals,’ peter went on,’ when you said “good 250 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee morning”. but it was, and i’m sorry. there.’ (nesbit, 1995: 38) peter wants the station master knows that he is the boy who has ever stolen the coals. fortunately, the station master appreciates his bravery to confess his mistake. the station master already has forgiven him. he has recognized peter before he greets peter. peter’s nerve to confess should be regarded as a brave attitude. he can manage his own doubt and fear to decide a proper action in solving the problem out. his action indicates his responsibility and honest personality. after this occurrence, the station master becomes one of his new friends. 2. action empowerment through doing favor for others to live in a society, children have to learn how to make relationship with others. they face the fact that they have to deal and work with others in their daily life. it is important to establish mutual assistance in their surroundings. bobbie, peter and phyllis are sociable kids. they make lots of new friends in their new neighborhood. they love to help other. there are many occasions that show their action in helping others. one of their actions is giving physical assistance to mother. they try to lessen mother’s duty by doing their own daily activities. ‘… no servant or anything. let’s get up and to be useful. we’ll just creep down mouse quietly and have everything beautiful before mother gets up.’ (nesbit, 1995: 20) in this story, the children have selfawareness to be accustomed to their duty of daily activities. it is a good habit to train discipline and responsibility. if they are able to do their daily duty well, they may be ready to a greater responsibility. feelings empowerment feeling empowerment is a form of children’s awareness and sensibility to deal with happening incidents. it is divided into two parts. they are feeling empowerment through empathy and through children’s unselfishness. 1. feeling empowerment through empathy empathy is an ability to share another’s emotion, thoughts or feelings. it is closely related to understand other’s feeling. children usually face difficulties to understand other’s feeling because of their less experience. to have sensitivity and awareness of the surroundings, children need practice. they have to learn about expressions, signs, or attitudes of a person to consider his real feelings. bobbie shows her deep empathy to the russian stranger for his suffering. she knows that he almost gives up finding his wife and kids. so when the doctor unconsciously laughs at bobbie’s story about the crying russian, she directly admonishes the doctor. ‘please don’t. you wouldn’t if you’d seen him before. i never saw a man cry before. you don’t know what it’s like.” (nesbit, 1995: 73) bobbie knows that it is hard for a man crying for his life. so, when the russian stranger cries in front of the crowd, she can feel that he is in a very distress and hopeless condition. the fact that he arrives in a foreign country without any money and ability to communicate with others makes him totally lost. moreover, he could not find any clues about his family existence in that country. it makes bobbie understands why he cries. the doctor realizes his mistake and feels sorry for what he has done. it illustrates that sometimes children have better sensitivity than adults. 251 adam anshori the empowerment of children in edith nesbit’s the railway children 2. feeling empowerment through children’s unselfishness unselfishness is the way of thinking or attitude of someone who tries to consider other’s need or welfare. it is a care expression for others. children express their unselfishness attitude on many occasions in the story. when peter gets involve in trouble, his sisters do not leave him alone to face it. they do things to help him, such as defending him or asking forgiveness for him. ‘it’s our fault just as much as peter’s. we helped to carry the coal away and we knew where he got it.” (nesbit, 1995: 32) it is clear that bobbie tries to exempt him. she tries to persuade the station master to forgive peter’s mistake. if the station master punishes him, bobbie and phyllis will deserve to get it too. the station master considers that peter actually has no intention of doing a crime. he only has a wrong perception of coal mining. his sisters try to convince the station master, and they succeed. he lets them go. their effort to help peter when he is in trouble shows their kindness and tolerance. tolerance is one form of unselfishness behavior. empowerment becomes the most interesting discussion in the railway children. this value is considered to have great influence in the improvement of children’s intelligence and emotion. child characters in children’s story are the best picture and reflection of life for them. they can portray themselves in the story, which will stimulate them to expand their experience. conclusion there are three kinds of empowerment in children characters, namely: thought empowerment, action empowerment, and feelings empowerment. thought empowerment focuses on thinking ability of the children coping with the situations or problems which happen around them. it consists of two parts. they are empowerment seen through children’s knowledge or idea and their understanding of other’s feelings. action empowerment describes children’s action, behavior, and attitude to overcome incidents in their everyday life. this type of empowerment is divided into two. they are empowerment seen through children’s bravery and their action to give favor for others. feeling empowerment shows children’s awareness and sensibility to understand other’s feeling. their awareness and sensitivity mainly deals with terrible feeling of others. feeling empowerment also consists of two parts. they are empowerment seen through children’s empathy and their unselfishness. acknowledgement in this section, the researcher personally wants to thank widyastuti purbani as the second observer. she plays an important role in order to make the data of this research credible. the researcher also wants to thank afdina afitri as partner for discussion. as fellow researcher which have the same interest in children’s literature, the discussion which we conduct help to determine the objectiveness of the 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(viii-ix) 253 254 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 61 teachers’ emotion in teaching practicum yayu heryatun english education department, state islamic university smh banten email: yayu.heryatun@uinbanten.ac.id tri ilma septiana english education department, state islamic university smh banten email: tri.ilma@uinbanten.ac.id apa citation: heryatun, y. & septiana, t. i. (2020). pre-service teachers’ emotion in teaching practicum. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 61-68. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3779 received: 29-06-2020 accepted: 28-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction teaching practicum program which is provided to pre-service teachers aims to develop teacher competencies and link the pedagogical theories that they have learned with actual teaching practice in school. during this program, preservice teachers may struggle to apply their cognition, personal, social, professional, even their own emotion. emotion has a vital role to play in our understanding and perception of place based on meanings and interactions (pile, 2010; urry, 2005; wood & smiith, 2004). in other words, teaching practicum could be regarded as an emotional exercise which is associated with the expression of emotions in interpersonal relationships. it means pre-service teachers during teaching practicum have emotional experience both positively or negatively, as a result throughout interaction with mentor teachers, students, even with their own friends. thus, pre-service teachers learn what it means being a teacher in a real practice (meyer, 2009). moreover, there is a mutualism symbiotic relationship between emotion and place. emotion reflects our real personality in interacting with other people in the working environment (berrens, 2016, p.76) while people exert a powerful influence on and within place. in school context, emotional understanding and misunderstanding thereby result from what hargreaves (2002, p.508) called as “emotional geographies”. emotional geographies comprise with “the spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and/or distance in human interactions and relationships that help create, configure, and color the feelings and emotions we experience about ourselves, our world, and each other” (hargreaves, 2001). in the concept of emotional geographies, it assists to recognize the support for and threats to the basic emotional bonds and understandings of schooling that arise from forms of distance and closeness in people interactions or relationship (hargreaves, 2001). furthermore, he vividly classified emotional geographies into six distinctive categories, namely, personal, professional, cultural, moral, political, and physical geographies, which will serve as the conceptual framework as well as analytical abstract: this present study involved two novice pre-service teachers who had teaching practicum. it focused on their emotion during two-months teaching practicum. their emotion dealt with personal geography as well as professional geography. the results revealed that pre-service teacher had emotional experience positively and negatively. the emotional experience that pre-service teachers had in personal geographies starting from nervous, anxious, scared, guilty, shame, self-doubt, and being oppressed to being calm, being enthusiasm to teach, having self-confidence, and having good rapport with school citizens. meanwhile, in term of professional geographies, pre-service teachers’ emotions were various, ranging from how to adopt theory to practice, confused how to interpret mentor teachers’ feedback to being disciple, learning how to both design lesson plan and manage classroom, learning to dress well and keeping good relation to students, mentor teacher, supervisors, and school staffs. in addition, this study found the culture influence on pre-service teachers personally and professionally. the indonesia culture to respect senior emerge during teaching practicum such different social status between student and teacher, tendency to underestimate the value of quality and achievement. keywords: pre-service teacher’s emotion; personal geography; professional geography; teaching practicum yayu heryatun & tri ilma septiana pre-service teachers’ emotion in teaching practicum 62 device (see also hargreaves 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2005) where the first two categories will be employed in this study. a number of studies has been done deals with pre-service teachers’ emotion in variety educational context (vaflander, 2008; barcelos, 2015; marais, 2016; yuan & icy lee, 2016). day and leitch (2014) expressed that emotions play a significant part in teaching learning that can serve as a filter for how pre-service teachers perceive and enact teaching. yongcan liu (2016) alerted that pre-service teachers experienced in her emotions, not only positively but also negatively in terms of different aspect of schooling. in addition, these pre-service teachers should be able to manage her emotion in order to adopt with her new school environment. among above previous studies, study on preservice teachers’ emotion in efl classroom, however, specifically in indonesia academic setting often neglected and less attention among indonesian scholars. these issues are not quite explored and less is known how pre-service teachers adopt their emotions during teaching practicum. indeed, emotion has significant role in teaching practice, specifically for pre-service teachers. therefore, this present study addresses the gap and discusses how pre-service teacher engage their emotion during teaching practicum in efl classroom. pre-service teachers’ personal and professional emotion is two important categories which are unified in one time during teaching practicum. methods this study applied the qualitative case study because case study involved the study of a particular issue that explored through one or more cases within a bounded system (i.e. setting, a context) over time, through detailed, in-depth data collection involving multiple sources of information rich in context (e.g., observations, interviews, documents, and reports). creswell (2016, p.79) clarified that case study research as “the in-depth study of instances of a phenomenon in its natural context and from the perspective of the participants involved in the phenomenon. two pre-service teachers from one of the state islamic universities in indonesia took part in this study, they are goni (pseudonym, female) and jack (pseudonym, male) who had carried out teaching practicum for two months in a senior high school in banten province. goni and jack were just ordinary university students and they previously had no teaching experiences. thus, this teaching practicum program became their first teaching experience in the real setting, efl classroom. the data from teacher reflective journals (glossed by rj) and open interviews (glossed by i) were employed to explore and describe preservice teacher’s emotion positively and negatively in teaching practicum by referring to the two hargreaves’ emotional geographies framework; personal geographies and professional geographies. the data from reflective journals were collected in a portfolio and it told about the entire of their feelings after accomplishing teaching practicum in every session. as soon as writers received the reflective journals, we began to identify, classify, and code with hargreaves’ emotional geographies framework. in addition, based on the reflective journals data, we developed interviews scripts. the interviews with these two pre-service teachers were conducted separately by utilizing their mother tongue (indonesia language) in order to make them feel more comfortable and able to express their feelings freely. the data from interviews were firstly transcribed verbatim and labeled with one of hargreaves’ emotional geographies categories and finally paired up with those derives from the reflective journals to be triangulated and/or to be cross checked its validity and credibility. these processes were committed repeatedly until we found pre-service student’s emotions positively and negatively in teaching practicum that fitted two categories of hargreaves’ emotional geographies. results and discussion results during conducting teaching practicum, preservice teachers did not only acquire additional pedagogic knowledge but also emotional experiences. the following data demonstrate how pre-service teachers’ emotion came up related to the relationship with mentor teachers, supervisor, students, fellows, and other school citizens at the school. professional geography teaching is art works, it needs persistency, sincerity, and seriousness. at the beginning, two pre-service teachers admitted that they were inexperienced and so nervous to encounter teaching practicum. in reflective journal, goni shared her feelings about the first teaching experience: english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 63 “to be honest, i have no thought about teaching because this is actually my new experience. i feel very nervous because i am scared my students do not understand what i’ve thought and they have more knowledge than me. however, my mentor teacher always reminds me to be calm and enjoy my teaching time. after teaching i got many corrections from her and it helps me to improve my teaching performances and administrative skills.” (rj_g1) the same case also happened to jack, although he also felt anxious on his first teaching experience, but in the interview, he told that he got praise from his mentor teacher. “similar to my fellows, i also feel anxious, but luckily, i can handle my mixed feelings by directly opening communication with students and stimulate them to be more active and engage in learning process. in the end of teaching practicum session, my mentor teacher was surprised with my performance and she also gave me many inputs regarding to designing lesson planning.” (i_j1) in teaching practicum, a supervisor also has prominent role. although s/he did not always monitor pre-service teachers’ performances at the classroom but her/his contribution could be seen when preparing mental readiness and equipping teacher professionalism competencies of preservice teachers. in the interview, goni and jack concurrently exposed their feelings on supervisor’s role during teaching practicum. goni said that: “before teaching practicum, he taught me many things such as teacher code of ethics, the implementation of scientific approach which refers to 2013 curriculum (current curriculum in indonesia), process of designing a lesson planning, and how to arrange preliminary research for my proposal paper. besides, in every teaching practicum session, he also reminds me to write teacher reflective journal that contains on my various feelings and experiences.” (i_g1) meanwhile, jack did not deny the substantial contributions of supervisor in preconditioning his mental readiness before teaching practicum. “on pre-departure, i had opportunity to talk privately with him. i said i did not have any experience in teaching, i was afraid i could not handle the classroom and deliver material that easily understood by students. he invited me to discuss on how to build a good rapport with students and school citizens. he boosted morale and burned my spirit. in the end of meeting, he smiled at me and whispered in my ears: “chase your moment and enjoy your time” while hugging me.” (i_j2) moreover, some experts (rosenholtz, 1989; mclaughlin & talbert, 1993; fullan & hargreaves, 1996; wiley, 2001) believed that teaching with fellows is considered to be better than teaching alone. hargreaves (2001, p.503) assumed that cooperation and collaboration among teachers give them access to the new ideas, creativity energy, and moral support that help them to be more effective with their students. in addition, in his study, hargreaves (2001) found that when teachers work together, they value appreciation and acknowledgment as well as personal support and acceptance, but tend to avoid disagreement and conflict, whether they regard themselves as close friends or as more distant colleagues. moreover, he also reiterated the importance of close personal bonds in teaching should not be neglected. they could and did sustain teachers in the face of professional stress, crisis, and difficulty. in the context of team teaching, they can also stimulate and energize professional engagement. nor should close bonds and friendships necessarily inhibit the creativity and disturbance of professional conflict and disagreement (hargreaves, 2001). in line with hargreaves’s perspectives, goni extended personal experiences with her fellows on how friendship support her teacher professionalism. “i learned a lot from my fellows. although we came from different majors but we often organizing teaching sharing before entering class at the dormitory. indeed, this was a good chance for me who basically very common in the education world to broaden my horizons and enhance teacher professionalism competencies. we discuss many things such as how to behave and dress well, how to implement certain teaching method, how to develop instructional media, how to build good rapport, how to design lesson planning, and so forth. in conclusion, i fond of this relationship because we did many positive things relates to teacher professionalism improvement.” (rj_g2) other issues that became concern on this study was how pre-service teachers interact with school citizens. according to zembylas (2007, p.355), teaching in a new workplace implies that they need to epistemological beliefs in order to understand the new moral legitimacy of practice. during this process, various emotions such as guilt, shame, and self-doubt could emerge, which require constant work and management. jack in his reflective journal told his adaptation process yayu heryatun & tri ilma septiana pre-service teachers’ emotion in teaching practicum 64 and sacrifice efforts in order to be accepted by board of teachers and staffs at school: “at the beginning of our arrival, i, along with my fellows experienced difficult periods, we were treated like stepchildren because we were placed in a library not teacher’s room. i felt isolated, awkward when saw other teachers as well as reluctant to see my mentor teacher. and it became worse when one of senior teachers told me that there was unwritten custom at school for pre-service teachers to serve meals and beverages in the teacher’s room. i realized that this was a kind of hazing. in addition, we also have to come earlier and go home later than others. i and my fellows tried to think clearly and react calmly to face these problems. after discussing with my fellows and obtaining advices from supervisor, we strive to get closer to school citizens and endeavor to be more engaged in all school programs. after a few days, we began to be welcomed warmly and enjoyed school circumstances.” (rj_j1) the quotation above indicates school circumstances influence pre-service teachers’ emotions and construct perspectives on their future fieldwork. school as a work place has potential to evoke a range of emotional responses (simm & marvell, 2015); understanding that places can generate emotional reactions is important in developing a sense of place and (in turn) an emotional attachment to place (smith, davidson, cameron & bondi, 2009). personal geography before the implementation of teaching practicum, both goni and jack had taken some pedagogic subjects that equip their teacher professionalism competencies. this implies that theoretically they have already sufficient knowledge for doing teaching practice in real place. however, personally, they are inexperience teachers. they also needed time to build self-confidence and good rapport with school citizens, capability to handle classroom, composure to manage various emotions as well as ability to design lesson planning. the following lines express the mixed feelings of pre-service teachers’ emotions that arises deal with how their relationship with people who involved in teaching practicum. inevitably, a mentor teacher becomes the most influential person. she has a strategic role in constructing teacher profile of pre-service teachers as well as describing their future workplace. generally, both two pre-service teachers have good relationship with their respective mentor teachers. in the interview, goni said that: “i had good relationship with my mentor teacher. even though she looked like serious person but our relationship went naturally not because there was an objective in order to get good grades. in every session of teaching practicum, i always obtained many corrections. i was happy with all corrections from her and without thinking twice i followed her instructions. i believed in her advices can improve my teaching performance. weeks later, she gave me more freedom to explore my potencies and it really increased my selfconfidence and competencies. now i am ready to be an english teacher.” (i_g2) in the same way, jack also had similar experiences. in the reflective journal, he wrote his opinion on his mentor teacher. “overall, even though i rarely talked to my mentor teacher but i was grateful for her feedback and sincerity in guiding me. i felt appreciated and helped by her when undergoing teaching practicum. she looked like a rigid person, talk a little but work a lot. she was one of senior teachers at school and everybody respected her so much. she was a model of professional teacher who had broad knowledge and extensive experiences.” (rj_j2) out of six pre-service teachers, goni and jack are considered as two prominent pre-service teachers who have attractive personalities. they are easy going, cheerful, helpful, and humble. they are able to interact well, not only with teachers or staffs but also students. after undergoing teaching practicum for two weeks, some students became more familiar with goni and they were keen to spend some time with her after class. some students wanted to consult their problems in learning but they were reluctant to discuss it in the casual way. in reflective journal, goni shared her rapport with students: “i have quite good relationship with almost all students. in the morning, i usually greet my students or have a small talk before entering class. after class, some students often come to my room, we discuss many things especially those related to the improvement of english skills. i give them some advices and we practice english little by little. in the weekend, sometimes i received invitation from my students to have a small potluck party. we enjoyed our holiday while practicing speaking english. hopefully, from this forum, they are excited to learn english.” (rj_g3) on the other hand, in the first two meetings jack have experienced difficulties in handling english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 65 students. some pupils were disobedient and difficult to be controlled. jack reveals that: “in the early weeks, i had difficulties to manage classroom. some students lack motivation and interest in learning religious subject. they were rebellious and noisy; that made me frustrated. however, i tried to find out the main factors why they dislike learning religious subject. after interviewing some students randomly, many students told me they didn’t like religious subject because the teacher always asked them to memorize qur’anic verses and taught them in old fashioned way.” (i_j3) to overcome to those problems, jack attempted to apply attractive teaching method and used different approach that suits to the students’ characteristics to attract and build students’ motivation in learning, jack often gave students project-based learning so they can work cooperatively. besides, jack also often invites students to study in library or open environment. discussions this study presents how pre-service teachers engage their emotional experiences either positively or negatively in teaching practicum. data from interviews and reflective journals were analyzed comprehensively based on hargreaves’ (2001) emotional geography framework which focuses on two categories namely professional and personal geography. the previous stories of goni and jack, it illustrated that they have experienced various emotional conflicts that indirectly have a valuable contribution to building their profiles as a teacher and practicing their ability to adapt with fieldwork. in school setting, the emotional geographies consist of the spatial and experiential patterns of closeness and/or distance in human interactions and relationship that help create, configure, and color the feelings and emotions we experience about ourselves, our world, and each other (hargreaves, 2001). in terms of relationship with mentor teachers, two pre-service teachers told that they academically had good relationship with their respective mentor teachers and acknowledged if mentor teachers had big contributions to their teacher professional development. it reflected on some feedbacks or inputs that they had gained before and after teaching practices. moreover, these two pre-service teachers become more motivated to apply any new innovation at efl classroom as they have positive emotion, especially when they consult with their mentor teachers. however, this could also threaten their creativities because they are too dependent upon mentor teachers’ instructions. in result, they definitely will be reluctant to have different ideas with mentor teachers. this could hamper the way they improve their teaching. because in indonesia, culture which still adheres to patronclient relationship, it is very taboo to refute the opinions of experienced and older people. meanwhile, regarding the relationship between pre-service teachers and students. goni and jack had extremely good relationship where they often had incidental potluck party with students after class or did pleasure activities on weekend together. this case was very different from what happened to wen (see liu, 2016:9) who taught at language center of an english university. when some chinese immigrant students became more familiar and considered her as big sister. she was forced to decline students’ genuine invitation because she had kept a professional distance from them. what happened to wen was very different from the culture and custom that prevails in indonesia where a teacher commonly has a tight personal relationship with students. teachers protect students like their children and students respect teachers like their own parents. this type relationship is very important as it could help pre-service teachers to always keep their positive emotions and reduce negative ones. besides, this study also captures the relationship between pre-service teachers and school citizens i.e. board of teachers except mentor teacher and staff. in principle, teaching practicum program is a valuable momentum for pre-service teachers to develop their teacher competencies, gain wide experiences as well as to manage their emotions. as adult learners, of course they have got in touch with various people with different characteristics and social status. on one hand, they had close relationship with one of female teacher, ratu (pseudonym). she often came to library just to chat or make sure the condition of pre-service teachers was fine. goni revealed that she personally felt comfortable with ratu’s presence and still keeping in touch with her. in other words, pre-service teachers’ positive emotion also achieved when there is the supportive work environment like support and encouragement from other teachers of school. the motivation from them become energy for pre-service teachers to work hard, give the best for school and feel valued. in contrast, most of pre-service teachers also experienced culture yayu heryatun & tri ilma septiana pre-service teachers’ emotion in teaching practicum 66 shock at work place. it is reasonable that preservice teachers may experience some reality shock due to the change of learning environment from university to practicum school (veenman, 1984, p.14). in this case, the culture shock at workplace was caused by seniority factor and social status. in reality, pre-service teachers like or dislike must to follow all prevailing custom at school. the bullying acts are seen obviously when one of senior teacher asked them to serve snacks and beverages in the teacher’s room and handle the classroom when he was absent. it is one of examples that makes pre-service teachers’ negative emotion come up. it means pre-service teachers’ expectation on teaching are not full filled at the place where they are teaching. indeed, some of pre-service teachers thought that by following all instructions they will get good grade. this indicates that there is still a misconception in pre-service teacher’s mind if the main objective of teaching practicum is only for obtaining satisfied score. in other words, they seek for academic degrees not the expertise they entail. in turn, teaching practicum is essentially to facilitate a pre-service teacher to attain teacher competencies as well as gain real teaching experiences (anonymous, 2019). conclusion in brief, the findings above infer that pre-service teachers’ emotions fundamentally interrelated with some factors such as identity (van veen and ilasky, 2005), place (smith 1993, bartos, 2013, berrens, 2016), age (hargreaves, 2000; 2005) teaching and learning strategies (marvell and simm, 2018), as well as colleague (hargreaves, 2001). empirically, this study more or less has similarity points with the previous studies. nevertheless, in this study there are distinguishing factors namely indonesian cultural and habits that influence pre-service teachers’ emotions that arise positively and negatively in teaching practicum implementation. in sum, preservice teachers’ positive emotions arise when their expectation on how they perceived teaching activities are achieved at school. on the other hand, 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(2015). the use of critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading. english review 4(1), 25-38 received: 02-07-2015 accepted: 01-04-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract this study attempts to reveal how the use of critical pedagogy principles in teaching english as a foreign language (efl) reading facilitates students to think critically. additionally, it investigates and elaborates the benefits and challenges of using critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading. the three critical pedagogy principles used in this study were dialogic education, democratic classroom, and reading the world and the word. critical thinking skills and dispositions expected to be performed by the participants were analysis and evaluation skills, open-mindedness, and making reasoned decision. this is a case study design which was conducted in the form of teaching program. the teaching program which consisted of eight meetings was given to 59 efl sophomores in the reading in professional context class at a private teacher education in bandung. data in the form of classroom talks and activities and students‟ responses as well as their critical thinking skills self-assessment were collected by using video recordings, observation notes, interview guideline, students‟ learning journals, and questionnaires. it is revealed that the teaching program has facilitated students to think critically by providing four categories of activity. they are (1) offering problematic topics and reading materials that are linked to the students‟ lives, (2) encouraging students to read between the lines, (3) distributing classroom power, and (4) creating space for students‟ voices to be heard. meanwhile, there are two benefits of the teaching program, namely (1) language development and (2) new knowledge as well as experience acquisition. however, there are three major challenges in conducting the teaching program that are (1) the lack of classroom-friendly authentic controversial reading materials, (2) the passive culture, and (3) the unpredictable classroom. keywords: critical pedagogy principles, critical thinking skills, efl reading class introduction it becomes common knowledge that since the dawn of reform in 1998, indonesian citizens have gained almost unlimited freedom in expressing their opinions after 32 years living under the repressive new order regime. suddenly, printed and electronic mass media easily spread all over the country. supported by information technology advancement, now, 18 years after the reform, indonesian citizens are often overwhelmed by different and even contradictory conflicting information. in such context, it is crucial for indonesian citizens to think critically. as a consequence, as it is written in the indonesian 2013 official curriculum, schools in all levels are required to equip students with critical thinking. it is not sufficient to merely view information and knowledge as separate parts of the larger entities such as power and culture. information and knowledge are always socially constructed (mclaren, 2003). therefore, the awareness that there is no neutral information and apolitical knowledge is also needed to be possessed by students to prepare them to become global democratic citizens in the future. in the meantime, for teacher students, the participants of the present research, the conception that education can not be 25 slamet wahyudi yulianto critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading separated from politics, economic system, and social values is important. it is believed that the critical pedagogy principles are important to be promoted to the efl teacher students as a teaching approach in order to provide a critical tool for both teacher and students in understanding the political nature of knowledge and education. in addition, the use of critical pedagogy principles in efl curriculum and classroom is in line with the call for efl education reform in indonesia (alwasilah, 2004; emilia, 2005; hayati, 2010; gustine, 2014; larson, 2014). critical pedagogy, as phipps and guilherme (2004) emphasize, provides crucial guidelines for language study and intercultural communication. bearing in mind the abovementioned explanation, this study aims at investigating the use of critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading as well as revealing its contribution in assisting tertiary level students perform their critical thinking skills in classroom. furthermore, the present research attempts to identify and elaborate benefits and challenges of using critical pedagogy principles in reading class perceived by students as the participants of this study. the literature on critical pedagogy (hereafter cp) has three major categories, namely theoretical, political, and pedagogical categories (cho, 2013). theoretically, cp is a broad terminology rooted in the critical theory (cultural marxism) of frankfurt school, theology of liberation, humanism, hegelian dialectic, post-colonialism, and post-modernism (giroux, 1997; mclaren, 2003; freire, 2005a; breuing, 2011; kincheloe, 2011). politically, cp is the political reflection and action of liberation in seeking social justice by offering alternatives against the capitalistic, oppressive, and exploitative political systems (giroux, 1997; mclaren, 2002; kincheloe, 2008). in the meantime, pedagogically, cp is the theories and practices of teaching and learning in raising learners‟ critical consciousness as the attempts to counter the spoon-fed or the teacher-centered teaching learning activity, or what freire (2005a) labeled as the “banking-education system.” generally, cp can be defined as a cultural theory which views knowledge as the representation of those who produce and distribute it (kincheloe, 2008). mclaren (2000) defines cp as a method of reflecting, negotiating, and transforming pedagogical practice, knowledge production and schooling institution relationship and the material and social relations of wider community. parallel with mclaren, shin and crookes (2012) mention that cp is a teaching method that helps students gain transformative experience by problematizing the commonly accepted and taken for granted knowledge. in the field of applied linguistics, akbari (2008) mentions that cp is the acknowledgement of sociopolitical implications of language teaching and the possibility of social change with language class as the departure point. meanwhile, for the language education context, aliakbari and faraji (2011) identify cp as an approach to language teaching and learning which is concerned with transforming relations of the oppressive power which leads to the liberation of people. the critical language pedagogy is a place where a language pedagogue can relate grammatical knowledge and vocabulary mastery to knowledge of how to solve wider social problems (riasati & mollei, 2012). in other words, cp is a language teaching learning approach which is based on the acceptance of its sociopolitical implications and aims at transforming society by relating the grammatical knowledge and the wider social problems. this study, due to the similarity of english as a second language (efl) education in indonesia as the research context, adopts emilia‟s (2005, 2010; see also emilia & safrina, 2010) three cp principles. they are dialogic education, democratic classroom, and reading the word and the 26 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee world. each of those principles is elaborated in the following paragraphs. in the educational practice, dialogue is crucial to be performed to create the ideal teaching learning atmosphere for teacher and students teach each other. moreover, dialogue is potential to avoid the existence of threatening and dominating teacher for the teacher-students dialogic relation is based on hope, love, and faith (shor & freire, 1987; freire, 2005a; dale & hyslopmargison, 2010). therefore, in relation with the critical thinking, dialogue is the only activity that can be performed to encourage learners perform their higher thinking order (phipps & guilherme, 2004; freire, 2005a; hajhosseiny, 2012; mui, 2013). it is possible because to demonstrate their critical thinking in classroom, students need to be free from the threatening teacher-students relation. for classroom context, through dialogue, both teacher and students constructively learn and share their ideas and world views (alvarez, calvete & sarasa, 2012). negotiation trough dialogue plays a central role in the classroom which applies critical pedagogy (mochinski, 2008; larson, 2014). it should be executed as a two-way process (freire, 2005a) for every classroom activity. in such classroom activity, teacher still and should have authority to ensure that the activity runs well without restricting students‟ freedom to participate actively in encountering the common knowledge forms and social relations (shor & freire, 1987; giroux & aronowitz, 1991; giroux, 1997; emilia, 2005). consequently, the class becomes more open and unpredictable (shor & freire, 1987; freire, 2005a; mochinski, 2008). in the formal education which has rigid official curriculum, the classroom unpredictability may be a serious challenge. democratic classroom may only be executed by creating classroom conditions which are conducive to support individual freedom and social empowerment and justice (freire, 1998, giroux, 1997; mclaren, 2003; emilia, 2005; thayer-bacon, 1996, 2012). consequently, without losing the needed authority, teachers should encourage their students to comprehend democracy by being involved in governance including arranging learning objectives, selecting learning materials, and forming their own groups (giroux, 1997; bowers, 2005). therefore, it is important for teachers to be aware that they are not the ones who dominate classroom. in the democratic classroom, teacher along with students should respect the voices of plurality, discourse variety, and different languages (macedo & freire, 2005). in highlighting human potential for democracy and humanity in order to criticize and challenge social and political structure, freire (2005a) uses the term “reading the word and the world.” correlated with the reading class, frerie (macedo & feire, 2005) states, “the act of learning to read and write has to start from a very comprehensive understanding of the act of reading the world.” as a consequence, reading the learners‟ world is considered as the starting point for the reading class. it is because of a crucial way of critical pedagogy in offering hope and possibility for creating equal and more justice society is presenting people‟s social, economic, cultural, political situations (mclaren, 2003; freire, 2005a, 2005b; kincheleo, 2008). in other word, reading class as a political act for social betterment should be started from making learners realize their actual situation. it is because only by knowing their lived situation, learners could be encouraged to transform their social life (freire, 2005b; macedo & freire, 2005; akbari, 2008; ko, 2013). in the present research, reading the word and the world principle is brought into classroom through presenting generative and academic themes. while themes are the topics that are closely related to students‟ daily life but rarely approached or questioned critically, generative themes are the particular topics that are related to the students‟ specific academic life (mochinski, 2008). both types of theme are 27 slamet wahyudi yulianto critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading presented in the form of written texts, photographs, diagrams, and videos. the topics that are categorized as the generative themes in this study are beauty representation in advertisements, indonesian tourism, teacher quality, and disability rights movement. in the meantime, there is only one topic that categorized as the academic theme namely english as international language. there is no single „how to do‟ cp that fits with every context of classroom. different context requires different method and technique in implementing cp (addo, 1981; shor & freire, 1987; mochinski, 2008; dale & hsylop-margison, 2010). freire (2005a) states that the application of cp lies in praxis. praxis is a social action-reflection recursive activity in transforming the world (mclaren, 2003; freire, 2005a; freire & macedo, 2005; thinsan, 2015). in classroom, praxis is executed through problem-posing education which has different forms of implementation in different context of classrooms. extracted from the three principles elaborated in the former sections and synthesized from several references, there are five categories of activity that should be performed when a teacher is willing to implement critical pedagogy in a foreign language classroom, especially for the context of higher level of education in indonesia. those five categories are (1) conducting classroom and group discussion; (2) experiencing democratic classroom; (3) presenting students‟ real life problems; (4) using various, authentic and problematic reading materials; and (5) challenging students to think and act critically (shor & freire, 1987; giroux, 1997; mclaren, 1997; wallace, 2003; alwasilah, 2004; freire, 2005a, 2005b; emilia, 2005; shin & crookes, 2005; mochinski, 2008; akbari, 2008; emila & safrina, 2010; hayati, 2010; kaufman, 2010; aliakbari & faraji, 2011; muro, 2011; swandarini, 2011; cho, 2013; ko, 2013; gustine, 2014; mambu, 2014; larson, 2014). critical thinking (ct) is an active reasonable thinking which is appropriately explored to evaluate information or statement before considering what to do and what to believe. to put it in the simple world, epstein (2006: 1) declares that ct is “a defense against a world of too much information and too many people trying to convince us.” emilia (2005: 25), quoting nosich (2001), mentions six ct standards including clarity, relevance, accuracy, depth and breadth, sufficiency, and precision. meanwhile bassham et al. (2011: 2-7) declare nine ct standards, namely clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, consistency, logical correctness, completeness, and fairness. the similarity between those two different opinions regarding ct standards is laying in clarity, relevance, accuracy, precision, and completeness (what in emilia‟s term is called as sufficiency). ct is a broad topic to cover for the context of this study. therefore, limitation should be made to address the specification and detailed learning tasks. consequently, only particular ct skills can be considered as learning outcomes and the focus of this study. the skills and disposition in this study are classified into three categories. those skills and disposition are analysis and evaluation skills (aes), open-minded (om), and making reasoned decision (rdm) skill. analysis and evaluation skills consist of identifying author‟s point, argument, and conclusion (wallace, 2003; wall & wall, 2005; cottrell, 2005; bassham et al., 2011; chaffee, 2012); analyzing who the author and intended reader and whose interests served and voices missing are (wallace, 2003; emilia, 2005; chaffee, 2012; ko, 2013); evaluating clarity and connectedness of argument (emilia, 2005; cottrell, 2005; chaffee, 2012) ; and assessing relevancy and source credibility (wallace, 2003; emilia, 2005; cottrell, 2005; chaffee, 2012). open-mindedness includes inventorying and taking into account multiple view points (facione, 1990; ennis, 28 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1996a; lipman, 2003) and listening and respecting others‟ opinions (djiwandono, 2013; ko, 2013). making reasoned decision (paul & elder, 2002; emilia, 2005; bassham et al., 2011) consists only one skill. the ct skills and disposition in this study are applied in and identified from reading texts and performing group and classroom discussions. in doing so, a set of classroom and reading questions are necessary to encourage students to perform the ct skills and disposition that are mentioned earlier. while reading is defined as the appropriate complex mental process of making meaning of the text which involves the reader‟s prior knowledge and personal background (grabe & stoller, 2002; nunan, 2003; hudson, 2007). reading is a crucial receptive skill in an academic world. it is a discursive activity which is influenced by previous textual experiences. successful reading activity requires the text and the reader‟s background knowledge interaction (bumela, 2012; hood et al., 2005; lems et al., 2010). reading does not only consist of decoding the written language, but is also leaded by and interconnected with the understanding of the world, for language and reality are vigorously interrelated (freire & macedo, 2005). reading activity can be performed through practicing several skills. there is a term called “reading as a social process” (carter & nunan, 2001: 26). the aim of this process, as carter and nunan (2001) say, is not only to comprehend the written text, but also to critique the ways that text has been written, the writer‟s motivation to chose that lexis, syntax, style and presentation of text overall. this process of reading is appropriate to be taught in reading classroom for intermediate to advance efl learners (harmer, 2007a). this type of reading process is suitable with the context of the present research. cahyono and widiati (2006) mention that there are three underlying theories in approaching the reading teaching, namely the text structure, the schema, and the metacognitive. the text structure theory which is effective in improving second language reading comprehension claims that when reading, a student starts from general into specific information (cahyono & widiati, 2006). while schema theory focuses on the students‟ prior knowledge activation in increasing reading comprehension, the metacognitive theory concerns students‟ knowledge about their cognitive activities such as predicting, paraphrasing, summarizing, and retelling (cahyono & widiati, 2006). because of the present research participants‟ reading level is varying from beginning to advance, the teaching reading program for this research employed several approaches to reading. pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading are three steps in teaching reading comprehension (brown, 2001; wallace 2003; hood et al, 2005; kress, 1985 and wallace, 1992 in emilia and safrina, 2010). each stage has its own activities and purposes. the following table displays activities and purposes for every step of teaching reading that incorporates the use of critical pedagogy principles and critical thinking skills synthesized from shor and freire (1978), tierney et al., (1995), wallace (2003), (freire, 2005b), macedo and freire (2005), antoni (2010), emilia and safrina (2010), sulyaningsih (2010), yatmikasari (2011). table 1. reading teaching stages step possible activity objective pre-reading sequencing pictures, videos, and diagrams predicting by scanning the title, and if exist, subheading, tables, pictures, and photos asking some general guessing questions about topic of upcoming written text to see the level of prior activating students‟ prior knowledge, experiences, and readiness to connect it with new knowledge and experience they will construct during the upcoming 29 slamet wahyudi yulianto critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading knowledge possessed by students brainstorming by encouraging students to compare the „codes‟ with their own experience, knowledge, and culture activities; identifying the purpose of the lessons. whilereading being executed in group, pair, or alone in group, in facing text and trying to solve reading task, students discuss, negotiate, and help each other reading aloud silent reading identifying parallel discourses analyzing linguistic choices answering some reading questions to perform several critical thinking skills generating appropriate strategies to help students in comprehending the text; collaboratively constructing meaning; checking comprehension as one of while-activities post-reading doing classroom discussion about while-reading activity performed before when every student is „in the spotlight‟ and expected to be engaged and participate equally exchanging point of views, understandings, and answers of reading tasks to familiarize students with the practice of democracy and open-mindedness summarizing monitor comprehension justify comprehension clarifying heightening the students‟ awareness of other ways in which the topic could have been written about; triggering students to perform critical thinking skills indicators; practicing classroom power distribution; evaluating students‟ comprehension in particular tasks reading class trying to implement critical pedagogy teaches the whole three hillerich‟s (1983 in antoni, 2010) reading comprehension levels: literal comprehension, inferential comprehension, and critical comprehension. he farther elaborates that literal comprehension requires readers to evoke facts which are explicitly written in the text; inferential comprehension permits reader to suggest relevant additional data derived from the personal experience and text confronted; whereas critical comprehension leads reader to make balanced judgements about several aspects of texts and writer‟s style. method to search the answers for the research questions, the present study applied a case study design. a case study is defined as an in-depth and detailed investigation of a case that could be a setting, a particular event, a subject, an ongoing process, or a document rather than a full numerical survey (boglan & biklen, 1992; fraenkel et al., 2012). a case study was used as a consequence of this study trying to understand the detailed aspect of meaning and process of a particular phenomenon. the research site for this study was a private teacher education in bandung, west java. this teacher education was selected due to the importance of introducing cp as a teaching efl approach to tertiary level education in indonesian context (hayati, 2010). furthermore, by implementing cp principles to teacher students, it is expected that the participants will practice and develop dialogic education and democratic classroom after they become teachers in the future. the group of participants was one of reading in professional context classes consisted of 59 fourth semester students (13 male and 46 female) in english education department. the participants were 19-21 years of age. the research was conducted in the form of teaching program which consisted of eight meetings from march 2015 to may 2015. the data collection techniques in this study were divided into two categories. they were the main and the supporting techniques. the main data collection techniques were observing classroom interactions and activities and distributing questionnaires. the supporting ones were 30 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee conducting interview and gathering students‟ learning journals. the various data collection techniques were employed in order to seek the rich data and to reduce the weaknesses possessed by each data collection technique (yin, 2011; alwasilah, 2012). the accumulated valid data were systematically transcribed, organized, coded, looked for patterns, thematically categorized, synthesized, interpreted, and concluded to answer the research queries (bogdan & biklen, 1992; silverman, 2005; yin, 2011; alwasilah, 2012; fraenkel et al., 2012). the data analyses were performed both during and after collecting the data (bogdan, & biklen, 1992; silverman, 2005). the ongoing analysis was executed for data that are assembled using classroom observation (silverman, 2005) and the rests were analyzed after the data had been collected. results and discussion how the use of critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading assists students to think critically after analyzing the collected data, it could be concluded that the teaching program has assisted students to think critically by providing four major categories of activity. they were (1) offering problematic topics and reading materials that are directly related to the students‟ personal and academic lives, (2) encouraging the students to read between the lines, (3) distributing classroom power, and (4) creating space for students‟ voices to be heard. the elaboration of each category is presented below. offering problematic topics and reading materials that are directly related to the students’ daily lives this category was the application of the reading the world and the word principle. when conducting this category, the students were offered four classroom topics, five written texts, and several codes in the form of pictures, diagrams, and videos. the selection of the classroom topics, the written texts, and the codes was based on whether they are problematic, controversial, and related to the students‟ real life. the evidence of the application of this category can be found in the observation notes. in the observation note of the second meeting, it is written that “materials are related to authentic real world of indonesia and are problematic to be argued.” moreover, upon the third meeting, the observer explicitly wrote, “news as one of critical sources for students to think critically.” the identical notes were then occurred again several times both in the first and the second sections of the teaching program. in the interview session, commenting upon the discussed topics during the eight meetings, several students emphasized the role of controversial topics that are related to their lives in giving them opportunity to perform their critical thinking ability. it is indicated in the following excerpts: topik-topik yang disampaikan berkaitan dengan kita. lebih singkron juga dengan apa yang dipelajari [the discussed topics were related to us, and correlated with what we have learnt]. icha the issue you brought to class. it gave us experience to be more open to contrasting and competing view points rather than only force other to receive our opinion. adi icha, in her utterance above, demonstrated that she was aware of the correlation between the topics and her life as well her major. the student used the word „we‟ that might mean she also spoke on behalf of her friends. in the meantime, adi‟s comment uncovers the value of the controversial issues in providing two or more possible contradictory view points that further will be used by the students to read between the lines. encouraging the students to read between the lines 31 slamet wahyudi yulianto critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading encouraging the students to read between the lines was executed by posing a set of critical questions as a tool to analyze the presented reading materials and classroom topics. the critical questions demanded the students to identify and evaluate arguments, source credibility, included and excluded voices, cause and effect, and fairness of the particular texts. upon the questions, the students communicated their answers both spoken and written during the group and classroom discussions. during the classroom discussion in the pre-, while-, and post-reading activities, some students were observed performing their critical capacity in order to respond the questions which were proposed by the teacher or their classmates. the following are evidences found by the observer: students discuss the difference between racism and discrimination. students discuss cause and effect of racism in the beginning of the lesson. (observation note on meeting #6) students analyzed cause and effect saat memaparkan argument mereka [when they elaborated their arguments]. (observation note on meeting #8) from the aforementioned notes found in the observation during the teaching program, it can be seen that there were two critical thinking skills were performed by the students. it is assumed that the students‟ critical thinking performances were the results of encouraging them to „read between the lines‟ by exposing critical questions repeatedly. the students‟ exposure to the posed questions and the designed classroom activities during the teaching program was relatively successful in encouraging them to perform their critical thinking capacity. the further evidence can be found by examining the students‟ reflective leaning journals, as indicated in the following excerpts. in analyzing the text we can learn how to get and tie ideas taken [from] the text. and we can identify whose voices are missing. (imas‟s learning journal on meeting #3) i think critically when i answer the question. (neni‟s learning journal on meeting #8) both students‟ reflective writings above demonstrate that the provision of the critical questions was successfully encouraging them to read between the lines as well as to think critically. the data from the teaching program are parallel with the data which were collected through interview. in the interview session, imas and neni gave detailed explanation about what they have written in their learning journals. the explanations are presented in the following experts: this questions used in the program motivates us to think beyond the texts. (imas in the interview session) there are many questions that the answers are not consisted in the texts. jadi ada di luar teks [outside the texts]. so it forces us to think about so we develop it. and it can make the discussion to be effective i think. jadi kita kan membahas contohnya seperti kemarin tentang bahasabahasa akhirnya kan mengacunya ke manamana gitu kan, secara luas. jadi tertariknya itu senengya itu seperti itu. jadi tidak hanya terfokus hanya kepada teks itu saja [so we discussed the example, like yesterday, about languages that at the end referred to everywhere, broadly. then we did not focus only to particular text]. (neni in the interview session) imas‟s utterance above indicates her effort in generalizing the advantage of the teaching program with the posed questions which motivate her and her friends to not only read and think about the texts, abut also to read and to think about what lies beyond the texts. meanwhile, neni‟s answer above delineates her recognition upon the intention of presenting the particular critical questions. 32 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee distributing classroom power the classroom power was distributed gradually in each meeting during the teaching program which was conducted for this research. one of the indicators of classroom power distribution can be seen from the number of speech production (milal, 2011). from the video transcript of the second until the eighth meetings, it can be identified that there were 403 utterances. from those utterances, 223 of them were produced by the teacher. table 5.1 illustrates the utterances which were produced during the teaching program. table 2. utterances during the teaching program producer utterance per meeting total % #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 t 27 44 23 32 38 28 31 223 55.3 s 22 36 16 24 34 22 26 180 44.7 total 49 80 39 56 72 50 57 403 100 by looking at the table above, it can be seen that the range between the number of speech produced by the teacher and the utterance produced by the students were not too far. it means that it was possible that the power had been distributed in almost equal portion between the students and the teacher. it is supported by the observation notes on the third and the fifth meetings. while in the third observation sheet is written “teacher and students have equal relation,” in th e fifth meeting observation sheet it is written, “equally teacher-students relation in the teaching and learning process.” in order to give opportunity to the students to control the classroom topic, the classroom power was also distributed through negotiating classroom decision making (akbari, 2008). the classroom decision making negotiation occurred several times both in the first and the second sections of the teaching program. the classroom decision making negotiation can be explicitly observed in the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh meetings. additionally, the following excerpts are the observation notes commenting the execution of the classroom power distribution which occurred in the fourth and the sixth meetings: negotiating saat t bilang ‘sudah belum?’ tapi siswa minta video diulang, lalu t mengulang [negotiating classroom decision making occurred when teacher asked „have you finished?‟ but students wanted the video to be replayed, then teacher replayed it]. (observer‟s note on meting #4) classroom discussion is more alive than before for the existence of the interesting topic from students. (observer‟s note on meeting #6) the second excerpt above provides the abstraction of the event that happened in the sixth meting. in the pre-reading stage, the teacher told the students that the class would discuss the text that had been distributed in fifth meeting. as a consequence, some students were observed enthusiastically performed four activities. those four activities were (1) engaging and demonstrating their critical thinking ability in discussing cause and effect of racism, (2) linking and making clear distinction between racism and discrimination, (3) supporting their claims with argument, and (4) being open-minded. further evidence about the distribution of classroom power could be found in the learning journal which was written by dian commenting upon the fifth meeting. dian writes: if there are things i do not know or are still difficult to understand, i will ask the lecturer and other students about it. if there is something i know, i explain what i know to 33 slamet wahyudi yulianto critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading them. it is very important in discussing the issue so that there is no misunderstanding about the knowledge that we know. (diah‟s learning journal on meeting #5) that excerpt indicates the desire for clarity as well as the openness to negotiate knowledge in order to collaboratively construct meaning. such desire and openness seem impossible to be occurred in asymmetrical power distribution and antidialogue relation (shor & freire, 1987; freire, 2005b). creating space for students’ voices to be heard this category covered inviting students to share their experience and knowledge regarding particular topics. it also consisted of listening and giving positive feedback to every occurred opinion, answer, and question. in responding students‟ ideas, the teacher often acted neutrally through confirming or inviting other students to react upon it rather than giving negative feedback. in order to train the students to be openminded as well as to give them opportunity to view from multiple perspectives, the teacher used his authority to ask the students to respectively listen, consider, and appreciate their friends‟ opinion upon the discussed issues (shor & freire, 1987; giroux, 1997). the observer‟s notes provide the authentic data which represent the application of the dialogic education. in this study, it was the result of creating space for students‟ voices to be heard. table 5.3 below lists those observer‟s notes meeting by meeting. table 3. observer’s notes on creating space for students’ voices to be heard meeting observer’s notes #2 teacher allowed students to express their point of views; teacher gave positive feedback upon students‟ opinion #3 answer and opinion are frequently invited to stimulate students‟ critical ability. #4 every student has an opportunity [to speak] in equal way; suasana kelas seperti hening saat ada siswa yang menjawab, mereka saling menghargai [classroom atmosphere seemed quiet when there is a student who answer; they respect each other]. #5 students were freely delivering the point of views related to the topic; teacher appreciated students‟ thought without interfering and direct judging #6 teacher listened to the answers and put them to consideration. #8 teacher tidak langsung bilang ‘salah’ terhadap pendapat siswa [did not directly say „wrong‟ towards students‟ opinion]. by looking at those observer‟s notes, it is seen that the conducive and supportive space for the students and the teacher conducting the dialogue was established. the data in the above table represent the classroom activities from observer‟s view point in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth meetings. the activities could be interpreted as the indicators of the application of democratic principles in classroom (thayer-bacon, 1996). it is supported by the data in the form of students‟ answers during the interview session. it can be seen in the following excerpt: after discussion, i often get very different understanding rather than when i try to solve a problem by myself. i often get many differences and similarities with other‟s opinion. in his answers, adi uncovered the influence of being exposed with the activity of exchanging information and ideas during discussion. it represents his openmindedness (djiwandono, 2013). benefits and challenges of using critical pedagogy principles the data in the form students‟ learning journal, interview, and open-ended questionnaire reveal that there are two major categories of benefits and three types 34 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee of challenges as the consequences of using critical pedagogy principles. the two benefits are (1) the language development and (2) the new knowledge and experience acquisition. meanwhile, the three challenges are (1) the lack of classroomfriendly authentic controversial reading materials, (2) the passive culture, and (3) the unpredictable classroom. each category of those benefits and challenges will be elaborated further in the following paragraphs. the development of students‟ language proficiency is the first benefit of using the critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading. this category consists of the development of students‟ four integrated language skills and the improvement of students‟ vocabulary mastery. those two benefits are the result of four classroom activities during the teaching program that are conducting classroom discussion reading the written texts, watching videos, and writing learning journals. there are three types of knowledge acquired by the students during the teaching program, namely the knowledge about themselves, about english as their major, and the knowledge about how to stand for the disability rights. in the meantime, there are also three types of new experiences acquired by the students. those new experiences are learning something that was never obtained, participating in the classroom discussions, and being motivated to be heard by classmates. the new knowledge and experience acquisition is the result of bringing several controversial and related to the students topics and reading materials as well as practicing reading and analyzing various types of texts writing learning journals, and conducting group and classroom discussions. the lack of classroom-friendly authentic controversial reading materials causes the unfamiliar words used in the text and the complex structure of text. the challenge labeled the passive culture is represented in the students‟ personal disengagement and the lack of their selfesteem. meanwhile, the classroom unpredictability is a consequence of negotiating and distributing classroom power. the classroom decision making negotiation may cause the teaching learning activities run differently from what have been planed before by the teacher. conclusion the utilization of the three principles of critical pedagogy has helped students to think critically through providing four categories of activity. the first is offering problematic topics and reading materials that are directly related to students‟ personal and academic lives. the second is encouraging them to read between the lines. the third is distributing classroom power. the last is creating space for students‟ voices to be heard. there are two categories of benefit in addition to the development of the students‟ critical thinking skills. they are the development of students‟ language proficiency and new knowledge as well as experience acquisition. the developed language proficiency consists of four language skills and vocabulary mastery. in the meantime, there are three sub-categories of new knowledge and two new experiences that are acquired by the students. the three sub-categories of new knowledge are knowledge about students themselves, about the variety of english, and new knowledge about how to stand for disability rights. the obtained new experiences are learning new lessons, participating in classroom discussion, and being motivated to communicate voices and to be heard by the classmates. there are three major categories of challenges which were perceived by the students during the teaching program. the first challenge is the lack of classroomfriendly authentic controversial reading materials. the second is the passive culture. and the last is the unpredictable classroom. 35 slamet wahyudi yulianto critical pedagogy principles in teaching efl reading it is recommended for efl teacher education to introduce and promote the contextualized principles of critical pedagogy to efl teacher students. it is crucial for efl teacher education institutions to give sufficient understanding and training for teacher students regarding the use of critical pedagogy principles in their future classroom. additionally, it is suggested for further research to elongate time allocation and enlarge research participants to gain clearer picture regarding the application of critical pedagogy principles in the efl classroom context in indonesia. references addo, h. 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(2005). the complete idiot's guide to critical reading. new york: penguin group. wallace, c. (2003). critical reading in language education. new york: palgrave macmillan. yatmikasari, i. (2011). incorporating the principles of critical discourse analysis in a reading classroom, unpublished text a thesis. bandung: upi yin, r. k. (2011). qualitative research from start to finish. new york: the guilford press. 38 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 157 technological knowledge application on academic writing english education study program students irfan english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: irfan13@outlook.co.id sofendi english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: sofendi@yahoo.com machdalena vianty english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: vian.unsri@gmail.com apa citation: irfan, sofendi, & vianty, m. (2020). technological knowledge application on academic writing english education study program students. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 157-166. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3788 received: 28-06-2020 accepted: 29-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 abstract: technological knowledge plays a role in academic writing such as assisting in finding suitable references, checking plagiarism, and publishing the article. however, technological knowledge does not always provide benefits in academic writing. technological knowledge may affect the writers’ mentality to take shortcut in finishing and checking their writing. the objectives of this study were: (1) to find out the technological knowledge level of english education study program students, (2) to find out how english education study program students applied their technological knowledge in academic writing, and (3) to find out the problems english education study program students encountered in applying their technological knowledge in academic writing. the study’s participant was 13 students from class b 2016 palembang of english education undergraduate program along with the latest lecturer that teaches them writing. this research used descriptive qualitative design. the data were collected by questionnaire, observation, interview, and document gathering. percentage calculation, transcribing, and triangulation were used to analyze data. the findings showed that (1) the technological knowledge level of the participants is level two technical maxim, (2) the participants applied technological knowledge on academic particularly in finding references and structuring idea, and (3) the participants have several problems in applying technological knowledge in academic writing, such as in citing references correctly, avoiding tendency to copy-and-paste, structural error due to using automatic correction, and paper formatting. keywords: technological knowledge; academic writing; article writing introduction in the 21st century, technology moves along with the humanity and becomes part of human’s daily life. this includes in the world of education, in which the terminology “education technology” is created. grinager (2006) defined education technology as the use of hardware, software, and other digital technologies to advance learning, teaching and administration in k-12 and postsecondary education settings. the education technology is related to the technological knowledge (tk) in which technological knowledge ensures that the education technology can be applied effectively. schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, koehler, and shin (2009) define technological knowledge (tk) as knowledge about various technologies which include low-tech technologies from pencil and paper up to digital technologies such as computer and internet. however, koehler and mishra (2009) explained that since technological knowledge is evolving over a lifetime, tk is directed more toward the information communication technology (ict) as the current form of technology. vincenti (1984) stated that there are three forms of technological knowledge, which are descriptive knowledge, prescriptive knowledge, and tacit knowledge. descriptive knowledge is a knowledge focused on the truth or fact. it is used to describe things as they are and cannot be adjusted easily to suit the needs (vincenti, 1984). mailto:sofendi@yahoo.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3788 irfan, sofendi, & machdalena vianty technological knowledge application on academic writing english education study program students 158 prescriptive knowledge is a form of knowledge used to find out whether something could be accepted as fact through the process of trial-anderror (houkes, 2009). prescriptive knowledge is a knowledge that can be altered depending on the situation in order to ensure the effectiveness (vincenti, 1984). these two knowledges compose explicit technological knowledge. on the other hand, tacit knowledge composes implicit technological knowledge. tacit knowledge is a special type of knowledge that is possessed by individual upon the process of learning something, which cannot be easily shared and will only expand into facts upon time (dampney, busch, & richards, 2002). this knowledge comes from individual practice and experience, thus making tacit knowledge rather inexpressible. vincenti (1984) explains that prescriptive knowledge and tacit knowledge are similar as both focus on procedures. these knowledges form the four levels of technological knowledge (herschbach, 1995). the following table describes the levels and the forms of knowledge they focus on: table 1. levels of technological knowledge no. level details 1 artisan skills focuses on tacit knowledge with little prescriptive and descriptive knowledge involved. 2 technical maxims focuses on prescriptive knowledge with little tacit knowledge. there is generalization of skills applied in making or using technology. 3 descriptive laws focuses on prescriptive knowledge with little descriptive knowledge, which addresses experience-based formulations through try-out and observation. scientific-like. 4. technological theories focuses on descriptive knowledge and prescriptive knowledge, which gives the user capability to apply scientific knowledge in real situations. in the world of education, 2030 education dictates that education process should contain technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack), where aside from improving the content and pedagogy of education, information and communication technologies have to be used to strengthen education (unesco, 2016). this means that technology should be applied in teaching and learning process, including in english education. english education ensures that the students of said study program should have good english skills and one of the skills that can coordinates with technology is the writing skill. technological knowledge plays a role in finding the suitable references, in which through browsing computer and internet, references can be gathered by specifying the correct keywords of what the writer wants to find. aside from that, academic writing is also structured using academic language, which is concise and clear, possessing formal language as well as having clear, straightforward toward the point style of writing. technology supports academic writing in this writing process where the language can be checked by spelling-checker as well as paragraph reviewer applications. moreover, technology can also be used for checking plagiarism, sharing the articles, and publishing article in journal. such kind of technologies makes the process of writing academic paper easier than ever if the proper technological knowledge is mastered and used effectively. mohamed and ayeche (2011) explain that using modern technology such as computer allows a whole new way of interaction in the process of writing that removes psychological obstacle that tamper students’ writing skill, such as fear and lack of confidence, if the technology is utilized correctly by the teacher and used appropriately by the students. similarly, inderawati (2017) emphasizes that technology must be become the important key element of the 21st century learning in sophisticated classroom. however, technological knowledge does not always provide benefits in terms of writing. alhusban (2016) explains that technological knowledge affects the student writers’ mentality in which the students believe that technology will provide them shortcuts of making a good and acceptable writing. the students can just find everything in the internet, copy it and use the computer application to check the writing automatically, truly believing that digital technology is flawless. this misuse of technology, rather than improving the students’ skill in academic writing, causes the writing skill to deteriorate since the students do not think critically in forming the ideas and set aside english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 159 cohesion and coherence of the paragraphs by copying what probably is suitable to the topic written without appropriate connection to the previous idea. it is worth saying that technological knowledge affects academic writing skills of the students as academic writers. the effects of technological knowledge can be either positive or negative. in the academic writing class, specifically the article writing class of english education study program sriwijaya university in academic year 2019, technological knowledge was applied in the writing activities, resulting students personal blog where the student posted his/her articles. this result shows that the implementation of technological knowledge in the academic writing of english education study program of faculty of teacher training and education of sriwijaya university is beneficial. the writer of this study was curious on how the students apply technological knowledge in the class as well as finding the possible challenges faced in applying technological knowledge in academic writing. thus, this study intended to (1) to find out the technological knowledge level of english education study program students, (2) to find out how english education study program students applied their technological knowledge in academic writing, and (3) to find out the problems english education study program students encountered in applying their technological knowledge in academic writing. method method of the study this research was a descriptive qualitative research. this research acquired the qualitative data through observing, interviewing, and gathering documents and quantitative data in the form of questionnaire is used to support the qualitative data. this research focused on matching the questionnaire result with data gained from observation, theory, and interview. the data were also gathered by getting the relevant documents to further support the results. the collected data were later analyzed to answer the research questions. site and participants the site of this study was the faculty of teacher training and education sriwijaya university in palembang. the participants were 17 students from class b 2016 palembang of english education undergraduate program (they will be referred as participants) along with the latest lecturer that teaches them writing. purposing sampling is used to pick the participants. the participants were chosen as they are the class that according to the syllabus has completed all writing class required in their study as well as the fact that prior information from lecturer tells that they used modern technology in their writing class. from the 17 students, four of them did not return the questionnaire. thus, they are not taken into account in the results. technique for collecting the data this research collected data by using observation, interview, and document gathering as quantitative data and questionnaire as quantitative data. the observation was done by using a check-list based on kirkwood and price’s (2016) questionnaire on learner use of technology as well as tpack assessment questionnaire by schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, koehler, and shin (2009), which is also used as the basis for the interview questions and questionnaire. interview was given to the lecturer as the students were given the same questions in the form of questionnaire. the interview questions were adapted from kirkwood and price’s (2016) questionnaire on learner use of technology as well as tpack assessment questionnaire by schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, koehler, and shin (2009). as for the documents gathered, the documents were the students’ writing results as well as the openended questions in the questionnaire which address the problems of the students in academic writing. the students’ writing results were checked by using the transparent academic writing rubric (tawr) developed by razi (2015), which combines several essential components of academic writing including in-text citation. the following table is the item distribution of the tawr by razi (2015): irfan, sofendi, & machdalena vianty technological knowledge application on academic writing english education study program students 160 table 2. transparent academic writing rubric (tawr) by razi (2015) item distribution no. writing evaluation criteria items 1 introduction 1-8 2 citation 9-24 3 academic writing 25-31 4 idea presentation 33-43 5 mechanics 44-50 the questionnaire used was adapted from kirkwood and price’s (2016) questionnaire on learner use of technology as well as tpack assessment questionnaire by schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, koehler, and shin (2009). the questionnaire consisted of questions related to tacit, prescriptive, and descriptive knowledges which constitutes the levels of technological knowledge by herschbach (1995), which are artisan, technical maxim, descriptive laws, and technological theories. the adapted questionnaire items were divided into the three types according of the types of technological knowledge in the form of five-level likert scale. the following tables are the specifications of the questionnaire item distribution and the interval for the technological knowledge according to likert scale. as each knowledge is distinct to the other, the interval for the technological knowledge levels represent their importance in each level. table 3. technological knowledge questionnaire item distribution no. type of knowledge items 1 tacit knowledge 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 2 prescriptive knowledge 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 3 descriptive knowledge 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 table 4. interval score of technological knowledge questionnaire no. level of technological knowledge type of knowledge tacit knowledge prescriptive knowledge descriptive knowledge 1 artisan 5-30 5-20 5-15 2 technical maxim 31-45 21-35 16-25 3 descriptive laws 46-50 36-40 26-35 4 technological theories 46-50 41-50 36-50 technique for analyzing the data the observation was analyzed by compiling the similarities found in each meeting. the result from the checklists based on kirkwood and price’s (2016) questionnaire on learner use of technology as well as tpack assessment questionnaire by schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, koehler, and shin (2009) was calculated by using percentage to get more concrete result. the interview given to the lecturer was analyzed by comparing the result with the theories regarding the use of technological knowledge as well as the students’ questionnaire responses to find out whether there are any differences between the students’ claim with the lecturer’s observation during the class. as for the documents gathered, the openended questions in the questionnaire were taken to be compiled to find the similarities between the students’ answer to get the general answer for the third research question. the students’ writing results were checked by using the transparent academic writing rubric (tawr) developed by razi (2015), with the score range of 0 to 2. 0 represents poor, 1 represents acceptable, and 2 represents excellent. the technological knowledge level questionnaire was analyzed quantitatively. the adapted questionnaire items were divided into the three types according of the types of technological knowledge in the form of five-level likert scale, ranging from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1). the results of the questionnaire were calculated to find out the percentage of each type of knowledges to be further analyzed to find out the students’ technological knowledge level. the calculation was done by using the microsoft excel 2016 to sum up the result and calculate the percentage. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 161 results and discussion students’ technological knowledge level results of observations the observations were done by monitoring the class as non-participant. the observations of the participants were done starting from january 25th, 2019 to april 11th, 2019, with the total of seven meetings observed during the period, which is treated as n. the following table and chart are the summary of the checklists for all of the observations done. table 5. participants’ technological knowledge observation results summary n* knowledge result average tacit knowledge prescriptive knowledge descriptive knowledge 7 31 20 19 *n refers to the number of observations chart 1. the percentage of observations’ results summary table 5 shows that the average scores of the participants’ tacit knowledge, prescriptive knowledge, and descriptive knowledge are 31, 20, and 19 respectively. based on the interval score for technological knowledge level, the participants’ level can be categorized in the second level which is technical maxim. according to the herschbach (1995) technical maxim shows that students possess higher tacit knowledge with a moderate level of prescriptive knowledge. this is further supported by the chart which shows that the average percentage of participants’ knowledge is toward the tacit knowledge with 44%, followed by prescriptive knowledge with 29%, and descriptive knowledge with 27%. the observations also showed the progress of the students during their writing class. on the first meeting on january 25th, 2019, the students were gathering ideas for their topic. in this meeting, the students use microsoft word to type short drafts to be peer-checked later by posting in the group. the students checked each other drafts by giving very short comment. the lecturer explained the process of writing article by making thesis statement followed by monitoring the students’ activity and giving feedbacks when the students asked. on the second meeting on february 1st, 2019, the lecturer introduced the students to mendeley system, which was used to check the references the students gathered and learn how to write references correctly. the lecturer started by giving tutorial on how to use the mendeley system effectively and various functions in the application. in this meeting, some students can be seen to have certain confusion in using mendeley system. however, they assisted each other in learning the system and by the end of the meeting, some students are capable of using the mendeley system effectively while others keep practicing independently or with supports from both peer and lecturer. on the third meeting on february 15th, 2019, the students were introduced to grammarly application to assist them in writing their draft. the lecturer explained how to use and analyze the result given by grammarly in order to find out the structural error. the drafts produced were then posted to the facebook group to be peerchecked. the peer-checking once again is given in a very short comment. the drafts produced in irfan, sofendi, & machdalena vianty technological knowledge application on academic writing english education study program students 162 this meeting were rough and unpolished. some students still wrote the topic in an unclear manner or redundant. however, the peer-checking pointed these problems to be fixed in the next draft. the next observation was on the sixth meeting on february 21th, 2019. the students continued working on the second draft of their article, specifically the body. the students used microsoft word and grammarly to assist their writing process in order to utilize the grammar checker feature. the results were posted in the facebook group. the students’ writing improved in this meeting although they did not put the references as well as having some mechanic problem such as the formatting and punctuation. the lecturer gave the students some feedbacks afterward based on their writing in the form of comments in the facebook posts about which parts should be improved. the fifth observation was done on the seventh meeting on march 8th, 2019. the students were learning to create a blog for them to post their articles for free access. the students spent time more in this meeting to understand the way to set-up the blog instead of writing. the students enjoyed the blog although some students were distracted which consequently made them neglect the article checking. the lecturer monitored this meeting and constantly reminded the students to also work on their articles. on march 11th, 2019, the lecturer instructed the students to post their article drafts in their blog. the students used microsoft word to write and revise their draft. some of them also used grammarly to further check their grammar. however, very few students used the mendeley system to check their references. moreover, almost all students did not write references in their drafts, despite citing some experts. some students still copied the references without paraphrasing or quoting as well. the lecturer reminded the students to use the mendeley system whenever possible as well as reviewed the way to utilize the applications briefly. the last observation was done on the 14th meeting on 11th april, 2019. the students were tasked to post their revised article drafts, which include background and literature review, in the facebook group as well as in their blogs. the drafts the students wrote were improved in academic writing and idea presentation aspects. however, the students still had problems in citing articles. many of them still neglect referencing and did not use the mendeley system. the application of grammarly improved although not all students utilize this as few students still had grammatical mistakes. the lecturer provided feedbacks in the form of comments for the students to revise before writing and submitting their final draft. result of the interview according to the lecturer, the students were capable of learning and using the technology introduced during the writing iv class. the lecturer states the students practiced using the applications given to support their academic writing, although some students struggled in using the application effectively. the lecturer also states that the students did not use the application actively during writing process after they learned how to use the application, which implies that the students were more comfortable in writing without constantly opening and closing different applications. however, the lecturer explained that the students have more positive view in writing academic writing as they shifted their opinion that writing academically is not as difficult as they predicted as there are many technologies that can assist their writing process in both mechanical aspect and referencing aspect. the lecturer explained: “after practicing using the technology and applications, my students come to an end that article writing is easy because i really showed them how to do it. they easily get information for their writing from google and know how to quote directly and indirectly.” the lecturer finally stated that despite using technologies to assist their writing process, the students still needed guidance as well as constant feedbacks from the lecturer as relying on peercomments was not effective due to the tendency of being given very brief comments by their peers. results of the questionnaire the purpose of the questionnaire is to find out the technological knowledge of the students through measuring their tacit knowledge (tk), prescriptive knowledge (pk), and descriptive knowledge (dk) as well as to find out the students’ way of applying the technological knowledge in academic writing and the problems they faced. the questionnaire consisted of two sections. the first section is a five-level likertenglish review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 163 scale close-ended questions with 30 items and the second section is three items of open-ended questions. as there are four participants that did not return the questionnaire, only thirteen participants were taken into account. both results are presented as follow. result of the first section of questionnaire as stated before, the first section of the questionnaire is used to find out the students’ technological knowledge level through their tacit knowledge, prescriptive knowledge, and descriptive knowledge. the following chart shows the percentage of the students’ knowledges: table 6. participants’ technological knowledge questionnaire results summary n* knowledge result average tacit knowledge prescriptive knowledge descriptive knowledge 13 45 34 23 *n refers to the number of participants chart 2. the summary of participants’ technological knowledge questionnaire results table 6 shows that the students’ expectation table 6 shows that the average scores of the 13 participants’ tacit knowledge, prescriptive knowledge, and descriptive knowledge based on their responses to the questionnaire are 45, 34, and 23 respectively. based on the interval score for technological knowledge level, the participants’ level can be categorized in the second level which is technical maxim, which is in line with the observations’ result. the chart further supports by showing that the average percentage of the participants is toward the tacit knowledge with 44%, followed by prescriptive knowledge with 34%, and descriptive knowledge with 22%. result of the second section of questionnaire as for the second part of the questionnaire, which is the open-ended questions, the purpose of the three items asked is to find out the students’ way of utilizing the technology using their technological knowledge and the difficulties they faced. the result of the questionnaire shows that the students use mendeley system, which they were introduced to in this writing class, as the technology mostly used during their writing iv class and facebook and blogger as the place to post their writing. they also used grammarly to assist them in writing their academic writing. some of the students use several other supporting media such as google scholar and plagiarism checker to further help their writing process. as for the difficulties they faced, some of the students stated that it is difficult in finding the related studies for their reference, while some other tends to just copy directly from the references, which is an act of plagiarism if done incorrectly. some other students also state that they face some difficulties in using the newly learned media in the beginning. statistical analysis the statistical analysis is used to find out the students’ academic writing skills. as there were four participants that did not return the questionnaires, they were not accounted in the descriptive statistics result. the table below is the descriptive statistic of razi’s (2015) transparent academic writing rubric (tawr) result. irfan, sofendi, & machdalena vianty technological knowledge application on academic writing english education study program students 164 table 7. descriptive statistic of the students’ academic writing skill descriptive statistics n sum mean std. deviation introduction 13 11.38 .8750 .27481 citation 13 8.63 .6635 .22029 academic_writin g 13 18.25 1.4038 .22909 idea_presentation 13 14.18 1.0909 .31272 mechanics 13 6.86 .5275 .24317 valid n (listwise) 13 the table shows the mean of each category in the tawr for 13 participants. the mean for both academic writing and idea presentation categories are the highest, meaning that the students are capable of presenting their idea and following rules of academic writing. however, the students have very low mean for both citation and mechanics, which shows that they had difficulties in citing and quoting experts and writing in correct structure and format. the mean for introduction is also quite low which means that the students were having difficulties in explaining their article purposes. discussion based on the findings, several interpretations can be made. the first interpretation is that according to the result of the questionnaire, the participants technological knowledge level is on the second level, technical maxim. herschbach (1995) explains that technical maxim is the level where the capability of the technology user to generalize the skills in using technology is applied internally with very general way of explaining the way to do it. in this level, the students were capable of applying their technological knowledge in academic writing. however, the students had problems if they want to share their knowledge to their peers. this level also shows that the students were more comfortable with technology that is relatable to them as they possess prescriptive knowledge, in which the students prefer to pick up technology such as microsoft word that they are familiar with instead of using the newly learned one such as grammarly and mendeley system in order to avoid the trial-anderror process as many times as possible. this answered the first research question. the second interpretation focuses on the second research question. based on the observation, interview with the lecturer, and the questionnaire result. the students apply their technological knowledge on academic writing moderately. the observations showed that the students struggled when new technology is introduced to them and they tended to avoid using the new technology during writing, such as not using the mendeley system for their referencing process. the questionnaire results also showed that the students were applying their technological knowledge to the internet-based technology such as google scholar and plagiarism checker, but tends to copy-and-paste what they found instead of paraphrasing and rechecking what they found, which is in line with what razi (2015) found that university students have tendency to plagiarize. this indicates that the students were more comfortable if the technology is instantaneous in nature instead of having to be learned in a certain amount of time. this, in turn, impacted to the quality of their academic writing, in which the students were capable of composing ideas for their topic, but were incapable of explaining clearly what they intended to explain as well as backing up their writing with proper citation. as whitaker (2009) states, there are 10 principles in academic writing, which are clear purpose, audience engagement, clear point of view, single focus, logical organization, strong support, clear and complete explanations, effective use of research, correct apa style, and writing style. the students writing result shows that some principles such as clear purpose, audience engagement, strong support, effective use of research, correct apa style, and the writing style were not fulfilled by the majority of the students. the third interpretation focuses on the third research question. the main problem faced by the students in applying their technological knowledge in writing was their tendency to copyand-paste. this tendency affected the quality of the students’ academic writing as alhusban (2016) explained that the students were used to getting everything fixed automatically and set their mind that what they copied is correct english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 165 without doubt. the observations and questionnaire results also found that the use of technology in finding references was tedious as the references were abundant and finding the suitable as well as credible reference takes lot of time that once the student found what they feel fit with their research, the student just copied the reference without proper citation. another problem based on the observations and the students’ academic writing is that the students were neglecting the mechanics aspect of academic writing, indicated by the lowest mean in the academic writing rubric result. this matches with alfaki’s (2015) finding which states that mechanical problems are the most prominent writing problems faced by university students, followed by linguistic problems and cognitive problems. the students writing, as stated before, were fixed manually by the technology the students use. however, the technological knowledge of the students in using applications to assist their writing made the students neglected rechecking their own writing, resulting in persistence structural error in subsequent draft. moreover, as facebook and blogger are the media where they posted their writing afterward, this resulted in the students did not follow the appropriate writing format such as spacing and paper format as both media are devoid of the feature. despite the existence of peer-checking through commenting each other work, the peer-checking is not effective to improve the students’ writing as the comments from peers tend to be very brief and very general. this is in line with what pechenkina and aeschliman (2017) states that group work is preferable and more effective in face-to-face settings instead of online. further statements from pechenkina and aeschliman (2017) states that students prefer to use the technology as communication media between friends, thus they do not seek assistance from their instructor to assist them. on the other hand, it is also clear that students need guidance from instructor as explained by inderawati, sofendi, purnomo, vianty, and suhendi (2019) that the roles of instructor in learning using technology are developing material, evaluating the result, and giving feedbacks in order to ensure the students do not neglect the writing process. conclusion based on the findings, the writer can conclude that: first, the technological knowledge level of the participants is at level two, which is technical maxim where the students are capable of utilizing their technological knowledge personally but prefer in using the technology they are familiar with, second, the participants applied technological knowledge on academic writing moderately, particularly in finding references and structuring the idea of their topic, and third, the participants have several problems in applying technological knowledge in academic writing, such as in citing references correctly, avoiding tendency to copy-and-paste, structural error due to using automatic correction, and paper formatting. references alfaki, i. m. (2015). university students’ english writing problems: diagnosis and remedy. international journal of english language teaching, 3(3), 40-52. alhusban, a. m. (2016). the impact of modern technological tools on students writing skills in english as a second language. us-china education review, 6(7), 438-443. creswell, j. w. (2012). educational research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research fourth edition. boston, ma: pearson education inc. dampney, c. n. g., busch, p., & richards, d. (2002). the meaning of tacit knowledge. australian journal of information systems [special issue], 3-13. grinager, h. (2006). how education technology leads to improved student achievement. denver, co: national conference of state legislatures. herschbach, d. r. (1995). technology as knowledge: implications for instruction. journal of technology education, 7(1), 31-42. houkes, w. (2009). the nature of technological knowledge. in a. meijers (ed.), handbook of the philosophy of science (vol.9. pp. 309-350). amsterdam, netherland: elsevier. inderawati, r. (2017). the dynamics of efl teaching in indonesia: be innovative teachers through social media. english language teaching and research. 1(1), 29-37. inderawati, r., sofendi, purnomo, m. e., vianty, m., & suhendi, d. (2019). students’ engagement in utilizing technology for learning support. english franca: academic journal of english language and education, 3(2), 181196. kirkwood, a. & price, l. (2016). technology-enabled learning implementation handbook. burnaby, ca: commonwealth of learning. koehler, m. j. & mishra, p. (2009). what is technological pedagogical content knowledge? contemporary issues in technology and teacher education, 9(1), 60-70. irfan, sofendi, & machdalena vianty technological knowledge application on academic writing english education study program students 166 koehler, m. j., mishra, p., & cain, w. (2013). what is technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack)?. journal of education, 193(3), 13-19. mohamed, k. & ayeche, z. (2011). the impact of the internet on the development of students’ writing. revue des sciences humaines, 21, 5163. pechenkina, e. & aeschliman, c. (2017). what do students want? making sense of student preferences in technology-enhanced learning. contemporary educational technology, 8(1), 26-39. razi, s. (2015). development of a rubric to assess academic writing incorporating plagiarism detectors. sage open, 1-13. doi: 10.1177/2158244015590162. schmidt, d. a., baran, e., thompson, a. d., mishra, p., koehler, m. j., & shin, t. s. (2009). technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack): the development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. journal of research on technlogy in education, 42(2), 123-149. unesco. (2016). sustainable development goal and its targets. retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/education2030sdg4/targets on august 14th, 2018. vincenti, w. g. (1984). technological knowledge without science: the innovation of flush riveting in american airplanes, ca. 1930-ca. 1950. technology and culture, 25(3), 540-576. whitaker, a. (2009). academic writing guide 2010: a step-by-step guide to writing academic papers. bratislava, slovakia: city university of seattle . https://en.unesco.org/education2030-sdg4/targets https://en.unesco.org/education2030-sdg4/targets english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 311 the pre-service teachers’ reflection in english for young learners teaching practice kharisma naidi warnanda sabgini department of english language education faculty of teachers training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, east java, indonesia e-mail: kharisma.naidi@umm.ac.id khoiriyah (corresponding author) department of english language education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, east java, indonesia e-mail: khoiriyah230693@umm.ac.id apa citation: sabgini, k. n. w., & khoiriyah, k. (2020). the pre-service teachers’ reflection in english for young learners teaching practice. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 311322. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.3028. received: 03-04-2020 accepted: 15-05-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: this study aimed to explore the use of self-reflection for the pre-service teachers (psts) in an english for young learners teaching practicum. through conducting classroom observation, semistructured interview, and document analysis, the result of this study revealed that psts are able to develop their teaching knowledge and teaching skills in term of classroom management, language pedagogy, and preparation trough having self-reflection. further, the usage of video recording provides self-critical and continuity for the pre-service teacher. teaching reflection is projected to improve the teaching practice. doing reflection in teaching practice is immensely important for professional development as student teachers are prepared to be a professional educator. as a result, the implication of this study will be further discussed. keywords: reflection; pre-service teacher; eyl teaching practice. introduction teacher must reflect their teaching practice. through reflection, he/she could self-evaluate what goes improper and what could be perfected from the teaching practice. therefore, it is paramount that the teacher reflects once the teaching practice ends. thus, based on the reflection, the teacher could improve at the sequence teaching practice. in other words, reflection is more of a process rather than a result. reflection has its roots on the constructivist approach. constructivist approach underlines the teacher to be aware toward their beliefs and views (ültanı 2012). the teacher reflects the teaching and learning process to conduct a fruitful learning experience as a part of education, teacher should maintain a continuum process of reflection (arslan 2019). in the process of reflection, the teacher could raise their awareness, personal, beliefs, and values that results, influences and is reflected in their professional teaching practice (marcosa, sanchez, and tillemab 2011). the term reflective practitioner is synonymous with the continuum process of reflection. reflection, as a part of the teacher’s lifelong learning professional development, is to enable the teacher to critique teaching process and make a better-informed teaching decision (larrivee 2000; pazhoman and sarkhosh 2019). in teaching practice, reflection refers to problemsolving that is the ability to look back in a critical and creative way, to analysis the task and also to look forward and make anticipatory planning during the teaching process (beauchamp 2015; chi 2010; mcalpine et al. 2004). for pre-service teachers, the purpose of the reflection is to evaluate what they have done to determine what changes might be made in the future. hence, there are advantages of being a reflective practitioner (leigh & bailey, 2013; nurmaulid, 2017). first, the teacher is aware of what the teacher actually does. second, it promotes collegial sharing as a means to enhance teacher collaborative learning. then, the teacher could gain insights to progress own teaching. next, doing reflection actually avoids burnout and saves time to prepare teaching. fifth, doing reflection is an affirmation to the current teaching practice. finally, doing reflection is the bridging gap between theory and practice. moreover, (fatemipour 2013; williamson, mears, and bustos 2015) mentions some tools of reflective teaching which are kharisma naidi warnanda sabgini & khoiriyah the pre-service teachers’ reflection in english for young learners teaching practice 312 categorized into three including formative feedback from learners, formative feedback from other teachers and self-generated sources of information. the tools are listed as follows: table 1. ways of gathering information for teachers’ reflection some tools of reflective teaching formative feedback from learners formative feedback from other teachers self-generated sources of information five-minute papers teacher assessment questionnaire dialogue journals written assessments student focus groups peer collaborations case interviews field notes and classroom ethnographies dialogue with supervisors observation schedules classroom observation video recording retrospective fieldnotes teaching journals lesson plan and lesson reporting as a matter of fact, the ministry of education and culture stated verbatim that the teacher should do reflection. the regulation of minister of national education no. 16: 2007 about teacher’s standard of academic and competence qualification is the legal basis of the notion. one of the core competences of being a teacher is that the teacher should do reflection. the teacher should do reflection continuously once the learning process finishes and apply the result of reflection to improve the sequence learning process. due to the fact that reflection is important, it is apparent that every teacher possess the ability to reflect their own teaching. regretfully, there are many teachers neglect the reflection phase due to confusion or simply are not accustomed to the practice (kim 2018; töman 2017). therefore, the principal step is to expose the teacher to reflection in the first place. moreover, for the pre-service teacher, who are on the initial step to teach and going to be the future of teacher, they need to be exposed to do the reflection. the objective is solely to train the pre-service teacher to be able to conduct selfreflection. clarke (2006) and clarke et al. (2014) argued that pre-service teacher is concerned about their teaching practice as to whether their teaching practice is effective. in the university, the pre-service teacher counts on the peers and the lecturer to give feedback or reflection about their teaching practice. once the pre-service teacher enrols in a classroom, the pre-service teacher is secluded from the peers and lecturer. on one hand, it is required for the pre-service teacher to reflect their teaching. meanwhile, on the other hand, the pre-service teacher has a limited access, even impossible, to gain feedback or reflection from their peers or lecturer. this issue calls an imperative action to train the pre-service teacher to self-reflect. as an endeavour to educate the pre-service teacher, the english for young learners (eyl) subject in the english language education department has equipped with a reflection phase in the teaching practice. every sunday morning that lasted for a semester, the pre-service teacher who takes eyl subject teaches young learners of english. the students of the eyl are 4 to 12 years old children. the teaching practice is lasted for 3 hours from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. the material in the teaching and learning process covers vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation, and very basic english skills. the lecturer of eyl supervises the teaching training to provide a written feedback. meanwhile, the pre-service teacher makes a video to record the teaching and learning process as a means to provide selfreflection at the end of the teaching training session. as zein (2017) argues that the larger emphasize attention in teaching young learners was on the young language learner rather than to the language itself. therefore, the pre-service teacher should pay attention to the development of child-friendly pedagogy. the pedagogy would not arise itself and pre-service teacher would not be able to achieve teaching expertise to reach children-friendly pedagogy without reflection (mergler and spooner-lane 2012; nilsson and karlsson 2019). further, güngör (2016) conducted a study about the pre-service teacher and the reflection practice. the objective of the study was to investigate whether the reflective practice can be promoted and how the practice contributes to the professional development, selfand peerreflection. the result of the study indicated that the reflective practice promoted self-correctness and self-decisions that leads to a better teaching english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 313 performance. then, the study provided a bridging gap between theory and practice between ideal and real teaching considerations. the study suggested that the pre-service teacher needs the encouragement to make video, journals, and selfreflection to develop critical reflective practice that leads to the professional development. however, the shortcoming of the study was the subject of the study involved the pre-service teacher neither had the experience of microteaching, internship, nor observed the young learners. beddal (2013) conducted a similar study that investigated the reflective practice in a training course for young learners’ teacher. the results pointed that the reflective practice had a significant effect on the research subject on the matter of practical technique and classroom management. the study claimed the research subject demonstrated a substantial positive progression during a limited training time. in other words, reflective could enhance teacher professional development program effectively in a short time. however, the study did not involve the pre-service teacher in a formal education setting. the subjects were mere a course participant. other previous researches are identified related to the reflection skill of pre-service teachers. halim et al. (2011) conducted research on examining the content of student teachers’ reflective thinking toward their teaching practice. student teachers were able to relate various aspects of teaching and learning such as 1) students’ enjoyment, achievement and diversity, 2) pedagogical practices, 3) peer coaching and 4) reflection to their day-to-day teaching. yet, this research is limited only two student teachers. meanwhile, santagata & guarino (2011) conducted action research by using recorded teaching video to develop pre-service teachers’ (psts) orientations. it aimed to enhance the knowledge and skills for analysing and reflecting mathematics teaching in ways they generated knowledge for improving their teaching technique. nonetheless, both studies suggested to conduct direct observation since some aspects of teaching and learning were not recorded well. although some previous researches are conducted for pre-service teachers, there is still a need to conduct a research regarding reflective process that is taken further to be incorporated into the actual teaching practice as it suggested by some previous studies (chee choy, yim, and sedhu 2019; liu 2015; salajan and duffield 2019; yalcin arslan 2019). hence, this research is intended to examine the reflection of teaching pts by having self-reflection and recorded teaching videos to gain more comprehensive insight from the pts teaching practice. by viewing videos of their teaching, pts become more aware not only of their embodied teaching techniques, but also of non-embodied aspects of teaching (e.g., pace of teaching, pedagogical decisions, classroom management, etc). those, more studies regarding the use of recorded teaching videos in reflection remains important. furthermore, although several studies related teaching and reflection have been conducted in indonesia (murtisari 2019; nurmaulid sakti 2017; yanuarti and treagust 2016; zulfikar and mujiburrahman 2018), those study are generally conducted in general education context. hence, this study will be the initial study that investigates reflection and teaching practice in english for young learners context. the use of video recording as an instrument to develop the preservice teacher self-reflection is investigated as well. in addition, the study will complete and perfecting the previous studies aforementioned. this study will investigate the subject who has experience in microteaching, internship, and observe young learners. finally, the subject of this study is the students of formal education in english language education department of a respectful private university. additionally, some practical suggestions regarding teaching reflective in eyl context will be addressed as well. method this study belongs to qualitative research since the main objective of this case study is to provide an in-depth, rich, and holistic description about the pre-service teacher’s reflection in their teaching experience, especially teaching english for young learners. the research involves 34 fourth-year students of eyl subject in the english department. they are 30 females and 4 males. the pre-service teacher chooses eyl subject as their elective course in which the elective course is offered since the semester 6, thus, there are three eyl courses across the undergraduate degree. the first two courses are intended to deepen the pedagogy of young leaner. then, at the last semester of eyl course is intended to give the pre-service teacher a teaching practice of young learners. the pre-service teacher has a weekly program of eyl that is conducted every sunday lasted for three hours. through this program, the respondents are required to record their teaching videos as well as kharisma naidi warnanda sabgini & khoiriyah the pre-service teachers’ reflection in english for young learners teaching practice 314 their lesson plan. further, they were also asked to join follow-up interview section in order to confirm some of the aspect of their teaching reflection. the researcher employs three techniques: observation, interview, and document analysis. the various techniques are intended to provide indepth analysis and to provide triangulation as a means of validity and reliability. meanwhile, the research instruments are video recording, semistructured interview guideline, and lesson plan. the usage of video recording is to provide the development of pre-service teacher as they study and reflect their own teaching practice. the researcher employs the video recording to distil the fact whether there is a development in the teaching practice based on the reflection. then, the semi-structured interview is intended to provide insight toward the development of the pre-service teacher according to their self. the researcher watched the video as well to develop the interview guide. finally, the lesson plan is intended whether the result of reflection is reflected in the lesson plan. in order to describe the reflection of preservice teacher in eyl, the researcher uses content analysis. it involves inductive analysis processes that are represented in three main phases including preparation, organizing and reporting (elo and kyngäs 2008). the assessment is the similar as the researcher give the preservice teacher to assess their own teaching practice. the video is watched numerous times to provide rich and depth data that are meaningful to the objective of the study. the video is also analysed to gather a similar theme and classify codes that are intended for systematic comparison method. the theme and codes then assigned to the interview and lesson plan until the data reaches saturation. hence, the concepts of reflection for pre-service teacher in teaching eyl are derived from the data in inductive content analysis. the examples in table 2 illustrate the reflection categories used in the analysis. further, to reach the validity of collected data, the researcher performs triangulation data. triangulation gives the results validity by combining multiple sources of data and methods. results and discussion prior to enlighten the extent of using selfreflection and video usage reflection to the preservice teaching practice, the researcher felt the urge of describing the problem in the classroom encountered by the pre-service teacher. once the problem identified, the pre-service teacher would be able to solve, develop, and perfecting their teaching practice. the researcher provided a table to present the theme and code found in the video. there were three themes and ten codes of problem. the comprehensive table is depicted in the table 2. meanwhile, the document analysis from lesson and video recording from the preservice teachers’ video recording and lesson plan as well as the data from the semi-structured interview were displayed into two sections below: the pre-service teachers’ reflection on the teaching practice, and their perception on the use of video recording to self-reflection. table 2. the list of code and theme no code theme 1 communication skill classroom management 2 confidence 3 being attentive 4 body language 5 voice 6 visual contact 7 knowledge of subject matter pedagogy 8 grammar and pronunciation 9 method and approach 10 material preparation the extent of pre-service teachers’ reflection on the teaching practice classroom management once the pre-service teacher watched their teaching practice, they could identify their weakness in their teaching practice. the most common identifications were in the teaching skills and classroom management. managing the space, the time, student’s engagement and participation are considered as the core element of classroom management (freeman et al. 2014; korkut 2017). moreover, in eyl teaching practice, even though the teaching practice is intended for english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 315 simulation as a part of learning process, the preservice teacher felt as if a real teaching. many teachers who do not receive adequate classroom management training feel unprepared to manage their student behaviours in their classrooms. they felt nervous, burdened, and depressed. one of the pre-service teachers admitted in the interview that: i was nervous at the time. teaching young learners is different from teaching junior high school like my internship experience. it is harder to manage the class. i just went along with the condition and had not had the time to look at my lesson plan and my time schedule had screwed up. i planned carefully for the teaching practice but when i face the young learners, i could not possibly implement it. it seems that i could not possibly focus on the entire class when all the children come to me and ask my help. i could not give a proper attention to the entire class. (it1_teacher#23) this finding is similar to the previous research (agustiana 2014; han, turgay and tulga 2019; peker 2009) highlighting the pre-service teachers’ anxiety in their teaching practicum. additionally, similar with the previous preservice teacher, there was another who admitted that their classroom management was not going well. the problem for this particular subject was her voice. she has a low voice and the students’ voice overwhelmed her. she had to scream her voice to grasp the young learners’ attention. she acknowledged that: the young learners would not listen to me. they were busy playing and doing something other than my instruction. it was like that i was not even there. maybe, i only instructed them once and in english. maybe, i should repeat my instruction or translate into bahasa indonesia, so they could understand. or, i could ask them whether they understand my instruction or not. and i think that my voice is not loud enough to say my instruction. i also noticed that sometimes i have wrong pronunciation. (it1_teacher#5) the pre-service teacher responsible as well toward their teaching practice (postholm 2012; walkington 2005; zein 2016). when they found their weaknesses, they did something about their weakness. they furnish their teaching practice based on the weaknesses they found. they did not accept the fact and give up about their teaching. identifying weakness and solve the problem indicated that they were responsible toward their teaching practice. as a part of lifelong learning and professional development, this attitude should be maintained throughout teacher’s life. finally, the pre-service teacher kept questioning their practice, actions, and attitude based on their wholeheartedness. they strived to keep improving their practice. they did not satisfy the current practice and would seek another alternate method, approach, or technique to make the teaching practice more effective for their teaching practice. wholeheartedness would allow the teacher to evaluate a problem for a different perspective (nurfaidah 2018; rodgers 2002). next, after doing self-reflection, the preservice teacher had successfully developed their confidence. she admitted that reflection helped him to develop his confidence as a part of his classroom management. she admitted: through reflection, i could see that my weakness is on my confidence. i was not confidence to speak in front of the children. i could not give the students warm-up activity because of this problem. i suddenly go to the main topic without giving the students greetings, pre-teaching, or apperception. therefore, it affected my presentation and material delivery. therefore, i try to develop my confidence, try to be calmer and relax in front of the students. (it2_teacher#17) besides, there were several pre-service teachers that admitted they should engage the young learners more in the teaching and learning process. they admitted that the learning approach and techniques they employed were lacking and needed more development. the young learners were easily distracted and bored, for the preservice teacher should be able to cope the problems (damar, gürsoy, and korkmaz 2013; uztosun 2018). one of them stated that: i get confused in the classroom. i think one technique did not suffice for the entire learning time. it seems that the children got bored with the technique and i need to do something about it. i prepared one activity and i thought it was going to enough for one meeting, but it was not. there was one time that there was nothing to do. the activity has finished and there was a lot of time left. i need to fill the time. i think my preparation was not enough. (it2_teacher#8) further, with the regards of classroom management, there was one pre-service teacher acknowledged that she did not give a proper attention. she also realized that she engaged in kharisma naidi warnanda sabgini & khoiriyah the pre-service teachers’ reflection in english for young learners teaching practice 316 more repetitive instruction rather than using body language. when she realized her shortcoming, she stated that: watching my teaching practice video made me realize that i was too focus on one place. i did not move as often as i should. i should have been moving from one place to another place and give proper attention to all the young learners. i also did not give them a proper feedback. therefore, maybe the students seemed to be bit boring in my class. when i move around the class and give them enough attention, they are all active and the teaching process runs well. besides, i used to instruct the students more using words or sentence. when the students did not understand, i directly translate it into bahasa indonesia. i realized that this was not a good instruction, because i speak bahasa. the young learners should hear more english rather than bahasa. so, i changed from translating into body language and gesture. i conclude that the students learn more when i use body language or gesture. for example, when i instructed them to sit, and i translate into indonesia they understand, but when i repeat the instruction for the second time with the same instruction, they did not understand. when i use body language and gesture, the second time i instructed them, they understand. (it1_teacher#22) based on saturated data, the main problems for the pre-service teacher were classroom management. this result is in line with the previous studies conducted by keser & yavuz (2018); peters (2012); and sueb (2013). the problem was acceptable since the pre-service teacher barely had a teaching experience. the only teaching experience they had was the internship. the arising classroom management problem called an immediate solution. thus, the pre-service teacher could solve the classroom management problem prior they had their handson real-world teaching. a mere fact that they had not had the experience should be made into an excuse. the pre-service teacher should be more than ready to take any challenge in the real-world teaching problem, particularly classroom management. in order to speed up their experience, the pre-service teacher should be taught how to manage the classroom well. therefore, self-reflection is a viable solution. self-reflection serves as doublesided blade. the pre-service teacher could criticize what they had done based on what have been learned. furthermore, training the preservice reflection would benefit them in the future. reflection is a part of professional development when teacher should do it overtime. in the future, there may be none available to criticize and evaluate their teaching practice. train them to self-reflect will train them to selfevaluate and self-critical about themselves. pedagogy despite the fact that there were numbers of shortcomings, none of the pre-service teacher complained about their subject matter. the entire pre-service teachers were confident regarding their subject mastery matter. however, there were some of the pre-service teacher expressed their uncertainties about their material design. one of them stated that: i should have made my flash card more colourful and bigger so the students who sat in the back can see the picture clearly and also attract their attention. i think my material is not interesting and too difficult. as a result, the students are not interested enough in my presentation. i also did not provide the vocabulary on my flashcard when i should have put the vocabulary in it. (it1_teacher#16) after analysing their teaching videos and having self-reflection, it was indicated that the pre-service teachers were able to develop their teaching practice. the most noticeable development was that the pre-service teachers’ pedagogy theme in proficiency and grammar code. they made a fewer mistake in grammar and pronunciation. based on the better pronunciation and grammar, one of the pre-service teachers acknowledged that: i did not realize that i have a lot of misspelled pronunciation. by doing self-reflection, i could identify my weakness. once i identified my pronunciation as my weakness, i tried so hard to correct my pronunciation. i even tried to speak as the native does. i believe that the young learners should be exposed to the correct form of pronunciation. if i do it wrong, the young learners may bring them for their live. it will be hard to correct their pronunciation. i have to do it right. i also try to ask the students to repeat the pronunciation after me to train their pronunciation and help them to remember the vocabulary. (it1_teacher#2) in spite of many weaknesses spotted, there were several pre-service teachers that noticed their strength. through reflection, they made their teaching practice better. moreover, they improve their teaching practice based on their strength. one of them stated that: english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 317 i like my teaching practice. the one in particular is my flash card. i think my flash cards is perfect. they are colourful, sturdy, and clear. the activity that i planned along with the flash cards also runs well. the students engaged in the activity actively and i gave them a good feedback. therefore, in the next meeting, i tried to make my flash cards better than perfect and i try to keep my performance. (it1_teacher#11) the pre-service teacher demonstrated three integral parts of reflection, open-mindedness, responsibility, and wholeheartedness. the preservice teacher opened their mind about their weaknesses. they opened to the idea that their teaching practice had many shortcomings and they were ready make their teaching practice better. the fact that they saw their weakness in teaching and committed to improve their teaching practice. the fact that they accepted questioned, and criticized their own teaching underlined that they a step closer to become a reflective practitioner. being open-mindedness was not easy. they must not be an idealist. they must accept and realize that their teaching practice needed an evaluation and far from perfect. to sum up, the pre-service teacher experienced a meaningful, hands-on, real teaching experience. they taught the young learner as well as to practice a professional development. a reflective teacher means that enable to be critical about one’s own teaching. there are many questions arise in teaching and they need to be answered, whether the method implemented is appropriate, whether the feedback given is sufficient, whether the explanation is comprehensible. answering the questions without any practical basis or empirical evidence and merely rely on experience will establish ineffective teaching. being reflective teacher means, first, heuristically solve the problem based on the fact in the classroom, based on the theory, and based on the empirical evidence. second, they are attentive to the institutional and cultural contexts in which they teach. third, they take part in curriculum development and involve in school development. fourth, they take responsibility of their own professional development (mathew, mathew, and peechattu 2017; salajan and duffield 2019). preparation the apparent findings were the pre-service teacher could differentiate their teaching practice before and after having teaching reflection. the self-reflection helped the pre-service teacher to criticize, evaluate, and improve their teaching practice, especially for preparing their teaching materials. the majority of the pre-service teacher acknowledged that doing reflection is useful as well as important to their teaching practice development. one of them admitted that: doing reflection is important. i could evaluate my teaching practice such as my teaching media, the materials and exercises for my students. reflection allows me to be more critical about myself. there are many mistakes that i did in my teaching practice. doing reflection helps me to correct my mistake. what i like the most about reflection is that i do not feel embarrassed. when my teacher corrects my teaching practice, my teacher writes it down on my assessment sheet and sometimes i do not realize that i make the mistake, or i cannot understand what my teacher is writing. the teacher did not give clear feedback and i cannot improve my teaching practice. therefore, doing reflection is helpful. (it2_teacher#8) the pre-service teachers were able to evaluate their teaching practice based on the empirical evidence. the video-recording is a paramount instrument for them to be able to question, criticize, evaluate, respond, and prepare their teaching practice and make their teaching practice to be better. the process of reflection is a neverending process (özen, raşit and öztürk 2016). this is a part of long-life learning the stage of reflection done by the pre-service teacher was in line with the schon’s theory (1984) of reflective practice (chee et al. 2019; slade et al. 2019). reflection takes place before, during, and after the teaching. before teaching means that teacher prepare and plan the entire teaching instrument related in place in order to establish a fruitful learning experience. during teaching means that the teacher implements the teaching instrument based on the plan. after teaching means that the teacher evaluates the teaching practice and prepare for the next teaching. figure 1. the phases for teaching reflection kharisma naidi warnanda sabgini & khoiriyah the pre-service teachers’ reflection in english for young learners teaching practice 318 the extent of pre-service teachers’ perception on the use of video recording to self-reflection the pre-service teachers had generally positive attitude toward the usage of video recording for self-reflection. the students expressed numbers of opinion toward the extent of video recording for their self-reflection. the most notable findings from the interview were presented as follows: video recording made me feel secure. at first, i thought that my performance would be seen by the entire class with my teacher. there, my teaching would be evaluated by my teacher and my friend. it would be a huge embarrassment. my friend could make a very mean comment and i would be very disheartened. however, my teacher asked to video the teaching and learning process and evaluate our own teaching instead. i was relieved, i am not confidence in my teaching. (it2_teacher#4) the pre-service teacher expressed her worried about doing feedback of teaching practice in the classroom. she was not happy with her teaching practice and if the teacher decided to make the feedback session in the classroom, she would be distraught. furthermore, she was anxious about the possibility of having her friend make a harsh comment about her teaching practice. further, the video-recording allowed the preservice teacher to be self-reflect. the necessity of using video recording as an instrument to selfreflect has been admitted (coffey 2014). the preservice teacher is trained to be more critical on their self. orlova (2009) stated that through video recording, the pre-service teacher will be motivated since they are not mere focus on their teaching pedagogy implementation. the preservice teacher will also examine their nonverbal side of their teaching. the pre-service teacher will also focus on their communicative competence, language proficiency, language functions, and the interaction built between teacher and student. there was another remark expressed about using video recording in self-reflection. this particular pre-service teacher admitted that using video recording for self-reflection could implement what has been learned and train the pre-service teacher to be more critical of their teaching practice. the best part about video recording is that i could be very critical about my own teaching. i can implement what i learned in the classroom and evaluate what i did based on the theory that i had learned. i became critical to myself. from the video recording, i also can prepare a better material for the next meeting. for example, i made a very bad material that my students cannot understand. by watching the video, i can avoid the mistake in the next meeting. i also can avoid repetitive mistake. for example, i did not greet the students when opening the class, i can avoid this mistake in the future mistake by remind myself about the mistake i made in the previous meeting. (it1_teacher#22) employing video recording is beneficial to train the pre-service teachers’ analytical skill as well. it is in line with the previous findings by murtisari (2019). she found that self-reflect using video recording makes the pre-service teacher more analytical, focus more on attention to the classroom management issue, teaching pedagogy, and language issue of the pre-service teacher rather than a general, descriptive and personal feelings issue. it is also supported by (brouwer 2015; dayan et al. 2015; tripp and rich 2012; xiao and tobin 2018). video recording allows the pre-service teacher to be more scientific, basing a judgement based on truth and evidence, and posing a clarification using facts in the field rather than using personal feeling and baseless assumption to evaluate and criticize. aforementioned, the pre-service teacher will more critical toward their self when using videorecording self-reflection. self-critical train the pre-service teacher to self-awareness and to be idealist. they will pursue the perfect and keep perfecting their self and their teaching practice for the better students and their self. the pre-service teacher will not satisfy with their current teaching practice. they will criticize their self and seek the solution of their teaching shortcomings. furthermore, the effect of employing video recording to self-reflect is beyond and bigger that a mere self-critical. through video recording, the pre-service teacher will be able to do self-reflect by their self in the future. when the pre-service teacher goes to the real world of teaching, when no one looks at their practice, the pre-service teacher will be able to do self-reflect. reflection is an important aspect of teaching and a part of long-life learning. when a teacher stops reflecting, the teaching practice is questionable. therefore, it is important to be able to self-reflect without help from colleagues. the video recording provides the solution. moreover, the video recording provides an immediate solution to the pre-service teacher reflection. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 319 conclusion there is a great extent of reflection toward the teaching practice of the pre-service teacher. there are numerous improvements in the teaching practice of the pre-service teacher once they implement reflection in their teaching process. thus, reflection should be trained, taught, implemented in every aspect of teaching and learning process specifically for the pre-service teacher. as a matter of fact, the pre-service teacher develops their competencies greatly through reflection. the pre-service teacher learns many things through reflection which are not taught in the classroom. the next problem should be addressed is the extent of using video recording for self-reflect. the pre-service teacher should be able to selfreflect in the future as a means of long-life learning. the pre-service teacher should realize that they need to strive for the perfection of teaching and keep developing their teaching skill. video recording provides a self-critical and continuity for the pre-service teacher to develop their self in the future when there is no colleague, lecturer, or supervisor to advise them, correct them. acknowledgement we thank all eyl four-year students of english department who were taking part to this research. further, this project was supported by direktorat penelitian dan pengabdian kepada masyarakat (dppm), university of muhammadiyah malang. references agustiana, v. 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(2018). understanding own teaching: becoming reflective teachers through reflective journals. reflective practice, 19(1):13. kharisma naidi warnanda sabgini & khoiriyah the pre-service teachers’ reflection in english for young learners teaching practice 322 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 abstract: this thesis presents the language style used by jimmy fallon in the tonight show talk show. the objective of this study is to investigate the types of language style used by jimmy fallon in his talk show based on joos’s (1967) theory. this research applied descriptive qualitative method. the data of this research were taken from the talk show video and the video transcript. the main theory which was used in this research was taken from five o’clock book by martin joss (1976) and the book of an introduction to sociolinguistics by janet holmes (1992). the result of this research showed that the researcher has found 29 conversations that contain types of the language style based on joos’s (1967) theory. as the result, it finds consultative style with 11 data and casual style with 18 data, which casual style becomes dominantly used. keywords: language style; jimmy fallon; talk show; sociolinguistics. five language style analysis of the host in the tonight show talk show: a sociolinguistics analysis muziatun department of english education, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: muziatun@ung.ac.id syarifuddin achmad department of english education, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: syarifuddinachmad@ung.ac.id puspita wulandari samidu department of english education, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: pitasamidu07@gmail.com apa citation: muziatun, achmad, s. & samidu, p. w. (2020). five language style analysis of the host in the tonight show talk show: a sociolinguistics analysis. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 115-124. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3784 received: 01-11-2020 accepted: 15-11-2020 published:01-12-2020 introduction talk show is one of the discussion forms that used to talk about some interesting topics. usually, there is a host and a guest speaker that sharing opinion about some topics in their conversation at the talk show program (abbas & setiawan, 2020). therefore, the host in a talk show will invite a various guest because from the entire different guests, they can see a different style of language. setting can influence the speech style also and it shows that the function of language is not only for communication, but also for other goals (putra & rosa, 2019). furthermore, “language could articulate someone inner feelings by referring to emotional states explicitly or implicitly” (schwarz-friesel, 2015, p.164). in the same way, language is used and is employed by humans creatively in their daily life as in direct and indirect interaction, which people who spoke language (direct) could also be different in style from the style they use in written language (indirect) (mangala & simon, 2017). it showed that language is one of the most powerful emblems of social behavior. meanwhile, people who express themselves in a particular situation are referring to their style. everyone has their own language style hence; every language individual has their own style to differentiate the way of representing (mulyani, hamzah & rosa, 2018). language style can describe the personality, mindset, condition of human (meyerhoff, 2006). also, the utterances produced can reflect the personal character of the speaker (batmang, gunawan, samad, & saad, 2018). in any case, language style can reflect the background of education and age of the user (indra & hamzah, 2018). therefore, language style is a way of expressing someone’s thoughts through language (keraf, 2010, cited in aflahah, 2017). furthermore, language style is a form of language that is characterized by degree of formality (joos, 1967). hence, the level of formality in language style is also influenced by the level of social diversity (jamil & nasrum, 2018). the explanation above tries to tell the readers why the language style is always selected as the research focus. some people realize that by seeing someone’s language style, particularly on the types of language style that they usually use, mailto:muziatun@ung.ac.id mailto:pitasamidu07@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3784 muziatun, syarifuddin achmad, & puspita wulandari samidu five language style analysis of the host in the tonight show talk show: a sociolinguistics analysis 116 it shows their character and mind indirectly. hence, it makes some researchers interest to analyze language style. however, in other objects such as two previous studies that the researcher got: in haqqo (2016), which is entitled ‘language style in the jakarta post advertisements’, stated that advertisement is a form of written communication that develops with the advance of technology, whether in oral or written way. moreover, the language of advertisement is compact and persuasive; it is different from the other language uses in daily life. thus, she is interested to choose the topic because she would like to know how the advertisements influence the readers with a language style. another research conducted by rahardian (2016) under the title of ‘an analysis of language style in “fury”’ movie’. he stated that the condition of human can create humans’ language style and that is happened in movie if we see in a language style perspective. hence, he is interested in that movie because during the war, there were many language styles appeared and used in their conversation, hence he wanted to analyze the types of language style that appear in the movie. the two previous studies are strengthening the researcher’s inspiration to observe deeply this research focus ‘language style’ in the other object. therefore, talk show is selected as the object of this research. in addition, the object of this research intended to be the host of the talk show. moreover, talk show is selected because people in a talk show do not speak the same in every episode, which they speak to a different person so that they have to change their style while they were speaking. in the same way, the researcher found a talk show that is interesting to be analyzed. the talk show named the tonight show starring jimmy fallon. the talk show is selected as the object of this analysis, particularly the host of the talk show. this research wants to see the language style phenomena that contains in social media such as youtube. language style has been broadly employed as a part of educating and examining language formality in the social media environment (rostami & khodabandeh, 2019). meanwhile, this analysis chose sociolinguistics approach because it is concerned about language used that occurs in society. it is supported by trioktaviani (2019) who stated that the language style is one of the categories in language variety and language variety is one of the topics discussed in sociolinguistics. moreover, a variety of language should be used by the speaker both in certain culture and certain situation (luthvia, nababan & kristina, 2020). additionally, this analysis has some significances particularly for the further researchers and english lecturers. this analysis can be a reference for the further researchers that may refer to in conducting their research. it is important because before observing the language style, it is necessary to have an insight of the language style phenomenon that might happen around us. meanwhile, the result of this study has a meaningful reference that might be referred to by the higher educators in building up their linguistic material, which is using the other illustration such as the language style phenomenon in a talk show. it can be stated that the result of this research is useful for the other researchers in the future, because we cannot deny that language is dynamic, which is always developed in the future condition, that is way a language has to be observed and researched continuously. in the same way, this analysis tells the readers how the language role in communication, how the impact of the language style used in the environment, also how the way we determine what types of language style that is used in speaking. it also becomes the reason why the readers are suggested to read this analysis. therefore, in analyzing this new object, the researcher decided to take five videos from different episodes to be the data of this research. the researcher chose some guests, which come from some different fields such as politician, singer, comedian, and youtuber. regarding this, an analysis is needed to know what are the types of language style used by the host in the talk show. therefore, that makes the topic important to be analyzed further. method qualitative method is used in this research. qualitative research is used to investigate the meaning, concept, definition, character, symbol, and description of the thing (lune & berg, 2017). for instance, qualitative research explicitly covers the contextual and environmental condition of data (yin, 2016). a qualitative description could be understood as a comprehensive description, one that seeks to provide a detailed description of the findings more likely to generate consensus among observers (seixas, smith & mitton, 2018). hence, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 117 the data of this research used the utterances that contain in the five talk show videos. in addition, the script is used in getting the accurate data. the method is used to collect the data in the form of the object’s speech texts on the sub-title that is not a number, but the data comes from their interview and other official document (susatyo & wardhono, 2019). data collection is important to determine the data of the study (dewi, ediwan & suastra, 2020). besides, this analysis took the data source from the object youtube channel that is the tonight show starring jimmy fallon. meanwhile, the data is collected through watching the video. analyze the data in starting the process of data analysis, the researcher analyzed the object utterances in the video, which is being guided by language style theory; particularly the types of language style theory by joos (1967). the utterance or the conversation will be categorized into one of the types if it contains some characteristics from the types itself. mark the data the researcher marked the utterances based on the types of language style from joos’s theory (1967), which the researcher wrote a different code in each type. categorize and interpret the data after marking the data, the researcher categorized it based on the theory from joos (1967) that is types of language style. in this case, the data will be categorized into a table. besides, the researcher interpreted the meaning of utterances for each type of the language style found. stating a conclusion the conclusion is the important point that the readers pay close attention to as the research finding. therefore, in this part, the researcher concluded the explanation in chapter four based on the researcher’s interpretation of the data. results and discussion in analyzing data of this research, it is based on the language type theory that had been found by joos (1967). to apply that theory in analyzing this research data, the researcher collected data from youtube video (ytv), as an object of this research. the name of the object youtube channel is “the tonight show starring jimmy fallon”. thus, the researcher identified and analyzed the video, which is being guided by joos’s (1967) language style theory. as what had been explained, the researcher will categorize the data analysis that already got into a table. in addition, interpreting some data themselves is based on the date when the video was uploaded. by the explanation above, the finding and analysis of each style found in the data are presented, as follow: muziatun, syarifuddin achmad, & puspita wulandari samidu five language style analysis of the host in the tonight show talk show: a sociolinguistics analysis 118 table 1. language style in “the tonight show” guest/ date types of language style utterances situation barack obama (10th of june 2016) consultative style utterances 1 jimmy asked obama about donald trump. utterances 2 2. jimmy asked about republican’s response utterances 3 3 jimmy asked about supreme court thing. utterances 4 4. jimmy asked how obama’s opinion after his job is over. evan and jillian (4th of january 2017) casual style utterances 1 1. jimmy asked why they did review toys. utterances 2 2. jimmy asked how to play jillian’s toy. utterances 3 3. jimmy played evan’s toy. utterances 4 4. jimmy was curious with jillian’s toy. bts (25th of september 2018) consultative style utterances 1 1. jimmy joked with the members of bts. utterances 2 2. jimmy let the members of bts to introduce themselves. utterances 3 3. jimmy asked how their felling when speaking at the u.n. utterances 4 4. jimmy asked the bts message when speaking at the u.n. utterances 5 5. jimmy asked their opinion about the new york city. utterances 6 6. jimmy asked what bts next project is. utterances 7 7. jimmy gave his support to the members of bts. madonna (20th of june 2019) casual style utterances 1 1. jimmy told madonna’s experience with obama. utterances 2 2. jimmy told how was madonna’s expression when she has to meet obama. utterances 3 3. jimmy asked about madonna tour. utterances 4 4. jimmy told his opinion about madonna’s tour. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 119 utterances 5 5. jimmy told the audience about the ticket tour was already sold out. utterances 6 6. jimmy asked how madonna’s tour would be like. utterances 7 7. jimmy asked madonna to teach him dance with the audience. utterances 8 8. madonna explained about her dance. utterances 9 9. madonna taught her dance. jimmy, madonna and the audience did “cha cha cha” dance together. eddie murphy (21th of december 2019) casual style utterances 1 1. jimmy asked about eddie’s feeling after coming back to the snl. utterances 2 2. jimmy asked about how eddie’s audition was like. utterances 3 3. eddie told his experience in the snl audition. utterances 4 4. jimmy asked eddie how his after parties was like. utterances 5 5. jimmy showed eddie’s iconic character when he was in the snl from the table above, this analysis found two types of language style from the five videos; namely consultative style and casual style. while the rest of the styles had never been used. research question: types of language style used by the host in a talk show the question of this study sought to find out the types of language style that the host used in his talk show. in this case, jimmy fallon is selected as the object of this analysis, which the data were collected from his talk show namely the tonight show starring jimmy fallon. in the following subsections, all the types of language style used by the host are discussed; which is being guide by joos’s (1967) theory. this step consists of the phenomena that happened regarding the types of language style, why the data called as types of language style, what is the different degree in the use of both language styles, how the previous study dealt with this phenomenon, and the theories that could strengthen the data. the types of language style that has been found in this research are explained below: the first video when the guest is barack obama (utterances 1) situation: the discourse or the conversation occurred when jimmy asked obama about the republicans’ response after the presidential election, which is when donald trump was declared as the elected president. meanwhile, jimmy was curious about the harder thing that obama went through after he was declared as the elected president in previous election. then, it muziatun, syarifuddin achmad, & puspita wulandari samidu five language style analysis of the host in the tonight show talk show: a sociolinguistics analysis 120 was what jimmy asked to obama afterwards. this discourse or the conversation included consultative style. this is because there were some characteristics of consultative style occurred in jimmy’s utterance. for instance, in utterance “people are gonna go, like not work with me?”. jimmy said the utterance because of his curiosity about obama’s feeling when he became a president of the united state of america. furthermore, this utterance showed jimmy used word ‘gonna’ in the middle of his utterance, in which the word ‘gonna’ is a shortened form of ‘going to’, and the word belongs to informal form. otherwise, some of his utterances have a good structure sentence. in joos’s (1967) theory, one of consultative style characteristics is that it has subject and predicate in every utterance, but some words of vocabularies are non-standard ones. moreover, the situation was semi-formal that can be seen from the way they talked. in the conversation, the situation was looked serious but sometimes they laughed together. another reason, jimmy asked someone that has specialized knowledge in political field that was barack obama. in addition, this is one of one of consultative style characteristics in joos’ (1967) theory. in the second video when the guest is evan and jillian (kids) (utterances 1) situation: the discourse or the conversation occurred when jimmy asked evan about his story and reason why he did review toys. the discourse or the conversation belongs to casual style because there was a shortened and slang in jimmy’s utterance; “how’d you end up reviewing toys?”. jimmy said the utterance to his guest because he wanted to know why they did review toys as their youtube content. moreover, the reason why that is categorized as casual style because based on joos’s (1967) theory, casual style consists of some characteristics such as use of slang, use of ellipsis. another reason, jimmy called his guest with their first name that can be seen in utterance “yeah i guess i've been saying that all the time. jillian?”. in addition, joos’ (1967) theory said casual style is also characterized by the use of the first name rather than a little name and last name in addressing one another. in the third video when the guest is bts (boyband) (utterances 3) situation: the discourse or the conversation occurred when jimmy asked bts about their experience when they spoke in the united nation. in addition, jimmy asked about how their feeling was at that time. this discourse or the conversation is classified into consultative style. this is because there was background information in jimmy’s utterance such when he said “and you got to speak at the u.n.”. in joos’s (1967) theory, consultative style can be classified into two features, one of the features is the speaker supplies background information, and he or she does not assume that they will be understood without it. furthermore, jimmy continued his question as when he said, “what was that like? was that amazing?”. in that utterances, jimmy gave a clear question to his guest also. this is what joos (1967) informed in his theory. consultative is for communication with strangers, so that each sentence that the speaker pronounces must be explicit and clear (joos, 1967). besides, bts members as the hearer gave some short responses while were jimmy asking, like “yeah, you know.”. on the other hand, there were some signals intimacy found in jimmy’s utterance such “buddy”, “guys”, “dude”, and “man”. however, they are not friend. it can be seen from their conversation, which there was no sign that indicated they knew each other. furthermore, there is no characteristic of casual style found in the conversation. for instance, containing slang, incomplete grammar, unclear sentence or pronunciation that was also contained ellipsis and shortened. jimmy used those signal intimacy words because of the language used development in society. nowadays in the united states and some places, people use intimacy signal not only to their close friend but also to the people that they talk with, such as stranger. in the fourth video when the guest is madonna (utterances 3) situation: the conversation occurred after jimmy explained madonna’s experience when she met obama. moreover, in that situation madonna said that she came to the show just to meet jimmy and no more reason. furthermore, in that video, jimmy asked madonna about her next project in that year, which was her tour. this discourse or conversation included casual style; because there is jimmy’s spontaneous occurred when he heard what madonna said to him. in the conversation, he english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 121 said “wow, thank you so much”. furthermore, there was an opinion that can be seen when jimmy’s said “our relationship has grown”. additionally, there were some ellipsis occurred in jimmy’s utterance. there were two ellipsis occurred; when he said “i feel-thank you so much” and “what are you gonna do that’s-i know you’re..”. in both utterances, jimmy did not continue his word and changed it to another one. in the first utterance he stopped in word ‘i feel..’ and the second utterance he stopped in ‘you gonna do that’s..’, in which there were ellipsis. furthermore, slang occurred in jimmy’s utterance such as when jimmy said “another curveball that you threw this year..”. spontaneous, opinion, ellipsis, and slang are the characteristics of casual style proposed by joos (1967). as he disclosed in his theory, there are two kinds of casual style. the first is ellipsis and the second is slang. moreover, the casual conversation is the type of talk in which we feel most relaxed, most spontaneous, and usually people prefer to use slang in their daily conversation. furthermore, the types of casual conversation are narrative, anecdotes, recounts, exemplum, observation or comment, opinion, gossip, joke telling, sending up, and chat. in the fifth video when the guest is eddie murphy (utterances 2) situation: the conversation occurred when jimmy asked about how eddie’s audition was like. this is because jimmy was curious about how the situations when eddie followed the saturday night live audition for the first time, which was on december 21th, 1984. this conversation belongs to casual style because there is ellipsis in jimmy’s utterance such as when he said, “do you remember your audition for the show?”, where it should be “do you remember how was your audition for the show?”, also another ellipsis can be seen when jimmy said, “what was it? do you remember - …” in this utterance, jimmy did not continue his utterance and directly asked another question like “what did you do?”. furthermore, there was spontaneous like when jimmy said ‘”wow..”. from joos’s (1967) theory, there are two kinds of casual style. the first, ellipsis (omission) that usually shows the differences between casual grammar with consultative grammar. the second is the type of talking in which we feel most relaxed, most spontaneous and usually people prefer to use slang if they talk to their friend in their daily conversation. the data analysis shows that from five types of the language style proposed by joos (1967), only two types found in the five talk show videos, they are consultative style and casual style. the first type used by jimmy fallon in his talk show is consultative style. based on the explanation of types of language style by joos (1967), this study found 11 data from two different videos, which were categorized as consultative style. the two videos that contain consultative style are the video with a politician that is barack obama and the video with a nonnative speaker, which is bts (korean boyband). this style used by jimmy fallon as the host of the talk show when he talked to obama. he used this style because of his respect. he knows that obama was his president, so that he spoke carefully but still relaxed. style refers to the atmosphere and its means of expression form of language (zhang & huang, 2020). in the same way, this consultative style is used by jimmy when he talked to bts in the talk show because they are not friend. indeed, there are some intimacy signals found in their conversation. however, jimmy knows that they are not american, which cannot speak english fluently so jimmy tried to make the conversation not awkward. the language style that someone used can be formal or informal depends on the social status of the person or a group of people she or he is talking to (febriyan, 2019). besides, there is an analysis from rahardian (2016), which is about language style in fury movie. meanwhile, the researcher found the similar finding between rahardian’s (2016) and this analysis. for example, the researcher found some short response in bts and obamas’ video such as “yeah, i did”, “no”, “of course”, “all right.” in the same way, in rahardian’s (2016) finding there are some short responses he found from his data such as “all right, sir.”, “yeah. i am”. moreover, the second type that jimmy used in his talk show is casual style. there were 18 data that indicate casual style. the data found in three videos, the first video with comedian that is eddie murphy. the second is video with singer that is madonna. the third is video with kids, those are evan and jillian. the host used casual style when he talked to these guests because of their relationship that indicated they have met before, so nowadays they become as close acquaintances or even friend. it supports by firda (2020) who stated that casual style is muziatun, syarifuddin achmad, & puspita wulandari samidu five language style analysis of the host in the tonight show talk show: a sociolinguistics analysis 122 used in a normal situation and used by some friends, such as jimmy and all musicians because they are from the entertainment field. this is what the researcher found in eddie murphy and madonna video. moreover, another reason that makes the host used casual style when he talked to his guest is because the guest is children, which the host needed to adjust their language when speaking in order to make the children understand and answer what the host asked. in addition, this is what the researcher found in evan and jillian video. from finding and analysis above, the researcher found the similarity with rahardian’s (2016) finding in casual style. for instance, the researcher found some opinion states from the object utterance in the conversation, such as “i mean, these are iconic” (in eddie murphy video), “i love that you’re doing this” (in madonna video), and “this is like so cool” (in evan and jillian video). meanwhile, there are some opinion states found in rahardian’s (2016). for example, “if they do, we'll know exactly where they are” and “we've been lucky till now”. additionally, it can be seen that among all of the types of language style found in data, casual style was the most dominantly used by the host of the talk show. based on the researcher interpretation of the data, the style mostly appeared in the video because the situation was relaxed. a host should be able to read the situation, create atmosphere to make the talk show runs well (rumpoko, 2013, cited in situmorang, 2015). each has a different style with other individuals especially in communication in essence (gunawan et al., 2019). also, the use of language styles is able to determine the purpose of communication (sakti & weda, 2020). in the same case, after analyzing all data, the researcher found a difference degree in the use of both types in each video. for instance, jimmy used consultative style when speaking to bts members and barack obama. however, when speaking to bts members the style tended to be intimate style, while it did not occur in barack obama’s video. it can be seen from the words that jimmy used; he often called the bts members with ‘man’, ‘dude’, and ‘guys’. in the conversation, jimmy said “yeah, that’s right. good to see you buddy. guys, it’s been so fun, exciting having you here in new york city, and you got to speak at the u.n”. jimmy said that utterance when he wanted to start the conversation with bts in which jimmy asked about their experience when they spoke at the united nation. another example that jimmy said is “wow. tell me. you spoke at the u.n. you sold out citi field in less than 10 minutes. i mean, this is –it’s a big deal for you guys”. in addition, there is another slang word that jimmy used in his conversation with bts in the video such as ‘dude’ and ‘man’. whereas, those slang words are not found in his conversation with barack obama. there are many semi-formal styles found in jimmy utterances, which do not contain slang or any non-formal words. therefore, it becomes a difference degree between the use of a consultative style of bts with barack obama video on jimmy’s talk show. moreover, there is a difference use of casual style found between the kids’ (evan and jillian) video with madonna and eddie murphy’s video. casual style is used in madonna and eddie murphy’s video. however, the style tended to be intimate style. it can be seen from their conversation. there is a short conversation that sounds a little intimate; when madonna said “i'm sorry, but the truth hurts. so, now we don't have any -we have no distractions, and there are no illusions. i am only here to see you”. that utterance expresses her feeling when she comes to jimmy’s talk show. moreover, jimmy replied her utterance like when he said “see, wow, thank you so much. i've grown. i feel - thank you so much. our relationship has grown” and madonna said “your hair has grown”. they tried to joke one another and the conversation shows how close their relationship, which is more than just a close acquaintance perhaps. in the same way, the same case also was found in eddie murphy video, which there is a conversation or utterance included into casual but tends to be intimate. it can be seen from the first utterance that jimmy said in the beginning of the video “thank you for coming by. what's it like? what's this week been like? you're back on "snl." is it like going back to school or”. the utterance “is it like going back to school or” is included into casual but sounds a little intimate. this is because it sounds like jimmy knows well how the snl influence the eddie murphy carrier. furthermore, in their conversation, there is a slang word found, when eddie murphy said “35 years since i’ve been back”. and jimmy replied “man oh man”, he said that slang word to show english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 123 his feeling after knowing how long eddie left the show. in addition, that is why their language style sounds casual but a little intimate. however, that case was not found in evan and jillian video, in which there are no utterances that tended to be the other style. jimmy used the casual style when talking to evan and jillian, although they are not friend which never meet before. however, jimmy used the casual style in order to make them feel comfortable when speaking to him. hence, jimmy chose a style that is suitable in speaking to a kid, and that is casual style. the way of delivering people thought, whether in the form of formal or informal can be understood from the styles of their language (syuhada, samad & muthalib, 2020). conclusion the major goal of this research is to describe the types of language style used by jimmy fallon in the tonight show talk show. this study used the theory of joos (1967) to analyze the types of the language style. furthermore, the result of this research has shown that the host of the talk show that is jimmy fallon used two types from five language styles proposed by joos (1967). those are consultative style and casual style. furthermore, the more significant findings in this research are the use of casual style. it is because jimmy wanted to make his conversation with his guest not awkward when speaking one another. therefore, this style becomes the most dominant in jimmy’s talk show because he wanted his guest feeling comfortable in speaking just like how they speak to their friend. “the most dominant function is created from the needs of people itself in communication” (putri, oktama & nursyamsu, 2016, p. 128). to understand the language, the hearer can not only know the meaning, but also the situation whether it is formal or informal, who is being addressed and who might be able to overhear (ivan, 2020). overall, the participant, the setting, and the function become the important things that have to be known when analyzing these types of language style. besides, joos’s (1967) theory teaches how style in language can be distinguished based on someone’s relationship with others. references abbas, a., & setiawan, h. i. 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(2015). presenter talk show “sarah sechan” dan minat menonton (studi korelasional presenter talk show “sarah sechan” pada televisi net dengan minat menonton talk show sarah sechan pada mahasiswa department ilmu komunikasi fakultas ilmu social dan ilmu politik universitas sumatera utara) [presenter of talk show “sarah sechan” (study correlation of talk show’s presenter “sarah sechan” on net television program with the interest of watching the talk show on department of communication sciences student political and social science faculty sumatera utara university]. (thesis, sumatera utara university, indonesia). retrieved from http://repository.usu.ac.id/handle/123456789/502 susatyo, b., & wardhono, a. (2019). study of language style in hillary clinton’s speech. journal of english teaching, literature and applied linguistics, 3(1), 1-12 doi: 10.30587/jetlal.v3i1.785. syuhada, r. f., samad, i. a., & muthalib, k. a. (2020). language style used in educational advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper. english education journal, 11(3), 303-315. trioktaviani, s. (2019). language styles on bedtime story in free kids’ online books. (undergraduate thesis, maulana malik ibrahim state islamic university of malang, indonesia). retrieved from http://repositori.uin-alauddin.ac.id/7826/ yin, r. k., (ed.). (2016). qualitative research from start to finish. (2nd ed.). new york & london: guilford press. zhang, j., & huang, y. (2020). good reviews go out the door, bad news travels fast? research on the influence of reference groups and their language styles in positive online review on consumers’ brand attitudes. open journal of social sciences, 8. 271-295. doi: http://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2020.82022 http://digilib.uinsby.ac.id/5971/ http://books.google.co.id/books/about/emotion_in_language.html&id=e4oxcwaaqbaj&redir_esc=y http://books.google.co.id/books/about/emotion_in_language.html&id=e4oxcwaaqbaj&redir_esc=y http://books.google.co.id/books/about/emotion_in_language.html&id=e4oxcwaaqbaj&redir_esc=y http://repository/ http://repositori.uin-alauddin.ac.id/7826/ http://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2020.82022 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee intercultural approach and character educationbased developing english textbook titi rokhayati purworejo muhammadiyah university, indonesia email: rokhayatititi@yahoo.com apa citation: rokhayati, t. (2016). intercultural approach and character educationbased developing english textbook. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 131-140 received: 08-10-2016 accepted: 07-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: this research was conducted with the purpose to develop the materials of textbook based on intercultural approach and character education as a guideline in learning english for senior high school class x in purworejo regency, and to determine the validity of the development of textbooks. the method used in this research is r and d. based on the findings, it can be concluded that english book published by the government in 2014 requires improvement in terms of 1) the current topic which are very important because the topics are most needed by the students as information directly from the book contained current trends, 2) insight of diversity means that the knowledge, experience, and discourse reflected in the texts contained insight of diversity including the target language, and 3) relationship with social emotional material students need to be improved. the material contained in this book will be developed based on the intercultural approach, meaning that based on the findings and goals to be achieved in this study, the findings of the field study is appropriate. keywords: textbooks, english, intercultural approach, character education introduction english is the first foreign language in indonesia which becomes a compulsory subject for students of junior high school to universities. in line with the development of globalization era, english is very important to be mastered since many people learn english for various intentions. they try to understand some english texts, for having interview, even for studying abroad, they need to master english either written or oral. observing the importance of english in any sphere of life, the government must be able to change the paradigm of educational system in indonesia. the change of basic paradigm in the national education system happenned in 2009s, the minister of education wants to have a focus in the national education which is known as character education. the government has made character education as the priority program in the national development. the education which is based on culture and nation character is attached to the curriculum and sylabus, the teachers find it is difficult to understand the meaning of the characters. it must be applied in the lesson plan. character is someone’s personality which is formed as the result of integration of understanding, the behaviour to the value, and the daily attitude. character implies a standard of moral which involved a value consideration (hurlock in kesuma 2012). 131 titi rokhayati intercultural approach and character educationbased developing english textbook character education is an education to form an individual’s personality through the character education in which the result can be seen in the good attitude, honesty, responsibility, appreciate others’ right, and work hard (lickona in gunawan, 2012) the characters’ value intended is the personality or character which can be reached in teaching-learning process. there are some important things in teaching learning process. they are input, process and output. in the process of teaching learning, the teacher needs to use method and media. one of the important media is textbook. based on direktorat pendidikan menengah umum (in muslich, 2010, p. 50) a “textbook is sekumpulan tulisan yang dibuat secara sistematis berisi tentang suatu materi pelajaran tertentu, yang disiapkan oleh pengarangnya dengan menggunakan acuan kurikulum yang berlaku.” while richards and schmidt (2010) say that textbook is a book contained certain subject which is used to teach or study in school or universities. english textbook has some special characteristics in which covers some limitations which relate to how to use the language, the function of the language, and condition of the society. the choice of materials and the appropriate technique can make the students interested. when the teacher finds some unappropriate materials which are not in line with the students’ need, the teacher must develop the material to make it suited to the students’ need. the teacher then has to select, adapt, and develop the materials. actually a teacher must decide on the materials needed, students’ activities, and the strategy he must apply in teaching learning process. the policy of teaching english must be in line with the availability of english textbook which fulfills students’ need and the curriculum. besides, the intercultural approach is needed to enrich the teachers’ knowledge in english teaching learning. the concept of “inter-cultural” is need to be conceived as independent of both their native culture and the new culture. while, the concept of teaching is helping someone to learn, guiding, providing with the knowledge, and giving instructions. teaching intercultural is helping the students to understand their own culture and respect other cultures because in fact there is an influence from other cultures. soler (2007) claims that we are so familiar with our own culture that we do not even realize it is there and, inevitably, it influences our expectations when we establish contact with people belonging to a different culture. intercultural understanding is the ability to participate and negotiate with people in a variety of contexts. participating and negotiating with people requires an ability to know and understand ‘your’ culture, ‘another’s’ culture and have skill in working between your own and another’s culture. (http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_ lecturers/professional_learning/intercul tural_competencies/developing_intercul tural_understanding/diu_resources/res ource_1_definitions.html). an intercultural approach gives lecturers and learners a clearly defined and consistent set of purposes, while intercultural communication should be a clearly defined option in language education. the goals of any course should specify whether learners, lecturers and institutions are concerned with (1) increasing language proficiency. (2) gaining factual knowledge about the target culture. 132 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee (3) acculturating, and/or. (4) mediating between cultures (corbett, 2003). intercultural competence is a set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural context (bennet, 2011). in addition, fantini (2006, p. 12) defines intercultural as “a complex of abilities needed to perform effectively and appropriately when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself.” the most elaborated model of intercultural competence is the model of savoirs developed by byram and zarate (1994): (1) savoir, (2) savoir être, (3) savoir comprendre, and (4) savoir apprendre. 1) savoir refers to knowledge of self and others, of their products and practices and the general processes of interaction. this constitutes a body of knowledge on which other operations can be performed. 2) savoir être, which involves an attitudinal disposition towards intercultural engagement manifested in approaching intercultural learning with curiosity, openness, and reflexivity. 3) savoir comprendre, which involves learning how to interpret and explain cultural practices or documents and to compare them with aspects of one’s own culture. 4) savoir apprendre, which is the ability to make discoveries through personal involvement in social interaction. byram (1997) adds a further dimension, savoir s’engager, which refers to the ability to make informed critical evaluation of aspects of one’s own and other cultures. in terms of character education, there are 9 pillars which will be developed (uu no 20 tahun 2003 pasal 3), they are; 1) love god and the creature, 2) responsibility, discipline, and independence, 3) honesty and wisdom, 4) respect and polite, 5) charity and cooperation, 6) self-esteem, creative and hard-work, 7) leadership and justice, 8) kindness and humble, and 9) tolerance, peaceful, and unity. another pillars in the characters education are: 1) religious, 2) honest, 3) tolerance, 4) discipline, 5) hard-work, 6) creative, 7) independence, 8) democratic, 9) curiosity, 10) nationality, 11) patriotism, 12) appreciative, 13) friendliness, 14) peaceful, 15) love reading, 16) environment concern, 17) social concern, and 18) responsibility. in this research the researcher has a research question; how is the development of the textbook based on intercultural approach and character education as the guidance book of english teaching learning for class x semester 1 in purworejo regency? method this research uses r and d method developed by richey (2007). based on the objectives of the research, this research belongs to the research and development method. sugiyono adds that “research and development is a research method which is used to produce a particular product, and test the effectiveness of product” (2012, p. 407). richey and klein (2007) call it developmental or development research, which then name it design and development research. it is divided into 3 steps; exploring (research), developing (design and development), and evaluation (design research). this research analyzes the exploring stage and the developing stage is still on the process. so, the researcher only discuss on the exploring or preliminary study. the subjects of the research are the tenth grader of sman 5 and sman 7 in 133 titi rokhayati intercultural approach and character educationbased developing english textbook purworejo regency. there are 160 students and 5 teachers. the main instrument is the researcher herself and the supporting instrument is questionnaire and observation for students and for teachers. the research was conducted seven times for collecting data for students and teachers on april to july 2016. results in a preliminary study, the researcher did a step namely literature study. the literature study is a step in which the researcher collected various books and sources which are relevant to the topics discussed. the books were very helpful as the basic resource of theories, so in discussing the topic the researcher can give clear and focused discussion. after doing some research, the researcher presented a field study on textbooks used. the textbook analyzed was an english textbook for the first semester of class x in sman 5 and sman 7 purworejo. the book was published by kemendikbud 2014. the research findings will be described as follows: the results of the students’ questionnaire in this section the researcher presents the results of questionnaire given to the students in grade x sman 5 and sma n 7 purworejo. table 1. the subjects of the research sma science class social class sman 5 32 64 sman 7 32 32 sum 64 96 total 160 the subjects are the students of sman 5 and sman 7. they are at the tenth grade semester 1. the schools are state senior high school. those schools are included as favorite schools in purworejo. both schools implement 2013 curriculum. the researcher chose 64 students majoring in science and the social class were 96 students. table 2. the result of students’ questionnaire no the questions no of item agree disagree number percentage number percentage 1. the conformity between the content and the core competencies 1 143 95.33 7 4.67 2. the materials represent social function 2 125 84.46 23 15.54 3. the aspects and meaning structure described clearly 3 111 75.00 37 25.00 4. linguistic feature is well-defined 4 110 73.33 40 26.67 5. the topics in the materials are trend topics 5 47 31.76 101 68.24 6. the materials include developing life skills 6 98 68.06 46 31.94 7. the insight of diversity is welldescribed 7 78 51.66 73 48.34 8. the materials are suited to the 8 137 82.33 29 17.47 134 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee development level of students’ cognitive 9. the materials are suited to the students’ social emotional level 9 82 56.55 63 43.45 10. the message in the material is clearly-read 10 103 69.13 46 30.87 11. use appropriate language 11 137 92.57 11 7.43 12. good management of chapters 12 122 81.88 27 18.12 13. interconnectedness of chapters and sub chapters 13 129 87.76 18 12.24 14 good performance in presenting the materials 14 133 89.26 16 10.47 15. the contents of the chapters are in balance 15 137 93.20 10 6.80 16. the focus is the students’ need 16 105 70.47 44 29.53 17. the materials lead the students’ idea, creativity and critical thinking 17 115 77.18 34 22.82 18. the materials enable the students to learn 18 96 64.43 53 35.57 19. the materials enable the students to have self evaluation 19 99 66.4 50 33.56 20. there are introduction, content and closing 20 127 86.39 20 13.61 total number 2234 74.92 748 25.08 based on the table above, it can be drawn that the questions in the questionnaire about the instrument ratings book filled out by the students by answering agree and disagree more dominant on the answers agree. however, if we look thoroughly, there are three questions that are more likely to provide input into the development of the material that is about current topics, they agree to answer a number of 47 (31.76%) and disagree 101 (68.24%). then, the second of the insights of diversity in the material, those who answered agree is 78 (51.66%) and disagree is 73 ( 48.34%) it was almost equal. the third on a question about the content of the material is in conformity with the social emotional development of students who answered agree is 82 (56.55%) and disagree is 65 (43.45%). seeing the first question, namely number of items 5 (topics contained in the materials are current topics), it is clear that the students who answer disagree are bigger than who answered agree. the second question i.e. number of items 7 (development of insights diversity is already imprinted in the material), insight into the diversity in this case includes not only insight into the cultures that exist in indonesia but also the cultures of the target language that is english. so, this insight also includes students' horizons about english culture as the target language. the answer of agree and disagree was no significant difference, it was almost the same. the third question, number of items 9 (fill material according to the social emotional level of the students) students who agree is more than those who was disagree but the difference was only 3.10%. based on the findings of the students’ questionnaire, it can be concluded that the english book for tenth grade semester 1 published by the government in 2014 requires an improvement in the current topic, insight into the diversity, 135 titi rokhayati intercultural approach and character educationbased developing english textbook and about the relationship of social emotional material with students. current topics are very important because the topics are most needed by students as the information directly from the book what are the current trends. it is considered very important for the students so that the students get inspiration from books and then interpret it in the form of tasks by the teacher. insights of diversity means that the knowledge, experience, and discourse reflected in the texts contained in the book because the english books here related to diversity also on the diversity of the target language. in accordance with the title of this study that the material contained in this book will be developed based on the intercultural approach, meaning that based on the findings and goals to be achieved in this study, the findings of the field study is appropriate. linkages of material with students’ social emotional which need to be improved. it may also be associated with the development of educational materials based on the character suited to the problems raised in this research. the results of the teachers’ questionnaire teachers’ questionnaires are filled out by five teachers who teach in the tenth grade science and social studies. the three teachers are from sman 7, they are dr. nikmah nurbaity, m.pd., agus setiyono, m.pd., and drs. moersito. meanwhile, while the other two teachers came from sman 5 namely heru, m.pd., and bambang, m.pd. the results of the questionnaire can be described as follows: feasibility contents: 1) core competencies and basic competencies are implied the core competencies and basic competencies should be written clearly, so it can be seen from the text and the real competencies that can be reached. 2) social functions has not yet written the social function especially from the text are found implicitly. in part of speaking, it must be practice so the students can make use of the text in the daily life. 3) it needs updating the novelty of the topics are so important for the students to be up to date, because it will make students update the newest thing in the world. feasibility of language 1) the material is already relevant to the students’ need the various topics in the textbook has fulfilled the students’ need. it covers some topics which are in line with what students want, the weakness is on the novelty although the topic has been reached the students’ need but it still needs to be reviewed on the topics which have trends nowadays. 2) communication message is understood the communication message is understood means that the packages of messages are understood well. the students understand well as the use of the language is simple and not complicated. 3) it meets the elements of coherence and cohesion the coherence and cohesion of the text is appropriate. they meet the elements. eligibility of the presentation 1) presentation system has been coherent and balanced it has good presentation, easy to understand and interesting. 136 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 2) lack of critical thinking skills the points of critical thinking skill need to be improved because it is very useful for the students to have some interesting topics which lead them to think critically. 3) presentation of introduction, contents, and closing are complete the book’s performance has been complete. it has introduction, contents and closing. from the summary of the teachers’ questionnaire described above, it can be seen that the contents of the feasibility of the contents are adequate but core competencies and basic competencies are still implied while for social functions has not been written completely. from the side of the topic shows that the topic still needs updating means that the topic should be adjusted to the current circumstances. in terms of the feasibility of the language, it is proved that the material was relevant to learners. communication message has been understood and already meet the elements of coherence and cohesion. this indicates that the english books for class x the first semester is deserved to be used. in terms of the presentation, there are some opinions from the teachers as the respondents of the research, they argue that the system presentation is coherent and balanced, it has not yet presented skills of critical thinking and the presentation in terms of introduction, contents and closing is complete. briefly, it can be described that from the questionnaire evaluation the feasibility of the contents are adequate but the core competencies and basic competencies are still implied while social function is not completely written. from the side of the topic it shows that the topic still needs updating means that the topic should be adjusted to the current circumstances. in terms of feasibility of language it is proved that the material was relevant to learners,, communication message has been understood and already meet the elements of coherence and cohesion. this indicates that the english books for class x 1st semester is deserved to be used. in terms of presentation of the opinion there are some teachers as respondents said that the system of presentation is already coherent and balanced, but it has lack of critical thinking skills and in terms of the presentation the introduction, contents and closing is complete. the result of observation one of the illustrations of teaching learning process is described here. the teacher and the students were enjoying the english class. it seems that they can make use of the textbook well. the teacher asked the students about the reading text, but he started the teaching by giving description about a unique place which he ever visited. using vocabularies which can be understood well the students enjoyed the teacher’s story. in the description, the teacher just described about the place, the location, and the visitors of the place, the description about what is the place for, the culture surrounding the place, and the people’s habit in the place were not described yet. seeing that the background of the place was important part in describing place it must be described also. thus, from the observation of teaching and learning process, it should be improved. some teachers like to have their own ways of teaching by describing something that they have ever seen. it is good because the description became so real for the students since it is based on the experience, but some parts may miss 137 titi rokhayati intercultural approach and character educationbased developing english textbook in the description as the teacher enjoyed much the explanation. besides, there are also some characters building found in the text but they do not describe explicitly so the readers must infer them through the text. conclusion the english book published by the government in 2014 requires improvements in terms of current topics, insights about the relevance of diversity, and the relationship of material and students’ social emotional. current topics are very important because the topics are most needed by students as the information directly from the book what are the current trends. it is considered very important for the students so that the students get inspiration from books and then interpret it in the form of tasks by the teacher. insights of diversity means that the knowledge, experience, and discourse reflected in the texts contained in the book because the english books here related to diversity also on the diversity of the target language. it is explicitly described in the book how to congratulate others for example in which the culture of the target language is being learned but it also includes the culture of indonesian in which something about ‘selamatan’ is also learned. in accordance with the title of this study that the material contained in this book will be developed based on the intercultural approach, meaning that based on the findings and goals to be achieved in this study, the findings of the field study is appropriate. linkages of the material with students’ social emotional need to be improved. it may also be associated with the development of educational materials based on the character which is suitable to the problems raised in this research. current topics, insight of diversity, and linkages of material with students’ social emotional are the three points which are improved in this research. by developing the material it is hoped that the textbook is more acceptable for the students. the observation has described about the students and teacher’s activity but the description needs to be improved. it relates to some important points about the place described. the teacher should also described about the people who live in the surrounding so the students know well about the life of the surrounding society which may also be influenced by the existence of the place. acknowledgement in the name of allah, the beneficient and the merciful, praise belong to allah “lord of universe” who has given us inspiration, so that the researcher can finish this part of the study successfully. this study is to fulfill the task of lecturers as a researcher who must always have research every year and publish the research but this research is only a part of the whole research in r and d research. the researcher would like to express her greatest gratitude to several people who participated in finishing this study. she extends her sincere gratitude and appreciations to: 1. drs. supriyono, m.pd as the rector of purworejo muhammadiyah university. 2. yuli widiyono, m. pd. as the dean of the teacher training and educational sciences faculty. 3. abdul ngafif, m.pd. b.i. as the colleague who helps the researcher in doing the research study. 138 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 4. the english teachers of sman 5 and sman 7 purworejo for the good help and cooperation. 5. the students of class x sman 5 and sman 7 purworejo, thanks for good cooperation and collaboration. 6. all of my colleagues in english education program of purworejo muhammadiyah university. 7. all of my friends in umj who always motivate me to be a better person in the eye of family and of god. love you sist! 8. my big family, my beloved husband who always be with me in happiness and sadness, my children who love me so much days and night, and my brothers. thanks for the support, prayers, motivations, love, and cares. references bennett, m. j. (2012). developing intercultural competence for international education faculty and staff. aiea conference * february 20-23,2011 san francisco, ca, usa. association of international education administrators, www.aieaworld.org byram, m., & zarate, g. (1997). defining and assessing intercultural competence: some principles and proposals for the european context. language teaching, 29, pp. 14-18. corbett, j. (2003). an intercultural approach to english language teaching. clevedon: cromwell press ltd. fantini, a. e. (2006). exploring and assessing intercultural competence. retrieved october 1, 20015, from http://www.sit.edu/publications/do cs/feil_research_ report.pdf gunawan, h. (2012). pendidikan karakter: konsep dan implementasi. bandung: alfabeta. kesuma, dkk. (2012). pendidikan karakter: kajian teori dan praktik di sekolah. bandung: remaja rosdakarya. muslich, m. (2009). ktsp (kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan): dasar pemahaman dan pengembangan. jakarta: pt. bumi aksara richards, j. c., & richard s. (2010). longman: dictionary of language teaching & applied linguistics (4th ed.). malaysia: pearson education limited richey, r. c., & klein, j. d. design and development research: method, strategies, and issues. new york: routledge. soler, e. a., & jorda, m. p. s. (2007). intercultural language use and language learning. dordrecht: springer. sugiyono. (2012). metode penelitian pendidikan: pendekatan kuantitatif, kualitatif, dan r&d. bandung: alfabeta (http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_lect urers/professional_learning/intercult ural_competencies/developing_interc ultural_understanding/diu_resources /resource_1_definitions.html). 139 http://www.sit.edu/publications/ http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_lecturers/professional_learning/intercultural_competencies/developing_intercultural_understanding/diu_resources/resource_1_definitions.html http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_lecturers/professional_learning/intercultural_competencies/developing_intercultural_understanding/diu_resources/resource_1_definitions.html http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_lecturers/professional_learning/intercultural_competencies/developing_intercultural_understanding/diu_resources/resource_1_definitions.html http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_lecturers/professional_learning/intercultural_competencies/developing_intercultural_understanding/diu_resources/resource_1_definitions.html http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_lecturers/professional_learning/intercultural_competencies/developing_intercultural_understanding/diu_resources/resource_1_definitions.html titi rokhayati intercultural approach and character educationbased developing english textbook ice cream there was an elderly couple who in their old age noticed that they were getting a lot more forgetful, so they decided to go to the doctor. the doctor told them that they should start writing things down so they don't forget. they went home and the old lady told her husband to get her a bowl of ice cream. "you might want to write it down," she said. the husband said, "no, i can remember that you want a bowl of ice cream." she then told her husband she wanted a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream. "write it down," she told him, and again he said, "no, no, i can remember: you want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream." then the old lady said she wants a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top. "write it down," she told her husband and again he said, "no, i got it. you want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top." so he goes to get the ice cream and spends an unusually long time in the kitchen, over 30 minutes. he comes out to his wife and hands her a plate of eggs and bacon. the old wife stares at the plate for a moment, then looks at her husband and asks, "where's the toast?" (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) 140 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee content and language integrated learning (clil): an experimental study on clil compatibility with the modern greek educational system catherine georgopoulou-theodosiou department of electronics eng., t.e.i. of piraeus, egaleo 12244, greece e-mail: catgeo@hotmail.gr apa citation: theodosiou, c. g. (2016). content and language integrated learning (clil): an experimental study on clil compatibility with the modern greek educational system. english review, 4(2), 149-160 received: 14-02-2016 accepted: 18-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: this paper focuses on the content and language integrated learning (clil) method for (foreign) language teaching. the clil approach is rapidly gaining momentum across europe and all over the world. it is the result of recent european union efforts to develop and apply innovative educational practices of interdisciplinary character in order to bridge the gap between foreign language education and optimum learning outcomes. in order to investigate the compatibility of clil with the contemporary greek educational reality, a small-scale experimental research study was set up, including the development of original e-learning material, a pilot class instruction based on this material and the evaluation of the results. the class instruction was based on project-based learning whereas collaborative learning was supported by the edmodo e-learning platform. information on the progress of the pilot class instruction and the learning outcomes achieved was disseminated through a wiki set up for this task. keywords: clil, interdisciplinarity, plurilingualism, multiculturalism, assessment, information and communication technology (ict) introduction in their effort to achieve economic success based on mobile multilingual populations, countries across the globe and the european union in particular, are recently expressing a great interest in human capital. linguistic capital is one of the most important components of human capital. multilingualism and the support as well as the preservation of linguistic diversity in europe are among the main goals of the european union's language policy. indeed, eu policy states that all european citizens should learn to communicate and use at least three languages –‘mother tongue plus two other languages’ and that teaching must start at an early age (barcelona declaration, 2002). the clearest indication of this interest is the appointment of a commissioner for multilingualism in january 2007. in the discussion on how to achieve the above goals while providing a quality education for all citizens, the clil method and its future developments play a central role. as clil develops and expands, it is linked to the educational evolution accompanying economic and sociopolitical changes, bringing with it opportunities and challenges worth taking. integrating language with non149 mailto:catgeo@hotmail.gr catherine georgopoulou-theodosiou content and language integrated learning (clil): an experimental study on clil compatibility with the modern greek educational system language content, in a dual-focused environment, has emerged as a solution, the most obvious advantage being that exposure to a foreign language does not need any extra time within the curriculum. it is more than the desire of governments, parents and the educational community to equip young people with higher competence in languages what promotes the clil approach. it is the very nature of the clil method, an educational innovation which suits the times, needs and aspirations of learners, that justifies the expectations for a huge impact in the near future. learners nowadays are increasingly unwilling to learn now for use later; they prefer to learn and use now, which suits the immediacy of purpose common in our times. globalization, mobility, technology and assessment issues are also considered likely to have a further impact on learners’ attitudes towards how they learn, particularly with regard to foreign language learning. clil’s four major components, the 4cs (coyle, 2010), content (subject matter), cognition (learning and thinking processes), communication (language learning and using) and culture (developing intercultural understanding and global citizenship) clearly underpin the conclusion that clil method is not just another way of learning a foreign language, but an innovative educational process that integrates major contemporary learning theories. within this framework of theoretical background and pedagogical method, the two research questions investigated through this project were (i) how efficient is the use of ict technology as a supportive tool in clil-based class instruction, and (ii) whether clil is compatible with the contemporary greek educational system. method the ‘eat well – be healthy’ project, designed and developed as a clil method application, took place in the 20th primary school of ilioupolis, a typical public school in the city of athens, greece, where english is taught as a foreign language four times a week in 40 or 45-minute sessions. the 5th and 6th grades of this school, each consisting of about 20 pupils, served as the research and the control group, respectively. the class instruction based on clil was designed and implemented by the author of this paper working as an english language teacher at the school. it lasted for eight weeks (april may 2015) using english as the medium language and involving the following subject areas: (i) informatics, (ii) english language teaching and (iii) pshe (personal & social health education). the students worked in five groups of mixed ability levels, following the steps and instructions of project based learning to foster learner motivation through an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. the main goal of the project was to promote healthy diet and good eating habits as a necessary component of students’ knowledge about life, health and wellness. the educational objectives were based on bloom’s revised taxonomy of educational goals and were divided into cognitive, affective and psychomotor, as indicated. the teacher resources were all gathered for reasons of convenience into a mind mapping software available through https://www.mindmeister.com /. the original work and material created by the students during this project were both digital and analogue, as they can be seen in the video available in http://www.kizoa.com/, a free web 150 https://www.mindmeister.com/ https://www.mindmeister.com/ http://www.kizoa.com/ english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 2.0 tool. some of them were crafts and posters for the class; other forms included recordings, digital storytelling works, publications, electronic posters and power point presentations. the lesson plans created were four (4) to correspond to the four objectives (4cs) of the clil approach. according to coyle (2000, 2007) they are absolutely significant for the educational process which is based upon them differentiating this method from traditional foreign language teaching. the specific objectives and corresponding activities are described below: • content: students are expected to fulfill the objectives of the curriculum for the subject area taught with the clil method, enriching their knowledge by studying the content from different angles allowing more depth and understanding on the area concerning nutrition and health. more specifically, in the first unit entitled 'eat a rainbow', the research group of students were invited, among other things, to work online on a collaborative digital canvas, which is provided by the web tool 2.0 www.linoit.com and is available online at: http://linoit.com/users/catherinegeo/canvases/eat%20a%20rainbow . on the canvas, they had to match the nutritional value of foods with their origin and benefits, adding comments and observations, an activity which the control group of students performed in the classroom, with fewer chances for adding comments or for information search at home. picture 1 shows an aspect of the electronic canvas. picture 1. aspect of the collaborative digital canvas • communication: students are expected to understand and communicate in the target language on issues related to nutrition, acquiring greater awareness of both mother tongue and the target language by practising communication skills and developing a positive attitude towards plurilingualism. in the second unit entitled 'my eat well plate', the students of both classes 151 http://www.linoit.com/ http://linoit.com/users/catherine-geo/canvases/eat%20a%20rainbow http://linoit.com/users/catherine-geo/canvases/eat%20a%20rainbow http://linoit.com/users/catherine-geo/canvases/eat a rainbow catherine georgopoulou-theodosiou content and language integrated learning (clil): an experimental study on clil compatibility with the modern greek educational system were asked to work in groups in order to design and present a healthy dish and then to be recorded during the description of their healthy dishes. participation in this activity came from both teams and the final digital storytelling product, available by the web 2.0 tool www.utellstory.com can be visited at the web address: http://www.utellstory.com/vie wstory/view/8ae80672f14123ba65e590b b2da83989#player. • cognition (knowledge): students are expected to develop cognitive skills and mental processing of information on healthy eating and other subject areas, strategies of an active learning approach to knowledge through critical and creative thinking and development of lifelong pursuit of language learning. picture 2. aspect of the digital storytelling web tool in the third unit, entitled 'do you like bread?', students of both groups were asked to create in groups their own recipes and present them to class, an activity that ended up in an electronic recipe book as a final product with the support of the web tool 2.0 www.issuu.com. it is available at the web address: https://issuu.com/catheringeo/docs/final_cookbook. 152 http://www.utellstory.com/ http://www.utellstory.com/viewstory/view/8ae80672f14123ba65e590bb2da83989#player http://www.utellstory.com/viewstory/view/8ae80672f14123ba65e590bb2da83989#player http://www.utellstory.com/viewstory/view/8ae80672f14123ba65e590bb2da83989#player http://www.issuu.com/ https://issuu.com/catherin-geo/docs/final_cookbook https://issuu.com/catherin-geo/docs/final_cookbook http://www.utellstory.com/viewstory/view/8ae80672f14123ba65e590bb2da83989 https://issuu.com/catherin-geo/docs/final_cookbook http://www.utellstory.com/viewstory/view/8ae80672f14123ba65e590bb2da83989 https://issuu.com/catherin-geo/docs/final_cookbook english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee picture 3. aspect of the electronic recipe book • culture: students are expected to understand their own culture compared to the culture of other people, fostering intercultural knowledge, respect, tolerance towards diversity, not only in the area of nutrition but of various other issues, as well. for the fourth unit entitled 'food around the world', the students of the research group were invited to create, among other things, a digital interactive poster presentation in which they recorded their opinions and comments on the problem of world hunger, malnutrition and on appetite disorder issues such as bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa. the electronic poster provided by the web tool 2.0 www.glogster.com is available at the web address: http://catgeo.edu. glogster.com/world-hunger/. the students of the control group expressed their views on the above issues in a classroom discussion and created analogue posters at school. picture 4 presents the collaborative work of the students of the research group on the digital poster. picture 4. aspect of the collaborative digital poster the teacher’s comments and critical thinking were saved in a digital diary available through https://penzu.com/. educational platforms and e-learning material educational platforms and elearning material were both employed in 153 http://www.glogster.com/ https://penzu.com/ http://catgeo.edu.glogster.com/world-hunger/ catherine georgopoulou-theodosiou content and language integrated learning (clil): an experimental study on clil compatibility with the modern greek educational system the specific project to support collaborative learning and enhancement of learning outcomes for the students. more specifically, the educational platforms were two. the first one, edmodo (for more information visit the web address: https://edmo.do/j/3x6hpq), is a social learning network (the so-called ‘facebook of pupils’) that offers collaboration and coaching tools to k-12 schools and teachers. edmodo is included in the list of "the top apps for teachers" published by the pc magazine in 2013. picture 5 shows the edmodo platform interface. the second platform developed for this project is a wiki called “clil taste” (visit the wiki at the web address: https://cliltaste.wikispaces.com /what+is+clil%3f), a tool that promotes collaborative learning and enhances learning outcomes. this is shown in picture 6. picture 5. the edmodo platform interface picture 6. aspect of the wiki’s interface 154 https://edmo.do/j/3x6hpq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pc_magazine https://cliltaste.wikispaces.com/what+is+clil%3f https://cliltaste.wikispaces.com/what+is+clil%3f https://edmo.do/j/3x6hpq https://cliltaste.wikispaces.com/what+is+clil? https://edmo.do/j/3x6hpq https://cliltaste.wikispaces.com/what+is+clil? english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee results and discussion 1. assessment starting with the project assessment, the procedure followed was the one indicated and promoted by the relevant instructions of the greek national curriculum which suggests three forms of assessment: initial, formative and summative. digital and analogue questionnaires were given to the students to assess (i) their prior knowledge on the subjects dealt with and (ii) the degree of assimilation of new material and teaching input with or without the support of technology (project and control group respectively). a common framework of assessment, especially designed and used in clil, that integrates content at different complexity levels, functions and cognitive skills, was employed for the evaluation of results of the teaching intervention (barbero, 2012). it is based on the knowledge framework by mohan (1986), a taxonomy where knowledge is considered in relation with language at three different levels: (1) classification /concepts, (2) principles/processes, and (3) evaluation/creation. the assessment suggested by mohan recommends "scale classified criteria" (matsagouras, 2004) or the so-called rubrics and focuses on how language is incorporated into the content in different difficulty levels of cognitive and academic requirements (calpcognitive academic language proficiency). the rubrics were adapted in the greek language by the instructor and author of this article to accommodate the age group of students and educational objectives of the project. 1.1. the leuven scale the leuven scale (laevers, 2005) is a standard instrument to measure the degree of well-being and the degree of involvement of learners during an educational process, which was also used for the assessment of the class instruction. according to the creator, both well-being and involvement are important during the educational process as they ensure a quality and an optimal relation of students with the environment and therefore a successful deep level learning and development. 1.2. the clil matrix a crucial thing in clil is to assess both language and communication skills and assimilation of content, a demand that is very difficult to satisfy as they are integrated into each other to produce the expected outcome. the most successful evaluation approach to assess the quality and analyse the integration of cognitive and linguistic levels in activities and materials used during a lesson employing the clil methodology has been adapted by professor do coyle (2002) from cummins’ work (1984). it is a key tool named clil matrix which teachers adopting the clil approach find quite useful as a means of evaluating their educational material, of the students’ progress in both the linguistic and cognitive domain alike and as a guide towards improvement of learning material in the future. it consists of four (4) quadrants to assess a single task, a sequence of tasks or even the quality and output of a whole unit in the teaching procedure. positioning tasks in the quadrants helps us analyse and ascertain the type of task and the balance between the task and the learner’s performance and needs. the matrix allows an overview of the learning progress in terms of linguistic and cognitive development. picture 7 shows a simple clil matrix but there is a more informed awareness-raising tool created by an international team of clil experts, which cross-combines content, language, integration and learning with culture, 155 catherine georgopoulou-theodosiou content and language integrated learning (clil): an experimental study on clil compatibility with the modern greek educational system communication, cognition and community. it is composed of 16 indicators which lead to examples and a number of questions for clil teachers to answer about their own teaching at the following web address: http://archive.ecml.at/mtp2/cl ilmatrix/en/qmain.html. picture 7. the clil matrix as one can notice in picture 8, the final depiction of the clil matrix was formed by the assessment of the educational material and the project activities. the conclusions could be processed if we followed the arrow, which charted the course of each unit in relation to the cognitive and language aims and objectives set beforehand. an interesting observation that could be made was that there was a decline in interest and involvement in the beginning of the intervention, as the leuven indicators also marked, created as a result of the exclusive use of the target language and the abundance of stimuli during the teaching of the first unit. for that reason, it was considered appropriate for the second unit to maintain cognitive and language requirements at a lower level in order to normalise the process of assimilation of content and new language requirements in the foreign language. the remaining modules seamlessly evolved steadily rising while fulfilling the expectations and anticipated outcomes of the students’ performance. picture 8. schematic representation of the assessment of the learning material of the project with the use of the clil matrix 156 http://archive.ecml.at/mtp2/clilmatrix/en/qmain.html http://archive.ecml.at/mtp2/clilmatrix/en/qmain.html english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee an interesting result obtained through the assessment and evaluation procedure of this project is that the engagement with technology leads to understanding and assimilation of the content of teaching to the same degree or extent as does the traditional teaching method without any technological support. where technology does make a difference, though, is in rendering learning more enjoyable and interesting and thus providing incentives and increased motivation for learning. as regards (foreign) language learning with technological support, our results show that students (i) individually interacted with technology (active learning), (ii) developed technological skills, (iii) managed to enhance their performance and (iv) ultimately gained more opportunities for language acquisition and communication. picture 9. tables of comparative assessment of language skills delivered through clil picture 10. tables of comparative assessment of content delivered through clil 157 catherine georgopoulou-theodosiou content and language integrated learning (clil): an experimental study on clil compatibility with the modern greek educational system the advantages of the approach are listed below along with some more thoughts that best describe the dynamics of the approach: • background knowledge of the english language in greece renders the introduction of clil methodology easier. • clil promotes linguistic and cultural diversity and the development of a european identity. • project-based learning and technology positively enhance the approach. • the introduction of the approach with low exposure to foreign language is considered advantageous if taught in a way appropriate to children's age (llinares, 2005). • clil helps learners better conceive even the use of mother tongue, namely to go deeper into the operating mechanisms of the two language systems (sanz, 2000). • clil is very useful for young learners who "use language to learn" and "learn to use language"(marsh, 2002). there are, however, a number of disadvantages coming from the implementation of the approach summarised below: • the demands on teachers are increased with respect to the preparation for the lesson and the development of the appropriate material. • at present, the clil method does not lead to any certification of knowledge, at least in greece. • the method should be disconnected from the teaching of english to fully develop its dynamics. • its adoption implies an increase in the time dedicated to foreign language teaching in the school timetable, which creates problems because of the pressing time limitations. • teachers’ training, both in a specific subject area and in the teaching of a foreign language, requires time and money. • the implementation of the method requires reforms in the school timetable up to the national curriculum and educational policy towards foreign language teaching, prerequisites which take time and are difficult to accomplish for various reasons. conclusion the conclusions following are based on this small-scale educational intervention and the experimental study of the clil approach at a school and reflect the writer’s personal ideas. they can be summarised in the following remarks: • the adoption of the clil approach would upgrade primary education in greece, mainly by reinforcing the substantial contact of students with a foreign language. • there is an urgent need for training of educators involved in clil and their participation in online communities for information and support. • countries worldwide respond to the need for increase of their linguistic capital through a series of policies concerning languages and clil can help transform these educational policies into reality. • teachers’ and students’ satisfaction from the implementation of clil, both in greece and europe, paves the way for further research on this approach, that could end up to a comprehensive proposal to the state. • the adoption of alternative educational models, better suited to 158 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the target content per case, is another suggestion. • the introduction of the clil method merits serious consideration in the context of both (foreign) language teaching reform and the country's more general planning and development policies. • the vision of clil is to promote linguistic and cultural experiences for every person providing inclusion and the privileges of plurilingualism and multiculturalism. the results mentioned above support a positive answer to the second research question: the clil approach is compatible with the modern greek public schools, even at the (pre-)primary education grades. an educational policy that considers clil as a realistic solution to the european and universal need to upgrade formal education and invest in education for the benefit of society can clearly be adopted in modern greece. clil emerges as a practical and sustainable solution with additional social, psychological and economic benefits. it is a solution compatible with the european policy and its goals which needs to be given a serious consideration. references anderson, l., kratwohl, d., airasian, p., cruikshank, k., m ayer, r., pintrich, p., raths, j., merlin, c., & wittrock, m. 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(2000). bilingual education enhances third language acquisition: evidence from catalonia. applied psycholinguistics, 21: 23-44. 160 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 13 abstract: innovative teaching model in the 21st century is of necessity because in this digital transformation era, lecturers deal with tech-savvy students. these students should be taught differently; it can be done by integrating teaching technique with newly-updated and technological-based media or platform. in english education study program, the lecturer still made use of conventional technique and it was monotonous and uninteresting. the present qualitative research with case study design was mainly intended to fathom out the students’ perceptions and the benefits of implementing tps-flipgrid in efl speaking class. the implementation of tps-flipgrid in the present qualitative research with case study design for the sake innovating efl speaking class has brought the language learning into certain level. the research clearly figured out that the perception of the third semester students was positive. they thought that tps-flipgrid was an innovative and flexible teaching model; besides, this model could invite active involvement and equalize classroom and online face-to-face interaction. the teaching model has successfully improved the students’ speaking performances and their 21st century life skills such as collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking. considering the significant results of applying tps-flipgrid, the implementation of this teaching model should be continuously carried out and improved. keywords: tps-flipgrid; efl speaking class; 21st century tps-flipgrid: transforming efl speaking class in the 21st century i komang budiarta english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, university of mahasaraswati denpasar, bali, indonesia email: mrbudi@unmas.ac.id made hery santosa english language education department, faculty of languages and arts, ganesha university of education, bali, indonesia email: mhsantosa@undiksha.ac.id apa citation: budiarta, i k. & santosa, m. h. (2020). tps-flipgrid: transforming efl speaking class in the 21st century. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 13-20. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3824 received: 29-06-2020 accepted: 27-09-2020 published: 11-12-2020 introduction to create an innovative language teaching and learning, innovation is of necessity. it is a must if lecturers would like to enrich their graduate quality that meets the external stakeholder needs. it should be carefully done; moreover, careful analysis and process should be carried out so that the results might give positive impacts. the advancement of technology and the skills required to face the future involving the ability to communicate, collaborate, and think critically should be completely taken into consideration in designing pedagogical framework in this digital transformation era, industry 4.0. in addition, integrating english language learning and technology nowadays are inseparable aspects to transform the teaching-learning process. dealing with students in this digital transformation of industry, industry 4.0 and students who are categorized as z generation (bencsik, horváth-csikós, & juhász, 2016), teachers are required to become tech-savvy who could grasp children’s interest in digital literacy (motteram, 2013). moreover, digital literacy is vital characteristic to be developed as a part of 21st-century learning skills: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration (bialik & fadel, 2015). thus, technology integration in the pedagogical framework is imperative in the teaching-learning process, especially in english language learning. tech-savvy teachers in the present digital disruption are completely needed to meet techsavvy students’ profiles (i.e. students of industry 4.0, z generation and 21st century). these students tend to be digitally literate that enable them to be acquainted with the uses of technology. one of the technology integration frameworks which can be developed is technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) framework. tpack framework has three main knowledge components used as the foundation (mishra and koehler in koehler, mishra, kereluik, shin, & graham, 2014). they mailto:mrbudi@unmas.ac.id mailto:mhsantosa@undiksha.ac.id i komang budiarta & made hery santosa tps-flipgrid: transforming efl speaking class in the 21th century 14 are technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge. the framework denotes the knowledge needed by teachers when they want to integrate technology into the way they teach the content area. mishra and koehler in pickering & gunashekar (2014) stated that the tpack framework needs to be integrated into any teacher training syllabus. besides, for practicing teachers, continual professional development that includes works on digital literacies is needed. teachers have an instinctive comprehension of the complex relationship within three basic components of knowledge: content, pedagogical, and technology by teaching content using apposite pedagogical methods and technologies (mishra & koehler, 2006; schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, koehler, & shin, 2009). as tertiary students in indonesia are digitally literate, english teachers need knowledge about the multifaceted interrelationship among technology, pedagogy, and content that enable them to develop appropriate and context-specific teaching strategies. in general, the integration of technology still needs to be enhanced in the process of teaching and learning. in the university of mahasaraswati denpasar, especially the english language education study program, innovative language learning is essential to deal with heterogeneous students. lecturers still carried out teaching and learning which made use of traditional teaching techniques and lack of technology involvement. this created a learning atmosphere that was monotonous and boring for 21st-century students. they should be taught by applying a teaching technique or model which is technological-based, and how the lecturers could deliver the subjectmatter through newly updated technologicalbased instructional practices or models that work for tech-savvy students. in this research, think pair share combined with flipgrid (henceforth tps-flipgrid) was applied as a teaching model that was used to transform efl speaking class. think pair share is a cooperative language learning which emphasizes on providing the students an opportunity to think individually, do pair discussion, and share it with the whole class sharing (richards & rodgers, 2001; arends, 2007; and arends, 2012). these stages allow the learners to learn english especially speaking in such a chronological procedure. as a result, their ideas can be structurally organized as well as possible which makes their speaking is well developed. flipgrid is a free online video discussion platform from microsoft that aids teachers see and listen to every student in the class and creates an enjoyable and supportive social learning environment (flipgrid, 2020). in flipgrid, lecturers post discussion stimuli and students reply with short videos. flipgrid provides an opportunity for students to do online face-to-face interaction. this also facilitates students to do virtual classroom discussion that enables them to interact with the other virtual class members. the use of flipgrid as an online video discussion platform could provide students with an opportunity to share their speaking performance freely and confidently. the implementation of tps-flipgrid is expected to be an innovative solution of integrating the technological-based teaching model in english as a foreign language class. flipgrid has some important features that support this video discussion platform; they are grids, topics, responses, and replies. first, a grid is a community of learners in which the lecturers can name the grid and create a custom flip code (or use the auto-generated one). second, topics are discussion starters or prompts, and students respond to the topics. third, responses are the recorded and uploaded videos by the students as their responses on the posted topics so that they can share their ideas through their voices. finally, replies in the flipgrid enables the students to make an interactive discussion in which they can reply to the previous responses that is added to the topic (fahey, moura, & saarinen, 2019). in addition, fahey et al. (2019) mention that using flipgrid is not about recording videos; it is about learning that is social and personal. it can happen anywhere and anytime, and it is about making connections. flipgrid also offers deep exploration and endorses that everyone can be a teacher and a learner as well. the use of flipgrid can create an efl learning atmosphere that makes students enjoy the class. to some extent, flipgrid enables students who are not really confident in expressing their ideas in face-to-face interaction to perform really well in responding to the topic of flipgrid discussion. they might perform expressively when they record themselves on the grid discussion. tps has already been massively applied in efl classes, and it was mainly intended to improve language performance. it was mentioned that tps was effective to teach writing (argawati & suryani, 2017 and budiarta, 2015). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 15 furthermore, it was much more effective than stad in essay writing (sutrisno, rasyid, & rahmat, 2018). in fostering speaking performance, tps succeeded not only improving speaking performance but also developing characters (budiarta & krismayani, 2014). this signified that tps was effective in improving and developing both productive skills and students’ characters. in this study, tps was combined with flipgrid to teach efl speaking class. choosing innovative approaches to be applied in tertiary levels is a must in this globalized and technological-minded era. thus, flipgrid can be used to deal with 21st-century students who also tune in to the rapid development of technology. many kinds of research have also been carried out by applying a technological-based teaching technique. syafii (2019) mentioned that multimedia presentation could effectively improve speaking performance; besides, other technological-based media digital comic toondoo (fatimah, santiana, & saputra, 2019) and pecha kucha presentations (mabuan, 2017) could promote students’ speaking performance. these researches proved that the use of media which made use of technology could effectively improve students’ language skills especially speaking. in accordance with the use of flipgrid in the teaching-learning process, some researches have been carried to figure out the efficacy of flipgrid. basko & mccabe (2018) confirmed that the application of flipgrid can maintain students’ persistence rates during the teaching-learning process; moreover, the media can also create a cognitive, social, and teaching presence (holbeck & hartman, 2018). they also added that the use of flipgrid could accommodate online face-toface interaction instead of traditional face-to-face classroom interaction. these researches confirmed that flipgrid can be possibly employed as a teaching platform that could uphold students’ focus in the teaching and learning process; furthermore, it can create community inquiry. the implementation of tps-flipgrid to transform the efl speaking class in the 21st century is expected to be an innovative teaching model. it is expected that the teaching model can innovate the efl speaking class and improve the students’ speaking performance. the combination of tps combined with flipgrid as an innovative video discussion platform was categorized as new in english as a foreign language class. it was very interesting to figure out the implementation of tps-flipgrid in efl speaking class because the teaching model was rarely used in the teaching and learning process. the results of this research are expected to contribute to the efforts of innovating efl speaking class so that the tech-savvy students might be well-accommodated and they can learn joyfully during the implementation of the model. in accordance with the elaborated research background, the application of tps-flipgrid to transform efl speaking class in the teachinglearning process is a very thought-provoking topic as integrating technology in the teachinglearning process is always challenging to do. tps-flipgrid is expected to be an innovative solution to the problem that is faced by lecturers particularly in integrating teaching techniques with technological-based platforms or media. in addition, the researches which were related to tps-flipgrid were also hardly found. it was researched separately during the process of teaching and learning in the efl class. therefore, the present research was mainly intended to fathom out the students’ perceptions in transforming efl speaking class by applying tps-flipgrid and the benefits of implementing tps-flipgrid in efl speaking class. method the present research which was mainly intended to figure out the students’ perceptions and benefits on implementing tps-flipgrid made use of qualitative research with a case study design. creswell (2009) stated that qualitative research is used to explore and understand the individuals or groups assigned to the social or human problem. besides, qualitative research studies attitudes, behavior, and experiences through such methods as interviews or focus groups (dawson, 2002). it is mainly intended to figure out a thorough opinion from the participants. as it includes attitudes, behavior, and experiences which are important, fewer people take part in the research. the present study was carried out at english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education university of mahasaraswati denpasar particularly the thirdsemester students. they were chosen as the samples of the present action case study because they were not really enthusiastic during the classroom teaching and learning process. these caused their speaking performances were not really good. in this class, there were 22 students altogether who were considered as the samples. the course that was taught during the present i komang budiarta & made hery santosa tps-flipgrid: transforming efl speaking class in the 21th century 16 research was “speaking for formal interactions” and the topic which was taught was “storytelling”. to collect data in the present case study, three kinds of instruments were prepared. the research instruments were carefully constructed in order to establish the validity and reliability of the research instruments because only valid and reliable instruments can be administered to collect valid and reliable data. the research instruments were observation, online open-ended questionnaire, and semi-structured interview. the data that were resulted by the research instruments were considered as the primary data in the present action case study. in the process of collecting the data, the researcher, first of all, started the process of teaching and learning by implementing tpsflipgrid. it was carried out in three meetings. the first meeting was mainly intended to teach the learning material about storytelling. the second meeting was used to perform their storytelling in front of the class. the third meeting was used to prepare their final projects to be posted on the flipgrid. during the three times meetings, the researcher carefully observed the samples. after the teaching-learning processes were carried out, the samples were then asked to fill in the online open-ended questionnaire. the link of the openended questionnaire was sent to the sample mobile. finally, based on the results of the observation and open-ended questionnaire, twelve samples were interviewed through a oneto-one semi-structured interview. this was an important part to get more comprehensive data on the implementation of tps-flipgrid in transforming the efl speaking class. the required data that were collected in this action case study were then analyzed to figure out the answer to the research problems. the collected data were transcribed, classified, interpreted, and concluded as the findings of the present case study. in order to yield worth findings of the study, the qualitative data were analyzed using triangulation in which the data that were resulted from the observation, openended questionnaire, and semi-structured interview were combined. the process of triangulating the collected data was important in order to analyze the data more comprehensively. therefore, the findings could be categorized as valid and reliable findings. results and discussion the present qualitative research with case study design was mainly intended to figure out the students’ perception and benefits of implementing tps-flipgrid in efl speaking class. to collect the data of the present case study, the researcher prepared three research instruments. they were observation, open-ended questionnaire, and semistructured interview. these research instruments were carefully designed and submitted so that they could collect the expected data for this study. after the submission of the research instruments, the researcher finally obtained the expected findings that were respectively discussed as follows. first of all, the results of the observation were focused on two major areas: the application of tps-flipgrid both in-class learning and in the flipgrid platform and the samples’ responses. based on the observation concerning the application of tps-flipgrid which has been wellplanned in the lesson planning, the procedural steps were carried out as they were expected during the process of teaching ‘speaking for formal interactions’ especially on the topic ‘storytelling’. in addition, the samples’ responses to tps-flipgrid showed that they were enthusiastic. they enjoyed both the classroom teaching and flipgrid discussion. in general, they responded to the teaching process well; besides, they undoubtedly enjoyed the efl speaking class. secondly, the online administration of the open-ended questionnaire clearly revealed that the samples really liked the teaching process which applied tps-flipgrid. they thought that it was really innovative and new for them. they enjoyed the opportunities to respond to the topic and they were also creative in creating their responses on the video. they also stated that their speaking performance improved gradually. besides, they felt that they were more confident speaking in front of the class. the use of tps-flipgrid also enabled them to develop their social skills especially 21st-century life skills. to sum up, they enjoyed almost every step of the teaching and learning process as they stayed tune in during the elucidation of the learning material until the implementation of tps-flipgrid. finally, the results of the semi-structured interview clearly revealed some findings that were in line with the results of the observation and open-ended questionnaire. they mentioned that they really enjoyed learning speaking by using flipgrid. they can be more expressive in delivering their speech in their video that they english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 17 made as to the final project. they expected that flipgrid could be used frequently to practice their speaking. they thought that the implementation of tps-flipgrid in the efl speaking class was really innovative. besides, they also mentioned that the lecturer should equalize classroom and online face-to-face interaction. discussion the students’ perceptions of applying tpsflipgrid the first research problem was focused on finding out the students’ perceptions of implementing tps-flipgrid in innovating efl speaking class. the implementation of this model was considered as an innovation because previously they were taught by applying traditional, monotonous teaching techniques that dominantly focused on classroom face-to-face interaction. on the other hand, the lecturer faced tech-savvy students who were in the middle of digital transformation so that the use of technology could make their learning more enjoyable. based on the results, the students’ perceptions can be elaborated as follows: innovation, flexibility, balancing interaction, and active involvement. first of all, the implementation of tpsflipgrid was considered as an innovative model for the samples as contextually it was totally new for them. they never experienced the application of tps which was combined with flipgrid. the application of the model could create an efl speaking class atmosphere which was interesting and always challenging for the students. since flipgrid is an online video discussion platform, they were really happy as if they were using their social media, and at the same time, they can develop video content creation skills for the digital era (stoszkowski, 2018). they can watch their friends’ videos which were posted to respond to the topic that was posted by the lecturer in the grid. the students also mentioned that they really tuned in with the application of tps-flipgrid. the use of flipgrid as a virtual discussion platform enabled the students who were categorized as 21st-century students felt comfortable when they built online video interactions with their friends. the use of flipgrid could make them more expressive in practicing their speaking. besides, they belonged to z generation who were tech-savvy so that the application of technology would make them interested in language learning (bencsik et al., 2016). they really loved the application of tpsflipgrid because they could explore themselves not only in the classroom. they considered they had another social media that they could use for the sake of not only doing online social interaction with their friends in the class but also learning and improving speaking at the same time. language learning through the integration of technological-based media or platform was always interesting. the second perception of the students was in terms of flexibility. the students who became the samples of this research were mostly digitally literate with the existence of new technology. that is why, when the tps-flipgrid was introduced, they could easily identify the features and use the platform. they warmly welcomed this online video discussion platform because it offered high flexibility. its flexibility was because the discussion was evenly distributed across cohorts (stoszkowski, 2018) so that the students considered that tps-flipgrid accommodated the desire of 21st-century students to get involved in the virtual class which has the learning flexibility. they can learn everywhere and every time as long as they have access to the internet, they can join and post their responses on the topic assign by the lecturer. they can access the platform on their laptop or smartphone. moreover, unlimited space and time of learning enable them to be more persistent in learning. the application of tps-flipgrid also provided a very wide private room for the students. they had a lot of chances to practice their speaking performance as they could socially and personally learn anywhere and anytime (fahey et al., 2019). they can assess the online video discussion from their smartphone and start practicing their speaking ability. they could easily respond to the video that was posted or assigned by the lecturer, and they could also figure out the feedback for their responses. in other words, the students might develop themselves during the learning process independently. they can also explore themselves in order to improve their ability to speak. continuous practice using the platform might also enhance their speaking performance and they could bring their effort to the maximum so that their learning objective can be attained. balancing interaction (i.e. classroom and online face-to-face interaction) was the third students’ perception. students thought that language learning should not be managed by eliminating the role of face-to-face interaction. they expected that the use of tps-flipgrid or i komang budiarta & made hery santosa tps-flipgrid: transforming efl speaking class in the 21th century 18 particularly flipgrid still accommodates the existence of classroom face-to-face interaction because it was important to emotionally learn how to deal with other people directly. for language learning, they emphasized that classroom interaction was still needed to practice their spontaneous response when they were talking about a certain topic. this might not happen when they only focused on online interaction. the students confirmed that both classroom and online face-to-face interaction should be well managed because, in online face-to-face interaction, they could deepen their speaking performance as their learning was not limited by time and space. in online discussion also they might have time to think and to make concepts of the video responses that would be uploaded. both classroom and online interaction should be well considered on the implementation of tpsflipgrid as they complete each other to achieve the learning objectives. this was in line with holbeck & hartman (2018) who mentioned that the application of flipgrid provided both lecturer and students opportunities to virtually and personally connect. finally, the students’ perception was mainly on their active involvement in the efl speaking class. they confirmed that the application of tps-flipgrid could increase their involvement in the classroom activities. they got involved very often during the online discussion which made them practice their speaking frequently. they actively followed both in-class learning and online learning even though the frequency of their involvement was still much higher than in online learning. this might happen because flipgrid was totally new to all of the samples and as 21st-century students, they were very curious to make acquainted with the platform. hence, they could use it for their purpose. the samples clearly mentioned that they can access the flipgrid more than twice a day and the frequency increased in line with the topic that was assigned by the lecturer on the grid. the application of tps-flipgrid could increase students’ persistence (basko & mccabe, 2018). in addition, the students’ engagement can be well maintained through the integration of ict in both in-class and outside-class of teaching and learning (melwani, tay, & lim, 2018). the benefits of implementing tps-flipgrid figuring out the benefits of implementing tpsflipgrid in innovating the efl speaking class was the second research problem that was researched in this study. the main purpose of innovating a teaching model to be implemented in the teaching and learning process was to yield fruitful impacts or benefits. the present action case study was expected to find out the benefits of applying tps-flipgrid in the efl speaking class. based on the results, the benefits of conducting tps-flipgrid in transforming efl speaking class can be seen from two viewpoints: speaking improvement and social skills development. they can be elaborated as follows. first of all, the benefits that were experienced by the samples after the implementation of tpsflipgrid were in terms of progressing improvement of their speaking ability. the students’ speaking performances improved significantly, particularly on their fluency and comprehension. the students’ fluency was getting improved which can be clearly seen from their live performance in the classroom. they could cope with the problem of speaking previously especially in fluency. their active involvement in responding to the topic in flipgrid enabled them to frequently practice in speaking. furthermore, their comprehension was also enhanced as they were required to understand the topic that was posted before they responded to it. the improvement of students’ englishspeaking ability might happen because they had a lot of opportunities to practice their speaking performance both in-class learning and online learning through flipgrid. the use of flipgrid enabled students to practice by themselves at home and they can practice it again and again until they thought that it was appropriate to be published. these frequent performances also made students more confident when they spoke english. the use of technology or apps provided students frequent practices (mabuan, 2018) and better learning experiences (fatimah et al., 2019) that made students speak confidently. they also mentioned that involving with all of their friends in flipgrid so many times made them familiar with their friends so that the feelings of nervousness can be tackled down when they performed in front of their friends. the implementation of tps-flipgrid did not only improve the students’ speaking performance but also their 21st-century life skills. one of the social skills that was really dominant as the result of the application of the teaching model was the sense of collaboration among students. the use of tps could put students into a language learning atmosphere that was enjoyable (budiarta & english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 19 krismayani, 2014) and flipgrid enabled them to share with the other students (basko & mccabe, 2018). in tps, the lecturer emphasized that students should be responsible for their pair so that they needed to kindly help each other to obtain the purpose. their classroom practice with flipgrid also required them to be able to collaborate with their pairs. furthermore, creativity and critical thinking were the other 21st-century life skills that significantly developed after the implementation of tps-flipgrid. to create a good video, the students were required to be creative so the content that they would deliver would be interesting for the other students to respond. some students also considered that they have employed their critical thinking both during inclass learning and online video discussion. the results showed that the integration of ict in the classroom could enhance the 21st-century learning skills (pheeraphan, 2013). conclusion the implementation of tps-flipgrid in the present qualitative research with case study design for the sake of innovating the efl speaking class has brought the language learning to a certain level. the third-semester students who were chosen as the samples thought that tps-flipgrid was an innovative technologicalbased teaching model that would be well applied for 21st-century students. they also considered that the efl speaking class through the application of the teaching model was flexible in terms of when and where it can be done. furthermore, the active involvement of the students during the process of teaching and learning enables them to frequently practice in speaking. they also gave emphasis on equalizing classroom face-to-face interaction and online video discussion through tps-flipgrid. in addition, 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(2019). improving students’ speaking skill by using multimedia presentation strategy. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 125–132. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1690. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 135 students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style and contribution to students’ english performance gita loveta english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: gitaloveta25@gmail.com bambang a loeneto english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: loenetobambang@gmail.com machdalena vianty english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: vianty.unsri@gmail.com apa citation: loveta, g., loeneto, b. a., & vianty, m. (2020). students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style and contribution to students’ english performance. english review: journal of english education,9(1), 135-144. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3786 received: 17-06-2020 accepted: 15-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 abstract: students’ expectation of their teacher’s teaching style is one of the factors that can affect academic performance. however, it is unclear how much students’ expectation affects the english academic performance of students. the objectives of this study were: (1) to find the students’ expectation on their english teacher’s teaching style, (2) to find whether the english teacher’s teaching style matches with the students’ expectation, and (3) to find the contribution of students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style toward their english academic performance. the study’s sample was one english teacher from each public senior high school in sukarami district, sma n 13, sma n 17, and sma n 21, along with 11th-grade students they taught. this research used descriptive quantitative design. the data were collected by questionnaire and documents as quantitative data, and interview as qualitative data. pearson product moment correlation and regression were used to analyze quantitative data while transcribing was used to analyze qualitative data. the findings showed that (1) the students expected their english teacher to use expert and facilitator teaching style, (2) the student’s expectation is not perfectly fulfilled as the teachers prefer expert and formal authority teaching style, and (3) there was no contribution of students’ expectation toward their english teacher’s teaching style to their english academic performance. keywords: students’ expectation; teaching style; english academic performance introduction students, in the process of learning, are affected by internal and external factors to ensure that they absorb the material given, especially in learning language, in this case, the english language (edmondson, 1999). mahmoudi and mahmoudi (2015) explained that internal factors, also known as internal variables consist of motivation, intelligence, anxiety, risk-taking ability, and several other factors from the students themselves. on the other hand, external factors, also known as external variables include social class, first language, early start, curriculum, and teacher. as stated, teacher is one of the external factors that may affect students’ achievement in learning process. mahmoudi and mahmoudi (2015) stated that teacher influences all kinds of learning and affect the students’ enthusiasm. teachers, in order to be able to affect students’ achievement effectively, are recommended to have interpersonal skills that enable them to understand what the students want from them. to sum up, teachers as one of the students’ learning external factors should take students’ expectation into account to ensure successful teaching and learning process, as students’ expectation is part of the motivation that affect students learning internal factor. students have expectations and preferences regarding how the teacher should be when teaching them, which affects their enthusiasm in learning. when entering a class, students may mailto:loenetobambang@gmail.com mailto:loenetobambang@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3786 gita loveta, bambang a loeneto , & machdalena vianty students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style and contribution to students’ english performance 136 have with them some kind of images that they want to happen for them to fully enjoy the teaching and learning process. this expectation may or may not be met by teachers. this, in turn, might impact the students in their willingness to participate effectively in the classroom. this is because teachers’ teaching style determines the responses the students will give in teaching and learning process. according to grasha (1994), teaching style is a representation of a teacher’s way in presenting information, interacting with their students, managing classroom tasks, supervising coursework, socializing students to their field, and mentoring students. teachers develop teaching style based on their beliefs about what forms good teaching, as well as the teachers’ personal preferences, their abilities, and the norms of their particular discipline (aldajah, haik, & moustafa, 2014). grasha (1994) grouped teaching styles into five styles, which are expert, formal authority, personal model, facilitator, and delegator. expert style puts the teacher’s position as the transmitter of information; formal authority style puts the teacher’s position as someone who sets standards and defines acceptable ways of doing things in teaching and learning process; personal model style puts the teacher’s position as someone that teaches by illustration and direct example; facilitator style puts the teacher as guide and director of students by asking questions, exploring options, and suggesting alternatives; and delegator style puts the teacher as someone who develops students’ ability to function autonomously (grasha, 1995). however, despite the grouping, grasha himself explains that all teachers possessed all the qualities, only that some are more apparent than the other. these teaching styles may help or disrupt students’ ability in acquiring content and skills taught as the students’ expectation may be fitting or contradicting what the teacher does in the class. according to rubie-davis, peterson, irving, widdowson, and dixon (2010), the expectation of students toward teachers has a positive effect on student attitudes to school and possibly motivation to learn. students are more academically active toward teachers who are caring toward the students’ achievements and use facilitator style to support student achievement. moreover, according to shishavan and sadeghi (2009), students prefer their teacher to have a good personality rather than pedagogical, in which pedagogical style is reflected mainly in expert and formal authority teaching styles while personality is reflected by personal model, facilitator, and delegator teaching styles. furthermore, ibrahim and ahmad (2016) explained that students generally prefer facilitator teaching style from their teacher as it keeps the students accompanied during teaching and learning process as well as discusses the students’ problem in the classroom. on the other hand, beyhan (2017) found that the student teachers who are preparing to be teachers prefer expert teaching style which focuses on lectures and explanation of detailed knowledge, in which this is due to the classical educational philosophies in the place they learn to be a teacher. furthermore, grasha (1995) found out from his research that teachers prefer expert and formal authority teaching styles, which takes 38% of 761 classrooms. this means that there is a discrepancy in the students’ expectation, which prefer teachers with facilitator teaching style, and teachers’ preference, which is leaning toward expert and formal authority teaching styles. in indonesia, english is one of the main subjects of final exam of junior and senior high school. for this reason, the students are expected to have a good score on english academic performance. academic performance refers to how well or bad the person in doing something especially in english. the students’ exam score of english or the note that the teacher writes in the students’ report book is one of the descriptions of students’ academic performance. however, ef english proficiency index (2018) shows that indonesia is ranked 51 among 88 countries in the world and 13 among 21 countries in asia, with average score of 51.58 and categorized as low proficiency in terms of english language. the result of the index implies that there might be a possibility of the students having problem in following the teaching and learning process of english language. the writer wonders whether the students’ expectation toward particular teacher’s teaching style contributes to their english academic performance, as the expectation is prone to mismatch with the real classroom situation. based on this question, this research intended (1) to find the students’ expectation on their english teacher’s teaching style, (2) to find whether the english teacher’s teaching style matches with the students’ expectation, and (3) to find the contribution of students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style toward their english academic performance. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 137 method this research used quantitative research design supported by qualitative data collection to answer the research questions. creswell (2012) explains that quantitative research design is done to examine relationships between and among variables to answer questions through surveys and/or experiments. this research uses quantitative data to provide numbers to be analyzed statistically, while the qualitative data are used to offer the perspective on the topic studied as supporting data for the quantitative. the data for this research were gathered by using questionnaire and interview, which serves as the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. the data were further supported by documents in the form of students’ score of english test. population and sample the population of this study was all public senior high school (sma) in sukarami district, palembang, which are sma negeri 13 palembang, sma negeri 17 palembang, and sma negeri 21 palembang. the following table shows the detail of the population of study: table 1. distribution of english teachers and students in the population no. school number of english teachers number of 11th grade students 1 sma negeri 13 palembang 5 423 2 sma negeri 17 palembang 5 440 3 sma negeri 21 palembang 5 320 source: http://sekolah.data.kemdikbud.go.id the sample taken was one civil servant english teacher along with the classes he/she teaches. the sampling method used is probability random sampling. this decision was made with consideration that the teacher is professional and possesses the four standard competences set by the government. the second-grade students were picked with the reasoning that the students already have some experiences with the teacher, in which the experiences come in the form of interaction inside of the class as the academic experience and outside of the class as social experience. despite having more experience, the third-grade students cannot be picked since they were preparing for the national exam and were not allowed to be observed. technique for collecting the data the data used in this study were collected by using questionnaire, interview, and english test score this questionnaire used in this study was a ready-made questionnaire designed by grasha and hruska-riechmann (1996) known as teaching style survey. there are 40 items in this questionnaire, which are measured in likert scale with five levels. as the questionnaire is designed for teachers, an adaptation is made to be given to students by modifying the items to address the students’ expectation. the following table shows the questionnaire specification and the interval score of the questionnaire: table 2. specification of teaching style survey questionnaire by grasha and hruska-riechmann (1996) no. teaching style items 1 expert 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31, 36 2 formal authority 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, 27, 32, 37 3 personal model 3, 5, 13, 18, 23, 28, 33, 38 4 facilitator 4, 10, 14, 19, 24, 29, 34, 39 5 delegator 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 table 3. interval score of teaching style survey questionnaire by grasha and hruska-riechmann (1996) no. teaching style preference score very low low medium high very high 1 expert ≤10 11-20 21-30 31-40 40-50 2 formal authority ≤10 11-20 21-30 31-40 40-50 3 personal model ≤10 11-20 21-30 31-40 40-50 4 facilitator ≤10 11-20 21-30 31-40 40-50 5 delegator ≤10 11-20 21-30 31-40 40-50 http://sekolah.data.kemdikbud.go.id/ gita loveta, bambang a loeneto , & machdalena vianty students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style and contribution to students’ english performance 138 the interview used in this study was general interview guide approach with one-on-one interview process. one-on-one interview is a data collection process in which the researcher asks questions to and records answers from only one participant in the study at a time (creswell, 2012). the interview guide is based on the theory of five teaching styles by grasha (1994), which states the strength and weaknesses of each style to find out the basis of the teacher’s tendency in choosing a particular style. the interview consists of 15 items. the following table shows the questionnaire specification: table 4. specification of teaching style interview by grasha (1994) no. teaching style items 1 expert 1, 2, 3 2 formal authority 4, 5, 6 3 personal model 7, 8, 9 4 facilitator 10, 11, 12 5 delegator 13, 14, 15 as for the document, the students' english test score is used. the english test score was obtained from the school. the score used was the result of the students’ english semester examination. technique for analyzing the data the questionnaire is analyzed according to the likert style interval score. as for the correlation and regression, pearson product moment correlation and stepwise regression were used to analyze the data. transcribing was used to analyze interview which is the qualitative data to support the quantitative data. results and discussion students’ academic performance the english semester score of the students from each school was used as their english academic performance for this research. the score obtained from the school is cognitive aspect without taking into account the affective as well as the psychomotor, in which this helps to show their english academic performance purely. table 5. summary of students’ english academic performance school n average score sma n 13 183 50 sma n 17 174 86 sma n 21 176 50 total 533 62 table 5 shows the average scores for each school as well as in total. sma n 13 and sma n 21 both have an average score of 50 although the number of the students differs. as for sma n 17, the average score is quite high, which is 86. students’ expectations toward english teacher’s teaching style to get the information about the students’ expectations toward their english teacher’s teaching style, a questionnaire was distributed to the students. table 3 shows a summary of the students’ responses. table 6. summary of students’ expectation toward english teacher teaching style teaching styles sma n 13 sma n 17 sma n 21 total average n average n average n average expert 39 30 35 30 36 32 30.7 formal authority 32 28 33 28 33 29 28.3 personal model 38 31 35 30 35 30 30.3 facilitator 38 32 36 31 36 31 31.3 delegator 36 30 35 29 34 30 29.7 table 6 shows that the students’ expectation toward their english teachers’ teaching style is mixed. sma n 13 students leaned their preference toward the facilitator teaching style, with average score 32, followed by personal model with average score 31. sma n 17 students leaned their preference toward the facilitator teaching style, with average score 31, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 139 followed by expert and personal model with average score 30. sma n 21 students leaned their preference toward the expert teaching style with average score 32, followed by facilitator with average score 31. from this result, it can be concluded that facilitator teaching style is a bit more favorable with average score of 31.3, which is considered high based on the interval. english teacher’s teaching style preference to get the information about the english teacher’s teaching style, a questionnaire was distributed to the english teachers. table 7 shows a summary of the teachers’ responses. as only one teacher was taken for each school, n represents the number of items in the questionnaire: table 7. summary of english teachers’ teaching style preference teaching style sma n 13 sma n 17 sma n 21 total average n average n average n average expert 40 35 40 40 40 34 36.3 formal authority 32 39 33 34.6 personal model 33 34 34 33.6 facilitator 30 38 35 34.3 delegator 33 36 33 34 table 7 shows that the teachers’ teaching style preference is quite balanced. sma n 13 teacher leaned her preference toward the expert teaching style, with average score 35, followed by personal model and delegator with average score 33. sma n 17 teacher leaned her preference toward the expert teaching style, with average score 40, followed by formal authority with average score 39. sma n 21 teacher leaned her preference toward the facilitator teaching style with average score 35, followed by expert and personal model with average score 33. from this result, the average result of the teaching style preference showed that expert teaching style is a bit more favorable with average score 36.3, meaning the teachers prefer to be in control of the classroom. the results of interview the results of the interview are presented to support the teachers’ responses in their questionnaire. the interview functions as information on how the teachers are doing and their common preferences in teaching method. these common preferences and method were used to find out where the actions are represented in the teaching style. four points can be concluded based on the teachers’ interviews: detailed explanation, guideline, leadership, and moral supports. detailed explanation detailed explanation refers to the professional competence of the teacher. as mulder (2014) explains, professional competence is explained as generic, integrated and internalized capability to deliver sustainable effective (worthy) performance (including problem-solving, realizing innovation, and creating transformation) in a certain professional domain, job, role, organizational context, and task situation. detailed explanation means that the teacher is obliged to explain materials as interesting and clear as possible to the students for the students to achieve their learning goals. all of the teachers think that it is crucial to explain the materials in detail to the students. for example, the english teacher of sma n 13 states the following, “it is important for teacher to explain material in detail because if not explained in detail, the students will not understand the material and are not able to do the task correctly. explaining in detail is part of teacher’s duty.” as the english teacher of sman 17 said, if the materials are not explained in detail, the students cannot work on the task given correctly. sma n 17 english teacher also followed this by stating that detailed explanation is important for students to reach the lesson’s goal. meanwhile, sma n 21 english teacher stated that detailed information serves as a way to allow students to have information to compare with what they found. detailed explanation is an apparent method used by expert and formal authority teacher as this method is teacher-centered teaching method where teachers give materials as detailed as possible to avoid misconception. thus, it can be said that the sample teachers have preference toward teacher-centered teaching styles. gita loveta, bambang a loeneto , & machdalena vianty students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style and contribution to students’ english performance 140 guideline in teaching and learning process, a guideline is a must for teacher and students to understand the importance of learning something. the guideline is set to make clear learning goal for the students. as the education hub (2018) explains, setting the guideline with clear learning goal can help students engage in learning better. all of the english teachers from the sample schools agreed that students should be given guidelines in learning activity. for examples, teacher of sman 17 and sman 21 state the following, “the purpose of giving guideline to students is to help them achieve the goal of learning more accurately.” (teacher of sma n 17 palembang) “giving guideline is very important in order for the students to understand what they should do” (teacher of sma n 21 palembang) both the teacher of sma n 17 and sma n 21 explained that providing guidelines allow students to achieve the learning goal easier. the teacher of sma n 13 further stated that providing guidelines also allows the student to relate the material with daily activities. teaching guideline is undoubtably inherent in all teaching styles. however, providing the guideline to the students is more apparent in expert teaching style and formal authority teaching style as the other three teaching styles stimulate the students by providing a more flexible and general idea which opens the chance to approach the goal in dynamic manner. the sample teachers’ act of providing guideline shows that they prefer teacher-centered teaching style. leadership in teaching and learning process, a teacher should be able to lead the classroom in order to be successful. this stems from the personality competence points from permendiknas no 16 in 2007, specifically point three which states that a teacher should show himself or herself as a steady, stable, mature, wise, and authoritative person. all of the english teachers agreed that teachers should assume the position as leader both in and out of class. sma n 21 and sma n 13 english teachers explained that assuming the position of leader helps coordinating the students in order for them to not only achieve the learning goal but also be disciplined. this is in line with the teacher questionnaire result, which shows a bit more preference toward expert teaching style followed by formal authority teaching style. moral supports moral supports are part of a teacher job as according to permendiknas no 16 in 2007, teacher should possess pedagogical competence including understanding learners. the education hub (2018) states that creating authentic relationship with students can improve students' academic and social progress. the interview showed that the teachers agreed that teacher cannot only monitor the student activities. teachers should also support their students morally. the teacher from sma n 13 stated, “teacher should be able to ignite the learning spirit of the students”, while the teachers from sma n 17 and sma n 21 explained that teachers should be the motivator of students and build the interaction and communication during teaching and learning process. these statements showed that the english teachers are capable of adjusting their teaching style according to what the students need at certain moments as moral supports reflect personal model, facilitator, and delegator teaching style better. the contribution of teacher’s teaching style toward students’ english academic performance to find out the contribution of teaching style with english academic performance, a regression analysis was conducted. however, first of all, a correlation analysis was done in order to find out which teaching styles correlated significantly with english academic performance. the correlation analysis used in this study is the pearson product moment correlation analysis. as all students possess preference in all teaching style albeit there is a higher preference to certain style, all students were taken into account in this correlation, hence the n is 533. table 8 shows the result of the correlation analysis. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 141 table 8. correlation analysis between english academic performance and teaching style expectation correlations teaching style score expert pearson correlation ,095* sig. (2-tailed) ,029 n 533 formalauthori ty pearson correlation ,124* sig. (2-tailed) ,004 n 533 personalmodel pearson correlation ,032 sig. (2-tailed) ,468 n 533 facilitator pearson correlation ,024 sig. (2-tailed) ,577 n 533 delegator pearson correlation ,017 sig. (2-tailed) ,688 n 533 *. correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). table 8 shows that expert and formal authority had significant correlations with the students’ english academic performance with pvalues lower than .05. based on the result of the correlation analysis, the regression analysis was conducted by including variables expert and formal authority in the analysis (stepwise regression analysis). table 9. stepwise regression analysis of correlated data model summaryb model r change statistics r square change f change sig. f change 1 ,124 a ,015 8,311 ,004 a. predictors: (constant), formalauthority b. dependent variable: score excluded variablesa model beta in t si g. partial correlati on collinearity statistics toleran ce vif minimum tolerance 1 exp ert .024b .42 5 .6 71 .018 .576 1.73 7 .576 a. dependent variable: score b. predictors in the model: (constant), formalauthority the stepwise regression analysis shows that the r-square change for the formal authority teaching style is 0.015, which means that the contribution of this teaching style is 1.5% toward the students’ english academic performance. as for the expert teaching style contribution, it was considered as excluded variable as its beta value is very close to zero, showing that it virtually does not affect the english academic performance. discussion based on the findings, some interpretations were drawn. first, based on the results of the questionnaire, the students prefer varying teaching styles in practice, which means that the students like if the teachers teach according to the situation in the classroom at the specific moment of the class. however, there is a preference for certain styles to be used more than the other albeit not too distinct. the students are expecting more toward facilitator teaching style, which answered the first research question. this is in line with what bullock (2015) found that students gita loveta, bambang a loeneto , & machdalena vianty students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style and contribution to students’ english performance 142 have stronger preference toward teachers with a more positive character. korthagen (2004) also states that teachers who stimulate the students to be active in teaching, which is done by facilitator teachers, and learning process are preferable as they affect the motivation of students in participating in classroom activities. the second interpretation is focused on the result of questionnaire and interview from the teachers. the result shows that the teachers adjust themselves in teaching their students according to the classroom condition, with expert style being the more preferable in the common situations. this is in line with grasha’s (1995) statement that teachers possess all the qualities of teaching style with only one or two is more apparent. however, the students themselves are expecting facilitator style to be more apparent as well, which is more toward student-oriented where the students possess more freedom with the teacher as someone who supports them. this result shows that the teachers’ teaching style preference does not match the students’ expectation which answers the second research question. the third interpretation focuses on the teaching style expectation contribution to the students’ english academic performance. the correlation analysis shows that among the teaching style, expert teaching style has a significant correlation with the students’ academic performance. surprisingly, formal authority affects the academic performance higher than the other styles. as for the regression analysis, it shows that formal authority teaching style affects the students’ english academic performance by 1.5%. this showed that teaching style does not contribute even a quarter of students’ english academic performance. this result is similar to what shaari, yusoff, ghazali, osman, and dzahir (2013) found that the contribution of teaching style affects the students’ academic performance modestly. the regression result answers the third research question that students’ expectation in their english teacher’s teaching style does not affect their english academic performance highly. this is probably because many factors affect english academic performance. shahzadi and ahmad (2011) explain that home environment, study habit, learning strategies, and academic interaction are the four factors that affect students’ academic performance, which can be deduced that home environment, study habit, and learning strategies are more prominent compared to the interaction itself. home environment does not only about the psychological factor of the students but also the economic state of the students, both provides great influence on the emotional state of the students. hussain and suleman (2017) explain that subfactors of home environment that particularly plays more critical role are lack of parental attention on children, tension between parents, death of parents or guardian, parental illiteracy, and poverty. these subfactors affect students in scholastic and behavioral aspects, in which the mental of students may keep focusing on familial matter instead of academic matter, thus reducing their focus when learning (alami, 2016). as for study habit, this factor is usually hindered by the lack of favorable studying environment, which in turns affect students’ motivation. the lack of opportunity to apply what they learned from the class may cause students to perform poorly academically since this affected their study habit to be pessimistic (amua-sekyi and nti, 2015). availability of facilities that support teaching and learning process such as books also affects the study habit because lack of facilities means that the students lost means to explore the materials which in turn lower the students’ eagerness to improve themselves (mosha. 2014). lastly, learning strategies developed by teacher also affected the students' study habit. the more interesting the material was delivered by the teacher, the more the students feel eager to explore the material further (mosha, 2014). in conclusion, the students’ expectation toward their english teacher affects their english academic performance modestly at best as there are many factors such as home environment and study habit which affect performance more prominently. conclusion based on the findings, the writer can conclude that students expect that their english teacher should teach them with facilitator teaching style more compared with other styles although the other styles are not rejected at all, students’ expectation toward their english teacher style does not match with the teacher’s teaching style, who leans more in using the expert teaching style. however, the teachers themselves adjust their teaching style with the classroom situation. the last is students’ expectation toward their english teacher’s teaching style does not contribute their english academic performance 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(2018). how to develop high expectations teaching. wellington, new zealand: the education hub. https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/regions/asia/indonesia https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/regions/asia/indonesia http://longleaf.net/teachingstyle.html gita loveta, bambang a loeneto , & machdalena vianty students’ expectation toward teacher’s teaching style and contribution to students’ english performance 144 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1 re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry masakazu mishima rikkyo university, japan e-mail: mmishima@rikkyo.ac.jp apa citation: mishima, m. (2019). re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 1-16. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1771. received: 07-01-2019 accepted: 15-03-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: this study examines an esl writer’s revision activity in composing an argumentative essay from an ecological perspective. the study aimed to explore how sociomaterial conditions present in the pedagogical context lead to the writer’s use of revision strategies in responding to instructor feedback. by using an interview-based case study approach, data were collected from one esl writer and instructor in an esl freshman composition class at a large public university in the us. based on the analysis of field-notes, transcripts from interviews and writing conferences, and various cultural artifacts, the study found that the writer’s goal-oriented agency foregrounded his engagement with instructor feedback, which narrowed down the problem space perceived to be important by the writer to achieve his goal in writing. the writer’s selective attention to the specific writing issues to be attended in his revision attempt provided an essential perceptual pretext for the concoctions of several sociomaterially-afforded revision strategies. the study also found that sociomaterial interactions inherent within one strategy use conditioned the emergence of another strategy while showcasing that the writer’s strategy use could be emergent and generative in nature. based on the findings, the study discusses the emergence of the revision strategies as a result of collective interplay of student agency and student-perceived sociomaterial affordances in the writer’s attempt to establish sociocognitive alignment with the instructor’s expectations delivered through feedback. implications for ecologically-oriented l2 revision strategy research are discussed. keywords: ecological approach; l2 revision strategies; l2 writing feedback; l2 writing process. introduction as we view writing as fundamentally a social act, the immediacy to examine l2 writing process as a socially situated activity naturally emerges; it requires accounts of the very context in which l2 writers engage in writing activity. in concert with the socially situated view of writing, the importance of contextual matters in l2 writing research has been increasingly recognized (casanave, 2003; ferris, 2014; hyland & hyland, 2006; lee, 2008; lei, 2008). this largely sociocultural movement has led researchers to expand the scope of analysis deeply into social aspects of writing as opposed to cognitioncentral views of writing (see for partial review, leki, cumming, & silva, 2008; cumming, 2001). the movement signifies a response to an increasing call for context-sensitive research on l2 writing to move away from a componential analysis of the apparently complex nature of l2 writing. the resultant effort is now visible in an increasing number of l2 writing studies with an utmost focus on social interactions as prominently capitalized in sociocultural framework of investigations (e.g., de guerrero & villamil, 1994; han & hyland, 2016). although the increasing attention to the matters of context is a welcoming trend, an exclusive focus on social interactions does not do justice in an attempt to explain an individual’s act of writing, which occurs in tandem with both social and material interactions. accordingly, an investigation into l2 writing process requires an integrative perspective, which nishino and atkinson (2015) succinctly referred to as, “a rich ecology of mind, body, and sociomaterial world” (p. 38). in light of this ecological notion above, it appears that the current landscape of l2 writing process research is limited in providing accounts of how students engage in writing in direct response to instructor feedback with which and for which the individual establishes unique relationships, while interacting with various temporal sociomaterial conditions present in his/her learning environment. the present research hence was conducted as an exploratory attempt to capture one aspect of l2 writing masakazu mishima re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry 2 process—an l2 writer’s use of revision strategies—as deeply situated in a specific pedagogical ecology wherein instructor feedback and other sociomaterial resources play a key role in directing the student’s revision attempts. to set a stage for the present research, the following reviews select studies from l2 writing strategy research. l2 writing strategy research l2 writing strategy research has been receiving significant attention from researchers in conjunction with the widespread practice of the process-writing approach since 1970s (reid, 2001; silva, 1990). in the process-approach, writers go through a series of stages in the act of composing texts, such as planning, drafting, revising, and editing (seow, 2002), and at any stage of writing, writers may use strategies/approaches to facilitate their acts of writing (manchon, roca de larios, & murphy, 2007). since the process of writing is intimately associated with individual acts of writing including strategy use, l2 writing scholars have been actively investigating writers’ strategy use (bosher, 1998; hedgcock, & lefkowitz, 1992; leki, 1995; raimes, 1985, 1987; roca de larios, murphy, & manchon, 1999; sasaki, 2000, 2002). early studies in l2 writing strategy were predominantly cognitive in nature and focused on exploring mental processes and strategies used by student writers (oxford, 1990; wenden & rubin, 1987; zamel, 1983). these early studies prototypically characterized learners’ strategy use as a problem-solving device with the underlying assumption of text-mind dualism. in the late 90s and onward, l2 writing strategy research focused on identifying factors which may have bearing on l2 writers’ strategy use. this line of research identified a number of factors leading to individual differences in strategy use. for instance, researchers reported esl writers used different revision strategies depending on the nature of writing issues they faced (conrad & goldstein, 1999; hyland, 1998; yasuda, 2004, 2005; wong, 2005). sze (2002) and wong (2005) showed that l2 writers’ strategy use changed from one stage of drafting to the next. takagaki (2003) specifically examined the strategy use of l2 writers at a revision stage and found that their strategy use was positively related to knowledge of revision task including their prior writing experience. more recent studies on l2 writing strategy became increasingly situated in nature by paying more focused attention to sociomaterial resources and their roles in l2 writers’ strategy use. in particular, researchers have been attempting to explore how l2 writers use their strategies by capitalizing on the notion of mediated-actions from a sociocultural perspective. lei (2008), for example, used a sociocultural framework to investigate l2 writers’ strategy use in relation to various tools in the specific l2 writing environment. the study demonstrated the l2 writers’ strategy use was mediated through a variety of social and material resources. another example of socially and materially mediated l2 writers’ strategy use was reported in bhowmik (2016). the study specifically addressed the role of agency, identity, and ideology in l2 writers’ strategy use and it identified the writers’ agency played a significant role in accounting for differences in their strategy use. in addition, the writers’ identity and ideology manifested as values, beliefs, assumptions, and perceptions of writing tasks which collectively fed into their highly deliberate and purposeful selections of strategy use. lei (2008) and bhowmik’s (2016) studies were exemplary in the respect that both of them captured l2 writing strategies as deeply immersed in a sociocultural context of writing wherein the writer as a whole person interacts with the environmental resources (i.e., social and/or material) and make agentive and ideological decisions in the process of writing. however, neither of the studies above considered instructor feedback as part of their investigations despite its well-recognized role as an important pedagogical intervention in the process-writing classroom. furthermore, currently available l2 writing strategy research is insufficient in explaining how an l2 writer selects socially and/or materially mediated strategies in the process of writing, most particularly in relation to student agency and temporal contextual conditions surrounding l2 writers. lei (2008) thus far pointed out the need for future research to probe deeply into the local and historical contexts of individual writing activities in order to further our understanding of how l2 writers select to use different l2 writing strategies. an overview of the previous studies reveals the scarcity of accounts as to how l2 writers determine to use specific sociomaterial tools to mediate their acts of writing. it is also important to note that the absence of instructor feedback in english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3 examining l2 writers’ strategy use as in the previous studies may lack ecological validity— relevancy to the widely practiced process writing approach in l2 writing classrooms. to address the gap, the present study was conducted in a naturalistic process writing classroom wherein instructor feedback (i.e., oral and written) was periodically provided to student writers. thereby, the researcher attempted to explore processes leading to the emergence of l2 writing strategies in response to instructor feedback and their underlying contextual conditions. the ecological approach although the ecological approach was originally developed in the field of biology, an american psychologist, gibson (1979) applied the approach to study visual perception and its relationship with the environment. later, an attempt was made by researchers to adapt it to applied linguistics research in order to use it as a metaphorical bridge to explain language learning as an environmentally situated and emergent behavior (gee, 2004; leather & van dam, 2003; van lier, 2000, 2004, 2010). the essential premise of the ecological approach in applied linguistics is its central focus on ecological relationships between learners and their environment (see kramsch, 2002). it highlights that language development is in and part of the context in which it occurs. van lier (2010) further provides a useful summary of the ecological approach as adapted to applied linguistics: an ecological approach aims to look at the learning process, the actions and activities of teachers and learners, the multilayered nature of interaction and language use, in all their complexity and as a network of interdependencies among all the elements in the setting, not only at the social level, but also at the physical and symbolic level. (p. 3) as presented above, the ecological approach is characterized by its comprehensive treatment of context extending to not only learners but to teachers and their interaction at the social, physical, and symbolic level. it also denotes the inseparable link between individuals and their ecosocial environment. the ecological approach, however, is not a uniform theory, rather it is a specific way of thinking about and viewing the world, which shares similar worldviews with sociocultural theory (lantolf, 2000) and sociocognitive approach (atkinson, 2011; nishino & atkinson, 2015). the present research used the ecological approach to represent the researcher’s overarching orientation within the conduct of the current investigation. as mentioned above, however, the ecological approach is a theoretical worldview, which is not readily applicable to empirical investigations for its broad theorization of language teaching and learning. hence, the researcher capitalized on select conceptual tools from the aforementioned two ecologically-oriented theories to help interpret and present the findings. the adoption and adaptation of the ecological conceptual tools were carried out post-hoc in order to avoid situating the study from the top-down in a singleunified theoretical framework (e.g., sociocultural theory). rather, the researcher conducted the study from the bottom-up (atkinson & sohn, 2013).what follows is a brief overview of the key conceptual tools adopted from the two ecological theories—sociocultural theory and sociocognitive approach. agency. the notion of agency has been recognized as an important theoretical concept in l2 learning (duff, 2012, kinginger, 2004, lantolf & pavlenko, 2001; pavlenko & lantolf, 2000). in contrast to the traditional conceptualization of learners as passive recipients of information in the process of learning, sociocultural theorists view learners as active participants (i.e., agents), who are aware of their own capacity, reflect on their past experiences and various social conditions (e.g., classroom learning situations), and self-regulate their own learning (lantolf & pavlenko, 2001). as in any human activity, agency is a drive to move people to act in a specific manner as a person perceives it as important and necessary (lantolf & pavlenko, 2001; van lier, 2004). while agency is associated with many psychological constructs, such as motivation (brown, 2014), a major distinctive characteristic of agency is that it includes one’s perception of a goal in activity and how to achieve the goal by selecting potential actions to take (duff, 2012). agency thus serves as a pretext to a personalized way in which people engage in activity. agency, however, does not appear in isolation from the world in which people live, including social and material settings (norton & toohey, 2011). thus, it is not an exclusive personal attribute of an individual, but a sociomaterially and sociohistorically constructed masakazu mishima re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry 4 temporal state which is always in constant motion and retains possibility for change or transformation. as we recognize the need to act and for what purpose, agency emerges and shapes the ways we act by looking around resources or affordances that can help them to act on and with the world in order to achieve the goal (bhowmik, 2016). in a similar vein, van lier (2008) views agency as person-in-context— “an awareness of the responsibility for one’s own actions vis-à-vis the environment, including affected others” (p. 17). agency in this way permeates our actions as it regulates our actions and gives us the directions to the action or activity. accordingly, agency has to be present when learning, including learning to write. in the present research, the researcher adopted an ecosocially situated view of agency as presented above for its compatibility with the ecological approach and overall conceptual fitness to present the findings of the current study. in more specific terms, the concept of agency is used to show how the writer-perceived goal of writing gives rise to agentive engagement in one l2 writer’s revision activity and how it uniquely shaped the ways in which he attempted to revise his essay draft. alignment. the notion of alignment has been predominantly used in research on interpersonal interactions though from different orientations (see atkison, churchill, nishino, & okada, 2007; nishino & atkinson, 2015; costa, pickering, & sorace, 2008; garrod & pickering, 2009). the present research adopted the alignment principle of the sociocognitive approach proposed and incorporated into l2 writing research (nishino & atkinson, 2015). in the sociocognitive approach, the alignment principle denotes “the complex means by which human beings effect coordinated interaction, and maintain that interaction in dynamically adaptive ways” (atkinson, et al., 2007, p. 169). in this principle, human behaviors are always in the process of achieving harmony with both social and material environments by means of adaptation, as nishino and atkinson (2015) stated, “we would simply add that social relationships are always also ecosocial relationships—individuals act in, on and in concert with their non-human environments in order to adaptively survive in them” (p. 39). alignment is also relevant to agency and is viewed as a form of learning (wang & wang, 2014). if agency gives a volitional direction within the confinements of sociomaterial conditions including potential environmental resources and the norms or rules of conduct within a community/classroom to social activity (e.g., writing), then alignment refers to the processes in which the agent adaptively attempts to minimize the distance between what the agent already knows and needs to learn through sociomaterial interactions. in keeping with the sociocognitive notion of alignment above, the researcher views alignment as an intermediary adaptive and agentive process of learning through sociomaterial interactions, and also a temporal state of that process, which subsumes the object of the current investigation—revision process. in particular, the study presents what the l2 writer attempted to establish alignment with in the course of his revision activity and how it contributed to the writer’s engagement with instructor feedback. affordance. the concept of affordance refers to potential mediating tools for taking action (gibson, 1979). for a potential tool to mediate action, one needs to perceive the existence of the tool, relevancy of it to the activity, and how to use the tool to facilitate the activity. this point is highlighted in gibson (1979) and gibson and pick (2000) in differential theory of perception. the environment offers overwhelmingly rich tools for us to manipulate and coordinate our actions (van lier, 2004). however, due to the limited capacity of our sensory systems and cognition, not every potential tool is perceived and used as a mediating tool. therefore, we naturally pay selective attention to potential mediating tools or affordances in relation to a given activity and the goal of the activity. hence, our perceptions need to be differentiated between what to perceive and not to perceive. the directions of our attention are tightly intertwined with our personal exigency or agency to act as gibson (1982) viewed, “we do not perceive stimuli or retinal images or sensations or even just things; what we perceive are things that we can eat, or write with, or sit down on, or talk to” (p. 60). agency guides the ways we act and thus it also encompasses what we perceive to be an affordance including its relevancy to the activity. therefore, the primary locus of affordance is identified in a relationship between the individual unique agency and social as well as material others. furthermore, agents’ physical and/or social engagement with potential tools must necessarily present as priori in mediated actions. this essentially means that an english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 5 agent must first establish some level of connection or attempt to be in alignment with potential affordances in the ecosocial environment. in summation, the way in which an individual perceives and uses affordances is intimately associated with his/her agency and the level of alignment with the environment. thus, any affordance-mediated action or activity including act of revising is enacted through one’s agency and the nature of alignment in and with the environment. the concept of affordance above is used in the current investigation to present the specific sociomaterial tools which mediated the l2 writer’s revision activity and how they contributed to the emergence of sociomaterially conditioned revision strategies in conjunction with the writer’s agency and alignment with sociomaterial tools. method the present research aimed to analyze; 1) the revision strategies used by an l2 writer in response to instructor feedback, 2) the sociomaterial resources used in the identified revision strategies, and 3) how the identified revision strategies emerge in the process of an l2 writer’s revision activity. this study was conducted at a large public university with one of the highest concentrations of international students in the us. the university offers an esl version of freshman composition course designed specifically for nonnative english speaking students. data were collected from a section of the aforementioned composition course during which students engaged in a threeweek long argumentative essay writing assignment. in the first week of the writing assignment, students received assignment directions, lectures, and engaged in practice activities to be ready to take on the assignment. in the second and third week, each student was required to meet their instructor in a 15 minute one-on-one writing conference. the writing conference session was held once a week for each student and lasted for two weeks before the submission of final drafts. at each conference session, the instructor returned a student’s essay draft with written feedback and discussed his/her writing. this study involved one instructor and one l2 writer in a section of the esl freshman composition course. prior to data collection, both participants received a research invitation with descriptions of the research and tasks to be completed. upon consent, the researcher observed all lectures, classroom activities, and writing conferences for three weeks during which students worked on the argumentative essay writing assignment. the instructor, elif, was a 34-year-old female from turkey. at the time of the research, she was a ph.d. student at the university majoring in second language studies. while she had no prior educational background related to teaching composition, she received threesemester long in-service training and was already an experienced composition instructor— one year teaching experience in mainstream freshman composition classes and three additional years of teaching esl composition. the student, jiang, was a 20-year-old male from an urban city in china. he was a sophomore student at the university majoring in economics. although he came to the university at the beginning of his sophomore year, he was placed in the esl freshman composition class since it was a required course for graduation. after his undergraduate studies, he was planning to go back to china and work for his father’s company. as for his experience in l2 writing, he reported that he had never experienced writing in the process-oriented classroom or received any form of feedback from his instructors in china. the study initially used a situated case study approach (atkinson, 2005). in particular, the study capitalized on student interview data which contained the detailed accounts of jiang’s strategy use. in addition, the researcher collected a wide array of cultural artifacts to better contextualize his revision activity. the sample size was intentionally kept minimal to allow for an in-depth analysis of one student writer’s revision activity. the method adopted is epistemologically interpretivist in nature (see denzen & lincoln, 2011). therefore, the study does not seek to generalize its findings but rather particularize them. during the entire course of data collection, the researcher assumed the role of observerparticipant whose involvement in the field was strictly maintained as an observer by minimizing any interactions with the members of the social setting (gold, 1958). data sources collected and analyzed in the present research were: (a) field notes, (b) recording transcripts from lectures and student-instructor writing conferences, (c) student and instructor interview transcripts, and masakazu mishima re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry 6 (e) cultural artifacts (e.g., classroom materials and essay drafts). in order to ensure the systematic data collection and analysis of multiple data sources, the researcher used several techniques widely adopted in qualitative research, such as theoretical sampling, constant comparison, member checking, open-coding, and triangulation (see for review, yin, 2014). the techniques were used as an integral part of data collection and analysis. thus, data collection and analysis were simultaneous processes of the entire research conduct. this is a common procedure especially in situated qualitative research wherein researchers exercise constant reflexivity, which is by large a non-linear process (atkinson, 2005). after the formal data collection period was over, the researcher continued to analyze the data gathered to identify common threads cutting across all data sources and generate final research narratives. the details of data collection and analysis procedures for each data source are presented in the following sections. field notes. field notes were produced based on classroom and conference observations. the researcher took detailed notes of classroom activities and writing conferences. in addition, all observed classroom activities and writing conferences were recorded by a voice-recorder and subsequently transcribed to add any missing information to the field notes. these notes were coded to classify them into thematic categories with associated descriptors. the coded notes were constantly revised as new data were entered into analysis. once the emerged codes were finalized, they were used to produce the descriptions of the instructional context specifically of lecture topics, the writing assignment, and student-instructor interpersonal interactions during writing conferences to facilitate the analysis and interpretation of jiang’s accounts of his strategy use. interview transcripts. the researcher conducted a total of three interviews individually with the instructor and student for 30 minutes to one hour per session. interview questions were semi-structured; there were several prestructured questions which were prepared based on the field notes and directed at the participants to clarify and/or confirm the information (i.e., member checking) obtained from classroom and conference observations. during one of the interview sessions with the student participant, a stimulated recall task was conducted by using the instructor-commented first and second drafts of jiang’s argumentative essay to probe into his revision strategies. all interview data were transcribed for analysis. then, the transcribed interview data were coded to find common threads and organize the data accordingly to the thematic categories emerged. similar to field notes, the emerged codes and their associated descriptors were constantly revised and compared with the themes identified in the other data sources. cultural artifacts. the researcher collected all materials produced and/or used by the participants in the field, including course syllabus, class schedule sheet, assignment sheet, lecture slides, worksheets, instructor-commented argumentative essay drafts, and eight sample essays. these cultural artifacts were thematically organized and then used to gain an insight into the pedagogical intentions/expectations of the instructor in relation to the argumentative essay writing assignment. the sources were then used to help interpret jiang’s revision strategy use. data integration and production of research narratives. in the entire process of the data collection and analysis presented above, the researcher produced reflective research notes or more formally knowns as memos (glaser, 1978), which contains various interpretations of the thematic categories and descriptors emerged from each of the data sources. at the final stage of analysis, the researcher further compared coded data with their associated descriptors and memos across all data sources to identify similarities, differences, and relationships. in this process, the researcher refined the memos in an attempt to produce research narratives in relation to the purpose of the research. this process was by its nature, involved a higher level of interpretation—an analytical shift from a predominantly emic to increasingly etic perspective to situate the study in relation to the researcher’s positionality—the ecological approach. it involved an active attempt to search conceptual tools in producing locally situated narratives or meta-narratives without forcing the data (lyotard, 1984). the researcher adopted three major conceptual tools related to the ecological approach presented earlier—agency, alignment, and affordance—to produce the research narratives and present the findings. results and discussion results are presented in five sections to demonstrate how the student writer’s agentive english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7 engagement emerged and how his several revision strategies were intimately associated with the sociomaterial resources available in his perceived environment. as mentioned earlier, the results that follow are primarily based on jiang’s accounts of revision strategy use while contextualizing them where relevant via the other data sources. jiang’s agency: the goal of writing during the first interview with jiang, he described at some length his goal of writing and how to achieve the goal which seems to have foregrounded his agency—the desire to align with elif’s pedagogical expectations delivered through her feedback: excerpt #1 researcher : what is the goal of writing for you, jiang? jiang : what do you mean? researcher : i mean, you are learning to write, right [in elif’s class]? do you want to improve your writing skills? jiang : to be honest, i don’t care about english writing. but it’s a required course so i have to do it. researcher : would you take the course if not required? jiang : no way. elif’s class is very very hard and i don’t need to write once i go back to china. researcher : what is your plan after you return to china? jiang : i [will] work for my father’s company. and i don’t need to write in english. researcher : so then what motivates you to write? jiang : i want to get a good grade. i have to write a good paper so i can get a good grade. i try hard to understand what elif wants me to do. researcher : why do you try so hard to understand what elif wants? jiang : hmm…she is the instructor. you need to do what the instructor says to get a good grade. researcher : does elif’s feedback help you understand what she wants? jiang : it’s difficult sometimes but i read feedback carefully and ask questions when i see her [at a writing conference]. researcher : is that how you studied in china? or something that you do in elif’s class? jiang : i always listened to what the teacher says in china and i can get a good grade. i just do it the same way [in elif’s class]. as the excerpt shows, jiang’s goal of writing—to receive a good grade and his belief about how to achieve the goal are the prominent sources of his agency. in particular, jiang’s agency manifested as the need to align with elif’s pedagogical expectations/intentions expressed through feedback to ensure a good grade as he stated, “you need to do what the instructor says” or “i read feedback carefully and ask questions…” jiang’s agency is also a product of his past successful learning experience in china, “i always listened to what the teacher says in china and i can get a good grade.” his goal-oriented agency above was an important source of drive which appeared to have shaped the nature of jiang’s engagement with instructor feedback and the emergence of his revision strategies as presented in the following sections. strategy to align with the instructor’s expectations the excerpts below exemplify jiang’s active agentive attempt to align with the instructor’s pedagogical intentions communicated through written feedback, and thereby to produce a revised essay that satisfies the instructor so as to receive a good grade. during the stimulated recall task at the third interview session, jiang compared the first and second drafts and attempted to recall how he revised his first draft. jiang reported that he tracked all feedback instances from the top of the paper to the bottom to not to miss out on any feedback. this strategy of responding to instructor written feedback can be called the head-to-toe approach in my own terms. excerpt #2 jiang : i look at all the comments from top to bottom. i go back to the first comment and changed the title. then, i forgot to put page numbers so i added them. i worked on the first argument, added more reason to it and revised the thesis statement. in the same way, i looked at all the other comments and made changes. jiang’s brief report above indicates that he attempted to revise his draft, while attending to all instances of elif’s feedback. jiang’s exclusive focus on elif’s feedback was further confirmed as he elaborated his head to toe approach: excerpt #3 jiang : i always retype everything. i look at comments and type everything [on a new word document] for second or masakazu mishima re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry 8 third draft. in this way, i can check all the comments and find mistakes that i missed. researcher : when you write in chinese, do you do this? jiang : no. researcher : so only when you write in english then? jiang : yes. i have never done this before this class. researcher : you mean, you do it only for elif’s class? do you do this in your other classes? jiang : no. i don’t have to. i don’t get feedback like this and i don’t have to revise. in the excerpt above, he explained that he had retyped his essay from scratch on a new word document rather than making revisions to the existing draft. in this way, his retyping strategy helped him to identify any issues that he might have missed otherwise, but also to make sure to fully attend to elif’s feedback. as his head to toe approach manifested as a means to satisfy his agentive need, the retyping strategy appeared to have been used as a means to further strengthen his alignment with the instructor by faithfully following the instructor’s directives. the use of the retyping strategy was most certainly not a pure cognitive event as jiang’s retyping strategy was made possible through two specific sociomaterial tools. one is a physical copy of the instructor-commented first draft, which he received at his first writing conference and the other is his bulky silver laptop which he would always carry around in his backpack to do school assignments and/or play videogames. his alignment with those sociomaterial tools seemed to be extant as priori as indicated in the following excerpt: excerpt #4 researcher : so how did you come to use this approach[the retyping strategy]? jiang : i want to understand what elif wants. so i don’t want to miss any comments [elif’s feedback]. researcher : yeah, i get that, but you said, you retype your essay after you receive feedback, right? when did you start doing this? jiang : i don’t remember exactly but elif always gives me my essay when i meet her and i always do my assignments with my laptop. so i carry it in my backpack. so i have a copy of my essay and my laptop to check elif’s feedback. it became like a hmm..habit? researcher : how often do you use your laptop to do your assignments? jiang : i don’t know but i have to use it almost everyday for all my classes. also, i like playing videogames so even when i don’t have assignments, i carry it anyway. researcher : oh, i like videogames, too. what do you play? jiang : starcraft. researcher : that one is very popular. strategy to align with the instructor’s unclear expectations jiang’s strategy use presented earlier was primarily geared toward effectively attending to elif’s feedback. however, there were some feedback instances which jiang found difficult to respond. the difficulty stemmed from elif’s feedback which focused on jing’s writing issues related to argumentation. in particular, issues related to thesis statement (i.e., a core argumentative statement) and jiang’s use of supporting evidence are some of the major concerns expressed by elif’s written and oral feedback. consider the excerpt below from the first writing conference with jiang where he discussed his first draft: excerpt #5 elif : as far as i can see there are two sources—one is mental health, the other is physical health. you used sources from your interview [the previously assigned interview-based paper]. you need five written sources where you can get evidence from. they should come from research papers. what you did was turning your interview into evidence. and apa style here. this is from a book but then you have to use apa to indicate it. jiang : so i need to find the source and use the source to support it. elif : your arguments are sound but you need to find sources, academic sources. it’s just you need to provide evidence. now, your thesis statement. i don’t see you reasons. this is my stance because…i want to see your reasons here. jiang : you want me to give reasons so i can say my personal experiences [from the interviewbased paper]? elif : no, don’t tell your personal story. this is your reason. it’s your opinion so you don’t have to provide evidence here. jiang : i have no more questions. elif : you need to work on in-text citations. for the second draft, please cite properly. there are some clarity issues. sometimes, i don’t understand. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 9 after the writing conference, jiang reported to me that the issues pointed out by elif were extremely challenging to resolve as she did not explain how or why the issues had to be resolved. be noted that elif’s general feedback approach was to not to provide straightforward answers to the issues at hand to push students to exercise critical thinking skills and curve out their own learning paths. excerpt #6 researcher : what is your approach to providing [written] feedback? elif : my focus is on more global things. do they have a thesis statement? is the introduction good enough? do they use transitional phrases? so i give much less feedback on grammar. i don’t give comments to everything. i just underline to have students to correct themselves. a review of elif’s written feedback shows, her feedback on global issues was predominantly provided in indirect form—underline or short verbal comment to indicate there is an issue to be attended. elif was also inclined to use indirect feedback during the oral writing conference as in excerpt #5, to not to give explicit solutions (i.e., direct feedback) to jiang’s writing issues. due to the absence of an explicit delivery of the instructor’s expectations, jiang was initially left out without a means to initiate revisions to those issues. he, however, attempted to find a way to further strengthen his alignment with the instructor by seeking help from some of his classmates with whom he had established a rapport over the course of the semester. consider the following excerpt: excerpt #7 researcher : i hear a lot of chinese in class. what do you talk about in class in chinese? jiang : sometimes, we talk about assignments but sometimes we talk about something else like having dinner together or going out to a party. researcher : do you ask your classmates for help with the current assignment [argumentative essay writing]? jiang : yeah, i sometimes ask my friends to show me their papers. their papers are good and they got good grades [on the previous assignments]. it helps me when i revise my arguments. researcher : you often sit alone in the classroom. do you have many friends in your class? jiang : not many but i know a few and their papers are good. so i talk to them when i have a problem [with assignments]. researcher : how did your friends’ papers help you to revise? jiang : what do you mean? researcher : i mean…what kind of change did you make to your draft after looking at your friends’ papers? jiang : i looked at their thesis statements and how they used evidence. then, i revised my thesis statement. i also asked them to share how they wrote them [their thesis statements]. they told me they checked the sample essays so i decided to look at them. the excerpt above shows this particular strategy, which i call peer support, was used to find clues as to how thesis statement and evidence had to be presented. jiang’s purposeful selections of whom to ask for help and for what purpose were clearly evident in his report. compared to the retyping strategy, the emergence of the peer support strategy was conditioned by the social relationship which he already had established with the select classmates, whose grades were good. i might further add that the development of this particular social relationship may be related to the demographic condition of the class which consisted of entirely chinese. jiang including all other students in class would often speak in chinese during lectures and/or classroom activities. the fact that all students in this class were chinese and spoke the same l1 may have provided an optimal condition for jiang to develop a kind of rapport that can benefit him in completing his revision task. in this sense, jiang’s strategy use is intimately associated with the demographic characteristic of the class—a part of the pedagogical environment. interaction between strategies when using the peer support strategy, jiang identified one other outlet to respond to elif’s indirect feedback. in his interaction with the peers presented earlier, he became aware of the sample essays which elif posted to blackboard, an online discussion and material sharing space allocated to the instructor for instructional purpose. her students had free access to these online resources. in jiang’s revision processes, he modeled after the sample essays that elif shared in order to find clues as to how he can best revise his thesis statement, improve his masakazu mishima re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry 10 presentation of evidence by correctly using apa in-text citations. excerpt #8 researcher : i can see you revised your thesis statement and in-text citations here. how did you do this? jiang : i did it because elif said i need to change it. researcher : did you use anything to make the changes? jiang : i looked at elif’s feedback but it doesn’t tell me how to do it but i know there is a problem. my friends told me about sample essays so i looked at them. researcher : what sample essays? the ones your friend told you about? jiang : i can get them online—blackboard. elif uploaded them. researcher : did you know about them before your friends told you? jiang : i did but i didn’t think they were important. researcher : you read them all when you revised your essay? jiang : not all of them. i just looked at thesis statement and how to show evidence. researcher : when you say, evidence, do you mean like apa? jiang : yeah. researcher : is it hard to learn apa in-text citations? jiang : no, it’s easy. it’s like math. i just need to know the rules. the modeling strategy emerged out of the interaction with his peers. before the interaction, despite the fact that the materials had been available from the beginning of the assignment, he was not aware of or did not pay attention to their relevancy to his writing/revision activity. however, the peer support strategy provided a ground for him to recognize the materials to use them as a means to scaffold his revision activity. for any form of affordance to mediate the agent’s activity, he/she first has to perceive its relevancy to the activity. hence, the emergence of the modeling strategy as used by jiang in this particular instance showcases that the previous strategy use—the peer support strategy—may have generated a perceptual condition for the emergence of another strategy. another important point to be noted is that jiang’s modeling strategy was exclusively used for attending to the select issues—thesis statement and apa in-text citations. this is also true to his peer support strategy. hence, as he reported, he decided to look at the only parts of the sample essays that were relevant to solving the specific writing problems. again, this particular focus is evident in the peer support strategy. jiang’s selective attention to those issues and the ways in which he utilized the sample and classmates’ essays were clearly reflective of his desire to meet the instructor’s expectations in order to strengthen his alignment with the instructor who repeatedly mentioned or else provided written comments on jiang’s specific writing issues—thesis statement and evidence. strategy to confirm alignment with the instructor’s expectations prior to the submission of his second draft, jiang brought his essay to the other instructor who was teaching a section of the same course. in elif’s class, it was a customary practice for her to provide a tentative grade on students’ second drafts to show their standings so as to encourage them to finalize their drafts with careful attention. as jiang was fully aware of this practice, and also he was gravely concerned about his potential grade for his argumentative essay, he decided to ask for an opinion from another instructor on the quality of his essay. by this time, his second draft had been ready for submission, but he was unsure that the changes he had made to the draft would suffice most particularly in relation to the issues of argumentation and supporting evidence. be reminded that jiang received only indirect feedback on those types of issues: excerpt #9 researcher : what do you think about elif’s feedback on your argument and evidence? she wrote these comments like here [pointing at elif’s comments on the first page of jiang’s first draft]. jiang : i really don’t know what the instructor means and wants. researcher : was it like that in china? jiang : no. actually, i brought my [second] draft to the other instructor who teaches the same course, and the instructor said, “just a little change and you can get an a,” but i don’t get an a, and i wonder why. [note: shortly before this interview, jiang received a c as a tentative grade on his second draft]. researcher : but you did make some changes in your second draft. jiang : i just did what i can but i don’t know what’s right or wrong. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 11 as shown in the excerpt above, the second opinion strategy was used to confirm if his revisions would meet elif’s expectations. what is interesting here is that he in fact did not know what was “right” or “wrong.” it suggests that his overall strategy use including the second opinion strategy above was not used based on his understanding of what the problems actually were but rather to enact the kind of change that elif would like to see in his paper. one important tenet of the ecological approach is its view on learning as emergent and environmentally situated behavior (van lier, 2004). as such, the following discusses the results of the present research by tethering the key conceptual tools adopted—agency, alignment, and affordance—to the notion of emergence. thereby, it offers an extended interpretation of the results in an attempt to explain how one l2 writer’s socio-materially afforded revision strategies emerged as a result of dynamic interplay of his agency and alignment with the environment. agency as a historical antecedent to writing at the moment jiang’s revision strategy use was tightly connected to his agency—the desire to meet the instructor’s expectations in order to achieve his goal—to receive a good grade. jiang seemed to have held a strong belief that, in order to receive a good grade, faithfully following the instructor’s directions was of paramount importance. as several researchers claimed that writing is a historically situated activity (e.g., leki, 1995; prior, 1998), jiang’s specific belief appeared to have been a carry-over from his past successful learning experience in china and preordained the way in which he engaged with the instructor’s feedback and employed several revision strategies. the finding is comparable to bhowmik (2016) which reported the participants actively used their past writing experiences to facilitate the completion of the writing task at hand. leki (1995) also reported a similar finding that her participants’ writing strategy use closely mirrored their past successful writing experiences. what is distinctive in jiang’s case, however, is that his agency manifested as the strong desire to align with the instructor not so much as the task requirements as specified in the assignment sheet. the finding is contrastive to bhowmik (2016) who found his participants’ agency was geared toward the successful completion of the writing task by paying focused attention to the task requirements. agency and the role of feedback the role of instructor feedback in jiang’s revision process was significant as it was the best conduit to understand the instructor’s mental representation of good writing for the given assignment; whether it was provided in written or oral form, it seems to have served as a guiding map in order for jiang to reach his destination. jiang’s attentiveness to elif’s feedback was evident in two of his revision strategies—the head-to-toe approach and retyping strategy—which he devised to conduct a thorough review of instructor’s written comments and revise his draft accordingly. an additional example was his second opinion strategy. after revising his first draft, he brought his revised draft to another instructor of the same course to assess if his revision was sufficient to receive a good grade. all these strategies above were intimately associated with his agency—to receive a good grade and in order to achieve this personal goal, he assumed that thoroughly attending to instructor feedback was the best course of action. agency and alignment with the environment the presence of social and/or material resources in the immediate environment was inseparably linked to all of his revision strategies. this is comparable to the findings reported by lei (2008) and bhowmik (2016). however, the study further offers an insight into how the writer selected his specific revision strategies. as mentioned earlier, jiang used the head-to-toe approach to strengthen alignment with the instructor in order to satisfy his agentive need. the use of the strategy was materially afforded by a copy of the instructor commented essay draft and his laptop with which jiang had established connection as priori—the presence and relevancy of these materials were perceived by jiang before the use of the strategy. without such connectivity to the material resources, this particular strategy use would not have been possible. likewise, jiang’s other strategies were all either socially or materially afforded but he aligned himself with these potential affordances before the enactment of his strategies. for instance, he had developed a social relationship with select classmates during the course of the semester. then, jiang sought help by consulting masakazu mishima re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry 12 the select classmates whose grades were good and used their essays as samples to model after. through the interaction with his peers, jiang also found other materials to model after—the eight sample essays shared by the instructor. these two strategies were categorically similar in that jiang ultimately used his peers’ essays and sample essays as examples in revising his thesis statement and evidence. however, the use of the instructor-uploaded sample essays was clearly demonstrative of its generative nature owing to his earlier interaction with his peers; jiang began utilizing the sample essays only after he had learned their relevancy from his classmates. hence, his preexisting alignment with social/material resources warranted a possibility for his strategy use. another point which merits a reflection is the nature of jiang’s use of the two strategies above was foreshadowed by the difficulty in establishing alignment with the instructor. in particular, two specific writing issues—thesis statement and evidence—proved to be a challenge to jiang since the instructor did not provide clear directions as to how the problems can be solved. his attention was selective in utilizing the strategies reflective of the said challenge presented by the two specific writing issues. while modeling is perhaps one of the most frequently reported strategies in the previous studies (e,g, bhowmik, 2016; lei, 2008, leki, 1995; hayes, 2012), most of the studies focused on explaining what strategy was used but not so much as how and/or why it was used. to this point, the findings of the current study contribute to the existing body of the literature. emergence of revision strategies the brief overview of the findings above suggests that jiang’s revision strategies emerged as a result of dynamic interplay of his unique agency and connectivity to or alignment with the immediate ecosocial environment. in particular, jiang’s agency assumed a powerful mediating role in the way he engaged with instructor feedback and devised his revision strategies. agency, as noted in the beginning of the paper, appears to give directions to the writer’s overall revision activity, but also his revision activity was socially as well as physically situated and conditioned, which naturally becomes “emergent” as a result of the total interaction of any relevant elements—the learner, instructor feedback, peers, and possibly broader social/physical contextual settings (ellis & larsen-freeman, 2006, p. 558). since the physical and social conditions are destined to fluctuate and an individual’s alignment with such conditions is also directed by his/her unique temporal agency, it is logical to assume that revision strategies may not be simply conceived as portable skills which can be carried across different writing contexts. rather, even a similar strategy use reported in the previous studies such as modeling (bhowmik, 2016; lei, 2008, leki, 1995; hayes, 2012) may well be qualitatively different due to what environmental resources the writer aligns with and the nature of his/her agency. as such, a writer’s strategy use and/or its outcome may not be strictly predictable even within one revision activity as lantolf (2000) stated, “activities, whether in the workplace, classrooms, or other settings, do not always unfold smoothly. what begins as one activity can reshape itself into another activity in the course of its unfolding” (p. 11). such strong connectivity between individual agency and his/her immediate ecosocial environment naturally leads to an ecologically bound revision activity in which the writer purposefully searches and utilizes potential mediating tools—whether it is social or physical—to adaptively coordinate the course of action in a given writing task. however, there seems to be a structural pattern— the nature of the writer’s agency and alignment appear to shape how and why specific revision strategies may be employed. if so, future research may closely examine patterns of individual agency and of alignment with environmental resources. such attempt can shed light on how individual differences/similarities in strategy use come into being in tight connection with the ecosocial environment and whether or not there is a systematic pattern exists across different writers in their strategy use. conclusion since the current research used a case study approach, a major limitation inherent is clearly its lack of generalizability. the interpretivist paradigm of research, however, takes a fundamentally different epistemological stance—the nature of knowledge claim rests on particularities and their relevance should be judged in relation to the context of potential audience—the reader. with that said, the significance of the study lies in its attempt to provide contextually rich accounts of an l2 english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 13 writer’s revision activity within the naturalistic classroom environment. by using the ecological approach, the study offered an explanation of one l2 writer’s revision process and his use of revision strategies in tight connection with the environment. conceptualizing l2 writers’ revision process as a situated and ecologically conditioned activity as demonstrated in the present research can be of significant value in understanding the complex nature of l2 writers’ revision process. further studies should be conducted to validate the findings and implications put forth in the preset research. references atkinson, d. 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(1983). the composing processes of advanced esl students: six case studies. tesol quarterly, 2, 165-188. masakazu mishima re-conceptualizing l2 writing revision strategies from an ecological perspective: an interview based inquiry 16 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 35 content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry rina wahyu setyaningrum doctoral program, language and literature education state university of surabaya, indonesia e-mail: rina.19019@mhs.unesa.ac.id english language education department university of muhammadiyah malang, indonesia e-mail: rina@umm.ac.id slamet setiawan english department, faculty of languages and arts state university of surabaya, indonesia e-mail: slametsetiawan@unesa.ac.id syafi’ul anam english department, faculty of languages and arts state university of surabaya, indonesia e-mail: syafiul.anam@unesa.ac.id pratiwi retnaningdyah english department, faculty of languages and arts state university of surabaya, indonesia e-mail: pratiwiretnaningdyah@unesa.ac.id apa citation: setyaningrum, r. w., setiawan, s., anam, s., & retnaningdyah, p. (2020). content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 35-46. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3777 received: 02-11-2020 accepted: 29-11-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction covid-19 outbreak has shifted the face-to-face (f2f) to remote teaching and learning process. this forced remote teaching and learning process require teachers to manage their onsite planned activities that they have prepared throughout the 2020 abstract: covid-19 outbreak that has shifted face-to-face (f2f) to forced remote learning challenged the clil science teacher to thrive in a new teaching form. the f2f adaptation of the virtual meeting using video conferencing software has driven the teacher to have an effective and accessible synchronous learning environment, in addition to the asynchronous one. this research was a narrative inquiry participated by a clil science teacher teaching the first-grader in a small town in indonesia. by employing an in-depth interview, the data were collected and then analyzed by emotional geography frameworks. the findings showcased the f2f adaptations made by the teacher that synchronous mode of delivery was conducted in thirty minutes by careful attention on clil frameworks, the language (s) use, and students’ engagement. her sociocultural, moral, professional and political geographies led her to decide what to do to make the students learning feasible. an implication of this is the possibility that the experience of how the clil science teacher taught the young learners using english would be a new insight for other teachers in dealing with real-time live lesson delivery during the covid-19 outbreak. keywords: clil science; covid-19 outbreak; face-to-face adaptation; young learners rina wahyu setyaningrum, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry 36 academic year, which cannot directly be implemented remotely. moorhouse (2020) suggested the new mode of delivery during the covid-19 outbreak using asynchronous and synchronous platforms. osman (2020) reported that various asynchronous platforms such as google classrooms, schoology, seesaw, blackboard, and moodle had been used in private and international schools in oman once the covid-19 pandemic started. meanwhile, on-air lessons and other elearning platforms were the different options for public schools there. in other parts of the world, schools that are well-equipped with information and technology (it) support like in singapore, synchronous platforms like zoom, microsoft teams, and google suite are used (monbec, 2020). regarding remote learning platforms, student engagement issues, which involve student psychological investment in learning and mastering materials or encouragement and learning strategies (cohen, madsen, touchan, robles, lima, henin, & parra, 2018; richardson & newby, 2010), were emerging. therefore, the use of the platforms and the students' engagement should be the essential considerations taken by the teachers for teaching students during the covid-19 outbreak. in the clil setting, forced remote learning should shift the learning by scaffolding the content and composition of the various technologies and the different interactions to achieve the same learning outcomes of f2f (monbec, 2020). f2f adaptation during covid-19 pandemic for young learners clil lessons requires more effort because of the complexity of situations. grieveson and wendy (2012) claimed that clil for young learners was carried out for various purposes. they are: (a) children's educational experience is enhanced when the quality of the subject is more emphasized than the words used, (b) language is taught in context and thus is more important to children, (c) clil is more inspiring and offers a wider variety of opportunities for a broader range of learners, (d) it gives learners greater exposure to foreign languages in a natural way, and (e) it does not need any extra time. with young learners in primary schools applying clil, the teachers should pay attention to clil frameworks. content, cognition, communication, and culture (4cs) frameworks proposed by coyle, hood, and marsh (2010) should be practiced to produce engaging, high-level lessons with meaningful consequences for the students' oral language and content knowledge related to the use of l1 that support l2 as the medium of instruction. tragant, marsol, serrano, and llanes (2016) compared the vocabulary building of primary school students and found that they have been exposed to more words and more abstract and technical vocabulary in clil content than those in efl context. still, students in both groups have made substantial improvements in vocabulary learning in both contexts. indeed, learning vocabulary from content has proven more challenging than learning english in the efl class. shao-jun and liu (2018) found the students' engagement was higher in the clil science classroom discussing life cycle. to acknowledge it, karlsson, larsson, and jakobsson (2019) have shown that translanguaging in science classrooms could be a medium for multilingual students in the mutual sharing of scientific information and related languages to combine knowledge of science with prior experience. it demonstrated the authentic use of the young learners l1 and l2 from a sociocultural point of view. they used english in addition to their home-language in science class, and it was found the gradual movement of scientific knowledge and language (laere, aesaert, & braak, 2014). related to the languages used in the clil classroom, lin and he (2017) have investigated the languages used to negotiate meanings. for example, translanguaging was found as a dynamic flow in the clil classroom as the students communicated by their community or home language during group tasks instead of english which is required language in the classroom. this is because the specific goals of clil and english language teaching (elt) contribute to different classrooms. for instance, in the clil classroom, mathematics and science are taught in english, while english is taught as an elt program. evnitskaya & dalton-puffer (2020) found that in the clil classroom, the students often noticed the gaps in their oral output and initiated to repair them, which is rarely found in the elt context. nevertheless, the affective component of foreign language learning is crucial in clil environments. the study's object is not language per se, but also the subjects through the target language and young learners are significantly english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 37 affected by the learning situation and their attitudes and beliefs towards foreign language learning (pladevall-ballester, 2018). to deal with forced remote learning situations, the clil science primary school teachers should find the most appropriate strategies for making their teaching meaningful. an experience of forced remote teaching in primary schools in indonesia, as reported by rasmitadila, aliyyah, rachmatudtullah, samsudin, syaodih, nurtanto, and tambunan (2020), exemplified factors that support remote learning. it comprised changes in instructional strategies, technology readiness to teachers in implementing forced online learning, support, and the motivation of teachers, parents, schools, and government involvement. additionally, cheng (2020) found the significant role of teachers when the school is off, but the class is on, such as emotional communication between teachers and students, which differs from f2f and the lack of realtime feedback. suppose the previous findings are connected to the clil context at the primary school level; in that case, the teacher position is central to get the students engaged in the remote learning that the f2f adaptation can be practiced well. for young learners, the teacher's "real" presence by synchronous learning mode provokes a stronger sense of social sensibility than asynchronous one (humphry & humpden-thompson, 2018). an hour of real-time live lesson delivery using synchronous platform, as suggested by moorhouse (2020), can be the option if the teacher should accommodate the young learners' needs in learning content and language, resembling the f2f situation. it can be combined with the asynchronous mode activities using the school's learning management system (lms) or other asynchronous platforms to share individual tasks and other additional instructions. meanwhile, monbec (2020) recommended how to plan online learning during the covid-19 outbreak for university students by dividing it into 100-minutes learning, including the pre-tutorial preparation and the post-tutorial follow up activities that can be adapted for young learners learning. the teacher should carefully plan it by preparing task guidelines and learning materials like videos and reading texts by asynchronous platforms before the activities are conducted synchronously. during synchronous learning using zoom, the students follow the activities such as a short lecture, the whole class discussion, and group discussion in breakout rooms. hence, during post-tutorial, the students work on individual tasks using asynchronous platforms provided by the teacher. teaching in clil setting should provide young learners linguistics resources in their second language instruction (mahan, 2020). at the time of the covid-19 outbreak, the studies on young learners clil remote teaching are very few. therefore, how the young learners clil science teacher manages her teaching and her emotional geography of making her teaching meet the clil learning requirements are critical to investigate. they are as the answers of the following research question: in what ways do the teacher manage the clil science at a primary school by f2f adaptation during covid-19 outbreak? therefore, this study makes a major contribution to research on clil for young learners during the forced remote learning. methods narrative inquiry documents the participants' stories or experiences related to their social interaction activities (clandinin & huber, 2010). this research employed narrative inquiry to describe a grade-one clil science teacher's experience in teaching her students during the covid-19 outbreak. riessman (2008) claimed that documents and visual data could be sources of narrative inquiry. in addition, oral data were transformed into textual form while the verbal data were transcribed as narrative data from stories and the answers of the semi-structured interviews. the research was conducted at an islamic primary school located in a small town near surabaya-indonesia that synergizes three curricula: national curriculum, cambridge curriculum, and al-islam, kemuhamadiyahan dan bahasa arab (ismuba) or islamic teaching, muhammadiyah ideology, and arabic. those three curricula are holistically integrated into learning and applied to international class program (icp) since grade one. every student has to complete a pre-icp program before enrolling in grade one. during five days perweek meeting the students have been exposed to english language like greetings, instructions, english-indonesian translation, and reading aloud sessions. to internalize the english language use, rina wahyu setyaningrum, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry 38 some common english words were in use during thematic lessons this research was participated by a millennial female clil science teacher who who has been a homeroom teacher of clil classroom since her graduation four years ago. previously, she was teaching at a well-known demonstration school owned by a public university in malang indonesia before moving to the school she is working for now. it was also reported that her english was advanced as she has passed a year training of english for specific purposes program that she joined during her undergraduate education. during her teaching service, she had opportunities to join teachers' professional development organized by cambridge center id 110. at the recent school, she teaches grade one, aged 6-7 years, who take various subjects and deal with three languages; bahasa indonesia, english, and arabic. the research data were obtained from in-depth interviews. to support, the teachers clarified her explanation by showing the teaching documents consisting of lesson plans (modified by the researcher for consistent display) and student worksheets. during the interviews, the teacher told her stories of teaching young learners in clil setting based on some topics such as how the teacher adapted the f2f learning for forced remote clil lesson, the integration of 4cs clil frameworks, the language (s) use, and the students' engagement. the interviews were conducted online by using whatsapp and zoom meeting platforms. to analyze the results of interviews, the researchers followed the steps suggested by widodo (2014) by listening to the interview recording and making notes for essential parts, writing the data and coding them, interpreting the data, and validating the data by discussing the data with the participant to avoid misinterpretation. furthermore, the data were analyzed using the emotional geography frameworks proposed by hargreaves (2001). it identifies the patterns of closeness and distance in human interaction that shape emotions that someone experiences about relationships with self, others, and the world. sociocultural, moral, professional, political, and physical closeness and distance are five elements of teaching's emotional geography. meanwhile, the teaching documents were described by considering f2f adaptation principles during the covid-19 outbreak connected to clil principles for young learners. the following table explains the emotional geography. table 1. emotional geography (adapted from hargreaves (2001)) emotional geography definition sociocultural sociocultural closeness or distance leads teachers to stereotype and to be stereotyped by the communities they serve. moral since emotion is a moral phenomenon, it is closely linked to and caused by purposes. it also lets anyone select the most suitable choice from a wide variety of options. professional it is related to closeness or distance of authority relations, occupation, or ethics within a rationalized ad bureaucratized structure. political as emotion is not just a personal matter, it is bound with the people's experiences of power or powerlessness. it deals with closeness or distance of how the teacher experiences anger, resignation, depression, anxiety, or satisfaction with authoritarian parties (like principals). physical this is the most visible emotional geography of teaching. it is related to closeness or distance to emotional understanding and maintaining emotional relations that require closeness and some measure of the strength, frequency, and consistency of contact. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 39 results and discussion the teacher narrated her experience in teaching clil to young learners by explaining her first job as a clil school teacher after graduation. because of her professional and pedagogical performance and her english language proficiency, she was assigned as a homeroom teacher and mathematics in a well-known bilingual school, a demonstration school of the state university in malang indonesia. when teaching at the school operated by a prominent university that prepares prospective teachers in indonesia, she got opportunities to meet educational experts and practitioners in clil during her first year of teaching. she was lucky as she was assigned as a home-room teacher who taught the thematic subject and mathematics using english as a medium of instruction based on the cambridge curriculum. she was learning and practicing how the national curriculum and one of the organization of economic co-operation and development (oecd) countries (cambridge curriculum) were synergized. the two-year experience had given her foundation for teaching her students. after her turning to the recent school for two years, the challenging time of the covid-19 outbreak has changed her teaching to the first graders. like almost all schools globally, the policy of emergency remote learning due to the pandemic is applied. she has to deal with the situation by doing some feasible activities. the adaptation of f2f learning is taken to get the students learning as targeted by the curricula. as a millennial, she quickly responded to the situation by preparing materials to support her teaching. she was also ready to be online for answering questions from parents and students. using both synchronous and asynchronous delivery modes, she affirmed that she has prepared her lesson plan for the whole semester. f2f adaptation in clil science for the first graders to provide the students learning activities similar to f2f before the covid-19 outbreak, the school offered full synchronous learning using zoom for three hours from 07.30 – 11.15 in the morning. this aimed at providing the students with learning experiences resembling those of before the pandemic. the next session continued in the evening for those who could not access the learning time during working hours and those who would like to get more reinforcement for the day's theme. however, based on the parents’ request to reduce the time for synchronous learning and the number of meetings per week, the school reduced the screening time to 07.30 – 10.30. the parents concerned their children’ health as the effect of screening times and attention span. the following narration explains the situation. “alhamdulillah, our school has provided the students' opportunity to learn synchronously. to support the learning, the teacher-made video was sent to the students by whatsapp and was uploaded to the school's youtube channel. the video was in english, so the students could learn some important points before the real-time live lesson.” (the teacher, zoom interview, october 18, 2020) for the teacher, the covid-19 outbreak was not a big problem because she could stay positive in dealing with the learning situation. her expression of alhamdulillah that translates all praise be to god was a sign of her moral geography. she could make a decision by creatively making a video using english to solve the problem related to the time limitation of forced online learning and get the purpose of her teaching. by sharing the video through whatsapp and uploading it to the school's youtube channel, her sociocultural geography existed because of her willingness to serve the community. contrasting to her efforts in providing video for the students before the synchronous class the next day, the students started to refuse to watch the video before the scheduled zoom meeting. the teacher looked a little bit disappointed with the situation, but she tried to accept the reality. the following story helps explain the situation. “the students used to enjoy watching the video before class, but they gradually forget that it is their individual task. i understand that it was boring to watch a video of a unit like living and non-living things with a long duration. so, i decided to trim the video and make it chunked into smaller sub-unit like parts of body or parts of plant. unfortunately, they confirmed that they did not watch the video before class, although it is in a shorter version. i was disappointed with this situation, but i think i have to find a way to make them watch rina wahyu setyaningrum, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry 40 the video as part of their forced online learning.” (the teacher, zoom interview, october 18, 2020) the teacher's sociocultural emotion has forced her to do her best for the community she served. although she was upset because of the situation, she chose to find ways to make her students watch the video as part of their learning. her moral geography led her to choose the most appropriate choice among those that might be taken but making the situation worse. for science lesson, particularly, she managed thirty minutes synchronous learning in addition to asynchronous one. to deal with the situation, she was making the science learning schedule in the following table. table 2. the clil science lesson activities aims learning platforms sending the video for the next day science class (a day before the class) providing the students' points to learn whatsapp greetings and introduction (5 minutes) preparing the students to get ready for the class and checking their attendance. zoom apperception – watching the video sent before the class or reviewing the video if the students have watched it in advance (5 minutes) linking the students' background knowledge and real-life experience with the materials learn during the day. zoom teacher's presentation and students activities (10 minutes) engaging the students in learning the materials based on the lesson zoom students' presentation (5 minutes) providing the students an opportunity to read, give opinions, or answer the questions in english zoom closing (5 minutes) concluding the lesson and reinforcement zoom students individual task (with time limitation) providing the students with some activities related to the theme autonomously at home whatsapp and hard copy submitted to the teacher weekly source: teacher made schedule table 2 shows that combining the synchronous and asynchronous modes of delivery (monbec, 2020; moorhouse, 2020) was the right decision because there should be a limitation of synchronous learning and there should be some individual tasks that the students have to complete. finding the most appropriate strategy in teaching young learners in primary school is essential for supporting the forced remote learning that depends on technology (rasmitadila et al., 2020). therefore, the teachers should open to any possibilities since online learning is not suitable for young learners, the first graders in particular, because of their very short attention span and preference to actively move than stay still. rasmitadila et al. (2020) reported that the teacher should reduce the time for synchronous learning and changed the instructional objectives to be fewer than f2f. the integration of 4cs clil frameworks there were external factors that arose during the forced remote learning. by synchronous mode of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 delivery, integrating 4cs frameworks of clil in teaching young learners clil science was another challenge. she should struggle to make her teaching suitable with the 4cs frameworks, such as starting with the content, linking the content with communication, exploring the kind of thinking skills the teacher developed that suited to what has been planned in content and communication, and making consideration to the culture where the clil was taught by including the existing language in learning. there will, likewise, be a situation that the teachers needed to attract the students' attention during the forced learning time. prompting questions was an option, for attracting the students' attention to the clil lesson (evnitskaya & daltonpuffer, 2020). calling the student's name and asking her/him to answer a question worked for the student's learning and thinking process. the questions were based on the video that they watched or their real-life experience related to the lesson. if one meeting was not enough, she extended the learning process to the following session. her narration is as follows. “i should be patient in teaching online. if i can choose, i prefer f2f learning to this forced online learning. for me, teaching is not only transferring knowledge but also educating my students. that is a part that i missed because of the pandemic. if i could not finish my teaching within one synchronous learning session, the next session means a lot to me because i have another session to wrap up and reinforce the content and language learning.” (the teacher, zoom interview, october 18, 2020) notwithstanding her obstacle in teaching clil science for the first graders, her moral geography drove her to make the learning meet 4cs clil frameworks. adequate reception of teacher support is considered very necessary to ensure that students have achieved meaningful results at the level of inputs they have obtained (meyer, 2017). she found that a student did not want to sit still in front of the computer during the learning time because that student considered unimportant to sit for a certain length of time in front of the computer if he could listen to the teacher's voice in the distance. to control the existing situation, the teacher should be back to the 4cs frameworks by resetting what to teach, how to communicate, how to make the student thinking and learning, and how to attract cultural opportunity in the first language. the language (s) use since english is a medium of instruction in the clil science lesson, pivotal exposure in the target language should be considered. in her class, english has been used up to 50%, aside from the use of bahasa indonesia for daily communication. the language reinforcement was still in practice during the forced remote learning by establishing video in english, asking the students to read the materials in english, and asking them to do the worksheets written in english. a thirty-minute real-time live meeting was just enough to get the students learning both content and language, despite the spotlight session's constraint on the students' english. she explains the situation as follows. “dealing with english language integration for young learners' clil lesson, i tried my best to get a chance to exploit the students' linguistic competency. i used to get time to spotlight the students' english before zoom time reduction to 30 minutes. now, i only can make it with a few students. the time is not enough for intensive english reinforcement. what i can do if i want to see the students' written english product, i ask them to write it on the paper, and they will send the photos of their work to my personal contact number through whatsapp.” (the teacher, zoom interview, october 18, 2020) from the narration, the teacher did not consider the situation as a burden. her moral geography set her to choose the best thing to do to make her students learn english. if there is no natural language support for young learners in the clil lesson, they will not get their learning goals. she showed political geography as she could not change the real-time live learning duration, her professional geography forced her to find a way to control the students' english learning. scaffolding is one of the strategies that clil that the teacher can integrate into learning the language while learning the content (mahan, 2020). she believed that young learners in grade one still needed support for their language learning as they learned the content in the target language with non-native english speaker rina wahyu setyaningrum, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry 42 teacher (nnts), who was not a foreign language expert (dalton-puffer, 2011; evnitskaya & daltonpuffer, 2020). there is evidence to suggest that young learners' language learning requires literacy experience. the young learners' english literacy should be conceptualized to better their language proficiency (satriani, 2019). the teacher affirmed that a thirtyminute meeting was only used for explaining the lesson without any extra time to train students' english literacy. the following is her explanation about the literacy program. “students' literacy in english is one of my attentions. that is the rationale for providing the students in my class with printed worksheets that should be submitted to the teacher every other week. i believe that the first graders need to learn how to write words related to science in english. reading those words and writing them for completing the individual tasks on worksheets helps advance their english literacy.” (the teacher, zoom interview, october 18, 2020) the teacher's professional geography has led her to pay attention to the literacy program. she understood that in the clil setting, young learners should get more exposure to the target language in various ways; one of those is to use multimodal texts. they can lead the young learners' comprehension, participation, and motivation to use the target language naturally (kaminski, 2019). accordingly, the teacher provided worksheets for students to develop their english literacy at home. her professional geography guided her to do things that support the students learning. the following is an example of the worksheet used for literacy support. figure 1. worksheet for english literacy at home (source: teacher-made worksheet) printed worksheets provided by the teacher for literacy support were for making the students use multimodal texts. this worksheet could make the students respond toward multimodal text in the form of pictures and writings. the instruction like to circle, underline, or cross different groups of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 things can positively impact english language learning. young learners' language learning is not a matter of vocabulary memorization but how they can experience using the language in context (shin & crandall, 2014). translanguaging as dynamic activities flows in the clil classroom (lin & he, 2017) was another teacher's endeavor in clil science. as she taught young learners, she had to manage her teaching by providing them the opportunity to practice translanguage. a translanguaging approach in teaching and learning is not a matter of code-switching, but rather an agreement that normalizes bilingualism without a diglossic functional distinction (creese & blackledge, 2015). although the teacher did not know the term translanguaging, her teaching efforts for clil science in grade one has proved it. she clarified her statement as follows. “i don't know what translanguaging is. what i know is that i always use english in teaching and i make a video using english. i usually ask my students to translate some reading text to understand a particular concept in science. if they cannot say any words in english, i let them use bahasa indonesia. i also clarify my explanation in english by using bahasa indonesia. i also use media to make the students understand the content through their thinking and learning process.” (the teacher, zoom interview, october 18, 2020) the explanation shows that the teacher's professional and moral emotional geographies have led her to make the learning environment feasible for the students to learn the content using the appropriate languages for communication to make the students understand the science concept by their thinking learning competencies. in the clil lesson, the meaning is negotiated using l1 and/or l2 to increase classroom conversational dynamics by shifting from one language to another (griva, 2017). in accordance, coyle, hood, and marsh (2010) affirmed that an additional language could be used for the clil lesson, and it can be supported by the l1, specifically for explaining the course. hence, zein (2018) claimed that translanguaging is a realistic strategy for advancing multilingual pedagogy among linguistically different young learners. the students' engagement teacher's attention during synchronous learning is essential to engage in the learning process. one of the teacher's attention was to call the students' names. this research participant told a story about the parent's request for calling her child's name frequently to make him back to his synchronous learning device. “i know that every student has a different learning style. for the student who likes kinesthetic learning, she/he cannot sit in front of their virtual learning device for a long time, while the audio learner can multiple tasks while listening to the teacher. one day, a mother informed me that her child was leaving his device to do something else, and he was back to it if the teacher was calling him, he's got his turn. it was true that i can control students' engagement when i call their names to do something.” (the teacher, zoom interview, october 18, 2020) from the interview transcription about the students' engagement, the teacher's professional geography was shown from her understanding of the students' learning style. she was also convinced that doing the parent's request to call the student's name showed her sociocultural geography for being stereotyped by society. students' engagement in remote learning is crucial because they cannot perform in the learning process similar to f2f. time limitation and the learning situation do not permit the students to demonstrate their excessive-performance (groccia, 2018). since the students' position at home, the teacher tried to engage them in teaching and synchronous learning by asking them to get living and non-living things around the house. the following is her narration. “to reduce the students’ boredom during remote learning, i involve the students to get the materials for learning. i asked them to tell what they know about the materials, like living things. i encouraged them to use the english and bahasa indonesia. i have to be ready for guiding them learning both content and language. repeating the words in both languages with them is always fun.” (the teacher, whatsapp interview, 19 october 2020) rina wahyu setyaningrum, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry 44 based on the narration, the teachers moral and professional geographies have motivated her to engage the students in learning by showing the teacher and friends learning media that might be different from others’. they proudly presented what they found at home, like pets, plants, even the people around them. this participatory activity was meant to avoid boredom. it was understandable by the students, easy to follow, and involving the students' presentation. boredom is classified as one of the "activity-related" emotions that shows students emotional experience during online learning (humpry & hampden-thompson, 2018). when the students are engaged in the activity, janna, christopher, barbara, kalle, joseph, jari, & katariina (2018) affirmed that they are in a situational engagement because the students feel that the task is exciting and challenging for them that they can use their skills to complete it. conclusion the implementation of clil to young learners underpins a variety of comments. from a pedagogical viewpoint, clil relies on constructivist and socio-cultural notions where the learning process makes it easier for young learners to provide more concrete feedback and output in l2 or target language. in addition to this, there will be more and more versatile options for both content and language learning. clil provides more practical and natural opportunities for young learners to learn and use additional language. in the time of the covid-19 outbreak, young learners clil science forced remote learning requires the teacher's commitment to f2f adaptation because of time limitation for the synchronous mode of delivery. it was too short that the teacher only focused on the content with only a little time for english language reinforcement. the initiatives taken by the clil science teacher in this research has allowed the students to engage in the material with considerable potency and efficacy as it puts out some fundamental tenets of a particular system of task-based learning and communicative language teaching by accommodating the state of sincerity and meaningfulness in communication. real-time live lessons using a particular synchronous platform was advantageous for the teacher and students to interact just like f2f learning session, but drawbacks of screening time for the young learners' health and psychology should be sensitive consideration. that is why in teaching science to the first graders, the teacher combined synchronous and asynchronous modes of teaching. the teacher's creativity was pivotal in getting the young learners engaged in doing content and language learning activities by using the two modes of delivery. clil, as a new trend in language teaching, can be practiced remotely as the teacher to direct content scaffolding through learning. limited time and space the teacher shared with the students could be manipulated by the teacher's creativity in arousing young learners' curiosity about their learning. references cheng, x. 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(2018). application of clil in teaching young learners about life cycle in english. destech transactions on social science, education and human science, (icaem), 344–348. doi: 10.12783/dtssehs/icaem2017/19104 shin, j., & crandall, j. (2014). teaching young learners english: from theory to practice. singapore: heinle cengage learning. tragant, e., marsol, a., serrano, r., & llanes, à. (2016). vocabulary learning at primary school: a comparison of efl and clil. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 19(5), 579–591. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2015.1035227 rina wahyu setyaningrum, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah content and language integrated learning (clil) in science class during covid-19 outbreak: a narrative inquiry 46 widodo, h. p. (2014). methodological considerations in interview data transcription. international journal of innovation in english language teaching and research, 3(1), 101-107. zein, s. (2018). translanguaging in the eyl classroom as a metadiscursive practice: preparing prospective teachers. in s. zein & r. stroupe (editors). english language teacher preparation in asia: policy research and practice, (pp. 4762). new york: routledge. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee noticing hybrid recasts in text chat mark j. oliver british council, singapore email: markjoliver78@gmail.com apa citation: oliver, m. j. (2016). noticing hybrid recasts in text chat. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 25-36 received: 14-10-2016 accepted: 09-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: this study examined ten efl learners’ noticing of the corrective nature of a form of text-based scmc (text chat) feedback that combined a recast of a grammatical error with metalinguistic information. the feedback, termed a hybrid recast, was provided by a nativespeaker interlocutor during two text chat activities: a spot-the-difference and pictureordering task. data was collected in two ways: analysis of task-based dyadic text chat interaction in which uptake was used as an indicator of learner noticing, and a post-task questionnaire containing questions that identified evidence of learner noticing. interaction analysis showed that learners responded to almost two thirds of the hybrid recasts with uptake. in addition, every learner provided evidence that they had correctly perceived at least some of the hybrid recasts as corrective in their post-task questionnaire responses. keywords: text chat (text-based scmc synchronous computed-mediated communication), corrective feedback, negative evidence, recasts, hybrid recasts, metalinguistic correction, uptake, repair, noticing introduction this study builds on the body of face-to-face and text chat studies of learner noticing of recasts. the purpose of the current study was to explore whether the corrective nature of recasts in text chat could be made more salient to learners by adapting them to include metalinguistic information in a form of feedback i termed ‘hybrid recast’. up to this point only one study by sheen (2007) had investigated such a form of feedback and this was conducted in a face-to-face environment. recasts have been repeatedly shown to be the most commonly used form of feedback by language teachers (lyster & ranta, 1997; lyster & mori, 2006), especially in response to grammatical errors (mackey et al., 2000). however, despite this popularity, a significant amount of research (lyster & ranta, 1997; mackey et al., 2000) points to recasts being less effective than more explicit forms of feedback, such as metalinguistic feedback. a common argument against their effectiveness is that they frequently fail to be perceived as corrective by learners. this is especially the case when the linguistic focus of the recasts is grammar (lyster 1998; mackey et al., 2000; sheen, 2006). a number of studies (doughty & varela, 1998; loewen & philip, 2006; sheen, 2006) have investigated whether certain characteristics of recasts resulted in greater learner noticing. loewen and philip (2006) and sheen (2006) found that recasts that were segmented, stressed and declarative, and therefore more explicit, were more likely to be perceived as corrective. sheen (2007) interestingly found that a form of feedback combining a recast with metalinguistic information, 25 mark j. oliver noticing hybrid recasts in text chat termed metalinguistic correction, led to more l2 gains than traditional recasts. in recent years there has been a growing interest in the utilization of textbased scmc or text chat in language learning (simpson 2002, p. 414). there is significant evidence (kung, 2004; lai & zhao, 2006; pellettieri, 2000, p. 81; smith, 2004; smith & sauro, 2009) that communication via text chat can increase learner noticing of both language and interactional feedback for three reasons: firstly, turn-taking proceeds at a slower speed; secondly, the language is written and thus more salient; thirdly, the enduring nature of the text chat means learners can reread previous messages, notice inconsistencies in their target language output and self-correct. however, despite of these benefits, when studies (lai & zhao, 2006; sauro, 2009) measured learner noticing of recasts provided via text chat, they reported a similar failure of learners to perceive recasts as corrective. this study attempts to investigate whether learners noticed the corrective nature of a form of feedback based on sheen’s (2007) metalinguistic correction which combined a recast of a grammatical error with a brief piece of metalinguistic information. interaction researchers, such as long (1996), have viewed noticing as an essential liaison that connects interactional input and learner output (egi, 2010). when considering learner noticing of recasts we must look at a number of issues that remain under debate. firstly, there is some debate as to whether recasts provide negative or positive evidence. secondly, while some view recasts as a form of implicit feedback, others see them as explicit feedback. thirdly, there are conflicting views regarding the uptake that recasts can trigger (ellis & sheen, 2006). ellis and sheen (2006, p. 585) define positive evidence as samples of grammatical and acceptable l2 and negative evidence as information about language which is not grammatical or acceptable. the developmental benefits of recasts are most widely held (long, 1996; oliver, 1995) to lie in negative evidence, which encourages the two types of noticing that schmidt (1990) argued were prerequisites for l2 acquisition. firstly, the linguistic feature being recast is made more salient to the learner and secondly, recasts prompt learners to compare their erroneous utterance with the recast allowing them to ‘notice the gap’ (schmidt & frota, 1986). however, bao et al. (2011) state that this argument rests on the assumption that learners are able to recognize the corrective intent of recasts. there is significant evidence that recasts, especially of grammatical errors, are often not perceived as corrective (lyster, 1998b; mackey et al., 2000; nicholas et al., 2001). interactionally, recasts can perform the function of acknowledging the content of the preceding turn (nicholas et al, 2001). in long’s (1996) definition, recasts are viewed as an implicit form of feedback where errors are implied and the focus is on meaning not form. however, others (ellis & sheen, 2006; loewen & philip, 2006) have broadened the definition of recasts to include varying degrees implicitness and explicitness. they posit that through the use of segmentation, stress and declarative intonation in recasts, the interlocutor can overtly state the existence of error and so switch the focus of interaction from meaning to form. a commonly used indicator that learners have perceived a recast as corrective is whether they react to the recast in their next utterance (lyster & 26 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee ranta, 1997; mackey et al., 2000). lyster and ranta (1997, p. 49) defined this learner reaction to feedback as uptake, and it is believed by many to be closely related to learner’s perceptions about feedback at the time it is delivered (mackey et al., 2000). lyster and ranta (1997, p. 49) stated that uptake could be classified as either repair or needs-repair. an utterance that contained a correct reformulation of the initial error was termed repair and an utterance that did not as needs-repair. needs-repair could range from a simple acknowledgment to a partial reformulation. lightbrown (1998, p. 193 in egi, 2010) noted that repair, in particular, gave some reason to believe that the learner had “noticed the gap” (schmidt & frota, 1986) between their erroneous utterance and the recast. an argument against the use of recasts is that they have often been found to result in lower levels of uptake than other feedback forms (lyster & ranta, 1997; mackey et al., 2000). however, there is some debate over whether uptake when used alone is an effective means of investigating learner noticing of recasts (ellis et al., 2001). sheen (2007) took recast research in a new direction by investigating an experimental form of feedback combing recast with metalinguistic information. sheen called this feedback type ‘metalinguistic correction’ and below is an example taken from her study (2007:307): student : there was a fox. fox was hungry.’ teacher: the fox. you should use the definite article ‘the’ because you’ve already mentioned “fox”. sheen (2007) found that in posttests measuring l2 gains the group receiving metalinguistic correction (in response to errors in article usage) outperformed the group receiving recasts, which also failed to perform significantly better than a control group. sheen (2007) explained the positive effects of metalinguistic correction in terms of schmidt’s (1995, in sheen, 2007) two levels of awareness; ‘noticing’ and ‘understanding’. she pointed out that schmidt (1995 in sheen 2007) argued that ‘noticing’ was an important step towards acquisition while ‘understanding’ could result in deeper learning. sheen (2007) concluded that the provision of a recast indicating the correct form, together with metalinguistic information was more effective than providing only a recast because it led to both the noticing and understanding of the underlying rule. despite the significant amount of literature on recasts and the potential of text-based scmc (synchronous computed-mediated communication) in language learning, there have been only a few studies (lai & zhao, 2006; sachs & suh, 2007; sauro, 2009) investigating recasts in a text-based scmc environment. interestingly, they observed a similar failure of learners to notice the corrective nature of recasts. lai and zhao (2006) compared the capacity of text-based scmc interaction and face-to-face interaction to promote learners’ noticing of interactional feedback. in stimulated recall sessions, learners exhibited noticing of 45% negotiation of meaning episodes in text chat compared with 24% in face-to-face interaction. however, for recasts the opposite was true, with learners noticing only 10% of text chat recasts compared to 18% of face-to-face recasts. it must be noted, however, that the information about recasts provided by the findings was very limited. lai and zhao (2006) explained that the low level of noticing of text chat recasts may have resulted from the recasts being provided 3 to 4 turns after the learner’s incorrect 27 mark j. oliver noticing hybrid recasts in text chat message. sachs and suh (2007) investigated the efficacy of textually enhanced and textually unenhanced recasts of errors in their use of indirect reported speech in terms of learner awareness and l2 gains. the textual enhancement involved underling the matrix verbs and representing the back shifted verbs in bold face. drawing on insights from schmidt (1995 cited in sachs in suh, 2007), they investigated learner awareness of l2 form at the level of noticing and understanding. schmidt (ibid:29) provided the following example to illustrate the difference: ‘awareness that a target language speaker says, on a particular occasion, ‘he goes to a beach a lot,’ is an example of noticing. being aware that goes is a form of go inflected for number agreement is understanding.’ to measure awareness, sachs and suh (2007) used an introspective tool called the think-aloud technique. verbalizations were coded according to three criteria for the presence of awareness: cognitive change, metaawareness and morphological awareness. cognitive change was considered awareness at the level of noticing and the others awareness at the level of understanding. the study found that 100% of the textually enhanced and textually unenhanced groups verbalized awareness at the level of noticing. however, only 43% of the unenhanced group reported meta-awareness and none reported morphological awareness. on the other hand, 100% of the textually enhanced group reported metaawareness and 33% reported morphological awareness. sachs and suh (2007) found despite outperforming the unenhanced group in post-tests, the enhanced group were not able to identify appropriate uses of backshifting in context or produce it themselves with greater ability. sachs and suh (2007) noted that while the enhanced recasts successfully highlighted the verb forms, participants may have still failed to perceive them as corrective. sauro (2009) investigated the effects of test-based scmc recasts and metalinguistic prompts on the development of learners’ l2 knowledge of the english zero article with abstract uncountable nouns. the study found greater improvement in the immediate post-tests for the metalinguistic prompt group than the recast group. furthermore, 44% of metalinguistic prompts resulted in uptake compared to 21% of the recasts. sauro (2009) suggested the greater l2 gains and uptake associated with the metalinguistic prompts resulted from its overtly explicit corrective nature. she argued that the corrective intent of the recasts was less clear and so reduced opportunities for learners to “notice the gap” between recasts and their erroneous utterances. the recasts in the study were generally full and long and these characteristics have been shown in face-to-face recast studies to reduce the saliency of recasts to learners (loewen & philip, 2006; sheen, 2006). also, at times there was a lack of adjacency between some of the recasts and the triggering erroneous utterance, an issue highlighted by lai and zhao (2006). doughty and long (2003:65) claimed learners needed to be able to hold both erroneous utterance and recast in their working memory to allow for comparison and noticing of any gap. this research covers two research questions: 1. to what extent do hybrid text-based scmc recasts of grammatical errors result in learner uptake? 28 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 2. how do learners perceive hybrid text-based scmc recasts of grammatical errors? method this study was unique in the sense that the researcher and participants were located in different countries. as stated by pellettieri (2000), text-based scmc does not have the geographical constraints of face-to-face communication. therefore, i decided that it would be interesting to carry out this research with participants located in a different country than myself. while i was located in malaysia, the participants of the study were parttime intermediate-level efl students at my previous school, the british council, beirut. participants were all female and aged between eighteen and thirty-two years old. they were university students, teachers, housewives, and office workers. two were from syria and eight were from lebanon and all had arabic as their first language. facebook messenger was used in nine of the text chat sessions and google talk in one. the materials used in this study included two text chat tasks performed by participants and a native-speaking interlocutor, in this case the researcher. these text chat tasks were a spot-thedifference picture task adapted from mackey et al. (2000), and a narrative picture task adapted from sachs and suh (2007). tasks were primarily meaningfocused, had clearly defined outcomes and required learners to make use of their own linguistic resources (ellis, 2003). the topic of the tasks was a holiday; selected in accordance to the topics the students had recently covered in class, participant interests and language levels. two task types were used because previous research (gass et al., 2005 in egi, 2007) found that task type could affect the nature of interaction. each learner met the researcher online once in a 40-minute text chat session. the date and time of this text chat session was arranged via email exchange. the learners performed two dyadic text chat tasks with the researcher acting as interlocutor. alongside performing the tasks, the interlocutor provided hybrid recasts of any grammatical errors made by the learner, as shown in the example below taken from the study. learner: he is wearing red t-shirt and shorts interlocutor: he is wearing a red t-shirt (indefinite article (a) + singular noun) the hybrid recasts consisted of a recast of the error and metalinguistic information relating to the error, which was bracketed to differentiate it from the recast. to identify episodes of recasts and any subsequent uptake, chatscripts were saved and later analyzed. participants also completed a posttask questionnaire immediately after finishing the text chat task. divided into two sections, the first consisted of five open-ended questions relating to learner noticing of the hybrid recasts; the second section included open-ended questions to elicit learner attitudes regarding the use of text chat in their language learning. the chatscripts were analyzed for instances of hybrid recasts and subsequent uptake using a coding scheme, adapted from lyster and ranta’s (2007) observational study of feedback and uptake in french immersion classes (figure 1 contains a summary of both coding schemes; figure 2 provides examples of each category of the coding scheme). 29 mark j. oliver noticing hybrid recasts in text chat the number and percentage of hybrid recasts that resulted in uptake and repair was then calculated for each participant and then for the study as a whole. this emulated the interaction analysis in previous recast studies (lyster & ranta, 1997; mackey et al., 2000). figure 1: coding schemes lyster and ranta (1997, p. 44) this study stage 1 learner produces an erroneous utterance learner produces a grammatically incorrect utterance stage 2 teacher provides a form of feedback or continues with topic interlocutor provides a hybrid recast of the error stage 3 if feedback provided, learner reacts to feedback (uptake) or continues with topic (no uptake); uptake classified as repair or needsrepair learner reacts to hybrid recast (uptake) or continues with topic (no uptake); uptake classified as repair or needs-repair stage 4 for repair, teacher continues topic or provides reinforcement; for needs-repair, teacher provides follow-up feedback or continues with topic for repair and needs-repair interlocutor continues with topic figure 2: coding scheme: examples from study hybrid recast episodes no uptake learner and he is wearing red shirt interlocutor wearing a red shirt (article (a) + singular noun) learner there are sofa and table uptake repair learner that clown is wearing colourful clothes interlocutor was wearing colourful clothes (use past continuous) learner that clown was wearing colourful clothes uptake needsrepair learner in front of desk there is open suit case. do you have the same? interlocutor there is an open suitcase (use article (a/an) with singular noun) learner all right. i understand. in addition to measuring uptake, the study analyzed participants’ questionnaire responses for evidence of learner noticing, using the following three indicators: 1. a direct reference to the interlocutor correcting their mistake 2. noticing the language feature that had been recast 3. correctly stating the number of grammatical errors they had made* (*the study posited that if a learner’s estimation of the number of grammatical mistakes made matched the number hybrid recasts they received, it could be concluded that they perceived every hybrid recast as corrective.) 30 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee results and discussion hybrid recasts of grammatical errors and learner uptake table 1: the frequency of hybrid recasts, uptake and repair participant number of hybrid recast episodes subsequent uptake (% of hybrid recasts) subsequent repair (% of hybrid recasts) 1 4 3 (75%) 0 2 6 3 (50%) 0 3 9 0 0 4 6 6 (100%) 5 (83%) 5 5 2 (40%) 0 6 4 4 (100%) 3 (75%) 7 8 8 (100%) 0 8 4 2(50%) 1 (25%) 9 6 5 (83.3%) 0 10 1 1 (100%) 0 total 53 34 (64%) 9 (17%) the frequency of hybrid recasts and subsequent uptake and repair is presented in table 1 above. participants received between four and nine hybrid recasts during the text chat tasks, with the exception of participant 10, who received only one. nine participants reacted to hybrid recasts with uptake. the lowest level of uptake among these nine was 40% and the highest was 100%, achieved by four participants. only three participants responded to hybrid recasts with repair. 47% of hybrid recasts were followed by needs-repair and 17% by repair. therefore, 64% resulted in some form of uptake. learners’ perception of hybrid recasts of grammatical errors all participants directly mentioned at some point in the questionnaire that the interlocutor had corrected their mistakes during the text chat tasks. four participants referred to this twice. although no limit was set on the number of features participants could report noticing, seven participants responded with only one answer and one participant did not respond. in addition, four participants indicated a number of mistakes that exactly matched the number of hybrid recasts they received. two participants provided answers that roughly matched. of the four that provided a number that did not match, one had misinterpreted the question. furthermore, four participants made some reference to their inability to use grammar accurately and a need to improve their english. two participants similarly mentioned a failure to use grammar correctly. this is further evidence that participants noticed their non-target use of english grammar, which implies that they perceived hybrid recasts to be negative evidence. hybrid recasts of grammatical errors and learner uptake the data collected from the analysis of chatscripts of the text chat tasks indicated that almost two thirds of the hybrid recasts provided resulted in uptake. table 2 shows the percentage of hybrid recasts that resulted in uptake, repair and needs-repair compared with feedback types in previous studies. 31 mark j. oliver noticing hybrid recasts in text chat table 2: uptake following hybrid recasts, recasts and metalinguistic feedback study setting feedback type % of student turns following the feedback that contained; uptake repair needs-repair this study (2013) text-based scmc hybrid recast 64 17 47 lyster and ranta (1997) face-to-face recast 31 18 13 metalinguistic feedback 86 45 41 panova and lyster (2002) face-to-face recast 40 13 27 metalinguistic feedback 71 29 42 sauro (2009) text-based scmc recast 21 not available (n/a) n/a metalinguistic prompt 44 n/a n/a as table 2 highlights, the level of uptake after hybrid recasts (64%) seems high when looking at the level of uptake that followed recasts in previous face-toface and text-based scmc study. only between 31%-40% of recasts in face-toface studies by lyster and ranta (1997), and panova and lyster (2002) were followed by uptake. this figure was even lower in the text-based scmc study by sauro (2009), which also experienced relatively low levels of uptake after metalinguistic prompts. interestingly, the hybrid recasts led to a level of uptake more usually associated with metalinguistic feedback. sauro (2009) explained that the low level of uptake identified in her study might have resulted from a lack of adjacency between the learner error and recast. in this study, 29% of the hybrid recasts were not provided in the turn immediately following the erroneous utterance, as highlighted in excerpt a. however, this did not seem to have an adverse effect on the level of uptake. excerpt a participant 9: this looks like a hotel room, there are two beds which are not used yet participant 9: and something on the bed interlocutor: which haven’t been used yet (use present perfect) participant 9: thank you! the relatively high level of uptake that followed hybrid recasts can be seen to result from learners more clearly perceiving them to be negative evidence. the low level of uptake usually associated with recasts has been explained by learners sometimes interpreting recasts as performing functions other than feedback, such as acknowledging (nicholas et al., 2000). in such cases, recasts are perceived to be positive evidence. the high level of uptake following hybrid recasts indicates that while the recast may or may not be perceived as negative evidence, the metalinguistic information most likely is. therefore, the level of uptake is more similar to that associated with metalinguistic feedback, as shown in table 2. another possible reason for the high level of uptake is that hybrid recasts are a significantly more explicit form of feedback than recasts. long (1996 in long et al., 1998) argued that recasts were implicit because they implied errors whose focus was on meaning rather than form. however, hybrid 32 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee recasts explicitly draw learners’ attention to the existence of an error. studies have repeatedly shown that learners are more likely to recast to explicit forms of feedback, such as metalinguistic feedback, as highlighted in table 2. while the overall level of uptake for hybrid recasts was quite high, only 17% resulted in repair. the majority of uptake was needs-repair and took the form of acknowledgement (lyster & ranta, 1997, p. 50) or recognize (ellis et al., 2001, p. 298), as shown in the excerpt b. excerpt b interlocutor: brown curtains (plural form) participant 1: yes thanks the text-based scmc setting of this study may have had an effect on the level of repair. in his text-based scmc study of negotiated interaction, uptake and lexical acquisition, smith (2005) found that only 11% of negotiated focus on form episodes resulted in repair. he argued that the low level of successful uptake or repair in text chat was due to the visual representation of the language, the pressure to respond quickly and the redundancy of retyping the recast. smith (2005) reported similar lexical gains from learners, independent of whether they produced repair, needsrepair or no uptake. learners’ perception of hybrid recasts of grammatical errors the qualitative data collected from the post-task questionnaires would seem to confirm that learners perceived the corrective nature of hybrid recasts of their grammatical errors. interestingly, despite every participant clearly reporting that recasts were corrective, only three participants provided uptake after every hybrid recast. in fact, one participant did not provide any uptake at all, yet still claimed to have noticed that they were corrective in the questionnaire. this contrasts with the findings of egi’s (2010) and mackey et al’s (2000) face-to-face studies. they found that when learners did not follow recasts with uptake, they were unlikely to perceive recasts as corrective in stimulated recall. also, egi (2010) observed that learners who produced repair were much more likely to accurately perceive recasts than those producing needs-repair. this study found otherwise, with accurate perception of recasts despite low levels of repair. in response to the findings, two claims could possibly be made about the use of uptake as an indicator of learner noticing in text-based scmc. the first is that as smith (2005) argued needs-repair is an equally good indicator that a learner has accurately perceived a textbased recast as repair. the second is that while uptake may indicate that the learner has correctly perceived the corrective force of the recast, an absence of uptake cannot be interpreted as evidence that the learner has not perceived the recast. as stated by smith (2005) uptake may be precluded by features of text chat, such as visual saliency and pressure to type responses quickly. ellis et al. (2001) argued that uptake could also be precluded by discourse considerations in face-to-face interaction. a possible explanation as to why all participants successfully perceived the hybrid recasts to be negative evidence in the post task questionnaire despite not always producing uptake is the visual and enduring quality of text chat (sauro, 2009). 33 mark j. oliver noticing hybrid recasts in text chat because the chatscripts were saved on the learners’ computer screens, they were able to revisit them post task while completing the questionnaire. therefore, while they may not have noticed that the hybrid recasts were corrective during the interaction, and so produced no uptake, a second or third reading may have facilitated noticing of their corrective nature. this revisiting of the hybrid recast episodes also provided learners with further opportunities for schmidt’s (1995) noticing of the gap between their interlanguage and the target form. the likelihood of this noticing occurring was potentially increased because learners did not need to hold both the erroneous utterance and recast in the working memory for comparison as in face-to-face interaction (williams, 2005 in sauro, 2009). another finding from this study was that four participants used metalinguistic terminology to report what they had noticed about english during the text chat tasks. in sachs and suh’s (2007) study, this was coded as morphological awareness and considered to indicate awareness of l2, which schmidt (1995 in sachs & suh, 2007) classified as at the level of understanding. in sachs and suh’s study, 33% of participants who received textually enhanced recasts reported morphological awareness in think-aloud vocalizations and 38% reported sensing that the interlocutor had been focusing on the correct use of verb tenses in the briefing questionnaire. therefore, the levels of morphological awareness reported by learners receiving textually enhanced and hybrid recasts was similar. sheen (2007) explained the greater l2 gains attributed to his metalinguistic correction, the feedback form that hybrid recasts were adapted from, in terms of schmidt’s (1995, in sheen, 2007) two levels of awareness; noticing and understanding. as noted by sheen, schmidt (1995) argued that ‘noticing’ was an important step towards acquisition while ‘understanding’ could result in deeper learning. sheen (2007) concluded that the provision of the correct form and metalinguistic feedback was effective because it led to both the noticing and understanding of the underlying rule. this provides a possible explanation for the morphological awareness reported by three learners. conclusion this study used two sources of data to investigate whether learners carrying out text chat tasks perceived hybrid recasts of grammatical errors to be corrective. chatscripts of the tasks were analyzed to identify the distribution of hybrid recasts and subsequent uptake and a post-task questionnaire yielded qualitative data on learner perceptions of hybrid recasts. both sources revealed that learners generally perceived the hybrid recasts to be corrective. when compared with findings from previous face-to-face (lyster & ranta, 1997; mackey et al., 2000) and text chat (lai & zhao, 2006; sauro, 2009) recast studies, results indicate that the corrective force of hybrid recasts might be clearer than traditional recasts. as such, further study into forms of text chat feedback that combine recast with metalinguistic information is warranted. references bao, m., egi, t & han, y (2011). classroom study on noticing and recast features: capturing learner noticing with uptake and stimulated recall. system, 39, 215-228. doughty, c., & long, m, (2003). optimal psycholinguistic environments for distance foreign language learning. 34 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee language learning and technology, 7(3), 50-80. doughty, c., & v, e. (1998). communicative focus on form. in c. doughty &j. williams (eds.), focus on form in classroom second language acquisition, (114-138). cambridge: cambridge university press. egi, t, (2007). recasts, learner’s interpretations, and l2 development. in mackey, a. (ed.) (2007). conversational interaction in second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press egi, t, (2010). uptake, modified output, and learner perceptions of recasts: learner responses as language awareness. the modern language journal, 94, 1-21. ellis, r, (2003). task based language learning and teaching. oxford: oxford university press. ellis, r., basturkmen, h., & loewen, s. (2001). learner uptake in communicative esl lessons. language learning, 51(2), 281–318. ellis, r., & sheen, y. (2006). re-examining the role of recasts in second language acquisition. studies in second language acquisition, 28(4), 575-600. cambridge university press. kung, s, (2004). synchronous electronic discussions in efl reading class. elt journal, 58(2), 164-173. lai, c., & zhao, y. (2006). noticing and textbased chat. language learning and technology, 10(3), 102-120. loewen, s., & philip, j. (2006). recasts in the adult l2 classroom: characteristics, explicitness and effectiveness. the modern language journal, 90(4), 536556. long, m. (1996). the role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. in ritchie, w.r, & bhatia, t.j., (eds.) handbook of second language acquisition. academic press, 413-468. long, m., inagaki, s., & ortega, l. (1998). the role of implicit negative feedback in sla: models and recasts in japanese and spanish. the modern language journal, 82, 357-371. lyster, r. (1998). negotiation of form, recasts, and explicit correction in relation to error types and learner repair in immersion classrooms. language learning, 48(2), 183-218. lyster, r., & ranta, l. (1997). corrective feedback and learner uptake, negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. studies in second language acquisition, 20, 36-66. cambridge university press. lyster, r., & mori, h. (2006). interactional feedback and instructional counterbalance. studies in second language acquisition, 28, 269-300, cambridge university press. mackey, a., gass, s., & mcdonough, k. (2000). how do learners perceive feedback? studies in second language acquisition, 22, 471-497. cambridge university press. nicholas, h., lightbrown, p., & spada, n. (2001). recasts as feedback to language learners. language learning, 51, 719-758. oliver, r. (1995). negative feedback in child ns-nns conversation. studies in second language acquisition, 17, 459481. cambridge university press. pellettieri, j. (2000). negotiation in cyberspace: the role of chatting in the development of grammatical competence. in warschauer, m., & kern. r. (2000). network-based language teaching: concepts and practice, (59-86), 3rd printing. cambridge university press. sachs, r., & suh, b. (2007). textually enhanced recasts, learner awareness, and l2 outcomes in synchronous computer-mediated interaction. in mackey, a. (2007). conversational interaction in second language acquisition, (197-228), oxford university press. sauro, s. (2009). computer-mediated corrective feedback and the development of l2 grammar. language learning and technology, 13(1), 96-120. schmidt, r. (1990). the role of consciousness in second language learning. applied linguistics, 11, 129-58. 35 mark j. oliver noticing hybrid recasts in text chat schmidt, r., & frota, s. (1986). developing basic conversational ability in a second language: a case study of an adult learner of portuguese. in day (ed.). 1986 sheen, y. (2006). exploring the relationship between characteristics of recasts and learner uptake, language teaching research, 10(4), 361-392. sheen, y. (2007). corrective feedback, individual differences, and acquisition of articles. in mackey, a. (2007). conversational interaction in second language acquisition, (229-248). oxford: oxford university press. simpson, j. (2002). computer-mediated communication. elt journal, 56(4), 414-415. oxford: oxford university press. smith, b. (2004). computer-mediated negotiated interaction and lexical acquisition. studies in second language acquisition, 26, 365-398. cambridge university press. smith, b. (2005). the relationship between negotiated interaction, learner uptake, and lexical acquisition in task-based computer-mediated communication. tesol quarterly, 39(1), 33-58. smith, b., & sauro, s. (2009). interruptions in chat. computer assisted language learning, 22(3), 229-247. 36 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 205 english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots) wisma yunita (corresponding author) english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, university of bengkulu, bengkulu, indonesia email: wismayunita@unib.ac.id syahrial english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, bengkulu, indonesia email: eric.syahrial@gmail.com gita mutiara hati english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, bengkulu, indonesia email: gitamutiara@unib.ac.id apa citation: baker, r. a. (2020). english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots). english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 205-216. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3800 received: 29-06-2020 accepted: 27-09-2020 published: 11-12-2020 introduction in the 21st century, hots is needed by every individual in facing the global era in the form of critical and creative thinking, collaboration, and good communication skills. as stated by brookhart (2010), hots is the ability to think critically, logically, reflectively, meta-cognitively, and creatively. further, hots leads the individual to have the ability to apply knowledge, skills, and values in reasoning, reflection, problem-solving, decision making, innovating, and creating new things (kusuma, rosidin, abdurrahman, suyatna, 2017; sulaiman, muniyan, madhvan, hasan, & rahim, 2017; abdullah, mokhtar, halim, ali, tahir, & kohar, 2017; hugerat & kortam, 2014). the skill of hots has been invaded in all aspects of life, including in the education field. for example, the ministry of education and culture of the republic of indonesia has been embodied hots in the 2013 curriculum. it is because education is the main place to introduce and practice the hots knowledge, especially teachers. the teachers are regarded as the main actors to transfer the knowledge of hots in all lessons and it is the easiest to see the changes in the students’ thinking skills in their daily life (rajendran, 1999; as cited in singh & marappan, 2020). they are the main factors that influence the success or failure in applying hots in the classroom (seman, yusoff, & embong, 2017). the teachers teach this skill to their students at schools, including at jhs and shs. therefore, the abstract: the higher order thinking skills (hots) has been embodied in the 2013 curriculum by the government of indonesia, in which aims every individual in indonesia has good skills at critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and communication to face life in the 21st century. therefore, the english teachers in indonesia should have good knowledge of hots to teach their students. this study aims to investigate the knowledge of the junior high school (jhs) and senior high school english (shs) english teachers on hots in bengkulu province. data obtained by providing a questionnaire containing questions with four answer choices (strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree) in the form of google form to 69 jhs english teachers and 74 shs english teachers in bengkulu province. the data were analyzed using simple statistics by calculating the average value of all answers from all question items and categorized them into very good (3.26-4.0), good (2.6-3.25), less good (1.76-2.5), and very poor (1-1.75). the results of this study revealed that the level of knowledge of english teachers in bengkulu province on hots is in a good category (3.24) for jhs teachers and very good (3.31) for shs teachers. these findings give contributions related to the knowledge of jhs and shs english teachers in bengkulu province about hots. keywords: higher order thinking skills; 2013 curriculum; english teachers mailto:wismayunita@unib.ac.id mailto:wismayunita@unib.ac.id wisma yunita, syahrial, & gita mutiara hati english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots) 206 teachers in all subjects should have good knowledge of hots to achieve the goal of the 2013 curriculum itself. hots is closely related to language learning. eran (2016) proclaims that language is an instrument of thought, in which thought is expressed by using a language. students will think critically before conveying their ideas and argument when solving the problems, promoting creativity, understanding the discourse, and explaining things well so that hots is required in the learning process. the english teachers integrate hots with the teaching methods that will be applied in the english classroom. several studies on the analysis of teachers’ knowledge of hots has been conducted by some scholars in different disciplines. for example, mathematics (retnawati, djidu, kartianom, risqa & anazifa, 2018; abdullah et al., 2017; madu, 2017), physics (kusuma et al., 2017), history (hashim, osman, arifin, abdullah, & noh, 2015), or integrated fields of science such as at the basic education level (yusoff & seman, 2018). those studies revealed that the teachers and pre-service teachers of those subjects at schools have different knowledge and perception about hots in the teaching and learning process. also, the implementation of hots in the teaching and learning process was still far from hots principles. in addition, several studies on hots were also found in the english language teaching field. for example, how to innovate with hots in the reading class at the university level in malaysia (yoke, hasan, jangga, rohani. & kamal, 2015), this study found that the esl students have a positive perception toward the teaching of hots in the reading classroom. a survey on level questions in the field of teaching english at the university level was conducted by ashadi and lubis (2017) and yuliati and lestari (2018). the results of the survey revealed that the lower thinking level is dominantly used in questions. thamrin and agustin (2019) investigated the shs english teachers’ perceptions, the practice, and the constraints in endorsing hots in teaching a foreign language. from three generations (baby boomers, generation x, and generation y) and mursyid and kurniawati (2019). the results show that the teachers from all generations were aware of hots and applied it differently when teaching english. thamrin and agustin (2019) discussed the phenomenon of conceptual variations on reading comprehension through the hots strategy in universitas kuningan and described how the hots strategy improved the students’ skills in comprehending the academic reading text. various concepts on reading comprehension are seen from the c1-c6 phase of hots strategy and critical reading. moreover, studies on hots analysis in english textbooks were also investigated by indonesian scholars (e.g. sukmawijaya, yunita, & sofyan, 2020; febriani, yunita, & damayanti, 2020). the results show that there was a textbook that has integrated well and unwell of hots proportion in the language skills and language knowledge tasks. as aforementioned, in the field of english teaching field, most studies focused on hots in reading, level of questions, teachers’ perception, practice and constraints, and hots proportion in language tasks in textbooks. there is no study as far as those authors investigating the english teachers’ knowledge on hots in indonesia. therefore, it is rational for this study to investigate the state jhs and shs english teachers’ knowledge of hots in bengkulu province. to address the issue the research question of this study is; “how is the state jhs and shs english teachers’ knowledge of hots in the learning process in bengkulu province?” method the method deployed in this study was descriptive-quantitative. descriptive research is research that describes the data and the characteristics of the subject of the research (margono, 2010), while quantitative research collects and analyzes the data in terms of the numerical procedure (gay, mills, & airasian, 2012). thus, this study used the descriptivequantitative method to describe and explain the findings of the study in terms of english teachers’ knowledge on hots in bengkulu province. the respondents of this study were 69 jhs english teachers and 74 shs english teachers in bengkulu province. the data of this study were collected by providing the questionnaire that was made using google form to all of the respondents. the questionnaire used in this study was adapted from a questionnaire by retnawati et al. (2018) and andini (2017). it was modified to be fifty questions about hots and ten questions of protocol test that contain hots criteria. the item questionnaire consisted of five components, namely 1) teacher’s knowledge on hots, 2) implementing hots in the learning process, 3) learning strategies in implementing hots, 4) measuring and assessing hots, and 5) the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 207 benefits of hots for students in the learning process. the measurements used in this study are by using a likert scale with four options (i.e., strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree). the data collected from the questionnaire were analyzed quantitatively using simple descriptive statistics by calculating the average value of all answers from all question items. finally, the data were organized to go through data interpretation where the results were interpreted to become findings by categorizing the answers into very good (3.26-4.0), good (2.6-3.25), less good (1.76-2.5), and very poor (1-1.75) following arikunto’s (2003) theory. results and discussion the aim of this study is to investigate the knowledge of the jhs and shs english teachers on hots in bengkulu province. the results of the analysis are presented in the table 1; table 1. results of the questionnaire no components of hots teachers jhs shs mean category mean category 1 teachers’ knowledge on hots 3.38 very good 3.43 very good 2 implementing hots in learning process 3.31 very good 3.31 very good 3 learning strategies in implementing hots 3.18 good 3.29 very good 4 measuring and assessing hots 3.08 good 3.24 good 5 benefits of hots for students in learning process 3.25 good 3.30 very good average 3.24 good 3.31 very good as shown in table 1, it shows that the jhs and shs english teachers in bengkulu province understand hots in the english learning process. the knowledge of the jhs english teachers on hots was a good category with a mean score of 3.24. it is viewed from five components of hots in which two of them were a very good category (e.g. teachers’ knowledge on hots and implementing hots in the learning process), other components were a good category (e.g. learning strategies in implementing hots, measuring and assessing hots, and benefits of hots for students in the learning process). also, the shs english teachers’ knowledge of hots was a very good category with a mean score of 3.32. among the five components, there was one only component that had a good category, namely measuring and assessing hots, while other components were a very good category. teachers’ knowledge on hots the teachers’ knowledge on hots explains about the teachers’ understanding on hots. it consisted of twelve questions. the results are presented in table 2. wisma yunita, syahrial, & gita mutiara hati english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots) 208 table 2. teacher’ knowledge on hots no statements jhs shs mean category mean category 1 i know the terms of hots or higher order thinking skills. 3.44 very good 3.50 very good 2 i understand that hots is a thinking skill that is not just remembering and identifying 3.55 very good 3.58 very good 3 i understand that hots is a thinking skill that is in the cognitive domain of bloom's taxonomy 3.24 good 3.37 very good 4 i understand the six cognitive levels in boom taxonomy 3.20 good 3.16 good 5 in hots, knowledge of dimension developed in factual knowledge encourages the growth of meta-cognitive abilities 3.20 good 3.18 good 6 in hots, the knowledge of dimension developed in conceptual knowledge encourages the growth of metacognitive abilities. 3.14 good 3.31 very good 7 in hots, the knowledge of dimension developed in procedural knowledge encourages the growth of metacognitive abilities. 3.24 good 3.31 very good 8 hots fits the needs of 21th century skills. 3.60 very good 3.55 very good 9 hots increases the thinking level of students to be higher. 3.53 very good 3.54 very good 10 in the learning process that uses hots includes the level of analysis. 3.52 very good 3.63 very good 11 in the learning process that uses hots includes the level of evaluating 3.37 very good 3.50 very good 12 in the learning process that uses hots includes the level of creating 3.50 very good 3.54 very good average 3.38 very good 3.43 very good as presented in table 2, the jhs and shs english teachers have the same knowledge on hots that is very good. it indicates that they have been familiar with hots (e.g. terms and definition, the way of thinking skills, knowledge of dimension, level, the needs of hots for the 21st century). however, when it is viewed from each item of the question, there is a different response between the jhs and shs english teachers. the shs english teachers have a better understanding (a very good category) of hots’ knowledge than jhs in terms of items number 3, 6, and 7. implementing hots in learning process this component is intended to see the jhs and shs english teachers’ knowledge in implementing hots in the learning process. the results of the analysis are shown in table 3. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 209 table 3. implementing hots in learning process no statements jhs shs mean category mean category 13 i know a model of teaching based on hots that needs to be implemented in the process of learning english. 3.21 good 3.29 very good 14 project-based learning model encourages the thinking level of students to be higher. 3.39 very good 3.37 very good 15 problem-based learning model encourages the thinking level of students to be higher. 3.40 very good 3.40 very good 16 discovery learning model encourages the thinking level of students to be higher. 3.40 very good 3.32 very good 17 inquiry-based learning model encourages the thinking level of students to be higher. 3.37 very good 3.25 good 18 in the learning process, hots can be facilitated by practicing question and answer between students and teachers 3.28 very good 3.36 very good 19 in the learning process, hots can be facilitated by practicing question and answer between students and students 3.21 good 3.31 very good 20 in the learning process, hots can be facilitated by practicing group discussions 3.36 very good 3.36 very good 21 in the learning process, hots can be facilitated by using games 3.20 good 3.25 very good 22 in hots, students can be honed by providing questions that contain higher-order thinking processes 3.34 very good 3.24 good average 3.31 very good 3.31 very good as shown in table 3, the jhs and shs english teachers’ knowledge on implementing hots in the learning process is in a very category. it indicates that they know that hots can be integrated with learning models (e.g. projectbased learning, problem-based learning, discovery learning, and inquiry-based learning), practicing question and answer, group discussion, and games. the learning model applied in the learning process will influence the students’ interest to follow the learning in the classroom especially when applying hots. the learning model should have presented the stages of learning to provide a memorable, creative, and innovative learning experience (wahana, 2019) so that hots can be applied effectively. the teachers who can implement hots in the learning process give a positive impact on students. the student can develop their thinking quality and improve their knowledge for solving the problem and making the right decision (yee, lai, tee, & mohammad, 2016). also, it assists students' productive and receptive skills in english language learning. the students will be accustomed to thinking critically in everyday life whether in writing something, responding to a problem, listening to an event or opinion, and understanding the content in texts, articles, books, and so on. it confirms rosyida’s (2019) statement, language learning should link to the real situation of daily life. the students can get and feel the benefits of hots for their life. learning strategy in implementing hots in the learning process, hots is implemented with some learning strategies. it aims at improving students’ thinking skills in all learning activities. in this component, the questions about learning strategy in implementing hots consisted of seven questions. the results of the analysis are presented in table 4. wisma yunita, syahrial, & gita mutiara hati english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots) 210 table 4. learning strategy in implementing hots no statements jhs shs mean category mean category 23 learning containing hots can be done using the project-based learning model. 3.30 very good 3.39 very good 24 learning containing hots can be done using the discovery-based learning model. 3.08 good 3.28 very good 25 learning containing hots can be done using the inquiry-based learning model. 3.24 good 3.24 good 26 learning containing hots can be done using the problem-based learning model. 3.31 very good 3.41 very good 27 i know a learning model that can facilitate hots 3.05 good 3.18 good 28 in the learning process using hots, teachers can provide problems to be solved by students from low to high levels 3.28 very good 3.39 very good 29 in the learning process using hots, the teacher can assign students to read literature about hots 3.01 good 3.20 good average 3.18 good 3.29 very good as presented in table 4, there is a difference in knowledge between the jhs and shs english teachers on hots in which the jhs english teachers’ knowledge is a good category while the shs english teachers’ knowledge is a very good category. it implies that the shs english teachers’ knowledge of learning strategy in implementing hots is more superior than jhs english teachers. based on each item of the question, the jhs and shs english teachers have a different understanding in terms of item 24 (e.g. learning containing hots can be done using the discovery-based learning model) in which the response of the jhs english teachers is in a good category while the shs english teachers are in a very good category. meanwhile, other items of questions are responded to by both jhs and shs english teachers in a good category (e.g. item 25, 27, and 29) and a very good category (e.g. item 23, 26, and 28). for the responses in a good category, both jhs and shs still lack the understanding that hots can be done using the inquiry-based learning model, facilitate students to improve their hots ability, and assign students to read literature. the findings above imply that english teachers understand the learning strategies in the implementing hots in learning process. as emphasized by jamaluddin, kadir, abdullah, & alias (2020) and lopez, ibanes, & racines (2017), implementing the right and appropriate learning strategies for students can make the learning process becomes easier and can maximize students' potential for hots. thus, the learning models such as project-based learning, problem-based learning, discovery learning, and inquiry-based learning, practicing question and answer, group discussion, and games are the appropriate learning strategies in implementing hots for jhs and shs students. those ask students to think higher in solving the problems and find the right solution. measuring and assessing hots this component informs the jhs and shs english teachers’ knowledge of measuring and assessing hots in the learning process. this component of hots consisted of seven questions. the results of the analysis are presented in table 5. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 211 table 5. measuring and assessing hots no statements junior high school senior high school mean category mean category 30 i know how to design an assessment instrument that contains hots 2.94 good 3.06 good 31 students' high-order thinking skills (hots) can be measured using written assessments (for example, reading test questions in the form of multiple choice) 3.08 good 3.14 good 32 students' higher order thinking skills (hots) can be measured using oral assessments (e.g. presentations) 3.18 good 3.33 very good 33 students' higher order thinking skills (hots) can be measured using observational assessments in the learning process 3.18 good 3.35 very good 34 students’ higher order thinking skills (hots) can be measured using an assessment in the form of an essay 3.18 good 3.37 very good 35 students’ higher order thinking skills (hots) can be measured using an assessment in the form of open-ended problems. 3.15 good 3.35 very good 36 in making questions containing hots, i know what operational verbs (ov) can do 2.85 good 3.12 good average 3.08 good 3.24 good as presented in table 5, the results show that both jhs and shs english teachers have the same knowledge on measuring and assessing hots in the learning process that is a good category. however, there is a different response in each item of the question. the jhs english teachers’ response in all questions is a good category, while the shs english teachers’ response consists of two categories, namely a good category (questions number 30, 31, and 36) and a very good category (questions numbers 32, 33, 34 and 35). the results of this analysis indicate that both jhs and shs english teachers have known how to measure and do assessment hots in the learning process in bengkulu. abosalem (2016) argued that teachers should create assessment techniques that help them in their job and reveal students’ skills. therefore, the varieties of assessment methods should be applied by teachers such as observations, short answer questions, and multiple-choice questions (doganay & bal, 2010). widana (2017) suggested three characteristics of assessment hots for teachers, they are; 1) measure the ability of a high level; it includes the ability to solve problems (problem-solving), critical thinking skills (critical thinking), creative thinking (creative thinking), argued ability (reasoning), and make decisions (decisionmaking). 2) contextual issue; it loads stimulus in the form of the case (based on case) such as global issue. 3) not familiar for students; it aims at building students to think to be more creative. with those suggestions, the teachers should follow the assessment principles in assessing and measuring hots in the learning process. the benefits of hots for students in learning process hots gives students some benefits in the learning process. the benefits of hots are described in fourteen questions. the results of the analysis are presented in table 6. it shows that shs english teachers have better knowledge than jhs english teachers on the benefits of host for their students in the learning process. wisma yunita, syahrial, & gita mutiara hati english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots) 212 table 6. the benefits of hots for students in learning process no statements junior high school senior high school mean category mean category 37 in learning using hots, students ask questions more often 3.21 good 3.21 good 38 in learning using hots, students become more courageous in expressing their opinions. 3.24 good 3.32 very good 39 in learning using hots, students become more willing to make observations. 3.15 good 2.82 good 40 in learning using hots, students want to do experiments. 3.23 good 3.37 very good 41 in learning using hots, it will foster the students’ creativity. 3.30 very good 3.47 very good 42 in learning using hots, students take advantage of existing information technology in schools. 3.20 good 3.43 very good 43 in learning using hots, students apply procedural knowledge to specific areas of study to solve problems. 3.18 good 3.31 very good 44 in learning using hots, students process what they learn at school independently 2.97 good 3.18 good 45 in learning using hots, reasoning from what he learns in school independently. 3.01 good 3.16 good 46 in learning using hots, presenting what they learn in school independently. 3.01 good 3.10 good 47 in learning using hots, students are encouraged to do higher physical activity 3.20 good 2.67 good 48 in learning using hots, students are encouraged to do higher mental activity 3.07 good 3.08 good 49 in learning using hots, it encourages the creativity of students to solve problems and ultimately find solutions. 3.30 very good 3.43 very good 50 in learning using hots, it opens opportunities for students to use a variety of techniques, media and equipment. 3.31 very good 3.44 very good average 3.25 good 3.30 very good table 6 shows that among fourteen questions, the jhs english teachers only responded to three items of questions with a very good category. item 41 (hots will foster students’ creativity), item 49 (hots encourage students’ creativity to solve problems and ultimately find solutions), and item 50 (hots opens opportunities for students to use a variety of techniques, media, and equipment). meanwhile, the shs english teachers responded to seven items of questions with a very good category, namely item 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, and 50. according to the results of the research presented in table 1, it indicates that both jhs and shs english teachers have good ability in implementing hots principles in the english teaching and learning process even though the jhs english teachers’ knowledge on hots is in a good category. it also assumes that they have had good cognitive skills because hots and cognitive are related to each other. the cognitive skill in taxonomy bloom's theory includes knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (brookhart, 2010). it means that the level of hots is higher than memorizing facts or retelling something that is heard (yuliati & lestari, 2018). thus, hots is an important thing in educational policy implementation in indonesia to improve the students’ ability in thinking skills. in this case, teachers and students are the main targets for implementing hots. english teachers who have good and very good knowledge of hots affect the english language teaching and learning process, the students, and the goals of the english language learning at jhs and shs. as affirmed by dinni (2018) and saputra (2016), hots is the ability to solve problems, think creatively, think critically, the ability to argue, and the ability to make decisions. students in every learning activity must have the skill of hots today (kusuma et al., 2017; sulaiman et al., 2017). it can be applied when making questions in language skills and language knowledge tasks for the students in the english teaching and learning process. the teachers develop those questions containing hots principles, and the students will answer the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 213 questions by using their critical thinking skills. therefore, teachers and students are related to the importance of hots in english language learning (retnawati et al., 2018). the students support the teachers’ professional development, so do the students (avargil, herscovitz, & dori, 2012). in addition, table 1 shows that the shs english teachers tend to have better knowledge than jhs english teachers do. however, their knowledge is in a good and a very good category. it seems that there are some factors influenced such as class environment (budsankom, sawangboon, damrongpanit, & chuensirimongkol 2005), academic background (nisa, nadiroh, & siswono, 2018), teachers’ motivation (teachers’ want to know. the difference of finding on the jhs and shs english teachers’ knowledge on hots is not only shown in the questionnaire, but also the results of the protocol test. this test was tested consisting of ten questions. among those questions, only seven questions contain hots (e.g., question no of 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10) while others contain lower-order thinking skills (lots) (e.g., question no of 1, 2, and 6). the results are presented in table 7. table 7. the results of protocol test no level of questions junior high school n senior high schools n correct wrong correct wrong 3 cognitive 3: (hots) – c5 (evaluate) – ov conclude 30 39 69 32 42 74 4 cognitive 3: (hots) – c5 (evaluate) – ov choose 53 16 69 63 11 74 5 cognitive 3: (hots) – c5 (evaluate) – ov decide 48 21 69 59 15 74 7 cognitive 3: (hots) – c5 (evaluate) – ov decide 64 5 69 69 5 74 8 cognitive 3: (hots) – c5 (evaluate) – ov choose 43 26 69 53 21 74 9 cognitive 3:(hots) – c4 (analyze) – ov check 65 4 69 70 4 74 10 cognitive 3: (hots) – c5 (evaluate) – ov decide 23 46 69 27 47 74 total 326 157 483 373 145 518 percentage 67.50% 32.50% 100% 72% 28% 100% table 7 shows that the percentage of correct answers from shs english teachers is higher than jhs english teachers. it indicates that the shs english teachers are better than jhs english teachers in answering the hots questions. the results assume that higher education levels demand the english teachers to have more ability to hots in the english teaching and learning process. comparing to the previous studies, the findings of this study were in line with sukmawijaya et al's. (2020) study, the authors of the english textbook for tenth-grade who have a background in english language teaching entitled bahasa inggris published by the ministry of education and culture of the republic of indonesia to have good knowledge of hots. it is viewed from the proportion of hots that has been integrated well by the authors in making language skills and language components tasks in the textbook. however, the different findings were also found in several studies conducted by several scholars about the english teachers’ and nonenglish teachers’ knowledge of hots. pratiwi, dewi, & paramartha (2019) reported that the knowledge of the english teachers in bali about hots is still low. it was proved by the summative tests made by them is still far from the hots principle. likewise, in the english textbook context, febriani et al. (2020) reported that the composition of hots in the language skills and language knowledge tasks in the textbook were not fulfilled yet the criteria of hots. it assumes that the authors of the textbook have not had a good ability in hots. the low knowledge about hots is also found in nonenglish teachers. retnawati et al’s. (2018) study revealed that the mathematic teachers’ knowledge of hots was low. although the findings of this study revealed that the english teachers’ knowledge of hots wisma yunita, syahrial, & gita mutiara hati english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots) 214 was good and very good, this study also has weaknesses. it is in terms of the numbers of the participants of the study that has not received a larger number of samples in bengkulu province, especially jhs and shs english teachers who live in remote areas. therefore, it is suggested for the further researcher to conduct a study with more numbers of respondents, so that more comprehensive data will be reached. conclusion this paper has done analyzing the jhs and shs english teachers’ knowledge on hots in bengkulu province. based on the results of the analysis, it can be concluded that the jhs and shs english teachers in bengkulu have different knowledge of hots. the knowledge of jhs english teachers is a good category, while shs english teachers’ knowledge is very good on hots. their knowledge on hots was viewed in five components, namely teacher’s knowledge on hots (terms, definition, and level of hots), implementing hots in the learning process, learning strategy in implementing hots, assessing, and measuring hots, and the benefits of hots in the learning process. also, the results of the protocol test on hots show that the shs english teachers have more correct answers than jhs english teachers. the findings of this study inform the knowledge map of the junior high school and senior high school english teachers in bengkulu province on high-level thinking skills (hots), which can be useful for determining government policies related to teaching the english language, especially in bengkulu province. references abdullah, a h., mokhtar, m., halim, n. d. a., ali, d. f., tahir, l. m., & kohar, u. a. h. 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(2018). higher-order thinking skills (hots) analysis of students in solving hots questions in higher education. perspektif ilmu pendidikan, 32(2), 181-188. https://doi.org/10.21009/pip.322.10. http://doi.org/10.21009/plpb.192.01 http://dx.doi.org/10.33369/joall.v5i2.10565 https://ejournal.unib.ac.id/index.php/semiba http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v8n8p10 https://doi.org/10.21009/pip.322.10 wisma yunita, syahrial, & gita mutiara hati english teachers’ knowledge on higher order thinking skills (hots) 216 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 183 metacognitive learning strategies in argumentative writing skills erwin oktoma language education study program, state university of jakarta email: erwinoktoma_7317157768@mhs.unj.ac.id zainal rafli language education study program, state university of jakarta email: zainal.rafli@unj.ac.id aceng rahmat language education study program, state university of jakarta email: aceng.rahmat@unj.ac.id apa citation: oktoma e., rafli, z., & rahmat, a. (2020). metacognitive learning strategies in argumentative writing skills. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 183-192. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3795 received: 28-06-2020 accepted: 29-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 abstract: this study aims to determine the effect of metacognitive learning strategies on students' argumentative writing skills. this research was conducted on third semester students of the english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan. a quantitative approach was chosen with an experimental data collection technique tests as a used method, namely: (1) test of argumentative writing skills. this study examines the effect of metacognitive learning strategies on students' argumentative writing skills. the learning strategies used are metacognitive learning strategies (experimental class) and control class concept map learning strategies. the findings indicate that metacognitive learning strategies are effective in teaching students' argumentative writing in english. regarding the results of this study, the application of different learning strategies is needed in students' argumentative writing learning. based on the results and conclusions above, it turns out that metacognitive learning strategies have a significant effect on students' argumentative writing skills in english. thus, this research provides a beneficial implication in planning and developing learning strategies which will be used in improving students' argumentative writing skills in english, especially with regard to the application of appropriate learning strategies. the argumentative writing skills of students who were given metacognitive learning strategies were better than those who were given concept map learning strategies instead. in this case, the role of the lecturer is very important so that to improve students' argumentative writing skills, metacognitive strategies are more effectively applied in class. keywords: metacognitive learning strategies; thinking ability; argumentative writing introduction writing is seen as a means of a written communicating messages or information between the writer and the reader. in addition, writing is also a diction practice to convey the message in a more comprehensible manner for readers. writing means producing a series of sentences which are arranged in an orderly manner and are interrelated in a certain way so that a series of arranged sentences becomes a text; which is not an easy and spontaneous activity. the implementation of learning to write according to wage and dantes (2015), needs to pay attention to the following matters: (1) writing is a process of two parties namely students as writers and teachers as readers and guides, (2) the experience must depart from the students themselves, so that ideas can be developed easily, (3) writing can be improved if the exercises run continuously, (4) the meaning and expression of the mind is prioritized rather than the stylized and composed of the writing. in a writing, someone often needs arguments to express their ideas. one of the texts which requires arguments is argumentative text. in argumentative writing, which contains the author's opinion in order to influence others, must have a strong foundation in describing the facts. mccrimmon (1984) writes that persuasion or argumentation is verbal a communication which seeks to make changes in making decisions voluntarily so that audience accept a new belief which was not previously believed. the form of verbal communication used is through written communication to convince the reader to switch their stance voluntarily in making decisions in accordance with the expectations of the author. this opinion is supported by mcdonald (1996) who uses the term rhetoric or rhetoric as another mailto:aceng.rahmat@unj.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3795 erwin oktoma, zainal rafli, & aceng rahmat metacognitive learning strategies in argumentative writing skills 184 term for argumentative, which is the use of persuasive language to influence readers or listeners. in other words, argumentative writing is the use of persuasive language or an invitation to influence the reader to make a change in thinking. these changes may be as simple as passing on one's beliefs to others or further influencing actions such as getting to choose person a over person b, asking to quit smoking, or to buy a product. argumentative writing is very important for students to master considering that this type of writing is widely used in various aspects of life, for example: in writing scientific papers, religious lectures, advertorials, for appeals, to campaign for someone or a program, and others. the writer must also be able to criticize something wisely and acceptable to reader's thoughts. in other words, the opinion expressed by the author must be reasonable and genuine. argumentative writing is not only concerned with clarity but requires conviction by means of existing facts, indirectly, through the writer's conviction, it can influence the author in uttering logical statements and the writer will be able to account for his writing properly. alwasilah (2008) explains that there are several components of an argument, as follows: the first component is an introduction or an exordium (exhortation) to the audience. introduction acts to attract the reader's interest or attention, and introduce the subject of discussion. second is thesis, a thesis is a statement regarding the position (attitude) towards an issue. the reader is led by the author to agree with the thesis or proposition (pro-position, i.e. side with a position) the evidence presented must support a thesis. third, conclusion, the conclusion means nothing but to strengthen the thesis previously described. in learning to write arguments for the use of learning strategies, basically, it is a suitable way of doing assignments or more generally in achieving goals (kirby, 1984). meanwhile, according to sanjaya (2006), to be able to achieve the results of learning to write english which is the goal of learning to write english, a strategy is needed which is in accordance with the nature of the writing lesson itself. according to sanjaya, the learning strategy is a way used by the teacher to achieve learning objectives which depend on the approach or method used. metacognition or metacognitive is a term coined by flavel and miller (1993) in 1976 starting from its limitations as a study of the psychology of cognition, since the 1970s metacognition has attracted the attention of scientists from other fields to also study it. now, besides being a study in the field of cognitive psychology, metacognition has become a study in the fields of language, mental disorders, mathematics and education. this development seems to be supported by a belief that metacognition as part of cognition is likely to experience changes in terms of capacities, strategies and forms of knowledge. research in the development of metacognition began in the 1970s brown, john flavell, and their colleagues. in the beginning, metacognition was broadly defined as knowledge or cognitive activity which makes cognitive activity its cognitive object, or which regulates cognitive activity itself (schneider, 2008). larkin (2010) says that "metacognition" comes from "meta" and "cognition". from his understanding, "meta" refers to a change in position, a thing which is moving outward or towards a higher level while "cognition" refers to our ability or ability to know or think. thus, "metacognition" describes a higher thought process, something which is reflective and constantly moves beyond the normal level of thinking in reflecting on the thinking itself. besides that metacognition is our knowledge of cognitive processes and how to use them optimally to achieve learning goals (pitenoee & ardestani, 2017). to illustrate this concept panahandeh and espandiari (2014) describe a study in which preschool and elementary children learn a set of items until they feel they can remember them perfectly. older children, once they have indicated they are ready, exhibit "perfect memories," whereas younger children usually do not. these results suggest that preschoolers are very limited in their knowledge and cognition of cognitive phenomena or in their metacognitive behaviour. it is clear that this definition refers to people's knowledge of information processing skills and knowledge of the nature of cognitive tasks, and of coping strategies for those tasks. this concept also includes executive skills related to monitoring and self-regulating their own cognitive activities. flavel in priscilla & ruan (2008) suggests three aspects of metacognition, namely metacognition knowledge, metacognition experience, and metacognition skills which are a strategy in controlling cognition. metacognitive knowledge is characterized by combinations of information around three self-knowledge variables. tasks and strategies which will be effective in achieving the objectives of the tasks english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 185 to be assigned. metacognitive experiences are metacognitive items which have entered the realm of consciousness, and can include evaluations where someone completes a task, or perhaps a sense of confusion where someone may or may not act. metacognitive knowledge is differentiated from metacognitive activity. metacognitive knowledge involves monitoring and reflecting on one's thoughts in the present moment. this includes factual knowledge, such as knowledge of tasks, goals or self and strategic knowledge, such as how and when to use specific procedures to solve problems. metacognition activity, on the other hand, occurs in students consciously adjusting and managing their thinking strategies when solving problems in thinking about a goal (santrock, 2004). baird in cubucku (2008) defines metacognition as knowledge, awareness, and selfcontrol. thus, the development of metacognition can be described as a development of one's metacognitive abilities, namely leading to greater knowledge, awareness and control of one's learning. larkin (2010) says that "metacognition" comes from "meta" and "cognition." according to him, "meta" refers to a change in position, something which is moving outward or towards a higher layer. "cognition" refers to our ability or ability to know or think. thus "metacognition" describes a higher thought process, something which is reflective and continues to move beyond the normal level of thinking in reflecting on the thinking itself. cazden defined metalinguistic consciousness like the metamemory definition flavell uses. both use the word meta which refers to reflective awareness of cognitive processes, while butterfield, wambold and belmont place an important emphasis on the control of a cognitive process called the executive process. this process has actually become part of the definition of metacognition given. flavell and bown. cavanaugh and perlmutter argue that the content of memory knowledge is called metamemory. baker and anderson in lawson more generally state that metacognition is knowledge and control of cognitive processes it has (lawson, 1984). therefore, people who have metacognition strategies are those who have knowledge and control of thinking and learning activities. according to hacker (2017), a person's ability to control various cognitive activities is carried out through action and interaction between four phenomena: (1) metacognition knowledge; (2) experience of metacognition; refers to what a person believes about his own state of mind, for example the belief which he is intelligent, knowledgeable, understands faster by hearing than by reading, has begun to forget often, is slow to think, and so on. (3) objectives (tasks); with regard to a person's knowledge of the nature of a particular task, for example the awareness that this job is more difficult than previous jobs, such work demands a lot of time, and this concept is not well mastered, and so on, and (4) action (strategy), relating to someone's knowledge of ways to carry out an activity, for example, this way is more appropriate than others for purposes and contexts like this, the best way to memorize a lot of material is to focus on the main idea, associate with things already known, and repeated it in his own language many times. furthermore, he said metacognition consists of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experience and regulation. thus, it can be stated that metacognition is (1) the process of monitoring and directing one's own thoughts so that something is achieved more optimally, (2) a person's knowledge of his own state or thought process, and (3) a person's ability to monitor and direct his own thoughts to achieve something expected. models and theory of metacognition on the other hand, researchers such as pintrich, wolters and bexters in cubucku (2008) argue that there are three main components of metacognition, namely metacognition knowledge, metacognition monitoring and regulation and self-control. first, metacognitive knowledge consists of cognitive learning strategies which learners use to regulate the knowledge acquisition process. this includes elaboration strategies such as building relationships with pre-existing knowledge, or memory strategies such as note-taking. both metacognition monitoring consist of metacognition control strategies. what is important here are activities such as planning and monitoring learning activities, evaluating the impact of learning and adjusting to various task demands, and (unexpected) difficulties. metacognitive strategies involve thinking about the learning process, planning learning, monitoring and learning assignments and how to evaluate what has been learned (panahandeha & esfandiari, 2014). besides the two models above, the third group of strategies is aimed at management, resources and self-management. these strategies are erwin oktoma, zainal rafli, & aceng rahmat metacognitive learning strategies in argumentative writing skills 186 concerned with controlling the general conditions associated with learning, such as time management and learning environment management. the model proposed by pintrich in cubucku (2008, p.2) states that "students develop perceptions of task demands, seen in metacognition monitoring, selecting and executing metacognition strategies which are appropriate for task demands, and evaluating performance tasks which illustrate the effectiveness of cognitive strategies." another cognitive model proposed by winne and hadwin has four basic stages, task definition, goal setting and planning, creation, and adjustment. this model states that students generate a perception of what is the task and the availability of resources, a plan shows the task, plays learning strategies, and makes changes to their cognitive structure based on performance perceptions. pintrich synthesized various expert opinions into a general framework which includes (a) initial thinking, planning and activation, (b) monitoring, (c) control, and (d) reaction and reflection. schneider (2008) elaborated on the theoretical model proposed by flavell, which they called the good information processing model. according to this model, sophisticated metacognition is closely related to the use of learner strategies, motivational orientation, general knowledge of the world, and the use of efficient automated learning procedures. all of these components are assumed to interact. for example, knowledge of specific strategies influences the application of adequate metacognitive strategies, which in turn influences knowledge. as these strategies are implemented, they are monitored and evaluated, leading to expansion and improvement of specific strategy knowledge. more recently conceptualization has added to its component self-regulating skills. originally, the concept of metacognition was developed in the context of development research, but is now widely used in different fields of psychology, including motivational research and clinical psychology and education. recent developments have also included cognitive neuroscience models of metacognition, the popularity of which is because metacognition is essential for everyday conceptual offerings and for those who value scientific thinking, as well as for social interactions. a recent research paradigm which is quite influential which aims to understand metacognitive processes within its developmental dimension, tries to link the 'minda theory' (tm) of children with their continuous metacognition development (schneider, 2008). metacognitive experiences involve metacognition strategies or metacognition regulation. metacognique strategy is a sequential process used to control cognitive activity and ensure that cognitive goals have been achieved (schneider, 2008). this process consists of planning and monitoring cognitive activities and evaluating the results of these activities. planning activities such as setting goals and analyzing assignments help activate relevant knowledge to make it easier to organize and understand lesson material. monitoring activation includes a person's attention when he is reading, and making questions or self-examination. this activity helps students understand the material and integrate it with initial knowledge. regulatory activities include adjustment and improvement of students' cognitive activities. this activity helps increase performance by monitoring and correcting his behavior when he completes assignments. for example, after reading a paragraph in a text, students ask themselves about the concepts discussed in that paragraph. the cognitive goal is to make sense of the text. asking oneself is a metacognitive strategy. if he finds that he cannot answer his own questions, or that he cannot understand the material under discussion, he then determines what needs to do to ensure that he achieves that cognitive goal. he may decide to repeat or reread the paragraph in order to be able to answer his own question. in the information-processing model, this experience or metacognition management is called executive process or executive control. executive control involves a process of metacognition. this process activates and directs the flow of information during learning. this strategy directs students' choices towards the cognitive strategies they use to determine what to do during the problem-solving process. what it does depends on the expectations or goals and on the strategies used to achieve the goals. for example, a student studying for a test will use a different strategy if he or she is preparing to teach a skill. according to klowe in hacker (2017), the process of monitoring selection and application as well as the influence of the process and regulation of problem-solving activities constitutes metacognitive procedural knowledge. the executive process involves both monitoring and regulating thought processes, because it is related to flavell's metacognition strategy and metacognition skills. the executive monitoring english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 187 process is a process which is directed at obtaining information about a person's thought processes. this process involves helping someone's decision (1) identifying the task, (2) monitoring the progress of the work, (3) evaluating this progress, and (4) predicting the obtained outcome. the executive management process is a process which is directed at the process of organizing one's thinking. this process helps (1) allocate available resources to do tasks, (2) determine the steps for completing the task, and (3) determine the intensity, or (4) the speed in completing the task. livingstone (2002) analogizes this difference with differences in theory and practice. knowledge is relatively consistent within a person while unstable settings, independent of age, can change depending on the situation. you exhibit self-regulatory behavior just in certain situations, and the child exhibits self-regulatory behavior which adults do not. anxiety, fears and interests and self-concepts such as self-esteem can influence regulations. the regulatory process tends to be more unconscious. the ability to bring automated skills to consciousness is a characteristic of high metacognition and intelligence. by developing self-awareness, means developing intelligence. halter (2017) classifies metacognition strategy indicators into three groups. first, awareness includes the awareness of identifying what is already known, determining learning objectives, considering learning aids, considering the form of tasks, determining how to evaluate how to evaluate learning achievement, considering the level of motivation, and determining the level of anxiety. second, planning, includes activities to estimate the time needed to complete a task, planning study time into a schedule, making checklists about the activities which need to be done, organizing the material and taking the steps needed to learn using cognitive strategies. third, monitoring and reflection, includes activities to supervise the learning process, monitor learning with own questions, provide feedback and maintain concentration and motivation. in more detail, the indicators for metacognition strategies are classified as follows. (1) selfplanning, has indicators of learning objectives, relevant initial knowledge, and cognitive strategies to be used. (2) self-monitoring, has indicators on monitoring the achievement of learning objectives, monitoring time used, monitoring hypotheses of initial knowledge material with new subject matter, and monitoring cognitive strategies used. (3) self-evaluation, has indicators of evaluation of the achievement of learning objectives, evaluation of the time used, evaluation of the relevance of initial knowledge with new subject matter, and evaluation of cognitive strategies which have been used. oxpord (1990) classifies learning strategies into two major groups, namely direct strategies and indirect strategies. direct strategies can also be divided into three groups of strategies, namely memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and compensation strategies. furthermore, indirect strategies are divided into three groups of strategies, namely metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social strategies. metacognition strategy is one group of strategies which are classified into indirect strategies. it is said that the strategy is indirect because these strategies support and regulate the learning process, which indirectly involves the language being learned. metacognition strategies allow learners to control their own cognition, namely coordinating learning processes using functions such as centering, arranging, planning and evaluating (oxpord, (1990). metacognition also includes three sets of strategies, (a) centering your learning, (b) arranging and planning your learning and (c) evaluating your learning. it also consists of several more concrete strategies or the strategies obtained are disclosed in detail. the following table describes the strategies contained in each strategy set (oxpord, 1990). another metacognition strategy model is a model developed by anna et al. (1999). they develop a metacognition model for strategic learning. this model is based on extensive studies of learning strategies whose data relates to the effective use of strategies in a second or foreign language. learning strategies are selected for inclusion in the model based on their usefulness and applicability in a wide variety of learning tasks thus learners can use these strategies in the four language skills, such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. the model developed by anna et al consists of four metacognition processes, namely planning, monitoring, problem solving and evaluation. the four metacognition strategies are not necessarily sequential but can be used as needed, depending on the needs of the task and the interactions between tasks. the image below illustrates the relationship between the four metacognition processes proposed by anna et al (1999). producing a good argumentative writing is not easy since a writer requires a complex process and needs continuous practice so that the writer erwin oktoma, zainal rafli, & aceng rahmat metacognitive learning strategies in argumentative writing skills 188 will be trained in expanding the idea systematically and logically. from the results of observations, the main problem in this study was that the students of the english language education study program, fkip, universitas kuningan were less able to develop argumentative writing seen from the results of the argumentative writing skills test at the time of taking the initial research data. this problem arises since; first, it is difficult for lecturers to determine the right learning strategy in the learning process of argumentative writing skills, as a result, the learning process is not well organized. second, the learning process does not lead to the achievement of the final goal, which is, students are less able to produce written products (argumentative). third, the learning process in argumentative writing skills seems to prioritize cognitive aspects only. fourth, student responses in learning argumentative writing skills are very low since the first place they already think that learning to write is very difficult so that students are unmotivated and less active when the learning process takes place. based on this description, it can be concluded that the development of argumentative writing can be carried out and improved through learning strategies including metacognition strategies because students must plan, then monitor and control their thoughts and can express and group ideas to be written logically and hierarchically. the problems studied in this study relate to argumentative writing skills in english (variable y) and learning strategies using metacognition learning strategies as experimental variables, (variable x1). method this study aims to determine empirically the effect of metacognition strategies on students' argumentative writing skills. this research was conducted at the faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan, english education study program semester iii, the research lasted for 3 months, namely from february to april 2018-2019 academic year. the method used in this research is experimental research. in this research design, the sample is divided into two groups, namely the experimental group and the control group. the first group is an experimental group consisting of students who are treated with metacognition learning strategies. the second group is a control group consisting of students who are treated with argumentative writing skills using concept map learning strategies. in this design, the total sample size is 52 people, consisting of 26 people as the experimental group (learning with metacognition strategies) and 26 people as the control group (learning with the concept map strategy). there are two kinds of instruments used for data collection in this study, namely: (1) test of argumentative writing skills. in order to measure the research variables quantitatively, the research variables of argumentative writing skills are defined as follows. a) conceptual definition, argumentative writing skills. in this study is the ability to carry out verbal communication as a process of developing and communicating ideas, experiences, and ideas effectively which involves transferring them into written language so that readers voluntarily accept a new belief which is not believed beforehand that writing must be supported by various definitions. examples of category classifications and applying the law of causality by following the rules of good argumentative writing including problem explanations, thesis statements, rebuttals to opposing arguments, composing their own arguments, and skills to compose words or sentences which become a text. the expected result is that the arguments are well structured, comprehensible with an excellent diction, structure sentences with good grammatical and structure using spelling, punctuation, and capital letters correctly. b) operational definition, operationally argumentative writing skills are the scores of the results of students' argumentative writing skills tests by following the rules of argumentative writing with criteria for content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics. results and discussion the description of the research data is intended to see in general the depiction of the argumentative writing skills of students who are the subjects of the study. the students' argumentative writing skills are divided into three groups based on learning strategies (metacognition strategy and concept map strategy): 1) argumentative writing skills of students who learn with metacognitive learning strategies (a1). 2) argumentative writing skills of students who learn the concept map learning strategy (a2). students' argumentative writing skills are given metacognitive learning strategies (a1). the data on students' argumentative writing skills for the group english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 189 learning with metacognitive strategies, obtained a maximum score of 91, a minimum score of 68, an average score of 79.15 standard deviation of 8.37. from the maximum and minimum scores, the score ranges from 23 class intervals and the number of classes 6. with these data, the frequency distribution table of students' argumentative writing skills for students learning with metacognitive learning strategies is as in the table below. table 1. frequency distribution of scores for argumentative writing skills for students who learn with metacognitive strategies (a1) no. score absolute frequency cumulative frequency relative frequency (%) 1 68 – 71 7 7 26.9 2 72 – 75 5 12 19.2 3 76 – 79 1 13 3.8 4 80 – 83 1 14 3.8 5 84 – 87 7 21 26.9 6 88 – 91 5 26 19.2 total 26 100 figure 1. the histogram of argumentative writing skills scores for students who learn metacognitive strategies (a1) argumentative writing skills for students who learn with concept map strategies (a2) data on the argumentative writing skills of students learning with concept map strategies, obtained a maximum score of 88, a minimum score of 68, an average count of 77.46 standard deviation of 6.56 and a variance of 42.98. from the maximum and minimum scores, the score range is 20, the class 4 interval and the number of classes 6. based on the data above, a frequency distribution table for students' argumentative writing skills is made for those who provide concept map strategies, as in the table below. 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 67,5 71,5 75,5 79,5 83,5 87,5 91,5 erwin oktoma, zainal rafli, & aceng rahmat metacognitive learning strategies in argumentative writing skills 190 table 2. frequency distribution of argumentative writing skills scores of students who learn with the concept map strategy (a2) no. score absolute frequency cumulative frequency relative frequency (%) 1 68 – 71 7 7 26.9 2 72 – 75 5 12 19.2 3 76 – 79 1 13 3.8 4 80 – 83 1 14 3.8 5 84 – 87 7 21 26.9 6 88 – 91 5 26 19.2 total 26 100 figure 2. the histogram for the score of argumentative writing skills for students who learn with the concept map strategy (a2) table 3. summary of scores for argumentative writing skills in english of all data groups in this study. data group statistics n sample lowest score highest score mean standard deviation metacognitive strategy (a1) 26 68 91 79.15 8.37 concept map strategy (a2) 26 68 88 77.46 6.56 a two-way analysis of variance (anova) was used in this study. analysis is allowed if the student's argumentative writing skills data comes from a population whish is normally distributed and homogeneous. therefore, before testing the hypothesis, it is necessary to test the normality and homogeneity requirements. table 4. results of the summary of normality test for argumentative writing skills sample group n lo l1 (α = 0.05) summary 1. a1 2. a2 26 26 0.152 0.173 0.174 0.174 normal normal in this study the variant homogeneity test was carried out on: (1) two groups, students 'argumentative writing skills in the group learning with metacognitive strategies (a1) and students' argumentative writing skills in groups learning with concept map strategies (a2), 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 67,5 71,5 75,5 79,5 83,5 87,5 91,5 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 191 test of variants of two treatment groups (a1 and a2) the homogeneity test of the variance of the two treatment groups in this study was carried out by calculating the fratio between the largest variance and the smallest variance of the two groups being tested. the calculation is by dividing the largest variance with the smallest variance of the tested group (sudjana, p.1989), then compared with the ftable value at the significant level α = 0.01 and the degrees of freedom respectively = 25 based on the calculation results obtained fcalculation = 1.75, while f0.001 (25 25) = 2.26. when compared, then fcalculation is smaller than ftable or 1.75 <2.62. this means that h0 is accepted. thus, two groups, namely the argumentative writing skills of students learning with metacognitive strategies (a1), and the other group, namely the argumentative writing skills of students learning with the concept map strategy (a2), were homogeneous. this means that between groups of students learning with metacognitive strategies and groups of students learning with concept map strategies are treated the same. based on the results of the two-way analysis of variance (anova), it can be explained: a). the results of the analysis of the two-way variance between columns show: fcalculation (a) = 5.22 is greater than ftable = 4.04 at the significance level α = 0.05. it shows that ho is rejected and accepts h1. this proves that there is a significant difference in argumentative writing skills between students who learn with metacognitive learning strategies and students who learn with concept map learning strategies. statistical hypothesis: ho: µa1 ≤ µa2, h1: µa1> µa2. the results of the two-way analysis of variance between the columns show that the value of fcalculation = 5.22 is greater than ftable = 4.04 at the significance level α = 0.05. this means that ho is rejected and accepts h1. after testing the significant difference, the next step is to see which is better student's argumentative writing skills between the two treatments. based on the results of the calculation, it turns out that the average score of argumentative writing skills of students who learn with metacognitive learning strategies (a1) is 79.15 better than the argumentative writing skills of students who learn with concept map learning strategies (a2) the average score is 77.46. thus, the argumentative writing skills of students with metacognitive strategies are better than those with concept map strategies. the discussion of the results of the study was carried out based on the data descriptions of students' argumentative writing skills and the results of hypothesis testing as previously described. in this study, there were differences found in students' argumentative writing skills between students who studied with metacognitive learning strategies and groups of students who studied with concept map learning strategies. this is evidenced by the two-way anova test obtained fcalculation = 5.221> ftable = 4.04 which was tested significantly at α = 0.05 this is because metacognitive learning strategies can help students in writing in a wellstructured and focused manner. during the writing process, students generally find it difficult to organize their ideas, which resulted in irregular essays. metacognitive strategies are especially helpful in overcoming these difficulties, namely in finding ideas and developing these ideas into argumentative writing, by looking at the overall picture of the argument and assessing objectively whether the arguments and structure of the essay make sense. metacognition strategies not only help plan what to write, but are also useful when writing it in a whole. to check whether the writing is still in the correct writing flow, the essay can be reconfirmed with metacognitive. in contrast to the concept map strategy, this strategy explores and utilizes a variety of one's past experiences as the main idea and a very diverse source of written information to be transcribed into written form. of the many life experiences, topics can be selected based on information from events which have been experienced by themselves or others. conclusion this study examines the effect of metacognitive learning strategies on students' argumentative writing skills in semester iii students of the english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan. metacognitive learning strategies and concept map learning strategies were used as the learning strategies. based on the results of hypothesis testing described in the previous chapter, the following conclusions can be drawn. argumentative writing skills, students who are given metacognition learning strategies are better than students who learn with concept map learning strategies. based on the conclusions, students' argumentative writing skills in english can improve if they learn using metacognitive erwin oktoma, zainal rafli, & aceng rahmat metacognitive learning strategies in argumentative writing skills 192 learning strategies. these findings indicate that metacognitive learning strategies are effective in teaching students' argumentative writing in english. regarding the results of this study, the application of different learning strategies is needed in students' argumentative writing learning. based on the findings of the research results and the discussion of the conclusions above, it turns out that metacognitive learning strategies have a significant effect on students' argumentative writing skills in english. thus, this research has implications, especially in planning and developing learning strategies that will be used in improving students' argumentative writing skills in english. the finding that the argumentative writing skills of students who were given metacognitive learning strategies were better than students who were given concept map learning strategies had implications, especially with regard to the application of appropriate learning strategies. in this case, the role of the lecturer is very important so that to improve students' argumentative writing skills, metacognitive strategies are expected to be more effectively applied in class. references alwasilah, a. c. 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(1984). strategies and processes in john r. kirby (ed). cognitive strategies and educational performance. london: academic pressinc. larkin, s. (2010). metacognition. london: routledge lawson, michael j. (1984). being executive about metacognition. in john r. kirbi (ed). cognitive strategies and educational performance. london: academic press inc. 1984. livingstone, j. a. (2003). metacognition: an overview. macdonald, a., & macdonald, g. (1996). mastering writing essentials. new jersey: practice hall regent. mccrimmon, james m. (1984). writing with a purpose, usa: houghton miffin co oxpord, r. l. (1990) language learning strategies: what every teacher should know. boston: heinle & heinle publisher panahandeh, esmaeil., & shahram, e. (2014). the effect of planning and monitoring as metacognitive strategies on iranian efl learners’ argumentative writing accuracy. procedia-sosial and behavioral sciences, 98, 1409-1416. panahandeha,e., esfandiari. s (2014). the effect of planning and monitoring as metacognitive strategies on iranian efl learners' argumentative writing accuracy. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 98. pitenoee. r.m., modaberi. a., & ardestani.m.e. (2017). the effect of cognitive and metacognitive writing strategies on content of the iranian intermediate efl learners’ writing. journal of language teaching and research, 8(3). retrieved from: http://146.87.24.:9:300/,metacognition.htm. 2002. sanjaya, w. (2006). strategi pembelajaran berorientasi standar proses pendidikan. jakarta: kencana. santrock, j. w. (2004). educational psychology. 2nd edition. new york: mc grawhill company, inc. schneider, w. (2008). the development of metacognitif knowledge in children and adolescent: major trends and implications for education. journal compilation: international mind, brain and educationsociety and wiley periodicals, 2(2). wage, w., wage, dantes, n., dantes, g. r. (2015). implementasi pembelajaran peta konsep terhadapmotivasi berprestasi dan hasil belajar siswa dalampembelajaran bahasa indonesia kelas gugus vi kecamatan abang. e-journal program pascasarjana universitas pendidikan ganesha, 5. http://146.87.24.:9:300/,metacognition.htm.2002 http://146.87.24.:9:300/,metacognition.htm.2002 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee interpersonal meaning in netanyahu’s speech arif firmansah department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: arif.firmansah.iced@gmail.com apa citation: firmansyah, a. (2015). interpersonal meaning in netanyahu‘s speech. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 103-110 received: 20-08-2015 accepted: 11-10-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: this study investigates how the interpersonal meaning is realized in the speech of israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu. this study aimed to uncover (1) the mood structure which realized in netanyahu‘s speech of iran and palestine and (2) to what extent the difference in field determine the interpersonal metafunction of the speaker. this study is largely qualitative but in order to answer those research questions, this study will be assisted by some descriptive quantification to observe the trend in the interpersonal meaning of the speaker. it applies hallidayan theory of systemic functional grammar (sfg) in analyzing the research data. the data were taken from the websites which are readily accessible to the public. two different transcribed speeches are discovered to extract the data which are needed to investigate the interpersonal meaning. subject, finite and modality are the main tools to realize the interpersonal meaning of netanyahu in his speech. it can be realized by discovering the use of those parts in his speech in different issue and occasion. it is found that netanyahu‘s interpersonal meaning is realized through the placement of subject and the utilization of finite, modality and mood adjuncts. it is also found that the differences of the field influence the interpersonal meaning of the speaker through the comparison of subject and finite. the findings in this present study are expected to be useful for some purposes in the future. keywords: interpersonal meaning, mood, modality. introduction interpersonal meaning is a technical term in systemic functional grammar (sfg) related to someone‘s attitude and judgments. in an utterance, there is meaning that wants to be delivered to the hearer. ―meanings are realized in wordings through what is called mood and modality‖ gerot and wignell (1994:13). mood is most centrally influenced by the context situation named tenor. on the other hand, halliday in beaugrande (1991:245) explains briefly that the interpersonal metafunction concerns ‗forms of interaction‘ and ‗embodies all use of language to express social and personal relations‘, ‗personalities, and personal feelings‘, as well as ‗the speaker‘s intrusion into speech situation and speech act. the interpersonal meaning can be achieved by analyzing the mood system and its constituents. mood represents the organization of participants in speech situation and speakers‘ roles. mood system consists of two elements. they are mood element and residue. mood element contains subject and finite. meanwhile, residue ―is a remainder of the clause ―(gerot and wignell, 1994:25). mood and residue are the elements which set the clause as exchange. those can be analyzed to set 103 mailto:arif.firmansah.iced@gmail.com arif firmansah interpersonal meaning in netanyahu’s speech how the interpersonal meaning is constructed in such situation. the main structure of mood is subject and finite. subject is a part of nominal group and finite is a part of verbal group. finite can be a representation of time speaking and the judgment of the speaker as stated by halliday and matthiessen (2004:115). martin et al (1997:62) state that ―the mood element makes the clause ‗negotiable‘ and consists of finite, subject and sometimes modal adjunct(s). the finite makes the clause negotiable by coding as positive or negative.‖ it means that the finite is the decisive factor which realizes the interpersonal meaning of the speaker. for detailed explanation, the following section will give brief explanation about the mood elements. halliday and matthiessen (2004:117) define subject as something by reference to which the proposition can be affirmed or denied. it is also vested the success or failure of the proposition. subject is also responsible for the functioning of the clause. it can realize the offer or command in a clause. furthermore, halliday and matthiessen (2004, p. 119) also state regarding subject, ―subject has got distinct identity which can carry modal responsibility which is responsibility for the validity of what is being predicated (stated, questioned, commanded or offered) in the clause.‖ it means that subject can be placed as the actor of what being said in the utterance which is responsible to what is being discussed. matthiessen et al. (2010, p. 98) define ―the finite verbal operators has the function to express the arguability value of the clause as exchange by reference to either of tense or modality (probability, usuality, obligation, inclination, or ability; high, median or low value).‖ in constructing meaning in a clause, finite works by using two operators. they are primary tense (temporal operators) and modality (modal operators). the primary tense is past, present or even future of the speaking time. meanwhile, modality indicates the speakers‘ judgment or the obligations in what the speaker is saying (gerot & wignell, 1994, p. 27-28). finite modal operators represent the three values to set the interpersonal meaning of the speaker. they are high, median and low value. each of them has their own function. the high value shows the obligation of the matter. the median value functions the inclination or futurity. then, the low value functions the possibility or ability. the three value of it is represented in the modal used by the speaker. the detailed information will be provided below with the temporal finite operators as taken from halliday and matthiessen (2004, p. 116). based on the explanation, the researcher is interested in how netanyahu positions himself towards current issues faced by israel regarding palestine and iran. the main issues addressed in this study are the interpersonal meaning of netanyahu found in his speeches. the enquiry towards these issues is formulated in the following research questions: 1. how is the mood structure realized in netanyahu speech of iran and palestine? 2. to what extent does the difference in field determine the interpersonal metafunction of the speaker? method this research is conducted by considering both theoretical and practical purposes. theoretically, this research is aimed to prove and to develop the theory about interpersonal 104 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee meaning expressed by someone in a speech. it investigates interpersonal meaning performed by benjamin netanyahu in his speech by means of qualitative method. in order to answer those research questions this research employs qualitative research design. qualitative research occurs in natural setting where human behaviour and events occur. ―the researcher is the primary instrument in data collection rather than some inanimate mechanism and the data emerge from a qualitative study is descriptive‖ (creswell, 2003, p. 227). the primary data of this study was taken from the selected speech transcription in two occasion, they are netanyahu‘s speech of iran and netanyahu‘s speech of palestine. these data are available in international websites which is readily accessible by the public. the object of this study is transcription of the speech taken from several websites which readily accessible by the public. as cited by sugiyono (2011, p. 329) from bogdan ―in most tradition of qualitative research, the phrase personal document is used broadly to refer to any first person narrative produced by an individual who describes his or her own actions, experiences, and belief.‖ from the definition above, it can be concluded that the transcription is one of the personal documentation form. then, the data of the study collected from the document of transcribed speech of benjamin netanyahu. taking some notes was very helpful to analyze the data. in analyzing the data, literature review was the preliminary task. this activity was begun by reviewing related theories and previous studies. then, preparing the data to be analyzed in accordance with its literature review was done before doing the main activity. in addition, the main activity in this study was analyzing the data. according to halliday and matthiessen (2004, p. 115), ―finite is used to show the proposition to its context in the speech event. this can be done in two ways. one is by reference to the time of speaking; other is by reference to the judgment of the speaker.‖ the modality is a parameter of the speaker‘s judgment through his speech. as stated by gerot and wignel (1994, p. 23), ―modality indicates the speaker‘s judgment of the probabilities or the obligations involved in what he or she is saying.‖ finite and modality inseparable because they are the indicators of someone judgment deliver in his or her meaning through the utterances. furthermore, finite also combined with the polarity in constructing the meaning existing in utterances. in analyzing the data, the researcher needs to breakdown all the phrase and sentences using the theory of sfg. after getting the data, the researcher tabulates it to get the frequency of the occurrence of the subject of this research. finally, the researcher translates it into the result supported by further explanation. results and discussion the foundation used to examine the data in this present study is the mood structure and interpersonal of the speaker is hallidayan theory named systemic functional grammar (sfg). the main issue discussed in this chapter is about the speaker‘s judgment regarding the sensitive issue in the world; they are about iran and palestine. iran and palestine are two countries that have a relationship with israel. iran becomes israel‘s attention because of the developing of nuclear 105 arif firmansah interpersonal meaning in netanyahu’s speech program which can threaten israel. palestine is being a huge attention from israel because they have a conflict since 40 years ago. netanyahu as the prime minister of israel positions himself as the representative of his nation regarding these two sensitive issues through the interpersonal meaning realised in his speech. in this section, the influence of different field can be analysed which probably influence the interpersonal metafunction of the speaker. the interpersonal meaning of the speaker will be analyzed through the use of subject and also the use of finite modal operator because it refers to ―the speaker‘s judgment of the probabilities or the obligations involved in what he or she is saying‖ (gerot & wignell, 1994). the first focus which probably influences the interpersonal meaning of the speaker is the placement of the subject. the subjects which used by the speaker in both speeches will be compared to be interpreted. it can be an indicator of the speaker‘s interpersonal meaning on the issue under discussion. for detailed information, the following table will provide the comparison of the realisation of the subject in both speeches. table 1. realisation of subject in both speeches entities realisation about iran about palestine f % f % speaker i 9 6.48 39 16.32 we (inclusive) 4 2.88 13 5.44 we (exclusive) 4 2.88 36 15.06 subtotal 17 12.23 88 36.82 iran iran 17 12.23 iranian 1 0.72 they 10 7.19 it 1 0.72 that 1 0.72 subtotal 30 21.58 audience you 4 2.88 palestine palestinian 18 7.53 they 1 0.42 who 1 0.42 this 1 0.42 that 1 0.42 subtotal 22 9.21 israel israel 8 3.35 israeli 2 0.84 the jewish 5 2.09 the government 1 0.42 who 1 0.42 it 2 0.84 this 4 1.67 subtotal 23 9.62 total 51 36.69 133 55.65 106 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee based on the table above, it is found that the speaker placed himself as the subject more when he was speaking about palestine. it is found in 88 clauses or 36.82%. the speaker placed himself as subject in speech of iran in 17 clauses or 12.23%. it generally shows his attitude toward the problem. by using the word ―we (exclusive)‖ 36 times or 15.06% in speech of palestine means that he as the representative of the government wanted to show to the audiences that he and the government are able to overcome the problem with the neighbour country, palestine. he always stated what government did in the past to bring peace between two states. it is to ensure that they are in the doing good things on this problem. he also tried to represent the audience by using the word ―we (inclusive)‖ to equalize his position with the audiences (israeli citizen). it is different when he was speaking of iran. he did not place the word ―we (exclusive and inclusive)‖ too much. he preferred to use ―i‖ to draw his statement toward iran. he wanted to show his neutral position toward the problem because this problem is still debatable that may trigger the worse conflict. after that, the speaker placed iran as the subject more than palestine. it shows that the speaker more concern on the problem related to iran which is developing the nuclear program which potentially threatens the security of international community – especially israel. the speaker directly mentioned iran by using the word ―iran‖ itself to refer to the whole country. in contrast, the speaker used ―palestinian‖ to refer to the palestine. the choice of palestinian shows his judgement toward the palestine state itself. he did not want to recognize the palestine as a state so that he just mentioned the people of the palestine not the country. finally, the use of ―israel‖ in the speech of palestine also showed the judgment of the speaker as israeli citizen. he wanted to show that israel is the most deserved state to own the existing land which is owned by israel and palestine. he always states the positive things when he places israel as the subject. it shows his attitude that he wanted to the audiences that israel is in the correct position. in conclusion, by looking at the use of subject, the speaker‘s attitude and judgment can be interpreted that when he was talking about iran, he tried to be careful because of the sensitivity of the issue, but when he was talking about palestine, he looked so confident and sure in delivering the statement. the next focus is the use of modal finite operators which influence the interpersonal metafunction of the speaker. the following table will provide the comparison of the modal finite operators which used in both speeches. table 2. the frequency of modality in both speeches value realisation about iran about palestine f % f % low can 5 13.51 7 10.15 may 1 2.70 1 1.44 might 2 5.41 1 1.44 could 4 10.81 0 0 median will 8 21.62 30 43.48 107 arif firmansah interpersonal meaning in netanyahu’s speech would 4 10.81 5 7.25 should 3 8.11 0 0 will not 1 2.70 4 5.80 would not 0 0 2 2.90 high must 3 8.11 17 24.64 have to 5 13.51 0 0 cannot 1 2.70 2 2.90 total 37 69 regarding the table above, it can be generally concluded that the speaker‘s attitude on subject matter can be seen through the frequency of modal finite operator. netanyahu used more modal finite operators when he wass talking about palestine. he produced 17 modal which represents the obligation (must). compared to the speech about iran, he just used 11 modal operators which represent the obligation. netanyahu was not overconfident in talking about iran nuclear program. this significant differentiation, of course, has an influence to the speaker. the emergence of obligation in the speech of palestine is to show his judgment that the recognition of the israel as a sovereign state by the palestinian is a must. it also shows his judgment toward the problem that he did not place himself to respect to the palestine even he disposed to force palestine to do what israel wants. his power clearly appeared in this speech. he was easily to blame even to force palestine to recognize israel and to overcome factions in palestine such as hamas and hezbollah. on the other hand, the fewer number of the obligation in the speech of iran seems that he did not show his power to this issue. it is probably because of the sensitivity of the case that may trigger the war. the use of ―will‖ which indicates the futurity also appeared more in the speech of palestine which appeared 30 times. the use of this word is to figure out the future will be if the palestinian recognize the israel as a sovereign state. it is also used to ensure the audiences that the peace will be reached if the neighbour country is ready to live side by side with them. in contrast, netanyahu was more careful when talking about iran. he just stated 8 times to draw the futurity (will) of the iran nuclear program. the use of ―will‖ is used by the speaker to draw the futurity if the international community does not do real action to stop the enrichment of deadly weapon. the use of ―can‖ indicates the possibility. the emergence of this word is not too significant. the speaker used this word in 7 clauses in the speech of palestine. the use of this word in speech of palestine is to show the possibility if both countries co-operate in many sectors. it is also used to ensure the audiences of the importance of the unity of both countries. contrary, the speaker used the word ―can‖ in 5 clauses to describe that the iran nuclear program is possible to be observed by the public. he also used this word to show the possibility that the international community may be too late stop iran if they do not do clear action toward the problem because iran already run the nuclear program. in conclusion, the numeric results provided in this chapter uncover the baggage of the speaker concerning the subject matter. the speaker was able to position himself on the problems occur 108 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee related to his country. he was able to select the appropriate modality to express his judgment in different field. he placed himself in a low value while talking about the highly-strung issue because it may trigger the worse condition. meanwhile, he placed his high value of judgment on the unfinished problem with the neighbour country, palestine. finally, the interpersonal meaning of the speaker can be influenced by the selecting of modality and field what or where he is saying. conclusion this study is aimed to reveal the interpersonal metafunctions found in benjamin netanyahu selected speech in two different occasions. this present study aims to uncover the mood structure which influences the interpersonal metafunction of the speaker and to what extent the difference in field determine the interpersonal metafunction of the speaker. it employs systemic functional grammar which is originally proposed by halliday as the main theory to analyze the data. this study has answered the questions of the research about how the mood structure realized in netanyahu speech of iran and palestine and also to what extent does the difference in field determine the interpersonal metafunction of the speaker. it was found that there are 426 clauses from two selected speech, 150 clauses found in the first speech and 276 clauses found in the second speech. furthermore, the speaker used some entities to be the subject in clauses. after that, finite as the primary constituent in mood element is becoming the main focus in this study. verbal operator that is frequently used is temporal finite. temporal finite in the both speech are significantly appeared in iran and palestine speech (73.38% and 71.72% out of clause). in addition, there is about 26.62% or 37 out of 139 of the finite operators in the first speech are modal. meanwhile, 28.28% or 69 out of 244 of the finite operators in the second speech are modal. in short, the numeric modal finite operators appeared in both speech is the expression, assessment, and judgment of the speaker to the issue under discussion. the adjunct of polarity is used 1 time, the adjunct of temporality is used 2 times and the adjuncts of mood appear 4 times in netanyahu‘s speech about iran. meanwhile, the adjunct of polarity is used 4 times and then the adjuncts of temporality appear 5 times, the adjuncts of usuality also appeared 5 times and the last adjuncts of mood appear 5 times in netanyahu‘s speech about palestine. furthermore, the interpersonal meaning of the speaker is also influenced by the field what or where he delivers his speech. the subjects used by the speaker in both speeches indicate that the speaker‘s interpersonal meaning toward the issue. it is found that the speaker‘s judgment and attitude are clearly seen when he was talking about the palestine issue than the iran issue. the interpersonal meaning of the speaker is also influenced by the use of modal operators. the speaker stated 8 times to draw the futurity, 5 times to draw possibility and 11 times to draw the urgency or obligation regarding the speech about iran which developing the nuclear program. the speaker holds on himself not to state offensive to prevent the worse condition. furthermore, regarding the speech of palestine, the speaker expresses possibility 7 times, the futurity 30 times, and obligation 17 times. it can be interpreted that the speaker has a high confidence in talking 109 arif firmansah interpersonal meaning in netanyahu’s speech about the conflict between the neighbour countries. finally, the construction of interpersonal meaning is really important to be understood. it is because the speaker is not always shows his/her judgment directly. he/she may show it through the diction of the word used in a communication. the speaker may also use indirect language to give a judgment toward something. this is really important to prevent misunderstanding between the speaker and the hearer or even it can be an indicator to know someone personality through his/her interpersonal meaning. references benjamin netanyahu: full speech on palestinian state. (2009) (2009, june 19). retrieved from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews /middleeast/israel/5535664/benjaminnetanyahu-full-speech-on-palestinianstate.html. creswell, j. w. (2003). qualitative inquiry & research design. thousand oaks: sage publications. de beaugrande, r. (1991). linguistic theory: the discourse of fundamental works. london: longman. eggins, s. (2004). an introduction to systemic functional linguistics. new york: continuum feng, h. & liu, y. (2010). analysis of interpersonal meaning in public speeches—a case study of obama‘s speech. journal of language teaching and research, 1(6), 825-829. gerot, l. & wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. sydney: antipoaean educational enterprises. halliday, m.a.k & matthiessen, m.i.m. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar (3rd edition). london: arnold. halliday, m.a.k & webster, jonathan (2002). on grammar. london: continuum. key portions of israeli pm netanyahu's u.n. speech on iran. (2012, september 27). retrieved march 19, 2013 from: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/27/u s-un-assembly-israel-textidusbre88q1rr20120927. september 27, 2012. marczyk, g. r., dematteo, d & festinger, d. (2005). essentials of research design and methodology. new jersey: john wiley & sons, inc. martin, j. r. christian matthiessen, m. i. m. & painter, c (1997). working with functional grammar. london: arnold. martin, j.r. (1992). english text system and structure. philadelphia: john benjamins publishing company. matthiessen, c. , lam, m., & teruya , k. (2010). key terms in systemic functional linguistics. london: continuum international publishing group. sugiyono (2011). metode penelitian pendidikan, pendekatan kuantitatif, kualitatif dan r&d. bandung: alfabeta. ye, r. (2010). the interpersonal metafunction analysis of barack obama's victory speech. english language teaching. 3(2), 146-152. 110 http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/author/christian-matthiessen http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/author/marvin-lam http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/author/kazuhiro-teruya english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 277 analysis of teacher needs related to e-learning schoology content in creative writing in middle schools throughout palembang city ernalida faculty of education and teaching, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: ernalida@fkip.unsri.ac.id santi oktarina faculty of education and teaching, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: santioktarina@fkip.unsri.ac.id rizki turama faculty of education and teaching, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: a.rizqiturama@gmail.com apa citation: ernalida., oktarina, s., & turama, r. (2021). analysis of teacher needs related to e-learning schoology content in creative writing in middle schools throughout palembang city. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 277-284. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4352 received: 24-02-2021 accepted: 27-04-2021 published:15-06-2021 introduction the development of technology and information in the era of the industrial revolution 4.0 has influenced all aspects of life including the world of education. students born in this era are referred to as generation z where they are a generation that is closer to technology than previous generations. generations included in this category are those born from 1995 to 2010 and are globally connected generations so that technology is the life and breath of generation z children (cilliers, 2017). in this connection, students in this era want a learning process that utilizes technology that is currently developing. in addition, the use of learning technology is a necessity for students at this time considering that they basically have a need to explore and understand the elements of technology, social media and social networks (plessis, 2011). therefore, current learning should have been carried out using learning technology adapted to generation z. iftode (2019) believes that z generation is familiar with using new technologies in a natural manner. in addition, rothman (2016) stated that gen-zers have been affected more deeply due to the abstract: learning indonesian in the text-based 2013 curriculum directs students to be able to produce textbased writings. however, the ability of students to write creatively in middle school found in the field is still in the weak category. obstacles related to this are increasing considering that indonesia is currently experiencing the covid 19 pandemic which requires learning to be carried out from home so that supporting learning media is needed in accordance with existing conditions. based on the above, a solution is needed to overcome this, one of which is the use of e-learning schoology, which is learning that is in accordance with the character of generation z. this research aimed to determine the needs of teachers regarding e-learning schoology content in learning creative writing in secondary schools in palembang city. this research is a type of research and development. the research object was indonesian language teachers in sma in palembang city. the data collection method used is a survey method with a questionnaire. data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. the results of the study show that when viewed in terms of necessities, the content of e-learning schoology in learning creative writing in secondary schools in palembang must be adjusted to the principles of learning to write, the principles of electronic / online learning, the circular of the minister of education and culture no.4 of 2020 concerning implementation of education policies in an emergency period of the spread of corona virus disease (covid 19) and distance learning guides for teachers during schools closed due to the covid-19 pandemic. the next finding is that when viewed from the components that are needed, teachers really need e-learning schoology in learning creative writing at high schools in palembang. the last finding is that there are still deficiencies in the implementation of learning creative writing and the media used in secondary schools in palembang is not adequate yet. keywords: needs analysis; e-learning schoology; creative writing mailto:ernalida@fkip.unsri.ac.id mailto:santioktarina@fkip.unsri.ac.id mailto:a.rizqiturama@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4352 ernalida, santi oktarina, & rizki turama analysis of teacher needs related to e-learning schoology content in creative writing in middle schools throughout palembang city 278 easiness of their access to information by being born into a world that is globally connected via internet. people born in gen-z grow up with recent technology such as internet, smartphones and applications, and find it difficult to live without these facilities (kingston, 2014). this is a challenge for teachers to provide learning that is tailored to the characteristics of students. as popenici & kerr (2017) stated that knowing students learning strategies/styles could be a method of improving their learning process and more important the learning results. however, in gen-z learning styles, demir & sönmez (2021) stated that teachers and materials are expected to be technology oriented to meet gen-zers personal and academic needs. cook (2015) also confirmed that gen-z post-secondary students desire technology and visual media to be integrated in educational settings. in indonesia, writing skill are considered important for written communication and academic writing purposes, such as; letters, essays, papers, articles, journals, project reports, theses, etc. (toba, noor, & sanu, 2019). it is even needed in high school, including creative writing skills. many types of creative writing must be mastered by students, including writing biographies, short stories, poetry, and so on. it also helps the students to develop their ability in expressing what they feel and think (ismayanti & kholiq, 2020). widiastuti & endahati (2020) also added that writing is functional communication, making students possible to create imagined worlds of their design. moreover, the benefits of students having the ability to write are: sharper imagination, mastery of language increases, and increase confidence (oppenheimer, zaromb, pomerantz, william, & park, 2017; yanti, nafri, suhartono, hiasa, & fina, 2018). as writing is important to be learnt, in the 2013 curriculum, text-based indonesian language learning directs students to be able to produce text-based writings. however, when viewed in the field, it is found that the students' ability to write creatively in secondary schools is still in the weak category. many students discovered it difficult to write because they do not understand how to properly convey their concept (kurniati, wijaya, & rohmatillah, 2020) and found it difficult to find the idea when they write (yoandita, 2019). furthermore, as durga & rao (2018) stated that, nowadays, students are lacking writing skills as they spend most of their time in using their equipped smart phones, and they depend on electronic devices or gadgets which provide instant or readymade answers/results available in the internet. several studies also stated that high school students have not been able to write creatively optimally where they are also less motivated in the learning process (hudhana and sulaeman, 2019; amalia and doyin, 2015; dwinita, yaqob, and hidayat, 2019). this finding is reinforced by the results of the 2019 national examination data which states that students' writing skills are still far from expectations, only 63.55% of them have mastered writing skills (https://hasilun.puspendik.kemdikbud.go.id/#201 9). the spread of covid-19 also has a major impact on the world of education today. who (firman & rahayu, 2020) recommends that activities that have the potential to cause crowds to be temporarily stopped. referring to the advice from who, the indonesian government has adopted a policy of temporarily closing schools throughout indonesia, which is also explained in circular number 4 of 2020 concerning the implementation of educational policies in the emergency period of the spread of coronavirus disease (covid-19). one of the contents of the circular is learning which is carried out online. therefore, this caused the use of e-learning which has been seen as a complementary medium in the education process in indonesia to be aroused (hermawan, 2021). e-learning can be found from various existing learning media, starting from language apps, video conferencing tools, virtual tutoring, online learning software, moodle, and many more (li & lalani, 2020). it is hoped that through online interaction, the social distancing principle promoted by the indonesian government can break the chain of the spread of the covid-19 virus originating from droplets or saliva splashes (putra, 2020). seeing the phenomena that occur, e-learning has now become a rational choice in addressing the educational process in the covid-19 pandemic (gupta & khairina, 2020). examining the description above, e-learning schoology-based learning can be used as an option for learning media in the covid 19 pandemic era, especially learning creative writing in high schools in palembang. e-learning schoology has many advantages that make many teachers use it. its superiority is that it is cheap and easy to obtain, efficient, and fast in terms of updating, fun, can be used remotely, has full features, saves paper, can conduct discussions, https://hasilun.puspendik.kemdikbud.go.id/#2019 https://hasilun.puspendik.kemdikbud.go.id/#2019 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 279 send files, videos, images, etc., can be submitted from anywhere, easy to control tasks with work results that can also be easily printed (haryanto, 2018). this article is part of the research and development research (research and development), namely the information gathering stage. the purpose of this article is to describe the needs of teachers for the content of elearning schoology for creative writing in high schools in palembang. method the approach used in this research is qualitative and quantitative approaches (mixed methods) while in practice the research and development method is used (research and development). data are collected using a survey method. the data from the results of the analysis in this study are quantitative data from questionnaires. sources of data in this study are indonesian language teachers in high schools throughout palembang with a total sample of 32 people. data are collected using a questionnaire. data analysis is performed using quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques. findings and discussion needs analysis is the most important part of development research. the collection of information in the needs analysis is very influential on the product to be produced. morrison, ross, and kemp (2007) explained that needs analysis can be defined as a condition that shows a gap between what students receive and what they are expected to receive. l.s.p nation and macalister (2009) divided needs into three components consisting of necessities, lacks, and wants. these three components constitute a set of tools needed so that an analysis of student needs can be carried out in learning a target language. first, there are necessities or things related to what students must master. the focus of the necessities is on skills and usage situations. the second is lacks which refers to the student's current position (knowledge). the third component is wants which describes that students have their own opinion about whatever they feel is useful for them. information about what the student wants (wants) will be very useful in determining whether there are similarities between the students' views and the analytical view. data collection was carried out through questionnaires and closed discussions to obtain data on the needs in this study. the covid-19 pandemic situation hampered data collection so that questionnaires were distributed to students and teachers in palembang via google form. this is because the research team cannot meet directly with students or teachers so that the google form that is distributed to students is done through the teacher. of the 1500 students surveyed, it turned out that only 737 students filled out the google form. on the other hand, the results obtained for the collection of teacher needs analysis data through google form are in accordance with the specified sample size. the following describes in detail the results of the research on teacher and student needs analysis of the content of e-learning schoology for creative writing learning for students and teachers in high schools in palembang. to obtain information on teacher needs, data collection was carried out through a questionnaire using google form. the results of the needs analysis are as follows. necessities necessities are related to what students have to master. the imperative in this study is interpreted as the content of e-learning schoology which should be used in learning creative writing for students and teachers in secondary schools in palembang. e-learning content that students and teachers must use is content that is in accordance with the principles of learning to write, the principles of e-learning, and the principles of learning in the covid-19 era. writing approach (process and outcome approach), paying attention to the background of the reader, integrating all language skills, being authentic, related to the writing process, how to respond to and correct student writing, and writing conventions (brown, 2011). the principles of electronic learning (elearning) include interactivity, independence, accessibility and enrichment (munir in shofiyah, 2016). in addition, the content of e-learning schoology for learning creative writing in the current pandemic is required to be in accordance with (directorate general of teachers and education personnel, ministry of education and culture, 2020). wants the third component is wants. students have their own opinion about anything they feel is useful to them. information about what the student wants will be very useful in determining whether the students' views and analytical views ernalida, santi oktarina, & rizki turama analysis of teacher needs related to e-learning schoology content in creative writing in middle schools throughout palembang city 280 have in common or not. the research results obtained are shown as the following. the use of e-learning schoology the use of e-learning schoology is the first component that teachers want to get their needs from. the research results are as follows. table 1. use of e-learning schoology no statement teacher’s assessment 1. the usage of e-learning schoology in creative writing learning (writing biography text and writing poem) 4. 25 sb based on the table above, it is known that the use of e-learning schoology in creative writing learning (writing biographical texts and writing poetry) is very much needed (sb) by teachers with an average score of 4.25. indicators and competence indicators and competencies are the second component of this needs analysis where the results obtained are as follows. table 2. indicators and competence no statement teacher’s assessment 2 the content of e-learning schoology in creating writing (writing biography text and writing poem) containing indocator and competence 4,1 3 b 3. indicator and competence are presented in the form of animation video 4,1 6 b 4. indicator and competence are presented in the forl of word file or pdf 3,9 4 b the table above explains that from the second statement, it is stated that teachers assess what they need is (b) e-learning schoology content in creative writing learning (writing biographical texts and writing poetry) contains indicators and competencies. second, in the third statement, the results of the study show that the teacher needs (b) an animated video which contains indicators and competencies. fourth, in the fourth statement it is known that the teacher needs (b) so that the indicators and competencies are made in the form of files with an average value of 3.94. presentation of material in e-learning schoology the next component used to collect information on e-learning schoology content needs is the presentation of material in e-learning schoology. the following results explain the research in details. table 3. presentation of material in e-learning schoology no statement teacher’s assessment 5. materials are presented in the form of (word/pdf) files 4,1 6 b 6. materials are presented in the form of tutorial video by using kine master/video scribe uploaded in youtube 4,3 8 sb 7. materials are presented in the form of electronic book 4,2 8 sb 8. materials are presented in the form of teacher’s blog 3,8 8 b 9. materials are presented in the form of game 3,9 9 b 10. materials are presented in the form of link 4,3 8 sb 11. materials are presented in the form of video completed with animation 4,3 1 sb 12. materials are presented in the form of interactive power point 4,4 4 sb 13. materials are presented in the form of audio 3,7 8 b based on the table above, in general the subcomponents offered by the researcher are considered to be needed by teachers and students in learning content using this e-learning. first, the results of the study show that the teacher needs the material presented in the form of a file that must be in the content to be developed with an average score of 4.16. second, the teacher assessed that the material presented in the form of video tutorials is needed (sb) with an average value of average 4.38. third, the teacher assessed that the material presented in the form of an electronic book was needed (sb) with an average score of 4.28. fourth, based on the google form filled in by the teacher, it is known that teachers needs a teacher's blog that contains creative writing material with an average score of 3.88. fifth, for the ninth statement it is known that the teacher assessed that in learning creative writing, games are needed with an average score of 3.99. sixth, for the 10th statement it is known that the teacher needs (b) creative writing learning materials in the form of links. the mean score for this need is 4.38 that of teachers. seventh, the results showed that teachers really need material equipped with animated videos with an average value of 4.31. eighth, from the research results it is known that teachers really need material made using interactive power points with an average english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 281 score of 4.44. ninth, teachers need creative writing learning materials equipped with audio. learning activities the next component used to collect information on the content needs of e-learning schoology is learning activities. the following results are explained for more details. table 4. learning activity no . learning activities teacher’s assessment 14. creative writing learning is conducted through online presentation and discussion using zoom meeting or google meet 4,0 9 b 15. creative writing learning is conducted through discussion by using discussion forum feature existed in e-learning schoology 3,9 7 b 16. creative writing learning is conducted by grouping the students into some groups to discuss (collaborative learning) 3,9 7 b 17. students are assigned to do writing individually 4,4 1 sb 18. creative writing learning is conducted in accordance with the writing stages namely prewriting, writing, and postwriting 4,3 1 sb 19. the teacher does assessment on the students’ writing in accordance with the assessment indicator 4,4 1 sb 20. the students do assessment on peer-friends’ writing in accordance with the assessment indicator 4,1 6 b 21. the students do writing revision 4,0 9 b 22. the creative writing learning uses online portfolio 4,0 6 b based on the table above, several conclusions can be drawn in the following points. first, learning creative writing carried out through online presentations and discussions using zoom meetings or google meet was found to be what teachers needed with an average score of 4.06. second, the teacher assessed that learning creative writing is carried out by discussion using the discussion forum feature in e-learning schoology with an average score of 3.97. third, learning creative writing was carried out by dividing students into several groups for discussion (collaborative learning) needed by teachers with an average score of 3.67 (teachers). fourth, the teacher assessed that students are assigned to write individually as needed with an average score of 4.41. fifth, teachers really needed creative writing learning so that it is carried out in accordance with the stages in writing, namely pre-writing, writing, and postwriting with a high average of 4.31. sixth, teachers really needed assessment activities carried out by teachers in accordance with the indicators with an average score of 4.41. seventh, the teacher believed that peer assessments are needed in creative writing learning activities with an average value of 4.16. eighth, the teacher assessed that the revision made by students is needed with an average score of 4.09. ninth, the teacher assessed that learning creative writing using an online portfolio is also needed with an average score of 4.06. evaluation / exercise the next component used to collect information on e-learning schoology content needs is evaluation / exercise. the following describes the results of the research obtained more clearly. table 5. evaluation / exercise no statement teacher’s assessment 23 evaluation/training is done individually 4,44 sb 24 evaluation/training is done in group 4,13 b 25 evaluation/training is given in the form of writing essay/task directly 4,05 b 26 evaluation/training is given in the form of multiple choices 4,31 sb 27 evaluation/training is given by using kahoot, hot potatoes, and other applications 4,03 b based on the table above, some information is known as follows. first, the average value related to teachers in dire need of evaluation / training carried out individually is 4.44. second, teachers need evaluations / exercises that are carried out in groups with an average score of 4.13. third, the teacher needs evaluation / exercises that are given in the form of essays / direct writing assignments marked with an average score of 4.05. fourth, teachers really need evaluation / training given in the form of multiple choices as evidenced by an average value of 4.31. fifth, teachers need evaluation / training given using the kahoot application, hot potatoes, and others with an average value of 4.03. ernalida, santi oktarina, & rizki turama analysis of teacher needs related to e-learning schoology content in creative writing in middle schools throughout palembang city 282 completeness of learning the next component used to collect information on e-learning schoology content needs is the completeness of learning. the following describes the results of the research in more detail. table 6. completeness of learning no statement teacher’s assessment 28 creative writing learning is completed with learning guidance in the form of file 4,34 sb 29 creative learning is completed with learning guidance in the form tutorial video 4,25 sb 30. creative writing learning is completed with online attendance list 4,25 sb the information obtained based on the table above is first, teachers really need creative writing learning equipped with learning guides in the form of files as evidenced by an average value of 4.34. second, teachers really need creative writing learning which is equipped with learning guides in the form of video tutorials which are shown with an average value of 4.25 third, teachers truly need creative writing learning which is equipped with an online attendance list. lack components of a needs analysis other than necessities and wants are lack. lacks are interpreted as what is still needed or what is lacking in learning creative writing at high schools in palembang. the results showed that the lacks found were as follows. first, when viewed from the shortcomings of learning creative writing, it is known that most students are not motivated in their learning, it is difficult to make them understand the material being taught; material is too theory-oriented; learning is considered too time-consuming; students are not able to express and develop their writing ideas; students are less able to choose words in creative writing, find it difficult to foster interest in reading, and difficulty overcoming students' laziness. second, in terms of the media used, several lacks were found, namely the monotonous media used; not varied; and the media do not provide direct examples. discussion based on the results of the research obtained, it was found that learning creative writing using eleaning schoology is really needed by teachers, which is evidenced by an average value of 4.25. the teacher's desire is based on the current pandemic situation which makes them have to carry out online learning. e-leaning schoology can be a teacher's choice to carry out learning better, especially for learning creative writing. this is in line with what haryanto (2018) stated that schoology is one of the alternative media used by teachers to improve and accelerate the teaching and learning process. the successful use of this media has been proven by ernida (2016), hasanah (2011), and mashudianti, sutomo, and suparno (2018) in their research. however, the learning that is carried out must be in accordance with the guidelines for the implementation of learning in the 2020/2021 academic year and the 2020/2021 academic year in the corona virus disease (covid-19) pandemic period based on the joint decree of 4 ministers number 01 / kb / 2020 dated 15 june 2020. e-learning schoology can indeed be the choice of teachers in implementing learning in the pandemic era. this is because this method has many advantages, which are cheap and easy to obtain; efficient and fast in updating; more attractive to students in learning; can be used at long distance or long distance; has complete features; can save paper; easy to use as a medium for holding discussions; can send files, videos, images, and others; can submit from anywhere; easy to control tasks (haryanto, 2018). the convenience offered makes it natural for teachers to answer that they really need e-learning in learning creative writing. referring to the description related to the research results, it can be concluded that teachers need e-leaning schoology content for learning creative writing in order to carry out creative writing learning better and efficiently. in implementing e-learning content, it must refer to the principles of learning to write, principles of electronic / online learning, and online learning guides. the results also showed that the teacher wants the learning material to be made with a more diverse version. this aims to increase students' motivation to learn and make them able to engage directly with the media because various versions of media can attract their attention. this is in line with the opinion of meisendi, yemin, & fiestawa (2016) which stated that the use of different media variations is carried out to achieve several goals, including (1) maintaining and increasing student attention to the relevance english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 283 of the teaching and learning process, (2) increasing student motivation, (3) forming positive attitudes towards both teachers and schools, (4) facilitating the possibility of individual learning choices, and (5) encouraging students to actively learn. in the aspect of learning activities, the teacher wants creative writing learning that focuses more on or applies the principles of learning to write. this makes students' creativity and imagination play an important role in their learning. creative writing requires the writer to think creatively and out of the box. however, the desired differences here are not necessarily different in the general context, but also think about and predict the function and purpose in the creativity, for example certain impressions or messages to be conveyed to readers. opinion of zulaeha (2017) supports this opinion where he reveals that imagination and creativity are needed in creative writing so that what is written has a clear meaning and gives the reader a distinct impression. conclusion conclusion points that can be drawn based on the results of research and discussion are as follows. first, the content of e-learning schoology in learning creative writing in high schools in palembang which is developed when viewed in terms of necessities must comply with the principles of learning to write, the principles of electronic / online learning, the circular of the minister of education and culture no.4 of 2020 regarding the implementation of education policies in an emergency for the spread of corona virus disease (covid 19) and distance learning guides for teachers while schools are closed due to the covid-19 pandemic with the spirit of independent learning. second, when viewed from the component of needs, it is found that teachers really need e-learning schoology in learning creative writing in high schools in palembang with content that meets several requirements such as indicators and competencies that are presented either in the form of animated videos or files; there is material presented in various forms which aim to foster motivation and improve the creative writing skills of students; contains learning activities that are in accordance with the principles of learning to write, online learning principles, and distance learning guides in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic; learning evaluation is carried out individually in the form of essays or multiple choice and with the help of applications; there is a learning guide presented in the form of a file or video tutorial; there is a list of attendees online. third, the research found that there were several deficiencies in learning creative writing and the media used. there are three components consisting of 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(2021). developing descriptive reading materials about palembang historical buildings. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.293-300. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4354 received: 27-02-2021 accepted: 19-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction in english language teaching and learning process, reading is one of the important skills that should be focused on. as stated by carrel (1998), reading is one of four major skills considered as the most important in learning english. it is a skill that can help the students to get more knowledge and information. in indonesia, learning english is a compulsory subject for junior and high school students. based on the national curriculum 2013 used, reading is one of the skills which has to be focused on teaching. it is also mentioned that the students have to be able to achieve good reading competencies. however, students’ reading achievement in indonesia has not been satisfied yet. the data from education first english proficiency index (ef epi) showed the ability of indonesian students to comprehend english texts was low. in 2017, indonesia was on the 39th world rank out of 80 countries with a score of only 52.15. in 2018, indonesia was on the 51st world rank out of 88 countries with a score of 51.58. this score was below the epi average (56.64). in the asia context, indonesia was on the 13th rank out of 21 countries with a score of 51.58 in 2018. the score also was below the epi average (53.49). this data implied that teachers should do something that can encourage the students to have better achievement in reading. some factors influence the student’s reading achievement. mohammed and amponsah (2018) abstract: the purpose of this study was to find out the validity, practicality, and potential effect of developed descriptive reading materials about historical buildings. the developed reading materials were for the seventhgrade students. the development research was based on akker’s three phases: 1) analysis, 2) design, and 3) evaluation and revision. in the evaluation phase, the formative evaluation modified by tessmer was applied and there were five stages: self-evaluation, expert review, one-to-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test evaluation. the validity was determined based on the results of the experts’ review and the product was valid which was categorized as high validity. the practicality was determined based on the result of the one-to-one evaluation and the small group evaluation. the product was categorized as very high practical level. the potential effect was evaluated in the field test. the result showed that the product has a potential effect since the students reached the passing grade score. in conclusion, the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang historical buildings were valid, practical, and has potentially effective for the seventh-grade students. keywords: development research; descriptive text; historical buildings mailto:uchaarko16@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4354 294 found that the students lack the confidence to practice, poor motivation from the teachers, lack of pre-reader books, lack of the library, low phonemic awareness skills, and teachers’ inadequate knowledge on phonemic awareness strategy. another thing that the teachers need to focus on had to consider the cultural aspect in teaching english. based on badan standar nasional pendidikan indonesia (2006), curriculum development has to go along with the socio-cultural characteristics of local communities. in line with this, the indonesian 2013 curriculum points out that learning materials should be integrated with a variety of cultures or local cultures of where the students live. indonesia’s government has supported the implementation of local culture materials in education. it is stated in the ministry of education and culture regulation no. 22 and 23 the year 2006 that the indonesian government gives great opportunities for local culture to be integrated into various school subjects for both the curriculum of primary and secondary education. in the indonesian curriculum of 2013 for junior high school, it is emphasized that the english teaching and learning process aims to develop the students’ potential to have good communicative competence in interpersonal, transactional, and functional texts by learning some types of text. one of the text types is the descriptive text which is for the seventh-grade students who were the participants of this present study. descriptive text is a text that describes the features of someone, something, or a certain place (wardiman, jahur & djusman, 2008). it means descriptive text says what a person or a thing is like; it describes and reveals a particular person, place, or thing. the descriptive text tells about the characteristic of the subject and description of people, animals, and things in detail. noprianto (2017) stated that introducing descriptive text to language learners as soon as possible is important because when students learn nonfiction genres, they automatically engage with the world outside themselves. integrating local culture into teaching materials gives valuable benefits for students because it can engage them to be aware and care of their own culture while learning english. students can add their knowledge about their own culture, maintain and promote their culture to others. learners who gain certain cultural knowledge can develop more positive attitudes towards and come to be more tolerant of other cultures (nguyen, 2017). furthermore, agustina, harahap, and syahrial (2018) found that the students interested in the reading materials developed. besides, wulandari, vianty, and fiftinova (2018) found that the integration of local culture in reading materials could improve students’ reading comprehension. integration of local culture in the curriculum will guide the development personality of creative learners so they can choose the cultural values, then applied into their real life. there are three ways to insert the local content (hartini, 2012), such as culture in teaching material. first, insert the local content in the form of ideas including norms, morals, ethics, and religious values. second, insert the activities including the traditional ceremony. the last is inserting the artifacts including historical or tourism places, food, and stories. for this present study, historical buildings served as the base for developing the reading materials. the historical building is an object in the surrounding as documents of cultural expressions or artifacts. they are generally considered buildings or structures that have historical values. the buildings hold special historical interests related to particular historical events or periods. historical buildings are one kind of local culture in palembang. integrating historical buildings into teaching materials is very important to enrich the students’ knowledge. it is also considered for having better moral values and it can help to create meaningful learning and influence the students’ learning. the most important point of integrating historical buildings as the reading topic is to make the students always remember and be proud of their own culture. historical buildings in palembang included benteng kuto besak (bkb), balaputera dewa museum, sultan mahmud baddarudin ii museum, monpera, water tower, limas house, siguntang hill, masjid agung palembang, rakit house, and kampung kapitan. this present study was started by having an informal interview with the english teacher of a junior high school in palembang. it was found out that the english teachers only used one textbook “when english rings a bell” which was provided by the indonesian government. in the textbook, there is only one descriptive text entitled “i’m https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/structure english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 295 proud of indonesia”. the content of the textbook lacked the local content especially the one that is related to the culture. whereas, it is important to provide reading text that consists of the students’ background or prior knowledge. besides, the readability level of the text in the textbook is not relevant to the student’s reading level at level 3. this was the reason why this present study was conducted. it is considered necessary to have supplementary reading materials related to students’ local culture. in this case, supplementary reading is related to the place where the students live. they need to know well, describe and promote the tourism places, products, and local cultures to others. the previous studies (ningtyas, 2016; indriyani, 2016; and mariana, 2017) have developed palembang local cultures related to clothes, folklores, and tourism destinations. some studies conducted local culture in reading materials (pitaloka, 2015; susanti, 2017; monica & vianty, 2019; sopian, inderawati & petrus, 2019; elviana, inderawati & mirizon, 2020; and azizah, inderawati & vianty, 2021). this present study focused on developing a supplementary reading on the historical buildings in palembang. as previously mentioned, the content of descriptive text lacks of the local content and only one paragraph is concerned. the study also aims to use historical buildings in reading materials because no one is exposed to local culture, especially historical buildings in reading materials. it also enriches the students’ local cultural knowledge through the developed reading texts. there is detailed information about historical buildings in the text, so the students will be more familiar with that famous places. in addition, the students can promote and spread widely the existence of palembang historical buildings in the global world. from the explanation above, the researchers are interested in developing descriptive reading materials about palembang historical buildings. method this present study used a development research method to develop descriptive reading materials about historical buildings. it was described by akker (1999) who stated that development research aims to design a product for certain purposes through three phases: (1) analysis, (2) design, and (3) evaluation and revision. in the evaluation phase, the formative evaluation modified by tessmer (1993) was applied. formative evaluation is a judgment of the strengths and weakness of interaction in its developing stages, for purposes of revising the interaction to improve its effectiveness and appeal. there are five stages in the formative evaluation: selfevaluation, expert review, one-to-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test. this research was conducted at one of the junior high schools in palembang, involving the seventh-grade students of the academic year 2019/2020 as the participants of the study (see table 1). table 1. participants of the study no formative evaluation stages number of students descriptive of the students 1 one-to-one evaluation 3 1 student for each reading level category, i.e: frustrational, instructional and independent. 2 small group evaluation 9 3 students for each reading level category, i.e: frustrational, instructional and independent. 3 field test 30 all students in a real class. total 42 students the participants of this study were selected based on their reading level. their reading levels were determined based on reading level tests by using jennings informal reading assessment which was developed by jennings (2001). the student’s reading level is categorized into three levels: frustrational, instructional, and independent reading levels. the students were selected randomly in each reading level category. a questionnaire and a reading comprehension test were used to collect the data which were analyzed to determine its validity, practicality, and potential effect. the validity of the product was determined based on the experts’ evaluation. the 296 products are classified as valid if the average score of the questionnaires is not less than 2.51. the practicality of the product was determined based on the result of the questionnaire that was given to the students in one-to-one and small groups. the product is considered practical if the average score is not less than 2.51. finally, the potential effect of the developed reading materials was determined based on the result of the field test. the developed product is considered to have the potential effect if the students’ score is not below the passing grade (70) and the total percentage of the students who pass the passing grade was 70%. results and discussion analysis phase instructional analysis the researcher analyzed the materials related to descriptive text available in students’ textbooks. from the textbook, there is one descriptive text entitled “i am proud of indonesia”. this descriptive text is available in the textbook for seventh graders but there is no local cultural values in the text. the textbook used by the students entitled “when english rings the bells” provided by the indonesian government. the writer also analyzed the 2013 curriculum to determine the basic competence, learning indicators, and learning objectives for developed materials. students’ need analysis students’ need analysis was conducted to obtain the following information: 1) students’ opinion toward reading, 2) obstacles in reading comprehension, 3) perception of the teaching and learning process, 4) perception about the available reading materials, and 5) students’ expectations on the developed reading materials. a questionnaire consisted of 30 items was given to the seventhgrade students to obtain the information. based on the results of students’ need analysis, it can be concluded that developed reading materials (i.e. descriptive text about palembang historical buildings) were needed to be developed. students’ reading level analysis the analysis was conducted to find out students’ reading level that was used as the reference for determining the readability levels of the developed descriptive text. in this analysis, jennings informal reading assessment by jennings (2001) was given to the students. the level of reading texts in the test included levels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. the reason for giving these reading levels to the seventh graders because based on the english teacher reports and the students’ reading achievement was at a low level. table 2 presents the result of the students’ reading test. table 2. the distribution of students’ reading level text level reading stage frustrational (correct number ≤ 4) instructional (correct number 5-6) independent (correct number 7-8) n % n % n % level 1 100 69.4 % 26 18.0 % 18 12.5 % level 2 88 61.1 % 35 24.3 % 21 14.5 % level 3 66 45.8 % 40 27.7 % 38 26.3 % level 4 99 68.7 % 27 18.7 % 18 12.5 % level 5 143 99.3 % 0 0 % 1 0.6 % *n = number of students *% = percentage of students design phase in this phase, the writer developed the reading materials about historical buildings in palembang as the topic of the text. based on the result of students’ reading level analysis, this developed product was designed for reading level three students. there are ten descriptive texts constructed which are seven texts for reading material and three texts for reading comprehension. every reading text has different readability levels that were checked by using flesh kincaid. reading texts for reading materials was used as an instrument to determine the potential effect of the developed product. the items were informed of multiple choices and true or false statements which consist of 70 items of questions. reading texts for reading comprehension consists of 30 multiplechoice questions. the content validity and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 297 instructional design validity were validated based on the experts’ judgments. evaluation and revision phase self-evaluation self-evaluation was conducted by the writer to recheck the developed reading materials. some grammatical mistakes and misspelling words were found. afterward, necessary changes were done to correct the mistakes. expert review the language and content as well as the instructional design were validated based on the experts’ judgments. the comments and suggestions as the results of the experts’ judgments were used to improve the quality of the product. one-to-one evaluation in this phase, three randomly selected participants were involved. they had different levels of reading that represented each level of reading i.e. frustrational, instructional, and independent reading levels. this evaluation was conducted by video call. each student was individually shown the developed product to read and they were asked to give comments about the strengths and weaknesses of the product. after that, the students were given the product and completed the exercises in the google form. the one-to-one evaluation aimed to determine the practicality of the developed product and it was done by analyzing the results of the questionnaire given to the students. the researcher calculated the students’ average score from 15 items of the questionnaire and the average score was 3.17 showed in table 3. it can be concluded that the developing descriptive reading text materials about palembang historical buildings for seventh graders were practical with the high category. table 3. result of questionnaire in one-to-one evaluation aspects no. average score remarks the appropriateness between materials and students’ needs 1. 2.66 high practicality 2. 2.00 low practicality 3. 3.33 very high practicality content presentation 4. 2.66 high practicality 5. 3.33 very high practicality 6. 3.33 very high practicality 7. 3.66 very high practicality 8. 3.33 very high practicality exercise and evaluation aspects 9. 3.33 very high practicality 10. 3.33 very high practicality 11. 3.33 very high practicality 12. 3.33 very high practicality attractiveness of the content 13. 3.66 very high practicality 14. 3.33 very high practicality 15. 3.00 high practicality average score 3.17 high practicality small-group evaluation in this phase, the product was given to nine participants who had different reading levels. there were three students in each reading level i.e. frustrational, instructional and, independent reading level. the students who had joined in the one-toone evaluation were not involved. this phase was similar to the one-to-one evaluation, each student was shown the developed product to read and they were asked to review or evaluate it. the questionnaire was the same used in the one-to-one evaluation. after that, the students were given the product and did the exercises in the google form. then, the result of the questionnaire was calculated to determine the practicality of the product. the result in table 4 shows that the average score was 3.44. it can be concluded that the developing descriptive reading text materials about palembang’s historical buildings for seventh graders were practical with the very high category. 298 table 4. result of questionnaire in small group aspects no. average score remarks the appropriateness between materials and students’ needs 1. 3.11 high practicality 2. 3.11 high practicality 3. 3.66 very high practicality content presentation 4. 3.55 very high practicality 5. 3.66 very high practicality 6. 3.44 very high practicality 7. 3.22 high practicality 8. 3.33 very high practicality exercise and evaluation aspects 9. 3.77 very high practicality 10. 3.66 very high practicality 11. 3.55 very high practicality 12. 3.55 very high practicality attractiveness of the content 13. 3.44 very high practicality 14. 3.22 high practicality 15. 3.33 very high practicality average score 3.44 very high practicality field test the field test was a phase in which the developed products were implemented in a real class of seventh graders of junior high school. the students who were participating in the one-to-one evaluation and small group evaluation were not involved anymore in the field test. thirty students from the real class of seventh grade involved in the field test. the test consisted of three reading texts with 30 multiple-choice questions. similar to inderawati, nurhayati, sitinjak, & susanti (2019) who developed narrative text reading material, haryanti, et al. (2021), and agustina, petrus, & inderawati (2021) who also produced descriptive reading materials. the developed descriptive reading materials on historical buildings in palembang were given to determine the potential effect of the developed product. the result of the student’s achievement in the reading comprehension test is shown in figure 1. figure 1. the result of the student’s achievement in the reading comprehension test conclusion the developing descriptive reading text materials about palembang historical buildings for seventh graders was valid, with an average score was 3.20. from the validity categorization, the developed descriptive reading materials were categorized high validity. the developed product was also practical based on the results of the one-to-one evaluation with a score of 3.17, the product had a high practical level. in the small group evaluation, the average score was 3.44. therefore, it can be concluded that the developed product had a very high practical level. finally, the result of the field test confirmed that the product was valid and had a potential effect on students’ reading achievement since 73.33% of students reached the passing grade. references agustina, k., petrus, i., & inderawati, r. (2021). descriptive reading materials: palembang tourist destination. yogyakarta: spasi book. agustina, l., and harahap, a. (2018). developing reading material based-on local culture for junior high school in kabupaten rejang lebong. journal of applied linguistics and literature, 3(1), 115128. akker, j. v. d. (1999). principle and methods of development research. in j. akker, r. branch, k. hustalfon, t. nieveen n, g plomp (eds.), design methodology and development research (pp. 1-14). london, uk: kluwer. azizah, n., inderawati, r., & vianty, m. (2021). developing descriptive reading materials in efl english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 299 classes by utilizing the local culture. studies in english language and education, 8(2), 596-621. badan standar nasional pendidikan (bsnp). (2006). panduan penyusunan kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan jenjang pendidikan dasar dan menegah. retrieved from http://bsnpindonesia.org/id/wpcontent/uploads/kompetensi/pa nduan_umum_ktsp.pdf. carrel, p.d. (1998). interactive approaches to second language reading (7th ed). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. elvian, r., inderawati, r., & mirizon, s. (2020). developing interactive multimedia for teaching descriptive texts based on palembang local culture. indonesia efl journal, 6(1), 19-26. ef epi. (2017). education first english proficiency index. the world’s largest ranking of english skills. retrieved from http://www.ef.co.id/epi/. ef epi. (2018). education first english proficiency index. the world’s largest ranking of english skills. retrieved from http://www.ef.co.id/epi/. hartini, r. 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(1993). planning and conducting formative evaluation. philadehelphia, pa: kogan page. wardiman, a., jahur, m. b., & djusman, s. (2008). english in focus for grade ix junior high school. jakarta, id: pusat perbukuan departemen pendidikan nasional. wulandari, a. a., vianty, m., & fiftinova. (2018). using local culture as teaching materials for improving students’ reading comprehension. the journal of english literacy education (the teaching and learning of english as a foreign language, 5(1), 11-24. http://bsnp-indonesia.org/id/wpcontent/uploads/kompetensi/panduan_umum_ktsp.pdf http://bsnp-indonesia.org/id/wpcontent/uploads/kompetensi/panduan_umum_ktsp.pdf http://bsnp-indonesia.org/id/wpcontent/uploads/kompetensi/panduan_umum_ktsp.pdf http://www.ef.co.id/epi/ http://www.ef.co.id/epi/ http://wps.ablongman.com/wps/medi/objects/2668/2753469/richek_appd.pdf http://wps.ablongman.com/wps/medi/objects/2668/2753469/richek_appd.pdf http://www.bsnp.go.id/ 300 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 217 lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications hartono hartono english education department of languages and communication faculty of university of islam sultan agung, semarang central java indonesia e-mail: hartono@unissula.ac.id ruseno arjanggi psychology department of psychology faculty university of islam sultan agung, semarang central java indonesia e-mail: ruseno@unissula.ac.id apa citation: hartono, h. & arjanggi, r. (2020). lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 217-226. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3859 received: 20-08-2020 accepted: 15-10-2020 published: 30-12-2020 introduction over the past few years the indonesian government through the ministry of research, technology and higher education, which under the second term of mr. joko widodo’s (jokowi’s) presidency (2019-2024) is named ministry of education and culture, has been encouraging lecturers and researchers to write and publish academic papers in international journals. academic papers, also called scholarly papers, are papers submitted to academic journals in which prior to their publications, they must pass an academic quality assessment and be reviewed by researchers or reviewers working in the same field (www.defsa.org.za/what-academic-paper). two ambitious goals were set regarding this vision: dissemination of lecturers’ research findings and lecturers’ active involvement in scholarly discourses with lecturers and researchers at the international level. in this way, global networks and stronger academic reputations can be established. the number of international publications and citations, according to the government, contributes to the increase of the quality of the national products which in the long run can increase foreign exchanges for the country (kemristekdikti, 2016). year-by-year data show that there has been a significant increase of indonesian’s international publications in the last recent years. in all subject categories, scimago recorded there were 21,315 documents in 2017 and the number increased to 34,496 documents in 2018 or it grew by 68.84%. the increase continued as in 2019 there were 44,576 documents or it increased by 29.22%. in 2017, indonesia stood as the ninth country in asiatic regions, in 2018 it stood the sixth and finally it became the fifth in 2019. however, by referring to the cumulative documents from 1996 to 2019, in 2019 scimago journal & country ranks listed indonesian international publication the 11th among the countries in asiatic regions for all subject areas and categories, and the 4th among the asean countries. indonesia stood after abstract: this study was aimed at investigating attitude and anxiety of indonesian lecturers in writing english papers for international publications, together with the influence of gender and functional grades on them. it involved lecturers of a private university in semarang, central java, indonesia (n=62) who were attending a training on english academic writing especially designed to help them prepare manuscripts for international publications. data were collected by questionnaires and analyzed using t-test and anova. the study found that the attitude toward writing was positive. three aspects of attitude namely behavioral, cognitive, and affective were all positive. the anxiety in writing english papers was found to be moderate and somatic anxiety was the type of anxiety the lecturers suffered the most. there was no difference on the attitude and level of anxiety across gender but there was a difference on the level of anxiety across functional grades. as attitude and anxiety predict the success of writing efforts, which may then affect the success of publication, the issue of attitude and anxiety needs to be addressed in the effort of increasing the productivity of indonesian lecturers in making international publications. keywords: attitude; anxiety; indonesian lecturer; english academic papers; international publication mailto:hartono@unissula.ac.id mailto:ruseno@unissula.ac.id http://www.defsa.org.za/what-academic-paper hartono hartono & ruseno arjanggi lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications 218 malaysia, singapore and thailand (www.scimagojr.com). this means that, despite the significant increase in the last recent years, there are still many things the indonesian lecturers and researchers need to do to make indonesia the country with the biggest number of publications, at least among the asean countries by taking over malaysia, singapore and thailand. this is very reasonable since, among the asean countries, indonesia is the biggest and the most populous country with the biggest number of universities (dikti, 2018; sukirno, 2017), and the biggest number of lecturers (ahmar, kurniasih, & irawan, 2018). although improving the quality of indonesian lecturers’ academic papers and increasing the number of publications particularly in reputable journals are important issues, studies on the issues are still very limited. among a few studies available mentioned that english language mastery is one among the factors leading to low productivity of indonesian lecturers and researchers in publishing scientific papers in international journals (alimi & rokhman, 2017). language problem is a serious problem. fundamental weakness in english has become the barriers for making international publications. according to the study, many english manuscripts submitted by indonesian writers were rejected because of being poorly written which consequently failed to fulfill the required standard. the paper of arsyad et al. suggested that low english mastery of indonesian lecturers has caused them problems either in reading english journals for references or in writing articles correctly and appropriately as required by well-established international journals. another cause of low productivity in scientific paper publication was the unfamiliarity of indonesian academics on rhetorical styles of academic papers, their similarities and differences between english scientific papers and the indonesian ones (arsyad, purwo, sukamto, & adnan, 2019). indonesian lecturers also encounter many types of language problems as grammar, syntax, vocabulary, spelling, paraphrasing and the likes (hartono, arjanggi, nugroho, & maerani, 2019). as language becomes a big problem for indonesian lecturers in writing and publishing papers in international journals, studies on the issue of improving lecturers’ competency in english language mastery become mandatory. for that purpose, the study was conducted. attitude and anxiety became the focus in this study because these two factors much contribute to the success of lecturers’ in writing english academic papers as english is a foreign language for the majority of them. attitude toward the target culture and target language significantly affects the level of success the learners will possibly achieve (gardner, 1985). attitude is a major determinant of behaviors (bohner & wänke, 2002), lecturers with positive attitudes toward learning and writing english papers for international publication will perceive every effort of learning and exercise as positive and enjoyable. on the contrary, those with negative attitude will perceive it as negative and discouraging. thus, attitude is linked to the person’s values and beliefs and promotes or discourages the choices he/she possibly makes in a certain realms of activity (mcgroarty, 1995). studies also found out that attitude represents one of the most important sets of variables for predicting learners’ efficiency and achievement since it intertwines with motivation. positive attitude will lead to stronger motivation (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009), therefore, leading to positive learning outcome (wesely, 2012), and in the case of language learning, it influences the level of proficiency in the target language (l2) (mckenzie, 2010). attitude is constructed from three different components namely affective, behavioral or conative, and cognitive. affective component is about the person’s feeling and emotion about a certain object, whether the person likes, dislikes, loves, is angry with or disgusted. it is an emotional response to an attitudinal object. behavioral or conative component is about a person’s actions or disposition to take up and practice the behavior in certain ways if he is in a certain situation. it is an overt action that a person is taking in relation to an attitudinal object. for example, a lecturer may attend or not attend an english writing training offered to him. cognitive component deals with person’s beliefs and thoughts as well as ideas about an object. people make beliefs by establishing associations or relationships between the attitude objects and various attributes resulted from an evaluation. in indonesian context up to the present, the topic on lecturers’ attitude toward writing english papers for international publication is under explored. there was a study conducted by arsyad (arsyad et al., 2019) on factors hindering indonesian lecturers from publishing articles in international reputable journals, which may serve as a starting point for further relevant studies, suggested that the lecturers attitude toward international publication is positive. besides the http://www.scimagojr.com/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 219 facts that indonesian lecturers mostly have been very busy with the activities of tridarma (three main jobs of lecturers) namely teaching, conducting research, and community services, they are still willing to work hard to write articles and submit them to international journals because of the benefits that they, and institutions, may obtain from the publications as credits for career promotion, institution credibility, selfsatisfaction/pride, and personal credibility. however, more studies are necessary to either verify the finding or develop greater understanding especially on the issue of writing since publication starts from writing activities. the second aspect of affect which is important to be researched dealing with writing in a second or foreign language is anxiety. it is a major obstacle faced by foreign language learners to overcome (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986). studies have consistently proven that language anxiety negatively correlates with language achievement (macintyre & gardner, 1991; tran, moni, & baldauf jr., 2013). it negatively influences language learning both intuitively and logically (horwitz, 2001). studies also show that it interferes with many types of learning. as a part of affective factor, anxiety is also hypothesized to affect the success of learning (krashen, 2009). writing anxiety or writing apprehension is a situation and subject-specific anxiety in the form of a person’s tendencies whether to approach or to avoid potential writing tasks (daly & wilson, 1983). to measure the anxiety, a second language writing anxiety inventory (slwai) was proposed (cheng, 2004). it is a multidimensional scale which conforms to three conceptualizations of anxiety namely somatic anxiety, cognitive anxiety and avoidance behavior. somatic anxiety is someone’s perception of the psychological effects of anxiety. the increasing feeling of tension and nervousness are the symptoms of this kind of anxiety. cognitive anxiety is the cognitive aspect of anxiety experience which covers negative expectation, preoccupation with performance and concerns about others’ perception. the last dimension is a form of avoidance behavior which refers to behavioral aspect of anxiety. it occurs when someone intentionally searches ways to approach or to avoid writing tasks. previous research shows that writing anxiety negatively influences writing performance and is inversely correlated with writing motivation. there is even a correlation between academic procrastination and writing anxiety (onwugbuzie & collins, 2001). cheng (2002) also suggests that language learners with high level of writing anxiety tend to feel discouraged in writing, hold negative attitude towards writing tasks, and produce low quality papers. learners with high level of foreign language anxiety may have a mental block which affects their ability to process information in foreign language contexts (liu, 2006). they also write essays that receive lower evaluation (lee & krashen, 2002). a study by hassan (2001) found out that esl writing anxiety affected learners’ writing performance. low anxiety students could compose better quality and longer writing than the students with high anxiety. another study by cheng (2004) suggested that writing anxiety affect both writing process and writing behavior. using a timed english writing task as an index of participants’ writing performance, cheng concluded that there is a significant negative correlation between anxiety and learners’ performance. considering the effect of both attitude and anxiety in the success of writing in a foreign language and the fact that topic on attitude and anxiety of indonesian lecturers in writing english papers for international publications is obviously under explored, the present study was conducted. it aimed at: 1. analyzing the indonesian lecturers’ attitude toward writing english academic papers for international publications; 2. analyzing the indonesian lecturers’ anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications; 3. finding out the influence of gender and functional grades on the levels of attitude and anxiety. method context and participants this research involved 62 lecturers attending an english academic writing training especially designed to help them prepare manuscripts for international journals. they were non-english subject lecturers of a university in semarang, indonesia. twenty-four people (38.71%) were male and 38 persons (61.29%) were female. the majority of them (80.30%) were master degree holders from either indonesian or overseas universities, while 19.70% were doctoral degree holders. they taught subjects other than english at different departments as civil engineering, electrical engineering, medicine, nursing, psychology, management, accounting, laws and education. based on their functional grades, hartono hartono & ruseno arjanggi lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications 220 43.6% of them were teaching assistants, 30.6% was junior lecturers, and 25.80% was assistant professors. there were 4 associate professors joining the training program, however, they were excluded from the study because of representation basis. instrument a five-part questionnaire was used to collect data for this study. part 1 served as an introduction stating the purpose of the research and a request for consent from the participants, while part 2 elicited demographic information on them. part 3 collected self-reported information on participants’ english academic writing performance. the last two parts which were the main parts of the instrument collected information about the attitude toward and the anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications. the attitude questionnaire consisted of 15 statements of indicators covering behavioral, cognitive, and affective components. the anxiety questionnaire also consisted of 15 statements of indicators which covered somatic aspect, cognitive aspect and avoidance behavior. the questionnaire was a likert-type form requiring the participants’ agreements in scales of 1 to 5. scale 1 represents “strongly disagree”, 2 represents for “disagree”, 3 is for “undecided”, 4 is for “agree”, and 5 is for “strongly agree.” negative statements were reversely scaled from “strongly agree” (scale 1) to “strongly disagree” (scale 5). the instruction and statements were written in indonesian as the participants’ mother tongue for the sake of clarity in meaning in order to avoid confusion and misleading. instrument validity was measured by pearson product moment correlation while the reliability was measured by the score of alpha cronbach. data collection and analysis participants were asked to complete the questionnaire before the training sessions. prior to doing the task, an explanation about the objectives of the research and the guidelines on how to complete the questionnaire were presented. data were then grouped and tabulated and were analyzed descriptively as well as inferentially by using spss software. finding and discussion academic writing performance the data on academic writing performance, particularly on the participants’ english writing competence and english publication performance is presented in table 1 below. table 1. participants’ self-reported academic writing performance no statements yes (%) no (%) 1 being able to write general english. 45 72.58 17 27.42 2 being able to write english academic or research papers. 41 66.13 21 33.87 3 having english paper(s) published in international journals. 18 29.03 44 70.97 4 getting translator’s service to help write journals. 24 38.71 38 61.29 the data in the table show that majority of the respondents reported that they could write both general english and english academic or research papers. however, the data show that the number of lecturers who are able to write english academic papers is lower than those who are able to write general english (66.13% compared to 72.58%). this reflects the fact that academic writing is more complicated than general type of writing. being someone who can write english does not always qualify him/her to write academic english. academic writing offers more challenges than general writing does as it requires, among others, the mastery of academic writing conventions, topic analysis, social identity construction, ability to research and apply knowledge across different contexts (pineteh, 2014). beginner academic writers very often also face difficulties due to lack of knowledge, inability to have a clear outline before drafting, and problems in avoiding plague words and phrases (fadda, 2012). in addition, they face linguistic, cognitive, and psychological problems (rahmatunisa, 2014) in their attempts to write. related to publishing english papers, lower number of respondents reported that they had successfully done it. there were only 18 respondents (29.03%) who had ever published papers in international journals. a wide gap between an ability to write and publication may indicate that there are other factors influencing or playing role in making lecturers publishing internationally. mastering the language and being able to write don’t necessarily mean that lecturers will write and publish papers in international journals. this finding validates previous studies english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 221 about major reasons lecturers not publish internationally namely feeling ashamed of having low quality articles, their predisposition that writing in reputable international journal is difficult, the absence of incentives for those who successfully published, low confidence, limited access to good research references, limited access to laboratory facilities, lack of research collaborations with international researchers, and lack of internationally reputable journals in indonesia (alimi & rokhman, 2017; arsyad et al., 2019; yusetyowati, 2015). the high number of lecturers getting translation services in writing english journal for international publications also serves as a strong indicator that language is a problem for lecturers to write (hartono et al., 2019). attitude toward writing english papers lecturers’ attitude toward writing academic papers for international publication was measured by 15 indicators covering affective, behavioral, and cognitive components. behavioral component was measured by 4 indicators namely the willingness to learn to write, to participate in a training if available, to keep trying even if difficult, and to read more english papers relevant to their topic of interest. cognitive component was measured by 6 indicators, 4 indicators were positive while the other 2 were negative. the positive indicators were their acknowledgement that english academic writing ability would help them 1) improve their performance as lecturers, 2) build networks with other researchers, and 3) develop their academic performance, and 4) that academic papers written in english have higher possibility to be accepted in scientific journals. the negative indicators were 1) their acknowledgement that writing english papers is more difficult, and 2) that they couldn’t develop their ideas if they had to write in english. affective component was measured by 5 indicators, three indicators were positive while the other two were negative. the positive indicators were 1) they think that writing english is enjoyable, 2) they would be very happy if they could finish writing, and 3) they would be very happy if their english paper were published in international journals. for the negative, 1) they didn’t have any interest to write articles in english, and 2) writing article in english would only make them depressed. the results were categorized into 3 groups of negative, neutral, and positive attitude. the categorization was based on hypothetical mean scores of the questionnaire in which participant’s total scores lower than or the same as 34.5 were categorized as having negative attitude, the participants whose scores were between 34.6 and 55.5 were categorized as having neutral attitude, and those with scores higher than 55.6 was categorized as having positive attitude. the result of the calculation is presented in table 2 below. table 2. descriptive statistics of attitude scores n min max mean sd attitude scores 62 46.00 75.00 61.48 7.03 valid n (listwise) 62 n no. of indicators min max calculated mean hypothetical mean behavioral component 62 4 12 20 17.23 12 cognitive component 62 6 19 30 24.06 18 affective component 62 5 13 25 20.19 15 the table shows that the mean score for the attitude in general is 61.48 (>55.5), the mean score for behavioral component is 17.23, and the one for cognitive component and affective component subsequently are 24.06 and 20.19. all those scores are higher than the hypothetical mean scores, therefore, it can be concluded that indonesian lecturers have positive attitude toward writing english papers for international publications behaviorally, cognitively as well as affectively. behaviorally, they would learn how to write in english, participate in a writing training, keep trying, and read english papers relevant to their topics of interests so that they can improve their writing. affectively, they found that writing english papers for international publications was enjoyable. cognitively, they believed that being able to write and publish english papers internationally would help them improve their performance and build networks with other lecturers and researchers. this finding is in line hartono hartono & ruseno arjanggi lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications 222 with the study of arsyad which concludes that indonesian lecturers had positive attitude toward publishing in international journals. although they may be busy with their both academic and administrative works, they are still willing to work hard to write papers and submitted them in international journals (arsyad et al., 2019). as attitude intertwines with motivation (dörnyei & ushioda, 2009), correlates to learning outcome (wesely, 2012) and influences proficiency in target language (mckenzie, 2010), the indonesian lecturers have a high possibility to be able to write english papers and publish them in international journals. this possibility has even materialized in the last 3 years as the number of the indonesian international publications increased significantly (scimago journal & country rank at www.scimagojr.com). anxiety in writing english papers the next part of the study was concerned with the level of anxiety experienced by indonesian lecturers in writing english academic papers. it was measured by 15 indicators covering somatic aspect, cognitive aspect and avoidance behavior. in this study, somatic anxiety was indicated by the pounding of the heart, the blankness of mind, the jumbling or easy flowing ideas, and feeling of panic when required to write papers in english. cognitive anxiety was indicated by the occupation of negative thoughts about their english as the english terms and phrases used in writing were inappropriate, the english was worse than other lecturers’ english, other lecturers would deride his english paper, other lecturers would think about the paper; and the english paper would be rated poorly. avoidance behavior was indicated by the lecturers’ efforts to avoid or approach writing papers in english. a descriptive analysis was conducted. the result is presented in table 3 below. table 3. descriptive statistics of anxiety scores n min max mean sd anxiety 62 17.00 60.00 41.24 9.77 valid n (listwise) 62 freq % valid % cum. % valid low 14 22.6 22.6 22.6 moderate 42 67.7 67.7 90.3 high 6 9.7 9.7 100.0 total 62 100.0 100.0 types of anxiety n min max mean sd somatic 62 5.00 22.00 14.90 4.01 cognitive 62 5.00 20.00 13.71 3.20 avoidance 62 5.00 20.00 12.63 3.74 valid n (listwise) 62 the table shows the minimum score of anxiety is 17, the maximum is 60, and the mean score is 41.24. with the same method of analysis as the one applied in the analysis of attitude scores, it was decided that scores lower than or the same as 34.5 were categorized as low anxiety, scores between 34.6 and 55.5 were categorized as moderate anxiety, and finally scores higher than 55.6 were categorized as high anxiety. calculated mean score (41.24) lies between 34.6 and 55.5, therefore, it can be concluded that in general the participants in this study had a moderate level of anxiety. fourteen participants (22.6%) actually had low level of anxiety, while for high level of anxiety there were 6 participants (9.7%) analysis on the anxiety types shows that somatic anxiety has the highest mean score followed by cognitive anxiety and avoidance behavior. this means that when the case is writing english papers for international publications, indonesian lecturers suffered somatic anxiety the most. somatic anxiety is someone’s perception of the psychological effects of anxiety as the increasing feeling of tension and nervousness. someone who is suffering from this type of anxiety may get sweaty, trembling, high heart rate, headache etc. http://www.scimagojr.com/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 223 the finding that somatic anxiety was the one indonesian lecturers suffered most is aligned with the study conducted by min and rahmat (2014) which found that in the case of final year writing for university putra malaysia undergraduates, somatic anxiety was reported to be the dimension with the highest score. jebreil, azizifar, and gowhary (2015) also found that somatic anxiety was the most common type of anxiety in the case of english writing. a study of indonesian efl writing learners found that both male and female learners suffered somatic anxiety the most, followed by cognitive anxiety and avoidance behavior (rudiyanto, 2017). however, it should be noted that this finding is different from the one of cheng (2004) which revealed that writing learners were more anxious cognitively rather than somatically. the role of gender and functional grades to see whether there is a significant difference of attitude and anxiety across gender, t-test was conducted. the result shows that the mean scores of attitude were 62.58 for male and 60.79 for female, and sig (2-tailed) was 0.332. the mean scores for anxiety were 41.58 for male and 41.03 for female. an analysis using t-test to see whether there is a significance difference between male and female results in sig (2-tailed) 0.332 for attitude and 8.29 for anxiety. therefore, it can be concluded that gender affects neither attitude nor anxiety. there is no significant difference on the level of lecturers’ anxiety in writing english paper for international publications between male and female lecturers. previous studies found an inconclusive result on the correlation between gender and anxiety in writing. cheng (2002) in the study on 165 english majors found no significant influence of gender on writing anxiety. more recent study by latif (2015) on 132 universiti teknologi malaysia space students investigating english language anxiety among adult learners using three demographic factors of gender, age and years of learning english also found no significant correlation between gender and anxiety. while jebreil, et al. (2015) in their study of 45 efl learners (26 females and 19 males) found a significant difference of anxiety level between male and female, in which males had higher cognitive anxiety than females did. in addition, shang (2013) in a study on 146 juniors majoring in english at a private university in taiwan found similar finding. male students had higher level of anxiety because the students probably spent more efforts in writing to have a better achievement. in this study, the finding that male lecturers had the same level of anxiety as their female counterparts may be attributed to the fact that the demand of having international publications is equally applicable to all lecturers regardless of gender. both of them got the same supports and facilities from universities as well as the same opportunity. to see whether there is a difference on attitude and anxiety across functional grades, test of anova was conducted. the study involved only 3 groups of lecturers namely teaching assistants (ta), junior lecturers (jl) (asisten ahli) and assistant professors (ap) (lektor). the result is presented below: table 4. descriptive statistics of functional grade scores functional grades n mean scores standard dev. attitude anxiety attitude anxiety teaching assistant(ta) 27 62.30 37.48 6.52 9.52 junior lecturer (jl) 19 62.68 44.84 7.72 9.66 assistant professor(ap) 16 58.69 43.31 6.67 8.51 total 62 61.48 41.24 7.03 9.77 dependent variable (i) functional grades (j) functiona l grades mean difference (i-j) std. error sig. 95% confidence interval lower bound upper bound attitude ta jl -.388 2.079 .981 -5.387 4.611 ap 3.609 2.190 .234 -1.658 8.876 jl ta .388 2.079 .981 -4.611 5.387 ap 3.997 2.356 .215 -1.668 9.661 ap ta -3.609 2.190 .234 -8.876 1.658 hartono hartono & ruseno arjanggi lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications 224 jl -3.997 2.356 .215 -9.661 1.668 anxiety ta jl -7.361* 2.790 .028 -14.070 -.650 ap -5.831 2.940 .125 -12.900 1.238 jl ta 7.361* 2.790 .028 .650 14.070 ap 1.530 3.162 .879 -6.073 9.132 ap ta 5.831 2.940 .125 -1.238 12.900 jl -1.530 3.162 .879 -9.132 6.073 *. the mean difference is significant at the 0.05 level. junior lecturer has the highest mean score both for attitude and anxiety, assistant professor has the lowest mean score of attitude, and teaching assistant has the lowest score of anxiety which may mean the lowest level of anxiety. when attitude is the case, however, those differences in mean scores are not significant (sig.> 0.05). this means that among the three groups, functional grade didn’t cause difference in attitude toward writing english journals for international publications. this is different from the anxiety. among the three groups, the anxiety mean score of teaching assistant is significantly different from the one of junior lecturer (sig. 0.028). in writing english journals for international publications, teaching assistant was less anxious than junior lecturer was. the absence of difference on attitude among the groups may be attributed to the fact that, besides most of them were young and energetic; publishing internationally perhaps has not been very pressuring. while professors and associate professors are required to have international publications on regular basis, junior lecturer and assistant professor aren’t. for performance evaluation (laporan beban kerja dosen) and grade promotion, they may use academic journals published in national journals. conclusion the study aimed at finding out the level of attitude and anxiety faced by indonesian lecturers in writing english academic papers for international publications, and the influence of gender and functional grades on them. the data and analysis found that indonesian lecturers were behaviorally, cognitively, and affectively positive about writing english academic papers for international publications and had a moderate level of anxiety. gender was proven to be an insignificant predictor for both attitude and anxiety since there was no significant difference in the attitude and level of anxiety across gender. for functional grade, while it didn’t bring different effect on attitude, this study found that the level of anxiety between teaching assistant and junior lecturer was significantly different, therefore, it was inferred that functional grade influenced the anxiety. since attitude and anxiety play important roles in the success of learning writing and publishing, any efforts by universities or the indonesian government in trying to encourage lecturers to prepare english academic papers for international publications should not neglect them. to increase productivity from the beginning of their academic careers, indonesian lecturers must be very confident to start writing. academic writing trainings should not only cover issues related to topics and how to write but also addresses the issue of affective factors. this study only involved lecturers from a university with a relatively small number, therefore, it is recommended that further studies involve lecturers from many different universities, both public and private. other factors such as infrastructure and funding that may potentially influence lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing papers for international publications may also be explored. references ahmar, a. s., kurniasih, n., & irawan, d. e. 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(2015). penggunaan bahasa inggris untuk penulisan artikel penelitian. orbith, 11(1), 19–23. hartono hartono & ruseno arjanggi lecturers’ attitude toward and anxiety in writing english academic papers for international publications 226 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee rape cases: genre and rhetorical analysis of controversial malaysian legal judgements maya khemlani david university of malaya, malaysia email: mayadavid@yahoo.com neda saeipoor university of malaya, malaysia email: nsaeipour@yahoo.com mumtaz ali university of karachi, pakistan e-mail: mumtaz.human@gmail.com apa citation: david, m. k., saeipoor, n., & ali, m. (2016). rape cases: genre and rhetorical analysis of controversial malaysian legal judgement. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 71-78 received: 03-10-2016 accepted: 08-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: kachru and smith (2008) emphasize that effectual communication in the context in which different varieties of world english are used, entails awareness of the varieties in use and their cultural, social, and ideational functions. court reports by malaysian judges are part of legal documents, which may be considered as a genre. investigating the linguistic details of these reports may be helpful in understanding the argumentative and persuasive strategies used in these judgments. the issue of rape and justice is an important concern in society. the aim of this study is to investigate malaysian judgment reports in the english language on rape cases from a linguistic perspective. specifically, the aim of the study is to identify court of appeal judgment reports of rape cases as a genre and to identify the moves used in this genre. the moves within the genre were identified by studying two controversial reports which showed that the judgments might suffer from relying on pathos argumentation in one critical move. keywords: language, law, legal, judgment, malaysia and courts introduction the literature on language and the law is replete with references to the central importance of language in the legal process. given the close relationship between language and law, it is not surprising that both lawyers and applied linguists have devoted considerable time and energy to the description of legal texts and associated legal literacy practices (hafner, 2010). according to richards, gillespie, & smith (2014) in most cases‘law enforcement officers are often first responders and are most likely to provide news media with a description of the crime’. the present study seeks to utilize interconnecting bridges between language and law in order to reveal the fundamental moves in this professional genre in the courts of appeal in malaysia with a focus on rape cases. the legal support in interpreting the rape cases is important (barnes & stringer, 2014). in a paper on blame attribution in rape cases finch and munro (2005) said 71 mailto:mayadavid@yahoo.com mailto:nsaeipour@yahoo.com maya khemlani david, neda saeipoor, & mumtaz ali rape cases: genre and rhetorical analysis of controversial malaysian legal judgements that the merger of provision of statutory and common law are criticized as illequipped to deal with the intricacies of modern sexual (mis) behavior. while bentham and other scholars such as wittgenstein looked at the relationship between language and law from a philosophical and even political point of view, other scholars have sought to address other levels of relationship between language and law. castero (1991) for instance studied criminal appeal cases in the philippines and attempted to establish the appeal case as a unique genre in itself. he applied bhatia’s model and concluded that the arrangements of the different moves of a legal case are structured and the sequence in which they occur are shaped by shared conventions. in malaysia, interdisciplinary work on linguistics and law is a relatively new area of study. a few malaysian scholars have selected malaysian courts to study different aspects of language and its interrelations with law in general and court reports in particular. several comprehensive studies have examined the linguistic aspects of court interactions and documents from different perspectives. for example, zubaidah ibrahim (2002) studied the adequacy of interpreting services and the effectiveness of the malaysian judicial system in providing such services in courts by exploring roles and expectations. she questions the insufficiency of interpreting systems, which affect the quality of judicial process, and secondly absence of proper supervision which adversely affects the reliability of the system. other studies including nadzimah's (2008) have looked at language choice and use among practitioners who deal with justice and order through the language of law. another example of such linguistic/law interdisciplinary research in malaysia is noraini (2007) who studied proceedings in the criminal courts of kuala lumpur. her study looks at the issue of chosen language, specifically those other than bahasa malaysia (malay language). the language act of malaysia asserts that bahasa malaysia is the medium of national communication and is used in all government departments. at the turning point of the millennium, the malaysian government decided to establish “a full-fledged ministry that demonstrates the government’s commitment to raise the status of women in this country”, first called as “the ministry of women's affairs" the ministry of women, family and community development has since been aiming for empowerment of women, promoting gender equality and securing women’s rights by setting strategies for related department and organizations as well as carrying out short and long term projects in order to enhance the situation of women. among different aspects of women and children issues, the phenomenon of rape can be considered as one of the most crucial and widespread problems worldwide and malaysia is not an exception. the matter is not only limited to the rights of women but the public health and psychological problems for women are related with domestic violence and rape (richards, gillespie, smith, 2014). according to the 2005 annual report of malaysian government to the united nations asia and far east institute for the prevention of crime and the treatment of offenders (unafei), regarding the issue of rape in malaysia, most of the abused, suffer in silence because they are not aware of the law and their rights and potential available 72 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee protections (unafei, 2005). according to women aid organization (wao) and based on royal police data, rape cases increased by more than 100% between 2000 and 2012. the present study seeks to shed light at a darker corner of women’s status in malaysia by looking at the rape cases from a linguistic point of view, in order to unearth the fundamental arguments in the reports of judges in rape cases. the significance of this issue is emphasized by the social and public interest devoted to the subject in social public media both online and offline. malaysian public’s awareness about rape cases, judgments on rape cases and the judicial system rules and regulations with regard to rape is reflected in the media in the form of protests, petitions and articles in newspapers, blogs, forums and online social networks. there is no known work on the generic structure of malaysian rape appeal case reports, which may be used by law students, lawyers, and judges as a source of information or reference. providing a clear picture of underlying steps in these reports might be helpful for law students and practitioners. different linguistic theories have been used to study written and oral legal discourses. interdisciplinary studies in law and linguistics have approached legal discourse using various methods and theories such as discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, rhetoric arguments, speech act theory, politeness theories, etc. considering our data and objectives we have decided to use a genre analysis approach to analyze rape case judgment reports of the court of appeal in malaysia. the framework for genre analysis used in this study is now presented. one of the basic concepts in genre analysis is the discourse community, which according to swales (1990) is a discourse in a community who shares a common public goal and has an intercommunication system and mechanism. discourse community has its own discoursal conventions, thus genre can be considered as communicative events by members of a discourse community, which is conventionalized through some explicit or implicit principles. some of the comprehensive works in this area that studied moves and steps in a genre include swales’ work (1990) on introduction to research articles that creates the cars model, bhatia’s work (1993) on sales promotion letters, and bunton’s study (2005) on phd thesis genre. bhatia (1991) and candlin (2003) have published on professional genre especially in legal discourse. bhatia (1997) explains the multidisciplinary nature of the generic framework and states genre analysis is “the study of situated linguistic behavior in institutionalized academic or professional settings”. earlier martin (1984) sought to describe rhetorical action in discourse. regardless of field of study, genre analysis is an academic approach to decipher the structural approaches of a known discourse and to unearth the underlying strategies of a discourse to achieve a certain goal through the realm of language. judges’ stance can affect the nature and formulation of their judgment. this can lead to variation in judgments, a consequence of which may be risk of a loss of trust. the particular stance taken by judges in their arguments is linguistically manifested in judgment reports. analyzing these legal reports from a genre perspective may serve to 73 maya khemlani david, neda saeipoor, & mumtaz ali rape cases: genre and rhetorical analysis of controversial malaysian legal judgements provide useful information on such variation and thereby enable the avoidance of social risk and the building of trust. mazzi (2007) conducted a multinational genre analysis, comparing european communities, uk and ireland. he reinforces the linguistic component of the analysis of legal on the argumentative discourse of judicial decisions by combining the perspectives of genre and corpus analysis. his focus is on the generic structure of the judgments concentrating on the more argumentative move of it, i.e. arguing the case. la free, as far back as 1980 said that response on reaction toward rape seemed flawed by theoretical and methodological problems that have prevented a reliable determinants assessment (la free, 1980). the analysis by mazzi (2007) was carried out on a small corpus of 40 judgments, 20 of which were delivered by the court of justice of the european communities, and ten by the house of lords (uk) and irelands's supreme court respectively. the corpus amounted to 425,502 words, and was designed according to two basic criteria: first of all, three courts of last instance were chosen, in order to ensure the homogeneity of corpus data and at the same time provide for a comparative framework provided by the inevitable differences among jurisdictions (european, english and irish) and legal systems (ec v. common law). the small corpus was randomly drawn from a larger reference corpus of 221 judgments (1,646,502 words) that had previously been created along the same guidelines. bhatia's model was taken as a standard reference, in order to re-construct the generic structure of the three types of judgments included in the corpus. the careful reading of all corpus texts revealed that english and irish judgments share the generic structure reported below: • identifying the case • establishing facts of the case • arguing the case • stating history of the case • identifying the conflict of categorization • presenting arguments • deriving ratio decidendi • pronouncing judgment this structure is close to bhatia's model in that it also features the four main moves identifying the case, establishing facts of the case, arguing the case and pronouncing judgment. however, it distances itself from it, since arguing the case is sub-divided into four rather than three sub-moves. when identifying the conflict of categorization it may be anticipated that through that move the judge explicitly acknowledges his categorization of the facts of the case, i.e. his interpretation of them under the appropriate predetermined legal category (e.g. murder v. manslaughter), and this may clash with an alternative categorization proposed by other subjects such as the representatives of a party in the dispute, another judge of the same bench or another court of the jurisdiction. on the other hand, ec judgments appear to be characterized by the slightly different generic structure reproduced below: • identifying the case • identifying the scope of proceedings before the court • retrieving relevant community and/or national legislation • stating history of the case • arguing the case • arguments of the parties • arguments of the court 74 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee • settling costs • pronouncing judgment even if european judgments are on an average shorter than english and irish ones, they are nonetheless articulated into more moves. for instance, a section of judgments is devoted to the identification of the scope of proceedings before the court in terms of: when did who bring what action against whom, and before judgment is pronounced, the court decides who is to bear costs. moreover, a peculiarity of european judgments lies in the courts accurate retrieval of relevant legislation at both a community and a member state level: this move is all the more important when the dispute is considered to center on an alleged incompatibility between ec law and national legislations. in addition, it is noteworthy that arguing the case is realized more briefly than in english and irish judgments, because it is limited to a summary of the parties opposed lines of argument followed by the court's own argumentation. english/irish and ec judgments both belong to the judicial genre, because they are both governed by the “discourse community” (swales, 1990, p. 9) of judges, whose communicative purpose is to settle a dispute by presenting wellfounded arguments in support of a judicial conclusion through which a number of more or less controversial facts are interpreted within the framework of a valid legal order. method the purpose of this study was to reveal fundamental contributing segments of language in court reports in the courts of appeal in malaysia with a focus on rape cases. considering the unique nature of the court of appeal judgment reports genre analysis was selected as a suitable technique to analyze the data. judgment reports can be defined as a genre based on bhatia (1997, p. 205) who defines genre as “the study of situated linguistic behavior in institutionalized academic or professional settings.” the reports in this study are analyzed based on bhatia’s seven steps for genre analysis: 1. determine the situational context 2. survey literature 3. refining the contextual analysis • speaker/writer and hearer/audience • history of discourse community • network of texts • subject/topic 4. select corpus 5. study how the genre is used 6. choose focal level for analysis • lexico-grammatical features • textualization (text-patterning) • structural analysis • cognitive move structure’ (focus on purpose) 7. get opinions of specialist informants objectives of the present study include: identifying the genre moves in court of appeal judgment reports in two controversial rape cases and identifying the rhetorical arguments in different moves in these judgments. based on lexisnexis database (online authoritative sources (which are relied upon by legal professionals) such as halsbury's laws of malaysia, malaysian precedents and forms, atkin's court forms malaysia, etc.) we accessed 242 judgment reports related to rape cases from different criminal courts in east and west malaysia. 103 cases concerning rape and murder were excluded because the victim was killed .the cases in the malay language from the “mahkamah” (religious) courts were also excluded. we focused 75 maya khemlani david, neda saeipoor, & mumtaz ali rape cases: genre and rhetorical analysis of controversial malaysian legal judgements on statutory rape cases (n= 102) and two 2 controversial cases were selected for analysis. results and discussion a total of 313 cases of rape were judged between 1963 and 2012. out of these documented cases the ones including other offences like murder, defamation, outraging modesty and other unrelated cases were deleted and 112 homogenous rape cases were collected and studied as a genre to find the general moves as well as submoves within them. five moves were distinguished to be common in all the reports: preambles, body of the case, appeal explanation, arguing the case and final sentence. these moves and their relevant sub-moves are classified below: 1. preambles • name of the alleged rapist • name of the court • name of attorney • identification number • date • summary of the nature of the case • particular to the case or their representatives o from the appellant, plaintiff o from the respondent, defendant o judge’s name 2. body of the case • explanation about the case history of the case • previous court’s judgment • grounds of last court’s sentence • scenario of the rape 3. explaining the appeal • appellant reasons 4. arguing the case • referring to other cases • referring to existing evidence o medical tests o extract of testimonies o reasons • wrapping up the reasons (conclusion) 5. final sentence • declaration of allowing or dismissing the appeal • (name of the reporter) the last part of the reports is declaration of the final sentence including the enhancement or mitigation of the sentence as well as restating whether the appeal has been allowed or dismissed. rhetorical analysis rhetorical analysis is an attempt to categorize the different aspects of the argumentation of the creator of an utterance. the argumentations are grouped in three major categories: 1. ethos (ethical appeal): writer’s credibility/qualifications to justify the argument made. 2. logos (logical appeal): the occasions where the judge mentions reasons and evidences in his argument. 3. pathos (pathetic appeal): tries to make use of the audience’s emotions for persuading the audience to attain approval, for instance creating sympathy or antagonism. accountability, expertise and professionalism are the basic elements of efficient and reliable investigations and judgments (fahsing & ask, 2015). according to sagana, sauerland & merckelbach (2015) critical legal practices create complications in decision-making processes. the moves and sub-moves were similar in both cases. the rhetorical arguments were 76 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee used only in the move named “arguing the case”. the analysis of the reports showed the tendency of the judges towards “pathos” backed with “ethos” emphasizing on the emotional aspects to raise the audience’s sympathy to approve the judgment. the judges also emphasized their authority to justify the sentence. “logos” on the other hand is used only in 2 or 3 sections in each report. the rhetorical argument pattern in the “arguing the case” move may help professionals avoid the risk of the effect of personal and emotional views. this can cost a loss of trust in the judicial system. the selected data was analyzed based on the above frameworks. there is a profound use of pathos. this argument is used several times to arose the audience’s sympathy and justify the sentence especially in the controversial cases in which the judges have shown a greater tendency to victimize the victim and make her share some of the responsibility for the occurrence of the crime and in this way explain the reduced sentence on the alleged rapist. this attitude is justified by drawing the audience’s attention to emotional aspects of the case more than the logical aspects. both cases show a fair amount of the use of pathos as a rhetorical device. conclusion bhatia (2008) argues that studies of professional genres and professional practices complement each other, in that they not only influence each other but also are often co-constructed in specific professional contexts. he emphasizes the function of interdiscursivity in critical genre analysis by drawing examples from a range of professional contexts for a shift towards an integration of discursive and professional practices. this view of professional discourse would account for and, to a large degree, integrate professional discourse and professional practice into a single framework. the moves and sub-moves were similar in the cases studied, allowing us to call the judgment reports of court of appeal for rape cases in malaysia “a genre” which law professionals and their audience use and understand. the rhetorical arguments were used only in the move named “arguing the case”. the analysis of the reports showed the tendency of the judges in these two controversial cases to move more towards “pathos” thus emphasizing the emotional aspects of the case and in this way logically explain the reduced sentence on the alleged rapists. references barnes, s. l., & stringer, e. c. (2014). is motherhood important? imprisoned women’s maternal experiences before and during confinement and their postrelease expectations. feminist criminology, 9 (1), pp. 3-23. bhatia, vijay k. (1997). translating legal genres. in: a. trosborg, ed. text typology and translation, amsterdam/philadelphia: john benjamin publishing company. (n.d.). retrieved november 23, 2013, from ministry of women, family and community development: http://www.kpwkm.g ov.my/latar-belakang bunton, d. (2005). the structure of phd conclusion chapters. journal of english for specific purposes, 4, pp. 207-224. christoph a., & hafner. 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(2015). the effect of choice reversals on blindness for identification decisions. psychology, crime & law, (just-accepted), pp. 1-25. swales, j. (1990). genre analysis: english in academic and research settings. cambridge: cambridge. up. yamuna kachru, y. & nelson, c. l. (2006). world englishes in asian contexts. hong kong university press. yan, l. s., chin abdullah, m., ju lin, o., & peck lin, w. (2002). an overview of rape in malaysia. strategic info research development. 78 http://www.unafei.or.jp/english/pdf/rs_no69/no69_15pa_jonit.pdf http://www.unafei.or.jp/english/pdf/rs_no69/no69_15pa_jonit.pdf english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 91 integrating process-genre approach with project ibunka to improve students’ english writing elis homsini maolida department of english education, universitas suryakancana, cianjur, indonesia e-mail: elishomsini@unsur.ac.id vina aini salsabila department of english education, universitas suryakancana, cianjur, indonesia e-mail: vnsabila91@gmail.com apa citation: maolida, e. h., & salsabila, v. a. (2019). integrating process-genre approach with project ibunka to improve students‟ english writing. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 91-100. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i1.2057. received: 22-10-2019 accepted: 19-11-2019 published: 01-12-2019 abstract: this study goes into how an integration of process-genre approach and project ibunka improves students‟ english writing. through process-genre approach, students put in writing essays by combining process and genre based writing. meanwhile, project ibunka as an online collaborative writing project is deployed as a means of publishing the students‟ writing to be read and commented by other students from various cultures and countries. in the context of this study, ibunka also provides sources used to explore the topic and as a writing model. this study is a classroom action research that involved 46 university students in two classes who learned to compose english essays in three learning cycles within twelve meetings. the integration of process-genre and project ibunka is implemented in four stages: introducing and exploring theme and topics of writing, modeling and determining genre, joint writing and independent writing. in joint and independent writing, the students go through several stages of writing process such as planning, drafting, writing, revising and editing. the result of essays scoring shows average score improvement in both classes from cycle 1 to cycle 2 and cycle 3. this students‟ writing improvement is also confirmed by students‟ positive responses revealed from observation, questionnaire and students interview. keywords: process-genre; project ibunka; writing; classroom action research. introduction writing is claimed as a challenging skill for learners (ali & ramana, 2016; cotos, link, & huffman, 2017) due to its complex processes (gonzales, 2010). the writing complexity arises from requirements to master multiple skills of writing (nyasimi, 2014) such as contribution of the writer‟s long-term memory, task environment, writing process (flower & tillema, 2013) and involvement of language knowledge, language contexts, and language usage skills (tudor, 2017) furthermore, this complexity seems to affect learners‟ writing ability. many learners encounter some obstacles in expressing ideas and thoughts in written text. these obstacles entails writer‟s block, low proficiency (maolida, 2015), inadequate content mastery, incorrect use of grammar, first language interference, limited vocabulary and insufficient teaching and learning resources (nyasimi, 2014). additionally, based on the result of direct observation, it is found that learners‟ writing ability tends to be the lowest comparing to other english skills. it is reflected in learners‟ difficulty to develop ideas and compose an organized and a cohesive text. the above issues appear to be worrying when contrasted with the primacy of mastering writing since writing skill is a beneficial tool for learning, communicating, self-expressing (khoeriah, 2018), assisting students in dealing with their academic demands and performing effectively in their professional contexts (nyasimi, 2014). in academic settings, the writing skill is required to keep and store both information and literary works (brindley, 2005). it is relevant to bailey (2004) who states that the writing skill is indispensable to the composition of essays used in most academic courses. in regard to the issues, teachers need to detect effective and innovative ways of teaching. one interesting way is by integrating teaching method of writing and technology. in this study, processgenre approach and project ibunka are integrated as the effort of conducting an effective and innovative way of teaching writing for tertiary level students. mailto:elishomsini@unsur.ac.id mailto:vnsabila91@gmail.com elis homsini maolida & vina aini salsabila integrating process-genre approach with project ibunka to improve students’ english writing 92 process-genre approach is the combination of process approach and genre-based approach. it is used since it facilitates students to “improve their knowledge of writing the genre, the structure, and the language features of a particular text, the social context (the purpose of the text), and the process of writing” (badger & white, 2000). this approach encourages students learn the relationship of purpose and form of particular genres. furthermore, process-genre approach also provides students to conduct processes of prewriting, drafting, revision, and editing in order to make them get familiar with various text types and composing process (saputra & marzulina, 2015). moreover, badger and white (2000) identify process-genre approach into six steps including preparation, modeling, planning, join constructing, independent constructing and revising and editing. these steps can be seen in figure 1. figure 1. process genre approach (badger & white, 2000) the first step of process-genre approach is preparation (badger & white, 2000). both process approach and genre-based approach begin the teaching steps by doing preparation (the term used in process approach) and background knowledge of the field (the term used in genrebased approach). in this step, the teacher provides the situation to be used as the topic (pujianto, emilia, & m.i., 2014) and puts it into a specific genre. furthermore, the teacher can also facilitate students to practice other language skills relevant to the topic such as listening exercises containing specific words in the genre, reading comprehension tasks, and discussing the topic to increase students‟ speaking skill and their knowledge regarding the topic in context (emilia, 2012). the next step of this approach is modelling in which students are introduced to genre type, grammatical and rhetorical features of the texts (hyland, 2007; pujianto et al., 2014). this phase also allows students to begin to identify the purpose of the text (badger and white, 2000) from myriad text sources and to understand of the organizational development of the text (pujianto et al., 2014; yan, 2005). the third step is planning. this step deals with brainstorming ideas of the text, discussing, and reading associated materials to help students develop their interest in the topic and relate it to their experience (yan, 2005).this is also the step for preparing students to get involved in the jointconstructing phase. the next step is joint-constructing which allows the teacher and students to start writing a text together. yan (2005) avows that the aim of this phase is “to produce a final draft which provides a model for students to refer to when they work on the individual compositions”. moreover, in this phase, the teacher introduces feedback towards writing to students (emilia, 2010, 2012). the activities might include brainstorming, revising, and editing. additionally, independent constructing is carried out as the continuation of the jointconstructing stage. in this step, students start to write their text individually through teacher‟s guidance. students also can decide the topic of their writing independently. this step can be conducted inside the classroom so that the teacher is “available to help, clarify, or consult with them individually during the process” (yan, 2005, p. 22) or it is also very likely to be used as home assignments. at the end of the activity, students can produce a draft of their writing (pujianto et al., 2014). english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 93 finally, revising and editing are conducted as the feedback on students‟ draft. the teacher can facilitate students to check, discuss, and evaluate their work with other students (peer feedback) (khoeriah, 2018). the teacher can also publish students‟ work for the sake of giving appreciation of students‟ achievement (belmekki & sekkal, 2018). in relation to the stages of process-genre based, project ibunka can be a medium for students to obtain information vis-à-vis the topic, the source of text in the modelling stage, and to publish their final draft of writing. project ibunka also provides chances for students to share their ideas through writing essays on this website. additionally, it is an internet-based collaborative project, initiated by professor watanabe, among students from various countries all over the world (watanabe, kasami, chung, & tsai, 2007). furthermore, watanabe et al. (2007) explain that project ibunka has three main features; 1) textbased bulletin board discussion, 2) chat sessions, and 3) video letter exchange. in this forum, students are able to freely write various topics of the text about three issues, i.e. school life, culture, and social issues. many studies show the strength of process genre approach in teaching writing as a study conducted by pujianto et al. (2014) who explore teaching steps of process genre approach to develop senior high studentss‟ writing skills. the result of this descriptive qualitative study indicates students‟ writing skill development after process genre approach implementation. the writing development specifically appears in the genre knowledge, writing process, and feedback from peers and teachers. another study was conducted by tuyen, osman, dan, and ahmad (2016) who implemented process genre approach to increase efl students‟ ability in writing research papers. this study is restricted only to the provision of teaching modules including theory, practice and assessment through the progress tests. the result of this study shows the stages of process genre approach can successfully be applied for designing research paper program in tertiary level. furthermore, a study of agesta (2016) also shows another strength of process genre approach implementation in teaching writing. this study aims to offer solutions in helping efl students to develop their writing ability by providing teaching scenarios using process genre approach. this study indicates that process genre approach can overcome students‟ writing obstacles. in addition, belmekki& sekkal (2018) strengthen the prominence of process genre approach as they applied this approach to improve students‟ achievement in writing business letters. this study is aimed at investigating the effect of process genre approach on esp students‟ writing achievement and to reveal students‟ responses to the use of process genre approach. this action research study reveals that there was a significant effect of process-genre approach on the students‟ writing achievement, covering four writing components: organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. regarding the study on project ibunka, watanabe et al. (2007) discuss the benefits of deploying project ibunka in developing students‟ writing ability and understanding culture, technology, and communication. another study of ayuningsih (2015) investigates the use of project ibunka in writing practice and the result indicates that students‟ writing skill has improved especially in the grammatical aspect. furthermore, maolida & mustika, (2018b) explore students‟ writing process in conducting project ibunka. this study highlights students‟ various sequence and strategies during writing process. additionally, maolida& mustika (2018a) discuss the benefits and challenges of writing in project ibunka. the result of this study indicated that students‟ challenges in writing were unstructured writing process and low proficiency. these obstacles become driving force to continue the research by integrating process-genre approach and project ibunka to improve students‟ writing ability. method this study employed three cycles of classroom action research (car) adapted from kemmis & mctaggart (1988) by involving 46 students who participated in two writing classes (class a and class b) for one semester. since each cycle consists of four meetings, this research is carried out in 12 weeks. the data were collected from classroom observation, questionnaire, interview and writing product (essays) scoring in each cycle. students‟ writing products published in project ibunka were scored to look into their writing improvement. in this case, students‟ writing product (essays) for theme 1 (my school life) was considered as students‟ writing product for cycle 1, students‟ writing (essays) for theme 2 (culture) was considered as the writing product elis homsini maolida & vina aini salsabila integrating process-genre approach with project ibunka to improve students’ english writing 94 for cycle 2, and students‟ writing (essays) for theme 3 (social issues) was considered as the writing product for cycle 3. the results of scoring were compared to denote students‟ writing progress. the observation was conducted to describe in detail how the integration of process-genre approach and project ibunka was implemented. the observation was focused not only on the learning process in the classrooms but also on students‟ writing interaction in project ibunka. in addition, the observation was also used to support the data from writing scores about students‟ development on their english writing. furthermore, the interview was administered and the questionnaire were distributed to support the data concerning the integration of process genre approach and project ibunka as well as students‟ perspectives on their english writing progress and improvement. results and discussion the findings of this study are divided into four sections: the activities during the integration of process-genre and project ibunka in the first cycle of car, the activities during the integration of process-genre and project ibunka in the second cycle of car, the activities during the integration of process-genre and project ibunka in the third cycle of car and students‟ writing improvement viewed from students‟ writing product scores in each cycle as well as students‟ responses from observation, questionnaire and interview. learning activities in the first cycle of processgenre integration and project ibunka in cycle 1, the integration of process-genre and project ibunka started. the implementation of learning stages can be seen in the following figure: figure 2. integration of process genre and project ibunka as depicted in the figure, the students underwent four stages of learning: introducing and exploring writing theme and topics, modeling and determining writing genre, joint writing and independent writing (badger & white, 2000). in the first meeting, the students were introduced to project ibunka and all of them were very excited for knowing that they had an opportunity to write essays and their writing would be read and commented by other students from different cultures and countries. in spite of their excitement, most of them were confused about what to write. even though ibunka determined the theme „my school life‟ for the first cycle, the students looked puzzled. then, the students explored the topics by reading various essays posted in previous project ibunka and other sources. this stage of exploration aimed to familiarize students with the topics (pujianto, emilia, & m.i., 2014; emilia, 2012). after that, they discussed the topics in small groups and the result of discussion was shared in a class discussion. at the end of the meeting, the students came up with several ideas about the topics they were going to write. in the second meeting, the students and the lecturer discussed and decided to write descriptive and recount texts about „my school life‟. then, a descriptive text and a recount text posted in previous project ibunka were used as writing models. in this case, the students discussed the texts, analyzed the generic structures and linguistic features of the texts to make the students comprehend the text english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 95 organization and its linguistic features (pujianto et al., 2014; yan, 2005). at the end of the meeting, the students were encouraged to think about their ideas of the topic and think about how their chosen topic would be written. in the third meeting, joint writing (it is already known as joint-constructing (yan, 2005; emilia, 2010, 2012) was conducted with the lecturer leading the process by writing the sentences on a whiteboard. in this case, the students and the lecturer discussed and decided a topic to be constructed together in the classroom. then, the students and the lecturer constructed a text together by going through the writing processes such as pre writing through brainstorming, drafting, revising and editing. through this stage, the students were expected to have prior experience of constructing a text using a specific genre. the last stage of process genre approach, independent writing to produce a writing draft (pujianto et al., 2014), was conducted outside the classroom with the students writing their first draft at home. in the fourth meeting, the first draft was brought to the writing class to be proofread, revised and edited by peer correction as suggested by khoeriah (2018) and lecturer‟s review. after the process of editing and revision, the final draft was published in project ibunka. in addition to posting their writing, the students also commented and gave feedback to essays posted by other ibunka participants. the result of evaluation and reflection from the first cycle collected from observation, interview and questionnaire reveals that most of students struggled with the ideas, not to mention common writing problems such as writing structure problems, grammatical obstacle and vocabulary limitation (maolida, 2015; nyasimi, 2014). some of them also admitted that they were anxious due to unfamiliarity with the system of project ibunka, the scoring system, the requirement to give and receive comments or feedback and insecurity toward other participants from other countries. in addition, few students experienced writer‟s block and they had not finished the draft in four meetings and were late in publishing their first essay. learning activities in the second cycle of process-genre integration and project ibunka the activities in the second cycle were arranged by considering the evaluation and reflection result of the first cycle. basically, the learning stages conducted in the second cycle were similar to those in the second cycle: introducing and exploring writing themes and topics, modeling and determining writing genres, joint writing and independent writing. however, several modifications were made as an effort to improve the students‟ writing. in exploring topics, as an example, small group brainstorming was skipped so the students directly brainstormed in a class discussion. each student then wrote their topic plan on the whiteboard. in the second stage of modeling and determining genres, explanation and procedure texts were added, reviewed, modeled and analyzed. the samples of the modeled texts were taken from texts posted in previous project ibunka. in addition, basic citing and referencing were introduced to avoid plagiarism. in joint writing, the students were urged to express their ideas to construct sentences and paragraphs together. compared to the stage of joint writing in the first cycle when the lecturer wrote the sentences on the whiteboard, the activity in cycle 2 was more student-centered since a student replaced the lecturer‟s role in conducting joint writing. however, the lecturer was there to give feedback towards writing to students (emilia, 2010, 2012). at the end of learning process, the students discussed their chosen topic and how the topic would be constructed in a specific type of genres. the modification was also made in drafting, revising and editing stage. in the second cycle, the students did not only write their first draft at home but also edit and revise their own draft. it was expected that they came to the class with better drafts. the revised draft was then brought to the class to be proofread and corrected by their partner who was considered as having higher degree of writing proficiency. however, several students insisted that their writing needed to be proofread by the lecturer. the results of evaluation and reflection in the second cycle yield that it was easier for several students in getting ideas of writing since they were more familiar with project ibunka so some students checked the topics in ibunka web prior to classroom discussion. besides, the theme of „culture‟ allowed them to explore a high variety of writing aspects. in addition, in the stage of classroom brainstorming and joint writing, the students were more active. most students participated in writing their topic plan and gave feedback to their friends‟ topic choice, and wrote their ideas on the whiteboard. however, some students still chose homogenous topics with elis homsini maolida & vina aini salsabila integrating process-genre approach with project ibunka to improve students’ english writing 96 traditional food and festivals as their favorite. some were also inconsistent with using grammatical form for their writing. in addition, few students copied and pasted some sources without giving any proper citations. learning activities in the third cycle of process-genre integration and project ibunka in the third cycle, the activities were carried out by taking into account the reflection results of cycle 1 and cycle 2. some adjustments were made to improve students‟ writing process and product. in pre writing stage, for instance, the students had independently searched and explored the theme and alternate topics given in ibunka website. as a result, when the students came to the class for the first meeting in third cycle, most of them had been well prepared with some samples of the text and the sources. it resulted in the brainstorming stage more interactive and interesting. moreover, the theme „social issues‟ made topics exploration more challenging since some topics such as terrorism, abortion, lgbt and other controversial issues offered various perspectives. in this stage, the students expressed ideas orally(emilia, 2012) by sharing their opinions supported with data. in determining genre and its modeling, exposition and discussion texts were reviewed, discussed and analyzed. different from cycle 1 and cycle 2 where the students discussed and analyzed the sample texts in terms of generic structures and linguistic features, in cycle 3 the students also critically discussed the texts in terms of its objectivity, its source validity and its conviction. the joint writing stage was also modified. previously, the students and the lecturer constructed the text on a whiteboard together. in the third cycle, an lcd projector was used to make it more efficient for students and the lecturer in constructing the text by providing supporting sources. in this stage, the students were also reminded about citation rules and were given practice of citing and referencing. as a preparation of the drafting stage, students were required to print the source they were going to cite to avoid plagiarism. so, when the students submitted their draft they also submitted the printed source that they used for their writing. after joint writing, the students made their own outline to write in the independent stage. in line with the independent writing stage in cycle 1 and cycle 2, the independent writing stage in cycle 3 was conducted outside the classroom with the students writing their text about „social issues‟, self-editing their text, selfrevising their text and asking their partner who was considered as a more proficient writer to proofread, edit and revise the text. the result of their writing and the printed sources were submitted in the last meeting of the third cycle. the lecturer checked and gave feedback to the draft, including the citing and referencing aspect. in the third cycle, the students showed more excitement and learning autonomy in exploring the topics and supporting sources. in addition, the students were more reflective and critical of the issues and became more critical of reading the sources for their writing. the students also showed more involvement during joint writing and had better preparation for their writing. the progress of students‟ writing result and process is discussed in the next section. students’ writing improvement the results of students‟ writing product average scores in cycle 1, cycle 2 and cycle 3 are illustrated in figure 3. in this case, the chart depicts two classes‟ average scores, class a and class b. as depicted in the chart, class a‟s average score was 78.09 in cycle 1, 79.27 in cycle 2 and 80.59 in cycle 3. the result of students‟ average score shows that the integration of process genre approach and project ibunka contributes to students‟ writing score improvement. this result is confirmed by the result of class b‟s average score of students‟ writing with the average score of 79.8 in cycle 1, 82.45 in cycle 2 and 83.05 in cycle 3. students‟ improved average score of writing in both classes corroborates the contribution of process genre and project ibunka integration in developing students‟ writing skills. this result confirms the positive influence of process-genre to students‟ writing in various contexts (pujianto et al., 2014; tuyen, osman, dan, & ahmad, 2016; agesta, 2016; belmekki & sekkal, 2018). english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 97 figure 3. the average score of students’ writing in each cycle in the first cycle, most of the students were excited yet confused about what to write. the result of the questionnaire reveals that in the beginning, many students admitted that it was hard for them to decide on what topics to write. in this case, they came up with homogeneous ideas such as subjects they learn, extracurricular activities and classroom atmospheres. on the other hands, several students said they had „too many ideas‟ but they were not focused in discussing the topic in their writing; they put and mixed several topics in an essay incoherently. in addition to those problems, common writing problems such as grammatical constraints and limited vocabularies(maolida, 2015; nyasimi, 2014) became two of other writing obstacles faced by the students. as a result, some students experienced writing anxiety that influences their writing quality as shared by one of the interviewed students: i was worried about everything, i knew about descriptive text or recount text but my problem was the ideas, i had so many things to write but i did not know which idea would make an interesting essay, i did not know how to put my ideas in my writing, my english was not good. i was also worried about the readers‟ reaction to my essay, especially the readers from other countries. #student11# the excerpt indicates a student‟s anxiety on various writing problems she faced in the first cycle. furthermore, the questionnaire reveals several students‟ reflection in the first cycle toward their writing obstacles in terms of vocabulary choice and intercultural knowledge, as stated by one of them: i should be more careful in composing my next essay. the students from different country misunderstood what i tried to say in my essay…i considered my story about my habit of borrowing pen to my classmates as funny since many students did that here but someone from another country considered this as a bad habit that would seriously influence people‟ trust on me. it did not only happen to me, my friend used a term „killer lecturer‟ in her writing and someone misunderstood the term. #student4# the excerpt reveals that the student received an unexpected comment from an audience who came from different country that made him more aware that the aspects accepted in his culture might not be accepted in another culture. it also reveals that the student learned from his and his friend‟s choice of vocabulary/term that was ambiguous to the audience from other culture who did not share similar background with him. it shows that project ibunka can be used not only to publish students‟ writing to appreciate students‟ achievement(belmekki & sekkal, 2018), but also to provide students with contextual feedback. in cycle 2, students‟ writing score improved with class a 78.09 in cycle 1 to 79.27 in cycle 2 and class b with 79.8 in cycle 1 to 82.45 in cycle 2. in this case, most students improved their writing in terms of content, language usage and mechanic. the improvement of their writing content was likely to result from the students‟ improved engagement in the topic exploring stage. the observation reveals that they had more awareness, more involvement, more autonomy in preparing, searching, and exploring the topic to develop their ideas in writing. meanwhile, the improvement of mechanic and language usage was likely generated from a more intensive revision process in which the students did selfediting and -revising before their writing was proofread, revised and edited by their more competent peer and the lecturer(see pujianto et al., 2014). the improvement was also recorded vis-à-vis learners‟ more awareness of structure and language feature of text type as stated by one of the students: in writing my second essay, i prepared it by reading some sources before discussing it in the class, it helped me to be more confident to write my draft. i wrote a report text about sundanese fruit salad „rujak‟so i made sure i used elis homsini maolida & vina aini salsabila integrating process-genre approach with project ibunka to improve students’ english writing 98 appropriate structure, i asked my friend who got good score in writing last semester to check my grammar …#student 3# it can be seen from the excerpt that the student was more aware of language features of her text choice. different from cycle 1 when the proofread and revision were done by a random partner in the class, in cycle 2 the students‟ writing was proofread and revised by a more proficient writer partner. however, many students in cycle 2 had not properly cited the sources in their writing due to lack of citing practice and experience. many also had not made coherent and logical sequencing in their essay. students‟ writing score improvement was also shown in cycle 3where class a‟s average score of 79.27 in cycle 2improved to 80.59 in cycle 3 and class b‟s average score of 82.45 in cycle 2 improved to 83.05 in cycle 3. even though the topic was considered as the most challenging topic by the students, they showed more excitement in exploring the ideas for their writing and they were aware that writing needs supporting valid and objective data. my first essay explored my personal life at campus then the second essay explored culture so i needed to broaden the coverage of discussion in my essay and searched for more information and the third essay discussed social and global issue that pushed me to further learned about various issues in detail. i wrote this not for myself, students from other countries probably read my essay, they could disagree with me, so i should see something from both sides #student 2# besides showing student‟s awareness of preparing the objective content and justifiable data, the excerpt also shows that the student had audience or reader orientation. in this case, he did not only write his ideas but also considered the potential readers. another student‟s perspective (student 22) well wrapped up the contribution of process genre and project ibunka toward students‟ writing improvement. this pushed me to write with purpose, like when i wrote a discussion essay i put perspectives from two sides. my writing also improved, i think, because it was checked and rechecked by me and my friends before i posted it in ibunka. i also tried to make interesting essays so i could get comments from other participants…#student 22# the excerpt reveals that genre approach helped the student to write her essay with clear purposes and with specific structure and language features. in the meantime, process approach facilitated her to improve her essay quality through writing process, especially editing and revising stage. in this case, the integration of both process and genre approach allows students to be more purposeful in composing and at the same time experience recursive writing process (deng, chen, & zhang in saputra & marzulina, 2015). meanwhile, project ibunka served as a means to publish students‟ writing and get comments as meaningful feedback to their writing. as a result, the students did not only get benefits of processgenre approach for their writing improvement but also utilized their writing to exchange ideas in a contextual way and got useful and meaningful response from real audience. conclusion this study discusses the integration of process genre with project ibunka to improve students‟ english writing. the results show that four stages of introducing and exploring theme and topics of writing, modeling and determining genre, joint writing and independent writing were implemented. in this case, writing process such as planning, drafting, writing, revising and editing were carried out by the students in joint writing stage and those steps were repeated in independent writing stage followed by the additional step to publish writing product in project ibunka. this integration results in students‟ writing improvement that is shown from the scoring results of students writing product published in project ibunka with class a‟s average score of78.09 in cycle 1, 79.27 in cycle 2 and 80.59 in cycle3 and class b‟s average score of 79.8 in cycle 1, 82.45 in cycle 2 and 83.05 in cycle 3. this improvement is confirmed by students‟ improved involvement and autonomy during their writing process and is also substantiated by students‟ responses revealing their writing improvement. acknowledgement we would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to direktorat riset dan pengabdian masyarakat (drpm), direktorat jenderal penguatan riset dan pengembangan – kementerian riset, teknologi dan pendidikan tinggi (ristekdikti) for funding this study under penelitian dosen pemula (pdp) category. references agesta, s. (2016). process-genre approach: breaking students‟ barriers in writing. international conference on education, (811–817). retrieved english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 1, december 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 from http://pasca.um.ac.id/conferences/index.php/ice/a rticle/view/107/104. ali, s. s., & ramana, d. v. l. (2016). academic writing challenges at universities in saudi arabia and solutions. international journal of english language, literature and humanities, iv(x), 291–298. ayuningsih, l. (2015). the use of online media to improve students’ writing skill: a case study in a senior high school in bandung. unpublished thesis, universitas pendidikan indonesia. badger, r., & white, g. (2000). a process genre approach to teaching writing. elt journal, 54(2). doi: 10.1093/elt/54.2.153. bailey, s. 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(2014). challenges students face in learning essay writing skills in english language in a secondary school in manga district, kenya. retrieved form: https://irlibrary.ku.ac.ke/handle/123456789/11907. pujianto, d., emilia, e., & m.i., s. (2014). a processgenre approach to teaching writing report text to senior high school students. indonesian journal of linguistics, 4(1), 99–110. doi: 10.17509/ijal.v4i1.603. saputra, h., & marzulina, l. (2015). teaching writing by using process genre approach to the eighth grade students of smp negeri 22 palembang. edukasi, 2(1), 1–12. tillema, m. (2013). writing in first and second language: empirical studies on text quality and writing processes. utrecht university. retrieved from https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/241028. tudor, e. (2017). the process genre writing approach:  an alternative option for the modern classroom. eric, 1–8. retrieved from: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed571522. tuyen, k. t., osman, s., dan, t. c., & ahmad, n. s. (2016). developing research paper writing programs for efl/esl undergraduate students using process genre approach. higher education studies, 6(2), 19-3. doi: 10.5539/hes.v6n2p19. watanabe, m., kasami, n., chung, n. s., & tsai, s. h. (2007). project ibunka: an international collaborative online project. retrieved from www.jlet.org/~wcf/proceedings/e-004.pdf. yan, g. a. (2005). process-genre model for teaching writing. english teaching forum, 43(3), 18–26. https://ir-library.ku.ac.ke/handle/123456789/11907 https://ir-library.ku.ac.ke/handle/123456789/11907 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed571522 elis homsini maolida & vina aini salsabila integrating process-genre approach with project ibunka to improve students’ english writing 100 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 419 the need analysis of writing module with edmodo yanti juniarti department of indonesian language education, indonesian language master program of sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia email: yanti@pap.ac.id subadiyono department of indonesian language education, indonesian language master program of sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia email: subadiyono.unsri@gmail.com zahra alwi department of indonesian language education, indonesian language master program of sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia email: zahra_alwi@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: juniarti, y., subadiyono., & alwi, z. (2021). the need analysis of writing module with edmodo. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.419-426. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4457 received: 28-02-2020 accepted: 29-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction the module is a thematic teaching material. it is packaged in an integrated manner and systematically. the module has a set of planned and designed learning experience instruments so that learners could master the specific learning objectives. according to warso (2016), a module is an arranged teaching material presented in a written manner. it should facilitate readers to understand the materials independently. the module is a specific preparation and a systematically designed teaching material based on a certain curriculum. daryanto (2013) argued that the module is a teaching material realization. it is packaged into a modular learning unit for learners to study independently and to achieve certain applied learning objectives (direktorat pembinaan sma, 2017). prastowo (2014) argued that the module is an arranged teaching material systematically with modest language and effective sentences. it is important to keep up with the learners’ cognitive levels and ages. thus, learners could learn autonomously or with the guidance of the teachers. wedemeyer (cited in rusman, 2016) argued that learners learn autonomously by reading the module and are expected to have a responsibility in managing and directing themselves during the learning process. abstract: paper writing skills for akamigas polytechnic students palembang had not reached the expectation. they still had difficulties organizing the ideas into written forms and effective sentences. they did not understand the paper writing systematically, how to cite, and how to write the bibliography. they were caused by the use of limited teaching materials, by relying on powerpoint as the main media. this research aimed to find out what the students needed of edmodo-writing module. this research is a part of the identification of teaching material needs to explore the needs of the teaching materials. therefore, this research applied the qualitative approach with descriptive method. the data were collected with a closed-questionnaire and interview. the need analysis showed a percentage of 97.1% of students preferred the internet as the reference source to any other. therefore, it is important to technology-based learning media that provided several applications. they could facilitate both lecturer and students to share and to learn the materials. the data showed 87.1% of students needed technology-based teaching materials, such as edmodo. a percentage of 91.4% of students stated that they wanted technology-based teaching materials that were developed into modules assisted with edmodo. besides that, a percentage of 95.7% of students wanted guidelines to facilitate them applying the module and using the edmodo. keywords: module; writing; e-learning yanti juniarti, subadiyono, & zahra alwi the need analysis of writing module with edmodo 420 prastowo (2015) found four purposes for creating a module. they were a learning resource, a guideline for understanding the materials, and measurement. thus, a module could be applied in each learning process, started from motivating readers, sharing information, and assessing the learning outcomes. many studies had been promoted by fadhilah, djaohar, & sunawar (2020), purwaningtyas, dwiyogo, & hariyadi (2017), and wijaya & iriani (2020). they developed edmodobased modules for learners so they could learn without being limited by learning sources. the modules could also facilitate teachers to develop their creativity. in this research, the developed teaching material was a paper-writing module of an indonesian language course. the module should have complete components. one of them was the teaching material structure. according to prastowo (2014), the module should cover six components. they are explicit teaching objective formulation, 2) student worksheet, 3) key answer sheet, 4) evaluation sheet, 5) evaluation answer sheet, and 6) teacher guideline. the arranged learning module based on module development principles consisted of the need analysis, the module-design development, the implementation, the assessment, the evaluation and validation, and the quality warranty. in this research, the stage only covered the need analysis. the module was developed to assist the students to write. writing skill becomes the main demand for the students. according to satata, suhardjono, and sadikin (2019), by having writing skills, students can think critically, express their ideas, and write them into academic writing. the writing skills of the students are expected to facilitate them while working on their tasks, such as paper works, final assignment, final project, thesis, and other tasks with scientific language variety. one of the indonesian language materials, stated in the semester lesson plan of akamigas polytechnic palembang is a writing paper. this skill is expected to facilitate students to write a paper by paying attention to the paper elements. the elements of the paper are such as paper form, validity, notion creativity, the proposed topic, data, information resource, analysis, systematic, and conclusion. according to the interview results with the indonesian language course lecturer on november 23, 2019, it was obtained that the paper writing skills for akamigas polytechnic students palembang had not reached the expectation. they still had difficulties organizing the ideas into written forms and effective sentences. they did not understand the paper writing systematically, how to cite, and how to write the bibliography. it made the students tended to copy directly from the internet without revising them. therefore, the paperwork results arranged by the students did not match the excellent criteria of paper writing. based on the preliminary survey from september 23, until november 23, 2019, the teaching material implementations were limited and relied on powerpoint as the main media. lecturers needed common books with the common indonesian language materials to support their teaching-learning process at the higher education level. the applied books by the lecturers could not be considered as teaching materials because they were only to share the reference during the course. the presented content materials in the book were still common and they did not cover the students’ needs. it made them not interested. based on the information, there had not been teaching materials arranged by the lecturers to support the teachinglearning process. from the explanation, this research aimed to describe the students’ and lecturers’ needs toward the paper-writing module with edmodo for akamigas polytechnic students of indonesian language course in palembang. theoretically, the findings of this research could enrich literature and become the reference to develop joyful teaching materials for students and to enrich their knowledge about the learning technology implementation. practically, the findings would be useful for any party, such as students, lecturers, and the campus. methods this research was conducted in akamigas polytechnic palembang. the subjects were the akamigas polytechnic students, palembang. the subjects were selected with purposive sampling. the sampling technique was chosen based on certain considerations with the objectives and the purposes of the research (ames, glenton, lewin, 2019a, 2019b; ernawati & kuncoro, 2016; english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 421 etikan, musa, alkassim, 2016; kuncoro & husnurrosyidah, 2015, 2017). the subjects of research were students and lecturers of the indonesian language course. this research was a part of the identification of teaching material needs to explore the needs of the teaching materials as suggested by jolly and bolitho (cited in tomlinson, 2011). this stage was important to carry because it would determine the following stages of an r&d (agastya, hati, machdum, 2018; azhari & agus, 2016; winayarti, handarsari, fathurohman, 2012). therefore, this research applied the qualitative approach. qualitative research collects evidence or findings to be reviewed, interpreted, and elaborated in which both findings and the explanations should be coherent (hardani, adriani, ustiawaty, utami, istiqomah, fardani, sukmana, auliya, 2020; çelik, baykal, memur., 2020; coombs, 2017; guetterman, 2015). the data were collected with a closedquestionnaire and interview. the interview in this research was addressed for the lecturers and the students. it was to obtain more information about something unclear found in the questionnaire results. the applied data analysis technique was descriptive. the obtained data of the questionnaire results were calculated in percentage and described. on the other hand, the data obtained from the interviews were only described. results and discussion the identification of needs was done for 68 students and a lecturer as the respondents. they were from the indonesian language course that had a lecturer taught the students paper-writing. from the questionnaire results, the student's needs could be identified to develop the teaching materials in the form of a module. some principles needed to develop the module were (1) respondents’ responses toward the paper-writing materials, (2) the importance of paper-writing teaching materials in the course, (3) the applied learning source during the paper-writing course, (4) hindrances or difficulties experienced during the course, (5) development of paper-writing teaching materials, (6) the content materials for writing paper, and (7) stages to present the concepts, examples, exercises, or tasks in paper-writing teaching materials. the students’ need analysis the students’ need identification was done by distributing the questionnaire via google form. it was done from june 10 until 14, 2020. the respondents consisted of 70 students in the second semester of akamigas polytechnic, palembang. based on the students’ responses toward the questionnaire, a percentage of 97.1% of students admitted they needed paper-writing material. a percentage of 67.1% of students stated that they needed textbooks or other handbooks to learn paper-writing material. the questionnaire results also showed that a percentage of 97.1% of students sought more materials via the internet besides the textbooks and handouts from the lecturer. the next question dealt with students’ difficulties in understanding the paper-writing materials in the textbook. the results showed a percentage of 90% of students had difficulties in understanding the materials from the textbook. the next question was about the use of a complementary module for paper-writing material understanding. based on the questionnaire, it was found that during the learning process, the lecturer did not use the module. it was proven with all no-answers of the students (100%). the next question showed a percentage of 85.7% of students had difficulties in understanding the material. a percentage of 92.9% of students admitted they had difficulties when they attempted to understand the material since it was limited. the next question dealt with the importance of an understandable and interesting module. a percentage of 91.4% students answered ‘yes’ while 8.6% students answered ‘no’. a percentage of 77.1% of students admitted that the lecturer did not use technology-based learning to share the course materials, especially on paper-writing material. learning by applying technology should be improved. it needs to keep up with the technology development that provides various applications to facilitate lecturers in sharing the materials. one of them is edmodo. the data showed 87.1% of students needed technology-based teaching materials, such as edmodo. a percentage of 91.4% of students stated that they wanted technologybased teaching materials that were developed into modules assisted with edmodo. besides that, a percentage of 95.7% of students wanted guidelines to facilitate them applying the module and using the edmodo. the results can be seen in table 1. yanti juniarti, subadiyono, & zahra alwi the need analysis of writing module with edmodo 422 table 1. the need analysis of edmodo-based module development number question items yes no a. the importance of paper-writing materials 1. the importance of paper-writing material learning 97.1% 2.9% b the applied learning sources 2. the students had textbooks or other handouts. 67.1% 32.9% 3. the students used the internet as a learning source. 97.1% 2.9% c. the paper-writing difficulties 4. the students’ difficulties to learn paper-writing material from textbooks. 90% 10% 5. the use of module by the lecturer as teaching material 0% 100% 6. the difficulties to understand paper-writing material learning 85.7% 14.3% 7. the difficulties to understand the materials from the applied teaching materials by the lecturer 92.9% 7.1% d. the module development with edmodo 8. the need for the module as the easier and more interesting teaching material 91.4% 8.6% 9. the information and communication technology-based learning by the lecturer 22.9% 77.1% 10. the importance of ict-teaching materials, i.e, edmodo 87.1% 12.9% 11. the importance of module with edmodo as teaching materials to understand the paper-writing material 91.4% 8.6% 12. the importance of guideline arrangement to apply module with edmodo during the learning activity 95.7% 4.3% based on the questionnaire results, the information of the most difficult matters to develop by the students were such as problems (65.7%), discussion (55.7%), introduction (35.7%), and conclusion (17.1%). the next statement was about the most difficult matters while writing papers. they were: paperwriting system (67.1%), idea development (50%), idea organization (47.1%), writing the introduction (22.9%), writing conclusion (18.6%), and the other matters (7.1%). based on the questionnaire, a percentage of 77.1% students argued that the developed teaching materials should cover paper concepts, discussions, and exercises; 30% of students needed teaching materials containing examples; 21.4% of students needed teaching material containing paper concepts; 20% students needed exercises, and 1.4% students mentioned other needs. it could be seen in the figure 1. figure 1. the need analysis results of the teaching material english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 423 the table below shows a percentage of 71.4% students wanted systematic and structured paper writing materials, 60% of students needed paperwriting guidelines, 55.7% demanded the definition of paper and its language features. 52.9% of students demanded paper types, 50% of students wanted to have paper examples. then, 24.3% of students chose different needs. it could be seen in the following table. table 2. the need analysis results of the teaching material number aspects percentage 1 paper definition 55.7% 2 paper types 52.9% 3 paper language features 55.7% 4 paper-writing guideline 60% 5 paper-structure system 71.4% 6 paper examples 50% 7 others 24.3% the following data deal with the exercise materials of the module. a percentage of 80% of students needed a paper-writing system exercise, 54.3% wanted to have an idea organization exercise, 51.4% of students wanted to have an idea development exercise, 47.1% of students needed writing introduction exercises, 40% of students wanted exercises to create a conclusion. then, 1.4% of students needed other exercises. it could be seen in the figure 2. figure 2. the need analysis results of the students the teaching material forms this session explains the findings of the concepts, exercises, examples, and tasks of the paper-writing module. a percentage of 71.4% of students preferred the exercises about the clear and ordered writing stages. 55.7% chose the stages to work on the exercises with accurate diction. 34.3% wanted to have exercises on how to answer the questions. then, 1.4% of students chose different forms. it could be seen in the figure 3. figure 3. the need analysis results of how to do the exercise in the teaching material yanti juniarti, subadiyono, & zahra alwi the need analysis of writing module with edmodo 424 the exercise of the teaching materials consisted of the clear and ordered stages to work on the exercises with accurate dictions. from the explanations of the opened questions, the researchers chose the students’ answers with higher percentages from 50% of each answer. they were used as considerations to develop the teaching materials. here are the results of the students’ analysis needs based on the opened question answers. figure 4. the need analysis results of the students the lecturer’s need analysis this identification was carried out on june 15, 2020. the respondent was a lecturer of an indonesian language course that taught “paper writing” course in akamigas polytechnic, palembang. based on the identification, he argued that writing is important for the students because they could not be separated from paper writing activities. during the learning process, the lecturer used various paper writing sources from textbooks and the internet. the lecturer had difficulties explaining the materials due to limited teaching materials and lack of teaching materials or specific guidelines to teach the material. these situations made the students had difficulties in developing their papers. most students had difficulties in developing the discussion and research methodology. therefore, they need more exercises to create better writing results. in the next question, the lecturer agreed with the idea to create paper-writing teaching materials in the form of an edmodo application-based module. the module should cover the descriptions, learning objectives, and learning materials, paper concepts, discussions, examples, and exercises. then, the content materials should discuss the paper-writing guideline, the paper system, and the paper examples. during teaching paper-writing materials, the lecturer should provide models about the examples for students both individually or in the group. the next question was about the exercise realizations of the module. the exercises should cover writing introduction, writing system, organizing ideas, and developing ideas. the guideline of the teaching materials was expected to cover how to work on the exercise clearly and orderly, how to work on the exercise of selecting the appropriate diction, and how to answer the questions. the most appropriate evaluation for the analysis of the students’ needs the difficulties the difficult parts the developed teaching material contents responses to the discussed materials responses to the developed materials responses to the ways to work on the exercises problem and discussion parts idea development the definition, type, language feature, guideline, and structures students wanted to have paper concepts, examples, discussions, and exercises containing clear and ordered stages to work with accurate dictions exercises of writing the systematics, introduction, and developing ideas english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 425 scientific writing learning, especially paper writing, was performance evaluation. based on the identification results, the developed module should contain guidelines, examples, stages, and exercises. edmodo from the need analysis, the students needed various learning sources. most students used the internet as a learning source. therefore, the students needed an edmodo-based teaching material. edmodo has similar look as facebook. it facilitates students to use it. the uploaded paperwriting module in edmodo could facilitate students to access the learning materials, to answer the exercises, to do the given tasks, and to facilitate the interaction among the students and with the lecturer. the writing module development for the indonesian language course is expected to facilitate the students in writing papers. hayati and rosids (2013) argued that edmodo as a social network could be used for learning management system (lsm). edmodo allows the lecturer to communicate, collaborate, share the learning content, share the questions for the students, discuss virtually, conduct online tests, etc. sulisworo, nursulistyo, and k (2018) found that edmodo could be one of a modest and effective learning management system to cover the learning needs. edmodo also has functions to share ideas, files, agendas, and tasks. these functions can create a lecturer-student interaction. edmodo can be also used to support the learning process and distance learning by using the current information and communication technology. edmodo provides a more interesting learning environment because it brings a different teachinglearning process atmosphere. edmodo also allows learners to be autonomous without ignoring the students’ minimum mastery standards. creative learning via edmodo can make students choose the learning promoted via the platform. then, once they enjoy it, they can learn new and challenging materials. this platform is easy to understand and use especially for lecturers that consider themselves to have less knowledge of current technology development. edmodo could motivate students to learn. even so, edmodo also has weaknesses, such as the absence of online syntax to connect directly with edmodo (basori, 2013). conclusion from the findings and discussion, a percentage of 97.1% of students chose the internet as the source of reference. therefore, it is important to technology-based learning media that provide several applications. they can facilitate both lecturer and students to share and to learn the materials. the data showed 87.1% of students needed technology-based teaching materials, such as edmodo. a percentage of 91.4% of students stated that they wanted technology-based teaching materials that were developed into modules assisted with edmodo. besides that, a percentage of 95.7% of students wanted guidelines to facilitate them applying the module and using the edmodo. references agastya, n. l. p. m., hati, g., & machdum, s. v. 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(2013). pemanfaatan social learning network "edmodo" dalam membantu perkuliahan teori bodi otomotif di prodi ptm jptk fkip uns. jurnal ilmiah pendidikan teknik dan kejuruan, 6(2), pp. 99-105 çelik, h., baykal, n. b., & memur, h. n. k. (2020). qualitative data analysis and fundamental principles. journal of qualitative research in education, 8(1), 379–406. https://doi.org/10.14689/issn.21482624.1.8c.1s.16m yanti juniarti, subadiyono, & zahra alwi the need analysis of writing module with edmodo 426 coombs, c. (2017). coherence and transparency: some advice for qualitative researchers. production, 27, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-6513.006817 daryanto. (2013). menyusun modul: bahan ajar untuk persiapan guru dalam mengajar. yogyakarta:gava media. direktorat pembinaan sma. (2017). panduan praktis penyusunan e-modul. jakarta: kementerian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. ernawati, n., & kuncoro, a. (2016). determinan persepsi etika mahasiswa akuntansi dengan love of money sebagai variabel intervening (studi kasus mahasiswa akuntansi universitas muria kudus). jurnal riset akuntansi terpadu, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.35448/jrat.v9i1.4279 etikan, i., musa, s. a. m., & alkassim, r. s. (2016). comparison of convenience sampling and purposive sampling. american journal of theoretical and applied statistics, 5(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajtas.20160501.11 fadhilah, y., djaohar, m., & sunawar, a. (2020). pengembangan modul pembelajaran elektronik berbasis e-learning dengan aplikasi edmodo dalam mata pelajaran dasar listrik dan elektronika kelas x teknik instalasi tenaga listrik di smk negeri 34 jakarta. journal of electrical and vocational education and technology, 5(2), 61– 69. guetterman, t. c. 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(2012). analysis pengembangan model pembelajaran “wisata lokal” pada pembelajaran sains. seminar nasional hasil penelitian, 332– 341. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee error analysis of writing verbs in discussion text dadang solihat department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: dacu_qta@yahoo.co.id diah novianti department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: diahnovianti1994@gmail.com apa citation: solihat, d. & novianti, d. (2015). error analysis of writing verbs in discussion text. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 75-81 received: 20-08-2015 accepted: 02-11-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: the objective of this study is to find out the error types of writing verbs in students‟ discussion texts and to identify the factors causing verb errors at the fourth semester students of english major in university of kuningan. the subject of this study is 20 students. the limitation of the problem is to classify the students‟ errors based on linville„s error types in writing verbs, there are subject-verb agreement errors, verb tense errors, and verb form errors. this research is using qualitative method by collecting data from documents, questionnaires, and interviews. the result showed that the highest error which most students made is subject-verb agreement. its frequency is 105 errors or 78.95 %. the second common error is verb form with 15 errors or 11.28 %. the third common error is verb-tense with 13 errors or 9.77 %. the factors causing verb errors are interlingual factor and intralingual or developmental factor. it is influenced by the students‟ lack of knowledge and understanding of the use of verbs. key words: subject-verb agreement error, verb tense error, verb form error, interlingual factor, intralingual or developmental factor introduction generally, english is taught and assessed in terms of four skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. those four skills are divided into two types, namely receptive skills which consist of listening and reading, and productive skills which consist of speaking and writing. all the skills are needed in learning english, because they have their own important role. but, brown (2000, p. 216) stated that “the most obvious approach to analyze interlanguage is to study the speech and writing of learners.” it makes writing needed to learn. since, writing is the productive skill that involves grammatical in a structured way. in writing skills, grammar is a major role to produce sentences in a text. it corresponds with brown (2001, p. 362) who said that “grammar is the system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence.” the students need to acquire basic grammatical knowledge to write effectively. in grammatical rules, a sentence usually consists of subject, verb, and object. a sentence can be meaningful because there is a verb as word that can express action of the subject. but, some 75 mailto:diahnovianti1994@gmail.com dadang solihat & diah novianti error analysis of writing verbs in discussion text students still make errors in writing some verbs in a text. the fact show that the fourth semester students of english major in university of kuningan face erroneous in writing verbs. it corresponds with corder (1981, p. 36) who suggested that “error is described by the application of linguistic theory to the data of erroneous utterances produces by a learner or a group of learners.” the students usually make an error in writing verbs especially in discussion text. as mentioned by linville (2004), the error types of writing verbs are usually found in subject-verb agreement errors, verb tense errors, and verb form errors. based on the point of view, the students make error in writing verbs. this is in line with thornbury (1999, p. 114) who noted that “grammar errors, on the other hand, cover such things as mistakes in verb form and tense.” the example is given in terms of a student‟s writing. the students write about the discussion text entitled “should we marry someone who supplies us money than someone whom we love?” in that writing activity students wrote, money and love is something interdependent. most of students wrote is as the verb on that sentence. the wrong verb belongs to subject-verb agreement error, and the students should have to write, money and love are something interdependent. some errors have been made by the fourth semester students of english major in university of kuningan indicated that there are causes of error which influence the students‟ writing. as mentioned by touchie (1986), there are two major factors cause of errors in second language learning, namely interlingual factors and intralingual or developmental factors. related to those cases, this study investigates error analysis of writing verbs in discussion texts made by university students, which focus on finding out the error types of writing verbs and identifying the factors causing verb errors made by the student in writing discussion texts. method in determining the site and participant, the writer uses purposeful sampling. as supported by creswell (2012, p. 206) “in purposeful sampling, the writer intentionally select individuals and sites to learn or understand the central phenomenon.” purposeful sampling usually applies to both individuals and sites. this study involves 20 of fourth semester students of english major in university of kuningan. the participants are chosen regarding two reasons. the first is the writer chooses the fourth semester students of english major because the material about discussion text is taught in the fourth semester students of english major. the second is the writer chooses university of kuningan, since those place is a strategic place for both the writer and the participant to conduct this study. the data in this research is taken through documents, questionnaires, and interview. the first is documents which are used to give information for the writer to know the problem that is faced by the students on the usage of verbs in writing discussion text. the step in collecting documents of this study is the writer asks permission to the teacher of writing course in english major of university of kuningan, to collect the students‟ discussion text as data instrument for this study. questionnaires are used to collect the information about factors which is causing the students make verb errors in writing discussion text. according to 76 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee gay et al. (2012, p. 388), “a questionnaire is a written collection of self-report questions to be answered by a selected group of research participants.” the questionnaires of this study use multiple choice questions. the questionnaire consists of some questions to collect the data for identifying the factors causing verb errors made by the student in writing discussion texts. a questionnaire could be easy analyzed by uses likert scale from fraenkel and wallen (2009, p. 126), namely 5 = strongly agree, 4 = agree, 3 = undecided, 2 = disagree, 1 = strongly disagree, and closed questions. the third is interview. it is equally popular to observation in qualitative research. creswell (2012, p. 217) stated that a qualitative interview happens when writers ask one or more participants general, open-ended questions and record their answers. gay et al. (2012) added that there are types of interview, namely unstructured interview and structured interview. hence, this study uses structured interview because the writer prepare a set of questions to acquire the necessary information. there are a number of steps taken in conducting an error analysis (gass & selinker, 2008). the first is collecting data, when this is typically done with written data. the second is identifying errors, it means finding out the error. the third is classifying errors, to classify the errors into the theme. the fourth is quantifying errors to know the total number of errors. the fifth is analyzing source, and the last is remediate, based on the kind and frequency of an error type, pedagogical intervention is carried out. results and discussion based on the study, a lot of students made errors in writing verb. terror types of writing verbs in discussion text, such as subject-verb agreement errors, verb tense errors, and verb form errors. by analyzing the students‟ discussion text, the writer obtained the results as presented in the following table: table 1. error types of writing verbs participants error types of writing verbs total of errors subject-verb agreement verb tense verb form student 1 1 1 student 2 1 1 student 3 1 1 student 4 1 1 2 student 5 1 1 2 student 6 5 3 1 9 student 7 5 5 student 8 6 1 1 8 student 9 44 1 45 student 10 8 1 9 student 11 4 2 6 student 12 11 11 student 13 6 1 7 student 14 2 2 student 15 3 1 4 student 16 3 1 1 5 student 17 4 2 6 student 18 2 1 3 6 77 dadang solihat & diah novianti error analysis of writing verbs in discussion text student 19 2 2 student 20 1 1 total 105 13 15 133 percentage of errors 78.95 % 9.77 % 11.28 % 100 % table 1 described the result of error types of writing verbs from the students‟ discussion texts. the writer found 133 errors consist of 105 subjectverb agreement errors, 13 verb tense errors, and 15 verb form errors. these table also presented the percentage of subject-verb agreement errors were 78.95 %, verb tense errors were 9.77 %, and verb form errors were 11.28 %. based on the study, a lot of students made errors in writing verb. the writer found error types of writing verbs in discussion text, such as subjectverb agreement errors, verb tense errors, and verb form errors. some examples are given below: 1) they supplies money for their son. (incorrect) they supply money for their son. (correct) 2) he come from south korea. (incorrect) he comes from south korea. (correct) the first error is basic subjectverb agreement error, the wrong verb is written by the student in the discussion text. the verb supplies, it should have to write supply. since the subject did not agree with the singular verb. then, the second error is made in subject-verb agreement using final –s/-es. the wrong verb come should be added by –s because the verb did not agree with the subject in singular pronoun. 1) financial stills needed to welfare the family. (incorrect) financial is still needed to welfare the family. (correct) 2) all the facilities has been guarantee. (incorrect) all the facilities have been guaranteeing. (correct) the first verb tense error occurred in passive sentence use the present participle (azar, 1989). this error produced because the sentence needs verb is. while, the second verb tense error has been guarantee, it should have to write have been guaranteeing, because the subject is plural noun. it belongs to present perfect continuous. according to azar (1999), the form of present perfect continuous is: have/has + been + -ing (present participle). 1) they will trying hard to make us… (incorrect) they will be trying hard to make us… (correct) 2) love is place to sharing. (incorrect) love is place to share. (correct) the first verb form error produced the incorrect verb will trying, it should have to write will be trying. since, as explained by knapp and watkins 78 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee (2005) the –ing form is used for the progressive tense. then, the second error occurred in using –ing form. the incorrect verb to sharing should have to write to share, because after to infinitive always followed by verb 1. in analyzing causes of error which faced by the fourth semester students of english major in university of kuningan especially in writing verbs, the writer obtained the data result from two instruments, namely questionnaires and interviews. those instruments had been used to know the dominant factor which faced by the students. it is between interlingual and intralingual or developmental factors. based on the questionnaires that have been analyzed by the writer, there were two factors causing verb errors in writing discussion text made by fourth semester students of english major in university of kuningan, namely interlingual factors and intralingual or developmental factors. however, there is a dominant factor which caused verb errors in their writing. the writer obtained the results in the following table. table 2. the factors of students’ errors no. category total average 1. interlingual factor 628 48 % 2. intralingual or developmental factor 669 52 % total 1297 100 % table 4.5 presented the factors of students‟ error in writing verbs in their discussion text. the results showed that interlingual factor is 628 representing with the percentage is 48 %, and intralingual or developmental factor is 669 representing with the percentage is 52 %. related to those result, the writer assumed that the dominant factor which caused the students made errors in writing verb is intralingual or developmental factor. meanwhile, after analyzing interviews from the student‟s responses, the writer found the factor which caused verb errors in students‟ discussion texts. based on the student‟s responses for the first question, the writer assumed that interlingual factor is one of the causes of error in writing verbs. it corresponds with touchie (1986) who said that the native language of student plays a significant role in learning a second language. the students did not know the verb in english, it made them write verb by using their native language. one of the students also still made errors when using the ending –s in third person singular pronoun. this is in line with noori, shamary, and yasin (2015) who assumed that some students usually omit such –s when the subject is singular. the interview data result from the second question, the writer thought that interlingual factor has a role in causing verb errors. according to brown (2000), the beginning stage of learning a second language is the negative influence from the native language. the students still made error in translating words in indonesian into english. from the result of interview for the third questions, the writer found that intralingual or developmental factor is a major factor in second language learning. it showed from the student‟s responses, because there are many statements who explained that intralingual or developmental factor 79 dadang solihat & diah novianti error analysis of writing verbs in discussion text influence the student‟s writing discussion text. as explained by brown (2000), intralingual occurred because the negative influence from the target language itself. a lot of students still confused in using –ed or –s form, and in deciding tenses in a text. conclusion error types of writing verbs which are found in students‟ discussion texts consist of subject-verb agreement errors, verb tense errors, and verb form errors. the highest until the lowest frequency and percentage verb errors derives from subject-verb agreement (105 errors or 78.95 %), verb form (15 errors or 11.28 %), and verb tense (13 errors or 9.77 %). there are two factors causing verb errors namely interlingual factor and intralingual or developmental factor. the writer found that intralingual or developmental factor is the dominant factor which is made by the 20 of fourth semester students of english major in university of kuningan when they produce verb errors in their discussion texts. at the study, 48 % of the questionnaire results showed that interlingual factor is the lowest percentage, and 52 % questionnaire results showed that intralingual or developmental factor is the highest percentage. interlingual factor and intralingual or developmental factor causing the students made verb errors. however, the dominant factor is intralingual or developmental factor which is influenced by the students‟ lack of knowledge and understanding of the usage of verbs. in other words, they made an error in using subject-verb agreement, deciding verb form like –s/es form, -ed form, and –ing form, and the students also still confuse in using tenses especially in discussion texts. references azar, b. s. 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(2011). a study of verb errors committed in written english by chinese college students in taiwan. journal of humanities and social science, 7(1), 91-101. retrieved from http://journal.dyu.edu.tw/dyujo/docu ment/hssjournal/h07-1--91-101.pdf 81 http://www.multidisciplinaryjournals.com/ http://www.multidisciplinaryjournals.com/ http://www.ijern.com/journal/2015/may-2015/38.pdf http://www.ijern.com/journal/2015/may-2015/38.pdf http://fatwarohman.blogspot.co.id/2014/04/english-text-types-genre-of-text.html http://fatwarohman.blogspot.co.id/2014/04/english-text-types-genre-of-text.html http://fatwarohman.blogspot.co.id/2014/04/english-text-types-genre-of-text.html http://fatwarohman.blogspot.co.id/2013/11/discussion-text-about-pros-and-cons-of.html http://fatwarohman.blogspot.co.id/2013/11/discussion-text-about-pros-and-cons-of.html http://fatwarohman.blogspot.co.id/2013/11/discussion-text-about-pros-and-cons-of.html http://journal.dyu.edu.tw/dyujo/document/hssjournal/h07-1--91-101.pdf http://journal.dyu.edu.tw/dyujo/document/hssjournal/h07-1--91-101.pdf english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee cohesive devices in efl students’ expository writing hanif nurcholish adiantika department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: hanifadiantika@gmail.com apa citation: adiantika, h. n. (2015). cohesive devices in efl students‟ expository writing. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 94-102 received: 15-09-2015 accepted: 23-10-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: this study aims to investigate the use of cohesive devices in students‟ expository writing. in particular, the study focuses on types of cohesive device used by the students and how cohesive devices contribute to their writing. this study employs qualitative research through a case study design. public senior high school in kuningan is chosen as the site for this study. nine students of twelfth grade are involved in the study as the respondents. documents of nine students‟ expository writings are the data of this study. the data are analyzed by using the concept of cohesive devices proposed by halliday and hasan (1976) which covers reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. analyses show that the respondents only use four cohesive devices in their writing i.e. reference, substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. these devices also contribute to the process of keeping track of the participants, avoiding repetition and text redundancy, enhancing logical connection between parts of text, and engaging the readers to the core argument of the text. the study infers that it is still problematic although most of the students apply many cohesive devices in their writing. this is because students have not received sufficient training concerning how to use appropriate cohesive devices. therefore, they should be guided to utilize appropriate cohesive devices in their writing. keywords: cohesive devices, cohesion, efl students, expository writing, case study introduction in presenting ideas in writing, students should be encouraged to make sure that their text flows through a sequence of sentences. hence, it is fundamental to direct them to the ideas they wish to express, as well as the sentences they use to express those ideas (holloway, 1981). in order to make the sentences readable, they should be connected to each other because a good sentence or text is not determined by its length but it depends on its connectedness and its unity (brostoff, 1981; but et al, 2006). therefore, efl teachers should guide students to compose many kinds of text. a text can either be written or spoken (halliday and hasan, 1976; matthiessen, 2004; butt et al., 2006). a text stands for a complete linguistic interaction from beginning to end as the manifestation of any instance of language that makes sense to someone who knows the language (eggins, 1994; halliday and matthiessen, 2004). this suggests that the fundamental in a text is not its length or medium but its meaning or sense to be identified by its receivers. for this reason, as it is aforementioned by halliday and hassan (1976 cited in eggins, 2004) text is best regarded as a semantic unit, a unit not of form but of meaning. 94 mailto:hanifadiantika@gmail.com hanif nurcholish adiantika cohesive devices in efl students’ expository writing moreover, the text should have texture that makes words „hang together‟ or become fixed meaningfully in a unity of text (halliday and hasan, 1976). it is in line with eggins (2004), i.e. that texture refers to the interaction of two components which are called coherence and cohesion. hence, to be a text, those minimum units of meaning should be related in a coherent and cohesive way. the coherence of the text is determined by the connection between its social and cultural contexts while cohesion is the way the text‟s elements are bound together as a whole. in other words, a text is a passage that becomes meaningful because its coherence and cohesion are intertwined to create the text as a whole. texture will help readers to understand the semantic relation of the text. furthermore, the writers‟ knowledge of semantic relation will potentially determine readers‟ comprehension (thompson, 1996). hence, writers should have the ability to master the concept of texture. cohesion is, according to halliday and hasan (1976), one of the crucial aspects of texture to improve the connectedness and unity of sentences in a text. it is fundamental for the students to join ideas between sentences to create texture (halliday and hasan, 1976). cohesion is one of the fundamental elements of texture defined as non-structured resources for discourse to hold the text together and give the text a meaning (halliday, 1994). cohesive devices enable a text to preserve consistency and connectedness throughout a passage. cohesive device are texts-specific linguistic elements employed to assemble an integrated, interpretable, and meaningful text. cohesion is achieved through cohesive device domains, i.e. reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion (halliday and hasan, 1976). these domains intertwine the text together into a unified whole to help the readers understand the text. halliday and hasan (1976) as cited in hoey (1991) divided cohesive devices into five categories i.e. reference, conjunction, substitution, ellipsis, and lexical cohesion. these are referred to as non-structural resources that are used in the surface structure of texts. the models of cohesion as used by halliday and hasan (1976) are obvious between sentences as those within the sentences can also function as structural elements. halliday and hasan (1983) also refer to cohesion as a semantic relation between elements in the text and some other element that is crucial to the interpretation of it. cohesion as described by halliday (1976) is one of features that combine to make up the textual component in grammar. the textual components include the structural components (theme-rheme), information and focus structure (the given and new) and cohesion (grammatical and lexical). halliday and hasan (1976) refer to grammatical cohesion as including reference, substitution, and ellipsis while the lexical refers to the different forms of lexical cohesions. therefore, cohesion as halliday and hasan (1976) describe is a semantic relation that is realized through the lexicogrammatical system. these elements as pointed out determine the texture of a text. mcarthur (1996), describes cohesion as a term derived from latin word coheasio which means cling together. he points out that in linguistic it is the language forms used to indicate semantic relations between elements in a discourse. these relations as halliday and hasan (1976) describe previously are not concerned with structure (unifying 95 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee relation, part of a sentence or clause) but non-structural resources which are used for organization of a text which has been described as including reference, ellipsis, conjunction, substitution, and lexical. these are resources used to create text. butler (1985), in similar manner observes that halliday and hasan (1976) refer to cohesion as belonging to the system of a language and not simply something arising from outside, concerned merely with, for example the subject matter by text. cook (1992) also agrees with halliday and hasan (1989) and butler (1985) on the fact that cohesion is a non-structural resources used for creating texts. he refers to the cohesive devices as formal links that create relationship between sentences and clause. these formal links enable the writer to hang stretches of language together and create unity. according to halliday and hasan (1976), cohesion is a semantic concept which refers to how parts of a text relate meaningfully. it has an important role to give texture to a text. it occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on presence of another. cohesion is part of the system of language and its potential lies in the systematic resource of references, ellipsis, and so on that built in language. therefore, cohesion is not a structural relation that holds the different part of clauses, but rather is a semantic one that links text part based on their meaning relations and in such case element is interpretable by resource to another. in other word, is defined as the way the element within a text bind it together as a unified whole (eggins, 2004). the fundamental concept behind cohesion is a semantic tie between an item at one point in a text and an item at another point so that both items and elements are potentially integrated into the text (halliday & hasan, 1976, gerrot & wignell, 1994; eggins, 2004). in other word, the ties encourage us to integrate one item for its full interpretation to another since there is a certain dependent relation between the two. moreover, it is stated that cohesion refers to relationship between items in a text such as words, phrases, and clauses, and other item such as pronouns, nouns, and conjunctions (paltridge, 2006). it is supported by carter and mccarthy (2006) that a text is cohesive as a whole if the sentences and spoken utterances are semantically linked consistently. and it will be useless if the readers or listeners are not able to see the connection of the sentence and spoken utterances. botley and mcenery (1996) state that a cohesive tie occurs between a particular meaning, realized as a surface marker such as noun and noun phrase, and another instance of that meaning, realized usually by linguistic units such as pronouns and definite noun phrase. cohesion, therefore, is achieved through cohesive ties, which can be found within or across sentences. this is also relevant with halliday and hasan (1976) by classifying cohesive ties into five major categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, lexical cohesion, and conjunction, although in halliday (1994) these cohesive ties have been reclassified into four types, with ellipsis being a subcategory of substitution. halliday and hasan (1976) regard cohesion as a semantic concept. it is mainly achieved through the availability of two types of cohesive categories, grammatical and lexical. grammatical cohesion is created by reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. lexical cohesion is brought by reiteration and collocation. 96 hanif nurcholish adiantika cohesive devices in efl students’ expository writing reference items are those items which are interpreted by relating them to something else instead of being interpreted semantically in their own right, or in other words, it refers to the situation where the identity of an item is retrieved from either within or outside text (halliday, 1994, gerot and wignell, 1994, salkie, 1995, eggins, 1994; paltridge, 2006). in english, these items are personals (i.e. john, he, the book, it), demonstratives (i.e. here, there and comparative (i.e. fewer). accordingly, this interpretation is achieved via two ways of reference either internal reference in which the refereed-to items are inside the text or by the aid of the outer context. in both cases a phoric relation is set up, but in each case, certain phoric relation is made. within the text an endophoric reference is made while beyond the text borders an exophoric reference is used (halliday & hasan, 1976). substitution occurs when one linguistic item is replaced by another that contributes new information in a text (halliday & hasan, 1976). this new information differs from the information previously provided by the antecedent linguistic item. it is differentiated from reference in being concerned with wording rather than meaning (akindele, 2011). generally, substitution is a relation that occurs inside the text. it is a kind of strategy used to avoid repetition. as a general condition, the substitute item should have the same structural function (halliday and hasan, 1976). since substitution is a grammatical category that depends on words resources rather than on semantics, three types of substitution categories are introduced based on the function of the substitute item: these types of substitution are defined as: nominal substitution (e.g. “pete owns the black sedan. the blue one belongs to mike), verbal substitution (e.g. a: has he had dinner yet? b: he must have done. there’s no food in the fridge), and clausal substitution (e.g. a: is there going to be an earthquake? b: it says so) (halliday & hasan, 1976: 90). ellipsis happens to the syntactic and semantic components of discourse. syntactic ellipsis is the non-expression of a word or phrase that is expected to occupy a place in the syntactic structure of a sentence. it represents the default interpretation of the term ellipsis. for example, in “mary got an a on math test and louise a b.” the verb „got‟ in the second conjunct is elided. from another hand, semantic ellipsis underlies the non-expression of items which are important to the full semantic interpretation such as in “i forgot my keys” and “he is reading tolstoy” (mcshane, 2005, p. 3; sainton, 2006, p. 275). thus far, halliday & hasan (1976) see that ellipsis like substitution is classified into: nominal ellipsis (e.g. how did you enjoy the exhibition? – a lot () was very good, though not all), verbal ellipsis (e.g. john has caught a cold is equal with john has () a cold), and clausal ellipsis (e.g. what was the duke going to do? () plant a row of poplars in the park. conjunction is the type of cohesion that involves the use of ties that perform the main function of connecting sentences (gerrot and wignell, 1994: 180; paltridge, 2006: 139). conjunction, or connective, links two ideas in a text or discourse together semantically. with the use of conjunction, the understanding of the first idea accommodates the interpretation of the second idea (eggins, 2004: 47). in english, conjunctive relations are usually established through the use of conjunctive devices, which may be a coordinating conjunction (like and, but, 97 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee or), an adverb (like in addition, however, thus), or a prepositional phrase (like besides that, despite the fact that). halliday and hasan (1976) and gerrot and wignell (1994) divide conjunctive relations into five broad categories: additive, adversative, causal, temporal, and continuative, each of which is further divided into several subcategories. additive relations add or substitute extra alternative clauses to a text. adversative relation means contrary to expectation and realize through the words like yet, but, however, etc. causal relations connect clauses as cause and effect. temporal relations connect clauses depending on whether the actions they encode take place at the same time or one after another. in his later work, halliday (1994), nevertheless, classifies conjunctive elements into three broad types: elaboration, extension, and enhancement. in elaboration, one sentence elaborates on another by specifying or describing it. in extension, one sentence adds something new to another by supplying more information, replacing something or providing an alternative. finally, in enhancement, one sentence qualifies the meaning of another by reference to time, place, manner, cause, condition, or matter. lexical cohesion involves the repetition of a noun phrase, or the use of another noun phrase which bears a relation to the antecedent noun phrase. halliday and hasan (1976) divide lexical cohesion into reiteration (which is subdivided into the repetition of a lexical item, the use of a general word to refer back to a lexical item, and the use of a synonym, or superordinate terms) and collocation. lexical cohesion is a cohesive relation whose cohesive effect is achieved by the selection of vocabulary. according to halliday and hasan (1976), lexical cohesion is divided into two categories, reiteration and collocation. reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which involves the repletion of a lexical item. constant repetition of lexical items would make easier for any reader to match strings in a sequence of sentences (chan, t‟sou, choy, 2000). the form of reiteration might be in repetition, synonymy, antonym, hyponym, and metonymy. the study puts an emphasis on the use of cohesive devices in students‟ expository writing. it covers the variety of cohesive devices used by the students to create semantic relation; and to reveal the contribution of cohesive devices to students‟ expository writing. this study uses the concept of cohesive devices as its analytical framework, as brought forward by halliday and hasan (1976). therefore, this study attempts to address the following research questions: 1) what types of cohesive devices are identified in the students‟ expository writing? 2) how do the cohesive devices contribute to the cohesion of students‟ expository writing? method the data in this study were written documents from nine students. they wrote an expository essay in 2 hours. the instruction for students to write an exposition text is attached in appendix. the concrete forms of the writing documents were the students‟ handwriting about the topic given in expository genre. the authenticity of the students‟ handwriting constituted the crucial data in this study. the writing documents or textual documents comprised the primary data to answer the research questions in this study. 98 hanif nurcholish adiantika cohesive devices in efl students’ expository writing the primary data in form of students‟ expository writing were analyzed according to theoretical frameworks based on halliday and hasan (1976) concerning the concept of cohesive devices analysis and eggins‟s point of view (1994) on cohesive ties interpretation. to analyze the data, first, the researcher separated each text based on clause. it is very fundamental to help the researcher in conducting a careful analysis since the data in this study were nine students‟ expository writing. therefore, it is necessary for the researcher to cut each text into clause. second, the identification of cohesive devices became the crucial data analysis procedure in this study. in this procedure, the researcher underlined the words belonged to cohesive devices. it is very crucial to mark the cohesive devices identified in the clause. third, classification is also the crucial procedure in this study since it is inevitable that based on the framework of halliday and hasan (1976), cohesive devices consist of five major categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. in this procedure, the researcher classified the underlined words to where they belong based on the taxonomy of cohesive devices: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. hence, the classification should be initiated to figure out where words belong to. the last procedure in this study was initiating descriptive quantification. descriptive quantification is very necessary to calculate cohesive devices found in students‟ expository writing. this procedure was also beneficial to elaborate, enhance, and illustrate the results of the study. after the words were identified and classified, the researcher then initiated the presentation through descriptive quantification to illustrate the results for examples the frequency of occurrences of each cohesive resources. results & discussion types of cohesive devices are identified in the students’ expository writing inside the circumstance of the use of cohesive devices, the present study shows that the cohesive devices appeared 651 times. lexical cohesion was the mostly occurring devices with 322 occurrences. it is because, there is a tendency where students lack of vocabulary items. as a result, they overuse the lexical cohesion which is commonly realized by reiteration, in particular repetition. in addition, they seem to be fully aware of applying many repetition in their writing. it can be inferred that lexical cohesion is mostly recognizable or needed by students to cover their lack of vocabulary mastery. it is subsequently followed by conjunction with 181 occurrences and reference with 146 appearance. both of them are cohesive devices which the students are familiar with. the students seem to be fully aware concerning the function of conjunction and reference. substitution is only identified in 2 occurrences in the students‟ expository texts. it is reasonable because the use of both substitution and ellipsis are commonly used more in speech than in writing. in other words, inside the circumstance of academic writing in particular expository writing, the use of substitution and ellipsis is rarely used by the writer. based on the occurrence of each cohesive device, it can inferred that students mostly applied lexical cohesion, in particular reiteration i.e. repetition to develop text‟s cohesion. it is subsequently followed by conjunction, reference, and substitution. on the other 99 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee hand, there is no student applied elliptical device to develop text‟s cohesion. the contribution of cohesive devices to students’ expository writing according to the result of the present study, there are two aspects which are covered in the analysis, they are (1) the aspects of cohesive devices, and (2) the contributions of cohesive devices to students‟ exposition texts. with regard to cohesive device aspects, reference is the most frequent cohesive devices with 196 occurrences (35.1%). it is subsequently followed by conjunction with 182 occurrences (32.6%). moreover, lexical cohesion occurs 179 times (32%) and substitution with only 2 occurrences (0.4%). with regard to the contribution of cohesive devices to students‟ exposition texts, keeping track of participant gives the highest contribution with 240 occurrences (42.9%). it is realized in the use of reference with 86 occurrences and lexical cohesion, more specifically repetition, with 154 occurrences. in order to keep track of the participants, most students apply many repetition in their writing. there is a tendency where students lack of vocabulary mastery to avoid repetition. they tend to overuse repetition. moreover, they seem to be fully aware in using such repetitions to cover their limited vocabulary. as a result, the contribution to the process of keeping track of the participants are mostly manifested through the high use of lexical cohesion, in particular repetition. it is subsequently followed by enhancing logical connection between parts of text systematically. this contribution is entirely realized by conjunction with 182 occurrences (32.6%). in order to enhance logical connection between parts of texts, the students utilize many kinds of conjunction. this is because some students are familiar with the function of conjunction. however, the high use of conjunction is not in line with their texts‟ cohesion. some of them were inappropriately placed. as a result, it leads to the appearances of incoherence in their texts. it is followed by engaging the readers to the core argument of the text with 97 occurrences (17.4%). this contribution is realized by reference which occurs 71 times, substitution with only one occurrence, and lexical cohesion with 25 occurrences. the smallest contribution is avoiding repetition and text redundancy with 40 occurrences (7.2%). this contribution is realized by reference with 39 occurrences and substitution with only 1 occurrence. this is relevant with halliday and hasan (1976) that substitution is used more in speech than in writing, and more in british than american english. in other words, in the academic writing, more specifically in expository writing. that might be the reason why substitution is rarely used by the students in the present study. conclusion according to the research questions, the purposes of the study are to identify the types of cohesive devices in the nine students‟ expository writing and to reveal the contribution of cohesive devices to students‟ expository writing based on the concept of cohesion proposed by halliday and hasan (1976). first, it was found that there were only four types of cohesive devices identified in nine students‟ expository writing i.e. reference, substitution, conjunction, and ellipsis. moreover, lexical cohesion is the most frequently 100 hanif nurcholish adiantika cohesive devices in efl students’ expository writing used cohesive devices. it is subsequently followed by conjunction, reference, and substitution. on the other hand, no students applied ellipsis as an elliptical device to develop text‟s cohesion. it is in line with halliday and hasan (1976:117) that ellipsis and substitution are used more in speech than in writing, and more in british than american english. in other words, inside the circumstance of academic writing in particular expository writing, the use of substitution and ellipsis is rarely used by the writer. although most of the students utilize many cohesive devices, it is still problematic since they mostly use inappropriate cohesive devices in their writing. as a result, their texts appear to be difficult to understand. second, it was revealed that most students utilize reference to keep track with the participants. this devices is also applied by the students to engage the readers to the core argument of the text by pointing something whether it is from within (anaphoric) or outside (exophoric) the text. in order to avoid repetition, reference (comparative reference) is also utilized by the students since it is effective to make the text less redundant. on the other hand, the contribution of conjunction to students‟ expository writing is to enhance logical connection between parts of the texts by expressing certain meanings which demonstrate the presence of other components in the text. then, substitution also has a crucial substitution to avoid repetition and text redundancy by substituting one item by another. in terms of lexical cohesion, it contributes to engaging the readers to the core argument of the text. in order words, this device is used by the students to keep track with the topic of the text in particular expository text. however, the overuse of certain cohesive devices by the students definitely causes redundancy in their writing and reduces their written texts difficult to understand. the students might be encouraged by their teacher of writing and discourse to apply as many cohesive devices as possible to conduct cohesive whole texts. this, in turn, will certainly result in less redundancy in their written texts. moreover, unlike the english l1 users, the students mainly focus on the word and sentence level and ignore the relations of meaning that exist within the text. this relationship is achieved through relations in meaning that exist within and across sentences. the result of this tendency is the absence of connectedness which makes the flow of thoughts meaningful and clear for readers. therefore, cohesion is very fundamental since it gives a sequence of sentences a coherent texture as it shows how semantic relationships are set up by lexical and syntactic features. as a result, the realization of the functions of cohesion in the text will help efl students to create meaning. it also helps the writer and readers to create communication. in other words, as it is relevant with thompson (1996) that the writer‟s knowledge of semantic relation will potentially determine readers‟ comprehension. however, even though the cohesive devices are clearly applied by the efl students, it is still problematic since the students may deal with some obstacles as a result of lack competence. it may also be caused by the teachers who are not able to teach them properly as the result of lack knowledge in teaching writing skill. 101 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee references brostoff, a. (1981). coherence: “next to” is not “connected to.” college composition and communication, 32 (2), 278–294. butt, d; fahey, r; feez, spinks, s; & yallon, c. (2006). using functional grammar: an explorer’s guide. sydney, australia: national centre for english language teaching and research. buttler, c. s. (1985). systemic linguistics: theory and applications. london, england: bats ford academic and educational. chan, s. w. k.; thou, b. k.; and choy, c. f. (2000). textual information segmentation by cohesive ties. [online]. available: http://aclweb.org/anthology/y/y00 /y00-1006.pdf. retrieved on june 9 2015. cook, g. (1992). discourse. oxford, england: oxford university press. eggins, s. (1994). an introduction to systemic functional linguistics. london, england: pinter publisher. eggins, s. (2004). an introduction to systemic functional linguistics (2nd edn). london, england: continuum. emilia, e. (2012). pendekatan genre-based dalam pengajaran bahasa inggris: petunjuk umum guru. bandung, indonesia: rizqi press. gerot, l and wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. sydney, australia: antipodean educational enterprises. halliday, m. a. k. & hasan, r. (1976). cohesion in english. london, england: longman. halliday, m. a. k. (1994). introduction to functional grammar. london, england: edward arnold. halliday, m. a. k., & r.hasan. (1989). language, context, and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. oxford, england: oxford university press. halliday, m.a.k. & christian m.i.m. matthiessen. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar. 3rd, revised edition. london, england: edward arnold. halliday, m.a.k. & matthiessen, c.m.i.m. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar (3rd. ed.). london, england: hodder arnold. hoey, m. (1991). patterns of lexis in text. oxford, england: oxford university press. holloway, d. w. (1981). semantic grammars: how they can help us teach writing. college composition and communication, 32 (2), 205–218. mcarthur, t. (1996). oxford companion to the english language. oxford, england: oxford university press. mccarthy, m. (1991). discourse analysis for language teachers. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. mcshane, m. j. (2005). a theory of ellipsis. oxford, england: oxford university press. paltridge, b. (2006). discourse analysis: an introduction. london, england: continuum. sainton, r. j. (2006). words and thoughts: subsentences, ellipsis, and the philosophy of language. oxford, england: oxford university press. salkie r. (1995). text and discourse analysis. new york, ny: routledge. thompson, g. (1996). introducing functional grammar. london, england: edward arnold. 102 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 355 learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using projectbased learning sakdiah wati university of muhammadiyah palembang, english education department, south sumatra, indonesia email: sakdiahwati@gmail.com syafryadin university of bengkulu, postgraduate program of english education, bengkulu, indonesia email: syafryadin@unib.ac.id eka apriani iain curup (state college for islamic studies of curup), tadris of english language, bengkulu, indonesia email: eka.apriani@iaincurup.ac.id apa citation: wati, s., syafryadin., & apriani, e. (2021). learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using project-based learning. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.355-366. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4370 received: 27-02-2021 accepted: 12-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction learning is essentially a process of interaction of all situations around an individual. “learning can be seen as a process that is directed towards goals and the process of acting through various experiences. learning is also a process of seeing, observing and understanding something” (sudjana in rusman, 2016, p.1). learning activities are carried out by two actors, which are teachers and students. teacher activity is teaching and student activity is learning. teaching activity is not teach about the material but also character (apriani, 2016; apriani, 2017; apriani, supardan, sartika, suparjo, & hakim, 2019). all of that is related to learning materials. meanwhile, schools as an educational institution must be able to carry out teaching and learning processes or activities that involve students as a whole. the learning process carried out in the classroom is an activity to transform knowledge, attitudes, and skills. teachers are expected to develop the full learning capacity, learning competence, basic competence, and potential of students. learning that is carried out is more student-centered, so that students participate in the learning process, can develop independent learning methods, play a role in planning, abstract: this development research aims to develop and produce a learning module to compile an exposition text. besides, this research and development also aim to describe the process of developing a material learning module, compiling an exposition text with a project-based learning (pjbl) model for grade viii smp students, describing the feasibility of the module based on assessment and validation by media experts, material experts, linguists, and student trials. this research is included in the research category utilizing descriptive quantitative. the resulting quantitative data will be converted into qualitative data to describe the feasibility of the product being developed. the results of the research and development of the module show that the module developed is based on tessmer's development with two main stages, namely the preliminary stage which consists of the analysis and design stages, the formative evolution stage which consists of self evaluation, prototyping, and export review. (expert test), one-to-one, small group, and field test. the validity of the learning module is seen based on the validation test, the results of the validation of media experts reach 75%, material experts 90%, and linguists 75% which can be categorized as valid. based on product testing at the field test stage, the average score of students was 83.00 which could be categorized as good, while the results of the student response questionnaire obtained a score of 96% which could be categorized as very feasible. based on the validation test, it can be concluded that the developed learning module can be used both in the student learning process independently and in the indonesian language learning process, especially in the exposition text material of class viii students in the class. keywords: development; learning modules; exposition text; project-based learning (pjbl) model https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4370 sakdiah wati, syafryadin, & eka apriani learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using project-based learning 356 implementing, assessing the learning process itself, so here the student's experience is prioritized in deciding the starting point of activities. based on the 2013 curriculum for junior high school equivalent class viii, one of the learning materials in the odd semester is exposition text. in this case, students are required to be able to understand to compile an exposition text both oral and written. writing exposition text is contained in the 4th core competency, which is "processing, reasoning and presenting in the field of the concrete (using, parsing, arranging, modifying, and making) and the abstract field (writing, reading, counting, drawing, and composing) related to development of what is learned in school independently, and is able to use methods according to scientific principles.” however, the students' skills in writing exposition text were still lacking. this is because the teaching materials used are still limited. schools do provide text books for students. however, students' knowledge is only limited to the textbook. thus, students find it difficult to develop their ideas in writing text. in the exposition text written by students, it is known that the students' abilities related to language are still low. there are errors in the use of indonesian spelling, such as commas (,), periods (.), capital letters, and hyphens. apart from mistakes in the indonesian spelling rule, there are also several other mistakes. the first mistake is in the form of a writing error such as shortening words. the word is shortened to "yg" (yang=which). furthermore, the number of sentences in one paragraph does not meet the requirements of a paragraph. even though writing a paragraph requires the main sentence and several explanatory sentences. according to kosasih, engkos, and kurniawan (2018, p.96), "an exposition text is a text that puts forward some arguments accompanied by facts." an exposition text can also be interpreted as a paragraph or an essay that contains some information in which the contents are written to explain or give meaning in a short, concise, and accurate writing style. " the text structure of the exposition generally consists of 4 main parts, that is the opening, content, argumentation, and reaffirmation. in the textbooks used by students, exposition text teaching materials are still lacking, both in terms of content and appearance. the text structure has not been described very clearly. also, in exposition text learning, the emphasis is more on the skills to understand the content of the text, while writing skills are still lacking. this makes students less understanding and less able to develop ideas in writing an exposition text. the lack of attractiveness of the teaching materials provided was also a factor in the low skills of students in writing exposition texts. learning that was previously teacher-centered can be transformed into student-centered learning. the teacher in this case acts as a facilitator. according to prawoto (2012, p.104), "module is a book written with the aim that students can learn independently without or with teacher guidance." the module is an independent learning package that includes a series of learning experiences that are planned and designed systematically to help students achieve learning goals. learning with modules allows a student who has a high learning speed to have more abilities than others. thus the module must be presented appropriately, in good and interesting language, so that students can learn to understand the material well even without the help of the teacher. learning modules can also be used anytime and anywhere, making it easier for students to learn and not depending on the subject teacher. students can learn according to their respective abilities and learning speed so that the complete learning process can be carried out using the learning module. besides, lubis, syahrul, juita (2015) stated that learning modules can attract students' interest in learning with new teaching materials. thus students will be helped in the learning process either independently or with the teacher. the reason for the researcher taking the project-based learning model is to be able to make students independent to play a more active role in solving a problem or task given by the teacher with a series of activities that allow students to be more active and quickly understand the material presented and be able to conclude the learning results that have been passed. dananjaya (2017) stated that the project-based model is to carry out tasks through a series of activities. the first activity is observing by counting, measuring, weighing, classifying, looking for relationships with time and space. second, make hypotheses or predictions. third, planning the implementation of activities. fourth, interpret events in activities and analyze them. fifth, conclude by describing the results or solving existing problems. sixth, communicate it. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 357 the learning steps in project-based learning consist of: starting with the essential questions. take a topic that corresponds to real-world reality and begin with an in-depth investigation. essential questions are asked to provoke knowledge, responses, criticism, and ideas of students about the project theme to be taken. planning the project rules. planning contains the rules of the game, selecting activities that can support in answering essential questions, by integrating as many subjects as possible, and knowing tools and materials that can be accessed to help complete the project. scheduling the activities. educators and students collaboratively compile a schedule of activities in completing the project. this schedule is structured to find out how long it will take to work on the project. monitoring the progress of the student project. educators are responsible for monitoring the activities of students while completing projects. monitoring is done by facilitating students in each process. assessing student work. the assessment is carried out to help educators measure the achievement of standards, play a role in evaluating the progress of each student, provide feedback about the level of understanding that has been achieved by students, assist educators in developing subsequent learning strategies. evaluating the student experience. at the end of the learning process, educators and students reflect on the activities and results of projects that have been carried out. the reflection process is carried out both individually and in groups. at this stage, students are asked to express their feelings and experiences during the completion of the project. besides, the reason the researcher took the title of this study was to increase students' understanding and activeness in learning, so that students not only listen to the teacher's explanation, but students can form study groups to discuss learning, exchange ideas, and dare to express opinions. like writing an exposition, students are assigned to make an essay about an event that is described in detail, both natural and other events. therefore, there need to be improvements in indonesian language learning to improve student learning outcomes. efforts to improve student learning outcomes in understanding the material is the development of teaching materials in the form of learning modules using models, methods, approaches, and learning strategies. one of them is by using a project-based learning (pjbl) model. wena (2009) stated that the project-based learning model is innovative, and emphasizes contextual learning through a series of complex activities. according to bie in trianto (2014), the project-based learning model is a learning model that involves students in problem-solving activities and provides opportunities for students to work autonomously in constructing their learning activities and ultimately producing student work products with realistic values. method according to sugiyono (2015), the research method is a scientific way to obtain certain data, objectives, and uses. so, the research method is the method used by a researcher with a predetermined procedure. arikunto (2014) stated a method is a way of studying a series of hypotheses using certain techniques and tools to achieve goals. this study uses the research and development (r & d) method. research and development methods are research methods used to produce certain products and test the effectiveness of these products. the definition of development research according to borg & gall (in sugiyono, 2015, p.407) is "a process used to develop and validate educational products.” following are the material steps presented in the following flowchart form: figure 1. flowchart of zulkardi's modification tessmer (2002) for the research development stage (in hendri, 2010, p.31) sakdiah wati, syafryadin, & eka apriani learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using project-based learning 358 based on the diagram above, this research goes through the following stages: preliminary stage at this stage, it is divided into two stages. analysis. at this stage, the analysis of activities carried out is to analyze students, curricula, and textbooks. then contact the teacher at the school and interview the teacher concerned and prepare scheduling and cooperation procedures with the classroom teacher used. design. at this stage the researcher designed a learning module with a project-based learning model, the material was compiling the exposition text. formative evalution stage the stages, among others: self evaluation. at this stage, self-assessment is carried out on the design of the learning module with the project-based learning model, the results are referred to as prototype 1. prototyping. at the prototyping stage, prototype 1 went through several stages to produce a final product that was valid, practical, and had potential effects. export review. products that have been designed, assessed, and evaluated by experts. these experts review the content, concepts, and language of each prototype. the meeting time with the experts is consulted with the experts. as proof of validation, a scribbled document/prototype is attached, as well as the expert's comments. experts' suggestions are used to revise the tools being developed, to be tested. one-to-one. the researcher tested the designs that had been developed on 1-3 students who became testers. the results of this implementation are used to revise the designs that have been made. small-group. the revised results from the difficulties experienced in the first prototype trial were used as the basis for revising the prototype and called the second prototype. then the results were tested on the small group. at this stage, the second prototype was tested on 5-8 students. students are asked to provide comments on the developed module. the results of this implementation are used to revise before being tested at the field test stage. field test. suggestions and the results of testing the second prototype were used as the basis for revising the design of the third prototype. the revised results were then tried out on the research subject in this case as a field test. at this stage, the final test will be carried out and the calculation of the scores obtained by each student to see the potential effects of the modules that have been developed. data collection technique in this study, the data collection techniques used were documentation, walkthroughs, and learning outcomes tests. documentation. documentation is a record of past events, documentation can take the form of writings, pictures, or monumental works of a person. this documentation data is in the form of photos in the learning process from expert review, one-to-one, and small groups. walkthrough. the design of teaching materials that have been made is given to the experts then the experts comment on the content, construction, and language of the teaching materials that have been made. the comments are used as a guide in the revision of the next student activity sheet. learning outcomes test. the test is used to obtain the potential effect of the module created, and to measure the level of understanding of the indonesian language of students after learning using a module with the project-based learning model. this test is given in the form of multiplechoice questions and essays which refer to indicators on the teaching materials contained in student activity modules. data analysis technique in this study, the data analysis techniques used were documentation analysis, walkthrough analysis, and analysis of test result. documentation analysis. analysis of the results of the documentation in the one-to-one and small group stages was used to analyze the practicality of these student activity sheets. the researcher analyzed at each meeting by looking at the students' answers from the questions given, correcting each answer, and seeing where the student's difficulties were. analysis of this document is used to revise the teaching materials in the form of modules and to see the location of the students' difficulties in answering those contained in teaching materials in the form of student learning modules. walkthrough analysis. based on the results of the walkthrough that was carried out at the expert review stage, the expert provided input on the student learning module used, and the researcher conducted an analysis based on descriptive notes and suggestions from experts. this will be the basis for validating the product being made. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 359 besides, the researcher also provided validation questionnaires to experts to determine the validity category of the products that have been developed. to determine the percentage of validity from the results of the validation questionnaire, the following formula can be used: source: arikunto (2014, p.313) information: p = percentage of validity = the total score of the assessment answers = the total number of the highest answer scores the validation criteria used in the validity of the study are presented in the following table: table 1. validation criteria no achievement level qualification explanation 1 81-100% very good very feasible, no need to revise 2 61-80% good feasible, no need to revise 3 41-60% good enough less feasible, need to be revised 4 21-40% not good not feasible, need to be revised 5 <20% not very good not very feasible, needs to be revised source: arikunto (2014, p.35) analysis of test result. analysis of the test results at the field test stage was used to see the potential effects of the student learning module with the project-based learning model. the student learning module that has been completed is then analyzed based on the predetermined scores on completing the learning module that the researcher has compiled and then observed in the following table. table 2. learning outcomes assessment category student scores category 85 – 100 very good 75 – 84 good 56 – 74 enough 40 – 55 deficient 0 – 39 very deficient source: arikunto (2012, p.281) findings and discussion findings this study are using research and development (r&d) model with developing learning module in the form of project based learning (pjbl). there are two steps in this developing process. the first step is preliminary that consist of: analyzing and designing. the second steps is formative evolution that consist of: self evolution, prototyping, export review, one-to-one, small group and field test. preliminary step analysis students analysis. this research was conducted at smp negeri 01 pemulutan barat. subject of the research wass students from viii a class. the total number of the subject was 20 students (10 male dan 10 female). curriculum analysis. based on observation result, smp negeri 01 pemulutan barat has been using kurikulum 2013 in their teaching-learning process. in this research, the researcher was focus on exposition text arrangement as a part of bahasa indonesia subject in k-13 curriculum. book and module analysis. based on observation and interview result, students from viii grade at smp negeri 01 pemulutan barat have never usedlearning module a project based learning model. teacher interview analysis. interview conducted with the bahasa indonesia teacher was conducted at smp negeri 01 pemulutan barat, her name was eva tamala, s.pd. based on interview result, the researcher found some points, the limited number of modules that are provided so that students find it difficult to learn independently by using it, and most students find some difficulties to understand the material and answer of the evaluation questions that contained in the module for the reason that the explanation of the material is too short and monotonous. sakdiah wati, syafryadin, & eka apriani learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using project-based learning 360 design tabel 3. initial design of project based learning module no explanation picture 1 front cover 2 table of content 3 initial display of each chapter 4 back cover formative evaluation self evaluation self evaluation are conducted to comprehend whether the learning module are appropriate with basic competence (kd), competence achievement indicator (ipk), project based learning characteristics and the principle of ejaan bahasa indonesia (ebi) or not. from the researcher’s assessment, the result of this module was appropriate. the result of this step were named prototype 1. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 361 expert review table 4. expert suggestion on module (walkthrough) experts suggestions muslimin, s.pd., m.pd 1. adjust the cover to the context of the pjbl in everyday life 2. give the answer key in every practice question 3. page variations, header and footer are adjusted to the characteristics of the pjbl model. 4. for each group activity question, give an interesting picture and in accordance with the pjba context. eva tamala, s.pd 1. in every discussion of the material give an example so that it is easy to understand. 2. distinguish the questions that are done in groups with those that are done individually. 3. give each chapter a mind mapping dr. sakdiah wati, m.pd 1. use language that is easy for students to understand 2. modify the sub-material 3. add index and glossary 4. the domain of the source is clarified 5. use communicative language so that students understand more quickly product revision picture 1. design revision result sakdiah wati, syafryadin, & eka apriani learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using project-based learning 362 product validity 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% media expert material expert linguistics expert validity percentage validity percentage figure 2. comparison of validity result by media expert, material expert, and linguistics expert one-to-one test tabel 5. students’ suggestion on one-to-one test name suggestions explanation tatia syalsyabila 1. make the material clear and give any example so that easy to understand. 2. give any advice and guidance for every test with new variation. have revised small group test tabel 6. students comments in small group step no name comments explanation 1 student 1 there are many interesting picture 2 student 2 so many practice that make me understand about material 3 student 3 this module is easy to understand 4 student 4 display of this module is interesting 5 student 5 there are some question that hard to understand have revised 6 student 1 the materials are easy to understand field test tabel 7. rekapitulation of viii grade students’ questionnaire responses no name assessment indicators score percentage category 1 2 3 1 student 1 22 22 12 56 93% strongly appropriate 2 student 2 24 22 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 3 student 3 24 22 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 4 student 4 24 21 12 57 93% strongly appropriate 5 student 5 23 22 12 57 93% strongly appropriate 6 student 6 23 22 12 57 93% strongly appropriate 7 student 7 23 22 12 57 93% strongly appropriate 8 student 8 24 22 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 9 student 9 24 23 12 59 98% strongly appropriate 10 student 10 24 23 12 59 98% strongly appropriate 11 student 11 23 24 12 59 98% strongly appropriate english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 363 12 student 12 24 22 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 13 student 13 24 22 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 14 student 14 24 23 12 59 98% strongly appropriate 15 student 15 24 23 12 59 98% strongly appropriate 16 student 16 24 22 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 17 student 17 24 24 12 60 100% strongly appropriate 18 student 18 23 23 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 19 student 19 23 23 12 58 96% strongly appropriate 20 student 20 24 23 12 59 98% strongly appropriate total 1162 96% strongly appropriate discussion the learning product developed by the researcher in this study is the student learning module. however, the material discussed as a whole in this module is only limited to exposition text material that is adjusted to basic competencies, competency achievement indicators, and in accordance with the characteristics of the projectbased learning model. the research method used by researchers is the development method according to tessmer which consists of two major stages, that is preliminary (preparation) and formative evolution (evaluation format). at the preliminary stage, the researcher collected data and information about the curriculum and modules used. at the initial information collection stage, the researcher analyzed students by observing the class. after that, the researcher made observations about the curriculum used, the learning modules, and the learning tools used in the learning process. the results of the student analysis stage obtained information about the students' ability to understand the exposition text. before using the exposition text module students tended to have difficulty understanding the material and were less active in learning activities due to the lack of examples in the previous module. however, after using the exposition text module that has been developed, the students become more active and understand the material in the learning. this result in line with insyasiska, zubaidah, & susilo (2015) who said that project based learning design can increase students’ motivation, creativity and critical thinking. this can be seen from the test results of students who get an average score of 83.00 and can be categorized as good and in accordance with the learning objectives. after analyzing the students, the researcher analyzed the curriculum used. the results obtained at this stage are that the researcher knows the basic competence and competency achievement indicators which will be used as a reference in preparing the module material to be developed. students understand it easier because the material in the developed module is arranged systematically according to the basic competencies of the exposition text material. furthermore, the researcher also analyzed the textbooks and modules used by conducting interviews with indonesian teachers regarding problems related to the learning module and constraints in the learning process. the results of the interview regarding the learning module were obtained information about the students' lack of understanding of the material caused by a lack of explanation of each material contained in the module so that there is a need for innovation so that learning runs more effectively and efficiently. modules that have been developed contain material that is clearer and more complete than the previous modules. besides, the existence of activity and exercise questions accompanied by examples also makes it easier for students to understand more about the exposition text material. based on the results of the textbook analysis and interviews that have been conducted, the researcher makes the initial design and design of the learning module. the arrangement of the learning module is oriented towards the characteristics of the project-based learning model. project based learning is an approach that accentuates learning in the form of long-term activities that are interdisciplinary, studentcentered and assimilated with real-world issues and practices (solomon, 2008). in this module, there are several practice activities and answer sheets for students to solve problems/questions. the concept of the questions contained in the module is adjusted to the characteristics of the pjbl model to make it easier for students to understand the material being taught. also, the concept and customized design will motivate students to be more active in learning. the next stage is the formative evolution stage, this stage consists of several stages, that is self evaluation, expert review, small group, sakdiah wati, syafryadin, & eka apriani learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using project-based learning 364 and field test. at the self evaluation stage, the results are obtained in the form of an initial design of the learning module being developed. the initial design at this stage is called prototype 1 which will be used in the expert validation test stage (expert review). in the expert review stage, prototype 1 that has been made is then given to experts consisting of media experts, material experts, and linguists and is assessed based on the aspects contained in the validation questionnaire. the result of the score obtained becomes a reference for determining the validity category of the module being developed. the score obtained from the media expert validation test was 111 (75%), the material expert's assessment obtained a score of 145 (90%), and the linguist's assessment was 21 (75%). based on the scores of the three validators, if accumulated, the overall score obtained from the expert validation test results is 277 (88%) and is included in the very good category. the results of the expert's assessment (expert review) become the basis for revising prototype 1. the results of the revised prototype 1 are called prototype ii. after the module made was valid according to the experts, the researcher then conducted the first try out on students in small groups. based on the small group trial, the results obtained were in the form of student opinions about the modules used. some students said that there were practice questions that were difficult to understand and solve. this is a reference for researchers to improve the module so that it can make it easier for students to learn. the revised results from this stage are called prototype iii, which will be the final prototype at the field test stage. field testing is the final stage of this research. this stage was carried out in two meetings with a total of 20 students at smp negeri 01 pemulutan barat. at this stage, the researcher distributes questionnaires and questions to students and explains the usefulness of the learning modules that have been distributed. the first meeting was held on thursday, july 16, 2020. at the first meeting, the researcher conducted learning activities using a learning module with the project-based learning model and gave students an explanation of the exposition text material contained in the module. furthermore, the second meeting was held on saturday, july 18, 2020, the researcher explained the exposition text material then the researcher gave the students questions related to the exposition text material. after students finish the given questions, the researcher gives a questionnaire in the form of an assessment sheet. students are asked to provide an assessment of the learning module with the project-based learning model on the student response questionnaire sheet that has been provided. during the final ability test, most students made mistakes in answering test question number 4. in these questions, students were asked to name the elements that need to be considered in editing the exposition text. however, students consider that the elements that need to be considered in editing the exposition text are the same as the language elements of the exposition text. this is a reference for the researcher to make several revisions to the questions contained in the learning module to make it easier for students to understand. the results of the revision of the field test stage are the final results of the learning module being developed. the results of the field test stage are the final prototype form in the form of a learning module with a valid and practical project-based learning model. this can be seen from the results of the student response questionnaire analysis during the field test. the learning module with the projectbased learning model got a total score of 1,162 from the total maximum score of 1,200. the total score is presented to be 96% and it can be categorized that the learning module with the project-based learning model developed is very good and practical.. in the indonesian language learning process using the exposition text learning module with the project-based learning model, the researcher provided the module sheet that has been developed to students and then explained the material contained in the module briefly and clearly. when the researcher explained the material, the student's response looked good and enthusiastic in learning activities. in addition to explaining the material, researchers also provide opportunities for students to ask questions and express their opinions. at the first meeting, several students asked about the material in the learning module. most of the students asked about how to determine the sentences included in the thesis, a series of arguments, and reaffirmation in an exposition text. then the researcher gave an example and allowed the student to try to analyze one of the examples of the exposition text contained in the module. after students understood the material that has been described, the researcher divided the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 365 students into 4 groups of 5 people each and asked students to analyze one example of the exposition text contained in the learning module. each group discussed determining the parts included in the exposition text. these activities help students to think critically and exchange opinions with their friends, then find solutions and work together to solve problems through several processes such as the discussion process and then re-examine the problems that have been resolved before being collected and assessed by the educator. this is in accordance with the characteristics of the projectbased learning model delivered by ravitz, hixson, english, and megendoller (2012) who confirmed that pjbl can improve several skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, communication skills, collaboration skills, and creativity. the effect of the learning module with the pjbl model on student learning outcomes can be seen from the final test in the field test trial. learning module with a valid pjbl model was then tested on research subjects, that is students of class viii a smp negeri 1 west pemulutan. at each meeting, students complete the questions contained in the learning module and at the third meeting, students are given final ability test questions to measure how much effect the learning module has. the potential effect of the learning module with the project-based learning model is reflected in the students' final scores during the final ability test in the field trial stage. a total of 12 students obtained results that could be categorized as very good with an average value obtained of 85, and 8 students obtained results that could be categorized as good with an average value of 80. the results of the final ability test scores of these students also showed that the average final score of students is 83.00 which means that student learning outcomes are categorized as good. it means that pjbl is effective in enlarging knowledge, especially in science and social discipline as well as language learning (quint and condliffe, 2018). based on the analysis of the learning module with the project-based learning model products that have been developed have a potential effect on student learning outcomes. conclusion based on the results of research and discussion, the following conclusions were obtained: based on the development process, it is also found that the developed module has the characteristics of self contained (complete) because it contains learning material that is completely discussed in the module. also, the potential effects resulting from module development also affect student learning outcomes. this is illustrated by the results of the students' final ability test on the exposition text material individually. it can be seen that of the 20 students there are 12 students (60%) including the very good category and 8 students (40%) including the good category. overall the average ability of students who are research subjects is 83.00. based on the student learning outcomes criteria, the test results obtained by students were in the good category. learning modules developed in this study are categorized as valid. this is illustrated by the results of the validator's assessment, where all validators state both based on content (material according to basic competencies and indicators), construction (according to the characteristics of the project-based learning method), and language (according to indonesian spelling rules). the practicality of the module can be seen from the results of observations in the small group trial where students can solve the questions given. the modules that are made can be used properly, are easy to read, and are understood by students. references apriani, e. (2016). a new literacy: the role of technology to develop student’s character. ta’dib: journal of islamic education (jurnal pendidikan islam), 21(1), 59-72. apriani, e. (2017). the misuse of ict by students: the effects of phornography and the teacher solutions. tadrib, 1(2), 185-203. retrieved from http://jurnal.radenfatah.ac.id/index.php/tadrib/a rticle/view/1046. apriani, e., supardan, d., sartika, e., suparjo, s., & hakim, i. n. (2019). utilizing ict to develop student’s language ethic at islamic university. potensia: jurnal kependidikan islam, 5(1), 114. arikunto, s. (2014). prosedur penelitian suatu pendekatan praktik. jakarta: rineka cipta. solomon, b. g. (2008). project based learning: a primer. technol. learn. 23(6), 3. dananjaya, u. (2017). media pembelajaran aktif. bandung: nuansa. hendri, e. (2010). guru berkualitas: profesional dan cerdas emosi. jurnal sang guru. http://file.upi.edu/. accessed on january 2nd, 2020 http://file.upi.edu/ sakdiah wati, syafryadin, & eka apriani learning module development on compiling exposition and argumentation text using project-based learning 366 insyasiska, d., zubaidah, s., & susilo, h. (2015). pengaruh project based learning terhadap motivasi belajar, kreatifitas, kemampuan berpikir kritis, dan kemamppuan kognitif siswa pada pembelajaran biologi. jurnal pendidikan biologi, 7(1), 9–21. quint, j. and condliffe, b. (2018). project-based learning: a promising approach to improfing student outcomes. mdrc build. knowledge to improv. socal policy, no. january, pp. 1–2, 2018. kosasih., engkos., & kurniawan. (2018). jenis-jenis teks. bandung: yrama widya lubis, m.s., syahrul., & juita, n. (2015). pengembangan modul pembelajaran bahasa indonesia berbantuan peta pikiran pada materi menulis makalah siswa kelas xi sma/ma. jurnal bahasa, sastra, dan pembelajaran universitas negeri padang. accessed on january 2nd, 2020. ravitz, j., hixson, n., english, m., and megendoller, j. (2012). using project based learning to teach 21 st century skills: findings from a statewide initiative jason ravitz buck institute for education. paper presented at annual meetings of the american education research assosiation, 2012. prawoto, a. (2012). panduan kreatif membuat bahan ajar inovatif. yogyakarta: diva press. rusman. (2016). model-model pembelajaran, mengembangkan profesionalisme guru. jakarta: pt rajagrafindo persada. sugiyono. (2015). metode penelitian pendidikan pendekatan kuantitatif, kualitatif, r dan d. bandung: alfabeta. trianto. (2014). model pembelajaran terpadu teori dan praktek. jakarta: prestasi pustaka publisher wena, s. (2009). perencanaan dan desain sistem pembelajaran. jakarta: kencana english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 177 the implementation of teaching genre in l2 listening classroom: iranian pre-intermediate efl learners in focus ehsan namaziandost department of english, faculty of humanities, shahrekord branch, islamic azad university, shahrekord, iran sajad shafiee department of english, faculty of humanities, shahrekord branch, islamic azad university, shahrekord, iran behrouz ahmadi department of english, ahvaz branch, islamic azad university, ahvaz, iran apa citation: namaziandost, e., shafiee, s., & ahmadi, b. (2019). the implementation of teaching genre in l2 listening classroom: iranian pre-intermediate efl learners in focus. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 177-184. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v7i2.2618. received: 27-02-2019 accepted: 14-04-2019 published: 01-06-2019 abstract: this study tries to implement genre-based instruction in iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ l2 listening skill. moreover, it aims to investigate if genre-based instruction impacts the listening skills of efl learners at different skill levels equally. to achieve this goal, 60 efl learners have been selected. these were split into groups a and b. groups a and b, respectively, consisted of 30 and 30 members. group a was split into experimental and control groups and administered the pre and posttest of listening skills. findings from one-way ancova showed that because of using genre-based instruction, the experimental group outperformed the control group. group b was also classified into proficient and lessproficient classes as demonstrated by the proficiency test; each administered two pre-and posttest of listening. nonetheless, the findings of one-way ancova revealed that both classes were improved from pretest to posttest; the professional group performed remarkably better than the less skilled group. generally speaking, the results of this study showed that gbt is a key and crucial factor in developing listening comprehension. keywords: genre-based teaching; listening proficiency; iranian pre-intermediate efl learners. introduction genre-based teaching (gbt) is dominantly associated with the teaching method of second language writing and is based on genre study. it is based on the idea that each writer produces their texts in an inimitable and peerless way, but in relation to the social base and other textualities (knapp & watkins, 2005). speaking from a similar perspective, hyland (2004, p. 5) describes gbt as "being careful about what students do when they speak," not a technical fastening of words together. therefore, gbt presumes writing as a social relevance defined by its commitment to systems of vocabulary, subject matter, writing styles, and textual types. this concentrates on teaching students how to use language in order to construct a meaningful dialogue. as gbt elucidated students are taught by cope and kalantzis (1993, p. 8) in "the manner that the hows' of text form procreate the causes for social impact." it has been an axiom among second and foreign language researchers to confine genre researches principally to written discourse. because of such a restricted view, research on genre-based teaching method is still inadequately represented (cheng, 2006, 2008). however, there is no motivation to restrict gbt to writing teaching method and place it into the straitjacket of written discourse. swales (1990, p. 33) characterizes genre as alluding to “a discernable class of discourse of any kind, spoken or written, with or without inconcrete appetence.” a few researches proclaimed positive connection among gbt and enhancement in students’ propensities towards language learning (henry & roseberry, 1998). in addition, these researches have assessed the efficacy of the genre-based teaching in enhancing students’ genre-based (cheung & lai, 1997; namaziandost, neisi, kheryadi, & nasri, 2019). listening is commonly viewed as a striking linguistic ability as an area of language acquisition where language students gain superiority faster and at a more significant level than other language skills. it also has a critical influence on the egress and development of ehsan namaziandost, sajad shafiee & behrouz ahmadi the implementation of teaching genre in l2 listening classroom: iranian pre-intermediate efl learners in focus 178 language skills, especially in reading and writing (oxford, 1990, 1993; scarcella & oxford, 1992). brown (2001, p. 248) describes the valence of listening in such a manner that it is "a major skill by which students mask linguistic data from which they cannot produce information." nevertheless, as brown (1995) said, listening is an unpleasant capacity to extend because it involves extraordinary quantities of cognitive processing. underwood (1989) refers to the small size of the vocabulary information of students and the absence of contextual indications in the spoken language to name a couple of different reasons. chiang and dunkel (1992) presumed the absence of adequate background information from listeners to be obstacles before expanding listening. despite extensive and thorough gender theory and role-based teaching possibilities, scholars have often concentrated on writing teaching (cheng, 2006, 2008; cheung & lai, 1997; namaziandost, hashemifardnia, & shafiee, 2019; manzouri & shahraki, 2014). clearly, such a trend does not seem unusual, as the concept of genre arose from the study of writing teaching for the first time. as bhatia (1993) stated, language students are required to provide basic skills and classification learning in the profession for diverse participation in a particular informative occasion. eventually, students should draw the expert community under such specialty-oriented instruction and hit their enrollment in the amplification of the target discourse. in order to fill the work void in the field, this analysis aims to drive the edges of gbt uses into one of the main language skills; listening. genre genre, based on hammond and derewianka (2001, p. 69), is associated with "antiquated greeks and their study of expository form of various historical, poetic and dramatic groups." johns (2003) reproaches the traditional definition of genre and argues that typical genre analysis is extremely focused on taxonomy of literary works. in any case, recent interpretations of the word consider it to be of a social nature. in order to highlight the social virtues of the genre, hyland (2003, p. 21) characterizes the genre as "dynamic, socially understood forms of language usage." gender-based teaching oriented on the cuttingedge senses of the word is seen as a revolutionary advancement in the form of language teaching, especially in the second-language writing. prior to finding new conceptions of genre and its use for language teaching system, writing classes were largely dominated by the approach of product and procedure. from the 1940s to the 1960s, and under the influence of the product approach, the system of teaching focused primarily on the last product's verbal accuracy and simple well-formedness. the product approach focused on teaching linguistic tenets for the position of instructor, which could potentially enable learners to construct syntactically correct sentences (pincas, 1982). due to various shortcomings of the product technique, it was replaced by its experienced partner; the process solution. kern (2000) suggests that attention is diverted from language structure, pronunciation and phonetic precision to enable learners to communicate without hesitation in the method approach. thus, in the process approach "writers ' procedures" (p. 182) were demonstrated, despite the product approach in which phonetic structures were displayed. hyland (2004) believed that genre instructional approach might potentially explain writing "as an attempt to speak for learners, to gain a better understanding of the forms in which vocabulary styles are used, and to achieve consistent, conscious visibility" (p. 5) on the grounds that gbt is encouraging, simple, verbal, convey, deliberate, needs-based, and stable. in other words, gbt precedes the way students do not compose what they compose (hyland, 2004; martin, 1992). gender-based instruction, as paltridge (2001) suggests, may help students to succeed in semantic communication and provide them with socially conscious language forms by providing common knowledge and skills. in order to highlight the capacity of genre as a powerful instructive method, numerous research in the field of language education has been completed (bhatia, 1993; cheung & lai, 1997; namaziandost, sabzevari, & hashemifardnia, 2018; henry & roseberry, 1998; 2001; holmes, 1997; hopkins & dudley-evans, 1988; hyland, 2002; manzouri & shahraki, 2014). some researchers have generally confirmed that as a result of gbt, the writing of students has been significantly improved and they would use communicative movements more frequently in their study. in the class activities, gbt has showed a strong interaction with the students ' diverse involvement. many researchers found that gbt results enabled respondents to establish a positive approach to language learning (cheng, 2008; emilia, 2005; krisnachinda, 2006). listening as a key language ability, listening is the most broadly used language ability in our everyday life english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 179 (morley, 2001; rost 2002). it is commonly seen as a working and diligent mechanism in which members of the audience concentrate on extracting the vital data from the spoken phonetic content, grasping its meaning and understanding its action, and generating phonetically suitable output by consolidating them with the related signs and their context learning (o'malley, chamot & küpper, 1989). in any case, listening is also seen as an extreme ability to secure in view of the fact that it allows listeners to infer meaning from the verbal information that is spoken. goss (1982) suggests that listening is a complex mental mechanism in which members of the audience seek to replicate the context from the speakers. this intellectually complex process is carried out when listeners rely on their experience of learning the language and, in addition, their learning of reality (nagle & sanders, 1986; young, 1997) and recombine data in their long-term memory to construe the spoken language (mendelsohn, 1994; young, 1997). gbt can help language students improve their listening skills by acclimatizing them with the traditions of language use and by providing them with background information in the specific types of language spoken. the following research questions are to be responded in the present study: 1) does gbt significantly affect iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ listening skill? and 2) does gbt equally affect the listening proficiency of iranian pre-intermediate efl learners at various proficiency levels? method the current study is a two-part longitudinal analysis that used quantitative methods to expose the effect of gbt on the listening skills of iranian efl students. the respondents of this study were 60 iranian pre-intermediate efl learners who were segregated into group a, and group b. class a consisted of 30 members of the efl and was equally split into study and control groups, each with 15 students. group b, on the other hand, consisted of 30 efl students. with regards to the evaluation of listening skills, group b respondents were divided into groups of proficient and less-proficient. in a private language school, the respondents were learning english as a foreign language (tefl). group a students studied in their 3rd semester, while group b students learned in their 2nd and 4th semesters. class a was administered ahearing pre-test and then half of them (the study class) took part in a gbt listening series of 10 hours. the class took 3 weeks and they focused on listening learning in each session by answering questions of interpretation and transcribing the audio file. the listening file was classified as a "documentary" genre and was part of the bbc planet earth series. to investigate their understanding, they could communicate and discuss with each other and their instructor. at the same time, a placebo was given to the control group. they were asked to participate in a seminar on english short stories in a 13-session listening comprehension. upon completing four weeks of listening training, all respondents (both study and control groups) in the form of another listening comprehension test were administered a posttest. on the other hand, group b learners first completed a hearing ability test and were then assigned to classes of proficient and less proficient. over four weeks and 10 days, these two participants were asked to participate in hearing comprehension courses. documentary files accepted by bbc planet earth were the class material. after completing the instruction, a listening comprehension test was carried out by both groups. the independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test were performed to analyze the data through spss program version 25. results and discussion rq 1. does gbt significantly affect iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ listening skill? the one-way ancova was performed to compare the posttest scores of the learners in the eg and cg (and to see if gbt was successful as far as efl learners ' listening skills were concerned). this mathematical method was used in particular because it was able to control on the pretest any potential pre-existing variations between the eg and cg participants, and make adjustments accordingly, then compare their posttest scores. the results of descriptive statistics for comparing the listening posttest scores of the eg and cg learners are shown in table 1. table 1. descriptive statistics comparing the listening posttest scores of eg and cg learners groups m sd n eg 28.36 6.12 15 cg 22.36 4.39 15 ehsan namaziandost, sajad shafiee & behrouz ahmadi the implementation of teaching genre in l2 listening classroom: iranian pre-intermediate efl learners in focus 180 total 25.36 5.25 30 as shown in table 1, the eg students outperformed their cg peers on the listening posttest. in table 2, the p value under the sig, to see if this disparity between the eg and cg learners ' listening posttest scores was of statistical significance or not. columns should be presented in the groups called lines. table 2. ancova results comparing the listening posttest scores of eg and cg learners source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. partial eta squared corrected model 560.53 2 280.26 22.18 .00 .64 intercept 44.21 1 44.21 4.16 .08 .09 pretest 270.66 1 270.66 21.26 .00 .43 groups 219.66 1 219.66 18.90 .00 .38 error 418.36 27 18.67 total 21216.49 30 corrected total 1315.26 29 the value of p below the sig. the column across the group row was lower than the meaning level, indicating that the difference between the two eg and cg groups on the listening posts was statistically significant. it could be concluded, therefore, that gbt helped the eg students improve their listening skills and significantly surpass their cg counterparts on the listening posttest. the effect size in table 2 under the partial eta squared section indicates the magnitude of.38, which is a large effect size dependent on cohen (1988, as cited in pallant, 2010). rq 2. does gbt equally affect the listening proficiency of pre-intermediate efl learners at various proficiency levels? to order to find a reasonable answer to this study's second research question, group b learners, a communication ability test was taken first. we were allocated to proficient and lessproficient groups based on the research results (table 3). an independent samples t-test are conducted to guarantee the reliability of the test results. there was a statistically significant difference in the pre-test scores for proficient and less-proficient groups p<0.05 based on the information presented in table 3. this conclusion was reached since the value of p was lower than the level of meaning (p <.05). it could therefore be concluded that the students in the two classes were at the same level of skill. table 3. independent samples test for pretest of group b levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference pretest equal variances assumed 36.91 .000 11.26 28 .00 14.37 1.08 since the study's second research question was intended to establish whether using gbt similarly influences efl learners ' listening skills at different skill levels, it was appropriate to compare the posttest scores of the proficient and less-proficient classes. to achieve this goal, the researcher may run a t-test of separate samples, but to look for any potential pre-existing discrepancies between these two subgroups and compare their posttest scores accordingly, oneway ancova was selected to be done. english review: journal of english education volume 7, issue 2, june 2019 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 181 table 4. descriptive statistics comparing the listening posttest scores of learners with differing proficiency levels proficiency levels mean std. deviation n proficient 48.12 7.16 15 less proficient 30.62 3.29 15 total 39.37 11.09 30 table 4 reveals that the proficient learners ' post-test mean score was higher than the less proficient learners ' post-test mean score. the analysts had to look down on the sig to figure out if this disparity was statistically significant or not. column and the skill level row in table 5. table 5. ancova results comparing the listening posttest scores of learners with differing proficiency levels source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. partial eta squared corrected model 3628.11 2 1814.05 126.19 .00 .91 intercept 249.16 1 249.16 16.96 .00 .42 pretest 369.98 1 369.98 29.19 .00 .53 proficiency level 168.26 1 168.26 11.89 .00 .34 error 789.67 27 12.986 total 7809.58 30 corrected total 3906.19 29 when you find the row called proficiency level in the leftmost column in table 5, and read below the sig throughout this section. line, you will consider the p value that should be compared to the significance level of the alpha (i.e., 0.05). the p value here was lower than the meaning level alpha (.00<.05), which indicates the difference between the two proficient and less proficient groups learners on the listening posttest was statistically significant. it indicates that the use of gbt influenced proficient groups slightly more than their peers, i.e. less proficient group. based on the data collected from this analysis and the figures previously demonstrated, it is quite clear that the use of genre-based approaches can be effective compared to conventional teaching methods. yes, there was a significant difference between the posttest ratings of the trial and control group. thus, due to its many advantages and advantages, an integration of genre-based teaching instruction is considered one of the best ways to instruct efl learners to listen. the explanation can be seen in the arguments suggested by hayland (2004), who argues that gender-based instruction makes learning easier to understand. furthermore, hayland (2004) suggests that gbt offers a consistent structure to concentrate on both vocabulary and meaning. however, genre-based ensures specific purposes and scope of the course. another reason for this may be that the genrebased teacher plays a primary role as a motivator for student learning and creativity, and this approach makes available patterns and variation possibilities in valued texts. the noted debate explores the influence of listening from different aspects of genre-based instruction. to sum up, if we regard doing something with the knowledge as the intention of listening to a text, the results of the current study showed that listening to genre-based teaching has an important and positive effect on enhancing the listening comprehension capacity of efl learners. the findings of this study largely corroborate the utility of gbt in language teaching identified in previous studies by other researchers (bhatia, 1993; cheung & lai, 1997; dudley-evans, 1997; emilia, 2005; namaziandost, shatalebi, & nasri, 2019; henry & roseberry, 1998, 2001; holmes, 1997; hopkins & dudleyevans, 1988; hyland, 2002; krisnachinda, 2006; manzouri & shahraki, 2014; swales, 1990). when these experiments focused primarily on learning, the results of this research corroborated gbt output in other than written language skills. such studies that indicate the significant influence of gbt in helping language students deal with the difficulty they face in the course of language learning. meanwhile, other research will concentrate on the effectiveness of gbt to improve reading and expression. however, the findings of this study support rozimela's research (2014), which found a significant relationship between efl students ' ehsan namaziandost, sajad shafiee & behrouz ahmadi the implementation of teaching genre in l2 listening classroom: iranian pre-intermediate efl learners in focus 182 knowledge of genre and perception of reading. in fact, the findings of his research showed that students with higher awareness of the genre performed significantly better in reading comprehension. moreover, this research is consistent with the report by sadeghi, taghihassani and hemmati (2013), who studied the effect of gender-based teaching on the interpretation of reading by esp learners. the results of the reading understanding test, analyzed through a t-test and independentsamples t-test, showed that gender-based teaching significantly enhances the ability to understand the reading of efl learners. the descriptive and inferential statistics showed a significant improvement in the understanding of learners reading compared to non-genre groups. with regard to pedagogical implications, it should be noted that the results of this study could particularly enrich the literature in the field of foreign language learning by teaching listening to iranian efl students. in turn, language therapists and program planners should adapt the results of the study to take into account the students ' need for genres in the content review process. once again, those that are more genre-based can be used to pick the teaching content to have a better educational context in which to improve the listening comprehension of efl learners. ultimately, as the most relevant actors, teachers should take advantage of the results of the current study to improve the communication understanding of the efl learners. current study and findings such as this that reinforce the understanding of the efficacy of genre-based teaching in improving hearing can enable teacher educators, english teachers, course book writers and curriculum creators to become more aware of the benefits of genre-based teaching and to integrate genre-based ideas into their classes, course books and curricula to assist learners be aware of the positive and beneficial properties of listening classes. conclusion gender-based instruction has historically been more related to second and foreign language learning writing preparation (swales, 1990). notwithstanding this, it was argued (cheng, 2008) the definition of genres can also be used for certain language skills. this research aimed to explore the impacts of genre-based instruction (gbt) on iranian efl learners’ listening as an effort to show the realms of genre theory. the results of all-group data analysis indicated that gbt had a remarkable impact in improving the listening skills of iranian efl learners. in addition, the findings revealed that gbt can be analogous for both skilled and less skilled listeners; therefore, skill is a significant agent in the effectiveness of gender-based teaching. the results of this study will enable language teachers to leverage the power of genre theory to teach language skills, particularly listening. the research can also allow students to take a broad view of the aspects used in communication. the subject needs to be more explored in some other experiments to complete the results of the current study. as far as the current study is concerned, more work may be needed in the following areas: the main concern of the current study was to explore the effect of gender-based instruction on the listening capacity of iranian efl learners. analogous studies on other language skills, such as speaking, writing, and reading understanding of iranian efl learners, can be carried out. the participants were male efl learners in the current study. if it is possible to conduct the same research on co-educational students, the outcomes may be different. if it is possible to conduct the same research on coeducational students, the findings may be different. this study used experimental design; other designs may therefore be used to further our understanding of the concept at issue. efl students from different fields can act in different ways to listen to classes that use this strategy. with respect to the materials used in this study, it is possible to examine different types of audio files and texts to see if similar findings are obtained. references bhatia, v. k. 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(1997). a serial ordering of listening comprehension strategies used by advanced esl learners in hong kong. asian journal of english language teaching, 1, 35-53. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee nigerians utilisation of code-mixing as communicative devices iyabode omolara akewo daniel national open university of nigeria, abuja email: akewoauthe@gmail.com & idaniel@noun.edu.ng apa citation: daniel, i. o. a. (2016). nigerians utilisation of code-mixing as communicative devices. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 101-114 received: 13-10-2016 accepted: 16-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: the importance of communication as a central idea in language usage cannot be over-emphasised. this seems to inform how many nigerian speakers make extensive use of the mixture of indigenous languages and the english language in one and the same breath. it seems to reveal a kind of perception of reality in two ways at the same time. they seem to go through the process of thinking in diverse ways at the same time. this study thus seeks to find out the extent to which the average nigerian user of the english language makes intelligible contribution to discourses. how much sense is made to and by interlocutors in the course of their discussions? to what extent is reality to them influenced by their knowledge of the english language? the extent of the indigenisation process is also of interest to the study. the expectation is that such contact should be to the advantage of one or the other of the languages in contact. real time linguistic data were collected and analysed, using linguistic levels as base to access the extent to which nigerian indigenous languages have been able to influence the english language. the finding shows that codemixing is an important part of the nigerian communication process and has enabled the vernacularisation of the english language to a very large extent. this has produced a new spatial identity that reveals the nigerian’s domination of the colonial english language. keywords: code-mixing, communication, language usage, english vernacularisation, nigerian indigenous languages, spatial identity introduction the english language came in contact with the nigerian people about five centuries ago when the britons first landed on the nigerian shores for commercial purposes (oyeleye, 1990; osakwe, 2005). the missionary activities that followed further strengthened the inroad by the english language into the nigerian society while the annexation of lagos in the 19th century and the subsequent colonisation of nigeria in the 20th century solidified the hold of the english language on nigeria (oyeleye, 1990; spencer, 1971). with english now being used for administrative purposes, it was only a matter of time before it permeated the entire national life of nigeria. moreover, because the colonial administration had need of such manpower like clerks, typists, etc., it decided to train some ‘natives’ for this purpose. this turned english into a language with some potential economic advantage. subsequently, many people struggled to learn this language. it also became a ‘language of high culture’ to many as it remained the essential language of the white man’s religion (spencer, 1971). all these factors facilitated the implantation and expansion of english in nigeria. however, the nigerian society has the indigenous languages. these 101 iyabode omolara akewo daniel nigerians utilisation of code-mixing as communicative devices languages, which were already advanced themselves, easily accommodated the new phenomenon that came to their shores. such new lexical terms like ‘buredi’ from bread, ‘ṣia’ from chair (examples are from the yoruba language of the south west nigeria) etc. were created (cf. bamgbose, 1995; daniel, 2011). another resultant effect of this contact was the pidginisation of english. ‘pidgin english’, which odumuh (1993) refers to as ‘the lingua franca defacto’ (p. 1), serves as the language of widest communication among educated and non-educated nigerians alike. it was developed among the niger delta people, with whom there was the earliest contact. it flourishes widest among them till date. it has even moved to the point of attaining creole status among some of the people of the area (osakwe, 2005). the very multi-ethnic and consequently multi-lingual nature of the nigerian society probably makes this simplified form of english the most extensively used. ubahakwe (1979) puts the literacy rate in nigeria at probably less than 20% and those employed by the government as being less than 25% of the 80 million nigerians (p. ix) at that time. the 1991 population suggests the literacy rate to be an average of 50%. the 2006 census, which is the current population census on which the nigerian population is based, appears to have doubled the population figure. however, the same cannot be said of the literacy rate as adult literacy rate averages 64.8% in the 2010 survey by the national bureau of statistics (2010) while the literacy of the youth indicates a much higher and hopeful figure of 81%. nonetheless, it will be interesting to know what happens to the remaining number of nigerians that have not had any contact with the formal education system within which the english language is learnt. this is in the light of the disparity in the literacy levels of the states. on the heels of this is the boko haram real time threat to education with its evil attacks on schools and worse still, the recent abduction of young school girls in the purported educationally disadvantaged north. in addition, it was noted in the survey referred to above that the tendency is that the literacy level in english is usually lower than in all the other languages in the country. therefore, odumuh (1993), quoting omolewa (1979), suggests that this remnant of the population that have to live with english as their second language might have developed a variant that mixes the indigenous language and the few words of english they know together for communication purposes. this variety, which is tagged non-standard, may be a way of not allowing themselves to be silenced (osundare, 1982) by the elites. this, once again, appears to show the resilience of the average nigerian in adapting to situations that one would consider intolerable. the very fear expressed by osundare (1982) may not be unfounded, but he forgets that the english language itself has been ‘colonised’ (odumuh, 1993) by the nigerian. this is not to say that an alternative indigenous language will not be better, but the reality of the uproar that may result is the fear that had been proven times over by the suspicion with which people view any language policy that does not favour them. this may account for the very way the nigerian had instead made the language that is considered ‘neutral’ subject to their very needs and environment (daniel, 2012). bilingualism seems to be prevalent in the nigerian society, but what was 102 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee actually discovered is that: while some may truly be bilingual in terms of functional bilingualism, that is have passable knowledge of a nigerian language and english (not necessarily coordinate knowledge), the majority of nigerians are actually able to use up to three to four codes, depending on where s/he comes from and the context (cf. essien, 1995). this fact is demonstrated in the data collected for this study. from the educated to the not-so-well educated, the rate at which they switch from one code to the other without losing intelligibility is amazing. it is therefore sensible that the code-mixing usage of nigerians be investigated to ascertain the communicative effectiveness of such usages in interactions among interlocutors of different levels. code-mixing has been defined as the mixing together of two codes in a communication event. essien (1995) asserts that code-mixing arises due to language contact as well as communication convenience. he argues that code-mixing is usually done in informal contexts. to him, a person that code mixes may not necessarily do same in a formal situation. however, he observes that most interlocutors use code-mixing to arrive at solidarity status in a manner which usually makes it impossible sometimes to determine the educational status of those involved. he nonetheless notes that a dangerous trend that the practice portends is that of being viewed as a threat to the nigerian indigenous languages. even then, he agrees with lamidi (2003) that the syntactic structure of code-mixing actually has a structural pattern. nevertheless, the concern in this paper is the communicative usefulness of code-mixing. the fact is that the effectiveness of communication is what language usage is all about. it needs be mentioned here that, contrary to essien (1995) assertion, wardhaugh (2006) sees code-mixing and code-switching as one and the same. all the same, wardhaugh agrees with this researcher’s position that, essentially, code-mixing is done principally to communicate. communication, to all intent and purposes, is usually described as a transfer of information from sender to the receiver of the message. wikibook.org (2013, p. 3) defines it as “…how humans share, encode, and decode what they know, what they need, and what they expect from each other.” weilenmann (1962) sees communication in terms of transfer of messages containing quantities of information. to him, information controls the human behaviour. this means that the source (sender) of the information tends to control the behaviours of others through carefully determining what sort of information is passed. however, one could find fault with this kind of definition in that, clearly, the receiver of information is not usually dormant in processing the information received. nonetheless, it cannot be disputed that the kind of information one is fed with tends to affect the way one responds to situations at times (cf. van dijk, 1995). in this way, his observation that the kind of information the decision maker in an organisation passes across could determine the behaviour members of that organisation (or society, for that matter) exhibits. an interesting part of the definition of communication is that it is seen as assigning meaning content or interpretation to a discourse (daniel, 2013). semantic functioning of language being related to its meaning content is an important view of communication processing. folarin (1998) asserts that communication is basically the ability of 103 iyabode omolara akewo daniel nigerians utilisation of code-mixing as communicative devices the speaker to get across the meaning they intend communicating to their interlocutor(s). this paper therefore seeks to find out how meaning exchanges and semantic processing are contributory to the communication effectiveness in linguistic exchanges among nigerians, even within the seeming limitation of a ‘foreign’ language and, sometimes, diverse linguistic backgrounds of the interlocutors. if language is essentially meant for communication (cf. daniel, 2012; essien, 1995), beyond mere artistic gymnastics, i. how much has english as an inherited second language been effective in its usage for communication among nigerians? ii. how well have the indigenous communities been able to naturalise the english language to their particular purposes, considering the reality of english as an unavoidable ‘legacy’ of colonialism in today nigeria? these are the concerns of this paper. method participant/observant method was employed in gathering the data. many speech events in which the author was either a participant and/or an observer were variously recorded. however, these two were finally purposively selected. of the two events used for this investigation, the first group (gp i) has a multi-ethnic mixed population of educated and non-educated nigerians as interlocutors while the second group (gp ii) has two yoruba bilingual speakers engaging in the interlocution. the second group has university education, which is of interest to the investigation in order to compare the employment of code mixing by the diverse interlocutors in the two speech events. in the first speech event, the writer visited a pools agency where some men, numbering eight, were playing cards and draft. she sat among them and participated in their discussions. the second speech event was done along the agbowo road, opposite the university of ibadan main gate. the participants in this second speech event are two young people: a young lady and a young man; the author was a mere observer of this second event. these were students of the university of ibadan. this second event was meant to serve as a kind of control variable in order to allow for a comparative datum with that collected from the first group, which seems to be a sort of a mix-bag educationally, socially, economically and ethnically. the data collected from these groups were orthographically transcribed. these served as appendices 1 and 2, presented at the end of this paper. the data analysis was done using the application of the occurrence of codemixing features as seen at different linguistic levels of their manifestation. these were indicated and discussed as identified in the data. their communicative usefulness or effectiveness is the focus of identification or discussion in the next section. results and discussion code-mixing the commonest feature found to be a major trend in the linguistic employments of the subjects in the two groups is code-mixing. the groups examined are investigated from the angle of the rate at which they code-mix yoruba, which is the prevalent regional language in the geographical area covered in the investigation, is constantly being used together with the english language. it seems to pose no 104 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee difficulty to the interlocutors in expressing themselves in each case as well as in understanding the meaning intended by the speaker. for example: gp i d: shokoloko bangbose, spell e. [nonsensical words] e: o easy baje. sho...ko...lo...ko... [it is so easy. (attempting to spell the nonsense words)] a: eyin e spell e n’gba t’eyin mo (to d) [you should spell it as you know it] b: so gbo ni sin in. won ni k’e spell e n gba t’e mo. [can you hear that. you are told to spell it as you know it.] a: teacher o ki i teach ba yen. eyin e spell e. [a teacher doesn’t teach in this manner. you spell it. (insisting to d)] c: bi won se n teach ni sin ni yen. [that is the manner being engaged in teaching these days.] gp ii y: so, ko try lati intensify efforts e. [so, you should try to intensify your efforts.] z: ma wa wa. church kan na l’emi ati woman yen jo nlo. [i will come to look for her. that woman and i attend the same church.] the rate at which the interlocutors shift from one code to another is surprising. odumuh (1993, pp. 23-24) contends that the nigerian does not lose a particular lect of english once acquired as implied by bickerton’s theory of scalogram lect. instead, he opines, the nigerian learning all the available varieties like pidgin, broken (patois), non-standard and educated varieties (if s/he is educated) may have them all present in their repertoire. s/he therefore switches to any of these codes as occasion demands. however, essien (1995) opines that context has a lot to do with the possible occurrence of codemixing for the nigerian speaker as demonstrated in the case of ibibio/english bilinguals. further examples could be seen in the data below: gpi f: who knows the new minister for education? [some muffled comments] f: na jamaican english we want to dey use now. [we want to start making use of jamaican english now.] a: where una for dey learn that one? [(curiously) where did you learn that one from?] ... ah! ah! (general laughter) a: i’m interested o. [i’m really interested.] f: what is the need now? [what is the need?] a: i’m a student of english, i want to know. where did you learn jamaican english? b: ah, o n sere. [he is joking.] g: riddles and jokes ni. [it is riddles and jokes.] a: oh, oh. but se eyin mo ipe there is jamaican english? [oh, oh. but do you know that there is jamaican english?] f: well... g: this man is from jamaica. 105 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the way the interlocutors easily moved from the standard english structures to yoruba, to pidgin english and to the non-standard english is surprising to say the least as noted above. it, however, goes to prove odumuh’s (1993) claim as stated above. moreover, it reveals that the interlocutors have a smattering command of all the languages involved, which makes communication to flow. this also agrees with wardhaugh’s (2006) assertion that many language users are actually multilingual and they operate in all the languages as the need arises. even though in the course of the exchanges in the data it was discovered that the participants are from different ethno-linguistic groups in nigeria, the languages being employed appear to have been adapted to suit their needs for communication without leading to a semantic breakdown or misunderstanding. this goes to show that linguistic integration is possible in nigeria if policy makers will think seriously about finding a language of communication beyond mere artistic embellishment. this phenomenon is virtually nonexistent in the second group, probably due to the fact that they are more strictly bilingual yoruba/english speakers. it appears to also reveal a fact that pidgin may be flowing more among the heterogeneous group than among the ethnically homogenous group. in edo and delta states, which had been called a mini-nigeria (when it was the defunct bendel state), due to the multilingual nature of the area, pidgin is virtually the language of official communication after english, as found by this writer as a teacher of the english language in a secondary school in edo state between 1993 and 1996 (cf. osakwe, 2005). this problem is apparently absent amongst the homogenous groups such as the yoruba that seem to have only their mother tongue (yoruba) to contend with as demonstrated by gpii. phonological level code transfer is another important area that is observed in the participants’ linguistic employments. interlocutor f pronounces /treʒə:/ as [treʃɔ], which may be accounted for as due to a lack of the sound /ʒ/ in any nigerian language. moreover, the english language as a whole seems to be pronounced in such a manner that you will almost imagine another nigerian indigenous language is being spoken rather than english when it is spoken as a stretch of sentence. for example: a: i am interested o. the addition of ‘o’ thus nullifies the sentence as strictly english in terms of pronunciation. it appears like any nigerian language being spoken. it should be stated that this element is actually an emphatic one. it, however, proves lamidi (2003) point that yoruba head parameter is actually a major determinant of the structural form of the structures produced by the yoruba/english bilinguals (see bamgbose, 1995) for the same position on the english code-mixed structures). for akinjobi (2004), this is a major feature exhibited by her subjects in her inquiry into some pronunciation tests undertaken by some educated yoruba english speakers. code transfer is thus a feature common in the use of language by these speakers. and it is obvious that it did not detract from the communication process as the communication process never experienced a hitch in the course of that section of the exchanges. obviously, then, the domestication of the english 106 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee language is an effective one as it enabled communicative functionality. syntactic level structures are given that would almost sound unintelligible to an outsider (i.e. a non-nigerian) that does not have an idea of the language of the discussants. such element as exemplified below could be seen in the data. a: why now? you are a citizen now? f: there is election for sale. the unnecessary addition of ‘now’ to a’s question instead of just a bare ‘why? but you are a citizen?’ (said in a questioning manner) and f’s use of ‘election’ instead of ‘votes’ demonstrate localised usages. this is again seen in f’s ‘you know bob marley’ when he actually means to ask if his addressee has heard of bob marley. all these syntactic and lexical differentiations reflect, not so much a bastardisation of the english language, but the people’s world view. it seems a reality of what the language had been adapted to become in the nation. it appears to be a validation of whorf’s (1956) view of language as a result of the thinking system of its users and for their own purposes and ends. apparently then, daniel (2012) argues that transliteration is a communication weapon in the nigerian milieu could be justified by this data. it thus appears that the argument for the pidgin english as an important part of the nigerian national life in terms of its functionality could also be advanced here for this case. it would seem then that rather than see these syntactic ‘malapropisms’ as such, their communicative effectiveness should determine their linguistic value. as the reality that stares all scholars of the english language in the face every day is that it can no longer be denied that the english language actually has become domesticated in many locations where it once dominated (cf. bamgbose, 1995). there exists indian english, nigerian english, australian english, kenyan english, ghanaian english, etc. as examples of the nativised options. even within nigeria, there are variants such as yoruba english, hausa english, igbo english, etc. you do not just not speak in the indigenous languages now but you speak the english that your kith and kin can understand; otherwise ‘you are on your own’ (to use a local parlance). what does this mean? communication breakdown. this paper examined the origin of the english language in nigeria and how it came to be planted. it also looked at the relationship between the nigerian and this ‘caliban’s curse’ (osundare, 1982). the study analysed two complementary speech events to determine if there is any effect of educational attainment on the english language and its domestication. it also tried to find out if, despite being a colonial heritage, the nigerian has turned round to ‘colonise’ the english language. as much as the paper realises that the language has not been without its effects on the local languages, it contends that the local environment had not been without effect on english as well (see daniel, 2012). it also found that given the present reality of the nigerian linguistic situation, the domestication of the english language can give the nigerian speech community what odumuh (1993) calls ‘linguistic independence’ without being the worse for it. if the language seems to tend towards communication for economic growth facilitation, the very fact that the heterogeneous gpi can communicate so effectively with all the available repertoire at their disposal 107 iyabode omolara akewo daniel nigerians utilisation of code-mixing as communicative devices seems to suggest that, as banjo (1995) puts it, “bilingual education is ideal for all the nation’s citizens” (p. 184). where even feasible trito quadri-ligual education should be made available to the nigerian citizen that is interested, otherwise, the ‘lingua franca’ pidgin can serve unofficially and informally as the language of communication. however, the best option seems to be to teach standard english, with nigerian colour just because of its exoglossic status while trying to maintain it as a level of symbiotic relationship with the nigerian indigenous languages as was found in the pool house discourse. bamgbose (1995) perceptibly notes that in any situation of language contact, “the resulting linguistic influence is mutual.” this writer agrees with him as revealed in the analysis of the data above. so, the issue of domination of english does not even arise as its vernacularisation is actually a testimony of its succumbing to the nigerian environmental influences. conclusion from the analysis and discussion above, it appears that what the nigerian speech community needs is a means of communication. if despite the heterogeneous nature of the first group of interlocutors it kept its communication flowing, the contention here then is that the nigerian nation should consider the emergent nigerian english as a good thing because english as an exoglossic language may still smart of the colonial heritage. but such language policy should also make sure that a symbiotic relationship is built between the nigerian languages and the english language. such can be achieved through the encouragement of respect for the indigenous languages and their being taught in the curriculum. this will foster the kind of linguistic plurality which is positive as observed in gpi. it should go beyond paper work; attempt at implementation should be seriously made. moreover, pidgin/non-standard english, which seems to help towards wider communication can help in the economic growth as those that are really the workers use it, as well as many educated nigerians. therefore, it should not be downgraded; instead, efforts at not substituting it for the real thing (standard nigerian english) should be made in the course of teaching. in addition, it is necessary that the english scholars in nigeria should make serious attempts at codifying the nigerian english. as stressed by bamgbose (1995) and daniel (2012), the nigerian english is a reality and can no longer be denied as exemplified in the works of these scholars as well as in the data in this paper; codifying and standardising it appears to be a sensible course of action. it is thus heartening that the nigeria english studies association conference of 2010 was basically focused on doing something about this. a step further is taking concrete action to actualise this in order to save the nigerian nation from the present confusion over the matter. the mix bag of british and american english is the present albatross that the nigerian speakers of english argue over as observed by this researcher (cf. bamgbose, 1995). one will also wish to suggest the need for a clear language policy by the nigerian government. the present idea of subsuming it in the national policy on education (federal republic of nigeria, 2004) does not appear to be forward looking. this is why most people are confused as to if nigeria actually has a language policy. 108 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee acknowledgements i wish to acknowledge the cooperation of the shop owners where i did the recording of the many speech events from among which only these two were used for this study. i 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(2013). communication theory. retrieved 2 may, 2015 from https://upload.wikimedia.org/ wikipedia/commons/5/51/communi cation_theory.pdf 110 http://www.discourse.org/oldarticles/themediatoday.pdf http://www.discourse.org/oldarticles/themediatoday.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/communication_theory.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/communication_theory.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/communication_theory.pdf english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee appendix i context: playing of draft and cards by the participants participants: seven men and a woman location: pools agency store appellation: alphabetic labels of participants interlocutor a: se ma f’owo si ni sin ni? ...... okay, twenty-five ti won se yen je ona mewa g: jamaican ni bobo yen ke c: jamaican ko, canadian ni d: shokoloko ba ngbose, spell e. o easy baje e: shokoloko... a: eyin e speli ngba t’eyin mo b: sho gbo ni sin in. won ni ke spell e ngba t’e mo. a: teacher o k ii teach bayen. e yin e spell e. c: bi won se n teach ni sin ni yen. f: 1940 something. .... f: who knows the new minister for education? ... f: na jamiacan english we want to dey use now a: ah, ah, where una for learn that one? (general laughter) a: no, i’m interested o. f: what is the need now? a: i’m a student of english; i want to know. where did you learn jamaican english? b: o ns’ere ni. g: riddles and joke ni. a: oh, oh. but se eyin mo i pe there is jamaican english? f: well... g: this man is from jamaica. a: eeh, eh. is that so? pleased, to meet you. what is the name? f: korika. a: ah! f: korika. a: o pari! (laughter). una go dey sey fifty naira for ... b: ta lo wo bombay to goar? (echoes of bombay to goar) b: ikan mu ika lati bombay de goar. a: se awon footballers? f: me, i no go cast my own vote again. a: for the one wey den dey do now? f: eh en. a: why now? you are a citizen now. f: there is election for sale. 111 iyabode omolara akewo daniel nigerians utilisation of code-mixing as communicative devices a: election for sale? you are a citizen now? f: ci... a: citizen. f: for algeria or for jamaica? ki lo n j’ebe? a: e gbo yoruba tele? i be think you be igbo o. f: ibo ke? i’m not a nigerian. a: oh, you’re a jamaican. i’ve forgotten. which place are you from in jamaica? f: in jamaica? oh ... you know bob marley? a: eh ... i’ve heard of him. f: at the back of ... that is bob marley village gan, at the back of it. a: ehn, ehn. (bemused) d: (singing) naira pool, omo gb’ade ro. a: (to b) s’eyin ni naira pool? b: rara o... g: where is the second ₦50 a: this man, you’re not yoruba (to f) f: i am not yoruba. d: naira pool, omo gbade ro. a: you are from edo? f: edo ke? ah, ah, no. i’m from the only state in nigeria. a: what is the name? what is the name? f: the ‘d’ state, ehn. the ‘d’ state, that is it. a: o ga o. uhn, na you be warri man. f: (pause) a: no be warri? you be asaba. f: you’re talking now. when you talk of ... when you talk of delta ... a: i want to hear that una sound wey una dey speak so ... that una broken, i want to hear am self. f: our broken? a: ehn ... ehn. f: that one we don drop am o. the time wey den kill ... ehm ... saro wiwa. b: o ma bami sise, o n ba won ro’jo. a: no. ejo, mo n bo naa. ....... a: saro wiwa is not from delta now, saro wiwa is not from delta. f: saro wiwa is from where? a: he’s from rivers now. f: you’re right. that’s a slip of mouth. a: (smiling) not a slip of tongue again. f: not a slip of tongue. d: i be omo yoruba. na ₦5 we dey ta si here. f: he suppose know. he is a politician. (to g) a: ehn, ehn, they may ask them during a debate. b: kini ten so ye o. won le fi jay an. ....... 112 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee b: ejo, n t’o ri oloun, se ‘born to rule’ ni won? h: each state ni won ni ko mu ... n ti won wa submit ni yen. b: n ti won submit ni yen. a: won ni won bere l’owo edo state n’igba t’oko ‘heartbeat’ k’o wa explain l’abuja. f: dem explain am now. dem explain am. ........... f: p. h. na ‘tre(ʃ)ɔ’ base . a: you be imo? oga? d: eh? a: you be imo? you come dey speak yoruba like ehn ... g: eni ti won bi s’aba aponrin. na dis aba wey dey here. im mama na yoruba. f: when dem go create ibadan state, dem go come give una foko local government. g: mo tun ti bere ki nma fin ball win fun opponent. a: k’e ma se kini fun opponent? [end] appendix ii context: on the street interlocutor y: so, ko try lati intensify effots e. z: ma wa wa. church kanna l’emi ati woman yen jo nlo.... so, n ma ri l’ola. y: then. z: monday ma, ma tun try lati wa so do e. ma wa s’odo woman yen gang an. ma lo ba. ti n ba n be. y: ehn, ehn, o se po. then, the other ile yen na. bi o tie s’omi, as long as to ba t’obi. to de look fine die na. z: bi o ba tile wo nu. y: to ba wo’nu bawo? z: to ba jina sinu l’ohun. y: to ba wa ni are ‘bi titi kuro. o si better. z: o si better. whatever the case may be, ma wish lati gbo feedback l’ola. 113 iyabode omolara akewo daniel nigerians utilisation of code-mixing as communicative devices drummer a drummer, sick of all the drummer jokes, decides to change his instrument. after some thought, he decides on the accordion. so he goes to the music store and says to the owner, "i'd like to look at the accordions, please." the owner gestures to a shelf in the courner and says, "all our accordions are over there." after browsing, the drummer says, "i think i'd like the big red one in the corner." the store owner looks at him and says, "you're a drummer, aren't you?" the drummer, crestfallen, says, "how did you know?" the store owner says, "that 'big red accordion' is the radiator." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) 114 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 291 compound words that occur during the global pandemic covid-19: a morphosemantic study ervina cm simatupang english department, widyatama university, indonesia e-mail: ervina.simatupang@widyatama.ac.id ida zuraida supri english department, widyatama university, indonesia e-mail: ida.zuraida@widyatama.ac.id apa citation: simatupang, e. c., & supri, i. z. (2020). compound words that occur during the global pandemic covid-19: a morphosemantic study. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 291-298. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2824. received: 16-02-2020 accepted: 23-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: this study aims to analyse and examine closely the category of compound words that occur during the global pandemic covid-19 and their type of meaning. the method used in carrying out the study was a descriptive analysis method. the data used were taken from the official website of the world health organization (who) in the ‘your questions answered’ section. the results demonstrated that there are two types of compound word found, namely compound nouns (67%) and compound verbs (33%). besides, there are three types of meaning found, namely literal meaning (50%), semi-idiomatic meaning (33%), and idiomatic meaning (17%). furthermore, in the category of compound nouns, the types of meaning that occur are literal meaning (50%), semi-idiomatic meaning (25%), and idiomatic meaning (25%). meanwhile, the types of meaning that appear in the category of compound verbs are literal meaning (50%) and semi-idiomatic meaning (50%). keywords: covid-19; coronavirus disease; compound words; meaning; word formation. introduction currently, the world is facing and struggling with a new virus that has been announced as a global pandemic by the world health organization (who) on march 11, 2020 that is the coronavirus disease, covid-19. after first found as an unknown pneumonia disease on 31 december 2020 in wuhan, china, according to the situation report 116 published by who on 15 may 2020, a total of 4.338.658 cases have been confirmed in more than 200 countries. as the virus progresses, every day, the world’s community is introduced to terms that may sound unfamiliar. after going through the who official website, the terms found are commonly constructed in a form of compound words. commonly, a compound or compound word is regarded as a phrase that is constituted by the combining of two words. it is in line with mcmanis et al., (1987) stating that a compound is a word formed by the combination of two independent words. on the contrary, according to spencer and zwicky (2001), a compound is a word that consists of two or more words. furthermore, akmajian et al., (2001) explain that “compounds are not limited to two words”. similarly, leech (1974) emphasizes a similar definition in which he states a compound is a word which contains two or more other words. in this regard, as this study progresses, the term compound is used to refer to the word combination that consists of two or more words. further, as stated by yule (2006), the process of combining two or more words is known as compounding. it is one of the types of word formation and arguably the most common one. as the coronavirus pandemic goes on, the terms emerge with it are countless starting from medical scientific terms, i.e. coronavirus disease, incubation period, to slangs that the community establishes, namely quarantine. it is a slang term for a cocktail people drink, martini (a cocktail made with gin or vodka and dry vermouth served with either a green olive or lemon peel), that is blended with the word quarantine as people could not go out to drink and instead drink at home. conceivably, terms that are occurring are not only caused by the new virus that needs certain terms for the medical or scientific matters, but it is also because of the ‘new normal’ that people are being forced into. the ‘new normal’ also brings terms like work-from-home, stay-at-home, and self-quarantine as the state mandates people ervina cm simatupang & ida zuraida supri compound words that occur during the global pandemic covid-19: a morphosemantic study 292 to have less physical contact. presumably, people are also trying to find new ways to get through the pandemic as it has been going on for around five months now. the phenomenon of creating and forming new terms/words during covid-19 can be studied through two of the linguistics branches, namely morphology and semantics. one branch of linguistics that studies the structure of a word and its formation process is referred to as morphology. etymologically, morphology derives from the greek word ‘morph’ which means shape or form. it is the system of categories and rules involved in word formation and interpretation as described by o’grady (1997). furthermore, it is defined as a study of the way words are built up from smaller parts (burling, 1992). similarly, bauer (1988) says that as a sub-branch of linguistics, morphology deals with the internal structure of word-forms. this is also comparable with the statement of payne (1997) that “morphology is the study of the internal structure of words”. additionally, morphology includes the constructions of words and parts of words. spencer (1999) argues that “morphology is at the conceptual centre of linguistics.” it is due to what morphology studies, that is the structure of words. specifically, aronoff and fudeman (2005) assert that morphology is the study of form or forms. linguistically, it refers to the mental system contained in word formation, its internal structure, and how it is formed. hence, based on those definitions, it can be concluded that morphology is the analysis of word structure which involves the internal structure of words, the processes, and the rules to form them. in morphology, it is known that the smallest unit to be analysed is a morpheme. according to o’grady (1997), there are two types of morphemes, namely free morpheme and bound morpheme. free morpheme has its meaning by itself, while bound morpheme has to be attached to another root to have a meaning. in other words, it can be said that free morphemes are roots (the simplest form of a word with no affix attached) and bound morphemes are affixes. according to yule (2006), there are seven morphological processes that can affect morphemes and therefore form new words, namely: 1) affixation – according to chaer (2003), affixation is the process of attaching affixes to roots. for example, the word manager (manage + -er) has experienced an affixation process particularly suffixation. it is the addition of an affix at the end of a root. this process cause changes in the class of words, namely from a verb (manage) to a noun (manager). 2) compounding – yule (2006) mentions compounding is a process of combining two or more words. in other words, it is the process of putting words together to build a new one that does not denote two things, but one. arguably, compounding is one of the most common ways to form words. moreover, williams (1975) emphasizes that compounding is the process of putting together two or more independent words to make one word. 3) blending – this process concerns the formation of words whereby new words are formed by combining parts of two words; for example, smog (smoke + fog), brunch (breakfast + lunch), and newscast (news + broadcasting). 4) clipping – clipping is the process of shortening a word to form a new word. the shortened form represents the word in its entirety. it is considered less formal and in some cases, the spelling is adapted to suit the pronunciation. for instance, nark for narcotics or bike for bicycle. 5) back-formation – it is the process in which new words are formed by the deletion of a supposed affix from an already existing word, which appears to be derivative, e.g. laze from lazy, edit from editor, and enthuse from enthusiasm. this process is more likely to cause a class of word change. 6) conversion – conversion is the process of forming new words by shifting the word category without necessarily changing the word. in other words, it is assigning an already existing word to a new syntactic category. for instance: i use comb after a shower – comb (noun) i comb my dog’s hair – comb (verb) 7) acronym – acronym is the process whereby a new word is formed through extracting the initial letters of the constituent words of a phrase. the words created from this process mostly function as nouns, e.g. nasa (national aeronautics and space administration) and vip (very important person). as one of the common ways in morphological processes, compounding has served the community to extend their creativity in creating new words by combining words. however, two or english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 293 more words combined can be misinterpreted as a phrase (quirk et al., 1985). there are seven characteristics of compounds, as follows: 1) compounds behave grammatically and semantically as single words; even though on a lexical level, each constituent has its meaning; 2) they have no affixes attached except for inflectional suffix, e.g. bathrooms; 3) the whole meaning of the compound word can often be obtained from the individual meaning of each component, e.g. boathouse which means a shed for storing boats. however, certain terms cannot be interpreted the same way; for example, the word ‘redcoat’ means a british soldier, not a coat that is red; 4) the second or the last element of the compounds usually determines the grammatical category of a compound. this is also called the headword; 5) compounding is a recursive process in which it may be a part of a larger compound, e.g. lighthouse keeper; 6) phonologically, the primary stress of a compound is on the first element; and 7) a compound can be written in three different ways: open (with a space separating each constituent), e.g. post office; hyphenated (with a hyphen in between), e.g. twoyear-old; and closed/solid compound (with no space or hyphen in between), e.g. beeswax. in addition to having those characteristics, compounds are also distinguished based on categories. according to katamba (1993) compounds can be put into three categories, as follows: 1) compound nouns – derive from two or more words combined that function as nouns. compound nouns can be formed by putting together words in category either noun (n) + noun (n), adjective (a) + noun (n), preposition (p) + noun (n), or noun (n) + adverb (adv). for example, skyline (n+n), sourdough (a+n), undergraduate (p+n), and hanger-on (n+adv). 2) compound verbs – are formed by the combination of two or more words that grammatically function as verbs. the common combinations are preposition (p) + verb (v), verb (v+v), and verb + preposition (p). for instance, underestimate (p+v), cross-check (v+v), and turn off (v+p). 3) compound adjectives – are modified by combining two or more words which as a unit function as adjectives. this combination can be done by combining noun (n) + adjective (a), adjective (a) + adjective (a), and preposition (p) + adjective (a). for example, user-friendly (n+a), short-lived (a+a), and outspoken (p+a). as it has been mentioned earlier, the terms introduced during this time are mostly found in a form of compounds. a compound is one of the topics discussed in morphology concerning wordformation or morphological process. compound words on a lexical level have their meaning; while being combined they can either add other meaning to one of the words or form a different meaning. for example, the word medical mask adds another meaning to the word mask that is the type of mask, which can be a cloth mask or a surgical mask. on the contrary, the words ‘flulike’ or ‘influenza-like’ do not add another meaning to one of the words, instead, they form a new meaning that is the symptoms similar to flu or influenza including fever, cough, runny nose, headache, and fatigue. on the other hand, semantics is the study of meaning in human language (o’grady, et al., 1997). additionally, palmer (1983) emphasizes that semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning. similarly, according to hurford (2007), semantics is the “study of meaning in language”. therefore, it can be concluded that semantics is the term used to denotes the study of language meaning. as the study of meaning, semantics is the centre of the study of communication (leech, 1981). this explanation is due to the increasing cruciality of communication and with that comes the necessity to understand language and its meaning deeper. o’grady, et al. (1997) notes meaning is the message conveyed by signs. they can be something spoken, written, or expressed in other ways (quirk et al., 1978). in other words, simatupang (2019) elaborates that semantics is the science of the meaning of words and sentences. from those definitions, it becomes clear that in semantics, meaning is an immensely important part. nevertheless, semantics as the study of meaning is frequently intertwined with another branch of linguistics that also studies meaning, pragmatics. the distinction between the two primarily relies on which meaning one holds. semantics discusses meaning in the language, the meaning as the language suggests. on the contrary, pragmatics holds meaning from the speaker’s point of view or known as the speaker’s meaning (yule, 2006). semantically, leech (1981) divides meaning into three types, namely conceptual meaning ervina cm simatupang & ida zuraida supri compound words that occur during the global pandemic covid-19: a morphosemantic study 294 (meaning that consists of primary concepts), associative meaning (figurative meaning), and thematic meaning (meaning defined by structure to deliver a certain message, e.g. emphasizing). on the contrary, downing (2006) states that meaning can be divided into three types, namely literal meaning (original or lexical meaning), the semi-idiomatic meaning (consists of at least one literal and one figurative meaning), and idiomatic meaning (non-literal meaning). this study is carried out using the data from the ‘your questions answered’ section on the who official website. as the pandemic continues, more unreliable sources of information are spread. therefore, the who official website is used as the main data source to avert any mislead. it is found to be unethical to use inaccurate data as they can cause panic and fright. hence, this study aims to discuss thoroughly the category of compound words related to covid-19 found in the ‘your questions answered’ section on the world health organization (who) official website and the meaning of the compound words. simply put, the problems discussed in this study are formulated into the following questions: 1) what is the category of the compound words related to covid-19 found in the ‘your questions answered’ section on the world health organization’s official website? and 2) what is the meaning of the compound words found? method this study aims to analyse the compound words related to covid-19 found in the ‘your questions answered’ section on the official website of the who, https://www.who.int/ that are last retrieved on 14 may 2020. the method used in conducting the research was a descriptive analysis method. trochim (2006) explains that the descriptive analysis method is used to illustrate the basic features of the data in a study. in this way, this method provides simple summaries. furthermore, whitney (1960) mentions that the descriptive method is carried out by the presence of facts analysed with correct interpretations. similarly, nazir (2006) states that it is a method in examining the case of a group of people, an object, a set of conditions, a system of thought, or a class of events in the present. this descriptive study illustrates or paints systematically, factually, and accurately the facts and the relationship between the phenomena. in other words, the approaches used in this study are classifying, analysing, and explaining the data obtained according to the theories related to compound words and meaning. results and discussion after analysing the compound words found in the ‘your questions answered’ section on the who official website, there are three types of compound words identified, namely compound nouns, compound verbs, and compound adjectives. thereafter, this study also discusses the meaning of the compound words on a lexical level and their type of meaning after having experienced compounding. the main theories used in this research dealing with compound words are taken from katamba (1993), and regarding the semantics view, it will be viewed according to downing (2006). the followings are the data based on the types of compound words found in the data source. compound nouns data #1 “what is a coronavirus?” (who, 2020, q&a on coronaviruses (covid-19)) from the data, the compound word found is coronavirus. morphologically, coronavirus represents the type of compound nouns due to the combining of the word corona and virus, which are in the category of noun + noun. semantically, on a lexical level, corona has mainly two different meanings depending on the field in which it is being used. in terms of environment, corona means a circle of light that can sometimes be seen around the moon at night, or around the sun during an eclipse or the outer atmosphere of a star as defined by cambridge dictionary. in terms of anatomy, corona means the top rounded part of a body part, such as a tooth or the skull. the word virus has the meaning of an extremely small piece of organic material that causes disease in humans, animals, and plants. however, the two meanings of corona have shown no relationships with any sort of virus. this is because the word corona in coronavirus does not derive from english, instead it derives from latin. in latin, corona means crown. this name is given since coronavirus seen under a microscope has a series of crown-like spikes on its surface. who mentions coronavirus to regard to the large family of viruses that may cause illnesses, specifically respiratory infections ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases. the https://www.who.int/ english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 295 previously known coronavirus diseases include middle east respiratory syndrome (mers) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars). for this reason, the word coronavirus carries the semi-idiomatic meaning in which it has one literal meaning that is virus and has one figurative meaning that is corona. data #2 “follow national guidance on self-isolation” (who, 2020, q&a on coronaviruses (covid-19)) the compound word found in data 2 is selfisolation. this compound word formed by the combination of the word self and isolation holds the category of compound nouns. it is because the word self is in the word category of nouns and so does the word isolation. therefore, it is formed by the combination of two nouns. the word self on a lexical level means oneself or itself or of oneself or itself. meanwhile, the word isolation means the action of isolating or the condition of being isolated. furthermore, who defines self-isolation as an act of separating people who are ill with symptoms of covid-19 and may be infectious to prevent the spread of the disease. based on the meaning of the two words combined, it can be concluded that the word selfisolation presents a literal meaning. data #3 “in the lockdown, i am spending much more time online playing games, socializing, and studying. should i be worried about this?” (who, 2020, q&a: adolescents, youth and covid19) from the data above, the compound word found is lockdown. it is formed by combining the word lock and down. the word lock is in the word category of nouns. on the contrary, the word down is in the word category of adverbs. therefore, lockdown is the combination of a noun and an adverb. in this case, lockdown falls into the type of compound nouns. on a lexical level, the word lock means a fastening (as for a door) operated by a key or a combination. additionally, the word down means toward or in a lower physical position. however, the combination of the two does not represent the meaning of a fastening operated by a key or a combination toward a lower physical position. on the opposite, lockdown means the confinement of prisoners to their cells for all or most of the day as a temporary security measure or a temporary condition imposed by governmental authorities (as during the outbreak of an epidemic disease) in which people are required to stay in their homes and refrain from or limit activities outside the home involving public contact. the latter suits the covid-19 situation. for this reason, the type of meaning of lockdown is idiomatic meaning in which it is interpreted non-literally. data #4 “it is who view that all countries with community transmission should seriously consider postponing or reducing mass gatherings that bring people together…” (who, 2020, q&a: mass gathering and covid-19) from data 4, the compound word found is community transmission. the word includes the compound nouns due to the combination of a noun (community) and another noun (transmission). the lexical meaning of the word community is a unified body of individuals, while transmission means an act, process, or instance of transmitting or the process of passing something from one person or place to another. after being combined, the meaning of community transmission is a situation where a country, territory, or area is experiencing larger outbreaks of local transmission. therefore, the type of meaning that community transmission represents is literal meaning since the meaning derives from the literal meaning of each word. compound verbs data #5 “stay at home, self-isolate and monitor your symptoms.” (who, 2020, q&a on coronaviruses (covid-19)) in the data, the compound word found is selfisolate. the category of the word is the compound verb. it is due to the combination of a noun (self) and a verb (isolate). although katamba (1993) does not mention the combination of a noun and a verb in the formation of a compound verb, this conclusion comes from one of the characteristics of a compound word that is the headword of the compound determines the word category of the compound. on its own, the word self means oneself or itself or of oneself or itself. meanwhile, the word isolate means to set apart from others or to be alone. the combination of the two creates the meaning of separating oneself from others or, in the case of covid-19, separating an ill person ervina cm simatupang & ida zuraida supri compound words that occur during the global pandemic covid-19: a morphosemantic study 296 from others. therefore, the type of meaning selfisolate portrays is the literal meaning. data #6 “what does it mean to self-quarantine?” (who, 2020, q&a on coronaviruses (covid-19)) from the data, the compound word found is self-quarantine. its compound word category is the compound verb. it is because the word self is a noun while the word quarantine is in the word category of verbs. lexically, the word self means oneself or itself or of oneself or itself and the word quarantine means to detain in or exclude or to isolate from normal relations or communication. this combination of words creates the meaning of to isolate oneself. for this reason, the word selfquarantine is often mistaken as self-isolation. therefore, the who published an answer concerning the difference between the two. according to who, self-quarantine means restricting activities or separating people who are not ill themselves but may have been exposed to covid-19. in this enlightenment, the sole difference between self-quarantine and selfisolation relies on the condition of a person that needs to be isolated. on this account, selfquarantine presents the type of meaning of semiidiomatic meaning. briefly, based on the analysis, it was found that there are two types of compound word categories, namely compound nouns and compound verbs. the percentages of occurrence of the two categories of compound word found are presented in figure 1. figure 1. the occurrence of compound words meanwhile, in terms of meaning, there are three types of meaning found, including literal meaning, semi-idiomatic meaning, and idiomatic meaning. the percentages of the three types of meaning found are presented in figure 2. figure 2. the percentage of meaning in compound words conclusion based on the analysis, it is found that there are two types of compound word, namely compound nouns (67%) and compound verbs (33%). on the other hand, there are three types of meaning, including literal meaning (50%), semi-idiomatic meaning (33%), and idiomatic meaning (17%). additionally, it can also be concluded that in the category of compound nouns, the type of meaning that occurs frequently is literal meaning with the percentage of 50% followed by semiidiomatic meaning and idiomatic meaning with each percentage is 25%. moreover, the type of meaning that appears frequently in the category of compound verbs are literal meaning and semiidiomatic meaning with each percentage is 50% while idiomatic meaning does not occur. this study also notes that as the covid-19 progresses, the number of ‘new’ or ‘re-emerge’ terms will also be increasing. most of the terms’ meanings are discoverable through news articles published massively on the internet. references akmajian, a., et al. (2001). an introduction to language and communication. mit press. aronoff, m., & fudeman, k. (2005). what is morphology? new jersey: blackwell publishing ltd. bauer, l. (1988). english word-formation. cambridge: cup. burling, r. (1992). pattern of language structure, variation and change. san diego: academic press. chaer, a. (1994). pengantar semantik bahasa indonesia. jakarta: rineka cipta. chaer, a. (2003). linguistik umum. jakarta: pt. rineka cipta. downing, a., & locke, p. (2006). english grammar (2nd ed.). abingdon: routledge. literal meaning 50% semiidiomatic meaning 33% idiomatic meaning 17% occurrence percentage of meaning in compound words compound nouns 67% compound verbs 33% occurence percentage of compound word categories english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 297 hurford, j. r. (2007). semantics: a coursebook. cambridge: cambridge university press. katamba, f. 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(2019). syntactic and semantic analysis on slogans of aviation companies in asean countries. english journal literacy utama, 3(2), 123-131. doi: 10.33197/ejlutama.vol3.iss2.2019.273. spencer, a. (1999). linguistics: an introduction. cambridge: cambridge university press. spencer, a., & zwicky, a. m. (2001). the handbook of morphology. uk: blackwell. trochim, w. m. l., & donnelly, j. p. (2006). the research methods knowledge base (3rd ed.). cornell university. whitney, e. l., & milholland, m. (1960). a four year continuation study of a teachers college class. education res. williams, m. j. (1975). origins of the english language. new york: the free press. yule, g. (2006). the study of language. new york: cambridge university press. ervina cm simatupang & ida zuraida supri compound words that occur during the global pandemic covid-19: a morphosemantic study 298 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 399 investigating the components of outcome based education in efl classroom: a lesson plan analysis nurti rahayu (corresponding author) hotel management department, trisakti school of tourism, jakarta, indonesia email: nurti@stptrisakti.ac.id dwi sloria suharti english department, fkip, university of muhammadiyah tangerang, tangerang, indonesia email: dwisloria@umt.ac.id fikri asih wigati english department, fkip, university of singaperbangsa karawang, karawang, indonesia email: fikri.asihwigati@staff.unsika.ac.id emi taufanawati smkn 3 karawang, karawang, indonesia email: emitaufanawati@gmail.com apa citation: rahayu, n., suharti, d.s., wigati, f.a., taufanawati, e. (2021). investigating the components of outcome-based education in efl classroom: a lesson plan analysis. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), 399-408. doi: 10.25134/erjee. v9i2.4419 received: 19-02-2021 accepted: 26-04-2021 published: 15-06-20211 introduction since the seminal of spady in 1994, outcomebased education (obe) has contributed to the discourse of education curriculum framework. some researchers reported the implementation of this framework in various countries such as malaysia (yusof, othman, norwani, ahmad, & jalil, 2017), pakistan (shaheen, 2019), and finland (sahlberg, 2014). other studies discussed the adoption of obe in teaching various subjects, such as engineering; mechanics (oreta & roxas, 2012), art carving training (analita, haryono, & florentinus, 2021), and physician competencies (frank & danoff, 2007). in indonesia, obe has gained much attention since the minister of education launched the new curriculum change in 2013, introducing outcomebased curriculum (obc), and officially replaced the previous competency-based curriculum (cbc). in the new curriculum, students’ learning outcomes previously called competency standards, have been changed to learning outcomes. this policy supports the national qualification framework (nqf) referred to in presidential regulation no. 8. in 2012. the obc guides the syllabus as comprises of kompetensi inti (core competencies) and kompetensi dasar (basic competencies). abstract: this study aimed to investigate the implementation of outcome-based education (obe) to teach english in a vocational school. this study is qualitative with document analysis. the data were taken from foursession english lesson plans from a vocational school, observation, interview, and library research. the results showed the crucial impact of obe to ensure the learning outcome, especially in a vocational school. obe is expected to answer the education challenge in the 21st century to provide students with the required skills and competency. the area of analysis covers three areas: objectives, teaching materials, and assessment. it is recommended that teachers construct concrete materials and action in the viewpoint that the english skills taught can be used in the students' lives in the upcoming time in their future job related to the expertise in accounting. finally, this study has important implications for accomplishing the framework for the practice and methods of goal setting, classroom activities, and assessment and evaluation of student's performance based on the obe framework. keywords: esp; lesson plan; vocational school; outcome-based education (obe) mailto:nurti@stptrisakti.ac.id mailto:dwisloria@umt.ac.id mailto:fikri.asihwigati@staff.unsika.ac.id nurti rahayu, dwi sloria suharti, fikri asih wigati, & emi taufanawati investigating the components of outcome-based education in efl classroom: a lesson plan analysis 400 this obe framework is applied to the "merdeka belajar" education curriculum. the "merdeka belajar" education curriculum concept is the education system's needs in the era of industrial revolution 4.0. nadiem makarim in kemendikbud.go.id (2019) said that "merdeka belajar," or freedom of learning/independent learning, was freedom of thought. it is the teacher's freedom of thought of teaching that promotes independent learning. the main points of the policy on independent learning include: (1) in 2020, the usbn will be replaced with an exam (assessment), which will only be hosted by the school, (2) teachers can freely choose, create, use, and develop a lesson plan format, and (3) three core components (other components are complementary and can be selected independently) are learning objectives, learning activities, and assessment (one page is enough). thus, lesson planning writing is done efficiently and effectively. the teachers have more time to prepare and evaluate the process so that the teaching-learning outcomes will be achieved (kementerian pendidikan & kebudayaan indonesia, 2019). then, current and new directive policy curriculum education in indonesia can be seen in the following table: table 1. current and new directive policy of the lesson planning implementation current situation new policy directive 1. teachers are directed to follow the rpp format rigidly. 2. rpp has too many components teachers are asked to write in every detail (one rpp document can reach more than twenty pages) 3. writing rpp takes a lot of teacher time, which should be used to prepare and evaluate the learning process itself. 1. teachers can freely choose, make, use, and develop a lesson plan format. 2. three core components are learning objectives, learning activities, assessment. other components are complementary and can be selected independently. one page is sufficient. 3. writing rpp is done efficiently and effectively so that teachers have more time to prepare and evaluate the learning process. (kementerian pendidikan & kebudayaan indonesia, 2019) to facilitate teaching and learning practice, the core and basic competencies are cited in the lesson plan. a lesson plan is further described as a teaching written document (nesari & heidari, 2014) serving as a systematic record for a teacher (farrel, 2002) and functions as a practical objective of what the students will do in terms of behavioral and activities (shrum and glisan in farrel, 2002). the significant role of the lesson plan in the successful teaching-learning process is uncontested. planning for instruction is an essential and integral part of complex activities such as teaching (zazkis, liljedahl, & sinclair, 2009). it also aids the enactment of particular routines or recipes (furlong, 2000). pulverness and williams asserted in naimie, siraj, ahmad, aziz, kasim, & abuzaid (2012) contend that the lesson plan is one way for teachers to handle the class properly. given the importance of lesson planning, the researchers investigated an extensive research body in that area. one research reported educational attitude, lesson planning, and students' outcome (nesari & heidari, 2014). other research also mentioned a framework analysis to measure: the lesson plans can meet the students' learning needs (chizhik & chizhik, 2018), the gaps between the lesson plan preparation and its implementation (emiliasari, 2019), pre-service teachers’ experience in implementing their lesson plan in practicum classes (mudra, 2018). in designing a lesson plan based on the "merdeka belajar” curriculum, there are some practical aspects that teachers need to consider. the so-many pages of lesson plan teachers previously engaged has now been adjusted into a one-page lesson plan (rpp) (kementerian pendidikan & kebudayaan indonesia, 2019). despite its simple format, some components of the lesson plan remain the same. although the fact that no standard formats of what a lesson plan should contain, the common agreement shows several essential elements that should be included in the lesson plan (brown, 2007). the aspects are as the following: objectives objectives contain what the teacher wants the students to accomplish at the end of the lesson (brown, 2007). in some cases, objectives are often english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 401 overlapping with goals. but richards (2002) has made clear distinctions of objectives compared to goals. the way of expressing objectives is known as behavioral objectives which “… take the idea of describing learning outcomes … by further operationalizing the definition of behavior” (richards, 2002, p.13). operationalizing the learning objectives can be done by including the aspects of "abcd" as proposed by mager, findlay, and nathan (richards, 2002). “a” stands for “audience” and refers to the students as the subject. “b” stands for “behavior” that defines performance to be learned stated by action verbs. “c” stands for “condition” under which the demonstration of students’ performance is to occur. “d” stands for “degree” which describes how well the students must be able to demonstrate the performance. materials good lesson planning includes the materials/equipment/platforms that the teachers need to arrange their classroom activities in online teaching-learning. activities under the implementation of the new directive curriculum education in indonesia, there are three stages to be exemplified in learning activities: opening activities (modeling), core activities (a set of exercises of the lesson), and closing activities (students’ tasks). assessments after students have sufficient learning opportunities, then the teachers have to consider how they assess the success of the learning. they should apply a certain kind of assessment such as dynamic assessment or create a rubric. then, the teachers may think about making appropriate adjustments for their next lesson plan so that outcome-based learning will be achieved. this study is essential to be conducted since the implementation of obe is still far from effective seeing from the new directive curriculum in indonesia. also, the researchers personally find some teachers in their circle who still find some problems in implementing a good lesson plan based on the new curriculum. their classroom practices are still conducted conventionally. this results in incompetent graduates which are far from the objectives of the obe. besides, few studies (if any) have been investigated the real teaching artifact from teachers and how these artifacts are implemented in the classroom. therefore, this paper seeks to investigate the lesson plan written by a team of the in-service teacher in a vocational school in karawang, west java. the lesson plan is intended for grade twelve (xii) vocational school. to provide a deeper analysis, this study focuses to answer the following research questions; (1) how the learning objectives signify the necessary competence, (2) how the teaching and learning activities theoretically can be a guarantee of learning objective accomplishment, and (3) how the assessment written in the lesson plan is suitable. the research findings provide feedbacks for the inservice teachers to evaluate their lesson plan as reflected on the document and classroom practices. in addition, the pre-service teachers can also benefit from the finding as it provides factual data on how the lesson plans were implemented in online session. last but not least, curriculum developers and other policy makers can learn from the findings to see the real implementation of their policy and seek some areas of improvements. method this study is qualitative, which aims to portray data on local participants' conceptions from the inside through a process of deep interest, empathetic understanding, and suspension or overlap of preconceptions on the topics under discussion (miles, huberman, & saldana, 2014). in specific, this study uses document analysis (bowen, 2009). a case study is used to portray a single entity in a comprehensive picture. it has a high level of comprehensiveness, depth of analysis, and readability. besides, new assumptions, models, and conceptions about the nature of language learning or other processes may be generated (duff, 2008). site and participants a case study may focus on one or more than one entity for a deep analysis of the phenomenon in the context (yin, 2009). this research participant is a team of in-service teachers teaching for a vocational school in karawang. she handles english for vocational high school for grade xii majoring in business. the teachers have been teaching for various years, and they have been working as teamteaching to produce the lesson plans. nurti rahayu, dwi sloria suharti, fikri asih wigati, & emi taufanawati investigating the components of outcome-based education in efl classroom: a lesson plan analysis 402 the technique for collecting data the multiple sources of data were used in this study as part of triangulation. the primary data was the lesson plans of four sessions, and the second data was the class observation. the researchers analyzed both data in line with the obe framework. the researchers sought permission from the research participant to observe and record the class to gather the data. she allowed the researchers to observe and record four accounting and financial institutions courses for the xii grade class. the lesson plans, observation results, and class-recording are used as the primary source of data. the technique for analyzing the data the primary data analysis was from the teachers’ lesson plans and the zoom recording. then, this study employed document analysis (bowen, 2009). it also employed library research to find appropriate references to support the data. it served as a systematic procedure for document review or evaluation—both printed and electronic material. the step was performed by examining and interpreting the documents to elicit meaning, gain understanding, and develop empirical knowledge (corbin & strauss, see also rapley as cited in bowen, 2009). the researchers used the observation as supplementary data to complete the primary data analysis. the lesson plan was intended for grade xii accounting class in one vocational school in karawang. in addition to lesson plans, the researchers also took the documents from the class recording. the researchers firstly converted the zoom recording into video and audio recording. then, they transcribed the recordings. before they analyzed them, they went through the validation process by comparing them with the video recording. finally, the documents from the lesson plans and transcription were sorted, classified, and analyzed for specific themes to answer the research questions. the lesson plans consisted of (1) cause and effect (47 minutes), (2) procedural text (an hour, 11 minutes), (3) on the job training (an hour, two minutes), and (4) application letter (45 minutes). findings and discussion how do the learning objectives signify the necessary competence? the researchers found the lesson plans' learning objectives signify the necessary competence by looking at the learning assessment, as shown in the attachment. based on the teacher's lesson plan, the learning objectives showed that the teacher tried to suit the lesson plans' learning objectives with the students' necessary competence that indicate in the assessments. all of the assessments are dynamic assessment types. the teacher used written tests: complete sentences, write a simple report, and oral test: create dialogue and present it, respond to dialogue text gaps, monologue text gaps, present the reports verbally. all the evaluations revealed to reach the learning indicators (language skills competencies: listening, speaking, reading, and writing). these language skills depict the students' necessary competencies for their future, such as the ability to elaborate cause-effect relationship in the form of performing dialogues under life's issues, to perform how to use the technology tools (procedure text), to write a simple report on the job training, and to write an application letter. those competencies are necessary for students' future needs in life. in line with jonathan (2017) and spady (1996), consistent learning outcomes can be seen after significant learning experiences. it is an application of our analysis. it implies that the outcomes are aspects such as the activities and performances representing and demonstrate the learners' competence. however, the researchers found that the teacher still employed the old type of lesson plans, which have many components. meanwhile, new lesson plans consist of only three core components: learning objectives, learning activities, and assessment. the teacher has more time to plan and assess the process so that the teaching-learning process's outcomes will be realized (kementerian pendidikan & kebudayaan indonesia, 2019). it is an effort to accomplish the students' necessary competencies for their future life. what are the teaching and learning materials and activities' recommendations to guarantee the learning objective accomplishment? the teacher established accounting skills competency to introduce and learn the bookkeeping system, either manually or computerized. it is expected that accounting students will compete and be competent in facing the current globalization. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 403 graduate competency the ability to graduate from the accounting program are: (1) experts in the field of financial administration, (2) able to make accounting managers of service companies and goods, (3) able to present financial statements of small and medium-sized companies, and (4) able to perform inventory and warehousing governance. scope of work fields of work that can be filled by the graduates of the accounting skills program include: (a) book stylist in the scope of accounting; (b) cashier; (c) payroll; (d) counting machine operator; (e) warehouse administration. (struktur kurikulum smk (perdirjen dikdasmen no. 07/d. d5/kk/2018, 7 juni 2018) | direktorat smk (kemdikbud.go.id)) compared to other majors, accounting majors' advantages are that accounting students can do financial bookkeeping from simple to complex, both manual and computer accounting (myob). also, accounting graduates are more thorough in working than other graduates because they have always been trained to work carefully. after all, financial and accounting graduates are more flexible in entering the world of work and broader employment opportunities than other majors. related to the english subject in the accounting program in the school being observed, it is a compulsory course that each student must take. after analyzing the document, this course is aimed to enable students to communicate using english. however, having checked the lesson plans, it is found that the activities of the english course are as follows: writing on the job training report (ojt report) the writing on the job training report (ojt report include: (1) analyzing social functions, text structures, and language elements of transactional interaction texts involving giving and requesting information related to writing simple reports through the following activities: determining true and false statements related to social functions, text structure, and language elements in the example of an accountant apprenticing reports and answering questions related to detailed information based on the accountant apprenticing report's text. (2) developing text of written transactional interactions that involve giving and requesting information related to simple report writing concerning social functions, text structure, and correct language elements and by the context of their use in the world of work through following activities: drafting reports by answering questions given by teachers and writing a simple report based on the draft that has been made. procedural text on the use of technology the procedural text on the use of technology are: (1) analyzing the social functions, text structure, and linguistic elements of some oral and written procedure texts by giving and requesting information related to technology use manuals and tips, short and straightforward, according to the area of expertise and context of their use through activities such as completing the text heard from audio, mentioning the characteristics of the text structure of the procedure related to the use of technology and tips, answering specific questions from information related to the use of technology and guidance. (2) developing procedural, oral, and written texts, in a manual form related to the use of technology and tips, taking into account social functions, text structure, and elements of language, correctly and in context through retelling the text of procedures related to the use of technology and tips and verbally demonstrate the use of technology and tips. cause and effect relationship the cause and effect relationship: (1) analyzing the social functions, text structure, and linguistic elements of oral and written transactional interaction texts involving giving and requesting information related to causal relationships by the context in which they are used by answering questions relating to general and specific information involving giving information relating to causal relationships and completing the playback dialogue of the listened audio involving the act of giving and requesting information related to causal relationships (2) developing texts of oral and written transactional interactions involving giving and requesting information related to causal relationships, taking into account the correct social functions, text structure, and linguistic elements and nurti rahayu, dwi sloria suharti, fikri asih wigati, & emi taufanawati investigating the components of outcome-based education in efl classroom: a lesson plan analysis 404 in the context of the text by mentioning sentences stating causal relationships of the given image and presenting a dialogue involving giving and requesting information regarding causal relationships by the theme given by the teacher in front of the class writing application letter analyzing the social functions, text structure, and language elements of the text of the cover letter, by the context of its use and developing the text of the cover letter, taking into account the social functions, structure of the text, and elements of the language, correctly and in context. analyzing the lesson plan's content from the point of view of obe it shows that the instruction designs are not yet directly based on the exit outcome framework. it is not distinct how and when the skills taught can be used in the students' future life and in the real context of the student's life in the upcoming time in their future job. from the obe paradigm perspective, teachers should shape decision-making and concrete action patterns to determine whether students learn successfully in the class and the real workplace as an accountant. it is more important than when and how they learn something. the teacher's task is to explain the standard of competence to be more specific about how the learners will use english in the accounting workplaces. teachers are then expected to respond to direction from a content-based and teachercentered approach to a student-oriented paradigm. schools and teachers are mandated to develop innovations of teaching models to improve their teaching performance. besides, obe also encompasses an active learning approach with the students determinedly carrying out performance roles. along with their learning and performance team members, students must engage in progressively complex content (spady, 1994). therefore, it is suggested that the teaching and learning activities involve vocational competency such as: applying professional principles of work as an accountant and conducting business communication as an accountant. related to the teaching and learning activities, since the curriculum uses a scientific approach, along these lines, the exercises ought to be arranged towards students' capacity to look for, build, and use the accounting activities using english. the teacher can stress relevant learning. along these lines, the instructor can utilize relevant education and learning and authentic materials in the class' learning cycle because the focal idea of a scientific theory is realities and experimental information (blackwell & martin, 2011). it plans the students to utilize language in reality and use language to accomplish objectives, for example as follows. all of the activities can be in the form of activities that are related to accounting activities, such as: (1) processing documents of small cash funds; (2) processing cash fund documents at the bank; (3) processing journal entries; (4) processing led books; (5) manage receivable cards; (6) manage inventory cards; (7) manage fixed asset cards; (8) manage debt cards; (9) present the product principal price report; (10) compile financial statements; (11) set up tax returns; (12) operate number processing/spreadsheet program packages; and (13) operates accounting computer applications. activities in the scientific approach can also help to develop students' critical thinking. students' curiosity can be increased by questioning processes, for example, asking or asking for information about essential data in the spreadsheet program packages. the more trained the student is asking; the more curiosity can be developed. the scientific approach has several steps: observing, questioning, associating, experimenting, communicating / creating. the observing stage in the scientific approach is the process of doing observations by reading and listening. students are encouraged to build knowledge and explore the situation by examining critical problems such as conducting business communication and manage transaction documents. then, in observing activities in the scientific approach, the teacher opens opportunities for students to ask questions about what has been seen, listened to, read, or seen related to the business communication and transaction documents. the experimenting stage provides students an opportunity to implement their understanding and ability to produce any texts related to business accountancy that is being taught. in the last communicating stage, students get the chance to speak and write skills they have learned in the previous stages and communicate the results of their activities, such as presenting the product principal price report and financial statements. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 405 moreover, in this globalization era, the students must have the ability to adapt all parties to the development of science and technology. then, 21stcentury skills must be prepared and mastered. the first is creative, critical, and innovative thinking skills. critical thinking skills are two essential factors for practicing self-ability. these skills are necessary for students to have when they are involved in a much different world from the classroom situation. when students possess these creative, critical, and innovative skills, they will adapt well to the world of work. second, digital technology skills. industrial revolution 4.0 demands the mastery of ict such as word processing, spreadsheet programs, presentation programs, social media, online forums. for communication aspects, students are expected to have the ability to communicate and share data. the principle of openness and multiculturalism is a must-have capability in the 21st century. the principle of transparency means understanding and accepting shared values from various cultures such as justice, peace, tolerance, doing good to others. last but not least is a team collaboration and negotiation skills. through collaboration, there will be negotiations to equalize perceptions and objectives. the result of the collaboration will bring up new ideas or ideas. the teacher can immerse those skills in teaching and learning activities (oeygardener, rahayu, amin, effendi, darma, dartanto, aruan, 2017). how does the assessment meet the lesson objectives? the discussion covers some theoretical perspectives on the obe assessment and its actual implementation in the efl teaching at vocational school understudy. the implementation of obe at the vocational school level would entail changes of relevant systems and procedures to facilitate attaining the desired outcomes of education. as for efl teaching, english teachers need to undergo critical restructuring of assessment methods and evaluating student performance. the evaluation process is critical in that it provides evidence of the achievement of outcomes. besides, assessment results show the rate of students' learning progress, and at the same time, it is a source of information of opportunities for further improvement. finally, assessment findings in an obe school serve as bases to enhance educational services and systems on an institutional level (bresciani et al. in jonathan, 2017). the ideal assessment in obe needs a change of mindset from the educational stakeholder. the change of paradigm is learner-centered and outcome-minded education. the first paradigm encourages the shift from traditional assessment into obe assessment. the second paradigm is outcome-minded education. this paradigm can be conducted by implementing four operating principles of obe and their implications for assessment. they are clarity of focus, high expectation, expanded opportunity, and design down (pp. 5-6). efl assessment was traditionally designed by following a bottom-up approach. teachers initially develop micro-learning tasks such as quizzes and assignments; then, they develop the end-of-term tasks such as mid-term and final test/project. in the obe context, it focuses on the culminating outcomes. thus, assessment development follows the same principle. the teacher firstly developed and designed the final assessment. after this, smaller measures (discrete tasks) can be logically designed and progressively implemented. this top-down approach (richards, 2013) ensures that all course assessments are constructively linked and aligned with the course/subject's desired outcomes and, ultimately, to the culminating education outcomes. regarding the implementation of obe in the vocational school understudy, the lesson plan, observation, and interview data did not show significant evidence on the implementation of obe. the lesson plans are there as teaching preparation showing some useful components for teaching. nevertheless, in actual classroom activities, the teacher undergoes several adjustments based on last-minute updates. the assessment is developed per session to measure how well the students are progressing. however, it still adopts the bottom-up approach when micro-learning tasks are assessed, and the final objective of the course outcome is left unnoticed. even though the government has stated the accounting program's learning outcomes, such as being a financial administration expert, performing several skills such as making financial statements of small and medium-sized companies, performing inventory and warehousing governance, english course outcomes can support english competence in specific skills, such as writing and understanding manuals, writing job nurti rahayu, dwi sloria suharti, fikri asih wigati, & emi taufanawati investigating the components of outcome-based education in efl classroom: a lesson plan analysis 406 applications, writing and understanding procedures, and other skills linked with the students' jobs upon graduation. obe assessment makes sure that the students can have the necessary skills as required by their future jobs. conclusion this study aims to provide a glance description of the implementation of obe in a vocational school. four-session english lesson plans arranged by a teacher are used as the fundamental consideration for analysis and other supporting documents. the results showed the crucial impact of obe to ensure the learning outcome, especially in a vocational school. obe is expected to answer the education challenge in the 21st century to provide students with the required skills and competency. the area of analysis covers three areas, objectives, teaching materials, and assessment. in general, to fully implement the obe framework, schools require an academic organization to realign and adjust educational processes and systems according to education's desired outcomes. in effect, this necessitates significant education stakeholders (e. g., academic leaders, educators, and external academic partners) to work together in determining, defining, and stating outcomes at various curricular levels (i.e., culminating, program, course outcomes). besides, schools need to undergo a paradigm shift and consequently adopt some redefinition of the kind of education and educational services that they deliver to the student, changing into student-centered, and adjust both formative and summative assessment based, select practical and contextual teachinglearning activities, and learning objectives to match with the course, program and learning outcome. the teacher should shape decision-making and patterns of concrete materials and action from the obe paradigm viewpoint. the skills taught can be used in the students' future life and in the real context of the students' lives in the upcoming time in their future job related to the expertise in accounting. it is also suggested that teaching and learning activities involve vocational competency. as the vocational school uses the scientific approach, the teaching and learning process had better have a theoretical foundation used in the scientific approach. therefore, the activities should be oriented towards students' ability to seek, process, construct, and use accounting knowledge. last but not least, the skill of the 21st century also can be applied in the curriculum. references analita, h. p., haryono, h., & florentinus, t. s. 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(2019). lesson planning in efl classroom: a case study in lesson plan preparation and implementation. wiralodra english journal, 3(2), 367–375. farrel, t. s. (2002). lesson planning. in j. c. & w. r. richards (ed.), methodology in language teaching (1st ed., pp. 30–40). cambridge university press. frank, j. r., & danoff, d. (2007). the canmeds initiative: implementing an outcomes-based framework of physician competencies. medical teacher, 29(7), 642–647. https://doi.org/10.1080/01421590701746983 furlong, j. (2000). school mentors and university tutors: lessons from the english experiment. theory into practice, 39(1), 12–19. jonathan, v. m. 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(2018). pre-service efl teachers' experiences in teaching practicum in rural schools in indonesia. the qualitative report. naimie, z., siraj, s., ahmad, n. a., aziz, a. a., kasim, n. h. a., & abuzaid, r. a. (2012). "have you heard about the new fashion?" (tailoring your lesson plan based on learners’ preferences). procedia social and behavioral sciences, 46, 5840–5844. nesari, a. j., & heidari, m. (2014). the important role of lesson plan on educational achievement of iranian efl teachers' attitudes. international journal of foreign language teaching & research, 2(5), 25–31. oey-gardener, m., rahayu, s. i., amin, m., effendi, s., darma, y., dartanto, t., aruan, c. d. (2017). era disrupsi peluang dan tantangan pendidikan tinggi indonesia. akademi ilmu pengetahuan indonesia oreta, a. w. c., & roxas, c. l. c. (2012). implementing an outcomes-based education framework in the teaching of engineering mechanics (statics). december. richards, j. c. 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(2009). case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). sage publication. yusof, r., othman, n., norwani, n. m., ahmad, n. l. b., & jalil, n. b. a. (2017). implementation of outcomebased education (obe) in accounting programme in higher education. international journal of academic research in business and social sciences, 7(6), 1186–1200. https://doi.org/10.6007/ijarbss/v7-i6/3352 zazkis, r., liljedahl, p., & sinclair, n. (2009). lesson plays: planning teaching versus teaching planning. lesson plays: planning teaching versus teaching planning., 29(1), 40–47. https://doi.org/10.14710/ijee.1.2.122-129 nurti rahayu, dwi sloria suharti, fikri asih wigati, & emi taufanawati investigating the components of outcome-based education in efl classroom: a lesson plan analysis 408 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 437 culture shock and campus program in elt for thai undergraduate students at university of islam sultan agung and university of ahmad dahlan didik murwantono english literature department, faculty of language and communication science, university of islam sultan agung semarang, central java, indonesia email :didik.m@unissula.ac.id rinawati medical department, medical faculty university of islam sultan agung semarang, central java, indonesia email : rinawati@unissula.ac.id apa citation: murwantono, d. & rinawati. (2021). culture shock and campus program in elt for thai undergraduate students at university of islam sultan agung and university of ahmad dahlan. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.437-444. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4545 received: 27-02-2020 accepted: 26-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction culture shock often happened for the foreign students while they are getting an interaction with the new environment. it is a logical response, most foreign students, in the first week of class, find difficulties to adapt with language and to interact with other students. they felt sheer panic, --panic at the sudden realization that they did not know how to communicate what they needed or wanted. they did not know where to go, what to expect or what to do. it was the same experiences with thai students who enrolled in university of islam sultan agung semarang and university of ahmad dahlan yogyakarta. they struggled for encountering the several problem of cross culture such as language barriers, attitudes, and local traditions. the roles of campus is very significant to get a better solution by giving benefit policies for the students who study efl in this global era. global culture still exists in the industrial modern society right now. understanding in cultural diversities is greatly needed for getting a better communication of across culture. the concept of multiculturalism and cultural diversity should be accepted in a global society. it is not an easy task to cover the problems around cultural diversity. hence the roles from government along with all citizens are very necessary to filter the changing of the cultural landscape. and university can be a model for promoting the cultural awareness to its students. students were chosen in this phenomenon because of their great contributions as an agent of change in the globalization era. university of islam sultan agung semarang and university of abstract. the existence of culture shock is undeniably true for foreign students studying in other countries. this phenomenon becomes more common nowadays. it also happened with some thai students who are studying at university of islam sultan agung semarang and university of ahmad dahlan yogyakarta. the main objectives of this article are to find out the cultural transition and to analyze the influence of culture shock and campus programs in elt for thai students. this research was under a mix-method combined between qualitative and quantitative research by using purposive sampling. twentyfour (n=24) thai university students participated in the study. the analysis technique applied an exploratory mixed-method research design by separating the result both quantitative and qualitative. the online interview along with questionnaires was used to collect information from the students by using zoom and google form. data collection was performed from october to december 2020. based on the questionnaire and interview as the primary data collection, this mini research reveals two findings. firstly, shock culture and campus programs have a great contribution to the cultural transition in elt. secondly, the thai students coped with the shock by adapting their experiences in academic programs and campus traditions. campus programs also played a critical role in lessening culture shock. keywords: culture shock; across culture; campus program; elt. mailto:didik.m@unissula.ac.id mailto:rinawati@unissula.ac.id didik murwantono & rinawati culture shock and campus program in elt for thai undergraduate students at university of islam sultan agung and university of ahmad dahlan 438 ahmad dahlan yogyakarta have the same experiences in facing this situation. at least there are four points, such as growth, renewal, change, and continuity being prominent factors for filtering the issues of global culture. there is no any single culture which is immune toward the existence of the global era. the alienation toward the phenomenon will be alienated from the relationship among nations over the world. there are two views regarding the impact of globalization on culture. one is the homogenization and the other is hybridization of cultures (xu, 2013). garrett relates cultural homogenization with cultural imperialism, westernization or americanization (garrett, 2010). the artifacts of american culture have dominated in a free global market, mainly the product of american popular culture. meanwhile a hybrid culture shows that there is no any genuine culture. the contact of traditional culture and modern culture gives a new birth of culture. it is any kind of hybrid culture. for the students, the culture of education is an principal element in continuing traditions (wekke, 2015). it was through culture that a student gets experience and human development (frempong, reddy, and kanjee, 2011). it is to be the main duty for the lecturers that they must survey the students’ behaviors because of their differences each other. through the education culture, the students will continuously respond (felderhof, 2010) in elt, teaching for foreign students needs the responsiveness for the lectures to observe the students’ backgrounds (yong, 2011). by knowing the different backgrounds, the lectures can manage the situation in teaching and learning process because each student needs different treatment (boudreau, 2011). it is mainly for teaching cross cultural understanding. the term of cross cultural understanding is well-known for undergraduate students. it consists of three key words—cross, cultural, and understanding denoting to different meanings. ‘cross’ is closed with the meaning of crossing the boundaries of other cultures. ‘cultural’ issue is a matter of cultural aspects. and ‘understanding’ is on how we can get a better communication among cultures around us. to get mutual understanding of different cultures, it is necessary to focus on communication among different backgrounds. by having different multi-cultures, it is fragile to invoke some conflicts. the guidance or campus program is needed to minimize the trigger of conflict. at least, the program we need ought to accurate and suitable with our local condition or environment. university of islam sultan agung semarang is familiar with islamic academic culture and university of ahmad dahlan introduces the concept of islamic integrity. besides the campus program, a lecturer must be able in conditioning himself. he can trigger the students to take any strategy in facing the differences and the strategies that can be taken (murphy, 2011). the cultural perceptions, beliefs, values and traditions of each culture have a direct influence on the ways of communication of the individuals and society (ay, 2018) the environment of students does not only consist of the educational environment (zuber, christian, and pfohl, 2016). sometimes it combined with an activity inside or outside campus. a study finds that the students have more free time to make a social interaction with their friends (lubis & wekke, 2009); (paugh, & dudley-marling, 2011). it illustrates that interaction can give positive impacts to complete learning goals. culture shock as a condition where a person experiences stress because the differences of culture, role, norms that had been there in his / her life (chung, 2011). the foreign students do not know how the host culture works, as the result, they feel uncomfortable to the target culture. it effects their academic progresses and consequently, they are reluctant to join the class. it is also a major reason to conduct this research. brita mattew stated that as an english teacher, we are often in cross cultural context (mattew, 2013). teachers must have any strategy to conduct english subject in the classroom when the class has foreign students. they have to create english environment moreover english is a must in facing global culture. elt and globalization is like a piece of coin. it is difficult to be separated. english is no longer subject but has become a central tool for communication. unfortunately, english is taught in the class room without considering how it is introduced and promoted in certain ways depending on historical, political, socio-cultural, and economic considerations in each country’s particular context. as a result, elt teachers are more deskilled and are not necessarily informed about or given opportunities to discover how their particular teaching activities and behaviors, as well as practices (suryanto, 2015). in indonesia, english does not become a part of tradition yet. it is difficult to master speaking— an example. even after the students completed english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 439 their undergraduate program, they do not speak english. the cultural environment plays a key role in elt. the other activities by listening music, watching movie, and hearing news in english can trigger in mastering english well. in short, english cultural academic is greatly needed by elt teachers. one of lecturer’s duties is to communicate the different culture by understanding the cross culture. it is the main task for elt teachers. understanding in cultural diversities is greatly needed for getting a better communication of across culture. it is not an easy task to cover the problems around cultural diversity. the roles from lecturers along with all students are very necessary to communicate the different cultural background hence they can filter the changing of the cultural landscape. in fact, the responses from people who have contacted with other cultures, are change or resistance. moreover, changes and traditions are both inter-correlated issues in studying the encountering of new cultures. lecturer and students must be astute enough to know that the cultural landscape of this millennial era. at university of islam sultan agung and university of ahmad dahlan, they have learned the rhetoric of change, but they have not changed. they have gone through the motions of change, but their perspective on cultural diversities remain unchanged. hence, discusses on some essential cultural diversities correlated with multiculturalism and communication are greatly needed by some scholars marwick characterizes culture shock being cognitive, behavioral, phenomenological, and socio-psychological. physical reactions as well as the characteristics of loss of identity, familiar cues, and incongruence in personal communication are features that are inherent in culture shock (marwick, 2016). culture shock needs something that we are be willing to go through in order to fully understand and appropriate others and other cultures. most if not all descriptions of culture shock indicate a progression of attitudes regarding one’s self and others from a lower to a higher level of development (pederson, 1995). special studies on the culture shock for foreign students in indonesia have not been conducted yet, but there are some researches related to indonesian students studying overseas. ernofalina reviews about culture shocks experienced by indonesian students studying abroad (ernofalina, 2017). some are the effects of culture shock (ward, 2017); (akhtar, kamal, hayee, imtiaz, 2018) and their experiences on the foreigners studying in indonesia (sulaiman and saputri, 2019) however, the discussion of culture shock is still focused on the effects and the experiences for foreign students. this paper reveals cultural transition along with thai’s struggles to get a better acculturation and assimilation. finally, there is a need to examine culture shock and campus program correlated with the process of english learning and teaching in a class. does shock culture along with campus program give any influence towards the process of elt in a class? method this research was conducted by using mixmethod, where it was combined between a qualitative and a quantitative research. this method was applied because it needed two collaboration designs to find out the result of this research (leech & onwuegbuzie, 2007) explain that the mixed-method represents a research covering, such as collecting, analyzing, and interpreting qualitative and quantitative data in single research with investigating the underlying phenomenon. the main goal of the approach is to come at a sketch of the nature of the particular phenomenon (creswell, 2013). phenomenology is a qualitative analysis methodology that focuses on the study of an individual's experiences within the environment (neubauer, witkop, & varplo, 2019). meanwhile qualitative research is a method of research which gathers and works with non-numerical data and attempts to interpret meaning from these data by observing targeted communities or places to help explain social life (crossman, 2020). in other words, it can be said that qualitative is a detail description of events, situation, interaction and observed behavior. in contrast, a quantitative research method involves a numeric or statistical approach to research design. this research was held in the period from september 2020 until december 2020. population was thai students studying in a higher education in jawa tengah and yogyakarta. this research took the purposive sampling. there were twentyfour students from university of ahmad dahlan and two students from university of islam sultan agung, who followed the class of the odd semester 2020. online media was used to support the data gathering, such as whatsapp, zoom, and didik murwantono & rinawati culture shock and campus program in elt for thai undergraduate students at university of islam sultan agung and university of ahmad dahlan 440 google form as the instruments in this research. by using zoom, the researchers conducted the semi-structured interview in less formal types of freedom interaction. the students also had opportunities to explore their experiences dealing with culture shock during they were active in the campus for several previous semesters ago. interview is a qualitative analysis technique involving intensive individual interviews with a small number of respondents to examine their views on a certain concept, program or condition (harvey, 2019). zoom meet was a means for interviewing the students to collect the data. the questions were about academic shock and social shock. the questions were divided into some categories based on the main themes, shock culture, campus program, and elt. and then they were followed by subcategories of questions. another instrument was questionnaire through online media of google form. purposive sampling was used to point thai students who have studied both in university of islam sultan agung semarang and university of ahmad dahlan yogyakarta. the respondents were 24 thai students who took the class of cross cultural understanding in the odd semester 2020. the questionnaire had 11 questions dealing with some variables, such as shock culture, campus program, and elt. the questionnaire section was on the likert scale and was graded with values ranging from 1 to 5. the scores for this statement as follows: strongly agree (sa) = 5, agree (a) = 4, netral (n) = 3, disagree (da) = 2, and strongly disagree (sda) = 1. the analysis technique used was an exploratory mixed-method research design. because this analytical research was a sequential design method, so the implementation of qualitative data analysis and quantitative data analysis was separated. these analytical procedures were prepared for the type of the data analyzed, explore the data, analyze the data to answer research questions, display the data, and validate the data. results and discussion quantitative results the findings of research showed the validity and reliability of the questions in the questionnaire were valid and reliable. validity testing used the spss program with the pearson correlation method, where it correlated each item with the total score of the questionnaire items. the decision of making a validity test is as follow: ‘if r count > r table, the question item is declared valid.’ r table can be seen in the r statistic table. given the value of r table with df = n-2 or 24-2 = 22 and the 2-sided test is 0.404. and the variables x1, x2, and y in the question items related with the values of pearson correlation between each item and total scores were more that r table (0,404). thus it concluded that the items in the questionnaire for these variables were valid. the reliability testing method which is used in this study was cronbach’s alpha. according to priyatno, if cronbach’s alpha > 0.60 = accepted reliability(priyatno, 2013). see the table for all variables below table 1. table of cronbach alpha test variable alpha r limits decision shock culture (x1) 0,912 0,600 reliable campus program (x2) 0,854 0,600 reliable elt (y) 0,915 0,600 reliable the result of reliability test can be seen from the output reliability or score of cronbach alpha (more than 0,800). the scores of x1, x2, and y were upper 0,600. it concluded that the measurement of the questionnaire had been reliable. the data that the researchers have got them by giving questionnaires to the thai students, the researchers checked the data by using a heteroscedasticity test. it is a condition where there is an unequal variance from residual for all of the researches in the regression model. to detect the emergence or not of heteroscedasticity can be used by looking the pattern of points on scatterplots regression. if the points spread unclear patterns on above the number of 0 in the y axis, it can be said that there is no heteroscedasticity problem (ghozali, 2016). picture 1. scatteploty : elt english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 441 the heteroscedasticity test result can be seen in the output regression on the scatterplot of picture 1. it can be seen that the points spread with unclear patterns above and below the number 0 on the y axis. it is simply a random scattering of points. it means that nothing giving any indication that the assumptions of the model (picture 1) are false. hence it can be concluded that there is no heteroscedasticity problem in this regression model. it indicates that shock culture and campus program has any influence partially toward the process of elt in the class. the hypothesis test in this research was carried using simple regression analysis for the first and the second. simple regression linear is used to determine the effect of independent variable toward dependent variable. meanwhile, the third hypothesis used double regression analysis. it was used to formulate the regression equation and to find out the increasing values or decreasing in y variable over the change in variable x. y = b0 + b1x1 + b2x2 + e information: y = elt b0 = constant b1-2= regression coefficients x1 = shock culture x2 = campus program e = mistake factor (score 0) the result from the data with spss program shown in table 2. table 2. table of coefficients elt (y) model unstandardized coefficients b std. error 1 (constant) 19.02 3 5.511 culture shock -.082 .204 campus program .104 .300 a. dependent variable: elt (y) the regression equation is as follow: y=19.023 + (-.082)x1 + 0.104x2 the meaning of these number is as follows: a constant is 19.023. it means that if x, the value is 0, then the magnitude of y is 19.023. the value of elt outcomes is a constant, namely 19.023 scales without any influence from the two predictors. regression coefficient of variable x1 is -0.082; it means that each increases x1 of 1 unit, it will contribute to an increase in y by minus (-0.082) unit. it indicates if shock culture rises, elt activities will be breakdown. meanwhile the regression coefficient of variable x2 is 0.104. it means that each multiplies x2 of 1 unit, it will increase y by 0.104 unit. renan saylag similarly claims that foreign students had some major difficulties adjusting to academic requirements, particularly the demands of the english as foreign language program(saylag, 2014). it short that shock culture is still an obstacle for efl learners. qualitative results the researchers also read the transcribed text of interview several times to seek the aspects both shock culture and campus program. in this section, we have organized the answers in logs for the different questions to find an answer for the second research question: what is the relative impact of shock culture and campus program towards elt. the researchers mapped out two categories to categorize the students’ responses according to dominant themes. those themes were shock culture and campus program. then, the researchers created subcategories within each general category and give codes, ft=female thai student and mt = male thai student. finally, the thai students’ narrative responses were analyzed by using qualitative content analysis(lambert & lambert, 2012) two themes from the narrative data and categories along with corresponding data are presented as follows: category 1. the knowledge of shock culture this category is to know whether the thai students have already known about shock culture. the researchers made a cluster of the similar answers from the thai students’ narration. the subcategories questions were headed in aspects of shock culture, such as “are you comfortable interacting a group of people from different culture in a class?”; are you tense and nervous while interacting with people from different cultures in elt?”; “what could you do in facing shock culture in a class?”; “tell me, how do you feel about the influence of shock culture had on your educational experience?”; “how far did the impacts of the lessening and the rising of shock culture in elt.” the thai students stated their knowledge dealing with shock culture in elt as follows: “i understand, it’s logic to experience culture shock when living in a foreign country, indonesia is a unique one” (ft-6, mt-11, ft20)” didik murwantono & rinawati culture shock and campus program in elt for thai undergraduate students at university of islam sultan agung and university of ahmad dahlan 442 “i have no difficulty to find new friends because they are very welcome and friendly. and campus environment support me to be active freely” (ft-2, mt-15) “based on my experience, students here more active during the teaching and learning process. if they don’t understand the lesson, they are initiative to ask questions freely. it makes me be free to do the same ways” (ft-1, ft-4) “in here, the teachers use more english in class, but in thailand, they used to using thai. but sometimes i feel disappointed with the unprofessional lecturers who were often absent in the class” (ft-8, mt-12, ft-17) “i am more confidence, my elder classmates were used to interacting with native students and others in the host community.” (ft-18,ft23, ft-24) “learning to recognize the stages of culture shock helps me moving through the process of adapting” (ft-7, mt-13, ft-14) “i begin to learn more about and understand yogyakarta’s culture (mt-22) “everyone is different, has different behaviors in the class. it (the classroom atmosphere) is nice for me, sometimes i feel at a disadvantage. but i know that i have to accommodate with this situation.” (ft-9, ft-16) here, the students’ experiences highlighted on the impact of shock culture and their efforts to accommodate the differences of cultural behaviors. academic shock and social shock were also found in their experiences, mainly the using of english in teaching and the support of campus environment. these findings also emphasize shock culture as a variable which gives influences toward english learning and teaching, that is, the reduction of shock culture will maximize student learning. all students can personalize how they study for a cross cultural understanding subject in the class. this view is in line with brandie yale who asserts that the students may be active without tense and can minimize the barrier of conflicts.eventually, most individuals who spend a considerable length of time in a new culture, are no longer negatively affected by differences in culture and can participate in social interactions without difficulty (yale, 2017). moreover, joseph and baker found that caribbean students studying in the u.s. reported feeling less culture shock when the had other students from their home country to create a sense of community. it can cause the students to remain in their comfort zone (joseph & baker, 2012). category 2. campus program in this part, we interviewed thai students dealing with the atmosphere of campus. we reviewed the students’ experiences in joining the class of cross cultural understanding. campus program is to be one variable in line with running learning and teaching well. university of islam sultan agung has ‘siakad’ (information academic system) each faculty and university of ahmad dahlan adopts simeru (room management system) for the service of room for teaching. both of them have significant attributes of islam. the researchers also made a group of the students’s narration which had the similar perception. thenthe subcategories of campus program were reflected in the following questions: “does the campus give any training dealing with language both indonesian and english?”; “how do you adapt the campus tradition like islamic academic culture that is practiced in the class”; “do you agree with the system of simeru that it helps classroom organization well?” see the students’ narration aftermath the interviews as follows: “to the best of my knowledge, there is any organization called ‘upt’ cilad but it focuses on english course and toefl course. i myself agree with my friend, hasuna that by making friends we could easily adapt with the environment. we could also explore indonesian and its culture through the local peers.” (ft-1, ft-2) “i absolutely agree with the campus islamic program, but i was also surprised when i saw unmarried women and men walking together because in thailand it is not commonly done”. i was also shocked while shaking hands with the male lecturer” (ft-8, ft-19, ft-21) “for me, simeru is very helpful. i can ask the schedule or anything dealing with my academic issues. in thailand, a lecturer must fulfill his schedule for teaching without changing the course time table, but i see that my lecturer sometimes change the schedule of teaching suddenly and it is without any notification before.?” (ft-3, ft-5, ft-7) “i along with my friends were welcome in campus warmly. it is like a family. the tradition makes me happy to make a friendship with other students” (ft-4, ft-9, mt-11, mt-12) “i used to eat thailand food; later on, i adjusted with some thai food at uad food corner. it english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 443 helped me to adjust to the overall situation.” (mt-22, ft-24) “in campus, i work on my english and indonesian. it is much easier understand a culture when i can understand the language being used.” (ft-10, mt-13) the above narrations show that campus program was strongly help for reducing shock culture. in the class, the students would not stress as much about getting the course. they could concentrate on what the lecturers said. campus program creates affordances that support learning by facilitating accessibility of using program or activities to students. some students were shocked about the relationship between unmarried men and women, even though the campus has the characteristics of islamic tradition but they did not obey it. in thailand, the activity was taboo. in yogyakarta, it is any tradition for some young men and women hang out together in café or ‘wedangan’. the lectures along with campus program of simeru in uad are perceived as creating opportunities for efficient and personalized learning that balance opportunities for success, minimize undisciplined lecturers and students, and improve in-class focus. this view is also supported by andrew c. pelling who asserts that a demand for shock culture understanding is necessary by both teachers and educational institutions that deal with international students (pelling, 2000). conclusion as a conclusion to this research, it can be said that in the opinion of thai students both in university of islam sultan agung and university of ahmad dahlan, they felt comfortable in elt when there was a decline in shock culture as well as the increase of campus program, mainly in the students’ services both academic and social aspects. shock culture have a meaningful contribution or role to play in improving student learning outcomes in elt. if the shock culture increases, the learning and teaching can be uncomfortable atmosphere. and it reverses, if the shock culture declines, the process of elt leads to a positive one. it also shows that there is a partial influence of campus program to thai students’ behaviors in elt. even though, it is not significant influence, but at least, the thai students can manage their shock cultures wisely, mainly in the class. in addition, it is also necessary to stress on the importance of flexibility and the acceptance of linguistic differences in the classroom. a lecturer must have responsibility for shifting in the current socio-educational context from the conventional role to the intercultural mediator in elt. the concept of culture shock as a psychological construct can be an alternative issue for other researchers. acknowledgement the authors broaden their gratitude to the students who shared their experiences of working in global virtual. this research is supported by funding from lppm 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(2016). teaching international business without teaching international business: opportunities through considering the students’ international environment. in v. taras & m. a. gonzalezperez (eds.), the palgrave handbook of experiential learning in international business (pp. 1–900). u.s.: palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137467720 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 195 university students’ needs of writing course materials: a case of indonesia ilham english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: ilham.ummataram@gmail.com bachrudin musthafa english education department, faculty of language literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: dinmusthafa@upi.edu fazri nur yusuf english education department, faculty of language literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: fazrinuryusuf@upi.edu apa citation: ilham, musthafa, b., & yusuf, f. n. (2020). university students’ needs of writing course materials: a case of indonesia. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 195202. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2988. received: 22-02-2020 accepted: 15-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: the aim of this study is to explore the target needs (i.e. necessities, lacks and wants) of the students to inform academic writing courses materials. a case study design was employed as this design to provide in-depth data information. to collect the data, questionnaire and interviews were used. twenty-three undergraduate students of english department at a private university in mataram west nusa tenggara who take academic writing course in the 2019-2020 academic year participated in the study. the result of the study showed that the students need to learn the types of writing texts, vocabulary and construct sentences into paragraph, have good skills in writing different genres since they are lack of grammar knowledge and vocabularies, and improvement on the aspect of teaching writing. this finding may promise implications for updating the current curriculum and materials as practiced for tertiary level english department students in an attempt to keep up with the latest changes in the methodologies of english language teaching. this study recommends that lecturers and universities should conduct a need analysis regularly and updated the curriculum with such insightful needs. keywords: target needs; learning needs; writing courses; materials. introduction learning materials have been scientifically confirmed as "one of the essential components of the language curriculum" in the area of language teaching and learning (mishan & timmis, 2015; richard, 2001; tomlinson, 2012). materials are anything which is used by teachers and leaners to facilitate the learning of a language, including coursebook, videos, graded readers, flash cards, games, websites and mobile phone interactions (tomlinson, 2016). instructional materials typically serve as the basis for much of the language input leaners and the language instruction that is conducted in the classroom. it was also generally agreed that most language teachers use coursebooks and that no coursebook would fulfill the needs and expectations of any class (tomlinson, 2016). material development play such a central role in efl learning because they effectively mediate between the course content, the teacher and pupils. material development can also be useful as a way helping teachers to understand and apply theories of language learning and fostering teachers’ continuing personal and professional development (bouckaert, 2018; tomlinson, 2016). teaching materials are fundamental part to language learning and teaching (augustonavarro, 2015). it facilitates students’ learning about culture, combining the linguistic competence along with the socio-cultural and communicative competence (cruz rondón & velasco vera, 2016). good teaching material is informative (informing the leaner about the target language), instructional (guiding the leaner in learning the language), experiential (providing the leaner with experience of the language in use, eliciting (enabling the leaner to use language) and ilham, bachrudin musthafa, & fazri nur yusuf university students’ needs of writing course materials: a case of indonesia 196 exploratory (helping the learner to explore the language) (tomlinson, 2012). good materials may have an important role to play as they become the ' de facto ' curriculum. materials can support novice teachers who lack confidence. materials are deemed to provide a clear set of activities and guideline for both teacher and students (garton & graves, 2014). it is also argued that appropriate coursebook can facilitate curricular change because they provide a feasible framework that both teachers and students can follow and they help teachers to fully understand and routinize change. language learning materials, particularly for english language learning, have gone from being a neglected area of research and publishing to one that has attracted a number of new publications (macalister, 2016; mishan & timmis, 2015; tomlinson, 2016). the majority of previous publications focus on the use of elt materials, namely books and chapters on design and development of materials (tomlinson & masuhara, 2018) material evaluation, adaptation and exploitation (bouzid, 2017; işik, 2018; kashoob, 2018; mishan & timmis, 2015; roohani & sharifi, 2015; spirovska tevdovska, 2015; tomlinson, 2013; tomlinson & masuhara, 2018; widodo, 2015), the writing material process (augusto-navarro, 2015; mishan & timmis, 2015; tomlinson & masuhara, 2018), and types of material (tomlinson, 2013), and adopting an ecological approach in the classroom that describes three key areas in which material interacts: education, classroom discourse and language acquisition (garton & graves, 2014). in recent review, the literature on material development focuses less on ways of selecting materials and more on application on theory to practice and practice to theory. the materials will increasingly be delivered electronically through computers and smartphones which develop locally (soleimani & esmaili, 2016; tomlinson & masuhara, 2018). at this level, there is a gap to be able to contribute to the teaching material development through analysis of university students’ writing needs of writing course material. it is manifestation of an effort of teachers to construct appropriate material that harmonizes with students’ need and wants. innovative english language teaching material (textbook) will play a pivotal role. textbook can help teachers through potentially disturbing and disruptive processes of transition, illustrate new and/or untried methodologies, gradually introduce change, and create scaffoldings on which teachers can develop their own more innovative methodology. textbooks provides the main basis for the curriculum (richards, 2014). textbook determines the goals and content of teaching, as well as the method teacher use. the textbook provides a map that lays out the general content of lesson and a sense of structure that give coherence to individual lesson that give coherence to individual lessons as well as entire course. furthermore, (mishan & timmis, 2015) notes that material development has purposes as: (1) material meet a psychological need; (2) materials provide exposure to the language; (3) materials are vehicles of information; (4) materials provide a stimulus for other activities; (5) materials can act as teacher education. material support the teacher, complement the teacher and support the leaner (mcgrath, 2013). one of the most important things in developing teaching materials is the analysis of the students’ need toward their learning materials. need analysis is the starting point of course design which aims to determine learners’ need in a particular learning context. need analysis guides the teachers select appropriate taks and content and teachers’ statement of goals and to provide a better understanding of the purposes of instruction for the leaner (darici, 2016). need analysis of learning material context is a process to find students’ expectations and needs by identifying the effective way of instructional material context to be presented (yundayani et al., 2017). need analysis will provide insight for policy makers and stakeholders to evaluate the success of a course, find the points of strength and weaknesses as well as to do the required amendments to improve the course (zohoorian, 2015). identification and analysis of leaners’ needs, interest, and purpose of learning will facilitate setting learning objectives, and goals, setting up positive language learning environment, enhancing leaners motivation, and the progress of specific skills such as reading and writing (rostami & zafarghandi, 2014). furthermore, identifying and analyzing learning needs will facilitate the setting of learning goals and objectives, establish a positive language learning environment, improve learning motivation and evaluate the progress of students. in addition, needs analysis helps to give teachers a clear view of students’ needs, wants, and lacks and control over their learning when needs analysis is used as an ongoing teaching process. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 197 needs analysis allows teacher to be aware of students’ needs, their desire and shortcomings in the learning process (al-hamlan & baniabdelrahman, 2015). pertaining to the issue of needs analysis in writing skills, the number of studies conducted in the topic of need analysis is increasing simultaneously such as the analysis of student needs for writing skills materials development (tjalla, akil, hamra & haryanto, 2017), designing academic writing material (ampa & quraisy, 2018; ghufron, saleh, warsono, & sofwan, 2016; ibrahim, ali, rahman, & salih, 2013; shree, mohd, nor, & din, 2014; sumarsono, bagis, & arrafii, 2017; yundayani, 2017, 2018), a model of instructional material of academic writing (ghufron et al., 2016; linh & suppasetseree, 2016). the current study is a need analysis which is conducted in academic writing to develop academic writing material that matches with the current curriculum and condition of learning writing for the indonesian university context. based on the researcher's observation of english writing materials taught at english department muhammadiayah university of mataram, it was found that the process of implementing writing skill instructional materials in the context of english classes is far from ideal, especially in terms of making students involved in the teaching and learning process. such phenomena are due to the expectations of the students, and needs are seldom identified to meet their exact want to learn english. teachers have limited time span in planning concrete writing materials and a lesson plan that suits students ' needs. furthermore, teachers have not found sufficient writing materials for the leaners, either because materials are not available or because they do not reflect changes in the curriculum. the students ' writing skills are alarmingly weak and under-standard. most of the problems are due to incompetence in grammar, coherence, ideas development selection of content thematic sentences, rhetorical conventions, mechanics organization, lack of vocabulary and improper use of vocabulary (fareed, ashraf & bilal, 2016). moreover, the students face difficulties in academic writing since there are limited source of material which are appropriate to be implemented. in the implementation, the lecturer merely uses the textbook which is available in the market. the book itself does not represent the students’ need and the curriculum (ghufron et al., 2016). this problem can be overcome by the proper use of instructional material as one of the learning sources. by considering the factors above, this paper aims to ascertain students’ needs in learning writing skills in an english department in tertiary education. data of students’ needs revealed through needs analysis will be the basis for designing model academic writing materials. however, this study only focuses on analyzing the students’ needs toward the writing materials for an academic writing course. method this study adopts a qualitative approach as it involved the collection and qualitative data analysis. this study belongs to a case study because it focused on a particular phenomenon, situation or event within its real-life context (merriam, 2012); (fraenkel et al., 2012); (silverman, 2005) and concern on “a small scale and a single case” (bogdan & biklen, 1998). a single case of this study referred to the issue of need analysis for developing writing subject material. the participants in this research are 23 students in the english department of muhammadiyah university of mataram. those 23 students were chosen by purposive sampling. this study uses a close-ended checklist questionnaire and interviews with students for collecting data. the questionnaire was used to investigate the students’ target needs (i.e., what the students’ needs to do in target situation). the student's target needs consist of necessities, lacks and wants. the purpose of delivering questionnaire was to find out what the students need to do to learn. the questionnaire consisted of 6 closeended checklist target needs questionnaire which described students’ necessities, lacks and wants of what students need to do in order to learn. the major advantage of close-ended questions was that their coding and tabulation was straight forward and leaves no room for rater subjectivity (dörnyei, 2003). the questionnaire was translated into indonesian language in order to ensure that the subjects clearly understand each item. the writing class teacher helped the students to respond to the questionnaire. the data from the questionnaire was analyzed by using descriptive statistics while the data from interview was transcribed and subsequently categorized and interpreted in a condensed body of information (alwasilah, 2002). in addition, interviews were arrange to serve as supplementary source and help correlate the data collected from the questionnaire (yin, 1994). for ilham, bachrudin musthafa, & fazri nur yusuf university students’ needs of writing course materials: a case of indonesia 198 this reason, out of the 23 students who completed the questionnaire, 9 were selected to be interviewed to support the finding with the data collected through the questionnaires. the questions of the interview were designed on the basis of target need which involves necessities, lacks and wants. the data analysis was guided by the research questions. it started with the data organized in the table and presented in form of explanation then moved to analysis and the last verifying the conclusion. the checklist questionnaire was analyzed using the likert scale as proposed by (dörnyei, 2003). all answers item on the closeended checklist questionnaire were classified and analyzed into a percentage. the calculation of the result was changed into the percentage. results and discussion the results are elaborated based on the result of questionnaires and interviews. the data elaborates students’ perspectives of target needs such as necessities, lacks and wants and learning needs i.e. goal, inputs, procedures, teacher role, student role, and setting in writing subject classroom. students’ target needs in writing class this section discussed the students’ target needs in writing class. the analysis of the response of target needs is divided into three main parts: necessities, lacks and wants. the students' views of those needs are displayed in the following table. necessities necessities is what the leaner has to know to function effectively in the target situation (hutchinson & waters, 1987). the results of the students’ needs in numerical are shown in table 1 below. table 1. percentage and frequencies for necessities in writing skill statement frequencies 1. in your opinion, are the following text types needed in a writing course? strongly needed needed not needed strongly not needed sum a. descriptive text 12 (52%) 11 (48%) 23 (100%) b. procedure text 6 (12%) 14 (61%) 3 (13%) 23 (100%) c. report text 11 (48%) 10 (43%) 2 (9%) 23 (100%) d. exposition text 9 (39%) 13 (57%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) e. explanation text 9 (39%) 13 (57%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) f. discussion text 7 (30%) 15 (65%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) 2. in your opinion, how important to master writing skill for completing writing tasks? a. mastering punctuation in english 11 (48%) 11 (48%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) b. mastering spelling in english 10 (43%) 13 (57%) 23 (100%) c. mastering the vocabulary of english 19 (83%) 4 (17%) 23 (100%) d. arrange phrases into simple sentence 12 (52%) 11 (48%) 23 (100%) e. construct sentences into a paragraph in english 16 (70%) 6 (26%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) f. understanding cohesion and coherence in english. 14 (61%) 9 (39%) 23 (100%) as is shown in table 1, from among the text types, discussion text, procedure text, exposition text and explanation text were highly preferred of majority students to learn in their writing class. however, another text type such as descriptive text was chosen by the students as not needed. furthermore, ab out the need for mastering writing skill to complete the task of writing course, learning the vocabulary of english, constructing sentences into a paragraph, understanding cohesion, and coherence, and arrange phrases into simple sentence were highly preferred by the students. this finding implies that students are in favor of being taught those skills of writing so that they need to learn from the exercises and many sourcebooks. the data from the questionnaire was strengthened with the interview result to provide supplementary source of information and to help corroborate the data obtained from questionnaire yin (1994). consistent with the result achieved through questionnaire, interviews revealed that students’ need to learn different kinds of genre. the following sentences are the students’ english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 199 responses which suggest the need to learn different kinds of genre. these, for example, are stated by s1 and s2: “i think it's important to know the type of text because if i don't learn this type of text, i can't write arguments about an issue” (s1). “i think it's important to learn the type of text because each text has different objectives” (s2) the data seemed to emphasize that students need to learn different types of text because they can describe people if they have knowledge of descriptive text and each text types has different purposes. asked about the importance of mastering skills of writing to complete the writing task, students acknowledge that they need to have knowledge of writing skill to complete the task such as the response delivered by s3 and s4: “i think it is important to learn how to arrange sentences into paragraphs and then to learn how to organize them in paragraph because the sentences have to be interrelated” (s3). “it is important to master the arrangement of sentences and phrases in paragraphs, as well as cohesion and coherence in order to write correctly” (s4). the data may suggest that students seemed to aware the importance of learning the way to arrange good sentences in paragraph with good coherence and cohesion ideas. hence, it can be inferred that the students really need the writing activity which improves their writing skill. in brief, the response of the students leads to the conclusion that majority of the students in this study need to learn a number of text types in english, writing text type to complete writing assignments, the importance of mastering writing skill for completing writing tasks and the need of mastering writing technique to complete the writing tasks. this was in line with nation & macalister (2010) who proposes that necessities such as learning text types ad mastering writing skills are the type of needs determined by the demands of the target situation, that is what the leaner has to know to function effectively in the target situation. lacks lacks refers to the gaps between the existing proficiency of the leaner and the target proficiency. the result of the students' response on lacks is illustrate in detail in the following table. table 2. percentage and frequencies for lack in writing skill statement frequencies 1. in your opinion, how well you can write text type in writing class? very good good fair poor sum a. writing descriptive text 14 (61%) 8 (35%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) b. writing narrative text 11 (48%) 10 (43%) 2 (9%) 23 (100%) c. writing exposition text 7 (30%) 14 (61%) 2 (9%) 23 (100%) d. writing explanation text 9 (39%) 13 (57%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) e. writing discussion text 13 (57%) 9 (39%) 1 (4%) 23 (100%) 2. in your opinion, what difficulties do you have in writing class? option yes no sum a. difficulties determining topic 10 (43%) 13 (57%) 23 (100%) b. difficulty of putting ideas into writing 17 (74%) 6 (26%) 23 (100%) c. difficulty of developing ideas into paragraphs 17 (74%) 6 (26%) 23 (100%) d. limited english vocabulary 18 (78%) 5 (22%) 23 (100%) e. lack of spelling knowledge 14 (61%) 9 (39%) 23 (100%) f. lack of grammar knowledge 20 (87%) 3 (13%) 23 (100%) table 2 shows that the ability of students on writing exposition text, and explanation text were on a fair level; meanwhile, writing descriptive text and writing discussion text were on a good level. regarding the data of students difficulties in writing class, the data shows that grammar was the greatest area of difficulties, though limited vocabulary, difficulties of putting ideas into writing and difficulties of putting ideas into paragraph also proposed serious problem. the next serious problem was spelling while determining a topic was a less serious problem. it was also stated by some students from the interview result that most of their ability of ilham, bachrudin musthafa, & fazri nur yusuf university students’ needs of writing course materials: a case of indonesia 200 writing text type were in adequate level. in addition, they had difficulties in learning writing such as they had difficulties of determining a topic, develops ideas into paragraphs, and difficulties of vocabulary skill because of lack of practice and reading. other students’ difficulties were not too good in spelling and grammar because it was influenced by the indonesian language, and lack of grammar knowledge. as noted, for example response by s5, s6, and s7: “during the writing process, i have problems developing ideas in writing, and difficulty in vocabulary and grammar” (s5). “my difficulty in writing is the creation of ideas due to a lack of vocabulary and grammar skills “(s6). “my problem when writing is lack of grammar and vocabulary” (s7). these were similar to the previous studies in the same topic (al-hamlan & baniabdelrahman, 2015; boroujeni & fard, 2013). based on the response of the students, it can be summed up that the students’ ability in writing was in sufficient level. this might be caused by the low motivation for reading and practicing the textbook and also the difficulties in writing. this result shows that the students are in favor taught different types of text and provide good material to solve their lacks in writing. this support nation & macalister (2010) view regarding this matter. they contend that lacks is an important part of need analysis which involve looking at where leaners at present who proposes that necessities such as learning. wants wants are described as “what the leaners think they need” (nation & macalister, 2010). the following table 3 will illustrate the result of need analysis on students’ wants. table 3. percentage and frequencies for want in writing skill statement frequencies in your opinion, what aspects of writing you might expect in a writing course? yes no a. improvement of vocabulary mastery 23 (100%) b. improvement on cohesion, coherence, and spelling 20 (87%) 3 (13%) c. improvement of grammar 23 (100%) d. improvement of writing material which stimulates students to write 22 (96%) 1 (4%) e. improvement of knowledge of academic writing 23 (100%) f. improvement of mastering text types 23 (100%) when you study in writing class, what type of text you might want to write? a. writing literature text such as drama, novel, short story, etc. 20 (87%) 3 (13%) b. writing factual text in daily life 21 (91%) 3 (13%) c. writing imagination text 16 (70%) 7 (30%) from table 3, it can be seen that most students preferred material which improves their vocabulary mastery, improvement of grammar, an improvement on knowledge of academic writing, and improvement on mastering text types. furthermore, the data of questionnaire was also strengthened by the interview result that the students highly preferred material which improves their knowledge of academic writing, materials of how to develop ideas and the structure of a text such as introduction, body, and conclusion. then it is also important to study organization, grammar, mechanics, and spelling of text’, as represented by s8 and s9: “i expect to learn grammar since english grammar is different from indonesian, and then i expect to learn how to develop ideas and organize writing.” (s8). “the things i would like to learn are how to organize text and also grammar” (s9). in brief, from the result of the questionnaire and interview, it reported that most of the students need to be guided with the material that they most need in writing class. conclusion needs analysis is an important stage in developing english as a foreign language teaching materials which are appropriate with the leaners characteristics and learners needs. the result of the needs analysis questionnaires and interview shows that students need to learn a number of text types, need to write varies of text, mastering writing skill and writing techniques to complete writing tasks, need to have good proficiency of writing course, good ability of writing varies of text and need to solve the difficulties in their english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 201 writing skills. furthermore, most of the students prefer on material that meet their interest which improves several aspect of writing, highly preferred writing varies of text, highly preferred writing activities which enable students to have good writing skills, and their vocabulary. based on the conclusion, it is highly recommended that there will be a model of teaching material of writing which is appropriate with the students' needs, characteristics, curriculum and purposes of english department students of muhammadiyah university of mataram, west nusa tenggara indonesia. further research regarding the need analysis on learning writing in a wi der context involving more students would be a great help for the improvement of teaching and learning writing in indonesia efl context. references al-hamlan, s., & baniabdelrahman, a. a. 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(2016). the importance of material development for language learning. in m. azarnoosh, m. zeraatpishe, a. faravani, & h. r. kargozari (eds.), issues in material development (pp. 1–219). sense publisher. doi: 10.1017/cbo9781107415324.004. tomlinson, b., & masuhara, h. (2018). the complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning. wiley backwell. doi: 10.2307/2071122. widodo, h. p. (2015). the development of vocational english materials from a social semiotic perspective : participatory action research (issue march) [university of adelaide]. retrieved from: https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitst ream/2440/97910/2/02whole.pdf yin, r. k. (1994). case study research: design and method. sage publication. yundayani, a. (2018). present situation analysis: students’ early characteristics in writing for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 119–126. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1262. yundayani, a., emzir, & rafli, z. (2017). need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 59–70. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.771. zohoorian, z. (2015). a needs analysis approach: an investigation of needs in an eap context. theory and practice in language studies, 5(1), 58. doi: 10.17507/tpls.0501.07. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 235 developing web-based online test system to boost ielts academic reading score hesti rokhaniyah international relations department, university of darussalam gontor email: hesti.r@unida.gontor.ac.id oddy virgantara putra informatics engineering, university of darussalam gontor email: oddy@unida.gontor.ac.id apa citation: rokhaniyah, h. & putra, o. v. (2021). developing web-based online test system to boost ielts academic reading score. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 235244. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4348 received: 19-02-2021 accepted: 18-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 abstract: web technology provides rich resources for both educators and learners in english teaching and learning process. in this context, the study aims at developing web-based online test for ielts academic reading test on the users need for learners and educator of universitas darussalam gontor. addressing the issue of online test developing, this study utilized alessi and trollip instructional system design model. the formative evaluation and the increase in the average score at the pre-test and post-test of the learning motivation included alpha testing validated by two material and media experts and beta testing on learners’ attitude toward the online test, while summative evaluation covered learning outcomes. upon analysis, the finding demonstrated that: (1) the resulting website: https://gets.unida.gontor.ac.id/pertanyaan/quiz was able to provide online evaluation for assessing reading performance among learners; (2) the increase in the average score on the pre-test and post-test of the learning outcomes of all learners was 0.43 (moderate category) and learner motivation scale was 0.38 (medium-g courses). hence, web-based online test could optimize learners’ excitement to assess their ielts proficiency. keywords: web-based online test; ielts; academic reading introduction the international english language testing system (ielts) exam rises in popularity and becomes the preferred high-stakes english language test. a reliable and valid assessment of language ability of the learners getting entry into the international academic needed for predefined english proficiency had been a required precondition to study oversea (hashemi & daneshfar, 2018). ielts provides and assesses information dealing with english level for the relevant applicants, based on the band score of ielts testing organization. ielts is composed of four equally weighted sub-components: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. it is available in two test versions namely ielts academic and ielts general training exam. liao (2019) revealed that the academic exam was intended to those employing for professional purpose, yet the general training exam was aimed at assessing the language proficiency of those migrating to english-speaking country. both the academic and general training exam gave accurate and valid assessment of four language skills (mallilin & gilbang, 2017; ali, washahi, & alhassan, 2020). reading section in ielts included 40 questions all over as well as three different texts designed to assess a wide range of reading skills; these consist of reading for main ideas, reading for gist, reading for details, scanning, skimming, comprehending the logical argument, and recognizing writers’ attitude and opinions (masna, 2016; liao, 2019; mirzaei, heidari vincheh, & hashemian, 2020). macdonald (2019) argued that every passage assigned with 20 minutes and two of the passages had 3 following questions and one of the three had 14 questions. in ielts reading test, syntax and vocabulary became utmost crucial and it leaded to be successful performance in the exam (farid, 2018; simanjuntak, 2018; liao, 2019). mirzaei, heidari vincheh, & hashemian (2020) found that syntax and vocabulary were two reading attributes for the participants. those aspects were necessary for test-takers’ reading so that they comprehended the passage as they had a lot of difficult lexical resources. web-based learning or online learning process was basically utilized the internet or intranet network (liao, 2019; macdonald, 2019). one form of media supporting the e-learning process is web-based learning multimedia which contains mailto:hesti.r@unida.gontor.ac.id mailto:oddy@unida.gontor.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4348 https://gets.unida.gontor.ac.id/pertanyaan/quiz hesti rokhaniyah & oddy virgantara putra developing web-based online test system to boost ielts academic reading score 236 various applications and learning materials connected online to the internet. it is equipped with various other facilities which facilitate interaction between users and the instructor. according to sun & chen ( 2016) and aşıksoy (2018), the world wide web, or web referred to basically internet server system which supports formatted document. the document was formatted in markup language mention hypertext markup language (html) supporting link to other documents, video files, graphic, or audio. chatwattana & nilsook (2017) revealed that webbased learning had a positive effect on learning outcomes and increased cognitive competence and concepts understanding. similarly, gunuç & babacan (2017) argued that the development of web-based teaching materials had been proven to be effective in increasing learners’ response and learning outcomes. learners found learning by web tools more effective and interesting than traditional method. another finding, petrişor, măruşteri, ghiga, & schiopu (2019) indicated that web tool enabled learners to let their dynamic, flexible, and creative learning climate from audial and visual materials. gunuç & babacan (2017) concluded the easy to apply, inexpensive, and accessible web impact on language learning was indispensable. pre-service educators should use the technology to establish positive attitude on pedagogical factors leading to notable contributions to learning progress (maity & pednekar, 2018; roy, 2019) recently, gunuç & babacan (2017) examined the integration of technology in efl’s teaching and learning. the aim of the study was addressing the significance of online test in teaching learning process of writing skill and introducing the integration of technology for language learning. the finding revealed that technology integration in english learning was great significance in the english skill development such as reading, listening, writing, and speaking. the hardware as well as software technological tool utilized in learning made many contributions both learners and teachers in the repeated used material, availability of materials everywhere and at all time, all time costless or low cost of material, efficient learning in short time, and evaluation for learners’ english proficiency. as a result of the research, the integration process of technology needed to be employed consciously and in a planned way to make crucial contribution to the technology and important task for teachers. bojovic (2019) and chen, hsu, & chang (2019) researched whether or not web technology assisted college learners in english writing. the study minded a blended approach combining peer assessment for writing course for first year learners in college. through the web and blended instructional approach, learners became attentive and willing to convey their own idea and more willing to get interaction with others. web enabled learners to self-examine, observe, review, and obtain detailed insight of each work. learners were able to optimize their grammar, organization, content, structure, lexical resources, and mechanics. the use of web could be a feasible approach and learners could continuously gain relevant skill and knowledge through the peer assessment (panyajamorn & suanmali, 2018). as the proliferation and development of web let learners more connected and provided access to more information and resources, observing more attractive strategy for english skill became increasingly significant for esl learners. web technology covered rich environment and resources for learners and educators in teaching and learning process (tekdal, sayginger, & baz, 2018). aşıksoy (2018) carried out research concerning elt learners’ awareness and attitude toward the use of web-online test for english learning. learners had positive attitude toward the tools and they were more aware of the existence of web tool used in english learning process. web motivated learners to be self-regulated learning and supported them in independent individuals assessing learning goals. the current researches were attempts to establish the theoretical framework for this study. there was similarity between researches stated above and this study. the previous researches concerned the use of web in efl’s teaching and learning. in this study, the development of web is to evaluate ielts academic reading test. instead of similarity, there was also difference. the past researches were carried out in writing skill; this study is conducted to develop web for ielts academic reading test. the technology that entered every area day by day has already affected the field of education; traditional method had become unable to meet the expectation. especially when digital native learners preferred to study in technological environment, it was crucial to utilize technology in education environment (gunuç & babacan, 2017; sudarsana, nakayanti, sapta, haimah, satria, saddhono, mursalin, 2019; nagasubramani, 2018). in the midst of the development of science and technology, the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 237 demand for mastery foreign languages cannot be avoided and even becomes an obligation. to measure the test takers’ english proficiency, various tests are created to certify their ability and one of them is ielts. the limited online ielts test prevents users to their language skills. based on this needs analysis, the researcher sees the need for a web-based ielts online test which facilitates users to assess their language skills. web-based ielts online test is only available on limited access; academics’ ielts ability cannot be measured optimally. supported by the availability of internet network owned by each user, researcher is motivated to develop a webbased ielts online test system which can be accessed anytime, anywhere. web-based online ielts test is crucial to be investigated in order to provide more precise and effective english exams. hence, learners can evaluate their english proficiency as well. in this development research, an online reading ielts test has been produced; a webbased test can be accessed through the portal address/url: https://gets.unida.gontor.ac.id/pert anyaan/quiz. this web-based online test is developed through the php programming using notepad ++ software, together with views compiled from html code, css templates, and adobe flash cs3. the present study, therefore, aims at addressing two specific concerns: facilitating web-based online test system for ielts academic reading test and identifying student learning outcome after ielts online test is employed. the project goal is designed to assist students optimize academic competence and to provide an application accommodating the needs of the ielts reading proficiency test with an open access system. method this existing research aims at developing an online test designed for ielts academic reading test and developed with php programming. the model used in the development of this product was a research and development model adopted from alessi & trollip model. the three-attribute of allesi and trollip instructional system design (isd) which were always presents: standard, evaluation, and project managements. those were the principle minded in the design and development process, and they established better foundation. clearing the standard, the design development was monitored to operate the benchmark. in addition, ongoing evaluation was applied at each phase whereby the approach of continual iterative was implemented until the functionalities could be achieved (por, mustafa, osman, phoon, & fong, 2020). the development meant flexible and the step depended on the previous step result. another emphasis in alessi & trollip isd model was project management in order to check the online test completed within the time, frame, and the allotted budget. slippage could be covered while maintain the standards (por & fong, 2011). allessi and trollip modei was illustrated in figure 1 below. figure 1. the allessi and trolip instructional system design model (2001) three-phase of alessi and trollip (isd); planning, design, and development were also utilized in the development of web-based online test system for ielts academic reading test. planning was carried out to ensure the system aspect run smoothly. planning phase covered defining the scope of this study, identifying learners’ characteristics, determining the boundaries of web-based online test, deciding the produce-style manual and also conducting initial brainstorming (alshammari, 2016). besides, design phase was the most creative as it referred to the content assembling and it needed to decide how the test online system was treated form interactive and instructional perspective which assisted learners archived the learning outcome (lestari, 2019). the design phase included conducting task and concept analysis and making flowcharts and storyboards for online test. the last phase was taking the design and turning it into web-based online system for ielts reading test. the development was the collaborative process as it required preparation and reading text production together with the support material https://gets.unida.gontor.ac.id/pert hesti rokhaniyah & oddy virgantara putra developing web-based online test system to boost ielts academic reading score 238 development. it demanded skill variety and overall process such as writing program and creating the graphics. developing web-based online test system for ielts academic reading test, product testing was divided into two types: test to determine the feasibility of web-based online test system and to examine the effectiveness of online test system. to test the feasibility of a product, both an alpha test (validation of material and media experts) and a beta test (learners’ test) were carried out. the data obtained were then analyzed to enhance the product being developed. through this trial process, the quality of the media developed could be more suitable for learners. the product effectiveness testing was undertaken through summative evaluation in order to determine whether there was gain score or an enhancement of learners’ motivation and achievement after the implementation of developed product. subject of research the test subjects in this summative evaluation test were 30 learners from semester 1 majoring in international relations of darussalam gontor. whereas for the formative test at both alpha and beta test, the subjects tested were 10 international relations learners. selection of trial subjects was based on their academic abilities. instruments producing a quality development product required a quality instrument exploring the research process. the instruments covered: (1) the main instrument, consisting of a questionnaire instrument to assess the quality of multimedia web-based learning developed both in terms of material and media validated by material and media experts and the band score of ielts reading test to find out to what extent the cognitive learning outcomes enhanced. through the test instrument, both learners’ pre-test and post-test could be evaluated; (2) supporting instruments, observation sheets were utilized to explore learners’ characteristics in order to achieve the accuracy of the design and product. through product developers’ interview, additional information including suggestions, criticism, and input outside of questionnaire were invaluable during beta testing. data gathering there were some data in the existing research: the validation results of media experts, material experts, questionnaires on the developed web, and learners’ questionnaire on multimedia products converted into a scale of 5 numbers, their motivation together with pre-test and post-test scores of learners’ learning outcomes. data analysis procedure the criteria of assessing the quality of material on web-based test online: ielts reading test included instructional quality (instructional flexibility, quality of testing, and assessment) and quality of content and goals (accuracy, completeness, interest, and appropriateness to user’s situation). the criteria of assessing the quality of web-online test adapted from alessi & trollip were display aspect quality (text or letters, colors, images/graphics, animation, screen design, and navigation) and technical quality (interactivity, communication features, privacy and data storage, compatibility of media, accessibility and stability, program boundaries, and non-web contact information). on the other hand, evaluating learners’ impressions of web multimedia dealt with media attractiveness such as text or letters, colors, images, screen design, material & tests, communication features, user interface, and language. in formative evaluation, questionnaires and direct interviews with media and material experts were then summarized in a table that was not converted into quantitative data as the experts only provided suggestions and input regarding the developed web-based online test. in contrast, in summative evaluation, the learning motivation questionnaire were analyzed into a numerical scale using a likert scale, while the pre-test and post-test data were compared to see if there was an enhancement in learning outcomes. learning outcomes improvement prior and after webonline: ielts reading test implementation was calculated by n-gain based on the normalized average score gain (g). the gain score was the score obtained from the pre-test and post-test; the maximum gain score was the highest gain score. according to hake (2011), the normalized average gain (n-gain) was conveyed: 𝑔 = 𝑆 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑡−𝑆 𝑝𝑟𝑒 𝑆 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑠−𝑆 𝑝𝑟𝑒 where the final (post) and initial (pre) class averages: high-g courses as those with (n-gain) ≥ 0,7 medium-g courses as those with 0,7 < (n-gain) ≥ 0,3 low-g courses as those with (n-gain) < 0,3 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 239 findings and discussion planning define the scope as a high-stakes standardized test, ielts was employed to reach comparable forms of test worksheet; thus, the participants form on different dates gained comparable test scores. three ielts academic reading tests were utilized in the present study: basic, independent, and proficiency level. each level of reading test was composed of three reading passages along with 40 test items and each reading text format contained three tasks which altogether consisted of 14 or 13 items. these three materials were the main material that can be the basis for conceptual understanding in understanding the ielts test as a whole. identify learner characteristics at the developmental age of the formal operational stage (11-20 years), learners’ thinking patterns had developed to be more logical. learners were able to interpret a concept, develop a hypothesis, and draw conclusions on the explanation given. in general, their uniqueness was that they like current and sophisticated things. they were accustomed to learning independently using the internet to find out current matters. notebooks and cellphones were utilized as a means of recording the material. based on the observations of these characteristics, the present study developed a web-based online test for ielts academic reading test that suited their characteristics at the formal operational stage along with facilitated learning english proficiency. establish constrains from a developer perspective: hardware specifications required to develop web-based ielts online test were: pc / laptop / notebook computers (pentium processor, 1 gb ram, minimum resolution of 1366 x 768, minimum vga 32 bit, speaker, operation system: windows xp, vista, windows 7, mac os); internet network with a minimum bandwidth of 256. likewise, software used in multimedia development included web browsers such as mozilla firefox, opera browser and google chrome, adobe flash cs 3, adobe photoshop cs3, notepad ++, corel draw x4, adobe illustrator. in terms of users: the specifications to access web-based ielts were: pc / laptop / notebook computers (pentium processor, 1 gb ram, minimum resolution of 1366 x 768, vga at least 32 bit, speaker, and operation system: windows xp, vista, windows 7, mac os); internet network with a minimum bandwidth of 256 kbps; equipped with a web browser such as mozilla firefox, opera browser, google chrome; and adobe flash. produce a style manual (1) the layout of this website consisted of 6 main menus, including the homepage, course-page, test-page, info-page, forum-page, and log-in page. especially in the test-page section, the web layout design was made separately for each level of questions, with the aim at generating a learning atmosphere. (2) the typeface employed in the text was the courier new and pristine theme fonts, with a font size of 12pt in the material text and 16pt on the homepage text and the material title. (3) the theme chosen in the website template design was modern futuristic with a minimalist template design without the use of striking icons or characters. (4) the basic colors used in the web-site template were light blue and white. (5) this web-based online test was accessible; users just entered the user name. (6) the navigation buttons in this web-based online test were created as attractive as possible by promoting a modern, futuristic theme. design conduct task and concept analysis the web-based ielts online test aimed at optimizing reading skills. the web-based online test was an interactive test media accessed by users wherever they were for independent study. the web had been combined with macromedia flash, an application to create attractive animations and websites. this test also encouraged students as users to learn independently and change teacher-centered learning to student-centered learning; thus, it improved their performance and achieved mastery. the text in reading had been attributed to the size of words in a text, length of sentences, and linguistic features including cohesion and narrativity. the task type available on the existing web-based ielts online test were matching heading, multiple choice, matching information, true/false/not given, summary completion, sentence completion, short-answer questions, and yes/no/not given. create flowcharts and storyboards web-based online test flowcharts described the basic flow or process sequence of web multimedia work systems when accessed by the user. the hesti rokhaniyah & oddy virgantara putra developing web-based online test system to boost ielts academic reading score 240 flowchart creation was followed by the creation of a web multimedia product storyboard. storyboard included the initial design or visual design of the product. in this phase, the main menu design, website logo, material display and test page, as well as other features were determined. the flowchart below illustrates the procedure for using the web-based online test. figure 2. the procedure for accessing web-based online test development the web-based online test for academic ielts reading test was set up through the php coding system or php programming and equipped with a website programmer, adobe flash cs 3 application, adobe photoshop cs3, notepad ++, corel draw x4, and adobe illustrator. the initial stages of development began with preparing the academic reading material for the test and determining the display design together with menu content. furthermore, web-programmers initiated the coding system process referring to the predefined flowcharts and storyboards. at this stage, role based access control (rbac) was also established. in this multimedia web, user roles were divided into 3: administrator (web manager), lecturer, and user (learners or general users). after the coding and merging process of each media component was established, the server and website domain were settled: https://gets.unida.gontor.ac.id/pertanyaan/quiz as the address for the website being developed. the following was a profile of the web-page of webbased online test: figure 3. register form figure 4. types of questions figure 5. ielts score after the multimedia learning of web-based online test: ielts academic reading test had been developed, evaluating the feasibility of the product prior being used in the learning process was implemented. product feasibility evaluation known as formative evaluation consisted of 2 stages of testing: alpha testing (product validation) and beta testing (user impression). in the alpha testing, validation was mainly conducted by the testers who were internal media experts and ielts expert. material expert validation validated the suitability of the material content. similarly, media validation aimed at evaluating aspects of display and media programs. further examination of the validation result showed that the test coverage developed in the web-based online test had met the validity term of the ielts reading test. the assessment from media experts revealed that the indicators related to each component had been achieved. meanwhile, media validation result indicated clearly that media components identified as not meeting the criterion standard in terms of appearance and media accessibility aspects. in general, the web-based online test could still be utilized in the learning process; some improvements were needed to obtain feasible web multimedia product. having been fixed, a webbased online test system was desirable to be tested english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 241 table 1. result of media expert assessment no aspect score 1 management 4.42 2 screen display 4.35 3 benefit 5.41 pertinent to the feasibility test carried out by media expert, the management aspect of online test achieved 4.42 (very good category) and the screen display was 4.35 (very good category). dealing with the benefit of web-based online test, media experts defined 5.41. having tried out each of the reading practice, the material experts evaluated the products. they conveyed their point of view into two categories i.e. the practicality and the effectiveness of materials. the practicality as indicated by the ease of accessing the ielts practice reading test on web and employing it in the ielst reading class and the effectiveness was characterized by usefulness of materials for ielts reading class. based on the data gathered from material experts, they considered that kind of genres found in reading text exceeded 4.21 (very good category). on the other hand, the conformity between reading text and curriculum was 3.79 (good category), and the arrangement of reading test based on level of difficulty reached 4.18 (very good category). the research instrument in the beta test was a questionnaire of media attractiveness. learners were then asked to learn and observe all the contents of the web-based online test for ielts reading test. as the learning activity was deemed sufficient, learners faced test to measure their performance in reading. an impression questionnaire on the web multimedia was also distributed to learners; likert scale was used to analyze the resulting data (see table 1) table 2. result of an impression questionnaire on web multimedia no aspect score 1 clarity of the text 4.46 2 color combination 3.86 3 menu presentation 4.33 4 web instruction 4.33 referring to the learners’ impression, clarity of text obtained an average score of 4.46 (very good category), color combinations on the web got a score of 3.86 (good category), menu presentation got a score of 4.33 (very good category), and the instructions for using the web derived a score of 4.33 (very good category). these results indicated that there was an increase for the gain score of 0.40 (medium-g courses); hence, web-based online test was sufficient to optimize learning outcomes. in addition to the data obtained from the pretest and post-test, data related to motivation for learning was also carried out for summative evaluation. the attitude questionnaire was in the form of qualitative data and it was converted into quantitative data using a likert number scale conversion. the pre-test performance of learners’ motivation was up to 2.03. meanwhile, the mean score of the post-test stage was 3.53. the results of the two means were then compared so that the gain score was derived. the gain score aimed at determining the significance difference in the motivation level prior and after the web-based online test utilization. from the average score, the gain for learner motivation scale was 0.38 (medium-g courses). therefore, learning motivation enhanced after learners employed the web-based online test for ielts academic reading test. in the summative evaluation, a classroom trial was conducted using a web-based online test involving 30 students. prior to utilizing the webbased online test for post-test, the offline pre-test was held to determine the learner’s cognitive ability in academic ielts reading test. in case 80% of learner passed the minimum standard of band score (6.5), the materials of reading were proper for learners in the term of level of difficulty. based on learners’ pretest scores, only 65 % of learners passed the band score. however, the post-test defined that most learners passed it. only 3 learners were considered incomplete at the post-test. based on the increase in learning outcome, then the gain score obtained was interpreted on the effectiveness of the web-based online test for ielts reading text. concerning the results of the mean score of pre-test and post-test, a gain score represented 0.43 and it fell into medium-g courses. thus, this web-based online test could enhance learners’ reading test performance. discussion many of us used web or internet as reliable source of information. in education, the web was increasingly employed as learning tool to support the program and as a mean to deliver online learning teaching. web-based online test brought with more opportunities to get innovative around assessment. online test when minded efficiently, could be valuable assessment of twenty first hesti rokhaniyah & oddy virgantara putra developing web-based online test system to boost ielts academic reading score 242 century learning; it was designed to align with the powerful assessment concept through selecting the question format, approach of philosophy embedded in the question, and cognitive level of question this research has revealed that web-online test: ielts academic reading enables to give performance among learners. as a product of development, the benefits of utilizing web-based online test were plenty. web technology offered unique opportunities for learners to become more engaged with learning beyond the boundaries of learning management. the existing web-based online test, the access anytime, anywhere construct served an attractive and attractive appearance. the benefits went in line with several research conducted in other places where learners enhanced the learning experience; they accessed to the test which was not available in the class (ashraf, 2016; chaplot, 2016; boitshwarelo, reedy, & billany, 2017; permatasari, ellianawati, & hardyanto, 2019). the website template had been different from other websites as it was developed with a dynamic programming language. the attractive display was showcased in form of the test menu presentation, i.e. exercise menu feature. similarly, the online test was presented with a drag and drop model which was very attractive and interactive to attract learners' attention and these characteristics could not be provided. this study revealed that the existence of an online web-based online: ielts academic reading test was able to provide a more precise and effective english test so that users, especially learners, could evaluate their english proficiency. online test can measure learners’ academic performance is also reflected in other studies (boitshwarelo et al., 2017; hashemi & daneshfar, 2018; verma, 2018). the drawback of this research was this webbased online test was not equipped with personal chat facilities to communicate with other users. this product could only be accessed online by users with an adequate internet network. the available bandwidth/internet network availability also affected the smoothness of access to the website so that it could hinder the online test process. other studies also indicated that online test system relied on internet connection together with software and if any of them failed, learners were not able to give the exam (chaplot, 2016; nagasubramani, 2018) and the progress of test data might be deleted in case the system off suddenly (asiksoy, 2018; tekdal et al., 2018). in addition, the scope of material in web-based online test was only limited to reading skills and did not yet cover all skills in ielts. this became an input for developers to design an online ielts test with listening, writing, or speaking skills. conclusion online test becomes more familiar in the digital century to measure the participants’ knowledge on given topic. with online test system, learners do the test online, in their own time, with their own device regardless of where they stay. they only require an internet connection and a browser. based on the results of the validation of the ielts and media experts, web-based online test is quality declared feasible to use. regarding the assessment of learners' impressions of web-based online test, the gain score obtained is 0.43 with medium-g courses. similarly, the summative evaluation results of using web-based online test also enhance the learners’ engagement and learning outcomes. 80% of learners passed the minimum standard of band score (6.5) in the posttest; reading materials were proper for learners in the term of level of difficulty. acknowledging the findings above, the web-based online test developed is appropriate for assessing ielts reading skill. the finding of this research can assist lecturers in developing the web-based online test. conducting this study, there are a number of limitations resolved in further research. this research could be replicated by various testing methods, other language skills, and different language proficiency levels. here are further recommendations: a) other studies may examine further research to develop web-based online test for academic and general ielts listening by exploring the same methodology; b) the lecturers are suggested to employ this product of this research as academic ielts reading practice tests developed using research and development design; and c) prior to applying the product, lecturers are recommended to encourage their learners to be relaxed experiencing ielts reading practice test; 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(2018). smart assessment system by means of online exam system. international journal for scintific research and development. 6(2).34563459. https://doi.org/10.12738/estp.2013.3.1580 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 203 the language features of male and female beauty influencers in youtube videos clara herlina karjo department of english literature, bina nusantara university, indonesia e-mail: claraherlina@yahoo.com stephani wijaya department of english literature, bina nusantara university, indonesia e-mail: tephtastic@gmail.com apa citation: karjo, c. h., & wijaya, s. (2020). the language features of male and female beauty influencers in youtube videos. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 203-210. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2593. received: 16-03-2020 accepted: 08-05-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: nowadays, the beauty community has a rapid growth of beauty influencers from both genders. the language style that is used on each gender has its own features and characteristics that can be explored from video sharing platform, youtube. the aim of this study is to find the language features and distinctive characteristics of the male and female beauty influencers and the differences of comments from their audience. the writer applies qualitative research method by using text analysis of the video script. the data shows that male and female beauty influencers have shown differences in their features and characteristic of language. men beauty influencers tend to be more straightforward and directive. they also use a more plain and simple words. on the other hand, the women beauty influencers are more polite and intimate in using language. this study is hoped to be the foundation for further research in the same topic of language feature in gendered community within limited topic especially in this modern era. keywords: gender; language features; characteristics; beauty influencers; youtube. introduction the internet contains different kinds of contents that can be accessed such as personal blogs, education blogs, social media and many kinds of entertainment content. the entertainment aspect of internet can be found from the social media such as instagram as a photo sharing platform or youtube as a video sharing platform. youtube in particular, has grown for the past decade containing a wide variety of contents. among the most popular contents that can be found in youtube are contents created by makeup and beauty community. the beauty community content creators are popularly known as beauty influencers. they are usually endorsing and reviewing makeup brands or products for tutorial purposes. as make up products are usually targeted to women customers and the beauty community is exclusively linked to women, it is generally assumed that all beauty influencers are all women. in fact, in today’s era, gender is no longer used as a limitation for one’s occupation. thus, there are males who also choose the profession as beauty influencers although the target viewers are still women. notwithstanding that any gender can choose gender stereotyped profession such as a beauty influencer, the language used by male and female still differ in some ways. this is because a person’s language style is constructed due to the social structure in each person’s environment such as how they have been raised in their family or what kind of neighborhood and school that the person attended (eckert & mcconnel-ginet, 2013). moreover, male and female speaks differently in different social situation as it reflects the speaker’s current roles, the topic, the context and the medium of communication and also the addressee (gleason & ely, 2002). gender differences in communication are explained by the different roles that men and women hold in society (lakoff, 2004). lakoff (2004) maintained that women speech pattern differ from men because of their subordinate social status (jan, 2017). in her seminal work, lakoff (2004) suggested that women typically display a range of features such as specific terms of color, avoidance of harsh words, hedges, empty adjectives, tag questions, and intensifiers. previous studies mostly give greater attention to women’s language features. on the contrary, men’s language was rarely discussed in literature, except for the work of coates (2016). thus, the discussion of men’s language characteristics was done by comparing them against women’s language features. for example, if one feature of clara herlina karjo & stephani wijaya the language features of male and female beauty influencers in youtube videos 204 women’s language is the avoidance of swear words, then in men’s language the researcher is looking for the opposite, i.e. the use of swear words. the discussion of each language feature is detailed below. the first feature relates to the use color terms. women are known to be able to identify color terms as a different series and variation of shades with more detail and variation of the same shades whereas men’s knowledge of color is limited to the primary colors as colors sometimes look very similar to each other. for example, women can differentiate between the lavender color and mauve; while man can just say purple. the precise and detailed manner of color identification by women is due to women’s ability to differentiate accurate chrome and hue (perezcarpinell, baldovi, de fez, and castro, 1998). the women’s ability to differentiate color precisely is due to the possibility of different standard of socialization between women and men that encourage women to have broader knowledge and awareness towards colors term and variation (bimler, kirkland, & jameson, 2004). the second feature of women’s language is the avoidance of harsh language. women are generally expected to act like ladies, hence they are avoiding harsh language and instead implementing a polite and soft speech style in their language (lakoff, 2004). when women have to use harsh language in their speech, they often replace it with euphemized form of harsh language such as what the heck to replace what the fuck. on the contrary, men were found to swear and use harsh language more often than women in their speech (poynton, 1995). the next prominent feature in women’s language is the use of hedges. hedges are used to soften the way people state their opinion, as they make statements to be less direct and less strong. holmes (2013, p. 26) said that hedges may be one of the crucial aspect whether an expression is considered as polite or not from the perception of it. hedges are commonly used in women’s language to be used as a politeness device and the use of hedges can determine whether a statement can be labeled as polite or impolite from the way the speakers deliver their speech to their addressee. mulac, bradac and gibbons (2001) stated that women use more hedges in their speech as compared to men. crawford (2012) noted that women frequently use hedges because they choose to criticize others in more acceptable ways. they don’t want to be seen as opposing others directly. the next feature mentioned by lakoff is the use of empty adjectives or women-only adjectives in women’s speech. lakoff (2004) suggested that women use adjectives as an act of appreciation and admiration towards something. lakoff (2004) gave a collection of adjectives that are considered as women-only adjectives such as adorable, charming, sweet, lovely, and divine whereas neutral adjectives consist of words such as great, terrific, cool and neat. on the contrary, men mostly use judgmental adjectives in their speech as opposed to women who use adjectives as appreciation. judgmental adjectives often used in particular to criticize others, as exemplified by mulac, et al. (2001) in this sentence “his performance is poor”. the adjective poor is indicated as judgmental adjective as it criticizes the person’s performance. the use of intensifier is also featured in women’s language. intensifier is a component that usually consists of adverb or adverbial phrase that acts as a modifier to give emphasis to the word behind it. the purpose of using intensifier is to strengthen the meaning of words. there are commonly used intensifiers such as so, really, very, absolutely, too, totally, extremely, etc. lakoff (2004) found that the intensifier so is more prevalent in women’s language rather than men’s, even though there is no restriction for men to use it. even though women use intensifier more frequently than men, men is found to use intensifier that is considered as negative intensifier instead of basic intensifier such as very and really to intensify the words that follow behind. sardabi and afghari (2015) explained that a particular intensification can be employed to the use of negative words to increase the effect of the positive context behind. in the example given by sardabi and afghari (2015), “she is dreadfully beautiful”, the word dreadfully is considered as negative intensifier that intensifies the positive word behind it. besides the above features detailed by lakoff, tannen (2013) added several other features, namely rapport and report talk, being indirect, quoting others and extensive apposition. these features also differentiate male and female speech. rapport talk is defined by tannen (2013) as the way when women establish emotional connection and relationships through their speech. women use rapport talk to connect with their addressee. they prefer to talk in a more private manner as it will be felt as if the speaker is talking english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 205 privately even if in a public situation. talking in a private manner means the topic of the talk is heavily leaning to the feelings and past experiences and memories. this is done to create a relatable connection with the addressee. on the contrary, male speech is characterized by report talk. instead of talking about private matters, men are found to talk about their knowledge and skill (tannen, 2013). men are also found to be more talkative during public speaking situation. the next feature of women’s speech is being indirect while stating their opinion especially when expressing dislike or unfavorable statement. women often express something in a thoughtful and non-threatening manner towards other person especially while directing their opinions of dislike and disapproval. crawford (2012) suggested that one of the main objectives of women is to criticize others in an acceptable and respectable ways, thus being indirect and ambiguous while doing so is applied and implemented in women’s language in general. on the contrary, men love to state their opinion openly and in direct manner. as their objectives for speech is to assert their position and dominance, they tend to be more straightforward and more honest about what they think. men are not afraid to state their opinion and criticize others; hence the directness will be shown in their speech. quoting someone else also appears in women’s language. lakoff (2004) claimed that women’s personal identity is linguistically submerged by quoting what someone else has said. quotation is a tool that uses the voices of others to convey their own opinion to avoid being direct in their speech. finnegan (2011) explained that a quotation can be used as a tool to convey originality, to support or even oppose particular authority as well as approve and disapprove by using the voices of others. crawford (2012) suggested that women often use quotation due to the fact that women are inferior in general where their position is submerged with the dominance of men. hence, quoting other persons will give more credit and authority to their speech to make it more valid and authentic. finally, women are also known to use extensive apposition in their speech. women generally adopt intensive and extensive form of word to their speech instead of plain and straightforward sentence. women tend to use a lot of words especially when describing attributes towards someone (lakoff, 2004). mulac, et al. (2001) also suggested that women’s language tend to have longer sentences and intensive words. different features of male and female speeches do not only occur in physical interaction but also in digital interaction, such as through social media. several previous studies have confirmed that male and female showed distinctive language features in social media interaction. for example, in one study, fatin (2015) found that men and women have different word choice in social media twitter in which men’s language was found to be harsher than women’s. women were observed to use weaker and more polite form of language. another study by broadbridge (2003) that examined the conversational style of men and women also discovered that women use more hedges while men use more vulgar term in their speech. moreover, wahyuningsih (2018) found that women prefer to use women-only adjectives such as wonderful, extraordinary, etc. in their speech through the social media interaction. the interaction that occurs in broadcasted platform such as youtube use specific form and structure of language, which are termed as media discourse (leitner, 2017). the interaction of media discourse involves the speakers or message senders and the addressees. however, the interaction in social media is referring more to the non-present addressee, reader, listener or viewer where they often cannot make immediate response towards the sender of the message (o’keefee, 2013). because of this non-present addressee, the interaction between the beauty influencers and their followers in youtube platform is mostly dominated by the influencers themselves. the engagement and participation of the audiences is limited to giving comments and likes to the videos presented by the content creators. though the beauty influencers do not interact directly with their audiences, they still have to consider carefully the language they use in their videos. thomson, murachver and green (2001) stated that language is not something that is fixed to individual but rather constructed to each conversation. that means, who the speaker is talking to also affect the type of language used by the speaker, no matter the gender of the speaker is. as the audiences of the beauty influencers’ videos are mostly female, it is interesting to find out whether male content creators speak with their own language style or they accommodate their speech to that of their audiences. speech accomodation is defined by giles & ogay (2007) as the constant movement toward clara herlina karjo & stephani wijaya the language features of male and female beauty influencers in youtube videos 206 and away from others by changing one’s communicative behavior. similarly, holmes (2013b) defines speech accomodation as a process in which one person’s speech converge towards the speech of the person they are talking to. thus, using this equation, the beauty influencers’ language in their videos will be converging towards their viewer’s language. yet, in their study, thomson et al. (2001) found that both women and men converge to the language style more female or male like of their netpals. that means, women will converge to male style if their addresse is male; and vice versa. the previous studies discussed above mostly deal language style of male and female speakers either in physical and digital interaction. however, almost none of the studies mention how the audiences or addresses affect the language styles of the speakers. therefore, the present study, which probes the language style used by male and female beauty influencers on youtube will be quite intriquing because they will be talking to female audiences. there are three research questions that will be explored in this study. 1. what distinctive language features do male and female beauty influencers show in their videos? 2. to what extent do male and female beauty influencers accommodate their speeches for their viewers? 3. what do the viewers comment about the beauty influencers? method source of data the data for the present study were taken from four youtube videos of four well-known beauty influencers, two female and two male. the first one is nikkie, a dutch beauty influencer who frequently uploaded beauty videos since 2008. nikkie has over 12 million subscribers on her channel. the second is tati westbrook, an american beauty influencer who has become a beauty content creator since 2010 and has almost 10 million subscribers. the third one is jeffree star who has been in the industry since 2003 but he began uploading videos since 2013 and has 14 million subscribers. lastly, manny gutierrez, a former beauty consultant who has opened his beauty channel since 2014 and has 5 million subscribers. data collection procedure and analysis we selected one video from each beauty influencer, thus there are four videos used as the source of data. for the ease of analysis, all the videos cover similar topic, i.e. review of makeup foundation. the titles of the videos are: 1) pores are shaking!! fenty beauty concealer & setting poweder review by nikkie. 2) fenty beauty concealer &setting powder … honest non-sponsored thought by tati 3) the truth.. fenty beauty concealer & setting poweder by jeffree star 4) brutally honest fenty concealer and powder review! by manny gutierrez the videos were downloaded and transcribed. besides the videos, 10 prominent viewers’ comments of each video were also taken as the data. the analysis of the videos and the transcripts was done by identifying the speech features as detailed by lakoff (2004) and tannen (2013) in the speech of male and female beauty influencers. meanwhile, the comments were also categorized as positive or negative feedback for the beauty influencers. results and discussion the language that was used by four youtube beauty influencers has its own distinctive characteristics and features that were shown in their videos. thus each gender has differences in the characteristics of language that is shown in their speech although they were discussing the same topic. table 1. men and women language features language features men women color terms associative word associative word harsh language used openly none hedges avoid quick verdict expression of uncertainty empty adjectives judgmental adjectives women-only adjectives intensifiers negative intensifiers positive intensifiers slang popularly used slang limited-topic slang rapport vs report report talk rapport talk opinion direct indirect quoting someone relevant to topic irrelevant to topic vocabulary plain and direct extensive apposition english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 207 male and female language features there are a total of ten language features with its own distinctive characteristics for each language feature. the language features consists of color terms, harsh language, hedges, empty adjectives, intensifiers, slang, rapport and report talk, opinion, quoting someone and vocabulary usage where each gender has their own and distinctive characteristics that are shown while the youtube beauty influencers are presenting their video in the same topic of discussion. the first feature, color terms, was shared by both genders. women, however, were using associative words in describing colors. the associative words are words that are similar to the color of real objects in life such as the use of banana to describe the color yellow and lavender to describe the color light purple. in this topic of research that is related to beauty influencer, color is extremely important and crucial especially in describing the shades of product that is currently in review or tutorials. association is one of the methods to facilitate understanding of color terms by comparing them to real objects that are generally known by the society. on the other hand, the men in the data use a more direct approach towards color terms. instead of using associative words towards the color terms, the men chose to explain the color instead. thus, instead of using the word ivory, men preferred to use yellowish white. moreover, if the men described the color with mauve instead of pinkish purple, they will be seen as either “imitating a woman sarcastically, or a homosexual, or an interior decorator” (lakoff, 1975). women are thought to have the ability to differentiate accurate chrome and hue than men (perez-calpiness, baldovi, defez & castro (1998). consequently, different shades of the same color are more visible to women than to men. the next language feature is harsh language. harsh language is common in spoken communication and usually spoken by men. harsh language contains words such as fuck which is popularly used as exclamation and bitch that is popularly used to address oneself or someone else. women tend to avoid harsh language altogether and avoid using it in their speech. the female speakers, nikkie and tati, used euphemism such as dang it to replace dammit or chose the word freaking instead of fucking. meanwhile, the male presenters jeffree and manny used harsh language openly in their speech. women tend to avoid harsh languages in their speech as they were expected to act as ladies since they were a child (lakoff, 2004). the third feature is hedges. hedges appear as verbs such as i wonder, i reckon, and i think as well as modal expression such as maybe, could be or the most frequently used hedge forms which is adverb such as kind of and sort of. using hedges in communication is to lessen the impact of the statement and usually displayed as a form of politeness. although all presenters were using hedges in their videos, their purposes varied. nikkie and tati used hedges to express their uncertainty in their statements to make them appear less direct and more polite. on the other hand, jeffree and manny used hedges as a tool to avoid quick verdict to things that they are reviewing, avoiding immediate blame towards one product or brand. crawford (2012) suggested that women criticized others in an acceptable way. hence, hedge that acts as a tool to soften and lessen impact of statement is used to express their dissatisfaction and preference towards things without straightforwardly display their lack of satisfaction. on the contrary, jeffree and manny use hedges to show their uncertainty of the product and not to express their personal preference. the next feature, empty adjectives, was extensively used in beauty influencers’ speech. for this particular feature, jeffree and manny used more adjectives than nikkie and tati. however, the type of adjectives used by each gender differed. female presenters were found to use women-only adjectives such as adorable, lovely, etc. and largely used by women as women often used to express their admiration towards something (lakoff, 1975). besides those empty adjectives, women also use the words such as vanilla and juicy as adjectives. meanwhile, male presenters mostly used judgmental adjectives such as weird and bizarre to describe the product. judgmental adjectives often contained a critical point of view within the expressed opinion (mulac, bradac & gibbons, 2001) as jeffree was describing the unusual texture of the product that he is currently reviewing. the following feature, intensifier acts as modifier to give additional emphasis and to intensify the subsequent words. women in particular are found to frequently use intensifier in their speech. they used intensifier to show emotional emphasis and to give more impact on the effect of the message they wanted to deliver. female presenters were found to use intensifier clara herlina karjo & stephani wijaya the language features of male and female beauty influencers in youtube videos 208 mostly to express their positive emotions such as happiness and love towards the product that they were reviewing. on the contrary, the males used intensifiers to express their opinion and judgment towards the product. manny particularly used negative intensifier such as hella (hell of) to intensify the word that followed it. on the contrary, the females only used basic intensifiers such as really, so, too and very. intensifiers, therefore, were used to drive the audience’s emotions (stock, 2010). the sixth feature found is slang. slangs can be categorized into commonly used slangs in internet-users community and limited topic slangs which exclusively belonged and used by particular group of people. common and popular slangs consist of words commonly used nowadays for example the word tea for gossip. on the contrary, limited topic slang like cakey (to describe skin texture while wearing makeup) only belongs to the makeup and beauty community. thus, from the data, male presenters were found to use popular slang in their speech instead of slang that is related to beauty. the word tea and flops were found in the men’s data whereas the words such as crinkly, holy grail, crunchy and cakey, which strictly related to beauty community, were found in women’s speech. male presenters in this study were using more slangs than females. this is in accord with poynton’s (1995) indication that men generally have higher number of slangs in their speech. on the contrary, slang usage featured less in women’s speech as slang is considered as informal form of communication that sometimes can be considered unfitting and raffish due to the politeness that is often applied in women’s speech. the subsequent feature is the usage of rapport talk and report talk. rapport talk is defined as a way to communicate by establishing emotional connection to build closer relationship, thus the addressee will feel as if the speaker is talking in a more private manner even though it is a public situation by sharing their personal and private past occurrences and experiences as a way to share one’s feeling (tannen, 2013). conversely, report talk, is a way of communication where one often share their knowledge and skills instead of personal past occurrences that seems to be intimate and private. the knowledge and skill sharing is used by the speaker to hold their position in the stage by sharing info information and output as it will assert one’s position in public situation. from the data, women were seen to use more rapport talk while men were using report talk. during the opening of the videos, women presenters began by sharing their personal information for around 30 seconds before mentioning the brands and products’ name. this kind of talk was done so that the viewers can feel the intimacy and sympathy towards the speakers. in contrast, the male presenters talked less of their personal feelings and intimacy towards their viewers but merely sharing information and facts about the products. the next feature is directness. since the videos were about reviewing make up products, presenters should at least share their opinion or judgment on the products. here, women generally favor uncertainty, hence strong opinion and being direct is scarce to be found. when expressing their dissatisfaction and disappointment, they stated their opinion indirectly by saying something vaguely. so, when these female presenters did not like the product, they would use body language like shaking her head along with uh and eh, instead of saying i didn’t like it. quite the opposite, males shared their opinions directly without worrying about what other people think of them. jeffree, for example, stated directly 100% not jeffree star approved when he did not like the product. the following language feature is quoting someone else. quotation is used when someone wants to extract word by word or phrase that someone else has said before. quoting other people might relate with how women’s personal identity is linguistically submerged where women’s role in the society traditionally favor euphemism and dependent towards others instead of stand by her own opinion. therefore, quoting other people can act as a way to give more validation towards the statement that is delivered (crawford, 2012). both men and women presenters used quotation but they had different purposes. female presenters quoted other people and themselves. the topic of the quotation was sometimes irrelevant to the topic of the video they were making. they were quoting something related to their personal life instead of beauty topic. in contrast, male presenters shared quotation of other people but the topic was still related to make up and beauty. the last feature found in the male and female speech is apposition or the use of two or more similar words or phrases to describe one particular thing. in the data, women were found to english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 209 use more extensive apposition when they were reviewing the products. for example, nikkie used the words smooth, highlighted, perfected, and lifted to describe how the product works. meanwhile, the males only used the word such as beautiful or pretty to describe similar product. women’s use of extensive apposition can be due to the fact that women often interpret accurately and sensitively towards their speech to other person especially their fellow women (crawford, 2012; mulac, et al., 2001). viewers’ feedbacks audience’s feedback towards youtube beauty influencers can be found in each of their videos where their followers or audiences interact and give their comments as well as reactions or suggestions towards the beauty influencers. viewers’ comments can be categorized as media discourse. media discourse is an interaction that is happening in a digital media where the interaction is oriented to a non-present addressee where an immediate response rarely happens as it takes place digitally in the media. comments can be given in the form of expressions or emoticons regarding the products being reviewed or the speakers themselves. the comments for nikkie consist of 8 positive ones and 2 negative ones. the positive commentators wrote about nikkie’s personality rather than the product she was reviewing. meanwhile, the other two comments contain critical feedback and suggestions for her future videos as her audiences cannot see clearly regarding the texture or a closer look of the makeup on her face. half of nikkie’s comment section also uses emoticons as a form of expression where all of the emoticons either show love sign or smiling and laughing face expression. next, tati’s comment section also contains 8 positive feedbacks. similar to nikkie’s, tati’s comment section is also generally directed to her personal life instead of to the product and brands that she is reviewing. four of the comments contain emoticon as a form of expression. in jeffree’s comment section, all the 10 comments are positive. most of the feedbacks found in the comment section do not feature emoticon in their comment. however, all of the comments generally said about how humble jeffree is, knowing that he is rich but still being honest about the product when it has an expensive price tag. the last one is manny’s comment section. unlike the other youtube beauty influencers, manny’s comment section is filled with negative comments instead of positive comments especially because of his scandal of fair use of copyright content that he strike to smaller youtube channel earlier last year. nine out of ten comments are negative comments with emoticons of snake as one of the most used emoticons in the comment section that acts as a symbol of evil. from the comment section, it can be seen that comments towards the beauty influencers are mostly positive. moreover, the comments mostly applied informal language rather than formal form of communication. the connection between each youtube beauty influencer and their audience is reflected through the comments that are given by their viewers. nikkie, tati and jeffree in particular have a good relationship with their viewers whereas manny’s relationship with his viewers is considerably bad, following his scandal of copyright issue. the comment section in youtube acts as a place to leave criticisms and suggestions as well as compliments to their favorite youtube beauty influencers. through this digital media, a non-verbal communication is recorded as the main mechanism of communication and participation between the beauty influencers as the sender and their audiences as the receiver. conclusion there are two major findings that this study achieved. first, both male and female you tube share similar language features. those language features were color terms, harsh language, hedges, empty adjectives, intensifier, slang, rapport and report talk, direct and indirect opinion quoting other people and the use of extensive vocabulary. however, even though some features are shared by both genders, male and female beauty influencers still showed specific characteristics in their speech. for example, the color terms expressed by females were using associative words while males used basic color terms. also in the use of slang, female speakers limited the use of slangs to those related to makeup and beauty, while the male speakers used more general slang words. these results indicated that male and female beauty influencers still maintain their respective gender language style although their audiences are from the opposite gender. in other words, male influencers did not accommodate their speech towards their female audiences. regarding the comments, most viewers gave clara herlina karjo & stephani wijaya the language features of male and female beauty influencers in youtube videos 210 positive comments towards the beauty influencers. however the comments towards the female speakers mostly relate to the speakers’ personal matters; however to the males they commented on the products being reviewed. for future research, researchers are suggested to find data from the opposite situation. for example, researchers can analyze the speech of women who are working in male dominant environment, such as women who are working in offshore oil exploration. moreover, the data can be taken from movie or real life interaction. references bimler, d. l., kirkland, j., & jameson, k. a. 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(2013). you just dont understand. new york: harper collins. thomson, r., murachver, t., & green, j. (2001). where is gender in gendered language? psychological sciencce, 12(2), 171-175. doi: 10.1111%2f1467-9280.00329. wahyuningsih, s. (2018). men and women differences in using language: a case study of students at stain kudus. journal of english education, literature and culture, 3(1), 79-90. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 377 how literate am i about assessment: evidence from indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers syafi’ul anam english department, faculty of languages and arts state university of surabaya, surabaya, indonesia email: syafiul.anam@unesa.ac.id nanin verina widya putri language and literature study program, postgraduate school state university of surabaya, surabaya, indonesia email: nanin.19029@mhs.unesa.ac.id apa citation: anam, s. & putri, n. v. w. (2021). how literate am i about assessment: evidence from indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 377-388. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4374 received: 15-02-2021 accepted: 02-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 abstract: language assessment literacy (lal) for teachers is a pivotal content area which teachers must have for their prefessional development. despite increasing interest in language assessment, research focusing on lal of pre-service and in-service teachers, especially in indonesian efl context, has yet to receive due attention. nevertheless, understanding pre-service and in-service teachers’ literacy of classroom assessment is essential for the quality of classroom assessment practice, hence the improvement of language learning and teaching. this study aimed to investigate indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers’ literacy of classroom assessment. using a quantitative approach with ex-post facto research design, this study examined the extent of assessment literacy among efl pre-service and in-service teachers. participants were 60 english department students who have done teaching practicum courses and 41 in-service teachers in the indonesian province of east java. the finding revealed that the pre-service and in-service teachers perceived a moderate level of assessment literacy. further, the two groups of participants demonstrated a statistically significant difference in overall assessment literacy, as well as in two of its dimensions, namely administering and scoring assessment results and alternative assessment. the findings of this study could shed light to the understanding of efl pre-service and in-service teachers’ literacy of classroom assessment. keywords: assessment literacy; pre-service teachers; in-service teachers; classroom assessment introduction assessment is acknowledged as an inseparable part of the teaching and learning process (ashraf & zolfaghari, 2018; bijsterbosch, béneker, kuiper, & van der schee, 2019; cheng & fox, 2017; popham, 2009). without assessment, teachers will be difficult to identify the extent of students’ abilities, and students have no information about their current performance. it implies that assessment results enable teachers and students to understand how teaching and learning take place. however, to implement assessment practice successfully, teachers need to understand the basic principles of classroombased assessment. more importantly, they need to know how to employ their knowledge and principles of assessment in classroom practice. to this end, teachers across the educational context should be aware of their assessment ability and knowledge in order to develop students’ mastery of designated lessons. in language classrooms, english language teachers’ ability to implement assessment is considered as one of the most crucial skills. the way teachers practice assessment in the classroom can influence students’ learning quality. as umam and indah (2020) pointed out, how teachers assess students’ performance has a meaningful impact on everything in the classroom. similarly, zulaiha and mulyono (2020) have highlighted that the success of assessment practice could influence students' achievement. for this reason, teachers need to have adequate knowledge and skill of assessment to support classroom assessment practice (jeong, 2013; koh, burke, luke, gong, & tan, 2018; popham, 2009). the skill and knowledge of assessment is typically called assessment literacy, which is recognized as a crucial part of teachers’ professional development (abell & siegel, 2011; engelsen & smith, 2014; inbar-lourie, 2013; xu & brown, 2016). mailto:syafiul.anam@unesa.ac.id mailto:nanin.19029@mhs.unesa.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4347 syafi’ul anam & nanin verina widya putri how literate am i about assessment: evidence from indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers 378 language assessment literacy (lal) is generally defined as ‘basic understanding of sound assessment practice and the ability to apply that knowledge to measure language learning in different contexts’ (yan, zhang, & fan, 2018, p. 158). teachers identified as assessment-literate are able to determine what assessment method they have to implement, how they assess, and when they have to assess so that teachers can gain information about students’ performance (jeong, 2013; stiggins, 1999). specifically, language teachers who are assessment-literate refer to those who have knowledge and abilities of assessment integrated with language-specific competencies (inbar-lourie, 2008). they have general assessment knowledge, understand the purposes of language assessment, know appropriate methods, and are capable of interpreting assessment practice (inbar-lourie, 2008; zulaiha, mulyono, & ambarsari, 2020). lal has three main components, including skills, knowledge, and principles (davies, 2008; deygers & malone, 2019; fulcher, 2012). consequently, language teachers are expected to master the concept of assessment theory which consists of knowledge of classroom assessment combined with language pedagogy (inbar-lourie, 2008; yan et al., 2018; zolfaghari & ahmadi, 2016). it is supported by harding and kremmel’s (2016) statement that language teachers, who frequently conduct classroom assessment, need to be “conversant and competent in the principles and practice of language assessment” (p.415). when they are assessment-literate, they are able to monitor students’ progress, know students' current improvement, and promote learning (earl, 2013). to help students gain their learning goals, teachers should be aware of improving their assessment literacy so that they can implement appropriate methods in classroom assessment (xu & brown, 2016). moreover, since they have learned about language assessment in pre-service education, they are expected to create meaningful assessment for the improvement of students’ learning. however, recent studies have showed that second/foreign language teachers still lack lal (lam, 2019; nemati, alavi, mohebbi, & masjedlou, 2017; popham, 2001; qian, 2014; tsagari & vogt, 2017). for example, a study by nemati et. al., (2017), investigating the assessment ability of iranian english teachers, demonstrated that teachers have inadequate assessment knowledge and training in writing skill. another study in hong kong context with similar results comes from qian (2014). it examined school-based english language assessment, and the result revealed english teachers’ low ability in marking skill when assessing learners’ speaking ability. the reasons why teachers have inadequate lal vary, such as contextual factors (i.e. assessment policy, stakeholders, resources, and constraints) and experiential factors (i.e. assessment development and use) (crusan, plakans, & gebril, 2016; vogt & tsagari, 2014; yan et al., 2018). the studies underscore that language teachers still face many challenges in assessment practice. despite the significance of assessment literacy for language teachers, it has yet to receive much attention from efl indonesian researchers (zulaiha, et al., 2020). a recent study by zulaiha et. al (2020), one among very few, investigated efl teachers' assessment literacy through their perception in the indonesian context. they asserted that efl teachers in indonesia were assessment-literate and aware of assessment principles. however, they asserted that they did not explore the quality of teachers’ assessment practice. another study by zulaiha and mulyono (2020) surveyed training needs of assessment literacy among 147 junior high school efl teachers. the finding showed that teachers expected to have abilities to select tests for use, develop test specifications, and develop test tasks and items. the other study of in-service teachers by umam and indah (2020) revealed that inservice english teachers have poor level of assessment literacy, which contradicts with the finding of luthfiyyah and basyari’s (2020) study, revealing a moderate literacy level of efl secondary teachers. the previous studies of lal conducted in indonesian and overseas are predominantly focused on in-service english language teachers (e.g. koh et al., 2018; lam, 2019; nemati et al., 2017; tsagari & vogt, 2017; yan et al., 2018; zulaiha & mulyono, 2020; zulaiha et al., 2020). consequently, empirical evidence about preservice teachers’ knowledge and skills of assessment is very limited, let alone from indonesian context. the evidence is important as the information of their level of assessment literacy. when they have poor literacy of assessment, they will ‘be less likely to help students attain higher levels of academic achievement’ (herrera & macías, 2015, p. 304). they should have more opportunities in assessment training during their education program to increase their professional english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 379 development (lopez & bernal, 2009). pre-service teachers also need to improve their knowledge and skills to allow them design the task and implement authentic assessment to prepare realworld practice properly. with adequate assessment literacy, they can utilize assessment data to support instructional practices and employ classroom-based assessment effectively (popham, 2009). regarding the previous studies already reviewed, examining assessment literacy of preservice and in-service teachers in indonesian efl classroom was worth doing. extending the research focus to indonesian efl classroom benefits assessment practice as well as teaching learning processes (edwards, 2017; willis, adie, & klenowski, 2013). for these reasons, the present study aimed to investigate the extent to which pre-service and in-service indonesian efl teachers rated their level of classroom assessment literacy, and whether they differed in classroom assessment literacy. method the study employed a quantitative approach with ex-post facto research. a total of 101 participants (42 male and 59 female) were recruited through convenience sampling, meaning that all the participants took part on the basis of their availability (weathington, cunningham, & pittenger, 2010). the participants comprised 60 english department students from one state university and two private universities who have done teaching practicum courses and 41 in-service teachers in east java. all participants reported having taken assessment courses when they did their undergraduate degree in english education, and in-service teachers also reported learning assessment when attending teacher trainings. all the in-service teachers had a range of teaching experience between 1 to 18 years. most of the inservice teachers taught in state secondary schools (64%) and the remainders taught in private secondary schools. the participants’ assessment literacy was measured using language assessment literacy scale (lals). the instrument was administered in english through google form. it gauged the participants’ perceived literacy in english classroom assessment, comprising the dimensions: (1) designing test/assessment, (2) administering and scoring assessment results, (3) alternative assessment, (4) validity and reliability issues, (5) using assessment results to make decisions in total, the instrument had 25 items, with a six-point likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all skilled) to 6 (highly skilled). the items were adapted from those developed by zhang and burry-stock (1997) and jarr (2012), as well as prompted by important literature on assessment literacy (coombe, vafadar, & mohebbi, 2020; mertler, 2003; national council on measurement in education (ncme), american federation of teachers (aft), 1990). to ensure content validity, the scale then was reviewed by two experts in language assessment, and necessary revisions were made accordingly. the researchers calculated reliability coefficients, for the 25-item lals (.93) and its five dimensions: designing test/assessment instrument (.80), administering and scoring assessment results (.86), alternative assessment (.84), validity and reliability issues (.88), and using assessment results to make decisions (.90). the instrument’ reliability coefficients suggested satisfactory consistency for research purposes. the survey data were then analysed quantitatively using descriptive and multivariate analysis of variance (manova). the descriptive statistics comprising mean and standard deviation as the summary statistics of the data set to determine the extent of pre-service and in-service english teachers’ assessment literacy. the descriptive statistics of the individual items in each subscale and score of the five dimensions were analysed and presented to display the level of assessment literacy the in-service and preservice teachers had, whether low, moderate, or high. to allow for such categorization, the participants’ responses were grouped into three levels of assessment literacy using equal cut-off points on the scale: low (1.00-2.70), moderate (2.71-4.40) and high (4.41-6.00). additionally, the one-way manova was employed to examine whether there were differences between the pre-service and in-service teachers in assessment literacy, as well as its five dimensions. this multivariate test was preferred instead of multiple independent sample t-tests as this could reduce the possibility of type 1 error (pallant, 2016). findings and discussion level of literacy in classroom assessment among pre-service and in-service teachers in order to address the first research objective about the level of literacy in efl classroom assessment for indonesian pre-service and inservice teachers, means and standard deviations the lals were calculated. the participants’ syafi’ul anam & nanin verina widya putri how literate am i about assessment: evidence from indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers 380 literacy in efl classroom assessment was analysed from five dimensions, as displayed in figure 1. the figure displayed a moderate level of assessment literacy for all participants, regardless of whether they were in-service teachers or preservice efl teachers (m=4.37 and m=4.03 respectively), suggesting that the participants had good understanding and skills related to efl classroom assessment. specifically, in-service teachers, on average, perceived themselves highly literate in administering and scoring assessment results (m=4.55) and using the results to make decisions (m= 4.60). on the other hands, preservice teachers only showed lower literacy of the two aspects of assessment, m= 4.12 and m= 4.12 respectively. meanwhile, both pre-service and inservice teachers only reported moderate level of literacy in the three other aspects of assessment, designing test/assessment instrument, alternative assessment, and validity and reliability issues, with the mean scores ranging from 3.96 to 4.38. compared to other aspects of assessment, the participants seem to be less confident with their ability in determining validity and reliability to ensure test quality. figure 1. means of assessment literacy dimention a closer inspection of the individual items for lals indicated that pre-service and in-service efl teachers felt capable of doing classroom assessment, with a mean range for all items measuring literacy assessment from 3.68 to 4.55 for pre-service teachers and from 3.71 to 4.74 for in-service teachers (table 1). the pre-service and in-service teachers shared similarities in two of the four highest rated items on the ability in using assessment results to improve teaching-learning process (m= 4.25; m=4.74 respectively) and the ability in ensuring fairness in assessing students (m= 4.55; m= 4.62 respectively). the two groups also rated their ability lowest on two items measuring literacy in determining the validity of objective tests (m= 3.72 for pre-service teachers; m=3.74 for in-service teachers) and performance assessment (m=3.70 for pre-service; and m=3.79 for in-service teachers). however, the two groups of participants also differed in other highest and lowest rated items. the two other items rated highest by the pre-service teachers were related to the ability to give feedback to students (m=4.20) and the ability to score students’ responses in listening and reading assessment (m=4.18). meanwhile, other highest ratings by in-service teachers were found on two items on the perceived ability to use formative assessment to monitor student learning (m=4.58) and the ability to use various test items for listening and reading (m=4.67). further inspection of the items also showed that the pre-service teachers rated their literacy lowest on the items measuring ability to develop blueprint/test specifications and using portfolio while their in-service teacher counterparts rated their literacy lowest on the items measuring ability to use reflective journal/learning log and to analyse items for better quality test. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 381 table 1. means and standard deviation of the assessment literacy items no item pre-service in-service designing test/assessment mean sd mean sd 1 developing blueprint/test specifications 3.68 .79 4.33 .61 2 developing various performance assessment based on learning objectives 4.08 .94 4.50 .67 3 developing various test items for receptive skills based on learning objectives 4.10 .99 4.43 .67 4 constructing a model answer for scoring essay questions 4.03 .94 4.38 .62 5 developing analytic and holistic scoring rubrics 4.05 1.03 4.29 .63 administering and scoring assessment results 6 implementing various performance assessment of speaking & writing skills 4.03 .99 4.48 .63 7 implementing various test items for listening & reading 4.12 .97 4.67 .61 8 scoring students’ task performance 4.17 .99 4.52 .63 9 scoring students’ responses of receptive skills 4.18 .99 4.55 .70 alternative assessment 10 using portfolio assessments 3.80 1.13 4.38 .54 11 using self-assessment 4.13 1.06 4.50 .59 12 using peer-assessment in english class 4.03 .66 4.50 .59 13 using formal observation in english class 3.87 1.16 4.45 .63 14 using informal, continuous, non-test type of assessment 3.93 .97 4.52 .63 15 using reflective journal/learning log 4.02 1.20 3.81 .71 validity and reliability issues 16 ensuring fairness in assessing students 4.55 1.11 4.62 .62 17 determining the reliability of objective tests 4.02 1.02 4.12 .67 18 determining the validity of objective tests 3.72 .89 3.74 .77 19 determining the reliability of performance assessment 3.92 1.11 3.83 .76 20 determining the validity of performance assessment 3.70 .79 3.79 .87 21 conducting item analysis 3.92 1.06 3.71 .80 using assessment results to make decisions 22 using assessment results when making decisions about individual students 4.03 1.01 4.57 .63 23 using formative classroom assessments to monitor student learning 4.00 1.09 4.58 .70 24 using assessment results to improve teachinglearning process 4.25 1.03 4.74 .66 25 giving feedback to students based on information from tests/assessment to improve students’ performance 4.20 1.02 4.52 .67 differences in literacy assessment between preservice and in-service teachers one-way manova was conducted to determine whether there were statistically significant differences in the mean scores of five dimensions of assessment literacy for pre-service and inservice teachers. prior to running the manova, preliminary analyses of the assumption and outlier were conducted. using the outlier labelling rule of hoaglin, iglewicz, and tukey (1986), there were no univariate outliers identified in either preservice and in-service group in the socres of five assessment literacy dimensions. multivariate outlier detection was also performed using mahalanobis d2 at p <.001. case no. 62 was spotted as multivariate outlier as its p value was less than .001 and then deleted accordingly. the visual assessment of histograms also suggested approximately normal distribution of the scores. as indicated in scatterplots, no curvilinear shapes were found and each pair of the scores in the two groups were linearly related. the assumption of homogeneity of variance-covariance was violated, the box’s m test value of 66.79, at p = .00 which was significant. however, with the group sizes are over 30, manova is robust to such violation. due syafi’ul anam & nanin verina widya putri how literate am i about assessment: evidence from indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers 382 to the violation, pillai’s trace statistic was reported instead of other statistics (tabachnick & fidell, 2001, p. 252). the results of the analysis revealed a statistically significant difference in overall assessment literacy scores of the pre-service and in-service teachers, f (5, 93) = 3.39, p < .005; pillai’s trace = 3.388; partial η2 = .154. the partial eta squared suggested that the effect of teacher category (preservice and in-service) on the combined scores of the assessment literacy was only 15%, which was small. the result means that in-service teachers were perceived more literate in classroom assessment than their pre-service teacher counterparts. following up the significant difference, multiple f-tests were performed to determine where the difference lay between the two groups of participants. a bonferroni correction was used to account for multiple tests being run; therefore, statistical significance at p  .01 is accepted (see tabachnick & fidell 2007, p. 270). as table 2 displays, a significant difference existed in two dimensions of literacy assessment, namely administering and scoring assessment results (f (1, 97) = 6.664; p = .01) and alternative assessment (f (1, 97) = 6.575; p = .01). the effect size of teacher category on administering and scoring assessment results and alternative assessment was relatively small, partial η2 = .064 and partial η2 = .063 respectively. the mean scores suggest that in-service teachers reported higher perceived literacy in administering and scoring assessment (m= 4.55, sd= .54) and alternative assessment (m= 4.36, sd=.45) than pre-service teachers (m= 4.12, sd= .82; m= 3.96, sd=.77) did. however, no significant difference was observed in the other dimensions of assessment literacy: using assessment results to make decisions (f (1, 97) = 4.347; p = .04; partial η2 = .043), designing test/assessment instrument f (1, 97) = 3.452; p = .06; partial η2 = .034), and validity and reliability issues f (1, 97) = 0.42; p = .83; partial η2 = .00). the nonsignificant differences suggest that the pre-service and inservice teachers didn't differ in the three areas, and the effect of the teacher category was very small. table 2. differences in assessment literacy between pre-service and in-service teachers variable pre-service in-service partial eta squared (η2) m(sd) m/sd) f (1, 99) p designing test/assessment 3.99 (.73) 4.38 (.47) 3.452 .06 .034 administering and scoring assessment results 4.12 (.82) 4.55 (.54) 6.664 .01 .064* alternative assessment 3.96 (.77) 4.36 (.45) 6.575 .01 .063* validity and reliability issues 3.96 (.77) 3.97 (.61) .042 .84 .000 using assessment results to make decisions 4.12 (.94) 4.60 (.51) 4.347 .04 .043 note: m (mean scores), sd (standard deviation), * p <.01 in view of less evidence about assessment literacy in efl classrooms, this study attempted to examine how efl indonesian pre-service and in-service teachers perceived their knowledge and skills of assessment in language classroom. in general, the findings reveal that the two groups of teachers claimed having quite good understanding and skills related to efl classroom language assessment. this suggests that the teachers are quite conversant and competent in practicing efl language assessment. this empirical evidence supports the finding of a study by luthfiyyah and basyari’s (2020), showing a moderate degree of assessment literacy among indonesian secondary teachers. a similar finding of a study by wise et.al (1991) also indicated pre-service teachers were quite skilled in assessment and measurement. the perception of being knowledgeable and skilled in classroom assessment can possibly be attributed to university coursework/training the participants have taken or trial and error in the classroom. the finding of the present study is certainly worth noting as teachers are required to possess adequate knowledge and skills of assessment to support assessment practice in efl classroom (deluca & klingerb, 2010; jeong, 2013; koh et al., 2018; popham, 2009). with such a literacy level, the participants seem to know various assessment methods they can use appropriately, to be capable of monitoring students’ learning progress, and make use of the results for the improvement of students’ performance in classrooms (jeong, 2013; stiggins, 1999). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 383 another finding shows that both pre-service and in-service teachers rated their literacy highest on the item about the ability in ensuring fairness in assessing students. this implies that they have conviction and strong intention to be fair in their assessment practice. the finding accords with that of studies conducted by phillips (2002) and tierney (2010) about teachers’ high awareness of students’ perception of fairness in classroom assessment practice. the awareness is crucial for teachers to have sound assessment practices and demonstrate school accountability for teachinglearning processes. in addition, with the increasing demands for recognizing diverse students and data-driven decision making, maintaining this principle of assessment is inevitable (campbell, 2013; tierney, 2013). teachers need to be aware of the importance of assessing their students fairly, especially in performance-based or authentic assessment. such awareness helps teachers conduct assessment without any forms of favouritism or bias. bias is likely to happen in classroom assessment which frequently uses subjective measurement and involves personal contacts. for example, teachers might favour students who are likeable or wellbehaved but mark down those who have negative or annoying traits. teachers’ conviction of being fair, as found in this study, can prevent such favouritism, while at the same time the teachers, as well as the school, need to have measures, like using the same assessment tasks or well-defined criteria, to ensure fairness in assessment. the other finding that both in-service and preservice teachers rated items lowest on the perceived ability to determine validity of performance and objective tests and to conduct item analysis to ensure test quality is no surprise. a previous study by brookhart (2001) demonstrated a similar finding that teachers lacked expertise in quality test construction and valid assessment procedure. it is likely that assessment-related trainings or courses the participants took didn't give adequate attention to issues related to validities and item analysis. the participants might also be less interested in validity evaluation because it is considered complicated and only dealing with psychometric properties of assessment. this finding is certainly concerning as validity is the main principle of language assessment (bonner, 2013; brown, 2010). the absence of the condition for validity will affect the quality of the instrument designed and used by teachers. therefore, raising teachers’ awareness of validity evaluation is crucial in ensuring the accuracy of an assessment and inference made by teachers based on the results of assessment. this is because teachers and schools currently have greater autonomy making decisions about students based on assessment, such as grades, promotions, and graduation (cirocky & anam, 2021), following the ministry of education and culture’s recent policy of “merdeka belajar” (freedom of learning) (circular no 1, 2020). through trainings or independent learning, teachers should be made more aware of the basic tenets of validity when constructing classroom assessment. for example, the teachers might ask their peers to check the content validity of the instrument in classroom assessment. they do not need to conduct any complex statistical analyses for validation process, typically required in that of high stake testing. the teachers also have the knowledge and ability of designing a rubric with well-defined score categories based on instructional objectives in their language classroom. additionally, the increasing attention to english as a lingua franca (elf) demands more effort from language teachers also need to learn more about validity and test constructs (lazaraton, 2017). the result of the manova demonstrates that inservice teachers had higher overall assessment literacy score, as well as the scores of administering and scoring assessment and alternative assessment dimensions, than their preservice teacher counterparts. this suggests that inservice teachers have better mastery of assessment theory and combine it with language pedagogy so that they are conversant in administering and scoring, as well as using various alternative assessment, like portfolios, learning log, peer assessment or self-assessment, suitable for their students. this finding lends support to that of plake, impara and fager’s (1993) study that preservice teachers exhibited somewhat weaker skills in classroom assessment than in-service teachers did. in-service teachers’ higher literacy found in this study might result from experiential factors, like experiences of developing and using assessment in their own classroom, teaching experience, teacher trainings, learning from peers in english teacher association (crusan et al., 2016; vogt & tsagari, 2014; yan et al., 2018). such experiential factors might raise their awareness of improving their assessment literacy so that they design and use appropriate methods of classroom assessment. pre-service teachers do not have such experiential factors. contextual factors, like the policy of assessment in merdeka syafi’ul anam & nanin verina widya putri how literate am i about assessment: evidence from indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers 384 belajar and resources provided by schools, might also make the difference in the degree of assessment literacy between in-service and preservice teachers. with the policy in place, teachers inevitably have to develop their knowledge and skills in classroom assessment and to implement them at school. the current study’s findings have pedagogical implications for secondary school teachers, school, and teacher educators. firstly, teachers have to be actively engaged in various activities of professional development specifically focusing on classroom assessment. such engagement will contribute to improving their knowledge and skills in assessment, which will then help students achieve learning goals and improve language skills. with their autonomy in hand, the teachers will be able to improve their literacy assessment through self-initiated or school-mandated professional development. secondly, school management should facilitate teachers to be actively engaged in teacher trainings or other activities which can enhance their knowledge in assessment. requiring teachers to be active in english teacher association or providing them with rich resources of classroom assessment can be effective forms of developing their assessment literacy. they also need to be ensured that school supports their autonomy to exercise their skills of classroom assessment because they have extensive knowledge of their students and classroom. school can also create collaborative environments in which teachers can share ideas and make joint work related to designing and administering assessment. thirdly, teacher educators need to review the contents of assessment coursework by giving adequate attention to validity related issues and awarding more semester hours. they also should provide student teachers more practical experiences in developing quality assessment instruments and ask them to research real practices of classroombased assessment so that the course content is relevant to the assessment realities of the classroom. conclusion the present study concludes that the efl preservice and in-service teachers’ literacy of classroom assessment were at moderate level, suggesting quite good understanding and skills in classroom assessment. specifically, the participants perceived themselves less capable in developing test specification, determining validity of test instrument, and performing item analysis, but they felt more capable of using assessment results to improve english teaching and of giving feedback to students’ work or performance. in addition, and there is a significant difference between assessment literacy scores of the preservice and in-service teachers. those findings should be read with caution in terms of generalizability because the participants of this study were selected through convenience sample. consequently, future research should involve more participants randomly to allow for generalizability of the results to other contexts. in addition, the findings of the study were drawn from self-report data only indicating perceived assessment literacy, which is although useful for diagnostic information. so, further studies are expected to measure the knowledge and skills of classroom assessment through a test which is able to allow for a behavioural measure of literacy. the use of such an instrument measures actual assessment 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(1997). assessment practices inventory: a multivariate analysis of teachers’ perceived assessment competency. paper presented at the annual meeting of the national council on measurement in education. chicago, illinois: eric. retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed408333.pdf zolfaghari, f., & ahmadi, a. (2016). assessment literacy components across subject matters. cogent education, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2016.125256 1 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 387 zulaiha, s., & mulyono, h. (2020). exploring junior high school efl teachers ’ training needs of assessment literacy exploring junior high school efl teachers ’ training needs of assessment literacy. cogent education, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2020.177294 3 zulaiha, s., mulyono, h., & ambarsari, l. (2020). an investigation into efl teachers’ assessment literacy: indonesian teachers’ perceptions and classroom practice. european journal of contemporary education, 9(1), 189–201. https://doi.org/10.13187/ejced.2020.1.189 syafi’ul anam & nanin verina widya putri how literate am i about assessment: evidence from indonesian efl pre-service and in-service teachers 388 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 313 early childhood language politeness strategy model in multiethnic communication dian eka chandra wardhana department of indonesian education, postgraduate program of university of bengkulu, indonesia email: dec.wardhana@unib.ac.id noermanzah department of indonesian education, postgraduate program of university of bengkulu, indonesia e-mail: noermanzah@unib.ac.id apa citation: wardhana, d. e. c. & noermanzah (2021). early childhood language politeness strategy model in multi-ethnic communication. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 313322. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4356 received: 15-02-2021 accepted: 25-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction children's language development is a marker of their cognitive development (rahayu, 2019; noermanzah, 2017). the development of language obtained by children is able to provide an image of the child's socio-cultural conditions (supriyanti, 2016). as community members, children learn what they hear from the speech community in which they grew up (molai, 2019; mukalel, 2003). children acquire language to become members of a culture in which they were born, and develop an understanding of the cognitive and social aspects (akhyar, 2019; hoyte, 2017). the value construction model obtained by children currently relies on independent reports of mothers, this results in a lack of data on the acquisition of politeness supplements, although several studies have described the use of politeness strategies used by preschool children. the research findings reveal several different politeness strategies when it is used to communicate with different speech partners (kushartanti, 2009; dardjowidjojo, 2000). the two studies descriptively show that at a very early age, children are aware of social distance, age, and authority with partners, so that children are able to use different politeness strategies when talking to their speech partners. the same thing was found by (wardhana, 2006), that the children of immigrants in the new land used a language system elaborated by linguistic politeness with the native ethnic culture in bengkulu, so that the speaker's directive speech act representation was expressed in direct mode, direct mode with a marker of politeness, and indirect mode. seken (2010) confirmed, when talking with speech partners of other cultural backgrounds, these children were also able to "share" ethnicity with the culture of the partner. speakers of japanese children also do something similar when talking to foreigners (nakamura, 2012), that is, children use language that tends to lower abstract: the purpose of this study is to describe the strategy model of early childhood language politeness in multi-ethnic communication with different social rules in bengkulu. the research method used was a crosssectional study design, with a study of subjects of different ages. the research subjects referred to were children aged 2, 3, 4 and 5 years in bengkulu. data collection was carried out by participating and non-participating observations, accompanied by data recording using an electronic recording device and field note cards. data analysis was performed using flow analysis techniques. the results show that the strategy model for early childhood language politeness in multi-ethnic communication in bengkulu is using elaborate politeness acquisition model and children's language politeness acquisition model that takes into account social distance when speaking by stringing 3 words when greeting, introducing oneself, expressing respect, thanking. love, apologize, ask permission, ask for help, ask for things, command, and promise. the series of words are meant to reflect the character development of early childhood. keywords: politeness strategy models; early childhood; multi-ethnic communication mailto:dec.wardhana@unib.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4356 dian eka chandra wardhana & noermanzah early childhood language politeness strategy model in multi-ethnic communication 314 themselves and elevate the person they are talking to. then, nafissi & shafiee (2019) and miller (2016) explained that early childhood language strategies are also influenced by teachers. these studies use data in the play environment and when children are at school. based on this phenomenon, a more comprehensive study on politeness strategies in preschool children is needed (kushartanti, 2009), especially in terms of obtaining politeness in terms of the substance of human thoughts when speaking. this is important, because in fact television media broadcasts and input received by children outside of school are very influential on children's language acquisition. this phenomenon affects the fact that children aged 3, 4 and 5 years are children who are developing their language (golden age), including how children use the language for communication purposes (landreth, 1958). a child who acquires language has a strong and incredibly complex system (zahro, noermanzah, & syafryadin, 2020). if we understand how children accomplish this task, we will know the substance of a human mind that works to acquire language, including the politeness of using language. the assumption is that if the child is able to use polite language, then the child is considered to understand a number of social rules of language. these rules relate to children's activities when greeting, introducing themselves, expressing respect, thanking, apologizing, asking for permission, asking for help, asking for things, ordering, and making promises. based on this phenomenon, the problem arises, how to obtain children's language politeness when communicating in multi-ethnic communication? this problem phenomenon occurs because language activities are an activity that is manifested from the interaction between language and thought (kusmiarti, yuniati, & noermanzah, 2020). this activity can also be observed in the speech of preschoolers, because they have begun to be able to communicate with their speech partners. although sometimes the form of speech is monologue or egocentric speech. egocentric speech is known when children speak according to what they think and feel (dawud, 2010). viewed from the development stage of piaget's thinking, the embodiment of this egocentric speech is in the form of a monologue discourse and if it is conditioned and stimulated by suitable media, it will creatively create children dynamically forming language in the form of dialogue in the form of discourse (dworetzky in dawud, 2010), that is, the acquisition of content constituents is better or earlier than the constituents of the function. this type of acquisition is similar to children's language acquisition when the child is still in the early stages of acquiring simple sentences called telegraphic utterances in the context of informal spoken language (hoff, 2009). thus, the form of speech that is exposed is daily indonesian speech. for example, it is characterized by the use of levy constituents from the local language or the language of the caregiver, so that the dominance of cultural influences is very likely. from the point of view of language acquisition, this phenomenon is the use of language learning strategies for communication. in communicating, speakers mix code or do code switching for the first and second languages (amaliani, triana, & riyanto, 2020). language learning strategies are an effort to accumulate the rules of the language learned and efforts to internalize them, through language transfer. in this study, what happened was the transfer from the second language to the first language (hoff, 2009) in accordance with the objectives of the established communication. according to vigotsky in hoff (2009), every child is born with a set of elements of basic thinking functions, for example, the ability to pay attention, consider, understand, and remember. this basic ability is an innate ability. it is culture that transforms these cognitive abilities into higher abilities through social interaction, in particular, through the teaching and use of language (eadie, stark, & niklas, 2019; nafissi & shafiee, 2019; méndez, hammer, lopez, & blair, 2019). based on this explanation, children will experience accelerated communication skills and be able to compose language forms due to social interaction with speech partners. various abilities resulting from this interaction include coexistential interactions of authority based on conclusions from the caregiver's or mother's explanation, the absorption of information from electronic media (for example in analo gical english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 315 reasoning based on conclusions from television information), penchant for listening to fairy tales or listening to adults when reading story books, and the use of language in daily life (for example in quasi-logical reasoning, causality, and generalizations that are based on conclusions from children's daily experiences. this is supported by muraishi in nakamura (2012) that children initially get keigo and polite linguistic expressions, then they begin to present these linguistic rules, learn different levels of speech by interacting with a wider variety of society and mimicking adult language behavior. muraishi in nakamura (2012) claimed that early childhood children actually want to use verbs with a nuance of respect for speech and simple language partners, but these efforts are often generated with grammatical and relational errors. even mackie (1983) in nakamura (2012) reported that early childhood children control politeness strategies such as the use of heizing (cryptic/indirect language) long before they master honorofic subjects and objects. for this reason, this study describes the strategy model of early childhood language politeness in multi-ethnic communication in bengkulu. method the research method used a qualitative method with a cross-sectional design (dardjowidjojo, 2010). this design characteristic is an assessment of data collected from subjects with various age characteristics (3, 4, and 5 years) within 10 months. observations were conducted (8 to 10 hours) every day and observing the model of acquiring politeness in the subject's language in multiethnic communication at a certain stage. by stimulating a conversation, the model of acquiring politeness can be observed, recorded, and noted. research settings the bengkulu setting is interesting to be used as a research background because the phenomenon of speech people in bengkulu is a multi-ethnic speech society with a variety of ethnic cultures. the spoken community in bengkulu consists of 9 ethnic groups and various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, including; (1) bengkulu malay, (2) minang, (3) batak, (4) rejang, (5) serawai, (6) javanese, (7) balinese, (8) chinese, (9) palembang, and (10) various other ethnicities. based on research reports (wardhana, 2006; seken, 2010; dawud 2010), the speech community with various ethnicities affects children's language input exposure and the purpose of children's communication. data and research subjects the data of this research is the speech of children when communicating with speech partners in the context of multi-ethnic communication. the utterance is utterance that reflects the speaker acquisition model in multi-ethnic communication and the responses that accompany it. in addition, field notes about the context of communication obtained from observations of researchers in the field complement the children's speech, so that the research data is intact. the subjects of this study are children aged 2, 3, 4, and 5 years with the javanese-malay dual language ability of bengkulu. the form of verbal interaction in a speaker's communication with various speech partners can be identified based on the use of speech acts with certain characteristics. from the results of recording speeches and observations of speaker's language behavior, it can be identified the model form of speaker politeness acquisition in multi-ethnic communication in bengkulu. the research subjects are eight children aged 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old who are in the healthy category and able to communicate based on the standardization of children's mental and motor development that has been formulated by the government. the determination of the number of subjects is based on the opinion of walfram (in rofi'uddin, 2006) that in psycholinguistic research research subjects can consist of five to ten research subjects. the determination of the subject of this study is based on the principle of adequacy of the data required in this study. the determination of the eight subjects is carried out on the grounds that with the eight subjects it is predicted that sufficient data can be obtained to answer the problems of this study. however, if it turns out that the data acquisition has not met the target as expected, then additional subjects are carried out to meet the sufficiency of the data. the eight subjects used in this study have the following characteristics: (1) come from an educated family environment, with a high school, s-1 and s-2 educational background, javanesedian eka chandra wardhana & noermanzah early childhood language politeness strategy model in multi-ethnic communication 316 malay bengkulu, (2) since living in bengkulu, they have been introduced to bengkulu, javanese and bengkulu malay, in other words the speakers from the beginning have lived in the bengkulu javanese-malay bilingual environment, and (3) reside in the bengkulu javanese-malay bilingual community. data collection technique the data collection technique used is the observation technique. the observation technique is carried out with participation and nonparticipation. observations are focused on the children's speech activities in carrying out verbal interactions with various speech partners. the observation technique is complemented by field notes and recording. data recording is carried out to obtain data in the form of acquiring models of children's speech politeness with various speech partners. this data is needed to answer the research problem, namely to examine the model of acquiring child politeness in multi-ethnic communication. data collection in the field carried out through observation pays close attention to the setting and context. the point is an event or case being observed is observed and recorded in the conditions to whom the child is speaking, psychological conditions, physical conditions, situations of where and when the speech occurs. interviews with parents were also conducted for the purpose of triangulating the recorded data and field observation notes. research instruments in this study, the researcher acts as a key instrument. therefore, the data in this study are in the form of language acquisition behavior of a speaker which can only be understood through the interaction between the researcher and the subject and the factors that play a role in the subject's communication activities. meanwhile, the additional instruments used are observation guidelines and observation aids, namely an electronic recorder (tape recorder) and field recording tools. the observation guidelines in this study are prepared as signs regarding what to observe in conducting field observations. observation guidelines are prepared to collect data in the form of verbal speech uttered by the subject along with the context of the speech that accompanies children's interactions with their speech partners. in field observations, data recording are carried out, namely the speech of speakers with various speech partners. data recording is done using an electronic recording device (tape recorder), either secretly or known by subject. this is done to maintain the naturalness of the data obtained from all subjects. during the observation activity, field data are recorded. recording field data is needed to determine the context of speech which includes (1) psychological, physical, place, time, and narrative conditions during communication, (2) status and roles of children and speech partners, and (3) topics, as well as to who the child speaks when the interaction is taking place. data analysis to achieve the objectives of this study, various supporting data for this study are analyzed based on the flow analysis technique of miles & huberman (2009). this analysis technique is developed with the aim of explaining a phenomenon of acquiring politeness in the language of children aged under five in bengkulu in multi-ethnic communication. this flow technique in depth, utilizes the facts of language acquisition of children who are the target of research. by using this analysis technique, the researcher can have a free opportunity to interpret the recorded conversations obtained from the subject. furthermore, data organizing is carried out in the form of data presentation which is completed with context. the data conclusion is carried out based on the results of the analysis of the acquisition model of children's language politeness in multi-ethnic communication. the results of the data analysis are abstracted into provisional conclusions. to obtain the validity of the conclusions, it is carried out to check the validity of the research findings through data and theory checking by confirming the results of data analysis and related theories that have been described in the theoretical study. the aim is to obtain confirmation of the credibility of the research findings. data validity test test the validity of the data in this study is using triangulation, memberchecks, and discussions with experts. the triangulation used is the triangulation of data sources obtained from observations, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 317 recording, and field notes. memberchecking is done by documenting the data of each oral conversation which is transcribed into writing. then, discussions with experts are carried out by discussing the results of the interpretation of research data with several psycholinguistic experts so that the results of the interpretation of the early childhood language politeness strategy model in multi-ethnic communication are more profound and comprehensive. findings & discussion based on the results of the analysis that has been done, it is found that the acquisition of politeness in children's language when communicating with different language rules. the research findings that are intended are: (1) the model of acquiring politeness in elaborating children's language politeness with the language of the surrounding community which tends to be multi-ethnic in terms of the substance of the human mind when speaking; and (2) a model for acquiring children's language politeness which takes into account social distance when speaking. the research findings are discussed in the following description. model of acquiring politeness elaboration of children's language politeness with the language of the surrounding community which tends to be multi-ethnic when children communicate exposure to children's language when greeting, introducing themselves, expressing respect, thanking, apologizing, asking for permission, asking for help, asking for something, ordering, and promising is a reflection of children's language activities when they communicate with their speech partners. this is a sign that the child has acquired a language, and that the acquisition of the language is equipped with a strong and extraordinarily complex system. if we understand this acquisition, it will describe the substance of the human mind at work (hoff, 2009), especially when receiving input, storing, and exposing these inputs in context. studying language acquisition has a crucial role in the cognitive revolution. for example, when a child represents the ability to speak, and understands the language production carried out by his speech partner. this condition is a representation of language competence which is extraordinarily complex. the various preliminary requirements for competence possessed by children are accepted abilities without positive reinforcement in terms of language principles. this is simply analogous to the explanation of behaviorism theory which describes rats pushing a lever to get food, or why a cat salivates when he sees the person feeding him, so that when he sees that person always whines (meow, meow, meow) to be fed. another example of children's language exposure when communicating with two speech partners. the two speech partners have very different social and verbal behaviors. speech partner a tends to be vocally and physically aggressive, while speech partner b is the opposite, especially when they speak and behave with children. it turns out that early childhood (2 years) has displayed the politeness they have seen and heard (data no. 01 / b-lk / 100812). this means that when children develop behavioral values that can shape their identity. he used the principles of seeing and hearing. for example, when he behaves physically aggressively when asked to speak by speech partner a, then he acts the opposite when dealing with or speaking with speech partner b. the following data 01 / b-lk / 100812 is in the context of "the afternoon when a and b were greeting after a long period of absence. meet because of their respective activities, through early childhood (subject) who is accompanied by his grandmother and he immediately behaves aggressively towards b (both words and behavior). however, he immediately greeted and smiled friendly when a greeted him. model of acquiring children's language politeness which takes into account social distance when speaking six terms that are generally used to refer to speech partners in bengkulu culture that reflect social distancing, namely, "ayuk, abang, adik, bucik, bunga, and dang" the term ayuk (older brother in terms of age) is generally used. to designate all people who are family related to speakers of older age. ayuk, abang, dang, uda, kakak are used to address speech partners in the category closest to the most distant narrator with an older age. the terms ayuk, abang, dang, uda, kakak are used as a strategy to respect and develop the values of politeness to elevate speech partners who are older in age when they are invited to communicate. this dian eka chandra wardhana & noermanzah early childhood language politeness strategy model in multi-ethnic communication 318 communication activity includes activities of various kinds of social relations and various contexts that have to do with social activities. these social activities can be in the form of social activities with neighbors, communicating with the context of work, and social organization. these social activities vary widely, from gathering with close friends to those who are most distant. the terms ayuk, abang, dang, uda, kakak are generally used to refer to foreigners who have a higher age and social position than the speakers. in communication, the identity of the speaker, interlocutor, choice of style, level of speech used, and conversations involving children are characterized by the daily use of bengkulu malay. whereas someone who is involved as a participant is characterized by the use of the subtle bengkulu malay language. the choice of use of daily bengkulu malay and bengkulu malay is refined, depending on the type of participant when it is marked as ethical politeness, and is categorized as a form of politeness in language. if the language selection is wrong, the use of the language level will cause impoliteness. the use of daily bengkulu malay in a communication will be represented in the crude colloquial form of malay. meanwhile, the soft bengkulu malay language is a speech development that contains ancestral values which sometimes appear saccharistic because the child uses speech acts that reflect the speaker's assumptions by connecting the social distance between the speech partner and himself. example: “cini-cini duduk ayunda..cini!” (come on and on, sit down ayunda ... come here) the conversation took place during a visit by a friend in the village of argamakmur. researchers joined s2 and the conversation took place in the living room. these two expressions state that the host said he was welcome and then greeted his guests. the first phrase, in daily bengkulu malay, is addressed to s2. the malay language used implies close social relations with speech partners. in this case, the researcher is a stranger or a participant in the owner of the house. what could be characterized by the host's attitude towards the researcher at that time came with the s2, the researcher as a stranger (as a participant) to the host, who encouraged retaining attitudes towards the researcher at that time. the first speech is a type of positive politeness act that is clearly familiar as a marker of social dynamism with the suspension of the second language by filtering language usage, determining the distance of speakers and speech partners which are negative politeness acts. the following data examples are the values of social distance parameters for the attitudes of speakers and speech partners which are low (“zero”), apart from events that are essentially informal and friendly. it should be noted that the use of subtle levels of language is not always associated with a speaker's choice of strategy that reflects the intensity of politeness. the level of speech in a certain language can be seen to have a relationship with the level of politeness. javanese, for example, has been described as a language where the level of the speaker is used to relate the level of formality and the intensity of respect by the speaker. the higher the level of formality and respect in speech, the higher the politeness shown. this shows that in javanese, the higher the level of speech used by speakers, the politer is expected in communication events. meanwhile, in bengkulu malay, the use of subtle language variations is considered as a sign that speakers are elevating the level of speech partners in certain cases, indicating that "formality" is a communication situation with a high degree of nobility. however, although "raising the speech partner" can be a negative politeness strategy, the use of subtle language variations does not automatically lead to the intensity of the speaker to be polite. in addition, in some cases the selection of subtle variations and everyday speakers chooses to use subtle variations to show different strategies so that it can be said that their use is only a strategy of politeness. that is, social difference with social distance is reciprocal, this case shows that the participants are socially distant, and they will differ from one another. this is indicated by the reciprocal use of the subtle-speech level, as seen below. examples of speech: pn : “ni…. punyamu ya?” (“this…. yours huh?) mt : “dua…(sini) ya!” (two .. (here) yes! the politeness represented by pn is rude because pn is s2 (p1) who meets s1 (a man who works in a stone-making studio, who has never met him before). so the social distance between english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 319 children and s2 reflects the reciprocal use of a level of speech. the use of speech level can clearly be seen by someone in an environment that causes the feelings of the speech partner to hurt, so that the type of politeness becomes rude. this politeness fluctuates with the variables of the situation, social distance, and the influence focused on the fluctuation may be combined with "development of unpleasant feelings" and "priority of speech partners to whom the speech responds". language development in children begins with a question of how children improve the acquisition of language starting from the development of acquisition of sounds, words, word formation, syntax, and discourse or a concept that can then be used functionally. the strategy model for early childhood language politeness in multi-ethnic communication in bengkulu is using elaboration politeness acquisition model and children's language politeness acquisition model that takes into account social distance when speaking by arranging 3 words when greeting, introducing oneself, expressing respect, thanking, apologizing, asking for permission, asking for help, asking for things, ordering, and promising. the series of words are meant to reflect the character development of early childhood. this is an extraordinary achievement and according to nafissi & shafiee (2019) that early childhood language politeness strategies are influenced not only by their parents, but by providing models of language politeness for teachers in schools. the results of observations of language acquisition can be started when the child is 1-year old, because at this age children experience changes in their communication behavior (hoff, 2009). this change can be observed from the production of sounds that have meaning in the rules of adult language, so that it can be said that children acquire vocabulary based on the sound concepts they produce. according to years of observations in the author's child or baby, a child understands words from birth. this is evident when the parents greet him with a happy condition, the child will laugh, and vice versa. he begins to recognize his name at the age of 4 months and understands a few other words at the age of 6, 8, to 10 months. based on the research findings of hoff (2009) and dardjowidjojo (2000), children begin to speak on average at the age of 1 year (pralinguistic stage), and continue acquisition as their brain grow and be developed. thus, it appears that he masters and understand their sounds, voices, words, and even grammar after 1 year of age. the next stage is during the children aged 2 years. at the age of 2 years, children acquire vocabulary with significant concepts. they start producing words, and by the end of 2 years they can produce 300 words and combine words (hoff, 2009). his words do not sound like adults. both the articulation ability and the basic phonological image change at 2 years of age. children are more communicative, both frequency and communication are relevant with increasing communication styles. when he is 3 years old, he begins to master grammar rules. the child starts producing two and three words. production of declaration sentences ended in exposure to incorrect grammar. exposure to words such as plural words, past tenses, nouns, and verbs (hoff, 2009). at the end of 3 years of age, children produce complete sentences, including interrogative sentences and negative sentences according to the rules. the vocabulary continues to develop, the articulation of sounds increases, so that the development of his mastery of phonology is beginning to appear. children's communication skills improve, and they begin to incorporate short stories or past events into their conversations. in the period of 3 to 4 years of age, most of the children's ability to filter sentences develops further. the most noticeable new developments occurred in grammar beginnings complete, many clause sentences. because nothing is completely lost from linguistic competence almost at the age of 4 years old children, usually the acquisition of a complete language at the age of 4 years (dardjowidjojo, 2010). children's language skills continue to develop in each field after 4 years of age, both in the fields of articulation, vocabulary, sentence structure, and communication skills (noermanzah, 2017; gauthier & genesee, 2011). meanwhile, the various markers of politeness used by speakers so that multicultural communication is able to reflect a new cultural orientation process so that communication harmonization is maintained, are language tools, pragmatic tools, modalities, speech lengths, use of verb diathesis, supporting statements, timers, repetition, timepiece, affirmation, softener, dian eka chandra wardhana & noermanzah early childhood language politeness strategy model in multi-ethnic communication 320 question words, greeting words and kinship, distorted / strange situation context, analogy, and overgeneralization. these linguistic aspects are used by paying attention to the social rules of language use that apply in the 2nd language community by controlling the noble values of the moral and ethical teachings of speakers (wardhana, 2006). several research findings have illustrated that the use of politeness strategies used by preschoolers has been able to reveal several different politeness strategies to different speech partners (kushartanti, 2009; dardjowidjojo, 2000). this research descriptively shows that at an early age, children are aware of social distance, age, and authority, so that children are able to use different politeness strategies when talking to their speech partners. the same thing was found by wardhana (2006), that the children of newcomers in the new land used a language system elaborated by linguistic politeness with the native ethnic culture in bengkulu, so that the speaker's directive speech act representation was expressed in direct mode, direct mode with a marker of politeness, and indirect mode. seken (2010) confirmed the various research findings, he found that when talking with speech partners with other cultural backgrounds, these children were also able to "share" ethnicity with the culture of the partner he said. teachers are also aware that the need for basic research on acquiring keigo in japan and politeness in indonesia is being carried out, but many researchers believe that children do not have a productive function of different politeness registers so they only accept explicit instruction in contexts, social issues, for example at school or work. this is supported by nakamura (2012) that children initially acquire linguistic expressions that are keigo and polite, then they begin to present these linguistic rules, learn different levels of speech, by interacting with a wider variety of societies. broad and mimic adult speaking behavior. muraishi (in nakamura, 2012) claims that early childhood children actually want to use verbs with nuances of respect for speech and simple language partners, but these efforts are often generated with grammatical and relational errors. even nakamura (2012) reports that young children control politeness strategies such as the use of heizing (vague / indirect language) long before they master the honorofic subject and object. for this reason, according to wilcox, gray, & reiser (2020), a literacy-based curriculum and according to early childhood language development in early childhood education schools is needed. the applied curriculum teaches students to jointly improve reading material that is interesting every day according to early childhood reading material and the teacher provides examples as concrete models in using polite language. it could also be that every day students are invited to do singing activities according to teacher instructions based on student brain development and giving scrabble games as suggested by elhenawy (2019) and hastuti (2018) in their research results which show success in improving the language mastery skills of early childhood students with singing activities with direct instruction by brain-based teachers and giving scrabble games. conclusion the results of this study indicate that the strategy model of early childhood language politeness in multi-ethnic communication in bengkulu is using elaborate politeness acquisition model and children's language politeness acquisition model that takes into account social distance when speaking by stringing 3 words when greeting, introducing oneself, expressing respect, thanking, apologizing, asking permission, asking for help, asking for something, ordering, and making promises. the series of words are meant to reflect the character development of early childhood. the development of early childhood language is influenced by the mother tongue and second language used in schools by teachers and students. then, at an early age, children become aware of social distance, age, and authority, so that children are able to use different politeness strategies when talking to their speech partners. references akhyar, f. (2019). perkembangan pragmatik dalam pemerolehan bahasa anak. ksatra: jurnal kajian bahasa dan sastra, 1(1), 75–86. doi:10.52217/ksatra.v1i1.15 amaliani, s., triana, l., & riyanto, a. (2020). alih kode dan campur kode pada proses belajar di tk pertiwi longkeyang dan implikasinya. jurnal skripta, 6(2), 64-71 doi:10.31316/skripta.v6i2.900 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 321 dardjowidjojo, s. (2000). echa: kisah pemerolehan bahasa anak indonesia. jakarta: grasindo. dardjowidjojo, s. (2010). psikolingusitik: pengantar pemahaman bahasa manusia. jakarta: yayasan obor indonesia. dawud. (2010). kecenderungan pembelajaran bahasa saat ini. malang: um press. eadie, p., stark, h., & niklas, f. (2019). quality of interactions by early childhood educators following a language-specific professional learning program. early childhood education journal, 47(3), 251–263. doi:10.1007/s10643019-00929-5 el-henawy, w. m. (2019). optimizing elementary education for english language learners. chapter: 7. pennsylvania: igi global. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-7507-8.ch022 gauthier, k., & genesee, f. (2011). language development in internationally adopted children: a special case of early second language learning. child development, 82(3), 887–901. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01578.x hastuti, d. (2018). improving early childhood language ability through scrabble for kids. proceedings of the international conference of early childhood education (icece 2017). doi:10.2991/icece17.2018.60 hoff, e. (2009). language development. wadsworth: florida atlantic university. hoyte, f. (2017). ewing r, callow j and rushton k, language and literacy development in early childhood. journal of early childhood literacy, 18(1), 154–158. doi:10.1177/1468798417713437 kushartanti, (2009). strategi kesantunan berbahasa anak paud. dalam kolita 9. jakarta: atmajaya press. kusmiarti, r., yuniati, i., & noermanzah. (2020). improving student communication skills in learning indonesian language through collaborative learning. international journal of scientific & technology research, 9(01), 207211. http://www.ijstr.org/paperreferences.php?ref=ijstr-0120-27801 landreth, c. (1958). the development of language and the function of speech in early childhood. the psychology of early childhood, 48(1), 126–170. doi:10.1037/13176-005 méndez, l. i., hammer, c. s., lopez, l. m., & blair, c. (2019). examining language and early numeracy skills in young latino dual language learners. early childhood research quarterly, 46(1), 252–261. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.02.004 miles, m.b. & huberman, a. m. (2009). analisis data kualitatif. jakarta: ui-press. miller, e. b. (2016). child care enrollment decisions among dual language learner families: the role of spanish language instruction in the child care setting. early childhood research quarterly, 36, 223–232. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.01.003 molai, t. n. (2019). factors affecting language development of children. international academic journal of social sciences, 6(1), 37–48. doi:10.9756/iajss/v6i1/1910004 mukalel, j. c. (2003). psychology of language learning. new delhi: arora offest press. nafissi, z., & shafiee, z. (2019). teachers’ roles in early childhood english language pedagogy: beliefs of kindergarten english language teachers. journal of early childhood teacher education, 41(3), 306–324. doi:10.1080/10901027.2019.1647479 nakamura, k. (2012). the acquisition of linguistic politeness in japanese. the handbook of east asian psycholinguistics, 110–115. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511758652.018 noermanzah, n. (2017). a 1.4 year old child language acquisition (case study on a bilingual family). parole: journal of linguistics and education, 5(2), 145-154. https://doi.org/10.14710/parole.v5i2.154 rahayu, p. (2019). pengaruh era digital terhadap perkembangan bahasa anak. al-fathin: jurnal bahasa dan sastra arab, 2(1), 47-59. doi:10.32332/al-fathin.v2i2.1423 rofi’uddin, a. (2006). tanya jawab penelitian kuantitatif dan kualitatif. malang: um press. seken, ik. (2010). pendidikan berbasis otak: suatu gagasan back to nature. dalam makalah kuliah perdana 2010 program pascasarjana pendidikan bahasa indonesia fkip unib. tidak diterbitkan. supriyanti, n. (2016). peran bahasa dalam pengembangan peserta didik dan pembangunan bangsa. jurnal bahasa lingua scientia, 8(2), 251-256. doi:10.21274/ls.2016.8.2.251-256 wardhana, d. e. c. (2006). representasi tindak tutur direktif penutur jawa pendatang dalam komunikasi lisan masyarakat multietnik di bengkulu. malang: universitas negeri malang. http://repository.unib.ac.id/10204/ wilcox, m. j., gray, s., & reiser, m. (2020). preschoolers with developmental speech and/or language impairment: efficacy of the teaching early literacy and language (tell) curriculum. early childhood research quarterly, 51, 124–143. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2019.10.005 zahro, u. a., noermanzah, & syafryadin. (2020). penguasaan kosakata bahasa indonesia anak dari segi umur, jenis kelamin, jenis kosakata, sosial ekonomi orang tua, dan pekerjaan orang tua. dian eka chandra wardhana & noermanzah early childhood language politeness strategy model in multi-ethnic communication 322 seminar nasional pendidikan bahasa dan sastra, 1(1), 187-198. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 253 the practices of intentional vocabulary acquisition for asian efl learners: a systematic review peggy magdalena jonathans english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, university of kristen artha wacana, indonesia & doctoral student in english language education, graduate school, state university of malang, indonesia email: jonathanspeggyofficial@gmail.com; peggyj@ukaw.ac.id utami widiati faculty of letters, state university of malang, indonesia email: utami.widiati.fs@um.ac.id indri astutik english language education program, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah jember, indonesia & doctoral student in english language education, graduate school, state university of malang, indonesia email: indri@unmuhjember.ac.id devinta puspita ratri english language education program, faculty of cultural studies, university of brawijaya, indonesia & doctoral student in english language education, graduate school, state university of malang, indonesia email: devinta@ub.ac.id apa citation: jonathans, p. m., widiati, u., astutik, i., & ratri, d. p. (2021). the practices of intentional vocabulary acquisition for asian efl learners: a systematic review. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.253-262. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4350 received: 22-02-2021 accepted: 21-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction vocabulary acquisition has aroused attention of esl and efl practitioners from the second half of century. the acquisition and learning of vocabulary are indispensable from l2 learners to obtain proficiency and competence in english (ahmad, 2012). with particular interests, intentional vocabulary acquisition has a profound implication for second language learners but has received minimal attention from efl formal teaching settings. since 2006, the publications of incidental vocabulary acquisition outnumber than those of intentional mode. incidental is a byproduct of learning something else while intentional is by designing l2 learning (yali, 2010). both modes of learning are of different abstract: this systematic literature review attempts to shed light on the practice of vocabulary acquisition in efl contexts (incidental versus intentional mode) and the recommendation for asia. aiming to fill theoritical gap, the present study elucidates methodological-related variables dealing with vocabulary acquisition asia efl teaching mostly needed and relevantly applicable. the study serves as a call for asia efl teachers to elaborate all reviewed components into elt practice and curriculum. prisma is applied for the study methodology while inclusion criterion used to key terms in search engines which found 13,653 articles, and resulted into 27 the most related studies within the 15-year-time frame after being circumscribed, comprising publication on incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition. the findings from the analysis indicated that extensive reading as the main input with additional of other skills. exposure and repetition for meanings and retentions should be balancedly planned preventing from counterproductive effects. the explicit instruction needs of integration of interrelated components for the acquisition and learning to occur, namely input, media, time length, meanings, tasks, efl teachers roles, l2 learners motivation, references, and evaluation. the larger the vocabulary size, the greater their engagement in l2 learning and real communication. the pedagogical implication recommends strongly intentional vocabulary acquisition with intentional vocabulary mode as supplementary since the two modes codeswitch in the cognitive domain. keywords: vocabulary acquisition; intentional mode; incidental mode; codeswitching mailto:jonathanspeggyofficial@gmail.com mailto:indri@unmuhjember.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4350 peggy magdalena jonathans, utami widiati, indri astutik, & devinta puspita ratri the practices of intentional vocabulary acquisition for asian efl learners: a systematic review 254 kinds but points on the acquisition continuum (barcroft, 2009). the lack is best explained since english is not of daily use in efl contexts, whereas esl contexts apt to provide the learners with all potential sources of acquiring english faster. thus, when the l2 learners’ vocabulary expands, relatively their english proficiency increases (juanggo, 2018). juanggo added that the l2 vocabulary knowledge as a benchmark to reflect how well they perform in the acquisition. three similar systematic reviews and/or metaanalysis are compared to the present study, such as vocabulary instruction impacting text comprehension (wright & cervetti, 2016); the effects of repetition on incidental vocabulary learning (uchihara, webb, yanagisawa, 2019); mobile-assisted sl/fl vocabulary learning (lin & lin, 2019) and incidental vocabulary acquisition through different input (tang, 2020). nevertheless, they did not specify the acquisition for asia context of needs and interests and they embodied the incidental vocabulary acquisition which outperformed intentional mode. their unbalanced proportion of study on intentional vocabulary acquisition due to lacking investigation of intentional vocabulary learning in efl formal settings. if teachers have to provide learners with language experiences that offer vocabulary exposure either incidentally or intentionally, the focus is to envisage which quantity input for the acquisition most likely to occur in efl contexts. of all possible inputs for vocabulary acquisition, reading is more potential for the acquisition. reading plus vocabulary exercise is better than narrow reading approach in enhancing target vocabulary and retention (min, 2008). this is also true with text-based tasks, and background knowledge moderated passage reading comprehension, where lexical input processing from the reading is for intake, receptive gain, and retention (o’loughlin, 2019; pulido, 2007). vocabulary learning is more likely to occur frequently in the texts than reading-whilelistening and listening-to-stories, and the input from the textbook proved more resistant to decay (brown & waring, 2008). besides, reading extensively beyond the classroom by providing a certain length of time would contribute to the acquisition (alsaif & masrai, 2019). as reading dominates the school works and activities, the learners' extensive words knowledge enable them to participate and engage effectively (wright & cervetti, 2016), this is true in efl contexts. in comparison, multimodal sources mediate enhanced input by triggering explicit and implicit acquisition, for instance, authentic web-delivered video. the video was used as online instruction for the incidental acquisition of vocabulary and exposure through listening. ashcroft et al (2018) also utilized captioned movies for japanese learners, while pavia et al (2019) found songs for listening for acquiring new words but unfortunately, the learning gains were not achieved. though listening is one of the important inputs for the acquisition, the efl curriculum is required to think of having one main and extensive intentional acquisition (e.g., reading) with the addition of other exposures aiming to gain the learning, considering the timeconstrained most asia efl formal settings have whose teacher’s concentration tends to be divided for all learners of big size classes. to the most recent systematic review by lin & lin (2019), though sophisticated mobile-assisted language learning (mall), l2 vocabulary learning effectiveness remained inconclusive. these imply, nevertheless, the exposure from reading was quite high and significant for receptive word acquisition as opposed to the other inputs (yali, 2010) whose length of retention was quite short rather than exposing from reading. in line with the assertion, explicit instruction is needed (barcroft, 2009). as a practitioner in efl teaching, i oversee the ideal condition of intentional vocabulary acquisition should be designed systematically so the learners' english grows at an achievable rate comparable to their schooling learning time could be intervened. nevertheless, one may wonder what the urgency of applying intentional mode within the curriculum allocation. some rooms left by previous studies to pursue further including codeswitching between incidental and intentional learning of vocabulary (ong & zhang, 2018); and incidental academic vocabulary acquisition using vks measurement (frietmuth, 2020), the two also motivated the present study. providing evidence, efl vocabulary acquisition should be deliberately designed in learning and acquisition and systematic organization. thus, the reviewed questions of the present study are: (1) what has been practiced in esl/efl regarding incidental versus intentional vocabulary acquisition within a 15-year time frame? (2) what is the best-recommended mode of vocabulary acquisition for the efl formal setting? can intentional override the incidental english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 255 and vice versa? if the modes cannot be separated, can codeswitching between the two happen in a classroom setting? (3) what are essential factors suggested for the instruction integrating intentional vocabulary acquisition? the current review serves to bring into the wider perspective of vocabulary acquisition and learning in esl which relevantly for efl in asia, recommending the potential intentional mode or explicit teaching in formal setting as the primary exposure in efl contexts for better learners’ input prior to and whilst learning. method research design the present systematic literature review aims to answer conceptualized reviewed questions, of the concerned interests by compiling sufficient evidence after thinking systematically about the topic under a theoretical framing and time frame. rereferring to prisma (http://www.equatornetwork.org/), the steps of the guideline are defining the reasons for slr (why); considering people involve (who) or the subject of interest (what); formulating the problem (what has/has not been done within the set time frame); conducting the search (defining key terms and applying into search engines and citing tools); extracting the data (sorting out the most relevant ones); appraising the studies critically and assessing them; synthesizing the data; displaying the reports (writing and presentation under the objective as operational guidelines); keeping updated on the topic of slr (any recent studies and suggestions from the results). subjects of the study the subjects of the present study are 27 shorlisted articles within 15-year-time frame on incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition in asia efl contexts or esl contexts to equip sufficient analysis. the number was achieved by, firstly, seeking the articles from the ‘science direct’ database and eric using proquest interface. particular key terms were selected, “vocabulary acquisition” (came up with 13,653 articles), and were specified to "vocabulary acquisition intentionally" (1,446 articles). then narrowing into "vocabulary acquisition intentionally in the second language in elt", it resulted 89 articles. then inclusion criteria was applied to circumscribe "vocabulary acquisition intentionally in second language acquisition in elt in asia" from only research-based and reviewed articles (total of 27 articles). besides that, additional sources was from google scholar manual searching using similar key terms. instruments having the highly selected articles, big mapping tables were elaborated to organize into: first authors, year, country of study, primary data resource, instrument / theory, respondents / participants, findings (intentional versus incidental mode). the articles' entries were systematically inputted on listing the central part and findings and seeking the state of the arts from the table. data analysis techniques deriving from the three questions, data analysis was made under core themes: the practice in esl/efl contexts (incidental versus intentional vocabulary acquisition); the mode of acquisition recommended for asia efl; the explicit instruction integrating vocabulary acquisition. overall, narrative analysis is conducted all through the present paper by examining the themes below, which are pivotal for interpretation leading to the conclusive results and important conclusion. the analysis was taken by contrasting, comparing, and corresponding the previous research findings. findings and discussion in terms of vocabulary acquisition and learning, visual presentation stimuli make pseudowords salient (elgort, 2011), and this is very useful to enhance texts which should be intertwined with enriched input (rassaei, 2015). duan (2018) shared the idea by investigating multiple-choice (mc) gloss and single-gloss choice (sg) on participants to measure the increased vocabulary knowledge. the gloss was enhanced with a short explanation of each word while hsu (2018) chose captioned video for vocabulary enhancement in the professional business domain and later investigated the incidental acquisition occurred. up to date, repeated exposure for acquisition elaborating multimodal stimuli has been tested towards the incidental effects, but the effects are not always constant (bisson, van heuven, conklin, k., & tunney, 2014). reynolds (2015) utilized digital games under the right conditions to induce incidental vocabulary acquisition but the amount of words gains is not comparable to that of reading exposure. more comprehensively, a study by ashcroft et al (2018) examined audio, visual, contexts, plot, songs, music, and the whole setting of a movie production affect to 167 http://www.equator-network.org/ http://www.equator-network.org/ peggy magdalena jonathans, utami widiati, indri astutik, & devinta puspita ratri the practices of intentional vocabulary acquisition for asian efl learners: a systematic review 256 japanese natives (efl learners). their experimental groups showed that they can recall targetted words exposed within the movie by which the participants never encounter before the study and match the meaning of each in l1. the investigation was to prove the meaning recognition through reading at natural. thus, some scholars have embraced various studies with their findings in support to intentional vocabulary acquisition through explicit teaching. barcroft’s (2009) study confirmed the explicit instruction since target word recall was higher using the instruction. referring to the meaning of the input, kim (2008) found that low-frequency words were learned better than those of the higher frequency, but the meaning of the lower frequency words are crucial to comprehend reading passages. on the other hand, van zeeland & schimtt (2013) claimed that frequency affected word meanings slightly. in the broader scope, kweldju (2004; 2005) believed language is not solely a list of words or lexical glosses but also a linguistic phenomenon. she explained the words and the meanings operate on a conceptual level; thus, to optimize the human mind's storage, recognition, and retrieval is through lexically-based teaching. file & adams (2010) in more balanced proposition came to the findings that both instructions (words taught in isolation before reading, and vocabulary instruction was integrated with reading) led to more learning and retention of vocabulary knowledge than incidental exposure alone. within the three questions leading this study, the discussion part elaborates all 27 main previous studies in addition to others related findings on the issue. incidental versus intentional vocabulary acquisition: the practice in esl/efl context (rq1) vocabulary acquisition is quite robust in theories and research findings, leading this review into the target of vocabulary acquisition: text comprehension; semantic knowledge; acquiring parts of speech; retention. esl specifies here as l2 learners studying english inner-circle countries. on the other hand, efl learners predominantly learn english in their home country where english is used only in certain places. incidental vocabulary learning refers to the learning approach through texts and doing tasks or other activities indirectly related to vocabulary; while intentional vocabulary learning concerns all sorts of conscious vocabulary learning strategies centralizing on vocabulary and ways of memorizing words (yali, 2010). one main vocabulary acquisition argued and investigated by many authors is dealing with text comprehension. the proponents of incidental vocabulary acquisition, e.g., ahmad (2012), stressed the importance of incidental type over intentional in term of the l2 ability to understand reading, retain, and use new words actively in a different teaching situation. this type flexibly maximizes the learners in instruction the active processing to link in their cognition, which leads to comprehension. in the same vein, task-based extensive reading improved participants' depth of vocabulary knowledge although there were no significant differences between the effect of form-focused and meaning-focused tasks on learners' lexical knowledge (khonamri & roostae, 2014). this clearly posed the need to improve the current efl situation that the text comprehension could be conveyed when there are other activities to use cognition because it is more a matter of a gradual process and not an immediate and instant process (chen & truscott, 2010). it is undeniably true that reading is a major input for the incidental acquisition of vocabulary but argued on the inadequacy. tang (2020) urged to elaborate reading with listening, speaking, and writing realizing all skills are interrelated in sla. even in esl context, teaching word meaning of a passage directly is not impactful compared to active-cognitiveprocessing of the leaners (wright & cervetti, 2016). narrowing to semantic knowledge, extensive reading (er)-plus-post-reading discussion and er-only has comparable facilitative effects to word gain, but for word-association knowledge, er-plus obtained gain significantly larger than the other one (boutorwick, macalister, & elgort, 2019). to rationalize, activating the l2 learners' cognition is the reason for incidental vocabulary acquisition and learning. rassaei (2015) drew the learners' attention to specific linguistic features in input and simultaneously keeping the activity meaning-focused. he found that enhancing the input salient was more effective than enriching the input with the extra token of target forms. however, he perhaps should think of the learners’ cognition across levels, to catch salient target forms. for example, l2 adult vocabulary size may predict their semantic lexical engagement of novel words (garcia-castro, 2020), as they deal with the cognitive structure of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 257 meanings. the larger the size they acquire, the more engagement they participate in vocabulary learning. encountering many english words also supportse one’s vocabulary size. degree of vocabulary use corresponds to one’s reading strategy (alemi & tayebi, 2011). moreover, semantic knowledge includes sense, reference, implication, and logical forms substantiate textual comprehension and these deal with abstraction. yali (2010) deduced that learners experienced incidental vocabulary learning deal with meaning which are less sufficient and thus, they are prone to error but the vocabulary retain was quite long. however, efl teachers should not be overwhelmed by semantic-orientated-vocabulary teaching which should be taken care wisely. it is not always positive grouping vocabulary by semantic fields, as notional-functional approaches tend to take because a product of excessive association with semantic categories (semantic-category entanglement) would inhibit learning (bolger & zapata, 2011). in this regard, contextualization is much better, e.g. allowing learners to educated guess from various stimuli. the other studies describe how schools in efl contexts, teach vocabulary from parts of speech. sato (2016) made metaphors as their subject of scrutiny in regards with explicit teaching. both initiate explicit teaching of metaphors as related to vocabulary acquisition because by understanding of metaphors activates learners’ conceptual association that allows meaningful and memorable vocabulary. different from the focus, alemi & tayebi (2011) came to similar findings that out of the three, meaningbased intentionally learned is the highest in means compared to the two (etymology-based intentionally and incidentally acquired vocabularies). however, this does not mean rendering the words with the learners’ native language, otherwise it is counterproductive. xie (2013) found misconception of teachers dealing with meaning-based activity by allowing their learners to respond in l1 to l2 equivalence. the similar case happens in asia whereby translation equivalent words in l1 instead of elaborating other approaches (realia, body language). regardless the massive number of studies on incidental acquisition, the question about number of encounters required for meaning-focused input for this mode remains unsolved (uchihara et al, 2019). retention, one of the acquisition expectations, could be achieved by the learners’ combined modes (incidental and intentional) which proved by higher recalling l2, only if synonym generation is not required (barcroft, 2009). deeper, file & adams’s (2010) findings showed learning and retention gains happened for words taught prior reading in isolated instruction, or in integrated instruction which incidentally flows. this proves that the two learning modes are inseparable. while this is true for any ages, except for children in esl, which show the otherwise: teacher interruption on read-out-loud story benefited less and left unenjoyable experiences, so retention is not achieved (mcquillan, 2019). this nevertheless is different from efl teacher dealing with young learners, whom would be very pleased if the teacher can address l2 meaning through other things (e.g., body gestures, facial expressions, changing of tones, voices, and volume), but not of the translation equivalent. even colorful background on the wall works best to the children minds sending them pre-reading context of what will being told to them through the stories. mcquillan (2019) though, to some extent criticized teacher’s intervention (e.g., the question-and-answer session and interruption) which he considered inappropriate. this however in efl context still is useful to strategically maintain the joy of story for the children. the mode recommended for asia efl formal setting: the merits (rq2) some tenets mention about codeswitching between incidental and intentional vocabulary learning. despite the comprehensive development period of incidental-versusintentional-vocabulary-acquisition studies (tang, 2020), relatively little studies that explicitly reveal about the codeswitching between the two because they operationalize in cognitive domain. ong & zhang (2020) pointed out that codeswitching only involved using l1 equivalent of the target language rather using both l2 and l1 in the attempts for vocabulary acquisition. the unconscious process transition to the conscious stage is undeniably true of mental state in every l2 learner. jib & webb (2020) took account of teachers' talk in the classroom viewing relationship between vocabulary gains and l2 equivalents. however, the study discouraged l1 use if vocabulary acquisition is the main concern. the equivalent use may disadvantage the learners, although for the communicative language teaching, the equivalent may serve well. teacher talk could be intentionally planned to peggy magdalena jonathans, utami widiati, indri astutik, & devinta puspita ratri the practices of intentional vocabulary acquisition for asian efl learners: a systematic review 258 assist l2 learners by emphasizing forms to be noticed through the teacher talk. as hypothesized reasonably by uchihara et al (2019) that the wider range l2 vocabulary encounter, the higher the relationship between learning that occurs and the frequency of encounters, although the exact role of the frequency still remains unconclusive. this suggests that efl teachers could plan certain range of l2 vocabulary with frequency of occurence and different difficulty degrees. despite incidental vocabulary acquisition surmounted the intentional vocabulary teaching in several studies, the result of many efl studies yield the idea that the intentional should be maximized, along with the incidental acquisition as complementary. explicit instruction integrating vocabulary acquisition: considering the essential factors (rq3) to improve the current situation of the prime importance of vocabulary teaching in efl contexts, the following components are recommended that might help l2 learners effectively acquire english vocabulary through better curriculum system. extensive reading as a source of main input in intentional vocabulary teaching for asian efl curriculum summing up all previous findings, er as the main input of intentional vocabulary acquisition should be a dominant part of the asia efl formal setting under intentional vocabulary learning. supplementing er with guided discussion provides an opportunity for further vocabulary development (boutorwick et al., 2019), besides considering the considerable amount of vocabulary knowledge as er's nature (brown & waring, 2008). nevertheless, efl teachers can specify certain vocabulary within the er program, out of the bulk, leading to a greater depth of knowledge (yali, 2010). however, for children whose sla is quite different from other age groups of l2 learners (see the golden age as a very potential to conceive any languages from the environment), the tasks are not really needed along with their reading, arguing that by engaging the children in the target language discussion may counter productively recast the meaning of the word (mcquillan, 2019). in addition to er tasks, efl teachers may design form-oriented and meaningoriented activities to interchangeably use and help sufficient helping for the learners developing their english, as there are no significant differences between the two orientations (khonamri & roostae, 2014). if the most substantial target of er both are for comprehension and vocabulary acquisition, it would be better in investing instruction time in words the closest to the key ideas and themes might have the greatest payoff in terms of comprehension (wright & cervetti, 2016), and this surely will save time for the lesson but the two purposes achieved. how to help the learners making use of all sources for the acquisition, listening and watching need to be integrated as an addition to er. one main objective is to extensively enable the learners at their choice make use of input according to their characteristics, as taken all together, there is the value from l2 incidental vocabulary learning through reading, listening, and tv viewing (feng, 2019). efl teachers may also think of engaging activities as the attached tasks of er as a study proved that tasks contributed more to the acquisition as opposed to reading itself (laufer & rozovski-roitblat, 2011), while at the same time maintaining their motivation to work and enjoy more in the activities provided. listening and watching and the extent of exposure and the frequency of repetition to make the acquisition require careful plan within the lesson. repeated exposure to the stimuli was found to have a large impact on learning during the initial few exposures and decreases thereafter, suggesting that the effects of repeated exposure on vocabulary acquisition are not necessarily constant (bisson, et al., 2014). however, repetition is a crucial variable promoting l2 incidental vocabulary acquisition and the frequency effects size varies greatly (uchihara et al, 2019). examining the counterproductive of excessive exposure, laufer & rozovski-roitblat (2011) attempted win-win solution proposing a realistic combination of tasks and number of words encountered in the classroom, having calculated statistically of the significance of effects resulting from word repetitions occurred when the words were practiced in 3-4 exercises, with the interest of exposure of paramount importance. students’ preferences: important internal drive in l2 learning, beside other factors in vocabulary acquisition albeit prioritizing on the acquisition, efl teacher should welcome if the learners have their own preferences for vocabulary acquisition english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 259 beside what has been designed systematically by the school because motivation is the internal driving force for any efl learners to achieve success. motivation is qualitatively linked to cognitive aspects of l2 learning since motivational effects regulate task-based learning processes at three different regulatory levels (papi, 2018). he espoused the levels as follows: 1) the regulatory focus of the participants; 2) the rewards and feedback structure of the task; 3) the regulatory focus of the task. it is important to bear in mind that acquisition is a complex growth of l2 learners, in which the efl teachers should think of all possible perspectives, including encouraging condition potential for the learners to progress. traditional, but works up to these days, is a vocabulary notebook, suggested by dubiner (2017), one known and simple way to know the development amongst l2 learners, which could be personally done by the learners under the monitoring of their teachers which assist on the process. concerning the students’ level in english relating to cognition, each learner vocabulary acquisition may not be the same. directing the focus to low english learners, ertürk (2016) recommended different glossing types, but his study findings indicated that l1 glossing is beneficial for low english proficiency. this is a common issue but challenging in efl that even adult learners could position at beginner or elementary english levels despite their ages and length of schooling. visualization, also, serves better vocabulary learning experiences for these l2 learners, rather than verbalization since the visualization technique is transmitting pictures to the learners' minds (ghaedi & shahkori, 2016). if the visualization utilizes technology, efl teachers are encouraged to examine the available technology in order to create relevant features to the targetted l2 knowledge (sato, 2016), because such distraction may inhibit the acquisition. pictures can tell more than one information or even bring the past to present, so a thoughtful picture selection can captivate the learners' concentration and stimulate the active process that they may retain longer than the use of any random pictures. another factor concerning the learners’ level is their age since their years of experiences with the l2 and text comprehension enable them to derive word meanings from strategies elaborated (uchihara et al, 2019). they moreover added that student-related variables and methodological variable pertain to the acquisition outcomes that explain differences may possibly happen to each individual. this broadened our perspectives then to facilitate the acquisition within the explicit teaching with the most relevant approach for efl in asia. meaning and retention: efl teaching main goal having some findings on vocabulary embedded tasks, it is quite comprehensive highlighting the co-relation between meanings and retention from the vocabulary acquired, regardless of the objection of some studies against l1 in vocabulary acquisition. by contrast, asia efl practices still compromise the l1 use having evaluated on varie learners proficiency and the urgency for meaningful approach. efl learners in thailand preferred the multimedia-linking visual and auditory information contained l1 and l2 captions on the video exposed to them accompanied with proper audio (yawiloeng, 2020). this problematic choice between l1 and l2 use in efl teacher endeavour for the learner vocabulary acquisition will be solved better by the teachers if they consolidate the theoretical underpinned their beliefs and the merits of both modes, with the intentional mode (for the dominant) as well as other effective strategies revealed within this paper. besides, multimodality, e.g., mall, if it is included in the curriculum of asia efl, may turn up into motivating, interesting, and effective input for the learners (yawiloeng, 2020), and this part of classroom plan actually could be extended for beyond classroom activities with engaging acquisition program. evaluating the intentional vocabulary learning to this end, an evaluation and assessment for the vocabulary acquisition is essentially important, acts as a guidepost of the program accomplishment, although not every detail of the cognition process dealing with acquisition is measurable. at least the school may be well informed on how the system works well for their learners through the evaluation and sort of assessment. freitmuth (2020), pioneered by iqbal & komal (2017), adapted vocabulary knowledge scale (vks), as a measuring tool to indicate the learners' vocabulary knowledge (noun, verb, adverb, and preposition) after er. vks should be in the school syllabus (iqbal & komal, 2017) to quantify something abstract resulted from the acquisition. vks is adaptable to meet what prioritized in the curriculum which target on the increase number of the learners’ word gains. peggy magdalena jonathans, utami widiati, indri astutik, & devinta puspita ratri the practices of intentional vocabulary acquisition for asian efl learners: a systematic review 260 conclusion naturally, the two modes, incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition and learning, are inseparable. the intentional learning (mode) of vocabulary would be more relevant to asia efl in terms of explicit teaching, language use and contexts, with embedded incidental acquisition tasks, for the sake of extensive exposure of vocabulary. this does not mean one overrides the other, but both are more appropriately addressed to complement each side the acquisition may take place. moreover, the efl teachers in asia are supposed to shift their mind-sets by referring to all previous studies, and further insert intentional vocabulary acquisition to the school curricula if the learners' vocabulary size, one of their main concerns, which can lead the efl learners into more engaging learning. the idea proposed here could be one of those in the education milestone to achieve, yet the teachers are called to commit to apply all suggestions from previous studies into real acts even in a small scope of their teaching. if they 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(2010). l2 vocabulary acquisition through reading-incidental learning and intentional learning. chinese journal of applied linguistics, 33(1), 1-15. retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/l2vocabulary-acquisition-through-readinglearning-ya-li/7d4eeb50135378db3856b 19389301ecd04bfeb20. http://publication/ https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/l2-vocabulary-acquisition-through-reading-learning-ya-li/7d4eeb50135378db3856b%20193893 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/l2-vocabulary-acquisition-through-reading-learning-ya-li/7d4eeb50135378db3856b%20193893 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/l2-vocabulary-acquisition-through-reading-learning-ya-li/7d4eeb50135378db3856b%20193893 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/l2-vocabulary-acquisition-through-reading-learning-ya-li/7d4eeb50135378db3856b%20193893 peggy magdalena jonathans, utami widiati, indri astutik, & devinta puspita ratri the practices of intentional vocabulary acquisition for asian efl learners: a systematic review 262 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee figurative language in english stand-up comedy maharani widya putri department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: putrimaharaniwidya@gmail.com erwin oktoma department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: oktoma09erwin@yahoo.com roni nursyamsu department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: roninursyamsu@gmail.com apa citation: putri, m. w., oktoma, e., & nursyamsu, r. (2016). figurative language in english stand-up comedy. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 115-130 received: 21-10-2016 accepted: 18-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: this descriptive qualitative research was about the analysis of figurative language in english stand-up comedy. the purposes of this study were to identify the types of figurative language and to describe the functions of figurative language found in the selected video of stand-up comedy show. the data source was taken from one of selected videos of russell peters stand-up comedy show. russell peters’s speech contained about figurative language in the video is observed. the data were collected through content analysis technique by collecting the verbal language used by russell peters. the first research questions was analyzed by mcarthur (1992) theory and supported by crystal (1994) theory to find out the types of figurative language found in english stand-up comedy. to answer the second research questions about the functions of figurative language found in english stand-up comedy was analyzed by chunqi (2014) theory and suppoted by kokemuller (2001) theory and turner (2016) theory. after analyzing data, it was found that irony was the most dominant figurative language used by russell peters in “russell peters comedy now! uncensored” with 29.94%. it was happened because the kind of topics used by russell peters in that show were about ethnics (canadian, white people, black people, brown people and asian), society case (beating child) and culture (accent and life style of various ethnics in the world, habitual of various ethnics in the world). irony and hyperbole were needed dominantly in the performance, to entertain the audiences in the stand-up comedy show. the function of eleven types of figurative language which were used by russell were concluded. the functions were to amuse people in comedic situations, to expand meaning, to explain abstract emotions, to make sentence interesting represented and give creative additions. keywords : figurative language, stand-up comedy, english stand-up comedy. introduction it has been known for decades that communication can be done with a process of interaction between sender and listener which uses message and produces feedback. then, communication also can be done with just a process of transmitting message from the sender to the listener without a feedback. one way communication is 115 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy considered as a special way of communicating because it produced several unique phenomena. fenner (2003) says that “in one-way communication, information is transferred in one direction only from the sender to the listener.” one-way communication is limited because it just occurs in a straight line from sender to listener and get little feedback. as an example, stand-up comedy represents the unique realization of oneway communication. astuti, sada, wardah (2013, p.2) mentions that “...humor and joke transformed into monolog activity and performed which makes any listener and audience enjoy and pleasant that called as stand-up comedy.” in monologue activity, a standup comedian talks to express ideas, experiences, feelings, and opinions in his/her mind. humor can be delivered in particular ways in stand-up comedy. most of stand-up comedy performance is presented in verbal ways because standup comedian relies their performance on their stories to make audiences interested. in term of the language used by stand-up comedian, chunqi (2014, p.276) mentions that “...in a stand-up comedian’s speech, there are figurative language, word play, puns, implication and allusion as the linguistic aspect to make the performance interesting and funny.” figurative language as one of linguistics aspect make the verbal communication used in stand-up comedy become more interesting and stimulate feedback in the form of laughter. in the field of semantic study, it is quite ordinary to do a research about figurative language in literary works because it can be found easily. therefore, conducting a semantic study with different subject becomes very interesting. stand-up comedy research seems to be important in indonesia society now. in line with (papana 2012) as cited in (fitri, 2013, p.22) states that “stand up comedy has been popular in indonesia for the last two years, since kompas tv held a stand-up comedy indonesia competition in september 2011 and brought this comedy show successfully into public.” so, if this research can reveal one of unique phenomena in stand-up comedy, this study will be useful for indonesia society who like watching stand-up comedy. based on the background above, the writer would like to answer the following questions: “what are the types of figurative language found in the selected video of stand-up comedy show?” and “what are the functions of figurative language found in the selected video of stand-up comedy show?” based on the research questions above, the objectives of this research are, as follows: to identify the types of figurative language found in the selected video of stand-up comedy show and to describe the functions of figurative language found in the selected video of stand-up comedy show. method descriptive qualitative method is used in this research. cresswell (2012, p.247) mentions that, “description involves a detailed rendering of information about people, places, or events in a setting.” the types of figurative language in the selected video of stand-up comedy show are described in detail in this research. the selected video of russell peters stand-up comedy show “russell peters comedy now! uncensored” used as the data source in this research. the url of the video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c pyyt0tmqjk which is published on 116 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee march 11th, 2012. the duration of the video was 00:45:07. russell peters’s speech which contains about figurative language in the video is observed by the writer. based on techniques of collecting data by kothari (2004, p.110), content analysis is used in this research. kothari (2004, p.110) states that “the analysis of content is a central activity whenever one is concerned with the study of the nature of the verbal materials.” the verbal language used by stand-up comedian in stand-up comedy show is analyzed by the writer to collect the data. the processes in collecting the data are; first, the video is watched by the writer then russell peters’s speech is transcribed. after that, each of russell peters’s speech which has an indication to be figurative language is classified. after finding the occurrences of figurative language in the data source, the first step in the analyzing process to answer research questions is identifying the types of figurative languages found by using the theory of figurative language by mcarthur (1992). crystal’s theory (1994) also used to support and to analyze russell peters’s speech which can’t be analyzed by mcarthur’s theory (1992). from the theory, not only the most dominant figurative language in the selected video of russell peters’s stand-up comedy show will be shown. but also the functions of figurative language found in the selected video of russell peters’s stand-up comedy show will be revealed clearly. in order to reveal the function of figurative language found in the selected video of russell peters’s stand-up comedy show, chunqi’s theory (2014) will be used. kokemuller’s theory (2001) and turner’s theory (2016) also will be used to support chunqi’s theory (2014). results and discussion after analyzed the data, for the first research question it was answered that there were found 167 (one hundred and sixty seven) utterance contained of figurative language. mcarthur (1992) proposed fourteen types of figurative language; alliteration, chiasmus, euphemism, hyperbole, idiom, irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, paradox, personification and simile. in the selected video of russell peters stand-up comedy show, it was found eleven types of figurative languages. each figurative languages types found in the selected video of russell peters’s stand-up comedy show counted by using frequency of cummulative formula by subana as cited in (oktoma, & mardiyono, 2013, p. 79). where: fk = frequency of cumulative (the number of occurences of figurative language types) σf = frequency of total (the number of the whole occurences of figurative language types) fk rel = frequency of relative cumulative (the result of percentages) subana as cited in (oktoma, & mardiyono, 2013, p. 79) the classification and percentage of figurative language used in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) stand-up comedy show could see in the table 4.4 types of figurative language and occurrences found in russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) below: fk rel = 𝐅𝐊 𝚺𝐅 x 100% 117 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy table 1. types of figurative language and occurrences found in russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) no. figurative language number of occurrences percentage 1. alliteration 7 4.20% 2. chiasmus 8 4.80% 3. euphemism 4. hyperbole 40 23.95% 5. idiom 9 5.38% 6. irony 50 29.94% 7. litotes 2 1.20% 8. metaphor 3 1.80% 9. metonymy 18 10.77% 10. onomatopoeia 16 9.58% 11. oxymoron 12. paradox 13. personification 3 1.80% 14. simile 11 6.58% total 167 100% from the table above, it was shown that in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) standup comedy show, there were found 11 (eleven) types of figurative languages. the types were alliteration, chiasmus, hyperbole, idiom, irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, personification, and simile. euphemism, oxymoron and paradox were not found in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) stand-up comedy show. from the table above, it could be known the number of occurrences of figurative language in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) stand-up comedy show. there were only 167 types of figurative language which were found in the russell peters’ utterances. there were 7 utterances (4.20%) belonging to alliteration, 8 utterances (4.80%) belonging to chiasmus, 40 utterances (23.95%) belonging to hyperbole, 9 utterances (5.38%) belonging to idiom, 50 utterances (29.94%) belonging to irony, 2 utterances (1.20%) belonging to litotes, 3 utterances (1.80%) belonging to metaphor, 18 utterances (10.77 %) belonging to metonymy, 16 utterances (9.58%) belonging to onomatopoeia, 3 utterances (1.80%) belonging to personification and 11 utterances (6.58%) belonging to simile. the most dominant of figurative language was irony with the number of occurrences was 50 (29.94%). the less figurative language was litotes with the number of occurrences was 2 (1.20%). in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) standup comedy show, russell peters used irony as the most figurative language used in his show. in his show, russell wanted to deliver his stories in stand-up comedy in unique way by make an irony statement almost in every utterance. as chunqi (2014, p.227) states that “irony is often taken as a common and incisive device for amusing people in comedic situations.” hyperbole also took in the 118 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee second place as the most dominant of figurative language use by russell peters in 40 utterances (23.95%). chunqi (2014, p.227) also adds that “...hyperboles creates a humorous effect by directing a satirical implication at a person who is in a superior social status. by using the hyperboles, the joke becomes indirect and less aggressive in attacking the target.” in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) standup comedy show, russell told various topics in society. “stand-up comedy function not only to entertain people but also to present various current issues and topics ranging from ethnicity, gender, politics, to those considered taboo” (setyaningsih, 2013, p.145). the topics were about ethnics (canadian, white people, black people, brown people and asian), society case (beating child) and culture (accent and life style of various ethnics in the world, habitual of various ethnics in the world). russell used irony to express something by using sarcastic expression. “...words with an implication opposite to their usual meaning, ironic comment may be humorous or mildly sarcastic” (mcarthur, 1992, p.532). irony statement was used by russell to tell about ethnic and culture stories to amuse people in the comedic situations. hyperbole was used to create an extra effect for comedy statement. “hyperbole is a rhetorical term for exaggeration or overstatement, usually deliberate and not meant to be taken (too) literally” (mcarthur, 1992, p.491). hyperbole was used by russell to tell stories about society case. so, irony and hyperbole were needed dominantly in the performance, to entertain the audiences in the stand-up comedy show. to answer the second research question, in order to reveal the function of figurative language found in the video of russell peters comedy now! uncensored stand-up comedy show, chunqi’s theory (2014) was used. kokemuller’s theory (2001) and turner’s theory (2016) also was used to support chunqi’s theory (2014). kokemuller (2001) has given a description about what are the purposes of figurative language in communication. figurative language plays a major role in compelling literary works. figurative language is a contrast to literal language. its primary purpose is to force readers to imagine or intuit what an author means with an expression or statement. applying the right element in making specific points in writing is necessary to make figurative language work. regardless the tool, figurative language strengthens or makes a point more compelling and effective (kokemuller, 2001). chunqi (2014) explains the finding from his journal about the function of figurative language in stand-up comedy. the functions were hyperbole used to exaggerate reality by carrying beyond the boundaries of rational thought, irony was often taken to infer the speaker’s intention and to amuse people in comedic situations, the last simile used to make analogy statement in stand-up comedy more interesting and unexpected to the live audience. in this present study, various types of figurative languages were used because of particular function. the function of figurative language found in the selected russell’s stand-up comedy show presented below: 1. alliteration the first function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is alliteration. alliteration is sound device in figurative language. “alliteration is terms in rhetoric, poetics, and general usage for the repetition of 119 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy the same sound, usually an initial consonant such as the/in 'fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute'” (mcarthur, 1992, p.29). in stand-up comedy, alliteration is used to give creative additions. in line with kokemuller (2001), alliteration is used to give an image in the form of playing sound to deliver stories. by using alliteration in telling the stories, the audiences will think that the stories is more interesting than usual stories because alliteration gives sound phenomenon in communication. one of alliterations which be the sample was: utterance 75 (20:17) • i went to italy.. the italians thought i was italian. russell used the repetition ly, lians and lians in the word ‘italy’ in one sentence to give creative additions in telling the stories. as we know, a stand-up comedian used a limited properties in stand-up comedy performance. one of ways that can they use to make their stories is catched by the audiences by playing the word in telling the stories. in the show, russell wanted to show his skill in telling the stories interesting by making a sentence which full with alliteration word. 2. chiamus the second function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is chiamus. according to mcarthur (1992, p.209) “chiasmus in rhetoric is an inversion of word order that creates a counterbalancing effect in the second of two linked phrases.” chiasmus is a figure of speech in figurative language which represents word play like alliteration. the differences are alliteration hold the role of figurative language on the same sound or consonant in the word but chiasmus hold the role on the balance structure between two sentences. one of chiasmuses which be the sample was: utterance 10 (03:40) • “you know, it’s not so much a problem. it’s a problem if you want it to be problem.” in that sentence, russell made a sentence or phrase in which the order of some words in the first sentence or phrase is reversed in the sentence or the phrase that follow. the arrangement of words, phrases and clauses were reversed with a phrase or clause that follows. if we heard a stand-up comedian used chiasmus like the exmaple above, it seemed to be more interesting and easy listening because it used balancing structure. in order to make the statement was interesting to speak, chiasmus as one of types in figurative language can be used. the way chiasmus represents two sentences in the complete sentence which has different meaning makes chiasmus can be used to make the word was interesting represented. so, chiamsus used by stand-up comedian to make sentence represented interesting. 3. hyperbole the third function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is hyperbole. in stand-up comedy show, russell used hyperbole to make a dramatic effect in his utterance because of overstatement word. in line with mcarthur (1992, p.491) states that “hyperbole is a rhetorical term for exaggeration or overstatement, usually deliberate and not meant to be 120 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee taken (too) literally.” one of hyperboles which be the sample was: utterance 29 (07:27) • “indian people has been in south africa for like six, seven generations now.” the sentence was overstatement word. how can russell peters know that indian people lived in south africa until seven generations while he was born in 70’s. chunqi (2014) explains that the function of hyperbole used in stand-up comedy is to exaggerate reality by carrying beyond the boundaries of rational thought. in line with what kokemuller (2001) says that “some figurative language is used to expand beyond the literal narrative in the story. hyperbole is a grossly exaggerated or excessive claim.” by overstating the word, audience’s mind will be opened because the meaning of the word has been expanded from the ordinary word. so, in stand-up comedy hyperbole used to expand meaning. 4. idiom the fourth function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is idiom. idiom is a figure of speech in figurative language which represents uniquely. “an expression unique to a language, especially one whose sense is not predictable from the meanings and arrangement of its elements” (mcarthur, 1992, p.497). in stand-up comedy, idiom used to make the audiences think deeply about what of stand-up comedian real utterance meaning. therefore, they will be curious and impressed because of the moral lesson in idiom sentence itself. idiom has a same function like hyperbole, because the word which is used is not ordinary and has more meaning. one of idioms which be the sample was: utterance 12 (04:22) • “i wouldn’t want my mom to pick my clothes!” that sentence means russell has been adult and know what he can do and choose for his life. the sentence was trying to make a word has more than one meaning. by using that sentence, audience’s will be interested, focussed and trying to interpret the sentence because the sentence has an expand meaning function. so, idiom used to expand meaning. 5. irony the fifth function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is irony. “...words with an implication opposite to their usual meaning, ironic comment may be humorous or mildly sarcastic” (mcarthur, 1992, p.532). in that standup comedy show, most of irony statement told about the way russell gave an ironic statement when he told stories about ethnic cases between chinese people and indian people, white people and black people etc. one of ironies which be the sample was: utterance 47 (11:37) • “chinese people and indian people cannot do business together. cos indian cannot live without a bargain and chinese people cannot give you a bargain.” that sentence heard sarcasm but humorous. because of indian people and chinese have same characteristic they can convince someone to be wrong in selling and buying event. 121 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy so, they couldn’t be united in selling and buying event. russell wanted to amuse audiences by stating the popular issue in the society in that moment in ironic way. as the result, almost the audiences involved in the room and laugh although russell told stories about certain ethnics issue in ironic way. so, the function of irony in stand-up comedy here were to infer the speaker’s intention and to amuse people in comedic situations. 6. litotes the sixth function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is litotes. litotes is a figure of speech in figurative language which almost has same function like irony. “litotes is a positive and often emphatic statement made by denying something negative” (mc.arthur, 1992, p.622). litotes is an ironic understatement that uses a negative statement. it is the opposite of irony. if the irony states something bad with the good statement in ironic way, litotes states something good by using negative statement in order to make the statement friendly and down to earth. one of litoteses which be the sample was: utterance 107 (27:21) • “we know it’s not the coolest accent in the world, you know” that sentence showed understatement of the word which tells about that indian people knew their accent was unique when they use english. russell used negative statement to tell audience that indian accent is not full bad, it is just unique and different from others. the statement is used more humble than in irony by understatement the word. litotes in that stand-up comedy almost has a same function but they have a different role. litotes is more positive than irony although it uses understatement word. so the function of litotes is similar like irony. it used to infer the speaker’s intention and to amuse people in comedic situations. 7. metaphor the seventh function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is metaphor. metaphor is one of rhetorical devices in figurative language which uses comparison statement to make the word is interpreted clearly. “a figure of speech which concisely compares two things by saying that one is the other” (mcarthur, 1992, p.653). kokemuller (2001) states that using metaphor and simile is a simple way making a statement about a person, place or thing interpreted clearly. these tools allow you to make the point by comparing one thing to another. by using metaphor, a sentence will be created lively and will make audiences understand easily about satnd-up comedian word. when audiences seemed to be easier in comprehending stand-up comedian speech, the situation will be created between audiences and standup comedian is more lively. one of metaphors which be the sample was: utterance 164 (40:45) • “yes i can. she’s a jackass.” in that sentence, russell tried to compare ryan’s mother with jackass although the comparison word (like, as) was not shown. the example showed that by using figurative some utterances in a language would be presented in expressive way because it uses the broader word. so, it will be 122 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee clearer than the bland statement. by using figurative some utterances in a language would be presented in expressive way because it used the broader word. it would be clearer than the bland statement. so, the function of metaphor was to make a life of stand-up speech in stand-up comedy performance. 8. metonymy the eighth function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is metonymy. crystal (1994) says in metonymy, symbol of a language or something is used. “metonymy is used to present a moral lesson or broader point by having a noun in the story represent something beyond the story” (kokemuller, 2001). one of metonimies which be the sample was: utterance 36 (09:36) • “glad to see brown people in the audience.” brown in that statement refered to indian people. when russell said ‘brown people’ in that statement, the audiences would think who is brown people. so, audiences will try to extend their thought about that reference. it means the function of metonymy in stand-up comedy is to expand meaning. 9. onomatopoeia the ninth function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is onomatopoeia. as we know, figurative language was used in literary works in order to make the language become imaginative and give different insight. because of that, the purpose of giving a creative addition in here was needed. in creative works, some figurative language tools simply increase the creativity of the writing. imagery is one of the simpler elements to understand. it is the use of descriptive, expressive language to give the reader a mental image (kokemuller, 2001). in the onomatopoeia utterances, russell showed his skill in mimicking many accents of some ethnics in the world. one of onomatopoeias which be the sample was: utterance 129 (30:57) • cause you’re saying stuff like “fuuuckkk asss!” (with donkey sound) “buuuulshiiit!” “yee haw! yee haw!” in that statement, russell was mimicking donkey’s sound when he told about the way canadian people curse to someone. it sounded like donkey sound. by using that sound, russell was seen to give a creative addition to his stories. so, his stories will draw audience’s attention. by showing that skill, it is shown that the function of onomatopoeia is to give a creative addition. 10. personification the tenth function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is personification. like in “metonymy is used to present a moral lesson or broader point by having a noun in the story represent something beyond the story” (kokemuller, 2001). “personification is used to give human qualities to an object or animal” (kokemuller, 2001). personification helps to relate ideas and objects to people, allowing an author to convey his meaning more effectively. one of personifications which be the sample was: 123 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy utterance 131 (31:33) • “this is nice room tonight, you know.” in that statement ‘room’ as inaminate object is given human characteristics by using ‘nice’ word. russell tried to give an image about his feeling in that show when he saw many people in stand-up comedy show’s room. turner (2016) says that “figurative language can be used, however, to explain abstract emotions such as love, grief, envy and happiness. besides to expand meaning, personification used in stand-up comedy to explain abstract emotions when a stand-up comedian in telling story. if it concluded, the function of personification in stand-up comedy was to expand meaning and to explain abstract emotions. 11. simile the eleventh function of figurative language in stand-up comedy which will be presented is simile. simile uses a form of comparison in which one thing is compared to another unlike thing by using specific words of comparison like: like, as in order to explain the word clearly by comparing it to another. simile has a similar function like metaphor. but difference is the using of comparison word is in direct or indirect way. one both of the examples made the bland statements become colorful because it was presented in expressive way. one of similes which be the sample was: utterance 130 (31:00) • “white people, when you swear you sound like donkeys” that sentence showed the way russell wanted to make the situations in the stand-up comedy show’s live by using simile word. he stimulated audience’s attention by making comaprison word. in line with chunqi (2014) says that simile is used to make analogy statement in standup comedy more interesting and unexpected to the live audience. so, the function of simile in stand-up comedy is to a life of stand-up speech in stand-up comedy performance. from the explanation above, it was concluded and found that the functions of figurative language used in stand-up comedy are: first, alliteration and onomatopoeia were used to give a creative addition. second, the function of chiamus was to make sentence represented in interesting way. third, hyperbole, idiom, metonymy and personification were used to expand meaning and to explain abstract emotions. fourth, irony and litotes were used to infer the speaker’s intention and to amuse people in comedic situations. fifth, simile and metaphor were used to make a life of stand-up comedy speech in stand-up comedy performance. as mentioned before, this research tried to reveal the analysis of figurative language in english stand-up comedy. stand-up comedy show video which was used as the data source was the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) stand-up comedy show. in that video, russell used various form of figurative languages to make his utterances was interesting. to reveal figurative language phenomenon, in this subsections the writer tried to explain clearly the conclusion and the discussion which were gotten from the finding data in this present study. after analyzing the data, it was concluded that both of main research questions answered clearly. the first research question which told about types 124 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee of figurative language were used in standup comedy were figured out. by using mcarthur’s theory (1992) and crystal’s theory (1994), there were found eleven types of figurative language from 167 utterance. the types were alliteration, chiasmus, hyperbole, idiom, irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, personification and simile. euphemism, oxymoron and paradox were not found in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) stand-up comedy show. the most dominant of figurative language was irony with the number of occurrences was 50 (29.94%) and the less figurative language was litotes with the number of occurrences was 2 (1.20%). in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) standup comedy show, russell peters used irony as the most figurative language used in his show. probably, russell used an ironic statement as the most dominant figurative language in his speech because he has a particular purpose and wanted to deliver his stories in stand-up comedy show in unique way. in line with what chunqi (2014) states that joe wong as one of stand-up comedian in his research used the most frequently figurative language like irony, hyperbole to convey ironies expression about ethnic and culture topic, to attract audience’s attention and to provoke laughter. hyperbole took in the second place as the most dominant of figurative language used by russell peters in 40 utterances (23.95%). by using the hyperboles also, probably the joke becomes indirect and less aggressive in attacking the target. in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) stand-up comedy show, russell told various topics in society. the topics were about ethnics (canadian, white people, black people, brown people and asian), society case (beating child) and culture (accent and life style of various ethnics in the world, habitual of various ethnics in the world). russell told about ethnic topic by using general characteristic, like white people, brown people, etc. in stand-up comedy, the techniques is called as stereotypes ethnic. in line with setyaningsih (2013), in her journal about ethnic stereotypes in stand-up comedy, she stated that to minimize the negative impact in telling ethnic issue in stand-up comedy show, ethnic stereotypes could be used to make the jokes more smooth. in this present study, figurative language in the form irony and hyperbole used to make ethnic issue stories told in safe way but still invited audiences to laugh. by using ethnic topics and mix with irony statement and positive hyperbole statement, russell hoped that expression could draw audience’s attention in safe way. in conclusion, probably when russell told about ethnic topic in irony way and hyperbole way, the jokes becomes smooth and indirect but still make audience to laugh and draw audience’s attention. because of that, irony is used dominantly by russell peters in his stand-up comedy show. litotes was the less figurative language used by russell peters in that stand-up comedy. litotes is an ironic understatement that uses a negative statement. it is the opposite of irony. if the irony states something bad with the good statement in ironic expression, litotes states something good by using negative statement in order to make the statement friendly and down to earth. in that stand-up comedy, russell didn’t tell much his stories in litotes way perhaps because his main topics in that stand-up comedy show were about ethnics. he wanted to tell it much in ironic way than in litotes way to make the stories became 125 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy funnier in front of the audiences. so, litotes became the less figurative language which was used in russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) stand-up comedy show. the second research question which told about the functions of figurative language were used in standup comedy were figured out. all of function of stand-up comedy could be concluded by using chunqi’s theory (2014) and supported by kokemuller’s theory (2001) and turner’s theory (2016). in his journal, chunqi (2014) told about linguistic perspective used by two standup comedian in delivering humour on the stage. one of stand-up comedian there, used figurative language to make his performance draw audience attention and make audience to laugh. in his journal, it was found that just irony, hyperbole, simile and metaphor were types of figurative language that could make jokes became funny. moreover, the function of figurative language which were found were just limited to the fourth types. in this present study, because 11 (eleven) types of figurative language were found, this present study was developed from chunqi’s journal (2014). the function of eleven types of figurative language which were used by russell was concluded. the functions are to amuse people in comedic situations, to expand meaning, to explain abstract emotions, to make sentence represented in interesting way and give creative additions. each function was shown in different types of figurative language used by russell peters. the first function is shown through the using of irony and litotes in that stand-up comedy. most of irony statement in that stand-up comedy told about the way russell gave an ironic statement when he told stories about ethnic cases between chinese people and indian people, the function of irony and litotes in stand-up comedy here were to infer the speaker’s intention and to amuse people in comedic situations. the next function can be found in the using of hyperbole, metonymy and personification. the function of hyperbole, idiom, metonymy and personification were to expand meaning. when telling about ethnic stories, each functions of figurative language were shown clearly. beside to expand meaning, figurative language also can be used to explain abstract emotions and creative additions in the speech of standup comedian. the next function can be shown through the using of metaphors and similes. metaphors and similes in russell’s utterance made the bland statements become colorful because it is presented in expressive way. by using figurative some utterances in a language would be presented in expressive way because it used the broader word. it would be clearer than the bland statement. so, the function of simile and metaphor here were to make a life of stand-up speech in stand-up comedy performance. the next function can be shown through the using of chiasmus. russell made a chiasmus sentence or phrase in which the order of some words in the first sentence or phrase is reversed in the sentence or the phrase that follow. the arrangement of words, phrases and clauses were reversed with a phrase or clause that follows. if we heard a standup comedian used chiasmus, it seemed to be more interesting and easy listening because it used balancing structure. so, the function of chiasmus is to make sentence represented in interesting way. the last function could be shown through the using of onomatopoeia and alliteration in that stand-up comedy show. as we know, figurative language was used in literary works in order to 126 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee make the language become imaginative and give different insight. because of that, the purpose of onomatopoeia and alliteration in that stand-up comedy were to give a creative addition. conclusion this study investigates figurative language in english stand-up comedy show. figurative language as one of the communication strategies is used by people to express the inner feeling and to make the communication more expressive, imaginative and colorful. after analyzing one of selected videos of russell peters’s stand-up comedy show in chapter 4, the writer found many particular ways and complex sentences to express the conclusion. the conclusion is based on the research question, that is what are types of figurative language found in stand-up comedy and what are the functions of figurative language used in stand-up comedy. from this study, it is concluded that russell as the stand-up comedian in the selected video of stand-up comedy used various figurative language. there were 11 (eleven) types of figurative language which were used. the types were alliteration, chiasmus, hyperbole, idiom, irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, personification and simile. from 167 utterance contained figurative language, there were 7 utterances (4.20%) belonging to alliteration, 8 utterances (4.80%) belonging to chiasmus, 40 utterances (23.95%) belonging to hyperbole, 9 utterances (5.38%) belonging to idiom, 50 utterances (29.94%) belonging to irony, 2 utterances (1.20%) belonging to litotes, 3 utterances (1.80%) belonging to metaphor, 18 utterances (10.77 %) belonging to metonymy, 16 utterances (9.58%) belonging to onomatopoeia, 3 utterances (1.80%) belonging to personification and 11 utterances (6.58%) belonging to simile. from the percentage above we can see that the most dominant of figurative language was irony with the number of occurrences was 50 (29.94%). the less figurative language was litotes with the number of occurrences was 2 (1.20%). russell peters used irony as the most figurative language used in his show. russell wanted to deliver his stories in stand-up comedy show in unique way by make an irony statement combined with positive hyperbole statement almost in every utterance. hyperbole also took in the second place as the most dominant of figurative language use by russell peters in 40 utterances (23.95%). by using the hyperboles, the joke becomes indirect and less aggressive in attacking the target. in the video of russell peters – comedy now! uncensored (2006) standup comedy show, russell told various topics in society. the topics were about ethnics (canadian, white people, black people, brown people and asian), society case (beating child) and culture (accent and life style of various ethnics in the world, habitual of various ethnics in the world). russell told about ethnic topic in irony way and hyperbole way, to make the jokes becomes smooth and indirect. because of that, irony is used dominantly by russell peters because he wanted to attract audience attention. in conclusion, probably by using ethnic topics and mix with irony statement and positive hyperbole statement, russell hoped that expression could draw audience’s attention, made the irony statement become smooth and provoked audience’s laughter. litotes was the less figurative language used by russell peters in that stand-up comedy. in that stand-up comedy, russell didn’t tell much his stories in litotes way because his main topics in that stand-up comedy show 127 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy were telling about ethnics issue in interesting way. he wanted to tell it much in ironic way than in litotes way to make the stories became funnier in front of the audiences. the functions of figurative language found in the selected video of stand-up comedy are: alliteration and onomatopoeia were used to give a creative addition in russell’s utterance. chiasmus was used to make sentence interesting represented. hyperbole, idiom, metonymy and personification were used to expand meaning. irony and litotes were used to infer the speaker’s intention and to amuse people in comedic situations. simile and metaphor were used to make a life of stand-up speech in stand-up comedy performance. thus, figurative language in this world has various types. the types can be found in people communication. that language is used to make word widely described and to give a special effect to listener. many functions and reason can be found when someone uses figurative language in communication. the functions itself can come from the situation in communication, etc. but the most domminant function is created from the needs of people itself in communication. references anonymous. figurative language, retrieved from http://figurativelanguage.net/ anonymous. russell peters comedy now uncensorred (2006). retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= cpyyt0tmqjk anonymous. russell peters. retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/russe ll_peters astuti, p., sada, c., & wardah. (2013). an analysis of students’ perception towards stand-up comedy in speaking spoof monologue. english language education study program of fkip untan. 1-13. retrieved from jurnal.untan.ac.id/index.php/jpdpb/a rticle/view/6872. chunqi, l. (2014). two immigrant humor styles of stand-up comedy (a linguistic perspective). international conference on education, language, art and intercultural communication (icelaic 2014), 176 279. hebei vocational college of foreign languages, qinhuandao china: atlantis press. retrieved from http://www.atlantispress.com/php/download_paper.php %3fid%3d12518&ved=0ahukewig38 2kpnmahuckpqkhyvbahmqfggc maa&usg=afqjcnhsjufkhyx6am tgchfjxd8gbic6xa&sig2=blbbdet1 jaetms1gdnn6ig cresswell, j. w. (2012). educational research: fourth edition. lincoln: univesity of nebraska. crystal, d. (1994). the cambridge encyclopedia of the english language. new york: cambridge university press. fenner, s. (2003). one way communication: definition, advantages & example. retrieved from http://www.study.com/academy/les son/one-way-communicationdefinition-advantages-examples.html fitri, f.r. (2013). discourse of chinese indonesia in ernest prakasa’s show in stand-up comedy. alussion publication, 2(2), 21-28. retrieved from journal.unair.ac.id. kokemuller, n. (2001). what’s the purpose of figurative language. retrieved from http://classroom.synonym.com/what s-purpose-figurative-language21752.html kothari, c.r. (2004). research methodology (second revised edition). new age international. mcarthur, t. (1992). the oxford companion to the english language. new york: oxford university press. 128 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee oktoma, e., & mardiyono, s. (2013). the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 76-86. setyaningsih, n. (2013). ethnic stereotypes in stand-up comedy. faculty of humanities, dian nuswantoro university, semarang. prosiding the 5th international conference on indonesian studies “ethnicity and globalization.” 144 – 157. retrieved from https://iccssis.files.wordpress.com/20 13/09/2013-0213.pdf&ved=0ahukew19tvbwlmahwbri8khvjdcskqfggamaa& usg=afqjcnfiiwmu7ledu_ro_hstg 9d0fffsza&sig2=x07bv_dvlc6nbvv k7o3wpq turner, l. l. (2016). what’s the purpose of figurative language. retrieved from http://education.seattlepi.com/whats -purpose-figurative-language5137.html yuri. a, r., & rosa, r. n. (2013). an analysis of types of figurative language used in internet advertisement. fbs universitas negeri padang, 72 – 79. retrieved from ejournal.unp.ac.id 129 maharani widya putri, erwin oktoma, roni nursyamsu figurative language in english stand-up comedy duck a duck walks into a feed store and asks, "got any duck feed?" the clerk tells him, "no, we don't have a market for it so we don't carry it." the duck says, "okay," and leaves. the next day, the duck again walks in to the feed store and asks, "got any duck feed?" again the clerk says no and the duck leaves. next day, the duck once again walks in, and asks, "got any duck feed?" the clerk says, "i've told you twice, we don't have duck feed, we've never had duck feed and we never will have duck feed. if you ask me again, i'll nail your feet to the floor." the duck leaves. the next day, the duck walks in and asks, "got any nails?" "no." "got any duck feed?" (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml 130 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 21 bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis nur azizah smkn 1 simpangkatis bangka tengah, bangka belitung province, indonesia e-mail: kanizatiara@gmail.com rita inderawati department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id machdalena vianty department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: vianty.unsri@gmail.com correspondence authors: rita inderawati and machdalena vianty corresponding e-mail: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id and vianty.unsri@gmail.com apa citation: azizah, n., inderawati, r. & vianty, m. (2020). bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 21-34. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3776 received: 29-06-2020 accepted: 30-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction one of the characteristics of teaching english at vocational high school (smk) is the specification of the materials taught. this is due to the materials provided for smk students have the same purpose as english for specific purposes (esp) courses. materials provided aim to meet the students' specific language needs. mcdonough, shaw, and masuhara (2013) explain that as the need for social, economic, and technological communication increases at the global level, teaching english becomes diverse, for example, esp which taught for specific purposes of the certain areas studied to support a job. it can be assumed that the approach of teaching english in smk can refer to the esp approach that meets the students' needs to learn the language which is referred to the specific fields. as one of the skills in english learning, it cannot be denied that reading is the important one especially for the students who need to read english abstract: this research aimed to find out the vocational high school (smk) students' needs in english reading materials development based on bangka local culture reviewed by students', teachers', and stakeholders' views. the data were obtained through the use of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. the data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. the result of the need analysis showed that: 1) english was important for the students mostly to support their future carrier, 2) students’ english proficiency was in the beginner level, 3) students still had some difficulties in reading comprehension, 4) the kind of text needed was a descriptive text, 5) the forms of questions mostly suggested were multiple choice and essay, 6) there was a need of integrating english reading materials with the materials of the content subjects, 7) students still lacked knowledge about bangka local culture, 8) there were no existing english reading materials which were integrated with bangka local culture, 9) two main reasons of integrating bangka local culture in reading, were enhancing the students’ knowledge about bangka culture, and promoting their skills in their study program, 10) the aspects of bangka local culture needed to be integrated into english reading materials were about arts, customs, foods, traditional clothes, traditional equipment, folklores, and historical places. due to the needs, it was necessary to develop supplementary descriptive reading materials by integrating bangka local culture which matched the students’ english proficiency and could support their study program. keywords: english reading materials in smk; local culture; need analysis. mailto:kanizatiara@gmail.com mailto:rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id mailto:vianty.unsri@gmail.com mailto:rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id mailto:vianty.unsri@gmail.com nur azizah, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis 22 materials for their specialist (mcdonough, shaw, and masuhara, 2013). additionally, mukundan, zarifi, and kalajahi (2016) describe reading is one of the most prominent and dominant activities in language learning. the function of reading is not only to provide the information but also as a tool to improve and strengthen one’s knowledge about the language itself. in smk, learning reading is expected not only as a means to enhance the students' reading comprehension but also the information presented can support the students’ study program and the lesson in the content subjects. as described in english syllabus of 2013 curriculum, the knowledge involved should focus on preparing the students to have specific skills by having practical activities and knowledge based on their study program to develop the students’ potential at school, in the workplace, and in the community and worldwide. consequently, the materials should be paid more attention since they consist of the knowledge, source, or content taught and learned based on the learning goals. as explained by tomlinson (2012) that teaching materials mean anything that can be used to help the students in studying. furthermore, maley (2016) explains that material taught is required to offer more educational prospective for example critical thinking, life skills, citizenship, global issues, crosscultural understanding, and more. in the curriculum, materials are considered as one of the important components in the teaching and learning process since materials are the knowledge which the students need to learn. the materials taught in smk should be designed or developed appropriately to fulfill the students' needs. providing materials for reading in teaching english in smk can be integrated with the knowledge of the content subjects. based on the 2013 curriculum of the content subjects in the tour and travel study program, the integration of english reading materials to the content subjects can be about certain topics such as tourism, flight reservation, or cultural tourism. it is in line with the core competence of the english subject of the 2013 curriculum which is described the knowledge taught in english is about science, technology, art, culture, and humanities. regarding the culture as one of the areas of knowledge that can be integrated into reading materials for tour and travel study program in smk, it is necessary to employ the local culture in english reading materials. it can be one of the ways to incorporate and support the lessons in the content subjects, the students’ skills, and future careers. moreover, in global communication, learning culture in learning a language is not only about the target culture but also the students' own culture or local culture. students also need to understand, explore, discuss, and describe their own cultures to other people. as explained in indonesian government regulation no. 5 year 2017 states that every citizen including student has the right to conserve, develop, and promote the cultures in indonesia. it is crucial for researchers to also include local culture in learning materials. a lot of inquiries showed benefits of local culture used in english learning, that is to improve the reading achievement and encourage the learners to read. (estuarso, basthomi & widiati, 2017; yang, 2017; fu, 2018; and sopian, inderawati & petrus , 2019). there were many findings of the studies that reported the use of local culture as reading materials could help the students to improve reading comprehension, encourage the students’ knowledge and awareness of their local culture (dehghan & sadighi, 2011; yousef, karimi & janfeshan, 2014; yang, 2017; fu, 2018; wulandari, vianty & fiftinova, 2018; sopian, inderawati & petrus, 2019; elviana, inderawati & mirizon, 2020). however, most of the reading materials provided in english coursebooks seem limited in relation to the students' background or local culture. dehbozorgi, amalsaleh, and kafipour (2014) reported the target culture was more dominant over the other culture categories based on the result of their research by analyzing three different textbooks. sari (2016) found that local values needed to be embedded in teaching materials, thus the development of teaching materials was necessary since the unavailability of the materials. hence, it is needed to design or develop the reading materials for tour and travel students of smk to present them with their own local culture in english. the first and important thing to do before developing the materials is doing need analysis. according to brown (2009), need analysis means the process of gathering information about the needs of a certain group in industry or education. it means that, at smk, it is the activity of gaining information about the students' needs in learning based on their study program. need english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 23 analysis is essential to do in course design especially in esp which is the prior step in designing or developing processes (richards, 2001; long, 2005; brown, 2009). furthermore, brown (2009) described nine types of language need analysis. they are (a) target situation analysis (tsa) which concerns the information on the language requirements learners face in learning a language. it focuses on the students' purpose or necessities in learning language, (b) deficiency analysis which considers the students' current wants and needs and their target situations deficiencies or lacks, (c) present situation analysis (psa) which focus on the existing proficiency, knowledge, strengths and weaknesses of the students, (d) learning-oriented analysis which takes the view that the needs (in terms of syllabus, content, teaching method, materials and others) should be negotiated between students and other stakeholders, (e) strategy analysis which focuses on the students' preference in terms of learning strategies, error correction, group sizes, amount of homework, and others, (f) means analysis which examines the learning environment or situation with as few prejudices as possible such as in terms of utility, organization or cultural appropriateness, (g) language audits which get the view of need analysis in large-scale in terms of well-planned language policies, professional fields, governmental service, countries and others, (h) set menu analysis which sets out to create a menu of main courses from which the sponsors or students can select, (i) computer-based analysis which is done by computer to match perceived needs to a data base of the materials. there have been numerous studies that dealt with the need analysis related to esp in terms of designing syllabus or developing the materials at a certain level of education which were conducted in indonesia. those studies were as conducted by sari (2016), yundayani, emzir and rafli (2017), mahbub (2018), rahamdina, harahap and sofyan (2019), ratri and puspitasari (2019), sularti, drajati, and supriyadi (2019). a number of studies on need analysis also have been conducted in other countries such as hamlan and baniabdelrahman (2015), bedoya, valencia, and montoya (2015), ibrahim (2016), kayaoglu and akbas (2016), lee (2016), alsamadani (2017), chetsadanuwat (2018), and wu and low (2018). those investigations showed the necessity and unavoidable function of the need analysis in arranging instructions, designing textbooks, or developing teaching materials. from the need analysis, it could be identified the problem faced by the students, the knowledge or skills needed, or the teaching method that should be used. furthermore, the result of the need analysis could be the main points that had to be considered in order to meet the needs of the students. as previously stated, many studies highlighted local culture for vocational schools, especially tourism study programs. however, this recent study developed local culture-based reading materials in terms of descriptive texts. the texts are entailed by the students in order to inform and to describe bangka local culture descriptively to the visitors or the tourists from abroad. based on the explanations above, the researchers needed to conduct the need analysis study related to the students’ needs in advance, as the prior stage of developing english descriptive reading materials for tour and travel students of smk in bangka based on their local culture. this study had similarities and differences from several relevant previous studies. the main similarity was about the investigation of the students' need analysis. the differences from some previous studies were about the level of the students, the english skills focused, and the scope of need analysis. the main difference was about the specific local culture integrated; bangka local culture. the students’ needs analysis conducted included tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis. this need analysis investigated the students' needs viewed by the students of tour and travel, english teachers, and other school stakeholders. thus, the objective of this research was to describe the views of the students, teachers, and stakeholders related to the students’ needs in english reading materials based on the student's local culture. methods the participants of this study involved tenth-grade students of tour and travel study program, english and content teachers, and other school stakeholders (the head of tour and travel study program and the assistant curriculum) at an smk in bangka belitung province. there were 35 ten grade students of tour and travel study program, 4 english teachers and 3 nur azizah, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis 24 content teachers, 1 head of study program, and 1 assistant curriculum. the data were obtained through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. the questionnaire was given to the students. it consisted of 25 questions. the questions were classified into tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis. the interview was conducted to the english teachers and content teachers, head of the study program, and assistant curriculum especially related to teaching english in smk, the existing english reading materials, and the use of bangka local culture in developing english reading materials. the data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. the quantitative method was used to assess the data obtained from the questionnaire while the qualitative method was used to interpret and describe the information got from the interview. results and discussion the students’ needs viewed by the students the data got from the students' view were related to the students' needs in tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis. the data presented in this paper were the highest percentage of the students' view of each question in the questionnaire. target situation analysis (tsa) this part was concerned about the students' necessities, a general intention, and expectations in learning english. the data obtained can be seen in table 1. from table 1, the main reason for learning english was to support their career in the future (68.6%). it was in line with the aims of the vocational high school which were described in 2013 english curriculum and the national education ministry regulation of indonesia no. 20 year 2016. then, the students expected that they could communicate fluently using english in oral communication in the future workplace (85.7%). most of them desired by learning english they could communicate with colleagues or tourists (91.4%). that became the reason that their english proficiency should be in advanced level in order to support their career (71.4%). therefore, to be able to communicate orally especially to the tourist, the tour and travel students had to have knowledge related to their study program, one of them was about their own local culture, bangka culture. they needed to explain and expose their own local culture to domestic tourists even the ones from overseas as one of their jobs in the future. one effort to provide knowledge about their local culture was by presenting it in reading materials. as stated by petrovska (2001) that the local culture can be used in teaching and learning language to enhance the new experience, motivate the students by presenting them with something familiar, and train them to speak about their own culture by using a foreign language for exchanging ideas, values, and knowledge. table 1. the students’ view on tsa no question/ statement students’ view percentage 1. the importance of learning english to support a career in the future 68.6% 2. the students’ expectation toward learning english to communicate using english in oral communication in the future workplace 85.7% 3. the language used for students’ career to do oral communication with colleagues or tourists 91.4% 4. the english proficiency level for students’ career advance 71.4% deficiency analysis this part considered the students' current wants and needs and their target situations deficiencies or lacks. the data about the students' current wants and needs related to the topics or input for reading are shown in table 2. based on the questionnaire result, 74.3% of students wanted the topic of their own local culture in reading materials. it could be assumed that the students felt that this topic could support their study program. it could be seen that 65.7% of the students desired texts related to the context of the tour and travel study program. it was showed that 65.7% of students thought integrating topics which were related to the general knowledge of students' study program for reading, was very important. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 25 additionally, the other topics that they also needed were about their local culture, bangka culture. 57.1% of the students gave the positive response that it was very important and the rest of the students stated it was important. it is in line with the finding of rahamdina, harahap and sofyan (2019) who conducted research which investigated the english needs of tour and travel study program at an smk in bengkulu. they found one of the important topics in reading needed by the students was about cultural tourism. table 2. the students’ view on current wants and needs no question/ statement students’ view percentage 1. topic desired by students in learning reading local culture (bangka local culture) 74.3% 2. students’ desired input for reading texts related to the context of the tour and travel field. 65.7% 3. integrating topics which were related to the general knowledge of students’ study program for reading very important 65.7% 4. integrating topics which were related to bangka local culture for reading very important 57.1% then, the students' view of integrating topics that were related to bangka local culture for reading was to help them for some reasons, as shown in figure 1. from figure 1, most of the students thought that integrating local culture in reading materials could enhance their knowledge about bangka culture (54.3%). then, 42.9% of students felt the reading materials based on bangka local culture could support their skills related to their study program. 40% of students considered that integrating local culture in english reading materials could encourage their cultural awareness and improve their english proficiency in reading skills. the other reason was encouraging motivation in learning english (25.7%). 11.4% of students assumed that it could make them more comprehend the texts. it can be because the students have prior knowledge about their local culture, are interested and familiar with the reading materials. it is in line with the explanation of cooper, warncke, and shipman (1988) about the prior knowledge which is as the background experience of the students is an important element in the reading process. it helps the students to construct an understanding of the reading text. mukundan, zarifi, and kalajahi (2016) explain that if there is no interest in reading, there will be little or no reading activities since the reader will be more delightful to read the topics which are about individual interest. therefore, providing reading materials which are suitable for the students’ interest will motivate them in reading, and finally, can improve their proficiency in reading skills. as reported by dehghan and sadighi (2011) the students significantly performed better on local items than the global ones which were influenced by text familiarity. furthermore, yousef, karimi, and janfeshan, (2014), and wulandari, vianty, and fiftinova, (2018) reported that local culture could be used as teaching materials, and could help students to improve their reading comprehension. fu (2018) found that the use of local culture was one of the effective ways to stimulate students' motivation in the language class. nur azizah, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis 26 11.4% 25.7% enhance the knowledge about bangka local culture encourage the awareness to learn bangka local culture more comprehending the content of english texts improve the english proficiency especially in reading encourage motivation in learning english the students’ view on the needs of integrating local culture in reading materials figure 1. the students’ view on the needs of integrating local culture in reading materials the aspects of bangka local culture that the students needed to be integrated into english reading materials can be seen in figure 2. from the figure, most of the students (62.9%) needed to learn bangka local culture related to arts, customs (60%), and foods (54.3%). the other aspects of bangka local culture that they need were about traditional clothes (40%), traditional equipment and folklores (37.1%), and historical places 17.1%. the data obtained could be the basic about the kinds of culture that should be integrated into developing the reading materials. these aspects of culture are also the ones that persevered and promoted by bangka belitung government based on the local regulation of bangka belitung province no. 14 year 2016 about conserving and managing bangka local culture. figure 2. the aspects of local culture needed dealing with the lack of the students, they found some difficulties with reading skills in learning. the data presented in figure 3 show the difficulties faced by the students. from the figure, the students faced some difficulties in reading skills. comprehending certain words was categorized as the most difficult skill (62.9%). then the other difficulties were arranging the chronological order or event (28.6%), comprehending the main idea (25.7%), and comprehending the detail information (22.9%). the least difficulty was about concluding cause and effect (8.6%). hence, it was suggested that in developing the reading materials, the aspects of reading comprehension had to be taken into account besides the content of the reading materials. cooper, warncke and shipman (1988) explain there are some aspects of reading comprehension that should be taught and learned; main idea, detail, reference, cause and effect, inference, sequence and vocabulary. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 27 figure 3. students’ difficulties in reading skill present situation analysis (psa) this part focused on the present students' proficiency in english, the materials learned, and the local cultural knowledge of the students. the data about the students' views on their english proficiency are shown in table 3. almost all students (88.6%) admitted that their current english proficiency was at the beginner level. then, 54.3% of students estimated that their current proficiency in comprehending the reading text was good enough. from the data obtained, it is expected that the developed reading materials can enhance the students' english proficiency, especially in reading skills, to a higher level as needed to support their career in the future. table 3. the students’ english proficiency no question/ statement students’ view percentage 1. students’ current proficiency level of english beginner 88.6% 2. students’ current proficiency in comprehending the reading text good enough 54.3% the students' view on the existing reading materials learned or provided at school can be seen from the data presented in table 4. the level of the reading text in english coursebooks used was considered difficult by 57.1% of the students. however, 71.4% of students felt that the topics were interesting. 62.9% of students thought that the kind of text commonly found or learned in learning english was descriptive text. 54.3% of students stated that sometimes english teacher provided reading materials or texts and the questions related to the general knowledge of students' study program for reading. meanwhile, 65.7% of students stated that english teachers rarely provided reading materials or texts and the questions related to bangka local culture for reading. it could be concluded that the students rarely got the reading materials related to their own local culture. table 4. the existing materials learned and provided no question/ statement students’ view percentage 1. the difficulty level of reading texts in english coursebook difficult 57.1% 2. the topics of reading texts in english coursebook interesting 71.4% 3. the kind of text commonly found or learned in learning english descriptive 62.9% 4. the frequency of english teacher provided reading materials or texts and the questions related to the general knowledge of students’ study program for sometimes 54.3% nur azizah, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis 28 reading 5. the frequency of english teacher provided reading materials or texts and the questions related to bangka local culture for reading rarely 65.7% the students' view on their current knowledge about bangka local culture can be seen from the data available in table 5. 62.9% of students estimated that their knowledge about bangka culture was enough. the aspects of bangka culture that the students know most were about traditional food (68.6%). 48.6% of students stated that they knew the local culture just from parents, grandparents, or elders. 60% of the students just knew the local culture in their place and the closer districts. then, 65.7% of them admitted that their knowledge about bangka local culture was still about general information. based on the data gathered, it was obvious that presented bangka local culture to the students' descriptive reading materials in learning was needed. table 5. the students’ local culture knowledge no question/ statement students’ view percentage 1. students’ knowledge about bangka local culture enough 62.9% 2. the aspects of bangka local culture that the students know traditional food 68.6% 3. the way students know about bangka local culture from parents, grandparents or elders 48.6% 4. the scope of bangka local culture that the students know in the students’ place and the closer districts 60% 5. the students’ knowledge level of bangka local culture general information 65.7% based on the students' view on their knowledge about bangka local culture, there were several things that the students thought they could do to preserve and develop the local culture. the activities that the students could do are shown in figure 4. figure 4. the students’ activities in preserving bangka local culture. promoting local culture (yellow), preserving the local culture actively (green), implementing local culture in daily life (purple), enlarging the knowledge about local culture (purple) based on the data obtained, 82.9% of students could preserve and develop their local culture by enlarging the knowledge about local culture, preserving local culture actively (42.9% students), promoting the local culture (40%), and implementing local culture in daily life (22.9). the data showed that the students had the intention to know more and preserve their local culture. hence, developing bangka-local-culturebased descriptive reading materials can be a way to enlarge their knowledge as well as to encourage their awareness of the existence of their own local culture, and help them culturally literate. sopian, inderawati, and petrus, 2019, and elviana, inderawati, and mirizon (2020) who developed teaching materials based on palembang local culture to meet the students’ needs found that developed teaching materials based on local culture had a potential effect to students. strategy analysis this part presented the students' preference in learning reading. the data obtained are showed in figure 5. the figure shows 42.9% of students english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 29 preferred to comprehend the text by translating. the other ways of learning reading were by reading aloud with correct pronunciation and discussing the content of the text in a group (34.3% students). then, 17.1% of students were interested in analyzing new vocabulary based on the context, and 11.4% of students preferred to read and answer the questions related to the text individually. the students' preference in learning reading should be considered as the strategy to help them to learn. figure 5. students’ preference in learning reading the students’ needs viewed by the english teachers based on the result of the interview with four english teachers, all of them had the same opinion that english subject was important for passing the examination as well as supporting the students' career in the future. one of the teachers (teacher 1) who strongly agreed stated: “the objectives of english subject are suitable for the requirements of the curriculum, and the english subject is needed to support the content subjects. after graduating, they will have a job based on their field of study so they have to be able to use english.” however, the teachers thought that the materials available were not really appropriate since most of them were still general. as stated by teachers: teacher 1: “especially, for the tour and travel students, there are a few english materials related to tour and travel study program. most of the existing materials are still general even though they have been designed for a vocational school.” teacher 2: “the texts available shouldn’t use general texts as can be seen from the title of the texts. they should be related to the study program.” teacher 3: “the book provided is still about something general.” teacher 4: “the reading texts are not really related to the students’ study program.” to overcome this situation the english teachers tried to get supplementary materials for reading by using an esp book, other commercial books, or taking the materials on the internet. as stated by teacher 1 and teacher 3: teacher 1: “i use the book which is provided by the government and another book that relates to the tour and travel study program, esp book.” nur azizah, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis 30 teacher 3: “i use the book from the government and a commercial one. i also search for the materials on the internet.” presently, teachers just used the materials from the supplementary books or the internet directly or adopt the materials. they did not adapt or develop supplementary reading materials for example related to the general knowledge of content subjects or the students' local cultures. all the teachers had a willingness to adapt or develop appropriate reading materials. however, they faced some problems. all teachers stated most of the reason was related to time. as stated by teacher 2: “i had a very tight schedule in teaching and sometimes i had other responsibilities at school. so, i had no time for developing teaching materials.” they also had problems with the way of developing the materials. as stated by two of the teachers: teacher 1: “i had ever tried to make reading texts for the students, but i am not sure it was procedurally correct.” teacher 4: “i want to develop reading materials, but i do not have time to do it alone and i am not sure the organization or the reading materials will be good or appropriate with the students.“ these problematic aspects were also faced by the other english teachers in developing english materials. syamsinar and jabu (2015) who conducted research dealt with the problems in professional competence faced by vocational school english teachers, reported one of the findings was teachers had problems in developing materials creatively such as the lack of references, the english knowledge was more likely about the general one, and because of the teacher’s capacity. metboki (2018) who conducted research about problems hindering the student teachers in developing elt materials found the problems were the lack of basic concepts about what and the way to develop elt materials that were appropriate to the needs of the students and the lack of time. in accordance with the students' english proficiency, all teachers estimated it was at the beginner level. then, two of the teachers considered that students' reading proficiency was good enough, while the other two teachers thought it was less. concerning the reading materials, all teachers stated that the reading texts provided in the course books were difficult for the students. as stated by teacher 2: “the language in the texts is difficult for the students. it should be simplified for example the vocabulary.” then, the english teachers assumed that the common difficulties faced by the students in reading were in terms of vocabulary and comprehending the text for example the main idea and detail information. as stated by teacher 2 and teacher 4: teacher 2: “in comprehending the text, the students needed to be guided. it depends on their understanding of the vocabulary in the text.” teacher 4: “the average problem faced by the students is the unfamiliar vocabulary. they need to look up in the dictionary first.” the most common kind of reading text taught was descriptive text, the other ones such as narrative, argumentative, and factual reports. all english teachers agreed that integrating certain topics which were related to the general knowledge of students' study program for reading was important. it was the same case as the integration topics which were related to bangka local culture for reading. as stated by one of the english teachers: teacher 1: “of course, it is needed to integrate bangka local culture in reading materials. it is very good for the students’ study program in which they will be tour guides someday. they will be able to explain about tourism, culture, historical places such as tin museum or others especially in english.” furthermore, all teachers admitted that it was necessary to develop local-culture-based reading materials since there were no reading materials which completed with reading comprehension test about bangka local culture which could meet the students' needs and match their reading level. teacher 2: “it is needed to present the materials related to the local culture, but there are no english reading materials presented to bangka local culture.” english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 31 the form of questions for enhancing reading comprehension, all teachers suggested in the form of multiple-choice and essay, as stated by teacher 4: “the multiple-choice and essay are commonly used in certain examinations like in the final semester exam or national examination.” the aspects of bangka local culture suggested were related to customs, arts, foods, traditional clothes, historical buildings, traditional equipment, and folklores. the students’ needs viewed by the content subject teachers the result of the interview with three content teachers showed that english subject could support the content subjects. as explained by one of the content teachers: “the students of tour and travel study program will not only interact with domestic tourists but also with the ones from abroad. we expect that the english subject can provide the materials that the students study in content subjects. the materials can be about ticketing, flight reservation, handling complaint, handling tourists, and cultural tourism.” the other content teacher stated: “when the students have studied certain topics that are also discussed in content subjects and should present the topics in english, the students will be ready. the content teachers do not need to teach or provide the materials in english anymore.” it is worth saying that if english materials can support the content subject, it can avoid the overlapping work of the content teachers. if the materials have been studied in english subject, the content teachers can focus more to train the students' skills in their field. in relation to integrating bangka local culture to english reading materials, all the content teachers interviewed, showed a positive response. it was one of their expectations. one content teacher stated: “it would be very useful for the students for example when they study tour guide subject later, they will have some references and knowledge about their local culture and can explain it in english.” the other content teacher said: “english reading materials based on local culture are related to tourism subject and tourism industry communication subject. the aspects of bangka local culture that need to be integrated are about customs, arts, traditional clothes, and foods.” the students’ needs viewed by the stakeholders the view of the head study program of tour and travel and the assistant curriculum was the same as the others' view that english was important to support the students' content subjects and careers. then, both of them recommended the integration were related to the general knowledge of the students' field and bangka local culture since the unavailability of reading materials. the head of the study program stated: “there have not been english materials which are integrated with the content subjects especially related to bangka local culture yet.” it was also justified by the assistant curriculum who said “i do not have any report, documents such as teaching materials, books, or other administration that show the integration of english subjects to content subjects.” both head of the study program and assistant curriculum hoped there would be an integration of english subject to content subjects for example by developing reading materials based on bangka local culture to meet the students' needs and administrated it. based on the result of identifying and analyzing the students’ needs reviewed by students, teachers, and stakeholders some points had to be highlighted. english was important for the smk students mostly to support their future carrier, students’ english proficiency was still in the beginner level, students still faced some difficulties in reading comprehension, the kind of text needed was descriptive text, there was a need of integrating english reading materials with the materials of the content subjects, students still lacked knowledge about bangka local culture, and there were no english reading materials provided which incorporate the bangka local culture in that school. from those points, english as one of the important subjects in smk is not only as a foreign language which should be mastered by the students but also a means that can assist the nur azizah, rita inderawati, & machdalena vianty bangka-culture-based descriptive reading materials for tour and travel in smk: students’ needs analysis 32 students in the workplace. hence, some efforts to make the students’ english proficiency to be in higher level should be done. one of them is by preparing appropriate materials for the students. in reading skills, the materials should involve the aspects of reading comprehension. these aspects such as a main idea, detailed information, reference, inference, or vocabulary should be taught and drilled to the students as explained by cooper, warncke and shipman, 1988. incorporating students’ local culture in developing reading materials is necessary. as reported by sopian, inderawati, & petrus (2019) and elviana, inderawati, & mirizon (2020) that providing materials based on local culture could motivate students as well as enhance their reading comprehension, in which the result of their studies showed most of the students achieved the minimum mastery criterion using their developed product which based on local culture. furthermore, the use of local culture in reading materials is one of the ways to integrate english subjects with the content subjects in tour and travel study program since english is not a subject that stands alone but it is a subject taught to the students in order to support their skills based on their study program. one of the consequences, conducting need analysis especially related to the students’ needs is important to know what should be developed and integrated into english materials. these points should be taken into account by the english teachers and stakeholders in order to get closer to the students’ needs. conclusion the english reading materials such as for tour and travel students should support their needs based on their study program. once the materials cannot meet the students’ needs it is important to develop the materials. one of them by integrating the reading materials with the students’ own local culture. the prior thing that must be conducted is doing need analysis. by doing a need analysis, there will be a lot of information obtained. it can be about the necessities, wants, lack of studies, and even the preference in the learning style of the students. that information can be the grounded consideration in developing english materials. based on the result of the need analysis of this study, it is suggested to develop supplementary descriptive reading materials by integrating bangka local cultures which match with the students’ english proficiency and support the students’ content subjects. references alsamadani, h. a. 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(2017). need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 59-70. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 103 innovation development strategy for hybrid learning based english teaching and learning entis sutisna english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education sciences, bogor, pakuan university, indonesia email: entissutisna@unpak.ac.id lungguh halira vonti english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education sciences, bogor, pakuan university, indonesia email: lunggh@unpak.ac.id apa citation: sutisna, e. & vonti, l. h. (2020). innovation development strategy for hybrid learning based english teaching and learning. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 103-114. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3783 received: 28-06-2020 accepted: 30-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction the development of science and technology is a challenge for every college. one of the challenges, at present, is to increase the contribution of knowledge and technology to develop the ability to meet the lives of the nation and to increase the availability and quality of science and technology resources, both human resources and facilities and infrastructure. this is in line with hediansah & surjono (2019) who argued that the development of technology has a significant impact on the process of information exchange, including in the field of education. this is in line with surahman (2019) who believed that everyone can learn without having to sit in the educational institution. as stated by celtekligil and adiguzel (2019), with the help of technological development, people can learn new things, communicate with other people, make innovations and share innovations with others. therefore, it is important for the educational institution to provide the ability to hold the teaching and learning process in emergency situations such as pandemic that do not allow the implementation of the learning process offline. this challenge should be interpreted by the university in mapping the profile of graduates against graduate work and also to perform the sustainability of the learning process. gupta (2018) stated that new ideas, technologies, and services are innovation products. in education, innovative processes provide variation and personalityoriented trend of the educational process, so that the knowledge, skills, and abilities of students are transformed into a means of developing their cognitive and personal qualities, competence to ensure their ability to be the subject of innovative abstract: this research is motivated by the importance of the modernization of the implementation of learning in the education system within the university. the existence of various limitations of human resources, study space, and time to face-to-face causes the learning process to experience various obstacles to achieve optimal results. learning in the form of hybrid learning is one of several alternative efforts to improve the quality and quantity of the lecture process. through learning by using hybrid learning, students and lecturers can interact in learning across distances, time and space. the objective of this research was to obtain an overview of the hybrid learning model to improve digital literacy of students in the learning process. the data obtained from this study were the results of document analysis, observation, interviews, and questionnaires. the sources of this study were students of the english language study program, faculty of teacher training and educational sciences, pakuan university who were registered as active students for the 2018/2019 school year. the stages of research were observation, instrument calibration, research, evaluation, data analysis, revision of research results, dissemination of results, and reporting. the result of the research showed that the students' digital literacy was improved through the process of hybrid learning. keywords: hybrid learning; digital literacy; learning mailto:entissutisna@unpak.ac.id entis sutisna & lungguh halira vonti innovation development strategy for hybrid learning based english teaching and learning 104 professional activities (mykhalyshyn, kondur, & serman, 2018). according to haizar, kee, chong, and chong (2020), there are four components of innovation strategy namely strategy, resources, capabilities, and processes. this is important so that national strategic issues in the administration of higher education are dealt with effectively and efficiently. the learning model is a design and a stage used by the lecturer and learning. the model serves to bridge the delivery of learning messages in the form of information (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor) from various sources to students. learning models have an important role to influence students to be actively involved in learning. this is in line with the opinions of bruce, well, and calhoun (2019, p.30) explaining that learning models are designed for teachers to create an enforceable learning environment. with this model, it is very useful to make learning planning both of material and strategy. as stated by rahman (2018), educators’ lesson plan must push new ideas keeping in mind the end goal to promote the learning of every last one of the students. higher education, in this case lecturers, always make efforts to emphasize and improve the quality and quantity of the elements that function in an educational process. higher education tries to solve the problem in innovative ways. one of the efforts is that universities are trying to innovate face-to-face learning processes. the innovation was carried out by integrating communication and information technology in the learning process, known as hybrid learning. herdiansyah and surjono (2020, p.2) defined hybrid learning as “a learning method that combines two or more methods and approaches in learning to achieve the objectives of the learning process.” graham (in avgerinou, 2008) explains three important reasons a teacher would prefer to implement hybrid learning over both online and classical learning, namely: better pedagogy, increased, and flexibility, and increased cost-benefits. integrating hybrid learning in the learning process has several advantages. hybrid learning can overcome the limitations and differences in distance, time, and space between learners and instructors. as stated by zainuddin & keumala (2018), the use of technology and internet access are potentials for each college to develop hybridbased learning media by integrating technology. through hybrid learning, the learning process cannot only be done through a meeting between learners and instructors in a room but can be done wherever the learners and instructors are. simply, the learning process cannot only be done based on a specific schedule allocation but can be done anytime and anywhere. related to the challenges faced by tertiary institutions, this research was carried out as an effort to integrate sporadic and partial preliminary research so that national strategic problem solving becomes more focused, more comprehensive, in a more efficient way, both in terms of resources human and time and source of funds (costs). this research is also an institution-based research activity which is expected to create a superior research centre that is able to grow the capacity of innovation along with technological advances and is market-oriented and the implementation of research results for fostering the nation's character. this research is a technology-based research of the future. the application of this research design aimed to prepare human resources for the mastery and development of future technology. the substance of the research carried out is a continuation of the related research being carried out. based on the explanation of the implementation of hybrid learning described above, the researcher considers it necessary to conduct special research related to the innovation of the learning process through the implementation of hybrid learning in an effort to improve digital literacy capabilities and provide a hybrid-learning based learning model, to prepare the educational institution and also the students in industrial era 4.0 as well as to prepare for the possibility of having limited condition to hold offline teaching and learning process such as in covid 19 pandemic. the implementation of hybrid learning provides flexibility when issues of time and place are taken into consideration. in this model, every student has the luxury of choosing the place and time that suits him/her. the benefits of hybrid learning were also stated by smedley (2010), that the adoption of e-learning provides the institutions as well as their students or learners the flexibility of time and place of delivery or receipt of learning information. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 105 however, besides the benefits, there are several disadvantages of blended learning discussed by experts. first, in online learning, there will be possibilities for the students to skip or prevent doing all the assignments on time (bijeesh, 2017). other disadvantages are related to the equipment needed by the students (brown, 2017), as well as the social interaction with their friends and instructor (dyrud, 2000; brown 2017; hutt, 2017). based on the descriptions of the benefits above, the writers would like to promote the possible innovation strategy of the development of hybrid learning. here is the state of art, summarizing the background and theories of the research. method this study attempts to answer two research questions; how was the performance of lecturers and student activities in teaching learning process in the form of hybrid learning and what is the innovation development strategy of blended learning based on the students' need to overcome some disadvantages in applying hybrid learning. the data source of this research is the permanent lecturer of english education study program and the students experienced hybrid learning in their teaching and learning process. the informants determined were informants who fit the research category so that the type used in this study was purposive sampling. the informants in this study were students of the english language study program at the faculty of teacher training and educational sciences of pakuan university who were given a blended learning course in the academic year 2018-2019. there were three courses given in blended learning and the researcher only took 5 students from each class by using random sampling technique. data collection techniques carried out widely and in-depth through observation, interviews (interview instruments are open, structured with entis sutisna & lungguh halira vonti innovation development strategy for hybrid learning based english teaching and learning 106 guidelines), and study documentation. data collection can be obtained from observations, interviews, documentation, and combination/ triangulation. in this study, data collection techniques were used by means of observation, questionnaires, interviews, and documentation. the data analysis technique used is descriptive narrative which is applied through three streams, namely data reduction, data presentation, and verification. the observation was conducted by observing the e-learning courses including various learning activities related to the content of each unit. there were three courses of english language study program conducted in blended learning. each course should conduct at least 6 sessions in elearning and 6 sessions in a conventional classroom. these online lessons were developed by the lecturers for students studying english courses. during the development of the program, the units were tested by the english lecturers at the department to confirm that it covered similar content to the classroom lessons. the documents used as the object of this research is blended learning based rps written by the lecturers who taught by using blended learning. the lms platform used was also observed to see the performance of the teaching and learning process related to the improvement of students' digital literacy. the activities and the procedure of using blended learning were also examined during the research. the questionnaire was used to obtain students’ experiences of the use of hybrid learning related to the benefits and the disadvantages in some courses. the subjects’ responses to the questionnaire were analyzed in terms of mean scores and standard deviations on a five-point likert scales which were interpreted as follows: 4.51 to 5.00 = strongly agree, 3.51 to 4.50 = agree, 2.51 to 3.50 = undecided, 1.51 to 2.50 = disagree, and 1.00 to 1.50 = strongly disagree. students in the experimental group were required to do a questionnaire. to provide further support, 3 lecturers who taught a blended learning course were randomly selected for interviews of 8 questions at the end of the experiment. lecturers were asked for their opinions on using e-learning to supplement the course, and their innovative development strategy to overcome the disadvantages of using hybrid learning models in teaching and learning processes. results and discussion as it was stated in theoretical review, the type of hybrid learning/blended learning and instructional methods applied does not simply combine the online and face-to-face instruction, but the appropriate combination of any kind of instructional method, model, and delivery strategies both live face-to-face, synchronous virtual collaboration, asynchronous virtual collaboration, and self-paced asynchronous activities. research findings revealed that in the hybrid learning/blended learning courses in english language education study program, the lecturers mostly combine live face-to-face instruction/sessions, asynchronous virtual collaboration, and self-paced asynchronous activities. methods used in live face-to-face instruction was lecture, group presentation, and discussion. live face-to-face was more focused on deepening students' understanding on the subject or certain topics. methods used in asynchronous virtual collaboration were blogs, online discussion boards, and listservs. methods used in self-paced asynchronous activities were online searching, online reading, and online assignment. research findings also showed that e-learning tools used in hybrid learning/blended learning strategy for the courses were non-proprietary learning management system; e-learning with the website http://elearning.unpak.ac.id. almost all facilities offered in the learning management system were used. facilities used were learning path, course description, assignment, announcement, discussion forum, and document as a repository of all kinds of learning materials. one of the alternatives to developing a hybrid learning strategy in english teaching and learning process can be done with the following steps. planning stage this stage is the stage of designing courses that will be uploaded in the elearning.unpak.ac.id portal. this stage includes the design of the semester learning plan by formulating course descriptions, learning outcomes of the course, selecting study material to be presented, and making exercises based on study material. in the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 107 faculty of teacher training and educational sciences, each semester, the lecturer who will give blended learning courses will be gathered before the courses begin and they will be asked to make rps (lesson plan) as well as to prepare the activities and sources that will be used in elearning. in planning a blended learning lesson, things need to be considered are: 1) the formal face to face learning stage; the teacher designs the subject or material discussed according to what is contained in the syllabus. there were 6 face to face meetings and 6 blended learning sessions. therefore, the lecturers should discuss the material and teaching learning method and media with their subjects’ team. 2) e-learning stage; in this stage, the lecturer should prepare some online activities that would be uploaded in e-learning. they designed the material and activities that would be given to the students in e-learning. development stage after the analysis and design stages of the blended learning course are carried out, the next stage is the development stage. the stages of this development include the process of preparing course portals, developing online course content, and uploading material. implementation the implementation of blended learning was done with the following steps. 1) the teacher explains the material and examples contained in the rps (lesson plan) in accordance with the curriculum in face-to-face meeting. there are two possible methods in having a blended learning course; first, the course will be held conventionally for the half semester and the rest of the meetings will be held online, second, the conventional and online meetings are held in turn every week. 2) the teacher uses the internet by opening the elearning website (lms) and selecting the material discussed to be explained to students. material must be available and accessible to students regardless of place and time. the following are the sample screens of e-learning course: figure 1. sample screen of e-learning course 3) lecturers can check students’ attendance (online presence) based on online discussions (asynchronous). then, students study or listen to audio and watch learning videos uploaded on the e-learning page. learning material can also entis sutisna & lungguh halira vonti innovation development strategy for hybrid learning based english teaching and learning 108 be downloaded in the form of .pdf, .ppt, and word files. 4) submissions of online assignments are directly commented on and assessed by lecturers where students can review the results of their assignments. there is also an online quiz for each subject. the documentation used in this research was rps blended learning used by the lecturer who gave blended courses to the students. in the last semester, there were three courses conducted in blended learning, namely; english phrase structure, ept preparation, and genre based reading. the researchers observed and analyzed the correlation between the implementation of elearning lessons and the rps made by the lecturers; whether the materials given were correlated and became supplementary of the offline lessons or were relevant to the offline courses. the researchers checked the e-learning websites and also the rps used. the presentation of the blended learning applied was 50% face to face sessions and 50% online sessions with the numbers of meetings was 6 face to face meetings and 6 online sessions. after doing the e-learning courses observation and checking the documentation, students received a questionnaire to determine the effectiveness of blended learning on their needs related to their digital literacy. in the questionnaire, the subjects were asked about their perception of e-learning’s effect on their digital literacy. the subjects’ responses to the questionnaire were analyzed in terms of mean scores and standard deviations on a five-point likert scale. students in the experimental group were required to do a questionnaire. the questionnaire was divided into three parts. part one collected the students’ personal information regarding the place in the program whether they were in the first, second, third or fourth year. the first part also asks about their experience of having blended learning courses like how many subjects they took in blended learning courses last semester. part two consisted of nine questions aimed at obtaining students’ general opinions toward the use of blended learning courses, reactions towards the instruction used in e-learning, the content, and the relationship between face to face and online learning. the last part was asking questions about their opinions of blended learning related to their digital literacy. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 graph 1. students’ personal information based on the result of the questionnaire, 100 percent of 15 samples said that their first opinion of the blended learning course was its flexibility of being able to complete assignments anytime/anyplace. it means that most of the students were interested in blended learning because they could do and access the assignments anytime and anyplace they could, not only in the classroom. therefore, the flexibility of time and place matters for the students. the second topic was about the interaction with other students in blended learning class, 33% or about 5 people said that there was no difference; however, 26% or 4 people said that somewhat, the interactions decreased since they did not need to meet their classmates in the classroom. the rest were spread between increased and neutral. on the other hand, 40% of the respondents said that the interactions with the lecturer were increased. entis sutisna & lungguh halira vonti innovation development strategy for hybrid learning based english teaching and learning 110 graph 2. students’ opinion of blended learning about the course calendar given by the university, most of the students chose neutral and agreed. meaning that even though the teaching and learning process was conducted online, the course still fulfilled the university expectations of the course. about the resources and content of blended learning courses, almost 67% samples said that the resources in online courses were sufficient, and 67% samples said that the workload in blended learning was moderate or still acceptable. when the samples were asked about the relationship between face to face and online learning, 53% said that the online learning was relevant to the face to face course; and if they were offered to have blended learning class, 33% agreed and 55% were neutral. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 graph 3. content in hybrid learning overall, the students in the experimental group had favorable attitudes towards having a teaching and learning process through e-learning. in addition, there was a favorable response relating to motivational aspects delivered through the use of technology. this information was obtained through direct interviews with some of the samples about their digital literacy. there are three parts of the interview asked to the lecturers conducted hybrid/blended learning. first part was about the content, instructional method, and evaluation. in the first part, the questions were about the preparation, the strategies, the most and least effective aspects of hybrid/blended learning, and the lecturer's suggestion of this hybrid/blended learning. the questions were asked to three lecturers who taught using hybrid/blended learning. the lecturers said that the preparations were necessary since to have hybrid/blended learning courses, they need to have prerequisite skills such as time management, technology integrations, and learner centered pedagogy. by having the preparation, the lecturers would have more options and sources before conducting the courses. the strategies they did mostly were introducing hybrid/blended learning to the participants and including the schedule of each topic and this was done in the first meeting of the course. the lecturer also kept monitoring the progress to make the students keep on the track. the other lecturer integrated classroom activity and online assignments slowly and gradually. the aspect that was most effective about hybrid/blended learning according to the lecturers was time management since the participants learned how to manage their time to finish all administrative tasks and may lead them to discipline themselves and also the online discussion where students get a chance to express their ideas and opinions on a given topic. while the least effective aspect was when the system was down since it usually made the students lose motivation to finish the tasks. the other aspect that was least effective was the relationship between the lecturers and the students because it took more time when they had online sessions. the suggestion that the lecturers can provide about hybrid/blended learning was the orientation before conducting hybrid/blended learning both for the students and the lecturers. about the instructional method, the difference lies down on the learning process and the sources. the participants are becoming more independent and it is possible for them to explore their entis sutisna & lungguh halira vonti innovation development strategy for hybrid learning based english teaching and learning 112 capability. blended learning approaches may stimulate their critical thinking skills that may not be done effectively in traditional classrooms. for the first taker of hybrid/blended learning, they should not be anxious or worried of not being able to accomplish the tasks because blended learning does not mean there is no collaborative work between the participants and the instructor. the lecturers should also familiarize the students with the instruction and tell them how to access each section and that the online and offline courses are hand-in-hand with the offline. the last part was about doing the evaluation. almost all the lecturers use varied evaluation forms such as assignments, quizzes, and their log participations. however, the lecturers still determined that the most effective evaluations were asking questions and checking their participations both online or offline. conclusion hybrid learning is the learning strategy that is very important to facilitate learning more effectively, efficiently and appealing for students since it is related to technology. the first type of online learning still has weaknesses; however, it can be overcome by the strength of combination of faceto-face instruction and online instruction. thus, in the implementation of hybrid learning, the appropriateness method and delivery strategies are the important key. in this research case, it described how the lecturers applied the hybrid learning started from the preparations until the evaluation and also the students’ perception about the application of hybrid learning that was perceived positively by the students. research findings showed that the application of hybrid learning benefited the lecturers and also the students in some aspects; one of them is the students' need to improve their digital literacy. on the preparation stage, it is important for the lecturers and also the students to have an orientation toward the implementation of hybrid learning since there would be prerequisite skills for them before having hybrid learning courses. the development of lesson planning was also crucial for the lecturers so that they could prepare the material and the activities they would post in elearning. on the main activity phase, students also are trained to be autonomous in doing task and assignments provided in hybrid learning. students' discussion through the forum discussion board also maintained the relationship between the lecturerstudents and students-students. however, the suggestions about the implementation of hybrid learning was about the orientation to both the students and the lecturers. they need to be familiarized with the system and all the activities included in the hybrid learning. immediate and intensity of feedback from lecturer is also a success key to the activity of hybrid learning. supporting factors for the succeed of hybrid learning are among others; 1) the availability of internet access both at campus or home, 2) the high of students and lecturer familiarity or literacy on computer and internet, 3) the availability of online learning resources that can be found and downloaded through internet, 4) lecturer and most of students has own computer facilities such as pcs, laptop, notebook, etc. however, the addition of e-learning to classroom teaching provides students 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(2018). method within indonesian higher education institutions. jurnal pendidikan humaniora, 6(2), pp. 69–77. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijmbl.2019%20040102 muhammad aprianto budie nugroho & nining mayda motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language: a case study in junior high school 7 kuningan motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language: a case study in junior high school 7 kuningan muhammad aprianto budie nugroho department of english education, the university of kuningan, indonesia. e-mail: muh.apriantobn@gmail.com nining mayda department of english education, the university of kuningan, indonesia. e-mail: maydaning92@gmail.com apa citation: nugroho, m. a. b., & mayda, n. (2015). an analysis of motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language: a case study in junior high school 7 kuningan. english review: journal of english education, 4(1), 82-93 received: 06-01-2015 accepted: 07-03-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: this research aims to analyze motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language at 7th grade of junior high school 7 kuningan and to analyze students‟ attitudes towards motivational strategies that were applied by teachers in teaching efl. the researchers used qualitative research by using classroom observation, interview, and questionnaires. the result taken from classroom observation and interview show teacher 1 and teacher 3 applied motivational strategies completely based on the phases of motivational strategies. thus, the students responded these strategies positively. on the other hand, teacher 2 applied motivational strategies incompletely because the teacher missed the first phases. this was responded negatively by students. therefore, the students were actively involved in teaching and learning process conducted by teacher 1 and teacher 2, but the students were passively involved in teaching and learning process conducted by teacher 2. furthermore, the result taken from questionnaires shows that students gave positive attitudes towards the teacher 1 (88.25%), teacher 2 (79.02%), and teacher 3 (85.71%). based on the findings, it can be concluded that the way the teachers applied motivational strategies in teaching efl determined students‟ attitudes towards motivational strategies applied by teachers in teaching efl. keywords: motivational strategies, phases of motivational strategies, students attitudes, teaching efl introduction in the world, english as an international language has been used by many people and become the lingua franca for communication, business, education, and opportunity. (latha and ramesh, 2012). in indonesia, it is first foreign language and has been studied in secondary schools for long time (nugroho, 2008). it has been introduced starting from kindergarten up to university level. however, for indonesian students who learn english as a foreign language, english is still difficult to learn and quality of language learning itself is often low. there are some factors affecting the quality of language learning. karahan (2007) considers that from the perspective of the learner, the factor 82 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee affecting language learning can be mentioned as diverse needs and goals, peer groups, role models. from perspective of the learning process, the factors influencing language learning can be outlined as learning style and strategies, motivation and classroom interaction. on the other hand, kubanyiova (2006) states that the quality of learning engagement in the classroom does not depend on students‟ cognitive abilities alone, but it is also influenced by complex motivational and affective factors. it means that the quality of language teaching and learning process does not only involve some of elements, but also all of teaching and learning elements including teacher. in this case, teacher also has a big role to determine the quality of language teaching and learning process itself. brown (2001, p. 72) claims that “one of more complicated problems of second language learning and teaching has been to define and apply the construct of motivation in the classroom”. motivation is significant determinant of success in learning a second or foreign language. “it can be defined as driving force that pushes someone to do something” (astuti, 2013, p. 14). without motivation, it seems to be impossible to achieve success in foreign language learning. “motivation could be considered as the emotion that a person could have towards learning a foreign language, and it is determined by his/her predisposition and personality characteristics.” (karahan, 2007, p. 2). therefore motivation is one of the most important in teaching foreign language especially english language. the teacher plays an important role in motivating student especially in the foreign language classroom (astuti, 2013, p. 14). the development of classroom engagement increases when the teacher has the ability to build students motivation in teaching and learning process. ramirez (2010, p. 22) states “the teachers‟ ability to motivate is important because it creates a freestressed atmosphere and establishes a relationship of mutual confidence and motivation”. from that statement, it is clear that a teacher, especially language teacher, should have ability to make a positive classroom atmosphere and good relation with students in classroom, because when all of classroom elements can support each other, it will build students motivation to learn confidently. the importance of motivation in teaching and learning process makes teacher is aware that one of the roles that must be done in teaching process is as a motivator for students. every teacher has a different way in motivating students; even what teachers done unconsciously in teaching and learning process, it could be a form of motivational strategies. dornyei (2001) defines the term of motivational strategies as techniques that promote the individual‟s goal-related behavior. he also states that motivational strategies refer to those motivational influences that are consciously exerted to achieve some systematic and enduring positive effect. according to wlodkowski (1999, p. 67), “motivational strategies are deliberate instructor actions that enhance a person‟s motivation to learn”. he also states that the strategy contributes to stimulating or creating a motivational condition: a mental/emotional state of being in which the learner is desirous of information, knowledge, insight and skill. this research is underpinned by motivational strategies theory of dornyei‟s (2001) who is identified motivational strategies into four phases, namely creating the basic motivational 83 muhammad aprianto budie nugroho & nining mayda motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language: a case study in junior high school 7 kuningan conditions, generating initial motivation, maintaining and protecting motivation, and encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation. these phases are built on each other so that student‟s motivation is created, generated, maintained and encouraged (dornyei, 2001, p. 29). dornyei (2001) classifies motivational strategies into four motivational phases namely creating the basic motivational conditions, generating initial motivation, maintaining and protecting motivation and encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation. creating the basic motivational conditions consist of three aspects, namely (1) appropriate teachers behaviors to create a good relationship with students, (2) a pleasant and supportive classroom atmosphere, and (3) a cohesive learner group with appropriate group norms. on the other hand, generating initial motivation consists of five categories, namely (1) enhancing the learners‟ language sense and attitudes; (2) increasing the learners‟ expectancy of success; (3) increasing the learners‟ goal orientation; (4) making teaching material be relevant for the learners; (5) creating realistic learners‟ beliefs. beside that, maintaining and protecting motivation consists of eight categories, namely (1) making learning stimulating and enjoyable, (2) presenting task in a motivating way, (3) setting specific learner goals, (4) protecting the learner self-esteem and increasing their confidence, (5) allowing learners to maintain a positive social image, (6) creating learners autonomy, (7) promoting self-motivating strategies and (8) promoting cooperation among the learners. lastly, encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation is divided into four categories, namely (1) promoting motivational attributions, (2) providing motivational feedback, (3) increasing learner satisfaction and (4) offering rewards and grades in a motivating manner. besides, attitude theory of oskamp and schultz (2005) is also used to identify the student's attitudes towards motivational strategies which are applied in efl classroom through considering the three main aspects of attitudes, namely affective, behavioral, and cognitive. the primary purpose of this research are to identify how teachers apply motivational strategies in teaching efl, whether it is based on the phases of motivational strategies, whether these phase are applied sequentially, and whether all of these phases are applied, and to explore the students‟ attitudes towards motivational strategies which are applied in efl classroom. method this research applied a qualitative research to investigate a phenomenon. denzin & lincoln (1995) state qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. this means that qualitative research studies things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. the research was undertaken in junior high school 7 kuningan. the participants were three english teachers of seventh grade and 123 seventh grade students in junior high school 7 kuningan, consisting of: 40 students of teacher 1, 41 students of teacher 2, and 42 students of teacher 3. these place, population and sample were chosen because researchers expected to identify how english teachers of seventh grade in junior high school 7 kuningan motivate students through applying motivational strategies in learning and teaching 84 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee process. besides, the researchers also aimed to explore the students‟ attitudes towards motivational strategies applied efl classroom. the instruments used were classroom observation, interview, and questionnaires. classroom activity was observed through videoing the english teaching learning process conducted in the seventh grade to observe how teachers applied motivational strategies in teaching efl and the students‟ attitudes toward motivational strategies applied in efl classroom. the interview was conducted with three english teachers of seventh grade to explore whether they motivated their students in learning process, and how teachers applied motivational strategies in teaching efl. besides, the interview was also conducted with three students who were one representative of seventh grade students from each class to identify the students‟ attitudes towards motivational strategies applied in efl classroom. the questionnaire was adapted from attitude theory and addressed to all of seventh grade students to explore the students‟ attitudes towards motivational strategies applied in efl classroom. all of these data collection techniques were administered at the same time, which was on august 26th, 2015 to september 4th, 2015. results motivational strategies applied by teacher 1 the result taken from classroom observation shows teacher 1 conducted all of four phases of motivational strategies. the teacher always tried to motivate students in teaching learning process. in the first phase of motivational strategies; creating basic motivational condition, the teacher tried to create a good relationship with students by showing enthusiasm and cheerfulness to teaching, tried to make positive personal relationship with students by greeting students, remembering their names and smiling at them during teaching process, and the teacher also created a pleasant and supportive classroom atmosphere by bringing humors that was related to the material to make students feel comfortable and happy, and serious but relax. it can be strengthened by the result of interview that the teacher implied that in the first phase of motivational strategies, the teacher created an atmosphere to made students feel comfort to learn and providing humors which were related with the lesson itself so that students feel comfortable and happy, serious but relax. as mentioned by dornyei (2001) that the humor is a tool to improve the classroom atmosphere. next, in the second phase of motivational strategies; generating initial motivation was conducted by the teacher through enhancing the learners‟ language sense and attitudes. the teacher encouraged the learners to apply english language proficiency in real life, but the teacher did not forget to notice students‟ understanding. besides, the teacher also made the teaching material be relevant for the learners by relating the subject matter to the everyday experiences and backgrounds of students. the teacher explained something and gave examples based on students‟ real life. it was also strengthened by the result of interview that the teacher conveyed the material in the language style that was understood by students by considering the words selection and lesson and using some media like pictures and images to make students more interested in following the learning process in the classroom. the teacher also related the material to the 85 muhammad aprianto budie nugroho & nining mayda motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language: a case study in junior high school 7 kuningan real daily life. it is important to help students get the main point and benefits of the material learned. teacher must know that one of the most demotivated factors for learners is when they have to learn something that they cannot see the point of because it has no seeming relevance whatsoever to their lives (mccombs and whisler, 1997). therefore, relating the material to the real daily life is one ways to motivate students in learning process. the third phase of motivational strategies; maintaining and protecting motivation, was also conducted by the teacher through creating enjoyable learning by stimulating students to actively involve at class and selecting task which requires mental or bodily involvement from each participants. the teachers also tried to protect the learner self-esteem and improved their confidence by giving a persuasive expression of belief that students can have a good capability. “self-esteem grows from the beliefs of others. when teachers believe in students, students believe in themselves. when those you respect think you can, you think you can” (raffini, 1993, p. 147). thus, teacher has an important role to help students believe in themselves. this was also found in the result of interview that the teacher implied that in the third phase of motivational strategies, the teacher gave an exercise to be done individually then discuss it together and also gave task in groups to help students convey opinions freely without fear of making mistakes. lastly, in the last phase of motivational strategies; encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation, the teacher tried to provide motivational feedback by giving positive feedback and the teacher also appreciated student‟s work by responding all students‟ answer or opinion even they were wrong in order to make students not feeling down, after that, the teacher discussed the appropriate answers. it also found in the result of interview that the teacher said that in the last phase of motivational, the teacher tried to appreciate student‟s work by accepting students‟ answer or opinion even it was wrong to make students not feeling down, after that the teacher discussed it together and tell that what students said was less appropriate and tell students about the appropriate answers. the teacher must be able to give positive information feedback to students to make students understand about the mistake and how to correct it. “most importantly, this feedback provides students with information rather than judgments against external standards or peer achievement.” (dornyei, 2001, p. 124). this is because judgment will make students felt down. motivational strategies applied by teacher 2 the findings taken from classroom observation shows teacher 2 did not implement one of motivational strategies phases in teaching efl. the teacher focused on the material, so the first thing to do when the teacher entered the classroom was delivering the material. the first phase of motivational strategies was not applied by the teacher. it also strengthened by the result of interview that the teacher did not apply motivational strategies sequential based on the phases of motivational strategies and the teacher did not implement the first phase of motivational strategies. the teacher said that the teacher explained the material after entered the classroom. dornyei (2001) said that motivational strategies cannot be employed successfully in a „motivational vacuum‟. it means that the teacher has to try to apply motivational strategies 86 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee sequentially based on the phases from the first until the last phase because teaching is not only process of transfer knowledge but teacher has to know how to make the students‟ mind involve and ready to accept whole teaching and learning process. the teacher has to create a good precondition before any further attempts to generate effective motivation. one of the things that can be done by the teacher is to ommit the tension between the teacher and the students by looking at them with smiling or cheerful face. “smiling at students is one of the things to convey personal attention”. (raffini, 1996, p. 182) next, the second phase of motivational strategies; generating initial motivation was conducted by the teacher through enhancing the learners‟ language sense and attitude. the teacher encouraged the learners to apply english language proficiency in real life, but the teacher did not forget to notice students‟ understanding. in this phase, the teacher also made the teaching material to be relevant for the learners by relating the subject matter to the everyday experiences and backgrounds of students. the teacher explained something and gave examples based on students‟ real life. it was also found in the result of interview that the teacher explained that in the second phase of motivational strategies, the teacher customized the media usage with the material to make teaching and learning process more interesting. furthermore, in the third phase of motivational strategies; maintaining and protecting motivation, the teacher made learning stimulating and enjoyable by breaking the monotony of learning. in this case, the teacher gave the task in pair work. from the result of interview, the teacher said that in the third phase of motivational strategies, the teacher gave tasks for students in groups or in pairs. lastly, in the last phase of motivational strategies; encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation, the teacher tried to provide motivational feedback by giving positive feedback, and then appreciated students‟ work by accepting students‟ answer or opinion even it was not appropriate. the teacher told students that what students said was less appropriate and told students about the appropriate answers. it was also found in the result of interview, in the last phase of motivational strategies; the teacher explained that the teacher tried to evaluate students positively, never convicted the students that „this is wrong‟, but tell students that „this is correct but still less complete and it should be more complete”. the teacher must be able to give positive information feedback to students to make students understand about the mistake and how to correct it, giving a judgment just will make students felt down. “most importantly, this feedback provides students with information rather than judgments against external standards or peer achievement”. (dornyei, 2001, p. 124) motivational strategies applied by teacher 3 the result of classroom observation shows teacher 3 conducted all of four phases of motivational strategies. the teacher always tried to motivate students in teaching learning process. it is important to motivate students because motivation is some kind of internal drive which pushes someone to do things in order to achieve something (harmer, 2001). it can help to get success in learning process. in the first phase of motivational strategies; creating basic motivational condition, when entering the classroom, 87 muhammad aprianto budie nugroho & nining mayda motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language: a case study in junior high school 7 kuningan the teacher tried to create a good relationship with students by showing cheerful face. the teacher also tried to make positive personal relationship with students by moving around in the class while teaching and learning process to convey personal attention to students. as mentioned by raffini (1996) that moving around in class is one of small gesture that do not take much time which can convey personal attention and can touch the lives of every student in some way. it can be useful to make students feel motivated. however, the result taken from interview shows the teacher said that in the first phase of motivational strategies, the teacher created the conditions to make students motivated in learning english by giving some information of the purpose of learning english at first and tried to make students‟ mindset that english is easy and fun. next, in the second phase of motivational strategies; generating initial motivation was conducted by the teacher through enhancing the learners‟ language sense and attitudes. the teacher encouraged the learners to apply english language proficiency in real life, but the teacher did not forget to notice students‟ understanding. in this phase the teacher also made the teaching material to be relevant for the learners by relating the subject matter to the everyday experiences and background of students. the teacher explained the material and gave examples based on students‟ real life. in addition, the teacher tried to create realistic learners‟ beliefs. the teacher positively confronted the possible erroneous beliefs, expectations that learners may have by telling students about english generally. in addition, the result of interview shows the teacher just explained that the teacher covered material based on the type and covered with interesting media like pictures. teacher can uses some kind of media or tool to make students interested to the material. teacher also can uses classroom decoration as the media to cover the material. dornyei (2001) says that the classroom decoration influences students‟ motivation such as putting posters, displaying bulletin board, etc. in the third phase of motivational strategies; maintaining and protecting motivation, the teacher made learning enjoyable by breaking the monotony of learning channel of communication. the teacher gave the tasks to the students by using visual aids. in addition, the teacher also sets specific learners goals by telling students about the purposes of learning the materials and activities. it is important to do by the teacher in teaching and learning process because explain the purpose is a strategy to present task in motivating way (dornyei, 2001). the result of interview shows the teacher said that in the third phase of motivational strategies, the teacher gave the task that was adapted to the material and what was given in the classroom. before giving the tasks, the teachers always gave exercises then discussed them together, teacher also visited and communicated with students to identify whether students had any troubles or not. lastly, in the last phase of motivational strategies; encouraging positive retrospective self-evaluation, the teacher tried to provide motivational feedback by giving positive feedback. and then, the teacher noticed and reacted to any positive contributions from students by taking time to give the thumbs up. taking time to appreciate every student‟s contribution in teaching and learning process is useful to make students feel motivated. teacher can use simple celebration way such as give the 88 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee thumbs up and applause to appreciate every student‟s contribution. “a good rule of thumb is regardless of how small it, every success must be celebrated” (scheidecker and freeman, 1999, p. 106). it also strengthened by the result of interview that the teacher said that in the last phase of motivational, the teacher tried to evaluate the students mistakes positively, when the students worked on the task or exercise, the teachers do not blame or cut „it is wrong or yes it's true‟ directly. however, at first, teachers gave students the opportunity to do the best and then discussed them together and asked the difficulty, so the teacher was able to give them more clearly and evaluate them from the beginning so that students could understand where their mistakes lied. students’ attitudes towards motivational strategies applied in efl classroom by teacher 1. the result of questionnaires that was strengthened by the result of interview showed that most of students of teacher 1 showed positive attitudes in the terms of affective, cognitive, and behavioral towards motivational strategies that were applied by the teacher in efl classroom. in affective aspect, the students were pleased to follow english lesson (100%), felt excited to heed the teacher teaching english lesson (100%), interested in following english lessons because the teacher teaches the material in a fun way (95%), even students did not prefer to do english task by own self than with friend (57.5%). in behavioral asepct, the result showed that students were not hopeless if there are any difficulties in learning english (92.5%) and always tried to do english task well and truly (85%). in cognitive aspect, the result showed that students felt a loss if did not follow english lesson (85%), learning continuously to make students‟ english skills are better than others (97.5%), challenged if the teacher gives the quite difficult english task (85%) and thought that should pay attention to the example given by the teacher first before do the english task (100%). the overall result of questionnaire showed that students gave positive attitudes towards motivational strategies applied by teacher 1 (88.25%). it was also supported by the result of data taken from classroom observation which showed that students of teacher 1 showed positive attitudes toward motivational strategies applied by the teacher in efl classroom. the students showed positive attitudes in affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. in affective aspect, the students were happy to follow english lesson, felt excited to heed the teacher teaching english lesson, interested in following english lessons, and students prefered doing english task with friend than by own self. in behavioral asepct, the result showed that students were not hopeless if there are any difficulties in learning english. it can be seen when students tried to ask the teacher about something which students did not understand. next, in cognitive aspect, the result showed that students thought that should pay attention to the example given by the teacher first before doing the english task. students’ attitudes towards motivational strategies applied in efl classroom by teacher 2. the result taken from questionnaires showed the students gave posittive attitudes in affective, cognitive, and behavioral asepcts toward motivational strategies applied by the teacher 2 in efl classroom. 89 muhammad aprianto budie nugroho & nining mayda motivational strategies in teaching english as foreign language: a case study in junior high school 7 kuningan in affective aspect, the students were happy to follow english lesson (78.1%), felt excited to heed the teacher teaching english lesson (78.8%), interested in following english lessons because the teacher teaching the material in a fun way (70.7%), but students did not prefer doing english task by own self than with friend (78.1%). in behavioral aspect, the result showed that students were not hopeless if there are any difficulties in learning english (92.7%) and always tried to do english task well and truly (92.7%). in cognitive asepct, the result showed that students felt a loss if did not follow english lesson (63.8%), learning continuously to make students‟ english skills are better than others (97.6%), challenged if the teacher gives the quite difficult english task (85.4%) and thought that should pay attention to the example given by the teacher first before do the english task (95.1%). this indicated that students showed positive attitudes towards motivational strategies applied by teacher 2 (79.02%). this was also in line with the result taken from interview. however, the result taken from classroom observation showed the students showed less positive attitude towards the motivational strategies applied in efl classroom by the teacher 2. this was because, there were only a small part of students who actively participated in teaching and learning process. besides, it also found that there were only a small part of students who felt happy to follow english lesson, felt excited to heed the teacher teaching english lesson and interested in following english lessons. on the other hand, related with cognitive asepct, athe result showed that students felt challenged if the teacher gives the quite difficult english task. students’ attitudes towards motivational strategies applied in efl classroom by teacher 3 the result of questionnaire that was supported by the result of interview showed that most of students of teacher 3 showed positive attitudes in affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects towards motivational strategies applied in efl classroom. in affective aspect, students were happy to follow english lesson (100%), felt excited to heed the teacher teaching english lesson (90.5%), interested in following english lessons because the teacher teaching the material in a fun way (83.3%), and students prefer doing english task by own self than with friend (54.8%). in behavioral asepct, the result showed that students were not hopeless if there are any difficulties in learning english (80.9%) and always try to do english task well and truly (90.8%). in cognitive aspect, the result showed that students felt loss if did not follow english lesson (90.5%), learning continuously to make students‟ english skills are better than others (83.3%), challenged if the teacher gives the quite difficult english task (80.9%) and thought that should pay attention to the example given by the teacher first before do the english task (100%). from those results, it can be concluded that the students gave positive attitudes towards motivational strategies applied by teacher 3 (85.71%). it can be approved by the result of data from classroom observation which showed that students of teacher 3 gave positive attitudes toward motivational strategies applied in efl classroom. in affective asepct, most students felt happy to follow english lesson, felt excited to heed the teacher teaching english lesson, interested in following english lessons. it can be seen when students gave attention 90 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to the teacher and participated actively in teaching learning process. in behavioral asepct, the result showed that students tried to do english task well and truly. in cognitive asepct, the result showed that students thought that should pay attention to the example given by the teacher first before do the english task. conclusions based on the findings taken from classroom observation, intervies, and questionnaires, it was found that teacher 1 and teacher 3 applied motivational strategies completely and sequentially based on the phases of motivational strategies. both teachers tried to motivate students continuously in teaching efl to make an effective teaching and learning process. that was responded positively by students of both teachers. besides, it can be seen from the result of questionnaires from students of teacher 1 which was 88.25% and students of teacher 3 which was 85.71%. furthermore, the result taken from the interview conducted with students of both teachers showed that the students showed positive attitudes towards motivational strategies that were applied by both teachers in efl classroom. on the other hand, teacher 2 did not apply motivational strategies completely and sequentially based on the phases of motivational strategies. the teacher missed the first phase of motivational strategies because the teacher focused on the material, so the first thing that was done by the teacher was delivering the material to the students. that was responded negatively by students. students showed negative attitudes towards motivational strategies that were applied by the teacher in teaching efl. from the result of classroom observation, it can be seen that students did not particiapte actively in teaching and learning process. most students were passive during the teaching and learning process and only a small part of students which were active enough in the teaching and learning process. however, this was not in line with the result taken from questionnaire which indicates that students gave positive attitudes which was 79.02% and gave positive answer in the interview. those findings indicated that the way teachers applied motivational strategies in efl classroom determined the students‟ attitudes towards 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(1999). enhancing adult motivation to learn. san fransisco: jossey-bass. 93 http://resopsitory.upi.edu/ https://explorable.com/case-study-reearch-design https://explorable.com/case-study-reearch-design english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the comparisons and contrasts between english and malay languages mohd nazri latiff azmi lidwina teo pik ching norbahyah binti jamaludin muhammad nur haziq bin ramli muhammad habibbullah bin razali muhammad ammar yasser bin amram kauselya a/p jayakumar universiti sultan zainal abidin, malaysia email: mohdnazri@unisza.edu.my apa citation: azmi, m. n. l., ching, l. t. p., norbahyah, haziq, m. n., habibullah, m., yasser, m. a., & jayakumar, k. (2016). the comparison and contrasts between english and malay languages. english review, 4(2), 209-218 received: 22-02-2016 accepted: 29-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: english and malay languages are categorized as popular languages in the world. however, both languages underwent different history and composition. this study investigates the languages in terms of history, phonology, loanwords, grammar, morphology and semantics. the purposes of studying the comparisons and contrasts of both languages are not only to analyze the uniqueness of the languages but also to identify the process of understanding the languages especially the view of second language learners. it is found that two languages come from different background; somehow they share similar characteristics such as the vowels sounds, loanwords and semantics. however, the learners face difficulty in learning both languages especially in pronunciations and spelling. keywords: english language, malay language, history of language introduction language is a complex way of communication that is used by human beings to communicate with each other; there are tons of different languages that are used by people today and more yet to be discovered. there are scientific studies of languages called as linguistics as scientists learn about the comparison and contrast of pronunciation and grammatical structure of a language. as languages gradually develop and expand, they started to have their structure that every language has its unique structures and different from one another. beginning with the sound system to meaning also known as semantics, they form the foundation of a language. acquiring a language implies acquiring all those structures. this paper aims to compare and contrast two different languages that are english and malay. both of the languages can be divided into three periods. for english language, history can be explained through three phases which are old english (450-1100 ad), middle english (1100-1500 ad) and modern english (1500 ad). on the other hand, for malay language, old malay (682-1500 c.e), modern malay (c.1500-1957) and contemporary malay (1957) were three significant periods in whole malay history. 209 mailto:mohdnazri@unisza.edu.my mohd nazri latiff azmi, et all. the comparisons and contrasts between english and malay languages the beginnings of these languages slightly differ from one another. for old english, three germanic tribes (saxon, angles, & jutes) came to the british isles from various parts of northwest germany at 5th century ad. these tribes were warlike and pushed out most of the original, celtic-speaking inhabitants from england to scotland, wales and cornwall. one group migrated to brittany cost of france where their descendant still speaks the celtic language of breton today. through the years, the saxon, angles, jutes mixed their difference germanic dialects. this group of dialects forms what linguists refer as old english whereas old malay begins with records of poems and thoughts on writing material made from plants described as the sharp cursive rencong, an ancient script believed to be native to south-east asia (nor hashimah, 2004). both of the languages do have influences from other languages in some aspects. in the history of english language, the latin language played a role. roman came to britain and brought latin to britain which was part of the roman empire for over 400 years. many word passes on from this era and those corned by roman merchants and soldier. examples of word used such as win (wine), candel (candle), belt (belt) and weal (wall). the arrival of st. augustine in 597ad and the introduction of christianity into saxon england brought many words into english language. there were mostly concerned with naming of church, dignitaries, and ceremonies. church, bishop, baptism came indirectly from latin. other than that, celtic language brought changes. this celtic language was seen in names of rivers. for instance, kent, york, dover, cumberland, thames, avon, trent etc. in addition, norse language or scandinavian language brought influence in english language. around 878 ad, danes and norsemen called vikings invaded the country and english got many norse words including sky, egg, cake, skin, window, husband, call, die, etc. furthermore, in middle english, the french language contributes its influence. by about 1200, england and france had split, english changed a lot because it was mostly being spoken instead of being written for about 300 years. the period of old english was almost over after william the conqueror, the duke of normandy and his nobles who spoke french and middle english was being formed. examples of old english word used such as crown, castle, parliament, banquet, art, poet, romance, servant (newmark, 1988). according to nik (1989), in the history of malay language, a few languages influence in it. at the beginning of old malay, many pallava words from vatteluttu, india bring changes in malay language. this is due to indians set feet on malay archipelago. other than that, sanskrit brings influenced in malay vocabulary. examples of words used such as agama, akasara, angkasa, anugerah, bahasa, bakti, bangsa, barat, biara, bidadari. portuguese language also brought changes in the malay language. in the year 1511, the portuguese conquered malacca and latin alphabets in place of jawi writing called rumi. although the conquest is short lived, the impact of portuguese language is large. words used in portuguese language are almari, baldi, bangku, biola. method this comparative study involves only document analysis in which established and well-accepted texts pertaining to the contexts, processes and 210 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee procedures were scrutinized and analyzed. a thorough study of the important elements of both languages we checked and corrected by several experienced linguists of both languages and given a serious concern. results and discussion the phonology of english and malay languages is different in the quantity of vocals and diphthongs, place and manner of articulation. in english sound system, there are 12 vocals, 24 consonants and 8 diphthongs whereas there are 6 vocals, 27 consonants (19 native consonants and 8 consonants that appear only in borrowed words) and 3 diphthongs in malay sound system. (tien-ping tan, bali ranaivo-malançon). the vocals that are similar in english and malay languages include [a], [e], [i], [o], [u] and schwa. for example, [a] sound appears in ‘up’ and ‘awal’ (early) respectively; [e] sound shows in ‘bed’ and ‘enak’ (tasty) accordingly; [i] sound appears in ‘igloo’ and ‘ikan’ (fish) respectively; [o] sound presents in ‘opposite’ as well as ‘oleh’ (by) accordingly; [u] sound appears in ‘unicorn’ and ‘ubat’ (medicine) respectively; schwa sound appears in ‘awhile’ and ‘emak’ (mother) accordingly. on the other hand, /æ/ in ‘cat’, /ɒ / in ‘hot’, /i:/ in ‘see’ etc. are the instances for the vocals that are included in english phonology and different from malay phonology. moreover, there are eight diphthongs in english phonology and three in malay. in english phonology, they are /aɪ / in ‘five’, /aʊ/ in ‘now’, /eɪ / in ‘say’, /oʊ/ in ‘go’, /ɔɪ / in ‘boy’, /eə/ in ‘air’, /ɪə / in ‘near’ and /ʊə/ in ‘pure’. meanwhile, in malay phonology, they are /ai/ in ‘kain’ (cloth), /au/ in ‘laut’ (sea) and /oi/ in ‘boikot’ (boycott). these examples show that the three malay diphthongs are the same as three of english diphthongs that are /aɪ /, /aʊ/ and /ɔɪ / respectively. there are seven important places of articulation in english according to kristin denham and anne lobeck, that are bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar and glottal but malay phonology has labio-velar and no labiodentals and dental sounds. for manner of articulation, both malay and english phonologies have six manners with voiced and voiceless pronunciation respectively. in english, they are stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, approximant and glide. in malay, they are plosive or affricate, fricative, nasal, trill, approximant and lateral. two tables below show the consonant chart of both english and malay languages. based on the table 1 and 2, it can be said that [w] sound in ‘one’ is the example of glide in english but in ‘wajar’ (reasonable) is the example of approximant in malay etc. it is undeniable that the sound [b] is similar in both english and malay that are ‘barber’ and ‘batik’ (one type of cloth) as examples respectively (murni, 2013). as we know, malay language or bahasa melayu is the national language in malaysia, while english is the second language and also the international language. both of them are two important languages in malaysia that began from british colonization. as we can see, malay language tends to borrow a lot of english words rather than vice versa. english seems to be the dominant language in this case because some english loanwords in malay are more than that of malay loanwords in english. 211 mohd nazri latiff azmi, et all. the comparisons and contrasts between english and malay languages table 1. international phonetic alphabet (ipa) chart table 2. malay consonant chart according to deterding (2013), a loanword is a word adopted from a foreign language with little or no modification. it also can be referred as a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. it is distinguished from a ‘calque’ or loan translation whereby a meaning from another language is translated into existing words or roots of the host language. this type of translation remains the pronunciation of the word in the original language when the word is being translated into another language. english loanwords in malay can be divided into a few categories. the first category is the loanword that remains its spelling for both languages and brings the same meaning. for example, ‘atom’ in malay language is spelled the same as ‘atom’ in english. the other examples are drama, bonus and hotel. next, the english loanword has changes in its spelling but the pronunciation remains the same in malay. for example, ‘carbon’ in english is translated into ‘karbon’ in malay that is different in the first alphabet. other instances are block (blok), script (skrip), graphic (grafik) and activity (activiti). besides that, there are few words in malay that are being translated and became valid words in english recently. 212 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee for example, the word ‘lepak’ which refers to hang out with friends, loiter about and do absolutely nothing. the other word is ‘amok’ which comes from malay word ‘amuk’, refers to behave uncontrollably and disruptively. other words in malay that is being officially used in english are durian, nasi lemak, silat, gong and sarong. in conclusion, it can be said that both of the languages have a correlation. we can see that they influence each other from the loanwords. there are numerous vocabularies in malay that resemble in english. this shows that english had influenced the malay language in vocabulary aspect. according to baker (2011), in grammar, there are similarities and contrasts between english and malay languages such as field of tenses, plural and singular nouns. among the field of tenses, there are past, present and future tenses. the past tense is a grammatical tense to show or indicate an event or situation in past time. past tense in a sentence shows a grammatical tense to indicate the situation had occurred in the past. usually, the verb to show past tense is to be added a suffix -ed. for example, the word ‘walked’. the verb walk is added -ed to become ‘walked’. however, not all the verbs can be added the suffix -ed such as the verb ‘put’. for example, i put the book on my table last night. in malay language, we do not have specific suffixes to indicate the situation happened in the past. for instance, if we want to say ‘ammar scored a goal’, we would say ‘ammar telah menjaringkan gol’. the term ‘telah’ indicate that the event happened in the past. according to the website grammar.ccc.commnet.edu, the present tense refers to an action is present, now, about the speaker or writer. it is used to describe actions that are factual or habitual things that occur in the present but not necessarily happening right now. for example, ‘my train leaves tomorrow morning’. the verb ‘leaves’ is a present tense although this situation shows an event that is going to happen. usually in english, the usage of the suffix ‘-ing’ is widely applied in present tenses. for instance, ‘i am walking’ for singular noun and ‘we are walking’ for plural noun (imran, 2000). in malay language, the original verb is not disturbed as we do not change the verb instead we use another term to show the situation happen in the past, present or future. for example, the sentence ‘saya sedang berjalan’ is for singular subject and another sentence ‘kami sedang berjalan’ is for plural subject. the word ‘sedang’ shows the action is going on at that time and the meanings of the malay examples corresponded to that of english examples. future tense indicates an action that is going to happen in the future. this situation applies to a situation that is going to happen later, next day, next week or even next month. according to englishpage.com, future tense has two different forms that are ‘will’ and ‘going to’. for example, ‘i will help him later’ and ‘you are going to meet jane tonight’. in malay language, the term ‘akan’ is often used to indicate a future situation. for example, ‘saya akan membantu dia nanti’ that means ‘i will help him later’. besides, the forms of singular and plural nouns in english are also different from that in malay. in english, most singular nouns form the plural by adding ‘–s’ and the examples are boats, cats and houses. however, it differs from malay language as we do not add ‘-s’ to show that it is plural. we only use term 213 mohd nazri latiff azmi, et all. the comparisons and contrasts between english and malay languages ‘banyak’ to show the plural meaning of the nouns. for instance, phrase ‘seekor kucing’ refers to one cat whereas ‘banyak kucing’ refers to many cats. on the other hand, there is also a singular noun ending in s, x, z, ch, sh need to be added ‘-es’ and to make it plural in english such as buses, wishes and boxes. moreover, there is also a singular noun ending in a consonant y and then it makes the plural by dropping the ‘y’ and adding ‘-ies’ to make it plural. the instances penny (pennies), spy (spies) and baby (babies). morphology is an area in linguistics studies that investigates the structures, forms and categorizations of words of a language. discussions on both malay and english morphology will specifically touch on affixes, preposition, adverbs and superlatives. however, for today we are going to discuss in-depth more about affixes. like other dominant languages, malay has pre-fixes, suffixes and infixes while in english, prefixes and suffixes are more prominent. the difference between malay and english affixes is that english affixes can indicate or produce an element that has been added either to the beginning or the ending of a word. for example, the root word ‘car’ is considered as the one and only car, we can change the meaning of the word by adding ‘s’ at the back of the word, becoming ‘cars’ that refers to more than one car. this is known as suffixation and it is quite challenging as compared to the others because it can change a word into a different part of tense or speech. however, unlike english affixes, malay language tend to have different meaning depending on the usage of the affixes itself. both suffix and prefix can change the meaning of a root word. for example, for the root word ‘mati’ which means death in english tends to have different meaning depending on its affixes. by adding suffix ‘-kan’ to the word causing it to transform into the word ‘matikan’ that means switch off in english. for example, a sentence using the word ‘matikan’ in malay might sound like this ‘aidan, tolong matikan generator itu’ that is translated into english and might sound like this ‘aidan, could u please turn off that generator’. this has completely brought different meaning and cannot be used to describe the death of something but used purposely to describe shut down or switch off things such as switches or engines. when you break a word apart and remove the prefixes and suffixes, you are left with the root. it's easier to determine the meaning of an unknown word if you know the root. for example, we might come across the word ‘happy' that means feeling or giving pleasure (hatim, 1997). however, most of us find it easier to recognize the word ‘happy’ than the prefix itself which is ‘un-’. by adding the prefixes, the word will be totally opposite from the root word that is not feeling pleasure. this shows that affix plays an important role in english language. there are many prefixes in english, yet only 20 accounts for 97% of the words that contain prefixes. learning these 20 prefixes and their meanings can make a big difference in your ability to recognize words and their meanings that can also help you to write a better essay with excellent grammatical structure. meanwhile, bahasa melayu also has prefixes but the usage of the prefixed is different from that in english. for example, when you look into malay dictionary especially kamus dewan bahasa dan pustaka, you might find words like ‘memandu’ that refers to driving and might be thinking that it is a root word. the root word is ‘pandu’ that 214 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee means drive and ‘me-’ is the prefix of the word. this shows that the prefix in malay is not similar as that in english because mostly the meanings of the root word and the word with prefix in english are opposite. not only that, prefixes in malay can be used on most of the word and are productive, unlike the prefixes in english. for example, the prefix ‘pe-’ in malay can be put on almost all words as it later will ring the same meaning such as ‘pemakai’ which means a user in english. which somehow make it easier to be remembered and used compared to english affixes that are different. you may use the prefix ‘un-’ for ‘unhappy’ but not for the word ‘engage’ which will use prefix ‘dis-’ making it as ‘disengage’ instead. even though they belong to the same negative prefix, they have different pronunciation, spelling and frequency compared to the malay affixes that are the same on those three aspects depending on the words. however, do take note that the tables above show the most common used affixes in malay language especially during writing and oral communication. there are still tons of other affixes that are used in malay as it is updated from time to time by the linguistics scholar back in the dewan bahasa dan pustaka. both of the languages affixes have the same goal that it to complete the sentence by putting different prefix or suffix for its meaning to suit the sentence itself. however, there is a slightly noticeable difference between both languages affixes which is the spelling, pronunciation and frequency. semantic is the field of study that examines the meaning of language. it is defined as the study of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences in a language. according to ferdinand de saussure, every linguistic sign consists of two elements, which are the signified and signifier. ogden and richards show the relationship between words, concepts, and objects referenced through a semantic triangle. there are few similarities between malay language and english language from the aspect of semantic. the similarities can be seen from the meanings of denotative and connotative and also from the lexical relations. denotation means an object or concept referred by a term or a set of objects of which a predicate is true while connotation is the abstract meaning or intension of a term, which forms a principle determining that objects or concepts it applies to such as the word heart. the denotation of the word refers it as the real heart that is triangular in shape, pumps oxygenated blood to all body parts to help us stay alive while the connotation is a symbol of love and affection. the connotation meaning makes us have a mindset like we always see the shape of a heart with red in color as the symbol of love. the denotative and connotative meaning in malay language and english are the same respectively. lexical relations show how meaning of a word relates to each other. lexical items contain information about category, form and meaning. the semantics relate to these categories then relate to each lexical item in the lexicon. some relations between lexical items include synonym, antonym, and hyponym (butt, 2000). synonym is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. in malay language, the word ‘bijak’ and ‘cerdik’ have the same meaning. thus, it is a synonym. in english language, the words that share 215 mohd nazri latiff azmi, et all. the comparisons and contrasts between english and malay languages the similar meanings are ‘wise’ and ‘clever’. the meanings are still the same even in other language. therefore, the synonym of malay language and english language are the same. antonym is a word opposite in meaning to another. a word may have more than one antonym. there are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meaning which are gradable antonym, complementary antonym and relational antonym. gradable antonyms are typically pairs of adjectives that can be qualified by adverbs such as very, quite, extremely etc. in malay language, this antonym is called ‘antonimi taksiran’. for example, we can say ‘the tickets were expensive’ or ‘the tickets were cheap’. since expensive and cheap are gradable antonyms, so we can qualify how expensive or cheap they were. this can be proven in a few sentences such as ‘the tickets were more expensive than the previous one’ and ‘the tickets were very cheap’ in english as well as ‘tiket ini lebih mahal daripada yang dahulu’ and ‘tiket ini sangat murah’ in malay. complementary antonyms are pairs of words that are opposite in meaning and cannot be graded. they are mutually exclusive, that is, only one of them can exist at one time. this antonym is called ‘antonimi penggenap’ in malay language. for example, there might be a newborn child in a family and the baby will only be either girl or boy. the child cannot be both girl and boy as the gender of the child is the complementary antonym. further examples of complementary antonyms are deadalive, young-old, and empty-full that same goes for the examples in malay, ‘mati-hidup’, ‘muda-tua’ and ‘kosongpenuh’ respectively. according to marlyna (2005), relational antonyms or converse antonyms are pairs of opposite words where one cannot exist without the other. this antonym is recognized as ‘antonimi sebalikkan’ in malay language. this antonym is a pair of words with the opposite meanings, where opposite makes sense only in the context of relationship between the meanings of the two words. there is no lexical opposite for teacher, but teacher and pupil are opposite with the context of their relationship. another example is when there is a husband, there must be a wife. therefore, husband and wife are relational antonym. other examples are night-day, policeman-criminal and parent-child. in malay language, they are ‘malam-siang’, ‘polis-penjenayah’ and ‘ibubapa-anak’ accordingly. thus, we can conclude that the antonym of malay language and english language are similar and the same. hyponym is a word of more specific meaning than a general or superordinate term applicable to it. for example, the word ‘european’, its hyponym is british, angle, jutes, etc. in malay language, the word ‘asia’ has the hyponym of malaysia, pakistan, japan and others. hence, we can simplify that the hyponym between these two languages is the same (asmah, 1983). in conclusion, it is shown that there are similarities and differences between malay and english languages from some aspects. they are history, phonology, influences in vocabulary (loanwords), grammar, morphology and semantics. although these two languages come from different background, somehow they share similar characteristics such as the vowels sounds, loanwords and semantics. this proves that human has the same mindset that is to use sounds and voices to communicate in the ancient 216 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee days. the words that are loaned from one another mean they have effect on each other. grammar is a big category which consists of both similarities and differences from many aspects, is the basic of a language. moreover, morphology is regarding the morpheme that refers to the basic unit in a word as well as the semantics of words share similarities and contrasts among the two languages (hazita, 2004). regardless the differences of these two languages, both of the languages are unique and beautiful in their ways and survive until today with their native speakers. the linguists who have categorized everything that we learn and use today, are unforgettable as these are their great works, and they shall be remembered forever. references asmah, o. (1983). the malay peoples of malaysia and their languages. kuala lumpur: dewan bahasa & pustaka. asmah, o. (1986). nahu mutakhir melayu. kuala lumpur: dewan bahasa dan pustaka. azar, b. (1989). understanding and using english grammar. prentice hall regents. new jersey. baker, m. (2011). in other words: a course book on translation. 2nd ed. london: routledge. butt, d., fahey, r., feez, s., spinks, s., & yallop, c. (2000). using functional grammar. sydney: national centre for english language teaching & research. deterding, d., & salbrina, s. (2013). brunei english: a new variety in a multilingual society. dordrecht: springer. halliday, m. a. k. (1994). an introduction to functional grammar. london: edward arnold. hatim, b. (1997). communication across cultures: translation theory and contrastive text linguistics. exeter: university of exeter press. hazita, a. (2004). global english and english literacy education in malaysia, in penny lee and hazita azman, global english and primary schools: challenges for elementary education, melbourne: cae press. imran, h. a. (2000). contrasting malay english preposition categories: indulging in in diverse voices: readings in languages, literatures and cultures. serdang: penerbit universiti pertanian malaysia. khazriyati, s., tan, k. h., & marlyna, m. 2006. "definiteness and indefiniteness: a contrastive analysis of the use of determiners between the malay language and english". gema online journal of language studies. volume 6 (1). marlyna, m., khazriyati, s., & tan, k. h. (2005). "everyone people must have a best friend. interference of malay structures in english written discourse". proceedings of the tleia conference. teaching and learning of english: towards an asian perspective. fakulti komunikasi dan bahasa moden: uum. murni. m. (2013). ‘fonetik dan fonologi (vokal & konsonan)’. retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/murnibint imohamat/fonetik-dan-fonologivokal-konsonan newmark, p. (1988). a textbook of translation. singapore: prentice hall international (uk) ltd. nik, s. k. (1989). tatabahasa dewan jilid 2: perkataan. kuala lumpur, dewan bahasa dan pustaka. noorizah, m. n., & rosniah, m. (1998) tatabahasa inggeris. utusan publications. kuala lumpur. nor, h. j. (2004). penguasaan bahasa melayu oleh pelajar melayu dalam arus globalisasi. jurnal bahasa jil. 4 (1), 63-95. ramli, md. s., ismail. s., idris. a., fadzeli. j. (2000). penguasaan bahasa melayu di kalangan pelajar-pelajar sekolah menengah rendah: kajian di sekolahsekolah rancangan felda negeri sembilan. universiti kebangsaan malaysia. 217 mohd nazri latiff azmi, et all. the comparisons and contrasts between english and malay languages 218 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 299 needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university ira septiana english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: iraseptiana733@gmail.com ismail petrus english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: septiana, i., petrus, i., & inderawati, r. (2020). needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 299-310. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.3027. received: 21-01-2020 accepted: 27-03-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: this study aims to design an appropriate english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university. this study analyzes the needs of students using target situation analysis (tsa), deficiency analysis (da), and strategy analysis (sa). descriptive analysis approach method is used in this study. there were 61 students in the second semester of bina darma palembang majoring in computers, 1 lecturer and director of the institute involved in this study. data were collected obtained from questionnaires, interview, observation, and documents review. the results show that the target needs are speaking and writing skill. the two language basic skills get a large portion in the preparation of the english syllabus. in addition, students need a learning process to focus more on practice than theory. the learning process also needs to be integrated with technology to make classroom activities more interesting. finally, this study proposes a syllabus that is recommended to use in the institution. keywords: need analysis; course framework; teaching materials; computer science; english syllabus. introduction designing appropriate syllabus of english for specific purposes (esp) which is based on need analysis is extremely demanded. english syllabus for special purposes that is well designed and able to meet the needs of its students is of concern to many academies in many countries. because the learning process of english will not run smoothly and successfully if it is not supported by a convincing syllabus. studies about this issue have been conducted by javid and zahid (2013), zahra and ali (2015), badruddin (2015), yusnita (2016), fareen (2017), belinda (2017), murphy (2018), sartika, puspita and imranuddin (2018), wu and lou (2018) and muhammad and raof (2019). javid and zahid (2013) confirmed that esp is still as a major concern of english teacher around the world. esp courses are likely to be designed for adult learners but may be organized for learners at the secondary school level. however, zahra and ali (2015) and murphy (2018) warned that a well-written syllabus could provide a doorway into the pedagogical beliefs of the teacher, it is a well-written description: a plan about what to be included in the course for the learning objectives. a study was conducted by badruddin (2015) confirmed that students' language needs include language skills and learning preferences. this research reveals that of the three language skills, reading is often used and learning through listening and speaking were mostly preferred by students. in line with this, yusnita (2016) explored needs analysis through discussing the principles of material design and reading strategies, discussing work agreements, syllabi, reading material, and using sample lessons. needs analysis is obtained after exploring information about what knowledge and skills are needed as a basis for developing the course framework and teaching materials. likewise, about class mailto:ismailpetrus@yahoo.com mailto:rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id ira septiana, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university 300 activities and climate what is needed by students. yusnita (2016, p. 28) asserted that: “this course framework contained general points of reading themes and topics, information of classroom activities that followed up reading, the length of study session, the number of the course meetings, and the number of participants. the course framework became the basis to write the syllabus. finally, the syllabus became the basis for designing reading materials”. incorporation syllabus and cultural aspect is very important to be noted. about this, fareen (2017) firmed that english teachers should incorporate cultural elements in their syllabus on metadata materials to prepare learning materials that are suitable for students 'needs and to develop students' awareness of these linguistic features. this is what belinda (2017) warned that syllabus is concerned with the specification and planning of what is to be learned. however, syllabus is a series of planning materials to be studied by students. but a good, precise and effective syllabus can only be designed based on students' needs. a research on communicative english syllabus conducted by sartika, puspita and imranuddin (2018) revealed that speaking skills are the most needed aspects of hospitality students in bengkulu when compared to other language skills (reading, listening and writing). this needs mapping is the basis for preparing a syllabus according to their needs. therefore, communicative english syllabus based on the results of this study must provide a large language exposure for students. the syllabus has to be designed based on communicative an approach that emphasizes communication and real life situations. syllabus based the communicative approach will help students use language as a tool communication on every aspect working conditions at the hotel in order to improve their language skills when they interact with hotel customers. undoubtedly, needs analysis is the basis for english teachers to design a course framework and syllabus that is relevant to the needs of their students. a good syllabus that really makes the needs of students as the main reference for the preparation of teaching materials (wu and lou, 2018). muhammad and raof (2019) analyzed the english language needs of engineering students studying at saudi universities and to identify what academic assignments they often need. participants' perceptions of task targets were compared and examined to see if there were significant differences between groups based on department specialization or year of study. in all, 27 assignments were identified as being most often performed by undergraduate students in all engineering departments at the university. this finding also revealed significant differences in undergraduate responses at the four study levels. this finding suggests incorporating these tasks into the current esp syllabus that is tailored to the immediate needs of engineering graduates. from various studies on the design of the english syllabus for special needs emerged that the analysis of student needs became the main reference and basis for course framework. analysis of student needs is certainly diverse in various educational institutions and regions so that requires a different syllabus design approach according to their individual needs. identifying various types of student needs and analyzing them are simultaneous activities that must be carried out by english teachers so that they find the right patterns in designing syllabi. from previous research also emerged that there has been no research that specifically examines the needs analysis of students of the faculty of computer, bina darma university, palembang method research site and participants this study is conducted at bina darma university concentrating on second semester with a accreditation. this study analyzes the needs of students using target situation analysis (tsa), deficiency analysis (da), and strategy analysis (sa). this university was considered as the field of study due to its easy accessibility. another reason was the urgency of having the specific english syllabus which is compatible with esp approach. here, the researcher focused on third semester students. the consideration to choose third semester students is suggested by the head master from this institution due to their unavailability of english syllabus and his consideration to make third semester students as the starting point for having needs-analysis syllabus design. therefore, the focus of this study was the computer majoring. according to the first study was conducted by wu & lou (2018) of yangtze university. the purposes of the study were to depict the existence conditions of the present english course; to find out the students need and the faculty expectations on the english course through need analysis, and to propose a better english course design based on the need analysis. english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 301 the research participants for this study secondyear students of computer science department of university of bina darma palembang and one teacher of english who teach computer expertise program and three classes that consist of 61 second semester students of computer program. triangulation triangulation is an attempt or map out, or more fully, the richness and complexity plain of human behavior by studying it from more than one stand point (huang, 2018). furthermore, for an overall improvement in the quality of the result needs analysis, the best approach is triangulation of sources and methods (hotham, vogt, & tulkki, 2013). there are four basic types of triangulation proposed by ngulube and ngulube (2015) i.e.: data triangulation, investigator triangulation, theory triangulation and methodological triangulation. data collection to collect the data, the researcher used four instruments. the instruments included questionnaire, interview, observation and document review. needs analysis questionnaire are distributed to the students in the classroom to find out the target needs and learning needs. the questionnaire format is adapted from wu and lou (2018) and the questions were adopted from dewi and amri (2019). which had been developed referred to the theory of needs assessment proposed by wu and lou (2018). thus, the questionnaire was made up appropriate with the learners involved. there were altogether 34 questions in the questionnaire: 6 items for students’ profile, 4 items for the target situation analysis, 20 items for the present situation analysis, 1 item for deficiency analysis, and 3 items for strategy analysis, the questions were in indonesia language in order to each the students to answer the questions. interview is one of research methods that is used to collect the data needed based on the purpose of a study (astuti and lammers, 2017). in line with that, defines interview as a dialogue between interviewers who wants to gather information from interviewer. kumar (2018) classifies the interview data process into: unstructured open-ended interview, semi structured interview and focus group interviews, the three interview models chosen because it is possible for researchers to receive broad answers and unexpected answers that could be developed there two forms of interview guides in this study, one is administered to the teacher of english who teach second semester students of computer program expertise area and the other is administered to the director from this institution through unstructured open-ended interview. the interview questions are translated into indonesian language in order to ease the interviewer in answering the questions. the interview results were recorded by using voice recorder and then transcribed descriptively. through observation, researchers will investigate classroom settings and teaching and learning activities in english in the third semester computer program expertise class at bina darma university palembang. (turner, 2015; cardinal, 2015; burton, 2015). states that observations observe the behavior of people in certain situations to obtain information about a phenomenon. observations will be focused on classroom settings and teaching and learning processes to help answer research questions number 2. observations are conducted one day in three classes for 60 students inthe second semester. during observations, researchers take field notes about class facilities and infrastructure as well as the process teaching and learning to obtain additional information and/or verify data obtained from questionnaires and interviews. documents review belongs to gathering information activity through some documents such as books, daily reports, and etc. the documents review was taken to support the primary data. in this study, the researcher reviewed the syllabus and lesson plan used by the teacher of english. the focus was on the contents and organization, and the approach. data analysis this research will be used descriptive qualitative data to answer research questions 1 and 2, the researcher administered the needs analysis questionnaire to the students in order to find out their target needs and learning needs. needs analysis theory had been reviewed and compared to the data collected from questionnaire, interview, observation, and documents review. then, the results of needs analysis were used to design and propose the english syllabus which was the research questions 3. in data collection process, the researcher will used questionnaire result as the primary data. in order to answer the first and second research questions on the students’ target and learning needs, the questionnaire data had been obtained from four subcategories of needs analysis i.e. target situation analysis (tsa). present ira septiana, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university 302 situation analysis (psa), deficiency analysis (da), and strategy analysis (sa) (appendix a). target needs were discovered from psa, tsa, and da, meanwhile learning needs were discovered from sa. then, the students’ questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively by using frequencies in data tabulation and percentages for each item of questionnaire. the highest percentage of the answers of each question is considered representing students’ needs. the tables are used to display the results. then, the data results were presented descriptively. the interview is based on interview guide. the participants for this interview are the teacher of english and the director of institution of university of bina darma palembang the director of institution of university of bina darma palembang. the interview session for the teachers of english is expected to find out the students prelearning situation, present situation, and future situation and the learning process which is implied. thus, the interview session for the rector and director of curriculum was aimed to dig the stakeholders’ hope and expectation in producing skillful and knowledgeable graduates from university of bina darma palembang. the interview will be recorded by using voice recorder and then it will be transcribed descriptively in order to strengthen the questionnaire results. in order to obtain any supporting information for questionnaire and interview results, observation technique is conducted. the directobservation is done in this technique. the researcher will take some pictures and wrote notes (field-note taking) during the study. the notes had been written soon after leaving the classroom. the notes were divided into two sessions, descriptive information and reflective information. the descriptive information included all the factual data that is being recorded, i.e. time and date, the physical setting, social environment and the descriptions of the subject and object being studied and their roles. the reflective information includes the observer’s reflections about the observation, i.e. ideas, questions, concerns, and other related thought (beaudoin, 2017). the first point observed was about classroom setting and the second point observed was about teaching and learning process. in observing the classroom setting, the researched focus on its physical condition. moreover, the researcher observed the teaching and learning process in order to see the alignment among the process and the syllabus and lesson plan. after obtaining the results, then it was transcribed descriptively. the documents that had been reviewed and described by the researcher were syllabus used by the teacher. the researcher will be tried to analyzed the components contained in the syllabus to the universities guidance and also reviewed the lesson plan created by the teacher based on syllabus. those documents are obtained from university of bina darma palembang and will support the data obtained from the other instruments. results and discussion based on the result of needs analysis questionnaire that was given to the students. the questionnaire was divided into five sections (rahman. m, 2015). the first section consisted of students' profiles, second section was target situation analysis (tsa), third section was present situation analysis (psa), fourth section was deficiency analysis (da), and the last section was strategy analysis (sa). those analyses analyze students' target needs and learning needs at computer majoring students university, especially information system study program (s1) and informatics engineering (s1) second semester students. the descriptions of the needs analysis are presented below. students' profiles the data collected from this section were students' name, age, school, grade, and expertise program. there were 48 students from information system study program (s1) semester 2, and informatics engineering students (s1) semester 2 were 12 students. based on the profile filled by students in the questionnaire following the division of students based on the genre. target situation analysis (tsa) this part presents students' general intentions in learning english, students expectation of their english proficiency level and mastery in the target situation, and students' english necessity for their future work. there are four questions that represent those aspects which are shown in summary, the results of questionnaire related to the theory wu and lou (2018). formulated that the framework of analysis of tsa's most famous needs. tsa refers to the tasks and activities undertaken by the learners / will use english for the target situation revealed that the student’ necessities toward learning english were to communicate fluently to foreigners, english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 303 clients/guests, and colleagues for present time to future form to others. therefore, to assist the necessities of the students, being familiar with computer term and able to use grammar correctly would also useful to support their career in the computer skills area, as the consequence, these facts should be considered by the teacher of english and the stakeholders to accommodate it properly. presents situation analysis (psa) there are twelve data information that can be obtained from present situation analysis (psa). the information was about student’s current proficiency level of english, desired speaking input, length of text for speaking, speaking topic, desired reading input, length of text for reading, reading topic desired writing input, length of text for writing, and writing topic. besides, the data obtained were also about student’s preference learning activities, speaking, reading, writing, pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. in summary concluded that analyzes the present situation analysis (psa) related to the theory (xing, 2018) described that the psa (analysis of the present situation) attempt to determine what students are doing at the beginning of their language courses, see their strengths and weaknesses. from the results of questionnaires, it can be concluded that the input of learning for listening, speaking, reading and writing skills is dominated by computer problems for learning topics. therefore, students prefer a variety of activities for each skill. deficiency analysis (da) this part presents students’ language skills and aspect difficulties that had been analyzed through deficiency analysis (da). there were eight choices provided in the questionnaire about students’ language skills and aspects difficulties. the choices were; listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. table 1. students' language skills and aspects difficulties no question item respondent percentage 1 students' difficultties of language skills and aspect listening 36 59,1% speaking 15 24,6% grammar 8 13,1% pronunciation 6 9,83% reading 4 6,6% vocabulary 3 4,9% writing 2 3,3% etc 3 4,9% based on the results above, related the theory from wu and lou (2018). in the model, needs analysis consists of two parts: target situation needs and learning needs. target needs include "necessities", "lacks" and "wants". "necessities" are determined by the demand of the target situation. they are the necessary needs that enable the learner to use effectively in the target situation. "lacks" are the gap between "necessities" and what the learner already knows, that is the existing proficiency of the learners. "wants" are learners' subjective needs, which has no direct relationship between the objective needs perceived by the teachers and course designers. learning needs, on the other hand, are how learners learn the language. it can be summarized from the theory and result questionnaire that the students considered themselves having difficulties in almost all of the language, but all of the that english lesson is still regarded as difficult for the students. therefore, the teacher of english should make an innovative learning to engage the students in the classroom. strategy analysis (sa) this part presents students’ preferred ways of learning and students’ point of view towards teacher’s role in teaching and learning process. the information gathered from three question in the questionnaire drew the strategy analysis (sa) required by the students. the first data obtained from the sa was about classroom arrangement to complete the task, individual work, park work, or group work. in short, the data collected from these questions shows students 'classroom management preferences, student learning style preferences, and students' expectations about the teacher's role. somehow, the results of the analysis help the course designer, lecturer, or teacher to make the course / class more interesting, enjoyable, and effective for teaching and learning processes related to theory according to chandra (2015), class management has two different objectives: ira septiana, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university 304 "this not only strives to build and maintain an orderly environment so that students can engage in meaningful academic learning, but also aims to enhance students' social and moral growth ". it can be concluded that in the classroom the teacher should always get his focus from the students so that learning will run successfully overall, the result of needs analysis questionnaire above was made to design syllabus together with the results of interview, observation, and document review. in this study, two interviewers were involved in order to support the data obtained from the questionnaire. the interviewers were the teacher of english of second semester of computer majoring and the director of institution of university. therefore, to keep the interviewees anonymous, initials would be used in presenting the information source. in this study, the researcher had reviewed two documents; syllabus and lesson plan. these documents were taken from bina darma university. those documents which were obtained showed that the content provided were not in details and suitable for computer expertise program. the syllabus observed had no specific content related to computer area. it was also portrayed on the lesson plan made by the teacher which contained general english not specific english. the core competences and basic competences in the syllabus were taken specifically of each unit considering the majors in which students enroll for. it described only the learning materials in which the teacher could convey the materials. the materials, therefore, could be adopted for any students’ majors. as the consequence, the lesson plan which is derived from the syllabus had no significant different related to the materials and the learning process. after the data had been analyzed and triangulated, the target needs were derived from necessities, lacks, and wants obtained from the four data sources. the necessities for the students included language aspects and language skills which need to be mastered by the students i.e. speaking and listening. the details of speaking skill were conversation with the computer field. then the details of listening skill were understood what the colleagues said and the partners said about computer field. for the language aspect the data showed that there were two language aspects which were needed by the students i.e. pronunciation and grammar. based on the results of students’ questionnaire and the interview session, it could be concluded that the specialized pronoun ions about computers content was needed. therefore, mastering grammar which could help the language skills and aspect implementation was also needed. the lacks of the students which were obtained from the data information concerned on difficulties and weaknesses. as the results of the data analysis, it was obviously seen that the students were lack of speaking and writing skills. the results of students’ questionnaire also revealed that their lack of language aspect was also on vocabulary and grammar. this fact was also supported by the interview results with the teacher of english that the students were lack of vocabulary. indeed, the lack of speaking and writing skills of students was affected by their lack of english term and grammar mastery. therefore, the students needed to be treated by having more practices in the learning process. besides the necessities, the other thing which is needed to be accommodated is the learners’ wants. from the questionnaire results, it was revealed that the students’ personal reason to learn english was too able to communicate with foreigners. however, these students want would be accommodated since it was correlated to their necessities. then, although the students had chosen their priorities of language skills, the students still would like to have four language skills taught based on their wants. unfortunately, due to time limitation, the researcher composed the syllabus by having speaking and writing as the dominant skills to be taught and could not accomplished students’ want to also have listened and reading. in addition to target needs, the data also provide information for the learning needs. the needs contained information such as mode, learning activities, practice, media, students’ role, and teacher’s role. the learning needs are somehow related to ‘route’ which is needs to go from ‘lacks’ or starting point to ‘necessities’ or destination. the modes used were oral and written. the learning activities applied were dialogue, role play, arrange jumbled sentences form sentences, correcting incorrect sentence structure and punctuation, highlighting discussing content, and composing text. for the language aspect, vocabulary task and grammar task were given to the students. the practices in the syllabus were based on practice-based learning, ict-based learning, and pair/group discussion. the media used were the facilities such as laptop/computer, lcd, and audio visual aid which were provided in the language laboratory which can be used in english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 305 the classroom’ role. the students would like to have pair/group discussion to do task or solve problems in learning process. the teacher’ role in the learning process which was preferred by students was as guide and facilitator. table 2. target needs and learning needs target needs necessities language skills  speaking (asking, describing, giving question in orally)  writing (how to write email, note, proposal …etc.) language aspect  specialized vocabulary (computer)  grammar lacks language skills  speaking  writing language aspect  vocabulary  grammar wants language skills  speaking (dialogue practicing related to computer topic)  writing (example text of computer topic)  listening (dialogue with picture of computer topic) mode  oral  written learning activities  dialogue  arranging jumbled sentences  correcting incorrect sentence structure and punctuation  highlighting discussion content  composing text practice  practice-based learning  ict-based learning  pair/group discussion media  laptop  lcd  audio visual students’ role  pair/group discussion to do task or solve problems teachers’ role  as tutor  as facilitator proposed syllabus design this proposed syllabus design followed the results of target needs and learning needs obtained from the field. therefore, the researcher also compromised the teacher of english and the director of institution. the details are started from rationale, aims and objectives, teaching method, teaching materials, assessment, and teaching media. rationale the syllabus was for computer major students bina darma university palembang. the class was english for occupational purposes (eop) which focused on speaking and writing and furnished with vocabulary and grammar. this concept was suitable with absolute characteristics and variable characteristics mentioned by wu. j & lou. y (2018). the students categorized as basic english learner who needed basic grammar and specialized vocabulary so it could help them improving speaking and writing skills (oral and written). therefore, every meeting always focuses on grammar, vocabulary, writing, and speaking. based on the analysis, the students wanted to have all four language skills taught, yet the researcher could not accomplish the students’ wants due to time limitation. hopefully, the students were able to reach the aims of the teaching and learning process by following the syllabus which had been designed through needs analysis. aims and objectives this part explains the aims and objectives of the english teaching and learning of computer major. in general, the aims of the students at the end of learning process are to: 1. improve students’ ability to be fluent in oral written communication ira septiana, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university 306 2. enrich students’ ability to master vocabulary related to computer content 3. comprehend basic grammar and its language function for real conversation at class and future job later. the objectives of the course were formulated as shown below. speaking: the students are able to form sentences for  greeting and self-introduction  describing job  describing computer hardware  asking and giving information about solving customer service problems writing: 1. the students are able to  reply to the email about introduce yourself and three people in your group  write a job description  write an email about comparing product  write sentence about comparing software  write a report 2. the students are able to arrange or compose sentences into good paragraph vocabulary: 1. the students are able to increase and understand vocabulary related to their expertise program: jobs, computer, websites, database, networking, reporting 2. the students are able to apply the vocabulary use into real situation 3. the students are able to form sentences by using the vocabulary taught grammar: 1. the students are able to understand basic grammar structures  tenses  schedules  superlatives  question words (5w+1h)  linking ideas teaching method based on the results of the analysis in the field, the students were interested in having a lot of practices in the classroom. since the class was based on practice-based learning, the methods used were dialogue practicing and role playing to increase speaking skill and the methods used for increasing writing skill were fun learning methods include arranging jumbled sentences, correcting incorrect sentence structure and punctuation, highlighting discussion content, and composing text to make the learning process interesting. ictbased learning was applied for teaching and learning process which allowed the teacher to deliver the lesson through media such as laptop, lcd, and audio-visual aid. therefore, pair/group discussion were implemented in teaching and learning process based on students’ choice from questionnaire results. teaching materials table 3. teaching materials incorporates meeting, theme and learning focus meeting theme learning focus speaking grammar writing and vocabulary 1 meeting people introducing yourself and others “how do you greet people in your country? what do you say when you greet people in english? “ present tense of be “ i'm natasha, nice to meet you. “ introductions personal questions 2 jobs in it describing your job “list the it jobs you know” present simple “what do you do? i ‘am a programmer.” jobs 3 schedules describing your daily routine and times “what time does it start/begin/finish/end” schedules what time does it start? routines times 4 spelling using the alphabet list the it acronyms you know. what does www stand for? how do you spell that? it acronyms the alphabet 5 exercise and review 6 computer hardware describing computer hardware comparatives that monitor is computer hardware english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 307 “make a list of all the computer hardware you use in your work or study. “ bigger than mine. 7 computer software describing computer software “make a list of all the computer software you use in your work or study. “ superlatives that software is the easiest to use. present tense of have(got) we've got the best software computer soft ware 8 working with computers describing tasks “listen and complete this dialogue “ present continuous are you installing it now? computer tasks 9 computer usage understanding computer usage “make a list of computer usage where you work or study “ must, mustn't, can, can't, don't have to 1must update my files computer usage 10 uts 11 website purpose talking about websites “which websites do you use in your working study? make a list and share it with a partner. do you use the same sites? “ question words (1) which websites do you visit? purpose of websites 12 website analytics getting information about websites “what information can you get about website traffic using a website analysis application? work in pairs. make a list. “ question words (2) how many people visit our website? website analysis tools 13 website development developing a website “describe something you do every day at home or at work. “ large number describing steps in a process after that... functions of a website features of a website 14 the best websites talking about your favorite websites “what are your favorite websites? why?” describing things there are a lot of photos on this website adjectives 15 review 16 uas assessment the formative and summative assessments were used to assess students’ learning results. the formative assessment was done every meeting to know whether or not the students accomplished the learning objectives, or in other word to know students’ progress after the meeting. the test was dialogue practicing, role playing, fill in the blank text, multiple choice, and composing text. in the end of the semester, the summative assessment would be given in order to see the students’ whole achievement after the class is started. teaching media the main teaching media preference is written/printed materials. therefore, based on the observation results, the language laboratory can be used for learning process. so, the teaching ira septiana, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university 308 media that can be used are written/printed materials, laptop, lcd, and audio visual aid. conclusion designing an english syllabus requires careful analysis of student needs. careful identification of students' needs is the first step for english teachers to design what knowledge and skills are needed. this includes what activities are expected and needed to improve students' academic abilities. the course framework and organicallybuilt syllabus will certainly be very useful in the learning process in class. references alsamadani, h. a. 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(2015). a needs analysis approach: an investigation of needs in an eap context. theory and practice in language studies, vol. 5(1), p. 58-65. retrieved may 12, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2018.915195 https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2018.612029 ira septiana, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati needs analysis-based english syllabus for computer science students of bina darma university 310 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee between reality and idealism: does novel reading generate empathy in algerian efl students? samya achiri department of english, faculty of letters and languages, oum el bouaghi university, algeria e-mail: sachiri38@gmail.com fadhila hadjeris department of english, faculty of letters and languages, oum el bouaghi university, algeria e-mail: fhadjeris@gmail.com apa citation: achiri, s., & hadjeris, f. (2016). between reality and idealism: does novel reading generate empathy in algerian efl students. english review, 4(2), 171-180 received: 28-02-2016 accepted: 24-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: this study is an exploration of the extent to which reading novels develops algerian efl students’ empathetic attitudes towards human issues in the novel they are exposed to on the one hand and towards current local and worldwide issues on the other. to achieve this aim, a survey questionnaire is designed. the respondents are 50 ma students of anglo-american studies at the english department of oum el bouaghi university (algeria). the students have been exposed to mark twain’s the adventures of huckleberry finn as a part of their syllabus. accordingly, their reactions to the questions concerning this novel provide the necessary data around which this study hinges. the findings of the research are meant to help teachers and researchers to seek out new possibilities of developing more effective ways of using novel reading in efl university classes. additionally, the results serve to raise algerian efl students’ awareness about reading novels and their impact on stimulating their imagination, critical thinking and emotional attitudes. keywords: efl teaching/ learning, novel, narrative empathy, empathetic attitudes, critical thinking, algeria. introduction up to now, integrating literature in efl classes as an engine to ignite language learning remains a site of contention between efl scholars and educators. there is no general consensus about what to teach and in what way to achieve the required objectives. despite this fact, a big proportion of scholars convincingly argue that literature in this type of classes proved to be an outstanding medium in favor of the learning process if used properly (collie & slater, 1987; lazar, 1993; widdowson, 1975). other important issues came resonantly to the fore after literature regained its importance in the 1980’s as a language learning material. the debate over the ability of literature to nourish mental faculties and psychological responses, rather than developing the four skills, of the reader, hence the learner, was accelerated by means of abundant publications. to put it in another way, scholars sought to take the 171 mailto:fhadjeris@gmail.com samya achiri & fadhila hadjeris between reality and idealism: does novel reading generate empathy in algerian efl students? implications of literature integration beyond the doors of the efl class to the real life. that reading literature can create empathetic individuals who care about one another becomes a strongly held belief with the publications of lazar (1993), helton, asamani and thomas (1998), nussbaum (1997), zunshine (2006). extending the implications of literature teaching in the efl class beyond its doors has been always a controversial challenging topic. this is simply because it is claimed by many specialists in the field that engaging students with literature may prompt, sustain or improve social skills especially empathy. this latter is of great importance to this paper since it links the empathetic attitudes of the reading experience of a sample of algerian university students with their empathetic attitudes towards real life issues. the contributions of martha nussbaum (1997) and suzanne keen (2007) to this topic are very memorable, for both of them succeeded to narrow down the previous studies by relating empathy to pedagogy. like other scholars, they believe that narrative fiction, and not popular fiction, is the most suitable literary genre to nourish empathy. yet, each of them approached the topic from a different angle. in this context, it is worth starting with the views of some scholars who believe in the power of fiction to lend such promising results after reading. poulson, duncan and massie (2005), for instance, argue that reading fictional narratives “may have an important and profound impact on how people feel and behave in their daily lives” (cited in bal &veltkamp, 2013, par. 1). lisa zunshine (2006) takes the study into another level by investigating her claims within the scope of evolutionary psychology using theory of mind (mind-reading theory) to support the idea that if readers are met with critical works that encourage them to question other minds, they will certainly appreciate them, and hence, they start to speculate every single detail about the characters. as it will be shown later with the ideas of nussbaum and keen, this is clearly the starting point of empathy. zunshine seems not only to be in favor of the readers’ empathy towards the characters but also about the repercussions of this empathy on daily life. she (2006, p.164) makes her claim clearer at the end of her book: [w]e do read novels because they engage our tom [theory of mind] ... fiction helps us to pattern in newly nuanced ways our emotions and perceptions; it bestows “new knowledge or increased understanding” and gives “the chance for a sharpened ethical sense”; and it creates new forms of meaning for our everyday existence. all of this exploratory work is inextricably bound up with tom, and the overall effect of it on the reader is not reducible to the sum of this narrative’s engagements with our various cognitive adaptations. some day we may have a conceptual framework that will allow us to speak about this overall effect—that “emergent meaning” of the literary narrative. in contrast with zunshine’s cognitive view of empathy, where mind is involved to decipher other opinions and to make inferences, patrick hogan (2010) argues that affective empathy is also “an essential component of the understanding and enjoyment of fiction” and that “literary representations of emotion may be ‘purer’ than those encountered in real-life, and thus have the power to enhance individuals’ affective empathic responses” (cited in stansfield & bunce, 2014, p.9). in this 172 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee paper, both types of empathy are taken into consideration. as a philosopher who is interested in the cultivation of humanity, martha nussbaum sees in literature, narrative fiction, a fountainhead to shape liberalthinking people. to her (1997, p.11), a key ability that comes from reading fiction is narrative imagination which is “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself [empathy], to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story.” through her pedagogical approach, nussbaum sees that this ability is the outcome of critical reading and tight relation with the text (ibid, p.100). this can be best done by introducing students to controversial novels that “challenge conventional wisdom and values” (ibid, p. 99). she makes this expression clearer by equating it with “[t]he inclusion of new and disturbing works in the curriculum” (ibid). the student, in this case, will be obliged to make moral choices, and this is what eric leake (2014) calls difficult empathy. when fleeing this zone of psychological ease, the student can really access and read the world of the character by assimilating himself to this character. nussbaum insists on the fact that putting oneself in someone else’s shoes requires “the thought that this suffering person might be [the reader himself]” (1997, p. 91). drawing on many sciences and studies, like neurosciences, psychology, and literary studies, suzanne keen summed up her ideas about the relation between novel reading, empathy, and altruism in her book empathy and the novel (2007). at the beginning of her book, she defines empathy as “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of effect, [which] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (p.4). she goes further to consider this behavior as a response that is not necessarily conscious (ibid, p. 4). keen (2007, p.3) states: “[i]f novels can be considered a part of readers’ environment, then fiction may elicit the expression of dispositional empathy, or it may cultivate the sympathetic imagination through the exercise of innate role-taking abilities.” it is the fictionality of novels that leads readers to empathize with characters providing “safe zones” for them to feel empathy without any need to resultant prosocial behavior (ibid, p. 4). this is the very essence of narrative empathy which is characteristic to suzanne keen’s research. it is delineated as “as an affective transaction accomplished through the writing and reading of fiction” (ibid, p. xv). so, authors and readers are equally involved in the creation of this emotion towards narrative fiction. according to keen, two major techniques can considerably provoke empathy: character identification and narrative situation. narrative empathy in keen’s eyes is not necessarily a text response that is followed by altruistic action. she (2007) sees that this hypothesis is not really tested, and it is a matter of exaggeration. the reasons behind her view are averred in many occasions in her book. 173 samya achiri & fadhila hadjeris between reality and idealism: does novel reading generate empathy in algerian efl students? figure 1. how empathy occurs (based on nussbaum’s ideas) to the researchers, the fact that some ma students’ language proficiency and critical thinking are highly distinctive is in many ways encouraging, but their appreciation of the value of literature is much less satisfactory. they seem to underestimate the cultural and human understanding that might spring from their reading experiences. they also ignore that these attitudes may stem as a serious deterrent in their future development since the ability to envisage what others feel and think becomes an overriding constituent to solidify human relationships be they within the country, algeria, or abroad, maghreb and the whole world. so, the study will try to answer the following research questions: 1) does reading novels promote empathy in algerian university efl students towards characters-related issues and real human issues? 2) are students aware of the results of neglecting literature reading on their future relations and its effects upon their perceptions of their surrounding events and cultures? before dealing with these two important questions, the researchers find it worth to answer the following questions: 1) how much do efl students read literary novels and to what extent are they able to respond critically to the texts they read? 2) what attitudes do algerian university students have towards 174 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the already-chosen novels of their syllabus? 3) why do students under-appreciate the power of literature? i.e. what leads them to maintain such negative attitudes towards reading literature? method the present study relies on a descriptive method which is proceeded by means of a survey questionnaire to provide data about the population and their psychological responses towards the adventures of huckleberry finn. it is conducted in the department of english (faculty of letters and languages) at the university of oum el bouaghi. it takes as its sample ma ii students of angloamerican studies (aas) who had been accepted initially in this department to complete a b.a in english on the basis of their grade in the baccalaureate exam. it is worth to mention that aas exposes students to a considerable set of modules of civilization and literature in which both are given a due concern in terms of number. in addition, during the first year in the program, our sample class is asked to read mark twain’s the adventures of huckleberry finn (1884) as a part of the syllabus. participants in this study belong to a class of 50 students (the only class of this course) who are aged between 22 and 28. the administration of the questionnaire took place in the first semester of the academic year 2015-2016. when the questionnaire was delivered, 6 students were absent and the present ones were 44 females. one of the researchers distributed the questionnaire to the students and helped to clarify the instructions. no time limit was set; therefore, students were requested to take their time to respond to the questionnaire. as the section of results will reveal later, only about 9% of the students were found interested in reading in general. to achieve the aims of the study, a four-section questionnaire is developed. it consists of different types of questions: multiple choice questions (mcq), open-ended questions, closed-ended questions. the first section, with three main items, aimed at getting background information about the respondents as their age and interest in the basic subject matters of their course (literature/ civilization). the second section was designed with the aim of inquiring about the students’ reading habits and their personal preferences (types of novels they like). evaluating their reactions towards the chosen text was the focus of section three. through the last section, which is entitled the text and its effects, the researchers aimed to see to what extent students are able to carry their emotional baggage towards human issues in the novel to current real life issues, recent world events most precisely. results and discussion reading experience. the researchers analyzed data obtained from the second section of the questionnaire to find answers to the three sub-questions listed above. analysis showed that 29.54 % of the students spend their free time in watching movies, 20.45% in surfing the net, 09.09 % in reading books, and only 2.27 % of the total number, i.e. one student out of 44 students spends her free time in reading literary novels. as to the number of novels they read in the course of the last two years, results demonstrated that 75% of the respondents read between 1 and 5 novels and 15.90 % read between 5 and 10 novels. among the total number of students, 65. 90% declared that they like 175 samya achiri & fadhila hadjeris between reality and idealism: does novel reading generate empathy in algerian efl students? reading novels. this claim was not only justified by the importance of such a fictional sub-genre in improving the skills needed in learning the target language, but also by the aesthetic pleasure that literary novels can confer. some students went further to consider reading literary novels as a kind of psychological relief and among the ways that help them to escape the real world. moreover, others pointed to the role which is played by literary novels in broadening their visions and introducing them to new perspectives. respondents who had negative attitudes towards reading novels (34.09%) attributed this to the fact that novels (especially assigned ones) are often boring, long, and difficult to read. as a matter of fact, they prefer cinematic adaptations and summaries of the novels in case their teachers ask them to read. in a response to the question about the type of novels students like reading most, 29.54% of them chose historical novels, and only 2.27 % preferred satirical novels. the latter is the type of the novel that was taken as a case in point. also, inquiry about the basic criteria students adopt to select novels they read revealed results in which the teacher is at the center by imposing novels (upon 27.27 % of the population), recommending (to 09.09%) or both (18.18%). 15.90 % of the students claimed that they choose the novels randomly while only one student had an in-advance prepared list. when students were asked if they prefer to have a free reading list of novels in their modules of literature, 84.09% of the respondents ticked “yes” option. a major reason spelled out for this choice was the motivation that stems from it since it gives them the opportunity to search and discover different types of novels. this, in turn, would make them updated. additionally, students considered the novels of their syllabus as boring (classics) and saw that the personal choice satisfies their needs and lessens their panic/ stress. students who ticked the “no” option (15.90%) provide their lack of interest in reading literature and experience to choose as their justifications. students’ responses to the text. about 77% of the students found themselves absorbed in their reading of the novel asserting that mark twain managed to attract the readers’ attention. to them, this was adeptly accomplished through tackling serious issues related to black american slaves by harmonizing different literary genres and techniques (satire, picaresque, humor …). the most frequently identified important issues of the novel center, thus, around slavery vs freedom. besides, other issues like the possibility of co-existence of blacks and whites, the problem of identity, innocence, and hypocrisy of white people were spotted. there are 16 students who did not respond to this question. unexpected results came with the question seeking students’ feelings about the story of jim, for 21 students did not respond and 11 others provided irrelevant answers. only 12 answers were considered relevant showing students’ supportive feelings which range between feeling sorry and sympathetic towards jim and all the slaves with their experiences without exception. to justify their feelings, almost 16% of the total population that answered the question thought that local or worldwide issues are well-reflected through the experience of this character. in relation to the same point, 21 students skipped the question which required them to point out the event that remained etched on their minds after 176 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee reading the novel. 17 answers were irrelevant and only 6 students provided clear answers revolving mostly around scenes combining both main characters: tom and jim. the text and its effects. this section along with the previous one aspires to find answers to the main questions of this study. in particular, the section tests the ability of the learners to link human issues, mainly the repression of black people, raised in the novel with real life issues. so, a considerable number of the students, i.e. nearly 57% of them, reported their dissatisfaction with the situation of the citizens in the islamic world. this attitude was clearly demonstrated through the following statements: student (a): citizens of the islamic world are the subaltern of a complex combination of oppressive powers; they are voiceless. student (b): because arabs have been repressed mentally, they do not get the chance to even express their needs and desires. nevertheless, 34% of the population, unlike the previous group, seemed satisfied since at least religious freedom is guaranteed. in the next question, 61.36% of the students expressed their empathy for the arabic citizens standing against the oppressive regimes whilst 31.81% of them had opposing views. they referred to most of the countries affected by the arab spring like tunisia, syria, and egypt. yet, most of them concentrated on the syrian issue by expressing their empathy through negative psychological responses (pain, sadness, sorrow). in the course of analyzing the results of this question, the researchers came across two interesting initiatives which exceeded the step of being empathetic to becoming active: student (a): i feel their pain because what’s happening is irrational; i share what i believe in via the different social networks. student (b): the syrian cause will be the topic of my dissertation this year. in the same vein, unexpected reactions came out towards other issues in the western countries like the terrorist attacks in paris, charlie ibdou incident and isis attacks since only 52.28% of the students showed empathy for them. few days before the questionnaire was administered, an explosion took place in a refugee camp in ouargla. when our sample students were asked to express their reactions about it, unfortunately, almost 57 % of them left the space blank, and 16 % stated that they did not hear about the incident. only 27 % of the total number tried to describe the type of feelings they had towards the victims (sadness, sympathy, being sorry, hoping their situation will change). the latter proposed encouraging individual initiatives, visiting the victims, organizing charity campaigns and raising awareness about the situation of the refugees once asked about the things they can afford to help. here, 43.18 % did not answer the question, and 6.81% were irrelevant. attempting to realize the key objective of this section, learners were guided to identify the local algerian issues that crossed their minds while reading the novel. 72.72% of them did not answer and 6.81 % of the responses were irrelevant. to the rest, it was mainly the period of french colonization, the black decade and the recent events of ghardaya. concerning whether reading the novel helped the students to view the issues raised in the novel differently, the results revealed that 56.81% did not respond while only 13.63% noted that their views remained the same. 177 samya achiri & fadhila hadjeris between reality and idealism: does novel reading generate empathy in algerian efl students? as stated earlier, the researchers presented an evaluation of novel teaching to tertiary efl students with the aim of investigating to what extent reading novels cultivate empathy in them. the results of the second section of the questionnaire revealed the students’ neglect of reading generally and reading novels specifically despite being an overriding component of their syllabus. nevertheless, the students’ awareness of the importance of novel reading in a reaction to another question is discernable. this reluctance to read may be ascribed to both individual and instructional factors, for most of the participating students perceive reading as a compulsory task: 1. inappropriate choice of the novels taught to/in this class as teachers usually prefer the classics. 2. students’ unfamiliarity with reading. 3. students’ inability to either understand the literary language or interpret the symbols and motifs used by authors to allude to other issues i.e. their critical thinking is not fully developed. 4. time restrictions because students are exposed to many modules of civilization and literature. these factors can adequately explain the difficulties the students encountered while reading the selected novel the adventures of huckleberry finn leading them to favor reading summaries or watching cinematic adaptations. the evaluation of answers about the thematic concerns of the adventures of huckleberry finn itself indicated the students’ understanding of what the story revolves around. yet, the series of unexpected results in which they skipped answering the remaining questions or provided irrelevant reactions lead us to say that in spite of reading the novel, our respondents did not understand the intentions of the writer. this also could be related to their inability to imagine the situation of the characters. therefore, they did not empathize or at least sympathize, as it is expected in regular situations, with the characters of the novel as believed by martha nussbaum (1997). it has been already shown that she sees narrative imagination as the result of critical reading of a contentious narrative fictional text. through the last section of the questionnaire, the attentiveness of the students towards the dominating issues in the middle-east (arab spring above all) can be induced. these issues impose themselves upon the lives of the algerians due to the emergence of private news tv channels and a wide access to means of technology. this in turn created a sense of annoyance and fear of being trapped in the same situation. worth underlining here is the fact that this wide access to the different media types (especially the net) participated undoubtedly in making the students obsessed with the current situation at the expense of reading or other important things. for this reason, students were less empathetic to western issues if compared to middle east issues. as far as local issues are concerned, the results do not lead us to say that 43.18% of the respondents are not empathetic since they declared their lack of knowledge about incident of ouargla. this could be explained by the fact that it is a local issue and it did not receive enough attention as other arabic or western issues. another finding of our evaluation is the minimal responsiveness to the association between the text and real events –local, arabic or western– which can be possibly attributed, as hinted above, to the students’ inability to imagine or to show critical thinking. hence, they cannot interpret hidden 178 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee messages conveyed by the author. this is the most important point of the paper that could be directly related to zunshine’s cognitive view (2006) of the whole matter. to her, a work of fiction must trigger the reader’s mind to read the character’s mind. understanding and empathy that spring in this case is called cognitive empathy. obviously, this is what the sample students of this current study lack. conclusion this study was inspired by the teachers’ experience in this pedagogical setting where english, as a foreign language, is a medium of instruction more than being an objective of instruction. to phrase it differently, learners at this level, in widdowson’s terms (1975), are supposedly guided, using english, to learn other disciplines rather than learning the language itself, a step which in our case involves studying literature. the dearth of studies that have been conducted to improve the teaching of literature generally and the impact of novel reading on the students’ psychological traits particularly in a university-level algerian context was another motivating factor. therefore, the researchers, who believe that this modest study is just a starting point, hope that this initiative will instigate further attempts in this area for which empirical research, precisely experiments, is obviously required to arrive to a better understanding of how empathy in such a context really occurs taking into consideration that algeria has its own cultural specificities. the latter of course include gender differences and their relation with empathy which is given a due concern by suzanne keen (2007). adding to this, empathy is an important capacity in a population that is normally characterized by major cultural differences, and algeria started to become one since it is now an open market to different nationalities. as a starting point, the researchers postulated that the reading experience of the sample students spawns no satisfactory empathetic attitudes, and the underestimation of the value of literature on the one hand and the lack of reading literary texts on the other stem as serious obstacles in the face of developing the students’ empathy and their reception of real and important human issues. overall findings paved the way to the researchers to unveil the problematic situation of teaching literature in this context. neglecting reading despite being aware of its advantages which is mostly related to the students’ obsession of technology has also a series of instructional reasons as indicated above. the impasse of feeling obligation and boredom while reading could be solved by means of suggesting a free reading list. certainly, this will have outstanding effects on the students’ performance in such modules if combined with smallgroup learning. involvement, motivation, interaction, circulation of knowledge, and the development of critical thinking are only few gains to mention here in case students’ preferences are taken into account. in this point, the teacher can, for instance, specify a literary genre and ask his students to choose a representative novel. additionally, allowing students to choose their texts will render them more responsible and also set the essence of the lmd system, as a learner-centered educational system, into practice. moreover, if we intend to develop teaching literature in algerian universities and to extend the effects of reading beyond the classroom precincts, then lecturers and course designers are invited to work hand in hand. a set of 179 samya achiri & fadhila hadjeris between reality and idealism: does novel reading generate empathy in algerian efl students? simple practices could be effective in meeting the students’ needs. to begin with, allocating much time to the modules of literature will be helpful to cover the objectives in a more adequate manner through creating a range of motivating activities like group works, presentations, and discussions. adopting more specialized modules of literature, like contemporary literature, women literature and postcolonial literature, is another practice that can lend promising results given that boredom will be led to an end. this point can be accelerated by means of introducing two other practices: (a) first, giving the opportunity to the students to choose modules of interest at the beginning of the program like it is the case in most of the universities all over the world, and (b) second, introducing anglophone african literatures as the researchers’ experience shows that the students are more attached to the literatures of the continent. returning now to the question posed at the beginning “does novel reading promote empathy in algerian university efl students towards characters-related issues and human real issues?”, we can say, after considering the results, that our sample students possess sympathy and empathy towards people of the major events in their lives. yet, their attitudes are not satisfactory as it expected at this level where students are supposed to have developed critical thinking and awareness, and they are normally being prepared to get real life opportunities as mainly teachers after graduation. so, the empathy they show does not normally come totally from novel reading since the results led us to come across the questionable status of literature teaching which was against the developmental effect of empathy in real life. the above practices are expected to boost interest in reading, hence to develop empathy. references bal, p. m. & veltkamp, m. (2013). how does fiction reading influence empathy? an experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation. plos one, 8 (1): e55341. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0055341 collie, j., & slater, s. (1987). literature in the language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. helton, c. a, asamani, j., & thomas, e. d. (1998). a ‘novel’ approach to the teaching of reading. tennessee state: tennessee state university, 1-5. [online] retrieved from http: // www.nade.net / documents / scp98 / scp98.19.pdf keen, s. (2007). empathy and the novel. new york: oxford university press. lazar, g. (1993). literature and language teaching: a guide for teachers and trainers. cambridge: cambridge university press. leake, e. (2014). humanizing the inhumane: the value of difficult empathy. in m. m. hammond & s. j. kim (eds.), rethinking empathy through literature (pp. 175-185). new york: routledge. nussbaum, m. c. (1997). cultivating humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education. cambridge, usa: harvard university press. stansfield, j., & bunce, l. (2014). the relationship between empathy and reading fiction: separate roles for cognitive and affective components. journal of european psychology students, 5(3): 9-18. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jeps.ca widdowson, h. g. (1975). stylistics and the teaching of literature. london: longman. zunshine, l. (2006). why we read fiction: theory of mind and the novel. columbus: ohio state university press. 180 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 333 instructional design of descriptive text materials based on palembang local culture by implementing lslc for students to understand learning nurlista iryanti language education, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: listafawdh@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) language education, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id soni mirizon language education, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: soni_mirizon@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: iryanti, n., inderawati, r. & mirizon, s. (2021). instructional design of descriptive text materials based on palembang local culture by implementing lslc. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 333-344. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4361 received: 17-03-2021 accepted: 27-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction education is the basis for building the nation's character to understand, assess things more realistically, including caring for others. therefore, in this 21st-century era, the indonesian government uses various innovations to establish students to think critically and be more active, especially in the language field. english becomes a global language as a tool that connects people around the world. meanwhile, in indonesia, english is used as the first foreign language which is taught after independence 1945. we could see that any levels of education in indonesia put english as one of the compulsory subjects taught in school, from elementary to college level. reading is one of the english skills that should be learned by students besides listening, writing, and speaking. as an important skill, reading brings the reader to get a lot of knowledge. according to nunan (1991), reading is a processof combining information by the readers from the text and their prior knowledge to build meaning fluently. similarly, patel and jain (2008) stated that reading is the most useful and important skill for people to update their knowledge. besides, reading is one skill that must be learned by the students along with listening, speaking, and writing. reading is the most basic activity in any language class. reading as a means of extending and consolidating ideas and knowledge of the language. afterward, harmer (2001) offered an idea that reading is essentially either for students’ careers, learning purposes, or pleasure. meanwhile, reading is the ability to get information in several texts. in this modern era, sometimes students are quite arduous to know what the culture is. by reading, the students recognize many benefits of local culture. another study about abstract: lesson study learning community (lslc) is one of the various innovations to make students have a good quality in learning in this 21st-century era. the objective of the study was to produce a learning trajectory in english which can help students in learning descriptive text material through lslc in the classroom. this study used design research method type validation study. the participants were 32 seventh-grade students and english teachers of smp negeri 18 palembang. the data were collected through interview, observation, documentation, and field notes. the results of the study revealed the teachers did not implement the application of lesson study learning community based on the appropriate stages. somehow, in the process of lesson study, some difficulties were discovered. from the result of interview and observation, some problems in implementing were still found due to the limitation of the time, and the teacher’s commitment during the implementation. however, the lesson study helps students to understand learning through collaboration. keywords: descriptive text; lesson study; lesson study learning community mailto:ritarudisaid@yahoo.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4361 nurlista iryanti, rita inderawati, & soni mirizon instructional design of descriptive text materials based on palembang local culture by implementing lslc 334 reading development with local culture by sopian, inderawati, and petrus (2019) showed that students wanted to learn reading english text with innovative ways and to have a guidance strategy to enrich students’ comprehension including english text. local culture is the habit of a particular group of people that also characterizes the culture of a local community group. somehow, they find some troubles when the teacher asks them about some information still in the context. it might be due to a lack of vocabulary and it made them find too many difficulties in understanding the text. another difficulty that is faced by the students is in finding the main idea of the text (hidayati, 2018). therefore, a lot of factors can influence students in reading especially in the teaching and learning process. additionally, factor which may influence reading comprehension, related to the readers’ such cognitive ability, strategy, knowledge background, effective characteristic, text, and content. in teaching reading, teachers must think about how to make the students gain an understanding of the text, such as learning about the descriptive text (smith, snow, serry, & hammond, 2021). descriptive text is one kind of text that usually students learn at school. hamalik (1993) stated there will be involved the interaction among persons, materials, facilitates tools, and the procedures that all of them influence each other in getting the teaching goal. moreover, yudiantoro (2010) defined that descriptive text is a text that has the purpose of describing a particular person, place, or thing. reading involves transforming a text, which is a graphic representation, into thought, meaning, or idea. descriptive text is used to describe a person or thing in general, related to color, shape, taste, and smell as painting something with words (tompkins, 1994). moreover, slavin (2009) mentioned that when children enter school, they have absorbed many aspects of the culture, such as language, attitudes, beliefs, attitudes, food preferences, and ways of behaving. similarly, wahlqvist and lee (2007) mentioned that food culture arises out of the place of a people’s origin, whether they still live there or not, but is shaped by resources, belief and information, technology, fishing (food processing and storage, transport, cooking), colonization, and ethnicity. therefore, food indicates the identity of a nation’s social and cultural shows viscosity. indonesia is one of the countries that make food as a symbol of the cultural region. it means, foods are one of the main roles in people’s lives and give any influences to the impacts on their culture. the lack of suitable reading materials with localcontent is a reason to propose a new reading material. another study about content analysis by kaltsum and susiati (2019) showed that the english textbook in surakarta is lack of local content, precisely 14%. this 14 % of local content is about national local content. then, they concluded that government policy that sets english as a local content has not gone well. some other researches show how local culture is beneficial in english language teaching (khan, asif, hasmi, & azeddou, 2017; yang, 2017; fu, 2018; inderawati, agusta, & sitinjak, 2018; sopian et al., 2019; elviana, et al., 2019; azizah, inderawati, & vianty, 2021). sato (2014) stated that lesson study can make students active and creative in learning. there are three stages of lesson study; it is known as plan-dosee stages. sato (2014) insisted that lesson study can make students active and creative in learning. therefore, a lesson must be a place where students can voice their original questions. students often fail to seek help and show their lack of understanding. as we know that lesson study originating from japan has spread worldwide: asia, europe, africa, australia, and even america. sato (2014) emphasized if a lesson study is not a strategy or method in the teaching and learning process, but lesson study is an effort to improve the process of effectiveness in teaching and learning in planning, doing, and understanding the process. the simultaneous achievement of quality and equality encourages the development of teacher professional and vocational skills, and schools are now the place of teachers as learning professionals who are mutually educating. so it is necessary to reform the school through lesson study for learning community (lslc). in short, lslc is a new concept that emerged from the development of the latest lesson study. this development is based on the demand for learning communities to achieve quality in implementation. this process involved small groups of teachers meeting regularly to engage in a collaborative process of lesson planning, implementation, evaluation, and refinement. in august 2019, mr. sato and mrs. takasawa came to palembang to be the speakers of the workshop to all selected headmasters and teachers for junior high english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 335 school at sriwijaya university. mr. sato presented a topic about applying and implementation lslc in class. in this opportunity, smpn 1 palembang was chosen and eighth-grade students as a sample. all of the participants became observers and had to do a reflection. from the implementation of lslc in class, the students were divided into heterogeneous groups. meanwhile, in general, the student collaborated with their friends to help solve the questions given in the sharing task and jumping task session. in other words, in lslc, students did not feel shy to ask, so that the students were encouraged to ask questions about what they did not understand. mr. sato also explained lslc is not only about learning processes to develop thinking power but also social processes. as observers, all the participants also observed psychological actions, such as difficulties to answer the question, what time they felt worried, and what made them confused. therefore, in the process of observation, there was one group seemed very active and quick to work on the questions given by the teacher because they had good collaboration between students in the group. on the other hand, some groups were not active and could not work at all. in this case, the teacher's role is to help weak students and become facilitators to help them solve problems. the results of the observation showed that students could solve the problems if they were collaborated and shared the problems. thus, it can be concluded that lslc is very important to improve students’ critical thinking while sharing knowledge to answer questions at the same time. another study was done by marlina (2018), in implementing lslc on students of biology education study program fkip tanjungpura university. she used a descriptive method with the subject is all students who are active in the biology education study program. implementation was done through 3 stages of plan, do, and see (reflection). the result showed that students gradually succeed in forming good learning communities among students because they were supported by creativity in preparing lectures designed collaboratively between the lecturers and observers involved. then, it was contrasted with a study done by nashruddin and nurrachman (2014) a case study about implementing lesson study in private senior high school in malang for tenth-grade students. the subjects of the study were english teachers, their students, and the school stakeholder from a private senior high school in malang. the result showed if their study about lesson study was not to work effectively since the limitation of time and not all of these steps of lesson study were reflected in the implementation of lesson study in that school. based on those results, it can be concluded that to guarantee the students learning, there were a lot of factors from the material and their learning trajectory. lslc is a learning system to make the teaching and learning process in the classroom more qualified with three stages, plan, do, and see. lslc focus on children’s learning grows from something that they do not understand. a lesson is a place where children struggle and comfort with what they have not previously known. that is why it is important to know the learning trajectory of the students when students produce a learning trajectory of students in descriptive text material through lslc in the classroom. method the method that was used in this study is the design research method type validation study, which is a form of qualitative approach in designing learning. design research is a systematical design study to developing and evaluating educational interventions (such as programs, strategies and learning materials, products, and systems) as solutions to solve complex problems in educational practice (plomp & nieven, 2007). design research aims to develop local instructional theory (lit) with researcher and teacher cooperation to improve the quality of learning (gravemeijer & eerde, 2009). in other words, design research is an interventionist that focuses on process and collaboration on learning. akker, gravemeijer, mckenney, & nieveen (2006) mentioned design research has different characteristic from other methods as summarizing. interventionist means the research aims at designing an intervention in the real world; it means design learning activities may change during the study because the design is flexible. then, interactive means research is a cyclic process that is repeated designation, evaluation, and revision. after that, process-oriented means research focuses on the learning process such as learning plans and learning tools. utility oriented is the benefits of the design that are measured by the user's practicality. the last, theory oriented is research based on field trial theory and learning design contributes to theory nurlista iryanti, rita inderawati, & soni mirizon instructional design of descriptive text materials based on palembang local culture by implementing lslc 336 building. in the design of learning, three stages are carried out repeatedly (cyclic cycles) until the discovery of new theories that are the result of a revision of the tried learning theory (gravemeijer & cobb, 2006). figure1. the cyclic cycle of design research the first stage of preparing for the experiment (research preparation) was conducted a literature study on descriptive text material. besides that, the researcher also examined the students' initial ability by conducting a pre-test to several students to find out the extent to which the students' understanding of the learning prerequisite material. the results are used to design a series of learning activities that contain the hypothetical learning trajectory. hypothetical learning trajectory (hlt) which is designed to be dynamic so that it forms a cyclic process that can change and develop during the teaching experiment process. in detail, the things done in this stage are: (1) analyzing the learning objectives, (2) determining the initial conditions of the study, (3) designing and discussing the conjecture or hlt to be developed, (4) determining the character of the class and the role of the teacher, besides that, the researcher conducted classroom observations, interviews with the teacher to determine the state of the initial abilities of the students who are the subject of this research. in the second stage, the design experiment consists of the first two cycles (pilot experiment) and the second cycle (teaching experiment). four students with heterogeneous abilities (1 high-ability student, 2 moderate-capable students, and 1 lowability student) were involved in the first cycle (pilot experiment), at this stage the researcher acted as a teacher. the results of the first cycle were used to revise the initial hlt version for one class participating in the second cycle (teaching experiment). in the second cycle, students were taught by their teachers as model teachers (instructors) and researchers acted as observers on learning activities. the third stage is a retrospective analysis, the data obtained from the teaching experiment stage are analyzed, the results of the analyst are used to develop the design in the following learning activities. hlt is compared to the next learning activity. hlt is compared to the learning activities of actual students (actual learning trajectory) to answer the research problem formulation. the purpose of retrospective analysis, in general, is to develop local instructional theory (lit). the participants were 32 seventh-grade students and english teachers of smp negeri 18 palembang. moreover, there were stakeholders of the learning community from another school. the data was collected using interviews, observation, documentation, and field notes. in this study there were three stages: plan, do and see. the documentation used as supportive data such as teachers’ teaching preparation, pictures, and video recording of the lesson study activity. observations were conducted for capturing the implementation of the lesson study, and the teaching and learning process during the lesson study especially in do stages. another instrument was a semi-structured interview for the teacher and students. it functions to gain information on how the process of lesson study was conducted. these were analyzed descriptively based on the adapting theory from sato (2011) that there were three stages: plan, do, and see. findings and discussion this study was introducing the stages of the lesson study learning community, there were plan, do, see and the main goal of lesson study learning community. started from the preparation about the setting goals of lesson study learning community until the implementation, it has spent seven meetings. although the implementation had two meetings only in the first cycle (pilot experiment) and second cycle (teaching experiment). meanwhile, before the implementation researcher and english teachers discussed students’ needs, students reading level, material, lesson plan, students worksheets, model teacher, and the strategies used by the teacher in the classroom. then, the researcher, english teacher, and expert validated them, to make sure the appropriateness based on the learning goals. in the plan stage or pre-discussion purpose to produce learning design, the teachers became a english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 337 learning community collaborated to develop a learning plan achieved both in cycle 1 and cycle 2. it is in line with towaf (2016), mentioned that the model teacher and observers plan together with the teaching preparation in which it would be implemented in the teaching and learning process. gravemeijer and cobb (2006) put forward the design experiment consists of the two cycles, the first (pilot experiment) and the second cycle (teaching experiment). researcher and english teachers at smpn 18 palembang discussed and prepared about the lesson plan, students’ worksheets, and the prediction of student's answers. the result of the plan stage in which they used lesson plans with lslc system and scientific approach, there were two kinds of the task; sharing and jumping task, and the prediction answer for students with heterogeneous ability. they analyzed the weaknesses and strengths of the plan. moreover, shulman (1987) added thoughtful planning involves anticipating students’ misconceptions and confusions and planning how these will be addressed. the learning was implemented in two cycles. therefore, the researcher also interviewed the teacher and student, the result showed: lesson study learning community is a learning system this result was revealed after the interview and discussion with an english teacher and a student about lslc that was a learning system to help the student gain the understanding with collaborative learning and the teacher as a facilitator to make sure the students in learning. it is in line with sato (2011) stated the goal was the teachers can help the students make the learning process more qualified. from the interview, the teacher never thought of english learning with lslc system. as indicated in the following interview excerpt: lslc is a pretty good system. indeed, we have never used inshaallah we will learn from this experience and inshaallah we will apply it next (teacher). the teacher was an enthusiast to implement lslc in class. unfortunately, based on the interview result, the teacher put forward if the students usually help each other when they have some difficulties in learning. however, initially, the students did the exercise individually without helping each other at the beginning of lslc has implemented. descriptive text as an important learning material concerning descriptive text and local culture, an english teacher in smpn 18 palembang realized that descriptive text is important material. descriptive text material that is easy but it was very difficult to be understood by students. english national test revealed that the students’ scores in 2018/2019 in descriptive text material were still low in smpn18 palembang. as indicated in the following interview excerpt: maybe not, because they only explained, but in reality, this descriptive text is one of the low un scores 2018/2019, so it needs to be improved how in the future for the un value in descriptive text material can increase. (teacher). however, the teacher could not show the students’ written assessment report to support the statements, she wanted to help the student succeed in learning descriptive text. the main purpose was to improve students’ scores in national examination in the next exam especially from descriptive text questions. thereafter, the teacher’s statement about descriptive text is important material. in descriptive text materials, there are many aspects to be taught. then the students usually describe animals, people, and things. based on kane’s statement (2000), the description is about sensory manipulation how something looks, sounds, and, tastes. mostly it is about visual experience, but the description also deals with other kinds of perception it takes a lot of time to understand. palembang traditional food as an innovation learning material based on the interview with an english teacher in smpn 18 palembang, it was said that descriptive text using palembang traditional food content never been taught in english subject. while the teacher was teaching descriptive text, the teacher usually used animals, people, or things. further, the teacher agreed that learning about palembang traditional food makes students understand descriptive text easily. hence, jordana (2000) mentioned traditional food is a part of a set of traditions that has lasted over time as mentioned by the teacher in the following statement: very good, because if in traditional food and students more understand better although they do not know what descriptive text is but at least they can already explain about traditional food (teacher). nurlista iryanti, rita inderawati, & soni mirizon instructional design of descriptive text materials based on palembang local culture by implementing lslc 338 therefore, by using local culture with traditional food materials, students would understand more about the descriptive text. it is supported by elviana, inderawati, and mirizon (2020), since the meaning conveyed in the language used depends on a society where they live and the communication is delivered through language, and culture is the basis of communication. in other words, teaching language is never done without culture due to some factors, for example familiar content in traditional food which english teacher of smpn 18 palembang revealed. then these findings confessed that the english teacher of smpn 18 palembang said, at least the students can explain about traditional food. jordana (2000) added the teacher mention traditional food was a part of a set of traditions that had lasted over time as mentioned. evidence of interviews, students know and mention familiar traditional food from palembang. the student statement can see below: famous food from palembang such as pempek (student). however, the students perhaps could gain an understanding of descriptive text easier if they use the familiar content. it is strengthened by inderawati & putri (2019) that using traditional food in learning a foreign language helps the students to elaborate the content of the texts and it is proved that the developed reading materials were valid, practical, and have a potential effect. in this term, food and culture not only have a role term generation of local identity, but also influences behavior and help the transfer of cultural heritage for future generations and interaction with others (albayrak and gunes, 2012). enthusiastic students in learning together based on the interview, the finding showed students were more enthusiastic when they learned together with their friends. therefore, when students learned together they built collaboration, discussion, and interaction among them. it is in line with indika (2017) that student’s enthusiasts will appear in learning collaboration by using the pleasant method in lesson study. as indicated in the following interview excerpt: very happy, especially learning in school so, i can meet my friends (student) however, it is also supported by sato (2011), in lesson study learning community process, the study is required for all members to work collaboratively so the students can mutually express their ideas and learn each other and get the solution to solve the problems on questions. cycle 1 at the do stage, the implementation of learning design is in the pilot experiment. there were three main parts: preliminary, core activity, and closing activities. learning activities carried out by the researcher as a model teacher. then, the other teacher community or english teacher became the observer. the focus of the observation was the students during the learning process, not on model teacher performance. observers were not permitted to interfere in the learning process even though they might record with a camera. the participants in this pilot experiment were only eight students. in the preliminary stage, the researcher as model teacher, gave them apperception showing the picture of learning material and the students gave a good response. moreover, in the general lslc system students’ sitting position is supposed to be letter u, but in this case, because of class limitations, the researcher only used the available class that was a computer lab where the table in that class could not form the letter u in apperception activities. therefore, it is contrasted with the theory from sato (2011), it was intended that students could hear each other, and they could provide opinions and responses to each other and a form of the seating plan with the shape of the letter u. then in core activity, the model teacher divided students into two groups with the heterogeneous ability and gave them an explanation about the lesson. the teacher also gave sharing and jumping task and directing the students if they encountered difficulties, they could discuss but could not cheat the answers of their friends. after the sharing task question was given, all members of the group worked on it, but there was a student who still did not understand the questions. one of the students with initials h. he felt confused and just sat staring at the problem. he did not ask his friend because all his friends already worked on the questions. at that time after the teacher explained it, the teacher saw that there were still those who had not done the work. then, the teacher gave an example of how to ask for help without copying a friend's answer. meanwhile, the student with the initials (h) asked the teacher because he was still confused with the intention of question number two. the teacher english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 339 immediately explained to him. after understood, the students read the question and then he tried to answer the question by himself without asking his friends. the collaboration among students began during when the activities of jumping tasks and the teacher occasionally controlled them to ensure they could work on the questions and still gave them instructions to help each other if there were friends who asked to be taught. picture 1. student’s collaboration as a result, one student in the group could answer the question by discussing, collaborating, and asking friends to be taught due to the model teacher's suggestion to him to say “please teach me” to the other friends. then, that student could solve his problem to answer the question. van rossum and hamer (2010) insisted that students attach great importance to hear, and that is also a deeper reason for an emphasis on discussion, allowing them to express their opinions. it is in line with coskun (2017) that teachers show a good perception concerning to the implementation of learning. it is proposed that lesson study is used as an alternative approach to solving the problems that the teachers are facing in the implementation of teaching and learning. in closing activities, each group collected their task and presented their answer by writing the answers on the board. the teachers and all the students together discussed the questions one by one. all students paid attention to the teacher’s explanation of the answers discussed. sato (2011) stated that the purpose is the teacher can make the learning process more qualified for the students. in see or reflection stage which is as a retrospective analysis, the model teacher started the discussion by conveying thoughts and impressions about the implementation of learning. sato (2014) stated researcher and observer provide input or a solution for the lack of teaching that was done to improve in the next instruction. the researcher as a model teacher discussed the finding of english teacher as an observer related to on the content of the material and also the attitude of the students during learning at the pilot experiment. the result showed students were very enthusiastic about learning and their weakness was only lack of mastering vocabulary, the teacher was good enough in delivering the lessons, students’ cheating habits were replaced by the way they asked to be taught by friends. initially, the model teacher told experience while teaching the students. criticism and suggestions were delivered wisely without demeaning the model teacher for the improvement of future practices. the finding on the first observation was done. according to lewis in sudrajat (2008), direct learning observation is one of the essential characteristics of a lesson study. there were two groups in the pilot experiment, muaz, and al-fatih, the result showed most of the students seemed comfortable in learning with a model teacher. when the teacher did apperception by showing pictures related to learning material, the students were concentrated apperception. sato (2011) mentioned basic techniques for carrying out learning with creative apperception. each student followed the instructions of the teacher in working on the questions. the students lost concentration during group division because they did not focus, but the teacher still controlled them and gave them students’ worksheets. at the beginning of learning, students did everything individually but the teacher told the students to discuss with their friends the things they did not understand yet. they must ask to be taught not to copy their friends' answers. however, some students glanced at their answers. during the sharing tasks, they were seen still relying on their thoughts. in the jumping task, they collaborated and discussed issues that were considered difficult although they were still shy to ask. in line with coskun (2017), teachers know the weak points of the lesson and knowing what students need the most in the learning process. cycle 2 the second cycle, do stage is the implementation of learning design in a teaching experiment. there were three main parts: preliminary, core activity, and third closing activities. english teacher with initial “i” as a model teacher and researcher as an observer. therefore, other english teachers became nurlista iryanti, rita inderawati, & soni mirizon instructional design of descriptive text materials based on palembang local culture by implementing lslc 340 observers and some were from other schools as members of the lslc community. in the preliminary, the model teacher gave them apperception showing the picture of learning material and students were interested and gave a good response. model teachers did use the lesson study learning system that is in line with sato (2011), a form of the seating plan with the shape of the letter u. it is intended that students hear each other, and they can provide opinions and responses to each other. then in core activity, the model teacher divided students into seven groups with heterogeneous abilities, gave them an explanation about the lesson. after that, teacher gave students worksheets: the first was the sharing task and the second was jumping task. in the beginning, all students did the question individually. the researcher focused on observing one student. the result showed the student with initial n was very enthusiastic and followed the lesson well even when looking at the pictures on the slide about kind of traditional food from palembang. after that, he often leaned his body into a chair, held his head and sometimes unfocused because he was busy with his activities. the teacher always controlled each group. when in n’s group, the teacher gave suggestions them to asked friends “please teach me” but the n did not pay attention to the teacher, but he covered his face with his hands. after the teacher left, then the n asked his friend. then, in jumping task, n had many discussions with his friends. in this focus group, the collaboration among students run well. students in groups did not ignore the members of the group who had difficulty in answering the questions. it is supported the statement from vygotsky (1978), the collaboration of students and experts on real-world problems or tasks that were built on the language, skills, and experiences of each person formed by each individual's culture in the social context. picture 2. student’s collaboration in the closing activity, the teacher asked each group to present their answers in front of the class. initially, n did not want to present the results of their answers. therefore, after being encouraged by his friends in the group, n was willing to present in front of the class with enthusiasm although he was nervous. a study done by marlina (2018) discovered that students gradually succeed in forming good learning communities among students because they are supported by creativity in preparing lectures that are designed collaboratively between the lecturers and observers involved. after that, due to the time learning, the teacher directly closed the class by asking, repeating material that has been studied, and asked the chairman to lead prayers together before going home. in reflections stages or see stage as a retrospective analysis, after the learning activities took place, the teacher and observers gathered in a room to reflect on today's learning outcomes and the findings during the learning process. that was the system of lslc that could help the student gain an understanding of the lesson and the collaboration among students became good. however, the result showed only several teachers followed the reflection because the other observers had a teaching schedule so some observers could not be present until the lslc process was over. meanwhile, the fact that found by agustin and fahri (2019) in reflecting stages, one of the teachers missed one meeting for reflection activities. as a result, reflection activities could not be done efficiently. the observers in this teaching experiment activity were five people: researchers, two english teachers at smpn 18 palembang, and two teachers from other schools but only three teachers took part in the reflection activities. this obstacle was similar to what was mentioned by nashruddin and nurrachman (2014) that not all of these steps of lesson study were reflected in the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 341 implementation of lesson study in that school. then, while the fact that found by agustin and fahri (2019) about the implementation of lesson study the in english teaching-learning process. the subject of the study was three english teachers in man 1 mojokerto. in reflecting stages, one of the teachers missed one meeting for reflection activities. as a result, their study in reflection activities could not be done efficiently. it is contrasted with mon, dali, and sam (2016) that participants should commit to the lesson study process, to get good results in lesson study. therefore, to take the core lesson, study requires ‘sustained commitment’ from both school leaders and teachers (perry and lewis, 2009). nashruddin and nurrachman (2016) revealed that the observation in the implementation of the lesson becomes the center of the teaching process. in the second observation results, there were seven groups in the teaching experiment. most of the students listened the teacher explanation carefully. all the students concentrated because the topic was considered interesting. the class condition was very crowded and several of them were busy because of their work. it was seen when the teacher gave them a sharing task, the students in several groups were talking with other friends from other groups. the teacher gave them instructions to asking their friends if they did not understand and found difficulties by saying “please teach me”. collaboration has appeared in several groups during sharing tasks. students could ask their friends and share ideas in groups. the constructions of knowledge take place in the social context of vygotsky (1962) which involves the collaboration of students and experts on real-world problems or tasks that are built on the language, skills, and experiences of each person formed by each individual's culture. moreover, when they did not understand, they ask the teacher to explain the purpose of the question. in line with sato (2011), the teacher should know what the students have said and connected it to other students if there are students who are still confused the teacher must approach and guide the students. most students who had high ability could explain and help their friends. they collaborated until they got an answer until jumping tasks. in line with coskun (2017), lesson study is beneficial for helping the teachers to have good quality in teaching. conclusion the learning trajectory in this study produced two questions of sharing tasks and two questions of jumping tasks with the context of familiar traditional foods in palembang which could help students to understand the learning concept of descriptive text. the students were more interested and eager to learn descriptive text because it used the context of traditional foods that they already knew in their daily lives. meanwhile, students could understand the purpose of learning descriptive text which can describe an object with words. besides, this research raises collaborative attitudes among students. it is very useful with the aim of ensuring students can understand the lesson well. based on the result of the research that had been done in two cycles (cycle i and cycle ii), it can be concluded that there is a good learning trajectory among students. the implementation of the lesson study learning community as a learning system can make the students have collaboration with their friends. collaborative learning activities that was used also provide positive effects for students. students can build a sense of caring for their friends. lesson study learning community system builds a 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(2017). cultural background on reading comprehension in junior high school. journal of language teaching and research, 8(2), 370-374. https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0802.21. nurlista iryanti, rita inderawati, & soni mirizon instructional design of descriptive text materials based on palembang local culture by implementing lslc 344 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee investigating age–based compliments in persian vahid shahidi pour phd candidate, sheikhbahaee university, isfahan, iran e-mail: vahid.shahidi72@gmail.com gholam reza zarei associate professor, english language center, isfahan university of technology, isfahan 84156-83111, iran e-mail: grzarei@cc.iut.ac.ir apa citation: shahidi pour, v. & zarei, g. r. (2016). investigating age–based compliments in persian. english review, 4(2), 275-288 received: 08-02-2016 accepted: 13-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: the present study was an attempt to investigate differences in the use of compliments in persian across age as a social variable. data was gathered through a discourse completion task (dct) with imaginary situations in which 200 native persian speakers were asked to put themselves in those situations and give compliments. the results indicated that the most frequently used compliment strategies by persian native speakers were explicit unbound semantic formula and non-compliment strategies. however, the participants used 'other' strategies, future reference, contrast, and request strategies the least. the results also suggested the effect of age on the distribution of compliments. while the younger participants preferred non-compliment strategies the most, the older participants preferred explicit unbound semantic formula strategies the most. however, despite minor differences, all age-groups rarely tended to use future reference, contrast, request, and 'other' strategies. the results cashed light on the cultural and socio-cultural factors affecting the way people offer compliments. keywords: pragmatic competence, speech acts, compliments, discourse completion task (dct), social variables introduction the last two decades have witnessed a plethora of research on pragmatics and its different aspects, especially speech acts. speech acts appear to contribute significantly to construction of every day communication. the performance of speech acts entails sociocultural as well as sociolinguistic knowledge. sociocultural knowledge refers to the ability to select appropriate speech act strategies with respect to social variables of age, gender of the speaker, social class and status in interactions. sociolinguistic knowledge conforms to the skill at selection of appropriate linguistic forms, registers or levels of formality to express speech acts (leech, 1983). many people who communicate across linguistic and cultural boundaries have experienced communication breakdowns with people from different first language (l1) backgrounds. sociolinguists recognize that such intercultural miscommunication is partly due to different value systems underlying each speaker’s l1 cultural group (chick, 1996). different value systems are reflected in speech acts; therefore, improper interpretation of a certain 275 mailto:vahid.shahidi72@gmail.com mailto:grzarei@cc.iut.ac.ir vahid shahidi pour & gholam reza zarei investigating age–based compliments in persian speech act can cause misunderstanding of the speaker’s intention. among different speech acts, complimenting has attracted the majority of researchers' attention. this speech act involves both compliments and compliment responses which are loaded with cultural and socio-cultural factors and therefore require a great deal of pragmatic insight to properly employ and understand them. compliments are speech acts that frequently occur in everyday conversations. based on speech act theory proposed by austin (1962), a speaker produces three types of act: first, the locutionary act referring to the act of uttering (phonemes, morphemes, sentences) and also saying something about the world. the second type of act is the illocutionary act referring to the speaker's intention realized in producing an utterance. finally, the perlocutionary act is the third type of act referring to the intended effect of an utterance on the hearer. this classification reveals that in producing an utterance, not only we say something, but also we mean something from what we say, and we seek to have an influence on our interlocutor. on the basis of this classification, compliments are speech acts in which they can be seen as an illocutionary act. compliments are commonly defined as speech acts which explicitly or implicitly give credit to the addressee, for positive qualities which are appreciated by the speaker or even the whole speech community (holmes, 1988). the most common topics which receive compliments are: possessions, appearance, skills and achievements (holmes, 1988). compliments are often used to initiate, maintain, or terminate a conversation and they can also indicate gratitude and facilitate the conversational interaction by reinforcing the rapport between the interlocutors (jin-pei, 2013). wolfson (1983) metaphorically argues that compliments are used to “grease the social wheels” and thus to serve as “social lubricants” (p.89). however, although compliments seem to be simple at the first glance, they may act differently which leads to their complexity. while one of the most primary functions of compliments is to consolidate and increase solidarity between interlocutors (manes & wolfson, 1981), brown & levinson (1987) consider compliments primarily as face threatening acts (ftas). that is, as brown and levinson (1987) assert, complimenting is a kind of positive politeness strategy which addresses the hearer’s positive face with the complimenter noticing the complimentee’s interests and needs; at the same time, it can be perceived as a fta when the complimenter is understood to envy the addressee or try to obtain something belonging to the complimentee. likewise, holmes (1988) maintains that compliments may act both as positive politeness strategies increasing or consolidating solidarity between people as well as a threat to the negative face. in other words, compliments are a multi-faceted speech act with various types and features, and the acts can be regarded as either facesaving behavior or face-threatening (brown & levinson, 1987). in fact, in some cultures, or even within the same culture in some situations, a compliment used by a complimenter makes the complimentee feel good; meanwhile, in the others, it connotes negatively that the complimenter aims to take advantage of the complimentee’s good qualities, which possibly causes embarrassment. the actual effect of a compliment on the complimentee can sometimes be very different from what the complimenter 276 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee has in mind. for example, in some cultures it is common for people to compliment on others’ appearance while in others it can be totally misinterpreted. similarly, golato (2005) believes that the same utterance can be compliment, interruption, reproach, sarcasm or tease in different cultures or situations. as tang and zhang exemplify, “while ‘you look lovely today’ may make an english woman’s day, it may well make a chinese woman uncomfortable and even somewhat resentful” (2009, p. 326).that is why the speech act of complimenting can be sometimes very complicated and confusing. hence, how to pay appropriate compliments, how to identify them and how to give appropriate responses are important aspects of communicative competence that everyone in a given society needs to develop in order to avoid pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic failure (brown, 2007). it seems that studying complimenting, as yuan (2001) points out, can enhance our understanding of a people‘s culture, social values, social organization, and the function and meaning of language use in a community. on the other hand, learning a second language has become a considerable issue for many people who go across linguistic borders. whatever they are looking for, they have to achieve a proper level of proficiency coupled with sociocultural norms in the second language to become a member of a new culture and simply to survive there (long& doughty, 2003). persian can be a second or foreign language (psl/pfl) whose pragmatic strategies may differ significantly from other languages. thus, if the new member does not know the proper strategies used in, for instance, persian requestive speech acts, his/her request will be rejected due to being considered as an eccentric, if not an impolite one. persian, as sharifian (2005) asserts, has received a great deal of scholars' attention for its complex sociocultural system. in fact, foreign language speakers not only should acquire grammatical competence to achieve linguistic accuracy, but also need to internalize sociolinguistic rules to help them use appropriate language. in addition, wolfson (1989) claims that nonnative speakers of a language are easy to forgive for an error in grammar or pronunciation; however, a pragmatic one can cause an offense. native speakers of any language acquire such competence during their learning of language and use pragmatic rules unconsciously in interaction with others. non-native speakers, however, as bardovi-harlig (2001) holds, differ significantly in their performance even if they have access to good amount of pragmatic input. several researchers (e.g., bardovi-harlig, 2001; kasper 1997) claim that learners of high grammatical proficiency do not necessarily possess comparable pragmatic competence. even grammatically advanced learners may use language inappropriately and show differences from target-language pragmatic norms. although lots of studies have been conducted so far on complimenting, only a few have worked on the relationship between different strategies of compliments used by native speakers across social variables in persian. a majority of studies have attempted to compare different ways of complimenting and responding to compliments across different languages, communities, and cultures (see, for example, huth, 2006; jin-pei, 2013; sadeghi & zarei, 2013), or others have taken other factors such as gender differences in only compliment responses in english into consideration (see, for example, heidari, rezazadeh, & eslami-rasekh, 2009; mohammad277 vahid shahidi pour & gholam reza zarei investigating age–based compliments in persian bagheri, 2015). however, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there has been little research investigating compliments in persian in relation to age. therefore, the current study aims at investigating the relatively unexplored compliment strategies employed by native speakers of persian across the social variable of age since there seems to be a gap in literature regarding this issue. the authors’ hope is that the findings of this study can contribute to the interlanguage pragmatic competence of both iranian learners of other languages and those who want to learn persian as their second or foreign language. motivated by the abovediscussed issues, the study thus tries to find out what major categories of compliments are used by native speakers of persian and whether or not these features are influenced by their age. method on the basis of the social variable, age, considered in the study, 200 persian native speakers were selected from different age groups (50 under18, 50 between18-30, 50 between 31-40, and 50 above 40 years old). it has to be noted that100 of the participants were male and 100 were female from various occupations, educational levels, and cities of iran including tehran, isfahan, mashhad, shiraz, qom, zanjan, qazvin, and urmia in order that they could be as representative of the target population, iranian people, as possible. the sites from which participants were chosen were as diverse as possible, as follows: parks, streets, academic settings, family gatherings, markets, e-mails, and social networks. one way to collect data in the area of pragmatics, as mackey and gass (2005) offer, is through discourse completion task (dct). yuan (2002) defines dct as a written questionnaire that contains a number of hypothetical scenarios or situations used to elicit a certain speech act. participants are required to supply, in writing, what they would say in real life if similar situations happen to them. it is worthwhile to note that data collected via this method do not always correspond to natural data (aston, 1995; hartford & bardovi-harlig, 1992). the way a researcher collects data from the participants may influence the results. dcts are in a crucial sense metapragmatic in that they explicitly require participants not to conversationally interact, but to articulate what they believe would be situationally appropriate responses within possible, yet imaginary, interactional settings. this suggests that the dct is a valid instrument for measuring not pragmatic action, but symbolic action (golato, 2003, p. 92). in fact, data collected through a dct can be different from those collected thorough other methodological approaches (e.g., recording spontaneous speech). despite their limitations, dcts have been widely used as controlled elicitation tools to collect data in the fields of pragmatics, intercultural communication, and second language acquisition, mainly because their simplicity of use and high degree of control over variables lead to easy replicability (yuan, 2002). likewise, golato (2003) offers some advantages of dcts over other methods of data collection such as allowing the researcher to control for certain variables (i.e. age of respondents, features of the situation, etc.) and to quickly gather large amounts of data without any need for transcription, thus making it easy to statistically compare responses from different speakers. 278 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee taking dcts’ advantages and disadvantages into consideration, the present study employed a dct developed by yuan (2002) and translated into persian to elicit data from the participants. the current persian dct was checked, modified, and verified for their authenticity of language by several native speakers of persian. it started by asking demographic questions regarding the participants’ gender and age. the dct questionnaire was designed to explore the possible compliment strategies used by persian native speakers. positive characteristics of the complimentee such as appearance, possession, kindness, and ability are common objects of compliment (yuan, 2002). as table 1 indicates, eight topics or scenarios which aimed to reveal such characteristics were described to the participants so that they could have a clear picture of what the topic is, and what the relationship between the speakers is. the participants were asked to play the role of the complimenters and pay compliments. table 1. topics of compliments in dct questionnaire context topic object of compliment 1 your classmate helped earthquake victims. kindness and generosity 2 your friend fixed your laptop. ability 3 your friend listened to your problems. kindness 4 your classmate made good presentation. ability 5 your friend bought a new cell phone. possession 6 your friend is wearing a fashionable shirt. attire 7 your classmate got a new laptop. possession 8 your neighbor is wearing a new shirt. attire the procedures followed in this study were divided into two main stages. first, based on the social variable, age, considered in the study, 200 male and female persian native speakers living in different cities of iran were selected. in the second stage, the persian dct was made available to the participants in a variety of ways, including direct encounters, electronic communication, friends, registered posting, and relatives who were given adequate time to complete the questionnaires at their own pace. the collected date were organized and prepared for further analyses. results and discussion the present study employed a framework proposed by yuan (2002) to analyze different compliment patterns used by the participants. the participants’ responses to the situations provided were divided into three types: compliment, non-compliment and opt out (see table 2). according to yuan (2002), semantic formulas for compliments can be divided into two types: unbound semantic formulas and bound semantic formulas. unbound semantic formulas refer to those expressions that can function independently as compliments, while bound semantic formulas refer to those responses that cannot be considered as compliments by themselves but must be attached to or co-occur with one of the unbound semantic formulas to be interpreted as part of a c. for example, in context 5 (buying a new cell phone), a response from one participant was “where did you buy this?” this response is not regarded as a valid compliment because it 279 vahid shahidi pour & gholam reza zarei investigating age–based compliments in persian is more of a question seeking an answer of place of shopping rather than a c. it must co-occur with a bound semantic formula to be interpreted as part of a c. unbound semantic formulas can be further divided into two sub-types: explicit compliments and implicit compliments. explicit compliments refer to compliments outside of context, being realized by a small set of conventional formula (herbert, 1997). explicit compliments are also defined as those responses that carry at least one positive semantic value (jin-pei, 2013). implicit compliments are those in which the value judgment is presupposed and/or implicated by gricean maxims (herbert, 1997). therefore, the positive value of an expression can be inferred from what is said in a particular situation. bound semantic formulas include explanation, information question, future reference, contrast, advice and request. explanation alone cannot be regarded as a compliment. but it co-occurs with an explicit semantic formula. information question is used in addition to the explicit semantic formula by the complimenter to ask more information about the complimentee’s qualification. a complimenter can use future reference to note that the complimentee will have a great future due to his/her good quality. contrast refers to the case that the complimenter compares or contrasts the qualification of the complimentee to that of another one. advice refers to the case that besides giving a c, the complimenter also gives advice to the complimentee. in some contexts, the complimenter makes some requests to the complimentee which is referred to the request compliment strategy. on the other hand, noncompliment refers to responses that cannot be seen as compliments, be it either mere expression of thanks, or bound semantic formula occurring on their own, or replies that do not carry any positive meanings. finally, opt out refers to the cases where the participants indicate that “i would not say anything” when a compliment is expected in that situation (jin-pei, 2013). table 2. yuan’s (2002) framework of compliment strategies compliment (c) strategies context example unbound semantic formula explicit c your friend bought a new cell phone. what a nice cell phone you have. implicit c i wish i could have a cell phone like yours. bound semantic formula explanation your friend fixed your laptop. i saw how difficult it was to fix my laptop. information question where did you learn to fix it? future reference you have a bright future in fixing laptops. contrast i think you are more helpful than your brother. advice you’d better open a laptop store. request can you check my cell phone too? non-compliment your friend listened to your problems. sorry to take your time. opt-out your neighbor is wearing a new shirt. i would say nothing. 280 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to address the major compliment types in persian, the present study elicited 1598 different compliments from 200 persian native speakers in different situations. as indicated in table 3, the most frequently used compliment strategy by persian native speakers was explicit unbound semantic formula. it accounts for 35.16% of the 1598 compliment tokens elicited through dct. this finding corroborates yuan’s (2002) observation that people tend to make direct and positive statements when they pay compliments. elsewhere, jin-pei (2013) in his study reached the similar result that the most frequently used compliment strategy by philippine english speakers was explicit semantic formula. such finding also lends credence to that of herbert (1991), who studied polish compliments and reported that more compliments were explicit and adjectival ones such as 'nice', 'great', and 'lovely'. moreover, it is in harmony with yu's (2005) finding that chinese and americans offered compliments directly rather than indirectly. yu went on to argue that compliments reflected genuine admiration among the chinese people rather than solidarity; therefore, they tended to compliment on the ability of addressees. the high frequency of explicit compliments may be attributed to the fact that people, including iranians, usually employ compliments to have a positive effect on interpersonal relations; therefore, they try the most explicit ones to strengthen solidarity. for example, participants made use of the following compliments which explicitly valued the complimentees' positive qualities (in all the examples, the italics are persian and the non-italics are their english equivalents): 1. che mobile bahali dari! what a nice cell phone you have! 2. kheili khoshgel shodi emshab! you are so pretty tonight! however, persian speakers often tend to offer compliments whether they really admire the qualities of addressees or not since the truthfulness of compliments was less important than adab or politeness and ehteram or respect. as a consequence, they prefer to pay more explicit compliments to express their politeness and respect more. on the other hand, it is worthwhile to recall that the kind of data collection technique used in a study influences the results. the dct used in the present study might favor the production of compliments which were direct explicit formulas. but if one adopts a different methodological approach (e.g., recording spontaneous speech), results will be probably different. in this regard, the relatively frequent use of explicit compliments is not supported by barnlund and araki's (1985) finding that japanese people tended to offer compliments nonverbally and implicitly rather than verbally and explicitly. such discrepancy can be explicated through both cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences as well as research methodology differences. in the case of the latter, while the present study used questionnaires to elicit data, barnlund and araki conducted questionnaires as well as interviews. these two data collection techniques might result in producing different data. the second most frequently used strategy was non-compliments which accounts for 27.72% of the total responses. these findings are in line with those of yuan (2002) and jin-pei (2013), who found that the most frequently used compliment strategies by the participants were explicit semantic formula and then non-compliments. the relatively high frequency of noncompliments, i.e., not paying compliments when the situation calls for 281 vahid shahidi pour & gholam reza zarei investigating age–based compliments in persian them, may be due to the fact that the respondents are not able to distinguish expression of thanks from expression of compliments since there are no sharp borders between the two things. on the other side, the point is not only that respondents are not able but that in real situations there might be an intrinsic ambiguity or that the respondents intend to use an avoidance strategy. participants, for example, simply tended to thank rather than pay compliments when compliments were expected. in the following case, it seems more common for more people to thank the interlocutor because he/she has been listening to them for a long time than to compliment his/her kindness. hence, it is important to consider a role that topics of compliments have to play in determining types of compliments. 3. merci ke be harfam gosh dadi! thank you for listening to me! 4. dastet dard nakone! thank you! however, the participants made use of other strategies, including offer, prayer, and blame, future reference and contrast strategies the least which amounted to 0.43%, 1.37%, and 1.37% of the total tokens, respectively. these findings are consistent with yuan's (2002) and jin-pei's (2013), who reported that other strategies (such as joke, blame, and offer), future reference, contrast, advice, and request were among the least popular compliment strategies. in fact, the low frequency of such strategies is related to the fact that they may have more potentiality to function both as positive politeness strategies consolidating solidarity between people as well as a threat to the negative face more than other strategies, namely, explicit ones. use of ironic or ambiguous sentences as compliments, for example, could simply lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication especially when the interlocutors are less familiar with each other. as brown and levinson (1987) point out, they can be understood or misunderstood as ftas rather than face-saving behavior. table 3. distribution of compliments across participants compliment strategy frequency percentage explicit 562 35.16% implicit 111 6.94% explanation 91 5.69% information question 148 9.26% future reference 22 1.37% contrast 22 1.37% advice 57 3.56% request 36 2.25% non-compliment 443 27.72% opt-out 99 6.19% other 7 0.43% total 1598 100% the next area of investigation aimed to see whether different age groups would affect the type of compliments. to answer this question, 1598 compliments were collected from four different age groups. as table 4 shows, different age groups also affected the type of compliment strategies among 282 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the participants. younger participants (the under-18 group) used noncompliment and explicit strategies the most, accounting for 35.76% and 25.69%, respectively. the least frequently used strategies by the participants under 18 were future reference and contrast, making up about 0.50% and 0.75% of the total tokens, respectively. the popularity of non-compliments among younger participants may be due to the fact that they cannot distinguish expression of thanks from expression of compliments or they intentionally use an avoidance strategy. another reason is that they think that using expression of thanks would suffice for these situations and using other strategies would function as ftas. they believe that compliments can be an act of judgment which makes addressees embarrassed, especially if their addressees are different from them in terms of age, gender, or social class. in addition, in the compliment exchanges, explicit unbound semantic formula strategies occurred most frequently among other age groups including the 18-30, the 31-40, and the above-40 groups, accounting for 36.88%, 44.41%, and 33.24%, respectively. the second most frequently used strategy by the 18-30, the 31-40, and the above-40 groups was non-compliment which amounted to 25.24%, 22.08%, and 28.05%, respectively. as discussed earlier, most people prefer to make more direct and positive statements when they give compliments to express more solidarity and politeness. that is why people above 18 used explicit semantic formulas to offer compliments. people under 18 are perhaps less confident and sociable to pay compliments explicitly and prefer to only thank their interlocutors for positive qualities. another reason behind the relative popularity of non-compliments among participants may lie in a fact that the older participants usually employed multiple expressions to compliment when the situation calls for compliments. they first began with expressions of gratitude and went on with direct and positive statements. for example, one participant made use of the following expressions simultaneously to thank his addressee and value his ability in fixing laptop to show politeness and develop solidarity: 5. dastet dard nakone. vaghean mokhet kar mikone. kheily bahooshi. thank you. your brain really works. you are so intelligent. on the other hand, the between18-and-30 participants made use of other (0.49%) and future reference (1.23%) strategies the least. the between-31-and40 participants employed other strategies (0.24%) and contrast (1.45%) the least. finally, the participants who were above 40 years old never used other strategies (0.00%) and used request (1.03%) the least. it is worth recalling that, irrespective of age, such strategies are more likely to act as either face-saving or face-threatening behavior than others such as explicit compliments; therefore, people rarely tend to use them. another reason of low percentage of such strategies may be again related to the way that data were collected. dct questionnaires often ask participants to pay compliments in different situations. therefore, they simply prefer to offer more explicit compliments when questionnaires call for compliments than compliments which are perceived as advice, request, etc. and thus as ftas. for example, such strategies would be employed more if the study, in addition to questionnaires, used other data collection techniques. 283 vahid shahidi pour & gholam reza zarei investigating age–based compliments in persian table 4. distribution of compliments across age groups compliment strategy frequency percentage -18 18-30 31-40 +40 -18 18-30 31-40 +40 explicit 102 149 183 128 25.69% 36.88% 44.41% 33.24% implicit 40 25 15 31 10.07% 6.18% 3.64% 8.05% explanation 11 23 28 29 2.77% 5.69% 6.79% 7.53% information question 37 48 33 30 9.31% 11.88% 8.00% 7.79% future reference 2 5 8 7 .50% 1.23% 1.94% 1.81% contrast 3 6 6 7 .75% 1.48% 1.45% 1.81% advice 10 16 17 14 2.51% 3.96% 4.12% 3.63% request 15 10 7 4 3.77% 2.47% 1.69% 1.03% non-compliment 142 102 91 108 35.76% 25.24% 22.08% 28.05% opt-out 31 18 23 27 7.80% 4.45% 5.58% 7.01% other 4 2 1 0 1.00% 0.49% 0.24% 0.00% total 397 404 412 385 100% 100% 100% 100% conclusion the present study attempted to investigate compliments in persian, in general, and the effect of age on the distribution of them, in particular. generally, persian native speakers tended to use explicit unbound semantic formula to compliment. however, the participants rarely used 'other' strategies, including offer, prayer, and blame. taking the age of the participants into account, younger participants used noncompliments the most and future reference strategy the least. in addition, the most frequently used strategies by the participants above 18 was explicit unbound semantic formula ones. at the same time, the between-18-and-30 and the between-31-and-40 groups hardly ever employed 'other' strategies and the participants who were above 40 years old never used such strategies. the findings confirmed that language and culture were closely interrelated. they also corroborate those of other studies suggesting that languages differ from one another in terms of speech acts and their linguistic realizations (holmes & brown, 1987; wolfson, 1982). every language speakers' compliments need to be analyzed in their social and cultural contexts. speech events in general, complimenting in particular, are mainly dependent on shared beliefs and values of the speech community coded into communicative patterns, and thus could not be interpreted apart from social and cultural context (halliday, 2003; yousefvand, 2010, 2012). on the whole, the findings have revealed that persian speakers tend to make direct and positive statements when they give compliments. however, the high frequency of non-compliments among persian speakers may be due to the fact that they fail to distinguish the speech act of gratitude from that of compliment giving since the boundaries between them are blurred. hence, the nature and the felicity conditions of compliments should be focused and the difference between compliments and gratitude should be explained. if foreigners are consciously aware of the pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic similarities and differences between their native languages and persian, negative effects of transfer will most probably be avoided. findings can also have some implications for foreigners who particularly wish to interact with persian 284 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee speakers. foreigners should pay attention to different cultural concepts governing compliments in persian. compliments in persian are particularly employed to have a positive effect on interpersonal relations; hence, they need to be handled appropriately for the outcome actually to be positive. iranian people, like many people around the world, seem to be very careful about status, adab or politeness, and abero or face and try to show their statusconsciousness in their interaction. findings of the study can be helpful to the understanding of compliment strategies in persian, especially the parts in which social variables interact with them. the findings may shed light on the pragmatic knowledge of the respondents and the cultural and socio-cultural factors which affect the way people compliment. such results can present valuable insight into the cultural norms which dominate any society. therefore, studying complimenting can enhance our understanding of a people‘s culture, social values, social organization, and the function and meaning of language use in a community (yuan, 2001). also, they can be helpful for those teachers whose students are psl/ pfl learners. teachers can use the results of the study in their syllabi to teach them the socio-linguistic differences existing between persian and their students' languages. furthermore, the findings may also provide materials developers of second languages with insight into effective ways to promote sociolinguistic competence in second language learners (billmyer, 1990). speech acts and other pragmatic features of language should be high on the agenda. both teachers and material developers are strongly recommended to pay more attention to this aspect of language. as any similar study, this study had some limitations. the main limitations of the study were its number of participants, variation of participants, and data collection method. there were only 200 male and female participants from different age groups. it also used only a dct to collect data. so, further research can be conducted on a larger scale and with a variety of participants from different social variables, for example occupations or educational levels, and with a variety of compliment topics, and should also make use of various tools for collecting data, for example recording spontaneous speech, since data elicited through a dct will be different from those elicited through other techniques. last but not least, all the situations in the dct mainly concerned the interaction between two friends. further research can also consider other contextual variables such as power, gender, and familiarity. references aston, g. 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(2002). compliments and compliment responses in kunming chinese. pragmatics, 12(2), 183-226. 287 vahid shahidi pour & gholam reza zarei investigating age–based compliments in persian 288 taj mohammad phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners taj mohammad department of english, najran university, k.s.a. e-mail: tajmohd09@gmail.com apa citation: mohammad, t. (2015). phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners. english review, 4(1), 54-65 received: 02-02-2015 accepted: 04-07-2015 published: 01-12-2015 abstract: arab learners' mother tongue influence on target language (english) is a very usual and well-known phenomenon in schools and universities. the present study attempts to find and analyze phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners. the study aims to critically analyze students’ writing samples and focus on the problems like capitalization, punctuation, language use and spelling. it critically diagnoses teachers’ perception on the above-mentioned writing problems through a personal interview and offers some recommendations based on the findings through writing samples and interview responses. to achieve these objectives, researcher analyzes forty writing samples of students from first and second midterm examinations at pyp (preparatory year program), najran university. to the surprise of researcher, writing samples had ridiculous errors. four writing samples are attached to expose errors of students. twenty teachers, especially teaching writing at pyp, najran university, were interviewed in order to investigate the real causes of extremely poor performance of students. teachers, in the interview, denoted various causes for the present condition of students. they admitted that use of mother in the classroom was one of the major causes of the present condition of students. the study offered some recommendations (based on the findings) like elimination of gt method and implementation of clt approach in the classroom. key words: gt method, mother tongue influences, target language introduction arab learners are influenced by mother tongue while studying english language. this problem is more common where english is taught through grammar and translation method. as a result of using gt method, students try to translate every expression in the target language that is almost impossible. it results into various kinds of phonological, morphological and syntactical errors. as ellis (1997) stated that errors reflect gaps in students' competence. it is so because the student does not know what is correct. mistakes reflect occasional lapses in performance or slips of tongue (brown, 2007). a mistake can be self-corrected, but an error cannot. errors are systematic, in the sense that they occur recurrently and not accepted by the learner. hence, only teachers or researchers would trace them, learners would not (gass and selinker, 2008; ellis, 1998). learners commit errors because there are distinctive differences between arabic and english in almost all syntactical, morphological, phonological, lexical, semantic, rhetorical and orthographical aspects (ali, 2007). 54 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee arabic and english do not share the same linguistic properties. one of the most noticeable differences between the two languages is that arabic is written from right to left. english, on the other hand, is written from left to right (sabbah, 2015) it is very difficult to adopt arabic as a linguistic model for transfer of learning. arabic is completely different (phonologically, morphologically and syntactically) from english. according to jie (as cited in james, 2007), transfer is "the carrying-over of learned responses from one type of situation to another.” transfer can be of two types: positive transfer and negative transfer. the positive transfer refers to the process of using rules from l1, which facilitates or has a positive influence on learning l2. this transfer is mostly due to similarities between l1 and l2. in contrast, negative transfer is the transfer of rules from l1, which impedes or has harmful influence on the command of rules of l2. this is due to differences between l1 and l2. (sabbah s.s., 2015) because of these linguistic variances, use of gt method often leads to negative transfer. using mother tongue in the classroom is not a fruitful idea. moreover, it also inspires students rely more on their mother tongue, arabic than the target language. despite rigorous attempts, students are not able even to write a paragraph in the target language, english. most of their errors in target language denote to capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar etc. for the ease of analysis and interpretation of data, this study is divided into four major parts namely capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar. this paper attempts to throw light on some of the commonest errors made by arab learners especially in the four areas. the study thoroughly analyses the writing samples of students and interview teachers with a certain set of questions (based on the major issues of students) to inquire the real causes of errors. literature concerning elt in general is available in a large number, but pragmatic researches conducted on writing are comparatively very few. some of the researchers have accomplished their research work on identifying the problems of the arab efl learners in four language skills like o’malley. however, arab learners of english encounter problems in both speaking and writing. this fact has been clearly stated by haq (1982). for example, yemeni students learn english in their country where native language is arabic. a range of overflowing psycholinguistic theories has long mystified foreign language teachers. many problems dealing with arab students have been identified in their course of studying english language. for example, the work of haq (1982) concluded that most arab students usually face problems in writing skills. another study conducted by zughoul (1984) confirmed the findings of haq(1982) and revealed that most jordanian students enrolled in efl classes have poor oral communication skills, as they usually commit gross lexical errors. they lack proper knowledge of syntax and spelling rules. they also have difficulty in expressing themselves. most of the studies conducted by mukattash (1983), suleiman (1983), and ibrahim (1983) noted that arab students’ problems in learning english denote to deficiency in english language curricula, alarming teaching methodology and psycholinguistic theories and problems with proper language environments etc. diab (1996) investigated the interference of arabic in english writings 55 taj mohammad phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners of lebanese students. the results showed that the transfer of arabic linguistic structures influenced english writings of lebanese students on the grammatical, lexical, semantic and syntactic levels. in his study, al-shuaibi (2009) focuses on the phonology of phono tactics, and he finds that learners have difficulty in pronouncing english initial consonant clusters having three members and final consonant clusters of three and four members. he showed some processes involved in the pronunciation of these clusters, namelyreduction, substitution and deletion. kharma & hajjaj (1989) tried to investigate the problems that arab students of english encounter at the initial stages and showed four major areas of difficulty. first, they found that arab learners confuse certain pairs of consonant sounds. second, learners insert a short vowel to break down the long consonant clusters. third, certain diphthongs are replaced by other sounds due to l1 interference. last, arab learners are generally confused with the distinction between certain pairs of vowels. the belief that l2 should be developed with no reference to l1 is known as language compartmentalization and the reasoning behind this belief is to avoid l1 interference (i.e. errors result from l1 negative transfer) (cook, 2001). macdonald's advice to teachers is "if you get stuck in the middle of a lesson, try to communicate your message by some other means, such as mime or demonstration" (macdonald, 1993, p. 23). however, there are researches, which support use of l1 in the classroom. for example, willis and willis (2007) consider that l1 cannot be avoided in l2 classrooms since it can bring some benefits to the classroom, especially with beginners. for instance, some teachers have found that learners who did a task in l1 before doing it in l2 showed good progress in l2; moreover, their overall use of l1 decreased. a similar view is held by harbord (1992). he considers l1 a natural communication tool between teachers and students, as in giving class instructions, but he stands firmly against using l1 for explaining grammar. butzkamm (2003) supports the previous reasons for employing l1 and adds that l1 promotes learners’ dependence on l2. the advice being "use as much of the target language as possible, and ensure that use of first language supports the children's language learning" (cameron, 2001: 199). while reviewing the above research works, it has been observed that most of the researchers have identified problems of arab efl learners, but very few have given the remedial measures and solutions for these problems. this study specifically focuses on the pragmatic problems of the four major areas of capitalization, punctuation, language use (grammar) and spelling in writing among the students of writing skills courses at preparatory year program, najran university. the present research attempts to suggest techniques, methods and elucidation to improve the major problems faced by arab saudi learners in general and najran university in particular. this study also attempts to provide some practical remedies and suggestions for the above mentioned problems. method fifty students were randomly selected for this study from different writing sections. their first and second 56 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee midterm examination scripts were selected in order to analyze the writing problems. the teachers, especially teaching writing, were contacted with the samples of writing and interviewed on the causes of errors, which students usually commit. teachers explained the reasons of students' errors in writing. students’ fifty writing samples from first and second midterm tests were selected randomly. four of them are presented for this study to examine and to offer the suggestions and relevant remedies to improve the teaching writing instructions and/or to develop the writing skills among learners. during the interview, teachers elaborated the reasons of students' poor performance in writing classes. results & discussion capitalization writing sample 1 there were many samples that the researcher studied though only four of them are presented here with analysis. the researcher has presented a general analysis of the rest of the samples which were not feasible to be pasted here. as shown in writing sample-1, most of the students were confused with capitalization. the student writes pronoun ‘my’ with a capital letter in the middle of the first sentence of the paragraph. in the same sentence he writes ‘shop’ where last letter of the word ‘shop’ is capitalized. in the second sentence, he writes the common nouns: ‘some’ and ‘person’ with a capital letter in the middle of a sentence. in the third sentence, he writes verb ‘sail’, pronoun ‘your’ and adjective ‘pity’ with a capital letter. they did not know that a new sentence must begin with a capital letter. in sentence 5, he again writes verb ‘sail’ with a capital letter. in sentence 6, he misspells the noun ‘peope’ for people and writes ‘p’ in capital letter. in the same sentence, he writes the noun ‘service’ with a capital letter. then again in sentence 7, he writes ‘sail’ with a capital letter. in sentence 8, he writes ‘some’ and ‘service’ with a capital letter. 57 taj mohammad phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners again in sentence 9, he writes ‘sail’ with a capital letter. in the last sentence, the student again writes ‘some’ with a capital letter. in the same sentence, he writes ‘people’ with capital ‘p’. it shows they are confused while capitalizing the letters. they are unaware of the rule that proper noun is to be written with a capital letter and common noun needs not be capitalized. sometimes, students use verb with a capital letter like sail. it is because of the influence of their mother tongue, they try to translate each and everything including capitalization and spelling too. there is no capital letter in arabic. in arabic, sentences do not start with capital letter. as influenced by mother tongue, they do not write proper noun and personal pronouns with capital letters. for example, هو means ‘he’. they write ‘he’ with small letter, no matter middle or start. the same is the case even with proper noun for example, they get confused with al that .السعودية means 'the'. they write in english it with ‘the saudi arabia’. it happens so because they confuse al with definite article ‘the’. students do not capitalize proper nouns. punctuation writing sample 2 as shown in writing sample-2, at the end of sentence 2, no (.) is used. sentence 3 is confusing. at the end of sentence 4, no (.) is used. in sentence 5, commas are not used at their proper places. at the end of sentence 6, no full stop is used. at the end of sentence 7, no full stop is used. sentence 8 is obscure and commas are not used at proper places. punctuation is found in arabic, but it is a little bit different from english. there is full stop (.) in arabic. for example, he reads a book. هو يقرا الكحاب. this is the reason that most of the students do not make mistakes in (.). comma (,) is there but its position in arabic is different from english. for example, ‘he reads book, magazines, newspapers etc’. .هو يقرا الكحاب،المجالت،الجرائد 58 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee colon (:) has the same position in arabic too. that is why students do not make mistakes in this area. for example, 1:09مه الساعة semicolon (;) is the same in arabic. so students hardly make mistakes in semicolon. question mark (?) is also the same in arabic. for example, ماذا جريد؟ inverted commas are also put at the same place in arabic. for example, ".اريد ان اذاكر الدرس"قال عادل another problem is that arabic is written from right to left but english is vice versa. students are organized to write from right to left. therefore, there are organizational differences between arabic and english which result into serious mistakes so often. language use writing sample 3 as shown in writing sample-3, student misspelled the verb ‘travilled’. in sentence 2, student was not able to write pronoun ‘we’ and preposition ‘in’ properly. in sentence 3, helping verb was not used. in sentence 4, no verb is used. sentence 5 is obscure. in sentence 6 again, helping verb is not used. in sentence 7, no verb is used. in sentence 8, proper form of verb ‘go’ is not used. in sentence 9, no verb is used. in sentence 10, no verb is used. in sentence 11, no proper form of verb according to tense is used. in the last sentence 12, no subject is used. the form of verb ‘go’ is also misused. the major problem that students face is that there is no helping verb in arabic. that is why students hardly use any helping verb in their sentences. for example, they commonly make mistakes in continuous tense, perfect tense, passive voice etc. there is no present perfect tense in arabic. therefore, students are more prone to commit these sorts of mistakes. another important aspect is that students are always confused with singular and plural. they treat plural of english as singular. for example, ‘the boys was in class’. in english, there is no masculine and feminine when demonstrative pronouns are used. for example, ‘this is a cat’. here you don't know if the cat is (he or she. ) هذه )ام ( هذا قط)ال تعرف هو يقصد .(قطة 59 taj mohammad phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners in arabic, one can change from masculine to feminine or vice versa by changing one letter in the word. (هى تكتب -هو يكتب ) normally sentences start with a يقرا الدرس verb in arabic. the sentence structure in arabic is verb+sub+object. for example, ‘yaqra aldas’ means ‘he reads the lesson’. verb changes according to doer. it is different with ‘he’ or ‘she’. they are called verbal clause. (jumla failiya) يقرا الدرس جقرا الدرس jumla ismiya (noun clause) starts with subject, for example, adil plays football.عادل يلعة الكرة. here the structure is subject +verb+ object. there are two ways of writing a sentence; verbal or noun clause. usually, sentence starts with verb. if name of the doer is given, it can start either way. for example, adil plays football. (يلعة عادل الكرة) while in standard arabic it is like عادل يلعة الكرة there is no auxiliary verb in arabic. for example, adil is playing football. ( االوعادل يلعة الكرة) here adverb decides the tense that denotes continuous but there is no auxiliary verb. these kinds of structures confuse the learners. students influenced by their mother tongue are likely to commit mistakes with these kinds of structures. arabic has model verbs too like ‘will’. for example ( كرةعادل سوف يلعة ال ) adil will play football. ‘sawf+verb’ ( سوف will play’. ‘may’ in arabic is called‘ ( يلعة he may play‘ هو رتما يلعة الكرة (رتما) football’. ‘must’ in arabic is called.يجة for example,يجة ان اذاكر الدرس means ‘he must study the lesson’. like english, in arabic too, model comes before the verb. that is why students do not make mistakes regarding models in english. arabic doesn’t have present perfect, past perfect, present perfect continuous and past perfect continuous. it has only indefinite and continuous which are written with a little difference in arabic. for example, .adil plays football يلعة عادل الكرة (present indefinite) adil is playing the يلعة عادل الكرة االن football. (present continuous) here are some examples from the past tense too. for example, adil played the football لعة عادل الكرة yesterday. (past indefinite) adil was playing the عادل كان يلعة الكرة football yesterday. (past continuous) kana (كان) is adverb here. here, for auxiliary verb, كان is used and that is adverb of time referring to past. االن(now) is also adverb that denotes to present. so, in arabic, there is no auxiliary verb but adverbs are used in the sense of expressing past or past to denote auxiliary verbs. there is a lot of difference between the sentence structure of arabic and english. that is why students who try to translate each and everything in english commit serious errors. in future tense too, adverbs denote the auxiliary verb expressing the future. for example, يلعة الكرة غدا adil will play عادل سوف football tomorrow. (future indefinite) يلعة الكرة غدا adil will be عادل سوف يكون playing football. (future continuous) is adverbial phrase that سوف يكون denotes ‘will be’. no future perfect or future perfect continuous tenses are there in arabic language. students have difficult time in understanding perfect and perfect continuous tense sentences. as far as articles are concerned, there are definite and indefinite articles in arabic language. for example: الجامعة means ‘the university’ and جامعة 60 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee ‘university’(any university). so it is an indefinite article. but there is no ‘a’ and ‘an’. because of a very common use of ‘al’ in arabic, students often use ‘the’ even if there is no need of definite article in english structure. prepositions are also found in arabic. for example, the book is on the table.الكحاب على المىضدة .here على means on. ‘under’ is denoted by جحث for example, الكحاب جحث المىضدة 'the book is under the table’. ‘in’ means ,for example الىto’ is denoted by‘ . فى . ذاهة الى المدرسةاوا students, usually, do not make mistakes in prepositions because there is a wide use of prepositions in arabic. spelling writing sample 4 as shown in writing sample-4, most of the students have problems in spelling. in sentence 1 of the paragraph, students misspelled the noun ‘friends’. in the second sentence, he misspelled the verb ‘flwe’ and noun ‘ciro’. in the third sentence he misspelled adverb of number ‘tow’. in sentence 4, he misspelled the verb ‘stud’ and ‘ciro’ in the same sentence. in sentence 5, he misspelled the noun ‘cinme’. in sentence 7, he misspelled the verbs ‘visted’, ‘stdy’ and noun ‘frind’. in sentence 9 he repeated the same mistake ‘visted’. in sentence 11, he misspelled the verb ‘enjoed’. students commit serious mistakes in spelling as shown above. spelling is very much influenced by phonetic transcription. students listen to an english word and then try to spell it as they listen to it. for example, there is no p sound in arabic. they write b for p. they write ‘pepsi’ as ‘bebsi’. p can be pronounced only in cluster sounds like ‘th’ and ‘za. that is why most of the spelling mistakes are due to phonic transcription. english words are complex in writing and pronunciation as well. for example, international if written according to pronunciation will be intarnashonal. in arabic, there are fixed rules of writing 61 taj mohammad phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners coping with pronunciation without any difference. one problem with english consonants is the distinction between the voiceless post alveolar fricative and the voiceless post alveolar affricate, namely ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ respectively. since standard arabic does not treat the distinction as phonemic, arab english learners confuse ‘catsh’ for ‘catch’. equally confusing to arab speakers of english is the distinction between vowels. since arabic has only long and short versions of three vowel phonemes, the distinction between e, i, ee, y, and ai as in ‘turkee’, ‘italya’, and ‘palestain’ is extremely challenging to arabs who tend to mispronounce and consequently misspell words with these vowels. a similar peculiarity of each is the spelling of the /f/ sound. is it spelt as ‘f’, ‘ph’, or ‘gh’? arab learners struggle with the spelling of this sound and the phonemic voicing contrast between /f/ and /v/ since the voiced version is not a phoneme in arabic; hence, these spelling errors0 ‘selfestor stalon’ for ‘silvester stallone’ are very common. analysis and discussion on interview another method used to collect the data was interview method. twenty samples were selected out of 30 which were filled in with complete information. the participants responded to the following questions in the interview: 1. some major causes for poor performance in capitalization: 2. some major causes for poor performance in punctuation: 3. some major causes for poor performance in language use: 4. some major causes for poor performance in spelling: table-1: results and discussion on interview question no. 1 q.1. number of participants some major causes for poor performance in capitalization: 5 students lacked motivation. impractical writing activities. 6 most of the students had poor background in writing. students were reticent to write in target language. limited vocabulary. 5 writing exercises were not as practical as they should be. students were not exposed to writing at an early stage. 4 most of the students were unable to understand what is proper noun and how to capitalize it students faced difficulties in understanding how to start a new sentence students didn’t distinguish among nouns, verbs, pronouns etc. as shown in table 1, in response to question number 1, most of teachers admitted that students had a poor background in writing because there was not much emphasis on writing in their schools. they hesitate to write in target language. they also have limited vocabulary. all these factors often lead students to commit grave mistakes. table-2: results and discussion on interview question no. 2 q.2 number of participants some major causes for poor performance in punctuation: 5 students did not get an opportunity to practice punctuation in the classroom students didn’t pay much attention on punctuation 62 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in early schools, students didn’t have much exposure to punctuation 8 students compare punctuation with arabic, their mother tongue students were taught through gt method in their earlier classes that influenced their learning of punctuation 7 some students do not know english at all and teachers do not know arabic at all. it often results into lack of communication. sometimes students do not understand the technicality of punctuation because they cannot understand english teachers as their english is too poor as shown in table 2, in response to question number 2, there were some common difficulties faced by the students. teachers admitted that students compare english punctuation with arabic one as mother tongue influenced their writing practice. some bilingual teachers also used gt method in classes, which caused the problem to its severity. arabic had a great influence on them while writing english language. because of the bilingual approach, students often commit serious mistakes. table-3: results and discussion on interview question no. 3 q.3. number of participants some major causes for poor performance in language use: 05 students are often confused with tenses 15 gt method is a big obstacle because arabic and english are two completely different languages on the basis of structure and grammar as shown in table 3, in response to question number 3, 5 teachers completely agreed that the students were confused with tenses. the rest of fifteen teachers accepted that bilingual method of teaching is a big problem. they translated each and everything from arabic to english and vice versa. translation practices often lead to serious mistakes in target language. table-4: results and discussion on interview question no. 4 q.4 number of participants some major causes for poor performance in spelling: 6 students have no knowledge of english phonetics. they cannot speak certain sounds like 'p' and 't'. it often leads to spelling errors. textbook does not have enough space to practice the spelling of words 5 spelling games are not provided in the textbook 5 students are not motivated to improve their spelling 4 in early classes, students were not exposed to rigorous practice of spelling as shown in table 4, in response to question number 4, there were some common causes of poor performance of students in spelling. the most common causes were no knowledge of phonetics, confusing sounds, textbook lacking activities to improve spelling. writing is only considered as a part of formal courses. sometimes it is boring for students. as they do not enjoy writing, they hardly pay attention to spelling. 63 taj mohammad phonological, morphological and syntactical influences of mother tongue on arab learners their only aim is to get pass marks in the examination. conclusion the analysis of students' ability to capitalize sentences shows they are confused while capitalizing the letters (see writing sample-1). arabic language does not capitalize starting of a sentence, proper noun etc. students' dependence on mother tongue often results into negative transfer and sample one is a good representation of it. therefore, it is recommended that use of mother tongue should be completely banned not only in the university but also in schools. punctuation is found in arabic, but it is a little bit different from english. students, as influenced by arabic punctuation, often commit errors in punctuation (see writing sample-2). these errors also attribute to excess use of mother tongue in the classroom. therefore, punctuation can be improved with the help of practice exercises. teachers can also assess progress of students by conducting quizzes and class tests from time to time. the analysis of students’ ability to use language and grammar shows that they have many problems in expressing ideas even if they are given controlled writing paragraph (see writing sample3). as interview with teachers demonstrate that gt method is a major cause of these errors. students should be discouraged to think in arabic and then translate into english. teachers can use direct method or communicative language teaching approach as it is the best solution to tackle this problem. in case of spelling, the analysis of writing samples shows that there are many errors (see writing sample-4). for example, students are usually confused with ‘p’ and ‘b’ as ‘p’ sound is not found in arabic alphabet. teachers also accepted it one of the major causes of spelling mistakes during the interview. this confusion, as teachers opined, often leads to spelling errors. cook (1999) suggests that the most common spelling errors are related to pronunciation and this is shown through substituted vowels and phonological mistakes. bebout (1985) is of the opinion that foreign speakers’ mispronunciation of english is a recognized cause of spelling errors. these kinds of spelling problems which arabic speakers have are discussed in more details in swan & smith (1987) and kharma & hajjaj (1989). the former, for example, highlights problems arabic learners of english have with the ‘mirror’ shaped letters(e.g. p and q) and comment on the difficulties which stem from the fact that arabic is written from right to left (thus learners may write crwon rather than crown). this reveals that either students are not aware of these sorts of mistakes or their attention is never invited to it. this can be attributed to the lack of background knowledge of the students in foreign language. students should be exposed to phonetics. teachers must practice phonemic transcription in the class to avoid spelling errors. references haq, a. f. (1982). an analysis of syntactic errors in the composition of jordanian secondary students" unpublished ma thesis. yarmouk: yarmouk university. ali, n. (2007). some linguistic problems facing arab learners of english. adab alrafidayn. (48), pp 1-14, retrieved from http://www.iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&ai d=33586 bebout, l. j. (1985). an error analysis of misspellings made by learners of english as a first and as a second language. journal of psycholinguistic research 14, 569-593 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01067386 brown, d. (2007). principles of language learning and teaching (fifth edition). london: pearson longman. 64 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01067386 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 1, december 2015 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee butzkamm, w. (2003). we only learn language once: the role of the mother tongue in efl classrooms: death of a dogma. language learning journal, 28, 29-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0957173038520 0181 cameron, l., 2001. teaching languages to young learners. cambridge: cambridge university press.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780 511733109 cook, v. j. (1999). teaching spelling. retrieved may 17, 2015 from http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~vcook/ obs2o.htm cook, v. (2001). using the first language in the classroom. canadian modern language review, 57(3), 402-423 http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.57.3.402 diab, n. (1996) the transfer of arabic in the english writings of lebanese students. esp 18(1) 71-83. ellis, r. (1997). second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. gass, s., and selinker, l. (2008). second language acquisition: an introductory course, mahwah, nj: lea, chapter 3.2. retrieved on oct 23, 2015 from http://ecaths1.s3.amazonaws.com/soleda dpampilloadquisicion/1865601592.second language-acquisition.pdf harbord, j. (1992). the use of the mother tongue in the classroom. elt journal, 46(4), 350355. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/elt/46.4.350 ibrahim m (1983). the role of english departments in arab universities, in dihayat and ibrahim (eds.), papers from the first conference on the problems of teaching english language and literature at arab universities, university of jordan, amman-jordan. jie, x. (2008). error theories and second language acquisition [electronic version]. us-china foreign language, 6(1), 35-42. kharma, n. & hajjaj. (1989). errors in english among arabic speakers: analysis and remedy. london: longman macdonald, c. (1993). using the target language. cheltenham: mary glasgow. ministry of education (1974). the educational policy in the saudi arabian kingdom. 2nd ed. riyadh: ministry of education. mukattash, l. (1983). the problem of difficulty in foreign language learning. in dahiyat, e./ibrahim, m. (eds.) papers from the first conference on the problems of teaching english language and literature at arab universities. amman: university of jordan. o'malley, j. and chamot, a. (1990). learning strategies in second language acquisition. cambridge: cambridge university press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo978113952 4490 sabbah, s. s. (2015). negative transfer: arabic language interference to learning english. arab world english journal, 6(4), 269–288. suleiman, s. (1983), teaching english to arab students at the university level. in dihayat and ibrahim (eds.), papers from the first conference on the problems of teaching english language and literature at arab universities. amman: university of jordan. swan, m. & smith, b. (eds.) (1987). learner english: a teacher's guide to interference and other problems. new york: cambridge university press. wallace, m. j. (1998). action research for language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. willis, d. and willis, j. (2007). doing task-based teaching. oxford: oxford university press. zughoul, m. (1984). the linguistic attitudes of arab university students: factorial structure and intervening variables (in arabic). j. the jordanian academy of arabic, 25-26, 148-200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1984.50.155 65 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571730385200181 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571730385200181 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511733109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511733109 http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~vcook/obs2o.htm http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~vcook/obs2o.htm http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.57.3.402 http://ecaths1.s3.amazonaws.com/soledadpampilloadquisicion/1865601592.secondlanguage-acquisition.pdf http://ecaths1.s3.amazonaws.com/soledadpampilloadquisicion/1865601592.secondlanguage-acquisition.pdf http://ecaths1.s3.amazonaws.com/soledadpampilloadquisicion/1865601592.secondlanguage-acquisition.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/elt/46.4.350 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139524490 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139524490 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students wawa puja prabawa stkip pasundan cimahi, indonesia email: wawapuja@gmail.com apa citation: prabawa, w. p. (2016). speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students. english review, 4(2), 231-242 received: 17-02-2016 accepted: 28-03-2016 published: 01-06-2016 abstract: speaking is considered to be difficult thing, moreover english as a foreign language. students' performance depends on their personalities. students who have low participation in speaking activity in the classroom lose their opportunity to practice their speaking skill which may cause poor speaking skill and achievement. however, some of students are active in speaking activity in the classroom that leads them to have good skill and achievement in speaking. this study attempts to reveal: (1) speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students in terms of speaking english and strategies to improve their speaking ability, and (2) to identify speaking strategies mostly used by the students when they speak english and improve their speaking ability. this study is a descriptive research since its purpose is to describe the indonesian tertiary students’ learning strategies in learning speaking english. the data from 15 tertiary students, who have good performance and achievement in speaking, from one of schools of higher education in cimahi were collected using a 21 items questionnaire of a modified version of strategy inventory language learning (sill) and 5 items interview questions. the result of the study revealed that some speaking strategies are used in terms of speaking english and improve speaking ability, namely cognitive, metacognitive and compensation strategy. in the type of speaking strategy that mostly used by the student in terms of speaking english is compensation strategy, while cognitive strategy was indicated as the mostly speaking strategies used by the indonesian tertiary students in improving their speaking ability. considering to the study conducted, it is recommended to students that they should know what strategies that appropriate and can help them in learning speaking english. the students should be able to choose strategies they need in learning and analyze which strategies that give better effect on their own learning. keywords: speaking, strategy, speaking strategy, tertiary students introduction people usually learn english because for some reasons, in some ways, they want to be able to communicate in english (edge, 1993, p. 17). furthermore, he points out that people are motivated to learn english as the language of international language (p. 18). in indonesia, english becomes one of the important subjects to be mastered by students at school, start from kindergarten up to university students. language means something spoken. people usually speak or share their opinion with one another by using it. by mastering speaking, they can carry out conversation with others, give ideas and change the information with interlocutors (fajariyah, 2009, p. 14). it means that speaking has a role in the language skill. 231 wawa puja prabawa speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students speaking is an activity used by someone to communicate with other(s). it takes place everywhere and has become part of our daily activities. when someone speaks, he or she interacts and uses the language to express his or her ideas, feeling and thought. he or she also shares information with other(s) through communication. speaking is one of the main purposes of language learning in that it is an ability to transfer some ideas to other people clearly and correctly. in other words, people can communicate their ideas well to other people (argawati, 2014, p. 76). communication is important. people need to talk each other, share their ideas, feeling their expressions and thoughts, and they need to understand each other. that becomes the reason why people need to speak. among the four language skills, learners consider speaking as the most difficult one since it needs great courage as well as preparation to produce the language. their personalities play a large role in determining how quickly and how correctly they will accomplish this skill. those who are risk-takers unafraid of making mistakes will generally be more talkative, but they do not realize with the errors they make. meanwhile, the conservative, shy students may take a long time to speak confidently, but when they do, they will make fewer errors and be proud of their english ability. learners will think about which one is better, to talk much with many errors or to think more with better result. it can be answered when the aims of speaking is clearly stated, that is to build meaningful communication. in this case, to encourage learners to talk as much as possible to convey the messages of communication is more important rather than to let them think about grammar rules they use (malihah, 2010, p. 86). in addition, malihah (2010, p. 87) suggests that there is a phenomenon today that students are sometimes not motivated to talk because they are lack involvement in the topic. besides, many students have to overcome psychological constraints before they are prepared to speak in the foreign language. some students feel uneasy when they have to speak in the classroom situation because there is always an audience. a few prefer not to speak at all and deny opportunities for practice. they feel so anxious in practicing their speaking skill in foreign language. for instance, some students have low participation in speaking activity in the classroom. it means that they lose their opportunity to practice their speaking skill which may cause poor speaking skill (rahmadeni, amri, and adnan, 2013, p. 413). it is a common thing facing difficulties in learning speaking english. the most important thing is how the students deal with such problem. cohen (1998, p. 66) in rahmadeni, amri and adnan (2013, p. 413) states that language learning will be easier if the students become more aware of possible strategies that can be selected during learning and using language. he also believes that the students' language skill can be improved by themselves when they become more aware of what helps them to learn the language they are studying most efficiently. every student has their own learning strategies in studying english. it can be seen from the successful students rather than method or techniques of teaching. after observing and teaching some students in one of schools of higher education in cimahi majoring in english education study program, some of them have low participation in speaking activity in the classroom. on one hand, the students' less participation 232 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in the classroom caused the students' low achievement in speaking. on the other hand, some of the students were active in speaking activity in the classroom. they also have good achievement in speaking. understanding speaking depends on the students in learning speaking. considering to the issue, the major purposes of this study are: 1) to investigate speaking strategies used by the indonesian efl tertiary students in terms of they speak english and improve their speaking ability, and 2) to identify the mostly speaking strategies used by the students in terms of speaking english and improve their speaking ability. listening to english songs, watching english movie, practicing with friends, and many more are some strategies that can be used by the students to make their speaking becomes more fluent. some strategies can be chosen by the students based on their needs. the students' intention use the strategies in learning is to help them in learning process, especially in speaking. o'malley (1990, p. 188) explains good learners are aware of the learning process and themselves as learners, seek to control their own learning through the use of appropriate learning strategy. styles are general characteristics that differentiate one individual from another and learning strategies are the special achieve or behaviours that individual use to help them comprehended, learn or retain new information. some experts have been tried to define learning strategies. wahyuni (2013, p. 4) provides some definitions from them that there is no consensus about the definition of learning strategies. researchers (for example brown, 2000; cohen, 1990; green and oxford, 1995; griffiths, 2008; o’malley and chamot, 1990; oxford, 1990; rubin, 1975; stern, 1992; wenden and rubin, 1987) define language learning strategies in slightly different ways, causing a debate about whether they are physical or mental, conscious or subconscious, and problem-or goal-triggered. o'malley (1985, p.23) provides broad definition of language learning strategies as “any set of operations or steps used by a learner that will facilitate the acquisition, storage, retrieval or use of information.” griffiths (2008) defines learning strategies as "activities consciously chosen by learners for the purpose of regulating their own language learning (p.87)." besides, nunan (1999, p. 171) defines "learning strategies are the mental and communicative procedures learners use in order to learn and use language." however, to provide a working definition for this study, i have adopted oxford's definition. oxford (1990, p. 1) defines learning strategies as step used by the students to improve their own learning. furthermore, she attempts to classify learning strategies into six groups: memory strategies (which relate to how students remember language), cognitive strategies (which relate to how students think about their learning), compensation strategies (which enable students to make up for limited knowledge), metacognitive strategies (relating to how students manage their own learning), affective strategies (relating to students’ feelings) and social strategies (which involve learning by interaction with others). this theory becomes the theoretical base of the study. in the area of speaking skill, some studies use theories of learning strategies as their theoretical bases. lopez (2011) for example, showed her result that students tend to select strategies according to their level of language proficiency. in indonesian context, 233 wawa puja prabawa speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students rahmadeni, amri & adnan (2013) reported on their study that students prefer to use metacognitive strategies as their strategy preferences in speaking english. besides, mistar and umamah (2014) found that gender provided significant effects on the intensity of use of six types of strategies of learning skill with female learners reporting higher intensity of use. a further analysis found that four strategy types—interactionalmaintenance, self-improvement, compensation, and memory strategies-greatly contribute to the speaking proficiency. in addition, wahyuni (2013) reported that the correlation between overall speaking strategy use and speaking proficiency is not significant, though positive. however, the effect of gender on strategy preference is found significant on affective strategies. whereas, moriam (2005) who investigated japanese and bangladeshi university students, found that bangladeshi employ cognitive and interpersonal strategies more than japanese, and that gender difference of both groups provides insignificant effect of the use of speaking strategies, except that cognitive strategies used by japanese females are found to be higher than those by the male. meanwhile, larenas (2011), investigated speaking strategies used by eight and twelfth graders, found that 8th graders claim to have broader knowledge of speaking strategies than 12th year secondary students, and the knowledge of speaking strategies of elementary and secondary school students does not vary depending on the type of school: public, semi-public and/or private. based on the explanation above, the present study was conducted in order to see kinds of learning strategies used by the students of english education study program in one of school of higher education in cimahi. this study analyzed the learning strategies used by the students in learning speaking english. the study covers only on speaking strategies used by the english education study program students in terms of at the time they speak english and improve their speaking ability. the subject of the study is limited to the students who have high proficiency in speaking and it is proven by their scores who always get a in speaking course. a number of studies have been conducted in the area of language learning strategies (lls) in particular of speaking strategies. to fill this gap, this study intends to explore speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students. therefore, the present study seeks answers to the following questions: 1. what kinds of speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students in terms of they speak english and improve their speaking ability? 2. what kinds of speaking strategies mostly used by indonesian tertiary students in terms of they speak english and improve their speaking ability? by knowing the students' learning strategies, especially in speaking strategies, it is expected that this research will give valuable contribution for the teacher to find teaching strategies that are suitable to the students' learning strategies. it can also increase students’ knowledge about learning strategies in speaking. moreover, it can be adopted by students who want to improve their speaking ability in learning speaking english. it is expected that students can speak more effectively after applying those kinds of strategies. furthermore, it gives 234 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee additional information to students to find the most suitable strategy to improve their speaking skill. to avoid misconception and misunderstanding, several terms are clarified. those are: 1. speaking is an act to express idea, feelings, and thought orally. it is also called oral communication. it is an act that is done naturally by people in their life. they have a freedom to express what they want to say. to communicate becomes the main goal of speaking. 2. strategies are specific actions, behaviours, steps or techniques that students (often intentionally) use to improve their progress in developing l2 skills. these strategies can facilitate the internalization, storage, retrieval or use of the new language. strategies are tools for the self-directed involvement necessary for developing communicative ability (oxford, 1992, p. 15). 3. tertiary means education after secondary level. primary and secondary level are compulsory (in most countries) whereas tertiary is not. tertiary means any form of higher education, e.g. college, university. thus, tertiary students refer to students who take higher education in college or university. over the past decade, the effort to explore the relationship of the use of language learning strategies with other variables such as motivation, gender, cultural background, type of task, age, level of l2 and learning style has been given tremendous importance (oxford, 1993) in moriam (2005, p. 48). there are some learning strategies that can be applied by the students in learning. oxford (1990) proposes two major groups of learning strategies: direct strategies and indirect strategies. direct strategies consist of memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and compensation strategies. meanwhile, indirect strategies are classified into metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social strategies. based on the two groups of learning strategies, there are some learning strategies for learning speaking. they can be seen in the following table 1. table 1. language learning strategies for speaking classified by oxford (1990) groups of strategies types of learning strategies learning strategies for speaking direct strategies memory strategies a. creating mental linkages (placing new words into a context) b. applying images and sounds (representing sounds) c. reviewing well (structured reviewing) d. employing action (using memory strategies for retrieval is memory strategies under using mechanical techniques) cognitive strategies a. practicing (repetition, formally practicing with sounds and writing systems, recognizing and using formulas and patterns, recombining, practicing naturalistically) b. receiving and sending messages (using resources for receiving and sending messages) c. analyzing and reasoning (reasoning deductively, translating, transferring) compensation strategies a. switching to the mother tongue (using the mother tongue for an expression without translating it) b. getting help (asking someone for help in a conversation by hesitating or explicitly asking for the missing expression) 235 wawa puja prabawa speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students c. using mime or gesture d. avoiding communication partially or totally e. selecting the topic f. adjusting or approximating the message g. coining words h. using a circumlocution or synonym indirect strategies metacognitive strategies a. centering the learning (overviewing and linking already known material, attention involves directed attention and selected attention, delaying speech production to focus listening) b. arranging and planning the learning (finding out about language learning, organizing, setting goals and objectives, identifying the purpose of a language task, planning for a language task, seeking practice opportunity) c. evaluating the learning (self-monitoring, self-evaluating) affective strategies a. lowering your anxiety b. encouraging yourself c. taking your emotional temperature d. rewarding oneself for good performance e. using deep breathing or positive self-talk social strategies a. asking questions to get verification b. asking for clarification c. asking for help in doing a language task d. cooperating with others, talking with a native-speaking conversation partner e. empathizing with others, exploring cultural and social norms these strategies can be specified as follows: 1) memory strategies for remembering and retrieving new information. 2) cognitive strategies for understanding and producing the language. 3) compensation strategies for using the language despite lack of knowledge. 4) metacognitive strategies for coordinating the learning process. 5) affective strategies for regulating emotions. 6) social strategies for learning with others (oxford, 1990, p. 14-15). furthermore, nakatani (2006) groups speaking strategies into seven different types which are described as follows: • strategy type 1: fluency-oriented strategy; this strategy is seen when students pay attention to aspects like rhythm, intonation, pronunciation and speech clarity in order to improve listeners’ attention. • strategy type 2: negotiation for meaning while speaking; this strategy is related to the speaker’s attempts to negotiate with the listener. to keep and maintain their interaction and avoid breakdowns while communicating, they both modified the message by giving examples and repeating the speech to figure out what they really wanted to say. • strategy type 3: accuracy-oriented strategy; it is associated with the desire to speak english with some accuracy. learners pay attention to the form of their speech and look for grammatical accuracy; therefore, they correct what they are saying by noticing their own mistakes. • strategy type 4: message reduction and alteration strategy; it is closely connected with the reduction and simplification of the message by using similar expressions in order to avoid breakdowns. • strategy type 5: non-verbal strategy while speaking; this strategy is directly linked to the use of body language. learners use eye contact, gestures and 236 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee facial expressions to achieve communication. • strategy type 6: message abandonment strategy; it is associated with the abandonment of the message in esl communication. learners have a tendency to give up their endeavor to communicate when they face difficulties carrying out their message. • strategy type 7: attempt to think in english strategy; this strategy is useful for learners who think in the second language during their speech. learners tend to think in english and avoid thinking in their native language. o’malley and chamot (1990) reveal their study that more effective (higher proficiency students generally use a greater variety of strategies and use them in ways that help the student complete language tasks more successfully; conversely, less effective (low proficiency) students not only have fewer strategies but also frequently use strategies that are inappropriate to the task or that do not lead to successful task completion. a study conducted by gharbavi and mousavi (2012) show that the higher the level the learners are at, the greater the number of strategies they use. kustati (2003), in her research, found that practicing naturally and using circumlocution and synonym are the highest intensity of speaking related language learning strategies (lls) used by the students in speaking. in line with that, liu (2004) revealed his study that students of the chinese technological institute english majors used metacognitive strategies as the most frequently used strategies in speaking. furthermore, volya (2009) reported that the strategies used were speaking with friends, speaking with english teacher, trying to find english speaker, and talking to themselves in english, taking english course, making dialogues, listening english music and watching english movie, those strategies were perceived, believed, regarded, though and considered differently by the students. methods this study was a descriptive research since its purpose was to describe the indonesian tertiary students’ learning strategies in learning speaking english. descriptive research is helpful for examining a variety of educational problems and issue (gay, 2009, p. 275). in this research, the population was students of english education study program of one of schools of higher education in cimahi. meanwhile, the sample of the research was 15 students consisting of students who have high performance in speaking. the research instruments were questionnaire and interview. the questionnaire used in this research was a modified version of strategy inventory for language learning (sill) developed by oxford (1990, 293-300) consisted of 21 items. after administering the questionnaire to the students, interview was conducted to support and gain the data. the results of interview would strengthen the data gained through questionnaire. the interview used openended question to gain information about the speaking strategies used by the students. the data, strategy that has the highest score, was indicated as a strategy mostly used by a student. then, the results were analyzed by using simple scaling percentage to see the strategy which was mostly used by all the students. the percentage formula is as follow: 237 wawa puja prabawa speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students f p = x 100% n where: p : percentage f : frequency of answer (total respondents who answer an item) n : total respondents after classifying, the data was interpreted to get general conclusion. the strategy that has the highest score was indicated as a strategy mostly used by the students. results and discussion question 1: what kinds of speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students in terms of they speak english and improve their speaking ability? the following table are the percentage for questionnaire results. and it is supported by the interview result. table 2. average percentage of speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students types of strategies frequency percentage in terms of speaking english compensation strategy 14 93.33 % metacognitive strategy 1 6.67 % improving speaking ability cognitive strategy 13 86.67 % metacognitive strategy 2 13.33 % a. in terms of speaking english from the table 2 above, it is shown that in terms of speaking english, there were two strategies used by the students: compensation and metacognitive strategy. 10 students used circumlocution and synonym, 3 students used gesture, and 1 student used switching to mother tongue as their compensation strategy. meanwhile, 1 student used metacognitive strategy by applying evaluating and learning, making correction of himself when he makes an error. b. improving speaking ability from the table 2 above, it can be seen that there were two kinds of strategies used by the students in improving their speaking ability, namely cognitive and metacognitive strategy. there were 12 students who like watching films or tv programs in english and there was 1 student who read newspaper and books in order to learn new structure and words as cognitive strategy. while, there were 2 students who repeat after listening to radio, recordings or music as metacognitive strategy. question 2: what kinds of speaking strategies mostly used by indonesian tertiary students in terms of they speak english and improve their speaking ability? 238 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 12.4 12.6 12.8 13 13.2 13.4 13.6 13.8 14 in terms of speaking english improving speaking ability compensation strategy cognitive strategy diagram 1. speaking strategies mostly used by indonesian tertiary students from the diagram 1 above, there were 14 students or about 93.33 % used compensation strategy as their speaking strategy when they speak english. they mostly used synonym to explain the word in english. al buainain (2010) states that compensation strategies enable the students to make up for missing knowledge in the process of comprehending or producing the target language. meanwhile, there were 13 students or about 86.67 % used cognitive strategy as their speaking strategy to improve their speaking ability. they mostly used watch films or tv programs in english because it can entertain them, it does not make boring, it makes enjoyment and fun so they are interested in learning english, especially in learning speaking. as what oxford (1990, p. 43) says that cognitive learning strategy is essential in learning a language. therefore, it can be assured that the result of the students’ speaking ability will rise due to the application of the cognitive strategy. conclusion based on the research findings, it was found that there are some strategies used by indonesian tertiary students when they speak english and improve their speaking ability, namely cognitive, metacognitive and compensation strategy. in the type of speaking strategy that mostly used by the student in terms of speaking english is compensation strategy, while cognitive strategy was indicated as the mostly speaking strategies used by the indonesian tertiary students in improving their speaking ability. considering to the research conducted, there are some recommendations that can be proposed to the teachers and students. it is recommended for the teacher to find the language learning strategies, especially speaking strategies, of their students and help them balance the strategies used by the students based on the students’ needs and preferences. the teacher should adapt the teaching strategies with the students learning strategies to enhance students’ achievement in 239 wawa puja prabawa speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students learning speaking. for the students itself, they should know what strategies that appropriate and can help them in learning speaking english. the students should be able to choose strategies they need in learning and analyze which strategies which give better effect on their own learning. references al-buainain, h. (2010). language learning strategies employed by english majors at qatar university: question and queries. asiatic: iium journal of english language and literature, volume 4, number 2, december 2010, p. 92-120. retrieved from http://www.myjurnal.my/public/arti cle-view.php?id=14934 on december 29th, 2015 argawati, n. o. (2014). improving students' speaking skill using group discussion; experimental study on the first grade students of senior high school. eltin journal, 2(ii), p. 74-81. edge, j. (1993). essentials of english language teaching. new york: longman fajariyah, d. n. (2009). improving students' speaking proficiency using games; a classroom action research on the eighth grade students of smp negeri 2 baki sukoharjo 2008/2009 academic year. surakarta: sebelas maret university. thesis. gay, l. r. (2009). educational research. new jersey: pearson education inc. gharbavi, a., & mousavi, s. a. (2012). do language proficiency levels correspond to language learning strategy adoption? english language teaching, 5(7), 110-122. griffiths, c. (2008). lessons from good language learners. cambridge: cambridge university press. kustati, m. (2003). students speaking-related language learning strategies in their speaking ability. padang: padang state university. larenas, c. d. (2011). exploring knowledge of english speaking strategies in 8th and 12th graders. profile, 13(2), p. 85-97. liu, d. (2004). efl proficiency, gender and language learning strategy use among a group of chinese technological institute english majors. retrieved from http://www.ecls.ncl.ac.uk/ publish/ volume 1/dongyue/dongyue.htm.pdf on december 29th, 2015. lópez, m. m. (2011). speaking strategies used by ba elt students in public universities in mexico. mextesol journal, 35(1), 1-22. malihah, noor. (2010). the effectiveness of speaking instruction through taskbased language teaching. register, 3(1), p. 85-101. mistar, j., zuhairi, a., & umamah, a. (2014). strategies of learning speaking skill by senior high school efl learners in indonesia. paper presented at the 10th international tesol conference, manila. moriam, q. m. (2005). speaking strategy use by the efl students in japan and bangladesh. journal of international development and cooperation, 12(1), 4761. nakatani, y. (2006). developing an oral communication strategy inventory. the modern language journal, 90(2), 151-168. nunan, d. (1999). language teaching methodology: a textbook for teachers. kuala lumpur: pearson education. o' malley, j. m. & chamot, a. u. (1990). learning strategies in second language acquisition. cambridge: cambridge university press. oxford, r. l. (1990). language learning strategies: what every teacher should know. new york: newbury house. rahmadeni, y., amri, z., & adnan, a. (2013). junior high school sudents' learning strategies and their achievement in speaking: a case study at smp negeri 3 padang panjang. journal of english language teaching, 2(1), p. 412-422. wahyuni, s. (2013). l2 speaking strategies employed by indonesian efl tertiary 240 http://www.ecls.ncl.ac.uk/%20publish/ http://www.ecls.ncl.ac.uk/%20publish/ english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 4, issue 2, june 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee students across proficiency and gender. (ph.d thesis, university of canberra, australia). volya, duti. (2009). students' speaking strategies and teachers' teaching speaking strategies at senior high school in kerinci district. retrieved from http://jurnal.pdii.lipi.go.id/ admin/ jurnal/ 96jan098790.pdf on december 29th, 2015. 241 http://jurnal.pdii.lipi.go.id/ 242 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 453 evaluation on an english coursebook in online learning: voices from teachers wawan setiawan english education department – university of esa unggul, jakarta, indonesia e-mail: wawan.setiawan@esaunggul.ac.id apa citation: setiawan, w. (2021). evaluation on an english coursebook in online learning: voices from teachers. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.453-462. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4580 received: 10-02-2021 accepted: 01-03-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction 2020 was the year of unexpected changes for the whole world. it has been the year of people embracing fundamental changes in life due to the coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic. to prevent the possibility of spreading the coronavirus, the government in indonesia started imposing largescale social restrictions or pembatasan sosial berskala besar/psbb in april 2020. this policy, of course, has transformed the way how teaching and learning is implemented. the ministry of education and culture has made various learning adjustments during the pandemic. there are hundreds of thousands of schools closed and students studying at home through online learning. both in the area of teaching and in mainstream education, online learning is becoming rapidly popular for over a decade (hockley & clandfield, 2010). white (2003) defined online learning as an approach to teaching and learning that includes the use of internet technologies for learning and teaching. similarly, ko & rossen (2010) asserted that online learning means delivering a course completely or partly over the internet. so, internet plays an important role in online learning. within the literature, the term “online education” is variously mentioned such as online learning, e-learning, distance learning, or web-based learning. despite their substantial differences, they share similar features as mentioned above. dealing with the online learning, the use of technology plays a vital role. internet and supported learning applications contribute to the success of online learning such as whatsapp, discord, google classroom, google meet, zoom, youtube, facebook, etc. however, the sudden transition in education driven by the covid-19, the implementation of teaching and learning process is not without challenges. this has raised the awareness of researchers to investigate the challenges faced by teachers and students in online learning. in indonesian context, lestiyanawati & widyantoro (2020) summarized three major problems faced by teachers: (1) lack of teacher knowledge to adapt teaching using technology, (2) lack of technical support from the school, and (3) difficulties in presenting the materials, while students’ main issue is the ability to access the internet due to their economic family background who may not be able to afford internet data or smartphones. in addition, online learning also has caused anxiety for some students due to the difficulties in understanding the lessons (simamora, 2020). so, online learning has changed the instructional system and it affects teachers’ performance and the quality of education abstract: the covid-19 pandemic has changed how teaching and learning is implemented in indonesia. to prevent the possibility of spreading the virus, students learn from home through online learning. the research is aimed at investigating teachers’ voices on the suitability of coursebook in online learning and teachers’ strategies to make the materials more relevant to teaching and learning context. data gathered from four english teachers at sman 1 indramayu, a public school situated in west java, indonesia, through closed and open questionnaires. the results showed that the coursebook was suitable to be used in online learning despite the fact that it was first used in traditional classrooms. to meet students’ needs and expectation, teachers adapted the materials by employing several strategies such as combining the materials with other resources, redesigning, and reordering. keywords: coursebook; online learning; materials adaptation; teachers’ strategies; teachers’ voices mailto:wawan.setiawan@esaunggul.ac.id wawan setiawan evaluation on an english coursebook in online learning: voices from teachers 454 (rasmitadila, aliyyah, rachmadtullah, samsudin, syaodih, nurtanto, & tambunan 2000). among considerable research on the challenges perceived by teachers and students in online learning, none has apparently researched the suitability of coursebook by eliciting teachers’ voices. in fact, coursebook is also “a central element in teaching-learning encounters” (mcgrath, 2006, p.171). it is a key component in english language teaching which determines the success of the teaching programs at schools (tok, 2010). so, understanding teachers’ voices on a coursebook is immensely important especially in online learning. the materials and tasks provided in the coursebook may not be relevant to students’ needs and expectation. therefore, teachers should be able to understand how suitable the coursebook is for students through a coursebook evaluation. in general, coursebook evaluation is a procedure of where judgments are made by the users to assess its potential values (tomlinson, 2003). tomlinson asserts that what becomes a major concern in evaluation is the users and their judgements which means it tends to be subjective. regarding this subjectivity, graves (2000) pointed out that teachers’ teaching experience, the established beliefs, and their understanding determine their evaluation. in other words, context is the key to the evaluation process to consider before using the coursebook. the purpose of coursebook evaluation is to estimate the suitability of materials following the existing teaching and learning context (mishan & timmis, 2015). deciding on the criteria for coursebook evaluation is a substantial element especially when the evaluators attempt to match these criteria with their context. it requires relevant criteria so that the results of the evaluation can attain the suitability where the coursebooks are being used. similar to the purposes and types of coursebooks evaluation, a variety of evaluation criteria have been proposed by the scholars (ur, 1996; cunningsworth, 1995; singapore wala, 2003; tomlinson, 2003). for the purpose of this research, the criteria from cunningsworth (1995) are used which orientate to investigate in-depth analysis into the materials. the following are eight criteria provided by cunningsworth (1995, pp.3-4) for coursebooks evaluation: aims and approaches. design and organization, language content, skills, topic, methodology, teachers’ book, practical consideration. sheldon (1988) contended that different users use different criteria in their coursebook evaluation due to contextual differences. therefore, in this study, only five criteria are used which are aims and approaches, language content, language skills, topic, and methodology because these criteria bring major information regarding the suitability of the coursebook in online learning. the next step after evaluating the coursebook is to find ways how to make the materials more relevant so that learners can learn more effectively from their coursebooks. this process is called materials adaptation or “a very practical activity carried out mainly by teachers to make their work more relevant to the learners” (mcdonough & shaw, 2003, p.85). adapting the materials require the principles of why the new version of materials is needed. there are three principles of adaptation described by mcdonough & shaw (2003) which are personalizing, individualizing, and localizing. in the first principle, teachers adapt the materials to meet the learners’ needs, interests, and goals. the second principle is to individualism of the materials to address learner differences and the last is to make the materials more relevant to the cultures and traditions of where the coursebook is used. material adaptation also has various techniques that can be used by the teachers. islam & mares (2003) listed some techniques of adaptation that they conclude from the other researchers such as mcdonough & shaw (1993) and cunningsworth (1995). first, teachers can make a quantitative change by extending the activities with similar type of materials or make a qualitative change by providing more activities which have different type of materials to support students’ learning. second, teachers delete the activities quantitatively to make the material shorter. third, teachers simplify the activity, for example by rewording the instruction to be more understandable for their learners. fourth, teachers reorder the sequence of tasks according to the level of difficulty and the stages of the teaching approach they adopt. last, teachers replace the material which is more relevant to their context by taking from other sources such as the internet, newspaper, and videos. in addition, mcdonough & shaw (2003) added one more technique called modifying. in this technique, teachers modify the material to be more relevant. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 455 previously, several studies on coursebook evaluation have been carried out. purwanti (2019) evaluated an esp coursebook entitled “get along with english for the hotel industry” for vocational high school students published by erlangga in 2012. the evaluation was conducted under seven categories which are language content, selection and grading of language items, presentation and practice of new language items, developing language skills and communicative abilities, supporting materials, motivation and the learner, and conclusions and overall evaluation. the result showed that the coursebook was appropriate for the students, but modifications should be made to meet the course objectives. besides, karsudinto (2019) also evaluated a coursebook entitled “when english rings the bell” published by the ministry of culture and education of indonesia for junior high school students grade eight. to collect the data, he used a questionnaire consisting of eight parts: overall evaluation, organization and structure, activities, vocabulary and grammar, language level, supporting resources, practical considerations, physical appearance, and content pages. the result indicated that the teachers had positive perceptions on the suitability of the coursebook but with some improvement in some aspects. similarly, handayani, suwarno, and dharmayana (2018) evaluated the “think globally act locally” coursebook used by junior high school students in grade nine by eliciting teachers’ perspectives. it was found out that the coursebook had strengths (e.g., the physical and utilitarian aspect, the objectives and supplementary materials, content, and language skills) and shortcomings (e.g., were unnatural coursebook illustrations, lack of teaching aids, boring exercises, lack of vocabulary building, and lack of audio materials). based on the previous studies above, it can be seen that there is still a lack of research dealing with the coursebook evaluation in online learning especially during the covid-19 pandemic. therefore, the coursebook evaluation in online learning is also important to be investigated. on top of that, this research also investigated teachers’ strategies to compensate for the drawbacks of the coursebook to meet students’ needs and expectation which have not been studied by researchers on this topic. method the research was conducted at sman 1 indramayu, a public school situated in west java, indonesia. according to bambang mohamad kartono, the assistant principle of academic affairs and curriculum of sman 1 indramayu, the school has prepared the management systems for online learning. they use discord as the communication management system to interact with students and google classroom as the learning management system. teachers are also allowed to use other supporting systems such as youtube, google form, google sheet, zoom, etc. in terms of materials, they use the same coursebook as used in traditional classrooms. with this regard, the researcher would like to find out teachers’ voices regarding the suitability of coursebook “erlangga straight point series english” by lidwina (2019) for high school students in online learning and teachers’ strategies to make the materials more relevant to teaching and learning context. with regards to the aims mentioned above, the following are research questions this study attempted to address: 1) what are teachers’ perspectives on the suitability of coursebook in online learning? 2) what strategies do teachers use to make the materials more relevant to teaching and learning context? this research employed a mixed method and the triangular technique was selected. so, the quantitative and qualitative data collected from the research instruments were analyzed separately and the results were combined to find the convergence, corroboration, and correspondence (greene, caracelli, & graham, 1989). the quantitative method was used to examine the data from the closed questionnaire and the qualitative method was used to analyse the data from the open questionnaire. the participants involved in this research were four english teachers (teachers a, b, c, and d) at sman 1 indramayu including a mixture of male and female participants. the teachers have distinct teaching experience and backgrounds. a likert scale, the most widely used approach, was selected because it can gauge the views of respondents with greater accuracy and offer more flexibility (wilkinson & birmingham, 2003). this questionnaire was distributed among teachers to investigate their perspectives on the coursebook used in online learning during the pandemic. there are 21 items in the likert-scale questionnaire under five categories (aims and approaches, language wawan setiawan evaluation on an english coursebook in online learning: voices from teachers 456 content, language skills, topic, and methodology) adapted from cunningsworth (1995). considering the small number of participants in this research, exploratory data analysis approach was selected. so, to process the data, teachers’ voices in the likert scale questionnaire were calculated quantitatively to find the frequencies and percentages for each item and to gain deeper information related to their perspectives regarding the coursebook, open questionnaire was shared consisting of 12 questions. results and discussion teachers’ perspectives on the suitability of coursebook there are 5 categories involved in this study regarding teachers’ perspectives on the suitability of the coursebook in online learning. aims and approaches the teachers’ perspectives on the suitability of coursebook related to aims and approaches in online learning are understood from four items (see table 1). the trend of their perceptions can be regarded as positive as the majority believed that the coursebook corresponded with the aims of the teaching program at the school (100% agreed), suited to the online learning environment (25% strongly agreed and 50% agreed), provided them a good resource (75% agreed), had flexibility (100%). upon a closer examination, no respondents disagreed on the items in this category which may suggest that there is relevance between the aims and approaches in the coursebook with the virtual environment. table 1. aims and approaches item statement sa a nad d sd 1 the aims of the coursebook correspond closely with the aims of the teaching program (online learning) at my school. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 2 the coursebook is suited to the online learning environment at my school. 25% 50% 25% 0% 0% 3 the coursebook is comprehensive. it provides me a good resource to teach online. 0% 75% 25% 0% 0% 4 the coursebook is flexible. i can use the materials to teach in online learning. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% in addition to this, one of the respondents (teacher b) claimed: “aims are designed to be applied at national level, so all publishers must use it as the standard. it is the same as the coursebook that i use, the aims are suited whether for online or face to face learning. in general, the approach is different, because it is designed for offline learning. however, the approach can be blended or combined into online approach which i use, blended learning (synchronous and asynchronous).” teacher b was aware of the fact that the coursebook was designed for traditional classrooms, but he believed it could be used in online learning too. he also mentioned that synchronous and asynchronous learning modes could be used by teachers to teach with the coursebook. reasons for its relevance were given by teacher a and teacher c, respectively: “because it provides suitable materials for senior high school students”; “the book contains the material and also the exercise in balance so when the teacher asks the students or discuss with them they have a good resources.” thus, it can be concluded that the materials in the coursebook are still effective to be used in online learning and they are also equipped with good contents and exercises which help teachers to interact or discuss with students virtually. language content to understand the suitability of the coursebook for language contents in online learning, three items are used. as seen, the majority claimed that the coursebook covers the main grammar items (75% agreed); though 25% disagreed on this item. regarding the vocabulary, the coursebook offers adequate materials in terms of quantity and range of vocabulary (100% agreed). nevertheless, there are two perceptions concerning the perceptions of teachers on the coverage of pronunciation in the coursebook (25% strongly agreed, 25% agreed, and 50% disagreed). but, in general, the teachers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 457 believed the coursebook had good language contents even when it was used in online learning. in the open questionnaire, teacher b and c also stated: “like the material in general, all the language contents are well suited for online learning”. (teacher b) “yes, i think so because they can study by themselves and the teacher only try to help them if there is a word or vocabularies that they don't know the meaning and get wrong pronunciation so the teacher will guide them into correct one after they try to follow the book “. (teacher c) judging from the two responses above, the respondents were assured that the coursebook contained grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation which could be presented in online learning. however, students do need teachers’ assistance when they encounter, for instance, some problems in understanding the lessons. that is to say, students require teachers’ guidance to comprehend the language contents in the coursebook in online learning. table 2. language content item statement sa a nad d sd 1 the coursebook covers the main grammar items which are appropriate for my students. 0% 75% 0% 25% 0% 2 the material for vocabulary online teaching is adequate in terms of quantity and range of vocabulary. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 3 the coursebook provides materials for pronunciation work (e.g., individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress, and intonation). 25% 25% 0% 50% 0% language skills for the language skills, teachers’ perspectives are elicited from six items. surprisingly, there are no negative responses to the statements which indicates that the suitability of the coursebook regarding language skills can be reckoned positive. the teachers believed that the coverage of language skills in the coursebook was good as recorded in item 1 (50% strongly agreed and 50% agreed). it is then followed by integrated skills work (25% strongly agreed and 75% agreed) and reading skills (100% agreed) which receive without disagreement. the high responses are also for listening skill (25% strongly agreed and 50 % agreed) and speaking skills (75% agreed) even though 25% of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with each of these skills. this indicates that the coursebook provides teachers with comprehensive language skills and the skills can be presented in online learning despite they were designed for traditional classrooms. table 3. language skills item statement sa a nad d sd 1 the coursebook covers four language skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing). 50% 50% 0% 0% 0% 2 the coursebook provides integrated skills work (e.g., speaking and listening; speaking and writing; reading and listening, etc). 25% 75% 0% 0% 0% 3 reading passages are suitable for my students to study in the online learning. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 4 listening materials are well-recorded, as authentic as possible, accompanied by background information, questions and activities which help comprehension. 25% 50% 25% 0% 0% 5 materials for spoken english are well0% 75% 25% 0% 0% wawan setiawan evaluation on an english coursebook in online learning: voices from teachers 458 designed to equip my students for reallife interactions. 6 writing activities are suitable in terms of the amount of guidance/control, degree of accuracy, organisation of longer pieces of writing and use of appropriate styles. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% to strengthen the positive outcome above, one of the teachers, teacher c, expressed: “yes, in that book there are part of dialog by scanning barcode (listening), pronounce it by read to pronounce in good way or perform the role play by following the instruction in the book (speaking) and they try to make an essay or produce the text (writing) and comprehend by answering the question from the text (reading)”. she made sure that even in virtual learning, students can still learn comprehensive language skills with the coursebook. so, it is no wonder that the majority had similar views on this category. topic topics for language learning should be carefully selected in a way that it arouses students’ interest. the suitability of coursebook in reference to topic in online learning is gauged from four items. looking through the table below, strongly agree and agree dominated the overall responses. visualized on the table, teachers believed that the materials aroused students’ interest (75% agreed), the topics expanded students’ awareness and enriched their experience (100% agreed), the topics had variety and range of topics (100% agreed), and the topics were relevant to students’ level (100% agreed). it illustrates that the topics in the coursebook have suitability with students’ interest even when it is learnt in online learning. data from open questionnaire also explicate the positive views: “yes, i do. the students are interested using this book.” (teacher a) “cukup menarik. karena isi buku ini sdh simple dan cukup bisa dimengerti oleh mayoritas peserta didik sy selama pjj.” (teacher b) (“quite interesting because the book content is simple and understandable for the majority of my students during distance education.” (teacher b)) “topiknya sangat menarik.” (teacher c) “the topic is very interesting.” (teacher c) with this regard, this coursebook consists of various topics whose suitability is relevant with students’ interest. table 4. topic item statement sa a nad d sd 1 there are sufficient materials of genuine interest to my students. 0% 75% 25% 0% 0% 2 the topics help expand my students’ awareness and enrich their experience in learning a foreign language. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 3 there is sufficient variety and range of topic. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 4 the topics are sophisticated enough in content which are relevant to my students’ level. 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% methodology methodology is the last category used to explore the suitability of coursebook. to understand this category, four categories are employed. based on the teachers’ voices recorded in the following table, the positive outcome outnumbered the negative. 75% agreed that the approach adopted in the coursebook is appropriate to language learning, 75% agreed that it has relevant activities with students’ learning styles and experiences, the techniques introduced in the coursebook are also suitable for online learning (25% strongly agreed and 50% agreed), and it provides students with advice on study skills and learning strategies (75% agreed). in other words, the coursebook has flexibility in which teachers can use it for both faceto-face and online learning. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 459 table 5. methodology item statement sa a nad d sd 1 the coursebook offers approaches which are appropriate to language learning/teaching situation (online). 0% 75% 25% 0% 0% 2 the activities in the coursebook match my students’ learning styles and expectations. 0% 75% 25% 0% 0% 3 the techniques used in the coursebook to present/practise new language items are suitable for my students in the online learning. 25% 50% 25% 0% 0% 4 the materials provide some advice/help to students on study skills and learning strategies in the online learning. 0% 75% 0% 25% 0% supporting the positive views aforementioned, teachers a, b, and d gave further information: “yes, i do. they have good methodology.” (teacher a) “ya. karena kegiatan-kegiatan yg ada dalam buku ini masih bisa dilakukan oleh mayoritas peserta didik walaupun tanpa bantuan penjelasan dr guru secara langsung.” (teacher b) (“yes. because activities in the book is still can be done by the majority of the students even though without the help of teacher’s explanation.” (teacher b)) “yes sure because in this book the students can do the activity by reading that book then they will know what the book wants from them but once again it depends on their thinking and the level of understanding of each students are different so in here the teachers should know what method or technique that they can do for making the students clear or understand it.” (teacher d) as seen, the coursebook promotes autonomous learning in which learners can learn it by themselves. this condition is relevant to the nature of online learning where learners study on their own pace (asynchronous learning mode) especially at sman 1 indramayu which utilizes discord and google classroom as the communication management system and learning management system. this could be the reason why teachers tend to believe that the methodology of coursebook is suitable for online learning. teachers’ strategies to address the second research question related to teachers’ strategies, the researcher found several points through qualitative analysis from the open questionnaire. first, the majority believed that the coursebook was of paramount importance in online learning. “absolutely important.” (teacher a) “it is strongly important. it helps teaching easier, provides steps of teaching, save teachers' time preparing teaching. in case of if it is not suited, teachers can redesign it easily than comparing to the teachers write the coursebook from beginning that is much more difficult.” (teacher b) “sangat penting sekali.” (teacher d) (“it is very important.” (teacher d)) teacher b also explained the coursebook provided him with teaching procedures which made teaching easier and it could save his time from lessons preparation. however, the respondents also realized that teaching with coursebook in online learning cannot be without obstacles. most issues they mentioned are related to teachers’ guidance in the sense that further explanation should be given because the instructions written in the coursebook may not be understood by students. “guiding and facilitating are more difficult in virtual or online learning.” (teacher b) “how to make the clear and make a good step in instruction so that the students can be more understand the material and how to guide the students in understanding by using the book maximally.” (teacher c) “banyak bagian dari buku tsb harus dijelaskan secara terperinci.” (teacher d) (“many parts of the book needed to be explained in details” (teacher d)) with that being said, several strategies applied by the teachers to cope the problems in online learning. wawan setiawan evaluation on an english coursebook in online learning: voices from teachers 460 “i can mix the resources by using online activities. give an extra instruction to modify the coursebook activities.” (teacher a) “the suited materials are taken and reordered to be in line with online faces. the blended learning does not need much changing. it is just redesigned, reordered and combined with other materials whitout harming copyright.” (teacher b) “i use it by modifying it and suit it or relate that book by the condition of the students at home. and also not to forget i always try to use the things around them at home and suit the topic from the book into their real life.” (teacher c) “saya harus mencari sumber lain untuk pjj sebagai pelengkap tambahan.” (teacher d) (“i need to look for other sources for distance education as an addition.” (teacher d)) analyzed from the extracts of the teachers’ responses above, some common trends are found. the respondents agreed to combine the materials in the coursebook with other resources in online learning. furthermore, they also mentioned that additional materials or instructions were needed to help students learn (teacher a and d). teacher b also stated that the coursebook did not need to be massively changed but redesigning, reordering, and combining materials were immensely important. this proves despite having good contents, the coursebook needs to be adjusted to meet students’ needs especially when it is taught in online learning. discussion teachers’ perspectives on the suitability of coursebook based on the findings revealed in the previous section, generally the teachers demonstrated positive attitudes towards the suitability of coursebook in online learning despite the fact that the coursebook was initially used in traditional classrooms. for the first category (aims and approaches), items 1 and 4 mark the highest percentage of agreement. as illustrated in table 1, there was closed correspondence between the coursebook and the aims of teaching programs at sman 1 indramayu. it shows the coursebook provides particular aims and objectives which contribute to the context of language teaching and learning (online learning) (cunningsworth, 1995). flexibility of materials in the coursebook also assists teachers in teaching online and the respondents 100% agreed on the flexibility of the coursebook. flexibility is important because coursebooks may have inadequacy (different needs of every student that the coursebook cannot embrace), irrelevance (the coursebook may not provide the topics that interest students), limitation (it blocks teachers’ initiative and creativity), homogeneity (lack of variety in contents for different ability and knowledge), and over easiness (teachers act more like mediators of content in the coursebook) (ur, 1996). yet, seeing from the positive outcome, the teachers seems to be able to adapt the coursebook to meet students’ needs. the second category discusses language content. among three items provided, vocabulary obtains the highest percentage of agreement (100%). it is then followed by grammar (75% agreed and 25% disagreed) and pronunciation (25% strongly agreed, 25% agreed, and 50% agreed). it indicates the coursebook has facilitated teachers with ready-made materials to support their teaching (woodward, 2001). yet, without ignoring the negative responses, the coursebook may not be perfect as some respondents felt the coursebook did not provide enough grammar and pronunciation materials. this condition is considered normal because coursebooks are, somewhat, not clear in ‘what’ and ‘how’ to teach (gabrielatos, 2004); therefore, materials adaption plays a vital role. the third category explores language skills, the majority expressed positive responses on the suitability of coursebook in terms of language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). it accounts that, generally, the coursebook has included four language skills in the syllabus and presents a good structure for teaching (mcgrath, 2002). also, complaints are not given in the open questionnaire too indicating the language skills in the coursebook can be presented virtually. the fourth category is the topic which also receives positive perceptions. topics in the coursebook could be boring for students because, according to ur (1996), the coursebook can have topics which might not match what learners truly need. in other words, the topics could be either too difficult or too easy for the students. however, this coursebook seems to be able to meet learners’ expectations and needs as recorded in table 4. the respondents seemed happy with the selection of topics provided because they aroused students’ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 461 interest, expanded students’ awareness, were varied and relevant to learners’ levels. the last category is the suitability of coursebook in online learning concerning methodology. upon a closer look in table 5, overall, the coursebook offers good methodologies and practical guidance that support teachers in teaching (ur, 1996). the appropriacy of approaches introduced by the coursebook helps teacher teach in online environment. in other words, it provides valuable information for students to know what they have to learn. mcgrath (2002) contends that it is one of the advantages of coursebook. yet, one respondent assumed that the coursebook did not provide advice and learning strategies for learners in online learning which could be a note for teachers to make sure that students are able follow and comprehend the lessons especially in online learning. teachers’ strategies given the fact that the respondents have positive perceptions towards the use of coursebook in online learning for reasons as explained in the previous section, they realized that teachers’ guidance is still important. that is to say, it is needed to make sure that students are able to comprehend the materials or language instructions especially in online learning. moreover, students may not be in proficient language users, so they may find some difficulties to learn the coursebook without being guided by their teachers especially in online learning. with this regard, it is found that teachers employ several techniques adaptations such as combining the materials with other resources or islam & mares (2003) name it as a quantitative change that is by extending the activities with similar type of materials and making a qualitative change by providing more activities which have different type of materials to support students’ learning. the other techniques noted are reordering and redesigning materials. reordering can be done to meet learners’ needs (islam & mares, 2003) and redesigning is applied to make it more relevant with the teaching context to produce better input for students (mcdonough & shaw, 2003). adapting the materials require the principles of why the new version of materials is needed. the transition of teaching and learning process from face-to-face learning to online learning may invite teachers to make some adaptations in order to meet students’ needs and expectations. conclusion online learning brings a new experience not only for students but also teachers. it invites them to be able to use technology to continue the teaching and learning process. internet and learning applications such as whatsapp, discord, google classroom, google meet, zoom, and youtube play important roles because the classes are conducted virtually. with this regard, it is important to evaluate the english coursebook to find its suitability in online learning because it is one of the key components in english language teaching. using closed and open questionnaires, the research investigated teachers’ voices on the suitability of coursebook used at sman 1 indramayu. in this school, teachers use discord and google classroom as the communication and learning management systems. the coursebook they use is erlangga straight point series english (2019). generally, the teachers had positive perceptions on the suitability of the coursebook regarding five categories (aims and approaches, language content, language skills, topic, and methodology). the teachers believed that the coursebook was suitable to be used in online learning despite the fact that it was first used in traditional classrooms. however, the respondents also realized that materials adaptation was needed due to the fact that face-to-face learning and online learning are different. the strategies they used are combining the materials with other resources, reordering, and redesigning in order to meet students’ needs and expectations especially in online learning. references cunningsworth, a. (1995). choosing your coursebook. macmillan education. gabrielatos, c. (2004). the coursebook as a flexible tool. teacher trainers and educators sig newsletter, 28-31. greene, c. j., caracelli, j.v., & graham f.w. (1989). toward a conceptual framework for mixedmethod evaluation designs. american educational research association, 11(3), 255-274. http://doi:10.3102/01623737011003255 graves, k. (2000). designing language courses. heinle & heinle publishers. handayani, s., suwarno, b., and dharmayana, w.i. (2018). evaluation of indonesian english http://doi:10.3102/01623737011003255 wawan setiawan evaluation on an english coursebook in online learning: voices from teachers 462 textbook for the ninth graders of junior high school “think globally act locally” from efl teachers’ perspectives. journal of applied linguistics and literature, 3(2), 11-32. hockly, n. & clandfield, l. (2010). teaching online: tools and techniques, options and opportunities. delta publishing company. islam, c. & mares, c. (2003). adapting classroom materials. in: tomlinson, b. ed. developing materials for language teaching. continuum international publishing group, 86-100. lestiyanawati, r. & widyantoro, a. (2020). strategies and problems faced by indonesian teachers in conductiong e-learning system during covid-19 outbreak. journal of culture, literature, lingustics and english teaching, 2(1), 71-82. https://ojs.unsiq.ac.id/index.php/cllient/article/vie w/1271 lidwina, s.a. (2019). erlangga straight point series english for sma/ma grade xii general program. jakarta: erlangga. karsudianto, f. (2019). an evaluation of an english coursebook “when english rings the bell”. journal of english language teaching innovations and materials, 1(2), pp.81-86. http://doi: 10.26418/jeltim.v1i2.33346 ko, s. & rossen, s. (2010). teaching online: a practical guide (3rd ed.). routledge. mcdonough, j. and shaw, c. (1993). materials and methods in elt. blackwell. mcdonough, j. and shaw, c. (2003). materials and methods in elt (2nd ed.). blackwell. mcgrath, i. (2002). materials evaluation and design for language teaching. edinburgh university press. mcgrath, i. (2006). teachers’ and learners’ images for coursebooks. elt journal, 60(2), 171-180. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cci104 mishan, f & timmis, i. (2015). materials development for tesol. edinburgh university press. purwanti, a.r. (2019). evaluation on an esp course book: get along with english for the hotel industry. journal of english educators society, 4(2),107-116. http://doi: 10.21070/jees.v4i2.2432 rasmitadila, aliyyah, r.r., rachmadtullah, r., samsudin, a., syaodih., nurtanto, m., & tambunan, a.r.s. (2020). the perceptions of primary school teachers of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic period: a case study in indonesia. journal of ethnic and cultural studies, 7(2), 90-109. http://dx.doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/388 simamora, r.m. (2020). the challenges of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic: an essay analysis of performing arts education students. studies in learning and teaching, 1(2), 86-103. https://doi:https://doi.org/10.46627/silet.v1i2.38 sheldon, e.l. (1988). evaluating elt textbooks and materials. elt journal, 42(4), 237-246. singapore wala, a.d. (2003). publishing a coursebook: completing the materials development circle. in: tomlinson, b. ed. developing materials for language teaching. continuum international publishing group, 141-161. tok, h. (2010). tefl textbook evaluation: from teachers’ perspectives. educational research and review, 5(9), 508-517. tomlinson, b. (2003). materials evaluation. in: tomlinson, b. ed. developing materials for language teaching. continuum international publishing group, 15-36. ur, p. (1996). a course in language teaching: practice and theory. cambridge university press. white, c. (2003). language learning in distance education. cambridge university press. wilkinson, d. and birmingham, p. (2003). using research instruments: a guide for researchers. routledgefalmer. woodward, t. (2001). planning lessons and courses: designing sequences of work for the language classroom. cambridge university press. https://ojs.unsiq.ac.id/index.php/cllient/article/view/1271 https://ojs.unsiq.ac.id/index.php/cllient/article/view/1271 https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cci104 http://dx.doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/388 https://doi:https:/doi.org/10.46627/silet.v1i2.38 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee presupposition analysis in some selected consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post sinta ananda department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: ananda.sinta15@gmail.com marwito wihadi department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: m_wihadi@yahoo.com yayan suryana department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: ysuryana2008@gmail.com apa citation: ananda, s., wihadi, m., & suryana, y. (2016). presupposition analysis in some selected consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 141-148 received: 20-10-2016 accepted: 17-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: this research investigates the presupposition in the slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition. this research aimed at finding the types of presupposition and describing the functions of presupposition in advertisement found in consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post newspaper. yule’s theory and descriptive qualitative research method applied in this research. 20 slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition selected to this research. the result of this research showed that the writer found 20 presuppositions. 11 existential presupposition or 55%, 4 factive presupposition or 20%, 3 lexical presupposition or 15%, and 2 non-factual presupposition or 10%. regarding the function of presupposition in advertisement, the writer found 17 slogans advertisement contains implicit competition, and 11 slogans advertisement contains making the advertisement short and memorable. in conclusion, not all type of presupposition and function of presupposition in advertisement are found, it is influenced by various types and functions in advertisement causing different assumption and presupposition. the writer hopes that further researchers who are interested in observing presupposition to explore more about presupposition in other types of advertisement. keywords: presupposition, consumer, advertisement, slogan introduction this research investigates the presupposition in the slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper. the writer wants to make an interesting research by choosing the data source from slogans of advertisement, because advertising slogan is one of manifestations of language use in human social life particularly through media. in daily activities, sometimes people are looking for and need some information from the advertisement, whether it is to fill of spare time or perhaps has become a necessity. the 141 sinta ananda & marwito wihadi presupposition analysis in some selected consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post advertisement can be found almost everywhere, such as newspaper, magazine, television, radio, etc. the advertisement is one of ways used by the advertisers to convey information, with purpose to introduce and to promote their products or services to consumers. in other words, the advertisement is inescapable parts of modern life that can influence others. the readers need advertisement when they want to see or to buy something, which usually accompanied by picture and slogan form. indirectly, the slogan purposes to offer the potential product and service to consumers. “the slogan is intended to motivate the potential consumer of the goods or services” (batyrovna, 2014, p. 262). however, when conveying the message through slogan, the readers do not realize that what is behind the slogan in the advertisement has a meaning, function even type that can attract public attention. they do not realize that behind an advertisement, all the advertisers are competing to make an advertisement with display or interesting language use in order to make the consumers interested in buying the products or the services advertised. the success of the advertisers in marketing products cannot be separated from how the advertisers promote the products. “the advertisers should know who their customers are, what media is used, what message that would appeal to them, and how to get their attention” (griffin & ebert, 2007, p. 368). to attract the consumers’ attentions, language has an important role in advertising. through language, the message of the advertisers can be delivered and can be accepted by the consumers. to achieve these objectives, the advertisers promote their products by using persuasive language. griffin and ebert (2007) states that persuasive language in advertising is a strategy of advertising influence consumers to purchase a particular product. persuasive language is used to persuade others who become the advertisement target to be interested toward the products or the services advertised. when the advertisers will convey information through the advertisement, previously, the advertisers make the beginning assumption or inference of what will be delivered. it is purpose in order to the readers can understand the intent of the advertisers. the assumption or inference above on pragmatic study is called presuppositions. the advertisers implement pragmatic approach in communicating purpose to persuade the readers use or purchase the products advertised. “presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance” (yule, 1996, p. 25). it means that how people can describe their process of thinking in analyzing implicit meaning, and how listeners or readers can catch other information beyond their interpretation. in this research, the writer tries to find out the types of presupposition and describe the functions of presupposition in advertisement are found in the slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper. the writer thinks that the types and the functions of presupposition in advertisement slogans are important to be understood deeply. method the research method which used in this research is descriptive qualitative method. fraenkel, wallen and hyun (2012, p. 427) states that “qualitative data are collected in the form of words or pictures rather than numbers.” this 142 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee research is classified as descriptive qualitative method since the data in the form of words, utterances, pictures rather than numbers. as yin (2011) states that qualitative research involves defining something to investigate, collect the relevant data, analyze and interpret the result, and draw a conclusion. it means that descriptive qualitative is a method of research involving method of collecting, classifying, interpreting, describing, and drawing conclusion. data source in this research, the writer took the data from the jakarta post newspaper during a month. the data were all consumer advertisements in the jakarta post newspaper on march, 1st-31st 2016 editions. the writer selected 20 data slogans of consumer advertisement from the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition. the writer chose the jakarta post newspaper because it was one of a daily english newspaper in indonesia. technique of collecting data technique of collecting data is the way of writer to collect and to get the data. there are some steps to collect the data. first of all, the writer collected the jakarta post newspaper containing of consumer advertisements. then, the writer identified one by one the consumer advertisements containing slogan. after identifying the consumer advertisement slogans, the writer selected the consumer advertisement slogans containing presupposition. next, the writer scanned the pictures of selected consumer advertisement in order to make the readers see the pictures of advertisement slogan easily and clearly. technique of analyzing data technique of analyzing data is the way of writer to analyze and to get the result. there are some steps to analyze the data. first step, the writer read one by one selected slogans of consumer advertisement from the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition. second step, the writer classified the data based on the types and the functions of presupposition in advertisement. third step, after classifying the types and the functions of presupposition, the writer interpreted the types of presupposition from each slogan in the advertisement. fourth step, the writer counted the occurrence from each type of presupposition and converted the occurrences into percentage. in determining the result of the types of presupposition in form of percentage, the writer used the formula based on the theory from subana (as cited in oktoma & mardiyono, 2013, p. 79), as follow: x 100% fk rel in this formula means frequency of relative cumulative (the result of percentage), fk means frequency of cumulative (the number of the occurrences of certain type of presupposition), means frequency of total (the number of the whole occurrences of presupposition) and 100% means percentage. fifth step, the writer gave pictures of consumer advertisement in every classification the types and the functions of presupposition. then, the writer described the types and the functions of presupposition from each slogan in advertisement. the last step, the writer drew a conclusion from the analysis. ∑ = f fk relfk 143 sinta ananda & marwito wihadi presupposition analysis in some selected consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post results and discussion yule (1996) divides presupposition into six types. they are existential presupposition, factive presupposition, lexical presupposition, structural presupposition, non-factive presupposition and counter-factual presupposition. in this research, the writer found 70 consumer advertisements in the jakarta post newspaper on march, 1st-31st 2016 editions, and selected 20 data slogans of consumer advertisements. the result of the type of presupposition in the consumer advertisement slogan is shown in the form of table below. table 1. the result of the types of presupposition types of presupposition frequency percentage existential 11 55% factive 4 20% lexical 3 15% non-factive 2 10% total 20 100% (yule, 1996) the result of analysis above, the writer found 20 presuppositions and only found four types of presupposition in the slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper on march, 1st-31st 2016 editions. four types of presupposition are 11 existential presupposition or 55%, 4 factive presupposition or 20%, 3 lexical presupposition or 15%, and 2 non-factive presupposition or 10%. in conclusion, existential presupposition is type of presupposition often used by the advertisers to convey their products or service to consumers. the advertisers often use the type of existential presupposition in delivering the product or the service. probably, the advertisers assume that the type of existential presupposition more easy to promote the product or the service advertised, compared with other types of presupposition. the advertisers use some exaggerated words, phrases and expressions to describe and to achieve sales promotion of products and services advertised. existential presupposition is one of types of presupposition the exaggeration in delivering information. however, if the information transmitted through presuppositions, the exaggeration properties it will facilitate in promoting the products (yingfang, 2007). meanwhile, the writer did not find structural presupposition and counter-factual presupposition as listed in yule’s theory. the advertisers do not use structural presupposition and counter-factual presupposition. probably, the advertisers fear if the readers have assumption of contrary to facts stated in the advertisement and also difficult to state inserted information. so it will becomes ambiguous and cause mistrust of the consumers towards the advertisers. yule (1996) states that counterfactual presupposition is the opposite of what is true or contrary to fact. structural presupposition is obtained from the sentence structure of “wh-question” followed state contains inserted information. regarding the process of analyzing the function of presupposition in the slogans of consumer 144 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee advertisement, the writer used lam’s discussion about the functions of presupposition in advertisement. lam (2009) divides the functions of presupposition into three functions. they are implicit competition, causing reader to consider the existence of product and service, and making the advertisement short and memorable. the result of the function of presupposition in advertisement is shown in the form of table below. table 2. the result of the function of presupposition in advertisement no. slogans implicit competition causing readers to consider the existence of the products or services making the advertisement short and memorable 1. the best or nothing √ √ 2. convenience, a luxury few can enjoy √ 3. wide coverage, fast, and stable √ 4. mix it up! √ 5. the essence of infinite innovation √ 6. when you expect the very best √ 7. gastronomy and art √ 8. ready unit & fully furnished √ 9. the ultimate sport utility truck √ 10. the total living environment √ 11. let’s get together! √ √ 12. incredible india √ √ 13. going places together √ √ 14. smooth as silk √ √ 15. unlimited aesthetics √ √ 16. wish you were here √ 17. art in your hand √ √ 18. imagine your korea √ 19. the mainstay true business √ 20. moving service √ √ total 17 0 11 (lam, 2009) the result of analysis above, the writers only found two functions of presupposition in advertisement. two functions are implicit competition and making the advertisement short and memorable.17 slogans advertisement containing implicit competition and 11 slogans advertisement containing making the advertisement short and memorable. in conclusion, implicit competition is the function often used by the advertisers in the slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition. probably, the advertisers assume that implicit competition is an easy and optimal function in delivering the message of advertisement clearly to compare the advantages of a product. lam (2009) states that the advertisement message has to be delivered clearly but implicitly, and often used for the ease of delivering message. one of strategy in advertising is comparing two or more products directly, it purpose to steal sales from competitors (griffin & ebert, 1996/2007). 145 sinta ananda & marwito wihadi presupposition analysis in some selected consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post in addition, there are some slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition has more than one function presupposition in advertisement, such as the function of implicit competition and making the advertisement short and memorable. implicit competition and making the advertisement short and memorable are the functions which often used by the advertisers to make the language of advertising is important. persuasive advertisement, comparative, short but memorable are needed to make the language of advertising is more important (lam, 2009). however, the writer did not find the function of presupposition causing the readers to consider the existence of the products or services. the advertisers do not use it function because probably the advertisers assume that it will make the readers confuse to consider existence the object advertised. so it will affect toward marketing and revenue the advertisers. the research about using of presuppositions as a research topic a lot of conducted by researchers, with different objects and media. when reading references about presupposition, many researchers talk about type and meaning of presupposition. therefore, the writer is interested in researching the types and the functions of presupposition in consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post newspaper. the writer uses some previous studies as references in this research. for examples of previous studies from bonyadi and samuel (2011), lam (2009), zare, abbaspour and nia (2012), kurniawan (2014), puspitasari (2015). from the results of several research above, the writer finds that the result of some research are different and similar with the result of research conducted by the writer. the research is conducted by bonyadi and moses (2011) focuses on comparison toward the using of types of presupposition used in two different newspaper, america newspaper and persian english newspaper. one of purposes from this research is to find out the types of presupposition with use yule’s theory and qualitative method. non-factive presupposition is the type of presupposition which often used in both of newspaper, america newspaper and persian english newspaper. this research has different result with the research is conducted by the writer. probably, the difference happens because different object as well as the use of language to certain purpose and certain circumstance. people speak or writer uses language with a certain purpose and in a certain circumstance. some advertisements are designed to all readers, but some to a set of readers. therefore, the advertiser designed advertisement for the people who intend to read them. (yingfang, 2007, p. 59). in other side, the research is conducted by kurniawan (2014) has similar result with the result of research conducted by the writer. this research focuses on the types of presupposition in the slogan of outdoor advertisement. yule’s theory and descriptive qualitative method are applied in this research. the type of presupposition which often found in this research is existential presupposition. it has similar result. probably, it happens because the writer analyzes the type of similar object, consumer advertisement. in conclusion, consumer advertisement focuses on type of existential presupposition because it refers to existence of product and service or contains referential expressions. 146 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee “existential presupposition is associated with referential expressions, arises simply because of an assumption that a person who uses such an expression intends to refer to something. all referential expressions give rise to existential presuppositions” (hashim, 2014, p. 58). meanwhile, the discussion about the types and the function of presupposition in advertisement based on lam’s discussion is same with the discussion conducted by puspitasari (2015) but different research object. the result of her research shows that non-factive presupposition is the type of presupposition which often used in mobile phone brochure. implicit competition and making the advertisement short and memorable are the functions of frequently used in mobile phone. lam (2009) states that persuasive advertisement, comparative, short and memorable are needed to make the language of advertising is important. conclusion the research investigates the presupposition in consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post newspaper on march, 1st-31st 2016 editions. this research focuses on identifying the types and the functions of presupposition in advertisement. yule’s theory and lam’s discussion are used in this research. in the process of collecting data, the writer finds 70 consumer advertisements and selects 20 consumer advertisements containing slogans and presuppositions. from 20 slogans of consumer advertisement, the writer finds 20 presupposition and four types of presupposition in the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition. there are 11 slogans containing existential presupposition or 55%, 4 slogans containing factive presupposition or 20%, 3 slogans containing lexical presupposition or 15%, and 2 slogans containing nonfactive presupposition or 10%. the dominant type of presupposition found in the selected consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition is existential presupposition. however, two other types of presupposition such as structural presupposition and counter-factual presupposition are not found by the writer. meanwhile, in the function of presupposition in advertisement, the writer only finds two functions are implicit competition and making the advertisement short and memorable. there are 17 slogans advertisement containing implicit competition and 11 slogans advertisement containing making the advertisement short and memorable. implicit competition is the function which frequently used in consumer advertisement slogan. meanwhile, the writer does not find the function of presupposition that cause the reader to consider the existence the product or service. in conclusion, not all type of presupposition and function of presupposition in advertisement are found in the slogans of consumer advertisement of the jakarta post newspaper on march 2016 edition. it happens because the advertisers make various types and functions of advertisement in the jakarta post newspaper. it affects the advertisers to have different assumption about what they want delivered, and allow the advertisers to have different presupposition. the advertisers make the advertisement in jakarta post newspaper focuses on consumer advertisement showing the existence and the advantages of products or services. it 147 sinta ananda & marwito wihadi presupposition analysis in some selected consumer advertisement slogans of the jakarta post is influenced by consumer needs and sales target which purpose to achieve sales promotion of products and services advertised. references. batyrovna, b,a. 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(2020). mobile assisted language learning: efl learners’ perceptions toward the use of mobile applications in learning english. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 183-194. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.2999. received: 01-04-2020 accepted: 18-05-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: although extensive research has been carried out on the positive effect of mobile assisted language learning (mall) for students’ learning, there have been few studies concerning on university students’ perceptions toward the use of mall in learning english. the study was undertaken to examine university students’ perceptions toward mall specifically the use of mobile application in learning english. the participants of this study were ninety six students (68 females and 28 males). data collection instruments used in this study were questionnaire and semi-structured interview. it reported that all participants apply mall by downloading and using english mobile applications to help their learning. six mobile applications which are often used by all participants were kamusku, google translate, elsa speak, youtube, zoom and google meet. the results of the questionnaires also showed that their perceptions toward the use of mall was that mall, in this case the english mobile application was considered to be useful and helped their learning, besides it was overall easy to use. keywords: mobile assisted language learning (mall); efl learners; learning english. introduction the low quality of graduates of english language education is something that needs special and serious attention from academics not only lecturers but also other stakeholders and the students. in this digital age, lecturers are not only limited to the transmitter of information but also has a very important and relevant role in preparing, compiling and organizing learning activities in class. some of its roles are as a designer, programmer, diagnostician, researcher, organizer, manager, innovator, educator and advisor (lanier, 2012). besides, lecturers are also a key success factor of college students. however, success of learning will also be achieved if students are able collaborate well so that the results obtained will be more leverage. a research shows that the majority of students of english education study programs still not yet autonomous or independent even though there is no denying that learner autonomy is one of the determining factors in the success of students’ learning (darsih, 2018). besides, the success of learning is also affected by their motivation. another study revealed that motivation of students in learning college english is low. students’ low motivation is reflected in their assessment of english as a boring and difficult subject. this might be one of the results of a teaching and learning process which tends to be repetitive and lack creativity. this also suggests a more teacher-centered teaching where students less active roles in class. therefore, there have been discussions on shifting from a teachercentered to a student-centered learning process. as stressed by lengkanawati (2016), there must be a change in the learning process from transferring knowledge from teacher to students to a learning process where students actively participate to gain some learnings. several studies have pointed to the benefits of educational technology particularly mobile assisted language learning (mall). it provides opportunities to implement a communicative approach more successfully (walsh, r., 2019). the use of mobile phone to access internet is found to be effective for students-centred teaching and collaborative learning (nah, white, & mailto:endang.darsih@uniku.ac.id mailto:nida.amalia.asikin@uniku.ac.id endang darsih & nida amalia asikin mobile assisted language learning: efl learners’ perceptions toward the use of mobile applications in learning english 184 sussex, 2008; osifo, 2019). therefore, in this day and age, mobile phones or smartphones have become an idol, trending and something very important until most students cannot escape from their smartphones. smartphones are no longer used as a communication tool but also are a social, work, and educational need. in developing countries, many people have adopted the use of cellular phones in the process learning. many studies have also been carried out by a number of researchers for identifying the use of technology among students, including usage of smartphone. for example, reinders (2010) explains 20 telephone usage ideas mobile in the language class. these twenty ideas allow teachers to offer increased language learning by taking advantage of that the students are very familiar and take it anywhere at any time. the other studies have reported that smartphone integration in language learning gives positive results and students are more interested in using smartphones to learn english especially in improving vocabulary (kukulska-hulme & shield, 2008; lu, 2008; saran et al., 2008; marzban & nafarzadehnafari 2018). teaching vocabulary by using smartphones or cellphones has remained popular (duman, orhon, & gedik, 2015; chen, liu, & huang, 2019). besides, the use of mobile phone to access internet is effective for learning listening skill and collaborative learning (nah, white, & sussex, 2008; hsu, 2015; huang, sun, 2010) and oral productive skills (kim, 2015). mall or mobile-assisted language learning is one of educational technology through smartphone applications designed for help student learning especially in the 21st century (loewen, crowther, isbell, kim, maloney, miller, & rawal, 2019; rocca, 2018). correspondingly, davie and hilber (2015) defines mall as the use of mobile devices for support language learning, using devices such as digital personal assistant (pda), ordinary cellphone, smartphones, tablet computer, android or mp3 player all of them are used for educational tools. a study conducted by kondo, m., ishikawa, y., smith, c., sakamoto, k., shimomura, h., & wada, n. (2012) reported that mall helps students improve their scores on the toeic listening and reading tests. mall also helps students improve their writing skill (gharehblagh and nasri 2019; al-hamad, raghda, al-jamal, dina, bataineh, 2019). this indicates that mall applications can be used as an effective mobile language learning tool. (gonulal, 2019). a recent study on a review of mall revealed that many studies are more descriptive than innovative and advocate the implementation of larger and long-term research studies on how mobile devices, and the ipad in particular, are impacting language teaching and learning. (morgana, 2019). other papers have highlighted the focus on the impact of mall on fostering the efl instruction (imtiaz, norrihan, aslam, waqar, 2016), the role of smartphones in helping students enhance their social and cultural capital (retorta, and cristovão, 2017), utilization of instagram vlog contributed to efl learners’ speaking skill on enhancing fluency, acquiring vocabulary items, and boosting confidence and motivation (wulandari, 2019), and the effect of mall in improving students’ motivation (teeter, 2017). when talking about mobile devices and their closer relationship with the teaching-learning innovation, the significance of mobile applications (apps) as useful tools in the achievement and acquisition for specific learning cannot be overlooked. therefore, the present study aims to identify types of english mobile apps that are used by the students in higher education, their perceptions toward the usefulness and the ease of use of mobile apps in learning english. the result of this study is expected to enrich the literature related to mall in learning college english. method the method deployed in this study was a mixed method which is an approach that involves qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques, integrating both data and using a certain design in its application (creswell, 2014). the design used is concurrent embedded which aims to answer questions which requires different types of data (malik & hamied, 2014). qualitative data were obtained from interviews with students. data collected were analyzed and interpreted, then described to find out the type of smartphones applications that students use to help them in learning english. furthermore, quantitative data comes from the questionnaires used for collecting specific data about students' perceptions of mall integration focusing on the usefulness and ease of mobile-assisted language learning. the questionnaire used in this study was adopted from a questionnaire compiled by davis (2003). the statements in this questionnaire were modified and then divided into three categories, i.e. the first category is open questions about the identity of the participants, the second english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 185 category is statements regarding the usefulness of mall in learning english, and the third is statements regarding the ease of use of mall in learning english. the measurements used in this study are by using a likert scale with five options (i.e. strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree. a total of 102 students from grade ii and iii of english education study program were involved in this research specifically to fill out questionnaires, while for the interview instrument not all students were involved. the data collected from questionnaire were analyzed quantitatively using descriptive statistics, while data taken from interview were analyzed qualitatively. after that, the data were reduced to general themes in order to focus on what is sought in this study. by doing data reduction, the data which share common information were categorized into broader themes. finally, the data were organized to go through data interpretation where the results were interpreted to become findings. results and discussion this study aims to find out what english language applications are used by students of the english education study program and their perceptions toward mobile assisted language learning (mall). data were collected through a questionnaire adopted from davis (2003) and modified according to the research context. questionnaire and interview questions are made using google form and can be accessed at https://forms.gle/jcfphcngwpxka269a. the questionnaire distributed to the total sample of 102 students, but returning questionnaires were 54 units from grade ii, as many as 42 units from grade iii, so that the total data from the questionnaire analyzed in this study were 96 questionnaire data. figure 1 represents the data of study participants who filled out the research questionnaire in terms of gender. figure 1. participants of the study the figure shows that the majority of participants in this study were female. of the total 96 participants who filled out the questionnaire, 71% of the participants were female students, and the remaining 29% of participants were male students. english mobile applications in student learning the first question in this study is related to what applications are used by students of english education study programs in helping their learning. based on the results of the questionnaires distributed to students of the english education study program about what applications they download and used on their smartphone/android to help learning english can be seen in figure 2. endang darsih & nida amalia asikin mobile assisted language learning: efl learners’ perceptions toward the use of mobile applications in learning english 186 figure 2. english mobile application used by english education students based on the results of the questionnaires presented in figure 2 it shows that the number of english mobile applications used by students is quite a lot; there are fifteen types of applications used by students of english education study programs to help their learning including kamusku, google translate, bbc, grammar test, english idiomatic, u dictionary, you tube, elsa speak, duolinggo, quizlet, speech notes, kahoot, zoom, google meet and kine master. of the fifteen applications, kamusku, google translate, you tube, elsa speak, zoom and google meet are applications that are often used by all participants. kamusku is an offline dictionary application of english to indonesian and vice versa. this application is the most widely used dictionary application by students because this application is simple, lightweight, and very easy to use and the most basic reason is that it is light to run even though ram is small. to translate words, students only need to enter the word they want to find meaning in the search field provided. it does not take long and does not need a loading process, the words sought will immediately appear with a variety of other related words. when the word that is searched appears, the meaning in question will also be directly listed. to find out more about the meaning, just tap on the word. in addition to the ease in finding the meaning of words in english to indonesian or vice versa, kamusku also has other features such as "speak" (speaker logo) located to the right of the search field. this feature is very useful especially for students who are still having difficulty with their pronunciation. once the "speak" button is tapped, the pronunciation will sound immediately. with this feature, of course, students will be helped especially in learning pronunciation. kamusku is considered very effective for translating words in english to indonesian or vice versa, but when you want to translate long sentences, an online translation service is available, which certainly requires an internet connection. nevertheless, students prefer to use the google translate application to translate longer sentences. google translate is a translator application developed by google inc. this application has a variety of good features and is quite complete because it not only translates text, images, sounds but also handwriting. similar to the kamusku application, the google translate application can also be used offline (without an internet connection). this is what might be the reason why these two applications are the most frequently used by students in helping their learning. elsa speak is an application designed to facilitate students learning to speak english. this application utilizes artificial intelligence (ai) and speech recognition to help improve and perfect english pronunciation, where pronunciation is the biggest challenge in learning english, thus becoming a barrier to speaking fluently and confidently. with this technology, elsa can detect user pronunciation errors with an accuracy of more than 95%. users can also receive advanced feedback to correct pronunciation errors. this is one of the things that distinguish elsa from other english learning applications. elsa speak provides more than 1,200 lessons and more than 60 topics for users to practice pronunciation, starting from the practice of pronunciation of words, phrases, and english sentences. another feature offered by elsa is an interactive dictionary, which will help users how to pronounce the words or phrases they are looking for. you tube is a free video sharing website on the internet. the website lets people upload, view, and share videos. videos can be rated with likes or dislikes, and viewers can subscribe to channels english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 187 they like. videos can be commented on if viewers log into their own accounts. the number of times a video has been watched (known as "views") is shown. many different types of videos can be put onto the website, such as educational content, animations, and events. with regard to the covid 19 pandemic that is still ongoing today, the online meeting application is an option for students who are forced to study and complete their work at home or work/study form home due to the covid-19 outbreak. one of these applications is zoom. zoom is a communication application using video. the application can be used on a variety of mobile devices, desktops, to telephones and space systems. in general, users use this application to conduct meetings to video and audio conferences. besides zooming, students also download applications that have the same features, google meet. this is an online video conversation conferencing application. in addition to the above applications that are most widely used by the participants, below are other applications downloaded by them: first is bbc, an application designed to learn english easily and effectively with exercises provided. through this application, of course students can learn english especially for their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills. second is speech notes, an application that can be downloaded on android that functions to convert spoken data into writing. so by using this application students can easily convert recorded or oral data into document form without having to type the spoken text because this application automatically types the oral data into written text. third is quizlet, a complete free learning aid to support the teaching and learning process, including for teachers / lecturers. in this application there are flashcard features that can guide users in mastering a particular topic. even now quizlet has grown into an international study site. fourth is kahoot, a free learning platform based game application, as an educational technology. this application can bring a lively quiz atmosphere into the classroom. by playing kahoot, learning becomes very enjoyable and makes the students not bored following the learning which is very difficult to understand. fifth is kine master, a mobile application specifically designed to help android and ios users to modify videos from ordinary videos to more interesting videos. students use this application to modify their presentation videos because learning is still online during the covid pandemic 19. students’ perceptions toward mobile assisted language learning (mall) the second question in this study is related to students' perceptions of english education study programs toward mobile assisted language learning (mall). questionnaires from davis (2003) were adopted and modified to collect data. the statements in this questionnaire were modified and then divided into three categories; the first category is an open question about the identity of the respondents and the results can be seen in figure 1 regarding the profile of the respondent, the second category is statements regarding the usefulness of mall in learning english, the results of which can be seen in table 1 and figure 3, and the third category is about the ease of mall, the results of which can be seen in table 2. the measurement used in this study is to use a likert scale with five options, namely strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree. the following are the results of the distribution of questionnaires regarding the usefulness of mall in learning english. table 1. students’ perception toward the usefulness of mall no statements sa a n d sd 1 using english applications on my smartphone improves the quality of the work/task i do 40% 58% 2% 0% 0% 2 using english applications on my smartphone gives me greater control over my work 0% 60% 40% 0% 0% 3 english mobile applications enables me to accomplish tasks more quickly 72% 28% 0% 0% 0% 4 english mobile application supports my ability in speaking, reading, listening and writing. 20% 52% 13% 15% 0% 5 using english mobile applications increases my productivity 10% 44% 32% 14% 0% 6 using english mobile applications increases my english vocabulary, grammar mastery and my 3% 64% 15% 18% 0% endang darsih & nida amalia asikin mobile assisted language learning: efl learners’ perceptions toward the use of mobile applications in learning english 188 pronunciation 7 using english mobile applications allows me to accomplish more work than would otherwise be possible 0% 30% 42% 20% 8% 8 using english mobile applications makes it easier to learn the material 20% 51% 15% 14% 0% 9 using english mobile applications enhances my effectiveness on my work 10% 28% 22% 26% 14% 10 using english mobile applications improves my motivation to learn english 14% 34% 21% 20% 11% 11 overall, i find english mobile applications useful in my learning 20% 80% 0% 0% 0% figure 3. students’ perceptions on the usefulness of mall table 1 shows that for item 1 which is related to the statement ‘using english applications on my smartphone improves the quality of the work / task i do’ it is known that, the majority of students as much as 58% agree that englishlanguage applications improve the quality of their assignments. based on the results of interviews with several students, it can be said that students feel that they are displaying assignments better both in the form of oral and written texts with the help of its english-language application. for example, in speaking english, students are helped to give a better performance in terms of pronunciation and increased vocabulary in supporting speaking skills. in addition, in writing appearance, students' written texts are more tidy in terms of grammar and choice of words. for item 2 which relates to the statement ‘using english applications on my smartphone gives me greater control over my work’ 60% of students agree that the use of english applications in their smartphones gives them greater control in their tasks and work. this means they are the ones who have constraints on the quality of the tasks and jobs that they want to display. good or bad learning and their tasks depend on them in utilizing english-language applications. for item 3 which is related to the statement ‘english mobile applications enables me to accomplish tasks more quickly’ it is known that as many as 72% of students rate that the englishlanguage smartphone applications that they download and use are able to help them complete their tasks and work faster. this is because that with the rapid development of technology, so that these applications have succeeded in becoming portable facilities and media that help students in completing their assignments. they can open the applications needed wherever and whenever there is difficulty in doing their jobs. for item no. 4 which relates to the statement ‘english mobile application supports my abilities in speaking, reading, listening and writing’ it is known that 52% of students agree that the english smartphone application supports their skills in speaking, reading, listening and writing. however, as many as 15% of students rated that the english-speaking smartphone application did not support their skills in speaking, reading, listening and writing. for most students some english-language applications such as elsa speak and kamusku are able to support four student language skills. but it is undeniable that with the limitations possessed by applications used by english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 189 students, it makes students not helped in displaying better language skills. for item no. 5 that is related to the statement ‘using english mobile applications increases my productivity’ it is known that 44% of students agree that the use of an english-speaking smartphone application can increase productivity. on the other hand, as many as 32% of students gave a doubtful assessment of this statement. this is because for some students, student productivity is not only determined by the smartphone application in english, but can be by other factors such as their craft and tenacity in doing assignments and utilizing the application. for item no. 6 regarding the statement 'using english mobile applications increases my english vocabulary, grammar mastery and my pronunciation' it is known that most students as much as 64% agree that the use of an englishspeaking smartphone application can improve their vocabulary, grammar mastery and pronunciation. based on interviews with several students, it is known that the smartphone application that they download and often use can help them improve english vocabulary, grammar comprehension and pronunciation. this is because some applications provide features that support learning vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation in english such as kamusku, elsa speak, and google translate. for item no 7 which is related to the statement ‘using english mobile applications allows me to accomplish more work than would otherwise be possible’ it is known that 42% of students give a doubtful perception of this statement. they are not entirely sure that the use of english-language applications in smartphones can make it get more work done. for students, the main factor that determines the amount of work that can be completed depends not on the application, but on the level of difficulty of the task and the level of student crafts. for item no 8 which is related to the statement ‘using english mobile applications makes it easier to learn the material as many as 51% of students agree that the use of an englishspeaking smartphone application makes it easy to learn the subject matter. this shows that another benefit that is felt by most students of english education courses is the ease they get in learning the subject matter. based on the results of the interview, the subject matter that is felt difficult to understand in the classroom from lecturers and books becomes easier to learn by opening the application. however, as many as 15% of students do not think the same. this is because due to the different learning styles of students, there are those that are better understood by lecturers, but some are clearer than applications. for item no 9, which is related to the statement ‘using english mobile applications enhances my effectiveness on my work’ it is known that only 28% of students agree with this statement. 26% of students responded disagree to this statement. this indicates that students are not sure of the effectiveness of using the english smartphone application. there are still other factors not examined that can improve the effectiveness of work and student learning by using english-language applications. for item no. 10 which is related to the statement ‘using english mobile applications improves my motivation to learn english; it is known that 34% of students agree, 21% are hesitant and 20% disagree with the statement. based on the results of the interview concluded that the application can increase motivation to learn english because they are practical, can be taken anywhere and at any time can be opened. with this practicality, and student addiction to mobile phones make students eager to learn english. however, for those who disagree, they do not consider that the ups and downs of their motivation are determined by the application used, but from other factors such as lecturers, parents, peers, environmental factors and material factors being studied. for the last item related to the statement 'overall, i find english mobile applications useful in my learning' it is known that as many as 80% agree and 20% strongly agree that the englishspeaking smartphone application is beneficial for student learning. for example some applications for the purpose of translating are deemed to provide significant benefits for students. first, the application is very easy to use both in online and offline conditions. second, the practicality of the application allows students to open it whenever and wherever they need it. third, the application does not consume too much big data. fourth, the application helps students recognize new words and meanings, examples of their use and how to pronounce them. this of course helps students to support their pronunciation and improve their grammar mastery. fifth, the application stimulates four main abilities of english namely speaking, listening, writing and reading abilities. for example in some applications such as bbc, elsa speak and you tube, students can hone four main skills in mastering foreign languages each endang darsih & nida amalia asikin mobile assisted language learning: efl learners’ perceptions toward the use of mobile applications in learning english 190 time they combine and integrate these skills; listening (listening, selection, pronunciation and intonation of words displayed in the application), writing (when students write what they are listening to, even though they do not know how to spell a term correctly, their brain will be stimulated to search for a matching spelling equivalent), reading (when reading back the words that students have written are considered able to make them better remember and understand the matter), speaking (when students use it and practice it in real conversation or when reciting it). the four language skills when applied are significantly related to stimulation of three linguistics skills, namely vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. finally, the application is useful in helping students writing. with a rich vocabulary of applications used to support students to make writing using terms that are not monotonous. meanwhile, the following is the result of questionnaire distribution regarding the ease of use of mall in learning english. table 2. students’ perceptions toward the ease of use of mall no statements sa a n d sd 1 i find english mobile applications system cumbersome to use 0% 16% 35% 39% 10% 2 learning to operate english mobile applications is easy for me 10% 50% 22% 18% 0% 3 interacting with english mobile applications is often frustrating 0% 20% 50% 30% 0% 4 i find it easy to get english mobile applications to do what i want it to do 4% 46% 40% 8% 2% 5 english mobile applications is rigid and inflexible to interact with 0% 21% 49% 30% 0% 6 it is easy for me to remember how to perform tasks using english mobile applications 3% 76% 21% 0% 0% 7 interacting with english mobile applications requires a lot of mental effort 10% 24% 47% 19% 0% 8 my interaction with english mobile applications is clear and understandable 0% 24% 51% 25% 0% 9 i find it takes a lot effort and time to become skillful as using english mobile applications 7% 52% 18% 23% 0% 10 overall, i find english mobile applications system easy to use. 24% 62% 14% 0% 0% figure 4. students’ perceptions toward the ease of use of mall regarding students’ perceptions on the ease of use of mall, there are 10 items of statements used in this questionnaire. for item no. 1 related to the statement 'i find english mobile applications system cumbersome to use', students gave varied responses. 10% strongly disagree, 39% of students disagree, 35% are neutral, and 16% agree to the statement that the englishlanguage smartphone application is considered to have a difficult system so it is difficult to use. this is because applications that are downloaded by students are diverse and have different systems, some are difficult and some are easy to use. some dictionary applications that are online english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 191 and offline are considered to have a simple system so students can directly use it easily. however, some other applications are considered difficult to operate because students have to go through several steps that are quite complex and not easy. most important is the desire of students to learn the application, because basically there is nothing difficult if they want to learn. for item no 2 which is related to the statement 'learning to operate english mobile applications is easy for me' 50% of students agree with this statement. as previously stated that there is nothing difficult if we want to learn, but back to students whether they have the desire to learn or not. for item number 3 related to the statement 'interacting with english mobile applications is often frustrating' it is known that as many as 50% of students give a neutral response to this statement. this neutral response shows that some students feel frustrated when interacting with english-speaking smartphone applications and some students feel fine when interacting and using those applications. when a job cannot be completed easily and quickly by the application, or when students encounter obstacles such as internet access and speed in operating these applications, some students experience frustration. for item no 4 which is related to the statement "i find it easy to get english mobile applications to do what i want it to do" it is known that as many as 46% of students agree that they feel easy when they use english applications in completing an assignment. for example when students want to search for a particular vocabulary, the application is able to provide what they are looking for. in addition, when they want to learn a material, they find it easy because they only have to open the application and find it. for item no 5, which is related to the statement of english mobile applications is rigid and inflexible to interact with, it is known that 49% provide a neutral response to this statement. this shows that some students still give positive and negative responses to the english-speaking smartphone application in terms of how to use it. most students considered that the english application was rigid, but most of the others considered that the application was flexible. in essence, back again to the users of the application, whether they can respond and interact with the application rigidly or flexibly. for item no 6 which is related to the statement 'it is easy for me to remember how to perform tasks using english mobile applications', it is known that 76% agree with this statement. most students agreed that they find it easy to remember how to do an assignment using an english-language application. for example related to the task of pronunciation, grammar and translation, students find it easy to do these tasks by using the application. for item no 7 which is related to the statement 'interacting with english mobile applications requires a lot of mental effort' it is known that 47% of students gave a neutral response to this statement. this shows that some students feel that interacting and using these applications requires mental effort such as patience because the applications downloaded by students have different levels of difficulty, which of course requires different mental efforts. however, there are also some students who feel fine and do not require much mental effort in using the application. for item no 8 which is related to the statement 'my interaction with english mobile applications is clear and understandable' it is known that 51% gave a neutral response, and 24% agreed to this statement. for item no. 9 which is related to the statement 'i find it takes a lot of effort and time to become skillful as using english mobile applications', it is known that 52% agree with this statement. this shows that they agree that it takes considerable time and effort to become skilled in using an english-speaking smartphone application. the more often the application in english, the more skilled it is in operating the application. for item no. 10 which is related to the statement ‘overall, i find the english mobile applications system easy to use’ it is known that 62% of students agree with this statement. this shows that most students find that the english applications they download tend to be easy to use or operate. conclusion mobile-assisted language learning, also known as mall is undergoing rapid evolution. mobile phones particularly english mobile applications can support many types of learning. they can be easily used outside the classroom because they can be in them, students can learn or practice pieces of information that can be managed anywhere on their own time, thereby taking advantage of their convenience. based on the results of data analysis, it is found that almost all endang darsih & nida amalia asikin mobile assisted language learning: efl learners’ perceptions toward the use of mobile applications in learning english 192 participants apply mall by downloading and using english mobile applications to help their learning. six mobile applications which are often used by all participants to help their learning are kamusku, google translate, elsa speak, youtube, zoom and google meet. the results of the questionnaires also showed that their perceptions toward the use of mall was that mall, in this case the english mobile applications are considered to be useful and helped their learning, besides it was overall easy to use. acknowledgement we have to thank kemendikbud of republic of indonesia which has fully funded this research through the penelitian dosen pemula (pdp) scheme. we are also very thankful to universitas kuningan which has provided us an ample opportunity to exert a passion for research, writing and publication. to the dean of the teachers training and education faculty of universitas kuningan and the english language 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(2019). improving efl learners’ speaking proficiency through instagram vlog. llt journal: a journal on language and language teaching, 22(1), 111-125. doi: 10.24071/llt.2019.220111. http://doi.org/10.1017/s0958344008000633 http://doi.org/10.1017/s0958344008000633 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej914893.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages2030012 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages2040019 endang darsih & nida amalia asikin mobile assisted language learning: efl learners’ perceptions toward the use of mobile applications in learning english 194 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 771 can technology-enhanced flipped learning instill character education? indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions risa triarisanti korean language education study program, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: risatriarisanti@upi.edu arif husein lubis (corresponding author) korean language education study program, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: lubis_ah@upi.edu velayeti nurfitriana ansas korean language education study program, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: velaansas@upi.edu apa citation: triarisanti, r., lubis, a. h., & ansas, v. n. (2022). can technology-enhanced flipped learning instill character education? indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 771-782. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.4687 received: 09-06-2022 accepted: 27-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction character education is an endless discourse to be discussed, even in this more globalized education era. the stipulation of character education is following the goal of education in 2030, mentioned by organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd, 2018) that learning approaches in the education 4.0 era are to create future-ready learners. those learners are expected to have active, responsible, aware, and engaged characters to be the agents of change. it is strengthened by previous literature (singh, 2019) that character education in this 21st century aims to develop students’ commitment to be responsible, caring, and contributing citizens for the success of establishing a democratic young society. today’s learners including in the english learning context are, therefore, encouraged to be involved in a abstract: the advantages of incorporating technology-enhanced flipped learning in english classrooms are nothing new. however, the impact of incorporating the learning method on the occurrence and decline of students’ characters has not much been revealed. this study aims to fill the void by exploring the students’ perceptions of whether flipped learning and the use of technology in learning english can instill character education. eighty-four (n=84) indonesian undergraduate efl students participated in this study. a 22-item questionnaire with a checklist and open-ended types was filled out after the students completed a 16-week course. while percentages were obtained from the checklist responses, codes and categories were generated from the open-ended responses. the results revealed that flipped learning could instill character values of responsibility, independence, and curiosity. the in-class group discussion was considered as the most contributing activity to the instillment of character values. character values of religiosity, patriotism, and nationalism were less occurred among the students. furthermore, the use of ict-based learning media such as youtube, whatsapp, the internet, and mobile phone could instill character values of independence, creativity, teamwork, activeness, and criticality. however, few students perceived that such learning media could influence them to commit cheating or become less concentrated during group discussion. this study emphasizes the teacher’s roles in designing learning activities oriented to developing the students’ english language skills and character. keywords: character education; flipped learning; indonesian efl students; perceptions; technology-enhanced learning. risa triarisanti, arif husein lubis, & velayeti nurfitriana ansas can technology-enhanced flipped learning instill character education? indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions 772 student-centered, contextual, community-integrated, and technology-enhanced learning environment. character education (ce) is nothing new in the education sector since it is associated with integrating values into teaching and learning and values and education are inseparable (mohamad, sihes, bohari, & uda, 2020). the basic concept of character education is the conscious action to instill and habituate moral virtues (singh, 2019). therefore, this deliberate action is intended to make the students “knowing the good, loving the good, and doing the good”. character is associated with moral judgments and represents all personal qualities that make one worthy (pala, 2011). it denotes the consistency of manifesting virtues or good habits. previous scholars (chang & chou, 2015) clarified the concept of the character itself as one’s dispositions or personal traits that influence how they respond to diverse circumstances. qoyyimah (2016) further explained that character education is focused on the students’ academic needs and moral development simultaneously. conclusively, character education is a deliberate action to develop students’ character by cultivating virtues or character values, referring to the moral standards, and raising their awareness of maintaining those values in diverse situations. hence, teachers play an important role to realize the process of transmitting such values to their students. character education has been discussed in the previous literature (astuti, aziz, sumarti, & bharati, 2019; sarkadi, casmana, & rahmawati, 2020), particularly in the indonesian context. the encouragement of character development from the education sector is fundamentally based on the goal of national education system. although character education is not formulated as a formal subject, it is integrated into all subjects and activities to shape the students’ strong personality (muhtar & dallyono, 2020). rooted in pancasila (five pillar of indonesian ideology), the policy related to the national education system clearly states that character education is a pivotal and prioritized means of realizing national development mandated in the planning of national long-term development from 2005 to 2025. we adapted the 18 character values from the guideline of the implementation of character education (center of curriculum and books, 2011): responsibility, independence, curiosity, discipline, honesty, tolerance, creativity, love to read, hard work, appreciation towards others' achievements, social awareness, friendliness / communicativeness, peace, democracy, environment awareness, religiosity, patriotism, nationalism. in a more digitalized era, chang and chou (2015) emphasized that the educators must develop students’ understanding and awareness of online moral standards and misbehavior. they further explain that the core virtues in a cyberspace comprise respect, honesty, integrity, care, patience, fairness, and justice. those virtues are rooted in the basic concept of character education. it is then relevant to examine character education in a technology-enhanced language learning (tell)-based learning environment. tell has long been a helpful approach to cater to the students’ needs in the learning process. technology-enhanced learning is defined as an instructional approach to enhance learning and teaching through technology (kirkwood & price, 2013). this approach is intended to make the learning process costand timeeffective, sustainable, improved, and positively transformed. tell is conceptualized as using technology to accomplish certain language tasks or achieve instructional goals “using technical processes, methods, or knowledge” (shadiev & yang, 2020, p. 1). the use of technology assists the students to retrieve, produce, and disseminate knowledge in a more open and flexible learning atmosphere. those merits may raise the students’ awareness of enacting responsible, cooperative, active, confident, critical, and respectful characters. several research (aghni, vianty, & petrus, 2020; ashfihana, 2021; islami, 2016; noprianto, suherdi, & muslim, 2022; qoyyimah, 2016) has investigated the implementation of character education particularly in the indonesian efl context. qoyyimah (2016) conducted a study on character education in indonesian state schools. she analyzed the efl teachers’ lessons to explore how they understood their roles in enacting moral curricular reform in the classroom. the data from interview and classroom observation revealed that the efl state school teachers viewed that the implementation of character education should be done through invisible pedagogy where moral values were infused implicitly in designing their classroom activities. however, on certain occasions, they explicitly informed the importance of the values through visible pedagogy. in a more comprehensive manner, aghni et al.’s (2020) study showed that ce could be english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 773 applied through several strategies such as group discussion and individual assignment. the use of instructional methods such as group discussion to instill character values was justified in another study conducted by ashfihana (2021) in the pre-service english teachers’ teaching practice program. ultimately, ce could serve as a pivotal means of maintaining the students’ character development, as what noprianto et al. (2022) found in their study. previous studies have also been concerned with the infusion and development of character values in the teaching and learning resources. for example, darmayenti, besral, & yustina (2021) developed efl textbooks, which included religious characters and local wisdom. the results showed that the language experts and students strongly agreed on the inclusion of religious characters in each chapter of the textbook. additionally, ashfihana (2021) explained that the pre-service teachers expressed some personality traits such as honesty, trustworthiness, respect, and responsibility in the lesson plans. in the context of tell, chang and chou (2015) explored the perceived e-character education (e-ce) among 2495 of 2868 taiwanese teachers from 556 elementary and 400 junior high schools by distributing a questionnaire, conducting a focus group interview, and doing a content analysis of teachers’ posted articles. the results generally disclosed three categories of virtues considered essential to be taken into account: self-oriented, interpersonal/social-oriented, and individualsociety-oriented virtues. the four most essential cyberspace virtues were law abidance, respect, selfdiscipline, and sharing, and they were interconnected with one another in a cyberspace-driven learning design. husna, purnawarman, suherdi, & lubis (2019) reviewed fourteen published research-based articles mainly related to the potentials and drawbacks of using youtube for the 21stcentury english language e-learning. the findings informed that youtube could indirectly instill several character values manifested in the forms of autonomy, teamwork, professionalism, creativity, and reflection. the development of students’ autonomy was also identified in the flipped english learning in tsai’s (2019) study. albeit not explicitly related to character education, the findings confirmed qoyyimah’s (2016) invisible pedagogy. the learning activities designed in an online learning environment could enable the students to foster their independence character value as the manifestation of learner autonomy in learning english. however, inculcating character education in this digital age to students is not an easy way out. one of them is articulated by noprianto et al. (2022) that integrating ce into the curriculum has not been optimally carried out. this should be taken into a serious account since the students might be dealing with the opposing sides of using technology such as cyberbullying, sexting, academic dishonesty, and other types of characters' decline. in a more specific context, english language teaching, some issues are reported in a review of tell studies by shadiev and yang (2020). they found that technology use may generate inappropriate feedback, trigger students’ frustration, and distract the learning process. those drawbacks can result in the decline of characters where the students do not manifest hard work, curiosity, and discipline character values. moreover, research on the perceptions of character education among undergraduate efl students in a flipped learning environment, assisted by the use of technology is still scant. flipped learning is a learning method integrating the concept of tell into the learning process. it is often termed as flipped classroom, inverted classroom, or reverted instruction. it is an instructional method through which the monologue teaching process is done outside the classroom, enhanced by the use of various educational technology (akçayır & akçayır, 2018; webb & doman, 2020). incorporating flipped learning is found to be a useful method in the elt context. a review done by turan and akdag-cimen (2020) showed that flipped learning can encourage activeness, boost up selfconfidence, foster autonomy, and enhance collaboration. flipped learning was also perceived beneficial to enhance the students’ willingness to communicate (amiryousefi, 2017), rendering the increased interactions and active participation among the students (hung, 2015). flipped learning also enables the students to be less anxious in learning english, which could influence their level of learning motivation. turan and akdag-cimen (2020) further revealed that the incorporation of flipped learning could develop students’ learning strategies and thinking skills. apart from the merits of incorporating flipped learning in the efl classrooms (see turan & akdagcimen, 2020 for a comprehensive review on this risa triarisanti, arif husein lubis, & velayeti nurfitriana ansas can technology-enhanced flipped learning instill character education? indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions 774 topic), the challenges remain in the surface of conversation. such a learning method is perceived burdensome for some students because they experience an increased workload, compared to the traditional learning mode (i.e. monologue teaching in the classroom, followed by exercises outside the classroom). hence, investigating the potential of incorporating flipped learning to instill character education among efl students particularly in the indonesian context is pivotal to better inform the pedagogy of english in accordance to the indonesian principles of character education in the higher education settings. raised by these concerns, the present study explores character education and the decline of characters in learning english using the technologyenhanced flipped learning method from the indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions. the following research questions drive this study. rq 1: what character values are occurred and less occurred among indonesian undergraduate efl students through flipped learning? what activities are contributing to the instillment of the character values? rq 2: what character values are occurred and declined among the students through the use of ictbased learning media? method the present research was designed as a descriptive qualitative study (creswell & creswell, 2018) because it was intended to describe the indonesian efl students’ perceptions of the potentials and drawbacks of technology-enhanced flipped learning in instilling character education. specifically, this issue was investigated from the activities and the ict-based learning media used in the classroom. in the indonesian higher education context, the stipulation of character education is based on indonesia's ultimate goal of national education system to develop learners’ skills and noble characters simultaneously. one-hundred first-year undergraduate students in a private university in south jakarta were involved in the entire course. their major is information technology. however, only 84 students returned the questionnaires in this study. eight students could not fully participate due to administrative affairs or health issues. another ten students did not return the questionnaire. the students were divided into three classes (class a=34 students, class b=33 students, class c=33 students). the reason for choosing the research site was that although the university is known as a technology campus, the instillment of noble character values has been the core of teaching orientation among the lecturers in the three learning domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains. the students had also given their consent to participate in this research. this study employed a questionnaire to obtain the data. table 1 depicts the details of the questionnaire (checklist=11 items, open-ended=11 items). the formulation of the questionnaire items regarding character education was referred to the guidelines for implementing character education (center of curriculum and books, 2011) where there are eighteen characters enumerated in the guidelines. three more character values, i.e. patience, initiative, and perseverance, were added from related literature. the “love nation” and “spirit of nation” character values were redefined as nationalism and patriotism, respectively. the researchers did formulation of the items related to the decline of characters by reflecting on previous literature. table 1. the details of the questionnaire items item no. item type objective 1, 3, 5 checklist occurrences of character values through flipped learning activities 2, 4, 6 openended reasons for the responses in item 1, 3, 5 7, 11, 15, 19 checklist occurrences of character values through the use of ict-based learning media 9, 13, 17, 21 checklist the decline of characters from the use of ict-based learning media 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22 openended reasons for the responses about character education through and the decline of characters from the use of ict-based learning media the questionnaire was formulated by using the indonesian language to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation. additionally, an extra “other” option was provided in every checklist item if the students had different choices not available in the list. because the open-ended items were not set compulsory to fill out, some students explained only several chosen character values. the students filled out the questionnaire after completing the sixteenweek semester from september to december 2019. all students reported that no questionnaire item or response option was ambiguous, unclear, or difficult to understand. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 775 the first author served as the teacher as well in this research. the teaching process was conducted before the covid-19 pandemic situation. the teacher spent an extensive amount of time to prepare for the learning design and materials. all teachers obtained an official training session from the campus to operate the moodle-based learning management system (lms). in the pre-class session, the students were encouraged to study the materials posted in the lms by the teacher several days before the class began. they were also allowed to enrich their knowledge by exploring other relevant resources to get themselves ready to participate in the in-class activities. several follow-up questions were provided to evaluate their understanding of the lessons. the in-class hours were mostly spent by group discussions where each student had a particular role to play (e.g., discussion director as the person who managed the flow of discussion). the learning process continued with group exercises. afterwards, the teacher allocated some time for an inter-group sharing, followed by reinforcement and feedback. the activities were intended to confirm the students’ comprehension and to activate peer learning so that the sense of interdependence toward successful learning process could be nurtured. in the after-class session, the students were given individual exercises to strengthen their grammar skills. once the students completed the questionnaire, the data analysis process was done in two stages. in the first stage, the responses of each checklist item were analyzed by using descriptive statistical technique. the number of students choosing each questionnaire item was divided by the total number of student respondents and multiplied by 100%. meanwhile, the responses of each open-ended item were analyzed by applying a qualitative data analysis technique (creswell & creswell, 2018). coding and categorization were conducted based on the eighteen character values. the analysis results were then sorted out to address the research questions. finally, the selected excerpts were translated into english carefully to get the same meaning as the indonesian version. results and discussion results occurred and less occurred character values through flipped learning in an efl classroom table 2 depicts the overall results of manifested character values in the learning activities through flipped learning. the results showed that although no character value obtained by 100% of students, flipped learning has instilled the manifestation of all character values. the top three character values were: responsibility (67%), independence (51%), and curiosity (51%). table 2. occurrences of character values among the students n o. character values number of students (n=84) percentage 1 responsibility 56 67% 2 independence 43 51% 3 curiosity 43 51% 4 discipline 41 49% 5 honesty 37 44% 6 tolerance 36 43% 7 creativity 36 43% 8 love to read 35 42% 9 patience 33 39% 10 initiative 33 39% 11 hard work 32 38% 12 appreciation towards others' achievements 31 37% 13 social awareness 30 36% 14 friendliness / communicativeness 26 31% 15 peace 16 19% 16 perseverance 15 18% 17 democracy 10 12% 18 environment awareness 9 11% 19 religiosity 8 10% 20 patriotism 5 6% 21 nationalism 4 5% several pairs of character values, however, were found to conform. independent character value did not necessarily represent initiative (51% and 39%, respectively). the act of being honest in learning english was perceived to be more triggered by the students than the actualization of being a religious person (44% and 10%, respectively). however, one of the manifestations of religiosity character value could be in the form of honesty. responsibility character value was also not in line with hard work and perseverance character values (67%, 38%, and 18%, respectively). the number of students who experienced the development of tolerance character value was higher than that of democracy character risa triarisanti, arif husein lubis, & velayeti nurfitriana ansas can technology-enhanced flipped learning instill character education? indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions 776 value (43% and 12%, respectively). it means that the students held different views on the boundary of defining the character values mentioned above. regarding the less occurred character values, no character value obtained 0% of the students. as envisaged, the bottom three character values occurred in the present study were: nationalism (5%), patriotism (6%), and religiosity (10%). environment awareness was less occurred as well (11%). the findings were further described in the following excerpts. during discussion, we also often use english. in addition to that, we also care less about the environment. it is due to the use of excessive papers in doing the task. (environment awareness) because we learn english is not a matter of religion. (misunderstood religiosity) the less occurrence of environment awareness was associated with the students’ habitual action to use excessive papers when accomplishing the assignments. they already understood the reasons behind the less occurrence of those character values. such understanding becomes worthy modal to regularize those character values in flipped english learning. furthermore, the analysis results pertain to the potentials of flipped learning activities in instilling character education. table 3 displays the overall descriptive statistical results. the results demonstrated that most of the students experienced the development of character values from the group discussion in the classroom compared with other learning activities (88%). almost half of them also thought that group discussion in the learning management system helped maintain certain character values (48%), followed by role-based assignments in the third position with 45% of the students. the least activity perceived to be useful in instilling character education was understanding learning materials from the teacher (31%). table 3. character education through the learning activities no. learning activity number of students (n=84) percentage 1 group discussion in the classroom 74 88% 2 group discussion in the lms 40 48% 3 role-based assignments 38 45% 4 searching for additional materials from the internet 35 42% 5 weekly assignments 30 36% 6 teacher’s monologue teaching 27 32% 7 understanding learning materials from the teacher 26 31% 8 other 0 0% the findings were corroborated by the students’ further explanation when learning english in the flipped classroom, as in the following excerpts. each group member is given the responsibility to present the material according to the role given. from there, i become more responsible to make the discussion run smoothly. (responsibility) in group discussions, of course, given the tasks and responsibilities, we learn to respect each other's differences of opinion and carry out our respective responsibilities properly. (tolerance) it shapes me to be a person who achieves goals together, not alone. (interdependence) i think that the discussion is quite important for myself, because it can help increase my confidence to convey information to friends. (self-confidence from responsibility) the students argued that the role-based group discussion in the in-class session encouraged them to understand the responsibilities of each group member. hence, they got an equal portion to participate and collaborate to achieve the intended goals. such in-class activity also triggered them to be more tolerant with different perspectives. this character value could be the catalyst for lessening the genderor proficiency-based exclusiveness of participation because every single voice was considered to achieve mutual goals and understanding. it also developed the students’ awareness that every group member contributed to achieving the goals. some other students posited that the group discussion encouraged them to increase self-confidence because every group member should present something based on the assigned role. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 777 character education and the decline of characters from the use of ict-based learning media in this sub-section, the analysis results were compared among the four types of ict-based learning media used in the flipped classroom to enhance the students’ english language learning, i.e. youtube, whatsapp, the internet, and mobile phone. the separation of mobile phone from the other three applications was because we intended to explore the effect of each type of technology on the students’ character education and the decline of their characters. figure 1 shows the overall results. the bar chart generally exhibited character education through all learning media, but no character value ranked the first position in all learning media. while no character value was perceived as manifested in the flipped classroom by more than 60% of the participating students, the development of criticality character value from all learning media in learning english was experienced by the least number of students. figure 1. occurrences of character values from the use of ict-based learning media specifically, the students perceived that youtube, like social media, could instill character education, such as independence and creativity in learning english (49%, respectively) more than the other three character values. meanwhile, although whatsapp was categorized as social media, it could not develop character values of independence and creativity more than through the use of youtube. the development of teamwork and activeness character values was most noticeable (51% and 43%, respectively) from whatsapp. criticality in learning english was the least induced character value in whatsapp (27%) compared to the other three learning media. like youtube, the internet as a worldwide system of computer networks was believed to spark students’ independence and creativity character values (52% and 39%, respectively) more than teamwork, activeness, and criticality. the mobile phone was the most contributing ict-based learning media in developing the students’ character of independence in learning english (58%) and activeness character value in group discussion (49%). the following excerpts further explained the reasons for the findings mentioned above. you watch it yourself and you have to understand if you don't understand, just ask a friend. (independence) by using youtube, we can think more broadly and freely. a lot of material can be found on youtube. i feel freer to improvise when watching youtube. when you practice watching youtube instead of reading it feels better. (creativity) i could learn a lot of things from the internet. it is easy to operate, fast, and free. (independence) because the teacher inverted the learning process where the monologue teaching was done outside the classroom by giving some curated youtube videos, some of the students argued that it triggered them to actualize self-paced or independent learning. hence, their independence could be fostered by understanding the materials autonomously and risa triarisanti, arif husein lubis, & velayeti nurfitriana ansas can technology-enhanced flipped learning instill character education? indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions 778 asking for help from their friends instead of their teacher if they encountered difficulties understanding the materials. some of the students also stated that the presence of multimodal learning resources in youtube videos enabled them to have more freedom and access to improvise while learning english. the multimodality of youtube videos could then enhance their creativity skills. likewise, the internet allowed them to quickly, freely, and quickly get access to numerous learning resources. this could make the students autonomous in executing their learning process. we hold discussions in various places and ways. we can do it directly face to face, use messaging applications on e-learning, or social media such as whatsapp, for example. (flexibility toward independence) sometimes we get motivation from group friends through wa. through wa, we can work together with friends, exchange ideas / knowledge. (teamwork) whatsapp makes it easier to communicate. we can ask a friend during e-learning. communication is made easier. for example, in terms of division of the tasks, i often ask about the materials or role selection in the wa group. (activeness) figure 2. types of the decline of characters from the use of ict-based learning media ict-based learning media such as whatsapp or the lms enhanced a self-paced or personalized learning atmosphere so that the students could determine how they executed every single learning stage. the learning media also helped them coordinate to run the discussion smoothly. whatsapp group was also considered a practical means of promoting teamwork character value because they could accomplish the assignments together. such social media could facilitate direct group communication to exchange some important information with one another. some students also asserted that the ease of communication through the wa group enabled them to ask about the materials or the role-based assignments. we feel more free and open by using mobile phones as the learning medium. the features of the mobile phones make it easier for me to access anything, including the learning materials. (independence) mobile phones make it easier to communicate with the group members. (activeness) because whatsapp and internet can be accessed by using mobile phones, the students’ explanation for the development of character values through mobile phones is similar. they asserted that mobile phones enabled them to explore learning materials. such personalized exploration could then foster their independence. likewise, the compact version of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 779 mobile phones could ease their communication process before the role-based group discussion. this helped the students keep practicing the character value of being active in the flipped classroom. on the other hand, the use of ict-based learning media was still believed by several students to be the contributing factor to the decline of characters. figure 2 exhibits the overall results. in general, none of the types of the decline of characters obtained 0% or 100% students. among the eight types of the decline of characters, the students perceived that ict-based learning media mostly influenced them to commit academic dishonesty such as cheating while doing the role-based assignments (average=13 students or 16% of 84 students). in contrastingly, the students thought that ict-based learning media were much less influential in making them passive in communicating with their friends during group discussion (average=2 students or 2% of 84 students). in particular, the use of mobile phone and the internet were perceived to be contributing to the decline of characters, especially cheating while doing the role-based assignments more than youtube and whatsapp. meanwhile, youtube and whatsapp as social media-based learning media were considered influential in making them not practice creativity character value during the completion of role-based assignments more than mobile phones and the internet. these social media tended to influence the students to commit cheating as well. the following excerpts represent the students’ opinions regarding the decline of characters from ict-based learning media in the flipped english classroom. it's so easy for me to get the materials that we usually just copy them without editing. (mobile phone) sometimes, we have fun chatting instead of working on the materials and do cheating. (whatsapp) because i always see the examples on youtube without trying to figure it out by myself first. (youtube) because when there is a trouble i just have to search for the solution in the internet. the use of the internet sometimes makes me not improve my critical thinking. (the internet) few students experiencing the decline of characters opined that the usability and flexibility of the ict-based learning media to get access to the various learning materials or resources made the students tend to do copy-pasting. this behavior could result in the manifestation of uncreative character among the students. even worse, the copypasting behavior made them uncritical every time they dealt with problems or difficulties. ultimately, they tended to commit cheating by exploiting those ict-based learning media. discussion this study has delineated character education and the decline of characters among indonesian undergraduate efl students through the incorporation of technology-enhanced flipped learning method. regarding the first research question, the results generally show that flipped learning can instill character values. of twenty character values, responsibility, independence, and curiosity are the top three most frequently occurred in the english classroom, as perceived by the students. meanwhile, the bottom three character values mostly perceived are religiosity, patriotism, and nationalism. the findings justify previous research (aghni et al., 2020; chang & chou, 2015) that responsibility is considered an essential interpersonal or social-oriented virtue. islami (2016) also found that independence and curiosity character values were instilled during the lessons at a madrasah (islamic-based) school. another worth-noting point is that technologyenhanced flipped english learning emphasizes an active, engaged, and autonomous learning process where the students are encouraged to be responsible for their learning; in other words, autonomous (tsai, 2019). this learning design enables the instilment of the three character values because the students plan, execute, monitor, and evaluate their learning activities by themselves in a flexible learning environment. on the other hand, the less occurred character values of religiosity, patriotism, and nationalism may be caused by the composition of the learning materials and themes, which are not related to culture learning. the lessons focus on the students’ development of grammar skills to be applied in a more productive discourse such as speaking and writing activities. risa triarisanti, arif husein lubis, & velayeti nurfitriana ansas can technology-enhanced flipped learning instill character education? indonesian undergraduate efl students’ perceptions 780 however, as one of the least perceived character value in the present study, religiosity is considered among the common character traits in ashfihana’s (2020) research. this discrepancy can be influenced by the students’ perception of the mere association of religiosity with the enactment of specific spiritual activities or rituals such as praying before conducting the learning process and the like, which are not explicitly done in the classroom. hence, the learning materials and learning activities in the classroom can affect the students’ perceptions of character education. it is essential for future research to provide detailed explanation regarding the domains where each of the character values can be enacted during the learning process. another important aspect is related to the learning activities, which influence the students to manifest character values in the flipped classroom. the results demonstrate that the in-class session through group discussions triggers their motivation to actualize the character values more than the other activities, followed by a group discussion in the lms and rolebased assignments. this resonates with the characteristics of flipped learning, i.e. active and collaborative. previous research (aghni et al., 2020; ashfihana, 2020) also noticed that group discussion can be a useful means for enacting character education; particularly respect and responsibility character traits. in the current study, the teacher assigns some roles to the students to drive the discussion process, followed by the assignments to strengthen their ability in that lesson. additionally, collaborative learning can develop students’ characters more than traditional learning, such as lecture or recitation. it also resonates with the principle of cooperative learning (foldnes, 2016), which underscores positive interdependence and individual accountability, to mention a few. such a learning climate, which encourages the students to make shared decisions on their learning, be on-time every time the discussion is about to start, and respect other people’s opinions, implicitly influences the development of their characters. hence, the character values of discipline and tolerance also occurred in the present study. furthermore, this study explores the students’ perceptions of whether the use of technology can also instill character education while learning english. the findings generally reveal that the main ict-based learning media used in the present study, i.e. youtube, whatsapp, the internet, and mobile phone, seem to help the students develop the character values of independence, creativity, activeness, teamwork, and criticality. while the utilization of youtube, mobile phone, and the internet contributes most to the development of independence character value, the advantage of using whatsapp is more on the development of teamwork and activeness character values. husna et al. (2019) also found that using youtube videos could foster the character value of independence toward increased autonomy among efl students. on the other hand, the whatsapp application enables the students to have an active interaction to succeed in the group discussion. indirectly, they become more collaborative and active as the instilment of teamwork and activeness character values. goodchild and speed (2018) asserted that social mediaand mobile-based learning from the mid2000s to the present-is getting ubiquitous in the higher education context in line with technology advancement and human mobilization. therefore, those learning media are used to cater to the current pedagogical approaches, such as social constructivism through borderless interaction and collaboration. ultimately, the proper combination of ict use and l2 pedagogical approaches can cultivate strong character values toward future-ready learners. however, using ict-based learning media as part of the elements of technology-enhanced flipped english learning may cause the decline of characters. one particular type of decline of characters identified in the present study is associated with cheating. two factors may cause the practice of cheating as part of academic dishonesty. first, some of the students seem not cooperative enough, although they have been assigned to a particular role. second, some of the instructions in the teacher's assignments are not clear enough, resulting in confusion among the students. both factors can result in academic dishonesty by copy-pasting the ideas from youtube or the answers from the internet using a mobile phone. even worse, one of the students reported that his classmates sometimes asked him to do their rolebased assignments, representing facilitation (blau & eshet-alkalai, 2017). we posit that teachers’ role is pivotal in selecting the ict-based learning media to help run the learning process and crucial in evaluating the potentials of those learning media to monitor and identify academic dishonesty. this reinforces the importance of integrating moral english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 781 education into the efl curriculum through methods, activities, and resources determined by the teachers. conclusion the present study has addressed the research questions regarding the possibility of a technologyenhanced flipped english learning method to instill character education among indonesian undergraduate efl students. the contribution of the present study lies on two findings. first, the incorporation of flipped learning can instill character education among the students in learning english language by implicitly integrating certain character values within the learning activities. teachers still play a pivotal role in this context. second, apart from the merits of using the ict-based learning media in instilling character values of independence, creativity, teamwork, and criticality, the decline of characters such as cheating still becomes the major concern in the realm of tell in the higher education context. again, we argue that a deliberate combination of ict use and l2 pedagogical approaches can better cultivate strong character values toward future-ready learners as the ultimate goal of 21st-century education. the present study must be viewed with caution. the comparative results of how efl students across genders and english proficiency levels view character education through technology-enhanced flipped english learning are still lacking. additionally, the exploration of an effective instructional design in lessening academic dishonesty is worth-doing. rigorous methods are recommended to develop the current l2 pedagogical approaches in this more digitalized era. acknowledgment the authors would like to express enormous thanks to all students involved and the reviewers for the suggestions to make this paper well-written. references aghni, l. a., vianty, m., & petrus, i. 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(2020). impacts of flipped classrooms on learner attitudes towards technology-enhanced language learning. computer assisted language learning, 33(3), 240–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2018.1557692 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 167 the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang galiansa english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: galiansa20tahun@gmail.com bambang a loeneto (corresponding author) english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: loenetobambang@gmail.com mgrt. dinar sitinjak english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: magiedinar@yahoo.com apa citation: guliansa, loeneto, b. a., & sitinjak, m. d. (2020). the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 167-182. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3794 received: 28-06-2020 accepted: 29-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction indonesia is one of the largest multilingual countries in the world. according to ethnologue (2018), there are 719 languages in indonesia. there seems to be little doubt that indonesians are accustomed to speaking more than one language. all indonesians are taught the national language, bahasa indonesia, but also grow up speaking unique local languages that exist throughout the country. in addition to being exposed to a diversity of languages in the country, indonesian students also learn foreign languages, such as arabic, german, and english, in formal settings. unlike the other foreign languages taught in schools, english holds a greater position in indonesia. this is in line with what nasution (1995) has said that english has become the language of commerce and one of the compulsory subjects in secondary education since the dutch colonization. as such, many people in indonesia are motivated to learn abstract: language exposure and learning motivation are two of the most essential aspects in learning any language. in english language acquisition, the development of these two components facilitates the development of other language skills, such as reading comprehension. in turn, reading comprehension is one of the significant indicators of fluency in second or foreign language acquisition. if a correlation can be determined between either language exposure or learning motivation and the development of reading comprehension, educators and specialists can focus their efforts on increasing these predictor variables in curriculum development to further reading comprehension and, ultimately, fluency. this study focused on the reading comprehension of senior high school students in palembang, indonesia and sought to find out whether or not there was any significant correlation between students’ english language exposure and reading comprehension, students’ learning motivation and reading comprehension, and among the predictor variables (english language exposure, learning motivation) and the criterion variable (reading comprehension). the samples of this study were 210 eleventh graders in sma unggulan, a high-performing senior high school in palembang. the data were analyzed by using correlational and regression analyses. the findings showed significant positive correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension. the contribution of english language exposure to reading comprehension was 41.8%, while the contribution of learning motivation to reading comprehension was 51.7%. moreover, the contribution of predictor variables to the criterion variable was 58.9%. keywords: english language exposure; learning motivation; reading comprehension mailto:loenetobambang@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3794 galiansa, bambang a loeneto, mgrt. dinar sitinjak the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang 168 english in order to expand their opportunities for success. english is one of the most fundamental factors that can help indonesians compete as global citizens in the 21st century. the status of english as the most dominant worldwide language of the 21st century has long been stressed by kachru’s analogy (1986) that knowing english is like having the aladdin’s lamp; once it opens, the roads to international business, technology, science, and travel are all opened. as such, it is crucial that students learn sufficient english in formal settings in order to expand their opportunities for success. in second or foreign language acquisition, the amount of exposure to the goal language must be adequate to be able to have the best learning outcome. according to magno, lajom, regondo, and bunagan (2009), english exposure is the total amount of time in which an individual has contact with a language. this contact may be verbal, written, formal, informal, active, or passive. the importance of language exposure has long been addressed by wikins (1972) that if children are exposed to the l2 in the same way as they are exposed to the l1, greatest success will be achieved since, being in the natural l2 learning situation, the pressure to acquire the tl so as to control the environment is indeed tremendous. similarly, children who live in a country where english is as a foreign language can also achieve greatest success if the english exposure that they receive is adequate. however, in general, indonesian students are only exposed to english for about four hours a week, which is inadequate. moreover, according to an english native speaker, adam (2013) who raises his children in japan where english is as a minority language, he needs to expose his children to english for 25 hour a week in order to keep pace with the development of their english skills. besides english language exposure, english language learners, especially students, also need to have learning motivation to push them to be adequately resourceful in exposing themselves to english. learning motivation aids them to keep on going regardless of the difficulties that they may encounter. according brown (1987), motivation is generally believed of as an internal determination, desire, emotion, or desire that interchanges one to a specific action, particularly, human beings collectively have desires that are relatively distinctive, however their intensity is naturally trained. it is likely that language exposure impacts learning motivation in students, because students will be more motivated to learn if being able to interact with and control their environment requires it (wikins, 1972). every individual has different motivations in learning. some people are highly motivated because they have particular goals to achieve, while others are equally motivated for other reasons. despite the various sources of motivation, learning motivation is desperately needed in second language acquisition to help students persevere toward fluency, including the development of their reading comprehension. the role of english language exposure and learning motivation in the development of reading comprehension is especially essential for english language learners due to the integral role that a fluency in english can play in students achieving success in this global era. crystal (2003) states that the current status of english as an international language is supported by its widespread use in politics, diplomacy, international trade, commerce, science, technology, education, media, information technology, and popular culture. hermida (2009) considers that academic success largely depends on an individual's reading skill and goes on to add that, with the need to handle lengthy assignments of various difficulty levels, the student must master reading skills to succeed academically. reading is a resource for continued education, for the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, and for gaining information through various media (noor, 2011). this is in accordance with the vision and mission of the international reading association (ira, 2012) that in order to succeed in life, reading literacy is very important to be conquered to train people to develop productive citizens in this 21st century. moreover, reading is less meaningful if one cannot absorb what is being read. it needs comprehension when reading takes place. if students simply focus on reading words correctly without understanding their meaning, their pronunciation may improve, but their ability to confidently and competently use new words in new situations—their proficiency—will not. moreover, comprehension needs a variety of strategies that students must know and manipulate in order to understand reading (ortlieb & norris, 2012). in other words, reading requires skills and to acquire them, students should be exposed to abundant reading materials there should be adequate exposure to either printed books or electronic books as well as a variety of visual and auditory stimuli. current research shows that indonesian students have english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 169 always faced problems with reading comprehension over the years, which has affected their ability to reliably use english proficiently. diem and lestari (2016) found that low achievement of indonesian students in the reading literacy test that they assigned directly correlated to low scores in students’ efl literacy (listening, reading, speaking, and writing). hence, there is an urgency to address this phenomenon into a larger scale since reading comprehension impacts english proficiency. english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension are three essential keys for students to be academically successful. this is an essential consideration for indonesia, because the reading comprehension level of indonesian students is below the world average in every metric used. the program for international student assessment (pisa, 2015) traced the reading achievement of indonesian students and found that it was below the organization for economic cooperation and development's (oecd) average. indonesian students' achievement in reading was 62nd out of 70 countries. furthermore, results from the test of english for international communication (toeic) on test takers worldwide (2018) showed that the reading performance of indonesian students ranked 49th out of 49 countries with a mean score of 464. the test of english as a foreign language (toefl) also ranked indonesia's score unsatisfactorily. indonesia's mean score on the toefl itp was 470 in 2018, which was below the standard (test and score data summary, 2018). finally, the english proficiency index (epi) results placed indonesia at 61st out of 100 total countries and 13th out of the 25 countries in asia with a mean score of 50.06 (english proficiency index, 2019). more specifically, epi traced the english proficiency of students in south sumatra province as low within the country of indonesia. it ranked 16th out of 22 provinces with a mean score of 45.68 (education first, 2019). all senior high school students in indonesia learn english in school. such low proficiency scores on global tests may be due to a lack of english exposure and learning motivation in english instruction. some schools have a good program for learning english, while many schools, unfortunately, don't offer any program for students to learn english. high-performing school systems set ambitious goals, are clear about what students should be able to do, and enable teachers to figure out what they need to teach their students. they have moved on from administrative control and accountability to professional forms of work organization (andreas, 2018). students in highly developed schools are more likely to be adequately exposed to english, to have high learning motivation, and to exhibit better reading comprehension than other schools in palembang. based on the phenomena above, the researcher was interested in conducting a research entitled ―the correlations among language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension of senior high school students in palembang. the population sample of this research consisted of eleventh graders in sman 1, sman 3, sman 4, sman 5, sman 6 (try-out), sman 8, sman 17, and sman 18 palembang. there were some rationales for choosing these schools. first, the limitation of this study was to explore english language exposure, learning motivation and their correlations to reading comprehension in highperforming schools in palembang to see if they are good in of themselves. it was shown that when looking at high-performing schools, it can be concluded based on their own statistics, that it was not necessary to compare them to lowerperforming schools. second, eleventh graders have been exposed to english for 4 years or more if they previously attended private schools where english was taught as a compulsory subject. third, the population of this study were schools located in the city-based-district (cbd) in the heart of palembang and the districts which have all levels of education (aled) from kindergarten to university. according to mirizon, diem, and vianty (2017), ―the most influential factors on comprehension are school location and grades. students from city based districts (cbd) and districts where all levels of education (aled) existing are known to be better achiever, while the farther the location of the schools from the center of the business and government activities is, the lower the students’ english comprehension would be (p. 538). therefore, these three factors likely indicated that students in these eight schools have similar experiences and opportunities in their education, which would allow the researcher to reveal whether or not they were highly exposed to english and had high learning motivation and allow the researcher to see the whether or not there were correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension as well as to see their contribution. galiansa, bambang a loeneto, mgrt. dinar sitinjak the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang 170 method a quantitative research approach was used with a correlational research design. creswell (2012, p. 338) states that ―a correlation is a statistical test to determine the tendency or pattern for two or more variables or two sets of data to vary consistently. it enabled the researcher to see the relationships among the predictor and criterion variables. the focus of this study primary investigated the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension of senior high school students in palembang sman 1, sman 3, sman 4, sman 5, sman 6, sman 8, sman 17, and sman 18. quantitative research approach was used with a correlational research design. creswell (2012, p. 338) states that a correlation is a statistical test to determine the tendency or pattern for two or more variables or two sets of data to vary consistently. the results of this study revealed that there was a significant correlation between variables: english language exposure and learning comprehension and reading comprehension of senior high school students in palembang. the limitation of this study was to explore english language exposure, learning motivation and their connection to reading comprehension in highly developed schools in palembang to see if they are good in of themselves. when looking at highly developed schools, it can be concluded based off their own statistics, that it was not necessary to compare them to lower performing schools. there were 8 high-performing high schools in palembang. one of these schools was taken as a sample to try out the instruments. hence, the population in this study was made up of eleventh graders in 7 high-performing schools in palembang during the academic 2018/2019 years. students were selected using purposive sampling, which involves identifying and selecting individuals or groups of individuals that are especially knowledgeable or experienced with a phenomenon of interest (cresswell & plano clark, 2011). according to patton (2002), purposive sampling is a technique widely used in qualitative research for the identification and selection of information-rich cases for the most effective use of limited resources. since this study aimed at seeing the correlations among english language exposure and learning motivation and reading comprehension, but was limited to a small number of students, only students who had taken extra-curricular english courses in their school participated in this research. the process of taking the sample was facilitated by teachers from the various schools, who selected students whom they knew took extra-curricular english courses. the total number of samples in this study was 210 eleventh graders in the academic year 2018/2019. results were collected by using questionnaires, which measured the students’ english language exposure and learning motivation, and a test, which measured students’ reading comprehension achievement. the english language exposure of the students was measured by using a ready-made questionnaire of magno et al. (2009). this questionnaire consisted of 23 items measuring four aspects in english language exposure. learning motivation was measured by a ready-made questionnaire by pintrich and groot (1990) consisting of 44 items measuring five parts of learning motivation. students’ reading comprehension achievement was measured by using a reading comprehension test adapted from the jennings’ informal reading inventory (2001), which comprised 40 multiple choice questions measuring seven aspects of reading comprehension: main idea, cause and effect, sequence, vocabulary, inference, reference, and detail. results general results of english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension the table below summarized the general information of the predictor variables (english language exposure, learning motivation) and the criterion variable (reading comprehension). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 171 table 1. general results of predictor and criterion variables n minimum maximum mean std. deviation english language exposure (x1) 21 0 46.00 101.00 65.5476 9.65630 learning motivation (x2) 21 0 160.00 193.00 170.4952 5.85980 reading comprehension (y) 21 0 27.50 100.00 60.8333 18.34402 valid n (listwise) 21 0 based on the statistical analyses, the english language exposure result shows that the minimum score of the students was 46, and their maximum score was 101. their mean score, in general, was 65.5476, and the standard derivation was 9.65630. statistically, based on the interval category of the english language exposure, it can be concluded that the english language exposure of senior high school students in high-performing schools in palembang belonged to the average category. moreover, the learning motivation result showed that the students’ minimum score was 160, and their maximum score was 193. in general, their mean score was 170.4952, and their standard derivation was 5.85980. statically, according to the learning motivation interval, the learning motivation of the students was in the average category. total distribution of english language exposure and the score distribution of each aspect table 2. total score distribution of english language exposure interval category frequency percentage x > 56 low 34 16.2% 57 – 75 average 143 68.1% 76 > x high 33 15.7% total 210 100.0% based on the descriptive data above, it can be seen that there were 16.2% of the students fell in the low category, 68.1%, while over 68% of them belonged to the average category, and the rest 15.7% of students belonged to the high category. table 3. score distribution of the aspects of english language exposure aspects mea n std. dev percentage home 1.78 0.50 16.6% friends 2.82 0.76 26.3% school 2.90 0.58 27.0% media 3.23 0.53 30.1% total 100.0% the score distribution of each english language exposure aspects presented that they were highly exposed to english through media, which made up 30.1%, followed by the exposure from the school, which was 27.0%, friends 26.3%, while the lowest english exposure the students received was exposure from their home, which was 16.5% galiansa, bambang a loeneto, mgrt. dinar sitinjak the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang 172 total distribution of learning motivation and the score distribution of each aspect table 4. total score distribution of learning motivation interval category frequency percentage x > 165 low 19 9.0% 166 176 average 167 79.5% 177 > x high 24 11.4% total 210 100.0% the table illustrated that, there were not many students fall in the low category. there was only 9.0% of the students belonging to the low category. meanwhile, there number of students who fell in the average category was 79.5%, and the rest 11.4% of the students belonged to the high category. table 5. score distribution of the aspects of learning motivation aspects mean std. dev percentage efficacy 3.91 0.34 20.5% intrinsic 4.26 0.32 22.4% anxiety 3.35 0.74 17.6% cognitive 3.96 0.26 20.8% regulation 3.57 0.33 18.7% total 100.0% the score distribution of the learning motivation above depicted that, the highest learning motivation aspect was the intrinsic aspect that there were 22.4% of the students who whose learning motivation who fell into this aspect. the second highest was the cognitive aspect, which was 20.8%, followed by efficacy 20.5%, regulation 18.7%, and anxiety 17.6% respectively. total distribution of reading comprehension and the score distribution of each aspect table 6. total score distribution of reading comprehension interval category frequency percentage < 44 very poor 56 26.7% 44 55 poor 45 21.4% 56 70 average 48 22.9% 71 85 good 25 11.9% 86 100 excellent 36 17.1% total 210 100.0% the total score distribution of reading comprehension of the students presented that, there were 26.7% of the students who fell in the very poor category, 21.4% of students belonged to the poor category, while 11.9% of the students were in the good category, and the highest percentage fell in the average category, which made up 22.9%, and 17.1% of students in the excellent category. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 173 score distribution of the aspects of reading comprehension table 7. distribution of the aspects of reading comprehension aspects mean std. dev percentage main idea 0.70 0.21 15.9% cause and effect 0.59 0.28 13.4% sequence 0.63 0.21 14.2% vocabulary 0.57 0.26 12.9% inference 0.64 0.25 14.4% reference 0.70 0.23 15.9% detail 0.59 0.24 13.4% total 100.0% the score distribution of the reading comprehension aspects illustrated that, the highest reading comprehension aspects were main idea and reference, which made up 15.9%. two other reading comprehension aspects which had the same percentages were cause and effect and detail 13.4%. the other reading comprehension aspects, such as inference and sequence distributed 14.4% and 14.2% respectively. meanwhile, the reading aspect for vocabulary was only 12.9%. results and discussion these statistical analyses analyzed (1) the normality, homogeneity, and linearity of the instruments, (2) correlation between students’ english language exposure and their reading comprehension as well as the correlations among the aspect of the students’ english language exposure and their reading comprehension (3) total contribution of the students’ english language exposure to their reading comprehension as well as the contribution of its aspects to their reading comprehension, (4) the correlation between students’ learning motivation and their reading comprehension as well as the correlations among the aspect of the students’ learning motivation and their reading comprehension (5) total contribution of the students’ learning motivation to their reading comprehension as well as the contribution of its aspects to their reading comprehension, (6) the correlation among predictor variables (english language exposure and learning motivation) and the criterion variable (reading comprehension), (7) the total contribution of the predictor variables (students’ english language exposure and learning motivation) to their reading comprehension. pearson product moment correlation coefficient explains how well two sets of data correlate to each other. the value can fall between 0.00 (no correlation) and 1.00 (perfect correlation). alpha level (p-value) is a determiner to see whether there is a significant correlation or not. generally, p-values lower than 0.05 are considered significant. the results of normality, homogeneity, and linearity before any analysis done statistically, the writer tested the normality, homogeneity, and linearity of the instruments. after testing the instruments for english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension, they revealed to be normal, homogeneous, and linear. the significance value of the variables was higher than 0.05, as the requirement for data to be significant. the results are presented in the following tables: galiansa, bambang a loeneto, mgrt. dinar sitinjak the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang 174 table 8. the results of normality (n= 150) variables kolmogorov smirnov sig. english language exposure 0.080 .087 learning motivation 0.193 .213 reading comprehension 0.186 .075 table 9. the results of homogeneity between english language exposure and reading comprehension (n=150) levene statistic sig. 1.069 .090 table 10. the results of homogeneity between learning motivation and reading comprehension (n=150) levene statistic sig. 1.447 .062 table 11. the results of linearity between english language exposure and reading comprehension (n=150) f sig. 1.275 .153 table 12. the results of linearity between learning motivation and reading comprehension (n=150) f sig. .998 .475 the correlation between students’ english language exposure and their reading comprehension after conducting pearson product correlation between the outcome of the whole english language exposure and the reading comprehension, the result revealed that the pearson correlation value was 0.646 for n= 210 with a significance value of .000, which is lower than 0.05 that it was significant. pearson's correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a strong significant correlation between students' english language exposure and their reading comprehension. table 13. correlation between english language exposure and reading comprehension reading comprehension english language exposure pearson correlation .646** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 210 the correlations among the aspects of the students’ english language exposure and their reading comprehension based on table 9, the result of the correlation analyses for each aspect of students’ english language exposure and students’ reading comprehension showed that the correlation coefficient of exposure from home and reading comprehension was 0.277 with a significance value of .000. the correlation coefficient of exposure from friends and reading comprehension was 0.323, with a significance value of .000. the correlation coefficient of exposure from school and reading comprehension was 0.263, with a significance value of .000. the correlation coefficient of exposure from media and reading comprehension was 0.721, with a significance value of .000. in conclusion, all four aspects of english language exposure had a significant correlation with reading comprehension. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 175 table 14. correlations among english language exposure aspects and reading comprehension y pearson correlation sig. (2tailed) n home 0.277 0.000 210 friends 0.323 0.000 210 school 0.263 0.000 210 media 0.721 0.000 210 x1 0.646 0.000 210 y 1 210 the contribution of the students’ english language exposure to their reading comprehension table 15. contribution of english language exposure to reading comprehension mode l r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .646a .418 .415 5.61142 based on the regression analysis using the stepwise method, it can be seen that the total contribution of the students’ english language exposure to their reading comprehension was neither low nor extremely high 41.5%. it was highly dependent on the student and their english exposure contribution of the aspects of the students’ english language exposure to their reading comprehension table 16. contribution of english language exposure aspects to reading comprehension y pearson correlation r square sig. (2 tailed) n home 0.277 0.077 0.000 210 friends 0.323 0.104 0.000 210 school 0.263 0.069 0.000 210 media 0.721 0.520 0.000 210 y 1 210 based on the regression analysis using the stepwise method, it can be seen that the contribution of the aspects of the students' english language exposure to their reading comprehension was varied. the highest aspect contributing to their reading comprehension was exposure from media 52%, while the smallest aspect was exposure from school 0.69 %. the other aspects of english language exposure from friends contributed (10.4%), and exposure from home contributed (07.7%). the correlation between students’ learning motivation and reading comprehension table 17. correlation between learning motivation and reading comprehension reading comprehension learning motivation pearson correlation .719** sig. (2tailed) .000 n 210 galiansa, bambang a loeneto, mgrt. dinar sitinjak the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang 176 the pearson product correlation between the outcome of the learning motivation (total) and the reading comprehension revealed that the pearson correlation value was 0.719 for n=210 with a significance value of .000, which was lower than 0.05, meaning that it was significant. pearson's correlation coefficient r indicated that there was a strong significant correlation between students' learning motivation and their reading comprehension. correlations among the aspect of the students’ learning motivation and their reading comprehension table 18. correlation among learning motivation aspects and reading comprehension y pearson correlation sig. (2 tailed) n efficacy 0.393 0.000 210 intrinsic 0.205 0.003 210 anxiety 0.178 0.010 210 cognitive 0.234 0.001 210 regulation 0.367 0.000 210 y 1 210 based on table 9, the result of the correlation analyses for each aspect of students’ learning motivation and students’ reading comprehension showed that the correlation coefficient of efficacy and reading comprehension was 0.393 with a significance value of .000. the correlation coefficient of intrinsic and reading comprehension was 0.205, with a significance value of .003. the correlation coefficient of anxiety and reading comprehension was 0.178, with a significance value of .003. the correlation coefficient of cognitive and reading comprehension was 0.234, with a significance value of .001. the correlation coefficient of regulation and reading comprehension was 0.367, with a significance value of .000. in conclusion, all five aspects of learning motivation had a significant correlation with reading comprehension. total contribution of the students’ learning motivation to their reading comprehension table 19. contribution of learning motivation to reading comprehension model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 719a .517 .515 5.11269 a. predictors: (constant), x2 based on the regression analysis using the stepwise method, it could be seen that the total contribution of students’ learning motivation toward their reading comprehension was 51.7. the contribution of the aspects of the students’ learning motivation to their reading comprehension table 20. contribution of learning motivation aspects to reading comprehension y pearson correlation r square sig. (2 tailed) n efficacy 0.393 0.154 0.000 210 intrinsic 0.205 0.042 0.003 210 anxiety 0.178 0.032 0.010 210 cognitive 0.234 0.055 0.001 210 regulation 0.367 0.135 0.000 210 y 1 210 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 177 based on the regression analysis using the stepwise method, it can be seen that the contribution of the aspects of the students’ learning motivation toward their reading comprehension was various. the highest learning motivation aspect that contributed to the reading aspect was efficacy (15.4%), while the other aspects of english language exposure provided small contributions. regulation contributed 13.5%, cognitive 0.55%, intrinsic 0.42%, the correlations among the predictor variables (english language exposure and learning motivation) and criterion variable (reading comprehension) table 21. correlations among the predictor variables and criterion variable variables r r square f predictor variables and the criterion variable 768 .589 148.46 6 a. predictor and criterion the result showed that the correlation coefficient between the predictor variables total and the criterion variable total was .768 with a significance value of .000. thus, it can be concluded that there was a significant correlation between predictor variables and the criterion variable. the contribution among the predictor variables (english language exposure and learning motivation) and criterion variable (reading comprehension) table 22. contribution among predictor variable and criterion variable variables r r square f predictor variables and the criterion variable 7 6 8 .589 148.46 6 a. predictor and criterion this table showed that the r-square, which indicated the contribution of predictor variables (english language exposure and learning motivation) to the criterion variable (reading comprehension) was 58.9%. interpretation of the study firstly, the results of the english language exposure questionnaire revealed that the eleventh graders in high-performing schools in palembang, in general, were classified in the average level, with a mean score of 65.5476 and std. deviation of 9.65630. on the one hand, in terms of aspects of english language exposure, they were highly exposed to english through media, which was 30.1%, followed by schools at 27% and friends at 26.3%. on the other hand, they were only exposed to english 16.6% from home. nevertheless, each aspect of english language exposure impacted the students’ reading comprehension development. this result was in line with a previous study done by mol et al. (2008) finding that students who were exposed to english, particularly reading material adequately, had good reading comprehension. the eleventh graders in palembang were exposed to english through media 30.1%, which was considered the highest among the other aspects. one of the reasons may be that students had access to any reading material on the internet. living the 21st century, students across the globe, particularly students in high-performing schools in palembang were benefited from advanced technologies that enabled them to have access to nearly any reading material they needed on their smartphone. meanwhile, the lowest percentage of english exposure was from home. the students didn’t frequently use english at home with their families. one of the reasons for this was likely to be that the status of english that is still as a foreign language. hence, there are less people use english on a daily basis, and in the case of english language exposure from home, these students are likely the only english speakers in their households. moreover, in schools setting, despite the fact that they took the english extracuticular, they could only learn english in a minimal amount of time. as a result, it was not surprising that students’ english language galiansa, bambang a loeneto, mgrt. dinar sitinjak the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang 178 exposure was only in the average category. similarly, with that average amount of english language exposure they received, it was reasonably unsurprising that their reading comprehension was also in the average category. the english exposure they received through media was neither high nor extremely low 30.1%, which aided their reading comprehension to not fall into the poor category. statistically, some students scored perfect grades in their reading comprehension test, and some other students scored poorly. however, in general, there was a significant correlation between english language exposure of the eleventh graders of senior high school students in high-performing high schools in palembang and their reading comprehension. the pearson correlation revealed that it was .646**, which was greater than 0.05, meaning that their english language exposure and reading comprehension were significantly correlated: an average level of english exposure equaled an average reading comprehension. furthermore, the students' english language exposure, in total, contributed 41.8% to their reading comprehension, while 58.2% of the contributions were from other factors. furthermore, the contribution of its aspects was 52% for exposure from media, 10.4% for exposure from friends, 0.77% for exposure from home, and 0.69% for exposure from school. from this, it can be seen that the media plays a vital role in helping students with their reading comprehension. concerning this, al-zoubi (2018) pointed out that students should be continually exposed to the english language through watching english movies and program, surfing the internet, listening to radio, reading english books, magazines, newspapers, and practicing english language with native speakers on a daily basis to encourage them overcoming their weaknesses and improving their fluency as well as proficiency in acquiring english language. additionally, teachers and parents should raise learners' awareness of the importance of learning the english language through exposure to the language daily using different techniques that can enhance second language acquisition. secondly, the result of the learning motivation questionnaire filled out by the eleventh graders, in general, showed that they were in the average category level, with a mean score of 170.4952 and std. deviation of 5.85980. moreover, in terms of aspects of their learning motivation, the students were highly motivated to learn english intrinsically, which was 22.4%, followed by efficacy 20.5%, and the rest of the learning motivation aspects, such as cognitive 20.8%, regulation 18.7%, and anxiety 17.6%. this learning motivation result likely reflects the characteristics of high performing schools that require students to perform academically best. in some ways, it could be intimidating for some students as well. however, agreeing to go to a high-performing high school seemed to suggest that they were already highly motivated to learn in the first place. this statistical result confirmed that the lowest learning motivation aspect was anxiety, meaning that students were less anxious in learning what they learned in school. therefore, their learning motivation had a significant impact on their reading comprehension. this result was in line with what maleki and zangani (2007) found that learning motivation, particularly reading motivation, is an essential element that distinguishes students' success in text recognizing and understanding reading comprehension must be considered in university levels. in foreign language learning, one of the most important factors for the learners is the method which teachers use in their teaching to facilitate learning. this was also in accordance with what john and vanleirsburg (1994) had long highlighted in their study that when students are highly motivated to read, the likelihood that they will increase their reading comprehension. in short, learning motivation have immense impacts on students’ reading comprehension. consequently, there was a significant correlation between students’ learning motivation and their reading comprehension. the pearson correlation revealed that it was .719**, which was greater than 0.05, meaning that their exposure to english and reading comprehension were significantly correlated, although their reading comprehension was in the average level. this result was still reasonable because reading comprehension is not easy. reading comprehension is a difficult process because students should be able to read the written words and decode the vocabularies and recognize the meanings of the texts. english language learning showed that reading comprehension is the main factor which should be focused on english language teaching. (ahmadi & hairul: 2012). this is in line what pang, muaka, bernbardt, and kamil (2003) stating that reading is about understanding written texts and comprehension is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 179 the process of making sense of words, sentences, and connected text. readers will use background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and other strategies to help them to understand a written text. nevertheless, the students’ total learning motivation contributed 51.7% to their reading comprehension. moreover, the contribution of its learning motivation aspects was 15.4% for efficacy, 13.5% for regulation, 0.55% for cognitive, 0.42% for intrinsic, and 0.32% for anxiety. the highest contribution learning motivation towards reading comprehension was efficacy 13.5%. a study conducted by barkley (2006) investigating selfefficacy and reading comprehension revealed that students’ self-efficacy beliefs about using prior knowledge, self-monitoring, and graphic organizers were statistically significantly correlated with reading comprehension scores on the stanford achievement test. in other words, the students' learning motivation, particularly the efficacy, impacted their reading comprehension. lastly, based on the statistical analysis, the answers to the research questions of this study were that predictor variable (english language exposure and learning motivation) and the criterion variable (reading comprehension achievement) had a significant correlation to each other because they were higher than 0.05 and the impact of english language exposure and learning motivation on reading comprehension contributed 58.9%. conclusion based on the interpretation of this study, the following conclusions can be drawn. first, there was a significant correlation between students' english exposure and their reading comprehension. the distribution of each aspect gave various percentages, which indicted that each aspect of english language exposure was essential. therefore, there was a significant contribution the english language exposure as well as its aspects to the students’ reading comprehension. in other words, the higher exposure they received, the better students’ reading comprehension. second, students’ learning motivation was also significantly correlated with the students’ reading comprehension. the distribution of each aspect similarly provided certain amount of percentages to the reading comprehension. hence, there was a significant contribution the learning motivation and its aspects contributed to the reading comprehension. from the analyses, it was clear that the more motivated the students, the better their reading comprehension. third, there was significant correlations among the predictor variables (english language exposure and learning motivation), and the criterion variable (reading comprehension) of senior high school students in palembang. the contribution of the predictor variables contributed 58.9 % to the reading comprehension of senior high school students in palembang. the writer suggests that english teachers be more aware of identifying the amount of their students’ english language exposure. distributing a questionnaire on english language exposure on the first day of class would likely help to recognize how much english exposure of each student has on a daily basis, so that teachers have time to sit and think of ways to help the students to be sufficiently exposed to english. there is also the need of teachers to be more courageous in infusing fun into the idea of learning english so that students will be more motivated in learning since learning motivation plays an essential role in boosting students' reading comprehension. it seems to be easier for teachers nowadays to trigger students to like reading. there are abundant free sources of learning english on the internet. the teachers should be able to provide students with the information as where they can access them. additionally, the writer would like to encourage other researchers who might be interested in further study, especially in english language exposure since it has not been widely discussed in indonesia, conduct a research on it with certainly different approaches, methodologies, and populations. the time constrains didn’t enable the writer to have a richer way to do the research, especially when conducting the reading test. the size of the samples was large. it would be wholesome if the writer could have one student at a time to do the reading comprehension test with him. for example, giving each of them certain amount of time to read and asking them questions regarding what they have read right away would create a more transparent result and better understanding about their difficulties in reading. references adam. 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(2015). literacy skill for the world of tomorrow. unesco institute for statistic. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-resultsin-focus.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf galiansa, bambang a loeneto, mgrt. dinar sitinjak the correlations among english language exposure, learning motivation, and reading comprehension achievement of high school students in palembang 182 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 69 the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills, and reading comprehension mawaddah hidayati english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: mawaddahhidayati2@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ritarudisaid@yahoo.com bambang loeneto english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: loenetobambang@gmail.com apa citation: hidayati, m., inderawati, r., & loeneto, b. (2020). the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills, and reading comprehension. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 69-80. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3780 received: 27-06-2020 accepted: 29-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction in education, critical thinking skills cannot be separated from language learners. they are constantly exposed to different types of information from what they have to see and read which require them to be able to investigate as well as critical thinking skills simultaneously. critical thinking skills cannot develop naturally and automatically. the skills must be practiced to increase students’ engagement to have the potential effect. they need to be taught, learned, and practiced (hammond, flook, harvey, barron, & osher, 2020; ghanizadeh, hoorie, & jahedizadeh, 2020; trinidad, ngo, nevada, & morales, 2020). the practice of critical thinking should be integrated in classrooms through questioning and reasoning. the students should be encouraged to question all information they got and they must also have reasons for their beliefs and actions. a study is conducted by saleh (2019) that it is a must that students’ critical thinking must be stimulated. it is relevant to pnevmatikos, christodoulou, & georgiadou (2019) that students’ critical thinking skills must be promoted. they argued an instructional approach that is values and knowledge education (vake) to apply. meanwhile, the teachers has good perspectives toward the integration of teaching critical thinking in the classroom since this skill can be an intellectual stimuli to facilitate abstract: critical thinking skills, critical reading skills, and reading comprehension were the most crucial life skills that should be mastered by the students, especially for university students. the objectives of this study were: (1) to find out whether or not there was a significant correlation among students critical thinking skills and reading comprehension, (2) to find out whether or not there was a significant correlation among critical reading skills and reading comprehension, and (3) to find out whether or not there was a significant correlation among the predictor variables (critical thinking skills and critical reading skills) and the criterion variable (reading comprehension) of english education study program students of uin raden fatah palembang. in this study, 90 undergraduate english education study program of uin raden fatah palembang in the academic year 2018/2019 in the fourth semester were chosen as a sample by means of purposive sampling. this study conducted correlational research design. the data were collected by using tests. pearson product moment correlation and regression were used to analyzed the data. based on the data collected and analyses applied in this study, the findings revealed that (1) there was a significant correlation among critical thinking skills and reading comprehension with r-value 0.810, (2) there was a significant correlation among critical reading skills and reading comprehension with r-value 0.844, (3) there was a significant correlation among predictor variables (critical thinking skills and critical reading skills) gave 71.3% contribution to criterion variable (reading comprehension). keywords: critical thinking; critical reading; reading comprehension mailto:ritarudisaid@yahoo.com mailto:loenetobambang@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3780 mawaddah hidayati, rita inderawati, & bambang loeneto the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension 70 student’s learning. therefore, education for now on should pay close attention to the development of student’s thinking skills. curriculum and implementation in relation to critical thinking must be designed (bezanilla, nogueira, poblete, & dominguez, 2019). the cultivation of thinking skill has been the focus of education for years. it is one of the most life skills that should be possessed by all people in order to survive in the future life (unesco, 2011). beside critical thinking skills, good at reading literacy is also important because it can help students to engage with the progress of information in the global era. reading is not only the way to share ideas between the writer and the readers, but also a very common way used by most of people in order to get information and enrich their knowledge. reading is a receptive skill, but it practically involves an active process of thinking and has cognitive consequences for the readers. according to yamasaki, mcgregor, & booth (2020), one of the categories in reading skills is critical reading skills. critical reading skills are skills that will help students be able to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate what is read as it represents a cognitive skill that is academically has high relevancy. when teachers expose students to critical reading skills, they will also make students see the cause – and – effect or comparing relationships in the text, or adopting critical stance toward the text. in other words, when teachers teach critical reading skills to students, they will develop students to be critical thinkers as well because when they do critical reading it will lead to critical thinking (critical reading will come first before critical thinking). it means that, students need to have fully understood a text where they would analyze, synthesize, and evaluate it, then only they would think critically about the text – choose or reject the ideas put forward, agree or disagree with the issues, and most important of all they know the reasons why they do it. moreover, reading comprehension is related close to critical thinking skills and critical reading skills. reading comprehension itself is a cognitive process of making meaning from text. the goal, therefore, is to gain an overall understanding of what is described in the text rather than to obtain meaning from isolated words or sentences (woolley, 2011). it means that, reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understanding its meaning, and to integrate with what the readers already knows. it is clear that the process involves analytic thinking and evaluating what one reads that requires to the higher order comprehension (cognitive skills) such as making inferences, reasoning and judging. these skills are important in order to infer, compare, distinguish between fact and opinion, and identify the author’s intention. in this information era, students must have critical thinking skills, critical reading skills, and reading comprehension ability. critical thinking skills will help students and graduates to achieve higher levels in their study and profession. critical thinking skills will help create students become leaders and professionals that are selfgoverning. then, critical reading skills will help students to not only know how to convert orthographic symbols to language (word attack skills), use context and knowledge to comprehend what is read (comprehension skills), or see larger sentences as wholes, but also it can help students to read fluently (fluency skills). further, if students have critical reading skills, they would definitely have good reading comprehension skills and could be successful in schools or universities. students with good reading comprehension skills could perform well in any subject or course because they have developed the critical reading skills to not only understand but analyze any text given to them. this will also help them to score better in any tests or exams they have to take in schools. the more crucial goal here is that teachers will prepare them to be better students if they embark in any program at the tertiary education (hudson, 2007). in the faculty of teacher training and education of uin raden fatah palembang, the students were practiced and taught to be a teacher. ideally, a teacher should be good at thinking and reading skills. for english majoring, thinking skills and reading skills was taught from semester 1 to semester 3. the writer assumed that critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension were practiced in integrative during reading classes. based on this assumed, this study attempted to know (1) whether or not there was any correlation between critical thinking skills and reading comprehension, (2) whether or not there was any correlation between critical reading skills and reading comprehension, (3) whether or not there was any correlation between predictor variables (critical thinking skills and critical reading skills) and criterion variable (reading comprehension) of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 71 english education program students of uin raden fatah palembang. method method of the study in this study, the writer used a quantitative research approach with a correlational research design. creswell (2012, p. 338) stated that a correlation is a statistical test to determine the tendency or pattern for two or more variables or two sets of data to vary consistently. in this study, the writer has found that there was a significant correlation between variables: critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension of english education study program students of uin raden fatah palembang. site and participant in this study, the total number of the population were 270 students of english education study program students of uin raden fatah palembang in the academic years 2018/2019. moreover, in the process of taking samples, the writer used a purposive sampling. according to johnson and christensen (2012, p. 231) purposive sampling is the way of researcher specifies the characteristics of a population of interest and then tries to locate individuals who have those characteristics. it is a nonrandom sampling technique in which researcher solicits persons with specific characteristics to participate in a research study. since this study aimed at seeing the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension, only students who had taken all the reading courses (reading i, reading ii, reading iii and intensive reading) were taken as the sample. because the fourth-grade students had already taken and passed all the reading classes, they were considered as the sample. a purposive sampling was used in this study to take 90 samples from 270 undergraduate students of english education study program of uin raden fatah palembang in the academic year 2018/2019. technique for collecting the data the data were collected by using tests which measured student’s critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension. student’s critical thinking skills measured by using collegiate assessment of academic proficiency (caap) critical thinking test that designed by american college testing (act) program in 2008. the test comprised 32 items of multiple choices that measured the students’ skills in analyzing, evaluating, and extending (creating) arguments. then, for the students’ critical reading skills measured by using a readymade test of the sat for critical reading published by peterson’s in 2005. the test consists of 20 items of multiple choices that measured the student’s skills in evaluating an argument, analyzing an argument, analyzing the limitation of the study and concluding an argument. moreover, for students’ reading comprehension measured by using toefl preparation test from heinemann in 1996. the total questions of the reading comprehension test were 50 questions in form of multiple choices that measured the student’s skills in analyzing main idea, analyzing detail, analyzing cause-effect, analyzing inference, evaluating vocabulary, evaluating sequence, and analyzing the author’s tone. technique for analyzing the data the data collected were analyzed using descriptive and inferential analysis. results and discussion the descriptive analysis of the test results this analysis summarized the general information about the students’ test results of critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension. therefore, this analysis included; (1) the results of critical thinking test, (2) critical reading test, and (3) reading comprehension test. mawaddah hidayati, rita inderawati, & bambang loeneto the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension 72 table 1. descriptive statistics of variables measured n minimum maximum mean std. deviation critical thinking 90 19 78 59.28 17.021 critical reading 90 20 75 46.17 14.727 reading comprehension 90 26 80 46.76 13.646 valid n (listwise) 90 based on the statistical analyses, the results showed critical thinking minimum score was 19, maximum score was 78, mean score was 59.28 and the standard derivation was 17.021. next, the results showed critical reading minimum score was 20, maximum score was 75, mean score was 46.17, and the standard derivation was 14.727. then, the results showed reading comprehension minimum score was 26, maximum score was 80, mean score was 46.76 and the standard derivation was 13.646. table 2. score distribution of critical thinking level of critical thinking score interval number of students percent (%) very good 64 – 80 8 8.8 good 48 – 63 44 48.8 average 32 – 47 19 21.1 poor 16 – 31 19 21.1 very poor 0 – 15 0 0 based on the descriptive data above, there were 8.8 % students who had very good in critical thinking, 48.8 % had good in critical thinking, 21.1 % had average in critical thinking, 21.1 % had poor in critical thinking, and 0 % had very poor in critical thinking. table 3. score distribution of critical reading level of critical reading score interval number of students percent (%) excellent 80.00 – 100.00 0 0 good 70.00 79.99 50 55.5 average 60.00 – 69.99 19 21.1 poor 50.00 – 59.99 12 13.4 very poor 0.10 – 49.99 9 10 from the result above, it found that there were 0 % students who had excellent level of critical reading, 55.5 % students had good level of critical reading, 21.1 % had average level of critical reading, 13.4 % had poor level of critical reading, 10 % had very poor level of critical reading, and 0 % had failed in critical reading. table 4. score distribution of reading comprehension level of reading comprehension score interval number of students percent (%) excellent 80.00 – 100.00 1 1.1 good 70.00 79.99 56 62.2 average 60.00 – 69.99 20 22.2 poor 50.00 – 59.99 9 9.9 very poor 0.10 – 49.99 4 4.4 from the data, it can be seen that there were 1.1 % students who had an excellent reading comprehension, 62.2 % had good reading comprehension, 22.2 % had average reading comprehension, 9.9 % had poor reading comprehension, 4.4 % had very poor reading comprehension, and 0 % had failed in reading comprehension. the results of normality, homogeneity, and linearity tests before analyzing all of the results statistically, it should be ensured that the data were normal, homogeneous, and linear. the data were obtained from the results of the tests. the results showed that the data of critical thinking, critical reading and reading comprehension tests were normal, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 73 homogeneous, and linear since the significance value were higher than 0.05. the results were presented in the following table: table 5. the results of normality variables kolmogorov smirnov sig. critical thinking 0.086 .099 critical reading 0.088 .079 reading comprehension 0.089 .077 table 6. the results of homogeneity (n=90) variables levene statistic sig. critical thinking & reading comprehension 1.185 .296 critical reading & reading comprehension 0.986 .490 table 7. the results of linearity (n=90) variables f sig. critical thinking & reading comprehension 0.847 .667 critical reading & reading comprehension 1.295 .205 the inferential analysis of the test results this analysis included; (1) the correlations among critical thinking and reading comprehension, (2) the correlations among critical reading and reading comprehension, and (3) the correlations among predictor variables (critical thinking and critical reading) and criterion variable (reading comprehension). table 8. the correlation among students’ critical thinking and their reading comprehension the correlations among students’ critical thinking skills (x1) and reading comprehension (y) pearson product moment correlation coefficient explain how well two sets of continues data correlate to each other. the value can fall between 0.00 (no correlation) and 1.00 (perfect correlation). alpha level (p-value) is as determiner to see whether there is significant correlation or not. generally, p-value lower 0.05 are considered significant. after conducting pearson product correlation between the outcome of the whole critical thinking categories scores and the reading scores, the result revealed that pearson correlation value was 0.810 for sample of n=90, and the significance was .000 which is lower than 0.05 and that was considered significant. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a strong significant correlation between students’ critical thinking and their reading comprehension. table 9. correlation between critical thinking skills and reading comprehension correlations reading comprehension critical thinking pearson correlation .810** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 90 critical thinking skills reading comprehension analyzing argument pearson correlation .170 sig. (2-tailed) .093 n 90 evaluating an argument pearson correlation .233 sig. (2-tailed) .020 n 90 extending an argument pearson correlation .177 sig. (2-tailed) .080 n 90 mawaddah hidayati, rita inderawati, & bambang loeneto the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension 74 correlation between critical thinking skills and its aspects to reading comprehension based on table 9, the result of the correlation analyses for each aspect of students’ critical thinking and students’ reading comprehension show that the correlation coefficient of analyzing argument and reading comprehension was 0.170 with the significance value was .093. the correlation coefficient of evaluating argument and reading comprehension was 0.233 with the significance value was .020. the correlation coefficient of extending argument and reading comprehension was 0.177 with the significance value was .080. it means that among three aspects of critical thinking, only one aspect had significant correlation with reading comprehension. it was evaluating an argument. table 10. contribution critical thinking skills and its aspects and reading comprehension based on the regression analysis using stepwise method, from three aspects of critical thinking, only evaluating an argument contribute to reading comprehension, used enter method, the contribution of aspect of critical thinking was 5,4%. table 11. the correlation among critical thinking skills and aspects of reading comprehension reading comprehension critical thinking skills main idea pearson correlation 1 sig. (2-tailed) n 90 detail pearson correlation .993** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 90 cause effect pearson correlation .957** sig. (2-tailed) .003 n 90 inference pearson correlation .969** sig. (2-tailed) .001 n 90 vocabulary pearson correlation .968** sig. (2-tailed) .002 n 90 sequence pearson correlation .976** sig. (2-tailed) .001 n 90 author tone pearson correlation .970* sig. (2-tailed) .030 n 90 based on table 11, the result of the correlation analyses for each aspect of students’ critical thinking and students’ reading comprehension aspects show that the correlation coefficient of main idea and critical thinking was 1 with the significance value was (-). the correlation coefficient of detail and reading comprehension was 0.993 with the significance value was .000. the correlation coefficient of cause-effect and reading comprehension was 0.957 with the significance value was .003. the correlation coefficient of inference and reading comprehension was 0.969 with the significance value was .001. the correlation coefficient of vocabulary and reading comprehension was 0.968 with the significance value was .002. the correlation coefficient of sequence and reading comprehension was 0.976 with the significance value was .001. the correlation coefficient of author’s tone and reading comprehension was 0.970 with the significance value was .030. it means that among seven aspects of reading model summary model r change statistics r square change f change sig. f change 1 .233a .054 5.550 .020 a. predictors: (constant), evaluating an argument english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 75 comprehension, only one aspect had no significant correlation with critical thinking. it was main idea. table 12. contribution critical thinking skills and its aspects and reading comprehension model summary model r change statistics r square change f change sig. f change 1 .987a .975 78.370 .013 a. predictors: (constant), vocabulary based on the regression analysis in table 12 showed that the contribution of vocabulary was 97,5% to reading comprehension of english education study program of uin raden fatah. table 13. the correlation among students’ critical reading skills and their reading comprehension the correlations among students’ critical reading skills (x2) and reading comprehension (y) the result showed there was a significant correlation between critical reading and reading comprehension, since the p-value .000 was lower than 0.05 and the pearson correlation value was r=0.844. it meant that the strength of correlation between critical reading and reading comprehension was in strong level. table 14. correlation between critical reading skills and reading comprehension critical reading skills reading comprehension evaluating an argument pearson correlation -.240 sig. (2-tailed) .004 n 90 analyzing an argument pearson correlation -.331 sig. (2-tailed) .011 n 90 analyzing the limitation of the study pearson correlation .391 sig. (2-tailed) .443 n 90 concluding an argument pearson correlation .106 sig. (2-tailed) .822 n 90 correlation between critical reading skills and its aspects to reading comprehension based on table 14, the result of the correlation analyses for each aspect of students’ critical reading and students’ reading comprehension show that the correlation coefficient of evaluating argument and reading comprehension was -0.240 with the significance value was .004. the correlation coefficient of analyzing argument and reading comprehension was -0.331 with the significance value was .011. the correlation coefficient of analyzing the limitation of the study and reading comprehension was 0.391 with the significance value was .0443. the correlation coefficient of concluding argument and reading comprehension was 0.106 with the significance value was .0822. it means that among fourth aspects of critical reading, only two aspects had significant correlation with reading comprehension. it was evaluating an argument and analyzing argument. correlations reading comprehension critical reading pearson correlation .844** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 90 mawaddah hidayati, rita inderawati, & bambang loeneto the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension 76 table 15. contribution critical reading skills and its aspects and reading comprehension model summary model r change statistics r square change f change sig. f change 1 2 .286a .377b .082 .142 8.669 6.735 .004 .011 a. predictors: (constant), evaluating argument b. predictors: (constant), evaluating argument, analyzing argument table 16. correlation between critical reading skills and aspects of reading comprehension reading comprehension critical reading main idea pearson correlation .985* sig. (2-tailed) .015 n 90 detail pearson correlation .957* sig. (2-tailed) .043 n 90 cause effect pearson correlation .933 sig. (2-tailed) .067 n 90 inference pearson correlation .991** sig. (2-tailed) .009 n 90 vocabulary pearson correlation .965* sig. (2-tailed) .035 n 90 sequence pearson correlation .947 sig. (2-tailed) .053 n 90 author tone pearson correlation .978* sig. (2-tailed) .022 n 90 in addition, the writer also conducted to see the correlation between critical reading and each aspect of reading comprehension. as showed in table 16, it was found that the correlation between main idea and critical reading was 0.985 with the significance value was 0.015. the correlation coefficient of detail and critical reading was 0.957 with the significance value was .043. the correlation coefficient of causeeffect and critical reading was 0.933 with the significance value was .067. the correlation coefficient of inference and critical reading was 0.991 with the significance value was .009. the correlation coefficient of vocabulary and critical reading was 0.965 with the significance value was .035. the correlation coefficient of sequence and critical reading was 0.947 with the significance value was .053. the correlation coefficient of author’s tone and critical reading was 0.978 with the significance value was .022. it means that among seven aspects of reading comprehension, there were two aspects had no significant correlation with critical reading. they are cause-effect and sequence. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 77 table 17. contribution reading comprehension and students’ critical reading model summary model r change statistics r square change f change sig. f change 1 2 3 4 5 .985a .957b .991c .965d .978e .953 .926 .983 .958 .965 101.443 112.324 114.573 102.654 111.785 .015 .043 .009 .035 .022 a. predictors: (constant), main idea b. predictors: (constant), detail c. predictors: (constant), inference d. predictors: (constant), vocabulary e. predictors: (constant), author tone the writers also found the contribution aspects of reading comprehension and critical reading. table 17 showed the result of regression analysis of each aspect of reading comprehension to critical reading using stepwise method. it showed that main idea, detail, inference, vocabulary and author tone had contribution from the seven aspects of reading comprehension to critical reading. the contribution was 95, 3% for main idea, 92,6% for detail, 98,3% for inference, 95,8% for vocabulary and 96,5% for author tone. regression analysis regression analysis by using stepwise method was applied to find out the contribution of critical thinking and critical reading to reading comprehension, to find out the contribution of critical thinking concept and its aspects to reading comprehension, and to find out the contribution of critical reading and its aspects to reading comprehension to english education student of uin raden fatah palembang. table 18. the correlations among predictor variables (critical thinking and critical reading) and criterion variable (reading comprehension) variable r r square f sig. predictor variable and criterion variable .844 .713 218.809 .000 the result showed that the correlation coefficient between predictor variables total and criterion variable total was .844 with significance value was .000. it means that there was a significant correlation between predictor variables and criterion variable. moreover, the contribution of predictor variables (critical thinking and critical reading) to criterion variable (reading comprehension) was 71,3%. table 18 presents the result of regression analysis among critical thinking and critical reading to reading comprehension. discussion the result of the tests showed that the fourth semester students of uin raden fatah palembang were in good level in terms of critical thinking. it can be seen from the table 2. they can think in clearly and rationally. they have a skill to engaged in reflective and independent thinking; they can decide what to do or what to believe. it was in accordance with what ennis (2011) state that critical thinking was the ability to think clearly and rationally. it included the ability to engaged in reflective and independent thinking; the ability to decided what to did or what to believed. meanwhile, because of they were students of the higher education, it was easy to do critical thinking. they have the greatest experiences to think critically. this was in accordance with akyuz and samsa (2009) claimed that taught students critical thinking skills was the aim of higher education. they believe that one of the greatest experiences for students in higher education was to think critically and to challenge other students’ ideas with those of their own. thinking skills were crucial for educated persons and by these skills they could cope with a rapidly changing world and deal with reality in a reasonable and independent manner. mawaddah hidayati, rita inderawati, & bambang loeneto the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension 78 from the data distribution showed that students were in good level in terms of critical reading. this finding was the same as the study conducted by dianti (2013) that the critical and analytical reading skills of the english education study program students of sriwijaya university were at good level despite their high academic achievement. this might happen because the students can comprehend what they were reading, not only literal meaning but also implied meaning. it was in line with what pirozzi (2003) state that a critical reading was as very-high level comprehension of written material requiring interpretation and evaluation skill and it also entails using reference to go beyond what was stated explicitly, filling in informational gaps and coming to logical conclusions. moreover, critical reading refers to a careful, active, reflective and analytic reading (kurland, 2006). moreover, the data distribution of reading comprehension showed that most of the fourth semester students of uin raden fatah palembang was in good level. it can be seen from the table 11. it could happen since they had already completed their reading courses, so they have enough knowledge and skills in reading comprehension questions. however, there was no one in excellent level of reading comprehension. this might happen due to many factors involving in comprehension. as stated by baier (2005) that is reading comprehension is a skill that is critical in the educational success of all individuals. without adequate reading comprehension skills, students could struggle in many subject areas. in addition, hansen (2016) also stated that reading is often described as an interactive process, where comprehension is a result of joint efforts from the author and the reader. the author has to formulate the content so that it is interpretable, whereas the reader must mobilize the skills and knowledge needed to comprehend the text – a joint venture. however, the reader is the one most likely to spoil the process; fail to understand, give in, and stop reading. hence, the reader is considered to be the one most responsible for gaining comprehension. it might be that the students did not engage fully during the test, or they had low motivation to do the test. besides, their interest and ability in thinking critically also influences their achievement in reading comprehension. the correlation analysis between critical thinking and reading comprehension showed that there was a significant correlation. this finding was in accordance with what commeyras (1990, p. 201) stated that critical thinking is closely related to reading comprehension. it was similar to the view that reasoning was an integral part of reading. critical thinking which involved reasoning, was the process the reader used to determine which interpretations were consistent with textual evidence and background knowledge. furthermore, there is a connection between critical thinking and reading comprehension. readers must have the inferential and reasoning skills to establish meaningful connections between information in the text and relevant background knowledge. central to these skills is knowing what constitutes an inferential or causal/logical relation and being able to recognize or construct one when need in order to form a coherent mental representation of the text (broek & kremer, 2000, pp. 11-12). there was a significant correlation between critical reading and reading comprehension. this finding was in accordance with what cleveland state university (2017) mentioned that a critical reading means that a reader applies certain processes, models, questions, and theories that result in enchanced clarity and comprehension. in line with that, reading comprehension could be utilized by a set of related concepts, such as: critical thinking, prior knowledge, inferencemaking, and meta-cognitive skills (zabit, 2010). besides, shanahan (2006) supports that one of the components that could influence the readers to read effectively was comprehension. comprehension was the only reason for reading. without comprehension, it meant that someone just read for word calling exercise. by comprehending the meaning of the text deeply, someone could enrich their knowledge, skills, and experiences. last, the answers to the three questions can be seen from the results of statistical analyses showing that there were significant correlations among predictor variables (critical thinking and critical reading) and criterion variable (reading comprehension achievement). it can be concluded that students’ critical thinking and critical reading had effect on their reading comprehension. it could happen since critical thinking becomes the starting point to involve in the way students gain the information especially in a reading activity, and the critical reading helps the students process and connect their prior knowledge and the new knowledge they get while reading. critical reading ability was largely explainable through fluent execution of critical thinking skills in that reading and thinking were two interdependent skills and the reading process could not take place english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 79 without active use of thinking activities (zin, eng & galea, 2014). critical reading was related to critical thinking in that engaging critically in reading meant employing critical thinking skills while reading. these included the analysis and inference skills. reading critically differed from other forms of reading in that the reading act goes beyond the literal meaning by questioning the functions and purposes of the text. reading with awareness of similarities and differences between what the reader has already seen and what he was seeing in the text he is reading. it was clear that the process involves analytic thinking and evaluating what one reads i.e. it required higher order cognitive skills and comprehension skills such as making inferences, reasoning and judging. these skills were important in order to inferred, compared, distinguished between fact and opinion, and identify the author’s intention. conclusion based on the basis of the interpretation of this study, the following conclusions can be drawn. first, the students’ critical thinking was significantly correlated with their reading comprehension. in other words, the more students’ critical thinking in reading, the better their reading comprehension. second, the students’ critical reading was significantly correlated with their reading comprehension. therefore, it can be said that the more students’ critical read, the better their reading comprehension. third, the students’ critical thinking, critical reading, and reading comprehension were significantly correlated. in conclusion, students’ success in reading comprehension was significantly affected by their critical thinking and critical reading. references akyuz, h. i., & samsa, s. (2009). the effects of blended learning environment on the critical thinking skills of students. journal of procedia social and behavioral sciences, 1, 1744-1748. baier, r. j. (2005). reading comprehension and reading strategies (a research paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master of education degree in education, university of wisconsin-stout, as). retrieved from https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle1793/41543 bezanilla, m.j., nogueira, d.f., poblete, m., & dominguez, h.g. (2019). methodologies for teaching-learning critical thinking in higher education: the teacher’s view. thinking skills and creativity, 33. broek, p. v. d., kremer, k. e. (2000). the mind in action: what it means to comprehend during reading. in b. m. taylor & p. v. d. broek (eds.), reading for meaning: fostering comprehension in the middle grades, newark, de, 1-31. cleveland state university. (2017). critical reading. retrieved from https://www.csuohio.edu/writing-center/criticalreading-what-critical-reading-and-why-do-ineed-do-it. collegiate assessment of academic proficiency (caap) critical thinking sample test questions booklet. (2008). american college testing program: act. http://www.act.org/ commeyras, m. (1990). analyzing a critical-thinking reading lesson. journal of teaching and teacher education. 6(3), 201-214. dianti, r. (2013). the correlation between critical thinking skills and critical reading skills of english education study program students of sriwijaya university (magister’s thesis, sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia). ennis, r. h. (2011, january 10). what is critical thinking. retrieved from http://www.criticalthinking.net/definition.html ghanizadeh, a., hoorie, a.h., & jahedizadeh, s. (2020). higher order thinking skills in the language classroom: a concise guide. second language learning and teaching. berlin: springer link. hammond, l.d., flook, l., harvey, c.c., barron, b., & osher, d. (2020). implication for educational practice of the science of learning and development. applied development science, 24(2), 97-140 hansen, e. j. (2016). reading comprehension (master i fremmedspråk i skolen, fordypning i engelsk). retrieved from https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1 1250/2396307/16-00400-21 heinemann, m. (1996). the heinemann elt toefl preparation course. oxford: macmillan education. hudson, t. (2007). teaching second language reading. oxford: oxford university press. kurland, d. j. (2000). how the language really works: the fundamentals of critical reading and effective writing. retrieved from http://www.criticalreading.com/critical reading thinking.htm peterson’s, t. (2005). peterson’s new sat critical reading workbook. united states of america: a nelnet company. retrieved from https://www.petersons.com pirozzi, r. p. (2003). critical thinking & critical reading. new york, ny: longman. https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle1793/41543 https://www.csuohio.edu/writing-center/critical-reading-what-critical-reading-and-why-do-i-need-do-it https://www.csuohio.edu/writing-center/critical-reading-what-critical-reading-and-why-do-i-need-do-it https://www.csuohio.edu/writing-center/critical-reading-what-critical-reading-and-why-do-i-need-do-it http://www.act.org/ http://www.criticalthinking.net/definition.html https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2396307/16-00400-21 https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2396307/16-00400-21 http://www.criticalreading.com/critical_reading_thinking.htm http://www.criticalreading.com/critical_reading_thinking.htm https://www.petersons.com/ mawaddah hidayati, rita inderawati, & bambang loeneto the correlations among critical thinking skills, critical reading skills and reading comprehension 80 pnevmatikos, d., christodoulou, p., & georgiadou, t. (2019). promoting critical thinking in higher education through the values and knowledge education (vake) method. studies in higher education. 44(5). saleh, s.e. (2019). critical thinking as a 21st century skill: conceptions, implementation, and challenges in the efl classroom. european journal of foreign language teaching, 4(1), 116. shanahan, t. (2006). the national reading panel report: practical advice for teachers. university of illinois, chicago. trinidad, j.e., ngo, g.r., nevada, a.m., & morales, j.a. (2020). engaging and/or effective? students’ evaluation of pedagogical practices in higher education. college teaching journal, 68(4), 161-171. unesco. (2011). world data on education. (7thed.). retrieved from http://www.ibe.unesco.or.id woolley, g. (2011). reading comprehension: assisting children with learning difficulties. springer science + business media. doi 10.1007/978-94-007-1174-7 2. zabit, m. n. (2010). problem-based learning on students’ critical thinking skills in teaching business education in malaysia: a literature review. american journal of business education, 3(6), 19-32. zin, z. m., eng, w. b., & galea, s. r. (2014). critical reading ability and its relation to l2 proficiency of malaysian esl learners. 3l: the southeast asian journal of english language studies, 20(2), 43-54. http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3l2014-2002-0 http://www.ibe.unesco.or.id/ english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee endorsing sense of identity for college students’ english language performance yuehong wei li zhang department of english, north china electric power university, baoding, china email: wyh231@163.com apa citation: yuehong, w., & zhang, l. (2016). teaching research of college students’ sense of identity in regular class. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 149-158 received: 06-10-2016 accepted: 11-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: triggered by the lack of students’ sense of identity in english regular class effects their language achievement, this research aimed at developing a kind of teaching mode for building students’ sense of identity with a series of teaching activities. targeted at 55 nonenglish major students for one semester, the experiment was to explain the effectiveness of this kind of mode in endorsing student’s sense of identity. here, the researcher used teaching observation and students’ feedback to collect the data. it revealed that the kind of mode can help improve students’ sense of identity, intrigue their interest, and improve their english learning efficiency. keywords: sense of identity, college english, regular class, english class, teaching research introduction sense of identity, also called identification is a kind of complicated mental phenomenon. among researches about sense of identity in china, scholars usually interpret sense of identity as the concept of internalization or concept of imitation and regard it as the change of emotions, attitude and cognition (wang, 1998). currently, researches show that engineering major students are low in sense of identity and they have no sense of achievement or interest during english classes so that they are unable to meet the basic requirement of english class whether from the point of cognition, emotion or attitude. especially for freshmen who are forced to learn english for college entrance examination, their attitude toward english learning have been changed since they feel less stressful when entering college. according students’ sense of identity has been much lower and they have little confidence, therefore, they lack enthusiasm and sense of achievement. besides, since the number of students has been much higher and teachers fail to supervise and guide each student just as teachers do in high school, students could not fully concentrate on classes. for some students, they can pass the cet4 by cramming for it, while some students just fail it. for teachers, they have the responsibility to guide students to solve this kind of problem. vygotsky(1978) held that the development of advanced cognitive function depends on the interaction between human and society and the negotiating relationship between language and other sociocultural products. that is to say, people’s cognitive activities are mediated through the cultural products and symbols and 149 http://cn.bing.com/dict/search?q=cognition&form=bdvsp6&mkt=zh-cn yuehong wei & li zhang endorsing sense of identity for college students’ english language performance are to be developed, which is the central part of mediation. according to lantolf and thorne(2006), the mediation in l2 learning refers to:1) the mediation in the social interaction with other (interpersonal mediation or other regulation); 2) the mediation by artifacts or object regulation; 3) the mediation through private speech as mediation by self or self-regulation. the zone of proximal development(zpd) refers to the distance between the learner’s language level dependent on self and the level developed under the help of cooperative assistant (lantolf & thorne, 2006).zpd is adapted to the human cognitive development process and can guide the teaching. but it is difficult to be applied to the practice. scaffolding theory refers to the cooperative behavior between any adult or child and experts or novice (lantolf & thorne, 2007). wertsch (1985) put forward that scaffolding theory is the interaction between peers or a collective unit. this theory combined with the zpd can be applied to the teaching process and can guide the learners to develop their cognitive ability. in this study, sense of identity is students’ emotion and attitude towards english learning, which belongs to social identity. according to the theory of social psychology, sense of identity consists of recognition, emotion and attitude (zhang & jin, 1996). therefore, teacher should focus on the improvement of recognition, development of emotion and building of confidence when conducting teaching activities. guided by social-cultural theory including the three main concepts introduced above, teachers should attach great importance to the role of english as bridge and platform, as well as the role of zone of proximal development. method the subjects of the experiment are 55 freshmen of the second semester. students are divided into the regular class according to their normal or poor performance despite the fact that some of them may get high grades by chance. some of the students are of high learning motivation, while other students, and though with good knowledge in english, are of low motivation and lacking the sense of identity. the teaching materials of the experiment are thenew horizon college english, cet-4 special training text paper and english vocabulary of new oriental, and questionnaire of the teaching performance. english classes are twice a week and two class hours for each class. the experiment design includes the holding of the seminar about students’ attitude toward english. after one week, teachers find that students are inactive and even indifferent towards classes and homework. after negotiation between teachers and students, the themes of the second seminar are about “is english learning important?”, “what should we do during classes?”, “how should we overcome the difficulties of english learning?”, “do students have their learning target?” teachers can assign some homework within students’ reach, for instance, dictation with english explanation, dictation of cet-4 vocabularies which should be corrected every time by mutual correction among students or the selective correction by teachers; presentation of each unit, discussion on a certain topic which aims to lead students to learn new knowledge, build confidence and strengthen their sense of identity, english debate to inspire students’ potential. in order to get a better interaction between students and teachers, the reflection journals are 150 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee requested for twice. most of them wrote the journal in chinese and some of them wrote them in english. for the purpose of analysis in the research paper, all the reflection journals in chinese have been translated into english (shown in appendix i). results and discussion collecting data by written and oral feedback from students and monitoring students’ learning outcomes by observation during classes. during the seminar, some students think that teachers are too strict with them compared with the first semester and feel it hard to adapt to. whatever purpose behind the words, it does cause a great responding among students. teachers positively acknowledge the fact and lead students by posing the question that what’s the consequence without any pressure. for this question, most students say that they only think about the great trouble left by heavy homework instead of its consequences. they hold that they are confused about the role of english in their future career and do not want to devote themselves to it. when asked about whether they want to pass cet-4 this semester, most students give a positive answer since they could only get their academic degree with the cet-4 certificate. in fact, some students are able to pass the exam by hard working while others are in great trouble. given their current performance, whether students with good or poor english, there is a high possibility that they won’t pass it. after fierce discussion, students come to the conclusion that they will suffer great losses if they do not change their attitude towards english learning. they should know that they learn english for themselves instead of teachers. both teachers and students are fulfilling their duties, one for teaching and another for learning. after the discussion, students have changed their attitude and emotions. students who are hard-working have been praised and students who are a little inactive have realize the consequence of their inappropriate behavior. it proves that self-adjustment of students is better than the push or the compulsory measures of teachers. homework should be within students reach. for instance, word dictation can give students great encouragement. even though students only get several words right, they will be encouraged and feel that they can make further improvement. some students talk with teachers that they find dictation is not that difficult and they are even anticipated for it. for presentation, students can get the topic they are interested in and get more exercise. after the accumulation of achievement, students can get comprehensive improvement. for regular homework, students need to write 5-7 pages’ words with a4 paper and teachers will check whether students have memorized those words by dictation. for some students who are unwilling to cooperate, teachers will take a flexible attitude. if you can memorize all words, it does not matter whether you write it or not. after two weeks’ practice, some students require that they want to follow this kind of training and even insist on it for the whole semester. for teachers, they should provide a good platform and help students develop good learning habit. the basis for the development of sense of identity is that students have realized the vital role they have played in english learning. english debate help students enjoy their time and enhance their confidence. since it puts a high requirement on 151 yuehong wei & li zhang endorsing sense of identity for college students’ english language performance students’ english ability, english debate is held on the end of each semester. while debate rules and relevant sentence structure will be told to students in advance so that they can make better preparation and know how to be logical. students are positive but not confident about the debate. debaters will be divided into two teams and the top debater of each team will give a conclusion after each team member expresses their own opinion in english separately. debate relies on the clarity of words and logic of thinking. as the carrier of debate, english plays very significant role and acts as the tool for checking students’ english learning. some students are even surprised that they should debate in english and it has strengthened their confidence and sense of identity. students’ written feedback (see appendix i) shows that they have initially built their sense of identity and the reasons are as follows: 1. common efforts of both students and teachers. at first, some students felt it hard to adapt to teachers’ teaching method or the change of teacher. and some teachers are not so strict with students that students regard english learning as a kind of recreation instead of an important way of gaining knowledge. but the joint efforts of teachers and students make english leaning more relaxed and enjoyable. some students hold that they feel good about classes in this semester and gained a lot. 2. effective selfadjustment. in the very beginning, some students hold negative attitude towards english homework. in spite of their unwillingness, students are forced to write english words. gradually, they recognized that they have memorized some words. though difficult, students feel it effective if they insist on writing word every day. 3. establishment of sense of identity at the end of semester. some students said that english classes give them a chance to express their views in english and intrigue their interest. teachers’ great responsibility help them won appraise from students. helping students set the sense of identity is very important in the teaching process. some activities are needed to be designed in improve it and let the students get some experience of to be good and a sense of achievement. meanwhile letting the students selfmonitor their learning process and getting themselves in the class activities are equally important. the teacher should establish a good environment and guide the students with some interesting topics and set the proper steps for their learning. it turns out that students should devote themselves to the classes. otherwise, they will fail the expected outcome. effective teaching activities can enhance student’s cognition and consolidate their knowledge. with the improvement and achievement, students’ sense of identity has been greatly intrigued. zpd and scaffolding can be applied in this teaching process and put the theory into practice and can be the basis of the teaching plan. it is necessary for the teacher to make a teaching plan following some psychological theory and provide a social interaction chances for students. then students can benefit from the cognition development when they are be involved in the activities with some interaction between students and teachers or students and books,even students and some medias. conclusion there are great numbers of excellent english learners in china, but college english teaching and learning 152 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee face great difficulties. dummy english has discourages us and most people of higher education regard english as the most difficult course. all of these shows that the shortage of sense of identity causes english learning are more difficult. centered on sense of identity with the effective teaching activities and specific learning method, the research aims to help students build confidence and change their attitude towards english. targeted at students with average english performance, all teaching activities and goals are designed for students which can help them improve their performance, strength their sense of identity and confidence. with qualitative study, the research has its own restrictions which are the narrow target of partial english learners. therefore, more quantitative research could be done with the target of more excellent students and comparative study between regular class and advanced class. acknowledgment this research was supported by “fundamental research funds for the central universities (grant# 2016ms135) and the excellent youth teacher supporting project. references wang, j. (1998). the psychological process of social norm learning identity. education research,1, pp. 36-42. zhang, z.,& jin, s.(1996). social psychology. beijing: people’s education press. pp. 186-190. lantolf,j.p.,&thorne,s.l.(2006). sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development. oxford: oxford university press. qin, lili., &dai weidong. (2013). the construction of motivational self system in college english learning from the aspect of activity theory. foreign language world. 6, pp. 23-31. lantolf. j. p.,&thorne, s. l. (2007). sociocultural theory and second language learning. in b. vanpatten&j. williams (eds.),theories in second language acquisition(pp.20123).mahwah,nj:lawrence erllbaum associates. wertsch,j. (1985). vygotsky and the social formation of mind[m].cambridge: harvard university press. 153 yuehong wei & li zhang endorsing sense of identity for college students’ english language performance appendix 1. suggestion: after finish section a of each unit, teacher should require students to memory some translations. it could benefit both our study and exams. teacher should dictate the words from section a and section b instead of checking the words from the pet4 book because in fact we are too busy to memory many. when explaining the text, it will be better if teacher could translate some long and difficult sentences or carefully explain in chinese. teacher should modify the essays according to the requirements of pet2 instead of pet4. 2. all the english lessons have been finished, and i have some inspiration for this term’s learning. english learning has its’ own tasty and most of student dislike it. in fact, it is not so boring like we have thought. once doing well in the vocabulary, grammar, and practicing the oral english, listening, you will find it is easy than the chinese. we practice the chinese every moment, while do not have time to learn english. so we should have the confidence. 3. this term, the difficult of learning is down. and i felt more relaxed than last tern’s, but it was a little nervous. the teacher’s strict treatment made me realize that this is collage and the english was still important. this term, i enjoyed finished the work and also learned some new knowledge. not only that, i fully used those knowledge in the cet4. thanks the teacher’s guide this term. 4. in a word, the teacher’s guide is successes. as the college teacher, not only did she put pass the cet4 as the teaching goal, of course itwas not means important, she told us learnt english was important in our working, life and training the ability through the example of her life in america. besides, the best part of my learning had been the change of thinking. the interested class and interaction with teachers made me think the english study is not so difficult and even is interesting. in the future, i will learn english continually even graduated because i should have the realize that learning english. 5. the whole term’s learning makes me get progress and also learn some american culture. i am interested in learning english. and the teaching way and attitude fully meet my need. i think it was same as my senior english teacher because you are all so strict and have the sense of responsibility for the job. at the beginning, the class was a little quiet, but through the effort, the english learning was relax and interesting. and i learnt more knowledge. wishing you the best of health and success, and i can make an improvement and get progress in my study. 6. first, i want to make self-examination. this semester, i cut class once and went to class late once, which i think are really impolite and irresponsible. as for english study, i feel just so and of course, my condition is not as good as in high school. however, considering that i am in university now, it is acceptable. in general, the state in which i feel about teacher you has been divided into three parts: good-badgood (the bad state refers to the time when you asked us to copy the words). your teaching level is very high and your teaching is full of your own features. all in all, i think highly of your class. finally, i wish teacher you the work of your heart and happy every day. 7. i think english classes this semester are pretty good, teacher is stricter than last semester and i have learnt a lot. sometimes i was not that careful but teacher really taught well. for example, teacher spoke in english all the time and sometimes i could understand but sometimes could not. all in all, i made some progress. at the 154 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee same time, i like some activities, like dramas before class, and debates. when having those, i felt very joyful. nevertheless, my behaviors were not that good, my statements were few and my english was poor still. 8. i’ve been caught using my cell phone in the first class so i never did that again. generally speaking, you are an excellent and responsible teacher. i felt really happy in your class. wishes teacher you have students everywhere someday. 9. your teaching style really differs from other teachers. at first, i think you were strict (maybe it was because the pet4 is coming). then i gradually got used to the style and become outgoing. 10. in this semester, i have learnt a lot of extra-curricular knowledge. to some degree, this class is the most unforgettable. you have shown us some pictures you took in the us, which left me a profound impression. this class has told me what the us looks like. i believe that one day i may go and settle there. thank you very much, my teacher. 11. this semester i worked harder than last semester to learn english and before the cet – 4i remembered a lot of words, and did some exercises. your teaching methods fit in very well with us, which improves our enthusiasm of learning english. in my opinion, english learning is nothing more than listening, speaking, reading and writing. however, i feel we have little opportunity to speak in class. even if i want to say something, words usually fail me. besides, i think reading english articles works well, and remember the words requires daily accumulation. 12. this semester’s english courses let me have a sense of fullness. because the learning rhythm is a little tough, i felt a sense of pressure. i think the study did not seem that easy like last semester, but i take it more serious than last semester. 13. it seems as if i have never studied english after i enter my college. i often studied one or two days to prepare for the exams, but after the exams i would remember nothing. therefore, i think i have learned almost nothing in english. but i promise i will make it up in the future. 14. i have learned a lot in english in this semester. i not only remembered a lot of words for tem-4, but also gained much progress in listening and writing. however, due to the large amount of learning terms, i spared less time for english. as a result, my grades have showed this. the current english learning problem is after the tem-4, there is no motivation for me to learn english. however, as long as i agree with english learning has a great benefit to my future life; i will generously input time and energy to learn english. 15. at the beginning of this term i feel not very adaptable for a new english teacher. compared to last semester, more severe teacher teaching increased a lot of pressure, perhaps it was because we just wanted to take the examination of tem-4.teachers held us too tight, though from the point of view of the results, it indeed played a certain role. we did remember a certain number of words, and also did many papers. although we cannot say how much progress has been made, but at least we keep the stability of the english level. thank you for the whole year’s hard work. 16.i have gained a lot through the half-term’s learning. there are many interesting things in each class, especially some funny things that you have experienced in america. from my perspective, there is nothing can be compared with the happiness that i have gained in the sharing process though there are only some pictures and explanations. 155 yuehong wei & li zhang endorsing sense of identity for college students’ english language performance in my opinion, i think it is very relaxed in this term. as time going by, i think i can communicate with you more convenient. due to lots of listening exercises, i have made great progress in it. what impressed me most was once i saw an english film with chinese subtitles, i could understand the meaning of the film by seeing the scene and listening to the english words. i do hope i can make more progress in english in the future. i wish teacher can lead a healthy and happy life. 17. to be honest, i couldn’t fix well with your teach methods at first, because it was quite different from the last teacher’s. but i can adapt to it gradually and i think it is good to teach us strictly. may health and happiness be with you. 18. generally speaking, i have gained a lot, not only some english knowledge, but also some foreign customs and methods of dealing with things during the one year english learning in the college. compared with boring grammars, college english is more interesting. what’s more, i have made a great progress in listening. at first, i would lose interest in studying and miss myself with low efficiency because of mandatory requirements. 19. i really hope that teacher can strengthen communicating with all of us, but not just some of us and stand in the perspective of students. i would like to have a teacher who is not only our teacher, but also our friend who is not serious. besides, thank you very much to teach us authentic english knowledge and classes which can help us learn a lot about america and english directly. 20. thank you very much for your tolerate and care in half of the year. i think teacher is very kind and gentle and care about our learning at the same time. however, somehow i feel that our teacher is a bit serious to us. actually, in terms of learning, i haven’t made too much progress. i think it’s mainly due to my own fault and i pay little attention to english studying so that my english is worse and worse now. 21. in my opinion, i think that the english classes of this term are quite different from last term. compared with last term, we can answer more questions in class, learn knowledge more effective and think independently for longer time. however, it’s really a pity that we don’t have our words listening anymore which make us lazier after classes. actually, i think all these are because of me, my will-power is not strong enough and i am not hard-working. i really hope that teacher can explain the exercises to us in the following days. 22. at first, thank you very much for your teaching of this term. i have gained a lot this term, not only knowledge, but also some foreign cultures and life styles in your class. i feel regret that i pay little attention to english this term. in fact, i couldn’t fix well with the new teaching method, but we can see that you have invested a lot on us. so i feel really sorry for my slight. from my perspective, i hope we can begin from some practical exercises. 23. for loose people like us, it’s really effective to teach us strictly. actually, each day a list of words can remind us of learning english more. however, i can’t understand what teacher means sometimes though teacher taught us a lot in classes, so do other classmates. so i hope teacher can translate and explain some difficult sentences to us. what i regret most was that i didn’t work hard before the cet-4, so i didn’t get good grades and i had no idea whether i could pass the cet-4. 24. i think teacher wei is very serious and responsible in english teaching of this term, but teacher isn’t lack of humor so that our class is lively compared with other 156 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee classes. what’s more, the way of words test is really special because we cannot predict which way our teacher will use to test us------teacher will read tell us the words’ english explanations to test us, but not the chinese meanings. in fact, i always got up late so that i would be late for classes and i didn’t receive my classmates’ messages. in today’s class which is also the last class of this term, we know a lot about your experiences in america. at last, i hope that you can meet your classmates in the future. 25. our teacher is really a good teacher. i feel teacher is very considerate and patient in half of a year. i like the american life which teacher has told us very much and i really look forward to this kind of life. however, i also correct the wrong mind that america is better than china in every aspect because i realize that we have our own life styles and we also can make great efforts. there is no need for us to admire other countries blindly. actually, i am not a good student because i didn’t come to have classes for many times. but i was moved when teacher encouraged and persuaded me with patience. at last, thank you very much! 26. i think you are very good. i like the debate competition very much. you teach us very seriously. it makes me keep up with my english. i think being serious is very important. 27. i don't know how your feeling is but i think you feel that being very responsible for us may be idealistic. don't worry. just hold on to it. perhaps you could do everything perfectly. but i think you could do everything better. don't blame yourself. it's our fault. our attitudes make us study not so great. 28. very good! english is very perfect! i will study english hardly. 29. while learning foreign language is boring sometimes i think english learning is useful, not only can it provide us with grace but let us relax. i think our teachers teaching is very interesting, but i think we should pay more attention to our textbook only by learning more about textbook can we get good grades. 157 yuehong wei & li zhang endorsing sense of identity for college students’ english language performance sherlock holmes and watson sherlock holmes and dr watson went on a camping trip. after a good meal and a bottle of wine they lay down for the night, and went to sleep. some hours later, holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend awake. "watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see." watson replied, "i see millions and millions of stars." "what does that tell you?" holmes questioned. watson pondered for a minute. "astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. astrologically, i observe that saturn is in leo. horologically, i deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. theologically, i can see that god is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. meteorologically, i suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. what does it tell you?" holmes was silent for a minute, then spoke. "watson, you retard. it tells me that some bastard has stolen our tent!" (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) 158 english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 323 investigating english language education students’ reading preferences rahmawati khadijah maro department of english language education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, indonesia e-mail: khadijah@umm.ac.id rosalin ismayoeng gusdian (corresponding author) department of english language education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, indonesia e-mail: rosalingusdian@umm.ac.id berliana febrianti safitri department of english language education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, indonesia e-mail: berlianafebriantisaff@gmail.com apa citation: maro, r. k., gudian, r. i., & safitri, b. f. (2020). investigating english language education students’ reading preferences. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 323328. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v8i2.3029. received: 02-04-2020 accepted: 13-05-2020 published: 01-06-2020 abstract: this study aimed to determine students' preferences for their reading materials and dig out the benefits of their reading preferences. a descriptive research design was applied in this study. two instruments were employed to obtain the data, namely a questionnaire and an interview guide. the subjects of this study were 35 third semester students of the english language education department. these participants were selected by using a simple random sampling technique. in the data collection procedure, the participants filled in the questionnaire. then, three of the participants were selected further to be interviewed. the data were then analyzed by calculating each item in the survey to obtain the final result in the form of a percentage, transcribing, and examining the interview result. the findings found that most of the students preferred novels as their reading material with 54,2%. furthermore, as many as 31,4% preferred the genre of fiction. several benefits from having their own preference in reading constitute (1) the students were able to comprehend the content of the reading material easily, (2) the students got more interested in reading, (3) the students gained broader knowledge, and (4) the students got attached to and focused on the text. overall, this study implies that english language education students preferred novels as their reading material and fiction as their favored genre. these findings also signified that the students could gain many benefits from their preferences. keywords: reading preferences; reading materials; english language education students. introduction students' reading skills can be sharpened and improved, along with the desire or motivation to read. by reading, students can obtain, devote, and process the ideas; it can later be implemented into their social life (zare and othman, 2013). it can only be possible to increase the student's love of reading by identifying the interests and needs of these students and guiding them towards those needs and interests (blau & baker, 2006). it enables learners to pursue their preferences when deciding what to read by strengthening their motivation for reading (aydın and ayrancı, 2018). preference for reading lets students fulfill their personal needs, improve maturity levels, and ensure freedom of opinion formation & reflection (hussain and munshi, 2011). there are various methods and strategies to develop and improve students' reading interest, one of which is knowing the student's reading preference. regarding the development of reading skills, the priority of reading preferences should be given to make reading more attractive as well as improving the quality of reading itself (aydın and ayrancı, 2018). among young kids and adolescents, different intentions stimulate reading and reading habits (mart, 2015). their interests and context may be regarded as the fundamental motives that urge them to acquire information and comprehension (arthi & srinivasan, 2018). the need to obtain rahmawati khadijah maro, rosalin ismayoeng gusdian, & berliana febrianti safitri investigating english language education students’ reading preferences 324 data and understanding causes them to read books, magazines, novels, articles and study papers, etc. also, hussain and munshi (2011) state that reading preferences of all individuals may be dissimilar according to their precise age group(s) and need(s) of information. considering the students' preference in the process of reading selection is as essential as investigating students' requirements (bouchamma, poulin, basque, & ruel, 2013). discovering materials that students are likely to be interested in is the first stage to do to find out their reading preference because regardless of how hard or simple a text might be, if it is not exciting to the students, it would be boring or hard to read (celik, 2017) . students may hesitate to read unless they find materials that draw their interests. adolescents prefer to choose light, pleasant reading, and generally enjoy reading books for pleasure and education through fun (jacobs, 2014). if they begin to read with their own will and with the text of reading they preferred, without any coercion from any hand, then their enthusiasm and motivation to read will continue. it is wisely appropriate for readers who plan to choose reading materials to spend sufficient time to analyze the essential aspects (alshammari, 2015). several significant factors in the reading selection process are students' levels, preferences, interests, needs, and background knowledge. meanwhile, the text itself is associated with other factors, such as content, relevance, and authenticity (arias, 2007) . there are various kinds of reading materials that can be read, ranging from newspapers, magazines, novels, short stories, textbooks, and others. from those reading materials, students can communicate in the form of written language. students can read in different ways for specific purposes, pleasure, and understanding or even for scientific analysis. they read to look for ideas, find solutions, explore knowledge, or even entertain themselves in their spare time. two approaches can be used in expanding reading skills, namely extensive and intensive reading (erfanpour, 2013); they are believed to be a method that is very helpful in improving students’ reading comprehension skills. previous studies have examined students’ reading preferences in all levels of education (hussain and munshi, 2011; bouchamma et al., 2013; shonfeld & meishar-tal, 2016; aharony & bar-llan, 2018; lestari, 2018; eutsler & trotter, 2020 ). however, none of them have been investigating students' reading preferences at the tertiary level of english education department students, especially the third semester as the intermediate level. thus, to bridge the gap, this study is conducted to identify the reading materials preferred by the students at the intermediate level of english language education department. thus, this study focuses on finding out the students' preferred reading materials that are not merely to help their score and achievement, but for their comprehension throughout the reading process that reflects their level of intermediate students. method the study was carried out in one of a private university in malang, east java. the study selected thirty-five students out of approximately two hundred third-semester students of the english language education department as participants to obtain the data. the age of the participants ranged between eighteen and twenty years old. the participants were randomly chosen to avoid bias in one particular class as every student had the same opportunity to be the subject of this research. there were two instruments used in this study to obtain the data, questionnaire, and interview guide. to collect the data, the researcher developed a questionnaire consisting of a list of questions related to the students' preference for reading and created the interview guidelines comprised of questions to complete or add the data and information obtained from the questionnaire. later, the questionnaire was distributed to the third-semester students. to strengthen the data, the researcher selected three students as representatives to be interviewed. the questions were about the types of reading materials or their preference on reading, which they were interested in. then, to validate the answers, a respondent validation is used. this technique involves the results from both questionnaires and interviews to see if they still have in-tune answers. each student's answers were sorted out and classified based on the question items. the data were processed by calculating each item of the questionnaire to obtain the final result in the form of a percentage. lastly, after the final percentage results were obtained, the results were interpreted in the form of a description. the conclusions were drawn based on data that has been analyzed to get the english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 325 concrete final results to later be presented as the finding. results and discussion reading materials preferred by the third semester students at this point, the researcher addressed the findings that refer to the first question about students’ preferred materials. the results are explained as follows: novels as the most preferred reading materials by students from the results of the questionnaire, it is found that novels are chosen by more than half of the respondents (19 students) or 54.2% as their preferred reading material. those findings provide a clear view of the final results expected from this study. students use the textbook suggested by the lecturer as their reading material during the learning process, and it turns out that they do not like it. they preferred novels as reading material provided in class. besides, to strengthen the results of the questionnaire above, the researcher also added data taken from the interview as additional information. out of the five interview questions list, one of them is question number 1, which asked about their opinions on the reading preferred by students at the tertiary level who are considered as teenagers. students showed consistent answers stating that teenagers at age 18-20 mostly favor reading literature such as novels or short stories that depend on what genres they interested in, comics, the articles on the website, and the applications which are very famous among teenagers, namely, wattpad and webtoon. these findings imply that learners now have a wide range of reading materials to choose from because they have access to a wide range of reading materials, either in printed or digital form. fiction as the most preferred genre of reading by students the researcher also delves deeper into the genre of reading that students preferred. when the students were asked about what type of reading that they favored, it is found that the fiction genre is in the first place with 31.4% and chosen by 11 students. the results obtained indicate that the fiction genre of reading is the most popular among the students. children indeed much favor fiction at their age as many of them have selected novels as their preferred reading material. in the second place is the real-life genre chosen by ten students with 28.5%. in this case, they are allowed to choose more than one genre. it is aimed not to limit their choices to something they like. every student's tastes and preferences are different. that is why they are allowed to choose more than one genre of reading. it also offers broader and more varied insights into the preferred genres of students. the third most preferred is occupied by fantasy and adventure, which have the same percentage 25,7%. the difference is those who choose fantasy are female students, and those who choose adventure are male students. in short, the respondents favored reading materials such as novels and fiction readings. they seemed to be firm and clear in describing their tastes and their characters as readers at a young age. this type of leisure reading is an indication of reading achievement and can be seen as a motivating factor in increasing their passion for books and reading. journals and newspapers as the least preferred reading materials by students the results obtained show that journals are not chosen by even one student so that it gets 0% as well as for newspapers. based on students' opinions from interview results, this is because students have the impression that journals are very challenging. students do not want to use academic journals as reading material as learning and interpreting existing vocabulary would take a long time. if they are at an advanced level and ready to write an essay, they probably would like to read a journal. in the case of newspapers, students do not accept that newspapers are current reading relative to magazines or articles. not the least of their perception of a newspaper is that it featured hard-to-understand aspects of politics that do not suit their level or age. non-fiction as the least preferred genre of reading by students in this category, the least preferred genre of reading is non-fiction. this category is chosen only by two students, with a percentage of 5.7%. it is the reverse of fiction reading as the most favored genre among the students. further, the students articulated that many topics in the nonfiction reading genre, such as literature, history, or research, are not too common for students to become their daily reading. also, some of these readings are considered burdensome and tedious. the second position of the least preferred genre is science, which is chosen by three rahmawati khadijah maro, rosalin ismayoeng gusdian, & berliana febrianti safitri investigating english language education students’ reading preferences 326 students and has a percentage of 8.5%. these results are in accordance with the results of the least preferred reading, journals. from the perspective of students as readers, academic science readings are considered too complicated as they discuss scientific matters with unfamiliar terms for the students. the benefits of students’ reading preferences at this point the researcher discussed the results that refer to the second question in the research problem about the benefits of reading by students' preference for their reading comprehension. the results found are described as follows: students are able to comprehend the reading easily when the students were asked how they read with their preferences, 22 students answered that they understood the contents of the reading more easily when they read with their chosen preferences. it could be seen that more than half of the respondents answered that they would be able to quickly understand the content of reading while reading with their own preferences. the researcher asked students' opinions about whether reading with their preference of materials makes them comprehend the contents better. student a asserts that "i can understand the content well and get to know new vocabulary and knowledge according to the type of reading that i like. it also makes me want to read more and want to explore another book.” having a particular book or reading based on one's interest means that there is an intention or desire to read. it makes the student focus on knowing the overall contents of the reading. also, the students can enjoy the whole reading process and have better comprehension as well. the students become more excited to read another benefit is that they become excited more to read. it will foster their motivation and enthusiasm in reading. in the interview section, student b says that “for me, it is important to choose a reading that not makes me bored. a reading that we are interested in makes us feel passionate about reading and enjoying the whole text." it makes the students want to read more and want to explore another book. when someone has started to read more, they will be more familiar with vocabulary from each reading. therefore, reading with students' preferences could be a wise alternative because the students usually feel bored with previous reading material that is too monotonous. this problem can gradually weaken their motivation to read so that they will find it harder to understand the content of reading in the future. students have broader knowledge continuing the results of the questions raised in the interview, student c mentions that “in my opinion, reading with our own preferences means that we are free to choose the topics and themes we want, which will broaden our knowledge and insights about many diverse things.” giving students the freedom to choose reading according to their preferences will increase their knowledge and help them obtain more diverse information. moreover, the more they read different readings, the more vocabulary they learn. it will be very beneficial for students to develop their reading skills further. students are able to get attached and focused to the reading when the students were asked how they grew the bond between themselves and reading, student d answered that "i feel passionate and excited to read a book that i favored. it makes me more confident and gets hooked into the text so that the text's sense can be inferred. besides, i also able to read it with pleasure, more relaxed, and enjoy the reading process itself." all the details of the above results show how readings with our own preferences provide a great deal of help and advantages in interpreting the reading material. students claim that reading with the text they prefer will make it easier to understand the content and enjoy the entire reading process. this research intends to find out the reading materials preferred by the students and the benefits of reading by students' preference for their reading comprehension. the first findings from the questionnaire reveal that novels are the most favored reading material by students. related to that, they also preferred the genre of fiction, which they think are more exciting and entertaining. it is in line with arias (2007), who states that learning using literacy such as novels can provide edutainment for students that is able to motivate them to read more. the interview outcome also shows similar results where novels are chosen as fond reading materials for students. the alignment of answers between the questionnaire and the interview can be seen here as students like novels as reading material. the data can be ascertained the validity english review: journal of english education volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 327 of seeing how the students’ responses are very consistent. the findings indicate that students are more motivated and enthusiastic about reading material. furthermore, based on arias (2007), reading literary materials fosters the development of language for students and is supposed to be a channel for learning about other cultures. using novels or fictions as reading materials may help readers in many ways. tsai (2012) claims that when students read fiction or other similar types, they can learn about different environments or times, enhance their imagination, gain insight into human existence, pursue their particular hobbies or desires, and act as a way out of unpleasant realities. the second findings show what benefits are obtained by reading using our own preference. it turns out to be interesting findings where they can easily understand the content, capture the meaning, interpret the entire reading content well, and enjoy the reading process itself even more. as gilakjani (2017) states, comprehension is a very significant skill because understanding what we read, all kinds of topics, information, knowledge, and messages from the text will reach us well. reading will be a useless activity if we do not understand the information contained therein, cannot capture the knowledge that we will later apply to our real life. furthermore, zare and othman (2013) postulate comprehension as acquiring and creating written texts in context. it includes active techniques that contribute to understanding. the purpose of reading itself is to find the information contained therein, creating new meanings that can be applied to our real lives. therefore, the readers need to draw conclusions and interpret the new meaning of a reading so they can be categorized as good readers. from the findings presented, it can be seen that students are able to enjoy and concentrate more on the whole reading phase if it focuses on their preferences. related to the statement of arias (2007), who mentions that students' preferences in reading determine their interests and motivations, it will have an impact on their ability to interpret the content of the reading. reading by their preferences plays such an essential role in increasing students' reading comprehension. their interest in such reading materials boosts their enthusiasm to read, build their confidence, and make them more attached to the reading to build a good focus in the reading process. conclusion overall, students have expressed their opinions and preferences in reading. it can be captured that they like fictional reading material in which the majority of them chose novels. they enjoyed the light and pleasant reading which minimizes their level of boredom and increases their motivation. reading novels as material unconsciously helps students be more sensitive to their surroundings, more creative and more imaginative. furthermore, the students claim that reading by their preferences allows them to easily construct the meaning of the contents and enjoy the whole process of reading. so, when students can grasp the information, they have become successful in reading. there are some obstacles and difficulties faced by the students in reading. the students are given difficult readings, and they are concerned about what if they cannot catch the meaning or understand the content of the written text. the students mentioned interesting readings are strongly anticipated in the future. students preferred light readings about daily life, hobbies, novels, or reading with pictures, and dialogues. this study focused only on students' reading preferences and its benefits to their comprehension skills. there will be the possibility of other answers as one's choices might change over time in the future. from this study, novel is most preferred reading 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(2013). the relationship between reading comprehension and reading strategy use among malaysian esl learners. 3(13), p.187–193. http://eprints.umm.ac.id/38803/ http://eprints.umm.ac.id/38803/ http://eprints.umm.ac.id/38803/ http://eprints.umm.ac.id/38803/ https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/171772/ https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/171772/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 125 a study on students' needs in learning english for pharmacy (a starting point to design innovative syllabus) tri agustini solihati english education department, faculty of education and teacher training, university of perjuangan tasikmalaya, indonesia e-mail: triagustini@unper.ac.id nurti rahayu hotel management department, trisakti school of tourism, jakarta, indonesia e-mail: nurti@stptrisakti.ac.id apa citation: solihati, t. a. & rahayu, n. (2020). a study on students' needs in learning english for pharmacy (a starting point to design innovative syllabus). english review journal of english education. 9(1), 125-134. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3785 received: 27-06-2020 accepted: 29-09-2020 published: 11-12-2020 introduction english has been evolving as the working language in asian context (kirkpatrick, 2012). the specified learning foci of english in workplace context is under the umbrella of english for specific purposes (esp). esp is getting more popular since more english language programs are intended for the individuals who might want to learn english, which is applicable to their occupations (renandya & widodo, 2016). one of such occupations is pharmacy. english mastery is badly needed to cope with the global change of the healthcare system. in this case, pharmaceutical science instruction should always be adjusted with the recent condition in society. as with the global covid-19 pandemic, pharmacists belong to the front line to fight against the virus, and they are doing their best to support the patients despite their backgrounds and origins(wang & tang, 2020). lack of english mastery will seriously affect their ability to provide service to their patients. given the situation above, an area of specialized english learning should be well-arranged for pharmacy students. robinson stated three differences between general english and esp. those are (1) objective-oriented learning activity, the students learn english is not because the language itself but also for specific goals in an academic and professional field, (2) the course content is designed and developed based on students' need analysis, and (3) it is especially proposed to adult learners (sari, kuncoro, erlangga, 2019, p.30). besides, esp is an effort or program which facilitates learners' needs in english to run a specific role. the examples are english for engineering, english for pharmacy, english for the nurse, english for midwifery, english for management, english for tourism, english or accounting, and other related english subjects. it does need appropriate and much-related content to a particular field (richard & rodger (2011) as cited in agustina (2014, p.38)). based on the author's experience, the teaching of english for pharmacy as one of the english for specific course presents some challenges. not only do the teachers have to deal with an extensive area of content knowledge, but it also deals with students' lack of english ability since abstract: this study aims to discover the needs of pharmacy students as an input to design an esp syllabus. the needs analyses were conducted by distributing questionnaires to and interviewing the respondents. the responses were analyzed based on a comprehensive concept of need analysis proposed by dudley-evans and st. john. the findings showed that most students consider themselves poor in vocabulary and weak in speaking, listening, writing, and pronunciation. hence, it is crucial to improve their skills to enable them from communicating effectively with foreign patients and avoiding misunderstanding which may happen when interacting with foreign patients. therefore, developing an appropriate esp syllabus for pharmacy course could be possibly developed based on these findings and the theory of material development. keywords: needs analysis; pharmacy students; esp; syllabus design mailto:triagustini@unper.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3785 tri agustini solihati a study on students' needs in learning english for pharmacy (a starting point to design innovative syllabus) 126 typical classes consisted of mixed-abilities students. another challenge is related to the course syllabus. not many schools have provided the teachers with a complete syllabus with learning material and evaluation criteria. several schools even left it for the teachers to arrange all the syllabus, methods, and evaluation. this practice will eventually present some problems since the schools cannot measure the expected learning outcomes for the students. in this view, the course evaluation should be conducted. the primary goal of esp classes is to provide targeted language instruction fulfill the students’ real communicative needs in various professional situations. (chovancová, 2014), in this case, teacher’s task to assist students to engage with their professional communities by providing the linguistic needs and they can be such as valuable feedbacks for syllabus design and improvements. research investigating about this roles are many, for example (cabinda, 2013; chostelidou, 2010; hu, 2017; menggo, suastra, budiarsa, & padmadewi, 2019; moslemi, moinzadeh, & dabaghi, 2011; seargeant, erling, solly, & chowdhury, 2017) the innovation was implemented in order to improve the current syllabus and more effectively to accomplish the goals of english language teaching in this institute. although the current syllabus is relatively sufficient, according to the lecturers involved, it is not entirely practical in terms of topic arrangement and is apparently difficult to implement in classroom teaching. it is, therefore, essential for improvements on the syllabus to be made, so that a lack of suitability between the learner's needs and the items taught can be avoided, and both teachers and learners can work together towards mutual goals. much research on needs analysis have been devoted on the area of healthcare workers (mazdayasna & tahririan, 2008), science students (a. ali & nasr, 2015), aviation english (aiguo, 2007), public and environment health (ibrahim, 2016), nurses (lu, 2018) airground staffs (cutting, 2012), and tourism industry (ibrahim, 2016; yasmin, sarkar, & sohail, 2016; zahedpisheh, b abu bakar, & saffari, 2017) in indonesian context, needs analyses were used to investigate the language needs in travel agencies (suprina & rahayu, 2018), maritime education (dirgayasa, 2014), vocational college students (paniya, 2008). in addition, some concerns on esp teaching in indonesia were reflected in some research such as challenges in esp in indonesia (marwan, 2009; poedjiastutie, 2017), esp teacher education model (ali,s.u 2015), issues and prospects of esp(kusni, 2013), and esp material development (paniya, 2008), and teacher identity in esp material development (widodo, 2017) despite the various research on needs analysis in esp and the crucial roles of healthcare professional in terms on pandemic, little attention has been given on needs analysis for english for pharmacy. a study on this area is essential as it provides empirical data on students’ english competence, topics, and preferred learning activities. the data serve as the basic consideration for designing effective syllabus which can guarantee the achievable learning outcomes. this study aims to investigate the students' need analysis on english for the pharmacy course, covering their personal information, current strength and weakness of english proficiency, the degree of importance of pharmacy skills/activities, and identification of topics that would interest them. in terms of investigating students' need analysis on english for pharmacy course, the followings are research questions proposed: a. how are the students' current strengths and weaknesses of english proficiency? b. how is the degree of importance of pharmacy skills/activities? c. how is the identification of topics that would interest pharmacy students? english at pharmacy school the study was conducted at one of pharmacy schools in tasikmalaya. it is in 117 out of 2100 non-vocational colleges in indonesia. there are four study programs. those are pharmacy, health analyst, optical refraction, and nurse. in this research, the respondents are only from the pharmacy department. the vision of this school is to manifest qualified national education, to create an academic culture which supports the adequate graduations in the health field with high morality, to have competent graduations as needed by the community, to produce research which contributes to the national development, to get contributive cooperation on developing knowledge in health field globally. this institution provides an english course in the even semester with two credits. this is a general basic course served to complete students' english skills, which emphasizes recognizing pharmaceutical terms. during the class, language aspects are english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 127 integrated comprehensively due to the improvement of students' skills. the aspects are vocabulary, grammar, listening, reading, writing, and speaking. the learning objectives of this class are (1) students are able to enrich their knowledge in the pharmaceutical field, (2) students are able to improve their english skills by integrating language aspects completely, (3) students are able to implement their english skills for daily life. english for specific purpose dudley evans (1998), as cited in (donesch, 2012, p.2), stated that english for specific purposes (esp) is defined to fulfill the specific needs of students. it uses both methodology and activities which underlie a particular field of study. it is also centralized to language activities such as lexis, grammar, passage, and genre. esp for adults commonly has basic english skills, and they are learning to communicate in relation to professional and career demands (hutauruk, 2012). the characteristic of esp is to fulfill specific learning needs (javid, choudhary zahid, 2013, p.140). besides, esp teaching methodology is appropriate with another language teaching model. in other words, esp shapes input, motivates students' desire in learning, manages learning strategy, and promotes its practices and uses (strevens, 1988) as cited in (eddine & chams, 2016). esp is defined as "an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and method are based on the learner's reason for learning" (hutchinson and waters, 1987). esp has a long history in the field of language teaching, in which it was started in the 1960s when the general english course could not meet the needs of language learners. there are three common to the emergence of esp courses: the demands of brave new world, a revolution in linguistics, and focus on the learner (hutchinson and waters, 1987). celce-murcia (2001) claimed that esp is a movement based on the proposition that all language teachings should be tailored to the specific learning and language use needs for an identified group of learners and also sensitive to the socio-cultural context in which these learners will use english. esp is generally known as a learner-centered approach, since it meets the needs of (mostly) adult learners who need to learn a foreign language use in their specific fields, such as nursing, pharmacy, science, technology, hospitality, academic learning, and other fields. basturkmen (2006) stated that the most prominent feature in esp course design is that the syllabus based on an analysis of the students' needs because, in esp, language is learned to equip the learners to enter a more specific linguistic environment. due to the above description, english for pharmacy is designed to provide students' knowledge of the pharmacy field. it is in line with the syllabus arranged by the lecturer. it covers english skills, such as speaking, reading, writing, and listening. however, it is not limited to them, because the learning activity is formulated also to improve their critical thinking and vocabulary mastery. needs analysis needs analysis is generally considered the cornerstone of esp course design (dudleyevans & st john, 1998). it is the basis of language learning programs, which leads to a focused language learning course and aid the development and improvement of the programs. takaaki (2006) viewed needs analysis as a systematic collection and analysis of all relevant information that meets the language learning requirements of learners within the context of particular institutions involved in the learning situations. a needs analysis includes all the activities used to collect information about the students, learning needs, wants, etc. however, an issue in the students' needs analysis is that sometimes the students do not know what they actually need. kavaliauskiene and uzpalience (2003) pointed out that students often find it difficult to distinguish between the needs (the skills seen as being relevant to himself/herself) and wants (the desired competence). one of the ways to find the students' needs is by taking a survey or interviewing the lecturers involved, as the lecturers are more experienced than the students, and they also know better what the students' needs in order to be a professional english-speaking pharmacist. the process of needs analysis may also involve looking at the expectations and requirements of other interested parties such as administrators, patients, employers, and other people who may be impacted by the language program. moreover, having an expert in esp area as a consultant would also be very helpful to decide which the best is for the students. the information gained from a needs analysis can be used to help the curriculum or syllabus developer to define program goals. these goals can then be stated as tri agustini solihati a study on students' needs in learning english for pharmacy (a starting point to design innovative syllabus) 128 specific teaching objectives, which in turn will function as the foundation to develop lesson plans, materials, tests, assignments, and activities. basically, a needs analysis serves as an aid to clarify the purposes of a language program. the syllabus, which is designed based on the students' needs, will have high relevance to what the students studied. method design this research is aimed to investigate students' needs in english for the pharmacy course. thus a survey method was taken in this research. check & schutt (2012), as cited in (ponto, p.168), stated that a survey is collecting information from individual sampling through the response on questions. besides, this method is used to answer the proposed questions to assess needs and to decide objectives. (isaac & michael; 1997) as cited in (glasow, priscilla, 2005). kerlinger (1973), as cited in (mathiyazhagan & deoki, 2010: 39) classified data collection method into a personal interview, questionnaire, a phone call, and observation. thus, in this research, the data was taken from questionnaires and interviews. both data collections proposed the same instruments. the interview was done through a phone call. nevertheless, the respondents had an opportunity to convey their opinions toward the response. data collection sample the participants of this study were forty pharmacy students selected randomly over 160 in tasikmalaya. all students are native speakers of bahasa indonesia and have been learning english since junior high school for at least six years. instrumentation in this study, there is one set of a questionnaire used and distributed to all respondents. the questionnaire was divided into four sections: (a) personal information of respondents; (b) identification of current strength and weakness of their english proficiency; (c) identification of the degree of importance of nursing skills/activities; and (d) identification of topics that would interest the respondents. their responses on the section about their english proficiency were measured by the five-point scale, ranging from "very weak" to "very good"; and on the section about the importance of pharmacy activities, their responses were also measured by five-point scale ranging from "little important" to "highly important." in the section about the topics that interesting to them, their responses were measured by a threepoint scale ranging from "it is not helpful" to "it is important, and it is interesting to learn more about it." to eliminate any possible misunderstandings, the questionnaire was distributed in bahasa indonesia. the questionnaires used a modified version of the needs analysis questionnaire proposed by susandi & krishnawati (2016) as they are already validated and published. data collection procedure 1. the researcher arranged the questionnaire in the google form. 2. the questionnaire was written in bahasa indonesia to convince that the respondents understand each meaning of the statements in the questionnaire on may 14, 2020. through the whatsapp group, the link was spread and should be filled no more than may 18, 2020. 3. there were only thirty-seven students who filled the questionnaire through a google form. 4. the researcher interviewed three respondents who did not fill the questionnaire online. 5. analyze the transcribed data. 6. report the research result. data analysis since the questionnaire was distributed through a google form, the result was automatically calculated and provided in the form of a percentage. the highest percentage is 100%. the calculation will be from the total number of choices divided by the total number of respondents and times 100. results and discussion data presentation to answer research questions and interpretation of the findings (needs analysis) the following section outlines the results of the questionnaire, which is divided into four parts. the 1st presents the participants' personal information, the 2nd presents their english, the 3rd describes the pharmacy skills, and the last describes topics needed and wanted by pharmacy students to be included in the esp course. table1. personal information frequency percentage english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 129 1 gender female male 22 18 55% 45% 2 age 19 – 21 22 – 24 40 100% 3 studied english (english for pharmacy) previously yes no 35 5 87.5% 12.5% 4 make efforts to improve english yes no 30 10 75% 25% 5 frequency of practicing english outside of campus/week not at all 1 – 2 hours 3 – 5 hours more than 5 hours 5 15 15 5 12,5% 37.5% 37,5% 12.5% table 1 provides the personal information of students. most of them are female (55%), ranging from 19-21 years old. most of them have studied english for pharmacy previously (87.5%) because they were graduated from pharmacy vocational school. only a few of them graduated from senior high school, which did not specifically study english for pharmacy. only 75% who make efforts to improve their english. the majority also stated that they practice english outside campus (87.5%), ranging from one to more than 5 hours per week. table 2. the students' current strength and weakness of english proficiency very weak weak fair good very good grammar 20% 12,5% 27,5% 37,5% 2,5% vocabulary 12,5% 12,5% 30% 45% 0% pronunciation 15% 25% 50% 7,5% 2,5% speaking 10% 20% 60% 10% 0% listening 10% 17,5% 22,5% 50% 0% reading 2,5% 7,5% 12,5% 75% 2,5% writing 12,5% 15% 37,5% 35% 0% the data provided in table 2 describes that majority of students identifying their ability in speaking and listening, mastering grammar, vocabularies, pronunciation, and writing needs to be improved. the students feel confident with their english only on the reading skill, in which 75% identifies themselves as "good" in reading. table 3. the degree of importance of pharmacy skills/activities activities/skills percentage social skills 87,5% interaction with patients 75% administering medication 80% giving advice 87,5% cultural differences 50% interpreting medical terminologies / abbreviations 75% interaction with fellow co-workers 80% report writing 75% presentation skills 75% giving instruction effectively 87,5% inquiring skills 50% reading and interpreting reports, prescription charts, etc. 62,5% table 3 reveals that skills related to communication are the skills that the students think as more important compared to others. social skills, giving advice, and giving instruction effectively are those on the top of the list. the above percentage was taken from two perceptions, including important and highly important. in addition to speaking skills, administering medication and interaction with coworkers are also considered to be very important by students. on the other hand, inquiring skills and cultural differences are considered to be not highly important, according to the students. table 4. the identification of topics that would interest the pharmacy students tri agustini solihati a study on students' needs in learning english for pharmacy (a starting point to design innovative syllabus) 130 no topics percentage 1 giving directions 62,5% 2 explaining medication to patients 87,5% 3 hospital departments 75% 4 hospital equipment 70% 5 a pharmacy 62,5% 6 pharmacist 70% 7 pharmacist's job description 75% 8 prescription & over-the-counter (otc) drugs 95% 9 intelligence pills 80% 10 medical prescription 87,5% 11 confirming measurements 87,5% 12 administering medication 82,5% 13 describing the frequency of administering medication 82,5% 14 pharmaceutical company 70% 15 laboratory 75% 16 measurements 75% 17 jobs in the pharmaceutical industry 70% 18 non-production pharmaceutical professions 62,5% 19 pharmaceutical documentation 55% 20 quality assurance and auditing 32,5% 21 substance discovery and product development 42,5% 22 symptoms and indication 50% 23 prime questions 50% 24 warning, precaution, patient education 67,5% 25 rough situation 62,5% there are twenty-three topics among twenty-five topics that are considered to be interesting and wanted by most students to be included in the esp course (50% and above). it was only taken from important topics based on students’ perception. topics that seemed to be less attractive to the students are quality assurance and auditing, as well as substance discovery and product development. further investigation is needed to elicit the reason behind this opinion; however, there is a possibility that students have had enough knowledge on these topics and poses relatively good english for these topics, thus learning these topics becomes less attractive to them. designing the innovative syllabus the learning-centered approach was adopted to present the planning stage of designing the innovative syllabus. the approach was also used to collaborate with the core of an esp module which focuses on the specific needs learners require in the learning process. the evaluation will be an important aspect as learners’ performances which can be obtained through performance-based tests and feedback will be required to give a more qualitative perspective on the effectiveness of the curriculum once it is implemented. material development for the esp syllabus material development in teaching esp is very essential; it shows the creativity and the awareness of the teacher towards the subject. materials can be defined as anything or any source that can be used to assist the student in the process of language learning. it can be textbooks, workbooks, audio video, photocopied handouts, paper cutting or anything that informs the language being learned (tomlinson, 2008). material too can also be in the form of instructional, experiential, elucidative or exploratory (tomlinson, 2008). in the case of pharmacy students, the materials used for these students are materials integrated with the real-world situation, their working situation as a pharmacist in a hospital or other health centers. however, with the limited amount of time in each meeting, designing an appropriate material and syllabus for the proposed time frame are relatively complicated. the findings of this study revealed that it is necessary to improve english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 131 the students' english proficiency (see table 2). the first english proficiency that needs to be improved is pronunciation and speaking skills. students identified both skills are not good enough; mostly answered that their ability is very weak, weak, and fair (90%). further, it was also found that the essential pharmacy skills, according to the students, are those who require communication as social skills, giving advice, and giving instruction effectively (see table 3). thus, it is evident that students need to improve their speaking skills in order to be able to interact with their future patients. another english proficiency which needed to be improved was listening. since without having an adequate listening skill, communication could not happen. this is very essential. indonesia was very familiar to the accent of both american and british, but they were hard to understand the accents themselves. to fulfill the needs of students, a wide range of collection for audio and video is significantly needed. a way to solve this obstacle was by arranging a specific task. students were assigned to have virtual friend whose second language is english and bring them to the classroom activity. the most common applications used for having video call were whatsapp, google meet, zoom, etc. in their live communication, they could play a role between pharmacist and patient, for example, talking about certain topic. students then took some notes to the words or phrases they could not get or hear. this task could also aid students in practicing correct pronunciation. integrating the pronunciation practice with speaking and listening practice through a role play is a good scenario. students can directly know whether or not they have pronounce the words correctly when the foreigner cannot understand them. the foreigner will be the indicator in assessing the pronunciation of the student. further, the third english proficiency that needs to be improved is the writing skill. based on the result describes on table 2, majority of students identifying their ability in mastering grammar and writing is not good enough. 20% students reported that their grammar knowledge is very weak and 12.5% students said that their writing skill is very weak. in the real working world, pharmacist had less opportunity in writing instead of another activity. they simply wrote some important information related to medication. it covered patient identity, type of the medicine, how to administer it, and a simple information related to the symptoms. the rest activity done by the pharmacist was through oral communication. assessment a discrete point test and performance test were two types of assessment. the discretepoint test has a constructed response format, and is conducted in order to assess several components of english knowledge, such as reading comprehension and listening (mcnamara, 2000). on the other hand, the performance test demonstrates real language performance in writing and speaking skills. the writing test could be conducted by giving the students a particular task, such as writing a brief medication report. the speaking test could be set as a role-play test held in a pharmacy laboratory, in order to create a realworld pharmacy situation, as well as to give the opportunity for the students to perform and communicate while performing typical pharmacy procedures. conclusion the conclusions of this research were (1) most of the students had already studied english for pharmacy since they graduated from pharmacy vocational school. however, following their english skills, they made some efforts to improve them, such as watching youtube videos, reading english articles, and using english application to have autonomous learning. (2) pronunciation and speaking skills seemed to be very weak among all. based on these findings, it can be inferred that the expected curriculum to suit the students’ lack should focus more on how to improve their speaking skills. the suitable methods which can boost students’ speaking is communicative methods where students utilize the language in a real context which is tri agustini solihati a study on students' needs in learning english for pharmacy (a starting point to design innovative syllabus) 132 adjusted based on their expected future jobs. regarding students’ weaknesses in pronunciation, there should be specific section in the textbook/module about pronunciation drills. this can be integrated in the content and syllabus where students need to be able to speak with received pronunciation. (3) communication activity looked to be very interesting for them to master. it was based on the rank of activities that they considered very important. it was actually in line with the previous finding. since the most challenging english skill and students’ activity was speaking and communication, again the appropriate method to implement was communicative approach. sometimes the activity was not only by practicing dialog or conversation in pairs; it was possible to use some speaking applications on their smartphone to practice. thus, the real and virtual situations could possibly assist and improve their communication activity. (4) there were twenty-three topics ranging from 50% and above as students need and want to be included in the english course syllabus. since a semester only had 14 meetings, the lecturer should determine the order of the topics. it could be taken from the highest rank to the lowest as seen in table 4. english teacher/lecturer could use these findings as a starting point to develop the innovative syllabus. it matched with students' needs and their expectation toward the learning process. to perfect this study, the researcher also recommended further observation on another perspective from the teachers' side and professional pharmacist. after getting multiple perspectives on this needs analysis, the basis for developing an innovative syllabus will be excellent. references aiguo, w. 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(2017). english for tourism and hospitality purposes (etp). english language teaching, 10(9), 86. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v10n9p86 tri agustini solihati a study on students' needs in learning english for pharmacy (a starting point to design innovative syllabus) 134 exploring the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al baha university osama yousif ibrahim abualzain english department, al baha university, kingdom of saudi arabia e-mail: osamaabualzain2011@hotmail.com apa citation: abualzain, o. y. i. (2017). exploring the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students‟ creative writing at al baha university. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 189-196 received: 26-04-2017 accepted: 22-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al-baha university. it introduces the types of free voluntary reading that can be employed by the students. in order to achieve this, thirty students at al-baha university enrolling in the ba program in english department were chosen randomly. the descriptive analytic method then applied in this study. pre-test and post-test designed for the students and a questionnaire directed to the teachers were used as tools of collecting data. finally, the results revealed that free voluntary reading plays critical roles in upgrading the students‟ creative writing. also, the teachers highly appreciate the contributions of free voluntary reading materials in pushing forward the students' achievement. keywords: free voluntary reading, university students, ba program, creative writing introduction reading comprehension as general is the process of making meaning from text. the goal, therefore, is to have an access of what is described in the text rather than to obtain meaning from isolated words or sentences. it is a complex interaction among automatic and strategic cognitive processes that enables the reader to create a mental representation of the text (van den broek & espin, 2012). reading is the key of knowledge. the history of reading goes back to the invention of writing. reading is of great significance in human life, therefore, it is the main factor in the acquisition of expertise and knowledge. it is a translation of written symbols into spoken words and the relationship between the written symbol and meaning (al-jarf, 2007). reading and writing are integrated skills since the two skills occur in most situations mutually. butler and turbill (1987) argue that there is a broad consensus exists about the relationship between reading and writing. most experts agree that reading and writing are similar and equally supportive language processes. in line with this, shanahan (1980) states that strong readers and writers share many habits and practices indicates that there is a strong relationship between reading and writing, and research supports this premise. reading and writing are closely connected endeavors for these reasons: reading and writing require related-but distinct-cognitive processes. upper elementary students face similar challenges in reading and writing. writing can support reading. reading can support writing. reading and writing together support learning. writing creativity as a productive skill goes through different procedure before it comes into being. these steps let the writer to reach an artistic piece of writing that could be accepted by the reader. according https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.534 189 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to brown (1994), writing is a process where a writer puts his ideas on paper and transforms his thoughts into words. this is not an easy task, especially for an efl/esl writer because he has to write down something based on his knowledge of vocabulary and grammar rules as well as a prior knowledge of the topic. brown (1994) claims that writing is a two-step process; first, you figure out your meaning, and then you put it into language. krashen (1988) thinks that those who do more recreational reading show better development in reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary. he sees that there is a positive relationship between the amount of free reading done and various aspects of second and foreign language competence. the question of whether creative writing can be assessed or not is a debatable issue. according to kantor (1972) and newman (2007), the argument bases on the common misconception that subjective criteria are the only source of estimating creativity in a piece of writing. similarly, mackey & gass (2005) as cited in newman (2007, p. 52) think that “the evaluation of works of art is purely subjective and thus cannot be codified.” on the other hand, may (2007) condemns the supposition and argues that to objectify evaluation, teachers should try to set standard criteria for evaluating creative works. in addition, blomer (2011) argues that rubrics or grading grids are the best ways to ensure objectivity in creativity assessment. accordingly, this study attempts to explore the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al-baha university. the term free voluntary reading (fvr) was firstly introduced by the famous american linguist stephen krashen in his book, the power of reading. it is a type of attractive reading that causes pleasure and enjoyment. according to day and bamford (2002), both free voluntary reading (fvr) and extensive reading (er) share the same characteristics in developing good reading habits, building up knowledge of vocabulary and structure, and encouraging reading for pleasure. krashen (1993) introduced sustained silent reading (ssr) and self-selected reading (sr) to assist the in-school fvr program. according to bader, veatch, & eldridge (1987), elley (1991), and jenkins (1957), several studies supported that students in the fvr program outperformed in the reading comprehension tests than ones in traditional skill-based reading instruction. in order to best understand the creative writing process, it is important to define creativity. the word creativity in english comes from the latin “creatus” which literally means to have grown. to be creative means having the ability or the power to create. webster‟s new collegiate dictionary (2009) describes creativity as “the ability to create inventions, produce works of art, or solve problems using an original, novel, or unconventional approach.” creativity, therefore, is strongly connected to the verb „create‟, which implies creation of any things or thoughts or acts. bastrukmen and lewis (2002) assert that the perception of success in creative writing is associated with self-expressions, the flow of ideas, outsider expectations, growing confidence, and enjoyment of academic writing. they believe that good writing involves the ability to express ideas clearly and confidently to readers. also, they stress that creative writing enables the students to express themselves more efficiently and with great confidence. therefore, this study highlights the three following research questions: is there a relationship between fvr and creative writing? do the students need to improve their writing abilities through reading? what are the teachers' point of view? the implication of the study will have a great value to the students who want to improve their writing skills and go further into creative writing. to achieve this, the 190 osama yousif ibrahim abualzain exploring the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al baha university students have to go through free voluntary reading process. for syllabus designers, they have to choose best attractive reading materials that face the needs and the interests of the students. method thirty male students at al-baha university enrolling in the ba program in english department were chosen randomly as the participants of this study. the students specialize in english language and literature. the students' age ranged from 19 to 21 years old and they have been learning english for ten years. this study was conducted in february 2017. questionnaire and tests were employed to collect data for the study. teachers' questionnaire to make authentic and reliable data, it is incumbent to introduce the english teachers' point of view. the feedback of the english teachers is highly recommended in this type of study. according to oxford & leaver (1996), questionnaires can give general assessments. they are effective, quick, and easy to administer and don‟t threaten the respondents. generally, through the questionnaire, the english teachers were asked whether the fvr helps pushing forward writing creativity among students or not. the questionnaire used in this study is shown below. table 1. teachers’ questionnaire no. statement answer sd d n a sa 1. students face difficulties in writing as general. 2. the existing reading materials in the syllabus do not satisfy the needs of the students. 3. fvr develops language proficiency. 4. fvr encourages students to read for pleasure. 5. there is a close relationship between fvr and creative writing. 6. fvr introduces students to good models of creative writing. 7. the styles of fvr develop different writing techniques. 8. fvr materials including fiction develops creative imagination. 9. attractive reading materials inspire writing creativity. 10. exposing students to different types of reading materials provide background for good writing. * sd stands for strongly disagree. * d stands for disagree. * n stands for neutral. * a stands for agree. * sa strongly agree. students' pre and postwriting tests pre and post-writing tests are the same tests. they were administered before and after the treatment of fvr. specifically, the pre-test took place at the beginning of the semester, while the post-test was held by the end of the semester. during the research, the students were divided into two groups, namely control group and experimental group. the control group does not go under any additional reading practice, whereas the experimental group goes through extra free voluntary reading materials which were chosen by the readers themselves. the aim behinds this procedure is to find out whether there is any significant difference between 191 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the performances of the two groups. the preand post-writing test results were documented in order to compare and analyze the students‟ performance. by the help of the creative writing rubric, the performance of the two groups is evaluated and measured. the creative writing rubric used in this study is shown in table 2. table 2. creative writing rubric 1. poor 2. fair 3. good 4. excellent criteria no use of significant details (sole use of abstractions, generalizations and judgments) minimal use of significant details (they are significantly less than abstractions, generalizations and judgments) several use of significant details (they are significantly more than abstractions, generalizations and judgments) maximal use of significant details (there is no or just 1 abstraction, generalization and judgment) image no use of characters' physical appearance, action, thought, symbol, etc. to reveal characters (complete direct characterization) minimal use of characters' physical appearance, action, thought, symbol, etc. to reveal characters several use of characters' physical appearance, action, thought, symbol, etc. to reveal characters maximal use of characters' physical appearance, action, thought, symbol, etc. to reveal characters (complete indirect characterization) characterization no use of images to make the voice appealing minimal use of images to make the voice appealing several use of images to make the voice appealing maximal use of images to make the voice appealing voice no use of narrative to convey purpose (purpose is conveyed through formal statement) the use of narrative to convey purpose. story results and discussion the study explored the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al-baha university. as stated previously, questionnaire and tests were used to collect the data needed. questionnaire was used to know whether or not the fvr helps pushing forward writing creativity among students. while the test was used to see the students‟ performance before and after the treatment. the analysis of the collected data is shown in the following sub-sections. students' pre -test the students were given a storytelling which is considered to be one of the most popular types of creative writing in the pre and post-test. storytelling lends itself to both fiction and nonfiction. popular forms include flash fiction and short stories. the pre-test was given to both the control and the experimental group before the treatment. the result of the students‟ pre-test is described below. 192 osama yousif ibrahim abualzain exploring the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al baha university table 3. the correlations between the students' score on pre-test students' score excellent good fair poor students' score pearson correlation 1 -.222.509 ** -.309.076 sig. (2-tailed) .239 .004 .097 .688 n 30 30 30 30 30 excellent pearson correlation -.2221 -.362 * -.106-.189 sig. (2-tailed) .239 .049 .576 .318 n 30 30 30 30 30 good pearson correlation .509 ** -.362 * 1 -.372 * -.144 sig. (2-tailed) .004 .049 .043 .447 n 30 30 30 30 30 fair pearson correlation -.309-.106-.372 * 1 -.731 ** sig. (2-tailed) .097 .576 .043 .000 n 30 30 30 30 30 poor pearson correlation .076 -.189-.144-.731 ** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .688 .318 .447 .000 n 30 30 30 30 30 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). *. correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). graph 1. the performance of the control and the experimental group on pre-test *1 stands for the control group *2 stands for the experimental group from table 3, we can observe that the correlations between the performance of the students in both control and experimental group is significant (0.01). in addition, graph 1 introduces and compares the performance of each group. because the students attend the same classes and experience the same situation, no considerable differences between the achievements of the students appear. 193 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee students' post-test the post-test took place after the experimental group had gone through fvr process whereas the control group enrolled into their normal course. the result of the students‟ post-test is described below. table 4. the correlations between the performance of the students on post-test studentsscore excellent good fair poor studentsscore pearson correlation 1 .781 ** .675 ** -.271-.753 ** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .148 .000 n 30 30 30 30 30 excellent pearson correlation .781 ** 1 .284 -.321-.583 ** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .129 .083 .001 n 30 30 30 30 30 good pearson correlation .675 ** .284 1 -.242-.690 ** sig. (2-tailed) .000 .129 .198 .000 n 30 30 30 30 30 fair pearson correlation -.271-.321-.2421 -.262 sig. (2-tailed) .148 .083 .198 .162 n 30 30 30 30 30 poor pearson correlation -.753 ** -.583 ** -.690 ** -.2621 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .001 .000 .162 n 30 30 30 30 30 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). graph 2. the performance of the control and the experimental group on post-test 194 osama yousif ibrahim abualzain exploring the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al baha university table 4 and graph 2 show the performance of the control and the experimental groups on post-test. it shows clearly that the achievement of the students in control group does not reflect a considerable progress and seems to be the same. this is due to the limitations of reading sources which do not give the progress towards the students' abilities in writing as general and creative writing in special case. on the other hand, the experimental group shows obvious improvement in creative writing. on pre-test, only 7.00% of the students in the experimental group who got excellent score in writing creativity, while the portion rises up to 12.46% which is considered as a remarkable progress on post-test. also, 13.67% of the students got good degree on pre-test, whereas the percentage goes up on post-test and reaches 15.78%. besides, the students who showed poor performance on pre-test were 16.33% whereas a considerable improvement takes place on post-test and the percentage falls down to 8.64%. teachers' questionnaire teachers' questioner is a very important resource and a reliable data. after the process of consulting and piloting of the questionnaire, twenty five english teachers were selected as respondents. the questionnaire consists of ten statements and follows likert scale which is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research. the format of a typical five-level likert item, for example, could be: 1. strongly disagree 2. disagree 3. neither agree nor disagree (neutral) 4. agree 5. strongly agree table 5. descriptive statistics of the teachers' questionnaire n mean std. deviation variance statistic statistic std. error statistic statistic items 10 5.50 .957 3.028 9.167 sd 10 2.60 .306 .966 .933 d 10 3.40 .340 1.075 1.156 n 10 3.70 .423 1.337 1.789 a 10 8.00 .447 1.414 2.000 sa 10 7.30 .396 1.252 1.567 valid n (list wise) 10 graph 3. the teachers' response to the questionnaire 195 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 5 and graph 3 show the responses of the teachers to the questionnaire. the researcher categorizes sa and a as positive responses that support the idea of employing fvr to upgrade the students‟ performance in creative writing. n's score is neglected, sd and d responses are listed as negative ones. table 5 shows that the mean of the positive responses is 7.3 for sa and 8.00 for a, while the mean of the negative responses is 2.6 for sd and 3.4 for d. this reveals that the majority of the teachers confirm the importance of fvr in pushing forward creative writing skills among university students. conclusion from the data analysis, it becomes clear that fvr plays a critical role in upgrading students' creative writing at albaha university. the findings of this study match the research questions. the research questions in this study are answered clearly and supported by the data analysis. the results show that when the students restore to fvr and choose the reading materials themselves, a remarkable improvement will take place in all language skills especially in writing creativity. the teachers‟ responses also reveal that there is a close relationship between fvr and creative writing. here, the teachers confirm the importance of fvr to upgrade the students' creative writing and think that attractive reading materials generate writing creativity in the students‟ writings. the teachers also criticize the existing reading materials in the syllabus that lack attractiveness to motivate the students and inspire them to write creatively. references al-jarf, r. (2007). developing reading and literacy skills in saudi arabia. retrieved from: ksu.edu.sa/jspui/handle/123456789/ 7709. bader, l., veatch, j., & eldridge, j. (1987). trade books or basal readers? reading improvement, 24, 62-67. bastrukmen, h., & lewis, m. (2002). learner perspectives of success in an eap writing course. assessing writing, 8(1), 31-46. retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s10752935(02)00032-6 blomer, y. (2011). assessment in creative writing. wascana review, 43, 61-73. brown, h. d. (1994). principles of language learning and teaching (3rd ed.). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall regents. butler, a. & turbill, j. (1987). towards a readingwriting classroom. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. day, r., & bamford, j. (2002). top ten principles of teaching extensive reading. reading in a foreign language, 14, 136-141. elley, w. (1991). acquiring literacy in a second language: the effect of book-based programs. language learning, 41, 375-411. jenkins, m. (1957). self-selection in reading. reading teacher, 10, 84-90. kantor, k. (1972). evaluating creative writing: a different ball game. the english journal, 64, 72-74. krashen, s. (1988). do we learn to read by reading? the relationship between free reading and reading ability (pp. 269298). in d. tannen (ed.) linguistics in context: connecting observation and understanding. norwood, nj: ablex. mackey, a. & gass, s. (2005). second language research. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. may, s. (2007). doing creative writing. new york: routledge. newman, j. (2007). the evaluation of creative writing at m.a. level (uk). in s. earnshaw (ed.), the handbook of teaching creative writing. edinburg: edinburg university press. oxford, r. l., & leaver, b. l (1996). a synthesis of strategy instruction for language learners. in r. l. oxford (ed.), language learning strategies around the world: cross cultural perspectives. manoa: university of hawaii press. shanahan, t. (1980). the impact of writing instruction on learning to read. reading world, 19(4), 357–368. van den broek, p., & espin, c. a. (2012). connecting cognitive theory and assessment: measuring individual differences in reading comprehension. school psychology review, 41(3), 315-325. webster's new world college dictionary (4th ed). (2009). longman dictionary of contemporary english for advanced learners. 196 osama yousif ibrahim abualzain exploring the impact of free voluntary reading in upgrading university students' creative writing at al baha university english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee writing about what we see: ekphrasis today josie arnold department of media and communication swinburne university of technology, australia email: jarnold@swin.edu.au apa citation: arnold, j. (2016). writing about what we see: ekphrasis today. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 1-10 received: 13-10-2016 accepted: 18-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: visual media presents us with an opportunity to enter into the written scholarly discussions about an understanding of the paradox that what is seen and what is written are different representation. in this paper i investigate the importance of audience today; i discuss how global communications via new media challenges traditional views of the concept of an audience. i look at how communication is now from one to many, from many to many and from one to one, and how this challenges the term ‘audience’ with ‘users’. this paper enters into the scholarly debate about how interactivity in new media places singular interpretive actions by individuals at its center rather than as the more traditionally peripheral audience. in doing so it suggests that existing audience theory can and should be extended in regard to new media audiences, players or users. this paper also discusses how audience theory remains apposite when it adapts and changes. keywords: visual media, audience, new media, audience theory. introduction today we live in a very visual world. we are surrounded by signs from billboards to television, from cinema to gaming, from art to graffiti, from ebooks to interactive multimedia and from still photography to 3 dimensional experiential photography. one thing, however, that all media have in common is that they are all written about as we use ekphrasis: language at the service of vision. yet such words cannot bring the actual visual before us: ‘words can “cite” but never “sight” their objects’ (mitchell 1994:3). it is not to be thought that the art/visual talks for itself in words rather than images, but rather that the person viewing the art/visual describes it in a different but complementary medium. this could best be described as ‘the discourse of viewing’ (goldhill 2007:2), that may also be called ekphrasis. in critiquing and analysing the seen, we question the visual representation and enter in this paper into scholarly discussion about the seen and/or about describing the seen in words. human interaction is the basis of all communications, and discourse is central to this. from earliest times, such discourse was essentially person to person: as well as talk, there was dance, body decoration, song, cave, sand and ash paintings, live entertainment oral histories, lores, laws and legends, and ceremonies. speech and interactions were the main factors in communication and obviously this meant that the tyranny of distance held sway. once this distance was overcome by print communications, time and space began the long period of shrinkage which has resulted in the communications age and the dominant electronic culture. 1 josie arnold writing about what we see: ekphrasis today ekphrasis: writing about what we see cultural narratives define both our lives and ourselves argues robyn fivush (2010); and this is also true of visual cultural narratives. visual texts arise from and reside in networks of meanings that are culturally learned. they are thus inevitably involved in the power relations that surround both the commercial production and the personal consumption of images. visual narratives are involved in the representation of culture as are the words that describe them. originally, ekphrasis had a singular meaning about witty poetic representations of the visual that is best described as the language we use to describe the seen (goldhill 2007). it is now more broadly how the image relates to what is written about it, and vice versa (francis 2009). so today it is used more broadly to describe how we write about what we see and how we place what we see into words so as to make a further narrative of meaning. we write about what we see for many reasons, but perhaps the dominant reason is that print is a powerful and far-reaching tool that is readily available both on paper and online. whilst it may well be argued that ekphrasis is based upon the illusion that we can depict the seen in text, it remains the most dominant way of communicating visual experiences away from their presence. it is ‘as much a venture into descriptive narrative as into description per se’ (elsner 2002: intro). such ekphrasis provides us with creating a sense of wonder about a given visual and bringing the seen to the imaginations of others to whom it is not necessarily available. it provides tools for the dissemination of critical analyses of a visual work or experience as well as conveys and shares the immediacy of the visual being experienced and the emotive responses called upon to the visual experience. such critical analyses inevitably involve an understanding of the pleasure of reading both the written and seen texts, an understanding that writing about the seen is always a personal act of translation. in interpreting and critiquing visual texts, we build a bridge between the seen and the imagined as evoked through words, we analyse a visual world dominated by the seen so as to understand the gap between the seen and the described. thus: ‘the reality referred to and promised by but never accessible in itself through ekphrasis may be said to stand (depending on the interests of the listener or reader) for a reality beyond the social and material world of our actual lives’ (bartch & elsner 2007:vi). nowhere could this be more true than in new media interactive visual texts. discourse through written communications as societies became more complex, written communications began to occur, so that the need for face to face discourse was less important. such interactions emphasised the inwardness of authorisation and control of communication as storage: the closed book is a good metaphor for this, as are the chained libraries and bibles held by church authorities. the utilisation of moveable type for multiple printings moved western culture into the orderly, the sortive, the taxanomic which has led to industrialisation and cultural dominance through colonisation. rather than doing or displaying things, we began to write about them. we have moved on to represent our experienced world through photographs, drawings, artistic 2 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee endeavours, t.v., the cinema and utilising interactive multimedia. of course, we also write on, about and alongside those representations. since the late 19th century, the camera and movie camera have introduced into our lives new ways of seeing the world and extended ways of living our own lives through mediated experiences. with the introduction of ‘talkies’ in the 1930’s, of television in the 1960’s, and of computers in the 1990’s, words related to visuals have become every-day. this has been emphasised in the 21st century by the increase in digital visualised communications (hobbs 2004; cho et al 2009), particularly interactive visual experiences. writing what we see why do we choose to write about visual experiences, and how do we write about what we see? the visual world surrounds us in both formal representations such as architecture, art and interactive multimedia, and in nature itself including people, animals and the environment generally. there are clearly many ways that we can write about what we see as we move through our built and natural environments ( buell 2009; elsner. 2010). in writing about what we see on/in multimedia and its elements, we can ask and seek to answer questions about interactivity, virtuality, three dimensionality and immediacy, and how they provide challenging components to critique or describe (harrow 2010). modern eurowestern multimedia means that there is a generational change from print to becoming also very highly visually literate. today, modern media and multimedia act to extend our life experiences, enabling us to participate in something bigger than ourselves alone as individuals. indeed, we lead multiple virtual or possible lives through the mediated experience rather than the firsthand one. this emphasises further the more traditional sense of being lost in a book. we have become familiar with watching a movie on tv or online, and this experience is different from suspending disbelief in the dream experience of the cinema, where you share your inner imaginative life with strangers in an external environment. in cinematic movies, visual action reveals character, but the cinematic action itself and the act of being in a darkened theatre with strangers sharing a dream experience reveals as our own and others’ thoughts, feelings, plans and so on through the plotline and the characters’ personalities. today we have moved on to digitised new media and we see that computers, e-watches and mobile phones are pervasive; alongside their powerful influence is that of gaming. are mobile phones and games ‘amusing ourselves to death’ as the american critic neil postman asserts? certainly they provide another form of the ‘culture industry’ that seeks only to make money while pretending to extend our worlds. multimedia devices provide entertainment through interactivity within virtual realities, but do they stifle interactivity with people? postings such as facebook spaces offer global relationships as well as local social units or urban tribes; we are bombarded with information related to news from citizen journalists as well as traditional ones, and there are multiple platforms for work information. how do we write about the visuals that occur online? gaming in gaming, the goal is to capture a huge global audience of the young street-smart and cool market for online 3 josie arnold writing about what we see: ekphrasis today games playing. at the same time, the new wireless technologies make mobile consoles able to be accessed without any national legal control much less parental control. the borderless world of the internet makes virtual gaming communities unreachable as far as regulations are concerned. in 2003, according to douglas lowenstein president of the american interactive digital software association, the average age of a computer gamer was 29 years with the most passionate being in their early 20’s and male; 17% were over 50 years of age and women of over 18 years made up 26% of the gamers. many new games aren’t about violent power (now about 15%), but about social dynamics, with the player acting in a ‘god-like’ manner. today, there is also more co-operative play, in games that are massively multiple player role playing games such as ‘every quest’. they are aimed at both male and female gamers. games where societies, cultures and people are constructed are called ‘god-games’. they act to build and construct through endless possible permutations that permit multiple combinations. such games are based on strategic thinking and planning, involve creative input and laterality as they invent open-ended universes that aren’t constrained by narrow rules or actual realities (heffernan 2004. pop 2010). interactivity for rob cover (2004) ‘achieves a new stage in the democratisation of user participation with the electronic game’. it signals, he states, a need for scholars to form new theories about textuality and discourse as ‘the author-creator function and the audience-user or recipient, can be said to be engaged in a struggle for control over the text in terms of participation, cocreation, transformation and distribution’ (n.p). it is, then, a concern of controlling the narrative in a nonlinear text that is not presented to the user as finished but that invites multiple possibilities of immersive interactive play. indeed, cover describes this as ‘the author-audience struggle’, and agrees that it is not new to scholarship. print: a powerful communication tool visual representations speak for themselves: we are very familiar with the saying that one picture is worth a thousand words. we do not have to follow an imperative of redescribing the seen in words. at the same time, there is a strong relationship between visual and verbal representations (hollingworth 2005). for example, millions of words and many books are written about art. artists themselves long to understand their work through verbal descriptions as well as the intrinsic visual representations themselves. vincent van gogh provides strong insights into this in his letters to his brother about his art works: ‘at present i absolutely want to paint a starry sky. it often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. if only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. and without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky’ we write about what we see because print remains the dominant communication tool even on the internet (kavoori & chadha 2009). print has had a very real influence on the cultural mindset not only of europeans but on the ways in which post-industrial capitalism has developed into the 4 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee dominant (almost sole?) cultural model up to today (hollingworth 2005). print made discourse very inward and subject to an authority. the individual can use the book or online information in print anywhere and at any time within reason to be instructed, to gain information, to have knowledge and opinion delivered to the reader. the poet gerard manley hopkins is also engaged in describing the visual in his written works: ‘drops of rain hanging on rails etc. seen with only the lower light rim like nails (of fingers). screws of brooks and twines. soft chalky look with more shadowy middles of globes of cloud on a night with a moon faint or concealed. mealy clouds with a not brilliant moon. blunt buds of the ash. pencil buds of the beech. lobes of the trees. cups of the eyes, gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. pencil of eyelashes. juices of the eyeball. eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeve’s, gloves. also the bones sleeved in flesh. juices of the sunrise. joins and veins of the same. vermilion look of the hand held against a candle with the darker parts as the middles of the fingers and especially knuckles covered with ash’ (gerard manley hopkins the penguin poets) visual experiences the pictorial represents a voyage of the imagination as we enter into the representation seeing it not as canvas or an epad but as an experience in which we are involved: ‘we do not see paintings, as much as we see according to them’ (mcgilchrist 2001: 183). visual experiences lead us beyond the media in which they exist to the world that they picture. the human imagination can also evoke a pictorial element through verbal description. as ian mcgilchrist says in his discussion of the role of the relationship of the hemispheres of the brain: language is ‘a living something that allows us to move through it and beyond…’ the visual, then, can be presented within the verbal albeit through 2 different codes of knowing. simon goldhill calls this ‘the language of sight’ (2007:6). for gregory ulmer (1985) new technologies provide a new form of textual discourse that he calls electracy because it is as important and powerful as literacy and numeracy. words and visuals contentiously, art history is described by jas elsner as ekphrasis because it ‘…represents the tendentious application of rhetorical description to the work of art (or to several works or even whole categories of art) for the purpose of making an argument of some kind to suit the author’s prior intent’ (2010:11). for him ‘the description of objects’ acts to ‘conspire to translate the visual and sensual nature of a work of art into a linguistic formulation capable of being voiced in a discursive argument’ (12). thus, writing about what we see can be called ‘a descriptive fiction’ that makes a visual object falsified: …the conceptual apparatus into which the object has been rendered, and its transformation from a thing that signifies by volume, shape, visual resonance, texture into one that speaks within the structures of grammar, language, verbal semiotics (call it what you will) and can be appropriated to numerous kinds are quite simply vast. in fact, they are so vast that the truly responsible viewer might balk at the prospect of so falsifying the object by the act of its verbal rendition’ (12). we can take issue with elsner’s argument is that the attempt to describe 5 josie arnold writing about what we see: ekphrasis today in words what is represented visually is ‘inevitably a betrayal’, for verbal descriptions of the visual are able to be seen as complementary rather than as betraying the artistic realisation of one through utilising the other. is there a false dichotomy here? clearly the seen differs from what is written about seeing it, but the intentions of each action are intentions of definition, of understanding. the earliest representations of language are still recorded in the ancient cave drawings across the world. elements of dance and song, of ritual performances and beliefs, are also forms of discourse. dramatic representations of reality meant that the religious plays and liturgies, sermons and publications were a very important ‘mediated experience’. they took the congregation from their everyday life and enabled them to experience other ‘higher’ ideas and ideals. mediated experiences in the dominant western culture in which we live, and which is growing globally, it was the invention of moveable type that began the ‘mediated experiences’ we have come to enjoy through print. of course, it was first envisaged by the inventor that moveable type would spread christianity by enabling everyone to own a bible. less religious people soon saw its market opportunities in printing cheap newspapers. these often contained serial stories that were later sold as books. cheap books containing biographies, stories about the european ‘discoveries’ of the colonies, and expositions about proper social behaviour were also printed in large numbers. it is easy to see why so many pamphlets and books were published about, for example, captain cook’s voyages. the imaginary ‘mediated experience’ of circumnavigating the world and building the empire was something few people could do in reality. the publication to a broad audience of creative writing such as short stories and novels is relatively recent. there was an upsurge in such publishing in the nineteenth century. this has been slightly diminished since the spread of cinema, t.v. and computers as modes of delivering ‘mediated experience’ quickly, easily, cheaply and in an entertaining fashion. reading about what is visual provides us with multiple lives and experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible. the book the book is an outstanding technology. it’s compact, being able in many cases to be fitted in the pocket or held quite comfortably in the hand. it can be stored: the thin spine gives it an easy access as well as a small amount of storage. it contains a great deal of information in a small space: the typography ensures its readability; there are references and cross-references, bibliographies and blurbs; pictures, graphs and diagrammatic representations. the reader can enter and exit at will and make connections within the book and between books which are quite individual. the book is information waiting to be turned into knowledge by the reader. this has been made even more explicit by the ebook. in the late 20th century, discussions about the book by such thinkers as roland barthes, jacques derrida, luce irigary, helene cixous,and, have led us to question the nature of meaning and discourse. roland barthes, for example, sees the book as: …not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the 6 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee author-god’ but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash. the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture (barthes, 1977: 142-143). helene cixous says of the writing of prose, of very words themselves, that they are reliable only in so far s they support a certain cultural power structure related to(by) the masculinist hegemony: ‘what would become of logocentrism, of the great philosophical systems of world order in general if the rock upon which they founded their churches were to crumble? if it were to come out in a new day that the logocentric project had always been, undeniably, to found (fund) phallogocentrism, to insure for masculine order a rationale equal to history itself? then all the stories would be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands, bodies, another thinking, as yet not thinkable, will transform the functioning of all society (cixous, 1988:361). jacques derrida, too, asks that we question the hitherto culturally unquestionable power of textuality and discourse, and most especially the empowerment of the authoritative text over the reader’s writing of it: ‘i will not work very hard to compose the thing, it is a rough draft of confused tracks which i leave in their hands. certain ones will put it into their mouths, to identify the taste, sometimes to spit it out with a grimace, or to gnaw at it, or to swallow it in order to conceive, even, i mean, a child (derrida, in ulmer 1985:ix). thinking such as this has paved the way for both print and electronic textuality to be intellectually understood. these theorists have shown the difference between the word (sign) and its meaning (signification). in doing so there has been a problematising of the very nature of authority itself. discourse is shown to be evanescent rather than definitive, authority is shown to reside in the reader rather than the author. barthes’s famous essay ‘the death of the author’ tells us that in all forms of discourse the author as god is dead. the power of print we write about what we see because print is still the most powerful of communication tools. print has had a very real influence on the cultural mindset not only of europeans but on the ways in which post-industrial capitalism has developed into the dominant (almost sole?) cultural model of the late 20th century. print made discourse very inward and subject to an authority. the individual can use the book anywhere and at anytime within reason to be instructed, to gain information, to have knowledge and opinion delivered to the reader. it also made it extremely commercial: industries of printing, publishing, selling, creating, education and information grew. so discourse was no longer public, first-hand, open and personal conversation or the consultation of chained books in public places like churches. after the sixteenth century, it was seen as extremely one-sided: the author informed the reader. the utilisation of print to describe the visual is an act of translating one medium into another. verbal descriptions of the visual are an act of interpretation by the writer of what has been viewed. elsner describes this act of 7 josie arnold writing about what we see: ekphrasis today interpretation and translation as based on an assumption that verbal text can represent the visual. for him, ekphrasis is ‘an act of betrayal’ (2007:13), an ‘appropriation of the object for ends that suit the interests of the interpreter…’(22). the story of the visual told through other media, however, can be seen otherwise, for any mediated representations are appropriations and translations whether in art, mass media or virtual reality. indeed the very term ‘virtual reality’ displays how the act of seeing and doing is able to be made through multimedia translations. new media new media opens up opportunities for new scholarly research into media relationships that are of digital non-linear and interactive form. user participation is increasing its extent into everyday activities such as, for example, driving a car; finding one’s way; playing interactive 3d games and discoursing with friends locally and globally. clearly, the relationship between authorship and audience is significantly different when the user participates in the activity in ways that were denied by previous technologies. the user enters into and can transform the interactive text. this new form of personalised authorial discourse inevitably involves social change. as users we are involved in what sonia livingstone calls ‘the wider ecology of communication’ (2015:np). she sees this as involving us in a move beyond the yardstick of face-toface communication to the adoption of ‘a multi-and trans-cultural gaze’ that understand the audience complexity without polarizing past communication techniques and ‘today’s more dispersed, participatory, globalized, peer-to-peer social media. she asserts that this is necessary as ‘polarizations of the “then” and “now” kind, especially those that bracket history as “how things were before now” rarely enrich our understanding of social change’. audience & audience theory in considering the new media interactive role of the audience, we can see how theoretical prisms can alter and change, and do not need to be defended as static. this period of new media development of 3d interactivity has led to the ‘end of the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another’ (carpentier 2011:520). the current ideal audience today the imagined audience, the ideal audience brings us to a new mental construction of an interactive audience. that brings about an apparently paradoxical situation of audience autonomy. this means that the audience participates in the mediated experience rather than being given information. new media, then, has changed traditional views of audience and hence has added dynamic new possibilities for audience theory. it has moved from a realisation of the passive audience in the sender-messengerreceiver model, where the audience is the final point of the message to an introduction of the active audience that participates in the online media production interacting with the media content. this offers audience theory a number of new ways in which to develop understanding of methodological perspectives that develop as global communications offer 8 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee new ways to interact with creativity. this is particularly evident in the field of journalism as well as media research. mass communication is shown as very personal, subjective and singular in many digital interactions. the new media user has different work to do as an interactive audience. conclusion theoretical perspectives provide us with scholarly critical tools that enable knowledge to be taken forward as well as to be built. bryan turner (2010) says that ‘social theory provides the necessary analytical and philosophical framework which the social sciences can develop. social theory both sustains the achievements of the past, notes needs and limitations of the present, and points the way to future research issues and questions’ (1). cultural theories such as audience theory offer us prisms that enable us to magnify our societal and cultural practices, views and metanarratives. these are too often taken for granted even in our scholarly analytical work. by identifying their existence, we can begin to understand how they are constructed and empowered. we can ask about these cultural metanarratives why are they seen as ‘normal; what group benefits from such ‘norms’ and what group is locked out through the unscrutinised application of such ‘norms’? identify through such theoretical prisms as audience theory the ways that cultural metanarratives contribute to the welfare of certain groups or even individuals in our society also involves us in identifying their the negative correlative. that is, in bringing into focus the ways that they act against other groups or individuals or groups. these cultural givens, when read against, provide the focal point that highlights the cultural metanarratives that enable dominant social practices and expectations: they inevitably influence scholarship. reading against these ‘givens’ benefits scholarship by highlighting the ways in which societies operate. new media offers challenges and opportunities to writing about what we see (harrow 2010; cunningham 2007). visual media, then, not only presents us with an opportunity to enter into the written scholarly discussions about an understanding of the paradox that what is seen and what is written are different representation. it also emphasizes the importance of audience today when global new media challenges traditional views of the concept of an audience. references bartch, s. & elsner, j. (2007). introduction: eight ways of looking at an ekphrasis (eds). classical philology, 102(1), pp. i-vi. barthes, r. (1977). image, music, text. london: fontana. buell, l. (2009). writing for an endangered world: literature, culture, and environment in the us and beyond. harvard: harvard university press. carpentier, n. (2011). contextualizing author-audience convergences. cultural studies, 25(4-5), pp. 517-533. cho, c.h., phillips, j.r., hageman, a.m., & patten, d.m. (2009). media richness, user trust, and perceptions of corporate social responsibility: an experimental investigation of visual web site disclosures. accounting, auditing, & accountability journal, 22(6), pp. 933-952. cixous, h. (1988). readings from the seminar of helene cixous. writing differences (ed.). milton keynes: open university press. cover, r. (2004). new media theory: electronic games, democracy and 9 josie arnold writing about what we see: ekphrasis today reconfiguring the author–audience relationship. social semiotics, 14(2), pp. 173-191. cunningham, v. (2007). why ekphrasis? classical philology, 102(1), pp. 57-67. elsner, j. (2002). introduction: the genres of ekphrasis. ramus, 31(1-2), pp. 1-18. elsner, j. (2010). art history as ekphrasis. art history, pp. 10-27. fivush, r. (2010). speaking silence: the social construction of silence in autobiographical and cultural narratives. memory, 18(2), pp. 88-98. francis, j.a. (2009). metal maidens, achilles' shield, and pandora: the beginnings of ekphrasis. american journal of philology, 130(1), pp. 1-23. goldhill, s. (2007). what is ekphrasis for? classical philology, 102(1), pp. 1-19. harrow, s. (2010). new ekphrastic poetics. french studies, 64(3), pp. 255-264. heffernan, j. a. (2004). museum of words: the poetics of ekphrasis from homer to ashbery. chicago: university of chicago press. hobbs, r. (2004). a review of school-based initiatives in media literacy education. american behavioral scientist, 48(1), pp. 42-59. hollingworth, a. (2005). the relationship between online visual representation of a scene and long-term scene memory. journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory, and cognition, 31(3), p. 396. kavoori, a., & chadha, k. (2009). the cultural turn in international communication. journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 53(2), pp. 336-346. mcgilchrist, i. (2001). the master and his emissary. yale university press. mitchell, w. (1994). ekphrasis and the other: picture theory. chicago: university of chicago press. livingstone, s. (2015). from mass to social media? advancing accounts of social change. social media + society, pp. 13. lowenstein, d. (2003). the sydney morning herald. may 22 news review p. 2. pauly, n. (2003). interpreting visual culture as cultural narratives in teacher education. studies in art education, 44(3), pp. 264-284. pop, d. (2010). introduction: representation and its relationships to reality and illusion. ekphrasis, (1), pp. 5-8. postman, n. (2005). amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business. new york city: penguin books. turner, b.s. (2010). the new blackwell companion to the sociology of religion (ed.). new york: john wiley & sons. ulmer, g. (1985). applied grammatology. baltimore: john hopkins press. 10 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 285 using drama in efl classroom for exploring students’ knowledge and learning deri sis nanda english education department, university of bandar lampung e-mail: derisisnanda@ubl.ac.id susanto susanto english education department, university of bandar lampung e-mail: susanto@ubl.ac.id apa citation: nanda, d. s. & susanto, s. (2021). using drama in efl classroom for exploring students’ knowledge and learning. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.285292. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4353 received: 21-02-2021 accepted: 19-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 abstract: this paper reported a research project on using drama in english as foreign language (efl) classroom for exploring students’ knowledge and learning. the exploration aimed at understanding the students’ interests, abilities and motivations. then, we also observed the teacher’s perceptions in the classrooms during the implementation of the drama for the students. in the study, we find that students show their good engagement and comprehension abilities. however, the perceptions of the teachers varied on the several aspects of the students’ preparation and performance. further, their perceptions reflect the pedagogical context offering possibilities for cultural production in language learning. the research results underline how the drama can be used to construct the abilities for early language learners especially for social engagement and language comprehension. keywords: efl classroom; drama; learning; social engagement; language comprehension introduction in indonesia, english is considered as a foreign language and taught in every level of education from primary school to university level. unfortunately, the indonesian education system does not have the distinction between second and foreign language studies. however, the system has the distinction among national, ethnic, and foreign language. as a foreign language in the country, english is only learnt during formal and non-formal education and not used on a daily basis. in english foreign language classroom, various pedagogical techniques and innovations have been applied to drive the students’ four language skills such as reading, listening, writing, and speaking. to develop those skills, the teachers can use dramabased pedagogy which employs creative and fun activities in the classroom. with the pedagogy, students may acquire rich experiences in learning english. there are some studies in relation to teaching drama in efl classroom. uysal and yavuz (2018) discussed language learning through drama by discussing the importance of integrating drama into the second or foreign language learning process and the role of teachers and students in the process. they found that teachers who utilized drama-based pedagogy became aware about students’ mistakes. then, the teachers were able to overcome the mistakes in learning the language. further, by introducing the pedagogical and linguistic aspects of using drama techniques in the language classroom, the teachers might focus on the dramaoriented verbal and nonverbal exercises. kondal (2016) discussed drama as a teaching tool for the integration of language skills. he described how dramatic techniques could be integrated in teaching language skills. for him, the techniques could involve and stimulate the feelings and visualization of the learners, providing them various stimuli and elevating their learning knowledge. in learning a foreign language, each individual may have different interests, abilities, and motivations (liu & chen, 2015; sansone, smith, thoman & macnamara, 2012; tsai & chang, 2013). understanding the knowledge and learning of these differences can be explored to generate and articulate ideas as in the context of foreign language learning. for the exploration of students’ differences in learning foreign language, an interaction framework may transform into creative dialogue such as that in utilizing drama for an mailto:derisisnanda@ubl.ac.id mailto:susanto@ubl.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4353 deri sis nanda & susanto susanto using drama in efl classroom for exploring students’ knowledge and learning 286 explorative way. in the exploration, sharing ideas and opinions among students and teachers can introduce performance outcomes, skills, and knowledge. in many cases, especially in the province of lampung-indonesia, the students’ language skills do not develop as expected in the designed curriculum. since then, it has been a debated problem of the education system in indonesia especially with the efl learning achievement. one of its central ideas deals with the students’ differences in interests, abilities, and motivations in learning foreign language. as an alternative to respond the problem, we propose an insight into english drama pedagogy as a teaching tool to explore and understand the students’ interests, abilities, and motivations. in exploring and understanding students’ interests, abilities, and motivations, we conducted a research project on utilizing drama as an exploration of knowledge and learning for primary schools in teaching english as a foreign language in indonesia. then, we observed the teacher’s perceptions in the classrooms during the implementation of the drama for the students. featuring trends in english teaching for primary schools in lampung-indonesia in the province of lampung, indonesia, primary schools are allowed to prepare their students for the growing influence of english as foreign language competence. models for english teaching in primary schools have been used, but the effectiveness of the models is being debated comparing with their counterparts, with two standing out in particular. the first is national language education (i.e. indonesian language), which is a core subject strengthening the national identity. the second is ethnic language education (i.e. lampung language) which has the emphasis on preserving the cultural based knowledge (see table 1). therefore, models for language teaching (i.e. english, indonesian and lampung languages) are potential to compete each other. the competition affects the public policy for reducing the foreign language education. implementing drama pedagogy offers the compensation of the reduction by teaching english through extracurricular activities (nanda, 2016; nanda & susanto, 2020). besides, the resources in national and ethnic languages can be used for drama activities, e.g. ethnic stories. table 1. philosophical outcomes in language education for primary schools curriculum outcomes national language education strengthening the national identity ethnic language education preserving the cultural based knowledge foreign language education preparing basic skills for globalized world with foreign language competence drama pedagogy drama pedagogy can be defined as a collection of drama-based teaching and learning strategies to engage students with the content they are learning (lee, patall, cawthorn & steingut, 2015; uysal & yavuz, 2018). researchers have explored the advantages of the pedagogy for primary students (strakšienė, 2015) and elementary students (cremin, gouch, blakemore, goff, & macdonald, 2006; demircioglu, 2010; dupont, 1992). it has also been explored for secondary learners (keehn, harmon, & shoho, 2008; certo & brinda, 2011; rothwell, 2011) and adult learners (dawson, cawthon, & baker, 2011). in the exploration, it is highlighted that using drama pedagogy as teaching tool can improve the students in learning english. not only does it help to learn language but it can improve their literacy skill such as understanding and learning the lives, culture, and wisdom. further, norris (2000) confirmed that using drama in educational context is effective to help students to understand live experiences that they do not have. drama pedagogy as a teaching tool is an integrated form which is useful for language learning. however, for language teachers, involving students in drama activities is a challenging task. when drama pedagogy activities, e.g. role-play, are conducted in classroom, the students are invited to engage in the content discussion, share their thoughts and opinions about characters and motivations. besides, they are encouraged to rethink and explore their perceptions about a situation. it can draw their attention and drive discussion among them. then, they are eager to play. as the result, the activities can speed up english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 287 the learning process and enrich the classroom environment (robinson, 2015). hence, considering its advantages, we utilized english drama pedagogy as a teaching tool in language learning classrooms for primary schools in lampung, indonesia. then, we tried to explore the teacher’s perceptions of using the pedagogy. method the research was designed in qualitative method. it focused on the description of implementing drama pedagogy in english learning classrooms of 10 (ten) primary schools in lampung, indonesia. the drama was derived from indonesian ethnic stories which are converted into english. the research was also designed to study the perception of the teachers when they used english drama pedagogy for their students in the classrooms (fig.1). in the study, perceptions are defined as the sensory experiences which involve both the recognition of environmental actions as well as the response to those actions (yates, 2007). the participants are 30 english teachers from the primary schools, both public and private, in lampung. the schools are located in the town and rural areas. the teachers are experienced and certified for their teaching service. data were collected from audio recorded interviews. the interviews were conducted in relaxed and open settings after they implemented drama activities. the responses gained from the interviews were transcribed and coded based on the themes. figure 1. a design for acquiring the teachers’ perception on the implementation of english drama pedagogy findings and discussion english drama activities the drama played by the students was taken from the indonesian ethnic stories such as malin kundang, a folktale from west sumatra, indonesia. the folktale talks about the retribution on an ungrateful son. it is chosen because the story has local wisdom to learn in the classroom. it is observed that before the students performed the drama, they were directed by the teachers in the preparation of english drama performance (fig. 2). further, it is underlined that the teachers designed and organized the drama activities in the classrooms with some difficulties because they did not have the educational background in theater study. however, in practice, the content of the drama activities was designed based on the teachers’ curricula unit. picture 1. the students are directed by the teacher in the preparation of english drama performance deri sis nanda & susanto susanto using drama in efl classroom for exploring students’ knowledge and learning 288 the teachers designed and organized each activity into several sections such as description, goals, rationale, guidelines, debrief, and reflection. then, the activities were combined with reading and writing assignments in the classroom. some activities were with the involvement of the teacher in a role play. the others involved the teacher as a facilitator. being involved in the role play and acting as a facilitator, it is found that the teachers welcomed the improvisation by the students and themselves. with the teacher involvement, the drama pedagogy activities were designed with the understanding that the teacher and the students had the shared experience using drama pedagogy in the classroom. it is as suggested in golinkoff, hirshpasek and singer (2006), and zigler and bishopjosef (2006) that drama pedagogy activities bring the involvement of not only the students but also the teachers. when the teacher gets involved in the drama activity, we observed that the teacher helps the students discover the ability to explore and understand the situations. it can be useful for the students to develop creativity and communicative competence. the students’ creativity in the drama activities helped the students developed their language use spontaneously. the teacher involvement also helps to prepare the students to understand self-knowledge to face real-life situations since the teacher facilitates the activities with the use of academic content and social experiences. as stated in baldwin and fleming (2003), creative thinking and self-knowledge can be acquired through the use of drama in education. moreover, we find that the activities bring the students’ engagement in learning situation. they engaged with the content they were learning (picture 2). picture 2. the students are reciting the text with the supervision of the teacher teacher’s perception the teachers gave various responses after they were interviewed. basically, what their responses are positive regarding english drama pedagogy as an effective tool for either teaching or learning. figure 4 shows the scoring values indicate the teachers’ perception on the implementation of english drama pedagogy. in one response, they agreed that the pedagogy is a good alternative way to develop pronunciation skill in communicative competence in the target language: i.e. english. but, they opined it is hard for the students as young learners to pronounce the english words as well as the intonation found in the drama that they never listen because they are indonesian natives (susanto, 2016). in another response, the teachers informed that they, in the beginning, did not know what to do with the drama pedagogy especially in english due to no experience in english drama activities. then, the teachers need much time to learn by themselves and explain the activities to the students. and they continued to struggle with explaining and setting up each activity for students. despite the struggles, teachers said that by doing drama pedagogy activities they see the students’ progress in pronouncing english words as well as sentences. the teachers also responded that they found the improvement in the students’ understanding on the english text. it was shown when the drama activities began, the students understood the information. as an example, they knew how a main character in the drama feels, e.g. the mother of malin kundang, and they could criticize why she behaves in a particular way when she is not recognized as the mother by her own son. it encouraged the students to learn the moral value in the cultural production depicted in the character. moreover, the teachers saw that the students got confident to speak in english and they attempted to make connection with the characters such as malin kundang, his mother, and his wife. they are eager to give some comments about the characters after the teachers gave the explanation. they pointed out that the students were completely engaged with those activities and the class became more dynamic through active cooperation of the classmates. for the teachers, the involvement of the students in the discussion on the characters shows their growing interest facilitated with their confidence to use and speak english. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 289 figure 2. the scoring evaluation of the teachers’ perception on the implementation of english drama pedagogy among those advantages, the teachers also responded about the difficulty for implementing english drama pedagogy as a teaching tool in language learning classrooms for primary schools in indonesia. it is about the policy that english is not a core subject in the school. as the consequence, the subject gets less class meetings. for teachers, it is difficult to set the time to implement the pedagogy especially for the students involved in the activities. limitations of the study and future research needs and possibilities this work is an exploratory study on the implementation of english drama pedagogy as a teaching tool for primary schools under the indonesian context in lampung province and the teachers’ perception of using the pedagogy in the classrooms. the number of schools involved may not fully represent the primary school population. in this respect, for the future research projects, we need more schools to observe and we will expand the exploration by looking through the dimension of multilingual context. we believe that by studying the dimension, we will have good opportunity to accommodate educational issues of multilingualism in indonesia, i.e. minority as compared to majority language students (festman, 2020) and ethnic in contrast with national and foreign language attitudes (bartram, 2010; dailey-o'cain, & liebscher, 2011). therefore, our future projects can contribute insights into multilingual approach dealing with utilizing drama pedagogy in efl classroom. conclusion studying the implementation of english drama pedagogy as a teaching tool for primary schools, we explored the drama activities in the language classrooms and the teacher’s perceptions. in our observation, the pedagogy contributed for building the students’ abilities for social engagement and language comprehension. those abilities were enhanced in drama activities with the involvement of the teacher in role play and as a facilitator. although some difficulties were found in designing and organizing the activities due to lack of theatre education, but in practice they could work based on the curricula unit. meanwhile in the perceptions of the teachers, we could examine how various their responses which are basically positive, i.e. the pedagogy can be effective for teaching and learning. the pedagogy is regarded as a good alternative for teaching pronunciation. although the students face that english words are not easy to learn because of its difference from indonesian, the teachers saw the students’ progress in pronouncing english words as well as sentences. besides, the teachers responded that they found the students’ improvement in understanding english text, e.g. by explaining and criticizing the characters. for the teachers, these made the class more dynamic with the students’ involvement in the discussion and their confidence to speak english. unfortunately, with the current deri sis nanda & susanto susanto using drama in efl classroom for exploring students’ knowledge and learning 290 policy treating english as not a core subject in the school, time constraints are the problems for implementing the pedagogy. references baldwin, p. & fleming, k. 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(2013). the study on motivation and anxiety of english learning of students at a taiwan technical university. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 291 international journal of english language teaching, 1(1), 24–41. uysal, n. d. & yavuz, f. (2018). language learning through drama. international journal of learning and teaching, 10(4), 376–380. yates, s. m. (2007). teachers’ perceptions of their professional learning activities. international education journal, 8(2), 213-221. retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej834237.pdf zigler, e. f. & bishop-josef, s. j. (2006). the cognitive child versus the whole child: lessons from 40 years of head start. in d. g. singer, r. m. golinkoff & k. hirsh-pasek (eds.), play = learning: how play motivates and enhances children’s cognitive and social emotional growth. oxford: oxford university press. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej834237.pdf deri sis nanda & susanto susanto using drama in efl classroom for exploring students’ knowledge and learning 292 empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia kuang ching hei faculty of languages & linguistics, university of malaya e-mail: kuangch@um.edu.my maya khemlani david faculty of languages & linguistics, university of malaya e-mail: mayadavid@yahoo.com apa citation: kuang, c. h., & david, m. k. (2017). empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 163-174 received: 19-03-2017 accepted: 20-04-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: given the easy availability of information due to social media, it is generally recognized that language teachers need to transform themselves from being mere disseminators of information to that of innovators. literature suggests that to do so, language teachers should make action research an indispensable part of their language teaching armory. this paper aims to encourage language teachers to take charge of their own profession by conducting action research in their respective classrooms. the paper illustrates two case studies which stress on the process which can be duplicated by teachers as well as the outcome which can be used for improvement and for sharing with peers through publication. by engaging in action research, language teachers can move beyond their conventional teaching roles to become researchers cum practitioners who are able to rise to the occasion by overcoming current language issues first hand instead of taking advice from educational researchers. keywords: action research, language teaching, reflection introduction preparation for english language teachers to motivate and teach their students should involve more than just techniques and the various strategies and tips for language learning. teachers need to develop their own practices after completing their formal training and courses. they must also aspire to improve their own teaching practices in response to changing conditions and experiences (richards & lockhart, 1994). to do that, teachers need to ask themselves what can be done to improve their students‘ learning. in this regard, teachers can resort to a number of strategies such as attending refresher course, seeking guidance from mentors, registering for higher programmes of learning or they can learn to conduct research pertaining to specific issues identified from their own classrooms. kurt lewin (1946), then a professor at mit, terms such kind of research as action research (adelman, 1993) action research can be seen as an innovative technique that can be integrated into teacher preparation programmes wherever the classroom context lies – countryside, suburbs, cities, huge institutions or small schools, so that future teachers can try out new approaches of teaching that can help them to understand their learners better. action research is also useful for teachers to investigate teaching/learning issues as some problems in learning may lie with the teachers. burns (2009, p. 6) notes that ―many teachers have been put off research and the teaching theories taught to them in teacher training https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.532 163 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee courses‖ because they discover that once they get into their classrooms, the theory does not match reality (burns, 2009). although action research has been around for many years, it is not commonly practiced nor is it frequently administered by the teachers themselves, particularly in the asian context such as malaysia. much literature (see section below) have been written about action research and in particular, the benefits to be gained. nonetheless, very few school teachers are able to conduct action research for various reasons: they may not know how to do it; they have no time to do it; they are not keen to do it; they may think that this is beyond their level or they are overwhelmed by work. in the case of turkey, atay (2006, p. 1) notes that ―neither pre-service nor inservice teachers of english can do much research in turkey; pre-service teachers generally cannot get permission from schools for research while in-service teachers do not have sufficient time and training to conduct research‖. this issue highlights the kind of difficulty school teachers experience. in 2008, the malaysian education ministry attempted to introduce action research as a means of improving teaching and learning in schools (see buku manual kajian tindakan, 2008). however, implementation has been slow as can be seen by the lack of reports noted in journal articles or books published by school teachers hence, studies and reports are limited. for instance, there was a compilation of reports and findings noted in the ―koleksi kajian tindakan 2011-2012‖ (a collection of action research conducted between 2011 until 2012) compiled by secondary school teachers in a suburban school in kajang, selangor. however, the book carried no publisher or isbn number although it comprised a collection of reports written by the respective teachers who had conducted the research in their classrooms. a further review of these reports indicate that they had not been systematically conducted and analyzed before reporting. thus, the methodology was questionable, making these studies less scientific. it is possible that the teachers involved were not trained on writing out the methodology section hence, the discrepancy. nonetheless, scholars (see teo, voon, & voon, 2011) note that school teachers are still finding their way into this activity. in contrast, the notion of action research is better received at the higher institutions of learning such as colleges (see abraham, 2015) or universities (see norasmah & chia, 2016). training modules on action research were organized and conducted (between 2012 and 2015) by experts at the academy of leadership for higher education (akept, malaysia) as a means of fortifying this interest. the aim was to empower practitioners like lecturers to conduct action research and to publish the research result. this aspect of research was placed under the discipline of scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl). norasmah and chia (2016) note that more teachers are being trained to do action research for the purpose of enhancing their teaching and learning processes. however, norasmah and chia (2016) have only cited the national university of malaysia (ukm) and the academy of leadership for higher education (akept) as their sources. both organizations have been providing training in the realm of action research since 2012 and their efforts in doing so have been aligned to the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl), a discipline that was developed for lecturers in higher institutions of learning. sotl focusses on classroom research as a means of identifying solutions to rectify problems faced by lecturers within their own classrooms. when such findings are shared, they become a scholarly pursuit. despite the call for school teachers to be involved, (teo, voon & voon, 2011), little has been done. eventually, most classroom issues are identified and pursued 164 kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia by academic researchers (see dzakiria, mohamed, hisham, malek & said, 2007). since specialists from schools seldom partake in such a pursuit, the ultimate advice and recommendations on how they can deal with their own classrooms would come from the academic or educational researchers. this is less beneficial for the teachers because as first hand observers of their own classrooms, they are a better judge on how the research can be conducted and what kind of problems they want to solve. teachers and action research as mentioned above, there are many issues preventing teachers from being engaged in research (see atay, 2006; meerah & osman, 2013; norasmah & chia, 2016). in line with this argument, borg (2009) adds that this requires raising the awareness among teachers because some teachers may ―have inappropriate or unrealistic notions of the kind of inquiry teacher research involves‖ (p. 377). this is clearly so because action research differs from traditional research methods. moreover, some people cannot see the benefits of action research when everything revolves around the class alone (see norasmah & chia, 2016). teachers are trained professionals. they have served time going through specialized trainings to develop their skills, knowledge, and expertise. the goal of the training is to equip them with the right skills, knowledge, and expertise to support the young learners whom they ―service‖ in schools so that these learners can one day, develop adequate skills and competence to serve as contributing adults in their society. language is just one aspect of the many skills which all learners— young and old— need to acquire at school. the language skills acquired by students can help them to fulfil an academic goal, a personal need, a profession/career or to fulfill an internal desire such as travelling. just as a mother would want her child to be well equipped for an uncertain future, language teachers too must be able to impart as much knowledge as they can to their learners with efficacy. this can ensure that the learners acquire the appropriate language skills for a future goal. effective language teachers can provide the best learning opportunities for their students and action research can serve as a very valuable approach for these teachers to deepen their insights into teaching and to improve their own understanding of themselves as teachers, their classroom environment as well as their students‘ desire and intention. studies (see meerah, johar, & ahmad, 2001; carpenter, 2003; meerah & osman, 2013; norasmah & chia, 2016) suggest that school teachers tend to be restricted in this pursuit by various factors. besides hindrance from superiors, lack of knowledge and disinterest, they also face issues like class discipline, school results or examinations. moreover, the idea of school teachers conducting research, collecting data, making an analysis and then producing papers for publication does not calibrate well with the respective school teachers. such a phenomenon is universal (see meerah et al., 2001; carpenter, 2003; atay, 2006; borg, 2009; burns, 2009; meerah & osman, 2013; norasmah & chia, 2016). thus, something needs to be done to encourage teachers to do so. most literature (see zeichner, 1983; ramsden & moses, 1992; brew & boud, 1995; hattied & marsh, 1996) mention that action research is more pervasive in the education domain with majority being conducted in higher institutions of learning. in his research, middlewood (1999) note that 94% of the teacher-respondents mentioned that action research had enabled them to learn new skills such as logical argumentative skills, critical thinking skills, and problem solving skills. from their experience, the teacher-respondents were also able to develop and enhance their own 165 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee teaching and learning processes thereby, benefitting both parties at the same time. the merits of action research (ar) have also been emphasized by hogarth (2005) who say that: a) ar motivates students‘ interest in the subject; b) ar improves students‘ understanding of subject; c) ar encourages critical reflection/analysis among students; d) ar provides teachers with up-to-date information and e) ar involves students as part of the research, making them partners to the learning and teaching process. understanding action research action research is doing research with the intention of addressing a problem that has been identified by the teacher‘s sharp eyes and reflection. to reflect means to take some time, usually at the end of the day, to evaluate if something had occurred well and if so, why or why not. thus, action research can be conducted individually or in groups with people who share similar issues or problems. denscombe (2009, p. 6) says that, ―an action research strategy is to solve a particular problem and to produce guidelines for best practice‖ while burns (2009, p. 2) notes that the fundamental premise of action research ―is to intervene in a deliberate way in the problematic situation in order to bring about changes and, even better, improvements in practice‖. as the world transforms to become more high tech and digital, teachers can no longer teach in the way they were taught by their teachers; they can no longer treat their students the way they were treated by their own teachers. the generation gap has widened but this does not mean that all teachers need to succumb to mediocrity or become helpless. instead, teachers can resort to looking for answers to their own problems or challenges. to do so, they must be equipped with the knowhow. burns (2009, p. 2) explains that ―action research is related to the idea of reflective practice and the teacher as researcher‖. action research involves taking a self-reflective, critical, and systematic approach to explore one‘s own teaching contexts. in action research, to be critical does not mean being negative or derogatory about the way you teach. it is about taking a questioning stance about a problem that exists and then asking yourself what can be done to improve it. in action research, the teacher becomes the investigator or explorer of his/her own teaching context which involves his/her learners. the teacher is also one of the participants involved. action research has been used by teachers to test the effectiveness of the ―shadowing‖ technique for learning english rhythm especially pronunciation, among japanese adults (omar & umehara, 2010). in their study, omar and umehara (2010) observe that their involvement as both facilitator and group member, allowed them to observe the students‘ responses including their nonverbal behaviors (e.g., facial expressions, gesture, and body movements). this helped them to understand their learners better. they were also able to develop the relevant intervention to assist their learners in becoming better at learning. curry, nembhard, and bradley (2009) maintain that by conducting action research, reflective practitioners can make their language teaching skills and methods more solid. this is useful not only for getting future teachers to become better equipped in teaching but also for all teachers to continue to grow and develop as reflective practitioners. many researchers including curry et al. (2009) say that action research follows a certain procedure including: a) selecting an issue, b) refining the research question, c) undertaking data collection, d) analyzing multiple forms of data, e) developing and implementing new instructional strategies and f) making the research findings public. action research can also be classified according to purposes: i) to determine what is currently occurring and ii) 166 kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia to test a hypothesis (meerah & osman, 2013). outcomes from action research tend to be qualitative in nature as data are mostly descriptively analyzed. this is because the research involves all the students in the respective classrooms. nonetheless, the most important outcome that can be derived from action research is the finding that can enable classroom teachers to learn and improve on their own performance (meerah & osman, 2013; luchini & rosello, 2007). action research encourages teachers to ―reflect upon their own teaching practices and, as a result, engage in change with the aim of redirecting their instructional objectives to meet their students‘ needs‖ (luchini & rosello, 2007, p. 266). this is valuable as it contributes to enhancing the teacher‘s development (luchini & rosello, 2007). such improvements can only be seen due to the information that was deduced from the data which had been collected through action research (burns, 2009). undoubtedly, data in action research must not be compromised and they must be systematically acquired. reflection as practice reflection-in-action is ―reflection on one‘s spontaneous ways of thinking and acting, undertaken in the midst of action to guide further action‖ (schön, 1983, p. 22). this reflection signifies what we do as we go around in the classroom, assessing our students‘ reactions as well as our own reactions to the moment-by-moment activities and interactions taking place. in contrast, reflection-on-action occurs only after the event. it is a kind of thinking back about what happened (burns, 2009). the teacher reflects on the decisions made on the students‘ responses, teacher‘s own responses towards the students, and on how the teacher thinks and feels about the lesson. these reflections are used to assist the teacher in understanding the reaction taken. without reflections, teachers may begin to think or talk about their teaching in a technical or automatic way (schön, 1983). in becoming mechanical, teachers have no reason to understand why they do what they do in the classroom. this includes their teaching routines, teaching approaches, teaching contexts, students, the philosophies/values motivating them to execute certain things in the classroom and others. without reflection, teachers are unable to look inward thus, there is not much input for improvement (schön, 1983). with reflection, teachers have a reason to look for improvement. a ―reflective teacher‖ is one who operates reflectively; he/she shows openmindedness as he/she begins to listen to other points of view, exhibiting responsibility as he/she becomes more alert to the consequences of his/her own actions (dewey, 1933). a reflective teacher demonstrates wholeheartedness by putting open-mindedness and responsibility at the center of his/her actions, questioning his/her own assumptions which are enhanced by the desire to want to introduce new approaches that avoid putting students at the heart of the problem (dewey, 1933). in this sense, a reflective teacher moves from a deficit view of the students (i.e., my students are the problem) to a deficit view of the learning situation as a whole (i.e., there are problems in my teaching set-up). as can be deduced, reflective teaching is empowering. it motivates teachers into becoming actively involved in articulating the nature of their work and in extending the knowledge base of their own teaching. it enables teachers to complement the work of educational researchers, involving themselves in the curriculum development and school change thereby, taking a leading role in their own professional development (zeichner & liston, 2013). nonetheless, three central questions underpin reflective teaching: what do i do? how do i do it? what does this mean for me and those i work with? (see burton, 2009). 167 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee general steps in action research there are certain steps to follow when implementing action research. first, the teacher identifies a problem, which can only be identified through reflection, looking for the cause of the problem. the teacher observes the problem once again and then reflects on how the problem can be best intervened. a plan is then hatched, usually through a series of reflection. the teacher would also have reflected on implementing this plan. until the plan is implemented, data will first have to be collected and the teacher then analyses the cause of the problem based on the data. the teacher then takes the appropriate course of action and he/she then evaluates the success of the action plan. these procedures—with some modifications—have been endorsed by some experts such as susman (1983), o‘brien (1998), winter (1989) and ferrance (2000). step 1: identifying the problem as the first step, identifying the problem in a classroom takes the sharp eyes of the teacher who is the person managing the class. however, as ferrance (2000) says, the teacher must be able to answer the following questions:  is the problem at hand one which the teacher has influence over?  is the problem something of interest and worth the time and effort?  is the problem real and worth researching or is it due to some discomfort or tension experienced by the teacher or is it due to some mismatch of teaching strategies and learner differences? step 2: planning upon reflecting on the problem, the teacher can try to look at the problem from various angles and then develop a plan to resolve the problem. this usually involves several cycles of reflection. step 3: implementing this is actually implementing the plan, for example, taking hold of the class and then carrying out the plan and collecting data. this is followed by studying the data and looking for answers to the problem. the next step is to apply the answers and evaluate the success of the resolution. most classroom teachers report on the outcome of their research either to their colleagues as a sharing practice or with students so as to be accountable. nonetheless, teachers may want to go a step higher by sharing their outcomes particularly, if the outcome reflects a global issue, with other colleagues who can use the outcome to rectify their own classroom issues. in higher education, outcomes are shared in conferences or seminars. these are ultimately converted to journal publications thereby, allowing the teachers concerned to take ownership and be known for their research. the current paper draws on two case studies of action research in malaysia. the context of this paper focusses on the method and the outcome. the aim is to encourage language teachers in schools to take the lead and conduct action research thus, become researchers cum practitioners who can move beyond their conventional teaching roles to become active disseminators of knowledge. by doing so, language teachers can offer greater learning opportunities and experiences in their class for their learners. through the outcome shared, these teachers can also be seen as contributors who are capable of rising to the occasion of facing and resolving current language issues by offering their own insights and not just take those offered by educational researchers only. case study 1: improving classroom interactions in 2015, kuang was teaching a course called critical reading and writing to a group of multiracial, mixed level and mixed gender, year two undergraduates. within the first two weeks of the course which involved 168 kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia three hours per week, 15 students were observed to be reluctant to participate in class discussions. this occurred when they were individually asked for some input towards certain issues identified in their reading texts. it was the usual one or two outspoken individuals who volunteered their thoughts while the rest kept silent. kuang (2016) became discouraged because the course required the students to think and speak their minds and to support their opinions and output with relevant sources or evidence, either from the text or from facts gathered from other sources. in this regard, kuang (2016) has thus identified the problem. when the problem was been established, kuang (2016) often reflected on the attitude of the class, writing down her own thoughts on what could have held the students back from interacting. this went on for a few weeks. subsequently, kuang (2016) noted that there could be a way to break the barrier. she decided to build a rapport with them. all the students were requested to meet her in her office for an interview and under the guise of getting to know them personally, through a casual setting of tea and biscuits, she began to learn a little more about each student. all these information were documented into a journal for future reference. following this activity, kuang (2016) then began applying some improvements on the class. she developed more empathy for the students whose classes were back to back. realizing their hectic schedule, kuang (2016) provided little foods to energize them in between classes. during class discussions, she also shared personal stories which were linked to the reading topics and students also got to share theirs. this helped to forge the rapport. as the weeks increased, the relationship became better than before and soon both parties were less distant and more friendly with each other. by week four, kuang (2016) began applying the reflection exercise on the students during the last five minutes of class. three questions were posed and the students were asked to answer anonymously on a paper which will be collected. the questions include: a) what went well in class today?, b) what did not go well in class today? and c) what would you like to see more of in the next class? this activity developed the students‘ confidence to articulate their opinions privately. it also reduced their insecurity. with that in process, kuang (2016) proceeded to conducting a more formal form of action research. she told the class, ‗i am going to observe you over the next few weeks to see if things can be improved for the course‘. she also gave them theories as to why student voices are important for the teacher. they were also promised that what was gathered from the action research would be analyzed and the analysis would be shared with them. however, the classroom research, in particular, responding to some of the interview questions had to be done on the condition that all things written down would be anonymous but honest. in week 10, data were collected when kuang (2016) posed ten questions. the students were required to answer them with regards to classroom atmosphere, assignments, marks, and teacher attributes. analysis indicates that students found their learning environment boring and rigid. they wanted a better learning environment with air conditioning, bigger chairs and tables and space to move around. they also preferred teachers who were warm and knowledgeable. most of all, the students wanted to be ―partners‖ in the learning process where they were given opportunities to negotiate their learning in terms of the number of assignments, submission deadlines, weightage of marks, activities and teaching materials. based on the outcome of this action research, kuang (2016) was able to empathize with her students, adjusting her teaching techniques and the class assignments and weightage of marks. the good relationship developed lowered their anxiety and increased their 169 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee confidence thereby, enhancing class management. the outcome was shared with peers in a conference and eventually published in a foreign journal (see kuang, 2016). case study 2: assisting postgraduate students in their academic writing as lecturers teaching postgraduate courses, we noted that majority of our postgraduate students were not proficient writers. we drew our evidence of the students‘ weak performance in writing from written works such as research proposals, written projects and seminar papers. it seems obvious that they would require a lot of support to hone their academic writing skills. they were not just weak in grammar structure but also unable to produce a coherent text that is clear, specific, and concise, albeit with lesser quotations. many were also ignorant in the organisation of texts. from our long term observations, it was deduced that their weak writing skills were the result of their diversity, their basic educational system and the influence of their first language (l1). we wanted to help these students to improve their skills so we had to first investigate what their specific writing problems include. theories denote that interference from l1 is quite predominant in l2/l3‘s writing tasks. the lack of exposure to reading materials may also be another factor. unsure if other faculties were facing similar problems, we then offered two workshops on postgraduate supervision for the academic staff of the university. from the input gathered during the workshops, we were informed that all the lecturers faced similar issues with student writing issues. with this verification, we reflected again. we had a duty to do something for the university and the postgraduate students. hence, we offered to conduct writing workshops for the postgraduate students by conveying our intentions to the institute of postgraduate studies (ips) in our university. we used the workshop to collect data by conducting smaller sessions of activities where the postgraduates learn how to review a portion of an article. based on a few questions provided, they had to identify the answers from the article. it is these written texts which were collected for analysis. using our experience as language teachers and examiners of theses, we then attempted to analyze the data through major themes. findings indicate that majority of our postgraduates were not competent in basic reading skills (cannot scan or predict) and they had issues in advanced writing techniques (cannot paraphrase, summarize or synthesize). based on this finding, we realized that the university requirement for students to have a certain english language qualification when they made their application to our university did not match the postgraduate programmes offered. clearly, their skills were too low to enable them to read academic texts and to write academic papers and theses. from that understanding, we then used our data to propose to the university that a kind of support system be provided to these postgraduate students so as enable them to develop their reading and writing skills simultaneously. likewise, we also presented our data to our peers. the paper was selected for publication in a local journal (see kuang & david, 2015). conclusion meerah et al. (2001) had noted that despite the fact that a teacher‘s main function is to teach, it is imperative for the teacher to read journals and to conduct research on a regular basis, as a form of professional development. they also examined how far malaysian teachers, especially those who have undergone inservice courses and workshops on action research, were able to venture into action research. they note that many were aware of the importance; many found satisfaction 170 kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia with their results when they had the opportunity to report and share their findings but overall, they were still hindered by some bureaucratic constraints placed by principals and colleagues alike. such situations need to change (johnson, 2012; brown, 2002) because the future direction of staff development programmes, teacher preparation curricula as well as school improvement initiatives are in the palms of these teachers. as they learn to adopt action research into their classrooms, their ability to become more critical of happenings around them will be impacted by the critical inquiry they apply in action research. in addition, a rigorous examination of their own classroom practices and school programmes will also elevate the quality of their own teaching and class management. johnson (2012) asserts that action research is a teacher empowerment tool that allows teachers to examine their own practices based on classroom inquiries. using what they found, teachers can reform their teaching techniques. outcomes derived from the result of action research can also be used by language teachers to look inward into their own practices thereby, resolving classroom issues and enhancing personal qualities and development (guskey, 2000). hollingsworth and sockett (1994) had observed that action research had also enabled teachers to professionalise teaching and to rethink about the schools‘ environment. oja and pine (1989) also maintain that teachers who engage in action research tend to become more critical and reflective about their own practices. thus, it becomes imperative for language teachers to become more acquainted with the process of action research. language teachers are the conduit for learners to acquire knowledge, communicate, and interact with others as well as gain social standing. they serve as role models for their learners. with the right attitude towards teaching and learning, language teachers should be trained to understand why there is a need to conduct personal and individual classroom research as the answers they uncover can serve as solutions to overcome any issue they face within the classroom context. as has been noted, once the results are shared and the teachers‘ confidence escalate, their attitude becomes more positively aligned with doing research. they may conduct more research; they may become more reflective in their attitude and they may also develop good practices of professionalism. thus, it is necessary that language teachers, irrespective of their teaching contexts, location and teaching era, strive to learn and understand more about action research and how this can be implemented in their classrooms. by subscribing to action research, language teachers will set the pace in being the first to take the initiative to combat what is rarely done and to take the lead in becoming practitioners cum researchers. based on this call, it is again asserted that language teachers must take the lead in doing research within their classrooms. references abraham, a. (2015). action researching power in an esl and academic writing classroom. qualitative research journal, 15(2), 155-165. adelman, c. (1993). kurt lewin and the origins of action research. educational action research, 1(1), 7-24. atay, d. (2006). teachers' professional development: partnerships in research. tesl-ej, 10(2), 1-15. borg, s. (2009). english language teachers‘ conceptions of research. applied linguistics, 30(3), 358-388. brew, a., & boud, d. (1995). teaching and research: establishing the vital link with learning. higher education, 29(3), 261-273. brown, b. l. (2002). improving teaching practices through action research (doctoral dissertation, virginia polytechnic institute and state university). retrieved from https://theses.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd04 152002182022/unrestricted/bethbrowndissert ation.pdf. 171 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee burns, a. (2009). doing action research in english language teaching: a guide for practitioners. new york: routledge. burton, j. (2009). reflective practice. in a. burns & j. c. richards (eds.), the cambridge guide to second language teacher education (pp. 298307). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. carpenter, l. (2003, september). teaching versus research: does it have to be that way?. the academic exchange: great expectations. retrieved from http://www.emory.edu/acad_exchange/ 2003/sept/carpenter.html curry, l. a., nembhard, i. m., & bradley, e. h. 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(2015). basic and advanced skills they don't have: postgraduates and literature review writing. malaysian journal of learning & instruction. 12, 131150. lewin, k. (1946). action research and minority problems. journal of social issues, 2(4), 34-46. retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.15404560.1946.tb02295.x luchini, p., & rosello, a. (2007). developing learners‘ oral communicative language abilities: a collaborative action research project in argentina. the journal of asia tefl, 4(4), 245-271. o‘brien, r. (1998). an overview of the methodological approach of action research. retrieved from: http://www.web.net/robrien/ papers/ arfinal.html meerah, t. s. m., & osman, k. (2013). what is 'action' in action research: a malaysian exposure. asian social science, 9(16), 148. meerah, t. s. m., johar a. r., & ahmad, j. (2001). what motivates teachers to conduct research? journal of science and mathematics education in s.e. asia, 25(1), 1-24. middlewood, d. (1999). some effects of multiple research projects on the host school staff and their relationships. practitioner research in education: making a difference. london: paul chapman publishing. norasmah, o., & chia, s. y. (2016). the challenges of action research implementation in malaysian schools. pertanika journal of social sciences & humanities, 24(1). oja, s., & pine, g. (1989). collaborative action research: teachers‘ stages of development and school contexts. peabody journal of education, 64 (2), 96-115. omar, h. m., & umehara, m. (2010). using a ‗shadowing‘ technique to improve english pronunciation deficient adult japanese learners: an action research on expatriate japanese adult learners. the journal of asia tefl, 7(2), 199-230. ramsden, p., & moses, i. (1992). associations between research and teaching in australian higher education. higher education, 23(3), 273-295. richards, j. c. (1998). teaching in action: case studies from second language classrooms. 172 kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia alexandria, va: teachers of english to speakers of other languages. richards, j. c., & lockhart, c. (1994). reflective teaching in second language classrooms. cambridge: cambridge university press. schön, d. a. (1983). the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. basic books. susman, g. (1983). action research: a sociotechnical systems perspective. london: sage publications. teo, a. k., voon, b. h., & voon, g. e. (2011). expectation-based teaching: an action research in english report writing. winter, r. (1989). learning from experience: principles and practice in actionresearch. philadelphia: the falmer press. zeichner, k. m. (1983). alternative paradigms of teacher education. journal of teacher education, 34(3), 3-9. zeichner, k. m., & liston, d. p. (2013). reflective teaching: an introduction. new york: routledge. 173 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee monkey a guy walks into a bar with his pet monkey. he orders a drink and while he's drinking, the monkey jumps all around the place. the monkey grabs some olives off the bar and eats them. then grabs some sliced limes and eats them. then jumps onto the pool table, grabs one of the billiard balls, sticks it in his mouth, and to everyone's amazement, somehow swallows it whole. the bartender screams at the guy "did you see what your monkey just did?". the guy says "no, what?" "he just ate the cue ball off my pool table-whole!". "yeah, that doesn't surprise me," replied the guy. "he eats everything in sight, the little bastard. sorry. i'll pay for the cue ball and stuff." he finishes his drink, pays his bill, pays for the stuff the monkey ate, then leaves. two weeks later he's in the bar again, and has his monkey with him. he orders a drink and the monkey starts running around the bar again. while the man is finishing his drink, the monkey finds a maraschino cherry on the bar. he grabs it, sticks it up his butt, pulls it out, and eats it. the bartender is disgusted. "did you see what your monkey did now?" he asks. "no, what?" replies the guy. "well, he stuck a maraschino cherry up his butt, pulled it out, and ate it!" said the bartender. "yeah, that doesn't surprise me," replied the guy. " he still eats everything in sight, but ever since he swallowed that cue ball, he measures everything first..." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) 174 kuang ching hei & maya khemlani david empowering language teachers through action research: two case studies from malaysia english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery (a quasy-experimental study to eight grader of smpn 1 cilamaya wetan) yogi setia samsi university of singaperbangsa karawang, indonesia email: ogie_21milan@yahoo.com apa citation: samsi, y. s. (2016). the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery (a quasi-experimental study to eight grader of smpn 1 cilamaya wetan). english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 79-88 received: 09-10-2016 accepted: 01-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: this research was aimed at finding whether or not the use of digital storytelling and dictionary can improve students’ vocabulary mastery. to get the answer of the defined research questions, the researcher used quantitative approach and quasi experimental design. the research had been done in smpn 1 cilamaya wetan, and took two classes as sample, namely, 8g and 8h with 40 respondents in each class. there were three steps in this research, namely pre-test, treatment, and post-test. pre-test was held in both classes to know students’ vocabulary mastery before the treatment. after doing pretest, treatment was held in experimental class by using digital storytelling and dictionary, that used the technology such as infocus, projector, speaker, and lcd in which the materials were taken from youtube, while control class only used song lyrics. in the next step, posttest was held in both classes to know the improvement after the treatment in experimental class. the data of the study were analyzed by using spss version 22 for windows. this research findings showed that experimental group had higher vocabulary score than control group. it can be seen from the posttest mean of experimental group was 74.75 , while the mean of control group was 60,62. meanwhile, the average of normality gained in experimental group was 0.37 and the average of normality gained in control group was 0.075. thus, the improvement of students’ vocabulary mastery by using digital storytelling and dictionary in experiemental group is greater than using song in control group. it can be concluded that digital storytelling and dictionary improves vocabulary mastery of eight grader of smpn 1 cilamaya wetan. key words : vocabulary mastery, digital storytelling, dictionary introduction especially for junior high school students, english skill is very useful for their basic to learn english at senior high school. however, there are still many problems in teaching english at junior high school, students still have many difficulties in learning english. the opinion of students’ who studying english is frightening, students’ are still difficult to make english sentences, because students’ still lack of vocabulary mastery. this propped of declining students’ learning outcomes. lack of english vocabulary mastery made difficult students’ speak, write and listen to english. by vocabulary, students’ are expected to be able to in speaking, listening and writing english. vocabulary is total number of word which make up a language (hornby, 2003). vocabulary is defined as 79 yogi setia samsi the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery the words which are used in a language that should be known used particular person who does not consitute all the word. vocabulary is very important in language teaching, because mastering language is imposible without vocabulary. vocabulary is one aspect in learning a foreign language. without a proportional amount of vocabulary, student gets trouble in their speaking, reading, listening, and writing. students do not have enough vocabularies to help them in learning process of english and cannot memorize more vocabularies in their mind. in indonesia, english is not considered as a second language, but english is a foreign language. english is also called as the target language that has to be taught in schools in today’s indonesian curriculum. the students got many vocabularies by conducting reading activity. that motivation gives task and practice by involving reading activity in order that the students can understand word by word and meaning of words. so that, they can learn vocabulary. most of students begin to read something because they have seen and they have heard something that is pronounced by other people. so that the using of media is needed to conduct teaching and learning process in the class. the suitable media is digital storytelling because the digital storytelling contains video, picture, and voice. media is medium to send the message from speaker to receiver. it means that the media can help the teacher to send their information for their students. the examples of media are television, lcd projector, radio etc. from the statement above, the researcher chooses a suitable media that is digital storytelling to teach vocabulary. by using this media, the students are able to see the objects in the form of pictures, and spell of the objects name. in addition, the students are also able to listen the way to pronounce the words which they learn. as a result, they can understand and memorize the vocabularies well. beside that, the students will be happy and they have feel enjoyable and enthusiastic to learn english vocabulary, they can catch the main message. in the last, the teacher can increase the quantity of english teaching and learning process. based on the description above, the researcher is interesting conducts a research entitled “the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery (a quasi experimental design at the eight grade students’ of smpn 1 cilamaya wetan )”. method in this research, the researcher uses quantitative approach to analyze the data because the researcher intended to examine the research hypothesis. the researcher compares the student value between experiments class group and control group. in this research, the researcher uses experimental research method. creswell (2012, p. 295) said that “experimental is controlled, it is the best of the quantitative design to use to determine caused and effect.” it means this research is to determine the improvement of students’ vocabulary mastery using digital storytelling. whether, there is improvement between students’ vocabulary mastery by digital storytelling and without using digital storytelling. moreover, quasi experimental is an emphirical study used to estimate the causal impact of an intervention on its target population. it divided into three kinds of design, there are one shot case study, one group pretest and post-test design and statistic group comparison. here, the researcher 80 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee uses one group pretest post test design. pretest and post test are given before and after treatment. one of the most commonly used quasi experimental designs in educational research can be represented as: experimental o1 x o2 control o3 o4 arikunto (2006, p. 130) stated that “population is formulated as the whole groups of people or object that have been formulated clearly.” in this research was all students of seventh grade in smp n 1 cilamaya wetan which consisted of 12 classes where each class generally consisted of 40 students. so, the total numbers of students are 582 students. from the population above, the researcher uses purposive sampling technique as sample. these two classes were gained because they had similar average achievement and been considered as homogeneous classes in which the each class consisted of 40 students. class viii h was chosen as the experimental group which was taught by using digital story telling while class viii g was chosen as the control group which was taught using song lyric. first of all, the researcher calculates the data to analyze the pilot test by determining: 1. validity according to creswell (2012, p. 159), “validity is the degree to which all of the evidence points to the intended interpretation of test score for the proposed purpose.” it is not sufficient to say that a test is “valid”; rather, the intended use of the test should be indicated . the validity of data will be conducted by anatesv4. the criteria of validity are shown in the following table: table 1. the classification of validity coefficients coefficient value interpretation of validity coefficient 0.00 – 0.199 very low 0.20 – 0.399 low 0.40 – 0.599 moderate 0.60 – 0.799 strong 0.80 – 1.000 very strong 2. reliability reliability means that scores from an instrument are stable and consistent (creswell, 2012, p. 159). reliability in this research was examined by using pearson product moment to know the correlation. researcher used spss 16 for measuring it. the criteria of reliability instrument can be divided into 5 classes as follows: 1) if the cronbach alpha score 0,00 – 0,20: less 2) if the cronbach alpha score 0,21 – 0,40: rather 3) if the cronbach alpha score 0,41 – 0,60: enough 4) if the cronbach alpha score 0,61 – 0,80: reliable 5) if the cronbach alpha score 0,81 – 1,00: very reliable 3. normality test normality test will be calculated before t-test. it aimed at investigating whether or not the distribution of pre81 yogi setia samsi the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery test and post-test scores in two groups are normally distributed. the steps are as follows: a. setting the level of significance at 0.05 and establishing the hypothesis as follows: h0 : the sample is not normally distributed h1 : the sample is normally distributed the level of significant at 0.05 is used because it is a standard which is applied in social studies. b. analyzing the normality test using spss 22. c. comparing the level of significance to test the hypothesis. if significance < α, h0 is rejected; if significance > α, h 0 is retained/accepted. 4. homogeneity of variance the homogeneity of variance test is used to determine whether the data obtained from the experimental group and control group has the same variance or not. homogeneity of variance in the pre-test are needed to find out the two groups are same variance. the steps are as follows: a. setting the level of significance at 0.05 and establishing the hypothesis as follows: h0 : the variance of the group is not homogenous h1 : the variance of the group is homogenous b. measuring the homogeneity variance using spss 22. c. comparing the level of significance to test the hypothesis. if significance < α, h0 is rejected; if significance > α, h 0 is retained/accepted. 5. dependent t-test in analyzing the result of pre-test and post-test, dependent t-test will be used to compare the means’ difference of the two tests. the steps are as follows: a. setting the level of significance at 0.05 and establishing the null hypothesis for pre-test and post-test data analysis. null hypothesis (h 0) there is no significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores. b. analyzing the dependent t-test by using spss 22. c. comparing (t) significance 2 tailed with the level of significance for testing the hypothesis. if (t) significance 2 tailed > 0.05, the null hypothesis is accepted; if (t) significance 2 tailed < 0.05, the null hypothesis is rejected. 6. independent t-test the independent t-test will be used in this study to see whether the difference of mean between the experimental and control groups. there are three steps in analyzing the independent t-test. a) stating the hypothesis and setting the alpha (α) level at 0.05. (h0) : there is no significant difference between the pretest and post-test mean for experimental and control groups. (h1) : there is significant difference between the pre-test and post-test mean for experimental and control groups. b) calculating independent t-test by using spss 22. c) comparing (t) significance 2 tailed with the level of significance for testing the hypothesis. if (t) significance 2 tailed > 0.05, the null hypothesis is accepted; if (t) significance 2 tailed < 0.05, the null hypothesis is rejected. 82 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7. analysis data index gain normalized gain (gain index) is used to find out the enhancement of students’ vocabulary mastery. the calculated data was obtained from pretest and post-test score of both experimental group and control group. in this study, n-gain would be used when the mean score of both groups is different. improvement that occurs before and after treatment is calculated with the following hake (1991, p. 1) formula: g= post−test−pre−test maximum score−pretest table 2. the criteria of gain index gain index criteria g ≥ 0.7 high enhancement 0.3 ≤ g < 0.7 moderate enhancement g < 0.3 low enhancement results and discussion a. determining pilot test result 1. validity to compute the validity test for reading ability, the researcher used anates v4. based on the calculation of instrument result above, the researcher got that the most of the items was valid because the score is 0,69. in the criteria, in coefficient correlation of validity if raw score 0,60–0,80 instrument was valid, with the computed who researcher got 0,69, it means that instrument was valid and the interpretation were high. 2. reliability the calculation was done by using the program of anates v4. the calculation of the variable instrument reliability of simple result of 15 items result who researcher got 0,85. based on criteria coefficient of reliability if reliability coefficient 0,61–0,80 reliability level was high. its means that instrument of researcher got from test instrument was reliable and level reliability was high. b. determining pretest and posttest result 1. pretest score a) normality distribution test kolmogorov-smirnov formula with level of sig. α = 0,05 was used to investigate the normality of pre-test scores. the hypothesis used is as follow: h0 = the score of experimental class and control class are not normally distributed. h1 = the score of experimental class and control class are normally distributed. the result are: table 3. tests of normality group kolmogorov-smirnova shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. statistic df sig. score exp. ,126 40 ,107 ,956 40 ,119 cont. ,162 40 ,010 ,955 40 ,114 based on table 3 of normality test, it is obtained score value sig. experiment class was 0,119 and control class was 0,114 where both > 0,05 then it concluded then the data of every class had normal distribution, that means h 0 accepted. 83 yogi setia samsi the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery b) homogenity of variance test tabel 4. test of homogeneity variance levene df1 df2 sig. 2.525 7 31 .035 based on table 4, it showed that the significance of pre-test result between experimental class and control class is 0.035. therefore, it can be concluded that the variance of the group is homogen because .035>0.05. 2. post-test score a) normality distribution test kolmogorov-smirnov formula with level of sig. α = 0,05 was used to investigate the normality of pre-test scores. the hypothesis used is as follow: h0 = the score of experimental class and control class are not normally distributed. h1 = the score of experimental class and control class are normally distributed. the result are: table 5. tests of normality (post test) groups kolmogorov-smirnova shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. statistic df sig. score exp. ,127 40 ,101 ,949 40 ,072 cont. ,106 40 ,200 ,968 40 ,335 based on table 5, it showed the obtained score value sig. experiment class was 0,072 and control class was 0,335 where both > 0,05 then it concluded, that the data of every classes had normal distribution, that means h 0 accepted. b) homogenity of variance test table 6. test of homogeneity variance levene df1 df2 sig. 1,061 10 29 .422 the table 6 showed that the significance of post-test result between experimental class and control class is 0.442. therefore, it canbe concluded that the variance f the group is homogen because 0.442>0.05. c) independent t-test after the normality distribution was conducted and analyzed. then, independent t-test computation with level sig. α = 0,05 were conducted. the hypothesis used is as follow: h0 = there is no significant different between test result of experimental group and control group. h1 = there is a significant different between test result of experimental group and control group. 84 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 7. independent samples test description t-test for equality of means t df sig. (2-tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper equal variances assumed 6,082 78 ,000 15,62500 2,56916 10,51020 20,73980 equal variances not assumed 6,082 68,118 ,000 15,62500 2,56916 10,49849 20,75151 based on table 7, it presented that the value sig. 0.000. it could be concluded that null hypothesis is rejected since significant result is lower than 0.05 (0.000<0.05). thus, there is significant difference between value of the control class and experiment class. then the value tcount is compared with ttable. to determine the value of ttable use significant level for 2 tailed with (alpha) error level ( for education research α = 0.05, df= 74). the result is 1.668 and tcoun>ttable mean that the null hypothesis is rejected. therefore, it is 6. 082> 1.668 and h0 is rejected. it can be concluded that there is significant different between students who are taught without by using digital storytelling and dictionary media. the use of digital storytelling and dictionary media can improve students’ vocabulary mastery. d) normality gain normalized gain (gain index) is used to find out the enhancement of students’ vocabulary mastery. the calculated data was obtained from pretest and post-test score of both experimental group and control group. index gain in experimental class: table 8. n-gain of experimental and control class name normalized gain experimental group control group student 1 0,3 moderate 0 low student 2 0,7 high -0,4 low student 3 0,1 low 0,1 low student 4 0,7 high 0,2 low student 5 1 high 0,2 low student 6 0,4 moderate 0,2 low student 7 0,4 moderate 0,1 low student 8 0,4 moderate -0,2 low student 9 0,5 moderate 0,2 low student 10 0,3 moderate 0,1 low student 11 0,4 moderate 0,1 low student 12 0,3 moderate -0,8 low student 13 0,1 low 0,3 moderate student 14 0,6 moderate 0,4 moderate 85 yogi setia samsi the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery student 15 0,2 low 0,5 moderate student 16 0,6 moderate 0 low student 17 0,2 low 0,2 low student 18 0,2 low 0,1 low student 19 0,5 moderate 0,2 low student 20 0,5 moderate 0,5 moderate student 21 0,6 moderate 0,2 low student 22 0,1 low 0,1 low student 23 0,1 low 0,4 moderate student 24 0,4 moderate 0,1 low student 25 0,3 moderate 0 low student 26 0,3 moderate 0,2 low student 27 0,2 low 0 low student 28 0,7 high -0,2 low student 29 0,6 moderate -0,2 low student 30 0,2 low 0,3 moderate student 31 0,6 moderate 0,1 low student 32 0,1 low -0,4 low student 33 0,5 moderate 0 low student 34 0,4 moderate 0,1 low student 35 0,5 moderate 0 low student 36 0,4 moderate 0,4 moderate student 37 0,2 low 0,1 low student 38 0,3 moderate -0,1 low student 39 0,1 low 0 low student 40 0,1 low -0,1 low mean 0.37 0.075 based on the table 8, it showed that the experiment class had 4 students increased as high, 23 students increased as moderate and 13 students increased as low. based on the table, the result of increasing in the average value of students’ vocabulary mastery score after treatment result given the increase is high. because if the students’ score 0,37≤ g ≤ 1,00 is moderate the average scores in experimental class is 0.37, it means that the use of digital storytelling and dictionary can improve students’ vocabulary mastery. meanwhile, the table shows that the result of control class of n-gain, there were no students increased high, 7 students has increased a moderate and 33 students have increased low. because of the students’ scores 0.075 ≤ g < 0.70 is a low increase. the average scores in control class is 0.075, it means that if it only uses the lecture/song method, the result will be less improvement for students’ vocabulary mastery. conclusion from the research findings, the data shows that improvement of using digital storytelling and dictionary in vocabulary mastery is significance after the students got treatment with digital storytelling and dictionary. it can be seen from the normality gain in moderate lavel. meanwhile, in control class there are no improvement. it can be concluded that the use of digital storytelling and dictionary can improve students’vocabulary mastery. 86 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee references arikunto, s. (2006). prosedur penelitian sebagai suatu pendekatan praktek. jakarta: rineka cipta. creswell, john w. (2012). research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodsapproaches– 3rd ed.. usa. sage publications, inc. hartley, j., & kelly mcwilliam. (2009). story circle digital storytelling around the world. united kingdom: willeyblackwell. hornby, a. s. (2003). oxford advanced learner’s dictionary of current english. new york: oxford university press. 87 yogi setia samsi the use of digital storytelling and dictionary to improve students’ vocabulary mastery teacher a teacher asks her class, "if there are 5 birds sitting on a fence and you shoot one of them, how many will be left?" she calls on little johnny. he replies, "none, they all fly away with the first gun shot" the teacher replies, "the correct answer is 4, but i like your thinking." then, little johnny says "i have a question for you. there are three women sitting on a bench having ice cream: one is delicately licking the sides of the triple scoop of ice cream. the second is gobbling down the top and sucking the cone. the third is biting off the top of the ice cream. which one is married?" the teacher, blushing a great deal, replied "well i suppose the one that's gobbled down the top and sucked the cone" to which little johnny replied, "the correct answer is the one with the wedding ring on, but i like your thinking." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) 88 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 193 investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students' english language skills hadeel abu safiyeh english department, faculty of arts, hebron university, palestine email: hadeel_safiyeh93@outlook.com mohammed farrah english department, faculty of arts, hebron university, palestine email: mfarrah@hebron.edu apa citation: abu safiyeh, h. & farrah, m. (2020). investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students’ english language skills. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 193-204. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3799 received: 06-12-2020 accepted: 20-12-2020 published:20-12-2020 introduction due to the outbreak of covid-19 pandemic, universities and schools were obliged to shut down world-wide. the closure of educational institutions disrupted the educational process and most schools and universities shifted towards online learning (farrah and al-bakry, 2020). to overcome this problem, many educational institutions took effective steps to cope with the covid 19 pandemic and to resume the teaching/learning process. one of the approaches which issued is flipped learning which aims to engage students inside and outside the classroom. the flipped learning approach depends on presenting the materials through pre-class input like recorded video lessons. flipped learning also provides students more time to practice their language in the classroom because students have to go to the classroom to do some exercises and activities (lockwood, 2014). there are several advantages for flipped learning such as saving the classroom's time for discussion and providing plenty of materials covering the same topic. besides, flipped learning is effective because it supplies immediate feedback which increases the learners' comprehension of the provided content (brown, 2007). bergmann and sams (2012) have mentioned that flipped learning allows students to study individually and they can learn and revise the materials anytime and anywhere they want (p.18). furthermore, lockwood (2014) has stated that flipped learning develops students' high thinking skills like synthesizing, application, and evaluation. felder, brent, and prince (2011) have also mentioned that flipped learning increases the learners' critical thinking abilities and literacy efficiency. the new technological devices like smartphones, laptops, and tablets enable students to access and search for what they require at any time and place they want. they allow learners to interact with their teachers and colleagues in easiness. moreover, various educational resources offer a wide range of data for the researchers. and these sources help to improve the learners' competency abstract: this study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of utilizing flipped classrooms on seventh graders' english language skills (reading comprehension, writing, listening, and speaking) and areas (grammar and vocabulary) at farahat secondary girls' school. the researchers chose two 7th classes for the study, and then the flipped learning was implemented with the experimental group, while the control group had traditional learning. according to data collection, the researchers used a pretest and a posttest to measure the students' achievements after 9 weeks of flipping the classrooms, which were executed on 36 female students. then, a semi-structured interview was conducted to draw a clear picture of flipped learning. the major findings of the study revealed that there were significant differences in english language skills and areas between both groups. the experimental group achieved higher scores than the control one, and the most prominent improved skills are listening, speaking, and communication. keywords: flipped learning; english skills mailto:mfarrah@hebron.edu hadeel abu, safiyeh, mohammed farrah investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students’ english language skills 194 in various english language skills and areas like grammar and vocabulary. reading comprehension the major goal of reading texts for readers is to understand the main ideas of them. puskorius (2011) has stated that reading comprehension is an active thinking process that depends on students' prior knowledge to understand vocabulary, concepts, and expressions in order to find out the main ideas of the text. abu nejmeh (2011) also has defined reading comprehension as a meta-cognitive procedure, which is subordinate to readers' previous experiences. also, it is not efficient to read words in order to understand the whole meaning of the text, but it is necessary to integrate different thinking abilities with discourses and texts in order to figure out the main messages behind them and to construct the right meaning (alharbi, 2015). writing skills writing is a productive skill and it needs practicing in order to master it properly. it is considered as one of the main difficult skills for students. sharples (1993) has indicated that the nature of the writing skill makes it harder than other skills and that demotivates the learners. moreover, that leads them to hold negative attitudes toward acquiring this ability. therefore, integrating technology into the classroom is like a solution to this problem and that can help teachers to create an enjoyable environment for learning this skill appropriately. listening and speaking skills learning the english language is a necessity these days for students, so that makes the teachers vary their methods in order to make students able to use the language efficiently. therefore, flipping the classroom may enhance learning the language and communicating with others sufficiently. listening and speaking skills are inseparable. therefore, before measuring the communicative ability the students need to acquire the language and expose to various listening scripts (teng, 1970). he also mentioned that flipping the classroom shifting students from passive into active participants and respondents. grammar grammar is the structure and the meaning system of such a language, and it is necessary to know the grammar in order to communicate and use the language properly (saidvaliyevna, 2018). native speakers can interact with each other because they recognize the sounds, words, and they are able to form meaningful sentences. vocabulary vocabulary is a prominent area of a language and it plays a significant role in language acquisition (alqahtani: 2015: 30s). schmitt (2000) also stated that learning vocabulary is a central point of language acquisition because it allows language learners to improve their communicative competence. moreover, nation (2001) mentioned that learning vocabulary is complementary to language use, whereas mccarthy (1988) confirmed the significance of learning vocabulary because it has a crucial role in all language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), and it is important for language mastery and production, while the lacks of vocabulary cause a major problem for learners. generally speaking, using technology for teaching and learning the english language may enhance the students' understanding and language acquisition. brame (2013) has stated that teaching the language through technology can motivate students to interact and discuss topics with their colleagues rather than focusing on the teaching process. he also added that flipped the education make teachers devote more time for discussion and sharing ideas. several researchers have stated that flipped learning is efficient for improving the students' skills and abilities. also, the discussion inside the classroom makes the materials clear and comprehensible for students, and they are responsible for their learning in the flipped style of teaching rather than the traditional model. recently, flipped learning has become popular because of using and employing technology for teaching, which is important for completing the instructional procedures. many researchers have studied blended learning as a new procedure of learning and teaching by mixing face-to-face learning with online materials like doing exercises. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 195 the ultimate goal of teaching the english language through blended learning and the flipped classroom is to enable students to apply their knowledge in their real life and to use the language communicatively. the idea of flipping the classroom is created by jonathan bergmann and aaron sams (2000). they have reversed the classroom lecturing and explanation of the topics included in the course material with activities and interactive tasks to be done in the classroom. they have mentioned that the theoretical martial will be studied by the students individually through recorded classes or videos while the class time is devoted to doing exercises and tasks relevant to the theoretical topics (bergmann & sams, 2012). marsh (2012) has pointed out that flipped learning has several advantages like such as promoting collaborative teaching environments, improving language skills, developing 21st-century skills and providing immediate feedback. however, according to some researchers, flipped classroom is not without drawback. for example, goodwin and miller (2013) have mentioned that some students are not qualified enough to deal with technological devices and they need special courses in order to be prepared regarding downloading videos or submitting some homework. jones (2016) has stated that one of the major disadvantages is the internet disconnection, so that leads teachers to put the recorded material on cds and dvds to enable students to keep in touch with their studying. on the other hand, he has argued that some parents do not prefer to share their laptops with their kids, while others are stressed out because they have to train their kids how to use laptops or pcs. moreover, the individual differences between students cause a big challenge because some students can achieve the main goal quickly, directly, and easily while others cannot do that with the same easiness because they need more time and effort to accomplish the requirements. in addition, some learners do not have positive attitudes or they are not enthusiastic to be learned by flipped classes (abeysekera & dawson, (2016). there are various studies were conducted to measure the impact of the flipped classroom on the students' english language proficiency. for example, ahmed (2016) has stated that the flipped classroom has affected the egyptian efl students' listening comprehension. he utilized a pretest and a posttest to measure the students' achievement and performances, and he concluded that flipped learning affected and raised the learners' comprehension, communication abilities, social relationships, and solidarity. moreover, tyson (2010) has investigated the effectiveness of flipped learning through mobile devices on saudi learners' achievement in the english language proficiency at a college level. also, he has concentrated on their beliefs and attitudes toward the english classroom environment. the sample of his study was 42 students, which were divided into an experimental and control group. he used an english proficiency test to measure their development. he has found that flipped learning enhanced the saudi learners' improvement in the english language skills sufficiently, especially grammar, and the learners had positive attitudes toward this style of learning. consequently, he recommended this model to be implemented in several saudi universities. pudin (2017) has found that his indonesian efl students were more engaged in a flipped classroom rather than traditional classes. he also added that flipped learning improved students' interaction and communication skills, and it increased their motivation toward learning english language skills. on the other hand, he mentioned that he faced a challenge at the beginning of the program, which is that some students are not familiar with this model of teaching so they were uncomfortable. moreover, lee and wallace (2017) have conducted an empirical study on 79 students at south korean universities to find out the impact of flipped classroom learning on students' english competence. data were collected through three tasks, three surveys, and teachers' feedback on students' participation in the class. the major results of this study show a significant difference between the students' achievement because the students who experienced flipped learning achieved higher scores than students in the traditional mode of teaching. moreover, the instructor found that learners in the flipped classroom participated and engaged more than the second group. furthermore, yousefi (2017) has measured the effects of flipped learning on the 67 iranian efl students' listening, speaking, interaction, and participation out of the classroom. for data hadeel abu, safiyeh, mohammed farrah investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students’ english language skills 196 collection, the researchers utilized a listening test, a speaking test, a questionnaire to elicit students' perceptions, and four open-ended questions. the finding revealed that flipped learning improved efl learners' listening skills through listening to various videos, tubes, and interacting with each other, which leads to enhance their speaking and communication skills as well. fauzan and ngabut (2018) have found out the efl students' perceptions on implementing flipped learning in writing classes at an indonesian university in central kalimantan province. the researchers used a survey and a questionnaire to gather the data. the results of the study displayed positive attitudes toward utilizing flipped learning in the writing classes. moreover, the learners pointed out that flipped classrooms created a flexible and enjoyable environment for them, which enhance their progress in their writing abilities. likewise, in a quantitative qualitative study, farrah and qawasmeh (2018) examined the attitudes of english major students in hebron university towards the flipped classroom. they found that the flipped classroom promotes more learner autonomy, motivation, engagement and self-direction. accordingly, they suggested integrating the flipped classroom technology improve learning outcomes and to provide better learning opportunities that enable students have better achievement. finally, evseeva and solozhenko (2015) have evaluated the impacts of flipped classroom technology on the learning of english at a technical university. moreover, the researchers aimed at analyzing the advantages and the disadvantages of the flipped classroom on the educational procedure of the english language. the main finding which was based on a survey revealed 85% of the students liked the integration between the flipped learning and the technology in the instructional procedure, while 15% of them disliked and uninspired by this implementation because of several factors like the internet connection, low self-confidence and self-discipline toward their learning to do the required works appropriately. ekmekci (2017) has mentioned that flipped learning is considered to be a pedagogical approach to teaching english language skills. his study explored the effects of flipped learning on the learners' writing skill, which was received as a difficult and boring skill to be learned. then, the researcher compared the students' performances in the writing classes relevant to flipped learning and to faceto – face instruction. he has used a pretest and a posttest to measure the writing achievement in both the experimental and the control groups. the experimental group consisted of 23 students, while the control group consisted of 20 students. the main results revealed that there was a great difference between the achievement of the experimental and the control group in the post-test in terms of their writing achievements. moreover, the students expressed and held positive attitudes toward the flipped writing model. khan and oiriddine abdou (2020: 2) proposed a modified model of the flipped learning approach to continue the educational process during covid19 pandemic. this approach enables educators share the learning materials with their students and encourages students to prepare the lesson and try to comprehend it “prior to the class time and offers teachers the opportunity, during class time, to ensure that every student actively participates in the explanation of the lesson and deep understanding is acquired”. kawinkoonlasate (2019) acknowledged the importance of integrating the flipped classroom technology in teaching the language skill. he reviewed a number of studies on the implementation of the flipped classroom technology approach and its impact on improving english language learning skills. he noted that integrating the flipped classroom technology approach is expected to have beneficial outcomes in the process of learning and learning environments. as 7th graders at farahat secondary girls' schools have a lack of english language proficiency and they hold negative attitudes toward learning the english language, mplementing flipped learning as a new model of blended learning on the 7th graders' may enhance their english language skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and areas (grammar and vocabulary). therefore, this study aims to examine the effectiveness of the flipped instruction on 7th graders at farahat secondary girls' school in bethlehem. methodology this section presents the methodology of the study and displays the participants, the instruments, and the procedure of conducting the study. it shows the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 197 analysis of the pre-test and post-test of the 7th graders, and the interview with an english teacher from farahat secondary girls' school. participants the researchers applied the flipped learning class on the 7th graders in farahat secondary girls' school in the first semester of 2020 in order to measure the differences between the students' achievement in the traditional and the flipped classes. the researchers have chosen one of two groups of the 7th graders randomly. both of the groups consist of 18 students. the flipped learning was implemented in the group (1), which consisted of 18 students, all of them are female, and their age range between 12 to 14. instruments the researchers used two different methods to achieve the aim of the study. they prepared and used a pre-test as the main tool of the study to measure the 7th graders' achievement and a posttest applied after the experiment. both the pre-test and the post-test were conducted to measure the students' english language proficiency. moreover, the test was divided into sections such as; listening and speaking, reading comprehension, vocabulary and grammar, and writing. each section gauge a student skill or some linguistic areas. moreover, the researchers have conducted a semi-structured interview with an english teacher at farahat secondary girls' school. an interview is a useful tool for collecting data because the teacher who delivers the textbook can provide fundamental information about the students, the textbooks, and the best style of teaching the material. long (2005) has stated that "the interview is a key datagathering tool in many branches of social sciences, most notably in anthropology and linguistic fieldwork" (p.35). it is worth mentioning that the interview was decided to be structured. but the conversation with the english teacher was fruitful which was shifted the interview into a semi-structured type. furthermore, the researcher asked about several points and issues. the procedure of the study this study was conducted at farahat secondary girls' school in bethlehem. the population was the 7the graders, and the researchers selected one group to implement the study and to compare their grades with the second one. the pre-test and posttest were prepared by the researchers and modified by two english teachers at farahat secondary girls' school to adapt to the situation. the content of the textbook was 12 lessons for 9 weeks. by the end of last week, the data was ready to be analyzed. by this time, the interview with the english teacher was conducted to discuss some beneficial issues. moreover, the goals of the study and the achievements of the course were taken into consideration during the design of the tasks and the activities of the nine weeks instructional plan. table 1. the procedure for using flipped classroom for teaching english language skills. the phase setting procedures phase one outside the classroom teachers post videos, pictures, worksheets, lessons, questions on microsoft teams. the students watch them and prepare themselves for the classroom activities. phase two inside the classroom 10 minutes of discussion and answering some students' questions. engaging students in doing some activities and tasks. phase three outside the classroom students doing some worksheets. teachers respond to their homework and send them feedbacks. phase four inside the classroom students correct their mistakes according to the teachers' feedback. submitting the assignments. after two weeks of school duration and taking the head teacher's permission, the researchers informed the students of the adoption of the flipped classroom approach. then, the researchers illustrated how the approach works, explained how to open their emails on the microsoft teams, illustrated how to utilize them, and exchanged their emails. some video lessons, pictures, and some hadeel abu, safiyeh, mohammed farrah investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students’ english language skills 198 worksheets for each new lesson were posted at the microsoft teams to discuss and cover the whole material. moreover, to check the students' comprehension, some questions were embedded at different stages of the videos. microsoft teams enabled the students to ask questions directed either to the teacher or to their colleagues. after that, the post-test was conducted to show the effectiveness of using flipped classrooms in contrast to traditional teaching classes. results of the study in this section, the researchers display the statistical analysis of the data gathered about the impact of the flipped classroom model on the 7th graders' english language skills. the information was collected through a pre-test to measure the students' achievement of the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading comprehension, and writing) and areas (grammar and vocabulary). the post-test was implemented in order to find out the differences between the students' achievement at the pre-test and the post-test and the impacts of the flipped classroom on the students' english language competence. the table below shows descriptive statistics of the pretest and posttest obtained by the experimental and the control group table 2. statistics of pretest and posttest scores relevant to experimental and control group this table shows the statistical analysis of the 7th graders' level in english language skills and areas. it is clear that there is no difference between their pretest scores, but there is a significant increase in their grades after implementing the flipped model on the experimental group, which is explained in the following tables. group english language skills and areas pretest percentage of achievement posttest percentage of achievement experimental group number 18 100% 18 100% mean 5.19 60.5% 6.44 78.9% listening & speaking 5.27 61.1% 6.61 83.3% reading comprehension 5.26 61.6% 6.72 80.1% writing 4.88 55.3% 5.73 73.2% grammar 5.16 61.4% 6.42 83.2% vocabulary 5.31 62.1% 6.49 70.8% control group number 18 100% 18 100% mean 5.23 59.6% 5.71 70.4% listening & speaking 5.21 59.5% 5.83 72.2% reading comprehension 5.18 62.2% 6.27 77.7% writing 4.72 54.3% 5.33 71.2% grammar 5.19 60.5% 5.63 65.3% vocabulary 5.22 61.3% 5.48 63.2% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 199 table 3. comparison between experimental and control group regarding pretest scores english language skills & areas group number mean percentage of achievement listening & speaking experimental 18 5.27 61.1% control 18 5.21 59.5% reading comprehension experimental 18 5.26 61.6% control 18 5.18 62.2% writing experimental 18 4.88 55.3% control 18 4.72 54.3% grammar experimental 18 5.16 61.4% control 18 5.19 60.5% vocabulary experimental 18 5.31 62.1% control 18 5.22 61.3% table 3 shows a comparison between the experimental and the control group according to their pretest grades. the results show that there is no significant difference in english language skills and areas (grammar and vocabulary) between both groups. also, it is worth mentioning that the researchers conducted a t-test to measure the distinction between the experimental and the control group before implementing the flipped learning, and the results show that the two groups extremely have the same level of english language competency and the difference between them is (0.02) and it is less than (0.05). table 4. comparison between experimental and control group regarding posttest scores english language skills & areas group number mean percentage of achievements listening & speaking experimental 18 6.61 83.3% control 18 5.83 72.2% reading comprehension experimental 18 6.72 80.1% control 18 6.27 77.7% writing experimental 18 5.73 73.2% control 18 5.33 71.2% grammar experimental 18 6.42 83.2% control 18 5.63 65.3% vocabulary experimental 18 6.49 70.8% control 18 5.48 63.2% table 4 shows a comparison between the experimental and the control group regarding the post-test grades. the results show that there is a great difference in the english language skills and areas (grammar and vocabulary) between the experimental and control group. the scores of the experimental group are higher than the control group which is approved and confirmed the effect of the flipped classroom on the students' achievement of english language competency. the result of the interview with the english teacher the following are the questions requested from a teacher of english at farahat secondary girls' school and the answers generated during the interview: 1. do you prefer traditional classes or flipped classes? why? "this is a critical question because the students are accustomed to be taught by the traditional style. on the other hand, it is better to change the routine of teaching. the flipped hadeel abu, safiyeh, mohammed farrah investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students’ english language skills 200 learning provides an enjoyable environment for students, and it encouraged them to discover new topics. therefore, i prefer it more than the traditional classes." (teachers) 2. do you think that flipped classrooms enhance students' communicative skills? teachers: "yes, i think so. the flipped learning requests students to interact and communicate with their teachers and colleagues in order to do the required tasks and activities. the interaction between them improves the students' fluency and encourages them to practice their language." 3. do you think that flipped classrooms enhance students' reading skills? “sure, the students read, watch, and answer some questions at their homes in order to be prepared for the classes at their schools. furthermore, some teachers provide students with some samples to read and discuss. but at school, they depend highly on reading to do interactive tasks." (teachers) 4. do you think that students feel more comfortable when they can display the provided material at any time they want? "the challenging point here is the internet connection. they need a good internet connection to watch the provided videos or to describe the pictures. i think it is a good point to display the material at any time, especially for absent students who miss some classes." (teachers) 5. how does the flipped classroom enhance the students listening and speaking skills? "flipping the classes depends highly on downloaded videos and recordings for students to watch them and to prepare themselves to do tasks and exercises in school. all that may improve students' listening skills. moreover, when they meet at school, they are gathering for doing some activities which are developing their communicative competence and speaking skills." (teachers) 6. do you think that a flipped classroom can enrich the students' personalities? "i believe that flipped learning improves the students' self-efficacy, self-discipline, and self-confidence because they are more aware of their learning. also, they are responsible for their achievements." (teachers) 7. what are the main advantages that the students can gain by using the flipped classroom? "flipping the classes have several benefits and drawbacks. the main benefits are improving the students' skills and abilities and it contributes to language acquisition. moreover, students like experiencing new models of teaching. furthermore, it saves the time of presentation of the lessons in the classroom for discussion, and it provides various sources of information for students." (teachers) 8. do you recommend your students to watch extra videos or to search for further information? "yes, sure. i ask them to notice the different accents and dialects that are spoken from native and non-native, and i ask them to search for the same information from different sources to see the difference." (teachers) 9. what are the main drawbacks of flipped learning? "in my point of view, our students need to have positive attitudes toward learning the english language in order to acquire it easily and sufficiently as i notice at this school and this is one of the challenges that face teachers every day. furthermore, some students are still depending on the teachers as the only source of knowledge and they refuse to engage in any new model or style of teaching. nevertheless, some students do not have internet connections in their homes, which are frustrating them. generally speaking, flipping the classes make students take their learning responsibility and trying to keep abreast with new lessons and topics." (teachers) 10. which prominent skills do you think that flipped learning develops the most? teacher: " i think that flipped learning develops interaction between students which improves their listening and communication skills. moreover, utilizing interactive tasks and activities encourage normal and shy to speak and express their ideas." (teachers) discussion of the results as shown in table (3) there were no significant differences between the experimental and the control groups in their pretest results, so that revealed that they are extremely at the same level of the english language competency before conducting the study. on the other hand, the post-test scores reflected a great impact of the flipped classroom on the experimental group compared with the control group's results. the impacts of the flipped classroom were prominent in listening and speaking skills which match the english teachers' answers in the interview, she expressed that flipped classroom develops students' listening and communication english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 201 skills as the teacher utilizes interactive tasks and activities which leads to encourage normal and shy students to interact and declare their ideas and thoughts. returning to table (4), the findings of conducting the flipped learning on the experimental group show the students' improvement in the english language skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and areas (grammar and vocabulary) as the following: listening and speaking skills are the most improved skills (83.3%), followed by grammar (83.2%), reading comprehension (80.1%), writing (73.2%), and finally vocabulary (70.8%). the flipped classroom developed the learners' listening and speaking skills because it depends on the communication skills and interaction for doing tasks and activities at the classroom, which is shifted the students from passive into active participants and respondents as mentioned by teng (1970). moreover, the findings of this study meet the results of ahmed's (2016), he has mentioned that the flipped classroom affected the egyptian efl students' listening comprehension and performances. he also concluded that flipped learning affected and raised the learners' achievements and communication abilities. in addition, the findings of this study match the results of these studies: of pudin (2017), yousefi (2017), and lee and wallace (2017), who have found that flipped classrooms improved students' communication skills , engagement and participation. secondly, the flipped classroom enhanced the learners' linguistics area, which is grammar. that is in line with tyson's study (2010) who found that the flipped learning enhanced the saudi learners' improvement in the english language skills sufficiently, especially grammar and the learners had positive attitudes toward this style of learning. then, flipped learning improved the learners' reading comprehension ability, because they have to depend on themselves for reading the provided topics and understanding the main ideas of the texts. after that, they can interact and do the tasks inside the classroom as mentioned by the english teacher in the interview. next, the development of the students' writing skills appears in doing and completing the needed exercises. also, utilizing this model is helpful because the teachers change the teaching routines and create a motivating environment for students as mentioned by the teacher of english in the interview. this result is matched with the study of fauzan and ngabut (2018) who noted that the students had positive attitudes toward utilizing flipped learning in the writing classes. moreover, the learners pointed out that flipped classrooms created a flexible and enjoyable environment for them, which enhance their progress in their writing abilities. furthermore, ekmekci's study (2017) has concluded that using flipped learning was the right choice because it increased the students' achievement in the writing classes. finally, practicing the language inside and outside the classroom encourage students to learn new expressions and vocabulary, which is affected the learners' lexical abilities, self-confidence, and selfdiscipline as stated by the teacher of english in the interview. conclusion to sum up, this study investigated the effects of flipped learning on the students' achievements in english language skills (reading comprehension, writing, listening, and speaking) and areas (grammar and vocabulary). the main results revealed a significant difference in students' achievements and performances regarding all english language skills and areas. moreover, the flipped classroom created an enjoyable atmosphere for learners and changed the traditional style of teaching. this model is also efficient for students as it caused a radical change in their learning process. references abeysekera, l., & dawson, p. (2016). motivation and cognitive load in the flipped classroom: definition, rationale, and a call for research. higher education research and development, 34(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2014.9343 36 abu nejmeh, s. (2011). integrating higher-order thinking skills on the tenth graders to improve learners' achievement in reading comprehension in jenin district (unpublished master's thesis). an-najah national university, palestine. ahmed, s. (2016). the flipped classroom model to develop egyptian efl students' listening comprehension. english language teaching, 9(9), 166-178. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v9n9p166 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2014.934336 https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2014.934336 https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v9n9p166 hadeel abu, safiyeh, mohammed farrah investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students’ english language skills 202 alharbi, a. m. (2015). building vocabulary for language learning: approach for esl learners to study new vocabulary. journal of international students, 5(4), 501-511. alqahtani, m. (2015). the importance of vocabulary in language learning and how to be taught. international journal of teaching and education, 3(3), 21-34., 10.20472/te.2015.3.3.002 bergmann, j., & sams, a. (2012). flip your classroom: reach every student in every class every day. eugene, or: international society for technology. in education. brame, c., (2013). flipping the classroom. vanderbilt university center for teaching. retrieved from: url: http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guidessub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/. brinks lockwood, r. (2014). flip it! strategies for the esl classroom. ann arbor: university of michigan press. brown, d. (2007). principles of language learning and teaching. new york, ny: pear-son education. ekmekci, e. (2017, march 31). the flipped writing classroom in turkish efl context: a comparative study on a new model. retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1145315 evseeva, a. & solozhenko, a. (2015). use of flipped classroom technology in language learning. paper presented at xv international conference "linguistic and cultural studies: traditions and innovations", lkti 2015, tomsk, russia. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.10.006 farrah, m. & qawasmy, a. (2018). english students' attitudes towards using flipped classrooms in language learning at hebron university. research in english language pedagogy, 6(2). 275-294. farrah, m. & al-bakry, g. h. (2020). online learning for efl students in palestinian universities during corona pandemic: advantages, challenges and solutions. indonesian journal of learning and instruction, 3(2), 65-78. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/ijli.v3i2.3677 fauzan, a., & ngabut, m. (2018). efl students' perception of flipped learning in writing class. retrieved from http://e-journal.iainpalangkaraya.ac.id/index.php/jefl/article/vie w/792 goodwin, b., & miller, k. (2013). research says evidence on flipped classrooms is still coming in. technology-rich learning, 70(6), 78-80 kawinkoonlasate, p. (2019). integration in flipped classroom technology approach to develop english language skills of thai efl learners. english language teaching, 12(11), 23-34 khan, md. shahadat hossain and oiriddine abdou, benadjih, flipped classroom: how institutions of higher education (heis) of bangladesh could move forward during covid-19 pandemic. available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3615400 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3615400 jones, m. (2016). a case study of blended learning in higher education in malaysia: flipped, flopped, or forgotten? teaching education, 132–13 lee, g., & wallace, a. 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(2011). reading comprehension strategies for elementary students. retrieved from http://createcomputelearn.com/comrehensio n-strategies saidvaliyevna, i. (2018). the role of grammar in learning the english language. retrieved from http://journalpro.ru/articles/the-role-ofgrammar-in-learning-english-language/ schmitt, n. (2000). vocabulary in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. sharples, m. (ed.) (1993). computer-supported collaborative writing. springerverlag. http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/ http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/ https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1145315 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.10.006 https://doi.org/10.25134/ijli.v3i2.3677 http://e-journal.iain-palangkaraya.ac.id/index.php/jefl/article/view/792 http://e-journal.iain-palangkaraya.ac.id/index.php/jefl/article/view/792 http://e-journal.iain-palangkaraya.ac.id/index.php/jefl/article/view/792 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3615400 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/tesq.372 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/tesq.372 https://doi.org/10.21093/ijeltal.v2i1.47 http://createcomputelearn.com/comrehension-strategies http://createcomputelearn.com/comrehension-strategies http://journalpro.ru/articles/the-role-of-grammar-in-learning-english-language/ http://journalpro.ru/articles/the-role-of-grammar-in-learning-english-language/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 203 teng, m. (1970, january 01). flip your classroom to improve efl students' speaking skills. retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/97 8-981-10-6968-0 tyson, t. (2010). making learning irresistible: extending the journey of mabry middle. in heidi hayes jacobs (ed). curriculum 21. yousefi, m. (2017). the incorporation of flipped learning into conventional classes to enhance efl learners' l2 speaking, l2 listening, and engagement. retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.10 80/17501229.2017.1394307 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-6968-0 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-6968-0 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17501229.2017.1394307 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17501229.2017.1394307 hadeel abu, safiyeh, mohammed farrah investigating the effectiveness of flipped learning on enhancing students’ english language skills 204 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 47 the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development arima renny dayu putri english education master program, sanata dharma university, yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: rimarenny@gmail.com paulus kuswandono english education master program, sanata dharma university, yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: kus@usd.ac.id apa citation: putri, a. r. d. & kuswandono, p. (2020). the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 47-60. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3778 received: 27-06-2020 accepted: 29-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 abstract: this study investigated the role of critical incidents (cis) to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development. the researchers examined the meanings of cis and how these developed their identities as public senior high school english teachers. to gain the data, the researchers conducted open-form questionnaire and open-ended interview toward eight public senior high school english teachers in yogyakarta. the data were collected using narrative inquiry statements which displayed respondents’ life story in constructing teachers’ identities related to their cis. the result of this research demonstrated that there were 12 cis which were classified into 3 major categories of cis namely: students’ misbehavior, smart student, and self-improvement. the meanings of these cis were; motivating teacher to be reflective teacher, empower teacher to be agentic teacher in finding solution, developing teachers’ identities, supporting teachers to have better quality of teaching, and improving teacher confidence. those meanings of cis gave a great role to construct senior high school english teachers’ identity. keywords: critical incident (cis); teacher identity; public senior high school english teacher introduction experiencing critical incidents in teaching process can substantially help teachers develop their identities. critical incidents (cis) often take place unpredictably and they are crucial to change people’s lives (schutz, nichols, & schwenke, 2018). cis are useful for teachers to learn and reflect on their most meaningful experiences, both positive and negative experiences (wijaya & kuswandono, 2018). after experiencing cis, instead of simply experiencing and forgetting it, the teachers would remember and scrutinize it as an insightful compass to a better envisage clearer direction as reflective teachers. it is crucial as cis often happened as unexpected moments. thus, it is fundamental that teachers continuously reflect on incidents to find ways to foster their professional identities. the efforts to be good and useful teachers for students will also shape teachers’ identities. teacher’s identity is dynamic and formed by motivation and goals before becoming a teacher, which particularly involves a long and continuous process to develop (schutz et al., 2018). it is constructed by the extent to which the teacher plays a role related to the tasks of the community and their profession in the future (richardson & watt, 2018). the willingness to embrace those professional tasks sincerely is the essential factor which can distinguish passionate and impassionate teachers from the perspective of professional calling. likewise, it is through experiencing and reflecting critical incidents can teachers develop the capacity of their professional calling. deciding teaching as a job, teachers are aware that they are holding teaching responsibilities for their whole life long. a teacher is concerned with teacher’s quality, belief, motivation, and skill to take the responsibilities as a teacher (richardson & watt, 2018). teaching as a career involves, among others, teachers’ motivation, goals, agency, and self-efficacy to accommodate the society needs mailto:rimarenny@gmail.com mailto:kus@usd.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3778 arima renny dayu putri & paulus kuswandono the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development 48 about education, as well reflection on critical incidents in classrooms. teachers sometimes experience cis while teaching, which in turn affect the teachers’ identities. cis are beneficial to challenge or support teachers’ goals, values, and beliefs based on teachers’ attributions and emotional responses, and it is significant in authoring their identities (schutz et al., 2018). the diagram below explains that cis are related to teachers’ motivation, goals, emotion, self-efficacy, and self-agency to construct teachers’ identities. diagram 1. the formulation of how cis shape teacher’s identity experiencing cis, teachers need a sense of agency and self-efficacy to solve the problems and to make meanings of those cis. in the journey of teaching english, teachers may have experienced several mandated versions of curriculum, a number of incidents in the class, many kinds of students’ character, and a large number of learning materials which should be delivered. several problems might have happened and have been solved. those problems require teacher’s agency, which is defined as teacher’s power to take better actions or transform their ideas to achieve their defined goals (beauchamp & thomas, 2009). agentic teachers are those who are active and able to shape their responsibilities to the challenging classroom (biesta & tedder, 2007). they define agency in three-dimensional pattern as a configuration of influences from the past condition, present situation, and future result. agency is connected to teacher identity because a teacher is a person who applies agency continuously. it means that teachers always think about their teaching history, on-going teaching activity, and the goals of teaching in the future. self-efficacy is people's beliefs in their ability to achieve goals that affect their life (bandura, 2010). believing that teachers can achieve their goals is the principal realization in constructing professional identity as english teacher. without keeping the belief in them, teachers do not have english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 49 any expectation. deriving the concept of bandura (1982), day (2018) indicated that empowered schools will usually focus on teachers’ sense of collective efficacy, on how they can take action to solve their problems and improve their teaching activities. while authoring their professional english teachers’ identities, they also at the same time develop the school’s identity. the better teachers’ identities are constructed, the better school’s identities are developed. in solving the problem, teachers need to remember their motivation and goals in order to regulate their identities. richardson and watt (2018) defined motivation as the energy to achieve defined goals. there is a solid connection between the self-identity and motivation by which teachers are motivated to take actions to control and make sense of their selves. through motivation, teachers will build their identities as their desired goals. nevertheless, without sufficient motivation, teachers who have extraordinary abilities cannot place appropriate strategies to achieve their desired goals (hong, day, & greene, 2018). motivation becomes the key point for teachers to regulate their identities to be always in line with their goals. it accompanies teacher to develop their professional identities. accepting teaching as a job must be decided after somebody set their life goals. as confirmed by schutz, nichols, & schwenke (2018), incoming goals, standard, and beliefs are significant points teacher used to measure their achievement in teaching. teachers have set their teaching goals before starting their journey of teaching. these certain goals can be used as the level of their achievement. furthermore, according to garner & kaplan (2019), purpose and goals are defined as the teachers’ knowledge and emotions about their personal purpose and objectives in teaching. hence, it is essential that teachers set their goals before starting their career as teachers. teachers’ emotions also play critical role in solving the occurring problems. emotion is related to the discussion of teacher’s identity because it is a feature between teacher-self and a factor that influence his/her identity and the shaping of it (beauchamp & thomas, 2009). how teachers manage their emotion when some cis occurred in their teaching process can significantly influence their identities. the good emotion influences good result to students as the main focus that teachers care about students. schutz et al. (2018) explained about the central value of emotional episodes that they involve conscious and unconscious judgments regarding perceived successes in achieving teacher’s goals or maintaining their beliefs. related to teachers’ identities, teachers must control emotion to keep good image in front of students. many studies about reflecting cis as one way to develop teachers’ identities and professional teachers have been carried out. wijaya and kuswandono (2018) investigated the effectiveness of reflection with critical incident theory (cit) framework as a form of teacher professional development. in their study towards six english teachers at a private school located in cirebon, indonesia, they found that by reflecting their cis, all of the participants could understand their experiences deeper and making them meaningful. furthermore, farrell (2011) also conducted a study on the professional role identity of three experienced esl college teachers in canada as communicated in regular group meetings. in his paper, he found that esl teachers can become more aware on their identities roles and reflect about how they have been shaped by being reflective teachers. in the same vein, sisson (2016) conducted a study to explore the significance of cis to develop identity and self-agency. the researcher presented cece stories about the relationship between her strong sense of life in the family, her troubling experiences in school and how these experiences developed her identity, and agency as a teacher. reflecting between the cis occurring in her studies and caring community she had with her family, she finally took action to promote caring relationship in her classroom. in this study, it can be drawn that the analysis of cece’s narrative stories created a powerful tool to shape her identity and agency. from those studies above, it is clear that cis are of imperative in developing teachers’ identities. why is this study crucial? although many studies have been carried out to reflect cis as one way to develop teachers’ identities as mentioned above, most of them were done outside indonesia, which may share different cultural persepectives. thus, it is fundamental to study cis because cis experienced by teachers have strong influences to the teachers’ behavior and their way of teaching. arima renny dayu putri & paulus kuswandono the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development 50 the researchers are aware that it is crucial to conduct similar study in yogyakarta, indonesia because yogyakarta is very popular known as an education city. in this city, there are a lot of reputable senior high schools. hence, the researchers conducted a study investigating the role of cis in teaching processes to construct english teachers’ identities development by interviewing senior high school english teachers located in yogyakarta, indonesia. based on the background of the research, the problems are formulated as follows: 1. what were the meaningful critical incidents (cis) identified from senior high school english teachers? 2. how did the critical incidents (cis) develop senior high schools teachers’ identities? method research method and participants this was a qualitative research where the researchers investigated the quality of relationship between cis and teachers’ identities development. the researchers followed the theory of qualitative research from fraenkel & wallen (1993, p. 380), and ary, jacobs, sorensen, & razavieh (2010). in this study, the researchers analysed public senior high school english teachers’ stories about how cis developed their identities by focusing on the total knowledge to get the depth understanding. to be specific, this study employed a narrative inquiry technique that focused on teachers’ meaningful experiences when they encountered unexpected situation. cis become a learning moment for teachers to process their actions during the teaching and learning activities which ultimately can authorize their own teacher identities (harrison, lee, harrison, & lee. 2011). as mentioned by ary et al. (2010), in narrative inquiry, the researcher analyses the knowledge of someone’s story. in this study, the researchers analyzed the story of teachers’ meaningful experiences as well as cis occurring during their teaching process which were useful to develop their identities as senior high school english teachers. the researchers investigated a small group of teachers from the population of public senior high school english teachers in yogyakarta. a population is a group of individual that shares one or more characteristic in common (best and kahn, 2006; fraenkel and wallen 1993). from this population, the researchers invited eight public senior high school english teachers to share their experiences in teaching english and to identify the quality of relationship between cis and teachers’ identity development. data collection and analysis technique the researchers used three kinds of method in gaining the data. they are open form questionnaire, open–ended interview, and classroom observation. the researchers collected the data in january 2020 up to march 2020 and carried out data validation by member’s checking in april 2020. to analyse the data, the researchers prepared data transcription continued by data coding. the data collection and analysis technique were arranged by the following diagram. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 51 diagram 2. the formulation of data collection and analysis technique first, the open form questionnaire was conducted to get prior information about how public senior high school english teachers defined and designed their identities as english teachers and whether cis helped them to develop their identities. second, the researchers completed the data transcription and data coding to develop the interview questions. the researchers followed the theory from ary et al. (2010) about “coding” to develop the concepts from raw data. it was designed to categorize the differences and similarities found in the data collection. third step, the researchers carried out individual open – ended interview to gain deeper data about the story of teachers’ identities development and gained information about how cis occurred, shaped, and developed their certain identities as public senior high school english teachers in yogyakarta. fourth, the researchers made the data transcription and data coding from the result of open-ended interview. after finishing data coding, the researchers observed the teachers carrying out the learning process in the class and later on analyzed the respondents’ stories. nevertheless, the process of classroom observation did not encounter cis as precisely experienced by the teachers. the initial intention of classroom observation was to provide research triangulation. next, the data collections were discussed with the supporting theories related to the teacher identity development and cis theory. the researchers analyzed the result using narrative inquiry in which the researcher told the teachers’ story during their teaching process related with the function of cis towards their identities development. the researchers followed the theory of ary et al. (2010) that is in narrative inquiry, researchers examine and analyze someone’s stories. after writing the analysis, the analysis was sent to all respondents in order to get data validation (member check). the researchers conducted member check to all respondents so that the data can be categorized as trusted and valid data. in writing the discussion, the respondents’ names are all disguised to protect their privacy. finally, from the data analysis, the researchers drew the conclusions. results and discussion in total, there are twelve critical incident stories gathered from the public senior high school english teachers to be discussed in this study. the stories were organized to answer the two research questions, namely the meanings of cis as reflected by the teachers and the roles of those cis to develop the teachers’ identities. the meaning of critical incidents for teachers the twelve stories of cis were categorized into three major categories of cis, namely students’ misbehavior, smart students, and selfimprovement. arima renny dayu putri & paulus kuswandono the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development 52 the researchers summarized the cis stories in the three tables below. students’ misbehavior students’ misbehavior was improper behavior or unaccepted behavior for the teacher occurring in the teaching and learning process. the study found three kinds of students’ misbehavior, namely; “sleeping students”, “impolite words”, and “late arrival”. these students’ misbehavior suggested meaning for the teachers as mentioned in table below. table 1. students’ misbehavior no teacher’s name story / number meaning 1 ms. patricia sleeping student (1) i have to make reflection about the teaching method and material. 2 ms. elsa sleeping student (2) i have to discuss with other teacher to design our next step related to the students’ misbehaviour. 3 ms. anna impolite words (3) this kind of incident helped me to change my identity from fun teacher to firm and discipline teacher by creating consequence related to the students’ misbehaviour. 4 ms. sofia late arrival (4) i have to be a wise and caring teacher who is able to choose the right action related to the lateness of the student. 5 mr. henry late arrival (5) i developed an identity as a caring teacher who was able to find the reason and solution about the student’s lateness. the public senior high school english teachers in yogyakarta experienced some students’ misbehavior in their teaching process. first, the cases of “sleeping students” (1, 2) were defined as cis and experienced by ms. patricia and ms. elsa several times. these cases provided great meaning for both ms. patricia and ms. elsa. experiencing some cis like “sleeping students”, ms. patricia realized that she was given a big chance to evaluate or reflect her teaching techniques and material designed. ms. patricia’s case was in line with joshi (2018) and hall & townsend (2017) that cis are useful for teachers to learn and reflect on their most meaningful experiences for both positive and negative experiences. ms. patricia has done the right thing that she evaluated herself based on the case of “sleeping students” in her teaching process. thus, the case of “sleeping student” provided a meaningful experience for teacher to conduct reflection about her teaching techniques and material designed. second, ms. elsa’s case of “sleeping student” (2) took her to a related action which was conducting a discussion with the homeroom’s teacher and other teachers to find a solution. her action was confirmed by hall & townsend (2017) that cis become a meaningful learning moment for teachers to take related actions. in this case, ms. elsa defined that the case of “sleeping student” was a meaningful moment to find related useful action. case number three, “impolite words” (3) were experienced by ms. anna and categorized as meaningful experience because it could change her identity. ms. anna’s awareness on her identity’s role was confirmed by farrell (2011) that critical incident can generate teachers’ awareness of their identities’ roles. ms. anna changed her identity from fun english teacher to be a firm and discipline english teacher after designing consequences for students who produced impolite words in the school environment. ms. anna’s critical incident of “impolite words” was in line with schutz, hong, & cross francis (2018) and gilstrap & dupree (2002) that cis often occur unpredictably and they are potential to change people’s lives as well as their development of identities. thus, it is discernible that ms. anna’s case of “impolite words” was categorized as a meaningful experience because it was potential to transform the identity as an english teacher. other cases of students’ misbehavior were the cases of “late arrival” (4, 5) experienced by ms. sofia and mr. henry. these cis were meaningful moments to develop their identities as a genuine english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 53 caring teacher (noddings, 2017). both ms. sofia and mr. henry’s actions corroborated the arguments from joshi (2018) and hall & townsend (2017). the arguments suggest that cis are meaningful learning moment to develop teachers’ professional identities as they may guide teachers to choose related action to deal better with students’ problem or inappropriate behaviour. both of them had to find the best action to deal with the late-arrival problem through critical discretion. it means that by arriving late, the students will not always deserve bad effect in their learning progress. smart students having smart students are meaningful to every teacher. they also become a distinct sign that meaningful learning process have occurred. on the other hand, smart students can create some learning problems leading to cis as figured out in the following table. table 2. smart students no teacher’s name story / number meaning 1 ms. elsa student’s feedback (6) pronunciations mistakes help me to evaluate myself. i have to learn and prepare the material well before teaching in order to be a good example for my students. 2 ms. sofia smart student (7) the students were smarter than me made me realized that i have to study hard in order to be a better teacher. 3 ms. sofia ill-timed material coverage (8) i have to be more creative teacher in designing learning materials which are suitable for my students’ potential. resulting smart students is the goal of every teacher. however, having smart students can be a rewarding cis for some teachers. there were three stories about “smart students” in the classroom as reflected by ms. elsa and ms. sofia. ms. elsa’s case of “student’s feedback” (6) was a serious moment in her teaching career and it provided a substantial meaning to her. being corrected by her student after having mispronunciations, she turned into deep embarrassment. it was a quite unpredictable and unforgettable moments for ms. elsa. this event was confirmed by schutz et al. (2018) that cis often happen unpredictably but they are significant to change people’s lives. ms. elsa’s case of having student’s feedback really took place in sudden and provide great opportunity for her to change her style of being a senior high school english teacher. ms. elsa was motivated to prepare her teaching better in order to be a good model for her students. her motivation to be better was confirmed by richardson and watt (2018) that motivation is somebody’s energy to achieve their defined goals. furthermore, critical events are beneficial to challenge or support teachers’ goals, and it is principal in authoring teacher identity (schutz, et al., 2018 ; joshi, 2018). ms. elsa’s goal is to be a good model for her students. therefore, by having wrong pronunciation in her teaching, she had to change her strategy in preparing and conducting teaching. so, it was assumed that “student’s feedback” provided a great meaning for an english teacher to be a better teacher by preparing and conducting teacher activities in a correct way. case number seven, the story of having “smart students” (7) gave a great meaning for ms. sofia. in this case, she thought that her students were smarter than her since they could answer the task faster and better than her. the meaning of this critical incident was providing a learning moment for teacher to take related action as well as study hard to have better performance and knowledge in teaching english. she believed that teachers have to learn and learn over the time. as a teacher, she believed that studying harder will produce better teaching activities. ms. sofia’s meaningful experience was in line with atai & nejadghanbar (2015) that cis become a meaningful learning moment for teachers to take related actions. it was clear that having smart students led ms. sofia to learn more as a teacher. likewise, the case of “ill-timed material coverage” (8) contributed a great meaning for a better material designed. in this case, ms. sofia arima renny dayu putri & paulus kuswandono the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development 54 experienced all materials that have already been delivered to the students before the semester ended. to cover the rest of the time, it was difficult for her to find materials to be delivered to the students. atai & nejadghanbar (2015) explained that cis become a meaningful learning moment for teachers to take related actions. in line with their findings, ms. sofia assumed that critical incident gave her meaning to design more creative material and well time management in teaching. self-improvement teachers’ self-improvement is continuous development of teacher’s knowledge and teaching quality. it is the requirement to upgrade their quality to be better in their teaching profession. the table below specified some experiences of cis supporting teachers’ self-improvement. table 3. self-improvement no teacher’s name story / number meaning 1 mr. christian high potential students (9) i have to upgrade my own quality in teaching and preparing the material for my high potential students. 2 ms. sofia high potential students (10) i have to learn how to design better material and to choose the better teaching methods to be applied in the new school. 3 mr. christian going abroad (11) i felt that my english was tested during school visit in australia. this experience improved my selfconfidence. 4 ms. sofia peer teaching (12) i developed my identity as a creative teacher who can design more interesting material for my students using technology as i learnt from the student-teacher. the last big major category of cis in this study was “self-improvement” which was experienced by two respondents. both mr. christian and ms. sofia experienced the case of “high potential students” (9, 10). their cis appeared when both of them faced high potential students on their movement in new public senior high schools. these new senior high schools as their new work places were categorized as favorite schools. the students there were very smart in comparison to their previous students in the previous schools. both of them thought and experienced that to deal with smarter students, it is mandatory to prepare better teaching techniques and materials. having such incidents, they realized that upgrading the quality of teaching must be done. mr. christian and ms. sofia’s actions were in line with harrison et al. (2011) that cis become a meaningful learning moment for teachers to take related actions. in this case, both mr. christian and ms. sofia were being agentic teachers to find solution in the challenging new classrooms. biesta and tedder (2007) argued that agentic teachers are those who are active and able to shape their responsibilities to the challenging classroom. in line with biesta and tedder (2007), mr. christian and ms. sofia took responsibility by upgrading themselves in terms of materials design and teaching methods. they were motivated to take responsibility so that they can be a good and appropriate teacher for high potential students. as richardson and watt (2018) defined motivation is somebody’s energy to achieve their defined goals, both of them had energy to have better teaching qualities. thus, having high potential students provided great meaning for teachers to burn up their energy or motivation to upgrade themselves and have better quality of teaching. the next case concerning with selfimprovement was the case of “going abroad” (11) experienced by mr. christian. he had an unforgettable experience on his first time visiting another senior high school in australia. unforgettable experience is confirmed by farrell (2013) that a critical incident is any unpredictable and unforgettable experience occurring both in the teaching process and outside class. both mr. christian and the natives’ teachers found difficulty and misunderstanding conversation since they had different dialects. thus, mr. christian struggled to have better communication. even though having difficulty, mr. christian thought that his english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 55 experience was a critical incident for him to achieve a better value of himself as an english teacher. his great point of view in analyzing critical incident was in line with schutz et al. (2018) that critical events are beneficial to challenge or support teachers’ goals, values, and beliefs and it is vital in authoring teachers’ identities. after visiting another senior high school in australia for about a month, he felt more confident to be an english teacher. in other words, his speaking english has been tested well by native speakers. it was clear that the case of “going abroad” provided special meaning for mr. christian for his english fluency improvement and his confidence in being senior high school english teacher in a favourite school. “peer-teaching” (12) was the last case of selfimprovement category which also provided deep meanings. ms. sofia learned how to design material using technology from the studentsteacher who practiced teaching in her classroom. by designing more interesting material and applying technology in teaching, she developed her identity as creative teacher. her critical incident’s meaning is in line with schutz et al. (2018) that cis take place unpredictably, they are potential to change people’s lives as well as their development of identities. it was found that ms sofia positively assumed the meaning of “peer-teaching” as having self-improvement to be creative teacher and have a better quality of teaching. the roles of critical incidents to develop teachers’ identities learning a larger study on teacher identity construction, those public senior high school teachers as the research respondents provided the roles of cis to develop their professional identities. the roles of cis to construct teachers’ identities were analyzed based on three major categories of cis. students’ misbehavior teacher identity is created during teacher’s life and the process of teaching. it means that identity can be developed by many factors, experiences, and conditions. identity is defined as a continual and dynamic process which involves both a person and a context (beauchamp & thomas, 2009). students’ misbehaviors were useful context which provided chance for teachers to develop their identity. ms. patricia’s case of “sleeping students” (1) was useful for her to be a reflective teacher. the incident of “sleeping student” made ms. patricia reflected on her quality of teaching. it was found that ms. patricia preferred to evaluate her quality of teaching than to classify “sleeping students” problem as students’ mistake. it was in line with schutz et al. (2018) that critical events are beneficial to challenge or support teachers’ goals, values, and beliefs based on teachers’ attributions and emotional responses, and it is essential in authoring their identities. the case of “sleeping students” was a challenging moment for ms patricia to develop her identity. it was assumed that ms. patricia chose more interesting teaching techniques and more creative material. the better quality of teaching was useful to develop students’ motivation in learning english. in this case, ms. patricia was an agentic teacher as she found solution related to the crucial problem in her english classroom. ruohotie-lyhty (2018) explained that an individual’s agency in a particular environment is crucial to identity development. she could design better qualities of teaching to support reaching her goal in teaching english trough self-efficacy. according to bandura (2010), self-efficacy indicates the success of a person’s belief in his ability to achieve goals that affect his life. by reflecting her teaching quality and designing better english teaching activities, ms. patricia’s identity as senior high school english teacher was developed to be interesting and creative teacher. the other case of “sleeping students” (2) could be regarded a role to develop teacher’s identity as experienced by ms. elsa. it was assumed that ms. elsa developed her identity as agentic and responsible teacher by creating solution dealing with students’ misbehavior. choosing teaching as a career involves individual qualities, expectancies, values, beliefs, and talents, as well as accommodating required social roles, responsibilities, and expectations (richardson & watt, 2018, p.39). in line with richardson and watt’s (2018) theory that teacher’s quality deals with responsibility, ms. elsa realized that she has the responsibility to educate students. therefore, she conducted discussion with homeroom teacher and other teachers related to the case of “sleeping arima renny dayu putri & paulus kuswandono the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development 56 students” to find out the best solution. this was a challenging problem and demanded active teachers to find the solution. agentic teachers are those who are active and able to shape their responsibilities to the challenging classroom (biesta & tedder, 2007). evidently, ms. elsa seriously appreciated her profession as agentic and responsible teacher and consistently developed her identity. the case of “impolite words” (3) experienced by ms. anna gave beneficial function for her to develop her identity as a firm and discipline teacher. ms. anna’s first identity was a fun english teacher. she wanted to have successful english teaching by being a fun teacher. however, she found a critical incident in her teaching that her students produce impolite words. it was assumed that her students had low respect to her. after having such incident, ms. anna realized that she had to develop a better character as well as being firm and discipline teacher in order to fulfill the responsibility of educating students. she designed consequences for the students who produce impolite words. the development of ms. anna’s identity was in line with ruohotie-lyhty (2018) that identity development depends on the people who actively take action to construct their identity or how they create better identity over time. it was clear that ms. anna has developed her identity from fun english teacher to be firm and discipline english teacher because of having the case of students’ “impolite words”. “late arrival” could create bad emotion for both the students and the teacher. however, it could be very useful for reflective teachers in developing their identities. late arrival provided benefits for mr. henry and ms. sofia. they were identified as caring teachers. they always managed their emotion in facing late arrival students so that there is not bad effect appeared to all students in the class. being able to control emotion is one of teachers’ identities developments. emotion is related to the discussion of teacher’s identity because it is a feature between teacher-self and a factor that influence his/her identity and the shaping of it (day, 2018). both mr. henry and ms. sofia chose to control their emotion and care to the students who came late to the class. emotion was an essential factor in the teachers’ identity development because it is a feature between the teachers and factors that influence their identities (wolff & de costa, 2017). both mr. henry and ms. sofia chose to control their emotion and gave good attention to the students who came late to the class. thus, it was shown that the case of “late arrival” contributed a great role in developing teachers’ identities as well as being caring teachers. smart students every student needs good teachers to obtain good education, particularly in the ways they guide students to generate meanings in their learning moments. ms. elsa and ms. sofia’s cases of “smart students” (6, 7, 8) are good evidences for teachers to develop their identity. the three cases namely “student feedback”, “smart students”, and “illtimed material coverage” were in line with richardson and watt (2018) that choosing teaching as a career involves individual qualities, expectancies, values, beliefs, and talents, as well as accommodating required social roles, responsibilities, and expectations. having mispronunciation during teaching process and being corrected by her students, ms. elsa was motivated to be a better teacher in order to be a good model for her students. teacher’s identity is dynamic and formed by motivation and goals before becoming a teacher. it is constructed by the extent to which the teacher plays a role related to the tasks of the community and their profession in the future (richardson & watt, 2018). in this case, she was motivated to develop her identity to be a good model for her students as her goal in the beginning of being an english teacher. furthermore, case number seven (7) was beneficial for ms. sofia to construct her identity. according to ruohotie-lyhty (2018), identity development depends on the people who actively take action to construct their identity or how they create better identity over the time. in these cases, she realized that she had to improve her quality of teaching and prepare more creative material for the students. in this study, it was found that teacher identity is a dynamic process. every teacher could evaluate and improve their quality of teaching after having such cis. senior high school english teachers developed their identity during their teaching process from the existing cis. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 57 self-improvement personal growth and development can create teachers’ identities. to gain teacher’s personal growth and development, upgrading teaching quality will be one requirement in developing teachers’ identities. the cases of “selfimprovement” (9, 10, 11, 12) were related to teachers’ personal growth to develop their identities as senior high school english teachers. the case of “high potential students” (9 & 10) motivated mr. christian and ms. sofia to upgrade their teaching quality. their motivations to upgrade their teaching quality upon their movement into favorite schools are confirmed by richardson and watt (2018, p.40) that motivation was extended to explain processes that empower people to engage in tasks to achieve goals. teachers wish to create better identities for themselves through upgrading their teaching quality. in this case, both mr. christian and ms. sofia had high potential students that empowered them to take a decision as well as upgrading their teaching methods and material for the students. similarly, the case of “going abroad” (11) provided mr. christian a great role to improve his confidence as an english teacher who was successfully having conversation with native english teachers in australia. he thought that his first visit to australia strengthened his identity as fluent speaking senior high school english teacher. the last case, “peer teaching” (12) also provided a useful function to develop senior high school english teacher’s identity. the critical incident experienced by ms. sofia as well as having peer teaching with student-teacher corroborated the notion from meijer and oosterheert (2018) that learning to teach for creativity can then be approached as a process of professional identity development. this study found that ms. sofia learned how to be a more creative teacher by applying some new application using technology to have more interesting teaching and learning process. thus, ms. sofia developed her identity to be a creative teacher. in accordance with two respondents’ life experiences, both of them proved that teacher identity is dynamic and is continually developed by career motivations and goals, playing the roles required of a teacher related to social needs of teacher profession, and is committed to the career (richardson and watt, 2018). both mr. christian and ms. sofia were undertaking self-improvement because of their cis reflection in the teaching process. they were committed to have better quality of teaching in order to take up the responsibility of public senior high school english teachers. conclusion teacher’s identity is essentially a dynamic cycle of teacher’s experience during their teaching process. cis in the teaching process occasionally occurred and actually contributed profound roles to construct teacher’s identity. in this study, there were 12 stories of cis revealed and subsequently classified into three major categories respectively: student’s misbehavior (5 stories), smart students (3 stories), and teachers’ self-improvement (4 stories). the stories motivated the teachers to be reflective teacher, empowered themselves to be agentic teachers in finding solution, developed teachers’ identities, supported their confidence, and encouraged them to have better teaching quality. those 12 stories constitute the evidences of significant reflections on the english teachers’ identity construction as public senior high school. the researchers perceive that this study can provide contribution to english teachers, english education study program students, and other researchers. to english teachers, this study provides additional contribution to the existing varieties of cis in developing teachers’ identities. to pre-service teachers in english education departments, this study is expected to provide clear information and knowledge concerning the role of cis in teaching and learning process. preservice teachers can reflect the usefulness of cis to improve their identities as professional english teachers in the future. to future researchers, this study suggests that the roles of cis are not limited to teacher identity construction, but are also available to benefit students. by reflecting cis in students’ learning experiences, for example, the teachers can help students to craft their agencies to be more autonomous and self-motivated learners. the integration of cis for students’ learning can provide challenging research ground, and yet, worthwhile for further investigation. arima renny dayu putri & paulus kuswandono the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development 58 reference ary, d., jacobs, l. c., sorensen, c., & razavieh, a. 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(2017). expanding the language teacher identity landscape: an investigation of the emotions and strategies of a nnest. the modern language journal, 101(s1), 76–90. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12370 arima renny dayu putri & paulus kuswandono the roles of critical incidents to construct public senior high school english teachers’ identities development 60 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 145 developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang octa risfa ria ringkisa english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: octarisfa95@gmail.com machdalena vianty (corresponding author) english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: vianty.unsri@gmail.com bambang a. loeneto english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: loenetobambang@gmail.com apa citation: ringkisa, o. r. r., vianty, m., & loento, b. a. (2020). developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang. english review: journal of english education,9(1), 145-156. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3787 received: 29-06-2020 accepted: 27-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 introduction education plays an important role in the 4.0 industrial revolution. it helps students faced the challenges for the industry 4.0 workforce that requires such skills as critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving. these skills are crucial for students’ success in this globalized world. the 21st century learning skill has an important role in preparing students to face the 4.0 industrial revolution era since 21st century learning emphasizes on students’ ability of critical thinking, connecting their knowledge to real world, using abstract: the aim of this study was to develop questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text based on bloom’s taxonomy framework. the research method applied was the developmental research developed by akker (1999). the procedure of the study consisted of three stages, analysis, design, and evaluation. formative evaluation by tessmer was conducted to see the validity, practicality, and whether or not the developed product had potential effect to the students. the subject of this study was eighth grade students at smp n 17 palembang. the sample of the study was selected purposively based on the category of their english proficiency i.e: low, medium, and high english proficiency. document related to higher order thinking questions, students’ need, and students’ reading level were analyzed. the results of the analysis became the basis for designing the developed questions. the prototype i, the developed question as the beginning design was validated by 2 experts (expert review) and stated that the prototype 1 consists of 60 questions are valid with average score 4.3, and appropriate to be used. in one-to-one stage, prototype ii was tested on 3 students, there were 10 questions that needed to be revised because the students had difficulty understanding what was being asked by the questions. the result of revised questions was called prototype ii. in a small group stage, prototype ii was tested on 6 students, there were 11 questions need to revised, the revised question then produced prototype iii. field test stage aimed to evaluate potential effect of the developed questions. the judgment of potential effect was seen from the mean score of the students in the field test. the results showed that students’ average score was 73. it means that the developed questions of high order thinking skill was categorized as very had high potential effect to the students. keywords: developmental research; developing questions; higher order thinking skill; higher-order questions; adventure story; narrative text https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3787 octa risfa ria ringkisa, machdalena vianty, & bambang a. loeneto developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang 146 technology of information and collaborating. partnership for 21st century skills (2009) proposed the main subject of 21st century learning, they are: information media and technology skills, learning and innovation skill, life and career skills. in addition, in the 21st century, people are required to have the following qualities: (1) willingness to ask question (2) strategic thinking skill (3) logical reasoning (4) ability to make inferences (5) ability to problem-solve (6) innovation and creativity (7) emotional intelligence and effective communication skills (conklin, 2011). therefore, it is important for students to have those qualities in order to succeed in both work and life in this 21st century. schools are expected to be the party that can provide students with the required skills of 21st century learning. curriculum is one element that provides a significant contribution to realize the development process of the potential quality of students. the education system requires a curriculum that has a large impact on the quality and competitiveness of the future workforce. in relation to this, on july 15th 2013, indonesian government enacted the 2013 curriculum although the ktsp curriculum is still applied. it is one of the indonesian government's efforts to reform the quality of the education system. the 2013 curriculum is expected to help developing indonesian students' ability to think critically, rationally and to solve problem. the demand for the 2013 curriculum is to make students more critical and creative. it is in line with the framework of partnership for 21st century skills that identifies the competencies needed in the 21st century namely "the four cs". (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity). those are the essential competencies of a 21st century students, and students nowadays should master those competencies, they have to think critically and creatively. according to conklin (2011), think critically and creatively are the characteristic of higher order thinking skill (hots). hots is a concept of education reform based on learning taxonomies (bloom’s taxonomy). bloom’s taxonomy is a concept in education that deals with classifying educational objectives in order to promote higher order thinking skills or hots and progress from lower order thinking skills or lots (llewellyn, 2013). bloom taxonomy system is divided into six levels or categories, which are divided into two main areas: lots and hots. hots makes up knowledge and comprehension, while lots makes up application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. however, hots is very challenging for indonesian students. the result of pisa (programme for international student assessment) which measure students’ performance in mathematics, reading, and science literacies show that indonesian student performance in reading literacies from 2000 to 2018 the result is far from satisfactory which is statistically significantly below the oecd average. indonesian students' reading literacy skills was ranked 71 out of 78 pisa-participating countries, and ironically the results of pisa 2018 show that the average reading score of indonesian students' reading literacy skill decreased from 397 to 371 (pisa, 2018). the pisa results of indonesian students’ suggest that there is a serious problem in the quality of education services in indonesia, particularly in reading literacy. there are several factors that contributed to the low score of indonesia students’ reading literacy. according to oecd (2003), indonesian students only able to recall facts, and have a low ability when find a contextual problem that require problem-solving abilities. indonesian students are two levels behind the oecd country average in terms of reading literacies, and most of indonesian students can do the simplest reading problem solving, but fail to solve more complex problems, particularly those that require a higher level of reasoning as well using and integrating more concepts in dealing with a phenomenon (oecd, 2012). according to carver and orth (2017), questioning is a powerful tool for helping students to better understand concepts while setting high expectations and promoting critical and creative thinking. in addition, jo and bednarz (2011), believe that learners should be asked high order thinking skill questions to develop his or her thinking skills. the whole point of asking high order questions is to stimulate students’ thinking, encourage them to reason through their answers and to engage them in enquiry (butt, 2010). hence, question is one of the best ways in training higher order thinking skill. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 147 the study conducted by purwani, rochsantiningsih and kristina (2017) who analyze the content of bright 1: a 2013 curriculum-based textbook for vii grade students found that most of the questions in the textbook for junior high school focus on lots questions than hots questions. it can be implied that students are poorly exposed in working on hots questions due to lack of the provision of hots questions in the textbook. this is in line with ilma (2018) who investigated higher order thinking skill questions in reading exercises of bright course book for the seventh grade of junior high school found that reading exercises in bright course book for junior high school are focused on lots questions than hots questions. there are 70 reading questions from 33 reading exercises. from those reading exercises, there are 11 reading questions that included in hots meanwhile 59 reading questions included in lots. in addition, mahzum (2018) who analyzed higher order thinking-based objective test at state junior high school 5 banda aceh. he found that only 14 out of 25 question items which fulfilled the criteria of the development of hots and 11 question items did not meet the criteria of hots development. in can be concluded that the number of hots question were not enough to improve their hot skill, whereas hots is important to be mastered by the students in facing the challenge of 21st century skill. in relation to the explanation above, the aim of this study was to develop questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang. the objectives of this study were to find out whether or not the developed develop questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school and practical, and whether or not the developed develop questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school had potential effect. method the research method that applied in this research was the developmental research method that was developed by akker (1999) since the aim was to develop questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang. the population of this study was the eighth-grade students in smp n 17 palembang. the sample of the study was selected purposively based on the category of their english proficiency i.e: low, medium, and high english proficiency. in one to one evaluation, there were three students chosen, each student has low, medium, and high english proficiency. in small group evaluation, there were six students chosen, two students for each category, i.e: low, medium, and high english proficiency. in the field test, there were thirty students chosen and students in the one-to-one and small group evaluation were excluded. this research development was carried out in three stages: analysis, design and evaluation stages (akker, 1999). the first stage was analysis, which was the process of identifying the needs and goals of a system and determining the process among them. there were three analyses were conducted. the first was document analysis. in this stage, the writer analyzed 2013 curriculum and syllabus. the developed questions were analyzed in terms of basic competence, learning indicators, and learning objectives which related to the developed questions. after that, students’ need analysis, this analysis was conducted to find out the information about students need analysis, the writer gave the questionnaire adapted from tessmer (1993) to the students dealing with students’ opinion towards reading, students’ knowledge about higher order thinking skill, students’ opinion about the importance of higher order thinking skill, and students’ opinion about higher order thinking skill question. the information from questionnaire was useful for the writer in designing the product. the last, students reading level analysis was applied to identify the appropriateness between students’ reading ability with the readability of the text that used in developing the questions. in this study, jennings informal reading assessment developed by dr. joyce used to measure students’ reading level. the next stage was design. design was the process by which objectives, strategies, techniques, and media for achieving the instructional goals are determined and specified. in this stage, the writer designed the questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text, there were 5 adventure stories octa risfa ria ringkisa, machdalena vianty, & bambang a. loeneto developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang 148 narrative texts with different title used. the adventure story narrative text used in developing the questions were the adventure of tom sawyer, peter pan, call of the wild, journery to the center of the earth, and king solomon’s mines. in determining the readability levels of text used in developing the product, which were matched students’ reading proficiency, those adventure story narrative text was analyzed by using flesh kincaid. in designing the questions, the writer used the framework of bloom taxonomy. after that, the writer produced the product which is called prototype i. the product was constructed in paperbased design. the product covered the skill of higher order thinking (analyze, evaluate, and create). the last was the evaluation, at this evaluation stage, the formative evaluation developed by tessmer (1993) was used. formative evaluation consists of self-evaluation, expert review, one to one, small group, and field test. the first step was self-evaluation. in the self-evaluation stage, the writer checked the product in terms of language, content, and instructional design before the product was validated by the experts in the expert review stage. next, in expert review stage, the experts assessed, evaluated, and validated questions that have been designed by the writer so that the strengths and weaknesses of the questions itself can be identified. the experts were asked for giving suggestions and comments on the validity sheet as the material to revise prototype 1 and stated that prototype 1 was valid or not valid. revision from experts was used as the material to test one to one. this stage aimed to test the validity of the questions being developed. the third stage was one-to-one. at this stage, the writer tested prototype 1 to three students from the eighth-grade students as a tester. the comments of the students were used to revise the question items. one-to-one evaluation was applied to know the students’ ability in understanding the language used in hots questions and to know the clearness of the developed questions, the weaknesses of the items then were revised. next step was small group, the result of the revised decision on the prototype i has resulted in prototype ii. then, prototype ii has been tested to 6 students from the eighth-grade students. at this stage, 6 students were asked for answering the questions. students were asked for comments and suggestions about the questions they have worked on. the suggestions and comments from the students then become the background to revise prototype ii. the last stage of the evaluation was the field test. this stage was aimed at finding out whether or not develop questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text had potential effect to the students. in collecting the data, there were three instruments used in developing higher order thinking skill questions. those were questionnaire, expert validation, and interview. in analyzing the data, the writer analyzed the validity, practicality, and whether or not developed questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text had potential effect. the validity of the product was validated based on experts' evaluation. after applying the developed questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text, the students who included in one-to-one and small group evaluation gave their comments on the questionnaire related to the develop product. after that, to determine the practicality of the product, the data from the questionnaire were administered. in one-to-one and small group evaluation: google classroom, google form and whatsapp video call were used. in this stage, the students were given hots questions (prototype 1) that were developed, the writer has previously uploaded the developed questions to google classroom. then students were invited to take part in google classroom and then students used, reviewed, evaluated and answer the developed questions. after the students use, review and evaluate and answer the developed questions, each student was given a questionnaire that has been translated into bahasa indonesia. it was intended to determine the practicality of the developed questions, the questionnaire was given to students in the form of a google form. each student was also interviewed by using a list of guiding questions to obtain information about their comments on the developed questions. the interview was done by using whatsapp video call. the revised questions from students' comments and suggestions in one-to-one evaluation then became prototype ii, and the revised questions from students' comments and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 149 suggestion in small group evaluation then became prototype iii. the last was field test. in the field test, the hots questions developed (prototype iii) which had been declared valid and practical were used, then prototype 3 was tested to the 8th grade students of smp n 17 palembang, the field test involved the eighth-grade students consisting 30 students having high, medium and low english proficiency. the students participating in one-toone and small group evaluation were not involved anymore in this field. the writer used google form as a media used for the students in answering the questions. field test was intended to know the potential effect of the developed higher order thinking skill questions using adventure story narrative text. the results of the student answer sheets in the field test stage were used to determine what potential effects arose from the questions developed by the writer. to find out whether or not developed higher order thinking skill questions using adventure story narrative text had potential effect, the resulting score of students were calculated to find out the percentage of the students who passed the score criteria which is 75. the test can be considered has potential effect if 70% or more students reach minimum criteria which is 75 in answering the developed product. the percentage were calculated as follows: mastery percentage (%) = results and discussion analysis stage in this stage, there were three main activities conducted to get information about the eighth graders students which was document analysis, students’ need analysis and students’ reading level analysis. in the document analysis, the writer analyzed the questions related to higher order thinking skill (hots) available in the students’ textbook. from the textbook, the writer found that the number of hots questions available in the students’ textbook were still insufficient. beside analyzing hots questions in the textbook, the writer also analyzed several documents, the documents included are 2013 curriculum and syllabus. the developed questions were analyzed in terms of basic competence, learning indicators, and learning objectives which related to the developed questions by checking the syllabus of the eighth graders students. from the 2013 curriculum analysis, it is then associated with indicators of hots questions as stated in the revised bloom taxonomy, while the results of the 2013 curriculum analysis obtained basic competence in accordance with the hots category. the indicators and learning objectives of developed questions were derived from basic competence. the core competence, basic competence, indicators, and learning objectives were described as follows: core competence core competence 3. to understand and to apply the knowledge (fact, concept, and procedures) on the basis of student’s curiosity about the knowledge, technology, art, and culture related to observable phenomena and events. core competence 4. to process, present, and associate in concrete domain (applying, explaining, composing, modifying, and creating) and abstract domain (writing, reading, counting, drawing and composing) suitable with school’s materials and other sources which have the same views or theories. basic competence to understand social function, text structure, and language feature of narrative text in the form of fable, in accordance with its contextual use. to understand social function, text structure, and language feature of narrative text in the form of folklore , in accordance with its contextual use. indicators 1. making the right conclusion based on the text 2. giving a judgement about a certain situation in the text 3. assessing the event that was experienced by the characters in the text learning objectives based on the learning indicators, the writer formulated the learning objectives as follows: by using developed of hots question adventure story narrative text, the students are able to (1) give a octa risfa ria ringkisa, machdalena vianty, & bambang a. loeneto developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang 150 judgement about the situation and conditions in the reading text (2) make the right conclusion (3) assess the event that occurred with the characters in the reading text. in this study, the hots questions asked some aspects of reading such as: main idea, details, cause and effect, inference, vocabulary and sequence questions. next, students’ need analysis was conducted to obtain information about the students’ needs in terms of higher order thinking skill questions. aspects which were included into consideration to obtain information about students’ need were (1) students opinion towards reading, (2) students knowledge about higher order thinking skill, (3) students opinion about the importance of higher order thinking skill, and (4) students opinion about higher order thinking skill question. to get the information about students’ opinion about reading, students’ knowledge about higher order thinking skill, students opinion about the importance of higher order thinking skill, and students opinion about higher order thinking skill question, a questionnaire consisting of 14 questions was administered to 51 eighth grade students consisting of 6-7 representative students from each class (from class viii-1 to class viii-8). the results are as follows: table 1. the summary of students need analysis aspects of questionnaire percentage student’ ability in learning english was good 72% the difficulty level of english reading text in the english textbooks used in schools is easy for the students 79% students often answer questions on the reading text 45% the questions given by the english teacher are usually essay questions 63% the students difficulties when answering the questions are concluding the cause or effect 25% the students who know about hots 29% english teachers sometimes give reading questions in the form of high order thinking questions (hots) 51% inserting higher order thinking skill questions into the question 69% in the english reading text was important including questions that hone the ability to analyze, evaluate and create into the questions in the english reading text was important 59% having the ability to analyze, evaluate and create was important solving higher order thinking questions often can help students improve their higher order thinking skill. 72% higher order thinking questions was important in improving their higher order thinking skill 69% based on the results of students needs analysis above students realized that higher order thinking skill was important, but their english teachers sometimes give reading questions in the form of high order thinking questions (hots). furthermore, the students were agree that solving higher order thinking questions often can help them improve their higher order thinking skill and higher order thinking questions was important in improving their higher order thinking skill, it can be concluded that developing hots questions were needed to be developed. students’ reading level analysis was conducted to determine the subject of the study and in matching the students reading ability with the readability text used in developing higher order thinking questions. with hopes of the readability levels of the text used in developing questions were appropriate to students' reading level. in this analysis, the writer used jennings informal reading assessment developed by dr. joyce. the level of reading text in the test included level 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. the reason of giving these reading levels was the eighth-grade students' reading achievement was at low level and based on the previous study done by . . . (..) that reading level of the eighth-grade students was in level 2. the results of students’ reading analysis were described as follows: english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 151 table 2. the distribution of students’ reading level text level reading stage frustrational (correct number ≤ 4) instructional (correct number ≤ 5-6) independent (correct number ≤ 7-8) nos* %* nos* %* nos* %* level 1 33 64.7 % 16 31. 3 % 2 3. 9 % level 2 17 33.3 % 22 43.1 % 12 23. 5 % level 3 24 47. 05 % 12 23. 5 % 15 29. 4 % text level reading stage frustrational (correct number ≤ 4) instructional (correct number ≤ 5-6) independent (correct number ≤ 7-8) nos* %* nos* %* nos* %* level 4 44 86. 2 % 6 11. 7 % 1 1.9 % level 5 49 96. 07 % 1 1.9 % 0 0 *nos : number of student *% : percentage of student from the distribution of the reading level above, it can be seen that students’ reading level were at the frustational (64.7%), (47.05%), (86.2%), (96.07%) for text level 1, 3, 4 and 5. while for text level in 2, students were at the instructional stage (43.1%). therefore, it can be concluded that students reading level was at level 2 since the highest percentage of the instructional stage was in level 2. design stage in this stage, the writer designed developed questions of higher order thinking skill questions. first of all, the writer was collecting adventure story narrative text from the internet. these adventure stories were then adapted. to know the readability of the text used in developing the questions, these adventure stories were then calculated automatically by using online tool named flesch kincaid (i.e.: https://www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/). there were 5 texts adventure stories. the illustrated of the results were described as follow: table 3. the readability level of the text used in developing higher order thinking skill questions reading text for developing hots questions no tittle readability level remarks 1. the adventure of tom sawyer 1 adapated 2. peter pan 2 3. call of the wild 3 4. journey to the center of the earth 4 5. king solomo’s mines 5 evaluation in this stage, the evaluation and revision were conducted together because those two stages were related to each other. before being processed the next evaluation, the developed higher order thinking skill questions might be revised. in evaluation stage, there were five stages of formative evaluation proposed by tessmer (1993). it consisted of experts' review, and one-to-one evaluation in prototype 1, small group evaluation in prototype 2, and the field test was conducted in prototype 3. the evaluation was needed to improve the quality of the developed products. thus, to know octa risfa ria ringkisa, machdalena vianty, & bambang a. loeneto developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang 152 the validity of the product, firstly it was evaluated by two experts in experts’ review stage. after that, the practicality of the product was determined based on the students’ comments in one-to-one and small group evaluation stage. afterward, to see whether or not the developed higher order thinking questions had potential effect there was calculating the percentage of the students who passed the minimum score criteria (kkm). self-evaluation in the self-evaluation stage, the writer checked the developed questions before the developed questions were validated by the experts in the expert review stage. it was considered that there were ungrammatical sentences and inappropriate of word used were found in the developed questions that should be revised by the writer. selfevaluation conducted to find out the weaknesses of the developed questions so that the writer could revise the developed questions to be valid, practical, and has potential effect. expert review the next stage of evaluating the developed product was experts' review. there were two experts in this stage. first was the expert of instructional design, and the expert of language and content. the experts had evaluated the products and given their comments and suggestions on the questionnaire. all of the experts said that the products were valid with revision. it means that the writer should revise the products which related to the content, instructional design, and language. the summary of the results of questionnaires is shown in the table below. table 4. summary of expert review aspects average score remarks language and content 4.7 very highly valid instructional design 4 highly valid total average score 4.3 very highly valid moreover, based on the expert's response on the questionnaire, the data indicate that the average score (4.3) of two aspects of instructional design, language and content which were categorized as very highly valid. one-to-one evaluation one-to-one evaluation was conducted to find out the practicality level of developed higher order thinking skill (hots) questions using adventure story narrative text. in this stage, there were three students representing frustration, instructional, and independent students’ english proficiency. students were asked to read and review the developed hots questions. the media used by the students in reading, reviewing the developed product were google classroom. a questionnaire was administered to students aiming to evaluate the practicality of product after they have read and review the developed questions. the questionnaire was given in the form of google form. the average score of questionnaires were calculated the practicality was interpreted based on the average score calculated from the questionnaire. the summary of the results of questionnaires is shown in the table below: table 5. summary of practicality in one-to-one stage aspects average score remarks the clarity of questions developed 3.11 high practicality the clarity of the instructions 3.33 very high practicality the effectiveness and efficiency of the questions developed 3.39 very high practicality the display quality of the developed questions 3.5 very high practicality total average score 3.33 very high practicality the next activity was a discussion session. students were asked their opinion of the developed questions. the discussion was conducted by using whatsapp video call. all of them marked some english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 153 difficult words in questions. all of the students had more than 3 difficult words in the questions. in addition, the students who categorized as independent student have already understood the purpose of the question and what being asked. meanwhile, frustration and instructional students have difficulty understanding the meaning of the questions because they did not know the meaning of the word and they said that the words were new for them. however, the students mentioned that the developed questions were quite difficult but they can handle it. in this stage there were 10 questions that need to be revised, the writer only changed the vocabulary which the students did not familiar with the word used in developing questions. referring to the average score of the total scores above, it means that the product had very high practicality level. however, the writer still needs to revise some of the questions based on students’ comments and suggestions so that the writer could continue the next evaluation stage. small group evaluation the practicality of developed product was also assessed in small group evaluation stage. the developed questions in this stage called prototype 2 which was the revision of the product in one-toone stage. in this stage involved 6 students in which every two students categorized to frustration, instructional, and independent student. the students were not the same as those who were in one-to-one evaluation. small group evaluation was conducted in one meeting. allocation time was 120 minutes. students asked to read, review and answer the prototype 2, after that, they filled the questionnaires. the questionnaires were given to the students as the basis of practicality evaluation. in the small group evaluation, the media used were the same as in the one-to-one evaluation, google classroom was also used in this stage, students read and reviewed the developed questions by using google classroom, while google forms was used by the students in answering questions and filled the questionnaire. in this stage, the writer also interviewed students to find out students’ feedback, comments, suggestions and to find out student difficulties. after the writer asked the students in the small group to work on the developed questions, the writer ask students’ comment by using whatapp video call. students' comments were obtained regarding the questions they were working on and there were several questions that students were still a little confused about, some students mentioned that there were still some complicated questions and they did not understand what is being asked by the question. from the of students' comments in the small group, it was concluded that there were still a few students who have difficulty understanding the purpose of the questions and what being asked is, because they did not know the meaning of the word and they said that the words were new for them. in this stage, there were 11 questions that need to be revised, the writer only changed the vocabulary which the students did not familiar with the word used in developing questions. after that the writer revised the questions, the writer asked the students again to read, review and evaluated the developed questions and all of the students mention that students have already understood the purpose of the questions and what being asked was. so that the writer did not need to revised the question anymore, the revised question in this stage then become prototype iii. the calculation of practicality in small group evaluation is shown in the table below: table 6. summary of practicality in small group evaluation aspects average score remarks the clarity of questions developed 3. 21 high practicality the clarity of the instructions 3.33 very high practicality the effectiveness and efficiency of the questions developed 3.45 very high practicality the display quality of the developed questions 3.24 high practicality total average score 3.30 very high practicality the results of questionnaires showed that practicality of the developed questions was very high. the first aspect of practicality, the clarity of questions developed, had been evaluated as high. it octa risfa ria ringkisa, machdalena vianty, & bambang a. loeneto developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang 154 can be said that the developed questions was clear, the sentences contained in the developed higher order thinking skills questions (hots) were clear and the vocabulary used was easy to understand. the second one was the clarity of the instructions was assumed very highly practical. it was affirmed that the instructions were easy to be understood and the students can carry out any instructions contained in the developed of higher order thinking skills. the third, the effectiveness and efficiency of the questions developed was assumed very high practicality. it was affirmed that the grammar used in the developed of higher order thinking skills (hots) was clear, the developed high-order thinking skills (hots) questions was easy to apply and use in the learning process and students can use it flexibly anywhere. furthermore, the developed higher order thinking skills (hots) questions can improve students' higher order thinking skill and help them practice higher order thinking skill. the last one was the display quality of the developed questions. this aspect was evaluated high practical. the display type and font size in the developed of high-order thinking skills (hots) has a good quality and the images used in the developed of high-order thinking skills (hots) were interesting for the students. furthermore, all aspects of practicality have been examined, and the results showed that the developed product was very highly practical. in discussion session, students mentioned that the developed hots questions were quite difficult for them however, they still can work on the questions. in conclusion, the developed questions were ready to be evaluated whether or not the developed product has the potential effect on the students in field test without revision anymore. field test the last stage of the evaluation was field test. the hots questions developed (prototype 3) which had been declared valid and practical were used, then prototype 3 was tested to the 8th grade students of smp n 17 palembang, the field test involved the eighth grade students consisting 30 students consisting of 3/4 representative students from each class (from class viii-1 to class viii-8) having high, medium and low english proficiency. the students participating in one-to-one and small group evaluation were not involved anymore in this field. the field test in this study hold in 12nd august 2020, with time allocation 120 minutes and in this stage, the writer used google form as a media used for the students in answering the questions. field test was intended to know the potential effect of the developed higher order thinking skill questions using adventure story narrative text. the results showed that all of the students passed the minimum score which was 70. with the average score of the english version was 78 and the average score of bahasa indonesia version was 83. it means that based on both average scores, pisa-based reading materials in indonesian context in the form of continuous text was categorized as very had high potential effect on the students. results and discussion the developed product was high order thinking skill questions using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang. the research method that applied in this research was the developmental research method that was developed by akker (1999). this research development was carried out in three stages: analysis, design and evaluation stages (akker, 1999). in this study, formative evaluation proposed by tessmer (1993) was applied. formative evaluation was used to improve the quality of the intervention. there are three main criteria for quality of the intervention, i.e.: validity, practicality, and potential effect. before the questions were developed, the writer did some analysis. this analysis was aimed to identify the student needs in developing the questions. in analysis procedure, there were four analyses conducted, they were document analysis, students’ need analysis, students’ reading level and readability level. the first analysis was document analysis, in document analysis the writer analyzed the questions related to higher order thinking skill (hots) available in the students’ textbook. from the textbook, the writer found that the number of hots questions available in the students’ textbook were still insufficient where as, carver and orth (2017) state that questioning is a english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 155 powerful tool for helping students to better understand concepts while setting high expectations and promoting critical and creative thinking. it means that the number of the questions available in the textbook were not enough to improve students’ hots, beside analyzing hots questions in the textbook, the writer also analyzed several documents, the documents included are 2013 curriculum and syllabus. the developed questions were analyzed in terms of basic competence, learning indicators, and learning objectives which related to the developed questions by checking the syllabus of eighth grade students. next, there were some aspects adapted from tessmer (1993) which were taken into consideration to obtain information about students’ need. they were (1) students opinion towards reading, (2) students knowledge about higher order thinking skill, (3) students opinion about the importance of higher order thinking skill, and (4) students opinion about higher order thinking skill question. in obtaining the information, a questionnaire consisting of 14 questions was administered to 51 eighth grade students consisting of 6-7 representative students from each class. from the results of the needs analysis the developed higher order thinking questions was needed to be developed since the students were agree that solving higher order thinking questions often can help them improve their higher order thinking skill. as for the student reading level analysis, jennings informal reading assessment developed by dr. joyce, was given to the students which included reading texts at level 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. from the distribution of the reading level on table 2. it can be concluded that students reading level was at level 2 since the highest percentage of the instructional stage was in level 2. next, readability level. the adventure stories narrative text that used in developing the questions were calculated automatically by using online tool named flesch kincaid (i.e.: https://www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/) to determine the readability levels. there were five adventure story narrative text from different title that being used in developing higher order thinking questions, since the reading level of the students was level 2. so, in developing higher order thinking skill questions the writer used the reading text for level 1,2,3,4, and 5. the next procedure was designing the developed product. at the question design stage, the writer designed the questions according to the higher order thinking skill (hots) indicator. the writer developed hots questions based on (hots) module guidelines of the ministry of education and culture in 2017. in developing the question, the writer analyzed the basic competencies that hots questions can be developed. then the writer chose an interesting stimulus, the writer used adventure story narrative text as an interesting stimulus. then, the writer arranged the hots questions card based on hots question indicators level that correspond to c4 (analyzing), c5 (evaluating), c6 (creating). the last, the writer wrote the questions in accordance with hots question grids. the questions developed were 60 questions. last stage, formative evaluation by tessmer (1993) consisting of self-evaluation, one-to-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test was applied. after the writer has finished developing the questions, the next stage was self-evaluation, in selfevaluation, the writer evaluated the developed higher order thinking skill questions using adventure story narrative text. from this selfevaluation, some misspellings and ungrammatical sentences. when the writer finished evaluating the developed questions herself, the writer gave the questions developed to the expert to be evaluated its validity in terms of its instructional design, language and content. and the result of validity of the developed questions in experts review stage were very high practical. besides, developed questions was also very high practical after being evaluated in one-to-one and small group evaluation. in addition, there were 10 questions and 11 questions were revised by the writer, there were still a few students who have difficulty understanding the purpose of the questions and what being asked was because they did not know the meaning of the word and they said that the words were new for them. after the writer revised the questions the writer continued to the next stage. the last evaluation was field test. a field test was conducted in order to find out whether or not the developed questions of hots questions had https://www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/ octa risfa ria ringkisa, machdalena vianty, & bambang a. loeneto developing questions of high order thinking skill using adventure story narrative text for junior high school students in palembang 156 the potential effect to the students. in the field test, the students were answering the questions with the length of time was one week and the students do it after the students finished their online class. the results showed that all of the students passed the minimum score which is 77 it means that based on the average scores, the developed hots questions by using adventure story narrative text was categorized as had high potential effect on the students. it was caused by the student passed the minimum mastery criterion (kkm) which is 75. conclusions results of study that have been discussed previously can be concluded as: the developed of higher order thinking skill questions was validated for its instructional design, language and content in which the validity for each was 4 and 4.7. the average score of validity was 4.3 implying the product was highly valid and the developed questions of higher order thinking skill questions was evaluated in one-to-one and small group evaluation for its practicality. in one-to-one evaluation, the practicality was 3.30 indicating very highly practical. the practicality in small group was 3,33 it also indicating very highly practical. the judgment of potential effect was seen from the mean score of the students in the field test. the resulting score of students were calculated to find out the percentage of the students who passed the score criteria which is 70. the results showed that the average score was 73. it means that the developed questions of higher order thinking skill questions as very had high potential effect to the students. references anderson, l. w., krathwohl, d. r., airasian, p. w., cruikshank, k. a., mayer, r. e., pintrich, p. r., et al. 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(1993). planning and conducting formative evaluation. philadelphia, pa: kogan page https://www.slideshare.net/alvinnoor/permendikbud-nomor-65-tahun-2013https://www.slideshare.net/alvinnoor/permendikbud-nomor-65-tahun-2013https://www.slideshare.net/alvinnoor/permendikbud-nomor-65-tahun-2013-tentang-standar-proses-23256577 https://www.slideshare.net/alvinnoor/permendikbud-nomor-65-tahun-2013-tentang-standar-proses-23256577 https://www.imls.gov/assets/1/assetmanager/bishop%20pre-con%202.pdf https://www.imls.gov/assets/1/assetmanager/bishop%20pre-con%202.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321841238_a_content_analysis_of_bri https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321841238_a_content_analysis_of_bri https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321841238_a_content_analysis_of_bright_1_a_2013_curriculum-based_textbook_for_vii_grade_students https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321841238_a_content_analysis_of_bright_1_a_2013_curriculum-based_textbook_for_vii_grade_students https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321841238_a_content_analysis_of_bright_1_a_2013_curriculum-based_textbook_for_vii_grade_students english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1 yemeni efl students’ perceptions and implementation of computer-assisted language learning sabri thabit saleh ahmed ph.d. scholar in english, s.m.d.m. college, dr. b.a.m. university & efl lecturer, department of english, university of aden email: sabri.thabt.edu.r@aden-univ.net bushra thabit ahmed salem ph.d. scholar in english, s.m.d.m. college, dr. b.a.m. university email: bushraahmed2018@outlook.com sunil v. pawar principal & professor in english, s.m.d.m. college, dr. b.a.m. university email: dr.pawarsunil@redifmail.com apa citation: ahmed, s. t. s., salem, b. t. a. & pawar, s. v. (2020). yemeni efl students’ perceptions and implementation of computer-assisted language learning. english review: journal of english education, 9(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i1.3822 received: 29-06-2020 accepted: 27-09-2020 published:11-12-2020 abstract: this study investigated how yemeni efl students perceive computer-assisted language learning, the extent to which call is implemented in their learning of english in and outside their faculties and the difficulties they encounter when implementing call. data were collected through a questionnaire that targeted 74 yemeni efl students and then analyzed by using spss 21st version. results revealed that the students who participated in this study perceive call positively (overall mean = 4.1144 out of 5) and believe in its effectiveness in developing their language skills and making their efl learning enjoyable and interesting. moreover, female students showed a higher overall positive attitude towards call as compared to their male counterparts and that was reflected in their implementation of call too. a significant correlation was also found between students’ perceptions of call and their computer competence in the favor of those students with higher computer competence while no significant correlation was found in relation to age. the results have also revealed that call’s implementation by many of the participants is still low. unavailability of internet and lack of call tools at their faculty; in addition to students’ lack of computer competence are viewed as the major barriers to call implementation by the yemeni efl students understudy. as per the results, the study recommends yemeni universities to provide call tools and internet for their efl classrooms and libraries and to train students to use technology for english learning purposes. it also recommends yemeni efl students to invest technology at hand for their efl learning. keywords: computer-assisted language learning (call); students’ perceptions; efl learning; aden university; yemeni efl students introduction nowadays, computer technology is used in many aspects of our life and one of these aspects is to assist language learning which is called call. it has an endless range of functionalities that are highly beneficial to language learners as it plays an effective role in developing language skills and enhancing students’ motivation and learning (eslit, 2014; gruba & hinkelman, 2012; ilter, 2009; lee, 2004; levy & stockwell, 2006; motteram, 2010). it is not only important for classroom learning and teaching process but it also helps learners to self-learning as technology and internet have provided learners with several online and offline resources for language learning (ahmed, qasem & pawar, 2020; saud, basri, ramly, abduh, & patak. (2020). call’s successful implementation in foreign language teaching and learning usually depends on three main factors: teachers, students, and schools/university infrastructures. according to teo (2006), students' attitudes towards computers have an influential role not only on the extent to which they accept to use the computer as a tool for their learning but also on their future behaviours towards computers such as using it for further study and vocational purposes. students' attitudes towards computers are considered as “a critical criterion in the evaluation of computer courses and in the development of computer-based curricula” (woodrow, 1991). teachers’ attitudes towards mailto:email:%20sabri.thabt.edu.r@aden-univ.net sabri thabit saleh ahmed, bushra thabit ahmed salem, & sunil v. pawar yemeni efl students’ perceptions and implementation of computer-assisted language learning 2 computer technology are also very important as lam (2000) argued that teachers’ personal beliefs about technology affect their decision in using it. that seems to be true as we do things better when we are interested in it. attitudes of both students and teachers towards technology are the criteria that tell us whether they are ready to implement technology in language learning or not. the term ‘call’ stands for computerassisted language learning that refers to the use of computer technology in language learning and teaching. levy (1997, p.1) has defined ‘call’ as “the search for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning". egbert (2005) has also defined call as “using computers to support language teaching and learning in some way” (p. 4). these technological applications designed for language learning and teaching are numerous and ranged from traditional drills of the 1960s to recent web-based learning programs, mobile-assisted language learning applications, and online learning such as webinars. such learning tools provide opportunity for learning english from its native speakers and help in linking fl classroom with native speakers. anyway, call implementation and success in language learning and teaching depends on many factors such as learners’ perceptions of call, their computer competence, teachers’ computer competence, school infrastructures, etc. when all these factors are met, call implementation can lead to effective outcomes. there is no doubt that students’ attitudes towards technology as a teaching and learning tool play an important role in its successful implementation. lasagabaster and sierra (2003) have pointed out that learners are viewed as potential contributors to the development of language learning tools. therefore, researchers and educators should take learners’ perceptions in consideration when evaluating any learning tool as such perceptions are considered as an indicator of whether they are ready to use it in their learning or not. liaw, huang, and chen (2007) have also argued that "as individuals' attitudes on e-learning and computer-based learning become more positive, they will have greater behavioral intention to use it". so, such evaluations of students’ perceptions of call as learning tool will help language teachers to predict the effectiveness of using call tools and to cope with the problems and difficulties that they may encounter when implementing it in their classrooms. as far as technology as a learning tool is concerned, there are several studies that have addressed this topic (afshari, ghavifekr, siraj and jing, 2013; al-naqeeb, 2006; arishi, 2012; behroozian & sadeghoghli, 2017; buenoalastuey and lópez pérez, 2014; burrus, 2009; chamundeshwari and evelyn, 2017; garcíapeñalvo & casillas-martin, 2017; holmes, 1998; hsu, 2013; ilter, 2015; lodhi, fatima, ismail, amin, khalid, & siddiqa, 2019; navaz and sameem, 2013; pinto-llorente, sánchez-gómez, garci-penalvo & casillas martin, 2017; saeed and al-zayed, 2018;wiebe & kabata, 2010) and showed positive outcomes but there is still a gap in investigating call in the yemeni context that should be filled. these above-mentioned studies have shown positive attitudes in the part of students towards technology use in their language classrooms and these positive attitudes were somehow reflected in their utilization of technology in their learning as well. however, in some of these studies, there was a gap between students’ positive attitudes towards technology as a learning tool and their actual use of technology in their learning that was justified in some other factors such as students’ lack of computer competence, unavailability of call tools at their hands and teachers’ computer competence, and their attitudes towards technology in teaching. when gender variable was taken into consideration, studies have shown contradictory results. some studies have shown that female students tend to have more positive attitudes towards technology use in their learning than their male counterparts (hashim & mustapha, 2004; sabti & chachan, 2014) while other studies have shown that male students held higher positive attitudes (kay, 2008; lodhi, et. al., 2019; shashaani, 1997). however, it seems that gender does not represent a major variable in measuring students’ attitudes towards call as shown in the majority of the studies related to this area of research. as far as students’ computer competence variable is concerned, studies have shown that students with high computer competence held a higher positive attitude towards computer use in their learning than their low computer competence counterparts (divine, wilson & daubek, 1997; mitra, 1998; saparniene, merkys & saparnis, 2005; teo, 2006). only one study, according to our record, that showed that students’ experience with computer has no effect on their attitudes (kitchakarn, 2015). it seems clear here that those students who have good english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3 experience with computers usually feel more comfortable to use it while those who are new to computers may feel anxious to use it in learning. call as a tool in language learning and teaching has proved a joyful use and effectiveness in developing students’ english (almekhlafi, 2006; al-shammari, 2007; jabir & omar, 2002; steven, 1991) and was highly recommended for efl classes as it facilitates language learning and enhances learners’ motivation. however, there are still some scholars who found that despite of students’ positive attitudes towards call in english classes, call should not be given priority over other skills (abalhassan, 2002; alkahtani, 2001; alrumaih, 2004). their main concern here was that students still need time to improve their computer skills and that will affect students’ learning of english. this could be a real problem for teachers especially in those contexts where students have no access to technology before joining english programs and teachers have to complete their syllabi within a limited period of time as planned by the educational authorities. therefore, this study hereby emphasizes the importance of setting a computer competence exam for students who want to join the tertiary efl programs in yemeni universities and to make computer competence one of the requirements of joining these programs. this will help teachers and students in coping with technology as a tool for their learning and save their times and efforts. it is for this reason that with applying computer-based language learning in our schools and universities in yemen, we need to know our students' attitudes towards computer-based learning and to correct any negative attitude they have. based on this discussion, this study aimed at achieving the following objectives: to examine yemeni efl learners’ perceptions of call. to investigate the extent to which call is implemented by yemeni efl students in their learning of english. to examine the effect of gender, age, and computer competence on students’ perceptions of call. to investigate the difficulties yemeni efl students encounter in call implementation. the study attempted to achieve these objectives with reference to the efl students of one of the yemeni facilities that utilizes to some extent icts tools in efl teaching. method this study is a descriptive survey that provides quantitative and qualitative results regarding yemeni efl students’ perceptions and implementation of computer-assisted language learning with the reference to the faculty of languages, aden. sample of the study the efl students of the faculty of languages aden were purposively selected as a sample for this study as it is one of the best faculties to implement icts in efl learning. the researchers aimed at targeting all the efl students of this faculty through a questionnaire that was distributed to more than 200 students in the form of hard copies in addition to sharing its google drive link with the students via their whatsapp groups. however, 74 efl students (n=74) responded to the questionnaire. 36 students were male and 38 students were female. their ages ranged between 21–40 years. data collection instruments the data of this study were collected through a questionnaire that was designed by the researchers. some items of the questionnaire were modified from vandewaetere and desmet (2009) to meet the objectives of the study. the questionnaire consists of four sections. the first section dealt with general details about participants such as age, gender, computer competence, etc. (independent variables). the second section consisted of 15 items and dealt with students' perceptions of call and its effectiveness in developing students' language skills and proficiency while the third section comprised 7 items that dealt with students’ implementation of call in and outside classroom and the types of technology programs and activities they utilize in their learning. the questionnaire ends with its fourth section containing open-ended questions that requested students to describe the extent to which call is implemented in their learning of english, technology programs they use in their language learning, and difficulties they encounter when using or trying to use call in their learning. validity of the questionnaire to measure its validity, the questionnaire was sent to five qualified professors in the field of teaching english as a foreign language. they were requested to give their opinions on its validity to achieve the objectives of the study. sabri thabit saleh ahmed, bushra thabit ahmed salem, & sunil v. pawar yemeni efl students’ perceptions and implementation of computer-assisted language learning 4 their comments and recommendations were taken into account in our revision of the last draft of the questionnaire. reliability of the questionnaire the questionnaire was piloted to 20 students of english departments at aden university and found reliable for measuring students’ perceptions of call and its effectiveness in english language learning. cronbach’s alpha was used to measure the internal consistency and the questionnaire was found reliable (r.= 0.780). statistical tools spss 21st version was used to get the frequencies, means, cronbach’s alpha, and anova. results and discussion results, as shown in table 1, reveal that 74 efl students participated in the questionnaire, 36 males and 38 females and their ages range between 21 and 40. 58 participants have computers at home while 16 students have no computer at homes. 60 participants are b.a. students and 14 m.a. students and their experience with computers range between 2 years to 17 years. 6 participants rated their computer skills as excellent, 25 good, 24 average, 12 poor, and 7 very poor. most of the poor and very poor students belong to the 16 students who said that they have no computers at home. table 1. general details about participants variables gender age program do you possess a computer at home? how long is your experience with the computer? how do you rate your competence in the computer? n total no. missing 74 74 74 74 74 0 m = 36 48.6% f = 38 51.4% 21-25yrs =60 26 -30 = 0 31-35 = 12 36-40 = 2 0 b.a.=60 m.a.=14 0 yes = 58 no=16 0 1 5 yrs = 34 6-10 yrs = 28 10 – 15 yrs =10 16 20 yrs = 2 0 very poor= 7 poor = 12 satisfactory=24 good= 25 excellent = 6 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 5 table 2. sudents’ perceptions of call items n mean std. deviation 1 using computer technology in the language classroom makes language learning more enjoyable. 74 4.4595 .55367 2 computer technology helps english language learners to develop their knowledge and skills. 74 4.5135 .60235 3 computer-assisted language learning is more effective than traditional teaching in which teachers explain lessons orally with the help of chalks and boards. 74 3.5676 1.15961 4 students who learn english by using the computer should be more proficient than those learning it through traditional teaching. 74 3.7297 1.11401 5 computer technology helps english as foreign language learners to develop their listening skills. 74 4.3514 .74819 6 computer technology helps english as foreign language learners to develop their speaking skills. 74 3.9595 .92809 7 computer technology helps english as foreign language learners to develop their reading skills. 74 4.0135 1.12862 8 computer technology helps english as foreign language learners to develop their writing skills. 74 3.9189 .78960 9 i am interested in learning english with the help of computer and ict tools. 74 4.2568 .79486 10 with computer technology, a language learner can easily do and submit his/her assignments. 74 4.4865 .60235 11 internet provides english as foreign language learners good and interesting opportunities for language learning. 74 4.3784 .67647 12 i think using computer technology in performing english language exams is better and more effective than using paper and pencil exams. 74 3.5135 1.27401 13 i feel motivated when english language learning is assisted by ict. 74 3.8649 .94106 14 i feel comfortable to use computer in my learning of english inside and outside classroom. 74 4.1622 .72200 15 computer and internet help me to develop my autonomy and self-competence as a learner of english. 74 4.5405 .60112 valid n (listwise) 74 4.1144 table 2 shows that the participants held positive perceptions of computer-assisted language learning as the majority of them agreed and strongly agreed that call makes language classroom more enjoyable and helps them to develop their proficiency in all language skills and competencies. they agreed and strongly agreed that call is more interesting and motivating and makes them comfortable to learn in classroom and outside classroom; it helps them to develop their autonomy and self-learning. such positive attitudes towards call are good predictors for students’ willingness to implement call in their learning and its potential success in promoting their learning. these results are in line with previous researches on call such as ayres (2002), al-shammari (2007), tunçok (2010), and arishi (2012). when students were asked whether call or traditional teaching is more effective in their efl learning, the majority of the participants agreed that call is more effective than traditional teaching and that students learn through call should be more proficient than those learning through traditional methods. however, there are still few participants who disagreed or showed neutral and negative attitudes towards the value of call in comparison to traditional teaching. such negative and neutral attitudes towards call’s effectiveness in comparison to traditional teaching can be explained in terms of their low experience with computer, difficulties sabri thabit saleh ahmed, bushra thabit ahmed salem, & sunil v. pawar yemeni efl students’ perceptions and implementation of computer-assisted language learning 6 they face in using it for learning purpose, in addition to their long-term experience with traditional learning that has become a part of their learning system and mentality. these attitudes should be corrected through providing training for them on how to use icts for english learning and building up their confidence in its implementation in their language learning. majority of the participants have also shown neutral attitudes towards using computers and technology in language exams to replace papers and pencils. these attitudes reflect students' fear of using the computer in exams as they used to conduct their exams via paper and pencil since they started learning. only a few students who have high computer competence have expressed positive attitudes towards using technology in language exams while those poor computer competence students expressed explicitly their negative attitudes toward using computers in language exams. as the majority of students expressed neutral attitudes, not negative, it means that they believe that computer technology is helpful and effective in language exams but they need some technical support to accept adapting it in their context. when comparing students' overall attitudes towards call to some variables such as students' gender, age, and computer competence as shown in the table 3, results revealed that female students held a higher overall positive attitude towards call than male students (pvalue = .007); and higher computer competence students showed higher positive attitude than their poor computer competence counterparts (pvalue = .016). no significant difference found that can be attributed to students’ age (p-value = .583). these results obtained confirm that gender and computer competence have a correlation to students’ perceptions of call. the study also investigated how call is implemented in the yemeni context in and outside classroom and the difficulties students encounter. students’ responses, as shown in table 4, revealed that efl teachers of the faculty understudy sometimes use ict tools in their teaching of english in b.a. classes while call is often implemented to m.a. classes. it seems that there is still a need for encouraging the implementation of call in b.a. and m.a. classes. students’ responses to the open questions showed that lack of icts and language laboratories at the faculty can be one of the factors affecting call implementation in their faculty. they also showed that teachers’ use of icts in their teaching is more limited to powerpoint presentation and listening activities. table 3. students’ overall attitude towards call in relation to their gender, age and computer competence table 4. how often do your teachers use ict tools in your classroom? program n minimum maximum mean std. deviation how often do your teachers use ict tools in your english classes? b.a. 60 1.00 4.00 2.5333 .81233 m.a. 14 3.00 5.00 3.4286 .64621 gender age computer competence male = 3.9815 out of 5 less than 25 = 4.1933 out of 5 poor and v. poor = 3.8982 out of 5 average competence = 4.1833 out of 5 female = 4.2404 out of 5 more than 30 = 4.1048 out of 5 good and excellent = 4.1935 out of 5 p-value (sig.) = .007 .583 .016 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7 table 5. have you ever subscribed on online english lessons? frequ ency percent valid percent valid no 44 59.5 59.5 yes 30 40.5 40.5 total 74 100.0 100.0 from the table 5, it seems that 44 students have never subscribed on any online lessons while 30 students showed that they subscribed on online lessons. these lessons as shown in their responses to the open questions are youtube channels for teaching english. responses also revealed that among the students who subscribe to online lessons 80% are female students. table 6. how often do you use youtube for english learning purpose? frequ ency percent valid percent valid never 18 24.3 2.7 rarely 24 32.4 32.4 sometimes 22 29.7 29.7 often 8 10.8 24.3 very often 2 2.7 10.8 total 74 100.0 100.0 table 6 shows that 2 students very often use youtube for learning purpose, 8 students often use it, and 22 sometimes use it while 24 students rarely use and 18 students never use. responses revealed that those students who stated that they subscribed on online english lessons often, very often or sometimes use youtube, emphasizes their responses to the previous statement about their subscription on online lessons. it seems that youtube channels are employed by almost half of the participants in their learning of english when they are at home. on the other hand, there is still a high number of students (majority) who rarely use youtube on their learning. this, as shown in students’ responses to open questions, can be explained in terms of the unavailability of internet or its weakness. table 7. how often do you use social media accounts such as (facebook, what's up, email, twitter) for communicating with your classmates/ friends in english? frequ ency percent valid percent valid never 28 37.8 37.8 rarely 8 10.8 10.8 sometimes 19 25.7 25.7 often 10 13.5 13.5 very often 8 10.8 10.8 total 74 100.0 100.0 table 7 shows that 37.8% of the participants often and very often use social media in communicating with their classmates and friends in english while the majority (48.6%) never or rarely use social media for communicating in english. 25.7% of the participants sometimes use social media in their communication in english. table 8. do you participate in any whatsapp group or google classroom where you, your classmates and teachers share knowledge and have discussions? frequ ency percent valid percent valid no 28 37.8 37.8 yes 46 62.2 62.2 total 74 100.0 100.0 table 8 shows that 62.2% of the participants participate in whatsapp groups and google classroom where they and their teachers share knowledge and discussions in english and arabic while 37.8% of the students do not participate in such groups. some students showed that such groups are arabic-medium and their use of english is very rare. table 9. how often do you submit your assignment online? frequ ency percen t valid percent valid never 16 21.6 21.6 rarely 32 43.2 43.2 sometimes 10 13.5 13.5 often 14 18.9 18.9 very often 2 2.7 2.7 total 74 100.0 100.0 table 9 shows that 21.5% of the participants often and very often submit their assignments to their teachers online, 21.6% never use online service to submit their assignments, and 43.2% rarely use it. 13.5% of the participants showed that they sometimes submit their assignment online. most of those students who submit their sabri thabit saleh ahmed, bushra thabit ahmed salem, & sunil v. pawar yemeni efl students’ perceptions and implementation of computer-assisted language learning 8 assignment online are m.a. students. table 10. what is the approximate time do you spend on computer and internet for english language learning purpose? frequ ency perc ent valid percent valid never 2 2.7 2.7 less than 2 hours per week 42 56.8 56.8 3 5 hours per week 26 35.1 35.1 6 10hrs per week 2 2.7 2.7 more than 10hrs per week 2 2.7 2.7 total 74 100.0 100.0 the average time for using computer and internet to learn english seems to be low, as shown in the table 10, 2.7% of the participants never use computer and technology at all, 56.8% (the majority) use it for less than 2 hours per week, 35.1% use it for 3 to 5 hours per week, 2.7% use it for 6 – 10 hours, and only 2.7% who spend more than 10 hrs per week learning from computers and internet. it seems that for most students, computer and internet are not primary sources for learning as they spend only less than two hours per week on computer and internet and this has been supported by their responses to the open questions where they mentioned that due to low speed internet they depend on the hard notes and hard books given to them by their teachers. most of those students who spend more hours on internet and computer are m.a. students as they have assignments for which computer and internet are needed for searching and preparedness. participants were also requested to respond to three open questions regarding what icts they and their teachers use in the classroom, what programs they use for learning english outside classrooms, and the difficulties they face in using icts in and outside classrooms. their responses to the first question showed that m.a. teachers use powerpoint and data show for presenting their lectures while others use board and pens. b.a. students showed that most of their teachers do not use computer in their classroom and only a few teachers who use technology such as computers in presenting their lectures and cds and recorders in teaching listening skill activities. participants also mentioned that there is no complete language laboratory in their faculty as it was collapsed during the war and only few ict tools are available for teaching english right now. as far as call at home is concerned, students’ responses showed that students’ uses of computer and internet for learning english is still at its minimum level as only some students who use computers for learning while the majority only use dictionaries and translating programs. the most used call programs for learning english by the participants are smartphone online and offline dictionaries, translators like google translator, cat, and memoq, and microsoft office word for preparing assignments by m.a. students, google chrome, pdf books, and youtube. m.a. students mentioned that google chrome helps them a lot in getting information about any topic they want to understand while b.a. students rarely get access to google chrome for learning purpose as they usually depend on the notes provided by their teachers. youtube channels for learning english were also used by few students. students have also highlighted some barriers that interrupt their implementation of call in their classes such as unavailability of the internet, lack of ict tools, and lack of computer competence for some students. though most students have computers at home, computers and internet are not used too much in their learning of english due to low internet speed and high internet cost. this study, therefore, suggests the following for implementing call better in the faculty of languages –aden: a. faculty of language should provide icts and internet to its classrooms and library; b. language laboratories should also be equipped with english learning software and hardware materials; c. training and workshops should be conducted in the faculty of language to train students on computer skills and on how to use icts for english language learning purposes. it also recommends efl students of the faculty of language to exploit icts they have at their faculty and homes for their english language learning as that will make their learning more interesting and motivate them to develop their proficiency in english. these recommendations can be applied to all yemeni universities for implementing call in their efl programs. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 1, december 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 9 discussion this study has shown that students of the faculty of language held an overall high positive attitude towards call in their efl learning. this positive attitude towards call goes in line with several studies conducted in other places where english is learned as a foreign or second language (afshari, ghavifekr, siraj & jing, 2013; al-naqeeb, 2006; arishi, 2012; behroozian & sadeghoghli, 2017; bueno-alastuey and lópez pérez, 2014; burrus, 2009; chamundeshwari and evelyn, 2017; holmes, 1998; hsu, 2013; lodhi et al., 2019; ilter, 2015; navaz and sameem, 2013; nugroho & atmojo, 2020; pinto-llorente, sánchez-gómez, garcía-peñalvo, & casillasmartin, 2017; saeed and al-zayed, 2018; wiebe & kabata, 2010). these positive attitudes towards call can be considered as a good sign for call implementation in their learning as call implementation usually depends to a high extent on students’ attitudes towards call. however, having such a high positive attitude does not guarantee successful implementation of call as there are some other factors that might contribute to the matter. the study revealed a contrast between students’ attitudes towards call and their actual uses of call in their learning which can be attributed to some other factors. it has been revealed that a number of students lacks computer competence and this makes call implementation in language learning more difficult as there are some students who cannot deal with technology. another important factor is the lack of internet and technology in their learning environment. this makes call implementation very low and more limited to teachers’ personal interest in using their own technology available at hand in their learning. such variables affecting call implementation in efl classes of the faculty of language were also highlighted in other studies where call was used in efl learning (al-khaldi & al-jabri, 1998; al-naqeeb, 2006; arishi, 2012). though this study showed that both male and female students held high positive attitudes towards call, its results can be used as a support for those studies such as sabti & chachan (2014) whose results showed that female students have a higher positive attitude than their male counterparts. it somehow contrasts with those studies that found out that male students held a higher positive attitude and use computer technology in their language learning rather than their female counterparts (lodhi, et. al., 2019; shashaani, 1993). the study also revealed that the students with higher computer competence tend to have higher positive attitudes than their lower computer competence counterparts. this indicates that those who have good computer competence feel comfortable to learn through call while low computer competence students may feel uncomfortable to learn though call as they may face some difficulties. though many students with low computer competence expressed their high positive attitudes towards call, this study exhibited some correlations between students’ computer competence and the level of their attitudes towards call. this correlation between students’ perceptions of computer technology as a learning tool and their computer competence was also reflected in previous research (divine, wilson & daubek, 1997; mitra, 1998; saparniene, merkys & saparnis, 2005; teo, 2006). the results of this study indicated that call implementation can be effective in the yemen tertiary context as students recognize the significance of technology in their learning. what is left will be the responsibility of the education authorities to provide technology tools and internet to their classrooms and to train students on computer use. conclusion this study surveyed efl students' perceptions of call, their call implementation and barriers. it concluded that the yemeni efl learners studying in this faculty of languages aden held positive attitudes towards call and believe in its significance in developing their language skills and making language learning more motivating and enjoyable. however, it showed that call implementation by those concerned students is still at its minimum level due to many factors such as unavailability of the internet at the faculty, lack of ict tools, lack of training, and the poor internet connection at homes. this study recommends the yemeni universities to provide internet and technology tools to their classrooms, hold training to improve students’ computer competence, and make computer competence one of the requirements for 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(2021). exploring efl teachers’ new pedagogical content knowledge of genre-based approach. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 1-14. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5348 received: 26-08-2021 accepted: 19-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction in english language teaching, teachers’ knowledge, as an important part of teacher cognition, has been a burgeoning area of research in the last four decades as one of the indicators of successful teaching (shulman, 1987). as a crucial foundation, knowledge is needed by teachers not only to accomplish the teaching and learning process (stark, eadie, snow, & goldfeld, 2020; carter and gonzalez, 1993), but also to fulfill learners’ needs (hao, 2016), and to improve the teaching efficacy and students’ learning achievements (walshaw, 2012). even in the 21st century, teachers’ knowledge is consistently required to advocate learners’ learning (kereluik, mishra, fahnoe, & terry, 2013). with knowledge, teachers are able to think, know, believe, and do (borg, 2003) to make their teaching better. among the types of knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge (pck) has been an interesting topic investigated in the literature. theoretically, pck emphasizes not only what to teach (content) but also how to teach (pedagogy) (shulman, 1987). the combination of these two entities has been empirically effective to be applied in the classroom instruction (schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, 2009), particularly to help students learn better (kleickmann, richter, kunter, elsner, besser, krauss, & baumert, 2013; baumert, kunter, blum, brunner, voss, jordan, klusmann, krauss, neubrand, & tsai, 2010). as pck plays an imperative role in reaching the instructional goals, cesur and ertaş (2018) suggested that teachers abstract: this study aimed at exploring the efl teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of gba and english instruction in the indonesian context. the data were collected from 42 senior high school english teachers by making use of a set of questionnaires, interviews, and observations. the first type of data was analyzed through a response counting to calculate the scores and percentages, with which the categories of teachers’ knowledge were engineered. meanwhile, the second type of data was analyzed by describing all indicators in the observation checklists (in the forms of spoken cycle and written cycle and four stages of teaching: building knowledge of the field, modeling of the text, joint construction of the text, and independent construction of the text). the data analysis reveals that the english teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of gba can be classified into two major groups: 38.1% english teachers had deep knowledge and 61.9% english teachers had shallow knowledge. in connection to the classroom teaching, teachers with these different levels of knowledge are identical in implementing the guidelines of spoken and written cycles. one of the essential implications is that both categories of efl teachers need to understand theories of gba and concepts of gba used in the curriculum more in-depth as the reference and signpost to perform a better classroom teaching. keywords: efl teachers; pedagogical content knowledge; teaching practices; gba. suharyadi, utami widiati, & yazid basthomi exploring efl teachers’ new pedagogical content knowledge of genre-based approach 2 should have good pck in order to be able to teach students the contents with more appropriate teaching method. to do so, pck should be viewed and assessed within three components: curriculumrelated knowledge, students-related knowledge, and teaching strategies-related knowledge (bukovagüzel, 2010). these components become a guideline for teachers to make teaching scenarios successfully (irvine-niakaris and kiely, 2015). so far, pck has been studied both in a single variable and integrated with other types of knowledge in different settings with various purposes. for example, könig, tachtsoglou, lammerding, strauß, nold, & rohde (2017) investigated the relationship between the learning opportunities in the efl teachers’ preparation program and their pck. the result shows that learning activities in the program can aid teachers to increase the level and development of their knowledge. liu (2013) also conducts a study focusing patterns and development of lecturers’ pck. she finds that policy and culture become important aspects in shaping teachers’ pck. similarly, al-jaro, asmawi, and hasim (2017) also study pck in the curriculum of english teacher education program (etep) at a faculty of education in a yemeni university. the results indicate that teachers possess different facets of pck and pedagogy-related courses provided are inadequate to increase teachers’ pck including their teaching skills. pck is also studied together with tpack. for example, lux, bangert, and whittier (2011) include pck in order to develop an instrument for pre-service teachers’ tpack. mishra and koehler (2006) assess teachers tpack and find out that teachers should possess sufficient knowledge in terms of content knowledge (ck), pedagogical knowledge (pk), and technological knowledge (tk). similarly, wu and wang (2015) combine pck with tpack in order to investigate teachers’ knowledge and teaching performance. they claim that teachers require more knowledge on technology in order to develop their pck and tpack. those aforementioned studies apparently adumbrate the importance of teachers’ knowledge pertaining to subject matter, pedagogy, and technology which is required to conduct an effective teaching. however, none of them gives adequate attention to the exploration of efl teachers’ knowledge on specific approach of teaching, namely genre-based approach (gba) and their teaching practices. previous research has shown that a study on what teachers know and how they teach it is essential to be undertaken (usak, ozden, and eilks, 2011). it is also believed that the harmony of these two parts (knowing and doing) can be a portrait of ideal classroom teaching (neumann, kind, and harms, 2019). further, none of the existing studies has explored the specific levels of teachers’ knowledge which refer to deep knowledge and shallow knowledge as proposed by bennet and bennet (2008). deep knowledge reflects teachers’ strong comprehension and abstraction as it is processed, structured and stored in memory so that it is useful for application and task performance (jong and ferguson-hessler, 1996). meanwhile, shallow knowledge shows teachers’ weak comprehension and abstraction and therefore it can insufficiently describe complex situations (badiru and cheung, 2002). knowing teachers’ levels of knowledge is surely pivotal for us to identify parts of knowledge teachers know and do not know so that we can develop an effective instruction. the intended knowledge in this study is different from knowledge commonly investigated in literature. it refers to knowledge in a specific context, that is the understanding of gba. as one of the teaching approaches, gba is strongly influenced by halliday’s systemic functional linguistics principles on texts, contexts, and meanings (halliday and webster, 2007). since its first prominence in 1980s, it has been formally embedded in the english curricula in several countries such as in australia (rose and martin, 2012; burns and joyce, 2007; marshall, 1991; hammond, 1987); new zealand (locke, whitehead, dix, & cawkwell, 2011); the uk (paltridge, 2004), the us k-12 schools (brisk, 2014; oliveira and lan, 2014; gebhard, chen, and britton, 2014; moore and schleppegrell, 2014, harman, 2013); singapore (lin, 2006); hong kong (graves and garton, 2017; maxwell-reid, 2014); and five european countries: sweden, denmark, scotland, portugal, and spain (whittaker and garcía parejo, 2018), including indonesia (mbau and sugeng, 2019; graves and garton, 2017; emilia and hamied, 2015; widodo, 2006). with deep knowledge of gba, teachers are able to achieve the expected aims of teaching and learning of english with gba which emphasize the understanding and production of various texts. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3 knowledge of gba in this study is called pck as it comprises knowledge of basic concepts of gba, knowledge of curriculum of gba, and knowledge of teaching strategies of gba. as relatively new in the pursuit of knowledge, these elements of gba (presented in table 1) are needed by teachers to facilitate students’ learning (triastuti, 2020; kissau and algozzine, 2017; stran and curtner-smith, 2010). this study is, therefore, inevitable to be undergone as it will enrich the body of knowledge in relation to genre pedagogy and types of knowledge and broaden teachers or practitioners’ perspectives about the importance of knowledge and its benefits for teaching practices. finally, this study is believed to enable teachers to positively transform the ways they teach in the future and bring about better students’ learning outcomes. method this study involved 42 senior high school english teachers of twelve senior high schools. they were selected based on the set-up criteria as follows: they should graduate from an english department; they should at least have had an undergraduate diploma as a minimum requirement of the teachers’ qualifications; they taught english in state senior high schools, not in private senior high schools and/or vocational schools; they should be tenured and certified english teachers; and they should have an experience of joining workshops, conferences, seminars, or training on english language teaching. the instruments (questionnaires, interviews and observations) aiming at collecting data related to teachers’ knowledge and teaching practice were developed based on the theory of gba (halliday and webster, 2007) and aspects of gba in the curriculum used in high schools in indonesia (kemendikbud 2013; emilia, 2011) and validated by the experts in the field and tried out to other english teachers. the questionnaires contained 63 gba-related items which were grouped under three major categories of gba (parts b, c, and d) as presented in table 1. the questions used for the interviews were also developed following the same procedures as employed in the questionnaires. the reason was that the interviews were utilized to confirm the teachers’ responses obtained through the questionnaires. in relation to observations, the checklists were developed as the guideline, containing two cycles (spoken cycle and written cycle) by which teachers conducted the teaching and learning process. each cycle was then followed by four stages of teaching, namely building knowledge of the field (bkof), modeling of the text (mot), joint construction of the text (jcot), and independent construction of the text (icot). in each stage, specific descriptors were elaborated concerning what and how teachers taught students based on gba. mainly formulated with open-ended questions, the questionnaires were distributed to 42 english of twelve state senior high schools. appointments to have face to face meetings were made so that teachers could spend time completing the questionnaires in the schools. having finished answering the questionnaires, they were also requested to be interviewed and observed. however, only 15 english teachers were available and willing to be involved in these stages. the interviews were conducted once for about 30-60 minutes for each teacher within their convinience. the interviews were carried out in a confortable place or room in the school so that noise or any other disturbance could be eliminated. indonesian language was used to avoid misleading questions and answers and misinterpretation. dealing with teaching practices, teachers were observed and recorded with the help of observation checklists from the beginning to the end of meetings. table 1. items in the questionnaire (adapted from kemendikbud, 2013; emilia, 2011; halliday and webster, 2007) variables part a: teachers’ background (10 items) part b: basic concepts of gba (11 items) part c: principles and models of gba teaching (33 items) part d: gba concepts in the curriculum (19 items) teaching experience training formal education text context types of contexts field tenor 3 principles of gba teaching concept of the curriculum cycle spoken and written types of conversations short functional texts monolog texts types of texts (recount, narration, news item, suharyadi, utami widiati, & yazid basthomi exploring efl teachers’ new pedagogical content knowledge of genre-based approach 4 mode text types genre cycles stages of teaching with gba procedure, spoof, report, description, explanation, discussions, exposition, and review) types of competences levels of literacy the data revealed from questionnaires and interviews were analyzed by comparing the teachers’ answers with the predetermined expected answers taken from the existing theory (scharfenberg and bogner, 2016; kellner, gullberg, attorps, thorén, & tärneberg, 2011). here, the correct and incorrect answers were then calculated to obtain the scores and percentages. the scores were utilized to categorize the teachers’ knowledge based on two levels of knowledge proposed by (bennet and bennet, 2008) as presented in table 2. it is important to describe whether teachers have shallow knowledge or deep knowledge on gba. to get details of how teachers with different knowledge teach, the results of observations were analyzed by describing all indicators in the checklists (in the forms of spoken cycle and written cycle and four stages of teaching: bkof, mot, jcot and icot. table 2. indicators of teachers’ knowledge (adapted from bennet and bennet (2008) teachers have deep knowledge if they… teachers have shallow knowledge if they… have information about gba and full understanding of the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum. have information about gba and some understanding of the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum. know the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum and can use them in the classroom teaching. know the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum but cannot use them in the classroom teaching. can make relationship between the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum. cannot make relationship between the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum. can easily remember the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum (they are not easy to forget). cannot easily remember the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum (they are easy to forget). develop/ construct the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum for understanding. memorize the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum for understanding. have more than 5 years of experience in using the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum in the classroom teaching. have less than 5 years of experience in using the basic concepts of gba, principles and models of gba teaching, and gba concepts in the curriculum in the classroom teaching. results and discussion results teachers’ pck of gba the data analysis shows that the english teachers’ pck of gba can be summarized in table 3. table 3. categories of teachers’ pck of gba categories teachers scores percentage deep 16 71.23-95.89 38.1 shallow 26 17.80-69.86 61.9 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 5 table 3 highlights that the teachers’ pck can be classified into two major groups: deep and shallow. sixteen teachers (38.1%) belong to having “deep” knowledge while 26 teachers (61.9%) fall within the category of possessing shallow knowledge. in details, teachers with deep knowledge mean that they are strong in two or three assessed parts of gba covering parts b, c, and d. from the responses, teachers with deep knowledge are strong in parts c and d as they are consistently able to explicate those parts as expected by the relevant theory, but weak in part b as they cannot theoretically elaborate the concepts such as “text, context, context of culture, context or situation, three elements of context of situation (field, tenor, and mode), and genre”. different from teachers with deep knowledge, teachers with shallow knowledge are weak in two or three measured parts. based on the data, they are weak in parts b and d. they cannot define the concepts of text, context, context of culture, context of situation, genre, levels of literacy, and types of competences, etc. however, they are strong in part c, which is related to the principles and models of gba teaching. teachers’ teaching practices of gba teachers with deep knowledge and shallow knowledge are also described based on the teaching practices. as reflected from the analysis, none of the teachers adheres the expected cycle of teaching in the form of spoken and written cycles as the guidelines which state that the listening and speaking skills are incorporated into the spoken cycle and the reading and writing skills are amalgamated in the written cycle. in this regard, teachers are also expected to integrate the language skills and components appropriately in the teaching practice. as revealed from the analysis, teachers with deep knowledge utilize the cycles to integrate the language skills and/or language components in the following patterns. for instance, in particular meetings with bkof-mot-jcot stages, teachers integrate readingspeaking; grammar-writing; speaking-reading; speaking-reading-speaking; reading-grammar-writing; speaking-writingspeaking; listening-reading-writing; listeningwriting-speaking; and grammar. in some other meetings with bkof-mot stages, teachers have the following styles of integration: speaking-readingspeaking-vocabulary; and speaking-grammarwriting. in bkof-jcot, teachers integrate the language skills and language components as follows: writing-reading-vocabulary; readingspeaking; reading-grammar; reading; speakingwriting-speaking; and speaking. in bkof-icot, teachers emphasize the teaching on one language skill only: writing. teachers with shallow knowledge on gba also deploy different styles of interpreting the spoken cycle and written cycle. for example, in bkofmot-jcot, teachers teach the language skills and components in this hierarchy: speaking-writingspeaking; listening-reading-writing; speakingwriting-speaking; grammar; listening-readingwriting; speaking-reading-speaking-reading; and listening-speaking-listening. in bkof-mot, teachers employ ten styles of integration: speakinggrammar-writing; writing-speaking-listening; listening; reading; speaking-reading-listening; listening-reading; speaking-reading; listeningspeaking; grammar; and reading-grammar. in bkof-jcot, teachers incorporate the language skills and components under these styles: speakinglistening-writing-speaking; speaking, writingspeaking; speaking-listening-writing; speakingreading-writing; reading; reading-speakingreading-writing-speaking; writing-speakingreading; reading-speaking-grammar; writingreading; speaking-listening; and speaking. in bkof-mot-icot, teachers possess two styles: reading-writing; and speaking-listening-vocabulary. discussion the main findings in this study are teachers’ pck related to gba and their teaching practices in the classroom. as portrayed from the results, sixteen (38.1%) teachers’ pck fall within “deep” and 26 teachers (61.9%) are found to be in the category of “shallow”. these categories indicate that the majority of teachers’ pck is low (61.9%). this finding can also similarly be portrayed in several previous studies. for instance, sumarsono (2015) finds out that the english teachers’ competence (combination of abilities, knowledge and skills) in indonesia is low as indicated by their national average score reaching 56.02 out of 100, which is below the minimal national passing grade, 75. in terms of english teachers’ professional competence, their average score is 32 and their pedagogical competence is 17. in another setting of study, kömür (2010) measures preservice efl teachers’ suharyadi, utami widiati, & yazid basthomi exploring efl teachers’ new pedagogical content knowledge of genre-based approach 6 knowledge of teaching and the result shows that their knowledge was not applied in their teaching. chen and goh's study (2014) focusing on teachers’ knowledge about spoken english teaching shows that that teachers do not have adequate pedagogical content knowledge. a similar study done by deboer (2007) reflects that a number of teachers possess insufficient knowledge on how to teach listening and speaking. with regard to grammatical knowledge, some other studies indicate that both pre-service english teachers and in-service english teachers are weak in their grammatical knowledge (borg, 2001; andrews, 1999; williamson and hardman, 1995). these studies inform that english teachers in different settings have shallow knowledge not only in terms of the language skills and components but also in teaching method. therefore, it is important for teachers to involve themselves in more focused and intensive professional development programs in the form of joining seminars, conferences and workshops, pursuing their studies, doing research and writing articles to be published in the proceedings or journals. the discussion on possible factors attributing to the teachers’ deep and shallow knowledge is presented in the following. teachers’ deep pck versus teachers’ shallow pck teachers with deep knowledge do not mean that they know all aspects of gba. they have different areas of mastery and non-mastery in their pck. for instance, they are strong in the principles and models of gba teaching (part c) and the gba concepts in the curriculum (part d), yet they are weak in dealing with the basic concepts of gba (part b). teachers with shallow knowledge also possess areas of mastery and non-mastery in their pck. in general, they are strong only in part c, which is related to the principles and models of gba teaching, but weak in the gba concepts in the curriculum (part d) and the basic concepts of gba (part b). in this context, teachers with deep knowledge can be described as the ones who have information and full understanding about the principles and models of gba teaching (part c) and the gba concepts in the curriculum (part d). they have deep knowledge of gba as they develop or construct, not memorize it. therefore, they can easily remember them in all occasions. with this knowledge, they are able to apply and undertake a better classroom teaching. in line with these characteristics, badiru and cheung (2002); jong and ferguson-hessler (1996) state that deep knowledge refers to the internal and causal structure of a system and involves the interactions between the system’s components. it is embedded in the person’s knowledge and deals with comprehension and abstraction. it is processed, structured and stored in memory so that it is useful for application and task performance. teachers with shallow knowledge can be also described in the following points. they have information and some understanding about the basic concepts of gba (part b) and the gba concepts in the curriculum (part d). they get their shallow knowledge of gba by means of memorizing, not by developing / constructing ideas. consequently, they cannot make connections among the concepts and application. since they have difficulties retrieving their knowledge, they cannot apply and undertake a better classroom teaching. in line with these, badiru and cheung (2002) state that shallow knowledge deals with reproduction and trial and error. this knowledge basically represents the input/output relationship of a system. it is stored in memory more or less as a copy of external information. shallow representation is limited. it may have little to do with the manner in which experts view the domain and solve problems. this may limit the capability of the system to provide appropriate explanations to the user. shallow knowledge may also be insufficient in describing complex situations. therefore, a deeper presentation is often required. regardless of these categories, there are interesting sides to explore pertaining to why they have different areas of mastery and non-mastery in the context of gba. here, we can say that teachers who are strong in a particular part or all parts may be sufficiently exposed to the concepts in the school context and therefore there is likelihood for them to read and understand the concepts correctly. in contrast, teachers who are weak in one part or all parts may also have no or less exposure to the concepts, and therefore it is difficult for them to figure them out. teachers’ exposures to the concepts seem to play an important role in making them have different levels of knowledge. in fact, teachers with deep knowledge have a better understanding about parts c and d compared to teachers with shallow knowledge who are good english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7 only in part c although both types of teachers are similar in that they know part c. teachers know the concepts as they are frequently exposed to in the school setting through various activities. for example, they join a teacher forum to share and discuss the issues or topics related to english teaching. when teachers read the curriculum and syllabus, they are supposed to know the goal of english instruction, competences students need to achieve, types of texts, etc. another example is when teachers are preparing lesson plans. commonly, they are required to determine the objectives of the teaching, the texts to be taught, methods of teaching (i.e. using spoken and written cycles and stages of teaching), media of teaching, activities to be done, and assessment tasks and procedures. in this regard, tagle, díaz, etchegaray, alarcón, quintana, & ramos (2020) stated that teachers activate six types of knowledge when designing lesson plans: content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, curricular knowledge, knowledge of learners, and knowledge of educational contexts. in the semesterly workshop provided by schools, teachers are usually also requested to analyze the relevant documents before conducting the classroom teaching in the following semester. these regular activities are the exposures teachers always deal with regardless of their different ages and teaching experiences. thus, these exposures are believed to help teachers be familiar with and understand the concepts. although there is no specific research on the issue, the exposures have been claimed to be influential, particularly in english language teaching and learning. for example, the provision of sufficient exposures in the forms of media (movies, books, magazines, and tv programs) can increase students’ vocabulary knowledge (peters, 2018). a study done by unsworth, persson, prins, & de bot (2014) also showed that giving early efl students exposures of grammar weekly can improve their grammar scores. these two studies indirectly indicate that exposures contribute to teachers’ familiarity and understanding of the concepts. besides those mastery areas, teachers also have nonmastery areas of knowledge. for example, as reflected in part b, teachers with deep knowledge get difficulties in defining the fundamental concepts of gba which include “text, context, context of culture, context or situation, three elements of context of situation (field, tenor, and mode), and genre”. they cannot elaborate the concepts based on the theory probably because they are not obviously operationalized in the curriculum, syllabus, and textbooks, so they have no idea to deal with and therefore they possess less exposures. to the best of our observation, the curriculum, syllabus, and textbooks provide limited information, for instance, about types of texts, types of competences, language skills and components. in other words, the ideas of “text, context, context of culture, context or situation, three elements of context of situation (field, tenor, and mode), and genre” should also be sufficiently provided in the curriculum or in a supplementary book which specifically elaborates the concepts and is accessible to teachers. surprisingly, what happens to teachers with shallow knowledge is quite unique in the sense that they do not understand the aspects of gba in the curriculum though they have been exposed to them in the schools. different from teachers with deep knowledge, the exposure to the concepts seems to have less influence to teachers with shallow knowledge and it is in contrast with the studies stating that exposures will increase teachers’ knowledge (peters, 2018; unsworth et al., 2014). for example, they are weak in explaining types of conversations, short functional texts, monolog texts, social functions, generic structures, and linguistic features of the texts instructed in schools, including types of competences. in addition, their teaching experience seems to not go hand in hand with their development of knowledge. even though they belong to experienced teachers with more than five years of teaching, their knowledge on gba is not developed. for example, two teachers involved in the study have been teaching english for about 30 years, yet they have shallow knowledge on gba. another teacher with eight-year teaching experience also has poor knowledge on gba. these examples of teachers show that the length of teaching does not guarantee that they have deep knowledge. this fact contradicts with the existing research results. for instance, and, tomer, and tamir (1990) prove that there is no connection between the length of teaching experience and knowledge of subject matter. more specifically, teachers with short and long years of teaching are similar in the sense that they possess partial knowledge of pedagogy. another study by chen suharyadi, utami widiati, & yazid basthomi exploring efl teachers’ new pedagogical content knowledge of genre-based approach 8 and goh (2014) focusing on teachers’ knowledge about spoken english teaching also shows that there is no considerable difference in terms of knowledge among teachers with various teaching experiences and involvements in training. a more surprising research finding also reveals that teachers with more years of teaching tend to have less pck (asl, asl, and asl, 2014). it means that teachers’ knowledge is complex, as it is determined not only by years of teaching, but also beliefs and positive attitudes towards the concepts in particular or gba in general. beliefs and positive attitudes can impact the levels of teachers’ knowledge and quality of teaching. in line with this, hu and tian (2012) state that beliefs and positive attitudes are key factors in determining the levels of teachers’ knowledge and quality of teaching. similarly, bernat and gvozdenko (2005) also assert that beliefs and attitudes become important determiners to the success of the classroom instruction including scaffolding instructors in preparing the syllabus and implementing teaching. some other research has also suggested that teachers with positive attitudes tend to have better knowledge and quality of teaching (al harthy, jamaluddin, and abedalaziz, 2013; nadeem, rana, lone, maqbool, naz, & ali, 2011; duatepe and akkus-cikla, 2004). therefore, teachers need to be open and have willingness (wong, 2011) to learn any changes in curriculum or development of teaching methods/media so that they have adequate knowledge. to do so, any teacher preparation programs should be effectively designed by focusing on how to develop pck (mayne, 2019; kaplan and owings, 2002). in addition to lack of exposure, beliefs and positive attitudes, teachers’ shallow knowledge is also related to their not being accustomed to reading concepts which sound too theoretical. in the efl context, not all teachers are interested in associating with something conceptual, which is full of abstractions and difficult to understand. in a response to it, author, (2001) state that teachers need to be equipped with more theoretical underpinning in the training so that they understand what underlies the practical matters. it is quite challenging also for them to spend adequate time enjoying reading, particularly articles and books that contain many theories, which include the notions of, for example, text, context, context of culture, context or situation, three elements of context of situation (field, tenor, and mode), and genre. to them, enjoying reading for comprehension and pleasure is not their habit and interest. research done by khan and madden (2018) has proven that psychological factors such as interest, anxiety, and motivation affect the reading activities. therefore, teachers need to psychologically be ready to start reading. it can be true also that having a reading habit is fundamental for teachers as it reflects their attitude and increases their understanding or knowledge. studies carried out by whitten, labby, and sullivan (2016); cullinan (2000) have empirically shown that enjoying reading can significantly enhance students or even teachers skills of reading comprehension, fluency, and general knowledge. a correlational study has also evidenced that the attitude towards reading directly has a positive correlation with reading habit and indirectly with critical thinking (ulu, 2019). here, reading habits become the key factors for teachers to be able to enrich their knowledge not only related to the subject matters but also pedagogical aspects to improve the quality of teaching. therefore, there should be a policy on promoting a reading habit for school teachers including the provision of a free online and anchor reading sources. another factor is related to teachers’ routine activities in the schools. during their teaching career for years, they have dealt with repeated activities such as preparing lesson plans and instructional materials and media, choosing teaching strategies, assessing students, and correcting students’ work. they have also been busy with administrative matters (ertmer and ottenbreit-leftwich, 2010) such as managing school finance, making proposals for school funding, attending meetings, etc. (dewi, hendrawani, kurniasih, suryati, & khery, 2018). these activities have, to some extent, changed their perception about how to develop their profession as teachers. in several formal meetings, teachers deem that that their job is teaching, not researching nor writing. teaching seems to be the only way to enrich their competence. consequently, not many teachers have interests to conduct research, write articles to be published in journals or proceedings, and take part in a seminar, conference, workshop, or training, particularly on gba as to develop their professional and intellectual competences as shown in our previous work (author, 2001) which reveals english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 9 that 45.2% english teachers are not interested in writing articles for publication. a similar study done by kartowagiran (2015) also shows that 82.5%-90% teachers, in general, have not done research and published articles. it means that the existing regulation stating that activities teachers can do for a promotion through research, dissemination, and publication is not optimally manifested. thus, the government should periodically evaluate and control the implementation of this regulation so that teachers’ research, dissemination, and publication can be increased. teachers’ knowledge and teaching practices this study is not correctional, yet it is interesting to see the teachers’ knowledge and their teaching practices. viewed from the levels, teachers with deep knowledge are supposed to perform a better teaching than those of teachers with shallow knowledge. a better teaching in this context is defined as a full implementation of the curriculum cycle to integrate the language skills and components in the real instruction. as shown in the data, however, both categories of teachers, in the spoken cycle, integrate listening not only with speaking but also with other skills and components. in the written cycle, teachers integrate reading not only with writing but also with other skills and components. for instance, teachers with deep knowledge mix listening with reading, writing and grammar. they also mix speaking with reading and vocabulary; and with grammar and writing. in the written cycle, teachers integrate reading with speaking, with grammar and writing, with listening, and with vocabulary. a similar phenomenon is also found out in teachers with shallow knowledge. they combine listening with reading and writing; speaking with writing; speaking with grammar and writing, speaking with reading; speaking with listening and writing. in the written cycle, they blend writing with speaking and listening, reading with grammar, reading with speaking and speaking, writing with speaking and reading, etc. these findings apparently evidence that there is no striking difference among those teachers in terms of utilizing the cycles of teaching as well as integrating the language skills and components. both types of teachers apply similar procedures in teaching although they have different levels of knowledge. obviously seen in this context, teachers’ knowledge is not always parallel with their teaching practice in the classroom. several studies have reported regarding this phenomenon. for example, al-husban and alkhawaldeh (2016) try to investigate a relationship between english teachers’ knowledge and the teaching practice. they find out that there is no connection between english teachers’ knowledge with the teaching practice. another study by cesur and ertaş (2018) on 127 english teachers’ perceptions in relation to their pck levels and the use of their pck in teaching also proves that their belief (being able to do) is not considerably reflected in their actual teaching, particularly in terms of lesson planning, leaners, and evaluation. a recent study is also conducted by triastuti (2020) assessing pre-service teachers’ knowledge base and their reflection on the real teaching in indonesia. the results reveal that their good knowledge is not adequately implemented in their teaching practicum. these findings show us that the quality of teaching of both categories is not yet reflected in the real classroom and is far from the expectation. they seem not to know what to do and how to do in the classroom. particularly, they do not have a clear lesson planning on what to teach and how teach english with gba. consequently, what can be seen in the classroom is just a set of teaching routines which may not make significant differences on students’ learning. in other words, the quality of teaching is not entirely related with the knowledge teachers possess. other factors such as beliefs and positive attitudes can be strong predictors. as mentioned earlier that both beliefs and positive attitudes influence the quality of teaching (al harthy, jamaluddin, and abedalaziz, 2013; hu and tian 2012; nadeem et al., 2011; bernat and gvozdenko, 2005; duatepe and akkus-cikla, 2004). being able to reflect is also paramount for teachers to help enhance their teaching performance (wong, 2011). triastuti (2020) finds out that reflections are also needed by pre-service teachers so that they can identify what works and what does not work in teaching. in other words, why teachers with deep knowledge and teachers with shallow knowledge do similar patterns in applying the spoken and written cycles is not merely because of the levels of their knowledge, yet their beliefs, positive attitudes, and reflections. another interesting thing to probe is that it can be a new piece of evidence that teachers’ suharyadi, utami widiati, & yazid basthomi exploring efl teachers’ new pedagogical content knowledge of genre-based approach 10 knowledge and teaching practice are of two different entities. they are not in nature connected, but they need to be purposively connected. knowledge is something teachers obtain from much reading and discussing, but quality of teaching is something teachers attain from real teaching practices and watching or observing teaching practices in the classroom. according to graham, white, cologon, & pianta (2020), the quality of teaching is not always related with whether teachers are beginning teachers or experienced teachers. knowledge is built from teaching, not the opposite. in line with this, watzke (2007) states that the development of teachers’ knowledge particularly on a teaching method occurs through the processes which include classroom teaching, conflict, reflection, and resolution. nilsson (2008); hashweh (2005) add that having more teaching experiences is an effective way to develop teachers’ knowledge and teaching quality. therefore, to get a better teaching, teachers need to do more teaching tryouts than knowledge mining. conclusion based on the findings and discussions, some conclusions are generated. first, the levels of the english teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge on gba are grouped into categories. from these categories, however, 38.1% teachers have deep knowledge and 61.9% teachers have shallow knowledge. second, both types of teachers have various areas of mastery and non-mastery regarding their pck of gba. these areas of mastery and nonmastery are not comparable with teachers’ length of teaching and teaching practices. third, both teachers with deep knowledge and teachers with shallow knowledge have similar patterns in utilizing the spoken cycle and written cycle in teaching resulting in similar integrations of language skills and components. fourth, teachers need to do more teaching practices to remember and apply what they have learned and understood from scholarly activities 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(2021). siti zubaidah: the islamic feminism review based on barlas’ theory. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 301-312. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4355 received: 25-02-2021 accepted: 21-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction a literature work, included poems, can make readers joyful (dulce) and provide benefits (utile) for them. many studies dealing with poems showed poems’ capabilities to provide guidance, messages, suggestions, and positive values for life (astuti, beding, & helaria, 2019; meisterernst, 2019). the examples of poems’ powers are the messages about compliance (afifah & jamjam, 2020), messages about all human will return to their god, allah swt (ma’rifat, 2014), messages about carefulness to make the decision (ridho, 2019), messages to be attentive and avoid destruction (irmaniati, 2016), etc. therefore, poems are interested to be reviewed in these modern and global eras. poems have a lot of values. moreover, the values are applied in our country as a country with cultural diversity and mostly populated by islamic religious citizens. many poems from our culture are inculcated by islamic values that can prevent moral decline (anshari & widyantoro, 2020). one of them is about feminism. generally, studies about feminism deal with the more modern indonesian works of literature both poems and poetry. for example, feminism study by andayani (2020). the research found the feminist realizations, such as hard-working to earn money and to make a living, the assumption that a female could act as her late father, and the opinion that a female could do anything without listening to what other people argued about her. the other examples could be seen from a feminism study by tawaqal, mursalim, & hanum (2020). they found the practice of power liberal feminism. the other finding was from setiawan & harahap (2020) about the realization of gender inequality. abstract: this research aims to analyze islamic feminism in the heroic story of syair situ zubaidah. in this research, it is important to understand that islamic feminism is based on islamic religious principles. this research aims to identify the female characters of a literature work and to determine the positions and the role of the characters inside of a family. then, it is also to determine how the character defends and saves her family and people. the applied method was the qualitative descriptive method. the results showed that the islamic feminism themes also indicated heroic values. the findings showed the struggles, patience, determination, tawaqal, and istiqomah to deal with life. this research applied the interpretation of al-qur'an and al-hadith, in the forms of the findings of the previous studies. it was important to do and had to be based on the experts to avoid subjective interpretation. keywords: islamic feminism https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4355 selly putri, pratami nurhayati, & agus saripudin siti zubaidah: the islamic feminism review based on barlas’ theory 302 the feminism concept refers to female mainstreaming that wants to have an equal gender position in the community. the previous findings concluded there was male hegemony upon females. females or women were seen as powerless, emotional, and male-dependents (suhendi, 2014). this finding showed the images appeared due to dualism that females were different from males. they were assumed to have lower positions than males. females were assumed to have a second-class position. the other social facts were shown by suhendi (2014), such as female marginalization and physical-psychological acts of violence. studies by fahmi & arfiyanti (2020), mahdalia & qur’ani (2020), and pratama et al. (2020) also found the physical and psychological violence experienced by the female characters. females were underestimated and there were gender inequalities inside of the patriarchal community. studies about feminism in poems are rarely done. syair siti zubaidah (transliterated by sayekti and jaruki, 2010) describes a very different female character from other female characters in other literary works. for example, the female characters in belenggu are written by armijn pane. they were described as shackled females due to marriages (nurhidah & liana, 2015). then, layar terkembang written by sutan takdir alisjahbana, describes females in contradictory manner. a study by lizawati (2016) showed rational females with public-activity roles, entrepreneurship, and bravery. the features were found in a character named tuti. meanwhile, the emotional female that was dominated by her feeling was found in maria. the other findings were shown by suparman (2019). he found a lack of education experienced by the women in perempuan di titik nol's novel. it made them became the objects of divorce, polygamy, and prostitution. their fates were worsened by the poor socio-economic condition. syair situ zubaidah is different. it describes a female with authority, managerial skill, competitive capability equal to males, heroism, and bravery. on the other hand, siti zubaidah is described as a character that defends islamic values, such as pious, obedient toward her husband, and respects her parents. what made the poems interested to investigate was the great female characters especially siti zubaidah. she is described as a brave female that fights to save her husband. she is a beautiful, kind, loyal, modest, wise, and pious woman that marries sultan zainal abidin. she is a kind-hearted woman that loves to help, compliant, obedient toward her husband, and respects her parents-in-law. she is perfect, masculine, but also feminine. the characters are probably difficult to find in the real world. it triggered a question of why the writer, tengku abdul kadir (see syam, 1993) tells siti zubaidah as a female with those criteria. heretofore, literature works have been focusing on male writers and from novels (liasna & ansari, 2016; sugiantomas & nadiyaturahmah, 2017). the male writers told about females but their applied world perspectives were still males’ perspectives. females described by male writers also had male images, such as siti zubaidah in syair siti zubaidah. at the beginning of the poem, siti zubaidah is not directly told by the author. however, along with the stanzas of the story, the islamic feminism practices promoted by siti zubaidah are getting clearer. these different realizations of feminism should be reviewed. how siti zubaidah engaged her domestic life; how she struggled to free her husband; and how strong her belief was to undergo any difficulties while seeking her husband that was imprisoned by a chinese princess. siti zubaidah is described as a compliant and wise character in governing the country. poems contain various women’s voices to reveal problems experienced by women and to make a decision about various things. poems also describe the women’s life implicitly and explicitly from various places and times (damayanti, 2018b, 2018a; fatmawati, 2009; sari, priyatna, & muhtadin, 2017). thus, poems are interesting to be reviewed in terms of feminism. poems become the media to show, describe, and fight equality for women (nuryanti, 2016; vida, 2017). syair siti zubaidah is known as a heroic story due to the tough and brave struggles of the main character. the poems also have feminism study that inspires women at the present day. however, not all parties realize the positive feminism study from poems. feminism in islam does not only agree with each concept or perspective of the westerns culture especially about equalizing the position of males and females. on the other hand, islamic feminism attempts to fight gender equality rights in the conservative traditional community that assumes english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 303 females or women as the subordinates of males or men (mahzar, 2012). according to barlas (2002), islamic feminism is a combination between islamic principles and feminism (seedat, 2016). therefore, it is important to be introduced to english learners in indonesia (wijayanto, 2020). by inculcating islamic feminism for learners, they will realize what things to struggle with while studying and fighting later in the future (y. irawan, 2020). thus, islamic feminism mediates the traditional conservative party and the modern pro-feminism party (moghissi, 2011). this islamic feminism, by mahzar, is called as post-integrated islamic feminism. it puts women as the friends of men. dealing with english education, islamic feminism in poems could be an alternative for teachers to teach the language (annisa & hadijah, 2017). barlas’ theory (2012) tells that islamic feminism is guided by the islamic religion's principles. the principles can be found in alqur’an and al-hadith. in his research, barlas found the gender equality discussed in al-qur’an. barlas’ research had a purpose to determine how the islamic religion's principles in al-qur’an regulate gender equality for women and how they regulate male-female interaction. one of the discussed matters was the effects of staring for both women and men. in the discussion, all men that keep their eyesight and women that are kept from men's eyesight are equal to women that protect themselves. it proves the truth of barlas’ islamic feminism theory. the truth of his theory is based on the islamic religion's principles in al-qur’an and al-hadith. the concepts of feminism should be understood first. they are such as the definition, development, and feminism varieties. the reason is the emergence of feminist literary criticism is strongly correlated to the emergence and development of the feminism notion and movement in the community. without those notions and movements, feminist literary criticism would not exist. the word feminism has several definitions. according to humm (2007), feminism combines woman right equality doctrine. it becomes an organized movement to reach women's rights through social transformation ideology. the purpose is to create a fair world for women. on the other hand, barlas’ theory (2002) about islamic feminism is based on al-qur’an and al-hadith. it shows that women’s equality has been already existing for a long time ago. islamic feminism is the foundation of islamic religion teaching (latif, 2018). therefore, it could be understood that the feminist movements are not necessarily needed (qomariyah, 2019). it was proven by aminah (2019), who found that al-qur’an and al-hadith encouraged women to find their potentials. the problem formulation of this research is about the feminist values of syair siti zubaidah. the previous studies that investigated feminist values were done by putri & asri (2019) in a novel titled saman was written by ayu utami. lalu, telu, and mei (2015) investigated feminism in a novel titled beri aku waktu was written by evi idawati. then, purwanto (2015) analyzed feminism in a drama script titled marsinah menggugat written by ratna sarumpaet. then, puspita, erni, and mokh (2018) described feminism in a novel titled aminah was written by ws rendra. the last one is yeni, abdurahman, & nst (2013), they explained feminism in a novel titled cinta suci zahrana written by habiburrahman el shirazy. the similarities of this finding with the previous finding dealt with feminism value descriptions. then, the differences are about the analyzed literature works. some previous studies analyzed novels, short stories, drama scripts, and modern poems. meanwhile, this research analyzed poems. this research aims to analyze islamic feminism in the heroic story of syair siti zubaidah. this research is different from the previous studies that only sought the islamic feminism realizations. method the applied theory to analyze syair siti zubaidah was islamic feminism theory. this theory is different from the other theories. it is also stated by many experts. some of them are ismail (2019), mahfud, nazmi, & maula (2017), mulia (2017), suryorini & suryorini (2012), and wirasandi (2019). the applied feminism theory was to analyze the feminism study in syair siti zubaidah based on barlas’ theory (2002). this research aims to identify the female characters of a literature work and to determine the positions and the role of the characters inside of a family. then, it is also to determine how the character defends and saves her family and people. thus, this research considered selly putri, pratami nurhayati, & agus saripudin siti zubaidah: the islamic feminism review based on barlas’ theory 304 the principles and attitudes of the female characters, their mindset, attitudes, speeches, and other characters’ perspectives especially the male characters toward the female characters. these matters would provide more explanations about the characters. the applied method was the qualitative descriptive method. the descriptive qualitative method required researchers to collect information, analyze the data, find the pattern, conclusion, or theories from various themes or categories. then, all of them were concluded based on previous experience and works of literature (creswell, 2009). syah (2010), with his descriptive research, investigated the broader knowledge on educational materials in a certain period. according to setyosari (2010), descriptive research is research to explain or elaborate certain events, situations, and objects both human or nonhuman dealing with the variables that could be explained with numbers and words. supriyati (2011) defines descriptive research as a structured fact or characteristic description of a certain population in a certain field in actual and careful manners. islamic feminism review should be based on the data about the positions and roles of women as individual and social creatures. it deals with the roles in family, community, and other characters, such as with male characters. with these correlations, women could be described as full of hope, having strong principles, being an initiator, being responsible, seeking fairness, and demanding new updates. the applied islamic feminism is based on barlas’ theory (2002). it was modified with several finding themes of asriaty (2014), junaidi & hadi (2010), and solihatin (2017). the applied theoretical framework was from wiyatmi (2012). the activities were systematically started by these steps: (1) selecting and reading the reviewed literature works. (2) determining the problem focus with feminism literature perspective, for example the correlation between the feminist writing or figures about the female characters and their correlation with male characters in the literature work or about how the female characters engaged the problems in the community (education, social, cultural, politics, health, environment, law, employment, etc.). (3) promoting literature review to understand some theoretical concepts related to the focused problems and criticism or previous studies. the studies toward the theoretical concepts would facilitate the understanding about the reviewed problems. thus, the results would be scientifically reliable. (4) collecting the relevant primary and secondary data based on the focused problem. the primary data was from the reviewed literature works while the secondary data was from various information (books, reference, articles, research report, and direct field research). (5) reviewing the data by using feminism literature perspective. in this case, the researcher could select various feminism literature based on the studied problems. (6) interpreting and assessing the research results based on the selected feminism literature variety. (7) writing the report by using the appropriate language with the selected media to publish. barlas (2002) argued that islamic feminism is rooted in islamic religious principles. it makes feminism different from other feminisms. for example, the radical, liberal, social, racial, and orthodox feminisms. islam does not differ between males and females. it also does not have gender bias (junaidi & hadi, 2010). the analysis instrument of this research combined the previous study finding themes. the indicators were obtained from asriaty (2014), junaidi & hadi (2010), and solihatin (2017). findings and discussion the findings consist of the listed themes in the table. table 1. the guideline themes as the analysis instrument number theme 1 islam does not forbid women to work and to do good things for both men and women. 2 women are allowed to work with a purpose to support their life. 3 job responsibility 4 women as leaders 5 women working in child care, early childhood education, etc. 6 women working in trading and nursing sectors 7 keeping the politeness 8 having well attitude 9 keeping their self-respect 10 working professionally 11 working based on nature english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 305 12 keeping the domestic situation sakina 13 prioritizing the husband-wife discussion 14 having roles as wife and mother for the children to assist the family economic situation 15 the humanity and gender quality of women 16 women do not hinder the islamic advancement 17 having responsibilities and helping each other as equal partners (socially, culturally, politically, economically, institutionally, etc.). the applied themes were not merely the products of the researcher’s thoughts but the interpretations of al-qur’an and al-hadith. it was important to do because islamic feminism could not be separated from the islamic religion's principles. the themes guided the analysis processes. the results were all of the themes were found in syair siti zubaidah. the themes were found to dependent from one to another. there were several themes in a stanza. the first theme dealt with the fact that islam did not forbid women to work and to do good things for both women and men; gender equality; and partnership equality. for example, it could be seen from the following stanza. yang tua bernama kilan suara ialah kujadikan bendahara karena negeri ia memelihara gagah berani tak terkira (page18, stanza 1) it had been known that the profession as treasurer was excellent. treasury jobs were the active functions to put income and outcome in balance (darwis, 2013). from this matter, the profession was seen to have benefits. thus, the profession was included in an excellent thing to do. the other professions stated on page 18 were minister (stanza 2), judge (stanza 3), and king (stanza 4). the jobs were categorized as excellent and pious jobs so islam does not forbid them. it is shown by the qur’an, verse. al-nahl: 97. besides the first stanza on page 18, the other stanzas showing islamic feminism realizations were in stanza 6 and the first stanza on page 19. they are: seorang bernama kilan suari jadi juru tulis di dalam negeri sangat bijak sukar dicari pekerjaan menulis sehari hari (page 18, stanza 1) the next theme was about professionalism and job responsibility. they were also found in page 18 and in line with the islamic principles. (1) karena negeri ia memelihara gagah berani tidak terkira (page 18, stanza 1, lines 3-4). the lines indicated what the female character did for the man. the lines such as karena negeri ia memelihara or di negeri cina sukar bandingnya showed the responsibilities of the characters. what the characters did was in line with the teaching of allah in qur’an, surah al-qassas: 23) in the lines and pages, the responsibilities of the female characters were such as governing the country and promoting her positions as a treasurer. the responsibilities carried out by the character might be given by the superordinate or might be reached by the efforts of the character. however, the point was the character could govern the country. it was also seen in the following line. the lines such as di negeri cina sukar bandingnya, gagah berani tidak terkira, or sangat pendekar bukan suatu indicated how the female characters carried out their responsibilities professionally. it was in line with the teaching of allah in qur’an, surah al-isra: 84. in this page, the stanza also showed the islamic feminism of woman as a leader. it was in line with the teaching of allah in qur’an, surah an-naml: 23. according to jalalayn interpretation, the verse provides an example of a queen named balqis. it was also found on page 18, stanza 4. seorang bernama kilan cahaya ialah raja yang amat mulia menggantikan kerajaan ayahnda dia negeri cina memerintahnya dia (page 18, stanza 1) the other finding of this part was the nature job of women. it was not explicitly shown while siti rodiah was speaking. in the first, second, third, fourth, and sixth lines, the natures of a mother were shown. the mother did love her son and it made her able to accompany her son's departure. she even wanted to follow her son. (1) siti rodiah mendengar sabda seraya menangis menumbak dada, “wahai, anakku buah hati bunda hendak karna usul yang syahda selly putri, pratami nurhayati, & agus saripudin siti zubaidah: the islamic feminism review based on barlas’ theory 306 buah hati cahya mata bawalah ibu pergi serta tidak kuasa ibu bercinta bercerai dengan cahaya mahkota dari kecil bunda pelihara sedikit tidak diberi cidera gundah hatiku tidak terkira bercerai dengan seri negara patik hendak perginya juga mengingkan tuanku intan mustika inang sekalian bawa belaka mendapat tuan celaka.” (page 31, stanza 1 until 4) the stanzas showed the woman's compassion, the mother's love for her son. this compassion feeling is in line with the al-qur’an, surah alqasas, verse 28. the next theme was about noble character shown by the female character, siti zubaidah. it was realized into living modestly although she was rich. it was in line with surah al-israa 26-27. in the poems, the relevant actions with the surah were shown in these stanzas. zubaidah memakai sekadar sahaja berbaju kasa bunga seroja berseluwar panjang entalas saja berbincang emas perbuatan kamboja bersunting biar jagi berikat ruai berselang pudi berjurai-jurai bersinta intak emasnya urai bertali leher mayang mengurai bertudung kasa kain wilanda berbunga emas tepi berenda memegang salawat bertulis perada dari istambul diberi ayahnda (page 71, stanzas 3-5) the character was not only living modestly. the other noble characters were shown by siti zubaidah’s behaviors, such as always doing salawat for the prophet muhammad saw. it could be seen from this stanza. membaca salawat berlahan-lahan halus manis tertahan-tahan manis seperti madu curahan laksana embun di ujung dahan (page 71, stanza 7) salawat or salutation is a missing expression of a pious people that have not met rasullullah saw (hs. bunganegara, 2018). allah swt commands all believers to salute the prophet as stated in the qur'an, surah al-ahzab verse 56. other stanzas indicating the noble characters of siti zubaidah could be seen below. zubaidah berkata lakunya gundah, “beta nan sudah tentu berserah “tawakal hamba kepaanya allah untuk dan janji sudah terjelemah di dalam quran sudah tertentu di dalam hadinya semuanya begitu di tawakal ali dia lamamu itu hamba menurut dalilannya itu.” (page 233, stanzas 2-3) the next theme was siti zubaidah’s politeness. it could be seen from siti zubaidah while smiling at siti rodiah. zubaidah tersenyum seraya berkata sambil mununjuk pun perserta, “santaplah sirih bundanya beta sudikan apa sirihnya serta.” (page 74, stanza 4) the stanza is in line with al-qur’an, surah alfurqan, verse 63, and the hadith narrated by imam ali (pbuh). it says, “ethics is a renewed solution.” the politeness and ethics of siti zubaidah always became her beauty the next theme was the role of women as wives to reach sakinah family. it was found on page 111, the second stanza, until page 112. stanzas were showing the noble characters of a wife, the wife's effort to keep the family, and her politeness. they are shown in these stanzas. (1) ketika baginda sampai di kapalnya masuk mendapat akan istrinya memandang zubaidah gemarnya terlalu manis tingkah lakunya baginda duduk serta bertalukan segala pakaian semuanya ditanggalkan sudahlah tuan adinda makan kakanda tidak tuan nantikan (page 111, stanzas 2-3) (2) hati baginda terlalu suka memandang zubaidah hilanglah duka dibawa baginda gurau jenaka english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 307 bujuk dan cumbu berbagi tiga (page 112, stanza 1) the stanza shows the character of a wife based on al-qur'an, surah al-furqan, verse 74. it tells about the excellent features of a spouse to soothe her or his couple. these soothing attitudes referred to the noble behaviors, habits, and characters. from the stanzas and based on surah alfurqan, the character was found keeping her family. on the other hand, she also performed polite behaviors. they were shown in these stanzas. zubaidah tunduk seraya berkata, “sudah di adapan patik yang lata tuanku di darat lama bertahta jadilah patik di adapan serta.” suka tertawa raja bestari zubaidah sangat merendahkan diri disambut tangan dipegang jari sambil bertitah dua raja berseri, “mengapa demikian emas juwita bahasa seperti orang yang lata terlalu sangat merendahkan kata dengan kakanda tiada setahta (page 111, stanzas 4-6) the next obtained theme was modesty. it was found in stanzas on page 128. the stanzas showed the noble characters of siti zubaidah. the character is in line with al-qur’an, surah alfurqan, verse 63. rodiah tertawa seraya berkata, “inilah dia duduk bertahta tidaklah tampak duli mahkota zubaidah duduk hampar di mata.” baginda tersenyum seraya madah, mengapa di situ adidna zubaidah kursi teratur semuanya sudah duduk bertiga alangkah indah zubaidah tunduk seraya berkata, “biar disini patik yang lata paduka adinda diamlah serta patik nan takut di dalam cita.” the next findings were the noble characters and the women’s jobs in child care service. on this page, some stanzas showed the noble character, patience. although siti zubaidah was humiliated by her mother-in-law, she kept her patience. on the other hand, siti zubaidah also made her husband calm. it showed the efforts of siti zubaidah to keep her family sakinah. siti zubaidah was also sincerely caring for other people’s and the other ministries’ children to recite the al-qur'an. (1) zubaidah berkata, benarlah itu tetapi tuanku jangan begitu jangan dicapak barang suatu akhirnya kelak jadi tak tentu kepada piker patik seorang bukannya kasih demikian garang tuanku menyakiti hatinya orang patik juga dimarah orang patik jangan dibilangkan apa ditinggalkan tidak menjadi apa putri dua jangan diberi apa janganlah tidak tuanku sapa.” (page 152, stanzas 1-3) the stanzas were in line with al-qur’an, surah al-baqarah, verse 45, and verse 153 because even siti zubaidah was humiliated, she remained patient. she realized that patience was the solution. besides that, there were also pages showing how siti zubaidah took care of the children from other people and other ministries and teach them to recite the al-qur'an. (1) banyak orang menyerahkan anaknya disuruh perintah apa sukanya oleh zubaidah diterima semuanya belajar mengaji sekalian anaknya berhimpun sekalian anak menteri ia baik-baik di dalam negeri belajar mengaji sekalian anaknya diperbuat seperti saudara sendiri (page 153, stanzas 3-4) the stanzas were in line with al-qur’an, surah al-baqarah, 233. the next theme was about women as the partners of men. this finding could be seen on page 181 until 182. at that time, siti zubaidah was told by her husband that the enemy had approached the country's territory to catch them. zubaidah was shocked. she showed her compassion and responsibility to her husband. the islamic feminism realization was about the roles of women as the partners of men. seraya berpikir di dalam hatinya baik ikut bersama ianya selly putri, pratami nurhayati, & agus saripudin siti zubaidah: the islamic feminism review based on barlas’ theory 308 sebarang hal kuturut semuanya hidup mati bersama dianya tuanku ganti ibu dan bapa akan memeliharakan dagang yang papa sekarang tuanku demikian rupa patik pun juga ia serupa (page 181 182, stanza 7 and 1). the finding was in line with al-qur'an, surah at-taubah, 71. the next theme was the roles as wife and mother of children. the finding was in line with stanzas on page 216 as shown below. (1) ada sedikit patik pesanku zubaidah itu patik pertaruhkan jangan tidak tuanku simpankan karena amal patik tangguhkan siapa tahu patik nan mati putera nan kelak jadikan ganti bunda peliharkaan dengan seperti jangan sekali dirusakkan hati (page 216, stanzas 7-8) the next theme was about the job’s profession as a trader. the finding of the theme was implicitly found in syair-syair siti zubaidah. it was strengthened by the summary of syair siti zubaidah written by sayekti and jaruki (2010). the next finding was about self-respect. the theme was found implicitly in the poems. however, it could be felt and understood based on the emerging plot. it was when siti zubaidah was proposed by many men but she kept her principle to choose. the other evidence could be read from how she kept strong and patient although she was humiliated by her parent-in-law. she was also violated by kilan cahaya, the chinese daughter mated by her parents-in-law for her husband. it was in line with the al-qur’an, surah ahzab: 35. the poems were arranged orderly and continuously. it indicated the intention of the writer to tell the story about siti zubaidah without ignoring the beauty aspect. it was in line with faizin (2019). the emerging islamic feminism was not only found in the main character but also in the other characters. the finding showed the implementation of islamic feminism practices. two matters could be discussed: (1) the islamic feminism in general based on 17 themes taken from barlas’ theory (2002) and islamic feminism themes by asriaty (2014), junaidi & hadi (2010), and solihatin (2017), and (2) the heroic indications of women's characters based on the 17 guideline theme. the obtained islamic feminism could also rebut the assumption that islamic feminism in indonesia emerged in the 18s century. it was in line with a study by luthfiyah (2015). this islamic feminism is important to teach for english learners (l. a. irawan, 2020). in syair siti zubaidah, leadership and feminism did not only emerge in the main character. the emergence of the influential characters in the story indicated that islamic feminism, in the form of women's leadership, could also influence the economic state of a community. it was in line with a study by prantiasih (2014). in syair siti zubaidah, the finding was also shown by the profession of siti zubaidah, as a trader. the heroism also emerged when the main character went to the battle zone; when she had confidence and compliance; when she did something without ulterior motives and giving up; and when she did anything based on the taqwa attitudes toward allah swt (anri, 2014). the realization of heroism based on islamic feminism was such as the character and patience of the main character to deal with unpleasant action. the realization was also seen in how she kept her family sakinah and kept struggling. it was in line with nugraha (2019) about excellent examples of despair and pessimistic antitheses. in islam, being desperate is forbidden. it was in line with the commandment of allah in surah al-hijr: 55-56. they responded, “we give you good news in all truth, so do not be one of those who despair.” he exclaimed, “who would despair of the mercy of their lord except the misguided?” [qs. al-hijr: 55-56] the other efforts could be seen when the main character taught the children of her parent-in-law country to recite al-qur’an and when she departed to save her husband although she was pregnant. although the main character was reviled and although her husband could not do anything, she sincerely shared her knowledge and tried to get the news about her husband who was on the battlefield. her toughness was not an easy matter to do. women are commonly more aware of toughness. it was in line with a study by lisa, kintan, andhini, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 309 & risha (2015). this attitude could lead to good prejudice, allah’s blessing, struggles and prayers, and belief about the divine assistance of allah swt (istiningtyas, 2013). the efforts of siti zubaidah to get her husband’s news was realized when she masqueraded into syahra and a soldier. it seemed like a feminist practice but this finding was not in line with the 17 themes of islamic feminisms. however, her ingenuity could be categorized as the features of heroism. it was not giving up the character. it was in line with sakdiah (2016). as a realization of heroism, the commandment of allah swt indicates that humans are obligated to seek a solution and to observe and solve problems brilliantly and cleverly. it can be seen from surah al-baqarah: 164. indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth; the alternation of the day and the night; the ships that sail the sea for the benefit of humanity; the rain sent down by allah from the skies, reviving the earth after its death; the scattering of all kinds of creatures throughout; the shifting of the winds; and the clouds drifting between the heavens and the earth—˹in all of this˺ are surely signs for people of understanding. (qs. al-baqarah:164) ingenuity is the given wisdom by allah swt as a realization of heroism. it could be seen in surah al-baqarah: 269. allah grants wisdom to whoever he wills. and whoever is granted wisdom is certainly blessed with a great privilege. but none will be mindful ˹of this˺ except people of reason. (q.s al-baqarah: 269). fortitude is a heroic feature of siti zubaidah. however, it was not included in islamic feminism. this feature could be found in the stanzas containing the actions of kilan cahaya, the daughter of the chinese king. when the king was caught and he did not want to change his religion. thus, the king of kumbayat took his daughter to be married to sultan abidin. although siti zubaidah knew about it, she was patient, tough, and compliant. on the other hand, sultan abidin could not forget and ignore siti zubaidah from his heart. the fortitude and patience of siti zubaidah could be seen from these stanzas. kilan cahaya putri cina diserahkan dia memerintah istana memerintahkan kerja amat sempurna seberang dewata semua kena zubaidah memakaikan putri dudukkan diatas peraduan istri diadap jawatan kanan dan kiri parasnya elok sedang ada gahari setelah sudah hidup dikakannya memakaikan pulak akan suaminya terlalu manis rupa rajahnya sangat ikhlas rasa hatinya memberikan suaminya terlalu rela sedikit tidak berhati cela terlalu suka hatinya pula karena besar menapat pahala (page 350, stanzas 6 -7, page 351, stanzas 1 and 2). from the excerpt, it could be discussed that kilan cahaya, the one that was married to sultan abidin, was given a credence to govern the country. therefore, both siti zubaidah and kilan cahaya were interacting with each other. however, siti zubaidah knew what she had to do. she remained patient. she knew how this matter could happen. her fortitude was seen in stanza 1 and 2 of page 351. from this discussion, it could be understood that islamic feminism has been existing for a long time ago. it is regulated by allah swt and explained in al-qur’an and al-hadith. even so, human still has various perspectives that are the gifts of allah swt. thus, the human could realize their tolerance (nuh, 2015). english learners in indonesia should be aware of these islamic feminism practices. the purpose is to make them able to screen other feminist practices and adjust them based on islamic values and our national cultures (isa, 2017; sofa, 2018; zaitun & wardani, 2019). from the discussion, it could be known that islamic feminism could be grouped into heroic selly putri, pratami nurhayati, & agus saripudin siti zubaidah: the islamic feminism review based on barlas’ theory 310 values. however, the values could not always cover islamic feminism. islamic feminism is different from the other feminisms that demand gender equality as men. it is guided by al-qur’an and al-hadith and has been regulated fairly. by using barlas’ theory (2002) and the islamic themes of the three previous studies by asriaty (2014), junaidi & hadi (2010), and solihatin (2017), 17 themes of islamic feminism were found. they were used as the guideline to analyze islamic feminism in syair siti zubaidah. conclusion this research aims to analyze islamic feminism in the heroic story of syair siti zubaidah. the emerging themes could differ the islamic feminism to similar matters. the differences were about the women's images, daily behaviors, and other things that did not have islamic feminism. the emergence of the influential characters in the story indicated that islamic feminism, such as leadership, heroism, self-confidence, compliance, without ulterior motive, not giving up, and other actions based on taqwa attitude toward allah swt. it also indicated how noble characters and patience could deal with unpleasant activities; how female characters could keep the family sakinah and could struggle to go in the battle. the other struggles were such as teaching the children how to recite al-qur’an. it proved that islamic feminism was based on islamic religious principles. this research recommends the next researches to apply the study of al-qur’an and al-hadith. it is also suggested for the next researchers to use alqur'an and al-hadith interpretation from the experts and not the subjective interpretation. reference afifah, h. z., & jamjam, a. 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(2019). islamic values in the context of english learning and teaching. english language in focus (elif), 1(1), 70. https://doi.org/10.24853/elif.1.1.70-80 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 37 investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice” ridwin purba english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of simalungun, pematangsiantar, indonesia email: nridwin@yahoo.com herman (corresponding author) english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: herman@uhn.ac.id veronika r. m. manullang english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: veron9515@gmail.com magdalena ngongo english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of kristen artha wacana, kupang, indonesia email: magdalenangongo12@gmail.com apa citation: purba, r., herman., manullang, v. r. m., ngongo, m. (2021). investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice”. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 37-48. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5352 received: 16-08-2021 accepted: 23-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. language is the ability possessed by humans to communicate with other humans using signs, for example words and movements. language is used to know how to produce and understand and acquire sentences with particular meanings in communicational interaction (sitanggang, hutahaean, and herman 2019). according to devianty (2018), language is a communication tool used to convey intentions, ideas, messages, and feelings to others. language becomes one of the important connecting tools between human beings, because humans are creatures that interact and socialize with other human. with language, human can be easily connected with other people. therefore, language can be said to be mandatory and important in terms of communication. communicating with others can use several abstract: this research was conducted to analyze decoding fillers in english learning talk show. the researchers made two groups of non-native english speakers to investigate fillers, group one with little or no abroad experienced speakers and group two with long term abroad experienced speakers. the researchers used descriptive qualitative as a method that describes an objective situation or certain event based on facts that appear or should be followed by an attempt to draw general conclusion. the procedure is ethnographic research which is ethnographic by qualitative enable researchers to understand the data by the functions of language (words, phrase and sentence) by grouping words that have same functions into categories. the researchers would analyze and conclude the data to be studied. in this research the data to be reviewed is english with alice which contain fillers. the researchers found one hundred sixty-eight fillers with the exclusion of filler used by the host and both of speakers. after analyzing the data, the researchers found that 2 groups (14 guests) in the talk show english with alice used different functions of decoding fillers. the functions in group one are mostly (a) to begin and close a discourse and (c) to hold the floor. moreover, the functions in group two are mostly (c) to hold the floor and (g) to express the response. keywords: conversation; decoding fillers; english learning; literature; talkshow. ridwin purba, herman, veronika r. m. manullang, & magdalena ngongo investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice” 38 types in language, those are oral language, written language, sign language, and inner language. oral language is a communication between humans to express their intentions through words spoken from oral or mouth. written language is a form of communication of vocabulary arranged into sentences that have meaning and then poured in written form. sign language is a form of communication that uses limbs such a hands and lips movement. the inner language is a direct mental interaction of sound using the contents of heart. (emmorey, 2011). interaction with others can use english as a tool. english is one of some international language which is used by most people around the world. english is important because english is a means for globalized community to interact socially, educationally and economically (kilickaya, 2009). english knowledge is needed if someone wants to coming up in life (mishanthi, 2018). the importance of english can be seen from some sides of life, for example job requirement, one of the requirements is language competence, both of spoken and written form (herman, purba, thao, & purba, 2020; sinaga, herman, and pasaribu, 2020). it must be learned by people who consider communicating in english as a foreign language or a second language wanting to compete and survive. communication can be defined as the process of transmitting information and common understanding from one person to another (keyton, 2011; van thao, herman, ha, thuy, and tho, 2020). the speaker and listener have different levels of ability or understanding. moreover, english speakers or listeners are foreign or second language. the level of language proficiency, interruption, emotions and attitudes can change or prevent messages to be conveyed. although there is always a problem in communication, the recipient needs to decode the message. feedback is needed to find out whether the message was received and understood correctly by the recipient. (luneburg, 2010). when the sender and receiver interact verbally face to face, they will tend to communicate spontaneously. usually the interaction is not planned. most spontaneous utterances are produced with a very different preparation from the planned communication. speakers prepare themselves in advance when they participate in planned speaking situations: speeches, presentation, and ceremonies (kurniawati and astita, 2011). the preparation before speaking helps speech to flow fluently. in contrast, it is predicted that a spontaneous speech will tend to have some disfluencies (uwasri, 2018). disfluencies are prevailingly found in spontaneous interactions. shiberg in uwasri (2018) has identified that in normal speech naturally produced, disfluencies can affect the words and disfluencies occur one third of utterances of speakers (p. 2). the disfluencies in spontaneous utterances consist of various functions: example [1] filled pause : uh, um repetition : the the repair : any health cov – any health insurance false start : it’s fir – i could get it where i work fillers are the sounds of words without meaning that indicate hesitation (oroh, 2016). they contain both lexical (e.g. i mean, you know, actually, you see) and nonlexical words (e.g. uh, um, uh-huh). there are various fillers given by different researchers such as silent pause, filled pause, repetition, false start, and lexical fillers (macgreger, 2008). these terms depend on the view of each scholar towards the functions of fillers. as mentioned, fillers are normally found in verbal communication. oral communication skills seem difficult to develop for non-native english. because of non-english speaking context and least opportunity to interact with native english speakers, oral skills difficulty is a perquisite issue for learners (khan, 2011). as fillers to cognitive processing load, when people engage in spontaneous interaction, fillers can be seen as stigmata of speech production. moreover, the flow of speech requires willingness to communicate that ground on self efficacy of speakers. in other words, the speaker's own evaluation of their communicative abilities has an impact on the verbal performance of language (doordinejad and afshar, 2014). so, the speech flow in interactions partly depends on speakers’ confidence to communicate. speaking english for non-native speaker is not as simple as people think. they acknowledged that it was really difficult to understand the words because poor of vocabularies in english and lack of experience to use english in their life. many nonnative english speakers do not speak english well which results in disfluencies and fillers when english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 39 speaking. the previous study of disfluencies and filler have been conducted by oroh (2016) entitled “the eloquence of cast in the harry potter series six and seven”. this study aims to show the disfluencies produced by characters in the harry potter series six and seven. in the conclusion, she found five types of speech disfluencies. the types are: silent pause, filled pause, filled pause, repetition, repair, and lexical fillers. schanadt in oroh (2016) stated that disfluencies is a natural part of language, and therefore an understanding of the role of speech fluency is broadly an understanding of speech fluency itself as an influence in the communication process. example [2]: harry: she want um the blue…uh…the red ball. from the example, oroh (2016) found that fillers used by harry showed his disfluency in speaking make the people difficult to understand. this happens because harry doesn't know what he wanted to say to the person who spoke to him, and makes harry a little confused and thinking. uwasri (2018) argued that fillers are considered as one of the deficiencies in speaking. the use of fillers in speaking can damage or change the actual meaning of the mind. uwasri also said that fillers were considered as impolite in speaking. therefore, the researchers choose to analyze fillers in this research. the researchers want to show that fillers can be seen not as a form of deficiency but rather as an aid in conversation. researchers believed fillers can help students to gather ideas or words that will be spoken next when speaking next. the use of fillers can also help students to convey their true intentions and objectives (fabelia, 2020). nowadays, students are raised in age where technology in advancing rapidly and they are constantly exposed to digital media, making them very different from earlier generations of learners. up to date it is needed to make them interested in learning. implement audiovisual media such as audio, television, film and video that are more effective than traditional repetitive practices and exercises (pun, 2013). moreover, students can gain authentic language use that includes a number of varieties, dialects, and accents of english (kenne, 2014). one of the audiovisual media is a talk show program. it represents spontaneous conversation that the use of fillers can be predicted to occur. the use of language in a talk show has been remarked that it intertwines both casual conversation and institutional talk. institutional talks are adapted patterns of talk and action from casual conversation by pressing conversational dialogue to more restricted practices (uwasri, 2018). therefore, the language use in a talk show can be concerned as spontaneous speech. english with alice is a talk show welcomes guests who are non-native english speaker. guests invited to this program have different levels of english language skills, accents, dialects, and even varying english. guests of this program have different english learning experiences. this program consists of everyday expressions and simple words that are often used. the researchers choose english with alice because this program very interesting to be examined and researched in more detail. researchers also chose to use this program for research because english with alice is a program where conversations in this program use a lot of fillers. this research investigated the filler function used in the english learning talk show program, english with alice. this study investigates the use of in-depth fillers found in spontaneous responses through the interaction of speakers of english as a foreign language and a second language. this research serves to help english teachers to create communicative responses through the use of fillers as a communication strategy for learning. based on the reasons above, the researchers would like to conduct a research entitled: an analysis of decoding fillers used in english learning talk show “english with alice”. method because the research aimed to examine fillers’ functions used by non-native speakers of english when they were engaging in conversational response, the qualitative content-based analysis was appropriate for this current study. qualitative research method was a research procedure that produced descriptive data in the form of written or oral words from people and observable behavior (moleong, 2011; munte, herman, arifin, nugroho, and fitriani, 2021). in collecting, expressing various problems and objectives to be achieved, this research was conducted with a descriptive analysis study approach. according to sugiyono (2017), that ridwin purba, herman, veronika r. m. manullang, & magdalena ngongo investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice” 40 descriptive qualitative research is a research method based on a postpositive philosophy that is usually used to examine natural objective conditions in which researchers play a key instrument. meanwhile ufie (2013) discussed a descriptive method as a method that describes an objective situation or certain event based on facts that appear or should be followed by an attempt to draw general conclusions based on these facts (herman, murni, sibarani, 2019) according to rahardjo (2011) there are 8 types of qualitative research that are relatively often conducted or used in qualitative research; qualitative case study, phenomenological research, ethnographic research, grounded theory research, natural observation, focused interviews, document studies and historical research. the researchers used ethnographic research to analyze this research. ethnography is a qualitative methodology that lends itself to the study of the beliefs, social interactions, and behaviours of small societies, involving participation and observation over a period of time, and the interpretation of the data collected (van thao et al, 2021). ethnography is a very in-depth study of behavior that occurs naturally in a particular culture or social group. ethnographic research is research that has the aim to examine the forms and functions of language available in culture which are then used to communicate by individuals within it. and see how the form and function of these languages become part of the life of a society. (rahardjo, 2011). in order to gain precise understandings following the research questions set in the chapter 1, fillers’ functions were examined through interactants’ conversation in talk show settings. fillers were predicted to occur by speakers of english who possessed different levels of english verbal performance and english language learning background experiences. in addition, both groups shared some characteristics: guests need to hold a non-native english speaker citizenship or have one of parents who was born non-native because this study investigated the verbal interactions of foreign nonnative speakers of english, and guests possessed willingness to communicate and a motivation. these represented a role model of how an inquisitive non-native learner of english. however, the english learning background experiences of guests were necessary to classify the guests into different groups: 1. little or no abroad experienced speakers, and 2. long term abroad experienced speakers. group 1: little or no abroad experienced speakers this group was regarded guests who encountered less english speaking surroundings. the guests who had an experience in any study programs in universities which contained any languages of instruction were classified into this group. it included any programs conducted in an international school because english speaking atmosphere that speakers experienced was still limited. also, speakers who have abroad experiences in short-term visit as less than a year in any english speaking countries or english as a foreign language/ second language countries were considered to this group because staying abroad for a few months had no effect on oral performance gains (llanes, 2011). group 2: long term abroad experienced speakers guests have abroad experiences in english speaking countries or english as a second language countries for long-term visit, study or even stay abroad at least more than a year led success to speakers’ oral production. they held an educational certificate from any english speaking countries or english as a second language countries: a diploma, a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, or a doctoral degree. from both groups above, it shows that guests exposed to different levels of english environment were grouped differently because speakers will appear with ease and confidence when they have study or living abroad experiences. this lead to less disfluencies in speech. moreover, study abroad or living abroad helps speakers acquire speech fluency and oral proficiency (kenne, 2014) due to speakers’ confidence to speak or communicate that come from speakers’ self-efficacy or their own judgments towards themselves. the researchers searched the fillers used in those speech and categorized them into each function by using uwasri’s functions of fillers to analyze. the source of data in this study is subject from which the data can be obtained (arikunto, 2013; van thao et al, 2020). this research focuses on analyzing decoding fillers in english talk show, english with alice. this english learning talk show, english with alice, can be classified as one of day time talk shows due to the air time of the program that will be broadcast at 20:00 p.m.-20.15 p.m on instagram @alissayatsoi every fridays. researchers got the video from https:// english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 instagram.com//happyalicetsoi?igshid=igywz8. according to the definition of day time talk shows mentioned above, celebrities, politicians, or ordinary people who engage in controversial issues are welcomed as guests of the show. the guests of this english learning talk show are mainly thai celebrities whose english oral performance is different since they experience english learning language atmosphere dissimilarly. among various english learning talk show programs in thailand, english with alice was considered as the suitable data for analysis due to the popularity of the program. english with alice has a channel on ig website that is currently followed by over 400k of instagram accounts (this information was collected on june 17, 2020). the availability of the program, instagram website helps audience easily accessible. the show welcomes guests who possess a wide range of english speaking performance as they were born, raised, and educated in different english environment. some grew up in thailand and have had little or no abroad experience in any english speaking countries while some have a long-term visit and study in english speaking countries. unlike other english learning programs that solely focus on teaching english grammar and vocabularies, the guests in english with alice were asked a few questions by the show host relating to english speaking experiences: the place of birth, education, work. the information was vital to the researchers to classify each thai speaker into the groups mentioned in research design. also, fillers were predicted to be found in the conversation of these guests whose english verbal performance was different. therefore, this english learning talk show, english with alice, contained with resourceful data to analyze. table 1. thai guests name list for english with alice 2020’ episode episode guests’ name episode guests’ name episode 1 love pattranite episode 21 kaykai salaider episode 2 puimekster episode 22 tul pakorn episode 3 nanon korapat episode 23 apple lapisara episode 4 ciizephr apichaya saejung episode 24 perthpp tanapon episode 5 toptap jirakit episode 25 jennie panhan episode 6 singto prachaya episode 26 mark siwat episode 7 ain satida episode 27 zommarie eugunie episode 8 mond tanichai episode 28 aye sarun episode 9 namtan tipnaree episode 29 cutekiw anongnart y episode 10 nara thepnupa episode 30 nae anothai episode 11 praewah nichapatc episode 31 kangkorn episode 12 pluempong episode 32 preenp rasisrarat episode 13 fiat pattadon episode 33 goyyog arachaporns episode 14 janeeyah episode 34 pop panu chiraguna episode 15 gusbanana episode 35 earth natravee episode 16 nammon krittanai episode 36 mbabby episode 17 tytan episode 37 captain episode 18 toptap napatchokenjidachai episode 38 nutthapong episode 19 bifern episode 39 kovasin episode 20 gadd_de episode 40 cheeren hvk table 2. the overall english with alice episodes as the sample group 1 (little or no abroad) group 2 (abroad experience) episode guest’s name episode guest’s name episode 3 nanon korapat episode 12 pluempong episode 5 toptap jirakit episode 17 tytan episode 6 singto prachaya episode 18 toptap naphat episode 9 namtan tipnaree episode 22 tul pakorn episode 24 perthppe tanapon episode 27 zommarie eugunie episode 25 jennie panhan episode 28 aye sarun episode 37 captain episode 36 mbabby ridwin purba, herman, veronika r. m. manullang, & magdalena ngongo investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice” 42 the researchers chose 14 episodes english with alice, 7 episodes in group 1 little or no abroad experience and 7 episodes in group 2 abroad experience because the researchers had made preliminary observations in these episodes. there are many fillers that support the data needed in this research compare the other episodes. the data of this research is collected from conversation in talk show english with alice. the process data collection itself is: (1) starting from watching each episode from english with alice. the researchers watched english with alice twice an episode because the target verbal discourse of the study was pragmatically considered. (2) selecting the conversation through the website. their conversation was mixed with both english and thai because some guests had difficulties to convey proper structure or vocabularies. (3) trying to find the words, phrases, sentences which contain fillers. (4) collecting fillers were categorized into each function. in this research, the data is analyzed by following several steps. (1) watching and listening the videos of the talk show. (2) identifying the sounds, words or phrases on the conversation that contain the fillers. (3) giving the code on the data to make easier in analyzing. (4) analyzing the fillers meaning based on own interpretation of the data. (5) classifying the data related to uwasri (2020), and explaining the fillers and fillers meaning of the sounds, words or phrases on the videos descriptively. results and discussion results after analyzing the use of decoding fillers in english learning talk show “english with alice”, the researchers found that: there are eight fillers’ function are used by 14 guests in english with alice program, they are (1) to begin and close discourse; (2) to change a turn; (3) to hold the floor; (4) to change the topic; (5) to constrain the relevance of one clause to the previous clause; (6) to repair discourse; (7) to express a response and (8) to influence the interactional and intimacy of the speaker and listener. the most dominant are used by 14 guests based on the experience of non-native english speakers. based on the analysis, the researchers found the percentages of fillers’ function that used by 14 guests in english with alice. it can be seen in the following table: table 3. summary of the number of fillers and percentages found in both groups of non-native english speakers including the host of the program fillers’s function group 1 (had little or no abroad group) group 2 (abroad group) frequency percentages frequency percentages (a) to begin and close discourse 7 10,14% 17 17,17% (b) to change a turn 4 5,79% 4 4,04% (c) to hold the floor 19 27,53% 31 31,31% (d) to change the topic 4 5,79% 6 6,06% (e) to constrain the relevance of connected discourse 5 7,24% 4 4,04% (f) to repair discourse 6 8,69% 8 8,08% (g) to express a response 16 23,18% 18 18,18% (h) to influence the interactional and intimacy of the speaker and listener. 8 11,59% 11 11,11% total 69 99,99% 99 99,99% in group 1 consisting of little or no abroad experienced speakers, the most used functions were (g) to express the response applied to the speech 16 times (23,18%) and (c) to hold the floor applied to the speech 19 times (27,53%). for group 2, they were people who experienced long-term abroad. in this group, the functions, (g) to express the response was found 18 times (1818%) and (c) to hold the floor was found 31 times (31,31%). however, when fillers produced by the host of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 the show were excluded and the researchers compared guests’ fillers found from both groups, the findings revealed the speakers from group 1 and group 2, which were categorized into different groups due to english language learning background experience, resulted similarly as the function (c) hold the floor was applied mostly. table 4.8 below demonstrated the summary of the number of fillers and percentages in both groups of speakers. table 4. summary of the number of fillers and percentages found in both groups of guests fillers’s function group 1 (had little or no abroad group) group 2 (abroad group) frequency percentages frequency percentages (a) to begin and close discourse 3 8,10% 14 18,91% (b) to change a turn 4 10,81% 3 4,05% (c) to hold the floor 17 45,94% 27 36,48% (d) to change the topic 0 0% 3 4,05% (e) to constrain the relevance of connected discourse 4 10,81% 3 4,05% (f) to repair discourse 5 13,51% 6 8,10% (g) to express a response 4 10,81% 10 13,51% (h) to influence the interactional and intimacy of the speaker and listener. 8 10.81% 8 10.81% total 37 99,99% 74 99,99% from table 4 above, it showed that the speakers from group 1, who had little or no abroad experienced, employed (c) to hold the floor 17 times (45, 94%), (f) to repair discourse 5 times (13,51%) and from group 2, who had abroad experience, employed (c) to hold the floor 27 times (36,48%), (a) to begin and close a discourse 14 times (18,91%). table 5. specific forms of fillers in each function found in group 1 and 2 included fillers used by the host functions group 1 (had little or no abroad experienced) group 2 (abroad experienced) forms of fillers number forms of fillers number (a) to begin and close discourse so, okay, uhm, yeah 7 so, okay, uhm, ah, so now, ah so, right, ah. 17 (b) to change a turn ah, uhm, well 4 ah, okay, all right. 4 (c) to hold the floor uhm-uhm, like, kind of, well 19 like, uhm, uh, um yeah, and um, oh, yeah 31 (d) to change the topic well, okay 4 but, okay, so, now, uhm, well 6 (e) to constrain the relevance of connected discourse so, okay 5 so, yeah 4 (f) to repair discourse like, uhm, ah 6 yeah, i mean, oh, ah 8 (g) to express a response yeah, uh huh, uhuhm, oh my god, wihh 16 okay, right, oh no, uh-huh, uh-uhm, ooh, yeah-yeah 18 (h) to influence the interactional and intimacy of the speaker and listener right?, yeah?, really? 8 okay?, all right?, yeah, and yeah, you know 11 totally, fillers were found 168 times in speech from both groups of speakers. the number of fillers in group 1 was 68 and group 2 was 99 respectively included fillers used by the host, and these fillers were analyzed as well as classified into different functions. ridwin purba, herman, veronika r. m. manullang, & magdalena ngongo investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice” 44 table 6. specific forms of fillers in each function found in group 1 and 2 excluded fillers used by the host functions group 1 (had little or no abroad experienced) group 2 (abroad experienced) forms of fillers number forms of fillers number (a) to begin and close discourse uhm, yeah 3 so, okay, uhm, ah, so now, ah so, ah 14 (b) to change a turn ah, uhm 4 ah, okay 3 (c) to hold the floor uhm-uhm, like, well 17 like, uhm, uh, um yeah, and um, oh, yeah 27 (d) to change the topic 0 but, okay, so, now, uhm, well 3 (e) to constrain the relevance of connected discourse so, okay 4 so, yeah 3 (f) to repair discourse like, uhm 5 yeah, i mean, oh, ah 6 (g) to express a response yeah, uh huh, uhuhm, oh, wihh 4 okay, right, oh no, uh-huh, uh-uhm, ooh, yeah-yeah 10 (h) to influence the interactional and intimacy of the speaker and listener right?, yeah? 4 okay?, all right?, yeah, and yeah, you know 8 the graph below compares different functions that two groups of speakers applied to their speech included fillers’ function used by the host. figure 1. fillers’ functions found in both groups of non-native english speakers however, when the researchers excluded fillers’ functions applied by the host, fillers were found 37 times in group 1 and 74 times in group 2 speakers who were the guests of the program. the most used functions in group 1 speakers were (c) to hold the floor and (f) to repair the course. the most used functions in group 2 speakers were (c) to hold the floor and (a) to begin and close a discourse. figure 4.2 compares fillers’ functions found among the guests in both group 1 and 2 separately. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 45 figure 2. fillers’ functions found in both groups of guests discussion fillers not only found in daily activity, people can also found fillers in the talk show program. fillers is a strategy that is used to control, master and cover up deficiency in speak english. long term abroad experienced group of guest mostly used fillers as a habit and style in speak english. meanwhile, had little or no abroad experience used fillers as a strategy to cover up the deficiency and to fill the blank while think and produce idea or new words to spoken next. the researchers discussed there are eight fillers’ functions are used by 14 guests in english with alice program namely (a) to begin and close a discourse; (b) to change the turn; (c) to hold the floor; (d) to change the topic; (e) to constrain the relevance of one clause to the previous clause; (f) to repair discourse; (g) to express the response and (h) to influence the interactional and intimacy of the speaker and listener. the related research was done by fatihurrahman (2016) “the use of fillers in thesis proposal presentation by indonesian efl learners”. based on the research findings above, the researchers found there were similarities with the findings from the previous research. the object both research was non-native english speaker. both of the research used same method that was qualitative research. the difference on this research was the previous researchers analyzed types of fillers, meanwhile this research analyzed functions of fillers. this research was used theory of uwasri and the previous research used theory of clarck and tree. in short, fillers can help non-native english speaker to cover up their deficiency speak in english conclusion the research was conducted to classify the decoding fillers into its functions. the conversation between non-naïve english speaker interactions is the main interest for this research. because of nonenglish speaking context and least opportunity to verbally exchange in english, alice welcoming non-native english speakers who differently posseses levels of english due to distinctive english language learning experience in her program is considered resourceful. based on the findings and discussion in chapter four, it can be concluded that there are different functions of decoding fillers used in english learning talk show “english with alice”. the fillers’ functions were differentiated to be (a) to begin and close discourse; (b) to change the topic; (c) to hold the floor; (d) to change the topic; (e) to constrain the relevance of connected discourse; (f) to repair discourse; (g) to express the response and (h) to influence the interactional an intimacy of the speaker and listener. the utterances which were analyzed in this research did not cover all functions of decoding fillers. after analyzed the data, the researchers found that 2 groups (14 guests) in the talk show english with alice used different functions of decoding fillers. the functions in group 1 mostly were (a) to begin and close a discourse and (c) to hold the floor. moreover, the functions in group 2 mostly were (c) to hold the floor and (g) to express the response. the researchers found out that fillers influenced the way of alice guests. the guest with had little or no abroad experience using fillers to cover up their deficiency in speak english. they also use fillers to ridwin purba, herman, veronika r. m. manullang, & magdalena ngongo investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice” 46 fill the blank when think the idea or new words to spoken next. in the guests with had long term abroad experience, the researchers found that they are use filler as a style and a habit in speak english. references arikunto, s. 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(2021). code-switching in learning via zoom application: a study in an efl context. asian esp journal, 17(3.1), pp. 91111. issn: 2206-0979. ridwin purba, herman, veronika r. m. manullang, & magdalena ngongo investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice” 48 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee ambiguity in autobigraphical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology christopher babatunde ogunyemi department of english studies, adekunle ajasin university, nigeria e-mail: bbcoguns2@yahoo.se apa citation: ogunyemi, c. b. (2016). ambiguity in autobiographical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 11-24 received: 19-10-2016 accepted: 22-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: this paper focuses on the examination of ambiguity in autobiographical writings in nigeria. it underscores the architectonic discourse, cultural alienation and ‘self-elevation’ in some selected autobiographies. ambiguity in this instance visualizes that these male narratives hinge on something, which is what we now wish to excavate as an area of serious academic endeavour. and it also hinges on how saro wiwa’s autobiographies who happen to be male is inevitably sexist in orientation, this will, however, be shown when examining in particular the structuring (narratological devices) of the texts. this work valorizes the cardinal representations of self and male gender in enhancing identity for people of diverse perspectives without appreciating female voices which constitute an integral part of the literary history and ideologue. ‘negating women in art is negating history because history is the main discipline through which we can understand gender’ (brereton, 1998, p. 17). this paper encapsulates the motif of dominance and oppression of women because women were only made to be seen and not heard or even represented in such art. however, this situation is disheartening because while the ‘african feminist accommodates men and make them its central assurance, love and care’ (chukwuma, 1990, p. 15), men who are fickle minded literary ideologues delight in over projecting self using the instrument of ‘i’ in autobiographies without recourse to women who hold some basis to their existence. this research work entails a close analysis of the question of gender and displacement originating from these autobiographical writings originating from nigeria and the configuration of the motif of metaphor in male dominated gender in five autobiographical writings in line with narratology and butler’s theory of performativity. keywords: autobiography, ambiguity, narratives, saro wiwa, butler, narratology introduction autobiographical writings are total representations of events surrounding the writer: male or female. many works have been subjected to the culture of imperialism which in the end shows alienation, pain, sorrow, repression and negation. (calvino, 2004, carruth, 1998 and butler, 1968). however, despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writings from anglophone nigeria, this work fully ‘charts the intersection of multiple, contradictory views of the colonial and post colonial images. it illuminates the concept of community and levels of social integration-a persistent pattern of both resistance and accommodation of the domain of male gender in art’ (brereton, 1998, p. 18). autobiographical works sometimes reflect the entire range of practice, including the slave narrative 11 christopher babatunde ogunyemi ambiguity in autobigraphical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology and testimonial, written and oral narratives, spiritual autobiographic, fiction, serial autobiography, verse, diaries and journals, elegy, and parody (d’more, 2012, folkenflik, 1993 and raditlhalo, 2003). the intention of this work is to demonstrate how saro wiwa uses some selected autobiographical works to show specific levels of degradation and environmental waste which affected ogoni culturally, economically and politically. the concern of this work is predicated on the configuration of metaphor in male autobiographical narratives of saro wiwa. the use of ‘male metaphor’, such as artificial creations and self created myths involving the use of ‘i’, and ‘me’ to express life situations most times constitute the focal point for this analysis. in nigeria, many writers such as chinua achebe, aguda, soyinka, obasanjo, buchi emechetta, akachi ezeigbo among others have typified their works in different dimensions to delineate a cordial relationship with societal superstructure. for soyinka in ake, the metaphoric portrayal of self is to denote referentiality between the art and human society; the essence of this is to portray a depiction of art in reality and a reflection of youthful life in contemporary times. reflecting on an event in soyinka’s narrative he opines that: {t}rue, i had done less of grasscutting than most in the formative years but this had been due to the unlucky accident which had nearly taken off my right eye. it had left a permanent scar, a visible reminder to every teacher of what, to everyone, what nothing short of a miracle. overawed by this singular mark of divine protection and, reluctant to tempt fate all over again, the teachers simply ordered me back into the classroom whenever it was time for mowing the grass. i had therefore a retarded education in the art of the oju agba but, i did catch up in my last year in the primary school when the incident had become all but forgotten (1981, p. 169). in the above quotation, the narrator’s childhood reflection is a depiction of the nature of memory and creative imagination which portray metaphors that stimulate the social functioning in society. the narrator would have lost his eyes at childhood; incidentally, it is that same eyes that give him the functioning sight of the society he lives in. the same metaphoric element is visualised by aguda when he says that ‘i never planned to go into the legal profession. i had no ambition, hope or desire to do so, until march 1947, when fate seemed to have left me to no other alternative’ (1980, p. 1). fate had left him in a good choice that spurs him to the legal limelight. writers of the autobiographical narratives either use metaphors in the domain of general and the particular in order to demonstrate their perception of society. our intention in this paper is not to be bogged down by the tradition in writing autobiographical narratives but to examine succinctly male dominance and the background of ‘patrilineage’ in wiwa’s aforementioned works which explain what most africa society’s experience in their contact with one another. according to nwachukwu – agbada, the ‘i’ in african literary autobiographies refers both to personal and public, the private and civic (1987, p. 10). ‘the eye of the society is mostly celebrated in autobiographical narratives’ (nwachukwu-agbada, 2003, p. 9). looking at various narratives, one would agree with emma kafalenos that 12 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee narrative writings ‘provide tools that help to explain the process of perceiving and interpreting event’ (2001, p. 36). however, raditlhalo’s ‘authorizing the self’ is axiomatic, he opines that: at the heart of life-writing are individuals who begin to narrativise their story in most instances for public consumption. while there may be many reasons why people write their life-narratives, in western society at least the genesis of the genre is usually associated with the confessions of saint augustine (c.400) though it reaches back to antiquity with, say, seneca’s letters from a stoic (ca. 63-65). this perception, amongst others, has been instrumental in the logocentricism at the heart of western culture, which is to say that the self has teleological beginning that is uniquely western in origin. it must be added that it is not only western society which has preserved a distinct genre in life writings, as felicity a. nussbaum attests (1988, n. 8). despite evidence to the contrary from scholars outside europe, however, this logocentric view is deeply embedded in western scholarship; an attack on such logocentricism is provided, among other scholars, by gayatri spivak (40). ‘the concept of ‘self’ becomes the major preoccupation in autobiographical writings’ (freedom 2004, raditlhalo, 2003 and fox-genove, 1986). while this kind of narration is a representation of sequential events in the narrative. the representation is a process in which events are revealed successively, one after the other. autobiographical narratives follow the sequence of perceived representation of events conceived in a parallel sequence. kafalenos further explains that this kind of narrative is a sequence in which the identical events occur in chronological order. the russian formalist named the two sequences: sjuzhet (the representation) and fabula (the chronological sequence abstracted from the representation). fabula is made by readers from the information found in a sjuzhet. nigerian autobiographical writings also conform to the application of both sjuzhet and fabula in their narrative portrayal of self in society. the readers make their comments from the explications found in the documented texts and thematic preoccupations which are deeply rooted in the autobiographical narratives. the essence is to guide readers to discern a particular metaphoric configuration in relation to literary activities which interpret given events. readers are led to include in a configuration certain revealed events and not others primarily by the relation between a sjuzhet and its fabula–a relation that is illuminated by gaps (kafalenos, 2001, p. 32). according to kafalenos in looking at barthes’ ‘autobiography’, he opines that: {r}oland barthes identifies “narrative contract” which throws some searchlight in the importance of autobiographical narratives. the bargain in this instance is between the narrator (of both the framing narrative and the contained narrative). as we begin to read the autobiographical narrative, on the first reading, we discover initially mine de rochefide’s motivation. the narrator’s companion is fascinated by the painting she sees at the party to which the narrator has taken her and she says she is “too beautiful for a man” (honore de balzac). the narrative form of an autographical writing is usually shared by both historiography and fictional narrative. this is considered to be the most important parallel between the two genres. here, contemporary literary and historical theories view 13 christopher babatunde ogunyemi ambiguity in autobigraphical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology historiography as another art form, which predominated until mid-19th century (ibid). contemporary writers like hayden white (1978) have also attempted to prove the fictional character of historiography by examining its narrative structures and recourse to literary modes of narration. white focuses on the narrative structures at the surface of the texts; he determines the instruments that constitute narrative force (ibid). nigerian autobiographers get their raw materials from historical issues; this is what white in the words of aristotle tags ‘mimetic representation’ of real historical occurrence or historical processes which are part of the narratives. in addition, they are contingent, metaphorical and, in the final analysis, fictional constructs. this means that historical discourse should not be considered as mirror image of the set of events which we simply describe autobiographical (ibid). writings attempt to prove that language and narrative form are not transparent media that merely enable the neutral representation of historical processes. chukwuma remarks that the woman is portrayed in various works including the autobiographical narrative as ‘a handicapped daughter, wife and mother even when the decisions affect her directly’ (2004, p. 131). various narrations have portrayed the fact that the most feasible way to x-ray gender factor of female subjugation in written autobiographies is her economic dependence on men and the social demand that a woman give all her earnings to the home (132). autobiographical literature is as old as man; it spreads gradually from the old period in art till this present dispensation. autobiographical works take many forms, from intimate writings made during life that are necessarily intended for publication (including letters, diaries, journals, memories and reminiscences to formal autobiography (freedom, 1993 and goodman, 1993). ‘outstanding examples of the genre extended from st augustine’s confessions (c. ad 400) to vladimir nabokov’s speak memory (1951). autobiographical narratives, as literary genre, narrate the story of one’s own life’ (raditlhalo, 2003, green, 2009 and hughes, 1993). this writing is predicated on ‘the individual’s quest to narrate his psychoanalysis; this is of interest as the story is told by the patient to the analyst and to himself’ (nwachukwu-agbada, 2003, p. 67). in the modern sense, autobiography began as a form of confession (saint augustine), even though there are memoirs in classical literature, such introspective works can be considered attempts at self-analysis before the psychoanalysis discovery of the unconscious. in 1925, sigmund freud wrote an autobiographical study, in which the story of his life merges with that of the creation of psychoanalysis. according to freud, biographical truth does not exist, since the author must rely on lies, secrets and hypocrisy. the same is true of autobiography. from this point of view, it is interesting that freud framed his theoretical victory and the birth of psychoanalysis in the form of a psychological novel. the function of autobiography is to use scattered bits of memory to create the illusion of a sense of continuity that can hide the anxiety or even of the absence of the meaning of existence, from a purely narcissistic point of view (smith and watson, 2010, smith, 1993 and 1987, chadwick, 2008). the selfreflection in nigerian autobiographical narratives intensifies cultural identity, colonialisation, post-independence 14 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee disillusionment, 1967 to 1970 war experience, the military in politics, corruption in governance and selfrepresentation. the main assumptions of the study are that, if the preoccupation of the male autobiographical narrative is a relative phenomenon to the understanding of historical and socio-cultural configuration in a dynamic society and if the depiction of self in autobiographical narratives is a reflection of developmental current in nigerian worldview. these are the tentative questions the research work attempts to raise and answer in order to explore the literary implications which nigerian autobiographies portray. the questions include: (a) that the configuration of metaphor in male autobiographical narrative propels self-histories in nigerian literature. (b) that these narratives explore some literary devices which point to the glorification of men and their achievements by the image of ‘i’. (c) that in the course of the exploration of these narratives, there are instances of gender conflict which lead to gender consciousness among nigerian women folks. (d) and that there is need to identify some lopsidedness in the projection of self in order to enhance distinct political, social and economic harmony among women for total posterity. the overall aim of the study is to explore succinctly the conceptualization of male metaphors in autobiographical narratives. generally, this work will, the first, focus on the postcolonial male autobiographies in a multi dimensional perspectives with the exposition of the power instrumentations in order to fully explain the focus behind such writings and why they are male dominant. it would situate practical development where all and sundry regardless of sex can be free to contribute to national development socially, economically, and physically and practically. it could create ‘an atmosphere in art whereby such writings have brought about awareness on the part of the women in particular and society in general because with awareness comes education and consciousness-raising, then reaction against all forms of sublimation, denial and marginalization which some forms of writings stand noted for’ (chukwuma, 2004). the second, juxtapose these narratives that originate from nigeria by explaining the various movements which shape the narrative metaphors, images and the use of male dominated ironies of marginalization in the corpus of the works. the third, succinctly investigate the multiplicity of meanings attributed to these male dominated autobiographical stories and natural archetypes they create to limit the exploration of the female gender in art and literature. this would be done by evaluating the philosophical perspectives which govern the notion of “omnipotence” for nigeria men in their worldview as visualized in literature. the fourth act as interface of liberation for the colonized and give the male colonizer a new sense of vision and purpose because strength and gender are not integral factors in enhancing practical and sustainable development which make globalization enhance development in nigeria. the study which investigates male autobiographical narratives and gender imperatives has these four-fold objectives as specific aims: (a) it x-rays recurring male features as archetype in nigerian autobiographical writings. 15 christopher babatunde ogunyemi ambiguity in autobigraphical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology (b) it exemplifiers elements of gender distinction and the various reactions attributed to this phenomenon. (c) it shows related reactions in some related primary sources emanating from nigeria. (d) the study visualizes the domination of male configurated metaphors in the autobiographical writings; this factor limits the scope of scholarship society would have been better propelled socially, economically, politically, etc. saro wiwa’s a forest of flowers (1986) encapsulates ‘i’ to metaphorically delineate the hypocrisy of the nigerian government, the church and fellow nigerians. in this work, wiwa presents himself as a portrayal of reality which virtually exposes the various problems encountered by the nigerian people, particularly the ogoni people. similarly, on a darkling plain (1989) is one of wiwa’s war diaries which document the nigerian war experience, this autobiography details levels of political and economic exploitation the ogoni people suffered in the hands of successive nigerian governments. it valorises the sad experience people had in the hands of the multi-national companies that came for oil exploration in the area. genocide in nigeria (1992) takes a cursory overview of a man’s overview and expression of the politics and the environment of the ogoni environment. in his self-remarks, wiwa uses his personal experience to denote the plight of the minority and the economic domination of the ogoni by the nigerian government. the trend shifts to sozaboy (1994) which enhances personal perspective of the ogoni environment. here, saro wiwa demonstrates his personal hatred of the domination of the nigerian government over the ogoni resources and the application of brutal force to reduce the ogoni people through the military encroachment in the area. the work xrays a selfexperience of the tragedy meted out to the ogoni minority in nigeria. a month and a day: a detention diary (1995) is an exploratory autobiographical account of ken saro wiwa’s period in detention. this work echoes the struggle to liberate the ogoni people from the shackles of nigerian imperialism. eventually, he lost his life to the struggle to liberate his people by the sanni abacha self-created judicial enquiry that recommended him for hanging in port harcourt in 1995. the choice of these works is to attempt an examination of ambiguities in saro wiwa’s autobiographical narratives in order to showcase various experiences beginning from the nigerian/biafran war time to the total reliance on crude oil by nigeria and to the total operation of the nigerian minorities. it explains the suppression of the ogoni people and subsequently the contemporary times when economic, political failures have eroded some cultural inclinations in nigeria and the need to expose some levels of corruption and marginalisation of values in the nation’s economy. the above stands as the motivation for the above mentioned justification of works. method the treatment of these research answers to so many questions which are yet to be attended to will enhance the understanding of myth, gender in nigerian autobiographies where the non-existence of female voices in the works of art is feasible. how can equality and sustainable development that is devoid of sexist discrimination be allowed to prevail? a study of unity of purpose in writing would make nigeria 16 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee take a dynamic and mutual relationship in creative art. this research work entails a study of ‘ambiguity in ken saro wiwa’s autobiographical narratives in nigeria’. for that reason, the work will incorporate the desktop writing with the corpus of its primary sources as mentioned above. it will blend the primary sources with the secondary sources that are retrieved from the library. the content analysis will dovetail into the critical analysis of our chosen texts. qualitative approach will be applied to delineate the subject matter of the project. a qualitative approach will be expedient because ‘it will underscore perceptions around the characters in the literary work of art as they move in time and space’ (okpara1990, p. 115). the methodology embodies a close analysis of trends and prognosis of the concept with recourse to the meta-analysis of both the primary and secondary sources. in analyzing the work, attempts shall be carried out in explaining explicitly the salient points which constitute the subject matter. i will use narratology as instruments to delineate the motif of self and male metaphor in literary analysis to evaluate the themes of gender and development in the nigerian autobiographical writings. the methodology also entails the application of this theory in the development of the thesis by blending theories with the traditions of writing. results and discussion for proper understanding of this study, narratology as a literary theoretical would be employed to showcase the application of the science of fiction in autobiographical narrative mieke bal's narratology (1985, p. 3) and gérard genette (1980) define narratology as the theory and the study of narratives. for the sake of this study, we shall dwell on gérard genette narratological works and apply it to the evaluation of our study because the theory aids the german and anglosaxon literary tradition, and it sheds more light to the understanding of the narratological criticism. however, ’narrative does not represent real or fictive story, it recounts it, that is, it signifies it by means of language. there is no place to imitate the narrative. there are simply varying degree of diegesis, narrative moods, mimesis and every text discloses traces of narration’ (pp. 42-43). in addition, narratology lends axiomatic credence to the ‘context of production as fundamental element of the narrative’ (40). narratology details narrative structure and the way it affect our perceptions is examined. in principle, narratology can refer to any systematic study of narratives, though in practice the use of the term is rather more restricted. it is because of this restricted application that this theory is applied to the study and understanding of the male autobiographical narratives and gender imperatives. the word ‘narratology’ is an anglicization of the french word ‘narratologie’ tzvetan todorov in his grammaire du decameron (1969), coins the word, and has been retrospectively applied by many writers. although a linage stretching back to aristotle’s poetics may be traced, modern narratology is most typically said to begin with the russian formalists and in particular with viadimir prop’s morphology of the folktale (1928). due to the origin of the term, it has a strong association with the structuralist quest for a system of formed description that can usefully be applied to any narrative. this aim has not, however, characterized 17 christopher babatunde ogunyemi ambiguity in autobigraphical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology all work that is today described narratological. {p}ercy lubbock’s groundbreaking work on point of view, the craft of fiction (1912), is a case in point. jonathan culler argues that the many strands of narratology are all united by recognition “that the theory of narrative requires a distinction between: story” – sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse and ‘discourse’, the discursive presentation of narration of event” (labov, 2006, p. 49). culler admits that the distinction in narratology is originally proposed by the russian formalists who used the terms fabula and sjuzhet, but a succession of other pairs has perceived what is essentially the same dichotomy for example (christoire/discous historie/recit, story/plot) in his text, the pursuit of signs (1981, p. 13). to a certain extent, the designation of work as narratological or otherwise may have more to do with narratives, stories, autobiographies and sociolinguistics. according to labov (2006), narratology lends credence to conversional analysis, discourse analysis that deal with arising in the course of spontaneous verbal interaction (190). however, constituent narrative structure could be included in the interpretation of male autobiographical narratives (15). more importantly, narratology enables the readers and critics to examine the structure of the autobiographical writings, their cultural artifacts and the ordering of time and space in narrative forms. this is because narratologists love to categorize and to taxonomize, which has led to a plethora of terms to explain the complicated nature of media in our lives (television, film, fiction). nwachukwu-agbada (2003 and 1987) captures the dynamics of autobiographical writing by asserting that these works celebrate ideas, which is spread across periods of time. his conception is predicated on the environment and ‘the result is that practically all the africa literary autobiographies are public gestures derived from a personal struggle with life and agents on the way of psychic, economic, material individual and national fulfillment’ (2003, p. 103). a preponderance of issues, which african autobiographical narratives discuss, reveals various exploitations within the domain of narratology. ‘nigerian autobiographies are not exception because they incorporate various issues in their corpus’ (1987, p. 97). essentially, ‘gender is a series of displays or performance’ (golfman 1957, p. 22, west, 1988, zimmerman, 1975, p. 157 and lucal, 1999, p. 19). to henry macdonald (1988), narratology is traditionally the story of narrative fiction, which is directed mainly to the level of the action of the story and its meanings (1). he further observes that narratology visualizes the narrative presentation of the story which the reader encounters. the story as a separate part of the presentation is an abstract constructed tale. hawthorne opines that it deals with interpretation and the interpretation is “twice-told all telling ultimately retellings (ibid). research in narratology is both prescriptive and descriptive, ‘although this may be socially altered’ (epstein, 1988, p. 231). the analysis is dynamic because autobiographical narrative is a complex phenomenon. the research blends narratological theory with gender theory. the need for the application of these theories is to bring out the nigerian literary ethos in a manner that 18 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee will explore the configurated metaphors art. other researchers have used many approaches to examine the narratives in their own ways. strauss and corbin (1998) applied the analytic strategic approach in their literary application of art. luke eyoh (2003), raditlhalo (2003) and chukwuma (1990), use the sociological approach as suitable critical framework, which clearly illuminate the position of characterization and how they become relevant to the contemporary society in autobiographical and critical analysis. the first aim is to identify elements of existing scholarly definitions that support an autobiographical narrative and then relate the approach to narratology. the significance of this work lies in its extension of previous literature on male autobiographies and gender perceptions. this research work concerns itself with male autobiographical narratives and gender imperatives with concrete allusions to selected autobiographies from nigeria. most autobiographical narratives encapsulate self-histories with a continental or national perception. this category of writing could be vividly perceived to qualify as literary material because of the inescapable manner the autobiographical writers weave functionality and artistic brilliance in their works. the significance of the research lends credence on the patterning of gender matrix with recourse to sociological reference. sociological references here would conceptualise the place of autobiographical narratives in the dynamics of nigerian landscape. we choose to select male authors because of the peculiar theme of male chauvinism and related sectional metaphors which are embedded in our collective memory. narratology and autobiographical narratives demonstrate more insight into the application of scientific instruments in african narratives. autobiographical works capture many strands of ‘events and sequences in human society’ raditlhalo, 2003, sternberg, 1988 and spegman, 1980). however, one can say that ‘autobiography covers the many different accounts that authors make of their experiences’ (berryman 1999, p. 72 as quoted by javangwe, 2011, p. 8). ‘the term is a derivation from a greek word ‘auto’ meaning ‘self’, ‘bios’‘life’ and ‘graphe’writing. in etymological sense, autobiography thus refers to self and life writing’ (ibid). this account goes further to comment that: memoirs are included in the scope of autobiography that gives particular attention to matters of contemporary interest not closely affecting the author’s inner –life. there are obvious conflations into generally accepted autobiography, as a genre, autobiography cannot exist without either of the elements of fact or fiction (ibid). autobiographical study propels the understanding of the framework of self in the depiction of personal experience, ‘the self and national identity’ (9). however, autobiographical narrative ‘constructs the individual as a distinct existence from the rest and at another allows the same individual to be subsumed within this group as the embodiment of its core values’ (10). the autobiographical narrative, therefore, locates the individual more critically at the centre of nationalistic politics. autobiography then performs the narrative function of capturing the individual lives that are both congruous and dissonant with the cultural fictions encouraged and imagined through the nation as an 19 christopher babatunde ogunyemi ambiguity in autobigraphical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology imagined community (anderson, 1983 as quoted by javangwe, 2011, p. 11). inherent themes of man and society dominate the preoccupations of autobiographical art. this preoccupation is brought about by language which is used to express the ‘representation of series of events’ (12). this ‘series of events’ is regarded as being sequential in autobiographical work because it expresses the narrative by exploring its relevance, significance and purpose. autobiographical work of art moves in time and space. it examines the chronological and systematic rendition of one’s life experience in various dimensions. to start with, raditlhalo (2003) traces the origin of autobiographical writing to the confessions of saint augustine. his observation is axiomatic of the fact that life writing becomes transmitted from one generation to the other. he further submits that: following the tradition of saint augustine, for example, coins the autobiography of jean-jacques rousseau (the confessions, 1781), which ushered in the male secular hero intent creating himself with a view to worldly fame and success. as jill kerr conway suggests, this model of the napoleonic hero emerges next to augustine and rousseau in creating the self “who embodies the feelings of his people in battle for political and economic freedom”. later comes economic man as a model, self created, given full expression in benjamin franklin’s autobiography (41). though, autobiographical writing emerges within the western scholarship, it has gained frequency in world literature and, african literature is not an exception. the major preoccupation in the autobiographical narrative is the portrayal of ‘self’ which has been portrayed as a vehicle of transmission of cultural values and idiosyncratic nouns of human society. however, the self-absorption of the male hero in the texts is perhaps unsurprising: after all, history (with a capital “h”) has always been seen as gender-based, and therefore what western writers wrote was taken as germane. the feeling that an ‘authentic’ reality can be brought about through the strivings of individuals might account for the reverence in which certain early thirtieth-century writes are held and canonized (42). although raditlhalo models the sidonic smith‘s ‘teleological aspects of all purposeful, rationalizing the self’ by ‘interlocking phrases in western society’ (42) to the concept of self in african cosmology while vambe’s from rhodesia to zimbabwe (1978) models critically the autobiographical fact and fiction to explore results. my arguments dovetail into the exploration of male metaphors in selected autobiographical works to illuminate the element of gender configuration in nigeria. these explorations shall visualize the definitions of ‘self’ in reality because: this presupposes phrases which reality is mediated by the self, seeking reason for life’s inexplicable phenomena and arriving at a logo which makes meaning of one’s life patterns. but central to such reasoning, in heracliatean terms, is an important premise that at each juncture of this continual search the self evolves (raditlhalo, 2003, p. 44). ‘if we therefore consider the self in autobiographical writing, we realize how, even with narratorial progress, the logos of the self keeps changing, reflecting and refracting its milieu and circumstances’ (ibid). it is these reflections of circumstance that ‘refract’ 20 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee various male motifs writers of autobiographies attempt to demonstrate in their writings. male and female dichotomies in autobiographical art are ‘resolution of the social impasse within the purview of the hegelian dialectic of thesis and antithesis in the oppressor/oppressed matrix’ (fanon, 1967). the proposal for such resolution betrays a materialist, dialectic vision stridently amplified by most autobiographical writers. the major terms explored in this thesis include ‘autobiography’ ‘narrative and gender imperative’, i will only limit myself to their connotative definitions here because these terms would subsequently be applied to my future discourse. by so doing, we shall experience their deep and implied meanings as they are used connotatively and denotatively a. ambiguity uncertainty or inexactness of meaning in language. a lack of decisiveness or commitment resulting from a failure to make a choice between alternatives. (free dictionary) b. autobiography a story about a person’s life, written by that same person or a self writing. raditlhalo sheds more light on the scenario: autobiographical texts exemplify eagleton’s point because they use fictional narrative strategies. whereas the account we read is ‘true’, in its rendition the society’s self-representation is reconstructed by the subject who draws on the full range of linguistic flexibility and the permutations of descriptiveness and metonymy that are denied a formal, straight historical account of any era. however, this does not mean that such historical predicates are a basis for what can be outright lies, but rather that it is for the subject the very fabric in which to insert a life. thus, in order to explicate autobiographical writings of the periods under study, it is essential to bear in mind the intertwining of history with power (or lack thereof), together with culture. while autobiographical subjects, for want of any other yardstick with which to delineate time, will necessarily refer to dates as markers of their passage from one stage to the next in life, these significations of ‘real lives’ remain but attempts to partially abolish the very history within which they operate. history cannot be left behind, or totally discarded, but autobiographical subjects seek to defy its autonomy in the construction of their identities (2003, p. 61-62). c. narratives. descriptions of events (either in a diachronic way or in a synchronic way-emphasis mine) this work would be a contribution to research on male autobiography and the gender question. this issue of gender is of paramount importance to world literature and globalization. many autobiographical would see the work as a redirection while creating new myths and metaphors in order to satisfy the yearnings of development and globalization, equality and the understanding of class stratifications in new writings. the work is also a recent contribution to academics. conclusion this section probes into the concept of male autobiographical narratives and gender imperative in nigeria. it is 21 christopher babatunde ogunyemi ambiguity in autobigraphical narratives in nigeria: valorizing sexism and displacement in ogoni cosmology expedient to state the aforementioned autobiographical narrative follows the sequence of literary ideologue that lends credence to male superiority and female relegation in literature. the study will demonstrate that in any social context, there is bound to be conflict and conflict resolution. narratology and autobiographical theory were used to explore the basis for this presentation. this analysis is contained in an assertion that autobiographical works ‘charts the intersection of multiple, contradictory views of the colonial and post-colonial images. it also examines the concepts of community integration and levels of social integration. it appreciates persistent pattern of resistance and accommodation within the levels of male gender in arts’ (10) as it moves in time and space. refernces bal, m. 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(2003). an exploratory analysis of a self-assessed life story. journal of adul development, 10, pp. 13-22. west, c., & angela, g. (1988). conversational shift work: a study to tropical transitions between women and men. social problems 35, pp. 55-575. white, h. (1978). topics of discourse: essays in cultural criticism. baltimore: the john hopkins. zimmerman, d. h., & candace, w. (1975). sex role, interruptions and silences in conversation. in language and sex: difference and dominance, ed. b. thorne and n. henley. rowley, ma: newbury house. 24 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 427 planning and developing creativity through mediabased learning in english language teaching mustasyfa thabib kariadi department of language education, faculty of humanities university of jenderal soedirman, purwokerto, indonesia email: mtkariadi_pbi@unsoed.ac.id m. riyanton department of language education, faculty of humanities university of jenderal soedirman,purwekerto, indonesia email: m.riyanton@unsoed.ac.id dini anggraheni department of economics, faculty of management universitas semarang, semarang, indonesia email: dinia85@usm.ac.id apa citation: kariadi, m. t., riyanton, m., anggraheni, d. (2021). planning and developing creativity in english language teaching. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.427-436. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4519 received: 26-02-2020 accepted: 25-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction a study program in english language education is needed to prepare english teachers with the necessary professional, pedagogical, personal, and social skills. english teaching and english language learning have become central directives in newly emerging bilingual and multilingual high school classes. the need for effective teaching strategies, including strategies designed to motivate students, has become a part of elt educational models (sucuoglu, 2017). education is the best way to obtain these. because learners can develop their abilities to survive in the future, education is also a key to progress and quality growth. the system of education and life changes rapidly in the pandemic era. everything has come to a halt on a global scale. projects have been pushed back, businesses have been closed, and schools have been closed. the new coronavirus appears to have brought the globe to a halt. students, particularly in small cities like purwokerto, continue their education through online learning and video conferences with their teachers. because keeping schools open creates a safety risk to students, this model is now the best option. smp 7 purwokerto used several platforms to bridging the teaching and learning process. the learning process in the pandemic era needs teachers’ creativity. some experts believe that creativity should encompass novelty, originality, practicality, and efficacy (maley & peachey, 2015). the teachers consider personalized learning technologies a promising way to mitigate these differences. however, they also acknowledge that the swedish’ curricular focus on communication, abstract: this paper justifies the planning and development of teachers' creativity through media-based learning in english language teaching, especially in the pandemic era. this study used a descriptive-qualitative method with a case study. the data sources consisted of 37 english teachers, school principals, and students involved in the teaching and learning process in smp 7 purwokerto. the results showed that the teacher's creativity at the planning stage was demonstrated by consistently well-arranged planning the lessons and adequately preparing the learning media regarding the implementation of multimedia. regarding creativity at the preliminary stage, esl teachers employed various mediums to make it easier for pupils to acquire and grasp the topic. audio, visual, and audiovisual media are examples of media. audio and visual media were the most commonly employed in elt classes. the planning and creativity teachers become the main factors to make the class more interactive using several media. keywords: creativity; planning; teacher; learning; media; online platforms. mailto:mtkariadi_pbi@unsoed.ac.id mailto:m.riyanton@unsoed.ac.id mailto:dinia85@usm.ac.id mustasyfa thabib kariadi, m. riyanton, & dini anggraheni planning and developing creativity through media-based learning in english language teaching 428 seen as mainly acquired through human-to-human dialogue, does not match the fundamental idea behind many personalized learning technologies. based on these findings, we discuss the potential and problems when aiming to introduce personalized learning technologies for learning english in swedish schools (bunting, af segerstad & barendregt, 2021). implementing the creative method in esl teaching as one factor contributing to improving the students' motivation is one important requirement of the language skill and practice success in the professional language (rus, 2019). the development of computer and information technology offers a favorable external environment for english teaching. there are more than 300 million learners of english in china. information technology furnishes them with abundant english teaching materials, which also provides an opportunity for teachers to change their pedagogical strategies to improve the efficiency of teaching and learning (cai, 2012). esl teachers are constantly attempting to implement excellent and effective teaching methods and using suitable media. its purpose is to make the educational content easier to comprehend for students. teachers must offer the best lesson to meet the goals using excellent and appropriate media during the learning process. according to detailed research, adopting relevant learning media can help learners enhance and develop their vocabulary (anggraheni, anandha, & ts, 2020). according to rus (2020), paper provides a brief theoretical grounding and a working definition for creativity in teaching english for specific purposes. it also explores the role and function of creativity in the changing paradigm regarding the overall scope of the educational system in general and specialized language learning in particular. finally, it analyses the role and potential of creative methods and active strategies in fostering better language acquisition during esp classes. creative methods mark a next desirable superior level in modernizing the teaching strategies. so that, the full potential of a student's abilities can be activated and the desire for independence and originality, for competition, for searching novelty and working better in the language classes can be encouraged. the learners' best interests are satisfied. the recent advances in technology have resulted in the development of intelligent smartphones. these advances have attacked researchers studying in education, especially in teaching foreign languages (cavus, 2016). youtube to boost the english vocabulary (kim, 2021) and powerpoint (aziz, 2020). one of the famous online media to do the teaching and learning process is zoom online video conference. "zoom becomes the famous media to use in the pandemic era to do online teaching and able to enhancing the vocabularies on students," written by anggraheni et al. (2020). so, at the beginning of the pandemic era, zoom became the very famous application used by most people in the world. based on the aforementioned issues, the researchers concentrated their efforts on examining the teachers' originality in selecting learning material for seventh-grade students at smp 7 purwokerto. this study focused on how english teachers construct their teaching materials since they choose a suitable teaching medium in the online classroom when considering the various learning media. in addition, this study looked into the benefits and drawbacks of using media in their learning processes. method qualitative research and descriptive qualitative were used in this study. the descriptive design describes the response to recent questions linked to research difficulties, such as what, who, when, where, and how (meliala, purba, doloksaribu, panjaitan, & tarigan, 2021). the research subjects were observed in the environment by the researchers. the information gathered is thoroughly examined, leading to a significant recommendation. teachers were employed as data sources in this study. the data used in this study were obtained from data sources, including: two english instructors, one school principal, and thirty-two seventh-grade students are among the resource people. it was a part of the learning and teaching process. several questions are posed, and the results demonstrate the state of the online teaching and learning process. google form provide relevant information to executing the education unit level on english lessons found in the archives and documents. data collection techniques used in this study were interviews, observation, and document research. the interviews conducted in this study english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 429 were in-depth interviews. interviews were conducted with flexible and open discussions, not tightly structured, not in a formal atmosphere, and carried out repeatedly on the same informant with increasingly focused questions on a problem as more in-depth information. the interview form sends by whatsapp message. instrument of collecting data teachers' inventiveness in employing learning and teaching media during efl teaching-learning is one of the study findings. researchers used interview procedures to acquire data. the interview guidelines include fifteen questions that address characteristics of creativity in the use and selection of learning material. the questions as followed: (1) what is kind of media that used in your online class? (2) how excited are you about going to your online classes? (3) in your online classes, how eager are you to participate? (4) in your online class, which projects/assignments/activities do you find the most engaging? (5) what does your teacher do to make your online class engaging? (6) what is your favorite media to learn english in your online class? (7) how difficult or easy is it for you to try hard on your schoolwork right now? (8) how would you like to be learning right now? (9) what do you like about school right now? (10) what do you not like about school right now? (11) when you have online schoolwork, how often do you have the technology (laptop, smartphone, tablet, or computer) you need? (12) how difficult or easy is it for you to connect to the internet to access your schoolwork? (13) what has been the most challenging part of completing your schoolwork? (14) how happy are you with how much time you spend in specials or enrichment (art, music, video, short movie, or others)? (15) how long the duration of a face-to-face meeting in your online class? this research enlists the help of 32 seventhgrade students. the criteria for selecting a study topic are based on the experiences and certifications of teachers. the researchers then interviewed and recorded them to obtain the desired information using a form and whatsapp messages. researchers studied the results of teachers' innovation in mediabased learning after interviewing them. teachers use several media to teach an online class and how the students feel in an online class. the questions for teachers and school principle: (1) what is kinds of media that you used? (2) what are the important things to prepare for the online class? (3) what is your creativity to make the interactive class, especially in an online class? (4) what is the school provide for teachers in the teaching and learning process? (5) what is the most challenging situation in maintaining an online class? (6) what is the leading media you used to teach? (7) what is online video conference you prefer? (8) do you transfer your material into word and pdf? (9) do you share all the material in google classroom? (10) how long the duration of a faceto-face meeting in your online class? results and discussion the results of research on teacher's creativity in learning english, as seen through interviews and observations, and documentation, showed the following: table 1. teaching media selected in english language teaching media reasons 1. whatsapp  most students and teachers have this application.  easy to operate.  allowing teachers to chat with the students, share materials (picture, video, music)  allowing students to chat with teachers, download the materials.  it cannot assess the assignment.  it is allowed to record the sound and practice speaking. 2. powerpoint  it is presenting all materials in a short time.  teaching material presented skillfully and easy to understand with pictures and words.  it is giving students key points of teaching materials.  it is providing students with some additional insight dealing with the lesson. mustasyfa thabib kariadi, m. riyanton, & dini anggraheni planning and developing creativity through media-based learning in english language teaching 430 3. youtube  provide many educational materials, more fun and attracted students' attention to learn.  it is improving students' speaking accuracy and pronunciation.  students can imitate the english native speakers through video. 4. zoom  it can lead online face to face teaching and learning process.  it is allowing teachers to share ppt, links, music, and video in 45 minutes.  it is allowing teachers to record the meeting. 5. google meet  it can lead online face to face teaching and learning process.  it is allowing teachers to share ppt, links, music, and video in 60 minutes. 6. google classroom  allowing teaches to share the rpp materials, distribute assignments, assess assignments, and chatting with the students.  allowing students to see the material, download, doing the assessment, chat with teachers.  it is allowing teachers to make form and share it with students. english lesson planning learning planning is a development system for every element of learning, including the development of objectives, content, methods, and evaluation development. in principle, it has the same meaning that learning planning is a process of formulating, managing, and developing every element of learning into a planning system as an operational learning guide. these theories are following what the english teachers at smp 7 purwokerto have done below: based on the research documentation obtained, in learning planning, the teacher always prepared to learn tools, prepared syllabus and lesson planning plans (rpp), and examined the teaching methods properly. each teacher was not much different. the syllabus has indeed been determined from the center. likewise, the teachers' preparation of the learning implementation plan also included competency standards, basic competencies, learning objectives, learning resources, teaching media, learning tools, and implementing student teaching and learning activities. moreover, they were understandable, easy to understand. because the lesson plan made by the teachers was easy to be understood by those who read it, it can be shared in google classroom and made the students able to read it before class. based on the research interviews, the teacher's creativity in preparing the syllabus and the design of the implementation of learning and material preparation did not only stick to one guidebook. it was shown by writing various sources in the rpp. the teacher took material from online sources, mass media that was trending and liked by teenagers, thus attracting students in learning. local content, which is considered necessary for students to know, was also the teacher's concern. the teacher also planned a learning strategy and instructional media suitable for the automation requirements to be taught and following the basic competencies. all teachers often applied discovery learning strategies so that all students have the opportunity to find themselves in using knowledge, and students were also trained to be active in learning. not only just memorizing, creating new answers to existing problems, and getting new questions that needed to be answered but also applied with google classroom and google meet or zoom. implemented in the learning processes the learning process took a large portion of teaching and learning activities in schools. so that, a teacher was required to present the learning process well, interestingly, and meaningfully. teachers have to do planning before teaching in the learning process, among others, meaningful learning; the meaningfulness of the elements involved will support insights in the learning process. the more the meaning of the relationship between a component, the more effective something is learned. it was imperative in problem-solving activities, especially in identifying social issues and developing alternative solutions. the things that students learn should have a clear and logical meaning with their life processes. teachers must be creative in producing something new in carrying out the stages in learning, starting from the introduction, core activities, and closing learning activities using selecting media. transform all materials into power points (ppt) and words version. it aligns with ciu (2020), reflections s from the current experience and literature findings, and implications for the use english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 431 of powerpoint will be enhanceed the experience of online teaching. learning controls allow learning according to the rhythm of each individual. according to the researchers' observations and observations, the theory follows what the two english teachers did. based on the results of research from interviews and observations show that: preliminary learning activities the researchers' observations showed that the teachers showed quite excellent and exciting perceptual steps in the preliminary stages and were very familiar with each student asking the students' condition. conveying the learning objectives to be achieved and providing attractive stimulants related to the material will be discussed. teachers in the pre-test stage no longer used written questions that students must answer seriously to determine students' initial abilities towards the basic competencies to be taught. google form was used to assess student's understandability. video recording also became one of the pre-tests to submit in google classroom. the teacher allowed students to express answers in a fun and intimate atmosphere. in the learning theory, this pre-test had many uses in exploring the learning process to be carried out. the pre-test function, among others: (1) to preparing students for the learning process, the mind will focus on the questions they have to answer with the pre-test. (2) to determine the level of progress of students about the learning process carried out. (3) to find out the initial abilities that students already have regarding teaching materials used as topics in the learning process. (4) to find out where the learning process should have started, which goals have been mastered by students, and which plans have received particular emphasis and attention. the teachers also provided interesting feeds through pictures, music, and a short film to start this stage. the material source came from youtube and several internet sources. this concept of education is effectively used in various disciplines and subjects from elementary school to higher education. educational data generated through intelligent classroom iot devices and 5 g networks can lead to the 5 g era. iot analyzes it to form and create dynamic educational systems with intelligent collection concepts. the intelligent aggregation of the internet of things can propose new educational models based on the english smart classroom (bai & zhang, 2020). students are teenagers who like music, songs, and movies, so it is easier and faster to attract students' interest in learning. it is all a means to measure the extent to which students master the material to be delivered. the teachers realized that the initial abilities of each student differ from one another. nevertheless, several samples of students in the class can be taken, representing the basic ability to start lessons. the interview results with the researcher showed that the teacher, in the opening of the learning process, argued that in planning, the primary learning centered on students. the pre-test model in the form of written questions was rarely used. a teacher must present an exciting and creative early stage of learning to instill a strong sense of student curiosity to learn the subject. as suggested by mr. s and mr. c, to foster a high interest in learning english, teachers must prepare the lesson material through youtube and share the link with the students. it is maybe about new gossip that is interesting in society, and others that make students who are the teenagers felt included in the teacher's chat. the initial stage also determines the effectiveness of the learning process being held. the teacher must be a motivator and inspiration for students who want to learn. affection and cognitive needs are essential, and the goal is to develop human beings who can selfactualize in a cooperative and supportive environment. it was also explained that, in essence, every human being is unique, has individual potential and an internal drive to develop and determine his behavior. therefore, every human being is free and tends to grow and develop to achieve self-actualization. mr. s and mr. c have applied this theory. the core learning stage the researchers' observations showed that the english teachers have shown good abilities in delivering the core of learning. the existing multimedia supported many of the learning techniques used, whether in a language laboratory room or a classroom or outdoors with an internet connection—the visible communication between mr. r with students showing a conducive intimacy. the teacher applied a tutorial system in the learning mustasyfa thabib kariadi, m. riyanton, & dini anggraheni planning and developing creativity through media-based learning in english language teaching 432 process. so that, it seems that students were very enthusiastic about learning, and there was no fear of asking questions to the teacher. teachers and students collaborated well. the atmosphere of discussion and exchange of opinions between students and teachers was evident. teachers were not as if they should be considered the truest and smartest but complement each other. arguments can often be seen between teachers and students. the teacher used constructivism theory to think to solve problems, look for ideas and make decisions. students understood better because they were directly involved in building new knowledge; they understood better and can apply it in all situations. in addition, students were directly involved actively; they will long remember all the concepts. the teaching of productive language skills in the integration with receptive language skills is undoubtedly one of the priorities of elt (klimova, 2014). in the middle of profound learning, laughter and jokes as an intermezzo were punctuated so that the online class atmosphere was not tense. even so, the limits of a teacher's professionalism were still well preserved. such a classroom atmosphere made students more active in learning activities. moreover, the classroom atmosphere was alive and well. according to the humanist learning theory (abraham in taylor, 2013), these teachers do this, which says the humanist theory also argues that human learning depends on emotions and feelings. each individual has a different way of learning from other individuals. therefore, strategies and approaches in the teaching and learning process should be designed and structured according to the student's will and emotional development. he also explained that every individual has the potential and desire to achieve self-actualization. so, teachers should maintain the psychology of students and guide them so that their potential can be developed to the highest stage. the interviews conducted by researchers with teachers are the teachers who use approaches and methods that allow students to always be active in every lesson. the term students were forced to always concentrate on following the process at the core of this learning. the teacher considered himself a study partner for his students. teachers were not patronizing but exchange opinions with students and were democratic. the teacher always provoked students to argue and guides students in answering questions. the teacher respected the differences in students' arguments because the abilities and perceptions of each student are different. the teacher also applied a tutorial model between students and group work. students with low learning speed were guided by students who can catch quick lessons. the teacher guided students to motivate each other to learn and help each other to achieve exemplary achievements. students should not look down on one another. in addition, the teachers also provided time to serve students who wanted to ask questions both in class and outside class hours through the whatsapp group. the teacher also provided tutorials or additional hours for students who needed deepening of the material to better master the fundamental competencies being taught. performing the concluding stage of the learning process the researchers' observations showed that the teacher in ending the learning process was good enough with a written post-test that functions to determine students' level of mastery against determined competencies both individually and in groups to assess competencies and objectives. the objectives that students can master and competencies and goals that have not been mastered are finding out which students need to participate in enrichment activities and finding out the level of learning difficulties and as a reference component for making improvements with something interesting. the teacher provided the opportunity for students to conclude what has been studied together. then the teacher provided comments on the results of students' conclusions and reinforces the material discussed. the teacher also motivated students through film footage shown or writing to study hard and maintain attitudes from the youtube link. the teacher also gave assignments to do at home both in groups and individually. either the questions were taken from the handbook or respond to new problems in society. the teacher also provided interesting games to end the learning process. teachers also offered opportunities for students who have not mastered the basic competencies taught to ask questions both in class and outside class hours. the researcher's interviews showed that the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 433 teacher believed in ending the learning process with written tests and something interesting. the teacher must provide the opportunity for students to conclude what has been studied together. then the teacher provided comments on the results of students' conclusions and reinforced the material discussed in the google classroom. the teacher should also motivate students through the video footage shown or writing to study hard and maintain attitudes. the teacher also gave assignments to do at home both in groups and individually. either the questions were taken from the handbook or respond to new problems in society. evaluating english learning learning evaluation was carried out during the learning process and at the end of the lesson. during the learning process, evaluation was carried out by observing students' attitudes and thinking skills. the seriousness of doing the task, the results of exploration, the ability to think critically and logically in providing views/arguments, the willingness to work together, and responsibility together were examples of aspects that can be assessed during the learning process. evaluation at the end of learning was an evaluation of the innovative products produced by students. assessment criteria can be mutually agreed upon at orientation time. thus, an evaluation that can show student achievement is a continuous process of finding facts to conclude how the achievement describes students' strengths, abilities, and achievements, including conceptual understanding, reasoning and communication, and problem-solving. assessment in learning aims to improve the learning process by identifying cognitive conflicts that students have so that they need to be remedied, eliminated, or even replaced. in addition, the assessment is also to identify student learning strategies that can be most successful, inform students' strengths or weaknesses about their knowledge and approach, inform teachers to use them in learning so that they match the needs and abilities of students. teacher’s creativity in carrying out evaluations can take various forms. the teacher evaluates problem-solving tests, quizzes, midterm exams, final semester exams, or assignments done in class or homework. these evaluations are part of the pursuit system, which implements the curriculum, measuring the achievement of competencies and learning objectives. through google forms, the teacher can prepare the questions and the answers; it will make it easier for the teacher to score for students. english subject curricula could partially help english teachers overcome this problem by providing methodological guidelines. appropriate initial and in-service training could enable english teachers to acquire the necessary skills evoked in our interviews (bucur & popa, 2013). the results of the researchers' interviews with resource persons indicated that the evaluation was carried out to determine how far the students had mastered the material and know the success of the learning process. the learning process was effective or not. furthermore, the assessment results are helpful for student remedial or improvement programs and improvements to the learning process itself. the teacher argued that there are various forms of evaluation being developed. there are forms of performance, process, product, and portfolio. each of these forms has its purpose of assessing whether or not students have mastered specific basic competencies or subject matter. these evaluation forms can all be carried out in one basic competency, but only a few are suitable for use in specific basic competencies. teacher's creativity in this evaluation stage, through quizzes, daily tests, structured and unstructured assignments, midterm exams, and final semester exams. furthermore, evaluation was carried out in the form of performance (presentation, discussion, speech, drama), process (persistence, activeness, enthusiasm), products (clippings, and crafts), and portfolios. these assessments were based on essential competencies in each material discussed. in learning, the creativity that english teachers showed can be fostered by creating an online classroom atmosphere that allows students and teachers to feel free to study and explore essential topics of the curriculum. the teacher asked questions that made students think hard and then pursued students' opinions about big ideas from various perspectives. the teacher also encouraged students to demonstrate/demonstrate their understanding of essential topics in the curriculum in their way using video. discussion the inventiveness of instructors at smp 7 mustasyfa thabib kariadi, m. riyanton, & dini anggraheni planning and developing creativity through media-based learning in english language teaching 434 purwokerto in general, according to the instructors whom the researchers interviewed. first, they used google classroom, making it easier for teachers to execute the learning method by simplifying, distributing, and assessing assignments without meeting face-to-face. they claimed that google classroom is simple to customize to match the instructional materials. it offers all of the necessary features and instructional tools for use in an efl classroom. it aligns with gupta (2021), who claimed that google classroom is a platform for optimizing instructors' work processes and assisting teachers in saving time, controlling the classroom, and improving communication with students. furthermore, the usage of google classroom in this practice demonstrates that english teachers choose this platform because it allows them to save files or documents quickly. students can follow fast and offer them a grading procedure (abdullah, sulong, & rahim, 2020). the second is a powerpoint presentation. this media is thought to be appealing, and the instructional materials are simple to give and assist students in understanding concepts (el rouadi, & anouti, 2021). the majority of teachers worldwide used this medium to convey their materials both online and offline. because powerpoint includes multimedia assistance, most english teachers chose to utilize it for presentations in our survey. they claimed that powerpoint is simple to use and run. they can include anything they wish in their presentation, including movies, images, and audio. they claimed that powerpoint is simple to use and run. they can consist of anything they wish in their presentation, including movies, images, and audio. it agrees with azis and dewi (2020), who found that using powerpoint to improve students' speaking skills using movies, graphics, and audio was beneficial. in this study, english teachers used cambridge dict to produce their teaching materials, which included audio. they changed it so that pupils may hear the correct pronunciation of each english word. furthermore, this research discovered that english teachers used youtube videos to complete their presentations with smp 7 students. according to them, students were more interested in youtube with numerous modifications. it appeared to be more enjoyable and drew students' attention to learning. additionally, youtube is one of the most popular learning sites for english teachers all around the world. it is in line with kim (2021), who claimed that youtube for educational reasons is beneficial since it can be customized to meet teachers' learning goals and settings. kim (2021) also argued that using youtube to boost students' vocabulary acquisition can be done. students in this study were requested to watch videos from youtube links and write down any words they did not understand. teachers urged pupils to pay attention to the grammatical characteristics announced by native speakers in videos when practicing sentence analysis. its goal is to teach students how to think critically about grammar problems (kim, 2021). the last instructional medium used by english teachers with seventh-grade students was zoom meeting, a program that combines video conferencing and web meetings to give remote conferencing services (anggraheni et al., 2020). conclusion based on the research and data analysis findings was discovered that the creativity of teachers at smp 7 purwokerto, in general, developed in the pandemic era. the first to use google classroom, which aims to simplify, distribute, and assess assignments without meeting face-to-face, allowed teachers to implement the learning system more efficiently. students may have lost interest in the course if there was no visual representation of the content or auditory effects contributing to making the teaching and learning process more enjoyable. students would not absorb new and relevant knowledge as time passes because they did not learn anything from the classes due to a lack of enthusiasm and attentiveness. if we allow the situation to deteriorate, neither the teacher nor the students will profit. as a result, the link between the two parties will deteriorate. the creativity possessed by english teachers in planning english learning as follows: (1) planning learning prepares learning tools contained in the syllabus, and lesson planning plans which contain competency standards and basic competencies using powerpoint and google classroom; (2) preparing and making learning plans such as prepare the materials with some relate youtube link and the lessons; (3) creativity in the preparation of learning devices is arranged under the curriculum development desired by the school. doing assessment using google form and assess in google classroom. (4) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 435 teacher's creativity in preparing learning tools is always student-centered, not teacher-centered. the teacher becomes an inspiration, motivator, and facilitator for their student. face to face is the right way to create chemistry with google meet or zoom. the daily communication was made with the what's app group. there are benefits to using media. students are less likely to become bored; teachers can teach more effectively because they do not have to explain as much, and the content may be read anywhere and at any time, regardless of time or location. teachers must be able to use technology, the school must offer more finances, the manufacturing process is highly sophisticated, and it is tough to correct problems in the media. it might be exhausting to unpack and start again with the media. references abdullah, m. h., sulong, m. a., & rahim, m. a. (2020). development and validation of the music education teaching practice e-supervision system using the google classroom application. international journal of innovation, creativity, and change, 11(10), 102–116. anggraheni, d., anandha, a., & ts, h. l. (2020). enhancing english vocabulary using clt method toward slb d students via zoom application as interactive learning media. eternal (english teaching journal), 11(2). aziz, i. n., & dewi, y. a. s. (2020). the use of powerpoint as media of language teaching on students' speaking skills. humanities and social sciences reviews, 8(1), 344–358. https://doi.org/10.18510/hssr.2020.8145 bai, h., & zhang, q. (2020). english smart classroom teaching system based on 5 networks and internet of things. microprocessors and microsystems, october, 103421. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.micpro.2020.103421 bucur, n.-f., & popa, o.-r. 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(2021). flipping the classroom concept through the whatsapp platform and the microsoft powerpoint presentations for the service of teaching mathematics, a case study in a lebanese public school. international journal of advanced research in science, engineering and technology, 8(1), 16384-16403. gupta, a., & pathania, p. (2021). to study the impact of google classroom as a platform of learning and collaboration at the teacher education level. education and information technologies, 26(1), 843-857. kim, t. p. t. (2021). the potential of youtube for teaching and learning for english learners. klimova, b. f. (2014). detecting the development of language skills in current english language teaching in the czech republic. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 158, 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.12.037 maley, a., & kiss, t. (2018). creativity and english language teaching.palgrave macmillan. meliala, e. p., purba, p. w. r., doloksaribu, l., panjaitan, l., & tarigan, n, w. p. (2021). an analysis of english teachers’ creativity in mediabased learning at the tenth-grade students, jollt journal of languages and language teaching, 9(1), 105-110. doi: https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v%vi%i.3388. rus, d. (2019). assessment techniques in teaching english for specific purposes to engineering students. procedia manufacturing, 32, 368–373. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.promfg.2019.02.227 rus, d. (2020). creative methodologies in teaching english for engineering students. procedia manufacturing, 46, 337–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.promfg.2020.03.04 sucuoglu, e. (2017). analysis of motivational strategies used by english language teachers teaching at secondary schools. procedia computer science, 120, 189–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2017.11.228 taylor, d. c. m., & hamdy, h. (2013). adult learning theories: implications for learning and teaching in medical education: amee guide no. 83. medical teacher, 35(11), e1561– e1572. http://doi.org/10.3109/0142159x.2013.828153 https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v%25vi%25i.3388 mustasyfa thabib kariadi, m. riyanton, & dini anggraheni planning and developing creativity through media-based learning in english language teaching 436 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 83 investigating indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking: current state and future directions eleazar evan moeljono english language education study program university of brawijaya, malang, east java, indonesia e-mail: el22ezer@gmail.com alies poetri lintangsari english language education study program university of brawijaya, malang, east java, indonesia e-mail: alieslintang@ub.ac.id apa citation: moeljono, e. e., & lintangsari, a. p. (2021). investigating indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking: current state and future directions. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 83-92. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5357 received: 25-08-2021 accepted: 18-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction the emerging collaboration opportunities around the globe due to globalization enable both developing and developed countries to work handin-hand leveraging the life qualities of their citizens. numerous studies have been conducted and lead to the fact that there is a dire urgency of human development to maximize the existing potential of this era. the world economic forum listed the top 10 skills required for the job of the future. among the 10, five are from problem-solving skill type, two from self-management, two from technology use and development, and one from working with people (whiting, 2020). analytical thinking, complex problem-solving, and critical thinking belong to the top required skills for everyone to possess, yet not everyone is ready, or even aware of this. this does not only lead to opportunities but also challenges, specifically in terms of the medium of communication which is language. although english has been determined as the lingua franca globally, english’s position as the second or third language in some countries, specifically in developing countries, hinders non-native speakers from comprehending english well. not only for the use of communication, the barrier in reading and listening also hinders non-native english speakers to learn critical thinking and any other specified skills that are available on the internet. as a result, a huge gap arises among people coming from developing countries. indonesia is one of the developing countries expected to become the largest economics in the world and part of the outer circle of world englishes. they are positioned at 74 out of 100 countries worldwide and 15 out of 24 countries in southeast asia for english first english proficiency index (ef epi). the considerably low level of english comprehension hinders the possibility to communicate among countries, discuss political, economic, social, legal, environmental, and technological issues globally. since this situation might weaken the national growth in the global setting, it is urgent to add the notion of english abstract: this research aims to investigate the critical thinking skills of 86 indonesian english as a foreign language (efl) learners who are prepared to be english teachers using an adapted questionnaire measuring critical thinking skills. this research uses a descriptive quantitative research design to examine the critical thinking skills of indonesian efl learners. it reveals the ability of indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking skills through a diagnostic test which results in a moderate level, implying that the strategies to embed critical thinking in an efl classroom setting need to be improved. this eventually might lead to a wide gap between the existing teacher's competence and the expected qualities. this research argues the diagnosis of critical thinking state in indonesia’s pre-service english teachers and the future directions to leverage critical thinking skills. keywords: critical thinking; developing country; english education; teacher development. mailto:alieslintang@ub.ac.id https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=mi0590 eleazar evan moeljono & alies poetri lintangsari investigating indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking: current state and future directions 84 teaching for indonesian students that facilitates critical thinking development. english has been embedded as a compulsory part of the national curriculum starting from the secondary level. this implies that at least 78.2% of the indonesian population who has enrolled in secondary schools have been introduced to english. however, the attempt done by educational institutions to leverage english skills has been considered unsatisfactory. according to rahmawati (2018), one of the key factors of english comprehension is learners’ ability to think critically. the fact that teachers’ ability to possess critical thinking skills is essential for teaching students critical thinking leads to an unanswered question of how is the current state of indonesian pre-service english teachers’ critical thinking skills. this study is important to be investigated to showcase the existing pre-service english teachers’ critical thinking skills that might give hints for the future direction of the teacher’s development program. previous studies have shown that teachers perceive professional development positively (nugraha, maulida, 2021) as a sign of opportunity in developing their critical thinking skills (syahrial, kurniawan, pratama, & perdana, 2017). with the positive opportunity, future direction for teachers’ critical thinking skills improvement is optimistically expected to be present in the future. critical thinking plays a pivotal role in learning and teaching activities. (mustofa, ubaidillah, & harianti, 2020; oktaviah, 2020) implementing critical thinking development within the classroom aligns with what is being considered as one of the most prominent skills in the 21st century (collins, 2014). within the context of english as a foreign language (efl) in the 21st century, teaching english is expected to be integrated with critical thinking development, despite no common agreement on how it should be implemented (vaseghi, 2012). rigorous attempts have been made to foster critical thinking skills in indonesia. the most prominent move was found in the enactment of the 2013 curriculum, as stated in permendikbud number 58 year 2014. critical thinking has become one of the required skills that students need to possess that is expected to be fostered through scientific inquiry. students are trained to be autonomous learners who perform intentional interactions with teachers, peers, and communities to build firm global understanding. directive learning is no longer encouraged within the classroom setting to avoid the pitfalls that the former education system had faced. in consequence, critical thinking mastery among teachers is mandatory. past studies have shown a genuine interest in establishing critical thinking skill skill-driven english classes in indonesia (puspitasari, 2020). mustofa (2020) elaborated the implementation of critical thinking skills in the classroom through intentional instructions that enable learners to sharpen their critical thinking skills specified through the four basic english skills: speaking, writing, listening, and reading. the context of teaching english as a foreign language plays a central role by adding content-based instructions rather than pursuing fluency like how native speakers do. for example, teachers could invite students to read passages and discuss their comprehension instead of just pushing them to pronounce the vocabulary well. this is aligned with what omar and albakri (2016) have concluded, that the essential traits of critical thinking include reading because literature reading’s mental process requires critical thinking skills. the use of technology also gives teachers the opportunity to explore potential strategies and techniques in developing critical thinking skills within the efl classroom. learners might be able to reach a wide array of reading materials whilst learning the context, background, controversies, and critics through the internet. teachers also could connect their classes to native english speakers that might benefit their classes. with the rich resources available, teachers and learners need to acquire an adequate judgment and inference ability which belong to critical thinking skills. critical thinking covers a wide array of subsets that each needs to be considered during critical thinking implementation in education. past studies have shown various components of critical thinking that slightly differ from one another. cambridge assessment (black, 2008) identified five processes that belong to the taxonomy: analysis, evaluation, inference, synthesis, and self-reflection. mustofa (2020) pointed out similar processes with one extra component: interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and self-regulation. according to assessment day (2021), the most common critical thinking test used is the watsonhttps://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=dvwlyh https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=oasghw https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=oasghw https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=lcntly https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=lcntly https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=oasghw https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=whglvl https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=whglvl https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=ehlkgo https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=efewwp https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=uhlapz https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=x4ype5 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=wmpbf4 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=rfy6gd english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 85 glaser critical thinking appraisal (w-gcta) that uses selected-response items such as multiplechoice or likert-type items. diversified the components into analyzing arguments, assumptions, deductions, inferences, and interpreting information. the outline of these components are as follows: assumptions. statements might or might not include assumptions. this component deals with the judgment of whether an assumption has been made or not from the provided statements. analyzing arguments. there are strong and weak arguments according to their relationship with questions. this component assesses how strong is the relationship between the argument with the question. the argument might be considered as strong if it directly aligns with the question or statement, and weak if it is not directly aligned with the question or statement. deductions. comprehending information from a passage might need an evaluation if there is a deduction made in a form of a statement based on the passage. this ability to deduce should be entirely based on the passage and not on self-made conclusions based on one’s own existing knowledge. inferences. true, false, and the possibilities in between are the elements of inferences. this component assesses one’s ability to infer truth and false facts based on the information provided. interpreting information. conclusions can be made from different perspectives based on one passage. this component involves someone’s ability to interpret the information and decide whether some conclusions follow the presented information or not. like the previous points, interpreting information should not be intruded on with existing knowledge. conducted on the basis of critical thinking implementation in the efl classroom setting, this research aims to investigate the current state of indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking and formulate the future directions that will be a prominent assistant for the fulfilment of the vision to upscale the human resource quality of indonesia intellectuals. this research discusses the possibilities of critical thinking improvement through teaching strategies in the efl classroom, particularly in higher education. method this research used a descriptive quantitative research design to examine the critical thinking skills of indonesian efl learners. descriptive quantitative has been widely used in educational research (nazri, wijaya, & zainurrahman, 2020; dabbagh, 2017; hasbi, 2013; husin & nurbayani, 2017). through this method, this research aims to define the characteristics of the indonesian efl learners’ population in terms of critical thinking skills, particularly in pre-service english teacher classrooms to forecast the quality of indonesian english teachers in the upcoming years. this study took the 82 second-year students of english language education in a public university in indonesia as the respondents of the research. the sample choices were taken based on the criteria as follows: (1) the second-year students were considered knowledgeable in decoding words well due to the development of critical thinking that takes place largely after decoding becomes automatic and (2) they were considered as adult learners with a possibility to be the future english teachers. thus, they have the tendency to comprehend more properties of critical thinking than the beginning learners. a set of critical thinking diagnostic tests using watson-glaser critical thinking appraisal (wgcta) by assessment day (2018) was used to measure the initial level of the student's critical thinking skills. the instrument used comprises five sections. each section measures different aspects of critical thinking: analyzing arguments (6 questions), assumptions (9 questions), deductions (6 questions), inferences (10 questions), and interpreting information (7 questions). some of the questions were dropped off due to the validity result. internal consistency reliability has been conducted with the alpha cronbach score of .652 which indicates that the score is acceptable at a moderate level (taber, 2018; ursachi, 2015). validity coefficients results show that most of the items are valid, yet, there are invalid items that have been dropped out during the data. the data analysis utilizes the summary of the calculation using descriptive statistics that include mean, median, mode, standard deviation, minimum and maximum scores. a histogram is used to distinguish the distribution of the score in each component, determining the critical thinking ability that the learners possess. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=zatgyj https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=zatgyj https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=pwiytq https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=pwiytq https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=pwiytq eleazar evan moeljono & alies poetri lintangsari investigating indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking: current state and future directions 86 results and discussion a diagnostic test was circulated among the (n) 82 respondents that consist of 62 females and 20 males. in order to measure the initial level of critical reading. a diagnostic test adopted from assessment day (2018) has been implemented to measure efl students’ critical thinking skills with 33 questions in total consisting of 6 questions measuring students’ skills in evaluating arguments, 8 questions measuring students skill in evaluating assumptions, 3 questions measuring students skills in deduction reasoning, 10 questions measuring students skills in induction reasoning and 6 questions measuring students skills in interpreting information that has met the validity and reliability criteria. students’ general critical thinking table 1 shows the general descriptive statistic of efl students critical thinking skills (n=82) with the mean score (m= 17.232), median (mdn=16), mode (15), standard deviation (sd=5.414), minimum score 9 of 33, and the maximum score is 33 of 33. + table 1. students critical thinking score valid 82 missing 0 mean 17.232 median 16.000 mode 15.000 std. deviation 5.414 minimum 9.000 maximum 33.000 figure 1 shows the histogram that describes the distribution plot of the critical thinking score. it shows that the distribution of the scores was rightskewed that indicates most of the students’ scores are relatively below the mean. most of the students’ scores are in the range 9-17 (n-50) while (n=32) students are having scores above the mean (m=17.232). figure 1. distribution plot of critical thinking score students’ critical thinking in evaluating argument table 2 describes the detailed data of each skill. it shows that the students’ mean score in evaluating arguments is (m=4.2), median (mdn=4), the mode is 4, standard deviation (sd=1.2), and the maximum score is 6. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 87 table 2. students critical thinking in evaluating argument score argument valid 82 missing 0 mean 4.232 median 4.000 mode 4.000 std. deviation 1.240 minimum 1.000 maximum 6.000 figure 2 illustrate that the score distribution is left-skewed which means that most of the students’ score in evaluating the argument is above the mean score and close to the maximum score. the histogram shows that most of the students’ scores are above the mean (n=61) and (n=21) students are having scores below the mean. figure 2. distribution plot of evaluating argument score students’ critical thinking in evaluating assumption in evaluating assumption, the mean score is (m=3.78), the median score is (mdn=4), the mode is 4, the standard deviation is 2.2 and the maximum score is 8 of 8. table 3. students critical thinking in evaluating assumption score assumption valid 82 missing 0 mean 3.780 median 4.000 mode 4.000 std. deviation 2.272 minimum 0.000 maximum 8.000 the histogram as shown in figure 3 describes that the score distribution plot is fairly distributed as the frequency of the students’ scores above the mean are (n=47) and the students’ scores below the mean are (n=35). eleazar evan moeljono & alies poetri lintangsari investigating indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking: current state and future directions 88 figure 3. distribution plot of evaluating assumption score students’ critical thinking in deductive reasoning table 4 illustrates the descriptive statistics of students’ critical thinking skills in deductive reasoning. it shows that the mean is quite high with the score (m=2.11) of the total score of 3. the median is (mdn=2), the model is 3 and the standard deviation is 0.81. table 4. students’ critical thinking in deductive reasoning score deduction valid 82 missing 0 mean 2.110 median 2.000 mode 2.000 std. deviation 0.817 minimum 0.000 maximum 3.000 as shown in the histogram (figure 3) that the distribution of students’ scores in deductive reasoning skills is left-skewed which indicates that most of the students’ scores are around and above the mean (n=65) and only (n=17) students are having the score below the mean. figure 4. distribution plot of deduction score students’ critical thinking in inferences (inductive reasoning) table 5 illustrates the descriptive statistics of students’ critical thinking skills in inductive reasoning. it shows that the mean is quite low with english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 89 the score (m=3.84) of the total score of 3. the median is (mdn=4), the mode is 3 and the standard deviation is 2.247 with a total score is 10. table 5. students’ critical thinking in inductive reasoning score of inductive reasoning valid 82 missing 0 mean 3.841 median 4.000 mode 3.000 std. deviation 2.247 minimum 0.000 maximum 10.000 the students’ score of the inductive reasoning is skewed right as shown in figure 5 with 44 students are having a score around the mean, 38 students are having a score below the mean score, and only 16 students and only 1 student reach the perfect score. figure 5. distribution plot of inferences score students’ critical thinking in interpreting information the mean score of the student’s critical thinking in interpreting information is (m=3.2), the median is (mdn=3.00), the mode is 4 and the standard deviation is (std=1.61) with the maximum score is 6. table 6. students’ critical thinking in interpreting information score of interpreting information valid 82 missing 0 mean 3.268 median 3.000 mode 4.000 std. deviation 1.618 minimum 0.000 maximum 6.000 the students score in interpreting information is also skewed right as shown in figure 6 with 27 students are having the score below the mean, 19 students are having the score around the mean, and 20 students are having the score of mode (4), while 16 students reached the score above the mean score including 12 students reach the perfect score. eleazar evan moeljono & alies poetri lintangsari investigating indonesian efl learners’ critical thinking: current state and future directions 90 figure 6. distribution plot of inferences score the findings indicated that an intentional attempt to foster critical thinking skills among efl learners who happen to be aspiring english teachers is urgently needed to be implemented effectively. among the five components measured in the diagnostic test, the result indicates that deductive reasoning is the hardest component with the lowest result. intentional practice on deductive reasoning in the classroom might be a significant assistance for the learners. learning critical thinking skills could be done through reading, writing speaking, listening, viewing, and visual literacy in the english language classroom to assist learners (omar & albakri, 2016). each of the items has its own strengths and weaknesses in leveraging critical thinking skills. teaching speaking skills in the efl setting relies on the students’ motivation (astuti, 2019). on the other hand, teaching writing skills requires the scaffolding technique, specifically among learners with low to moderate english skills (faraj, 2015). reflecting on what previous studies have concluded, critical thinking is highly impacted by the activity of critical reading in the classroom (par, 2018). critical reading involves synthesizing, evaluating, interpreting, and selectively using the information provided in the passage. it bears a close resemblance to the critical thinking components. efl learners are expected to be able to not only comprehend texts in a proper way but also to evaluate the accuracy of the information through critical reading. the information gained from the reading activities will develop the learners’ critical thinking (delfi, diah, & jismulatif, 2018). conducting critical reading activity requires careful planning and execution as it is part of learning. learning includes the cognitive, social, and emotional processes (national academies of science, 2018). learning might be incomplete if the learners fall short in one of the specified processes. in other words, critical reading activity needs to facilitate cognitive, social, and emotional processes. reading discussion group was found as one way to leverage learners’ confidence in using english that includes all three processes of learning (moeljono, 2020). the activity commences with an extensive reading done by the learner, followed by a reflection-in-action, then continued to the discussion. these three activities foster cognitive, emotional, and social processes respectively. however, the implementation has not been commonly talked about among adult learners, specifically in higher education (fenton-smith & stillwell, 2011). one of the untapped issues in the reading discussion group lies in the quality assurance of the discussion. the discussion quality relies fully on the interest of the learners, making the learners who have lower-to-none interest might be passive during the discussion. resolving the issue of the reading discussion group, macphail (2001) introduced one technique to maximize learners’ participation in a discussion that is known as the nominal group technique (ngt). there are various formats of ngt that have been widely used, but the most relevant with the respondents’ situation is the process conducted by chapple and murphy (1996) because of the characteristics of the learners. https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=ydhtiv https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=ydhtiv https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=fnnkde https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=71gcdy https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=0qx8cy https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=0qx8cy https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=w8cuma https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=w8cuma https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=m4lybc https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=o43fnh https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=o43fnh https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=bvzplg https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?broken=g65wns english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 91 silent phase. leaners are provided with questions to be responded to in private without discussion. this is to facilitate all individuals processing the idea generation and avoid any dominating person. item generation phase. the responses then are distributed within the group. still avoiding discussion, this procedure records the responses until no more ideas are submitted to the group. discussion and clarification phase. the process continues to a conversation between individuals that enable seek clarification, ask questions, and indicate judgment whether the individual agrees or disagrees with any item on the list. this helps learners to utilize their critical thinking skills, specifically in analyzing arguments. voting phase. after the discussion ends, each of the learners is asked to choose the items they consider the most important to them by listing them in accordance with their priority. the ability to infer and deduce ideas is sharpened through this activity. conclusion derived from the discussed theories and findings, critical thinking implementation among efl learners in indonesia might affect the performance of learners in comprehending english which will indirectly boost the potential international collaborations in the global setting. this can be done by well-equipped teachers who possess critical thinking skills that involve analyzing arguments, assumptions, deductions, inferences, and interpreting information. after assessing these components in efl learners who have the potential to be future english teachers, it is concluded that intentional critical thinking training among efl learners is urgently needed because the current state shows an unsatisfactory result. as one of the aspects of english learning, reading can be one of the most effective ways to foster critical thinking skills. activities such as the reading discussion group and the nominal group technique are among the potential strategies for future direction. further studies on these strategies might be beneficial for the betterment of efl learners’ critical thinking skills implementation within the classroom setting. that being said, embedding critical thinking skills through other aspects such as speaking, listening, and writing might lead to other possibilities of significant improvement in critical thinking skills implementation in the efl classroom. acknowledgements this study was funded by the southeast asian ministers of education regional open learning centre (seamolec) research funding scheme. the highest appreciation is given to the participants who have partaken in the data collection process. the writers also would like to state that this research was conducted as a part of the requirements of study fulfilment of bachelor’s degree of faculty of cultural studies of brawijaya university. references astuti, y. 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(2021). character building implemented in english lessons as prescribed in 2013 curriculum. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.367-376. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4371 received: 28-02-2021 accepted: 23-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction the current character education wave has caused some dilemmas over what should be taught and how it should be taught. since public schools educate all students, in making-decision valuebased is a general psychological term used to explain decision-making in situations in which students face a choice between options associated with different rewards (osman & wiegmann, 2017). elkind and sweet (2004) argue that character education is seen as a deliberate effort to make people understand upon core ethical values. it is clear that to be able to judge, care about, and then do what students believe. madani (2019) states that students are considered as the core, while to ensure its quality consequently character should be implemented in order to enhance students’ character. therefore, getting good score is not the major objective of education, but promoting the character education is a significant matter. in line with that, the ministry of education of indonesia claimed that all subjects in the 2013 curriculum were fully integrated with character building. character building in education is a program that has been socialized by the indonesian government since 2010. in line with the abstract: this study aimed at finding out the english teachers’ understanding of character building prescribed in 2013 curriculum, the integration of character building in english teaching and learning, the reasons teachers apply certain character(s), and the challenges of the integration of character building in english teaching and learning. this is a qualitative study in a case study design. the participants were two english teachers of secondary school in palembang. the data were collected through questionnaire, interview, observation, and documentation. the data of this study were analyzed qualitatively. the data obtained from the observations and interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis by identifying, classifying, arranging, and clarifying them. data from documentation were read thoroughly and matched with criteria set. data from questionnaire were classified based on the frequency of characters taught during classroom teaching. the results revealed that in understanding the character, the teachers were in the level of good and fair. it was found that there were 15 out of 18 characters taught, mostly in implicit manner; only 6 characters were explicitly mentioned in each lesson plan. the reason of applying the characters was due to the characters recommended matched with teaching materials taught. teachers encountered challenges in determining the recommended character to teach and in managing students’ different characteristics keywords: english learning; character building; challenges. mailto:ira96audina@gmail.com mailto:smirizon@unsri.ac.id mailto:ritarudysaid@yahoo.com ira audina pratiwi, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati integration of character building in teaching english as prescribed in 2013 curriculum 368 government’s regulation, there are 18 character values to develop (ministry of national education, 2010). they are religious, honest, tolerant, disciplined, hard-working, creative, independent, democratic, curious, nationalist, patriotic, achievement appreciative, communicative, peace loving, reading loving, environmental caring, social caring, and responsible. each of character has some descriptions as the teacher’s guideline in choosing the character to integrate. ernalida, oktarina, and turama (2021) said that students have their own poinjt of view about how they feel. information about what the student wants will be very important in determining whether the students' views and analytical views. character education leads to the establishment of school culture that underlines the attitudes, traditions, habits, and symbols practiced by all stakeholders of the school and its surrounding communities. therefore, character education is expected to support the construction of indonesia’s new generation. character values are not taught directly, but they are integrated into the teaching and learning process, self-development activity, and school culture (ministry of national education, 2010). teachers and all school citizens should integrate those values into the existing curriculum, syllabus, and lesson plan including teachers of english. the integration of character education is essential for the development of indonesia, mainly in the field of education in indonesia which is not only creating smart people but also possessing good character. previous researched done by permana, inderawati, and vianty (2018) conducted a research of the characters’ value that found in junior high school textbooks. the characters were confidence, courtesy, wisdom, and humility. before integrating character values in the teaching and learning process, english teacher should design lesson plans with character building included. a study conducted by faiziyah and fachrurrazy (2013) at junior high school 3 malang showed that only one teacher taught the character values by using direct statements. while, according to ministry of national education (2010) the goal of the character building is to make the students realize that there are in the process of integration of character. it means that teachers are asked to integrate the characters by using explicit method. sugirin (2011) mentions that the implementation of character education should be integrated into relevant content subject instruction. thus, he introduces two different modes in implementing character education in efl learning—explicit and implicit modes. another study done by rosalina (2011) showed that the teachers in gugus 4, bandung barat have already designed lesson plans with character values included. however, in the implementation of character building in the classroom, the teachers did not develop activities that accommodate the implementation of character building. it has been introduced above that there are a lot of theories and explanation above the values of characters building from some experts. moreover, the characters in this study are limited to the characters as prescribed in 2013 curriculum based on the education system in indonesia. in other words, the study used the characters as prescribed in 2013 curriculum as the theoretical framework of the study and the data analysis also referred to 2013 curriculum. the characters as prescribed in 2013 curriculum could be seen in table 1. table 1. values of character education no. character values explanation school indicators 1. religious attitudes and behavior that obey in doing the teachings of their religion, tolerant toward the integration of the practice of other religions, and live in harmony with other faiths. a. admire the greatness of god through the human ability to synchronize between physical and psychological aspects. b. admire god's greatness because of her ability to live as a member of society. c. admire the power of god that has created various universes. d. admire the greatness of god because of the religion that became the source of the order of life of the people. e. admire the greatness of god through various english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 369 subjects in various subjects. 2. honest behavior based on an attempt to make himself as a person who always trustworthy in word, action, and jobs. a. not cheating or being a plagiarist in doing every task. b. speaks unquestionably on a subject. c. express happy or unhappy about the lesson. d. express attitude towards a class discussion material. e. purchase items purchased at the school shop honestly. f. return items borrowed or found in public places. 3. tolerant attitudes and actions that respects differences of religion, race, ethnicity, opinions, attitudes, and actions of others who are different from themselves. a. does not bother friends of differing opinions. b. respect a friend with different customs. c. make friends with friends from other classes. 4. disciplined actions show orderly behavior and obey with various rules and regulations. a. clean school environment orderly. b. orderly in spoken and written language. c. obedient in running the provisions of student organizations. d. obey the rules of speech specified in a class discussion. e. orderly in applying the rules 5. hard-working behaviors indicate a really effort to overcome various barriers in learning and assignments, as well as completing the task as well as possible. a. finish the assignment on time. b. do not give up on learning difficulties. c. always focus on learning. 6. creative think and do something to generate new ways or the result of something that has been owned. a. suggest opinions related to the discussion. b. asking critically about learning materials. 7. independent attitudes and behavior that is not easy to depend on others to complete tasks. a. do a task by himself. b. solve learning problem by himself 8. democratic ways of thinking, being attitude, and acting which assesses the same rights and obligations of himself and others. a. choose group leader by discussion. b. vote in selection. c. tell opinion about classmates. d. participate in helping classroom duties 9. curious attitudes and actions which seek to know deeper and spread of something learned, seen, and heard. a. ask teacher about the material. b. ask someone about natural phenomena. c. ask about something heard from any sources 10. nationalist ways of thinking, act, and having knowledge that puts the importance of the nation and country above self-importance and group. a. love indonesia geography and its fertility. b. appreciate various culture of indonesia. c. appreciate the existence of tribes and languages. d. appreciate various agricultural products, flora and fauna of indonesia. e. appreciate industrial and technological products of indonesia. 11. patriotic ways of thinking, being attitude, and acting that show loyalty, caring, and high appreciation toward language, physical environment, social, cultural, economic, and political nation. a. participate in the ceremony. b. telling and acting toward the threats from other countries. c. telling and acting about the relationship between homeland and colonial countries. ira audina pratiwi, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati integration of character building in teaching english as prescribed in 2013 curriculum 370 12. achievement appreciative attitudes and actions that encourage him to produce something useful for society, and recognize and respect other people's success a. finish the assignment as well as possible. b. working hard for success in sports and arts. c. respect others‟ work. d. appreciate parents‟ achievement. e. appreciate someone’s work. f. appreciate tradition and society product. 13. communicati ve actions show a sense of fun to talk, hang out, and work together with others. a. work in groups. b. associate with others. c. cooperate with classmates. d. interact with teachers and staffs. 14. peace loving attitudes, words, and actions that cause others to feel happy and safe on the presence of himself. a. protect friends from any threats. b. establish friendship. c. participate in school security. 15. reading loving habits provide time to read a variety of literature that gives virtue for him a. reading books or any written documents related to science, literature, arts, culture, technology, and humanities. b. read magazine or newspaper. 16. environmenta l caring attitudes and actions which seek to prevent damage to the surrounding natural environment, and develop efforts to repair the environmental damage that has occurred. a. participate in any activities related to cleanliness, aesthetic, and environmental maintenance. 17. social caring attitudes and actions have always wanted to help other people and communities in need a. participate in any social activities. b. give someone in needs. 18. responsible attitudes and behavior of people to do his duties, he should do, to himself, community, environment (natural, social, and cultural), the country and god almighty one. a. do a task consciously. b. make report in every activity in form of written and oral communication. c. show the pleasure to solve problems. d. avoid cheating. (source: ministry of national education, 2010, pp. 9-10) character education has been a quite hot issue in 2013 curriculum implementation. therefore, in 2013 curriculum, the government would emphasize the character building in society by having character education at school, since it is believed that good characters are reflected by good achievements at school and character becomes the vital core of education (suherdi, 2013). a study on the factor influencing character education insertion process is conducted by pane and patriana (2016) who investigated the environment as one factor in the character education process. it is started by the integration of character building but the impact of this program on the young students or young generation has not determined yet. fahmy, bachtiar, rahim, and malik (2015) found out that the young generation is chosen to be an agent of change. from those results, it can be concluded that the lower the level of education the more portion of character building must be given. it means that junior high school students have a big portion than senior high school and college students. meanwhile, in elementary school, english is not the compulsory subject anymore it can be concluded that junior high school students are the best level to start the integration of character building. according to ministry of education and culture (2017), the portion of characters should be given for junior secondary schools is 60 percent. that is why it is important to know which characters that teachers integrate at junior high school. this study was aimed at finding out teacher’s understanding of character building prescribed in 2013 curriculum, the integration of character building in english teaching and learning at one secondary high school in palembang, the reason of applying certain character(s) in english teaching and learning, and the challenges of the integration of character building in english teaching and learning at the school. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 371 method this is a qualitative research in a case study design. case study is one of the frequently used methodologies, defined as a research methodology that helps in exploration of a phenomenon within some particular context through various data sources (yazan, 2015). it is based on an in-depth investigation of a single individual, group or event to explore the causes of underlying principles. this study employed case study design to seek the character building in english teaching and learning and its challenges. this study was conducted in one junior high school in palembang. this school was chosen because it implemented character building program since it was firstly launched by the government. two english teachers took part as the participants of the study. they were certified teachers who had more than ten years teaching experience. in addition they had taken part in seminars dealing with character building. the data were collected through questionnaire, interview, observation, and documentation. the questionnaire, proposed by nova (2017), consisted of 2 close-ended questions. the question items covered the frequency of inserting character education and types of character values inserted. the interview questions, proposed by nova (2017), consisted of 4 open-ended questions. the questions covered the reason for not inserting character building, the techniques in integrating character building, and the challenges faced in inserting character building. in documentation, teachers’ lesson plans, four lesson plans of each teacher, were reviewed. classroom observations were conducted to know the natural condition of the integration of character building in english subject including the problems and which characters that were usually integrated into teaching and learning process. the observations were done during four meeting of each teacher. to make this study valid due to multiple sources, the researchers applied methodological triangulation. the writers checked the results of the observation compared them with the results of documentation, teachers’ responds of the questionnaire, and what they told in the interviews. the data of this study were analyzed qualitatively and reported descriptively. the data obtained from interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis suggested by miles and huberman (1994) by identifying, classifying, arranging, and clarifying the data into themes. data from documentation (lesson plans) were read thoroughly and matched with criteria set. the data from questionnaire were analyzed through the frequency of inserting character education during classroom teaching and learning. the criteria score categorized as poor, fair, and good was ranged from 3 to 12. the data of observation were obtained using the field note form. after analyzing the data, data interpretation was made and discussed by relating them to theories and previous related studies. at last, the results of the analysis were reported descriptively. findings and discussions data from questionnaire based on the findings from the questionnaire both teachers always integrated the character building in their teaching and learning process. teacher a chose to integrate nine out of eighteen characters. meanwhile, teacher b chose to integrate six characters. it could be seen in table 2. table 2. character value inserted character value inserted efl teacher’s responses teacher a teacher b yes no yes no religious √ honest tolerant √ disciplined √ hard-working √ creative √ independent √ democratic curious √ patriotic √ nationalist √ achievement appreciative communicative peace loving reading loving √ environmental caring √ social caring √ responsible √ √ teacher a chose to integrate nine out of eighteen characters, such as disciplined, hardworking, creative, curious, patriotic, reading loving, environmental caring, social caring, and responsible. meanwhile, teacher b chose to integrate six out of eighteen characters, such as ira audina pratiwi, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati integration of character building in teaching english as prescribed in 2013 curriculum 372 religious, tolerant, hard-working, independent, nationalist, and responsible. in line with the characters found teachers used in this study, ariesinta (2016) also found that some values of character education such as social caring, honest, peace loving, disciplined, curious, and creative applied by the teachers in her study. based on the results of documentation data, all teachers designed their lesson plans involving character values such as disciplined, hard-working, environmental caring, creative, responsible, tolerant, and brave. one value, namely brave is not one of the characters that was mentioned by ministry of national education. this value was mentioned by teacher b. if we take a look at the eighteen characters mentioned by ministry of national education, brave actually is similar with the character named communicative, for instance: work in groups, associate with others, cooperates with classmates, interact with teachers and staffs. this was similar with the values mentioned by adisusilo (2012). he reported that character education was value education that covers nine principles of value such as; responsible, respect, fairness, courage, honest, citizenship, self-discipline, caring, and perseverance. some of the values were included in values mentioned by ministry of national education (2010) while some others were not. so, it could be assumed that those teachers included the character values that were mentioned by other experts. it indicated that teachers were still lack of knowledge related with the component of each character. according to lickona (1991), teachers must have good behaviour so that the students can also have good behaviour by modelling on their teachers. to be a role model for students, teachers themselves should know the component of good character. data from interview results from interview revealed that the teachers were not fully understood with the character values as prescribed in the curriculum, as indicated by the following responses. “in my opinion it is impossible to force all the characters to integrate at every meeting and then to consider also the material that will be given either it is appropriate when using this character or not, besides that need some preparations on how to properly integrate the characters so i think there are some characters that i don't need to integrate first and put on lesson plan.” (teacher a) “there are no characters that cannot be included in the teaching and learning process, because all characters are expected to be applied at school during the teaching and learning process.” (teacher b) in line with that, sugirin (2011) states that in explicit mode, efl teacher should have a plan of what character values are expected to be inserted in teaching and learning activity. it means that before integrating the characters, teacher should prepare well the activity that could support the integration of characters. if the characters that have been planned in the lesson plan are different with the one integrated in the field, it is worried that the integration of the character will not be successful or the students did not get the values of the character, as reflected in the following quotes. “i think so, for example, sometimes i am still confused to determine which characters i need to integrate either in lesson plan or the learning process. other obstacles sometimes i also find it difficult to find the right way so the character that i will integrate is conveyed well to students. in fact, sometimes i forget whether the characters that i planned match to what happened in the field.” (teacher a) “barriers to the character of students who have been embedded from the family are sometimes difficult to change in everyday life.” (teacher b) the quotes above reveal that teachers encountered challenges in determining the recommended character to teach and in managing students’ different characteristics. these challenges were similar with what mentioned by collins and henjum (1999) that there were some challenges faced by teachers in the process of integrating character education; one of them was the difficulty of matching the character education values toward the materials available which meant that not all materials contained character values. therefore, teachers, in this case, must be creative to connect character values in the materials available. poerwati and amri (2013) argue that nation character building can be taught by making students accustomed to moral values and make practice the national character. it means that teachers should know how to change the embedded character of students and integrate the characters recommended by ministry of national education (2010). both teacher a and teacher b mentioned two challenges english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 373 including the examples and the solution that they offered in integrating characters so teacher a is categorized in the level of good with the total score of ten and teacher b was in the level of fair with the total score of eight, as can be seen in table 3. table 3. table of teachers’ character building understanding inter view ques tions poor (1) fair (2) good (3) total a b a b a b teacher a teacher b no 1 √ √ 2 2 no 2 √ √ 2 1 no 3 √ √ 3 2 no 4 √ √ 3 3 total 10 8 good fair data from documentation the writers took four samples of lesson plans from each teacher; therefore, the writers got eight lesson plans in total. from the analysis of the lesson plans given by teacher a, it was found that some characters were planned to be integrated by the teacher. teacher a mentioned the character values in a special point in the lesson plans in instructional objectives section. however, the writers could not find the elaboration of character values in the learning activities section. teacher a designed the learning activities in the form of table containing four columns. the first column was number, students’ activities, and teacher’s activities. teacher a did not provide special column for character values. from the analysis of the lesson plans given by teacher b, it indicated that teacher b mentioned the character values in a special section in the lesson plan after instructional objectives section. the writers could also find the elaboration of character values in the learning activities section. teacher b also designed the learning activities in the form of table. different from teacher a, teacher b provided a special column for character values. the table contained 3 columns, for steps, activities, and character values. from the eighth lesson plans provided by both teachers, the writers found seven character values. the most frequent value was responsible and the less frequent ones were environmental caring, tolerant, creative, hard-working, and disciplined. table 4 summarized the values contained within the lesson plans. table 4. the character values appearing in the lesson plans no. character values planned in the lesson plan frequency teacher a teacher b 1. disciplined 2x 2. hard-working 2x 3. creative 2x 4. environmental caring 2x 5. responsible 2x 4x 6. tolerant 2x 7. brave 2x according to ministry of national education (2010), before integrating character values in teaching and learning process, teachers have to design lesson plans accommodating character building. in order to implement character building in the teaching and learning process, a teacher should adapt the lesson plan. the adaptation can be done by adding or modifying learning steps, indicator, and assessment so that character values can be implemented in teaching and learning process. the teacher could modify the assessment by integrating the character and so on. however, from the eight lesson plan provided by the two english teachers, modification could not be found in the learning steps, indicator, and assessment technique in the lesson plans. this finding was in line with the finding by rosalina (2011) where teachers in gugus 4, kecamatan batujajar, kabupaten bandung barat have already designed lesson plans with character values included. however, in the implementation of character building in the classroom, the teachers did not develop activities that accommodated the implementation of character building. a lesson plan is an extremely useful tool that serves as a combination guide, resource, and historical document reflecting our teaching philosophy, and more importantly our goals for the students (jensen, 2001). if the teacher did not modify the learning steps, indicator and assessment technique, the goal of building the students’ character would be difficult to achieve. in the classroom, teacher a and b explicitly implemented the character building even though not all the characters were integrated explicitly. based on the data, it was revealed that teacher a got confused in determining which characters she need to integrate either in lesson plan or the learning process. ira audina pratiwi, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati integration of character building in teaching english as prescribed in 2013 curriculum 374 data from observation all observations were conducted in four meetings for each teacher. each meeting was eighty minutes. each observation was conducted in same classes handled by the teachers to make the findings more specific and accurate. the writers observed teacher a’s class four times. the topic was stating capabilities and willingness. the writers also had four observations on teacher b’s class. the topic for the lesson that day was present continuous tense. from the eighth observations, the writers found some character values taught by teacher a and teacher b. table 5 presented the character values taught by the two teachers in eight meeting. table 5. character values taught by two teachers no. character values taught by three teachers frequency teacher a teacher b 1. religious 2x 4x 2. honest 2x 1x 3. tolerant 3x 2x 4. disciplined 3x 2x 5. hard-working 1x 1x 6. creative 4x 1x 7. independent 3x 8. democratic 1x 1x 9. curious 2x 1x 10 nationalist 2x 11. achievement appreciative 1x 1x 12. communicative 3x 3x 13. reading loving 1x 1x 14. environmental caring 3x 15. responsible 1x 2x in analyzing the data from the observations, the writers classified the data based on the teacher’s techniques in integrating character values. some of the values were taught by using direct statements or explicitly. some other values were implicitly inherent in activities, not directly stated but inherent in asking students to do something and inferred by the students then confirmed by the teacher. this was similar with what was mentioned by sugirin (2011) that the implementation of character building should be integrated into relevant content subject instruction. as stated by ministry of national education (2010) in panduan pendidikan karakter, it is important for the teacher to make the students realize that they are in the process of building good character. one way to make the students realize that they are in the process of character building is by teaching the character values using direct statements or explicitly. from the observation result, both of the teachers explicitly built the students’ character by using direct statement. the values that were explicitly implemented by teacher a were only four values: disciplined, creative, environmental caring, and honest, while, only three values mentioned in teacher a lesson plan. teacher b also only explicitly integrated four values: hard-working, honest, disciplined, and independent but none of those values was mentioned in teacher b lesson plan. similar study done by abdi (2018) in east kalimantan also found the character values developed by the teachers such as religious, creative, independent and responsible. from the explanation above, it is obvious that the character values in their lesson plans were not the same as those planned to be implemented by the two teachers. there were some factors that could make some differences in character planned and implemented. from those two teachers’ responses in the interview, it was found that the teachers’ lack of knowledge in implementing the character values. from those two teachers, only teacher b had joined workshop about character building. another teacher had never joined any workshop and seminar dealing with the implementation of character building in english subject. this is in line with study by kurniadi and hapsari (2017) which objective was to investigate how character education was implemented in efl learning development in classroom practice at sman 1 pakem involving five classrooms. they found that teachers had implemented character education in learning classroom process consisting of eighteen values in learning. moreover, the implementation of character education gave teachers several advantages and challenges in teaching process. the principle of character values integration in all subjects was apparently implemented in the school. every subject should integrate the character building in teaching and learning process. english is one of the subjects that must integrate the character building in the teaching and learning process. data from the interview showed that teacher acknowledged that there were eighteen characters while they could only mention some of them. both of the teachers kept repeating the same characters for several meetings. concerning the principle of character building, that is, developing the students’ awareness of the character values, the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 375 findings from observation and interview showed that teacher a and b used direct statement to teach the character values but not all characters integrated explicitly, so the principle was not fully implemented by the two teachers. building human being’s character is not a simple task, since long process is needed. therefore, this study did not discuss the assessment used by the teacher to measure the character building of the students. besides, various approaches are needed to internalize the character values. making the students realize that they are in the process of character building is also important so that it is possible for the students to assess themselves in the process of building their character. therefore, teacher plays an important role to support the success of the implementation of character building in indonesia. this is in line with study by wahidah (2017), which objective was to investigate the way english teachers implemented character education in english subject at sma muhammadiyah 1 malang. it was revealed that teachers implemented eighteen characters education in teaching and learning process. teachers implemented it by integrating the variety of character education into each learning activity by using a scientific approach and discussion method. this could be a consideration for teachers in choosing the characters to teach. conclusion in relation to the objectives of the study, four conclusions can be drawn. first, teachers of english did not fully understand with the description of each character; they were merely in the level of good and fair understanding. second, it was found that there were 15 out of 18 characters taught, mostly in implicit manner. teachers tended not to explicitly build students’ character by using direct statement. this is not in line with the goal of character building to make students realize that they are in the process of integrating the characters. only six character values explicitly mentioned in each lesson plan. third, the reason of applying the characters was due to the characters recommended matched with teaching materials taught. fourth, teachers encountered challenges in determining the recommended character to teach and in managing students’ different characteristics. references abdi, m. i. (2018). the implementation of character education in kalimantan, indonesia: multi site studies. dinamika ilmu: journal pendidikan, 18(2), 305-321. adisusilo, s. (2012). pembelajaran nilai-karakter: konstruktivisme dan vct sebagai pendekatan pembelajaran afektif. jakarta: pt raja grafindo persada. ariesinta, d. (2016). an analysis of character education in the 2013 curriculum english textbook of the seventh grade students. universitas sanata dharma. collins, d., & henjum, r. (1999). the 3 c‘s in character education. guidance & counseling,14(3), 24-30. elkind, d., & sweet, f. (2004). you are a character educator. today's school: shared leadership in education,5(2), 16-2. ernalida, oktarina, s., & turama, r. (2021). analysis of teacher needs related to e-learning schoology content in creative writing in middle schools throughout palembang. english review: journal of english education,9(2), 51-58. fahmy, r., bachtiar, n., rahim, r., & malik, m. (2015). measuring students’ perceptions to personal character building in education: an indonesia case in implementing new curriculum in high school. social and behavior science, 211, 851858. faiziyah, n., & fachrurrazy. (2013). the implementation of character building in english subject at junior high school 3 malang. state university of malang. jensen, l. (2001). planning lessons. in m. murcia, teaching english as a second or foreign language (3rd edition, pp. 403-413). boston: heinle & heinle. kurniadi, c., & hapsari, a. (2017). the implementation of character education in english classroom learning process: a case study. qualitative research in elt, 6. lickona, t. (1991). educating for character: how our schools can teach respect and responsibility. new york: bantam books. madani, r. a. (2019). analysis of educational quality, a goal of education for all policy. higher education studies, 9(1), 100-109. miles, m. b., & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). london: sage. ministry of education and culture. (2017). penguatan pendidikan karakter jadi pintu masuk pembenahan pendidikan nasional. retrieved from https://www. kemdikbud.go. id/main/blog/ 2017/07/penguatan-pendidikan-karakter-jadipintu-masuk-pembenahan -pendidikan-nasional https://www.kemdikbud.go.id/main/blog/ ira audina pratiwi, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati integration of character building in teaching english as prescribed in 2013 curriculum 376 ministry of national education. (2010). desain induk pendidikan karakter. jakarta, indonesia: ministry of education. nova, m. (2017). pendidikan karakter di kelas efl indonesia: implementasi dan hambatan. jurnal pendidikan karakter, (2), 142-157. osman, m., & wiegmann, a. (2017). explaining moral behavior: a minimal moral model. experimental psychology, 64(2), 1-15. pane, m. m., & patriana, r. (2016). the significance of environmental contents in character education for quality of life. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 222, 244-252. permana, d. r., inderawati, r., & vianty, m. (2018). potraying character education in junior high school textbooks of the 2013 curriculum. journal of english language studies, 3(2), 245-258. poerwati, e., & amri, s. (2013). panduan memahami kurikulum 2013. jakarta: prestasi pustakaraya. rosalina, r. (2011). penerapan pendidikan karakter pada pelajaran ips di sekolah dasar gugus 4, kecamatan batujajar, kabupaten bandung barat. universitas pendidikan indonesia. sugirin. (2011). character education for the efl student-teachers. cakrawala pendidikan, special issue: dies natalis uny, 30, 1-14. suherdi, d. (2013). buku pedonam penyelenggaraan pendidkan profesi guru bahasa inggris: bahan ajar pemantapan kompetensi akademik (1st ed.). bandung: celtics press. wahidah, i. (2017). the implementation of character education in english subject at sma muhammadiyah 1 malang. (undergraduated thesis. university of muhammadiyah malang). yazan, b. (2015). three approaches to case study methods in education: yin, merriam, and stake. qualitative report, 20(2), 134-152. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 61 abstracts: one among many considerations that should be taken into consideration when moving a conventional face-to-face course to a web-based course is learners' needs, which are transformed into a research-informed blueprint. this study addressed the process of blueprint design resulting from the needs analysis process of design-based research. the objective is to describe the designed blueprint set for a web-based english writing course for nursing students in indonesia. the blueprint consists of designs of learning approach, performance goals, learning tasks and feedback, instructional strategies, and web design modules and interface. the descriptive statistics were used to test 37 items scored by experts of esp and writing about the blueprint. the results of expert judgments showed that all items obtained mean at the ‘good’ categories. it means that the blueprint can be used in conducting the next stage, which is website development. keywords: blueprint design; esp; english writing instruction; web-based learning a web-based english instruction blueprint design: an application of esp writing course risa arroyyani nursing department, institute of health science surya global yogyakarta, indonesia email: rissa.arroyyan@gmail.com lusi nurhayati english education department, yogyakarta state university, indonesia email: tehlusi@yahoo.com apa citation: arroyyani, r., & nurhayati, l. (2021). a web-based english instruction blueprint design: an application of asp writing course. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 6174. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5355 received: 13-08-2021 accepted: 16-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction esp is growing very rapidly due to the high demand for english in various fields (woźniak, 2017). esp is a bridge that connects general english with the specific needs of students related to their academic fields so that esp is a part of the eap (english for academic purposes), which is designed to equip students with language skills closely related to their current and future profession, the language they need (gestanti, mufanti, & nimasari, 2019; hui, 2017; hutchinson & waters, 1987). esp for nursing is one kind of esp that has been growing up to facilitate nursing students to master english for their future needs. the instruction of esp for nursing is not only given face to face but also involves the technology use, for example, webbased learning. web-based english learning is currently becoming an important matter due to the rapid development of science and ict (information, communication, and technology). teaching through the web has developed in many institutions in various parts of the world, which shows that it has a positive impact both to provide new learning experiences and to improve students' linguistic abilities (liu, traphagan, huh, koh, choi, & mcgregor, 2018; simich-dudgeon, 1998; suriaman, rahman, & noni, 2018). the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic further emphasizes the importance of the existence of websites for learning english following the context/situation of the learners/students. since a learning website cannot be created without adequate planning, there is a need to design the blueprint as the basis for webbased instruction. a blueprint is “a specification of plan of action in any given endeavor or task” (adelodun, 2010, p.69) to achieve the goals. it is like maps and specifications for an assessment program, ensuring that all aspects of the curriculum and educational domain are covered. unlike the syllabus, a statement of plans for a part of the curriculum excluding the elements of curriculum evaluation itself, a blueprint is defined as a plan that the teacher makes to be transformed into a reality of classroom interactions (sabbah, 2018). in simple terms, blueprints link assessment with learning objectives (pichholiya, yadav, gupta, kamlekar, & risa arroyyani & lusi nurhayati a web-based english instruction blueprint design: an application of asp writing course 62 singh, 2021). blueprints are also used to examine the weaknesses of existing materials as a basis for designing new materials (mahardika, 2018; patil, hashilkar, & hungund, 2014). in the context of the materials development, it is crucial since it provides detailed planning in terms of the form, learning objectives, and assessment system so that it does not complicate the process of implementing and evaluating learning. the blueprint development for web-based esp (english for general purposes) learning is still under-research. research on blueprint development is mostly carried out at the level of general english (ge) learning, in terms of objectives, activities, and assessment (godwin-jones, 2018; brand, favazza, & dalton, 2012; villarroel, bloxham, bruna, bruna, & herrera-seda, 2018). therefore, developing blueprint involving the use of technology is crucial to be done. in designing blueprints, especially esp webbased instruction, several principles are considered, including pedagogy, technology, and social (berge, 1998). the pedagogy principle is related to the purpose of each activate, level, and type of social and instructional activity, the levels of teachercontrol and student-control, the density of content, which should be inversely related to the amount of synchronous communication within the web-based educational learning environment. regarding technological support, it needs to consider using the easiest media as text and graphics, technological minimalism, and adequate technical support and training for students and instructors. finally, regarding social principle, it is necessary to ensure trust among students and the instructor and the balancing of the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication. a web-based esp instruction should promote active and collaborative learning, provide various perspectives, build knowledge, and encourage teachers' active involvement as student partners (chen, lin, yeh, & lou, 2013; woźniak, 2017). it should also reflect learners’ needs and unique characteristics, provide the types of task which emphasize flexibility, convenience, reliability, and practicality in scoring (hemmati & ghaderi, 2014; sudha & amutha, 2015), provide appropriate feedback to show intended learning achievement, involvement and web-system appropriateness (katerina, nicolaos, & charalampos, 2014; narciss, 2013). thus, blueprint design can be started by determining the appropriate approach to determine the next design steps. recently, teaching english for nursing students is mostly given with a theme-based approach, but not many use other approaches, such as a situation approach. theme-based instruction itself can be used to help the learners form the concepts of decision making, in which the course is arranged based on a theme or a topic instead of a subject. meanwhile, situation-based learning encourages the students learn something new when they face different situation (suhaebar & isrokatun, 2019; yao & hung, 2020). by using a combination of approaches in developing web-based english teaching blueprints for nursing students, learning activities will be more varied. in a combination of theme and situation approaches, the teachers compile a set of language learning activities (christiawati & darsana, 2020) based on simulations of certain situations. by doing this, they will be able to see, understand, solve and apply known understandings through certain themes to analyze and solve the problems they face through web-based media (cheng, yeh, chao, lin, & chang, 2020; yao & hung, 2020) to maximize the potential that students have, involve them personally in the learning process, connect to life experiences, interests, and their knowledge base students, creating a focus for students that open relationships between areas of knowledge, encourage positive student attitudes, and increases student success and achievement (ramdan, hanifah, & isrokatun, 2019; tessier & tessier, 2015; yao & hung, 2020). this theme and situation will determine the learning objectives to be achieved, related to what language skills the students need to master, and how learning activities, exercises, and feedback will be given to the students to assess the understanding and knowledge. regarding learning writing, themebased instruction can help connect different skill areas in which it avoids fragmentation and unconnected skill exercise. the teachers then are able to provide various activities which are integrated around meaningful context including writing activities (fatmawaty & haryani, 2017). with the lack of blueprint development research on web-based teaching in esp and various aspects that need to be considered in designing the ideal web-based teaching, this article only focuses on writing language skills as the first step in blueprint english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 63 design. therefore, this article aims to (1) describe the blueprint design process of web-based english instruction in writing for nursing students and (2) describe the blueprint of web-based english instruction in writing for nursing students itself with the score obtained from the experts. what is discussed in this article is essential for teachers since the article contains empirical experiences in developing blueprints for writing programs through web-based learning specifically aimed at esp learners, especially nursing, which has not been widely practiced, especially in indonesia. method this study is the second part of design-based research (dbr) that uses the dick & carey addie model (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation). the blueprint was developed based on the results of needs analysis done in the “analysis” stage, involving several nursing students from multiple academic years, esp teachers, and it experts. the design stage consists of determining a learning approach, determining performance goals, developing learning task items and feedback, determining web-based learning methods, strategies, and materials, and conducting content validity. three experts were involved in assessing the content and format of the blueprint. the criteria of experts are professional esp teachers (medical and nursing). they gave scores in five aspects, namely general aspect, content, task, feedback, and instructional procedures of 37 items. the ranges of the score were 5 for the highest and 1 for the lowest. the scores were then tested using descriptive statistics to determine the mean value and converted into scales interval of mean value categories, as shown in the following table. table 1. data conversion scales interval of mean value categories mean value categories 2.00 ≤ x̅ ≤ 2.60 2.61 ≤ x̅ ≤ 3.21 3.22 ≤ x̅ ≤ 3.82 3.83 ≤ x̅ ≤ 4.43 x̅ ≥ 4.44 very poor poor fair good very good results and discussion determining learning approach an approach refers to the general assumptions about what language is and how learning a language occurs (richards & rodgers, 2014). this blueprint design combines theme-based and situation-based approaches in which themes are presented in a situation to lead students to think about what language they need. with context thematically familiarized, students are more prepared to deal with ‘the cognitive demands of the english systemic features’. the theme-based approach supports the content use and teaching without neglecting the language which is its most important objective (padilla de la cerda, 2016). the topic chosen in the blueprint design in this study is "patient's history." table 2 shows a detailed example. table 2. learning approach of blueprint lesson title/topic patient's history theme dealing with the patient's medical history, both current and past illnesses, drug history, and family medical history. situation the situation created for students to imagine is that as a nurse, before the doctor conducts a physical examination of the patient, the nurse first gives patients several questions to be validated with their medical history data. the nurse needs to provide some notes that will be given to the doctor as a basis for the patient's physical examination and as nursing documentation. from the table, it can be seen that the blueprint design starts from choosing the topic, followed by determining the theme and designing a situation that becomes the basis for deciding what sub-skills students must master in achieving their learning targets according to that topic. by using a combination of theme-based and situation-based approaches, teachers can direct students to imagine what language skills they should be good at on this topic in a particular context. the teacher will describe this situation in the learning material before providing other materials. determining performance goals the topics and situations should be relevant to the learning goals. in determining the performance goals, or learning objectives, some existing criteria and rubrics were considered. they are aryadoust's risa arroyyani & lusi nurhayati a web-based english instruction blueprint design: an application of asp writing course 64 criterion and description, assess and score writing sample and the common framework of reference (cfr) grid on the secondary a.2.2 writing global scale (aryadoust, 2010; government of saskatchewan ministry of education, 2012). the first consists of arrangement of ideas and examples (aie), communicative quality (cq), or coherence and cohesion (cc), and sentence structure vocabulary (ssv) as a guide for the sub-skills the students must master, as a guide in determining student learning objectives based on these sub-skills. the last, the global cfr scale, is an internationally recognized language level chart highlighting observable language behavior in a social or academic context (i.e., learners will…). the statement describes proficiency concerning student performance in a 'real world' context. the basis for choosing the two guides is that each has items and a detailed description of what skills the students must master and their application related to writing on predetermined topics. of course, not all items were selected; only certain items were chosen according to the lesson titles, themes, and situations created previously. table 3 contains details of the sub-skills and course objectives of “patient's history.” table 3. learning sub-skills and objectives of blueprint learning sub-skill & objectives sub-skills objectives indicator present the ideas and information about the patient's medical history obtained from the form. (aie) can write down information and brief descriptions explaining what, where, and when based on the patient's medical history form in a simple sentence, using correct grammar structure of prepositions, transitional words, and appropriate conjunctions regarding facts and terminology related to the topics. can write down information and brief descriptions explaining what, where, and when based on the patient's medical history form as part of a patient examination procedure. can write simple descriptions of the patient’s medical history using correct grammar structures use the right transitional words/phrases when moving the discussion (cq), use appropriate pronouns and conjunctions to connect ideas or sentences (cq), use the correct vocabularies which are appropriate to the topic (ssv) can use transitional words and appropriate conjunctions in writing descriptive reports from patient medical history data can fill in information gaps regarding facts, and terminology, as well as a description of the patient's medical history data. use proper spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. (ssv) can write simple descriptions of the patient’s medical history using correct grammar structures use the correct syntax/verb tense. (ssv) can write simple descriptions of the patient’s medical history using correct grammar structures from the table above, it is clear that both the determination of sub-skills writing and students' learning objectives directly follow the theme and situation previously determined. mastering subskills writing is related to how students can express ideas and information from the medical history form in descriptive form by using the correct tenses for each part of the description, writing, vocabulary, pronouns and conjunctions and transitions, and correct punctuation. by determining detailed subskills and course objectives such as the table above, it is easier to determine the right exercises to achieve learning objectives and compile feedback rubrics for each given exercise. developing learning task and feedback the next step in web-based english writing blueprints for nursing students was determining types of web-based tasks to achieve learning objectives and feedback types on each task. the following table explains the types of tasks and materials under the sub-skills and learning objectives in the lesson entitled “patient's history”. table 4. learning tasks and feedback of blueprint learning tasks & feedback input text types of tasks examples of question types of feedback type of text: descriptive text to describe the patient's medical history, both previous and current medical history, to explain the patient's symptoms. multiple choice based on the patient's past complaints on the form, lights could make his complaint … a. better b. worse when did the patient do the last screening test based on the patient's history form? a. two months ago b. two years ago. automatic knowledge of results feedback (immediate) form: the notification of “congratulations, your answer is correct” or “sorry, your answer is incorrect. please try again” when the students click the "submit" or "check" option. the short explanation about the correct answer such as: "on the form, the patient wrote ‘light’ in the column of aggravating factor, it means that the light made his complaint worse". form of the patient’s medical history and example of describing the form into sentences. text constructions based on the patient’s history form, write a descriptive report using correct grammar and tenses. don't forget to put a tick on the rubrics before submitting your report. knowledge of correct response feedback through rubrics and informative-tutoring feedback through manual teacher’s comments (delayed) form: feedback rubrics items are based on the can-do statements scale derived from the criterion of sub-skills and indicators. feedback is formed in rubrics in which the students can put a tick in each statement and manual feedback given by the teacher to the students' writing. vocabulary: adjectives, nouns, verbs, prepositions. multiple choice based on the information on the patient's family history, his elder brother died ....his forties. a. on b. in he found that he was ....to the medicine. a. allergy b. allergic automatic knowledge of results feedback (immediate) form: the notification of “congratulations, your answer is correct” or “sorry, your answer is incorrect. please try again” when the students click the "submit" or "check" option. the short explanation about the correct answer such as: "to describe age, preposition 'in' is used". the terminology used in describing a patient’s medical history based on the information on the patient's history, he took a (an) … for his allergy. a. otc b. homeopathy remedy risa arroyyani & lusi nurhayati a web-based english instruction blueprint design: an application of asp writing course 66 structure: simple sentences in describing health history matching match the description to the category based on the patient’s health history.the patient had a severe attack of central chest pain.the pain got worse when doing jogging. answers: [aggravating factors] [sites of pain] automatic knowledge of results feedback (immediate) form: the notification of “congratulations, your answer is correct” or “sorry, your answer is incorrect. please try again” when the students click the "submit" or "check" option. grammar: simple past tense multiple choice which is the correct use of tenses to describe the patient's health history? a. his elder brother is died because of a heart attack. b. the light made the patient vomit. which one is the correct conclusion of the patient's social and personal history based on the form? a. he smoked cigarettes almost every day. b. he drank alcohol. c. he didn’t take regular exercises. automatic knowledge of results feedback (immediate) form: the notification of “congratulations, your answer is correct” or “sorry, your answer is incorrect. please try again” when the students click the "submit" or "check" option. the short explanation about the correct answer such as: "on the form, the patient put a tick on ‘alcohol’. it means that the patient drank alcohol". the table above shows the types of texts and tasks given to achieve learning objectives based on the sub-skills the students need to master. some types of tasks resemble the forms of activities a nurse might need to do in their professional context (e.g., selecting/choosing specific indicators). types of vocabulary are related to the topic; they include the meaning, parts of speech, and spelling. grammar materials focus on sentence making and types of tenses according to the topics, themes, and situations. some materials will be included in the discussion of topics; however, other materials, for example, grammar and basic sentence writing, will be given separately due to its complexity and the different needs that learners might. besides, the table also describes the types of feedback given according to the task. feedback is needed as an important step to encourage learning. the web-based instruction designer must plan how to obtain feedback (kusairi, 2020). the type of feedback provided in this web-based instruction design is knowledge of results feedback (immediate feedback) for training in the form of multiplechoice, matching, or sentence completion (cloze test/gap-fill exercise). this type of feedback is a simple verification that provides information to students about correct/incorrect responses. immediate feedback means that feedback is given to students as quickly as possible by computer hardware and software during instruction. in this blueprint design, the type of immediate feedback is in the form of the item, which means that students do the task one by one, and the feedback will be immediately given as soon as the exercise item is submitted. feedback is a significant aspect of interaction as it could be motivating. meanwhile, for the type of text construction task, the feedback given is knowledge of correct response feedback through rubrics and informativetutoring feedback through manual teacher's comments that entered delayed feedback. it provides important information to complete the task but does not immediately offer the correct solution, and also, because of its delayed nature, the feedback is given to students after a certain program delay interval on the web that is specified during english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 67 instruction or testing. in this blueprint design, delayed feedback was in the form of manual comments by the teacher on students' writing results within 1-24 hours or 1-7 days (vasilyeva, puuronen, pechenizkiy, & rasanen, 2007). meanwhile, rubrics as a form of feedback on text construction tasks were prepared based on the cfr can do statements scale (cfr). determining learning strategies and methods after determining the types of tasks, supporting materials, and also the feedback, the blueprint design focused on choosing methods and selecting learning strategies and materials. the three of them cannot be separated from each other so that in this blueprint design, they are put into the same stage. the learning activities provided were in the form of questions for their understanding of the reading/chart displaying the patient's medical history information and filling in sentences with missing words (gaps in sentence practice) for both terminology and grammar-related (for example, prepositions) and paragraphed writing. in the other hands, in designing the learning strategy in this blueprint, there were several stages, namely (a) strategy for organizing learning content, (b) strategy for delivering the learning (c) strategy for learning management. meanwhile, from the three patterns of learning material selection by dick and carey (aji, 2016) including (a) the teacher designs individual learning materials, all stages of learning are included in the material except the pretest and posttest, (b) the teacher selects and changes existing materials to suit the learning strategy, (c) the teacher does not use materials but delivers all learning. according to the learning strategy that he has compiled, the blueprint designer chose the second pattern, where the teaching materials were adjusted to the previously prepared learning strategies. table 5 presents the details of the learning strategies used. table 5. learning strategy and methods of blueprint learning strategy & methods materials website modules method of delivering materials on website instructional procedures type of text: descriptive text to describe the patient's medical history, both previous and current medical history, to explain the patient's symptoms. delivered in the category “patient's history” in the topics module. accessed directly by the students (webusers) by clicking on the category. if the users want to save it, they can click on the download option. activities on the website: 1. the students visit the website page and sign in (for non-student visitors, they cannot sign in). 2. for the students who have not registered, they are directed to register first. 3. the students visit the topics page and select the sub-topic patient's history. 4. the students download a hand out on one of the categories in patient's history and visit the “materials review” page. 5. the students study the materials review page, which contains the learning objectives of patient's history, the introduction of vocabularies, terms, phrases, and examples of describing patient's history form. implementation of ppp: (ppp1) target language set up (ppp2) vocabulary pre teach 6. the students visit other category pages in patient's history to do some types of tasks and determine what language function is used through those tasks. implementation of ppp: (ppp3)context building form of the patient’s medical history and example of describing the form into sentences. vocabulary: adjectives, nouns, verbs, prepositions. vocabularies regarding parts of speech are given in the category "parts of speech" of supporting modules. accessed directly by the students (webusers) by clicking on the category. there is no download facility for this category. the terminology used in describing a patient’s medical history vocabularies related to terminology of topics are provided in the category “patient's history” risa arroyyani & lusi nurhayati a web-based english instruction blueprint design: an application of asp writing course 68 in the topics module. (ppp4) elicitation 7. the students can visit supporting materials pages while doing the tasks if they want to check the theory of punctuation, tenses, and sentence writing as part of independent learning. implementation of ppp: (ppp5) standardization, individual, finger error correction. 8. after completing the tasks, the students check the answers to get feedback. if they make mistakes in doing the tasks, they then students do the tasks until they really understand. implementation of ppp: (ppp5) standardization, individual, finger error correction. 9. the students have to do the last task that is text constructions by typing paragraphs according to the instructions in the space provided and filling in the rubrics checklist then submitting the task (only the students who have signed up and approved by the admin). implementation of ppp: (ppp1) board stage. 10. if the students find difficulties in the tasks for writing sentences or paragraphs or just reevaluate what they have written previously, they can visit the home page which contains basic categories of grammar and the basics of writing sentences and paragraphs. structure: simple sentences in describing health history delivered in the category "basic sentence writing" of supporting modules accessed directly by the students (webusers) by clicking on the category. there is no download facility for this category. grammar: simple past tense delivered in the category “tenses” of supporting modules accessed directly by the students (webusers) by clicking on the category. there is no download facility for this category. the table above illustrates the strategies and learning materials designed in this blueprint. in terms of the instructional procedures, this blueprint implemented the ppp or presentation, practice, and production stages with some adjustments due to the suitability of the stages with the objectives of this blueprint design, especially in this blueprint, students learned grammar structures, new vocabularies, and tenses related to the topic, so that ppp is considered the most appropriate. the stages in ppp used in this blueprint were” the application of presentation practice production method” including: (1) target language set/ppp1 to determine the function of the target language to be taught, (2) vocabulary pre-teach/ ppp2 to introduce vocabulary or terms needed by students related to the material and function of the language being studied, (3) context building / ppp3 to determine the context or situation to the students. the teacher has a role in introducing the situation, (4) elicitation/ppp4, where the students can guess the topic's language function. one way of elicitation is displaying images or media, (5) standardization, choral, individual, finger error correction, in which in writing learning, the standard is to make sure students write the terms or sentences correctly, and (6) board stage, that is about writing language functions as the final stage in the ppp stage series (ihsan, 2020). designing website design modules & interface based on the instructional procedures as part of developing web-based learning english writing for nursing students with a web as a final result, planning website modules and website user interface is crucial before conducting further stage. website modules are website components used to create pages including images, text, buttons, etc. while user interface is the visual appearance of a website that bridges the system with the user in the form of shape, color, and writing or how the appearance of a website is seen by the user. the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 69 website interface provides an overview of what the visitor will see. there are several aspects in the user interface consisting of layout, logo image, color selection, typography, and other aspects. the user interface in this web design is designed with some criteria including clear, concise, responsive, structured, consistent, and attractive. the learning content must be structured to avoid the information displayed overlap, making it easier for students to explore the web. the table below illustrates the plans for teaching english writing website modules for nursing students. table 6. website modules planning content/modules features layout design title of website title & logo of the website header menu color: blue background color: white header color: blue footer color: black typography: typeface, typestyle, font weight, font width, padding, margin, font size, font variation, angle, line height, paragraph spacing. font: roboto & sans serif main modules (nursing materials) topics top menu tasks (multiple choice, matching, text construction sub menu feedback feedback of tasks pop up supporting modules (grammar, tenses) parts of speech, punctuation, capitalization, tenses, basic writing side bar list content exercise menu bar additional modules about, login/register top menu website description, address, contact us, copyright footer the table above describes the type of module plans that will be displayed on the website. the main modules shown here are only related to nursing materials including theory and terminology which can be read through the website and can be downloaded, as well as tasks according to their type. this module is placed on the top menu under the header. meanwhile, the supporting modules are materials that support learning the main materials such as parts of speech, punctuation, capitalization, tenses, and basic writing. the module is equipped with exercises to deepen students' english skills and is placed on the left side bar. the website will use blue color as the header and module buttons, black color as the footer, and white color as the background color. in terms of typography, this website uses common typography designs namely ‘roboto’ and ‘sans serif’. the detailed design of the website will be conducted in the next stage that is web development. the users (visitors) can access web pages according to the following figure 1. figure 1. use case diagram website planning when accessing the website, the users do not need to register because this website is designed to be accessible by anyone, however, when the user is intended to download the materials or to do text construction tasks, he or she must first sign up. the user registration consists of full name, affiliation, study program, and student number. the admin then will approve the registration application. the instructional procedures on how to use the web for learning can be seen in table 5 (learning strategy and methods of blueprint). the following figure describe the web interface. figure 2. user interface planning figure 2 is the website interface on the main page (home) which consists of a header, top menu (home, topics, exercise, about), side bar (categories grammar and tenses), list content categories, and footer. the design will be developed on the further stages including the interface of each module, feedback, and form of task. experts judgment on the blueprint design the experts scored five aspects of blueprint validity. the following are the detailed results of each aspect. table 7. general aspect items n m category 1. the learning objectives statements are available. 3 4.33 good 2. the learning objectives are clear and suitable for the goals of materials development (writing) 3 4.00 good 3. the indicators of achieving learning objectives are available 3 4.33 good 4. the indicators and learning objectives are suitable 3 4.00 good 5. the tasks are suitable for the indicators and learning objectives 3 4.00 good table 7 above showed that all items get mean more than 4.00 but less than 4.44. it can be concluded that all items of general aspect were good. table 8. content aspect items n m category 1. the content is suitable for students’ career needs. 3 4.33 good 2. the content is suitable for learning theories. 3 4.00 good 3. the content is suitable for students’ language needs. 3 4.33 good english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 71 4. the content is developed from easy to difficult 3 4.33 good 5. the content is suitable for students’ level of thinking. 3 4.00 good 6. the content is suitable for students’ language proficiency. 3 4.00 good table 8 above showed that all items get mean more than 4.00 but less than 4.44. it can be concluded that all items of the content aspect were good. table 9. task aspect items n m category 1. the tasks designed are suitable for learning topics. 3 4.00 good 2. the tasks designed are suitable for writing sub-skills. 3 4.00 good 3. the tasks designed are varied. 3 4.00 good 4. the tasks designed provide students to explore the internet. 3 4.00 good 5. the tasks are designed to build students’ autonomous learning. 3 4.33 good 6. the tasks are designed to support media/internet literacy. 3 4.00 good 7. the tasks selected do not make students’ confused. 3 4.00 good table 9 above showed that all items get mean more than 4.00 but less than 4.44. it can be concluded that all items of the task aspect were good. table 10. feedback aspect items n m category 1. the feedback is suitable for learning topic 3 4.00 good 2. the feedback is suitable for learning objectives. 3 4.00 good 3. the feedback is suitable for learning indicators. 3 4.00 good 4. the feedback is suitable for the tasks given. 3 4.00 good 5. the feedback is suitable to monitor students’ learning progress. 3 4.00 good 6. the feedback is suitable for learning through the website. 3 4.00 good 7. the feedback facilitates students’ autonomous learning. 3 4.00 good 8. the feedback motivates students to do self-evaluation. 3 4.00 good 9. there is final learning feedback. 3 4.00 good table 10 above showed that all items get mean more than 4.00 but less than 4.44. it can be concluded that all items of the feedback aspect were good. table 11. instructional procedures aspect items n m category 1. the instructional procedures are suitable for learning topics. 3 4.33 good 2. the introduction in instructional procedures contains related competency taught. 3 4.33 good 3. the instructional procedures are designed in detail. 3 4.33 good 4. the main learning designed is focused on the students. 3 4.00 good 5. the main learning provides an opportunity for the students to interact/explore the internet/website. 3 4.00 good 6. there are pre-activities in the instructional procedures. 3 4.00 good 7. there are while-activities in the instructional procedures. 3 4.00 good 8. there are post-activities in the instructional procedures. 3 4.00 good 9. the instructional procedures are suitable with the learning objectives and indicators 3 4.00 good 10. the instructional procedures are suitable for the tasks given. 3 4.00 good risa arroyyani & lusi nurhayati a web-based english instruction blueprint design: an application of asp writing course 72 table 11 above showed that all items get mean more than 4.00 but less than 4.44. it can be concluded that all items of instructional procedures aspect were good. the experts' descriptive analysis results showed that all the 37 items have a mean in the ‘good’ category. based on this score, all items are feasible and can be used as a basis to continue to the next stage (web development). by reflecting on the design process, some crucial aspects can be determined to improve the blueprint category; it includes the focus of language skills in a unit, the website interface description, and a simple short explanation of automatic feedback. the blueprint is expected to get the perfect category by conducting some revisions before the further development stage. the designed blueprint could be used as an alternative to develop the esp webbased instruction. this design is expected to encourage esp teachers, especially those planning web-based learning, to provide an overview of building web learning. the constraint so far is that there is a limited innovation of the teaching of esp related to the development of learning characters in each institution involving technology. this blueprint has the advantage which emphasizes student interaction with the internet as a part of cybergogy, due to the demands of learning change every time, especially after the covid-19 pandemic. however, there are some challenges that appear, including a lack of inadequate learning design due to limited it support skills so that further research can accommodate this with more supportive it. conclusion designing a blueprint is one stage in developing overall teaching materials, particularly in webbased learning development. the blueprint design for web-based english instruction in writing for nursing students using a combination of themebased and situational-based approaches is arranged through a series of stages. these stages are carried out sequentially by the blueprint designers to obtain an overview of how web-based english instruction in writing for nursing students will be created and developed. the blueprints have been designed to provide an overview of how learning will be done through the website, including the form of the task, feedback, and instructional procedures. the ‘good’ categories are based on the scores given by the experts from both english for specific purpose and writing subjects, the blueprint obtains assessments and suggestions that can be used to proceed to the next stage that is website development. acknowledgements the researchers wish to acknowledge the ministry of higher education, research and technology of republic of indonesia for the grant or funding that has supported our work here. references adelodun, g. a. 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(2020). to kill or not to kill: a theme-based instruction in decision making for military english learning. international journal of multidisciplinary and current educational research (ijmcer), 2(5), 270–289. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 105 content analysis of speaking activities in english textbook based on 2013 curriculum for the first grade students at senior high school ali akbarjono english education program, tarbiyah and tadris, state islamic institute of bengkulu email: aliakbarj250975@gmail.com pipit melati english education program, tarbiyah and tadris, state islamic institute of bengkulu email: melatipipit98@gmail.com feny martina english education program, tarbiyah and tadris, state islamic institute of bengkulu email: feny@iainbengkulu.ac.id syafryadin university of bengkulu email: syafryadin@unib.ac.id apa citation: akbarjono, a., melati, p., martina, f., & syafryadin. (2021). content analysis of speaking activities in english textbook based on 2013 curriculum for the first grade students at senior high school. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 105-112. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5360 received: 26-08-2021 accepted: 27-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction speaking skill is one of the language abilities that are greatly essential to promote further verbal communication. speaking is an oral communication between a speaker and listener which includes productive skills, competence and understanding (thornburry, 2009; renandya & widodo, 2016). speaking is an interactive real-time activity to express our ideas to interact with others that is unplanned and just continues based on the situation. for that reason, the teaching of speaking tends to use the activities that consist of real situations. then, to make sure the students achieve speaking skill, they have to focus on studying and doing practice during the learning process. although speaking skill is the most complicated skill to promote, but it is really essential to assist oral communication. abstract: this research is focused on speaking activities in two versions of english textbooks published by the government/kemendikbud and published by private publications/erlangga based on the 2013 curriculum syllabus, and this research is also to find out which books meet the good category to help student learning activities. this research is very important for the academic world to make it easier for a student and teacher to choose a good textbook to meet their speaking needs. the method used in this research is content analysis. the researcher used two analysis matrixes in collecting data. the first analysis matrix will show the suitability of the speaking activities in the two versions of the textbook with the 2013 curriculum syllabus. the second analysis matrix will show the percentage scores of the two versions of the english textbook based on the guidelines evaluation. as for the results of data analysis, the first matrix shows that speaking activities in the two versions of the english textbook are in accordance with the 2013 curriculum syllabus, and the second matrix al so shows that the two versions of the english textbook are in the "good" and “fair” category, which is the textbook published by the government/kemendikbud has an average percentage of 93%(good) and textbooks published by private publications/erlangga have an average percentage of 73% (fair). in conclusion, both versions of english textbooks published by the government/kemendikbud and published by private publishers/erlangga are good and fair categories for students in carrying out the teaching and learning process. keywords: speaking activities; textbook; 2013 curriculum. ali akbarjono, pipit melati, feny martina, & syafryadin content analysis of speaking activities in english textbook based on 2013 curriculum for the first grade students at senior high school 106 however, in reality most of students in indonesia cannot speak english fluently. english speaking skill is usually studied by students in the classroom that uses a textbook or media as a learning resource. in english speaking the student can practise and do improvisation to find out their potentials in communications (widiana, 2018). besides that, the teacher’s role becomes important because the teacher plans the materials that are needed by students during the learning process. the material that is commonly used in our education system is the textbook as a simple design for success in teaching and learning process. choosing the correct textbook becomes a challenge for the teacher, so that can make it easier for students or learners to know the material better. in support of the learning process, using media such as a textbook will help learners to learn easier, clearer, faster, and better. the textbooks also help teachers to do their job better, easier and organized. as a media in the learning process, the textbook is capable of contributing what teachers illustrate to learners. on the other hand, the textbooks are media and learning resources that have been designed to meet educational standards in a simple form to simplify the teaching-learning process at schools, and the most important things are if the contents, materials, and activities in the english textbook are have to suitable with the curriculum in force which is in the teaching-learning process our curriculum design is expected to create active learning, creative, fun and character. talking about curriculum has a relation in all aspects in education system because all learning processes are based on the curriculum established by the ministry of education and culture. and of course, the teaching and learning process cannot be separated from the curriculum both of them have relevance for each other. according to the government regulation number 20 year 2003 section 1 letter 19, curriculum means a set of plans and regulations about the aims, content and material of lessons and the method employed as the guidelines for the implementation of learning activities to achieve given education objectives. the education system in our country uses the 2013 curriculum (k13), which is the 2013 curriculum is a curriculum that is more focused on developing student character values and also focuses more on practical activities rather than theory, and it has several aspects including attitudes, knowledge, and skills competencies (kurniasih, imas & sani, 2014; poerwanti, and amri, 2013). based on the pre-observation conducted by researcher on tuesday, march 4, 2021. the researcher was able to collect data at sman 5 lebong. the researcher observed the english teacher and student of the first grade during the learning process, with identified problems including: first, the teacher is still dominating in the speaking class. second, students are a passive learner, and it is difficult to speak in front of their classmate. third, students are not confident to speak and afraid of making mistakes. fourth, students have low vocabulary of english. fifth, the teacher just uses the english textbook without knowing which textbook in the category is the good one. and the students claimed that the most difficult basic skill was speaking skills because the students were really scared of making mistakes and did not have the confidence to speak (lisa, 2016). they also had difficulty in delivering their opinions and ideas verbally. in addition, the students still have trouble with pronouncing particular words in english. then, the english teachers also claimed that students have difficulties in sharing their ideas to speak in english during the lesson, it is proven by the students' speaking scores which are still below average. besides that, for make sure to students master in speaking skill they certainly need a good textbook or material to support the learning process, but due to the many versions of textbooks, it will be difficult for teachers to choose the right textbook that has good criteria related to the syllabus and the teachers are also often confused about which textbook is more in line with the 2013 curriculum syllabus. using the correct textbook will be an important reference for teachers to provide opportunities for students to learn to speak, and it is important to give students as many opportunities to speak as possible. furthermore, several studies were conducted about speaking activities in textbook, but they just analyzed speaking activities in textbook of elementary school and junior high school and whether or not speaking activities belong to communicative competence (lesmana, 2015; kartini, 2015; ayu, 2017; fitri, 2019, and ariska, 2020). considering the above statement, by looking at the condition that speaking skills are a skill that is difficult for students to understand, besides that english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 107 teachers also certainly need good references in learning, so as to help with these problems and make it easier for teachers and students to choose good english textbooks, especially content speaking activities that should be in accordance with the syllabus curriculum used at the school, namely the 2013 curriculum. then, to find out which english textbook is in the good category, the researcher wants to analyze some textbooks that are commonly used by teachers as learning resources for students in learning, and they will certainly be measured, with the criteria in choosing a good textbook, according to experts. in addition, seeing the many versions of textbooks available in schools, especially schools where researchers conducted research at sman 5 lebong, researchers compared two versions of english textbooks published by the government (kemendikbud) and english textbooks published by private publications (erlangga) for the first grade student. method the design of this research will be a content analysis. content analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from data to their context (krippendorf, 2013; ary, jacobs, & sorensen, 2010; creswell, 2014). it means that in doing content analysis, the researcher tended to describe the source texts into inference meaning in order to be more understandable by the readers for implicit meaning stated in it based on its context of use in society. it indicated that this kind of research is more than a counting process, as the goal is to link the results to their context or to the environment in which they were produced. on the other hand, content or document analysis is a method that is applied for written or visual data with the purpose of identifying specific characteristic of materials. the materials can be taken from textbook, newspaper, television program, advertisements, musical composition, or any of a host of other types of documents (donald et. al., 2010, p. 457). in this research, content analysis will use to analyze the content of speaking activities of the two versions of english textbooks which are based on textbook evaluation criteria and both of them are based on the 2013 curriculum for the first grade student at senior high school. this research which focus on two versions of english textbooks published by government/ kemendikbud and published by private publications/ erlangga. the instruments used were two analysis matrixes, the first analysis matrix will use to explain how does the suitability of speaking activities in the english textbook of first grade student published by the government/ kemendikbud and private publications/ erlangga fulfill the content aspects suggested in the syllabus of the 2013 curriculum? then, the second analysis matrix will shows the percentage score in the textbook evaluation criteria which aim to find out which textbooks meet the content aspects better suggested by materials evaluation. in collecting the data, the researchers used two versions of english textbooks that are used at the senior high school it refers to a technique of collecting data by gathering speaking activities in english textbook and analyzing documents, while a document is a communicable material used to explain some attributes of an object, systems or procedures (sewagegn, 2020). it means that the qualitative data which is drawn with words and sentences, clustered following its category to gain conclusion. as for several steps that will be taken by the researcher, they are: first, researcher chose the school that has already implemented the 2013 curriculum. after the permission from the school to collect the data had been given, checking and asking the syllabus for their first grade students and the textbook which is used by the teacher and student in doing the learning process. furthermore, copying the syllabus and collecting english textbooks, especially more focus on speaking activities, into the table that the researcher has made to collect data. this table is to find out the suitability of english textbook with the syllabus of the 2013 curriculum. second steps are followed by designing the textbook evaluation criteria checklist containing a set of standard criteria for evaluating english textbooks which will be derived from the guidelines materials evaluation, this guidelines checklist is to know which english textbook is the good one (balachandra, 2014). third, to strengthen data and avoid information bias, researchers will also conduct interviews with english teachers about how they think about english textbooks commonly used in teaching and learning activities in class. this interview is only additional information for researchers in describing the data that has been collected. ali akbarjono, pipit melati, feny martina, & syafryadin content analysis of speaking activities in english textbook based on 2013 curriculum for the first grade students at senior high school 108 then, to find the percentage score of two versions of the textbooks, the researcher will use the formula: p = f x 100% n note: p = percentage f = frequency of fulfilled aspect criteria each unit. n = the total number of criteria in each aspect. the above formula was used to decide the results of data analysis as a final calculation was classified into one of four criteria proposed by pusat perbukuan (arikunto, 2016). table 1. the conversion of fulfilment range of fulfillment score category 80%-100% good 60%-79% fair 50%-59% sufficient 0%-50% poor results and discussion results the result of this research was divided into two parts. the first result shows the coverage of speaking activities contents in two versions of english textbooks published by the government (kemendikbud) and private publications (erlangga) for the first grade students of senior high school in line with the 2013 curriculum syllabus. the second result shows the percentage of which textbook is the good one between the two versions of english textbooks published by government and private publications by guideline material evaluation. there are 15 chapters of english material in the english textbook both published by government and private publications. the extent to which the textbook entitled “bahasa inggris” published by government suitable with the 2013 curriculum syllabus the material and activities in the textbook published by the government are already relatively easy to understand, especially for students who have not been able to understand english before. then, the language use in the textbook that was published by the government above is relatively good to help in improving students’ speaking. as shown in the table above, speaking activities in the textbook published by the government use the common or general language and correspond with our learning culture. on the other hand, the explanations and directions presented in speaking activities are also very clear, even though without instructions from the subject teacher, students can practise independently by using textbooks as their reference material in learning, and it is very necessary for students to avoid difficulties in learning, because basically students often feel less directed and do not know what to do understand english better. furthermore, the table above also shown if material and speaking activities in the textbook published by the government are already suitable with the syllabus of the 2013 curriculum, which focuses on standard competence such as core competence and basic competence that includes in explain about elements of precommunication and communication activities about vocabulary, structure, pronunciation, spelling, communicative expressions, role play, and simulation. the extent to which the textbook entitle “pathway to english” published by private publications suitable with the 2013 curriculum syllabus based on the table of researcher analyze about the textbook published by private publications above, the researcher capable of describing if that textbook is difficult to understand for student who don’t has the ability about english before. then, speaking contents on the textbook published by private publications has the high level of language, as we know our education system has been remove the english subject at school, it will show that if students are not really enough to learn english. futhermore, because of this textbook are published by private publication, it has been suitable enough with the syllabus of 2013 curriculum. the result shows the percentage of which textbook is the good one between the two versions of english textbooks published by government and private publications by guideline material evaluation the percentages of materials evaluation in two versions of english textbook published by the government and textbook published by private publications for the first grade students of senior high school based on the 2013 curriculum. there are 15 questions and every checklist for every english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 question was valuable 1 score. in the textbook 1 (published by government) there is valuable 14 score and in the textbook 2 (published by private publications) there is valuable 11 score. then, to find the total score of the instrument, the researcher will use the formulation below. textbook 1 (published by government/ kemendikbud) p = f x 100% n p = 14 x 100% 15 p = 93% note : p = percentage f = frequency of fulfilled aspect criteria each unit n = the total number of criteria in each aspect therefore, it can be concluded that the percentages of the textbook that published by government are 93%, based on the results, the researcher stated that “basaha inggris” textbook published by government/ kemendikud/ textbook 1 was categorized as “good” with an average score 93%. this statement was according to pusat perbukuan. textbook 2 (published by private publications/ erlangga) p = f x 100% n p = 11 x 100% 15 p = 73% note: p = percentage f = frequency of fulfilled aspect criteria each unit n = the total number of criteria in each aspect therefore, it can be concluded that the percentages of the textbook that published by private publications are 73%, based on the results, the researcher stated that “pathway to english” textbook published by private publications/ erlangga/ textbook 2 was categorized as “fair” with an average score 73%. this statement was according to pusat perbukuan. discussion the textbook is one of the determinants educations: success and failure of the quality of education depends on the textbook itself. the textbook is a course book which is used in the teaching-learning process based on curriculum recommended for a teacher and student. the majority of teachers in indonesia use textbooks as the main guideline for curriculum and learning resources, so that textbooks can support what teachers explain to students in the teaching and learning process. many textbooks do not contain enough speaking skill, which may be the reason why many students have difficulty with speaking and are very deficient in speaking skill (lee, 2012). textbooks are books prepared by experienced and qualified individuals and that the material contained in the reading materials is generally deliberately attempted in pilot concentration in the actual performance state prior to publication (cunningsworth, 1984). the textbook provides ready-made teaching texts and learning tasks. moreover, a textbook is an easily and cheaply way of preparing learning materials. such a tom hutchinson and eunice torres (1994, p. 319) state that only a textbook is capable of showing as much as possible what is actually going to be done in the lesson. textbook published by government textbook had 15 chapters. there were 15 lessons about interpersonal texts both oral and written. they were talking about self in chapter 1, congratulating and complimenting others in chapter 2, what are you going to do today? in chapter 3, which one is your best gateway? in chapter 4, let’s visit niagara falls in chapter 5, giving announcement in chapter 6, the wright brothers in chapter 7, my idol in chapter 8, the battle of surabaya in chapter 9, b.j. habibie in chapter 10, cut nyak dhien in chapter 11, issumboshi in chapter 12, malin kundang in chapter 13, strong wind in chapter 14, and you’ve got a friend in chapter 15. from the analysis, it can be concluded that the author of the textbook had tried to arrange this book as perfect as possible, but as human being short of lack still appeared in this textbook. the author also had been trying to provide the activities which related to the context, but there are not always acceptable for students. then, this textbook also has been suitable with the syllabus of 2013 curriculum it showed by matrix analysis that the researcher have been made. the textbook that published by government were classified as “good” category based on guidelines ali akbarjono, pipit melati, feny martina, & syafryadin content analysis of speaking activities in english textbook based on 2013 curriculum for the first grade students at senior high school 110 material evaluation. on the other hand, this textbook are really help students in learning, actually for students that really difficult to understand about english before. all content in the textbook are really useful and easy to understand, it will be good facilitated students in learning. each chapters in the textbook that published by government/ kemendikbud is in a good category because it have suitabilities with the documentary checklist which is in the textbook that published by government/ kemendikbud the interpersonal text can be found in some of the chapters which correspond with student daily life. it includes about the topic expression for introduction, where the student will talk about himself or herself. on page 29, there are any activities that make students understand about congratulating. on page 32, it explains about complimenting. and on page 40, it explains about the expressing intention. the transactional text in the textbook that published by government/ kemendikbud can be found in some of the chapters that explain that topic. on page 16, there are any activities that explain giving instruction to make students learn about guessing ‘who am i?’. on page 39, there is a topic that makes students explain their opinion about some of the places. and on page 47, there are any activities that explain the topic about plans. the functional text that be found in the textbook that published by government/ kemendikbud. on page 81, there are any topic that explain about giving announcement. on page 110, 123, 134, and145, it explains about recount text. on page 157, 172, and 183, it explains about narrative text. there is so many of presentational text found in the textbook that published by government/kemendikbud such as a person who told in the book, communication act, and illustration. on page 17, it shows that illustration that explains the topic about introducing. on page 27, there are any pictures that explain about activities for complete the blank. on page 34, there are any the illustration that expresses the topic about complimenting. on page 39, it explains about pictures that showing some place. on page 81, there are any illustrations about giving announcement. on page 120, 132, 143, 157, and 170, it shows some of the pictures of expert and types of recount and narrative text. in textbook that published by government/kemendikbud, it can be found some of the text such as transactional, interpersonal, descriptive, narrative, and recount text. some of the page are explains about particular type of text in explain about exposure. then, in the textbook that published by government/kemendikbud almost all of unit is include social function, generic structure, and linguistic features. on page 10 and 11, it explains about text structure and grammar review. on page 16, it shows that the language feature of content. in the textbook that published by government/ kemendikbud, actual production can be found almost in all of the chapters that explain about grammar review and text structure. on page 11, 43, 61, 89, 115, 127, 139, 151, 164, 176, and 188, it explains about grammar review on the content. besides that, the textbook that published by government/ kemendikbud is coverage the syllabus and the learners can be absent of the class because the material explain is same topic. on page 108, 132, 143, and 169 are explain the topic about recount text and narrative text. then, all of chapters in textbook that published by government/ kemendikbud is include the task, all of chapters is explain about grammar/part of speech, and all of chapters is explain about vocabulary and pronunciation. textbook published by private publications textbook had 15 chapters. there were 15 lessons about interpersonal texts both oral and written. they were let’s do it! in chapter 1, would you fill out this form, please? in chapter 2, i’m sorry to hear that in chapter 3, what should i do? in chapter 4, too hot, too cold in chapter 5, products on discount! in chapter 6, it was memorable event in chapter 7, a story to remember in chapter 8, whatever will be, will be in chapter 9, because of you in chapter 10, why does it occur? in chapter 11, both you and i in chapter 12, what’s the difference? in chapter 13, why is water like a horse? in chapter 14, and make a peaceful world through a songs in chapter 15. the textbook published by private publications is already suitable with the syllabus, it showed that from the lesson that usually develop interpersonal in each chapter. but, textbooks are usually difficult to understand for students who do not understand english previously. based on the guidelines english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 evaluation, this textbook categorized as “fair” based on percentages from pusat perbukuan. in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga that can be found some of the text that relate with short interpersonal text such as making invitations, showing symphty, advice, and etc. on page 9, it explains about invitation. on page 38, it explains the topic about words of symphty. on the page 55, it explains about advice. on page 78, there are any activities that follow the situation. in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga also can be found some of the text in the textbook is relate with the indicator such as discussing possibilities to do something. on page 5, it explains about instruction offering to do something. and on page 55 and 255, it explains about advice. some of the unit in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga can be found is offering an invitation, advertisement, recount text, report, narrative, explanation text and etc. on page 11, there are any topic that explains about offering an invitation. on page 82, it shows that the topic about advertisement. on page 108, it explains the topic about recount text. on page 125 and 209, it explains about report. and on page 134, it explains about narrative text. there are so many of presentational text found in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga such as a person who told in the book, communication act, and illustration. on page 3, 8, 67, 82, 89, 104,106, 132, and 221, there are any picture of activities. on page 7, 38, 52, 69, 217, and 219, there are any illustrations that showing about communication act. in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga, it can be found many types of text such as recount text, report, narrative, and explanation text. on page 108, there are explains about recount text. on page 125 and 209, it explains about report. in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga almost all of unit is include social function, generic structure, and linguistic features. on page 11, it explains about the structure in offering invitation. on page 53, it explains about the use of sentence ‘should have done’ on page 127, there are explain about the structure of report text. on page 130, it explains the structure of recount text. and on page 161, it explains about the generic structure of narrative text. in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga, actual production can be found almost in all of the chapters that explain about grammar review and text structure. on page 11, 53, 127, 130, and 161, there are explains about the generic structure of the text, and the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga is coverage the syllabus. besides that, all of chapters in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga is include the task, and all of chapters in the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga is explain about grammar/part of speech. conclusion first, based on the study of analyzing the english textbook published by government/ kemendikbud, the researcher concluded that the textbook was good to be used for the first grade of senior high school that has started using 2013 curriculum. this book fulfilled all the aspects of competence of 2013 curriculum, and this textbook is suitable with the syllabus of 2013 curriculum. on the other hand, this textbook is also categorized as “good” with the percentages 93% based on the guidelines evaluation and the percentages from pusat perbukuan. then, this textbook is really useful and helpful to students in order to be easier to understand english with basic knowledge about english. secondly, based on the study in analyzing the english textbook published by private publications/ erlangga, the researcher can concluded that the textbook was good enough to be used for the first grade of senior high school that started using the 2013 curriculum. this textbook was also suitable with the syllabus. even though the researcher said this textbook is good enough for learning, but this textbook is not suitable for students who do not have basic competence about english. on the other hand, this textbook is categorized as “fair” with the percentages 73% based on the guidelines evaluation and the percentages from pusat perbukuan. as the result, both of the textbooks that analyze above are categorized as good and fair, and they have differences in scores, which the textbook published by government/ kemendikbud/ textbook 1 has the average percentages of 93% ali akbarjono, pipit melati, feny martina, & syafryadin content analysis of speaking activities in english textbook based on 2013 curriculum for the first grade students at senior high school 112 and the textbook published by private publications/ erlangga/ textbook 2 has the average percentages of 73%. references arikunto, s. (2016). prosedur penelitian suatu pendekatan praktik. jakarta: rineka cipta. ariska, s. (2020). analysis of speaking activities on textbook (unpublished thesis). uin ar-raniry, aceh. ary, d., jacobs, l. c., & sorensen, c. (2010). introduction to research in. education. usa: wadsworth ayu, h. i. (2017). a content analysis of “when english rings a bell” english textbook in 2013 curriculum for the seventh grade student of junior high school published by kementrian pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia (unpublished thesis). iain surakarta. balachandra, d. (2014). criteria-based post-use evaluation of english textbooks. ijellh (international journal of english language, literature and humanities), 2(5). creswell, j. w. (2014). research design: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. approaches: fourth edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. cunningsworth, a. (1984). evaluating and selecting efl teaching materials. great britain: biddles ltd. fitri, w.a. 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(2013). panduan memahami kurikulum 2013. jakarta: pt. prestasi pustakaraya. renandya, w. a., & widodo, h. p. (eds.). (2016). english language & teaching today: linking theory and practice (vol. 5). springer. salinan permendikbud ri nomor 36 tahun 2018 tentang perubahan atas peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan nomor 59 tahun 2014 tentang kurikulum 2013 sekolah menengah atas/madrasah aliyah. sewagegn, a. a., & diale, b. m. (2020). authentic assessment as a tool to enhance student learning in a higher education institution: implication for student competency. in assessment, testing, and measurement strategies in global higher education (pp. 256-271). igi global. thornburry, s. (2009). how to teach speaking. new york: pearson education ltd. widiana, i. w. (2018). the effectiveness of communication learning activities based on tradisional game toward the cognitive process dimension. jurnal cakrawala pendidikan, 37(2). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 245 needs analysis of vocational high school textbook to local culture materials and the 21st century competencies rita inderawati language and art education department, faculty of teachers training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id ismail petrus language and art education department, faculty of teachers training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com eryansyah language and art education department, faculty of teachers training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: eryansyah@unsri.ac.id meilinda mathematics and science education department, faculty of teachers training and education, university of sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: meilinda@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: inderawati, r., petrus, i., eryansyah., & meilinda. (2021). needs analysis of vocational high school textbook to local culture materials and the 21st century competencies. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 245-252. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4349 received: 21-02-2021 accepted: 23-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction the importance of english in secondary vocational schools in the 21st century must not be overestablished; thus, student learning should be taught in a variety of ways depending on their major or study program. they must be prepared to compete for posts in indonesia or elsewhere after graduation. according to the oecd, the global economic market forces countries to be competitive in terms of goods and services quality. in addition, the oecd (2017) stated that if its abilities are closely aligned with industries' needs, countries may have a competitive edge in industries. the asean economic community (aec), according to aring (2015), exposes countries that participate in the organization to the risk of human resource rivalry by forcing them to develop their skills. this corresponds to one of the most important goals of 21st-century education: the growth of life and career skills. abstract: the needs to know local cultural materials and skills for the future of students in the 21st century motivated researchers to concentrate more on them. in this recent research, an english textbook developed with palembang local culture in mind and reviewed by students considers student needs. in smk negeri 3 palembang, the travel agent competency program had 35 graders who completed a questionnaire with 45 questions. questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to collect and quantitatively and qualitatively interpret the details. the findings showed: 1) english must be taught through technology to support students; (2) english is essential to students' future careers; (3) no existing english language education materials are included with local palembang culture; and (4) two main reasons for integrating local palembang culture into educational materials were to enhance the knowledge of students. due to the queries, learning resources such as blogs, twitter, video calls, and voice notes became important for the promotion of skills in the 21st century. keywords: needs analysis; textbook; vocational high school; local culture; 21st century competency https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4349 rita inderawati, ismail petrus, eryansyah, & meilinda needs analysis of vocational high school textbook to local culture materials and the 21st century competencies 246 graduates of vocational high schools (vhs) should have skills that will help them succeed in their careers, regulation no. 20 for 2016 according to indonesia's national ministry of education. this means that english is not only treated by the schools as a subject but also as a material awareness skill, based on the students’ study program and the requirements of industry at the high school vocational level. as a result, the aims of teaching english at vhs should be to develop specific skills in students through practical exercises based on their study program, so that they can perform well in the workplace later. the vhs students should have access to materials which are similar to those used in the english for specific purposes (esp) course. according to hussin (2018), one trend in education 4.0 is to take into consideration industrial revolution 4.0’s needs when developing and upgrading the experience of students. curriculum designers will use their feedback to keep the curriculum and its contents informed, meaningful and useful, including their interests, characteristics, and perspectives. as a consequence, when planning, designing, and developing instructional materials, the teacher should promote skills that are suitable for the students' learning needs. according to many kinds of research, developing students’ reading comprehension, extending their awareness, and becoming more aware of their own culture could be achieved by the help of local culture reading materials (elviana, inderawati, & mirizon, 2020; fu, 2018; sopian, inderawati, & petrus, 2019; yousef, chatti, & schroeder, 2014). the majority of english reading materials textbooks, on the other hand, are restricted in terms of students' ethnicity or local culture. on the basis of their findings from three different textbooks, dehbozorgi, amalsaleh, and kafipour (2014) argued that the target population was more influential than the other cultural classes. as a result, it is important to integrate local values into teaching materials. since there are currently no teaching materials containing local culture content, the development of teaching materials containing local culture content is considered necessary (sari, 2016). as a result, creating or designing materials of reading for vhs tour agent students which provided their own local culture in english is critical. one vital thing and most significant step before designing materials is to conduct an assessment of the situation. it was discovered through informal interviews with vocational teachers who studied in the instructional materials writing and evaluation course at universitas sriwijaya's magister program in the faculty of education that most english teachers used government and commercial publishers' textbooks as their primary source of teaching at school. despite the fact that the books' contents are not directly relevant to their research program, they are still considered general. they lacked of unique content, such as culture, that is covered by a content syllabus. as a result, the textbooks used remain generic and devoid of culture, especially local culture. on the basis of the textbooks they use, english teachers acknowledge that further reading opportunities are needed to meet the needs of their students. experts discussed the need for students to learn english more directly in their fields, which led them to develop english teaching materials for vocational school students. numerous needs analysis studies have been conducted in indonesia, many of which are related to esp in terms of syllabus design or materials development for particular levels of education (sularti, dradjati & supriyadi, (2019); mahbub, 2018; rahamdina & sofyan, 2019; ratri & puspita, 2019; sari, 2016; yundayani, et al, 2017). other countries have also undertaken a variety of needs recognition studies (bedoya, et al, 2015; chetsadanuwat, 2018). these findings highlight the value of performing a needs review while developing standards, textbooks, or instructional materials. the needs analysis may explain students' challenges, the expertise or skills required, or the teaching strategies to be used— besides, the findings of the study of needs. the study will be the most relevant thing to consider to fulfil the needs of students. in addition, literacy on reading skill is one of the skills that need to be considered as well as emphasized. students can gain more information to explain their skills, such as being a guide, by reading. then there is the descriptive text that is widely used in english. it was suggested by rajabi and ketabi (2012) that tools for reading locality were able to be supplemented with insightful or descriptive texts, manners, and viewpoints, and genuine human interest texts from literature. additionally, the teacher of english expected to see several supplementary english reading material english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 247 dealing with locality, especially the culture of south sumatra. the following is an extract from article 8 of the southern sumatra provincial regulation no 4 of 2015: (1) participation of the group in the implementation of cultural protection measures is expected. (2) the preceding paragraph's definition of community responsibility shall be prioritized as follows: (a) to contribute to a list of cultural activities in the area; (b) to participate in activities such as learning about regional history and inventorying regional cultural properties; (c) to take part in programs aimed at preserving cultural heritage; (d) to engage in the social interaction and publication of the community's regional cultural values; (e) to engage in activities aimed at facilitating the improvement of the quality of human capital in the field of cultural preservation. local culture materials, in the form of procedure, narrative, and descriptive texts, may intensify the students’ encouragement to learn on the basis of their needs. they will learn and practice student skills related to their field of study and gain a better understanding of the content of their everyday lives. after completing the course, all knowledge and skills related to their local community can be transferred to their workplaces. as a result, it is necessary to develop reading materials that are culturally acceptable for students. this is in line with research that shows that using local culture as a reading material will help students increase their reading comprehension, broaden their knowledge, and gain a better understanding of their culture (deghan & sadighi, 2011; sopian, et al, 2019; elviana, et al; 2020; fu, 2018). accordingly, teachers face many difficulties in promoting student competence and encouraging them to read because of a shortage of opportunities that meet their needs and interests. as a result, students must have access to reading materials that are suitable for their subjects and interests. if the content does not meet the students' standards, the instructor will have to create new material (elviana, et al., 2020; mahbub, 2018; mukundan, et al., 2016). teachers must be able to design, modify, and adapt teaching materials based on teaching and learning objectives and student characteristics, as set out in national education regulation no. 16 of 2007, relating to teachers' professional competence. adapting or altering other items or tools can be used for the development of materials (tomlinson, 1999). by reducing, adding, replacing, modifying, and adding to the importance of the book for each student, curriculum adaptation improves the content to enhance or make it more suitable for certain types of learners. as a result, the authors have attempted to build reading materials for vocational students based on a variety of texts relating to local culture or tourism. students research several aspects of local culture in tourism content subjects that cover local culture and are enriched with 21st-century skills or skills for life. pursuant to regulation no 10 of the indonesian ministry of national education of 2014 and regulation no 5 of the indonesian government of 2017, this research examined a number of topics related to their material subjects and the curriculum, with a focus on the form of culture for preservation. informal interviews were conducted with some students in the travel agent competency program and english teachers at smkn 3 palembang for the purpose of this report. several findings need to be taken into account when teaching and learning english in that grade. first and foremost, english had to be incorporated with the subject matter. this means that the standard of materials written in english will help students in their academic endeavours. second, most english teachers used government-published books and two-course books from private publishers as their primary teaching tools. however, because the course books' content was not specifically applicable to students, they were still considered to be general. there was a lack of cultural materials, particularly from the local area. after that, one of the qualities that needed to be stressed was the ability to learn. to meet the needs of their students, the english teachers confessed that they entailed more reading opportunities. due to a shortage of english reading materials on palembang's local culture, it was proposed that some additional local culture based reading materials be made accessible to suit the students’ needs while remaining compatible with their english skills. before designing local culture english descriptive reading subjects for students of vhs in palembang, it is necessary to carry out a needs analysis study that is specific to students' needs. several similar previous studies have been rita inderawati, ismail petrus, eryansyah, & meilinda needs analysis of vocational high school textbook to local culture materials and the 21st century competencies 248 compared and contrasted in this paper. the study of the student needs analysis was a crucial similarity. the students' level, the focus on english skills, and the depth of the needs assessment were all different from previous studies. the main difference was the inclusion of a specific local population, namely the culture of palembang. tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis were all used to determine student needs. the need study looked at students' needs as seen by students of the travel agent competency program, english teachers, and other school stakeholders. as a result, this study aimed to clarify the perspectives of students, teachers, and stakeholders on the needs of students in english reading materials based on their cultural context. method a total of 35 research participants took part in this study. there are 45-question questionnaire was given to tenth-grade students at smk 3 palembang's travel agent competency program. the questions were divided into four categories: tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis with 20 items on the likert scale and 25 items on a multiple-choice scale. issue classifications included tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis. the discussion was centred on teaching english at vhs, available english reading subjects, and the introduction of palembang culture into english reading subjects. to interpret the information gathered from the questionnaire, the data was evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively. in order to evaluate questionnaire data, the qualitative approach was employed to decipher and clarify the interview data. findings and discussion students' tsa, weakness analysis, psa, and strategy analysis criteria were related to the knowledge gathered from their point of view. this paper's data included the highest proportion of students' answers to each of the questionnaire's questions. target situation analysis (tsa) this section focused on the students' needs, goals, and aspirations in terms of learning english. table 1 shows the information gathered. table 1. the view of the students on tsa no question/ statement percentage 1. the significance of knowing english 69.6 % 2. expectations of learners when it comes to studying english 77.3% 3. the language used by students in their professional lives 83.6% 4. the degree of english proficiency needed for a student's future career. 68.2% the prominent argumentation for studying english was to advance their careers in tomorrow, as seen in table 1. (68.2 %). it was in keeping with the goals of vocational secondary school as seen in the 2013 english curriculum and in the 2016 regulation no 20 of the indonesian ministry of education. the students then needed to be able to communicate fluently in english in the future workplace through oral communication. the majority of them wished to learn english so that they could interact with co-workers or visitors (83.6%). that became the reason why, in order to help their career, their english proficiency had to be advanced (77.3%). table 2. technology based english content no question/ statement percentage 1. english must be taught with technology in the technological era to help me understand what my main tourism services need. 86.7% 2. in the dynamic global economy, countries increasingly need to cope with the characteristics of products and merits that enable me to improve life and professional skills. 83.2% 3. including tourism in the city of palembang in the english language textbook, i automatically learn the local culture through my later work environment. 86.5% 4. in response to demands of the world's financial contest, i need interactive, integrated english training with technologies such as blogs, twitter, video calls and voice notes. 86.6% 5. since english is incorporated into these technologies, the virtual english textbooks is necessary for me. 82.1% 6. the texts i learned included interactive, communicative, critical and artistic practices, in keeping with the needs of the industrial revolution 4.0. 79.2% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 249 in the 21st century, english must be taught using technology to help students understand what is required according to the students' competence travel agent. countries are increasingly being challenged to compete on the quality of their products and services in today's competitive global economy, which allows the students to develop life and career skills. students will learn about the local culture as a result of their potential use of english if an english textbook includes a section on tourism in palembang. interactive and integrated english learning is needed using technologies such as blogs, youtube, video calls, and voice notes in order to meet the demands of global economic competition. therefore, virtual english textbooks were entailed these technologies due to the integration of english with these technologies. present situation analysis (psa) this section focused on the students' current english proficiency, the resources they had learned, and their local cultural awareness. table 3 shows the data on the students' perceptions of their english proficiency. table 3. the students’ english proficiency no question/ statement percentage 1. the new english level for students 81.5% 2. the students' recent level of comprehension of the reading text 60.3% from the table, it can be identified that almost all students (81.5%) recognized that their current level of english skills was beginner. 60.3% of students, therefore, felt that their current understanding of the reading text was sufficient. deficiency analysis table 4 displays the existing desires and needs of the students in terms of topics or reading suggestions. table 4. students' perspectives on current wants and needs no question/ statement percentage 1. learners want to hear about a specific topic while they're learning to read. 70.3% 2. students' preferred reading feedback. 60.7% 3. topics related to students' general knowledge were integrated into the reading study program. 61.6% 4. including topics for reading that 72.5%% were related to palembang's local culture. according to the results of the survey, 70.3% of students chose to incorporate their own cultural culture in reading materials. it is reasonable to think that the students thought this subject would help them with their studies. it was clear that 60.7% of students wanted tour and travel contexts based textbook. it was discovered that 65.7% of learners felt it was very important to integrate topics related to general knowledge into their reading study program. in addition, they needed information on palembang's local culture. 72.5% of students said it was extremely important, and the remaining students said it was very important. discussion students in the travel agent competency program had to have knowledge related to their study program in order to communicate orally, particularly to tourists. one of them dealt with palembang's history. one of their potential tasks will be to illustrate and show their own local culture to domestic visitors, including those from other countries. reading materials were one way of disseminating information about their local community. according to petrovska (2001), language learning and language learning will benefit from local culture, inspire students to provide familiar perspectives, and prepare students to communicate in foreign languages about their own culture. the main incentive for vhs students to learn english was to help them progress in their careers. this was consistent with the goals of vocational high school as outlined in the 2013 english curriculum and regulation 20 year 2016 of the indonesian national education ministry. the students then needed to be able to communicate fluently in english in the future workplace through oral communication. the majority of them wished to learn english so that they could interact with coworkers and visitors. that became the reason why, in order to help their career, their english proficiency had to be advanced. as a result, smk tourism majors needed to have knowledge of their study program, one of which was about their own local culture, in order to communicate orally, especially with tourists. one of their potential tasks will be to illustrate and show their own local culture to domestic visitors, including those from other rita inderawati, ismail petrus, eryansyah, & meilinda needs analysis of vocational high school textbook to local culture materials and the 21st century competencies 250 countries. reading materials were one way of disseminating information about their local community. additionally, students desired reading materials that contained details about their own neighbourhood. it is fair to believe that the students felt this subject would assist them in their academic endeavours. the majority of the students clearly desired to read texts about tourism. the students believed that integrating topics related to their general knowledge into their reading study program was extremely important. they also needed more knowledge about their local culture. the majority of students gave supportive responses, saying that learning it was crucial. it supports rahamdina, harahap, and sofyan's results (2019), which looked into the english specifications of a tour and travel study program at an smk in bengkulu. cultural tourism was discovered to be one of the most fascinating reading topics for the students. the existing reading materials are expected to help students improve their english proficiency, especially their reading skills, to the level needed to support their future careers, based on the information gathered. conclusion teachers and educators must conduct a need review in order to acquire a wealth of information about their students' needs, interests, academic shortcomings, and preferred learning styles. this type of information can be used to build learning materials that are well-founded. for example, english reading materials for tourism majors should be adapted to their particular requirements. based on the findings of the need report, it is suggested that learning materials be created that integrate the use of technology for learning as well as palembang's local culture, are compatible with students' english proficiency, and aid in their majoring. references aring, 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(2012). aspects of cultural elements in prominent english textbooks for efl https://www.uklo.edu.mk/filemanager/horizonti%202019/serija%20a%20br%2023/p40.pdf https://www.uklo.edu.mk/filemanager/horizonti%202019/serija%20a%20br%2023/p40.pdf english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 251 setting. theory and practice in language studies. 2(4), pp. 705-712. ratri, d. p., & puspitasari, i. (2019). need analysis for developing course book for english for elementary school students with local-content values. indonesian journal of english education, 6(1), 1-9. sari, r. a. (2016). teaching english for tourism in bali based on local culture: what do students need? iselt, 4, 221-229. sopian, s., inderawati, r., & petrus, i. 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(2017). need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(1). rita inderawati, ismail petrus, eryansyah, & meilinda needs analysis of vocational high school textbook to local culture materials and the 21st century competencies 252 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 121 systematic literature review of a scientific journal: improving literacy in online classroom learning eska perdana prasetya english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of ibn khaldun bogor, indonesia e-mail: eska@uika-bogor.ac.id apa citation: prasetya, e. p. (2021). systematic literature review of a scientific journal: improving literacy in online classroom learning. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 121128. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5362 received: 22-08-2021 accepted: 21-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction as we all know, starting in march 2020, president of republic of indonesia, jokowi announced the first case of corona in indonesia. starting from that announcement, we began to experience the covid pandemic in indonesia, many have started to be exposed to this corona virus. severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (sars-cov-2), the first time from wuhan, china to cause severe acute respiratory syndrome that is widespread globally (di gennaro, pizzol, marotta, antunes, racalbuto, veronese, & smith, 2020). the virus spreads rapidly from person to person through respiratory droplets produced when coughing and sneezing (hafeez, ahmad, siddaqui, & mishra, 2020). the process of spreading this virus will generate an immune response from the host body consisting of natural and adaptive immune systems (setiawan, puspitasari, sunariani, & yudianto, 2020). this corona virus was first discovered in wuhan, china which causes severe acute respiratory syndrome which is globally popular throughout the world including indonesia. the viral process spreads very rapidly through coughing and sneezing from one individual to another and ultimately produces an immune response from the body which consists of a natural and adaptive immune system. since indonesia officially entered the covid-19 pandemic, all life arrangements have changed completely from offline to online for all areas of life in indonesia. the initial step of the government to implement large-scale social restrictions (psbb), this step is useful for limiting activities in the community to prevent the transmission of the corona virus, this system is arguably a small-scale lockdown. likewise in the world of education, starting from the kindergarten level to the college level everything changes from face-to-face learning to online learning. this requires teachers, students and parents to change their views and methods of learning. at first everyone must feel heavy on online learning, the main problems experienced are of course starting from the gadgets and internet quota needed at the time of learning. there are two main contributing factors in effectiveness online learning in the covid-19 pandemic is the support capacity of network access abstract: this research is a systematic literature review research that can provide a clear picture of what has been investigated and what gaps require further research, then aims to overcome this problem by identifying, critically evaluating, and integrating the findings of all studies, and aiming not to just to gather all the evidence on the research question; it is also intended to support the development of evidence-based guidelines for practitioners. this study uses ten main articles to find out how to improve literacy in online classrooms. this main article was taken because it is related to the main objective of this research, namely improving literacy in online classroom learning, which we all know that we are living in the era of the covid 19 pandemic, which forces us to change all the order of life including in the world of education. the result of this research is that there are seven things that can improve literacy in online classroom. there are scientific literacy and literacy learning opportunities, digital tools and using technology, students' creativity and creating new applications, online environments and content knowledge, teachers and students hold positive attitudes, teaching philosophy and pedagogical knowledge, and texts and resource's positive identity work. keywords: systematic literature review; literacy; classroom; online learning. eska perdana prasetya systematic literature review of a scientific journal: improving literacy in online classroom learning 122 and the ability of devices to access the internet (hamid, sentryo, & hasan, 2020). there are several psychological effects of online learning: frustration, fear, anxiety, apprehension, stress and depression (dhull & sakshi, 2017). in learning activity, smartphone is a tool to help students connected to be online (lekawael, 2017). in essence, online learning requires two things to support learning, namely an internet connection and gadgets. the connection here can use wifi or internet quota. however, there are several psychological effects of online learning: frustration, fear, anxiety, apprehension, stress and depression. from the psychological effect, this does not only happen to students, but also to teachers and parents of students. there are several incidents from several online media which tell about a father who was forced to steal a smartphone for his child to study online, there were even students who committed suicide which was predicted due to pressure in online learning, the pressure could be in the form of a large number of assignments given by the teacher. online learning as it is today is not only related to the covid 19 pandemic. however, online learning is closely related to today's digital era, an era that demands the speed of the internet to communicate, search for information, and anything related to globalization. some things that show how easy it is to live in today's digital era: it is easy to communicate, is mobile and flexible, the internet is more powerful than quota, it's easy to shop, doesn't need to be complicated, cashless, and if you want to be an artist you can do it with youtube. what is called literacy? in general, literacy itself is a person's ability and skills in reading, writing, speaking, calculating, as well as solving problems in everyday life. even unseco also provides an understanding of literacy, which is a set of real skills, especially one's cognitive skills in reading and writing which are influenced by competence in the academic field, national context, institutions, cultural values, and experiences. literacy is indispensable for the group or community effectively and relates to using reading, writing and calculation (keefe & copeland, 2011). it is widely accepted that literacy generally is simply defined as the ability to read and write (rintaningrum, 2019). literacy is something that one either has or does not have; people are either literate or illiterate, and those who are illiterate are deficient (perry, 2012). some of the benefits of literacy are as follows: increase one's vocabulary, optimize brain performance because it is often used for reading and writing activities, get various new insights and information and a person's interpersonal skills will be better. in essence, the literacy movement will lead to improving the quality of human resources, the benefits of literacy are increasing vocabulary, making the brain work more optimally, adding insight, sharpening oneself in capturing information from a reading, developing verbal skills, training thinking and analysing skills, focus and concentration and can write and compose words well. method this research method uses systematic literature review (slr). in general, slr is slr is a method that identifies, assesses, and interprets findings on a research topic to answer pre-determined research questions. the aim of an slr is not just to aggregate all existing evidence on a research question; it is also intended to support the development of evidencebased guidelines for practitioners (kitchenham, brereton, budgen, turner, bailey, & linkman, 2009). the method in this study has several process flows, namely: 1. research questions or research questions are made based on the needs of the selected topic; 2. the search process, its used to get relevant sources to answer the research question (rq) and other related references; 3. inclusion and exclusion criteria, this stage is carried out to decide whether the data found is suitable for use in slr research or not; 4. quality assessment, in slr research, the data found will be evaluated based on the question of quality assessment criteria; 5. data collection. at this stage, the data required in the research are collected for further analysis process; 6. data analysis, data that has been collected in the previous stage will be analyzed at this stage. the results that have been analyzed will answer the research question that has been previously determined; 7. documentation, at this stage the research results are written in paper according to the format provided. results and discussion english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 123 this study uses the systematic literature review method, the authors take from several articles in reputable and indexed journals on improving literacy in online classroom learning. below are the steps of the systematic literature review method: the following are research questions in this study, namely what can improve literacy in online learning? the search processes and inclusion and exclusion criteria the results of the search process and inclusion and exclusion criteria were only 10 journal papers that met the criteria, namely journal papers published in the 2020-2021 timeframe and had a discussion related to improving literacy in online learning. the following are the types of journals that have been successfully obtained: table 1. types of journals that have been obtained no name of journal author and year 1 computer assisted language learning marie webb & evelyn doman (2020) 2 journal of education for students placed at risk (jespar) kristin s. farley & shayne b. piasta (2020) 3 the clearing house: a journal of educational strategies, issues and ideas katie walker (2020) 4 international journal of evaluation and research in education (ijere) ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani (2020) i5 international journal of evaluation and research in education (ijere) r. ahmad zaky el islami & prasart nuangchalerm (2020) 6 studies in english language and education (siele) aji budi rinekso, rojab siti rodliyah, & intan pertiwi (2020) 7 studies in english language and education (siele) titus terver udu (2020) 8 studies in english language and education (siele) budi waluyo & aisah apridayani (2020) 9 international journal of language education (ijole) salasiah ammade, murni mahmud, baso jabu & suradi tahmir (2020) 10 social semiotics janine knight, melinda dooly & elena barberà (2020) quality assessment results in slr research, the data found will be evaluated based on the following quality assessment criteria questions: (1) qa1. was the article published in 2020–2021? (2) qa2. does the article discuss improve literacy in online learning? the following is the result of the quality assessment: table 2. comparative study of scientific literacy: indonesian and thai pre-service science teachers report author/ year (el islami & nuangchalerm, 2020) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 3. digital literacy practices in tertiary education: a case of efl postgraduate students author/ year (rinekso, rodliyah, pertiwi, 2021) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 accepted and q2 table 4. digital-based instruction: chances and challenges in english language teaching context author/ year (argawati & suryani, 2020) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 5. examining early childhood language and literacy learning opportunities in relation to maternal education and children’s initial skills author/ year (farley & piasta, 2020) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 6. getting smart: towards critical digital literacy pedagogies author/ year (knight, dooly, & barberà, 2020) q1 yes eska perdana prasetya systematic literature review of a scientific journal: improving literacy in online classroom learning 124 q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 7. impacts of flipped classrooms on learner attitudes towards technology-enhanced language learning author/ year (webb & doman, 2020) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 8. teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards reading and writing: do they correlate to students’ achievement in english? author/ year (udu, 2021) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 9. teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices on the use of video in english language teaching author/ year (waluyo % apridayani, 2021) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 10. the english language arts classroom as a multilingual literacy community author/ year (walker, 2020) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted table 11. tpack model based instruction in teaching writing: an analysis on tpack literacy author/ year (ammade, mahmud, jabu, & tahmir, 2020) q1 yes q2 yes result of q1 and q2 accepted data analysis in this section the data is analysed and the results will answer the research question (rq) that has been determined previously and in total there are 10 journals obtained through the search process. result of qa2: does the article discuss improve literacy in online learning? after the data is selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria using the keyword "improve literacy in online learning", there are 10 journal articles which are then given a quality assessment (quality assessment). from the results of the quality assessment (qa), there are 10 relevant journal articles which are then grouped based on the techniques, strategies, approaches and methods used to answer the research question. these results answer rq1, which is shown in the table as follows: table 12. results of quality assessment no article title type 1 comparative study of scientific literacy: indonesian and thai pre-service science teachers report four components of scientific literacy: science content, science context, scientific process, and scientific attitudes based on local wisdom 2 digital literacy practices in tertiary education: a case of efl postgraduate students how the students used digital tools for academic/research and general purposes. 3 digital-based instruction: chances and challenges in english language teaching context. the findings showed that the chances of applying dbi cover activating students, elevating digital literacy, provoking students’ creativity, and creating new application. 4 examining early childhood language and literacy learning opportunities in relation to maternal education and children’s initial skills relations between children’s language and literacy learning opportunities, initial skills, and maternal education 5 getting smart: towards critical digital literacy pedagogies explores how different roles of human and non-human agents in an online environment can be made salient and how teachers can promote learner awareness of hidden agents at the layer of digital interfaces. 6 impacts of flipped classrooms on learner attitudes towards technology-enhanced language learning results showed that the usa experimental group showed a statistically significant difference in all selfreported attitudes in using technology for language learning overtime. 7 teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards reading and writing: do they correlate to learning would be facilitated if both teachers and students hold positive attitudes towards reading and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 125 students’ achievement in english? writing, and this, in turn, could impact the students’ achievement in the english language. 8 teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices on the use of video in english language teaching four key factors which involved teaching philosophy, there are: teacher’s knowledge, skill, facility, and reading literature. 9 the english language arts classroom as a multilingual literacy community through texts, resources, and positive identity work, the english language arts (ela) classroom contains the building blocks for empowering multilingual literacy places and spaces. 10 tpack model-based instruction in teaching writing: an analysis on tpack literacy the main points on the survey were about technological knowledge (tk), pedagogical knowledge (pk), content knowledge (ck), and technological pedagogical and content knowledge (tpack) below are some keywords related to improve literacy in online learning based on ten research articles that were researched: table 13. some keywords related to improve literacy in online learning type article number: scientific literacy and literacy learning opportunities 1 and 4 digital tools and using technology 2, 6 and 10 students’ creativity and creating new application. 3 online environment and content knowledge 5 and 10 teachers and students hold positive attitudes 7 teaching philosophy and pedagogical knowledge 8 and 10 texts and resource’s positive identity work 9 by using the systematic literature review method, the authors get facts and data from ten articles related to improve literacy in online learning, namely: scientific literacy and literacy learning opportunities this section is divided into two, namely scientific literacy and literacy learning opportunities. for scientific literacy, the fourth category of scientific literacy, there are cultural scientific literacy, civic scientific literacy, scientific literacy practice, and aesthetic literacy and consumer science (drago & mih, 2015). when students have the opportunity to learn literacy, this opportunity also allows the student to become an agent who is engaged and ultimately excited to learn and study (loerts & heydon, 2016). the most important things for students of scientific literacy are culture, civic practice and an aesthetic that can make students as mobile agents and ultimately eager to learn and learn. digital tools and using technology in general, digital tools and technology are something that cannot be separated. a digital tool is a program, website, or online resource that can make tasks or communications easier to complete. while technology is the application of scientific knowledge that is useful for human life to be practical. the use of digital tools is recognized by teachers of all subjects and people in charge extracurricular activities, which will ultimately diversify learning activities in class ivaniuk, soroko, gritsenchuk, & kravchyna, 2020). the use of technology in the classroom is associated with test scores but the results will be positive if it is implemented in schools with a higher level of accuracy (gilakjani, 2017). students’ creativity and creating new application a student must have creative abilities, creative abilities are the ability to create innovative ideas, new theories, insights, and new objects for the reconstruction and development of various fields of science. because when students have creative abilities, they will be able to produce new applications for learning or other functions. student creativity is fostered when teachers minimize the use of assessments in making social comparisons (beghetto, 2005). the way to create an app is design, implementation, testing, and publishing (seymour, hussain, & reynolds, 2016). online environment and content knowledge eska perdana prasetya systematic literature review of a scientific journal: improving literacy in online classroom learning 126 the goal of an online environment is to challenge educators in their environment to approach and develop competent students' cultural awareness and skills (jacobsen & jacobsen, 2019). the main goal of an online environment is to challenge educators how to make competent students who are expected to produce knowledge content that has subject matter knowledge such as knowledge of language, mathematics, natural sciences and social sciences. teachers and students hold positive attitudes teachers’ positive attitudes have positively influence students’ personality as well as their life performances (ulug, ozden, & eryilmaz, 2011). teachers must have a polite character, knowledgeable and good moral character so as to create a favourable atmosphere for students when studying (gowder, 2016). teachers must have a polite character, knowledgeable and good moral character so as to create a favourable atmosphere for students when studying. teaching philosophy and pedagogical knowledge the statement of teaching philosophy is generally individual because it reflects the personal values and what the teacher has (faryadi, 2015). various pedagogical approaches and appropriate ways to use ict to support the development of their students’ 21st century skills (septiyanti, inderawati, & vianty, 2020). in increasing literacy, it must also be considered side 6. teaching philosophy and pedagogical knowledge, two things that are important to have by a teacher reflect personal values and what they have and a pedagogical approach and the right way to use ict. texts and resource’s positive identity work to create knowledge from textual in the form of offline and online resources, a student needs to be supported by the process from the start and during the learning process schmidt & skoog in (schmidt & skoog, 2020). the text must pay attention to the following things such as using language that is suitable for spelling, paying attention to punctuation, using appropriate capital letters and avoiding body language. the types of text have several sections such as; a. narrative text is a written work that tells or describes an event in detail based on a timeline, b. an exposition text is a written work that presents the author's ideas / opinions accompanied by facts and logical reasons, c. explanatory text is often used to write scientific texts, d. persuasion text is a written work in the form of an invitation or persuasion to the reader to do or follow the contents in the persuasion text that has been made, e. argumentation text is a written work in the form of paragraph development that aims to convince or persuade readers to have the same thoughts as the author, f. descriptive text is a writing whose content aims to give the reader a detailed and clear description of an object. conclusion this study uses a systematic literature review method using several steps to find out how to improve literacy in online learning. a systematic literature review can provide a clear picture of what has already been investigated and what existing gaps (tan, le, & xuan, 2020). this study using ten main articles, it is known that there are seven things that can influence literacy in online learning. there are scientific literacy and literacy learning opportunities, digital tools and using technology, students' creativity and creating new applications, online environments and content knowledge, teachers and students hold positive attitudes, teaching philosophy and pedagogical knowledge, and texts and resource's positive identity work. there is something that should not be forgotten in this online learning, don't just assume that online learning is only carried out during a pandemic like today, but what we must pay attention to is that we also live in the digital age. the digital age then implies important modifications in how we connect to the world, in a broader, more interactive and simultaneous way (gutiérrez-martín, 2008) and the era of the industrial revolution 4.0 which is all related to the power of the internet as a life extender to find the desired information and news. industry 4.0 is really a disruptive concept or simply a natural incremental development of industrial production systems (rojko, 2017). references ammade, s., mahmud, m., jabu, 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(2020). impacts of flipped classrooms on learner attitudes towards technology-enhanced language learning. computer assisted language learning, 33(3), 240–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2018.1557692 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 445 english teacher professional development to education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic muhammad anjar nugraha english education study program faculty of teachers training and education, subang university, indonesia e-mail: anjarnugraha@ymail.com ida maulida english education study program faculty of teachers training and education, subang university, indonesia e-mail: izdamaulida@gmail.com apa citation: nugraha, m. a. & maulida, i. (2021). english teacher professional development to education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.445-452. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4546 received: 22-02-2020 accepted: 24-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (covid 19) has impacted all aspects of human existence. one of the areas affected by the covid19 epidemic is education. closing schools and moving to online learning is one of the government’s policies. many educators working with in-service and pre-service teachers are having trouble planning for online or blended learning (hartshorne, baumgartner, rakowski, & ferdig, 2020; muhayimana, 2020). despite the fact that this condition is in line with the vision and mission of future learning in the industrial revolution (ir) 4.0 era, it nevertheless has advantages and disadvantages (abidah, hidaayatullaah, simamora, fehabutar, & mutakinati, 2020). professional development (pd) acts as a fundamental and crucial to guarantee or real contribution to students learning (marcelo, 2009; mizell, 2010). pd can be defined as the educators’ effort to strengthen their practices and experiences throughout their careers. they assume that teacher professional development refers to a variety of both formal and informal experiences of an individual or collective process that should be accomplished by the teachers. professional development is not only referred to as a formal process such as a conference, seminar, workshop, course, college, but it also occurs in informal contexts such as independent reading, peer discussion, or group discussion (mizell, 2010). tanang & abu (2014) claim that a real contribution to students' learning is a commitment to do the self-improvement. policymakers, scholars, and educators around the world agree that promoting the pd of teachers is one of the keys to success in the globalized world changes (bautista & oretga-ruiz, 2015). lisnawati (2019) argues that the professional development of indonesian teachers consists of three demands: (1) having pedagogic, personality, personality, and social competence, (2) implementing a current curriculum for language teaching and learning, (3) producing graduates with 21st-century skills. abstract: teachers' professional development (pd) is one of the solutions to make the teachers always improve their skills and adapt to current issues. one of the challenges that teachers have to face nowadays is industrial revolution 4.0 (ir 4.0). furthermore, skills development in the time pandemic is required. this study aims at investigating english teachers' professional development to the 4.0 education era during the covid 19 pandemic. this research was conducted on a member of the english teachers support group (mgmp) in subang, west java. to collect the data of the research, the questionnaire and semi-structured interview have administered to the participants. the data analysis found that the participants have a positive perspective towards pd to 4.0 education era with five factors (time, funding, time, school principal, colleague influence, and school culture); courses or workshop is the most helpful in pd activity; last, availability of facilities is the most challenge in using technology in the classroom. furthermore, it is known that young teacher from public school has a wide chance to join pd activities; age, colleague and school principal influence the participation of mgmp event; determining teaching content is a the most challenge in implement the education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic. keywords: professional development; education 4.0; teacher support group (mgmp) mailto:anjarnugraha@ymail.com mailto:izdamaulida@gmail.com muhammad anjar nugraha & ida maulida english teacher professional development to education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic 446 many programs have been implemented by the government to professionalize more than 2.7 million indonesian teachers such as conducting teacher certification programs, facilitating their undergraduate's degrees, conducting teacher competency test (ukg), providing kinds of training and workshops, and conducting teacher education program (ppg) (afrianto, 2018). he claims that the challenges of becoming a professional teacher are not easier. one of the challenges that teachers have to face nowadays is industrial revolution 4.0 (ir 4.0). industrial revolution 4.0 seems a current issue to be discussed among practitioners and academics in many countries including indonesia. technologies and broad-based innovation emerge much faster and more widely in ir 4.0 that has impacted society, economy, business, and also education (schwab, 2016; fisk, 2017). historically, industrial 1.0 was indicated at the end of the 18th century by the influence of production mechanization to the effectiveness and efficiency of human activities; industry 2.0 is started in the early 20th century indicated by mass production and quality standardization; robotbased manufacturing was characterized as industry 3.0; however, industry 4.0 goes beyond manufacturing collaboration that caused by the information technology revolution (hermann, otto, & pentek, 2015). there are nine trends of education 4.0: (1) learning can be taken anytime and anywhere, (2) learning refers to student-centered, (3) students can determine what and how they learn, (4) project-based will enhance students learning, (5) exposing students to more hands-on learning, (6) exposing students in data interpretation, (7) students’ factual knowledge can be assessed during the learning process, (8) students opinion plays as the input to the curriculum designersupdate and usefulness, and (9) students will learn independently ( fisk, 2017). english teachers should adapt to education 4.0. it means they have to develop their professionalism. learners’ achievement depends on the readiness of the teacher’s skill itself. the teacher must make the graduates have the skills that ir 4.0 needed. teachers professionalism development (pd) is one of the solutions to make the teachers always improve their skills and adapt to current issues. (lokita, utami, & prestridge, 2018) researched how english teachers learn in indonesia. they focused on the tension between policy-driven and self-driven professional development. the findings show that the participants learn through pd events such as attending the seminar, workshop, and training. besides, these teachers as well do online professional learning (pl) which was selfdirected such as web-browsing, reading articles, and downloading. besides, they mentioned that they preferred to share with their colleagues at their school site. a variety of online platforms are used to aid in the teaching and learning process. as a result, technological skills are essential for both teachers and students since it has become an important role in the online learning implementation during covid-19 pandemic (al kodri, 2020; nugraha & yulianto, 2020). reimers, schleicher, saavedra, & tuominen (2020) have identified the efforts or alternative methods for students and teachers to continue with their lessons during this pandemic. they investigate online educational resources that 333 participants from 99 countries had found helpful in supporting education continuity. the resources are divided into three categories based on their intended use, they are curriculum resources, professional development resources, and tools resources. it can be concluded that the teachers or the educators realized the common curriculum should be transformed to covid-19 curriculum. that is why the minister of education in several countries design the emergency curriculum under pandemic circumstances, including indonesia. the ministry of education, culture, research, and technology provides the courses, online workshops, webinars to participate. that played as the aid for indonesian teachers to develop teaching and learning skills. moreover, the government also cooperates with some learning management systems to enrich the use of digitalization in the online learning process. hence, this study aims at answering three research questions: first, what are the teachers’ perspectives towards professional development in education 4.0 during covid-19 pandemic? second, what are the activities of pd that have been enrolled to improve the skill of education 4.0 during covid-19 pandemic? last, what are the challenges to involve education 4.0 during covid19 pandemic? method this research was conducted on a member of the teacher support group (mgmp) in subang, west java. subang decided to be the place for this research was because the researcher is one of the lecturers of universitas subang which is located in the same town. even though subang is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 447 near bandung, most academicians are rarely given attention. the participants of this research are the member of teacher support group (mgmp) of english subject. the reason why the researcher only took mgmp of high school because most of the graduates of high schools refer to apply for the job rather than continue their study to the university. high school teachers must prepare graduates for a future life with any unpredictable situation. they have to face education 4.0 and 21st-century abilities. to collect the data of the research, the researcher administered both close-ended and open-ended questionnaires to the participants. the questionnaire is adapted from (bayar, 2013). the questionnaires cover internal (personal) factors and external (environmental) factors. the former consists of teachers’ attitudes toward professional development and teachers’ self-efficacy. the latter consists of time, funding, principal influence, colleagues’ influence, and school culture. malik, r.s. & hamied, f. a (2014) state that the questionnaire helps the researcher to get and collect large data relatively for a short time. semi-interviewed data was taken as secondary data to support the data from the questionnaire. three participants were chosen to be interviewed. the collected valid qualitative and quantitative data were systematically transcribed, organized, coded, looked for patterns, thematically categorized, synthesized, interpreted, and concluded to answer the research questions (gay et al., 2009; fraenkel et al., 2012). results and discussion this part is started by establishing participants’ demographics. seventy-eight english teachers participated in distributing the questionnaire. the data can be shown in the table below: table 1. participants’ demographics gender male: 56 participants female: 22 participants age under 25: 0 25-29: 12 participants 30-39: 11 participants 40-59: 55 participants 60 more: 0 teaching experience under 25: 61 participants 25-29: 5 participants 30-39: 11 participants 40-59: 1 participant 60 more: 0 level of formal education d3: 0 s1: 54 participants s2: 24 participants s3: 0 regarding the table 1, it is known that: most of the participants is male; most of the participants are male between 40-59 years old; most of the participants have a teaching experience under 25 years; and most of them got a bachelor degree of level of formal education. after delivering the questionnaire, the researcher interviewed three participants to enrich the primary data. the researcher selected participants with various backgrounds. the information can be seen as follow. table 2. participants in the interview t#1 t#2 t#3 age 40-59 30-39 30-39 teaching experinece 30-39 under 25 under 25 school public private public rq#1 what is the teachers’ perspective on professional development? to answer the first question, this study divides the questionnaire data into two factors: internal and external factors. the internal factor refers to the participants’ attitudes of self-efficacy. it means how their attitude, behavior, and cognitive view towards pd in education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic. meanwhile, the external factor refers to how the environment affects them in conducting professional development. the external factor includes time, funding, principal influence, colleague, and school culture. hence, this study will not only find either a positive or negative perspective but also investigate to what extent the teachers claim it. the findings of internal factors can be seen from the table below. internal factor table 3. internal factors no. statements neg. n. pos. sd d n a sa 1. professional development activities are necessary for teachers. 2 30 46 2. professional development activities help teachers to develop their instructional skills 2 1 38 37 3. professional development activities are valuable enough to justify the time spent. 2 1 7 56 12 muhammad anjar nugraha & ida maulida english teacher professional development to education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic 448 4. participating in professional development activities makes me feel better about myself. 1 46 31 5. the best way for teachers to learn more is to participate in professional development activities 9 47 24 6. i enjoy participating in professional development activities. 3 54 21 neg: negative, n: neutral, pos: positive sd: strongly disagree, d: disagree, n: neutral, a: agree, sa: strongly agree the data from table 3 shows that almost all the participants agreed with the six statements above. they agree that pd is necessary, helps them to develop the instructional skills, is valuable enough to justify the time spent, makes them feel better about themselves, the best way for them to learn more enjoys in participating in it. thus, the teachers have a positive attitude towards professional development. however, how effective their belief, as the internal factor, influences the consistency in continuing pd. in contrast, the study from hürsen (2012) found that pd activities are unstable. it is influenced by age, gender, and teaching experience. women teachers, younger teachers, and less experience have positive attitudes towards pd. however, teachers’ motivation and commitment play key factors for professional development to deal with a high-demand workload condition (kusmaryani, siregar, widjaja, & jatnika, 2016). it is in line with teachers’ challenges in the new normal. teachers have to adapt to the internet of things (iot). we can conclude that even though the participants claim that pd activities are demanded for them, they have to show their commitment to developing their skills. this study will find out as well how the external factors influence their commitment. the data will be explained in the following sub-topics. external factors time figure 1. time the findings show that 61.5% agreed that they have time to regularly attend offered pd activities. in contrast, 3.9% disagreed about it and 34.6% is neutral. it can be concluded that almost half of the participants are having doubt either they can attend professional development activities or not. the research from (mascher, 2016) found that time was the biggest factor impacting the decision whether or not to participate in pd activities, followed by a lack of incentives and scheduling. besides, the data demonstrate that the main reason why the participants want to spend time on pd is for improving their skills followed by getting their knowledge. the findings can be seen in the chart below. chart 1. the reason to spend on pd it can be inferred that the participants are willing to spend their time developing their skills. webinars and online workshop are the examples of pd common activities during the pandemic. the teachers can choose and attend the webinar with any topic they want. spending time to participate in those activities will be very possible since it has conducted online. in another word, the teacher can attend the event at any time from almost anywhere via the internet. however, not all indonesian areas are covered with stable internet connection. some major regions facing slow internet connections, some other regions have no internet. funding funding, in this case, is divided into two parts: first, funding to pay the additional teacher to cover the classes; second, funding to support the salary supplements during pd activities. the data can be seen in the table below. table 4. funding statements pos. neut. neg. lack of funding for an additional person to cover classes prevents me from participating in 48.7% 25.6% 25.7% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 449 professional development activities. salary supplements would encourage me to participate in professional development activities. 66.6% 23.1% 10.3% pos: positive, neut: neutral, neg: negative regarding the first statement, almost half of the participants agreed that they have to find an extended person to be in charge of school activities. the school has to prepare for an extra teacher to replace the teacher who attends pd activities. meanwhile, due to the pandemic situation, most courses, workshops, seminars, group discussions are conducted online. so, the teachers do not need to leave the school to attend those events. furthermore, teachers will have extra motivation or willingness if they get salary supplements to encourage them in participating pd activities. hence, school principals should be able not only to encourage but also to fund support the teachers. it conforms to the first statement, even though the teachers do not need to come to the event venue, they need to pay a registration fee (if it is not free) and for internet data. school principal influence figure 2. principle influence the data in the figure 2 shows that 83.3% of participants claimed that their school principal boost them to participate in pd activities. it is known that the principal of each school gives a huge chance for his/her staff or teacher to improve skills in pd activities. it is because the school principal gives a significant influence and a substantial impact on teacher professional development. these roles are: first, as the instructional leader and teacher; second, as the learning environment creation; third, as the direct involvement of design, delivery, and content; last, the assessment of professional development (bredeson & johansson, 2000). it is supported by the research findings from (hilton, hilton, dole, & goos, 2015) that the impact of the school principals’ participation in teacher professional development give a positive influence on the capacity for teacher to enact and reflect on new knowledge and practices, and the professional growth of the principals themselves. colleague influence several studies have identified the importance of the influence of colleagues in teachers’ participation in pd activities. (drossel & eickelmann (2017) discovered in their study that the teacher systematically collaborates with colleagues to develop information and communication technology (ict). teachers who participate in professional development are more likely to utilize computers, place a greater focus on teaching ict skills, and have a stronger sense of ict. horn, garner, chen, & frank (2020) found that teachers' participation in learning-rich, in-depth sessions was revealed to be a strong predictor of the creation of new advice-seeking ties. the table below shows the participants’ responses to three statements of colleague influence on pd activities. table 5. colleague influence statements p neutral n my colleagues encourage me to participate in professional development activities. 84.6% 14.1% 1.3% my colleagues and i share common values related to professional development activities. 92.3% 7.7% my colleagues and i participate in professional development activities together. 85.9% 14.1% it can be seen from table 5 that almost all the participants have a positive response towards the three statements above. they get encouragement in pd activities (84.6%); they do sharing, and they do pd together. therefore, colleague influence is one of the external factors that affect to increase in the participants of pd activities. the research from (park, steve oliver, star johnson, graham, & oppong, 2007) found that the nature of interaction among teachers in national board certification can be described in several ways: (a) enhancing reflection on teaching practice; (b) establishing a professional discourse community; (c) raising the standard for teaching performance, and (d) facilitating collaboration. muhammad anjar nugraha & ida maulida english teacher professional development to education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic 450 school culture school culture is one of the factors affecting teachers’ participation in professional development. professional school culture refers to a school environment that has learning communities among all the stakeholders through training, mentoring, research, and communication (khalil & abiodullah, 2013). the sociodemographic situation is strongly linked to the teaching site. parental engagement, working environment, income, personal growth, and family environment are all five problems mentioned by rural school instructors (ling, na, yan-li, & sriyanto, 2020). further, they suggested educational beliefs, cooperation relationships, and teacher self-training as the three primary techniques utilized for pd. the figure below will establish the availability of pd activities in the participants' workplaces. figure 3. school culture figure 3 above stated 90.4 of participants agreed that their school environment has a good school culture. rq#2 what are the activities of pd that have been enrolled to improve the skill of education 4.0 during pandemic? the second question is to investigate pd activities that have been attended by the participants. the findings showed that courses and workshops are the most helpful in pd (76.9%). courses here refer to continuing study. meanwhile, a workshop refers to a small activity rather than a conference to discuss a specific theme. it complies with continuing professional development (cpd) program that has a purpose to develop and enhance teachers’ abilities. they need a workshop certificate that has a credit score. in other words, they will select which pd activities that can give a credit score as much as they can. most workshop events offer a course with a minimum of 32 hours. because the teachers will get a credit when score when an event offers at least 30 hours. the findings can be seen in chart 2 below. chart 2. pd activities however, there was a surprising finding of pd activities that have attended by the participants a year back. the data can be seen as follows. chart 3. pd courses that have attended regarding the data in chart 3, it is known that 27 teachers did not attend any pd activities a year back. most of them were able to attend 1 until 3 times pd activities. then, only 20 teachers attended pd activities more than 3 times in a year back. from the data as well, it is known that the participants are keeping up with pd activities during the pandemic by (a) joining the webinar or workshop; (b) individual research from google and books; (c) learning and discussing with colleagues; (d) whatsapp group. the questionnaire data is supported by the interview data. this study has interviewed three teachers who have different teaching experiences and school statuses. the teachers were asked about their experience in attending a seminar, course, or webinar about education 4.0. it is known that t#3 got the skill to improve education 4.0 during participation in the teacher professionalism training program (ppg). meanwhile, t#1 and t#2 said that they have never participated in any pd focusing on education 4.0. it can be seen from the excerpt below. t#3: i have ever learned about education in the industrial revolution era 4.0 during mgmp and ppg daljab 2020. t#1: never followed q#2: so far i have never attended which is focused on education 4.0 the expert above shows that the teacher who is 30-39 years old and in public school seems to have an easy access to get current information. it is proven by the participants who claimed that english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 451 most of young teachers from public schools have a big chance to join the mgmp event. however, the private teacher has a tight schedule to join the event. q#1 i've ever heard, but i didn't attend this activity. i’ve another business. the young teachers who were usually attended. q#2 maybe there were other events that i couldn't attend because it coincided with my teaching schedule. rq#3 what are the challenges to involve education 4.0 during covid-19 pandemic? education 4.0 demands teachers to adapt to technology. due to this pandemic, teachers must conduct e-learning. the data found that the availability of facilities is the most chosen by the participants, followed by students’ involvement, and self-readiness. the facilities here are not only the devices that belong to teacher but also students. not all students have their gadget as their learning tools. it influences their involvement in the teaching and learning process. particularly, both teachers and students are struggling with online learning. the table below will demonstrate the challenges to involve in education 4.0 chart 4. the challenges to involve education 4.0 the data from the questionnaire is in line with the interview data. the participants claimed that sometimes they need more time to prepare the material to be implemented during the pandemic, less institutional support and colleague, and the content to support education 4.0 as can be seen in the excerpt below: t#1: the difficulty is when i have to prepare contextual material, especially during this pandemic. because the school is in the rural area, we face lack of school facilities. t#2: it will be very difficult when there is no support from the school and there is no cooperation with colleagues. t#3: maybe it's more about what content should be taught to answer the challenges in education 4.0 the findings above conform with tafazoli (2021) who claims that teachers’ expectation of pd activities during the covid-19 pandemic can be divided into six categories, they are technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge, technological pedagogical knowledge, technological content knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. conclusion this study investigates teachers professional development (pd) to 4.0 education era during covid-19 pandemic. it can be concluded into three main points regarding research questions. first, the participants have a positive perspective towards pd to 4.0 education era during covid-19 pandemic with five factors (time, funding, school principal, colleague influence, and school culture). second, courses or workshop is the most helpful in pd activity. most of the participants attend once to three times of pd activities this year. last, the availability of facilities is the most challenge in using technology in the classroom. furthermore, it is known that young teacher from public school has a wide chance to join pd activities; age, colleague and school principal influence the participation of mgmp event; determining teaching content is a challenge to implement education 4.0. acknowledgement we are grateful to all related institutions, participants, especially ministry of research and technology for funding support. references abidah, a., hidaayatullaah, h. n., simamora, r. m., fehabutar, d., & mutakinati, l. 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(2014). teacher professionalism and professional development practices in south sulawesi, indonesia. journal of curriculum and teaching, 3(2), 25–42. https://doi.org/10.5430/jct.v3n2p25 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 139 a bibliometric analysis of efl reading fluency from 2016 to 2021 hijril ismail english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah mataram, indonesia e-mail: hijrilismail@yahoo.com edi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah mataram, indonesia e-mail: edi.dompu.80@gmail.com apa citation: ismail, h., & edi. (2021). a bibliometric analysis of efl reading fluency from 2016 to 2021. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 139-148. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5364 received: 25-08-2021 accepted: 23-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction reading is a crucial skill to be increased in children (abd ghani, muslim, & zakaria, 2020), a complex task that involves not only word decoding but also linking pieces of information across longer text passages (eilers, tiffin-richards, & schroeder, 2018), an active, reflective and interactive process between the reader and the text, where the reader’s prior knowledge, objectives, and expectations play a fundamental role in the meaning construction (duran, ribosa, & sánchez, 2020), a complex task requiring appropriate eye movements, attention, and information processing (dodick, starling, wethe, pang, messner, smith, master, halker-singh, vargas, bogle, mandrekar, talaber, & leong, 2017), an important element for effective language learning (ismail, rahmat, & emzir, 2020), an important skill in language learning that connects the students’ prior knowledge with the information contained in the reading text (ismail, aceng, & emzir, 2021), a fluent process of readers combining information from a text and their background knowledge to build meaning (nunan, 2003). there are four main ways of reading (grellet, 1983). first, skimming is high-speed reading that can save a lot of time. one skims to get the general sense of a passage or a book (mikulecky & jeffries, 2004). harmer (2003) claims that skimming means that we do not have to read every word and line; on the contrary, such as approach would stop them from scanning successfully. juan and flor (2006) assert that skimming is a rapid sample reading to obtain general gist. brown (2004) argues that skimming constitutes the process of rapid coverage of reading matter to determine its gift or main idea. it is a prediction of rapid coverage of reading matter to determine its first or main idea. it is a prediction strategy used to give a reader a sense of the topic, the purpose of a text, the organization of the text, the perspective or point of view of the writer, its ease or difficulty, and/or its usefulness to the reader. assessment of skimming strategies is usually straightforward: the test-taker skims a text and abstract: the aim of the research is to provide an extensive literature review on reading fluency. articles were located through publish or perish software and the google scholar database. scanning by scimagojr.com (q1, q2, q3, and q4). we analyzed 60 articles from 2016 to 2021. mendeley software was used to manage and resume the references. we have reviewed this database and attempted to classify articles using vosviewer software. four clusters are identified. cluster 1 consisted of ten items (disability, elementary students, fluency intervention, impact, intervention, reader, reading fluency, reaped reading, student, and teacher), cluster 2 consisted of seven items word (child, effect, fluency, language, present study, reading, and word), cluster 3 consisted of five items word (comprehension, oral reading fluency, relationship, research, and vocabulary), and cluster 4 consisted of 4 items word (accuracy, development, relation, and study). keywords: bibliometric analysis; reading fluency. hijril ismail & edi a bibliometric analysis of efl reading fluency from 2016 to 2021 140 answers questions such as (what is the main idea of this text?, what is the author’s purpose in writing the text?, what kind of writing is this (newspaper, article, manual, novel, etc)?, what type of writing is this expository/technical/narrative, etc)?, how easy or difficult do you think this text will be?, what do you think you will learn from the text?, and how useful will the text be for your profession/academic need/interests?). second, scanning as high-speed reading. when one scan, he/she has a question in mind. he/she does not read every word, only the words that answer his/her question. practice in scanning will help one learns to skip over unimportant words so that he/she can read faster (mikulecky & jeffries, 2004). harmer (2003) puts forward that scanning is reading texts for particular bits of information they are searching for. juan and flor (2006) claim that scanning is rapid and partial search reach reading for specific information. and, brown (2004) classifies that scanning as a strategy utilized by all readers to find relevant information in a text. third, extensive reading, it usually read longer texts for pleasure which undertaken by a fluency activity involved global understanding (grellet, 1983), reading many books (longer segment of the material) without focusing on classroom exercises that may test comprehension skills (nunan, 2003), involves somewhat longer texts such as journal articles, technical reports, longer essays, short stories, and book (brown, 2004), involves reading fluency of large quantities of texts and longer reading (e.g. whole books) for general comprehending, with the focus generally on the meaning of what is being read than on the certain language (richards & renandya, 2002). forth, intensive reading constitutes involves a short reading passage followed by textbook activities to develop comprehension or a particular reading skill (nunan, 2003). grellet (1983) argues that intensive reading means reading short texts, not extracting specific information. this is more an accuracy activity concerting to reading for detail. this study concentrated on reading fluency, as the ability to read at an appropriate rate with adequate comprehension (nunan, 2003), as the ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression to identify fluency (chang, 2020), a fundamental aspect for successful reading development (archambault, mercer, cheng, & saqui, 2019), a critical skill necessitated to free up cognitive resources for more complex tasks such as comprehension (van norman & nelson, 2021), as the ability to read age-appropriate text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression (vess, begeny, norwalk, & ankney, 2018), as the ability to read text quickly and accurately with few miscues and little effort and to read expressively with appropriate pausing, phrasing, and articulation. (lee & yoon, 2017), as the ability to read quickly and accurately with proper prosody, is one of the most crucial components of reading skills (wu, gadke, & stratton, 2018), a necessary capacity ensuring work efficiency, life quality and often refers to the ability to read rapidly and accurately (huang, liu, & zhao, 2021), a linked to the ability to recognize the correct spelling of whole words (krasa & bell, 2021). reading fluency has been widely discussed in many articles. however, a bibliometric analysis of reading fluency has never been performed so we are interested in carrying out research entitled "a bibliometric analysis of the term "reading fluency". method a literature review was carried out by applying a systematic, explicit, and reproducible method or a mind-mapping method that give emphasizes the limitation of knowledge. a bibliometric review was generally utilized in scientific disciplines and concentrated in a quantitative study of journals paper. this study adapted to the five steps method of bibliometric analysis introduced by fahimnia, sarkis, & davarzani (2015). these five steps are defining research keywords “reading fluency”, initial search results, refinement of the search results, compiling statistics on the initial data, and data analysis. defining search keywords a literature search was undertaken in december 2021, employing the keyword “reading fluency”. publish or perish software with google scholar was utilized to gather the data. to start, we entered the keyword “reading fluency” into the publish or perish software, arrange to publish names for ‘journal’, ‘title word’, and years ‘0-0’. from the google scholar database, we gain 482 articles in the initial search for the period from 1973 to 2021 (48 years). initial search results during this step, we did not control the range of years, the oldest article about reading fluency was english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 141 published in 1973. these top fifteen articles were identified from publish or perish software. table 1. top fifteen articles identified from publish or perish (unrefined search) authors titles years of publication jm pullis how important is reading fluency in shorthand? 1973 pa schreiber on the acquisition of reading fluency 1980 e le coultre, m carroll the effect of visualizing speech rhythms on reading comprehension and fluency 1981 j marvan a pilot study: the effectiveness of the neurological impress method on fluency, accuracy and power of oral reading. 1983 dl share, af jorm, r maclean, r matthews the contribution of language skills to reading fluency: a comparison of two orthographies for hebrew 1984 lj o'shea, pt sindelar… the effects of repeated readings and attentional cues on reading fluency and comprehension 1985 ba cooper, kj stewart the influence of variations in syntax on oral reading fluency 1987 t rasinski, d reinking redefining the role of reading fluency 1987 j zutell current directions: attending to oral reading fluency 1988 tv rasinski effects of repeated reading and listening-while-reading on reading fluency 1990 bb swanson reading fluency and the novice reader 1990 pg aaron, j whitefield dysfluency‐fluency: implications of a new cognitive style for reading consultation 1990 cl carroll, s mccormick, jo cooper effects of a modified repeated reading procedure on reading fluency of severely disabled readers 1991 r parker, je hasbrouck… greater validity for oral reading fluency: can miscues help? 1992 dr reutzel, pm hollingsworth effects of fluency training on second graders' reading comprehension 1993 refinement of the search results to refinement the search results, the authors excluded articles that were not published in scopus indexed journals (q1, q2, q3, and q4). the number of articles that meet the requirements for five years is 60 articles. while these that do not meet the requirements are 124 articles. the total that appeared after the year limited (2016 to 2021) is 184 articles. the comparison of the result between the initial search and refinement search can be shown in table 2. table 2. comparison metrics metrics data initial search refinement search query journal, reading fluency journal, reading fluency from 2016 to 2021 (5 years) source google scholar google scholar paper 484 60 citations 19295 1279 years (1973-2021) 48 years (2016-2021) 5 years cites/year 19295.00 255.80 cites/paper 40.03 21.32 authors/paper 2.49 3.10 h_index 71 16 g_index 131 35 hi_norm 41 10 hi_annual 41.00 2.000 ha_index 71 8 hijril ismail & edi a bibliometric analysis of efl reading fluency from 2016 to 2021 142 compiling the initial data statistics the result after refinement was downloaded, saved in the mendeley software to the ris format to include vital information related to the paper, including; title, authors’ name, abstract, keywords, and journal specification (publication journal, year of publication, issue, and pages). then, data were analyzed to classify the year publication trend, source of publication, and the publishers. figure 1. year-over-year publication trend (note: the trend of publications on reading fluency in the last five years is in 2016 there were eight articles published in the scopus indexed journal. in 2017 was 9 articles, in 2018 was 13 articles, in 2019 was 7 articles, in 2020 was 9 articles, and in 2021 was 14 articles.) figure 2. publishers of cited articles (note: journals.segeput.com, wiley online library, taylor & francis, elsevier, researchgate.net, springer, and search.proquest.com are the seven most often appearing publishers.) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 143 figure 3. journal in which articles in analysis appeared 33 journals have to data only published on articles on the theme of “reading fluency”. the 33 journals are australian journal of education, australian journal of psychology, electronic journal of research in educational psychology, international journal of education research, international journal of educational development, international journal of music education, international journal of pediatric otorhinolaryngology, international journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation, international journal of psychosocial rehabilitation, journal of adolescent & adult literacy, journal of autism and developmental disorders, journal of child neurology, journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, journal of computer assisted learning, journal of early childhood research, journal of education and practice, journal of educational practice and research, journal of educational psychology, journal of educational technology system, journal of language teaching and research, journal of psychoeducational assessment, journal of psycholinguistic research, journal of research in music education, journal of research in special education needs, journal of research on educational effectiveness, pedagogies: an international journal, scandinavian journal of psychology, the asian efl journal quarterly, the journal of educational research, the journal of general psychology, the journal of research in reading, and universal journal of educational research. in total 41 journals discussed issues related to reading fluency. data analysis this paper presents the bibliometric analysis for the term “reading fluency” from the google scholar database. a bibliometric review in this paper was utilized to publish and parish software version 7.33.3388.7819. the author obtained 484 papers in the initial result and 60 in the refinement result. the data regarding citations changes with 1279 citations and 255.80 citations/year. results and discussion this study shows that articles published in scopus indexed journals have a substantial impact on metrics related to citations. table 3 shows that the most cited article on reading fluency is the article written by sebastian p. suggate entitled “a metaanalysis of the long-term effects of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and reading comprehension interventions”. the article was written in 2016, published in the journal of learning disabilities, and cited by 341 authors. the second most-cited article is an article written by j lee, sy yoon entitle “the effects of repeated reading on reading fluency for students with reading disabilities: a meta-analysis” the article is written in 2017, published in the journal of learning disabilities, and cited by 150 authors. and, the third most-cited is an article was written by elizabeth a. stevens, melodee a. walker, and sharon vaughn entitle the effects of reading fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities: a synthesis of the research from 2001 to 2014. the article was written in 2017, published in the journal of learning disabilities, and cited by 138 authors. https://www.proquest.com/pubidlinkhandler/sng/pubtitle/journal+of+educational+practice+and+research/$n/2041167/openview/2244569375/$b/55209cd8b1f4f32pq/1;jsessionid=22358d01ded6fbdadd421a01fbfd4b24.i-0ffafdc2bb9c3c535 https://www.proquest.com/pubidlinkhandler/sng/pubtitle/journal+of+educational+practice+and+research/$n/2041167/openview/2244569375/$b/55209cd8b1f4f32pq/1;jsessionid=22358d01ded6fbdadd421a01fbfd4b24.i-0ffafdc2bb9c3c535 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219416638028 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219416638028 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219416638028 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219416638028 hijril ismail & edi a bibliometric analysis of efl reading fluency from 2016 to 2021 144 figure 4. network visualization mapping (note: four colors in figure 4 shown that there are four clusters of reading fluency.) after counting for citation frequency and other metrics, the author analyzed the output from publish or perish application into vosviewer application to determine what keywords were occurring frequently and utilized for visualizing bibliometric analysis maps. the vosviewer application shows the bibliometric mapping on three different visualizations, they are network visualization, overlay visualization, and density visualization. figure 5. density visualization mapping extracting from the title and abstract fields, full counting with the minimum number of occurrences set to 3, we get 444 terms and 30 items meeting the threshold and four common words were excluded. four clusters are identified here. cluster 1 consisted of ten items (disability, elementary students, fluency intervention, impact, intervention, reader, reading fluency, reaped reading, student, and teacher), cluster 2 consisted of seven items word (child, effect, fluency, language, present study, reading, and word), cluster 3 consisted of five items word (comprehension, oral reading fluency, relationship, research, and vocabulary), and cluster english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 145 4 consisted of 4 items word (accuracy, development, relation, and study). table 3. article with 10 or more citations n o citatio ns per year authors title year publication publisher 1 341 68.20 .00 sp suggate a meta-analysis of the long-term effects of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and reading comprehension interventions (2016) journal of learning disabilities journals.s agepub.c om 2 150 37.50 .00 j lee, sy yoon the effects of repeated reading on reading fluency for students with reading disabilities: a meta-analysis (2017) journal of learning disabilities journals.s agepub.c om 3 138 34.50 .00 ea stevens, ma walker, ... the effects of reading fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities: a … (2017) journal of learning disabilities journals.s agepub.c om 4 94 0,805 5555 56 b piper, l schroeder, b trudell oral reading fluency and comprehension in kenya: reading acquisition in a multilingual environment (2016) journal of research in reading wiley online library 5 63 0,677 0833 33 tv rasinski, sc chang, e edmondson, ... reading fluency and college readiness (2017) journal of adolescent & adult literacy wiley online library 6 62 0,879 8611 11 m torppa, k eklund, s sulkunen, ... why do boys and girls perform differently on pisa reading in finland? the effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour, leisure reading and homework activity (2018) journal of research in reading wiley online library 7 38 0,333 3333 33 i ribeiro, i cadime, t freitas, ... beyond word recognition, fluency, and vocabulary: the influence of reasoning on reading comprehension (2016) australian journal of psychology wiley online library 8 37 12.33 re o'connor reading fluency and students with reading disabilities: how fast is fast enough to promote reading comprehension? (2018) journal of learning disabilities journals.s agepub.c om 9 33 08.25 nh clemens, d simmons, ... the prevalence of reading fluency and vocabulary difficulties among adolescents struggling with reading comprehension (2017) journal of psychoeduca tional assessment journals.s agepub.c om 10 31 06.20 c young, c valadez, c gandara using performance methods to enhance students' reading fluency (2016) the journal of educational research taylor & francis 11 30 06.00 sp ardoin, ks binder, te foster, ... repeated versus wide reading: a randomized control design study examining the impact of fluency interventions on underlying reading behavior (2016) journal of school psychology elsevier 12 29 07.25 d dodick, aj starling, the effect of in-school saccadic training on reading fluency and (2017) journal of child journals.s agepub.c https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679817 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679817 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679817 hijril ismail & edi a bibliometric analysis of efl reading fluency from 2016 to 2021 146 j wethe, y pang, ... comprehension in first and second grade students: a randomized controlled trial neurology om 13 27 0,302 0833 33 y liu, gk georgiou, y zhang, h li, h liu, ... contribution of cognitive and linguistic skills to word-reading accuracy and fluency in chinese (2017) international journal of education research elsevier 14 23 0,338 1944 44 jc begeny, ra levy, sa field using small-group instruction to improve students' reading fluency: an evaluation of the existing research (2018) journal of applied school psychology taylor & francis 15 17 0,254 8611 11 c young, d pearce, j gomez, ... read two impress and the neurological impress method: effects on elementary students' reading fluency, comprehension, and attitude (2018) journal of educational research taylor & francis 16 16 05.33 ej solari, ca denton, y petscher, ... examining the effects and feasibility of a teacher-implemented tier 1 and tier 2 intervention in word reading, fluency, and comprehension (2018) journal of research on educational effectivenes s taylor & francis 17 12 03.00 ca wolters, ma barnes, pa kulesz, m york, ... examining a motivational treatment and its impact on adolescents' reading comprehension and fluency (2017) journal of educational research taylor & francis 18 10 03.33 le johnston, sh mercer, ... incorporating vocabulary instruction in individual reading fluency interventions with english language learners (2018) canadian journal of school psychology journals.s agepub.c om 19 10 02.50 s santos, i cadime, fl viana, ... assessing reading comprehension with narrative and expository texts: dimensionality and relationship with fluency, vocabulary and memory (2017) scandinavia n journal of psychology wiley online library conclusion reading fluency is a complex skill defined as “reasonably accurate reading at an appropriate rate with a suitable expression that leads to accurate and deep comprehension and motivation to read. this study reviewed 60 articles with a theme related to “reading fluency”. the articles were gathered from the google scholar (gs) database by using the publish or perish software version 7.33.3388.7819. these 60 articles were extracted from a larger original set of 482 articles obtained from the initial result. the number of data citations is 1279 citations and 255.80 citations/year. the most cited article on reading fluency is the article written by sebastian p. suggate entitled “a meta-analysis of the long-term effects of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and reading comprehension interventions”. the article was written in 2016, published in the journal of learning disabilities, and cited by 341 authors. and, the second most-cited article is an article written by j lee, sy yoon entitle “the effects of repeated reading on reading fluency for students with reading disabilities: a meta-analysis” the article is written in 2017, published in the journal of learning disabilities, and cited by 150 authors. references abd ghani, a., muslim, n. h., & zakaria, m. n. 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(2018). read two impress and the neurological impress method: effects on elementary students’ reading fluency, comprehension, and attitude. journal of educational research, 111(6), 657–665. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2017.1393650 young, c., valadez, c., & gandara, c. (2016). using performance methods to enhance students’ reading fluency. journal of educational research, 109(6), 624–630. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2015.1016599 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the notions of english language and research instructors on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing process of their college students yvonne p. velasco mary ann v. dolor carlos hilado memorial state college, philippines email: yvonnevelasco@outlook.com apa citation: velasco, y.p., & dolor, m. a. v. (2016). the notions of english language and research instructors on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing process of their college students. english review: journal of english education, 5(1), 89-100 received: 09-10-2016 accepted: 09-11-2016 published: 01-12-2016 abstract: this is a descriptive study investigating teachers’ view on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing of their students. using mishra and koehler’s (2006) tpck model as framework, a probe was made on how technology and content are related and how pedagogical strategies in research relates to the use of technology in the classroom. the results reveal that teachers generally viewed the impact of digital technologies as positive but also showed misgivings on some aspects of technology use. the results have significant impact on the ict policy currently being implemented in most state-run schools in the philippines. keywords: digital technologies, teacher perceptions, college research, ict policy introduction the use of digital technologies in and for education is rapidly expanding in many countries and is now seen as both a necessity and an opportunity for improving and enhancing the education offered to citizens across the globe (unesco, 2006). in fact, information and communication technology is regarded as a building block of modern society (unesco, 2002). hence, the acquisition of skills in using digital technologies, generally labelled as information and communication technology (ict), has been regarded as part of their core education (unesco, 2002) by many countries globally. for example, in the united kingdom, the official view of ict as potentially transformative of education has placed it at the centre of the national agenda for school reform (deaney, ruthven, & hennessy, 2005). in the us, in its informational literacy competency standards for higher education, informational literacy is identified as crucial to today’s environment of rapid technological change and proliferating information resources. all these are, undoubtedly, a collective global stance that supports the use of digital technologies in education, by especially focusing on the way students write in today’s digital age. as it is, the philippines as a developing country makes efforts in recognizing the advances in communication due to technology and the internet, prompting the department of budget (dbm) and the commission 89 yvonne p. velasco & mary ann v. dolor the notions of english language and research instructors on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing process of their college students on higher education (ched) to issue joint circular no. 1 (series of 2012), which establishes the guidelines on state universities and colleges (sucs) on how to avail a portion of the five hundred million pesos (500,000,000.00php) allotted budgetary support for the maintenance, operating and other expenses (mooe) and capital outlay (co) requirements of selected sucs (eligible under said guidelines) to undertake programs/projects and activities that will create key employment generators in the priority growth sectors. in addition to this requirement for special funding, article 2.3.d of the circular stipulates that as one of the criteria for selection of sucs recipients, …“the sucs mandated to offer science and technology degree programs and those with good track record in their engineering, technology or ict courses shall be given preference.” paglaum state college (psc), a government-owned higher education institution in the philippines, does not need to prove its track record in engineering for it has consistently been in the category of best performing schools in the civil engineering board examinations in the philippines for the past 5 years since the inception of said course. what it needs is to prove that it deserves the budgetary support from dbm and ched which requires establishing a good track record in its ict courses. to this end, the psc administration mandated the use of digital technologies in classroom instruction veering towards blended learning even. this recent events in psc, however, raises some concern in the sense that while the goal to improve ict instruction is clear, the implementation of such initiative across departments and, ultimately, across psc’s four campuses is rather sketchy. while there seems to be no resistance being offered against psc administration’s initiative to integrate ict in classrooms, no inquiry has been made about the teachers’ comfort level in the use of these technologies in their classroom activities. since teachers are facilitators of student success and achievement, their perceptions of, and attitudes toward, technology in education may be closely related to students’ engagement with technology (hadley, eisenwine, hakes, & hines, 2002). considering that the expertise of teachers makes their role central to education, teachers’ perceptions regarding technology integration may influence students’ learning by constituting a part of a hidden curriculum (fleener, 2002). following willis (1991), if perception is primary to human experience, then an investigation of teachers’ perceptions of technology in education may serve to fill this seemingly neglected but very important area related to pedagogy in the 21st century. the central position of the teacher, between the school administration and the students, makes the teacher ultimately responsible for the successful implementation of policies of curriculum. consequently, as enactors of the curriculum, teachers are the vital link between the curriculum planners and the students. current literature suggests that teachers perceive computer technology primarily as a teacher aid to clerical work in basic word processing, calculating, keeping grades, and maintaining class rolls (swan, et al., 2002; swan, bowman, holmes, vargas, & richardson, 2000). what this means is that these teachers look at technology as productivity tools and not as students’ learning tools. this may have stemmed 90 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee from the way teachers regard their ability to meet the challenges of technology integration since the literature indicates that many teachers feel inadequately prepared for this undertaking (mccannon & crews, 2000; smerdon & cronen, 2000). pinar and irwin (2005) have cited this lack of technology training for teachers to carry serious implications for the relationship of human beings and computer technology. over the past decade, technology has appeared in the classroom with increasing frequency and has become a major factor in education reform (wenglinsky, 2000). however, even if more technology appears in the schools with each passing year and with each technological innovation, teachers are not using it effectively (mackenzie, 1999; padgett & conceicao-runlee, 2000; roblyer & edwards, 2000). essentially, the teachers’ perceptions about technology use may be used as a signpost that should indicate which way reform should proceed. balanskat et al. (2006) conducted a review of seventeen impact studies carried out between 2002 and 2006 which aimed at determining the benefits and impact of ict integration in schools in two major areas: learning outcomes and learners, and teaching methodologies and teachers. the studies reveal some evidences that ict impacts learner performance (machin) as cited in balanskat et al. (2006). sutherland et al. (2004) reported on the findings of the inter active education project conducted in the united kingdom, wherein teachers and researchers worked together to develop and evaluate initiatives focused on using ict to enhance learning in curriculum areas that students would normally find difficulty in. the results show that despite the guardedness to use technology in the classroom, some teachers who participated in the project reported several positive outcomes with regards to ict integration in the projects implemented. the teachers reported marked improvements in the writing skills of lower ability students, increased levels of interaction among students, greater student enthusiasm and engagement and an increase in confidence for both the teacher and the students. several researchers have argued that teacher beliefs about teaching and how students acquire knowledge play a critical role in determining not only the degree to which technology is used in the classroom but how technology is used to support teaching and learning. the sociocultural theory of learning posits that learning is interactive, discursive, technology-mediated, and situated (schellens et al., 2005; gee, 2003). gee (2003) extends this perspective to suggest that human learning is “fully embedded in a material, social, and cultural world” (p. 8) and that the affordances of tools and technologies (e.g. computer and the internet) can enhance learning. furthermore, teachers’ perceived usefulness of an innovation play a pivotal role in determining the extent to which that innovation will be adopted for use in the classroom (hall & hord, 2001). however, liu (2010) found that while teachers held learner-centered beliefs, they did not integrate constructivist teaching with technology use, thus revealing clear inconsistencies between teacher pedagogical beliefs and teaching activities. he found that most teachers, regardless of pedagogical beliefs, were inclined to utilize lecturebased instruction. according to a report released by the project information literacy, college students in the united states do not know how to do research correctly 91 http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/pil_fall2010_survey_fullreport1.pdf http://projectinfolit.org/ yvonne p. velasco & mary ann v. dolor the notions of english language and research instructors on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing process of their college students (www.huffingtonpost.com). the study, which surveyed 8.353 students from 25 colleges across the usa, reports that 84% of respondents found "getting started" to be the hardest part of research projects. interestingly, if these are problems confronting college students in a first world country such as the united states, how would college students in a developing country such as the philippines fare in their research activities especially since it was only recently that state-run higher institutions are catching on with teaching in digital space. this study is informed by mishra and koehler’s (2006) teaching with technology model. they theorize that well thought-out pedagogical uses of technology necessitate the development of a complex situated form of knowledge. this knowledge is what they refer to as technological pedagogical and content knowledge (tpck). tpck builds on shulman’s (1986) pedagogical content knowledge model, which outlines the essential qualities of teacher’s knowledge required for effective integration of technology in teaching. tpck is an emergent knowledge that goes beyond the three individual components of content, pedagogy, and technology and represents a class of knowledge that is central to teachers’ work with technology. hence, tpck is an allencompassing theory on teaching technology that takes into account the teachers’ appreciation of the digital phenomenon; this appreciation transcends knowledge of content, pedagogy, and of technology itself. most initiatives in technology seemed fixated in the purchase of hardware (computers) for schools. it seems that there is an assumption that computers would magically transform teaching and learning. even in cases where educational software was provided along with the hardware, there was the belief that knowledge was somehow embedded in the software and the technology (sutherland, et al., 2004). however, knowing how to use technology is not to be construed with knowing how to teach with it. teaching in the 21st century therefore carries with it is not just practical knowledge, content, and strategies in teaching and integrating technology, but also an understanding of how all these are built up into a system that is compact and inseparable and requires the teachers’ conscious effort to discern. in an effort to understand the contexts and situations relating to the role played by teacher perceptions on the value of digital technologies to education particularly in research writing, this study sought to understand the english language/research instructors’ perceptions of digital technologies and the importance of integrating ict in the context of a mandate to integrate technology in the classrooms. specifically, the following are the research questions addressed: 1. what is the english language/research instructors’ perception of the students’ use of digital technologies for research paper writing, in terms of: a. manner (of doing research) b. ability 2. what benefits may the various digital technologies bring in when utilized by the students in their research paper writing? 3. what risks can these digital technologies likely pose when utilized by the students in their research paper writing? 4. how do the english and research instructors view the impact of digital 92 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee technologies on students’ research writing? method the study is descriptive and sought to understand the meanings teachers make of their experiences with digital technologies and the way it has impacted their students’ research writing process. merriam (1998) stresses that a descriptive study presents a detailed account of a phenomenon under study and is useful for investigating innovative programs and practices. both the quantitative and qualitative methods were employed; the quantitative aspect is realised by conducting a survey while the qualitative aspect is realised by conducting a focus group discussion which stitched in the elements which a survey could not possibly uncover. psc has four campuses, hence, to have a comprehensive assessment of the english and research instructors’ perceptions the study included the possible maximum number of the population. however, due to some constraints, a 100% sampling of the population was not realized (table 1). table 1. participants distribution across four campuses psc talisay 20 psc alijis 15 psc binalbagan 15 psc fortune towne 15 the instrument used in this study was adapted from an online national survey conducted in the united states by pew internet, the college board, and the national writing project. the survey is the pew research center’s internet and american life project’s first extensive examination of teachers’ perceptions of the positive and negative impacts of a rapidly evolving technological environment on teachers’ professional activities, and how that new environment has impacted teachers’ own technology use (http://pewinternet.org/reports). the questionnaire is retrievable on-line and consisted of 50 items exclusive of the demographic assessment. while the questionnaire is divided into six sections, the researchers adapted the questions on the section relative to the impact of digital technologies on research, albeit, with some modifications to suit the culture and setting of the study. proper research conventions were observed (permissions, schedules, orientation as to the protocols for the conduct of the test, etc.) before the instrument was administered. the schedules for the focus group discussions proved a little problematic for the instructors’ schedules would not allow for a common time schedule wherein they could convene without class disruption. the survey questionnaire administered prior to the fgd, the reason being that the issues which were not delved into in the survey can be further explored and clarified during the discussion that ensued. the fgd was audio-recorded and transcribed. the questionnaires were retrieved for scoring, statistical treatment, and interpretation. data analysis for the quantitative aspect consists of encoding the responses given by the participants in the survey questionnaire. the descriptive statistical 93 http://pewinternet.org/reports/2013/teachers-technology-and-writing yvonne p. velasco & mary ann v. dolor the notions of english language and research instructors on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing process of their college students mean and frequency measures were obtained to come up with a description of the area this study is concerned about. data analysis for the qualitative aspect consists of a grounded theory approach (strauss & corbin, 1990) such that data were analysed for emerging themes. after the fgd sound file were transcribed, the data were segmented and re-grouped according to themes. initial coding was done by examining the data and defining the ideas explicit within the data, and finally, categories were established. this method of analysis allowed for a rigorous review of the data culled from the fgd. similarly, it provided for a structure for analysis and interpretation. results and discussion table 2 below presents the data regarding age and length of service. table 2. distribution of respondents in terms of age and length of service age f % length f % 20-29 16 25 0-9 16 25 30-39 25 38 10-19 29 46 40-49 18 28 20-29 15 23 50-59 6 9 30-39 5 8 table 2 shows that 38% of the participants belong to the 30-39 age bracket. this may imply that these participants have a relative exposure to digital technologies when they began school because the internet saw its origins in the 1980’s. 46% have been teaching for more than 15 years (16-19year bracket), while only 8% have been teaching for more than 30 years. more than half of the participants have been teaching for less than 20 years and considering this, the utility of being able to embed ict in the classroom shall be felt more by this group of participants. table 3 and 4 presents the demographics. table 3. distribution of respondents according to gender and home internet gender % male 18 28 female 47 72 home internet % yes 30 46 no 35 54 72% of the participants are female while less than 50% of the participants have internet connections at home. this data gives us a picture of the teachers’ access to the internet at home and to group the perceptions according to age and gender. table 4. distribution of respondents according to digital devices owned cellphone smartphone tablet notebook laptop desktop f % f % f % f % f % f % 55 85 18 28 27 42 48 74 40 62 43 66 evidently, most participants have cellphones, which implies that somehow, the importance of this digital device is felt across participants whether male or female, or whether tenured or not. 74% of the participants have notebooks which 94 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee gives the impression that they are positively endorsing the utility of digital technologies. the participants of the study enthused that the definition of research has considerably changed in the digital world. this change according to them reflects how students approach the task of researching. undeniably, search engines have a relative place in the world where students do research. some participants said that for most of their students the idea of research is almost synonymous with ‘googling’ the topics assigned. when prompted to elucidate on the matter, participants said that most of them felt that students would define the process as independently gathering information by looking it up or searching in google. furthermore, the participants expressed the perception that their students use only a handful of resources and rely mainly on search engines for their research. when asked how likely their students were to use a variety of different information sources for a typical research, 62% of the participants said their students were very likely to use google or other online search engines. table 5 presents the manner of sourcing/accessing information in the internet that the teachers perceive their students use. table 5. manner of accessing information for research purposes source very likely % somewhat likely % not too likely % not at all % unsure % overall rating google, etc 40 62 14 22 4 6 1 2 6 9 vl online databases 15 23 18 28 27 42 3 5 2 3 ntl e-mail; yahoo, gmail 24 37 30 46 7 11 4 6 0 0 sl text books (print or e-books) 20 31 28 43 7 11 3 5 7 11 sl you tube or other social media 32 49 26 40 4 6 3 5 0 0 vl news sites 10 15 27 42 20 31 8 12 0 0 sl wikipedia 40 62 20 31 3 5 2 3 0 0 vl sixty-two percent (62%) said their students were very likely to use wikipedia or other online encyclopedias in a typical research assignment. third on the list was youtube or other social media sites, which about half of teachers (52%) said their students were very likely to use. only 31% think that the students are most likely to do research using textbooks or e-books. based on these figures, it would appear that the use of textbooks has rather become passé with students when they do research. this finding has significance to the educational community in psc in the sense that, an adequate library service would need to cater to how the students would conduct and write their research assignments. simply stacking physical books in the library is no longer an option. the library should mirror the way students actually do research and as 95 yvonne p. velasco & mary ann v. dolor the notions of english language and research instructors on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing process of their college students the findings of this study seem to imply, a huge measure of ict capable tools are a need that must not be overlooked in the college library. presently, there are only five (5) computer units in the library (main campus) that serve approximately two thousand (2,000) students. this computer-to-student ratio is rather distressing. a majority of survey respondents described their students as very good when it comes to understanding how online search results are generated and in their ability to use appropriate and effective search terms and queries. these likely reflect the participants’ assessment of how well they have attained their instructional objectives in terms of these two skills. it is possible that the skills of doing online search, as well as using effective search queries are areas of instruction that were given emphasis by the participants and which reaped the positive approval ratings. table 6 presents the results. table 6. students ability to do on-line research ability e xc el le n t % v er y g oo d % g oo d % fa ir % p oo r % o ve ral l r at in g understanding online results generation 5 8 37 57 11 6 10 15 2 3 vg using to use effective terms and queries 5 8 40 62 6 9 8 12 6 9 vg assessing quality and accuracy of information 3 5 6 9 42 65 8 12 6 9 g recognizing bias in online content 5 8 6 9 30 46 12 18 6 9 g using multiple sources to support argument 4 6 4 6 38 58 14 22 5 8 g the survey inquired into which research skills in particular, do participants consider critical for their college students to learn. though the survey constrained the choices to five, wherein participants gave mostly good and very good ratings to students, the fgd was able to extract from the participants an extended discussion on this particular topic. the participants were in agreement that for students to do online research, it requires ‘knowing how to do online research’, that is, knowing how to effectively use terms and queries in the search field area. one participant shared her experience when she was in the computer lab and she saw one of her students typed in whole sentences in the search area. she said, “it saddens me to see that student grappling with technology at his fingertips. it was supposed to make life easy for him, instead, it made it a little complicated.” accordingly, this has prompted her to teach her students the skills of finding information in the internet by efficiently using search tools and advance search, to which, most participants favorably agreed. they were also mostly unanimous in saying that the skill in recognizing bias in online content is quite difficult to teach, given that students are always procrastinating and would not be very discriminating with content because of constraints in time. “with technology, comes great responsibility”, quipped one participant 96 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee which elicited laughter from the group as this line is an allusion to the spiderman movie. this statement however bears much truth when the findings from the survey came out. risks and benefits indeed are equally present when using digital technologies in the research according to the participants. table 7 shows the responses on the impact of digital technologies to students’ research writing. table 7. impact of digital technologies to students’ research writing from among the benefits that merit the highest percentage (strongly agree) that has impact to students is availability of resources (77%), second is that students find within their reach quick and easy to find information (69%). 65% somewhat agree that it fostered self-sufficiency among their students. for the risks, participants say that online information can be overwhelming (66%) to students. they somewhat agree that digital technologies discouraged the use of other sources (69%) and made it harder for students to find and use credible sources (52%). overall, the survey and focus group findings suggest that instructors view the impact of the internet and digital technologies on the research process of their students positively. to the participants, the impact of the internet and digital tools on student research habits and skills is diverse. the focus groups afforded the instructors an opportunity to talk in more depth about the impacts they see the internet having on their students’ research practices and among the benefits of these technologies, focus group participants noted how the internet provides students with greater breadth and volume of information than ever before. they held the belief that not only is more information more available now, but it is also available in many different formats. they said that this can benefit those students with different learning styles and even cognitive abilities. one instructor enthusiastically shared, “i just love the way they creatively include visuals to accompany their research! it implies that they are motivated to do the research assignment given to them.” when asked about what the instructors think the most positive impact s tr on gl y a gr ee % s om ew h at a gr ee % u n su re % s om ew h at d is ag re e % s tr on gl y d is ag re e % o ve ral l r at in g overwhelming 43 66 19 29 3 5 0 0 0 0 sa quick and easy information 45 69 20 31 0 0 0 0 0 0 sa availability of resources 50 77 12 18 3 5 0 0 0 0 sa self sufficiency 15 23 42 65 6 4 4 6 0 0 swa discouraged use of other sources 12 18 45 69 1 2 4 6 3 5 swa harder to find and use credible sources 14 22 34 52 6 9 5 8 6 9 swa 97 yvonne p. velasco & mary ann v. dolor the notions of english language and research instructors on the impact of digital technologies on the research writing process of their college students impact digital technologies bring to the research endeavours of their students are, elicited varied responses. the coded responses relate to openness and accessibility of online information. they venture that students have quick access to some of the best available research online. others expressed a sentiment that, “it’s a pity psc’s library does not subscribe to online databases that could help a lot in our students’ research undertaking.” although this was countered by another when she mentioned that the internet also makes available to students quick access to online pornography. another instructor commented, “the internet makes doing research for the students easier yet, because of the relative ease it affords them, it has led to procrastination and poor quality outputs.” according to them, the use of search engines beats researching using books, journals, etc, which is more tedious and more time-consuming for students. the most negative aspect on the use of digital drew responses mainly concerning the ease by which students copy and paste information online. likewise, concerns were raised about students’ ability to judge the quality of online information. one participant mentioned that because of easy access to information, plagiarism has increased, “..and of course, there is online pornography which is an issue every school and home should address. the availability of firewalls should be disseminated to those parents who are not so well-versed about technology.” furthermore, the participants mentioned that prior generations’ research practices were time-consuming and that the learners of the digital age are fortunate to have the internet come to their aid in doing research. while doing research in the past entails seeking out relevant and accurate information from reliable sources, the students of today only need to ‘google’ the information. it is thus apparent that digital technologies has helped shape the way college students do research. by psc’s mandate of adopting ict integration in the classrooms, comes this rather timely and opportune moment because the students, through the eyes of the english and research instructors seem ready to adopt to this changing landscape of education. in this study, the tpck model was adopted by probing into teachers’ perceptions to find out if there is an understanding of the interrelationship among the three types of knowledge that the tpck model advances: what pedagogy is suitable for which content, how technology and content are related and how pedagogical strategies can be applied to the use of technology (mishra & koehler, 2006). a clear picture of this understanding was initially gathered by getting the teachers’ perceptions and it is discovered that indeed, ict integration to the participants, is a reality that they must face. there is an utter lack of defining line whether teachers do realize that technology and content are related and, most importantly, with some admissions coming out during the fgd, that participants need further training for them to optimize the use of technology in the teaching learning process. conclusion the survey and the fgd gave a glimpse of how english and research instructors view the impact of digital technologies on the research writing of their students. it was generally viewed as positive, but there are also negative aspects perceived that teaching in digital spaces wrought. teachers view that students are now in a position to do research tasks with an unlimited supply of information in their fingertips. this 98 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 5, issue 1, december 2016 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee boon to their research making is however seen as a bane too, in the sense that the unlimited supply of information can become overwhelming. students need to be taught how to filter through vast amounts of information so that they are able to discriminate reliable and credible sources. though ict integration is recognized by most institutions, there is no one-best-way or trajectory for elearning development at tertiary education institutions, and, it might prove more difficult to provide the social, organizational and legal changes in tertiary education than provide the technological infrastructures necessary to fully embrace the advantages of elearning (david, 2004). it is therefore quite necessary to include what the implementers (teachers) of ict integration have to say and expose them to technology in multiple contexts in the earliest conceptions of the ict initiatives of the school. furthermore, there is a need for them to develop the kind of familiarity with digital technologies that foster confidence necessary to their willingness to use digital technologies in teaching. indeed, according to vasu and atkins (2000), integration will succeed only if teachers are adequately trained to use the technology and if they also 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(1991). phenomenological inquiry: life-world perceptions. in e. c. short (ed.), forms of curriculum inquiry. albany: state university of new york press. 100 http://nces.ed.gov/ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(issn)1365-2729 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(issn)1365-2729 http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/sutherland_rb_19.pdf http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/sutherland_rb_19.pdf english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 195 students’ responses towards e-learning schoology content on creative writing learning during the covid19 pandemic ernalida faculty of education and teaching, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ernalida@fkip.unsri.ac.id santi oktarina faculty of education and teaching, sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: santioktarina@fkip.unsri.ac.id ansori faculty of education and teaching, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ansori@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: ernalida., oktarina, s., & ansori. (2021). students’ responses towards e-learning schoology content on creative writing learning during the covid-19 pandemic. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 195-198. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5370 received: 12-08-2021 accepted: 24-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction the era of the covid-19 pandemic brought major changes in the world of education, not only in indonesia, but in the world. almost all countries feel the same way. the learning system has shifted from an offline/face-to-face to an online system. the covid 19 pandemic started a digital transformation in the world of education (adedoyin and soykan, 2021). this transition is a way so that the education sector is not disrupted. online learning that was previously rejected is now like a god of help in the world of education. according to dhwan (2020), this world disaster helps in showing the positive impact of online teaching and learning. this system is able to make the world of education exist in the midst of the crisis due to the corona virus. in this situation, this system is able to protect and save the academic community and society. this abstract: the era of the covid-19 pandemic brought major changes in the world of education, not only in indonesia, but in the world. almost all countries feel the same way. the learning system has switched from an offline/face-to-face to an online system. this world disaster has made many new applications appear or the famous applications that support online learning. one of them is indonesian learning which requires learning technology, especially writing skills; creative writing. writing skills in high school are needed. there are many types of creative writing that must be mastered by students, such as writing biographies, writing short stories, writing poetry, and so on. moreover, in the 2013 curriculum, indonesian language learning is text-based which directs students to be able to produce text-based writings. the purpose of this study was to determine the practicality of the content of e-learning schoology in learning creative writing in high schools in palembang city in terms of teachers. this research is research and development research. the object of research is the 10th grade indonesian at sma palembang. the method used is the delpi method. data collection techniques are questionnaires and fgds. data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. based on the results of research and discussion, it can be concluded as follows. first, the e-learning schoology content for creative writing learning has been practically used based on the small group test which was participated by 10 students. this practicality can be seen from the assessments given by students on aspects of material, language, content presentation, and e-learning which show a very decent value. mean value which was above 4.25. second, the students stated that the content developed has advantages such as, interesting, motivating, complete material, easy to use, inspiring, provides many learning experiences, the language is easy to understand, the features used are interesting and make it easier to learn. third, this content has weaknesses, but these weaknesses occured because of the lack of understanding of students in operating this e-learning. keywords: e-learning; schoology; creative writing. ernalida, santi oktarina, & ansori students’ responses towards e-learning schoology content on creative writing learning during the covid-19 pandemic 196 is a positive impact of technological advances in education which have developed rapidly although some do not yet have the ability to apply. however, this short-term change in the future will become permanent due to the rapid development of technology (yang, 2020). in indonesia, the transition of the learning system is regulated by the government based on the circular of the minister of education no. 4 of 2020 which contains the learning process carried out from home which means online learning/in distance learning. this is carried out to provide a meaningful learning experience for students without being burdened with the demands of completing all curriculum achievements for grade promotion and graduation. in order to get maximum results, the government issued guidelines for the implementation of online learning for students from elementary schools to universities. this is a form of government concern for the world of education. however, there are various obstacles from learning, including: (1) many teachers are not yet skilled in online learning implementation, (2) limited internet access, (3) lack of educators-students interaction, (4) differences in material understanding, ( 5) supervision during the learning process is lacking, (6) limited facilities for students and teachers, (7) students are less serious in learning, (8) lack of material understanding, (9) economic limitations, and others (dwi and sarjito, 2021; asmuni ,2020; dhawan, 2021). this situation is normal. the obstacles that arise are actually both an opportunity and a challenge for teachers and researchers to find effective solutions to this situation. teachers are required to be flexible and adaptable in dealing with unexpected situations and have multidisciplinary skills during the covid-19 pandemic (yang, 2020; kalloo, mitchell, and kamaloedeen, 2020). educators must be technology literate. they must be able and creative in providing media in order to achieve a successful learning. supportive online learning media is very much needed at this situation. that is why professional teachers are required to be professional to deal with all current issues and be able to demonstrate their ability to overcome the existed problems (nurgraha & mauliada, 2021; lokita, utami, & prestridge, 2018). however, technology cannot make online learning successful without the help of other aspects. so, here, digitally confident teachers are essential for successful learning (hog, 2021). this world disaster has made a lot of new and famous applications appear in supporting online learning. in fact, there are also many website providers, ranging from paid to free ones. for example zoom meeting, google meeting, moodle, etmodo, scholoogy, and others. these website or application is indeed very helpful in achieving learning goals, especially in the pandemic era that has lasted almost two years. there are quite a number of studies examining the reliability of this learning technology, both before the pandemic and now. there have been many studies exploring how technology frames professional learning for students and teachers (murray and kidd, 2016). in more depth, various studies on language learning have also proven the superiority of learning technology. such as the use of moodle, youtube, website, etmodo, and multimedia in language skills learning (oktarina, 2018; fay & matias, 2019; ramadhan, s., sukma, e., & indriyani, 2019; nispi, subadiyono, & oktarina, 2021) . one of them is indonesian learning which requires learning technology, especially writing skills, especially creative writing. in this study, writing skills in high school are needed. there are many types of creative writing that must be mastered by students, such as writing biographies, short stories, poetry, and so on. moreover, in the 2013 curriculum, indonesian language learning is text-based which directs students to be able to produce text-based writings. but in reality, the creative writing ability of students in high school is still weak. several studies have stated that high school students have not been able to write creatively optimally and they are less motivated in the learning process. if you review various previous studies, it is known that the application of learning technology in writing skills is developed or used in the form of separate components or not many use the latest learning technology (see wicaksono, roekhan, & hasanah, 2018; hudhana & sulaeman, 2019; afifah , 2021; hadi & eviyanti, 2021). even though in the era of the covid-19 pandemic which the learning is conducted online, complete learning media are still needed to help students with generation z characters in learning. this research is a continuation of the research in 2020. in previous research, a prototype of elearning schoology content has been produced. to find out the practicality of this content, it is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 197 necessary to do a user or small group test. this aims to see the practicality of the e-learning schoology content reviewed by students. this research is expected to be useful for teachers and students to improve their creative writing skills. method this research is part of research and development using a mixed approach (qualitative and quantitative). the research subjects were 11 respondents consisting of 10 students and 1 teacher at smu south sumatra in palembang. data were collected through questionnaires and focus group discussions (fgd) and analyzed using qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques. results and discussion results e-learning schoology content creative writing learning is designed based on needs analysis (ernalida, oktarina, and turama, 2021). the characteristics of the content of the e-learning schoology for creative writing learning developed are as follows. first meeting. (1) material content: learning video writing poetry part 1. (2) sample content and learning resources: a teacher's blog containing examples of poetry. (3) assignment content: multiple choice questions using the kahoot application, so students are triggered by time to work on them. in addition to maintaining student integrity, students are like playing a game while working on these questions. second meeting. (1) material content: video learning steps to write poetry. (2) sample content and learning resources: examples of poetry on the teacher's blog, learning resources in the form of audio podcasts made by the researcher, and provided learning resources for doing assignments in the form of word rima links, a blog to find rhyme words easily by simply typing the word to be searched the rhyme. (3) assignment content: students are provided with the coggle application to make mind mapping online, easy, and same in the term of variety so that each student does not differ in form or application. third meeting. (1) material content: learning videos for writing and post-writing poetry. learning videos were made using the canva application for video background design, editing using the kinemaster application, teaching videos were taken by the researchers themselves. (2) sample content and learning resources: students are provided with learning resource facilities in the form of an electronic book of diction which is made by the researcher himself using kbbi sources. this book serves to help students in finding dictions that are not commonly used and beautiful dictions for their poetry writing assignments. the e-book is created using the 3d pageflip professional application which can include book audio. the background of the book and cover were made by researchers using the canva application to make it not monotonous and more interesting. (3) assignment content: students write poetry and submit it in the schoology space, this makes use of the application space. to find out the practicality of the content of elearning schoology, a small-scale trial was conducted. this trial was conducted in one class consisting of 10 students. the results of this practicality test are as follows. material aspect the material in the e-learning schoology content learning creative writing in high school is a very important thing. the material that is arranged optimally will become arranged learning objectives with satisfactory results. this content is developed with various sources and media. it aims to be able to transfer knowledge to students. after being tested in a small group test, the perceptions of students and teachers can be seen in the table below. table 1. the perceptions of students and teachers no statement score student n k 1 suitability of the material with the objective 4.40 sl 2 completeness of material content 4.30 sl 3 the truth of the substance of material 4.30 sl 4 clarity of the described material 4.30 ss 5 suitability of the material content with the norm 4.40 sl 6. fostering students’ interaction 4.40 sl ernalida, santi oktarina, & ansori students’ responses towards e-learning schoology content on creative writing learning during the covid-19 pandemic 198 mean score 4.35 sl based on the table above, it is known that all students perceive that the material developed in the content of e-learning schoology creative writing is very feasible with the mean value of all items is 4.3 with a very decent category. in detail, the students in perceiving as follows. first, they argue that the material developed in this content is very suitable to be used because there is a match between the material and the objectives. they gave a score of 4.40 which is a very decent category. second, the completeness of the material in this content is considered very decent with a mean value of 4.30. third, in terms of the substance of the material, the mean score given by the students was 4.30 with a very decent category. fourth, the clarity of the material described is considered very feasible with mean value of 4.30. fifth, the students in the small group test agreed that there was a suitability of the content of the material with the values with mean value of 4.40, the category was very feasible. sixth, the students thought that this content was able to foster student interaction with a mean score of 4.40, very feasible. language aspect the language aspect also has an important role in the development of content for creative writing learning. with good and correct use of language, the information to be conveyed can be well received. in addition, the language used in this content must comply with the applicable indonesian language rules. the following describes the results of student assessment on aspects of language use. table 2. the results of students’ assessment on aspects of language use no. statement score student s k 1 text readability in multimedia 4.40 sl 2 clarity of information 4.40 sl 3 the completeness of information 4.10 l 4 suitability with the indonesian language rule 4.30 sl 5 the accuracy of using language effectively and efficiently 4.30 sl mean 4.30 sl based on the table above, it is known that the students in the small group test assessed that the creative writing content in e-learning schoology was very feasible with the 4.30 category. for clarity, the following is described. first, the readability of the text in this multimedia content is considered very decent with a mean value of 4.40. second, the clarity of information is also considered very decent with a mean value of 4.40. third, the students considered that this content provided very appropriate information for learning creative writing. fourth, the use of indonesian language rules in this content is considered very feasible with a score of 4.30. fifth, this content uses language effectively and efficiently with a mean value of 4.30, very decent categories. aspects of e-learning schoology content presentation the aspect of presenting e-learning schoology content is very important in this research. this research develops this content for creative writing learning, which is writing poetry. after going through several stages in r & d research, this content prototype was tested in small groups to find out the practicality of its use for students. the report can be seen in the table below. table 3. report of statement no. statement score student s k 1 suitability of the order of presentation of the material in the e-learning content 4.40 sl 2 e-learning content is able to provide students’ learning motivation 4.20 sl 3 e-learning content can improve students’ understanding. 4.50 sl english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 199 4 e-learning content can increase students’ atterativeness. 4.20 sl 5 the accuracy of of font size and its type. 4.10 l 6 creativity and innovation of learning content. 4.20 sl 7 e-learning content documentation is clear 3.80 l 8 there is a continuity of display 4.20 sl 9 suitability with students’ characteristics. 4.20 sl 10 ease of media operation. 4.40 sl 11 text quality is clearly visible. 4.40 sl 12 audio can be listened well. 4.40 sl 13 video can run smoothly 4.30 sl 14 all navigation tools work fine 4.10 l mean 4.24 sl based on the table above, students agreed that the presentation of e-learning schoology content is very feasible to use with the mean value for all items is 4.24. in detail each item is as follows. first, the suitability of the order of presentation of material in e-learning content is considered very high, 4.40. second, e-learning content is able to provide very high learning motivation for students with a score of 4.20. third, e-learning content is able to increase students' understanding very high with a score of 4.50. fourth, e-learning content can increase student attractiveness very high. the students gave a score of 4.20. fifth, the students rated the accuracy of using the type and size of the font in this content high with a score of 4.10. sixth, creativity and innovation of e-learning content is rated very high, 4.20. seventh, the documentation of e-learning content is clearly rated high with a score of 3.80. eighth, display continuity is rated very high, 4.20. eighth, this content has a very high suitability for student characteristics with a value of 4.20. ninth, the ease of operation of the media is rated very high, 4.40. tenth, the text quality is very high, 4.40. eleventh, the audio can be listened well. this statement was rated very highly by the students, 4.40. twelfth, videos run smoothly. this statement is rated very high, 4.30. thirteenth, all navigation tools function properly. this statement was rated highly by the students, 4.10. aspects of e-learning schoology the e-learning schoology aspect is the focus of the assessment in the small group test so that this prototype is practically used by students and teachers. the results can be seen from the table below. table 4. the aspects of e-learning schoology no. statement score university students n k 1 the features used in schoology motivate students to learn. 4.10 l 2 the material facilities and students’ activities in e-learning schoology are easy to be used by the teacher and students. 4.40 sl 3 e-learning schoology has a guide that helps students and teachers to cary out the learning 4.30 sl 4 the navigation in this course is well organized. 4.30 sl 5 the accuracy of using language effectively and efficiently 4.20 sl mean 4.26 sl based on the table above, the overall aspect of e-learning schoology is considered very feasible with a score of 4.26. first, the features used in schoology motivate students to study highly. the students also gave a score of 4.0. second, on the statement of material facilities and student activities in electronic learning (e-learning) schoology, which is easy for teachers and students to use, the students gave a very high score, namely 4.40. third, electronic learning (e-learning) this schoology has a guide that helps students and teachers carry out learning. this statement is rated very high by students, 4.30. fourth, the navigation statements in this course are well organized; the students rated it very high, 4.30. finally, the accuracy of using language effectively and efficiently in this content was rated very high by the students, 4.20. to get deeper data, a focus group discussion (fgd) was conducted with the students involved in the small group test. there are 10 questions to ernalida, santi oktarina, & ansori students’ responses towards e-learning schoology content on creative writing learning during the covid-19 pandemic 200 discuss with the students. first, students were asked to argue about the attractiveness of this content and whether it is able to motivate students in learning. some students expressed the following. “it is interesting and easy to absorb the learning material. besides being interesting, it has also motivated the learning process to write poetry because there are links to rimakata.com and the diction book makes it easier in writing poetry.” (fgd: student 1) "it is very interesting and easy to learn because of the attractive appearance, the collection of materials is covered in schoology application, so when you want to repeat the material you can directly search in schoology because it has been covered well in it." (fg: student 2) second, students are invited to assess the material used in this e-learning content. there are two students who express their opinion as follows. “the material is very good and sufficient for the level of high school students. the material provided is clear, concise, solid and clear. it's not long, so it's easy to understand.”(fgd: student 3) “the material has been presented very well and effectively. the learning videos have been made very creatively, interesting, fun to watch, and not boring, so the material is easy to understand.” (fgd: student 4) third, the researcher asked students to think whether the developed e-learning content made students good at writing poetry or inspired students to write poetry. based on the results of the fgd, there are two students expressing their opinions. “it's been very inspiring. while working on the task of writing poetry, i experienced a loss of style to continue my poetry. then i opened the book of diction and rimakata.com and continued the writing. so, i was inspired to continue the poetry that i have written.” (fgd: student 5) "it is very inspiring. after reading the poems in the teacher's blog, i was inspired to make even more poems from them.” (fgd: student 3) to get input to make this content more perfect, the students were asked to give their opinion about the strengths and weaknesses of this content. here it can be seen clearly. strength “the learning process with existing e-learning content is simple, uncomplicated, easy to access (adequate internet network), features and language are easy to understand, the learning process is more exciting (because it is the first time learning to use schoology), the features are good and easy to understand.” (fgd: student 6) “the use of schoology is very easy, because the learning process usually uses a wa group, so it is difficult to find the material given by the teacher due to the stacked chats. the content is easily accessible. it is easy to access the material; you do not have to search in the chat room.”(fgd: student 3) “the features are very good and complete, because in schoology there are materials, assignments, we are able to search for materials while working on assignments, and also saving files. it is easy to find material files because they are categorized and you do not need to store them on your devices or laptops, so it does not take up storage memory space. the application file size is not large” (fgd: 10 students) weakness "in the initial view of the material list, you cannot return to the previous material, and it only return to the initial view" (fgd: student 9) discussion based on the results of the research above, it is known that the e-learning schoology content prototype for creative writing is feasible to use. this is known from the average assessment given by almost all students rated very decent. the students agreed to give a score above 4.25 for the assessment in terms of material, language, content presentation aspects of e-learning schoology, and e-learning schoology. in addition, based on the results of the fgd with students, it is known that this content has many advantages and is very suitable for the character of the students. this is in accordance with the opinion of ernida (2016), hasanah (2011), and mashudianti, sutomo, and suparno (2018) in their research that schoology has proven its success. however, there are drawbacks to this content. students argued the lack of a system for navigating the material. actually, it is already in this creative writing content. however, not all students know this because this media is new to them. this e-learning schooology content creative writing can be used as a teacher's choice in teaching, even more so in this covid-19 pandemic. with various advantages, it is able to motivate students and teachers in learning. in addition, this developed content positions students as student centers while teachers act as motivators and facilitators. students are formed as students who are independent in learning, but remain under english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 201 the guidance of the teacher. this creative writing content is in accordance with the character of students who live in the era of technological progress. therefore, it is necessary for teachers who are technology literate to be able to follow the flow of digital transformation in the world of education (adedoyin and soykan, 2021) conclusion based on the results of research and discussion, it can be concluded as follows. first, the e-learning schoology content for creative writing learning has been practically used based on the small group test which was participated by 10 students. this practicality can be seen from the assessments given by students on aspects of material, language, content presentation, and e-learning which show a very decent value, mean rating was above 4.25. second, the students stated that the content developed has advantages such as, interesting, motivating, complete material, easy to use, inspiring, provides many learning experiences, the language is easy to understand, the features used are interesting and make it easier to learn. third, this content has weaknesses, but these weaknesses occur because of the lack of understanding of students in operating this e-learning. acknowledgment the research team would like to thank the sriwijaya university research and community service institute (lppm) for providing competitive flagship research grants in 2021 to finance this research. references adedoyin, o. b., & soyka, e. 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(2021). english teacher professional development to education 4.0 during the covid-19 pandemic. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.445-452. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4546. oktarina, s., emzir, & rafli, z. (2018). students’ and lecturers’ perception on academic writing instruction. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 69-76. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1256. ramadhan, s., sukma, e., & indriyani, v. (2019). persepsi guru terhadap penggunaan bahan ajar bahasa indonesia dengan perangkat seluler dan aplikasi edmodo. in seminar internasional riksa bahasa. wicaksono, h., roekhan, r., & hasanah, m. (2018). pengembangan media permainan imajinasi dalam pembelajaran menulis puisi bagi siswa kelas x. jurnal pendidikan: teori, penelitian, dan pengembangan, 3(2), 223-228. yang, r. (2020) china’s higher education during the covid-19 pandemic: some preliminary observations. higher education research & development, 39(7), 1317-1321, doi: 10.1080/07294360.2020.1824212 https://doaj.org/toc/2148-225x https://doaj.org/toc/2148-225x english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 227 teachers’ perception to clil and web-based material implementation in a primary school alimin adi waloyo english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, malang, indonesia email: aliminwaloyo@umm.ac.id khoiriyah english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, malang, indonesia email: khoiriyah230693@gmail.com, rafika rabba farah english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, malang, indonesia email: rafikafarah@gmail.com apa citation: waloyo, a. a., khoiriyah., & farah, r. r. (2021). teachers’ perception to clil and web-based material implementation in a primary school. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 227-234. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4347 received: 26-02-2021 accepted: 19-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction english as a key component for knowledge advancement and global communication. in indonesia, english gains a less amount of attention particularly in formal instruction although english is delivered formally since junior high school stage. this condition clearly impacts the students’ english mastery. also, formal education for most students is most likely the sole option to learn english. so, it will create less opportunity for learners to develop their english. hence, content and language integrated learning (clil) could be an approach to let learners get higher portion of english learning pedagogically. clil refers to the use of foreign language (english in indonesian context) as a medium of classroom course delivery (ludovico & zambelli, 2017). in other words, english is not taught separately, but it is integrated into the content subjects. and the language becomes the primary communicative tool in classroom. some teachers might be worried clil implementation will reduce the students’ understanding towards the learned contents. students might be overwhelmed because they are trying comprehend the learned topic and efl simultaneously. it will be exhausting for them. also, when the learned material is delivered through english, the content teachers might explain materials incompletely and unclearly due to their lack of english communication competence. this could hinder the main goal of abstract: primary school teachers have a crucial role to support clil and web-oriented media implementation in class. clil approach pedagogically offers double advantages; english competence and content development. this pedagogical approach leads to sufficient english input at the early stage of learning which makes primary learners able to shift the paradigm that english is a challenging language to learn. more importantly, primary school learners can take the advantages of the information and communication technology (ict) part of their daily use for the sake of clil, so learning can be fun and enjoyable. nevertheless, much of the previous research in indonesian context gives limited attention to how primary school teachers perceived clil interwoven into ict based media.) that situation led into this research. also, this research is expected to encourage the clil application in formal education, particularly in primary levels due to time efficacy and effectiveness. the involved participants were 12 primary school teachers in a primary school in malang. a 14-item likert-scale questionnaire and fgd were applied to collect the data. it was found that the teachers perceive the clil and web-based media positively, but they would reconsider to implement it in their class due to english competency reasons and material design issue, facilities, and school support. therefore, hybrid clil implementation and teachers’ collaboration are suggested. keywords: clil; web-based platform; english competence; content instruction mailto:aliminwaloyo@umm.ac.id mailto:khoiriyah230693@gmail.com mailto:rafikafarah@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4347 alimin adi waloyo, khoiriyah, & rafika rabba farah teachers’ perception to clil and web-based material implementation in a primary school 228 learning to master the content. however, yilmaz and şeker (2013) convincingly believed clil students can understand the discussed topic equally as their peers who learn it in their l1. however, it could be different when being implemented in indonesia as most learners have low english skills due to less english exposure formally or informally, such as unsupportive local environment for english learning. therefore, there should be a real strategy to deal with that issue. one of the approaches is the clil teaching approach should be assigned to a group of bilingual teachers who collaborate with english teachers and language assistant (campillo, sánchez, & miralles, 2019). collaboration as a part of clil teaching seems applicable as suggested by (campillo et al., 2019 and usman, ferdiansya, & widodo. 2020). however, bilingual teachers are rarely found in indonesia. so, changing those teachers with content teachers who have sufficient english competence could be more practical. if clil is going to be widely implemented, there is no doubt that english access will be wider for indonesian learners. in addition to english development, students take advantages by developing skills, knowledge, and competence needed to finish a number of different tasks by taking into account english and content quality improvement (heras & lasagabaster, 2015). referring to those benefits, it could be interesting to introduce clil as early as possible. therefore, infusing english into primary school thematic topics is a good way to foster both english and other knowledge and competences simultaneously. the approach is not supposed to be too formal, so it can reduce the students’ learning motivation. alcaraz-mármol (2018) suggested the teaching approach could be done through fun classroom tasks, engaging games and other exciting activities aiming to improve primary school learner listening and speaking skills followed by reading and writing when teaching creative activities are developed. it will be interesting to know some researches on clil implementation in primary education. so, it is identifiable how effective clil is when being applied in the elementary level. clil is considerably effective for both subjects and a foreign language improvement, and believed to improve cognitive aspect, communication abilities, and cultural awareness (sakurai, 2015). diezmas (2016) found that clil is effective to improve primary students’ english skills, particularly listening and speaking. the clil positively effects young learners’ communicative skills. also their attitude towards fl and content subjects become more positive (korosidou & griva, 2014). current trend on the information and communication technology (ict) use is massively entering nearly all fields, including education. the ict provides abundant references for the teachers and students both in class and outside the class, so learners have more opportunity to optimize all their potential for obtaining required information (sansanwal, 2020). a web-based teaching, part of the ict implementation, is quite popular in an academic context even in primary school levels. this is going to be a comfortable approach for clil in primary schools because integrating clil into digital technology can ease the learning itself. the evolution of web-based approach on clil proved to be an accessible, customizable, and accessible to apply clil strategies to primary school education (ludovico & zambelli, 2017). so, clil implementation will be more effective and doable anytime. clil implementation is inseparable from the teachers’ role to guide the students on the practice. hence, teachers are supposed to have positive perception on the clil implementation. the perception drives the teachers’ teaching performance, such as how they teach and deal with their classroom effectively (tachaiyaphum & sukying, 2017). they found in particular thailand universities, clil helps students improve their language competence and subject knowledge simultaneously although it was agreed that clil implementation was challenging when having to teach content, language, and culture at the same time. at a spanish university, teachers and students perceive clil positively to improve teachers’ productive skills and students’ vocabulary knowledge, listening and speaking skills. in the tertiary level education in taiwan, teachers believed clil benefited learners, like attracting more international students to study in universities in taiwan (yang, 2016). tsuchiya & murillo (2019) found motivation to learn english and the positive attitudes are benefits of the clil in primary school and clil offers the chances to develop english language skills and content subjects simultaneously. some more investigations related to clil were conducted in indonesian context. mahmud (2020) found clil was effective to teach science, particularly biology subject, using genre-based approach in secondary level. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 229 setyaningrum and purwati (2020) stated through clil, teachers’ competence and knowledge were improved and they perceived clil in young learners level as a positive way for pedagogic and linguistic development. fitriani's (2016) investigation revealed a university student had a mixed feeling regarding the english use in content delivery. they were so motivated because of vocabulary development, but it was sometimes annoying given looking up a dictionary many times to learn new words. it was admittedly clear that the need to english mastery is crucial as a part of global society. clil is suggested by many experts and researchers as a great alternative for english development. research on it was conducted in various countries including indonesia. however, the researcher found the scarcity of study examining clil implementation focusing on the primary school teachers’ perception. in particular, there were no studies, known to the researchers, examining clil and web-based media in primary school levels in indonesia. hence, this research would investigate how the primary school teachers perceived clil and ict-based media implementation. most importantly, this research would promote the clil implementation in formal education, particularly primary level due to dual benefits (english and the learned subjects) creating time efficacy and student’s motivation. method to gather the data, the researchers applied a survey. survey was used as it is a unique process to gather information derived from large population (jones, baxter, & khanduja, 2013). the survey instrument was questionnaire, formulated using likert-scale using indonesian language as the questionnaire questions which was translated into english in this article as part of the article writing requirement. the indonesian language was used to avoid the misleading question resulting invalid data. the questionnaire was distributed virtually through google form with 14 close-ended questions. online questionnaire allows the respondents’ data to be recorded automatically in the computer database. afterwards, there was a recorded fgd that focuses on teachers’ perception about clil integrated in the web-based media. the discussion would lead into more in-depth data. there were 12 participants participated in the study that involved homeroom and content teachers. their professional teaching experiences were one up to fifteen years. they also joined the professional development program conducted by the researchers, so they had sufficient knowledge and competence on clil integrated into webbased platform. here is the detail of participants’ data: table 1. detail of participants’ data no. gender teaching experience grade lessons further information 1 female 6-10 years 2 thematic lessons homeroom teacher 2 female 11-15 years 6 thematic lessons + science homeroom teacher 3 female 1-5 years 2b thematic lessons homeroom teacher 4 female 11-years 5 math, civic, social science, bahasa jawa content teacher 5 female 1-5 years 1b thematic lessons homeroom teacher 6 female 11-15 years 4 thematic lessons homeroom teacher 7 female 11-15 years 1 thematic lessons homeroom teacher 8 male 1-5 years 1-6 pe content teacher 9 female 1-5 years 3 thematic lessons homeroom teacher 10 female 16 years 1-6 religion content teacher 11 female 2 months 3-6 english (as extracurriculer) content teacher 12 female 1-5 years 1-6 arabic and kemuhammadiyahan content teacher the research setting was at sd ‘aisyiyah malang. the school is one of muhammadiyahaffiliated schools under universitas muhammadiyah malang supervisory school. they were so welcomed to join the professional teacher development in clil and web-platform as the initial process of the data gathering. the collected data were analyzed differently. the data from questionnaire were treated quantitatively through simple computation. then, they were elaborated to identify the teachers’ perception regarding clil implementation in alimin adi waloyo, khoiriyah, & rafika rabba farah teachers’ perception to clil and web-based material implementation in a primary school 230 primary schools using ict platform. on the other hand, the fgd outcomes were coded manually by referring to the literature review to gain the participant insights and thoughts on the clil applied virtually in a primary level. the fgd data were more natural due to the discussion concept letting the participants to share what they perceive regarding the topic. dervin & dyer (2016) highlighted the data of fgd were applied to identify authentic perception of the participants findings and discussion after analyzing the questionnaire 14 (items using a five-likert scale) and fgd data distributed to 12 teachers who have completed the professional development program on clil with digital platform for primary level. the researchers found how the participants perceived clil and web platform integration classified into three subthemes; 1) their readiness and motivation to implement clil approach using web-based materials, 2) the impact of clil through webbased materials for learners’ english development, and 3) the supporting facilities to implement clil approach using web-based materials. the teachers’ readiness and motivation based on the data analysis, teachers were categorized as table 1 below in relation to their readiness and motivation when the clil and online platform were implemented in their class. figure 1. the teachers’ perception towards their readiness and motivation to implement clil approach using web-based materials concerning the teachers' perception on their readiness and motivation to implement clil approach using web-based materials, it can be seen from the result of questions 1, 2, and 3 (mean= < 3.00) indicating that most teachers looked themselves not so ready to implement clil approach. some teachers expressed their difficulties in starting to implement clil approach for their classes. hence, they were not full confidence in their language competence. “actually, we do understand about the materials that we are going to teach [integrating the content and language learning]. yet, i do not feel confident with my english…" (fgd#teacher4) "...we have tried to give an english lesson in our classes. yet, we are still confused on what we need to prioritize... our language as the instruction or the students' vocabulary…. we also have difficulties in preparing the materials…" (fgd#teacher7) “...i want it [implementing clil], somehow it’s difficult to make my teaching materials in english…” (fgd#teacher2) in another aspect, even though the teachers expressed their less readiness, most teachers are triggered and motivated to implement clil approach facilitated by web-based materials in their classes as shown on their responses for questions number 5, 6, and 7 (mean= >3.00). two teachers restated their understanding in the following excerpts. “i see… it means that [at least] we change our instruments in english to start it…” (fgd#teacher10) “...is that okay when we start it from the simple one? such as mentioning number in english. because i am not good enough in speaking english.” (fgd#teacher8) further, the participants considered they were in need for collaboration with other teachers, either homeroom teachers or content teachers to prepare their teaching materials. they need help from other teachers to change their teaching instruction into the target language (english). teacher 2, who is teaching science for the upper class, expressed her attention to collaborating with other teachers. “ehm…. we can consult our teaching materials to the english teacher, perhaps, and asked the home-room teacher about the topic the students have discussed in their thematic books.” (fgd#teacher2) some teachers were well-prepared to apply clil approach. however, some expressed their less confidence if clil approach through webbased platform materials would be regulated in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 231 their classes. hence, they were not fully confidence in their english skills and competence. basically, all of the teachers have a clear understanding of the basic concept of clil approach that is in line with the context of their school although this approach is relatively new for them. therefore, they were reluctant to implement it. similarly, pinner (2013) found integrating the content into language and eliminating language barriers could be a big challenge not only for teachers but also students. therefore, the teachers need to have a particular approach, so they are motivated to prepare the clil materials. bentley (2010) proposed three possible types of clil. they were language-led, subject-led (modular), and subject-led (partial immersion). all of them were based on the time allotment of clil practice in the learning process and the content addressed. to deal with the problems above, language-led approach could be applicable. this type of clil, also known as language-driven clil or content-rich language learning (crll) (escobar urmeneta, 2019), allows teachers to teach particular content topic using english in 45 minutes once a week. the short time allotment let teachers have more time to prepare better materials and was considered sufficient as the primary paces of clil implementation. also, it corresponds the current regulation of curriculum 2013 where english is extracurricular. take an example, a science teacher is planning to design a unit of clil materials for the fifth grade. the selected topic is based on the thematic book of the fifth grade in the regular thematic class. it makes it possible to integrate language and content in a short-allocated time which was then mixed with the daily material delivery. this was a hybrid clil implementation. this type model is also highly suggested by khoiriyah (2018) in her research on the implementation of adopted clil in some indonesian primary schools. by implementing clil approach using web-based materials, students will gain greater foreign language exposure due to the limited school time. clil approach is different from foreign language teaching, as in clil a foreign language is the vehicle for a form of subject-based teaching. it means that primary teachers should master both the language and the content. the most common problem encountered to implement this teaching innovation is limited to english proficiency. they were encouraged to join the workshop on pd (professional development) program highlighting clil implementation online. however, they had a fairly positive perception to implement clil with web-based materials in their school. they mostly did not feel confident with their english competence, particularly their speaking skills. some teachers stated that they were not familiar with some content vocabularies as it is also reported by bui and truong (2015), stating that teachers got some confusion in acknowledging some specific content vocabulary terms. further, primary school teachers should be equipped with language and pedagogical skills. more attempts and professional development programs are needed to upgrade the primary teachers' competence since most of them do not have an english education background. it also was reported by setyaningrum & purwati (2020) that to make clil approach visible for primary schools, all of the related stakeholders should go hand in hand to facilitate the teachers to improve their competences concerning linguistic knowledge and pedagogical issues. additionally, there is a need of sufficient understanding from all the stakeholders ranging from teachers, parents and the school principals to accommodate the planning program and give more access to the teachers to explore their clil classes. hence, the school leadership team is projected to make a policy to support the program and create supporting clil environment. it takes some time and practices to become a clil teacher. particularly, the clil teachers applied web-based materials. thus, such this goal cannot be accomplished immediately. their answers indicated their positive perceptions on the clil and web platform integration. this positive perception could lead into fun clil class. yamano (2013) highlighted students experienced excitement and enjoyment when designing their favorite animals (one of clil exercises) and developing their english skills. usman et al. (2020) in their research strongly suggested that collaboration in preparing the clil materials is crucial to create an effective learning process. in order to enable students to participate more actively in content and language learning, primary teachers can collaborate to choose contextually-relevant topics based on thematic books. the selected thematic topics can be the starting point for building awareness of the content and create more engaging language learning (rohmah, 2019). to achieve these learning objectives, language teachers and alimin adi waloyo, khoiriyah, & rafika rabba farah teachers’ perception to clil and web-based material implementation in a primary school 232 content teachers can cooperate to discuss the selected topic and their teaching materials as well. it makes it possible for content teachers to learn about the classroom language or english instruction for the classroom activities from the language teachers. meanwhile, the language teachers also enable to consult their specific content vocabulary items to the content teachers. the impact of clil through web-based materials based on the data analysis, it was found the teachers had various perception when being asked about the effect of clil and web-based classroom topics for their students’ english advancement. figure 2. the teachers' perception of the impact of clil through web-based materials for learners’ english development further, based on the result of the survey regarding the teachers’ perception toward the use of web-based materials for their clil classes, the teachers had a tremendously positive impression (mean = > 3.00). the teachers stated that to effectively integrating lesson, what they considered was using some supporting applications such as google classroom, google form, and other social media to communicate with their students. “we usually use g-form for the quiz… and sometimes using google classroom for sharing the materials. it will be easy for the upper classes. i think clil materials will be beneficial for the students, if we try to implement it… (fgd#teacher9) “yeah, students will be motivated to learn by giving some pictures or videos.” (fgd#teacher11) “i have already tried to provide web-based materials, such as i send a video to my students about the numbers… and i asked my students to learn at home. they were very interested in singing the song." (fgd#teacher10) nonetheless, some teachers were concerned that what they considered to have an effective clil lesson using web-based materials was the availability of internet access and supporting devices for their students. as it is stated by the teacher as follows: “...for having web-based materials, it seems a bit problematic because some students do not have access to the internet or even supporting devices.” (fgd#teacher1) this research found the teachers mostly agreed on the benefits of clil lesson using webbased materials. this finding showcased teachers’ comprehension about the concept of clil and how it can affect the students english. it is no surprising because of the common knowledge about the important of english for student’s future education opportunities in job and career. also, they have realization that ict can be separated when learning english. this finding is in line with some empirical research reporting the benefits of clil approach in real classroom practice. yamano (2013) in her study for japanese efl context, revealed that the implementation of clil has the potential for improving primary students’ proficiency in the target language, particularly in promoting a positive attitude among students towards the target language and mastering vocabulary. it is going to be a great step to let them learn and develop their english more. that positive feeling should be maintained so students can enjoy english learning which is in fact learnt automatically while developing their content knowledge. furthermore, campillo-ferrer, mirallesmartínez, & sánchez-ibáñez (2020) also reported that clil is strongly believed resulting cognitive development of primary school students in spanish efl context. it was interesting finding that clil does not only enhance primary students’ english skills and communication but also think, explore, and solve their real-world issues. this may not be realized by participants of this research and most of primary school teachers. hence, they do not really get encouraged its implementation. so, more research on this area need to get more attention. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 233 and, there should be more workshop and seminar children cognitive development could be fostered through clil and web integration. the use of online learning apps and interactive websites facilitates the students for immediate translation from the target language to l1 and also provide the correct pronunciation (bailey, 2015). besides, mahmud (2020) deemed that by integrating multimodal learning resources, clil approach helps the establishment of students’ prior knowledge towards the content learned and support the students’ language learning activities. these are in line with this research highlighted the use of google classroom, google form, and other social media affecting the lesson gaining more effectively and create more effective communication. the supporting facilities to implement clil approach using web-based materials the findings on the participants’ perception regarding facilities supporting the implementation of clil and ict-based topics are elaborated below. figure 3. the teachers’ perception towards the supporting facilities to implement clil approach using web-based materials for the teachers, the availability of supporting ict tools will make clil easily to be implemented for their classes (ludovico & zambelli, 2017). participants in this investigation stated the same that what they saw as an effective clil lesson with web-based topics was supposed to be supported by reliable internet connection and related devices. so, primary schools’ planning to implement this approach need to prepare solid digital infrastructure. here, the policy makers are supposed to know and be encouraged to build all the facilities to ease the clil and web-based topics. otherwise, all the concepts, teaching media, teaching preparation and modified lesson plans for its implementation will not work. in fact, supporting facilities are not sufficiently available to implement this teaching approach. here, supporting facilities clearly have a key role to run this new and challenging teaching approach. in other words, policy makers have to be highly motivated to support and supply the required ict facilities. conclusion this study concludes the teachers were basically encouraged to adopt clil approach using webbased materials for their classes and had a reasonably positive perception to implement clil for their classes. however, they mostly were not confident to apply it in their class due to their lack of english competences (vocabulary, speaking, etc.). therefore, language-led approach was a good option where they could mix english and indonesia to lessen their anxiety. also, the teachers basically agreed that implementing clil using web-based teaching materials has comprehensive impact for students due to its dual-focus, content, and language learning despite of the teachers’ lack of english proficiency, lack of appropriate teaching materials, and lack of ict facilities. the successful implementation of clil as a bottomup policy inevitably involves a joint effort by all related parties (teachers, principals, and parents). the expected implementation of adopted clil approach and web-based materials could be promoted as long as the teachers are adequately trained and supported by the school. recognizing that this study covered a small research area and that the findings cannot be generalized in the context of all indonesian primary schools. therefore, there is a strong need for more research to explore a broader context. references alcaraz-mármol, g. 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(2019). content and language integrated learning in spanish and japanese contexts: policy, practice and pedagogy. in content and language integrated learning in spanish and japanese contexts. springer nature. usman, h., ferdiansyah, s., widodo, h. p., & lestariyana, r. p. d. (2020). primary school english teachers’ perceptions of the teacher educator-created english textbook: the case of indonesia. the journal of asiatefl, 17(3), 1057–1067. yamano, y. (2013). using the clil approach in a japanese primary school: a comparative study of clil and efl lessons. the asian efl journal, 15(4), 160–183. yang, w. (2016). an investigation of learning efficacy, management difficulties and improvements in tertiary clil (content and language integrated learning) programmes in taiwan: a survey of stakeholder perspectives. latin american journal of content & language integrated learning, 9(1), 64–109. https://doi.org/10.5294/laclil.2016.9.1.4 yilmaz, f., & şeker, m. (2013). young learners’ perceptions on learning languages through clil and ict. academica science journal, 1(1), 42– 48. unearthing students’ realization of speech act in asking information in telephone conversation ida zuraida supri department of english, widyatama university, indonesia e-mail: ida.zuraida@widyatama.ac.id apa citation: supri, i. z. (2017). unearthing students‟ realization of speech act in asking information in telephone conversation. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 227-236 received: 09-04-2017 accepted: 18-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: this research aims at investigating speech acts realization in asking for information in bahasa indonesia done by students at widyatama university. secondly, it seeks for the utterance patterns highly used by students in asking for information using bahasa indonesia. the study utilized a descriptive method. this method comprises distributing questionnaires, collecting data, classifying data, and analyzing data. the subjects in this study were fourth semester students of information technology, faculty of engineering. the results showed that speech realization patterns highly used when they ask for information via telephone to a friend is they make an opening and directly to the purpose of calling, and closing. when calling to parents, casual utterances are significantly employed. keywords: speech acts, utterance patterns introduction communicating is one of the basic human needs as a social creature. communication can be conducted by two or more people in expressing feelings or thoughts. in communicating to one another, people make use of sentences, or specifically, utterances. according to wardhaugh (2010), utterances can be classified by length, by grammatical structure, by semantic or logical structure, and by functional approach. utterance which is long is not a guarantee that it is easily understood by the hearer. more often short but concise utterance is more effective than the longer one. in terms of grammatical structure, utterances may vary in number of dimensions, for instance, the use of active and passive, clausal type an complexity, statement, question, request, and exclamatory. in terms of functional approach, simple functions of utterance may be as stating, questioning, requesting, and exclaiming. in short, a conversation engages not only language to state propositions or to utter facts but also the unmarked used of the language. through conversation, people establish relationships with others, achieve or fail a measure of collaboration or cooperation, maintain channels open for further relationship. people communicate orally face to face, or at least they can see and not too far, in nature with their partner of speaking. however, advanced technology allows them to speak with their partner of speaking without direct presence of the two speakers at the same place of which the conversation occurs. let‟s take some examples of advanced technology that are highly used nowadays; telephone, web camera (digital imaging system), teleconference, etc. among those instruments mentioned earlier, the easiestto-find and easiest-to-use is telephone. it can be found in almost all houses, especially in cities even in countryside of some parts of indonesia. furthermore, the availability of cellular phone enables people to talk with https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.538 227 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee other users without any limits toward distance. speech acts possible to be conducted when conversing are manifold. when people need to know something that they do not know, they would ask other people to let them know the information. in order to get information they need, they have to realize it through speech acts. one of the speech acts employ as to get information is requesting. yule (2000) classifies general functions performed by speech acts into declarations, representatives, expressives, directives, and commissives. firstly, declarations are kinds of speech acts which change the realm through the utterance. utterances like below: priest : “i now pronounce you husband and wife.” referee : “you‟re out!” jury foreman: “we find the defendant guilty” the above utterance should be uttered by one who has a special institutional role, in a specific context, in order to perform a declaration appropriately. secondly, representatives are speech act which state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. statement, assertions, conclusions, and descriptions are categorized into representative speech acts. thirdly, expressives are kinds of speech acts which state what the speaker feels. the expressions of psychological states, statement of pleasure, pain likes, dislikes, joy, and sorrow can be delivered by using expressives speech acts. following are the examples; „i‟m sorry!‟, “congratulations!” and “oh, yes, great, mmmmm, ssahh!”. the speaker makes the utterance fit the world of feelings. fourth, directives are kinds of speech acts which speakers use to get other people to do something. the utterances express what the speaker wants which can be positive or negative, they can be commands, order, requests, or suggestions. following are the samples of utterances of directives: a. “give me a cup of coffee. make it black” b. ”could you lend me a pen, please?” c. “don‟t touch that!” finally, commissives are speech acts which speaker use to commit themselves to some future actions. it expresses what the speaker intends, for instance, promises, threats, refusals, pledges, that can be performed by the speaker alone or by the speaker as a member of a group. when performing a commissive speech acts, the speaker undertakes to make the world fit the words through the speaker. yule (2000) also simplifies the elaborations on classifications of speech acts as in the table below: table. 1. the five general functions of speech acts (searle, 1969) speech acts type direction of fit s = speaker x = situation declarations words change the world s causes x representatives make the words fit the world s believes x expressives make the words fit the world s feels x directives make the words fit the world s wants x commissives make the words fit the world s intend x yule (2002) also distinguishes types of speech acts. he proposes three basic sentence types; declarative, interrogative, and imperative. on the other hand, allan (1994) says that speech acts is classified as interpersonal acts. it is usually addressed to an individual so that it only involves the speaker and interlocutor(s). a speech act is considered to be effective when there is reaction from the interlocutor. further, austin (1962) classifies speech acts into three; locutionary acts, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary acts. the basic unit of human linguistics 228 ida zuraida supri unearthing students’ realization of speech act in asking information in telephone conversation communication is illocutionary act (searle, 1969, p. 1). whereas, asking for information lies under the umbrella of requesting of perlocutionary acts; the speaker should utter his intention through a speech act properly so that the interlocutor would do what the speaker wants. in other words, the speaker ought to be polite in conveying the utterance. in terms of politeness, brown & levinson (1987) claimed that there are certain social principles that guide human communication. they argued that as people communicate with others, they are constantly aware of their own and others‟ face and that they cooperate to maintained one another‟s face. thus, people attempt to soften the effects of their face threatening acts (fta) by using a variety of politeness strategies. it is commonly stated that there are three influential factors in interpersonal communication; firstly, social distance. boxer (1993) states that social distance is one of the foremost factors that determine the way in which interlocutor conserve precisely because it is an important determinant of the degree of comfort in a verbal exchange. secondly, relative power. it refers to a speaker‟s power level that enables him to make an interlocutor do or not do the action. lastly is absolute ranking of imposition. this links to what kind of action expected. the strategies employed by speakers to maintain politeness can be in terms of address e.g. miss, ma‟am, or sir. gordon and tripp (1985) state there are conventional request types as following; 1) imperatives: any form with imperative syntax, 2) imperative ellipsis: naming what is wanted without a verb is heard as a request, 3) embedded requests: make explicit the desired action, agent, and object, e.g. using modals can/could, will, etc., 4) permission requests, e.g. using can/may i, and explicit need or wants statements, e.g. i want, i need…, etc. the above forms can be varied or nuanced in many ways (gordon & tripp, 1985). expressions can be intensified or mitigated through prosodic variation such as falling pitch or wheedling tone. request can be mitigated through displacements and minimizers, which include; utterances with displaced tense or aspect (e.g. could you? would you?) and utterances with displaced agents and minimization (e.g. give me a little of ….). further, there are etiquette performance that people do when making a phone call, which are opening, mentioning numbers, mentioning self-identity, mentioning reason for calling, and closing. method the objectives of this research are as follows: 1. to find out language realization by students at widyatama university in conveying asking for information in bahasa indonesia. 2. to investigate the strategy they employ to lead to the main topic of conversation. 3. to see utterance patterns which are highly used by students in asking for information by using bahasa indonesia. the scopes to be analyzed are as follows: 1. to unearth students‟ style in a telephone conversation which includes the way they open and close the conversation. 2. to find out how students lead to the main topic of the conversation in terms of directness and politeness. 3. how they use the language in asking for information. the subjects involved in this research were students of fourth semester of information technology, faculty of engineering, widyatama university bandung. there were fifteen students in the classroom consisting of five female and ten male students. it is assumed that they are familiar with or accustomed to conversing through telephone. the instruments used to investigate the three research questions above are; 1) a 229 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee questionnaire containing questions related to their procedure in using phone, e.g. when the line is connected to the interlocutor what would he says first, etc., and 2) dct or discourse completion test. the questionnaire comprises a situation where the subjects should respond to by creating a dialog on how they would ask for information through a telephone. the two questionnaires are intertwined since one of the two can be used to crosscheck subjects‟ consistency in responding the questions given related to procedure of telephoning. since the writer wants to know students‟ speech realization in bahasa indonesia, the instruction and the questions are in bahasa indonesia. besides giving the written instruction, the writer also gave verbal instruction as well in order to avoid misunderstanding in questionnaire completion. following is the example: anda menelpon teman untuk menanyakan apakah besok ada kuliah tambahan atau tidak. ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ the procedures employed in obtaining the data were as follows. the writer made five situations (dct, discourse completion test) where the subjects can respond to. the discourse completion tests were then distributed to the subjects to be filled out. next, they are assigned to respond to the given situations by completing them. after that, the data collected are categorized based on their group. then, the writer analyzes the data by referring to the theoretical foundations used in this research. results and discussion asking for information, a type of speech act which is under the classification of directive speech acts is very day to day utterance to perform. in asking for information, a person might address the utterance to someone he already knows, like family, friends, and relative or even to someone that he does not know, e.g. a policemen at the street, a passer-by, a receptionist at an office or hospital, etc. people ask for information for many reasons. they ask questions because they need a piece of information or just to make sure or confirm that the information that he or she understand is valid or correct. in this modern era, there are various types of media to use in asking for information. with the advancement of the technology, people can text, phone or video call to get information. different applications of social media facilitate the flow of information. unfortunately, there is still constraint in using those media in getting information. for examples, using applications such as whatsapp, messenger, line for texting are lack of intonation in delivering the utterance. although emoticons are created to represent the feelings of the speaker when expressing his/her idea, misunderstanding may still occur. therefore, video call is a better facility to offer for long distance communication. it offers a face to face communication as long as the connections in the speaker and hearer‟s area are good. initially, asking for information can be simply conducted through a telephone line. people commonly used a telephone line to get information they need since it offers a fast response. therefore, it would be interesting to find out whether there will be differences when a person makes an utterance via telephone or directly face to face. however, scollon and scollon (2001) claim that there is no faceless communication. this means that face is an important aspect to maintain in a communication. besides, there might be a distinction when a person asks for information from someone he knows and from someone he does not. the differences might lie in terms 230 ida zuraida supri unearthing students’ realization of speech act in asking information in telephone conversation of utterance, like the greeting, addressing, leading to main topic, closing, as well as in directness and politeness in making the utterances. when there is distance between speaker and hearer, the utterance will be then delivered in an indirect manner. on the contrary, if there is no distance between the speaker and the hearer, then the utterance will be conveyed in a direct manner. the data gathered from the questionnaires show that the subjects, students of faculty of engineering, are active users of telephone as their means of communication. although the availability of internet-based media communication is various for the students to use, they still use telephoning in getting information. especially, when they are in situations where they need quick responses from their interlocutors. some of the students will text their lecturers first before they make a phone call. they think that they do not want to disturb if their lecturers are giving lectures when they call them. some others will make a phone call directly without making appointment or permission to make phone calls to their lecturers. in short, almost all of the subjects use the telephone when they find it necessary to do it. some students prefer to use social media applications available on their smart phone rather than making phone calls. they stated that using social media applications on the basis on internet connection is a lot more economical. on the other hand, few of them use it only for chatting. it means that they are quite economical, since it is not cheap using this modern technology, they use only if they really have particular urgency. the conclusion is supported by their response in the questionnaire that they use the telephone when they really need it. opening the utterances produced by the subjects reveal that students employ different types of opening. they generally utter opening before they proceeded to the conversation. halo and assalamu’alaikum are the most used utterance by the subjects. the use of halo is universal since it does not refer to particular religious believers‟ utterance, whereas the latter is. however, few subjects seem to be persistent in using assalamu’alaikaum to whomever they were calling; a person they know or a person they talk to for the first time. in my opinion this happened because saying assalamualaikum has been their habit as soon as they make a contact with other people. the other few subjects opened the conversation by saying both and became „halo, assalamualaikum’. but they utter it to people that they already know. some of the subjects did not use the two types of openings above. they use eh, instead. the subjects used eh to intimates; especially, when they made the call to cellular phone. they have already known the hearers they are contacting. utterance eh which is used as an opening serves as an attention getter or a way to directly start the conversation. it happened because they were very certain that the person replying is the one they expected to speak to, e.g. eh, besok ada kuliah tambahan gak? saya gak tau, euy! eh, lif, besok ada kuliah tambahan gak? however, when they made the call to home telephone most of the subjects will ask for information on whether the person they wanted to speak to is there or not, can be contacted or not. type of utterance highly used by subject is bisa bicara dengan (could i speak to) … (name). permission is used in interrogatives since the speakers understand that the addressee is potential source of the permission. it happened because they assumed that anybody in the house might pick up the receiver. they do not know yet who was answering the phone it can be the maid, parents, sibling, etc. that is why they made the utterance in a polite way by using 231 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee modality can or could in bahasa indonesia „bisa’. none of the subjects mentioned the number they were calling when they made the calls in asking for information. it is evidence that mentioning the destination numbers is not a popular procedure in telephoning in indonesia. they did not think it is necessary to do until they find out that they had dialed the wrong numbers. especially in a digital era, the dialed phone number can be seen from the telephone screen. some telephone machines come with wide screen enabling the caller see the number that he/she is being dialed. closing utterance used to close a telephone conversation is quite various, including makasih ya, ya udah, makasih, assalamu’alaikum, dah, sampe besok, thanks, terima kasih, terima kasih banyak, terima kasih, maaf telah mengganggu. the first seven closings are used when they close the conversation with people they feel close, whereas the last three and assalamu’alaikum are addressed to people they respect or they talk to for the first time. situation #1 when they made a call to a friend that they know well, almost all of the subjects tend to be very casual and they directly get to the topic or the purpose of calling. however, few of them greet first and made a question as an ice breaker by asking questions like, halo vie, lagi ngapain? (hallo vie, what are you doing?), before they get down to the reason for calling. they ask the interlocutor‟s activity when they made a call. this is showing that the relationship of the two speakers is close. they are trying to be attentive. the utterance used is casual or informal because they are aware that they are familiar with each other and of the same level of power in terms of social distance. the pattern used is; they mention name or nick name of their friends and directly mention the purpose of calling. the utterances produced are also direct. examples:  eh, lif, kalo besok ada kuliah tambahan gak? (eh, lif, is there any additional lecture tomorrow?)  ada kelas tambahan gak? (is there any additional lecture tomorrow?)  ji, kata anak-anak bu ida ngadain kelas tambahan, beneran nih? (ji, someone told me that mrs. ida will give additional lecture, is it right?) out of fifteen subjects, only one uses explicit want statement in uttering asking for information, e.g. halo, rin saya mau tanya apakah besok ada kuliah tambahan? the language used tends to be formal. it might be because the speaker thinks that her relationship with the interlocutor is not very close so that she feels reluctant to produce informal utterance. another possible reason is that the speaker do not think that she feels comfortable to be casual to the hearer due to personal matter. situation #2 in situation #2, the subjects are assigned to ask for information from someone they talk to for the first time. the speech realizations are similar to when they ask for information from friends. the procedures of telephoning conducted by the subjects are different. something that is obviously different is that they are introducing themselves before they come to the purpose of telephoning. the procedure becomes: opening, mentioning their selfidentity, and tell the reason for calling (asking for information). they realize that the interlocutor will not directly understand the conversation because they do not have the same common ground; topic of conversation. mentioning self–identity becomes crucial so as to make the 232 ida zuraida supri unearthing students’ realization of speech act in asking information in telephone conversation conversation runs smoothly. following are speech realizations made by the subjects.  ini faisal dari fakultas teknik. (i am faisal from engineering faculty)  saya taufik anak if ’14 (i am taufik from if ‟14)  hai dan, ini kiky, mau tanya nih (hai dan, i am kiki, i want to ask you something) when they realize the speech act of asking question, some of them tried to be casual by uttering directly the point of conversation, following are the examples.  bu ida nitip buku buat difotokopi gak untuk perkuliahan minggu depan? (did mrs. ida entrust a book to be copied for the next lecture?)  tadi ibu ida menitipkan buku untuk dikopi ngga buat minggu depan? (did mrs. ida entrust a book to be copied for the next week?) the data above show that most of the subjects tend to use explicit want statements, e.g. mau tanya, mo nanya, mo nanya nih, before they realize the asking for information. it occurs because they understand the social distance between them and their interlocutors. they are aware that they have a non-casual relationship. since they talk to them for the first time, somehow they would feel awkward in the beginning. after that, they tend to be informal in making the utterance. situation #3 in asking for information from parents, they tend to be direct. after they utter the opening, they directly proceed to the main topic of conversation; asking for information. however, few of them make question asking their parents‟ conditions and continued to the topic. in my opinion, it may be the result of the family culture or upbringing style. the family has custom not to be direct to other members of family when they conversing. the parents expose the children on asking condition in the conversation as a way of respecting elderly. the tones of the utterances are informal. it shows that their relationship is very close. they feel comfortable to be direct in expressing their intention. casual utterances indicate that the speakers feel close to the interlocutor so that they feel comfortable making informal utterances. the data show that none of the respondents tell his or her identity when telephoning to their parents. therefore, mentioning self-identity is not important, as they feel certain that the partner of speaking know already the speaker from the voice and topic of conversation. following are the utterances made by the subjects:  assalamualaikum, apa kabar bu? (assalamualaikum, how are you, mom?)  assalamualaikuum, ibu sehat? (assalamualaikum, are you okay, mom?) situation #4 making a phone call to ask for information from a lecturer is quite different from the one making for parents. the procedure is after the opening, they mention self–identity; name and major of study. all subjects try to be informative on their identity. they think that the lecturer may not be able to directly identify who the speaker is unless the students tell their identity or the students have good personal relationship with the lecturer. this is a strategy that is employed by the students to be concise in giving self-identity and be polite with one that they respect. after mentioning their identity, the subjects then lead the interlocutor to the topic or purpose of telephoning. before mentioning their purpose of calling, they express an apology by saying, maaf bu/pak, bu, maaf saya menganggu. the apology is meant to show that it is an effort for them to be polite. they realize their social distance with the interlocutors. most of the utterances use explicit want statements: “saya elif, mau tanya nilai uas kemarin sudah keluar belum”, “apa nilai uas saya sudah keluar, pak?” paying attention to their utterance, 233 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the writer notices that they tend to use casual or informal language in uttering their purpose. instead of using a formal one, they use a less standardized or formal language. the reasons may be they are trying to be informal although at the beginning of their conversation they use opening, greeting and self-mentioning; procedure of being formal. another reason is they have lack language competence so they cannot employ appropriate expressions when they want to extend purpose conversation. saying an apology before they state their intention of calling indicates their effort to be polite in their utterances. they try not to direct to the purpose of calling; asking for information. following are examples.  maaf bu, saya elif mau tanya nilai uas kemarin sudah keluar belum? (i am sorry miss, i am alif, i am calling to ask you about the result of the final test, has it been published?)  maaf pak saya taufik, apa nilai uas sudah keluar pak? (i am sorry sir, i am taufik, has the final test result been published?) however there are also subjects who directly get to the topic by using explicit want statements without expressing an apology. their politeness in the utterance is indicated by explicit want statement. here are some examples. 1. hallo bu ini ma eril. eril mo nanyain nilai uas bu? apa udah keluar gitu? (hallo miss, this is eril calling. i want to ask you about the result of the final test, has it been published?) 2. apakah nilai uas sudah dikeluarkan buk? terimakasih. (has the final test result been published? thank you.) situation #5 they make a call to ask for information from someone they talk to for the first time; a customer service. the pattern that the subjects employ is similar to situation #4. they start with greeting, make an apology, and then state their purpose of conversation. few of them express an apology before mentioning the main topic. out of fifteen subjects only one mentions self-identity by stating that he is a spokesperson from a particular region, e.g. kami perwakilan kompleks x. i. mentioning self-identity is not compulsory for the subjects unless they represent a specific community or a group of people, not as an individual. as a manifestation of social distance, they use explicit want statements in uttering asking for information. conclusion the speech realization patterns highly used when the subjects ask for information via telephone to a friend is they make an opening and directly state the purpose of calling, and then closing. meanwhile, when calling to someone of relatively the same age and social status but talk for the first time, they will mention their self-identity then continue with the topic of calling. mentioning self-identity is an evidence that they somewhat feel awkward and to lead and give interlocutors clue to their purpose of calling. when calling to parents, casual utterances are significantly employed. comfortable feeling in uttering their purpose in informal way indicates their closeness with the interlocutors. the patterns employed when asking information to a lecturer or someone they talk to for the first time is quite similar. to a lecturer, they will make an opening and followed by mentioning self-identity. they tend to be indirect in proceeding to the purpose of calling by expressing an apology for disturbing the lecturer‟s time. anyway, this is a way used to show their politeness. the other way employed to show politeness is by using explicit want statement. to someone they talk to for the first time, e.g. pln customer service, is they utter the opening, (they tend not to) mention self234 ida zuraida supri unearthing students’ realization of speech act in asking information in telephone conversation identity. realizing the social distance, they will state their apology and continue with the purpose of calling. to sum, the speech realization in asking for information through a telephone line tend to be brief and purposive to whomever the call is addressed to. references allan, k. (1994). felicity conditions on speech acts. in r. asher, encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 1210-1213). oxford: pergamon press. austin j. l. (1962). how to do things with words. london: oxford university press. boxer, d. (1993). social distance and speech behavior: the case of indirect complain. journal of pragmatics. brown, p., & levinson, s. (1987). politeness: some universals in language use. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. gordon, d. p., & tripp. s. e. (1985). the development of request. in r. l. schieffelbusch (ed). communicative competence: acquisition and intervention. beverly hills ca: college hills press. scollon, r., & scollon, s. w. (2001) intercultural communication: a discourse approach (2nd ed.). malden: blackwell publishers. searle, j. (1969). speech acts. london: cambridge university press. 235 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee drummer a drummer, sick of all the drummer jokes, decides to change his instrument. after some thought, he decides on the accordion. so he goes to the music store and says to the owner, "i'd like to look at the accordions, please." the owner gestures to a shelf in the courner and says, "all our accordions are over there." after browsing, the drummer says, "i think i'd like the big red one in the corner." the store owner looks at him and says, "you're a drummer, aren't you?" the drummer, crestfallen, says, "how did you know?" the store owner says, "that 'big red accordion' is the radiator." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) 236 ida zuraida supri unearthing students’ realization of speech act in asking information in telephone conversation english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 409 the personality of “borno” in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel written by tere liye: psychoanalysis study eka yuningsih department of indonesian language education, indonesian language master program of sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia email: ekayuningsih42@gmail.com nurhayati (corresponding author) department of indonesian language education, indonesian language master program of sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia email: nurhayati@fkip.unsri.ac.id izzah department of indonesian language education, indonesian language master program of sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia email: izzahzen@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: yuningsih, e., nurhayati., & izzah. (2021). the personality of “borno” in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel written by tere liye: psychoanalysis study. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.409-418. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4454 received: 29-02-2021 accepted: 20-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction literature work is an actual, imaginative, and creative realization of a writer with different processes from one to another. the differences consist of several methods, the creative progress appearance, and the expression models of the writer until the applied language modes. mursalim (2019) found four main approaches in literature works. they were mimetic, expressive, pragmatic, and objective. those approaches have developed into various approaches. they are such as structural, semiotic, sociological literature, receptive literature, psychological literature, and moral approaches. literature psychology is applied to analyze literary works correlated to the characters’ personalities. it is actually a combination between psychology and literature based on sigmund freud (el hafiz & himawan, 2020). the novel is a literature work with complex problems and allows the characters to experience various personality abstract: this research aimed to determine the psychological description of the main character, borno, reviewed from sigmund freud’s psychoanalysis. the subject was the novel of kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah written by tere liye. the applied research methodology was descriptive qualitative. the data of this research consisted of words, phrases, sentences, and discourse related to the main character's personality structures in the novel. the data collection techniques were reading, noting, and analyzing the documents with literature psychological analysis of sigmund freud. the novel tells the love story of borno and mei due to a pincher, sepit. at that time, mei was doing field practice in pontianak. she crossed the kapuas river. borno saw her and fell in love with her, the chinese-breed girl. the red packet, angpau merah, was left on a pincher made borno wanted to return it. borno's struggles to find out her name, mei, was successful. from the analyzed data, the personality ego frequently appeared in borno. it was due to his considerations while being advised by the old man. the conflict of id and ego made an internal conflict for borno. their love story was begun from the boat. at that time, mei was doing an internship in pontianak. she crossed the kapuas river by boat. borno saw it then he fell in love with the indo-chinese breed girl. the red packet, angpau merah, was left on a pincher made borno wanted to return it. borno always kept an eye on mei. he even remembered what time mei went to teach and always kept trying to ensure his boat be always in the thirteenth line. it was the line in which mei would be on board every morning. keywords: psychoanalysis; character’s personality; sigmund freud’s theory eka yuningsih, nurhayati, & izzah the personality of “borno” in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel written by tere liye: psychoanalysis study 410 problems. this matter is known as psychological problem or conflict (rahmawati, 2017). psychological literature is influenced by several facts. first, it is a creation of the personal and cognitive processes of a writer in the subconscious stage. then, it is expressed in the conscious stage (endraswarra, 2003). second, psychological literature review refers to psychological reflection review of main characters to make readers experiencing the psychological problem story. it sometimes makes the readers involved in the story. the problems presented in novels might vary. studies by maulana (2014), mujihadi (2016), pratami, djohan, & purwaningsih, (2016), and sistiana (2016) showed that the problems could be mental torment, mental conflict, psychosexual problem, social-interaction, romance dilemma, etc. the novel, kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah, written by tere liye also had psychological problems experienced by the main characters. although the novel brings a love story, tere liye could make it interesting with the presented problems. the problems could attract the psychological sides due to lots of conflicts experienced by the main characters. they were such as problems dealing with the romance or romantic element, the lifestyle, and the community values (basid, jannah, & hamzah, 2018; kholijah, priyadi, & sanulita, 2015; yulianto, 2019). some studies with psychological literature had been done for examples aras (2015) and khotimah, masulah, & mayasari (2017). they applied psychological literature analysis approach on novel but they did not investigate from id, ego, and superego. on the other hand, studies about the novel, aku, kau, dan sepucuk angpau merah, were done by basid et al (2018), kholijah et al (2015), and yulianto (2019). however, they did not investigate the novel based on psychological literature analysis. human characters are varied as expressed in the literature work. the novel written by tere liye was published by pt gramedia pustaka utama, the twenty-fourth print, in february 2020. it consisted of thirty-seven chapters and 507 pages. the simple love story between borno and mei becomes an amazing love story for the current era. the novel tells a life of a young man living near kapuas river, pontianak, western borneo, named borno. he fell in love with an indo-chinese girl, named mei. the love story was begun with a sept, a boat. mei who was doing field practice in pontianak, crossing the kapuas river with a boat. borno saw him and fell in love. a red packet was left on the boat. it made borno eager to return the packet and at that time he always kept an eye on mei. he even remembered what time mei went to teach. he even knew that the thirteenth line was the right queue for mei to be on board every morning. the love story theme always embellishes the community life. this argument is also supported by al-haj (2015). he found that the attitude of the character in a novel that kept on loving in the beloved one could attract readers. in the current novel, kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah, is also entailed with conflicts of love stories that make the writers interested to create literary works. character psychology brings uniqueness to each literature work (santos, santos, & silva, 2018). thus, a literature work will be different not only from the story but also from the characters’ psychology. the characters in a literature work become the important parts in psychological approached studies (clare, 2019; mete, 2017; hans, 2018; xinyin, 2019). it is since literature works are frequently used as research studies about the psychological approach. the inner conflict experienced by borno could be reviewed with sigmund freud’s psychoanalysis (2000). psychoanalysis is a specific term of psychological literature study (kasimbara, 2020). according to freud, there are id, ego, and superego in humans. they cause humans to always have a personal conflict, anxiety, worry, restlessness, stress, etc. however, if they do not work equally, an abnormal character will appear (kasimbara, 2020). psychological science is used as a literature work review, especially to examine the characters. psyche, according to jung in wu & wei (2020), it is defined as the totality of all conscious and subconscious events. thus, human personalities consist of consciousness and subconsciousness (mededović, 2018). both of the states are compensatory connected. the functions of those states are (1) to adjust the external world (the consciousness) and (2) to adjust the internal world (subconsciousness). the border of both states is dynamic. it means the area of both states can be larger or narrower. the psychological literature should also prioritize the literature instead of the psychology. this study can be done in two manners. they are by english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 411 using the psychological theory understanding and analysis on a certain literature work or determining the literature work as the object and determining the relevant psychological theories. psychological literature in this discussion refers to the applied research methods and the literature work deployment as a dynamic event. literature work determines the theory and it is not the theory that determines the literature work (ratna, 2013). method the applied method was the descriptive qualitative method (haradhan, 2018). the collected data were words, phrases, sentences, and dialogues that described the main character's personality structures in the novel. the researcher in this research had roles as the key instrument. the researcher had the main role to collect the data by reading, classifying, and interpreting the data. the research data consisted of paragraph, sentence, and quotation explanations of the novel written by tere liye. they were in the form of dialogs among the characters, the explanations of the characters, and the actions in the novel. the applied instruments used the personality table of sigmund freud's theory in the form of id, ego, and superego. they were used to label the research focus, classification data based on the research focus, and data corpus table to determine the analyzed object codes. the procedures of collecting the data consisted of six stages. they were (1) selecting the novel, (2) reading and understanding the novel, (3) labeling the personality structures of the main characters, (4) classifying the data, (5) providing codes, and (6) interpreting the findings. the data checking was done with the reference adequacy technique. therefore, the researcher used sigmund freud’s psychoanalysis to analyze the main character, borno in the novel. results and discussion the main character’s personality in a literature work is always interested to review. one of them is by reviewing the personality with a psychological approach. psychology and literature are two different matters. however, they are connected due to the reviewed object. in this research, it was the personality. the characters in literature work are imaginative. however, they have psychological aspects as humans in the real world. this part is explained in this research. it is about the main character, borno, in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel, reviewed with sigmund freud’s psychoanalysis. the psychological description of borno the analysis of the psychological aspect of the character, borno, in the novel was based on human personality. it consisted of ide, ego, and superego. those matters cannot be separated from a human. the finding below was in line with aji (2019). borno, a young man of kapuas river, pontianak, western borneo had a story since he was 12 years old. at that time, the littler borno had to face a desperate fate. his father passed away but at the moment before it happened, his father agreed to donate his heart for another patient. borno was very sad, not only because of his father's death but questions. he was wondering how his father passed away whether it was due to the surgery or the accident. borno grew up and became a good personality character as his father was. after graduated from senior high school, borno tried to get a job, propose a job, and change jobs. borno was often insulted by his neighbors and the surrounding people of kapuas. one day, he decided to work at a ferry dock. his performance made his relative, bang togar, the chief of the speed boat community or sepit angry. then, as the result, he was prohibited to cross the river on the boat. borno decided to quit the job and stay away from his relatives and other people. he started to learn to drive the boat. although it was tough for him, due to the suggestions of his mother and the old man, he kept doing it. his love story was begun from the boat. at that time, mei was doing an internship in pontianak. she crossed the kapuas river by boat. borno saw it then he fell in love with the indo-chinese breed girl. the red packet left on the boat made borno had eager to return it. although in the end he was disappointed since the packet, containing money, was shared to celebrate the chinese new year. it was a temporal disappointment because mei called borno's name after sharing the packet. then, on that day, borno always kept an eye on mei. he even remembered what time mei went to teach and always kept trying to ensure his boat be always in the thirteenth line. it was the line in which mei would be on board every morning. borno chose to be loyal to mei although mei had several times left him without clear reasons. eka yuningsih, nurhayati, & izzah the personality of “borno” in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel written by tere liye: psychoanalysis study 412 however, borno believed that he would meet her again no matter what. finally, the secret was revealed. mei’s mother was a doctor. she was responsible for bornos’ father's death. she was the one who transplanted his father’s heart when there was a slight hope to live for his father. however, since she was blinded by carrier and position at that time, in which there had not been anyone who could transplant the heart, she was determined to do it. she was just realized once she completed the operation. she saw a young man and a woman hugging each other and cried due to losing someone’s important in his family. that was the reason why mei left suddenly without clear reasons and why she knew borno's name first. it was why although mei loved borno but she chose to let him go since she knew there would be a scar opened. data 12 “aku berjanji akan selalu mencintai kau, mei. bahkan walau aku telah membaca surat dalam angpau merah itu ribuan kali, tahu masa lalu yang menyakitkan, itu tidak akan mengubah apapun. bahkan walau satpam galak rumah ini mengusirku, menghinaku, itu juga tidak akan mengubah perasaanku. aku akan selalu mencintai kau, mei. astaga, mei, jika kau tidak percaya janjiku, bujang dengan hati paling lurus sepanjang tepian kapuas, maka siapa lagi yang bisa kau percaya?” (liye, 2012, p.507) “i will always love you, mei. even after i read the letters in the red packet a thousand times and knew the painful truth. it cannot change anything. even if this means security kicks me out and insults me. it will never change my feeling. i will be always loving you, mei. oh dear, if you do not believe in me, a young man with the pure heart in kapuan, who else will you believe?” (liye, 2012, p.507) data 13 malam itulah untuk pertama kalinya aku menyadari, mei datang dari keluarga yang amat berbeda denganku. taksi membawa kami menuju pusat kota, melewati jalan protokol surabaya, lantas masuk ke pintu gerbang besar, ke halaman dengan luas seperempat lapangan bola. aku yang sejak tadi lebih banyak diam, lebih banyak salah tingkah, bercakap sepatah-dua patah, menatap rumah besar tujuan kami itu dengan sebuah kesadaran baru. (liye, 2012, p.222) that night, for the first time i realized. mei came from a different family than me. the cap brought me to the central city, passing the highway of surabaya. we were brought through the large gate and yard, a fourth of the football field large. i was only keeping silent and turned into feeling awkward. i spoke once or twice, starring at the huge house, the objective of our journey with a new consciousness.” (liye, 2012, p. 222) the most dominant personality elements of borno the psychoanalysis theory of sigmund freud consists of id, ego, and superego. (1) id refers to the biological aspect. it is the most basic personality system under consciousness. (2) ego refers to the psychological aspect. it is the personality system acting as an individual’s direction toward an object of reality and promoting the function based on reality. (3) superego refers to the sociological aspect. it consists of values and regulations that are evaluative (dealing with good or bad things). the personality analysis of borno dominated could be seen on the figure 1. figure 1. the analysis of dominant personality of borno english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 413 the main character of the novel is borno. he struggled to know mei’s name. his first meeting failed and mei suddenly returned to surabaya to finish her study. borno was so crazy to contact each contact with mei's father's name. he hoped the contacted number was the address of mei. his struggle was also distracted by a beautiful chinesebreed woman. she was also as beautiful as mei and a doctor named sarah. she was the daughter of his father-donated heart recipient. she was the childhood friend of mei. a man's loyalty could be seen from borno. he remained loyal to mei although mei left him several times without clear reasons. however, borno believed that he would meet her again no matter what. finally, the secret was revealed. mei’s mother was a doctor. she was responsible for bornos’ father's death. she was the one who transplanted his father’s heart when there was a slight hope to live for his father. however, since she was blinded by carrier and position at that time, in which there had not been anyone who could transplant the heart, she was determined to do it. she was just realized once she completed the operation. she saw a young man and a woman hugging each other and cried due to losing someone’s important in his family. that was the reason why mei left suddenly without clear reasons and why she knew borno's name first. it was why although mei loved borno but she chose to release him since she knew there would be a scar opened. borno's personality as the main character from the id aspect the id aspect dealt with the biological aspect and was the original system in personality. from this aspect, the other two aspects were developed. the aspects consisted of matters brought since an individual was born or the biological elements, such as the instincts. id refers to psychics’ energy that has some principles, such as joy. guidance in the id function is to avoid an individual from inconvenience and convenience. borno experienced sadness since his father’s death. it was at his twelve years old. he was stung by jellyfish until it made him donating his heart to other people. the situation made him working as a speed boat driver. here are the quotations: data 10 “bapak belum matiii! dia bisa sadar kapan saja!”aku loncat, beringas menahan ranjang bapak. (liye, 2012, p.16) “he is still alive!!!!! he may regain his consciousness anytime” i jumped, holding my father’s bed. (liye, 2012, p. 16) data 11 “lulus sma, modal tak punya, keahlian tak ada, kesempatan minus, jaringan nol, yang tersisa cuma mimpi. dulu aku bermimpi bisa kuliah sambil bekerja. lihat sudah empat tahun lulus sma, itu-itu saja kemajuan mimpiku. jadi pengemudi sepit, penghasilan pas-pasan. sementara teman-teman kita dulu, sibuk kuliah, sibuk dengan masa depan. ada yang hendak jadi pns, ada yang mau jadi karyawan swasta necis. terus terang, aku cemas jangan-jangan aku tetap jadi pengemudi sepit. nasibku sama seperti bang jau, jupri, dan yang lain. dari kecil sudah jadi pengemudi sepit. bang togar masih lumayan, dia pernah bertualang ke hulu kapuas, punya masa muda yang berbeda. pak tua apalagi, menjadi pengemudi sepit hanya hobi, bahkan kupikir dia amat menikmatinya setelah berpuluhpuluh tahun berkeliling dunia, kaya, meski hidupnya sederhana. sedangkan aku? tidak ada hal hebat yang pernah kulakukan.” (liye, 2012, pp.281-282) after graduating from shs, i did not have anything, no skills, no opportunities, no network. i only had dreams. i was dreaming i could work and go to college. i have been graduated four years from shs and it is all my dream. thus, becoming a speed boat driver only brings limited income. on the other hand, our schoolmates are busy studying and busy with their future. some of them want to be civil servants while others want to be entrepreneurs. honestly, i am feeling restless. i am afraid i am always going to be a speed driver. i am afraid my life will be just like jau, jupri, and the others. they have become speed boat drivers since children. togar is better. he ever went to kapuas upstream. he had different young age. the old man became the speed boat driver as his hobby. i think he enjoyed it. he even went around the world for years although his life is just simple. what about me? i have not done anything great. (liye, 2012, pp. 281-282) data 11 “tidak usah bertemu?” aku memastikan, siapa tahu aku salah dengar. langit-langit warkshop terasa lenggang. “tapi kenapa?” intonasi suaraku terdengar bergetar. mei hanya diam, menunduk lagi. aku menepuk dari, aku sungguh tidak mengerti kalimatnya barusan. bukankah baru kemarin kami seharian pergi berdua? jalan-jalan yang eka yuningsih, nurhayati, & izzah the personality of “borno” in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel written by tere liye: psychoanalysis study 414 menyenangkan terlepas dari ulah bang togar dan kawan-kawan. kenapa tiba-tiba sore ini dia datang dengan wajah letih, bilang kalimat yang sangat tidak masuk akal? “kau hanya bergurau, kan?” aku menyelidik, tertawa kecil gadis itu mengangkat wajah, menggeleng. matanya berkaca-kaca, membuat tawaku bungkam, mematung. (liye, 2012, p.397). “what? i cannot see you?” i tried to ensure what i heard. the workshop atmosphere felt so free. “but why?” i trembling asked. mei was only keeping silent and bowed her head. i slammed my face. i really did not understand what she spoke. we were just dating yesterday. it was amazing, away from togar and the others. then, suddenly, this afternoon she came in with her long face and spoke nonsense? “are you just kidding?” i ensured it while smiling a little bit. she looked at me and shook her head. she was tearing. it made me stop smiling and frozen still. (liye, 2012, p.397). borno's personality as the main character based on the ego aspect the ego aspect refers to the psychological state due to the factual connection of an individual. the id is influenced by the environment to satisfy an individual. then, the ego tries to connect the internal part of the individual (id) and the external part (superego). the encouragement of ego to do what id expect could be achieved. the reality in the novel does not support the realization of the id. here are the quotations: data 6 berhari-hari berlalu. aku kadang tidak punya ide mau menulis apa, jadi lebih banyak asal. sebenarnya aku ingin menulis kalimat seperti “mei, aku suka kamu” atau “mei, aku kangen”. tapi kalimat itu tidak kuasa kutuliskan. situasiku sudah rumit tanpa perlu ditambah rumit— sebelum jelas benar apa perasaan mei padaku. sejauh ini, pesan-pesan pendek itu juga tidak pernah mendapat balasan. (liye, 2012, pp.456457) day by day, i still did not have any idea to write. i just recklessly wrote them. i actually wanted to write something like “mei, i like you” or “mei, i miss you.” but i could not write it. it was so complicated and i did not make it more complicated. i had no idea how was my feeling for her. so far, my letters had not been replied to by her. (liye, 2012, pp.456-457) data 7 “aku pikir, kita tidak usah bertemu lagi.” (liye, 2012, p.398). “i think we should not meet anymore.” (liye, 2012, p.398). data 8 “mei, kau tidak bisa melakukan ini tanpa penjelasan.” “suaraku serak.” (liye, 2012, p.398). “mei, you just cannot do it without reasons.” “i spoke unclearly.” (liye, 2012, p.398). data 9 aku tidak berkomentar lagi.ini hari ketiga mei tidak naik sepit. aku sebenarnya sama gugupnya dengan tiga hari lalu, berharap-harap cemas mei akhirnya muncul di gerbang dermaga. kemarin saat aku bertanya pada murid sekolah itu, yang naik sepitku, jawabannya tetap sama. “ibu guru mei mengajar seperti biasa.”jawaban yang mengambil separuh semangatku.aku sudah berusaha menuruti saran bang togar, selalu berprasangka baik, tapi itu tidak membantu. gugup menunggu di antrean nomor tiga belas, berpikir tentang kalimat apa yang akan kukatakan saat melihatnya, pertanyaan apa yang akan kukeluarkan, ternyata sia-sia. tiga hari berturut-turut mei tidak muncul di dermaga. (liye, 2012, pp.336-337) i cannot argue anymore. it is the third day mei does not go on board. i am actually nervous just like three days ago. i expect mei will come to the dock. yesterday, when i asked the student at that school, the one who went on my boat, the answer was just the same. “madam mei is still teaching as usual.” the answer took half of my spirit. i have followed bang togar's suggestion. i always think positively but it does not help. i am feeling nervous waiting in this thirteenth line. i am thinking about what i should say when i meet her, what question i should express but it was just in vain. she did not arrive at the dock. (liye, 2012, pp.336-337) borno's personality as the main character based on the superego aspect the superego aspect refers to the personal psychological aspect. it consists of traditional values and community images. superego is considered a personal moral aspect. it is to determine whether something is correct or not, suitable or not, moral or immoral as applied in a community. the superego deals with the subconsciousness and is a moral ethic to determine the correct one. the superego in the novel consists of etiquette, morals, and custom. borno was english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 415 described as a high-curiosity character. it could be seen from this excerpt. data 1 “usia enam tahun, aku suka memikirkan hal-hal aneh. salah satunya aku pernah sibuk memikirkan: jika kita buang air besar di hulu kapuas, kira-kira butuh berapa hari kotoran itu akan tiba di muara sungai, melintas di depan rumah papan kami? “kau ada-ada saja, borno. urusan kotoran saja kaulamunkan.” bapak bukannya menjawab, malah tergelak, sibuk membereskan jaring. aku mengeluarka “borno, jangan tanya macam-macam! melihat tingkah kau satu macam saja ibu sudah pusing.” ibu melotot, tangannya terus memilah-milah ikan hasil tangkapan semalam, menyuruhku bergegas mengantar pesanan.” (liye, 2012, p.7). “when i was six years old, i was thinking something strange. one of them was if i defecated the upstream of kapuas, how long would it take to reach the estuary. when would it pass our house? “you were kidding. did you reality think about that?’ after hearing that one, my father did not answer me. he was laying down and tidied up the net. i took them out. “borno, do not ask something strange! just looking at you doing that one has made me confused.” my mom stared at me. her hands were still selecting the fish caught last night. she asked me to deliver the order.” (liye, 2012, p.7). data 2 “...aku terus berjalan lurus menelusuri gang sepanjang kapuas. rumah sempit memadati tepian sungai. anak-anak asyik mandi. ibu-ibu tidak peduli mencuci di air keruh.” (liye, 2012, p.18). “...i was walking straight, passing the alleys along kapuas. the small houses stand near the bank of the river. many children were taking a bath there. many women washed with the dirty water.” (liye, 2012, p.18). data 3 “...dengan demikian, penduduk di jantung kota pontianak jika hendak menyeberang, terpaksa harus memutar jauh menumpang bus, mobil, atau opelet.” (liye, 2012, p.34). “aku menatap rumah yang ada di hadapanku. amboi, aku menelan ludah, apa aku tidak salah alamat? alangkah besar rumahnya! pintu pagar tidak dikunci, aku menggesernya, melangkah masuk. terdengar suara keran air penyiram otomatis.” (liye, 2012, p.148). “....thus, many citizens of pontianak should take the long route to cross by taking the bus, cap, or wagon.” (tere liye, 2012, p.34). “i starred at a house in front of me. oh dear, did i miss the address? how big it is! the gate was not locked. i moved it and got inside. i heard the automatic valve’s noise.” ( liye, 2012, p.148). data 4 “aku berjanji akan selalu mencintai kau, mei. bahkan walau aku telah membaca surat dalam angpau merah itu ribuan kali, tahu masa lalu yang menyakitkan, itu tidak akan mengubah apapun. bahkan walau satpam galak rumah ini mengusirku, menghinaku, itu juga tidak akan mengubah perasaanku. aku akan selalu mencintai kau, mei. astaga, mei, jika kau tidak percaya janjiku, bujang dengan hati paling lurus sepanjang tepian kapuas, maka siapa lagi yang bisa kau percaya?” (liye, p.507) “i will always love you, mei. even after i read the letters in the red packet a thousand times and knew the painful truth. it cannot change anything. even if this means security kicks me out and insults me. it will never change my feeling. i will be always loving you, mei. oh dear, if you do not believe in me, a young man with the pure heart in kapuan, who else will you believe?” (liye, p.507) data 5 malam itulah untuk pertama kalinya aku menyadari, mei datang dari keluarga yang amat berbeda denganku. taksi membawa kami menuju pusat kota, melewati jalan protokol surabaya, lantas masuk ke pintu gerbang besar, ke halaman dengan luas seperempat lapangan bola. aku yang sejak tadi lebih banyak diam, lebih banyak salah tingkah, bercakap sepatah-dua patah, menatap rumah besar tujuan kami itu dengan sebuah kesadaran baru. (liye, 2012, p.222) that night, for the first time i realized. mei came from a different family than me. the cap brought me to the central city, passing the highway of surabaya. we were brought through the large gate and yard, a fourth of the football field large. i was only keeping silent and turned into feeling awkward. i spoke once or twice, starring at the huge house, the objective of our journey with a new consciousness. (liye, 2012, p.222) from the analyzed data, the personality ego frequently appeared in borno. it was due to his considerations while being advised by the old man. the conflict of id and ego made an internal conflict for borno. their love story was begun from the boat. at that time, mei was doing an internship in pontianak. she crossed the kapuas river by boat. borno saw it then he fell in love with the indoeka yuningsih, nurhayati, & izzah the personality of “borno” in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel written by tere liye: psychoanalysis study 416 chinese breed girl. the red packet, angpau merah, was left on a pincher made borno wanted to return it. borno always kept an eye on mei. he even remembered what time mei went to teach and always kept trying to ensure his boat be always in the thirteenth line. it was the line in which mei would be on board every morning. conclusion after analyzing the personality based on sigmund freud’s psychoanalysis, it could be concluded that, with the psychoanalysis theory developed by sigmund freud, the personality structure is divided into the id, ego, and superego. from the analyzed data, it could be seen that borno was the only young man with a pure heart in kapuas. he even took the job as the speed boat driver that was prohibited by his father (superego). however, on the other hand, borno’s was crazy to contact each address with mei’s father name. he expected one of them was the address of mei. he did so because borno had a little clue about mei's presence in the city (id). borno could not accept the reality that mei left him when the love blossomed. borno could not forget her even he tried. the figure of mei always appeared in his heart (ego). the superego of the main character could be found when he found out the content of the red packets. finally, the secret was revealed. mei’s mother was a doctor. she was responsible for bornos’ father's death. she was the one who transplanted his father’s heart when there was a slight hope to live for his father. however, since she was blinded by carrier and position at that time, in which there had not been anyone who could transplant the heart, she was determined to do it. she was just realized once she completed the operation. she saw a young man and a woman hugging each other and cried due to losing someone’s important in his family. that was what made mei left without any clear reasons. it was also why mei figured the borno's name first. mei loved borno but she chose to leave her because she knew there would be a scar opened. borno has a complex character. the id, ego, and superego appeared together. the appeared id was when borno got angry, worry, and confused. the appeared ego was shown when borno kept his loyalty, effort to not give up, anxiety, and compassion. the superego personality was shown by the attention, loyalty, optimism, purity, intelligence, effort, autonomy, curiosity, and politeness of the character. references aji, h. a. p. 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(2019). unsur romantsi sebagai pembentuk estetika dalam novel kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah karya tere liye. tuah talino, 13(1), 1689–1699. eka yuningsih, nurhayati, & izzah the personality of “borno” in kau, aku, dan sepucuk angpau merah novel written by tere liye: psychoanalysis study 418 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 323 the impacts of creating youtube video project to facilitate students’ critical thinking dedeh rohayati english education program, teacher training and education faculty university of galuh, ciamis, indonesia e-mail: dedehrohayati2017@gmail.com etika rachmawati english education program, teacher training and education faculty university of galuh, ciamis, indonesia e-mail: etikarachmawati@gmail.com apa citation: rohayati, d. & rachmawati, e. (2021). the impacts of creating youtube video project to facilitate students’ critical thinking. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.323-332. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4360 received: 25-02-2021 accepted: 21-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction the great concern of critical thinking which has become predictor for reading comprehension skill (hidayati, indrawati, & loeneto (2020), has become a subject to be investigated by many educational practitioners. moreover, the ability of thinking critically in 4.0 era is considered imperative (brodahl, hadjerrouit, & hansen, 2011; sharadgah, 2014; hidayati, indrawati, & loeneto, 2020) and it must be implemented in the classroom. the reason is that critical thinking skill can create the individual who are able to evaluate, think logically, and do many sense of actions (chaffee, 2014; chafee, mcmahon, & stout, 2015; facione & facione, 2011). it must be kept in mind that the inclusion of critical thinking ability should meet the students’ current trend, i.e., the involvement of internet in teaching and learning process (kavaliauskiene, suchanova, & velickiene, 2012; saadé, morin, & thomas, 2012; sharadgah, 2014; jones & shao, 2011; alanazi, 2013; romagnuolo, 2015). consequently, this lead to the necessity of creativity and communication which is sought by today’s employers who considers those skills essential. many experts have a great concern on critical thinking definition, like reichenbach (2001, p. 13) and chaffee (2014). reichenbach (2001, p. 13) defines critical thinking as utilization of “a set of skills which are interconnected, with the purpose of analyzing, creatively working with, and evaluating what you have obtained from reading or hearing so that someone can make a decision whether she / he must take a specific action or not.” meanwhile, (chaffee, 2014) considered thinking critically as the way someone makes sense of the world so that she or he can clarify and improve it or making sense of the world by carefully examining the thinking process to clarify and improve our understanding. however, the present study concerns with critical thinking skill referring to bloom taxonomy (bloom, 1956) regarding the hierarchy of thinking skill. there are six levels of bloom taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, abstract: nowadays, the education system has to meet the characteristics of 21st century skills, among others, the involvement of digital literacy, students’ centeredness, and critical thinking. this study depicts the impact of creating youtube video project to facilitate students’ critical thinking skill at which the qualitative case study is employed. six third year students of english department learning the topic of english for medical are selected purposively. the interview questions analyzed thematically and documentation of youtube video processed descriptively using scoring rubric are utilized. the finding revealed that: (1) students were aware of the learning which is based on project and understand critical thinking; (2) students perceived creating youtube video project in learning the topic of english for medical as a tool to facilitate critical thinking skill; (3) students demonstrated their satisfactory improvement in english for medical; and (4) students were aware of digital literacy to support their future career and lifelong learning. meanwhile, the documentation of youtube video shows that students’ video uploading onto youtube were excellent in term of length, content accuracy, and presentation. their works were weakened by their unfamiliarity of how to create an effective youtube video. consequently, youtube video is unclear if it would be widely utilized, particularly, for those who intend to learn english for medical. this implied that students’ critical thinking skill in creating a project needs improvement. keywords: critical thinking; english for medical; project-based learning; youtube video mailto:dedehrohayati2017@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4360 dedeh rohayati & etika rachmawati the impacts of creating youtube video project to facilitate students’ critical thinking 324 synthesis, and evaluation. that is not all, the educators also must be aware of the utilization of the relevant teaching strategy that trigger students critical thinking, for example, project-based learning (saliba, mussleman, fernandes, & bendriss, 2017). this kind of approach provides students the opportunity of designing, planning, carrying out the large project to produce artefact or public output such as product, publication, or presentation (patton, 2012). moreover, it must be kept in mind that utilization of project assessment should match the characteristics of learners in 21st century who are categorized as digital natives and think fast (jones & shao, 2011; alanazi, 2013; pratama & abdullah, 2015; pratama, 2018), in particular, the inclusion of information and communication technology competencies (dooley & masats, 2011; artello, 2013; topps, helmer, & ellaway, 2013; june, yaacob, & kheng, 2014). one of information and communication technology competencies is creating a youtube video. as one of top rate video websites (brunner, 2013) for teaching media, youtube video might become an effective project-based assessment to reveal students’ ability in critical thinking. unlike the others studies, the present study is not focused on how to lead the students to learn by project based learning along the teaching and learning process because there was online lecturing along the semester. in the present study, the researcher asked the students for making a project of youtube video substituting their midterm test by adapting the idea of dooley & masats (2011), topps, helmer, & ellaway (2013), and bloom (1956) as given in figure 1. also, it is intended to fulfill the objective of the present study regarding the alternative way to facilitate students’ critical thinking. of course, the characteristics of project based learning is exemplified during and until the submitting of their working; so does the critical thinking skill in creating a youtube video. many researchers are intrigued by the topic related to the present study (june, yaacob, & kheng, 2014; lubis, lubis, & purba, 2020; wahyudin, 2017). lubis et al. (2014) found that integrating project-based learning with telegram as media digital is effective to share video and absolutely effects on students’ communication skill. similarly, june, et al. (2020) endeavored youtube video as an effective tool to stimulate students’ learning and improving their critical thinking. so did wahyudin (2017) who employed project based learning in english for business class with the result that students who learn english for business through project based learning outperforms those who learns english for business by using presentation, practice, and production (ppp). it is unfortunate that based on previous studies aforementioned, none of them focuses on creating youtube video project in learning the topic of english for medical to facilitate critical thinking. for this reason, this study was intended to sketch how the students organized themselves to create a youtube video project, in particular, depict the impact of creating a youtube video project in learning english for medical to facilitate students’ critical thinking skill. method as previously mentioned, this study aimed at finding out the impact of creating youtube video project in learning the topic of english for medical to facilitate students’ critical thinking skill. the study implemented the qualitative paradigm with the type of case study involved six third year students majoring english department enrolling esp program development course (the specialization course). they worked in pairs and played role based on their own selected situation and character focusing on the topic of english for medical. the respondents grouping into three group were selected purposively because it was based on the researcher judgment at which they provided the researcher the sufficient data. they were required to accomplish the project as a substitution of midterm test in the form of creating three-minutes video clip that had to be uploaded onto youtube. the frameworks used in the present study was based on the framework of topps, helmer, & ellaway (2013), dooley & masats (2011) and bloom (1956). there were three selected topics of conversation held by each group: conversation between obstetrician and patients, conversation between doctor and patients, and conversation between pharmacist and patients. as the primary data, the online semi structured interview (via whatsapp video call) employing seven open ended questions was conducted due to the fact that the lecturing was at the time of the covid-19 pandemic; so there was not traditional lecturing. to follow abdgani, rathakrishnan, & krishnasamy (2020), the validity and reliability of interview questions were administered through the pilot test using three steps of the interview procedures session: (1) pre-interview stage, (2) during the interview stage, and (3) post-interview english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 325 stage. it was piloted to the cohort students; so, the instrument was considered valid and reliable. figure 1. framework of project on creating 3-minutes video clips uploading onto youtube channel another primary data was documentation of youtube video created by students containing students’ playing a role on three situation of english for medical, among others, pair 1 took the character of obstetrician and patient, pair 2 played role of doctor and patient, and pair 3 conducted the conversation between pharmacist and patients. in conducting the project, students were required to determine the setting, the appropriate property, etc. the creating of three-minutes youtube video project was employed in this study for it has been widely utilized and very effective to accommodate the character of project based learning, english for specific learning purposes (wahyudin, 2017), and facilitate critical thinking skill. meanwhile, the use of roleplaying was intended to assess students’ linguistics competencies on the related topic. table 1. scoring rubric 4 3 2 1 argument 30pts the video clearly and convincingly expresses why the text best embodies the essence of the topic chosen and the culture of its time. argument is supported by evidence from the text and historical context. the video clearly and somewhat convincingly expresses why the text best embodies the essence of the topic chosen and the culture of its time. argument is supported by some evidences from the text and historical context. the video expresses why the text best embodies the essence of topic chosen and the culture of its time, but does so vaguely and unconvincingly. argument is supported by little evidence from the text and historical context. the purpose of the video is unclear. the argument is not developed or supported by any relevant evidence. presentation 30pts video is visually interesting and approach is extremely creative. many props and/or costumes enhance the presentation. if video is visually interesting and approach is fairly creative. some props and/or costumes are used and are relevant, but do not enhance the video is somewhat dull visually and not very creative. few props and/or costumes are used, and they are barely relevant to the video is visually uninteresting. no props or costumes are used. if additional music is used, it is irrelevant to the dedeh rohayati & etika rachmawati the impacts of creating youtube video project to facilitate students’ critical thinking 326 additional music is added, the music compliments the piece and does not overpower other audio. presentation. if additional music is added, the music somewhat compliments the piece and may overpower other audio at times. presentation. if additional music is used, it does little to compliment the piece, and often overpowers other audio. presentation and often overpowers other audio. content accuracy 20pts content of movie is 100% historically accurate. the information presented is extremely relevant to the overall topic. content of movie is 100% historically accurate, however, the information presented is peripheral to the overall topic. content is less than historically accurate. the information presented does not do a good job conveying the overall topic. content is inaccurate or incomplete. information chosen is not relevant to the overall topic. length 20pts video is between 2 and 4 minutes long. video is more than 1 minute over or under the time limit. video is more than 1 minute and 30 seconds over or under the time limit. video is more than 2 minutes over or under the time limit the interview data was analyzed by the following steps: transcribing, categorizing, condensing, and interpreting (brinkmann & kvale, 2014). subsequently, the interview result was formulated into four central themes, among others: (1) students’ awareness of the project based learning; (2) students’ awareness of critical thinking; (3) students’ improvement in english for medical such as mastering the terms and expression in conversation between obstetrician and patients, doctor and patients, and pharmacist and patients; 4) students’ awareness of information, communication technology competences to support their future career and lifelong learning. meanwhile, the youtube video performing the role playing of the students on english for medical was rated by scoring rubric adopted from www.rcampus.com (see table 1). subsequently, it was analyzed by using the project idea of dooly & massats (2011) and topps, helmer, & ellaway (2013), as well as bloom (1956) regarding the critical thinking theory. findings and discussion the result of the study was obtained from the interview which were analyzed thematically and the documentations of youtube video which were processed by scoring rubric. those were aimed to answer the research question regarding the impact of creating youtube video project in learning the topic of english for medical to facilitate students’ critical thinking skill. there are five significant impacts resulting from the analyzed interview data which reflected students’ attitudes towards creating the project of youtube video in learning the topic of english for medical to facilitate students’ critical thinking skill. second, students’ project in the form of youtube video documentation were analyzed by using scoring rubric. those are to be presented in the following organization. students’ attitudes towards creating a youtube video project in learning material of english for medical the first central themes deal with students’ awareness of the project based learning as given in table 2. table 2. students’ awareness of the project based learning no. questions students’ answers 1 what do you know about project-based learning pbl? project-based learning is a learning method at which the activity employs medium of projects…is a learning method that provides students the opportunity to explore, assess, interpret, and present various product forms of learning outcomes…it also provides a direct experience because pbl involves project…is a teaching method in which students actively engage their knowledge and skills in real-world and meaningful personal projects. 2. elaborate the steps of pbl! preparation, questioning, planning and designing, researching, and producing product, performing a product, assessing the outcome, evaluating. http://www.rcampus.com/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 327 based on table 2, it indicates that students understood the theory and the implementation of project based learning as learning approach. furthermore, the keyword of project characterizing the outcome of the project based learning approach has been mentioned by all of students. students’ understanding on the intended theory shows students’ positive attitudes towards project based learning which can accommodate students’ engagement as well as students’ centeredness. connecting to documentation of youtube video, the project created by students was not doubtful to be similar with the framework of topps, helmer, & ellaway (2013) and dooley & masats (2011). students commenced the project by their linguistics competencies on english for medical. it was embedded by other competencies such as digital literacy or information, communication and technology competencies, and critical thinking skill. thus, those evidences were consistent with what has been said by patton (2012) regarding the steps and the definition of project based learning. similarly, the students also have been familiar with the term of critical thinking. as can be seen in table 3, students offered several keywords of critical thinking such as “what to do and what to believe” (judgment or evaluation), questioning, and problem solving. students’ opinion might be implied that someone who has been equipped by the critical thinking ability would become a valuable person in the future, lead her/ him to be a creative person. as far as it was concerned, the creativity representing someone’s higher order thinking level would be more demanded in the 21st century skill. table 3. students’ awareness of critical thinking no. questions answers 3 what do you know about critical thinking? critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. it includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following: understand the logical connections between ideas… means thinking critically in seeing something…critical thinking is an act of responding to the information we receive by considering all aspects related to that information… the ability to think critically, or continue to question until finally finding a solution. critical thinking involves creativity and the desire to keep finding out so that we can become someone who has good thinking skills…critical thinking is the ability to think rationally and clearly in understanding the logical connections between ideas. when you think critically, you think of the best solution to a problem in an organized manner. 4 what do you think about creating youtube video project in learning material of english for medical in improving your critical thinking skill? how does it flow! critical thinking skills will be easier to be facilitated…there are so much contents on you tube, so we have to select, to learn, to think critically in learning english for medical…creating youtube video for english for medical can improve critical thinking, because with pbl we must be able to think critically to solve a problem, complete a project, and find solutions to these problems, so students will think critically…it can improve critical thinking skills because english for medical learning is designed and oriented towards high-level skills so that students are able to analyze, evaluate, create, and solve problems. promote interaction among students as they learn. learning in a group setting often helps each member achieve more. ask open-ended questions that do not assume “one right answer.” critical thinking is often exemplified best when the problems are inherently illdefined and don't have a “right” answer…by analyzing, observing and making conclusions during the creation of youtube video, somebody are motivated to think critically and deliver criticism…and to have the character of hard work, creativity, curiosity, respect and love reading achievement…students are given instructions about a project that will be done about english for medical, then students will think critically about working on the project, then students look for solutions by making youtube video about english for medical….learning activities using the pbl model begin with giving a problem, the problems presented relate to the real life of the students, organizing the discussion around the problem, not discussing around scientific disciplines, students are given maximum responsibility in establishing and carrying out the learning process directly. students are formed into several small group. students are required to demonstrate the product or performance…critical thinking skills in working on a youtube video project in learning english for medical have improved, because while working on the project i was required to think critically so that the project was completed dedeh rohayati & etika rachmawati the impacts of creating youtube video project to facilitate students’ critical thinking 328 well. and it was satisfying, because with this project i was able to improve my critical thinking, and the video results were very satisfying….my critical thinking skills in doing the project youtube video in learning english for medical have improved because when i made the video i was trained to think critically about how to finish the video properly so that the results obtained can be satisfying. apart from their understanding towards the theory of critical thinking, they agreed that their critical thinking skill was more easily triggered and improved during the process of the project. they were able to deliver opinion which linked to what were stated by reichenbach (2001) and (chaffee, 2014) regarding judgment as the final step of critical thinking skill. also, they elaborated the way the critical thinking is facilitated in creating youtube video project in learning material of english for medical. students’ statements implied that the process of creating the project and critical thinking skill went hand in hand. their satisfying final project led them to feel contented because at the beginning they seem to realize that in the internet of thing era, critical thinking skill is a must. the students’ answer linked to sharadgah (2014) in that critical thinking would be ultimate developed in the accessible internet environment. thus, it is fair to say that students’ opinions represented the generation of 4.0 era at which they have been familiar with any kinds of social media and learning platform. connecting to taxonomy bloom on the level of thinking, it is indeed that they have successfully demonstrated their critical thinking skill. they needed several steps including gaining and comprehend the knowledge of the related topic, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating the resources to produce the satisfying project of product. they seemed to believe that the major requirement in creating the project is critical thinking skill. this assumption is relevant with statement proposed by saliba, mussleman, fernandes, & bendriss (2017). another central theme discusses something about students’ improvement in english for medical. as can be seen in table 4, it was found that students gained a very fruitful result after creating the project. table 4. students’ improvement in english for medical no. questions answers 5. what improvements did you obtain after creating a youtube video project in learning material of english for medical? creating youtube video project in learning the material of english for medical provides student the opportunity to broadly improve students’ knowledge on english for medical as well as their english proficiency…it improve learning outcome of english for medical, self-directed/ self-regulated learning…after creating youtube video project in learning english for medical, we were was able to speak some vocabulary about english for medical and understand the types of conversational english for medical in various situations. based on table 4, students elaborated their improvement in linguistics, especially vocabulary and the type of discourse format, and language skill aspect, in particular, speaking skill. implicitly, students were encouraged to have a high and accurate english proficiency and trained to be a skillful teacher on the topic of english for medical. this might become a pathway for all of practitioners who teach english for specific purposes to apply learning which is based on project, as proposed by wahyudin (2017). differently, he focused on the implementation of teaching students english for business without exploring students’ critical thinking. regarding creating a youtube video as a substitution for midterm or final test, it is considered effective for assessment. this is consistent with pratama & abdullah (2015) although they did not dig out deeply the critical thinking skill during the implementation of project based learning as well as the analyzing the project using critical thinking theory. the last central theme is regarding the students’ awareness of information, communication, and technology competencies to support their future career and lifelong learning, as given in table 5. students were also sure that, nowadays, the process of teaching learning would be best to involve technologies which can be accessed by internet. in addition, they also realized themselves who are considered as digital natives and always think fast. implicitly, this english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 329 interpretation linked to what has been said by jones & shao (2011) and alanazi (2013) regarding the categorization of young people and students’ enthusiasm on the use of technology. students were also sure that, nowadays, the process of teaching learning would be best to involve technologies which can be accessed by internet. table 5. students’ awareness of digital literacy to support their future career and lifelong learning no. questions answers 6. what do you think about creating a youtube video project? i think creating youtube video has become a very popular for students nowadays, moreover they have been accustomed to learn everything through this application in internet environment…creating a youtube video is effective media in pbl because it facilitates students’ thinking, analytical and imaginative skill, motivation, and enthusiasm…the inclusion of creating a youtube video in pbl is used to present an image and sound representation of an idea or event so that it becomes a material collection for learning beyond lecturing and reading a book….the use of youtube video match the young generation demand who tend to have more various way of learning. 7. based on your opinion, explain how can the creating of youtube video prepares you for a professional career and lifelong learning? explain! it can prepare us for in professional careers because we are not only studying the material of english for medical but also learning the process of creating youtube as a popular application for student. so, we can earn money if we can navigate it as well as possible…pbl with youtube accommodates students’ analytical skill that is needed in the future career and the world which is very competitive…the application of project based learning with youtube videos will be very useful and very supportive of future careers, because the process of creating youtube video project involves the ability to solve the problem. this experience will be very useful in the future. the calculation of youtube video scoring relating to critical thinking skill as previously mentioned, the documentations of youtube video were then scored by using scoring rubric adopted from www.rcampuscom. in general, students’ work uploaded onto youtube are excellent and satisfying in three aspects, namely, length, content accuracy, and presentation, with the obtained score of each video created by students valued 4. it is unfortunate that the students’ works were weakened by the aspect of argument at which the students did not attach subtitle or any captain accompanying what expression they were uttered uploading onto the video. consequently, all students work fulfilled the criteria of 1. the calculation of youtube video scoring are described in table 6. table 6. the calculation of youtube video scoring aspects description score argument the purpose of the video is unclear. the argument is not developed or supported by any relevant evidence. 1 presentation video is visually interesting and approach is extremely creative. many props and/or costumes enhance the presentation. if additional music is added, the music compliments the piece and does not overpower other audio. 4 content accuracy content of movie is 100% historically accurate. the information presented is extremely relevant to the overall topic. 4 length video is between 2 and 4 minutes long. 4 table 6 indicates that students followed the instruction well which means that they gained knowledge by reading the instruction given before creating the project. the accuracy of the content was also obtained through their comprehension knowledge on english for medical. this was followed by their ability of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation in order to produce and present the project. only the argument aspect that had the least of all aspects because the students did not include the subtitle or any captain text accompanying what they were uttered in video. the intended argument in the project created by the students of the present study refers to the http://www.rcampuscom/ dedeh rohayati & etika rachmawati the impacts of creating youtube video project to facilitate students’ critical thinking 330 reason, as well as fact, as suggested by reichenbach (2001), why the video was created. the purpose of the creating youtube video seemed to be difficult to be answered as an authentic material for those who would like to learn english for medical. meanwhile, the future learners who would use this video would also like to learn all aspect of english productive and receptive skill, both orally and written accurately, that would occur hand in hand. it was unfortunate that there were not subtitle to prove that the video youtube can be utilize for developing student english proficiency, mainly in listening skill and recognizing written vocabulary. yet, it must be admitted that students’ project represented their innovative work due to the contribution of internet environment. this is relevant with hermariyanti & ferawaty (2016) who conduct the research on the topic of electronic based writing, however, resulting in the same idea in that the internet accessibility made any students’ work innovative. connecting to critical thinking skill, the documentation of youtube video created by students reflected their critical thinking skill referring to taxonomy bloom. students’ knowledge on creating the project was based on their ability in searching the information. the intended information consisted of how to have a comprehensive knowledge of linguistics competences and information, computer, and technology competencies. after comprehending the information regarding the way to create youtube video containing english for medical, students applied those informations which is in the form of instruction. it was followed by analyzing each information of procedure and resources to be utilized in creating a youtube video. all of procedures and resources were synthesized, then, the students made evaluation towards the obtained procedures and resources. after making evaluation, it was obtained all resources to be employed in creating a youtube video. finally, the project final product was uploaded onto youtube channel. seeing the students’ critical thinking skill reflected on youtube video, it implied that students have a high reading comprehension skill. meanwhile, the reading comprehension correlate to the ability of critical thinking (hidayati, indrawati, & loeneto, 2020). the intended reading activity deals with reading instruction or procedure in creating the project and reading the world which is getting global and competitive. conclusion the present study has discussed the impacts of creating youtube video to facilitate students’ critical thinking. it has been revealed not only students’ attitudes towards creating the projects, but also students’ competencies in the area of linguistics, information, communication, and technology, as well as critical thinking. regarding the linguistics competencies, students become more proficient in spoken english for medical, master the related vocabulary, and recognize the discourse format on related topic. with regards to the competency of information, communication, and technology, students begin to have a comprehensive knowledge of creating the content of youtube video, particularly that can be used widely for learning english for medical. despite the fact that students’ critical thinking still need improvement, the present study exemplifies students’ critical thinking reflection. in addition, the final products might become evidence that students are insisted to share the video widely in order to be used by those who wants to learn english for medical. however, the research would seem to be significantly intriguing best if only the research involved various instrument and rich data. therefore, the future research is suggested to broadly utilize the methodologies which lead to the rationale research result. references abdgani, n. i., rathakrishnan, m., & krishnasamy, h. n. 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(2021). loanwords in barack obama's inaugural speech. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 235-244. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5383 received: 03-07-2021 accepted: 23-09-2021 published: 31-12-2021 abstract: the purpose of this research is to examine the types of loanwords used in obama's inaugural speech. the loanword theory of haugen (loanword, loan blend, and loan shift) and yule's theory of word creation were adopted in this research. it used a qualitative approach to describe the before-after borrow pattern, the types of loanwords, and the process of word formation. the data indicates that sixteen words are part of loan blend; nine words are part of loan shift; and one word is a loanword. while based on word formation, it is revealed that the borrowing word formation process includes twenty-six words and the derivation word formation process involves sixteen words. keywords: loanword, word-formation; morphological process; speech introduction loanwords are words that have been borrowed from another language and introduced into our language (kunert, 2020; luikham & singh, 2017; ma'nawi & hadi, 2021; xiao, 2020; yunusova, 2021). in addition, another concept, linguistic borrowing, describes similar situation, which is the adaptation of a linguistic expression from one language into another (ciobanu & dinu, 2020; koliopoulou, 2020; marello, 2020; muziatun, 2017). loanwords are constructed to fill in the gaps in vocabulary development and enrichment, allowing people to maintain up with the rapid advancement of technology, information, and communication. however, due to the fact that people learn other languages and incorporate them into their own, many people believe that all foreign words are loanwords, which is not the case. this is also true in the english language. not all english terms have their origins in the english language. it has been said by luikham and singh (2017) that in today's world of globalization, borrowing has become a need for effective communication. when people need to name a certain object, idea or concept, or process that does not currently exist in our native languages, they are faced with a lexical difficulty. consequently, that problem might be solved by borrowing a word from another language where they have the potential to be used in actual situations. this borrowing word might be continuously used by the majority of people and perhaps be adapted as the standardization of native language in a country. moreover, a language that has been borrowed from another language might provide names to objects that do not exist in the language it has been borrowed from (muziatun, 2017). as a nutshell, this process of borrowing a word may occur when two or more languages come into regular contact with one another. morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies loanwords and how they are formed. morphology has often been defined as the study of form and the process of word formation (arkadiev, 2020; gardani, 2021; ralli, 2020; rzepiela, 2020; waqar & hussain, 2021; xu, kodner, marcus, & yang, 2020). the loanwords could be found in both spoken and written language. loanwords are utilized in various types of broadcast media such as radio, television, and advertising (chaa, 2021; kitanina & trukhanova, 2020; muziatun, 2017; tran & tanemura, 2020; yaniar & masrokhah, 2021). furthermore, because of the broadcast media and the cultural mailto:muziatun@ung.ac.id mailto:muzdalifah.mahmud@ung.ac.id mailto:fatiahanapi5@gmail.com muziatun, muzdalifah mahmud, & fatia hanapi loanwords in barack obama's inaugural speech 236 interaction that exists between people from diverse language backgrounds, the phenomena of borrowing and re-borrowing words is quite plausible. the present research will provide an insight at oral/spoken language. the speech made by barack obama during his first inauguration will be the subject of the investigation. it will concentrate on obama's speech since his ability to communicate effectively is one of his greatest assets (hill, 2020; o'donnell, 2021; rahayu, susilo, & sunardi, 2018). the majority of the reasons for obama's decisive win may be attributed to his eloquent speech. furthermore, there are many words in the speech that have been borrowed from another language, and it is possible that the majority of people are unaware of the origins of the words used. the term "lexical borrowing" or "borrowing" is commonly used to describe a loanword (alathwary, 2021; anggraeni, 2021; anggraeni, 2016; geller & gajek, 2020; muziatun, 2017). it has been defined as a word that entered a language's lexicon by borrowing (or transfer, or copying) at some time in its history. the term "loanword" has been described by campbell (2004) as a "lexical thing" that is borrowed from a source language but does not become part of the beneficiary language's lexicon. therefore, loanwords can be said as words that have been borrowed and adopted to a certain language and treated as if their own. the present research is focused on the types of loanwords offered by haugen's (1950) theory, which was developed in the 1970s. it is widely acknowledged that haugen's theory is one of the most dependable theories in the field of linguistic borrowing. principally, he classified loanwords into three types: the loanword type, the loan blend type, and the loan shift type. the first type is loanword that demonstrates morphemic importation but does not demonstrate substitution. it is frequently a combination of copying both the word's form and its meaning. the next type of loan is a loan blend. as the name suggests, a loan blend is often created by blending the word of the foreign language with the words of a native language. the last category is loan shift, which refers to a word that undergoes morphemic substitution without being imported. as a result, this implies that only its meaning is borrowed. in addition to haugen's (1950) theory of loanword classification, this research will offer yule's (2016) theory of word creation to simply investigate the process of word formation. according to yule, there are 10 distinct processes through which a word is formed. they are coinage, borrowing, compunding, blending, clipping, back-formation, conversion, acronym, derivation, and multiple process. method the qualitative method was used in the undertaking of this research. using a qualitative method was necessary for this research since it revealed in detail to the readers how language performs in a wide range of personal, social, and environmental contexts. in accordance with silverman (2020), qualitative research is defined as studies in which descriptive data in the form of verbal and other non-numerical data is utilized as the foundation for analysis and problem solving. for the purposes of this research, the nonnumerical data consists of the utterances of barack obama throughout his address, which makes this type of method particularly appropriate for the data presented in this research. as previously indicated, the loanwords used in the speech provided the basis for this present investigation's data. this data has been examined in accordance with certain criteria. firstly, the merriam webster dictionary was utilized to acquire a definition of the word identified. second, this study was limited to the noun form of the word. this decision was supported by earlier works (ali, hassan, karamat, & aleem, 2021; matiki, 2016; meakins, pensalfini, zipf, & hamilton-hollaway, 2020; muziatun, 2017; schreur, 2021), which shown that nouns are more easily borrowed than other lexical elements. as a result, it is not unexpected given the abundance of evidence in the literature that nouns are more often borrowed than the other parts of speech. third, just the pure noun would be taken into account (there are no changes in word classes). fourth, this current research concentrated on old english (french, germanic, and latinic languages), as suggested by the merriam webster dictionary. it was due to the fact that the old english (french, german, and latin) had a higher proportion of indicated loanwords than the other languages. according to zhou (2016), the china national knowledge infrastructure revealed that 29 percent french, 29 percent german, and 6 percent latin are the most often utilized languages in teaching english loanwords. fifth, this current research only looked at the 12th and 13th centuries. it is because, according to the history of english, the period in which english borrowed more words from old english began in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 237 the 12th century and ended in the 13th century (finegan, 2014), the period in which english borrowed more words from old english ended in the 13th century (thu, 2018). loanwords are examined in various stages: checking, selection, exclusion, categorization, and explanation. the word was checked at the stage of checking using the merriam webster dictionary since this study was limited to words that included a noun. then, in the selecting step, the word classified as a noun was chosen. this is because the research's constraint is a noun. then, in a different color and meaning, highlight the noun identified. there are three separate categories for each of the three colors. the red color represents a word that is not a pure noun since it becomes another component of speech (adjective, verb, pronoun, etc). the green color represents a noun, typically attributive, and its function is to explain other nouns in the same way that an adjective does. the blue color denotes the pure noun. the next stage is exclusion; only a pure noun or the color blue was taken. after excluding them, they are classified into old english (french, german, and latin) and the 12th as well as 13th centuries. the meaning of the word, its original pattern before borrowing, the forms of loanwords it contains (loanword, loan blend, and loan shift), and the process by which the word was formed were all then described in straightforward detail. results and discussion the data for this research was gathered from barack obama's first inauguration speech, which took place on january 20, 2009. this president obama's speech has 2408 words (including the repetitions). as a result, his whole speech included just 809 words. after identifying 809 words, they were examined toward the merriam webster dictionary to determine if they were classified as a noun. table 1. types of nouns types of nouns total numbers non-pure nouns 352 words attributive nouns 33 words pure nouns 153 words total nouns 538 words there were 538 words in all that were classified as nouns. only 153 of the 538 nouns were considered pure nouns, which will serve as the basis for the majority of the data in this study. these 153 pure nouns were then classified according to their old english (french, german, and latin) origins, as well as those from the 12th and 13th centuries. the final selection revealed that this category of data had just 26 words. as a result of this large datasets, it can be determined that barack obama did not overuse borrowing words of old english from either the 12th and 13th centuries in his speech. types of loanwords these twenty-six nouns were classified into three main categories in accordance with haugen's proposed loanword classification. to begin, loanword identified only one word (deserts); loan blend revealed sixteen words (gift, grace, office, age, measure, riches, fame, places, habits, route, perils, charter, sake, cause, tribe, virtue); and loan shift revealed nine words (skill, choices, rule, forge, heritage, hatreds, duties, price, enemy). regarding the distribution of the whole data, it can be concluded that barack obama used a greater amount of loanwords that fall into the loan blend category in his speech than other categories of loanwords in general. table 2. types of loanwords types of loanwords result loanword the word that has been directly borrowed from another language. the pattern that existed before and after the loan remained unchanged. deserts loan blend the word was a combination of the source language and the recipient language. the pattern adopted the beginning and end of the language as its starting and ending points. gift grace office age measure riches fame places habits route perils charter sake cause tribe virtue loan shift only the meaning of the word has been borrowed, and the word's physical form has been completely altered. skill choices rule forge heritage hatreds duties price enemy deserts the word "deserts" is included in this data since it muziatun, muzdalifah mahmud, & fatia hanapi loanwords in barack obama's inaugural speech 238 originates from the anglo-french and was taken into english in the 13th century, according to merriam webster dictionary. "deserts" is a plural noun with the suffix –s added to the basic word "desert". according to merriam webster dictionary, the term "deserts" refers to arid area with often-scant flora. this word is represented in the category of loanword. it shown that the pattern previously borrowed is "desert" and that the pattern in english now is same. this word is borrowed throughout the process of word formation. gift. the word "gift" was included in the dataset since it was the 12th century borrowing from old english. according to merriam webster dictionary, the word "gift" refers to anything that is given without compensation by one person to another. this word is included in loan blend category of loanwords since the pattern was "giefan" before it was borrowed and modified to "gift." in modern english, the suffix –ft replaces the suffix –efan in old english. the suffix blended because it adapted to the receiving language's standards. yule's theory classified this term as referring to the borrowing and derivation processes of word formation. this word was included into the derivation since the process of affixation takes place in this word. grace the word "grace" is considered as a borrowing due to its origins in latin in the 12th century. according to the merriam webster dictionary, "grace" is a divine attribute. the latin pattern is "gratia," which becomes "grace" in english. it demonstrated that this word was included into the loan blend. this is because of the suffix –tia from latin evolved into –ce in english. oftentimes, the suffix of the word blends into the receiving language. this word is a result of borrowing and derivation during the process of word formation. then, this word was included in the derivation since the process of affixation performed in this word. office the word "office" is included in the borrowing since it was taken from latin in the 13th century. according to merriam webster dictionary, the word "office" refers to a location where a certain kind of business is conducted or a service is provided. this word is listed in loan blend categories because the pattern before the borrowing is "officium", which becomes "office" in english. in english, the suffix –ium is shortened to –e. additionally, the form combines the word from the other source language with the word from the receiving language. this word is a product of borrowing and derivation during the process of word formation. then, this word was included in the derivation since the process of affixation happened in this word. age in the 13th century, english adopted the word "age" from anglo-french. according to merriam webster dictionary, "age" refers to the stage of life in which a certain quality, power, or ability develops or ceases to exist. this word is listed in loan blend classifications because the pattern before the borrowing is "aage", which becomes "age" in english. in english, the prefix ahas been omitted. this word is categorized into a borrowing and derivation during the process of word formation. “age” was included in the derivation since the process of affixation occurred in this word. measure the word "measure" is included in borrowing since it was taken from latin in the 13th century by the english language. in the merriam webster dictionary, the word "measure" is defined as the dimensions, capacity, or quantity of anything, and it is included in the loan blend forms of loanword. there has been a shift in the pattern of the word "measure" from "mensra" to "measure." the infix –n changed to become –a, and the suffix –a changed to become –e in english, as can be seen from the shifting pattern given above. in most cases, the suffix of the word blends into the recipient's native language. the word "measure" is included in the borrowing and derivation processes that occur throughout the wordformation process since the process of affixation performed in this word. riches the word "riches" is classified as a borrowing word since it originates in anglo-french and was first used in english in the 13th century. according to the merriam webster dictionary, the definition of this word is the things that make one wealthy. "riches" is derived from the word "rich" with the suffix –es added as a plural identifier. the word "riches" is included in the loanword blend category, since the pattern in the past was "richesce," which was then blended into "riches" english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 239 when borrowed in english. the suffix –ce was dropped from anglo-french in english. affixation took place in the word-formation process, making this a borrowing word derivation. fame this word "fame" is included in borrowing since english took this word from latin in the 13th century. in the merriam webster dictionary, "famous" is defined as "public acclaim". while "famma" was the original latin word, "fame" became the english equivalent. it was evident that this word was part of the borrowing blend. for reasons that have to do with the standardizing of the receiving language, latin's suffixes –ma have evolved into english's -e. in the process of word formation, the word "fame" has been included in derivation since the affixation procedure took place. places english borrowed the word "places" from latin in the 13th century. the merriam webster dictionary defines "places" as the physical environment in which an event happens. this word demonstrates a plural noun by including the suffix –s, whereas the underlying word is "place". the english word "places" is derived from the latin word "platea". this word is included in the loan blend because the suffix –tea merged with –ce in english to represent an example of borrowing in which the source and recipient languages are generally merged. since the process of affixation occurred in this word, it is included in a borrowing derivation during the word-formation process. habits this word "habits" is included since english inherited it from latin in the 13th century. according to the merriam webster dictionary, this term refers to a customary method of behaving. the word "habits" is a plural noun involves the addition of the suffix –s, but the root word is "habit". this word is included in the loan blend because the original latin form is "habitus", and when english took it, the suffix –us was eliminated, resulting in the term "habit". it demonstrated that this word was accepted as a result of the receiving language's standardization. due to the affixation process, this word is included in a borrowing derivation during the word-formation process. route according to the merriam-webster dictionary, the term "route" refers to a channel of communication. this term was first used in the 13th century and came from anglo-french. according to haugen, this term is included in the loan blend types of loanword. it demonstrated that the pattern previously borrowed is spelled "rute", but in english it is spelled "route". after the term was borrowed into english, the infix –owas removed from it. this word is included in the borrowing derivation since the process of affixation took place in this particular term. perils "perils", according to the merriam-webster dictionary, are things that are dangerous. this term was first used in the 13th century and was derived from latin. this term is a plural noun due to the inclusion of the suffix –s in the word, despite the fact that the root of the word is "peril." the pattern that was previously borrowed was "perculum," which in english is rendered as "peril." after being borrowed into english, the suffix –culum was eliminated and merged with the suffix -l to get the final form. this word is categorized as borrowing derivation. inclusion of this word in the borrowing derivation is based on the fact that the process of affixation took place in this word. charter according to merriam-webster dictionary, the word "charter" is a gift or reward letter comprising a written declaration of an official character. in the 13th century, the term "charter" was taken from latin. originally called "chartula," the pattern is now known as "charter" in the english language. it is because the suffix – ula in latin has been changed to –er in english to keep up with the language norm. the affixation process took place in this word, therefore it is included in the borrowing derivation. sake “sake” is defined as a benefit or advantage for some entity in the merriam-webster dictionary. old high german was the source of this term, which was first used in the 13th century. the word "sake" is included in the loan blend because the pattern before borrowed was "sahha", but in english it is "sake". when translating from old high german, the suffix –hha became –ke in the english language. this word is included in borrowing derivation in the word-formation process because of the affixation process that happened in this word. muziatun, muzdalifah mahmud, & fatia hanapi loanwords in barack obama's inaugural speech 240 causes according to merriam-webster dictionary, the term "cause" refers to anything that has a direct influence on something else. it was taken from latin in the 13th century. this term is part of a loanword blend, since the latin suffix –a became –e in english via blending with the suffix –e. the latin word "causa" was used before it was changed to "cause" in english. this word is included in the borrowing derivation since the process of affixation took place in this word. tribe according to the merriam-webster dictionary, a "tribe" is a social group made up of a large number of families, clans, or generations who live in close proximity to one another. it was first used in the 13th century and was derived from latin. the pattern that was previously borrowed was "tribus", but in english it is referred to as "tribe". due to the fact that the suffix –us in the latin pattern blended becomes -e after being borrowed into english, it is apparent that this word is included in the loan blend types of loanwords category. inclusion of this word in the borrowing derivation is based on the fact that the process of affixation took place in this word. virtue “virtue”, according to the merriam-webster dictionary, is defined as a quality of moral perfection that is distinct from others. this term was first used in the 13th century and was derived from latin. the pattern that was previously borrowed was "virtut", but in english it is represented as "virtue". it demonstrates how the suffix –t in "virtut" was mixed to get the suffix –e in "virtue". it was determined from the description of the word that this word is included in the loan blend kinds of loanword because the word was blended at the conclusion of it. inclusion of this word in the borrowing derivation is based on the fact that the process of affixation took place in this word. skill according to the merriam-webster dictionary, the definition of the word "skill" is the capacity to employ one's knowledge effectively and quickly in the execution of a task. this word was first used in the 13th century and was derived from old english. this word is included in the loan shift since only the meaning of the word borrowed and the pattern are completely different. it demonstrated that the term "scille" had been previously borrowed and had been completely modified to conform to the english standard, and had become "skill". yule incorporates this term into the borrowing of the word-formation process. choices merriam-webster dictionary defines "choices" as the process of making a decision. the word "choice" is the root of this word and the suffix -s indicates a plural version for this word. in the 13th century, it was taken from old high german. this word is included in the loan shift since it is simply the meaning of the word borrowed that has changed, and the pattern as a whole has changed. it shown that the word "kiosan" was before borrowed in english, but that the word "choice" was afterwards imported in english. it demonstrates that the general pattern changes as a result of the borrowing. yule incorporates this word into the process of word development via borrowing. rule generally speaking, "rule" refers to laws or regulations established by the leader and enforced by the members. according to the merriamwebster dictionary, the term "rule" was first used in english in the 13th century after being adopted from latin. this term is one of the loanword types that are included in the loanshift category. this is due to the fact that the pattern that was previously borrowed was "regula", while in english it became "rule". it demonstrates how the pattern changes totally when translated into english. yule includes this word in the borrowing derivation of the word-formation process since the process of affixation took place in this word. forge according to the merriam-webster dictionary, a “forge” is a workplace where wrought iron is created or where iron is rendered malleable. this term was first used in the 13th century and was derived from latin. the design that was previously borrowed is called "fabrica", whereas the english word for it is "forge". it demonstrated that the pattern is entirely different in english. in conclusion, this term is included in the loan shift types of loanword due to the fact that just the meaning of the word has been borrowed, but the pattern has not been. yule incorporates this term into the borrowing of the word-formation process. heritage english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 241 according to the merriam-webster dictionary, the term "heritage" refers to a piece of property that is passed down to a descendant. this term was first used in the 13th century and was derived from latin. the pattern that was previously borrowed was "hērēditāre", which in english becomes "heritage". the term changes once it has been borrowed from the english language. it shown that this term is included in the loan shift since the pattern is different and only the meaning was borrowed. yule incorporates this term into the borrowing of the word-formation process. hatreds according to the merriam-webster dictionary, "hatreds" is a strong detest or disgust. as a plural noun, "hatreds" includes the noun with the suffix –s in the word; the basic word is "hatred". when this term was first used in the 13th century, it was acquired from old english. according to haugen, this term is a loan shift type of loanword. this word “hatred” in english is derived from the old english word "rǣden", which was the pattern before it was borrowed. borrowing completely rearranged the structure of the design. borrowing is a step in the word-formation process that includes this term. duties the word "duties" refers to a plural noun with the suffix –s added to the end of the word, but the original word is "duty". the definition of duty is the required responsibilities, behavior, service, or functions that emerge from one's position and which must be performed without fail. this term was first used in the 13th century and came from anglo-french. the "duty" is included in the loan shift types of loanwords. it shown that the pattern previously borrowed is "deueté", yet the pattern in the english term is completely different. this word is included in the borrowing sequence of the word-formation process. price the word "price" refers to the sum of money offered or established as compensation for the sale of a certain item. in the 13th century, the word "price" was acquired from latin. the pattern was previously borrowed as "pretium", which became "price" in english. it demonstrates that the term completely changes after borrowing and concludes that this is a loanword that shifts loanword types since only the meaning is borrowed. this term is borrowed throughout the process of word creation. enemy an "enemy" as defined by merriam-webster dictionary is someone who opposes another. merriam-webster dictionary also defines "enemy" as a latin term from the 13th century, which is when it was first used in english. the word "enemy" is included in the loan shift. the word "inimicus" was the pattern before it was borrowed, whereas "enemy" is the translation in english. only the meaning of the term borrowed may be deduced, however the pattern cannot. furthermore, depending on the pattern, it is shown that the pattern entirely changes once it is borrowed. this term is involved in the process of word development as a result of borrowing. following the completion of the aforementioned research, it is reasonable to conclude that the great majority of the borrowing words identified in the data were subjected to form modifications. put another way, the bulk of them preserved the meaning that they had when they were brought into the english. among the borrowing words used by obama in this data set, the majority are derived from latin and old english, with a few words from other languages thrown in for good measure. as a result of their inclusion in the merriam webster dictionary, it is reasonable to assume that they have been previously investigated as a manifestation of the development of the english through time. conclusion the purpose of this research is to identify three different kinds of loanwords that appeared in barack obama's first inaugural address. the theory of haugen states that there are three types of loanwords: loanwords that have no phonetic replacement (loanwords), loanwords that have a partial phonetic substitution (loan blends), and loanwords that have a full phonetic substitution (loan shift). the total number of words in all of the data results is twenty-six. the researcher discovered that loanword is made up of sixteen words in the loan blend types, nine words in the loan shift types, and one word in the loanword itself. then, according to yule's hypothesis (2006), twenty-six words were discovered to be involved in the borrowing wordformation process, and sixteen words were found to be involved in the derivation word-formation process. conclusively, the data demonstrate how rapidly english has developed as a consequence muziatun, muzdalifah mahmud, & fatia hanapi loanwords in barack obama's inaugural speech 242 of the borrowing process, making it one of the fastest-growing languages in the world. however, since the concept of language is always evolving and responding to new discoveries, it is essential that this research be carried out today more than ever before. the reason for this is because it is crucial to assess the extent to which language evolves as a consequence of technological advancement. this research may also provide light on the relationship that exists between various languages spoken all over the world, as well as the extent to which these languages influence the evolution of one another. if this can be explored, it may also be possible to study the fact that languages are practically adjacent to one another. as a consequence, it will be much simpler to track down the language contact in concern. references al-athwary, a. a. 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(2021). productivity patterns in morphology: a comparison of english and urdu negative prefixes attached to inherited and borrowed roots. ilkogretim online, 20(5), 37983809 xiao, x. (2020). the study of loanwords in english. journal of contemporary educational research, 4(12). 36-43 xu, h., kodner, j., marcus, m., & yang, c. (2020). modeling morphological typology for unsupervised learning of language morphology. paper presented at the proceedings of the 58th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics. yaniar, e. s., & masrokhah, y. (2021). analysis of the formation of gairaigo in japanese commercial advertisements for the 2016-2020 advertising period (reviewed from morphological studies). paper presented at the 1st annual international conference on natural and social science education (icnsse 2020). yule, g. (2016). the study of language. cambridge, united kingdom: cambridge university press. yunusova, f. v. (2021). the research on some features of turkish loanwords in russian language. journal of global economics and business, 2(7), 99-110. zhou, l.-n. (2016). loan words in modern english and their features. sino-us english teaching, 13(3), 209-212. muziatun, muzdalifah mahmud, & fatia hanapi loanwords in barack obama's inaugural speech 244 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 389 the effect of media guessing game towards university students’ writing ability on descriptive text local tourism content irma khoirot daulay english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of prima indonesia, medan, indonesia e-mail: irmakhoirotdaulay@unprimdn.ac.id nurmahyuni asrul english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of prima indonesia, medan, indonesia e-mail: nurmahyuniasrul@unprimdn.ac.id apa citation: daulay, i. k. & asrul, n. (2021). the effect of media guessing game towards university students’ writing ability on descriptive text local tourism content. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 389-398. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4379 received: 24-02-2021 accepted: 18-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 abstract: this study aims to determine the effect of media guessing games on students’ writing ability on the descriptive text about local tourism. the type of research is quasi-experimental. the population in the research is students of university of prima indonesia. the samples were taken by cluster random sampling which consists of two classes namely the experimental class and the control class and each class consists of 25. the experimental group was taught by guessing game media while the control group was taught by conventional teaching media in writing descriptive text. the instruments used were test sheets for writing and observation sheets. the techniques used in analyzing the data were descriptive statistical analysis and t-test. the finding of the research explained that guessing game media of local tourism content successfully effect students’ ability in writing descriptive text, especially on local tourism content. keywords: guessing game; ability to write text; descriptive text; local tourism introduction one of the language skills which must be mastered by the students who are studying the english language is writing skill. in indonesia, however, writing skill is also considered important, as writing is one of productive english skills that should be masterly skilled by english as foreign language (efl) students in indonesia for written communication and academic writing purposes, such as; letters, essays, papers, articles, journals, project reports, theses, etc. (toba, noor, & sanu, 2019). moreover, the benefits of students having the ability to write are: sharper imagination, mastery of language increases, and increase confidence (oppenheimer, zaromb, pomerantz, william, & park, 2017; yanti, nafri, suhartono, hiasa, & fina, 2018). to be considered, writing is a fairly complex activity because various elements must be applied at once, it is supported by the data found in the writing 1 lesson for the first semester of english language major students in prima indonesia university, only 10 students got 80 points for the lesson, while the other students got the minimum points which below 70. these data showed the ability of students is yet satisfying; it needs the creative media to brainstorm the previous knowledge, to open up the idea, and to improve their ability in writing. on the other hand, by writing, someone can express thoughts or feelings to others. according to ismayanti & kholiq (2020), writing is also considered as the indicator toward the student success in learning english. writing requires a process. as febriyantika & parmawati (2021) stated that writing is not as it were drawing some words on a bit of paper and defining letters together but moreover a combination a process and product, it needs a specialization to combine thought and good product of writing. writing is needed for a form of expression of ideas that is continuous and has a logical sequence by using certain vocabulary and grammar or rules of the language used so that it can describe and present information that is expressed clearly. this in in line with widiastuti & endahati (2020), stating that some important aspects should be considered in writing skill are content, organization, purpose, vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling. moreover, sari, sumarmi, utomo & astina (2021) stated that writing skill shows the quality of student learning. therefore, writing ability can be obtained through https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4379 irma khoirot daulay & nurmahyuni asrul the effect of media guessing game towards university students’ writing ability on descriptive text local tourism content 390 tasks and requires much time. writing is seen as a continuous process (fananie, 2002). it means writing ability is taught at all levels of education. one of the abilities to write is writing descriptive text. according to siahaan (2008), descriptive is a written english text in which the writer describes an object. it is also supported by aryanto (2009), descriptive text is a text which describes a particular person, thing, or place. an effective description will contain sufficient and varied elaboration of details to communicate a sense of the subject being described (yoandita, 2019). therefore, the people who read the descriptive text will know what the person, thing, or place looks like through the writing of the writer. descriptive text is considered as the simple text in learning english. descriptive is saying what somebody or something is like. therefore, it aims to define and expose a specific entity, place, or thing. in other words, a descriptive text is a text that defines someone's attributes, something, or position based on their actual state. one of the forms of text taught in the teaching of english is descriptive text. moreover, a description is a form of writing related to the efforts of the writers to provide details of the object being discussed. in the description, the writer moves his impressions, moves his observations and feelings to the reader, and conveys the nature and all the details of the form that can be found on the object. the descriptive text aims to enable the creation of images in the reader as if the reader saw the object as a whole. descriptive text is writing which mentions the characteristics of an object as a whole, clearly and systematically (zainurrahman, 2011). in writing descriptive text, the researcher must try so that the reader seems to be able to see, experience, feel what is being described. the author must be able to describe in detail using certain vocabulary that is able to provide a "mental picture" of the object felt by the reader. besides, the vocabulary in writing descriptive text must be relevant to the object described, which describes it in real and also abstract terms. in descriptive text learning, three text structures must be understood by students, namely identification, classification, and description. in descriptive writing, the writer tries as much as possible so that the reader seems to be able to see, experience, feel, what is being described (semi, 2007). it is hoped, the descriptive writing about local tourism content give the curiosity for tourist to visit it after reading the powerful description about it. over and above, oshima and hogue (2007) stated that the senses are attracted by descriptive writing, so it says how something looks, feels, smells, tastes, and/or sounds. it is in line with meyers (2005, p.60) that "a scene description allows readers to see, hear, or even feel the subject mat." thus, the purpose of writing is to make creative and interesting writing to be engaged with the reader. in this part, the researchers hoped to be successfully affecting the students’ ability in writing the descriptive text of local tourism content to broaden the knowledge of tourists who are interesting in reading, knowing, understanding, and visiting the local tourism of north sumatera province especially berastagi, lake toba, and maimun palace. based on the previous research, it is concluded that descriptive text is to expose something, describe the object more influentially and emotionally, shape the imagination of the reader, and explain the object following the characteristics and traits. as many students perceive that the teachinglearning process is not interesting, the teacher can find another way to teach effectively and make it to be more fun which make students easier to understand and get the point (kurnia & kareviati, 2021). one of solutions is through games. nuraen & karyati (2018) argued that using games in teaching and learning process is very influential to build students’ spirit and participation, they can do the teamwork with their friends and change the ideas each other. mustiarini (2020) added that game-based learning can make learners become the center of learning process easier, more interesting and effective. but sadly, the analysis of the teaching methodologies analyzed shows that, although their implementation has been successful in favoring the active learning of students, their use (especially that of serious games) is not yet widespread (de la torre, onggo, corlu, nogal, & juan, 2021). meanwhile, a guessing game is a game where someone or a group tries to answer a question that has been given several keywords. the basic rules of the guessing game are very simple, one knows about the vocabulary of something and others try to find it. in guessing games and speculating games, one knows something and the other must find what it means. a guessing game is a game where one has to compete with other people or groups about guessing something that has been given a clue. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 391 accordingly, suardiyasa (2017) explained that guessing games are eminently simple. one person knows something that another one wants to find out, it is very simple, someone knows about vocabulary and others are trying to find it. in other words, a guessing game is a game where someone has to compete with other people or other groups to guess something that has been given the instructions. based on these definitions, it is concluded that a guessing game is a game with someone or participants knowing something and competing individually or in teams to identify or guess it. the game can be applied in teaching english. in learning languages that cover all skills (speaking, listening, writing, and reading) at all levels of learning. from the above explanation, it is very clear to conclude that the game can be applied in teaching all language skills. the basic rules of guessing games are very simple, basically in guessing and playing must speculate, one knows something and the others must find out what it is. according to harmer (2007), the guessing game procedure is as follows: students are divided into small teams; on each team, one member sits back to the whiteboard; the lecturer writes words or phrases on the board; all groups who can see these words or phrases must explain (without saying the words or phrases) to the sitting team members who are facing the whiteboard; and if a student who turns his back to the whiteboard can guess a word or phrase, the team will get points. another, nation and newton (2009) explained that guessing games consist of the following steps. first, students are divided into groups, one group consisting of 4 or 5 students. second, one group is asked to appear in front of the class and one of the group members chooses the category to be played from a box. third, one of the group members sits back to the word/picture shown and tries to guess the word/picture in question, and asks in advance about the category. many experts explain the procedure of guessing the game differently. the researcher decided to use the harmer theory (2007) because the procedure described is very simple and easy to understand and apply. based on the theories above, it is concluded that a guessing game is a game that can train students to write and speak in english. games in learning have the advantage that guessing games can be applied to all abilities, ages, and also to other materials such as guessing the names of people, objects, animals, places, types of professions, and others. moreover, guessing game is one of interesting and motivating thing that builds students spirit to be active to study and raise their focus to study so they can get what the topic talking about and the guessing game lead the students not to feel bore for teaching and learning process (daulay & br. hasugian, 2021). in addition, the media of local tourism was chosen to catch up with the intention of university students, attract and increase their ability in writing descriptive text well. as iswara (2021) stated, writing will help students master other skills and mastering english completely. however, it is not as easy as it seems. many students discovered it difficult to write because they did not understand how to properly convey their concept (kurniati, wijaya, & rohmatillah, 2020). besides, there are some important aspects that should be considered in writing skill; they are content, organization, purpose, vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling (widiastuti, & endahati, 2020). similarly, in previous study conducted by nasser (2019), the iraqi efl students’ writing composition difficulties and revealed that the students’ errors were concerned on using grammar, punctuation, spelling, and handwriting. in addition, husin & nurbayani (2017) also identified the two factors why the efl students faced the trouble in writing; internal and external factors, in which internal factor dealt with their low english writing proficiency, meanwhile external factor referred to their inadequate quality in studying the writing skills. furthermore, based on preliminary data at prima indonesia university, students found several problems in writing descriptive text. the problem stated by students are: (1) lecturers only use conventional methods, such as question and answer the assignments without explaining the generic structure of the descriptive text. it made students did not know how to describe something and students did not know what descriptive text is; (2) lecturers do not use special media that can motivate students to write descriptive text; (4) students lack of vocabularies and the limitation of the local tourism knowledge. these problems trigger the researcher to research by using a media guessing game that contains local tourism content. in addition, tourism is one of the attentions in our country because it has its attraction and contribution to the country. the knowledge of the tourism contents for the individual must be needed to create the love between societies and their country, to build their responsibility in promoting and possessing the local tourism in irma khoirot daulay & nurmahyuni asrul the effect of media guessing game towards university students’ writing ability on descriptive text local tourism content 392 their province. as one of the provinces in indonesia, north sumatera has great potential in tourism, pandia (2007). this potential includes natural beauties such as lake toba, berastagi, tropical, rain forest, and others. this study served three local tourism contents as the media of teaching and learning descriptive text. it potentially increases the students’ knowledge based on the local tourism in north sumatera province. concerning guessing game media used in improving students ability, there are articles published and found by the researcher are, the first; fairuz, fitriani, and burhansyah (2018) in their article entitled “the use of guessing game in teaching speaking” found the effective strategy in teaching speaking to students by using guessing game media, the second; puspitasari and asari (2018), their article entitled “the effect of using interactive guessing game technique on fluency students’ speaking skill” concluded that interactive guessing game technique give significant effect toward fluency students’ speaking skill at mts bustanul ulum tanggung prigel. and the third; safitri, wijaya, and husin (2015), in their article entitled “the effectiveness of guessing game toward students writing skill on descriptive text” is very strong to improve the students’ writing skill on descriptive text. the fourth, crestiani (2019) on the students’ ability in writing descriptive text through outdoor activity at palopo cokroaminoto university”. this research deals with the students’ ability in writing descriptive text through outdoor learning activities in the sixth semester of the english language education study program of palopo cokroaminoto university. writing test is the instrument of this research. based on the findings and discussion in the previous chapter, the researcher concluded the students’ ability in writing descriptive text through outdoor learning activities is good. the fifth, byantara and mayestiendra (2021) on exploring the use of domino cards as teaching media of descriptive text indonesian rural junior high school. this study explained how the teachers used domino cards in teaching descriptive text at smp 6 wonogiri. this study used interview and observation techniques in data collection. the students were unfamiliar with and never used domino cards before. although experiencing some difficulties, the students felt happy and enthusiastic about the domino cards as teaching media in learning descriptive text. the sixth, safitri, wijaya, and husin (2015) on the effectiveness of guessing game towards students’ writing skill on descriptive text. this research aimed to investigate the effectiveness and the effect size of using the guessing game in students’ writing skills on descriptive text. as the result of data analysis, the researchers found out that the effect size of the treatment was 1.47 and it was qualified as a very strong effect. the seventh, herizal and afriani (2015) on improving students’ descriptive writing text through picture word inductive model (pwim) strategy for the seventh grade of smp inaba palembang. the obtained data were analyzed by using regression analysis in spss (statistical package for social science) program. the result showed that there was a significant difference in students’ descriptive writing achievement taught using picture word inductive model (pwim) and teacher method (gtm) since t value 19.484 was higher than ttable (t0.05, 62 = 1.99897), it could be stated that the null hypothesis (ho) was rejected and the alternative hypothesis (ha) was accepted. the eighth, tri, kasmaini, and indah (2018) on the effect of using powerpoint modified pictures in writing descriptive text to the eighth-grade students of smp n 22 bengkulu city in 2016/2017 academic year. this study aimed to investigate the effect of using powerpoint modified pictures as a medium in teaching writing descriptive text. after giving some treatments to the experimental and control group, the post-test was held in both groups. it means that the null hypothesis (h0) was rejected and the alternative hypothesis (ha) was accepted. the use of powerpoint modified pictures could increase students’ writing ability especially in descriptive text. the ninth, rizka, zahrida, and mei (2019) on the effect of guided question technique on students’ writing ability in descriptive text. the objective of this research was to find out whether or not there is a significant effect of using the guided question technique on students’ writing ability in descriptive text. this research is a quasiexperimental design. the result of the research showed the mean score of the experimental group (31.34) was higher than the mean score of the control group (23.35). the tenth, hayati (2020) on the use of digital guessing games to improve students’ speaking ability. this study investigated the effects of digital guessing games strategy on students’ speaking ability of islamic senior high school students as well as to find out their perceptions of using it. the experimental group was taught by english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 393 using the dgg application, whereas the control group by using a conventional guessing game. furthermore, islamic senior high school students in tasikmalaya had a positive attitude toward the utilization of the dgg application. the eleventh, arsyad (2018) on students’ learning style: a case study of senior high schools in bengkulu. it is widely accepted that the use of learning materials that accommodates students’ schemata is much more effective than the ones outside student’s present knowledge background. the objectives of this study were to describe the students’ learning style distribution and their perception of localoriented and learning style-based english learning materials in bengkulu province. it could be concluded that local-oriented and learning stylebased learning materials can be not only more effective but also preferred by the students. the relevant studies above contribute the knowledge and support the experience of using the guessing game in speaking and writing skills. the highlight of the present research is the local tourism content which gives a big contribution toward tourism area especially in north sumatera province, it also broadens the students’ knowledge and love on their local tourism spot. method this type of the research is a quasi-experimental (experimental research). it aims to determine whether there is effect of something caused on the subject, that is students. the research design uses pre-test and post-test. this research was conducted in semester iii or odd semester of the 2018/2019 academic year at university of prima indonesia (unpri). the populations in this research were undergraduate students of the university of prima indonesia (unpri) medan, 2nd semester, 2018/2019 which consisted of 2 classes with a total of 50 students. thus, the two classes were divided into experimental classes and control classes. the experimental class was taught by using guessing game media while the control class was taught with conventional media. the research instruments consisted of writing descriptive text containing local tourism such as lake toba, berastagi, and maimun palaca. thus, the sampling in this research was taken by random cluster sampling consisting of two classes namely the experimental class and the control class. hence, the following hypothesis were formulated: alternative hypothesis: media guessing game affects students’ ability in writing descriptive text. null hypothesis: media guessing game does not affect students’ ability writing descriptive text. the method of the research is quantitative method by using media guessing game. the instruments used were test sheets and observation sheets. technique in analyzing the data of the research used descriptive statistical analysis and ttest. in quantitative research, data analysis techniques were used to answer the problem formulate on, then the data analysis use statistical methods. the classes were divided into two classes, namely experimental class and control class. those two classes consisted of 25 students. the experimental group was taught by guessing game media while the control group was taught by conventional teaching media in writing descriptive text. data analyzed in the form of test results from the control class and the experimental class using the t-test formula for free random samples so that they know the differences between control class and experimental class. before giving the treatments, a pre-test was administrated to the experimental group and control group. the pre-test was used to find out some sample and the mean score of each group. having given the treatments, the post-test was given to each group. the items of the post-test were exactly the same as the one in the pre-test. it was intended to discover the mean score of the experimental group and the control group. the researcher used t-test formula to know the differences between two classes. the formula is: t = in which: mx : mean of the experimental group my : mean of the control group x : the deviation square of the experimental group y : the deviation square of the control group nx : the total number of samples of the experimental group ny : the total number of samples of the control group findings and discussion the research found that the highest score of the pre-test of the experimental group was 80 and the lowest was 65. while the highest score of the post-test of the experimental group was 95 and the lowest was 80. the mean score of the pretest was 76 and the mean score of the post-test was 81. irma khoirot daulay & nurmahyuni asrul the effect of media guessing game towards university students’ writing ability on descriptive text local tourism content 394 before the post-test, the research applied the treatment by applying media guessing game in writing descriptive text. on the other hand, the control group was taught by conventional technique of teaching. meanwhile, the highest score of pre-test of control group was 80 and the lowest was 63. while the highest score of the post-test was 80 and the lowest was 70. the mean score of the pretest was 72 and the mean score for the post-test was 77. table 1. students’ score of pre-test and post-test on experimental group no. initial name of the students pre-test (x1) post-test (x2) deviation (d) x2-x1= (x) dx2 1. bs 58 80 22 484 2. jm 36 78 42 1764 3. js 38 78 40 1600 4. gv 62 84 22 484 5. kf 40 76 36 1296 6. ld 58 88 30 900 7. lm 36 74 38 1444 8. mm 60 80 20 400 9. ms 40 78 38 1444 10. mn 46 78 32 1024 11. nw 58 80 22 484 12. na 64 88 24 576 13. pn 38 76 38 1444 14. pa 48 80 32 1024 15. pw 48 82 34 1156 16. rh 60 80 20 400 17. rs 36 74 38 1444 18. rs 30 74 44 1936 19. rp 38 78 40 1600 20. rs 40 78 38 1444 21. rs 34 78 44 1936 22. sh 44 74 30 900 23. ta 62 86 24 576 24. rk 60 82 22 484 25. vy 38 74 36 1296 total 1172 2052 806 27.540 mean 46,88 82,08 32,24 table 2. students’ score of pre-test and post-test on control group no. initial name of the students pre-test (y1) post-test (y2) deviation (d) y2-y1= (y) dy2 1. ag 68 76 8 64 2. ah 54 74 20 400 3. as 42 64 22 484 4. an 40 62 22 484 5. as 60 74 14 196 6. as 60 78 18 324 7. bm 30 54 24 576 8. bb 58 70 12 144 9. cg 48 78 30 900 10. cp 62 76 14 196 11. dy 60 76 16 256 12. ds 70 80 10 100 13. dn 50 74 24 576 14. ep 52 80 28 784 15. et 36 60 24 576 16. eg 50 66 16 256 17. es 52 76 24 576 18. fs 56 78 22 484 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 395 19. ht 48 74 26 676 20. hh 60 78 18 324 21. hs 40 72 32 1024 22. hm 40 74 24 576 23. ib 34 74 40 1600 24. ih 64 82 18 324 25. jm 36 72 36 1296 total 1270 1822 542 13.196 mean 50,8 72,88 21,68 analyzing the data by using t-test formula t = mx = my = dx2 = = 27.540– = 27.540 – = 27.540 – 25.985 = 1.555 dy2 = = 13.196 – = 13.196 – = 13.196 – 11.750 = 1.446 t = t = t = t = t = t = t = 4,73 based on the data above, it can be explained that there is a positive effect using guessing game media on the ability of students to write descriptive texts. there is an effect of learning guessing game media towards students’ ability to write descriptive text. in the experimental classes taught by using guessing game media, students tended to be enthusiastic in teaching and learning activities. based on observations, it can be said that the lecturers have the ability to carry out their duties properly. lecturers were able to explain the task of writing descriptions, monitoring student behavior, providing guidance in the learning process of writing descriptions, and evaluating learning outcomes well. however, in terms of providing stimulus to students and giving praise to students, it needs to be improved. lecturers can give praise by giving rewards to students who excel so that students can be enthusiastic in learning process. it can be seen from their enthusiasm in working on the descriptive writing task requested by the lecturer. the classroom situation was also more conducive compared to the learning process carried out in class taught by conventional learning. based on the average score table that the results of writing a description of students have met the minimum completeness criteria and learning objectives have been achieved. it means that the learning process of descriptive writing by using guessing game media was improved. in this research, guessing games media were used toward students’ ability in writing the descriptive text of local tourism content. in fact, by doing the research, it is found that this media helped the students to build up the idea, to increase the vocabulary, to broaden the knowledge on local tourism content which not be gotten previously. in the experimental class, it showed the curiosity, fun, and happy face of the students while studying with guessing game media. and it also contributes to the increasing results and point of their descriptive writing. guessing games media are more effective than conventional learning when students facing conventional learning are more passive when the learning process takes place. based on the irma khoirot daulay & nurmahyuni asrul the effect of media guessing game towards university students’ writing ability on descriptive text local tourism content 396 information obtained, students' skills in writing descriptive in conventional learning are not optimal. based on interviews with lecturers, students have less motivation to write. in the process of writing, students still often encounter obstacles. this can be seen from the results of writing; student grades were still low. the lecturer explained that students are still confused between the description and narrative text. in addition, students were also still low in motivation in writing, especially writing descriptive text. students' characteristics were quite passive so that the atmosphere in the class was quite calm and not crowded. a guessing game is a game where someone or a group tries to answer a question that has been given several keywords. in guessing games and speculating games, one knows something and the other must find what it means. a guessing game is a game where one must compete with other people or other groups about guessing something that has been given a clue. according to safitri, wijaya, and husin (2015), guessing games are eminently simple. one person knows something that someone wants to find out, it is very simple. one person knows about vocabulary and the others are trying to find it. a media guessing game is a game where someone has to compete with other people or other groups to guess something that has been given the instructions. by the implementation of guessing games media, where a person or participant knows something and competes individually or in a team to identify or guess it, it is possible to stimulate the imagination of students which in turn increases the ability to write descriptive texts of students. harmer (2007) explained that lecturers usually do not have problems to improve the ability to write descriptive texts if he makes appropriate practices in teaching by applying appropriate techniques. based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that in the application of guessing games, aspects of the ability to write descriptive texts can be improved. conclusion based on the results of the study, the score of students' ability to write descriptive texts in the experimental group taught by using media guessing shows that the mean score of post-test was 82,08. while in the control group taught by using conventional learning shows that an average score of 72,88. it can be seen that the ability to write descriptive text taught by using media guessing games is better than students taught by using conventional learning. this is evidenced by looking at the t-test carried out. it means that there is an effect of media guessing games on students’ ability to write a descriptive text. it is concluded that there is a positive effect of using the guessing game media towards students’ ability in writing descriptive text. this research is focused on applying guessing games in improving students' ability to write a descriptive text. based on the analysis in this research, the most dominant factor that affects students' ability to write descriptive text in using english verbally is the media guessing game. the tourism content also contributed to the local tourism horizon which improved the students’ knowledge of their local tourism province. acknowledgment we would like to thank direktorat riset dan pengabdian masyarakat (pdp) from kementerian ristek for funding this research through the pdp program. references arsyad, s. 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(2011). writing: from theory to practice. bandung: alfabeta. irma khoirot daulay & nurmahyuni asrul the effect of media guessing game towards university students’ writing ability on descriptive text local tourism content 398 teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school sri wuli fitriati universitas negeri semarang e-mail: sriwuli.fitriati@mail.unnes.ac.id gabby allen vica isfara universitas negeri semarang e-mail: gabbyallenvicaisfara@gmail.com novia trisanti universitas negeri semarang e-mail: novia.santi@mail.unnes.ac.id apa citation: fitriati, s. w., isfara, g. a. v., & trisanti, n. (2017). teachers‟ questioning strategies to elicit students‟ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 217-226 received: 19-04-2017 accepted: 23-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: this article reports on a study aimed at exploring and examining english language teachers‟ skills in questioning to enhance students‟ verbal repsonses in efl (english as a foreign language) classes. this was a qualitative case study, employing discourse analysis, conducted in one junior high school in a town in central java province, indonesia. the research participants were two indonesian teachers of english language. they taught year eight students in the academic year of 2015/2016. the data were collected from audio-video recordings, transcripts of the lessons, classroom observations notes, and teachers‟ interviews. the transcriptions were analysed by using wu‟s taxonomy of questioning strategies (1993) as it gave a detailed categorization of teachers‟ questions to stimulate students‟ verbal responses. the findings showed that the teachers used mostly four questioning strategies. the first teacher often applied decomposition strategy where the initial question was elaborated into some questions, while the second teacher tended to use repetition strategy. this study has shown that teachers‟ questioning skills is crucial to successfully make students engaged in the classroom interaction, enhance students‟ verbal responses, and lead to the comprehension of the lesson. therefore, it is suggested that teachers should be more aware of their questioning skills to assist students achieve better proficiency in the english language. keywords: teachers’ questioning strategies, students’ verbal responses, efl classes, classroom discourse analysis. introduction the main goal of learning english as a foreign language (efl) is not only gaining good understanding of the language grammar, but also using the language directly to communicate. language learners are considered successful learners when they are able to use it communicatively. the common problem happened in schools in efl context is lack of speaking practices for students. it might be caused by many factors, including that students have not got adequate exposure in english; they are shy to speak; or, teachers lack providing them a chance to speak english. furthermore, some teachers focus more on teaching grammar than leading them to practise the language directly. as a result, many students are only good in the theory of grammar, but they cannot apply it appropriately and fluently in https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.537 217 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee context. this makes many students are passive in speaking english, even in the english language classes. many researchers have shown that efl teachers‟ questioning highly influence their students‟ speaking ability. teachers play a main role to control and manage the class, especially solving the students‟ passiveness. according to white and lightbown (as cited in toni and parse, 2013), teachers are dominating the class, controlling the topics, speaking turns of the conversation, and giving most of the questions; they provide a lot of questions and help students respond on it as well. teachers totally can control the class in which they find and use some questioning strategies that are appropriately applied on students. they actually have strategies to solve the students‟ speaking problems. in a teaching and learning process, teachers always involve the use of questioning skills for any kinds of teaching goals. teacher‟s questions become the main tool to achieve the teaching and learning purposes (boyd, 2015). to elicit students‟ responses and encourage their participation in class, questions are frequently used by teachers to stimulate them. chaudron (as cited in tan, 2007) urges that teachers‟ questions dominated the class talk for 20%-40%. questions potentially make students engaged to speak because questioning produce oral interaction between teacher and students. when a teacher asks, students who know the answer will try to respond. essberger, rubin and thompson (as cited in haron et al., 2012) state that students can perform and participate in classroom activities by answering teacher‟s questions. swain (as cited in tan, 2007, p. 89) asserts that: for language students, responding to teacher questioning is a learning opportunity in which they are presumed to devote to thinking and producing comprehensible output, testing their hypotheses about how the language works and modifying their output when getting negative feedback. (swain as cited in tan, 2007, p. 89) by responding to teachers‟ questions, students can know and also apply directly how the language really works. teachers‟ questioning is the skill frequently used, more powerful to create the talk move (boyd, 2015). questioning is usually found when language teachers apply communicative language teaching method. questioning influences students‟ participation and comprehension as well. through questions, the talk or discussion will be created in the classroom. talk will be dominating during the teaching and learning process so the discussion is created between teacher and students. toni and parse (2013) state that in language education, teachers should direct students to questioning, provide them to think at high level, enhance students‟ participation, and improve their listening ability. teachers‟ questioning also stimulate students to speak because teachers are found to speak more frequent in questions while students will speak in answers (dillon, 1981). therefore, students can practice to speak english properly when answering the teachers‟ questions. in addition, their speaking ability will improve through responding to the questions. in fact, teachers‟ questions do not always successfully stimulate all students to respond. this problem might be caused by many factors. one of the factors is that english remains an unfamiliar language for most students in indonesia, particularly in rural areas, like the site of this present study. not knowing the meanings of words will be a difficult thing; it makes them difficult to understand the lesson as well. hence, asking unclear questions will make students more confused and silent. teachers should find or use strategies to ask the students. however, they must be careful about the techniques used in delivering questions. ornstein (1987, p. 74) asserts that “teachers should know how well and effective their 218 sri wuli fitriati, gabby allen vica isfara, & novia trisanti teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school questioning strategies and techniques are”. this is because how teachers deliver the questions will influence students‟ understanding. strategies in questioning are used to give guidance for teachers in giving questions to students. kerry (as cited in tekene, 2006) states that types of questions which are used and formulated by teachers are very important processes for students‟ achievement and their level of engagement in teaching and learning. unclear questions will not make them participate well; furthermore, students‟ verbal responses are not elicited well. teachers may use other techniques to encourage students to respond to their questions by rephrasing the questions or changing the complex questions into simple and understandable constructions (cole & chan, ekasingh, wu as cited in dumteeb, 2009). when students cannot catch the meanings of the initial questions that have been given, teachers must look for another way to express it. using different types and ways of giving questions is very important to make students understand. nisa (2014) focused her study on the classroom interaction analysis in the efl speaking class. her findings provided evidence that teachers should promote their students‟ communicative skills and encourage students to use english during speaking activities by asking questions. according to wu (1993), there are a range of questioning strategies that can elicit students‟ speaking practices. wu‟s taxonomy of questioning strategies is vital and effective to extend students‟ verbal responses. as proposed by wu (1993, pp. 55-56), the five questioning strategies that teachers should use to generate verbal responses from students include: rephrasing (a question is expressed in another way), simplification (this may be regarded as a kind of rephrasing by means of which a situation is simplified so that students can cope with it), repetition (a question is repeated in the hope that a verbal response will be elicited), decomposition (an initial question is decomposed into two or more parts so that an answer may be obtained), and probing (a question is followed up by one or more other questions so that the teachers can solicit more responses from a student). using strategies in giving questions for students is important to help teachers elicit students‟ verbal responses as questions can make them attentive and engaged in a lesson. questioning strategies provide ways how to make students clear about teachers‟ questions. students are quiet because they probably do not understand what have been asked, how to answer it, or feel shy. by applying questioning strategies, teachers can solve these problems. it can encourage students to answer and help them to arrange utterances, so they are motivated to speak confidently. against this backdrop, this present study attempts to examine how english language teachers give questions to their students. particularly, this study explores teachers‟ questioning strategies in the classes, and how their questions could enhance the students‟ oral reponses. following the literature review and the aims of the study, this study has two main research questions: what questioning strategies are used by english language teachers to stimulate students‟ oral responses in the classes? and, how do the teachers‟ questioning strategies enhance students‟ responses? in the following section, the methods of this study will be briefly and clearly explained. method this was a classroom discourse study which employed qualitative research methods. this study was conducted in a state secondary school in a suburban in the province of central java, indonesia. the research participants were two indonesian female teachers of english, aged 43 (teacher a) 219 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee and teacher b, 44 years old. in the daily life, the two teachers spoke indonesian language, the national and official language of the country, along with the javanese language, their native language. they got a bachelor‟s degree in the english language education from local universities. teacher a taught class viii a which consisted of 30 students. teacher b taught class viii h which consisted of 32 students. all the school community members were javanese. the data of this study were drawn from audiovideo recordings of four english lessons. each lesson ran in 80 minutes. three methods were used to collect the data: 1) classroom observations: in the classroom observations audiovideo recordings were used to capture the teachers‟ questioning and students‟ oral responses. the observation sheets were also used to take notes on the teachers and students‟ behavior during the lessons regarding the teachers‟ questioning and the students‟ oral reponses. the lessons were audiovideo recorded by a research assistant, while the other researcher sat queitly at the corner of the classroom and took notes. 2) interviews: interviews were done with the teachers and their students. interviews were aimed to find and explore their perceptions on the teachers‟ questioning to engage students‟ oral responses. the two teachers and ten students (five from each class) were interviewed. the english teachers were interviewed twice: the first interview was held before classroom observation, and the second interview was done after the classroom observation, that is after obtaining initial interpretation of the data. 3) questionnaire: to get complementary data, questionnaire was used to find out the students‟ perceptions and opinions on their teachers‟ ways of giving them questions then, the audio-video recordings were analyzed in three steps as follows: transcribing the lessons, identifying and categorizing the teachers‟ questions as well as the students‟ responses. the identification, coding, and categorization were based on wu‟s (1993) taxonomy of questioning strategies because the taxonomy particularly aimed at describing teachers‟ questioning strategies to elicit students‟ verbal responses. after the teachers‟ questions were categorized, the identification of questioning strategies frequently used by the teachers were conducted. the transcription of the students‟ oral responses was important to know to what extent the questioning strategies used by the teachers could stimulate students to give answers. to triangulate the data analysis, the teachers‟ interview data and observation notes were used to complement the findings. results and discussion this section will start by describing the findings of the first research question: what questioning strategies are used by the teachers to stimulate students’ verbal responses in the classes? the findings show that the teachers in this present study used mostly four questioning strategies out of five proposed by wu (1993). those are: rephrasing, simplification, repetition, and decomposition. probing strategy, that is a question is followed up by one or more other questions so that the teachers can solicit more responses from a student, was found very few in the lessons observed. the interview findings indiciated that the teachers might think that probing question was difficult for the students as this type of question required students to think deeper. such a question usually needs long answers containing arguments, opinions, or explanation. the teachers admitted that probing questions had to be prepared and arranged in advance before the lessons; like preparing a scenario of a particular sequence of questions. the interviews also revealed some implicit reasons why the teachers lack using probing questions. according to the teachers, the students were lack of speaking 220 sri wuli fitriati, gabby allen vica isfara, & novia trisanti teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school practice, and they were not accustomed to use english more often. another problem was that students‟ limited vocabulary attainment. this resulted in the difficulty for them to respond to the teachers‟ questions which required deeper and critical thinking. the teachers clarified that if complex questions (like probing) were used, the students often respond hesitantly. therefore, they mostly used questioning strategies which did not function to probe or ask deeper thinking from the students. the four strategies that were used by the teachers in this study will be illustrated with some extracts as follows: 1) rephrasing rephrasing means that a question is expressed in another way. the following is an example of a rephrasing strategy used by teacher a: extract 1: t : then, the next… how was nyi mas inten character? how was nyi mas inten? ss : stingy [chorusing] s : she is stingy [in soft voice/almost inaudible) the teacher‟s utterances which are in bold show the rephrasing strategy. anticipating that the students did not know the meaning of the word „character‟, teacher a omitted it and rephrased it into “how was nyi mas inten?” this question eventually was able to elicit her students‟ response. another example of rephrasing is as in extract 2. extract 2: t : then, what happened to the village? ss : [silence] t : when there was big flood, what did they do? what did they do? s : they run away t : they run away! ya, they run away. in extract 2, it was evident that there was no response when the teacher asked “what happened to the village?” then, when she rephrased her initial question into “when there was big flood, what do they do? what do they do?” a student responded it quickly. from the whole data, it appeared that rephrasing strategy was frequently used by making the questions shorter where the teachers expected that their students would understand the question easily. 2) simplification simplification is a questioning strategy which is similar to rephrasing strategy, but in simplication the teachers simplified the meanings of their questions. in this strategy, teachers would use many methods such as giving examples, clues, and focusing words to make the previous question become more specific, clearer, and understandable for students. the example of simplification strategy can be seen in extract 2. extract 3: t : the purpose is? s : to make the readers... um...um.... [hesitant] t : to make the readers? ayo! ss : [silence] t : okay… yang pertama to amuse the...? ss : readers [chorusing] t : yang kedua, to…? enter...? entertain the…? [raising intonation] ss : readers [chorusing] in extract 3, the simplication strategy was used by the teacher by mixing the question with the indonesian language, and this seemed to have generated the students‟ verbal responses. in addition, in the teacher‟s utterance “yang kedua, to…? enter...? entertain the…? [with raising intonation], she expected the students to continue her unfinished sentence. this type of questioning strategy which is called response slot (martin, 2005) was also often found in the lessons observed. 3) repetition repeating the same question for 2-3 times appeared to be the teachers‟ favourite strategy to stimulate students‟ responses. 221 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the example can be seen in the following extracts: extract 4: t : okay, dan sekarang, would you like to listen to a short story? ss : [silence] t : hello? ss : hi.... [chorusing] t : would you like to listen to a short story? ss : yes [chorusing] extract 5: t : question number one is…where did the story happen? t : iqbal? [pointing to a student, named iqbal] where did the story happen? s1 : [silence] t : ardian? s2 : [silence] t : ya? layla? where did the story happen, layla? s3 : west java t : in west java [confirming the student‟s answer]. in this case, repetition happened because the students who were called by the teachers did not repond to her question, so the teacher might think that she needed to repeat it to make sure that other students understood her question. below is another extract showing repetition. extract 6 t : what day is it? ss : [silence] t : what day is it? ss : saturday. [chorusing] repetition might be caused by at least two reasons. first, it could be because the teacher‟s question has not been heard clearly by the students, and second, the students might have low ability in listening skills. they needed much more time to think before answering. my observation also suggests that the teacher gave a little time to think for the students whose names were called. therefore, in this case, the teacher needed to wisely have a wait time, that is, pauses to wait for responses. the students needed to take their guts to produce loud and clear answer. 4) decomposition decomposition strategy means that the teacher broke down their initial question (which is quite complex) into several simple questions in order to assist the students understand the question‟s meaning. the evidence can been seen in the extract 7. extract 7: t : okay, come on, what is narrative text? s : [raising hand] t : ya? s : umm... telling a story.... t : and next? what is the purpose of narrative text? extract 8: t : and then, the generic structure? ss : orientation, complication, resolution.... t : orientation, yes.... ss : complication. t : complication.... ss : resolution.. t : resolution, yes.... what is orientation? ss : tokoh..., tempat.... t : yes, the characters, the time, the place. complication? s : conflicts. s : konflik, permasalahan dalam cerita. t : okay…and then the resolution? s : solution. decomposition strategy was very useful and helpful for the teachers in order to elicit the students‟ verbal responses. they make different questions based on the initial ones. it could provide enough chances for students to give their own opinions or arguments. furthermore, there were many students who tried to give responses. next, the following discussion will answer the second research question of this study: how do the teachers’ questioning strategies enhance students’ responses? the findings show that repetition and decomposition were the most used strategies employed by the teachers. repetition was 222 sri wuli fitriati, gabby allen vica isfara, & novia trisanti teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school very often used by the teachers as this technique seemed to be the easiest strategy to elicit the students‟ oral responses. it was also helpful for the teachers because the teachers did not have to change, rephrase, or simplify their questions. they simply restate the same question until they got their students‟ responses. although this strategy seemed simple but both the teachers and the students got a benefit – the teachers could elicit the students‟ answers, and the students had an opportunity to hear the teachers‟ english utterances again as to make them confident to respond. another good point from repetition strategy was that the students were more active because repetitive questions made them became focus. in implementing repetition strategy, it was not only about repeating the same question but the teachers also attempted to make it much clearer for students. it would not be able to elicit students‟ reponses if the teachers asked a difficult, long, or complex question for several times. it was because the students still did not understand and were confused about what they had been asked. the teachers tried to make the repetitive questions more meaningful by using non-verbal clues, like using body gestures (nodding, raising hands, pointing at something), facial expressions (smiling), or voice audibility (raising intonation, stress, speak slowly, whispering). these non-verbal clues from the teachers were important as they help students to have better understanding towards the teachers‟ questions. the second most frequently used questioning strategy was decomposition. both of the teachers delivered relatively varied questions through this decomposition strategy because, according to the interview findings, it was easy for the teachers to elicit more responses from the students. many students raised hands and tried to answer when the teachers decomposed the question into some simple questions related to the initial question. furthermore, the classroom observation shows that decomposed questions succeeded in making the students more active in the discussions. another function of the decomposition strategy used by the teacher was that it could lead to the conclusions of the lesson (teacher b interview). as mentioned in the earlier part of this section, the probing strategy was almost not used by the teachers. this strategy seemed quite challenging for the teachers to apply as this needed a skill to make students used their higher level thinking. the illustration below shows one evidence in which probing was not successful: extract 9: t : what happened then? what happened after the beggar prayed? what happened then? what happened, raihan? s : yang terjadi… [a student raised his hand. he translated into indonesian, then silence] t : what happened then? [to a student who raised his hand] s : she prayed.... [he seemed hesitant and then silence] t : no... no… after the beggar prayed? “oh god, give her punishment…” [the teacher quoted an utterance from the story] ss : flood….flood… [chorusing] t : yes. there was a big flood. and then, what happened? [pointing to a student, and the class was silent]. this extract provided evidence that the teacher‟s probing question “what happened after the beggar prayed?” required the students to think critically which demanded their understanding of the topic of discussion. there was another prominent finding in this study. some non-verbal supportive techniques were also used, such as: calling the students‟ names and using body gestures, strong intonation, and facial expression. one teacher often used these non-verbal supportive questioning 223 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee techniques, as can be seen in the extract below: extract 10: t : okay, the last question. what can you learn from the story? what can you learn from the story? ss : [silence] t : what can you learn from the story? [teacher uttered the word „learn‟ with high intonation] s : don‟t be stingy t : don‟t be stingy? okay! the emphasis of the word „learn‟ by uttering it with high intonation aimed at giving a stress of her question. this could attract her students‟ attention because it strengthened the meaning of the question. moreover, the students seemed like having the clue which helped them find the correct answer. as a result, they were brave to raise hands and gave the verbal responses. turney et al. (1983, p. 116) called these features “voice variations” (i.e. raising intonation, falling intonation, changes in the tone, pitch, volume and speed of speech). the findings discussed above have provided evidence that questioning strategies the teachers used have helped in improving students‟ engagement in the classes. the ways the teachers structured their questions influenced the students‟ oral responses. the teachers‟ varied questioning strategies could eliminate students‟ passiveness and stimulate them to speak english more frequently. in addition, to prevent the students from being passive in the classroom interaction, the teachers often called their names one by one. this strategy is called “distributing” (turney et al., 1983, p. 66). turney et al. (1983) also suggest that “teachers should carefully select students to respond to questions, giving as many as possible the chance to contribute, because by increasing the number of responses from each individual student in a lesson, learning is enhanced” (p. 66). another finding indicates that both of the teachers tended to ask students to respond in short answers, such as about the examples, facts, things. this is a display question type (kayaoglu, 2013). a display question refers to a question which the teacher already knows the answer. the purpose is “to make the students display some previously-learned knowledge” (wu, 1993, p. 51). this finding is in line with the study conducted by james and carter (2006) that commonly students in a school actually tend to respond more often through short and literal level of questions. this study also gave evidence that rephrasing strategy could decrease students‟ speaking passiveness. first, the teachers summarized the initial question which had long or complex structures. second, they strengthened particular parts of their sentences that were important to be emphasized. third, they repeated the same questions in different ways, forms, or structures without changing the purposes of the questions. fourth, the use of indonesian language was still used by both of the teachers in their questions. in the teachers‟ interviews, they considered that indonesian and javanese languages were sometimes used because the students had not accustomed to english. furthermore, they were lack of vocabulary and lack of english pronunciation practice. to solve this problem, besides the four strategies, the teachers used a questioning strategy in the form of codemixing or codeswitching to stimulate students‟ speaking participation. in this study, the teachers gave questions to the students for certain purposes; one of the purposes was to encourage students to speaking english. yet, students‟ responses could not be obtained easily. this made the teachers aware that they had to change the ways they delivered the questions. morover, as the teachers stated in the interviews, many students have different characteristics. there were fast and slow learners, high and low achievers in the classes. consequently, some students were silent and others were active 224 sri wuli fitriati, gabby allen vica isfara, & novia trisanti teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school in responding to the teachers‟ questions. not all of them could respond quickly; they needed to be stimulated and given time to think as well. the teachers decreased the students‟ passiveness in the class by using safe talk which dominantly gained students‟ chorused responses where they answered together towards teachers‟ questions and cues. moreover, elongating and raising intonation of the last word of the questions were also employed to trigger the students‟ responses. this confirms the findings of fitriati‟s study (2015). the teachers also often used the indonesian language in their questioning. the use of indonesian was absolutely easy to understand, but the students could not develop their english skills well. apparently, the teachers sometimes needed to translate their questions into indonesian to be quickly answered by the students. in the context of teaching english as a foreign language, particularly in the indonesian educational context, where english is not used for everyday communication, indonesian teachers who teach the english language should have adequate competence to establish and maintain classroom interaction to extend the students‟ opportunities to speak and enggaged in the lessons (fitriati, 2015). with regard to the empirical evidence found in this current study, it could be concluded that teachers‟ questioning strategies used in the classes were varied. classroom interaction is a complex phenomenon; therefore, the teachers‟ questions are also influenced by many factors, including the teachers‟ english proficiency. the observations indicated that the teacher in this study who performed mostly repetition strategy seemed to show lack of grammatical competence in constructing her questions. she tended to repeat the questions, whereas the other teacher who used more rephrasing and decomposing strategies show more accuracy in her grammar. therefore, it is evident that teachers‟ linguistic competence influence their questioning skills in eliciting students‟ oral responses. in addition, the teachers in this study need to develop types of question they posed. not only did they ask display questions to check the students‟ comprehension of the learning materials, but they also needed to pose referential questions, that is, a question that the teacher does not already know the answer (wu, 1993, p. 51). referential question would usually generate more responses from the students. eventually this study shows that the teachers apparently succeeded in encouraging their students to engage and interact actively in the whole class discussion. they used a varied strategies of questioning. however, it is suggested that the teachers develop their questioning skills, particularly in giving probing question, as this strategy will solicit more responses from the students and stimulate student thinking (davoudi & sadeghi, 2015). conclusion the findings of this study show that teachers should be aware that their questioning skills would have an impact on improving students‟ verbal responses in the classroom interaction. teachers can apply comfortable and appropriate questioning strategies that are suitable for students and the class‟ context of situation. therefore, some pedagogical purposes of questioning can be achieved, including developing students‟ english proficiency, measuring their abilities, and motivating them to speak the language. this study has shed some light on the importance of teachers‟ questioning skills. these skills need to be taught explicitly in english language education, particularly for student teachers, i.e. university students majoring in english education and prepared for being future teachers. for further research, it is suggested 225 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee that studies on teacher questioning should be broaden, for example, by comparing and contrasting questioning skills between english-native-speaker teachers and nonenglish-native-speaker teachers to provide complementary evidence and theoretical knowledge about questioning strategies. references boyd, m. p. (2015). relations between teacher questioning and student talk in one elementary ell classroom. relc journal, 47(3), 370404. doi: 10.1177/1086296x16632451. davoudi, m., & sadeghi, n. a. (2015). a systematic review of research on questioning as a high level cognitive strategy. english language teaching, 8(10), 76-90. retrieved from: files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1078735.pdf dillon, j. t. (1981). to question and not to question during discussion. relc journal, xxxii(5), 51-55. retrieved from: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0 02248718103200605?journalcode=jtea. dumteeb, n. (2009). teachers’ questioning techniques and students’ critical thinking skills: english language classroom in the thai context. (doctoral dissertation, oklahoma state university, oklahoma, usa). retrieved from gradworks.umi.com/33/72/3372164.htm fitriati, s. w. (2015). teachers’ language ideologies and classroom practices in english bilingual education: an ethnographic case study of a senior high school in central java, indonesia. (doctoral dissertation). university of southern queensland, queensland, australia. haron, s. c., ahmad, i. s., mamat, a., & mohamed, i. h. a., (2012). strategies to develop speaking skills among malay learners of arabic. international journal of humanities and social science, 2(17), 303-310. retrieved from: www.ijhssnet.com/ journals/ vol_2_no_17...2012/34.pdf james, i., & carter, t. s. (2006). questioning and informational texts: scaffolding students comprehension of content areas. forum on public policy 1, 1-13. retrieved from: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1099153.pdf martin, p. (2005). 'safe' language practices in two rural schools in malaysia: tensions between policy and practice. in a. m. y. lin, & p. martin (eds.), decolonisation, globalisation: language-in-education policy and practice (pp. 74-97). clevedon: multilingual matters. nisa, s. h. (2014). classroom interaction analysis in indonesian efl speaking class. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 124-132. retrieved from: https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee/a rticle/view/99/60. ornstein, a. c. (1987). questioning: the essence of good teaching-part ii. nassp bulletin, 7-80. retrieved from: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0 19263658807250514?journalcode=buld tan, z. (2007). questioning in chinese university el classrooms: what lies beyond it? relc journal, 38(1), 87-103. doi: 10.1177/0033688206076161. tekene, m. l. (2006). enhancing teachers‟ questioning skills to improve children‟s learning and thinking in pacific island early childhood centres. new zealand journal of teachers’ work, 3(1), 12-23. retrieved from: http://www.teacherswork.ac.nz/journal/volum e3_issue1/mauigoa_tekene.pdf. toni a., & parse, f. (2013). the status of teacher‟s questions and students‟ responses: the case of an efl class. academy publisher, 4(3), 564569. doi:10.4304/jltr.4.3.564-569. turney, c., eltis, k.j., hatton, n., owens, l.c., towler, j., & wright, r. (1983). sydney micro skills redeveloped (series 1 handbook). sydney: sydney university press. wu, k. y. (1993). classroom interaction and teacher questions revisited. relc journal, 24(1), 4968. doi: 10.1177/00336882930240020. 226 sri wuli fitriati, gabby allen vica isfara, & novia trisanti teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school analysis of presidential inaugural addresses using searle’s taxonomy of speech acts paulus widiatmoko universitas kristen duta wacana yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: widiatmoko@staff.ukdw.ac.id apa citation: widiatmoko, p. (2017). analysis of presidential inaugural addresses using searle‟s taxonomy of speech acts. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 275-282 received: 10-04-2017 accepted: 12-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: this study analyzes the performance of searle‟ speech acts in presidential inaugural addresses. five presidential inaugural addresses taken as the samples of this study were analyzed using searle‟s speech act taxonomy and different distinctive features of illocutionary acts. the findings of this study revealed the frequency and comparison of the speech act performance. each inaugural address possessed distinctive characteristics influenced by sociopolitical, economic, and historical situation of the countries. in addition, some commonalities in relation to the performance of searle‟s speech act taxonomy were also observed. keywords: speech acts, taxonomy, presidential inaugural address introduction the study of how people speak and write about the world has been an important part of social science of language. searle‟s work is a part of the study of language, especially of what can be called the philosophy of language. as it is known that the focus has been on performance of the speech acts, its investigation from the starting point of social science concerns with explaining social behavior. acting by speaking or acting by other means have important aspects in common. in the words of john searl: “a theory of language is part of a theory of action, simply because speaking is a rule-governed form of behavior” (searle, 1969, p. 17). keifer and bierwisch (1980) state that the theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communication is not sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thinking, congratulating, and some other language functions. accordingly, searle (1969) states that speech act theory is concerned with the use of language to do things and it provides a universal characterization between „uttering‟ and „doing‟. searle‟s taxonomy of speech acts is said to be the improvement of austin classifications of verdictives, exercitives, commisives, expositives, and behabitives. therefore, searle (1979) comes up with five categories of what he calls illocutionary acts, namely: 1. assertives. searle puts it: “the point or purpose of the members of the assertive class is to commit the speaker to something‟s being the case” (searle 1979, p. 12). assertives can be found true or false. they are speech acts because the speaker wants the hearer to believe that the speaker believes what he says about the world, and thus the speaker performs a speech act. examples are stating, complaining, and claiming. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.542 275 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 2. directives, which are attempted by the speaker to get the hearer to do something. they can be modest, such as ask or strong such as order. 3. commissives. the point of these speech acts is to commit the speaker to some future course of action. examples are promising and offering. 4. expressives. they express the speaker‟s psychological attitude towards a state of affairs that the illocution presupposes. examples are thanking, congratulating, and apologizing. 5. declaratives: when successfully performed these speech acts brings about the correspondence between the propositional content and reality. the saying is the doing, like „you are fired‟ or „i resign‟. such utterances often include „hereby‟, to emphasize this effect. the above conceptions of differentiating speech acts serve as the framework of this study. on the other hand, inaugural address in this paper is seen as a communicative event involving the new president to deliver his/her speech to the whole nation and the world. the term inaugural refers to „marking of a beginning” (http://www.merriam-webster.com). a presidential inaugural address cannot be detached from its political nature. harrison and tony (2003) claim that politics is primarily about the acquisition and maintenance of power. it is further stated that power is inherent in the relationship between individuals, groups, the state and a wide range of what are known as „actors‟ in international politics. in other words, the actors of this event are the president as the one conveying the speech, the people of the country and the whole world as the audience. baumeister in miller and stiles (1986) claims that the two central selfpresentational, among others, concerns of pleasing the audience and constructing a public self. thus, speeches are seen as a means to convey their relative power or status, and their intimacy, closeness, and solidarity. another scholar, bourdieu as cited in kvasny and truex (2001), proposes that slogans, commentaries, commitments, and promises are often used by politicians to form a labor of representation by which they attempt to construct and impose a particular view of the world while at the same time they attempt to mobilize support of those upon whom their power ultimately depends. the content delivered can be interpreted as containing a very crucial point for the new elected president to begin his/her leadership. specifically, it marks an ending of the previous president‟s term and the transfer of power from one president to the next. regarding to this context, a presidential inaugural address then might be categorized as a political speech in which the agents seek to form and transform their vision of the world and thereby the world itself. words become actions and the symbolic character of power is at stake (bourdieu in kvasny & truex, 2001). taking the above concept of presidential inaugural address to the framework of philosophy of language, therefore this study is designed to answer the following questions: 1. what speech acts performed in the presidential inaugural addresses? 2. what commonalities and differences identified in (relation to) the application of speech acts in the inaugural addresses? method as stated previously, this study analyzed performance of speech acts of the corpus data from the presidential inaugural addresses using searle‟s taxonomy. five inaugural addresses were chosen based on the availability of the script and possibly the streaming audio or video of the inaugural addresses in the internet as not every country publishes them. certainly, other considerations such as different features 276 paulus widiatmoko analysis of presidential inaugural addresses using searle’s taxonomy of speech acts comprising sociopolitical contexts, and availability of resources for analyzing the context were also taken into account. the five presidents are the president of country a (abbreviated as gwb), country b (gma), country c (sby), country d (nm), and country e (csb). the performance of their speech acts were identified and classified using searle‟s taxonomy of the speech acts. however, some utterances were not easily classified. therefore, as it has been described earlier concerning the importance of other factors and context in the interpretation of speech act performance, examinations of experiential, relational and expressive values of the words, terms or expressions used by the presidents in their inaugural address were conducted where necessary. the necessity depends on some extent with the sufficiency of clues and context that contribute and underlie the interpretation. taken from critical discourse analysis (norman, 1989), by examining at experiential values, the analysis attempts to show how „the text producer‟s experience of the natural or social world‟ and is shown in a text. a person‟s views of the world can be identified by assessing formal features with experiential value. relational values may identify the perceived social relationship between the producer of the text and its recipient. the third dimension, expressive value, provides an insight into „the producer‟s evaluation (in the widest sense) of the bit of the reality it relates to.‟ linguistically, those clues partly might be drawn from the usage of certain terms, words, or expressions that make up the general schemes or contrasted ideas or ideology in the discourse. each occurrence of the speech act performance was identified and a descriptive analysis was then applied to identify the most frequently performed speech act for each inaugural address. finally, the findings were compared to draw commonalities and differences in relation to the speech acts and context contributing to the performance. results and discussion discussion of the findings in the subsequent sections would reveal the frequency of the speech acts performance and relate them with the context of each country. commonalities and differences shown by the inaugural address were then could be analyzed. table 1. speech acts of gma inaugural address illocutionary acts n % assertive 26 23.85 directive 35 32.11 commisive 45 41.28 expressive 3 2.75 declarative 0 0.00 total 109 table 1 portrays the total number of speech acts performed by president gma in her inaugural address. from the findings, it can be inferred that the most frequently performed speech act was commissive which is slightly above 40%. it is identified that gma performed 45 commissive speech acts ranging from providing job opportunities to resolving past political events at edsa i, ii, and iii. concerning to directive speech acts, gma mainly encouraged and asked components of the nation to work together, to unify, and to dismantle obstacles for the development of the country. furthermore, gma also asked the citizen to pay taxes and invite investors 277 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to conduct their business. in relation to assertive speech act, gma performed slightly above 23% of showing her commitment to the truth of the expressed proposition covering various topics. table 2. speech acts of gwb inaugural address illocutionary acts n % assertive 96 68.09 directive 26 18.44 commisive 18 12.77 expressive 1 0.71 declarative 0 0.00 total 141 table 2 exemplifies the percentages of speech acts as performed by president gwb. as it can be seen, the president, to some degree, committed himself to the truth of his proposition in almost 69% of the total speech acts performed. moreover, less than fifteen percent of the speech acts deal with committing himself and the government to future actions. small percentages were identified in the performance of expressive speech acts. table 3. speech act of sby inaugural address illocutionary acts n % assertive 50 46.30 directive 20 18.52 commisive 26 24.07 expressive 12 11.11 declarative 0 0.00 total 108 table 3 exemplifies types of speech acts performed by president sby. as can be inferred from the table, sby performed almost half of the total speech acts as statements that can be measured in terms of true and false. in this type of speech act, sby exemplified the success of general election, the hard working general election commission, the national principles, the country current democracy, and other issues. furthermore, above twenty percent of his speech acts deal with his commitment for future action dealing with national issues and problems. however, in some of this speech acts, instead of stating himself for doing the action, he used the term „my administration‟ which refers to the government. as commonly can be seen on the other inaugural address, the sby also performs directive speech acts mainly containing encouragement to work together in maintaining unity and achieving the national goals. furthermore, the percentage of expressive speech acts are performed by this president is almost equal to the ones performed by another president (nm). table 4. speech act of nm inaugural address illocutionary acts n % assertive 22 50.00 directive 10 22.73 278 paulus widiatmoko analysis of presidential inaugural addresses using searle’s taxonomy of speech acts commisive 7 15.91 expressive 5 11.36 declarative 0 0.00 total 44 the numbers of speech acts performed by president nm are not as many as the other because of the length of the inaugural address. as portrayed in table 4, half of the speech acts performed belong to the assertive type. in this speech act, nm conveyed his proposition and beliefs on south african situation related to the history and the country‟s future hope. then, slightly above than 22% of the speech acts are directives and slightly under 16% belong to commissives. in contrast, more than 10% of the total speech acts performed relate to his expressions of psychological state. table 5. speech act performance of csb inaugural address illocutionary acts n % assertive 119 74.84 directive 21 13.21 commisive 14 8.81 expressive 5 3.14 declarative 0 0.00 total 159 president csb performed almost 75% on assertive type of speech acts. he mainly delivered the history, development, and future of taiwan as a new independent country. as it is described in the table, the gap between the assertive speech act and the other ones were very big. table 6. comparative percentage of the five presidents’ speech act performance illocutionary acts gma gwb sby nm csb assertive 23.85 68.09 46.30 50.00 74.84 directive 32.11 18.44 18.52 22.73 13.21 commisive 41.28 12.77 24.07 15.91 8.81 expressive 2.75 0.71 11.11 11.36 3.14 declarative 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 based on the table above, it is observed that none of the presidents performed declarative speech act. similarities are also identified concerning the performance of assertive speech acts for four of the presidents; gwb, sby, nm, and csb. the other speech acts are found out varied in the percentage of their performance. in his inaugural address, gwb exemplified and announced to the world that his country really concerns to fight for liberty and freedom. in conveying the idealism, gwb at the early part of the speech stated his proposition that what he intended to struggle had been started by their predecessors. then, it was also observed that he mentioned certain key phrases repeatedly, over and over again, centering on the god-given mandate of the country to intervene anywhere in the world to advance the cause of “freedom.” in the 20-minutes speech, the president uttered the words “free” or “freedom” 34 times, and the 279 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee word “liberty” 12 times. as can be inferred from the finding of this study, the use of those terms, as contrasted with the term tyranny, obviously signifies the major schemes of the inaugural address in which most of the assertive speech act deal with their idealism and rhetoric of free nation and liberty. another interesting finding is related to gwb performance of the other searle‟s speech acts. it was observed that other speech acts were put under the framework of his idealism of creating the world free from oppression and tyranny. after series of assertive speech acts on that idealism, bush clearly emphasized that the country would struggle for liberty and freedom for the people in other countries. concerning this commissive speech act, among others he stated, “all who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the country will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.” the idealism of freedom was also directed to its citizens in the form of commissive speech acts that they would extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of their time. the subsequent performance of commissive speech acts specified this promise more by giving highest standard to schools, building ownership society and widening home and business, retirement of saving, and health insurance. furthermore, his performance of directive speech acts could inferred in the context of the above idealism as he put, “ i ask the youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes... make the choices to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself…” putting himself to the fulfillment of propositions for the country, gwb finally stated, “…we will give our fellows the citizens greater freedom from want and fear, make our society more prosperous, just, and equal.” unlike gwb, different schemes were identified in gma and sby inaugural addresses. in her speech, in which on majority consists of commissive speech act, gma after expressing her gratitude immediately conveyed her promises to people of the country. the commissive speech acts performed by gma were observed as the ones in which the achievement are observable and could be measured. some of her promises among other deal with providing more job opportunities, providing loans for entrepreneurs, expanding agriculture lands, and other benefits. traced back to the country in 2001, one of the prominent newspaper in the country stated that there are five fundamental problems faced by this country, namely poverty, a non-performing economy a debased education, law and order (lack of absence) and graft and corruption (benigno & benigno, 2001). in other words, it seems obvious why those agendas were put into priorities and raised as the major issues in gma inaugural address. similar to gma, sby also performed a lot of commissive speech acts, although the percentage was not that much. however, different agendas obviously underlie this fifth of the country president‟s inaugural address. it seems that sby attempted to accomplish reconciliation for various groups and communities in the country. sby right at the beginning related his inaugural event with the general election and his expressive speech acts for the government as they had successfully held the general election. then, it was followed by commissive speech act to preserve brotherhood with the president. partly, the performance of these speech acts could be traced back to the atmosphere of competition during the general election after the country‟s second president era. at the 1999‟s general election, there were around 48 parties participated (used to be 3 big parties) and it was acknowledged as the first democratic general election in the country (the jakarta post, 2001). the next general election in 2004 was also markedly the country‟s great achievement for democracy learning since was the first direct general election. the election is conducted by choosing not from the political parties but 280 paulus widiatmoko analysis of presidential inaugural addresses using searle’s taxonomy of speech acts directly the individuals to be seated in certain political institutions for the president. furthermore, the fact that there are numbers of groups entitling different tribes, political parties, and religions urge the necessities to be accommodated and collaborated. aside from what has been stated earlier, this intention can also be seen from his speech acts of directives that in almost all of these illocutionary acts he appears to emphasize togetherness and collaborative works by means of pronoun us, we, or the ones involving himself and other components of the nation. some examples of these would be, “it is the time for us to walk together, we have passed our moment of competition, now it is time for unity, we must overcome this problem together, and other similar tones. even, at the other part of his address he stated, “with the mandate i received from you, i am determined to be become, not only the president of the country c, but also the president of all of the people, all of the country people.” as has been stated in the finding of this study, president nm performed speech acts of assertive in fifty percents of his total speech acts. conveying his concepts of liberty and being the owner of their own land, the speech acts cannot be detached from his political struggle against the racial discrimination practiced in his country. nm spent 27 years in prison on convictions for crimes that included sabotage committed when he struggled against apartheid (yadav, 2007). the concept of freedom is observed in both inaugural address delivered by gwb and nm. however, different from gwb‟s concept, the proposition of freedom in nm inaugural address can be inferred to build patriotism, feeling of togetherness, and gratitude for being freed from racism and apartheid. thirty four occurrences of pronominal we and the ones referring to it (us, our) signify the feeling of being one destiny experiencing hard time in the past. furthermore, his performance of speech acts mostly can be inferred back to their past history. at the end of the speech, it is clearly observed that, through directive speech acts, nm invited the collaborative participation of south african to work together, develop their nation as the ideal one based on their past experiences. sharing some similar features as country d (nm), country e had been struggled for its independence from china. on march 2000 presidential race, voters elected pro-independence candidate csb of the democratic progressive party, ending more than 50 years of nationalist rule (chu, 2008). therefore, most of the assertive speech acts performed in the inaugural speech reflected historical and current situation of taiwan as well as the future expectation of the country. aside from what has been presented, some points are worth to note related to other commonalities of searle‟s speech act performance. first, to some degree it was observed that speech acts were performed by all of the presidents to affirm national principles, linking their history to their present situation, reconstituting people and groups, and presenting national policy of administration. second, the series of speech act performance appeared to be arranged to show coherence of the idea presented. for instance, assertive speech acts on national principles and history were commonly performed prior to directive or commissive ones to ascertain their strength. conclusion an inaugural address as a starting point for the elected president to lead the country and run the government certainly marks an important event as it represents the president‟s vision on many crucial issues, conveys the government agendas, and moreover builds his/her establishment to the whole country and the world. reactions, criticism, and comments toward what the content of the speech show its significance 281 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee towards socioeconomic and political situation of the country. observing the status of the speaker and the listeners in the event, then the language used in the inaugural address serves not only to announce the existence of the new president, but also to perform various illocutionary acts. searle‟s taxonomy of speech acts seem to be able to provide analysis of what the president mean and trying to say. the contexts, historical and current conditions, indeed contribute in providing foundation towards the analysis. therefore, combining some features of other analysis such as critical discourse analysis (cda) in the framework of speech act study appears to give more comprehensive examination of various interrelated aspects in the discourse. further investigation employing cda would likely contribute to the richness of discourse analysis study in this field. references benigno, g., & benigno, p. (2001). monetary policy rules and the exchange rate. cepr discussion paper no 2087. chu, y. h. (2008). taiwan in 2007: the waiting game. asian survey, 48(1), 124-132. harrison, & tony. (2003). understanding political ideas and movement. new york: manchester university press. kvasny, l., & truex, d. (2001). defining away the digital divide: a content analysis of institutional influences on popular representations of technology. in realigning research and practice in information systems development (399414). us: springer. miller, n. l., & stiles, w. b. (1986). verbal familiarity in american presidential nomination acceptance speeches and inaugural addresses (1920-1981). social psychology quarterly, 72-81. norman, f. (1989). language and power. new york: longman. searle, j. r. (1969). speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. cambridge: cambridge university press. searle. (1979). expression and meaning. cambridge: cambridge university press. yadav, a. k. (2007). nelson mandela and the process of reconciliation in south africa. india quarterly, 63(4), 49-84. 282 paulus widiatmoko analysis of presidential inaugural addresses using searle’s taxonomy of speech acts english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 811 teachers’ reading habits and their effect on the students’ literacy hesni neno english study program, faculty of education science, universitas timor, kefamenanu, indonesia email: nenohesny@yahoo.co.id ulu emanuel english study program, faculty of education science, universitas timor, kefamenanu, indonesia email: ulu_emanuel@unimor.ac.id delti yulita english study program, faculty of education science, universitas timor, kefamenanu, indonesia email: yulitadelti@ymail.com apa citation: neno, h., emanuel, u., & yulita, d. (2022). teachers’ reading habits and their effect on the students’ literacy. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 811-820. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.5705 received: 19-06-2022 accepted: 21-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction the indonesian students’ literacy, especially in reading is still low compared to other asean countries. this result was exposed by pisa or oecd programme for international student assessment 2018 released in december 2019. the average score by indonesian students’ literacy are 371. this score is lower compared to china, singapore, macau, and hongkong which are on the top position with score 525 in students’ literacy. this fact about indonesian students’ literacy implicitly showed the quality of learning outcome in school and teachers’ practices is still far from the expectation. the lack of knowledge in literacy and teaching methodology in reading lead to the low quality in students’ literacy. based on pisa result analysis in oecd (2018), there are many factors that influence students’ literacy, those are economic, resources and all school components. at school, teachers hold the important role in learning process and encourage the students to improve their reading ability. from this situation, a question about teachers reading habits and affection on english reading is raised. whether the teachers are a good reader or not need to be investigated to support the teaching and learning process in the classroom. efl learners still found that reading is difficult and consuming time which caused the deficiencies of reading habits (bakken & lund, 2018; daniel, esoname, chima, & udoaku, 2017; gustine, 2018). research in efl reading showed abstract: this article is intended to show the importance of teachers’ reading habits to develop students’ literacy effectively. it is shown that the lack of teachers’ reading habits causing the deficiencies and lack of opportunity for students’ quality in efl literacy. this study used mixed method approach and the data were collected through questionnaire, interview, reading test, and observation. the participants in this study were 6 teachers and 120 students from 6 schools. the result showed that teachers’ reading habits and affective states in efl reading were in medium level and students’ literacy were in low level. it also exposed that teachers faced many reading problems and challenges throughout the years they studied english. there is a tendency that teachers’ deficiencies on their reading habits is from their perception about efl reading that still focus on translating the words into their first language rather than critically involved with the main ideas in the text. the result concludes that teachers’ lack of reading habits had caused the lack opportunity of their students’ quality literacy instruction in the classroom. this lack of instruction caused the students are thriving and struggling as efl readers who do not achieve proficiency, fluency, or comprehension. moreover, there are also many factors that affect reading habits such as socio-economic background. parents’ role and the development of technology that changes the medium of reading. keywords: literacy; reading habits; students; teachers. hesni neno, ulu emanuel, & delti yulita teachers’ reading habits and their effect on the students’ literacy 812 that reading is a complex mental process (denton, wolters, york, & swanson, 2014; yulita & safrina, 2019; yulita & neno, 2021). the process of reading become complex because it involves the mental process in mind to comprehend the text. this mental process is the ability to break the code of each sentence, find main ideas, and connect the meaning from each idea in the text. to understand the meaning of the text, denton et al. (2014) added that the readers have to synthesize the first information in the text and their general knowledge to build their mental map and cognitive development. therefore, to master and level up their reading ability, students need mind practice a lot and spend much time in reading. based on the previous research, the effect of reading is proven can increase students’ academic achievement (daniel et al., 2017; bano, jabeen, & quthosi, 2018; hasanah; 2017; & kusdemir, 2018). in addition to that fact, reichenberg & andreassen (2018) & sorman, ljungberg, & ronnlund (2018) stated that this requires a high standard for teachers as they are expected to cover the goal of curriculum and improve students’ literacy. therefore, teachers must have good reading habits because it affects the students reading ability in the class. in teaching and education field, generally reading habits is built from the repetition of reading practice in an unconscious time that became daily habits (alsaeedi, ngadiran, kadir, & altowayti, 2021; celik, 2019). good reading habits is determined by frequency, spontaneity, and accuracy, satisfaction in doing the activity, the length of time, and good ability in english (male, angelianawati, & sudirman, 2021; yulita & neno, 2021). it also requires positive attitude towards reading, high reading awareness, and having teachers who love reading (yulita & safrina, 2019, yulita & neno, 2021). moreover, some other factors like the choice of books, reading motivation, willingness to accept books as gift, and regular extensive reading time also plays important role in building good reading habits (alsaeedi et al., 2021; kusdemir & bulut, 2018). in the opposite, bad reading habit is classified as the low motivation in reading and negative attitude about reading and reluctant to accept books as gift. from the previous research about reading habits, it is revealed that there are some factors that influence reading habits. personally, reading habits are affected by age, social class, and parents job (bana, 2018), internet access and home video (male et al., 2021; loh & sun, 2019). moreover, reading habits are also affected by the environment such as parents, peer group, school curriculum, and teachers (ahmad, tariq, chaudhry, & ramzan, 2020; le, tran, trinh, nguyen, vuong, & vuong, 2019; & reichenberg & andreassen, 2018). thus, parents and teachers have important role in providing and supporting children reading habits by creating reading environment and being role model for developing good reading habits. regarding the affective states in educational field, this term points the students’ awareness in assessing and knowing themselves during learning process. according to yulita & neno (2021), affective states in reading consist of motivation, volition, feeling, attribution, and selfefficacy. motivation in learning consists of intrinsic and extrinsic that combining those two could improve learning outcome (kusdemir & bulut, 2018). yulita & neno (2021) stated that the self awareness and determination could help students to increase their motivation in learning. moreover, celik (2019) added that motivation could improve internalization process in learning. regarding volition, yulita & neno (2021) described volition as self-determination and selfcontrol towards learning experience. students who shows strong determination will have ability to seek solution and finish the task given and understand that learning success is affected by knowledge and skill. feelings in education field relate to emotional aspect in learning process. yulita & neno (2021) emphasis that students do not only think but also feel and it is important as an emotional aspect that could develop students’ cognitive aspect. yulita & neno (2021) added that english foreign learning needs a high personal belonging level to support the learning process. meanwhile attribution is explained by celik (2019) as effort and perception in learning success and failure. moreover, weiner explained that there are four factors that affect learning success and failure, those are ability, effort, perception about difficulties and luck. lastly, the term of self-efficacy described by yulita & neno (2021) as the students’ confidence in their ability in learning and finishing the learning task. this related to self-ability in controlling and practicing the right action in order to get the learning success. self-efficacy also influences the aspiration, strength, motivation and determination level when facing difficulties and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 813 setbacks in learning, also increase the ability to analyze the cause of failure and success in learning and increase the strength to face pressure and problem. literacy in education is associated with the ability to read current text in everyday world (gustine, 2018; tompkins, 2014). reading is considered as one of indicators of being literate by interpreting a written discourse. being literate is essential as it relates to the skill in millennial era. it can develop people’s social skills, improve hand-eye coordination, and give more fun and entertainment for people’s life. being literate is an access to social, economic, and civic life (tompkins, 2014) and one of fundamental skill to be success in learning process (andriani, 2017; ameyaw & anto, 2018). therefore, the ability in reading is important for students as a preparation for academic performance and career development in the future. however, there are some challenges faced by the teachers in implementing literacy in the classroom, for examples, the lack of knowledge about literacy (gustine, 2018), students’ characteristics that dependent and less autonomy in learning (lengkanawati, 2016), the limited use of technology to find in the classroom practices (karaarslan, 2015), and the conservation notion from students about efl literacy (septiarini, rahmat, & darmahusni, 2018). increasing students’ literacy is related with building up their reading habits. nowadays, students make use of the internet as vast resourceful information and provides a bounder less world of various reading materials (loh & sun, 2019). it cannot be avoided that students spend most of their time surfing on the internet to look for many information, either through reading or watching. thus, teachers and parents should be aware and notice what kind of information that the students and children get form the internet. in indonesian education context, reading instruction is integrated with other skills, those are listening, speaking and writing since junior high school. then it continues to senior high school and university. this showed that indonesian students have been learning english for 6 years and more. teachers should have more time and experiences in english learning and ideally they should have good and solid reading habits for those long period of learning time. however, the low ability of students in reading highlights the teacher reading habits to be questioned. based on the observation in some high schools and junior high schools in kefamenanu, east nusa tenggara, there was a tendency that teachers’ perception about english reading was quite conservative as they considered efl reading is a process of translating the words and sentences from the target language to the source language. the lesson plan and syllabus from the teachers have to point out cognitive and construction theory such as observing, asking, associating, collecting data, and communicating (sundayana, 2017). however, on the practice, the teachers have low tendency to use learning methods that support the reading activity. the reason that makes the teachers choose old tradition and convention in english reading was influenced by some factors and situation. as revealed by bakken & lund (2018) that most of the teachers consider that pronunciation and reading aloud are the most important activities in reading process. therefore, the process of reading mostly stops at pronunciation and reading aloud. this could degrade the students’ reading ability that are lower and indifferent. this situation has been complicated and seen in the learning process of efl reading where the students do not have any solid habits and strategies in reading to help them improving their reading ability. to make sure that the students get the useful information and wisely use the internet, teachers and parents need to guide and actively participate in students reading practices (bano et al., 2018). significantly, teachers’ important role is guiding and building their students’ reading habits. in order to build good reading habits for their students, teachers’ reading habits need to be considered. regarding those problems and situation above, this research is aimed to find out teachers’ reading habits and affective states in efl reading and how it effects their students’ literacy. since there is no study on investigating how teachers’ reading habits and affective states in efl reading effects their students’ literacy, therefore this research is significant for the improvement of increasing literacy and teaching methodology in education policy. in addition, this research is important as a scientific data and support to show the importance of teachers’ reading habits in developing students’ literacy that could be applied by school and institution to set their syllabus and curriculum. method hesni neno, ulu emanuel, & delti yulita teachers’ reading habits and their effect on the students’ literacy 814 this study used mixed method approach that combined the triangulation data from questionnaire, interview, and test in order to answer three research questions. those questions that underpin this study are: (1) how is teachers’ reading habit; (2) what is teachers’ affective states in efl reading; (3) how is teacher’s reading habits affected students’ literacy? the questionnaires were used to investigate teachers’ reading habits and their affective states. then, it was followed by interviewing the teachers to dig more and to analyze their response on the questionnaires. the questionnaire of reading habits and affective states was adapted from yulita & neno (2021). reading habits questionnaire consists of the amount of reading time, number of books, kind of books, and purpose in reading. the questionnaire about affective states was modified in which consist of motivation in reading, volition, feelings, and attribution in reading. furthermore, reading test was conducted to measure student’ reading ability and interview was applied to describe their literacy. the result of the data was analyzed by using data transformation to compare quantitative results with the qualitative data (hamied, 2017). the quantitative data is qualified in themes that can be compared with theme from qualitative data. results and discussion overall, the finding shows the tendency of teachers reading habits, their affective states in efl reading and their effects on students’ literacy. it is revealed that teachers’ reading habits were at low level and their affective states were in moderate level. meanwhile, students’ literacy was at low level. the results conclude that the lack of teachers’ reading habit causing the lack of opportunity in literacy. the detail explanation of these three research questions are described below. teachers’ reading habits the finding in teachers’ reading habits was divided into five sections, those are the amount of reading practice, the length of time of having reading habits, the types of text read, the number of books read, and the number of published writings. the details about teachers’ reading habits are formulated in the table below. table 1. teachers’ reading habits no description teachers’ response 1 the amount of reading practice 1-2 hours per day 2 the length of time of having reading habits since junior and senior high school 3 the types of text read all type of text 4 the number of books read less than 5 books per week 5 number of published writing none the amount of reading practice the result showed that the amount of reading practice was around 2-3 hours per day. teacher 6 stated that she does not read every day due to her busy time in daily activities. most of the teachers had some notion that they did not spend much time in reading unless it was for pleasure or entertainment. it indicated that teachers’ reading habits were still low quantitatively and it affected their teaching practice in the classroom. this poor reading habits reflected the low awareness of reading practice in the classroom. linear to that, the students’ reading habits also become low and unsteady. the students were rarely given the encouragement from the teachers to build their reading habits. the length of time of having reading habits regarding the length of time of having reading habits, most of teachers started their reading habits from senior high school. no one started their reading habits from elementary school. the interview revealed that the biggest problem faced by the teachers in the past time was the lack of reading sources so that they could not build their reading habits earlier. this fact indicated that external factor such as reading sources is so significant in order to build good reading habits. without broad access to reading sources, learner would not be exposed to many opportunities in building a solid reading habits. the types of text read regarding the types of text read, most of the teachers read all types of text. however, there was a tendency that the teachers were more interested in reading fiction and entertainment text for pleasure. due to the advanced technology recently, most of the teachers got the reading text from the internet that provides them many reading sources. it is a positive sign that their reading habits was assisted by the technology. meanwhile, the interview revealed that teachers’ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 815 knowledge about text types was considered poor since they rarely concern about the text they read. it was caused by their previous knowledge about text types was quite different compared to the newest development in text genre. the number of books read related to the number of books read by the teachers, it was shown that teachers read less than 5 books in a week. it is probably caused by the use of the internet that changed teachers’ habits in reading where they tended to read the online text than the conventional text. reading a hardcopy of books already been considered as an old way for the teachers. their motivation in reading become low when they saw thick books and they got interested in reading short text rather than long text. this revelation was related to their purpose in reading in which they read for pleasure instead of for getting knowledge. the number of published writings in case of publication, there was no teachers who ever published their writing. it indicated that their poor reading habits affected their writing ability and willingness to publish an article. teachers said that there was no obligation from their institution to publish their writing. because of there was no external motivation, they were reluctant to write academic paper or article. moreover, they also have low confidence in their ability in academic writing since they never attended any workshop or learned about how to publish in their past learning experiences. teachers’ affective states in efl reading regarding teachers’ affective states in reading, the interview and observation showed the details about a changing in their affective states due to long learning experiences. the advanced development of technology gives much contribution in teachers’ affective states towards efl reading. in one way, it helps them to find many reading resources and gets reading comprehension easier than the past time. however, in the other way, it does not lead to a better practice in the classroom and does not increase their motivation in publishing or writing article. the detail is explained below. motivation the interview showd that teachers’ motivation mostly determined by external factors rather than internal factors. it means that the teachers did not have a strong intention to maintain their reading habits consistently. teachers tended to think that reading was just an obligation of their job as a teacher. they did not consider it as something they needed to do in their spare time to gain knowledge and to improve their teaching. some reasons that decreased teachers’ motivation in reading were they were busy doing their daily activities, they were not interested in academic reading, and they were not familiar with the advanced technology that changed the text format from textbook to online texts. these reasons were a combination of internal and external factors that influenced teachers’ motivation in reading. feelings the result from questionnaire and interview revealed the mixed feeling, both negative and positive, of the teachers about efl reading. teachers got negative feelings in reading since they percept that efl reading was difficult and took a long time just to understand the words in the texts. this perception made teachers’ motivation become low in reading. meanwhile, the positive feelings occurred when they realized the importance of efl reading to support their teaching practice. they agreed that this awareness needed to be built to create more positive feelings towards reading. volition regarding teachers’ volition in efl reading, the study revealed that it depended on teachers’ interest towards the text and the obligation of their job. teachers had high volition in efl reading if they found that the text is interesting or in case the text related to their teaching material. they were willing to struggle and making effort to do the reading task in order to fulfill their curiosity about the text. so, the type of the text was also significant in increasing teachers’ volition to finish their reading. it can be concluded that teachers’ willingness in efl reading is affected by both internal and external factors. attribution the result showed that teachers’ attribution in reading was also determined by internal and external factors. the internal factor related to the text difficulty level and the lack of reading strategies. meanwhile, the external factor is influenced by the internet that help them to increase their reading ability. in this case, the external gives more positive input in teachers’ attribution in efl reading. hesni neno, ulu emanuel, & delti yulita teachers’ reading habits and their effect on the students’ literacy 816 self-efficacy teachers’ self-efficacy was on the medium level in their response towards efl reading. in doing efl reading, teachers admitted that they still focused on difficult words and tended to view that efl reading is a process of translating the text into their first language. this perception made them do not have high confidence in doing reading task. moreover, some of the teachers have never taken any reading test such as toefl or ielts, so that they do not sure about their ability in reading test. effect on students’ literacy the result for reading test showed that students’ ability in efl reading is still low with total percentage 59.35%. so, from the total number of questions in reading test, the students only could reach half of the correct answers. this result indicated that students’ ability in reading and their literacy are affected by teachers’ reading habit. the lack of teachers’ reading habits leads to the lack of opportunity for students to improve their literacy. the details about students’ literacy is shown in the table below. table 2. students’ reading test result students mean score percentage junior high school 3.5/6 58.7% senior high school 3/5 60% total 59.35% the observation and interview added the fact that students are struggling in understanding the text due to lack of vocabulary and reading strategies. in the reading process, instead of processing the information from the text and focusing on the meaning level, the students were focused on word by word. based on the reader level elaborated by yulita & safrina (2019), the students were at the low level of reader because they are still struggling in understanding the words rather than the whole context of the text. this majority of the conception of efl reading as translating the words were merely seen as the old tradition that surpass from time to time by the teachers to their students. besides, the lack exposure to english text also become the important factors that degrade students’ literacy since it caused unfamiliarity and increased reading anxiety. the findings also imply that the students are lack of reading strategies that could help them to understand the information from the text in the limited time. the students missed the strategic reading activity during classroom teaching and never get exposure to many reading strategies. meanwhile, a good vocabulary banks and good reading strategies could be achieved with a lot of reading practices. therefore, the importance of good reading habits could help students to increase their reading ability. in relation to the amount of time that the students spend in reading, unfortunately it is shown that students’ reading time is limited. although the advanced technology like the era of the internet has made it easier to access reading sources, students seldom use it to read more, they spend more time in the internet watching videos and playing games. based on the interview and observation, this decline of reading time was caused by students’ lack of interest in reading and there was no external motivation in reading english text. it is revealed that the teachers rarely give reading task for the students that could increase their reading habits and their interest in reading. this result was supported by gustine (2018) that found teachers are still insured about teaching literacy and promoting reading strategies to students that can develop students’ literacy and reading habits. discussion furthermore, the result of this study revealed that the teachers teaching practice did not expose students’ reading experience which was important to empower their literacy as the ability to read and see the reality of the world they are living (gustine, 2018). besides, students’ literacy in english text was also affected by students’ anxiety and negative perception about english text. both anxiety and negative perception were considered as the affective states. as supported by bana (2020), many students considered english text as difficult to understand. they said that it took a long time for them to understand the meaning of the text and many of students were perceived reading practice as translating practice. this conservative notion trapped the students in a belief that reading english text is just about translating the words into l1 instead of reading to learn and gaining knowledge (bakken & lund, 2018; gilakjani & sabouri, 2016). given the fact above, it is critical for education system and especially teachers to put the importance of literacy in teaching and learning process in the classroom. apart from the teachers’ lack of knowledge and practices in literacy, students revealed their willingness to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 817 complete efl reading task as long they were guided and aided well during reading process. this related to their dependency to their teachers rather than themselves in solving the problems. students said they did not have strategies in reading that can help them to understand the text faster and make reading more interesting. based on the result above, it is found the teachers and students were still struggling on building a good reading habits and creating positive affective states in efl reading. this phenomenon was relatable with a study by male et al. (2021) & loh & sun (2019) that found the difficulties in understanding the words and meaning in efl reading become number one factor that influence the reading habits. this negative treat made the teachers’ and students’ reading habits became poor and low. the study also shown that even the teachers have long period in learning english, it does not guarantee that they have a good reading habits. daniel et al. (2017) & hasanah (2017) proved that students with good reading habits have teachers that love all kinds of text. moreover, kusdemir & bulut (2018) added that motivation in efl reading by the teacher made the students could maintain a good confidence and positive affective in doing reading task. therefore, teachers’ reading habits are important to give positive influence towards students’ literacy especially in efl. as supported by reichenberg & andreassen (2018) and sorman, ljungberg, & ronnlund (2018) teachers’ professional development should be improved as it is significant to raise students’ reading habits and their literacy. teachers could improve the classroom situation by modifying the textbooks as the sources of reading practice and engaging students in more valuable and critical reading activities. surely, teachers could not rely on textbook fully since it is not always relevant to the current situation. teachers could mix the use of textbook with their teaching method that focusing more on reading process of getting knowledge from the text and not only translating word by word. moreover, the combination of teachers’ reading habits and affective states is significant towards their teaching practices. by improving their reading habits and changing their affective states to be more positive, the implementation of their teaching will nurture the students’ literacy in the class. as explained by gustine (2018), the significant of literacy is to connect the students to the outside world and current situation that could lead their future to be better and improving. this could be reached by developing solid reading habits and changing affection towards english reading. in addition, teachers should be more critical about the external factors that influence students’ literacy such as socio-economic, parents’ role and the advanced of technology that could help students to get more opportunity for effective literacy development. conclusion this study showed that the teachers’ reading habits were in medium level and they had mixed affective states, both positive and negative. in efl reading, there was a tendency that teachers’ reading habits were low due to their perception about efl reading text. teachers still focused on difficult words while reading and considered that translation is the best reading strategies they could apply in reading process and also in teaching reading. this poor habits and perception lead to the deficiencies of students’ opportunity to get more literacy instruction in the classroom. it can be concluded that teachers’ reading habits affected students’ literacy and reading ability. moreover, the development of technology helps the teachers and students to get more reading sources from the internet. it is hoped that their reading habits increase along with the increase in advanced technology that enables students to access the reading material easily. besides, other factors need to be considered in building good reading habits, those are economic and social status and individual perception about efl reading. thus, this study concluded that directing the teachers and the students to be more positive about efl reading is important to increase their reading habits. acknowledgement the authors would like to extend their gratitude to lppm universitas timor as the funder of this research. this study was funded by lp2m universitas timor as a part of lectures research program. the article publication is included as the report to respective institution. references ahmad, z., tariq, m., chaudhry, m. s., & ramzan, m. 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(2018). read or perish: reading habits among students and its effect on academic performance: a case study of eastbank senior high school-accra. library philosophy and practice. 1748. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/17 48. andriani, d. (2017). the influence of reading comprehension achievement at the eight grade students of smp muhammadiyah 1 rawa bening bu using drta and kwl strategies. journal of english language studies, 2(1), 32-45. bakken, a. s., & lund, r. (2018). why should learners of english read? norwegian english teachers' notion of efl reading. teaching and teacher education, 70(1), 78-87. bana, a. (2020). students' perception of using the internet to develop reading habits. journal of english teaching, 6(1), 60-70. bano, j., jabeen, z., & quthosi, s. b. (2018). perceptions of teachers about the role of parents in developing reading habits of children to improve their academic performance in schools. journal of education and educational development, 5(1), 42-59. celik, b. (2019). a study on the factors affecting reading and reading habits. international journal of english linguistics, 10(1), 101114. celik, b. (2019). a study on using the university library and reading habits of students: a study on tishk international university students in erbil. international journal of english linguistics, 9(4), 224-240. daniel, o., esoname, s. r., chima, o. d., & udoaku, o. s. (2017). effect of reading habits on the academic performance of students: a case study of the students of afe babalola university. teacher education and curriculum studies, 2(5), 74-80. denton, c., & wolters, c. a., york, m. j., & swanson, e. (2014). adolescents' use of reading comprehension strategies: differences related to reading proficiency, grade level, and gender. learning and individual differences, 37, 81-95. gilakjani, a. p., & sabouri, n. b. (2016). a study of factors affecting efl learners' reading comprehension skill and the strategies for improvement. international journal of english linguistics, 6(5), 181-187. gustine, g. g. (2018). a survey on critical literacy as a pedagogical approach to teaching english in indonesia. indonesian journal of applied lingusitics, 7(3), 531-537. hamied, a. f. (2017). research methods: a guide for first-time researchers. upi press. hasanah, a. (2017). the effect of teaching technique and reading habits towards student's writing skill at junior high school in serang. journal of english language studies, 2(2), 141-154. karaarslan, y. (2015). reading and reading comprehension skill levels of primary students and the opinions that they are reading and reading comprehension difficulties faced by classroom teachers. turkey: karadeniz technical university graduate school of education sciences. kusdemir, y., & bulut, p. (2018). the relationship between elementary school students' reading comprehension and reading motivation. journal of education and training studies, 6(12), 97-110. le, t. t., tran, t., trinh, t. p., t, n. c., nguyen, t. p., vuong, t. t., & vuong, q. h. (2019). reading habits, socioeconomic condition, occupational aspiration and academic achievement in vietnamese junior high school students. sustainability, 11(18), 5113. lengkanawati, n. s. (2016). teachers' belief about learner autonomy and its implementation in indonesian efl settings. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 6(2), 222-231. loh, c. e., & sun, b. (2019). "i'd still prefer to read the hard copy" adolescents' print and digital reading habits. journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 62(6), 663-672. male, h., angelianawati, l., & sudirman, a. (2021). a study of students online reading habits and preferences. degres article, 20(1), 172-183. oecd. (2018). handbook of pisa. paris: oecd. reichenberg, m., & andreassen, r. (2018). comparing swedish and norwegian teachers' professional development how human capital and social capital factor into teachers' reading habits. reading psychology, 39(5), 442-467. septiarini, t., rahmat, a., & darmahusni. (2018). the relationship between reading habits and reading comprehension of english department in untirta. journal of english language studies, 3(2), 178-191. sorman, d. e., ljungberg, j. k., & ronnlund, m. (2018). reading habits among older adults in relation to level and 15-year changes in verbal fluency and episodic recall. frrontiers in psychology, 9, 1-10. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 819 sundayana, w. (2017). telaah kurikulum & perencanaan pembelajaran. jakarta: erlangga. tompkins, g. e. (2014). literacy for the 21st century a balanced approach (6th ed.). new jersey: pearson. yulita, d., & neno, h. (2021). do teachers fond of reading? teachers' affective states in efl reading. journal of english language studies, 6(1), 52-64. yulita, d., & safrina, r. (2019). metacognitive in reading: the awareness of less proficient students on reading strategies. metathesis, 3(2), 135-145. hesni neno, ulu emanuel, & delti yulita teachers’ reading habits and their effect on the students’ literacy 820 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 621 the effect of fiction short movie on students’ english speaking ability riswanto uin fatmawati soekarno bengkulu, indonesia email: riswanto@iainbengkulu.ac.id reko serasi uin fatmawati soekarno bengkulu, indonesia email: reko.serasi@iainbengkulu.ac.id azzah salandega uin fatmawati soekarno bengkulu, indonesia email: azzahazzah76@gmail.com kasmaini universitas bengkulu, indonesia email: kasmaini@unib.ac.id apa citation: riswanto., serasi, r., salandega, a., & kasmaini. (2022). the effect of fiction short movie on students’ english speaking ability. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 621628. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6282. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction speaking is a crucial ability to develop when learning english. it plays a crucial function since the primary purpose of language is the ability to transmit thoughts or information vocally in addition to written information. the most crucial active skill in learning a foreign language is the ability to communicate verbally (rao, 2019; zarifa, 2020). it's the act of putting words together to convey a message. it signifies that speaking is the primary action of language. the majority of language activity is oral communication from one speaker to another in the context of daily living. clampitt (2016) mentioned that speaking is an important part of daily life that shouldn't be taken for granted. given that english is currently the most widely spoken language in the world, it is without a shadow of a doubt the case that oral communication ability is an essential component of english language proficiency in the modern period (islam, ahmad, & islam, 2022). hence, because of the importance of speaking skills in this international language, usmonov & usmonova (2020) argued that people of all ages, including students, must develop these foreign language abilities so that they are able to use english as a means of communication, particularly in their studies and job. iftanti & maunah (2021) implied that because students think that english is a path to academic and social success, they are challenged to become competent in english so that they may stay up with global innovation, compete in the global economy, and improve their quality of education in the face of global change. abstract: the purpose of this research is to investigate whether or not students' students' speaking skills may be improved by watching short films. quantitative research using a quasi-experimental design is the method that was used for the study. all of the pupils in the second grade at smp a'isyiyah pagaralam in south sumatra, indonesia, make up the population. this research was conducted with the participation of forty different students. it was decided that 20 students from class a would make up the experimental group, and the remaining 40 students from class b would serve as the control group. the method of data analysis makes use of a prerequisite test, specifically the normality test and the homogeneity test, and the final test is hypothesis testing. according to the findings of the research that was carried out, there is an effect in the use of short movies as a medium for improving students' speaking ability. keywords: fiction short movies; media; students speaking ability. riswanto, reko serasi, azzah salandega, & kasmaini the effect of fiction short movie on students’ english speaking ability 622 as a result, speaking skills must be prioritized throughout english lessons so that students may use them in everyday situations. speaking has become one of the primary abilities in learning english in the indonesian curriculum to make pupils learn it. at school, students study the four english skills including speaking. in order to be able to speak english well, the aspects of speaking must be considered. students needs to consider the accuracy which is the correct use of language related to grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. gower, phillips, & walter (1995) mentioned that accuracy requires making sure that one's vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation are all correct. in fact, students in speaking class should expect to cover a wide range of material, but the speaking component is smaller than the reading comprehension portion. furthermore, several issues arise throughout the teaching and learning process. some problems are usually found in speaking, such as feeling nervous when they try to speak in front of the class, lack of vocabulary, and feeling afraid of making mistakes. these problems belong to linguistics and psychological problems. wulandari, amalia, & ramdhani (2022) implied that low levels of proficiency in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation were contributing linguistic factors in students' inability to communicate effectively at the medium level. meanwhile anxiety, lack of practice and confidence were the psychological aspect that contribute to the students’ difficulty in speaking. more over pronunciation and fluency is one of the students’ weaknesses in learning speaking because, mastery of the both components means they can speak fully similar with native speaker or pronounce similarly with native speaker and speak as fluent and effortless as that of a native speaker (delozier & rhodes, 2017). students should be given the opportunity to use their language orally whenever possible so they can express themselves verbally (amalia & apriani, 2016). as a matter of fact, it is essential to engage the students to the learning process where they can feel more motivate to learn and involve in the speaking activities. other concerns, ineffective teaching methods and a boring classroom environment can lead to students being bored and disinterested. because there is no new setting, students have a hard time honing their speaking abilities when using the strategy. islam & stapa, (2021) indicated that because the learners are deprived of the opportunity to use the language and acquire the skills necessary for appropriate communication, their fluency suffers. using movie as a media in teaching speaking can be a solution. movies are the type of media that will pique students' interest because most teenagers enjoy watching movies. through movies, students will learn how foreigners use the language in different situation in daily life context. movies can be used as a pedagogic means to improve language learning, based on the premise that they provide real life language input (smaldino, lowther, & russell, 2012). conversations in films occur in real life contexts, therefore learners explore how language is used by its native speaker. one of the major benefits of films is their contribution to the development of spoken language comprehension. blasco, moreto, blasco, levites, & janaudis (2015) advocated that movies are helpful in teaching the human dimension, which is necessary for developing as a human being and for forming identity in early learners. movies are comforting, evocative, and non-threatening. they are also based in both visual and emotion. for teachers, the movies experience helps also to confirm and clarify their role to bring a new perspective in teaching. kanellopoulou (2019) stated that movies are an excellent way to gain exposure to actual language. the production of authentic materials takes place more in the context of actual dialogue than in the context of language instruction. because authentic materials include the qualities of language as it is used by a native speaker, using them can significantly contribute to the enhancement of language skills. berk (2009) argued that, when you watch a movie or a tv show, emotions like excitement, rage, laughter, relaxation, love, whimsy, or even boredom are often omitted. all of these elements of filmmaking inspire audiences to express themselves verbally about the feelings they're experiencing. bloomsabury international mentions that listening to native speakers will also help students improve their fluency in the language. listen to how to connect their words and where to place intonation on specific words and sentences. furthermore, through movies students and teachers can put the knowledge to practice. in english classroom they will learn a lot of vocabulary and grammar but they may not know how to use it in real life. watching english movies will help them understand how use all english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 623 knowledge that has lean in everyday situation. according to lynch (2016), because of the variety of dialects they can show and the enjoyment they provide, movies are frequently used in the classroom. other studies also reported the benefits of using movie in english language teaching classroom. it is more efficient and speedier for learners to acquire the english language by viewing a movie (yaseen & shakir, 2015). goctu (2017) mentioned that students can learn a variety of accents and practice speaking in an authentic setting by watching films. rao (2019) also argued that learning the english language in a real-world setting is made possible by the use of authentic materials and a wide range of language scenarios in english movies. the findings of the studies showed that language students around the world believe that movies are credible resources for language learning and that watching movies is an efficient way to develop a variety of language skills, including reading, listening, vocabulary, and speaking (albiladi, abdeen, & lincoln, 2018; goctu, 2017; kabooha, 2016). both students and teachers viewed the usage of films in the classroom to improve language abilities as a positive development. students' language learning might be enhanced and their motivation to study the target language could be increased by using carefully chosen film resources. films and also are now an integral part of students' daily life, so incorporating them into the language classroom is only natural. the use of film as a motivator makes learning a language more pleasurable and interesting (khan, 2015). this research focused on the utilization of short films as a movie format. this study calls for a video no longer than 15 minutes. to ensure that the students are not bored while watching the film, a short film is chosen. students will desire to mimic the character in the movie in order to enhance their english skills. there have been few research studies covering the use of short movies in the field of the teaching of english (audina & ratna suminar, 2018; irmanda, ahmad, & al baekani, 2021; madiyoh, hidayanto, & putro, 2018; masruddin, 2018; tnomat, densiana, billik, & banu, 2022). it is worthwhile to study the impact of short movies on students' speaking abilities because there are few studies on this topic. in addition, only few researches include junior high school students as a sample. it is important to put the students’ level of education, since different characteristics of the students influenced the choice of the materials as well as the teaching procedures. this study, on the other hand, focuses on the use of fiction short movie that depicts fictional characters, locations, or situations. method this study applied quasi-experimental research design. the design was nonequivalent groups pretest-posttest control group design. due to the impossibility of randomly assigning individuals, pre-posttest control or comparison group designs with non-equivalent groups are quite common and beneficial in education. the researcher employs entire, previously created groups of individuals, administers a pre-test, administers the intervention condition to one group, and then administers a posttest (mcmillan & schumacher, 2014). the design is presented in figure 1. figure 1. the notation of nonequivalent groups pretest-posttest control group design there were total of 40 students participated in this study. purposive sampling was used in order to select the participants. the students were chosen since they were in the same level of english achievement. twenty students from class a were assigned as experimental class, while the rests of 20 students were assigned as control class. the students in experimental class were given the treatment of using fiction short movie in speaking class. while the students in control group were not exposed to any new treatment. during the interventions, the teacher applied several teaching procedures. the students were split into four groups. the researchers then, instructed the students to pay close attention to the movie. then the researchers challenged the group to come up with ten words from the movie. the words then were riswanto, reko serasi, azzah salandega, & kasmaini the effect of fiction short movie on students’ english speaking ability 624 exchanged to other groups as the students practice to pronounce them. after then, each of the groups discussed about the movie. finally, the researchers formed a brand new group without letting the students to join their previous group, then with the new group the students’ practice speaking through retelling the story to each other. the instrument used in this study was speaking test which was in the form of talk as performance. according to richards (2008), talk as performance is a useful term for the third sort of talk that can be distinguished. this relates to public speaking, or speaking in front of an audience, such as school presentations, public announcements, and speeches. in order to collect the data of the students’ speaking score objectively, the students’ talks were analysed by using speaking rubrics that include four elements of speaking; pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and fluency. the researchers used t-tests to determine whether or not watching fiction short movies improved the pupils' capacity to communicate verbally. a paired-samples t-test was used in order to determine whether or not there was a significant change in the level of achievement attained by the students in the experimental class either before or after the treatments. in the meantime, the researchers utilized an independent sample t-test so that they could examine the differences in outcomes between the two groups. results and discussion after collecting the data on students’ speaking performance, researchers conducted prerequisite test to makes sure that the data were normally distributed. the results of kolmogorov-smirnov statistic of the whole collected data including pretest (sig-value =0,200)-posttest (sigvalue = 0.074) in experimental group and pretest (sigvalue= 0.200) -posttest (sig-value = 0.07) in control groups showed that the data were normally distributer, p > 0.05. therefore, parametric statistics can be implemented. a statistical analysis called a paired-sample ttest was carried out in order to determine whether or not there was a significant difference in the level of achievement exhibited by the pupils either before or after they were given access to the intervention. in the pretest the highest score in experimental group was 70 while the lowest score was 20 (m= 42). in the post test, the highest score was 85 while the lowest score was 55 (m= 73). the statistical analyses of paired-sample t-test showed that there was statistically significant difference on students’ speaking score before the intervention (m= 42), sd= 14.27) and after the intervention (m= 73, sd= 10.183), t(19)= 20.976, p<0.0005. the results indicated that there is significant improvement on the students’ speaking ability. figure 2 illustrates the distribution of the score in experimental group. figure 2. experimental class speaking score distribution the results of the test based on an independent sample demonstrated positive achievement as well. independent-samples t-test was conducted in order to compare the speaking score obtained by the students in experimental group and control group. there was significant difference in score for experimental group (m= 73, sd= 10.183), and control group [m= 66, sd= 9.542; t(38)= 2.243, p= 0.03 < 0.05. table 1 and 2 illustrated the analyses. table 1. independent group statistic class n mean sd std. error mean speaking exp 20 73 10.183 2.277 ability cont 20 66 9.542 2.134 table 2 independent sample t-test speaking ability levene's test for equality of variances f .12 sig. .913 t-test for equality of means t 2.243 2.243 df 38 37.841 sig. (2-tailed) .031 .031 mean difference 7.000 7.000 std. error difference 3.120 3.120 95% lower .683 .682 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 625 confidence interval of the difference upper 13.317 13.318 the findings of the statistical studies suggested that the utilization of a fiction short film brought about a considerable effect on the students' ability to communicate verbally. it is possible that the students' overall performance would benefit by incorporating media into their speaking class. the findings lend themselves to a number of interpretations. firstly, the result indicated that there was improvement on the students’ english speaking ability after the students taught by using fiction short movie. the presence of short movie as learning media has an important role in achieving learning objective. the presence of learning media can be able to bring and arouse students’ interest in participating in the learning process, which in the end arose the students’ motivation. this is in line with what masruddin (2018) found during his study that the use of short video in teaching speaking was effective. besides, there is evidence that short videos can help students get excited about learning a new language (madiyoh et al., 2018). hameed (2016) also reported that even with a small sample size of only fifty students, the study shows that the use of short films in english language education has a significant impact on students' learning results. irmanda et al. (2021) revealed that students became interested in english short films because of the film's audio-visuals. according to majority of them, they were able to overcome their apprehension and stiffness when it came to practicing their english skills. in addition, movies in english might encourage students to participate actively and enthusiastically in the teaching and learning process. hassan, murshidi, & al murshidi (2020) also added that the students' english listening and speaking abilities improve as a result of watching english films, and this positive link is strengthened by the students' increased enthusiasm to learn. furthermore, during the study, it was found that practically, almost all of the students’ engaged in the teaching and learning process. the movie attracted the students’ attention since it brings story line. it presented the whole language used in the real context in which the learners could get the real example with the real expression. madiyoh et al. (2018) also implied that authentic short movies present the real language used, new words, phrases, and expressions. students' capacity to communicate in english is enhanced through the use of short films, which provide a rich context for language learning. short english movies are an excellent teaching tool because they keep students interested in what they are learning and help them enhance their vocabulary through active listening (tnomat et al., 2022). eshboeva (2021) concluded that the screening of an original feature-length motion picture, when incorporated into a lesson on a foreign language, not only assists students in effectively developing their spoken communication abilities, but it also makes the session more instructional, cognitive, and intriguing for the learner. this is real when the researchers observed the students’ behaviour in the classroom. the level of the students' passion was reflected in their level of active participation in the process of teaching and learning. those students who had a history of experiencing shyness during the learning process made a concerted effort to participate actively in the various learning activities. conclusion this study brings empirical evidence of the effectiveness of using short movie in english speaking class. the study emphasized on the use of movie to improve students speaking ability. this study contributes to the growing body of research that demonstrates the efficacy of watching movies to enhance one's linguistic skills. the first thing that the research found was that when students were shown an activity that was familiar to them which is watching movie, it was much easier for them to become interested in what was going on in the classroom. those individuals who had been reluctant to talk were now able to speak freely as a result of this. the students are driven to enhance their general fluency as they hear native english speaking in an authentic accent since it inspires them to have more practice in pronouncing the words and to extend their vocabulary, both of which assist them improve their pronunciation. because of the many advantages that may be gained from utilizing fiction short movies in english classrooms, the investigators hope to persuade language teachers of the english language to adopt this instructional strategy. the choice of the movie is something else that needs to be taken riswanto, reko serasi, azzah salandega, & kasmaini the effect of fiction short movie on students’ english speaking ability 626 into account. this study, on the other hand, did not focus on the particular instructional strategy or method that need to be applied. as a result, a subsequent study might desire to incorporate the particular instructional approach that should be integrated in the utilization of instructional media. acknowledgement the researchers give many thanks to the rector of uin fatmawati soekarno bengkulu. the researchers also give many thanks to all of the respondents from uin fatmawati soekarno bengkulu who were involved and directly supported this research. references albiladi, w. s., abdeen, f. h., & lincoln, f. 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(2020). the importance of speaking skill in the classroom. in proceeedings of 3rd international multidisciplinary scientific conference on innovative technology (ed.), proveeding of 3rd international multidisciplinary scientific conferemce on innovative technology (pp. 3–4). https://conferencepublication.com riswanto, reko serasi, azzah salandega, & kasmaini the effect of fiction short movie on students’ english speaking ability 628 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 287 teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices in teaching content subjects through emi ulfah oktaviani english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: uoktaviani@gmail.com soni mirizon (corresponding author) english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: smirizon@unsri.ac.id machdalena vianty english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: machdalenavianty@unsri.ac.id apa citation: oktaviani, u., mirizon, s., & vianty, m. (2021). teachers’ belief and classroom practices in teaching content subjects through emi. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 287-296 https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5399 received: 27-10-2021 accepted: 28-11-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction the education sector has been influenced significantly by the globalization of english as a medium of instruction. english as a medium of instruction (emi) is the use of the english language to teach academic subjects in countries where the first language (l1) of the majority of the population is not english (dearden, 2016). in this era, there are a growing number of educational institutions in non-anglophone countries that have implemented emi (macaro et al., 2018) and this global trend has shown no sign of dwindling and has gained momentum in recent years that is likely to continue into the inevitable future (dearden, 2016). this phenomenon grow rapidly because of the belief that a foreign language will be more effectively acquired if it is integrated with content rather than learned in isolation as a school subject. in other words, english should rather be used in ‘real’ contexts than just learned formally. in line with this, smith et al. (2017) found that learning new language in a meaningful academic content can enhance students’ language level while absorbing abstract: the urge of 4.0 industrial revolutions has made the growth of english as a medium of instruction (emi) in the educational field unbearable. the beliefs of emi more or less would give a contribution to the teaching and learning process. this study aimed to investigate teachers’ beliefs towards emi, to find out how the beliefs reflect in their classroom practices, and the challenges that teachers encounter in teaching content subjects through emi. the qualitative in case study design was applied and questionnaires, observation, and interviews were used to collect the data. the observations and interviews data were analyzed through thematic analysis and the questionnaire data were analyzed by using descriptive statistical analysis. the findings of this study showed that most content subject teachers at sis palembang had a strong belief towards emi. in the classroom practices, it was found that all teachers put into practiced what they believed in teaching content subjects through emi such as they used english during the class, applied some strategies to illustrate new vocabulary, used prescribed teacher guide books, provided clear and explicit instructions, engaged the students, delivered the content greatly, and rarely did the code switching, the challenges they encountered in teaching content subjects through emi included language barriers, class discussion engagement, and lesson preparation. keywords: emi; teachers’ beliefs; challenges of emi. ulfah oktaviani, soni mirizon, & machdalena vianty teachers’ belief and classroom practices in teaching content subjects through emi 288 content materials. therefore, recent language teaching methods have been directed toward involving both content and language teaching simultaneously. in accordance with the phenomenon, in indonesia, the government has implemented several programs related to emi, one of them was the establishment of international standard schools (sekolah berstandar internasional or sbi). according to the law of national education system article 50 paragraph (3) of law no. 20 the year 2003, the indonesian government emphasizes that every district/province government must hold an international leveled school or at least one international leveled school for every unit of the education institution. in sbi schools, english as a medium of instruction is used in teaching content subjects such as math and science. through this implementation, students are expected to have more opportunities to practice the english language. according to government policy which is stated in the law of national education system no. 20 the year 2003 article 33 verse 3 about the use of foreign language in the teaching and learning process, it is said that a foreign language can be used as the medium instruction in a certain education unit to support the students’ language competence (national education system, 2003). according to government policy which is stated in the law of national education system no. 20 the year 2003 article 33 verse 3 about the use of foreign language in the teaching and learning process, it is said that a foreign language can be used as the medium instruction in a certain education unit to support the students’ language competence (national education system, 2003). however, there were limited schools in indonesia that has implemented emi. according to kemendikbud (2019), from 149,435 primary schools in indonesia, there were only 196 schools that have implemented emi since they were spk schools. this was because they were not aware of how important emi is and the benefits of emi. besides, teachers and schools didn’t realize one of the factors that influence a teacher's quality is their belief. according to pajares (1992), a teacher's belief has a greater influence than the teachers' knowledge on how they plan their lessons, on the decisions they make, and on their general teaching practice. also, wu et al. (2015) argue that teaching beliefs are crucial in influencing classroom behaviors that affect teachers' efforts, persistence, and resilience when faced with difficulties with students. furthermore, there were limited researches about teacher’s beliefs towards the benefits of emi in the primary level especially in indonesia. this factor caused lack of the awareness of the importance of emi from teachers and schools. as mahboob (2020) mentioned that there were some understudied issues about english language used as a medium of instruction in early grades. there were some previous studies related to this study that has investigated about teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices. first, yuan et al. (2020) who found that teachers formed different types of beliefs about the roles of english and emi, about emi teaching and learning, and about university curriculums and policies on emi. second, briggs et al. (2018) conducted a research about comparing teacher belief towards emi in secondary and tertiary education found that teachers in both phases believed that the greater exposure brought about by emi was beneficial to students in terms of their english language learning. third, khatri (2019) found that all teachers believed that emi helps not only student but also teachers to enhance competence in english language usage. besides, teachers shared that emi plays vital role in their professional development. however, since the first and second research data were teacher self-report which focused on university level students and the third previous study focused on secondary level students that is different with this study which focused on primary level and real classroom observation and interview. this present study hopefully might give the reality demonstration and depth information about teacher’s beliefs towards emi and classroom practices in primary level. therefore, this study were aimed to find out content teachers’ beliefs towards english as a medium of instruction, how content teachers’ beliefs reflect in their classroom practices, and the challenges that content teachers encounter in teaching content through english as a medium of instruction. method english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 289 this study applies qualitative in a case study design. a qualitative study was characterized as an research process of understanding a social or human issue, based on building a complex, holistic picture, formed with words, reporting detailed views of informants, and conducting a setting characteristic (john & creswell, 2018). the data were collected using questionnaires, interviews, and observations. this study took place at one famous private school in palembang. the participants were 3 mathematics and 2 science teachers who taught at the primary school level. the data collected using the questionnaires adapted from tan (2009) were analyzed by using descriptive statistical analysis and reported qualitatively. the data obtained from interview and classroom observation were analyzed using thematic analysis suggested by braun and clarke (2006) by familiarizing with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, producing the report in order to find out the depth information about teachers’ beliefs in teaching contents through english as a medium of instruction, to see how teachers’ beliefs were put into classroom practices and challenges that they encountered. findings and discussions teachers’ beliefs towards emi table 1. result of teachers’ questionnaire scores interval category number of teachers percentage 1-16 strongly not believe 0 0% 17-32 not believe 0 0% 33-48 believe 1 20% 49-64 strongly believe 4 80% based on table 1, the finding from the questionnaire showed that most teachers at the school strongly believed and believed in the benefits of english as a medium of instruction in teaching content subjects (math and science). the finding also showed that none of the teachers did not believe or strongly did not believe in the benefits of english as a medium of instruction in teaching content subjects. this finding in a line with the findings obtained in the interview where the teachers, generally, had a strong belief towards the benefits of english as a medium of instruction in teaching content subjects. besides, most teachers believed that emi is very important. they said that it is important because english is an international language and every activity that the students do will require them to understand english language. in this case, using english in teaching a content subjects gave the students a chance to learn and understand more about english. if the school is like this school, i think it’s good because the students will get both knowledge, from science they get and from the english skill they also will get. (t2) moreover, due to the globalization era and 4.0 industrial revolutions education, using english in teaching content subjects will prepare students to compete with others around the world and to continue their study abroad. it’s good for the students who will face the 4.0 industrial revolutions and globalization. as we know that globalization moves very fast right now, so we prepared for them. for example if they want to be a scientist in the future, they already can compete with scientists around the world. (t1) in this school, the purpose is clear, we teach mathematics by using english because our purpose is to use an international curriculum and the students will take the cambridge checkpoint test and it’s all in english. so, if our students want to study abroad they have already gotten used to the instruction. (t3) these findings were in accordance with çağatay (2018) findings that the aim of emi is to prepare an international career for the students. similarly, ernawati, et al. (2021) discovered that the use of emi at this primary school can improve students' english skills and prepare students for the international competitions such as debate, international science olympiad, and students could learn igcse cambridge materials which were more practical than 2013 curriculum materials. in line with teachers’ previous statements, teachers also believed that teaching and learning content subject using emi improved teachers and students’ english skills, increased their vocabulary mastery, and helped them understand the content better. personally, i can apply my english skill into communication. i can make my english become fluent at least. for students, as we know there are ulfah oktaviani, soni mirizon, & machdalena vianty teachers’ belief and classroom practices in teaching content subjects through emi 290 a lot of terms in science that have different meanings, if they learned science through emi they already know that for example. the symbol of force is f because it starts with the letter f. if the students are not from international school they will be confused because in bahasa, letters of force start with g and not f. (t1) for me the benefits are improving my speaking, reading, and writing skills. for students i think since they learn mathematics through emi they can comprehend the lesson better because the instruction is simpler …. besides, if from the language side, because students learned by using word problems in mathematics class they can improve their reading skills and enrich their vocabularies. (t4) this was similar with the findings from vidal and jarvis (2020) that emi give a lot of benefits to students such as helped students to improved their english language proficiency. in the same vein, noviani, et al (2018) found that a high degree of satisfaction in teachers’ mindsets and understanding of bilingual education because the english proficiency of teachers had increased and it reflected the success of the program in improving teachers’ english proficiency. furthermore, yang et al. (2019) revealed that both the teachers and the students english language skills for both general and academic purposes improved. they also believed that emi program had helped to cultivate the students’ independent thinking skills and selflearning skills. in addition to the benefits, teachers also believed that the students were able to cope with english as a medium of instruction since so far students at this school were able to follow the lesson and understand the content well and it was because the students were used to the english as a medium of instruction since they were in the early age. i think if the students from sis, we don’t have such a thing because they are able to learn and understand the lesson in english well. it is because students learn all subjects in english since they are pre-school and p1 (t1). i think my students can understand the lesson in english. the reason is because before entering the school all students here must have at least the basic of english and most student even have english as their second language or event first language because sis is an international school (t5) this result highlights the findings from wallin (2017) that early exposure to the second language is important because young learner learn a second or third language through listening to and interacting with different speakers which will bring exposure to sounds, words, and grammars of the languages that they will use in the future. therefore, it’s easier for the students to learn content subjects when they have mastered the language. teachers also mentioned that their school supported them in teaching contents through emi by providing them with resources, guidelines, and training about how to teach content subjects (mathematics and science) by using books that use english language and how to do the activity/ assess students’ work from the book. we have my pals' teacher's guide from singapore and from the teachers’ guide book there are steps on how to teach the materials to the students, hands-on activity, and steps on how to answer questions with different methods. the book explains clearly on how to teach students so it’s really helpful. (t3) we have a teacher's guide and the school guidelines are enough for us. even for the new teachers, they can read that. moreover, the guidelines in the teacher's guide book help us in asking questions to the students related to the topic so that the students can understand the lesson. (t5) actually, i have joined training but it’s not teaching science in english specifically but it’s training to teach science by using cambridge book from mentari. but yeah the book is in english. it’s about how to develop the topic, experiment, and how to teach in an inquiry method. (t1) this belief was built because of the school's readiness to support teachers in teaching and learning activities. in contrast with the government, teachers didn’t believe that the indonesian ministry of education has prepared them sufficiently well to teach mathematics and science in english. this finding is in accordance with the previous research that explained there are 60 percent of countries among 55 countries in the word that have no guidelines in implementing emi and only 27.3 percent have guidelines (dearden, 2016). in this case, indonesia is one of those who don’t have guidelines in implementing emi. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 291 furthermore, teachers shared that they believed that their content mastery and linguistic competence were sufficient to teach the emi class. no, i don’t have any problem using english. it is because i was a teacher in gloria and i have been teaching english before. (t2) no. i think if you don’t have any experience in teaching emi and never learned english before it will be a big problem. but for me, i have been teaching in an international school before i entered sis and they teach me a lot. besides, in sampoerna university all lecturers teach us by using emi so i can teach mathematics by using english. (t4) no, like what i have said before, in my university all students were trained to teach mathematics by using english. even before we graduate, we have ppl in international school before. so, we are used to it. (t5) these beliefs were shaped because teachers have been exposed to emi before they were teaching in sis. some teachers were taught to teach content by using emi in their university and the others have an experience in teaching emi class in previous school. in brief, this research results about teacher’s beliefs supported the theory from richardson (1996), who said that three main sources of teacher beliefs are personal experience, experience with instruction, and experience with formal knowledge. teachers classroom practices from the observation, it was found that teachers put into practiced what they believed in teaching content subjects through emi in the classroom. this is in line with what skott (2014, p. 19) said that beliefs are expected to significantly influence the ways in which teachers interpret and engage with the problems of practice. it was observed that teachers manifested their beliefs in many aspects. first, it was found that their belief about the benefits of english in teaching contents through emi was reflected in their effort to always use english during the classroom practice. second, it was found that their beliefs about the support/resource provided to aid emi implementation was reflected in their act to always use some strategies to illustrate new vocabulary, used prescribed textbooks/teacher guide books in english provided by school, and added other supplementary materials through various modalities (auditory and visual) in english such as using realia, bar graphs, picture, and video. however, teachers added that since the ministry of education didn’t provide them with the guidelines, they can only use the guidelines given by the school. third, it was observed that teachers’ beliefs about the sufficiency of their own linguistic competence was reflected in their way to provide clear and explicit instructions in english engage the students in various teaching and learning activities such as; class discussion, making a group project/experiment, and playing games, and summarize the ideas related to the content of mathematics and science in english well. this finding is in accordance with the results of the study conducted by kubanyiova (2014) that teachers’ practices are closely related to how they believe teaching should be carried out and to the teaching methods they have internalized throughout their careers. fourth, it was discovered that teachers’ beliefs of their content mastery was reflected in their act to always deliver the content greatly. it can be seen from the classroom interaction between teachers and students where teachers were able to answer unpredictable questions from students and students are able to understand teachers' explanations related to the lessons. this finding portrayed warshauer’s (2015) findings that an extensive and complex interplay of teacher knowledge of mathematics content and pedagogical content knowledge was important to teachers to maintain high cognitive demand of tasks, and sustain student struggle while supporting individual and whole class engagement. fifth, it was found that teachers’ beliefs in the impressions of students’ content mastery and linguistic competence was reflected in their effort to rarely did the code switching and gave the opportunities for the student to express and shared their ideas in english about the topics given individually in oral or written form. challenges in teaching content through emi despite the benefits and the strong beliefs towards emi in teaching content subjects, the challenges are things that were undeniable in the implementation process. fitriati (2015) found that teachers struggled to teach english after implementing a bilingual education program. besides, fauziah, et al. (2021) ulfah oktaviani, soni mirizon, & machdalena vianty teachers’ belief and classroom practices in teaching content subjects through emi 292 discover that cambridge science teachers felt the challenges while participating in the program. from the result of the interview, it was found that there were three challenges that teachers encountered in teaching contents through emi; language barriers, class discussion engagement, and lesson preparation. first, language barriers. teachers mentioned that since english was not their first language even they believed that their proficiency was sufficient, there were still a lot of terms in science and mathematics that they didn’t understand so they have to read carefully the spelling and the vocabularies before they were teaching. of course there must be challenges because it’s not my first language so like what i have said before. i have to check the vocabulary first before i teach and so do the spelling (t1). moreover, language barriers also caused them sometimes to misinterpret the meaning of the questions from the book. the challenges first, the terms in science that have been used. sometimes i don’t understand the terms. second, understanding the questions. like what i have said before, sometimes when we translate the questions it’s not what the questions really mean. i mean, interpreting the questions (t3) in line with this, fauziah, et al. (2021) discovered that it was really challenging for the teachers to teach the students science concepts using scientific language because teachers needed to to use scientific terms and they should also learn more vocabulary before teaching, just like the students. similarly, ma’ruf and sari (2020) found that science and mathematics teachers mentioned that it was difficult for them to explain terms of science and mathematics in english due to lack of vocabulary. moreover, aizawa and rose (2018) who found that emi teachers in japan expressed difficulty in teaching in english, regardless of the level of their english proficiency. in other words, even high proficiency teachers also reported linguistic challenges. another language barrier problem that the teacher faced was also caused by some students' low proficiency in english. teacher 4 mentioned that even though most students in sis palembang were able to speak english some students that just entered the school late like in p3 didn’t have good english. i think my students’ ability in sis is fine. of course some students that just enter the school late like in p3 don’t have a good english have difficulties (t4) teachers explained that these students made teachers spent more time teaching the class, they had to re-explain again the lesson, changed some vocabularies until the students understand, gave them extra time to do worksheets, and even did code switching. in the class, for some students, their english is excellent but there are some students that are not good at english. so, sometimes, we have to change and mention some words that the students with the low proficiency are familiar with. so i have to teach them repeatedly. so it’s fair for them. besides, it takes time to do the worksheet so i have to give them extra time (t1) it’s not too distracting or troublesome in teaching science because they just lack grammar. so sometimes they understand the lesson. but if in another case, it’s more tiring because i have to do code switching (t2) these findings similar with sela and luke (2020) that most teachers mentioned that the students with low level of english proficiency was a challenge for them because these students would hardly understand the content of subjects delivered or transferred. also, ahmad and qasem (2019) stated that learner’s first language (l1) is a barrier to the development of spoken english. therefore, this challenge was unavoidable since english is students’ second language the second challenge that teachers face was class discussion engagement. it was found that some students that had low proficiency found it difficult to engage in the class discussions. they tend to be quiet because they were not confident and afraid to make mistakes in saying the words. the difficulties are from the students with low proficiency level. maybe it’s because they are not confident so they are quiet during the discussion. besides, these types of students when they answer the questions their sound are too low maybe because they are afraid to make mistakes. but for some students that start learning english from preschool they can follow (t1). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 293 in addition, due to students’ anxiety, the students felt more comfortable to talk or asked questions to their friends rather than the teacher. ...sometimes there are some students that ask directly to their friends. that's where the discussion happened. it’s because some students feel more comfortable talking with their friends...it’s their initiative to ask their friends, maybe because they are afraid to ask me directly. that’s it (t3). this finding was in accordance with ozer (2020) that students’ reluctance to talk in english due to their low level of english proficiency. similarly, manalastas and batang (2018) discovered that the students confidence in emi class was lower than those in the multi lingual class due to language barriers in expressing themselves. furthermore, ibna seraj and habil (2021) identified that shyness, anxiety, self-efficacy, reluctance, emotions, and confidence of the students create barriers tostudents’ development in spoken english. the third challenge was lesson preparation. it was quite challenging because it was wasting the teachers’ time since they need to read the book carefully and look at the dictionary before they were teaching. it was because there were some vocabularies/ terms that they didn’t know the meaning and the pronunciation. there are a lot of students that like to ask but it’s out of the topic so we must answer their question as best we can and don’t let it become a question mark for a long time. so usually i study the topic first. if there are some vocabularies that i don’t know i will find it in the dictionary. besides, i like to make the script before i teach so i know what i want to say but that was when i was still a newbie in this school. now, i am not doing it anymore (t1). for the preparation, we need to find out the vocabularies first so the work is double. it’s because some terms in science are quite different from the english word that we use in daily conversation so we have to find out the meaning first whether it is ambiguous or not (t2). the difficulties are not a lot. i just need to read the book carefully first before teaching so i will not make mistakes in pronunciation (t3). moreover, teachers need to spend more time to understand the lesson and to read the material carefully before teaching. therefore the teacher knew how to deliver it to the student because english was not the teacher's mother tongue. i have to read the material first because i am using bahasa indonesia language so i have to read the materials so i know how to deliver it to the students with my language until they understand. i cannot directly teach the class without preparation except it’s urgent and for example we have 2 years’ experience in teaching. however, there must be a procedure for that because i am indonesian and bahasa indonesia is my mother tongue. and if i want to teach by using english i have to read and prepare (t5). regarding this finding, doiz et al. (2018) found that lesson preparation was a challenge because lecturers need to spend an extra hour in elaborating the classroom materials and lessons preparation in english. conclusion in relation to the objectives of the study, there were three conclusions that can be drawn. first, teachers’ believed in the benefits of english as a medium of instruction in teaching content subjects. second, teachers manifested their beliefs in accordance with the classroom practices. third, teachers faced the language barriers, class discussion engagement, and lesson preparation as challenges in teaching content subjects through english as a medium of instruction. based on the findings, it is suggested that first, school in indonesia especially in primary level could implemented emi because emi is very beneficial. second, school and teachers need to be aware of the source of teachers’ beliefs which might influence the reflection of the beliefs in the classroom practices. third, teachers cannot sweep aside to the challenges and further action is needed to overcome the challenges since it would affect the implementation of emi. references ahmed, s. t. s., & qasem, b. t. a. 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(2018). the pros and cons of english-medium instruction in higher education in an efl context. in journal of foreign language education and technology. 4,(2). retrived from http://jflet.com/jflet/206http://jflet.com/jflet/ dearden, j. (2016). english as a medium of instruction: a growing global phenomenon. london, england: british council. retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3092309 56_english_medium_instruction_a_growing_gl obal_phenomenon doiz, a., & lasagabaster, d. (2018). teachers’ and students’ second language motivational self system in english‐medium instruction: a qualitative approach. tesol quarterly, 52(3), 657. doi:10.1002/tesq.452 ernawati. e, sofendi. s, silvhany. s. (2021). english as a medium of instruction (emi): a primary school teachers’ and students’ perceptions. international research in counseling and education, 5(1): pp. 24-32, doi: 10.24036/00414za0002 fauziah, n., mirizon, s., & silvhiani, s. (2021). bilingual education program: teachers’ and students’ perspectives and challenges. jurnal pendidikan progresif, 11(2), 219-234. doi: 10.23960/jpp.v11.i2.202107. fitriati, s. w. (2015). english bilingual education in an indonesian public school. in p. a. danaher, p. redmond, & j. lock (eds.), educational innovations and contemporary technologies: enhancing teaching and learning (2nd ed., pp. 87– 102). london, england: palgrave macmillan. ibna seraj, p. m., & hadina, h. (2021). a systematic overview of issues for developing efl learners’ oral english communication skills. journal of language and education, 7(1), 229240. doi:10.17323/jle.2021.10737 john w, c., & creswell, j. d. (2018). research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (5th ed.). pennsylvania, usa: sage publications. kementrian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. (2019). number of schools by time of operation and province 2019-2020. retrieved from http://statistik.data.kemdikbud.go.id/ khatri, k. k. 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(2018). medium of instruction on student achievement and confidence in english. tesol international journal, 13(3), 88-99. retrived from https://www.tesolinternationaljournal.com/volume-13-issue-3-2018 ma’ruf, h., & sari, h. y. (2020). teachers’ perspectives toward the implementation of bilingual immersion program in indonesian private schools. journal of english education, literature, and culture, 5(1), 118-125. doi:10.30659/e.5.1.118-125 national education system (2003). undangundang republik indonesia nomor 20 tahun 2003 tentang sistem pendidikan nasional. (indonesian government law no. 20, 2003 on the system of national education). ministry of education. retrieved from https://pusdiklat.perpusnas.go.id/public/media/reg ulasi/2019/11/12/2019_11_1203_49_06_9ab7e1fa524ba603bc2cdbeb7bff93c3. pdf noviani., dahnilsya., & novitri. (2018). the teachers’ perception on the implementation of bilingual program of smp and sma dharma yudha pekanbaru. jom fkip, 5(2), 1-11. retrived from https://jom.unri.ac.id/index.php/jomfkip/article/ view/20633 ozer,o. (2020). lecturers’ experiences with englishmedium instruction in a state university in turkey: practices and challenges. issues in educational research. 30(2). 612-634. retrieved from https://www.iier.org.au/iier30/ozer.pdf sela, s.t., & luke, j.y. (2020). english as medium of instruction implementation for communication and sustainability in 4.0 era. ethical lingua, 7(2). doi: 10.30605/25409190.219 skott, j. (2014). the promises, problems and prospects of research on teachers’ beliefs. in h. fives & m.g. gill (eds.), international handbook of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 295 research on teachers’ beliefs (pp. 13– 30). london, england: routledge. smith,f. b., humphreys, p., & walkinshaw, i. (2017). english medium instruction in higher education in asia-pacific from policy to pedagogy (1st ed.). switzerland, uk: springer. vidal, k., & jarvis, s. (2018). effects of englishmedium instruction on spanish students’ proficiency and lexical diversity in english. language teaching research, 1-20. doi:10.1177/1362168818817945 wallin, j. (2017). bilingual education for young children: recent research. guest editor’s note. rangsit journal of arts and science, 7(1). retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3297736 45_bilingual_education_for_young_children_r ecent_research warshauer, h. k. (2015). productive struggle in middle school mathematics classrooms. journal of mathematics teacher education, 18(4), 375-400. doi:10.1007/s10857-014-9286-3 wu, c., wan, s., & wong, y. (2015). exploring hong kong secondary school teachers' teaching beliefs on differentiated instruction. in d. garbett, & ovens (eds.), isatt:teaching for tomorrow today (pp.158-167). auckland, new zealand: edify ltd. yang, m., o’sullivan, p. s., irby, d. m., chen, z., lin, c., & lin, c. (2019). challenges and adaptations in implementing an english-medium medical program:a case study in china. bmc medical education, 19(1). doi:10.1186/s12909-018-1452-3 yuan, r., chen, y., & peng, j. (2020). understanding university teachers’ beliefs and practice in using english as a medium of instruction. teaching in higher education, 1470-1294. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2020.1715936 ulfah oktaviani, soni mirizon, & machdalena vianty teachers’ belief and classroom practices in teaching content subjects through emi 296 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 337 the learning style of high achiever students of english department of iain samarinda umar fauzan iain samarinda, indonesia e-mail: umar.fauzan@iain-samarinda.ac.id rostanti toba iain samarinda, indonesia e-mail: rostantitoba@gmail.com nirmayana iain samarinda, indonesia e-mail: nirmayana1811@gmail.com apa citation: fauzan, u., toba, r., nirmayana. (2020). the learning style of high achiever students of english department of iain samarinda. english review: journal of english education, 8(2), 337-344. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v8i2.4656 received: 12-04-2020 accepted: 05-05-2020 published: 01-06-2021 introduction learning style can be used by students to learn a language, including english. it can be described as the set of factors behavior and attitudes facilities learning for an individual in a given situation. learners can perceive and process information in a learning situation (amelia, 2018). in this case, the dominant factor that influences students’ learning is learning style. it is a factor that dominant the success of learning in order to understand that every individual has a unique style of learning whether visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, they are different from each other (gunawan, 2012a; 2012b). moreover, learning style is one dominant factor because learning style is influenced by our brain (winardi, 2010). it is the combination between brain domination of how people manage and deal with information and the modality of the easiest way how people deal with information (deporter & hernacki, 2005). the learning style is influenced by human brain because it has a big capacity to save memories or experiences of learning. some people have a different brain capacity to receive and understand things through the brain. additionally, human brain has a different capacity in the process of accumulating and managing information, while some of the human brains are capable of receiving and managing information quickly, some of the brains that process information slowly. learning style is happened naturally and goes by quite unnoticed in many cases. in psychology, the term learning styles refers to learner’s preferred general approach to learning, which includes the process of absorbing, processing, and retaining new information. in the process of second language acquisition, the term language learning style refers to language learners’ preferred approach to language acquisition. it is internally based characteristic often not perceived or used consciously, that are the basis for the intake and understanding of new information (reid, 1995; 1998; 1987). learning style has been defined as a consistent way of functioning that reflects the underlying causes of the learning behavior (keefe, 1987). learning style is both a characteristic that abstract: learning style is the method of a person to get solutions from problem-solving in process of learning. in this case, students’ learning styles have closely relation to their achievement. in this research, the researchers focus on the the type of learning styles of high achiever students of the english department at iain samarinda. this is a survey research where the researchers collected by usig the perceptual learning style preference questionnaire. the subject of this research is the high achiever students of the english department at iain samarinda that consists of twenty-two students from fifth and seventh semester students. this research found that all of learning styles exist in this research results where visual learning style become the highest percentage among others. students’ learning habits in everyday life also play important role in determining their learning style. research discussion and suggestion are provided further in this study. keywords: english language learning; high achiever students; learning style umar fauzan, rostanti toba, & nirmayana the learning style of high achiever students of english department of iain samarinda 338 indicates how a student learns and likes to learn, as well as instructional strategy informing the cognition, context and content of learning. to go further, learning style has some characteristic on which they are based. the first is that every person, student, and teacher alike has a learning style, learning strength, and weakness. teachers can use students’ learning style as a tool to develop their student learning. teachers can help students by understanding or knowing their students' preferred learning style (deporter & hernacki, 2005). in other words, a successful learning place teacher to boost students’ strength and build their capacity to learn in a range of style. thus, teachers need to have an understanding for different learning style within the class. moreover, learning style is characterized by the degree to which the learner emphasizes abstractness over concreteness in perceiving information and the degree to which he or she emphasizes action over reflection in processing information in a learning situation (kob et al., 2018). additionally, learning style is a term that describes the variation among learners in using one or more senses to understand, organize, and retain experience (dunn & dunn, 1998). then, it is also a learner’s consistent way of responding and using stimuli in the context of learning (claxton & ralston, 1978). the characteristic of learning style differs on learner from another, such as visual, auditory and kinesthetic. based on reid (1995; 1998; 1987), there are six fundamental characteristics of learning styles including 1) every person, student, and teacher alike, has a learning style and learning strengths and weaknesses; 2) learning styles exist on wide continuums, although they are described as opposites; 3) learning styles are value-neutral, that is, no one’s styles are better than others; 4) students must be encouraged to ‘stretch’ their learning styles so that they will be more empowered in a variety of learning situations; 5) often students’ learning strategies are linked to their learning styles; 6) teachers should allow their students to become aware of their learning strengths and weakness. furthermore, learning style is connected to learning strategies. in this case, direct learning strategies are useful to help students store and recover information (oxford, 1990). additionally, learning strategies can influence students’ success in learning. it means that learning strategies can help learners to produce language even when there is a knowledge gap, it can also help them to understand and use new language. learning strategies are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations (oxford, 1990). in this case, learning strategies have twelve key features i.e 1) contribute to the main goal that is communicative competence; 2) allow learners to become more self-directed; 3) expand the role of teachers; 4) problem-oriented; 5) specific action was taken by the learner; 6) involve many aspects of the learner, not just the cognitive; 7) support learning both directly and indirectly; 8) not always observable; 9) often conscious 10) can be taught; 11) flexible; and 12) influenced by a variety of factors (oxford, 1990). learning strategies can assist students in facilitating everything in the learning process such as making it easier for students to complete assignments in their way without having to follow the directions given. it means students have different skills in answering and completing their assignments with the learning styles they have. identifying learning styles and strategies could be very beneficial both for students and for teachers. many specialists suggest to teachers of foreign languages not deal only with teaching a language but pay attention to learning strategies (amelia, 2018). concerning with high achievers students, they have different reasons in applying learning strategies when they get problems. therefore, there are several criteria of high achievers i.e high achiever students develop their own effective and efficient strategies that suit themselves in their learning process (mubarok et al., 2016), and high achievers who interested in learning and enjoying school (kingore, 2004). moreover, regarding with learning style, some experts said that there are three types of common learning styles i.e visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. yong (2010) said that visual learning style refers to a preference for learning through vision and visual learners rely on their sight to take the information. additonally, sadker & sadker (2005) stated that students learn the best seeing, students will find the information when it is explained by the aids of textbooks, charts, picture, course outlines, and graphics and visual learners like to keep their on the teacher by sitting in front of the class and watching the teacher closely. moreover, deporter & hernacki (2005) were covering that characteristic of visual learner are tidy and order, talk active, a good planner and manager, detail and attentive, good performing in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 339 appearance and presentation, good speller, good at remembering what they see, good at memorizing using visual association, not easy to be disturbed by noisy, bad in memorizing verbal instruction, good in reading speed and diligent, good in learning by reading than listening to someone, need whole vision and objective, good in taking notes during in phone cell. different with visual learning style, auditory learning style is learning through hearing lectures or audiotapes (daiek & anter, 2004). additonally, daiek & anter (2004) elaborate features of auditory learners are listening to tapes, watching documentaries, speaking about the subject, sounding out words, using rhymes, having discussions, explaining notes, using word links, taping-recording studying, using oral direction, talking, and listening with a partner, using rhythmic sounds, listening carefully, talking to own selves and reading aloud. student can accurately remember details of information heard in conversation or lectures. according to deporter & hernacki (2005), they pointed that auditory learners talking to own self when working, getting easy to be disturbed by noise, speaking in a good rhythm, used to be a fluent speaker, listening to music rather than art, learning by listening and remembering what they discussed rather than seeing, speaking, discuss and telling a story completely, having a job problem which commits to visualization, spelling loudly rather than to write, making a joke than to read comic. regarding with the next learning style, kinesthetic learners will show a preference for demonstration and physical activity involving bodily movement (brown, 2007). this type of learner learns best by doing. they will catch the idea easily when it is explained by instructional aids of skits and role-play (brown, 2007). students learn best by using their hands “handson learning” or by full-body movement. deporter & hernacki (2005) claimed the characteristic of kinesthetic learners are speaking slowly, responding to physical gesture, touching people for getting their attention, standing closer when talking with someone else, orienting to physics and much made moving, learning through manipulation and practice, memorizing by walking while seeing, using fingers to point when reading, using body language intensively, never staying quiet for a long time, bad to remember geography, excluding if they have ever visited the place, using much action verbs, reading a book which oriented to the plot, having an untidy characteristic, tending to do everything, playing games much. everyone has a different learning style, but everyone has uniqueness (felder & silverman, 1988). if lecturers or instructors do not adjust teaching to students' learning styles, it will create discomfort and lack of attention from students (felder & silverman, 1988). students’ learning styles may be influenced by their reactions to personal life experiences and approaches to learning as well as their previous learning habits. additionally, students’ learning style is influenced by students’ personality, habits, and behaviour (kolb & kolb, 2013). in fact, people usually have just one dominant style (deporter, 1992). in other words, everyone has a different learning style from the others, but one of those styles will be dominant. researches concerning with students’ learning style (amchosihi, 2013; amelia, 2018; pramongkit, 2019; tabatabaei & mashayekhi, 2013; phantharakphong, 2012), learning strategies (mubarok et al., 2016), learning achievers (kob et al., 2018; salikin et al., 2017), as well as relationship between learning styles used by high, mid, and low achievers (samperio, 2019; kamarulzaman, 2012; violita, 2014; jahanbakhsh, 2012; khasanah, 2014), connectivity between teaching methods and learning styles to students’ achievement (munir et al., 2019) seems very fascinating and connected to each other. considering the importance of the topic chosen by the researchers, it is obvious that learning style which related to students’ achievement in english learning becomes very important. therefore, the researchers are intended to investigate the learning styles of high achiever students in learning english particularly in the context of higher education at iain samarinda, indonesia. method this research is a survey study (creswell, 2012b) where the intention of the researchers is to investiagte the learning style of high achiever students at english department at iain samarinda, indonesia. in terms of choosing the subject, the researchers relied on purposive sampling technique (bhatti & sundram, 2015; allen & yen, 1979) in order for the researchers to get apropriate subject who are suitable for this research. purposive sampling technique was done by seting up the criteria of high achiever students i.e those who got “a” grade for speaking course umar fauzan, rostanti toba, & nirmayana the learning style of high achiever students of english department of iain samarinda 340 and have atleast 3.5 for the gpa. thus, from three classes from fifth semester and two classes from seventh semester, the total number of subject selected was twenty-two students. moreover, the data in this research is divided into two types of data i.e primary and secondary data. in order to gain the primary data, the researchers used close-ended questionnaire (creswell, 2012; johnson & christensen, 2000) in the form of statements referring to learning styles so that the students can choose whetehr to strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, and strongly disagree. in this case, the questionnaire analysed by using likert-scale (creswell, 2014) in order to figure out the high achiever students’ types of learning styles. meanwhile, the secondary data were obtained from semistructured interview (cresswell, 2005; bernard, 2002; dörnyei, 2007) to those students which conducted online. the secondary data contained learning devices and habits of high achiever students in learning english. results & discussion findings data gained from questionnaire types of learning style table 1. types of learning style of high achiever students indicators stro ngly agre e % agree % unde cided % disa gree % stro ngly disa gree learning better by reading when the teacher writes on the whiteboard 0 0% 17 77% 2 9% 3 14% 0 remember better when reading the instructions 4 18% 11 50% 6 27 % 1 5% 0 understand better when reading the instructions 2 9% 17 77% 2 9% 1 5% 0 learn better by reading than by listening 4 18% 7 32% 6 27 % 5 23% 0 learning more by reading textbooks than listening lecture 2 9% 7 32% 9 41 % 4 18% 0 understand better when the teacher tells the instructions 4 18% 14 64% 2 9% 2 9% 0 learning better when someone told something 2 9% 13 59% 6 27 % 1 5% 0 remember things by learning, heard is better than reading 2 9% 14 64% 5 23 % 1 5% 0 learning better when the teacher gives a lecture 0 0% 14 64% 7 32 % 1 5% 0 learning better in class when listening to someone 1 5% 14 64% 4 18 % 3 14% 0 prefer to learn by doing something in class 2 9% 10 45% 6 27 % 3 14% 1 do something in class, learning make better 2 9% 12 55% 5 23 % 3 14% 0 enjoy learning in class by doing an experiment 6 27% 12 55% 4 18 % 0 0% 0 understand things better in class when participating in roleplaying 4 18% 12 55% 6 27 % 0 0% 0 learning best in class when can participate in related activities 5 23% 12 55% 5 23 % 0 0% 0 the most dominant learning style table 2. table of the most dominant learning style item frequency percentage i learn better by reading what the teacher writes on the whiteboard 17 77,3% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 8, issue 2, june 2020 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 341 when i read instruction, i remember them better 11 50% i understand better when i read instructions 17 77,3% i learn better by reading than by listening to someone 7 31,8% i learn more by reading textbooks than by listening to lectures 9 40,9% when the teacher tells me the instruction i understand better 14 63,6% when someone tells me how to do something in class, i learn it better 13 59,1% i remember things i have heard in class better than things i have read 14 63,6% i learn better in class when the teacher gives a lecture 14 63,6% i learn better in class when i listen to someone 14 63,6% i prefer to learn by doing something in class 10 45,5% when i do things in class, i learn better 12 54,5% i enjoy learning in class by doing experiments 12 54,5% i understand things better in class when i participate in role-playing 12 54,5% i learn best in class when i can participate in related 12 54,5% data gained from interview this part of research findings, the researchers found high achiever students in terms of learning devices used as well as habits of learning style they used to do in daily life. in terms of communication, high achiever students actively use english in their daily lives e.g whatsapp application for long-range comunication by sending messages both in terms of chatting and voice call. other than that, in terms of using smartphones, all of them use english as the language used on their smartphone setting. the next fact showed that high achiever students often listen to english music and watch youtube on their smartphones. specifically, they use english music to learn english vocabulary and pronunciation through listening to the english songs as well as reading and pronouncing the lyrics provided online. in terms of the use of youtube, they often watch english movies with english subtitle, video of english songs, and english learning content from famous youtubers. other than that, some other social media also used as devices for learning english by the high achiever students i.e twitter, instagram, and facebook. in this case, they use those three platforms of social media to share their daily activities, thought, and feeling by using english. additionally, they use those social media to make a friend with foreign citizens so that they can practice to speak and write in english. moreover, the high achiever students also learn vocabulary through english quotes shared on the social media. not only regarding with english learning habits in daily life as well as devices they use in learning english. another fact showed that the high achiever students have certificate of merit from prestigious english competitions e.g english poetry and speech competitions. in this case, they said that by joining such english competitions, they can have memorable and reputable achievements in english. additionally, they can develop as well as invent their talent in english language area as well as training their mentality to perform in front of public. discussion from the research findings above, all of the three types of learning styles used by the high achiever students. in this case, major findings in this research is that most of high achiever students are considered as visual learners. it is indicated by the result where 77,3% students mentioned that they learn better by reading what the teacher writes on the whiteboard. additinally, 77,3% students noted that they have better understanding when they read instruction given by lecturers. it is supported by the result found from interview where most of the students use social media to read english quotes and information e.g from whatsapp, instagram, twitter, and facebook. this result is similar to the previous study conducted by pramongkit (2019) where visual learners are more dominant than the auditory and kinesthetic learners in class. this research also supported by kob et al. (2018) where visual is the highest percentage of students’ learning style among others. the second place of learning style used by high achiever students is auditory style. specifically, 63,6% students said that they remember lessons they heard better than what they see. in addition, 63,6% students pointed out that they understand better when they listen to lecturers’ explanation as well as when lecturers giving oral instruction. in this case, high achiever students who are considered as auditory students use social media for listening to english songs such as the use of spotify, joox, sound cloud, resso, and youtube. similar with this research, a research from phantharakphong (2012) found that auditory became the second learning style of the students. finally, kinesthetic becomes the lowest percentage of learning style of the high achiever umar fauzan, rostanti toba, & nirmayana the learning style of high achiever students of english department of iain samarinda 342 students. particularly, 45,5% students understand better when they are learning by doing such as having classroom experiments and role-playing. in this case, this type of students love watching english movies. in a research from phantharakphong (2012), it showed that kinesthetic is the most learning style having by students in learning. meanwhile, visual learning is the lowest percentage of learning of the students. it is also similar to a research from amchosihi (2013) where kinesthetic learning style became students’ learning style preference. the findings from this research indicate that none of the three learning styles whether visual, auditory, or kinesthetic always become the highest learning style. surely there is an influence from learning behavior and students’ personality (kolb & kolb, 2013). therefore, the students’ daily activity on learning and the way they use various types of learning devices contribute to the shaping of the students’ learning style. conclusion the findings of this research drive to two major results. the first is that all of the types of learning styles whether visual, auditory, or kinesthetic do exist in learning styles of english department students at iain samarinda. the second main result in this research is that from those three learning styles, it is found that most of the high achiever students of english department at iain samarinda is visual learning style. specifically, they have better understanding when they read instruction given by lecturers as well as see and read the display of explanation from the lecturers. the learning style of the high achiever students have closely relation to the learning habits in their daily lives. particularly in this research, the high achiever students use different platforms of social media to learn english e.g youtube, twitter, facebook, instagram and some others to search and share information in english. in conclusion, none of those learning styles become the most popular or better than others, but it really depends on the students’ personality and habits in learning. therefore, it is suggested to further researchers to dig deeper to efl students’ learning styles in relation to students’ behaviour and attitude that shape their learning styles. references allen, m. j., & yen, w. m. 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(2019). learning strategies used by high and low achievers in the first level of english. profile: issues in teachers’ professional development, 21(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.15446/profile.v21n1.68246 tabatabaei, o., & mashayekhi, s. (2013). the relationship between efl learners’ learning styles and their l2 achievement. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 70, 245–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.01.061 violita, d. (2014). the influence of students’ learning style on their learning achievement at the eleventh grade of smk muhammadiyah kutowinangun in the academic year of 2013/2014. universitas muhammadiyah purworejo. winardi, a. (2010). optimizing the potential of children through understanding learning style. http://ideguru.com/2010/04/13/mengoptimalkan -potensi-anak-melalui-pemahaman-gayabelajar/ yong, f. l. (2010). a study on cultural values, perceptual learning style and attitudes toward oracy skills of malaysian tertiary students. european journal of social sciences, 1. umar fauzan, rostanti toba, & nirmayana the learning style of high achiever students of english department of iain samarinda 344 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 637 enhancing efl in-service teachers’ teaching skill through the role of video-based reflections zainuddin universitas terbuka, banten e-mail: ainuddinpau@gmail.com sunu dwi antoro universitas terbuka, banten e-mail: sunudwi@ut.ac.id herri mulyono universitas prof. dr. hamka, jakarta e-mail: hmulyono@uhamka.ac.id nani solihati universitas prof. dr. hamka, jakarta e-mail: nani_solihati@uhamka.ac.id rosalina universitas prof. dr. hamka, jakarta e-mail: ocalinaoca@gmail.com ferawati universitas prof. dr. hamka, jakarta e-mail: ferawati1996@gmail.com apa citation: zainuddin., antoro, s. d., mulyono, h., solihati, n., rosalina., & ferawati. (2022). enhancing efl in-service teachers’ teaching skill through the role of video-based reflections. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 637-644. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6286. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction the practice of reflection in education has been comprehensively investigated, especially video reflection in the last decade (sablić, mirosavljević, & škugor, 2021). referring to reflection itself, it can be considered an element of self-evaluation to determine someone’s competence, which is interrelated with thinking and behaving. in this regard, dewey in lebak (2017) suggested reflection to be fundamental in the learning process, and views it to be “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends”. building on dewey’s belief, hamel and viauguay (2019) associates this idea with educators in a way that reflection supports to encourage teachers’ performance in the classroom. in more detail, selfabstract: the essential purpose of the research was to examine efl in-service teachers’ perceptions after watching their teaching video recording. this research attempted to explore more insight of the video-based reflections roles focusing on teacher development. the research applied a qualitative design with eight efl inservice teachers as participants. the data were conducted through semi-structured interviews, journal reflective, and video recording. all these data were then analyzed using thematic analysis. the result demonstrates that video-based reflection is an accomplished way to gain self-evaluation. these in-service teachers have gained new views, and have chances to analyze both deficiencies and potencies using video-based reflections in their teaching experiences. conclusively, video-based reflections can promote teachers’ professional development. keywords: english as a foreign language; teachers’ teaching skill; video-based reflections; in-service teachers; reflection. mailto:sintalumbangaol12@gmail.com mailto:noviadamayanti800@gmail.com mailto:nani_solihati@uhamka.ac.idm mailto:ocalinaoca@gmail.com mailto:ferawati1996@gmail.com zainuddin, sunu dwi antoro, herri mulyono, nani solihati, rosalina, & ferawati enhancing efl in-service teachers’ teaching skill through the role of video-based reflections 638 reflection is crucially needed for teachers to evaluate previous activities in the classroom to improve their future performance (bergman, 2016). thus, reflection is now perceived as a key factor in developing teaching quality. in the same vein, mann, davidson, davis, gakonga, gamero, harrison, & mosavian (2018) highlighted that such videos have often been used as an instrument to improve professional teachers in various fields, for instance in mathematics and science. as indicated by wass and rogers (2022), videos allow actions in teaching schemes to be monitored and focus on the mentors and tutors’ individualized, contextual, and relevant professional development. similarly, gelfuso, (2016) offers a framework of reflection which assists pre-service teachers to create ‘warranted assertibility’ about literacy teaching and learning. the evidence presented through videos has an excessive impact on teaching programs. unfortunately, there has been little discussion with regard to this method in the indonesian teaching community. hence, the objective of this study is to explore the use of video-based reflection for efl teachers in indonesia and teachers’ perception of video-based reflection. our inquiry into this current study was prompted by the following questions: (1) what is the efl inservice teachers’ perception of watching a video of themselves in their teaching program? (2) does video recording help efl in-service teachers improve their teaching skills during the teaching program? the primary objectives of this current study are to explore the perception of english as a foreign language (efl) for in-service teachers after watching a video recording of their teaching process. it is intended to accomplish two aims: first, it is designed to develop the literature on efl teacher education in indonesia by scrutinizing critical issues in an undertaking of teaching sessions. second, it is aimed at harnessing more teaching skills, improving methods and performances in the subsequent teaching sessions, in addition to gaining fruitful insights to teachers in other educational and cultural contexts. method a qualitative approach was employed in this current research in order to gain an insight into the perceptions of in-service teachers after watching their teaching recording. subsequently, the narrative inquiry was implemented in this study because the researcher was interested in porting intensely personal of the teachers’ experience. thus, bell, (2010), p.21 indicated that a narrative inquiry is a strategy which includes reflective autobiography, personal story, or the incorporation of extracts from the respondent's stories to illustrate a theme that developed by the researcher. therefore, this current study conducted from may to june 2019. the journal reflective and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. as a result, this study took a month and thirteen days to collect all the data. eight efl in-service teachers who taught english as a foreign language in secondary school have participated in this research. participants engaged from five different schools in jakarta. the participants selected by purposive sampling. with this regard, robinson (2014) declared that purpose sampling techniques are non-random methods to ensure that specific categories of instances within a sampling universe were identified in the final sample of a study. the criteria for selecting the participants because of two main reasons: (1) english teachers of secondary school who teach in jakarta and, (2) the teachers volunteered to engage in this research. all of the participants were aged between 22-50 years old, and their teaching experience ranged from two up to thirty-three years whose backgrounds were: table 1. background of the participants me mbe rs name* sex level of teaching teaching experience s 1 mr. arya male senior high school 3 years 2 mr. gio male junior high school 8 years 3 ms. leen female senior high school 3 years 4 ms. deli female junior high school 2 years 5 mrs. nada female junior high school 2 years 6 mrs. arana female junior high school 33 years english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 639 7 mrs. aleena female junior high school 30 years 8 mrs. dania female junior high school 27 years results and discussion results this study was examined to explore the perceptions of efl in-service teachers after watching their teachings videos. the data was presented based on the reflective journal and interview. the main goals of this study were supporting the teachers in identifying their teaching for improving the teaching skill. with this regarding, the teachers highlighted that the video-based reflection was beneficial in teachers’ development. the teachers revealed a change process in these following steps: (a) recognizing the need to change, (b) brainstorming ideas for change, (c) implementing the ideas, and (d) evaluating changes (tripp & rich, 2012). recognize the need to change gain a new perspective the teachers gain new insight into their teaching. the most exciting finding was that seven from eight respondents claimed that this is their first time to watch their teaching during the entire teaching experiences. for instance, several teachers confirmed in these following statements: “this is the first time that i used video for selfreflection. i felt there are some weaknesses that i can recognize”. (mrs. dania interview in-line 4647) “i was shocked because this is my first time having reflection through video” (mrs. aleena interview in-line 27-28) “i haven’t seen my performance during 32 years of teachings” (mrs. arana interview in-line 21-22) perceiving themselves for the first time during the teachings’ experiences was gain a new perspective and realized something new. hence, observing themselves through a video provided them a chance to evaluate and realize the way of the teaching process. the teachers mentioned that it is like placing a mirror on their face. reflecting through video supported the teachers to comment on their teaching in real situations. mrs. dania felt she gained something different and funny to watch her video. when the researcher investigated how was her feeling to watch of her video, and she declared, “it is funny because during this time we watched others’ teachers and gave commented about their mistakes. then, after watching ourselves, we realized that there were several weaknesses. then, for me, having self-evaluation through video was great tools because i can see every single performance of myself.” (mrs. dania interview in-line 119121) watching the own teaching video realized the teacher that teacher during this time, the teacher focused on others’ teacher performance than reflecting their own performance. in addition, she mentioned that the video-based reflection such a significant component as selfevaluation. focus analysis teachers explained that they had reflected themselves by reviewing what was going on in the classroom. then, the other teachers obtained feedback from the supervisor’s comment. it was beneficial because teachers can understand what needs to be enhanced. similarly, with other teachers who represent the feedback from the student in every year. the reflection showed several benefits in the process of teaching. in addition, the teachers contrasted the reflection of what they organized earlier with video-based reflection. as a result, the teachers defined the video more beneficial because the video showed whole the part what they have done from opening to closing. every single portion can be seen while supervisors and students’ feedback, they only listen without knowing in which portion that needs to be improved. while analyzing the video, the teachers have a specific part of being identified. for instance, mrs. aleena indicated, “in my first video because i identified that i was talking too much” (mrs. aleena interview in-line 166-167) the teacher above specified the way she was delivering the materials that she realized how she talked more than the students. hence, mrs. arana focused on their pronunciation, grammar structure. she explained, “from the video, i knew when i am teaching, i have weak points in using the articles, an in several sentences. it is better to prepare the media zainuddin, sunu dwi antoro, herri mulyono, nani solihati, rosalina, & ferawati enhancing efl in-service teachers’ teaching skill through the role of video-based reflections 640 which is suitable for the materials.” (mrs. arana interview in-line 180-182) the explanation from the teacher overhead can be concluded in two aspects. first, the teacher recognized what have done in the previous activities. then, she also prepared the plan for better performance in the future. see with own eyes after watching their video, the teachers were feeling thankful because they can see the reality of themselves during this time. the focus of thankful here because the teachers mentioned that watching the teachers’ performance presented the teachers a new chance to see their performance with their own eyes. through video, teachers were seeing their performance along the time how they are delivering the materials and their communication with the students. everything is easy to be recognized. for instance, the teacher realized that she was too serious in order to deliver the materials. she mentioned, “my viewpoint video is … oh, this is the way that i am teaching, and i realized that i am too serious in teaching.” (mrs. arana interview in-line 90-91) mrs. arana realized how serious she is while explaining the material. watching themselves with their own eyes gave them a more obvious situation then listened to the suggestion from the students and supervisors. brainstorm ideas for change after recognizing each part in the video, the teachers enquire to write what would they improved and changed for the next. the main focus of the teachers was realized how teaching method is essentials. previously, the teachers mentioned that they found several weak points on their selves. several teachers highlighted by the comment, “video helped me to see my teaching performance to evaluate how i teach in the class. it was beneficial to prepare things for the next teaching. i need to up my voice, be active in approaching the students, and motivating the students more.” (mrs. deli interview in-line 7376) “maybe i would develop an enhancement in instructional media during my teaching. in each session, i would yield an entertaining media based on the lesson plan.” (mrs. deli interview in-line 143-146) watching the video of teaching assisted the teachers to brainstorm several ideas for developing the teaching performance in the upcoming sessions. gain a new change the following stage, the teachers had a plan to change their teaching method became students center in order to gain fun learning and to make active interaction with students. for example, mr. gio reflected in this statement, “from the video, i realized how important the teaching method is. because my teaching method is still on the teachers’ center, then, i would implement the student’s center approach for the next performance.” (mr. gio interview inline 7376) the teachers focused on the teaching method while analyzing their video. numerous of the teachers mentioned that they applied the teachers’ center than students’ center. as regard, the video presented how their method didn’t show excessive interaction with the students. moreover, the teachers assumed to change the method for the upcoming sessions. implementing ideas implementing the ideas are the next steps after brainstorming the ideas for change. teachers commented that they generate the change after identifying their self on video. with this concern, the teachers mentioned that they prepared a change for the students in upcoming sessions. in addition, the teachers specified the ideas what must be employed in the classroom. for example, mrs. nada explained, “i am a spontaneous teacher. i am preparing the plan, but i am teaching the classroom differently.” (mrs. nada interview in-line 125) the teacher taught based on the contextual. she performed based on her mood. therefore, planning and action were different. hence, reflecting through video. then, she supported the ideas with her planning for the future sessions as corresponding to her ideas, “then, after watching my teaching video, i decided to develop the lesson plan with the material which is concentrating on the students ' creativities. the lesson plan will assist us as english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 641 teachers to deliver the materials properly. then if i have extra time in the class, i will generate a vocabulary with a flashcard.” (mrs. nada interview in-line 158-161). some participants expressed how they desired to implement new things to develop their teaching for the next. as a result, the teachers always struggled to give their best effort to make better teaching and learning. overall, video-based reflection revealed as substantial elements supported the teachers to increase their teaching quality. vivid images in order to reflect ourselves, the teachers declared that from the video, the teachers perceived obviously about the real situations. in this case, mrs. deli stated, “from the video, i noticed our manner, how we performed, and how we noticed the students. in fact, i realized that without video, i could not see my performance clearly.” (mrs. deli interview in line 53-57). the vivid images helped the teachers to evaluate the situation in detail. how the teachers act, how the teachers speak, exclusively of activities can be recognized easily. repetition the value of reflecting through video is the video can be watched multiple times, which is the function to reach more and more something that needs to be identified. in proven in these following sentences that the teacher explained, “we could play the videos many times to observe and convince ourselves that i lacked here. then it could be an archive for us to see the progress of our teaching in the long term.” (mr.gio interview in line 291-294) evaluating changes video realized mrs. aleena how she was active in class without giving a chance to the students to explore their ideas. as regards, she attempted her best to develop classroom interactions to obtain active learning. mrs. aleena highlighted, “i noticed that i was too much delivering with speech method, but effectively in the next teaching, i was struggling to talk less to allow the students to explore their thoughts. with this reflection like this, it influences the teachers”. (mrs. aleena interview in-line 166-170) mrs. aleena presented how video helped herself to change her teaching strategies. she took an effort to implement the new activities that she evaluated in the reflective journal after watching her first video. proof video can be an element as proof when the teacher performance was improved. the teachers recognized the enhancement of the part that they have been predictable earlier. one of the teachers indicated how her performance improved in order to approach the students, and she stated, “from the video, i noticed several parts in myself. the part that i focused on was my action. i realized that i lack noticing the students in my first video. but in the second video, i am trying to approach my students one by one by questioning, “do you understand?” (mrs. deli interview in-line 65-68) the video showed the proof of how the teacher became more aware in order to check the students’ understanding. as regards, the teacher above proved the implement of her change in the teaching process. formative evaluation the formative evaluation is an activity which has a goal to involve the feedback to improve the next performance. the teachers such has a new motivation after analyzing their performance to develop their teaching method. the number of teachers defined that video has a beneficial tool as the self-evaluation by stating, “by watching my video, i sensed a lack of confidence because the students in the classroom were passive and also only several students coming to the school. moreover, in the second video, i noticed that i have a significant intonation when explaining the materials.” mrs. nada “here what i think, oh, the fact i realized that i am full of weaknesses and i supposed to do this, but it is not like what i hope.” however, i am happy because all of those are great feedback for me.” (mrs. deli interview in-line 11-17) “in my mind, video is helping the teacher to recognize the mistake. and i will prepare for this and if i can for the next semester i will ask the students to record my teaching. i feel that i am lucky.” (mrs. arana interview in-line 180-184) zainuddin, sunu dwi antoro, herri mulyono, nani solihati, rosalina, & ferawati enhancing efl in-service teachers’ teaching skill through the role of video-based reflections 642 interestingly, one of the teachers have stated that she would request her students to record her in teaching for the next time because reflecting through video helped the teachers to identify the weaknesses in details. overall, the teachers contributed how video-based reflection is vitally needed for the teachers to ensure great feedback from themselves by observing by their own eyes. discussion as mentioned in the literature review that two initial objectives of the study were to explore the teacher's perceptions of english as a foreign language (efl) in-service teachers after watching the video recording of their teaching. this study aimed to generate valuable insights to teacher educators in indonesia contexts. this study also has a conclusively huge purpose of developing the quality of the teacher in the next teaching sessions which has similar goals with the previous studies such as (baecher & mccormack, 2015; tripp & rich, 2012), which focus on developing teachers’ quality. the present study yielded the two significant aspects; firstly, the teachers presented the positive impact of the used video-based reflection as evaluation tools for analyzing themselves. these results agree with the result of the previous study, in which baecher, kung, jewkes, & rosalia (2013) indicated that observing the video of teaching involved to obtain the teachers more aware of assessing and prepared themselves for the future teaching. in similar with (tripp & rich, 2012) which stated that the benefit of observing videos is to support the prospective teachers and encourage the teachers’ development in teaching. interestingly, the teachers indicated how video-based reflection helps them in fostering the teachers’ development. secondly, eight of efl teachers mentioned how video-based reflection assisted them to improve their teaching in the way the teachers’ delivering the material, the teaching method, and the preparation such has been declared above. in addition, the teachers mentioned that reflecting through video is easier to recognize the weak points. in a nutshell, my research findings specified the valuable of video-based reflection in order to gain the teachers’ perspective about their own teaching. with this regard, the outcomes of this research revealed that video-based reflection is a component as self-evaluation to assist the teachers in being aware of the teaching sessions. reflecting through video by teachers’ itself is gain a new perspective to identify the strengths and weaknesses in details. however, zhang, lundeberg, koehler, & eberhardt (2011) claimed that watching the others teachers’ recordings were enormously contributing in teachers’ enhancement than watching videos of one’s own teaching because the others teacher’s recording assisted the teachers in gaining a new perspective about how their performance. by the present results, previous studies have demonstrated that gelfuso (2016) video supported to capture the teachers’ performances in the real context and writing the comment in the reflective journal is essential in order to provide the video with knowledgeable to create “warranted assertability” to support professional improvement. conclusion this study contributed the efl in-service teachers in expanding their teaching quality in the classroom by reflecting themselves through video-based reflection. these findings enhance our understanding of how important of video-based reflection with the purpose to reflect what has accomplished in preceding performance. the key strengths of this study are the teachers have reliable data to observe and recognize their performance with their own eyes. as mentioned earlier, the teachers highlighted, such as having a mirror on their face. by the same token, this study declared the idea that the teaching skills can be developed in view of the teachers has a high desire to improve the part that needs to be established. additionally, this study has attempted to enrich the literature on efl teacher education in indonesia by examining essential concerns in undertaking the teaching sessions and to the development of an efl teacher education curriculum. finally, a number of significant limitations need to be considered. firstly, this study focused on efl in-service teachers’ perception after watching their own teaching video. the second, this study identified the impact of video-based reflection in improving the teaching skill. furthermore, the researcher should provide the codes while watching the video for the participants is recommended for the future study in order to assist the teachers in supporting the statement in the specific. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 643 acknowledgement earlier findings of the research in this paper was presented at the 2nd international conference on advance and scientific innovation, icasi 2019, 18 july, banda aceh, indonesia. funding the current research was funded by universitas terbuka, indonesia. references baecher, l., & mccormack, b. 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(2011). understanding affordances and challenges of three types of video for teacher professional development. teaching and teacher education, 27(2), 454–462. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2010.09.015. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.08.001 zainuddin, sunu dwi antoro, herri mulyono, nani solihati, rosalina, & ferawati enhancing efl in-service teachers’ teaching skill through the role of video-based reflections 644 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 465 teaching reading by collaborative strategic reading: an action research yon a. e. english education study program, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: yona.e._7317157788@mhs.unj.ac.id zainal rafli department of language education, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: zainal.rafli@unj.ac.id nuruddin department of language education, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: nuruddin.unj@unj.ac.id apa citation: yon, a. e., rafli, z., & nuruddin. (2022). teaching reading by collaborative strategic reading: an action research. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 465-474. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6247 received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 08-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction english as second language learners study various language skills. reading is among the skills students are required to master for in learning english as foreign language. reading skill as a process not only involves with textual understanding but also includes an activity to grasp the writer purpose. for english language learners, reading skills is required both for academic activities and working performance. besides, the skill encourages students to acquire knowledge and science through reading materials as well as their interpersonal and cognitive competences (ramli, boeriswati, & emzir, 2019a, 2019b). they may benefit from academic field and in the working places. the more they read the more they get information and develop knowledge and science (francisco & madzaro, 2019; mirza, ansari, khatoon, pathan, raheem, & mushaq, 2021). it, therefore, needs more attention to the teaching of reading in order to shape and improve the students’ reading performance. reading skill can be developed by applying proper strategies. with proper strategies, the students are encouraged to understand information from text and connect it to their former knowledge. this knowledge is a process transforming science by synthesizing, inferencing, and comprehending a message in the text (gani, yusuf, & susiani, 2016). the final scores of the second semester students’ performance in reading comprehension enrolling reading 2 course at academic year 2014/2015 are abstract: english language learners experienced difficulties in understanding readings in english. this research aims to improve students’ reading comprehension by implementing collaborative strategic reading (csr) at second semester students of english department, stkip panca sakti bekasi. this research used a classroom action research (car) was conducted in two cycles. there are qualitative and quantitative data collected in this research. the former data were gained by analyzing field note, observation sheet and interview while the latter ones were obtained from pre-test, post-test and portfolio of pre-cycle, cycle i and cycle ii. the result shows that the mean score of students’ reading performance increases in four dimensions not only on literal, interpretative, applicative but also on critical understanding. the finding indicates that the students’ mean score at pre-cycle (68) increases to 77 and to 87 in the first and second cycles respectively. for interpretative understanding, the average score at pre-cycle was 61, increasing to 69 in the first cycle and to 80 in the second cycle. for applicative understanding, the average score at pre-cycle was 62, increasing to 64 in the first cycle and to 84 in the second cycle. finally, the critical understanding also increases, from 59 at pre-cycle to 65 in the first cycle and to 85 in the second cycle. therefore, the implementation of car effectively improves the students’ reading performance. keywords: english readings; reading comprehension; collaborative strategic reading; action research. yon a. e., zainal rafli, & nuruddin teaching reading by collaborative strategic reading: an action research 466 below the mean score, 60, from 20 students. in details, four students get 50, two students gain 55, two students gain 65, two students gain 70, and only one student scores 80. this condition encourages the researchers to study investigate the problems in order to improve the students’ performance in reading comprehension. this shortage is also supported by the data on indonesia’s reading performance reported by oecd in 2018. indonesia learners scored below the oecd mean score (oecd, 2018; schleicher, 2019). on the other hand, the researchers also utilized observation sheet to identify the students’ understanding on the reading comprehension. the observation results on the existing teaching reading strategy applied by two lecturers of reading 2 course in academic year 2015/2016 reveal that the strategies they used do not encourage the students to overcome their problems in comprehending english passage. therefore, an improvement needs to undertook for activities: discussion through metacognition, reading teaching strategy models, cognitive strategies to help and restore understanding (daguay-james & bulusan, 2020; francisco & madzaro, 2019; kim & kim, 2020; ramli et al., 2019a) in encouraging the students’ motivation in reading. they also delivered the materials by predicting, questioning, visualization, connection and summarizing methods. in addition, the they only used evidence and interpretation chart, concept map/graphic organizer, qar (question answer relationship), think aloud, reading article in the learning process. in addition, the pre-test data suggest that the students’ performance still low and only literal aspect they perform well and not for interpretative, applicative and critical aspects-indicators subsets. therefore, these problems should be overcome by implementing a proper strategy in teaching reading. having the fact of the low reading performance of the students and after discussing with the collaborators (lecturers), the researchers come to conclusion that the teaching reading should involve with the collaborative activities in developing learners’ reading performance (anwar, 2020; gani et al., 2016). collaborative strategic reading (csr) is one of the strategies in teaching reading implemented collaboratively. this strategy integrates cooperative learning and reading comprehension strategies (abbasnezhad & zoghi, 2016). the students are engaged collaboratively to practice a number of strategies in reading comprehension required them to actively during learning process involving four activities; preview, click and clunk, get to the gist, and wrap up (anwar, 2020; klingner, vaughn, boardman, & swanson, 2012; rahman, 2015). besides, the collaborative strategy provides such benefits as improving the students involvement in the leaning process, lecturers as a facilitator, students can share knowledge and experience in the class, promoting leaning quality (boardman, buckley, maul, & vaughn, 2014) as it involves with interaction among students’ group, high responsibility among students to complete assignments independently or collaboratively, and students are encouraged to develop their understanding constructively by collaboration in group. collaborative strategy in comprehending english reading text requires every group member to work in group. they have to be proactive and fill each member’s shortcomings. as a result, csr not only improve the students’ knowledge but also develop emotional intelligence in responding to the dynamics of the group member idea. csr strategy designed for esl learners is instructional tool integrating the principles of cooperative and strategies containing instruction to understanding the content of passage, language mastery, and reading comprehension. it encourages the cognitive skill to continue to develop as a result of social interaction csr implementation (nosratinia & hooshmand fateh, 2017; rosari & mujiyanto, 2016). predicting, click and clunk, identifying main idea, and wrapping up activities are experienced by the students while the tutor plays essential role in guiding their learners to: play role, giving example, thinking and discussing (grabe & stoller, 2013; karabuga & kaya, 2013; nosratinia & hooshmand fateh, 2017) there are seven steps in applying csr to comprehend english readings: activate the students’ pre-knowledge before previewing, utilize sensorics’ images, ask the students, student predict inference, define the main topic, fix-up option, and synthesize the concepts (gani et al., 2016; nosratinia & hooshmand fateh, 2017). a number of studies involve with csr has been conducted. a research by suryaningsih (2018) discovers that teaching by csr improves the students’ comprehension and the quality of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 467 learning. the students can identify the main idea of the passage explicitly and implicitly, infer the meaning of specific words, and find reference. furthermore, maming (2019) found that team-based learning promotes the students’ involvement actively in efl class when integrated with crs and it improves the students’ performance in reading comprehension. crs can also improve reading comprehension in pet test (nosratinia, mania hooshmand fateh, negin, 2017; gani, et al., 2016). by comparing individual (isr) and collaborative (csr), kassem found both to be equally effective in improving reading comprehension (2013). amjadi also reported that crs strategy gained a positive view toward the intervention from students (2021) having the facts that the students experienced difficulties in reading performance, this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of collaborative strategic reading and to improve the students reading comprehension using collaborative strategic reading at english study program, stkip panca sakti bekasi. method the research was carried out at sekolah tinggi ilmu keguruaan dan ilmu pendidikan (stkip) panca sakti, bekasi, jawa barat. it was conducted at academic year 2018/2019 from march to june 2019. it involves 30 second-semester students of english education program, stkip panca sakti bekasi as the subjects of study. this study is an action research conducted to improve the students’ reading performance by implementing collaborative strategic reading. it was carried out in two cycles after the researchers completing the pre-cycle. it used kemmis & mctaggart model by implementing four steps in every cycle: plan, action, observation, and reflection. one a cycle completed, the students were administered reading comprehension test at the end of the cycle. the results then were comparing to the previous data. upon completing the cycles, the qualitative and quantitative data were then analyzed to answer the research questions. observation, students’ logbook, interview, and test were used in collecting data. observation, students’ logbook, and interview were gathered during the learning process in the form of qualitative data while reading comprehension test was administered at the end of each cycle to acquire quantitative data. the former data were used to answer the research question on how the collaborative strategic reading was effective in improving the students’ reading performance and the latter data were used to answer the question if the collaborative strategic reading can improve the students' reading performance or not. observation is used to portray the teaching of reading process using csr completed by lecturers and collaborators in 12 items score ranges from 1 to 5. logbook contains the students’ experience and feeling about the application of csr strategy in relation to the course materials, learning development, interaction with peer, interaction with lecturer, and the completion of materials during the learning process. the students immediately write the logbook at the end of the class. interview is used to reveal what the students experience and think about the collaborative strategic reading. it is carried out in the end of each cycle. test is administered to measure the students’ reading comprehension score consisting of pre-test and post-test in every cycle. the test is to measure the four dimensions of reading comprehension: literal, interpretative, applicative, and critical. every item score 0 for wrong answer and 1 for the right one. the data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. the qualitative analysis is used to describe the data collected in observation, students’ logbook and interview. the data explain effectiveness of collaborative strategic reading during the learning process. the quantitative analysis is used to investigate the improvement of the students’ reading performance by comparing the scores in every cycle. results and discussion pre-cycle activities first of all, the researchers conduct pre-study to get the real data on students’ reading performance. for the qualitative data, the interview with students and lecturers of the course discovered the following issues: lecturers used lecturing method (teachercentered), ignorance of lecturers to the students’ obstacles in reading english text, rarely student received feedback, and students need immediate correction to their assignments before the going to next topic. the researchers, then, investigate the students’ reading performance based on the scores of reading i and reading ii courses. the gathered data show yon a. e., zainal rafli, & nuruddin teaching reading by collaborative strategic reading: an action research 468 that only 62% students passed the course and the rest 38% failed enrolling reading i (odd semester 2017/2018). on the even semester 2017/2018, the students who passed the reading ii course increase to 70% and there are still 30% students failed. these quantitative data reveals that the students’ performance needs to be improve. in addition, the researchers administered a reading performance pre-test to 30 students involved in this study and found that the mean score is 62.4. there are 23 students scored 56-65 or 76.7% and only 7 students score 66-80 or 23.3% cycle one at the planning phase, the researchers design the instructional scenario, learning lesson plan, preparation of learning resources and media, setting the time, observation sheet, interview guidance and reading test instrument. the action phase consists of the implementation of collaborative strategic reading once a week for four weeks. the students were taught reading using csr four times on march 6th, 20th, and 26th and on april 10th 2019. the first meeting is intended to promote the students’ motivation. in the second meeting, the students practiced to synthesizing from the reading materials the studied. in the following meeting, the students are encouraged develop their literal, interpretative, applicative, and critical understanding of the passage. and in the last meeting of cycle one, the students are divided into a group consisting of five members. their prior knowledges are activated. during the cycle i, all students were engaged in activities of csr. it encourages the students to activate the students’ prior knowledge before previewing, utilize sensorics’ images, make inference, identify the main topic, fix-up option, and synthesize the concepts found in the passages. observation table 1. observation results of lecturers and students cycle i cycle ii observation lecturer students observation lecturer students meeting i 46.7 30 meeting i 93.3 85.83 meeting ii 62 57.45 meeting ii 100 91.25 meeting iii 86 71.67 meeting iii 100 96.25 table 1 provides the results of lecturer’s and students’ observation during the cycle i for three meetings. the data reveal that the process of csr implementation in teaching reading gradually improves in each meeting. the meeting i shows that crs was not effective. the observation scores are only 46.7 and 30 for lecturer and students respectively. this condition become the initial introduction to csr. the scores increase for lecturer’s observation to 63.3 and for students to 57.45 in the meeting ii. in the meeting iii, the scores for lecturer and students increase significantly by 86 and 71.67 respectively. reflection overall, the application of csr during cycle i effectively improve the students’ reading comprehension as well as the positive attitude toward its application. on the lecturer’s perspective, csr strategy has already maximally implemented. on the students’ attitude, the implementation of csr still needs to be maximized. therefore, the researchers consider to proceed to the cycle ii. cycle two planning based on the data of cycle i, the researchers continue to extend the treatment of csr to cycle ii. we make evaluation and improvement of the design of instructional scenario, learning lesson plan, preparation of learning resources and media, setting the time, observation sheet, interview guidance and reading test instrument. action the treatment (action) also consists of three meeting in implementing the csr strategy. the students were taught reading using csr four times on april 17th & 26th and 1 may 2019. the learning process is intended to develop and improve the students’ reading comprehension in literal, interpretative, applicative and critical performances. similar to cycle i, the students in cycle ii are also engaged in the activities to activate the students’ prior knowledge before previewing, utilize sensorics’ images, make inference, identify the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 469 main topic, fix-up option, and synthesize the concepts found in the passages. observation in the cycle ii, the responses of lecturer’s and students’ observation result significantly increase in each meeting (in table 1). the lecturer’s responses have gained perfect score. this data confirm that the csr strategy has already implemented as intended. on the other hand, the students’ responses to csr strategy also show great acceptance. the scores also reach the perfect points in each meeting. reflection in summary, the implementation of csr has been implemented effectively by the lecturer and received positive acceptance from the students. therefore, this condition has important effects on the students’ reading performance in all four dimensions of knowledge measured. discussion the process of teaching reading during the implementation of csr. reading activities help students to acquire wide understanding in a various field of science they focused on. the readers have paradigms, experiences in understanding the readings. in other words, reading skill involves with experience and paradigm to find the meaning of the passage. to understand the reading, students should apply strategies. collaborative strategy is reliable to develop students’ reading comprehension as it provides the students with alternative for learning resources and other resources. besides, csr strategy can be accounted for guiding to the next phase of independency while reducing the lecturer roles in the learning process (gani et al., 2016; tamah, 2015). this section discusses the process of leaning by using csr to improve the students’ performance in reading comprehension at academic year 2018/2019 second semester, at stkip panca sakti bekasi. the initial step in csr is an instructional feature integrating cooperation and strategy involving with instruction to comprehending passage content, language competence, and reading comprehension (klingner & vaughn in grabe & stoller, 2013). this csr is applied in action research design to improve the reading performance adopting kemmis & mctaggart model (kemmis, mctaggart, & nixon, 2014) by following steps: plan, action, observation, and reflection. this csr is applied to improve the students’ reading performance in four areas: literal, interpretation, application, can critics. all students experienced four methods: preview, click and clunk, get to the gist, and wrap up (rahman, 2016). during the action conducted in two cycles, the students show active involvement. they give feedback among them for correction, they completed the tasks in time, they also actively responded to task in the class, interact with each one and the lecturer in the class, they are responsible to complete the tasks, they used time to critical thinking, observing, analyzing, solving the problems and giving response confidently, and they make sure the learning process runs successfully during the class. these activities confirm that the students show positive attitude during the application of csr and understanding the readings either in the observing process or in the journal notes during the research. the descriptive results are discussion in the following section the students’ reading performances table 2 displays the students’ performance in reading comprehension in cycle i. overall, the students’ scores ranging from 66 to 80 were at the good level (21 students) and only 8 students still performed in medium ranging from 56 to 65 as follow. the mean score is 62.4 which fall into medium level. table 2. score distribution of reading comprehension in cycle i no. score range category frequency percentage 1. > 80 very good 0 0.00% 2. 66-80 good 21 72.4% 3. 56-65 medium 8 27.6% 4. 45-55 low 0 0.00% 5. < 45 very low 0 0.00% total 29 100.00% mean 62.4 to figure out the students’ performance in the four dimensions in cycle i, it is provided in the figure 1. the data show that mostly 90.00% (27 students) performance good in literal understanding and the rest (3 students) scored above 80. for the interpretative performance, 19 students scored yon a. e., zainal rafli, & nuruddin teaching reading by collaborative strategic reading: an action research 470 range 66 -80 and there are 11 students performed good. and no student score above 80. the students performed in good and medium levels for applicative dimension. seven students scored range 66-80 and 23 students scored ranging 55-65. and the last indicator, the students’ critical skill also in the good and medium levels. 10 students got good level and 20 gained medium score. this cycle one data show that most students’ performance is dominant for literal understanding which is the basic level in reading comprehension. as a result, the next cycle needs to be undertook. table 3. score distribution of reading comprehension in cycle ii no score range category frequency percentage 1. > 80 very good 23 76.7% 2. 66-80 good 7 23.3% 3. 56-65 medium 0 0.00% 4. 45-55 low 0 0.00% 5. < 45 very low 0 0.00% total 30 100.00% mean 83.8 diagram 1. distribution of students’ reading scores in cycle diagram 2. distribution of students' reading scores in cycle ii the students show the great improvement of reading comprehension in the second cycle. table 4 shows that there are 23 students perform very good in reading comprehension means that mostly students scored above 80. and there are 7 students left who gain scores range 66 to 80. this english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 471 performance suggests, overall, that the implementation of csr strategy in teaching reading effectively improve the students reading performance. in details, the students’ performance in four dimensions of reading comprehension is provided in diagram 2. their literal understandings are mostly (20 students/66.67%) in very good level or scored above 80. and the rest (10 students/33.34%) gain a good level. the next aspect, interpretative ability also shows great improvement. mostly a half scored above 80 (46.67%) and the rest scored range 66-80 (53.37%). similar to interpretative, almost half respondents scored above 80 for applicative ability (46.67%) and the rest are in good category. the next is critical performance. the are 33.34% or 10 students achieved higher than 80 and 17 students gained good score ranging 66-80. overall, the students are able to comprehend the english reading passage in cycle ii. they can identify the literal meaning and make inference of the passage. almost all students perform very good and scored above 80. as a result, the conclusion can be drawn that the implementation of collaborative strategic reading (csr) has affected the students’ reading performance significantly. the following section discusses the improvement of students’ reading comprehension performance in every cycle. diagram 3. reading performance pre-cycle and cycle one mean score in four indicators students’ performance development after being taught using collaborative strategic reading the diagram 3 portrays the growth of students’ mean score in all four dimensions of reading comprehension comparing the pre-cycle to cycle i. table 4 provides the details of improvement. the lowest is critical dimension (3) while there are two dimensions increased to 13% improvement (literal and interpretative dimensions). them applicative dimension is the medium (9%). the literal area mean score is 68 to 77, interpretative is 61 to 69, applicative is 62 to 64, and critical aspect is from 59 to 65. table 4. mean scores comparison among pre-cycle, cycle i, and cycle ii in four dimensions indicators action improvement precycle cycle i cycle ii precycle to cycle i precycle to cycle i literal 68 77 87 13% 12% interpretative 61 69 80 13% 14% applicative 62 64 84 3% 24% critical 59 65 85 9% 24% the mean scores between cycle i and cycle ii are available in diagram 4. the data show that all four dimensions of reading comprehension measured are increased. applicative and critical dimensions improve 20 scores which are the highest and the mean scores of literal and interpretative dimensions increase 10 and 11 respectively. this improvement suggests that the teaching reading using csr is appropriate to improve the reading comprehension of the learners. yon a. e., zainal rafli, & nuruddin teaching reading by collaborative strategic reading: an action research 472 diagram 4. reading performance mean scores between cycle i and cycle ii these improvements can be understood comprehensively by presenting the data in table 4. applicative and critical dimension increase to 24% while literal and interpretative increase to 12 and 14 percent respectively. in diagram 4, the data present the development of reading performance in overall cycles. it shows that all four dimensions of students’ reading comprehension increase from cycle to cycle. the more detail data of improvement are presented in table 4. firstly, the literal dimension improves from 68 to 77 and to 87 or about 27 percent improvement. secondly, the interpretative mean score improves gradually from 61 to 69 and to 80 or about 31 percent. thirdly, the applicative mean score also increases from 62 to 63 and to 84 or about 36 percent improvement. and finally, the mean score of critical dimension increases from 59 to 65 and to 85 or about 45 percent improvement. these results confirm that overall the students; reading comprehension effectively increase in all four dimensions measured. therefore, the hypothesis proposed in this that the reading comprehension will improve when the students are taught with collaborative strategic reading is confirmed. conclusion the implementation of collaborative strategic reading engages the students to actively participate during the learning process. they responded to tasks, actively involved in discussion activity, were enthusiastic during the class, and submitted the assignment in time. as a result, the students’ reading performance enhances in cycle one and cycle two. the positive attitude from students toward the strategy they were taught at the end of second cycle. this was portrayed from their journal notes and interviewing data on the implementation of the csr strategy. they had fun and learnt enthusiastically during learning process. in addition, they were enthusiastic as they can learn systematically and clearly. the descriptive data on the students’ reading performance reflect that the four sub-competences measured in this study has been increased gradually from pre-cycle, cycle one, and cycle two. their precycle mean score (68) increases to 77 in cycle one and to 87 in cycle two or about 12 percent increase. secondly, the interpretative performance also increases from cycle to cycle. the mean score of pre-cycle (61) increases to 69 in cycle one and to 80 in cycle two or 14 percent increased. for the third indicator, their mean score of applicative performance also improved 24 percent form 62 (pre-cycle) to 64 (first cycle) and to 84 (second cycle). the last aspect, critical understanding, also increases to 24 percent. their mean score in precycle (59) enhances to 65 in cycle one and to 85 in cycle two. the implementation of collaborative strategic reading effectively has improved the students’ four dimensions of reading performance: literal, interpretative, applicative, and critical understandings. therefore, the collaborative strategic reading is an alternative strategy to consider in teaching reading. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 473 as the results suggest, it can be considered some educational implications. the csr effectively has encouraged the students to shape their performance to understanding english reading text. therefore, the collaboration becomes the key aspect during the teaching-learning process for reading class to enhance the quality of learning process and reading achievement. aknowledgment the researcher would like express the deepest thanks to the persons for their help in the research. firstly, the researcher would like to thank the scholarship support from bppdn program drpm ristekdikti 2015. secondly, the researchers would like to say generous thanks to the school of teachers training and education (stkip) panca sakti bekasi who have facilitated good services for the researchers during the research. references abbasnezhad, s., & zoghi, m. 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(2018). improving students’ reading comprehension at zakah and waqf management class using collaborative strategic reading. edukasi: jurnal pendidikan islam, 6(2), 44– 53. doi: 10.5281/edukasi.v6i2.343. tamah, s. (2015). the effect of collaborative strategic reading on grade six students’ reading achievement. ijee (indonesian journal of english education), 2(1), 17–27. doi: 10.15408/ijee.v2i1.1501. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 393 efl student’s difficulties in extensive listening activities: a thematic content analysis indra cipta putra mandiri english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: indra18@upi.edu muhammad handi gunawan (corresponding author) english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: handi_gunawan@upi.edu suharno english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: suharno@upi.edu apa citation: mandiri, i. c. p., gunawan, m. h., & suharno. (2022). efl student’s difficulties in extensive listening activities: a thematic content analysis. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 393-400. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6240 received: 19-02-2022 accepted: 26-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction extensive listening is defined as all types of listening activities that allow learners to receive a lot of comprehensible and enjoyable listening input (ivone & renandya, 2019). in the world of english teaching, the concept of extensive listening is a relatively new one. listening itself (as a language skill) receives a relatively smaller teaching or research attention, in comparison with other language skills (burns & siegel, 2017), and the concept of extensive listening itself is quite possibly developed from the pre-existing concept of extensive reading (er), or perhaps simply from the novel concept of l1 listening (chang, 2018). regardless of its origin, it is beneficial to the increase of listening comprehension as it allows learners to adjust their learning activities to the type of text, and their comprehension needs (ivone & renandya, 2019). with the aforementioned definition of extensive listening, it should come as no surprise that extensive listening activities involves the act of listening to large amounts of motivating and engaging materials which are linguistically appropriate over a period of time, in which they listen to materials with a reasonable speed for general understanding (renandya & jacobs, 2016). with this, we can infer that generally, extensive listening is an engaging listening activity where its listeners focus on attaining a general understanding of what is being spoken. one of the most abundant extensive listening resources that are readily found in the internet is videos, sourced from sites like youtube, dailymotion, and many others. these resources can be considered as authentic e-learning resources abstract: the study of extensive listening (el) is a comparatively new field in comparison to its peer, extensive reading (er). extensive listening itself can be defined as an engaging and enjoyable listening activity that is beneficial in increasing one’s listening comprehension. although there have been extensive studies in regards to the field of listening in general, the field of extensive listening receives relatively little attention. this study aims to uncover the difficulties encountered by efl students in their extensive listening activities, and to contribute itself to the present gap of studies concerning extensive listening, specifically difficulties encountered in it. this study involves twenty-three efl students under the class of listening for general communication 1, and conducts a thematic analysis on the participants’ questionnaire and interview responses. the findings showed that the difficulties encountered by the participants in their extensive listening activities can be divided into three major categories, namely comprehension difficulties, technical difficulties, and motivational difficulties. keywords: extensive listening; listening difficulties; thematic analysis. indra cipta putra mandiri, muhammad handi gunawan, & suharno efl student’s difficulties in extensive listening activities: a thematic content analysis 394 (kobayashi, 2020), and with it, comes several benefits, including (but not limited to): a way of implementing a comprehensive approach to learning, and significantly increasing learner’s motivation to learn a foreign language (zhdanov & baklanov, 2020). saputra and fatimah (2018) argued in their journal that extensive listening activities allows the students to receive abundant comprehensible and enjoyable input (sourced from sources like youtube, ted, etc). listening itself (perhaps a byproduct of receiving a relatively smaller teaching or research attention, in comparison with other language skills), is considered to be a particularly difficult skill to acquire, especially for language learners (nawir, 2020). this is because in listening, extra attention and concentration would be crucial in comprehending the speakers’ utterances (zulfikar, aulia, & akmal 2020). in this regard, renandya (2011) has eloquently illustrated four notable reasons why listening is perceived to be difficult by language learners: first of all, speech is fast, as even in normal speech rate, spoken information could still be perceived as being too fast by beginner language learners. in addition to that, if the speakers speak too fast, problems in comprehension may occur for those who are not native speakers of the english language (saraswaty, 2018). second, speech is variable, as when words are woven in a speech, they will oftentimes undergo (up to some extent, radical) phonological changes (e.g. modification, reduction, et cetera). third, word boundaries tend to get blurry, as in some words could seemingly “blend” with other words in certain dialects or speech rates. lastly, speech is by nature processed in real-time, meaning that unlike reading something, there is little to no chance to “re-read” what one may have missed, although the option of asking the interlocutor to repeat the sentence is viable. there had been previous studies conducted in light of revealing difficulties that learners encounter in listening activities. nushi and orouji (2020) discovered that encountering phonological processes such as assimilation, deletion or addition of sounds, and not understanding the sounds in combination poses itself as a significant difficulty for learners in relation to their listening. another evident difficulty is when learners try to comprehend considerably lengthy and/or comparatively complex materials. another research was also conducted by nadhira and warni (2020), and it revealed additional insight to the plausible difficulties that learners encounter in listening. these difficulties include perception of unfamiliar words and/or vocabularies, rate of speech, accent used by the speaker (alongside his/her pronunciation), and technicalities (audio quality, for example). another study conducted by rakhman, tarjana, and marmanto (2019) reflected similar results in regards to listening difficulties, especially in the question of having difficulty with the speech rates of the speakers. additional difficulties were also revealed, namely difficulties related with inadequate practice of listening outside the classroom, and difficulties in recalling spoken information. reflecting on the preceding paragraph, it is clear that a number of studies have been conducted under the guise of revealing difficulties in listening. however, from it we can also infer that there is a lack of study that specifically focuses itself on revealing the difficulties under the context of extensive listening activities. it is for this reason that this paper aims to fill in the present gap of scarcity of studies exploring difficulties in extensive listening. this paper means to conduct a thematic analysis of efl students’ difficulties in extensive listening activities in order to unveil difficulties that may arise in extensive listening activities, under the demography of indonesian efl students. thematic analysis is chosen as the study does not only intend to simply generalize the difficulties found, but also to thematically group common themes found in each difficulty, the factor inducing the aforementioned difficulties, and to see whether cooccurrences are found along the way. thematic analysis is a form of analysis that moves beyond counting the occurrence of explicit words and phrases, and instead focuses itself on identifying and describing both implicit and explicit ideas within the data’s themes (macqueen, guest, & namey, 2012). in that regard, thematic analyses may include the comparison of code frequencies, the identification of code co-occurrence, and the graphic display of existing relationships between codes contained in the data. method as previously mentioned, this paper aims to conduct a thematic analysis of efl students’ difficulties in extensive listening activities in order english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 395 to unveil difficulties that may arise in extensive listening activities, under the demography of indonesian efl students. specifically, this study involves first-semester english education department students of a public state university located in indonesia, under the class of listening for general communication 1 as its participants. the data that serves as the main focus of the analysis is sourced from a reflection questionnaire in regards to their experience throughout the course. among other questions, the reflection questionnaire also includes questions that inquire the participants’ difficulties in their extensive listening activities, and the way they cope with said difficulties. all 23 students of the selected class are participating in the study, and 5 out of the 23 participants are selected for an additional interview session as a means of clarification and/or to provide additional insights, as their responses are deemed unclear and are in need of further elaboration. these interview sessions implemented a semi-structured style of interview, as the writer prepares a set of predetermined questions, but opens the possibility of formulating more questions should it be deemed necessary. it is important to note that both the questionnaires and the interview uses bahasa indonesia, and therefore the original text and excerpts that will be provided in the article will include both its bahasa indonesia version and its translated to english variant, as a means to provide transparency to the readers. the time allotted to each individual interview with each participant is 30 minutes, and the three main questions that the interview is centered around are: (1) kesulitan-kesulitan apakah yang paling sering muncul ketika anda melakukan extensive listening? (2)dari kesulitan-kesulitan tersebut, yang manakah yang menurut anda merupakan kesulitan yang paling sukar untuk ditangani? (3)bagaimana anda mengatasi kesulitan yang telah anda hadapi? (1) what do you think are the most prevalent difficulties that you encounter in extensive listening activities? (2) from the aforementioned difficulties, which one do you think is the most challenging one to deal with? (3) how do you cope and manage the difficulties that you have encountered?) under the context of the aforementioned course, it should be noted that in the practice of listening, both intensive and extensive listening practices are combined. this is due to the fact that in the department of english education in the aforementioned university, there is no standalone class that focuses itself on extensive listening. listening courses in the department heavily relies on intensive listening, where the lecturers previously dictate the materials that would be used in the course. the extensive listening part of the course comes in the form of a weekly assignment where the students would have to listen to various extensive listening materials such as podcasts, ted talks, etc. in addition to that, they were also required to record their extensive listening activities through the use of listening journals, adapted from takaesu (2013). after recording their extensive listening activity in their weekly listening journals, they would then be allotted time to discuss their journals with their peers in class, after they are finished with the intensive listening part of the class. the time allocation for each session in the class is roughly 40 minutes. results and discussion an analysis of the gathered data from the distributed questionnaire revealed that there exists three major recurring themes under the context of difficulties faced by students in extensive listening activities. these three major difficulties are comprehension difficulties, technical difficulties, and motivational difficulties. each of these difficulties would be further elaborated alongside relevant factors that induced each accordingly in the following passages. the ways that these students cope with the difficulties will also be discussed. 1. 2. comprehension-related difficulties comprehension-related difficulties concern itself with difficulties that pose a challenge in comprehending the listening material that the students are listening to. for comprehension related difficulties, three factors play a pivotal role in inducing it: a. b. range of used vocabulary thirteen students (approximately 57% of the students that filled out the questionnaire) admitted that the extensive range of vocabularies used in the extensive listening materials they listen to poses a challenge for them in comprehending said podcast. a few examples of the statement are provided below: “kendala yang saya alami yaitu terkadang sulit untuk memahami topik yang dibicarakan di indra cipta putra mandiri, muhammad handi gunawan, & suharno efl student’s difficulties in extensive listening activities: a thematic content analysis 396 podcast/sumber lain tersebut karena beberapa kosa kata masih terdengar asing bagi saya.” (“a hurdle i experienced was the difficulty of comprehending the topic being talked about in the podcast/other sources i was listening to, as some vocabularies still sound relatively unfamiliar to me…”) “terdapat banyak slang yang asing bagi saya dan ketika saya mencarinya di google berbeda dengan apa yang dimaksud.” (“there are many slang words that sound alien to me, and when i look up what they mean on google, it would sometimes be different than what was intended.”) “...kurangnya kosa kata yang saya miliki, hal tersebut membuat saya sulit memahami isi percakapan dalam podcast maupun dari sumber listening lainnya. (“...due to the little range of vocabulary i am familiar with, i often find it hard to understand the topic of a conversation in a podcast or other sources.”) accent of speakers seven students (approximately 30% of the students that filled out the questionnaire) admitted that the accent of the speakers in the extensive listening media that they listen to poses a challenge for them in comprehending said media. a few examples of the statement are provided below: “terkadang saya sulit memahami jika bahasa inggris yang podcast bicarakan itu aksennya yang sulit dimengerti.” (“sometimes i find it difficult to understand the spoken english in the podcast if the accent itself is difficult to understand.”) “kesulitan yang saya dapatkan yaitu pelafalan dan aksen mereka yang masih asing untuk saya dengar…” (“the difficulties i faced are the speakers’ pronunciation and accent, which are still unfamiliar to me…”) “aksennya yang kadang kurang dimengerti.” (“the accents are sometimes a challenge to be understood.”) rate of speech three students (approximately 13% of the students that filled out the questionnaire) admitted that the speakers’ rate of speech in the extensive listening media that they listen to poses a challenge for them in comprehending said media. a few examples of the statement are provided below: “kadang-kadang terdapat kata yang saya belum ketahui dan tidak ada script atau subtitle seperti pada platform youtube, sehingga saya harus mengulang-ulang pengucapan kata tersebut dari podcastnya dan mencari penulisan dan arti dari kata tersebut. atau ketika pembicara dalam podcast tersebut berbicara terlalu cepat.” (“sometimes there are words that i don't know and there are no scripts or subtitles like on the youtube platform, so i have to repeat the pronunciation of the word from the podcast and look for the writing and meaning of the word. or when the speaker in the podcast is talking too fast.”) “jika peserta yang ada di podcast mengomong terlalu cepat/keras/rendah sampai microphone mereka tidak meregistrasi suaranya, membuatnya bersuara tidak jelas dan tidak dapat dipahami. (“the problem i encounter when listening to a podcast is if the participants of the podcast speak too fast/loud/low, to the point where the microphone cannot register the sound, making it unclear and incomprehensible.”) “ketika saya mendengarkannya (podcast) di spotify saya selalu kebingungan ketika mereka berbicara dengan cepat…” (“when i listen to podcasts on spotify, i always get confused when they talk quickly…”) it can be seen from these findings that the comprehension difficulties encountered by students in extensive listening activities are in line with the findings made by renandya (2011), in regards to difficulties in listening. just like in renandya’s findings, the idea that “speech is fast”, as spoken information could still be perceived as being too fast by beginner language learners, is evident in the provided example, specifically “the main problem i face is when the native speakers start to talk. when they start talking, they do so rather quickly…” another recurring finding is where word boundaries tend to get blurry, as in some words could seemingly “blend” with other words in certain dialects. this is exemplified in the provided response example stating “sometimes i find it difficult to understand the spoken english in the podcast if the accent itself is difficult to understand.”. under the context of comprehension-related difficulties, it can also be inferred that the major english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 397 factor that plays a role in inducing it is the vocabulary-induced ones. this particular factor stems from the fact that apparently, the participants’ unfamiliarity with the used vocabulary, or the use of slangs in the materials that they listen to, serves as a challenge for them in their effort to comprehend the aforementioned material. another inducing factor is the accent used by the speakers in the material they are listening to. this mirrors what renandya & farrell (2011) had previously stated, that word boundaries tend to get blurry, as some words could seemingly “blend” with other words in certain dialects. as all of the participants of the research are not native speakers of the english language, for accents and dialects to pose a challenge in their comprehension of the materials that they listen to is surely something that is to be expected. the last factor related to comprehension difficulties is the rate of speech of the speakers, which also mirrors previous findings by renandya in the preceding sentence. technical difficulties technical difficulties concern itself with difficulties encountered by the participants of the study that are related to the technicalities of the activity. as the materials used are sourced online, this section’s difficulties mainly concerns itself with hurdles related to online material technicalities. seven students (approximately 30% of the students that filled out the questionnaire) admitted that the technical difficulties, (poor connection, audio playback errors), pose a challenge for them. a few examples of the statement are provided below: “banyak kendala yang saya hadapi, misalnya internet yang lambat…” (“there are many hurdles i experienced, slow internet for example…”) “terkadang saat menemukan topic yang kita inginkan audionya tidak bisa diputar…” (“sometimes when we find the topic that we want, the audio cannot be played…”) “kendala atau kesulitan yang saya alami ketika mendengarkan podcast atau sumber lain yaitu kendala jaringan dan kesulitan menemukan media tersebut.” (“the hurdles, or the difficulties i experienced when listening to podcasts or other materials are the difficulties with the connection, and the difficulty of finding the media.”) as previously mentioned, technical difficulties concern itself with difficulties encountered by the participants of the study that are related to the technicalities of the activity. these difficulties are present– and are taken into account as the extensive listening activities being carried out by the participants are under the confines of the material being sourced from online resources. the findings indicated that when it comes to technical difficulties, poor internet connection (resulting in buffering video/audio) and playback errors are the most prevalent technical difficulties encountered by the participants. the sentiment of having these technical difficulties are shared by approximately 30% of the participants involved in the study. motivational difficulties albeit being the comparatively smallest number of occurring difficulty that surfaces in the questionnaire and interviews (by only summing up to a total of 22%), this difficulty is still worthy to be discussed, as it remains a factor that plays in the grand scheme of encountered difficulties in extensive listening activities. motivational difficulties concern themselves with difficulties that pose a challenge in a student’s motivation and focus to follow through in their extensive listening activities. for comprehensionrelated difficulties, the factor that unanimously induces it is mainly centered around how the material is being delivered. example of responses that voice these difficulties are provided below: “...cara penyampaian yang membosankan, dan penyampaian yang tidak jelas/ terkesan mumbling.” (“...boring delivery, and the delivery is unintelligible/felt like mumbling.”) “sejauh ini kendala yang dialami adalah dari podcast itu sendiri. seperti saat pembawaannya datar atau materinya yang kurang menarik, saya sangat cepat kehilangan minat untuk lanjut mendengarkan.” (“so far, the problem is from within the podcast itself. like when the delivery is flat or the material is uninteresting, i very quickly lose interest in listening to it further.”) “kendala saya ketika mendengarkan podcast yakni, bosan dan kesal, tidak dapat dipungkiri bosan dan kesal adalah alasan terkuat yang menyulitkan saya.” indra cipta putra mandiri, muhammad handi gunawan, & suharno efl student’s difficulties in extensive listening activities: a thematic content analysis 398 (“the hurdle when listening to podcasts for me is being bored and annoyed, it is undeniable that boredom and annoyance are the strongest reasons that make it difficult for me.”) 3. students’ coping mechanisms coping mechanisms here mean ways of how students involved in the study cope with the difficulties in comprehending their selected listening material in their extensive listening activities. the coping mechanisms are divided into two ways, one being repetition of their extensive listening material, and two, enlistment of subtitles and/or transcripts of their selected extensive listening material. both of these coping mechanisms and their example will be elaborated below, and cases of co-occurrences will also be discussed. a. repetition of the material repetition of material is quite self-explanatory. it simply means that the way these students cope with the difficulty is by the repetition of listening to the material until they deem that they understood the material, and or/ what is being spoken by the speakers there. sixteen students (approximately 70%) have shown that repetition of their listening material is their preferred method of coping with the difficulties. some examples are listed below: “saya biasanya mendengarkan berulang kali sampai saya mengerti.” (“i usually listen over and over again until i understand.”) “biasanya saya akan mendengarkan podcast/sumber lain tersebut secara berulangulang hingga saya bisa memahami topik yang dibicarakan.” (“usually i will listen to the podcast/other source over and over again until i can understand the topic being discussed.”) “apabila ada kata yang belum diketahui, saya harus mencari script podcast tersebut pada platform google kalau tidak ada, saya mengulang perkataan pembicaranya pada podcastnya berkali-kali.” ("if there is a word that i haven’t known, i have to look for the podcast script on the google platform. if it's not there, i repeat what the speaker said on the podcast again and again.") enlistment of subtitles and/or transcripts enlistment of subtitles and/or transcripts means that the way these students cope with the difficulty is by using the aid of subtitles and/or transcripts of their extensive listening materials so that they could understand the material, and or/ what is being spoken by the speakers there. seven students (approximately 30%) have shown that enlistment of subtitles and.or transcripts is their preferred method of coping with the difficulties. some examples are listed below: “mencari alternatifnya seperti mencari teks pembicara di website resmi sumber video. seperti contoh ted talks di youtube biasanya menyediakan link untuk membaca teks yang dibawakan narasumber dalam video.” (“looking for alternatives like looking for the speaker's text on the official website of the video source. for example, ted talks on youtube usually provides a link to read the text presented by the speaker in the video.”) “…namun, setelah 3 kali pengulangan dan isi video yang saya dengar belum cukup jelas, maka saya akan mengaktifkan subtitle berbahasa inggris.” (“…however, if after 3 repetitions and the content of the video i am hearing is still not clear enough, i will then turn on english subtitles.”) “…dan cara saya mengatasi kesulitan ketika mendengarkan podcast yaitu dengan menggunakan transcript text untuk memahami percakapan dalam podcast tersebut…” (“…and the way i overcome difficulties when listening to podcasts is to use the transcript of the text to understand the conversations in the podcast…”) b. c. co-occurrences found throughout the interview and questionnaires, three co-occurrences in regards to the way students cope with difficulties they encounter in extensive listening appear. the three found co-occurrences include both repetition of the material and enlistment of transcript and/or subtitles as a way of coping with the difficulties that these students encountered. the three co-occurrence excerpts are provided below: “biasanya saya akan mendengarkan podcast/sumber lain tersebut secara berulangulang hingga saya bisa memahami topik yang dibicarakan. apabila masih terdapat kosa kata yang belum dimengerti, saya akan english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 399 memperkirakannya dan menghubungkannya dengan topik yang dibahas. namun jika terdapat script audio atau subtitle, saya akan melihatnya dan mencari tahu arti dari kosa kata yang belum saya ketahui.” (“usually i will listen to the podcast/other source over and over again until i can understand the topic being discussed. if there is still a vocabulary that is not understood, i will estimate it and relate it to the topic discussed. but if there is an audio script or subtitles, i will look at it and find out the meaning of the vocabulary that i don't know.") “saya selalu mencari transcript dari podcast yang saya dengar atau mendengarkan 2x audio tersebut, yang pertama tanpa subtitle dan yang kedua saya membaca transcriptnya.” (“i always look for transcripts of podcasts that i listen to or listen to twice the audio, the first without subtitles and the second i read the transcript.”) “sebelum masuk ke podcast, waktu yang paling banyak saya habiskan ialah untuk mencari sumber betul-betul saya tertarik dengan sumber tersebut. kemudian, saya akan mendengarkannya berulang semisal 2-5 kali. karena ketika diulang, akan ada tambahan kata-kata yang dapat pahami sehingga isi dari podcast tersebut lebih tertangkap jelas. namun, setelah 3 kali pengulangan dan isi video yang saya dengar belum cukup jelas, maka saya akan mengaktifkan subtitle berbahasa inggris.” (“before getting into podcasts, i spent most of the time looking for sources i was really interested in. then, i will listen to it over and over again like 25 times. because when repeated, there will be additional words that can be understood so that the content of the podcast is more clearly captured. however, after 3 repetitions and the content of the video i hear is not clear enough, then i will turn on english subtitles.”) from the provided excerpt samples, it can be inferred that there exists a connection between the two coping mechanisms. the first coping mechanism, the repetition of the extensive listening material, has the tendency to be the first coping mechanism utilized by the participants in the event where they think they were unable to comprehend the extensive listening materials that they are listening to. the second coping mechanism, the enlistment of subtitles and/or transcripts have a tendency to be chosen under the circumstances where repetition is deemed insufficient to fully comprehend the extensive listening materials that the participants are currently listening to. conclusion in conclusion to the aforementioned findings and discussions, the difficulties that are faced by efl students in extensive listening activities can be divided into three major parts. the three parts are comprehension difficulties, technical difficulties, and motivational difficulties. comprehension difficulties on its own are mainly induced by three key factors, which are the range of vocabulary being used in the extensive listening material being listened to (approx. 57% of cases), the accent of speakers who are speaking in the material (approx. 30% of cases), and the rate of their speech (approx. 17% of cases). the latter two factors are in-line with the findings of renandya (2011) that stated that speech rate in spoken information could still be perceived as being too fast by beginner language learners, and as when words are woven in a speech, they will oftentimes undergo (up to some extent, radical) phonological changes (e.g. modification, reduction, et cetera), meaning that word boundaries would get blurry, as in some words could seemingly “blend” with other words in certain dialects or speech rates. technical difficulties as the name suggests means that the difficulties encountered by the participants of the study are related to the technicalities of the activity. as the nature of the materials used are online, the difficulties mainly concern themselves with hurdles related to online material technicalities, like connection problems and audio playback problems. these technical difficulties are encountered in approximately 30% of the cases. motivational difficulties are induced mainly by how the extensive listening material is delivered by the speaker. among the three, this difficulty is the least-encountered, amounting to just approximately 22% of cases. flat and boring delivery are the prominent complaints listed by the participants of the research, and it tampers with their motivation in carrying out the extensive listening activities. the participants cope with these difficulties mainly using two ways, repeating the materials that they are listening to, and by enlisting the aid of transcripts and/or subtitles. cooccurrences of these two coping strategies are found, where the latter serves as a consequence to the former not being viable enough to attend comprehension of the material being listened to. indra cipta putra mandiri, muhammad handi gunawan, & suharno efl student’s difficulties in extensive listening activities: a thematic content analysis 400 results of this study may be applied as “heads-up” for educators who would like to employ extensive listening to their students. in other words, the findings may serve as an insight to the possibilities of difficulties encountered by the students and/or the practitioners of extensive listening activities in general. as a recommendation for a follow-up or continuation of the study, it is possible that further study in regards to efl students’ preferred media and/or materials for extensive listening to be conducted, in order to complement the findings discovered in this study. acknowledgements the writer would like to profess utmost gratitude to allah swt, for allowing the chance to write this article to be possible, and to the two lecturers and co-authors of this study, muhammad handi gunawan, m. pd. and suharno, m.pd. for providing the chance and possibility to work on this study concerning the field that the writer is interested in, and tirelessly guiding the writer throughout the study. the writer is also very grateful to all of the writer’s cherished family members, who had been naught but very supportive in the writer’s endeavors, be it mental, physical, and monetary support. without them, the writer would not have the capacity to perform as best as possible in this study. very special thanks to the individuals: kevin aprilio, muhammad arya raqi wardhana, muhammad cisco zulfikar, muhammad yusuf dzaudan agus, and wildan rahadian, for being irreplacable friends who kept the 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(2011). teacher, the tape is too fast!’ extensive listening in elt. elt journal, 65(1), 52-59. 10.1093/elt/ccq015 renandya, w. a., & jacobs, g. m. (2016). extensive reading and listening in the l2 classroom. in english language teaching today (pp. 97-110). routledge. saputra, y., & fatimah, a. s. (2018). the use of ted and youtube in extensive listening course: exploring possibilities of autonomy learning. indonesian journal of english language teaching, 13(1), 73-84. saraswaty, d. r. (2018). learner's difficulties and strategies in listening comprehension. english community journal, 2(1), 139-152. https://doi.org/10.32502/ecj.v2i1.1003 zhdanov, d., & baklanov, p. (2020). training english listening using e-learning resources. arpha proceedings, 2895-2908. 10.3897/ap.2.e2895 zulfikar, aulia, c. t., & akmal, s. (2020). exploring efl students' problems in listening to english news broadcasts. language literacy: journal of linguistics, literature and language teaching, 4(2), 340-352. 10.30743/ll.v4i2.2940 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 263 developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students novita sari english language education, faculty of teacher training and education sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: novitas2992@gmail.com soni mirizon (corresponding author) english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: smirizon@unsri.ac.id rita inderawati english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education sriwijaya university, indonesia e-mail: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: sari, n., mirizon, s., & inderawati, r. (2021). developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.263-276. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4351 received: 27-02-2021 accepted: 28-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction reading occupies a large portion of teachinglearning activities (maspufah, 2019). dealing with this, reading comprehension is an important thing in lifelong learning. it also has an important role in the learning process that involves an interactive process between the reader and the text. students need reading comprehension skills at all educational levels and for all school subjects. reading, a required skill in academic and social life, is a basic language skill (ozdemir & akyol, 2019). from the explanation above, it can be learned that reading is important and the students should be good readers and be able to comprehend the reading text that they learn in their learning process. meanwhile, the results of some studies in international measure showed the fact that reading performance is an issue in indonesia education. according to the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd, 2015), the mean score of reading literacy in indonesia was still low. it was 397 for program for international student assessment (pisa) score, while the mean score for the overall participating countries, if compared to, was 493 points in average. the mean score just increased by one point from the previous pisa (oecd, 2013). this mean score in reading performance was one of the lowest among pisa participating countries and economies although the test was in bahasa indonesia, let alone in english. indonesia was ranked 64th out of 69th countries participating in pisa 2015. in 2018 the results of abstract: this study was aimed to develop interactive multimedia of recount texts in teaching english in one public vocational high school in palembang. in specific, this study was intended to see whether or not the developed interactive multimedia had validity, practicality, and potential effect. the subject of the study was the tenth-graders of multimedia study program of the school. this development research applied analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (addie) design. the formative evaluation was done through one to one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test. the findings showed that the validity mean score of the developed product was 3.71, categorized as very high validity level. the practicality mean score in one-to-one evaluation was 3.69, in small group evaluation was 3.65, and in field test was 81.37, categorized as very high practicality level. the material of the reading test also had potential effect. it pointed out that there were 33 participants (94.28%) out of 35 participants in the test of reading achieved the minimum mastery criterion, which was 71. keywords: development research; interactive multimedia; recount text; vhs mailto:smirizon@unsri.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4351 novita sari, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students 264 pisa mean score of indonesia students was 371. this score was worse than the previous one. in national context, reading test results showed the inferiority of indonesian secondary school student reading ability. results of reading tests in various vocational high schools (vhs) are also evidence of indonesian student low competence in reading. diem and mirizon (2018) reported that vhs students in palembang had very low reading interest and critical thinking. those facts indicate that reading skill is one of the skills that students find difficulty to master, especially in understanding the contents of the text. this is in line with the reality in the field that most secondary school students also have problem in reading skills and find it difficult to learn all types of reading texts, one of which is recount text. the difficulties experienced by students include understanding the content of the text and the characteristics of the language contained in the recount text. these difficulties might be due to lack of teachers’ creativity and development in the teaching and learning process. it is apparent that in general, teachers depend on the use of textbooks and even did not make use of the rapid technological advances in this industrial revolution 4.0 era in the teaching and learning process. nasir (2018) argue that indonesia needs to improve the skills and capacity of its human resources through digital technology. besides, the demand of 2013 vhs curriculum was that 21st century teachers need to have functional competence, such as (1) critical and rational thinking skills and applying high-level thinking patterns, (2) creative skills, (3) communication skills, (4) collaborative skills, and (5) skills to utilize technology which is a mandatory task of a teacher who is required to be proficient in using technology in the delivery of learning material in teaching and learning processes such as using computer devices, multimedia, learning software and internet (directorate general of vocational high school guidance, 2017). regarding the fifth skill, teachers are required to be proficient in using and utilizing technology in delivering their learning and teaching processes because of the demands of the 21st century learning model. technology gives an important role in the world of education to facilitate and accelerate the learning process and the importance of using various types of technology. unfortunately, learning materials used at schools, especially vocational high schools were conventional and were supported by technology. moreover, english learning materials that are commonly used in vhs have not accommodated the specific needs of students. in other words, english learning materials are still in general english. as a result, they are not appropriate with the needs of each major available at vhs. certainly it would likely have an impact on the students' english competence. students would not be able to master english for specific purposes. in order that the students’ needs in english can be met, vhs should provide english for specific purposes (esp). the gold standard in esp is to allow students to use english to fulfill their needs in specific fields, such as read a manual, write a dissertation, listen to a lecture, present a sales pitch, and even for academic learning (sarmento & bocorny, 2018). according to 2013 curriculum, the graduate standard competence in vocational high school could be developed into english for specific purposes. it means that the teacher or school curriculum developer could provide and develop specific content of english for vhs students (ministry of education and culture, 2013). the revitalization of vhs poses that vocational fields are very diverse and demand adaptation of learning english to accommodate different needs of each of these vocational sectors. so, different learning materials should be provided in order to facilitate the students to achieve good specific english proficiency. it is expected that students have english knowledge and skills related to their jobs and work after they graduate. in this case, there is a need to provide english learning materials that fulfill vhs students’ needs. one of the ways in the learning materials provision is through material development. there are some previous related studies about designing english materials and develop interactive multimedia used for teaching english for vhs. jayanti (2015) developed reading materials for the tenth grade students of computer engineering and networking program at smkn 1 pundong. the target need was that students could learn english to communicate effectively and fluently, pass national examination on english subject, and understand technical terms related to computer engineering and networking. raharja (2016) found that students english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 265 preferred to learn written text related to their multimedia field to support their future career in developing english learning materials for the eleventh graders of multimedia study program at smkn 2 sewon. then, puspitasari (2011) did a study focusing on developing english learning materials. she found that students the eleventh graders smkn 1 sleman preferred learning materials that are able to support them in mastering vocabulary related to multimedia department. another study by komang, nitiasih, and budasi (2014) was about developing blended learning based reading materials for the tenth grade multimedia students of smk wira harapan. the result of this study showed that students need specific reading material based on their specific jobs; the design of blended learning, the developed blended learning and in developing and implementation the blended learning based reading material. leow and neo’s (2014) study aimed to improve the quality of student's learning achievement by developing an interactive learning module as the core component in forming the multimedia-mediate student-centered learning environment. significant improvement was found in the test results and showed that this learning environment enhanced the student's learning achievement. furthermore, puspita, sukmantara, and santihastuti (2016) developed esp reading materials by using authentic materials for automotive students at smkn 2 jember. the result was that esp reading materials for automotive students in the form of booklet. noho (2018) also developed supplementary english reading materials for the tenth grade students of computer networks at smk almamater telaga, gorontalo. the result showed that students preferred most reading texts that are specific to their field rather than the general one. other studies dealing with the use of technology in language teaching such as mobile reading (inderawati, agusta, & sitinjak, 2018), elearning (sopian, petrus, & inderawati, 2019), and interactive multimedia (eliviana, inderawati, & mirizon, 2020) conducted to provide learning materials blended with technology which were specific to vhs students. those studies are not identical with this current one. this study developed reading materials specifically for vhs students in the form of interactive media applications that can be used offline. interactive media-based reading materials were designed and developed with various types of recount text stories in the form of texts, audio, and videos about the bibliography of famous people. in addition, the reading materials are also completed with examples, explanations of recount texts, and evaluations to test students' abilities in recount texts. considering the importance of teaching the specific reading material for the specific purposes, the writers were interested in developing learning media of recount texts for vhs students. method research design this study employed mixed-methods approach in development research design. according to akker (1999), development research aims to design a product for certain purposes through certain procedures, i.e: analysis, design, evaluation, and revision activities which are iterated until a satisfying balance between ideals and realization has been achieved. in developing the recount text, analysis, design, develop, implement, and evaluate (addie) model of instructional design was applied (mcgriff, 2000; aldoobie, 2015; cheung, 2016). this study was conducted at one public vhs in palembang. the population was the tenth grade students consisting of four classes. they were chosen based on their english proficiency level in one-to-one and small group evaluation. their english proficiency level, was classified into low, medium, and high proficiency (dick, carey & carey, 2005), which were determined based on students’ grade point average. the subject of the study was described in table 1. table 1. the subject of the study no. stages of formative evaluation number of students description of the students 1. one-to-one evaluation 3 1 student for each category, i.e. low medium, and high english proficiency. 2. small group evaluation 9 3 students for each category, i.e. low medium, and high english proficiency. novita sari, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students 266 3. field test 35 all students in a real class total 47 students in collecting the data, to determine its validity, practicality, and potential effect of the product, questionnaires, interview, and reading test were used. there were four questionnaires distributed to the subjects: (1) need analysis questionnaire, adapted from petrus (2012) and indriyani (2016), (2) need analysis multi-media questionnaire (adapted from wao, 2016), (3) expert review validation questionnaire, and (4) students’ questionnaire toward the developed interactive multimedia of recount texts (adapted from tessmer, 1993). need analysis questionnaire and need analysis multimedia questionnaire were administered to the all students in multimedia major. expert review validation questionnaire, and students’ questionnaire were passed to experts in an expert review in order to know about the validity and also to students in one-to-one evaluation and small group evaluation in order to know practicality, and to get an information of their opinion and comments after reviewing and/or using the developed interactive multimedia of recount texts. an interview was also conducted in one-toone and small group evaluation. it was aimed to obtain students' comments, critiques, and suggestions after conducting the using of the developed interactive multimedia of recount texts. it was also used as the basis for revision. reading test was given to the students to know the potential effect of the product. it was constructed based on recount texts developed in this study. the reading text evaluation was used by using reading comprehension test in the form of multiple choice questions, true-false items, and matching items. the reading comprehension test included several aspects, such as main ideas, inference, vocabulary in context, cause and effect, details, and sequence. results and discussion there were five stages of development research as follows: analysis phase instructional analysis the writers analyzed the materials related to the recount text that was available in the students’ textbook entitled ‘forward’ for the vocational high school students grade x which was issued by the government. based on the analysis of the textbook, there were eleven recount texts found that most of the texts did not have any title, the content was too general and not related to the students’ major. then, the learning environment in the vhs was in good condition, such as had good electricity, computer laboratory for each major was available, each computer laboratory equipped with one lcd and one whiteboard, student sometimes brought a laptop and used their laptop during the process of teaching and learning. based on these school conditions, it can be said that the developed interactive multimedia of recount text could be implemented and conducted well during the process of teaching and learning. students’ need analysis to find out information about the four classes students’ achievement, an interview to the english teacher of the tenth grade students was also conducted. the results of interview showed that: (1) students reading skill was still low; and (2) it was caused by some factors, such as lack of vocabularies, and low of motivation. it can be said that the students reading achievement fell into unsatisfactory level. then to find out the information about the students’ need analysis. there were 21 question items about students’ need analysis was distributed to 105 students. the result of students’ need analysis was illustrated in table 2. table 2. students’ need analysis no. question/statement students’ response nos* % target situation analysis (tsa) 1. the importance of learning english a. to pass the national examination 4/105 3.5 b. to support the carrier in the future 25/105 23.5 c. to help to continue further study in the multimedia field 18/105 17.9 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 267 d. to communicate with foreigners 58/105 55.1 e. others ... 0/105 0.0 2. the students’ expectation towards learning english a. able to communicate fluently using english in oral communicate in the future workforce 64/105 60.4 b. able to communicate in written communicate in the future workforce 5/105 4.7 c. mastering the vocabulary related to the multimedia field 33/105 31.6 d. using grammar correctly 3/105 2.1 e. others ... 0/105 0.0 3. the language use for students’ carrier a. to do oral communicate with colleagues or clients 46/105 43.5 b. to do written communication both in formal or informal contexts 8/105 7.9 c. to deepen the multimedia skill by reading the english text 50/105 47.9 d. others ... 1/105 0.4 4. the english proficiency level for students’ carrier a. beginner 17/105 16.5 b. intermediate 34/105 32.1 c. advance 54/105 51.6 d. others ... 0/105 0.0 present situation analysis (psa) 5. students’ current proficiency level of english a. beginner 74/105 70.2 b. intermediate 26/105 24.9 c. advance 5/105 4.7 d. others ... 0/105 0.0 6. students’ desired input for reading a. authentic materials (such as news, menu, receipt, announcement, schedule, etc) 35/105 33.4 b. texts that relate to the context of the multimedia field 58/105 55.1 c. texts with the list of new vocabulary 7/105 6.7 d. texts with picture 4/105 3.5 e. others … 1/105 0.4 7. the length of input for reading a. < 100 words 30/105 28.5 b. 100 – 150 words 22/105 20.4 c. 150 – 200 words 13/105 12.1 d. > 200 words 40/105 38.2 8. topic desired by students for learning input in reading a. daily life routines 42/105 40.0 b. education/school 13/105 12.1 c. the multimedia field 42/105 40.0 d. issues/latest news 8/105 7.7 e. others … 0/105 0.0 9. students’ preference activity for learning reading a. reading a text loudly with correct pronunciation and intonation 16/105 15.1 b. reading a text individually and answering questions related to the text 20/105 19.6 c. discussing and comprehending a text in a group 17/105 16.5 d. comprehending a text and translating it into indonesia langauge 44/105 41.8 e. analyzing the meaning of the new vocabulary from the context 8/105 7.7 10. students’ opinion toward the difficulty level of reading text in english textbook used in the classroom a. very easy 3/105 2.1 b. easy 42/105 40.0 novita sari, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students 268 c. difficult 52/105 49.8 d. very difficult 8/105 7.7 11. students’ opinion toward frequency of english teacher in providing the reading text/material and reading assessment with the topic related to the multimedia field a. very often 13/105 12.1 b. often 31/105 29.8 c. sometimes 51/105 48.4 d. never 10/105 9.8 deficiency analysis (da) 12. students’ difficulties with the language skills and aspects a. listening 18/105 17.9 b. speaking 43/105 40.4 c. reading 11/105 10.2 d. writing 0/105 0.0 e. vocabulary 13/105 12.1 f. grammar 9/105 8.5 g. pronunciation 10/105 9.8 h. others ... 1/105 0.4 13. students’ difficulty with reading skill in the reading process a. comprehending the main idea 21/105 20.0 b. comprehending the detai information 16/105 15.1 c. making conclusion related to the chronological order of event 7/105 6.7 d. making conclusion related to cause and effect 13/105 12.1 e. making and drawing conclusion 48/105 45.4 f. comprehending certain words 0/105 0.0 strategy analysis (sa) 14. students’ preference activity for learning vocabulary a. matching the words or expressions with correct meaning in indonesia language 33/105 31.6 b. matching the words or expressions with the pictures 21/105 20.5 c. predicting the meaning of the new words based on the context 26/105 24.9 d. completing the incomplete sentences or paragraph with students’ own words 15/105 14.7 e. others ... 10/105 9.8 15. students’ preferences activity for learning grammar a. indentifying the incorrect sentences structure 36/105 34.7 b. correcting the incorrect sentences structure 36/105 34.7 c. writing sentences based on structure learned 32/105 30.2 d. others ... 1/105 0.4 16. students’ preference activity for learning pronunciation a. repeating the words pronounced by the teacher 29/105 27.9 b. pronouncing the words based on the phonetic transcription 32/105 30.2 c. discussing the correct pronunciation in a small group or with other friends 44/105 41.8 d. others ... 0/105 0.0 17. students’ preference class management for completing the task a. individual work 24/105 22.8 b. pair work 20/105 19.6 c. group work 42/105 40.0 d. whole class work 19/105 18.2 e. others ... 0/105 0.0 18. students’ learning style preference english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 269 a. listening to the teachers’ explanation only 29/105 27.9 b. discussing with other friends to solve the problem or to do the tasks 48/105 45.3 c. writing all information given by the teachers 28/105 26.7 d. others ... 0/105 0.0 19. students’ preference for teachers’ role a. giving students questions to finish and discuss them later 33/105 31.6 b. giving examples about the topic which is learned and give an assignment 53/105 50.2 c. supervising the students’ works and helping them when students get a problem 17/105 16.5 d. walking around and giving comment to students’ works 2/105 1.8 e. others ... 0/105 0.0 20. students’ opinion toward intergrating the topic/content related to the multimedia field in reading text a. very important 69/105 65.3 b. important 35/105 33.4 c. not important 1/105 0.4 d. very unimportant 0/105 0.0 21. students’ opinion toward discussing the content of the multimedia field in reading text could ease them to comprehend the text a. very agree 46/105 43.5 b. agree 56/105 53.4 c. disagree 3/105 2.1 d. very disagree 0/105 0.0 students’ need analysis multimedia questionnaire there were 30 questions in this questionnaire. the 25 questions were about multimedia use, and the other 5 questions were about student interest in reading. there were 105 tenth grade students answered the questionnaire. the findings showed that the use of multimedia technology in class: (1) promoted students’ interest in learning english, (2) was more practical; some students did not need to do note taking, (3) could obtain information accurately in a short time, (4) stimulated students’ attention in class, (5) helped develop students’ english communication skills, (6) made students want to take part in the discussion, (7) inspired them to avoid tardiness in class, and (8) enhanced their reading skills. students’ functional reading level analysis this analysis was intended to measure the students’ functional reading level by measuring the readability levels of the developed recount texts which had to match with their reading level. in this activity, jennings informal reading assessment developed by joyce (2001) at level 1 – 8 was given to determine the students’ functional reading level. the results were described in table 3 below. table 3. the result of students’ functional reading level analysis text level functional reading level stage frustrational (correct number ≤4) instructional (correct number 5 – 6) independent (correct number 7 – 8) nos % nos % nos % level 1 59 56.1 32 30.4 14 13.3 level 2 63 60.0 30 28.5 12 11.4 level 3 68 64.7 31 29.5 6 5.7 level 4 65 61.9 33 31.4 7 6.7 level 5 61 58.2 39 37.1 5 4.7 level 6 60 57.1 43 40.9 2 1.9 level 7 76 72.3 27 25.7 2 1.9 level 8 84 80.0 21 20.0 0 0 source: jennings informal reading assessment developed by joyce (2001) novita sari, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students 270 based on table 3 above, it can be seen that 105 students (13.3%) were already at the independent stage in text level 1. for text level 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8, it showed that 63 students (60.0%), 68 students (64.7%), 65 students (61.9%), 61 students (58.2%), 76 students (72.3%), and 84 students (80.0%) were at frustrational stage respectively, whereas for the text in level 6, there were 43 students (40.9%) at instructional stage. as mentioned by burns and parker (2014) the instructional level as criterion to target reading intervention. therefore, it could be said that the reading level of students was at level 6 since the biggest percentage of learners who belonged to the instructional stage was in level 6. design and development phase paper-based design in this phase, there were eleven recount texts that the writers developed based on the students’ multimedia learning and student’s field. then the developed recount texts were checked to find out their readability levels using an online tool of flesch-kincaid (i.e.: https://www.webfx.com). for completing the materials of reading, several questions as warming-up activities were also made. the storyboard of interactive multimedia after the all reading materials had been accomplished along with the evaluation, then the materials had to be transformed into interactive multimedia. therefore, a storyboard was made to be used as a guideline to develop interactive multimedia. the storyboard consisted of some parts such as opening slide, student’s data, home slide, and computer-based design. computer-based design consisted of recount text and the storyboard of interactive multimedia were transformed into computer-based design by using adobe professional cs 6. the program was created and then launched in the form of software of interactive multimedia which could be operated in each pc or notebook. implementation phase evaluation and revision phase this phase was to find out the validity that was determined in the expert review phase, practicality that was determined in one-to-one and small group evaluation phase, and the potential effect of the product that was determined in a field test phase. the result of the evaluation and revision are described below. self evaluation in this phase, the writers tried to treat themselves as expert to evaluate the developed recount texts, so the evaluation process did not a simply look over the product. the self-evaluation covered all of the four aspects such as instructional desgin (construct), language, media (production), and content (subject matter). in addition, the writers evaluated the product which was aimed to find out some errors and mistakes, such as misspelling, ungrammatical sentences, and punctuation. experts review in this phase, a questionnaire consisted of 15 items was distributed to three different experts, i.e.: content (english), instructional design (curriculum/construct), and media (technology). the first expert of content (english) validation was a lecturer of english who has been teaching for 20 years and hold doctoral qualification in english. the second expert of instructional design (curriculum/ construct) was a lecturer of english who has been teaching for 36 years and his expertise in instructional design, the last expert of technology (media) was a lecturer of education technology who has been teaching for 30 years and his expertise in material development. the first evaluation aspect in the evaluation and revision phase was content (english). it was also important to make sure whether the validation sheet fulfilled the standardized requirement. therefore, it was developed by adapting from tessmer (1993). a lecturer of english reviewed the product. during the validation process, the expert gave some constructive comments and suggestions for better revision of the product, especially in content. the expert advised to pay attention to the narration of the story, so as not to confuse students when understanding and reading the contents of the story section. after the product was revised as suggested, it was found that the average score of content validity was 3.74 which was at very high validity, which means that it was valid without revision. the second evaluation aspect in this phase was instructional design (construct). to develop the product with good construct validation, another expert reviewed the product. it was found that there were some comments and suggestions which needed to be considered, such as change the https://www.webfx.com/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 271 incorrect writing on the validation construct sheet, i.e. the 2006 curriculum is replaced with the 2013 curriculum because it had to adjust to the learning objectives of the material made. he gave advice to think about the allocation of time in the subject matter test which must be adjusted to the total number of questions. the experts also suggested giving feedback to students to be actively involved in learning through material packaged in the form of interactive multimedia, like by adding a few more warm-up questions before starting core activities. after reviewing the product twice, the expert reviewer of the construct declared that the product was valid without revision, and the average score obtained from construct validity was 3.53, which was at very high validity. the last evaluation aspect in the evaluation and revision phase was done to complete all three product validation sheets. in terms of media, the product then was reviewed by an expert of technology who was a lecturer of education technology at sriwijaya university. he gave some comments and suggestions which needed to be considered, such as, when the user enters the "log in" column he must use only names not numbers. the expert also suggested that welcome sentence on the opening menu should not use the name of the school that was examined in the media. finally, after being revised for the third time, the expert reviewer of the media revealed that the product was valid without revision. the total average score of the validity of product design was 3.87, which was a very high validity. one-to-one evaluation the questionnaire consisted of 22 items was distributed to 3 students in one-to-one evaluation to determine the practicality of the product. the score of practicality obtained in one to one evaluation was 3.69, which was very high practical. the results of questionnaire were presented in table 4. table 4. result of questionnaire in one-to one evaluation aspect n o statement average score remarks the match between materials and students’ characteristics 1 the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia are suitable for my age. 4.00 very high practicality 2 the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia are suitable for my english proficiency. 3.67 very high practicality 3 i am excited to learn the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia because i learn and feel entertained at the same time. 3.67 very high practicality materials presentation 4 materials presentation in the interactive multimedia is clear and understandable. 3.67 very high practicality 5 the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia are presented in a good sequence so that they are not confusing. 3.67 very high practicality effectiveness and efficiency of the product 6 i can operate the interactive multimedia well without assistance. 3.33 very high practicality 7 i can use the interactive multimedia to learn at home or anywhere. 4.00 very high practicality 8 learning recount text by using the interactive multimedia can save my learning time. 3.66 very high practicality evaluation 9 the directions in evaluation are clear and understandable. 3.33 very high practicality 10 questions item in the evaluation are clear and understandable. 3.33 very high practicality 11 the number of question items in the evaluation are sufficient. 4.00 very high practicality 12 the forms of question in the evaluation are various. 4.00 very high practicality attractiveness of 13 i enjoy using the interactive multimedia in learning to read english recount texts. 4.00 very high practicality novita sari, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students 272 interactive multimedia 14 the interactive multimedia makes me motivated to learn english recount texts. 3.67 very high practicality 15 the interactive multimedia attract my attention in learning materials of english recount texts. 3.67 very high practicality 16 i am more interested in learning english about recount text by using the interactive multimedia than learning it by using conventional method without technology. 3.67 very high practicality 17 learning by using the interactive multimedia is not boring. 4.00 very high practicality 18 doing the computer-based evaluation is exciting, easy, and time and energy saving. 3.67 very high practicality media quality 19 the use of navigation (buttons) in the interactive multimedia is very helpful to operate the interactive multimedia. 3.67 very high practicality 20 font, pictures, narration, and animation in the interactive multimedia are in line with the instructional materials. 3.00 high practicality 21 text, pictures, narration, and animations in the interactive multimedia are in line with the instructional materials. 3.33 very high practicality 22 colors used in the interactive multimedia are interesting and well-synchronized. 3.67 very high practicality average score 3.69 very high practicality after determining the practicality of the product using a questionnaire, the writers also conducted an informal interview with the students in the one to one evaluation to get their responses and comments toward the developed product to find out its strength and weaknesses. the result of students’ comments were: (1) the interactive multimedia was very interesting and colorful, lots of animations and images, and supported with relaxing music that does not interfere with concentration, (2) the recount texts was suitable enough with my field, and (3) the feedbacks were good and able to respond well and i could use the product at home independently. small group evaluation a questionnaire consisted of 22 items was distributed to 9 students in small group evaluation to determine the practicality. the students’ average score was evaluated and then interpreted into practicality categorization. the average score was 3.65, which was in very high category of practicality. the practicality level was presented in table 5. table 5. results of questionnaire in small group evaluation aspect no statement average score remarks the match between materials and students’ characteristi cs 1 the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia are suitable for my age. 3.44 very high practicality 2 the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia are suitable for my english proficiency. 3.33 very high practicality 3 i am excited to learn the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia because i learn and feel entertained at the same time. 3.56 very high practicality materials presentation 4 materials presentation in the interactive multimedia is clear and understandable. 3.67 very high practicality 5 the recount text materials in the interactive multimedia are presented in a good sequence so that they are not confusing. 3.56 very high practicality effectivenes s and 6 i can operate the interactive multimedia well without assistance. 3.44 very high practicality english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 273 efficiency of the product 7 i can use the interactive multimedia to learn at home or anywhere. 3.89 very high practicality 8 learning recount text by using the interactive multimedia can save my learning time. 3.67 very high practicality evaluation 9 the directions in evaluation are clear and understandable. 3.78 very high practicality 10 questions item in the evaluation are clear and understandable. 3.67 very high practicality 11 the number of question items in the evaluation are sufficient. 3.67 very high practicality 12 the forms of question in the evaluation are various. 3.56 very high practicality attractivene ss of interactive multimedia 13 i enjoy using the interactive multimedia in learning to read english recount texts. 3.67 very high practicality 14 the interactive multimedia makes me motivated to learn english recount texts. 3.78 very high practicality 15 the interactive multimedia attract my attention in learning materials of english recount texts. 3.67 very high practicality 16 i am more interested in learning english about recount text by using the interactive multimedia than learning it by using conventional method without technology. 3.67 very high practicality 17 learning by using the interactive multimedia is not boring. 3.33 very high practicality 18 doing the computer-based evaluation is exciting, easy, and time and energy saving. 3.89 very high practicality media quality 19 the use of navigation (buttons) in the interactive multimedia is very helpful to operate the interactive multimedia. 3.89 very high practicality 20 font, pictures, narration, and animation in the interactive multimedia are in line with the instructional materials. 3.56 high practicality 21 text, pictures, narration, and animations in the interactive multimedia are in line with the instructional materials. 3.78 very high practicality 22 colors used in the interactive multimedia are interesting and well-synchronized. 3.89 very high practicality average score 3.65 very high practicality after the test was conducted, the questionnaire of an informal interview in the small group evaluation was also distributed to get students’ comments on the developed interactive multimedia of recount text. the result of students’ comments were: (1) the students knew the learning objectives of they learned; they mentioned that they learned about kinds recount text and the generic structure of recount text, (2) the students felt challenged in learning the materials due to the feedbacks, picture animation, video and including the difficult evaluation, (3) the students mentioned that they could independently use the product at home due to interactive multimedia that related to the computer was their field, and (4) the students felt interested and motivated to learn recount text by using interactive multimedia. evaluation phase field test the field test evaluation was intended to know the potential effect of the developed interactive multimedia of recount text. in this phase, the field test was conducted in one meeting within 90 minutes. it involved a real class of the tenth-grade students of one vsh in palembang consisting of 35 students. from the result of the students’ scores in the reading comprehension test, there were 2 students (5.71%) who obtained score below the minimum mastery criterion which was 71. the rest of the students, 33 students (94.28%) obtained the score novita sari, soni mirizon, & rita inderawati developing learning media of recount texts for vocational high school students 274 above the minimum mastery criterion. the total students’ mean score in the field test was 81.37. after the data were analyzed, the result of the students’ scores was interpreted by using the criteria of mastery percentage of universitas sriwijaya (2012) in order to know the level of the potential effect of the product. the results indicated that: 10 students out of 35 students obtained very high category level (86-100), 23 students btained high category level (71-85), only 2 students obtained average category level (56-70), and no students scored below the low category (41-55) nor very low category (0-40). in addition, the result of a field test of 35 students revealed that 33 students obtained scores above the average and only 2 students obtained average scores based on mastery percentage categorization. in conclusion, the developed interactive multimedia of recount text had a potential effect and the students’ average scores were at the criteria of mastery percentage (71-85) in the high category of mastery level. however, of the 2 students who achieved grades below average were influenced by several factors during the final evaluation process. based on the teacher's observations and the questionnaire results of student responses to the interactive multimedia learning in the recount text, it was found that (1) these students did not like learning english, (2) they did not understand the presentation of material in interactive multimedia, and (3) they felt anxious while answering questions because the time allocation was limited on the media screen. the result of students score on the reading comprehension test can be seen in figure 1 below. figure 1. students’ score on the reading comprehension test conclusion based on the findings, some conclusions were drawn. first, the developed interactive multimedia of recount text in multimedia content was valid in terms of its content (english), construct (instructional design), and media (technology). its validity average score, based on three expert reviews was 3.71 indicating that the developed product had very high validity. second, the developed interactive multimedia of recount text in multimedia content was practical. the practicality score was 3.69 in the one-to-one evaluation and 3.65 in small group evaluation which was at a very high level of practicality. at last, the developed interactive multimedia of recount text in multimedia content had a potential effect on students’ achievement. since the number of students reaching the intended result score was 94.28%. it can be concluded that the potential effect of the product was at a very high level of mastery. references akker, j. v. d. 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(2016). multimedia questionnaire. retrieved from: https://www.scribd.com/document/331801849/questionnaire https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328964474 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328964474 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 345 investigating undergraduate students’ perceptions of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery in english department of pattimura university ambon rosina f. j. lekawael faculty of teacher training and education, pattimura university, ambon-maluku, indonesia email: rosina.lekawael@gmail.com marcy s. ferdinandus faculty of teacher training and education, pattimura university, ambon-maluku, indonesia email: ferdinandusmarcy@gmail.com apa citation: lekawael, r. f. j. & ferdinandus, m. s. (2021). investigating undergraduate students’ perceptions of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery in english department of pattimura university ambon. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp. 345-354. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4362 received: 21-02-2021 accepted: 24-04-2021 published: 15-06-2021 introduction reading is one of the critical skills in learning english in which students can develop their cognition, building vocabulary, as well as bring enjoyment. reading can support students to get many language inputs to be used in their daily communication. teachers of higher education tried hard to create various materials and develop their reading ability better. before the teachers design reading materials, they must identify students’ need. reading materials may offer vocabulary inputs and improve students’ comprehension in reading various texts. the second language curricula of most developing countries put stress mainly on intensive reading leaving the idea of extensive reading ignored (haider, 2012). the focus of intensive reading is reading speed and fluency of the reader. while, extensive reading concerns on critical thinking and analytical skill in the reader. here, we can say that extensive reading extends the knowledge and skill of the students. to be an effective reader, critical thinking is of great significance. therefore, a critical thinker has an ability to analyze the chosen texts and handle problematic parts during the reading time. as we know that extensive reading is a continuation of intensive reading. extensive reading has posited as one of the useful approaches besides intensive reading to build students’ vocabulary repertoires by engaging students to read as much as they can be based on their appropriate reading level. the idea of the meaning of extensive reading differs between related experts. extensive reading can bring about a smoother reading experience, allowing readers to automatically identify and comprehend new words in a piece of writing, and reading is one of the critical skills in learning english in which students can develop their cognition, build vocabulary, as well as bring enjoyment. extensive reading is known as one of the useful approaches to build students’ vocabulary repertoires by engaging students to read as much as they can be based on their appropriate reading level. therefore, this survey study aims to find out how the students perceive their reading experiences in the extensive reading, how this approach increases their english vocabulary, as well as their reading comprehension. for the data collection technique, we distributed questionnaires for 40 undergraduate students in their second and fourth semester in the english department. to gain more comprehensive data, we also interviewed 20 students. the results of this study revealed that the majority of students show their positive response to and perception of extensive reading. we also found that this approach impacts the progress of students’ reading comprehension as well as the development of their vocabulary building. the findings of this study shed light on students’ perceptions of extensive reading and how it impacts their vocabulary building and reading comprehension. this study prompts further studies to examine the effectiveness of extensive reading on vocabulary learning of english foreign language students in various reading levels. keywords: perception; extensive reading; vocabulary building; reading comprehension mailto:rosina.lekawael@gmail.com mailto:ferdinandusmarcy@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4362 rosina f. j. lekawael & marcy s. ferdinandus investigating undergraduate students’ perceptions of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery in english department of pattimura university ambon 346 can also cause a more positive reading attitude (lin, 2010). extensive reading is intended to get the reader to focus on reading for the sake of reading (for information or entertainment), and less on reading for the sake of mastery of a particular linguistic structure of even a particular reading strategy or skill (carrell & carson, 1997). given the many positive benefits of er, l2 scholars, including elt experts (e.g. macalister, 2014; maley, 2005, 2008), l2 reading specialists (e.g. day and bamford, 1998; grabe, 2009; nuttall, 2005), coursebook researchers (e.g. brown, 2009; tomlinson and masuhara, 2013), and sla researchers (e.g. ellis, 2005; nation, 2007) gave er a respectable place in language teaching. this kind of reading creates many activities to be done by the students freely and voluntarily. it becomes a substantial area because it can be helpful in spreading awareness of the english language. the benefits of this reading are to increase students’ self-esteem and develop reading fluency. in this current study, the researchers tried hard to find out students’ concepts of extensive reading itself. extensive reading becomes a prerequisite program at english department in indonesia. the idea behind extensive reading has shown that a lot of materials available to attract students’ interest in reading and enrich their vocabulary knowledge. many research studies found that extensive reading can affect vocabulary knowledge. vocabulary knowledge plays important role in foreign language learning process. efl students give significant improvements in their reading and vocabulary growth to make them feel interested to gain new words through their reading passages. therefore, day and bamford (2002) proposed the following important features of extensive reading: (1) students should do their best to extensively read materials not related to the classroom. (2) there should be a wide variety of reading materials to help encourage reading from different perspectives. (3) students can freely choose their reading materials. if they find one book to be boring, they can stop reading then find a different book. (4) reading goals should be determined by the content of the reading materials and personal interests. (5) students read for themselves and therefore seldom need to hand in homework relating to what they have read. (6) the vocabulary and grammar level of the reading materials should not exceed the students’ language abilities so that they do not need to refer to a dictionary when reading. constant breaks to look up words in the dictionary can make a smooth reading experience impossible. (7) reading is a personalized and sedentary experience. students should read outside of the classroom at their own pace and decide when to finish reading a book. (8) reading speed is often rapid. students should read books or articles that they find easy to understand. (9) teachers should guide students to their goals, explain to students the methods of extensive reading, follow up on books read, and guide students to completion of their reading goals. (10) a group of students in a class can be viewed as a reading community. the teacher should be an example for students. the teacher is also a member of the reading community and should display the temperament of a good reader to set an example for students. we can see that extensive reading can be successful done if the students are eager to read more and completed whether inside or outside the classroom. extensive reading is about students’ reading willingness. the reading materials are chosen freely by the students based on their interests on their contents. it was said that the materials should be those that students actively enjoy reading and gain enjoyment from, which can increase their motivation for english learning (day & bamford, 2000; 2002). by choosing a good material, the reading habit can be increased. successful promotion of extensive reading relies on the aforementioned features and suitable english reading materials and strategies that can guide students to a habit of extensive reading (liu & young, 2015). therefore, cultivation of the reading habit is a way to help students to find joy in and be willing to continue reading. in this current study, the researchers guided the students in reading activities. students worked in small groups and applied certain strategy in order to gain enjoyment while reading various materials. in extensive reading learning, enjoyment has become a principal aspect needed by the students. sometimes, it can be an obstruction in reading activities. some researchers also concern about it. based on the national reading survey conducted by global views journal in 2014, showed that people in all ages in taiwan did not enjoy reading and contact with books in daily lives, this was much english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 347 lower than contact with personal computer or laptops and smartphones (wang, 2015). this data affirms that the students’ reading habit should be more encouraged by the parents at home, as happened in taiwan. the implementation of 12years compulsory education policy has caused parents to be more encouraging of reading habits in their children, showing that traditional asian parental desires for success continues to impact deeply upon parental attitudes to the reading habits of their children (wu & honig in liu, 2016). for this reason, extensive reading is regarded as an effective strategy to enhance students’ language abilities when learning a foreign language, especially english. in extensive reading, the students had low persistence to develop the habit impacted to the vocabulary mastery. they did not enjoy in reading. vocabulary is an important component of extensive reading instruction for english students who has weaknesses in comprehending reading materials from easy to complex one. in practice, researchers operationalize vocabulary breadth knowledge as knowledge of form–meaning mapping (schmitt, 2014). laufer, elder, hill, & congdon (2004) and laufer and goldstein (2004) distinguished four categories of form–meaning mapping knowledge: active recall, passive recall, active recognition, and passive recognition: (1) active recall is defined as the ability to produce the l2 form of a given meaning (e.g. word translation task). (2) passive recall involves the ability to provide the meaning for an l2 word (e.g. word definition task). (3) active recognition requires language users to recognize the l2 word form of a given meaning (e.g. word selection task based on a given meaning). (4) passive recognition requires language users to recognize the meaning of an l2 word (e.g. meaning selection task based on a given l2 word form). there are number of studies confirmed that fl or l2 learners can acquire vocabulary knowledge through extensive reading (renandya, 2007; horst, 2005; pigada & schmitt, 2006; suk, 2016). it is a complication to assessing how english learners acquire vocabulary through extensive reading because each student may read different books. besides, other studies have explored ways that vocabulary instruction can be incorporated into individual reading interventions for ell students, and development of such interventions would be beneficial to schools given that ell students as at a greater risk for reading difficulties (august, carlo, dressler, & snow, 2005; helman, 2008). from the previous studies, it can be assumed that vocabulary learning is very influential in extensive reading. without vocabulary learning, the extensive reading becomes empty. accordingly, this current study examines how efl students acknowledge that their vocabulary is going to improve as well as interest to extensive reading. extensive reading for enjoyments has numerous benefits and have ideas to promote this habit among the students in learning class. it can motivate students to read more with various texts. teacher facilitates them to be active readers and choose the books that they are interested to read. the teacher is a role model of a reader (day & bamford, 2002). the teacher should promote pleasure reading either in classrooms or homes. there are previous studies related to this current issue. first, ferdila (2014) investigated benefits of using extensive reading in teaching reading. the findings revealed that extensive reading is beneficial in teaching reading. there are five benefits found, those are reading as fascinating activity, creating enjoyable learning atmosphere, helping students in developing a wide vocabulary, improving students’ reading comprehension, and increasing students’ motivation. second, fawzia & salwa (2016) identified the current practices regarding the implementation of extensive reading in omani public schools. result of the study revealed that the frequency of reading among students is very low as 53% of the students read only once a semester and they read the same type of genre. besides, most of the english teachers chose the same reading materials for their students regardless of the students’ interests or proficiency level. third, johnston, et al., (2016) did a preliminary study to determine whether incorporating vocabulary instruction in individual reading fluency interventions for english language learners (ells) would improve reading comprehension. results indicated that the two vocabulary instructional procedures, on average, did not affect reading comprehension. finally, hsu (2018) studied about vocabulary level of voa news as voluminous reading material for mid-frequency vocabulary learning. results showed that voa news reached the sixth 1,000-word-family level at 98% text coverage. the results may serve as a reference for english extensive reading practitioners rosina f. j. lekawael & marcy s. ferdinandus investigating undergraduate students’ perceptions of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery in english department of pattimura university ambon 348 and learners who are concerned with mid-frequency vocabulary learning. based on the findings above, the researchers were more focused on students’ perception of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery. based on that there are some crucial problems appeared here that is the students have lack of motivation in reading and also lack of vocabulary. those facts become focus of this study. this survey used survey method to find out how the students perceive their reading experiences in the extensive reading, how this approach increases their english vocabulary, as well as their reading comprehension. the survey was intended to address three broad questions: (1) what do students know about extensive reading? (2) what do students know about the effect of extensive reading on vocabulary? (3) what are students’ expectations to extensive reading course? method the current study adopted survey method to analyze students’ perception of extensive reading in english department. there were only forty undergraduate students in second and fourth semester that filled out the complete questionnaire. on the other hand, interview was conducted for ten students. the data were collected using questionnaire and interview. the questionnaire contained a variety of questions about the extensive reading practice. the questionnaire was constructed based literature review and also observation during teaching of extensive reading for two years. the form of interview was a structured interview which consisted of five questions. the first question was regarding extensive reading materials; the second question looked into the effect of extensive reading to students’ comprehension and vocabulary learning; the third question inquired about learning situation; the fourth question asked about extensive reading practice in english department; and the last question targeted to discover students’ expectation to extensive reading course. findings and discussion in this section, the results for each of ten questions are given. in this study, the researchers administered the questionnaire sheet and in-depth interview. the questionnaire was distributed for 40 undergraduate students in their second and fourth semester in the english department. the questions are discussed in two broad categories: knowledge about extensive reading and the effect of extensive reading on students’ vocabulary. the result of the questionnaire is as follows. table 1. the result of questionnaire semester 2 respondent knowledge about extensive reading yes no unsure 1 i know what extensive reading is 48% 10% 42% 2 i know extensive reading is important course 95% 0% 5% 3 i believe that extensive reading activities encourage me to be comprehensive reader 88% 0% 12% 4 i believe that extensive reading can enhance my language skills very greatly 93% 0% 7% 5 i can learn english through reading for pleasure 93% 0% 7% respondent the effect of extensive reading on students vocabulary yes no unsure 1 i believe that extensive reading has a positive effects to increase comprehension and vocabulary 98% 0% 2% 2 i believe that extensive reading materials affect me to be motivated on the vocabulary building in class 88% 3% 9% 3 i believe that materials written with a vocabulary range help me to acquire many new words 90% 0% 10% 4 i understand words in text and able to introduce them to many words 30% 0% 70% 5 i can manage my vocabulary difficulties 53% 3% 44% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 349 and the following is the categorization of the questions in the questionnaire. part 1 figure 1. the students’ knowledge about extensive reading in part 1, the graph focuses on the students’ knowledge about extensive reading. it showed that most of the students knew and had experience of extensive reading. the students had little (48%) information about extensive reading. but, they did agree (95%) that this course is important to increase their reading skill. by studying extensive reading, most of the students (88%) believed that extensive reading activities encourage them to be comprehensive reader. besides, many of them agreed (93%) that it can enhance their language skills very greatly. so, almost all students agreed that they can learn english through reading for pleasure. part 2 figure 2. the effect of extensive reading on students’ vocabulary in part 2, it shows about the effect of extensive reading on students’ vocabulary. from the graph, the researcher can say that most of them (98%) believed that extensive reading has positive effects to increase comprehension and vocabulary. while, most students (88%) agreed that extensive reading materials affect them to be motivated on the vocabulary building in learning activity. on the other hand, many of them (90%) believed that materials written with a vocabulary range help them to acquire many new words. but, unfortunately little students (30%) could not understand words in text and able to introduce them to many words. so, some students (53%) felt unsure that they can manage the vocabulary difficulties. the result of part 2 can be seen in the graph above. interview result the interview was conducted in order to gain data about students’ expectations to extensive reading course. there were 20 students involved in this interview session. as the interview proceeded, the researchers asked each student about the reading materials in extensive reading class. through the question “say about reading materials in extensive reading class”, the participants generally conveyed the same answer towards this particular question. they pointed out about their appreciation towards their enhancement in new vocabularies through the extensive reading materials. since the lecturer required them to read and list their new vocabularies in the vocabulary log. student 1 and 2 stated: “um what i think about materials for me that first i experienced it, it really helped me at the time because it was really full with any kind of text that discusses any kind of events or a person or things that happened around us. also in those texts, there are so many new vocabulary words that i can learn and remember. that is what i think about extensive reading material, ma’am.” “for me it’s interesting. because the lecturer has given materials that require me to read to increase my vocabulary especially in vocabularies log.” beside new vocabularies, they also admitted that reading materials in extensive class was helping them in understanding countries’ culture and short story such as fairy tale. as what student 3 explained below: “i think, when i was in the extensive reading class ma’am, we got a lot of materials. but i think it is really helpful material for us as students. i think it rosina f. j. lekawael & marcy s. ferdinandus investigating undergraduate students’ perceptions of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery in english department of pattimura university ambon 350 really helps us to understand many things, like other countries’ cultures, and also about short story, fairy tale. the point is i think the material really enhance our ability to understand the reading passage ma’am, in our class. yes, i think reading materials are really good for us as students. it also brings us many benefits for learning process ma’am.” meanwhile, there were slightly different answers than what have been stated by the other participant. some of the participants believed that the reading materials in extensive reading were more complex than intensive reading since it provided harder vocabularies to be understood and remembered. reading material in extensive reading class was not only about gaining new vocabulary but also required and helped them to build their perspective reading and develop their critical thinking. these two aspects were implicitly happening since they read and built their perception regarding things and asking questions before reading. moreover, the reading material was valued good and interesting because of the activities after reading itself. the students had to summarize and made a mind map of the reading passages. “there is a statement which mentions that extensive reading is important to enhance students’ comprehension and to mold students’ motivation on vocab, do you agree?” being asked, all the participants boldly showed their agreements toward the statement. they mostly agreed that extensive reading materials could enhance their comprehension and vocabularies. the answers are represented by students 4: “yes, i strongly agree. because when i find some new words in the text that i never knew before it is really important to help me understand the whole text, and to motivate me to increase my vocabulary.” further explained, the new word which they discovered in the text triggered their curiosity in order to understand the whole passages or text. the situation of not acknowledging a new word motivated them to find the meaning and it was easier for the new words to be absorbed. extensive reading materials also probed the students to gain more benefits such as applying their new vocabularies into their academic writing. aligned with that, to enrich their word bank they had to find the synonyms in words thesaurus. in a deeper answer, student 5 explained as follow: “i agree with it because vocabulary is important not just in reading but also in writing and more beneficial if you have a lot of vocabulary and if you have big vocabulary here is a big chance you know their synonyms. i often use thesaurus to look for similar words.” “okay what do you think about the learning situation during class?”. this question focused on their opinion of the class situation or atmosphere during extensive reading class. whether the class situation provided by the lecturer helped them comprehend the material or otherwise. since the question focused on students’ opinion, the answers were varied and not stagnantly in the good side only. this question divided the participants into two sides where some of them agreed that the class situation was interesting and helpful for them, while the rest of the participants seemed to disagree. the participants who believed that the situation was helpful is represented by student 6, as she stated: “talking about the learning situation during the class, actually, i really like it ma’am. because our lecturer provides many good materials, we got something new to learn. our lecturer also tries to make a good situation, like comfortable situation for us to learn where we as students can really be active to answer his or her questions and then also learn more about many things ma’am.” by stating that the lecturer provided many good materials, some of the participants believed that these good materials helped them building their reading comprehension. in the activities during class, the students were required to do more than only read. such as, discussing the content of the passages in order to gain the implicit meaning from the text provided by the lecturer. discussing in extensive reading class was not only revolving between lecturer and particular students, but the discussion also revolved among students themselves. by discussing and sharing among students, when they were divided in groups, they could independently gain new insights through the session. since there was no gap between them. the discussion could go easy and surely eased them to deliver their thoughts and to listen to others’. the explanation highly conveyed the answer by the participants that the lecturer provided comfortable situation to the students for them to be active in the class activities. on the other side, the rest of the participants believed that the class situation was no that helpful. it was due to the monotonous learning strategy english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 351 where they were required to read and there was no interesting activity afterwards. it is also supported by student 7, as she answered: “i think it is not really active but because just a few students are speaking and they are always speaking and no one really stands up for speaking other than them. the students are not really active.” being interpreted, these participants agreed that the reading class was not active as the students tended to be quiet rather than spoke up. this also related to the situation where there were no following activities after reading. student 2 admitted that the class situation was boring. the case was “the situation in extensive reading class is quite boring ma’am. i’m so bored at that time because it’s only read and read and no activity that is interesting.” he elaborated more. it could not be denied that dividing the students into groups might be a good strategy for learning, however this could not guarantee the students’ motivation in studying and participating in class. instead, this situation was considered to demotivate students’ willing to participate. since the students who would take the role in speaking when asked were always the same students. they believed, this situation of being in a group was not enough to motivate each other in participating and be active in class. thus, the class situation became boring and more quite despite having discussion. supporting these, student 1 stated: “at that time truly it’s a bit boring because i think it’s just monotone and students do not have motivation to stand up and say what we think or opinion during class about the materials. the class did not really motivate us.” the next question, the researcher tried to probe the participants’ outlook toward the practice of extensive reading in english department by asking “okay, that was about learning situation, you already passed extensive reading and you have experience. maybe you can share with friends from the other class and maybe your seniors about this course, how do you see the practice of extensive reading in english department?”. being asked about the question, the participants portrayed varied answers to one another. although, in some points, the paths of their answer was aligning and headed for the same purpose. according to the answers, they accepted as true that the practice of extensive reading in english department was relatively enjoyable. as the class provided interesting reading materials about foreign countries’ culture and stories. there were projects such as mind mapping, presentations, and assignments as well. to this condition, the participants admitted the improvement of their creativity in thinking and practicing reading activities. having elaborated more, the practice of extensive reading class delivered beneficial insights in helping the students to comprehend the text or passage. through the reading materials, the students might discover brand new knowledge, terms, vocabularies which they had never known previously. nevertheless, there were always possibilities of diversity when it dealt with perspective. the minority of the participants conveyed their contrast points of view regarding the practice of extensive reading. these minorities perceived that the practice had not gone well. they believed the practice of this class had to be improved in terms of the activity and class management. since a good practice of a class was where all students should talk about their own opinion and perspectives instead of only small number of students. aligned with this, student 3 supported by saying: “in my opinion, i see that it’s not going well because there are some people that don’t have any comprehension when they read something. that is why it’s not going well since there is only about 40% of the students that can comprehend what they read. so, i think it’s not going well ma’am.” moreover, beside the new vocabularies they gained through the reading materials provided in the class, there was no big difference between extensive reading class and intensive reading class. therefore, the minority of the participants believed that the practice of reading extensive class had to be improved. although there were different answers toward this question, the majority of the participants still believed that despite the weaknesses of this class, extensive reading class still had a part in helping them to be a good reader. furthermore, the practice helped them to understand the passage clearer and once again added their vocabularies through vocabulary log. to the last question of the interview, the researcher asked “after you have extensive reading class, what do you expect or what do you hope from this class?”. the answers to this question were aligned from one participant to the others. they more likely hoped that in the future the class could rosina f. j. lekawael & marcy s. ferdinandus investigating undergraduate students’ perceptions of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery in english department of pattimura university ambon 352 get more creative in providing many new and unique materials. not only from the cultures of foreign countries but also indonesia as well. not only about stories, but also journals, famous books, and novels to increase the level of the class to be more complex. as well as distinguish the class from intensive reading. this way, the students could be more interested in the class, they believed. furthermore, they hoped the class was able to help them improve their reading fluency and reading comprehension. as they had their own ambition relating to reading, they wished to be improved and motivated by the extensive reading class. through extensive reading, their language skills become better. besides, it contributed largely to the students’ vocabulary gain through texts read. finally, it can raise awareness and impact on materials’ design change to be prepared for better extensive reading learning practice. these results may reflect the real learning situation in extensive reading course. it cannot be avoided that teacher’s role is needed in the case of determining the students’ needs and situation in the classroom. data from this study demonstrated the important role of pedagogy aspect to enhance students’ comprehension and promoting students’ motivation on the vocabulary learning. more studies are needed to explore more about effectiveness of extensive reading on vocabulary learning of efl students. research on extensive reading materials used in classroom should be the focus for the future researchers. conclusion the results of this study revealed that the majority of students show their positive response to and perception of extensive reading. we also found that this approach impacts the progress of students’ reading comprehension as well as the development of their vocabulary building. the findings of this study shed light on students’ perceptions of extensive reading and how it impacts their vocabulary building and reading comprehension. when fl students do more reading and become more fluent readers, their ability to comprehend texts improves as well as vocabulary. this study prompts further studies to examine the effectiveness of extensive reading on vocabulary learning of english foreign language students in various reading levels. references august, d., carlo, m., dressler, c., & snow, c. (2005). the critical role of vocabulary development for english language learners. learning disabilities research & practice, 20, 50-57. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5826.2005.00120.x. brown, d. (2009). why and how textbooks should encourage extensive reading. elt journal, 63(3), 238–245. carrell, p. l., & carson, j. g. (1997). extensive and intensive reading in an eap setting. english for specific purpose, 16, 47-60. day, r. r. & bamford j. (1998). extensive reading in the second language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. day, r. r. & bamford j. (2000). reaching reluctant readers. english teaching forum online, 38(3), 12-17. day, r. r. & bamford j. (2002). top ten principles for teaching extensive reading. reading in a foreign language 14(2), 136-141. ellis, r. (2005). principles of instructed language learning. system 33(2), 209–224 fawzia, a. s. & salwa, a. r. (2016). a closer look at extensive reading in omani public schools: current practices and teachers’ perceptions. english language teaching, 9(8), 93-105. ferdila, r. (2014). the use of extensive reading in teaching reading. journal of english and education, 2(2), 68-80. grabe, w. (2009). reading in a second language: moving from theory to practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. haider, m. z. (2012). extensive reading in efl classroom at secondary schools in bangladesh: current practices and future possibilities. international education studies 5(3), 126-133. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2873073 26. helman, l. (2005). english words needed: creating research-based vocabulary instruction for english learners. in a. e. farstrup & s. j. samuels (eds.), what research has to say about vocabulary instruction (pp. 211-237). newark, de: international reading association. horst, m. (2005). learning l2 vocabulary through extensive reading: a measurement study. canadian modern language review, 61(3), 355382. hsu, w. (2018). voice of america news as voluminous reading material for mid-frequency vocabulary learning. relc journal, 1-14. doi: 101177/0033688218764460. johnston, l. e., et al. (2016). incorporating vocabulary construction in individual reading fluency interventions with english language learners. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 353 canadian journal of school psychology, 1-19. doi: 10.1177/0829573516658855. laufer, b. & goldstein, z. (2004). testing vocabulary knowledge: size, strength, and computer adaptiveness. language learning 54, 399–436. laufer, b., elder, c., hill, k., & congdon, p. (2004). size and strength: do we need both to measure vocabulary knowledge? language testing, 21, 202–226. lin, l. f. (2010). senior high school students’ reading comprehension of graded readers. journal of language teachng and research, 1(1), 20-28. liu, i. f. (2016). an exploration based in intrinsic, extrinsic, and interpersonal motivation that affect learners’ intention to participate in an english reading contest: from extensive reading perspective. journal of educational computing research, 0(0), 1-25. doi: 10.1177/0735633116682340. liu, i. f., & young, s. s. c. (2015). an exploration of participative motivation in a community-based online english extensive reading contest with respect to gender difference. interactive learning environment, 1-14. retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/101080/1049 4820.2015.1090457. macalister, j. (2014). teaching reading: research into practice. language teaching 47(3), 387–397. maley, a. (2005). review of ‘extensive reading activities for the second language classroom’. elt journal 59(4), 354–355. maley, a. (2008). extensive reading: maid in waiting. in tomlinson b (ed) english language learning materials: a critical review. london: continuum, 133–156. nation, isp. (2007). the four strands. innovation in language learning and teaching 1(1), 2–13 nuttall, c. (2005). teaching reading skills in a foreign language (3rd ed). oxford: macmillan. pigada, m., schmitt, n. (2006). vocabulary acquisition from extensive reading: a case study. reading in a foreign language, 18(1), 1-28. renandya, w. a. (2007). the power of extensive reading. relc journal, 38(2), 133-149. schmitt, n. (2014). size and depth of vocabulary knowledge: what the research shows. language learning, 64, 913–951. suk, n. (2016). the effects of extensive reading on reading comprehension, reading rates, and vocabulary acquisition. reading research quarterly, 52(1), 73-89. tomlinson, b. & masuhara, h. (2013). adult coursebooks. elt journal 67(2), 233–249. wang, m. j. (2015). the worst and the best of times for reading: global views journal 2014reading survey. journal of national new books, 19(6), 12-15. rosina f. j. lekawael & marcy s. ferdinandus investigating undergraduate students’ perceptions of extensive reading toward their vocabulary mastery in english department of pattimura university ambon 354 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 587 students’ beliefs about social media in efl classroom: a review of literature anita dewi ekawati english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah prof. dr. hamka email: anita.dewieka@uhamka.ac.id apa citation: ekawati, a. d. (2022). students’ beliefs about social media in efl classroom: a review of literature. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 587-592. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6261. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction the popularity of social media cannot undoubtedly. people use social media platforms for entertainment. since the pandemic era, people have relied more on social media to express feelings, get information, communicate with each other and even use social media as a tools for the teaching and learning process. this has an impact on increasing social media users as illustrated in the following table (cinelli, quattrociocchi, galeazzi, valensise, brugnoli, schmidt, zola, zollo, & scala, 2020): table 1. social media users according to cinelli et al. (2020) posts comments users period gab 6,252 4,364 2,629 01/0114/02 reddit 10,084 300,751 89,456 01/0114/02 youtube 111,709 7,051,595 3,199,525 01/0114/02 instagram 26,576 109,011 52,339 01/0114/02 twitter 1,187,482 390,866 27/0114/02 total 1,342,103 7,465,721 3,734,815 the data above depict the traffic on social media usage during the pandemic is quite high. the use of social media can have a good impact on increasing literacy skills, especially digital literacy. digital literacy can be translated into a third space in teaching (mcdougall, readman, & wilkinson, 2018). social media as part of digital applications makes it easier for people to communicate with each other even though they are in different places. easy access to social media allows everyone to talk freely even if they just know each other. on social media applications such as facebook, instagram, whatsapp, telegram, twitter, youtube, etc., everyone can upload photos and write captions and give each other comments. they can also upload live videos and video blogs (vlogs). by using social media, people can hone their language skills such as speaking, writing, listening, reading, and language components such as vocabulary, grammar, etc. in the teaching and learning process in the pandemic era, social media can be used as an interesting learning media. this can attract students' attention to learning activities that they are not aware of. students and some teachers as generation z have characters that support digital learning through social media. generation z are people born after 1995-2010 (mohr & mohr, 2017) who tend to be digital natives (ayuni, 2019). so for generation z, both students and teachers, there abstract: this article reviews research on student beliefs about the use of social media in english as a foreign language (efl) classrooms. this study involves a discussion of how social media impacts students' language learning from previous studies. this study uses a systematic literature review (slr) in reviewing articles. in determining the article, it is carried out in three stages, namely peer-reviewed articles, re-examined articles, and analyzing the selected articles. the literature review summarizes research on student beliefs from 2017 to 2021. a total of seven articles are referenced in this study. the conclusion drawn from the seven literatures is that students' beliefs about the use of social media in efl classrooms are positively affected. social media helps students to improve their english skills. the use of social media can be a reference for teach media that efl teachers can present in learning activities to attract students' attention and achieve goals in language learning. keywords: student; beliefs; social media; ef; classroom anita dewi ekawati students’ beliefs about social media in efl classroom: a review of literature 588 are very few obstacles in using digital media and using social media applications. they can operate both. some teachers have implemented the application by using social media even before the covid-19 outbreak. in addition, several studies have also suggested the effectiveness of social media in learning itself. some studies described about the advantages of using social media for students learning process. soviyah & etikaningsih (2018) in their articles concluded there is a significant difference in students writing score. students taught using instagram had a good score than those who aren't. azlan, zakaria, & yunus (2019) in their article believes instagram encourages and improvements pupils interest to practice english speaking and at the same time increase their speaking skills. they were concluded after they gave observation and semi structured interview for student year 6. gonulal (2019) in his study claims that the effectiveness of social networking platforms and mobile-assisted language learning (mall) applications in a mobile language learning tool is highly recommended. moreover, ahmed (2020) claimed social media let students to free communication with native-speakers. students had a good impact to elaborate the language. the effectiveness of the use of social media in teaching can also be seen from various points of view, namely the teacher as a teacher and students as learners. in this study reviews the effectiveness of students as users of social media in learning. this study uses a literature review of research that has been done previously. the questions that will be answered in this research are: how are the current researches of students’ beliefs about social media in efl classroom? the sequences of this review involves the methods in selecting the studies to improve the review and current the findings of the review. in section three discusses the results and discussion of the review. lastly, the conclusion of the review findings in the fourth section. method this research entitled students’ beliefs about social media in efl classroom: a review of literature. this study uses a systematic literature review method (slr). systematic literature review (slr) demands thorough and accurate understanding beyond traditional literature in answering questions or discussing topics of interest (xiao & watson, 2019). moreover, xia et al. in tan, le, & xuan, 2020 explained the sequences of slr as follow: first, search databases using keywords taken from abstract titles, search databases on wos, scopus, google scholar, and others, search for publications based on article research and time span: before doing research. second, re-check the articles obtained by eliminating duplicate documents, and eliminating unrelated articles. third, analyze the content of research articles through coding and synthesizing. in analyzing the text, the typology used is a narrative review method. the data obtained were extracted in an informal way (nonstandardized or systematic) and the data were synthesized by juxtaposing narrative evidence (xiao & watson, 2019). therefore, in this article the data is taken using three steps. first, the peer-reviewed article is collected from the online database of “scopus” and “google scholar” using publish or perish. specified key words were chosen; “students perspective using social media”, “students’ perception using social media”, “social media for writing”. furthermore, the criteria of article were 100 articles published from 2017 until 2021. second, re-examined unrelated articles. third, the articles were analyzed. observation is continued by processing data using vosviewer. the result of vosviewer as follow: figure 1. the results of vosviewer from the figure 1 above, it can be concluded that “student”, “perspective”, and “social media” are rarely discussed topic in research. hence, in this articles those topics interest to explain. results and discussion a total 7 articles chosen to described about social media in efl classroom. the articles illustrated in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 589 table 2. it is divided into five columns consist of the author, the year of the publication, instruments, the number of participants, and the study result. table 2. articles about social media in efl classroom author year instrument participants the study result ayuni akhiar, alamin mydin & shaidatul akma adi kasuma 2017 questionnaire 101 students have very positive responses and wider views on using instagram to improve their writing skills. ismail xodabande 2017 classroom observation 30 social media had a great deal to helped writing class. geminastiti sakkir, a. eritme yustika abrar 2018 questionnaire 20 facebook group could attracting students in learning to write. renata kenanga rinda, adriadi novawan, alfi hidayatu miqawati 2018 questionnaire 70 instagram could control students to correct grammar, ideas to construct writing, spelling correction, and motivated to compose a better essay ari hilman 2019 pre test, post test, questionnaire 48 instagram had positive impact for students in writing activity. rahmah fithriani, utami dewi, sholihatul hamidah daulay, maryati salmiah, and widia fransiska 2019 questionnaire , interview, and observation of students’ 52 using facebook depict significant for students confidence, encouraging students participation in class discussion, and gaining students proficiency in the writing skill. nikenda putri, dyah aminatun 2021 questionnaire 20 students provide their positive response of using facebook to drill their writing skill. first, article entitled “students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the use of instagram in english language writing” written by akhiar, mydin, akma, & kasuma (2017) which published in malaysian journal of learning and instruction: special issues. in their research, 101 participants, consists of 70 percent female and 30 percent male, answered questionnaire with 20 closed-ended items, and five open-ended questions about using instagram for english language learning process. the close-ended questionnaire analyzed using quantitative to found mean scores and the openended questionnaire analyzed using mixed method (quantitative to found up mean scores and qualitative for content analysis). second, article entitled “the effectiveness of social media network telegram in teaching english language pronunciation to iranian efl learners” written by xodabande (2017) which published in cogent education. 30 efl learners from iran as the participants in this research. those students divided into experimental and control class. 14 students in experimental class and 16 in control class. they taught using different treatments over four weeks. they filled pre-test and post-test. then the test analyzed using spss and anova. third, article entitled “students’ perception of the implementation facebook group in learning writing skill” written by sakkir & abrar (2018) which published in the 65th teflin international conference. the participant were 20 students of second semester english education department in 2016/2017 academic year. the data taken from the questionnaire about the students’ perception and implementation in writing of facebook group. the scored were examined by using likert scale. fourth, article entitled “students’ perspectives on social media-based learning of writing through instagram” written by rinda, novawan, & miqawati (2018) which published in journal of english in academic and professional communication (jeapco,). the data collected using close ended questionnaire and focus group discussion. after that, the data were analyzed using qualitative method. anita dewi ekawati students’ beliefs about social media in efl classroom: a review of literature 590 fifth, article entitled “the effectiveness of using instagram in developing students’ descriptive text writing” written by hilman (2019) which published in journal of applied linguistics and literacy (jall). the participants were 48 students of tenth grade. they were divided into 24 students in control and 24 students in experiment class. their aged between 16-17 years old. the pre-test and post-test examined using quantitatively and the questionnaire counted using qualitatively. sixth, article entitled “using facebook in efl writing class: its effectiveness from students’ perspective” written by fithriani, dewi, daulay, salmiah, & widia (2019) which published in the second annual international conference on language and literature. the participants were 53 students, 40 female and 13 male. the data were composed using three instruments; close-ended and open-ended questionnaire, semi-structured openended in-depth interview; and observation. the data used mix method, qualitative and quantitative method. seventh, article entitled “using facebook to practice writing skill: what do the students think?” written by putri & aminatun (2021) which published in journal of english language teaching and learning (jeltl). the participants were 20 english students. the instruments were questionnaire adopted likert-type scale, and interviewed. from the five articles it can be concluded that social media attracts students to learn and explore their ideas. social media can be a media for traditional learning methods through drilling and discussion. through social media, students have more confidence in learning. this is good news for educators, learning can be done with social media. in addition to attracting students according to the data obtained from previous research, social media can also reduce students' feelings of depression while studying. conclusion advances in technology have brought smartphones that make it easier for everyone to access the internet. various applications are offered for various purposes. this application can be used by various groups such as applications to watch videos on youtube and youtube kids, social media applications such as facebook, instagram, whatsapp, and so on. however, the use of this technology has not been maximized in learning. most of the students spend much of their time accessing social networks and others, some students use the internet for dictionaries and games, and only a few students use the internet for educational purposes (lekawael, 2017). as time goes by, learning by using applications is getting more interesting and easier for both teachers and students. several studies reveal that the use of social media can be maximized in helping students learn. learning using social media also has a positive impact, namely fun learning without feeling pressured and not limited by space and time. students can also cultivate their creativity. the research was conducted using a systematic literature review (slr). the purpose of the slr is to assess a systematic literature review (secondary study) by conducting research as a tertiary literature review (kitchenham et al., 2009). a total of seven journal articles related to the research title "students' beliefs about social media in efl classroom: a review of literature" were analyzed. the conclusion that can be drawn from the seven articles is that students' beliefs about the use of social media in efl classes have a positive impact. social media is considered to be able to help students to improve their ability in learning english. thus, the use of social media can be a reference for teaching media that can be used by efl teachers in learning activities that serve to attract students' attention and achieve goals in language learning. from the results of the literature review in this study, it is hoped that it can provide a gap so that it can facilitate further research. references ahmed, b. e. s. (2020). social media in teaching of languages. ijet, 15(12), 72–80. akhiar, a., mydin, a.-a., akma, s., & kasuma, a. (2017). students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the use of instagram in english language writing. malaysian journal of learning and instruction (mjli, (special issue on “graduate students research on education”), 47–72. ayuni, r. f. (2019). the online shopping habits and eloyalty of gen z as natives in the digital era. journal of indonesian economy and business, 34(2), 168-184. azlan, n. a. b., zakaria, s. b., & yunus, m. m. (2019). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 591 integrative task-based learning : developing speaking skill and increase motivation via instagram. ijarbss, 9(1), 620–636. https://doi.org/10.6007/ijarbss/v9-i1/5463 cinelli, m., quattrociocchi, w., galeazzi, a., valensise, c. m., brugnoli, e., schmidt, a. l., zola, p., zollo, f., & scala, a. (2020). the covid ‑ 19 social media infodemic. scientific reports, 10(16598), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-73510-5 fithriani, r., dewi, u., daulay, s. h., salmiah, m., & widia, f. (2019). using facebook in efl writing class: its effectiveness from students’ perspective. aicll 2019 the second annual international conference on language and literature conference, 2019, 634–645. https://doi.org/10.18502/kss.v3i19.4892 gonulal, t. (2019). the use of instagram as a mobileassisted language learning tool. contemporary educational technology, 10(3), 309–323. hilman, a. (2019). the effectiveness of using instagram in developing students’ descriptive text writing. jall (journal of applied linguistics and literacy), 3(1), 31–44. kitchenham, b., o. pearl, b., budgen, d., turner, m., bailey, j., & linkman, s. (2009). systematic literature reviews in software engineering a systematic literature review. information and software technology, 51(1), 7–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2008.09.009 lekawael, r. f. j. (2017). the impact of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 255–262. mcdougall, j., readman, m., wilkinson, p. (2018). the uses of (digital) literacy. learning, media and technology, 43(3), 263-279. mohr, k. a. j., & mohr, e. s. (2017). understanding geneation z students to promote a contemporary learning environment. journal on empowering teaching excellence, 1(1), 84-94. putri, n., & aminatun, d. (2021). using facebook to practice writing skill: what do the students think ? journal of english language teaching and learning (jeltl), 2(1), 45–50. rinda, r. k., novawan, a., & miqawati, a. h. (2018). students ’ perspectives on social media-based learning of writing through instagram. journal of english in academic and professional communication (jeapco), 5(1), 23–33. sakkir, g., & abrar, a. e. y. (2018). students’ perception of the implementation facebook group in learning writing skill. proceeding the 65th teflin international conference (pp. 30– 34). soviyah, s., & etikaningsih, d. r. (2018). instagram use to enhance ability in writing. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 32–38. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1373.receive d tan, l. p., le, a. n. h., & xuan, l. p. (2020). a systematic literature review on social entrepreneurial intention. journal of social entrepreneurship, 11(3), 241–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/19420676.2019.1640770 xiao, y., & watson, m. (2019). guidance on conducting a systematic literature review. journal of planning education and research, 39(1), 93– 112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x17723971 xodabande, i. (2017). the effectiveness of social media network telegram in teaching english language pronunciation to iranian efl learners the effectiveness of social media network telegram in teaching english language pronunciation to iranian efl learners. cogent education, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186x.2017.134708 1 anita dewi ekawati students’ beliefs about social media in efl classroom: a review of literature 592 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 75 online learning perception during covid-19 pandemic viewed from high school students junaedi setiyono english language education, teacher training and education faculty, university of muhammadiyah purworejo, purworejo-central java, indonesia email: junaedisetiyono@yahoo.ac.id semi sukarni english language education, teacher training and education faculty, university of muhammadiyah purworejo, purworejo-central java, indonesia email: semi.sukarni24@gmail.com abdul ngafif english language education, teacher training and education faculty, university of muhammadiyah purworejo, purworejo-central java, indonesia email: abdulngafif@umpwr.ac.id apa citation: setiyono, j., sukarni, s., & ngafif, a. (2021). online learning perception during covid-19 pandemic viewed from high school students. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 75-82. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5356 received: 14-08-2021 accepted: 19-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction the emergence of the covid 19 outbreak has had an impact in various fields, including in the field of education. face-to-face learning held in schools is no longer possible due to physical and social restrictions. learning during a pandemic is turning into online learning. the change in learning from face-to-face to online learning raises new problems from both schools, teachers, students, and parents of students. not all schools are ready with an online management system, not all teachers have the skills by developing online it-based learning, not all students have the readiness to take part in online learning and not all parents can provide support to children in online learning the new practice of online learning certainly makes a lot of differences between the normal condition and this condition during covid-19 that there is no conventional learning. some of the education systems have changed in terms of learning methods, material delivery, duration of online learning, interaction during online learning, the intensity of tasks, attendance list, and online learning media. regardless of region or family economic background, online learning should take place not only in cities but also in villages and rural areas. depending on where online learning takes place and who the students are, these factors may result in different implementations. as a result, students require some of the educational institute's utilities to support this online learning program. in terms of learning methods, how the material is delivered, the duration, the interaction during online learning, the intensity of the tasks on the attendance abstract: the purpose of this study was to investigate sma and smk students' perceptions of online learning. secondly, to examine whether the two schools differ greatly and to describe their perception of online learning based on their perceptions. there were 133 participants, comprising 61 sma students and 72 smk students. the data was collected using likert scale questionnaires and an interview. to analyze the data, the authors carried out descriptive and inferential analyzes of the quantitative data, while a qualitative thematic analysis was used. the finding of the study shows that there was a significant difference in the perception of online learning between sma and smk students. the high perception was obtained from sma students, while medium perception was showed by smk students. based on the thematic analysis, it showed that smk students encountered more difficulties in attending online learning classes compared with sma students. keywords: online learning; perception; sma; smk; students junaedi setiyono, semi sukarni, abdul ngafif online learning perception during covid-19 pandemic viewed from high school students 76 list, and the media used, online learning is vastly different from traditional learning. with these distinctions, there are numerous perspectives on online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. students may be eager to participate in online learning, or they may not be. is there a positive or negative perception of online learning among students? the questions piqued the researchers’ interest, prompting them to conduct this reassessment. this study aims to identify students' perception of online learning of the english subject during the covid 19 pandemic. based on the background above, the writers identified some of the problems commonly faced by students and teachers during the online learning process as follows: there are some difficulties in conducting online learning that is not only faced by teachers but also the students. these problems include: some schools do not have enough facilities to learn online, some teachers cannot conduct online learning, different abilities among students to receive and understand online lessons, different utilities available to students to receive online lessons, and different perceptions among students about online learning. there is a lot of studies concerning the practice of online learning, research of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic, students and teacher's perception of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. in this part, the researcher would like to present previous research to analyze the research gap-an area which hasn't been studied by previous researchers. the first previous studies on the implementation of online learning before the covid-19 pandemic had been done by goodwin & twani (2017), guler (2020), joosten & cusatis (2020), rasheed, kamsin, & abdullah (2020), williams, howell, & hricko (2005), and yang, lavonen, & niemi (2018). these studies highlighted readiness, challenge, participation and obstacles, and teacher preparation in online teaching and learning. the second studies were about online learning during the covid-19 pandemic had been conducted by almusharraf & khahro (2020), alawamleh, altwait, & al-saht (2020), schaefer, abrams, kurpis, abrams, & abrams (2020), smith (2020), hodges & martin (2020), lassoued, alhendawi, & bashitialshaaer, (2020), wen & hua (2020). these studies emphasized the real conditions of online learning supports to the quality of online learning outcome which among them were family support, effective, communication, choosing appropriate platforms, methods and, preventing obstacles. the third research concerning the students' and teacher's perception of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic had been conducted by (alnofaie, 2020), niemi & kousa (2020), rojabi (2020), rusmiati, reza, achmad, syaodih, nurtanto, sultan, tambunan (2020), and syauqi, munadi, & triyono (2020). although these studies were about the students' perceptions, the focus was different. al-nofaie (2020) and rojabi (2020) drew learners' perceptions on the platforms of online learning. the first by using blackboard, while the second using microsoft teams. with the new platform, the learners were motivated while the learners were less interested via blackboard and they prefer to be asynchronous. syauqi, munadi, & triyono (2020) studied mechanical engineering education students, while (niemi & kousa, 2020) studied finnish high school students. there was a contrast finding the online learning in finnish high school was implemented successfully, on the other hand, the learning in with the vocational education was not by the students' expectation. (rusmiati et al., 2020) which focused on primary school teachers shown that the success of online learning must be done through collaborative learning between teachers, parents, and schools. through the discussion of the previous research, none of them conducted a comparative study on students' perception between two school types: senior high school and vocational high school, particularly in english subjects. thus, this paper aims to describe the different perceptions of students from the two schools, to report whether there is any significant difference of perception from the two schools and to describe their perception of online learning based on their view. method this research was held at two schools namely sman 1 samigaluh which is located in kulon progo regency, and smk 8 purworejo which is located in purworejo regency. however, this research was conducted online because the condition of the covid-19 pandemic did not allow the researchers to go directly to the field to maintain the physical distance. in collecting data, the researchers made online questionnaires in the form of google forms and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 77 distributed them to the students through whatsapp groups in march 2021. then the researchers conducted telephoning interviews in april 2021. the subject of this study were 61 of the twelfthgrade students of sma n 1 samigaluh, kulon progo, and 72 of the twelfth-grade students of smk 8 in the academic year of 2020/2021. thus, the number of participants of the study were 133 students. in this study, data were gathered through the use of a questionnaire and an interview. in order to collect data, several steps were taken. to begin, questionnaires were created that included twenty closed-ended questions about students' perceptions of online english learning during the covid-19 pandemic. the questionnaire was written in indonesian and later translated by the researchers to make it easier for students to fill out. the researchers created an online questionnaire using a google form, which they then distributed to each class's whatsapp group at each school. due to the fact that the questionnaire is a closed questionnaire, students only chose the answers available without having to think about their answers. second, the researchers prepared some interview questions and an interview guide then scheduled a phone interview with the informants. third, i conducted interviews with students using the interview guide and transcribed the results. in this research, the writers used questionnaires and interviews as the instrument for collecting data. questionnaire. questionnaires are written tools that present a number of questions or statements that respondents should either write their responses or select from existing answers to which they must respond (brown, 2001 cited in donyei, 2003). according to doryei (2003), the advantages of questionnaires are that they are efficient in terms of researcher time, effort, and financial resources. however, they have a limitation in that other researchers frequently claim that the data is less reliable or valid. as a result, additional instruments are required to complete the data. there are types of questionnaire items, as follows: closed questions. the respondent is provided in closed questions with ready-made response options, usually either by encircling or ticking one of them or by placing an x in a corresponding slot/box. the benefit of closed questions is that their coding and tabulation is simple and leaves no room for subjectivity. opened questions. open questions include items that do not follow up the actual question with the answer options that the respondent needs to choose but rather with some blank space. open format items can provide much more "richness" than entirely quantitative data by allowing greater freedom of expression. the most popular items in the research questionnaires include rating scales, which require the respondent to assess the target by marking one of a number of organized categories in scale. the different points on the scale continuum indicate the difference between the different degrees of a certain category, from different attributes (frequency or quality) to intensity (for example – not at all) and opinion (for example, strong agreement – strong disagreement). the likert scale, which comprises 20 items, used this research to address closed questions. interview. an interview is a way of collecting a data where an interviewer (the researcher or someone involved in a research) asks a question for an interviewee (the research participant). the interviewer obtains the data from the person who gives the details. personal interviews are called face-to-face interviews; telephone interviews are called. the strength of an interview is that a scientist can use samples freely prompts for obtaining clarity of response or further information (johnson & burke, 2019). to maintain the physical distance during the covid-19 pandemic, a telephoning interview was used to collect the data of the students’ recount of their real opinions, views and experience during the implementation of online learning. using quantitative and qualitative analyses, the authors analyzed the data after gathering. the descriptive analysis includes calculating the frequency, proportion, and significance of the answer of the likert scale questionnaire, namely strong consent, consent, neutrality, disagreement, and a strong discretion and, by using an inferential analysis, to see the average difference between the two schools. it has been used with spss version 22. in addition, the interview information was transcript and analyzed through thematic analysis in which themes and codes were determined. results and discussion junaedi setiyono, semi sukarni, abdul ngafif online learning perception during covid-19 pandemic viewed from high school students 78 related to the aims of the study, this paper seeks for the differences of perception between senior high school (sma) and vocational high school (smk). the result will be shown on the tables and in the description. these include the table frequency, result from inferential analysis, and table of the thematic analysis reported from interview result. high school students’ perception of online learning the perception is reported from the data analysis from 20 items of the questionnaire which was distributed to 61 students of sma n 1 samigaluh, kulonprogo. the questionnaire consists of eight learning aspects which cover learning method (3 items), material delivery (4 items), online learning duration (2 items), interaction during online learning (2 items), intensity number of tasks (3 items), attendant (2 items), online learning media (4 items) and support facilities provided by the school (1 item). to interpret the result, the writers adopted silaen & widiyono’s mean interpretation (2013:128) i.e. very high (4.20 – 5.00), high (3.40 – 4.19), medium (2.60 – 3.39), low 1.80 – 2.59, and very low (1.00 1.79). the result of the descriptive analysis is shown in table 1. table 1. senior high school students’ perception statement sa a n d sd m interpretation s1 13 32 14 2 0 3,93 high s2 3 26 27 5 0 3,48 high s3 0 26 28 7 0 3,39 average s4 7 37 16 1 0 3,82 high s5 1 19 34 5 2 3,23 average s6 0 19 32 9 1 3,18 average s7 7 27 22 4 1 3,64 high s8 0 17 26 16 2 2,98 average s9 11 30 17 3 0 3,79 high s10 1 30 23 5 2 3,41 high s11 5 29 25 2 0 3,67 high s12 1 28 28 4 0 3,49 high s13 3 20 28 10 0 3,28 average s14 15 35 11 0 0 4,05 high s15 10 34 16 1 0 3,87 high s16 9 37 13 2 0 3,87 high s17 0 32 26 3 0 3,51 high s18 3 25 30 3 0 3,51 high s19 1 40 18 1 1 3,69 high s20 20 30 10 1 0 4,11 high table 1 shows that the majority of each item in the questionnaire obtained a high perception of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic from 20 items in the questionnaire obtained high perception. there are only four items, namely item 5, 6, 8, and item 13 got average perception. the obtained mean is 3.59. it is in the high category. it is interpreted that the students in the study have a high or positive perception of the online learning implemented during the covid-19 pandemic. vocational high school students’ perception of online learning similar to high school students’ perception (sma), the data of vocational high school students' perception (smk) was obtained from the questionnaire and telephoning interview. the questionnaire was distributed to 72 students and the result of descriptive analysis is shown in table 2. table 2. vocational high school students’ perception statement sa a n d sd m interpretation s1 11 34 26 1 0 3.76 high s2 2 11 30 25 4 2.75 medium s3 1 16 29 23 3 2.85 medium english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 79 s4 6 34 29 2 1 3.58 high s5 2 10 24 33 3 2.65 medium s6 2 5 33 25 7 2.58 low s7 4 23 28 15 2 3.17 medium s8 2 5 31 23 11 2.50 low s9 5 36 22 8 1 3.50 high s10 3 15 34 18 2 2.99 medium s11 2 25 28 14 3 3.13 medium s12 4 19 33 11 5 3.08 medium s13 3 14 32 18 5 2.89 medium s14 25 28 16 1 2 4.01 high s15 9 27 30 4 2 3.51 high s16 9 28 28 5 2 3.51 high s17 2 19 39 11 1 3.14 medium s18 0 17 41 12 2 3.01 medium s19 4 37 27 4 0 3.57 high s20 22 29 18 2 1 3.96 high table 2 shows that the majority of each item in the questionnaire obtained a medium perception of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic from 20 items in the questionnaire. there are two items, namely item 6 and 8 were low. the obtained mean is 3.21. it is interpreted in the medium category. it shows that the part of the students agreed with the online learning but partly was unfavoured towards the practice of online learning done during the covid-19 pandemic. in other words, they are in a neutral position or just accept it because of the condition. different perception of sma and smk students to investigate the different perceptions between sma and smk students, an independent sample test with spss version 22 was used. the result of the test is shown below. table 3. a descriptive comparison of perception group statistics school n mean std. deviation std. error mean perception sma 61 3.5951 .43231 .05535 smk 72 3.2076 .44315 .05223 table 3 shows the result descriptive statistics of sma and smk students' perceptions. it shows different means from the questionnaire result. it is seen as 3.59 for sma students and 3.21 for smk students. it shows that sma students have a better perception than smk students as 3.59 > 3.21. table 4. independent samples test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper perc eptio n equal variances assumed .175 .677 5.08 131 .000 .38744 .07626 .23659 .53830 equal variances not assumed 5.09 128.39 .000 .38744 .07610 .23687 .53802 the independent sample test results are shown in table 4. the t-value showed 5.08 with an important 0.00. the difference is said to be greater as 0.00 < 0.05 than the t-table 5.08 > 1.65. ho is rejected, but ha is accepted. in other words, during the pandemic between sma and smk students there is a different perception of online learning. junaedi setiyono, semi sukarni, abdul ngafif online learning perception during covid-19 pandemic viewed from high school students 80 to have a deeper understanding of the students' perception, a telephoning interview was conducted. it was done by interviewing both students and teachers who taught the english subject. for students, there were four aspects in the interview questions, namely learning process, learning platform, learning difficulty, and solution, while for teachers there were five aspects – the four questions were the same as the questions to the students which added by a question about teacher's opinion about the difficulty faced by students during the implementation of online learning. the result of the thematic analysis based on the interview is presented below. table 5. themes and codes of sma students' perception of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic theme code sma smk learning process a. given learning material a. given learning material b. given assignment c. explained the lesson d. given chance to ask questions e. submitted assignment b. given assignment c. given chance to ask questions d. submitted assignment learning platform a. whatsapp group a. google classroom b. google classroom difficulties faced by students a. understanding the material a. understanding material b. internet connection c. managing time between home chores and school assignments b. assessing internet connection c. managing time between home chores and assignment d. being bored with the lesson e. became stress with school tasks expected solution a. given more learning method variation b. given motivation to be active in lesson c. given more interesting learning media d. used more appropriate lms for a better explanation of learning material a. given more of learning method variation b. flexible learning schedule c. intensity number of assignments d. period of delivery assignment table 5 shows the result of thematic analysis from the interview of sma and smk students about the perception of online learning during a covid-19 pandemic. four learning aspects were provided on the left side as themes, while the responses from students about their perceptions were presented with codes on the right side. learning process. the first question of the interview asked students about the learning process. there is a slightly similar answer between students of sma and smk. based on the interview, the learning process of online learning includes the students were given learning material, given assignment, given an explanation about the lesson, given chance to ask questions, and submitted the assignment. but surprisingly, smk students have not explained the lesson. learning platform. the second question of the interview asked students about the learning platform. based on the students' interview results, the platforms were used for online learning in high school were google classroom and whatsapp group for sma, while smk were only used google classroom. the result shows that the schools used limited types of learning platforms which it can be assumed that there were limited learning variation and interaction. difficulties faced by students. the third question of the interview asked students about difficulties faced by them. the result shows that there were more difficulties of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic faced by smk students. there are three similar difficulties of online learning during the covid-19 pandemic faced by sma and smk students, namely difficulties in understanding the material, difficulties of connecting the internet, managing time between home chores, and school assignments. however, there are two more english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 81 difficulties faced by smk students namely being bored with the lesson and became stress with school tasks. expected solution. the fourth question of the interview asked about the expected solution viewed by students. there is the same number of expected solutions initiated by sma and smk students, however, only one answer is the same, namely given more learning method variation. other expected solutions for sma students were given the motivation to be active in the lesson; given more interesting learning media; used more appropriate lms for a better explanation of learning material. whereas, smk students were a flexible learning schedule, intensity number of assignments, and period of assignment delivery. the finding of the current research on the students' perception of senior high school (sma) is in line with abuhmaid's finding (2020) that the students have positive perception toward online learning, however, it doesn't appear for the perception of smk students as they have medium perception as it can be stated that partly positive and partly not in favor with online learning. however, the finding from the interview shows the different facts as both students of sma and smk feel unsatisfied and faced some difficulties in attending online learning. this finding supports alnofaie's (2020) that students online education is not always appealing for students. besides accessibility, the online learning platform is also another theme that receives comments from both students' participants of two studies as the students expected to have a friendlier platform that makes students easier to understand learning materials. thus, the finding of this study is in contrast with almusharraf & khahro (2020) as their research participants felt satisfied with the faculty members who used more specific platforms like google hangout, lms moodle and, google classroom. one reason for different perception because almusharraf & khahro (2020)'s research participants were university students, while the current study were high school students. another finding during online learning the students of smk felt bored and even felt stressed. these facts were in contrast with rojabi’s (2020) as he found that the participants of his study felt motivated and it was easier to comprehend the learning material. this fact is contradictory with high school students as they felt difficulties in understanding the material. why the result in contrast? it is because the two studies applied different learning platforms. in rojabi's study which participated by students of open-university, moodle and microsoft teams were used, while in the current research, google classroom and whatsapp group were used. it difficult to understand the material without teacher explanation and interaction. however, it is easier to understand the materials taught through microsoft teams as it is synchronous and that it is done through virtual learning. conclusion based on the findings of the study it can be concluded that there is a different perception among students of sma and smk which can be shown by the result of the t-test independent sample as the tvalue is 5.08 > 1.65 and there is a significant difference as the sig. was 0.00 < 0.05. sma students’ perception is high or positive towards the online learning, while smk students’ perception was medium as it can be stated that some students were positive towards the online learning, while parts were not unfavorable towards the online learning as they faced a lot of difficulties. students from both schools encountered problems during online learning such as internet accessibility, the difficulty of understanding materials, lack of interaction with teachers, difficulty with school assignments and limited and ineffective learning platforms. the implementation of online learning aroused many complex problems which are not easy to solve. the implication of the study suggests that cooperation among regional education authority, schools, faculty members, students and parents are completely needed to overcome the lost learning values. schools together with regional education authorities have to make a policy to realize the teaching-learning process to facilitate the students. references al-nofaie, h. 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(2018). online learning engagement: critical factors and research evidence from literature. themes in elearning, 11(1), 1–18. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 27 functions of euphemism in putu wijaya’s short story guru jumino suhadi english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: jumino.suhadi@sastra.aisu.ac.id m. manugeren english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: willyman1299@yahoo.com purwarno purwarno english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwarno@sastra.uisu.ac.id purwanto siwi english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwanto.siwi@sastra.uisu.ac.id susi ekalestari english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: susi.ekalestari1977@gmail.com apa citation: suhadi, j., manugeren, m., purwarno, p., siwi, p., & ekalestari, s. (2021). functions of euphemism in putu wijaya’s short story guru. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 27-36. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5351 received: 19-08-2021 accepted: 25-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction humans are social beings who must interact with one another in meeting various needs of life. therefore, a person cannot possibly live alone without interacting with other people. in everyday life, humans recognize culture and create various forms of ideas, activities, and artifacts to fulfill their needs (korneeva, 2019). related to this, humans highly need language, as the most important element that affects life and culture. language has an important role in human life because it is the main communication tool. as a means of communication, language includes words, collections of words, clauses and sentences that are expressed proportionally (candria, 2019). while the notion of language as a human communication system language is expressed through the arrangement of sounds or written expressions that are structured to form larger units, such as morphemes, words, and sentences. meanwhile, in the perspective of functional systemic linguistics (fsl), language is a form of social semiotics that is working in situational and cultural contexts, which are used both orally and in writing. in the lsf abstract: euphemisms in the form of non-offensive or subtle expressions to replace the one felt to be insulting or unpleasant become guidelines in social interaction, essentially, using words with good meanings or intentions. euphemism can also be interpreted as an expression that is not straightforward, the driving motive behind the development of pejorative, motivated by a natural human attitude, avoiding conflict by not hurting or offending other people. if there were no euphemisms, there might be depression or demeaning of meaning. this research is focused on the functions of euphemism in the short story entitled guru written by putu wijaya with the concept of the functions of euphemism in speech acts. the research is conducted by descriptive qualitative method related to social phenomena, in this case the uses of euphemism either in a literary or social text. the results show that out of the 15 data obtained, there are 12 data referred to the function of euphemism as a means of speech refinement (80%), 2 as a means of diplomacy (13%, and 1 keeping something secret (6%). keywords: euphemism; pejorative; social interaction; language refinement; diplomacy jumino suhadi, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, & susi ekalestari functions of euphemism in putu wijaya’s short story guru 28 perspective, language is seen as a construction formed through simultaneous functions and systems (endarto, 2017). language is also part of the most basic human abilities, as well as being the main feature of the homo sapiens species. although animals have the ability to use symbols or signs to communicate, the communication system is not a language. different from animals, humans are able to exchange speech through language to interact with one another. by this it is seen that the main function of language is to meet the needs of communication among human beings. in addition, in human life, language is also closely related to cultural development (cahyaningtyas, et.al, 2015). there are three factors that show the roles of language in cultural development. first, language is a cultural element. every activity in human life has an element of language in it. so, to understand the development of a culture, it is necessary to first examine the development of language in society. second, language is a marker of social stratification. language can show patterns of relationships and social stratification in a society. third, language is a symbol of ethnic culture. language can show cultural symbols in an ethnic group. this is evident from the existence of various dialects or from various ethnic groups. this is caused by geographical differences and the stratification of the social environment among ethnic groups in people's lives (boltayevna, 2020). obviously, there is a reciprocal relationship between language and culture. what is more, people’s cultural background and behaviors shape the way they interpret the world around them and since language we use and the social contexts in which it occurs are mutually related, language should be treated “not only as a mode of thinking but, above all, as a cultural practice (kavakli, 2020). therefore, language plays an important role in human life because language functions as a means of communication among humans. it is considered so commonplace that it is rarely thought about, as is walking and breathing. if we look further, the influence of language on human life is so strong, that it is not uncommon for disputes to occur in society or in other words, any kind of symptoms that arises in human life is caused by language (banga, 2015). it is 'natural' people say “language is power”. this word is so simple, but it has a complex meaning. this statement is put forward by norman fairclough, one of the founders of critical discourse analysis as applied to sociolinguistics (bulan and kasman, 2018) as fairclough is so concerned about language. in connection with this, on the other hand there are those who argue that: "we think with the word, and with words we form concepts". (erkoci and bushgjjikaj 2019). based on the description above, it is clear that the role or function of language in human life cannot be doubted, as whatever our activities are, starting from the morning: at school, at the office, at the market, and so on, it is always colored with "language" as a means of communication. even whatever the name of the scientific discipline is, absolutely uses language as an introduction for a writer to convey ideas readers. however, in certain circumstances many people still ask about the function of language. this is possible if answered with a statement that the function of language is as a means of communication. language is a crucial tool for human communication, central and most important among all human semiotic systems. language is created by human civilization in a row with the development of culture, thought, and also technology. it is one of the most important things in human life because humans are social beings, humans cannot live without having an interaction with other living things. language becomes a medium for the human to communicate with each other (kanaza, 2020). without language, science and technology cannot grow and develop. in addition, language in the cultural structure has a dual position, function, and role, namely as the root and product of culture which also functions as a means of thinking and supporting the growth and development of science and technology. therefore, if we are careful in using language, we will also be careful in thinking because language is a mirror of the power of reason or mind. language can be said to be a very effective social control tool because every day we use language as a means of communication among one another, both orally and in the form of writing (baydak, 2015). crystal in mansoor (2019) believes that politeness, in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, is a term that signifies linguistic features associated with norms of social behavior, in relation to notions english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 29 like courtesy, rapport, deference and distance. such features involve the usage of specific discourse markers (please), suitable tones of voice, and tolerable forms of address. theories of politeness are involved in what belongs to either of these linguistic subfields for politeness is specifically concerned with language use that is connected with pragmatics-and it is a phenomenon that represents a link between language and the social world. language is a reflection of one's personality; even language is a mirror of the nation's personality. the meaning of this statement is that through the language used, a person or a nation can know the level of their personality. the quality of the personality of a person or group of people will be difficult to measure, if they do not express their thoughts or feelings through language acts (both verbal and nonverbal) in a polite manner (caplan, adams, boyd, 2020). language politeness is a reflection of a person’s character. therefore, the character of a person can be built through one of the abilities of language skills, i.e. the ability to usepolite language. the strategy of language politeness as one of the efforts to build the character of a nation can be effected through: 1) family education by having habitual, creating a conducive atmosphere and guidance; 2) positive language attitudes, both local and national languages, by building cognitive, affective, and conative aspects, and 3) mastery of polite vocabularies, both receptive and productive (sulastriana, 2018). politeness plays a crucial role in all cultures and societies for maintaining relationships and for face saving. although politeness is common to all cultures and languages, how it functions and is realized varies from one culture to another. politeness exists as a result of interactions between people and culture, and politeness is acquired with the passage of time through the socio-cultural coexistence of people with one another. people perform functions of politeness to various degrees to successfully communicate with each other (shalihah and zuhd, (2020). accordingly, it can be said that politeness is not a natural phenomenon, but it is acquired gradually and programmed in terms of social norms in the mind of the individual who is going to express them through his behavior .this indicates that the social rules of a society are specific for that society, and the rules enable the individual to use his speech acts appropriately (al-duleimi, 2016) language politeness is closely related to euphemism. as a symptom of language, euphemism is a kind of reference in the form of expressions that do not offend people, or subtle expressions to replace references that may be felt insulting, offensive, or suggesting something unpleasant. in everyday communication, both spoken and written, we often hear or read words or sentences that contain such euphemisms. however, it feels natural, considering that communication requires the accuracy of message disclosure so that the intended message can be understood by those who receive the message properly (sibull, et.al. (2019). the use of euphemism can avoid conflict and this is the main function of euphemism which is under the umbrella of sociolinguistics. sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary science or a combination of two disciplines, namely sociology and linguistics. this science explains the human ability to use language rules appropriately in different situations. using polite language through euphemism is a picture of the language maker to use good and polite language, but the messages contained in it, both implied and explicit, can be conveyed properly. euphemism through a sociolinguistic approach and based on the concept of the function of euphemism becomes the object of this research, with the aim of identifying and analyzing the functions of euphemism in putu wijaya's short story guru (2011) so that the readers, especially the academic community, understand and apply the functions of euphemism in spoken or written language. the concept of euphemism as a means of avoiding conflict by means of smooth expressions are also supported by two relevant studies. the first is conducted by khedir and almoayidi (2018) stating that euphemisms are sweet-sounding, or at least inoffensive, alternatives for expressions that speakers or writers prefer not to use in executing a particular communicative intention on a given occasion; and the second conducted by iswara and sastaparamitha (2020) stating that euphemisms are the replacements of taboo, rude and inappropriate expressions. from the two previous studies, it is clearly pictured that the main function of euphemism is to sustain harmony in social interactions by polite appropriateness of language use. jumino suhadi, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, & susi ekalestari functions of euphemism in putu wijaya’s short story guru 30 putu wijaya is a top indonesian writer who is often called putu. putu wijaya is known as a playwright, novelist, short story writer, and journalist. he starts writing since junior high school and he always says “writing for me is not an easy job”, as a way to remember anyone who has contributed to his writing development. for putu, writing is not just telling stories, but also expressing opinions with calculated strategies but without losing sense and spontaneity. putu wijaya does a deconstruction. he floods his readers' heads with works of this kind, with unexpected themes. some of putu's works depict a world that is turned upside down, which is strange and miraculous, and beyond common sense. it is appropriate to say that putu's works are modern fairy tales. in his career putu wijaya is famous as a playwright. from his hands have emerged several modern drama scripts with the flow of consciousness. the drama scripts he writes are not the same as conventional drama scripts. in addition, putu wijaya also writes several novels with new genres. his novels are also "stream of consciousness", "absurd". novels with psychological and philosophical patterns are the characteristics of putu wijaya's writings. putu wijaya also writes short stories. a number of short stories appears, both in the form of books and published in various magazines and newspapers. just like his dramas and novels, putu wijaya's short stories also have a new style, new streams of consciousness, and reveal many streams of consciousness. putu wijaya is a very energetic and versatile person. the element of alienation as a characteristic of modern man is increasingly evident in his novels. this is where he shows his talents as a novelist to the fullest. putu wijaya received several awards and prizes for his works. in 1967 putu wijaya's script "the singing ocean" won the third prize from the indonesian national theater development board in the play writing competition. in 1980 he received the asean literature prize (sea write award) held in bangkok, thailand for his work ‘telegram” and in 2008 he received the indonesian theater federation award at taman ismail marzuki (kasmanah, 2021). the short story entitled guru tells the story of a father who is restless and angry at the wishes of his son, taksu. this father is not happy that taksu aspires to be a teacher. according to the father, teachers have no future, teachers are jobs for people who fail. he has tried everything, such as buying a car for taksu so that taksu would change his mind not to dream of being a teacher anymore. however, his efforts fail. taksu is adamant that he wants to be a teacher, no matter what his father says. then after ten years, the father is no longer restless and angry. taksu has become a teacher, a teacher for young people, the nation and the country for transmitting the work ethic. in today's era, the teaching profession is still often underestimated. there are still many people like "bapak" character in putu wijaya's short story in the real world; people who think that teaching is not a profession that should be coveted. through this short story we can take a message. if we have a dream for our future, we must focus on that dream and ignore any negative words that other people say, as in the end, we will live our own lives. if we succeed in achieving the dreams we have, other people will automatically realize our abilities. putu wijaya's short story deserves thumb-up. through this short story he tells the real things in people's lives, the things as they are in society, including the language used, and certainly related to sociolinguistics. sociolinguistics, under which lies the research, is a study that compiles theories about the relationship between society and language. based on the previous understanding, sociolinguistics also studies and discusses social aspects of language, especially the differences in language related to social factors (nisa, 2019). based on some of the opinions above, it can be concluded that sociolinguistics does not only study language but also learns about aspects of language used by society. sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary science between sociology and linguistics, two fields of empirical science that are closely related. sociology is an objective and scientific study of humans in society, institutions, and social processes that exist in society. sociology seeks to find out how society comes into being, lasting, and persisting. by studying institutions, social processes and all social problems in society, it will be known how humans adapt to their environment, how they socialize, and place themselves in their respective places in society. on the other hand, linguistics is a field of science that studies language, or the science that takes language as the object of study. thus it can be said that english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 31 sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of science that studies language in relation to the use of that language in society (ginting, 2020). from the description above, it can be concluded that sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary study of language in relation to the language used in that environment. the use of sociolinguistics for practical life is very much, because language is a means of human verbal communication. in its use, sociolinguistics provides knowledge of how to use language in society. sociolinguistics provides knowledge about the various language variations that exist in society. we as humans who live in society, sociolinguistics provides knowledge about how we can place ourselves in the use of our language in a particular society. sociolinguistics also provides a description of language variations in relation to users and their uses. in addition, sociolinguistics allows us to examine the phenomena and symptoms of language that exist in society through sociolinguistic "glasses". as a science that studies language in society, sociolinguistics is able to "melt" with other fields of science. this is because language is a human verbal tool that exists in various other fields of science. as a means of communication, of course, language cannot be separated from other sciences as a means to express the results of thought. in addition, the object of sociolinguistic study is language in society. surely. it is very possible for sociolinguistics to be interrelated with other fields of science such as politics, culture, economics, and so on (akhtar, 2020). from the description above, it is illustrated that euphemism is part of sociolinguistic studies with the thought that euphemisms are part of language customs that are found in all cultures and are part of etiquette or language manners in interpersonal or group interactions at the level of power such as social, position, or age or solidarity. euphemism language is not just a means of communication. the relationship between a speaker and his interlocutor can be strengthened because of the use of the right language, on the other hand, if the language is used politely and appropriately, social relations can stretch and even break. polite and proper language refers to euphemism which is a characteristic of all languages. this statement does not imply that all languages have the same part of euphemism, which means that statements contained in one language and considered a form of euphemism are not necessarily the same as those in other languages. euphemism is a way of conveying information to audiences in the form of words, phrases or in a broader grammatical unit because euphemism is essentially using language politely without losing the concept of meaning it contains. the beginning of meaning is conceptual meaning, that is, meaning based on language conventions. conceptual meaning is the most important element in conveying messages because it includes logical, cognitive, and denotative meanings. in other words, the conceptual meaning is the meaning according to the concept, according to the referent, and there is no association or other meaning. however, in a certain text, euphemisms that are present may contain associations or other meanings because humans as reporters are creative through language. therefore, words, phrases, or sentences may experience changes in meaning and there is a tendency to manipulate reality because of this form of creativity. this can happen according to the practical interests of language users, including expressing arguments for social and cultural problems (mohammed and majeed, 2018). euphemisms give color to the use of language and reflect the attitude or policy of a person in presenting a message between uncertainty in facing facts and the need to convey information. this is related to the value of the taste of the language. choices of words that have a high sense of value tend to stick in the minds of listeners or readers than choices that have low value. the choice of words (diction) that has a high sense of value shows respect for the person or institution that is being discussed. euphemism can be positive because people, groups, institutions, authorities can use euphemisms to reconcile the atmosphere and stability, but it can also be negative because the reality is not known for certain. it is undeniable that the use of euphemisms in language is found in almost all ethnic groups in the world. its use is increasingly spreading to various fields of life and professions in our society. euphemisms which are part of language politeness are seen as important to use to maintain relationships with friends, work partners, relatives, and superiors. the use of euphemisms in language can be identified from the use of certain words in jumino suhadi, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, & susi ekalestari functions of euphemism in putu wijaya’s short story guru 32 communication. the right choice of words or diction marks the use of euphemisms in each professional field and life activity (al-khasawneh, 2018). the study of euphemisms is able to describe various uses of word meanings related to the tendency of language culture in modern society in general. changes that occur in a society can also be seen from the frequency with which certain words are used in everyday life. the emergence of new meanings in language, especially literary texts, indicates a change in the value system in the language that is closely related to the culture of the speaking community. avoiding language taboos and using euphemisms in communication is a form of politeness in language. the expression of euphemistic words makes us feel comfortable to express things that we feel are inappropriate, and neutralize them, for example topics about death, unemployment, taboos, and animals. we are constantly naming and labeling the words with expressions that make them sound better (serli, 2018). the function of euphemism the functions of euphemism according to bachriani, et.al. (2018) include: (1) as a means of language refinement. euphemism is used in the form of words or expressions that have indecent, unpleasant or terrible denotations, low connotations or dishonor which are replaced with other expressions to avoid various obstacles or social conflicts. (2) as a means to keep something secret. this euphemism serves as a tool to keep something secret, for example in the field of medicine where doctors cannot provide actual information to patients whose disease cannot be cured or is fatal. (3) as a means of diplomacy. this euphemism is usually used by leaders or officials to appreciate or satisfy their subordinates or people in order to avoid unwanted things. (4) as a means of education. euphemism is an educational tool. this is to avoid direct mention of words that are impolite or recognize words that are previously rarely known by the public at large because of the influence of the use of foreign words. (5) as a means of danger repellent. this euphemism used as a tool to ward off danger is a concept that reflects human efforts to obtain peace, safety, and welfare. method this type of research is qualitative research with content analysis method. qualitative method that requires categories as units of analysis, various categories made based on theoretical references, both categories of form and purpose and of meaning which are then simplified in steps by rational thinking (moleong, 2018); while the design uses inductive and deductive design models. the object of this research is related to euphemism. the data of this research are words, phrased and sentences that contain euphemisms. the data source is the short story guru by putu wijaya and the data are taken randomly in the forms of words, phrases and sentences oriented to euphemism. the data collection techniques used in this study are observation and recording. in order for this research to be more accurate, the writer (1) reads the the short story intensively, (2) notes the use of euphemism in the storyline, (3) sorts out the types of data that contain the functions of euphemism to be further presented in the form of discussions. the data analysis procedures in this study are related to the symbolic message of information with the following steps. 1) determine the form and function of each euphemism, 2) explore and reveal each euphemism meaning. 3) express the purpose or function of the euphemism used. 4) and based on these steps, conclusions are drawn which are then used as the basis for realizing the research report (busetto, 2020). results and discussion humans as cultured social beings have to pay attention to how expressions are presented in good language, especially regarding the uses of words that have cultural meanings. expression of language that is expressed in the form of words must remain in the corridor of social and cultural norms that can be accepted by the wider community. there are certain words that must be avoided, because they are considered taboo and are prohibited from being disseminated. by using euphemism in speaking and writing, social conflicts can be avoided. euphemism, a subtler expression instead of a harsh one and considered harmful or unpleasant becomes the object of this research based on the short story guru by putu wijaya. the data studied are in the form of words, phrases and sentences taken from the short story focused on the functions of euphemism, among others: language refinement, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 33 keeping things secret, diplomacy, education and hazard repellent. language refinement data 1: “anak saya bercita-cita menjadi guru. tentu saja saya dan istri saya jadi shok.” (wijaya, 2011, p.1) analysis: the word shok in data 1 is included in the euphemism category because it is considered a subtler expression to describe an atmosphere or situation that is very stressful. the word shok above itself comes from the english word “shock” which means unpleasant experience. this expression occurs when bapak characters knows the desire of his son who aspires to become a teacher. for bapak character, this is something that really surprises him and to hinder his son's dreams he is willing to do anything even if he has to drain the entire contents of his deposit. data 2: “kami dengar selentingan, kamu mau jadi guru, taksu?” (wijaya, 2011, p.1) analysis: the word selentingan in data 2 is euphemisms because it is felt to be subtler in expressing an utterance that has the meaning of being the subject of public discussion. data 3: “guru itu hanya sepeda tua.” (wijaya, 2011, p.1) analysis: the words sepeda tua, meaning old bicycle in data 3 is a euphemism to say a junk that has no value at all. junk refers to something so worthless that no one wants it. data 4: “ngapain jadi guru, mau mati berdiri? kamu kan bukan orang yang gagal, kenapa kamu jadi putus asa begitu?!" (wijaya, 2011, p.1) analysis: the word gagal or failed in the above expression shows a word refinement or euphemism to replace a harsher word, namely the mention of a person who has no future or a loser. data 5: “yang dijadikan bulan-bulanan, saya.” (wijaya, 2011, p.3) analysis: the word bulan-bulanan is a euphemism because it is considered to be a refinement of the condition of someone who is a victim of anger venting. data 6: “sekali ini kami tidak muncul dengan tangan kosong.” (wijaya, 2011, p.3) analysis: the words tangan kosong, or empty handed is a euphemism. the word empty-handed is used to avoid saying that we do not bring anything when we visit or meet someone so that we do not seem to respect the person concerned. data 7: “taksu senang sekali. tapi kami sendiri kembali sangat terpukul.” (wijaya, 2011, p.3) analysis: the word terpukul, which also means offended in data 7 is a euphemism of a disappointing situation. in addition, the word terpukul is generally used to refine words that have a sad or dissatisfied meaning data 8: “dipuji sedikit saja sudah mau banting tulang, kerja rodi tidak peduli tidak dibayar.” (wijaya, 2011, p.3) analysis: the words banting tulang or toiling is a euphemism to express working very hard regardless of time. the use of the words indicates a very unpleasant situation for a person to be able to meet the needs of his life or his family, so the word toil can be used to smooth out the meaning. data 9: “puji-pujian itu dibuat supaya orang-orang yang lemah hati seperti kamu.” (wijaya, 2011, p.3) analysis: the words lemah hati or weak-hearted in data 9 is considered a softer word to express the word not having a stand or determination, so it belongs to the category of euphemism. data 10: “pesawat penerimanya sudah rusak.” (wijaya, 2011, p.6) analysis: jumino suhadi, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, & susi ekalestari functions of euphemism in putu wijaya’s short story guru 34 the word pesawat conveys a subtler meaning for the expression or utterance using the word “brain”. the word “brain: is considered a word with harsh connotations, so that the word pesawat sounds smoother to replace it data 11: ketika kami tanyakan bagaimana hasil perenungannya selama dua bulan, taksu memberi jawaban yang sama. (wijaya, 2011, p.3) analysis: the words hasil perenungan, which means reflection result is a euphemism that falls into the category of smoothing words from thoughts or situations in undergoing the process of determining a difficult choice. data 12: “sudah waktunya membuat shock therapy pada taksu.” (wijaya, 2011, p.4) analysis: the words shock therapy is an expression of refinement of the word to put pressure on someone so that they want to do an order, a euphemism. keeping things secret data 13: kami berobat ke sana-kemari, sampai berkali-kali melakukan enseminasi buatan. (wijaya, 2011, p.9) analysis: the word inseminasi or insemination has a euphemistic meaning because it basically refers to an artificial pregnancy, an unnatural pregnancy; then the word insemination is a closure of the meaning of artificial pregnancy which is considered uncomfortable for the perpetrator. diplomacy data 14: “…padahal kamu masih muda, otak kamu encer, dan biaya untuk sekolah sudah kami siapkan.” (wijaya, 2011, p.2) analysis: the expression above is a category of euphemism used as a means of diplomacy. the expression above occurs when the bapak character persuades his son not to become a teacher because for him the teacher is a job that has no future. by using the expression in data 14, the bapak character tries to persuade his son not to do things that he thinks very bad as the son will plunge into life difficulties. data 15: “kamu kan bukan jenis orang yang suka dipuji kan? kamu sendiri bilang apa gunanya pujipujian, yang penting adalah sesuatu yang konkret.” (wijaya, 2011, p.4) analysis: the expression in data 15 is a refinement or euphemism in the diplomacy category because the series of expressions is a way to neutralize the situation or calm someone so that the person pays more attention to the expressions conveyed. in this case the above expression is conveyed by the bapak character to his son, taksu so that taksu can consider his decision to become a teacher. conclusion euphemism is an integral part of social interaction. humans as social beings must have social interactions to maintain life. one important means of sustaining life is the use of language, which must be polite, kind, and to the point and, more importantly, not offending others. thus euphemism is a must to be implemented by language users. figure 1. functions of euphemism the focus of this research is to identify and analyze the functions of euphemism in short the story of guru, based on the concept of euphemism initiated by wijaya and rohmadi (2011). there are five main functions of euphemism in oral and written speeches: as a means of language refinement, keeping things secret, diplomacy, education and hazard repellent. of the 15 euphemism data taken from the short story, 12 data of language refinement are found; 2 of diplomacy and 1 of keeping things secret; while no data is found for education and hazard repellent functions. thus, it can be seen that euphemism as a means of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 35 language refinement is the most dominant one used at 80%, followed by diplomacy at 13% and keeping things secret at 6%; references al-duleimi, h. y., rashid, s., abdullah, a. n. 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(2023). english graduate student’s perception about the effectiveness of online learning tutor in distance education. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.5531 received: 28-08-2022 accepted: 23-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction distance learning is a lively issue and gets a lot of focus in carrying out the learning process, especially in a situation that full of uncertainty like what we experience today. the existence of distance learning has become the right choice, especially if the individuals and organizations that will organize the learning have limited time and certain distance (mishra et al., 2020). as done by many schools, universities and institutions in today's era, distance learning can become the best choice to access the education quickly and easily (budiastra et al., 2020; churiyah et al., 2020; lee et al., 2019). the distance learning model has been introduced for a long time, one of which is carried out by universitas terbuka. as a campus that uses a distance learning scheme, universitas terbuka has a curriculum structure, learning methods, learning media, and the interaction process that are carried out through online platforms (charina et al., 2022; prasojo et al., 2019; rosyadi, 2018). among the highlights of the campus is the term tutor who is identified as an educator and the person who will abstract: one of the successes of a learning program is obtained by the various feedbacks during the evaluation process, including when the program is implemented in the form of distance learning. the purpose of this study was to examine the perception of graduate students in english education department about the effectiveness of distance learning carried out by the tutors during the learning process. descriptive quantitative method was used in this study to answer the objectives of this study. a total of 21 students of master's degree in english education department were involved in this study by selecting the respondents using the purposive sampling technique. the researchers used the measurement with reference to kirkpatrick's model which explains the effectiveness of online learning through the aspects of reaction, learning, behavior and results. the result has shown that the majority of respondents were satisfied with the learning process provided by the tutor as seen from the satisfaction score that reached more than 75% for each aspect. meanwhile, other results also showed that the four aspects which were the manifestation of the effectiveness of a tutor's learning have a strong and significant relationship in supporting the performance of a tutor. this study emphasized the importance of elaboration of every aspect that must be possessed by the tutors in carrying out online learning. keywords: distance education; english graduate student; online learning tutor; student’s perception. fauzy rahman kosasih, juhana, zulmi ramdani, & lidwina felisima tae english graduate student’s perception about the effectiveness of online learning tutor in distance education 2 provide the teaching process in a distance mode. this is what distinguishes it from learning in general which can be done face-to-face (foo et al., 2021). although this distance learning scheme has developed rapidly and many educational institutions are also using it, the limited information regarding the optimization and success of this distance learning program is one of the problems that still occur (alyoussef, 2023; lytras et al., 2022). in fact, if distance learning is effectively carried out, it will make it easier and reduce the cost of the implementation when it is done face-to-face. the success of a distance learning program will depend on many things. it starts from the purpose of planning a program, the availability of human resources in it, the connectivity between the program and the activities provided, and the existence of a structured and consistent program evaluation (abuhammad, 2020; suárez et al., 2021). the existence of an evaluation in a distance learning program is essential to obtain the information about whether or not a program is being held, including a specific evaluation of the human resources who run the program. evaluation is basically a structured form to obtain the information about the sustainability of a program and to conclude that a program is good or not for the institutions and individuals in it (dijk & schodl, 2015; martinez et al., 2016). evaluation is an imperative part in a distance learning activity, because with this evaluation, the organization is able to predict things that are considered to be improved to get better productivity or goals. various evaluations can be manifested in various activities and methods, so that the information obtained about the object of evaluation will be more comprehensive (ramdani et al., 2019). nowadays, many evaluations of distance learning programs are considered ineffective and assumed to be just a formality, even though essentially this evaluation activity can be very useful to get better results. this happens because there is an assumption that evaluation only costs a lot of money and the results are sometimes inaccurate. the inaccuracies in choosing the method, target object, and timing of the evaluation are considered to be a large part that makes the evaluation not optimal (luo et al., 2021; saidi et al., 2021; vinogradova & kliukas, 2015). in addition, it is the existence of the evaluation subject who is prone to subjective assessment which also adds to a bad impression in evaluating a program (saidi et al., 2021; vinogradova & kliukas, 2015). one of the schemes that may be carried out by the institutions in evaluating the distance learning, is usually carried out to evaluate an educator or tutor. tutor himself as presented in the previous explanation is a term that is commonly used to define an educator in an online mode (fandiño & velandia, 2020). basically, they have the educational background and experience that are qualified to provide the teaching process. what distinguishes it may be from the status and formal identity that they do not have as in universities in general. the situation that occurs in a tutor then makes them more flexible to carry out the learning process according to what they want, even though there are rules that regulate these activities (rosyadi, 2018). this is also one of the causes of the non-optimal evaluation carried out by the tutor (fandiño & velandia, 2020; gould et al., 2014; kang et al., 2021). the evaluation process carried out for the tutors usually only focuses on student perceptions in general, but it is still rare to use an assessment model with a focus on important psychological aspects in the distance learning process itself. in fact, when referring to the learning evaluation model introduced by the kirkpatrick model (farjad, 2012; kirkpatrick & kayser-kirkpatrick, 2014; sakthi & moshi, 2021), it is clear that to get optimization of the distance learning process includes various aspects including (1) reaction, which is a response that shows the level of individual satisfaction with the tutor so that they can feel the benefits of the tutor's presence; (2) learning, which is a form of individual assessment of the learning process in increasing the capacity of existing knowledge and skills; (3) behavior, is a form of real behavior that can be learned by individuals in the learning process and get comprehensive feedback, and (4) result, namely the level of achievement of the learning process that is generated and supports all existing processes. many previous research has focused on the development of model evaluation in the distance learning process. several similar studies have explained the major obstacles and challenges that will be faced in the distance learning (harrison, 2020; johnson & cooke, 2016; martin & bolliger, 2018). in indonesia itself, the online learning evaluation model has been discussed by many researchers and the majority contained the qualitative descriptions of how online learning was carried out (abdullah, 2018; affandi et al., 2020; riyanto & yunani, 2020). meanwhile, the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3 evaluation of online tutorials has also been carried out by ardiasih et al. (2018), but focused on the approach model used based on the student needs. however, research that focuses on direct evaluation of educators is not widely carried out, especially by using a comprehensive approach as described by kirkpatrick's model. the purpose of this study was to examine the perception of graduate students in english education department regarding the effectiveness of a tutor in providing the distance learning. method this study used a quantitative approach with a focus on descriptive quantitative design. this design was used to explain the descriptive data and then used it as supporting information for predetermined goals (ramdani et al., 2021; warsihna et al., 2021). this quantitative design is very useful for providing the initial information related to a topic, especially if the researcher does not have a lot of data and resources to explain a topic. but the researcher can objectively use a representative description to explain the initial situation of the phenomenon being raised. the subjects involved in this study were master students of english education department in universitas terbuka who were attending the distance lectures and were active as the students. the samples were selected using a purposive sampling technique, so that the respondents who filled in were those who fit the predetermined characteristics (kanya et al., 2021; ramdani et al., 2021). the selected sample will then be given an informed consent sheet containing their willingness to participate in this research activity consciously and without any coercion. meanwhile, the informed consent form itself has been validated by the research and community service institute of universitas terbuka. to answer the purpose of this study, the researcher used a research instrument in the form of a psychological questionnaire which was made using appropriate psychometric guidelines. the instrument made was based on a theoretical model of distance learning evaluation which was intended to see the effectiveness of a tutor in carrying out the learning process. the questionnaire was created using the theoretical foundation by kirkpatrick model which contains four aspects of distance learning (kirkpatrick & kayser-kirkpatrick, 2014). the four aspects are reaction, learning, behavior and results. the questionnaire was made using a likert scaling model consisting of 4 answer choices for each statement provided. the answer choices range from strongly disagree (1), disagree (2), agree (3), and strongly agree (4). each assessment aspect has a different number of items, including the reaction aspect as many as 12 items, the learning aspect as many as 3 items, the behavioral aspect as many as 6 items, and the results aspect as many as 4 items. thus, there are a total of 25 items used in this instrument. the instrument used in this study used an instrument that has been tested by in their research. based on the results of these trials, the psychometric properties of the instrument have met the quality of a good instrument. this was indicated by the validity value for each item reaching more than .3 and the resulting reliability coefficient was also above .7. after that, the researchers distributed the questionnaires directly to the subjects who were the target of filling out with a duration of 2 weeks for the data collection. data analysis was carried out by looking descriptively at the level of student satisfaction with the effectiveness of learning carried out by the tutors. the level of satisfaction was adjusted to the level of satisfaction above the average which indicates that if the results show a number above 75%, it means that the respondent is satisfied with the tutor's learning (kanya et al., 2021). meanwhile, correlational analysis using spss software was used to see the correlation and significance of the four aspects of learning carried out by the tutors, whether significant or not in supporting their learning performance. results and discussion the implementation of data collection resulted in as many as 21 subjects who successfully completed the questionnaire until it was complete. these 21 subjects are the master students in english education department in open university who are still active. for demographic data, the researchers present it in table 1. meanwhile, the results of the respondents' descriptive evaluation of the effectiveness of tutors in carrying out distance learning can be seen in table 2. table 1. respondent demographic data category total percentage gender man 3 14.3% woman 18 83.7% home address bandung 19 91.5% outside bandung 2 9.5% age 20 – 30 years old 3 14.3% 31 – 40 years old 15 71.5% fauzy rahman kosasih, juhana, zulmi ramdani, & lidwina felisima tae english graduate student’s perception about the effectiveness of online learning tutor in distance education 4 41 – 50 years old 2 9.5% 51 – 60 years old 1 4.7% occupation language teacher 21 100% based on table 1 regarding the data about research respondent, the majority of subjects in this study were dominated by female respondents. for the data on residence, most of them came from outside bandung, which reached more than 90 percent. meanwhile, the age of the subjects was dominated by the ages of 31-40 years which reached 15 people and the rest varied. for selfemployment, all subjects worked as english teachers. table 2. result of descriptive evaluation on tutor effectiveness aspect item average total average percentage reaction 1 3.76 3.51 87.75% 2 3.67 3 3.52 4 3.52 5 3.57 6 3.57 7 3.38 8 3.19 9 3.52 10 3.38 11 3.57 12 3.43 learning 13 3.24 3.25 81.25% 14 3.19 15 3.33 behavior 16 3.05 3.22 80.5% 17 3.19 18 3.24 19 31.4 20 3.33 21 3.38 result 22 3.33 3.39 84.75% 23 3.62 24 3.14 25 3.48 notes. the percentage results were obtained from the calculation of the total average value divided by the highest score on the scale, namely 4, then divided by 100%. the criterion is good if the percentage value is above 75%. the information in table 2 describes the description of the descriptive assessment given by the respondents to the existing tutors. it can be seen from table 2 that all the average values for the 25 items got the scores above 3 which means that interpretively the assessment given by respondents regarding the effectiveness of the tutors can be said to be good. then, if we make a percentage of the total average value for each aspect, the reaction aspect got the largest percentage, which was 87.75%, and the behavior aspect got the lowest percentage, which was 80.5/5. however, in general all aspects were considered to be good because everything was in over 75%. in table 3 below, the researchers present the correlation results from each aspect that will support the effectiveness of distance learning itself (see table 3). table 3. the correlation result of tutor effectiveness in distance learning aspect reacti on learnin g behavi our result reaction 1 .728** .717** .875** learning .728** 1 .737** .754** behaviour .717** .737** 1 .734** result .875** .754** .734** 1 notes: (the symbol ** represents a significant correlation at the 1% level) referring to the table 3 described above, the aspect of correlation results shown to the tutor resulted in significant scores and were at a satisfactory stage. the correlation value between the four aspects tested showed the scores above .3, with a significance of .01. this of course has illustrated that there was a positive and significant relationship between the four aspects tested. this study has provided the information that was quite clear in explaining the evaluation given by the participants, in this case the master students of english education department regarding the effectiveness of distance learning provided by the tutors. the researcher will in a structured way explain in advance the objectives to be explored in this study, which consist of two more specific objectives, namely explaining the description of the descriptive evaluation towards the quality of the tutors and further identifying the relationship between aspects in the assessment. the result has shown that the respondents felt that the existing tutors had provided good and effective teaching in the process. this can be seen from the high score of the assessment given to the tutors on the four aspects tested. the four aspects which included reaction, learning, behavior and results were considered good for the tutor. from the range of 0-100%, the percentage obtained in this study reached more than 75% for each aspect. these results certainly showed that the tutors had provided effective learning in these four aspects. when viewed from the explanation of each aspect, the reaction aspect was intended to see the satisfaction and interest in what has been shown by english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 5 the tutors. subjects considered that the tutors attracted enough attention in the learning process and what tutors did was able to attract and bind the students to be actively involved in various activities. in the learning aspect, the students also assumed that there was an increase in their knowledge and skills, one of which was due to the method and learning process carried out by the tutor. in terms of behavior, the result of tutor’s evaluation has shown that the behavior they showed and displayed was in accordance with what was learned with the tutor. as well as the last aspect, namely the results, in general, participants felt that the presence of a tutor could make them feel more satisfied and the final results that the students got were also according to their expectations. thus, the assessment form of the tutor was very good and has shown that the tutor played an active role in distance learning for students in this study. theoretically, the function and role of a tutor is of course being an educator as well as a partner for students to learn and discuss the challenging things (fandiño & velandia, 2020; gould et al., 2014). in the distance learning scheme itself, being a tutor is not easy and it requires mastery of the latest technology and media so as to be able to support the existing distance learning process. several previous studies also have assumed that the existence of a qualified tutor is able to provide an effective learning. in table 2 which has been explained previously, the reaction aspect got the highest score which was considered the best for the tutor. this reaction score was closely related to the level of care and creativity built by the existing tutor. this finding is also reinforced by the results of several previous studies which saw that personal aspects like this could be used as valuable capital in implementing the distance learning (johansen, 2023; obsuth et al., 2022; palali et al., 2018). as it is known that the existence of distance learning always limits a student's communication with a tutor to be more limited and less open, so a tutor who is able to be communicative, interactive, and passionate about learning is needed (fandiño & velandia, 2020; gould et al., 2014). meanwhile, other results which can also be seen in table 3 further strengthen the researchers’ findings that these four aspects tested play an important role in the quality of the learning provided. all aspects were positively and significantly correlated. this shows that when a tutor has a high level in one aspect, it will also increase other aspects. likewise, when one aspect is not optimal, the others will also not be optimal. as explained in the kirkpatrick model itself, which explains the four aspects as dimensions of continuity that will influence each other (dewi & kartowagiran, 2018; farjad, 2012; kirkpatrick & kayser-kirkpatrick, 2014; sakthi & moshi, 2021). in the first dimension, reaction and learning will be the two things that most determine how a tutor can be effective in providing learning. meanwhile, in third dimension, the behavior aspect will be a manifestation of the previous dimension and in the last dimension, the result, will show the quality of the process that has been passed. in general, the result of this research has provided quite comprehensive information about the existence of a tutor in distance learning. the effectiveness of learning carried out by the tutors is essentially determined by many things, although one of the dominant factors in distance learning is the mastery of media and technology. the result of this study has indicated that the personal aspect is also considered to have an influence on the sustainability of distance learning itself. this research is of course very limited to the number of subjects which was only 21 people. however, the involvement of a number of respondents could become the good information because it can be used by the institution as the evaluation material, meanwhile for the tutors themselves, it is necessary to improve their personal aspects, including abilities in reaction, learning, behavior and results. future research, of course, needs to involve more respondents by also looking more broadly at other non-personal factors such as relationships with students, organizational climate, and other technical factors. conclusion this study has shown that the effectiveness of a tutor in implementing distance learning depends on his/her personal aspects. respondents in this study assumed that the majority of existing tutors had carried out their roles effectively, judging by the assessment scores given by the respondents. acknowledgement the researchers thank the research and community service institute of the universitas terbuka for fully funding this study. we also thank all the respondents who have joined this study. references abdullah, w. 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(2021). kesiapan guru dalam mengimplementasikan buku panduan pembelajaran pasca bencana. kwangsan: jurnal teknologi pendidikan, 9(2), 142-152. https://doi.org/10.31800/jtp.kw.v9n2.p142-152 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 255 descriptive reading materials for tenth graders: palembang tourist destinations kananda agustina checaria language education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: kanandagstn@gmail.com ismail petrus language education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) language education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: checaria, k.a., petrus, i., & inderawati, r. (2021). descriptive reading materials for tenth graders: palembang tourist destinations. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 255-264. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5386 received: 28-08-2021 accepted: 21-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction reading is one of the most important skills in learning english. by reading, students can get more knowledge and important information, especially for tourism. moreover, the targets that should be achieved is mastering foreign language communication, such as simple daily conversation related to the work field, basic grammar, vocabulary, and basic expressions. in line with the statement above, teaching reading skill involves identifying word meaning, drawing inferences, identifying the main idea, and identifying relevant information of the text. the component skill approach is practical to important reading process and classroom practices and it is useful for teaching reading. in addition, reading is one of the most important skills in learning english. by reading, students can get more knowledge and important information, especially for tourism. moreover, the targets that should be achieved is mastering foreign language communication, such as simple daily conversation related to the work field, basic grammar, vocabulary, and basic expressions. in brief, those tourism subjects are mostly part of vocational high schools of tourism majoring. they should practically master a foreign language. based on ef epi in 2018, indonesia was internationally ranked 51 from 88 countries. it meant that indonesia has low proficiency in english, the score was 51.58. it can be concluded that reading interest in indonesia was very low. the data showed that the quality of abstract: the purpose of this study was to find out the validity, practicality and potential effect of the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations for the tenth-graders of vocational high school. this study was conducted based on akker (analysis, design, evaluation, and revision) development research design. the formative evaluation was consisted of self-evaluation, expert review, one-to-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field trial. formative evaluation was intended to find out the validity, practicality and potential effect of the product. the average validity score of the developed product was categorized as a very highly valid level. the practicality in one-to-one was at a highly practical level and small group evaluation was at a very high practical level. the reading test material was categorized as effective. it showed that in the reading test students exceeded the passing grade which was 75. in brief, descriptive reading texts of palembang tourist destinations were able to help students know about tourist destinations. the developed product was appropriate for the tenth-graders of vocational high school, especially for tourism majoring. keywords: descriptive reading materials; development research; palembang-tourist destinations. kananda agustina checaria, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati descriptive reading materials for tenth graders: palembang tourist destinations 256 english language teaching in indonesia still categorized as very unsatisfactory. most students faced the difficulties in reading comprehension especially in reading habit cause them lack in reading skill (satriani, 2018). students at higher proficiency level showed more interest in learning english than students at lower level (chin-ling, 2016). there were some methods to improve students' reading comprehension, like students' and teachers' understanding of the curriculum, the method of teaching reading and the variation of reading texts. descriptive texts aim to give information by describing particular person, place, thing or animal. meanwhile, for esp students’ especially tourism majoring needs to learn about descriptive texts in order to get a better information about the tourist destinations. esp (english for specific purposes) is stated to meet various kinds of demand and request for learners. students' needs are an important role in planning teaching because it is appropriate input selection in teaching language. the developing materials were used to support the framework of learners’ understanding of the language use. mahbub (2020) explains vhs (vocational high school) and general school use the same text/course books which are provided by government. furthermore, karman (2017) states materials which are provided for the students are general and not specified for certain study program or school. then, ayutami, harahap and syahrial (2018) found that the material used in the teaching and learning process did not suit with vhs students. there was no difference material in the specification or vocational high school students. it seems general english materials less appropriated to vocational high school students since the english materials should meet their needs and interests. salwianto and pratika (2017) found in their study that 2013 curriculum textbook did not meet the students’ needs. moreover, erfiani, ngadiso and suparno (2019) found that english textbook which is used by the school are lack of reading materials. it makes teacher to use english materials which are not suitable with the students’ needs. the use of irrelevant english books was a problem in the implementation of school based curriculum and it caused by two factors; the lack of relevant english books sold in the market and the inability of english teachers to design such kind of materials. senior high school students learn whole english as their subject and there was no specification in skills that they must master. meanwhile, vocational high school students need different subject matter. vocational high school students only need to learn about demand and needs which could support them in getting a job since most of the vocational school students were applying for a job right after they graduate (septiana, 2020; inderawati, et al., 2021; rhahima, et al., 2021; octaviana, et al., 2021). since esp materials provide exemplars relating to forms and structures of target genre to raise learners’ awareness of how texts are organized and how their communicative intentions are attained, it is important that they be relevant to learners’ target contexts and authentic. in line with the explanation before, it is necessary that the materials should be determine the particular features of the target language or related to their reality that should be taught to the particular learner. tomlinson (2012) states the important of materials development as an attempt optimally to meet all the students’ needs and wants. in connection with the idea above, the targets that should be achieved is mastering foreign language communication, such as simple daily conversation related to the work field, basic grammar, vocabulary, and basic expressions. in brief, those tourism subjects are mostly part of vocational high schools of tourism majoring. they should practically master a foreign language. an appropriate material should be based on the students' need and interest. hanifa (2017) found in her study that to improve material adaptation teacher should include some process like reducing, omitting, modifying, adding and supplementing but the lack of opportunity caused the materials adaptation become inappropriate for the students. waheeb (2019) found that the using authentic materials can helped in increasing students motivation and cultural awareness. by designing an appropriate descriptive reading material can accommodate suitable learning and teaching activities. designing materials should be done first before the teaching and learning process is conducted. this is due to that language teaching and learning is a complex activity that requires a good plan and it becomes a guide for both teachers and students in achieving some goals. the materials play a role in the success of a language course. furthermore, the materials are dealing with the students' needs, want and aspirations. especially in providing the concept of materials for second english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 257 language teaching which engaged what the student's necessity in teaching and learning activities. due to the importance of materials design for the students, the reasons to have materials are: the reading materials which have existed are not appropriate for vocational high school students, and it can support the teachers and students because it makes language learning task easily to teach. related to the explanation above, destinations originally from palembang can be utilized as reading material in efl teaching for students as an attempt of preserving local identity so that palembang destination will be promoted and tourist will visit palembang and it will not vanish from its existence as a part of precious cultures of palembang in the middle of globalization threats. by including these palembang tourist destinations as local content-based descriptive text in reading materials, not only students learn english but also, they learn their own culture. susanti (2017) states in her study that the story of siti zubaidah should be introduced as a cultural heritage as a local culture from south sumatera. concerning the use of palembang tourist destinations as the descriptive reading materials in efl teaching, the writer had not found english textbooks containing palembang tourist destinations texts. palembang tourist destinations texts available on the internet were also far from sufficiency and even the stories mostly in indonesian. those, there was a need for developing reading materials containing palembang tourist destinations texts. the local context was developed in the form of descriptive text as an explanation belongs to the type of text in the 2013 curriculum. there were some previous related studies about the research. the first was a study done by sopian, inderawati, and petrus (2019) who tried to developed e-learning based local-folklores which were used for the eight-graders. in their study, the eight-graders of smp xaverius 6 palembang were involved as the subject of the study and e-learning based local-folklores was developed. e-learning based local-folklores were considered appropriate to be implemented to the students based on the results of the assessment from the expert of content, construct and product design. meanwhile, elviana, inderawati, and mirizon (2020) conducted development study about interactive multimedia for teaching descriptive texts based on palembang local culture. the results of their study showed that the developed materials were valid, practical, and effective to be applied for the tenth-grade students of sma lti igm palembang. kusuma (2016) found in her study that the fifth-grade students of elementary schools in buleleng regency had some potency and problems towards the use of existing reading material. the development of descriptive reading material based on the criteria of good material, and it is also had high validity and practicality and was proven to be effective to improve the reading competency of the students (azizah, 2021; inderawati, et al., 2018; herawati, et al., 2020; kumbara, et al., 2021; octaviana, et al., 2021; tenridinanti, et al., 2021). from the explanation above, the differences were clearly stated. the title showed that the reading material of the previous study was narrative text while the present study was used descriptive text. interactive multimedia and e-learning were the media used in the previous study; meanwhile, the present study was not use media. in previous study, the researchers focused in senior high school and junior high school, while recent study focus on vocational high school, especially tourism majoring. some researchers have been done conducted the study by using descriptive text such as tourist destinations, historical building, and local culture as teaching materials. concerning to the case above, to contribute in the development of esp material is needed to meet the students’ need. this research is aimed at developing descriptive reading materials based on palembang-tourist destinations of which results can be used as a reference for english teacher to develop the materials, hopefully benefits to transfer and preserve local culture to the students through stories. then for students, it will minimize students’ difficulty in reading comprehension especially descriptive text and gain knowledge about palembang tourist destinations by studying localcontent materials. method development research method was used. this study was arranged to developed and validate a specific product. akker (1999) states development research aims to design a product for certain purposes through certain prototype, i.e.: analysis, design, evaluation, and revision. analysis phase has several analyses consist of instructional analysis, students' need analysis, and reading level analysis. kananda agustina checaria, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati descriptive reading materials for tenth graders: palembang tourist destinations 258 while in the design phase, descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations was developed and designed by considering the result of the analysis that was done in the analysis stage. this study used formative evaluation proposed by tessmer (1993) to improve the quality of the product. there are three main criteria for the quality of the product; validity, practicality and effectiveness. validity refers to the extent of the developed product related to the state of art knowledge (content validity) and that all the components included in the product are related and connected among each other (construct validity). practicality refers to the extent that users and experts consider the product that it meets the need is engaging and implementable in regular settings. effectiveness referred to the quality that the content and outcomes with the product are consistent with the intended aims. this study was conducted at smk 3 palembang. the population of the study was the tenth-grade students consisting of two classes in academic year 2019/2020. the subject of the study can be seen on the table below. dick, carey and carey (2005) states that the subjects of this study were selected based on their english proficiency. the students’ english proficiency was determined based on the teacher’s evaluation. table 1. subject of the study no stages of formative number of students description of the students 1 one-to-one evaluation 3 1 student for each category, i.e.: low, medium and high english proficiency. 2 small group 9 3 students for each category, i.e.: low, medium, and high english proficiency 3 field test 23 all students in real class total 35 students source: document from smk negeri 3 palembang, 2019 in one-to-one evaluation stage, there were three students consisted of one student for each category (low, medium, and high reading level). the next step was a small group phase; there were another nine students (three students for each category). and field trial/test phase, the students that involved in one-to-one and small group evaluation were not involved anymore. to conduct the field test, one class consisted of 35 students, only 23 students were involved. they were administered and developed reading comprehension test, then their scores were used to measure the effectiveness of developing a reading test in this study. this research aimed to develop descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations which were valid, practical and had a potential effect. to determine its validity, practicality and potential effect, instruments used in this study were questionnaires, interview, and reading comprehension test. questionnaires were given to experts in expert review and to students in one-to-one and small group evaluation in the form of likert-scale to get information about their opinion and comments after reviewing and/or using the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations. beside given a questionnaire to students, an interview was also conducted in one-to-one and small group evaluation. the interview intended to obtain students' comment, critiques, and suggestions after using the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations. the results of the interview were used as a basis for revision. formative evaluation was used to know the potential effect of the product by using reading comprehension test in the form of a multiple-choice question with five alternatives. the reading comprehension test was constructed by the writer based on descriptive texts developed in this study. the reading comprehension test included several aspects, such as the main idea, inference, vocabulary in context, cause and effect, and detail. the validity of the product was determined in experts’ review. after reviewing the descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations, the experts gave their judgment through a questionnaire in the form of likert-scale and write their comments on it. their comments were used as a basis for revision of the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations. to find out whether the developed descriptive reading materials with palembang tourist destinations was practical, a questionnaire was administered to students in one-to-one and small group evaluation. after studying descriptive texts by using the developed product, students gave their judgment through a questionnaire in the form of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 259 likert-scale with a score ranging from 1 to 5. students were also interviewed to obtain their comments on the developed product which their comments were used as the basis for revision. to determine the validity and practicality level of the product, the average score of the obtained total score from the students' judgment was calculated and interpreted as follows: table 2. validity and practicality categorization average score category 4.21-5.00 very high 3.41-4.20 high 2.61-3.40 moderate 1.81-2.60 low 1.00-1.80 very low table 3. potential effect categorization mastery percentage category 86-100 very effective 71-85 effective 56-70 moderate 41-55 less effective 0-40 poor effective to now the potential effect of the product, the developed reading comprehension test was used. this analysis was done by using the percentage of the number of students who passed the passing grade which was 75. after being analyzed, the result was then interpreted to the table above. results and discussion analysis phase based on the data analysis, three kinds of analysis conducted to get information about the tenthgraders which were instructional analysis, students’ reading level analysis, and students’ needs analysis. the aim of conducting instructional analysis was to identify the indicators and objectives of learning english for the tenth-graders students in odd semester. therefore, 2013 curriculum which is applied in the school was the target of the analysis. the indicators and learning objectives of developed reading materials were derived from the core competence and basic competence. students’ needs analysis was conducted to obtain information about their needs in terms of reading. aspects which were taken into consideration to obtain information about students’ needs were (1) their reading achievement; (2) their perception about the reading materials in their textbook; (3) their barriers in reading comprehension; (4) their perception of the learning process; and (5) their expectation on the developed reading materials. from the results of students’ needs analysis, the conclusion drawn as a guide to developed descriptive reading materials based on palembang tourist destination. descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations were needed to be developed. meanwhile in students’ reading level analysis, the analysis was intended to find out students’ reading level as the readability levels of the developed descriptive texts had to match with students’ reading level. design phase as the further action of this study, palembang tourist destinations descriptive texts were developed and designed the palembang tourist destinations descriptive texts. in relation to this, there was a step conducted in this design phase which was paperbased design. in this phase, the first thing to be conducted was to write the learning objectives which had been identified in the analysis phase. the next step was collecting all of stories from palembang. the palembang tourist destinations were taken from internet. since in 2013 curriculum, tourist destinations used in teaching descriptive texts, all tourist destination, like sacred places, historical places, iconic places, religious places, and so on were developed. the texts were translated into english from bahasa indonesia. after being adapted and translated, the developed descriptive texts were checked by the validators to know whether the texts were appropriate or not and the readability levels were checked by using an online tool of flesh kincaid. the developed materials, there was warming-up activities before the reading materials. after descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations had been set and the reading comprehension text was completed for evaluation phase. all of the items were constructed based on the indicators in the analysis phase. the reading comprehension test was used to measure whether the developed reading materials had potential effect or not and as a formative evaluation whether the students achieved the learning objectives or not. evaluation and revision evaluation and revision were done in this phase because some revisions were needed in one of the kananda agustina checaria, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati descriptive reading materials for tenth graders: palembang tourist destinations 260 evaluation phases; product had to be revised before it was proceeded to the next evaluation phase. from self-evaluation phase, the ungrammatical sentences, misspelling and redundant word were found. in validating this product, three experts validated this product to know whether the developed product was valid or not in content, instructional design and media design. moreover, it was intended to get the experts comments or suggestion towards the developed product to improve the quality of the product. there was suggestion which needed to be paid attention and the validity level of the product was described below: table 5. suggestion from expert review no. experts review judgement suggestion 1 validation sheet of content check your grammar. 2 instructional design 3 validation sheet of media table 6. the recapitulation of validity, practicality and potential effect palembang tourist destinations validity practicality potential effect conte nt const ruct media one-toone small group evaluation mastery percentage of field trial unit 1 (historical places) 4.01 4.25 4.89 4,09 4.21 73.90% unit 2 (sacred places) 4.01 4.2 4.52 78.26% unit 3 (religious places) 3.99 4.14 4.98 0 unit 4 (iconic places) 4.08 4.23 5 82.60% total 16.09 16.82 19.39 4.09 4.21 234.76% average score 4.02 4.21 4.85 4.09 4.21 78,25% average of validity = 4.36 average of practicality = 4.15 average of potential effect = 78.25% the average score of content validity (i.e.: english) was 4.02 showed in table 6 was at a highly valid level. it can be concluded that a set of descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations was valid in content and categorized as highly valid level. then, in construct validity (i.e.: instructional design), the average score was 4.21 which was at a very highly valid level. it can be concluded that the product valid. and for validation sheet of media, the expert reviewing the product was a lecturer of english study program at sriwijaya university. from the validation sheet of media, the average score o media validity was 4.85 which was at a very highly valid level. to determine the product overall validity, the average score of scores above was used. the results showed that the average score was 4.36 which was a very high validity category. therefore, in brief, the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations was valid and in category of very high validity. one-to-one evaluation there were three students involved in one-to-one evaluation to use and review the developed of descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations. the students consisted of one student as the representative of students having high english proficiency, one other students as the representative of students having medium english proficiency, and the last one as the representative of students having low english proficiency. the results from the total 15 items of questionnaire, the average score from the three students’ score was 4.09 which was at a high practicality level. it can be concluded that the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations was practical and at a high practicality level. in addition, in determining the practicality of the product, in one-to-one evaluation, interview was also conducted to obtain students’ comments and suggestions toward the developed reading materials, the comments and suggestions were used as a basis for the revision of the product. small group evaluation small group evaluation was intended to know the practicality of the product like in one-to-one evaluation. small group evaluation, involved more students and was conducted by implementing the real instruction by using the developed descriptive reading materials about palembang touristdestinations. students who were participated in oneto-one evaluation were not involved anymore in small group evaluation. based on the results of the questionnaire, the average score of practicality in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 261 small group evaluation was 4.21 which was at a very high practicality level. it can be concluded that a set of developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist-destinations was practical and at a very high practicality level. table 7. results of questionnaire per text text one-toone evaluation small group evaluation field trial text 1 4.09 4.23 4.24 text 2 4.11 4.27 4.27 text 3 4.11 4.19 4.25 text 4 4.02 4.23 4.25 text 5 4.09 4.26 4.23 text 6 4.11 4.18 4.24 text 7 4.09 4.13 4.25 text 8 4.13 4.19 4.25 average 4.09 4.21 4.25 remark h vh vh field trial field trial was intended to examine the potential effect of the developed product. field trial was conducted in a real class of tenth-graders of smk negeri 3 palembang. there were 23 students involved in field trial. to determine the potential effect of the product as mentioned before, the writer tested the students with reading comprehension test in the form of multiple-choice questions. descriptive reading materials with palembang tourist destinations were given to determine the potential effect of developed product to students’ passing grade. from the results of reading test material, the developed product was effective. it showed that 19 students in the reading test fulfilled the passing grade that means the mastery percentage was 78.25% which was at a highly potential effect categorization. from the results above, the best aspect was inference and the worst aspect was vocabulary. figure 1. the mastery percentage of three texts discussion the developed product was a set of palembang tourist destinations in relation to descriptive reading materials for tenth-graders of tourism majoring. there were some phases that examined to be done in the process of developing reading materials and reading test materials. the prototype of the study used akker model which were analysis, design, evaluation and revision. in the analysis phase, there are three kinds of analysis conducted to get the information about the tenth-graders which were instructional analysis, students’ needs analysis and students’ reading level analysis. in the instructional analysis, the indicators and the learning objectives were analyzed. the core competence and basic competence of descriptive demanded students to response descriptive texts actively and established students become an active reader. it was relevant to the descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations which invited students to understanding and appreciating local tourist destination in the form of descriptive text. therefore, students were able to reach the learning objectives in catching and reflecting the values from descriptive texts and for teacher, it was a chance to develop reading materials to introducing local tourist destinations, especially in palembang. in students’ needs analysis, it was to obtain information about students’ needs in term of reading. some aspects were taken into consideration. in this phase, interview was conducted to the tenth-grade teachers and the results was that the students’ reading achievement still unsatisfactory and needed to be improved. then, to get the students’ perception about reading materials in their textbook, students’ difficulties in reading comprehension, students’ perception of the learning process, a questionnaire and interview conducted. from the results of students’ needs analysis, the conclusion drawn as a guide to developed descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations. in reading level analysis phase, this phase described that there were some needs and lacks. the students’ needs were having good proficiency in reading english. as explained before, english becomes one of the subjects that is examined in the national examination and most of the questions were reading texts. it can be seen how student comprehend the texts and represent the meaning of the texts. meanwhile, the lacks were kananda agustina checaria, ismail petrus, & rita inderawati descriptive reading materials for tenth graders: palembang tourist destinations 262 students reading comprehension was not really good, their reading interest was good but they were lack of motivation and eagerness in reading, especially in reading english. suryanto (2017) claims that during the teaching of reading comprehension, students tend to be inactive. paper-based design was conducted, where a set of descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations were developed and designed. the first thing to do was to write the learning objective related to the analysis phase and next step was collecting the tourist destinations from palembang from the internet and simplify the text before adapted and translated into english. there were eight texts about the tourist destinations in palembang and each text has different readability level that match with the students’ reading level. to achieve the instructional goals designing the process of objectives, media, techniques are needed (gentry, 1994). the last phase was the evaluation and revision phase. in evaluation phase, there are three criteria for the product: validity, practicality and potential effect. formative evaluation consisted of five steps. in every step, the product was checked in terms of quality of the content, construct and media. after developed the texts, the product was validated by the three experts, to know whether the developed product was valid or not in the form of content, instructional design and media design (herawati, et al., 2020; inderawati, et al., 2021, kumbara, et al., 2021; azizah, et al., 2021). the practicality of the developed product was done in one-to-one and small group evaluation. the results from each evaluation were calculated and interpreted. field trial was intended to examine the potential effect of the developed product of descriptive reading materials with palembang tourist destinations. to determine the potential effect of the product, the writer tested the students with reading comprehension test in the form of multiple-choice questions. descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations were given to determine the potential effect of the developed product to the students. from the test given, the results showed that the reading comprehension test was effective because most of students accomplished the passing grade. from the results above, the best aspect in reading descriptive materials was inference. puspita (2017) found in her study that to comprehend the text, students should understand the content of the text. in fact, students found some unfamiliar words on the texts and could not get what it means. it showed that descriptive texts of palembang tourist destinations were able to help students known about local tourist destination. perhaps, students understood about descriptive text. conclusions this study aimed at developing a set of valid, practical and effective descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations for tenthgraders. there were some conclusions described as follows: first, the developed product of descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations was valid in term of content validity, construct validity and media validity after reviewed by three experts of english, instructional design and media. the obtain score was (4.36) which was in a very highly valid level. then, the developed product of descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations was practical after giving the reading material to the students in one-to-one group evaluation and small group evaluation. the obtain score was (4.15) which was in a highly practical level. third, the developed product was effective as reading assessment which was showed all the texts were effective as reading assessment. it was conducted by the result of students’ reading comprehension test was (78,25%). the result of practicality was relevant to what rhahima, et al. (2021) and zahra, et al. (2019) found that the developed product based on palembang culture was important for students to learn their own culture. based on the results above, there are some suggestions. first, the english teachers especially for esp teachers are suggested to have information about students’ needs and students’ reading level before having reading activity. during the learning process, it would be better if the teacher provided more vocabularies related to the material and focused more on vocabularies so that students can understand the texts better. and teacher should be familiar with 21st century curriculum and instruction enable innovative learning methods which integrated with the use of higher order thinking skills. for students, students are expected to use other kinds of palembang-local tourist-destination reading materials. for schools, especially vocational high school is suggested to provide such training for english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 263 teachers to develop local tourist destination because students were interested and motivated in learning descriptive reading materials about palembang tourist destinations. finally, other researchers are suggested to develop other materials with other type of texts. references akker, j. 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https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahukewjw5rz8zzhqahxszcskheildhaqfjaaegqibbab&url=http%3a%2f%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2fsites%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2ffiles%2fasiatefl%2520program%2520book%252023%2520agustus%2520new.pdf&usg=aovvaw1zppf5x320qs9lhke5bsl9 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahukewjw5rz8zzhqahxszcskheildhaqfjaaegqibbab&url=http%3a%2f%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2fsites%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2ffiles%2fasiatefl%2520program%2520book%252023%2520agustus%2520new.pdf&usg=aovvaw1zppf5x320qs9lhke5bsl9 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahukewjw5rz8zzhqahxszcskheildhaqfjaaegqibbab&url=http%3a%2f%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2fsites%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2ffiles%2fasiatefl%2520program%2520book%252023%2520agustus%2520new.pdf&usg=aovvaw1zppf5x320qs9lhke5bsl9 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahukewjw5rz8zzhqahxszcskheildhaqfjaaegqibbab&url=http%3a%2f%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2fsites%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2ffiles%2fasiatefl%2520program%2520book%252023%2520agustus%2520new.pdf&usg=aovvaw1zppf5x320qs9lhke5bsl9 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahukewjw5rz8zzhqahxszcskheildhaqfjaaegqibbab&url=http%3a%2f%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2fsites%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2ffiles%2fasiatefl%2520program%2520book%252023%2520agustus%2520new.pdf&usg=aovvaw1zppf5x320qs9lhke5bsl9 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahukewjw5rz8zzhqahxszcskheildhaqfjaaegqibbab&url=http%3a%2f%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2fsites%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2ffiles%2fasiatefl%2520program%2520book%252023%2520agustus%2520new.pdf&usg=aovvaw1zppf5x320qs9lhke5bsl9 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahukewjw5rz8zzhqahxszcskheildhaqfjaaegqibbab&url=http%3a%2f%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2fsites%2fasiatefl2017.uny.ac.id%2ffiles%2fasiatefl%2520program%2520book%252023%2520agustus%2520new.pdf&usg=aovvaw1zppf5x320qs9lhke5bsl9 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1199324 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 159 the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia desi nahartini department of english education, faculty of tarbiya and teachers’ training, state islamic university syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: desi@uinjkt.ac.id ratna sari dewi department of english education, faculty of tarbiya and teachers’ training, state islamic university syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: ratna@uinjkt.ac.id siti fitriah department of english education, faculty of tarbiya and teachers’ training, state islamic university syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: sitifitriahmusadad@gmail.com maya defianty department of english education, faculty of tarbiya and teachers’ training, state islamic university syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: maya.defianty@uinjkt.ac.id zaharil anasy department of english education, faculty of tarbiya and teachers’ training, state islamic university syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: zaharil.anasy@uinjkt.ac.id apa citation: nahartini, d., dewi, r. s., fitriah, s., defianty, m., & anasy, z. (2021). the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 159-174. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5366. received: 02-08-2021 accepted: 28-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction indonesia has a vast number of populations with the fourth rank in the world after china, india, and the united states. hence, it is a little surprise that the needs of employment rate relatively high in indonesia. unfortunately, jobs can be considered as scarce as the numbers of employee outweigh employment opportunities. as a consequence, many abstract: the scarcity of job opportunities in indonesia has encouraged some of its citizen to work abroad; these workers are commonly known as pmi (pekerja migran indonesia –indonesian migrant workers). one of the salient challenges encountered by pmi occupied in the semi-skilled and unskilled employment, which shared the highest percentage of pmi, is limited english proficiency. this has caused a range of formidable impacts ranging from misunderstandings between the employer and pmi to making pmi less preferable compare to workers from other countries. this research aims to (1) evaluate materials used in the english training programs by blkln (balai latihan kerja luar negeri -overseas training centre for indonesian migrant workers); (2) identify pmi’s perceptions concerning their english language needs. forty-five pmi in malaysia and thirty-six pmi in singapore were involved in this case study research. findings from the study revealed that there are gaps between how english is taught at blkln and pmi’s language learning needs to the extent of materials and method. hence, findings from this research put an urgent call to improvement in the english language training at blkln in order to meet the pmi’s learning needs. keywords: indonesian migrant workers (pmi); english training materials; blkln (training centre for indonesian migrant workers) desi nahartini, ratna sari dewi, siti fitriah, maya defianty, zaharil anasy the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia 160 indonesian migrate to find jobs abroad commonly known as pmi (pekerja migran indonesia – indonesian migrant workers). data from the research and development centre of badan nasional penempatan dan perlindungan tenaga kerja indonesia (national agency for placement and protection of indonesian migrant workers, hereafter bnp2tki) in 2020, showed that although the number of pmi is decreasing from 283.640 in 2018 to 276.553 in 2019, this number is still regarded as high which implies that working abroad an alternative for job seeker in indonesia. raharto (2017) argued that of the reasons why pmi migrates is that they want to look for a better and fixed income to ends meet. malaysia, taiwan, hong kong, and singapore have become target counties for most pmi. malaysia is relatively preferable for pmi because the language used in the country is moderately similar to bahasa indonesia; thus, pmi need not to struggle to communicate in english (salleh, nordin & rashid, 2012). being proficient in english is actually pivotal for migrant workers as english is commonly used as means of communication in most target countries. this also means that lack of english competence can hamper migrant workers for job opportunities. as an illustration, in taiwan migrant worker from filipino is more preferable as they have good english competence which is not surprising because english is a second language in philippines (loveband, 2003; tan, 2003). to the extent of language competence, bnp2tki as the governing board dealing with pmi has specified that it is compulsory for migrant to be able to communicate in english; therefore, all pmi candidates must have undergone english language training program prior to their departure to the destination country. however, enabling pmi with good english competence can be challenging due to the following reasons. first, unlike in malaysia and philippines, english is a foreign language in indonesia which means the context of learning english is not available in the society (rahmi, 2015). second is the wide array of pmi’s educational background, from high school to elementary graduates, which can make learning and designing a language program complicated (bnp2tki 2019 report, 2020). third, in indonesia, the importance of improving pmi’s english skills is supported by evidence that language teaching projects in development context are often underpinned by a perceived relationship between english language ability and economic development (azam et al, 2010; aslam et al, 2010; eia, 2010; chiswick and miller in coleman, 2010; pinon and haydon, 2010; shamim, 2011; erling, 2015). last, as novalita (2008) reported materials provided by blkln (balai latihan kerja luar negeri -overseas training centre for indonesian migrant workers) have not yet in line with pmi’s needs as they are more indonesia-oriented instead of target country oriented. departing from this point it is important to establish english training program that can support pmi in the target country. however, despite the importance of such program, there remains a paucity of evidence on how english language program for pmi should be carried out. only few studies have investigated this landscape. for example, astuti (2008) focused her study on rationales for english language training for migrant workers. astuti (2008) delineated specific points on how learning and language learning can be implemented in the context of migrant workers; however, the study is merely conceptual-based that information on how it is implemented in real life setting cannot be attained. another study in the same areas was conducted by hermayanti (2018) who focused her study on functional english design for domestic migrant workers. although hemayanti’s (2018) study has shed light on materials and implementation, as she mentioned in her study it has not designed to support pmi in official and scientific situations. hakim, abidin, and adnan (2019) also focused their study on designing english language training for migrant workers using assure model. however, this study is limited to pmi in penang, malaysia; hence it may not be suitable to be adopted by various english training for pmi who are planning to work in various different countries. in light of the great contribution made by tki to indonesia commonly known as pahlawan devisa (foreign exchange heroes) needs to be appreciated and supported by providing effective english language training as their preparation before the departure to the destination country. considering the global competition situation, indonesians working both in formal and informal sectors overseas such as in singapore, malaysia and hong kong, establishing english language training is pivotal as it can support pmi to survive and also english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 161 communicate in various different context in the target country. this study will take an initial step in establishing english language programs for migrant workers by evaluating current english language training materials at blkln and also conducting needs analysis which data taken from pmi in malaysia and singapore. nowadays, the tasks of need analysis are much more complex: it aims at collecting information about the learners and at defining the target situation and environment of studying esp. according to duddley-evans and st. john (2009), there are eight components in today's concept of need analysis which have been grouped into five broad areas including: target situation analysis and objective needs analysis (e.g., tasks and activities learners will use english for) which includes necessities, lacks and wants of the learners. necessities refer to what the learners have to know for functioning effectively in the target situation. accordingly, finding out what the learners know already is crucial to decide any necessities that the learners lack. in addition, learners’ view as to what their needs are should also be taken into consideration despite the possibility that their views may conflict with other interested parties such as teachers or institutions. linguistic analysis such as register analysis, discourse analysis, genre analysis (i.e., knowledge of how language and skills are used in the target situations). register analysis is any analysis in the word and sentence level to make it relevant to learners’ needs. further, discourse analysis refers to a textual analysis above the level of sentence in which identifying how sentences are combined into a discourse used as an act of communication and functions of materials. it may overlap with genre analysis in which discourse analysis studies cohesive links between sentences, paragraphs, and or the structure of the whole text while genre analysis focuses on distinctions of structures in one type of text compared to another. subjective needs analysis (i.e., learners’ wants, means, subjective needs-factors that affect the way they learn e.g., previous learning experiences, reasons for attending the course, expectations). the voices of the learners are involved which includes relevant aspects before and during the course is implemented. learners’ background and opinions are important in the analysis. present situation analysis to identify learners' current skills and language use. it represents the current condition of some aspects in the teaching and learning situation such as learners’ characteristics, staffing, materials, syllabus and academic records which contain the data of their language learning. it also covers the information of their current proficiencies and ambitions in learning the language. means analysis (i.e., information about the environment where the course will run) covers the logistics and pedagogy which may impact on the implementation of the course. some considerations included in the means analysis are classroom culture, staff, pilot target situation analysis, status of service operations, and study of change agents. widodo (2016) stated that "as part of esp instructional design, needs analysis serves as the basis for informed curriculum practices, such as syllabus design, materials development, and instructional design. thus, the values of needs analysis should go beyond the prediction of what should be taught and learned." a long time before, stern (1992) as cited in zakaria, et.al (2018) distinguished four types of esp teaching objectives: proficiency, knowledge, affective, and transfer. further, hutchinson & waters (1992) observe that if we know why learners need english, the content of the language can be adjusted accordingly, and the teaching process will focus on these needs. these ideas have been in line with the findings of several recent research (masoupanah and tahririan, 2013; alsamadani, 2017; sulistio, 2016; sincer, 2017) which expressed that 'needs should be stated in terms of goals and objectives which, in turn, can serve as the bases for developing tests, materials, teaching activities and evaluation strategies.' (brown & lee, 2020). in the context of pmi english language training, need analysis should be done to identify specific english language materials and content in order to suit the pmi english language needs especially when they have already stayed and worked abroad. each content material should lead to specific goals and objectives that must be reached through right and well-constructed classroom activities and evaluation strategies. before pmi can work in foreign countries, it is a must for them to have passed the training held at blkln (balai latihan kerja luar negeri) which is provided both by the government or by private desi nahartini, ratna sari dewi, siti fitriah, maya defianty, zaharil anasy the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia 162 institutions. based on ministry of manpower regulation no. 17/men/vi/2007 article iii, blkln can be held by the indonesian government or private sector job training institutes. the private job training institution should have a legal license issued by the head of the agency responsible for manpower affairs in the district or city. english language training is one of the training provided by the blkln to improve the quality of pmi to be able to work professionally in the destination countries as well as improving their qualification. the english training curriculum discussed in this study is designated to the whole body of english knowledge that pmi, as the learners, acquires in blkln, as the training institution. there has been a very little empirical investigation into the english language training activities held at blkln in indonesia. on the other hand, teaching english for vocational purposes especially for pmi in indonesia was found to be far from satisfactory in terms of customizing esp courses by using the real needs of learners or the language situation at the workplace as the input to feed esp courses. one implication of this is that when the specific language needs are not defined based on language use, tki may end up being troubled with the language proficiency level that they achieve once they join the workplace. bad quality of specific language proficiency and the low level of communicative ability of tki has been reported to create many problems in foreign countries. an english learning program specifically for indonesian domestic workers held by astuti (2008) mentioned some components and process to be considered such as learning interaction and teaching activities with communicatively purposeful activities such as conversation, dialogue, role play and simulation; teacher functions as the facilitator as well as the organizer of the learning recourses and activities; instructional material function that is authentic such as signs, advertisement, documents, realia, and other visual sources around, and; syllabus design that is built around the notion of communicativeness with functional or task based. nevertheless, lubis (2011) pointed out that it was suggested that this need analysis requires the involvement of exindonesian domestic workers or those who have experienced the target situation. accordingly, hermayawati (2018) found out that the pmi candidates are still asked to memorize a list of words and their meanings. thus, in her study of functional english design for domestic migrant workers, the material was designed by developing the use of “imparting and seeking factual information” language category of the training program and broken down into eight units namely greeting, answering a call, accepting a guest, organizing the house, caring for children, giving direction, going to the market, and writing a memo with an addition of phonetic spelling and transcriptions. unfortunately, this design turned out to have limited learning outcomes in the mastery of speaking skills and limited use of language just for survival needs. according to novita (2019), english teaching for indonesian migrant workers should be in accordance to skkni (standar kompetensi kerja nasional indonesia) or indonesian national work competency standards. this standard is defined as a formulation of work capabilities which includes the aspect of knowledge, skills, and attitudes in relevance to the implementation of required tasks and vocation according to the provisions of legislation. during the observation in her study, it was found out that the teacher asked learners to repeat the material previously given. learners were expected to know and understand all vocabulary given by the teacher. the review was done by the teacher saying the vocabulary in bahasa indonesia and followed by the learners saying the word in the english version. only simple sentence is used during the class considering the limited communication with the employers in the target situation (lubis, 2011). it can be seen that the strategy used by the teacher is input to output strategies which focus on providing learners with input from the teacher as the basis for production (output). accordingly, considering the big influence of teachers to the learner’s learning, good quality teachers are required, not only those having experienced working in the destination country or ex-indonesian migrant worker, but also those having a certification. another study was also conducted by hakim and abidin (2019) in developing an english instructional module for indonesian migrant workers focusing on speaking and writing activities. some topics covered are daily conversation, business communication, basic writing, speech delivery, news reading, and tourism conversation. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 163 providing english training program to the pmi candidates can improve their basic english as well as their self-awareness towards the importance of the target language, and further planning of the program is necessary and highly suggested in a more practical management (metboki and ledo, 2017). the planning can begin by conducting an evaluation of the current materials used by the english training program. in order to evaluate a course book, four criteria need to be taken into considerations (cunningsworth in mukundan et.al, 2011). first, it should correspond to learners’ needs by matching the aims and objectives of the learning program. second, it should reflect the uses (present or future) that learners will make of the language to help equip students to use language effectively for their own purposes. third, it should take account of students’ needs as learners and should facilitate their learning processes, without dogmatically imposing a rigid “method”. last, it should have a clear role as a support for learning. like teachers, it mediates between the target language and the learner. method in relevance to the nature of the research questions and theories underpinning the study, a case study is selected as the research design. this method is particularly useful in studying detailed information of a program that can be considered as a case (yin, 2018; merriam & tisdel, 2015; cohen, manion & morrison, 2018). among the three types of case studies outlined by yin (2018), this study employed a multiple (or collective) case study model. the overall study involved two cases: tki in singapore and malaysia. three sources of data were collected for this study: document reviews, questionnaires, and focus group discussions (hereafter, fgd). the documents consist of the english training program guideline and module used in the blknln. to find out the strengths and weaknesses further on the module as well as to evaluate its effectiveness, a checklist for evaluation and selection of course books (richards, 2017) was used. the checklist includes some elements such as aims and approaches, design and organizations, language content, skills, topics, methodology, teachers’ books, and practical consideration. the questionnaire was divided into two parts. the first part aimed to identify participants' perceptions of their language needs and capabilities; the questions in this part were developed based on li and richard's (1995) questionnaire who was working on needs analysis on cantonese. the questionnaire explored the pmi’s needs as learners for english, attitudes towards english, and their perceptions of english training they have taken. the questionnaire asked the participants to identify (a) situations in which they need english, (b) their present level of ability in english, (c) their experience in learning english, (d) their preferences for classroom activities in an english class, and (e) their attituded towards english as a language. another instrument employed in this research was fgd. the fgd was conducted in tki communities in singapore and malaysia. the fgd aims to obtain further information from the questionnaires data and to clarify several points from the questionnaire that need deeper understanding. this study employed purposive sampling (creswell, 2015) and participants were selected based on their relevant profiles to the purpose of the study (flick, 2014). stake (2006) as cited in ebneyamini & moghadam (2018) contented that there are three criteria for selecting cases: relevancy, diversity, and opportunities to get an insight about the subject being investigated. in line with this idea, the participants involved in the study are indonesian migrants who have worked for several years in malaysia and singapore. as mentioned previously, data for this study were derived from questionnaires, fgd, and documentation. before collecting the data, the researchers had a meeting with the blkln representative to ask for permission. having gained permission to enter the research site, data collection began with access to relevant documents of english language training material for tki candidates such as the learning syllabus and module. the questionnaires were distributed to indonesian migrant workers in malaysia and singapore and the data was codified before conducting the fgd session as an aim to identify several points which were interesting, or still unclear which needed further clarification. the fgd was held in bahasa indonesia, and each fgd which lasted for 60 to 90 minutes was audio recorded. documents as another source of data for this study were acquired during the process of collecting data from questionnaires and fgd. desi nahartini, ratna sari dewi, siti fitriah, maya defianty, zaharil anasy the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia 164 the process of making meaning from the collected data or data analysis (gay, mills, & airasian, 2014) was adapted from creswell (2015). the collected data from the questionnaires were coded based on the questions. an initial reading was conducted having transcribed the audio recording from the fgd. codes were labeled based on research questions. an excel spreadsheet was selected as a platform to analyze the data as it provides more flexibility in managing the data. since the data collected in this research were in bahasa indonesia, they were first translated before they were displayed. results and discussion results english language training material at blkln work competency-based training program (program pelatihan berbasis kompetensi kerja) in blkln covers some units of competencies for the pmi candidates. one of the units of competence is to communicate in the language of the destination country (melakukan komunikasi dengan menggunakan bahasa negara penempatan). this unit of competence includes the knowledge, skills, and work attitudes required to have a verbal communication and to use any communication tools in a relevant manner to the language of the destination country. table 1. communication unit elements of competence criteria indicators to use a verbal communication vocabulary is pronounced accurately. able to explain how to pronounce the vocabulary correctly and accurately able to pronounce the vocabulary correctly and accurately must be accurately and clearly sentences are structured clearly and accurately. able to explain how to structure a sentence clearly and correctly able to structure the sentence clearly and correctly must be thorough, precise, and careful communication is done in a polite manner. able to explain how to have a communication in a polite manner able to have a communication in a polite manner must be thorough, precise, and accurate to use communication tools communication device is identified. able to explain how to identify a communication device able to identify a communication device must be thorough, effective, precise, and accurate communication device is used according to the procedure. able to explain how to use the device according to the procedure able to use the device according to the procedure must be thorough, effective, precise, and accurate telephone communication is done in a polite manner. able to explain how to have a communication on the telephone in a polite manner able to have a communication on the telephone in a polite manner must be correct and accurate communication device is taken care of. able to explain how to take care of communication devices well to keep functioning able to take care of communication devices to keep functioning must be through, precise, and accurate it is followed by the variable context in which in this case the unit is for workers in the scope of domestic such as housekeeping, babysitting, childcaring, caretaking, family cooking, gardening, and family driving. the communication is not limited to receiving guests, at the market, at the hospital, at the airport, at the bank. overall, it is meant to cover the use of vocabulary and simple sentences in the working environment. this syllabus is then translated into a module as the source of learning material. the module content is listed below: table 2. module content lesson theme lesson 1 alphabets lesson 2 numbers lesson 3 pronouns, examples of using 'can' (ability), question words lesson 4 general expressions (greeting, apologizing) lesson 5 general expressions (question words) lesson 6 general expressions lesson 7 general expressions lesson 8 general expressions lesson 9 personal data, experience and others lesson 10 some questions and answers lesson 11 some questions and answers lesson 12 prepositions of place and time lesson 13 imperatives (give me, don’t, commands), want to lesson 14 let me, let's lesson 15 days, months lesson 16 want lesson 17 telling time lesson 18 a list of verbs lesson 19 personal data, experience and others lesson 20 some lists of vocabulary (articles of clothing, objects in bedroom, objects in living room, objects in the house, kitchen utensils, family members, miscellaneous, vegetables/plants/flowers, objects in the bathroom, food/drinks/fruits) english language needs of tki candidates the first part of the questionnaire is to identify the situations in which english would be useful for the pmi. from 14 situations given in the questionnaire, all situations are considered as useful. the five situations considered as most useful are (ranked in order): (1) getting information about services and goods i want to buy. (2) buying things in stores and supermarkets. (3) asking for directions. (4) ordering food in a restaurant/canteen/cafeteria. (5) talking to colleagues at work. (6) making travel arrangement the situations mostly rated by the participants are interactional needs in which they have to interact socially with other speakers. in addition to the situations in the list, some additional situations are listed such as emergency, culture shock, mental health, rights and duties as pmi, employment contract, and communities or organizations. then, participants are asked to indicate their current level of ability in english: (1) basic (lower): 45%. (2) basic (upper): 15%. (3) intermediate (lower): 0%. (4) intermediate (upper): 10%. (5) advanced: 30%. most of participants indicate themselves to have the basic level of english and some others have an advanced level. the lower basic level of proficiency means that they know a few words and fixed expressions; cannot manage conversational exchanges; respond to question and answer exchanges on a few topics; have very limited vocabulary, grammar, and knowledge of idioms, and have pronunciation heavily influenced by mother tongue. the second biggest percentage is the advanced level that is defined as being able to converse fluently and naturally on most topics; having a little difficulty with vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and pronunciation. reflecting on their proficiency level, the participants were then asked about the three biggest contributors to their success. next, the questionnaire also addressed those who previously had studied english but who gave up studying the language. the most frequent reasons cited for giving up their language study were (ranked in frequency order): (1) i did not have time to continue. (2) i was not given any opportunity to use english outside the classroom. (3) the lessons were not useful because i found the vocabulary too difficult to master. (4) the lessons were not useful because i found the language too difficult to master. (5) the lessons were not useful because i found the pronunciation too difficult to master. (6) the lessons were not useful because i found the grammar too difficult to master. desi nahartini, ratna sari dewi, siti fitriah, maya defianty, zaharil anasy the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia 166 next, the learning style preferences of the participants are addressed. there are some ways indicated by the respondents that they found useful (in a rank order): (1) watching or listening to people speaking english around me. (2) trying to use english whenever i have the opportunity. (3) memorizing bilingual vocabulary lists. (4) watching tv in english at home. (5) talking to friends in english. (6) making myself understood even if i make a lot of mistakes. the other need to be considered in an analysis is the preferences in teaching and learning activities. the following is a list of what participants felt important for the teacher to do in class (in rank order): (1) explaining new grammar points before practicing them. (2) correcting my mistakes of pronunciation. (3) correcting my mistakes of grammar. (4) using both bahasa indonesia and english. (5) correcting any mistakes in front of others immediately. (6) practicing before explaining new grammar points. (7) using english only. next, attitude towards the language is considered to be an important attribution. the result of the questionnaire shows the following attitude of the participants: (1) english is a fascinating language. (2) english is very useful language in malaysia/singapore. (3) english is a language where pronunciation is very important. (4) english is a language with a rich vocabulary. (5) english is a polite language. the statements above show positive attitudes among participants towards english. discussion english language training material at blkln after analysing some supporting documents used by blkln in jakarta to prepare pmi candidates before their departure, it was found out that the english training is conducted at least once a week, in addition to other courses such as cantonese for those going to taiwan, to support their future work, especially in the scope of domestic work such as housekeeping, babysitting, childcaring, cooking, and gardening. despite the high necessity of english for migrant workers, the role of blkln is currently not supporting. according to the document analysis, the blkln has a set of english syllabi with two main competencies, to communicate verbally and to use as the means of communication. both competencies are followed by some broad indicators which emphasize the knowledge of pmi about english instead of the use of the language itself. accordingly, the materials provided in the module and then given to learners are broken down into several lessons which consist of a list of vocabularies, phrases, and expressions for drill and practice and expect learners mainly to pronounce and arrange sentences properly and politely. this method does not work effectively since pmi as learners need a more meaningful lesson that can be put into practice later at the workplace and in the destination country. in other words, its aims and approaches do not correspond with the aims of the program and with the needs of the learners. the learning materials of the training are covered in one module for both teachers and learners with a supporting book resource namely my home (english for early childhood) published by kanisius. in terms of the design and organization of the module, it has no specific organization (structure, functions, topics, skills) or sequence (complexity, learnability, usefulness) used in the content. each lesson starts with a title, a subtitle, and learning content. after the cover, no table of content is provided for both teachers and learners to find a way around the module. due to the unavailability of specific english proficiency tests from the government or institutions for the pmi candidates, it cannot be identified whether the module meets the requirements. regarding the language content, the module has some parts of reference section for grammar such as the use of can, want, let me, let’s, but it covers only the meaning of the word along with a list of sentences as examples and their translations in the indonesian language. no further explanation is available to give learners an understanding of its functions and contexts to use. additionally, phonetic transcriptions are provided for each word, phrase, and expression included in the module. strikingly, the phonetic transcription is not written in the standardized international phonetic alphabets, but in indonesian alphabets representing the way how teachers would pronounce. in some parts of the module, it provides a list of questions along with a specific answer for each question to be practiced and memorized by learners to interact with their future employers and/or other workers. to prepare pmi candidates’ skills, the topics of the module used by blkln are mainly in the scope of domestic work with some additional and random english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 167 topics included such as in the market with a very limited amount. in fact, the syllabus clearly mentions that the program prepares pmi candidates to have good communication in a hospital, an airport, and a bank. from the module, it can be seen that all learners are categorized into only one language level of proficiency with the same content for all. further, considering some different destinations countries of pmi candidates as learners such as malaysia, singapore, taiwan, and even some middle east countries, no social and or cultural context of diversity is presented in the module. additionally, working in a foreign country allows pmi to meet people with various backgrounds, but no group represented concerning ethnic origins, occupations, disabilities, etc. overall, the approach to language learning taken by the module is grammar-translation which is not appropriate to the learning and/or teaching situation for pmi candidates as learners. as previously mentioned, the level of active involvement can be expected from learners is by memorizing the listed words, phrases, expressions, and sentences, responding to the listed questions with particularly listed answers and doing written translation, which overall does not match students’ learning styles and expectations. in other words, the skill taught to learners is a communicative ability that is based on the script which is randomly listed without any supporting and clear contexts or situations. the module is the main and only available material with no teacher’s book available. thus, in line with the description in previous paragraphs, the teacher just uses the module as the guidance in learning with no information of teaching techniques, language items such as grammar rules, and culture-specific information to teach. interestingly, in practice, the teacher or trainer has no english teaching background. the trainer is an ex-tki who graduated from open university in taiwan teaching english with the help of a module. it results in limited lessons delivered by the trainer without any further practice in conversation or further explanation in grammar. in terms of practical consideration, no cost is required in which students write the materials down on their book or make a copy of the book. since it is a copy, the material is not too strong or long-lasting, with not attractive in appearance. overall, no supporting device or equipment is needed such as a language laboratory, listening center, or video player, no equipment needed. the worse thing is that not all migrant workers were provided with the training before their departure. it varies among them, some had it, while others did not. some of them had it but only in a short time. according to them, the training is given based on the recruitment type, either by the agency or the employer directly. particularly for undocumented workers, which in fact is in a big number in both malaysia and singapore, never attended any english language training. despite the variability in the recruitment process, the training is a part of the regulation to be provided. for those who had some lesson earlier before going, they were provided with several words, phrases, and expressions to be memorized in line with the finding in the document analysis. in fact, at the workplace, they didn't find it to be useful since they were not sure in which situation context to use which phrases or expressions and were lack of confidence to speak up. in addition to the skills required at the job, the ability to communicate in english is crucial for pmi. according to the findings, there have been many cases of violence towards pmi due to miscommunication between them and their employers. having the ability and confidence to speak up in english minimizes this possibility to happen and creates a better working environment. english helps pmi to create a mutual understanding with the employer, especially in case any of their rights are violated. other than that, the ability to understand english needs to be prepared since most of the documents and information provided in the destination country will be in english, especially in singapore where another language spoken by its majority after english is mandarin. english is highly important not only in singapore wherein english is the main language of the country, but also in malaysia despite its less use by the majority of the people. the malay language is quite similar to bahasa indonesia that is spoken by pmi in the home country. the exposure to speak english in malaysia may not be as big as that in singapore, but the ability of english will give a better understanding in some cases in which malaysians cannot be understood well due to some different meanings in the language. for example, pmi needs to fill out the form to register passport, visa renewal, bank account, or checklist report at desi nahartini, ratna sari dewi, siti fitriah, maya defianty, zaharil anasy the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia 168 work. most of them are written in english, even though sometimes dual languages are provided (malay and english), and certainly they cannot depend only on their limited malay because it is somehow different in some cases. in both countries, malaysia and singapore, all pmi found that having english ability at the workplace is to be more respected and valued, especially in terms of salary. foreign workers from other countries commonly generalize pmi to not be able to speak in english, mock, and look down at them. by showing their english, pmi has more confidence in themselves to be surrounded by others. the respect comes from the employer itself, too. compared to other workers from the philippines with the same job position, the findings from the discussion revealed that pilipino earns a higher salary for they speak english. thus, english gives more bargaining power to the pmi so that they can negotiate with the employer on any concerns that they have related to issues at work. english language needs of tki candidates after evaluating the module used in the blkln preparing pmi candidates, another data was collected by distributing a questionnaire to pmi in malaysia and singapore. according to the results, after having work experience in the foreign country, they are aware of the importance of english for them as workers, especially in some situations such as to get information about the service and goods to buy, to buy items from shop/supermarket/market, to ask for directions, to order food from restaurant/canteen/café, and to talk with friends or other workers at the workplace. it can be seen that even though they should have been prepared to have communication not only at the workplace, especially in the domestic area, but also in some public places. most workers consider themselves to have a basic proficiency level in english in which they know some words or expressions but are not able to exchange information in a conversation, are able to respond by exchanging questions and answers only in certain topics, have a very limited vocabulary, grammar, and structure, and certain expressions, get strongly influenced by mother tongue in which bahasa indonesia. here, it shows the importance of giving pmi candidates more opportunities and exposure to practicing english as a language of communication to be more confident starting from the preparation phase. in addition to the english language training provided by blkln to some pmi, some workers tried to get connected with a group/organization/association/community of pmi and have been actively participating in an english language class provided for them. according to the workers’ previous experience in learning english there, most of them have limited time to continue their learning. only half of them have a chance to use the language out of the classroom which may be due to their limited access to the outside environment since most of them work as domestic workers living in their employer’s place. it shows the importance of english to support them working and living in a foreign country. pmi realizes that learning english is useful, and it is not difficult to master in terms of pronunciation and structure, and grammar, but they consider english vocabulary challenging to master. related to their english learning experience in some communities, they consider the materials to be interesting and challenging, not difficult and meet their needs. the teacher taught them english well and they like it. so far, they feel that they have made improvements in their english. since they have been working in the destination country for a long time, those who had a chance to receive english training in the preparation phase have no clear memory of how their learning experience was. thus, their experience represented in the results mostly refers to their latest learning experience in the community. as pmi, there are some activities that the workers find useful during the class according to their experience such as watching or listening to people speaking english around them, speaking english at any time they have a chance, watching tv/videos in english during free time, speaking in english with friends, supporting and motivating themselves to understand even though they make many mistakes, memorizing a list of vocabulary in both languages, english and indonesian. it can be seen that they need a more communicative and interactive learning environment for them to improve their skills in english so that their confidence can be improved beyond memorization. in terms of the teacher, the workers would prefer the teacher explain the new structure before the practice, correct any mistakes made especially in pronunciation and structure, use bahasa indonesia and english. these points can be some takeaways english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 169 for developing an english curriculum and materials for pmi candidates in the future. to have a better and deeper understanding of pmi in the foreign country, a focused group discussion was held. despite a lack of english language training in the preparation phase, some workers can significantly improve their english ability after working for many years in the destination country, more than ten years. some of them could have successfully adapted themselves to the new environment very well and learn the language both malay, for those working in malaysia, and english independently or in autodidact from their employers and workplace. nevertheless, those who struggle in adapting themselves they would tend to stay for a shorter time in the foreign country relying on the kindness and patience of their employers who are willing to teach them and have them stay. otherwise, it is always possible that the employers would end the contract or treat them in a bad manner such as giving their salary less than the minimum standard. the workers realize the impact of inadequate and insufficient english language training before their departure such as they may struggle in having communication with their employers which results in some misunderstanding or miscommunication, in some occasions, they are unable to reject or stand for themselves when being asked to do some harmful tasks, they will be reluctant to ask the people around or the security officers when they get lost once going outside for grocery shopping, they may find a difficulty in understanding the employment contract which may deceive them, they will be unable to negotiate once their salary is below standard. in accordance to the findings and discussion above, several needs of english to be provided to pmi candidates are as follow: an emergency living in a foreign country must be anticipated with any unexpected situations such as getting lost in a new place, having a health problem, experiencing any problems with the employer, etc. bringing up some emergencies situations theme in learning english provides the pmi candidates to be more prepared with the situation in the new workplace and environment later on. culture shock the destination country must have its own culture which might be similar or even totally different from that of the home country. it is since most of the pmi candidates come from villages and regions to work in the employers’ place where mostly are located in the big city in which there must be a lot of differences in terms of how the work is done. learning english on this topic provides some help for pmi in case any differences occur at the workplace to have better communication and understanding with the employer. this culture shock includes the accent of how the people of the destination country speak english which may cause unfamiliarity with the language itself. mental health working in a new environment comes with a lot of new people and situations to adapt to. any pressures come from the surrounding may cause any problems to the mental state of the pmi. knowing it earlier before going to the workplace provides pmi with any possible pictures to happen in the future and any alternatives to tackle the problems are available to avoid too much stress and depression during work. rights and duties of pmi another urgent matter to be discussed in preparing english is the rights of migrant workers in applicable law of the respective country so that while doing their duty, they are aware of what they can and cannot do. in addition, they can speak up at any time their rights are violated by the employer. employment contract /official letter in some situations, pmi needs to deal with some official documents, especially employment contracts. this contract is where the pmi depends on during the work with any terms and conditions applied. having some fundamental information and knowledge about the contract, which is commonly given in english, despite some in dual languages, pmi was well informed with the given agreement to be signed. some other important documents are such as application to health insurance, bank account, visa renewal, etc. communities or organizations there have been several organizations and communities for pmi to gather on the weekends provided by indonesian government and private institutions. by joining the communities or organizations available abroad, pmi will have more opportunity to share their current condition and get immediate help if they need it. having more friends abroad will also help them to deal with culture schock or mental health problem. pmi should be desi nahartini, ratna sari dewi, siti fitriah, maya defianty, zaharil anasy the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia 170 aware that they have the rights to join this communities in their working countries. more than that, some learning opportunities are also offered such as english, computer, sewing class, and many more hard skills. the importance of need analysis in designing the english language training at blkln the study set out with the aim of assessing to what extent the available english language training for indonesian migrant workers align with pmi’s needs. the most obvious findings to emerge from the analysis is that there is a discrepancy between the english language training and what pmi’s considered to be central as they live in the target country. the gaps can be categorized into two major respects. first concerns with the learning materials in which the english language program only focused on language for survival and language use in domestic context. in comparison, pmi perceived that they needed to communicate beyond domestic context such as in a bank, hospital, restaurant and so on. second, findings from the research revealed that the english language trainings emphasizes language learning on grammar translation method, commonly known as gtm, (brown & lee, 2020). these findings are consistent with those of novita’s (2019) findings which showed that english language learning blk eka management focused their teaching on translating between english and bahasa indonesia specifically on simple sentences and vocabularies. however, findings from interviews with pmi revealed that they preferred to learn english in real life, and thus implementing communicative language teaching (clt) is more suitable for the english language training. these findings raise an issue regarding the nature and extent of how blkln design english language program in order to support pmi in target countries. a possible explanation for this might be that there have not been any serious concerns manifested in the english language training. moreover, standard qualification for teachers taught at the training has not yet established; as a result, teachers could not empower themselves as they are dealing with textbooks which do not support their learners. in fact, developing learning materials is part of teachers’ role (harmer, 2015). furthermore, material development is not always complicated, as tomlinson and masuhara (2018) pointed out the activity of adding, reducing, and/or extending learning materials from the prescribed textbook can also be considered as materials development. overall, findings from this study, while preliminary, has important implications form developing quality textbook that provide guideline for teachers who taught at the program as well as allow flexibility for teachers to innovate their teachings. the process in carrying out the materials development should be comprehensive that it aligns pmi’s needs. for example, it may adapt richards’ (2017) needs analysis procedures that needs analysis does not merely involve stakeholders, students, and teachers, but also situation analysis. conclusion the findings showed that the english language training materials provided by blkln were quite far from effective to prepare the migrant workers. it is due to the teaching approach, material provided and method applied that were not in line with pmi candidates’ language needs. the worst case is the fact that not all pmi candidates are provided with english training before their departure to the destination country. the existing english language training materials for pmi candidates at blkln require betterment for preparing them at the workplace. the betterment can be made by designing the materials on more relevant topics to their work such as emergency, culture shock, mental health, migrant workers' rights and duties, employment contract, and communities. those topics provide tki candidates with more knowledge and information to deal with any problems that they may find at the workplace in particular, and in the destination country in general. this need is offered by taking into account pmi’s wellness and safety in the foreign country wherein no relatives or friends are available at any time, especially in the early time of arrival. in addition, to let the pmi candidates practice, it is to encourage them to be more confident in speaking up and using the language. this goal can be achieved by designing the materials and learning activities which encourage pmi candidates to use the language during the training between them as students and the trainer, and among all students, both in pairs or groups. by having lots of interactions during the training, students’ reluctance to speak up will be getting less and less, while their confidence keeps improving at the same time. in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 171 addition, the more practice pmi candidates have during the training, the more feedback is given by the trainer for their improvement in using the language. following the conclusions of this research, some suggestions are made for respective parties. first for training center of foreign labors (blkln) to break down the topics presented previously into english materials in communicative approach for pmi candidates. the design of materials can be done by having some consultation with english teaching experts and the teaching should be delivered by trainers who have competencies in english language teaching so that the learning objectives can be met by the end of the training. as an alternative, the available trainers can be given training of some basic principles in english language teaching so that the training will be more effective for pmi candidates. the second suggestion is for protection agency and the indonesian manpower placement (bnp2tki) to take account of the need for the english language with the presented topics to be applied to all blkln. finding out the fact that not all blkln delivers standardized training, bnp2tki should put these needs in the guideline to be followed by all blkln and monitor the program regularly to make sure that its application is following the criteria provided. a regular monitor of the program will maintain the quality of how pmi candidates have been prepared during the program. last for indonesia, the regulation of english training before the departure needs more enforcement and regulation. more enforcement will lead to a better quality of blkln in delivering the language training which then eventually impacts on the better indonesian workforces to be sent to other countries. a bilateral agreement between indonesia and the destination country would be beneficial for pmi to have an access to join in a union wherein they are able to join in some educational programs of the union to improve their quality and capacity especially in english and generally in many other skills. this protection covers not only those who are documented but also those who are undocumented. the last but not least recommendations to the government especially to blkln is to manage an english proficiency test for migrant worker candidates before their departure to the target country and to handle and prepare a short english course for migrant workers candidates who has low language skill and ability based on the level of english proficiency scores. acknowledgment this work was supported by puslitpen uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, lp2m uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, 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(2018). language learning strategies used by secondary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/moodle http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/euromonitor%20report%20a4.pdf http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/euromonitor%20report%20a4.pdf english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 173 school students in enhancing speaking skills. creative education journal, 9(14). desi nahartini, ratna sari dewi, siti fitriah, maya defianty, zaharil anasy the quest of developing a better english training material for migrant worker candidates in indonesia 174 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 113 the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in maritime english learning angga aminullah mansur cirebon maritime academy email: qazkila246@gmail.com dian nur asmawati smk negeri 3 kuningan email: dianurasmawati@gmail.com apa citation: mansur, a. a., & asmawati, d. n. (2021). the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in maritime english learning. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 113120. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5361 received: 19-08-2021 accepted: 14-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction one of the impacts of today’s covid-19 outbreak is global transformation. this swift-change happens globally in every aspect of life—from healthcare systems to socio-economics, from agricultures to energy. not excludingly in education (oyedotun, 2020), school life has also transformed its outlook from initialy classical face to face teaching-learning activities to various online learning settings and has led to both the employment of distance learning and the comprehension of the use of technology by the tutors/lercturers online learning has commonly been associated and interchangeably used with other alike-terms such as ‘e-learning’, ‘blended’ or ‘distance learning’ (hockly, 2015) and is often considered as a growing educational alternative that evolves the role of technology in providing instructional materials and educational tools as well as in facilitating teachers-students’ interactions in distant learning (horn and staker, 2011; blake, 2011; hockly, 2015). however, as to evade the overlaping use of the terms from conffusions, some distinctions are given out. online learning refers to teachinglearning activities that are partially or entirely conducted through the internet (means, toyama, murphy, bakia, and jones, 2009). blake (2011) associates online language learning with a number of learning arrangements namely web-facilitated class, blended or hybrid course, and fully virtual or online course. hockly (2015) attempts to clarify the notion by distinguishing between ‘blended’ and ‘fully online learning’. he defines the later as fully online via the internet without any face-to-face component in both formal and more informal learning schemes. white (2003) emphasizes more on the independency of the learners to distinguish between face-to-face classroom and distance language learning. on the other hand, kuama (2016) pointed out some significant benefits that abstract: this current pandemy has led both educators and students to acquire the ability to vastly adjust themselves in picking out and applying both a suitable and convinient way of teaching and learning that involve the use of technology. this paper is aimed at describing (1) how online learning platforms namely zoom, google classroom, and quizizz are collaboratively utilized in maritime english (me) learning (2) how effective they are, and (3) what setbecks the students encounterd during the learning proscess via this collaboration. the study uses a qualitative approach in which 62 of the total numbers of 110 students were surveyed by applying a purposive sampling inquiry technique after having accomplished their me course for about three months to find out the effectivity and setbacks of the integration of those three online learning platforms. according to the survey, it turns out that the integration of those three platforms tends to be effective to be applied for me learning in the meantime situation with the interval scale of 83.55% (strongly agree) and respectively feel that online learning method is the best method of learning to be applied in this current pandemic situation with the interval scale of 81.61% (strongly agree). however, the scale went lower, notching only 58.71% (unsure), when the students were inquired whether the online learning method in general is suitably applied regularly in normal time. this happens due to some constrains they have as well. keywords: maritime english; online learning platforms; utilization; effectivity. angga aminullah mansur & dian nur asmawati the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in maritime english learning 114 online learning provides as clear distinctions to traditional or face to face classroom settings. they mention that online learning gives students flexibilities in preferring better learning style and creating opportunities for active learning due to its self-centered platform. in addition, harasim, calvert and groeneboer (1997) point out that the use of good online learning applications or software can support the students to have opportunities in participating in discussions, expressing oppinions, and sharing konwledges without having to relly on classroom size and time. zoom, google classroom, and quizizz are some of many online instructional paltforms designed for facilitating online teaching-learning activities. each platform with each of its features represents distinctive characteristics and functions. zoom embodies the nature of synchronuous online learning. as one of synchronuous meeting tools (smts), zoom offers immersive and convenient features to facilitate authentic communicative language learning in interactive syncchronuous classes (kohnke and moorhouse, 2020). the interactions established through zoom by using its features such as its web-cam and microphone facilities facilitate similar interactions to those run in traditional classroom activities (rahayu, 2020). on the other hand, google classroom and quizizz are typically used asynchronically. as the integral part of google apps for education (gafe), google classroom plays a significant role in engaging students in asynchronuous distance learning activities. sudarsana, putra, astawa, & yogantara (2021) describes it as a virtual extension of brick and mortar classroom in which information is shared, discussions are conducted, and tasks are distributed and collected. this platform also enables the teachers to provide their students with readily available materials such as audio/video lectures, handouts, articles, and power point presentations that can be accessed anythime anywhere (perveen, 2016). lastly, quizizz is an online assesment tool with interactive and entertaining test features like avatars, themes, memes, and music that brings a refreshing experience to the test takers (zhao, 2019). practically, this gamification platform can be used in several ways and many types of online classroom activities. maritime english (me) is the english used, particularly in multicultural and multilingual context, to ensure seafarers’ works and safety in the shipping industry (progulaki & roe, 2011; ismail, rizani, & rauzilan, 2019). the necessity of the use of me in maritime practice is derived from the fact that english communication defficiency has been one of the major causes of maritime accidents (rashed, 2010; shi & fan, 2021) and thus the need for acceptable standard english ability is essential (ismail et al., 2019). in addition to that, tchkonia, kalandadze, & dolidze (2019) underline the importance of effective english communication at sea as a means of safety ship operations. they mention that the practice of english communication is essential for the effective and safe running of the ship as it takes place in many ways and involves multi-parties. therefore, the english communication practiced should be as precise, simple, and unambiguous as possible. this importance of good english comprehensions and skills is parallel to the sellection of the right unless the best teaching techniques. the use of online learning platforms in me teaching-learning and in teaching-learning in general has previously discussed in some previous researches. yurzhenko (2019) studies the work of lms moodle e-courses she designed for me learning. the study reveals that the platforms tend to be effective to utilize for improving foreign profesional competence of future maritime specialist. shi and fan (2021) investigate the status of online me education in china from the perspectives of both chinese maritime students and me teachers. it is found out that online me education in china was underdeveloped due to its simplicity and lack of explorations. sudarsana et al (2019) point out the suiatbility of google classroom in overcoming the obstacles of distance education and in improving teacher’s and student’s quality. rahmawati (2021) focuses more on discussing the challenges faced by me lecturers in delivering me through online learning. similar to rahmawati (2021), mu’awanah (2021) point out both benefits and challenges that zoom brings to the learners involved in distance english learning. therefore, based on the reviews above, the writer was then tempted to study the collaboration of three online learning platforms namely zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in me learning and to investigate their effectivity and challenges from the students’ perceptions. this paper is then aimed at describing how three online learning platforms namely zoom, google english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 classroom, and quizizz are collabaorativley utilized in me learning, how effective they are, and what setbacks the students face during the learning through the collaboration. it is expected that the paper can contribute well in providing both me teachers and learners an alternative model of me online learning required to be applied in this current situation. method the research applies a qualitiative approach in which the applications of the three online learning platforms (zoom, google classroom, and quizizz) in me online classes are observed and described. by using a purposive-sampling technique, in order to obtain information about learners’ perceptions on effectivity and challenges of this collaboration, questionaires are given (creswell, 2014). the respondents are restrictively sellected only to those participating in the learning. from the total of 110 participants, 62 are taken into the inquiries. the research is conducted based on the research plan shown as in this following chart: figure 1. flowchart of the research it can be seen from the chart above that the research comprises a series of stages. it begins with the stage of preparation, the stage where everything required for the learning is ellaborated. the second stage is the stage of application, that is the stage at which the materials are applied through the use of those three online learning applications in the learning process. in the final phase of learning, the students are given questionaires to discover their perceptions towards the application of those three online learning platforms used and the challenges they may find along the way. lastly, by applying the likert scoring, the data taken are then analyzed to determine whether the use of the three applications in the learning works well and effective. results and discussion in this online me learning, zoom, google classroom, and quizizz are collaboratively applied. the applications of these three online learning platforms are synchronous, asyncrhonous, and hybrid (mixed-type). the following table describes the applications of the platforms in the learning: table 1. the applications of the platforms in the learning no learning activity mode of learning mode of oll application 1. class session lecturing, explaining, drilling synchronousasynchronous (hybrid) zoom + google classroom 2. assignment session doing homework, assignment, final project asynchronous google classroom 3. reinforcement session giving quiz, test asynchronous quizizz the learning is divided into three main activities namely (1) class session (2) assignment session, and (3) reinforcement session. the materials given are derived from selected topics of smcp with a 75 angga aminullah mansur & dian nur asmawati the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in maritime english learning 116 minute learning duration per-meeting. in the class session activity that particularly consists of main and drilling activities, the first 45 minutes is allocated for giving explanation on the topics or issues to be delivered. the class is orginized synchronously via zoom and the materials are mostly presented through power-point presentations in combination with other audio-visual media like video presentations from you-tube. the zoom activity is in the form of monologues with only a minimum student interaction as most of synchronous meeting tools (smts) might feature in a lecture-style (kohnke and moorhouse, 2020). the materials are presented thoroughly with comprehensive explanation and examples. the rest 30 minutes is provided for drills and practice. in this later stage of learning, the students are engaged in spoken practice either individually or collectively in a group through the use of the ‘breakout room’ panel, making the class more lively and controllable. another scenario for this session is by combining the synchronous and asynchronous modes. the first 45 minutes is similar to the first one; when it comes to the drill and practice sessions, the mode is switched and centrilized to activities in google classroom. the students practice the smcp phrases and expressions by keeping up with either video or audio practice modulations uploaded in the ‘classwork activity’ panel. by splitting the class into small groups through the ‘breakout room’ panel, the instructor only does the observation and interact once in a while to check the progress while the students are doing the practice. besides synchronous modes described previously, asychronous modes are applied in the assignment and the evaluation sessions. in the assignment sessions, the students work on the assignments or projects both individually and collectively at their most convenient time based on all the materials and instructions uploaded in the ‘classwork activity’ panel in their google classroom accounts. the works are later submitted into the submission panel based on the due date. the instructor do the scoring and evaluation right at the same panel. another asynchronous mode of learning is applied in the reinforcement quiz. quizizz, with its gamification features, is utilized to meassure students’ vocabulary comprehension through the provision of vocabulary quizes. through quizizz, the students experience a new perspective on having a quiz since they do not feel like doing a quiz or exam as they commonly do in a more conventional mode with pen and paper. the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz as mentioned above does not entirely eliminate but particularly restore the roles and functions of conventional or classical face to face settings. by utilizing zoom and its features, the instructor is still able to have a real interaction with the students as to ask questions and receive answers immediately (skylar, 2009) and the students, on the other hand, are able to repeat all the materials given by accessing and replaying the recording of the materials as to master them (perveen, 2016). through the use of google classroom, the instructor and the students are engaged interactively in material and assignment sharings. the instructor can provide the students with various types of materials such as text, audio, video, etc. the students, on the other hand, can work independently by optimizing the time they have in doing the assignments. this functionalizes google classroom as a learning center for communicatiing, feedback sending, and homework providing (sudarsana et al, 2019) alike we commonly see in conventional face to face classroom activities. quizizz, on the other hand, restores the role of test-paper in a conventional classroom. the use of this platform makes the quiz or exam paperless. its test formats can be designed in many ways and its gamification features bring a unique atmosphere to both the learning and the learners. about 62 of 110 students who participated in the learning were taken as respondents. they were handed out a set of deductive perceptional propositions they had to respond on the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in the me learning they participated in. among the inquiries, some were intentionally proposed to investigate the effectivity of the utilization of the three platforms. table 2. set of perceptional propositions on the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz no propositional inquiry 1. online learning is suitably applied for learning in this current pandemy situation. 2. you are satsfactorily able to participate in online learning activities throughout this pandemy situation. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 117 3. you have excellent supporting devices for online learning (smartphone / laptop /pc, etc). 4. you have good internet connection for participating in online learning activities. 5. you have installed zoom, google classroom, and quizizz platforms and been able to utilize them well. 6. as far as your concerned, the online me learning has been suitably applied throughout this pandemy situation. 7. as far as your concerned, the online me learning has been suitably applied through the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz throughout this pandemy siatuation. 8. the zoom platform used in the me learning has so far been effective. 9. the gooogle classroom platform used in the me learning has so far been effective. 10. the quizizz used in the me learning has so far been effective. 11. the me learning materials delivered by utilizing zoom, google classroom, and quizizz are easily understood and comprehended. 12. you are satisfied with the me learning with zoom, google classroom, and quizizz. 13. you will be more contended to have online than offline learning as your prefernce for your future learning. those thirteen propositions above go from general to more specific issues. all are channeled to explore the students’ perceptions on the use of the three platforms in the me learning. the first five propositions concern about the students’ online aparatus availibility for joining the me learning, while the rests are directly related to the applications of the three platforms in the learning itself. in order to understand students’ opinions/perceptions, the responses to the propositions are assessed through the application of likert scale by operating its symetric scoring (joshi, kale, chandel, & pal, 2015). the responses are categorized into ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘unsure’, ‘disagree’, and ‘strongly disagree’ with the scoring scale of 5 to 1 representing the highest to the lowest continuum of proposition score. to eventually come to a final finding of each of the proposition measured, all the scores of all the items are combined (sum) to generate a composite score (joshi et al, 2015) by applying interval scoring formulation (pranatawijaya, widiatry, priskila, & putra, 2019). after having been summed up through a certain formulation, the interval index for each of the category is decided as follows: table 3. category interval index index scale 0% 19, 99% strongly disagree 20% 39, 99% disagree 40% 59, 99% unsure 60% 79, 99% agree 80% 100% strongly disagree as we can see in the following table of all five first propositions below, all are within the index of 78% to 86%. it means that most of the respondents show positive attitude towards the inquiries. the respondents, as for instance, have no complain with the online learning applied in this current pandemy situation. they are in the same opinion that online learning is suitably applied in this pandemy times. in term of their accesibility and readiness to follow or participate in online learning activities, the majority of respondents do not have much trouble in joining the program due to the excellent supporting devices they have and the availibility of the internet connection they use. they are also able to install and utilize zoom, google classroom, and quizizz well. table 4. responses to the first five inquiries no propositional inquiry response index strongly agree agree unsure disagree strongly disagree 5 4 3 2 1 1 online learning is suitably applied for learning in this current pandemy situation. 22, 6% 53, 2% 17,7% 6, 5% 0% 78, 39% angga aminullah mansur & dian nur asmawati the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in maritime english learning 118 2 you are satsfactorily able to participate in online learning activities throughout this pandemy situation. 19, 4% 48, 4% 21, 0% 11, 3% 0% 75, 16% 3 you have excellent supporting devices for online learning (smartphone / laptop /pc, etc). 37, 1% 54, 8% 6, 5% 1, 6% 0% 85, 48% 4 you have good internet connection for participating in online learning activities. 19, 4% 51, 6% 22, 6% 6, 5% 0% 76, 77% 5 you have installed zoom, google classroom, and quizizz platforms and been able to utilize them well. 38, 7% 56, 5% 4, 8% 0% 0% 86, 77% meanwhile, how the respondents respond to the rests of the propositions is described in the following table below. table 5. responses to the rests of the inquiries no propositional inquiry response index strongly agree agree unsure disagree strongly disagree 5 4 3 2 1 1. as far as your concerned, the online me learning has been suitably applied throughout this pandemy situation. 27, 4% 53, 2% 19, 4% 0% 0% 81, 61% 2. as far as your concerned, the online me learning has been suitably applied through the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz throughout this pandemy siatuation. 29, 0% 59, 7% 11, 3% 3, 2% 0% 83, 55% 3. the zoom platform used in the me learning has so far been effective. 27, 4% 50, 0% 3, 2% 0% 0% 80, 32% 4. the gooogle classroom platform used in the me learning has so far been effective. 25, 8% 64, 5% 9, 7% 0% 0% 83, 23% 5. the quizizz used in the me learning has so far been effective. 29, 0% 59, 7% 11, 3% 0% 0% 83, 55% 6. the me learning materials delivered by utilizing zoom, google classroom, and quizizz are easily understood and comprehended. 25, 8% 51, 6% 22, 6% 0% 0% 80, 65% 7. you are satisfied with the me learning with zoom, google classroom, and quizizz. 21, 0% 50% 21, 0% 8, 1% 0% 76, 77% 8. you will be more contended to have online than offline learning as your prefernce for your future learning. 11, 3% 22, 6% 21, 0% 38, 7% 6, 5% 58, 71% according to the table above, the respondents similarly have positive attitudes towards most of the propositions with the index ranging from 76% to 83% (‘agree’ to ‘strongly agree’). they believe that me learning is appropriate to be applied online in this current situation. furthermore, they strongly agree that the collaboration between zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in the online me learning english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 119 is effective as they single out each of the platforms to have been effectively applied in the learning. they also believe that the delivery of the materials through the utilization of the three platforms is easily understood and comprehended. however, as to the last proposition having them to respond whether they will be more contended to sutdy online than offline for their future learning, the response does not show similar trend as it only reaches 58, 71% (‘unsure’). to finally determine whether the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in the me learning is effective, all the index are summed up and then divided by the total numbers of propositions or items given through this following equation: equation 1 average of total index equation through the aplication of the above equation, it is found out that the final average of the index of all the items is 79, 30%, within the range of the interval of 60% 79, 99%. this means that the majority of the respondents agree on the online me learning and the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in it. in the other words, the application of those three platforms in the online me learning is considered to be effective. although the result shows that the learning is considered to be effective, some challenges are still encountered by the students along the process of learning. most of them feel that sometimes learning online at home is not as convinient as it is offline. when they are offline, the focus and concentration portions will be alloted to the class activities---the instructor, the materials presented, the discussion conducted and so on. however, at home, the may have lack of concentration due to any possible distractions coming from the environment. the internet connection is sometimes the hamper itself. when they are online at home, their areas are varied and so are their internet accessibilities. as online learning at home is a self-fulfilment activity and requires a lot of internet quota package, the students feel that online learning is a little costly as they will have to buy the internet package more often than when they are offline. conclusion the utilization of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in online me learning does not eliminate but restores the principle roles and functions of a conventional face to face setting. it is channeled in synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid modes of learning within three forms of activities namely class session, assignment session, and reinforcment session. the use of zoom represents the function of a classroom with its properties like whiteboard and markers. by utilizing zoom, the instructor is able to present materials and interact with the students. these activities are as much as similar to what we commonly do in a classical face to face setting. google classroom is like a classroom cabinet in which reference books, work books, and class agendas are orginized there. it is utilized as a means of material and assignment storage and distribution. on the other hand, quizizz represents the role of a test-paper with a joyful gamification mode and outlook. based on the survey, it turns out that the utilization of those three platforms tends to be effective to be applied for me learning in the meantime situation with the index of 83.55% (strongly agree) and respectively feel that online learning method is the best method of learning to be applied in this current pandemic situation with the index of 81.61% (strongly agree), heighten by the average of 79, 30% (agree) of all the total index of the items. however, inspite of its effectivity, the students still encounter both internal and external constraints in doing the online learning. references blake, r. j. 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(2010). maritime english holds a great stake both the safety and security of merchant vessels. proceedings of the 22nd international maritime english conference, egypt, pp. 1-13. sudarsana, i. k., putra, i. b. m. a., astawa, i. n. t., & yogantara, i. w. l. (2019). the use of google classroom in the learning process. in journal of physics: conference series, 1175(1), 012165. iop publishing. shi, j., & fan, l. (2021). investigating teachers’ and students’ perceptions of online english learning in a maritime context in china. sage open, 11(3), 21582440211040800. skylar, a. a. (2009). a comparison of asynchronous online text-based lectures and synchronous interactive web conferencing lectures. issues in teacher education, 18(2), 69-84. tchkonia, m. n., kalandadze, m. e., & dolidze, m. n. (2019). teaching maritime english with innovative technologies. presented at conference: international conference on new trends in social sciences. white, c. (2004). independent language learning in distance education: current issues. in proceedings of the independent learning conference 2003 (vol. 20). yurzhenko, а. y. (2019). an e-course based on the lms moodle to teach" maritime english for professional purpose". information technologies and learning tools, 71(3). zhao, f. (2019). using quizizz to integrate fun multiplayer activity in the accounting classroom. international journal of higher education, 8(1), 37-43. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 93 students’ perception on google meet video conferencing platform during english speaking class in pandemic era berita mambarasi nehe english study program, stkip setia budhi rangkasbitung email: itanehe81@gmail.com apa citation: nehe, b. m. (2021). students’ perception on google meet video conferencing platform during english speaking class in pandemic era. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 93-104. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5359 received: 16-08-2021 accepted: 17-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction due to current covid-19 outbreak, all institutions and business area, and religious institutions do meeting events by using online meeting platform for the sustainable activities. electronic learning (e-learning) has been viewed as the most appropriate strategy to deal with the teaching and learning process. now almost all institutions hop on online meeting due to lockdowns related to coronavirus. in addition to these, all primary, junior, and senior high schools and all universities in indonesia also use online media to conduct distance teaching process (dave, 2020). during pandemic in indonesia, the elearning stages suggested by the government are rumah belajar platform created by the ministry of education and culture of indonesia and spad is created by the ministry of research, technology, and higher education for heis. rumah belajar is a free internet learning platform as an elective learning asset for teachers and students. the ministry of education and culture of indonesia joined forces with a few web-based learning applications, for example sekolahmu, mejakita, ganeca digital, kelas pintar, ruang guru, quipper school, cisco webex, zenius,, and google classroom (octaberlina & muslimin, 2020). while france-presse stated that some platform options that can be used are facebook, google meet, zoom, skype, etc. the using google meet is about six million organizations like manufacturing facilities and hospitals, banks, and warehouses (francepresse, 2020). a solution in teaching learning process nowadays is by using online-based platforms that can be undergone smoothly. virtual meetings through online applications have many benefits, especially on video conferencing that provides the abstract: the aim of the research was to investigate students’ perception while teaching learning process in 16 meeting by having google meet video conferencing. method of the research used qualitative research by focusing at descriptive analysis to explore students’ perception in english speaking class as it was followed by 13 english students at the second semester of english study program of stkip setia budhi rangkasbitung who join speaking lesson. instruments used were observation, questionnaire, and interview. the results of the research about students’ perception emphasized on interaction, teaching learning process, psychological aspects, and speaking skills. the researcher found that interaction showed that there were three patterns of interaction, they were interaction lecturer-students, students-lecturer, and students-students interaction. the three interactions happened well since the number of them was 100% and all students were involved in speaking activity. teaching learning process was done as usual like in a real classroom such as pre-activity, main activity, and post-activity. in the form of psychological aspects, students were happy, secure, confident, and brave. data showed 100%, it meant that they did not have any barriers during english speaking class with google meet video conference. speaking skills in the form of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and comprehension. students kept having their right to learn about those aspects supported by the teacher in google meet. when students did some mistakes, lecturer explained directly in general at the end of class and this way was very helpful for students in learning speaking. from these findings, the conclusion was the usage of google meet video conferencing in the speaking class showed positive respond that students’ perception on google meet showed mostly perceive the advantages rather than disadvantages of google meet video conferencing provided. keywords: students’ perception; google meet video conference; english speaking. berita mambarasi nehe students’ perception on google meet video conferencing platform during english speaking class in pandemic era 94 learning process practical, safe, efficient (pratama, nor, azman, kassymova, & shakizat, 2020). through video conferencing, students can feel a sense of togetherness and have good interaction to communicate with friends and teacher interactively. besides, the features online applications make the learning process easier because users can send files during the learning process or use digital whiteboards in online application features. online learning is an alternative way which can be used as a learning tool during the pandemic. some studies recognized the shift towards online learning as vigorous, but this is important for learning process keep going (bao, 2020; halim, hashim, & yunus, 2020; hodges, moore, lockee, trust, & bond, 2020; zhu, chen, & avadhanam, 2020). all universities and colleges use some platform in shifting a group of virtual teaching environment to achieve certain successful results. when implementing the online learning, most english lecturer were not able to use various media or platforms as well as learning activities in online learning. lee & pyun said their digital literacy make could be the cause in that situation (lee, 2019). the process of teaching and learning tended to be monotonous (durriyah & zuhdi, 2018). thus, it led to the students’ boredom. consequently, this situation significantly affected the students’ motivation in learning english during the pandemic. moreover, the decrease of students’ efl learning motivation might lead to the decrease of their achievement owing to monotonous learning and having unable to understand the subject matter well. in several cases that the researcher found in the school, there were only 6 to 7 of 13 students joined the online classroom. the long run of this condition can trigger to students’ fear when dealing with english. this condition can’t be taken for granted if english teachers put high expectation towards better english mastery for indonesian learners (hidayati, 2016). the study of the use of google application for education and the enhancement of english communication skills among the learners should be run to investigate the students’ perceptions, experience, and attitudes towards the effectiveness of the google apps such as g suite (google drive, google form, google docs, gmail, google hangouts, google sheets, and google calendar) in an online setting. it is believed that the results of this research will be a good point for english teachers to apply a task-based learning approach along with the use of web 2.0 tools, particularly g suite, to serve the needs of the learners in the future online and blended learning contexts (chiablaem, 2021). google meet is one of video communication service which is very helpful, the interface provided by google meet allows users to meet face to face directly and effectively, but it is also very light and fast. management is not difficult and can be followed by many participants (singh & awasthi, 2020). according to fakhruddin (2019), the use of google meet as the teaching tool which is applied on english classroom of speaking activities was proven to be effective in improving the students’ speaking skills. using google meet video conferencing, students have more opportunities to interact with their friends and can expose and explore verbally their speaking skills (fakhruddin, 2019). some advantages of a google meet are easy to use, interesting display, white board is available there and you are free to write, free of charge, video display in high definition (hd), video encryption, share screen feature and available for 100 or 250 audience (sawitri, 2020). the easiness given by google meet make instructors easy to use this tool on every occasion whatever the lesson you want to teach to your students and there is no reason anymore that lecturer is difficult to teach online. face to face online can help lecturer as well to monitor students’ behavior during class running. students feel satisfied when get interaction in online classes by using a google meet video conference platform, teacher give motivation directly from teacher verbally, they see the teacher from beginning until the end class, students can get direct explanation when students do not understand with the material, adequate facilities, and so on. they have this when they use online learning media via video conferencing (baber, 2020). google meet video conference as one of alternative ways for online interaction as it helps speaking practice for groups of students and facilitates engagement among them to negotiate, interact, and communicate (vurdien, 2019). lecturer and students were like in real classroom, they can speak take in turn and practice speaking english together. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 95 google meet is a safe platform in operating because google has claimed that they operate all the products on a safe foundation, and they believe their product data users will keep exist and private. they also provide built-in protection by default that will keep users' meetings safe (john, 2020). since it has many various advantages as a video conferencing platform, many people in the education and business areas prefer to use google meet. users find it easy to use, so this creates a positive perception of this platform. and every day, google meet users are increasing significantly (purwanto & tannady, 2020). practically, the use of google meet video conferencing is very easy to use in a virtual speaking lesson, students practice speaking english with their friends as they practice like in a real classroom because the platform provides them a virtual room to speak face to face virtually. blasco and virto investigated about understanding the use of video conferencing, research revealed between interestingness of content and perceived playfulness that the most significant relationship; playfulness and intention is most significant linkage; and there is no effect between perceived ease of use and usefulness (blasco & virto, 2020). pyun and lim conduct the research via desktop videoconferencing on a group of korean students at a university in the us and their peers at a college in south korea, they highlighted that video conferencing sessions had contributed to the development of students’ listening and speaking skills, apart from broadening their cultural horizons through exposure to the views of the target language speakers (lim & pyun, 2016). coutinho investigated students in middle east could improve their linguistic skills through performing collaborative tasks with brazilian students in video conferencing. he found that video conferencing helped students in getting confidence and improved their communicative skills, their knowledge was broader and became more aware of the foreign culture (coutinho, 2016). putra (2021) found on his research where during this online learning many students lost their motivation to learn, as evidenced by most of students being proved by those who were late or reluctant to complete the assignment that the teacher had given. after using google meet, their motivation increased by 79.4%. this is evidenced by the results obtained that students were involved and participated actively. besides that, they also shared their ideas about the learning material at that time. in addition, their motivation was increased when doing their assignments according to what their teacher intends (putra, 2021). bailey & lee stated that conversation classes need corrective feedback and some activities were required during the class moreover when it focus pronunciation aspect and writing skill create the teachers’ hardship more than other online learning lessons (bailey & lee, 2020). students need more energy in learning speaking. don’t let students less motivation in learning during pandemic covid-19 because they deserve to have learning either in the classroom or online learning. and google meet video conferencing answer this challenge to support students keep learning speaking lesson. many studies showed the difficulty of mastering speaking skills. speaking is an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves the production, reception, and processing of information. some of the factors that cause problems in speaking to students, first are poor reading habits, unequal participation and practice of english both inside and outside the classroom, and confusion in the application of grammar rules (sayuri, 2016). student interaction plays an important role in the classroom because students can improve their speaking skills in a classroom setting. this analysis also confirms the important concern for the use of student interaction instruction in the development of speaking skills (saeed, khaksari, eng, & ghani, 2016). englishtina et.al investigated on students’ participation on speaking online class, there it was founded that students less interest in speaking through online (englishtina, al, dieni, mahardhika, & faculty, 2021). different from baron that audio visual element in learning gives benefits for mastery of speaking skills. moreover, nowadays the mobile phone features have been equipped with many applications that can be used to learn english speaking. zoom and google hangouts meet is a popular video application. the implication of study is to increase teacher’s creativity to use the online application (baron, 2020). adijaya and santosa investigated students’ perception in online learning about students’ interaction and learning environment. the data show that students face some problems to interact berita mambarasi nehe students’ perception on google meet video conferencing platform during english speaking class in pandemic era 96 not only with other students but also with the lecturer. on learning environment less support them in learning teaching process (adijaya & santosa, 2018). the creativity and innovative of using application make students interested in learning so lecturer must be clever in digital literacy.. while purnama investigated about students’ respond toward google meet implementation for speaking subject for daily context. she found that all students got high motivation in learning and involved actively during teaching learning (purnama, 2021). septantiningtyas, juhji, sutarman, rahman, sa’adah, & nawisa (2021) found that google meet give good influence on students’ interest in learning this is because the learners is very easy to implement, time flexible (septantiningtyas et al., 2021). nilayon and brahmakasikara found that the use of video conferencing showed outstanding improvement on lower level participants and most of the participant thought that the way of learning improved their english speaking skills and confidence (nilayon & brahmakasikara, 2018). from those previous studies above, it can be concluded that there were few researches that investigated deeply online english speaking class related to students’ perception on google meet video conferencing, here the researcher did research deeply to explore and focus on students’ perception on interaction, teaching learning process, psychological aspect, and speaking skills in speaking class in details. the current research aims to provide an understanding of the students’ perception of using the google meet video conferencing application in english speaking class. this understanding is expected to be a consideration for other lecturers who will use the same feature during the current outbreak. this online application can be a medium which improves students’ learning outcomes not only for speaking class but also for other subjects during this critical period. the use of google meet conference must be suit to students’ need and students’ condition to make the learning become meaningful. the way to teach in google meet platform especially on speaking class must be the same situation like in a real classroom, it means students are asked to speak actively even though in virtual room. method this paper is a report of a qualitative research by having descriptive analysis about students’ perception when they are learning through google meet video conferencing during speaking lesson. this research is done in a speaking class at the second semester in an english study program of stkip setia budhi rangkasbitung with 13 students. it is arranged to have 16 meeting during even semester 2021. data is taken through observation, questionnaire, and interview. the questionnaire has four indicators, they are about interaction, teaching learning process, psychological aspects, and speaking skills. throughout the semester students join google meet video conferencing practice their speaking skills. results and discussion results based on the research result conducted for 16 meetings in speaking class by using google meeting video conference covered interaction, teaching learning process, psychological aspects, speaking skills aspects. students’ perception in term of interaction student interaction plays an important role in the online class so that lecturer must set and use the platform well. the result can be seen at table 1 and diagram 1. table 1. perception analysis on interaction during speaking class using google meet through interview and observation no. pattern of classroom interaction number of interaction percentage 1 lecturer-students (ls) 13 100% 2 students-lecturer (sl) 13 100% 3 students-students (ss) 13 100% this table above could be drawn into a diagram as followed: english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 97 diagram 1. pattern of classroom interaction based on the interview and observation result that all students agreed that using google meet conference in speaking class keep having good interaction on verbal interaction between lecturer – students, students – lecturer, and students – students. the pattern of classroom interaction in google meet video conference in speaking class were ls was 100 %, sl was 100 %, ss was 100 %. it meant that the interaction of speaking activity in the google meet video conference was 100 %. the interaction happened very good in the platform because all students were involved well. students’ perception in term of teaching learning process the result of teaching learning process through questionnaire can be seen at table 2 and diagram 2 table 2. perception analysis on teaching learning process during speaking class using google meet through questionnaire teaching learning process yes no pre-activities share link  greeting  checking attendance list  apperception  main activities question answer  chain of speaking  discussion  summarizing the topic learnt  post-activities giving feedback  this table above could be drawn into a diagram as followed: diagram 2. students’ perception on teaching learning process berita mambarasi nehe students’ perception on google meet video conferencing platform during english speaking class in pandemic era 98 the table and diagram showed students perceive in positive in which lecturer did teaching learning process well by using google meet video conference. based on the questionnaire got from students, students put check “yes” for preactivities, main activities, and post activities. these meant that the lecturer taught the students used google meet video conferencing normatively as in the real classroom happened. students’ perception in term of speaking skills the result of speaking skills can be seen at table 3 and diagram 3 below table 3. analysis perception on speaking skills speaking skills p v g f c y n y n y n y n y n stud 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 p stands for pronunciation, v stands for vocabulary, g stands for grammar, f stands for fluency, c stands for comprehension, y stands for yes, and n stands for no. it can be drawn into diagram below: diagram 3. speaking skills from google meet video conference, students keep going study about pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, fluency and comprehension between students and lecturer, and between students and students. these elements must be trained well to students. with this application audio visual help students train those elements. students’ perception in term of psychological aspects the result of psychological aspects can bee seen at 4 and diagram 4 below table 4. psychological aspects students aspects happy secured confident brave a-m yes yes yes yes it can be drawn into diagram below: diagram 4. psychological aspects english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 based on questionnaire given to students that 13 students answer happy when they engaged on google meet or = 100 % because they could see lecturer and friends there. 100% students were secure because they feel secure when they spoke and there were no friends laughed them, 100% students were confident to speak because nobody around them since learning only friends in a camera or virtual, even all students watched but it was different from real classroom. 100% they were brave to speak, they did not feel shy to express ideas and made conversation with lecturer and students. the rules were when lecturer spoke with one student or two students, the other must turn off microphone, in this case when something happen and make students laugh, the sound would not be heard by the other only capture smile and the students were in good feel condition. it can be written in table and drawn below: all students feel positive feeling in learning by using google meet video conference, it could be seen that all students or 100 % from four aspect proposed they answered yes. discussion interaction google meet video conference as one of an alternative way for online interaction as it helps speaking practice for groups of students and facilitates engagement among them to negotiate, interact, and communicate (vurdien, 2019). in this platform the students and lecturer interact verbally, no physical interaction at all. lecturer-student interaction is the interaction between the lecturer and students, the lecturer held an important role in this interaction. in this moment, lecturer explained the material to students, when the session was finished the lecturer gave some questions, then students answer the questions to increase students’ ability in speaking english. the interaction on google meet occurred when lecturers giving explanation, information, question, clarification, encouraging, and correct mistakes. see figure 1 below. figure 1. pattern of interaction with lecturer -student interaction the letters on the pattern were l and a-m. l was for lecturer and a-m were for students. from the figure above that there were 13 interactionhappened during teaching learning process engaged in the google meet video conference. students-lecturer interaction is to increase students’ speaking skill, lecturer had to give motivation and appreciation to make students having self-confidence to speak up in english. when the teacher explained about the material and the student do not understand then student asked to the teacher. the interaction happened when students ask questions related to topics, students argue about the topic explained, students expressed their thought, express their feeling. see figure 2 below. figure 2. pattern of interaction with studentlecturer interaction l a b c d e f g h i j k l m l a b c d e f g h i j k l m berita mambarasi nehe students’ perception on google meet video conferencing platform during english speaking class in pandemic era 100 from the figure above that there were 13 interaction happened during teaching learning process engaged in the google meet video conference. students-students interaction were more complex when they meet in google meet conference. the meeting would be more crowded since the sound from the microphone crush each other cause the situation on the platform disturbed. role of lecturer in this moment was instruct students to take in turn when they want to speak with friends or lecturer called two names of students to speak english. interaction in google meet of course quite different from classroom in which in the google meet all the students were not allowed to speak on the same time because it would be mass the learning. from the three interaction, lecturer and students must be wise in using the platform, make the platform more powerful in usage so between the party both lecturer and students were wise in taking turn to speak english. in the google meet, students as the role model on interaction and lecturer was as adviser. by working in peers, the students could exchange ideas and correcting each other’s mistakes. they had an opportunity to make dialogues and communicate among students. see figure 3 below. figure 3. pattern of interaction with students-students interaction from the figure above that there were 13 interaction happened during teaching learning process engaged in the google meet video conference. teaching learning process in teaching learning process used google mee video conference, it was basically the same as when we taught in real classroom. start from opening classroom, main activity, and close activity. when the lecturer wanted to start her lesson, she asked students to turn off microphone, and let lecturer speak by herself and they listen and watched. then she asked students to turn on camera to make sure that they were there. the lecture also must set the sound volume, speed, of speaking, her camera, of course her style performance must be formal. then she opened the class by greeting, gave motivation to students, and checked students’ attendance list by calling students’ name one by one. from opening, she went to main activity that was explaining the material, she must give clear explanation to help students understand well. when the students did not understand, the lecturer could open the session question answer. in this session, lecturer gave kind of exercise of speaking english by asking students to make conversation related to topics which is the content were free based on their thinking. when this session finished, the lecturer concluded the lesson and asked for more weather students truly understood or not and give the feedback. if there were students who did not understand, they could ask the material then the lecturer would explain again and the class closed when all students stated understood. this condition above had brought students in good condition online class, because speaking class need much practice in verbal so that google meeting support well without losing the essence of learning speaking. they practice during the class with lecturer and friends. speaking skills students joint for speaking class by applying google meet video conference. some aspects related to speaking skills were pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and comprehension. the lecturer kept paying attention to speaking skills aspects as one of ways to help them getting better in speaking. when the students made kind mistakes during learning, the lecturer evaluated them by not pointing to students who made the mistakes. it was done in general evaluation and students improved their weakness from lecturer’s evaluation. from here, students realized that google meet video conferencing provided them well in learning english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 101 speaking english in which the lecturer always help students to improve their speaking skills by speaking directly on the platform. psychological aspects starting point if you want to teach your students is making sure that your students’ psychology is safe from feeling bad. when they have a good mood, they will follow your class enthusiastic and ready to join the class whenever and wherever even offline or online class. in this research, students’ psychology was fine, they did not have any burden even the class was online. feeling happy make students focus following speaking class and they were not awkward when lecturer asked them to practice. feeling secure make them not afraid to make mistakes when they spoke up, the lecturer never underestimated at all. feeling confident make students feel free practice speaking and feeling brave make students practice speaking among friends well. from result and discussion above, we could see that when students gave positive perception on the usage of platform, it could be said that the lecturer had an intelligence in digital literacy well and vice versa. (lim and pyun, 2016) stated that lecturer must have good digital literacy to do online learning using certain application moreover the application by using video conference in this case was google meet, it must be packaged with interesting learning. moreover, durriyah and zuhdi stated that process of teaching and learning which was monotonous caused unsuccessful in online teaching and make students bored (durriyah & zuhdi, 2018). google meet video conferencing has a special feature for the lecturer who run the platform well make students feel good, safe and this application is very efficient and easy to use in my research. as pratama et.al stated that teaching through virtual meetings have many benefits for both party lecturer and students, especially on video conferencing which provides the learning process efficient, practical, and safe (pratama et al., 2020). conclusion google meet video conference was a tool to teach students during pandemic in an english speaking class. this platform was used to provide students felt like in the real classroom which is lecture and students can meet face to face even the fact was in virtual world but this tool help much to students in interaction, teaching learning process, psychological aspect, speaking skills. students did interaction in three ways, they were lecturerstudents interaction, studentslecture interaction, and students-students interaction. in teaching learning process, it was the same treatment as teaching in a real classroom such as opening activity, main activity, and closing activity. in psychological aspect, all students were happy, secure, confident, and brave to speak in front of camera facing their friends as like in a real class. and in speaking skills, lecturer helped them directly after the class finished by making evaluation about teaching learning process, make sure weather students truly understand or not and correct their pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and comprehension in general. acknowledgement i would like to say my thankful to stkip setia budhi rangkasbitung that had support me in funding for conducting the research. thanks to mr. dr. h. suherman, m.pd as the head of stkip setia budhi and p3mpmi who supported me much in doing this research. references adijaya, n., & santosa, l. p. 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(2020). reading and connecting: using social annotation in online classes. emerald insight. https://doi.org/10.1108/ils04-2020-0117 berita mambarasi nehe students’ perception on google meet video conferencing platform during english speaking class in pandemic era 104 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 349 rhetorical moves analysis on scopus-indexed research article abstracts by national and international authors ananta buana nurcik (corresponding author) english language education, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: anantabuana@upi.edu eri kurniawan english language education, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: eri_kurniawan@upi.edu arif husein lubis korean language education, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: lubis_ah@upi.edu apa citation: nurcik, a. b., kurniawan, e., lubis, a. h. (2022). rhetorical moves analysis on scopus-indexed research article abstracts by national and international authors. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 349-358. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6235. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction academic contexts, publications, including in the form of research articles, play an integral role regardless of which field of expertise they contribute to. amongst the academic societies, publications are the means in which new knowledge is advanced and communicated (martin-martin, 2003; yoon & casal, 2020). in order to reach a wider range of readers, authors often times prefer to publish their research articles internationally, resulting in an increase of demands for international publications. furthermore, international publications will also further boost the rate of publication productivity and enhance the individual and institutional reputations (suherdi, kurniawan, & lubis, 2020) as it is one of the vital parameters in the assessments of world university rankings (zheng & gao, 2016). abstract: abstracts in research articles are important for readers in determining whether to continue reading the article or not. a plethora of studies involving abstracts’ rhetorical moves has previously been published, but scant attention has been given to the relationship between the rhetorical moves and authors’ nationalities. this study is aimed at comparing the rhetorical moves and linguistic realizations of abstracts by authors of different nationalities. this study analyzed 30 hard sciences abstracts written by national and international authors published in the international journal of science and technology (ijost). hyland’s (2000) model of rhetorical moves was employed as the framework of analysis. findings showed that both groups similarly spent more space in manifesting the method and findings moves. however significant differences were evident in the steps of the introduction and method moves. national authors considered the conclusion move as optional, whereas the other moves in both groups were considered conventional. international authors considered topic generalization step as conventional, while all other steps in the introduction move of both groups were optional. no difference was found in the voices used. however, tense-wise, the international authors favored present tenses in describing the research purpose while the national authors favored past tenses. this study concludes that the differences in the rhetorical organizations between the international and national authors can mostly be found in the steps, instead of the moves. additionally, as the use of voice does not show any difference, the use of different tenses in each move distinguishes the two groups of authors. keywords: abstract; rhetorical moves; linguistic features; national authors; international authors. ananta buana nurcik, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis rhetorical moves analysis on scopus-indexed research article abstracts by national and international authors 350 in order to publish their works internationally, it is a well-understood convention among authors that their works must be written in an internationally preferred language, in this case, english. due to english being the lingua franca in academic writing, particularly for international publications purposes, research articles published in non-english journals are likely to receive fewer citations and are often undervalued or ignored (cianflone, 2014; liang, rosseau, & zhong, 2012; li, 2020). moreover, publications in english may result in a faster circulation of knowledge, a higher chance of funding, and career promotion (cianflone, 2014). as the demands for international publications arise, the standards would be strictly monitored to ensure the overall quality of the published research articles. out of all the accounted parameters in assessing the quality of a research article, the abstract is often considered as the main and most significant one used by editors to determine the content quality and whether an article is to be deemed worthy of being published or not (suherdi et al., 2020; fauzan, lubis, & kurniawan, 2020; lorés, 2004). moreover, the abstract tends to be the first part of a research article to be encountered by the readers apart from the title itself (pho, 2008). hence, the readers’ impression on the abstract is important as it may reflect their overall impression on the rest of the article. as the gateway to the articles, abstracts promote the contents of their articles and help the readers determine whether to continue their reading further towards the articles or not (swales & feak, 2009; hyland, 2000, 2009; salager-meyer, 1990; lorés, 2004; can et al., 2016). they also allow the readers to process information quickly and comprehensively as they determine the relevance of the articles’ content to their interests (kurniawan et al., 2019). unlike their entailing research articles, abstracts are always available to be read online for free, even in cases of articles requiring payment for their access (can, karabacak, & qin, 2016). due to the importance of research articles abstracts, having excellent skills in composing and writing them is a must. however, the significant and pivotal roles of abstracts in research articles are often overlooked. as a result, abstracts with unsatisfactory quality are composed in many occasions. for some authors, composing abstracts may prove to be a considerably challenging process in writing research articles (can et al., 2016). the varying templates on how abstracts are to be constructed does not make it any easier (kurniawan, lubis, suherdi, & danuwijaya, 2019). various skills and knowledge contribute to the authors’ overall competency in composing satisfactory abstracts with their very own style of writing. one of the most determining factors in the production of well-structured abstracts is the authors’ genre knowledge (pratiwi & kurniawan, 2021) due to abstracts being considered as a genre of its own for having distinguishable communicative purposes than the entailing research article. swales and feak (2009) and swales (1990) defined genre as a set of discourse with distinct communicative purposes. genre knowledge itself concerns how specific types of discourse, genres, are constructed in their particular organizational structures and linguistic realizations to deliver the communicative functions. the communicative functions and purposes of abstracts as a discourse are manifested in the rhetorical moves and steps, the units of communicative stages which are also the units of analysis in this study. move analysis as a method of analyzing genre is proven to be effective, particularly considering the complexities of research articles (pratiwi & kurniawan, 2021), including the abstracts. indeed, there have been a plethora of studies concerning the rhetorical organization and linguistic features of research articles abstracts in the past. a wide variety of variables have also been previously covered by a great number of notable authors. some of which concerns with the language background, particularly the first language (l1) of the authors (e.g., chalak & nourouzi, 2013; al-khasawneh, 2017; kaya & yagiz, 2020; xiao & cao, 2013). other studies focus on the comparison of research articles abstracts written in different language mediums (e.g., martin-martin, 2003; candarh, 2012; li, 2020, pratiwi & kurniawan, 2021). as a matter of fact, the horizon in which the possibilities of variables have even explored as far as to compare abstracts of research articles in different disciplines (e.g., juanda & kurniawan, 2020; gani, kurniawan, gunawan, & lubis, 2021; liang et al., 2012; khany & malmir, 2019). despite being distinguished between one and another due to the difference in data source and variables, all of the said studies were aimed at uncovering and analyzing the rhetorical organizations of the moves and steps of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 351 the research articles abstracts in each of their respective focus. in the past, a number notable scholars have previously proposed their ideas of the ideal rhetorical organizations or structures of research article abstracts. swales (1990), in his research involving applied linguistics research article abstracts, argued that abstracts should comprise of four moves; introduction, method, results and discussion. santos (1996), proposed his five-move configuration comprising of situating the research, presenting the research, describing the methodology, summarizing the findings, and concluded by discussing the research. hyland (2000), in his research on multi-disciplines research article abstracts, proposed his very own five-move configuration consisting of introduction, purpose, method, product, and conclusion. swales and feak (2009), who also analyzed multi-disciplines research article abstracts, also proposed a five-move configuration extending swales’ (1990) model consisting of introduction, purpose, method, results, and conclusion. additionally, lubis and kurniawan (2020) proposed their configuration which was based on hyland’s (2000) model with slight tweaks and modifications on the subcommunicative units or steps. although previous studies regarding the rhetorical moves and linguistic realizations in abstracts have been abundantly published, exiguous attention is given on the authors’ nationality, exclusively in respects of national and international authors of a particular nation. andika, safnil, & harahap (2018) have previously covered a part of this domain by analyzing the rhetorical moves of abstracts by post-graduate students, national, and international authors in applied linguistics. additionally, kurniawan and sabila (2021) have also covered a similar focus by analyzing the rhetorical moves and linguistic realizations of tourism research article abstracts by national and international authors. however, to the authors’ knowledge, little to no other studies have explored such a domain to date, especially in the discipline of hard sciences. in response, this study is aimed at analyzing the rhetorical organizations and linguistic features of q1 scopus-indexed research article abstracts written by national and international authors in hard sciences published in indonesia. additionally, the present study also analyzes the steps, subcommunicative stages, in the analyzed research article abstracts, which have also been given scant attention in previous studies involving the same group of variables. this study is expected to provide an in-depth knowledge on how these two groups of authors compose their abstracts and to provide insights for novice authors regarding abstracts construction. in order to acquire the necessary information and achieve its purpose, this study is essentially driven by the following research questions: rq 1: how do the rhetorical organization of ra abstracts written by national authors differ with those written by international authors? and rq 2: how do the two groups of authors linguistically realize the moves and steps? method as the goal of this study is to analyze and compare the rhetorical organizations and linguistic features of hard sciences research article abstracts written by two groups of authors, this study adopted a comparative approach using qualitative and quantitative research design. the comparison of the rhetorical organizations of the research article abstracts focused on the moves and steps occurrence and salience. concerning the linguistic features, the comparison focused on the tense and voice. the descriptive qualitative design was employed in determining and coding of the rhetorical moves, steps, and the linguistic features. the comparison and classification of the rhetorical units and the linguistic features within the abstracts pivots on the sentences as the units of analysis. the findings of the analysis would be visualized in the form of tables. in addition to the visualizations of the findings, excerpts and further explanations would also be presented for a better comprehension. a total of 30 research article abstracts were chosen as the data source for this study. all of which were retrieved from research articles published by the indonesian journal of science and technology (ijost), a q1 scopus-indexed journal based in indonesia, of the latest edition to date. the retrieved research articles were classified into two groups, based on the nationality of the authors, while 15 research articles were written by indonesian or national authors, the other 15 ras were written by international authors with multinational backgrounds, mostly from middleeastern and other asian nations. the year of ananta buana nurcik, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis rhetorical moves analysis on scopus-indexed research article abstracts by national and international authors 352 publications of the retrieved research articles ranged from as early as 2019 and as late as 2021. a short span of the latest publication period is chosen in an attempt to reveal the current trends in abstract writing. in this study, hyland’s (2000) model of moves and steps classification of abstract rhetorical units was employed as the instrument of analysis of abstract rhetorical organizations. the said framework of classification consists of a five-move coding model widely used by authors as a guideline in composing research article abstracts. the first rhetorical move proposed in this model is the introduction (i) which function is to establish the context of the paper and motivate the paper or discussion. the second move is the purpose (p) which function is to indicate the purpose, thesis or hypothesis, and outline the intention behind the paper itself. the third move is the method (m) which functions to provide information on the research design, procedure, assumptions, approach, data, etc. the fourth move is the product (pr) which function is to state the main findings or results, arguments, or what was accomplished in the study. the final move is the conclusion (c) which function is to draw inferences, interpret or extend the results beyond the scope of the paper, and point to applications or wider implications. hyland’s (2000) model was employed in this study over that of santos’ (1996) due to a more comprehensive definition of move 5, the final move, which covers not only the discussion of the research, but also further implications or recommendations or that of swales’ (1990) and swales’ (2009) model in which the former does not exclusively separate the purpose move from the introduction and the latter is considered to be quite similar with that of hyland’s (2000). additionally, hyland’s (2000) model is the most extensively employed model of analysis in previous studies in rhetorical organizations (lubis & kurniawan, 2020). hence, further enhancing its proven credibility and reliability as a framework of analysis. furthermore, santos’ (1996) definition on move 4, summarizing the findings, is considered to be insufficient due to the nature of certain research which may not present findings, but products or results instead. complementing the analysis on rhetorical organizations, the salience classification model proposed by kanoksilapatham (2005) in measuring the salience of the moves and steps is also employed in this study. the said model of classification measures salience based on the overall frequency of occurrences of the moves and steps in the corpus. the model proposes that a move or a step is considered to be optional (op) should its frequency is recorded at <60%, conventional (c) when it is recorded at 60-99%, and obligatory (o) in salience when the frequency of occurrence is recorded at 100%. this study implemented a multi-step procedure of analysis. the said procedure began immediately after the collection of the corpus data consisting of the necessary research article abstracts had been completed. the first step taken after the data had been collected was to break apart the abstracts into individual sentences. following that, the sentences were then put into an excel file with two different sheets corresponding with the two data variables. the next step was to determine and label which move and step each of the sentences belongs to in accordance with hyland’s (2000) model of classification. then, the following step was to determine and analyze the linguistic features, the voice and tense, of each of the labeled sentences. once the sentences had been labeled and coded with the corresponding moves, steps, and linguistic features, the recorded results from the two data groups were compared and contrasted. due to the coding of the sentences’ moves and steps being based on subjective observations, an inter-coder reliability test was conducted to achieve alignment in classifications. the test concluded that out of the entire sentences analyzed in the corpus, a satisfactory rate of inter-coder reliability was achieved at the rate of 88.7% alignment in coding results. the remaining 11.3% of inter-coder disagreement of coding results were then aligned and revised to reach even better coding results. table 1. hyland's (2000) five-move model of ra abstracts rhetorical organization move step introduction (i) step 1 arguing for topic significance step 2 making topic generalization step 3 defining the key term(s) step 4 identifying gap purpose (p) stating the research purpose(s) method (m) step 1 describing participants/data english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 353 sources step 2 describing instrument(s) step 3 describing procedure and context product (pr) describing the main results conclusion (c) step 1 deducing conclusion step 2 evaluating research significance step 3 stating limitation step 4 presenting recommendation or implication results and discussion the analysis showed that out of the 30 research article abstracts collected and analyzed, a total of 393 moves and steps were manifested in the two data groups. 78 steps in 122 moves were recorded to be manifested by the first group of research article abstracts written by international authors. quite similarly, 73 steps in 120 moves were recorded to be manifested by the second group consisting of national authors. henceforth, the following subsections will provide further explanations in terms of the similarities and differences in the manifestation of the rhetorical moves and steps, and the linguistic features of the two data groups. move-step occurrences the occurrences of the moves in both data groups recorded evident similarities based on the statistical calculations. the calculations were conducted under the conditions of ɑ = 0.05 and the null hypothesis which states that the moves occurrence’s proportions in the two data groups were similar. move-wise, a striking statistical similarity of the two was that both data groups showed an evidently similar distribution in terms of the moves occurrence’s proportions. as shown in table 2, move 3 (method) in both data groups had the highest proportion compared to the other moves at 30% and 33% with the national authors being the one recording the higher number. the differences in terms of the moves occurrence’s proportions were evidently insignificant, as the highest difference in number was only as much as 4%, in move 1 (introduction), and as little as 2%, in move 5 (conclusion). although, the discovered differences were evidently insignificant due to the calculated pvalue of > .05. the comparable distribution pattern of the moves occurrence’s proportion is parallel with the findings of gani et al. (2020), kurniawan and sabila (2021), and harisbaya, qurratu’aini, kanafani, nurcik, kurniawan, & lubis (2021) in which all three recorded that move 1 (introduction), 3 (method), and 5 (conclusion) have the highest number of proportions compared to the other two moves. furthermore, the resemblance in the pattern is made even clearer due to the fact that the first two of the three also recorded that move 3 (method) holds the highest proportions. this may indicate that notable differences are non-existent across the authors’ nationalities and disciplines. perhaps, this is due to a common understanding or conventions that the proportions of abstract composition should focus on move 1 (introduction), 3 (method), and 5 (conclusion). excerpt 1 a very challenging problem in mobile robot systems is mostly in obstacle avoidance strategies. (step 1 of move 1, national author) table 2. moves occurrence proportions move international national z-score p-value 1 25% 21% 0.844 .399 2 11% 11% -0.045 .964 3 30% 33% -0.641 .522 4 25% 28% -0.513 .608 5 9% 7% 0.679 .497 table 3. steps occurrence proportions move step internatio nal national z-score pvalue 1 1 16.1% 8% 0.914 .846 2 71.0% 60% 0.862 .388 3 6.5% 20% -1.524 .128 4 0% 12% -1.983 .047 5* 6.5% 0 1.293 .196 2 n/a 3 1 8.3% 2.5% 1.137 .255 2 30.6% 12.5% 1.928 .054 3 58.3% 85% -2.596 .009 4* 2.8% 0 1.061 .289 4 n/a 5 1 45.5% 75% -1.288 .198 2 9.1% 12.5% -0.239 .811 3 9.1% 0% 0.876 .381 4 36.4% 12.5% 1.166 .243 however, the presented data in table 3 showed that the distribution of certain steps’ proportions were distinct between one another. based on the statistical standard score calculations, the occurrences’ proportions of a number of steps showed significant differences. the calculations were conducted under the same conditions as of the ananta buana nurcik, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis rhetorical moves analysis on scopus-indexed research article abstracts by national and international authors 354 moves occurrence’. it was found that step 4 of move 1 (introduction) and step 3 of move 3 (method) of the two groups showed significant differences proven by the low p-values of p < .05. step 4 of move 1 (introduction) had no proportions at all in abstracts written by the international authors, but had 12% of proportions in the national authors’ abstracts. the 12% gap between the two may seem trivial, but was evidently significant. additionally, the step 3 of move 3 (method) had 58.3% of proportions in the international authors’ abstracts, but 85% in the national authors’ abstracts. the 26.7% gap was evidently enough to point out the significant difference between them. in both cases, compared to the international authors, the national authors spent more space in their abstracts to manifest step 4 of move 1 and step 3 of move 3. aside from the significant difference between step 4 of move 1 (introduction) and step 3 of move 3 (method), the other remaining steps’ proportions were considerably stable and similar. although there were found gaps of occurrence’s proportions between one step and another, statistically speaking, said gaps were considered insignificant. such a premise is due to the high p-value of the data as shown in table 3. as a matter of fact, there is no step in move 5 (conclusion) which has significant difference, implying that the two groups evidently have similar distributions of steps occurrence’s proportions in move 5 (conclusion). an excerpt of move 5 is as follows: excerpt 2 the implication is that teaching and learning process must be equally fostering all these variables to achieve a high level of students’ achievement, especially in mathematics subjects. (step 4 of move 5, international author) as shown in table 3, two additional steps were found in the international authors’ abstracts; step 5* of move 1 (introduction) and step 4*of move 3 (method). the two new steps were included in the analysis due to certain sub-communicative functions yet to be defined in hyland’s (2000) model. step 5* of move 1 (introduction) which function is to present previous studies and step 4* of move 3 (method) which function is to describe the research design were lubis and kurniawan’s (2020) extended model of rhetorical organization, which was based on that of hyland’s (2000). despite the low recorded proportions, the occurrences of these new steps may potentially spark a new trend and chart new horizons in abstracts’ rhetorical organizations. additionally, the emergence of the previously unclassified subcommunicative stages may indicate the eligibility of hyland’s (2000) extended model proposed by lubis and kurniawan (2020) for future studies. the following excerpts demonstrate the use of the additional steps: excerpt 3 however, there are works related to applications directed to the human body, especially in replacement devices for the upper limb. (step 5* of move 1) excerpt 4 in the past there have been important works in physician recommendation. (step 5* of move 1) excerpt 5 in this work, we adopt neural networks and undertake a comparative analysis between several different available supervised algorithms to identify one best suited neural architecture that can work best in the applied fields. (step 4* of move 3) table 4. moves and steps salience move internati onal national step international national 1 73% (c) 67% (c) 1 27% (op) 13% (op) 2 67% (c) 53% (op) 3 13% (op) 27% (op) 4 0% (op) 13% (op) 5* 13% (op) 0% (op) 2 73% (c) 73% (c) n/a 3 93% (c) 87% (c) 1 20% (op) 7% (op) 2 47% (op) 27% (op) 3 67% (c) 80% (c) 4* 7% (op) 0% (op) 4 93% (c) 87% (c) n/a 5 73% (c) 47% (op) 1 33% (op) 40% (op) 2 7% (op) 13% (op) 3 7% (op) 0% (op) 4 27% (op) 13% (op) move-step salience another point of analysis is the salience of the moves and steps. as shown in table 4, as no moves were recorded to have a 100% frequency across all of the analyzed abstracts, none of the five moves were considered obligatory in salience in both data groups. the highest recorded salience in the data were those of move 3 (method) and 4 (product) of the international authors group at 93% each, which means that 14 out of 15 abstracts in the said group employed those moves in their organizations. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 355 interestingly, the same moves in the national authors group also recorded the same level of salience with both recorded at 87%. hence, both moves in both data groups were considered to have similar standings in the level of importance as both were classified as conventional in salience. aside from the similar salience degree of move 3 (method) and 4 (product), the salience of move 2 (purpose) in both data groups also recorded an uncanny resemblance. in both data groups, move 2 (purpose) had a salience of 73%, which then also classified as conventional. despite the similarities in terms of the moves’ salience, there was also a striking difference between the two data groups. as the data in table 3 suggests, the salience in move 5 (conclusion) was notably different in the two groups. in abstracts written by international authors, with 73% of salience rate, move 5 (conclusion) was classified as conventional in salience as did the other moves. on the contrary, with only 47% of salience rate, it was classified as optional in abstracts written by national authors. thus, making it the only optional move due to its lowest degree of salience in the data. the low salience of move 5 (conclusion) resonates with the findings of kurniawan and sabila (2021) in which it was found that the abstracts by indonesian authors typically focus more on move 1 (introduction) and less on move 5 (conclusion) in terms of the moves’ salience. however, it contrasts with the findings of andika et al. (2018) in which move 5 (conclusion) recorded a higher salience than move 1 (introduction) with a minor gap of only 5% and with that of ramadhini, wahyuni, ramadhani, kurniawan, gunawan, & muniroh (2020) with a larger gap of 20%. interestingly, the salience of move 1 (introduction) and 5 (conclusion) of international authors’ abstract do not correspond with swales’ (2009) as it is more similar with that of the national authors’ abstracts. additionally, the high salience of move 3 (method) and move 4 (product) in both data groups is parallel with the premises of hyland’s (2000; 2004) regarding the typical constructions of hard sciences research article abstracts. the absence of moves classified as obligatory in both data groups is comparable with that of andika et al. (2018) and gani et al. (2020) as the former also did not record any obligatory moves in international and national authors, and the latter in hard sciences research article abstracts, which indicates that both national and international authors do not necessarily employ all moves in their abstracts. the comparison on the steps’ salience also showed a number of interesting findings. no data regarding the steps of move 2 (purpose) and 4 (product) were presented in table 4 nor will it be analyzed in this subsection due to the fact that hyland’s (2000) classification model of rhetorical moves did not include any steps in the said two moves. as shown in table 4, all of the steps in move 3 (method) and 5 (conclusion) of both data groups showed similar degrees of salience. the differences in percentage of occurrence were not drastic enough to change the group of salience classifications in which they belong to. the salience of step 1 of move 3 (method) could demonstrate this premise. in the international authors’ abstracts, the said step was classified as optional at 20% of salience, and still classified as optional despite recording only 7% of salience in the national authors’ abstracts. the 13% gap in salience was not enough to demonstrate a difference in the salience classifications. however, the similarity in the salience of the steps of move 3 (method) and 5 (conclusion) was found to be contradictory with the findings of ramadhini et al. (2020) in which the steps of move 3 (method) were either conventional or obligatory, and those of move 5 (conclusion) were mostly conventional. nevertheless, the notably high salience of step 3 of move 3 (method) is evidently similar with the findings of kurniawan and sabila (2021) and kanafani, nurcik, harisbaya, qurratu’aini, kurniawan, & lubis (2021). although the salience of all the steps in move 3 (method) and 5 (conclusion) was evidently similar in both data, the steps of move 1 (introduction) do not share the same level of similarities. international authors had a rather higher tendency to provide the generalizations of their research topic in their abstracts when compared to national authors. this was due to the striking difference recorded in the salience of step 2 of move 1 (introduction). as presented in table 4, the said step in international authors’ abstracts was conventional in salience, but in that of the national authors’, it was optional in salience. nevertheless, the other steps of move 1 (introduction) have similar degrees of salience in both data with all of them being evidently optional in salience. ananta buana nurcik, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis rhetorical moves analysis on scopus-indexed research article abstracts by national and international authors 356 table 5. tenses and voices used in the abstracts moves tense voice international national international national 1 pr (90%) pr (88%) ac (90%) ac (68%) pa (10%) pa (12%) pa (10%) pa (32%) 2 pr (85%) pr (46%) ac (92%) ac (85%) pa (15%) pa (54%) pa (8%) pa (15%) 3 pr (44%) pr (42%) ac (31%) ac (30%) pa (56%) pa (58%) pa (69%) pa (70%) 4 pr (47%) pr (50%) ac (93%) ac (76%) pa (53%) pa (50%) pa (7%) pa (24%) 5 pr (82%) pr (88%) ac (82%) ac (75%) pa (18%) pa (12%) pa (18%) pa (25%) linguistic features this subsection presents the comparison of the two data groups in terms of the linguistic features, particularly the tenses and voice. as shown in table 5, a number of considerable similarities and differences were found in the data. in general, both data groups only used present and past tenses. both international and national authors extensively used the same tenses in move 1 (introduction), 3 (method), and 5 (conclusion). however, in move 2 (purpose), international authors dominantly used present tenses with a gap of 60% between the proportions of the two tenses. on the other hand, national authors tend to favor past tenses in the same move with gap of only 8% between the proportions of the two tenses. interestingly, national authors recorded an equal proportion of both tenses in move 4 (product), while their international counterparts favored the use of past tenses over present tenses. surprisingly, the analysis on the proportions of the use of voice in the two data groups did not record any difference whatsoever as the dominantly used voice were similar across all the moves. excerpt 6 this study was conducted to produce samples under various mixing speed conditions. (move 2, national author) excerpt 7 the main purpose of this work is to compare two main types of ffr schemes; respectively; strict ffr and soft frequency reuse with the proposed scheme. (move 2, international author) the dominant use of present tenses in move 1, 3 and 5 echoes with the findings of andika et al. (2018), kurniawan and sabil (2021), and ramadhini et al. (2020). thus, indicating that the authors nationality and disciplinary background do not exceptionally affect the choice of tenses. furthermore, lubis and kurniawan (2020) also pointed out that present tenses are generally used extensively in move 1, 2, and 5 due to the functions of those moves commonly presenting generalizations, intentions, and interpretations of the findings. past tenses are generally used in presenting the method and result/product moves (lubis & kurnaiwan, 2020). hence, confirming that the high proportion of past tenses in move 3 of both data groups and move 4 of international authors’ abstracts is in accordance with the typical characteristics of the moves. voice-wise, the extensive use of active voice dominating the voice’s proportion across all the moves resonates with the findings of kanafani et al. (2021), gani et al. (2020), andika et al. (2018), harisbaya et al. (2021), and kuniawan and sabila (2021). conclusion based on the conducted analysis on the sentences constructing the research article abstracts of international and national authors exclusively published in q1 scopus-indexed journal, a number of conclusions describing the overall characteristics of the two groups were derived. in terms of the proportion of moves’ occurrence, it can be concluded that there was no significant difference between the two data groups. however, the proportions of steps’ occurrence, particularly that of step 4 of move 1 and step 3 of move 3 was evidently significant in favor of the national authors’ abstracts. two additional steps outside the sub-communicative stages proposed by hyland (2000) were found and labeled with the extended model by lubis and kurniawan (2020) due to the convenient description of the said steps. in terms of the moves and steps’ salience, both data groups were in agreement that no moves were considered obligatory. the international authors considered all moves to be conventional, while the national authors considered move 5 as optional. the only difference in steps’ salience was found in step 2 of move 1, in which international authors manifested more attention to the topic generalization. the comparison on the linguistic features of the two data groups showed more variations in terms of the tenses, but was strikingly similar in terms of the voice. both groups of authors were recorded to use only present and past tenses. furthermore, both also extensively used present tense in move 1, 3, and 5. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 357 additionally, no considerable difference was recorded in terms of the voice used in all of the moves. this resonates with the findings and premises of previous studies which may have established a shared knowledge among authors on the linguistic features of research article abstracts. despite the considerably low number of abstracts or samples analyzed in this study, it is expected to be able to provide in-depth insights on how these two groups of authors compose their research article abstracts. although accurate generalizations on both the rhetorical organizations and linguistic features may still require a larger sample and more sophisticated methods or instruments of analysis. in addition to that, it is also expected that novice and emerging authors in this particular field of study or those beyond it could learn and apply the accepted exemplary norms of abstracts’ writing which some of those are as showcased in this study. references al-khasawneh, f. m. 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(2016). chinese humanities and social sciences scholars' language choices in international scholarly publishing: a ten-year survey. journal of scholarly publishing, 48, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.48.1.1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102795 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0828-0 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607087010 https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v10i1.24989 https://doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12300 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 297 the effect of using quizizz to efl students’ engagement and learning outcome ahmad munawir english education department, teacher training and education faculty, university of sulawesi barat, majene/west sulawesi, indonesia email : ahmadmunawir@unsulbar.ac.id nurul pratiwi hasbi man 1majene, majene/west sulawesi, indonesia email: nurulpratiwi880@gmail.com apa citation: munawir, a., & hasbi, n. p. (2021). the effect of using quizizz to efl students’ engagement and learning outcome. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 297-308 https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5412 received: 04-10-2021 accepted: 27-11-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction creating a learning environment through a gamification approach is not a very new concept. there are several studies are using this approach towards the classroom. one of them is a study by bicen & kocakoyun (2018). it was found that through the gamification approach, the students' interest was increased and their ambition for success was formed (bicen & kocakoyun, 2018). in gamification studies, internal motivation goals and competence have important effects on work engagement. (muntean, 2011). it has been examined that it provided a positive impact on the motivational affordance and psychological/behavioral affordance (hamari, koivisto, sarsa, 2014). it is a necessity to solve the problem of students faced in their learning experience –emotional and behavioral problems and learning difficulties (evolution, n.d.). the problems are such as limited class hours in practicing language skills, limited authentic material resource and too many students in a class. for this reason, the e-learning model is an innovation to facilitate students in improving their learning abilities (evolution, n.d.). quizizz is a free online-based of a formative assessment tool that allows the teacher to conduct both assessments in class and as homework. it tends to be effectively used, helped to stimulate metacognitive of the student, liveliness in class and student attendance in advanced education which abstract: the objectives of the research are to find out the extent of students' engagement in efl learning before using quizizz application, to find out students' score results from the test using quizizz application, to find out the extent of students' behavior during the efl learning and to find out the effect after using quizizz to students' engagement and learning outcomes in efl learning. this research applies a one-shot case study on explanatory quantitative research design to describe a phenomenon on the effectiveness of student engagement and learning outcomes after using quizizz application in the efl classroom of the 5th semester at the english education department in universitas sulawesi barat. there are four classes and the researcher took one class purposively. the data are collected by employing preliminary and final surveys, treatments, direct observation, and tests. structural equation modeling analyses show that using quizizz application gave constructively contribution to some of the dependent variables. the effect of using quizizz has the highest contribution or influence on the students' psychomotor outcomes. next is to the effect of using quizizz to the students' cognitive and affective outcomes. moreover, student engagement is little or not significantly affected by the use of quizizz. the conclusion highlights the importance, although currently ignored, ways that students contribute depends on the flow of the instruction they received. moreover, the learning environment encourages students to think. as a concern to the teacher that students need motivational elements than a scoring system to increase their motivation. keywords: quizizz, gamification approach; students’ score; students’ behavior; students’ engagement; learning outcomes; efl learning ahmad munawir & nurul pratiwi hasbi the effect of using quizizz to efl students’ engagement and learning outcome 298 demanding the limited participation of lecturers and students (bicen and kocakoyun, 2018). although, some previous studies describing the benefits of using quizizz and the students' perception of quizizz application in the classroom, this study examines quizizz application from a review of students' abilities: knowledge (cognitive), attitude (affective) and psychomotor in english as foreign language classroom. this study applies quizizz application as a gamification approach towards the class to engage students by analyzing those students' abilities in being able to learn efl. it is to find how the students' engagement and their learning outcomes are affected in terms of those students' abilities using quizizz in learning efl. student engagement studies on the engagement of the student in the teaching-learning process showed that there is no consensus about the definition of it (fredricks, blumenfeld, paris, 2004). the concept was found its strong connection to a psychological and behavioral component (beer, clark, jones, n.d.). regarding engagement means to discuss students' behavior in the school (sullivan et al., 2009). to the students who are in their adolescent development in the age of 15-19, the school experience is considered as not an opportunity to succeed, but rather as an obstacle to maturity (papalia, olds, feldman, 2009). this obstacle occurs due to many problems students often faced such as emotional and behavioral problems and learning difficulties (battin-pearson, et al., 2000). the tension becomes more intense because of demands as rigid rules related to education in school (appleton, christenson, furlong, m.j, 2008). students often experienced boredom in school and few students took advantage of their study time, both inside and outside the classroom. above emotional, behavior problems and learning difficulties are at risk of inhibiting the learning process. it can reduce academic achievement. students need to increase involvement in learning including aspects: emotion; behavior and cognition to achieve academic achievement. student engagement is the time and effort created for learning activities based on the goal or outcome of the school to encourage students to participate in these activities (kuh, 2009). according to literature national association of independent school (nais) report on the 2016 high school survey of student engagement, there are three dimensions of engagement: cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement. student cognitive engagementdescribes how students regulate themselves, create steady and deep technique for learning in their learning activities – the students' works do and the students' ways to go about what their work. behavioral engagement includes students' interaction with their social, extracurricular and non-academic activities in the school. this involvement results in the positive attitude of the students during these activities. emotional engagement is about the emotional reaction and affective relationship of the students during the lesson or other activities that composed as the school environment. reactions such as excitement, well-being, anxiety, frustration, and disgust are the example. it deals with a feeling to the people, working ways and where they are in the school 'placed' (joseph corbett & amanda torres (2016) on nais report on the high school survey of student engagement," n.d.). learning outcomes learning outcomes is an expression of educational goals, which is the statement of what is expected, known, understood and can be done by students after completing a learning period (kkni team, 2015). learning outcomes is more focused on what is expected to be carried out by student during or at the end of a learning process. learning outcomes must be accompanied by proper assessment criteria that can use to assess the expected learning outcomes that have been achieved. learning outcomes together with assessment criteria specifies the credit requirements (butcher, davies, highton, 2006). bloom's taxonomy is one of the bases for categorizing educational goals, test preparation, and curriculum that has been used for almost half a century (gunawan & palupi, 2016). this taxonomy was first compiled by benjamin s. bloom in 1956 in his book taxonomy of educational objectives and the learning domain is categorized into several domains and each of them is divided into levels/complexities of ability: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor outcomes. cognitive outcomes contain behaviors that emphasize intellectual aspects, such as knowledge, understanding and thinking skills (solving complex problems). knowledge called complete and board english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 299 adapted to the context or needs. in this domain, the term low order thinking skills (lots) and high order thinking skills (hots) is referred to which refers to the level of cognitive thinking ability according to the taxonomy developed by bloom. affective outcomes emphasized the aspect of belief, ideas and attitude, such as interest, attitude, appreciation, and ways of adjustment. la pierre incited crano & prislin, (2006), the meaning of word attitude can generally be described as mental tendencies or to be actualized in affective tendencies, both in a more positive or negative direction. it formulated in the form of attitude, affective tendencies are commonly expressed of likes – dislikes, agree – disagree, love-hate, likedislike, and so on. psychomotor outcomes is the acquisition of physical skills that includes behavior that emphasizes aspects of motor skills such as handwriting, typing, swimming and/or operating machines. according to bloom, psychomotor domains include physical skills, both physical (muscle) and complex coordination between the brain and muscles (oermann, 1990). quizizz quizizz is an educational software example using game-based pedagogy that provides online questionnaires, discussions or exams. it can be designed in different formats (true or false, multiple choices, etc.). the teacher can set the quizzes as public or private. for public mode, the teacher can share his/her quizzes with other educators around the world. a free account is created on https://quizizz.com/. to join the game, students do not need to sign up. students can participate in the game by accessing https://joinmyquiz.com, enter the game code and type their nickname. the password given is randomly created which is shown on-screen that connects to the projector. a new password will be created automatically for each game. the teacher can also share the link via google classroom or remind. method this research uses a one-shot case study on the explanatory form of quantitative research. quantitative research is a systematic scientific on parts and phenomena and their relationships. it develops and uses mathematical models, theories, and or hypotheses relating to natural phenomena as their goals. therefore, inferential statistics is the main tool to analyze data (žukauskas, vveinhardt, andriukaitienė, 2018). the explanatory research method uses one group as the sample. the measurements of student engagement and learning outcomes are taken at first as primary data and references for the final survey and then we do certain treatments for a while. once doing the treatment on the same group, the measurements are made as a final survey a second time. the research requires five instruments to collect the data and information needed. they are student engagement questionnaire (seq), quizizz-basedtest, report documentation, observation form, and learning outcomes questionnaire (loq). participants this survey was administrated to the student of the educational english department in the fifth semester at universitas sulawesi barat. there were four classes where each class consists of approximately 25 students. in explanatory research, the sample is intended to explain the generalization of the sample to its population (creswell, 2014). all the participants in this research are from class d. in this semester, students had studied ict courses so it was easier to promote the quizizz application as a learning media later. the selected students joined a class where the learning use quizizz app as a mediating tool. all of the participants were male and female with a proficiency level of efl is intermediate. they had the same level of proficiency (intermediate). measures the questionnaire of student engagement (seq) in achieving expected learning outcomes is adapted from reeve and tseng, (2011) who used wolters' (2004) learning strategies derived from pintrich and degroot's (1990) widely-used motivated strategies for learning questionnaire. pintrich and degroot's (1990) study written by wolters (2004) about the use of learning strategies found a positive relation between seventh-grade students' endorsement of intrinsic goals and their use of cognitive and metacognitive-learning strategies. this research adapted measure features two subscales, one with items to assess the use of sophisticated (elaboration-based) learning strategies (items 1–4 in table 3.1 indicator of the research) ahmad munawir & nurul pratiwi hasbi the effect of using quizizz to efl students’ engagement and learning outcome 300 and a second with items to assess the use of metacognitive self-regulation strategies such as planning before study, monitoring on tasks study, and revising one's work after studying. learning outcomes' questionnaire (loq) is used to the survey of students learning outcomes which are conducted in the last meeting of the study. its items indicators are adapted from bloom's taxonomy and bloom's digital revised taxonomy. the contribution of the researcher is to change the context of the items to ensure students respond to their level of learning outcomes. table 1. questionnaire items to assess the aspects of student engagement learning outcomes items to assess students’ cognitive engagement 1. when i am doing schoolwork, i try to relate what i am learning to what i have already known. 2. when i study in class, i try to connect what i am learning with my own experience. 3. when i study in class, i try to fit all the ideas so it makes sense 4. i make up my own example so it is easy to understand the important material. 1. before i begin to study, i think about what i want to get done. 2. when i am working on my schoolwork, i stop once, in a while and go over what i have been doing. 3. when i study, i focus on how much i can understand, not only if i am getting the right answer. 4. if i am learning on difficult to understand, i change the way i learn the material. items to assess students’ emotional engagement 1. i enjoy learning through quizizz app in the class. 2. when i am learning through quizizz app, i feel interested. 3. when i study by using quizizz, i feel curious about what we are learning. 4. quizizz makes learning fun! items to assess students’ behavioural engagement 1. i listen to the material carefully. 2. the first time the teacher talks about a new topic, i pay a lot of attention. 3. i am difficult to be accustomed when we begin to learn something new in class. 4. i ask question to teacher when i meet difficulty in learning. 5. during in learning class, i express my preferences and opinions about the material to my teacher. 6. i pay attention to my teacher explanation in front of class. 7. i try to understand the material as i can while learning in class. items to assess students’ cognitive outcomes 1. i have been able to make each example of all types of sentence structures without need to look at a notebook 2. i am able to describe the differences of the four types of sentence structures directly when asked by the teacher 3. i am adept at operating the quizizz app well 4. i can get used to submit assignments through the google classroom app and will recommend it to other teachers using this app. 5. i can post question (quizzes) that i made myself to be played by my classmates items to assess students’ affective outcomes 1. i pay attention to the subject as well about sentence structures because it is very important in english courses 2. i enjoy learning sentence structures through the quizizz app 3. i organize my notebook to be completed and contains teacher’s explanation and my understanding of this material 4. when working in group, i express my ideas and get opinions from group members 5. i enjoy assignments both individually and in groups through quizizz app given by teacher. therefore, i get good scores 6. i am interested in learning english even harder. this is because applying quizizz app on the learning items to assess students’ psychomotor outcomes 1. using quizizz is effective in enhancing my engagement in the class. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 301 2. doing in-class exercises using quizizz is more helpful in my learning than doing in-class exercise on paper. quizizz-based test is a test on english as a foreign language by using the quizizz app. quizizz reports documentation is real-time data of students' scores of the test accomplishment. the teacher can view the progress of the game use these data reports. observation form which the data is obtained by observing directly and indirectly by using video support. data collection we do a preliminary survey to measure the extent of students' engagement before the study. the preliminary survey aims to gain a deep understanding of the conditions related to the students' engagement. thus becoming an indicator refers to the measurement of students' engagement after the study, whether to be the same or different (increased). quizizz is applied for one class where the sample (25 students) as the representation of all populations of the fifth semester. quizizz is used frequently throughout the study. the purpose of researching using quizizz is to investigate how student engagement influences their learning outcomes which emphasize the frequency of using quizizz as a media tool of learning efl. we collect data using a secondary data source. the data collection techniques are carried out by observing and giving questionnaires. we do a test that would later be the data to be used as a reference to measure the extent of student engagement in the classroom. it is intended as the reference to the final survey indicator where there is a significant effect or not. we give tests that we had named the quizizzbased test (q-bt) to all participants of quizizz learning class in sections 1, 2 and 3. we teach sentence structure first before giving the test. once teaching the material, we execute a test on quizizz application named quizizz-based test (q-bt) in the 20 minutes-left of each section which first we explain the tutorial of quizizz application. the tests are given frequently in sections 1, 2 and 3. therefore, we evaluate their engagement during the treatment in-class by filling out an observation form. evaluations are done at the end of sections. we survey at section 3 to examine their engagement and learning outcomes during the study. data analysis students' engagement questionnaire consists of 27 items which factors loaded to be measured consist of 9 indicators. they are (1) learning strategies and meta-cognitive self-regulation strategies loaded on cognitive engagement; (2) fun, interest, curiosity, and enjoyment loaded on emotional engagement; (3) expression of students' on-task attention, lesson involvement, and effort loaded on behavioral engagement. we analyze data of the result of student engagement preliminary survey by using a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 to 5. we use a google form application to collect the preliminary survey data. it is displayed by diagram and statistical analysis. after analyzing the data, we do the validity and reliability test to the overall items of the questionnaire. we use bivariate pearson correlation and cronbach's alpha technique to analyze the data survey on ibm spss statistics 25. direct observation is used to see the student behavioral and emotional involvement among individuals and particular situations (dealing with the class situation and/or other students). the data is displayed and arranged in the form of tabulated data. the item of each indicator in the observation form is recorded using the tally method. this relates to the frequency of the same indicator that we observe when in-class activities. students' engagement questionnaire on this final survey is consisted of 26 items which factor loaded to be measured also consist of 9 indicators, same with the students' engagement questionnaire on the preliminary survey. the students' learning outcomes consist of 22 items which factors loaded consist of 11 indicators to be measured. they are (1) doing, connecting, applying, conceptualizing, and evaluating loaded onto cognitive outcomes; (2) receiving, responding, assessing, processing, and appreciating loaded on affective outcomes and (3) psychomotor outcomes. both questionnaires also consist of positive and negative statements that use a 5-point likert scale ranging from 1 to 5. students fill out the questionnaires on the google form application. we also do validity and reliability test which measuring with the same techniques on the questionnaire on the preliminary survey. after the preliminary and final survey data are collected, we do a paired sample t-test. before doing the test, it is necessary to ensure that the data ahmad munawir & nurul pratiwi hasbi the effect of using quizizz to efl students’ engagement and learning outcome 302 distribute normally by the test of normality. then, data also are tested on a paired sample correlation test to know whether there significant correlation or not of both data. once the data collected, the analysis technique of structural equation modeling (sem) is used to examine the effect of using quizizz application to variables (student engagement and learning outcomes and efl learning). research model through sem enables the researcher to answer the research question that is both regressive and dimensional (hooper et al., n.d., 2008). sem is a combination of two separate statistical models namely factor (regression) analysis and path analysis into one comprehensive statistical method (bungin, 2005). results and discussion after administering the preliminary survey, we did the treatment at three sections where each section was held per week from 4th to 18th november 2019. at the end of the third section where the treatment was finished, we administered a final survey to know the effect after using quizizz application as media learning in their learning activities. the questionnaires contain statements related to student engagement and learning outcomes before and after using the quizizz application. student engagement on efl learning before using quizizz application the finding shows that most of the students know how to develop learning strategies. firstly, students need to clear that to make the learning process run effectively, they must know what will be achieved or the aims from the first place. it is to avoid the ignorance to own learning. secondly, their emotional engagement towards the learning shows good, although, some of them still have a neutral attitude whether they enjoy learning in class or not. to the factor loaded from students' behavior towards learning, students listen the material carefully, especially about the new topic. but, they need to take more time to be accustomed with. further, some students prefer to ask if they find difficulty in learning. related to their efforts in learning, many of them are confused to express preferences and opinions about the lesson to the lecturer. sometimes, some prefer to talk with friends rather than listen to the lecturer's explanation. moreover, almost half of them agree or doubt that they still have difficulty understanding the lesson. quizizz-based-test result the reliability test of overall students' score results through quizizz application showed an indication of whether the tests are reliable or not and is acceptable for both upper and lower group level (hair, 2017). the test results showed some fairly unreliable tests, for instance in the first, second and last meeting on individual tasks (classic mode). the highest reliable tests are shown in homework mode. we consider this phenomenon occurs for some reason which is the same as the factors affecting the level of reliability written by hair (2017). in the first meeting, study time is limited by other lecture hours caused a very brief explanation of the subject and doing the exercise on quizizz in a hurry. some students have not finished working quizzes while others guessed which the right answer. there are some students did not answer or complete their quizzes on homework mode. they said that they lost internet connection while working so they could not continue their work. this we state the weakness of this application requiring a strong internet connection before losing any work. but also, they have a lot of time to do homework rather than doing the test live-on class. students' behavior during the efl class the finding identified that students tend to discuss/ask their friends than to the teacher. however, all the students agreed to listen to the teacher's explanation or take a friend's note before missing the lesson. we also took control of the class by influencing students through orders. this is as our effort constructively to influence and to keep the students' attention in the class. command sentences are "listen to what explain, once the quizizz is running, you will have no time to look the book, you will race against the time!", and "pay attention to what explain, you won't get this such lesson in any lecture". on the medium category finds some students did something irrelevant during the teaching and learning activities. this is still tolerated. some sets of class where require students to look and work on different team randomly several times caused this reaction. it was also found that in-class students prefer to ask a friend when meet problems operating english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 303 quizizz application. meanwhile, in the low category was connected to the good criteria where students seem to discuss/ask a friend than to the teacher. also, students do not read the related lesson from any resources except to the teacher explanations. student engagement and learning outcomes in efl learning after using quizizz application once done statistical analysis with the structural equation modelling, the results are as shown in the following figure. besides looking at the overall impact of using quizizz on students' engagement and learning outcomes, we also analyze several possible effects of students' engagement and learning outcomes. the influence of these two dependent variables might be even greater than the quizizz on both. table 2. the empirical model of the role of quizizz on student engagement and learning outcomes (n=24) based on the calculation of the structural equation modelling for the modified model, the result of the goodness-of-fit index is summarized in the following table. it concludes that the results of the model analysis show the criteria for goodnessof-fit models that are unfit. those are indicated by the srmr value (standardized root mean squared residual for the between-person model) which is greater than 0,08 and nfi value (normed fit index) which is smaller than 0,90. unfit srmr and nfi indicate the model cannot be accepted (browne & cudeck, 1993). the chi-square value (397,319) is much greater than the critical value 36,42 which according to joreskog & sorbom (1993) to assess the fit model, it is expected that the chi-square value is not significant (p-value > 0,05). this is because the result indicates that there is no difference between the model and the data. table 3. fit summary saturated model estimated model critical value evaluation model srmr 0.154 0.187 ≥ 0,08 unfit chi-square 367.732 397.319 ≥ 36,42 fit nfi 0.238 0.176 ≤ 0,90 unfit table 4. path coefficients ahmad munawir & nurul pratiwi hasbi the effect of using quizizz to efl students’ engagement and learning outcome 304 the roles of students' engagement and their learning outcomes turn out to be more indirect where through variable using quizizz in-class and out-class. the tables show that those findings cannot be read as a single result that is sufficient to represent the true effect of using quizizz because they stand equally as strong as evidence. student cognitive engagement and cognitive outcomes after using quizizz application the influence of quizizz test scores has little impact or not related to the students' cognitive engagement. student activities involve to learning strategies i.e. relating learning to what have already known and/or making own example to ease to understand the material while learning and activities involve to meta-cognition i.e. thinking about what to get done before begin to study, focusing on certain things that she/he can understand apparently cannot be measured only by direct questioning. this is because actually, cognitive involvement activity occurs when the learning process is ongoing. there are still quite a lot of respondents who chose to be undecided about the statement of cognitive engagement factors. we conclude students could not figure out the expression towards cognitive engagement factors. it is like the statement "i make up my own example so it is easy to understand the important material" dominates undecided responses. this needs further study when reeve & tseng (2011) use this kind factor loaded on engagement, whether this can be used to other research or only addressed to their research purposes. based on the findings, the only reliable result used as an indicator for students' cognitive engagement activities during class is the students' scores result on quizizz itself which improves in each section/meeting. increased reliability is one proof that the level of difficulty of the test on quizizz that we made fit to students who are in the upper group and lower group. to the cognitive outcomes results still seem better than the influence on student engagement above. it is as seen on the path coefficient chart, students' cognitive outcomes related to quizizz around 28% and r square chat, quizizz gives an effective contribution 23% to cognitive outcomes. learning outcomes factors involve intellectual aspects such as knowledge, understanding and thinking skill. in fact, more respondents choose a neutral attitude towards the statements of learning outcomes factors that make the contribution or effect of quizizz on learning outcomes look very small. the results are students operate quizizz application well and at the same time, they get used to submitting the assignment on quizizz. they also will recommend using this app for lectures. moreover, some students can post quizzes they made to be played to friends. students' emotional engagement and affective outcomes after using quizizz application to the effect of using quizizz to the student emotional engagement and affective outcomes seems to be improved compared to the first. it is shown by the path coefficient test where the effect of using quizizz to the students' emotional engagement and affective outcomes is 0,35. likewise, the emotional engagement survey findings look satisfying. students enjoyed and felt interested in learning through quizizz in the class. they felt curious about the learning and it made learning fun. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 305 however, a review of the overall score results on quizizz seems not so. the score results show that many students got low scores and some of them did not accomplish answering all the quizzes. the fact happened in class that we observed shows the reason. several students admitted somewhat 'depressed' working on quizizz. this is due to the time demand. this is true, that the score on quizizz is not only determined by the correct number of answers but also the speed in answering each question. so, even though some students have the same number of correct answers, it does not mean they have the same scores due to different duration answering each question. this why there are still among students guessed the answer, it is because of suggestion being the earlier finished. it is found that the model inequality between quizizz and students' engagement on the structural equation modeling test is a different data figure. this phenomenon also found on the effect on students' affective outcomes. the data collected reveal that quizizz was successful in capturing students' affective outcomes. the survey of this factor showed high mean scores instead of the quizizz score results which mean scores tend to be low despite increasing in each section. this is what makes the path coefficient test model is not so effective or influential due to the different data figure we stated. however, the result of students' affective outcomes found that almost all students paid attention to what we taught. they enjoyed learning sentence structure and assignments both individual and group through quizizz application. they also became not hesitate to get involved in group working and received feedback from group members. they were interested in learning english even harder. students' behavioral engagement and psychomotor outcomes after using quizizz application the first thing to know is that the study established that english as a foreign language is not only perceived as an important subject for the broader majority of participating students. but, it is how to bring english to be enjoyable learning in the efl classroom. furthermore, the findings revealed that using quizizz changes students' behavioral engagement in-class regarding students' on-task attention, lesson involvements and students' efforts on learning english. the survey on students' behavioral engagement found that students listen to the material more carefully, tried to understand the material while learning and more interestingly, they got paying more attention to what the teacher talked about a new topic. once you start playing on quizizz, you have a little or even no chance to see your textbook due to time running. especially, for the effect of using quizizz to the students' psychomotor outcomes viewed by the rsquare chart found that quizizz has an impact or greatest significant contribution among others. this indicates that the most significant factor being influenced by the use of quizizz is on the students' psychomotor outcomes. the varied respondents' answers tend to be the cause. however, all students agree that the use of quizizz is effective in enhancing students' engagement in the class. also, it found an interesting fact that because of the requirement, students should accomplish all quizzes. it makes students inevitably have to listen to the lesson in the first place. a fact also majority students agreed that doing in-class exercise through quizizz is helpful than doing exercise on paper besides there are still at least four students who did not agree on it so. conclusion students vary in the way they react to the learning activities that teacher provides, as some students work harder with greater joy and prioritizing strategies in learning. these behaviors, emotional and cognitive are important in predicting students learning and their achievement in the future. but students are more varied in how much or little they are 'depressedly' learning because of the demands by the teacher as requirement in-class or school rules in general. with this students' engagement test as a way for how they can be enriched, personalized, or enhanced in their learning especially in english as a foreign language. the use of quizizz found that students are more interested in the lesson, and being encouraged to be more ambitious for success. similarly, the use of learning platform devices proved to have a positive impact on student motivation. students responded that collaboration is very important during learning which supported quizizz's application and make them help each other in learning. the students who play and learn on this application stated that the reward and leaderboard system increases their ahmad munawir & nurul pratiwi hasbi the effect of using quizizz to efl students’ engagement and learning outcome 306 motivation. the students can see the status of their progress on projection displayed and on the smartphone. they can evaluate which sub material that they are deficient. additionally, a combination of a gamification approach to the learning method help students better understands the lesson. badges make students feel important and students are easier to remember information when presented in a gamified manner. competition helps them to improve their response to time management and allows them learning topics that difficult to understand. acknowledment alhamdulillahi rabbil alamin, the writers say greatest thanks to the almighty god allah swt, bestowed his blessing, mercy, and guidance which him alone we worship and ask for help. peace be upon to the last messenger of allah, the prophet muhammad saw who guided us from the darkness to the lightness. this article has been finished under the assistance, direction, and guidance of some people. therefore, the writers would like to express greatest gratitude and appreciation to all my colleagues at english eduation department of 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(eds.), management culture and corporate social responsibility. intech. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.70631 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 463 formative assessment in english learning of junior high school dian fitriani english education department, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: dianfitrianii85@gmail.com bambang a. loeneto english education department, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: loenetobambang@gmail.com rita inderawati english education department, faculty of teaching training and education, sriwijaya university, indonesia email: ritarudisaid@yahoo.com apa citation: fitriani, d., loeneto, b. a., &inderawati, r. (2021). formative assessment in english learning of junior high school. english review: journal of english education, 9(2), pp.463-474. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v9i2.4982 received:17-02-2021 accepted:09-03-2021 published:15-06-2021 introduction assessment is considered important to improve students‟ performance, as well as to contribute in the better teaching and more efficient learning (flucher & davidson, 2007). in indonesia, assessment is one of the core competences as it is stated in the regulation from minister of education and culture number 16 year 2007. based on the context of the implementation of 2013 curriculum which is now applied in indonesian schools, there are three kinds of assessment; assessment done by educators (teachers), by a unit of education (schools), and by government (stakeholders) (mulyasa, 2018). in mulyasa‟s book (2018), it is also described that the assessment done by teacher is used to measure the students‟ attitude improvement in which based on the national standard of education and on the regulation of education and culture number 23 year 2016, the assessment from teacher is done in line with the things to maintain the process, evaluation process of teaching and learning, the learning improvement, and the result improvement. on the implementation of curriculum 2013, teachers have to be able to conduct the assessment of the process and the result of the students‟ learning achievement involving the affective, cognitive, and psychomotor. gani & mahjaty (2017) added that this curriculum requires abstract:formative assessment (assessment-for-learning) helps teachers to conduct teaching and learning activities that can enhance the students‟ learning achievement. this study was aimed to find out the teachers‟ understanding about formative assessment, the implementation of a formative assessment for english learning including the use of formative assessment to improve the teachers‟ teaching and students‟ learning, and the supporting and/or hindering factors in implementing a formative assessment. qualitative in case study design was used in this study. the data were collected through interview, observations, and documentation to four teachers, the school principal, and some observed students as the participants. the data collected were validated through methodological triangulations and were analyzed qualitatively and reported descriptively. the result discovered that teachers‟ understanding of formative assessment was in “good” category. the implementation of formative assessment in english learning given by the teachers followed the steps of input, process, and output. the teachers gave follow – up actions namely remedial and enrichment for students although the actions were not carried out as properly as what it is supposed to due to some hindering factors in giving the formative assessment. in conclusion, teachers‟ lack of assessment training affects their understanding in implementing formative assessment. therefore, the teachers need to participate in such a seminar and they need to be given opportunities to join assessment training so that they can get input on how to give assessment well, and moreover to make the right assessment instruments. keywords:formative assessment;teachers’ understanding; implementation; english learning; follow-up actions dian fitriani, bambang a. loeneto, &rita inderawati formative assessment in english learning of junior high school 464 teacher to have knowledge of standards for content, teaching-learning processes, and evaluation. moreover, 2013 curriculum as the latest version used in indonesia, requires teachers to have an expertise in assessing the students either in formative (assessment for learning) or summative assessment (assessment of learning) to help students be able to develop themselves and have life-long learning as well. dolin, black, harlen, & tiberghien (2018) explained that formative assessment aims to seek the students‟ achievement and decide the following action, while summative assessment aims to report students‟ level of learning at particular time unfortunately, in recent decades, using a simple assessment and neglecting assessment implementation in the teaching and learning process are still considered done by most teachers in indonesia. saefurrohman (2015) found that there are several reasons why english teachers are lack of assessment implementation or practices. first, it is due to the varied background of the students and obstacles learning faced by the students in the classroom during the learning process. second, the teachers‟ lack of instructional instruments used to teach efl students as well knowledge to conduct such a proper assessment to promote students‟ learning and assess their learning progress is considered a problem. furthermore, the problems are not only faced by the teachers of public and private schools located in remote areas but also it possibly happens in schools located in downtown area. over the years, formative assessment (assessment for learning) is considered important since it contributes in giving impact on the students‟ learning, to make them have a better achievement as well as an improvement. karimi (2014) reported formative assessment as one of the most influential things to the teaching and learning process. this type of assessment is used to assess students‟ understanding, learning needs, and learning progress concerning a particular unit of learning materials. it is in line with the purposes of assessment stated by southeast asian minister of education (seamoe) (2015) which include monitoring process and progress of students‟ learning, and improving process and outcomes of students‟ learning continually. as applied in the curriculum 2013, government mentioned that assessment is as the process to collect and analyze the information in order to measure students‟ learning achievement. in addition, filsecker and kerres (2012) described that the formative assessment components include taking teacher student(s)‟ interactions, communicating about the students the criteria of success, gathering detail information about learning activities, providing learning feedback, and providing instructional corrective adjustments. teachers are required to understand these components of formative assessment so that they can carry out the formative assessment in classroom practices properly. one of the characteristics of the 2013 curriculum regarding assessment is the requirement that teachers doauthentic assessment. according to the regulation of ministry of education and culture of indonesia no 66 and 81 (2013b), authentic assessment isa comprehensive assessment to assess the start of input, process, and output (learning), which includes the domain of attitudes, knowledge, andskills. the principles of implementing an assessment is also related to these three dimensions; input, process and output(may,2013). even though the regulation and guidance to implement the standard of assessment has clearly stated, the implementation done by teachers of english is still considered unsatisfying enough, especially the assessment for learning (formative assessment). data from education for all monitoring report (2012) emerged that indonesia efa development index (edi) ranking was 64 out of 120 countries, categorized into medium level; the point in this research was learning assessment. moreover, teachers‟ understanding of formative assessment itself is still considered a problem. for instance, kuzel and shumba (2011) found that teachers in selected schools in fort beaufort in south africa did not understand well about formative assessment and had a negative attitude towards it. as a result, the formative assessment did not seem applicable to be used by most teachers as a way of their teaching improvement. similarly, a study conducted by foster and poppers (2009) showed that most teachers in their study could not carry out an appropriate formative assessment in their teaching practices, instead of using formative assessment to improve their teaching and students‟ learning, the teachers use formative assessment only to test students‟ ability. nielson (2015) also argued that indeed, such examinations are designed and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 465 have been proved to fulfill standard requirements for reliability. in addition, widiastuti and saukah (2017) who conducted research on the formative assessment practices in efl classroom claimed that based on the result of their research, the majority of the english teachers do not have comprehensive understanding of formative assessment yet; as a result, the follow up actions are not properly carried out. several improvements have been done by the teachers after conducting formative assessment; however, these were not done in various high quality activities. in contrast to the teacher‟s lack of understanding of formative assessment, the result of the study conducted by and panchbhai and srivastava (2014) in deemed university which took undergraduate students of dental faculty as the participants showed that 95.46% students agreed that formative assessment is needed to trigger them to study. based on the result of panchbhai and srivastava‟ (2014) study, it shows that formative assessment is needed and so is the feedback given to the students by the teachers. it drives to the appropriate follow up actions taken by the teacher in responding to the students‟ needs based on the result of the formative assessment. finally, based on the previous studies, it is clearly concluded that teachers must have a good understanding of the formative assessment which lead them on how to conduct the right formative assessment itself, because the better teachers‟ understanding of the formative assessment, the better students‟ outcome will be. in line with the rationales, the writer decided to have smp negeri 14 palembang as the further observed school in implementing formative assessment in english learning. smp negeri 14 palembang has been implementing the formative assessment as they apply 2013 curriculum which is considered as curriculum-based assessment. this school holds a accreditation and based on the vision and mission of the school, the assessment for learning is highlighted both to improve the quality of teaching and learning of the school and the quality of the students and teachers. additionally, the school intends to have formative assessment in every activity involving learning, motivation, and attitude as it helps to improve their learning achievement as well as to improve the teachers‟ teaching. method this study used qualitative in case study design. according to ary, jacobs, sorensen, & razavieh (2010), qualitative research is designed to reach information of the current status of phenomena that is related to the existing situation at the time of the study. this study involved four teachers of english of smp negeri 14 palembang, the school principal, and some observed students. the data were collected through interview, observations, and document review. the interview was adapted from brink (2017). to support the findings on the data from interview, the observation was held and was supported by the document review analysis regarding teachers‟ lesson plan and assessment instruments. interview was administered to the four teachers of english concerning their understanding about formative assessment, how formative assessment was implemented in english learning, and the supporting and / or hindering factors in implementing formative assessment in the teaching and learning process. the interview was based on interview guide. the interview was recorded by using voice recorder and then it was transcribed. the analysis of the interview and document analysis followed the data analysis procedure through the following steps as noted by ary et al. (2010): the steps are: (1) familiarizing with and organizing the data. to do that, the obtained data must be re-read and repeatedly listened to from the audio-tapes. then, the information must be transcribed without omitting or adding anything to the recorded original data; (2) coding and reducing, that is identifying codes as many as needed from the transcription, then reducing the codes into categories and themes; (3) interpreting and presenting, that is telling story, providing elaborations and developing plausible explanations of the obtained data, then presenting the information. in addition, the four representative students were also interviewed to confirm and also crosscheck the teachers‟ answer related to how the teachers implement the formative assessment in teaching and learning process and whether they use the formative assessment to improve the students‟ learning. the data obtained from the interview about teachers‟ understanding of formative assessment were analyzed using rubric of understanding of formative assessment and were categorized into bad, good, and very good with the scoring range: 010 was categorized bad, 11-20 was categorized dian fitriani, bambang a. loeneto, &rita inderawati formative assessment in english learning of junior high school 466 good, and 21-30 was categorized very good. the result of the teachers‟ understanding was presented in a chart. however, the result of the teachers‟ understanding was still described descriptively with themes. then, the data obtained from interview about the implementation of formative assessment in english learning, the use of formative assessment to improve teachers‟ teaching and students‟ learning, and the supporting and / or hindering factors in implementing formative assessment were analyzed qualitatively and reported descriptively by using an analysis procedure suggested by ary et al. (2010), and analyzed by following what is stated in the regulations of ministry of education and culture no.23 year 2016 about formative assessment based curriculum 2013. some themes were emerged in describing the results. the data obtained were supported by the observations in the teaching and learning process and strengthened by the document reviews regarding teachers‟ lesson plans, assessment instruments, and also the teachers‟ monthly report. results and discussion results the results of interviews, classroom observation, and documentation were analyzed into three mainobjectives to draw conclusions. teachers’ understanding of formative assessment based on findings on the interview, most teachers‟ understanding of formative assessment based on the highest score was in very good category. the total number of teachers who had this category was 1. meanwhile, 3 teachers were in category of good. the result showed that teachers of english had no serious problem in answering the interview questions of understanding of assessment in general and formative assessment. this implication showed that the teachers were comprehensive enough about assessment in general and formative assessment based on curriculum 2013. the result of the teachers‟ understanding of formative assessment was presented in figure 1 below. figure 1.description of teachers’ understanding of formative assessment based on the data from interview, it was found that there were three teachers of english of smp negeri 14 palembang who had the same idea that formative assessment deals with its use to see the students‟ progresses. in assessment guidance of 2013 curriculum, ministry of education and culture via directorate of primary and secondary education (2017) defined that assessment for learning (formative assessment) is a set of activities in assessing students in which it enables educators to use the information of the condition of the learners to improve their learning. in indonesia, teachers take classroom practice which can be described as assessment activities. according to directorate general of primary and secondary education(2017), daily assessment is considered as one of formative assessments which is defined as the process of gathering and processing information on student learning outcomes used for establish improvement or enrichment programs based on the level of mastery of competencies and improving the learning process. the findings reflected that the teachers had right concept on when to conduct formative assessment. it is in line with the concept of assessment for learning regulated in assessment guidance of 2013 curriculum, regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 23 year 2016 about the procedure of evaluating the learning process and learning outcomes by educators (teachers) is carried out with 0 5 10 15 20 25 teacher 1 teacher 2 teacher 3 teacher 4 understanding of formative asssessment score english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 467 some ways, one of them is by setting assessment objectives with reference to the lesson plans that have been prepared. in relation to the definition of formative assessment as regulated by the indonesian government in curriculum 2013, the understanding of formative assessment also covers the knowledge of when the assessment is given, what activities are given in implementing formative assessment, what the aspects to assess are in formative assessment, and what the importance of formative assessment is both for students and teachers. filsecker and kerres (2012) described that the formative assessment components include taking teacher student(s)‟ interactions, communicating about the students, the criteria of success, gathering detail information about learning activities, providing learning feedback, and providing instructional corrective adjustments. teachers need to understand these components of formative assessment so that they can carry out the formative assessment in classroom practices properly. therefore, english teachers have to have a good understanding of formative assessment as the good understanding will determine their ability in taking the follow up actions as the way to improve students‟ learning achievement and improve the teaching quality. in other words, the understanding includes how teachers define the formative assessment, the characteristics of formative assessment, and how they give feedback after giving formative assessment to students. this is in line with bennet‟s (2011) suggestion that teachers‟ understanding of assessing students‟ understanding is also dependent upon the teachers‟ cognitive ability in theories of learning. he further emphasized that teachers might have difficulties in conducting formative assessment without comprehensive understanding of learning theories. as stiggin (2002) said that teachers who conduct assessment for learning work with the classroom assessment process, collecting information about learners that it supplies in order to advance, and check on the learners‟ learning. in terms of the time in giving formative assessment, it was found that the teachers of english of smp negeri 14 palembang understood that formative assessment was done to see the students‟ ability in learning every lesson taught and improve their learning; therefore the teachers should give formative assessment after finishing one basic competence or one lesson. in relation to regulation, it was reflected that what teachers of english of smp negeri 14 palembang uttered is in the same boat referring a set of activities in assessing students for learning as well as deciding the right time to conduct the formative assessment which is done during instruction. this is in line with the theory of formative assessment, according to wiggins and mctighe (2007), in which formative assessment occurs during instruction, as part of instruction rather than a separate activity. teachers who conduct formative assessment should provide feedback as well as the follow up actions they take after implementing the assessment. wiliam and thompson (2008) distinguished between different terms used along with the term “formative assessment”: “another way of thinking about the distinction being made here is the terms of monitoring assessment, diagnostic assessment, and formative assessment. an assessment monitors learning to the extent that it provides information about whether the student, class, school or system is learning or not; it is diagnostic to the extent that it provides information about what is going wrong; and it is formative to the extent that it provides information about what to do about it” (p. 62). it can be inferred from the statement above that formative assessment is important as it gives information to both teachers and students to check their success in teaching and learning process and make an improvement afterward. through the formative assessment, both teachers and students get feedback on what they have to improve. in response to the importance of feedback as the follow up action after giving formative assessment to the improvement of both teachers‟ teaching and the students‟ achievement, it is claimed that formative assessment is required to be given during instruction as the assessment for learning. as explained by linquanti (2014), formative assessment is a process done during instruction in which some feedback is provided by teachers to make adjustment toward the teaching and learning process to improve students‟ achievement of the learning. in other words, formative assessment functions to inform learners of their progress in learning and to empower them to take action to improve their performance as well as for teachers to dian fitriani, bambang a. loeneto, &rita inderawati formative assessment in english learning of junior high school 468 take the appropriate actions needed by students as the improvement of their teaching. realizing the importance of formative assessment both for students and teachers, according to stiggin (2002), teachers who conduct assessment for learning work with the classroom assessment process, collecting information about learners that it supplies in order to advance, and check on the learners‟ learning. assessment for learning is done during the teaching and learning; this helps also teachers to conduct more appropriate teaching and learning activities to enhance the students‟ learning achievement. panchbhai and srivastava (2014) explained that the term formative assessment refers to the assessment to assign the teacher in designing new materials and improvement of teaching in response to students‟ needs. since this assessment occurs throughout the learning process, teachers could visibly see the students‟ understanding towards the lesson and decide what they can do to help students‟ progress. assessment for learning is the part of formative assessment which means that the assessment conducted by teachers who keep monitoring the level of the success of the students‟ learning based on the learning objectives (stiggins, 2004). after analyzing the result of the interview, the writer found that the findings were in line with the prediction over those four teachers that their answers on interview showed that they knew something about assessment in general and formative assessment in particular. the implementation of formative assessment (inputprocess-output) the findings on interview and observations about how formative assessment implemented for english learning, the writer used the theory of implementation (input, process, output) following what is stated in the regulation of ministry of education and culture no.23 year 2016 and supported by the theory of implementation suggested by may (2013) to analyze the data obtained. document reviews regarding teachers‟ lesson plans, teachers‟ daily journal, and the assessment instruments were also collected and analyzed to strengthen the findings of this study. the obtained data about the implementation of formative assessment for english learning at smp negeri 14 palembang could be seen in table 2. table 1.formative assessment implementation: input-process-output dimensions indicators participants input 1. objectives  teacher 1: what to assess based on the indicators in the lesson plan  teacher 2: assess students‟ progress on their cognitive, psychomotor, and affective in every meeting  teacher 3: what to assess based on the material taught to the students  teacher 4: assess students‟ learning progress, their attitude on each learning domain. a. syllabus followed the syllabus for one semester b. lesson plans stated and followed the learning objectives in the lesson plan based on the material taught to give the assessment c. instruments all participants got used to make assessments instruments like preparing questions sheet made by themselves related to one material/chapter that has been learnt and giving daily test. teachers also have daily assessment report to assess students‟ in every meeting. d. human resource teachers and students process a. setting assessment objectives with reference to the lesson plans that have been prepared according to the syllabus; b. arranging assessment grids; c. deciding and providing the   english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 469 assessment instruments along with the assessment guidelines; d. conducting instrument quality analysis; e. doing the assessment; f. processing, analyzing, and interpreting the results of the assessment; g. providing feedback h. taking follow-up actions as creating opportunities for learners to undertake remedial action and/or consolidation activities and / or enrichment i. reporting the results of the assessment; j. utilizing the report of the assessment results       output the process and output of implementation both for students and teachers;  students‟ score as the representative of their learning progress  formative assessment result to see teachers‟ success in teaching  formative assessment result to see students‟ learning progress (regulation of ministry of education and culture no.23 year 2016) the findings on the implementation of formative assessment in english learning at smp negeri 14 showed that teachers of smp negeri 14 palembang did some of those steps in conducting formative assessment. discussion assessment instruments as described in the „understanding of formative assessment‟part, it is stated that the teachers assessed the students on what they have learnt stated in the indicators and learning objective in the lesson plan. afterward, the teachers said that they had to prepare the assessment instruments. in this case, the teachers considered daily test as a kind of formative assessment that they give to the students. according to the regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 23 year 2016, the procedure of evaluating the learning process and learning outcomes by educators (teachers), such as; (1) setting assessment objectives with reference to the lesson plans that have been prepared; (2) arranging assessment grids; (3) deciding and providing the assessment instruments along with the assessment guidelines; (4) conducting instrument quality analysis; (5) doing the assessment; (6) processing, analyzing, and interpreting the results of the assessment; (7) reporting the results of the assessment; (8) utilizing the report of the assessment results. the results of the interview showed that teachers did some of those steps in conducting formative assessment. in the input, the teachers prepared some kinds of assessment instruments. as described in the „understanding of formative assessment‟ part, it is stated that the teachers assessed the students on what they have learnt stated in the indicators and learning objective in the lesson plan. afterward, the teachers said that they had to prepare the assessment instruments. in this case, the teachers considered daily test as a kind of formative assessment that they gave to the students. the teachers knew the input part of formative assessment implementation. however, most of the teachers did not really understand about the assessment instruments that they needed to prepare, they only prepared the media like questions sheet as the instruments for formative assessment instead. according to the ministry of regulation of education and culture (no 66/2016), some criteria of mechanisms, procedures, and instruments of assessment as the learning outcomes are the standards of educational assessment. educational assessment as the act of collecting and processing information to measure the learning outcomes of the learners including the authentic assessment, selfdian fitriani, bambang a. loeneto, &rita inderawati formative assessment in english learning of junior high school 470 assessment, project-based assessment, examinations (daily, semester, and final semester), competency test, competency of quality level test, national examination, and school examination. follow-up actions in formative assessment in the process of the implementation of formative assessment, teachers are required to carry out follow-up actions as feedback for both teachers and students. according to smith and gorard (2005), feedback is vital to help teachers improve the dayto-day assessment of their students, because it improves learning and gives learners specific guidance on strengths or weaknesses. brookhart (2001) also pointed out that assessment can be considered formative if the information is used to form students‟ performance. it is in line with fulcher and davidson (2007) defining formative assessment that it is designed in order to encourage students‟ learning and improvement. formative assessment is considered to be given a bigger portion since it is engaged with the practices in learning and contributes much in students‟ performance. since feedback is very vital, ceri (2008) stated that it is important for teachers to give a feedback which leads students to know how well their learning progress as well as to give suggestions for the future better learning achievement. based on the results of the interview, the teachers gave follow – up actions namely remedial and enrichment for students. in the teachers‟ point of view, the passing grade has become their parameter of deciding which students should be given a remedial and which students should be given enrichment. in the daily test done after one basic competence, or a quiz given in every meeting, the teachers analyzed the students‟ scores. for those students whose score under the passing grade, they had to be given such a remedial. in terms of the form of the remedial, each teacher had their own ways in deciding it. teacher 1: “like remedial and enrichment. after i analyze the result of the students‟ score then i give them like assignment. i usually ask some students who have the same problems then i group them up. i give them explanation about the materials that they still do not get it yet then i give them like assignments to do in group. it is done after the class dismissed. that‟s what i did if only some students who need to take remedial, but if many of the students in the class need to take remedial then i ask them to stay after other students leave, then i give another teaching and i explain the material.” teacher 2: “follow up action of course. for students whose scores are under the passing grade, i gave them like remedial. before remedial i gave them another explanation about the material. and for enrichment is what i like the most because enrichment is for the chosen ones. the remedial is in the form of assignments, but before given the assignments, the students are called and given explanation of which one they still do not understand. (follow up action of course. for students whose scores are under the passing grade, i gave them like remedial. before remedial i gave them another explanation about the material”. it means that both teacher 1 and teacher 2 decided to use assignments as the remedial for students. however, teacher 3 gave assignments for those students who have reached the passing grade score instead. then, the remedial students were asked to repeat the test doing the questions that they failed to answer in the previous daily test. teacher 3: “i give remedial for the students who cannot reach the passing grade, and those who have reached the passing grade or got score over the passing grade, i give them enrichment. the enrichment is in the form of assignments which can trigger them more to study and understand the lesson. for the remedial students, they have to repeat answering the questions which they failed in the previous test, and it is given after the daily test after i return their daily test sheet and give them the score. they have to repeat doing the test, only answering the points that they couldn‟t do previously”. out of four teachers who were interviewed, teacher 4 could only explain that she took followup action like remedial and enrichment and mentioned for which students she gave the remedial and enrichment to. teacher 4: “i give remedial test after daily test for the students who haven‟t reached the passing grade and i give enrichment for those who have reached the passing grade”. the way teachers assessed the students is in line with the regulation of the government. directorate general of primary and secondary of ministry of education and culture (2017) mentioned assessment for learning is the process of gathering information / english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 471 data about learning achievement of learners in affective, cognitive, and psychomotor aspects done in a planned and systematic manner. furthermore, based on the regulation of ministry of education and culture of indonesia no. 23 (2016), there are some components of assessment mechanism that are used as the principals to assess the students on elementary and secondary education level. those components are: (1) planning assessment strategies when teachers conducting lesson plan based on syllabus; (2) assessing affective domain through observation and other relevant techniques of assessment and the report is accounted to the teachers; (3) assessing cognitive domain through written test, oral test, and tasks which suit the assessed competence; (4) assessing psychomotor domain through practice, product, portfolio, and other techniques of assessment which suit the assessed competence; (5) students who obtain score lower than the passing grade, they must have remedial; (6) the result of cognitive and psychomotor domain possibly reported either in number or description. moreover, based on teacher 1 and teacher 2‟ explanations, they claimed that they did such a reteaching by giving another explanation first for the students who will take remedial. before giving them assignments as the remedial action, the students were given some explanation on the materials that they still did not understand about analyzed from their result of daily test, although the other 2 teachers did not do the same thing. this is in line with some elements or steps which should be implemented in conducting assessment for learning according to jones (2005): (1)explain the learning objectives and feedback opportunities, (2) check learner understanding of learning objectives, (3) brief learners on what they have to do and what they have to hand in, (4) introduce the assessment criteria to learners and check their understanding, (5) provide learner with the opportunities to apply the assessment criteria to examples of work produced, possibly by a previous cohort, to illustrate standards required and application of the assessment criteria, (6) provide the necessary guidance to learners on an individual basis and provide oral feedback, (7) provide peer-assessment opportunities, (8) provide self-assessment opportunities, (9) undertake the teacher –led assessment of learners‟ work, (10) provide written feedback to learners, (11) create opportunities for learners to undertake remedial action and/or consolidation activities and also enrichment. additionally, to ensure the teachers‟ statements on how they took follow-up actions such as remedial and enrichment and moreover include the way the teachers assess the students, some students were interviewed. it is assumed that the teachers have the same focus on the three domains in assessing the students which is through assignments, exercise, and the daily test. in the output process, it was found that taking follow-up actions is important. thus, the teachers have already told some kinds of follow-up action they took in formative assessment. according to jones (2005) who stated that there are three kinds of feedback used in classroom setting;affirmative feedback, developmental feedback, and effective feedback. first, affirmative feedback is defined as a direct feedback done after a performance has been observed. second, developmental feedback considered as a feedback containing a developmental comments on someone‟s work. third, an effective feedback is used to meet the needs of the individuals and is directly linked to observable evidence – either a learner‟s written or practical work or a performance from a task given, then it focuses on individual‟s action points and deals with one point at one time. it was found in the observation of the teaching and learning process that teachers of english of smp negeri 14 palembang did a direct feedback when the material is speaking skills such as having a dialogue in front of the class by giving correction in students‟ speaking performance and written feedback for exercises. moreover, teachers also have the teachers‟ journal as they assess students in every meeting. teachers use the teachers‟ journal to make such a feedback for students. for example, facing students‟ negative attitude and we should take follow-up action like giving advice, and also we have to note down the positive attitude of the students and give them compliment as follow up action from teacher. based on the result of documentation, the teacher could prove that she had teacher‟s agenda containing teacher‟s journal on assessing students‟ every meeting as well as giving comments and stating the idea to improve her teaching every meeting. in the process of the implementation of formative assessment, teachers are required to carry out follow-up actions as feedback for both teachers dian fitriani, bambang a. loeneto, &rita inderawati formative assessment in english learning of junior high school 472 and students. according to smith and gorard (2005), feedback is vital to help teachers improve the day-to-day assessment of their students, because it improves learning and gives learners specific guidance on strengths or weaknesses. brookhart (2001) also pointed out that assessment can be considered formative if the information is used to form students‟ performance. supporting and or hindering factors in implementing formative assessment the findings on supporting and or hindering factors faced by the teachers in implementing formative assessment could be seen in table 2. table 2. supporting and or hindering factors in implementing formative assessment supporting and or hindering factors teacher 1 teacher 2 teacher 3 teacher 4 1. students‟ different ability     2. teaching and learning media   3. insufficient number of class meetings   4. lack of assessment training.     it was claimed that the teaching and learning media has become both opportunity and challenges for teachers in teaching. it seems that teachers need sufficient guidance and support in applying assessment. the good support both from schools and environment would bring an opportunity to both teaching and learning process and teachers‟ assessment practices. in line with it, saefurrohman (2015) found that there are two reasons why english teachers are lack of assessment implementation or practices. first, it is due to the varied background of the students and obstacles learning faced by the students in the classroom during the learning process. second, the teachers‟ lack of instructional instruments used to teach efl students as well knowledge to conduct such a proper assessment to promote students‟ learning and assess their learning progress is considered a problem. some of the teachers also said that they got difficulty in handling the teaching due to the unexpected things such as the bad weather in palembang at that time (in october-november 2019) which led the education government ruled all schools in palembang to have some days off due to the haze. this impact the teaching and learning process did not run as planned. the teachers got difficulty in handling the class due to the insufficient number of class meetings where they sometimes had to combine two or three basic competences before taking the daily test. this situation was considered to result in the ineffective result of the students‟ formative assessment. moreover, even though some of the teachers said that they have participated in assessment training held at the school, however, they said that the training was considered still not enough to make them have good knowledge on assessment especially in 2013 curriculum. the teachers said that they still needed to take part in many kinds of assessment training, moreover in such a workshop or seminars. teachers need to participate in such a seminar and they need to be given opportunities to join assessment training so that they can get input on how to give assessment well, and moreover to make the right assessment instruments. conclusion the results of this study revealed that the teachers‟ understanding of formative assessment was mostly in category of good. this implication showed that the teachers were comprehensive enough about assessment in general and formative assessment based on curriculum 2013. then, the implementation of formative assessment for english learning, the results of the interview showed that teachers of smp negeri 14 palembang did some of the steps in conducting formative assessment based curriculum. however, in the input process, the assessments instruments used by the teachers were mostly in the forms of questions as they gave daily test as the assessment for english learning and then in the process, they gave both direct and indirect english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 9, issue 2, june 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 473 feedback to assess students‟ learning. the follow up actions; remedial and enrichments were also taken by the teachers during the process of giving formative assessment. although the remedial and enrichment given were not specifically described and inserted in the lesson plan. one teacher out of four gave re-teaching before the remedial given to the students under the passing grade. however, some steps like preparing assessments grid, and conducting the quality of assessment were not done by the teachers as they only provided the questions sheet for students in the daily test as the assessment instruments, while the assessment rubric was also not included in their lesson plan. in using the results of formative assessment, the teachers‟ statements implied that assessment results are essential part in teaching and learning process. the results could give a feedback for both teachers and students to correct their methods in teaching. regarding the hindering factors such as the teachers were lack of assessment training, it was concluded that assessment training for teachers is very important. even though the school had ever hosted a training about 2013 curriculum for teachers, the teachers still consider they were insufficient in the assessment. teachers need to participate in such a seminar and they need to be given opportunities to join assessment training so that they can get input on how to give assessment well, and moreover to make the right assessment instruments. references ary, d., jacobs, l. c., sorensen, c. k., &razavieh, a. 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(2008). integrating assessment with learning: what will it take to make it work? in c. a. dwyer (ed.).the future of assessment: shaping teaching and learning(pp. 53-82). new york: lawrence erlbaum associate english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 219 representation of students’ critical thinking in writing: a critical literacy perspective nasori efendi english education department, fkip, universitas wiralodra, indramayu, indonesia email: nasoriefendi@unwir.ac.id aceng rahmat applied linguistics, pascasarjana, universitas negeri jakarta, jakarta timur, indonesia2 email: aceng.rahmat@unj.ac.id ninuk lustyantie applied linguistics, pascasarjana, universitas negeri jakarta, jakarta timur, indonesia3 email: ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id apa citation: efendi, n., rahmat, a., & lustyantie, n. (2023). representation of students’ critical thinking in writing: a critical literacy perspective. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 219-228. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.5896 received: 29-10-2022 accepted: 26-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction the major educational objective and explicit learning outcome in higher education has grown to be well-known, warmly embraced, and universally acknowledged as critical thinking (ct) as an intellectual identity. knowledge should be the foundation for critical thinking skills (rahmat, 2020). in order to become a smart learner, students need to work hard in class, read, and search for information. critical thinking aids in all of these activities. they become more successful and reach their goals as a result (zhang, 2022). as a developed and necessary skill for university graduates and society as a whole, ct is a distinguishing quality of a graduate. the success of 21st century professional employment in the disruptive shifts of the industry 4.0 revolution has been attributed to it (beniche et al., 2021; driscoll, 2018). it has become a vital component of teaching-learning, appropriately represents the results of study experience, and contributes to the success of the generation z workforce. hence, the 4cs—creativity, ct, collaboration, and communication—are essential 21st-century abilities for students to possess (ahmed, 2022; hayse, 2018; nuridayanti et al., 2021; zubaidah, 2018). this is in keeping with sunendar et al.'s (2021) claim that one of the four 21st century abilities that the students must master is ct. ct also incorporates scientific thinking techniques like issue identification and description, information gathering, scenario analysis, solution creation, and evaluation of suggested solutions (warsah et al., 2021). ct in the educational system, plays an important role (aránguiz et al., 2020; gilmanshina et al., 2021; rahman, 2020). students are urged to develop their thinking skills to gain comprehension and effective thinking techniques (saputri et al., 2019; supena et al., 2021; teng et al., 2019). it encourages the development of new information while enabling learners to assess their existing knowledge (sahoo & mohammed, 2018). writing abilities among students are also impacted by critical thinking abilities (ebadi & rahimi, 2018; ismail et al., 2018). even writing exercises can incorporate abstract: the goal of this study is to investigate university students’ representation on their critical thinking in academic writing from a critical literacy perspective, in which text is bias and it possesses ideological perspective of writer in expressing social critics, inequality, and power relations. researchers analyzed 91 argumentative texts writing from indonesian undergraduate english education students, which were qualitatively assessed using facione’s hctsr and laguardia’ s clr rubrics, as well as nvivo 12 plus software and an integrated theme meaning approach to qualitative content analysis. researchers discovered that students’ critical thinking skills varied in demonstrating their logical arguments, systematic thinking in reasoning, analysis and evaluation, decision-making, and problem-solving strategies in their academic writing in higher education. keywords: academic writing; critical literacy; critical thinking skills; higher education. nasori efendi, aceng rahmat, & ninuk lustyantie representation of students’ critical thinking in writing: a critical literacy perspective 220 critical thinking (rahmat, 2020). there have also been initiatives to support students' writingrelated critical thinking abilities (maamuujav et al., 2020; khazrouni, 2019; aliyu, 2020; rohayati et al., 2019). this is due to the fact that writing includes analysis of different word choices and the process of producing new ideas (ghofur et al., 2019). writing also requires critical and creative thinking. in theory, developing critical thinking abilities can help writers improve as authors (rahmat, 2020). critical thinking is essential for writing well reflecting a thinking process and person’s abilities (khaidruddin et al., 2021; kuhn, 2019; rahmat, 2020). in fact, students must exercise critical thinking in order to write well because the products of writing reveal a person's critical thinking (suteja, 2022). additionally, it aids in the development of one's own powerful arguments (intja & nahole, 2021). since it develops skills like observing, analyzing, reasoning, and making decisions (nurjanah & trimulyono, 2022) ct skills enables students to find, analyze, and take action (wahono et al., 2022) even students in higher education (rohayati & kosasih, 2023) are required to employ critical thinking abilities when writing academically (aygün & yavuz, 2020). in academic writing, critical thinking is the process by which students assess or analyze the various ways in which they can present their ideas. it is obvious that developing thinking and reasoning skills is necessary for writing effectively (pramonojati et al., 2019). critical thinking aids in producing well-informed opinions since it is based on knowledge, reasonable analysis, and reflection (ma & li, 2022). to ensure highquality writing, criticality aids in evaluating the arguments and supporting data, constructing a debate, being skeptical, asking questions, spotting trends, searching for bias, spotting organizational problems, and reaching an unbiased conclusion based on the available data (saha, 2022). additionally, it was discovered that the writing of high critical thinkers was superior to that of low critical thinkers in both writing modes (motallebzadeh et al., 2018). this study built on previous research by islamiyah & al fajri (2020), who discovered that master indonesian students still lacked synthesis and evaluation skills. analysis and evaluation are two of six core critical thinking skills identified by facione (2020), where analysis identifies the intended and actual relationships between statements, questions, concepts, and descriptions, and evaluation rates the veracity of assertions and representations. al-mahrooqi (2020) observed in another study that the critical thinking abilities of omani tertiary level students are still insufficient. therefore, students need clear direction, plenty of possibilities, and multidisciplinary discussion to foster critical thinking in higher institutions (forbes, 2018). in other words, the capacity for critical thought is not innate. the ability to critically think well should be cultivated in students (bazhouni, 2018). this study differs from previous research in that it examined and explored how indonesian undergraduate students learn to think critically in writing by using logical arguments, systematic reasoning, analysis and evaluation, decisionmaking, and problem-solving strategies. this shows that critical thinking and writing is a trend capable of realizing a learning that is theoretically and practically interpreted not only as learning from texts, but also from other sources. in particular, thinking with mental models/mindset patterns with accompanying elements, such as: conceptual and procedural thinking mental models, with elements of critical thinking with logical arguments, in expressing ideas and critical thinking in the form of a thesis statement; think with systematic reason; is a representation of the entirety of the experience of learning to write and learning to think critically for students. this study is very significant to be looked into because it will have pedagogical implications for future critical thinking education in indonesia at the tertiary level by making more serious efforts to improve students' writing and critical thinking abilities for undergraduate base education. the new outcomes of this project include the predesign of an android application for critical thinking in writing as well as a text-based critical thinking learning model for undergraduate students to acquire critical thinking in writing. method in this study, the researchers used qualitative content analysis (qca) research method. qualitative research uses scientific methods to understand human experience and behavior. as a method for analyzing data, interpreting its meaning, and articulating the meaning, qca is a systematic and objective approach of describing and quantifying phenomena and qualitative material. to develop the theme, it examines evident, descriptive, and interpretive content (apa, 2020; lindgren et al., 2020). the research questions proposed in this study are: how do undergraduate students express their english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 221 critical thinking in their academic writing? how is the description of students’ critical thinking characteristics represented in their written texts? and how is the achievement level of students’ critical thinking? this study investigates the participants’ ct skills in their writing. the participants are indonesian undergraduate students from the lower semester to the upper semester who took a writing class in english department at a private university in west java. they provide data for this study in the form of papers from ninety-one argumentative writing texts as shown in table 1. the participants’ contributions of 91 texts. table 1. the participants’ contributions of 91 texts second semester third semester fourth semester thirty students’ texts tb (30) blog-texts .html (four male; twenty-six female) thirty-six students’ texts ar+ta (9+27=36) .doc texts (seven-male; twenty-nine-female) twenty-five students’ texts pp (25) .pdf (two-male; twenty-three-female) there are 13 male and 78 female students among the 91 (ninety-one) participants in this study, who are split throughout three-semester classes. the participants are english department undergraduate students in their second, third, and fourth semesters who provide writing documents. the research tools employed in this study were a combination rubric assessment based on facione’s hctsr and laguardia’s clr rubrics, with nvivo12 plus assisting the integrated theme meaning approach of qualitative content analysis. texts were analysed by researchers using a simple, communicative, and coherent analysis technique that ensures that reliability and validity are equal. researchers first read the texts to acquire a general sense of the plot, then review them page by page, looking for representations, beliefs, and the assumptions. in this study, researchers employed nvivo research tools in assessing written texts analysis. figure 1. theme procedure of analysis shows the qca method, which applied schreier’s employing categorization, coding as process analysing qualitative data in meaningful way (elliot, 2018), and theme for unit code analysis descriptions for data interpretations to obtain the results. figure 1. theme procedure of analysis results and discussion logical arguments and opinions logical arguments must begin with premises that lead to a logical conclusion. an argument is a collection of statements composed of three parts: a conclusion, premises, and an inference from the premises to the conclusion. it is distinct from opinion, which is formed based on faith, intuition, or emotion. the data bit snippets below show the student’s critical thinking in writing, which demonstrates the development of logical argument in discussing teacher welfare issue in indonesia as shown in table 2. generic arguments. table 2. generic arguments data bit excerpt developing order thinking level 2 teacher welfare issues are a major concern, with low payment and challenges to improve students' progress in learning making many people reluctant to become teachers. indonesia's government lacks appreciation for teachers. (tsl). generic thesis statement supported by data, evidence, and systematic thinking. analyze information, assumptions, and arguments from multiple perspectives. fair appreciation of social critic, freedom, and reform. as stated in tsl, students struggle to convey logical arguments in writing due to a lack of facts and reasonable proof. the author, on the other hand, does not provide any clear facts or supporting evidence to back up her logical arguments in written language. showing evidence in supporting arguments becomes difficult for students to demonstrate critical thinking in writing. however, from the perspective of critical literacy, the tsl’s arguments apply to explanations for the inequality in teacher welfare guarantee in indonesia. nasori efendi, aceng rahmat, & ninuk lustyantie representation of students’ critical thinking in writing: a critical literacy perspective 222 in order to reflect their critical thinking in written text, students must understand the “inductive and deductive reasoning” implied in critical thinking (wechsler, 2018), as deductive, the process of arriving at a specific conclusion follows or contradicts an argument (tarchi, 2020), that are based on premises and evidence to the conclusion (deductive process). the manner, in which they concluded that what they regarded as representation on her knowledge experience, intuition, belief, and feeling regarding civil servant teacher and part time teacher as her opinion rather than her argument, even though from a critical literacy perspective, social and ct are intertwined through the use of thinking skills (valencia, 2018) as shown in table 3. regular thinking. nonetheless, students struggle to write logical arguments in their argumentative texts, where argumentative writing described as a critical thinking activity (ngajie, 2018), in other words, critical thinking as skills of argument (kuhn, 2019). table 3. regular thinking data bit excerpt low order thinking level 1 “nowadays, the teachers’ welfare is one of the educational problems, which is being solved by indonesian government” [premise-1]. (snw). [no assumption] poor thesis statement based on self-interest and preconception. misunderstanding of grammar, language style, and vocabulary leads to incoherent writing. lack of understanding of social critics, reform, and originality. systematic thinking in reasoning research suggests that students need to improve their ct skills in order to use sophisticated reasoning skills at the he level. critical thinking skills are essential for successful participation in modern society, and help students develop an understanding of the world around them (hatim & munday, 2019). table 4. systematic thinking in reasoning data bit excerpt high order thinking level 3 honorary teachers in indonesia are still in high positions due to their low welfare and higher risk than civil servants due to their guaranteed welfare and different salaries. (kki) strong thesis statement, logical reasoning, reliable sources, effective decision making. as shown in table 4, data bit excerpts kki. in systematic thinking in reasoning, the author attempts to provide reasons for why honorary teachers continue to hold high positions. power relations are important in critical literacy, just as they are in kki’s reasoning. in this case, the social problem of civil servants having more power relationships with the government than honorary teachers. analysis and evaluation evaluating a text involves determining its success, such as how well a conclusion is supported by an argument, or how strong the evidence for a claim is. students can respond to the text by presenting a reasoned case for or against the claims. table 5. analysis and evaluation data bit excerpt developing order thinking level 2 “the national film industry in indonesia is struggling to promote its local film industry, with filmmakers using market tastes as a scapegoat” (eky). [analysis and evaluation: judgment] demonstrate systematic thinking, proper grammar and language style, fair appreciation of social critics, and self-awareness of other perspectives. table 5 shows an excerpt of the data bit eky. evaluation and analysis. the term judgment refers to the author’s judgement in analyzing indonesian national films. in data bit eky, the author attempts to identify the fundamental problems of the national film. undergraduate students still lack evidence to back up and respond to their claims and arguments when it comes to analyzing and evaluating arguments. as a result, students in higher education institutions should be encouraged to learn how to analyze and evaluate arguments. in a critical literacy perspective, this demonstrates the author’s ideological identity as someone who expects the highest quality for a national film. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 223 effective problem-solving strategies evaluation of alternatives is essential for effective problem solving, regardless of size, assumptions, or lack of information. as shown in table 6. problem solving strategies, data bit amd indicates that the student, in this study, demonstrates problemsolving strategy for writing. from a critical literacy perspective, amd’s problem-solving strategy is linked to power relations in which corruption problems are always connected to the power of the government. to develop an effective assessment of student problem solving skills, however, knowledge of the process involved in solving such problems is required (shanta, 2022). table 6. problem solving strategies data bit excerpt developing order thinking level 2 “in the era of democracy, the corruption eradication commission, the police, indonesian corruption watch (icw), and the attorney must work together to eradicate corruption and prevent it.” (amd). demonstrate systematic thinking, proper grammar and language style, fair appreciation of social criticism, and self-awareness of other points of view. negative sentiments nvivo software is the most frequently mentioned software for qualitative data analysis and widely used by researchers all over the world (qsr international, 2022). the use of nvivo in this study is to assist the researchers in discovering and analyzing sentences that contained negative sentiments. nvivo 12 plus software processes 30% of all text document data to determine students’ negative sentiments in the texts. in students’ written texts, those negative sentences express emotional feelings as clark (2021) mentioned the non-rational biases that teachers should devoted attention. sentiment nodes in nvivo indicate that students’ thinking patterns are being disrupted by emotions or feelings, negative thinking, positive thinking, or neutral thinking. nvivo is used in this study to find the negative sentiments node. figure 2. negative sentiments as shown in figure 2. negative sentiments, the results indicate positive sentiment by the dominance of green color, mixed sentiment by the domination of orange color, neutral sentiment by the domination of grey color, and negative sentiment by the dominance of the red color. figure 3. shows that students have fewer negative sentiments than other components (positive, neutral, or mixed) when it comes to expressing their critical thinking in writing. furthermore, when they express their thoughts in the form of sentences of written texts about the topic they discuss, they feel positive thinking in viewing phenomena in the world. based on the nvivo analysis results, this means that the students exhibit positive critical thinking toward the topic under discussion. undergraduate students in this study encountered difficulties communicating their critical thinking in writing, but it does not mean that they failed. most students continue to be weak (though some are strong) in exploring their logical arguments in criticizing, analyzing, and evaluating written information and arguments. these difficulties are not limited to psychological issues and emotions. critical thinkers recognize their emotions and understand how they can influence decisions and take control of when and where they should become part of the process; a critical attitude requires the ability to seek reasons, and willingness to judge impartially, even when impartial judgement is not in one's self-interest. furthermore, many students are still unfamiliar with research knowledge and skills, particularly the ability to analyze and evaluate arguments systematically using analytical and evaluative thinking patterns. in fact, students in the english department also complain about the limitations of their english language skills, particularly in academic writing, where they still struggle to demonstrate critical ideas into written text in english with grammar proficiency. thus, students' critical thinking in writing includes the ability to express critical thinking ideas effectively through nasori efendi, aceng rahmat, & ninuk lustyantie representation of students’ critical thinking in writing: a critical literacy perspective 224 good written language, appropriate question issues related to a problem’s topic, analyze and solve a problem or contemporary topic that requires logical argument, systematic thinking in reasoning, well-founded analysis and evaluation, and effective problem-solving strategies represented in written text. figure 3 depicts descriptive characteristics of ct in writing as proposed in this study. figure 3. descriptive characteristics of critical thinking in writing figure 3 depicts complex components that build critical thinking. critical thinking in writing is supported by logical thinking, systematic thinking, analysis and evaluation, decision making, and problem-solving strategy. figure 4. achievement levels of students’ critical thinking in addition, students’ achievement levels of critical thinking are shown in figure 4 that the analysis using the hctsr rubric produces critical thinking levels: acceptable level acceptable (level 3); unacceptable level unacceptable (level 2); and a very weak level of significantly weak (level 1). meanwhile, strong's level of critical thinking (level 4) was found to be less significant in this study. this shows that there are only a small number of students who are at a higher level of thinking. meanwhile, text analysis using the clr laguardia’s rubric resulted in critical literacy levels: developing intermediate level (level 3); novice entry level (level 2); and early beginning level (level 1). this shows that only a small proportion of students have a high level of critical literacy. meanwhile, in the combined analysis of critical thinking, it indicates that the level of critical thinking is divided into three levels, namely: level 3, high-level critical thinking; level 2, developing critical thinking level; and level 1, low-level critical thinking with a composition of fewer students at low and high levels. the rest are almost mostly at the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 225 developing level. this shows that most students are at a developing level as a representation of the level of achievement of critical thinking in writing. several detailed analysis discussions on critical thinking in writing are centered on undergraduate critical thinking for tertiary degree research writing. in addition, this new concept is completing theory of critical thinking in writing from critical literacy perspective, as representation of critical thinking in writing, as the combination of thinking theory, critical thinking theory, and writing theory. this study examined students’ critical thinking in writing at the undergraduate level of higher education, finding that the text is biased from critical literacy perspective and has close relations to the writer’s ideological perspective in expressing inequality, social critics, and power relations. conclusion we define critical thinking as logical and systematic reasoning about truth and fact from a discernible mind, supported by strong arguments, data, and evidence. as findings demonstrated students’ challenges of various development, critical thinking is necessary to improve students' logical argument, systematic reasoning, analysis and evaluation, decision making, and problemsolving strategies in written texts, particularly in indonesian higher education. this study illustrated students’ critical thinking representations in academic writing. this study’s pedagogical implications suggest that higher education should provide undergraduate students with conceptual knowledge and understanding of critical thinking. furthermore, higher education institutions should facilitate students critical thinking learning experiences and awareness through a variety of methods of teaching learning critical thinking, such as teaching learning writing process from early grades to the upper-level semester students for better abilities in logical argument and systematic thinking in reasoning, how to write thesis statements, premises, claims, reasoning, and drawing conclusion (deduction process) in their written texts. acknowledgement i wish to express my sincere gratitude to rector of universitas wiralodra for providing internal university research grand for lecturers. references ahmed, m. a. 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(2018). mengenal 4c: learning and innovation skills untuk menghadapi era revolusi industri 4.0. 2nd science education national conference, 13, 1-18. nasori efendi, aceng rahmat, & ninuk lustyantie representation of students’ critical thinking in writing: a critical literacy perspective 228 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 603 the use of google classroom for distance learning in the current covid-19 situation at the vocational school contexts in indonesia lia novita department of english education, faculty of language and literature institut pendidikan indonesia email: lienovitza@yahoo.co.id pupung purnawarman universitas pendidikan indonesia email: purnawarman@upi.edu didi suherli universitas pendidikan indonesia email: suherli_d@upi.edu apa citation: novita, l., purnawarman, p., & suherli, d. (2022). the use of google classroom for distance learning in the current covid-19 situation at the vocational school contexts in indonesia. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 603-612. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6276. received: 05-02-2022 accepted: 23-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction at this time, the world is entering the era of the industrial revolution 4.0 where technology has become the basis of human life. everything becomes limitless due to the development of the internet and digital technology. this era has influenced many aspects of life both in the fields of economy, politics, culture, art, and even to education (shaharanee, jamil, & rodzi, 2018; daniela & bond, 2019). the education field is required to keep up with technological developments that are developing rapidly and utilize information and communication technology to facilitate the learning process (yustanti & novita, 2019). in addition, it is hoped that with the use of information and communication technology, the learning mindset can shift from teacher centered to student centered (rahmad, wirda, berutu, lumbantoruan, & sintong, 2019; anwar & adnan, 2020). the development of learning is now experiencing progress which is based on the fact that information technology and communication in abstract: the aims of this study are (1) to find out how to implement optimization using google classroom in the distance learning process at vocational school, students’ response towards it, and whether it can achieve the learning objectives at vocational school. this qualitative study used exploratory sequential mixed methods with observation and questionnaires, analyze the results and then strengthen it with quantitative research (test) by using two groups consisting of the experimental group and the control group. this research was carried out in one of the existing vocational schools in west java and used the 184 twelfth grade students of the academic year 2020/2021 using purposive sampling technique. the sample was the students from computer and network engineering program, each subject taken from the population is chosen intentionally based on the class group selection. for data collection techniques, this study used observation, questionnaire with closed ended question, and test. based on the data, the results of this research that have been carried out, that: (1) application of optimization using google classroom in the distance learning process shows that the distance learning process carried out which run well and in accordance with classroom learning procedures starting from making classes, changing the old class themes, making general information about subjects, making subject matter, making and starting assignments, students working on assignments, until the teacher evaluates the results of the assignment. (2) student responses to the use of google classroom for distance learning were very good. (3) distance learning using google classroom can achieve the learning objectives. keywords: distance learning; google classroom. lia novita, pupung purnawarman, & didi suherli the use of google classroom for distance learning in the current covid-19 situation at the vocational school contexts in indonesia 604 its development has influenced the world of education. it increasingly feels in line with the shift in learning patterns from face-to-face advance towards a more open education by utilizing technology information and communication as learning media and fulfill needs they will have almost unlimited information (cassandra, brian, susanna, & michael, 2019). with advances in information and communication technology, the current learning strategy has evolved (ict). education is one of the fields that has had a significant impact on the development of ict; therefore, a teacher or lecturer should plan an innovative and creative teaching method that makes use of computer assisted instruction. students can obtain learning materials from a variety of sources quickly and affordably through ict-based learning (cheung, 2021). current technological literacy can be seen with the emergence of blended learning as part of the learning process. learning currently more directed at modernization activities with the help of technology sophisticated technology with the hope of helping students in learning lessons interactive, productive, effective, inspiring, constructive and fun (min & kavita, 2019). moreover, students are also expected to have life skills from the application of technology because learning by using technology provides opportunities for teachers to be able to improve and develop their competencies, especially pedagogic and professional competence (martin, 2020). technology in education is usually called elearning. it is a type of information technology used in education that takes the form of a website that can be accessed from anywhere. e-learning is the foundation and logical outcome of the advancement of information and communication technology. the benefit of using e-learning is to facilitate the learning process. through e-learning, learning process can be done anytime and anywhere (sarah & samantha, 2017; connie, 2019; kohnke & morhouse, 2020). the use of technology is expected to increase students' interest in learning because the conventional learning process is felt to be less fun and fairly monotonous (alim, 2019). other benefits of e-leraning are added flexibility and self-paced learning, better time mangement, demonstrated self-motivation, improved virtual communication and collaboration, a broader, global perspective, refined critical-thinking skills, and new technical skills (suresh, priya, & gayathri, 2018). at this moment, the world, including indonesia, is facing the covid-19 pandemic which is increasingly worrying due to the increasingly widespread spread of the virus, therefore, all learning activities have been carried out at home by distance learning in two years. in this case, the minister of education and culture of the republic of indonesia through circular no. 4 of 2020 stipulates that the student learning process is carried out at their respective homes through online/distance learning focused on life skills education, including the covid-19 pandemic. in this circular, it is stated that the purpose of implementing learning from home is to ensure the fulfillment of the rights of students to obtain educational services during the covid-19 emergency, protect education unit residents from the adverse effects of covid-19, prevent the spread and transmission of covid-19 in and ensure the fulfillment of psychosocial support for educators, students, and parents. when the implementation of home learning was officially announced by several local governments regarding the covid-19 pandemic, parents and teachers had to think about how to conduct learning activities remotely. in this digital-based era, it seems that parents need to know distance learning technology that can optimize children's learning activities at home. distance learning is a learning activity carried out by students and teachers through communication technology, information and other media by using various communication tools for learning (li & marsters, 2019). distance learning is a new experience for teachers and students. as a teacher, he/she will be motivated to improve his/her ability to teach online which is certainly related to the progress of science and technology (abid & iqbal, 2018). especially now in the digital era or industrial revolution 4.0, it is hoped that teachers can implement it in the teaching and learning process. many teachers have been teaching manually using whiteboards, laptops, lcds and the internet, but there are still few who use applications in learning which in fact these applications can make it easier for teachers to manage classes. additionally, students can also optimize their android phones according to technological developments in learning. teachers and students gain new learning experiences by utilizing science and technology, because they also apply various applications or platforms in the distance learning english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 605 process, for example google drive/google form, google classroom, moodle, edmodo, zoom and so on (tira, 2020). in this line, learning activities and assignments at home can also vary between students, according to their individual interests and conditions, including considering the gap in access/facilities for learning at home (harshavardhan, naveen, prakash, & venkatesh, 2021). this is of course welcomed by the issuance of circulars within the scope of local government and education units in schools. schools give teachers the freedom to determine distance learning strategies (pjj) which of course considers the gap in access/learning facilities at home. teachers and students will be motivated to learn applications in order to support this online learning process so that they are not only through wa (whatsapp) but also collaborated with applications that are easy and suitable to be applied. in online learning, teachers can apply simple learning applications or platforms and it is easier to adjust the teacher's ability to implement technology (maria & jan, 2016; ronald, 2020) one of the distance learning technologies is google classroom. this application can be downloaded for free and is certainly very effective. google classroom is part of g suite for education which also comes in a mobile app version. teachers and students must have a google account to connect with each other. also, being part of g suite, google classroom is tied to drive, calendar, forms, jamboard, hangouts meet, docs, sheets, slides, including gmail. this means that these services can be used in the learning process. google classroom enables teaching and learning to be more productive and meaningful by simplifying assignments, increasing collaboration, and fostering communication (gudivada & vijayalakshmi, 2021). teachers can create classes, assign assignments, send feedback, and see everything in one place. schools and nonprofits get google classroom as a core service of g suite for education and g suite for nonprofits for free. anyone with a personal google account can also use classroom for free. for organizations, google classroom is an additional service within g suite products such as g suite enterprise or g suite business. the google classroom feature can be set up easily. in this line, teachers can set up classes and invite students and teaching assistants. on the classwork page, they can share information—assignments, questions, and materials. with google classroom, teachers can save time and paper. they can create classes, assign assignments, communicate, and do management, all in one place. google classroom also offers better management. students can view assignments on the assignments page, in the class stream, or in the class calendar. all class materials are automatically saved in the google drive folder (gugino, 2017). in addition, google classroom allows for more effective communication flows between teachers and students or between students. teachers can create assignments, send announcements, and start class discussions in real time. students can share materials with each other and interact in a class stream or via email. teachers can also quickly see who has and who hasn't completed an assignment, and instantly provide real-time grades and feedback. equally important, an affordable and secure google classroom that is provided free of charge to schools, nonprofits, and individuals and contains no ads and never uses user content or student data for advertising purposes (andi, 2020). moreover, support google classroom can be accessed using the internet on a computer with any browser, such as chrome, firefox, internet explorer, including safari. in general, google classroom supports major browser releases on an ongoing basis. in other words, there is no need for installation because google classroom is website-based. however, installation is required when accessing google classroom via a mobile device, as it is also available for android and apple-based mobile devices. the advantages of google classroom are being fast and convenient class setting process, saving time efficiency, being able to improve cooperation and communication, being efficient, practical and fast resource sharing (ahmad, 2020) related to this issue, there are some previous studies which are conducted by some researchers. first, ketut, ida, i nyoman, & i wayan (2019) conducted the research entittled “the use of google classroom in the learning process”. this research aimed to show a new way of doing learning process by using google classroom as a medium of distance learning. with google classroom, there are many opportunities that can be created or prepared for learning, starting from how to join a virtual class and what can be done with google classroom. based on the experience of using google classroom, the researcher said that classroom offers an all in one solution where all documents are lia novita, pupung purnawarman, & didi suherli the use of google classroom for distance learning in the current covid-19 situation at the vocational school contexts in indonesia 606 managed automatically by the google drive folder for each teacher and student. second, alim (2019) conducted the research about “the effectiveness of google classroom as an instructional media”. this article describes google classroom was effective as an instructional media in teaching process. the students can share information or materials, communicate and discuss, submit assignment or quiz. they were statisfied with this media as online learning method. third, benjamin, yanna, & steve (2021) conducted the research about “e-classroom interactional competencies: mediating and assisting language learning during synchronous online lessons”. it was stated that the teachers recognised the additional competencies they need to mediate and facilitate interaction during the teaching process and actively explore their own context and practices. fourth, jason (2017) conducted the research about “wearable writing:enriching student peer review with pointof-view video feedback using google classroom”. it was stated that google classroom is a networks platform for interaction among teachers and students, collaborate, share and evaluate homework, grades, class discussions, notices, and evaluations. its objective is to help educators use social media power to customize the classroom for all students. awareness of the positive potentials of this learning style allowed google classroom to introduce a mixed learning approach in the classroom. it was discussed how google classroom facilitates english classroom teaching and learning writing. the argument continues with google classroom presentation and the idea of mixed education using google classroom and the application of this platform into actual teaching writing context and its outcome, the current and future challenges of google classroom in elt writing for efl learners as well as teachers. fifth,, dhawan (2020) investigated of online learning: a panacea in the time of covid-19 crisis. this article discussed about the importance of online learning and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, & challenges (swoc) analysis of e-learning modes in the time of crisis. this article also put some light on the growth of edtech start-ups during the time of pandemic and natural disasters and includes suggestions for academic institutions of how to deal with challenges associated with online learning. based on the description above, it is necessary to conduct a research with the title: the use of google classroom for distance learning strategies on the current covid-19 situation at vocational school in indonesia, with three main objectives, are; to know the implementation of optimization using google classroom in the distance learning process, to know students respond to the use of google classroom for distance learning, and to know whether distance learning using google classroom can achieve the learning objectives or not. method this study used exploratory sequential mixed method. it begins with a qualitative research phase and explores the views of participants. the data are then analyzed, and the information used to build into a second, quantitative phase. the researcher conducted qualitative research first with observation and questionnaires, analyze the results and then strengthen it with quantitative research (test) by using two groups consisting of the experimental group and the control group. each group was given different treatment, one group used the google classroom application as a media and learning tool, and the other one used the whatsapp (wa) application learning. after receiving different treatment, each group was given another test to see the results of using the google classroom application, the test carried out after receiving treatment is called a posttest. figure 1. conceptual framework of exploratorysequential mixed method this research was carried out in one of the existing vocational schools in garut regency, west java and used the 184 twelfth grade students of the academic year 2020/2021 using purposive sampling technique.. the sample was the students english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 607 from computer and network engineering class,each subject taken from the population is chosen intentionally based on the class group selection. this study uses three variables, namely the independent variable 1; the use of google classroom application, the independent variable 2; subject and the dependent variable 1; distance learning. based on the formulation of the problem and framework of thinking, the research hypothesis can be formulated as ha1 : there is an effect of using the google classroom application on the quality of learning. ha0 : there is no effect of using the google classroom application on the quality of learning. for data collection techniques, this study used observation, questionnaire with closed ended question, and test. the observation was applied to investigate the dependent variable, namely distance learning strategies that were applied using the google classroom application to class xii students. it has some components such as preliminary activities:. conditioning and testing students' initial knowledge and delivering learning objectives, main activities: explanation of material, approaches and learning strategies, utilization of media and learning resources, assessment of the learning process, closing activities: involvement in drawing conclusions. next, questionnaire. this questionnaire was applied to know the quality of learning that was applied using the google classroom application to class xii students. then, a test to measure students' abilities in cognitive aspects, or mastery of subject matter. the test instrument here aims to find out how much ability in understanding the material that has been given, whose learning and evaluation uses the google classroom application. the test instrument is in the form of multiple choice questions, consisting of five alternative answers a, b, c, d and e. the test is arranged based on indicators. from the network service technology material that has been taught. scores are assessed on multiple choice, worth 1 (one) for the correct answer and 0 (zero) for the wrong answer. results and discussion this study seeks to determine the role of using google classroom in the online learning process and student responses to the use of google classroom during learning and the extent to which the effectiveness of using google classroom to achieve learning objectives. google classroom is expected to be able to help teachers and students in distance learning activities (online) so that learning becomes more effective and communicative. one of the free services provided by google in online learning is google classroom. this service makes it easy for users because it is free and does not require requires special installation or equipment. google classroom can be accessed online using google account which can also be obtained for free. in this community service activity, organized training for teachers and students to use google classroom in order to support the online teaching and learning process during the covid-19 pandemic. with service activities to the community (abdimas), the learning process can continue well and optimally even if it has to be done online.google classroom already has adequate features and can support teaching and learning activities. from the results of research on the implementation of distance learning activities using google classroom, satisfactory results were obtained. based on the data source of the observation sheet, the optimization of distance learning using google classroom reached 84.54%, this shows that the distance learning process using google classroom can be implemented properly and optimally. there are some of the superior benefits or features of google classroom that can be got by the students. first, it can be prepared easily. teachers can set up classes and invite students and teachers. second, on the classwork page, students and teachers can share information, assignments, questions, and materials. third, save time and paper. teachers can create classes, assign assignments, communicate, and manage, all in one place. fourth, better management. students can view assignments on the assignment page, in the class stream, or on the calendar class. all class materials are automatically saved in the google drive folder. fifth, improved communication and input. teachers can create assignments, send announcements, and start a live class discussion. students can share materials with each other and interact in the class stream or by email. teachers can also quickly see who has and have not completed assignments, and immediately provide real-time grades and feedback. sixth, can work with a variety of other applications. classroom can be linked to google docs, calendar, gmail, drive, and forms. seventh, affordable, free and safe. classroom is provided free of charge to schools, nonprofits, and individual. classroom contains no lia novita, pupung purnawarman, & didi suherli the use of google classroom for distance learning in the current covid-19 situation at the vocational school contexts in indonesia 608 ads and never uses student content or data for advertising purposes. eighth, mobile friendly. it can be accessed via smartphone devices using browser or by installing the special google classroom application available on the google playstore. then, based on the data received from students by using questionnaire, more than 89 percent of students answered "yes" to every question. in particular, 180 students (97.8%) thought the google classroom tool was useful, while only 4 students (2.2%) said no. there were 178 students (96.7%) who said the google application was successful and productive, and 6 students (3.3%) who disagreed. in response to a question regarding how easy it is to use the google classroom program, 181 students (98.3%) said yes and 3 students (1.7%) said no. furthermore, 177 students (96.1 percent) said google classroom was simple to use, whereas 7 students (3.9 percent) disagreed. there were 175 students (95.1%) who believed google classroom aided the learning process, whereas 9 students (4.9%) disagreed. 176 students (95.6 percent) said they felt comfortable using google classroom, while 8 students (4.4 percent) said they were not. there were 161 students (87.5%) who said google classroom met their expectations, whereas 23 students (12.5%) disagreed. according to that explanation, more than half of the participants, or the majority of the students, were satisfied with the use of google classroom as an online learning technique for their educational process. in response to a question on the questionnaire about the benefits of google classroom for students, the majority of students stated that it is convenient to submit assignments without having to physically meet with their lecturer and that it is efficient in sending assignments because it is paperless and free. almost every student said that the most difficult part of using google classroom was the internet connection, which was especially problematic at the time the research was conducted because the faculty was in the process of constructing a new building, making the internet connection unstable. this was also a disadvantage for students who could not afford internet data. many students noted that, while this online learning approach via google classroom is highly useful, it should not be the sole tool used in their learning process and that its use should be adjusted according to the situation. it can be concluded that optimizing an online learning method application through google classroom was beneficial and satisfying for the majority of students due to its ease of use, particularly in the paperless and unprinted way of submitting assignments, where physical interaction was unnecessary. additionally, the researcher also would like to examine the extent to which students respond to distance learning using the google classroom application. student response is an important factor to determine the achievement and success of the learning process. to find out students' responses to the distance learning process using the google classroom application, researchers used a media questionnaire that was distributed to students after the learning process was completed. from the results of the questionnaire on student responses to distance learning using the google classroom application, it was quite good with a score of 54.44%, this shows that some students do not understand the use of google classroom in the learning process. hypothesis testing is carried out to test the truth and draw conclusions whether to accept or reject the hypothesis that has been made. the hypotheses are: ha : there is an effect of using the google classroom application on the quality of learning. ho: there is no effect of using the google classroom application on the quality of learning. based on the results of calculations with a simple linear regression test assisted by spss version 23.0 computer program. for windows, the results are known, as follows: table 1. significance test results with f . test anova b model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression residu total 3987.387 797.229 4784.615 1 24 25 3987.387 33.218 1210.037 .0002 based on the table above, the simple linear regression value of the use of google classroom on distance learning strategies (pjj) is 120,037 with a sig. (2-tailed) value of 0.000. this sig.(2-tailed) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 609 value is smaller than 0.05 (5 %). this means that ho is rejected and ha is accepted. in conclusion, the use of google classroom is effectively used in distance learning (pjj). from the results of linear regression calculations, the regression equation is then formulated with the following table: table 2. t-test significance test results unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b std. error beta 141.351 -1.032 6.991 .094 -.913 20.220 -10.956 .000 .000 based on the table above, the regression equation is y = a + bx = 141.351 + 1.032x. this equation shows the value of 141.351 which means constant (a). this means that if there is no increase in the profitability of using google classroom, distance learning (pjj) is only 141,351. meanwhile, the value of 1.032 is a regression coefficient which indicates that if the use of google classroom increases by 1 point, the distance learning outcomes (pjj) will increase by 1.032. then, to find the magnitude of the effect of using google classroom on the effectiveness of distance learning (pjj) it is known from the value of the coefficient of determination (kd). table 3. coefficient of determination test results (r) model summary model r r square adjusted r square std.error of the estimate 1 .9132 .833 .826 5.76349 based on the table above, it is known that the coefficient of determination (kd) or r square is 0.833 (83.3 %). this means that the influence of the use of google classroom on the effectiveness of distance learning (pjj) is 83.3% and the remaining 0.17% is influenced by other variables (factors) not examined in this study. based on the results of observations of 84.54% which shows that the distance learning process using the google classroom application is running well and optimally. student responses to learning using google classroom are also quite good as evidenced by the results of the questionnaire which reached 54.44%. with these results, it can be concluded that the distance learning process using the google classroom application takes place optimally. based on the results of hypothesis testing, it is known that the simple linear regression value of the use of google classroom on the effectiveness of distance learning (pjj) is 120,037 with a sig. (2-tailed) value of 0.000. compared to the significance level of 0.05 (5 %), the value of sig.(2-tailed) is smaller than 0.05 (5 %). this means that ho is rejected and ha is accepted. in conclusion, the use of google classroom is effectively used in distance learning (pjj). the test is also strengthened by seeing the magnitude of the coefficient of determination (rsquare) where the magnitude is 0.833. this means that the effect of using the old google classroom on the effectiveness of distance learning (pjj) is 833% and only 0.17% is influenced by other factors. referring to the evidence above, it strengthens the allegation of using google classroom, which is very effectively used in distance learning (pjj) which is carried out. google classroom is actually designed to make it easier for teachers and students to interact in cyberspace. this application provides an opportunity for teachers to explore their scientific ideas to students. teachers have the flexibility of time to share scientific studies and give independent assignments to students. in addition, teachers can also open discussion rooms for students online. however, there is an absolute requirement in applying google classroom, which is that it requires qualified internet access. google classroom is an application that allows the creation of classrooms in cyberspace. in addition, google classroom can be a means of distributing assignments, submitting assignments and even assessing submitted assignments (herman in hammi, 2017). thus, this application can help facilitate teachers and students in carrying out the learning process more deeply. this is because both the rest and the teacher can collect assignments, distribute assignments, assess assignments at home or anywhere without being bound by time limits or lesson hours. therefore, using google classroom will make it easier to arrive at the learning goals desired by a teacher. lia novita, pupung purnawarman, & didi suherli the use of google classroom for distance learning in the current covid-19 situation at the vocational school contexts in indonesia 610 conclusion based on the results of the study and understanding that refers to the formulation of the problem that has been determined and based on the data analysis described descriptively, it can be concluded that optimizing the application of using google classroom in the distance learning process, as evidenced by the results of observations, questionnaire and test, these shows that; the majority of the students of the participants were satisfied with google classroom application as an online learning method and find online learning with google classroom useful and facilitates the learning process in the form of various learning activities such as sharing information or materials, communicating and discussing, submitting assignment, quiz, and mid-test. the majority of participants believe that google classroom offers advantages in terms of convenience in completing assignments without having to meet with the professor in person, as well as its paperless and unprinted submitting process, which is more cost effective than the traditional method. besides, the implementation of google classroom gives the benefits in on-learning process such as first, the distance learning process carried out is running well and in accordance with learning procedures classroom starts from creating classes, changing the old theme of the class, making general information about subjects, making subject matter, making and starting assignments, students doing assignments, until the teacher evaluates the results of the assignment. second, student responses to the use of google classroom for distance learning at are very good. third, distance learning using google classroom can achieve the learning objectives. furthermore, the majority of the participants had trouble accessing google classroom due to a terrible internet connection or a lack of internet data. many of the participants noted that, while using google classroom for online learning was helpful, it should not be the sole way used in the learning process; rather, it should be a substitute approach that is altered according to the situation. based on the conclusions of the study, the authors in this section make suggestions to: first, the principal. he needs to carry out his roles and duties well as school principals and carry out educational programs in accordance with the national mandate and carry out government programs such as distance learning activities by using the classroom application better. and he needs to maintaining stake holders in the school environment in order to create a conducive learning atmosphere and the development of the educational institutions they lead can continue to advance and be in harmony with the ideals of the nation. many students and lecturers would be interested if the access was well-provided if the principle was more supportive in implementing online learning methods in the learning environment, notably in enhancing the internet network or connection. second, for teachers, they have to be more open-minded and attempt other types of teaching approaches in their courses based on their teaching needs, with the majority of students satisfied, according to the findings of the study. teachers should try to use online learning methods in class to train and familiarize themselves, and students should be involved in technology and information to increase mastery of technology and information in science, in line with the study program's mission of producing competent graduates who master the branches of science and technology. they should always motivate students to be able to carry out learning activities well, one of which is using distance learning with google classroom. and the last, the students should have a high spirit in studying, and following all activities in school well. references abid, a, k., & iqbal, n. 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(2019). pemanfaatan e-learning bagi para pendidik di era digital 4.0. prosiding seminar nasional pendidikan program pascasarjana universitas pgri palembang. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 509 the realization of task-based language teaching to foster students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context eline rozaliya winarto english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah cirebon, indonesia email: eline.rozalia@umc.ac.id fitri aprianti english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah cirebon, indonesia email: aprianti_fitri22@gmail.com apa citation: winarto, e. r., & aprianti, f. (2022). the realization of task-based language teaching to foster students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 509-520. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6251 received: 06-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction task-based language teaching (henceforth tblt) is one of the alternative strategies employed by the teacher to attain students’ confidence and motivation in english as foreign language (hereinafter efl) speaking classroom. tblt has altered with regard to the restrictions of the oldstyle ppp (presentation, practice, and performance) approach (ellis, 2003). this sort of approach offers students a tangible chance to communicate language use through tasks (douglas & kim, 2015; lin & wu, 2012; thanh & huan, 2012). hence, it can be elucidated that language learning is an evolving process that can foster students’ communication and interaction instead of acquiring language by practicing language items, and that students are able to utilize language when exposed to activities in a meaningful and natural way. moreover, this bandwagon has evolved into a practical framework for the communicative classroom wherein the students employ task-based activities through the cycles of pre-task preparation, task performance, and post-task feedback (skehan, 1996, 2014; elis, 2003; willis & willis, 2007; willis, 1996). according to ellis (2003), tblt has been acknowledged in recent years from different standpoints emphasizing on meaning, real-world language use, and communicative-based activities to incorporate four language skills specifically speaking skill. hence, it is fundamental in teaching and learning process to offer different activities to foster students’ interaction in efl speaking abstract: the present study aims at scrutinizing the realization of task-based language teaching in fostering students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context. four diverse tasks are administered to the students particularly: sequencing task, picture narration task, question and answer task, and problem-solving task. twenty-eight eleventh grade students in one vocational school in cirebon were selected as the participants. from twenty-eight students, six participants were chosen as the representatives whose speaking performance were scrutinized by considering at several linguistic aspects namely segmental errors, speech rate, and grammatical accuracy. the findings indicated that task-based language teaching fosters students’ speaking fluency. there was an improvement in terms of students’ speech production specifically rhythm, segmental, and speech rate aspect. the students also showed positive responses throughout the realization of task-based language teaching in respect of the various aspect of english pronunciation awareness. furthermore, the result of observation in each meeting and students’ interview revealed that students’ participation in interacting in english was enhanced. this study suggests that the students need to be exposed and learn the different aspects of pronunciation to further enhance their speaking performance. keywords: task-based language teaching; speaking fluency; benefit and problem in the realization of taskbased language teaching method. mailto:eline.rozalia@umc.ac.id%201 mailto:aprianti_fitri22@gmail.com eline rozaliya winarto & fitri aprianti the realization of task-based language teaching to foster students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context 510 classroom. in english as a foreign language (efl) context, speaking skill is deemed as the most fundamental skill to be mastered by the students concerning its prominence for academic, social, and professional purposes (aleksandrzak, 2011; hasan, 2014; tuyen & an, 2019). furthermore, since speaking skill requires courage as a psychological factor as well as a proper preparation to produce english as a target language (malihah, 2010; bashir, azeem, & dogar, 2016; oradee, 2013), it is also regarded as a complex and difficult skill to master despite its importance. furthermore, most students tend to be reluctant to speak and require more time to deliver their speech (aleksandrzak, 2011; bashir et al, 2016; samaranayake, 2016). this situation might lead to the poor improvement of their englishspeaking skills and affect the accuracy and fluency in their speech production. therefore, due to its complexity students’ proficiency may not become practical as expected. a variety of language teaching methods have been implemented to provide the betterment on improving students’ speaking skill. currently, communicative language teaching (clt) is considered the most dominant method employed in many schools all around the globe. communicative language teaching (clt) possesses several varieties in which tblt is one of them. previous studies have been stressing the strategies the efl students may employ to overcome their speaking problem (aleksandrzak, 2011; malihah, 2010; bashir et al, 2016; oradee, 2013). in indonesian context, there have been several studies concerning the implementation of tblt in speaking skill context. adiantika and purnomo (2018), in their study, investigated the implementation of tblt in efl teaching speaking skill comprising the advantages and shortcomings faced by the students and teachers in implementing tblt particularly in teaching speaking skill. this study employed a qualitative approach by using a case study design. the findings indicated that tblt resulted in several advantages (i.e., fostering students’ engagement in speaking classroom interaction and enhancing students’ speaking skill) and shortcomings (i.e., teacher’s ability, time constraints, and different students’ proficiency level). another study regarding the implementation of tblt in efl teaching speaking skill was conducted by munirah and muhsin (2015). this study stressed students’ speaking improvement in respect of their speaking fluency after the students were taught with tblt. the study utilized classroom action research wherein the students’ speaking improvement was measured and investigated throughout the cycles. the indicator for students’ fluency was based on their self-confidence in each cycle. furthermore, according to crowther, trofimovich, isaacs, & saito (2015), tblt can potentially improve efl students’ speech comprehensibility. this study put an emphasis on examining the effect of speaking tasks to measure efl students’ speech based on several linguistics domains particularly pronunciation, fluency, lexis, grammar, and discourse. with respect to the fluency aspect, the study emphasized the segmental, word stress, rhythm, and speech rate categories as one of the measurements. therefore, tblt is deemed as the best alternative to facilitate students obtaining their speaking proficiency specifically fluency. in addition, tblt can improve students’ confidence enhance students’ fluency in four english language skills (chou, 2017; halici page & mede, 2018; kafipour, mahmoudi, & khojasteh, 2018a; tavakoli, lotfi, biria, & wang, 2019) particularly speaking skill (ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004. one of the pertinent tasks that can be utilized as a tool to foster students’ speaking fluency is picture description task (albino, 2017; samaranayake, 2016). according to the previous studies as aforementioned, this study is intended to foster students’ speaking proficiency through the realization of tblt. this study will employ a number of tasks which put an emphasis on pedagogical purposes as proposed by skehan (1996; 2014), willis and willis (2007) and willis (1996). moreover, this study will also scrutinize students’ responses and speaking fluency improvement during the teaching and learning process. the previous empirical studies as aforesaid have examined the realization of tbi in fostering students’ speaking fluency by scrutinizing several linguistic domains namely fluency (particularly segmental, word stress, rhythm, and speech rate) and grammatical accuracy through each task. however, the realization of tblt in teaching speaking skill in vocational school context is still rarely conducted. most of them are conducted at junior high school, senior high school, and university level. therefore, this study attempts to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 511 examine students’ speaking improvement and their responses towards tblt method in one vocational school in cirebon. method the present study employed qualitative research paradigm since this study was aimed to obtain a comprehensive data in a classroom as a natural setting in qualitative research paradigm through multiple data instruments namely open-ended interview, observations, and document analysis. it is relevant with the characteristics of qualitative research in which it emphases on gathering an indepth information through a number of research instruments (creswell, 2018). hence, the selection of qualitative study is relevant with the intention of portraying a more thorough description concerning the problem being investigated. case study was selected as the design in this study since this study was intended to obtain a variety of data in a certain period of time or in other words this design is restricted by time and activity (creswell, 2018). therefore, this design is considered pertinent for this study as it emphasizes on how students can improve their speaking fluency through the realization of tblt in a certain time period inside the classroom as a natural setting of the research. this study was carried out in one classroom of eleventh grade students in one vocational school in cirebon. the selection was based on the accessibility in terms of permission and location. this study involved 28 students in one class where they had attended four sessions in the second semester. since this study employed case study design, there were seven students who were chosen to see their improvement in speaking fluency. the students’ presentation of each task was subsequently recorded in each session. due to data collection technique, several techniques were sequentially initiated to obtain an in-depth and comprehensive data namely observation, students’ document, and open-ended interview. in conducting the observation, observation sheet and field notes were utilized during the teaching and learning process. furthermore, the students’ document for instance students’ audio-recording transcription of the four tasks were scrutinized and analyzed. interview session was initiated through a set of open-ended in which the students’ answers were transcribed and analyzed to enrich the findings. there were four sessions initiated in this study in order to perceive and observe the students. the researcher played a role as both a teacher and also a participant observer where it is in line with creswell (2018) that participant observer is tangled during the process of perceiving and observing the situation and the participant. hence, it is crucial for the researcher as a participant observer to actively play a part in the activities the researcher attempts to investigate. throughout the observation, the researcher highlighted on the realization of tblt stages. the students’ interaction, activities, and participation were underlined and thoroughly recorded. in addition, the researcher also carried out transcripts on the whole learning process and noted crucial aspects for reflection purpose in each meeting. a number of tools or instruments were utilized to obtain the detailed data such as video, camera, and teacher’s field notes. subsequently, the data obtained from video and field notes were analyzed to crosscheck the whole learning process as an information concerning the improvement of students’ speaking fluency through tblt. the document employed in this study was students’ fluency transcription. firstly, the students’ speech in each task was recorded and their speech was subsequently transcribed by classifying it inti varied linguistic aspects particularly the number of segmental and word stress errors, rhythm, speech rate, and grammatical accuracy. in order to obtain more comprehensive and holistic data based on participants’ perspectives, the questions were employed through open-ended questions. it is relevant with creswell (2018) that open-ended questions allow the participants to share their idea without any restrictions. semi-structured interview was also carried out by considering the research questions formulated in this study. there were six students chosen as the representatives of the class. the data obtained from the interview were subsequently transcribed and analyzed to crosscheck the participants’ fluency improvement and their perspectives concerning the speaking tasks. the analysis technique carried out in this study was based on the study conducted by crowther et al (2015). the present study emphasized on qualitative description analysis despite diverse method employed in the previous studies in analyzing the data. there are several steps initiated in this study eline rozaliya winarto & fitri aprianti the realization of task-based language teaching to foster students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context 512 to analyze the data. the first step was collecting the recording of four meetings teaching-learning process as well as teacher’s field notes. the recording obtained from each session was transcribed to recognize students’ engagement amidst the realization of tblt. the aspects investigated to observe the data was scrutinized by focusing on the stages of tblt particularly pretask, task cycle, and language focus based on the framework proposed by skehan (1996; 2014), elis (2003) willis & willis (2007) and willis (1996). the second stage was initiated by analyzing the transcribed data of students’ recording in each session. the transcribed data were subsequently analyzed by emphasizing on the segmental and word stress errors, rhythm, speech rate, and grammatical accuracy to explore students’ performance in each session. students’ interview was sequentially analyzed to decipher their perspectives concerning the realization of tblt. results and discussion in the present study, the findings showed that the realization of tblt was successful to foster students’ speaking fluency and generate an expressive learning process in the classroom. these positive teaching-learning occurrences were indicated by the data gathered from multiple data collection techniques namely observation, document analysis, and interview. according to the result of observation and interview, tblt was deemed indispensable to facilitate students in practicing their speaking skill. it is relevant with (adiantika & purnomo, 2018) that the realization of meaningful and focused task can potentially increase students’ active engagement. in addition, the variability of tasks employed in teachinglearning process are considered effective to encourage students’ interaction using their target language (liu, mishan, & chambers, 2021; xu & fan, 2021). in the present study, the students were deemed active to perform their speaking skill through the realization of tblt despite their lack of improvement in terms of students’ speech production in each session. hence, in order to deliver a clear understanding of the research findings, the discussion as follows puts an emphasis on the students’ speaking fluency performance by focusing on the segmental errors, word stress errors, rhythm, speech rate, and grammatical accuracy faced by the students. these students’ speaking fluency aspects as aforesaid were subsequently crosschecked by the students’ perspectives towards the realization of tblt in their speaking fluency. the improvement of students’ speaking fluency the findings exposed that the students’ fluency improvement was considered not actually substantial. the students’ performance observed from four sessions indicated slight improvement in certain aspects specifically in word pronunciation, word stress, and grammatical accuracy. despite the lacks as stated earlier, some students also committed a progress in several aspects namely speech rate and rhythm. it is relevant with the study conducted by samaranayake (2016) that students’ improvement mostly emerged in respect of speech rate after realizing tblt in english speaking class. however, the improvement related to the aforementioned aspects should be necessarily exposed in a frequent way to uphold sustainability (aleksandrzak, 2011; crowther et al., 2015; bashir, 2016). put together from the observation and students’ speech analysis in four teaching-learning sessions, it was found that the segmental errors in students’ speech were considered the most frequently issue in this study. generally, the shortcomings faced by the students were still concerned with the pronunciation of the specific vocabularies the students could not find in bahasa indonesia. the illustration of the segmental errors can be identified through the table 1 as follows: table 1. example of segmental errors student’s speech the current coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic is having a profound impact, not only on people’s health, but also on how they learn, work and live. among the most important challenges created by covid-19 is how to adapt a system of education built around physical schools. phonetic transcription ðiː ˈkʌrənt kəˈrəʊnəˌvairəs pænˈdemɪk ɪz hæv eɪ prəˈfaʊnd ˈɪmpækt, nɒt ˈəʊnli ɒn ˈpiːp(ə)l helθ, bʌt ˈɔːlsəʊ ɒn haʊ ðeɪ lɜː(r)n, wɜː(r)k ænd lɪv. əˈmʌŋ ðiː məʊst ɪmˈpɔː(r)t(ə)nt ˈtʃæləndʒ kriˈeɪt english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 513 baɪ kəʊvɪd naɪnˈtin ɪz haʊ tuː əˈdæpt eɪ sɪstəm əv ˌedjʊˈkeɪʃ(ə)n bɪlt əˈraʊnd ˈfɪzɪk(ə)l skuːl segmental errors ðiː ˈkʌrənt koronaˌvirus pandemɪk ɪs hæv eɪ proˈfoʊnd ˈɪmpækt, nɒt ˈonli ɒn ˈpiːp(ə)l helt, bʌt ˈaːlso ɒn haʊ ðeɪ lɜː(r)n, wɜː(r)k ænd lɪv. əˈmʌŋ ðiː məʊst ɪmˈpɔː(r)t(ə)nt ˈtʃæləndʒ kriˈeɪt baɪ kəʊvɪd naɪnˈtin ɪs haʊ tuː aˈdapt eɪ sɪstəm əv ˌedukes(ə)n bɪlt əˈraʊnd ˈfɪzɪk(ə)l skuːl based on the aforementioned table, the highlighted words in segmental errors column are the mispronounced words uttered by the students. they found it difficult to pronounce certain words in the table 1. for example, the word virus was mispronounced as /virus/ instead of /vairəs/. from the example as stated earlier, it can be inferred that the students were not aware with the english sound [ə] which in result caused them to produce the sound [u]. the subsequent error is exemplified by the use of word pandemic. the students inclined to mispronounce this word as /pandemik/ rather than /pænˈdemɪk/. in other words, it can be stated that the students were unacquainted with the english sounds such as [æ] and [ɪ]. yet they were not alert with the stress placed in the word pandemic (illustrated as [pæn]ˈ[demɪk]) pronounced as /pænˈdemɪk/. further mispronounced words are demonstrated by the word education and health. there was a propensity that the students mispronounced those words as /ˌedukes(ə)n/ and /həlt/ instead of /ˌedjʊˈkeɪʃ(ə)n/ and /helθ/. from the example as stated earlier, the students were not conversant with the english sounds [jʊ] and [θ] which resulted them to pronounce and speak as the way it is written without considering how they are pronounced in english sounds. in other words, the students seemed to neglect the difference between oral form and written form of the word in english since they were still strongly attached with bahasa indonesia as their source language (sl). it is relevant with derakhshan (2015) and jabu and salija (2012) that the students incline to put words in sentences or spoken in structure relevant with their sl when their language background of the target language (tl) is insufficient. moreover, adiantika and purnomo (2018) delineates that since oral and written form of english words are different from one another, indonesian efl students have a tendency to struggle in producing sounds which are unavailable in bahasa indonesia. the reason behind this occurrence is due to students’ lack of exposure concerning the ways the words produced and pronounced in english sound. this occurrence can negatively influence the clarity of the students’ speech. therefore, it is fundamental to tackle this negative occurrence by cultivating the students to practice more on foreign language particularly english to avoid misunderstanding hence the clarity and the comprehensibility are assured (crowther et al., 2015; maijala, 2020; samaranayake, 2016). furthermore, since students’ awareness in terms of pronouncing appropriate correct words in english sound was considered to be problematic, this issue should be necessarily overcome by improving the practice allotment during teachinglearning process. the findings indicated that only few students who correctly pronounced the english words before the presentation in the planning stage of tblt as most of them did not prepare for the presentation earlier. consequently, during students’ presentation in the classroom, they found it difficult when they encountered unfamiliar english words. therefore, in order to overcome this issue, it is very prominent to robustly exposed them to the certain english words in the learning process. it is pertinent with aleksandrzak (2011), nunan (2006), and xu and fan (2021) that initiating a well-planned activity plays a crucial role to accomplish the learning outcomes. nevertheless, due to time constraint in this study, it can be elucidated that students’ improvement regarding word pronunciation of uncommon english words was not really significant despite the use of tblt that could improve students’ speaking performance in general. the quantity of words uttered by the students, however, cannot be merely utilized as an assessment to measure students’ fluency improvement since the result of students’ spoken report are different in each session based on the tasks implemented in this study. therefore, the emergence of dysfluency indicators particularly hesitation, repetition, filled and unfilled pauses is more prioritized to assess their fluency improvement (malihah, 2010). according to the result of students’ document analysis, there was an improvement in respect of repetition and pauses production. they inclined to produce an eline rozaliya winarto & fitri aprianti the realization of task-based language teaching to foster students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context 514 unnecessary repetition and improperly positioned the pauses in their speech. it is relevant with (namaziandost, homayouni, & rahmani, 2020) that this occurrence commonly takes place since there is a difference of the pauses placement between non-native speaker and native speaker. furthermore, it can be elucidated that fluency refers to a skill to smoothly speak in respect of speech flow with fewer pauses (hasan, 2014; tuyen & an, 2019). table 2. speech frequency in sequential task s #1 67 words per minute s #2 80 words per minute s #3 110 words per minute s #4 101 words per minute s #5 100 words per minute s #6 105 words per minute due to grammatical accuracy, it is revealed that the students made a slight improvement. the aspect of grammatical accuracy cannot be simply employed to measure speaking fluency. nonetheless, speaking fluency and grammatical accuracy should be equivalently produced by the speakers to create comprehensible speech to be clearly grasped by the listeners (lin & wu, 2012; liu et al., 2021; namaziandost et al., 2020; samaranayake, 2016). therefore, it can be elucidated that the aspect of grammatical accuracy should be taken into account to improve students’ more comprehensible speech. furthermore, students’ problems concerning the production of target language could potentially affect their speech fluency and comprehensibility. most students who were struggling in producing and pronouncing particular words could not recognize the essential meaning of their own speech. consequently, when the students crossed path with any unfamiliar words, they inclined to produce and pronounce the words which are unavailable in english or indonesian. additionally, the lexical and grammatical errors made by the students could also influence the students’ speech performance, hence, these problems affect the way the listeners acquire the meaning of the students’ speech. since it is fundamental for the students to deliver the meaning of the their speech to realize comprehensibility, hence, they have to be emphasized more on pronunciation practices, word stress, and grammatical accuracy in teachinglearning process by offering them a comprehensive instruction and enhancing their confidence in speaking english (liu et al., 2021; namaziandost et al., 2020; shabani & ghasemian, 2017). students’ responses towards tblt with regard to students’ responses towards tblt, it was revealed that the students indicated positive responses due to meaningful and interesting teaching-learning process. the positive responses in this study were demonstrated as: (1) escalating and enhancing students’ speaking skill; (2) promoting students’ active engagement in teaching-learning process; (3) intensifying students’ collaborative skill and shaping their critical thinking ability. conversely, the negative responses were due to several shortcomings during the teaching-learning process such as: (1) time constraints; diverse students’ proficiency level; (3) the occurrence of practical problem. these findings are relevant with adiantika and purnomo (2018) that the implementation of task-based language teaching could positively contribute students’ engagement/active participation in teachinglearning process and also intensify their speaking skill. nonetheless, despite the positive responses towards the realization of tblt revealed by the students, the students’ speaking performance is still compulsory to be enhanced. escalating and enhancing students’ speaking skill according to the result of the students’ interview, it was revealed that the realization of tblt contributed to escalate and enhance students’ speaking skill. the entire seven students entirely thought that tblt was beneficial to advance their speaking skill. in addition, they entirely asserted that their speaking performance was enhanced through the realization of tblt. this finding occurrence was indicated by the interview excerpts as follows: excerpt#1 “penerapan tblt dalam pembelajaran bahasa inggris membuat pembelajaran menjadi menarik dan tidak monoton. sehingga saya sangat menikmati proses pembelajaran dari awal sampai akhir. saya merasa kemampuan speaking saya sedikit demi sedikit meningkat karena terus didorong untuk praktek berdasarkan tugas-tugas yang menarik dalam tblt.” (s3) (the implementation of tblt creates a meaningful teaching-learning process in english lesson, hence, i can entirely enjoy the classroom thoroughly. i also believe that my speaking english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 515 performance gradually increases due to the fascinating tasks based on tblt). excerpt#2 “guru selalu memberikan sesuatu yang baru melalui tblt baik itu berupa kosa-kata baru dan tugas-tugas yang variatif sehingga atmosfir belajar menjadi sangat komunikatif dan interaktif. kepercayaan diri dan kemampuan speaking dalam bahasa inggris saya pun perlahan meningkat dibandingkan sebelum-sebelumnya.” (s1) (teacher continuously offers something new concerning vocabulary and interesting tasks to create a communicative and interactive classroom atmosphere. both my confidence as well as my speaking ability progressively improve compared to previous circumstances). according to the excerpt #2, it can be elucidated that the realization of tblt in particular vocabulary and different meaningful tasks could enhance students’ speaking ability. moreover, it also positively contributed to students’ englishspeaking confidence in which they tend to be convinced to enthusiastically speak english. in the meantime, excerpt #1 indicated that the realization of tblt could create their speaking performance due to interactive tasks provided in teachinglearning process. in other words, the lesson was deemed meaningful instead of monotonous. those findings are pertinent with the statements that tblt can foster students’ target language development, give students to increase their motivation to speak, and enhance students’ ability to speak fluently and accurately (adiantika & purnomo, 2018; liu et al., 2021; namaziandost et al., 2020; shabani & ghasemian, 2017). promoting students’ active engagement in teachinglearning process in line with the result of students’ interview, it was found that the realization of tblt in efl classroom was useful to offer students an opportunity to interactively and communicatively engage them in every single activity. the tasks, based on tblt stages, provided in each session encouraged students to practice more in speaking. on this occasion, they were allowed to easily share their thoughts during the class discussion. this finding emergence can be scrutinized in the interview excerpts as follows: excerpt #3 “dalam pembelajaran bahasa inggris melalui tblt, saya selalu ingin aktif berinteraksi baik dalam menjawab pertanyaan maupun mengemukakan pendapat secara bebas. tidak hanya itu, dalam sesi dialog praktek speaking pun saya sangat termotivasi untuk terus aktif terlibat dalam setiap aktifitasnya.” (s5) (throughout the realization of tblt, i am always willing to actively interact either in answering question or sharing perspectives freely. besides that, i am always excited to actively take part in every single dialogue session using tblt). excerpt #4 “metode tblt memungkinkan saya cenderung lebih aktif baik dalam bekerja secara individu, berpasangan, atau berkelompok. pembelajaran melalui tugas-tugasnya yang menarik juga sangat menyenangkan.” (s7) (through tblt, i tend to be more active either to work individually, in pair, or group. the teachinglearning process through meaningful tasks is simply exciting). from the excerpt #3, student 5 asserted that she could really articulate her perspectives easily in a group discussion session and she tended to be more actively engaged in every single task through the implementation of tblt. on the other hand, student 7 in excerpt #4 stated that she could actively participate in any kind of sessions (individual, in pair, group). in other words, it can be inferred that tblt can facilitate some spaces for students to interact by using the target language (oradee, 2013; xu & fan, 2021). those occurrences are harmonized with the statements that tblt can offer an opportunity for the students to be more active and practice their linguistic knowledge through the learning process (chou, 2017; halici page & mede, 2018; kafipour, mahmoudi, & khojasteh, 2018b; tavakoli et al., 2019). intensifying students’ collaborative skill and shaping their critical ability the implementation of varied tasks in each session enabled students to shape their critical thinking ability to accomplish the task. the findings indicated that the students were eager to figure out the solution towards the problems being discoursed in each session. therefore, it can be stated that the different tasks in each session were beneficial to the way the students respond and accomplish the task. eline rozaliya winarto & fitri aprianti the realization of task-based language teaching to foster students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context 516 as in third meeting, the students were supposed to share their experience concerning ‘the use of gadget at school for educational purpose’. on this occasion, the students appeared to be interested in discussing the tasks since it related with the fact they usually encountered on a regular basis. besides problem-solving task, the other tasks were considered useful to shape students’ critical thinking ability. this occurrence can be observed from the excerpt #5 as follows: excerpt #5 “tugasnya teh bagus karena bisa membuat kita berfikir terhadap suatu masalah secara kritis sesuai dengan apa yang kita yakini. apalagi masalah ini teh menjadi perbincangan diantara kita siswa-siswa. intinya mah tugasnya bagus dan menarik jadi tidak melulu ke buku dan sebagainya.” (s4) (the task is good as it enables us to think critically based on what we believe towards the problem or issue being exposed. additionally, this problem remains debatable among the students like us. importantly, the task is good and interesting since it does not merely depend on textbook and so on). according to the excerpt #5, students 4 emphasize that he is able to critically respond the problem being delivered (the use of gadget at school for educational purpose) through problemsolving task. thus, through the realization of tblt, student 4 can really enhance his knowledge regarding the topic and decipher the solution towards the problem being discussed the use of gadget at school for educational purpose). this emergence is relevant with the studies conducted by bao and du (2015) and tuyen and an (2019) that the utilization of tblt can potentially promote students’ critical thinking ability towards the issue being scrutinized. in line with the result of students’ interview, it is indicated that the students are more interactive in accomplishing the tasks as they can collaboratively work with their team. they tend to be more dynamic in finishing the tasks since they are able to initially discuss with their friends. in other words, it can be elucidated that the students can frequently practice their speaking skill with their group. during the task learning, the students also obtain feedback from other students not merely from the teacher. consequently, the students can attain many advantages from the group discussion particularly in accomplishing the tasks. it can be seen from the excerpt #6 as follows: excerpt #6 “melalu diskusi grup, pembelajaran bahasa inggris menjadi lebih menarik dan lebih mudah. untuk pengerjaan tugasnya pun tidak melulu secara individu namun bisa dilakukan secara berkelompok sehingga lebih cepat dan efektif tentunya.” (s6) (using group discussion, english learning becomes more meaningful and easier. for tasks accomplishment, it can also be done in group despite individually hence it could be faster and more effective). from the aforesaid students’ interview result, student 6 in excerpt #6 underline that the effectiveness is assured since they can work together with their partners in group. this finding is pertinent with the statement that tblt, consisting of diverse tasks, can empower students to work collaboratively with their partners and intensify their engagement in learning the target language (douglas & kim, 2015; hasan, 2014; maijala, 2020; oradee, 2013). time constraint from the result of students’ interview, it is found that the students also highlight negative response due to several shortcomings towards the realization of tblt. the shortcoming asserted by the students is initially due to time constraint. the studentrespondents entirely admit that they have inadequate time to accomplish tasks or instruction in tblt. this issue can be seen from the excerpt #7, excerpt #8, and excerpt #9 below: excerpt #7 “pembelajaran bahasa inggris melalui tblt yang berhubungan dengan kosa-kata, pronunciation, dan grammar sebetulnya sangat menarik. hanya saja, waktu yang tidak banyak membuat siswa tidak semuanya mengerti.” (s7) (the realization of tblt in efl classroom regarding vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar is actually interesting. however, not all students can comprehend it as the implementation requires a plenty of time). excerpt #8 “instruksi-instruksi yang diberikan memang bervariasi dan sangat menarik tetapi membutuhkan waktu yang relative lama untuk memahami dan menyelesaikannya.” (s2) (the instructions given to the students are varied english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 517 and meaningful, nonetheless, it needs a lot of time to understand and accomplish the tasks). excerpt #9 “tblt membutuhkan waktu yang relatif lama untuk bisa dimengerti oleh siswa karena banyak sekali hal-hal yang harus siswa fahami dan kerjakan.” (s5) (tblt necessitates a relatively long time for the students to understand and finish the tasks or instructions). from the excerpt above, it can be elucidated that the students require more time to really grasp certain materials specifically vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. this occurrence is due to a condition that students tend to emphasize more on grammatical rules, spelling/pronunciation, and vocabulary mastery. therefore, in consonant with the time constraint, the present study puts an emphasis on students’ awareness to communicate. it is relevant with adiantika and purnomo (2018) and aleksandrzak (2011) that time availability plays a fundamental role in implementing tblt to empower students’ communicative competence. diverse students’ proficiency level another shortcoming revealed in this study is due to diverse students’ proficiency level. four students out of 7 students-participants acknowledge that they possess inadequate english language proficiency. in other words, they tend to struggle in speaking english due to lack of pronunciation, vocabulary mastery, and also grammar. this drawback is identified in the excerpt #10, excerpt #11, and excerpt #12 as follows: excerpt #10 “jujur, saya kurang bisa memahami pembelajaran secara keseluruhan karena guru selalu menggunakan bahasa inggris ketika mengajar. sehingga terkadang saya tidak bisa memahami bahkan menjawab pertanyaan yang diberikan oleh guru.” (s4) (honestly, i can really understand the learning thoroughly since teacher always speaks english during the teaching-learning process. somehow, i cannot understand even answer the question given by the teacher). excerpt #11 “meskipun pembelajarannya menarik namun saya terkadang kurang mengerti apa yang disampaikan oleh guru karena beliau selalu menggunakan bahasa inggris ketika mengajar. mungkin ini karena kosa-kata yang miliki masih sangat sedikit.” (s6) (despite meaningful teaching-learning, i sometime cannot comprehend what the teacher says due to the frequent use of english in teaching-learning process. probably, it is because my low vocabulary mastery). excerpt #12 “materi-materi maupun instruksi-instruksinya semuanya dalam bahasa inggris. mungkin jika ada versi terjemahan bahasa indonesianya, siswa yang kurang mengerti seperti saya bisa terbantu.” (s5) (both the materials and instructions are in english. i believe if the indonesian version are available, it could be really helpful for the student like me). according to the excerpts as aforementioned, the students mostly use indonesian as their first language (l1). it is pertinent with derakhshan (2015) and jabu and salija (2012) that the students tend to use indonesian as their l1 rather than english as their target language (tl). in addition, it can be inferred that not all students can fluently respond even answer teacher’s question by using english since they possess diverse english proficiency level particularly lack of pronunciation, vocabulary mastery, and grammar. therefore, it is essential for the teacher to accommodate students with appropriate materials in consort with the suitable lesson plans to completely cover students’ proficiency level starting from low proficiency, middle proficiency, and eventually high proficiency. the occurrence of practical problem the last shortcoming identified in this study is owing to the occurrence of practical problem. from the students’ interview, it is revealed that the students show their negative response regarding the realization of tblt through the incorporation of multimedia carried out in the fourth meeting specifically. in addition, the integration of multimedia seems to be a little problematic due to the poor internet connection and students’ insufficient multimedia possession. this shortcoming can be seen from the excerpts below: excerpt #13 “beberapa sumber pembelajaran yang diberikan guru bersifat daring ketika diakses sedangkan internet di sekolah kita tidak terlalu bagus. hal eline rozaliya winarto & fitri aprianti the realization of task-based language teaching to foster students’ speaking fluency in vocational school context 518 ini terkadang menjadi masalah dan tidak semua siswa bisa mengaksesnya dengan mudah.” (s2) (several learning sources offered by the teachers are accessible when connected to the internet but our internet connection here is not really good. somehow it leads to difficulty for students to easily access them). excerpt #14 “jaringan internetnya teh kurang bagus ditambah lagi tidak semua dari kita memiliki hp atau perangkat yang memang support untuk mengakses materi yang diberikan.” (s5) (the internet connection is not really good, yet, not all students have sophisticated gadgets to facilitate us accessing the materials given). based on the abovementioned excerpts, it can be stated that poor internet connection and students’ insufficient multimedia possession become the concrete shortcomings in terms of practical problem faced by the students. in other words, the realization of tblt combined with the incorporation of multimedia does not decently work since there is still an issue regarding practical problem. those findings are relevant with the statement that lack of technological infrastructure in language learning particularly in efl classroom may cause some difficulties for the students to really grasp and comprehend the target language (altun, 2015; floris, 2014; özdemir, 2017). therefore, the enhancement of technological infrastructure in efl classroom is crucial to really assist the students to effectively acquire english as a target language in efl/esl classroom (cuhadar, 2018; park & son, 2020). conclusion tblt is deemed to be able to foster students’ active engagement in teaching-learning process. tblt is also beneficial to facilitate students an opportunity to exercise their speaking and enhance their linguistic aspects. furthermore, the realization of tblt is considered beneficial to escalate and enhance students’ confidence in speaking english throughout the variability of the tasks implemented in each session. regardless the slight improvement indicated in students’ speech performance, the students express positive responses due to the advantages of tblt realization. through the realization of tblt, the students are able to escalate and enhance their speaking skill, promote their active engagement in teaching-learning process, and intensifying students’ collaborative skill and shaping their critical thinking ability. according to the findings in the present study, there are implications for the teachers and students. for teachers, this study is expected to contribute current knowledge concerning the realization of tasks variability in teaching-learning process. this study is also expected to reassure the teachers to conduct relevant meaningful tasks in order to enhance students’ speaking ability. furthermore, the realization of tblt in teaching-learning process can encourage students’ interest and active engagement in efl speaking context. the teachers can also offer more opportunity for the students to emphasize more on pronunciation, word stress, and language structure for the sake of their students’ speaking skill performance. meanwhile, for students, they are expected to keep practicing their english with other students throughout interaction and discussion in order to accomplish the speaking skill’s expected outcomes. since all data was simply obtained from seven students in one vocational school in indonesia, the findings of this study are limited by the small sample size. hence, it is suggested for the impending study to broaden the study with more participants in different contexts to scrutinize what factors enhancing and improving the students’ speaking fluency. acknowledgement we acknowledge the financial support received from the education and culture ministry of indonesia. in addition, this research also has been supported by institute of research and community service (lppm) universitas muhammadiyah cirebon. references adiantika, h. n., & purnomo, h. 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(2021). finding success with the implementation of task-based language teaching: the role of teacher agency. language, culture and curriculum, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2021.1906268 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 371 the praxis of integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching to young learners nia kurniawati english study program, faculty of education and teacher training universitas suryakancana, cianjur indonesia email: nia@unsur.ac.id anisa sofarini english study program, faculty of education and teacher training universitas suryakancana, cianjur indonesia email: anisa.sofarini@unsur.ac.id elis homsini maolida english study program, faculty of education and teacher training universitas suryakancana, cianjur indonesia email: elishomsini@unsur.ac.id rahmat taufiq dwi jatmika international administration and business study program, faculty of applied science universitas suryakancana, cianjur, indonesia email: r.jatmika@unsur.ac.id apa citation: kurniawati, n., sofarini, a., maolida, e. h., & jatmika, r. t. d. (2022). the praxis of integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching to young learners. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 371-380. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6238 received: 07-02-2022 accepted: 22-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction for the past few decades, teaching english to young learners has been a common practice all around the world (rixon, 2013) as evidenced by the growing number of policies that integrate english language learning in elementary schools. this policy is frequently driven by economic (chang, 2012) and political goals (kirkpatrick & liddicoat, 2017), with the belief that the more citizens who speak english for international engagement, the better for the economies and politics of the country. this study understands young learners as individuals under the age of 18 (ellis, 2014), approximately aged 5 to 10 years old (ersöz, 2007). in this case, many believe that they, to a certain extent, can learn foreign languages more effectively than adults (cook, 2008). this is why the policy on learning english earlier in elementary school level is highlighted. abstract: in this digital age, using technology to teach english has become commonplace. this study focuses on the integration of virtual reality (vr) into vocabulary teaching to young learners. the aims of the study are finding out the teacher's classroom practices, the challenges, and the young learners’ views of vr integration in learning vocabulary. in this study, a case study was applied in conjunction with observation, an open-ended questionnaire, and an interview to uncover the concerns. the respondents were an english teacher and 40 students of fifth grade at sdn 1 cipanas, cianjur. despite the fact that the teacher was able to incorporate vr into her english classroom, there are also some challenges discovered during the practice. school readiness in terms of device availability, teacher’s tpack level, workloads, teaching media, and classroom managerial skills became the primary issues in the language instruction using vr. furthermore, the proficiency, characteristics, and quantity of students in the classroom must also all be taken into account. to young learners, on the other hand, learning vocabulary using vr is engaging and entertaining, even if prolonged exposure to the vr lens causes headaches. it is recommended that policymakers pay greater attention to providing more supportive policies and improved facilities for teyl practice in indonesia. keywords: teyl; vocabulary; virtual reality; tpack; case study. nia kurniawati, anisa sofarini, & elis homsini maolida the praxis of integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching to young learners 372 in the context of indonesian eyl practice, the idea of bringing english, as one of the foreign languages, to elementary schools’ dates back to the 1980s. a survey revealed parents' strong belief in the importance of their children learning english, as well as the disappointing results of secondary students' english proficiency. the presidential decree number 28 of 1990 included english in the elementary school curriculum (kirkpatrick & liddicoat, 2017), and it was later upgraded to a local content topic by the ministry of education and culture's decree number 060 of 1993 (iskandar, 2018). the policy suggested that schools might opt to teach english to grades 4, 5, and 6, or teach other topics like arts, dance, music, or sports that were more suited to their socioeconomic and geographical condition and needs (zein, 2012). nevertheless, it is to note that young learners require extra pedagogical support to assist their english language acquisition in a formal setting. this is since formal language learning is influenced by social, individual, and environmental elements (copland and garton, 2014). in this case, kimsesiz, dolgunsöz, and konca (2017) elaborated that social factors such as sociocultural class and the status of english in society play a role in this scenario. in addition, learners' attitude toward the target language, as well as their motivation to learn, are individual aspects. meanwhile, the learner's parental background and attitudes toward language learning are environmental influences. regarding foreign language skills for young learners, it has been acknowledged that efl vocabulary learning is very important to learn at young ages. tomasello (2014) looked at this as a smaller linguistic lesson where objects are shown to young learners, then they must connect the term to what they hear and observe, also young learners relate the words to concrete entities. the young learners also map words onto concrete elements as another way of learning a word. in this case, young learners’ experience of l1 or first language (cameron, 2001) and the second language (l2)’s features and linguistic input, both are crucial (cook, 2008). while word frequency is a useful criterion for selecting vocabulary, the ease with which a word's meaning may be shown and its appropriateness are equally essential considerations. the development of a child's first language vocabulary is inextricably linked to their conceptual growth. children may link new words to equivalent terms in their l1 for l1 and l2 relationships. teaching vocabulary to young learners may not be the same as teaching vocabulary to adult learners. diptoadi, mindari, and tedjasuksmana (2018) explained that young learners have unique and interesting characteristics, thus teachers are required to have high creativity, make innovations and bring fresh ideas in teaching english at this level. they also highlight the importance of young learners’ motivation in learning that they tend to acquire new things while playing. that is why they need to be facilitated with an interactive learning technique and application. during this process of learning vocabulary, their verbal efforts should be encouraged and supported with language activities that are engaging, interesting and motivating such as by using interactive technology. the use of technology plays a major role in creating a more effective and innovative educational practice in the 21st century, known as the industry revolution 4.0 period (sadiyoko, 2017). this era has given full attention to learning management, which aids students in improving their english skills through the use of new technology (puncreobutr, 2016). as a result, students in indonesia require a new breakthrough learning medium that can assist them in integrating their skills and based on their alpha generation nature. in this case, the alpha generation tends to be visual learners who are primarily envisioning their material in order to aid them in retaining the information. moreover, visualizing the information will assist them in focusing and attracting their interest in learning (augusto, 2018). this rapid advancement in technological integration has provided a better pattern for identifying new instructional approaches (gilakjani, 2017), particularly in almost every language class (ahmadi, 2018). in a number of teaching and learning milieus, technology is now widely regarded as a crucial instructional and supportive tool (qizi, 2021). this is especially true when it comes to teaching english. in addition to teaching approaches, susikaran (2013) argued that fundamental changes in classrooms have occurred because the chalk-and-talk method is insufficient for efficiently teaching english. learners learn how to learn effectively in a well-planned classroom setting. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 373 moreover, technology provides a plethora of options for making teaching more engaging and beneficial in terms of advancement (patel, 2013). teachers in traditional classrooms stand in front of students and use a blackboard or whiteboard to deliver lectures, explanations, and instructions. with the advancement of technology, these methods must be modified. the use of multimedia texts in the classroom helps students learn new vocabulary and language structures (ahmadi, 2018), for instance. multimedia can be used to improve learners' linguistic knowledge by using print books, videos, and the internet. in response to this, arifah (2014) claimed that learners can acquire information and use a variety of tools for analyzing and interpreting language and settings when they use print, video, or the internet. in this sense, solanki and shyamlee (2012) also argued that learners' visual and aural senses are both satisfied by technology. the benefits of using technology in english language teaching and learning have been studied. however, the plus points of technology do not happen by accident; it is dependent on how teachers use it in their language classes (bransford, brown, & cocking, 2000). teachers should develop ways to employ technology as a beneficial learning instrument for their students, even if they have not studied technology and are not computer experts. as a result, a tech-savvy language instructor must constantly update and expand pedagogical and technological knowledge and skills to fulfill the current language instruction demand, particularly in teaching to young learners. given the rapid shift of new technologies, teacher education should focus on the three variables of content, pedagogy, and technology for teacher professional development. although teachers are aware of and understand pedagogy, material, and technology, there is still a lack of understanding on how to combine them in collaborative curriculum design (boschman, mckenney, & voogt, 2014; harrington, driskell, johnston, browning, & niess 2019). in order to support effective technology-enhanced education, the tpack framework presents a new technique and paradigm for global teacher knowledge (koehler & mishra, 2009). although tpack is not a novel paradigm for instructors to integrate technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge, putting it into practice is a challenge for teachers as professionals. teachers' three cores of knowledge, on the other hand, continue to be a concern. pre-service teachers should be aware of and comprehend this teaching and learning paradigm for future classrooms in different areas. mahdum (2015) conducted a tpack research study in pekanbaru, indonesia, utilizing a self-assessment questionnaire to explore the use of tpack among senior high school efl teachers. cahyono and kurnianti (2016) conducted another study that found that taking a tpackoriented teaching practice course can help indonesian efl teachers improve the quality of their efl instructional designs and practices. the idea of incorporating vr into language instruction is now gaining traction. many of the activities in vr are a perfect fit for language instruction, as they create the conditions necessary for real communication to take place. for instance, educators have used job simulator to focus on procedural instructions (bonner & murphy, 2018). while many of these vr applications seem perfectly suited for the creation of new and exciting lessons by teachers, there are still large hurdles that need to be overcome before more educational institutions can embrace vr in classrooms. the costs of implementation in classes, prolonged comfort, stability and continued availability of vr applications continue to be significant factors that work against the adoption of vr in education. a number of academics have expressed interests in using vr in language education. the first study discovered that vr enhanced the students' learning because it provided authentic learning in the classroom and can be used alongside traditional and online learning methodologies. the second discovered that using vr for learning activities is enjoyable for both students and teachers. furthermore, developers should be able to take a risk and do something essential by submitting prospective learning advantages (frazier, lege, & bonner, 2021). vr is a valuable tool for learning, however, there is a lack of education focused content for language learning needs. this article introduces the vr application analysis framework to assist educators in scaffolding existing commercial offthe-shelf (cots) applications for use in classroom activities through four key lenses: immersive capacity, cognitive load, purpose, and communicative capability. the framework is then nia kurniawati, anisa sofarini, & elis homsini maolida the praxis of integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching to young learners 374 used to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of an example cots vr application, tilt brush. this analysis, completed using the framework, is followed by three lesson plans for tilt brush that demonstrate how vr could be used in the language classroom (santosa, putra, banjar, & permana 2020). teaching english for young learners in indonesia still invites controversies among the educators and psycholinguists that concern learners' development in thinking and communication. because teaching english for young learners in indonesia seems to force them to know the rules and forms of the sentence. in addition, some of the teachers who teach english for young learners have not the appropriate educational background that can teach the younger as well as the objective wish. actually, there is not any regulation or decisions that obligate the school to teach english to young learners. it only depends on the school itself. in this paper, the writer would like to describe the teaching of english to young learners in indonesia on the side of its implementation and also the pros and cons based on the second language acquisition experts (nufus, 2019). another study discovered that english teachers in indonesian elementary schools (es) are divided into two groups: specialists and generalists. in indonesia, there are 103,667 specialist pets serving 147,536 elementary schools. the generalists, who are primarily homeroom teachers, substitute the position of english teachers due to insufficient number of those specialists. generalist teachers teach a variety of courses in addition to english, and they only teach english to learners in their class. they may regard other subjects to be more essential than english because it is not their primary focus. these teachers typically struggle with devising english learning tasks and activities, learning materials, and appropriate evaluation since they have a limited command of the english language. specialist teachers, on the other hand, typically have a broader range of english skills and teach english to students of all ages (zein, 2012). from the previous study it could be seen that not many studies conducted on the use of virtual reality in vocabulary teaching to young learners. therefore, this study focuses on three important issues, including the practice, the challenges, and how the students perceive the use of virtual reality in vocabulary teaching to young learners. method this case study follows a qualitative approach. qualitative approach is chosen since it gives the author wide room to interpret the data from the teaching of english to young learners in the site. this qualitative research is focusing on describing the process of something considered suitable for discovering the answers to the research questions of this research, which is to elaborate the process of teaching-learning (creswell, 2020). this is also a single instrumental case study where the researchers focus on an issue or concern, and then selects one bounded case to illustrate this issue (yin, 2012). this research was conducted in sdn 1 cipanas involving 40 students of fifth grade and one english teacher. the data were collected from observation, interview, and questionnaire. observation is the process of gathering firsthand information by observing people and places at the research site (creswell, 2009). the classroom observation was functioned to determine the aspects to be observed in the form of a checklist. the observation checklist follows the tpack framework to find out the teacher's praxis on the use of technology in her english classroom. the observation was also used in revealing the challenges the teacher and students face in the english classroom with the existence of vr in the learning process. the interview was utilized to expose the challenge as well as the advantages of using vr in the process of learning english to young learners at the site. the respondents in the interview were the teacher and five selected young learners. before using vr in her classroom, the teacher was interviewed. the students' interview was conducted following the second time they used vr in their english session. the interview was semi-guided mode with 5 questions. to get more in-depth data, the researcher also used an open-ended questionnaire sent to the teacher as well as the school’s headmaster to dig more information about the profile of the teacher at the site, english teaching on a daily basis at sdn 1 cipanas and the school's readiness for vr integration in learning process. this school was chosen since it is the one school in cipanas that lists english as a local content and assigned english teachers to handle the class. qualitative data analysis consists of three concurrent flows of activity: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification (miles, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 375 huberman, & saldana, 2014). therefore, after collecting the data through observation, open-ended questionnaire, and interview, then the data was reduced, displayed and concluded based on the tpack framework. results and discussion as previously stated, there are three issues that will be addressed in this study. the first is about the practice of incorporating vr into english vocabulary teaching to young learners. the second is the challenges, and the last is the students’ perceptions towards vr-supported vocabulary learning. the integration of vr into vocabulary teaching to young learners in answering the first issue, the researchers used observation as the main instrument. the observation followed the tpack framework to find out the practice of vocabulary learning to young learners using vr. the stages preparation from the observation it was found that the teacher has designed the lesson quite well. the topic she chose is things at home. she used the vr video entitled vr 360 nobita house tour 8k video quality. the time allotment was 35 minutes. she used drilling, tpr, and game as teaching techniques. she divided the teaching into three parts, pre-activity, main activity, and post-activity. practice observation #1: during the pre-activity, the teacher checked the students' understanding of the previous lesson and how it related to the lesson for that day. in checking students’ understanding, she used a song of things at home that the students had learned some times before. then, she taught the students to use the vr box. students were allowed to bring smartphones to school that day, which was a departure from the usual policy of not bringing smartphones to school. the students then were divided into four groups, and asked to name their group. then, the teacher asked the students to answer some questions about the topic. at the first observation, the topic was about things at home. the teacher asked the students to google the 360° video of nobita’s house. they explored nobita’s house via vr box in turn within the group. after they had finished observing the video, the teacher asked the students about the things they saw in nobita’s video. the teacher then made sure that the students comprehend the vocabularies that related to topic things at home such as door, wardrobe, window, pillow, etc. to give the students various activities, the teacher asked the students to name the objects. one of the members of the group became the writer and the rest helped him/her to write by mentioning the target vocabulary. at the end, the teacher would give them a sign to stop, then the teacher checked if their writing was correct, and the group with the most correct answer won. to assess the students’ vocabulary comprehension to the lesson, the students were given multiple choice vocabulary tests. the test result shows that the average score is 83,5 out of 100. it means that the students learn the vocabularies by using virtual reality quite well. observation#2: the teacher had a different topic. the topic was sea creatures. the steps of learning for the topic were similar. in pre-activity the students were asked about the previous lesson, and whether they have learned the vocabularies about sea creatures. then the teacher asked the students to repeat some words after her. after the students did the drilling, they were asked to browse the 360° video about sea creatures in turn. then they were asked to match the vocabulary with the pictures. to assess the students’ comprehension, the teacher gave the students vocabulary test, and the students’ average score is 89,3 out of 100. the techniques in teaching vocabulary using vr, the teacher tried to combine the vr with various techniques. the first technique is tpr. james asher's total physical response (tpr) is thought to be an appropriate and successful strategy for teaching and consolidating english vocabulary to young learners (ha & hue, 2020). this method is appropriate for beginners or young learners since it is based on the process of learning a new language through physical movement in response to a command (richards & rodgers, 1999). then, the teacher drilled students into the vocabulary about things at home and sea creatures. drilling is a technique for improving pronunciation nia kurniawati, anisa sofarini, & elis homsini maolida the praxis of integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching to young learners 376 that involves copying and repeating words, phrases, and even entire sentences (thornbury, 2006). from the observation, the teacher introduced a new word by constantly speaking it during the drilling phase. the kids finally remember the word after pronouncing it out loud multiple times. as a result, this exercise could be an appropriate approach to teach kids about foreign languages (ernawati, tsurayya, & ghani, 2019). a song was added in the teaching process by the teacher. song is a great approach to get students interested in developing their english skills. many prior studies have found that using music or song to give a lesson to children helps them develop strong practice habits, especially for those still in primary school (hadi, 2019). most efl learners find vocabulary learning to be time-consuming and demanding in terms of memorization and retention over a long period of time (namaziandost, alekasir, dehkordi, & tilwani, 2021; waluyo & bucol, 2021), and gamification may be an effective solution to address these issues and turn a tedious learning experience into a fun and enjoyable one (kingsley & grabnerhagen, 2018). this supports what the teacher in study has done during her teaching practices using vr. in using the vr specifically, the teacher asked the students to use their digital literacy by browsing the video that fit with the vr box, and of course using the vr box to observe the video of the lesson. the requirements integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching certainly needs lots of effort. in integrating virtual reality into teaching of course it requires the devices themselves, in this case the virtual reality box and compatible smartphone, internet connection, and the teacher’ tpack. it is similar to other uses of technology for education. the teacher’s pedagogical is crucial in selecting the suitable technique for teaching the content using any technology in education. the teacher is only required to handle technical things like how to use virtual reality, but also to select appropriate learning sources for teaching vocabulary in terms of students’ proficiency level and background, and also how to practice it in the classroom. the facts and the challenges there are some facts as well as challenges faced by both the teacher and students. they are categorized into three groups; the school, the teacher, and the students’ readiness. the school readiness the first is the challenge in integrating vr into vocabulary teaching. that is the school readiness in supplying vr headsets. the number of vr devices is not proportional to the number of students. one of the considerations that the school takes into account is the cost of the vr headsets. in regards to cost, such as google cardboard, which still requires a smartphone, vr remains a luxury product outside the budgets of most educators. while prices have dropped significantly over the past 5 years, the prospect of buying entire class sets of even the cheapest all-in-one headsets remains prohibitive. in 2018, the cheapest headset, the oculus go, which does not require a pc or smartphone, costs ¥23,800 (oculus.com/go/). while a capable device, surpassing cheaper smartphone powered headsets such as google cardboard, the oculus go has its drawbacks. without positional tracking these cheaper devices may result in discomfort or motion sickness. they also lend themselves more towards passive experiences such as watching 360° videos rather than active participation experiences that benefit from object and scene interactions. the facts and challenges about the teacher the teacher was interviewed before the class. some challenges were then discovered. the teacher admitted that teaching english at elementary level is very challenging. she should design her own syllabus and materials, and she used a worksheet from a certain publisher selected by the school as the guidance. moreover, time allotment and teaching media also become her main concerns. the time allotment is 35 minutes for one credit hour. english is allotted 2 credit hours in normal time per week, but since the pandemic time, the time allotment is only 35 minutes per week. the classroom is sufficient for children's study environment, but it lacks english exposure. there are many posters and realia for other subjects, but not for english. the other challenge the teacher is facing is the large class and students’ proficiency level. it almost happens in many schools in indonesia that the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 377 english proficiency level varies. some students are fast learners while the others are slower ones. it is challenging for the english teacher to design material that would fit to all students. besides, the typical indonesian state school is big class. a class could have more than 40 students within. it requires the teacher to use her classroom managerial skill during the teaching. there are some astonishing facts about the teacher’s pedagogy and technology knowledge. the school has integrated computer use with english teaching. the students can learn english at a computer laboratory, and the teacher is used to gamifying the lesson assisted by technology. therefore, the teachers are not too surprised to use vr in their teaching. she only needed a short amount of time to adjust her teaching material with the use of vr. these findings actually have been estimated, since many studies have mentioned the fact that many elementary schools still list english lesson even though the curriculum does not put it as a priority to be taught at elementary level. the english teachers at the site mention that actually they expect the government to revise the policy and give place to english as it was in the previous curriculum. acknowledging the practice of teaching vocabulary in the classroom, the english teacher has demonstrated her tpack at the most basic level. it is seen from the way she executed the teaching and learning activities that were not wellarranged. however, she had no problem using technology, in this case vr, into her teaching. she could adapt the material with the vr. in observation 1, the lesson was about the things at home. she combined the 360° video with the printed material, and could guide the young learners to experience the virtual environment via vr box and smartphone to visualize the vocabularies they are learning. the students this study enlisted the participation of 40 fifthgraders, aged around 11. they are generally from the alpha generation, who grew up with technology at home. as a result, they have no trouble dealing with vr. they can simply control the devices and look for vr-based videos. nonetheless, as young learners, they have a short attention span and get easily bored when the teacher ignores their curiosity. in regards to young learners’ short attention period (scott & ytreberg, 1990), they can collaboratively and individually be involved in physical activities and experiments (diffily & sassman, 2002). vr integration is undoubtedly useful, but it necessitates the usage of cellphones, which the school cannot offer. students should be asked to bring their own smartphone from home as a solution. however, it is common knowledge that schools prevent kids from carrying smartphones to school, so it is a little ironic that students must rely on smartphones but are not permitted to bring them with them. as it has been highlighted previously that the young learners have a very short attention span, easily get bored, and easily get distracted. therefore, the english teacher should be very creative in designing different activities during the lesson. vr is very attractive but when the teacher has no creativity in using it in the learning process, it will be useless. the students’ views there are some points that the students show on their views towards the vr integration. the students perceived that learning vocabulary with vr is engaging and entertaining. they assumed that, by using vr, they could see the real objects taught by the teacher. simply speaking, it helps them visualize the vocabulary and as a result, it could ease them to memorize the vocabulary. notably, learning english using vr is something new to them. this meets young learners’ nature of fulfilling curiosity. the limited number of vr, in fact, did not distract the students' involvement in experiencing vr to learn english vocabulary. they were excited in taking turns to use vr, task sharing, and support one another in games created by the teacher. despite some merits perceived, there are complaints from some students. they felt headaches when they were exposed to the device lens for a longer time. conclusion there are some conclusions that can be taken from this current research. first, virtual reality could support the teaching of vocabulary to young learners. it helps students visualize the vocabulary, nia kurniawati, anisa sofarini, & elis homsini maolida the praxis of integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching to young learners 378 and gives them the sensation of being with the real objects. however, it needs lots of effort in terms of facilities. as the teacher’s tpack is at basic level, they need to improve their capacity (tpack) to keep up with technological advancement. acknowledgment we would extend our sincerest gratitude to kementerian pendidikan, kebudayaan, riset, dan teknologi for funding this research program on mbkm policy and research-based community service for private universities. we also would like to extend our appreciation to: (1) direktorat jenderal riset dan teknologi pendidikan tinggi. 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(2012). the contexts of english language teaching at primary level in indonesia. journal of teaching and education, 1(3), 85–90. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7918-2.ch016 https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7918-2.ch016 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3019248 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261444817000027 https://doi.org/10.24853/elif.1.1.65-70 nia kurniawati, anisa sofarini, & elis homsini maolida the praxis of integrating virtual reality into vocabulary teaching to young learners 380 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 555 form and modulation of metaphor translation to indonesian of vingt-milles lieues sous les mers of jules verne yusi asnidar universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia email: yusiasnidar_7317157789@mhs.unj.ac.id m. syarif sumantri department of applied linguistics, postgraduate studies, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia email: syarifsumantri@unj.ac.id ninuk lustyantie department of applied linguistics, postgraduate studies, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia email: ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id apa citation: asnidar, y., sumantri, m. s., & lustyantie, n. (2022). form and modulation of metaphor translation to indonesian of vingt-milles lieues sous les mers of jules verne. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 555-564. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6255 received: 27-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction language and cultural diversity is not only a phenomenon, but also an important foundation in foreign language teaching which is regulated in the european language teaching frame of reference, namely cefr (council of europe, 2020). plurilingualism is presented in the cefr as a changing competence, in which the learner’s resources in one language or variety may be very different in nature to those in another (council of europe 2018). the council of europe refers to this competence as the repertoire of resources which the students acquire in all the languages they know or have learned, and the cultures associated with them (beacco, jean-claude, byram, cavalli, coste, cuenat, goullier, and panthier, 2016). it is indeed essential that students gain knowledge and understanding of different languages so that they develop social and intercultural understanding, but in order to achieve this, plurilingualism needs to be promoted in the classroom (chabert, 2018), and it is marked by the move from language separation to integration of languages in the classroom (piccardo, antony-newman, chen, & banafsheh, 2021). the abstract: this research aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the form and modulation of metaphor translation from french to indonesian, its use in the communicative context of speech events. furthermore, this study also looks at the relevance of the results of the translation of the form and modulation with mediation, plurilingual and pluricultural competences in the cefr european standard language proficiency. the data sources used are the novel vingt-milles lieues sous les mers by jules verne and its translated novel 20.000 mil di bawah laut by nh dini. the data in this study is a metaphor in a broad sense. the most dominant form of metaphor translation used is reproduction. next, there are substitutions and paraphrases. the combined form of reproduction+paraphrasing is found in the vlm metaphor translation. equivalence of meaning is obtained by using explicit and implicit modulation, special and general meanings, and point of view. the context of speech events contributes to producing an equivalent and natural translation. the results of this translation indicate that translation activities are complex language activities and require precision and accuracy. translating literary works requires cultural mastery and an advanced level of linguistic mastery. the competencies are described in the petra project terms of reference contained in the cefr 2020 and cecrl 2018 terms of reference. translating skills require guided practice acquired through a well-oriented education. the ability to understand metaphors and other cultures and be able to compare them by providing analogies in the local culture is a plurilingual and pluricultural competence. keywords: metaphor; forms of metaphor translation; modulation; mediation competence; plurilingual and pluricultural competence. yusi asnidar, m. syarif sumantri, & ninuk lustyantie form and modulation of metaphor translation to indonesian of vingt-milles lieues sous les mers of jules verne 556 language teaching curriculum should place plurilingualism and pluriculturalism as important components in teaching, including mediation activities, one of which is translating text. along with the development of science and information technology, the need for translation is currently increasing. the cultural representation in the novel can be seen from the choice of words and the use of figurative expressions. one of the figurative forms that are often found in literary works is metaphor. dubois (2002) explained that metaphor is a figure of speech or figurative expression commonly used in rhetoric. metaphor is a concrete word that describes an abstract concept. hence, metaphor is defined not as a deviant linguistic representation but as the result of conceptual metaphors through which the underlying concept is expressed by a linguistic element (aprouz & mohammadi, 2022). metaphor is a concern in the field of cognitive linguistics, which was first coined by lakoff and johnson (1980). metaphors can be general in nature, but they can also be specific and can be influenced by certain cultures. in line with this, lustyantie and dewi (2020) emphasized that language does not only determine cultural styles, but also ways of thinking. translators often experience difficulties in translating metaphors. therefore, the translation of metaphor was handled under the cognitive framework by taking into consideration that each linguistic metaphor is created by the human cognitive system, through which things and events are conceptualized by using the experiences in a particular culture (hastürkoğlu, 2018). in literacy translation, there is even a term of untranslatability which some scholars have used this idea to mediate, comprehend, and translate the linguistic and cultural differences (fani, 2021). as putranti (2018) stated, translation is concerned with not only transferring message written in one language into another language accurately, but also obtaining the naturalness of message delivery, so that equivalent translation can be produced. larson in rahmatillah (2017) mentioned four points of translation difficulties reasons: (1) the components of meaning are always packed in the points of lexical (words) but the way translators transfer the words maybe different between the sources to the target language. (2) the components of the same meaning may appear in different words. (3) a certain word could be used to represent multiple meanings. (4) a meaning can be expressed with many different kinds of words. despite the difficulties, metaphor is an indispensable reality of translation that should be encountered by translators (supardi, 2018). metaphors can be translated through three techniques (snell-hornby 2006; baker, 2011), namely; 1) translating sl metaphors into metaphors that have the same equivalent (procedure m→m), 2) translating metaphors with different metaphors, but with the same meaning (procedure m1→m2) which results in substitution forms, 3) translating sl metaphors with nonmetaphors / paraphrases (procedure m1→p). in the translation process, the shift includes not only form, but also meaning, which is known as modulation. /meaning, which is also known as modulation. modulation is generally divided into changing the point of view, general/special meaning coverage, and explicit/implicity (durjava, 2012). through the medium of the translator’s voice, multiple linguistic and cultural framings are brought into relation so that meanings may be communicated across linguistic and cultural boundaries (liddicoat, 2016). this is in line with gonzález-davies (2019), believing that aside from linguistic skills required in translation, intercultural mediation skills are necessary required as well. according to hartono (2011), modulation is a procedure when there is a change in point of view, focus or cognitive category in the source language text, both lexically and structurally. this procedure has the characteristic of changing the point of view of the category focus in the source language, both lexically and structurally. machali (2000) explained that meaning shift or modulation can be done by lexical substitution which is divided into two, namely concretization and generalization. based on the various types of modulation proposed by vinay and dalbernet (1977) and durjavu (2012), it can be simplified into 1) a change of point of view, 2) the scope of general and specific meanings, and 3) explicitation / implicit. this study used a combination of the theories of vinay and dalbernet (1977), and durjava (2012). metaphor cannot be translated literally; it has to undergo some adjustment or alteration (hong & rossi, 2021). this adjustment is called as mediation. mediation is the intervention of a translator in a process of finding equivalents which english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 557 can be in the form of word choice, grammatical form, or phonology. mediation concerns how far the translator intervenes in the transfer process, incorporating his knowledge and belief in the translation process (hatim & munday, 1997). mediation frames the act of translation as a complex engagement with meanings across languages and cultures (katan, 2013). it is also emphasized in hoed (2003) that mediation mainly occurs in the translation of culturally charged texts, such as fairy tales, children's stories, literary works, philosophical works, and religious texts. translation is a form of mediation that aims to facilitate the pluricultural sphere as seen in mediation activities and strategies described below in the european language curriculum reference framework (council of europe, 2020). figure 1. mediation activities and strategies in the reference to the petra project (2016), mediation competence in transferring messages includes the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to translate into tl at the required level. these capabilities are described as follows. (1) understanding st. (2) identify translation problems. (3) knowledge of translation strategies. (4) implementation of translation strategies. (5) production of tsu. (6) justification of translation. (7) literary approach. (8) literary creativity. media activities translating texts are closely related to aspects of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism. plurilingual and pluricultural competence are defined as the competence to communicate with language and interact in culture owned by someone who masters (to varying degrees) several languages and has experience interacting with various cultures (to varying degrees). typically, individuals who have high ppc levels are aware of similarities and differences among cultural groups and comfortable navigating between and among cultures (galante and dela cruz, 2021). plurilingual approaches empower learners through recognition of their plurilingual repertoire and their diverse knowledges and identities (canagarajah, 2013; galante, 2019, 2021; lin, 2013). this concept was first coined by coste, et al. in beacco et al., (2016). these competencies include the use of pluricultural repertoire, plurilingual understanding, and the use of plurilingual repertoires (conseil de l’europe, 2018). figure 2. plurilingual and pluricultural competence plurilingual and pluricultural competence exploit pluricultural repertoire plurilingual comprehension exploit pluricultural repertoire yusi asnidar, m. syarif sumantri, & ninuk lustyantie form and modulation of metaphor translation to indonesian of vingt-milles lieues sous les mers of jules verne 558 a review of several previous research results that are relevant to this study aims to find a gap between previous research and this research. olynyk (2014) in his article discussing the metaphor translation strategy by maintaining metaphorical and non-metaphorical forms in ukrainian focuses on the theory of metaphor translation proposed by newmark (1988). hemphill (2019) examined the importance of identifying conceptual metaphors and analyzing them first before translating text techniques. shi (2014) examined the translation of metaphors from english to chinese using two main strategies, namely domestication and foreignization. in this case, the translation is based on three procedures: 1) finding a suitable conceptual metaphor in the target language, 2) the cultural techniques involved in the metaphor must be maintained as well as possible, and 3) the technique of translating the metaphor that is culturally specific and unique. we should use a translation strategy that is in accordance with the purpose and function of the metaphor itself. based on the descriptions of articles relevant to the research, translation has an important role in the development of civilized society that upholds cultural diversity and democratic life. translation is a mediation activity that is the main concern in the framework of reference for the european language teaching curriculum, namely cefr (council of europe, 2020). there are four main types of linguistic activities, namely understanding, production, interaction and mediation. this shifts the old paradigm that views the four language activities of oral comprehension, spoken production, written comprehension, and written production. the aspects of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism promoted by the division of linguistic policy of the council of the european union are the primordial elements in foreign language teaching. plurilingualism, with its embedded construct of plurilingual and pluricultural competence (ppc) (which we elaborate on below), encompasses an explicit and equal emphasis on the cultural dimension (pluriculturality) which is essential to language pedagogy (chen, karas, shalizar, & piccardo, 2022). of course this is closely related to mediation competence. the translator as a mediator is responsible for producing translations that are accepted by the community and commensurate with emphasizing the meaning to be conveyed. mediation competence, which cannot be separated from plurilingual and pluricultural competencies, plays an important role in translation activities, especially the translation of metaphors which are closely related to sl culture. the complexity and description of the processes that occur in translation implies the importance of teaching translation. this is the background of this research to review the form and modulation of metaphor translation from french (sl) to indonesian (tl) and its relevance in developing mediation, plurilingual and pluricultural competencies in the common european framework of reference for languages. /cefr). instead of saying equivalence of meaning, many theorists give the term functional equivalence or skopos theory: a translated text must produce the same aesthetic effect as the original text. to be precise, equality in the exchange of values. therefore, this research novelty is formulated in the problem of the research as follows: (1) what is the form of translation used in translating metaphors? (2) how is modulation used in metaphor translation? (3) how is the relevance of the form and modulation of metaphor translation with the development of mediation, plurilingual, and pluricultural competencies in the european standard language proficiency terms of reference (cefr)? method this study uses a qualitative approach because the data collected is in the form of words. this is one of the main characteristics of qualitative research as stated by creswell (2012). the method used is a qualitative content analysis method. as stated by kripendorff (2004) that qualitative content analysis is a research methodology that analyzes textual information systematically which is then standardized to produce interpretations. the analysis step is to match the metaphors contained in the french novel and its translation, then analyze the translation form, then determine the modulation used, explain the factors that cause the use of form and modulation in the translation of the metaphor, as well as its relevance to mediation skills, plurilingualism, and pluriculturalism in the scope of the cefr. this study was designed by using wiersma (1986) method. the researcher determined the research focus, submitted a research statement, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 559 collected research data, and validated the data. furthermore, the researcher analyzed and interpreted the research findings, until at the final stage, the researcher conducted verification and drew conclusions from the research results. this design is also in accordance with the components of qualitative data analysis presented by miles and huberman (2014), namely data collection and reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. the sources of data in this study are metaphors contained in: (1) the novel vingt-mille lieus sous les mers, (2) 20,000 miles under the sea by nh. early. the qualitative data collection techniques used according to this research are documents and indepth interviews as well as verifying the comparison of meanings in the french-french dictionary and the big indonesian dictionary. results and discussion results the metaphors collected as data are metaphors in a broad sense, namely all forms of figure of speech, idioms, and proverbs contained in the french novel as a source language (sl) by jules verne, entitled vingtmille lieues sous les mers (vlm) and the translation results. into indonesian as the target language (tl) in the novel translated by nh. early, 20,000 miles di bawah lautan (dbl). there are 156 metaphors found. the metaphors are collocations in the form of phrases, clauses, and sentences. metaphor translation produced reproductive forms, namely replicating the same form with a total of 92 with a percentage of 59%, substitution, replacing the sl metaphor with a different metaphor with a number of 39, with a percentage of 25%, paraphrasing, using non-metaphorical forms, amounting to 22 with a percentage of 14%, and combined forms of reproduction + paraphrasing as much as 3 with a percentage of 2%. table 1. metaphor translation form percentage form of metaphor total percentage reproduction 92 59 % substitution 39 25% paraphrase 22 14% reproduction +paraphrase 3 2% figure 3. form of metaphor translation metaphor translation modulation the translation of metaphors using explicit/implicit modulation is 73 with a percentage of 41%. furthermore, there is the use of general and special modulation, namely a shift in meaning that experiences an expansion of meaning from specific to general, and narrowing of meaning from general to specific, totaling 35 with a percentage of 10%. the use of point of view modulation is 27% as much as 25%, and the use of combined general/special + explicit/implicit meaning modulation is 21 with a percentage of 15%. table 2. percentage of translation modulation modulation total percentage explicitation/implicitation 73 47 % general and specific 35 22 % point of view 27 17% general/specific+ exp/imp 21 15% figure 4. the use of translation modulation discussion reproduction metaphor yusi asnidar, m. syarif sumantri, & ninuk lustyantie form and modulation of metaphor translation to indonesian of vingt-milles lieues sous les mers of jules verne 560 data 1 1a) un ecueil fuyant (vlm, p.1) 1b) terumbu karang yang menghilang (dbl, p.1) the metaphor in french is in the form of personification. ecueil, an inanimate object as if depicted as a living being that can disappear. the translation above shows that the metaphor is translated by means of reproduction, which is to reproduce the same metaphor in sl. the french metaphor is re-translated into a metaphor that has exactly the same meaning. reproduction + paraphrase metaphor data 2 2a) aussi bien, n’en déplaise à monsieur, répondit conseil, qu’un bernard-l’ermite dans la coquille d’un buccin. » (vlm, p.24) 2b) « sesenang udang pertapa di dalam cangkang kerang laut. suka atau tidak kita terpaksa » (dbl, p.20) the translation of the above metaphor uses reproduction and paraphrasing techniques. the translator tried to maintain the metaphorical form by translating literally, but also provided additional information. the result of this translation technique is called the form of reproduction metaphor + paraphrase. substitution metaphor data 3 3a) nulle affaire n’a été couronne de plus de succès (vlm, p.7) 3b) tidak ada usaha yang membawa hasil lebih baik dari itu (dbl, p.6) the expression above contains a metaphor in the form of a passive sentence. literally, the meaning is that there is no business that is not crowned by success. translators still tried to maintain the french metaphor, but replaced it with a different metaphor, namely by using a substitution technique so that the result is called a substitution metaphor. the meaning of this metaphor is influenced by the context that surrounds it. paraphrase metaphor data 4 4a) l’abraham lincoln ne pouvait lutter de vitesse avait modéré sa marche et se tenait sous petite vapeur (vlm, p.49) 4b) karena tidak bertanding kecepatan, abraham l mengurangi kelajuannya dan berlayar dengan tekanan uap kecil (dbl, p.39) the sentence in french uses a metaphor in the form of personification which analogizes the abraham lincoln ship as a human walking and stepping. instead of using metaphors as equivalents in indonesian, translators preferred to provide explanations by paraphrasing. explicitation/ implicitation metaphor data 5 5a) cette mystérieuse mer (vlm, p.31) 5b) laut yang penuh misteri (dbl, p.25) the french metaphor literally means this mysterious sea is translated using explicit modulation. the translation of the french metaphor into indonesian is laut yang penuh misteri. the translator tried to translate literally, but added words so that it becomes laut yang penuh misteri. this translation is correct and in accordance with the rules of the indonesian language. data 6 6a) mille diable (vlm, p.355) 6b) sialan! (dbl, p.251) the french mille diable metaphor, literally means thousands of demons. satan is a spirit that is associated with the concept of l'esprit du mal, le démon. evil spirit, devil. the translation into indonesian becomes «sialan». the word sialan is a metaphor for sarcasm. in indonesian dictionary, sialan is a noun used to curse, including harsh words. in this case, the translator used implicit modulation of meaning. sialan, comes from the root word sial, meaning unlucky. general/specific meaning modulation data 7 7a) la mer étant belle (vlm, p.7) 7b) laut tenang (dbl:6) french metaphor which literally means beautiful sea in its translation to indonesian is a calm sea. the word beautiful is a physical description of qui suscite un plaisir esthétique d'ordre visuel ou auditif that evokes visual or auditory aesthetic pleasure. laut tenang has the meaning of looking still, not moving or making waves, not being restless: not rioting; not messed up; not noisy; safe and secure (about feelings, circumstances). this translation uses special meaning modulation. the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 561 word belle has a wider range of meanings when compared to the word tenang. data 8 8a) le bruit du vent et de la mer (vlm, p.49) 8b) suara angin dan laut (dbl, p.40) french metaphor le bruit du vent et de la mer literally means the sound of the wind and the sea. in its translation into indonesian it becomes suara angin dan laut. the word bruit refers to a special meaning, namely noise, noise. the translation into indonesian becomes suara that has a broader and general meaning. in this case, the translation of the french metaphor into indonesian undergoes a special to general meaning modulation. general specific meaning + exp/imp modulation data 9 9a) ces lueurs qui flottent dans les plus profondes nuits (vlm, p.70) 9b) sinar tak menentu yang melayang dalam kehitaman paling padat sekalipun (dbl, p.55) the french metaphor above literally means a flash of light that floats in the darkest night. the translation into indonesian is an erratic ray that floats in even the densest blackness. there is an explicit meaning in lueurs (irregular rays), les plus profondes (even the densest), and modulation of specific to general meaning in the word nuit (blackness). data 10 10a) a six heure, le jour se fit subitement avec cette rapidite particuliere (vlm, p. 314) 10b) pukul enam, tiba-tiba suasana menjadi cepat terang (dbl, p.224) the french metaphor above literally means at six o'clock, suddenly the “day” rushes by at a certain speed. in translating it to indonesian, it was six o'clock, the atmosphere suddenly became light. the modulation of explicit and implicit meaning is shown in the addition of the word to and the omission of prepositions before the phrase "six morning". the modulation of general to specific meaning is found in the word jour which is paired with atmosphere. point of view modulation data 11 11a) nulle affaire n’a été couronne de plus de succès (vlm, p.7) 11b) tidak ada usaha yang membawa hasil lebih baik dari itu (dbl, p.6) the sl metaphor above literally means that there is no business that is not crowned by success. the translation into tl becomes no effort that brings better results than that. in this case, the translation uses point of view modulation by replacing passive diathesis in sl to passive diathesis in sl. relevance of translation form and modulation with mediation, plurilingual, and pluricultural competencies based on the results of the metaphor translation found, reproduction is the form that appears the most. furthermore, there is the use of substitution and paraphrasing forms. the combined form variations found are reproduction+paraphrasing. this shows that the translation of the vlm novel seeks to bring the sl culture closer to the reader. furthermore, in terms of meaning modulation, the most commonly found use of modulation is the variation of meaning explication/implication. the next use of modulation is the variation of general to specific meaning and special to general meaning or in other terms also called concretization, generalization, narrowing, and expansion of meaning. next is point of view modulation. combined variations between the specific general meaning and the explicit/implicit are also found. implicity is done to avoid repeated meanings, as in the sentence un danger réel, sérieux éviter. bahaya yang nyata, serius untuk dihindari, translates to bahaya yang sangat serius. variations in general and special meanings cannot be avoided because of cultural differences between sl and tl. in this case, there are various nuances of meaning, such as velocité (speed) which has a wider or general scope of meaning. this word is often translated into a more specific agility. then, the more general word esprit is translated into a more specific idea. penible which of meaning is more specific is translated into difficult which has a more general and broad meaning. point of view modulation bridges the cultural differences between sl and tl. in french culture, a person who is so hungry that his stomach hurts is expressed in the metaphor of la faim nous aigullionait (the hunger pierces our stomachs). in translating it into tl, the sentence translates to rasa lapar melilit perut kami. in this case, french culture yusi asnidar, m. syarif sumantri, & ninuk lustyantie form and modulation of metaphor translation to indonesian of vingt-milles lieues sous les mers of jules verne 562 analogizes hunger with a sharp needle, while in indonesian culture, hunger is analogous to a snake or a rope that can be tightly wrapped. this shift in point of view also gives the impression of fairness so that the translation is not rigid. in this case, it can be seen that there is a dynamic equivalence as described by nida & taber (1969) and halverson (2010), namely that translation must bring the idea and nature of the text in sl closer and use natural expressions that are easy for the reader to understand. in translating metaphors into sl, there are rigidities and irregularities as in the following examples. cette bienfaisante lumière ranima nos forces translates to sinar yang dermawan itu menghidupkan kembali kekuatan kami. the translator translates the metaphor literally. the word philanthropist which is juxtaposed with light feels stiff even though the translator tries to maintain the meaning of bienfaisante to present a «odd» feel. many forms of reproduction are found in narratives, which amount to 70. the forms of reproduction are also found in 12 monologues and 10 dialogues. although this translation tries to maintain the form as close as possible to the sl, a shift in meaning in the form of modulation must also be done to produce equivalence. most of the modulation used in the translation of this reproduction is explicit/implicit, totaling 39. furthermore, there are also 24 general/special modulations, 21 combined, and 8 points of view. the form of reproduction + paraphrasing (nonmetaphoric) which amounted to 3 pieces was found in the form of narrative and monologue storytelling. there are 30 forms of substitution found in narration, 5 dialogues, and 4 monologues. furthermore, there are 15 forms of substitution using point of view modulation, 13 of explanations, and 6 general/specific forms. large is found in the narrative. various findings in this study indicated that translation is a complex mediation activity because it involves culture, language system, and the context of communication between sl and tl. successful translation can bridge cultural differences. translation is an important language activity that cannot be separated from language activities in general, namely production, receptive comprehension activities, mediation, and interaction. furthermore, the findings of various types of forms and modulation of metaphor translation indicated that appropriate strategies, techniques, and procedures are needed in translation. its relevance in the petra project descriptor is the ability to transfer meaning, master translation strategies, be able to observe the impact of translation strategies, be able to carry out several translation strategies in an appropriate way, and be able to apply various strategies in the right direction. in the findings, there are different metaphors with sl, such as analogies using words bagaikan and ibarat or pleonasm sunyi senyap and sialan sarcasm. this is very relevant to the ability of the petra project descriptor, namely textual competence, which is to know well the specific language styles found in sl. in the findings of this study, there are mismatched translations, such as glowing dust which is literally translated from poussière lumineuse which is supposed to be a natural phenomenon of meteor showers. this vlm novel is a science fiction literary genre, so there are several terms related to natural knowledge. of course, translators must look for information and references as accurately as possible in translating specific terms. the findings show that time-related metaphors are often analogous to humans (personifications), such as malam hari segera berlalu, malam hampir tiba. the sea which has a beautiful / beautiful physical character is described as a human figure and is translated into calm. this refers to the context that surrounds it. conclusion the most dominant form of metaphor translation used is reproduction, which is 59%. next, there are substitutions and paraphrases. this is in line with the translation of sl-oriented literary works. substitution is the second most common form of translation, which is 25%. in contrast to reproduction which is mostly found in narratives, paraphrasing is found in narratives that involve professor arronax directly, so that the narration uses first-person singular pronouns (je/i) and plural first-person pronouns (nous/kami). the combined form of reproduction + paraphrasing is found in the vlm metaphor translation. the translator tries to maintain the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 563 figurative form, but by providing additional information that refers to the actual meaning to clarify the meaning of the intended metaphor. equivalence of meaning is obtained by using explicit and implicit modulation, specific and general meaning, and point of view. the shift in meaning is carried out to obtain a reasonable and acceptable translation result. based on the results of the translation of french metaphors into indonesian, the translator tries to present french colors. the translator tries to bring the reader closer by presenting french culture. on the other hand, the translator tries to clarify the meaning by getting closer to the culture of indonesian readers. the equivalent given by the translator is very tied to the context that surrounds it so that it produces a unified and intact meaning. the result of the translation shows the creativity of the translator and is also a parole representation of a translator translating literary works requires cultural mastery and an advanced level of linguistic mastery. the competencies are described in the petra project terms of reference contained in the cefr 2020 and cecrl 2018 terms of reference. the ability to understand metaphors and other cultures and be able to compare them by providing analogies in the local culture is a plurilingual and pluricultural competence. references aprouz, h., & mohammadi, r. r. 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(1986). research methods in education: an introduction. massachusetts: allyn and bacon, inc. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 707 collaborative strategic reading effect on reading comprehension by considering learners’ cognitive styles leroy holman siahaan postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, jakarta, indonesia email: leroyholmansiahaan_7317157806@mhs.unj.ac.id aceng rahmat universitas negeri jakarta, jakarta, indonesia email: aceng.rahmat@unj.ac.id nuruddin universitas negeri jakarta, jakarta, indonesia email: nuruddin.unj@unj.ac.id apa citation: siahaan, l. h., rahmat, a., & nuruddin. (2022). collaborative strategic reading effect on reading comprehension by considering learners’ cognitive styles. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 707-712. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6330. received: 03-04-2022 accepted: 17-05-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction students need reading comprehension when they read scientific literature. students’ understanding of the text is a must. students who can understand the text automatically can add insight into developing science. besides, the student can also contribute thoughts based on the text they have read. the initial problem specifically for indonesian students is the low level of literacy with neighboring countries, such as malaysia, as quoted in the 2018 pisa, (“compare your country by oecd,” n.d.) data shows that indonesia's reading ability is still below malaysia's. therefore, steps to improve the reading literacy performance of indonesian students must be continuously pursued, by being open and ready to be criticized by observers of education anywhere. the state in the information age today no longer has boundaries for national borders. therefore, the failure of a country in any field can no longer cover itself from existing failures, even though thousands of miles away can be immediately known at this very moment. on the contrary, with this very fast information, indonesia can make abstract: the use of collaborative tactics based on moodle is quite effective in assisting students in improving their reading comprehension. moodle is an online education platform that creates a unique learning environment for students to learn in. students are split into two groups based on their attitudes toward information from outside sources: field-independent learners and field-dependent learners. the independent learner has a selfsufficient mentality and is not depending on others. the dependent learner, on the other hand, is a student who is completely reliant on the people or her immediate surroundings. the goal of this research is to see how collaborative techniques based on moodle and cognitive styles affect students' reading comprehension. it divides the participants into two groups at random: an experimental group that received csr through moodle, and a control group that received csr without moodle. the geft (group embedded figures test) is used to see if the participants' cognitive styles are field-independent or field-dependent. furthermore, a two-way anova and descriptive test are used to analyze the data. the results of anova test revealed that the learners' reading comprehension was influenced by csr and cognitive styles. this study suggests that english teachers use moodle for csr with cognitive types to help students improve their reading comprehension. finally, the descriptive test's average differences revealed that csr with moodle is better for learners with independent cognitive styles than for those with dependent ones. csr without moodle, on the other hand, is best for dependent learners. keywords: collaborative reading strategy: online learning; moodle; face-to-face learning; cognitive style; field-independent/dependent. leroy holman siahaan, aceng rahmat, & nuruddin collaborative strategic reading effect on reading comprehension by considering learners’ cognitive styles 708 comparisons by looking at countries that have succeeded in reading literacy levels quickly. learners experienced some problems in reading comprehension especially at: 1) literal comprehension (with activities such as: understand the meaning of the word, determine the topic of the reading, find the main idea of the reading, and determine the express statement). 2) interpretative comprehension, (with activities such as: organizing reading information and the relationship between reading content, understanding the details implied in the reading, making reading inferences, and concluding the content of the reading). 3) critical understanding. (with activities such as: assessing an event based on the rules of certain norms, comparing the information in the text with the reader's background) (aritonang, lasmana, & kurnia, 2019; levine, 2019; nadirah, asrifan, vargheese, & haedar, 2020; octavia & jufri, 2020). next, the ways of collaborative strategic reading (csr), such as: 1) preview so that students can activate their previous knowledge. 2) shows a sensory image to feel the context situation that exists in the text. 3) asking students to build an understanding of the context in the text. 4) ask students to predict conclusions in a text. 5) determine the main idea. 6) fix-up option, when students do not understand the text, the teacher builds understanding in several stages, such as: rereading, reading on until they understand, or finding out words that are not understood. 7) synthesize the concepts in the content text (gani, yusuf, & susiani, 2016; yon a.e., rafli, & nuruddin, 2022). moreover, online learning moodle have features (aldiab, chowdhury, kootsookos, alam, & allhibi, 2018; deepak, 2017) which support what the students read (e-mail, e-documents, e-white paper), view (e-courses with visuals, online selfstudy guides, online power point) presentation), listen and watch (e-courses with audio and video, recorded live e-learning sessions), say and write (interactive live e-classes or e-seminar, interactive e-courses, ementoring or e-coaching). besides, moodle also supports lms (lwande, muchemi, & oboko, 2021) which includes virtual learning environment (zacarias, de almeida, prettz, da costa, de freitas, canedo, & de sousa, 2016), learning management system (aldiab et al., 2018) and course management system (kolekar, pai, & manohara pai, 2018; witte, 2018). face-to-face mode is how learning activities are carried out in the classroom with physical contact between students and teachers. the teacher's role in this activity involves physical contact with students during the learning process. the teacher plays an active role in monitoring student activities and provides immediate feedback when students seem to have difficulties. furthermore, from the student's point of view, the face-to-face mode is very helpful in providing personal motivation for students. the influence when guided directly by eye contact by the teacher will have an emotional impact on his personal motivation. the impact of direct teacher supervision will direct students to stay focused on completing their assignments (donkin, hatje, & reinke, 2022; el-soussi, 2022; jonker, märz, & voogt, 2018; lee, chui, & fung, 2022; mali & lim, 2021). furthermore, cognitive style is the behavior or attitude in reacting receipt of information from outside oneself. the impact of accepting this information is altogether different from every person. the distinction in accepting information from every individual is brought about by an individual's experience, both from the family environment and community. contrasts in cognitive styles are arranged by field independent and field dependent. in different cases, language knowledge can likewise be impacted by cognitive style factors (kusumawati & widiati, 2017; par, 2018; ramli, boeriswati, & emzir, 2019a; slavin, 2018). additionally, field independent is a character style in responding to a task completion characterized by a focus on details, likes innovation, achievement-oriented. then, in socializing the fi style likes formality. its communication styles are clear and sparing in using words, likes to finish assignments without the help of the teacher, and does not like to be rewarded for his work (council, 2019; philip c. mefoh, nwoke, chukwuorji, & chijioke, 2017; par, 2018). on the contrary, the cognitive style of field dependent is a characteristic of individual students who have a learning style that sees only unspecified unity. in socializing, fd tends to be too dependent on people around them in completing a task. then fd has the characteristic that it tends to attract general thinking skills, does not see in detail the problem and is unable to think longer without the help of the teacher (onyekuru, 2015; ramli, boeriswati, & emzir, 2019b; slavin, 2018; witkin, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 709 moore, oltman, goodenough, friedman, owen, & raskin, 1977). based on the things above, this study implemented collaborative reading strategies (csr) by considering the learners’ fieldindependent/dependent cognitive styles. thus, this present study aims at these research questions: (1) do csr and cognitive styles significantly affect the students’ reading comprehension? (2) which type of cognitive styles has an impact on csr with online moodle and without moodle? method this study took two classes consisting of 39 students as participants. the experimental group has 20 students. the control one has 19 students. both classes were chosen by using a purposive sampling method. prior to the treatment, the group embedded figures test (geft) instrument (andheska, suparno, dawud, & suyitno, 2020; par, 2018; slavin, 2018) was managed to the respondents targeting distinguishing students’ psychological style types. this quantitative research executed an experimental method by a 2 x 2 factorial design. it expected to analyze the impact of the csr educated to two classes. one received an online learning as the experimental group and one received a face-toface learning as the control group. each group consisted of field-independent and field-dependent students. after completing the experiment, a fiftyreading comprehension multiple choice test was administered with the students. this research used two instruments, the geft and multiple choice of reading tests. the former is aimed to observe cognitive styles, whether or not they have been field-independent learners or fielddependent learners. the examination challenged the learners to acknowledge an easy graph embedded within the advanced figure. it consists of 3 sections in 30 minutes. section one consisted of ten queries supposed for adapting the respondents to the check section 2 and 3 every consisted of ten queries. one score for the proper answer and 0 for the false answer. thus, the participants will gain score starting from 0-100. the upper the score, the additional possible the students known as fi learners. on the contrary, the lower the score, the additional possible the students recognized as fd learners. the latter is employed to raise the respondents to answer a fifty-reading comprehension in ninety minutes. results and discussion results table 1 shows descriptive statistics for the reading group's score when using csr in the learning process. one received an online learning as the experimental group and one received a face-to-face learning as the control group. each group consisted of field-independent and field-dependent students as follows. table 1. descriptive statistics, dependent variable: reading scores strategies mean std. deviation n csr moodle field independent 87.90 4.795 10 field dependent 63.00 6.749 10 total 75.45 13.987 20 table 1 figures there are numbers of 20 respondents which consist of 20 fi and fd students. fi mean score is 87.90 with sd 4.795, and fd is 63. according to mean score shows fi students performed better in reading comprehension than fd ones. the hypothesis of normality and homogeneity were tested for the requirements of anova analysis which the data must be normal and homogeny. normality testing table 2. test of normality shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. standardized residual for y 0.961 39 0.2 a. lilliefors significance correction normality testing was analyzed by shapiro-wilk statistics using spss ver.22 for windows. the output in table 2 confirmed that the significance values (sig) reading scores (0.199) which was higher = 0.05. therefore, it can be concluded that the study data are normally distributed. this means that it is possible to perform parametric statistical analyzes. homogeneity testing test of homogeneity was conducted for using the levene’s test. the requirement is the data variance is homogeny if the value is based on mean leroy holman siahaan, aceng rahmat, & nuruddin collaborative strategic reading effect on reading comprehension by considering learners’ cognitive styles 710 significance > 0.05, but if it is lower than 0.05, the data variance is not homogeny. table 3 shows the significance value 0.153 was higher than 0.05. thus, it can be concluded that the variance of the data is homogeny. the presumption testing of normality and homogeneity of the information proposed that the data were normal and homogeneous. thusly, the hypothesis testing utilizing anova can be directed. table 3. levene’s test of equality of error variances dependent variable: y f df1 df2 sig. 1.032 3 35 0.39 tests the null hypothesis that the error variance of the dependent variable is equal across groups. a. design intercept + a + b + a * b testing of anova the hypothesis testing was carried out by means of the usage of a two-way anova for the predominant effect and persevered with the simple effect. anova checking out was once used to investigate the most important and interaction outcomes between csr and cognitive styles on studying comprehension scores. the check effects had been introduced in table 4. answering question one: do csr and cognitive styles significantly affect the students’ reading comprehension? table 4. tests of between-subjects effects source type ii sum of squares df mean square f sig. corrected model 3738.509a 3 1246.170 36.795 .000 intercept 215195.103 1 215195.103 6353.888 .000 a (csr) 65.411 1 65.411 1.931 .173 b (cornitive styles) 532.022 1 532.022 15.709 .000 a*b 3150.487 1 3150.487 93.022 .000 error 1185.389 35 33.868 total 220119.000 39 corrected total 4923.897 38 a. r squared = .759 (adjusted r squared = .739) table 4 figures analysis of variance table. every subject within the model, is tested for its ability to account for variation within the dependent variable. main effect fo (a) = 1.931 with p-value = 0.173 > 0.05, or ho is accepted. this means that there is no difference in the average csr online learning and face to face one. fo (b) = 15,709 with p-value = 0.000 < 0.05, or ho is rejected. this means that there is an average difference in cognitive styles, field independent and field dependent. interaction effect fo (ab) = 93.022 with p-value = 0.000 < 0.05, or ho is rejected. this means that there is a very significant interaction effect between factor a (csr) and factor b (cognitive styles). thus, csr and cognitive styles significantly affect the students’ reading comprehension. it can be seen from the results of the analysis that the influence of the collaborative strategic reading and cognitive styles variables on reading comprehension is 75.9%. hypothesis testing answering question two: which type of cognitive styles has an impact on csr with online moodle and face to face learning? table 5. descriptive statistics, dependent variable: reading scores csr mean std. deviation n online (moddle) field independent 87.90 4.795 10 field dependent 63.00 6.749 10 total 75.45 13.987 20 face-toface field independent 67.80 4.131 10 field dependent 78.89 7.201 9 total 73.05 7.996 19 total field independent 77.85 11.193 20 field dependent 70.53 10.595 19 total 74.28 11.383 39 based on the average reading comprehension score above, it states that students who have field independent (fi) styles get a higher average score of 87.90 than field dependent (fd) 63 who are taught online moodle. next, according to the average reading comprehension score above, it is stated that students who have fd styles get a higher average score of 78.89 compared to fi 67.80 who are taught with face-to-face learning. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 711 discussion the things above are strongly supported by the opinion of experts. the geft check will distinguish students fi and fd cognitive styles (andheska et al., 2020; goodenough & witkin, 1977; par, 2018). in addition, the findings stated fi students are suitable for online learning with moodle which requires concentration independently, and is not affected by the environment. individuals who have the fi style can identify objects that obscured by the surrounding environment and can also observe an object as a whole with specific characteristics. in alternative words, the analytical power of the fi student is a lot of careful and sharp, even though the surrounding environment interferes with the object's view (philip c. mefoh et al., 2017; philip chukwuemeka mefoh & ezeh, 2016; par, 2018; slavin, 2018; zhang & tian, 2019). on the other hand, students who have cognitive style fd tend to be happier with face-to-face learning. this is supported by fd characters such as the fd cognitive style which is a characteristic of individual students who have a learning style that sees only one unified whole is not detailed. in socializing, fd tends to be too obsessed with their friends around in finishing a task. then, fd has characteristics that tend to draw in general thinking skills, don't see well the matter and can't think longer without assistance of the teacher (onyekuru, 2015; ramli et al., 2019a; slavin, 2018). conclusion the teaching reading skills aims to develop the students’ text competence. csr and cognitive styles significantly affect the students’ reading comprehension. the results of the analysis that the influence of the collaborative strategic reading and cognitive styles designs variables on reading comprehension is 75.9%. next, according to on the average reading comprehension score above, it states that students who have field independent (fi) styles get a higher average score than field dependent (fd) who are taught online moodle. on the contrary, students who have fd styles get a higher average in reading comprehension than fi who are taught with faceto-face learning. in addition, the current study has pedagogical implications. it contributes to providing one of the effective methods in teaching reading comprehension. for teachers who teach reading comprehension, they can do their teaching online with moodle by paying attention to the students' field independent. meanwhile, with students who are fd, teachers can teach csr face-to-face so that learning using csr can run effectively. references aldiab, a., chowdhury, h., kootsookos, a., alam, f., & allhibi, h. 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(2019). the influence of field independent-dependent cognitive styles on students’ learning performance under different teaching modes. iciet (pp. 230–237). japan: association for computing machinery. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 689 fostering qualitative content analysis skills through case method noermanzah (corresponding author) postgraduate program of indonesian language education, universitas bengkulu email: noermanzah@unib.ac.id dian eka chandra wardhana postgraduate program of indonesian language education, universitas bengkulu email: dec.wardhana@unib.ac.id awalludin indonesian language and literature education study program, universitas baturaja e-mail: awalludinawri@gmail.com apa citation: noermanzah, wardhana, d. e. c. awalludin. (2022). fostering qualitative content analysis skills through case method. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 689-698. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6312. received: 03-04-2022 accepted: 17-05-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction the qualitative content analysis method is one of the discourse analysis techniques that seeks to give the discourse's content meaning. as explained by mayring (2014), qualitative content analysis is a variety of text analysis procedures that integrate qualitative and quantitative analysis steps, making them part of mixed methods. according to choi and kim (2019), qualitative content analysis can be carried out by creating inductive categories and deciding deductive categories with the purpose of understanding the meaning of the characteristics of strengths and weaknesses of a text that is researched using, for instance, fgi (focused group interview). entering society era 5.0, to prevent misinformation or hoaxes, students must be able to acquire digital literacy, which necessitates their capacity to assess discourse using qualitative content analysis (adila, weda, & tamitiadini, 2019). the better the ability to analyze discourse with qualitative content analysis methods, the better students will be in understanding correct information as new knowledge. then, karto, suhartono, susetyo, noermanzah, & maisarah (2019) explained that the ability to analyze discourse with qualitative content analysis will also affect students' ability to innovate, think critically, think creatively, cooperate, and collaborate so that they are ready to become members of the community and the business world. researchers frequently utilize qualitative content analysis, particularly when investigating a discourse abstract: this study is aimed at demonstrating how students in the university of bengkulu's master's program in indonesian language education have improved their capacity to employ qualitative content analysis techniques. this study uses a classroom action research method with the kemmis and mc model. data collection techniques using observation, interviews, tests, and documentation. data analysis techniques are: 1) analyzing qualitative data, namely observation data, interviews, and document analysis; 2) analyzing quantitative data, namely performance test data, and 3) interpreting and setting indicators of success of actions. test the validity of the data using the technique of inter rater, member check, and triangulation of data sources. the results showed that the application of case method carried out online through zoom cloud meetings and lms university of bengkulu was able to improve the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods for students. improvement both in terms of the learning process that activates the learning experience through solving discourse analysis cases at the level of knowledge and activities trying to analyze class discourse, as well as increasing learning outcomes in the first cycle by 16% which reached a value of 80, increasing in cycle 2 by 91.66% which reaches a value of 80. keywords:; qualitative content analysis skills; case method; learning outcomes. mailto:noermanzah@unib.ac.id noermanzah, dian eka chandra wardhana, awalludin fostering qualitative content analysis skills through case method 690 or communication event in a community. for example, a study by sumarno (2020), language and literature learning research uses content analysis. in this situation, content analysis can be utilized to transform the communication phenomena's content into a socially understandable phenomenon, particularly in the study of language and literature. yenrizal (2018) also used analytical methods to reveal the meaning of the environment in the srivijaya era through the talang tuwo inscription. likewise, content analysis can also reveal the contents of the press and online journal coverage during the covid-19 outbreak in italy (corvo & de caro, 2020). the results of the content analysis showed that the articles in the first two weeks mainly focused on information on the covid-19 disease ranging from prevention, treatment, healing but also fear, and anxiety. while after a while, about 2 months later the newspapers are much more focused on the socio-political-economic impact that covid-19 has had in italy and could potentially happen in the near future for health organizations. the qualitative analysis method is also able to reveal the contents of twitter users' opinions through "#amnestipajak" and "#taxamnesty" (rumata, 2017). the qualitative content analysis method is very helpful in revealing the meaning of an important event in the history of human development, so it is very important to learn, especially for students in the field of language and literature education. as one of the language research methods, the qualitative content analysis method has not received special attention for discourse teachers, especially how appropriate learning methods are to provide understanding to students in improving their ability to use qualitative analysis methods. the study of classroom action research, for example, research conducted by noermanzah & suryadi (2020) showed that the method of learning blended learning based on moodle is able to improve the ability of students in applying critical discourse analysis with the fairclough model. the results of this study indicate that the moodle-based blended learning method is able to improve students' ability to analyze discourse, especially norman fairclough's critical discourse analysis model with evidence of an increase in ability from cycle 1 to cycle 2 with an average value of 80.5. from the learning outcomes data for the 2019/2021 odd semester, it shows that the ability to analyze discourse, especially qualitative content analysis, for second semester students of the indonesian language education master’s program, bengkulu university is still in the sufficient category, with an average score of 68.82. this low value is indicated by the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods that are not as expected by these nine qualitative analytical procedures, namely determining the material, analyzing the situation where the text originates, formally characterizing the material, determining the direction of analysis, differentiation of questions that must be answered according to with existing theories, selecting analytical techniques (summary, explication, arrangement), definition of units of analysis, material analysis (summary, explication, arrangement), and interpretation (mayring, 2014; emzir, 2014; krippendorff, 2004). the results of interviews with students who took the discourse analysis course also showed that students still had difficulties, especially in analyzing the situation where the text came from, formally characterizing the material, determining the direction of analysis, differentiation of questions that must be answered according to existing theory, selecting techniques. analytical (summary, explication, arrangement), definition of units of analysis, material analysis (summary, explication, arrangement), and interpretation (kusrianti & suharto, 2019). in addition, their lack of insight related to studies conducted on discourse using qualitative content analysis methods. from the results of observations, the occurrence of low student understanding in carrying out qualitative content analysis in analyzing discourse is influenced by several things such as lack of understanding of the work procedures of qualitative content analysis, incomplete qualitative content analysis teaching materials, lack of practice in analyzing discourse with qualitative analysis methods, methods less interesting learning, and low student motivation in studying a discourse with qualitative content analysis methods. for this reason, it is necessary to present learning methods that are able to maximize the shortcomings of previous learning methods. learning methods that are thought to be able to stimulate the development of students' thinking progress to solve the problems they face appropriately and motivate students to design an invention are by applying case solving methods or problem solving or problem-based english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 691 learning (sakila, 2019; sitepu, 2018; nisa, 2018; sukesti, 2020). method to address this research question, classroom action research using a participatory design is used. researchers characterize car parsitipative design as instructors who perform actions (kemmis, mctaggart, & nixon, 2014). the process of action research using the kemmis, mctaggart, & nixon model in general with action steps, namely planning, implementing, observing, and reflecting. the steps of action research are described by kemmis, mctaggart, and nixon (2014) in the form of a spiral of self-reflection. planning for change; providing action; observing the learning process and making modifications based on observations; reflecting on this process and its effects; replanning; carrying out actions and making observations; reflecting; and repeating in activity 1 are the next steps. the kemmis, mctaggart, and nixon spiral model approach was used during the second semester of the indonesian language education masters program at the university of bengkulu to implement classroom action research procedures that employ problem-solving strategies (2014). the execution of this spiral model is scheduled over two cycles, which are actually one action in the spiral model. the population of this study consisted of 12 students enrolled in the second semester of the university of bengkulu's master's program in indonesian language education, including 8 women and 4 males. class a students enrolled in the indonesian language education masters program at bengkulu university fkip in the second semester of the 2020–2021 academic year make up the research sample or the study's subject. there are a total of 12 participants in the study, including 8 women and 4 men. purposive sampling is used to determine the sample size (sampling technique with certain considerations or objectives). students that enroll in the discourse analysis course serve as the sample population. because there is just one class, immediately class a semester 2, there are a total of 12 students. tests, observations, interviews, and documentation techniques are utilized to collect data in order to address the formulation of the research problem. test methods used to evaluate student performance in evaluating speech using qualitative content analysis techniques are presented as essay techniques. the observation method, known as open observation, is watching what students and lecturers are doing while they are learning. additionally, an open interview strategy was used to gather feedback from instructors and students on the implementation of case-based learning for qualitative content analysis. the next step in the documentation process is to record the lecture program units, audiovisual from the case method application in learning, and semester learning plans. the main instrument in this research is the researcher and the observer. in this classroom action research, researchers and observers are assisted by the following research instruments. the observation sheets used are lecturer activity observation sheets and student activity observation sheets in online activities in applying case-solving methods to qualitative content analysis learning. the observation sheet is open, with the observed aspects relating to preliminary activities, core activities, and closing activities. observation sheet used by the lecturer and student activities is relating to learning steps, starting from preliminary activities, core activities, and ending with closing activities. essay tests or descriptions are regulated in the form of a performance test to analyze a discourse using the qualitative content analysis method of the mayring model. essay tests can be seen in the lecture event unit the part in the appendix. the ssessment indicators in discourse analysis are aimed at the performance results of discourse analysis activities using mayring's qualitative content analysis method are as follows (emzir, 2014; eriyanto, 2011; mayring, 2000). table 1. assessment indicator of the results of student products in analyzing discourse using the mayring model qualitative content analysis method no. indicators of discourse analysis activities value weight 1 material determination 5 2 analysis of the situation where the text originates 5 3 characterization that is formal from the analyzed material 5 4 determination of the direction of 5 noermanzah, dian eka chandra wardhana, awalludin fostering qualitative content analysis skills through case method 692 class discourse analysis conducted by students 5 differentiation of questions that must be answered according to theory 5 6 the selection of analytic techniques in the form of summary, explanation, and organization 10 7 definition of units of analysis 10 8 material analysis (summary, explication, organization) 10 9 interpretation 45 score 100 the steps of data analysis are carried out in two steps, namely quantitative data analysis and followed by qualitative data analysis. qualitative data obtained from observations and interviews (thomas, 2006), while quantitative data is test data. from the results of the essay test, the performance was assessed by two assessors, namely by lecturers and colleagues. then calculate the average value using spss 21. classical learning completeness criteria will be obtained if there are 85% in the class with a minimum completeness criteria value of 80 or criteria a-. activities in analyzing data types of qualitative data come from data on observations of lecturer and student activities in learning, as well as data from the results of interviews with lecturers and students relating to data that cannot be explained from observation data. observation results from lecturer activities related to implementation qualitative content analysis learning using case solving methods in sap. if the results are right, it can be informed that the activity of the lecturer in applying the case method method is good, and vice versa if it is not in accordance with the work steps case method, then the lecturer's activities are considered not good. it is the same with student activities related to student activities in preliminary activities, core activities, and closing activities. if from the implementation of the three processes of the activity, most of them show active students, the student activities are good, otherwise if they are not active, the student activities are not good. the results of the interviews are also related to the problems faced by lecturers and students. in this case, the results of the interview are more to help reflect activities or improve the results of actions. the results of the interviews are also the basis for determining whether the case solving method really provides motivation and good impact for lecturers, especially students in understanding discourse analysis activities using mayring's qualitative content analysis method. the interpretation process is an activity of interpreting and carrying out connecting activities quantitative data and qualitative data whether they have achieve a hypothesis in the form of indicators of successful action or not. then, if it has reached the indicators of success, it can be concluded that the research hypothesis is accepted, namely the case solving method can improve the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods for students in semester 2 of the masters program in indonesian language education, university of bengkulu. the indicators for the success of this classroom action research is shown by the application case method in improving the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods for semester 2 students of the indonesian language education masters program, fkip bengkulu university, are as follows: (1) the criteria for the limitations in the classroom is 85% with the minimum completeness criteria score of 80 or criteria a-. (2) the results of the observation of the learning process carried out by the lecturer is in accordance with the process or procedure for the application of the case solving method in the lecture program unit. (3) the results of observing student activities that provide information that students are active in the learning process. (4) the results of the interviews showed that students were happy and students are motivated through learning activities qualitative content analysis using case solving methods. results and discussion learning process using case method on material use of qualitative content analysis method the results of observations from the learning process using the case method carried out by the lecturer, the learning steps using case solving methods on the material using qualitative content analysis methods and the results of cycle 1 reflection, are as follows: the steps of learning cycle 1 virtual online meeting through the zoom cloud application are as follows. introduction (20 minutes). (1) students and lecturers pray together. (2) students are asked to log english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 693 in at bengkulu university's lms, namely on the https://elearning.unib.ac.id/ page especially for the discourse analysis course and have their attendance checked by the lecturer. (3) students are checked for their health condition by the lecturer. (4) students are given apperception by giving video discourses on learning indonesian language teachers with national level achievements and providing motivation to students. (5) lecturer explains sub-cpmk and learning objectives. core activities (70 minutes). exploration. (1) students are formed into small groups, each group consisting of 2 students. (2) each group is given the task of analyzing sample articles from class discourse analysis research using qualitative content analysis methods. the analysis was carried out on how the steps of qualitative content analysis work from several research articles. (3) students in groups are accompanied by lecturers in solving the problem of analyzing the work steps of qualitative content analysis from several research articles. (4) students prove the results of their analysis by presenting in the form of a talk show. (5) all group representatives in the talk show discussed and came to joint conclusions about the steps of qualitative content analysis work from several research articles. (6) the lecturer provides reinforcement on qualitative content analysis of several research articles. elaboration. lecturers give assignments in groups to solve cases of analyzing teacher skills in explaining from learning videos downloaded from youtube with qualitative content analysis tasks, namely: 1) determining the material, 2) analyzing the situation where the text comes from, 3) formally characterizing the material, 4) determine discourse analysis activities, 5) differentiation of questions that must be answered in accordance with existing theories, 6) the selection of an analytical technique in the form of summary, explanation, and settings, 7) definition of units of analysis, 8) material analysis (summary, explication , arrangement), and 9) interpretation of the findings of the teacher's skills in explaining the learning video. (1) the lecturer accompanies students when carrying out problem-solving stages in analyzing teacher skills in explaining from learning videos downloaded from youtube with qualitative content analysis methods. (2) each group is able to determine the conclusion of the analysis through the activity of presenting the results of the analysis of the skills of the teacher in explaining the indonesian language learning video using the qualitative content analysis method. (3) each group presents a question and answer session with other groups regarding their findings. (4) students are given reinforcement by the lecturer from each analysis result by providing analysis results that should be based on the work steps of mayring's qualitative content analysis method. (5) students in their groups are asked to improve the results of the analysis outside of lecture hours based on the results of discussions and reinforcement from the lecturer. confirmation. (1) students are given questions regarding the learning objectives that have been achieved. (2) several student representatives were asked to provide conclusions regarding the learning objectives that have been achieved. closing activities (10 minutes). (1) students are given reflection by asking questions about the learning objectives that have been and have not been achieved. (2) students are reminded again of the task of improving the results of their analysis and collecting the results of the improvement analysis at the bengkulu university lms, namely https://elearning.unib.ac.id/ in the discourse analysis course meeting 6 according to a predetermined schedule. (3) students and lecturers close the study with students with prayer. cycle 1 reflection results the results of cycle 1 reflection from the results of observing the learning process using the casesolving method carried out by lecturers and students are as follows: the results of observing the activities of the lecturers are in accordance with the procedures for applying the case solving method in sap or 100% according to the very good criteria. at the time of exploration, the lecturer was too fast in providing reinforcement for explanations and when students presented in a talk show, they did not ask group members to provide suggestions. problems occur in elaboration activities, namely the lack of maximum lecturers assisting students at the stage of students doing problem solving because only two groups are actively asking questions while the other four groups are less active. breakout rooms should be facilitated for each group so that lecturers can assist more optimally. the lecturer also gave a presentation time in the form of a talk show but did not ask other group members to give their opinion noermanzah, dian eka chandra wardhana, awalludin fostering qualitative content analysis skills through case method 694 so that the active students were only group representatives who became the spokespersons in the talk show. the results of observing student activities show that they are active in every learning activity with 100% results with very good criteria. it's just that there are some students who are less active in conducting discourse analysis with qualitative content analysis methods and more of their group leaders are actively working. students are also still confused in understanding the steps of analysis using the qualitative content analysis method because the lecturer is too quick to explain and is not accompanied by examples of each stage of the analysis. the results of the interview showed that the lecturer was too quick in explaining so that it still made students not understand the steps of analysis using qualitative content analysis methods. then, students still have difficulty understanding the steps of qualitative content analysis correctly, especially in interpreting the data, especially interpreting the data according to the research problem, namely determining the basic skills of teaching teachers. the average value of cycle 1 is 77.7 (b+) and only 16% of those who are successful have achieved a score of 80 or 2 of the 12 students who were the research sample. this shows that it has not reached 80 or abecause the specific success indicator for classical learning completeness criteria must be 80% with a kkm value of 80 or criteria a. the steps of learning cycle 2 virtual face with zoom cloud are as follows. introduction (20 minutes). (1) students and lecturers pray together. (2) students are asked to log in to the bengkulu university lms, namely on the https://elearning.unib.ac.id/ page especially the discourse analysis course and have their attendance checked by the lecturer. (3) students are checked for their health condition by the lecturer. (4) students are given apperception by giving video discourses of writers in the field of discourse analysis who have written in various reputable international journals and provide motivation to students. (5) lecturer explains sub-cpmk and learning objectives. core activities (70 minutes). exploration. (1) students are formed into small groups, each group consisting of 2 students. (2) each group is given the task of analyzing sample articles from class discourse analysis research using qualitative content analysis methods. the analysis was carried out on how the steps of qualitative content analysis work from several research articles. (3) students in groups are accompanied by lecturers in solving the problem of analyzing the work steps of qualitative content analysis from several research articles. (4) students prove the results of their analysis by presenting in the form of a talk show. (5) all group representatives in the talk show discussed and came to joint conclusions about the steps of qualitative content analysis work from several research articles. (6) the lecturer provides reinforcement on qualitative content analysis of several research articles. elaboration. (1) lecturers give assignments in groups to solve cases of analyzing teacher skills in explaining from learning videos downloaded from youtube with qualitative content analysis tasks, namely: a) determining the material, b) analyzing the situation where the text comes from, c) formally characterizing the material, d) determination of the direction of analysis, e) differentiation of questions that must be answered in accordance with existing theories, f) selection of analytical techniques (summary, explication, arrangement), g) definition of units of analysis, h) material analysis (summary, explication , arrangement), and i) interpretation of the findings of the teacher's skills in explaining the learning video. (2) the lecturer accompanies students when carrying out problem-solving stages in analyzing teacher skills in explaining from learning videos downloaded from youtube with qualitative content analysis methods. (3) each group is able to determine the conclusion of the analysis through the activity of presenting the results of the analysis of the skills of the teacher in explaining the indonesian language learning video using the qualitative content analysis method. (4) each group presents a question and answer session with other groups regarding their findings. (5) students are given reinforcement by the lecturer from each analysis result by providing analysis results that should be based on the work steps of mayring's qualitative content analysis method. (6) students in their groups are asked to improve the results of the analysis outside of lecture hours based on the results of discussions and reinforcement from the lecturer. confirmation. (1) students are given questions regarding the learning objectives that have been english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 695 achieved. (2) several student representatives were asked to provide conclusions regarding the learning objectives that have been achieved. closing activities (10 minutes). (1) students are given reflection by asking questions about the learning achievements of discourse analysis that has been and has not yet reached the minimum completeness criteria. (2) students are reminded again of the task of improving the results of their analysis and collecting the results of the improvement analysis at the bengkulu university lms, namely https://elearning.unib.ac.id/ in the discourse analysis course meeting 6 according to a predetermined schedule. (3) students and lecturers close the study with students with prayer. cycle 2 reflection results the results of the reflection of cycle 2 from the results of the observation of the learning process using the case-solving method carried out by lecturers and students are as follows: the results of the observation of lecturer activities are in accordance with the steps for implementing the case solving method in sap or 100% in accordance with the very good criteria. at the time of exploration, the lecturer had provided a strengthening explanation of the steps of qualitative content analysis so that students gained a good understanding before carrying out the activity of trying to analyze discourse. lecturers have invited each individual in the group to ask questions so that they are active in question and answer and are able to build their knowledge well. lecturers have provided breakout rooms for each group so that lecturers can assist students more optimally in student activities to solve problems in analyzing discourse. the results of observing student activities in learning show that they are active in every learning experience with 100% results with very good criteria. it's just that there are still some students who have not actively asked questions because of signal problems. the results of the interview show that the lecturers have explained in detail the steps of qualitative content analysis accompanied by examples of analysis. then, there are still students who have difficulty making conclusions about the interpretation of the meaning of the basic teaching skills of teachers and connecting these findings with relevant research. the average value of cycle 2 is 80.6 (a-) and those who have succeeded in achieving a minimum completeness score are only 91.66% who have achieved a score of 80 or 11 people who have succeeded from the 12 students who were the research sample. this shows that from student learning outcomes in compiling research using qualitative content analysis methods, the indicator of success is 80% of the number of students who have achieved the minimum completeness criteria score, namely 80 or criteria a-. improving learning outcomes using qualitative content analysis technique through case-method the results of cycle 1 show that student learning outcomes in mastering the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods after the implementation of learning using case solving methods in cycle 1 obtained an average value of 77.7 and the number of students who achieved the minimum completeness criteria score of 80 only obtained 2 students. or 16% of the total research sample, namely 12 students. then, the results in cycle 2 showed that student learning outcomes in mastering the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods after the implementation of learning using case solving methods in cycle 2 obtained an average value of 80.6 and the number of students who achieved the minimum completeness criteria score of 80 which obtained 11 students or 91.66% of the total research sample, namely 12 students. the application of case-solving methods carried out online through zoom cloud meetings and lms bengkulu university was able to improve the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods for students of the indonesian language education masters program, bengkulu university. although in the first cycle only 16% reached a value of 80, but in the second cycle it increased to 91.66% which reached a value of 80. the learning process with the case-solving method on the qualitative content analysis method was carried out with steps developed from opinion of yee (2019), kuzle (2015), arends (2008), greiff (2013), gulo (2002), and decree of the minister of education and culture of the republic of indonesia, number 3/m/2021, namely 1) solving cases by building concepts in exploration activities with the steps are as follows: a) students are formed into several small groups, b) each group is given a case to analyze qualitative content analysis procedures based on noermanzah, dian eka chandra wardhana, awalludin fostering qualitative content analysis skills through case method 696 several examples of research results in the field of discourse analysis, c) students are assisted in the analysis process so that they are able to build knowledge and prove about working steps of discourse analysis with qualitative content analysis methods, d) each group presentation in the form of talk shows, and e) lecturers provide reinforcement to the steps of discourse analysis by using qualitative content analysis methods. then, 2) solving cases with activities trying to apply knowledge about qualitative content analysis methods to elaboration activities with the following steps: a) lecturers give assignments in groups to solve cases analyzing with quantitative content analysis about the skills of teachers in explaining from the downloaded learning videos from youtube; b) the lecturer accompanies students when carrying out problem-solving stages in analyzing the teacher's skills in explaining; c) each group presents the results of its discourse analysis in the form of a talk show; d) students are given a strengthening explanation by the lecturer. in the application of the case-solving method that has been applied to the material using the qualitative content analysis method according to greiff (2013) and gulo (2002), a special strategy is needed so that students are able to formulate problems, examine problems, formulate tentative assumptions with alternative problem solving, collect data, classify data, presenting data in the form of narratives and pictures, conducting evidence and establishing conclusions, to communicating the results of the analysis in the form of groups. in action research, the case-solving steps are carried out twice and at two levels, namely carried out at the exploration stage by building knowledge through completing analysis of examples of research results in the field of discourse analysis and at the elaboration stage by conducting activities trying to analyze discourse. learning by using qualitative content analysis methods. with the stage of building knowledge at the beginning, students can easily solve the given analytical case. although the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods is still not optimally accepted by students, especially in their ability to interpret research data because of the lack of time in carrying out these assignments. however, for the ability to determine material, analysis of the situation where the text of characterization comes from, formally determining the direction of analysis, differentiation of questions that must be answered according to theory, selection of analytical techniques (summary, explication, arrangement), definition of units analysis, and material analysis (summary, explication, arrangement) is good. the key to the application of the case-solving method in improving the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods for students of the masters program in indonesian language education, bengkulu university is to give simple cases first to master a knowledge, followed by case analysis that is experimental in nature, mentoring and strengthening from educators as facilitators to students. all students, use the facility to provide breakout rooms for each group so that lecturers can assist students more optimally in student activities to solve problems, and provide opportunities to communicate the results of solving analytical cases through presentation activities. in addition, time management in case resolution must and presentation of case resolution results must be well planned according to the level of difficulty of the case. then, in applying the case-solving method, it must provide room for discussion in groups so that each individual acts as a protagonist in determining problem solving in the learning provided by the educator. this is in accordance with the decree of the minister of education and culture of the republic of indonesia, number 3/m/2021, the case method is carried out in several stages as follows: 1) students act as "protagonists" who try to solve a case; 2) students conduct case analysis to build solution recommendations, assisted by group discussions to test and develop solution designs; and 3) the class discusses actively, with the majority of the conversations being carried out by students, while the lecturer only facilitates by directing the discussion, asking questions, and observing. conclusion students at the university of bengkulu's indonesian language education masters program were able to use qualitative content analysis methodologies more effectively by applying case-solving methods through online learning management systems (lms) and zoom cloud meetings. the following english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 697 learning process and student learning outcomes serve as indicators of this increase. the learning process has been running actively with the application of case solving methods on the material of qualitative content analysis methods carried out in several steps, namely: 1) solving cases by building concepts in exploration activities with the following steps: a) students are formed into several groups small, b) each group is given a case to analyze qualitative content analysis procedures based on several examples of research results in the field of discourse analysis, c) students are assisted in the analysis process so that they are able to build knowledge and prove about the work steps of discourse analysis with qualitative content analysis methods, d) each group presentations in the form of talk shows, and e) lecturers provide reinforcement to the steps of discourse analysis using qualitative content analysis methods. then, 2) solving cases with activities trying to apply knowledge about qualitative content analysis methods to elaboration activities with the following steps: a) lecturers give assignments in groups to solve cases analyzing with quantitative content analysis about the skills of teachers in explaining from the downloaded learning videos from youtube; b) the lecturer accompanies students when carrying out problemsolving stages in analyzing the teacher's skills in explaining; c) each group presents the results of its discourse analysis in the form of a talk show; d) students are given a strengthening explanation by the lecturer. the results of learning the ability to use qualitative content analysis methods after the application of case solving methods in the first cycle were only 16% which reached a value of 80, increased in cycle 2 increased to 91.66% which reached a value of 80. with details, in cycle 1 obtained an average value the average was 77.70 and the number of students who have reached the minimum completeness criteria score of 80 was only obtained by 2 students or 16% of the total research sample, namely 12 students. then, in cycle 2, the average score was 80.6 and the number of students who achieved the minimum completeness criteria score of 80 was obtained by 11 students or 91.66% of the total research sample, namely 12 students. students who experience less than optimal scores, especially in interpreting research data. acknowledgments the research team would like to thank the leaders of the fkip universitas bengkulu for funding through the 2021 rba funds and the lppm universitas bengkulu for facilitating the permit preparation of proposals and the process of implementing this activity until its completion. references adila, i., weda, w. & tamitiadini, d. 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(2019). teacher professional development and the case method. springer. yenrizal, y. (2018). makna lingkuungan hidup di masa sriwijaya: analisis isi pada prasasti talang tuwo. jurnal aspikom, 3(5), 833-845. doi:10.24329/aspikom.v3i5.302. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 49 developing learner autonomy in writing through the use of e-portfolio fitri aprianti department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah cirebon, cirebon, indonesia email: fitri.aprianti@umc.ac.id eline rozaliya winarto department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah cirebon, cirebon, indonesia email: eline.rozaliya@umc.ac.id apa citation: aprianti, f. & winarto, e. r. (2021). developing learner autonomy in writing through the use of eportfolio. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 49-60. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5354 received: 13-08-2021 accepted: 12-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 abstract: learner autonomy is mandated to be developed by the newest curriculum of 2013. this research explored the use of e-portfolio to develop learner autonomy especially in the area of leaner involvement, reflection, and target language use. the mixed method design involving the quantitative and qualitative data was used in this research. the data itself was collected in the naturalistic settings of two vocational high school classes. the two classes were taken from the population which consisted of 440 participants. inventory tests were specifically designed to measure changes in the participants both before and after a writing program applying eportfolio documents was given. meanwhile, document analysis was used to indicate the development of learner autonomy in writing. the results of the initial inventory test show that the profile of initial autonomy development of the population was moderate which indicates that the participants had not yet reached the optimum capacity to carry active involvement, reflection, and target language use in writing it means that a type of preventive intervention such as that of e-portfolio was needed. whereas, the results of the intervention or experimental study and document analysis suggest that there was an improvement regarding the degree of learner autonomy development. in this case, the results indicated that the requirements of the e-portfolio for the participant to constantly use the target language may have possibly supported the initial autonomy development in writing, while the participants’ independence in deciding aspects of writing in the e-portfolio may play a role in supporting the constructs of learner autonomy especially in terms of learner involvement, and lastly, the segment of learner reflection provided in the e-portfolio may have a critical role to play in the subsequent learner autonomy development of the participants. keywords: learner autonomy; writing; e-portfolio. introduction in indonesian context, learner autonomy is encompassed as an integral part of attitudinal or social competency and acknowledged in the educational policy number 65 and 66 year 2013 (curriculum of 2013, national ministerial regulations of education and culture, 2013; marhaeni, 2015). besides the requirement of nurturing and measuring learner autonomy as stated in the 2013 curriculum, nowadays, it is also found that the all-sudden shift of language curriculum due to the spread of corona virus from what was initially face-to-face to online learning, the absence of the teachers’ direct presence, and the more restricted form of socialization among class members, have further escalated the demand for inserting the construct of learner autonomy in the teaching and learning process. the teaching and learning process of english writing is no exception. numbers of research also support the importance of fostering learner autonomy in foreign language learning especially during the crisis of pandemic covid-19 (zhang, zhang, & zhang, 2021). they acknowledge that the lack of support on developing learner autonomy at this time of crisis where students are obliged to study more independent through online media is the source that can create a tendency for the students to be unmotivated and passive in learning the writing material online. in such a case, the lack of learner autonomy can be fitri aprianti & eline rozaliya winarto developing learner autonomy in writing through the use of e-portfolio 50 determined as an initial step toward the failure of gaining success in learning english writing especially through online media (müller & goldenberg, 2020). therefore, it can be concluded that finding a learning model that can develop learner autonomy that can be used adaptively both online or offline is critical. referring to its definition, learner autonomy is reckoned as the students’ capacity to take responsibilities and make decisions concerning aspects of their learning both in online and offline situations. in either situation, the capacity itself always encapsulates two major constructs, namely ability and awareness as originally declared by little (1991). ability refers to as the learners’ active involvement for planning, monitoring and evaluating the process of online or offline learning activities. meanwhile awareness reflects the psychological construct of the learner to make critical reflection over their learning both offline and online. many experts specify that the learners who are autonomous in their learning are those who are able to employ their ability for making independent decision, action, critical reflection (lengkanawati, 2017; (hedry, 2020). to sum up, from the definition of learner autonomy above, it can be deduced that there are three principles that should be applied in the process of developing the growth of learner namely; constant target language use, active learner involvement, and reflection. it is stated that finding and possibly testing a model of online learning that can measure and nurture learner autonomy is as urgent as determining the construct of learner autonomy itself (thanh loan & tan tin, 2016). one of the promising examples that is adaptable for both offline and online learning would be the use of eportfolio (al-qutaiti, ahmed, & mohin, 2020). eportfolio is a model of learning that can nurture and measure many competencies including autonomy of the learners. through the use of e-portfolio, learners are directed to use their experience as a source of learning, thus they can be directed to gradually take control over their learning, in other words, becoming autonomous learners (obaid, 2020). e-portfolio is defined as a purposeful collection of the students’ works that exhibits the efforts, growth, and achievements of the students in language skills such as writing (choi & lee, 2020). the addition of the word “e” in the e-portfolio refers to as electronic. in e-portfolio, the collection of the students’ work is provided in a form of electronic file. the file can be further saved in online media such as e-learning or can also be printed as needed. the way of saving students’ writing electronically provides many benefits, one of which is the ease for sharing the material among the teacher and the class members. this way, the flow of information or knowledge is expected to be much smoother. e-portfolio enables to show the development of learner autonomy (obaid, 2020). it is asserted that in order for the e-portfolio to be able to exhibit the intended goals then the e-portfolio itself should at the very least includes three major components namely; inventory writing tasks, selfassessment/ self-reflection and showcase (thanh loan & tan tin, 2016). all of these three elements are interrelated and are meant to support the growth of the constructions of learner autonomy (constant tl use, learners’ active involvement, and reflection). writing inventory task is the first component of the e-portofolio. in the inventory task, the students can save a set of self-selected writing samples. ideally, it is stated that the self-selected sample in inventory task should illustrate the students’ accomplishment of the standard and educational goal so that the growth of learner autonomy can be in line with the expectation of the curriculum. the inventory task leads the students to get involved more in the writing process and it reflects one of the principles of developing learner autonomy, namely active involvement or decision making process (cakici, 2017). self-reflection is the other component of e-portfolio. self-reflection refers to written justifications that the students made regarding the selections of the writing samples in the inventory tasks. at this stage, students will judge their own work as well as reflecting on their strategy of completing the assignments/works given to them. the self-reflection is given periodically throughout a semester of completing the e-portfolio. self-reflection mirrors the second principle of the promotion of learner autonomy, namely reflectivity (yang, 2021). showcase is the last component of the e-portfolio. showcase is an activity that students conduct in order to inform publicly to their peers and teachers regarding their work in the inventory writing tasks. e-portfolio enables its user to be much freer with their selection of showcasing their work. this means that it can be saved in a form of audio, video, or any other form of multimedia. this english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 51 component is meant to reflect the last principle of learner autonomy, namely target language use (zhang et al., 2021). again, the above components of the e-portfolio are selected and arranged in order to create an environment where students can gradually involve and reflect upon their own writing development. based on the rationale above, it can be assumed that applying the use of e-portfolio especially at the crisis of pandemic covid-19 is critical (müller & goldenberg, 2020). e-portfolio is predicted to be able to nurture and measure the construct of learner autonomy although there is restriction in teaching and learning process. thus, this research investigated the use of e-portfolio by applying it as a classroom intervention so that the effectiveness of e-portfolio in developing learner autonomy in writing can be revealed. it is stated that when a program is projected over a course of time then it may be able to provide direction for the students to exercise their innate ability to become autonomous learner by continuously getting involved, reflect, and use target language more in their learning. additionally, it is also revealed that implementing e-portfolio is also in line with the assumption of reciprocal determinism in which there is a connection in among individual, behavior and environment (behforouz & frumuselu, 2020). this means that when individuals are provided with suitable learning environment that can support their initial ability to becoming autonomous then they will shift their behaviour accordingly (wiraningsih & santosa, 2020). therefore, referring to the aforementioned aims then the research questions are as follow: (1) how is the profile of learner autonomy of the population? (2) to what extend does the e-portfolio develop the construct of learner autonomy in writing? method referring to the nature of the research questions, then, a mix method design which combines both quantitative and qualitative data were used (creswell & creswell, 2018). in this research the data were gathered by quantitatively employing non-equivalent pre-test -post-tests control group design and by qualitatively using document analysis. the first research design indicates that in order to gain the data needed there were two kinds of test required. the tests were aimed in order to find out whether the intervention, in this case the eportfolio, could cause a significant difference in regards to the autonomy development of the participants. meanwhile the document analysis was conducted as a form of collecting qualitative data. the document analysis was administered once the e-portfolio programs were completed as it was intended to depict the development of the learner autonomy in specific area of writing skills (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2018). the population of the research was consisted of 440 tenth graders of vocational high school. the pre-test on learner autonomy was administered to all of the population of the research so that two intact groups that relatively had the same level of autonomy could be taken as the samples of the research. the participants were selected on the basis of purposive sampling using intact group technique (leavy, 2018). the first class (class a) was consisted of 39 students. this class got a pre and post-test and was exposed to the use of the e-portfolio program. the other class (class b) was consisted of 30 students. this class took a pre and a post-test followed the regular learning program. the two classes were selected as the sample of the research since they have a particularly equal degree of initial autonomy development. the initial equality of the samples is paramount as it controls the validity of the research. several sources also confirm that the more similar the groups in their recruitment and the more this similarity is confirmed by the score of pre-test , then, the more valid the interpretation of the research becomes (leavy, 2018). the initial autonomy development of the two classes is as follow. table 1. the initial autonomy development of the samples class number of students mean scores class a 39 34, 00 class b 30 34,07 research instrument in order to gather the data about the use of the eportfolio in developing learner autonomy, then inventory tests were administered to the e-portfolio class and the e-portfolio free class. the inventory tests were in a form of questionnaire that consisted fitri aprianti & eline rozaliya winarto developing learner autonomy in writing through the use of e-portfolio 52 of attitudinal measures (nguyen & habók, 2021). three pedagogical principles for learner autonomy development namely learner involvement, increase english use, and learner reflection were used as a basis for developing the questionnaires. the construct of the inventory test was adapted from loan and tin (2016). in addition, the principles of the learner autonomy were also adjusted as it is aimed to reflect the development of the students’ writing skills. in the questionnaire, there were 27 items which belonged to the aspect of active involvement. the aspect of active involvement captures three interrelated sub-aspects namely planning, monitoring, and evaluating. the other 8 items were constructed to reveal the degree of the target language use. lastly 10 items were aimed to capture the effort of the students’ reflection in writing as shown on the table 2. table 2. specification of the research instrument on learner autonomy aspects sub-aspects number of item learner involvement planning 27 monitoring evaluating reflection metacognition 8 metalinguistic target language use spoken 10 written language of thought document analysis was also conducted in order to support the findings on the impact of e-portfolio on the development of learner autonomy. there were 39 e-portfolio files collected from the research participants. the collected documents were kept and analyzed accordingly. in this case, in order to ease the researcher in interpreting documents, then the documents were clustered and labelled. the results of the document analyses were sorted into two main categories of information. the first category of information is focused on revealing the indicators that could signify the impact of eportfolio in developing learner autonomy in general. meanwhile, the second category of information is focused on revealing the evidence of the development of learner autonomy in each aspect. the teaching instrument e-portfolio was used as a means of developing the construct of learner autonomy. the sections in the e-portfolio were specifically developed to match the pedagogical purpose of english writing skills in vocational high school level. the overall construct of e-portfolio is expected to be able to improve learners’ ability to carry actively involvement in, reflection on, and target language use in writing. accordingly, the e-portfolio was consisted of three components, namely; inventory task, selfassessment and showcase. the implementation of the teaching program took about 16 weeks to be fully completed. the e-portfolio files were kept in the e-learning that was owned by the school in which the study took place. yet, individual soft file was also kept by each of the research participant. table 3. teaching procedure of the e-portfolio week program 1 preliminary test & introduction to and training about the e-portfolio and its platform 2-4 inventory writing task (writing project 1) 5 reflection & inventory writing task 6-7 inventory writing task (writing project 2) 8 reflection & inventory writing task 9-10 inventory writing task (writing project 3) 11 reflection & inventory writing task 12-13 showcase 14 reflection 15 post-test 16 evaluation of the e-portfolio program & closing english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 53 rusults and discussion learner autonomy profile the profile of learner autonomy was used as a blue print in formulating e-portfolio and testing the extent to which e-portfolio can be used to develop the degree of learner autonomy. the profile of learner autonomy (in general and in the three aspects) was gathered by means of learner autonomy inventory test which was administered to the population of the study. the profile of learner autonomy in general the first segment is aimed to depict the profile of learner autonomy in general. based on the learner autonomy inventory test which was administered to the population that consisted of 440 students, it was revealed that the mean score was 36,15. mean score around 36,15 can be classified to be in the moderate category of learner autonomy. to be more precise, the frequency distribution of the students’ score based on the category of learner autonomy is on the table 4. table 4. frequency distribution of the students’ scores in the pre-test categories score interval frequency percentage mean score high >67 1 0,23 36,15 moderate 34-66 284 64,55 low <33 155 35,23 total 440 100 from the mean score it is found out that the population had moderate category of autonomy in writing. this category signifies that the students generally had not yet reached the optimum capacity to use target language constantly either in a form spoken, written, or in a form of language of thought both in face-to-face or online learning practices. in addition, the moderate category of autonomy also indicated that the students relatively had difficulties in carry active involvement as they had just begun adjusting themselves with new learning environment due to the all-sudden shift form what was originally face-to-face to full online teaching and learning process. in such a case, the students were still uncertain of how to get involved in the process of planning, monitoring, and evaluating their writing task especially the ones that were conducted online. lastly, the students were not used to reflect on the process and product of their writing. this finding further indicated the need for developing a media that could assist the students to be more autonomous especially in doing the online teaching and learning process as required by the government due to the rapid spread of corona virus in indonesia. in this case, there were two dominant factors that might have caused the moderate profile of learner autonomy of the population. the factors are the students’ age and the teaching and learning context that the students newly faced. the first factor is the students’ age. the participants of the research were the tenth graders of vocational high school. it indicated that the students’ age were in between 15 to 16 years old and they are categorized as adolescents. as adolescents, the students were on the transition phase from junior to senior high school therefore they might find it difficult to recognize their role and responsibilities in learning. these difficulties might have risen especially at the crisis of pandemic covid-19 where the students were required to learn more independently through online media. online media, in one hand, could offer its user with abundance of benefits starting from the ease of sharing learning material up to learning without space limitation, yet in other hand, it is found that without exact media or route that could capture the progress and process of the students’ learning, then the students might find learning difficult to follow. as the consequences, their motivation or willingness to take the roles and responsibilities in learning could be different and relatively unstable. the second factor is the teaching and learning context. in this case, the teaching and learning context that the students encounter can also contribute to the moderate profile of learner autonomy. at this stage, it is possible that the online teaching and learning context that the students recently encountered did not provide enough contextual learning choices and opportunities to develop learner autonomy especially in writing. for instance, the students worked on many forms of writing tasks but then at the end they tasks were scattered. thus, they might not realize on their progress in writing. on the contrary, there might have been too wide variety of the learning choices fitri aprianti & eline rozaliya winarto developing learner autonomy in writing through the use of e-portfolio 54 and opportunities for the students yet they might have difficulties in accessing it due to the limitation of the internet connection. this finding, again showed the need for an adaptive learning platform such as that of e-portfolio where it can be saved and access both offline and online. the profile of the three aspects of learner autonomy in order to give more empirical evidence regarding the profile of learner autonomy, the data gained from the test was further analysed based on the three aspects of learner autonomy namely; target language use, learner involvement, and reflection. the mean scores were used as a basis of revealing the profile of learner autonomy in every aspect. the general finding of the mean scores of the three aspects of learner autonomy is shown in chart 1. chart 1. mean scores of the three aspects of learner autonomy. as shown in the chart 1, the mean score of the target language use, learner involvement, and learner reflection were 35,53, 35,28, 38,64, respectively. all of them were on the moderate category. the result indicated that the degree of autonomy of the population could not fulfil the expectation stipulated in the newest curriculum of 2013 (educational policy number 65 and 66 year 2013, national ministerial regulations of education and culture, 2013) and the recent requirement about online teaching and learning process due to the crisis of pandemic covid-19 as stated in the educational policy number 4 year 2020 (the ministry of culture and education, 2020). the result showed that the students generally had not yet reached the optimum capacity to carry active involvement, reflection and using the target language properly in writing both the ones that were conducted offline and online. thus, this finding showed the urge of developing and implementing learning platform that could support the development of learner autonomy both in offline or online types of learning situations. again, eportfolio was signified as the finest choice as it was adaptable to be applied in online or offline form of teaching and learning processes. in this case, as the degree of autonomy of the population was relatively low then the e-portfolio program was implemented as a form of preventive intervention. the impact of the e-portfolio on learner autonomy this section addresses the second research questions guiding the study: to what extend do writing e-portfolio develop the construct of learner autonomy? accordingly, the finding and discussion in this section involves: 1) the impact of the eportfolio on developing learner autonomy in general and 2) the impact of the e-portfolio on developing the three aspects of learner autonomy (target language use, learner involvement, and learner reflection). the impact of the e-portfolio on learner autonomy in general the impact of the e-portfolio on developing learner autonomy can be inferred by analysing the difference of the mean scores of the class with the e-portfolio program and the class without the eportfolio both in the pre-test and post-test. from the quantitative data analysis (chart 2), it was found that the mean scores of both classes improved on the post-test as shown in chart 2. chart 2. mean scores of experimental and control groups in pre-test and post-test chart 2 depicts the mean scores of the class with the e-portfolio program and the class which did not. the mean scores of both classes signify that in the pre-test both groups were in the low category of autonomy. different to that in the pre-test, both groups made improvements in the post-test. the improvements are signified by the increase of mean english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 55 scores and by the change in the category of learner autonomy. the mean scores of the control group increased from 33,00 to 36,56 meanwhile the mean scores of experimental group increased from 32,86 to 56,38. in addition, the category of autonomy of the experimental group had also shifted from the low to the moderate category of autonomy. the moderate category of autonomy indicates that the students had gradually begun to take control of their own learning. as the students made improvements, then an analysis of significance of difference between the mean scores of both groups using the nonparametric independent sample t test was conducted. table 5. independent samples t test of pre-test and post-test aspect test assumption sig (2-tailed) a category learner autonomy pre-test .998 0.05 not significant post-test .000 0.05 significant table 5 shows that in the pre-test, the significance of probability (.998) was higher than alpha (.05). the result indicates that there was no significance difference between the class with eportfolio and the class without the e-portfolio in the pre-test score. conversely, in the post-test the significance of probability (.000) was lower than the alpha (0.05) which means that the null hypothesis was rejected in the level of probability of .01 (1 per cent). thus, the finding shows that the class with the e-portfolio outperformed the eportfolio free class in terms of degree of autonomy in writing. this further indicates that the e-portfolio was empirically proven to be effective in developing learner autonomy in writing. based on the document analysis it is proven that the effectiveness of e-portfolio in developing learner autonomy in writing might due to the fact that e-portfolio had given more opportunities for the students to use more target language, to get involve and to reflect on the learning process. the opportunities themselves were adaptive in a way that they can be applied both online or offline. the example of the target language use, the learner involvement, and reflection as the result of the implementation of the e-portfolio can be seen on figure 1. figure 1. the use of e-portfolio on developing learner autonomy in general figure 1 shows that in the e-portfolio program every student was guided and challenged to get involved in completing the writing projects. three writing projects were provided and in each teaching project the students followed a cycle of preparation, modelling, joint construction, and independent construction. this cycle followed the principle of writing development. in every stage e-portfolio assisted the students to document the writing progress that they have made. at the stage of preparation and modelling, for instance, the students decided the writing topics, used writing samples or models that they gathered from various sources and using various forms such as that of figure or multimedia ones. at this stage they also had more flexibility in accessing the writing materials such as that of power point presentation program or e-book. in addition, figure 1 also shows that he eportfolio also lead the students to reflect on the process and product of writing by filling the section on the reflection log which was conducted on regular basis at the end of every writing project and at end of the semester. on the reflection log the students mostly reflected their reaction of the process and product of the writing projects that they had conducted. in the reflection log the students also put forward their experiences on the revision or comment that was given by their peer or their teaching during the process of independent construction of the writing project. lastly, by the use of the e-portfolio the students were also offered opportunities to continuously use target language as a medium of communication both in the writing product and in communicating with their classmates or teacher. the use of language itself was well documented as it can be saved online. one of the evidences was in a form of the students writing drafts. the drafts were consisted of comments which were given both by their peers or by the teacher. the result of the document analysis shows that the well documented fitri aprianti & eline rozaliya winarto developing learner autonomy in writing through the use of e-portfolio 56 and constantly used of the target language may have possibly supported the initial autonomy development in writing. similar finding is also shown by büyükdumana & şirina (2010). in this case they found that the learning portfolio enhanced the autonomy of the students. the impact of the e-portfolio on the three aspects of learner autonomy the impact of the e-portfolio on the three aspects of learner autonomy was also analyzed. in this case, the mean score gained from pre-test and post-test was further analyzed based on the three aspect of learner autonomy namely; the target language use, learner involvement, and reflection. the data is shown in the chart below. chart 3. mean scores in the pre-test chart 3 depicts that in the pre-test the mean scores of all aspects of learner autonomy both in the e-portfolio class and the e-portfolio free class were on the low and the moderate category of autonomy. it signifies that the two classes had relatively similar conditions. they were all in the low category. conversely, the result of the post-test is in chart 4. chart 4. mean scores in the post-test chart 4 shows that the mean scores of the eportfolio class and the e-portfolio free class in the post-test varied. mostly they showed improvement. however, although most of the aspects showed some improvement yet it can be seen that the eportfolio class made better improvement than that of e-portfolio free class. this indication is proven from the fact that in the e-portfolio class there was no aspect found to be in low category. the detail of the findings and discussion in each aspect will be depicted in the following section. the impact of the e-portfolio on the target language use the impact of the e-portfolio could be explored by revealing the independent sample t test between pre-test scores of the two sample classes. the result of the independent t test can be seen on table 6. table 6. independent samples t test of pre-test and post-test on the aspect of tl use aspect test assumption sig (2-tailed) a category tl use pre-test 0.207 0.05 not significant post-test 0.000 0.05 significant the result in table 6 indicates that the significance (2 tailed) of probability was higher than alpha (.05). this proves that there was no significant difference between students means scores in the pre-test in 1% significance. conversely, a particularly different result was gain on the post-test. the data showed that the significance value of the post-test was .000. this means that the significance of probability was lower than alpha (0.05) which indicated that the null hypothesis was rejected in other word there was such significant difference between mean scores of experimental and control groups in the post-test in 1% significance. this finding strengthens the notion that e-portfolio enables to increase the use of english as tl during writing practice. the findings signify that the e-portfolio had an effect on maximizing the students’ use of english as target language. in this case, students who used the e-portfolio in completing their writing projects could better increase their use of target language than those who completing their writing projects in the e-portfolio free condition. in sum, the development of target language use might have occurred due to the requirement given to the students to constantly use english in form of spoken, written or language of thought in order to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 57 complete writing projects, reflections, and showcases (fadaee, marzban, & karimi, 2021). in the use of the e-portfolio the students were exposed to the cycle of preparing and constructing the different type of texts. at the stage of constructing the text type that the students were working on, they constantly conducted the editing and revising process. this process was conducted with their peers. the students received written comments on the drafts of their writing projects. based on this comment they could make some revision in order to make the text achieved its purpose more effectively. it might have supported the initial autonomy development in writing. the students’ language use ability was constantly exercised in a much more communicative way. the form of communication itself was well documented and easily shared among the class members. in addition, the requirement for the students to conduct the showcase showing their most ‘proud’ of writing project might also has its own contribution on developing the students spoken language use. although the spoken interaction was not recorded on the e-portfolio yet the students can keep the documentation in a form of phonograph or figure at the time the showcase presentation was held. this form of documentation can be very beneficial in maintaining the students’ autonomy development. lastly, the students were also required to regularly write their experiences on producing the writing projects. this had possibly supported the development of the students’ ability of using language of thought. they openly expressed their learning strategy in completing the writing projects as well as evaluated it. the impact of the e-portfolio on the learner involvement the initial result of learner active involvement shows that the students both in the e-portfolio class and in the e-portfolio free class made improvement (chart 3 and chart 4). the result of nonparametric independent sample t test is in the following table supported that the class with e-portfolio program outperformed the class without e-portfolio program. table 7. independent samples t test on the aspect of learner involvement aspect test assumption sig (2-tailed) a category learner involvement pre-test 0.774 0.05 not significant post-test 0.000 0.05 significant the result of the post-test showed that there was such significant difference in terms of the degree of active involvement between the class with eportfolio and the class without e-portfolio. the significant difference was indicated by the fact that the significance of probability (.000) was lower than the alpha (.05) which means that the null hypothesis was rejected. in this case, the class with e-portfolio outperformed the other class in terms of active involvement in writing. it means that the eportfolio has proven to be able to give significant effect on the different ways by which students can increase their involvement in writing. the positive impact of the e-portfolio in developing learner active involvement can be caused by several interrelated factors as shown from the data gained from the document analysis. firstly, the components of the e-portfolio had provided the students with adaptive and contextual learning choices so that they can get involved more in their learning. in this case, there were three indicators that signify the increase of the students’ involvement in writing. these indicators are shown in the examples of the documents that the students uploaded into their e-portfolio as follow. figure 2. examples of learner involvement the first indicator is in a form of the students’ effort on collecting self-selected writing samples and inferring writing materials from them (figure 2a). in completing the writing tasks, it was found that once the students previewed the writing purposes then each of them decided to bring their own self-selected sample of writing texts (advertisement text). this stage was considered as the initial stage toward completing their writing projects. in several references this stage was also known as the stage of preparation in writing a text. the students’ willingness and initiative to bring the fitri aprianti & eline rozaliya winarto developing learner autonomy in writing through the use of e-portfolio 58 sample texts indicates the students’ motivation to get involved more in their learning. at this stage the students’ motivation was much more pronounced as some of them were willing to bring sample texts that they have previously made. in class a, one of the students showed a sample text that she had previously made. she tried to test whether or not the text that she made fit in the schematic structure of the intended writing project (figure 1). this activity showed the students motivation to get involved more in completing their writing projects. the other indicator is in a form of the students’ attempt on making the format to present their writing tasks and the students’ ability in determining the writing project deadlines. deciding the format of presenting the writing project as well as deciding its deadline might also have challenged and boosted the students to get involved more in the learning process. as the results the students tried to get involved by identifying the goals, the tasks’ requirements, and the plans to accomplish the tasks. the impact of the e-portfolio on the learner reflection the impact of the e-portfolio on learner reflection was also revealed. here, it is depicted that the mean scores of both groups in the pre-test were 36,62 and 35,00 respectively. in other words, both groups were on the initial moderate category of learner reflection. yet on the post-test the mean score of the class with e-portfolio program had risen. this means that the category of learner reflection of the e-portfolio class had shifted from low to moderate meanwhile the e-portfolio free class stayed on the low category of learner reflection. the result of the independent sample t-test on table 8 supports this finding. table 8. independent samples t test of pre-test and post-test on the aspect of learner reflection aspect test assumption sig (2-tailed) a category learner reflection pre-test 0.309 0.05 not significant post-test 0.000 0.05 significant in this case, the independent sample t-test shows that in the post-test the probability significance (.000) was less than alpha (.05). this means that the null hypothesis was rejected in the level of probability of .05. by this it means that there was such significant difference between the mean score in the post-test of the e-portfolio class and the eportfolio free class. again, in learner reflection the class with the e-portfolio program showed better progress than that of the class without the eportfolio program. in this regard, the quantitative findings indicate that the students who used the e-portfolio in completing their writing task were found to better reflect on the process and product of their learning than those who practiced in the e-portfolio free condition. in this case, the requirements given for the students to reflect on the product and the process of completing their writing task might have possibly led the students to better understand and differentiate the process and product of writing itself. accordingly, the students’ ability of reflecting on their learning had improved. in such a case, there are several indicators that can signify the improvement of learner reflection as the result of the use of e-portfolio. figure 3. the example of reflection log in the eportfolio. the first indicator of the improvement of learner reflection is the students’ willingness to identify the strategy of learning that they typically used as well as evaluating its strengths and weaknesses. the second indicator is the students’ awareness of the importance of having purpose of learning. the third indicator is the increased their awareness of their strengths and weaknesses. the third indicator is especially shown as the students could identify one writing project that they like the most as well as declaring justification for it. the last indicator is the students’ willingness to continuing the cycle of doing the writing project, showcase, and reflection also indicated that portfolio can be used to support the reflectivity skills of the students. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 59 conclusion all in all, it can be concluded that the data showed that there is significant difference between the pretest and post-test scores of the e-portfolio class and the e-portfolio free class both in terms of autonomy in general and in every aspect in particular. in other words, the implementation of e-portfolio had been empirically proven to be able to improve learner autonomy in writing. accordingly, the result of the research supports the earlier evidence that the use of the e-portfolio can be implemented to develop learner autonomy. the findings also may reinforce and enrich the existing theories stating that eportfolio have a positive role in developing learner autonomy in writing. additionally, there are also some recommendations for english as foreign language teachers and further research. in this case it is recommended for efl teachers to play their role in making students aware of and fostering autonomy in language learning. additionally, teacher should be made aware of the barrier on the classroom management that can hinder the development learner autonomy. this may be achieved by providing them with support in a form of e-portfolio both as teaching and learning models. meanwhile for the further research it is recommended to investigate the use of e-portfolio in a more electronically friendly environment and possibly tailor it into e-portfolio, to explore the use of portfolio to develop learner autonomy not only in writing skill but also in other sills as well and lastly to use more classes or groups as the comparison for the experimental group so that the significance difference or the effectiveness of the e-portfolio can be truly depicted. figures and tables should be placed either at the top or bottom of the page and close to the text referring to them if possible. acknowledgement we would like to offer sincere appreciation and gratitude for the junior lecturer research grants which kindly held by the directorate general of higher education, ministry of national education, culture, research, and technology. in addition, we would like to acknowledge that the completion of this paper could not have been established without the valuable supervision, encouragement, and support of the pdp program’s committee and also the internal committee and supervisor for research of university of muhammadiyah cirebon. references al-qutaiti, y. o., ahmed, i., & mohin, m. 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(2021). metacognitive instruction for sustainable learning: learners’ perceptions of task difficulty and use of metacognitive strategies in completing integrated speaking tasks. sustainability (switzerland), 13(11), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116275 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 149 efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class: a classroom implementation imroatul ma’fiyah department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of slamet riyadi surakarta, indonesia e-mail: imroatulhardiyanto@gmail.com ulupi sitoresmi department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of slamet riyadi surakarta, indonesia e-mail: ulupi102@gmail.com irpan yulianto department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university slamet riyadi surakarta, indonesia e-mail: irpanyulianto908@gmail.com apa citation: ma’fiyah, i., sitoresmi, u. & yulianto, i. (2021). efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class: a classroom implementation. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 149-158. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5365 received: 15-08-2021 accepted: 05-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction since the government policy about guidelines for learning from home to all levels of education launched as an effort to minimize the spread of the covid-19 virus, learning in campus has shifted to home learning. face to face learning moves to online learning. it requires a range of technologies such as worldwide web, email, new group and text, chat, audio and video conferencing through computer network to impart education (jia & hew, 2021) it also implied to students, parents and the lecturers’ readiness to improve digital literacy (maqableh & alia, 2021; girvan & savage, 2019). the integration of technology in the world of education has essentially been done as part of learning innovation in the era of globalization. yet, it’s no longer as a challenge to innovate, but it becomes a necessity. even though online learning system has been implemented for almost two years, problems dealt with lacks of teacher/lectures readiness of integrating technology in their class still exist (pallof & pratt, 2017; weiss, piancentine, candela, & bobay, 2021). the other problems also came from both students and their parents. the students are burdened with bdr assignments since they perceive that online learning means assignment from teachers; and from parents’ points abstract: this study aims to determine efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class. it specifically describes on how higher education students perceive about the implementation and challenges towards virtual learning in listening class. this research employs a qualitative case study design. it involves several facets as the participants in order to obtain valid and reliable data to answer the research problems. the participants were 90 students and 2 lecturers taken from two different universities. from those amount of students, it was 50 students selected to meet the criterion of virtual learning implementation and the students’ responses profiling their perception of listening class. the findings about students’ perception of listening class are analyzed through the internal and external factors. internal factors include students' physical condition, opportunities and motivation as well as students' perceptions of the level of difficulty in listening. external factors consist of learning materials, lecturers and teaching methods and the use of learning media. in the level of implementation and challenges, students thought that virtual learning is appropriate media of teaching listening during pandemic if lecturers are able to carry out their roles and students are always response the challenge adaptively in both terms of content and technology. keywords: english for foreign language (efl); students’ perceptions; virtual learning; listening class. imroatul ma’fiyah, ulupi sitoresmi, & irpan yulianto efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class: a classroom implementation 150 of view, they feel tired of accompanying their children besides of thinking how to survive of their respective lives and jobs during the pandemic. those factual conditions are best to be our reflection towards the implementation of online teaching process. english subject becomes an important, yet difficult subject that the students especially in higher level needs to be mastered. students are expected to be capable in four english skills, they are listening, reading, speaking, and writing. teachers have long used the concept of four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. the four language skills can be called macro skills. on the other hand, there are micro skills such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling. those four basics skills related to each other. however, this study will focus more on listening skills. listening is one of the important and fundamental skills in learning english. it is a receptive skill which means that learners receive new words from what they hear. the ability to listen will affect the ability to produce sentences (chang and millet, 2016). students at higher education levels who are good at listening; they will have good competence in productive skills, which are speaking and writing skills (burns & siegel, 2018). djabborova (2020) adds that there is a significant difference between listening and just hearing. hearing refers to the sound of words that your ears receive and it is a physical process that can occur as long as a person does not have a hearing problem. on the other hand, listening requires more than that, it requires more focus and effort, both mentally and physically. it means, listening skill is a skill that not only involves physical hearing but also understanding the words that are heard so that later a sentence can be produced, both spoken and written (schmidt, 2016). teaching listening requires certain ways to help students especially in higher education levels to fully understand what they are listening to. misbah, gulikers, maulana, & mulder (2019) explains that an effective teacher presents how they can adapt students' listening behavior to face various situations. the teachers help students to develop a set of the right strategy or method for every listening situation. krivosheyeva, zuparova and shodiyeva (2020) confirmed that it doesn't matter what method a teacher uses to teach listening skills. teachers can think of ways of teaching that will help teachers and students direct the learning process. effective modern methods for teaching listening skills include starting from interactive exercises to multimedia resources (maqableh & alia, 2021). listening skills can be learned well or improved through simple and engaging activities that focus on the learning process. teaching media commonly used to practice listening skills are generally in the form of transcript videotape, audiotape and various other supporting materials for activities that allow direct lecturer-student interaction in the classroom or language laboratory (caroline, 2007). in face-toface learning, lecturers have broad opportunities to ensure students’ active participation starting from the pre, whilst to post listening stages through active participation and involvement; by giving deep questions and answer (nusha & orouji, 2020). haynes (2010) indicates that the questions arise will promote students’ participation and create specifics value-bound. from the results of previous studies, it is said that 43% of students think that listening comprehension is the most difficult among the three other language skills (reading, writing and speaking) and some of them feel bored and less motivated in learning (bourdeaud’hui, et.al: 2018; burns & siegel, 2018). these difficulties are also experienced by students in the listening class, including failure in recognizing which is caused by limited mastery of vocabularies as well as the speed of speech of native speakers who are too fast. other research conducted by wong, leung, tsui, dealey, & cheung (2021) showed that other factors also influence the students’ listening skill. this is caused by several factors, such as learning media factors and less conducive learning environment. as a result, students are less able to understand the material presented by the lecturer. this fact is one of the considerations for lecturers to be able to carry their roles in designing, implementing and reflecting on methods, media as well as teaching materials. most of the researchs that have been done previously described the process of face to face teaching listening skills. however, since the pandemic occurred, the teaching and learning process has also undergone significant changes english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 151 (gillespie, boulton, hramiak, & williamson, 2007). due to limited circumstances to be able to hold face-to-face learning, online learning is an option that can be done. virtual classrooms become an alternative for lecturers to hold online listening class. it is learning activity based on e-learning; a place where virtual learning occurs. some of the platforms used by lecturers, i.e. zoom, google meet, ms teams. some lecturers also used whatsapp call to facilitate virtual classrooms. the targeted outcomes of teaching listening through virtual class would be: in the end of lesson, students will be able to listen effectively in limited time and circumstance. its successful will depend on three pedagogical factors (parisi, 2015). the first pedagogical factors require studentscentered learning and teachers’ role as a facilitator and the integration of knowledge. secondly, is dealing with flexible learning design based on students’ needs, contextual and integrating suitable technology. the last factor is facilitation which includes clear expectations, appropriate questions, understanding and choice of cultural issues, giving timely feedback, constructive and detail, as well as high attitude and commitment (carillo & flores, 2020). meanwhile, that ideal condition sometimes cannot be obtained by the students since direct interaction can be done during covid-19 pandemic. therefore, some challenges appear in listening class through virtual learning. lecturers have to manage classroom atmosphere where each phases of listening process in which students’ experience difficulties during the class are managed and guided well. method this research employs a qualitative case study design. of all common types of qualitative research in education, the design to conduct is case study. case study can be defined in terms of the process of actually caring out the investigation, the unit of analysis (the bounded system, the case), or the end product (cresswell, 2016). other definition of a case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates phenomena in real life, where the boundaries between the phenomenon and context are not clearly defined and where multiple sources of evidence can be utilized (yin, 2013). case studies in particular can be used in research in education. sources as evidence referred to here can be in the form of documents, audio, visual or audiovisual materials interviews, observations and equipments. the focus of this study was classroom behavior as part of the phenomena or culture of a group of students in particular community in the context of teaching english in higher education. thus, this type of case study research applied to this research is ethnographic evaluative case study (glaser & strauss, 2006). it is intended to investigate the students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class. specifically, it will describe the implementation and challenges faced by efl students. in order to uncover the problem formulations, the data are collected through observations, interviews, and documents. some evaluation is given to develop a better understanding of virtual learning implementation. the research is precisely conducted in english education program from two different universities. it involves several facets as the participants in order to obtain valid and reliable data to answer the research problems. the participants were 90 students and 2 lecturers taken from both universities. from those amounts of students, it was 50 students selected to meet the criterion of virtual learning implementation and the students’ responses and perception. the primary qualitative data are taken from the observation and interview. observations are conducted during the process of teaching and learning during pandemic. interviews between the researcher, lecturers, and students from english education program. the interview carried out in a structured way involving the use of a set of predetermined questions and of highly standardized techniques of recording. open questionnaire, as one of the documents to be analyzed considered as the heart of a survey operation. it was carefully constructed. it consists of 30 items which written and open ended. after data collected and analyzed, the triangulation-using multiple investigators, member-checks, and longer observation were done in order to increase the validity of the findings. in relation to the ethical issue, the researcher has conducted the research in certain ways to appreciate the subject involving in the data collections; particularly interviews and observations. the researcher has adopted the following procedures to ensure the ethical standard of the research: (1) approval from research site has been obtained before further studies, (2) approval imroatul ma’fiyah, ulupi sitoresmi, & irpan yulianto efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class: a classroom implementation 152 from lectures and institutions, whose class is to be observed, have been available, (3) all students in the observed class are guaranteed privacy, anonymity, and confidentiality, and (4) the researcher, as advised by the academic section and teachers, has observed the class under complete participant observation to maintain students' convenience and naturalness of the flow of teaching and learning process in the classroom. results and discusssion students’ perceptions of listening skills regarding students’ perception of listening skills, the researchers focused on external and internal factors that influenced students’ responses to virtual learning of listening class. internal factors that include students' physical condition, opportunities and motivation as well as students' perceptions of the level of difficulty in listening. external factors include learning materials, lecturers and teaching methods, as well as the use of learning media. students’ physical conditions one of the determinant factors of students’ success in listening is closely related to physical condition. when a student is healthy, not tired, listening will certainly be more effective. related to this, from the total number of respondents, 19 students (38%) answered “always” and often (27 students or 54%) to the statement that they continued to take listening classes even though they were sick. in declined health condition, most of them (66%) admitted that they were not able to concentrate fully, so they could still they were not optimal in doing listening exercises. only a small proportion of respondents answered that they could still concentrate when they were not fit. it can be concluded that they can’t concentrate fully and have difficulty to listen properly at the moment their physical condition is declining. however, students are still trying to concentrate as in virtual learning, considering their awareness of time limitation and their interest joining listening class. as said by one of students, “i think we have to do it with high concentration because to do the exercise from this skill we have to adjust with time, and actually this course is really fun.” motivation and interest as students of the english education program, students realize that even though they thought listening is difficult (76% of respondents), they must be able to conquer material given by the lecturer. one of their reasons is that listening become most important skills in addition to the other skills. as student’s explanation, “i think it is the most important skill among the others because when we talk to native speakers, we have to know what they are talking about first, if we understand the meaning then we can answer it in many ways.” another student revealed that listening skills are important considering that we will not able to understand what the speaker is saying (in english), as obtained from the interview, “listening skills is very important. because, if we can't understand what the speaker say, we don't understand what the speaker meaning”. this awareness increases their interest and raises their motivation to explore material being listened in virtual learning (parisi, 2015). this is evident from the following questionnaire data (figure 1); most of students choose answer sometimes for statement 3 about the level of difficulty of listening. figure 1. students responds of difficulties in listening english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 153 listening materials dealing with listening material taught, students feel happy when lecturers provide learning materials with interesting topics accompanied by strategies to hold on problems related to the spoken text easily. as conveyed by student, “yes, because we are given the opportunity to listen to the audio first about an interesting topic to learn and the lecturer also gives some tricks that can help us solve the problem”. in addition, it also said that students were happy with the way lecture gave listening task, especially during virtual class. as another student explained in the interview, “i am quite happy with the way the lecturer teaches by giving assignments and holding virtual meetings” lectures, methods and teaching media from the result of interview, it can be concluded that most students feel motivated in virtual listening class because the lecture plays the role very well, as a facilitator, lecturer provide materials clearly and easily to be understood, as said by student, “yes, i am. the lecturer's explanation is easier to understand”. this also supported by the explanations of other students who prove that the role of facilitator is well carried out by lecturers, it’s seen from the presentation of material and the ability to share tricks on doing listening tasks, “yes, i am. because the way she teaches is very clear and she also explain and share tips to how to answer the question easily.” furthermore, lecturers are also able to carry out role as a motivator, this was explained by some students in the interview, “yes i'm happy, because i like listening to lectures.” “yes, the method. they give an interesting way to do and explain to the students.” “mrs. always says that listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving. by becoming a better listener, you can improve your productivity, as well as your ability to influence, persuade and negotiate. what's more, you'll avoid conflict and misunderstandings. all of these are necessary for workplace success!” . those explanations show that lecturers are able to facilitate students in virtual learning. carrying out the role as collaborator, the lecturers always allow students to be active in class, sharing and collaborating so that they do not feel afraid to ask many questions. “absolutely happy, cause the lecture can be "friend" during lecturing time and also in real life.” “yes of course, i am happy cause students are given more chance to deliver their ideas or preferences so lectures are able to see student's ability.” most of the students agreed that besides using google meet, zoom, or whatsapp call, lectures often used ms teams as teaching listening platforms for virtual meeting. through teams, students explain that teaching strategy applied by lecturers, “in teams, lecturer will give us an audio for the next week. and in that time, we play the audio from the last week and try to do the task. lecturer often give us trick and suggestion how to identify and understand the purpose of listening to the audio.” classroom implementations and challenges results of in-depth interviews and observations, the media used by the lecturers in teaching listening is virtual class (vc). this was confirmed by the students, as seen in questionnaire response which stated that virtual learning was applied to certain platforms; microsoft teams (64%), google meet (24%), and zoom 0,12%. therefore, this study discusses virtual learning through ms teams. in virtual learning through ms teams, there is interaction between students-students, students-the media, students-teachers, and also students with the contents. due to the smooth interactions, course content is designed interactively, contextual and involving students to be active, in this case lecturer plays important roles to motivates the students in using the media verbal and non-verbally. the students are challenging to adapt with integration of technology and content. a student explains, “i don’t really feel comfortable with virtual class. the audio often not clear and make the class hard to understand. but the condition force us to do so. that’s why students have to prepare the internet connection, material learned so that we can actively join the class.” in contrast with face-to face learning, in virtual classes the lecturer has to control the interactions imroatul ma’fiyah, ulupi sitoresmi, & irpan yulianto efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class: a classroom implementation 154 and ensure that students understand material discussed. involving students to participate as often as possible will prevent students from becoming bored and losing control of the material. the following are material illustrations, objectives and the application of teaching procedures that been applied by lecturers. materials identifying a set of familiar topics such as feeling, food, hobbies, sport, leisure times. recorded voice of some proficient native speakers or conversational dialogue about each topic. depending on the difficulty and complexity level of the task, the students are asked to do in the whilst-listening, they are usually asked to listen passages twice, or occasionally three times. the specific objectives will be: (1) students’ focus will be on meaning, they are trying to understand the speakers’ ideas about related topics (main idea and details of information). (2) the students should listen the tape as often as possible, and the more they listen, the greater their understanding will be. (3) realizing that initially perhaps students will find difficult to listen different speakers with different speaking rate, accents and style, but after listening several times, they will become used to these. all learning activities are intended to provide opportunities for students to understand the content of listening effectively. as sims (2021) mentioned it becomes transformative sign of traditional learning models to a virtual world. accommodating students’ space and opportunities and make sure the interactions run smoothly. classroom activities in listening class through virtual classes are described in table 1. table 1. teaching and learning activities teaching phase lecturer's activities students' activities opening opening the class listening and giving necessary response turning on the camera and participate actively reviewing previous lesson checking the students' attendance main activity pre-listening understand the problem guiding students to understand the topic watching, listening, taking notes or giving other necessary responses facilitating students to guess related vocabularies meaning listening to the teacher's guidance/instruction attentively know/ need to know (define the issue) questioning to promote exploration of the issue through topic will be discussed (what the students' know and don't know about the issue) listening to the teacher's guidance/instruction attentively, giving necessary response, taking notes define the problem statement whilst-listening explaining the objectives learning listening and giving necessary response (taking notes, etc.) research the knowledge giving material in form of recorded voice of some proficient native speakers or conversational dialogue about each topic listening, taking notes, or giving other necessary response facilitating finding main idea and detail information on the material given listening, answering the teacher's questions, asking and answering the meaning of vocabulary, doing highlighting facilitating extensive listening comprehension exercises reading, paying attention, and accomplishing exercises questioning to promote information and exploration while explaining listening strategies exploring material, answering teacher's question actively, taking a note, highlighting reviewing and repeating play when it is necessary, making summary and listening to the review and giving necessary response english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 155 post-listening checking the students understanding investigate the solution facilitating small group task and small group discussion working in group, giving contribution to the discussion, and presenting the result/ solution evaluation and reflection giving conclusion about the solution of the problem, certain text purpose, structure and language features listening attentively to teacher's explanation, giving appropriate response, taking a note the result of questionnaire shows that there are several challenges faced by the students in listening class through virtual learning. the first related with content. this is due to limited understanding of vocabulary, as well as the unstable of the voice quality as explained by students. “in my opinion using virtual conference in listening class is very difficult, because we are encountered with unstable connection, such as bad signal and not clear. it is completed when we don’t know the meaning of some terms or vocabularies stated.” limited ability to understand words, phrases, terms and expressions in english that are found in dialogues and long conversations that must be listened virtually become one of some challenges. 23 students (46%) feel that sometimes they find difficulties to understand the meaning of words that are not pronounce clearly; 18 students feel often and the rest always find it difficult. figure 2. students response of difficulties related with content about the limitation of understanding of contents related to vocabulary, the lecturers said that she always giving guidance by introducing topics, list of vocabulary-related to topic and then facilitate them with providing opportunities in order to actively guess meaning of words meaning, grouping, looking for word meaning and so on. further, it explained by students that the other things make virtual learning challenging is that to be always concentrated fully since there is unstable signals and limited internet connection. it makes learning listening a bit difficult than as in offline class. as stated by students, “i don't think it's very effective because you know we had a lot of problems going through this learning, such as bad signal and there are a lot of students who are shy or afraid to give their opinion” “i think it is best as offline meeting substitution in pandemic situation but sometimes it is not effective because bad signal or internet connection. in addition to limitation of internet connection, lecturers took an alternative through asking students to listen passages and materials twice or occasionally three times. it depends on the difficulty and complexity level of the task. a. conclusion the findings about students’ perception of listening class were analyzed through both internal and external factors; internal factors include students' physical condition, opportunities and motivation as well as students' perceptions of the level of difficulty in listening. in addition to the external factors, the students’ perception described in terms of learning materials, lecturers and teaching methods and the use of learning media. in the level of implementation and challenges, students thought that virtual learning is appropriate media of teaching listening during pandemic if lecturers are able to carry out their roles and students are always response the challenge adaptively in both terms of content and technology. imroatul ma’fiyah, ulupi sitoresmi, & irpan yulianto efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class: a classroom implementation 156 virtual learning uses a combination of tools to recreate structure and learning experience of a physical classroom. it becomes special application as a substitution of face to face meeting, since it involves learning by interacting with other students and lecturer in classroom context. however, students feel that it does not run effectively due to their limited internet connection and unstable network. therefore, it is important for lecturers facilitate students’ experience in listening class through virtual class. as assumed by the lecturers, it is implemented through the following steps. regarding to the limitation of understanding about contents related to vocabulary, lecturers’ guiding students in pre-listening stage by introducing topics, list of vocabulary-related to topic and then facilitates them with providing opportunities for students to actively guess meaning of words meaning, grouping, looking for word meaning and so on. in addition to limitation of internet connection, lecturers took an alternative through asking students to listen passages and materials twice or occasionally three times. it depends on the difficulty and complexity level of the task. references burns, a., & siegel, j (ed.). 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(2021). chinese esl learners’ perceptual errors of english connected speech: insights into english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 157 listening comprehension. system, 98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102480 yin, r. k. (2013). case study research: design and methods (5th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. imroatul ma’fiyah, ulupi sitoresmi, & irpan yulianto efl students’ perception of virtual learning in listening class: a classroom implementation 158 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 729 the effect of mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model on recount text writing ability: the role of learning style as variable moderation purwo haryono universitas widya dharma klaten, central java, indonesia email: pwharyono@gmail.com tukiyo universitas widya dharma klaten, central java, indonesia email: tukiyo@unwidha.ac.id apa citation: haryono, p., & tukiyo. (2022). the effect of mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model on recount text writing ability: the role of learning style as variable moderation. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 729-736. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6332. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction education is a basic effort to prepare the next generation to accept and face the challenges of the global era. education must be carried out as efficiently as possible to create quality education and improve human resources quality (nurrita, 2018). english education is becoming increasingly vital in schools along with the times. every school in indonesia teaches english as the first foreign language. listening, speaking, reading, and writing are all abilities that students are required to learn in english class. "writing is a manifestation of language through letters, symbols, or words," says bryne (in pardede & herman, 2020). to create words and sentences, a set of symbols must be placed in a specific way. writing is a form of communication. in other words, writing is a person's attempt to communicate an idea in written form. the writing is realized in the form of text. recount text is a type of text that combines the individual's own experiences given sequentially, is one part of this type of text. in this scenario, students are asked to write down events that have occurred in other people's lives and relate them in the order in which they occurred (prayogo, 2021). a lack of vocabulary and a fear of grammatical errors are the result of the perception that writing is difficult and dull for students (pardede & herman, 2020). the importance of english language education in learning needs to be accompanied by an appropriate learning style. learning style is considered as a series of behaviors that are collected in one goal. learning style is defined as a combination of cognitive, affective, and physiological traits (costa, souza, valentim, & castro, 2020). every student learns in a different way, such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles, in which the three categories of learning styles. when the learning style taught by abstract: the aim of this study is to use quantitative research methods and causality models to investigate the proposed hypothesis of the mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model effect on the recount text writing ability: the role of learning style as a moderating variable. the participants in this study are pupils from kartasura's al-islam junior high school. this study's sample consisted of 100 students chosen using a basic random selection procedure. sem (structural equation modeling) is the analytical technique employed, and it is controlled by smart pls application. the results show that the team game tournament learning model had a substantial beneficial effect on the capacity to write recount text, and the learning style had a significant positive influence on the students' ability to write recount text. in addition, to improve the learning model for the team game tournament's recount text writing abilities, it's important to consider the learning style of each participant keywords: team game tournaments; ability to write recount text; learning style purwo haryono & tukiyo the effect of mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model on recount text writing ability: the role of learning style as variable moderation 730 the teacher is suitable for the students, the learning outcomes of students will increase more. following the times, mobile learning has become an option for teachers to help make learning more effective. mobile learning is learning that allows students to easily access more resources, directions, and applications related to the lessons taught (ilman, sulthoni, & wedi, 2022). monotonous and less creative methods will cause students to easily get bored, disinterested, and ultimately hinder the transmission of knowledge. the habit of using gadgets increasingly often causes students to be more interested in something that can be accessed via their smartphone. mobile learning that aims to make it easier for teachers and still be accepted by students needs to be packaged in an attractive and effective way (kabunggul, pramita, mandailina, abdillah, mahsup, & sirajuddin, 2020). team games tournament (tgt) is a cooperative strategy in training students to write. according to fuji, uus, & cucu (2018), this method trains students by emphasizing the game as a means to achieve a common goal. the tgt approach is easy to apply because it incorporates the game aspect, which increases students' enthusiasm in learning english. therefore, the research that applies the use of tgt in recount text writing ability with the use of learning style needs to be conducted to know the connection between variables so that it can contribute to the learning activities in which teacher can apply it to enhance recount text writing ability. some research has been conducted to determine whether tgt can affect the english language learning. first, the research conducted by pratiwi, rasana, & pudjawan (2018) showed that tgt can affect the english vocabularies of grade iv students in tabanan. other than that, arifin, vega, & anggriani (2018) also showed that tgt can increase the english achievement of students. in addition, research conducted by merti (2020) showed that tgt is able to increase the learning outcomes of sma negeri 1 blahbatuh in xi mipa 6 through audio-visual media. however, from the previous research, there is no research that involves tgt, recount text learning ability, with the use of learning style as moderation has been conducted. therefore, this research is conducted entitled "the effect of mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model on recount text writing ability: the role of learning style as a moderating variable". learning model is a conceptual framework, serves as a guideline for developing the implementation of learning in the classroom and provides a systematic management of students in achieving learning goals (sugiata, 2019). according to experts, the learning model is a blueprint or pattern in the form of a curriculum to plan and lead classroom learning for the implementation of learning achievements (usman, saud, & kasim achmad, 2018). it has been suggested that this learning paradigm is one that is easy to implement, includes all students regardless of status, involves students as peer tutors, and incorporates elements of games and rewards (setiani, 2019). in addition, learning activities based on tgt paradigm train students to learn comfortably and at the same time encourage healthy competition, collaboration, responsibility and learning. putri & wati (2020) revealed that tgt learning style divides students into 5-6 people in each team. the members of each team are the same. giving some questions to students and delivering lecture materials in accordance with the lecture contract (+90 minutes). this is the "first round" of the learning competition. these questions must be answered individually by each student. students count the number of questions answered correctly the they can add up the scores obtained. as part of the "second half," they have to repeat the test questions. instruct the team to collect their score once again and add it to their first-round total. students who give an incorrect answer must receive a score of minus 2. if they are not sure about the answer, they can mark the blank answer page as zero. students who give correct answers with a score of 4 is rewarded. there will be two rounds or two tournaments whenever there is a conference in lectures. it also provides opportunities for teams to participate in learning sessions between rounds. there are five components of tgt according to putri & wati (2020), defined in the following table. table 1. five components of tgt (putri & wati, 2020) component indicators english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 731 class presentation 1. explaining subject materials 2. giving learning techniques team 1. discussing the problems 2. comparing answers 3. checking students’ understanding is their team makes errors game 1. testing students’ understanding they get from the presentation class tournament 1. doing academic matches and games 2. balance competition may make students contribute maximally toward the team scores game recognition 1. getting certificate or other achievement appreciations if their scores reach certain criteria the concept of "mobile learning" refers to dealing with information technology (it) in the teaching and learning process, such as pdas, cell phones and other smartphones. since mobile learning is a component of electronic learning (elearning), it is also considered distance learning (d-learning) (yafie, samah, kustiawan, tirtaningsih, astuti, & haqqi, 2020). using such technology allows students to understand information by expanding their cognitive domain, optimizing their cooperation by expanding their affective domain, and enhancing psychomotor interactive skills and power. this condition causes mobile learning to use local game applications as an instructor's effort to achieve the three learning domains of cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor culture. purnama, sesunan, & ertikanto (2017) stated that m-learning is wrong. a learning media that allows educators to deliver teaching materials to students using smartphonebased media. to maximize mobile learning, mobile learning tools must have several helping features, including connecting with other devices, displaying information, and actualizing bilateral teacherstudent contact. mobile learning differs from traditional learning in that students can view related materials, guides, and applications at any time from any location. students are motivated to use mobile applications for various reasons. for mobile learning to be successful, certain variables must be taken into account. criollo, guerrero-arias, jaramillo-alcázar, & luján-mora (2021) stated that the influencing factors are classified into three main categories, namely features of the device which contain about usability and functionality, user expectations which contain about ownership, privacy, self-regulated, flexible learning, fun, and the last is profit. pedagogical. according to mastura, arsyad, & koto (2020), writing is the act of telling or painting visual symbols to explain to others in easy-to-understand language. aprina (2018) also stated that writing is defined as an action in which a person conveys a thoughts and ideas with writing as the medium. in sum, writing is a collection of actions in which a person expresses a thoughts in written language so that others can read and understand them (barus, herman, & niswa, 2020). recount texts teach students how to make regular or structured writing that tells about previous events. students tell stories through writing that contains a chronology of what happened. recount text is a type of text in sequence and contains one's own experience (prayogo, 2021). the purpose of recount writing, according to amir (2020), is to give the reader a summary of an event at a certain time and location. the focus is on events written in chronological order, such as (1) personal recount: the author is directly involved; (2) factual recounts: describing events or scenarios such as newspaper headlines or accident reports; and (3) imaginative retelling: depicting fictional roles and relating imagined events (sari, sutapa, & sada, 2021). shamsuddin & kaur (2020) stated that learning style is to describe how students learn. students' learning style can be described as a combination of the ways in which they acquire, organize, and process information. learning styles, according to widharyanto & binawan (2020), are distinct combinations that help people learn more efficiently. a learner's learning style is a consistent technique in capturing stimuli or knowledge, as well as ways of remembering, thinking, and solving problems (childs-kean, mlis, & smith, 2020). students will have a difficult time retaining material when presented with ways they aren't used to. it is important to remember that students learn in different ways, use different methods of purwo haryono & tukiyo the effect of mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model on recount text writing ability: the role of learning style as variable moderation 732 processing information, and have different learning styles. students who have dominant learning styles tend to use such styles in a variety of contexts, making it less likely that they will switch to another type. according to the theory and characteristics of the learning styles stated by kulkarni, banerjee, & raghunathan (2022), the signs of each learning style are as follows table 2. the signs of each learning style according to kulkarni, banerjee, & raghunathan (2022) learning style indicators visual learning by visual understanding well related to position, numbers, and colors neat and in order having no bother with crowd having difficulty in accepting verbal instructions auditorial learning by listening good in spoken activities having sensitivity toward music easily distracted by crowd low in visual activities kinesthetic learning by physical activities sensitive toward expression and body language liking to try but not neat low in verbal activities method the hypotheses hypothesized are tested using a quantitative technique with a causality model in this study. participants in this study are students of smp al-islam kartasura. this study’s respondents consist of 100 students selected using a basic random selection procedure. this survey approach is used to obtain an overview of the mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model on the ability to make recount text for this research. sem (structural equation modeling) is the analytical method employed in this study, which is managed by the smart pls program. using a combination of factor analysis and regression analysis (also known as correlation analysis), sem analyzes how different variables in a model are connected. the three stages of pls analysis are outlined in the following: outer model analysis establishes the link between latent variables and the model's indicators. the outer model dictates how each indicator interacts with its associated hidden variable. the external model is entered through the following tests: (1) convergent validity: the degree of convergent validity is determined by the loading factor value on the latent variable and its accompanying indicator. expected value > 0.7. (2) average variance extracted (ave): a variable's ave is the average of the percentage of variance extract (ave) between question items or indicators of the variable. ave value should be > 0.5 for good condition. (3) composite reliability: data that has composite reliability of >0.7 has high reliability. (4) cronbach alpha. cronbach alpha is used to improve the reliability test. for all constructs, the expected value is >0.6. the proportion of variance described in the inner model, particularly r2, indicates that the inner model is a model from inside. changes in r2 can be used to assess whether certain independent factors have a meaningful effect on the latent variable. according to colton, the strength of a link between two variables is classified into four categories: table 3. the strength of a link between two variables r-square correlation strength 0.00-0.25 low 0.25-0.50 moderate 0.51-0.75 strong 0.76-1.00 very strong/perfect hypothesis test the last stage is hypothesis test using the criteria of using statistical numbers, such as 1.96 for 5% alpha (purnamasari, warastuti, & murniati, 2013). as a result, the research hypotheses are: (1) ha is accepted if t-statistic is > t-table and p value is <0.05. (2) ha is rejected if t-statistic is < t-table and p value is > 0.05. results and discussion english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 733 figure 1. number of subtheme published in erjee outer model analysis validity test a validity test is used to verify whether or not a questionnaire is valid. in this study, convergent validity and ave were used to assess validity. if the ave value is greater than 0.05 and the outer loading value is greater than 0.6, the instrument is certified valid. table 4. the results of the instrument validity test reliability test in this study, researchers performed two types of reliability tests: the cronbach alpha test and the composite reliability test. cronbach alpha is a measure of the lowest level of reliability (lower limit). it is regarded good if the data has a cronbach alpha value of more than 0.7 and a composite reliability score of more than 0.7. table 5. instrument reliability test results cronbach’s alpha rho_ a composite reliability learning style 0.912 0.913 0.927 recount text writing ability 0.773 0.773 0.869 moderating effect 1.000 1.000 1.000 team game tournament 0.903 0.905 0.912 based on the calculation results, all instrument items meet the standards of validity and reliability, with scores that exceed the threshold. r square the coefficient of determination of measurement (r-square) describes how much outside factors influence endogenous variables. the r-square value is calculated based on data analysis using the smart pls program, as shown in the table below. table 6. results of r-square analysis r square r square adjusted recount text writing ability 0.639 0.628 the table shows that the variable of recount text writing skill is explained by the tgm learning model and learning style 62.8 percent of the time, purwo haryono & tukiyo the effect of mobile learning-based team game tournament learning model on recount text writing ability: the role of learning style as variable moderation 734 while the rest is explained by variables outside of this study. hypothesis testing original sample (o) t statistics (|o/stdev|) pvalues learning style  recount text writing ability 0.596 6.282 0.000 moderating effect  recount text writing ability 0.089 2.246 0.025 team game tournament  recount text writing ability 0.032 3.315 0.001 the effect of learning style on recount text writing ability according to results from testing the first hypothesis of learning style on students' recount text writing ability, the beta score (0.596) was found to be positive and the t-statistic (6.282) was found to be statistically significant, which means that students' recount text writing ability was positively influenced by their learning style. the better the learning style possessed by students, will affect their ability to write recount text. a recount text must be well-structured and convey the details of the events it recounts. in other words, students inform others about events that have just happened, which can be in the form of writing and include a chronology of events. in a study by mastura et al., (2020) pupils' writing skills were improved by using serial visuals. for children who prefer to learn by visual means, the utilization of picture series has an impact on their writing abilities. furthermore, the use of picture series has an impact on students' writing skills based on their learning style. the effect of tgt on recount text writing ability moderated by learning style team game tournament moderated learning style was found to have a positive beta score (0.089) with a t statistic of 2.246 (p> 1.96) and a significant positive effect between the team game variables (p = 0.025) in the hypothesis testing results. recount text writing ability is used as a moderator for the tournament. the better the team game tournament learning model given by the teacher to students, will increase recount text writing ability. additionally, the presence of an appropriate learning style ensures that students' capacity to create recount material is enhanced. class presentations, teamwork (teams), games, tournaments, and group rewards are the five stages of tgt learning. using tgt is meant to provide students with a unique learning experience and keep them from being bored while in class. tgt is one of the positive techniques in teaching writing recount texts. researchers observed that students' ability to create narratives was influenced by their learning methods because they made mistakes in writing descriptive texts. the existence of moderation between team game tournament and learning styles will make recount text writing ability even better (war-wind & simamora, 2018). the effect of team game tournament on recount text writing ability testing hypotheses about how well teams can write recount texts yielded a positive beta score (0.302) and the following statistics: t statistic = 3.315% and p values (0.001) (p0.05). this indicates that there is an important positive correlation between the recount text writing ability and various aspects of teams' performance in team game tournaments. the better the teacher in providing team game tournament for students, their writing skills will also improve. tgt techniques can help students develop their social skills and work together to solve challenges (usman et al., 2018). the tgt technique prioritizes group achievement over individual success. however, group incentives are mostly based on the topic mastery of each person in the team. students can use the tgt model to compare their responses, identify differences, and help one another when they reach a dead end. they can even give each other quizzes about the material they are studying. writing skills will also improve for those taking the course. that the tgt model has an effect on students' writing skills is supported by the study of baydar, (2020). conclusion based on the results of the study, it can be stated that the team game tournament learning model has a large effect on recount text writing ability, and learning styles have a significant positive effect on students' recount text writing skills. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 735 therefore, if the team game tournament learning model on recount text writing ability is controlled by learning style, the results will increase 62.8% of the time, the value of r square is reached. suggestions for further research include including variables not included in this study to improve research. acknowledgement the authors would like to give the best gratitude to universitas widya dharma klaten for the support so that the research can be conducted and finished well. references amir, a. s. 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(2020). learning style and language learning strategies of students from various ethnics in indonesia. cakrawala pendidikan, 39(2), 480-492. https://doi.org/10.21831/cp.v39i2.28173 yafie, e., samah, n. a., kustiawan, u., tirtaningsih, m. t., astuti, w., & haqqi, y. a. (2020). design and development seamless learning model to improve student performance in higher education. proceedings 2020 6th international conference on education and technology, icet 2020. malang, east java. https://doi.org/10.1109/icet51153.2020.9276 569 an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi universitysudan amin ali al mubarak department of english, university of al imam al mahdi, sudan e-mail: amino.last25@gmail.com apa citation: al mubarak, a. a. (2017). an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university sudan. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 175-188 received: 16-04-2017 accepted: 19-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: academic writing skills mostly involve the linguistic competence development of the students which many english second language learners may identify it as a challenging task. the main objective of this study is to look into various challenges encountered by english second language students in academic writing in ordinary graduation project in the context of universities. specifically, this research focuses on identifying the problems faced by the arts colleges within the university of al imam al mahdi, sudan. the researcher used the student‟s project graduation to investigate the problems encountered by the students when they used their academic writing skills. to state the obstacles recognized by the examined students in academic writing skills, the researcher employed a descriptive method. the findings of this research revealed the most problematic area faced by the students. finally, the results of this research may help the scholars to reflect on teaching practices and urge the goverment to help teachers‟ attempts to enhance the academic writing skills of their students at the university of al imam al mahdi, sudan. keywords: academic writing, students, problems. introduction nowadays, english plays an essential part in educational activities. students are relied on to impart mostly in the universities where english is the means of teaching. learners confront the task of grasping content area in subjects such as mathematics, social studies, science, and business which are taught in english. in such cases, instructing and learning of english can help the students to bargain effectively with their academic requirements and to function productively in their disciplines and learned contexts (adams & keene, 2000). writing appears to be one of the most important, yet challenging, academic skills for university students to learn. this is particularly the case of foreign or second language learners. academic writing plays an indispensable part in learning a foreign language. nonnative english speakers ought to be acquainted with writing procedures, components, and elements like the convention, objectivity, and unpredictability to utilize the language precisely and accurately. ismail (2011) pointed out that english writing bears chances for students to think critically and gives the inspiration to learn certain parts of academic writing like utilizing powerful word expressions and a great vocabulary. also, academic writing includes certain components like basic deduction and self-expression that understudies ought to get amid the courses they attend. there are different parts of academic writing which must be studied and grasped such as arranging paragraphs by utilizing robust style of word structures, paraphrasing, and appropriate conjunctions. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.533 175 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee academic writing is commonly characterized as scientific writing which is portrayed as organized research practiced and utilized by researchers at higher education level. dynamic and quality research have dependably been the keystone of higher education. research is primarily integrated with academic writing as genrebased pedagogies acknowledge the writing procedure as a necessary arranged with social and cultural response to specific contexts and communities. by applying different linguistics and rhetorical options to achieve important tasks in diverse settings, novice writers may allow themselves to accomplish their writing tasks after careful examination of the complicated variable in composition texts (johns, 2008). writing abilities are a critical part of communication for the students all through their academic life since it permits them to arrange their sentiments and thoughts obviously and additionally to pass on significance through well developed content. academic writing appears to be one of the most important, yet a problematic academic ability for university students to learn. this is predominantly evident with second language learners (negari, 2011). students confronted problems in various areas ranging from spelling words correctly to how to develop an argument in one‟s essay. considerable number of research has recommended that writing in a second language learning context is a difficult and demanding task. alsamadani (2010) pointed out that the “difficulty and complexity of academic writing arise from the fact that writing includes discovering a thesis, developing support for it, organizing, revising, and finally editing it to ensure an effective, error-free piece of writing.” moreover, musa (2010) stated that writing is considered as a difficult skill to learn because it includes several components, for instance, grasp on spellings and punctuation, a comprehensive command of grammar, grasp on spellings and punctuation, use of appropriate vocabulary, suitable style to meet the expected readers‟ expectations and organizational skills. yiu (2009) said that much research had offered valuable insights into the fact that this trend “...led to the exponential growth of research in second language writing over the last decade and a half.” chou (2011) expressed that however there has been an expanded enthusiasm for writing yet there has been a lack of research in this field in english as second language settings as a significant portion of research studies identified related to writing skills has been done in the english as second language contexts such as australia, canada, england, new zealand, and america. he has additionally clarified that the announced research in this field can be separated into four classifications. the first group research studies explored the faculty standpoint concerning the academic writing for instance, zhu (2004) and casanave & hubbard (1992). the second type examined the students for instance, grami (2010) and yiu (2009). the third class investigated the students writing sample for example, ezza (2010) and tahaineh (2010), and the last group tried to examine the discernments of the students against the academic advisors for instance, bacha and bahous (2008) and myles and cheng (2003). moreover, it has also been stated that much of the research in the past two eras has mainly concentrated on either product, process or both” (yiu, 2009). various studies have been carried out to distinguish the issues of english as second language learners that faced in their writing. for instance, has expressed that arab students‟ blunders in academic writing mostly fall in the classification of grammar and syntax. while, noor (1996) who explored and analysed various of studies carried out on english as second language learners‟ syntactic mistakes and expressed that the students‟ blunders can be sorted in seven 176 amin ali al mubarak an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university – sudan syntactic subcategories: verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, relative clauses, sentence structure and adverbial clauses. next, mahmoud (2005) explored english as second language learners syntactic blunders also found out that verbs and prepositions are the most challenging areas in this regard. regarding the problems of academic writing, khan (2011) who recently conducted a study to explore the problems of saudi university students, has mentioned that they face numerous difficulties in phoneme clusters, spellings, grammar, mistakes due to first structure, doubling of subjects, language interference, doubling of preposition, articles, tenses, appropriate vocabulary, wrong use of prefixes, and suffixes. khan (2011) reviewed a number of studies in this respect and concluded that arab learners‟ difficulties are caused by the shortage in the english language curricula obtainable by some schools and universities, dreadful teaching methodology and the problems with appropriate language environments and the lack of personal motivation on the part of the students. al murshidi (2014) pointed out that the low of the language proficiency might also obstruct academic writing. as determined by al-khairy (2013), the subject of his study affirmed that their main difficulties encompass the inappropriate choice of vocabulary, grammatical errors, incorrect punctuation, and spelling irregular verbs. other causes that could lead to the problem in academic writing are first language interference, insufficiency of views, and unclear guidance of the task. saddler, moran, graham, & harris (2004) said that academic writing skill ought to start at elementary and secondary education so that when the learners are at univesity level, they should not battle with academic writing. besides, they recommend a few rules in avoiding writing problems, namely: to provide exemplary writing instruction to all the students from the start, beginning in university level, and to offer early supplementary writing instruction aimed at avoiding or at least alleviating later writing difficulties. further, lea and street (1998) utilized an ethnographic qualitative approach which incorporated semistructured interviews with the teachers and the learners, respondents observations, models of student‟s writing, and written feedback on students. they found that the learners experienced problems with writing, mainly with conflicting, distinct and implicit requirements for writing in various courses. in addition, gambell (1991) finds that the students discernments toward their own writing and how they go about academic writing found that even fruitful learners are awkward with their own university-level writing and that writing is challenging and distressing to a hefty portion of them. furthermore, lee and tajino (2008) pointed out that a number of researchers explored english as second langauge student discernments and they all approve that it is significant to include the students‟ recommendations in developing academic writing programmes. some found that the students consider that interaction with native speakers will resolve their writing problems finally, the previous studies endeavored to give answers to the challenge of students in academic writing in english as second language contexts. as a result, research input various previous studies in academic writing. the research continues to explore ways in which english as second language students can be developed academic writing. however, academic writing will continue to posing a challenge to these students due to several factors. accordingly, this study is based on the following questions: 1. what are the academic writing problems encountered by english second language earners? 2. what are the factors that may cause difficulties academic writing problems? 177 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee method the present study intends to investigate the issues of writing problems faced by postgraduate students at al imam al mahdi university in sudan. besides, this paper reacts to the inadequacy of research in this particular area at the university level. currently, there is limited research that addresses the issues under scrutiny. it is aimed that the outcomes of this study could assist the administrative authorities to enhance the level of translation skill at the university level. the data for the present study were collected from 15 graduation project for the year 2017. the collect data was used in identifying the issues of academic writing for english as second language at al imam al mahdi university in sudan. a quantitative method was used in collecting the data: 15 b.a. graduation project checked in order to identify the issues of academic writing for english as a second language in sudan. the number of the graduation project involved in this study was 15, and their identity was kept confidential. apart from that, the researcher believes that the respondent‟s project demography and gender, have no impact on the analysis of this study. results and discussion the analysis was carried out in order to find out about the potential isuues of academic writing in english as a second language for the learners in sudan. the result of gradution project that analysised were listed below issues of the first student graduation project figure 1 shows the frequency of issues in the first grdaution project. seven percent of the of the first student project found having problems with the use of articles and forty two percent of the same project show weakness in the use of punctuation. only nine percent of the first student projectdisplayed difficulties in employing theprepositions. similarly, four percent of the first student project found have problem with use of irregular verbs and eighteen percent of same project found have problems used poor expressions. moreover, only twopercent of first student project faced problems in consistency and twenty-four percent of same project found have problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, tweleve percent of first student project found have problems with used of verb tense. figure 1 issues of the second student graduation project figure 2 shows the frequency of issues in the second grdaution project. seven percent of the of the second students projectshows problems with the use of articles and twentyeight percent of the same project do have weakness in the utilization of 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 178 amin ali al mubarak an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university – sudan 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% punctuation. only tweleve percent of the second student project have difficulties in employing the prepositions. similarly, fifteen percent of the second students project found have problem with usage of irregular verbs and eighteen percent of the same project found have problems used poor expressions. additionally, only seven percent of the second student project have problems in consistency and nine percent of the same project found have problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, four percent of the second student project found have problems with used of verb tense. figure 2 issues of the third student graduation project figure 3 shows the frequency of issues in the third grdaution project. two percent of the of the third students project have difficulties with the use of articles and twentytwo percent of the same project do have weakness in the utilization of punctuation. only twenty-five percent of the third student projection have problems in using the prepositions. similarly, seven percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and tweleve percent of the third student project show poor expressions. additionally, only four percent of the same project faced problems in consistency and ten percent of the third student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, eighteen percent of the same project found having problems with used of verb tense. figure 3 0% 10% 20% 30% 179 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee issues of the fourth student graduation project figure 4 shows the frequency of issues in the fourth grdaution project. eight percent of the of the fourth students project have difficulties with the use of articles and twenty percent of the same project do have weakness in the utilization of punctuation. only thrity-two percent of the fourth student project have problems in using the prepositions. similarly, twleve percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and twenty-five percent of the fourth student project show poor expressions. additionally, only four percent of the same project faced problems in consistency and six percent of the fourth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, three percent of the same project found having problems with used of verb tense figure 4 issues of the fifth student graduation project figure 5 shows the frequency of issues in the fifth grdaution project. ninteen percent of the of the fifth students project reveals the difficulties with the use of articles and twenty-eight percent of the same project show the weakness in the utilization of punctuation. only eighteen percent of the fifth student project reveals problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only two percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and thirteen percent of the fifth student project show poor expressions. additionally, eighteen percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and one percent of the fifth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, only one percent of the same project show problems with used of verb tense figure 5 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 180 amin ali al mubarak an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university – sudan issues of the sixth student graduation project figure 6 shows the frequency of issues in the sixth grdaution project. four percent of the of the sixth students project depicted the difficulties with the use of articles and fortyfive percent of the same project show the weakness in the utilization of punctuation. only thirty percent of the sixth student project reveals problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only five percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and ten percent of the sixth student project show poor expressions. additionally, four percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and one percent of the sixth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, only one percent of the same project show problems with used of verb tense. figure 6 issues of the seventh student graduation project figure 7 shows the frequency of issues in the seventh grdaution project. one percent of the of the seventh students project represented the difficulties with the use of articles and fifty-three percent of the same project display the weakness in the utilization of punctuation. only twenty-two percent of the seventh student project discloses problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only one percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and eight percent of the seventh student project indicates poor expressions. additionally, tweleve percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and one percent of the seventh student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, only two percent of the same project show problems with used of verb tense. figure 7 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 181 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee issues of the eighth student graduation project figure 8 shows the frequency of issues in the eighth grdaution project. one percent of the of the eighth students project signified the problems with the use of articles and tweleve percent of the same project show the debility in the utilization of punctuation. only eighteen percent of the eighth student project reveals problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only one percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and seven percent of the eighth student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, tweleve percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and one percent of the eighth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, fortyeight percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 8 issues of the ninth student graduation project figure 9 shows the frequency of issues in the ninth grdaution project. three percent of the of the ninth students project showed difficulties with the use of articles and twenty-seven percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. twentyfive percent of the ninth student project show problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only four percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and nine percent of the ninth student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, tweleve percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and three percent of the ninth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, seventeen percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 9 0% 50% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 182 amin ali al mubarak an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university – sudan issues of the tenth student graduation project figure 10 shows the frequency of issues in the tenth grdaution project. three percent of the of the tenth students project showed problems with the use of articles and nine percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. threeteen percents of the tenth student project show problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only four percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and nine percent of the tenth student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, tweleve percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and five percent of the tenth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, forty percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 10 issues of the eleventh student graduation project figure 11 shows the frequency of issues in the eleventh grdaution project. six percent of the of the eleventh students project showed problems with the use of articles and nine percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. ten percents of the eleventh student project show problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only four percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and thrity-four percent of the eleventh student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, sixteen percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and five percent of the eleventh student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, tweleve percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 11 0% 20% 40% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 183 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee issues of the twelfth student graduation project figure 12 shows the frequency of issues in the tweleveth grdaution project. six percent of the of the tweleveth students project showed problems with the use of articles and thrity-seven percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. seventeen percents of the tweleveth student project show problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only six percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and fourteen percent of the tweleveth student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, thriteen percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and only two percent of the tweleveth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, five percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 12 issues of the thirteenth student graduation project figure 13 shows the frequency of issues in the thirteenth grdaution project. two percent of the of the thirteenth students project showed problems with the use of articles and seven percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. forty percents of the thirteenth student project show problems in using theprepositions. similarly, only three percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and eighteen percent of the thirteenth student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, ten percent of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and only nine percent of the thirteenth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, eleven percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 13 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 0% 20% 40% 184 amin ali al mubarak an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university – sudan issues of the fourteen student graduation project figure 14 shows the frequency of issues in the fourteen grdaution project. four percent of the of the fourteen students project showed problems with the use of articles and tweleve percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. ten percents of the fourteen student project show problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only two percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and twelev percent of the fourteen student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, fifty-two of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and only three percent of the fourteen student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, five percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 14 issues of the fifteenth student graduation project figure 15 shows the frequency of issues in the fifteenth grdaution project. three percent of the of the fifteenth students project showed problems with the use of articles and tweleve percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. ten percents of the fifteenth student project show problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only two percent of the same project found have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and sixteen percent of the fifteenth student project specifies poor expressions. additionally, threeteen of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and twenty-eight percent of the fifteenth student project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, eighteen percent of the same project display problems with used of verb tense. figure 15 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 0% 10% 20% 30% 185 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee over all fifteen student graduation project assessment for academic writing figure 16 shows the frequency issues of fifteen student graduation project assessment for academic writing. thirteen percent of the fifteen students graduation project showed problems with the use of articles and forty-five percent of the same project display the feebleness in the utilization of punctuation. thirty-six percents of the fifteen students project show problems in using the prepositions. similarly, only nine percent of the same project found that the students have difficult with usage of irregular verbs and twentyseven percent of fifteen students graduation project specifies poor expressions. additionally, twenty-three of the same project reveals the problems in consistency and thirteen percent of the fifteen students graduation project found having problems with used of paralleled structure. finally, fourteen percent of the same project display problems in using of verb tense. figure 16 the primary intention of this study was to investigate the challenges of academic writing which a group of english as the second language learners undergraduate project had to encounter. one interesting finding which came to light through the present study is the significant role played by academic writing towards the students‟ overall english language learning experiences. therefore, a broad investigation has been carried out on the difficulties of academic writing that faced undergraduate learners.the outcomes of this research revealed that students encountered various obstacles used academic writing. it is indisputable evidence that the knowledge of the grammar is necessary, and as it is said that leaning academic writing as the flesh of the language and grammar is the skeleton. an analysis of the students‟ graduation project revealed that various kinds of mistakes made by the students writing weak. by examining the academic writing samples of the students, it can be presumed that a significant number of the students face academic writing problems. while writing, they show more concern for language related problems.the findings of the study revealed some issues that the students encountered in academic writing, for instance, the use of articles, punctuation, the use of prepositions, the use of irregular verbs, weak expressions, singular and plural, unparalleled structure, consistency and verb tense. moreover, the study findings indicating that using relevant articles is the one of the problems that they face in their academic writing at the university level. this finding is also in line with the (alkhasawneh & maher, 2010) who informed that the students are unable to use articles appropriately in their writings due to their limited grammar. furthermore, the findings of the current study revealed that the 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 186 amin ali al mubarak an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university – sudan students face difficulties in using punctuation which is extremely significant in academic writing. this finding inline with hutchinson & waters (1987) who also strongly suggested that it is important to to acquaint the learners with use of punctuation for smooth progression in academic writing. the „use of irregular verbs‟ is another difficult area for the undergraduates which represented the use of past and past participle forms of irregular verbs. the findings also, revealed the problems in using appropriate prepositions and stand as problematic areas in academic writing tasks for the students which had been confirming in of numerous studies which reported that use of inappropriate prepositions is a major kind of error found in the academic writings of the arab students (al-khairy, 2013). the students may need to enhance their consistency and connect words to their personal experience they may have to be motivated to write words frequently and consistently and attempt to paraphrase the meanings. the findings also indicate that the most common beliefs in the difficulty among students in academic writing are about paralleled structure. the findings from the present study are consistent with some previous findings which claimed that the esl learners are inclined poor expressions than novice learners which is also the case in the present context. as has been reported in related studies, this is more so if the students are not familiar or lack experience, which in turn may fail to make metacognitive connection with.the study also revealed that the attitude of students towards academic writing with unique characteristics can be considered as a crucial factor in making academic writing more helpful for all students. findings show that intervening strategies in using academic writing reveals the linguistics problems. conclusion the present study shows that the students faced numerous challenges relating to academic writing at university level. successful academic writing is considered of utmost importance to the academic accomplishment of the english as second language students, especially in content areas in the contexts of tertiary levels. the present study investigated the challenging aspects of academic writing encountered by the students at the al-imam al mahdi university in sudan. the significant results from this research revealed that students sampled were not familiar with the academic writing strategies. it is noteworthy that academic writing is reportedly considered as the most common activity at the university level. unfortunately, related studies have discovered that the students are not always aware of the potential benefits of both the conscious and continuous use of academic writing which may help expedite and make the writing process more efficient. in answering the first research question of the study, i.e., what the academic writing problems encountered by english second language learners are, it was discovered that many challenges about academic writing experienced by the students while writing, they were articles, punctuation, prepositions, irregular verbs, poor expressions, consistency paralleled structure, and used of verb tense. in answering the second research question of the study, i.e., what the factors that may cause difficulties academic writing problems are, a considerable number of the project that was examined reported that they faced problems regardless of their language level proficiency when using morphology and syntactic properties to understand the meanings of words. references adams, k. h., & keene, m. (2000). research and writing across the disciplines. new york: mcgraw hill. al-khairy, m. a. (2013). saudi english-major undergraduates' academic writing problems: a taif university perspective. english language teaching, 6(6). al-khairy, m. h. (2013). english as a foreign language learning demotivational factors as 187 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee perceived by saudi undergraduates. european scientific journal, 9(32). al-khasawneh, f., & maher, s. (2010). writing for academic purposes: problems faced by arab postgraduate students of the college of business, uum. esp world, 9(2), 1-23. al murshidi, g. (2014). uae university male students‟ interests impact on reading and writing performance and improvement. english language teaching, 7(9), 57. alsamadani, h. a. (2010). the relationship between saudi efl students‟ writing competence, l1 writing proficiency, and self-regulation. european journal of social sciences, 16(1), 53-63. bacha, n. n., & bahous, r. (2008). contrasting views of business students‟ writing needs in an efl environment. english for specific purposes, 27(1), 74-93. casanave, c. p, & hubbard, p. (1992). the writing assignments and writing problems of doctoral students: faculty perceptions, pedagogical issues, and needed research. english for specific purposes, 11(1), 33-49. chou, l. (2011). an investigation of taiwanese doctoral students' academic writing at a us university. higher education studies, 1(2), 47-60. ezza, e. (2010). arab efl learners‟ writing dilemma at tertiary level. english language teaching, 3(4), 33. gambell, t. j. (1991). university education students' self-perceptions of writing. canadian journal of education/revue canadienne de l'éducation, 420-433. grami, m. a. (2010). the effects of integrating peer feedback into university-level esl writing curriculum: a comparative study in a saudi context (unpublished doctoral dissertation). hutchinson, t., & waters, a. (1987). english for specific purposes. cambridge: cambridge university press. ismail, s. a. a. (2011). exploring students' perceptions of esl writing. english language teaching, 4(2), 73. johns, a. m. (2008). genre awareness for the novice academic student: an ongoing quest. language teaching, 41(2), 237. khan, i. a. (2011). learning difficulties in english: diagnosis and pedagogy in saudi arabia. educational research, 2(7), 1248-1257. lea, m. r., & street, b. v. (1998). student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach. studies in higher education, 23(2), 157-172. lee, s. n., & tajino, a. (2008). understanding students' perceptions of difficulty with academic writing for teacher development: a case study of the university of tokyo writing program. mahmoud, a. (2005). collocation errors made by arab learners of english. asian efl journal, 5, 1-9. musa, f. (2010). teaching writing to post-secondary students: procedure and technicalities in an efl classroom. paper presented at the first national conference on english language teaching, al-quds open university, palestine. retrieved from http://www.qou.edu/english/ conferences/firstnationalconference/pdffiles/ farouqmusa. pdf. myles, j., & cheng, l.. (2003). the social and cultural life of non-native english speaking international graduate students at a canadian university. journal of english for academic purposes, 2(3), 247-263. negari, g. m. (2011). a study on strategy instruction and efl learners' writing skill. international journal of english linguistics, 1(2), 299. noor, h. h. (1996). english syntactic errors by arabic speaking learners: reviewed. retrieved from: files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed423660.pdf saddler, b., moran, s., graham, s., & harris, k. r. (2004). preventing writing difficulties: the effects of planning strategy instruction on the writing performance of struggling writers. exceptionality, 12(1), 3-17. tahaineh, y. s. (2010). arab efl university students‟ errors in the use of prepositions. modern journal of applied linguistics, 1(6), 76-112. yiu, r. h. h. (2009). disciplinary writing: a case study of hong kong undergraduates undertaking their writing tasks. university of leicester. zhu, w. (2004). writing in business courses: an analysis of assignment types, their characteristics, and required skills. english for specific purposes, 23(2), 111-135. 188 amin ali al mubarak an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university – sudan english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 129 the implementation of google site as e-learning platform for teaching efl during covid-19 pandemic jusriati department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah palopo, south sulawesi, indonesia email: jusriati@umpalopo.ac.id nasriandi department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah palopo, south sulawesi, indonesia email: nasriandi@umpalopo.ac.id wisnu kurniadi department of informatics, faculty of computer engineering, university of cokroaminoto palopo, south sulawesi, indonesia. email: wisnukurniadi@uncp.ac.id ratna department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education university of muhammadiyah palopo, south sulawesi, indonesia email: ratnasyamsul01@gmail.com apa citation: jusriati., nasriandi., kurniadi, w., ratna. (2021). the implementation of google site as e-learning platform for teaching efl during covid-19 pandemic. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 129-138. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5363. received: 29-08-2021 accepted: 24-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction the rate of covid-19 cases worldwide are now declining, including indonesia. however, it cannot be the reason for people to turn their guard down, especially with some new mutations of the covid19. thus, the government are trying their best in order to keep this rate or even going down. the presence of this virus was discovered for the first time in wuhan, china, and has spread to virtually every country in the world, and indonesia being one of them. the republic of indonesia's national disaster management authority has decided to extend the period of the disaster emergency caused by the covid-19 pandemic until may 29, 2020, and in fact even exceeded the stipulated time. because of that the minister of education and culture of republic indonesia decided policies that lead students to study from home and teachers to teach from home, too (syarifah & zainil, 2021). it absolutely replaces face-to-face learning in school room setting into online learning. it has become a significant challenge for both students and teachers to manage online learning. as has been experienced by almost all people so far, the covid-19 certainly has a very negative abstract: the aims of this study are to find out whether the implementation of google site is effective or not for teaching efl and to know the student’s perception toward the implementation of google site in teaching efl. the subject of the study will be english students education at university of muhammadiyah palopo. the samples of this study will be chosen randomly. the data will be from the efl test and interview and all documents use by the lecturer in their teaching and learning process. the efl test used to measure the students’ improvement after implementing the google sites and the interview used to investigate while the interview done to dig more information on how the students’ perception toward the implementation of google site in teaching efl. however, through the implementation of the media, it can be said to be effective and attract the attention of students in efl learning. keywords: google sites, efl, e-learning, covid-19. jusriati, nasriandi, wisnu kurniadi, & ratna the implementation of google site as e-learning platform for teaching efl during covid-19 pandemic 130 impact on all aspects of life such as the economy, social life, education and many more. for some time ago, the indonesian government has issued cautions and restrictions on people leaving their homes, working, and attending school. work from home and learn from home are two new phrases that have arisen. even today the caution is still ongoing. education is one of the important things in human life. during the covid-19 pandemic, it faces very high challenges. one of the most challenging things in the world of education today is the enactment of a learning from home policy that directly requires all relevant parties to implement virtual learning (broto, miarsyah, & ristanto, 2021). the implementation of virtual or online learning is one of the learning models carried out during the pandemic, this is motivated by the principle of education policy during the covid-19 pandemic is to prioritize the health and safety of students, educators, education staff, families, and society in general, in the context of fulfilling educational services during the pandemic. virtual learning is also usually synonymous with the application of e-learning. it is a method or idea of education that incorporates information technology into teaching and learning, with the learning process being supported by an electronic or computer system. discussing about computer systems, there are of course many things that can be used in the learning process such as the implementation of google site as a platform in the teaching and learning process. however, students must continue to study even if it is done online, there are many platform that the teachers can use as media on online teaching and according to some research result regarding to teaching using web material shows positive result,(waloyo, khoiriyah, & farah, 2021) stated that the teachers basically agreed that implementing clil using web-based teaching materials has comprehensive impact for students due to its dualfocus, content, and language learning despite of the teachers’ lack of english proficiency, lack of appropriate teaching materials, and lack of ict facilities. according to the 2020 kemdikbud pusdatin online article, with the outbreak of the covid-19 virus, physical restrictions have been imposed in various public environments including the educational environment. physical restrictions imposed in schools make face-to-face learning difficult due to the various limitations that students and teachers have. there are many ways that can be circumvented to improve student learning outcomes during a pandemic, such as through a google site module so as not to consume a lot of internet quota compared to video conference. most people have some experience with visiting websites, and the world wide web constitutes an incredible resource to use with your students. webbased learning media able to improve student learning outcomes, this is due to the learning process student-centered and with many sources, with a mix of several pictures and videos will make students more interested in learning as well as with there will be more student web-based media get the material studied because models made according to child development and technology (peprizal & syah, 2020). google sites is a platform on google that allows you to easily create websites. in addition (jubaidah & zulkarnain, 2020) state that google sites is one of the products from google as a tool for creating websites. users can take advantage of google sites because they are easy to create and manage by ordinary users. so that anyone can use or create google sites, especially a subject teacher who is currently conducting wfh (work form home) learning activities during the covid-19 pandemic. the present of covid-19 pandemic environment has offered language teachers with several possible possibilities to utilize online apps and tools to enhance learners' language competence, there are several applications that have been used in the efl learning process such as: the blackboard ultra, podcasting, vodcasting, video conference, etc. (hakim, 2020). several research results have also revealed that the use of technology in learning english as a foreign language has a very important role, such as: (au-yong-oliveira, gonçalves, martins, & branco 2018) who stated important issue about the raise awareness about technology integration to the learning process among learners and parents. next, access to internet connection without disruption and bandwidth limitations is another technical aspect to be dealt with and resolved as it potentially discourages efl teachers from implementing new technologies to online classrooms (yadov, gupta, & khetrapal, 2018). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 131 adnan, ahmad, yusof, kamal, & kamal (2019), integration of vodcasting and podcasting into online classrooms was reported as successful. however, regardless of all the constructive steps taken and positive developments in language learning and teaching, there are certain issues that still need to be addressed. teaching english as a foreign language is not easy for several reasons. as we know that english is a foreign language, it certainly requires maximum effort in the teaching and learning process, especially during the current online learning period. for this reason, the process of selecting learning media is basically a very crucial thing. it must be done carefully so that it can be used and utilized properly, and in turn will be able to improve the quality of learning. the current learning model requires students to be able to learn independently. therefore, the learning process during the pandemic requires lecturers to be more interactive in choosing and implementing online learning media so that the material delivered is in accordance with learning outcomes. online learning can be implemented using an internet-based interactive model and a learning management system. for example, by using the google site this study aims to implement the google site as a learning platform in teaching english as a foreign language. method this research conducted on the basis of mixed method with central points on (1) the implementation of google site as learning platform for teaching efl, and (2) the extent the implementation of google site that facilitated students in learning english as foreign language. according to (creswell & creswell, 2018), a mixed method research is a procedure for collecting, analysing, and mixing both quantitative and qualitative methods in a single study or a series of studies to understand a research problem. therefore, the data were gathered from a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data namely open-ended interview. this research focused on 25 efl students of english education study program at universitas muhammadiyah palopo in academic year 2021/2022. the instruments used in this research namely: efl test that is used to find out the improvement of students’ ability in learning efl skill in pre-test and post-test, and interview that is used to find out the students’s perception toward the use of this google site in learning efl. the interview consisted of 6 open ended questions. next for techniques of collecting data in this preexperimental research namely efl test that is to find out the students’ the improvement of students’ ability in learning efl skill in pre-test and post-test. and then for the interview used to evaluate the students’ perception toward the use of this google site in learning efl. in analysing data, the researcher used both quantitative and qualitative. the data from efl test was analyzed quantitatively and the data from interview was analyzed qualitatively. results and discussion the first stage in this research before the implementation of the e-learning platform was development. the development of the efl teaching website was organized as follows: selection of topic in this research, the researcher preferred the topic academic writing. this is because the topic is a fairly complicated topic for students because they have to pay attention to several rules in its application so that something new and interesting is needed in the teaching process. through this research, the researcher tries to create something new for students in the writing course which so far has only been done in the conventional way, namely writing on a paper and then collecting it to the lecturer, which of course will make them bored. currently, with the development of this platform, researchers believe that it will create something different in terms of learning writing. developing the website after choosing a topic that is considered appropriate, the researcher then develops the learning media using the google site. the content in the google site was based on the outline as arranged in order as listed namely (1) home, (2) lesson plan, (3) teaching material, (4) middle and final test and (5) students project. jusriati, nasriandi, wisnu kurniadi, & ratna the implementation of google site as e-learning platform for teaching efl during covid-19 pandemic 132 figure 1. home page of the entire e-learning platform. the developed e-learning platform of academic writing has attracted the attention of students in its use. this e-learning platform utilize the students’ knowledge about academic writing. there several materials included in this platform such introduction of academic writing, the principles on it until the process and practices in writing. it can be seen in the following figure. figure 2. list of teaching materials not only that, this platform also displays a menu of projects or tasks that have been given to students. this certainly makes it easier for lecturers and students to control and check every project or task that has been done. the assignments or projects that have been collected can be checked via the url or link of each student that is loaded on the student project menu. it can be seen in the following figure. figure 3. list of students’ project after implementing the e-learning platform, the next step is calculating the students score in pre-test and post-test. however, the results show a difference. it can be seen in the following table about the distribution of students’ scores in english ability. where after conducting the treatment, the students’ english ability show an improvement. the mean score and standard deviation of the students’ english ability in pre-test and post-test are shown in table and figure below: table 1. students’ mean score and standard deviation of pre-test and post-test mean n std. deviation std. error mean pair 1 pre-test students 55.16 25 10.258 2.052 post-test students 70.52 25 8.856 1.771 table paired sample statistics above shows that the mean score of post-tests is higher than the mean score of pre-tests, (70.52 > 55.16). 70.52 is classified as good category. while,55.16 is classified as poor category. it means that by implementing google site in teaching efl is successful in improving the students’ english ability. the results of the students’ improvement in pre-test and post-test are shown in figure below: figure 4. students score in pre-test and post-test the pervious data associated with increasing student scores in the learning process as a result of this study is in line with the results stated by (broto et al., 2021) who found that the use of google site as a teaching material and media was very effective in its use. they can prove this by looking at the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 133 comparison of the mean value in the experimental class which has increased by 3 points. the students’ perception toward the implementation of google site in teaching efl. the next steps in this research are measuring the students’ perception toward the implementation of google site in teaching efl to determine the level of students’ acceptance of that website. from the questionnaire submitted to 25 students, there were eleven item statements that were asked, namely the students’ perception toward the implementation of google site in teaching and learning process. the following are the questions that have been given to the students. students’ response on the question based on the results of research that has been carried out, it was found that by using google site as a platform in teaching and learning efl can increase effectiveness in the efl learning process during the covid-19 pandemic. this can be needed through increasing student scores in the pre-test and post-test. not only that, this can also be confirmed through our online interview quote with the following students. researchers : “do lecturers always use media in efl learning?” ss : “yes, they do.” researchers : “what types of media are used by lecturers in efl learning?” ss : “google site, whatsapp, google classroom, zoom, google meet, blog, etc.” based on the results of the interview above, it can be said that basically lecturers in teaching have implemented various kinds of media as mentioned above, including the google site. to get more information related to the use of the google site in the learning process, the researcher again asks questions such as the following: researchers : “have you known the media (google site) before? if so, since when and through whom?” s1 : “ya, melalui guru bahasa indonesia di sma.” (yes, through an indonesian teacher in high school) s2 : “iya, sejak kegiatan english camp dan melalui dosen.” (yes, since the english camp activities and through lecturers.) s3 : “ya, saya tahu tentang google site melalui dosen saya yang mengajarkan tentang writing dan dia menggunakan itu agar proses belajar lebih menarik.” (yes, i know about google site through my lecturer who teaches about writing and he uses it to make the learning process more interesting.) s4 : “sejak semester 4 melalui salah satu dosen menerapkannya saat proses perkuliahan daring dimulai di kala pandemi.” (since semester 4, one of the lecturers has implemented it when the online lecture process began during the pandemic.) based on some of the quotes from the answers described above, we can see that some of them have known about the google site before through different people. but some of them also admit that through this research this is the first time they use the google site. furthermore, because the students were based on different prior knowledge related to the google site, the researcher was then interested in exploring more detailed information related to their experiences related to implementing the media in the learning process they experienced. researchers : “what is your experience related to the use of the media?” s1 : “pengalaman saya menggunakan media tersebut ialah saya sangat dibantu dalam menyalurkan isi pikiran yang ingin saya tuangkan dan dapat dibaca oleh semua orang.” (my experience using these media is that i am greatly assisted in channeling the contents of my thoughts that i want to pour and can be read by everyone.) s2 : “yahh sangat menarik,karna kita bisa menuangkan segala ide dan pemikiran kita dalam media tersebut.” (well, it's very interesting, because we can pour all our ideas and thoughts into the media.) s3 : “experience and knowledge saya bertambah, seru juga belajar sambil menggunakan teknologi. pengalaman saya belajar untuk membuat website yang belum pernah saya tau sebelumnya.” (my experience and knowledge has increased, it's also fun to learn while using technology. my experience is learning to create a jusriati, nasriandi, wisnu kurniadi, & ratna the implementation of google site as e-learning platform for teaching efl during covid-19 pandemic 134 website that i have never known before) s4 : “awal menggunakan agak susah, namun sekarang sudah bisa dan ternyata memudahkan dalam pembelajaran.” (at first it was a bit difficult to use, but now you can and it turns out to be easier in learning.) from the previous quotes we can see that there several students who said that by using the google site as a learning medium, of course, we can subconsciously increase our knowledge related to the use of technology. this is in line with research from (roodt & villiers, 2012) that state that google site gives positive impact on the students because it can improve the students general computer knowledge. after listing some of the answers given by the students, the researcher then asked their views and interests regarding the use of the google site. answers related to this can be seen in the following interview results. researchers : “how do you feel about learning with the use of these media? are you interested in taking lessons if the lecturer uses the media? if yes, why?” s1 : “tentunya saya sangat senang dan sangat berterima kasih kepada dosen yang terkait telah memberikan kami kesempatan untuk menggunakan media tersebut. dan ya tentunya saya tertarik jika selama pebelajaran daring ini dosen menggunakan google site ini karena lebih praktis.” (of course, i am very happy and very grateful to the lecturers concerned for giving us the opportunity to use these media. and yes, of course i am interested if during this online learning the lecturer uses this google site because it is more practical) s2 : “saya sangat beresemangat dalam proses belajar, karena kita diperkenalkan dengan salah satu cara baru dalam proses belajar daring. iya sudah pasti saya tertarik karena tidak terlalu ribet dan kita memiliki pengalaman baru soal media baru.” (i am very excited about the learning process, because we are introduced to a new way of learning online. yes, i'm definitely interested because it's not too complicated and we have new experiences about new media.) s3 : “rasanya seru karena mengenal media baru dan sangat bermanfaat pastinya apalagi berkaitan dengan pemanfaatan teknologi. dan yaa, saya setuju dan tertarik dengan pemanfaatan media itu sebab media tersebut bisa dijangkau atau diakses oleh siapapun.” (it feels exciting because i know new media and it is very useful, of course, especially related to the use of technology. and yes, i agree and are interested in using the media because the media can be reached or accessed by anyone) s4 : “saya merasa sangat senang, karena saya dapat mengetahui dan mempelajari hal yang baru. pastinya saya ya saya tertarik karena dengan menggunakan media tersebut mahasiswa jadi lebih muda dalam mengerjakan tugas tanpa kita harus bertemu secara langsung.” (i feel very happy, because i can know and learn new things. of course, yes, i am interested because by using this media, students will be younger in doing assignments without us having to meet in person.) based on some of the answers described above, we can conclude that overall, the students had a pleasant experience and interest in using the media because almost all of them showed interest through the answers they gave. it relates with results research that has been conducted by (parmar, patond, rathod, & ninave, 2020) who found that most of students on their research both students and faculties have a positive feedback on the use of teaching module based google site. after knowing the students' views related to the use of the media, the researcher then tried to ask about the advantages and disadvantages of the media and what suggestions or input from them related to the use of these media for the next learning process. researchers : “in your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages of google site media compared to other learning platforms such as lms ump etc.?” english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 135 s1 : “bagus, loginnya mudah tidak ribet, cuma kekurangannya yaitu tidak terlalu bagus jika akan melakukan editing via handphone.” (good, the login is easy and not complicated, the only drawback is that it is not very good if you are going to do editing via handphone.) s2 : “media ini dapat dijangkau oleh banyak orang tidak hanya mahasiswa yang ada di perguruan tinggi kita saja. kekurangannya yaitu jika melakukan editing menggunakan handphone kurang maksimal hasilnya karena layarnya kecil.” (this media can be reached by many people, not only students at our higher education. the drawback is that if you are editing using a handphone, the results are not optimal because the screen is small.) s3 : “kalau google site mudah, tidak membingungan seperti lms yang lain. tapi di google site belum disediakan form untuk absen oleh dosennya.” (if google site is easy, it is not confusing like other lms. but the google site has not provided a form for absent by the lecturer.) s4 : “tidak berbelit-belit dalam penggunaanya. misalnya pada saat akan melakukan editing tugas itu sangat mudah. tidak hanya itu ada banyak fitur-fitur menarik yang tersedia di dalamnya. menurut saya belum ada kekurangan yg saya temukan dan saya juga masih belajar menggunakan google site.” (not complicated to use. for example, when it comes to editing the task is very easy. not only that there are many interesting features available in it. i don't think i've found any flaws and i'm also still learning to use the google site.) although there were some disadvantages expressed according to the students, some of them still gave suggestions so that the use of this media could be implemented in the next lesson. from the previous quotes some of student state that by using google site will make it easier for students to access it and this can also be seen by others widely. it is accordance with the previous results research from (roodt & villiers, 2012) who state that the use of google site can encourage collaborative learning. in addition (parmar et al., 2020) who state that by using web-based teaching via google site can be accessed by students anytime comparing with traditional classroom. besides that, it also can be explored in depth by another one. the previous data discuss about advantages of google site that give good impression for the students so they suggest to use that media at a later stage. this can be seen in the quote below: researchers : “what are your suggestions regarding the use of the media (google site)?” s1 : “sekarang kita hidup di era modern di mana informasi mudah di akses di situs atau sosial media dengan adanya google site kita bisa membuat informasi dapat diakses oleh orang yang membutuhkan. untuk itu penggunaan media ini sangat membantu mahasiswa dalam berbagi informasi tentang tugas tugas kuliah dan lain sebagainya.” (now we live in a modern era where information is easily accessible on sites or social media with the google sites, we can make information accessible to people in need. for this reason, the use of this media is very helpful for students in sharing information about course assignments and so on.) s2 : “saran saya kedepannya agar tugas yang diberikan lebih menantang siswa untuk memaketkan tulisan tangan dengan desain yang berkualitas. agar pembaca / pengunjung site tidak bosan dengan apa yang dipaparkan. dan dengan adanya tantangan tersebut siswa juga bisa resah, nah disitulah ada timbul dari dalam diri siswa tersebut untuk melakukan improvement.” (my suggestion in the future is that the assignments given are more challenging for students to package handwriting with quality designs. so that readers / site visitors do not get bored with what is presented. and with these challenges students can also be restless, so that's where there is something that arises from within the student to make improvements.) s3 : “akan lebih baik jika google site digunakan untuk hal-hal positif jusriati, nasriandi, wisnu kurniadi, & ratna the implementation of google site as e-learning platform for teaching efl during covid-19 pandemic 136 misalnya dalam proses pembelajaan, seperti membagikan tugas berup cerita pengalaman di universitas, sekolah, ataupun pengalaman bekerja. hal yang juga dapat bermanfaat bagi semua orang.” (it would be better if the google site was used for positive things, for example in the learning process, such as sharing assignments in the form of stories about experiences at university, school, or work experiences. it can also be useful for everyone.) s4 : “perbanyak memberikan latihan menggunakan google site dengan latihan-latihan sebelumya. penggunaan google site sebagai media pembelajaran menurut saya sudah bagus, krna mahasiswa dapat menggunakan media yang lebih variatif.” (give lots of practice using the google site with the previous exercises. the use of the google site as a learning medium in my opinion is good, because students can use more varied media.) from the quotes, it can be seen that most of students suggested that the implementation of the google site in learning should be continued because it is very interesting where with this website, they can share about the tasks that have been made not only limited to lecturers or colleagues in only the scope of the university can see it but many people. however, it is better to give more challenging assignments in order to improve students' abilities. for this reason, in the covid-19 pandemic era, the implementation of google site as an e-learning platform is very interesting and makes it easier for students.this is in accordance with what has been disclosed by (agad, pitonang, terrado, salic-hairulla, gomez, nabua, & yuenyong, 2019) on their research which states that developing teaching materials using the google site can attract the attention of learners and is certainly very helpful. conclusion through this research, we can draw a conclusion that by implementing google site as an e-learning platform in efl learning, it can increase students' ability in efl learning so that it can be said to be effective. furthermore, related to student perceptions, overall they are interested in implementing the platform and agree if it is still used in further learning. references adnan, a., ahmad, m., yusof, a., kamal, m. m., & kamal, n. m. 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(2021). gsite development as teaching materials and science learning media to improve junior high school student learning outcomes on plant structure materials. abjadia, 6(1), 20–29. https://doi.org/10.18860/abj.v6i1.11398 creswell, w. j., & creswell, j. d. (2018). research design: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. in journal of chemical information and modeling (vol. 53, issue 9). hakim, b. (2020). technology integrated online classrooms and the challenges faced by the efl teachers in saudi arabia during the covid-19 pandemic. international journal of applied linguistics and english literature, 9(5), 33. https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.9n.5p.33 jubaidah, s., & zulkarnain, m. r. (2020). penggunaan google sites pada pembelajaran matematika materi pola bilangan smp kelas viii smpn 1 astambul. lentera: jurnal pendidikan, 15(2), 68– 73. https://jurnal.stkipbjm.ac.id/index.php/jpl/article/v iew/1183 parmar, p., patond, s., rathod, g., & ninave, s. (2020). google site as a tool for teaching undergraduate students in forensic medicine. indian journal of forensic medicine and toxicology, 14(4), 427– 431. https://doi.org/10.37506/ijfmt.v14i4.11512 peprizal, & syah, n. (2020). pengembangan media pembelajaran berbasis web pada mata kuliah english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 137 fisika modern. jurnal ilmiah pendidikan dan pembelajaran, 4(3), 455–467. http://repository.untad.ac.id/3668/ roodt, s., & villiers, c. de. (2012). using google sites as an innovative learning tool at undergraduate level in higher education. in ecis 2012 proceedings. syarifah, i., & zainil, y. (2021). teaching and learning challenges in efl classrooms during the pandemic era. proceedings of the ninth international conference on language and arts (icla 2020), 539(icla 2020), 111–115. https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210325.020 waloyo, a. a., khoiriyah, k., & farah, r. r. (2021). teachers’ perception to clil and web-based material implementation in a primary school. erjee, 9(2), 227–234. http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee/article /view/4347 jusriati, nasriandi, wisnu kurniadi, & ratna the implementation of google site as e-learning platform for teaching efl during covid-19 pandemic 138 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 47 the factors of students’ investment in learning english during online learning at one of smpn in musi rawas yenni anggraini master’s program in language education, universitas sriwijaya email: yennianggraini98@gmail.com eryansyah eryansyah (corresponding author) master’s program in language education, universitas sriwijaya email: eryansyah@unsri.ac.id sary silvhiany master’s program in language education, universitas sriwijaya email: ssilvhiany@unsri.ac.id apa citation: anggraini, y., eryansyah, e., & silvhiany, s. (2023). the factors of students’ investment in learning english during online learning at one of smpn in musi rawas. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 47-52. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.6339 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 17-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction in this globalization era, there are many aspects influencing people’s life, such as economy, culture, and even language. language is a means of communication that conveys meaning and message to each other. it helps people to express their thoughts, emotions, feelings, and desires. thus, language is an important parts of human life because every human being needs a language to communicate with one another. in this era, english is spoken by millions of people in the world. it has usually been used to interact effectively with people from all over the world. english has achieved the status of being a universally comprehensible international lingua franca (o'neil, 2018). english as a global language can be used as a first, second or foreign language. english's distinctive quality as a global language suggests that it is primarily utilized for communication in most countries throughout the world since information is transmitted intercountries (rao, 2019). the information is delivered in a way that takes into account codes in a multilingual society. therefore, many people consider the need to master english for their life (ahmad, 2016). more than ever, in one of smpns in musi rawas, english is a compulsory subject from grade 7 to grade 9. learning english is expected to be able to reach the functional level, where the students are able to communicate spoken and written english to solve daily problems. the communication skills included are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. according to the ministry of national education in kepmendiknas no. 22 of 2006, english is a tool to communicate spoken and written. therefore, english subject was directed to develop those skills, since the students were able to communicate in english at a certain literacy level. the spread of covid-19 pandemic had reached many areas in our life. in this pandemic era, for abstract: most of the students’ reason decided to invest in learning english was because of the perceived capital that provided them with benefits for their academics as well as their future careers. this study was a qualitative narrative inquiry which was aimed to investigate the factors affecting the students’ investment in learning english during online learning at one of smpns in musi rawas. the instruments used to collect data in this study were interviews and documentation. seven ninth graders at one of smpns in musi rawas were involved as respondents in this study. findings from the interviews indicated that the most dominant factors affecting the ninth students to invest in learning english was family support, the second dominant factor was to get better english achievement, and the last dominant factor was past experience. the findings from documentation collected in this study confirmed that the seven students had put some efforts in their investment in learning english in order to acquire their goals in the present and also future. they also wanted to improve their english language skills. keywords: investment; learning english; online learning; perceived benefits. yenni anggraini, eryansyah eryansyah, & sary silvhiany the factors of students’ investment in learning english during online learning at one of smpn in musi rawas 48 instance, it is undeniable that learning is done online. the students have to use some applications to participate in every meeting. therefore, the student must be able to master in english, in order the students to do their tasks and homework, especially in academic texts by themselves. anwar and wardhono (2019) argue that learners need english for academic purposes (eap) in order to study at an english-speaking university or college, or because they need to access english-language academic text. then, during the online learning, the teacher always gave assignments or quizzes in everyweek, and sometimes the material of the assignments was not explained by the teachers previously. therefore, the students had to understand the material indenpendently by themselves, because they wanted to get good grades in academics, especially in the english subject (adger et al., 2018; murray & christison, 2019). considering to meet the demands of english proficiency, the students had to begin to invest in learning english. according to teng (2019), the idea of investment might more effectively describe how students' relationships with the target language are socially and historically created, as well as how ambivalent they are about learning and using english. assalahi (2018) also states that the motivation to learn english actually is not the same as being involved in investing in language learning, because the investment involves commitment from students and the practice community. similarly, moná and rodríguez (2019) also explain that, despite their motivation to learn a language, students may put little effort into their studies as a result of marginalization, racism, intolerance, classism, and other forms of prejudice. these inequitable relations of power could affect learners’ investment despited their high level of motivation to learn the foreign language. in other words, it could be explained that the students might have a high motivation in learning english, but it did not imply that their investments were same as their motivation (jiang et al., 2020; sung, 2020). the notion of investment was firstly introduced by norton in 1995, she had mentioned that investment perceived language learners as having a complex social history and multiple desire. the main reason language learners invested in the target language because they did so in order to gain a wider range of material and symbolic resources (darvin, 2019; darvin & norton, 2021; lu et al., 2020). the students were aware that their investment in the target language could help them to acquire the resources which would increase the value of their social power and cultural capital. learners invested in learning english because they hoped that it would provide a wider range of material and symbolic resources that increase the value of their cultural capital and social power (darvin & norton, 2017). teng (2019) believes that investment depends on learners’ perception of affordance, benefits for the self, or the action opportunities grasp by the learners. thus, it understood that the belief of investment spilled the socially constructed desires and goals of the learner between the learner and the destination language.therefore, the model of investment is located at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology (darvin & norton, 2017; lado & quijano, 2020; leeman, 2018). however, this study was only focused on the capital of investment. regarding to capital and investment, darvin and norton (2017) further states that language learners invest in language knowing that it may aid them to gain greater resources that will increase the value of learners' social and cultural capital. then, drawing on bourdieu (2020), we use capital to recognize that power exists in different forms that is from the economic to the cultural and social. therefore, from the statement above we could illustrate that students affordance in their language learning investment was influenced by the benefits provided by his family. it understood that the background and context of students learning were related to the outcome of the individual's learning investment. darvin and norton (2017) also states that investing and learning must be worth the time, effort, and money spent. it could be concluded that the gains from language learning were expected to be comparable to the energy utilized during the learning process. as darvin and norton (2017) argues, if learners invest in a language, they do so with the understanding that they would acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which would increase the value of their cultural capital and social power.therefore, from the statement above we could illustrate that students affordance in their language learning investment was influenced by the benefits provided to theirs. it understood that the background and context of students learning were related to the outcome of the individual's learning investment (rintaningrum et al., 2017). thus, with the purpose explained before, this paper addressed the following research question: 1) what were the factors of students' investment in learning english during online learning? english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 49 method the present study employed a narrative inquiry approach to know the efl students’ investment in learning english and also explained the interests of the participants during their english learning process especially in this covid-19. clandinin and connelly as cited in haydon and van der riet (2017), states that “narrative inquiry is a way of understanding and inquiring into experience through collaboration between writer and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus” (p.20). it understood that narrative inquiry was seen in a variety of ways and tends to transcenda number of different approaches and traditions such as biography, autobiography, lifestory, and life course research. this study was conducted at one of smpns in musi rawas, involving ninth-grade students. there was a total of 7 students involved in this study. the students who rarely came to school were not involved in this study because they were hard to find m in the school and they were also not active in the class. the data of this study were collected by asking the participants' opinions. the method to collect the data required a narrative inquiry approach by using some instruments, they were interview and documentation. this study was aimed to find out about what factors affecting the students’ investment in learning english during online learning. the participants were allowed to use english, indonesian, or translanguaging to describe their responses. it would avoid the language barrier that might hinder their ability to express their opinions. in this present study, the analysing of data focused on the interview. the datas were analysed by thematic analysis. the first thing to do once the data obtained was gaining familiarity, then proceed to generating initial codes; after that, searching for themes. after the theme was determined, the next process was reviewing the theme and followed by defining and naming themes. the last step was producing the report. the interview was done in semi-structure interview type. it was used to analyse the students investment in learning english. the responses of interviewswere recorded during the interviewing and they were transcribed descriptively, coded and the interpreted with narrative analysis by pointing out investment in learning english through sequences of narrative procedures by adapting creswell’s model of qualitative data analysis (nawawi, 2018). results and discussion the results are presented related to the research question, namely the factors affecting students to invest in learning english. the results of this study were taken from the interviews results. the factors why learners invested in learning english based on the interviews from the participants, there were three various factors why the ninth grade students in one of smpn in musi rawas invested in learning english. past experience the first factor was past experience. there were two students who wanted to follow their brother footstep. the students were fino and ani (psuedonym). fino's brother had become a police officer right now at lubuk linggau. he could be a police successfully right now because of their proficient in english. while ani’s brother had become an english teacher at one of english course in muara beliti since he was at senior high school. thus, fino and ani were really proud of their brother's achievements. then, they started to invest in learning english right now. they wanted to get a better job like their brtohers in the future. “hmmm... i was motivated by my brother who was currently a police in lubuk linggau. he was very proficient in english. thus, he can graduate to become a police. my parents also really support me in learning english. they said that english would help me easier to get a job later. one of them was like working in a foreign company, one of the requirement was to be able in speaking english.” (fino) “i liked english because of the inspiration and motivation from my brother who has taught at one course in muara beliti since he was in high school. i wanted to follow his footsteps, at least i was able to make my own money although i was still a student. my brother and parent always supported me to be proficient in english, because they thought english was very important. english would help me easier to get a job later.” (ani) from the statements above, it could be concluded that the students believed investing in learning english would help them to achieve their success as same like their brothers. it shown that the factor came from themselves, which means that the factor was included as extrinsic factor. those who are extrinsically motivated perform a certain action not because they truly enjoy it, but because yenni anggraini, eryansyah eryansyah, & sary silvhiany the factors of students’ investment in learning english during online learning at one of smpn in musi rawas 50 of a reward that is available in their environment (burda et al., 2018; buzdar et al., 2017; locke & schattke, 2019). it understood that extrinsic motivation involved doing something because they wanted to earn a reward (cherry, 2022). legault (2020) also states that the extrinsic activities is an individual engages to an expected outcome rather than for one’s sake. therefore, the students invested in learning english was because they wanted to followed their brothers' success footsteps. darvin and norton’s (2017) analysis, discusses if learners invest in language, they do so with the understanding that they will acquire more symbolic and material resources, which in turn will increase the value of their cultural capital and social power. family support the next factor was family support. there were 5 students who stated that their influences to invest in learning english were because of their parents encouragement. in past, their parent could not speak english at all, because they were just a farmer, laborer, and trader who only stayed at a village. thus, their parents hoped that their children might learn english well, in order they could get good grades in academics right now, especially in english subject. their parents also believed that english would help their children more easily in finding a job in the future. thus, their children was taking an offline or online english course right now, in order their children's careers would be better in the future. their parents hoped by investing in learning english, their childrens’ dreams will come true. “initially, my parents who motivated me to learn english. however, as time went by, it was myself that pushed me to learn english. i realized that my self who need english. my parent could only provide a support and encouragement for me to learn english. my parent wanted me to be able to achieve my goal of becoming an english teacher in future. therefore, i have to be good at english.” (leni) “my parents. because they always remind me about the importance of english. they always ask me to learn english, like taking courses or learning in my own way (listening to english songs), to improve my ability in learning english.” (hani) “as i mentioned before, my parents always said if i was proficient in english, then my career would also be better in the future.my father previously asked me to join with one of english course in muara beliti. however, my mother didn't allow it, because our house was far from muara beliti. therefore, my parent bought me a laptop to help me learn more easily, especially in learning english.” (cinta) “of course. one example was like my parent bought the internet quota for me to study english. they did not support me to take an english course was because the location of my house was far from muara beliti, which made my parent did not allow me to join there. also there was no english tutor in my village. therefore, i had to learn english indenpendently by internet.” (veny) “my parents supported me to take an english class to increase my knowledge in learning english. the form of support they provided was a financial, because as i talked before that they did not speak english at all. beside learning english at school, taking online class was my another way to learn english. my parent did not really think much about my learning process, because they had tried to help me as best they could.” (santi) based on the five students's statements above, they explained that their parents always gave an advice about the important of learning english. their parents also wanted their children got a good grade in academics, expecially in english subject. therefore, they began to learn english by some ways, like listening to english songs, taking an offline english course or online english course. althought their parents were a farmer or laborrer in her village. however, they really appreciated the importance of learning english for their children, since they did their best to support their children in learning english, such as encouraging her to take english courses because her parents could not speak english at all. thus, their english learning were stimulated both through instrumental motivation and acts as a symbolic force for them and their parents. extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are important for children’s success, motivation from parents is a separate form of motivation that has a more direct and positive influence on student achievement (adamma et al., 2018; kumar & hossain, 2017; tripathi et al., 2018). it means that if parents supported their children’s invested in english by facilitating language learning opportunities, children are more likely to achieve success sooner. bariroh (2018) estimated that the kids' parent-related motivation or what they called parent-oriented motivation would give the positive after effects of parental involvement and its part in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 51 understudies' engagement and accomplishment. better english achievement the last factor was getting a better english achievement. there were 3 students who stated that when learning was carried out online, the students had to be able to understand english material independently, because their tecaher rarely explained the material in detail. therefore, the students was decided to study english right now because they needed to be able to do their taks or quizzes that given by their teacher in every week. then, they wanted to get a better grade in english subject. their grade in english subject would also affect their academic grade. “the most pressing reason for me to study english right now is the learning condition that is carried out online. now, the teacher often gives assignments without explained the material at all. that's why, we have to understand the material independently. we have to submit the assignments on time. if i just stay silent, my academic score will be low eaxctly. therefore, my parent and my brother asked me to join one of english course in muara beliti immediately.” (hani) “english was one of the compulsory subjects in my current school. especially when learning was carried out online, i had to be able to understand the english material independently. thus, in my opinion, english was a must for me to learn in order to improve my academic grade and also my career in the future.” (veny) the students explained that when learning was done online, they had to be able to understand the english material independently. they had to be able to do the assignments and quizzes given by their teacher in every week. thus, according to them, investing in learning english would help them to get good grades in academics, especially in english subject. according to wang (2018), intrinsic motivation is acting in a way that is motivated by internal rewards. in other words, you are motivated to engage in an activity because you find it to be inherently satisfying. it was in line with the statement that learners invested in learning english was because they hoped that it will provide a wider range of symbolic resources that increased the value of their cultural capital and social power (bourdieu, 2018; darvin & norton, 2017). conclusion the seven participants at one of smpn in musi rawas realized how important to invest in learning english to achieve the desired goals. the most dominant factor influenced the students to invest in their english learning was the family support. their parents believed that investing in learning english would help their children in getting a good academic and their career in the future. the family support could be in the form of material and nonmaterial. the material support could be seen from the support of parents by financing their english education and facilitating the needs of the participants. while the form of non-material support could be seen from the encouragement of parents in providing advices and overviews to participants about the importance of learning english for their future. the second dominant factor was a better english achievement. the students explained that the reasons they invested in learning english was because of the learning situation changing. when learning done online, their teachers often give the assignments and quizzes in everyweek (without material explanation before). they had to understand the english material indenpendently. then, the last dominant factor was past experience. the students explained that they want to follow their brothers’ success footsteps. they added that their brothers could be a police and a teacher at a course successfully because they were proficient in english. therefore, the students were motivated to invest in learning english. references adamma, o. n., ekwutosim, o. p., & unamba, e. c. 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(2018). handbook of research on program development and assessment methodologies in k20 education. igi global. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 901 creative writing and innovative process of beowulf virtual drama undergraduate students karwandi magister program of language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: karwandis@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) magister program of language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id didi suhendi magister program of language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: didisuhendi@fkip.unsri.ac.id margaretha dinar sitinjak magister program of language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: magiedinar@yahoo.com eryansyah magister program of language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: eryansyah@unsri.ac.id sardianto markos siahaan magister program of language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: mr.sardi@unsri.ac.id apa citation: karwandi., inderawati, r., sitinjak, m. d., eryansyah., & siahaan, s. m. (2022). creative writing and innovative process of beowulf virtual drama undergraduate students. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 901-910. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6323 received: 25-07-2022 accepted: 26-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 abstract: pandemic covid-19 forced education sector to have no more face-to-face classes since 2020. unluckily, students from drama classes no longer performed on the stage even though they have well-prepared for the performance. this article highlighted four main problems: 1) how creative were students in writing drama script for virtual drama performance? 2) what were innovative processes created by the students for virtual drama performance? 3) what were the problem faced by the students in writing drama script and performing virtual drama performance? and 4) how were the lecturers’ role for the students in writing drama script and performing virtual drama performance? to answer these questions, the study employed online observation, interview, and documentation to dig up the research questions. the result of the study showed that by using documented-limited creative writing, most of the students were able in creating the drama script collaboratively and they utilized zoom platform and canva application through these preliminary investigation, detailed investigation, development, testing and validation, and full production processes. as a whole, the students were creative and innovative during the process of virtual drama performance and it could make the process of teaching and learning are worthwhile because lecturers and students had collaborated very well. key words: creative writing; innovative process; virtual drama performance. introduction the presence of the covid-19 pandemic in indonesia, in particular, has brought various bad impacts in various sectors, including the education sector. according to the ministry of education and culture (2022), at least, there are three potential prolonged negative social impacts that threaten students due to the effects of the mailto:rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id mailto:magiedinar@yahoo.com mailto:eryansyah@unsri.ac.id karwandi, rita inderawati, didi suhendi, margaretha dinar sitinjak, eryansyah, & sardianto markos siahaan creative writing and innovative process of beowulf virtual drama undergraduate students 902 covid-19 pandemic. the three impacts include dropping out of school, decreasing learning achievement and violence against children and external risks. in indonesia, distance learning (pembelajaran jarak jauh – herein after referred to as pjj) ranging from kindergartens to universities started at the end of march, 2021 to impede and cope with the spread and transmission of covid-19. nevertheless, there were a lot of problems arising since the schools were required to carry out online learning without proper preparation. there are three problems faced by the students and teachers. the first is the students’ difficulty in understanding the subject materials, the second is the teachers’ ability to use the technology in online learning (inderawati, 2011; inderawati; 2017; inderawati et al., 2021; septiyanti et al., 2020), and the third is the limitation in the learning controlling (efriana, 2021). consequently, the government was encouraged to issue policies supporting the schools to run the learning process smoothly, specifically by holding webinars and quota assistance for teachers and students. the lecturers begin to innovate by participating in various online trainings and creating learning videos. in addition, they attempt to use online meetings with students in the learning process, for example using zoom meetings, google meetings, and so on (oktarina et al., 2022; inderawati et al., 2018; inderawati et al., 2019). as one of the language skills, writing is very important for students to practice and improve. through writing, the students can express their ideas and thoughts into a written form. creative skills plays an important role in language learning such as drama, music, storytelling, projects, and creative writing all require a lot of creativity and imagination (pentury et al., 2020; septiandini et al., 2021). the creative writing is an imaginative, crafted, productive and original writing process (inderawati, 2022). it generally covers all areas of fiction, such as novels, short stories, poetry, etc., but can also include non-fiction, such as feature articles for magazines. furthermore, the creative writing occurs when the writers (the learners) write in their own language creatively and use their own writing style (harshini, 2020). in line with the previous ideas, when students are writing a text, they may not be afraid, they can express the ideas in their mind enthusiastically and free (inderawati et al., 2018). in other words, the creative writing is the process of writing where the writers (learners) write their ideas creatively using their own language and their own writing style to produce a new idea (inderawati, 2022). innovative process is a series of steps between the conception of an idea and its implementation. innovation is the process of developing new solutions to defined problems (faludi, 2015). on the other hand, the young learners respond very positively to opportunities to co-create the dramatic narratives that bring these worlds into being (hulse & owens, 2017), to express their ideas in performing the virtual drama. therefore, to improve the students’ achievement there are some activities that can be conducted, one of them is by staging a virtual drama performed by the students and facilitated by the lecturers entitled “beowulf”, the old english poetry. drama is any activity in which students are asked to describe themselves or play other people in imaginary situations (angelianawati, 2019). a virtual drama is a drama staging activity performed virtually, it can be conducted through an online platform such as zoom (cziboly & bethlenfalvy, 2020). this virtual drama entitled “beowulf” was a collaboration between teachers and students to fulfill the final assignment of literature in english language teaching class. in carrying out virtual dramas that are still very rarely performed by lecturers and students, the obstacles that might occur are the ability of the teachers and students to use ict. supporting applications also enlivened technological developments during the covid-19 pandemic, for example google classrooms, rumah belajar, ruang guru, canva, virtual reality and so on. however, inderawati (2022) qualitatively focused her study on the innovative process of drama virtual performance. based on the perpetual observation conducted by the researchers, there were no other performances conducted during the spread of covid-19 pandemic. however, the researchers discovered that the drama existed in virtual performance on campus and also had the experience of writing the script creatively and performing virtual drama in the classroom. to carry out virtual drama performance, deep creative writing and innovative process between lecturers and students are required because these processes require long preparation and time in order to produce a spectacular performance even during the covid-19 pandemic where the lecturers and students could not meet face-to-face one another, instead they could only do it through virtual meetings. for this reason, the teachers and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 903 students had to be able to understand how to use the applications used in staging this virtual drama, for example, by combining zoom meetings and canva. this study focused on the students’ creativity in writing drama script and the process to perform beowulf virtual drama. to find out the creative writing and innovative process in implementing virtual drama performance, there were several previous studies related to the preliminary study already conducted by the researcher. the first is coming from houlihan and morris (2022) finding that performing drama digitally can improve students’ confidence, share their ideas and increase their collaboration to each other. in addition, the drama which is performed virtually can connect the real space and the virtual space thorough desktop drama (li, 2022). furthermore, after learning the role playing and writing the drama script, the students become more self-confidence to act and capable to conduct drama performance (dahlan, 2022). in conclusion, the previous related studies proved that the virtual drama could be performed and had significant effects for the students. based on three previous studies, the researcher conducted study entitled “creative writing and innovative process of virtual drama performance of the 4th semester students of english education study program of universitas sriwijaya.” this study was conducted to find out how creative were students in writing drama script for virtual drama performance, what were innovative processes created by the students for virtual drama performance, what problems were faced by the students in writing drama script and performing virtual drama and how were the lecturers’ role for the students in writing drama script and performing virtual drama performance. method a research design is a plan or strategy devised to conduct research and make it practical, so that research questions can be answered based on evidence and warrants (cohen et al., 2018). in addition, creswell and creswell (2018) state that qualitative methods rely on text and image data, have unique steps in data analysis, and use multiple designs. the research adopted a case study method located within an interpretive theoretical framework. the purposes of this case study were to investigate students’ creative writing, innovative process, students’ problem and lecturers’ role in performing virtual drama performance. therefore, the researcher used qualitative data to answer the research questions and to optimize the research findings. the participants of this study were the 4th semester undergraduate students of english education study program of sriwijaya university for the academic year 2020-2021. the total number of the participants was 34 students consisting of 8 male students and 26 female students. there are five steps in conducting this study as follows: (1) preparing and organizing the data using fieldnotes. (2) reviewing and exploring the data. . (3) developing a data coding system. (4) assigning codes to the data in qualitative interview analysis, going through each participant’s responses and tagging them with codes in a spreadsheet. (5) identifying recurring themes. linking codes together into cohesive, overarching themes. the data collection is obtained through observation, interview, and documentation to investigate how students were creative in writing drama script and what innovative processes are in implementing virtual drama performance. table 1. research problem and the instruments no research problems instruments obser vation inter view docum entation 1. how creative were students in writing drama script for virtual drama performance? √ √ √ 2. what were innovative processes created by the students for virtual drama performance? √ √ √ 3. what problem were faced by the students in writing drama script and performing virtual drama performance? √ √ √ 4. how were the lecturers’ role for the students in writing drama script and performing virtual drama performance? √ √ √ the data were analyzed by using qualitative data analysis methods to get the results, including (1) preliminary exploration of the data by reading through the transcripts and writing memos; (2) coding the data by segmenting and labeling the text; (3) using codes to develop themes by aggregating similar codes together; (4) connecting and interrelating themes; and (5) constructing a narrative (creswell, 2012). the interview results are qualitatively analyzed by coding: each segment (e.g., group of words) was assigned to a semantic reference category, as systematically and rigorously as possible. karwandi, rita inderawati, didi suhendi, margaretha dinar sitinjak, eryansyah, & sardianto markos siahaan creative writing and innovative process of beowulf virtual drama undergraduate students 904 results and discussion the students’ creativity in writing drama script the creative drama script was written by the students after the lecturers divided the scenes into 34 scenes based on the total of the students. so, all the students had the same position as writers. the students started to rewrite their scenes based on the situation they got. they had to learn the characters, characteristics, plot, setting, point of view, and conflict. besides that, they reported into their whatsapp group. they discussed to each other to connect one scene to another. the lecturers gave the suggestions if the scenes had a mistake or did not relate to the story. they also put the supported pictures and sounds by using links to strengthen their drama scripts. all of the writing processes were carried out through their homes since the covid-19 pandemic still exists. the interview data showed that the students were creative in writing drama script because all the students took a part and wrote the scenes by themselves (one student wrote one scene) from their home virtually, also connected the script to another script so that it could become unity and related to each other. besides that, they discussed the script in whatsapp group so that it helped them to transcribe and compose the drama script creatively. it is supported by yang (2022) stating that creative writing tells information in such a way that the reader can get emotional while reading it. furthermore, he states that good writing can help writers to connect with readers through good communication, and clearly express the thoughts, ideas, and opinions of the author. based on this information, the students were creative in writing drama script for the virtual drama performance because they could connect the writers and the readers by sharing the ideas through drama script with the new ways and valuable. figure 1. the process of creative writing done by participant although the scenes had been divided by the lecturers, it did not restrict them to write the drama script creatively because they used their own style in writing. in order they did not write out of the box, they had to see the scene to write the drama script. table 2 shows the percentage of students’ creativity in writing drama script. table 2. the percentage of students’ creativity in writing drama script no students’ creativity frequency (%) 1. the students wrote the drama script by themselves 34 100% 2. the students could use music and background through the links 34 100% 3. students discussed together (collaboration) through whatsapp group 34 100% 4. students could give the elements of drama 34 100% table 2 showed that there were 34 students (100 %) could write the drama script by themselves through their homes, 34 students (100%) also could use music and background to support their writing by giving the links, there were also 34 students (100%) could feel the collaborations among them because they did discussion together through their whatsapp group and there were 34 students (100%) could understand and give the elements of drama. this is supported by greenawald (2021) stating that creative writing is any form of writing that uses the author's own style or by combining several writing styles with the aim of conveying the story of a story in a new way so that it makes the reader entertained and surprised. the innovative processes created by the students for virtual drama performance they had discussion about the beowulf story and its characters in the whatsapp group supervised by the lecturers. then they got the scene one by one from the lecturers and they started to record in the canva application. after they recorded in the canva application, the lecturers and the students discussed together. after all the records had been presented, the lecturers divided the characters based on the total number of the students. in this chance, the students also discussed to decide which characters were suitable for them. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 905 these could be said as the innovative processes because the students had used the recent apps to be applied for their process in performing the virtual drama such as canva and zoom. besides, the recording and performing their drama virtually from their home and it was very different when the drama performed on the stage formerly. they could also use the online background and sound by using link. this findings were strengthened by inderawati (2022) that the students were really creative as well as innovative as they could create drama performed virtually by utilizing zoom platform as the virtual stage and canva application for the virtual setting. figure 2. the innovative process done by the students (discussing in the whatsapp group) figure 3. the innovative process done by the students (writing the drama script from their home, one student one scene) figure 4. the innovative process done by the students figure 5. the innovative process done by the students (the students recorded their drama through zoom) meanwhile they divided the characters, the lecturers gave the students limited time to record in zoom meeting because the video would be combined. there were some students having 2-3 minutes for recording. they had to record based on the characters on the scene so some students could record themselves more than one especially the main characters of the story. they had to record over and over until they got the best video to be presented. the lecturers would tell in their whatsapp group if their videos were good or not. if they were not good, they had to record again until their videos were better. it is also supported by olimov and mamurova (2021) that the innovative process can be done if the process can manage the changing happened to the process itself. in addition, silva et al. (2016) divide three main steps of innovation, namely idea of something new, development of something new, and commercialization of something new. figure 2,3,4, and 5 showed that all the students did their innovative processes by telling the story in their whatsapp group, recording in canva application, recording the scenes in zoom meeting, and writing their drama script through their home virtually. these could be said as innovative processes because they had used the recent apps to be applied for their process in performing virtual drama such as canva and zoom. besides that, they did the process of recording and performing virtual drama from their home (online) even they had to recorded over and karwandi, rita inderawati, didi suhendi, margaretha dinar sitinjak, eryansyah, & sardianto markos siahaan creative writing and innovative process of beowulf virtual drama undergraduate students 906 over until they got the best scene (video). the background and the sound used through online indicated the process of innovation. figure 6. the opening of virtual drama for scene 4 figure 6 above showed the opening for scene 4 narrated by the students. in this process, the students recorded the scene through zoom together with their pairs. the narrator (one of the students) told that the grendel always attacked the hrothgar’s kingdom. in the beginning of the video the students narrated the story accompanied by the sound. besides that, the student gave the opening background by showing the sky. the sound can be seen in the link from the drama script for scene 4 below. figure 7. the drama script for scene 4 figure 8. the characters were having a conversation in scene 32 figure 8 showed that the advisor gave the suggestion to the king about the contest for fighting the grendel. it could be seen that the students did the innovative process when they used another background at the same time and scene. the background was downloaded and changed through an online platform. figure 9. the geats wanted to meet king hrothgar figure 9 showed that the geats came to visit hrothgar’s kingdom and the guards asked him what to do. from the picture, it could be seen that the students could use different background, characters and sound at the same time and scene. it is proved that they could do the innovative process very well in performing beowulf virtual drama. figure 10. beowulf’s dialogue for scene 4 the problem faced by the students in writing drama script in writing drama script, there were some problems faced by the students for instance, the students got difficult to suit the condition with the story and also the setting because it played virtually, the students were also confused how to connect their scene with the other scenes because they did not meet to each other, the students also needed more vocabularies because there were some new words used to make the dialogue interesting, and the last they needed more time to write because they had to write over and over to get a good scene and related to other scenes to support the beowulf story. table 4 shows the percentage of students’ problems in writing drama script as follows. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 907 table 3. the percentage of students’ problem in writing drama script no students’ problem frequency (%) 1. adjusting the drama situation 11 32.35% 2. connecting the scenes 8 23.53% 3. lack of vocabulary 7 20.59% 4. lack of time 8 23.53% table 3 showed that there were eleven students (32.35 %) had difficulties in adjusting the drama situation, eight students (23.53%) had difficulty in connecting the scenes. there were seven students (20.59%) getting difficult in creating some words because of lack of dictionary and there were eight students (23.53%) had more time in writing drama script. these were found when they did creative writing in drama script. in addition, the observation and documentation data showed that the students had similar problems about writing the drama script. most of them needed more time to write beside that they needed to imagine the story in order the scene that they made to be more interesting and unique. they also needed to connect between one scene and another and if it did not connect, they had to rewrite so it could be the whole scenes supporting to each other. all of the problems above could be overcome by having discussion among the students and lecturers. the problem faced by the students to process virtual drama performance in doing the innovative process of virtual drama performance, there were some problems faced by the students for instance, the students had difficulty to have a good connection in using zoom and canva applications, the students were also confused how to edit the videos because they did not meet each other, the students also got difficult to use costumes and light to support their performance, and the last they needed more time to record their scene. most of them needed more time to write beside that they needed to imagine the story in order the scene which they made could be more interesting and unique. they also needed to connect between one scene and another and if it did not connect, they had to rewrite so it could be the whole scenes which was supported to each other. all the above problems could be overcome by having discussion among students and lecturers. besides, if the area (remote or rural area) does not have enough internet access and it could disrupt the students’ preparation and performance in staging virtual drama. the result of the interview is presented in figure 11 as follows. figure 11. the problem faced by the students to perform virtual drama performance figure 11 showed that ten students (29.41%) had bad internet signals when they recorded the scenes because they lived out of the city. some of them lived in the village which did not have good internet signals. there were fifteen students (44.12%) having lack of editing. some of them were still new in having a record and an edit by using canva or zoom. in addition, there were five students (14.71%) had difficulty to find the costumes to support their performance, and there were four students (11.76%) had difficulty to use appropriate time because they had to repeat the scenes over and over. it could be said that there were fifteen students (44.12%) having problems to process the virtual drama performances but the rest, nineteen students (55.88%) had no problem to process the virtual drama performances. the lecturers’ role in creative writing in the interview, the lecturers’ role gave significantly positive for the students when they wrote a drama script. they could write the script well and perfect to support the story and connect between one scene to another. the result of the interview is presented in table 4 below. table 4. the percentage of lecturers’ roles in writing drama script no lecturers’ roles frequency (%) 1. giving suggestions about scenes 7 20.59% 2. making students more understanding about writing drama 11 32.35% karwandi, rita inderawati, didi suhendi, margaretha dinar sitinjak, eryansyah, & sardianto markos siahaan creative writing and innovative process of beowulf virtual drama undergraduate students 908 3. making students more spirit 9 26.47% 4. making students had new experience in writing drama 7 20.59% table 4 showed that there were seven students (20.59%) felt that the lecturers had important roles to provide them suggestions about the scenes so that they could write the drama script based on the scene given, eleven students (32.35%) said that the lecturers made them have more understanding about writing the drama script. there were nine students (26.47%) becoming more excited in writing the drama script and seven students (20.59%) having a new experience in writing the drama script. in other words, the lecturers’ role had important things to support the students in writing the drama script. the interview result is presented in figure 12 below. figure 12. the lecturers’ roles to perform virtual drama performance figure 12 showed that all the students (100%) felt that the lecturers’ roles had positive influence to process the virtual drama performances. the lecturers could make the students use the recent applications such as zoom and canva. on the other hand, the students recorded the scenes spiritedly even they rerecorded to get the best video. besides that, they understood better how to create the virtual drama performance and felt the relationship among them grew better. the lecturers’ roles has many functions as a mentor, a mediator, an inspirator, a collaborator, a role model, a teacher plays, and a facilitator (teacher, 2022). they could write the script well and perfect to support the story and they could connect between one scene to another. the lecturers provided the suggestion not only in their whatsapp group but also in an online meeting such as zoom meeting. performing drama can make the communication between students and teachers (lecturers) improve and they can interact to each other to give response and feedback (bsharat, 2021). in line the with the previous information, karaosmanoglu et al. (2022) finds that online drama is effective if it is done virtually because it gives the students and teachers space to share their ideas and expression in the limitation of the movement in the covid -19 pandemic although there are some weaknesses found such as the students got difficult to make a circle, fluent interaction and so forth. conclusion based on the findings and discussion above, it could be concluded that students could do creative drama script writing due to some factors. first, they were very excited in learning something new like writing drama script. writing drama script was rare for them and it was performed virtually. they could understand about the characters, characteristics, plot and setting virtually. the drama script was usually written by one person and team, in this study, all the scenes were written by themselves (one student one scene) from their homes virtually. second, they learned the scenes which they got from their lecturers and they discussed each other using their whatsapp group so they helped and supported to each other. although they had some problems, by having discussions and lecturers’ roles, all the obstacles could be solved because their lecturers could make their scenes better and more interesting. third, all the students did their innovative processes by telling the story in the whatsapp group, recording in canva application and recording the scenes in zoom meeting. these could be said as innovative processes because they used the recent apps to be applied for their process in performing virtual drama such as canva and zoom. besides that, they could use online background and sound to support their performance. so, they had done the process of innovation. even though the problems appeared such as the students got difficult to have a good connection in using zoom and canva applications, they were confused how to edit the videos because they did not meet to each other, they also got difficult to use costumes and light to support their performance, and the last they needed more time to record their scenes. all the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 909 problems could be solved by having discussions among students and lecturers. finally, the lecturers’ roles were significantly effective to make the process of virtual drama performance better. acknowledgement this study was funded by the anggaran dipa badan layanan umum universitas sriwijaya tahun anggaran 2022 no. sp dipa023.17.2.677515/2022, tanggal 13 desember 2021 sesuai dengan sk rektor nomor: 0019/un9/sk.lp2m.pt/2022 tanggal 15 juni 2022. references angelianawati, l. 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(2022). research on digital teaching of creative writing in the context of computer big data. hindawi wireless communications and mobile computing, 2022, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/2699833 https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/340940-the-innovation-process-is-a-priority-in-adcb358a.pdf https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/340940-the-innovation-process-is-a-priority-in-adcb358a.pdf https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/340940-the-innovation-process-is-a-priority-in-adcb358a.pdf https://doi.org/10.30998/deiksis.v12i02.5184 http://repository.unsri.ac.id/id/eprint/42731 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rai.2016.04.005 https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/2699833 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 421 developing millennial drama performance basedtextbook on “siti zubaidah” for undergraduate efl students selly septiandini english education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: andiniseptiselly@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) english education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id ismail petrus english education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: ismail_petrus@fkip.unsri.ac.id nurhayati english education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: nurhayati@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: septiandini, s., inderawati, r., petrus, i., & nurhayati. (2022). developing millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” for undergraduate efl students. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 421-430. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6243 received: 04-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction local culture is one of an identity of a region. mukherjee (2018) said that identity is a complex concept that envisages local, cultural, ideological, linguistic, and environmental affiliations. it is an amalgamation of the complex tapestries of the history of a land and its people, along with considerations of the present development. according to khan (2020), the character of a language in the development of cultural identity varies at a greater length across societies. futhermore, rahyono (2009) puts forward that the local culture as wisdom constitutes intelligence which is generated based on one’s experiences so that it belongs to everybody. government regulation no. 5 year 2017 states that every citizen including student has the right to conserve, develop dan promote the cultures in indonesia. it means that it is relevant and important to insert local culture in abstract: this study aimed at developing a dynamic teaching-learning process by integrating the millennial drama performance-based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” to improve students learning outcomes. the research design in this study was development research that covered the phases of analysis, design, evaluation, and revision. the data were collected through questionnaires, validity tests, and the effectiveness of the developed millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” from south sumatra through stages designed according to akker models. the data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. to determine its validity, practicality and potential effect of the product, a formative evaluation was conducted. the validity of the developed product was 4 (high validity). the product was evaluated in experts’ review related to instructional design and content. the practicality of the developed reading materials was evaluated in one to one evaluation (4.16), categorized into high category and small group evaluation (4.44) which categorized as very high practicality. in field test, the result was 90% which the developed product was regarded as a high potential effect. the millennial drama performance-based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” was potential to be applied for undergraduate efl students because it became a basic reference to improve the students’ drama performance. moreover, the textbook gave the students insight into one of the local cultures in palembang, sumatra selatan. keywords: design research; performance; siti zubaidah. mailto:andiniseptiselly@gmail.com mailto:rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id mailto:ismail_petrus@fkip.unsri.ac.id mailto:nurhayati@fkip.unsri.ac.id selly septiandini, rita inderawati, ismail petrus, & nurhayati developing millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” for undergraduate efl students 422 english subjects since language and culture are indivisible. then, local culture consists of drama performances, dances, musical instruments, folk songs, traditional houses, clothes, traditional weapons, tradition, and traditional cooking. to accommodate the elt at sriwijaya university, the lecturers teaching prose, drama, poetry, short stories, and fables. this study focused on drama performance in which the students played dramas without any good references for them to learn how to perform so far. drama performance is a kind of independent art, which is an integration between various types of arts such as music, lighting, painting (decoration, stage), costume art, and arrangement (waluyo, 2001). a drama work in aiming for a show to entertain the audience. one of the drama performances from palembang, sumatera selatan is siti zubaidah. drama is one of the lessons that are always taught in the literature course at sriwijaya university. according to fleming (2006) (in ozbek, 2014), using drama in education can lead to the development of broader understanding through “generalizing and making connections” via the personal involvement that initially engages and motivates students in their learning. moreover, puspitasari (2018) found that there are some findings using drama performance. firstly, the implementation of drama performance is a medium of practice on basic analysis of drama performance in the english education department. basic analysis of drama course divided into two parts; preparation and performance. secondly, student's perceptions of drama performance helps students develop basic language skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing and language areas; pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling. thirdly, the drama performance has some possible challenges; self-confidence, time management, financial, stamina to preparation. however, there were still many students who had difficulty understanding what is in the drama, what should they do, especially in drama performances. they only knew information from the lecturer and the internet, even only in general. nurhayati (2014) also found that out of 36 students, only 12 (33%) who were interested in drama performance because it is not interesting. thereafter, based on an interview conducted by the writers to the lecturer who taught the literature course on april 27, 2019. it was discovered that there were some problems in learning drama performance which was included in literature in the elt course. first, some students did not like literature, especially drama. second, there were still many students who did not understand the parts of the drama. third, the students did not have textbooks about drama, especially for a drama performance. therefore, to improve the process of learning in literature course, the writers developed a textbook as a teaching material that students need in drama performance to facilitate the students to perform the drama and support the learning process. teaching materials in the form of textbooks also used as a reference for students. trisnaningsih (2007), says that the development of teaching materials is one form of learning process activities to improve the quality of learning. according to garinger (2001), the usefulness of textbooks emphasizes that using a textbook is one of the most effective and readily available ways to relieve some of the pressures put on lecturers or teachers, lessens preparation time, provides ready-made activities and finally provides concrete samples of classroom progress through which external stakeholders can be satisfied. then, the development of teaching materials of textbooks is an inseparable part of the learning activities carried out by lecturers and students to achieve the set goals (inderawati, petrus, eryansyah, & meilinda, 2021). so, developing a drama performance based-textbook made the learning process in the class more active because there are guidelines. national ministerial education regulation number 41 of 2007 concerning process standards also said that in this case the lecturers or teachers are expected to be able to develop teaching materials as a source of learning. therefore, through drama performance based-textbook, students can more easy to understand to learn. not only that but also the writers gave the students questionnaires to know what the students need in the drama book. some previos studies also focused on the students’ need when they developed learning materials (azizah, inderawati, & vianty, 2020; septiana, mael, & lestari (2020), inderawati, et al., (2021). after giving the questionnaire, the writer found that the student needed (1) a textbook of drama, (2) parts of a to be prepared drama, because the students still have difficulty prepare when they doing drama, (3) drama in the local culture is also needed because it is important for students to know english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 423 their culture. (4) the levels of knowledge of students is still limited to general information, especially in drama and drama in local. there were several parts that distinguish drama performance in ancient times and today, because the writers includesthe millennial part. therefore, millennials were urgently needed in the current era to always develop if there is any renewal, because millennials are an important role to make drama performance more modern, so it was not monotonous. then, millennials can be more interested and enjoy it. hauw and vos (2010) find that millennials are more willing to put forth the extra effort to help an organization succeed. not only are millennials achievement-focused, but they feel accountable for their actions. millennials also enjoy utilizing technology. ghavifekr and rosdy (2015) state that the 21st century, the term “technology” is an important issue in many fields including education. according to flintoff (2005), educational systems are continuing to prioritize the importance of technology in learning. curriculum guidelines and frameworks from across the globe insist that all learning areas find ways to utilize appropriate technologies in the teaching-learning process. research center (2010) found that millennials have been leading technology enthusiasts. for them, these innovations provide more than a bottomless source of information and entertainment and more than a new ecosystem for their social lives. they also are a badge of generational identity. many millennials said that the use of modern technology is what distinguishes them from other generations, one of them is also in drama performance. to sum up, performing arts are evolving with time due to the impact of developing technology. as steve dixon says; “digital performance is an extension of a continuing history of the adoption and adaptation of technologies to increase performance and visual art’s aesthetic effect and sense of spectacle, its emotional and sensorial impact, its play of "meanings and symbolic associations, and its intellectual power." furthermore, a study conducted by subasi, aydin, and seven (2016) revealed that the effect of drama technique on students' academic performance and permanence found that the result using the technique of drama on the post-test and retention test, the testing group was more successful and it has a positive impact on academic success and retention of learning for students. then, fiftinova, inderawati, and rosmalina (2018) found that the students give an agreeable response to the learning with project-based drama learning. the participants believe that it could facilitate english learning. additionally, the phases which exceedingly facilitate reading capability are critical reading and character analysis. next, a study by nurhayati (2016) shows that there is an improvement of the students’ appreciation of the performing art of siti zubaidah in the cognitive, attitude, and psychomotor aspects. another previous study by inderawati and nurhayati (2017) found the results of from siti zubaidah lyric to character identification and storyline writing for local culture revitalization are: (1) from the data, there were 37% or 15 students who categorized as very good, meanwhile, there were 63% students who categorized as excellent in identifying the characters of the lyric, (2) the storylines arranged by the students were categorized as good enough with the average score was 70, and(3) there were 66 % or 23 students who positively perceived the importance of lyric for the local culture revitalization. based on the previous studies, the writers did not find any dealing with drama performance learning material for millennial. therefore, it is essentialto develop such kind of textbook for university students. thus, the aim of this study was to develop millennial drama performance based-textbook “siti zubaidah” for undergraduate efl students which was valid, practical and had a potential effect. method the method of this study was design research by akker (1999). this research aimed to developed millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” as the developed product which was valid, practical, and had a potential effect. there were three main phases conducted namely analysis, design, and evaluation and revision. in the analysis phase, some analyses conducted in order to get some information needed as the grounded consideration to develop the product. the analyses involved instructional analysis and students’ need analysis. in the design phase, the product was designed and developed based on the result of the analyses. the evaluation and revision phase conducting by applying a set of formative selly septiandini, rita inderawati, ismail petrus, & nurhayati developing millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” for undergraduate efl students 424 evaluation proposed by tessmer (1993). tessmer (2003) explains that formative evaluation needed to be conducted as a problem-finding part of a design or product development process to improve the quality of the product. the formative evaluation of this study involved five-stage; self-evaluation, expert review, one-to-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test. akker (1999) explained that there were three main criteria to determine the quality of the product such as validity, practicality, and the potential effect of the developed product. validity refers to the extent to which the design of the intervention is based on language knowledge (content validity) and that all components included in the intervention are consistently related and connected (construct validity). practicality refers to the extent that uses consider the intervention is in normal condition. the potential effect refers to the extent that the experiences and the outcomes with the intervention are consistent with the intended aims. in this study, the validity, practicality, and the potential effect of the developed product were investigated and determined in the formative evaluation. the study was conducted at one of the universities in indonesia (sriwijaya university). the population of this study was the 5th-semester undergraduate efl students consisting of a and b classes academic year 2020/2021. the subject of this study was described in table 1: table 1. the subject of the study no formative evaluation stage number of students description of the students 1 one-to-one evaluation 3 1 students for each gpa category, i.e: low, medium, and high level 2 small group evaluation 9 3 students for each gpa category, i.e: low, medium, and high level 3 field test evaluation 20 all students in real class total 32 students the subject was selected based on their score gpa in literature course (drama) which are low, medium, and high. dick, carey and carey (1990) cited in tessmer (1993) stated that the minimal number in the one-to-one stage is three students, in the small group stage is nine students and in the field test stage at least twenty students. the proceduresof the study were three main phases proposed by akker (1999); analysis ,design, and evaluation modified with the formative evaluation proposed by tessmer (1993). this research aimed to develop millennial drama performance based-textbook on "siti zubaidah", which was valid, practical, and had a potential effect. therefore, to determine its validity, practicality, and potential effect, instruments used in this study were questionnaires and a drama performance textbook. questionnaires were given to the experts in expert review and the students in one-to-one and small group evaluation to get information about their opinion and comment after reviewing and using the developed product which in form of a likert scale ranging from 1 to 5 which illustrates sa (strongly agree), a (agree), n (neutral) d (disagree) and sd (strongly disagree) from tessmer (1993). the specification of the questionnaire (validation sheets) in expert review was described in table 2, 3, and 4. table 2. specification of questionnaire for validation sheet of content aspects number of statement the appropriateness of contents with students’ characteristics 1, 2, 3 the importance and completeness toward learning objectives 4, 5, 6, 7 the accuracy of the presentation of conent 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 linguistics aspects of the contents 14, 15, 16, 17 evaluation aspects 18, 19, 20, 21 table 3. specification of questionnaire for validation sheet of instructional design aspects number of statement the completeness of learning objectives 1, 2 the effectiveness and efficiency of product in the implementation 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 contents presentation 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 typography 14, 15, 16 visual art and lay out 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 cover design 22, 23, 24 physical makeup 25, 26, 27 the appropriateness paper 28 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 425 based media with students’ characteristic the appropriateness between paper based media with contents 29 usability 30, 31 table 4. specification of students’ questionnaire aspects number of statement the appropriateness of the material with student needs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 contents presentation 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 attractiveness of the contents 12, 13, 14, 15 technique the data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. the quantitative method was used to assess the data obtained from the questionnaire and drama performance textbook. the qualitative method was used to interpret and describe the information obtained from the interview. in this study, the validity of the products was reviewed in terms of content, and instructional design. thus, there were three experts who validated the product. the experts evaluated and determined the validity of the developed product. after evaluating the product, the expert was gave scores and comments or suggestion in the provided validation sheet. their comments were used as a basis for the revision of the developed product. the products are classified valid if the average scores were not less than 2.61.the category of validity level of the product developed is described in the table 5 below: table 5. validity categorization avarage score categogy 4.21 – 5.00 very high 3.41 – 4.20 high 2.61 – 3.40 average 1.81 – 2.60 low 1.00 – 1.80 very low source: modified from kubiszyn & borich, 1993 the practicality of the developed product was evaluated by using a questionnaire about the students’ response in one-to-one and small group evaluation. after applaying the developed product, the sudents who were included in one-to-one and small group evaluation gave their comments on the questionnaire of students; response. then to determine the practicality of the product, the data from the questionnaire were calculated. the developed product was considered as practical if the average score was not less than 2.61. the category of practicality level of the product is described in the following table: table 6. practicality categorization avarage score categogy 4.21 – 5.00 very high 3.41 – 4.20 high 2.61 – 3.40 average 1.81 – 2.60 low 1.00 – 1.80 very low source: modified from kubiszyn & borich, 1993 to find out the potential effect of the developed product, the students’ answer in a drama performance test in the field test. the developed product was considered to have a potential effect if the students could reach the minimum passing grade that was 70 and the total percentage of the students who passed the required passing grade that was 70%. after calculating, the result was classified into the potential effect category as described in table 7: table 7. potential effect categorization avarage score categogy 86 – 100 excellent 71 – 85 good 56 – 70 average 41 – 55 low 0 – 40 very low source: university of sriwijaya, 2012 results and discussion analysis phase instructional analysis in this analysis, the writer analyzed the syllabus a set of goals and objectives of the course based on the existing syllabus used at university. students’ need analysis students' need analysis was conducted to find out the information about the needs of the students on drama performance textbook. the main information was gathered from the view of the 5th-semester undergarduate efl students. the questionnaire consisted of 30 questions. needs analysis includes necessities analysis, present situation analysis, want / target analysis, and analysis of local culture knowledge. the additional information related to the students need was obtained from the view of lecturer. based on the result of the questionnaire showed that (1) in the drama process, the difficulty selly septiandini, rita inderawati, ismail petrus, & nurhayati developing millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” for undergraduate efl students 426 that students often encounter is parts to be prepared (63.6%); (2) the type of drama performance teaching material that students use at university is module (60.6%); (3) the percentage of topics related to local culture in the text for the drama performed is 25% 50% (48.5%); (4) in the teaching and learning process, the frequency provide material or stories related to the local culture of south sumatra (siti zubaidah) is never (54.5%); (5) in teaching, the frequency make/develop material or text books related to drama performance is seldom 59.4%. design phase in the designing process developed product, first, there was 10 chapter of millennial drama performance textbook developed, that chapter 1. drama (drama and teater in the world, history, and development of drama in indonesia, drama in indonesia, drama in education, structure drama, genre/form drama, and benefit drama performance); chapter 2. drama in management concepts (management principles, management elements, and management functions); chapter 3. production management of drama performance (producer, leader of production, drama administration); chapter 4. elements of drama performance (script, directors, players, and audiences); chapter 5. directing drama (history of director, and the task of the director); chapter 6. actuality and acting (the nature of the acting, elements of acting, and technique for acting); chapter 7. makeup and costumes; chapter 8. lighting and sound; chapter 9. stage management (kinds of stage, and composition of the stage); chapter 10. siti zubaidah (siti zubaidah, and video description of siti zubaidah). the writer developed this textbook by gathering information from some books written by cultural practitioners and official sources from the internet and the writer also used “siti zubaidah” as one of the drama performances from palembang to be introduced. second, completed the developed product with a real picture. third, made a list of the words used for the glossary to easy the student find the meaning. the fourth was designed in the textbook presentation and the cover of the developed product. evaluation and revision phase self-evaluation in this stage, the writer evaluated prototype 1 of the developed product to revise some mistakes in the textbook. the mistakes found were related to misspelling, capitalization, punctuation, and ungrammatical sentence. additionally, the concern of the evaluation was in the layout of the pictures, cover, material presentation. after being revised, the developed product was given to an expert to be evaluated and validated. experts review in the expert review, the developed product was reviewed by two expertsin terms of the content and instructional design to judge its validity. the experts' review determined whether the millennial drama performance based-textbook on“siti zubaidah” were valid or not by evaluating, giving comments or suggestions for the revisions of the developed product, and scoring the aspects of evaluation based on the questionnaire of the validation sheet provided. the content validity was reviewed by a lecturer of sriwijaya university who teaches in the english study program master's program in language education. she is qualified and has expertise in their field especially related to the english language and writing. after reviewing the developed product, she stated it was valid with revision. the instructional design validity of the developed product was also reviewed by a lecturer of sriwijaya university who teaches in the english study program master's program in language education. he is qualified and has expertise in their field especially related to the english language and instructional design. he gave some suggestions related to the ways of grammatical errors, writing some description, and explanation. then, he considered that this developed product was valid with revision. the result score of the validity level of the developed product is shown in table 8: table 8. validity level of the product no aspects score category 1 content 3.71 high validity 2 instructional design 4.25 very high validity average score 4 high validity based on the level of validity in content, it is presented that the average score of the content was 3.71 which can be categorized into high validity. while, instructional design, it is presented that the average score of the instructional design was 4.25 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 427 which can be categorized into very high validity. the total average score achieved from content and instructional design were 4, which means that the developed millennial drama performance basedtextbook on “siti zubaidah” had high validity. one-to-one evaluation the one-to-one evaluation was held on monday, august 10th,2020 at one of the universities in palembang (sriwijaya university). due to the current situation in a pandemic and the teaching and learning process being shifted to learning at home, the writer conducted research online. in one-to-one evaluation, google form, whatsapp, and google classroom were used. based on the results, from the total 15 items of the questionnaire, the average score of practicality in one-to-one evaluation from the three students’ score was 4.16 showed table 9, which was in high practicality. it can be concluded that millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” practical and categorized as high practicality level. table 9. the result of practicality in one-to-one evaluation aspects average score category the appropriatness between students’ characteristic 4.13 high practicality content presentation 4.11 high practicality attractiveness of the content 4.25 very high practicality total average score 4.16 high practicality small-group evaluation the small group evaluation was held on thursday, august 13th, 2020 at one of the universities in palembang (sriwijaya university). it still the same as one-to-one, the teaching and learning process being shifted to learning at home, the writer conducted research online. in one-to-one evaluation, google form, whatsapp, and google classroom were used. based on the results, from the total 15 items of the questionnaire, the average score of practicality in one-to-one evaluation from the three students’ score was 4.44 showed table 10 which was in very high practicality. it can be concluded that millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” practical and categorized as very high practicality level. table 10. the result of practicality in small group evaluation aspects average score category the appropriatness between students’ characteristic 4.35 very high practicality content presentation 4.54 very high practicality attractiveness of the content 4.42 very high practicality total average score 4.44 very high practicality field test there were 20 students involved in the field test. the field trial in this study was conducted on monday, august 17th, 2020. the students who were participated in one-to-one and small group evaluation were not involved anymore. the teaching and learning process google form, whatsapp, and google classroom were still used. the result of the students’ score in pretest showed that there were 15 students (75.00%) who obtained a score below the intended minimum mastery criterion which was 70 and 5 other students (25.00%) who reached the intended result score. from the result of the students’ score in the post-test/field test, there were 2 students (10.00%) whose score was below 70, and 18 other students (90.00%) obtained scores exactly or above 70. based on these results, it can be concluded that there was an improvement in the students’ scores after using the developed millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah”. the improvement of students’ drama performance is presented in the following figure 1 below: selly septiandini, rita inderawati, ismail petrus, & nurhayati developing millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” for undergraduate efl students 428 figure 1. comparison of pre-test and post-test of 5th-semester undergarduate students at sriwijaya university. sources result data processing, 2020 discussion based on the finding in the research result, it is found that the students have never use the drama performance textbook “siti zubaidah” in teachinglearning activities. some factors as the main cause of those conditions. first, in the drama process, the difficulty that students often encounter is part to be prepared. second, the type of drama performance teaching material that students use at university is a module. there was no textbook provided by the university and the lecturer only give some information about the material on the internet and module, but the module did not focus on the part of the drama. third, the percentage of topics related to local culture in the text for the drama performed is 25% 50% (48.5%). it is still low, so the students need some local culture into learning drama performance; fourth, in the teaching and learning process, the frequency provides material or stories related to the local culture of south sumatra (siti zubaidah) is never. the lecturer did not focus on local culture but also outside culture; and fifth, in teaching, the frequency of make/develop material or textbooks related to drama performance is seldom. the lecturer usually used the story to learn the drama and asked students to make the script. they are not focused on parts of the drama. analysis of the students’ needs was done once to the 5th-semester undergraduate students before developing millennial drama performance basedtextbook “siti zubaidah”. it aimed to obtain preliminary information about the students’ needs related to drama, the questionnaire was distributed to the students in 5th-semester undergraduate students. in other words, there must be a need for developing learning material as previously discoreverd by (inderawati, et al. 2021). based on the result of students’ needs analysis, it was found that most of the 5th-semester undergraduate students at sriwijaya university needed a drama performance textbook. one way to make learning activity more effective, efficient, and enjoyable was by developing instructional media based on local culture (inderawati & sofendi, 2018). in a previous study in which the developed sociodrama textbook (tri, 2013) were used to guide to learn to perform drama. the developed product has been evaluated in the self-evaluation stage before it was given to the experts. the developed millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” was reviewed by two experts, one expert for the content aspect, and one for instructional. it aimed to determine the validity of the developed product. the expert checked the developed millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubaidah” by filling their evaluation in the likert scale questionnaire. the result of the experts' review was analyzed to determine the validity of the developed product. after being analyzed, it was stated that the content and instructional design of developing millennial drama performance a textbook for the undergraduate efl students were a high category, and for the instructional design, a review was a very high category. the total from two aspects has belonged to high validity. it is relevant to other previous studie, after the product was validated, it met its validity (azizah, et al., 2021; sopian, et al., 2019) then, to determine the practicality and potential effect of the product, the writer conducted three evaluations such as; one-to-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test (azizah, et al., 2021; sopian, et al., 2019). however, before english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 429 conducting the assessment by using the developed product, the writer did a pretest to the students to obtain preliminary information about students' drama achievement before they used the developed product. the result of 32 students' pretest showed that only 5 students passed the test or reached the minimum mastery criterion (kkm) which was 70 and 15 students who were failed. the writer provided the questionnaire for the one-to-one evaluation and small group evaluation. the average score of a questionnaire in the oneto-one evaluation developed product at the level of high validity. the result of small group evaluation has belonged to very high practicality. the last evaluation was the field test (posttest), the writer analyzes the students' drama performance test to determine the potential effect of the developed millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubadiah”. after analyzing the students' answers, there was an improvement in the students reading achievement after they used the developed products. it was summarized that there were 18 students who passed the test or reached the minimum master criterion and 2 students who did not reach the minimum mastery criterion. so, it can be concluded that the millennial drama performance based-textbook on “siti zubadiah” can be applied in university especially 5th-semester undergraduate efl students, english education study program, because that textbook improves the students' interest and achievement in learning drama performance. in line with the previous study, the developed millennial drama performance based-textbook "siti zubaidah" for 5th-semester undergraduate efl students of sriwijaya university was effectively used to lecturer and students. conclusion millennial drama performance textbook for the students should support their needs based on their study program. one of the ways is integrating the students' local culture into drama performance. the aim of local cultural involvement in efl is students can communicate effectively about their own culture and beliefs by using english. futhermore, the use of local culture in drama performance is considered can improve the skills and understanding of the students. the developed product of this study was considered valid, practical, and had a potential effect based on the result shown in the evaluation and revision phase. additionally, this developed product supported the students' content subjects. thus, it can be concluded that the developed millennial drama performance based-textbook “siti zubaidah” in this study can be implemented to undergraduate efl students in english education study program. finally, the development of textbooks using other media should be taken into consideration. it is suggested to develop other textbooks of the other skills related to sumatera selatan local culture. acknowledgment the writers would like to express their gratitude to the rector of universitas sriwijaya who had funded their research through hibah unggulan profesi universitas 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(2019). developing e-learning based local-folklores for eighth graders. english review: journal of english education, 8(1), 100-112. subasi. m, aydin, s., and seven. s (2016). the effect of drama technique on students' academic performance and permanence. international journal of education, science and technology, 2(1), 29-38. tessmer, m. (1993). planning and conduction formative evaluation: improfing the quality of education and training. london: psychology press. tri, w. e. (2013). a drama textbook with sociodrama method: research and development in linguistic education study program in central java. journal of education and learning. 7(2), 91100. waluyo, h.j. (2001). drama teori dan pengajarannya. yogyakarta: pt hanindita graha widia. https://dx.doi.org/10.2991/ice-17.2018.38 http://www.oapub.org/edu https://dialog.puchd.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/14.rituparna-mukherjee-postcolonial-and-eco-critical-readings.pdf https://dialog.puchd.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/14.rituparna-mukherjee-postcolonial-and-eco-critical-readings.pdf https://dialog.puchd.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/14.rituparna-mukherjee-postcolonial-and-eco-critical-readings.pdf https://dialog.puchd.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/14.rituparna-mukherjee-postcolonial-and-eco-critical-readings.pdf http://www.core.ac.uk/reader/2964754 http://www.pewresearch.org/millencials english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 667 digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials ratna dewanti department of english education, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: rdewanti@unj.ac.id berliana febri department of english education, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: berlianafebri1804@outlook.com dadang solihat department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: dadang.solihat@uniku.ac.id apa citation: dewanti, r., febri, b. & solihat, d. (2022). digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 667-678. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6305. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction digital literacy in this fourth industrial revolution (ir 4.0) era, where the advancement of information and communication technology (ict) grows rapidly, plays an important role in everyday life: personal, social, and work. digital literacy is required in the acts of finding, generalizing, and analyzing digital resources on a daily basis (yashalova, shreider, & yakovleva, 2019). studies concerning the requirement of being digitally literate conducted by polizzi (2020); techataweewan & prasertin (2018); polizzi (2020). a survey by kominfo (2020) involving 1670 indonesian people across 34 provinces exhibits an identical finding: index score for digital literacy in indonesia is 3 out of 5 (average). this is in line with other research findings (eryansyah, 2019; perdana et al., 2019; (eryansyah, erlina, fiftinova, & ari, 2019). the lack of digital literacy education has the possibility to generate serious issues which can jeopardize relevant individuals or even bigger, communities (susilo, afifi, & yustitia, 2020). in addition, technologies such as robotic, artificial intelligent, 3d printing, augmented reality, virtual reality, cloud computing, and internet of things (ditpsmk, 2019), encryption and cyber security, e-commerce and digital trade, big data analytics (world economic forum, 2020) are designed to do human’s work. to comply with this disruptive change and compete with these machines, vocational high schools must be oriented to tailor these qualities: knowledge combination, technical and social skills, positive etiquette, and digital competence to their students (ditpsmk, 2019). different sources use different terms for digital literacy – digital literacy (alexander et al., 2016; hague & payton, 2010; hague & williamson, abstract: this study aims to investigate digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials since these schools are supposed to prepare their students for professional world. this qualitative study employs a content analysis method, analyzing the english learning materials used by vocational high schools in central jakarta. the words and sentences representing the weaving of digital literacy in 42 english learning materials are the data of this study. digital literacy indicators covering seven components: information processing, critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration, citizenship, ethics, operation skills and safety are used as the research instruments. the findings indicate that all literacy components but citizenship and safety are incorporated in the materials. they are mostly used in the assignments, followed by the contents and the miscellanies parts of the learning materials. however, despite the existence, they seem to be not evenly incorporated in all components of the materials. keyword: digital literacy; ict. ratna dewanti, berliana febri, & dadang solihat digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials 668 2009; oecd, 2019; unesco, 2018; unicef, 2019), ict literacy (educational testing service, 2002; griffin & mcgraw, 2018; partnership for 21st century skills, 2009; mceetya, 2007), digital citizenship (council of europe, 2019), digital competency (european commission, 2016), and digital-age literacy (ncrel, 2003). yet they refer to the same thing the application of skills, knowledge, and ethics within particular contexts (mayes & fowler (2006). it involves interrelated clusters of skills, knowledge, and understanding namely creativity, critical thinking and evaluation, cultural and social understanding, collaboration, information processing, communication, e-safety, and operation skills (hague & payton, 2010). it constitutes these competences: computer literacy, ict literacy, information literacy, media literacy (law, woo, de la torre, & wong, 2018). apart from aforementioned aspects—skills, knowledge, and understanding—attitudes and values in conducting digital activities are, as well, taken into account (griffin & mcgraw, 2018; nascimbeni & vosloo, 2019). to go even deeper, information processing deals with searching for, filtering, accessing, understanding, analyzing, evaluating, managing, integrating, synthesizing, communicating, and creating information, or in another term, digital resources. in processing information, critical thinking and creativity should be incorporated as those skills allow individuals to effectively and efficiently process information retrieved from the internet; and create novel and richer information or digital resources. aside from using critical thinking in processing information, this skill also needs to be employed in solving problems and facing challenges that arise in digital environments. communication and collaboration encompass connecting, interacting, and working with people in a team digitally. citizenship consists of diverse social, cultural, and political understandings. ethics in the context of digital literacy comprises a set of attitudes and awareness requisite in conducting digital activities as they hinder individuals from committing morally questionable or wrong actions. operation skills cover the technical aspect by containing the abilities to operate and utilize digital technologies. safety in the digital environment includes protecting data and health or well-being. the incorporation of digital literacy in english learning materials foster students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes concerning digital technology and its use necessary to acquire in this disruptive era. studies regarding digital literacy in vocational high school have been conducted to investigate the practice of ict-integrated english lessons by vocational high school teachers, their attitude toward ict, and their motivation to use ict in their teaching. the findings revealed that instead of using a myriad of ict tools—both hardware or software tools which implied their adequate digital literacy in the sense that they knew and were able to operate the digital tools, the teachers only utilized a few ict tools, indicating a lack of optimization in utilizing the tools. in terms of attitude, they had a positive one toward ict, they believed that ict would have a positive impact on their teaching practices. their motivations in using ict varied: (1) their interests in ict, (2) the today’s world demands, (3) ict as a students’ motivation booster in learning, (4) ict to effectuate learning, (5) and their confidence in utilizing ict for teaching and learning purposes (rodiyah, 2018). more studies proved that the students’ digital literacy and students’ entrepreneur behavior improve using a certain learning model (patmanthara & hidayat, 2018); (mudasih, subroto, & susanti, 2021). to make more confirming reasons for the awareness of teachers and learning material writers of the importance of digital literacy in vocational schools, this study aims to seek the incorporation of digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials. method this study employed a qualitative research approach, analyzing 42 english learning materials used in grade x, xi, and xii taken from ten vocational high schools located in central jakarta. the materials comprised one coursebook, seven modules, eight videos, seven audios, four web articles, and 15 slides microsoft powerpoint and canva. the instruments are the indicators of digital literacy derived from sources pertaining to digital literacy (alexander et al., 2016; council of europe, 2019; educational testing service, 2002; european commission, 2016; griffin & mcgraw, 2018; hague & payton, 2010; hague & williamson, 2010; kemendikbud, 2017; law et al., 2018; martin, 2005; mceetya, 2007; nascimbeni & vosloo, 2019; ncrel, 2003; partnership for 21st english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 669 century skills, 2009; pedrew, 2017; western sydney university, 2017). there are 13 indicators for information processing, four indicators for critical thinking and problem solving, eight indicators for communication and collaboration, four indicators for citizenship, ethics, operation skills, and safety respectively which makes them 42 in total. the data was collected through reaching out to vocational high schools located in central jakarta via online correspondence (whatsapp and zoom meeting). they were analyzed using the indicators. results and discussion to see the extent of which digital literacy is incorporated in the english learning materials, the findings begin with the amount of the occurrence of digital literacy indicators in the materials. out of 42 english learning materials, it appears that 17 of them incorporated these following components of digital literacy: information processing, critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration, ethics, and operation skills but not citizenship and safety. to be more specific, information processing indicators are 5.3% incorporated, critical thinking and problem-solving indicators are 0.6% incorporated, communication and collaboration indicators are 2.4% incorporated, ethics indicators are 0.6% incorporated, and operation skills indicators are 14.3% incorporated. as described above, the indicators that are fulfilled in information processing cover accessing for digital resources, searching for digital resources, understanding digital resources, understanding the purpose of digital resources, identifying digital resources, managing digital resources, filtering digital resources, analyzing digital resources, evaluating digital resources. the first indicator “accessing digital resources” appears dominantly in 11 english learning materials. below are some of the evidences of the incorporation: open these two links. discuss with your classmates to respond to these questions. link 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpidsx7vus link 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mty q (in listening section of english learning material 1 (announcement/song – coursebook) study the dialogue, search in the website the example of congratulating between yunita and winni in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9hl2qanjwi (in exercise 1 ) english learning material 3 (congratulation and compliment – english module) english learning material 4 (cause and effect – english module) watch the video and answer the questions carefully. https://youtu.be/g4h1n_yxbia (in task 8) the second indicator to appear frequently is “incorporates searching for digital resources.” see below: in your group, find the video about saving the earth and answer the similar questions above. (in task 9) english learning material 4 (cause and effect – english module). do in groups of four. find 8 pictures on internet about activities, events, accidents or disasters. (english learning material 12 -suggestion and offer – powerpoint slides) the third indicator ‘incorporates understanding digital resources’ is shown below: open these two links. discuss with your classmates to respond to these questions. link 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpidsx7vus link 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mty q (in listening section of english learning material 1 (announcement – coursebook) study the following examples of introducing oneself. introduce yourself in english, make a record. the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7qmhkgvn 5s (in exercise 2) english learning material 2 (introduction – english module) study the dialogue, search in the website the example of congratulating between yunita and winni in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9hl2qanjwi (in exercise 1) english learning material 3 (congratulation and compliment – english module) the fourth indicator “incorporates understanding the purpose of digital resources” only appears in one english learning material, pertaining to procedure text in the form of powerpoint slides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpidsx7vus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mtyq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mtyq http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9hl2qanjwi https://youtu.be/g4h1n_yxbia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpidsx7vus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mtyq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mtyq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7qmhkgvn5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7qmhkgvn5s ratna dewanti, berliana febri, & dadang solihat digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials 670 then, think about the purpose of the writing. is it to inform you or to teach you or is it to promote something to you? for example, if the article is telling you all about a famous politician and how important and amazing, they are, be careful. its real purpose may be to make you vote for them, so the information in it may not be objective. (in the example of procedure text) english learning material 11) the fifth indicator fulfilled is “incorporates identifying digital resources” which appears in two english learning materials. then, think about the purpose of the writing. is it to inform you or to teach you or is it to promote something to you? for example, if the article is telling you all about a famous politician and how important and amazing, they are, be careful. its real purpose may be to make you vote for them, so the information in it may not be objective. (in the example of procedure text) english learning material 11 (procedure text/powerpoint slides) do in groups of four. find 8 pictures on internet about activities, events, accidents or disasters. english learning material 12 (suggestion and offer – powerpoint slides) the sixth indicator “incorporates managing digital resources” is found in one english learning material do in groups of four. find 8 pictures on internet about activities, events, accidents or disasters. (english learning material 12) the seventh indicator of information processing that appears in the english learning materials is “incorporates filtering digital resources.” it appears in two english learning materials. here are five ways to spot fake news: (1) number one, look for unusual urls. if they end with lo. or com.co, chances are they aren't legitimate news sites. (2) number two, dissect the layouts. look for grammatical errors, incorrect dates, both claims with no sources, and sensationalist images. these are all red flag. (3) number three, dig deeper. find out who wrote the article and who supports the site. if this information doesn't exist or you need to register to get it, then question why. (4) number four, crosscheck. use fact checking sites to confirm information and see whether other credible news outlets are reporting similar news. (5) number five, try a reverse image search. if the same picture appears in unrelated stories, you may have a reason to be suspicious. english learning material 7 (procedure text – video) however, there are millions of websites. some of them have accurate information, but some do not. this is why we should evaluate a website before we accept what it is telling us. imagine you have found an article that seems useful. here are some tips to help you evaluate it. (1) first, check the url. it may tell you something about the website, its creator and its country of origin. (2) then, think about the purpose of the writing. is it to inform you or to teach you or is it to promote something to you? for example, if the article is telling you all about a famous politician and how important and amazing, they are, be careful. its real purpose may be to make you vote for them, so the information in it may not be objective. (3) next, check the writer’s credentials. look for a link to their ‘about me’ page so you can read more about their education and experience. she or she a professional in this area? do you think person is qualified to write about the subject? (4) after that, check to see whether any information has been taken from another website. if it has, go to the original source to check that information hasn’t been changed. (5) also, look at the date of publication. old articles can be unreliable because they miss out the latest evidence, or because the situation has recently changed. (6) finally, weigh everything up and decide if you trust the information (in the example of procedure text) english learning material 11 (procedure text – powerpoint slides) similar to the seventh indicator, the eight indicator “incorporates analyzing digital resources” also appears in two english learning materials. watch the video and answer the questions carefully. https://youtu.be/g4h1n_yxbia, (1) what is video about? (2) find some statements that show the cause and effect of the discussion! (3) who is the speaker most likely? (4) what should people do after watching the video? (5) what can you do at school to support this information? (in task 8) english learning material 4 (cause and effect – english module) https://youtu.be/g4h1n_yxbia english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 671 giving an oral presentation can be scary, but we’re here to help you. watch two students giving presentations in the video on our website and then read the tips below. which tips do they follow? which ones don’t they follow? (link: www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglishteens) english learning material 5 (oral presentation – web article). the last indicator of information processing to be present in the english learning materials is “incorporates evaluating digital resources.” however, there are millions of websites. some of them have accurate information, but some do not. this is why we should evaluate a website before we accept what it is telling us. imagine you have found an article that seems useful. here are some tips to help you evaluate it. (1) first, check the url. it may tell you something about the website, its creator and its country of origin. (2) then, think about the purpose of the writing. is it to inform you or to teach you or is it to promote something to you? for example, if the article is telling you all about a famous politician and how important and amazing, they are, be careful. its real purpose may be to make you vote for them, so the information in it may not be objective. (3) next, check the writer’s credentials. look for a link to their ‘about me’ page so you can read more about their education and experience. she or she a professional in this area? do you think person is qualified to write about the subject? (4) after that, check to see whether any information has been taken from another website. if it has, go to the original source to check that information hasn’t been changed. (5) also, look at the date of publication. old articles can be unreliable because they miss out the latest evidence, or because the situation has recently changed. (6) finally, weigh everything up and decide if you trust the information. (in the example of procedure text) english learning material 11 (procedure text – powerpoint slides) four out of 13 information processing indicators which read “incorporates synthesizing digital resources, incorporates organizing digital resources, incorporates reformulating digital resources in different formats/modes, incorporates creating innovative digital resources” are absent in the english learning materials. the only indicator of critical thinking and problem solving found in the english learning materials is “incorporates solving problems by using digital technology.” this indicator appears in one of the materials. number four, crosscheck. use fact checking sites to confirm information and see whether other credible news outlets are reporting similar news. number five, try a reverse image search. if the same picture appears in unrelated stories, you may have a reason to be suspicious. three out of four indicators that are not fulfilled, are “explains the impact of technology, explains the differences between real and virtual world, and incorporates solving technical problem.” the indicators of incorporation of communication and collaboration for each english learning material cover digital communication, an interrogation by using digital technology, communicating digital resources, and socializing with people in digital environments. the first indicator “incorporates digital communication” appears in all five english learning materials analyzed. responding to an email/a letter. imagine that you’re alia. write an email or a letter responding to the email or letter you’ve read and discussed. use the following questions to guide you. (in writing) english learning material 1 (introduction – coursebook) ask these questions using telephone or whatsapp to each of your friends, write his/her name and answer based on his/her experiences. (in exercise 10) english learning material 2 (introduction – english module) writing skills practice: a more formal email – email (see appendix 16) english learning material 4 (formal invitation – web article) the second indicator “incorporates an interrogation by using digital technology” appears in english learning material 2 pertaining to introduction. ask these questions using telephone or whatsapp to each of your friends, write his/her name and answer based on his/her experiences. (in exercise 10) english learning material 2 module the third indicator which reads “incorporates communicating digital resources” is present in one http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglishteens ratna dewanti, berliana febri, & dadang solihat digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials 672 english learning material analyzed. it is in a section of a book pertaining to an announcement. open these two links. discuss with your classmates to respond to these questions. link 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpidsx7vus link 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mtyq (in listening section) english learning material the last indicator of communication and collaboration “incorporates socializing with people in digital environments” is fulfilled in one english learning material pertaining to introduction. responding to an email/a letter. imagine that you’re alia. write an email or a letter responding to the email or letter you’ve read and discussed. use the following questions to guide you. (in writing) english learning material 1 – course book four of eight indicators are not fulfilled: incorporates the awareness of people having diverse interpretations, incorporates a presentation by using digital technology, incorporates communicating with people in any formats/modes/contexts, incorporates a collaboration with people digitally. the indicators of incorporation of ethics are not fulfilled entirely. only one indicator is found in one english learning materials, which reads “incorporates ethics awareness in digital environments.” top tips for writing: (1) if you know the name of the person you’re writing to, use mr. for a man and ms. for a woman. (2) start by saying why you are writing or what you are responding to. (3) use indirect questions such as i would be grateful if you could … to ask for information politely. (4) use words like firstly, secondly, and finally to order you points. (5) use this standard phrase to finish a formal letter or email. (6) if you’ve begun the email with dear and the name of the person, finish with yours sincerely. if you have used sir or madam, finish with yours faithfully. three out of four missing are: incorporates legality awareness, incorporates copyright/ plagiarism awareness, and incorporates understanding how values and point of views are included or excluded. regarding the incorporation of operation skills, three indicators are fulfilled in 13 english learning materials. the first indicator “incorporates the understanding of the purpose of digital technology” is incorporated in one of the materials. number four, crosscheck. use fact checking sites to confirm information and see whether other credible news outlets are reporting similar news. english learning material 8 (procedure text – video) two indicators which read, “incorporates accessing digital technology” and “incorporates operating digital technology” have the same evidences, except for english learning material 7 and 8 which do not incorporate the latter indicator. responding to an email/a letter. imagine that you’re alia. write an email or a letter responding to the email or letter you’ve read and discussed. use the following questions to guide you. (in writing) english learning material 1 (introduction/announcement/song – coursebook) ask these questions using telephone or whatsapp to each of your friends, write his/her name and answer based on his/her experiences. (in exercise 10) english learning material 2 (introduction – english module) study the dialogue, search in the website the example of congratulating between yunita and winni in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9hl2qanjwi (in exercise 1) english learning material 3 (congratulation and compliment – english module) the evidence for the fulfillment of this indicator, which reads “incorporates accessing digital technology” is as follows: there's more about this on our website at bbclearningenglish.com. join us again for more 6 minute grammar. english learning material 7 (if conditional – audio) the only indicator that is absent in 13 english learning materials analyzed reads “incorporates the activity of programming.” having got the occurrence of digital literacy indicators, the next focus of this study is to seek how digital literacy is incorporated in the materials. in this analysis, the learning materials components are classified into three: contents, assignments, and miscellanies. the component with the highest number of occurrences of digital literacy is assignment with 53 out of 82 occurrences (64.6%), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpidsx7vus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7sn9mtyq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9hl2qanjwi english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 673 followed by miscellany with 15 occurrences (18.3%) and content with 14 occurrences (17%). in each of the component, digital literacy is incorporated unevenly in information processing (42.7%), making them the most frequent indicators to be incorporated in the materials. indicators for critical thinking and problemsolving occur to be incorporated in merely one component of the english learning materials, the content. the number of the occurrence is one, causing them to be the least frequent indicators incorporated in the english learning materials analyzed (1.2%). communication and collaboration indicators are incorporated in two components of the english learning materials: the content and assignment. there are five occurrences (50%) in the content, as well as in the assignment (50%). in total, there are ten occurrences (12.2%) of communication and collaboration indicators in the english learning materials analyzed. ethics indicators share the same exact amount of number in occurrences with critical thinking and problem-solving indicators, which is one occurrence (1.2%) in only one component of the english learning materials, the content. the evidence is as follows: the indicators that define operation skills are incorporated in every component of the english learning materials analyzed. the amount of the indicators incorporation in the assignment is the largest with 26 occurrences (74.3%), followed by their incorporation in the miscellany with eight occurrences (22.8%), and in the content with one occurrence (2.8%). the total occurrences of operation skills indicators in every component are 35 occurrences (42.7%). the indicators that define operation skills are incorporated in every component of the english learning materials analyzed. the amount of the indicators incorporation in the assignment is the largest with 26 occurrences (74.3%), followed by their incorporation in the miscellany with eight occurrences (22.8%), and in the content with one occurrence (2.8%). the total occurrences of operation skills indicators in every component are 35 occurrences (42.7%). the findings reveal that 17 out of 42 english learning materials analyzed have incorporated digital literacy indicators. however, not every indicator of digital literacy is fulfilled. two out of seven categories of indicators (citizenship and safety) occur to be absent in all 42 english learning materials. thus, the incorporation of digital literacy in the 42 english learning materials is 3.7% (63 out 1722 indicators are incorporated). in specific for each category, sequenced from the highest to the lowest level of incorporation, information processing indicators are 46% incorporated (29 out 63), operation skills indicators are 38.1% incorporated (24 out of 63), communication and collaboration indicators are 12.7% incorporated (8 out of 63), and critical thinking and problem-solving indicators as well as ethics indicators have the same results which are 1.6% incorporation (1 out of 63). the findings of this present study appear to be similar with the previous ones in terms of digital literacy deficiency (eryansyah, 2019; perdana et al., 2019). both studies show that students participating in their studies possessed a deficient-level digital literacy due to several causes, while this present study found the english learning materials utilized by teachers have incorporated only 3.7% digital literacy indicators. the findings regarding five components of digital literacy (information processing, critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration, ethics, operation skills) that are incorporated in the three components of english learning materials (content, assignment, and miscellany) analyzed are discussed in the following. the discussions focus on describing how each abovementioned component is incorporated in the english learning materials. information processing are incorporated in 13 out 17 english learning materials with the first indicator dominantly appearing in 11 of them. however, there is no specific topic category in which these indicators are incorporated. even if the indicators show dominance in a specific category, it cannot be regarded as dominant since there are merely one or two indicators that are fulfilled in the english learning materials analyzed with a certain topic. speaking of the english learning materials’ components, the component that appears to largely incorporate these indicators is the assignment. they appear in the instructions, for example, an instruction to watch a video on youtube by clicking the link provided, or to search for digital resources to be used in learning. but there is a ratna dewanti, berliana febri, & dadang solihat digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials 674 special case which is when the researcher determines the incorporation of this indicator “incorporates analyzing digital resources.” besides determining the incorporation of this indicator by analyzing the instruction, the researcher also analyzed the questions that follow the instruction, for example: “giving an oral presentation can be scary, but we’re here to help you. watch two students giving presentations in the video on our website and then read the tips below. which tips do they follow? which ones don’t they follow?” the questions act as a determinant point of whether or not the indicator is incorporated. by looking at the questions, the researcher assumed that students have to analyze the digital resource, in this case is a video, to answer the two questions. in bloom revised taxonomy (brt), the instruction of analyzing employs these verbs: analyze, arrange, break down, categorize, classify, compare, connect, contrast, etc., (anderson, 2001). the contents in which the indicators of critical and creative information appear are pertaining to evaluating digital resources. they fall into the procedure text category of topic. the examples of procedure text provided are rather sophisticated as they comply with the current situation, where information can be created and published vastly by anyone, regardless of their education or occupation. such content can hinder the consumption and dispersion of hoaxes. as for the miscellany component, the indicators are found on the link directed to a video or website, or closing statement containing links that provides further information. regarding critical thinking and problem solving, out of 17 english learning materials that incorporate digital literacy, only one english learning material incorporates one of the indicators that define critical and problem solving in the context of digital literacy. the indicator “incorporates solving problem by using digital technology” was found in the content of the english learning material, here is the evidence: “number four, crosscheck. use fact checking sites to confirm information and see whether other credible news outlets are reporting similar news.” the problem is whether or not the information is credible, and using digital technology such as fact checking site can be the solution to solve the problem. going further with communication and collaboration, four communication and collaboration indicators are fulfilled in five english learning materials. the indicators are located in two components of the english learning materials analyzed, which are: content and assignment. in the content, the incorporation is marked by examples of digital correspondence like email, and how to form it (see appendix 1, 11 and 16). whilst in the assignment, the incorporation is marked by instructions to use digital communication such as email or whatsapp in learning. this evidence shows the incorporation of communication and collaboration indicators in the assignment: “ask these questions using telephone or whatsapp to each of your friends, write his/her name and answer based on his/her experiences.” the use of digital communication in learning might help hone students’ digital literacy. since the previous study by saripudin et al. (2021) assert that the frequent use of digital technology will enhance individuals’ digital literacy as they gradually become used to it. nonetheless, the utilization of digital technology must be under the supervision of the adults, like teachers or parents. from all the english learning materials analyzed, one english learning material incorporates one of four indicators for ethics. the indicator “incorporates ethics awareness in digital environments” is found in the content of the english learning material pertaining to formal invitation. here is the evidence: top tips for writing: (1) if you know the name of the person you’re writing to, use mr. for a man and ms. for a woman. (2) start by saying why you are writing or what you are responding to. (3) use indirect questions such as i would be grateful if you could … to ask for information politely. (4) use words like firstly, secondly, and finally to order you points. (5) use this standard phrase to finish a formal letter or email. (6) if you’ve begun the email with dear and the name of the person, finish with yours sincerely. if you have used sir or madam, finish with yours faithfully. the content contains tips for writing a formal email, that is generally used in companies’ correspondence nowadays. this is in alignment with the aim of vocational high schools which is to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 675 equip their students with skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for entering the work industry. however, the finding shows the deficiency of ethics indicators fulfillment in the english learning materials. as stated by supratman & wahyudin (2017), inadequacy of digital literacy education, specifically ethics, causes indonesian students to possess no knowledge nor ability to use social media in wise and responsible manners. consequently, the responsible adults (teachers/parents) have to keep an eye on students’ activity in digital environments. indicators for operation skills appear to be present in every component of the english learning materials analyzed. the following are three indicators fulfilled in the 13 english learning materials: (1) the first indicator, “incorporates the understanding of the purpose of digital technology”. (2) the second indicator, “incorporates accessing digital technology”. (3) the third indicator, “incorporates operating digital technology” the evidences of operation skills incorporation are the same as information processing. since students are instructed to process digital resources, the initial step they would take is accessing digital technology and then, operating it. the two indicators “incorporates accessing digital technology” and “incorporates operating digital technology” are interrelated as in order to access digital technology, individuals have to possess the ability to operate it. the first indicator, “incorporates the understanding of the purpose of digital technology” is found in the content of one of the english learning materials analyzed. the evidence is as follows: “number four, crosscheck. use fact checking sites to confirm information and see whether other credible news outlets are reporting similar news.” the proper explanation of the use or purpose of digital technology helps students determine which digital technology is best to cater their needs. this activity needs to be facilitated with proper tools like a personal computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. moreover, a study conducted by bawack & kamdjoug (2020) found that a steady access to reliable digital information sources, with the use of digital technology, will be likely to give a positive impact on students’ academic experiences. the two categories of indicator that are found absent in the english learning materials analyzed are citizenship and safety. citizenship competence widens individuals’ horizon as it comprises the awareness of social, cultural, and political diversity. social, cultural, and political diversity is inevitable in consequence of the connection with no geographical boundaries through the internet. safety awareness is as crucial as the other categories. the deficiency of this awareness will generate serious and harmful issues. according to supratman & wahyudin (2017), without any proper safety guidance in conducting digital activities, individuals are at risk of negative exposure of the internet such as cybercrime. this study has explained the concept of digital literacy and the indicators that are used to analyze their incorporation in the english learning materials. the findings have also exhibited that not every indicator is fulfilled and not every english learning material incorporates digital literacy indicators. the three components of the english learning materials divided by the researcher: content, assignment, and miscellany appear to incorporate some of the digital literacy indicators. the topic category of the english learning materials analyzed is varied, from the topic for grade x, xi, to xii. conclusion the study found that not all english learning materials analyzed have incorporated digital literacy; only five out seven digital literacy components, sequenced from the highest to the lowest number of incorporations, information processing, operation skills, communication and collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, and ethics are incorporated. citizenship and safety, which are as crucial as others, are found absent in all the english learning materials. there are three components in which digital literacy indicators are incorporated, which are: content, assignment, and miscellany. in addition to the findings, digital literacy indicators are largely incorporated in the assignments of the english learning materials, followed by the contents and miscellanies (outside the content and assignment). references alexander, b., adams becker, s., & cummins, m. 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(2016). qualitative research from start to finish (2nd ed.). new york: the guliford press. ratna dewanti, berliana febri, & dadang solihat digital literacy in vocational high school english learning materials 678 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 203 analyzing 'hate speech phenomenon' research in indonesia: a systematic review yelly andriani barlian school of creative industries, telkom university, bandung, indonesia email: yellybarlian@telkomuniversity.ac.id pikir wisnu wijayanto school of applied science, telkom university, bandung, indonesia email: pikirwisnu@telkomuniversity.ac.id apa citation: barlian, y.a., & wijayanto, p.w. (2021). analyzing 'hate speech phenomenon' research in indonesia: a systematic review. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 203-212. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5371 received: 28-08-2021 accepted: 21-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction the current technology has brought human beings to a more developed civilization. almost all the working procedures and tasks run more accessible and faster, not to mention its limitless border. distance is no longer a severe problem in communication since social media takes its place to alter one's existence. the positive impacts occur in varied life aspects. in the economy aspect, technology assists the traders to market their products online. they do not have to own stores or places; however, they can spread their products widely. in the education aspect, technology contributes much in bridging difficulties, particularly in the chaotic condition lately (covid 19 pandemic), the students gain knowledge with long-distance learning, and the sources are millions apart from learning materials uploaded by the teachers. furthermore, there are still more benefits in other life aspects by technology. technology significantly plays a vital role in communication needs. it creates new and modern media and their characteristics. starting from the oldest social media such as bulletin board system (bbs) that announced meetings and shared information in 1978, then friendster in 2002 as a growing social network that connected people worldwide virtually. the latest social media is instagram, created in 2010 by kevin systrom dan mike krieger (sartika, 2019), and it has defeated facebook's popularity. these platforms can represent real-life in cyberplace. dialogic (two-way) communication is efficiently conducted with social media. as a result, they are the potential to expand human social interaction. however, undoubtedly, they also cause negative impacts on communication issues. one of them is the hate speech phenomenon. according to myers in rahma and andreas (2020), this communication issue is aggression, defined as physical or verbal actions that hurt others. hate speech is one of the insulting verbal actions. in indonesia, hate speech is delivered in varied forms, such as words, phrases, clauses, and sentences (syafyahya, 2018). the forms of hate speech could be blasphemy, defamation, unpleasant conduct, provoking or inciting, and spreading false news (handayani, 2019). research conducted by the centre for innovation policy and governance (cipg) in 2017 revealed that the hate speech phenomenon in indonesia has emerged since 2012 with political issues in jokowi ahok, jakarta local election (pilkada jakarta). it abstract: this study aims to analyze some hate speech phenomenon reviews in indonesia. it compares how these two reviews are carried out to indicate how each source contributes and integrates the topic. the research uses a qualitative method with a systematic review. they were analyzed using a literature review matrix with the abstract data, such as author, years published, topic, and effects and findings. the prisma checklist (reporting guide for systematic review) is also applied to validate the observed systemic review. the research findings demonstrate that the clarity and transparency of the observed literature reviews need to be improved. keywords: hate speech; prisma checklist; systematic literature review. yelly andriani barlian & pikir wisnu wijayanto analyzing 'hate speech phenomenon' research in indonesia: a systematic review 204 was started with the shifting role of buzzer from promoting products to campaigning specific political figures. it shows that buzzer reputation has shifted to negative (camil et al., 2017). for instance, we often observe social media platforms such as instagram, facebook, youtube, twitter, and whatsapp, the latest name-callings 'kadrun,' short for kadal gurun (dabb lizard), referring to jokowo critics and jakarta governor anies baswedan supporters. meanwhile, derogatory terms cebong (tadpoles) is associated with jokowi devotees (heriyanto, 2019). social media has been dominated by a rude sarcasm language style that contains swearing, satire, ridicule, and insulting (jamilah, 2020). furthermore, cipg found that buzzers, mostly influencers, have a significant role in persuading and managing their followers to support their opinions driven by voluntary or commercial motives. at this level, most of them will not concern communication ethics. indonesians have frequently degraded noble values because of this modern technology and postmodern paradigm that only prioritizes human rationality and objective clarity. this view belongs to deconstructionists (poststructuralists). they are famous for "a text meaning depends on the point of view of each interpreter. then the meaning is also different and varied". for example, if the phrase "setan kau" (you are evil) is spoken to other people, and they both understand the expression as a regular thing, it should not be interpreted as an insult. in contrast, the act is subjective to the victim when the person who hears that expression feels humiliated (nasution, 2019). this different interpretation often causes conflict. meanwhile, the other research stated that those who commit hate speech develop insufficient linguistic intelligence and communication ethics (syafyahya, 2018; nasution, 2019). the negative, unpleasant impact is still increasing today, and unfortunately, it tends to create and endanger national conflict. these two parties keep opposing each other using hate speech almost in all social issues in politics. public figures, such as celebrities, often face situations once what they write on social media contradicts local society values. it was found in young lex's case when he revealed his present wife was pregnant before marriage (latifah, 2019). however, sometimes hate speech is given without specific reason, for instance, taboo words given to aurel hermansyah, the daughter of indonesian singer anang hermansyah (suryani, 2021). it is also known that cyberbullying has been contributed to mental health and suicidal number (popoola et al., 2020). many researchers have investigated hate speech from varied perspectives to counter this possible national conflict, such as language features, hate speech reasons, or its solution. some researchers mainly investigate hate speech from its grammatical units and their meaning using forensic linguistics. subyantoro in suryani (2021) stated that forensic linguistics is a multidisciplinary study, namely linguistics and forensic science. particularly, danielewicz-betz in hazhar (2021) explained that forensic linguistics assesses and observes the language in the aspects of “crime, judicial procedures or disputes in law.” nowadays, forensic linguistics is used in court to observe hate speech as provoking, inciting, insulting, blasphemy, defamation, and spreading the hoax. each charge will bring the offender to jail, for example, in ahmad dani's case, as he provokes people to oppose the regime in power (permatasari & sunyantoro, 2020). these aspects are urgently required to be investigated; thus, we can formulate some proper solutions to counter this hate-speech phenomenon. before that, specific hypotheses, new theories should be investigated from previous related research. the research investigating what and how it happens (grounded theory) is a systematic literature review. in this case, the research type investigates secondary data of the hate speech phenomenon. in other words, it observes research conducted by others. the previous research has explained how to conduct this systematic literature review in the field of tropical medicine and health (tawfik et al., 2019). before that, the same research field was also conducted to evaluate the quality of the systematic review (vu-ngoc et al., 2018). one of the tools used to evaluate systematic review quality is the prisma statement, and a guideline has been conducted by page m.j (2021). however, we hardly find the study that compares the literature review analysis by using reporting guide for systematic review (prisma checklist). the research findings will show how these research types are conducted. this is needed as the research phases should be done appropriately to validate the clarity and transparency of the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 205 systemic literature review. an error in one of the phases, such as in searching strategies, will negatively affect information retrieval (salvadoroliván, j., 2019). these failure terms were synthesized and clarified in research studies published between 1970 and mid2018 (simpson, 2020). however, some methodological solutions were carried out to diminish the difficulties (haddaway et al., 2020). in this study, two qualitative systematic literature reviews were taken randomly to compare how these two reviews were carried out and indicate how each source contributes and integrates to the topic. furthermore, from the research findings, it is expected that some pedagogical research will be conducted to minimize and solve this hate speech phenomenon later on. method this research uses a qualitative method with systemic literature review or systematic qualitative review. along with davis in snyder (2019), this method is most widely used, particularly in medical science, as it is considered transparent, systematic, and reproducible. the systematic qualitative review is also called 'meta-synthesis that integrates the data to gain new detailed concepts and theories (lachal et al., 2017). this systematic review can analyze and identify empirical evidence to respond to the research questions or hypotheses. to validate the research questions, initially, it can be done by testing the research titles. picos (population, intervention, comparison, outcomes, and study design) is mainly used in a systematic literature review. however, they are hard to accommodate the qualitative systematic literature review. therefore, another tool developed by cooke et al., 2012 known as spider stands for sample, phenomenon of interest, design, evaluation, and research type. they are usually used as research instruments (flemming & noyes, 2021). 'sample' size in qualitative research is smaller, but they are more detailed if it is compared to quantitative research. 'phenomenon of interest' triggers the researchers to discover why the phenomenon happens and why it happens. 'design' research of these research papers is reflected in the abstracts. in a qualitative systematic literature review, the qualitative method should be revealed to guarantee the quality of the analysis. 'evaluation' is the outcomes measure. it could be different from quantitative research that usually consists of statistics. the measurement could be unobservable and subjective. the last one is 'research type,' which is qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method. this research is qualitative. the construction of the spider tool is explained in table 1 below. table 1. the construction of the spider tool spider justification s more minor participants tend to be used in qualitative research than quantitative research, so this term was deemed more appropriate. pi qualitative research aims at understanding the how and why certain performances, judgments, and personal experiences. therefore, its intervention/exposure is not always marked in qualitative research questions. d qualitative research uses a theoretical framework to determine which research method to use. inference statistics are not used in qualitative research, so the details of the research plan will help you make decisions about the robustness of your research and analysis. in addition, this may increase awareness of qualitative research in databases where titles and summaries are not structured. e qualitative research measures the same results as quantitative research methods, that is, results. these vary depending on the survey question and may contain more unobservable and subjective composition than quantitative surveys (e.g., attitudes and views and so forth), so evaluation was deemed more suitable. r three types of surveys can be searched: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method source: flemming & noyes (taken from cooke et al., 2012) this research is conducted to analyze some hate speech phenomenon reviews in indonesia. it compares how these two reviews are carried out to indicate how each source contributes and integrates the topic. once, the research uses secondary data, taking other literature as the research materials, it is yelly andriani barlian & pikir wisnu wijayanto analyzing 'hate speech phenomenon' research in indonesia: a systematic review 206 a systematic qualitative review. the approach is shown in table 1 below. table 2. approach to systematic literature reviews approach systematic typical purpose synthesize and compare evidence research questions specific search strategy systematic sample characteristics quantitative articles analysis and evaluation quatitative example of contribution evidence of effect inform policy and practice source: snyder, h. (2019) additionally, snyder concludes there are four steps in conducting this systematic qualitative method, such as 1) designing, 2) conducting, 3) analysing, and 4) writing up the reviews. in designing the review, the first question is the significance of the evaluation and which method is most appropriate for the research topic and its contribution. a qualitative systemic review is chosen as this research analyzes the hate speech phenomenon review in indonesia. after deciding on the research questions, the research strategy can be started by searching related studies. these studies were taken from secondary data, namely journal articles, thesis, proceedings, and online magazines. there are 2 indonesianlanguage articles taken from a varied database and available in google scholar, researchgate, and doaj.org. in gaining reliable synthesis on this research topic, a literature review matrix was made with the data abstracted, such as the author, years published, topic, and the effects and findings (snyder, 2019). the second phase is conducting the review. both researchers chose the secondary data to guarantee quality and reliability. snyder proposes some strategies, such as reading all the selected research papers and reading some parts (the methodology and findings). the last option is reading the abstract, selecting, and then rereading the full text before deciding. in this study, the researchers chose the second method, reading the methodology and findings as time-consuming. after conducting the review and choosing the research materials, the researchers analyzed them using the most appropriate approach for the research purposes. as this research analyzes the hate speech phenomenon review in indonesia, the approach used is a systematic qualitative review. the last phase of conducting this systematic review is writing up the review. the appropriate reporting guide for a systematic review is prisma (preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis) which is a revision of the quorom (quality of reporting of meta-analysis) statement. prisma was developed by 29 review authors, methodologies, clinicians, medical editors, and a customer (selçuk, 2019). it consists of 27 checklists for giving a transparent report of this systematic review. table 3. 27-item reporting guides of prisma section/topic item checklist items title title 1 identify the report as a systematic review, meta-analysis, or both. abstract structured summary 2 if necessary, provide a structured summary that includes: goals; data sources; qualification criteria, participants and interventions; study evaluation, and synthesis methods. results; limitations; conclusions and implications of important findings; systematic review registration numbers. introduction rationale 3 please explain the reason for the review about what is already known. objectives 4 ask clear questions about participants, interventions, comparisons, results, and study design (picos). methods english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 207 protocol and registration 5 if possible, provide registration information, including the registration number, confirmation logs, availability, access locations (such as web addresses). eligibility criteria 6 specify and justify the characteristics of the study used as admission criteria (e.g., picos, duration of follow-up) and reporting factors (e.g., years considered, language, publication status). information sources 7 describe all sources at the search date and the last search (e.g., a database containing the acquired data, contact the study author to identify additional studies). search 8 presents a complete electronic search strategy for at least one database, including the limits used, to be repeated. study selection 9 demonstrates the process of study selection (i.e., screening, eligibility, inclusion in systematic reviews, and inclusion in the meta-analysis, if applicable). data collection process 10 describes one way to extract data from a report (for example, individual and duplicate pilot forms) and the process for retrieving and validating data from investigators. data items 11 list and define all the variables for which the data was sought (picos, funding sources, etc.), as well as assumptions and simplifications. risk of bias in individual studies 12 describes how to assess the risk of bias in an individual study (including whether this was done at the study level or the results level) and how this information is used in each data synthesis. summary measures 13 enter the most important summary indicators (risk ratio, mean difference, etc.). synthesis of results 14 describes how to process data and combine research results, including a measure of consistency for each meta-analysis (e.g., i2). risk of bias across studies 15 describe all risk assessments of bias that may affect cumulative evidence (e.g., publication bias, selective reporting within the study). additional analyses 16 explain any additional analysis methods (sensitivity or subgroup analysis, metaregression, etc.) and provide predefined methods. results study selection 17 include the number of studies included in surveys, ratings, and reviews, ideally with a flow chart, along with reasons to exclude them at each stage. study characteristics 18 for each study, provide the characteristics from which the data were extracted (study size, picos, follow-up period, etc.) and provide citations. risk of bias within studies 19 includes data on the risk of bias in each study and, where possible, provides an assessment at the outcome level (see point 12). results of individual studies 20 available in each study at all endpoints (benefit or harm) considered: (a) simple summary data for each intervention group (b) effect estimates and confidence intervals, ideally forest diagrams. synthesis of results 21 presents the results of each meta-analysis performed, including confidence intervals and consistency measures. risk of bias across studies 22 presents the results of assessing the risk of bias throughout the study (see point 15). additional analysis 23 when complete, state the results of further analysis (e.g., sensitivity or subgroup analysis, meta-regression [see point 16). discussion summary of evidence 24 for each primary endpoint, summarize the key findings, including the strength of the evidence. take into account relevance to essential groups (health providers, users, policymakers, etc.). limitations 25 discuss limitations at the study and outcome level (risk of bias, etc.) and review level (incomplete search of identified study outcomes, error reporting, etc.). conclusions 26 provides a general interpretation of the results concerning other evidence and its impact on future studies. funding funding 27 describe funding sources for systematic reviews and other support (providing data). the role of the funder in systematic reviews. source: nawijn., et al. (2019) yelly andriani barlian & pikir wisnu wijayanto analyzing 'hate speech phenomenon' research in indonesia: a systematic review 208 only items 1 and 2 will be revealed in the two chosen research papers in the research implementation. they are the title and the structured summary (context, objectives, data sources, study selection, and data synthesis. findings and discussion two articles were reviewed for the second time to eliminate unfit for the selection criteria. a literature review matrix was made to synthesize this research topic with the data abstracted (muniarti et al. 2018), such as the author, years published, topic, and the effects and findings (snyder, 2019). table 4. literature review matrix no author year published topic method effect and findings conclusion suggested solution 1. irawan 2018 hate speech in indonesia: bahaya & solusi literature review, but it is not mentioned explicitly, research method: critical race theory & islamic perspective. 1) hate speech in indonesia: verbal & non-verbal 2) hate speech causes social division, rudeness, and national decline 3) hate speech does not reflect the respected indonesian characteristics or nationalist values 4) hate speech causes violence and intolerance between religions, ethnic groups, races, and groups. government, religious leaders, and society should solve the hate speech phenomenon. 2. hanna rahmi, andreas corsini 2020 overview of the phenomenon of "hate speech" with political content in indonesia in the perspective of "psychological hatred" systematic literature review, and using secondary data, psychological studies. the emergence of hate speech: 1)political events, such as in indonesia president election (2014-2019) between jokowi and prabowo 2)jakarta (local) public election in 2017 between anies baswedan and ahok 3) the social gap 1) moral and religious education at school and home 2) parents and teachers roles 3) tolerance education 4) multiculturalism they were taken and analyzed using a literature review matrix and prisma statements to answer the research questions. these articles are written in the indonesian language with the same topic, the hate speech phenomenon in indonesia. for instance, from most research papers, these articles, we realize that this cyber harassment can be found almost in all media, printed and online. the prisma statements were made to give a clear and transparent report systemic literature review. in this case, the research will take snyder's strategy in reading some parts of the research paper (the methodology and findings). the prisma checklist item 1: title & abstract english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 209 title research 1: 'hate speech in indonesia: bahaya & solusi' title research 2: overview of the phenomenon of "hate speech" with political content in indonesia in the perspective of "psychological hatred" item 1 identifies the report as a systematic review, meta-synthesis, or both. the title is observed with the spider tool. explanation: the title of the first research should be more informative to help the readers and the search engine. spider (sample, phenomenon of interest, design, evaluation, and research type) approach can be used to make titles. research' sample' is defined as a smaller group from a certain population. it could be a group of people, objects, or items (bhardwaj, 2019). the titles of the two research papers refer to a sample of hate speech items in indonesian, which are available in varied media. they are a smaller group from the population. 'the phenomenon of interest' is reflected in the first titles (bahaya & solusi or hazard & solution in english), and in the second title refers to a political issue. the 'design' research of these two research papers is not described in their research titles. they are mentioned insufficiently in abstracts. the 'evaluation' only appears in the title of the second research that uses the psychological hatred perspective to discuss its research data. as the systematic literature review, both titles should reflect it by adding the phrase 'systematic review,' 'meta-analysis,' or 'meta-synthesis as the 'research type.' item 2: structured summary provides a structured summary and includes background information as needed. goals; data sources; qualification criteria, participants and interventions; study evaluation and synthesis methods. results; limitations; conclusions and implications of essential findings; funding for systematic reviews. systematic review registration number. this step significantly improves the writing quality as it guides the writer to jot the information down in detail and is well organized. it is also known as the ‘initial impression’ (tullu, 2019). report-research 1: 'hate speech in indonesia: bahaya & solusi' context: hate speech in social media (mainly) is categorized in many forms, and it can endanger indonesia's 'unity of diversity' value. objective: the research aims to capture the hate speech phenomenon in indonesia and its solution. data sources: this research uses the critical race theory perspective from delgado & jean stefancic (harris, 2001), islamic perspective on hate speech, the universal declaration of human rights, kuhp (book of criminal law), and some additional online services. study selection: this research focuses on the critical race theory perspective from delgado & jean stefancic (harris, 2001), islamic perspective on hate speech data synthesis: hate speech can be categorized into verbal and non-verbal disturbing actions. this research observed the hate speech phenomenon in indonesia, particularly digital social media. due to its adverse effects, the indonesian government has committed to oppose it by instructing all the social media to confirm the 'regime of censorship' and delete all the hate speech contents, besides the cyber policy implementation. this first research suggests the critical race theory (crt) and islamic perspectives to offer the solution. it explains that crt can learn and transform the relationship among races, racism, and power. moreover, political subjectivity will degrade the objectivity of social and human welfare implementation. based on the crt perspective, hate speech can cause physical and psychological disorders. thus, the crt perspective needs to provide social media users with techniques, guidance, and counseling. another perspective suggested by the researcher is applying the islamic perspective. principally, there is no prohibition of free speech as long as the verbal or non-verbal actions are not contrary to islamic values and against others' freedom and dignity. furthermore, the researcher also demonstrates the 'shura' concept in islam. it is noted that 'shura' is such a discussion forum where people can have different opinions to find the best solutions (nusa, 2018). conclusion: according to the crt perspective, the hate speech phenomenon should be prevented due to its adverse impacts on individuals and nations. the researcher proposes the concept of 'shura' to improve people's communication issues. yelly andriani barlian & pikir wisnu wijayanto analyzing 'hate speech phenomenon' research in indonesia: a systematic review 210 the researchers also urge active participation from the government, religious leaders, and society. report-research 2: overview of the phenomenon of "hate speech" with political content in indonesia in the perspective of "psychological hatred" context: the phenomenon of political hate speech in indonesia ojective: this second research observed the emergence of hate speech to discover the reasons, especially in pedagogy. data sources: this research uses systemic literature review, electronic information and transaction (indonesian: ite law), "duplex theory of hatred," semiotics, social and contains control theory, bio sociological theory, cognitive perspective. study selection: systemic literature review, duplex theory of hatred, perspective cognitive. data synthesis: the negative impacts of social media are fraud, hoax, cyberbullying, and hate speech intensely in a political context. hate speech is known as aggression, precisely non-physical or verbal aggression. this phenomenon is increasing because hate speech characteristics are 1) permanent, 2) itinerancy, 3) anonymity, and 4) transnationality (anis, 2017). besides encouraging all social media to delete hate speech contents, the indonesian government authorizes the ite law and cybercrime determination to overcome this issue. the researcher exposes "duplex theory of hatred" to relate hate speech to a psychological perspective: (1) hate is psychologically related to love. (2) hate is not the opposite of love, nor is it the absence of love. the relationship between these is quite complex. (3) hate, like love, is a story related to emotional character. (4) hatred, like love, can be explained using a triangulation structure based on individual stories, and the components of that structure exist negation of intimacy, passion, and commitment. (5) hate is the main component that gives rise to violence large (e.g., terrorism and genocide) (sternberg, 2003). conclusion: due to the negative impacts of the hate speech phenomenon, some solutions should be provided. it should be supported by all aspects, especially in the education aspect. teachers, principals, and parents are obliged to educate young generations to be tolerant regardless of different issues. from the results, the two research should be more informative both in title and abstract. the report noted that research title (1) only exposes the sample and the phenomenon of interest. in contrast, the title of research (2) only exposes the sample, phenomenon of interest, and evaluation. a good title in a systematic literature review should reflect the research sample, the phenomenon of interest, design, evaluation, and the research type. some elements should be available in a research abstract. they are the 1) objective, aim, the research purpose, 2) research method, 3) result of significant findings, and 4) principle conclusion (regoniel, 2021). the second research explores the topic phenomena more and a concise research objective in the last sentence of the abstract. it should have revealed the research method as well. meanwhile, the first abstract is complete. besides explaining its research method, it also contains the research conclusion. the structured research summary of these two research sufficiently covers all the research questions. conclusion from this research, we can conclude that writing a systematic literature review is challenging. to conduct an excellent systematic literature review, we can use the prisma checklist statements to guide us in composing the research and the spider tool as an instrument to decide the systematic literature review titles. furthermore, a more complete and detailed observation of related topics will be conducted, particularly in pedagogical aspects, such as academic writing issues. references anis, m., anggreni, l. and yuliarti, m. 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(2018). ujaran kebencian dalam bahasa indonesia kajian bentuk dan makna. makalah kongres kbi 2018. fakultas ilmu budaya universitas andalas. tawfik, g.m., dila, k.a.s., mohamed, m.y.f., tam, d., kien, n., ahmed, a., huy, n. (2019) a step by step guide for conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis with simulation data. trop med health 47, 46 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41182-019-0165-6 tullu m. s. (2019). writing the title and abstract for a research paper: being concise, precise, and meticulous is the key. saudi journal of anesthesia, 13(suppl1), s12–s17. https://doi.org/10.4103/sja.sja_685_18 vu-ngoc h, elawady ss, mehyar gm, abdelhamid ah, mattar om, halhouli o, vuong n., ali, c. d., hasan u. h., kien n., hirayama, k., huy, n. t. (2018). quality of flow diagram in systematic review and/or meta-analysis. plos one 13(6): e0195955. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195955 https://doi.org/10.32528/bb.v6i1.4167 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 15 teacher assessment literacy: indonesian efl secondary teachers' self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice dewi aria department of english education, faculty of language and literature education, indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia email: dewiariadi@upi.edu didi sukyadi department of english education, faculty of language and literature education, indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia email: dsukyadi@upi.edu eri kurniawan department of english education, faculty of language and literature education, indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia email: eri_kurniawan@upi.edu apa citation: aria, d., sukyadi, d., & kurniawan, e. (2021). teacher assessment literacy: indonesian efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 15-26. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5349 received: 15-08-2021 accepted: 05-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction an assessment is a crucial activity in the teaching and learning process (cheng & fox, 2017 in xu, 2018; ashraf & zolfaghari, 2018) besides it has been widely acknowledged as the essential element of a teachers' job (khadijeh & amir, 2015; luthfiyyah, basyari, & dwiniasih, 2020; vogt, tsagari, & spanoudis, 2020). furthermore, this is increasingly being recognized as an integral part of teacher professionalism (giraldo, 2018; tian, louw, & khan, 2021). this is due to teachers spend their professional time performing classroom assessment activities (deluca, lapointe-mcewan, & luhanga, 2015); up to 50 percent of their time (howell, 2013) to monitor their students' achievement towards learning outcomes (giraldo & abstract: assessing students' performance is an essential part of a teacher's job. hence, they are believed to be familiar with various kinds of assessments, especially classroom-based assessments (henceforth cba). language teaching and assessment are two interrelated that affect each other to a great extent. undoubtedly, language assessment becomes a more complicated activity in the field of language teaching. the major objective of this study was to describe how efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on the basic principles of assessment and their own practice in cba. this study was conducted in the form of a descriptive survey research. shim's (2009) survey instrument was adapted to collect data and gathered using an online survey. 48 respondents willingly fulfilled the online survey containing 80 statements concerning classroom assessment procedures. the data obtained were analyzed using descriptive statistics. the findings of the current study revealed that teachers seemed to practice assessment for learning (henceforth afl), in which most teachers conducted assessments to support students’ learning and used the results as feedback to improve and revise their teaching. the teachers in this study appeared to be literate and excellent in understanding the concept and using it in practice. however, a question remains as to whether their classroom practice was excellent. since most studies have largely reported results on teacher's assessment literacy (henceforth tal), future programs and research should be directed toward classroom-based research on how the cbal can improve students' learning and improve the quality of teacher instructions. the implications of the result are expected to provide a clear understanding and theoretical foundations of cbal. keywords: assessment literacy; classroom-based assessment practice; efl secondary teachers. dewi aria, didi sukyadi, & eri kurniawan teacher assessment literacy: indonesian efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice 16 murcia, 2018) and influence their quality of instruction towards the quality of the assessments used (rad, 2019; rusli, 2017). to this end, teachers must have an adequate assessment literacy level to properly assess students' learning outcomes (deluca et al., 2015; koh, burke, luke, gong, & tan, 2017; luthfiyyah et al., 2020; popham, 2011; zulaiha, mulyono, & ambarsari, 2020). studies concerning assessment literacy (henceforth al) have been appearing in education literature since 1990s (stiggins, 1991). since then, many scholars have proposed the meaning of al. one of them defined al as the ability of teachers to properly design, select, interpret, and use the assessment results for educational decisions (quilter & gallini, 2000). a literate teacher can incorporate assessment with teaching (pastore & andrade, 2019); hence they are able to draw accurately and efficiently students' achievement as well as to communicate the assessment results to the relevant stakeholders (scarino, 2013). therefore, it seems that al reinforces teachers' assessment practices substantially influence the students' learning quality (coombs, deluca, lapointe-mcewan, & chalas, 2018). though al is perceived as a central core in language teaching, some researchers (al-bhalani, 2019; muhammad & bardakçi, 2019; yamtim & wongwanich, 2014) found that teachers' assessment skills are generally weak. similarly, stiggins (2001) states that he noticed unacceptably low levels of al among teachers and administrators in schools. he also saw that assessment illiterate resulted in inaccurate assessment for students and would prevent them from reaching their full academic potential. the results from several empirical studies also found that there was a mismatch between teachers’ knowledge and skills (jannati, 2015; lam, 2014; luthfiyyah et al., 2020; zulaiha et al., 2020) and more knowledgeable for summative assessment rather than formative assessment (deluca & klinger, 2010). lam (2019) confirmed that teachers in his study had fundamental knowledge about cba more than the theories of reliability and validity. furthermore, this study also found that despite the teacher had good knowledge of cba, the assessment practice was not more than grading activities. additionally, some other researchers even point out some teachers knew only a limited set of language testing terminologies for their practical use (vogt & tsagari, 2014). hence, those problems urged this research to explore teachers' assessment literacy, especially in terms of cba practice in different settings. although many researchers have conducted studies in the field of al, similar studies in indonesian context are still underexplored. this is due to al is still a relatively new concept in language assessment (bahtiar & purnawarman, 2020). puspawati (2019) investigated teachers’ language assessment literacy in a higher education context. the findings showed that the teachers had a sound understanding of language assessments' knowledge, skills, and principles. furthermore, prasetyo (2018) researched a student-teacher experience of teaching practice in one of the senior high schools in yogyakarta. it was found that the teacher got more experience in administrative tasks than guidance in teaching and assessment. bahtiar & purnawarman (2020) investigated language teachers’ assessment literacy, perceptions, and experiences in assessing students. the participants were teachers in junior and senior high school. thematically, the results showed that most of the teachers do not know the term of al, and they still need training to improve their assessment ability. then, a case study research by saputra, hamied, & suherdi (2020) attempted to examine trajectory teachers who enrolled in a professional learning community (plc) project. findings showed that the plc broadened teachers’ understandings of al and the use of authentic assessment in practice. the last, more recent studies by luthfiyyah et al. (2020) and zulaiha, et al. (2020). luthfiyyah et al. (2020) examined junior and senior high school teachers, while zulaiha, et al. (2020) examined only junior high school teachers. both studies investigated the alignment of teachers’ perception of cba and their classroom practices quantitatively. based on the previous studies in indonesian context, a survey study on efl secondary teachers’ assessment literacy especially in term of classroom practice seems rarely discussed from such empirical studies. therefore, this study intends to fulfill the gap focusing on surveying teachers' assessment literacy with the coverage of the study deals with teachers' self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice in terms of the basic principles of cba proposed by shim (2009), i.e., planning, implementation, monitoring, as well as recording and dissemination. in particular, this study was aimed to address three research questions: (1) is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 17 there any significant relationship between efl teachers' perception of the basic principles of cba and their self-perceived on their own practice, (2) how efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived the basic principles of assessment with their own practice of cba? and (3) to what extent do the teachers perceive their classroom assessment practice? the growing interest in studies of al has resulted in a wealth of research conceptualizing and providing insight into understanding it. many scholars also attempted to define the meaning of al and developed measurements in assessing teacher assessment literacy. the main concept of al and studies on it are floored below. the term assessment literacy was firstly coined by richard stiggins almost thirty years ago in terms of assessment literate person characteristics. he argued that an assessment-literate educator realizes that effective instruction, learning, and assessment are to reach high-quality education, and they act assertively to prevent unsound assessment (stiggins, 1991). however, stiggins did not provide a clear definition of assessment literacy. he then portrayed teachers who are assessment literates know what they assess, why they do so, how best to assess the achievement of their students' interests, how to generate sound samples of students' performance, what can go wrong, and how to prevent those problems before they occur (stiggins, 1995). since then, assessment literacy has become a term commonly used by scholars and researchers trying to conceptualize the meaning of assessment literacy further. for instance, davies (2008) suggested the combination of the practical (the skills) with the descriptive (the knowledge) and the theoretical (the principles) for assessment literacy. skills describe the practical know-how in assessment and construction, and knowledge to the relevant background in measurement and language description (davies, 2008; see also fulcher, 2012) and principles concern the proper use of language tests, their fairness, and impact, as well as questions of ethics and professionalism, necessitating consideration of the growing professionalism of language testing, language testers' responsibilities and the impact of their work on a variety of stakeholders, as well as the ethical choices they must make (davies, 2008). similarly, webb (2002) defined al as the knowledge for assessing what students know and can do, interpreting the results from these assessments, and applying these results to improve student learning and program effectiveness. moreover, quilter & gallini (2000) defined al as the ability of teachers to properly design, select, interpret, and use the assessment results for educational decisions. mcmillan (2001) in pastore & andrade(2019) defined teachers with a robust background in the assessment are well-positioned to integrate assessment with instruction so that they employ appropriate forms of teaching. otherwise, (koh et al., 2017) affirms that teachers’ assessment literacy refers to their demonstrated understanding of the principles behind selecting and designing tasks, judging student works, and interpreting and using assessment data to support student learning. taylor (2009) also described al as stakeholders' ability to use assessment to fulfill both learning and grading purposes. from the sociocultural lens, willis, adie, & klenowski (2013) offered the definition of al as a dynamic, context-dependent social practice that involves teachers articulating and negotiating classroom and cultural knowledge with one another and with learners in the initiation, development, and practice of assessment to achieve the learning goals of students. as the theories have been mentioned above, it can be seen that al is constructed by some aspects, including knowledge, skill, practice, and interconnecting with other aspects such as experience, sociocultural, personal beliefs, and others that can improve both learning quality and teaching instruction. the following will discuss cba. meanwhile, chappuis & stiggins (2020) describes cba as an assessment carried out in the classroom by the teachers with formative assessment use day-to-day to gain its primary focus on the ongoing improvement of learning for all students. as a result, the terminology of assessment for learning (afl) is used for assessment practices that are ongoing processes and take place during a lesson (deluca et al., 2015) or using assessment information (e.g., self, peer, or teacher feedback) to support learning (lam, 2019). assessment as learning (aal) is typically considered a subset of afl, emphasizing learner capacity to review and improve learning metacognitively via reflection and self-assessment (lam, 2019). while, an assessment practice that serves an evaluative function (summarizing and judging student learning) at the dewi aria, didi sukyadi, & eri kurniawan teacher assessment literacy: indonesian efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice 18 end of a unit or term refers to as assessment of learning (aol) (lam, 2019). in afl, both teacher and learner use cba information to modify teaching and learning activities. by applying the principles of afl, teachers will get the effects that high-quality and formative assessment can have on student achievement (chappuis & stiggins, 2020). in addition, chappuis, stiggins, chappuis, & arter (2014) defined classroom-based assessment literacy (henceforth cbal) as the knowledge and skills needed to be required by the teacher to gather accurate information about student achievement and use the assessment process and its results effectively to improve student's achievements. in addition, deluca & klinger (2010) argued that a cba literate employs various pedagogical techniques, including self and peer assessment, modeling various learning levels, offering continuous descriptive feedback, and establishing student-friendly expectations and assessment criteria to encourage focused and meaningful learning. lan & fan (2019) summarized the cbal mainly includes the skills in designing, developing, and evaluating tests critically, using other assessment methods, grading and scoring assessment as the basis of knowledge, and the last, skills in interpreting and communicating the assessment results. from the research undertaken in cba, there is a need for constant professional development for stakeholders (language teachers) to be up to date with the challenges and expectations that arise in cba, which highlights the level of tal (vogt et al., 2020). regarding the level of tal, bybee (1997), as expanded by kaiser & willander (2005) and pill & harding (2013), identified and described it into five categories; a) illiteracy (ignorance of language assessment concepts and methods); b) nominal literacy (understanding that a specific term relates to assessment, but may indicate a misconception); c) functional literacy (sound understanding of basic terms and concepts); d) procedural and conceptual literacy (understanding central concepts of the field, and using knowledge in practice), and e) multidimensional literacy (knowledge extending beyond ordinary concepts including philosophical, historical and social dimensions of assessment). before elaborating on teacher perception, standards for teacher competencies in student assessment are discussed in the following section. to be assessment literate, teachers not only need to be knowledgeable and skilled in different areas of assessment, they need to use appropriate assessment methods that maximizes benefits for both students and teachers. in 1990, aft, ncme, and nea (pastore & andrade, 2019; xu & brown, 2016) developed a set of teacher competencies in assessment called standards for teacher competence in educational assessment of students, herein known as the standards. there were seven standards that teacher should be skilled in: (1) choosing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions. (2) developing assessment methods appropriate for instructional decisions. (3) administering, scoring, and interpreting the results of both externally produced and teacher-produced assessment methods. (4) using assessment results when making decisions about individual students, planning teaching, developing curriculum, and school improvement. (5) developing valid pupil grading procedures that use pupil assessments. (6) communicating assessment results to students, parents, other lay audiences, and educators. (7) recognizing unethical, illegal, and otherwise inappropriate assessment methods and uses of assessment information. (aft, ncme, & nea, 1990). the standards are the most widely cited in studies of teacher competence and have served as the basis for instruments to measure teacher competence in assessment (deluca et al., 2015). two instruments which have been empirically tested and offer reports of reliability and validity, namely the teacher assessment literacy questionnaire (talq) and the assessment practices inventory (api). in addition, many studies use adaptations of these instruments to measure assessment literacy. for instance, a study conducted by braney (2010) and howell (2013) used api revised version called apir, quilter & gallini (2000) used only 21 of 35 items of talq in their study. in a very different study of tal, wang, wang, & huang (2008) developed a web-based model and investigated its effectiveness at promoting tal, and shim (2009) presented four stages in teachers’ cba; planning, implementation, monitoring, and recording and disseminating. further discussion related to teacher perception. teacher perceptions of assessment are seen as an internal guiding framework on how teachers perceive the purposes and use the assessment in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 19 relation to their beliefs (xu & brown, 2016). therefore, it should be taken into consideration. the processing of a person's perception is connected with the person's conception, expectation, and knowledge which also influence his/her perception. studies reported that teachers’ assessment conceptions had influenced their assessment practices (coombs et al., 2018; lam, 2019; luthfiyyah et al., 2020). xu & brown (2016) categorized into two dimensions of teacher conceptions of assessment; cognitive and affective dimensions. cognitive refers to the teacher’s perception towards assessment purposes (assessment of/for/as learning). in this case, studies (brookhart, 2011; deluca et al., 2015) revealed that teachers tend to be more skillful and confident in performing assessment of learning (aol) than assessment for/as learning (af/al). otherwise, the affective dimension points to teachers' emotions towards assessment (lam, 2019). some teachers have a definite system belief of assessment (e.g., assessment can improve students' learning), and others do not (e.g., assessment is irrelevant, or the scoring methods is hard to do) so they did not particularly favour the assessment. teacher's experiences in assessment practices in the classroom can impact the way they view the assessment in recent times (vogt & tsagari, 2014). consequently, teachers who have positive conceptions about assessment may find some merits from assessment practices, while the negative conceptions may resist or upset in practicing assessment (vogt & tsagari, 2014). thus, how teacher perceived the assessment is basic in assessment practices. method this study employed descriptive survey research. it aims to describe, compare, contrast, classify, analyze and interpret an individual or a group's beliefs, point of view, or practice about a particular issue (creswell & creswell, 2018; hamied & malik, 2017). in this study, descriptive survey research utilizes to depict how efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on the basic principles of assessment and their own practice in cba. an online survey was conducted as remained the best way to collect the data during the pandemic covid19. other benefits include saving both time and money for the researcher. forty-eight efl secondary teachers willingly participated in the online survey. they are teachers from senior and vocational high schools in riau. most participants were female (n=79.17%) aged between 31 and 35, with more than 11 years of teaching experience. table 1 briefly describes the participants’ demography includes gender, age, and teachers’ ownership of competence certificates, and teaching experiences. since this study was a small scale, the current study cannot represent or generalize the view of all efl teachers in indonesian context. table 1. demography data of the participants demography category n % gender female 38 79.17 male 10 20.83 age 26 – 30 years old 6 12.50 31 – 35 years old 23 47.92 > 35 years old 19 39.58 competence certified 30 62.50 non-certified 18 37.50 teaching experience < 3 years 0 0.00 3 – 10 years 17 35.42 11 – 20 years 28 58.33 > 20 years 3 6.25 the questionnaire was adapted from shim (2009). it comprises three sections to examine participants' demographic information, teachers' perceptions of the basic principles of cba, and self-perceived on their own practice, consisting of 80 statements (40 items regarding teacher perceptions and the rest related to teacher selfperceived on their own classroom practice) with four likert scales from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree,” typed in google form. the questionnaire covers four sub-aspects based upon classroom-based assessment procedural principles, i.e., teachers' practice of planning, implementation, monitoring, and recording and dissemination. this questionnaire was translated in indonesia; hence it is necessary to check the validity of the instrument. pearson product moment was used to check the instrument item's validity. the result showed that all items were valid with the r > .284 (n=48, sig. 5%). the online questionnaire was then distributed through whatsapp teacher group, known as musyawarah guru mata pelajaran (mgmp). the question items were tested on ten teachers to check the items' validity and reliability before they are distributed. dewi aria, didi sukyadi, & eri kurniawan teacher assessment literacy: indonesian efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice 20 the data obtained from the questionnaire were tabulated and analyzed statistically using spss to calculate the frequency, mean (m), and standard deviation (sd) of all the questionnaire items. after screening and selecting the data, descriptive statistics were calculated to respond to the aforementioned research questions. results and discussion results the results of this research were arranged under three research questions. beforehand, the questionnaire findings also revealed that most teachers performed the assessments more than three times each semester. table 2 below presents the descriptive statistic of assessment frequencies that the teacher has done in one semester. table 2. frequencies of assessment done by the teacher each semester once two times three times more than three times total 3 5 8 32 48 6.2 10.4 16.7 66.7 100% it was seen that more than 60% of teachers performed the assessment tasks more than three times. it indicated that assessment practices were teachers' normal routine activities in their english classroom. the questionnaire findings also revealed that more than 64% of teachers constructed the assessment by themselves. this number indicated that the teacher might have had difficulty finding ready-serve assessments or perceived the assessment material they found questionable for their classroom. the relationship between efl teachers' perception of the basic principles of cba and their selfperceived on their own practice. to answer the first research question concerning the correlation between teachers' perceptions of principles of cba and their self-perceived on their own practice was run by pearson correlation. the results were displayed in table 3. table 3. the correlations between teachers' perceptions and their practices teachers’ perceptio ns teacher s’ practice s teachers’ perceptio ns pearson correlation 1 .706** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 48 48 teachers’ practices pearson correlation .706** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 48 48 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2tailed). as seen in table 3 above, there was a significant relationship (𝜌<0.01) between teachers' perceptions of the classroom-based assessment principles and their self-perceived on their own practice. in addition, there was a positive relationship which indicated that teachers' perceptions reflect on what and how they did in classroom assessment practice. how efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived the basic principles of assessment with their own practice of cba. furthermore, to assess the second research question regarding how efl secondary teachers selfperceived the basic principles of assessment with their own practice in cba according to shim's classroom-based assessment principles, the summary of descriptive statistics was shown in table 4 below. table 4. a summary of descriptive statistics of assessment literacy competences n mi n max mean convers (100) teachers’ perceptio ns 48 129 168 151.5 90.2 teachers’ practices 48 105 168 147.0 87.5 total n (listwise) 48 the average score of teachers' perceptions on the principles of classroom-based assessment based on the table above (𝛭=151.5) or after converting (𝛭=90.2) was more than satisfactory. in addition, the average score of teachers' practice (𝛭=147.0) or after converting (𝛭=87.5) was also satisfied. furthermore, the average score of those two variables was 88.85. the statistics showed that efl english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 21 secondary teachers’ perceptions and the way they perceived their own practices of cba in this study were on the procedural and conceptual literacy level based on bybee's categories as expanded by kaiser & willander (2005) and pill & harding (2013). the level indicates that the teachers seemed to understand the concepts of the classroom-based assessment principles and use their knowledge in practice. to what extent do the teachers perceive their classroom assessment practice? to elaborate the answer of research question 3 regarding what extent the teachers perceive their classroom assessment practice, it was demonstrated as follows. table 5 presents teachers’ planning in cba practice. table 5. teachers’ classroom practice of shim’s planning assessment principles q propositions m sd q16 i make sure that all students are given the same learning opportunities in their classroom 3.79 .410 q17 i make sure that assessment is not affected by students’ personal characteristics such as gender, appearance, and economic and social background. 3.73 .449 q7 assessments (tasks) are meaningful to the students. 3.67 .519 q12 assessment focuses on students’ progress and achievement rather than on comparisons between the students in the classroom. 3.67 .476 q8 assessment (tasks) is designed in such a way as to obtain information about what students know at that particular time. 3.63 .489 q14 i receive advance ‘informed consent’ from the students or their parents with regard to carrying out the assessment. 3.62 .570 q6 assessment (tasks) is related to what the students do in real class time. 3.56 .542 q13 i give the students advance notice, so that the students are able to prepare for the assessment. 3.54 .582 q4 i balance the attainment targets with the students’ needs when i design the assessment 3.52 .652 q3 i consider what the students’ needs are when i design the assessment. 3.50 .715 q9 assessment (tasks) is designed in such a way as to obtain information about what students can do at that particular time. 3.50 .546 q2 i consider the standards or attainment targets which the curriculum requests when i design the assessment. 3.48 .583 q11 the appropriateness of assessment (tasks) are checked by calling for peer comment or with reference to published guidelines (if these are available). 3.46 .544 q1 i first identify the purpose of the assessment when i design the assessment. 3.46 .771 q5 i use assessment specifications when i carry out the assessment. 3.46 .544 q10 assessment (tasks) is designed in such a way as to obtain information about students’ potential to use the language effectively. 3.42 .539 q15 i respect the privacy of the students and guarantee confidentiality. 3.04 .824 from table 5 above, the propositions q16, q17, q7, and q12 obtained the highest score (m>3.65), indicating that teachers perceived cba tend to focus on students’ progress rather than grading and comparing students. the results also indicated that teachers avoid discrimination against students. however, little concern was given to proposition q15, showing that teachers less respect students’ privacy and confidentiality. table 6 below describes teachers’ implementation of the cba principles. table 6. teachers’ classroom practice of shim’s assessment implementation principles q propositions m sd q24 assessment (tasks) processes are completed within a manageable time considering the given context. 3.58 .498 q20 students understand the desired outcome of the assessment (tasks). 3.56 .580 q23 i give students immediate feedback after they complete each assessment (task). 3.54 .504 q18 i inform the students of the reasons why they are being assessed. 3.50 .652 dewi aria, didi sukyadi, & eri kurniawan teacher assessment literacy: indonesian efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice 22 q22 i provide students with an opportunity to monitor their own work while they are performing the assessment (tasks). 3.48 .583 q21 students are supported when they have a problem hindering their completing the assessment (tasks). 3.46 .683 q19 i explicitly instruct the students how to do the assessment (tasks). 3.44 .580 from table 6 above, propositions q24 and q20 obtained the highest mean score in this stage (m=3.58 and m=3.56), indicating the teachers strongly agree that assessment is done within a manageable time and the students should know the desired outcome of the assessment they did. however, proposition q19 indicates the teachers less agree that the students need explicit instruction. table 7 presents the survey findings regarding teachers’ perceived their own practices on monitoring assessment principles. table 7. teachers’ classroom practice of shim’s monitoring assessment principles q propositions m sd q30 i use the results of assessment positively not negatively 3.77 .425 q31 i make assessment a part of teaching and learning. 3.77 .425 q29 i use the results of assessment for revising my teaching. 3.67 .519 q25 i construct a marking system as a part of the whole assessment process. 3.63 .489 q33 the overall feedback enables students to know how to improve their work and take their learning forward. 3.54 .504 q28 i mark the students’ performance consistently. 3.52 .583 q26 marking criteria are connected with the aims of the assessment and the learner’s characteristics in a given context. 3.50 .583 q34 the whole process of assessment is consistent in terms of procedure and administration. 3.40 .536 q36 i monitor the misuse of the overall consequences of the assessment as a tool of power. 3.31 .719 q27 i let students have detailed information about the marking criteria. 3.27 .818 q35 the process of assessment is supported by the involvement of the parents. 3.15 .684 q32 i share the findings of assessment with other teachers 3.08 .767 table 7 above showed that the four propositions (q30, q31, q29, and q25) achieved the highest scores, indicating that teacher did the assessment for learning; the assessment is used to improve learning both students and teachers. the students used the result to improve their learning, while teachers used the result of cba to improve and revise their teaching. however, teachers’ responses to q32 suggest that teachers preferred not to share their assessment findings for certain reasons with other colleagues. the findings concerning teachers’ self-perceived their own practices on recording and dissemination assessment principles are presented in table 8. table 8. teachers’ classroom practice of shim’s recording and disseminating assessment principles q propositions m sd q38 i am aware of my responsibilities for the output of my professional work. 3.79 .410 q39 local or nationwide report systems about the students’ progress and achievement are provided. 3.58 .539 q37 i consider students’ rights as assessment takers; they must never be harmed by the assessment. 3.56 .681 q40 my schools develop their own report system of students’ progress and achievement 3.48 .583 q42 a formal review of a student’s progress and achievement is reported to the local education authority and the central government 3.27 .610 q41 i am involved in the development of the report system at all levels. 3.10 .722 table 8 shows that the teachers generally agreed to all propositions presented. proposition q38 had the highest score (m = 3.79, sd = .410), with the lowest proposition q41 (m = 3.10, sd = .722), english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 23 indicating that the teachers strongly believed that assessment becomes the responsibilities of their professional work and they less agreed that they should be involved in reporting at all levels, perhaps they thought that they did not teach at all levels. discussion this study surveyed efl secondary teachers’ perceptions of cba principles and their selfperceived on their own cba practice. there was a significant relationship between teachers' perceptions of cba principles and their selfperceived of their own practice. this is aligned with the idea of some scholars (coombs et al., 2018; lam, 2019; luthfiyyah et al., 2020), who believed that teachers’ assessment conceptions had influenced their assessment practices. the questionnaire results also indicated that teachers had an excellent understanding of the cba concepts and using their knowledge into practice. as a whole, the current study indicated that teachers seemed to practice assessment for learning, in which most teachers conducted assessments to support students’ learning and using the results as feedback to improve and revise their teaching. teachers also tried to be transparent regarding the desired outcome of the assessment would be done. the teachers also realized that assessment activities are the responsibilities of their professional work. moreover, these results were consistent with the findings of jannati (2015) and zulaiha et al. (2020) that some teacher focused on improving their teaching and monitoring students’ progress, while others still viewed assessment merely as a tool for measuring or scoring students’ achievement (learning outcome). however, findings revealed that teachers had better respect students’ privacy and maintain students’ confidentiality in relation to assessment results. it is aligned with the idea of maccarthy (2014) that test scores could be considered “sensitive” confidential information. therefore, the teachers must be able to use the results of the assessment positively. conclusion in general, the teachers in this study appeared to be literate and excellent in understanding the concept and using it in practice. however, a question remains as to whether their practice in the classroom was excellent. therefore, future programs and research should be directed toward classroom-based research on how the cbal can improve students' learning, especially involving four language skills and improving the quality of teacher instructions. document analysis and classroom observation are also deemed necessary in future research. this study also had some limitations on the number of participants due to time constraints and resources as well as the setting of the study, which involved only efl secondary teachers in one province. despite these limitations, the findings of this study could contribute to a better understanding of teachers’ assessment literacy in their particular context as they intensively interact with relevant assessment materials and assessment stakeholders. references al-bhalani, s. m. 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(2020). an investigation into efl teachers’ assessment literacy: indonesian teachers’ perceptions and classroom practice. european journal of contemporary education, 9(1), 189–201. https://doi.org/10.13187/ejced.2020.1.189 dewi aria, didi sukyadi, & eri kurniawan teacher assessment literacy: indonesian efl secondary teachers’ self-perceived on classroom-based assessment practice 26 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 485 the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang indah pratiwi hrp english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: indahpratiwiharahap@gmail.com sofendi english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: sofendi@yahoo.com ismail petrus english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com apa citation: hrp, i. p., sofendi., & petrus, i. (2022). the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 485-498. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6249 received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 29-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction language has been considered as a bridge which facilitates communication among people. over the years, the importance of english has become higher and higher, and it took place in the curriculum (tsui, 1995). in indonesia, english is learned as a foreign language and a compulsory subject in senior high schools up to university levels. thus, students should learn its four language skills, such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. one of the language skills should be mastered in learning english is speaking skill. speaking is the ability that requires the process of communicative competence, pronunciation, intonation, grammar, and vocabulary. however, knowledge is almost nothing if not expressed. it is not necessary to say that the students at university level should have the ability to express their thoughts and ideas in english (chowdhury, 2016). so, it is expected that the students would be competent enough in oral and written english, when they get themselves admitted into a university. moreover, speaking has been given priority during english teaching and learning process nowdays. but unfortunately, it is observed that some problems still occur for most of the students, for instance, they feel like speaking tasks are rather difficult to do in the classroom, then, not all the students during english speaking activities have courage to speak, in addition though the students can write well, they are not ready to speak abstract: this study aims to investigate the correlations among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency. for this purpose, the unwillingness-to-communicate scale (ucs) questionnaire and the ipip bigfive questionnaire were used. moreover, speaking proficiency test to the sample was employed to find the correlation among students’ reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency. the questionnaire and speaking test result revealed students’ reticence tend to reflect attitudes toward communication, and the students’ dominant personality type was agreeableness, and students’ speaking proficiency was in moderate category. the results revealed that, there was a significant correlation between traits (agreeableness, emotional stability, openness of experience) of personality type and speaking proficiency and there was a significant correlation between personality types and (vocabulary) aspect of speaking proficiency. keywords: reticence; personality types; speaking proficiency. mailto:indahpratiwiharahap@gmail.com mailto:sofendi@yahoo.com mailto:ismailpetrus@yahoo.com indah pratiwi hrp, sofendi, & ismail petrus the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang 486 in english and if the teacher asks them any question in english, they would keep silent for sometime till the teacher helps them out, moreover, during speaking activity, the students only did some written exercises and the teacher mostly gave high attention in teaching grammar to their students with the less speaking exercises. therefore, some researchers have investigated this phenomenon which related to the problems above, it is student’s reticence, and they have discovered various reasons about it. for example, westgate, batey, brownlee, & butley (1985) claimed that the structure of the teacher fronted interaction in language classroom might cause the poor behaviors on the part of the students. wesgate et al. also observed that students attempts to avoid talking to deal with such classroom settings, which in turn exerts influences on the amount of learners’ talk in class. on the other hand, the study conducted by lee (2006) supported the above findings; lee stated that there are strict behavioral rules between the teacher and his/her students, for example, students speak only when they are spoken to. the interaction between the teacher and students’ character is that the teacher leads the students in the classroom, and students’ verbal participation is passive. also, language competence, previous negative speaking experiences in class, lack of confidence, personality, or cultural constrains are all possible reasons that prevent students from communication. reticence is defined by keaton, kelly, & finch (2000) as a communication problem with cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions are is due to the belief that one is better off remaining silent than risking appearing foolish. therefore, when people avoid communication because they believe it is better to remain silent than to risk appearing foolish; this behavior is referred to as reticence, and people who tend to avoid communication, they are called reticent. the speaking problems above are probably closely related to the students’ personality types toward speaking in english. personality plays an important role that affects academic achievement (khatibi and khormaei, 2016). according to dzulkifli and alias (2012), personality is also described as a categorized set of attributes that is found in a person that influences and defines the individual’s cognition, motivations and behaviors. therefore, personality is one of the internal factors that takes crucial part in language learning. different students may have different personality, since they have their own weaknesses and strengths. the students will get different outcomes in their learning activities. it happens since each type of personality will influence students in taking decision and responding to it. thus, personality is a crucial thing in teaching and learning, because knowing students’ personality types is able to understand of the classroom dynamics and to be better able to determine what kinds of classroom activites and strategies would be effective in the class. consequently, teachers are suggested to acquire knowledge on students’ personality in order that the students will be treated differently and overcome the problems easily in order to achieve the goal in teaching and learning process, especially to enhance students’ speaking proficiency. hence, awareness of the of reticence of the efl students in language classrooms and the relationship between learners’ personality and their reticence in efl classroom can play an important role in identifying the potential causes of verbal nonparticipation and encouraging the students to speak and express their ideas in oral language classrooms. meanwhile, it can help the teachers to come to a better understanding of the students’ behavior in the learning situations. in english education study program, the students are demanded to have three such as main competence, the four skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. while, the other skills such as grammar/structure, linguistics, translation, etc. related to this study, the researcher focus only to speaking subject. moreover, the greatest challenge in efl classroom is the development of students’ speaking skill. in english education study program, there are three speaking subjects offered, they are speaking-1, speaking-2 and speaking-3. thus, students who have passed the three speaking subject are considered having good english speaking. based on the researcher’s personal experience as an alumni student of the english department at pgri university of palembang and the latest conditions based on the results of my preliminary interview with one of the lecturers of english department at pgri university of palembang and concerning things discussed above, the researcher was interested in doing the study in pgri university in investigating the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 487 correlation among students’ reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency. method in conducting this study, correlational research was used. this study is aimed at finding out whether or not students’ reticence and personality types correlate to their speaking proficiency. the procedure of conducting this study were: first, researcher identified the students' reticence by using questionnaire. then, researcher identified the students' personality types by using questionnaire. the students' speaking proficiency obtained by using speaking test. pearson product moment correlation coefficient used in order to find out the correlation among the variables based on the result of questionnaires and speaking proficiency test. at last, the researcher discussed the explanation and interpretation of the results. the research design was as follows: description: x1 = students’ reticence x2 = students’ personality types y = students’ speaking proficiency r1 = correlation between students’ reticence and students’ speaking proficiency r2 = correlation between students’ personality types and students’ speaking proficiency r3 = correlation between the predictor variables (reticence and personality types) and the criterion variable (speaking proficiency) r4 = contribution of the predictor variables (reticence and personality types) to the criterion (speaking proficiency) table 1. population of the study no. class students 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1st semester 3rd semester 5th semester 7th semester 9th semester 84 91 77 30 26 total 308 source: pgri university palembang population is the larger group to which one hopes to apply the results (fraenkel and wallen, 2012). the population of this study is all active first till ninth semester students of english education study program of pgri university palembang. the population of the study is presented in the table 1 above. table 2. sample of the study no class students 1. 5th semester 59 total 59 source: pgri university palembang according to arikunto (2010), the sample is a part of the whole population of the investigation. to determine the sample this study, purposive sampling was used which the sample selection was not carried out randomly with certain criteria. according to fraenkel and wallen (2012), purposive sampling method is a method where investigators use personal judgment to select a sample. therefore, the researcher took the fifth semester students of the english education study program of pgri palembang in the academic year 2020/2021 as the samples of this study, because they passed speaking-1, speaking-2 and speaking-3 in first semester until third semester. from 77 of the total number students in fifth semester, there were only 59 students who participate to do the speaking test and questionnaires, because they passed the passing grade for speaking-3. the sample of the study is presented in the table 2 above. two techniques are used to collect the data, those are (1) asking for respondents’ opinion using ready-made questionnaire of ucs (unwillingnessto-communicate scale) for reticence and goldberg’s ipip big-five questionnaire for personality types and (2) testing the sample using speaking proficiency test in this study, two sets of questionnaires were used. the first is reticence questionnaire. to obtain the information about students’ reticence, the researcher used reticence unwillingness-tocommunicate scale (ucs) by burgoon (1976). it is indah pratiwi hrp, sofendi, & ismail petrus the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang 488 developed to measure students’ reticence in speech communication. the questionnaire measures two dimensions of communication reticence: approachavoidance (aa) and reward (r). the aa dimension represents an individual’s tendency to avoid or participate in interpersonal and small group interactions. the r dimension, by contrast, reflects attitudes toward communication—whether one considers it a valuable, honest, and personally rewarding enterprise or feels socially isolated and regards communication as a deceptive, manipulative, or unprofitable activity. in this study, the 20-item (10 items for aa and 10 items for r) short form of the ucs will be used to measure students’ general tendency to avoid speech communication. the questionnaire contains 20 items, the specification of questionnaire items 1. (aa) approach-avoidance: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. 2. (r) reward: 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20. each type had 10 items having positive and negative statements. a response indicating a low level of reticence receives one point, and those showing a high level of reticence receive five points. the score ranges are represented by using numbers (likert-scale) from 1 until 5. the answers have five responses, which are (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) netral, (4) agree and (5) strongly agree. the possible range of reticence scores is 20 for the lowest score and 100 for the highest score for reticence. the second, personality types questionnaire. the researcher used a ready-made ipip big five questionnaire from goldberg (1992) in ipip.ori.org. it is used to know which dominant type of students’ personality. the ipip big five questionnaire was categorized five types: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. the questionnaire contains 50 items. the questionnaire consisted of 50 items by using likertscale from very inaccurate to very accurate. each type had 10 items having positive and negative statements. the specification of questionnaire items 1. extraversion: (positive statement) 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 46, (negative statement) 6, 16, 26 and 36. (2) agreeableness: (positive statement) 7, 17, 27, 37, 42 and 47, (negative statement) 2, 12, 22 and 32. (3) conscientiousness: (positive statement) 3, 13, 23, 33, 43 and 48, (negative statement) 8, 18, 28 and 38. (4) emotional stability: (positive statement): 9 and 19, (negative statement) 4, 14, 24, 29, 34, 39, 44 and 49. (5) openness to experience: (positive statement) 5, 15, 25, 35, 40, 45 and 50, (negative statement) 10, 20 and 30. the personality types questionnaire was scored by assigning the value of 1 to 5 points to the chosen response. the score ranges are represented by using numbers (likertscale) from 1 until 5. the answers have five responses, which are (1) very inaccurate, (2) moderately inaccurate, (3) neither accurate nor inaccurate, and (4) moderately accurate and (5) very accurate. a response indicating a low level of personality types receives one point, and those showing a high level of personality types receive five points. the possible range of personality types scores is 50 for the lowest score and 250 for the highest score for personality types. the speaking test is aimed at identifying the students’ skill and attitude toward speaking. to know the result of students’ speaking score, analytical speaking rubric (2004: foreign language program of studies) was used. the rating sheet consists of a set of qualities to be rated such as task completion, comprehensibility, fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary and language control. the ratings have a range of one to four points. then, to get student points the researcher used the scoring system, student points = converted % score × (max score/100). the possible range of speaking proficiency scores is six for the lowest score and 24 for the highest score for speaking proficiency. the researcher conducted kinds of analysis in this study: first descriptive statistic and second pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. the descriptions of the degree of correlation are as follow: table 3. the degree of correlation interval degree of correlation 0.00 – 0.199 very weak correlation 0.20 – 0.399 weak correlation 0.40 – 0.599 fair correlation 0.60 – 0.799 strong correlation 0.80 – 1.000 very strong correlation source: sugiyono (2016) results and discussion the result of reticence questionnaire reticence questionnaire was from unwillingnessto-communicate scale (ucs). it was a ready-made questionnaire by burgoon (1976). it was administered to know a students’ tendency to be english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 489 reticent of fifth semester students of english education study program of pgri university palembang. reticence questionnaire consisted of 20 items. table 4 below shows the descriptive statistics of the reticence questionnaire. table 4. the descriptive statistics of reticence questionnaire n mini mum maxi mum mean std. deviation reticence 59 41 88 66.75 9.815 valid n (listwise) 59 source: output from spss version 20 based on the data obtained from reticence questionnaire, students reticence ranged from a minimum 41 to a maximum 88 with the mean of 66.75 and a standard deviation of 9.815. the result of personality types questionnaire personality types questionnaire was a ready-made questionnaire. it was from ipip big-five questionnaire by goldberg (1992). it was administered to know what dominant characteristics on that certain type of personality of fifth semester students of english education study program of pgri university palembang. personality types questionnaire consisted of 50 items. table 6 below shows the descriptive statistics of the personality types questionnaire. table 5. the descriptive statistics of personality types questionnaire n mini mum maxi mum me an std. devi ation personality types 59 103 196 16 1.3 9 17.4 44 valid n (listwise) 59 source: output from spss version 20 based on the data obtained from personality types questionnaire, students’ personality types level ranged from a minimum 103 to a maximum 196 with the mean of 161.39 and a standard deviation of 17.444. the result of speaking proficiency the researcher made speaking proficiency test in form of monologue. the researcher wanted to measure students’ speaking proficiency by asking their opinion, thought, feeling in a particular situation. the researcher used topics about the impact of covid-19 pandemic on education, economics and social. the following table 7 presents the descriptive statistics of the speaking proficiency test result. table 6. the descriptive statistics of speaking proficiency n mini mum ma xim um mean std. deviati on speaking_ proficiency 59 69.7 97. 0 84.89 0 6.1631 valid n (listwise) 59 source: output from spss version 20 based on the data obtained from speaking proficiency test, students’ speaking proficiency level ranged from a minimum 69.7 to a maximum 97 with the mean of 84.89 and a standard deviation of 6.1631. correlation analysis table 7. correlation reticence and speaking proficiency reticence speaking reticence pearson correlation 1 .053 sig. (2tailed) .692 n 59 59 speaking proficiency pearson correlation .053 1 sig. (2tailed) .692 n 59 59 source: output from spss version 20 as shown in the table above, the correlation test obtained between reticence and speaking proficiency. to make sure that there was a significant correlation between the two variables, the researcher consulted the value of r-table to check the value of r-obtained. if the value of robtained is higher than value of r-table and p (probability) is lower than 0.05, it means that there is a significant correlation between the variables. it was found that the r-obtained (.053) indicates a positive direction, meaning that there is a unidirectional correlation between reticence and speaking proficiency and it was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.692) was higher than 0.05. it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the indah pratiwi hrp, sofendi, & ismail petrus the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang 490 pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between reticence and speaking proficiency. table 8. correlations the dimensions of the reticence and speaking proficiency appro achavoid ance rewa rd speaki ng proficie ncy approachavoidance pearson correlation 1 .447* * .028 sig. (2tailed) .000 .833 n 59 59 59 reward pearson correlation .447** 1 .064 sig. (2tailed) .000 .628 n 59 59 59 speaking proficiency pearson correlation .028 .064 1 sig. (2tailed) .833 .628 n 59 59 59 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). source: output from spss version 20 based on the table 8, the result of the correlation analyses for each dimension of reticence and speaking proficiency showed that there was no correlation which coefficient correlation of approach avoidance was .028. because the correlation coefficient value was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.833) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between approach avoidance and speaking proficiency. in addition, the correlation coefficient value of reward was .064 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.628) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between approach avoidance and speaking proficiency. table 9. correlations reticence and aspects of speaking proficiency task completio n compre hensibili ty fluency pronunc iation vocabu lary languag e control reticenc e t c pearson correlation 1 .760** .502** .477** .464** .461** .185 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .160 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 c pearson correlation .760** 1 .509** .521** .471** .466** -.035 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .791 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 f pearson correlation .502** .509** 1 .326* .385** .308* -.153 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .012 .003 .018 .248 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 p pearson correlation .477** .521** .326* 1 .540** .729** .103 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .012 .000 .000 .438 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 v pearson correlation .464** .471** .385** .540** 1 .645** .144 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .003 .000 .000 .278 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 l c pearson correlation .461** .466** .308* .729** .645** 1 .125 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .018 .000 .000 .344 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 491 r pearson correlation .185 -.035 -.153 .103 .144 .125 1 sig. (2-tailed) .160 .791 .248 .438 .278 .344 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 based on the table 9, the result of the correlation analyses for reticence and aspect of speaking proficiency showed that there was no significant correlation which coefficient correlation of task completion was .185. because the correlation coefficient value was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.160) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between reticence and task completion. in addition, the correlation coefficient value of comprehensibility was -.035. the correlation index number was given minus (-) symbol. it showed that the correlation direction was negative. thus, the correlation coefficient value of comprehensibility was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.791) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between reticence and comprehensibility. the correlation coefficient value of fluency was -.153. the correlation index number was given minus (-) symbol. it showed that the correlation direction was negative. thus, the correlation coefficient value of fluency was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.248) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between reticence and fluency. the correlation coefficient value of pronunciation was .103 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.438) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between reticence and pronunciation. the correlation coefficient value of vocabulary was .144 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.278) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between reticence and vocabulary. the correlation coefficient value of language control was .125 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.344) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between reticence and language control. table 10. correlation personality types and speaking proficiency personality types speakin g personali ty types pearson correlation 1 .197 sig. (2-tailed) .134 n 59 59 speaking proficien cy pearson correlation .197 1 sig. (2-tailed) .134 n 59 59 source: output from spss version 20 as shown in the table above, the correlation test obtained between personality types and speaking proficiency. based on table 10 above, the correlation coefficient value obtained is .197, with the sig value obtained is .134. the correlation coefficient value of .197 indicates a positive direction, meaning that there is a unidirectional correlation between personality types and speaking proficiency. the result of the correlation analyses for personality types and speaking proficiency showed that there was no significant correlation which coefficient correlation of personality types was .197. because the correlation coefficient value was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.134) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between personality types and speaking proficiency. table 11. correlations among the types of the personality types and speaking proficiency extraver sion agreeab leness conscie ntiousne emotion al opennes s speak ing indah pratiwi hrp, sofendi, & ismail petrus the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang 492 ss profic iency extraversion pearson correlation 1 .418** .086 .079 .309* .095 sig. (2-tailed) .001 .518 .551 .017 .473 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 agreeablenes s pearson correlation .418** 1 .460** -.264* .580** .353** sig. (2-tailed) .001 .000 .044 .000 .006 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 conscientious ness pearson correlation .086 .460** 1 .051 .538** .180 sig. (2-tailed) .518 .000 .700 .000 .172 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 emotional pearson correlation .079 -.264* .051 1 -.229 -.306* sig. (2-tailed) .551 .044 .700 .081 .018 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 openness pearson correlation .309* .580** .538** -.229 1 .385** sig. (2-tailed) .017 .000 .000 .081 .003 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 speaking proficiency pearson correlation .095 .353** .180 -.306* .385** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .473 .006 .172 .018 .003 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). *. correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). source: output from spss version 20 based on the table 11, the result of the correlation analyses for each type of personality types and speaking proficiency showed that the correlation coefficient of extraversion and speaking proficiency was .095. because the correlation coefficient value was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.473) was higher than 0.05, it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between extraversion and speaking proficiency. the correlation coefficient value of agreeableness was .353 which is higher than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.006) was lower than 0.05 it showed that there was significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a weak correlation between agreeableness and speaking proficiency. the correlation coefficient value of conscientiousness was .180 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.172) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between conscientiousness and speaking proficiency. the correlation coefficient value of emotional was -.306. the correlation index number was given minus (-) symbol. it showed that the correlation direction was negative. thus, the correlation coefficient value of emotional was higher than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.018) was lower than 0.05 it showed that there was significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a weak correlation between emotional and speaking proficiency. the correlation coefficient value of openness was .385 which is higher than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.003) was lower than 0.05 it showed that there was significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a weak correlation between openness and speaking proficiency. table 12. correlation among personality types and aspect of speaking proficiency task completi on compre hensibili ty fluenc y pronunc iation vocabul ary languag e control personal ity types tc pearson correlation 1 .760** .502** .477** .464** .461** .224 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 493 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .088 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 c pearson correlation .760** 1 .509** .521** .471** .466** .021 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .873 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 f pearson correlation .502** .509** 1 .326* .385** .308* .053 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .012 .003 .018 .690 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 p pearson correlation .477** .521** .326* 1 .540** .729** .100 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .012 .000 .000 .453 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 v pearson correlation .464** .471** .385** .540** 1 .645** .299* sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .003 .000 .000 .021 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 lc pearson correlation .461** .466** .308* .729** .645** 1 .177 sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .018 .000 .000 .180 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 pt pearson correlation .224 .021 .053 .100 .299* .177 1 sig. (2-tailed) .088 .873 .690 .453 .021 .180 n 59 59 59 59 59 59 59 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). *. correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). source: output from spss version 20 based on the table 12, the result of the correlation analyses for personality types and each aspect of speaking proficiency showed that the correlation coefficient of task completion and personality types was .224. because the correlation coefficient value was lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.088) was higher than 0.05, it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a weak correlation between task completion and personality types. the correlation coefficient value of comprehensibility was .021 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.873) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between comprehensibility and personality types. the correlation coefficient value of fluency was .053 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.690) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between fluency and personality types. the correlation coefficient value of pronunciation was .100 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.453) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between pronunciation and personality types. the correlation coefficient value of vocabulary was .299 which is higher than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.021) was lower than 0.05 it showed that there was significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a weak correlation between vocabulary and personality types. the correlation coefficient value of language control was .177 which is lower than value of r-table (0.256) and p value (0.180) was higher than 0.05 it showed that there was no significant correlation between the two variables. the pearson’s correlation coefficient r indicates that there was a very weak correlation between language control and personality types. indah pratiwi hrp, sofendi, & ismail petrus the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang 494 table 13. correlations among predictor variables (reticence and personality types) and criterion variable (speaking proficiency) model summary variables r r square f sig. predictor variables and criterion variable .219a .048 1.413 .252b a. predictors: (constant), personality types, reticence source: output from spss version 20 the result showed on table 13 that the correlation coefficient between the predictor variables total and the criterion variable total was .219 with a significance value of .252b. thus, it can be concluded that there was no significant correlation between predictor variables (reticence and personality types) and the criterion variable (speaking proficiency). regression analyses table 14. contribution of agreeableness and speaking proficiency model summary model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .353a .125 .109 5.8167 a. predictors: (constant), agreeableness source: output from spss version 20 stepwise method was used to see the contribution. squaring r value leads to 0.353= 0.125. it could be seen that the total contribution of agreeableness toward speaking proficiency was 12.5%. table 15. contribution of emotional and speaking proficiency model summary model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .306a .094 .078 5.9188 a. predictors: (constant), emotional source: output from spss version 20 stepwise method was used to see the contribution. squaring r value leads to 0.306= 0.094. it could be seen that the total contribution of emotional toward speaking proficiency was 9.4%. table 16. contribution of openness and speaking proficiency model summary model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .385a .148 .133 5.7375 a. predictors: (constant), openness source: output from spss version 20 stepwise method was used to see the contribution. squaring r value leads to 0.385= 0.148. it could be seen that the total contribution of openness toward speaking proficiency was 14.8%. table 17. contribution of personality types and aspect of speaking proficiency (vocabulary) model summary model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .299a .089 .073 .424 a. predictors: (constant), personality source: output from spss version 20 stepwise method was used to see the contribution. squaring r value leads to 0.299= 0.089. it could be seen that the total contribution of openness toward speaking proficiency was 8.9%. discussion based on the results of the students responded to reticence questionnaire, it is discovered that there were 31 students who tend to reward (r). while, there are 28 students who tend to approachavoidance (aa). in short, the majority of the students (53%) were in reward (r). meanwhile, 47% of students were in approach-avoidance (aa). the aa dimension represents an individual’s tendency to avoid or participate in interpersonal and small group interactions. the r dimension, by contrast, reflects attitudes toward communication— whether one considers it a valuable, honest, and personally rewarding enterprise or feels socially isolated and regards communication as a deceptive, manipulative, or unprofitable activity. the result of personality questionnaire shown that of three students had extraversion personality type, 24 students had agreeableness personality type, 22 students had conscientiousness personality type, three students had emotional stability personality type and 7 students had openness to experience personality type. the distribution of the result of personality types, showed that 41% (24) of the students were dominant for agreeableness. most students agreed that they did not get stressed easily, they were relaxed most of the time, they seldom felt english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 495 sad, they did not get depression and they did not have interpersonal problems. in short, most of students felt flexible, helpful, sympathetic, warm, kind, courteous, and appreciate with either people around them or their lives. mccrae and john (1992) state that agreeableness and extraversion generally define interpersonal circumflex. agreeableness appears the human aspects of humanity such as altruism, nurturance, and emotional support. it is in line with the study conducted by shahab (2016) in which most students got high scores in agreeableness. meanwhile, the conscientious students felt responsible, disciple, careful, organized, mindful, and related to hardworking, success-orientation, and tenacity. the open students felt creative, curios, imaginative, reflective, and adventurous. the extrovert students felt active, energetic, talkative, cheerful, and comfortable. the stable emotional students felt patient, confident, and respectable on emotion. therefore, some students displayed and brought out their personality types to the society and others focused on the achievement. based on students’ speaking proficiency test result, the researcher found that 10 students (17%) were in good category of speaking proficiency, 39 students (66%) were in moderate category of speaking proficiency, and 10 students (17%) were in poor category. in short, it can be concluded that majority of fifth semester students of english education study program of pgri university palembang speaking proficiency were in moderate category. this study revealed that reticence exists among students in english foreign language classroom. as reticence has been found to be a problematic behavior by many english foreign language instructors, this issue should be studied seriously. it has been explored that psychological factors contribute to students’ reticence and makes it a serious problem in foreign language learning. reticence is a phenomenon in which students tend not to participate or interact in the english foreign classroom. there are various reasons behind reticence such as low self-confidence, fear of losing face and past experiences. baktash and chalak (2016) state that the result showed that personality types influence on the efl students’ reticence. the influence is more prominent among the students with higher proficiency level. moreover, educational, situational, and emotional factors impact on the english foreign language learners’ reticence. in addition, the more proficient in english the students were, the more willing they were to participate in speech communication and the more positive they were about it. in order to avoid reticence and its consequences in english foreign language classrooms, both teachers and students are expected to transform the classrooms into a more active one. conclusion based on the findings of this study, the researcher shows the result of the research. the analysis of the data collected through the researcher found out that there was no significant correlation between reticence and speaking proficiency. second, there was no significant correlation between personality types and speaking proficiency. however, there was a significant correlation between trait of personality type and speaking proficiency and there was a significant correlation between personality types and (vocabulary) aspect of speaking proficiency. first, a significant correlation between agreeableness and speaking proficiency are found in this finding. based on the calculation of the distribution of personality types result, showed that the students’ dominant trait is agreeableness, it means that most students agreed that they felt concern for others, they sympathized with others’ feeling, they made people feel at ease, they felt others’ emotions. in short, most of students felt flexible, helpful, sympathetic, warm, kind, courteous, and appreciate with either people around them or their lives. agreeableness may have a positive contribution to academic achievement. it is in line with the study conducted by vermetten, lodewijks, and vermunt (2001). this was indicated by a study which mentioned that this factor was associated with compliance with teacher instructions and concentration on learning. this means that those who are high on agreeableness are generally good at academic adjustment as they can keep a positive relationship with their teachers and peers, and they usually show scholastic competence, behavioral conduct, and academic success. second, the researcher found that there was correlation between openness to experiences and speaking proficiency. those who are high on openness to experience are usually intellectually curious. this personality trait has been considered to be a reflection of the ideal student (de raad, and indah pratiwi hrp, sofendi, & ismail petrus the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang 496 schouwenburg, 1996), due to its relationship with foresightedness and intelligence. openness to experience showed an association with academic achievement in school and at different university levels. students high in this personality factor tend to have more curiosity and interest to discover or learn new things including foreign languages. these students may consider english language a skill that is worth being learnt in order to explore the world and, therefore, broaden their experience. third, in this finding there was a significant correlation between emotional stability and speaking proficiency. in this study, most students agreed that they did not get stressed easily, they were relaxed most of the time, they seldom felt sad, they did not get depression and they did not have interpersonal problems. thus, learners with high scores on emotional stability may avoid holding a conversation in the english language as they usually have extreme worry. fourth, the researcher also found that the correlation between personality types and vocabulary as aspect of speaking proficiency. it is line with the study conducted by sukainah (2016), students could not recognize speaker’s idea because of limited english vocabulary and low motivation in learning. some students were shy to ask difficult learning materials but some of them were not. this study revealed that reticence exists among students in english foreign language classroom. as reticence has been found to be a problematic behavior by many english foreign language learners, this issue should be studied seriously. it has been explored that psychological factors contribute to students’ reticence and makes it a serious problem in foreign language learning. reticence is a phenomenon in which students tend not to participate or interact in the english foreign classroom. there are various reasons behind reticence such as low self-confidence, fear of losing face and past experiences. baktash and chalak (2016) state that the result showed personality types influence on the efl students’ reticence. the influence is more prominent among the students with higher proficiency level. moreover, educational, situational, and emotional factors impact on the english foreign language learners’ reticence. in addition, the more proficient in english the students were, the more willing they were to participate in speech communication and the more positive they were about it. in order to avoid reticence and its consequences in english foreign language classrooms, both teachers and students are expected to transform the classrooms into a more active one. lastly, for future researchers, the researcher hopes that other researchers are suggested to find out the better way and methods to advance the students’ speaking proficiency achievement. future researchers are also suggested to find different population which has different characteristics with the population in this study and to use the other recent instruments for measuring the students’ speaking proficiency test, reticence and personality type in order to do some better improvements. it is also advisable for english teacher to enhance student’ interest in and motivation to speak language, also promote students to be active participation in english lesson. acknowledgement i would like to acknowledge my advisors and english students at pgri university in palembang. references arikunto, s. (2010). prosedur penelitian: suatu pendekatan praktek. jakarta: rineka cipta. burgoon, j. k. (1976). the unwillingness-tocommunicate scale: development and validation. communication monographs, 43, 60-69. chowdhury, f. r. (2016). reasons of reticence in speaking english among the freshmen in port city international university; chittagong, bangladesh: a case study. asia pacific journals, 2(3). de raad, b., &schouwenburg, h. c. (1996). personality in learning and education: a review. european journal of personality, 10, 303-336. dzulkifli, m. a., & alias, i. a. (2012). students of low academic achievement – their personality, mental abilities and academic performance: how counselor can help?. international journal of humanities and social science, 2(23), 220225. fraenkel, j. r., & wallen, n. e. (2012). how to design and evaluate: research in education (8th ed.). new york, ny: mcgraw-hill higher education. goldberg, l. r. (1992). the development of markers for the big-five factor structure. psychological assement, 4(1), 26-42. keaton, j. a., kelly, j. l., finch, c. (2000). effectiveness of penn state program in english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 497 changing beliefs associate with reticence. communication education, 41, 35-45. khatibi, m., & khormaei, f. (2016). learning and personality: a review. journal of educational and management studies, 6(4), 89-97. lee, y. (2006). towards respecification of communicative competence: condition of l2 instructions or its objectives? applied linguistics. 27(3). mccrae, r. r., &john, o. p. (1992). an introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. rerieved from www.workplacebullying.org shahab, a. (2016). the correlation among personality types, cross cultural understanding, and reading habits of efl students of sriwijaya university (graduate’s thesis). sriwijaya university, palembang, indonesia. tsui, a. b. m. (1995). introducing classroom interaction. london: penguin books. tsui, a. b. m. (1995). introduction classroom interaction. london: penguin. vermetten, y. j., lodewijks, h. g., &vermunt, j. d. (2001). the role of personality traits and goal orientations in strategy use. contemporary educational psychology, 26, 149-170. westgate, d., batey, j., brownlee, j., & butley, m. (1985). some characteristics of interaction in foreign language classrooms. british educational research journal, 113(3), 271-281. http://www.workplacebullying.org/ indah pratiwi hrp, sofendi, & ismail petrus the correlation among reticence, personality types and speaking proficiency of english education study program students of pgri university palembang 498 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 821 english preservice teachers' perception of ict: the study on the students from rural areas burhanudin rais english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kapuas e-mail: burhanudin.rais@unka.ac.id risto kristiawan english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kapuas e-mail: ristokristiawan89@gmail.com apa citation: rais, b., & kristiawan, r. (2022). english preservice teachers' perception of ict: the study on the students from rural areas. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 821830. https://10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6452 received: 29-07-2022 accepted: 27-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction technology is an inseparable thing in human lives. almost all over the world have enjoyed technological advances, which are supported by their increment. the increment of technology is very fast in this century. it comes in every sector of human lives, including the educational sector. in this area, the use of technology is commonly known as ict. ict, or information and communication technology, is a tool that can be used in the teaching and learning process. it includes tools such as computers, radio, television, projector, and the internet (zulfiati et al., 2018). ict is a beneficial tool for learning. it can support various learning abilities and styles, make learning more effective, make students active and engage in the learning process, make students more creative and imaginative, increase confidence, and make them creative in finding, exploring, analyzing, and presenting information (mai, 2020). ict can also open schools to the outside world, allowing the student to practice communicating with a wide range of people (azmi, 2017). recently, there has been a development in the use of ict in education. this development begins with the stipulation of covid 19 as a pandemic. the use of ict has changed the way of offline teaching. the routine of the education system, which provides offline or face-to-face learning, is replaced by online learning. the students do not intend to follow the class in a particular school room with their friends. they only need to prepare their gadgets, such as phones or computers, and an internet connection to follow the learning process everywhere. the use of ict affects the students' achievement in language learning, such as increasing pronunciation (abbas & fathira, 2020) and students' writing skills (yundayani et al., 2019). using ict media also increases learning motivation (utami & djamdjuri, 2021). students like giving a positive attitude when ict is used in the classroom (azmi, 2017). motivation is one of the factors that can determine success in learning, especially in learning a foreign language. students will fail if they lack strong motivation to learn the language (seven, 2020). however, the fact in the field showed that many teachers teach english using conventional abstract: the development of technology brings a good effect on learning english. some research supports that using technology in learning english increases students' comprehension. however, the fact in the field state that many teachers teach english using conventional methods without technology. on this basis, researchers aimed to examine the perceptions and attitudes of english preservice teachers. this research will be exciting because knowing the current perception of preservice teachers may impact their behavior with technology in the future. in conducting the study, the researchers used a descriptive qualitative method using interviews to obtain data. the criterion used is english education students who study at the higher education level in sintang. there are 6 (six) students or preservice teachers that the researchers chose as the participants. the result of this research showed that all of the participants think that ict is important for teaching english. using ict in learning can make students understand the material better, making them easier to find information from the material being taught. keywords: english teacher; ict; perception; preliminary teacher; sintang. burhanudin rais & risto kristiawan english preservice teachers' perception of ict: the study on the students from rural areas 822 media without technology. conventional meant only using a book as a source in teaching. the researchers believe that it is not a mistake because books are a source of learning. even a famous word says, "books are windows to the world". however, teachers need to combine other media to make learning more effective. the use of learning media is also believed to hone the teacher's creativity. it is mentioned above, there are many benefits of learning media if a teacher can use it. however, many teachers still choose a book as the only source for teaching. it may be caused by the influence of their perception of ict. the experience becomes the nature of awakening the perception (alptekin & unver, 2020). it makes perception will be different for each person. perception belongs to the process of taking data by using a human sensory organ from the environment. however, individual interest and curiosity are other kinds of the base of perceptionbuilding perception (alptekin & unver, 2020). two kinds of familiar perception-building processes are bottom-up and top-down (galotti, 2007). the term bottom-up process refers to the process obtained from small pieces of information. then, that information is combined into a conclusion or perception. meanwhile, the top-down process refers to the process obtained from expectations, theories, or concepts from experience. several stages of the perception formation process are shown in the figure below (walgito, 2004). st e: environment, s: stimuli, i: individual, r: response figure 1. perception formation process (walgito, 2004) perception includes the process of receiving, organizing, and interpreting designs to influence behavior and shape attitudes (hermawan & tyas, 2018). the understanding of the positive impact of the use of ict on improving student learning achievement may also give a role in making perceptions. the positive impact means, such as accommodating slow students because they can create an effective learning climate more individually, stimulate students to do exercises, and process data with the availability of animated graphics and music (said & hasanudin, 2019). it means the issue discussed earlier on teachers' attitudes toward ict may be affected by their perception of ict. from the basis that many english teachers favor using a book as the only teaching source, the researchers are interested in analyzing teachers' perceptions of the use of ict. however, the teachers targeted by the researchers are not people who already have a career as teachers but preservice english teachers. thus, this research will be very interesting because knowing the current perception of preservice teachers may impact their behavior with technology in the future. even there are many studies analyzing perceptions of technology, such as the research that analyses public senior high school teachers in palembang attitude and problems on using ict for teaching english (aminullah et al., 2019), turkey preservice teachers' perception of ict (demirtaş & mumcu, 2021), senior high school teacher of banda aceh perception on ict in elt classroom (juliana & muslem, 2017), and perception and motivation of senior high school teachers from indonesian rural area to ict (mahdum et al., 2019), this research is different from the previous research. the first difference is the place of research. this research is conducted in the city of sintang, where no similar research has been conducted in sintang. sintang is a city that also becomes a district in west kalimantan, which consists of 14 districts. in addition, sintang is included in the lagging area. it means that using technology in underdeveloped areas is a challenge. below are the national data facilities on the lagging area or known as 3t. s t response st st if if if if sp e s i r e st : stimuli if : internal factor sp : individual personal structure st english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 823 table 1. facilities in 3t area (muhammad, 2020) area electricity internet computer/ laptop smartphone 3t 81,2% 41,5% 24,5% 57,2% 15,1% 40,1% 18,9% 14,9% 3,7% 18,4% 56,6% 27,9% * yellow: available and usable, red: available but hard to use, green: unavailable the second difference is the participants of the research, they are preservice english teachers that are now english learners from various rural areas. thus, this research will be interesting to find out the perception of students who may become teachers in their areas or origin, which is rural areas. method this research is conducted by following a descriptive qualitative design. descriptive research is a type of qualitative research design in which the researcher investigates events, and phenomena in the lives of individuals and asks one or a group of individuals to tell their stories, then the researcher retells the story in descriptive form (rusandi & rusli, 2021). in accordance with the explanation above, the method is in line with this research's aim. it will be used to guide in analyzing the perceptions of students or preservice english teachers in the city of sintang. the participants in this study were students in the english education department that took the study in sintang. there were six students or participants in this study who were in the eighth semester or who had completed ppl (field study) program. students who have followed ppl must have carried out teaching activities in the classroom. thus, based on their experience, the researchers are interested in making the study. furthermore, another criterion set by the researchers was that students came from villages that were included in the 3t or terluar (outermost), tertinggal (lagging), and terdepan (leading) coverage. students who did not come from 3t were not selected to participate in this study. this choosing was following the concept of purposive sampling. purposive sampling is a process for selecting participants in qualitative research (abdussamad, 2021). it is a process of selecting participants by consideration (abdussamad, 2021). for collecting the data, researchers used interviews. a structured interview was selected as a type of interview in this study. there were some questions related to the perception of ict and their experience in learning and teaching english using ict. the researchers collected the data from their experience to analyze the relation of their perception to their previous experience. after all the data was collected, the researchers continued to analyze the data. the analysis was conducted in several steps: preparing and organizing the data. this step was conducted by organizing the data to make sure that the data were in a form that could be easily analyzed. code data into categories. this step was conducted by coding the data into a similar research category. construct descriptions. this step was conducted by writing a description of the data that has been categorized. build themes. this step was conducted after writing a description. the researchers made a theme that will be written in the research. report the data. it was the last step; the researchers reported and interpreted the data in the form of descriptive text. furthermore, the research was started on march 1st, 2022, and finished on june 28th, 2022. result and discussion the data that the researcher collected revealed some themes. these were all elaborated and discussed below. basic information about the participants from the interviews, the researchers knew that all students or preservice teachers came from areas with inadequate public facilities. this inadequacy mainly refers to the availability of the internet or electricity network. internet and electricity are challenges to operate ict because ict is a device that requires such a connection, especially electricity. this information needs to be known because perception is revealed from a person's contact with the environment (alptekin & unver, 2020). it makes the perceptions referred by the researchers in this study also come from the experience of learning english that is not only from university but also in junior and senior high school. the interview questions did not explore preservice teachers' experience since elementary school because english was a subject that must be burhanudin rais & risto kristiawan english preservice teachers' perception of ict: the study on the students from rural areas 824 learned starting from junior high school. however, not all students who became preservice teachers in this study had school experience (junior and senior high school) in the village; the university level was in the city. however, some of them mentioned their experiences studying in the city, especially in high school. the data from the interviews can be seen in the tables below. table 2. experience learning by using ict in junior and senior high school participant origin school experience using ict junior high school senior high school university level r1 village district city never experienced ict media in learning english, excluded in university level r2 village city city only experience ict in senior high school and university level r3 village city city only experience ict in senior high school and university level r4 city city city experience ict on every level of education r5 village district city only experience ict in senior high school and university level r6 district district city never experienced ict media in learning english, excluded in university level table 3. public facilities on junior and senior high school participant public facilities in the school junior high school senior high school university level r1 no public electricity and internet connection no public electricity and internet connection public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is connected smoothly r2 public electricity and internet connection is available public electricity and internet connection is connected smoothly public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is connected smoothly r3 public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is available public electricity and internet connection is connected smoothly public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is connected smoothly r4 public electricity and internet connection is connected smoothly public electricity and internet connection is connected smoothly public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is connected smoothly r5 no public electricity and internet connection public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is connected smoothly public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is connected smoothly r6 public electricity and internet connection is connected smoothly public electricity and internet connection is connected smoothly public electricity is connected, and the internet connection is connected smoothly the data above showed that two participants (r1 and r6) never experienced ict in the learning process in junior and senior high school. analyzed from the public facilities, the participant (r1) has a school (junior and senior high school) background from a rural area that was not covered by state electricity and internet connection. it is known that ict media needs both connections to operate. however, electricity has become an important part of using technology. examples of these tools are projectors and speakers. these tools only require electricity without the internet, unlike smartphones and laptops. however, smartphones and laptops do not entirely require the internet to operate. data from the participants support this assumption. participant (r4) who carries out education in the city is more experienced in ict than others. it is because adequate facilities are found in the city than in the village. however, another participant (r6) that has connected to a public facility also never english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 825 experienced ict in learning when they were in junior and senior high school. the availability of technology owned by teachers and schools may be the cause. the lack of teachers' ability to operate digital devices is also a challenge that participants may experience when learning english at the junior and senior high school levels. based on data from the ministry of education and culture, teachers' ability to operate digital devices is one of the problems students face in learning (muhammad, 2020). moreover, the participant also claimed that he was allowed to bring the phone but not in the classroom (junior and senior high school) when the class started. in fact, smartphones are also reliable devices for learning english. "i was allowed to bring a smartphone, but i was not allowed to use or operate my smartphone in the class (when learning)" (data r1) then, the following are some of the ict media used by the participants when learning english from junior high school to university. table 4. experience learning by using ict media at school and university no experience in ict media participants 1. youtube r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 2. zoom r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 3. google meet r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 4. google classroom r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 5. browser r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 6. powerpoint and projector r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 7. online dictionary r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 8. mp3 player r1, r2, r3, r4, r5, r6 the available data showed that the majority were experienced at the university level. at the junior and senior high school level, the students only experienced learning english by using mp3 players, powerpoints, and projectors. the media in table 4 can be classified as online (zoom, youtube, google meet, google classroom, online dictionary, and brower) and offline (powerpoint, projector, mp3 player). the online and offline means in this discussion refers to the use of the internet. many researchers have shown that the ict media have a positive role in teaching english. such as google classroom, it is a media that useful for increasing students' motivation (batubara et al., 2021). the increment noted from previous research is 76.154 mean of post-test from 47.692 (pre-test). the other media is youtube. the previous study claimed that this application decreases students' anxiety, makes students learn faster, motivates them to learn, and increases students' language comprehension (binmahboob, 2020). in addition, youtube brings benefit for fostering students’ autonomy (purwanti et al., 2022), and affect to the students critical thinking (cahyana, 2022). participants' view on ict for teaching english several times has been mentioned that perception is the base of human behavior. someone's perception is perceived from the cognitive contact with the environment (alptekin & unver, 2020). in this case, the participants' experience of learning to use ict is one of the most important parts of knowing the perception. following figure 1, the perception stage starts by capturing the stimuli by the human senses. the second stage is called the physiological stage. at this stage, the stimulus received by the human senses is transmitted through the sensory nerves. the third stage is called the psychological process. it is the process of raising a person's awareness of the stimulus that is received by the receptor. then the last stage is the result obtained from the perception process in the form of responses and behavior (walgito, 2004). the data revealed by researchers showed that 100% of preservice teachers agree that ict is important in teaching english; this data is shown in figure 2. figure 2. participants' decisions on ict all the preservice teachers stated that ict is essential in teaching english. based on their teaching experience, the preservice teachers think it will benefit their students by attracting them to the class, making learning and finding information about learning material becomes burhanudin rais & risto kristiawan english preservice teachers' perception of ict: the study on the students from rural areas 826 easier. this statement is proven in several data below. "the use of ict as a learning medium is very good for student learning activities because (the use of ict) makes learning becomes easy." (data r4) "the implementation of ict is quite good (in helping me to teach) …. (it acts) as a (tool to) support students (in learning)it can attract the students' attention." (data r2) "make students easy to… ict is related to the internet and makes students (can) seek deeper information for learning materials." (data r6) kinds of ict in teaching english the respondents used several ict tools for teaching, such as an online dictionary, zoom meetings, powerpoints, and others. the table below shows the ict tools used by the participants in the teaching process. table 5. ict tool for teaching english no. tool user 1 online dictionary r1 2 zoom r4, r6 3 google meet r6, 4 powerpoint r2, r4 5 whatsapp r2, r3, r5 6 browser r6 these data are in accordance with interview data. "using a laptop (zoom meeting) when learning from home or online – using a zoom meeting, i use powerpoint in teaching" (data r4) "(ict) is very necessary, because not all words in indonesian language can be translated into english manually without any help (online dictionary application) – and learning is not only focused on books." (data r1) different from online dictionary, powerpoint, and browser, the use of zoom, google meet, and whatsapp is rapidly increasing because of the prohibition on making face-to-face learning in the pandemic era. an example is whatsapp, this application is used for sharing information, giving material, or teaching students by using text, video, picture, or audio (diharjo, 2021). moreover, google meet and zoom are the other application used for teaching. these applications allow interaction between teachers and students to carry out audiovisual learning (diharjo, 2021). the challenge on using ict in esl classroom based on a participant's experience, online learning is ineffective in increasing student understanding compared to face-to-face learning. it is based on the opinion of the supervisor (teacher) when carrying out ppl. "….it is not effective, so at that time the teacher (mentor at school) suggested to carry out offline or face to face learning." (data r5) even previous study claim that using online teaching gives benefits (rawashdeh et al., 2021), but many teachers in the field still perceive its disadvantages. some obstacles such as technology literacy, laziness, less of teacher's guide, hard to understand material learnt, time management, lack of communication among pair, cheating, and excessive assignment (herwiana & laili, 2022) become the consideration on the use of online teaching. it is added by indonesian ministry of education that online learning causes several problems, such as making students unable to understand the lesson, unable to ask directly to the teacher and other friends, boredom, inadequate internet network, and others (muhammad, 2020). on this basis, zoom or google classroom and another online platform includes in ict is reduced and emphasizes face-to-face learning. as additional information, ppl was held in augustoctober 2021. learning in schools at that time was not completely done using online media. several schools have decided to carry out face-toface learning with consideration and application of health protocols to prevent covid transmission. it is not strange because a previous study has also revealed that some students and teachers feel offline learning has a better impact on student understanding than online learning (sulasmiati et al., 2021). in addition, the habit of using conventional media is also a challenge in using ict. one of the participants who did face-to-face learning in the class said that the offline learning he carried out always used books because it had become a habit in school. in fact, projectors are available in the teacher's room and can be used to teach the students in the classroom. "there is a projector but it is not used because (i) already familiar with the learning process using books.” (data r3) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 827 this habit made a preservice teacher not use ict in the classroom. he preferred to use only book as a learning media. however, he revealed that using ict helped him in the learning process. this habit made ict not utilized optimally by the teacher (mentor) and preservice teacher. this issue also be caused by the teachers' perception and readiness to use technology in the classroom (puspitarini & hanif, 2019). additional discussion – the potential of ict and preservice attitude toward it perception results of this study were obtained based on participants' experiences. this experience is then felt by participants, who then consider ict as a good learning media to be used for teaching and learning or not. it is supported by the statement that perception has a role in human behavior (shambodo, 2020); someone with a certain perception is earned from the contact with the environment that is made (alptekin & unver, 2020). it means their thinking process is revealed by some previous experiments. the perception expressed by the participants is categorized as a top-down process. this process is defined as a process in which perceptions are obtained from expectations, theories, or concepts from experience (galotti, 2007). participants stated that using ict in learning is very beneficial for their class. participants' experience in learning english by using ict is the base of their perception. they think that many things can be obtained when using ict in learning, such as making students better understand the material, making it easier for students to find information from the material being taught, and making learning process being easier. in addition, the use of ict in learning can also make students do self-learning. in this case, students can learn the material that will be delivered before learning begins. in addition, other things that have been revealed by previous research related to the benefits obtained when using ict are supporting various learning abilities and styles, making the learning process more effective, making students active and engage in the learning process, making students more creative and imaginative, increase confidence, and make students creative in finding, exploring, analyzing and present information, (mai, 2020), increasing students' pronunciation (abbas & fathira, 2020) and writing skills (yundayani et al., 2019), and increasing motivation in the learning process (utami & djamdjuri, 2021). moreover, it can provide an activity that allows students to practice communicating with a wide range of people (azmi, 2017). even if it has a good role in learning, learning using ict is considered less effective, especially using ict in online learning, such as using zoom. it is based on the research findings and also supported by data from the ministry of education and culture that students experience difficulties in learning with the learning-from-home model (muhammad, 2020). the connection factor and the teacher's ability to operate digital devices are one of the causes of learning not going well (muhammad, 2020). besides, other problems like lack of discipline because no one controls students, poor student attendance and students skipping without any reason, lack of student interest in learning, and prolonged use of cell phones for class cause headaches due to harmful rays become the challenge that can be faced (muthuprasad et al., 2021). besides utilizing online learning media as a means of using ict, other digital devices that do not need to use the internet connection are the use of projectors or laptops. the internet is a challenge on using ict (purwanti et al., 2022) for some places, especially in rural areas. there are 12,548 villages and sub-districts that still do not get a good internet connection (jemadu & prastya, 2021), including some areas in the sintang regency. in addition, 3 of 6 participants said they would use ict in learning when they became teachers. this statement includes when teaching in a rural area that does not have internet and electricity. the media that will be used is playing a video using a laptop or mp3 using a cell phone or laptop. "(i will keep) using ict but it won't be a priority, i (will) use (some tools) like smartphone and laptop for listening activities and watching videos." (data r5) indeed, electricity is a major requirement for using ict in learning. without electricity, the technology will be difficult to operate. however, innovating ict media, such as displaying videos using laptops, can be an option for teachers to build motivation to learn and improve students' listening skills. as mentioned above, motivation is one of the factors that can determine success in learning, especially in learning a foreign language. someone with the low motivation will fail in learning (seven, 2020). burhanudin rais & risto kristiawan english preservice teachers' perception of ict: the study on the students from rural areas 828 conclusion perception becomes one of the nature of people habits. such as using ict, the perception that preservice teachers got from their experience influenced their need to use ict. a good perception will lead to the thinking that ict brings benefits to the users. it makes them will use the tool in the teaching context. this expiation refers to the finding that the researchers got. all preservice teachers from different backgrounds of rural areas gave a positive mind toward ict. even though, many things challenge the use of ict in the learning process. however, they still think that ict is important for teaching. when being a teacher, they will use ict tool in teaching english, even in rural areas. acknowledgement this research is funded by universitas kapuas, sintang. researchers are very grateful to universitas kapuas sintang and all those who have supported researchers in conducting and publishing research on the perceptions of preservice teachers from the rural areas on using ict to teach english. references abbas, m. f. f., & fathira, v. 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(2018). optimizing ict-based learning of social studies in primary schools. in proceedings of the joint workshop ko2pi and the 1st international conference on advance & scientific innovation (pp. 77–83). eai. burhanudin rais & risto kristiawan english preservice teachers' perception of ict: the study on the students from rural areas 830 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 439 utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance erina ayu lestari english language education department, universitas teknologi yogyakarta, indonesia email: erinaayulestari14@gmail.com budiarti english language education department, universitas teknologi yogyakarta, indonesia email: budiarti@staff.uty.ac.id juhansar (corresponding author) informatics department, universitas teknologi yogyakarta, indonesia email: juhansar@uty.ac.id apa citation: lestari, e. a., budiarti., & juhansar. (2022). utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 439-452. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6245 received: 01-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction writing is one of the four language skills which difficult to learn for second and foreign language learners (manegre, 2021). the difficulties are not only in generating and organizing ideas but also in translating ideas into readable texts. writing is the most challenging skill to learn for students who regard english as a second language or the foreign language. it has brainstorming, planning, drafting, revision, editing, to proofreading process (fadhly, emzir, & lustyantie, 2018). writing is a form to produce language, the same as when you speak, but the writing needs more time to think about the subject and revise your work to achieve good sentences and paragraphs (hassanzadeh & fotoohnejad, 2021). writing takes more time to produce the language before it becomes good writing by determining the subject and revising it. writing is a process of expressing thoughts and ideas in a paragraph in which every sentence relates one to another (nemati, alavi, & mohebbi, 2019). writing in this research means putting words into sentences that relate to one another to build paragraphs in a descriptive text. descriptive text is one of the functional texts that students should master. descriptive text is a part of factual genres that functions to describe a particular person, place, or thing (potradinata, 2018). it means a factual genre of text that says what a person, a thing, or place is like to be described. besides, descriptive text is a text that helps the readers to imagine what they have read or abstract: this present study aims at exploring the utilization of the clustering technique to enrich students’ performance in writing a descriptive text in english, discovering students’ participation in learning-teaching descriptive text writing using the clustering technique, and finding out the improvement of students’ english writing performance using the clustering technique. this research implies a mixed-method action research design where researchers act as teachers. the respondents consisted of 30 vocational high school students. this research uses qualitative and quantitative data. the qualitative data were obtained by observing the learning-teaching process of writing descriptive text using the clustering technique and interviewing students. quantitative data were acquired through the pre-test, post-test i, and post-test ii. the results show that implementing the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process enriches students’ performance and attracts students’ participation, attention, activeness, motivation, and seriousness in learning english writing. pre-test and post-tests prove that the clustering technique enhances students’ english writing performance. the technique helps students to express ideas in english text writing. students gain 67.49 in the pre-test, up to 75 in the post-test i, and up to 79.87 in the post-test ii. the mean improvement percentage shows about 16.6% enhancement from the pre-test, 36.6% from the post-test i, and 86.6% from the post-test ii. keywords: clustering technique; learning-teaching; english writing; students’ performance. erina ayu lestari, budiarti, & juhansar utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance 440 helps the reader to visualize something of what they have read about something that has been described (sari, pulungan, & husein, 2020). the text gives the reader information about the physical appearance and the nature of the object described. it means the descriptive text is the text that gives the readers visualize to imagine what they read about the information of the physical appearance and the nature of the object described (hasanah & aziz, 2021). the definitions mentioned earlier show that descriptive text is a part of factual genres that helps the readers visualize something about the physical appearance and the nature of the object described. the social function describes a particular person, place, or thing. teachers have to use the appropriate technique to engage students’ involvement in the english writing learning-teaching process. the appropriate technique is used to accomplish the objectives with a consistent method and a harmony with an approach that the teacher uses, which takes place in a classroom. the technique is manifested by specific activity consistently, which is in harmony with an approach in the classroom (khoiriyah, waris, & juhansar, 2019). the technique is one specific activity that is very important in the learning-teaching process in the classroom in which the method is implemented or manifested consistently and in harmony with the approach to achieve the goal (anggraini, 2020). teaching descriptive text english writing needs effective techniques such as clustering to overcome students’ problems. the clustering technique is like diagramming or mapping ideas to visually generate material for a paragraph by making the lines, boxes, arrows, and circles to show the relationships among the ideas. the clustering technique is one strategy for expressing the relationship among facts and ideas that require preliminary preparation time to divide the topic broadly (herniyastuti & rahmi, 2020). in other words, the clustering technique is a preliminary preparation in writing and strategy to cluster the topic broadly through expressing the relationship of ideas and the facts that relate to one another using lines, boxes, arrows, and circles to generate the sentences into a good paragraph. so far, several studies related to clustering techniques and english writing have been conducted by scholars. first, some studies concerned the use of classroom action research (arifuddin, 2019; herniyastuti & rahmi, 2020) in exploring the clustering technique improves the students’ writing ability in descriptive text. these studies show that students understand more to make descriptive sentences and make the descriptive sentences into a descriptive text. the activity makes the student interested in describing the pictures or objects, and students are more active and more enthusiastic in the writing learning process. these studies conclude that the clustering technique can positively improve the students’ writing ability (megawati, 2019; sari & wahyuni, 2018; suryani & apriliani, 2021; widiyanti, fiki, susilawati, endang, rosnija, 2018). second, some other studies focus on the effect of the clustering technique to increase students’ ability in english writing. these studies were quasi-experiment (dewi & ayunisa, 2020; hanafiawi, muharam, & parmawati, 2020; sumartini, puspita, & zahrida, 2018). sumartini et al. (2018) showed that the clustering technique affects students’ writing ability. it shows that the tcount was 2.07 and the t-table was 2.01. the tcount of the organization was 2.56, the t-count of content was 3.62, and the t-count of coherent was 3.47. since the t-count was higher than the t-table, h1 was accepted. those aforementioned studies have similarities with this research in terms of research variables, dependent and independent variables, and significant differences with this current research, including research setting, respondents, data collecting and analysis techniques, and research design. the design of this research is different from other studies; classroom action research, quantitative research, and experimental research, whereas this present study uses the mixed methods action research design proposed by (ivankova & wingo, 2018) to see the implementation of the clustering technique to increase students’ performance in writing descriptive text; to discover students’ participation in learning-teaching descriptive text using clustering technique; to find out the improvement of students’ performance in writing descriptive text using the clustering technique. this current research is expected to enrich learners’ english writing performance by utilizing the clustering technique and offer novelty related to the implementation of the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process by discovering students’ participation and their performance scores improvement. the utilization of the clustering english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 441 technique in the learning-teaching process is required through an action research approach to explore holistically how students or learners are experiencing the technique implementation. therefore, this present study is also expected to bring constructive contribution both theoretically and practically to students, teachers, and further researchers. theoretically, this research provides information on utilizing the clustering technique in the english writing learning-teaching process, so teachers-students and further researchers have preliminary preparation and understanding before implementing and researching the technique. practically, this research could help students improve their english writing performance through clustering technique utilization. students-teachers could cluster words into boxes, arrows, and circles using lines to connect, build, organize, and generate ideas into good english sentences, paragraphs, or text. method this research relies on mixed methods action research (mmar) design proposed by ivankova & wingo (2018). it was used to give information on the changing of the classroom practices and the learning-teaching quality by diagnosing and solving the problems in the learning-teaching activity through need analysis in the pre-implementation techniques, planning and (re)planning, acting, observing, reflection, and creativity and innovation. the technique implementation was conducted in two cycles where every cycle has three meetings. this research design was used to seek the implementation of the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process and the results of the learning-teaching process itself, including students’ participation in the english writing learningteaching process using the clustering technique. the participants of this present study were 30 students of grade x fashion department students of vocational high school muhammadiyah berbah located in sleman regency, daerah istimewa yogyakarta (diy), indonesia. this school was appointed as the research setting since students have problems writing descriptive text in english. students find it difficult to express and explore ideas and experiences in written form using english. therefore, it is necessary to conduct research at this school using mixed methods action research (mmar) to solve the problems and to help students explore and express ideas and experiences through english writing using the clustering technique. this research has two kinds of data, qualitative and quantitative data. qualitative data are collected in words, pictures, and documentation (aspers & corte, 2019). quantitative data refer to numerical information that includes standardized test scores to measure educational outcomes (arias, arias, & rodríguez-medina, 2021). to collect qualitative data, the researchers use observation and interviews. meanwhile, english writing tests, pretest, and post-test, are used to collect quantitative data. qualitative data intend to discover the implementation of the clustering technique and students’ participation in the learning-teaching process using the clustering technique. quantitative data aim to determine students’ performance and improvement in writing descriptive text using the clustering technique. in analyzing the qualitative data, the researchers describe the observation and interview data findings by reviewing and exploring the data collected using the observation checklist and interview transcripts during the learning-teaching process using the clustering technique. in reviewing observation and interview data, the researchers describe the result of data into a descriptive explanation. furthermore, the researchers calculate quantitative data to see students’ performance and improvement in writing descriptive text in english using the clustering technique. the researchers analyze the results of quantitative data (pre-test, post-test i, and post-test ii) using holistic scoring rubrics. results and discussion pre-implementation before implementing the clustering technique using the mixed methods action research design in the learning-teaching process of english writing, the researchers conducted some stages. in the first stage, the researchers observed the learningteaching process to know students’ difficulties in english writing descriptive text learning-teaching. besides, the researchers also conduct a pre-test to measure students’ pre-understanding and english writing performance. it is conducted to seek how deep their understanding of the descriptive text is as a consideration in applying the clustering technique in the classroom action research. another aspect that becomes the consideration in applying the erina ayu lestari, budiarti, & juhansar utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance 442 technique is to know the result of students’ tests, i.e., writing components (content, organization, vocabulary, punctuation, grammatical), generic structures, and language features of descriptive text. the second stage is the researchers’ interview students and teacher(s) before preparing the lesson plan, the material, and the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process. the implementation of clustering technique: cycle i planning the researchers plan and prepare everything before conducting learning-teaching activities in this stage. in this stage, the researchers use the appropriate clustering technique, appropriate material, and media to be taught and used in the learning-teaching process based on the english syllabus of tenth-grade students of vocational high school muhammadiyah berbah. the researchers use descriptive text as the appropriate material, clustering technique as the appropriate technique, and powerpoint and pictures as the media to teach. besides, the researchers also make the lesson plan and consult it with the english teacher before applying it in the classroom. after getting the lesson plan ready, the researchers prepare the material of descriptive text and the clustering technique, including the research instruments for collecting the data. acting before conducting the first cycle, the researchers ask students to write the descriptive text to measure students’ pre-understanding and english writing performance levels. the researchers give the pretest before conducting the learning-teaching process. after giving a pre-test, the researchers conduct learning-teaching the next day in the classroom. one of the researchers acts as a teacher and explains the material of the descriptive text, starting with the definition of descriptive text to the generic structures using the clustering technique before asking them to write. the learning-teaching process is divided into three activities, i.e., preactivity, main activity, and post-activity. the researchers begin the learning-teaching process in the pre-activity by greeting the students. after greeting the students, the researchers ask them to pray together by asking the class chairman to lead the praying. furthermore, the researchers continued by starting to check the students’ attendance by calling the students’ names one by one. after that, the researchers also convey to the students the material learned. in the main activity, the researchers stimulate students by giving an example of descriptive text. then, ask questions to the students related to the example of the descriptive text before explaining the material. furthermore, the researchers measure students’ pre-understanding of descriptive text orally. the researchers engaged the students in the learning-teaching process by giving the stimulation; then, the researchers used powerpoint as the media to explain the descriptive text. after explaining the material, the researchers ask them about their understanding of the presented material. furthermore, the researchers explore another example of descriptive text for each student to analyze the difference between the new example of descriptive text and the previous one. after that, the researchers ask students individually about the differences between both examples of descriptive text. after the students understand and differentiate both the example of descriptive text, the researchers explain the material using the clustering technique. moreover, to relate the material and the clustering technique explained before, the researchers ask students to make the clustering before they write the descriptive text according to the question of the task individually. the researchers ask the students to write and practice english writing through the clustering technique on the piece of paper and then submit it to the researchers as teachers. to end the learning-teaching process in postactivity, the researchers evaluate students’ work and understanding by asking about their difficulties through the clustering technique. after that, the researchers return the students’ works and ask them to bring them to the next meeting. besides, the researchers summarize the material and then explain the next material to learn and discuss. moreover, the researchers ask students to prepare and learn for the post-test i in the next meeting. lastly, the researchers end the meeting by reciting thank you for students’ attention and cooperation. this first activity similarly is also conducted in the next meeting. observing in the first cycle, the learning-teaching process of descriptive text using clustering runs well. the implementation of the clustering technique engages english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 443 students’ interest in the learning-teaching process. although not all students are active in since they are still confused and ashamed to ask the researchers who act as teachers, some students are active in the learning-teaching process and curious about how to make clustering before writing descriptive text. students’ interest in clustering technique could be seen in the following quotation: student a : “sir, should i cluster the word based on its part of speech in english, e.g., verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so forth?” researcher(s) : “no, word(s) clustering may not be based on the part of speech. it is free, as long as the meaning connects one another.” furthermore, a student also asks about the identification and description of the descriptive text. some students have difficulties writing based on the generic structures of descriptive text. they are still confused to distinguish between writing identification and description of the descriptive text. a student asks researchers about some vocabularies related to the place they described when writing a descriptive text about the place. some students are still confused when describing a place because of many unfamiliar english words. one of the difficulties is described in the following quotation: student b : “mom, i don’t know what to write in the identification and description. sometimes, i cannot differentiate them.” researcher(s) : “in the identification, you should write the identified thing you are interested in. in the description section, you should explain it in more detail based on what you identified before. student c : mom, how to write in english “seni ukir” and “arca”?” researcher(s) : “the english for “seni ukir” or “seni pahat” is “sculpture,” and the english for “arca” is “statue.” please bring your dictionary to the next meeting.” reflecting the results of the cycle i show that students have a high interest in learning english writing descriptive text using the clustering technique. however, some students cannot be active in the learning-teaching process, even though others are active by asking questions during the learning-teaching process. it is in line with the study conducted by utami, pabbajah, & juhansar (2018), stated that some students are active and others are not in english writing using jumbled sentences. it proves that the implementation of the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process is not satisfactory since some students find it difficult to translate unfamiliar vocabularies when describing a place. furthermore, some students also struggle to differentiate between the identification and description in writing a descriptive text. it indicates that the researchers need to revise the planning creatively and innovatively to achieve better results in learningteaching descriptive text using the clustering technique and overcome students’ difficulties. creativity and innovation in the learning teaching process as a consequence of the cycle i result, the researchers revised the learning-teaching planning. the planning aspects should be revised in the learning-teaching process, such as students’ participation and understanding of descriptive text and clustering techniques. the researchers changed and modified the clustering technique from individual to group settings so that students could discuss together within the group to solve their problems and be more active in learning-teaching activities. besides, in the previous cycle, students found difficulties when the researchers ask them to describe a place. they do not know how to write in english. it challenges the researchers to change the “thing” identification from a “place” to a “person.” the implementation of clustering technique: cycle ii re-planning in line with the result of cycle i, the researchers revise the planning of the learning-teaching process creatively and innovatively. in this stage, the researchers also revise the lesson plan in cycle ii. in revising the lesson plan, the researchers changed the clustering technique’s implementation from individual to the group so that students could discuss, share ideas, and solve problems within the group. they could share their understanding of the material delivered in the learning-teaching process. besides, the researchers also explained more deeply the material in the learning-teaching process. furthermore, the researchers also change the “thing” to write, from a “place” to a “person.” erina ayu lestari, budiarti, & juhansar utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance 444 acting in this meeting, the researchers ask students about understanding the previous meetings’ material. after that, the researchers asked them to make a group so that students could discuss everything related to material delivered in the learningteaching process. the researchers not only ask students about their understanding of the material but also ask them about their difficulties in the posttest i. students’ responses show that they are still confused in identifying and describing the “thing” that they are writing about, as in the following quotations: student d : “sir, i am still confused in writing a “place” description in the identification part. i am still confused because i wrote a little information in this part and directly explained the detail.” researcher(s) : “you can try clustering the words maximally. the general information that you will write later becomes a part of the identification section. in clustering the words, you need to relate one word to another to get more ideas. in the identification part, you only explain the general information, not in detail, because the detailed information is explained in the description part.” the data above show how students are still confused in writing the identification part of descriptive text on “place.” therefore, the researchers explain the material more and give more exercises to students about “person” as a part of research creativity and innovation. in this session, the researchers divide the learning-teaching process into three sessions as in the previous cycle: preactivity, main activity, and post-activity. observing the observation in this cycle is related to creativity and innovation as the development activity from cycle i. in this cycle, the implementation of the clustering technique makes students more active than in the previous cycle. the following quotations prove it: student e : “mom, how to write the identification part in describing someone?” researcher(s) : “you can identify the general things in the identification part, for example, describing a singer artist. you can identify the general things like their name.” student f : “sir, is it free to cluster the words in every cycle?” researcher(s) : “yes, it is free as long as each word in the circle is related.” student g : “mom, may i write a descriptive text about a person, but i write about “where she or he was born” or “where she or he lives” before writing it in detail?” researcher(s) : “absolutely, you can. it should be so, from general to specific.” data above show that the students understand descriptive text in describing “person” and through clustering technique. guiding students in clustering the words to write descriptive text make them enjoy the learning-teaching process and be more active. as a result of the observation after implementing the creativity and innovation, most students are no longer confused to start writing descriptive using the clustering technique, including how to cluster the words, how to organize the sentences related to the generic structure of descriptive text than in cycle i. changing the implementation from individual to group proves that students enjoy the learning-teaching process and be more active than in cycle i since they can share and discuss ideas within group. reflecting the observation results show that students’ participation, understanding, and writing development of descriptive text using the clustering technique are better than previously. the students understand more about descriptive text and its generic structure and language features. furthermore, students enjoy the learning-teaching process through intensive guidance from the researchers. similarly, hanafiawi et al. (2020), sari, sutapa, & sada (2021); suryani & apriliani (2021); ullah & dharma (2019) also stated similar ideas as this present study results. it means that implementing the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process help students in organizing ideas into the sentences in a generic structure of a descriptive text, express the ideas in the sentences, and bringing up the ideas into a good and correct paragraph. the change of the instruction english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 445 command from “place” to “person” supports students to be easier in clustering words and writing descriptive text in english. the change implementation technique from individual to group makes students enjoy the learning-teaching process since they can share ideas and discuss within the group and be more active. besides, discussions within the group help students solve problems or difficulties in clustering words and writing descriptive text in english. students’ participation in the learning-teaching process using clustering technique using the clustering technique, the researchers use an observation checklist to discover students’ participation in the descriptive text english writing learning-teaching process. the results of the observation checklist can be seen in the following table 4: table 4. students’ participation in the learning-teaching process no point of observation cycle i cycle ii meeting 1 meeting 2 meeting 3 meeting 4 h m l h m l h m l h m l 1 the students’ participation in asking a question. √ √ √ √ 2 the students’ participation in suggesting ideas. √ √ √ √ 3 the students’ participation in responding to the question. √ √ √ √ 4 the students’ participation in accomplishing the task. √ √ √ √ 5 the students’ participation in being enthusiastic in implementing the clustering technique. √ √ √ √ 6 giving attention to the researchers’ explanation and instructions. √ √ √ √ 7 actively having discussions with the researchers. √ √ √ √ 8 making comments or asking questions about the explanation or instruction. √ √ √ √ 9 the students are easy to understand descriptive text and clustering. √ √ √ √ 10 the students use a dictionary to check unfamiliar english words. √ √ √ √ 11 the students enjoy making sentences. √ √ √ √ 12 students’ participation in the group: actively involved in a discussion. √ √ √ √ a. students’ participation in the group: b. helping their friends when they find difficulties or problems. √ √ √ √ c. students’ participation in the group: d. helping their friends to understand the instruction and material. √ √ √ √ note: h means high participation; m refers to medium participation; l means low participation accordingly, table 4 shows students’ participation in learning descriptive text using the clustering technique in cycles i and ii. the first point is about the students’ participation in asking questions during the learning-teaching process. students who ask questions are in low and medium levels in the first and second meetings. it is in line with the research conducted by jenkins (2021) who showed students participation in asking questions in the learning-teaching process. however, after the researchers changed the implementation setting from individual learning to group learning, students’ participation in asking questions increased significantly during the third and fourth meetings. it erina ayu lestari, budiarti, & juhansar utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance 446 shows that students become more active in the learning-teaching process in a group setting, and most if not all students are active in asking questions. in the second point, students still have low and medium participation in the first and second meetings. still, it changes to a high level in the third and fourth meetings. it proves a change in students’ participation in the third and fourth meetings. the third observation point shows a change in students’ participation in responding to the question. the first meeting is at the medium level. it is caused by students’ understanding of the material delivered in the learning-teaching process. in the second, third, and fourth meetings, after the researchers explained more about the material and asked students to make a group, most students responded to the question as seen in meeting two, three, and four. it indicates that students are more active and understand the materials explained by the researchers (teachers). the next point is about students’ participation in accomplishing the task at a high level from the first to the fourth meeting. all students are enthusiastic and serious about participating in the learning-teaching descriptive text using the clustering technique. besides, this point relates to point tenth on students use dictionaries to check unfamiliar english vocabulary. students’ enthusiasm and seriousness in implementing the clustering technique in writing descriptive text. point five shows that students tend to have a medium level in the first meeting since only half students understand the materials. besides, some students are still confused and not enthusiastic about giving questions about the clustering technique to the researchers. it is similar to the research conducted by iatrellis et al., (2021); makruf, lubna, khasanah, sulaeman, & harahap, (2020). furthermore, it is related to point nine about students understanding descriptive text easily because most students’ responses show that they understand the descriptive text and clustering easily. students’ participation was high in the second, third, and fourth meetings because most of them understood the material by asking the researchers (teachers) questions about the clustering implementation. point six is about giving attention to the teachers’ explanation and instruction. in the first meeting at this point, students’ participation was at a medium level, but it was at a high level in the second, third, and fourth meetings. it shows a change in students’ attention to the researchers’ explanation and instruction by paying attention and seeing the researchers in front of the class when the researchers give explanation and instruction. furthermore, it shows from the next point about making comments or asking questions on the explanation or instruction. it is related to one another. it shows that giving attention to the researchers’ explanation and instruction is proven by the next point of students’ participation in making comments or asking questions about the explanation and instruction. it means students give attention to the researchers’ explanation and instruction. point eight shows a change from the medium to the high level. it shows that most students are more active. besides, those two points are related to point seven, which students actively discuss with the researchers. those points above show that most students discuss with the researchers. the last point is about students’ participation in the group discussion. the students are actively involved in a group discussion with their friends; it is shown in the next point when their friends are having difficulties. others help them make their friends understand the materials or the instruction by explaining and discussing the materials and the instruction of the researchers (maranzano, bento, & manera, 2022. in short, the observation checklist points show that students are serious and more active in learning to write descriptive text in english using the clustering technique. the result of pre-test in conducting a pre-test, the researchers ask students to write a descriptive text about a place, i.e., the prambanan temple. the researchers conduct the research in 30 minutes in the classroom with 30 students. to understand the pre-test results clearly, the researchers provide the table to measure their pre-understanding related to descriptive text before implementing the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process. the following table 5 shows some aspects of descriptive text english writing, such as writing components (wc), generic structure (gs), and language features (lf). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 447 table 5. the students’ scores of pre-test no students’ id score on each aspect total score pre-test score wc gs lf 1 student 1 67.2 100 66.5 233.7 77.9* 2 student 2 68.7 100 65 233.7 77.9* 3 student 3 74.5 50 75.3 199.8 66.6 4 student 4 78.8 50 65 193.8 64.6 5 student 5 100 50 89 239 79.6* 6 student 6 75.8 50 85 210.8 70.2 7 student 7 65 50 75 190 63.3 8 student 8 80 50 85 215 71.6 9 student 9 75.7 50 65 190.7 63.5 10 student 10 85.6 50 85 220.6 73.5 11 student 11 53 50 44 174 58 12 student 12 67.8 50 65 182.8 60.9 13 student 13 83.3 50 70 203.3 67.7 14 student 14 67.3 50 60 177.3 59.1 15 student 15 63 50 73 186 62 16 student 16 80 50 85 215 71.6 17 student 17 88 100 75 263 87.6* 18 student 18 75.7 50 67 192.7 64.2 19 student 19 75 50 65 190 63.3 20 student 20 67.8 50 65 183 61 21 student 21 65 50 66 181 60.3 22 student 22 75 50 85 210 70 23 student 23 65 50 67 182 60.6 24 student 24 75 50 70 195 65 25 student 25 75 50 65 190 63.3 26 student 26 67.3 50 60 177.3 59.1 27 student 27 78 50 70 198 66 28 student 28 75 50 70 195 65 29 student 29 73 50 75 198 66 30 student 30 78 100 78 256 85.3* amount 2.218.5 1.700 2.130.8 2.024.7 mean 73.95 56.66 71.02 67.49 note: symbol * refers to a student who passed the kkm the calculation data of the pre-test shows that the mean score of the pre-test is 67.49. only five students, or 16.6%, pass the score above the minimum mastery criterion (kkmkriteria ketuntasan minimal). meanwhile, the other 25 students were below the criterion. besides, the result of the pre-test about three aspects: writing components (wc) is 73.95, generic structure (gs) is 56.66, and language features (lf) is 71.02. furthermore, it shows that most students still have very low scores on each aspect of descriptive text writing in english. after analyzing the result of the preliminary study, the researchers conclude that most students have low skills in writing descriptive text and low understanding of writing skills performance. therefore, it needs to find out a solution to overcome this problem. thus, the researchers use the clustering technique to overcome the cycle i and cycle ii problem. the result of post-test i after calculating the pre-test result, the researchers found that students still have low performance in writing descriptive text and less understanding of descriptive text writing. therefore, the researchers conduct the post-test i to seek and increase the results of students’ performance in writing descriptive text, including students’ understanding of writing descriptive text in english. besides, the post-test i show an improvement in students’ performance in writing descriptive text using the clustering technique from pre-test to post-test i. post-test i is conducted after implementing the clustering technique in cycle i. the students are erina ayu lestari, budiarti, & juhansar utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance 448 asked to write a descriptive text about the borobudur temple. the following table 6 shows students’ scores on post-test i to discover students’ performance improvement from the pre-test to posttest i: table 6. the students’ score of post-test i no students’ id score on each aspect total score post-test i score wc gs lf 1 student 1 80 100 76 256 85.3* 2 student 2 63 100 70 233 77.6* 3 student 3 76 50 84.3 210.3 70.1 4 student 4 88.3 50 80 218.3 72.7 5 student 5 78.2 100 70 248.2 82.7* 6 student 6 83 50 87 220 73.3 7 student 7 85 50 85 215 71.6 8 student 8 85 50 85 215 71.6 9 student 9 85 50 88 223 74.3 10 student 10 75.3 100 65 240.3 80.1* 11 student 11 85 50 85 215 71.6 12 student 12 99.7 100 75 274.7 91.5* 13 student 13 85 50 86.3 221.3 73.7 14 student 14 74.2 50 75 199.2 66.4 15 student 15 75.8 50 85 210.8 70.2 16 student 16 70.3 50 76.5 196.8 65.6 17 student 17 88.7 100 76 264.7 88.2* 18 student 18 83 50 78 211 70.3 19 student 19 85.3 50 84.5 219.8 73.2 20 student 20 75 50 85 210 70 21 student 21 85.6 50 83.5 219.1 73 22 student 22 73.5 100 68.7 242.2 80.7* 23 student 23 65.3 100 60 225.3 75.1* 24 student 24 87.3 50 86.7 224 74.6 25 student 25 82.3 50 78.3 210.6 70.2 26 student 26 66.3 100 60 226.3 75.4* 27 student 27 80.5 50 85.6 216.1 72 28 student 28 78 50 83.5 211.5 70.5 29 student 29 88.6 50 86.5 225.1 75* 30 student 30 83.6 100 73 256.6 85.5* amount 2.411.8 2.000 2.362.4 2.252 mean 80.39 66.66 78.74 75 note: symbol *refers to a student who passed the kkm data above show that the mean score of post-test i is 75. eleven students, or 36.6%, get scores above the minimum mastery criterion (kkm). meanwhile, the other 19 students have scores below the criterion. after analyzing the result of 3 aspects: writing components (wc) score is 80.39, generic structure (gs) is 66.66, and the language features (lf) is 78.74, it implies that generic structure has not fulfilled the minimum mastery criterion (kkm). it has the lowest mean score, 66.66, below the criterion. although the mean score of the posttest i pass the kkm, the aspect of generic structure in the post-test i need creativity and innovation in the next cycle to make the performance improvement in every aspect. the result of post-test ii the result of the post-test i implies that one aspect has not fulfilled minimum mastery criterion (kkm). therefore, it needs creativity and innovation in the next cycle. the researchers give post-test ii as the last test to increase the better result of students’ english writing performance. students were asked to write a descriptive text about the artist “iqbal cjr” or another well-known person like “dilan” in the post-test ii. below is the table of students’ post-test ii results to see the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 449 performance improvement from post-test i to posttest ii after implementing creativity and innovation in learning-teaching. table 7. students’ performance score in post-test ii no students’ id score on each aspect total score post-test ii score wc gs lf 1 student 1 84 100 80 264 88* 2 student 2 78.3 100 73.2 251.5 83.8* 3 student 3 85 50 100 235 78.3* 4 student 4 76 100 80 256 85.3* 5 student 5 88 100 78 266 88.6* 6 student 6 74.2 100 68.3 242.5 80.6* 7 student 7 85.3 50 86.3 221.6 73.8 8 student 8 78.3 100 64.2 242.5 80.8* 9 student 9 85 50 100 235 78.3* 10 student 10 75 100 67 242 80.6* 11 student 11 86.6 50 85.7 222.3 74.1 12 student 12 99.5 100 95 294.5 98.1* 13 student 13 92.5 50 100 242.5 80.8* 14 student 14 100 50 85 235 78.3* 15 student 15 62.5 100 63.5 226 75.3* 16 student 16 85 50 100 235 78.3* 17 student 17 95.2 100 75 270.2 90* 18 student 18 60.5 100 65 225.5 75.1* 19 student 19 100 50 85 235 78.3* 20 student 20 65.5 100 62 227.5 75.8* 21 student 21 64.8 100 62 226.8 75.6* 22 student 22 100 50 90.5 240.5 80.1* 23 student 23 88.7 50 86.5 225.2 75* 24 student 24 88 50 85.5 223.5 74.5 25 student 25 85.6 50 85 220.6 73.5 26 student 26 100 50 85 235 78.3* 27 student 27 78.5 100 62.5 241 80.3* 28 student 28 62 100 65.8 227.8 75.9* 29 student 29 88.7 50 86.8 225.5 75.1* 30 student 30 83.7 100 73.4 257.1 85.7* amount 2.412.6 2.300 2.396.2 2.396.2 mean 80.42 76.66 79.87 79.87 note: symbol * refers to students who passed the kkm table 7 shows that the mean score of post-test ii is 79.87. there are twenty-six students, or 86.6% of students get scores above the minimum mastery criterion. meanwhile, the other four students’ scores are below the criterion. from the post-test i up to post-test ii, there are better results than before, from 36.6% to 86.6%. in the post-test ii, the result of every aspect: the writing components (wc) is 80.42, the generic structure (gs) is 76.66, and the language features (lf) is 79.87. the analysis clustering technique implementation in the learning-teaching process the tests result, as mentioned previously, shows the improvement in students’ performance in writing descriptive text. implementing the clustering technique helps students enhance their english writing performance. students’ performance improvement mean percentage from the minimum mastery criterion (kkm) (75). there are five students above the kkm or 16.6% in the pre-test, in the post-test i, there are 11 students above the kkm or 36.6%, and in the post-test ii, there are26 students above the kkm (the minimum mastery criterion) or 86.6%. it indicates that students’ performance improved from the pre-test to the posttest i and ii. although there is performance erina ayu lestari, budiarti, & juhansar utilizing clustering technique to enhance students’ english writing performance 450 improvement in the pre-test up to post-test i from 67.49 up to 75, the performance improvement score has fulfilled the minimum mastery criterion. however, one aspect of writing descriptive text still has not been fulfilled. the mean aspect of generic structure is 66.66, which has not fulfilled the minimum mastery criterion. the minimum mastery criterion is 75. the researchers conduct the creativity and innovation in cycle ii to increase the students’ mean performance. based on the creativity and innovation result in cycle ii, there is a performance improvement in students’ mean on generic structure from 66.66 in the post-test i up to 76.66 in the post-test ii. it means that creativity and innovation have succeeded in cycle ii. besides, the clustering technique enhances students’ performance in writing descriptive text. the improvement percentage of students’ performance mean score calculation, from post-test i to post-test ii. the calculation of post-test i is 11%. in post-test ii, there is an improvement percentage up to 18.3%. the clustering technique helps the students improve their english writing performance. indeed, the implementation of the clustering technique helps students enhance their skills in writing descriptive text. to make it clear, the following table 8 becomes the comparison mean aspect of students’ english writing performance improvement: table 8. the improvement of students’ mean score performance in writing descriptive text of english no aspects mean pretest posttest i posttest ii 1 writing components 73.95 80.39 80.42 2 generic structures 56.66 66.66 76.66 3 language features 71.02 78.74 79.87 overall mean 67.21 75.26 78.98 % improvement 12% 18% table 8 shows the improvement of students’ mean score performance in writing the descriptive text in english. the table shows a 12% performance improvement from pre-test to post-test i and 18% from post-test i to post-test ii. in the column pretest, three aspects belong to the category that not fulfilled the kkm because all of the aspects, writing components (wc), generic structures (gs), and language features (lf), whereas the mean is less than 75. after implementing the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process, the researchers conduct a post-test i to measure the improvement of students’ performance in english writing, whether it is improving or not. after implementing the clustering technique, the researchers compare the pre-test and post-test results. based on the results, there is an improvement in students’ descriptive text writing. in table 9, one aspect still has not been fulfilled yet, the minimum mastery criterion in the post-test i. although the mean score of the post-test i have fulfilled the kkm, one of the mean aspects of writing descriptive text has still not fulfilled the kkm. the writing components in post-test i have mean aspect about 66.66. it means the post-test i still need the creativity and innovation in the learning-teaching process. furthermore, the researchers modify the process of learning-teaching creatively and innovatively in cycle ii to enhance students’ mean score performance. in cycle ii, the researchers conduct post-test ii to discover the usefulness of the clustering technique towards students’ performance in writing english text. the results of post-test ii show that no students get less than a 75 performance score. in other words, the use of the clustering technique is effective in helping students enhance their english writing performance. conclusion this research indicates that implementing the clustering technique in the learning-teaching process enhances students’ english writing performance, especially in writing descriptive text. the clustering technique makes students’ participation more active, serious, and motivated in the learning-teaching descriptive text, as seen in the results of the observation checklist. the clustering technique not only helps and attracts students’ attention and participation in the learning-teaching descriptive text but also shows the improvement of students’ performance in writing a descriptive text in english. furthermore, students’ performance means score percentage is 36.6% in the post-test i from the pre-test 16.6%. it proves that the students’ mean scores on the tests increased from 67.49 in the pre-test to 75 in the post-test i. although those results increase from pre-test to post-test i, they do not pass the minimum mastery criterion (kkm). one aspect of writing descriptive text has not english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 451 fulfilled the kkm. its score is 66.66. therefore, the researchers modify the learning-teaching process by having creativity and innovation in cycle ii to fulfill the minimum mastery criterion (kkm). the performance improvement in the post-test ii is 86.6% as the students’ mean percentage from the mean 79.87 and the aspects of generic structure increase up to 76.66. in line with the students’ performance mean score, the improvement in every test shows students’ performance mean score is 11% in post-test i up to 18.3% in the post-test ii. references anggraini, f. 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(2018). the implementation of jumbled-sentences toward students’ skill in writing report text. english review: journal of english education, 7(1), 115. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v7i1.1501 widiyanti, f., susilawati, e., & rosnija, e. (2018). the use of clustering technique to teach writing descriptive text. jurnal pendidikan dan pembelajaran khatulistiwa. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 277 learning english utilising online platforms during covid -19 in tertiary level: indonesian efl learners' retrospective perception rudi suherman english education program, faculty of education, universitas persatuan islam, indonesia e-mail: rudisuherman@unipi.ac.id sri yunita department of management, sekolah tinggi ilmu ekonomi yasa anggana, indonesia e-mail: sriyunita@stieyasaanggana.ac.id siti nurjanah hadiati department of islamic education, stai persis bandung indonesia e-mail: sitihadiyati@staipibdg.ac.id apa citation: suherman, r., yunita, s. & hadiati, s. n. (2021). learning english utilising online platforms during covid-19 in tertiary level: indonesia efl learners' retrospective perception. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 277-286 https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5394 received: 12-10-2021 accepted: 23-11-2021 published: 31-12-2021 abstract: this study aimed to examine the indonesian efl learners' retrospective perception toward utilising online platforms in teaching english as a foreign language during a pandemic. the mixed quantitative and qualitative research design method is employed to achieve this goal. seventy-five efl learners from three different universities who took english for general communication courses were recruited in this study. the data were obtained by deploying two research instruments: questionnaires and a retrospective interview. many participants preferred to select the most suitable and economical online platform to maximise their online learning experience. they also regard that learning effectiveness and efficiency can only be achieved by utilising blended synchronous and asynchronous modes. the findings also show that lecturers pose a fundamental role in helping students maximise their learning experiences. thus, lecturer-student engagement during online learning is inevitably essential. keywords: online platform; online learning; covid-19 pandemic; efl learners’ perception. introduction the covid–19 pandemics have dramatically affected many life aspects, including education. in relation to this, indonesian education is forced to make a number of adjustments. therefore, the online platform came to give a light as, temporarily, a way out to meet the need of this demand. all school levels from primary, secondary to tertiary level of education in indonesia made a great shift of teaching mode from teacher-student face to face meetings to online meetings. for that reason, learning english utilising online platforms during covid-19 in the tertiary level is important to be discussed. some research has been conducted on this issue; however, they focus on certain aspects such as online platform preferences (amin & sundari 2020) or teachers' challenges and reflection during the teaching-learning process (atmojo & nugroho, 2020; tathahira & sriayu, 2020). as recognised, the study related to the student's experience and perspective after more than one year of online learning implementations during covid-19 is still under-researched. thus, this study is trying to investigate the issue in order to give the shield light for all parties in education during this prolonged pandemic. the literature review, research methodology, findings, discussion, and conclusion are fully presented below. during a pandemic, the teaching-learning process, which is typically taken place in a classroom or face to face mode needs to be adjusted to make the demand to avoid the risk of students or school stakeholders being infected by the highly contagious virus which has been considered a global threat (harapan et al., 2020). online learning is defined as learning carried out from a distance assisted by electronic devices, for instance tablets, smartphones, laptops, and computers which require internet connection (gonzalez & louis, 2018).online learning as mailto:rudisuherman@unipi.ac.id mailto:sriyunita@stieyasaanggana.ac.id mailto:sitihadiyati@staipibdg.ac.id rudi suherman, sri yunita, & siti nurjanah hadiati learning english utilising online platforms during covid-19 in tertiary level: indonesia efl learners' retrospective perception 278 opposed to face to face learning has proliferated rapidly for the past decades (e.g atmojo & nugroho, 2020; tathahira & sriayu, 2020). therefore, huang et.al (2020) said that the "flexible learning" technology was used to carry out the learning procedure during the covid-19 epidemic. santoso and lestari (2019) said that at present moment, information and communication technology literacy is the essential and basis of the education sector. conducting online learning becomes a new challenge for both students and teachers. according to cao., et al. (2020), these acts have a significant influence on education, notably on students' learning. in line with this case, this shifting certainly triggers problems, challenges, and opportunities worth discussing. the challenges include integrating pedagogies and technologies, developing engaging activities, improving formal learning, getting student support, and dealing with technology-related issues (son, 2018). as a lecturer, along with two other lecturers from different campuses, at a private university in bandung. the researchers took the initiative to capture this phenomenon. although a large number of quantitative and qualitative studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of online learning (gonzalez & louis, 2018), research on online language learning conducted during a pandemic is very rare, particularly in the context of english as a foreign language (efl) in secondary school settings, as most online language learning research has been conducted at the tertiary education level (lin & warschauer, 2015). because of this extraordinary event, online language learning occurs unexpectedly and unprepared. a study of totally online language acquisition, on the other hand, is highly unusual (sun, 2014), especially during a pandemic. many efl/ esl teachers and researchers have extensively investigated the efficacy of online learning concerning students' learning achievement (waluyo, 2020). many studies about the effectiveness of online learning recognise that it is essential for students satisfaction and that it is a critical factor in students academic achievement (hew, 2016; yeh., kwok., chien., swean., baek., & mcintosh., 2019). related to academic achievement of positive student learning outcomes, attractive features in online platforms have engaged students. interactivity in the online environment is a key to keeping students engaged (deschaine & whale, 2017). online environments might benefit certain types of engagement (dumford & miller, 2018). and it is often related to the achievement of (akbari, naderi, simons, & pilot., 2016). in addition, ahmad, sosa and musfy (2020) stated that online learning is indeed beneficial. besides, others have been focused on its strengths and shortcomings as well, e-learning also facilitates networking and information exchange, but it has the disadvantage of possibly squandering time (salmon et al., 2015; hollis & was, 2016; brownson, 2014). however, only a few emphasise how students or efl learners perceive it (khotimah, widiati, mustofa,& ubaidillah., 2019; wright, 2017). therefore, the promptly significant shift and direction from offline to online has to be taken, furthermore in the context of force majeure due to an outbreak. given the opportunity to contribute significantly and fill in the gap on the proposed issue, this study is primarily intended to unfold how the students viewed the unprecedented shift of learning from face-to-face to online mode based on their personal experience. what they perceive likely affects the efficacy of the online program in the future, which can shed light on the online curriculum and some pedagogical aspects at a larger scale. thus, this study specifically put a focus on (1) the online platform references, (2) students' view toward lecturers' role during online learning, (3) the efficacy of the teachinglearning process, (4) students' comprehension toward the lesson on online learning, and (5) synchronous/ asynchronous tacit view. method to achieve the research goal, the mixed quantitative and qualitative research design method is employed, embracing the characteristics of survey research design. 75 efl learners who came from three universities. the participants were distributed equally from those campuses. they enrolled in education, economy, finance, management, and religious study programs. the vast background of the research participants is taken into consideration to prevail rich and robust data, which is discussed later. for ethical consideration, all participants' names in this study remain pseudonyms. firstly, the participants were asked to fill in the questionnaire, which consisted of 6 questions divided into several issues. the questionnaires were tailored in bahasa indonesia as participants' first language. secondly, they are then distributed online through google documents for its convenience. after all responses were collected, 3 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 279 participants from each university were invited to have semi-structured interviews consisting of 5 related questions. it was held via zoom and lasted between 15 – 25 minutes. the interview was performed in the participant's first language (l1). the questionnaire is then analysed quantitatively, whereas the interview results are transcribed and analysed qualitatively. those two findings support each other to reveal and answer the research objective being proposed profoundly (creswell, 2013; ubaidillah, 2018). the researchers translated the excerpt used in this study as accurately as possible. results and discussion results online platforms preferences among seventy-five students who participated in this study, more than half (52%) preferred to utilise whatsapp® as their learning platform during the online class. in contrast, google classroom comes into second choice (21.3 %), as shown fully on the pie diagram below. figure 1. online platforms preferences three of the interviewees stated that the reasons that drive them to use whatsapp® compared to other platforms are economical, practical reasons. ….it doesn't consume data much, and generally, everyone has this application, learning is not difficult to use, …………. makes it easy for us to interact with what lecturers …. if there is new material or ask questions that have not been understood (putri). …. more economical and i can study the lesson again….(guardian) …… it can make it easier for me to ask questions when there are some materials that i don't understand…. we don't need to scroll to find our answer. (iman) although whatsapp has its drawback, compared to other platforms, when it comes to real-life interaction, this handicap can be relatively covered by its useful default features. as stated below, the respondent found it very useful when learning as uttered by novyanti (pseudonym) and her peer. i prefer to use whatsapp because…(thinking) using it can support tasks both in terms of images, docs, and also voice notes (noviyanti). because in whatsapp, there is a feature reply which when the lecturer answers or when we ask, we can immediately find the answer to the question, especially in english (questionnaire responses) to sum up, this section displays that whatsapp has become the most preferred choice by the students due to several reasons. even though it does not possess all the required features, it still can relatively help them get most of the lessons given by the lecturers. this platform has met the demand of most respondents when participating in online learning. students’ view toward lecturers’ role during online learning the information gained from this section shows that the students had diverse viewpoints towards lecturers' role in the online class. for the top three, they considered lecturers as controller (30%), tutor (26.7%), and assessor (18.7%), respectively. it can be interpreted that the students may prefer to have the lecturer–centred based rather than student-centred based. figure 2. students’ view toward lecturers’ role during online learning comment from those who viewed lecturers serve as the controller included the following: students still feel unfamiliar with this method of learning, and they still need a lot of direction from the lecturer (questionnaire response) ... lecturers are very influential in the continuity of the teaching and learning process during online learning by continuously controlling students to do rudi suherman, sri yunita, & siti nurjanah hadiati learning english utilising online platforms during covid-19 in tertiary level: indonesia efl learners' retrospective perception 280 assignments on time (questionnaire response). with this online learning, the control (from lecturers) is very much needed. (questionnaire response) as depicted from those comments above, even college or university students are categorized as adult learners who generally tend to be independent learners and are expected to be more autonomous and be responsible toward their learning process and goal (khotimah et al., 2019). surprisingly, in the context of online learning in the outbreak situation, they tended to depend more on their lecturers. lecturers who act as controllers are more favorable for them. controlling is urgently needed by most participants in this study as they are not entirely familiar with the system approach, as the teaching materials potentially hinder them from comprehending the subject. the effectiveness of online learning one of the critical issues that become apparent is the effectiveness of the online class. interestingly, the finding shows that students were primarily uncertain (50,7%) about online class effectiveness they underwent, whereas 36% disagree and 13.3 % agree, as shown in the figure below: figure 3. the effectiveness of online learning they felt uncertain that the role played by the lecturers, as perceived, was not significant. some respondents considered that the lecturers did not assist them fruitfully during the learning process. the lecturers rarely explained the material. most of the lecturers only gave assignments without explaining….even some lecturers who only told students to fill in the absence without any assignments and materials (questionnaire response) most of the lecturers give assignments to students without explaining the lesson first (questionnaire response) following the former finding, the respondent expected the lecturers to play more role, compared to face to face learning which influences them in learning mastery, by explaining the materials in detail rather than merely assigned them to do the tasks ...understanding english learning is more effective in learning offline and explained directly by the lecturer concerned (nopri) on the other hand, the learners found a limitation of expressing what they felt compared with activities in the classroom as they can ask questions and get the points from the lecturers directly, as stated by teni below. for me, it's not an effective way since all of the students can't express more themselves in studying due to limitations (teni) a respondent also argued that online learning is not as effective as offline due to poor internet connection. the learning process from home becomes a new challenge because the signal cannot spread quickly to the whole of areas where they live, as it is uttered by anisah below: in my opinion, online learning is less effective than offline learning. offline learning has a more positive impact on students than online learning. because online learning is very dependent on signals. if the signal is bad, the learning material is left behind (anisah) it may happen because some students come from remote areas in which internet access is not stable. they further testament to going somewhere to get better internet access during the interview sessions. it was always challenging for me (every time i had online classes) i had to go to a hill close to my house or to go to my relatives to get better and stable internet access so i could follow the online class (nani) some participants argued that many online platforms could support their learning process predominantly depending on how the lecturers design and create the method to improve their understanding. thus, the lecturers need to adapt and add more skills about recent technologies in language teaching. still can understand because many applications can support learning english (questionnaire response) it is effective because the learning process is exciting and fun. the lecturers gave a new atmosphere and method to make the class is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 281 comfortable (questionnaire response) the efficiency of online learning the online class efficiency tenet shows identical tendencies similar to effectiveness data findings. as it is shown in figure no. 4, the respondents were primarily unsure (53%), followed by disagreement (28%) and agreement (19%) toward the notion of online class efficiency during the pandemic. figure 4. the efficiency of online learning in the online class, students are required to fill in the online attendance list before the class; it can be writing a name list or filling out a google form which cannot guarantee that the students standby until the course finishes. the lecturers might not identify who paid attention to the lectures, including checking whether or not the students understands the lessons. the students could only come to sign the presence list and attend the closing part of the session. this finding is succinctly justified by the respondents' comments below. because some students rarely take online classes or are just absent without following the lecture flow (questionnaire response) effective yet not efficient (questionnaire response). some participants regarded only learning as money and time-consuming. the learning process took longer than it usually does. assignments and tasks need to be submitted later in the same day or even more. consequently, they need to spare more time to understand the material and finish the duty independently. at the same time, students need to add internet data in expenses allocation during the pandemic, as it is clearly stated. …. if it carries longer, so students will have a mental problem such as depression because of lack of sleep, radiation effect from electronic media or finance such as when internet data runs out, but the class goes normal, so it causes stress and lack of communication impacts of less confidence (nopri) the concept of online learning still cannot achieve its efficiency, where students need extra effort to benefit from the lessons. the lack of direct communication impacts the student's confidence, which is necessary to ask for help regarding the material and another activity. students ‘comprehension toward the lesson figure 5 displays the students ' self-evaluation on their lesson comprehension. most students place themselves in uncertainty tenet (63%). in contrast, about a quarter of them (27%) argued that they didn't comprehend the lesson, and the most negligible percentage of respondents (11 %) asserted that they could understand the class. figure 5. students’ comprehension toward the lesson this minority clustered (10.7%) is represented by some participants who highlighted learning commitment and being independent whatever the online class mode is being carried out or obstacle faced, as stated by one of the respondents below. overall, i can understand very well. but of course, there are many obstacles, and coming back to the reasons for whether online learning is effective or not, if we are serious about learning, any difficulties, we can certainly overcome them by looking for other sources for the lesson material we do not understand (questionnaire response). students' understanding of the lesson is influenced by the lecturers' method during the learning process. some students can easily understand all topics without any difficulty. the learning process comes so fresh with new designs and enables them to learn the subject passionately. it is the uniqueness of method, where it makes the students are feeling excited and can not wait for what will the lecturers brings for the next meeting (na) the lecturers always give the maximum explanation, which is even more than usual, and rudi suherman, sri yunita, & siti nurjanah hadiati learning english utilising online platforms during covid-19 in tertiary level: indonesia efl learners' retrospective perception 282 also they provide convenience such as the length of submitting tasks and absence (al). in contrast, most students are challenged to follow the learning process. they could not easily follow the class or catch the lesson because of multiple reasons, methods, tools and timetables. they argue that offline meetings are more detailed than online meetings. it's hard, i have no idea about the reason why online classes are too hard for us to follow (teni) the explanation given by the lecturer is more detailed if offline learning is carried (nopri) ….. the direct communication with lecturers and friends, even some of materials were not delivered clearly but many assignments handed; also we do not need to think about obstacles regarding with signals or too extravagant of internet data, and the last the timetable is not scheduled well during online class (al) no social interaction because it feels so pseudointeractions. it's not easy because at least the quality of data must be maximised, especially the time when we need to have a class via zoom, draining the interned data a lot (fi). it can be perceived that real-time interaction has become a vital element during the online learning process. they can easily ask for direct inquiry without being interrupted by poor signals that hinder them. most students inevitably demand direct, intimate interaction to benefit from the studied lesson. students’ preferences between synchronous and asynchronous approach for most participants, blending synchronous and asynchronous mode is considerably the best option. as seen from the figure below, more than half of respondents (52%) prefer to select this option, whereas mere synchronous and asynchronous places respectively at 30% and 17 %. this hybrid approach provides flexibility to the students and helps them better understand. figure 6. students’ preferences between synchronous and asynchronous approach here are the following arguments of the students who prefer to have both methods. by trying to use two methods of asynchronous and synchronous learning, students or lecturers can complement the lack of learning methods from one another (questionnaire response) i prefer direct interaction, but i'm also clueless about it; with the asynchronous learning system, i can at least operate it (questionnaire response) let learning be more engaging and not boring (by having) both modes (questionnaire response) both are very supportive for doing online learning, but i personally prefer learning in realtime because the material presented will be faster to understand (questionnaire response) as can be viewed from the commentary above, most students considered that both synchronous and asynchronous methods had each drawback. synchronous methods tend to consume more internet data if prolongedly applied and require a stable internet connection. this situation is disfavored for the students who reside in remote areas with poor internet connections. whereas asynchronous the lecturer student interaction is less intensive, students who demand further explanation or questions that require immediate response cannot be facilitated. in addition, it requires the students to be more independent and be responsible with their learning duty. in addition to this, by utilising and incorporating them. the lack of each learning method can relatively be minimised. therefore, the learning objective of each lesson can be fairly achieved better, and the students can get the benefit and most of the learning. discussion the finding of this study has yielded five points english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 283 that are worth discussing. firstly, regarding the platform preferences, the respondent prefers to utilise the platform during the class that is practical, economical in terms of data consumption and endows with valuable features that can support the learning objective. this finding is in line with perry's (2017). it confirms amin's (amin & sundari, 2020) in which friendly user platforms and its accessibility help the students to gain most of the benefit of the lesson as the offline class does. müller's research (2008) further supports that accessibility and comfort in the online learning environment enable students to become more interested in the study. secondly, regarding lecturers' role, most of the respondents still consider lecturers as the centre of learning and demand intensive interaction during online learning teaching. teachers need to scaffold interactions of student-teacher and student-material to enhance students’ learning (lin, zheng, & zhang, 2017). they believe that lecturers should take complete control of the online class, ensure the students' participation, check their understanding of the lesson, and monitor their learning progress. consequently, when the lecturers lack the assigned tasks formerly mentioned. the students are unlikely to grasp the lesson maximally. this tenet has confirmed deris, et al. (2012), who pointed out "teachers have a principal role in shaping students' learning experience and ultimately their persistence in learning" (p. 256). it is further revealed that student-lecturer interaction in a class can lead to a decreased sense of belonging. as a result of this tendency, it has been pointed out that feeling disengaged from teachers is one of the causes of attrition from a class. thirdly, concerning the effectiveness and efficiency of online learning, the respondents mostly regarded that the class is not entirely effective and efficient as opposed to offline learning due to lack of lecturer role and poor internet connection. this finding has been clarified by wright's (2017). some studies indicate that online learning is not as effective as face-to-face traditional instruction (pickering & swinnerton, 2019). despite its great flexibility, lecturers' commitment and poor capability and internet stability can account for the success and effectiveness of the online class in achieving its goal. in line with the above reality, the results of research by hikmat et al. (2020, p. 1) show that learning online in practice courses and online course subjects are less effective. fourthly, in the context of students' comprehension of the lessons, most respondents consider that the classes during online learning are more challenging to comprehend. due to two factors; lecturers 'presence and an internet connection, lecturers' presence have made the lesson more difficult to understand. according to them, some lecturers do not seem to take their lesson preparations as maximally as they could; this has negatively affected the quality of online learning. it is, therefore, inevitable that most students demand direct, intimate interaction to get most of the lesson, parallel to the theory that interaction between teachers and students leads to student satisfaction and student learning outcomes. other factors such as peer community, engaging online teachers, confidence and course design prove how online degrees can assist students with successful academic and engaging learning experiences (farrell & brunton, 2020). then the internet has contributed significantly to this tenet for some students who reside in remote areas with relatively poor internet connections. they can access or participate in the class when a stable internet connection such as zoom meeting or youtube live is provided. lastly, to date, offline or face to face learning still outperforms and is more preferable to online learning, especially for the students who endow socioeconomic disadvantages and are unable to have proper internet access. it is also discussed by green (2016) that online learning needs a bigger investment than face to face classes to make it properly designed and implemented. as suggested by moorhouse (2020) extensive studies that investigate the transition from face-to-face to online learning are equally worthwhile. therefore, a blended synchronous learning mode presents as the alternative to minimize its drawback and eventually achieve the learning objective. conclusion according to the respondents' perception who participated in this study, online learning should be easily accessed and implemented through the most practical and economic e-learning platforms, particularly in terms of internet data consumption and embedded features that enable the students to learn and comprehend the given lessons maximally. this study also found that the lecturers occupy a fundamental role during the online teachinglearning process. most respondents generally consider the lecturers' presence who can control the class as necessary as in the offline class. in rudi suherman, sri yunita, & siti nurjanah hadiati learning english utilising online platforms during covid-19 in tertiary level: indonesia efl learners' retrospective perception 284 addition to this, the lecturers are highly imperative to acknowledge and embrace the recent technologies in language teaching to minimize the technical issues related to the platform being utilized. furthermore, students are also expected to foster their internal and external motivation and intention to establish immediate goals and be in charge of individual responsibility towards their learning process and goal during online learning. another notable point that is intriguing to discuss is that the mixed-marriage approach between synchronous and asynchronous is regarded as the most effective and efficient option. this approach can facilitate learning style, need and expectation toward the lesson. this study has revealed that students and lecturers are highly advisable to have common ground and commitment to online learning. this can be achieved by having intensive lecturer-student interaction and engagement in pre-duringpostlearning activities. acknowledgement the sincere thanks are addressed to all 75 students from three different institutions who have been willing to participate in this study. references ahmad, l., sosa, m., & musfy, k. 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(2019). how college students' achievement goal orientations predict their expected online learning outcome: the mediation roles of self-regulated learning strategies and supportive online learning behaviors. online learning, 23(4), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12457 https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2020.1755205 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2014.891428 http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jktp https://doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2018.15.4.23.1186 https://doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2018.15.4.23.1186 https://doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2020.17.1.10.160 https://doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2020.17.1.10.160 https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v7i1.6859 rudi suherman, sri yunita, & siti nurjanah hadiati learning english utilising online platforms during covid-19 in tertiary level: indonesia efl learners' retrospective perception 286 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 737 independent learning in english online class during covid-19 pandemic: students perceptions and its challenges andi mukarramah nagauleng tadris bahasa inggris, fakultas tarbiyah dan ilmu keguruan, institut agama islam negeri manado e-mail: andi.mukarramah@iain-manado.ac.id ahmad mustamir waris tadris bahasa inggris, fakultas tarbiyah dan ilmu keguruan, institut agama islam negeri manado e-mail: ahmadmustamirwaris@gmail.com apa citation: nagauleng, a. m., & waris, a. m. (2022). independent learning in english online class during covid19 pandemic: students perceptions and its challenges. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 737-748. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6421. received: 09-02-2022 accepted: 26-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction since the spread of covid-19 in worldwide (who, 2020), indonesian schools are forced to conduct online learning-teaching process. one of the schools implementing online learning-teaching process is madrasah aliyah negeri (man) model 1 manado, north sulawesi. the school, located in the tuminting sub-district of manado city, north sulawesi province, is one of the most popular high schools. the school currently has 1449 students divided into 41 classes with 91 teachers has been conducting online learning since march 24, 2020 (source: man model 1 manado database). learning is carried out through the school’s elearning application and the zoom facility for faceto-face online meetings. all subject teachers at man model 1 manado use this learning system, including english subjects. as it is well known, english has been officially taught at the secondary school level in indonesia for a long time (suwarno, 2020; utami, pabbajah, & juhansar, 2018). this subject is considered important among other subjects. english subjects have also been included in the national exam (uswatunnisa, 2020). therefore, without a doubt, indonesia has become one of the most prospective markets for teaching english (zein, 2019). however, during the covid-19 pandemic, where schools are required to learn from home, the online learning process for english subjects is one of the challenges for teachers in this field of study. it is hard because students must master four language skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing abstract: the spread of covid-19 in indonesia forces teachers and students to conduct the online learningteaching process independently. online learning is carried out to protect teachers-students and reduce the number of people affected by the virus. thus, this present study aims to discuss how independent learning in online english class put into practice at school, discover students’ perceptions of independent learning in online english classes and its challenges during the covid-19 pandemic. this present study relays on mixed methods research design. qualitative and quantitative data were collected through a survey using a google form. qualitative data were analyzed by coding, classifying, explaining, and concluding. meanwhile, quantitative data were analyzed using the likert scale method through spss ver. 23. the results show that in the learningteaching process during the covid-19 pandemic, students learn independently using learning-teaching materials provided by english teachers. besides, students use media such as youtube to help them understand the material given by teachers. students claim that independent online english learning is ineffective since students find difficulties in understanding materials. although students use technology to support the learning-teaching process, it does not work well since the internet connection is unstable and internet quotas are limited. therefore, teachers should manage independent online learning properly to enable students to achieve the goal of the learning-teaching process. teachers should organize and control the learning-teaching process according to current needs; planning, implementation, and assessment. keywords: education quality; independent learning; english; online class; covid-19. andi mukarramah nagauleng & ahmad mustamir waris independent learning in english online class during covid-19 pandemic: students perceptions and its challenges 738 (anwas, sugiarti, permatasari, warsihna, anas, alhapip, siswanto, & rivalina, 2020). online learning means a series of learning activities in a subject delivered through a network to provide access and exchange of knowledge. by the term, this learning uses a learning-teaching approach that involves internet technology. online learning could be interpreted as learning that is carried out remotely with the help of electronic devices, such as tablets, smartphones, laptops, and computers that require an internet connection (milheim, fraenza, & palermo-kielb, 2021; serevina & priane, 2021). the online learning environment is useful for students to access knowledge and materials, interact with teachers, and collaborate between students (zulfa & effendi, 2021). based on initial observations made by researchers at man model 1 manado in october 2020, online learning, especially english learning, is carried out once a week at each grade level, using e-learning according to the school schedule. the elearning address used is for class x: https://elearning.manmodelmanado.sch.id/ and http://mandeldodaring.myddns.me:8094/ for class xi and xii . students would log in to the e-learning application using their nisn account and their respective passwords to access their respective classes. in addition, face-to-face online learning is also carried out through the zoom meeting application, which is held 2-3 times a month for each subject, including english lessons, wherein this learning the subject teacher would provide material directly, and there is the direct interaction between students and teacher. the activities such as giving material, collecting assignments, and student and teacher interactions also take place using the whatsapp application; by using this application, students and teachers could directly conduct discussions via short messages. teachers must understand and train students’ english skills in online english learning. therefore, teachers inevitably have to think of learning methods that are fun and not boring for students. considering they have to learn a foreign language, they may never get in their daily lives. students could learn english better with online learning because they can participate in virtual classes anywhere via computers or smartphones. through virtual classes or online materials, students could engage in interactive activities, be given authentic materials, and interact with teachers and other students. they could watch the class or the recorded video if they miss class or want to watch the material again to understand the content. as for teachers, after they provide the material, they could update it again easily. they could improve students’ abilities through video or sound recordings sent via e-learning or recordings during online learning. various learning objects lacking in the traditional learning process could be applied to distance learning. thus, learners prefer online learning, which contains various learning activities such as discussion forums (snyder, koustas, & jillson, 2020). as learning becomes more individualized, learner-centered, passive, cooperative, and available anywhere and anytime, e-learning technology would also become more individualized, usercentered, network-based, long-term, and available anywhere and anytime (dhillon & murray, 2021; ghosh, muduli, & pingle, 2021). apart from the various benefits of online learning, there may also be some problems faced by learning actors (teachers, students, parents) in implementing online learning. some of the problems faced in online learning are lack of internet access, lack of technical equipment such as computers, mobile devices, cameras, etc., technical problems, lack of student or teacher technology skills, negative beliefs of students or teachers about online learning, especially for online language learning-teaching, some habits from traditional learning to online learning, lack of orientation or training sessions, lack of technical or administrative support for teachers or students, the dependence of students on teachers which makes them unable to learn independently (altunay, 2019). in addition, papoutsi & rangoussi (2020) also stated that problems related to pedagogical support and forms of human-computer interaction hinder the distance learning process. some scholars have conducted research related to this present study. those studies are mapped into several perspectives. first is motivation and technology literacy. students motivation and knowledge of technology are important factors in online learning (bailey, almusharraf, & hatcher, 2021; mardesci, 2020). students did not know much about online learning and preferred offline learning to learn english (eryani & mulyanti, 2021; faizah, ambarwati, & rahayu, 2021; gupta, 2021; huang, tlili, wang, shi, bonk, yang, & burgos, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 739 2021). second is technical aspect of online learning. students-teacher are lack equipment and other technical problems to conduct online learning (hazaymeh, 2021; putra, 2021; rahman, 2021). atmojo & nugroho (2020) conducted a study to determine how teachers conduct online learning during the covid-19 pandemic in indonesia. third is learning-teaching media. teachers-students use several applications and platforms, namely learning management systems (lms), chat and message, video conference, content maker, assessment, video streaming, and online learning. (purwadi, saputra, wahyudi, supriyanto, muyana, rohmadheny, ariyanto, & kurniawan, 2021; rakhmanina, martina, halolo, syafryadin, & noermanzah, 2021; wijayanengtias & claretta, 2020). this current study seeks to complete the existing studies on the independent learning through online class by discovering independent learning in online english class during covid-19 pandemic at madrasah aliyah negeri (man) 1 model manado, north sulawesi. therefore, this study aims to discusses how independent learning in online english class put into practice at school, to explore students’ perceptions of independent learning in online english classes and its challenges during the covid19 pandemic. method this research used a mixed-method. to determine student perceptions, the researchers used quantitative data. therefore, the likert scale survey method was used to answer this question. the likert scale method is suitable for exploring student perceptions. the likert scale survey method is a quantitative research method to obtain data from a group of people with the approach of agreeing/disagreeing, satisfied/dissatisfied, and so on about that person’s attitudes, opinions, behavior, perceptions, or characteristics (åkerblad, seppänenjärvelä, & haapakoski, 2021; ellis, 2021; harrison, reilly, & creswell, 2020). then the researcher also collected qualitative data to find out how students learn independently. the data was collected through several procedures such as the following: 1) the researcher asked the participants of the class teacher of each sample to distribute the questionnaire link in the form of a google form to their students. 2) after all the questionnaires had been collected, the researcher took questionnaire data in excel form thus that it could be classified and analyzed easily. 3) researchers separated quantitative and qualitative data. quantitative data were statistically analyzed to show the trend of the responses given by the target population about the phenomena being discussed (jung, 2019; scherbaum & shockley, 2020). the data were processed using the spss ver.23 application. the data obtained and processed from the google form is presented in tables or diagrams to determine students’ perceptions of the online learning implementation during the pandemic. then qualitative data in the form of answers from an open questionnaire was analyzed using coding, classification, explanations, and concluding. results and discussion students’ independence learning and online english class the covid-19 pandemic has forced students to study online. learning through online-based learning gives students the flexibility to manage study time. students could learn independently of time, anytime, and anywhere. in addition, students could interact with teachers both synchronously, namely learning interactions simultaneously, such as using video conferences, telephone, or live chat, or asynchronously (sobri, nursaptini, & novitasari, 2020). student participation in online learning activities is very important because it develops instructional skills and knowledge of the relevant learning content (myers & rivero, 2019). through learning resources in various forms and references available in online learning systems, participants could learn to improve knowledge and skills related to the learning materials presented. individuals who apply independent learning would experience changes in study habits, namely by arranging and organizing themselves to determine learning goals, learning needs, and strategies used in learning that lead to the goals that have been formulated. independent learning is a learning activity carried out by individuals with the freedom to determine and manage their teaching materials, time, place and utilize various learning resources needed. with this freedom, individuals could manage learning methods, have a high sense of responsibility, and are skilled at utilizing learning resources. several indicators are used as learning independence for students, one of which is digital andi mukarramah nagauleng & ahmad mustamir waris independent learning in english online class during covid-19 pandemic: students perceptions and its challenges 740 literacy (hikmawati, sari, malkan, andani, & habibah, 2021). digital literacy in question is in the form of the internet, direction guides, hypertext, evaluation of information content, and knowledge compilation (hikmawati et al., 2021). there are benefits and barriers to digital literacy for young learners learning english. the benefits of digital literacy include improving beginner students’ writing skills, reading, listening, and speaking skills, familiarizing themselves with authentic materials, increasing the frequency of using digital technology, increasing online collaboration between teacher students and students students (mudra, 2020). utilization of learning resources through digital literacy could enrich the repertoire of learning in increasing the independence of good student learning in studying the subject matter provided by the teacher even though they are at home (rumahlatu, sangur, berhitu, kainama, kakisina, & latupeirissa, 2021). high learning independence would make students learn independently without anyone asking; thus, student learning behavior is more exploratory, making decisions, being confident, and creative. digital literacy also has several negative impacts on young students. the problem of a weak signal that makes internet access difficult is still a problem. the content of online digital materials is not easy for young learners to interpret and convert into simple, self-organizing information. in addition, digital literacy tools are considered expensive (mudra, 2020). the data were taken from the interviews of the students who were divided into eight groups. “menurut saya kurang efektif, karena kuota (karena saya berasal dari keluarga yang kurang mampu saya tidak mempunyai wifi sendiri di rumah, jadi saya harus sering-sering beli kuota yang harganya tidak murah agar dapat mengikuti pembelajaran) dan jaringan (tidak semua daerah memiliki jaringan yang bagus, meskipun kadang bagus tapi sewaktu-waktu bisa saja jadi tidak bagus).” (wawancara siswa kelompok 1). “in my view, it is not effective because of the quota limitation (i come from a low-income family i do not have my wifi at home, so i often have to buy a quota that is not cheap to take part in learning) and also the network (not all regions have a good network, although it is good sometimes it could be not good).” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 1). “kekurangannya terkadang harus diulang ulang untuk baca atau pahami karena terkadang kurang mengerti atau paham, banyak gangguan di rumah, sulit untuk interaksi dan siswa bermain main.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 2) “the drawbacks of online learning are sometimes the materials have to be read several times or to understand. there are lots of distractions at my home. it is difficult to interact with others, and students are not serious in online learning.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 2). independent learning for students is needed. thus they could take responsibility for organizing and disciplining themselves. in addition, with independent learning, students could also develop learning abilities of their own accord. these attitudes need to be possessed by students because these are characteristics of the maturity of an educated person. independent students would be able to determine their learning competencies, find their learning input, and carry out self-evaluation and reflection activities on the learning process they are undergoing. online learning is a government policy in handling the covid-19 virus worldwide (indiani, 2020). this kind of learning impacts students’ understanding of various subjects, especially english. from the students’ perspective regarding online learning, this creates its difficulties, ranging from material that is difficult to understand, connection problems, internet credit problems that make many students complain. table 1. english online learning increases students’ english skills indicators frequency percent valid percent valid strongly disagree 4 7.7 7.7 disagree 23 44.2 44.2 agree 21 40.4 40.4 strongly agree 4 7.7 7.7 total 52 100.0 100.0 based on table 1, students felt that learning english online could not improve students’ ability to speak english. it was evidenced by 44.2% of students who chose not to agree, and 40.4% agreed. it means that it is better to learn english face-toface than online. this comparison can be seen clearly in figure 1. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 741 figure 1. the diagram of english online learning increase english skills however, not all students had difficulty learning english online. other students could also enjoy this relatively new learning model. the difficulties faced by students make them have ways to overcome them. for example, students asked the teacher directly if the material was hard to understand. then if there was a problem with network connections, students also tried to adjust it. students learned materials from various accessible media such as dictionaries english modules, made small groups, and most importantly, created a comfortable learning atmosphere. “sama seperti diatas atau dengan cara lain yaitu dengan menonton video penjelasan materi tersebut melalui aplikasi youtube (jika materinya tidak dikirim melalui video/audio) oleh guru mata pelajaran. kemudian, lebih baik para siswa sudah memiliki kamus bahasa inggris agar bisa mengatasi kendala dalam pembelajaran daring bahasa inggris.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 4). “as explained previously, we learn by watching videos through the teacher’s youtube application (if the material is not sent via video/audio). then, we should have an english dictionary already to overcome obstacles in online learning english.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 4). “menurut saya salah satu cara mengatasi adalah saya bertanya kepada guru yang mengajar tentang materi yang saya tidak tau dan tidak mengerti, dan juga memahami dan mendengar apa yang disampaikan oleh guru mata pelajaran tersebut. jika terhalang internet maka saya akan menunggu internet stabil kembali dan berusaha menyesuaikan diri dengan jalannya pembelajaran. jika telah diberikan materi akan saya baca dan jika diberikan tugas akan saya kerjakan.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 5). “one option to solve the problem is to ask the teacher who teaches about the material that i do not know and do not understand. i also try to understand and listen to the material explanation from the teacher. if the internet is unstable, i will wait for the internet to stabilize again and adjust to learning. if the material has been given, i will read it, and if the teacher gives an assignment, i will do it.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 5). “cara saya mengatasi kendala adalah dengan mencari media pembelajaran lain, seperti dengan menonton video penjelasan dari youtube dan saya juga mengambil kelas belajar tambahan (les) diluar dari jam sekolah.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 6). “i overcome the problem is to look for other learning media, such as watching an explanatory video from youtube. i also take additional learning classes (private courses) outside of school hours.” [free translation] (interviews with students in group 6). “buat metode belajar yang kreatif. adakan zoom meet, uji lisan, dan pemahaman. bertanya kepada teman teman juga menjadi cara untuk memahami pelajaran tersebut.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 7). “we are creating creative learning methods. hold a zoom meeting, oral test, and comprehension test. asking friends is also a way to understand the lesson.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 7). “ciptakan lingkungan yang nyaman dan mendukung, hal pertama yang harus kita benahi adalah memperbaiki lingkungan belajar, kita harus menciptakan lingkungan belajar yang benar nyaman dan mendukung untuk belajar bahasa inggris.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 8). “creating a comfortable and supportive environment, the first thing we must fix is to improve the learning environment; we must create a comfortable and supportive learning environment for learning english.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 8). it turns out that online learning independence from students has been raised. online learning forces students’ creativity to overcome various difficulties in learning. it was evidenced by how students already understood technology and used it in the learning process. andi mukarramah nagauleng & ahmad mustamir waris independent learning in english online class during covid-19 pandemic: students perceptions and its challenges 742 table 2. the independence of students in english online learning indicators frequency percent valid percent valid strongly disagree 2 3.8 3.8 disagree 8 15.4 15.4 agree 21 40.4 40.4 strongly agree 21 40.4 40.4 total 52 100.0 100.0 the data processing results presented in table 2 show that learning english online could increase students’ independence in english, with a percentage of 40.4% agreeing and also choosing strongly agree. students chose to disagree only slightly, namely 15.4%. this comparison can be seen clearly in figure 2. figure 2. the diagram of students’ independent learning in english online learning the survey results stated that students agree that online learning made them more independent. however, the students still need help from the teacher. although it could show learning independence, online learning english is a bit effective because students feel they have not been able to understand better the material presented by the subject teacher. the implementation of online learning in the educational practice of the covid-19 pandemic turned out to be less well implemented because, from the side of the students, they were not independent enough. this study showed that students still had enough confidence and responsibility for online learning. online learning could not replace offline study habits related to students because students must have their preparation and discipline while studying. students’ perceptions on independent learning in english online class learning english online at madrasah aliyah had its twists and turns. not all students could follow online learning english well. based on the recognition of madrasah aliyah students, it was more difficult for students to participate in learning english remotely well compared to regular meetings. their reasons were very diverse. the students admitted that they had difficulty understanding learning english. it was because the students felt less understood than what was explained by the teachers. in addition, students were also given more new material that had not been explained clearly by the teacher, plus students were getting bored over time. “belajar bahasa inggris lewat daring kurang seru dan kurang menantang karena tidak dapat berdialog langsung bersama teman-teman dan guru dalam bahasa inggris.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 1). “learning english online is less fun and less challenging because it is impossible to have direct dialogue with friends and teachers in english.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 1). “pendapat saya tentang kelas online di masa pandemi corona ini, menyenangkan tapi lama kelamaan membosankan. kadang tidak mengerti karena keterbatasan jaringan dan pemahaman yang terbatas.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 2). “my opinion about online classes during this corona pandemic is fun, but over time it gets boring. sometimes we do not understand because of network limitations, and the materials are hard to understand.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 2). the students also complained that online learning made it difficult to accept and understand the materials provided. it was because the absorption of the brain was different. some materials are more difficult to understand when explained online than the teacher’s direct explanation in offline learning. “kekurangan dari pembelajaran daring ini yaitu kurangnya pemahaman dalam mendalami materi. kekurangannya yang yaitu kita tidak bisa melakukan aksi secara langsung.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 3). “the drawback of this online learning is the lack of understanding in exploring the material. the drawback is that we could not take action english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 743 directly.” [free translation] (interviews with a student in group 3). “kekurangan dari pembelajaran sistem daring menurut saya ialah siswa jadi kurang dalam berinteraksi menggunakan bahasa inggris. pertama tidak mudah akan mengerti lalu kedua komunikasi antara siswa dan guru sangat terbatas (wawancara siswa kelompok 2).” “the disadvantage of online learning, in my opinion, is that students are less able to interact using english. first, it is not easy to understand then; secondly, the communication between students and teachers is limited.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 2). supporting facilities for learning remotely for students also are not optimal. the students complained that internet facilities (the main facility for online learning) were still lacking. the students are forced to use their own money to buy internet credit even it should be the school’s responsibility. the parents also have to spend more money on their children’s learning needs. “kekurangannya adalah kebanyakan siswa menggunakan paket data, jadi para siswa kesusahan ketika paket datanya habis atau ada gangguan jaringan. ditambah keterbatasan akses internet, berkurangnya interaksi dengan pengajar, pemahaman tentang materi, minimnya pengawasan dalam belajar.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 2). “the drawback is that most students use internet credit, so students face difficulties when they run out of internet credit or a network problem. in addition, limited internet access reduced interaction with teachers, understanding of the material, lack of supervision in learning.” [free translation] (interviews with students in group 2). furthermore, learning english online provided an unpleasant atmosphere for students. this online learning confused students in understanding the material, how to solve internal problems (e.g., the internet is not good), etc. table 3. students’ enthusiasm in english online learning indicators frequency percent valid percent valid strongly disagree 11 21.2 21.2 disagree 18 34.6 34.6 agree 16 30.8 30.8 strongly agree 7 13.5 13.5 total 52 100.0 100.0 based on table 3, students’ enthusiasm did not grow in learning english online. it was evidenced by the number of students who choose not to agree as much as 34.6% on the grounds of difficulty understanding english lessons if carried out online. meanwhile, 30.8% of students agree because the tasks could be completed by looking online. this comparison can be seen clearly in figure 3. figure 3. the diagram of students’ enthusiasm in english online learning table 4. conducive situation of english online learning from students indicators frequency percent valid percent valid strongly disagree 6 11.5 11.5 disagree 18 34.6 34.6 agree 16 30.8 30.8 strongly agree 12 23.1 23.1 total 52 100.0 100.0 table 4 shows the atmosphere of english online learning, which provides an uncomfortable atmosphere for students. it was evidenced by 34.6% of students who chose not to agree, and 30.8% agreed that learning english provides a comfortable atmosphere. this comparison can be seen clearly in figure 4. andi mukarramah nagauleng & ahmad mustamir waris independent learning in english online class during covid-19 pandemic: students perceptions and its challenges 744 figure 4. the diagram of english online learningteaching atmosphere although the difference was not far, the students did not like online learning more. on the other hand, the other students enjoy learning english remotely. the students found it very interesting even though it needed adjustment. for example, students could search for english language materials via the internet. the involvement of teachers is very important in terms of practice. research also revealed that the weakness of online learning is due to technical problems and lack of physical interaction (hazaymeh, 2021). “pelajaran bahasa inggris merupakan pelajaran yang membutuhkan praktek agar cepat terbiasa bisa melalui pelajaran daring maupun luring.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 6). “english lessons require practice to get used to them quickly through online and offline lessons.” [free translation] (interviews with students in group 6). “menurut saya pembelajaran daring bahasa inggris sangat membantu saya. tentang materimateri yang susah saya pahami dan cara belajarnya sangat dan mudah dipahami.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 8). “i think learning english online is very helpful for me. it is about the difficult materials for me to understand, and the way of learning is very easy to understand.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 8). adjustment online learning could start with schools, parents, friends, teachers, and most importantly, support from students themselves. this support encourages every student (azmiyyah & lianawati, 2021). even in an online learning situation, students could carry it out well with their creativity. in addition, students could also take advantage of various media as the learning process. “menurut saya, kelebihan pembelajaran daring bahasa inggris yaitu kita lebih leluasa dalam mempelajari bahasa inggris. seperti ketika tidak tahu arti sebuah kata, kita dapat mencarinya. lalu, kita juga dapat melatih dengan berbicara di internet entah dengan teman atau anonim menggunakan bahasa inggris.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 4). “in my opinion, the advantage of learning english online is that we are more flexible in learning english. when we do not know the meaning of a word, we can look it up. then, we could also train by talking on the internet either with friends or anonymously using english.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 4). “kelebihannya hanya waktu yang fleksibel videovideo dari pelajaran bahasa inggris sangat banyak, selain itu kita bisa melihat materi bahasa inggris dari berbagai sumber semisal google sebagai referensi materi.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 5). “the advantage is that the time is flexible. there are lots of videos from english lessons. besides that, we could see english material from various sources such as google as reference material.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 5). “waktu mengerjakan tugas lebih panjang, bisa menambah pengalaman saya tentang belajar bahasa inggris. selain itu kita bisa menerjemahkannya ke dalam bahasa indonesia serta waktu mengerjakannya lebih panjang.” (wawancara siswa kelompok 7). “the time i do the task is longer, which could add to my experience of learning english. in addition, we could translate it into the indonesian language, and the time to do that task is longer.” [free translation] (interview with a student in group 7). online learning should make it easier for participants to learn. much knowledge is available from various media and is easy to reach. although this method of learning english online is still considered new by students, students should be able to make more use of the existing media. in the current technological era, students are very familiar with using existing technology, which means that a lot of information could be obtained by students, one of which is english material. that way, with online learning, more independent learning appears to students. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 745 the challenges of independent learning in english online class the changes in learning patterns that occur quickly and last for a long time in students greatly affect the learning achievement obtained. this change is not only due to the technique of giving different material, but students and educators are also required to master the learning media used. in the synthesis of learning independence, there were dimensions of learning management, responsibility, and the use of various learning resources. students must take advantage of these dimensions to optimize independent learning. first, students must manage the time and place in carrying out learning activities. it could be started from reading, making summaries/notes, or listening to various materials from electronic devices, e.g., audio, smartphones, etc. (khoiriyah, waris, & juhansar, 2019). this method could help students to succeed in the learning process. second, students must be responsible for their learning activities. starting from the difficulties faced and each student’s ability, they have to prepare for it. this method is obtained through high learning motivation. in the difficulties faced, students could overcome them by practicing doing various questions regularly and correcting their learning errors. third, students must be able to take advantage of various learning resources obtained, such as books, magazines, internet learning modules, or it could be by using a learning tutorial. these three dimensions were already owned by the students where the students persistently tried to overcome the difficulties encountered in the online learning process. students can be responsible for completing the learning that the school has required. in addition, students who are not left behind on technological sophistication can use it in completing learning. independent learning students could control personal awareness. they can build motivation and competence and the skills to be achieved. students who can learn independently can control themselves, have high learning motivation, and are confident that they have a broad and flexible orientation or insight (rochmawati, fatmawati, sukma, & sonhaji 2021). regarding the facilities that need to be prepared to facilitate learning english from both teachers and students, it was the school’s responsibility or related government agencies (chung & choi, 2021). the school has at least prepared internet facilities, english learning modules/books, face-to-face media (zoom or other conference media), and learning motivation for students. seeing the responses of madrasah aliyah students, it turned out that they could enjoy learning english even though it was online learning. even with some difficulties students face, such as the internet and materials that were not ready, madrasah aliyah students could adapt. furthermore, it is left to the school and interesting methods from the teacher concerned to make learning more effective. to develop student learning independence, the teacher should create a conducive learning atmosphere and avoid anything that would interfere with student learning, encourage students to understand the correct methods and procedures in completing a task, help students manage time, foster self-confidence in students that they can do assignments given, encourage students to control their emotions and should not be panic easily when completing assignments or facing difficulties, as well as showing the progress that students have achieved (ezra, cohen, bronshtein, gabbay, & baruth, 2021). then, teachers must carry out online learning management (sanoto, 2021) well; thus, students can meet the planned learning success indicators. teachers need to be competent in carrying out learning management according to current needs from planning, implementation, and learning evaluations (mashuri & hasanah, 2021). conclusion the students of man 1 model manado in the implementation of english independent online learning use the materials provided by the english teacher. in addition, to facilitate learning-teaching process, students commonly use media such as youtube to enrich their understanding related the material discussed. students consider that independent learning-teaching in online english class during covid-19 pandemic is ineffective especially for students who are living in remote area. even though the learning teaching process is supported by the use of latest technology, students who are coming from isolated area find it difficult learn because of the unstable network connection and the limited data credits. references åkerblad, l., seppänen-järvelä, r., & haapakoski, k. 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(2021). teacher’s illocutionary acts in online learning interactions. jurnal pendidikan dan pengajaran, 54(1), 28-37. http://dx.doi.org/10.23887/jpp.v54i1. andi mukarramah nagauleng & ahmad mustamir waris independent learning in english online class during covid-19 pandemic: students perceptions and its challenges 748 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 565 the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text iskandar rosyidin politeknik negeri sriwijaya palembang email: iskandarrosyidin_7317157770@mhs.unj.ac.id nurrudin department of applied linguistics, universitas negeri jakarta email: nuruddin.unj@unj.ac.id ratna dewanti department of applied linguistics, universitas negeri jakarta email: rdewanti@unj.ac.id apa citation: rosyidin, i., nurrudin., & dewanti, r. (2022). the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 565-578. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6259. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction the objective of reading is related to reading comprehension. comprehension is related to knowledge gained after reading in order that readers are able to relate new things after reading the problems. this research is aimed at finding out the differences in students’ comprehension of english reading text using the pbl and the tbl models. this research recommends the revision of taxonomy bloom as a way of determining the standard of level in comprehension. they are remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating which the first three levels refer to low critical thinking and the other three belong to high critical thinking. it means that when we are teaching reading, it is recommended to have any strategies or models which are appropriate to use in order to gain better or maximum achievement. supriyadi, mayuni, & lustyantie (2019) in their paper found that the language learning model gives positive effects on the students’ comprehension. there have been so many strategies or models offered and applied but so far experiments are always done to fit what reading comprehension with what model is best to use. one of them is by singh (2019) who wanted to find the effectiveness of implementing a metacognitive strategy training approach in second language reading instruction to a japanese female participant. the result was that there was a significant improvement in scores of reading comprehension so he concluded that abstract: this research entitles the effect of problem-based learning model (pbl) on the students’ comprehension of the english reading text. it is aimed at finding out the differences in students’ comprehension of english reading text using the pbl and the tbl models. the methodology used was an experimental method in which there were two groups available. the first group was an experimental group that was treated using the pbl model and the second group was a control group that was treated using the tbl model. the learning models were applied to find out the one which had the greatest effect on the students’ achievement in english reading comprehension. since the subject delivered was reading iv, the sampling technique used was purposive sampling, the sample chosen was students of semester iv, english department of state polytechnics of sriwijaya. based on the result of two-way analysis of variance or anova ab on the level of significance of α = 0,05, it is found that fhitung = 4,555 dan ftabel (0,05;1:40) = 4,08. based on the value of significance on the table of tests of between-subjects effects on line a that if it is less than 0.05, the result of the test is significant. in the table of 4.12, the sig value for line a was 0.039, less than 0.05. then it is concluded that students treated using the pbl model were far higher in english reading text comprehension compared to those who were treated using the tbl model. keywords: students’ comprehension; english reading texts; pbl model; tbl model. iskandar rosyidin, nurrudin, & ratna dewanti the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text 566 comprehension in reading can be gained through a metacognitive strategy training approach. macadangdang (2019) then recommended in the finding of her research that problem-solving (as one of the characteristics of a problem-based model) was successful in increasing students’ skills of identifying important details, writing summary, analyzing and making interpretation on the text. it indicates that the students’ reading comprehension was higly developed. pbl recommends some skills: 1. critical thinking, 2. the wise use of appropriate learning reseources, 3. small group work collaboration, 4. demonstration of communication skill verbally and in written, 5. use of knowledge and intellectual capability. then, arends (2012) acknowledged that pbl leads students to do problem solving, use high critical thinking and develop self confidence. for that, aliyu, fung, rashid, & nimehchisalem (2020) described in their findings that pbl was successfully led the students to critisely locate the opinions based on the discussion topic through the group interactions. arjuna & jufri (2016), any way, made research about the teaching of reading comprehension using pbl model. they wanted to increase the students’ skill in reading comprehension using pbl. their research fostered the same steps in pbl model with the current researcher but they did not compare it with the other model. single model they used recommended that pbl was effective for teaching reading comprehension. any way, they did not try to prove if pbl is more suggested to use compared to the other model. the researcher of this research tries to prove the more effective model to use in teaching reading comprehension between pbl and tbl. tbl has a purpose to strengthen the language acquisition to communicate, do some activities with the activity as the focus. in terms of characteristics, willis in rudd (2019) said that the concept of english language teaching using tblt could promote the use of language in students’ interaction and active participation. tbl negates language meaning and communication competency (chen, 2018). some researchers, through their researches, also recommend tbl as the model in teaching reading comprehension. one of them is the research done by gavel (2021). he used task-based in her research and teaching university students in the combination of using authentic materials in uzbekistan. it was proved that the activities made the students active and increased their critical thinking abilities. the class of reading comprehension became more effective. ahmed & lenchuk (2020), then, study to prove that tbl was effective to teach efl by using action research as the methodology. after some discussions and observasions, it was found that it was effective to increase students’ motivation and interest to actively involved in the teaching and learning process. critical thinking has a very strong influence to reading comprehension. fernando & bandara, (2020) recommended that in reviewing the literature of researches, critical thinking can be best promoted through the process of reading. then ardhian, ummah, anafiah, & rachmadtullah (2020) then stated that learning and understanding the very detail problem in a text needed reading comprehension. it shows that critical thinking skill like deductive and inductive reasonings, analysis, evaluation, and inference closely relate to skills needed in reading process. further, facione (2020) mentioned the 6 characteristics of critical thinking. they are interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulated. in the form of the research, fatmawati, zubaidah, mahanal, & sutopo (2019) concluded in their article that critical thinking skills contributed much in learning outcomes that the teaching was very successful. in this research, any way, the researcher tries to search whether or not the two models have any interaction to each other with critical thinking. consequently, this research tries to answer the research questions or hypothesis as follow: (1) english reading text comprehension of students treated with pbl is higher than those who were treated using tbl. (2) there are some interactions among pbl, tbl, critical thinking towards the comprehension of english reading text. (3) in the class of student with high critical thinking, the students’ comprehension of english reading text of pbl students is higher than those who were treated using tbl. (4) in the class of student with low critical thinking, the students’ comprehension of english reading text of pbl students is lower than those who were treated using tbl. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 567 there have been many researches dealing with the similar one done by the researcher. the followings are the state of the arts that could be presented. in the context of the tbl in asia schools, ji (2017) applied the model started elementary scools until universities. the variety of languages used and the big numbers of participants in each class (about 50 students) became problems along the application process of tbl model. the management improvement made tbl model contributed much in the great success of the application. it was concluded that tbl model was very effectively used in all levels in asia. in terms of tbl model done by the researher, the tbl model is purposely used in teaching reading comprehension and measured to test how effective it is compared to pbl model. in his study, lin (2017) proposed to examine the effect of pbl on the students who studied english reading comprehension through web-based english and their perceptions of pbl. the experiment was done to class using pbl strategy and to class using traditional strategy. students in the pbl class was directed by the problem and surveyed the internet to identify solutions. then, students in the traditional class were taught using the teacher lecture method. preand posttests, an instructional questionnaire, and self-reports were assigned to students in the two classes. the results showed that the pbl class was much more effective than the traditional class since the students in that class got much better mean scores than the the traditional one in english reading comprehension. besides, the questionnaire results showed that pbl helped students increase their active learning and synthesized their cognitive processing. it was concluded that pbl strategy for reading comprehension through web-based english was more effective than the traditional strategy. in researher’s study, the experiment compared the effectiveness of pbl and tbl, not the traditional strategy. adiantika & purnomo (2018) wanted to know whether tbl was effective and applicable in the subject of speaking in senior high school in kuningan. questionnaires and interviews were carried out in this qualitative study and there were several results found. 1. tbl provided some advantages for making students active in the process of teaching and learning and 2. tbl was successfully developing students’ abilities. on the other hand, there were also some difficulties using the tbl model when there were differences in time allocation, teachers’ and students’ proficiency at the english level. the difference with the researcer’s issue, the research also discusses pbl model to prove which one is more effective to use in reading comprehension lesson. aker, herrera, & daniel (2018) believed that problem-based learning and service leaning (pbsl) should be combined to provide instructional strategies to guide els to academic success in order to activate the skills identified by the partnership for 21st century skills. reflecting a studentcentered approach, we incorporate practice into the research process by illustrating a successful integration of pbsl into an esol learning environment in higher education and then highlight additional curricular opportunities for synthesizing pbsl at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. aker, in his research, promoted problembased and service learning to develop students’ skills in efl but did not clarify the certain subject skill to improve like listening, reading, speaking, or writing. azis (2018) specifically applied the tbl model at the high school level for speaking subjects using a quasi-experimental method. after comparing the results of the pre-test and post-test, it was found that the experimental group using tbl achieved better results than the traditional model. students are more confident and can speak english m ore clearly in public. this meant that tbl model is more effective. compared to the researcher’s discussion the tbl is not compared to traditional model, but pbl one. besides, contrary to the researher who uses reading subject in his experiment, azis did the experiment in speaking subject. the next research was done by hartman, renguette, & seig (2018), they tried to develop a program they called teacher-mentor by using pbl in their research in order to educate teachers to use pbl effectively in the classroom and to help teachers improve their own knowledge of pbl in united states classroom context. in their program, they used pbl to help teachers learn more about literacy and pbl. literacy learning for all students improves in classroom settings that take a cooperative, student-centered approach and they belived that pbl makes students involved in active learning and leads students do multiple learning styles through a variety of collaborative tasks. the iskandar rosyidin, nurrudin, & ratna dewanti the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text 568 results showed that pbl has become an effective method in terms of students’ self-directed problem solvers. pbl also showed that the teacher could apply reflections, discussions, presentations, and self-evaluations in their classrooms while enhancing students’ collaboration. different from the issue fostered by this researcher to concentrate to the improvement of students’ capability in reading comprehension, hartman focused to improve teachers’ competences in using pbl for their students. the next research was done by amini, mahmoudi largani, & hedayat (2019). she found that tbl model was suitable to be applied in the middle schools and colleges. this survey research by distributing questionnaires to 117 high schools and colleges recommended that all teachers support the tbl model to be used since the results of the learning process were very satisfying. different from the researcher who uses experimental method, amini, any way, used survey method in the research. fatmawati et al. (2019), in her study tried to find the correlation between critical and creative thinking skills, critical thinking skills and learning achievement, creative thinking skills and learning achievement, and critical thinking, creative thinking, and learning achievement. the sample was 30 fourth-semester students from the department of biology education of ikip mataram, indonesia. the instrument used were 19 essay questions on photosynthesis and the critical thinking instrument which was composed of five aspects. the result showed that there were correlations among (1) critical and creative thinking skills; (2) critical thinking skills and learning achievement; (3) creative thinking skills and learning achievement; (4) creative thinking, critical thinking, and learning achievement. since critical and creative thinking skills affect learning achievement, the empowerment of these skills may lead to the enhancement of learning achievement. syahfutra & niah (2019) did the research entitled “improving students’ reading comprehension by using problem-based learning strategy”. the experiment was conducted at sekolah menengah pertama darma yudha and it proved that pbl provides strategies for expressing ideas in real-life contexts. this model enhances critical thinking and problem-solving skills. it also develops flexible knowledge, effective collaboration skills and life-wide learning. pbl also helps students improve their reading comprehension and motivation. any way, they did not prove that this model gave more contribution in student’s improvement in reading comprehension compared to the other model like tbl. then, supriyadi et al. (2019) carried out a research entitled "the effects of learning model and cognitive style on students' english listening skills". the purpose of this study was to determine whether there was an effect of the learning model and cognitive style on students' english listening skills. after going through an experimental study using two-way anova, it was found that students who were taught using the integrative learning model had better results than students who were taught using the experiential learning model. this study also proves that there is an interaction effect between learning models and cognitive styles with students' listening abilities. supriyadi’s research also employs learning model but not tbl and pbl. he, then, did the experiment in listening subjecct, not in reading comprehension. the next research is entitled “improving the critical thinking skills of secondary school students using problem-based learning” by lapuz & fulgencio (2020). this study wants to ensure that the use of pbl can improve the critical thinking skills of economic high school students. this research is the experiment research using purposive sampling, namely 27 students from high school in zambales, the philippines in the 20172018 school year. the results prove that there are significant differences in test scores before and after treatment. in conclusion, pbl is effective in improving students' critical thinking skills based on the results of the analysis of the mean, standard deviation and t-test. lapuz’s experimental research did the analysis using t-test, not anova and did not classify in low and high levels of critical thinking. then, hasyim (2021), explored reading proficiency for prospective arabic teachers or practitioners beside core competencies from the field of study they are studying. this study aimed at examining the effectiveness of the implementation of a student-centred learning method in the form of a problem-based learning method with seven-jumps (seven-steps) approach in increasing the reading proficiency in arabic. there were 50 people of muthala’ah mukatsafah class as sample of the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 569 research. the data analysis was performed through a significance test before and after treatment. the results show that there were differences in the subjects’ advanced reading proficiency level as well as an increase in empathy soft skill before and after the implementation of the learning method. the research done by hasyim was in arabic but the researcher in this experiment uses english with the application of pbl and tbl. the next research done by magaji (2021). the research question to be answered was what skills can science teachers promote and encourage among students through designing and implementing problem-based learning in their classrooms? the instrument used in his research were lesson observations, interviews, and focus groups. there were 52 students of second year of secondary education, aged 13 years old in england as sample of the research who used a theoretical framework of the 3c3r model (3ccontent, context, and connection, and 3rresearching, reasoning, and reflecting) in problem-based learning (pbl). the result of the study showed that the application of prior knowledge, collaborative learning, modeling and eliciting feedback were the skills promoted by pbl especially problem solving. besides, collaborative learning was also dominant. magaji did the research by using single model in secondary school. that was pbl. on the contrary, the researcher in this research paper uses pbl and tbl in college, ulla & perales (2021) conducted experimental research with tbl using group work to improve speaking skills in english. the experiment was conducted on 106 early-year thai university students. the subject taught is speaking with the work group method using task-based for 12 weeks. using additional data through surveys, questionnaires, and speaking performance scores in the classroom, it was found that although this group work method was new to students, they gave a good attitude. the students believe that the performance of assignments in class and activities in groups can improve and develop their english skills when they work collaboratively with classmates. this tbl experiment was done in speaking subject, not reading comprehension and it was not compared to pbl in order to find the more effective model between them. nasim, ghani, kausar, & khatoon (2022) tried to know effectiveness of pbl in developing knowledge of under graduate nursing students. they, then, conducted a pretest–posttest experimental design among b.sc. nursing students of saida waheed fmh college of nursing lahore. to determine the sample of the experiment, they used random sampling in lottery method and put them in experimental and control groups on the topic of diabetes mellitus. data were collected using mcqs-based questionnaire during pre-testpost-test processes. after doing the analysis of the data, it was concluded that pbl method has significantly improved more knowledge of the students of experimental group than the control group using traditional method. pbl is more effective teaching method in developing knowledge of nursing students than the traditional one. contrary to the research done by nasim and friends, the research done in this dissertation use pbl for experimental group and tbl for control group to the develop students’ reading comprehension. the above articles describe how pbl and tbl separately effective in students’ competency in english (not only in reading comprehension). the gap shown was determining the best model to be used in teaching reading comprehension. therefore, the novelty of this research paper is experimentally proof the effectiveness between pbl and tbl in teaching reading comprehension and shows which model is more affective to use than other (pbl or tbl). besides, this research proposes to see whether or not there is an interaction between the model used and critical thinking on the increase of students’ reading comprehension. method this is an experimental study in english department of politeknik negeri sriwijaya palembang, indonesia and designed as treatment by level 2x 2. this study applied two sample groups, experiment and control. the experimental group used the strategy or model of problem-based learning (pbl). on the other side, the control group used task-based learning (tbl). this research took 44 samples from the total of 83 students. they were taken from all fourth semester students of english department. since the requirement to follow this subject is passing reading iii, the sample technique chosen is purpossive sampling. it is the design that the researcher provides to get the best information for the purpose of his study (etikan & bala, 2017). iskandar rosyidin, nurrudin, & ratna dewanti the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text 570 the next step was determining two classes into experimental and control groups. the two groups were then divided into: (1) experimental group consisted of 11 high critical students. (2) experimental group consisted of 11 low critical students. (3) control group consisted of 11 high critical students. (4) control group consisted of 11 low critical students. before doing the experiment to the two groups, the researcher, as the first phase, conducted pre-test in order to know the initial ability of the object of research in comprehending the english reading text. this pre-test also helped the researcher in considering putting the students in their category of critical thinking in each group both in experimental and control groups. then, he continued writing syllabus, peparing the models for the two groups, preparing learning materials and the facilities needed. at the the second phase, the researcher conducted 8 weeks experiment and applied the strategies or models of learning. they were problem-based learning model (pbl) to experimental group and task-based learning model (tbl) to the control group. the researcher firstly used readability test to make sure that the level of difficulty was suitable for the students. the researcher used flesch formula accessed in (no title, n.d.) http://www.readabilityformulas.com/flesch-readingease-readability-formula.php. the best reading score lays between 60-70 since it is acceptable and understandable. the following range presents the complete description about the readibility score based on flesch: (1) 90-100: very easy, (2) 80-89 : easy, (3) 70-79,: fairly easy, (5) 60-69: standard, (6) 50-59 : fairly difficult, (7) 30-49 : difficult, (8) 0-29: very confusing. post-test was given after the treatment to visibly show the result of students’ comprehension after learning using the given models. besides, the researcher used content validity to measure the validity of the instrument and used the formula of hoyt to determine the level of the reliability of reading instrument in english as follows: note: r = reliabality of appropriateness of observer/rater rjkb = variance of the respondence rjke = rest of variants the 30 questions multiple couice test become the instrument of the test. the questions given reflected the six elements of critical thinking: interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation suggested by facione (2011). besides, the questions were constructed based on level of difficulty in taxonomy bloom’s revision suggested by anderson dan krathwohl. they are remember (c1). understand (c2). apply(c3), analyze (c4), evaluate (c5), and create (c6). besides, the theoritical validity test involved 5 experts to judge. it showed that the theorotical validity was applicable. then, this research measured instrument reliabily by using the formula of k kr-20: note: = coeficient reliability kr-20 n = sum of poin = variance of respondent’s score = proportion 1 for each poin the data analysis is as follow: (1) conducting normality test using liliefors test. (1) conducting homogenity test to population using f test and bartlett test for the significance of a = 0,05. (2) conducting data analysis using two-way analysis of variance or anava on the level of significance of a = 0,05. (3) conducting the analysis of tuckey test. results and discussion results data description the data of this study were grouped into eight groups of data, namely: (1) students 'english reading comprehension scores were given the pbl model strategy (a1), (2) students' english reading comprehension scores were given tbl model strategies (a2), (3) students' english reading comprehension scores with high critical thinking skills (b1), (4) students' english reading comprehension scores with low critical thinking skills (b2), (5) students' english reading b eb rjk rjkrjk  r english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 571 comprehension scores given learning strategies pbl model with high critical thinking skills (a1b1) ), (6) students 'english reading comprehension scores who were given tbl model learning strategies with high critical thinking skills (a2b1), (7) students' english reading comprehension scores who were given pbl model strategies with low critical thinking skills (a1b2), (8) ) scores of students' english reading comprehension who are given tbl model strategies with low thinking skills (a2b2). complete descriptions of the eight groups of research data are as follows: english reading comprehension scores of students given the pbl model (a1) based on the data collected from 22 students as respondents, it was known that the scores of students' reading comprehension in english who were given the pbl model got the highest score of 46; lowest score of 22; an average score of 33.82; median value 35.0; mode value 26; variance 43.11; standard deviation 6,57. english reading comprehension scores of students given tbl model learning (a2) based on the data collected from 22 students as respondents, it was known that the scores of students' reading comprehension in english who were given the tbl model had the highest score of 40; lowest score of 22; average score of 31.27; median value of 30.5; mode value of 29; variance of 22.68; standard deviation of 4.76. english reading comprehension scores of students with high critical thinking ability (b1) based on the data collected from respondents as many as 22 students, it was known that the students' english reading comprehension score with the highest critical thinking ability score was 46; the lowest score was 22; the average score was 34.05; median value was 35.0; mode value was 37; variance was 42.81; standard deviation ofwas 6.54. english reading comprehension scores of students with low critical thinking ability (b2) based on the data collected from 22 students as respondents, it is known that the scores of students' english reading comprehension with low critical thinking skills get the highest score of 40; the lowest score of 22; average score of 31.05; median value of 30.0; mode value of 29; variance of 21.66; standard deviation of 4.65. students' english reading comprehension score given pbl model with high critical thinking ability (a1b1) based on the data collected from 11 students as respondents, it is known that the a1b1 score has the highest score of 46; lowest score of 35; an average score of 39.18; median value of 38; mode value of 35; variance of 11.96; standard deviation of 3.46. english reading comprehension scores of students given a tbl model with high critical thinking ability (a2b1) based on the data collected from 11 students as respondents, it was known that the a2b1 score got the highest score of 37; lowest score of 22; an average score of 28.91; median value of 29; mode value of 26; variance of 19.89; standard deviation of 4.46. english reading comprehension score students given learning strategy pbl model with low critical thinking ability (a1b2) based on the data collected from 11 students as respondents, it was known that the a1b2 score was the highest score of 36; the lowest score of 22; an average score of 28.45; median value of 28; mode value of 26; variance of 15.27; standard deviation of 3.91. english reading comprehension scores of students given tbl model with low critical thinking ability (a2b2) based on data collected from 11 students as respondents, it was known that the a2b2 score had the highest score of 40; the lowest score of 29; an average score of 33.64; median value of 35; mode value of 29; variance of 15.45; standard deviation of 3.93. testing requirements analysis the data analysis requirements to be tested in this study were the normality test and the homogeneity test. normality test the normality test was carried out to know whether or not the sample came from the population of 44 iskandar rosyidin, nurrudin, & ratna dewanti the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text 572 students must be normally distributed. the normality test carried out in group a1: students' english reading comprehension scores which were given the pbl model, group a2: students' english reading comprehension scores which were given tbl model, group b1: students' english reading comprehension scores with high critical thinking, group b2 : students' english reading comprehension scores with low critical thinking, group a1b1: students' english reading comprehension scores who were given pbl model with high critical thinking, group a2b1: students' english reading comprehension scores were given tbl model with high critical thinking, group a1b2: students 'english reading comprehension scores were given the pbl model with low critical thinking, and group a2b2: students' english reading comprehension scores were with the ability of low critical thinking whether it came from a population whose distribution was normal. group a1 normality test the normality test criterion was that the sample scores of students' english reading comprehension who are given the pbl model came from a population with a normal distribution if lcount <ltable. the largest lcount value was 0.0863, ltable for n = 22 with a significant level of 0.05 is 0.183. thus, it could be concluded that the a1 data is normally distributed. group a2 normality test the sample scores of students' english reading comprehension as the criterion used in the normality test who were given a tbl model came from a population that is normally distributed if tcount <ltable. the largest lcount value was 0.1064, ltabel forn = 22 with a significant level of 0.05 is 0.183. thus, it could be concluded that the a2 data wass normally distributed. group b1 normality test the criterion which was used in the normality test was the sample of students' english reading comprehension scores with high critical thinking omes from a population that was normally distributed if tcount <ltable. the largest lcount value was 0.0869, the ltable for n = 22 with a significant level of 0.05 was 0.183. thus, it could be concluded that the b1 data is normally distributed. group b2 normality test the normality test criterion used was the sample of students' english reading comprehension scores with low critical thinking cames from a population that was normally distributed if the count <ltabel. the largest lcount value is 0.1321, ltable for n = 22 with a significant level of 0.05 is 0.183. thus, it could be concluded that b2 data was normally distributed. group a1b1 normality test the normality test used the sample of students' english reading comprehension scores who were given a pbl model with high critical thinking, came from a normally distributed population if lcount <ltabel. the largest lcount value was 0.1781, l tablen for n = 11 with a significant level of 0.05 is 0.249. thus, it could be concluded that the a1b1 data was normally distributed. group a2b1 normality test the basis used in the normality test was the sample of students' english reading comprehension scores who were given a tbl model with high critical thinking, came from a population that was normally distributed if tcount <ltabel. the largest lhitung value is 0.1214, ltabel forn = 11 with a significant level of 0.05 is 0.249. thus, it could be concluded that the a2b1 data was normally distributed. score normality test for group a1b2 the criterion used in the normality test is that the sample of students' english reading comprehension scores who were given the pbl model with low critical thinking, came from a normally distributed population if lcount <ltabel. the largest lcount value was 0.0997, ltabel for n = 11 with a significant level of 0.05 was 0.249. thus, it could be concluded that the a1b2 data was normally distributed. normality test for group a2b2 the normality test of the sample scores of students' english reading. comprehension who were given the tbl model with low critical thinking came from a normally distributed population if lcount < ltabel. the largest lhitung value s 0.1852, ltabel for n = 10 with a significant level of 0.05 is 0.249. thus, it could be concluded that the a2b2 data was normally distributed. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 573 the recapitulation of the calculation results of the data normality test is shown in the following table: table 3. summary of normality test results group lcount ltable status a1 0,0863 0,183 normal a2 0,1064 0,183 normal b1 0,0869 0,183 normal b2 0,1321 0,183 normal a1b1 0,1781 0,249 normal a2b1 0,1214 0,249 normal a1b2 0,0997 0,249 normal a2b2 0,1852 0,249 normal homogeneity test in addition to the normality test, one of the requirements that needed to be done before testing the research hypothesis was the homogeneity test. the homogeneity test for the treatment group (a) used the f test. while the test for 4 cell groups in the experimental design used the bartlett test at the level of α = 0.05. the homogeneity test was carried out to determine whether the data variance was homogeneous or not. homogeneity test of variance for group a1 and group a2 hypothesis tested: h0 : σ 2 a1 = σ 2 a2 h1 : not h0 based on the results of the calculation, it was found that fcount = 1.98 was smaller than ftable (0.05; 21: 21) = 2.08, so h0 was accepted. this means that the learning model of the two treatment groups had the same variance (homogeneous). homogeneity test of variance for groups a1b1, a1b2, a2b1, and a2b2 hypothesis tested: h0 : σ 2 a1b1 = σ 2 a1b2 = σ 2 a2b1 = σ 2 a2b2 h1 : not h0 2countthe test criterion was to accept h0 if < 2 table in the real level α = 0.05. 2count (0.65) 2table for the significance level (α) = 0.05 with the number of groups 4 1 = 3 was 7.82, which means that 2count = 0.65 while 2 based on the calculation, the value of < 2table (0.05; 3) (7,82) means that the meanings of the four groups are homogeneous. table 4. summary of homogeneity test results group variance variance 2count  2 table summary combination a1b1 11,96 15,65 0,65 7,82 homogen a2b1 19,89 a1b2 15,27 a2b2 15,45 note: a1b1 = students' english reading comprehension score given the pbl model with high critical thinking a2b1 = student's english reading comprehension score given the tbl model with high critical thinking a1b2 = students' english reading comprehension score given the pbl model with low critical thinking a2b2 = students' english reading comprehension score given the pbt model with low critical thinking 2count = price of calculated chi square 2table = price of chi squared table hypothesis testing hypothesis testing in this study was carried out using two-way analysis of variance and continued with the tukey test, if there was an interaction in the test. two-way analysis of variance was used to examine the main effect and interaction effect between learning strategies and critical thinking skills on students' english reading comprehension scores. by using the two-way analysis of variance or anova table, the results were shown in table 5 below. table 5. spss results for two-way analysis of variance tests of between-subjects effects dependent variable: english reading comprehension source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. correcte d model 827,091(a) 3 275,697 17,622 ,000 intercept 46605,091 1 46605,091 2978,8 26 ,000 a 71,273 1 71,273 4,555 ,039 b 99,000 1 99,000 6,328 ,016 a * b 656,818 1 656,818 41,981 ,000 error 625,818 40 15,645 total 48058,000 44 correcte d total 1452,909 43 iskandar rosyidin, nurrudin, & ratna dewanti the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text 574 a r squared = ,569 (adjusted r squared = ,537) based on the results of the two-way analysis of variance (anova) above, it can be explained: differences in students' english reading comprehension between groups of students given learning strategies of pbl model and groups of students given learning strategies of tbl model based on the results of the analysis of the variance of the two lines between a lines at a significant level of α = 0.05, it was obtained that fcount = 4.555 and ftable (0.05; 1: 40) = 4.08 the summary could be seen in table 4:12 and the calculations could be seen in the appendix. based on the sig. in the tests of between-subjects effects table for the a row if it was less than 0.05 then the test result is significant or h0 was rejected. in table 4.12, it could be seen that the sig. for row a was 0.039; less than 0.05, then h0 was rejected so that h1 was accepted. it could be concluded that there wass a significant difference in students' english reading comprehension between the group given the pbl model and the group given the tbl model. in other words, the pbl model (ῡa1 = 33.82) was higher than the tbl model (ῡa2 = 31.27). this means that the research hypothesis which stated that students 'english reading comprehension given the pbl model was higher than students' english reading comprehension given the tbl model could be accepted. the interaction between learning strategies and critical thinking ability against students' english reading comprehension scores based on the results of the two-way variance analysis on the interaction between learning models and critical thinking on students' english reading comprehension scores, it could be seen in the twoway anova calculation table above, that the value of the interaction fcount = 41.981 and ftable (0.05; 1: 40) = 4.08. based on the sig. in the tests of between-subjects effects table for rows a * b, provided that if it was less than 0.05 then the test result was significant or h0 was rejected. in table 4.12, it could be seen that the sig. for row a * b was 0.000; less than 0.05, then h0 was rejected so that h1 was accepted. the conclusion was that there was an interaction between learning strategies and critical thinking on students' english reading comprehension. by testing this interaction, further testing was necessary. the follow-up test was intended to find out about: (1) the differences in the scores of students' reading comprehension in english who were given the pbl model and those who were given the tbl model for student groups with high critical thinking (a1b1 and a2b1); and (2) differences in the scores of students' english reading comprehension who were given the pblmodel learning strategy and those who were given the pbt model for students with low critical thinking (a1b2 and a2b2). table 6 below. the calculations could be seen in the appendix. table 6. summary of the tukey test calculation results no compared group dk qcount qtable status α = 0,05 1 a1b1 with a2b1 4: 11 8,63 4,26 significant 2 a1b2 with a2b2 4: 11 4,35 4,26 significant differences in english reading comprehension of students given the pbl model and students given the tbl model in the group of students with high critical thinking ability students with high critical thinking have an influence on students' english reading comprehension scores with the existence of a model. this is proven based on the results of further tests using the tukey test which results are as follows: table 7. comparison of groups a1b1 with a2b1 no compared group dk qcount qtable status α = 0,05 1 a1b1 with a2b1 4 : 11 8,63 4,26 significant the scores of students 'english reading comprehension who were given the pbl model with high critical thinking (a1b1) were compared with the students' english reading comprehension scores who were given tbl model with high critical thinking skills (a2b1), obtained qcount = 8.63 and qtable (0.05).; 4: 11) = 4.26. thus, qcount is greater than qtable, so h0 was rejected, it could be interpreted that there was a significant difference between students' english reading comprehension scores and high critical thinking between pbl model and tbl model. in other words, students english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 575 who were given the pbl model with high critical thinking (ῡa1b1 = 39.18) were higher than those given the tbl model with high critical thinking (ῡa2b1 = 28.91) on the score of students' english reading comprehension. thus, the research hypothesis which stated that students' english reading comprehension with high critical thinking who were given the pbl model was higher than the tbl model could be accepted. differences in english reading comprehension of students given pbl model and students given tbl model in student groups with low critical thinking ability students with low critical thinking gave some effects to their scores of english reading comprehension. this was because of learning strategy. this was then based on the follow up tukey test with the following result: table 8. comparison of groups a1b2 with a2b2 no groups’ comparison dk qcount qtable note α = 0,05 2 a1b2 with a2b2 4 : 11 4,35 4,26 significant the scores of students' english reading comprehension who were given the pbl model with low critical thinking skills (a1b2) were compared with the english reading comprehension scores of students who were given tbl model with low critical thinking (a2b2), obtained qcount = 4.35 and q table (0, 05; 4: 11) = 4.26. thus, qcount was greater than qtable, so h0 was rejected, it could be interpreted that there was a significant difference between students' english reading comprehension scores and low critical thinking between pbl model learning and tbl model. in other words, students who were given the pbl model with low critical thinking (ῡa1b2 = 28.45) were lower than those given the tbl model with low critical thinking (ῡa2b2 = 33.64) on the students' english reading comprehension score. thus, the research hypothesis which stated that students' english reading comprehension with low critical thinking who were given the pbl model was lower than the tbl model could be accepted. discussion the general objective of this study was to obtain a more complete picture of the effect of learning methods and critical thinking skills on students' english reading comprehension. based on the results of the two-way analysis of variance in line a, it was found that fcount was 4.555 greater than table (0.05; 1: 40) = 4.08 with a probability value (sig.) of 0.039 which was smaller than the significant level (0.05). this shows that the students' english rading comprehension scores can be a significant difference between the pbl model and the tbl model. this difference is indicated by the average score of students 'english reading comprehension given the pbl model of 33.82 and the average score of students' english reading comprehension given the tbl model of 31.27. this means that there are differences in the scores of students' english reading comprehension who are given the pbl model and those who are given the tbl model. this supports dastgeer’s & afzal’s (2015) theory that pbl was more effective than other method for teaching english writing skill to the secondary level students. it means that pbl may also be applicable for teaching reading comprehension. the results of the two-way analysis of variance on the a * b interaction line found that the interaction fcount of 41,981 was greater than ftable (0.05; 1: 40) = 4.08 with a probability value (sig.) of 0.000 smaller than the significant level (0.05). this means that there was a significant interaction effect between learning strategies and critical thinking skills on students' english reading comprehension. because there is a significant interaction effect, it is followed by the tukey test for the two cells in the experimental design. this result supports lismayani, parno, & mahanal (2017) who said in their findings that there is a relationship between students critical thinking skill and problem-solving ability. that shows that there is an interaction between critical thinking and models of learning. the results of the tukey test on students 'english reading comprehension scores with high critical thinking skills obtained a value of qcount = 8.63 greater than qtable (0.05; 4: 11) = 4.26. this means that there was a difference in the scores of students' english reading comprehension who are given learning strategies pbl model and given the tbl model for student groups with high critical thinking. thus, it could be concluded that the average score of students' english reading comprehension with high critical thinking, in the group of students who were given the pbl model of 39.18 was higher than iskandar rosyidin, nurrudin, & ratna dewanti the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text 576 the group of students who were given the tbl model learning strategy of 28.91. this result is in line with awang & raml stated in sada, mohd, adnan, & yusri (2016) that pbl enables students to use and develop a high thinking skill. the results of the tuke test on students' english reading comprehension scores with low critical thinking obtained the value of qcount = 4.35 greater than qtable (0.05; 4: 11) = 4.26. this means that there were differences in english reading comprehension scores of students who are given the pbl model and those who are given the tbl model for student groups with low critical thinking. thus, it could be concluded that the average score of students' english reading comprehension with low critical thinking, in the group of students who were given the pbl model of 28.45 was lower than the group of students who were given the tbl model of 33.64. this result is in line with awang & ramly stated in sada et al. (2016) that pbl enables students to use and develop a high thinking skill, not a low thinking skill. the lower thinking skill in tbl will transparently becomes dominant in score that makes tbl get better score than other models including pbl. conclusion all the questions raised have been answered through the data analysis made. then the research comes to the conclusions after learning all the results and findings. consequently, h1 is accepted since pbl model gives students’ higher comprehension in english reading text compared to tbl model. concerning with the interaction between the two models (pbl and tbl) and critical thinking against the score of students’ reading comprehension, it was significant that there was interaction between them. this proves that h0 is rejected and h1 is accepted after it was analized by using two-way analysis of variance. besides, students who were given the pbl model with high critical thinking got higher score in english reading comprehension compared to those given the tbl model with high critical thinking. it was proven that h0 is also rejected and h1 is accepted after the tukey test. at last, it is also proven that h0 is also rejected since the students who were given the pbl model with low critical thinking were lower than those given the tbl model with low critical thinking on the students' english reading comprehension score. references adiantika, h., & purnomo, h. 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(2021). employing group work for task performances in a task-based learning classroom: evidence from a university in thailand. 3l: language, linguistics, literature® the southeast asian journal of english language studies, 27(2), 69–100. iskandar rosyidin, nurrudin, & ratna dewanti the effect of problem-based learning model towards students’ comprehension of the english reading text 578 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 223 the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on halliday’s systemic functional linguistic approach magdalena ngongo english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kristen artha wacana, kupang, indonesia e-mail: magdalenangongo12@gmail.com apa citation: ngongo, m. (2021). the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on haliday’s systematic functional linguistic approach. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 223-10. doi: 0.25134/erjee.v10i1.5382. received: 04-08-2021 accepted: 27-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction modality in the text generally means expressing interpersonal meaning that is realized in in mood system. it indicates several implications, such as judgments, request and command. this study concerns to the analysis of modality used in the texts. it is only focused on what types of modality used by the speakers in oral texts, and what interpersonal meaning is revealed through the use of modality in the texts. modality represents the interpersonal meaning since it indicates the speakers’ judgement of the probabilities or the obligations involved in what he or she is saying (gerot & wignell in yang, 2021). other views such as matthews (2005) as cited in rui and jingxia (2018) defines modality as “category covering either a kind of speech act or the degree of certainty with which something is said”. moreover, eggins (2004) in arabzoozani & pahlavannejad (2019) writes that modality is a complex area of an english grammar which investigates how to convey the message of the text, and how human express their attitudes and judgements through different ways. furthermore, halliday and matthiessen (2004) in amalia et al (2018) write that modality as the speaker’s judgement, or request of the judgement of the listener, on the status of what is being said. from the definition above, modality is generally defined as a means of expressing the relationship between a speaker and an utterance, in a stricter sense a speaker and the truth-value of an utterance. as one of the sfl tools, modality also has a system. halliday and matthiessen (2004) in yang (2021) divided it into two terms, they are propositions and proposals which are also known as modalizations and modulations. halliday and matthiessen (2004) in yang (2021) state that modalizations involve the expression of intermediate possibilities; first, degrees of probability (possibly/probably/ certainly), second, degrees of usuality (sometimes, usually, always). eggins (2004) in xuan and huang (2017) defines the terms of probability and usuality as follows the speaker expresses judgements as to the frequency in which something happens. furthermore, eggins (2004) in xuan and huang (2017) argues that modal adjuncts and modal abstract: this paper is aimed to describe modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing girl using waijewa language. modality refers to degrees of indeterminacy. it is to construe the region of uncertainty that lies between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. it refers not only to verb modal but also to modality idea. thus, modality is manifested into two ways, namely modalization and modulation. the use modality grammar enables people to emphasize what can or cannot be done on what is ordered or offered. data informing this study were from observation by recording oral texts of proposing a girl happened in wewewa community. these data then were transcribed and analysed based on systemic functional grammar. the results showed that the use of modality was realized simultaneously by verb such as baka amiko-ngga dede wa kadanu … ‘i will come to take my handbag…’. the use of modality showed varieties of probabilities and obligation. modalization tended to be uttered by bride’s party whereas modulation by groom’s party. this fact indicated interpersonal relationship in which groom’s party took a position as humble as possible in speaking and usually agreed everything stated or asked by bride’s parents. while bride’s party was dominant in speaking. this condition was influenced by honour value as one of the six values in this text. the use of adjunct related to mood adjunct that covered modal adjunct such as probability, usuality, obligation, obviousness, intensity, and polarity; and comment adjunct such as admissive, desiderative, entreaty, evaluative, opinion, predictive, persuasive, and presupposition. keywords: adjunct; modality; girl proposing; text; waijewa magdalena ngongo the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on haliday’s systematic functional linguistic approach 224 operators can also be categorized into three values of certainty or usuality; first, in high: must, certainly, always, etc; second, in median: may, probably, usually, etc and third, low: might, possibly, sometimes, etc. the use of modality indicates as justifying idea as almaida and pastor’s statement (2017: 304) that participant internal and external possibility modality appeared as a useful resource in justifying idea. rahmasari and lawren (2020:118) found that medium and low category dominate the usage of modality in those ten highlights. it is also stated by farshbafiana and esmaeil (2021:782) that what is responsible for the truth and falsity of proposition, and the finite which includes three elements of modality, primary tense and polarity and as the chief constituent of the clause determines the mood of the clause. thus, related to this study, modality in the texts indicates several implications, such as judgments and command as interpersonal meaning. in addition, modality system in the texts can be power of language used by the speakers in the texts. related to this study, spoken text was one of text in which speaker utter varieties of probability and obligation that show the use modality system in texts. therefore, modality in the text generally means expressing interpersonal meaning between the speakers and listeners that indicates the truth value of modality. the use of modality in spoken texts especially in a proposal of a girl in local language were characterized by the context such as modality that were used by groom’s parents/ mediators and bride’s parents/mediators. the research about modality and adjunct in waijewa language did not have many references since not many researchers conduct the research. but, the researcher has found a previous study related to metafunction in a language presented by farshbafian & safaei (2021) in their research entitled a metafunctional approach to word order in persian language. matthiessen (2004)’s metafunctional model was used to describe and analyze word/element order in a simple persian declarative clause. in fact, based on evidence from the persian language, which includes samples from persian texts and works by other persian researchers, we have sought to show how the three experiential, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions are involved in determining the order of the main elements in an active simple declarative clause in persian. there is a "basic" order for the main elements in a persian simple clause and specifically a single-complement clause that is consistent with both experiential and interpersonal metafunctions, according to the findings of this research. based on the background previously described, the problems of the study related to the modality and adjunct used or uttered in spoken text. therefore there were two research questions that were answered, namely: (1) how is modality realized in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language? (2) how is adjunct realized in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language? systemic functional linguistics theory theory of functional systemic linguistics is employed to find out and describe modality system in text and how it realizes experiential metafunction of meaning in text. this theory has centered on the lexico-grammatical study of the three meta-functions of ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning by taking clause as representation, exchange and message (suardana, 2020; hutabarat et al, 2020). sfl, has developed from the work of halliday (1985, 1994, 2004, 2014). the sfl conception of language is a set of resources that enable speakers to exchange meanings. the relation between social context and language is conceived as ‘realization’, that is, social contexts are realized by language. this theory concerns to the function as a fundamental property of language (susanto and watik, 2017; herman, 2014; purba and herman, 2020). language enables human beings to build a mental pictures of reality, to make sense of what goes on around them and inside them (herman et al, 2019; zhao and ou, 2020). in other words, this theory describes how language functions in use and it uses text as its approach to analyze language. as what has been mentioned previously that modality system is included in mood system of lexico grammatical level that realizes experiential meaning (alaei and ahangari, 2016). it represents the interpersonal meaning since it indicates the speakers’ judgement of the probabilities or the obligations involved in what he or she is saying (xiuye and wencheng, 2020). modality system can be studied in the view of modalization ad modulation. (yang, 2021). it is also be studied in the viewed of adjunct. adjunct in text is an element that does not have potential of being subject. other adjunct can be viewed from it is usually realized by adverb or prepositional phrase that are called comment adunct. adjunct gave more and varieties information that were added to clauses. adjunct consisted of adverb group, prepositional phrase, and modal adjunct. therefore, this study covers the discussion of modality and adjunct used in text. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 225 method the method applied in this study was descriptive. the oral data were taken from observation by recording the events of proposing a girl happened in wewewa society in sumba island. these data were transcribed, identified and analysed following analytical procedures techniques that based on functional grammar (systemic functional linguistic), focused on the level of lexicogrammatical in which modality system as one important features realizing interpersonal meaning. it also covered additional information in clauses known as adjunct either mood or comment adjuncts. the results of the analysis is presented by using formal, informal method and combining formal and informal methods. results and discussion modality in text based on the texts analysis, it can be stated that modality in text refers to degrees of indeterminacy. speakers usually uttered their judgement of probability and obligation modality used referred to modal verbs, such as noto-ngge ‘may/might’, budi, wuku ‘’will/would’, takka ‘must’, and marginal modals, such as pongngu ‘had to’. modality used also refered to modality notion that was extended to every verb. relating to verbs, modality was manifested in two ways, namely modalisation and modulation. modalization relates to probability, certainty, or usuality. whereas modulation relates to obligation, permission, or inclination. participant internal and external possibility modality appears as a useful resource in justifying ideas. the following clauses are presented to show the use of modalisation in text. (ii:85) ///pamiyangge ba ndakura wi wawi// kata sabaya///. ///heti toro da ata panewe// kanda pandedaka ndi ne sabayango/// //notongge ka ta liwe bata sadeka ndi ata panewe///(01) table 1. clauses which show the use of modalisation in text noto-ngge may be ka ta we liwe discuss ba that ta we sadekka once ndi ata panewe this people speaker f/modal conj s p conj s ar c mood residue mood residue ‘may be we discussed once about mediators’ awards.’ (i:83) ///wai pona kira //nyaka baka na duada kabullu pakai da// gai ka nda duada kabullu//, na kabullu weitaka wi na kabullu//. ///nyaka na kabullu enga tama na//, nyaka touda kabullu karambo//, ia mane ia bei a kondo ndi/// /…// //ka wa’i kua pongngu ndi hida oma rara//.///mi ya kua pongngu-ngga ndi hida duada bolo oma rara //ne maromba na kana bowo kingge//, ka na manawara ndi hitti tante na// nya palunggu na//. //nyaka ne keto ullu lele na tama//. //nyaka bahina ko hida patekinggu nya ba wi//. (02) table 2. clauses which show the use of modalisation in text mi you ya give kua all pongngu must ngga me ndi hida dua bolo oma rara those two piece gold red s p ar am c c mood residue residue ‘ you must give me all two pieces of gold.’ (iii:51) ///ndapeibana neengge, ba ne palummu pongngungge//, ba na rato olumu// ba nya a nee waina lunggu hinangge// pakole dengngakya we wee maringngi ba oongge// ba indaki ba nyamo teki wi///. ///oo bahina pongngu bangge na maringngingge// mono kana tulu ama mawolo ama marawi lunggu hinangge nati pamama///…./// (03) table 3. clauses which show the use of modalisation in text pakole get dengngado will nda we wee maringngi water cool p modal s c mood residue ‘we will get cool water (blessing).’ all the clauses (01—03) have modalisation, such as notongge ‘may/might be (clause 01), pongngu ‘must’ (clause 02), and dengnga ‘will’ magdalena ngongo the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on haliday’s systematic functional linguistic approach 226 (clause 03). especially clause (03), the word wee maringngi ‘cool water’ has metaphor meaning, namely ‘blessing’. modulation in text concerning to obligation, permission, or inclination, such as takka ‘must’ and enga ‘can’. the following data are presented to show the use of modulation in text. (i:83) ... //nyaka hida oma rara duada bolo ku dengngi wa na ana kabinne//, umba ka nda kai ka ngga ndi//. //ka wa’i kua pongngu ndi hida oma rara//.///mi ya kua pongngu-ngga ndi hida duada bolo oma rara //ne maromba na kana bowo kingge//, ka na manawara ndi hitti tante na// nya palunggu na//. //nyaka ne keto ullu lele na tama//. //nyaka bahina ko hida patekinggu nya ba wi//. (04) table 4. clauses which show the use of modulation in text hida duada bolo oma rara those two piece gold ka mi you ya give taka pongngu must ngga ndi me those c conj s p modal c residue mood mood ‘those two piece of gold, you must give them to me,’ you must give me those two pieces of gold.’ (05) table 5. clauses which show the use of modulation in text ka for enga would tuluki help ngga me ndi these hina say nati kaweda that oldman conj modal p c p s residue mood modus ‘that oldman said, ‘i would be helped ‘ in clause (04), the more information is stated by the use of modal adjunct taka pongngu ‘must or had to. it concerns to inclination or obligation. while in clause (05), it concerns to ‘probability or permission’ enga. the use of modality in text enable tenor to state or explain his message that can or cannot be done. by using varieties of probability, usuality, or frequency tenor also stated and explained something whether it can or cannot be done. the use of modality also enable tenor to exchange experience using varities of obligation, such as takka pongngu, must or had to’, okkoki ‘frequency’, notongge ‘may/might be’. these varieties of obligation were used by tenors to do what are asked or demanded. modality were always used by tenor in text, such as baka ami kongga dede wa kadanu lili wa kaleku ‘i will come to take my wallet and carry my handbag’. the use of modality baka ‘will’ in that clause has inclination meaning. the use of grammatical of proposition in text was to exchange experiences. when tenors exchanged his experience they used indicative type of mood. this type of mood in text can be differentiated from interrogative type of mood by the use of intonation. from the grammatical point of view of yes/no interrogative, it could be differentiated since it was the same as affirmative type. tenors could differentiate or understand whether it was interrogative or not by paying attention to the intonation that usually used raising intonation. in text, yes/no interrogative can be understood by the use of word peina ‘how’, garra ‘who’, gei ‘when’, where’, appa ‘what’. the examples of clauses in text using whinterrogative type of mood are presented as follows. (iii:6) ///nyaka bahinako ne a nee na ponu mareda byali// mono byali ba garraku ndi a nee na katuku tana rara// mono a nee na lenango pamareda// pakako lolongge/// (06). garra ndi ata panewe pa-pende mi who these people speaker be choose you ‘ who are these speakers/meditors you choose ?’ (ii:70) //kabullu iapo wa na ranga//, neengge bara mi//, geingge ne rapa ba ammi minggi ponnu wa ranga kette//, baka dekengge diki//. (07). gei na rapa ba ammi minggi ponnu ranga kette what the time that come you finish animal held ‘when do you come to bring/complete animal of proposing to a girl?’ as it has been explained before, clause 06) is wh-interrogative type, that is garra ‘who’ and in clause (07) gei na rapa ‘when’. more information relating to ‘who’ and when’ is the needed answer on the interrogative grammar. this kind of exchanging experience indicates some aspects of propositional grammar. the question and answer are stated by using mood form. this fact relates to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 227 almaida and pastor’s statement (2017:304) that participant internal and external possibility modality appeared as a useful resource in justifying idea. adjunct in text adjunct in text is an element that does not have potential of being subject. it is usually realized by adverb or prepositional phrase. adjunct gave more and varieties information that were added to clauses. adjunct consisted of adverb group, prepositional phrase, and modal adjunct. (i:4) ///nyado… bata babado na pamadengngi bara na ama mawolo marawi// tutuna bata ma dengngi// ba ata a wainda barra na ama mawolo marawi//, nyaka bahinna kowe / notongge /ka ta dukki ngge ne pamai dengnga nda ne bahinna///. ///nyaka ka kako belli hida pamama pata patama wainda//, kata mama belli// nyaka ba yodikyaki// appa ko ne padukki dengnga nda// kata padukki ndi hiddi pateki///. (08) table 6. adjunct in text noto-ngge may be ka that ta we duki-ngge arrive ne pamai dengnga nda the come with our ma conj s p c mood residue ‘ we may come to our presence.’ (ii:30) … …/// ///taka ndaku teki kipu ne// kana pandengge hindangu mi///. ///ia mane tanggu uma kalada//, okkokina netingge hina uma kalada baku kako barra da hittingge// nati ata nee ndi buka bera//, waimangura// neti ka lende zodina kaku ngare ngare kalete zodi// baku pangga hina pateki na/// ///.ia nenti nai manu// mono hida papala karewe langutaka//, kabola wirro// kabola rara taka wi// nai manu///. .//…// (09) table 7. adjunct in text okkoki na rarely netti-ngge even ba that ku i kako go barra da hitti-ngge to them ma ar conj s p prep mood residue m rarely i go to them.’/ i rarely go to them.’ (i:95) ///…//…/// // //hidi oma a pata bolo oma rara// gai ka na ya taka pongngu ngga ndi//. ///heti ba lunggu ku ngge// gai ne lodo boro mema// mawo roo karambo ba nee ko yodi kyaki bana bitaka tana gonggola mi donga watu// enga donggu ba mi tawa ngge ngundu// nibangge nangga// hidi paworo ma puu na// pakado ma lawina na bata///…/// (10) table 8. adjunct in text hida oma pata bolo these gold piece four ka mi you ya give takapongngu must ngga ndi me them c s p ma c conj mood mood residue ‘these two piece of gold, you must give me .’/ ‘you must give me those two pieces of gold.’ (iv:38/78) (11) table 9. adjunct in text papala pass beli first ndi them ba and budi will tekiku talk wi them p ar c konj ma p c mood mood residude ‘pass/retell these (information) first and they will be discussed.’ (ii:17)/ ///indaki ndahinaki hida ole//, ne bara mi yemi bapaduki na lodo// nya papala belli mu///. ///heti appaku pangindi mi// hida papapalami/// (iv:23) //kanyado dappa pasala lunggunya//. //nda hinaki nya ole…?// (12) magdalena ngongo the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on haliday’s systematic functional linguistic approach 228 table 10. adjunct in text indaki, nda no, not hina say ki it hida those ole friend f p c c s mood residue ‘no, it (that saying) is not like that, friend.’ (13) table 11. adjunct in text ka mala ok duada gazu two bar pa that lu say nggu hina i ar c conj p s residue mood ‘ok, i have said two bars.’.’ adjunct in clauses (08--13) give or add more information to those clauses. additional information is realized by modal and adverbial adjunct. in clause (08), modal adjunct noto-ngge ‘may be’ adds more information relating to ‘probability’. in clause (09), modal adjunct okkoki ‘rarely’ adds information relating to usualilty, and adverbial adjunct netti ‘later’ adds information relating time. therefore, this clause has information that is realized by either modal or adverbial adjunct. in clause (10) modal adjunct taka ‘must’ adds information relating to obligation. in clause (11) adverbial adjunct beli ‘firstly’ adds information relating to time, and modal adjunct budi ‘wiil’ adds information relating to intensity. in clause (13) adverbial adjunct mala ‘ok” adds information relating to request. whereas, clause (12) is polarity indaki, nda. ‘no’ modal adjunct are clause constituents that add interpersonal meaning to the clause. it covers mood and comment adjuncts (eggins 1994:167168; halliday 1994:82-83). mood adjunct added/gave more information relating to probability and usuality, intensification, presumption, inclination and polarity. whereas comment adjunct add an expression and attitude and evaluation. it consisted of admissive, desiderative, entreaty, evaluative, opinion, predictive, persuasive, and presupposition. the use number of modal adjunct in texts are presented in table one below. table 12. the use number of modal adjunct in texts tipe modal adjunct text i text ii text iii text iv total adjunct % mood adjunct 158 42 71 149 420 66 comment adjunct 124 30 28 33 215 34 total of clauses 1250 472 544 854 635/ 3120 100 table one pictures the total use number of adjuncts in texts is 635. the use number of mood adjunct is 420.(66%).and comment adjunct is 215 (34%). the use number of mood adjunct is higher than the use number of comment adjunct. the following data can show the use of adjunct in clauses. (iv:14) (14) //ne ba wai ma ne lodo// ma tunda bana kira//. //ka ma woro-ngge ne lodo//, nda papande taka mi yemi//. //nyawi hida ka ma kako nee ba bawai ndi ne bahina// ne padengngi na kaweda dada// gai ka manowara-ngga hina ne panewe//. //nyaka waiku ndi ndapa pande ma yame ata ene// nya pahinda na kapapala ndi// kana ounda wi//. //remangga ba lu-nggu-ngge bahina-ngge waina heti tudana ba ndappa kambu ate we//. / //langka ndaiku taka orona ba wai ndi paworo ma heti// nyaka ne lodo kira na//. //nyaka teki we ka ounda// nya kaidu pakambu ate ma yame//. //today we are presence, we have postponed the time// so, we have discussed something that you really do not know // ///that is why we go there and they are here now // the demand of grandma, dada is that she was loved // so, if there is something that six of us do not know, i tell it now in order to be known/ understood /// ///what had been said to be waited last time does not seem not to have intension /// ///eventhough he is not here, we have had our discussion at that time. therefore, to day is the time /// /// so, tell it in order to be known and it is our purpose // // looking at the clauses or text (14), we can identify that it consists of eight independent clauses and six dependent clauses. when tenor gave information, he used affirmative type, such as ne ba wai ma ne lodo ma tunda bana kira ’ today english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 229 we are present, for we have postphoned the time’. tenor also used imperative type, such as teki we ka ounda,’’tell them in order to be known’. those clauses have additional information that are realized by modal adjunct such as nda papande taka mi yemi ( ‘nda ’ not’, taka ‘really) ‘that you really do not know’, and comment adjunct such as nyaka waiku ndi ndapa pande ma yame ata enne ‘so , if there was something that six of us did not know,’ look at the presented data below. the clauses have additional information realized by mood adjunct and comment adjunct. (i:45) //o…o.. kanyado tenababa//, ka netti banapa pillo.//. //nee bange ne barramu hidanggu//. //a pala bana hida ngawu//, na wawi wa’i ba ni tyana/gyounga//. //ka enga tekkimu ne patekimu//, a limma hidangge hida umbamu//, nda ta dapa padekuki hidanggu//. (15) nda ta dapa padekuki hinda-nggu am s ar p p s not we just follow say i ‘we did not just follow, i said.’ (iv:15) //nya ndapa wi wainda//, ne tanggal enam belas// wai keto agazu//. //malla tau wolla ingngi// wolla wee// ati ia manu//. //enga wai gobba na ne katopo nyapo // ongo tunda bina ko bangge takangge kira lodo// (16) enga wai gobba na ne katopo,… am p pos s must there was pair it this machete ‘this machete must have its pair.’ (iv:52) //kanyado nai ranga a touda kabullu ndara// touda kabullu karambo// ka ya takakingga ndi//, dukabana hinanggu// (17) nai ranga a touda kabullu ndara// touda kabullu karambo// ka mi ya those animal thirty hourses thirty buffalows so you give k s p taka-ki ngga ndi must them me them ma c c c you had to give me those animal, thirty hourses and thirty buffalows.’ i:34) ///kanyado hinna ngge na ama// kaba barra du barra dadi do// nya kanda rema na parangi tilli bendo// kanda mangga na kamutu leto tana// ka wak’i ndi ne ne ba toma ngge ne milla// ba dukki ngge ne ndengo// ka … na tenawi ba hida ngge///. ///takka ba hina wali kaia// ka mama belli ponggai na kaleku nggu// hina ngge pateki na ama umba mi ne olle.///. (18) ///takka ba hina wali kaia// ka mi mama belli na kaleku nggu eventhough/now that you eat first this handbag my ar s p ar c pos ‘now that you firstly eat my handbag.’ (it means that you firstly have betel and areca nut) (ii:38) //oo , malla… hina hida//. ///nee nda dappa nangu-nangu// nda etakaikipo wana pakambu ate kaida hida///. //heti paya lima yemi// apaumba na hida// (19) /oo , malla… hina hida//. ///nee nda dappa nangu-nangu// yeah, ok say they we continous talk am(ar) p s s am p ‘yeah/ok, we are still talking/discussing.’ (ii:25) //hinaba wi,// teki loloko pateki//. (20) //hina ba wi teki loloko pateki//. surely it say just speech ma s p ar c ‘surely it is, just say the speech.’ clauses (14--20) have additional information that are realized by mood adjunct nda, ‘not’, enga ‘ still’ and taka ‘must/had to’. nda’ not’ is polarity and enga ‘still’ and taka ‘must are obviousness. whereas, in clauses (18--20) have additional information that are realized by comment adjunct takka ba hina wali kaia ‘eventhough’, malla ‘all right’, and hina ba ‘ it is right’. examples of adjunct in text are presented as follows. table 13. mood adjunct budi okko domma ongo enga taka pongngu kali pata sadeka nda hinaki takka nda kali wai wuku nda, indaki ‘will’ noto ‘always’ okko ‘must’ ongo ‘usually’ pongngu ‘not like that’ sadeka ‘not usually’ takka no, not’ wuku ‘may/might be’ table 14. comment adjunct badekuko-ngge ‘according to’ bahinako ‘therefore’ baka ‘then, and’ balengnga ‘because’ bangge ‘then’ bengge ‘even if ‘ magdalena ngongo the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on haliday’s systematic functional linguistic approach 230 kalongga ate ‘willingness’ kanyado, nyado ‘ok, surely’ karoba ‘surprise’ langka ‘though’ lapata ‘up to’ loko hina wali kaiya ‘though, eventhough’ louka-louka ‘even if, mainly’ malla ‘all right’ melle ‘‘if’ na tenaba it is right/surely, exectly’ na tenawi ‘it is right/surely’ nda kali waikina ‘not always’ nda peikina ‘does not matter’ ndua atedo ‘kindness’ nggai ‘kindness’ nyaka ‘so’ oro ‘because’ papangeda-nggu ‘my opinion’ taka nyakido ‘eventhough’ tutuba ‘it is enough’ utuba ‘luckily’ wali kalaki ate from deeply hard’ beside modal adjunct, comment adjunct that add more information in clause were found in texts. the table (2) below are presented to show the use of ar and prepositional phrase in text. table 15. the use number of adverbial residue and prepositional phrase in text adjunct types text i text ii text iii text iv total percentage adverbial 315 135 163 339 952 67 prepositional phrase 107 48 63 88 461 33 total adjunct 422 182 226 427 1.413 100 table two shows the additional information that are realized by ar and prepositional phrase. the total use number of adverbial adjunct is 952 (67%). the total use number of prepositional phrase is 461 (33%). ar is higher than prepositional phrase. this fact indicates that using adverbial adjunct is more important when tenor exchange experience. it is aimed to have other tenor ensure the information stated. if they miss the information realized in addvrbial adjunct, culturally there would be a cultural sanction. therefore, the aim or purpose should be understood and some decision can together be decided. the function of comment adjunct accordoing to eggines (1994:168) was to express an assessment about the clause as a whole. look at the data below. (iv:123). (21 a) //nyaka ole… neme bali tonga//, patoo baka nda na bali gollu dommo ka ne panewe//. ///pateki da bali tonga//, tanggala enam belas wulla ka ia tahun dua ribu tiga belas// ponu ranga heti//, ka ami pamalle///. //wale we koro dana// wulla ka ene tanggala satu// kappa malle tanggala tiga puluh hina ka ponu ranga//. //hina by ali //mono byali,// orona eta pateki na maro bali tonga hina koro dana///. //hinako heti yame pawai da ma a ene// ka tai ma ne tillu na// katuku tana rara// kangali dua paduana//, ba hina ne pateki// oro heti byali// mono byali// ba ma eta yame neti a nee na tillu na// ne tanggala enam belas// wulla ka lima// ponu ranga///. ///ponu ranga budi worongge kira pamalle// hina ne paworo ma //paduada ma ne tillu na// ba ma teki minggi///. ///ata pawai ya ma //nyaka tai ma ne tillu na bali tonga// koro dana//, gainanggu kadapa nya padeimba lunggu minggi ne bahina// pateki ma ata ene//, ka dukabana///. ///garra ko a wale ullu// koro dana //bali tonga, ka wale we…/// ///tanggala enam belas// wulla lima// ponu wi ranga//, pamalle//, hida pateki ma ata a ene///. //gara wale ullu//, koro dana//, bali tonga?// (iv:124) (21b) //nyado ku walepo yauwa bali tonga// ba lengnga limi dongge//. ///nyado nena ka ndaiki duka na// ba limiko-ngge ne bahina nee// mono ata pabeiba mi// nyaka tai minggi tillu na ata ene// ka pawai weki na///. //bahinako ne bahina nee ata pabei ba mi katorro na pamama//. // all underlined words in clauses (21a and 21b) are adverbial adjunct and prepositional phrases. those adjuncts add more information to the clauses. in clauses (21a), there are 19 adverbial adjuncts and eight prepositional phrases. whereas, in clauses (21b), there are four adverbial adjunct and one prepositional phrase. it seems that in clauses (21a), there is restated information used by tenor. this fact causes the use number of adjunct in clauses (21a) is higher than the use number of adjunct used in clause (21b). the purpose of repeated adjunct by tenor is to make or ensure other tenor get clear information that can be together understood. based on the fact shown in clause (21b) adjunct are less used since tenor has understood the message, and therefore he does not need to use more adjuncts in clauses (21a) . the following presented data are adverbial adjunct and prepositional phrases in text. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 231 table 16. prepositional phrase and adverbial adjunct in the text prepositional phrase adverbial adjunct aro umma ‘in front of house balitonga ‘waiting room’ barra ‘near’, ‘closed to’ byali ‘beyond’ dana ‘inside’ deta ‘on’ gyounga ‘outside’ katonga deta ‘on stage’ korodana in bed room’ lira ‘behind’ lola ‘down’ mbondo ‘above’ ne’e ‘over there’ nenna ‘there’ newe ‘here’ oma dana in the garden, field’ omba dana ‘in the lake’ pandou deta ‘on a bed’ ponnu ‘up’ tidi ‘beside’ tillu ‘middle’ umma dana ‘upstair’ duada wulla ‘two months later kapugede ‘in the morning’ kira ‘time’ koka ‘tomorrow’ male ‘last night’ mewa ‘day after tomorrow muriwali muri wali ‘for ever’ murri ‘follwing day’ ne bahina nee ‘now’ ne lodo ‘today’ neme ‘later’ neme ndou ‘next year’ nena ‘a while ago’ sebentar ‘for a moment’ tanggala ‘date’ touda dou ‘ three years’ ullu na ‘last time’ waina ‘last time’ wulla kaia ‘the first month’ wulla kapata ‘the four month’ yodikyaki ‘next time’ yone ‘over here’ adverbial adjunct included adjunct residue, such as circumstances. adjunct position can be either at the front or the end of a clause. look at the following data. (i:148, 182) //duka bana.// //kanyado kapeinda ndi hida ama anton?// //ne bahina ne’e hida ranga enne kabullu wa//, touda kabullu karambo// touda kabullu ndara//. ///ne toma nda ndakurapu hida wawi// ne kata naba memapu hida olle//, kana sadekapu ne/// (22) //ne bahina ne’e hida ranga enne kabullu wa//, touda kabullu karambo// now these animal sixty them thirty buffalow ar s c touda kabullu ndara thirty hourse ‘now, these animals are sixty of them, thirty buffalows, thirty hourses.’ (i:178) //oo, ka ne hida ngge hida ata wee leo// ne lodo ba waingga kette katonga weri kawendo// a lima hidi pangindi nggu// berarti kabullu lima powa nda wai na ranga kette katonga weri kawendo//. ///duada wulla nangge ka amiko ngga// kaku ponuku// kaku ngindi wa na kabullu lima// bolo oma rara//, hina ne pateki na///…/// (23) ///duada wulla na ka ami ngga// ka ku ngindi wa na kabullu lima// two month that come i in order i bring those fifteen ar p s conj s p c ‘two months later , i come to bring those fifteen.’ (iv:9) //heti nya ba wi// papala ndi pateki ullu na nena// //ne pateki mu na tena we// (24) //heti nya ba wi// papala ndi pateki ullu-na nena// these are they retell this speech a while ago ar p c ar ‘here they are, retell this speech a while ago.’ (iv:115, 118) ///pateki na kaweda kalli//, kana duki pongngumo neme dua ribu tiga belas///. //ka ba nyakido a hina na// kadaku sadekamo neme tahun dua ribu tiga belas// baami hinangge nati kaweda kalli///. ///yang berikut// nda lakawa a dapa mawanggoki wa neti gyounga// , remana manairo/// ///na marro pongngu we ne tanggala pateki mi//, hinangge pateki na nati kaweda kalli///. (25) nda lakawa a dapa mawanggo -ki wa neti gyounga// not chil that just play she out side am conj ar p s ar ‘she is not a child that just plays outside.’ (26) ba yodi kyaki ka nda dappa mawewaraka na yame ata a nee na tillu na later not just scaterred we people that are middle ar am p s ar ‘later, we, the six people that are in the middle (as mediators) are not scattered.’ magdalena ngongo the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on haliday’s systematic functional linguistic approach 232 (iv:7) //nyaka ne hina nena koro dana//, tyana//, bali tonga//, pangau we kabutika gainanggu// ka parengnge pateki na//. //ne byali tonga piya lakawa//, koro dana piya lakawa// gainanggu yodi kyaki ka bana kako panewe// kadana matagelaka// nyaka hina kata teki//. (27) //ne byali tonga piya lakawa//, koro dana piya lakawa// in living room all children in bedroom all chilrdren ar ar s ar f s ‘in the living room and bedroom are all children.’ all clauses (22--27)) have additional information relating to time and place. information relating time such as ne bahina nee ‘now’ (clause 22) , dua wulla na ‘two months later’ (23), ullu na nena ‘ a while ago’ (clause 24), and information relating to place such as neti gyounga out side’ clause 25), ne byali tonga ‘in the living room’ (clause 26). in clause (25), there are additional information relating to modal adjunct nda ‘ not’ and residue adjunct neti gyounga ‘outside’. in clause (26), there are additional information relating to residue adjunct yodi kyaki ’later’, tillu na ‘ in the middle’, and adjunct modal nda ‘not’. conclusion the use of modality in spoken text related to two ways, namely modalization and modulation. modalization were always used by groom’s parent and mediators. while modulation were used by bride’s parent and mediators. this fact relates to what cheng and wang (2017) findings that the disparity of modals verbs in different situations depended on distinct situation. it is also proved ravelli’s statement (2000) that modalization related to fact (giving/demanding information, and modulation related to facts (giving/demanding goods and services). modalization involves the scale of probability and usuality and modulation relates to the scale of obligation and inclination (halliday and matthiessen (2004). the terms of probability and usuality as follows the speaker expresses judgements as to the frequency in which something happens (eggins, 2004). modal adjunct covers mood and comment adjunct were used in text that add more information to a clause. the use of polarity of modality in text indicated how strong the language reveals interpersonal meaning suggested by speakers. the more use of modal adjunct than comment adjunct indicates that the speaker’s judgement or request in propositions and proposals were very important in this text. modality system in text realized interpersonal meaning. it is suggested that it is interesting to conduct more study relating to modality system that also covers its orientation, value and polarity completely references alaei, m. and ahangari, s. 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(2020). an analysis of interpersonal function in ted educational speeches. ieee/wic/acm international joint conference on web intelligence and intelligent agent technology (wi-iat), 2020, pp. 724-729, doi: 10.1109/wiiat50758.2020.00111. magdalena ngongo the investigation of modality and adjunct in spoken text of proposing a girl using waijewa language based on haliday’s systematic functional linguistic approach 234 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 213 efl teachers’ capability and barriers in using information and communication technology (ict) harli zadtyi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia harlizadtyi@gmail.com ismail petrus english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia ismailpetrus@yahoo.com machdalena vianty english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya,indonesia machdalena074@yahoo.com apa citation: zadtyi, h., petrus, i., & vianty, m. (2021). efl teachers’ capability and barriers in using information and communication technology (ict). english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 213-222. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5385 received: 04-08-2021 accepted: 27-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction integration of communication and technology (ict) in english foreign language (efl) is important for education in the future. utilizing ict in the process of teaching and learning activities, either in or outside the school. it helps developing teaching strategies, and rising teaching quality. one essential instrument for addressing the digital immigrant divide inside the state is knowledge data and communication technology (ict) in education. according to prensky (2001), digital immigrants mean people who weren't born within the digital world before 1990. the utilization of ict in education will cut the digital divide and build new learning strategies. gilakjani (2017) states that ict is in addition viewed as media to push a brand new learning method. it means ict as a key in facilitating acceptable activities for students and also as an impact to contemplate fun and purposeful teaching ways. according to roy (2015, p.75), "ict is all devices and tools in digital form, which can be distributed for realizing the goals of teachinglearning." ict will support the teaching and learning process. similarly, zahra, et al. (2019) found that the use of ict was highlighted at the school. meanwhile, cakici (2016) states that information and communication technologies (ict) have increased dramatically reinforced and have a powerful learning atmosphere. as we know english in indonesia is a foreign language, using ict teaching and learning will be more exciting and abstract: integrating and developing ict for the school has become an important facet and conferred a more robust pattern to get the new teaching and learning models. the combination of ict has several benefits to form a context for teaching and learning english skills. in this pandemic situation, teachers should use kind of ict tools for online teaching. supported this necessity, there must be problems faced by the teacher in the access of ict. studying the teachers' capability and barriers in education will help teachers become successful technology adopters in the future. this study applied a qualitative descriptive research design conducted through questionnaires, observation, and interviews. the result of the questionnaire, interview, and observation was described. participants were efl teachers from senior-high-schools in sanga desa. the study findings teachers category good in capability and the main barriers faced by teachers were lack of facilities, time, training, and internet problem. the research has the purpose of exploring teachers' capability and the barriers they face to improve the quality of ict use in teaching english in the future. keyword: ict; teachers’ capability; barriers. harli zadtyi, ismail petrus, machdalena vianty efl teachers’ capability and barriers in using information and communication technology (ict) 214 make the learning atmosphere more enthusiastic. then, it takes a more creative way of learning (fajri, et al., 2015; inderawati, 2017; apriani, et al., 2021) suherdi (2012) in his study found the utilization of ict focus at schools particularly rare notably in english language teaching. supported curriculum 2013 program, ict could be a primary tool that ought to be integrated into every subject. also in teaching english, particularly for high school. teachers need to determine the exact tools of ict to support teaching to be more effective. the utilization of technology is crucial, most lecturers would acknowledge, there is still rather a lot of to do an effective and pleasant use of the (latest) technology” (rank et al., 2011, p.1). in the 21st century today, most tools are operations using english. there are examples of ict devices used in the educational field as interactive whiteboards, interactive tables, tablets, digital books, laptops, multimedia, virtual teaching platform, and online applications (“life persona,” 2020). based on curriculum 2013, ict integration as the in english language teaching and learning as concept to promotes students' learning autonomy and communicative development. the use of ict has barriers within the educational systems, like the way to increase the students' involvement to achieve higher academic accomplishment in smeda, et al. (2014). if teachers have the potential to use kind of ict tools in daily learning activities, the implementation of ict is going to be successful for teaching and learning (inderawati, et al., 2019a; inderawati, et al., 2019b; . capability in ict includes knowledge, skill and attitude should develop to support the teachers be professional in teaching efl. such as the two blades, ict will be very helpful on the other hand the barriers that always exist from various factors. next, elemam (2016) states if the teachers have numerous barriers to deploying ict. supporting elemam’s opinion (2016), payal and kanvaria (2018) claim there are barriers to implementing ict tools in teaching and learning. the lack of computers, content, and material for teachers, teachers' skills, technical support, pedagogical support for lecturers, and school time organization. examine the benefits of victimization ict itself, it's needed to research the sort of ict barriers faced by efl teachers out of urban areas. the research focusing on the topic of ict is not something new there studies of ict focus on different objectives. mollaei and riasati (2013) conducted a study in shiraz, iran. they focus on teachers' perceptions of ict in the class kind of technology, facilitating, implementation, and attitudes of male and female teachers toward using ict. other research, juliana and muslem (2017) conducted a study in banda aceh. the topic was the use of ict: perceptions and challenges. the study found that academics faced three important challenges in explore of ict. (1) restricted ict tools and (2) low-level connections (3) the last challenge could be a lack of information and skill development. this study focuses on the teachers' capability: knowledge, skill, and attitude on barriers faced by efl teachers. this analysis supported the standard of education as a result of the event of technology modification continued and renewable. significantly during this current pandemic, the teaching and learning method ought to be online. in this case, all the teachers should have the ability the use ict. all the teachers must access ict tools and provide learning based on curriculum, learning materials, time, and appropriate strategies. learning material should be understood even online (inderawati, 2011; inderawati,et al., 2018). from the researchers' point of view, there is a shock wave for the use of ict. teachers will face barriers. teachers may found teaching problems and support by lack of knowledge, skill and attitude, but they could solve the problem as easy by access in the city. now the question is how to use kind of ict tools for online teaching in the regions. in this case, the research focus on teachers’ capability and barriers of using ict at senior-high-school in sanga desa by identifying the teachers’ capability and barriers to the utilization of ict in education would be a great step to rising the standard of teaching and learning. ict the use of technology in teaching english isn't new for education system. rank et al. (2011) state that info and communication technology (ict) provide learners with authentic content. all materials will help students expand their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. in the technology and knowledge-based era today, the utilization of ict in teaching is characterized by technology devices to support teaching and learning activities. information also helps students increase their understanding because of the use of media technology itself. it has english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 215 associated an important role within the field of education to boost the quality of teaching and learning. it conjointly affects teaching and supporting teachers in their education ways and serving to students perceive (bingimlas, 2009). nowadays, students think and learn in different ways. teachers need to understand and interact with students to adapted teaching approaches and learning strategies. the professional use of technology by teachers includes the planning of different classroom tasks. preparing educational content, engaging or interacting with peers, students, and parents, finding interactive tools, and drawing up lesson plans (bebell, russell & o'dwyer, 2004). teachers should know how to consider the focus and desires of students in the classroom. as liu (2009, p.101), "technology taking part in classroom system as computer-assisted teaching and interactive media technologies. in the listening class, teachers use computers and the network to find an authentic model which helps learners with native pronunciation. the teachers should open their minds to the integration of technology in teaching. hsu (2016) states three components of belief to find teachers' classroom technology use. it is a pedagogical, selfefficacy, and the value of technology for students. pedagogical define as teachers' acceptance in utilizing technology. self-efficacy refers to the teachers' self-confidence, it closely connects to the skills and knowledge. the last positive value of teachers influences the frequency of using the technology in the class. teachers’ capability in this research, teachers' capability divided into three: knowledge, skill and attitude. inside: it defines as condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association (webster, 2018). the present research refers to the teachers' understanding of how to manage ict for personal use, using ict as a tool for teaching— understanding the policy dimensions of using ict for teaching and learning process. another is mastery of a range of 7 assessment paradigms involving ict, knowledge of various educational paradigms related to ict use (kirschner and woperies, 2003). skills: it refers to the teachers' ability the use ict that includes skills in internet experience, skills in computer experience, skills in computer-mediated communication, and skills in microsoft office (al-furaydi, 2013). attitude: attitudes refer to measure a reaction to some referent or object, inferred supported the individual's beliefs. in line with al-zaidiyeen (2010), states readiness of mental organized through expertise, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all or any objects and things which connected." it means that perspective may be a positive or negative reaction of feeling toward a specific state of affairs. barriers in this case, the teacher needs to learn fastly to use ict tools, helping facilitate teaching and learning activities/processes. schoepp (2005, p.5) states integrating ict in education, significantly into classroom instruction isn't as simple as flipping a switch. it includes integration with the complex method, and result teachers might encounter difficulties or barriers. however, the barriers faced by each teacher to integrate ict and teaching ways were different. potter and szapkiw (2012) state teachers need a shift in thinking to find out and applicate the way to manage learning behavior otherwise as they use ict within the classroom, it such as the two blades that the one hand ict are going to be terribly useful. vice versa barriers exist from numerous factors. support this crusader (2017, p.12) states most of the teachers face barriers in applying technology into the teaching method as a result of lack of proficiency. a lot of teachers, not mastery of integrating educational technology in their curriculum. it means the lack of ability impacts the increasing number of barriers that teachers will face. ict barriers classify into two categories: extrinsic and intrinsic. according to ertmer (1999), there are external such as access to resources and time. next, intrinsic factors relate to the attitudes, values, behaviours, and resistance to ict. support this, mingaine (2013) states the main obstacles that prohibit school teachers from using ict effectively are: a) lack of ict preparation time, b) low ict practice models, and c) weak school administration. method to collect the data, the writer used questionnaires, observation, and interviews for both schools: seniorhigh-school 1 and vocational-high-school 1 of sanga desa. after the data of the questionnaire got, the writer chose two teachers to represent with a harli zadtyi, ismail petrus, machdalena vianty efl teachers’ capability and barriers in using information and communication technology (ict) 216 maximum and minimum score to be an interview and observed—the analysis used reduction of the text; exploration of the text and integration of the exploration. according to attride (2001), claims qualitative analysis procedure into three main stages, including the reduction of the text, exploration of the text, and integration of the exploration. data reduction means the process of selecting, identifying, classifying the data that are considered essential. next is the exploration of the text, which means the researcher explores and describes data in sentence form. the last integration of exploration means the researcher concludes the data exploration. also, use categorized based on scores: the interview analyzed by transcribed, categorized, and code. the observation was transcribed descriptively to support the interview results. this research applied a qualitative descriptive. according to hamid (2017), qualitative research acknowledges participants' behavior and the researcher understood in context. issac & michael (1984, p.73) stated that descriptive research is the kind of research to systematically and accurately describe the situation and facts of a given population. this methodology suited with this research aims to understand teachers' capability, barriers and find the solutions. in this research, the researcher selected efl teachers from two schools: senior-high-school 1 and vocational-high-school 1 of sanga desa. the schools have facilities such as a computer lab, computers, laptops, and a projector. the participants were six efl teachers who teach in major related to ict were willing to be participants. in qualitative research to describe the accuracy and credibility to validate, the writer used methodological triangulation, and it employs more than a method to gather the data: questionnaire, observation and interview. questionnaire given for completeness of data and gather much information relevant to research needs on teachers capability and barriers. the information obtained will be more prosperous and more complete by the data or additional data from questionnaires. a detailed description of the study's final results was genuinely comprehensive and provided convincing and valid conclusions. the questionnaire gave to the participants (efl teachers) in senior-high-school1 and vocationalhigh-school1 of sanga desa. the total question was 51 questions and divided into three sections: teacher profile, section two was teachers' capability, and section three barriers. in doing the observation, researchers design some means for recording notes. it's called field notes. according to creswell (2012), field notes are text (word) recorded by the research worker throughout the observation during a qualitative study. the researcher used an observation note sheet to describe the result of the observation. the interview used to got many sources to gain information that could not explain. the researcher used open-ended in the interview section. next, chose the respondent who represented the maximum and minimum score. based on the form results, elaborated data is required to enhance the detail of information also complete the data. interviews session were applied with the teachers as participants. it completes individually and for about 15 minutes with each participant. results and discussions to determine the scale rating of all answers, the researchers divided into two category; each items (1-51) and aspect (knowledge (10), skill (20), attitude (10), barriers (11) items), the ideal score is used with the formula: table 1. score of each aspect t x pn (knowledge & attitude with each 10 items) t x pn (skill with 20 items) scale t x pn (barriers with 11 items) scale 10 x 4 = 40 20 x 4 = 80 very good 11 x 4 = 44 no problem 10 x 3 = 30 20 x 3 = 60 good 11 x 3 = 33 slightly 10 x 2 = 20 20 x 2 = 40 medium 11 x 2 = 22 medium 10 x 1 = 10 20 x 1 = 20 poor 11 x 1 = 11 poor source: sugiono (2012) below was the result of rating scale english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 217 figure 1. the result of rating scale teacher profile this is a profile of the efl teachers from seniorhigh-school1 and vocationalhigh-school1 of sanga desa. the teachers' profile includes age, gender, last degree, teaching experienced, experienced use of ict, time use ict in a day, and kinds of use ict tools. table 2. teacher profile name age g e n d e r l a st d e g re e t e a c h in g e x p e ri e n c e experie nce with the use of ict spent time in access internet in a day kind of ict use teach er 1 2630 male bachelor degree 1-3 years less than a year 2-3 hours word processing, spreadsheet, powerpoint, electronic learning resource centre (cd & ebook), social media, e-mail, www, wiki, text & video chatting teach er 2 3640 femal e bachelor degree 11-15 years more than ten years 4 hours and over word processing, database, spreadsheet, powerpoint, multimedia(audio&vi deo), social media, email, www, blog teach er 3 3135 femal e bachelor degree 7-10 years 7-10 years 1-2 hours powerpoint, multimedia(audio&vi deo), social media, email,www, text & video chatting teach er 4 3640 male bachelor degree 11-15 yeas 1-3 years 2-3 hours sosmed teach er 5 3640 femal e bachelor degree 11-15 years 7-10 years 3-4 hours word processing, multimedia (audio&video), social media, e-mail, text & video chatting teach 36femal bachelor 11-15 7-10 2-3 hours word processing, harli zadtyi, ismail petrus, machdalena vianty efl teachers’ capability and barriers in using information and communication technology (ict) 218 er 6 40 e degree years years multimedia(audio&vi deo), social media, email, wiki based on the info higher than, the participants of this study were 2 males and 4 females, whereas the age of the participants ranges from 26 to 40 years. for the last education, all the teachers were bachelor degree. relating to their age and teaching experience 1 to 15 years, their experience with the use of ict was less than a year until more than ten years. all the participants spent the time for access the internet range one until more than four hours. the last kind of ict used, almost all participants used word processing, multimedia (audio & video), social media, and e-mail. teachers capability after got the teacher profile, the researcher used data in section two in questionnaires. it includes knowledge, skill, and attitude. the red number mark as negative questions. table 3. knowledge results of each item respondents knowledge t o ta l q1 q2 q3 q4 q5 q6 q7 q8 q9 q10 teacher 1 3 4 3 2 4 4 3 4 4 3 34 teacher 2 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 38 teacher 3 3 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 27 teacher 4 4 3 4 3 4 3 3 3 3 3 33 teacher 5 3 3 2 2 3 3 3 3 2 3 27 teacher 6 3 3 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 2 27 total 19 19 16 15 21 20 19 20 19 18 the table shows the teachers have “good” information within the mastery of creating personal use of ict. in terms of a way to use graphic software package, do computer maintenance, and mastery a variety of academic paradigms associated with the utilization of ict to grasp a variety of academic paradigms associated with ict use. others may be categorized as “very good” within the mastery of creating personal use of ict within the term of use of spreadsheet/excel, powerpoint and do internet surfing for the new information. next, they knew how to access kind of ict tools in teaching, understanding the policy dimensions of using ict for teaching and learning, and last mastering a range of assessment paradigms that involve ict use (zahra, et al., 2019). table 4. skill results of each item based on the data above, teachers' skill was called "medium" in the skill on internet experienced in creating website/blog, creating & accessing databases, and using a concordance. next could categorize as "good" in the skill of internet experienced in term of creating & manage wiki and use electronic learning resource centres (such as cd and e-book). in skill in computer experience in terms of using real audio and windows media player and play computer games, as well as in microsoft office skills. the last category was "very good" in skill on internet experienced in terms of browsing the internet is easy, downloads sound files are familiar with audio and video on the internet, and searches for online research. in skill in computer experience in terms of using the language software, and skill in computer-mediated communication. table 5. attitude results of each item english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 219 respondents attitude total q31 q32 q33 q34 q35 q36 q37 q38 q39 q40 teacher 1 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 37 teacher 2 2 4 4 3 4 4 4 2 4 4 35 teacher 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 28 teacher 4 3 3 4 2 3 3 2 3 4 3 30 teacher 5 3 3 3 3 2 3 2 3 2 4 28 teacher 6 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 3 3 3 31 total 18 19 21 17 19 21 18 17 19 20 based on the data above, teachers' attitude was "very good" in all items, including perceived usefulness and ease of use. table 6. barriers results of each item respondents barriers total q41 q42 q43 q44 q45 q46 q47 q48 q49 q50 q51 teacher 1 3 4 4 4 2 3 4 3 3 3 3 36 teacher 2 3 3 1 4 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 36 teacher 3 2 2 1 3 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 28 teacher 4 2 3 1 3 2 3 3 4 4 2 4 31 teacher 5 2 2 1 3 2 3 1 3 2 3 2 24 teacher 6 3 3 1 2 1 2 2 3 2 2 3 24 total 15 17 9 19 12 17 16 20 18 17 19 the teacher barriers were "poor" in teacher ict skills (teacher level barrier) based on the data above. they faced difficulty in using ict. next, for "medium" category in teacher confidence (teacher level barrier), training, access to ict, ict infrastructure (school level), ict support on school’s overall strategies (school level), projectrelated experience (school level) in term of the school follows an ict project handled by the government or other parties. the last have “good” category in project-related experience (school level) in term of the need to prepare for the public examinations does not limit the use of ict. based on an interview, the biggest problem was accessibility for teaching english and time to utilize ict in teaching. it measures if they don't have enough time to use ict. based on observation, teacher one and teacher five taught online in this situation because of a pandemic. the researcher got the information if both teachers used edmodo to give the assignment and whatsapp to explain the materials. for using other applications such as zoom and google classroom, they got a problem in connection. they told if they didn't have enough time to present the material because online teaching gave the teacher a short time to teach. next, barriers came from school facilities, and teacher 5 asked if the school have a projector and computer lab. but to use a projector is not efficient because only one projector and need some of time to prepare to operate it. besides that problem in access to ict tools, both teachers have a problem using ict tools because they didn't have much experience teaching using ict. teachers 5 never join the training for education using ict. if she got a problem accessing or operating ict tools, she prevents it by learning from the other teacher. both teachers agreed that ict training would develop their pedagogical knowledge and skill. teacher 1 assumes that joining the training it will make the teacher more professional. conclusion in line with this research, the result shows if all the teachers have basic knowledge of accessing ict in teaching efl. the result of the questionnaire, teachers' capability was category as good. we could say they have readiness in using ict. the biggest problem was accessibility for teaching english and utilizing ict in teaching, limited school facilities, teacher training also is the problem faced by teachers. they never join the training that could increase their experience in teaching using ict tools. both teachers agreed that ict training would develop their pedagogical knowledge and skill and make the teacher more professional. based on the barriers found, several solutions to the barriers. first, support for the development of teachers' harli zadtyi, ismail petrus, machdalena vianty efl teachers’ capability and barriers in using information and communication technology (ict) 220 capability should always conduct so that all their ict knowledge, skills, and attitude are sufficient to implement ict use. the barriers impeding the success of ict use in teaching english should overcome. regular training on the use of ict, adequate ict facilities such as solid internet facilities, computer laboratory come as an utmost factor to be concerned. to develop the teacher's ict knowledge, skills, and attitude to use ict, barriers faced by ict use in efl classrooms should overcome. first, regular training on the use of ict means teachers should support the school with training, or teachers must join training outside the school to increase their use of ict and make them professional. second, the school expected to collaborate with teachers to improve the facilities needed by teachers, such as complete the facilities. it means computer/laptop enough for all students, projector, wifi for teachers and students. third, taking the limitation of this study into consideration, additional analysis is sometimes suggested to involve many academics as participants of the analysis to induce loads of 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(2018). knowledge. retrieved from https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/kno wledge. the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo from the perspective of sociolinguistics’s dimensions isti’anatul hikmah sarjanawiyata tamansiswa university, yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: ihikmah99@gmail.com apa citation: hikmah, i. (2017). the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 283-292 received: 11-04-2017 accepted: 12-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: the study analyzes the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in daily conversation in sidoarjo. this study applied a qualitative descriptive method. the theory of sociolinguistics’s dimension proposed by holems (1997) and deixis persona by yule (2006) are used in this study. as results, the study concludes two things; (1) there are six deixis persona of singular second pronouns that are usually used in sidoarjo society in their daily conversation, those are panjenengan, njenengan, sampeyan, peyan, awak mu, and koen; then there are three deixis persona of singular second pronouns that are seldom used by sidoarjo’s society, those are peno, ente, and koe; and (2) there are three sociolinguistics’s dimensions which influence the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns namely solidarity, power, and situation. keywords: deixis persona, singular second pronouns, sociolinguistics’s dimensions, sidoarjo society introduction javanese as one of the biggest society in indonesia has complexity in its language used. javanese is uttered by people who were born as javanese. it is mostly used in java especially is east and central java. as stated by fergusson (2008, p. 1368), javanese, the first language of 45 percent of indonesian, is the principal language of central and eastern java. because of its huge use, each place which uses this language has its own characteristics. the differences of feature can be seen in east and central java. people seldom use krama inggil in east java. on the other hand, people in central java mostly use krama inggil. the other example can be found in east java. people who live in some cities in east java like bojonegoro, ngawi, madiun, nganjuk, kediri, and ponorogo tend to use ngoko alus. on opposing, people who live in lamongan, surabaya, gresik, sidoarjo, and malang lean to use ngoko. those diversities are similar to nadar’s statement. he stated that javanese has complicated levels and the use of the language relates to the speaker and hearer’s status, age, level, and relation (2009, p. 135136). those factors influence them in using javanese. although there are some varieties in javanese, it still has general characteristic which can be spotted in the level of language use. there are at least five level of language use, those are krama inggil, krama, madya, ngoko alus, and ngoko kasar. krama inggil is the highest level followed by krama, madya, ngoko alus, and ngoko kasar. krama inggil usually used by speaker or hearer who has low status to speaker or hearer who has high status. for example, a speaker has high status than b hearer, b hearer will automatically use krama inggil to a speaker. then, the use of krama is https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.542 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 283 mailto:ihikmah99@gmail.com almost similar to krama inggil. in addition, ngoko is used by speaker or hearer who has similar status and same age. for example, c speaker is a student and d hearer is also a student, both will use ngoko. the level of javanese which is used by javanese can be claimed as language style. based on linguistics analysis, the language style of javanese can be categorized into two; morphology and syntactic diversity (nadar, 2009, p. 136). morphology diversity is caused by the use of prefix and suffix in a word, whereas the syntactic diversity is caused by the use of another particle, personal pronoun, or preposition in utterances. one of syntactic diversity in a communication of javanese is the choice of deixis persona. yule (2006, p. 15) explained that deixis persona is divided into three including first, second, and third personal pronouns. the first personal pronouns refers to first person like ‘i’; second personal pronouns belongs to second person like ‘you’; third personal pronouns denotes to third person like ‘he, she, and it’. those three classification of deixis persona are also found in java. each area in java has different choice of it. mangga (2013, p. 221) said that every language has personal pronouns in its word. it means that different places or countries have different personal pronouns. this condition happens in java, for example, koen (you) is used as a second deixis persona in east java, but it is not used in central java. that diversity shows the variety of deixis persona in java. in addition, because there are many varieties of deixis persona in java, this study has some limitations. the first limitation is the diexis persona. it is limited into singular second pronouns. the second limitation is the place of observation. this study took place in sidoarjo, east java. those curbs must be done in order to get accurate result. the deixis persona in sidoarjo which is analyzed in this study is singular second pronoun. according to sidoarjo’s people, there are six singular second pronouns in sidoarjo. it involves panjenengan (you), njenengan (you), sampeyan (you), peyan (you), awakmu (you), and koen (you). they are used by the sidoarjo society in their daily communication and the use of those pronouns are influenced by some factors like status, age, situation, relationship, and others. the example of the use of singular second pronouns can be seen in a conversation described in table 1. table 1. example of sidoarjo society daily conversation using singular second pronoun general relationship close relationship a: piye kabare sampeyan? (how are you?) b: alhamdulillah apik. (alhamdulillah, fine) the speaker a has general relationship with hearer b, he uses deixis persona sampeyan to hearer b. c: koen gak sekolah ta? (don’t you go to school?) d: ora, aku lagi loro. (no, i am sick.) the speaker c has close relationship with hearer d, he uses deixis persona koen to hearer d. from the example, it can be seen that the degree of relationship between speaker and hearer influences the use of singular second pronouns by speaker. when they have general relationship, they will use ngoko alus like sampeyan; and when they have close relationship, they will use ngoko like koen. the level of relationship between speaker and hearer always persuades them isti’anatul hikmah the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions 284 in choosing singular second pronouns. it is one of the parts of sociolinguistics’ dimensions. holmes (1997, p. 376) states that there are four dimensions of sociolinguistics, namely social distance/solidarity, status/power, formality, and function. distance or solidarity means the degree of relationship between speaker and hearer. then, the status or power means the authority of speaker or hearer in a society. it relates to their strength in society whether they have high or low status or power. next, formality means the situation. it relates to formal or informal situation which appears in conversation. moreover, function means meaning of the conversation between speaker and hearer. those factors persuade speaker or hearer in choosing singular second pronouns in a communication. therefore, the main objective of this study is to explain the use of second singular pronoun of deixis persona from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions. in other words, this study explains the use of second singular pronoun by the speaker and hearer as a representative of sidoarjo society’s culture. method qualitative descriptive method was used in this study. qualitative research is an umbrella term for a wide variety of approaches and methods for the study of natural social life (saldana, 2011, p. 03). the qualitative method in this study is divided into three techniques those are the data collecting, analyzing, and presenting. simak method is used to collect the data. mahsun (2005, p. 92) said that simak method is a collecting data by scrutinizing the oral and written of language use. specifically, the techniques of data collecting are simak bebas libat cakap, noting, interviewing, and recording. simak bebas libat cakap is a procedure which observes the language use by respondents (mahsun, 2005, p. 93). the second technique is noting which is used to note the written data in this study. it is done by noting some relevant forms for this study from the language use in a written manner (mahsun, 2005, p. 94). the third technique is interviewing. it is done to know the respondents’ reasons in using singular second pronouns. then, the last technique is recording. it is the continuous technique from interviewing. this technique is done by recording the interview section done with the respondents. the data of this study were collected by recording the sidoarjo society’s conversation and also by interviewing them. the data were taken from formal and informal situation which involves 10 women and 10 men as the respondents. the ages of the respondents were ranging 18 to 45 years old. further, padan method is used to analyze the data. sudaryanto (2015, p. 15) said that padan method is a method which uses extra lingual factors as determining tool. the data were transcribed first. after finishing the transcription of the data, the writer checked and analyzed it based on the theory used in this study. the data is presented using words, it includes the use of technical terminology (mahsun, 2005, p. 123). the results of collecting and analyzing the data are presented in detail based on the objectives of the study. results and discussion the discussion of this study will be divided into two main parts; (1) the variety of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo; and (2) the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions. the variety of second deixis persona in sidoarjo as stated above, the number of deixis persona of singular second pronouns english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 285 in sidoarjo is six. the number of those singular second pronouns was acquired by interviewing sidoarjo’s people because there is no printed literature which mentions about it. the data can be clearly seen in table 2. table 2. the list of deixis persona of second singular pronouns no deixis persona of second singular pronouns meaning 1. panjenengan y o u 2. njenengan 3. sampeyan 4. peyan 5. awakmu 6. koen the six second singular pronouns in sidoarjo above is arranged based on the highest level. the first is panjenengan, the second is njenengan, the third is sampeyan, the fourth is peyan, the fifth is awakmu, and the last is koen. those six singular second pronouns is used by sidoarjo society differently in daily communication. each of them is explained clearly below. a. panjenengan panjenengan is placed in the highest level of singular second pronouns used by sidoarjo society. it is seldom used by them because four main factors. first, in their daily communication, they almost use ngoko alus or ngoko kasar. the first factor relates to their habit of speaking with other people. second, some sidoarjo’s people do not know about this term, so this term is generally known by educated people who got javanese education in their school. third, they prefer to use njenengan than panjenengan. it is caused by the easy of the utterance. some people said that panjenegan is difficult to pronounce than njenengan. fourth, this term is only utilized to people who are honored and have highest position like kyai (a leader of moslem). the use of panjenengan in sidoarjo’s society is infrequently. although it is rarely used, they ever apply it. the society use panjenengan when they talk with someone who is respected, someone who has higher status, and someone who has older age. this situation can be seen in the following conversation. conversation 1. the conversation between female santri and kyai the first conversation happened in kyai’s house. the participants of conversation were santri as speaker and kyai as hearer. the kyai was older than santri. the situation of the conversation was formal. the speaker and hearer had close relationship. the topic of the conversation was about the invitation to the wedding party. santri : kulo mriki bade ngaturaken undangan walimah. menawi panjenengan wonten waktu, kulo aturi dateng griyane kula. (i come here to give a wedding invitation. if you have free time, please come to my house.) kyai : insyaallah tak usahakno yo nduk. (insyaallah i will try to come to your house.) as described in conversation 1, speaker used second singular pronoun panjenengan. it was used to replace kyai’s surname. speaker used it because of the higher status of kyai. in addition, it was used by her to show her respect to kyai although they have close relationship. their close relationship did not influence speaker to use other second singular pronoun. it happened isti’anatul hikmah the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions 286 because santri had less power than kyai. the less power means that santri did not have enough knowledge than her kyai. therefore, she used panjenengan to address him. b. njenengan njenengan is ranked in the second level of singular second pronouns used by sidoarjo’s society. it is used by them in some moments. first, when speaker or hearer has high position, when speaker or hearer is older, when speaker and hearer have general relationship, and when they are in formal situation. njenengan is usually used by people in formal situation like people who are attending seminar, people in work area for example staffs to their boss, and others. njenengan is also employed by children towards their parents, but this condition is also rare. they will prefer singular second pronouns peyan than njenengan. it happens because of their custom. only a few family members who uses it when they speak to their parents. they who choose njenengan are people who have high education and have high status. the use of njenengan in daily conversation can be seen below. conversation 2. the conversation between teacher and headmaster the second conversation happened in school and in formal situation. the participants of the conversation were teacher as speaker and headmaster as hearer. the headmaster is a man and the teacher is a woman. then the headmaster is older than the teacher. the speaker and hearer had general relationship. the speaker reported to the headmaster about the meeting preparation. teacher : bu, rapate sampun siap sedanten. lek wonten sing kurang, njenengan saget langsung sanjang ten kulo. (mrs., the meeting is ready. if there is a thing that you do not agree, you can say to me.) headmaster : ok. as stated in conversation 2, speaker used second singular pronoun njenengan. it was used to replace headmaster’s surname. speaker used it because of the status of the hearer that was as a headmaster. the use of njenengan by speaker was applied to show her respect to her leader. it happened because the teacher had less power than the headmaster. the less power means that the position of teacher is lower than the headmaster. in other words, it relates to the position of their job. the one who has higher position must be respected by them who has lower position. c. sampeyan sampeyan is classed in the third level of singular second pronouns used by sidoarjo society. it is classified as ngoko alus. it is used by the speaker who has general relationship; and in formal or informal situation. the general relationship means that two people know each other but they do not close enough or two strangers who meet in some place at the first time. for example, when e speaker meets f speaker at the first time in bus station, they will use this term. the use of sampeyan shows admiration which means they appreciate us as human. they will not use peyan, awakmu, or koen because they do not have closeness. if they use those three singular second pronouns, it will sound rude and it may cause face threatening act. as a result, it shows polite manner of sidoarjo society towards other people especially new people or people who do not close to them. the example of the use of sampeyan can be seen below. conversation 3. the conversation among housewife the third conversation happened in front of their house and in informal english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 287 situation. the participants of conversation were housewife a as speaker and housewife b as hearer. their ages are similar. the speaker and hearer had general relationship. the topic of conversation is about hearer’s lateness in coming home. speaker : bu, sampeyan teko endi? jam sak mene kok gek muleh? (mrs, where have you been? why you come home at this time?) hearer : iki lo mau iku dalanan macet, ono demo nak bungurasih, mulakno aku gek muleh. (there is a traffic jam everywhere, there is a demo in bungurasih, that’s why i come late.) as shown in conversation 3, speaker used second singular pronoun sampeyan. it was used to replace hearer’s surname. speaker used it because they had general relationship. in other words, their connection was not too close. they only knew each other in general. sampeyan is used to esteem hearer and this conversation is only greeting conversation between neighbors, so this is only simple conversation. d. peyan peyan is categorized in the fourth level of singular second pronouns used by sidoarjo society. it can be classified as ngoko alus. word peyan comes from sampeyan. it is called abbreviation. some javanese including sidoarjo society use word peyan because of easy to utter. when speaker speaks sampeyan, it needs few second than utter peyan, so some javanese tend to use peyan. peyan is used by the speaker who has close relationship to hearer and the conversation happens in formal or informal situation. the close relationship here refers to relationship between parents and children, husband and wife, and men and women. most of children in sidoarjo use peyan to address their parents. although it is ngoko alus, it does not create problem because they always use it in their daily activities. most of parents also use it to call their children. they prefer to use it than use awakmu or koen. this term is always uttered by parents and children so it becomes habit for them. as a result, this term does not sound rude. in addition, peyan is also use to name wife or husband. as a married couple, they must use it in order to show respect and love to each other. moreover, this term is also used by men and women who have special relationship. they will use peyan to address their duo. it aims to prove that the men or women are different from their general friends. in other words, when someone uses peyan to call their friend, they may have special relationship. the example of the use of peyan can be seen below. conversation 4. the conversation among close friend the fourth conversation happened in the mini store and the situation is informal. the speaker is a man and the hearer is a woman. both have special relationship. the topic of conversation is informing hearer that speaker went to her house. speaker : aku mau teko omahe pean, tapi pean lagi metu. (i visited your house, but you were outside). hearer : iyo ta? aku mau ijek nang kantor. (are you sure? i was still at office.) speaker : iyo, aku ape nyileh novel ‘the joy luck club’. (yes, i want to borrow ‘the joy luck club’ novel.) hearer : ayo saiki nang omah ku. (let’s go to my house now!) as stated in conversation 4, speaker used second singular pronoun peyan. it was isti’anatul hikmah the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions 288 used to replace hearer’s surname. speaker used it because they had close relationship. peyan used by sidoarjo society to people who have close relationship. when they used peyan instead of sampeyan, it can be said that the speaker and hearer have close relationship. in other words, it uses to someone who are special like from boyfriend to girlfriend or vice versa. e. awakmu awakmu is leveled in the fifth level of singular second pronouns used by sidoarjo society. it is classified as ngoko. many people use awakmu to address their listener. awakmu tend be used by woman. they will use it to call their friends who have close relationship with them, have similar age, and have similar status. in addition, there is additional situation when women use this term. the situation is when speaker is older than the hearer. for example, when an older woman speaks to a younger hearer, she may use this term. sometime men also use this term, but it is usually used by them to address listeners who have general relationship and have older age. this term is used in informal situation. the example of the use of awakmu can be seen below. conversation 5. the conversation among close friend the fifth conversation happened in speaker’s house and the situation is informal. the speaker and hearer are women. both have close relationship. the topic of conversation is asking about hearer’s drive license. speaker : awakmu sido njupuk sim a ta? sopo sing ngeterno nang kantor polisi? (have you already take sim a? who will accompany you to the police station?) hearer : iyo, mene aku nang kantor polisi. aku mrono karo x. (yes, tomorrow i will go to police station. i’ll go there with x.) as expressed in conversation 5, speaker used second singular pronoun awakmu. it was used to replace hearer’s surname. speaker used it because they had close relationship. it also influenced by their situation. they were talking in informal situation with daily conversation topic. f. koen koen is positioned in the sixth level of singular second pronouns used by sidoarjo society. it is classified as ngoko. most people in sidoarjo use koen to address their listener. koen in sidoarjo is used by men and women in their daily conversation. people utter it everywhere. this term is the most popular in sidoarjo because many people use it to speak with their listener. in central java, this term may sound rude, but in sidoarjo it does not rude. it is caused by their habit. once more habit plays significance role in the use of singular second pronouns. this term is used among close friend especially men to men. when men use this term, the different age does not become problem. women also use it, but they usually use it to address their men friends. women who use this term must be older than the men hearer. then this term is used in informal situation. the example of the use of koen can be seen below. conversation 6. the conversation among friend the sixth conversation happened in speaker’s house and the situation is informal. the speaker and hearer are men. the speaker is younger than the hearer. both have close relationship. the topic of conversation is about waiting speaker’s mother. speaker : koen budalo disik, aku isek nunggu ibu teko pasar. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 289 (you go first, i’m still waiting for my mother from traditional market.) hearer : tak tunggu gak po po. (that’s ok, i’ll wait for you.) as stated in conversation 6, speaker used second singular pronoun koen. it was used to replace hearer’s surname. the speaker and hearer had general relationship. it was used because they were in informal situation and they are men. g. the other forms of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo there are some other forms of deixis persona which are found in sidoarjo, but they are rarely used or they are only usef by some people who come from outside sidoarjo, those are peno, ente, and koe. peno is rarely used by people in sidoarjo because they usually use pean instead of peno. actually, the meaning of peno is similar to pean, but they prefer pean because of their custom. kramsch (2009, p. 4) said that culture refers to what has been grown and groomed. in other word, it can be said that the deixis persona in sidoarjo is influenced by their their culture. afterwards, in sidoarjo society, peno is used when speaker and hearer are making joke. ente is used by people of arabic race who live in sidoarjo. it is used by them when they communicate with their circle or with other races in the daily communication. ente is a second singular pronoun which is taken from arabic language that is anta. anta becomes ente because of the influence of betawi’s language. as a result, the word anta which means you becomes ente which also means you. the last is koe. it is used by people who are from outside sidoarjo. they usually come from central java or yogyakarta. the outsider use it because they are influenced by their original culture. it means that they still use their original way in talking with other people. basically, koe can be classified as ngoko; it is usually used by speaker and hearer who have similar age and status, and also have close relationship. the deixis persona of singular second pronouns from the perspective of sociolinguistics’s dimension the deixis persona of singular second pronouns which is used in sidoarjo is influenced by sociolinguistics’ dimension consisting of social distance or solidarity, status or power, formality, and function (holmes, 1997, p. 377). the social distance or solidarity emphasizes on how well you know someone. this dimension affects the way the speaker or hearer chooses it. the status or power refers to high and low status between speaker and hearer. the formality relates to formal and informal situation of communication. while, the function conveys referential and affective function scales. each of them is explained clearly below. a. social distance or solidarity social distance or solidarity in this study is classified into two; close and general. close social distance or solidarity denotes the close relationship between speaker and hearer. while general social distance or solidarity identifies that speaker and hearer have general relationship. when speaker and hearer have close relationship or when they know each other well, they use second singular pronouns awakmu and koen. the use of them is influenced by several factors. first, awakmu and koen are used by speaker and hearer in a communication which happens in informal situation. when the speaker and hearer are in formal situation, they will try to use other second singular pronoun. second is age. when speaker is older than hearer or vice versa, speaker or hearer will not use awakmu or koen. they will choose other second singular pronouns like sampeyan or peyan. this situation shows that age becomes important factor in using the isti’anatul hikmah the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions 290 second singular pronouns. third is sex. when speaker and hearer have different sex, those deixis are rarely used by them because it sounds rude. for example, if men speak to women, they will choose other deixis of persona like pean. in addition, awakmu and koen are used by them when they have close relationship, have similar age, and have same sex. in addition, there are other second singular pronouns which are usually used by speaker and hearer who have close relationship. they are panjenengan, njenengan, and sampeyan. those three second singular pronouns are used by them because of age which means that the age of speaker or hearer is older. although speaker and hearer have close relationship, they will choose one of them. this condition can be seen in conversation 2. in contrast, the second singular pronouns used when speaker and hearer have general relationship are panjenengan, njenengan or sampeyan. they are used to show their respect since they do not know each other well. those pronouns have different level. the first high level is panjenengan, the second is njenengan, and the third is sampeyan. consequently, the use of them does not only show the level of solidarity but also the height status of speaker and hearer. b. status or power status or power in this study is classified into two, involving low and high status. low status/power means that speaker has low status than hearer or vice versa. while, high status or power identifies that speaker has high status than hearer or vice versa. status or power here contains many aspects like wealthy, knowledge, work position, and others. when speaker has low status than hearer or vice versa, he or she will use panjenengan and njenengan. in daily communication, panjenengan is rarely used by them. it is only utilized in special occasion, for example when they meet special person like leader of religion and government. the use of panjenengan is affected by other factors like relationship that is close or general, and formal or informal situation. on the contrary, njenengan is used in daily communication when ones speak to general person who has high status like headmaster and teacher. besides, it is also persuaded by other factors such as general relationship and formal or informal situation. when speaker or hearer has high status, they will use sampeyan, pean, awakmu, and koen. in other word, when those second singular pronouns are used by them, it may show that speaker has high status than hearer or vice versa. c. formality formality relates to formal and informal situation. when speaker and hearer are in formal situation, they will use panjenengan, njenengan, peyan and sampeyan. those four second singular pronouns are chosen for formal situation and the use of them are influenced by some factors like status or power, age, and solidarity. the use of them is already explained in point a (solidarity) and b (status or power). in addition, when speaker and hearer are in informal situation, they will use njenengan, sampeyan, peyan, awak mu, and koen. the five second singular pronouns are used in informal situation because of some factors, like status or power, age, and solidarity. d. function the function contains referential and affective function scales. it relates to the content of information and affectiveness of utterance. this situation associates to highlow information content and low-high affective content. moreover, the dimension of function cannot be explained here since it refers to the content while the focus of this english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 291 study is on the use of deixis persona in daily communication. conclusion based on the explanation above, there are six deixis persona of singular second pronouns found, namely panjenengan, njenengan, sampeyan, peyan, awak mu, and koen. those six deixis persona of singular second pronouns are used in sidoarjo’s society in daily communication. in addition, there are three additional deixis persona of singular second pronouns which are used by people in sidoarjo, those are peno, ente, and koe. those three are seldom used by original people of sidoarjo. when sidoarjo’s society chooses deixis persona in a communication, there are three sociolinguistics’s dimensions which influence it, namely solidarity, power, and situation. when the speaker and hearer have close relationship, they will use pean, awakmu and koen; when they have general relationship, they will use panjenengan, njenengan, and sampeyan. then, if the speaker has low status than the hearer, he or she will use panjenengan and njenengan; in contrast, when the speaker has high status than the hearer, he or she will use sampeyan, peyan, awak mu, and koen. next, when a speaker and a hearer in a formal situation, they will use panjenengan, njenengan, and sampeyan; whereas when they are in informal situation, they will use njenengan, sampeyan, peyan, awak mu, and koen. references holmes, j. (1997). an introduction to sociolinguistics. new york: longman. kramsch, c. (2009). language and culture. oxford: oxford university press. mahsun. (2005). metode penelitian bahasa: tahapan strategi, metode, dan tekniknya. jakarta: pt. raja grafindo persada. mangga, s. (2013). telaah pronomina diri orang kedua tunggal dalam bahasa jepang perspektif linguistik antropologi in celah bahasa kumpulan analisis linguistik (221-229). yogyakarta: green publishing. nadar, f. x. (2006). pragmatik dan penelitian pragmatik. yogyakarta: graha ilmu. saldana, j. (2011). fundamentals of qualitative research-understanding qualitative research. new york: oxford university press. sudaryanto. (2015). metode dan aneka teknik analisis bahasa. yogyakarta: sanata dharma university press. yule, g. (2006). pragmatik. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar. isti’anatul hikmah the use of deixis persona of singular second pronouns in sidoarjo from the perspective of sociolinguistics’ dimensions 292 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 629 integrating online reading activity in a critical reading course: a course evaluation sri kusuma ningsih english education department, faculty of teacher training and pedagogy, university of muhammadiyah prof. dr. hamka, east jakarta, indonesia) email: sri_kusuma@uhamka.ac.id apa citation: ningsih, s. k. (2022). integrating online reading activity in a critical reading course: a course evaluation. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 629-636. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6285. received: 01-02-2022 accepted: 29-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction in the present day, readers can get information easily from digital sources. by accessing digital sources, people have some light benefits. they can enrich their knowledge and skills. most people use digital sources for their needs everywhere and every day. manalu (2019) explores the expectations of students in reading digital texts. it has been noticed from the study that the participants felt good reading digital texts. they enjoy reading digital texts because they are inspiring, informative, and in line with the way they are reading. a study by gilbert (2017) shows that language learners engage in characteristically different reading activities and techniques while reading web text and that digital literacy skills are required in conjunction with the development of traditional target language literacy skills. online reading for students offers advantages in improving their understanding, and the availability of e-books promotes better reading habits and enhances motivation. huang (2013) examines the expectations of students about an e-book reading program. the findings indicate that students received positive feedback on the program's strategy resources and learning effects. they pointed out the ability of e-books to promote better reading habits and motivation. they also viewed ebooks as more affordable, portable, and environmentally friendly than print-based texts. additionally, ciampa (2012) explores and investigates the effect on reading motivation and listening comprehension of online e-books among six grade 1 students aged seven from ontario, canada. the study also indicates that, after using the online e-book reading program, all participants improved their understanding scores from pretest to post-test, enjoyed the online reading experience, and regularly read the online e-books at home during their free time. then, yeh, hung, and chiang (2017) analyze how students use annotations online during their reading processes and how such usage can contribute to their progress. the finding shows that the students strengthened their reading comprehension after the intervention. previous researcher shows that students of all ages and levels of experience generally prefer online textbooks to paper (lin, 2019). for example, aldaihani et al. (2015) analyze english programs taught at the college of technology studies (cts), the public authority for applied education and training (paaet) in kuwait. the study found that the participants consider the english program effective in improving their english proficiency. however, they also pointed to some inadequacies that appear to be related to the programs. abstract: advancement of information and communication technology (ict) has promoted changes on students’ reading behavior; from conventional reading and online reading. in the current study, online reading activity was integrated in a critical reading course in an english department of a private university. in the course, fifty-eight efl students were exposed with paper-based reading and online reading. after eight week, an evaluation was performed to the course. all participating students were surveyed and twelve of whom were interviewed. the quantitative data from the survey were analysed using rasch model while thematic analysis was performed to the qualitative data. findings showed students’ preference to online reading activity than paper-based reading, particularly for those who were already familiar with electronic reading devices. online reading was perceived to provide students with flexibility while reading and helped them navigate the reading sections at their ease. small screen size and lights from the screen appeared to issue students’ eye irritation. recommendation thus was offered particularly regarding further curriculum development that integrate online reading activity in a reading course. keywords: online reading activity; reading course evaluation. sri kusuma ningsih integrating online reading activity in a critical reading course: a course evaluation 630 examination of previous studies as discussed above has presented two critical issues, convenient sample size and students' perceptions of using digital text for more specific language learning. a study by ciampa (2012) states that it would be better if the sample used was larger and varied and checked the use of online e-books for early readers. also, manalu (2019) states that to make generalizations clearer, the research must include a greater number of participants from different educational institutions. examination of previous studies, as discussed previously, has presented two critical issues, convenient sample size and students' perceptions of using digital text for more specific language learning. a study by ciampa (2012) states that it would be better if the sample used is larger and also varied and check the use of online e-books for early readers. students need to improve their skills alongside the advancement of technology in all fields, including learning. in this era, reading and learning activity is very easy to do with the many technologies that promote and are readily available to enhance students' reading skills. moreover, hazaea and alzubi (2016) said that the practices of efl reading can be changed by using mobiles. mobile phones give students opportunities to practice reading independently and seek feedback. manalu (2019) indicates that advances in technology that continue to evolve trigger accelerating changes in almost every life. moreover, technology has changed the way we do things and is no exception in reading. technology makes knowledge readily available, and we can access information such as online news, wikipedia, articles, etc., with the internet. the digital text provides a modern reading experience and enables readers to communicate by displaying document types, fonts, and colours. the transformation of world technology in this era has led to increased use of online information in academic activities. this makes online reading become learning material and teaching material for most institutions (wu and chen, 2011). as taki and soleimani (2012) investigated online reading, digital text is one of the media used in online reading. digital text can also be interpreted as a paper-based test that is made into a digital text version that can be accessed through a technology device (huang, liaw, & lai, 2016). lin (2019) described digital text as the text specially designed to be used through a technological device with various features, enabling it to use mobile phones, help overcome students’ stress over financial issues and encourage them to get to know more about copyright issues. research conducted by experts on students' perceptions of online reading within the academic environment still causes debate because besides having a positive impact, online reading also gets a negative perception. pasaribu (2020) investigated 25 students’ responses to online reading classes. the data were collected from online records, reflections, and questionnaires. the results yield that online reading and tasks have promoted their autonomous learning and get in touch in meaningful learning encounters that they were able to plan, carry out, and evaluate their learning. despite the advantages and importance of online reading mentioned earlier, students expressed the opposite in the study of mizrachi and chou. the study of mizrachi (2014) investigated that students prefer printed text for longer and more extensive readings, whereas for fewer readings, they feel comfortable using both printed and digital text. this is because staring at the screen for too long when reading online will cause the eyes easier to fatigue and also causes a decrease in learning outcomes. despite the advantages and importance of online reading mentioned earlier, however, in the study of mizrachi and chou, students expressed the opposite. in the study of mizrachi (2014), investigated that students prefer printed text for longer and more extensive readings, whereas for fewer readings, they feel comfortable using both printed and digital text. this is because staring at the screen for too long when reading online will cause the eyes easier to fatigue and also causes a decrease in learning outcomes. the evaluation was needed to give the idea that the study was significant. the definition of evaluation has been explained in(murphy et al., (2018) study. there have been previous studies on a digital text that influence online reading can increase motivation and vocabulary of foreign languages (chen et al., 2013). the evaluation of language programs is a way of identifying practical values to be able to explain the unity of interventions of the developer intervention and inhibitory factors, the type of language, and the consequences that will occur. besides that, he said evaluation is different from measurement (collection of information about personal knowledge, expertise, and ability) and assessment (quantifiable measures of theoretical constructs), specifically in its context, intention, and fundamentally multi-methodological epistemology (norris, 2016). the latest advancement of the issue is the context of the research and evaluation of the online english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 631 reading understanding literacy system. the current study could be the potential for social-collaborative learning, where learners can display feedback from other users and access various perspectives and interpretations of the texts. in addition, students can improve their comprehension of the text and critical thinking skills by involving them in making annotations. there is plenty of research on online reading (e.g., aldaihani et al., 2015; huang, 2013). however, assessing the effectiveness of online reading activity in the course and the contributing factors to the students’ reading activity is rarely conducted in indonesia. the current study was aimed to evaluate a critical reading course in a private university in jakarta where an online reading activity was integrated into the course activity. the course evaluation included the effectiveness of online reading activity in the course, students’ behaviour toward online reading activity, and the contributing factors of such behaviour. thus, the study aims to address the following research questions: (1) how do students perceive the online reading activity integrated into the critical reading course? (2) what are the contributing factors influencing students’ online reading activity? this study focused on evaluating the effectiveness of an online reading activity implemented under the critical reading course activity at the english education department. the findings of the current study will contribute theoretically and practically. theoretical signification would support the theories on curriculum development, especially about evaluating online reading activity in a reading course. practically, the result of the study will have a beneficial insight for teachers to reconsider the strategy of teaching academic reading. method critical reading is a required course for all 2ndyear students. in this course, students will learn reading strategies to understand and retain information, the organization of reading passages, and strategies for learning and retaining vocabulary. building on these strategies, students will develop skills to analyse texts critically. in addition, students will practice and develop skills for paraphrasing and summarizing. a critical reading course has 14 meetings, and each meeting covers 4 credit hours or 200 minutes per week. during the first seven meetings, students learn conventionally, using printed texts during the course. for the rest of the seven meetings, they read using digital texts. they are allowed to use various online reading devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, computers, and others. in the first seven meetings of reading course, students needed to prepare for class by reading the book entitled “mindscapes: critical reading skills and strategies. in the class, they discussed a specific topic. for the rest of the seven meetings, students did online exercises. doing the online reading, the lecturer provided an account for each student to access the website. on the website, there were several course options. before starting online reading, the lecturer first gave directions. if students had not reached the minimum score, the lecturer would provide extra time so that students could try other exercises until they got a minimum score. the main aim of this study is to evaluate a critical reading course where an online reading activity was integrated into the course activity. particularly, it addressed two research questions: 1) how do students perceive the online reading activity integrated into the critical reading course? and 2) what factors influence students’ online reading activity? a mixed-methods design was employed to answer the research questions. the quantitative method with survey design and qualitative research with an interview were employed to explore students' perspectives about online reading activity and the contributing factors of such behaviour. the site under study was a private university in jakarta. the participants for this study consisted of english education department students (4 were male, 52 were female) enrolled in the critical reading course. two cr classes consist of 26 each class. to obtain the quantitative data regarding students’ perception of the effectiveness of online reading, a 20-items questionnaire was adapted from tseng (2010) in taiwan. some modifications were made to address the research question and for more clarity and precision. the questionnaire consists of three parts: demography information, opinions for the printed text version and the digital text (10 items), perception toward digital text (10 items). the questionnaire was developed online using google form. to gain an automated data collection and provides the easiness for further data analysis. the link will be distributed online through email and whatsapp. participants responded to the statement by choosing one out of the five options from strongly agree to disagree strongly. to examine the questionnaire’s reliability, it was tested using cronbach’s alpha test. perveen (2018) observed that the instrument had provided an appropriate reliability since the cronbach alpha value was greater than 0.60 (α = 0.83). sri kusuma ningsih integrating online reading activity in a critical reading course: a course evaluation 632 using a 20-item test, the questionnaire was separated into two dimensions (i.e., opinions for the printed text and digital text versions and perceptions towards digital text). the dimensions address students’ perception of the application of the online reading program, along with the individual items as follows: opinions for the printed text version (10 questions) and perceptions towards digital text (10 questions). both dimensions are coded as a (opinions for the printed and digital text versions) and b (perceptions towards digital text) to ease further data analysis. prior to actual data collection, there are 58 efl students and 20 items which are then measured using a rasch model. rasch model measurement through winsteps software 4.3.3 is used to determine the validity and reliability of the instrument as a whole. through its calibration, rasch model can transform the ordinal data (likertrating scale) into an interval data called “logit” (logarithm-odd units), which assesses the overall of the instrument for both item and person (bond & fox, 2015). table 1. display the reliability score based on the overall fit statistics of rasch model measurement. the quality of instrument statistics reported by a logit value for both person and item. table 1. instrument statistics mean reliability separation cronbach alpha person 0.26 0.33 0.70 0.43 item 0.00 0.95 4.23 as shown in table 1, statistically, the instruments show unreliable scores alongside with the cronbach  which is lower than 0.60 (cronbach’s  = .43). the score obtained indicating that the instrument possesses a poor reliability value (sumintono & widhiarso, 2014). the reliability values for the person and items show a great result for the item (0.95) but poor for the person (0.33). however, the reliability score for person and item indicates a great value as it possesses logit values of 0.70 and 4.23, respectively. the result suggests that the interaction between person and item is classified into a poor attribute (linacre, 2012; boone, staver, and yale, 2014). it is critical to note that poor attribution of instrument reliability was due to limited samples participating in the study and thus should be considered as limitation of the study. interview with students was conducted to collect the qualitative data for the study. a total of 12 students participated in the interview. the interview was a semi-structured where students were asked to respond four questions, such as the advantages reading online, the factors contributing to reading articles online. the interview was employed in the native bahasa indonesia to allow them express their thought freely without any language constraints. the data obtained through semi-structured interview was used to support quantitative data. the quantitative data collected from the questionnaire then will be analyzed into two different stages. first, the data are screened in microsoft excel to improve the quality of the data collected. second, the raw data are then tabulated and converted into logit (logarithm odd unit) through a rasch analysis using winsteps software 4.3.4 to maintain an equal interval within a linear scale (linacre, 2012). the purpose of using rasch analysis is to ascertain the external consistency on inventories, and evaluate the distribution and the quality of responses. in addition to the quantitative data analysis, qualitative data analysis was performed using a thematic analysis. results and discussion students’ perspective about online reading course item stratification the classification of items measured is 4.23 (rounded to 4), as informed in table 1. the four strata of the questionnaires’ items listed two broad groups: more difficult items to be considered and easier items to be considered (see table 2). the classification of each strata ranges from the most difficult item upon (item a4, lvi =1.16) to the easiest item to be agreed (item a10, lvi = -1.07). precisely, the item stratification process uses percentile values of 25, 50, 75, and 100. specifically, each item stratification is then classified by providing the logit value (lvi). the item logit scores were distributed very well and indicated that the items are capable of discriminating the individual response. table 2. item stratification category criteria item/lvi more difficult to be considered difficulty strata i lvi > 0.49 a4 (lvi = 1.16) b5 (lvi = 0.82) a7 (lvi = 0.70) a1 (lvi = 0.61) a8 (lvi = 0.55) difficulty strata ii 0.49 > lvi > 0.26 a3 (lvi = 0.49) a5 (lvi = 0.49) a2 (lvi = 0.34) a6 (lvi = 0.28) b2 (lvi = 0.28) easier to be english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 633 category criteria item/lvi considered difficulty strata v 0.26 > lvi > -0.74 b3 (lvi = 0.25) b9 (lvi = 0.02) b4 (lvi = -0.39) b1 (lvi = -0.66) b8 (lvi = -0.68) b10 (lvi = -0.68) difficulty strata vi lvi > -0.74 b6 (lvi = -0.75) b7 (lvi -0.80) a9 (lvi = -1.01) a10 (lvi =-1.07) as shown in table 2, four items considered easiest to be agreed b6 (lvi = -0.75), b7 (lvi = 0.80), a9 (lvi = -1.01), and a10 (lvi = -1.07). this implies that those four items are positively viewed refers to the effectiveness of an online reading course. in other words, few participants perceived that the online reading course was effective in promoting reading activity. they felt that ‘when doing the online test, the scroll bar helps me read the articles’ (item a9), ‘when doing the online test, the mouse helps me read the articles’ (item a10), ‘i think hyperlinks are helpful when i read on computer screens’ (item b6), and ‘i think the scroll bar is helpful when i read on computer screens’ (item b7) consider as the benefits of an online reading program. however, they also have a negative tendency toward five items considered difficult to agree on. those items are a8 (lvi = 0.55), a1 (lvi = 0.61), a7 (lvi = 0.70), b5 (lvi = 0.82), and a4 (lvi = 1.16). this is an important notion that online reading course raised issues regarding ‘in the online test, the question asking when which, and who are more difficult than other questions’ (item a7), ‘in the online test, the vocabulary question is the most difficult question’ (item a8), ‘paper-based test is more difficult to read than online test’ (item a1), ‘in the printed text test, the questions asking when, which, and who are more difficult than other questions’ (item a4), and ‘to me, there is no difference between reading on computer screens and reading on paper’ (item b5). students’ perceived benefits of attending online reading course findings of the current study showed that the online reading course through a computer-mediated offered several benefits for the students, including the completeness of its features, i.e., the use of scroll bars (a9, lvi = -1.01), mouse (a10, lvi = 1.07) and hyperlinks (b6, lvi = -0.75). such features allowed the students to navigate the texts easily, particularly when the article had a sufficient number of pages. it is also interesting but not surprising that the online reading tool's supportive features helped the students explore their reading. it should be noticed that students felt more convenience reading on a computer screen during the reading course than on their smartphone reading application. students’ perception of the instruction and online course despite the benefits offered by the online reading course, which are able to facilitate learning activities, perceptions towards the utilizing online reading course were still under expectation. it can be seen in table 3, which shows the overall perception. table 3. overall perception perception n % gender ages male female 20 – 22 23 25 positive 18 31 1 17 17 1 negative 40 69 5 35 28 12 table 3 shows that students had negative perceptions of the effectiveness of using online reading courses in learning. of the total 58 students who voluntarily participated in this study, there were 40 students possessed negative perceptions (69%, lvi < 0.47), and 18 students took possession of positive perceptions (31%, lvi > 0.41) on the effectiveness of the online reading course. in terms of gender, the majority of students who have positive perceptions are females aged 20-22 years (94%), with a total of 17 (94%). similarly, 35 female students (86%) figured out to hold negative perceptions with an age range of 20-22 years (70%). based on these results, it can be concluded that the online reading course is still doubtful regarding its effectiveness, along with students' perceptions that tended to be negative while the course offered numerous benefits. furthermore, findings revealed that students preferred conventional reading using paper to online, particularly when attending the reading test. students found paper-based reading easier to work on the test compared to online reading tests (a1, lvi = 0.61). the questions contained in text-based questions such as when, which, and who are also considered far easier to finish (a4, lvi = 1.16). however, conveniences are also presented by online-based reading learning, questions such as when which, and who is easier to answer compared to other forms of questions (a7, lvi = 0.70). also, vocabulary-themed questions are easier than other themed questions (a8, lvi = 0.55). responding to these matters, students believe there is no difference between reading courses based on printed text and online digital text on the computer (b5, lvi = 0.82). sri kusuma ningsih integrating online reading activity in a critical reading course: a course evaluation 634 factors contributing to students’ reading activity students’ computer literacy in the semi-structured interview question, students’ technological competence in operating online reading tool feaures such as scroll bar, cursor, and hyperlink made them easier to search for information in digital texts, especially when there is a very long article. some interviewees stated the following: “yes, when reading the digital text i use the scroll bar, cursors and hyperlinks. it’s very helpful when doing reading in digital text because it makes me easier doing an online reading.” (interviewee b) “yes, i use scroll bar, cursor and hyperlink when reading online as it really helps me to make it easier to read online.” (interviewee e) students’ interest and motivation all participants’ motivation and interest are positive. it may indicate that they enjoyed reading online because they found many advantages. the following interviewees clarify this: “firstly, the advantage of reading online, in my opinion, is easier to do anywhere and anytime. secondly, reading online helps us more easily understand the contents of the text because if we have difficulty, we can immediately look for the things we are disposed to know. then, it's easier to find a topic or articles that we consider reading” (interviewee c) “so, when i carry a lot of stuff and have a lack of time to read a book, i am still able to read a material given by a lecturer. i can read digital text through a smartphone. also, there is no need to bother visiting the library to read the material you want or recommended by lecturers because i can easily find and download it on google or other search engines to read online.” (interviewee d) “because there’s no time to print it out. it is also waste of paper.” (interviewee i) “reading an online article is easy and can be done anywhere. then, online articles are sometimes more interesting to read. if there were any difficult words to understand, we can directly look for the meaning online.” (interviewee k) challenges in reading online although students were observed to be benefitted from attending online reading programs, many reported that they encountered one critical challenge during the online reading activity. many students reported having health issues, particularly eye irritation caused by the screen light or make a notes on computer screens. “spending too much time reading online may cause headache and eyestrain” (interviewee b) “when doing an online reading, the technology devices we used automatically must be fully charged. sometimes when i read online, i don't realize that my device is off due to a low battery. then, the eyes become more easily exhausted and dizzy because staring at the screen for a long time period. and generally, constraints are found on our devices such as viruses, blanks, or suddenly freeze.” (interviewee d) “i find the difficulty at the time when reading on a computer screen or cellphone, because easy to feel sore eyes and runny when staring too long at the computer screen or cellphone” (interviewee h) “for some occasions, sometimes reading online will be difficult when you want to create notation on the article” (interviewee i) conclusion based on the findings and discussion, it can be concluded that there was no difference between the critical reading course based on paper-based reading and online reading. they found that online reading could assist them in reaching the flexibility of reading and searching articles, particularly for those already familiar with electronic reading devices. they found it helpful to be able to read better on a computer screen. however, participants tend to negatively perceive the effectiveness of online reading tests. they found it easier to do paper-based reading tests than online-based reading tests. moreover, the small screen size and lights on the screen appeared to issue students’ eye irritation. the research from this study has contributed to knowledge in the field of curriculum development that integrates online reading activity in a reading course. since the participants in this study were from a single educational institution, the findings could not be generalized to other populations outside the institution. future studies should involve a large number of participants from various educational institutions to generalize. acknowledgement i acknowledge the funding from the research and development body, university of muhammadiyah dr. hamka, jakarta, indonesia no. 345/f.03.07/2022 references aldaihani, h. a., shuqair, k. m., alotaibi, a. m., & alrabah, s. 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(2016). language program evaluation. modern language journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12307 pasaribu, t. a. (2020). challenging efl students to read: digital reader response tasks to foster learner autonomy. teaching english with technology, 20(2), 21–41. perveen, a. (2018). role of moocs in pakistani english teachers’ professional development. studies in self-access learning journal, 9, 33– 54. https://doi.org/10.37237/090104 sumintono, b., & widhiarso, w. (2014). aplikasi model rasch untuk penelitian ilmu-ilmu sosial (b. trim (2nd ed.). trim komunikata. taki, s., & soleimani, g. h. (2012). online reading strategy use and gender differences: the case of iranian efl learners. mediterranean journal of social sciences, 3(2), 173-184. tseng, m. (2010). factors that influence online reading: an investigation into efl students' perceptions. the reading marix, 10(1), 96-105. wu, m., & chen, s. (2011). graduate students' usage of and attitudes towards e-books: experiences from taiwan. program 45, 294-307. yeh, h., hung, h., and chiang, y. (2017). the use of online annotations in reading instruction and its impact on students' reading progress and processes. recall, 29(1), 22-38. sri kusuma ningsih integrating online reading activity in a critical reading course: a course evaluation 636 the impact of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning rosina fransisca j. lekawael universitas pattimura, ambon, indonesia e-mail: rosina_lekawael@yahoo.com apa citation: lekawael, r. f. j. (2017). the impact of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 255-262 received: 22-03-2017 accepted: 09-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: english language skills here mean the development of the main parts or elements of the language which include speaking, listening, reading, and writing. english language subject has different educational tools that are likely suited with it. smartphone and internet usage have actively influence daily life, even for children and adolescents. in learning activity, smartphone is a tool to help students connected to be online. a qualitative approach was pursued in this study. then, the data collection technique used in this study is a survey by using questionnaires. as result, the research shows that most students spend much time to access the social network, some students access internet for dictionary and games, and only a few students access internet for education purposes. in short, the students rather to use smartphone for other thing than education. therefore, english language learning should be focused on leading language teaching by using english resources from smartphone and internet, as media, which closed to students. by using smartphone and internet, it is expected that either teacher or students become more active and creative to explore their knowledge through media. pedagogically, there is an urgent need for teachers to implement smartphone-based language learning in order to engage students to be critics with material and its content. so, it enables students to build and enhance a technology awareness of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning in classroom. keywords: smartphone, internet, english language learning introduction most children and adolescents in indonesia are now actively using internet. internet is needed for them to study or just to communicate with families and their friends around the world. internet does provide a powerful genuine resource for the learning of english. as warschauuer (2001) reveals that internet may be said to enhance english language learning in accordance to communicative language teaching principles on meaningful interaction. this shows that internet has essential effect to english learning which is to activate communicative skill. in this case, students‟ roles are required to be more dominant on english language learning process to catch knowledge from various resources. smartphone and internet usage have influence human daily life, even for children and adolescents. the way people learn english has also shifted from the traditional classroom to the internet. many apps and website are available to learn and explore the language. with updating reason, teacher prepared materials (texts, audiovisual, video, pictures, etc.) to support students to learn english in classroom. so, many exercises are adopted as if they are authentic one in learning process. basically, english language skills consist of four main parts, including listening, reading, speaking, and writing. each language skill requires different educational tools that are likely suited with it, since the use of several technical tools has a significant effect https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.540 255 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee on the learning process of each area of the language (sharma, 2009). listening, as an input skill, is considered as a principal language skill. through listening, people can acquire a large portion of their education, their information, their ideas, and their understanding of the world. listening is defined as the process of identifying and understanding the speech of the speakers. it involves understanding the speaker‟s accent or pronunciation, speaker‟s grammar and vocabulary, and comprehension of meaning (saricoban, 1999). the listener should be capable of doing these four things at the same time. therefore, listening plays a vital role in student‟s language development. here, some tools that can be used as a media in teaching listening are whatsapp, apps and online sources on smartphones, podcasts, videos, etc. reading is the process of understanding a written text by learner. it is an important input skill which depends on the vocabulary and background knowledge of the learner in the second language (constantinescu, 2007). during the reading process, the english language learner can improve his vocabulary and terms, acquire new information and ideas, and enhance his real-world knowledge. learners can have access to a variety of different types of text on their phones, many of which are free or inexpensive. the learner can use an application for reading texts on kindle. this app allows readers to highlight words, find the word definitions and make their own meaning. the apps like quick reads and oxford bookworms provides the learner‟s with short, accessible texts. to cultivate the habit of extensive reading among learners, teachers can encourage them to visit these websites and explore various e-books available and which also develops both reading and digital literacy skills. speaking is one of output or productive skill. human communication can be taken place between the speaker and the listener if only they understand each other. both speaker and listener have a positive function to perform in simple terms. the speaker has to convert his message into spoken language, while the listener has to understand the language of the speaker. in this context, a smartphone is a blessing as it provides learners to get exposure to the language inside and outside the classroom. learners can listen to conversations which will influence their acquaintance with the language. speaking becomes a little easier with good exposure to the language he intends to learn. writing process can be very difficult for learners as they must do tasks like generating ideas, organization, and perfect use of grammar and vocabulary. learners should be motivated to access various writing apps and use them while writing. these following apps assist learners to write an essay, formal letter or even a note for a friend: 1. dictionary/thesaurus 2. note taking apps – helps the learner to capture ideas on the move and assist the learner to be a budding writer. 3. brainstorming and outlining apps – help the learner to produce a coherent piece of writing which requires the learner to organize their ideas and thoughts. 4. outlining apps – show down facilitates assessment. other brainstorming techniques include the use of „mind mapping‟ tools like mindnode. based on the explanation above, it is clear that smartphone and internet has important role in the teaching and learning of english. english language learning can be made more effective by the integration of smartphones; this potential device also ensures self-assessed language learning (sall). the self assessed language learning provides the learner with autonomy and encourages him/her to do things his/her way and reflect on the work critically and assume greater responsibility towards their own learning. here, the role of the teacher is 256 rosina fransisca j. lekawael the impact of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning to guide the learner to achieve the required objectives of the curriculum. furthermore, mcluhan (2012) states some advantages of online learning as follows: 1) access – the internet offers the possibility to experience english without the need of travel. even without the need of leaving home or bedroom. 2) flexibility – the internet allows for students to learn language whenever they want and wherever they want. 3) response – the internet offers the possibility of instant feedback to learners. this greatly enhances the learning experience. 4) repeatability – the learner can encounter the language in a repetitive fashion until mastery is achieved. 5) durability – the internet is 24/7. it never tires. it does not take coffee breaks. 6) modality – the internet is a multimodal learning tool. it stimulates in a rich sensory and cognitive and thus fertilizes language acquisition successfully. 7) specificity – the internet allows the language learner choose in both what and with who will be learned. learning can be tailored to the language learners‟ precise makeup and needs. 8) cost – the internet is a business model which due to economies of scale can offer services for pennies. it also offers to widen access through a pay as you can dynamic. in brief, internet allows students to share not only brief messages, but also create lengthy documents – thus facilitating collaborative writing (learning). besides, learners can share graphics, sounds and video. thus, the internet does help teacher in creating an environment where authentic and creative communication is integrated into all aspects of the course. method to address the problem above, it is needed to closely investigate phenomena of smartphone and internet usage that occurred in real context, such as english language learning process in classroom. this research did not intend to prove hypotheses or test a theory; rather it investigated phenomena in order to generate theory from data. therefore, a qualitative approach was pursued in this study. then, the data collection technique used in this study is a survey by using questionnaires. besides, the literature review on the impact of smartphone and internet on english language learning were also conducted. the questionnaires were distributed to 35 students around 12 to 20 years old graded from primary to secondary schools in ambon city. table 1. characteristics of the subjects characteristics categories total (n=35) (%) age (year) 12-14 11 (31.4) 15-18 14 (40) 18-20 10 (28.6) purpose of using smartphone and internet searching 10 (28.6) learning 8 (22.8) chatting 5 (14.3) game 9 (25.7) others 3 (8.6) time of using smartphone and internet per day (hours) ≤ 1 15 (42.8) 2-3 12 (34.3) ≥ 4 8(22.8) 257 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee results and discussion there are two main points highlighted in this section. first, general survey of statista was described related to the smartphone application and internet in english language learning. second, the questionnaire results to investigate what ways the students use smartphone and internet for personal and educational purposes and also the data on attitudes towards the use of smartphone and internet in english language learning. general survey of statista the use of smartphone and internet has given positive impact on the development of social networks worldwide based on statista survey results conducted on april 2016. those results are described below. the compilation of the most popular social networks reported by statista gives a clear picture that facebook has the greatest number of user in which over 1.590 million students actively use this social media. it holds 18% market share, 7% higher than its closest competitor, whatsapp. figure 1. most popular social network the figure above shows that there is predominantly apac favored platforms, with qq (9%), wechat (8%) and qzone (7%) all with over 600 million active students. we then see a cluster of predominantly western social media networks in tumblr (6%), instagram (4%), and twitter (4%). next, the following figure shows the popularity comparison between facebook, whatsapp, twitter, instagram, and wechat. it indicates that the popularity of twitter, facebook, whatsapp, wechat, instagram have raised from 2010 to 2016. but, the compilation of the most popular social networks reported by statista reveals that facebook has the highest popularity among these five social networks and leaves twitter far behind. 258 rosina fransisca j. lekawael the impact of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning figure 2. the fast growing social networks the questionnaire results to collect data, the researcher used two questionnaires. first is used to investigate what ways the students use smartphone and internet for personal and educational purposes. second takes data on attitudes towards smartphone and internet for english language learning. smartphone and internet usage for personal and educational purposes in 2014, only 11% of students used their smartphone for educational purposes, which are a stand-alone application solely used for the purpose of language learning. this increased very marginally to 14% in 2015, indicating that students still do not view their smartphone as a tool for educational use. encouragingly, the number of students that use a dictionary function on their smartphone increased from 17% in 2014 to 20% in 2015. the number of students who used their smartphone for games remained relatively unchanged from 2014 to 2015. in 2014, the number of students who used their smartphone for games was 25%, increasing slightly to 28% in 2015. the most dramatic change can be seen in students who use their smartphone for social networks. it is favored one. this includes facebook, messenger, path, instagram, and a variety of other applications. in 2014, the number of students who use social networks was 57%, but it increases to 60% in 2015. lastly, the number of students who use smartphone for other things was 85% in 2014 and increased to 87% in 2018. the following chart is a summary of the responses given by the students. figure 3. types of application used by students 259 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the result shows that most students spend much time to access social network and other, some students access internet for dictionary and games, and only a few students access internet for education purposes. in short, the students were rather to use smartphone for other thing than education. the media used by them in order to support their learning including making tasks, projects, or other assignments, especially in the development of english language skills. attitudes towards smartphone and internet for english language learning on the contrary, the result of the second questionnaire related to the students‟ attitude indicated different numbers. as we know, research in technology acceptance has shown that students‟ attitude toward a particular innovation is a predictor of the decision to adopt or reject that technology (davis, 1989). in 2014, 3% of students believed that using smartphone for the purpose of english language learning would be “harmful” or “not helpful”. in 2015, the percentage of students who have the same viewpoint decreased slightly to 5%. however, the percentage of students who held “neutral” attitudes towards this use of the technology differed more significantly with 25% of students in 2014 choosing this response as opposed to 20% in 2015. then, there are 43% students who felt helpful by the use of smartphone in 2014. this number increased to 45% in 2015. finally, the percentage of students who believed that smartphone would be “very helpful” in their language study increased from 24% in 2014 to 35% in 2015. the following chart provides a comparative summary of students‟ attitudes in 2014 and 2015. figure 4. students’ attitudes toward the use of smartphone and internet for english language learning the data proved that majority of students graded from primary to secondary school were demanding to smartphone and internet. the development of technology has influenced the students‟ attitude. therefore, teaching and learning processes are required to take into account students‟ aptitude and interests and to be based on principle of lifelong learning. besides, the environment around them plays an essential role here. the learning environment itself, as well as the activities selected by teachers, should encourage thinking processes such as problem-solving or critical thinking. in addition, teaching and learning processes need to encourage the students to apply their knowledge and experience to new situations. the result of this study must be viewed in light of its limitations. first, the students‟ behavior was self-reported; consequently, common method bias is a potential weakness. future researchers could 260 rosina fransisca j. lekawael the impact of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning correct for this bias by measuring smartphone and internet use behaviorally. second, since the measurement of the students‟ behavior was in average percentage, it is difficult to determine if the results would have been different if the percentage was one hundred. third, the sample size was relatively small. conclusion internet is a media to help teachers and students to get much materials, enrich teacher‟s pedagogy when selecting the material and methods in english learning, and engage the students in creating a new english learning experience. based on the result of the data analysis, most students spend much time to access the social network and other, some students access internet for dictionary and games, and only a few students access internet for education purposes. in short, the students were rather to use smartphone for other thing than education. english language learning should be focused on leading language teaching by using english resources from smartphone and internet, as media, which closed to students. by using smartphone and internet, it is expected that either teacher or students become more active and creative to explore their knowledge through media. pedagogically, there is an urgent need for teachers to implement smartphonebased language learning in order to engage students to be critics with material and its content. so, it enables students to build and enhance a technology awareness of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning in classroom. references constantinescu, a. i. (2007). using technology to assist in vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension. the internet tesl journal, xiii(2). retrieved from: http://iteslj.org/articles/ constantinescuvocabulary.html davis, f. (1989). perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. mis quarterly, 13(3), 319-340. ghose, a., goldfarb, a., & pil, h. s. (2010). how is the mobile internet different? search costs and local activities. wharton interactive media institute-marketing science institute. mcluhan, m. (2012). understanding media. new york: mcgraw-hill. park, b., & lee, k. c. (2011). the effect of students‟ characteristics and experiential factors on the compulsive usage of the smartphone. common in computer and information science, 151, 438-446. 261 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee ice cream there was an elderly couple who in their old age noticed that they were getting a lot more forgetful, so they decided to go to the doctor. the doctor told them that they should start writing things down so they don't forget. they went home and the old lady told her husband to get her a bowl of ice cream. "you might want to write it down," she said. the husband said, "no, i can remember that you want a bowl of ice cream." she then told her husband she wanted a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream. "write it down," she told him, and again he said, "no, no, i can remember: you want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream." then the old lady said she wants a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top. "write it down," she told her husband and again he said, "no, i got it. you want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top." so he goes to get the ice cream and spends an unusually long time in the kitchen, over 30 minutes. he comes out to his wife and hands her a plate of eggs and bacon. the old wife stares at the plate for a moment, then looks at her husband and asks, "where's the toast?" (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) 262 rosina fransisca j. lekawael the impact of smartphone and internet usage on english language learning correlation among semantics, syntaxes, pragmatics, and cognitive barriers towards the accuracy of geometry proofs of math students english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 309 correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs erna iftanti department of english education, faculty of teacher education, uin tulungagung; indonesia e-mail: erna.iftanti@iain-tulungagung.ac.id umy zahroh department of math education, faculty of teacher education, uin tulungagung; indonesia e-mail: umyzahroh@iain-tulungagung.ac.id musrikah department of math education, faculty of teacher education, uin tulungagung; indonesia e-mail: musrikahstainta@gmail.com apa citation: iftanti, e., zahroh, u., & musrikah. (2021). correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 309-322. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5711 received: 04-08-2021 accepted: 27-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 abstract: the purpose of this article is to discover the correlation among language elementssemantic, syntactic, pragmaticand cognitive barriers towards the accuracy of geometry proofs. this interdisciplinary study was carried out in response to the fact that students of math neither focus on mathematical procedures nor integrate the topics of math into the representation of mathematical concept which brings about the constraint of achieving the goal of learning math. this fact is resulted from either external or internal factors such as students’ background knowledge that is influenced by cognitive or communicative factors. thus, effective communication consisting of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic can be big barriers towards achieving learning goal. this study was conducted through a correlational study with 30 students of math department, iain tulungagung indonesia as the sample out of 120 populations. they were selected randomly based on their own availability and willingness to seriously take part in this interdisciplinary research. the instrument used was a set of achievement math test on triangle congruency. the findings of this study prove that there is a correlation and negative effect of semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards the accuracy of geometry proof. the result of this study is pedagogically implemented for tutors of math to consider either oral or written communicative barriers which inhibit the students’ learning success in math. further studies on efforts of minimizing language barriers in geometry proof accuracy is suggested to be conducted. keywords: communicative barriers; cognitive barriers; accuracy of geometry evidences. introduction to have mathematical communication skills is essential to achieve the learning goal. referring to rohid & rusmawati (2019), the skills cover students’ ability to (1) arrange and link their mathematical thinking through communication; (2) communicate their logical and clear mathematical thinking to their friends, teachers, and others; (3) analyze and assess mathematical thinking and strategies used by others; and (4) use mathematical language to express mathematical ideas correctly. such skills are important to explore and support their mathematical abilities (hafifah & bharata, 2018). however, rohid & rusmawati (2019) in their study found that only 1 out of 3 students of junior high school in indonesia is able to express mathematical ideas; understand, interpret and assess or respond to mathematical ideas; and use terms, notations, and symbols to present mathematical ideas. in indonesian context, students’ mathematical skills need to be improved. another study (fauziyah & jupri, 2020l) ferret out that most students encounter problems in mathematical communication skills. there have been studies related to language and mathematical communication skills which cover three areas. the first is problems and challenges in teaching and learning mathematics. some studies revealed a not well established system of mathematic instruction (tanujaya, prahmana, & erna iftanti, umy zahroh, & musrikah correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs 310 mumu, 2017), low communication skills and mathematical representations (fauziyah & jupri, 2020), mathematical problem solving (martins & martinho, 2021), cognitive obstacles (herscovics, 2018), and misconceptions and other difficulties in syntactic knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and strategic knowledge (qian & lehman,2017). the second area of research in math is ways to promote students’ mathematical communication skills. studies ferret out that students’ mathematical communication ability can be promoted through project based learning with scaffolding (paruntu, sukestiyarno, & prasetyo, 2018), metacognitive based contextual learning (ahdhianto & santi, 2020), problem based learning (surya, syahputra, & juniati, 2018), core (connecting-organizingreflecting-extending) learning (yaniawati, indrawan, & setiawan, 2019), probing-prompting based on ethnomatematics learning (hartinah et.al. 2019), pisa with realistic learning (sari, 2019), and brain-based learning (bbl) approach with autograph (triana & zubainur, 2019). the third area is learners’ communication barrier. for example ofulue (2011) investigated communication barriers in long distance class. meanwhile, ozmen, akuzum, muhammed & selcuk (2016) studied communication problems between teachers and students’ parents. sbaragli et al.(2011) conducted a study on cognitive and epistemology barriers. bishop et al (2014) researched barriers and competence on integers. mallet (2012) studied the cognitive barriers on integral, and magajna (2013) conducted a study on cognitive obstacles of the learners with insufficient knowledge. meanwhile, nyikahadzoyi (2013) studied only on the learners’ cognitive problems. however, it is almost hardly found a study concerning with correlation among those barriers with the accuracy of the learners’ geometry proof. thus, it is necessary to investigate the correlation between and among the barriers towards their accuracy of geometry proof. taking a closer look at the above-mentioned facts, it is significant to carry out a study on finding out the correlation between the skills of mathematical communication and problem solving in maths. there are three reasons underlining this interdisciplinary study. the first is language is considered as the key notion for the understanding of the complexity of math (planas,2018). he further explains that language is a shifting resource for the communication of tensions which consider languages of learners and the creation of newer situations toward the production of meaning taken as mathematical. participants in mathematics lesson use their languages to communicate their mathematical thinking in the multilingual mathematics classroom. consequently, language is variably realized within the network of options produced and activated at the intersection of language system, the language of mathematics and the language of instruction. the second reason is regarding the importance of language in math. as proved by peng et. all. (2020) that the language use for retrieving mathematics knowledge may be more important for foundational mathematics skills. this in turn can further strengthen linguistic thought processes to perform more advanced mathematics tasks. the more complicated language and mathematics skills are associated with stronger relations between language and mathematics. furthermore, perez & alieto (2018) proved that the proficiency in the use of mother tongue has a very strong positive correlation with math achievement. an effective communication either between students and students or between students and teachers becomes underlying factor of learning success. this communication process involves semantic, syntaxes, and pragmatic factors (ongstad, 2006). the third is serious effort need to be given in order to reduce cognitive problems and thoughts which focus on helping the learners’ cognitive barriers (bishop et al., 2014). one of which is by discovering the correlation between barriers on mathematical communication skills and mathematical problem solving. this study is then intended to reveal what barrier which correlates to the learners’ learning failure to accurately accomplish the task and to know whether each barrier affected each other. method this research employed correlational study. the population of this study were 120 students of math education department of iain tulungagung, indonesia who learned euclid geometry. the material learned in this subject is geometry proof. the sample was selected randomly by asking those who were available and willing to take part seriously in this research. there were 30 students selected as sample who were not forced to get involved in this research because they were asked to do the test. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 311 the object of investigation in this present research was triangle congruency. this material needs to be comprehensively understood about axiom, theorem, definition, and their uses during the process of proving. this material did not only require cognitif competence, but the skills of constructing and arranging argumentative sentences appropriate to the context as well. thus, there was a complexity of competence namely cognitive and communicative competences which need to be achieved by the sample. those competences were used as the underlying basis to measure their competence to construct proof sentences. accordingly, the predictor variables of this research were semantic (x1), syntaxes (, x2), pragmatic (x3) and cognitive (x4) barriers. the dependent variable (y) is the accuracy of geometry proof. the instrument used to collect the data in this research was a set of achievement test which consisted of 4 questions asking about how to prove the accuracy of geometry. it was written in bahasa indonesiathe sample’s mother tongue. the test is divided into two types of questionpictured question and narrative questions. the first type comprised 2 questions which were equipped with pictures and known elements. the latter one consisted of two narrative test items without pictures. it was developed through the following steps: 1). arranging indicators and descriptor of test ítems; 2). developing test; 3) developing rubric for test validation; 4). conducting expert validation; 5). conducting try out test; 6). the test was used to collect data if they are valid and reliable; 7). the questions selected are the ones with the highest validity of the two types of questions; 8). if the questions are not valid and reliable yet, then the steps of test development are repeated. the validity of the instrument was tested using pearson correlation which showed that the sig. score is less than 0,05. meanwhile, its validity is done by taking a look at the scores of alpha cronbach’s which shows 0,848 showing its high reliability. the design of this research was as follows: the researchers 1). decided the materials of the research, namely triangle congruency; 2). arranged indicators and descriptors of the materials; 3) arranged indicators and descriptors of the constraints; 4). developed instrument and scoring rubric; 5). conducted expert validation; 6). revised draft of instrument based on the feedback given by the expert; 7). conducted try out test to students sharing common characteristics with the sample of the research; 8).conducted validity and reliability test; 9). selected test items which have high validity of both types of questions; 10). conducted test to the sample of the research; 11). did scoring and tabulating the score obtained from the sample of this research; 12). conducted test requirement and hypothesis; 13. drew conclusion from the result of hypothesis test findings and discussion this research is intended to see both the correlation between predictor and dependent variables and their effects predictively. the collected data were tested by using multi regression test and simple regression test for each predictor variable towards dependent variable (y = a  bx.). the result of simple regression test of semantic barrier ( ) towards geometry proof accuracy (y) this hypotheses testing is aimed at knowing whether the coefficient regression is significant or not. the hypothesis to be tested is whether there is significant effect of semantic barrier ( ) towards accuracy proof (y). table 1. correlation between semantic barrier and accuracy proof correlations accuracy proof semantic barrier pearson correlation accuracy proof 1.000 -.486 semantic barrier -.486 1.000 sig. (1-tailed) accuracy proof . .003 semantic barrier .003 . n accuracy proof 30 30 erna iftanti, umy zahroh, & musrikah correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs 312 correlations accuracy proof semantic barrier pearson correlation accuracy proof 1.000 -.486 semantic barrier -.486 1.000 sig. (1-tailed) accuracy proof . .003 semantic barrier .003 . n accuracy proof 30 30 semantic barrier 30 30 table 1 shows that coefficient correlation between semantic barrier and accuracy proof is 0,486 which means that there is negative correlation between the two variables. this correlation is defined as the higher the semantic barrier the weaker the accuracy proof. the score of r square as seen in table 11b. is 0,236. this number indicates that the semantic barrier contributes 23, 6% to the accuracy of arranging proof, and 76, 4 % is determined by the other factors. that percentage points out the contributing number of semantic competence in doing accuracy proof of geometry. the strength of geometry proof is partly dependent on the students’ semantic competence-the way defining and comprehending any math symbols employed in the test items. either students or teachers should then notice the importance of semantic knowledge and competence in producing accurate proof in math. this finding supports mimau et.al. (2019) who proved that syntactic awareness acts together with semantics in order to foster the use of context in word reading such as narrative math test item. table 2. correlation between semantic barrier and accuracy proof model summary model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .486a .236 .209 24.005 a. predictors: (constant), semantic barrier meanwhile, it is found that the score of sig is 0,007 and it is smaller than 0, 05. thus, it is feasible to be continued doing regression test in order to see how much semantic barrier towards accuracy proof can be predicted. in addition, the result of simple linier regression equation found is y = 67,813  0,643 x which indicates that the semantic barrier (x1) negatively affects the proof accuracy (y). this means that for every increase in the value of x by one unit, the value of y will decrease by 0, 643 units. the result of simple regression test of syntactic barrier (x2) towards geometry proof accuracy (y) the result of correlation test as seen in table 2a shows that the ccorrelation coefficient between semantic barriers and proof accuracy is 0.907. this indicates that there is a very strong correlation between syntactic barriers to the accuracy of evidence. a negative sign indicates a negative relationship, the higher the syntaxes obstacles, the weaker the proof produced. this indicates that syntax-related math is influential in learning math as proved by klibanoff et .al. (2006) that teachers' math-related talk was related significantly to the growth of preschoolers' mathematical knowledge. further study has indicated that algebraic systems can be taught using generalizations from written english syntax (ostler & bruckner, 2017) table 3. correlation between semantic barrier and the proof accuracy correlations accuracy proof syntaxes barrier english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 313 pearson correlation proof accuracy 1.000 -.907 syntaxes barrier -.907 1.000 sig. (1-tailed) proof accuracy . .000 syntaxes barrier .000 . n proof accuracy 30 30 syntaxes barrier 30 30 . table 4. the effect of semantic barrier towards the proof accuracy model summaryb model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .907a .823 .817 11.549 a. predictors: (constant), syntaxes barrier b. dependent variable: proof accuracy table 4 shows that the score of r square is 0,823. this coefficient of determination indicates that the syntactic constraints 82.3% contribute to produce the proof accuracy, while 17.7% was determined by other factors. thus, it can be said that the syntactic barriers have a strong influence to produce the correct geometry proof. mahfudy (2017) in his study revealed that students employ syntactic proof production type consisting of identifying and manipulating the statement or information in the question, translating the information in the question, choosing the relevant theorem, using formal mathematical symbol or notation in conducting the proof stage, using sketch, and making conclusion from every statement. this indicates that syntax correlate with the success or failure of the geometry proof. in addition, the result of anova test that the sig score is 0,000 and it is smaller than 0, 05. this demonstrates that the syntactic barrier is predicted to be significant towards the proof accuracy of geometry. table 5. the significance of anova testing on the effect of syntactic barriers towards proof accuracy anovab model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression 17381.346 1 17381.346 130.305 .000a residual 3734.909 28 133.390 total 21116.255 29 a. predictors: (constant), syntaxes barrier b. dependent variable: proof accuracy so, it can be predicted that syntactic barriers (x2) negatively affect the accuracy of proof (y). moreover, it can be stated that for each increase in the score of x by one unit, the score of y will decrease by 0.961 units. based on the score of a and b obtained, the regression equation can be written y = 91.559 0.961x. the regression coefficient is minus. then it can be predicted that the syntactic barriers (x2) negatively affect the accuracy of proof (y). furthermore, it can be stated that for each increase in the score of x by one unit, then the score of y will decrease by 0.961 units. table 6. the predictive effect of syntactic barrier towards proof accuracy coefficientsa model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b std. error beta 1 (constant) 91.559 4.707 19.451 .000 syntactic barrier -.961 .084 -.907 -11.415 .000 erna iftanti, umy zahroh, & musrikah correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs 314 coefficientsa model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b std. error beta 1 (constant) 91.559 4.707 19.451 .000 syntactic barrier -.961 .084 -.907 -11.415 .000 a. dependent variable: proof accuracy the result of simple regression test of pragmatic barrier ( ) towards geometry proving accuracy (y) pragmatic barrier is concerned with how to define meaning from context either problem or proving contexts. in this research, it was found that the coefficient correlation between pragmatic barrier and geometry proving accuracy arranged by math students is 0,745 (see table 16). this shows that there is a strong negative correlation between pragmatic barriers and geometry proof accuracy the higher the pragmatic barriers, the weaker the proof accuracy. table 7. correlation between pragmatic barrier and accuracy proof correlations proof accuracy hambatan pragmatic pearson correlation proof accuracy 1.000 -.745 pragmatic barriers -.745 1.000 sig. (1-tailed) proof accuracy . .000 pragmatic barriers .000 . n proof accuracy 30 30 pragmatic barriers 30 30 then, it was found that r square showing the strength of the effect of pragmatic barriers towards proof accuracy in geometry. table 7 shows that the score of coefficient determination coefficient is 0,555 which mean that the contribution of pragmatic barrier towards the accuracy of geometry proof is 55.5% and the rest 44, 5% is affected by the other factors. table 8. the effect of pragmatic barriers towards proof accuracy model summaryb model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .745a .555 .540 18.310 a. predictors: (constant), hambatan pragmatic b. dependent variable: proof accuracy meanwhile, the significance of its effect can be seen from the sig. score of anova testing and it was found that it is 0,000 (see table 7). since the sig. score is smaller than 0, 05, it can be sum up that there is significant effect of pragmatic barrier towards geometry accuracy proof. table 9. significance of anova testing on the effect of pragmatic barrier towards geometry accuracy proof anovab model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression 11728.723 1 11728.723 34.983 .000a residual 9387.532 28 335.269 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 315 total 21116.255 29 a. predictors: (constant), pragmatic barrier b. dependent variable: accuracy proof this can also be found that the predictive regression equation of pragmatic barriers towards geometry accuracy proof is y = 77,029 – 0,894x (see table 8). because the score of regression coefficient is minus (), it can be predicted that pragmatic barrier ( ) negatively influence the geometry accuracy proof (y). it can also be stated that each increase in the score of x by one unit, then the score of y will decrease by 0,894 units. table 8. regression equation on the effect of pragmatic barriers towards geometry accuracy proof coefficientsa model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b std. error beta 1 (constant) 77.029 6.578 11.709 .000 pragmatic barrier -.894 .151 -.745 -5.915 .000 a. dependent variable: proof accuracy the result of simple regression test of cognitive barrier (x4) towards geometry proving accuracy (y) this cognitive barrier refers to the one in understanding the content of the materials which covers understanding on definition, axiom, and theorem. the result of correlation test (see table 9) shows that the score of correlation coefficient between cognitive barrier and geometry accuracy proof is 0,881. this score indicate strong negative correlation between the two variables meaning that the higher the cognitive barrier the weaker the accuracy proof made. table 9. correlation between cognitive barrier and accuracy proof correlations proof accuracy cognitive barrier pearson correlation proof accuracy 1.000 -.881 cognitive barrier -.881 1.000 sig. (1-tailed) proof accuracy . .000 cognitive barrier .000 . n proof accuracy 30 30 cognitive barrier 30 30 meanwhile, the effect of cognitive barrier towards the geometry accuracy proof can be seen in table 10. the score of r square is 0,777 which means that its determination coefficient is 77, 7%. this can be noted that 77, 7% accuracy proof is affected by cognitive barrier and the rest 32, 3% is the other factors which might influence the learners’ geometry accuracy proof. noto et.al (2019) who studied about learning obstacles on transformation geometry found that the learning obstacles are related to cognitive factor such as applying the concept, visualizing, principle, understanding of the problem and how to prove. table 10. the effect of cognitive barrier towards geometry accuracy proof measures of association r r squared eta eta squared proof accuracy * cognitive barrier -.881 .777 .892 .795 then, whether such an affect is significant or not can be seen in table 11. from the table, it can be erna iftanti, umy zahroh, & musrikah correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs 316 found that the sig. score (.000) < 0, 05 which demonstrates that there is significant effect of cognitive barrier towards geometry accuracy proof. table 11. significance of anova testing on the effect of pragmatic of cognitive barriers towards geometry accuracy proof anovab model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression 16397.892 1 16397.892 97.309 .000a residual 4718.363 28 168.513 total 21116.255 29 a. predictors: (constant), cognitive barriers b. dependent variable: accuracy proof subsequently, to know how much the correlation between cognitive barrier and accuracy proof can be taken into a look at table 12 below. the table tells that the score of a = 93,051 and b = – 0,974. the common regression equation is y = a + bx. thus, on the basis of the result of count score, the regression equation is y = 93,051 – 0,974x. since the score of regression coefficient is minus (), then it can be predicted that cognitive barriers ( ) has negative influence towards accuracy proof (y). in addition, it can be sum up that each increase in the score of x by one unit, and then the score of y will decrease by 0,974 units table 12. regression equation on the effect of cognitive barriers towards geometry accuracy proof coefficients model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b std. error beta 1 (constant) 93.051 5.552 16.758 .000 hambatan cognitive -.974 .099 -.881 -9.865 .000 a. dependent variable: accuracy proof the result of multiple regression test: semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy proof this kind of test is done in order to if there is any effect of semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards geometry accuracy proof done by math students. the process of finding out the answer is started from looking at the scores of mean, deviation standard, correlation test, the effect, significant effect, and regression equation used to predict the accuracy of the answer when the learners encounter semantic, syntactic, pragmatism and cognitive barriers. table 13 indicates that the result of the descriptive statistic shows that the mean score of the accuracy proof is 43, 52 and its deviation standard is 26,984. this means indicates that the learners’ competence to do geometry proof is relatively low. table 13. descriptive statistic of barriers and accuracy proof descriptive statistics mean std. deviation n accuracy proof 43.52 26.984 30 semantic barrier 37.78 20.381 30 syntactic barrier 50.00 25.480 30 cognitive barrier 50.83 24.404 30 pragmatic barrier 37.50 22.505 30 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 317 meanwhile the mean score of semantic, syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic barriers are sequentially 37,78; 50,00; 50,83; 37,50 with each sequential deviation standard is 20,381; 25,480; 24,404; 22,505. this finding shows math students tend to experience obstacles in doing geometry proving as also revealed by noto et.al (2019). the biggest barriers are on cognitive and syntactic. then the correlation of each barrier toward accuracy proof can be seen table 14. there are some points that can be noticed from the table. the first, the correlation between accuracy proof and semantic barrier is found -0,486 indicating sufficient level of correlation. however, the negative correlation shows that the correlation between the two variables is opposing each other. this means that the higher the semantic barrier, the weaker the accuracy proof resulted by the learners. the second, the correlation between accuracy proof on geometry and syntactic barrier is -0.907. this score indicates strong negative correlation showing that the higher the syntactic obstacle the weaker the accuracy proof arranged by the learners. table 14. correlation between semantic, syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic barriers and accuracy proof correlations proof accuracy semantic barrier syntactic barrier cognitive barrier pragmatic barrier pearson correlation accuracy proof 1.000 -.486 -.907 -.881 -.745 semantic barrier -.486 1.000 .529 .512 .595 syntactic barrier -.907 .529 1.000 .858 .756 cognitive barrier -.881 .512 .858 1.000 .785 pragmatic barrier -.745 .595 .756 .785 1.000 sig. (1tailed) accuracy proof . .003 .000 .000 .000 semantic barrier .003 . .001 .002 .000 syntactic barrier .000 .001 . .000 .000 cognitive barrier .000 .002 .000 . .000 pragmatic barrier .000 .000 .000 .000 . n accuracy proof 30 30 30 30 30 semantic barrier 30 30 30 30 30 syntactic barrier 30 30 30 30 30 cognitive barrier 30 30 30 30 30 pragmatic barrier 30 30 30 30 30 the third, the correlation between accuracy proof and cognitive barrier is 0,881. this score indicates negative strong correlation between the two variables which means that the higher the cognitive barrier the weaker the accuracy proof resulted by the learners. the last is the correlation between the accuracy proof and pragmatic barrier. the result of the computation shows -0,745 which demonstrates negative strong correlation. this negative correlation means that the higher the pragmatic barrier encountered by the learners, the weaker the accuracy proof which can be performed by the learners. then to see how much effect of barriers towards geometry accuracy proof, table 15 tells that the score of r square is 0,864 which shows that the determination coefficient is 86, 4%. the score shows that the semantic, syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic barriers contribute 86, 4 % to do accuracy of proving arrangement. meanwhile, the rest 13, 6 % is determined by other factors as also proved by noto et.al (2019) that the use of language and mathematical notation are obstacle of preservice math teachers on transformation geometry table 15. the effect of semantic, syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic barriers towards geometry accuracy proof erna iftanti, umy zahroh, & musrikah correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs 318 then, to know if the score is significant or not, this can be seen from the result of anova testing which is reported in table 16 below. table 16. significant effect of semantic, syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic barriers towards geometry accuracy proof anovab model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression 18244.058 4 4561.015 39.700 .000a residual 2872.197 25 114.888 total 21116.255 29 a. predictors: (constant), semantic, syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic barriers b. dependent variable: accuracy proof the result of the computation of the significant effect shows that the score of sig. is 0, 00. it is smaller than 0,05 which indicates the predicted effect is significant and this can be made into a regression equation stating that there is correlation between predictor variables and the independent variable. the significance of the anova test can be used to test the feasibility of a regression model with the provisions that a good probability value to be used as a regression model is less than 0.05. thus, this regression model is very feasible to be used in predicting the proof accuracy. subsequently, table 17 demonstrates that constant values is 95, 126 and the coefficients for each independent variable are x1 (semantic barriers), x2 (syntactic barriers), x3 (pragmatic barriers), x4 (cognitive barriers) respectively 0.42; 0,608; -0,038; -0,421. so that, the form of the regression equation is y = a1x1 + a2x2 + a3x3 +a4x4 + c y = 0,42 x1 – 0,608 x2 – 0,038 x3 – 0,0421 x4 + 95,126 these equations indicate that for each increase in the value of x1 by one unit and the value of the other x variables do not change, and then the value of y will increase 0.42 units. for each increase in the value of x2 by one unit and the value of the x other variables do not change, then the value of y will decrease by 0.608 units. then, for each increase in the value of x3 by one unit and the value of the other x variables do not change, then the value of y will decrease by 0.038 units. table 17. regression equation on the effect of semantic, syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic barriers towards geometry accuracy proof coefficientsa model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. 95% confidence interval for b correlations co linearity statistics b std. error beta lower bound upper bound zeroorder partial part toleranc e vif 1 (constant) 95.126 4.990 19.062 .000 84.848 105.404 semantic barrier .042 .123 .031 .339 .738 -.212 .295 -.486 .068 .025 .631 1.584 syntactic barrier -.608 .159 -.574 -3.831 .001 -.934 -.281 -.907 -.608 -.283 .243 4.122 cognitive barrier -.421 .174 -.381 -2.425 .023 -.778 -.063 -.881 -.436 -.179 .221 4.527 model summaryb model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate change statistics durbinwatson r square change f change df1 df2 sig. f change 1 .930a .864 .842 10.719 .864 39.700 4 25 .000 2.480 a. predictors: (constant), pragmatic barrier, semantic barrier, syntactic barrier, cognitive barrier b. dependent variable: proof accuracy english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 319 pragmatic inhibitions -.038 .156 -.031 -.240 .812 -.360 .285 -.745 -.048 -.018 .319 3.131 a. dependent variable: keewatin butte in addition, for each increase in the value of x4 by one unit and the value of the other x variable do not change, then the value of y will decrease by 0.421 units. this shows that the increasing barrier of syntactic, pragmatic and cognitive can result in the weakness of the result of geometry proof accuracy. however, the semantic barrier does not correlate to the accuracy proof. conclusion this study proves some important notes on the correlation between the semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers and the geometry accuracy proof. the first, the all four barriers have correlation and a significant negative effect with the accuracy of the geometrical proof constructed by students. however, all types of obstacles correlate and significantly influence the accuracy of the evidence when they are tested individually. the second, the average proof accuracy produced by math students is still in the poor category. meanwhile, the average successive barriers are respectively cognitive, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic barriers. the correlation between the semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers with the geometry proof accuracy is sequentially arranged from the strongest one into correlation between syntactic, cognitive, semantic, and pragmatic barriers to the proof accuracy. subsequently, the amount of effect of the barriers can be explained that: a) semantic barrier contributes to the proof accuracy for 23,6% with the regression equation y = 67,813  0,643 x; b) the syntactic barrier contributes to the proof accuracy for 82.3% with the regression equation can be predicted in the form of equation y = 91.559 0.961x; c) the pragmatic obstacles give effect of 55.5% with the regression equation y = 77.029 0.894x; d) the cognitive barriers have an effect of 77.7% with the regression equation is y = 93,051 0,974x; e) the all four barrier simultaneously give an effect of 84.2% with the regression equation can be predicted in the form of the equation y = 0.42 x1 0.608 x2 0.038 x3 0.0421 x4 + 95.122. accordingly, the result of this study can be pedagogically implemented that math lecturers should consider some possible linguistic barriers which might inhibit the students’ achievement in doing geometry accuracy proof. they should provide their students with correct instructional planning and activities either cognitively or linguistically. further researchers are suggested to do research on finding out the best way of helping the students proving geometry accurately. acknowledgement this paper and research behind it was financially supported by research grant under dipa iain tulungagung year 2019. we thank the rector, prof. dr. maftukhin, m.ag. and lp2m, a research and community service chamber of iain tulungagung that greatly provided financial assistance to carry out this research. references ahdhianto, e., & santi, n. n. 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(2011). epistemological and didactic obstacles: the influence of teachers' beliefs on the conceptual education of students. mediterranean journal for research in mathematics education, 10, 61-102. available at http://repository.supsi.ch/id/eprint/3384 surya, e., syahputra, e., & juniati, n. (2018). effect of problem based learning toward mathematical https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0012-1649.42.1.59 https://doi.org/10.31764/jtam.v1i1.101 http://repository.supsi.ch/id/eprint/3384 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 321 communication ability and self-regulated learning. journal of education and practice, 9(6), 14-23. tanujaya, b., prahmana, r., & mumu, j. (2017). mathematics instruction, problems, challenges, and opportunities: a case study in manokwari regency, indonesia. triana, m., & zubainur, c. m. (2019). students' mathematical communication ability through the brain-based learning approach using autograph. journal of research and advances in mathematics education, 4(1), 1-10. yaniawati, r. p., indrawan, r., & setiawan, g. (2019). core model on improving mathematical communication and connection, analysis of students' mathematical disposition. international journal of instruction, 12(4), 639-654. erna iftanti, umy zahroh, & musrikah correlation among semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cognitive barriers towards accuracy geometry proofs 322 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 749 developing instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts for the tenth grade students rita inderawati english education study program, universitas sriwijaya email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id sri susanti (corressponding author) english education study program, universitas sriwijaya email: srisusanti300182@yahoo.co.id nurhayati indonesian education study program, universitas sriwijaya email: nurhayati@fkip.unsri.ac.id margaretha dinar sitinjak english education study program, universitas sriwijaya email: margarethadinar@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: inderawati, r., susanti, s., nurhayati., & sitinjak, m. d. (2022). developing instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts for the tenth grade students. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 749-760. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6431. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 27-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction reading is one of the four major skills considered as the most important in learning english (carrel & eskey, 1998). it means students in learning english should master reading. the y will get many kinds of information needed in order to help them in acquiring knowledge. students become literate, knowledgeable, and capable graduate that can give contribution to the national development (tabroni, irpani, ahmadiah, agusta, girivirya, & ichsan, 2021; reddy, sharma, chaudhary, 2021). students can obtain and increase their knowledge. if they have knowledge, they can support the national development. mustafa (2012) also states that reading is the postern to the knowledge which could lead indonesian societies become knowledgeable people and expectedly could reach high standard of welfare and resolve prosperity problem of indonesian people. abstract: the purposes of this study was to find out the validity, practicality, and potential effect of the developed instructional reading materials using siti zubaidah narrative lyrics as a local culture-based narrative texts from south sumatra. the method of the research used development study. the subjects of the study were tenth grade students whose instructional reading level was level four. the procedure of the study consisted of three stages: analysis, design, evaluation and revision. in the first stage, instructional, students’ reading level, and their reading needs were analyzed. the data collected by using questionnaire and test. the result of the analyses became the basis of product development. texts with comprehension questions were written. formative evaluation was conducted to see the validity, practicality, and potential effects of the product. the validity about the content and construct of the product was evaluated in expert review phase. the product was stated to be very highly valid (4.45). the practicality was evaluated in one-to-one and small group phases. the results showed that the product was very highly practical since the average score in both phases were 4.64 and 4.79 respectively. field test phase aimed to evaluate the potential effect of the product. after being tried-out in the field test as 93.3% of the students achieved the minimum mastery criterion which was 68. it meant that this product had a very high potential effect. in conclusion, the developed product was potentially effective to be applied for the tenth grade students. keywords: development research; local culture; narrative texts. rita inderawati, sri susanti, nurhayati, & margaretha dinar sitinjak developing instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts for the tenth grade students 750 reading can be defined as a constructing process or meaning developing from text which is printed out (clinton, 2019; pellicer-sánchez, tragant, conklin, rodgers, serrano, & llanes, 2020; støle, mangen & schwippert, 2020; singh & alexander, 2022; duke, ward, & pearson, 2021; duke & cartwright, 2021; hooven & tunmer, 2021; magnusson, 2022). furthermore, reading comprehension is not an easy process. readers need to hold the information in working memory long enough for the information to be more extensively processed (mackey, 2022). similarly, in’nami, hijikata, & koizumi (2021) also defines reading as a process of constructing meaning b y coordinating number of complex processes that include word reading, word and world knowledge, and fluency. relevant to this, moura, nascimento, & ferreira (2021) states that the changes, events, relationships, and effects that we are experiencing (trans)form our forms of sociability and bases of psyche. it needs an interactive process in constructing the meaning (heuer & rolfs, 2021). it is supported by smith, snow, serry, & hammond (2021) who said that readers with lower background knowledge appear to benefit more from text with high cohesion, while weaker readers were able to compensate somewhat for their relatively weak reading skills in the context of a high degree of background knowledge. the results of some studies showed the facts that reading comprehension is an issue in indonesia. for example, internationally, according to the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) in 2013, the mean score of the reading literacy in indonesia was still low. it was 396, while the mean score for the overall countries participating was 496. the mean score was dropped six points and the rank was drop seven level from the previous oecd in 2010. e v e n t h o u gh t h e t e s t was in indonesian language, l e t a l o n e in english . i n p i s a ( program for international student assessment) 2 0 1 2 w hich is an assessment that allows educational performances to be examined on common measure across countries, t h e r e w e r e 6 5 c o u n t r i e s p a r t i c i p a t i n g . i r o n i c a l l y indonesia was in the second lowest position. kareni (2016) also found that students of man 1 palembang got difficulty difficulties in comprehending text. based on the data evaluation, it was known that 50 % of the total students got the lowest score, under the criteria of kkm of 75. those students did not fully understand what was being asked since they were not capable of differentiating between the natures of different types of reading comprehension questions. these difficulties were influenced by their weaknesses in mastering a wide range of vocabulary and sentence structures. even, shehu (2015) also found that there were four reasons why students get difficulties in reading comprehension. firstly, the students found new words as great obstacles to comprehend text. secondly, they often complained to the fact that they couldn’t recall the information they just read. next, students read a little or nothing. it is happened when students faced great obstacles in comprehending a written text. they failed to decode a text and analyze its meaning. finally, the students argued that some texts were easy to be understood while others were very difficult. dealing with curriculum 2013, curriculum 2013 requires the teaching and learning process at educational institutions should be held interactively, inspirational, fun, challenging, and can motivate the students to be active, give them chance to be creative, independent based on their talent, wish, and psychology development (government regulation no. 23/ 2013 article 19). in school, teachers play important roles in teaching and learning process. they are the base foundation with multi-tasking. as stated by aktekin & celebi (2020), weisberger, grinshtain, & blau (2021) there are six roles of teachers. one of them was as a resource developer. in relation to this study, in order to be a resource developer, teachers can select the appropriate and interesting reading materials for her/his students or even develop their own material which match with their students’ interest. teachers need to make the teaching and learning activities fun and enjoyable. therefore, teacher as the agent of learning who has already known the core and basic competence of their teaching should be able to adapt and adopt the materials which fit on the need of teaching and learning process in the classroom (tomlinson, 2012). based on the government regulation no 23/2013 article 77a about national standard of education (snp), curriculum structure for educational institution must be based on the local culture and its potential aspects. the notion of inserting in teaching and learning english is that https://scholar.google.co.id/citations?user=3a3rcomaaaaj&hl=id&oi=sra https://scholar.google.co.id/citations?user=op2hmwkaaaaj&hl=id&oi=sra english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 751 culture is indivisible from language. culture and language are interconnected (hernandez, garayargandoña, lira, fuster-guillén, garay, & ocañafernandez, 2021). thus, language is the key component of culture, its development is influenced by culture, and the transmission of culture depends on language used. in 2013 curriculum, narrative text as stated in basic competence point 3.8, is one kind of genres that will be learnt at tenth grade of senior high school students. here in teaching narrative text, the writer applied a method of developing materials for this genre. the writers chose narrative text due to the finding of pancarini (2016) who found that narrative text can improve students’ reading comprehension of the tenth grade students in palembang and narrative text made the students very enthusiastic in learning. in teaching narrative, english teachers can fulfil the obligation to introduce the local culture/content from their own province particularly within the young generation as it is an attempt of preserving local culture and very important in the middle of this globalization era. as mckay (2003) claimed english teachers should not limit the materials only to the cultures of native english-speaking countries to get the english sense as an international language. meaning that they should allow for local culturebased in their teaching and learning process. by regarding the use of local culture in elt materials, these english teachers have given a very big support for their utilization. this process of transmitting local culture through elt materials is one of example of how to preserve our national identity (alwasilah, 2006). furthermore, the materials provided in the english textbook given by central government have already provided two reading narrative stories, one is from japan (story about issumboshi) and other is from west sumatera (malin kundang). however, those narrative stories actually do not reflect the south sumatera cultural background. therefore, english teachers who teach in south sumatera are supposed to include local culture-based narrative stories from south sumatera in their teaching and learning process. by including these, students learn b o t h english and their own culture. to include such kind of materials is not easy. there must be investigations dealing the local culture for the students’ needs. in other words, teachers must analyse whether the students need relevant materials before doing the material development (inderawati, et al., 2018; azizah, inderawati, & vianty, 2021; rhahima,et al., 2021; inderawati, petrus, eryansyah, & meilinda, 2021; tenridinanti, inderawati, & mirizon, 2022; noto, sofendi, inderawati, hartono, putri, 2022; inderawati, et al., 2022) some previous researchers have done the study dealing with developing local culturebased content teaching materials on reading comprehension. one of the previous studies was conducted by alakrash, edam, bustan, armnazi, enayat, & bustan (2021). they found that the use of indonesian folktales in translation as material for efl teaching at primary level in solo, indonesia, has benefit for language learning. second research was done by azizah, et al (2021). they developed an interesting instructional reading material by using local culture for her tour and travel study program students at vocational school in bangka. they used local culture from her hometown and the result of her observation showed that the developed reading material was valid, practical, and had good potential effect on students reading comprehension. next, wastuti, febrianto, & hanik (2021) developed their own text book materials for their fourth-grade students in klmapis barat. the findings of the study showed that the text book used for fourth-grade students about text book material based on local culture could be declared eligible to serve as learning materials. other study which also focused on product development were firstly conducted by elviana, inderawati, & mirizon, (2020) developed interactive multimedia for teaching descriptive texts based on palembang local culture. their findings of the study showed that those ten reading descriptive texts for tenth grade students about tourist destinations in palembang could be declared eligible to serve as learning materials. next, azizah, inderawati & vianty (2021). they developed an interesting instructional reading material by utilizing the local culture for her students at smkn 3 pangkalpinang, bangka belitung. the result of her observation showed that the developed reading material was valid, practical, and had good potential effect on students reading comprehension. in 2022, tenridinanti, et al. and irnansyah, mirizon, & petrus, conducted research on reading material development. the first study rita inderawati, sri susanti, nurhayati, & margaretha dinar sitinjak developing instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts for the tenth grade students 752 focused on climate change reading material and the second one used local culture as learning material. as teachers, the writers tried to develop reading materials with local culture-based to improve the students’ reading narrative texts by using appropriate reading materials. the reading materials however should be valid, practical, and had potential effect to the students’ achievement (inderawati, et al., 2018; azizah, et al., 2021; rhahima,et al., 2021; checaria, et al., 2021; septiandini, et al., 2022; irnansyah, et al., 2022). considering this, the writers developed materials with local culture-based from south sumatra. the local culturebased chosen was a story about siti zubaidah version of dulmuluk. it was actually in form of siti zubaidah lyrics which consisting 3822 lyrics written by abdullah munsyi in 1925. it was one of the potential of local-culture that supported with the establishment of regional and national development in facing the global challenges (governor south sumatera regulation no.38/2015) and needed to be preserved as a local culture (inderawati & nurhayati, 2017). they also put forward that siti zubaidah should be acknowledged as cultural heritage and should be introduced to the wide community as local culture from south sumatra. that is why as parts of revitalizing it, the students as young generation should be involved as they are the one who is going to share and tell it in the future. otherwise, it will stay virtually unknown by the next generation (nurhayati, subadiyono, & suhendi, 2014). in conclusions, the aim of this study was to develop instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative text for the tenth-grade students which was valid, practical, and had potential effect. method the development research proposed by akker (1999) which consisted of three phases (analysis, design, evaluation, and revision) was the method of this study. in analysis phase, instructional analysis and students’ needs analysis were conducted. informal reading assessment (jennings, caldwell, & lerner, 2006). in design phase, the developed reading materials with local-content based narrative text or tenth grade students was developed. at last, in evaluation and revision phase, the developed reading materials were evaluated and revised by using self-evaluation, expert review, one-toone evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test as what formative evaluation model proposed by tessmer (1993) was. in expert review phase, 3 experts evaluated the developed product (i.e.: expert of dulmuluk researcher, translator, and instructioal design). students who involved in evaluating the developed product were from sma negeri 1 sungai lilin. they were 3 students participating in one-to-one evaluation (1 student for each category of english proficiency level, i.e.: low, medium, and high english proficiency), 9 students participating in small group valuation (3 students for each category of english proficiency level, i.e.: low, medium, and high english proficiency), and 30 students of a real class participating in field test. questionnaires and reading comprehension test were used in determining the criteria of the product which were its validity, practicality, and potential effect. to determine the validity and practicality level of the product, the average score of the obtained scores from the three experts’ judgement through questionnaires (for validity) and from students through questionnaire (for practicality) was calculated next. the collected data were calculated by using percentage of the number of students who passed the minimum mastery criterion or kkm (68) to determine the potential effect of the product. after al l , the result of the percentage was interpreted to these criteria: (1) 0%-40% students were in very low category, (2) 41%-55% students were low category, (3) 56%-70% students were moderate category, (4) 71%-85% students were high category; and (5) 86%-100% students were very high category (universitas sriwijaya, 2012). results and discussion analysis phase instructional analysis the writer identified the indicators and l e a r n i n g objective of english for tenth grade students in even semester in this phase. therefore the 2013 curriculum which is applied in the school was the target of analysis. dealing with the developed instructional reading materials with local culture-based, the students were hoped to able to determine t h e social function a n d identify text structure, linguistic elements, and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 753 various meanings from the story of siti zubaidah version of dulmuluk. textbook used in classroom is another part of instructional analysis. the textbook used was given by central government. there were two narrative stories entitled issumboshi from japan and malin kundang from west sumatera. the result of readability with flesch kincaid grade level showed that the scores of those two text were 3.8 and 5.6. however, those two texts did not actually reflect the south sumatera cultural background. that was why the developed instructional reading materials with local culture-based from south sumatera could be used in teaching and learning narrative text at any schools in south sumatera. students’ needs analysis in this research, students’ needs analysis was conducted to obtain information about their needs in terms of reading skill. a questionnaire consisting of 15 close-ended questions were administered to 42 students. the results showed (1) students’ reading skill was poor (71%), (2) students w h o w e r e h a v i n g lack of of vocabulary knowledge (20%) experienced difficulty in reading and comprehending english texts, students with lack of pronunciation knowledge (20%), students who were lack of knowledge of types of text (23%), and even 37 % of students were lack of all options given, (3) students (69 %) were having a very poor knowledge about stories originally from south sumatera and they expected that reading materials containing stories from south sumatera were provided, and (4) student’ perception towards the reading activity varied from very unenjoyable to very enjoyable. they (43%) were really interested in reading narrative texts which were relevant to their social live. in other words, the developed learning material must be appropriate to their needs (azizah, et al., 2020; inderawati, et al., 2021; tenridinanti, et al., 2021; oktarina, inderawati, & petrus, 2022; noto, et al., 2022; chiceria, et al., 2022). the students’ reading level analysis to find out the students’ reading level was the second analysis. the students got jennings infromal reading assessment developed by dr. joyce which included reading texts at level 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. table 1. the distribution of students’ reading level text level reading stage frustrational (correct number = ≤4) instructional (correct number = 5-6) independent (correct number = 7-8) nos* % nos* % nos* % level 2 15 35.7 % 26 62.0 % 1 2.3% level 3 14 33.3 % 22 52.4% 6 14.3 % level 4 5 11.9 % 31 73.8 % 6 14.3 % level 5 29 69.1 % 12 28.6 % 1 2.3% text level reading stage frustrational (correct number = ≤6) instructional (correct number = 7-8) independent (correct number = 9-10) nos* % nos* % nos* % level 6 35 83.3 % 7 16.7% 0 0% *nos = number of students source: modified from jennings, caldwell, & lerner (2006) from the distribution of the reading level, there were 14.3 % of 35 students were already at independent stage for text in level 3 and 4, 73.8% students were at instructional stage for text in level 4. while students were at frustrational stage which were 69.1%, and 83.3% for text in level 5 and 6. since the students with the biggest percentage who belonged to instructional level was at level 4, it can be concluded that students’ reading level was at level 4. design phase writing the learning objectives which had been identified in the analysis phase was the first thing to do in this design phase. then reading siti zubaidah version of dulmuluk lyrics which consisted of 3822 lyrics. it was divided into six chapters of narrative story. the six stories then were translated into english and adapted into short and simple narrative texts as 2013 curriculum rita inderawati, sri susanti, nurhayati, & margaretha dinar sitinjak developing instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts for the tenth grade students 754 demanded. after that, online tool of flesh kincaid to check t h e readability levels of the developed narrative texts. the reading materials had to have text which was exactly matched with the students’ reading level as it should be. therefore there would be 2 texts which had to be 2 levels above students’ reading level and 2 texts which had to be 2 levels below students’ reading level. as the students’ reading level was at level 4, the readability levels of the stories were at level 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. the writers also constructed some questions as the warming-up activities to complete the reading materials before the actual reading phase. these materials were provided with some pictures and glossary to help students comprehending the texts. at least it could solve their problem of being lack of vocabulary and pronunciation knowledge. after the local culture-based narrative texts had been set well, the materials with an evaluation in the form of reading comprehension questions for each texts which were constructed in form short answer, true/false, and multiple choice were then completed by the writers. finally, some pictures were designed related to each part of the story to make the stories became more interesting (irnansyah, et al., 2022; checeria, et al., 2021; azizah et al., 2021; tenridinanti, et al., 2021). evaluation and revision phase self-evaluation the writers, in this phase, evaluated developed localcontent-based narrative texts by the writer. they read and checked first. then, some capitalization, misspellings, punctuation, and ungrammatical sentences were found. finally, they were improved. texts with comprehension questions were compiled into a file named prototype 1. therefore, lay-out was also the concern of evaluation. margin of paper was set into the standard margin. pictures were also added in line with the text experts review in this second phase, the experts review phase aimed to check the validity of the developed instructional reading materials. the experts checked the validity of the product by giving the five-scale questionnaire as the basis of evaluation. the first two experts reviewed content validity. one was a lecturer of bahasa indonesia study program whose expertise was dulmuluk researcher and other was lecturer of english education study program whose expertise was translation. after they reviewed the product, they stated that it was a valid product with some revisions. in term of t he content, there were four components reviewed, namely linguistics aspects, the appropriateness of contents with students’ needs, the accuracy, content, and exercises and evaluation. in the construct validity (instructional design) term, a math lecturer at universitas sriwijaya with high toefl score and expertise in instructional design reviewed the product. after reviewing it, he claimed that some revisions should be done to make it valid. in other words, the products was valid with revisions. prototype 1 of the developed product had been claimed valid in both content and product. based on five-level-classification of validity, it was showed that the average score content of developed reading materials was 4.21 which could be classified into very high validity. the construct validity of prototype 1 was in very high validity classification because its average score was 4.69. in addition to validity in particular aspects, the overall validity of the developed reading materials was also calculated. the total average score got from two aspects was 4.45. it can be concluded that the overall product had very high validity. the developed instructional reading materials with local culture-based was valid with very high validity. it is in line with the findings of tenridinanti, et al. (2021) that the developed reading materials would have high validate as the product had been revised and confirmed with the validator. it is also relevant to the findings of previous research (inderawati, et al., 2021; checeria, et al., 2022; septiandini, et al., 2022) one-to-one evaluation there were 3 students in one-to-one evaluation administered a questionnaire to determine the practicality of the product. from the total 15 items of the questionnaire, the average score from the three students’ scores was 4.6. it was at very high practicality level. in conclusion, the developed instructional reading materials with local cultureenglish review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 755 based narrative texts was not only practical, but also had a very high practicality level. small group evaluation small group phase involved nine students in which each three students corresponding to frustration, instructional, and independent readers. these students were not the same as those who were included in one-to-one phase. the nine students in small group evaluation had to read the prototype 2. after the two meetings were conducted, a questionnaire was administered to the students to find out the practicality of the developed instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts. from the result of questionnaire, it showed that practicality of the developed product was very high. the students responded that the story using simply structured sentences. those sentences also used familiar words so that they did not find any difficulties in comprehending the story. pictures and the proportion of the text were well designed. they had willingness in comprehending the story since they were really happy and enjoyed the story very much. in discussion the students also did not report any difficulty in comprehending the narrative texts. unfamiliar words added in glossary helped them very much in understanding the texts. in conclusion, the developed product was ready to be evaluated its potential effect in field test phase without any revision. field-test field test was conducted to know the potential effect of the developed product. in this phase, reading comprehension test was firstly tried out to other students from other school. the result was analyzed by using spss to check the validity. there were 40 items out of 50 items were valid and 10 items were invalid. those 40 questions would be used in the field test for checking the potential effect of developed product in the field phase. the writers also checked the percentage of each aspects of reading comprehension done by students in field test. from 30 students, there were 79 % students who were capable of answering questions in term of main idea, 77 % students in term of details, 85% students in term of inference, 91 % students in term of cause and effect, 93 % students in term of sequence, 82 % students in term of vocabulary, and 96 % students in term of reference. from the results of the students’ scores in pretest, there was 14 student (46.7%) who reached the minimum mastery criterion which was 68 and there were 16 other students (53.3%) who obtained score below the intended outcome score. while from the results of the students’ scores in posttest, there were 28 students (93.3%) obtained scores exactly or above 68 and 2 other students (6.7%) whose scores were below 68. from these results, therefore, it can be concluded that there was an improvement in students’ scores before and after using the developed instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts. in developing instructional reading materials, development research method was used. the procedure of this research consisted of three stages as analysis, design, evaluation, and revision as proposed by akker (1999). in this study, formative evaluation model proposed by tessmer (1993) was also used in the evaluation phase to improve the quality of intervention. as previously mentioned, there are three main criteria for quality of the intervention, i.e.: validity, practicality, and potential effect. in analysis procedure, there were three analyses that were conducted they were (1) instructional analysis, (2) students’ need analysis, and (3) students reading analysis. before the product developed, some analysis were conducted. instructional analysis was done to identify learning objectives as the basis of development. it was stated that curriculum structure of educational institution must be based on local culture and its potential asset (government south sumatra regulation no.38/2015). from the analysis, it was found that there were two narratives story in the textbook used in classroom given by central government entitled issumboshi from japan and malin kundang from west sumatera. the result of readability with flesch kincaid grade level showed that the scores of those two text were 3.8 and 5.6. even though those suited with students’ level readability in sma negeri 1 sungai lilin, those two texts did not actually reflect the south sumatra cultural background. next, there were some aspects adapted from dick, carey, & carey (2005) which were taken into consideration to obtain information about students’ needs. they were (1) their reading achievement; (2) their perception about the reading materials in their text book; (3) their barriers in rita inderawati, sri susanti, nurhayati, & margaretha dinar sitinjak developing instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts for the tenth grade students 756 reading comprehension; (4) their perception of the learning process; (5) their expectations on the developed reading materials; and (6) their expectations on the developed instructional media. in obtaining the information, there were some steps that were taken i.e. teachers‟ documentation, and a -15 itemsquestionnaire distributed. from the results of the needs analysis, the local culture-based narrative texts (about siti zubaidah version of dulmuluk originally from south sumatra were needed to be developed. the reading materials had to provide vocabulary knowledge, pronunciation, knowledge about narrative text, and some pictures to make the texts more interesting especially for those who were from out of south sumatra. in short, the usage of the developed instructional reading materials that fit the students’ need could improve their interest, motivation, and also reading achievement. the students did the reading test for the students’ reading level analysis, jennings informal reading assessment developed by dr. joyce which included reading texts at level 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. from the distribution of the reading level on table 9, it can be seen that the biggest percentage (73.8%) of students who were in the instructional level. it was at level 4. in conclusion, students’ reading level was at level 4. the second procedure was designing the developed product. there was only one step conducted in this design phase, paper-based design. the narrative text was made based on siti zubaidah version of dulmuluk which was consisted of 3822 lyrics. this narrative lyrics originally comes from south sumatra and needs to be shared and told in future (nurhayati, subadiyono, and suhendi, 2014). it is hoped by reading it, students could gain experience and new understanding about many things (inderawati and nurhayati, 2017). these lyrics into six chapters of story were narated. those were translated and adapted into short and simple narrative story texts as as what 2013 curriculum demanded. those chapter were checked their readability levels by using an online tool of flesh kincaid (i.e.:https//readability-score.com). after the narrative texts had been set well, the writers also completed the materials with an evaluation in the form of reading comprehension test. the reading comprehension test which intended to find out the potential effect of the developed product in terms of multiple choice questions which were distributed through 40 items of questions. after all of the reading materials had been completed along with its evaluation, some pictures were taken to support the story more interesting. last phase, it was formative evaluation by tessmer (1993) consisting of selfevaluation, oneto-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test was applied. the evaluation was intended to gain experts’ and students’ comments to revise and improve the quality of the product. it also functioned to know the validity (determined in expert review phase), practicality (determined in one-toone and small group evaluation phase), and potential effect of the product (determined in field test phase). in self-evaluation phase, the writers evaluated the developed instructional reading materials. from this self-evaluation, some misspellings and ungrammatical sentences were found. the validity of instructional reading materials the validity of the product was reviewed by three experts in two different aspects, i.e.: content (dulmuluk researcher and translator of english) and construct. the three experts had different reviewing and validating the product. in terms of content, the obtained average score was 4.21 belonged to “very high validity” category while for constructing, the average score obtained was 4.69. it was in “very high validity” category. in determining its overall validity, it used the average score of scores above from each aspect. it was known that the average score was 4.45. it belonged to “very high validity” category. therefore, it can be concluded that the developed instructional reading materials with local culture-based narrative texts for tenth grade was valid with “very high validity” category. in the expert reviewers’ comments and suggestions, there were some comments and suggestions that could be used as the improvement of this developed instructional reading materials. the practicality of instructional reading materials students in one-to-one evaluation and small group evaluation administered the practicality of the product. after studying narrative texts by using the developed product, students gave their judgment through a-20 items questionnaire in form of a likert-scale with score english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 757 ranging 1 to 5. students were also interviewed informally to obtain their comments on the developed product which their comments were also used as the basis for the revision. the average score from the three students’ scores was 4.64. it belonged to “very high practicality” level. in small group evaluation, the average score from the nine students’ scores was 4.79 which also belong in “very high” category of practicality. from both, one-to-one evaluation and small group evaluation, it can be concluded that the developed instructional reading materials was practical and at “very high practicality” level. it was actually in line with leow and neo (2014) who mentioned that their research had significant improvement when they found their students showed positive attitude change as they became more active and motivated in the learning process. the test results of their students showed the improvement of the students‟ learning achievement. in the informal interview, the students mentioned some weaknesses of the developed product. the first one was about the quantity of reading materials. there was revision to be made since one student thought, it was really needed for researcher to add more vocabulary in the glossary for each chapter of story. the second it was about the wording in evaluation so that the students could understand about the questions easily. last, there were some additional pictures to make the story more interesting especially for those who came from out of south sumatra. the result of one-to-one evaluation indicated that the developed product has a few glossary of vocabulary and the reading materials which make one of the students, the low level one, bored. it means that the student in the low level of english proficiency cannot digest too much reading passage. even though the texts given had been calculated based on the students reading level, it means it was suit with the students reading level. feeling boring could be caused by internal factor, such as the student was not in good condition. the potential effect of instructional reading materials the potential effect was administered in the field test (azizah, et al., 2021; rhahima, et al., 2021; inderawati, et al., 2018). after the product was conducted in three meetings, a developed reading comprehension test was given to the 30 students to know the potential effect of the product. this analysis was done by using percentage of the students‟ number who passed the minimum mastery criterion or kkm which was 68. as mentioned by farida, yani, & sigit (2013), instructional reading would be known effective or not after conducting an evaluation. from the results taken, it was shown that this developed product had ‘very high’ category. the results showed the improvement on students’ reading comprehension achievement. it was relevant to inderawati, et al., (2018) that after being taught and tested, the reading material had good potential effect to the students’ achievement. in conclusion, this developed materials with local culture-based narrative texts had potential effect. conclusion the results of study first, the developed reading materials with local cultured-based narrative texts was validated for its content and construct in which the validity for each was 4.21 and 4.69. the average score for validity was 4.45 implying the product was very highly valid. second, the developed reading materials with local culturedbased narrative texts was evaluated in one-to-one and small group evaluation. its practicality was 4.64 in one-to-one evaluation and 4.79 in small group evaluation which was at very high practicality level. finally after being tried-out, the developed reading materials with local culturedbased narrative texts had potential effect in field test. as the number of students achieving the intended outcome score was 93.9 %, it can be stated that the potential effect of the product was very high. based on the research result in the evaluation and revision phase, it could be confirmed that the reading material developed in this study met its validity, practicality, and potential effect on the students’ achievement. in addition, the product was relevant to the students’ reading level and the students’ content subjects was supported. hence, the conclusion was that the developed reading materials based on siti zubaidah lyric in this study can be carried out to senior high school students. since south sumatra is rich of its cultural assets, other 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(2021). development of advisor text book on rokat tase’ local wisdom for class iv elementary school. jurnal pendidikan dan pembelajaran sekolah dasar. 9(1). https://journal.trunojoyo.ac.id/widyagogik/article/ view/13638 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103861 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103861 https://www.mccaddogap.com/ojs/index.php/me/article/view/15 https://www.mccaddogap.com/ojs/index.php/me/article/view/15 http://www.cambridge.org/html https://scholar.google.co.id/citations?user=3a3rcomaaaaj&hl=id&oi=sra https://scholar.google.co.id/citations?user=op2hmwkaaaaj&hl=id&oi=sra https://journal.trunojoyo.ac.id/widyagogik/article/view/13638 https://journal.trunojoyo.ac.id/widyagogik/article/view/13638 full title of your paper here english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 655 the teachers’ perception about critical thinking skills in english language teaching methodologies moh. yamin english education and literature, universitas negeri surabaya, indonesia english department, universitas lambung mangkurat, banjarmasin, indonesia email: moh_yamin@ulm.ac.id slamet setiawan english education and literature, universitas negeri surabaya, indonesia email: slametsetiawan@unesa.ac.id syafi’ul anam english education and literature, universitas negeri surabaya, indonesia email: syafiul.anam@unesa.ac.id pratiwi retnaningdyah english education and literature, universitas negeri surabaya, indonesia email: pratiwiretnaningdyah@unesa.ac.id apa citation: yamin, m., setiawan, s., anam, s., & retnaningdyah, p. (2022). the teachers’ perception about critical thinking skills in english language teaching methodologies. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 655-666. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6302. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction in the post method in which teaching activity and the goal of learning concerning english should be based on the need and need analysis, it is very necessary to consider what the learning and teaching are for. english at present is different from english while it was in the past time; english today is more familiar and more well-known as lingua franca than english as foreign language. when english is called lingua franca, it indicates that every people in the world, not only native countries have been using english as the need because of communication. in lingua franca's perspective, although those speaking are not native, they are allowed to speak based on their dialect. it is stated that it is important to identify the goals of elt from different perspectives (hud, 2013; shatrova, 2014). in english viewed as a foreign language, those who speak should be able to imitate the native’s pronunciation. the way to pronounce, the way to speak, and the like should be able to be the reflection and imitation of the natives (başok, 2020). abstract: in the current situation in which all teachers are required to participate in contextual teaching fulfilling the world dynamics and students’ need in learning, it is important to follow the dynamic of contemporary elt methodologies. the teacher’s ability in reading, learning, interpreting, and implementing the current contemporary elt is the must; critical thinking skills are needed so that they can be the ones taking part in this study. critical thinking skills are not only viewed as the framework of thinking but also as the framework to increase teachers’ capacity in enlarging their views about contemporary elt methodologies. this study aimed at presenting the new perspectives concerning contemporary elt methodologies for non-english speaking countries through critical thinking. this research was conducted qualitatively in which the data collection was through distributing questionnaires to five lecturers aiming to ask for their perspectives about english language teaching methodologies through critical thinking. the analysis was content analysis. the findings stated that teacher’s knowledge about contemporary elt methodologies is needed as the basic knowledge; teachers’ motivation in learning the contemporary elt methodologies through critical thinking skills are strengthened; and teachers’ ability in identifying and analyzing the contemporary elt methodologies is sharpened through critical thinking skills. keywords: critical thinking; elt; teaching practice. moh. yamin, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah the teachers’ perception about critical thinking skills in english language teaching methodologies 656 in today's perspective, implementing this way of efl is impossible and it is time to move on to the way of lingua franca as a new perspective in enhancing contemporary elt methodology. almeida (2019) asserted that it is important to teach english through an appropriate pedagogy in which teachers should allow students to have ownership of it as well, but starting from a local perspective, avoiding, this way, bad feelings on the part of students. in the pursuit of an appropriate pedagogy to teach english, she proposes the focus on the nonnative speaker, since understanding that english is a world language, spoken by a great number of people, from different cultures, what has recreated this language in many aspects. that is why this language should not be only taught based on hegemonic cultures. therefore, the appropriate pedagogy should be based on the local context and need without neglecting the global context for communication. the history consideration to defend the importance of the new perspective in enhancing contemporary elt methodology is that today some terms have also been used to refer to the english language: english as a global language, english as an international language, world english, englishes, and english as a língua franca. there are also varieties, such as chinglish, espanglish, and singlish. these varieties reflect the spread of english around the world (bhowmik, 2015). this is the consideration why elt should be reconstructed because the present and future need to be able to be in line with the goal of language practice itself (velikaya, 2015). this article aims to enhance the new perspective concerning contemporary elt methodology for non-english speaking countries through critical thinking. in proposing a new perspective, it is started by discussing some research articles implementing elt for non-english speaking countries, analysing elt methodology implemented, and enhancing the perspective as the contemporary elt methodology. method this research was conducted qualitatively in which the data collection was through distributing questionnaires to the selected number of respondents. the respondents here are the five lecturers on behalf of english subject coming from different universities in indonesia, namely universitas merdeka pasuruan, universitas pendidikan mandalika, universitas muhammadiyah jember, universitas lambung mangkurat, and universitas islam malang. the data were from the phenomena the respondents had so that all data gotten were potential to develop and were rich of interpretation. because the data were phenomena from the respondents’ views, the data were described descriptively to get a clear interpretation and comprehension. all respondents were asked to deal with their perspectives of contemporary language english teaching methodologies applied in the classroom through critical thinking. the data collection was formulated in google form so that all respondents filled in their views digitally. the data obtained were displayed, tabulated, and coded manually (wicks, 2017) to answer the research problem posed. in manual coding, the data were defined, categorized, and grouped based on the items of coding. it was started from the definition of comtemporary english language teaching methodologies, identifying and analyzing the contemporary english language teaching methodologies in learning the contemporary english language teaching methodologies through critical thinking. every three items after coded were analyzed through content analysis (krippendorff, 2004) to get the whole description on how the lecturers have their perspectives dealing with contemporary language english teaching methodologies applied in the classroom through critical thinking. results and discussion results table 1. manual coding result no name of respondent lecturers' view about comtemporary english language teaching methodologies coding 1 respondent 1 contemporary english language teaching contains several new and exciting methods/ways of teaching and innovative classroom techniques it is the current teaching method english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 657 2 respondent 2 it talks a lot about english language teaching in terms of concept and practice it deals with teaching practice 3 respondent 3 collaborative, task-based, think pair share, problem based learning, project based learning 4 respondent 4 current comtemporary english language teaching methodologies are content and language integrated learning (clil), clt, task-based approach, project-based approach, collaborative learning, spaced learning, flipped classroom, self-learning, and gamification. they were shifting from the direct method, the grammar translation method, the audio lingual method, the structural approach, suggestopedia, total physical response, communicative language teaching (clt) and the silent way it is about the current teaching approaches 5 respondent 5 contemporary english language teaching methods are considered the modern ways of teaching english in the 4.0 era or it is common to say industrial revolution where technology plays important role in our daily activities including education. the example of contemporary teaching methods are collaborative learning, flipped classroom, and gamification it is the teaching approach that takes students participate in practice from the table 1, it says that every respondent has own view in defining contemporary english language teaching methodologies. first respondent calls it as the current teaching method; second respondent says it as the teaching practice; third respondent tells it as the current teaching approaches; and the fifth respondent defines it as the teaching approach in which the teachers should be able to involve the students in practice. it means that the definition of contemporary english language teaching from the five respondents state that contemporary english teaching methodologies are produced based on the needs to answer the need and interest. because language is the social fact, teaching language should be based on the strategy need contextually. what should be described from the five respondents is that contemporary english language teaching methodologies are the theoretical framework underpinning to see teaching english language based on the perspective and need. every perspective based on the need will be different although the keyword of contemporary english teaching methodologies is the same, namely trying to make the teaching language closer and closer to students as the target in the activities. the language is the social; fact in which teaching language should pay attention the students’ input and the like make teaching language methodology should be adaptive. in the other word, it is called contemporary that is responsive to the need in practice. teaching language is teaching students on how to use it in practice, not only teach them theoretically. it means that it is very necessary to understand the students’ lives in their activities. as a result, teaching language methodology should be in harmony with the students’ activity, students’ lives, students’ habit, and the like. it is expected that they like the language. the teaching approach stemming from their lives underpins the importance of language teaching methodology definition used in practice. table 2. manual coding result no name of respondent lecturers' views about critical thinking in learning the contemporary english language teaching methodologies coding moh. yamin, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah the teachers’ perception about critical thinking skills in english language teaching methodologies 658 1 respondent 1 it is important because if educators teach with a new way of teaching instead of traditional method and provide lessons in more proper scientific method of teaching, many problems including unemployment can be solved. all of this can be obtained by giving a strong pillar of education system. that is why contemporary teaching methods are essential to be applied critical thinking attends to open and widen the new perspectives in teaching approach 2 respondent 2 it is paramount because of creativity in developing certain method (needs analysis) it makes easy in implimenting the teaching approach needed based on the students' need and learning goal 3 respondent 3 it is very important for finding out and learning all elt methods that are familiar with the students' need it helps to explain the current needs for current teaching method 4 respondent 4 it is vastly important as critical thinking helps to reach the decision. taking for granted for the current method will make confused and easily influenced by unclear direction critical thinking is the keyword to decide the right teaching method for teaching method needed 5 respondent 5 critical thinking skill is indeed crucial in learning process, especially when a contemporary method is applied. it can be said because most of the learning outcome is a project which has closed relationship with students' daily live critical thinking answers the students' need in choosing the teaching method in the current daily live from table 2, learning contemporary english language teaching methodologies through critical thinking is helpful to open and widen the new perspectives in teaching approach; impliment the teaching approach needed based on the students' need and learning goal; explain the current needs for current teaching method; decide the right teaching method for teaching method needed; and answer the students' need in choosing the teaching method in the current daily live. there is a new paradigm saying that teaching english to students today should be able to follow the dynamics. therefore, teaching methodologies is the manifestation from the world development and human being advance. it is necessary to say that those who learn english language teaching methodologies through critical thinking are required to read beyond, think beyond, and act beyond the text. the existence of critical thinking in learning contemporary english language teaching methodologies according to the five respondents is the power that make easy in finding out variations of paradigm and this is good in enriching the knowledge of english language teaching methodologies. more knowledge they have dealing with english language teaching methodologies; they view that more critical in responding every problems or issues in english language teaching methodologies themselves. it means that critical thinking when related to learning english language teaching methodologies has the important role in sharpening the dynamic of english language teaching methodologies currently. therefore, critical thinking skills are the important element to facilitate the learning process that is very helpful in discussing contemporary english language teaching methodologies. through critical thinking skills used, learning language teaching methodologies is guided so that the goal is easily achieved. all respondents have the same perception about the importance of critical thinking skills that support the process of learning teaching methodologies contextual with the need today and future. every need needed to increase the power of teaching methodologies perspective should be based on the critical thinking skills in order to achieve the goal. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 659 table 3. manual coding result no name of respondent lecturers' views about critical thinking in identifying and analyzing the contemporary english language teaching methodologies coding 1 respondent 1 today, the scope of knowledge both in the field of science and technology has extremely increased, and the human beings’ capability to adapt to a new knowledge has also increased. hence, there is an tremendous need for creative as well as innovative mind to explore more to unrevealed area of different fields. to cope up with the modern world, adopting a new way is the only means to survive. thus, the learners must be taught in a manner to tackle the 21st c, that is technology-driven time that needs creative thinking for the progress of individuals, society, and nation as well. the learners should be introduced with new/modern teaching method and are served adequate knowledge, so they can build chances for themselves and others teaching method should be contextual, process-oriented, enhance students with new knowledge 2 respondent 2 reading is in very details all about the teaching methods the way of teaching is produced from reading alot 3 respondent 3 following the way how we should think critically will be easier to select the appropriate contemporary english language teaching to be implemented in classroom activity teaching method should be based on students' need to achieve targetted goal 4 respondent 4 critical thinking helps in identifying and analyzing the contemporary english language teaching methodologies through the basic step that is understanding. after understanding the method, it is followed by trying to reflect which one is suitable to apply, analyze, gain as much information. involving other people to the discussion should be conducted and finally deciding the method, having a commitment towards what to do mapping the steps in teaching is the embryo to determine the right teaching success based on the achieved goal 5 respondent 5 contemporary english teaching methods focus on students' activeness and creativity. most of the learning activities are based on collaborative learning where they learn how to solve a problem the current teaching methods trigger students to participate and involve in meaningful activity from the findings in table 3, it says that teaching method should be contextual, process-oriented, enhance students with new knowledge; the way of teaching is produced from reading alot; teaching method should be based on students' need to achieve targetted goal; and the current teaching methods trigger students to participate and involve in meaningful activity. all respondents hold that through critical thinking, it is important to read and interprete the comtemporary english language teaching beyond the text in order to find something new and different to enhance students with teaching strategy more effective and responsive. the ability to discuss and dig the meanings beyond the text should be had and livened so that there is dynamics and development in learning teaching methodologies. every study in teaching methodologies has the substance that should be moh. yamin, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah the teachers’ perception about critical thinking skills in english language teaching methodologies 660 used to enrich the knowledge of teaching methodologies. because change is necessity and natural, it is important to state that studying teaching methodologies needs to be planned well and implemented regularly as the part to increase the quality of teaching methodologies. there is change without paying attention to the need. critical thinking skills as the part inherent in identifying and analyzing teaching methodologies have the contribution in determining the achievement. the change of teaching approaches and designs actually brings new era in teaching english language. getting information and learning the new ones should be fought to answer the need. besides that, this is the barometer in monitoring every phase of change in teaching practices. principally, teaching methodologies in line with the present and future needs should be obtained. as a result, teaching practices that are based on the teachers’ knowledge and experiences add the new way of learning english language. discussion critical thinking skills responding to the text needs the capacity in analysing and critical thinking skills are needed to be able to conduct appear in table 1, 2, and 3. the existence of critical thinking in text play becomes the entry point in building the knowledge and enriching it. critical thinking is supposed as the framework of thinking based on self-capacity in which it works for logical reasoning. therefore, padmanabha (2018) viewed critical thinking as the ability to transfer knowledge learned from certain disciplines to other cognitive areas. it is connected with supporting suspicious thoughts along with developing individual thinking skills, such as logical reasoning and personal judgment. it means that it is based on the thinking order that is in line with the logical truth. because critical thinking is aimed to form the capacity in deep analysis, critical thinking skills are categorized to work for open analysis and how to open analysis, give new nuances, and colorize new perspectives. thorndahl and stentoft (2020) viewed critical thinking that involves the use of focused, self-regulatory judgment to assist with identification of a problem and its associated assumptions: clarifying and focusing the problem; analysing, understanding, and making inferences; inductive and deductive logic; and judging the validity and reliability of the assumptions and available data. what should be noted here is that critical thinking skills are the manifestation of protest toward a thing considered to be evaluated and gets some notes. according to atabaki, keshtiaray, and yarmohammadian (2015), critical thinking skills should be based on the capacity to find out the data. in critical thinking skills, each activity to find out should involve being interested in obtaining facts and being having a willingness to question. it means that critical thinking exists because of the existence of searching out and questioning. when searching out and questioning, the people are asked to be able to break down the facts and to give meanings to the facts. they need to show their inquiry to find out and they should have the responsibility to see and to evaluate every finding of the facts, give corrections and solutions to the problem found out and questioned. the principal one in critical thinking skills is a doubtful mentality in which people take different affairs with suspicion. by having suspicion, it guides them to open perspectives in giving evaluation and recommendation. as a result, these kinds of people can take the roles as those working for independence and bravery to take a critical role. elt by considering local needs the localities wisdom in which every student have their nature on learning language should be respected as table 1, 2, and 3 narrate according to the five respondents. all non-english speaking countries undergo different ways and treatments that should be faced by teachers when they are in the classroom with the students. commonly, nonenglish speaking countries are faced with the problem of teaching effectively to students because they are non-native, never get english since childhood, consider strange towards english, and other reasons. admittedly or not, it is not easy to teach english to non-english speaking countries by paying attention to the varieties of l1 background that can be the barriers to the success of elt itself. the interference of l1 to english learning can impede the goal of teaching-learning itself (debreli, 2016; hasanah & utami, 2020). non-english speaking countries in which the non-native englishspeaking teachers (nnets) attend in the classroom to teach should be faced with the challenge of whether their way of teaching is still effective to apply. the present need noticed for non-english english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 661 speaking countries is the importance to design the elt methodology that is applicable and contextual to the need. again, it should be highlighted that designing a contemporary elt methodology should be based on the local context, the effectiveness of teaching design, providing the teaching material needed for the students’ needs, and the like. therefore, illustrating the variety of teaching design for non-english speaking countries should be rich and enriched. there is no best teaching design and practice. however, every teaching design and practice can be modified based on the goal of teaching; and it is the effort that should be conducted by the teachers for non-english speaking countries (anderson, 2017). almeida (2019) and floris & renandya (2020) stated that the appropriate pedagogy to teach english should be a process of appropriation both local and global. the classroom should be an arena to discuss social reality with learners, seeking to provoke an intimacy with their social experience. therefore, teachers need to be familiar with what they propose to share with their students. this can also be done through a foreign language since we understand that education is a form of intervention in the world. as the non-native english-speaking teachers (nnets), they should grasp the idea that english is not the same anymore. to teach english should take into account the role of english in the world, but especially those who are the learners, their origins, their local perspectives. they need to humanize the teaching/learning process by being sensitive to our students, listening to them, supporting them, and making them progress. teaching english is to respect the idiosyncratic way in which non-native speaks english in non-natives’ mother tongue and their particular cultures that will influence the production and communication through english. it is because their mother tongue's grammatical and phonological structure probably will influence the production of the new language. teaching english to non-native englishspeaking students should consider their background and this is the main point to conduct. therefore, it is necessary to learn students as the source of learning for the teachers in preparing themselves to be good teachers. it means that they should be able to learn the students’ characteristics and this is the entry point in stating that there will be a new way of enhancing a new perspective in displaying contemporary elt methodology. livoreka (2019) stated that every student is unique. this uniqueness should be viewed as a way to know and find out the different ways of facing the students, especially those who are non-native. mackey, abbuhl, & gass (2012) stated that methods of learning should be facilitated because they have a contribution toward students’ achievement in learning. every method of learning that can allow students to learn independently in their surroundings will drive students to get comprehension quickly. they learn from the experience. learners who do the process of learning by trying to communicate what they did will change their way of thinking and acting. what they get from the experience will form the way of life what to do. therefore, learners in learning should be based on methods of learning that develop their skills to cooperate with others, can share with others, and togetherly solve the problem. the thing to highlight is that non-native students as a source of teaching for teachers become the entry point in conduct the adaptive and contextual elt methodology. it is impossible for non-native students to be able to learn, such as native students with speaking english well. teaching them should be started from the basic one concerning their background. a shift to another trend of elt, communicative language teaching (clt) aims to offer students real-life communication that tries to imitate the natural development of language learning. besides, in clt, communicative competence is the goal of language teaching. clt pays less attention to the explicit presentation of grammar instead; it allows students to convey the message in terms of its meaning communicatively (wiangsima & boonmoh, 2014). ahmad and rao (2013) conducted the research correlated to clt and the result revealed that it is proven to make the motivation for learning high. coherently, the study of chang (2011) also shown that clt can make english teaching effective and meaningful. it is also supported by winch (2019: 112) that clt helps the students to think critically. it means that the future need that should be conducted by the teachers for non-native students is giving them an opportunity in self-development in which they are facilitated based on the goal of teaching-learning. again, it should be noted that non-english speaking countries in which the learners learn english should be treated differently. moh. yamin, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah the teachers’ perception about critical thinking skills in english language teaching methodologies 662 the implementation of elt should be formulated and designed as well as possible based on the goal of what the english achievement is for. clt is the collection of the current methodology of teaching that is intended to upgrade students’ communicative competence. therefore, clt is the reflection of current teaching methods supporting the learners' study. clt can make english teaching meaningful and interesting and students learn linguistic form in theory and practice. clt opens the space for the students to learn in a more free manner because they get their right to develop their own capacity to learn independently. in the other side when viewed from the teachers’ task, the communicative process implemented in clt make the students learn in a meaningful environment because they learn from what they undergo and the teachers’ existence is to fill their experiences with meaningful activities themselves. besides that, the students can share their experiences to understand each other. in a further manner, clt urges the class more relaxed in teaching-learning activities because the students feel at home during the learning process. clt creates an interesting class situation. in the class using clt, all students learn to actualize and articulate their life skills to be able to work together. they are tied in a learning framework that is colorful because they are coming from different backgrounds to be able to reach the goal of achievement (chang, 2011). to achieve this, teachers must consider the following indicators: (1) be familiar with contemporary elt principles and methodology; (2) know the role(s) of a teacher when dealing with pupils’ problems in learning english; (3) be familiar with the learning and teaching strategies in the english classroom; and (4) be familiar with the ways of tackling elt issues in the classroom context (lai & yeung, 2010). those are the basic concepts in applying the teaching that is near the students’ environment. every teacher who has been successful in conducting this will be easy to interact with the students. again, it should be noted that every student is unique and because of the uniqueness itself, the teachers should know the students very well (floris & renandya, 2020). teaching english to them as non-native students need high awareness so that the goal of teaching can be achieved. the change that is created in non-native students is producing high motivation for them to have the spirit of learning (floris & renandya, 2020). it is very important to state that teachers should build their motivation to be interested in english. becoming a teacher for non-native students has a self-challenge. hasanah and utami (2020) delivered three notes for teaching english in non-native english-speaking countries. it deals with learning materials that do not respond to the students’ needs in their country, too many students in one class that makes the class not effective including environment at school that is not supportive, and low motivation the students have. the reason for learning materials dealing with the english handbook commonly is not in line with the students’ level is because of no study to create the learning material. the overloaded class happens because of limited classes used for teachinglearning activity. this problem appears because the school does not get maximal support from the government. the reason for low motivation happening to students is because they come to school with low input. one source of low input is that environment at home and society does not drive the learners active to study. whatever the challenges are, three problems block the goal of teaching for students’ achievement (frenzel, taxer, schwab, & kuhbandner, 2019). therefore, it should be supported by teachers’ performance in which they implement principles based on teaching. it is the entry point in driving teachers in teaching english, including for non-native students (khany & darabi, 2014). as the main part of teaching for non-native students, teachers should introduce their students to non-native speakers of english whose language is both intelligible and acceptable although they do not variably speak the native speaker. this, in the long run, will help educate the students that english does not belong to nativespeakers only. besides that, teachers also have numerous opportunities to inform their students that a good language teacher is not associated with his/her nationality. topics such as “my favorite english teacher” or “how i learn english” can be discussed in any english classrooms, and the discussions can further continue with the teachers’ explanation on the characteristics of a good language teacher or techniques to learn and improve english proficiency (floris & renandya, 2020). therefore, teaching english to non-native students should be planned well so that the goal of teaching is achieved. brown (2012) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 663 proposed these components for the teachers: (1) they should know their students’ native language and culture; (2) they should know what elements or factors are crucial for instructed language acquisition; (3) they should be able to use students’ l1 to explain concepts most efficiently; (4) they should serve as an excellent model of successful english learners; (5) they should be able to evaluate and adapt teaching methods and materials to suit the local needs; (6) they should know the expectations of administrators, students, and their parents. in responding to the dynamic of teaching english for non-native students, larsen-freeman and anderson (2011) suggested the important points for the students to know and consider: (1) having knowledge dealing with self-reflection supports the teachers’ task in building awareness on what to do in the class. self-reflection is the way of teaching so that the students can dig their understanding of what they get from the teacher in the class; (2) the classroom in which the students interact and learn from the teacher is the place for them to sharpen their comprehension. every comprehension appears because the students attempt to get what to comprehend in each phase of the learning activity. this chance should be viewed as the effort to enlarge the choices of perspective in learning. the teachers’ task is giving an opportunity as large as possible to the students to learn without being trapped in definite constraints. let the students learn and the teacher has the responsibility to facilitate the teaching-learning process in a deeper understanding so that the students can learn from the class a lot. it is the chance for the teacher to learn and get the knowledge of method in an inclusive space; (3) knowing methods enlarges the teacher’s perspectives and experience of what to do in the class when interacting with the students. knowledge of method always correlates with a bunch of innovation of teaching that can be implemented and this is the chance for the teacher to prove in their articulation of classroom activities. by a knowledge of methods, it will empower the teachers to update the knowledge in theory and practice. it means that method is not only talking about a collection of modules, but also a collection of practices to implement in practice. the teachers can apply them based on their goal, perspective, and need as the effort empower them as organizers and facilitators in activating their students in the class activities to reach the goal of the teaching (richards and rodgers in hall 2016; tavella 2016). as a result, understanding contemporary elt methodology cannot be seen in a single perspective, but multi-perspective. teaching english for nonnative students should start with whom and to whom the teacher should face. the different nonnative countries will be different in giving treatment and approaches to teaching. consequently, it needs consideration before applying the definite approach or method of teaching. the teacher should know and understand the context, the students’ background, and the approach used to achieve the goal of teaching (smith, 2014). again, it is important to remember that the success of teaching english to native and non-native students cannot be compared because both of them have different backgrounds dealing with the mother tongue. the effective way of teaching both of them also cannot be compared because there is a difference between the one who is a foreigner and a local teacher who is from the same country. learners tend to use their mother language to communicate with the teacher during the lesson. it should be tolerated as a way of facing them in teaching english (baştuğ, karakuzu, & akdoğan, 2010). hence, english should be used as a tool for linguistic unity without compromising cultural, historical, or ideological diversity. by doing so, minority cultures will find it easier to have their voice heard on the international stage. otherwise, they will probably be condemned to cultural obscurity (llurda, 2004). learning a foreign language expands the person’s way of thinking and they get a variety of knowledge or view. the native thinking that the english way is overall in teaching english is a way of killing a great deal of linguistic and sensitivity. the important thing is not whether a teacher should be native or non-native speakers of english, whether a teacher is a good english teacher or not (mizuno, 2004). by learning this perspective, teaching english is not for english itself but also strengthening teachers’ capacity in enhancing and introducing local issues, such as cultural values. those contents can be the materials for teaching to tie the students towards their tradition. therefore, teaching english to students should be based on local needs so that they speak in english by bringing their traditions. it is also the attempt to moh. yamin, slamet setiawan, syafi’ul anam, & pratiwi retnaningdyah the teachers’ perception about critical thinking skills in english language teaching methodologies 664 give admission to a difference of culture among non-native speakers that they have their own tradition to show in international communication (jayanti & norahmi, 2015). critical thinking skills for contemporary elt methodology studies teachers become the important element in teaching language to their students. the teachers’ skill in following the dynamics of contemporary english language methodology study should be strengthen as table 1, 2, and 3 show according to the five respondents. participating in contemporary elt methodology studies for efl teachers is the need as a part of the self-contribution in developing selfcapacity. following the trend in elt methodology studies opens new experiences and enlarges sides of knowledge in elt. it means that it is important to read and study contemporary elt methodology studies through critical thinking skills to enrich perspectives in contemporary elt methodology. the existence of critical thinking skills in studying contemporary elt methodology studies is helpful and is the new way of increasing teachers’ capacity as the ones who should be a part of the global world (alsaleh, 2020). today teachers are those who can answer the global challenge in which change in teaching should be followed. teaching elt today is not only based on the traditional approach but also the modern approach. yuan & stapleton (2020) said that one of them is technology-based teaching paying attention to local values. teachers need to take the role of elt studies in the world, but they do not forget the local needs that teachers should dwell in the local environment. therefore, critical thinking skills are needed for teaches to be able to think critically about what to do and what to design to conduct the teaching task in two dimensions, namely local and global dimensions. critical thinking skills are the medium for teachers to be able to enrich their views and perspectives about the development of contemporary elt methodology. by using critical thinking skills, they can be the ones who understand the students’ needs in their environment, yet teachers also use their global views and perspectives about elt in enriching their activities of teaching in the class (lorencová, jarošová, avgitidou, dimitriadou, lorencová, jarošová, avgitidou, dimitriadou, & lorencová, 2019; polat, 2020). the combination of local experiences and global perspectives in elt will colorize the teaching practice that is more meaningful for achieving the teaching goal. therefore, good and excellent teachers are those who can collaborate with the local and global experiences for contemporary elt methodology. it means that critical thinking skills are the need for teachers to go forward in the development of elt in the future. conclusion in a word, teaching english for non-native speaking countries should be conducted by teachers who have a world-view concerning local context, communicating language teaching that is familiar and tolerant to students, and respect the students as those who are unique. again, there is no the best elt method in teaching english for non-native speaking countries. english as a lingua franca should be the reason for designing and formulating an effective way of teaching english in order to achieve the goal of teaching itself. the different backgrounds of the students in mother tongue linguistic and their environment, including culture determine the effective strategy in teaching english for non-native speaking countries. more and more knowledge the teachers have dealing with world-view concerning local context and communicating language teaching, it is the key to successful teaching. critical thinking skills are helpful for teachers in conducting their roles like the ones who are learning to be better in teaching practice. critical thinking skills can be used by the teachers in designing the way of teaching english to help students learn english but not forget their traditions to activate during learning english. acknowledgment i, as the first author, express gratitude to lembaga pengelola dana pendidikan (lpdp), the ministry of the monetary republic of indonesia that facilitates me scholarship for the doctoral program. my thankfulness also goes to universitas negeri surabaya the venue of my study to present this research. references ahmad, s., & rao, c. 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(2020). student teachers’ perceptions of critical thinking and its teaching. elt journal, 74(1), 40–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccz044 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 409 the efl students’ perceptions of the quality of the english language textbook arsen nahum pasaribu english department, faculty of language and arts, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: arsen.pasaribu@uhn.ac.id apa citation: pasaribu, a. n. (2022). the efl students’ perceptions of the quality of the english language textbook. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 409-420. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6242 received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 08-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction textbooks are essential and cannot be separated from the school-based learning process. a textbook is one of the key sources of learning materials used in the classroom by teachers (shahid, qasim, & iqbal, 2021). the textbook can then be utilized as a compass, guiding teachers and students through the teaching and learning process. along with a learning syllabus, teaching materials, and instructional methods, a textbook includes a learning evaluation that assesses students' mastery of the book's material as taught by the teacher. as a result, the textbook utilized must be of high quality in order to engage teachers to teach textbook material to students in class and to enhance student achievement of textbook material presented. the provision of high-quality textbooks is a priority that teachers, schools, and even the government must address. teachers are required to be able to select textbooks that meet appropriate criteria for classroom use. additionally, the school, in this case the principal, is urged to be more selective in procuring high-quality textbooks for classroom usage. book publishers are also critical to the production of high-quality textbooks. book publishers must adhere to book publishing standards in terms of content and layout in order to ensure the book's quality. meanwhile, the government is critical in enacting policies and regulations that enable access to high-quality textbooks. the collaboration of all parties involved in ensuring the existence of high-quality textbooks is crucial for implementation and improvement. the indonesian government has made a policy to provide textbooks for students in elementary (sd), junior high (smp), and high school (sma) levels issued by the indonesian ministry of education and culture in order to ensure the availability and quality of textbooks that teachers and students will use in the classroom. the government also recognizes the necessity of having inexpensive, high-quality books available for students who have limited access to good textbooks in the classroom. as a result, students can now obtain books in soft copy, which they can obtain via a website supplied by the indonesian ministry of education and culture. an english book used by class xi high school students entitled "bahasa inggris" is one of abstract: the purpose of this study is to elicit students' perceptions about the quality of english textbook used by indonesian efl students. although numerous teaching researchers have undertaken research on textbooks, it is still uncommon to conduct textbook research to ascertain students' perceptions on the quality of textbooks. this study employed a mixed-methods approach and gathered data from 300 senior high school students in grade eleven. they were chosen at random among 674 students. these students come from sma 12 medan and smk 3 parulian medan. each school was represented by 150 students in the eleventh grade. google forms were utilized to collect data. simple statistics are used to calculate the number and percentage in research data analysis, while interactive data analysis is used to examine qualitative data. the results of this study show that the textbook "bahasa inggris" meets the criteria for a textbook of appropriate quality in terms of external appearance, content quality, language or vocabulary used, scoring system, and positive impact. however, the quality of the textbook's look and content may be enhanced. the findings of this study provide a unique viewpoint on the difficulties studied in comparison to earlier textbook research. keywords: efl students’ perception; english textbook quality; high school. arsen nahum pasaribu the efl students’ perceptions of the quality of the english language textbook 410 the free textbooks in soft copy format that can be downloaded from the website provided by the government. cunningsworth proposed the following criteria for judging whether or not a textbook is of high quality (milarisa, 2021; jeong, 2019): 1) the textbook must cater to the needs of students and the learning program's objectives; 2) textbooks must assist students in effectively using language for their purposes; 3) textbooks must cater to the needs of students as students and facilitate the learning process without putting pressure on them to follow specific methods; 4) textbooks must cater to the needs of students as students and facilitate the learning process without putting pressure on them to follow specific methods; 5) textbooks must cater to the needs of students as students and facilitate the learning process without putting pressure on, and 6) textbooks must have a clear function in assisting teachers and students in the classroom teaching and learning process. based on the four criteria mentioned, it can be concluded that a good textbook may suit the needs of students while also assisting teachers in accomplishing the learning process' objectives. greene and petty (in ulumudin, mahdiansyah, & joko (2017) divided the criteria for a good textbook into ten categories, including the following: 1) the textbook must be attractive to students; 2) it must be able to motivate students; 3) it must provide attractive illustrations; 4) it must effectively use language (linguistic aspect); 5) it must be related to other lessons; 6) it must stimulate students' creativity and independent activities; 7) it must have clear and firm concepts; 8) it must have a point of view; 9) it must provide consolidation and emphasis on the values of children and adults; 10) can display respect for students' differences. of the ten criteria, we can summarize that the criteria for a good book must pay attention to aspects of the book's appearance, content, concepts, language, and its impact on students and other users. the ministry of education and culture's center for education and culture policy research in balitbang likewise divides hypothetical textbook criteria into four groups (ulumudin et al., 2017). 1) content feasibility; 2) learning support feasibility, such as displayed values and good attitudes; 3) learning support feasibility, such as the use of exact language; 4) presentation (layout) feasibility, such as an attractive picture display from the perspectives of the two experts above, as well as the formulation set forth by the center for policy studies on education and culture, mission of education and culture, it can be concluded that a good textbook must consider 1) the textbook's appearance; 2) the content or material contained in the textbook, including the evaluation system; and 3) the language used must be clear, without multiple interpretations, and have a positive impact on students. several scholars have conducted numerous studies on textbooks. jonathans (2018) examined image construction through the lens of the textbooks used by students in kupang, east nusa tenggara. the textbooks examined provide an accurate portrait of asian self-identity. suryani (2018) also delved into the contents of the textbook "when english rings the bell," which was produced by the indonesian ministry of education and culture and adheres to the ministry's requirements for a good textbook, which includes objectives, language use, content, and design. the findings indicated that the contents of the textbooks examined were of a high quality. additionally, agni, setyaningsih, & sarosa (2020), santosa (2020) and hendriwanto (2018) were interested in assessing textbook material in terms of gender representation. these studies demonstrate that the textbooks examined have a greater number of male characters than female ones. naturally, this conclusion demonstrates that the textbook's content has no beneficial effect on students' gender equality (greene and petty in ulumudin et al., 2017). rahmat & coxhead (2021) investigated the efl textbook quality in terms of vocabulary. it was a corpus-based study to explore the use of vocabulary in efl textbooks for senior high school students in indonesia. the findings of this study demonstrate that vocabularies in the efl textbooks influence the students’ comprensions of the textbooks. other studies examining textbook material in relation to its cultural setting have been conducted by several scholars (butar-butar & pasaribu, 2021; samsudin, ansas, & triarisanti, 2021; ariawan, 2020; kim & ma, 2018). butar-butar & pasaribu (2021) conducted a comparison of english textbooks published by domestic and international publishers in terms of the sort of culture and dimensions included in the two textbooks. according to this study, english textbooks issued english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 411 by international publishers have a greater amount of foreign cultural content than textbooks published by domestic publishers. the cultural elements included in the textbook will aid students in comprehending the textbook's meaning and substance. similarly, ariawan (2020) investigated the cultural dimension in efl textbook. moreover, kim & ma (2018) and samsudin et al. (2021) studied the cultural content of textbooks in south korea. he examined portrayals of american and south korean culture in korean high school textbooks. this study demonstrates how the textbook contributes to the formation of cultural stereotypes and the incorporation of a certain culture. other studies that attempt to elucidate additional facets of a textbook include the following. yolanda (2018), inderawati, petrus, eryansyah, & meilinda (2021), akbarjono, melati, martina, syafryadin (2021) and ali, javed, & murtaza (2020) used certain criteria to identify the strengths and limitations. additionally, miroud (2021) evaluated the reading material to ascertain the textbook's content. gho & pasaribu (2021) also used modality theory to analyse the content of textbooks in order to determine the semantic meaning of the language employed. in addition, sulistiyo, wulan, al arif, efriza, & anwar (2021) and darmayenti, besral, & yustina (2021) investigated content analysis of english textbooks in indonesia regarding cultural content and local wisdom. they found that the textbook contents were still lack of cultural information and context. all of the studies listed above focus on the textbook's content, language, appearance, cultural context, and meaning. meanwhile, other studies examine textbooks differently than the research above, and this study focuses on efl students' impressions of textbooks used in class. although there is a growing body of research on student perspectives of learning, particularly in the online teaching and learning process (ridho, 2020; nugroho, basari, suryaningtyas, & cahyono, 2020; rahman, 2020; lodhi, farman, ullah, gul, tahira, & saleem, 2019; bali & liu, 2018). there is still a dearth of study on student impressions of textbooks. wang & fan (2021) conducted a study in shanghai and england on secondary school students' perceptions of the use of mathematics books. they discovered substantial disparities in the role of textbooks used by students in shanghai and england using the mixed method. then morales & baker (2018) sought to elucidate how students' perspectives on open scientific textbooks differ. their research demonstrates that open textbooks can help students develop more positive attitudes and behaviors toward learning. jou (2017) also investigated undergraduate students' perceptions of writing textbooks. using the interview method, he discovered that the students had a favorable opinion of the textbook in question. nugraha, ratnawati, & surachmat (2019) did research on book perceptions in indonesia. this study differs from the previous one in that it looks at students' perceptions of the impact of utilizing edictionaries, rather than textbooks, on their vocabulary knowledge. the results of this study, which used a mixed method approach, show that the majority of students have favorable views about the usage of an electronic dictionary, such as google translate, in the translation process. from the aforementioned studies on students' opinions of textbook use, there are still several opportunities to investigate students' perspectives on the textbook they use in class from various angles. the quality of a textbook is one element that may not have been addressed or on which there has been relatively little investigation. as a result, the purpose of this research is to learn about students' impressions of the quality of their textbooks in class. the textbook under investigation is an english open textbook titled "bahasa inggris," which is used by indonesian eleventh-grade senior high school students. although there has been research on the quality of "bahasa inggris" books (sihotang, manik, & pasaribu, 2021), the focus of this research is solely on comparing the quality of the textbook's content to that of other textbooks, not on students' views of the book's quality. this study was considered critical to be arrayed to identify the problems or weaknesses of the textbook “bahasa inggris” that the students use in the eleventh grade of senior high school. the findings will enlighten the stakeholders (teachers, priciples, authors, publishers, and the government) who are involved in the production of the textbook to find the solutions for the improvement of the quality of the textbook method the purpose of this study is to examine efl students' impressions of the textbook "bahasa inggris," which was just issued by the minister of arsen nahum pasaribu the efl students’ perceptions of the quality of the english language textbook 412 education and culture. it was created for senior high school students in grade xi. the study adopted a mixed-methods approach (cresswell, 2014). a quantitative method in the form of a survey was used. it provides the number and percentage of students' perceptions based on the questions' parameters. meanwhile, a qualitative method was necessary to elicit additional descriptions of the students' perceptions via closed interviews conducted using google form. the research participants in this study were 300 senior high school students in grades 11 who were chosen at random from a group of 674 individuals. they are students from two separate medan schools. 150 students from each school's parallel grade 11 represented each school. sma 12 medan and smk 3 parulian medan were the schools that took part in this research. the school was chosen because both schools used the ministry of education and culture's "bahasa inggris" textbook as teaching material in english classes for class xi. another reason is because the two schools reflect the city of medan's public and private schools. the following google form was used to collect research data: https://forms.gle/qpg9kwhoyiprtwj19. on google forms, students were asked two types of questions. the first was a survey of students' attitudes of the "bahasa inggris" textbook they are currently studying in english classes. the question was multiple-choice, with the following options: very, standard, sufficient, and not/less. the three things in the questions are based on the criteria of an good textbook (milarisa, 2021; ulumudin et al., 2017). the criteria are: 1) the book's cover and content, 2) the material's feasibility, including the assessment method, and 3) the book's use of language and its impact. the second form of the question aims to elicit more information about what students think about the "bahasa inggris" textbook and what its benefits and drawbacks are. it is intended that by exhibiting these two forms of data, they will be able to demonstrate a thorough grasp of how students think about the "bahasa inggris" textbook they are using. the number and percentage of students' perception frequencies that appear were calculated using simple statistical procedures throughout the analysis of study data. in a pie chart format, the usage of google forms allows for automatic statistical analysis of the frequency of students' perceptions. then, using the interactive data analysis approach (miles & huberman, 1994), qualitative data in the form of words, phrases, and sentences shown by students in response to questions about what they believe about the "bahasa inggris" textbook was analyzed and also what benefits and drawbacks of the textbook the students had. results and discussion this study examines the perspectives of high school students in medan on the use of the indonesian ministry of education and culture's "bahasa inggris" textbook. the findings of this study will address the following research issues: how students perceive the textbook's external and internal look, whether the book's contents are easy to comprehend, and whether students find it easy to answer the textbook's practice questions. the view of the textbook a textbook's attractive design or layout, both on the cover and within the book, is one of the requirements for a good textbook. the value of a beautiful layout on the cover of this book is regarded a factor in students liking and reading their textbooks. the use of attractive imagery and a variety of colors to capture readers' attention, as well as the use of attractive fonts on the cover and throughout the book, are all factors to consider when determining whether students will be interested in reading a book. knowing the students' perspectives on the appearance of the "bahasa inggris" textbook is regarded necessary in order to evaluate the book's overall quality, including the cover and contents design, image selection, color scheme, font selection, and layout of the images and contents. the following pie chart illustrates students' perceptions of the appearance of this book. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 413 chart 1. students' perception of the layout of the book the perceptions of the textbook "bahasa inggris" are depicted in chart 1 by the images used, the color of the cover and contents of the book, the type and size of the letters used, and the layout of the contents or images in the book. a total of 101 students (33.7%) responded that the appearance of the book's cover and contents piqued their curiosity, and that the choice of photographs, colors, typefaces, and layout of the pictures and contents piqued their interest. the majority of the students, 45.5 % (136 students), claimed that the appearance of the textbook was all that mattered to them. meanwhile, 52 students (17.3 %) claimed they were very interested in the textbook's appearance. however, 11 students (3.7 %) admitted that the textbook's appearance did not appeal to them. this finding indicates that the majority of students found the book "bahasa inggris" appealing, however a minority percentage of students find the book's appearance unpleasant. in other words, this textbook is deemed to be of high quality in terms of aesthetics. the students stressed how the engaging illustrations and colors will entice them to study the textbook. this finding also aligns with (ulumudin et al., 2017) textbook standards, which suggest that the appearance or presentation of a textbook is a criterion for a high-quality book. jonathans (2018) and suryani (2018) research also reveals that beautiful images and photographs improve students' interest in textbook reading. increasing kids' interest in reading will surely help students' ability to meet the teacher's learning objectives (milarisa, 2021; jeong, 2019). the language used in the textbook using clear language in textbooks that students can understand is critical. several criteria for effective language use include the use of varied vocabulary that students can understand; the use of grammar that enables students to comprehend the book's reading text in its entirety; and the use of clear and easy-to-understand directions for students. these characteristics will aid students in comprehending the textbooks they use, as a good book is one that provides amazing convenience and benefit to students (milarisa, 2021). chart 2. students' perceptions of the language used in the textbook arsen nahum pasaribu the efl students’ perceptions of the quality of the english language textbook 414 students' impressions of the usage of language in the "bahasa inggris" textbook vary, as shown in chart 2. the most common comment from students was that the english textbook they were using was simple to grasp. this viewpoint was stated by 140 students (46.7%). furthermore, there were 76 students who thought that the textbook's usage of english was simple to comprehend (25.3 %). around 21.7 % of students indicated that the language utilized was relatively simple to understand (65 students). however, 6.3 % (19 students) believe they are unable to comprehend the language, syntax, and directions in this book. overall, the number of students who consider english in this book, the vocabulary used in the content and directions, and the usage of grammar is pretty good, ranging from 68.4 % to 69.4 % (205 students). however, 31.6 % of students believe that the textbook's use of language, including vocabulary, instructions, and grammar, is only somewhat easy, if not impossible to understand (95 students). the findings indicate that the textbook's language use, vocabulary selection, instructional language, and grammar still need to be evaluated and improved in order to reduce the number of students who do not grasp the language and grammar used in the book. the findings of this study contradict those of suryani, 2018), who asserts that textbooks issued by indonesia's ministry of education and culture are of high english quality and easy to understand. with regard to language use, some students, though fewer than 10% of all respondents, believed that a lack of understanding would impair students' comprehension of textbook material (morales & baker, 2018). the assessment in the textbook the assessment method employed in a textbook that is used by students during the learning process in the classroom is a vital component. the grading system is critical for determining students' comprehension of a textbook's material. as a result, it is critical to solicit students' feedback on the grading system employed in this "bahasa inggris" textbook, regardless of how difficult or easy it is to tackle. the assessment system in question is comprised of practice questions or sample exam questions found throughout this textbook. according to the survey results, the following graphic depicts students' impressions of the scoring system used in this book. chart 3. students’ perceptions of the assessment used in the textbook in chart three above, students' impressions of the grading method employed in the "bahasa inggris" textbook are depicted. 16.7% of students said the evaluation mechanism in the form of practice questions and sample tests in this book were simple to use (50 students). 122 students expressed the opinion that the exam questions in this book are simple to answer (40.7%). when compared to other perspectives, the number of people who hold this viewpoint is the highest. the students then reported that the questions in the textbook were pretty simple to complete. there were 106 students in all (35.3 %). finally, 7.3 % of people believe that the practice problems or examinations in this book are inaccessible or difficult to complete (22 students). there is a little variation in figures between the percentage of students who find it easy to answer practice problems in the book, 57.4 %, and the number of students who say the questions in the textbook are sufficient or tough to do, 42.6 %. these findings suggest that the assessment mechanism in this book, which includes practice english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 415 problems and tests, is difficult for students to understand. as a result, considering the varied levels of students' english skills, the form of questions, variations, and levels of difficulty of the questions in this book should be amended or enhanced. the findings of this study show that students' textbooks are still of poor quality in terms of the assessment system provided in the form of practice questions. this case contradicts cunnungsworth’s requirements (milarisa, 2021; jeong, 2019), which indicate that a textbook must help students in terms of content and have a good impact on them. as a result, the content of the textbook must be tailored to the teaching objectives and the needs of the students (miroud, 2021; inderawati, et al., 2021; akbarjono, et al., 2021). the strengths of the textbook each student is given the opportunity to express multiple points of view on the benefits of this book. "what are the benefits of this textbook?" is the question posed to students. this question was aimed to elicit further comments from students about english textbooks in addition to those already expressed in the previous questions. only 178 students out of 300 responded to the survey with their thoughts on the book. this question was not answered by the remaining 122 students. the table below illustrates the top five students' thoughts on the textbook's flaws. chart 4. students' perceptions of the strengths of the textbook the figure depicts students' perceptions of the textbook's benefits. the appealing appearance of the textbook is the most important element for determining the textbook's advantages. this view was given by a total of 154 students. additionally, 112 students stated that the book's material was simple to comprehend. a total of 107 students indicated that the book's vocabulary was adequate. a small number of students stated that the advantages of this textbook were that it contained an exciting text; for up to 25 students, this textbook was light and easy to carry; for 18 students, this textbook was light and easy to carry; and for 12 students, the advantages of this textbook were that it contained an accessible, practical, and opinionated text. this is in contrast to the criteria outlined in chart 1. according to the analysis findings, this textbook has an enthralling appearance. this study reveals that this book meets the aesthetic requirements for a quality book. ulumudin et al. (2017) asserted that a beautiful textbook would pique students' interest in reading. additionally, the textbook's appearance provides an overview of the textbook's contents (jonathans, 2018). the appearance of the textbook, both on the cover and within, must be a priority for the author or publisher. then again, this textbook is pretty adequate in terms of content. more than 30% of students indicated that the textbook's content was simple to comprehend. additionally, the terminology employed in this work is pretty adequate. this viewpoint is shared by more than 30% of students. according to the findings of this analysis, this textbook has a high level of substance and vocabulary. however, it still needs improvement in order to obtain the maximum amount of research from students that use it. the weaknesses of the textbook arsen nahum pasaribu the efl students’ perceptions of the quality of the english language textbook 416 each student is permitted to express multiple viewpoints on the book's strengths and flaws. only 145 of the 300 students questioned expressed an opinion regarding this book, and the majority of the remaining 155 students did not answer. the table below summarizes the five most significant weaknesses of this textbook as perceived by students. chart 5. students' perceptions of the weaknesses of the textbook students' perceptions of the limitations of this "bahasa inggris" textbook are depicted in bar chart 5. the following is a ranking of their perceived weaknesses with this book. it progresses from the most frequently reported criteria for the book's flaws to the least mentioned. to begin, this textbook's appearance is less appealing. this was the consensus of 112 students. additionally, 108 students stated that the book's material was difficult to comprehend. then 83 students stated that the information contained in this book was insufficient. 75 students indicated that the vocabulary employed in this textbook was difficult to comprehend. 27 students felt that the number of practice questions in this book was still insufficient. a tiny number of students voiced generalized comments that contradicted the criteria in chart two, such as the responses: there are no flaws, they are not good enough, and they are unqualified. several points stand out as a result of the data analysis above. the consequence of the analysis of this book's flaws is evident in its look. as a result of this result, we can see that the appearance of the book is also the most significant weakness of this textbook, despite the fact that the number of students who expressed this opinion is less, namely 112 students, compared to 154 students who stated that the appearance of the book was attractive. as a result of this comparison, we can conclude that while the appearance of this book is sufficient, the presentation quality may be improved. in other words, the appearance of textbooks is a major determinant for student attentiveness. as a result, authors and publishers alike must pay close attention to this issue. the textbook's content difficulty comes in second. this textbook was difficult to understand, according to a rather high score of 108 students. when contrasted to the 112 students who indicated that the contents of this textbook were easy to comprehend, we can conclude that some students found the contents of this textbook to be easy to understand, while others with almost the same number found it difficult to grasp. as a result, the criteria for the content of this textbook must be considered in delivering an explanation of the content that is easier for students to understand, particularly the practice questions in this textbook, which must be improved and added while taking into account the students' overall english skills (milarisa, 2021; ulumiddin, 2017). the inclusion of practice questions is expected to aid comprehension of the textbook's contents. this textbook information drew the next student's interest as well. they believe that the textbook's content is incomplete. although the textbook material is not covered in length, it is critical to supplement this textbook with more engaging and varied information to pique students' interest in using this book independently during english sessions. additionally, a textbook's use of terminology is critical. difficult-to-understand vocabulary, whether used in reading texts or instructions in textbooks, becomes a factor that students consider when evaluating a good textbook (rahmat & coxhead, 2021). according to the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 417 results of this analysis, the textbook's usage of language is appropriate, however some students believe it may be improved. additionally, students cite the following elements as shortcomings of this textbook: the book's size is excessive, the quantity of pages is still insufficient, the need for new discussion topics, and other minor concerns that account for 7.6 % of students who expressed this opinion. the results of the data analysis and discussion above indicate that this research was able to determine the quality level of the "bahasa inggris" textbook based on three textbook criteria: 1) the appearance of the cover and content of the book, 2) the feasibility of the content, including the scoring system, and 3) the use of language and its impact. this textbook meets two of the three criteria, while changes are still needed in terms of cover and content, subject matter and additional practice questions, and the use of simple-to-understand language for all students. additionally, the majority of students stated that the "bahasa inggris" textbook benefited students studying english significantly. this conclusion is based on cunningsworth’s theory (milarisa, 2021) and ulumudin et al. (2017) assertions that a textbook is considered to be a good one when it gives positive benefits and influences for the students who use it. conclusion this study was undertaken to ascertain the "bahasa inggris" language's quality level "the ministry of education and culture released a textbook based on the perspectives of students in grade 11 who use it. through the use of quantitative and qualitative data collecting and analysis techniques, it was determined that the textbook "bahasa inggris" meets the criteria for a good textbook in terms of its exterior and internal look. however, some students believe that the textbook's appearance might be improved. in terms of the textbook's content and grading system, the majority of students believed that the textbook's content was adequate for students to use when learning english. however, numerous students felt that the textbook's content and practice questions needed to be expanded and enhanced in quality in light of the students' ability. finally, based on the language criteria, this textbook could be enhanced in terms of instruction and the use of vocabulary that is easily understood by all students. additionally, the majority of students indicated that this "bahasa inggris" "they had profited greatly from the textbook in terms of english acquisition. the educational implication of this study is that textbooks are a necessary component of teaching and learning. as a result, all parties involved in assessing the quality of textbooks must exercise due diligence to ensure that the textbooks used by students are appropriate for their skills and deliver significant advantages and positive outcomes. publishers and authors of textbooks must guarantee that the books they produce meet the criteria for a good book in terms of appearance, content, rating system, and language utilized, as well as having a positive influence. additionally, authors or publishers must change textbooks on a periodic basis to improve or enhance the quality of textbooks based on input from students regarding the findings of textbook research such as this. additionally, the school, both the principal and instructors, should exercise prudent judgment in selecting textbooks for classroom usage based on the criteria for textbooks stated above. the government, through the ministry of education and culture, can exercise its regulatory authority over education by promulgating regulations or policies governing textbook publication and establishing standards for textbook quality. this research continues to have flaws in terms of the data collection techniques used. the secure interview method places a cap on the amount of information that may be gleaned regarding students' thoughts about their textbooks. additionally, because the number of respondents in this survey is still relatively small, the quantity of data collected and the outcomes of data analysis will be impacted. thus, researchers interested in analyzing the quality of textbooks used by elementary, high school, and university students should pay close attention to these issues in order to provide more accurate research results. acknowledgment sincer gratitudes are addressed to the students and teachers that have participated in this research. references agni, z. a., setyaningsih, e., & sarosa, t. 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(2018). writing material analysis of office administration english textbook. in d. mulyadi, d. santoso, & d. hardiyanti (eds.), 2nd english language and literature international conference (vol. 2, issue 1, pp. 187–191). universitas muhammadiyah semarang. https://ellic.unimus.ac.id/2018/ arsen nahum pasaribu the efl students’ perceptions of the quality of the english language textbook 420 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 187 the english teacher’s proficiency in south sulawesi: its implications to the teacher’s performance ishak english education, iain bone, indonesia email: ishak@iain-bone.ac.id apa citation: ishak. (2021). the teacher’s english proficiency in south sulawesi: its implications to the teacher’s performance. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp.187-194. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5368 received: 17-08-2021 accepted: 09-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction teaching proficiency is an important in any educational setting. the goal of teaching is to analyze the students’ need and to drive the students to reach goal. this is in line with abucayon, bautista, & romano (2016), stating that the prime aim of teachers is to help students to learn effectively and efficiently. the students’ problems have many sources. if the teacher could not overcome the students’ problem, it will affect the classroom quality. especially, mainly the students are incompetent in comprehending the subjects or hard to elaborate their competency in classroom. as many teachers have proficiency but they do not master to perform in classroom. as stated by özgenel and mert (2019), teacher performance is a key element in the success of school effectiveness and is very important. proficiency refers to the extent to which a person thinks that she is competent at communicating (richards, 2017; sumual & ali, 2017). instructional strategy and personal communication could support inexperienced persons to create innovation in learning innovatively target to create the process of thought and better education (ishak, 2020; seechaliao, 2017). teachers’ proficiency is an important issue to be investigated in teaching and learning process (garza, huerta, spies, lara-alecio, irby, & tong, 2018; suyansah & gabda, 2020) proved that to excel performance should be improved the english performance because it is a critical for english learners to succeed in the science classroom. this is supported by saruhan and yıldız (2012), argued that performance is a numerical or non-numerical result that results from predetermined goals. ertürk (2018) also added that the purpose of performance evaluation is to determine the degree of success of an individual for a job or task and to evaluate the factors affecting his/her success. the benefit of discourses strategies highlights the want to regulate the level and mode of conversation in assembly the language proficiency level of the learner. there is wide variety of studies related to the nature of expertise that desires to be learned and the results of the learning process (bråten & ferguson, 2015; macugay & bernardo, 2013). usman, silviyanti, & marzatillah (2016) stated the teacher’s captivation and his/her cognitive, effective and psychomotor expertise heighten energy to learn english. teacher is the main personality in the classroom. some number of researches proved that teachers and students in case of necessity to communicate abstract: in this article, it referred to the implications of proficiency to the teacher’s performance in the classroom in south sulawesi. most of english teachers associate level of language proficiency with greater powerful teaching performance skills. this research was descriptive qualitative research in south sulawesi, the participants consisted of several qualified teachers aged from 30 – 40, and they have been teaching more than 10 years, all of the participants interviewed felt strong desire about the implications of proficiency. the data were collected from observation, interview and documents and it was analyzed in interpretation to draw inferences and conclusions based on the description data. the result of this research provided a great interpretation of proficiency and its excessive implication for teaching english, the higher level of language proficiency is, the better performance of the teacher is. it is needed to investigate more about the role of language proficiency to determine the teachers’ performance. keywords: teacher; proficiency; implication; performance ishak the teacher’s english proficiency in south sulawesi: its implications to the teacher’s performance 188 their thoughts and concepts in the classroom hua, nor, & jaradat, 2012; mahmud, 2017; moazen, kafipour, & soori, 2016). while, thompson aizawa, curle, & rose (2019) in the studies explored the utility of the same tenor of academic english courses for not only the direct development of students’ academic english expertise but also their overall immediacy for content learning through second language english. the role of teachers in curriculum implementation is influenced by various factors competence which includes knowledge, skill, and attitude. in another view, a teacher not only knows manage their knowledge but also the classroom and the students in terms of discipline. teaching is a qualified contextual and textual process and there are many aspects that assist to teacher skillfulness; thus there are no worldly ready for occupancy criteria for knowing the teacher’s expertise. performance is one of the proportion components that develop a language teacher’s proficiency. cappelli & tavis (2016) characterized performance into two kinds, they are objective performance and subjective performance. having an adequate performance leads the teachers to be more adept at using english to bring out the classroom tasks and prepare appropriate skill the students. during a class relate to the concept of performance of the teacher, the teacher shall be supported by the proficiency. a teacher is a foster communication of ideas. they will show a total physical response, modeling, and demonstration to elaborate the concept of some topics. teacher’s appearance is designed to formulate the degree of teacher’s appearance in conjunction with teacher’s standard and their ability to appear process standards and product standards of learning (maba, perdata, & astawa, 2017; mantra, 2017). indonesian teachers have rather unfavorable language proficiency because in a context where english is mostly confined to the classroom or academic forums, as it in indonesia, teachers appear to lose their language gradually. the quality has been proven to be significant in improving employee performance (phytanza & burhaein, 2020; taylor, 2015). language performance should be taken as the most important reason for which a teacher shall concentrate on their oral communication in front of the students. alabdulkareem (2016) proved in his article that teacher’s trust has mostly focused on teachers’ essence views using self-breakdown mechanisms, including questionnaires and interviews, whereas research investigating whether these trust are conducted in the classroom is restricted. the cultural connections could be a great helping to integrate the students’ academic expectations (mahboob & dutcher, 2014; renandya, hamied, & nurkamto, 2018; tsang, 2017). they asserted that language proficiency is one of the keys unit that build up a language teacher’s professional knowledge and scientific language. while özgenel & mert (2019), and weda & sakti (2018) asserted that the purpose of teacher’s moral performance value is to predict the percentage level of the methods and practices of the teacher with measurement tools to give feedback to the teacher. the teacher can enable the students to develop their oral language for the sake of having a wonderful performance. language is used to form a meaning, produce a sound, body language or printed language which encodes and decodes information. the usefulness of sound is to communicate a meaning of language and to deliver the speaker thoughts to others. when the speaker begins to develop their language abilities, the main purpose is to communicate or interact with interlocutors. spoken language is students’ the prime way of communicating and it is very significant aspects of their learning legal action. it is something that could be implemented to all foreign language acquisition, where one of student’s purposes is to improve the communication expertise to be taken into consideration. english is taken as interest as foreign/second language as long as other school subjects becoming a vital product of a certain language used for learning and teaching in all academic courses. based on the experience and observations of the researcher as an english teacher, the researcher was interested to know much about the implication of proficiency to perform in the classroom. method this research was qualitative research which applied descriptive qualitative design. it was considered appropriate to know the proficiency of the teachers’ performance in classroom. qualitative research is a method to comprehend the phenomenon in depth which was based on how the participants in the research perceive it. gay, mills, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 189 & airasian (2011) stated that the design of descriptive qualitative research conducted to collect data, analyze and explain the some data that is connected toward the evidence of phenomenon, it is a way to communicate in learning process. observation and interview were utilized by the researcher focused on a proficiency levels, they are: accuracy, fluency, complexity. the participants of the research were from the qualified english teachers who are teaching in south sulawesi, indonesia. the research participants were english teacher aged 30 – 40, they have teaching more than 10 years. all of the participants consisted of 5 males and 5 females with different social and cultural background. the researcher selected participants according the researcher’s observation. the method of the research was to explain all aspects of existing proficiency english teacher. the techniques used by researcher in collecting data were: observation, interview, and documents. observation and interview were conducted to collect the unrefined data. the data particularly was analyzed by using thematic analysis. in qualitative research, the data was analyzed in dynamic, intuitive, and creative process of thinking and theorizing. as the analysis of data is based on the conceptual of discourse analysis which believes on the recording of data, the transcription of data, the selection of data and the interpretation of data (gee, 2010), the researcher therefore provide a description of the implications of accuracy, fluency, complexity, and capacity and the data reduction strategies that were essential in the analyses, then the description and analyses leaded into interpretation to draw inferences and conclusions to get a novelty of the research. results and discussion this part provides some extracts of informants when they were asked about the proficiency of accuracy, fluency, complexity, and capacity to the teacher’s performance: accuracy “accuracy is very important because it will minimize the students’ misunderstanding.” (informant#1) “the accuracy will make the teacher look fabulous, skillful, and professional in teaching his/her subject.” (informant #2) “a teacher's good looks are abilities that are possessed with the precision of choosing a word.” (informant#3) “we are able to convey ideas in a simple, precise, concise way, and easy to understand.” (informant#4) “being skillful in selecting and sorting words indicates the teacher thinks about performance.” (informant#5) “accuracy influences the teacher’s confidence and it plays an important aspect to the teacher’s performance.” (informant#6) “the teacher has to know students’ ability and level first, if the students are at beginner level; it means that the teacher should use the language by mixing or switching the explanation, so the students can understand what the teacher is talking about. besides, the teacher should use simple instruction to the students. for the intermediate and advanced students, the teacher could use full english, but in some situations for difficult or new materials, the teacher should switch his/her language.” (informant#7) the extracts above that show that by pronouncing the words accurately, by choosing appropriate words accurately, and speaking clearly and communicating all instructional materials to students, it will make students able to enjoy and comprehend the materials in the classroom and the teacher will look more professional. fluency “the fluency of a teacher in conveying their ideas will show their performance. so, the teacher should prepare their material before entering to class.” (informant#1) “the teacher has the ability to convey ideas in a simple way but with a wide content of meaning.” (informant#2) “we are able to explain the studies that are quickly understood by the interlocutor.” (informant#3) “the fluency is the image of the teacher’s ability to express his/her feeling accurately and appropriately.” (informant#4) “the teacher whose good english will speak clearly, understandable, and communicatively and it is a good performance.” (informant#5) “the teacher should master their teaching material in order to speak fluently.” (informant#6) “the teacher has to know the situation to determine the style of language used in teaching.” (informant#7) the extracts above show that the teacher has to build up the ideas before entering to the class. it refers to convince the students about the ideas and minimize to the use of fillers in speaking. using many fillers speaking such as “er…” or “em…” ishak the teacher’s english proficiency in south sulawesi: its implications to the teacher’s performance 190 indicates that the teacher lacks of the idea. telling the idea fluently means the teacher masters the topic and it is as a good performance. complexity “the teacher who masters vocabulary can easily convey their material and affect their performances in teaching.” (informant#1) “the teacher who lacks of vocabulary will face difficulties in his/her feeling precisely” (informant#2) “the lack of preparation, lack of knowledge, and psychology factors could hinder teacher’s vocabulary.” (informant#3) “sometimes, the teacher has many ideas, but because of psychological factors she/he gets difficulties to deliver concepts to the students.” (informant#4) “because understanding the students’ level will encourage and promote the effectiveness of learning itself.” (informant#5) “the teacher should know, not only constrained by the voice but also the idea to be conveyed.” (informant#6) “selecting topics / teaching materials in accordance with the expertise will have an effect on achieving the achievement of learning objectives that certainly determine the success of a learning process.” (informant#7) the extracts above show that the teacher should be promoted to the improvement of each individual aspects rather than believing learners able to present to every aspect of language performance; accuracy, fluency and complexity. by mastering the three aspects, the teacher will become plenary teacher. a great interpretation of proficiency language of the teacher’s performance includes accuracy, fluency, and complexity. in addition, teacher’s performance influences students’ skill motivation and interest in learning skill. thus, the teacher should show, tell, model, and exemplify the teaching and learning materials accurately in the classroom. the result shows that: accuracy is the ability of language user to pronounce the word. it refers to the extent to which language learner’s performance and the system that underlines to this performance derivates from a norm. the teacher needs to have proficiency to enrich the ability of the students and control the emotions and perceptions of other people. teacher should be adaptive alongside personality traits based on the cultural and social change, the teacher set up the students to socialize themselves to be easier to apply the rules, discuss the varieties of topics, and share knowledge among them. bradford (2019) reported the framework characteristics of student’s understanding of teachers, including the teacher’s specialized unfamiliar accents, spontaneous, dialect, and the way of teacher to elaborate their ideas in front of the students. the teacher’s accuracy is used to produce free speech clearly as much as possible. classroom should become a process of building the basis of language, culture, values, and social communication. fluency is the ability to manage the ideas in speaking. it will take longer to be carried out by the teachers in the classroom. fluency can be a rate and density of linguistics units produced, breakdown fluency (number, length and locations of pauses) and repair phonological phenomenon. rose & galloway (2019) elaborated in their studies took as conclusion that the challenging performances are the challenges of science of language, and it was always faced by students when the students become negotiating content, especially when the teacher’s proficiency levels are poor. the fluency of english differentiates between stages and levels of english. the teacher’s capacity to choose the topics in proficiency levels affects their performance, the teacher should be able to use language based on the situation by taking into the consideration where, when, the purpose, the social relationship, and the form of communications. learning system design is to guide to interact effectively and efficiently. the teacher has to know students’ ability and level first, if the students are at beginner level; it means that the teacher should use the language by mixing or switching the explanation, so the students can understand what the teacher is talking about. besides, the teacher should use simple instruction to the students. for the intermediate and advanced students, the teacher could use full english, but in some situations for difficult or new materials, the teacher should switch his/her language. fluency is as production model to construct the judgment to be expressed and take into declaration based on the linguistic structure. complexity is the ability to combine between vocabulary and grammar. teacher activates prior knowledge related to the proficiency in daily experiences, beyond gaining general and specific vocabulary to combine in the correct grammar. the teacher should enforce to learn the academic content such as science and skills of language, the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 191 teacher also should enhance the understanding of academic knowledge to develop english proficiency of complexity as dekeyser (2016) believed that complexity could be understood as a production of oral language by teacher or students, specifically, to produce a sound in lexical and grammatical complexity. language learning and the way of design of knowledge affects the proficiency process. proficiency refers to how we declare language knowledge and the capacity to produce sound spontaneously. the different performance of fluency, accuracy, and complexity would be result from the proficiency of the teacher. in this article, the researcher offers a specific instructional proficiency that the teacher can integrate proficiency and performance in the classroom. it would address flexible forms of literacy related to science and skills of language, the students would be a support to communicate the skills. the proficiency of complexity is needed to change the form of lexical and grammatical lexicon the role of the teacher is demanded to have achievement in high academic standards. english language learning is expected to develop english proficiency in content situations to achieve higher proficiency level but developing english language capacity needs to give attention for academic approach as the academic language function is to identify, explain, and interpret. effective teaching models help the students to perform to formulate the hypotheses, manage ideas, draw conclusions, organize the situations and communicate the ideas. ekperi, onwuka, & nyejirime (2019) supported that the classroom atmosphere is determined by the teacher’s attitude. academic language should be considered among disciplines to guide the students to manage the ideas of texts and tasks. the teacher is expected to give instruction to students to be able to create atmosphere in learning creatively at every stage. the difficulties of this concept could be varying based on vary situations, it depends on the contexts and the instructional designs by the teachers. instructional strategies for students to education should include sharing knowledge, solution, and consensus ideas. based on the result, the good performance of the teacher refers to the three levels of proficiency. the teacher should integrate them based on cultural practices. integrated is focused on classroom interaction to provide cultural and social performance in the classroom. teachers agreed that english proficiency is a basic to have a good performance, the more language use we know, the better likely to perform properly in the academic subjects. effective teacher guides the students to classify the vocabulary and manage their brain to recognize the pattern of language. recognizing the pattern of language is the key to provide the students with access to understanding science. the english teachers are responsible to perform well in the class to influence the students to learn. in the end, the teacher’s goal in the classroom is to facilitate the students to speak english as much as possible in the classroom. conclusion it can be concluded that the variables of teacher’s proficiency are the teacher’s appearance or performance, the teacher’s personality, and the teachers’ language use in the classroom. the better teacher’s proficiency, the better teacher’s performance is. it definitely shows that the teacher’s performance is the most important variable to promote the quality of the teacher. a teacher who has a qualified proficiency gains the confidence, powerfulness and good performance in the classroom. the teacher’s language is important to build the positive perception of the students. integrated proficiency (accuracy, fluency, and complexity) and performance are an approach to the teachers to teach based on the cultural, social, and educational practices, and become skillful into four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). the proficiency is beneficial for the teacher who is going to develop their academic performance. the teacher’s proficiency is predictor to teacher’s performance. some students resolutely rely on english language expansion as an important output of product for their studies, expecting to achieve not only the essence of language, but also to improve their english language proficiency. it is as procedural knowledge that reveals in the turn automatically of spoken components. references abucayon, r. i., bautista, y. t., & romano, j. m. 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(2015). the integrated dynamics of motivation and performance in the workplace. performance improvement, 54(5), 28–37. thompson, g., aizawa, i., curle, s., & rose, h. (2019). exploring the role of self-efficacy beliefs and learner success in english medium instruction. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 1–14. tsang, a. (2017). efl/esl teachers’ general language english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 193 proficiency and learners’ engagement. relc journal, 48(1), 99–113. usman, b., silviyanti, t. m., & marzatillah, m. (2016). the influence of teacher’s competence towards the motivation of students in learning english. studies in english language and education, 3(2), 134–146. weda, s., & sakti, a. e. f. (2018). the relationship between study anxiety and academic performance among english students. xlinguage "european scientific language journal", 11(2), 718–727. ishak the teacher’s english proficiency in south sulawesi: its implications to the teacher’s performance 194 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 875 lexicostatistics of malay and malagasy languages: comparative historical linguistic study wan anayati english literature study program, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: wnnt70@gmail.com muhammad kiki wardana english literature study program, faculty of language and communication, universitas harapan email: muhammadkikiwardana@gmail.com mayasari english literature study program, faculty of language and communication, universitas harapan email: mayasarispdmsi@gmail.com purwarno purwarno english literature study program, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwarno@sastra.uisu.ac.id apa citation: anayati, w., wardana, m. k., mayasari., & purwarno, p. (2022). lexicostatistics of malay and malagasy languages: comparative historical linguistic study. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 875-882. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6690 received: 29-06-2022 accepted: 23-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction history reveals there is a strong and pivotal relationship between madagascar and indonesia. some scientific and academic evidences unveil that the ancestors of the madagascar people came from the archipelago. in addition to the similarities in the physiology of the people with indonesian, another similarity is found in the language. madagascar's official language is malagasy, which is believed to be similar to other indonesian languages, such as banjarese malay, dayak, and some sabah languages in malaysia. ducros (2018) argues that the malagasy language comes from the southeastern barito language in borneo, kalimantan. this is also approved by serva & pasquini (2020) who highlighted that malagasy has a very strong connection to one of the languages in indonesia. in addition to the previous fact, beaujard (2011) and serva et al. (2013) in their researches attempt to investigate historically about the early migration of indonesian people to madagascar in accordance with what has been done by dahl (2011) in his previous research in the same scientific area. the opinion of these experts concludes from some forensic linguistic evidences in which it is true that the malagasy language originated in borneo. it is estimated that the first indonesians got to madagascar by sea about one thousand to two thousand years ago. the most likely explanation about the ancestors of the abstract: this study examines the kinship of the malay language and the malagasy language. these two languages come from the same proto language, namely proto austronesian (pan). departing from the researchers’ assumptions about the linguistic relationship both at the phoneme and morpheme levels, there is a close kinship system or relationship between these two languages. even though they are geographically and geo-politically separated, preliminary research on these two languages shows several universal features, one of which is that both languages are agglutinative languages. therefore, this study is an attempt to find empirical evidence about the separation time between malay and malagasy by using language grouping methods and lexicostatistical techniques. the first stage, the researchers collect 300 basic vocabularies compiled by swadesh (1995). the method used in providing the data is the referential method, while the technique used is the note-taking technique. second, the researchers determine which pairs of the two languages are cognate languages. third, the researchers calculate the age and separation time of the two languages. fourth, the researchers calculate the error term to determine a more precise separation time. the result of this research indicates that malay and malagasy were a single language at 4223-3951 thousand years ago and began to separate from their proto languages in 2201-1929 bc. keywords: comparative historical linguistics; kinship; lexicostatistics; malagasy language; malay language. mailto:wnnt70@gmail.com mailto:muhammadkikiwardana@gmail.com mailto:mayasarispdmsi@gmail.com wan anayati, muhammad kiki wardana, mayasari, purwarno purwarno lexicostatistics of malay and malagasy languages: comparative historical linguistic study 876 madagascar is that they did not sail alone but were brought as slaves by malay sailors. evidences from other studies say that the madagascar community comes from approximately 30 women from indonesia (ramanantsoa et al., 2021) and this has been concurred by goodman & jungers (2018 ) and serva (2018). the most recent study on this area was written by serva & pasquini (2022) who concur that malagasy language was initially identified as a member of the austronesian family around the beginning of the 17th century. it is particularly similar to several of the languages spoken in indonesia. dahl, who in 1951 clearly established a startling kinship with maanyan, spoken in the south-east of kalimantan, is responsible for the connection to a specific indonesian language. the introduction of bantu terminology has been extremely restricted; in contrast, the genetic makeup of the malagasy people is primarily african and indonesian. while linguistics and genetics concur that indonesian sailors colonized madagascar in the second half of the first millennium, they dispute on the significance of east africa in this process. the facts above are very interesting to be studied further from a linguistic perspective as said by dardanila et al. (2020) that an analytical approach was carried out to know how far the historical relations of one language with another were compared. it is enhanced further by aminin & dacholfany (2021) who state that related languages have their history of development that needs to be studied historically. therefore, the comparative historical linguistic study tries to connect and relate the points of knowledge that are still tenuous in discussing the kinship of the malay language used in indonesia with the malagasy language. as two languages that come from the austronesian family, and have the same type, namely agglutinative, then the search for language kinship, the time of separation of languages and when these two languages are in the same family need to be studied more deeply. researches related to lexicostatistics in the proto austronesian family (pan) only focus on the comparison of languages in the archipelago, and only a few discuss other languages such as malagasy, cebuano, ilokano, and the austronesian language family located in pacific island countries. therefore, this research tries to fill the gap in knowledge related to the discussion in the same area. some studies on lexicostatistics have been carried out, such as reid (2018; 2017) attempts to research the philippine language as one of the austronesian languages and the result of the research which breaks the assumption that tagalog has more words related to ilokano than bikolano, but it unveils that tagalog, ilokano, and bikolano have the same proportion of cognates. current research on another lexicostatistics study conducted by wardana et al. (2022) which discovered that the results of this study indicate that malay and tagalog share about 28% of words that are related and fall into the category of stock clumps. other results also show that malay and ilocano historically and linguistically are closer and classified as category of language stock with the cognate or related words as much as 31%. meanwhile, research conducted by sofiyatunnida & hendrokumoro (2021) on lexicostatistics of malay and mandailing reveals that batak mandailing and malay have a percentage of 58% kinship. based on lexicostatistical calculations of 200 lists of swadesh’s vocabulary in batak mandailing and malay, 114 kinship vocabularies and 84 non-relative vocabularies are found. the conclusion of this research is that batak mandailing and malay are related and belong to the language family level. another study on malay was conducted by istiqamah (2017) who claims that that (1) the kinship level of acehnese language with malay is 48.4%, (2) acehnese language and malay began to separate from its proton language (parent language) since 1,635 years ago, (3) the acehnese language with the malay language is included in the classification of the language family. further research about lexicostatistics is presented by mbangi & marafad (2018) which found that according to the analysis's findings, which were based on the lexicostatistic technique, there is a quantitative 39% vocabulary similarity between the tolaki and culambacu languages. both languages diverged from a protolanguage around 230–307 years ago. abner et al. (2020) reveal that the study of sign language families and histories is less advanced and suggest a lexicostatistic analysis utilizing modern quantitative techniques and discuss the tools and techniques for annotation that can make this approach easier. another research on austronesian language that is close to both indonesian language and malagasy language is conducted by paul & ralalaoherivony (2020) and cole & hermon (2018) which presented in a thorough investigation of the languages spoken in the philippine territory of the zambales mountains, a lexicostatistic survey was carried out. six separate languages were defined as a result of the survey, which involved the gathering and analysis of about forty-word lists in a region where the linguistic situation was previously mostly english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 877 unknown. this article proposes a general-use computer software that significantly improved the accuracy and speed of the lexicostatistic analysis and presents the survey results as a language tree. arokoyo & lagunju (2019) examine african languages of yorùbá, àkúré ̣ and ìkàré ̣ àkókó dialects and discovered that standard yorùbá and kré had a greater cognate percentage (86.40%), followed by kàré, kókó, and kré (74.60%), and standard yorùbá and kàré, kókó (78.90% cognates). this study found that standard yorùbá and kré have a higher degree of mutual intelligibility than standard yorùbá and kàré kókó, although kàré kókó and kré have a lower level of mutual intelligibility. adjacent to this research, hendrokumoro & temaja (2019) conducted a study on malagasy and ma’anyan language and revealed that the findings show that both languages' lexicostatistical cognate percentage is 37%. the two languages diverged from their protolanguage between 273 bc and 94 ce, according to glottochronology calculations (2018). four different types of sound modifications and seven sets of sound correspondence are found qualitatively. nurhayati (2017) in her findings indicate that the malay (indonesian) and bugis languages are related. there are 72 terms in the bugis language that are kin to words in the indonesian language. there are 14 similarly identical words among the 72 comparable words, as well as insertions, metathesis, sound modifications, sound increments, and sound disappearances. based on these findings, it was also discovered that the malay language (indonesian), along with the bugis language, split out from their parent language 414 years ago. last but not least, ntelu (2017) exposed that the findings of this study further demonstrate that the glottochronology of the gorontalo and atinggola languages is as follows: (a) at 1.377 + 122 years ago, gorontalo and atinggola languages were one single language; (b) at 1.449 1.255 years ago. the study's findings are (a) that these two languages are related through kinship and (b) that the separation of the gorontalo and atinggola languages occurred between 1.4 and 1.2 thousand years ago, or in the 12th to 14th century. lexicostatistics technique not only serves to determine the percentage of related words and calculate language age, but can also be used for grouping kin languages. languages that show a high percentage of kinship are groups that are closer in membership, while those with a low percentage of kinship are groups whose membership level or kinship is more distant. according to keraf (in indrariani, 2017) lexicostatistics is a technique in language grouping that tends to prioritize statistically observing words (lexicon). meanwhile, glottochronology groups the lexicon between languages to calculate the age of related languages. this echoes starostin (2013) about both "glottochronology" and "lexicostatistics," two approaches originally put forth by swadesh in (suzuki, 2019) to construct relative genetic classifications of languages based on percentages of related items in their basic lexicons, have not been particularly well-liked by mainstream comparative linguists because of an early set of critical works that called into question their general veracity. the majority of lexicostatistical research is avowedly quantitative; it has primarily focused on analyzing pairwise comparisons of languages to determine the percentage of cognate forms they contain and has built trees from the results of these pairwise comparisons, which are then presented in matrices or are displayed in tree-like cladograms after being expressed in tables of percentages (grant, 2010). swadesh (1995) proposed a classification of language kinship systems, namely: table 1. classification of language kinship systems (keraf, in indrariani 2017) language level separation time in centuries percentage of relatives language 0-5 100-81 language family 5-25 81-36 stock 25-50 36-12 micro phylum 50-75 12-4 meso phylum 75-100 4-1 macro phylum 100-more 1-less than1% method this research was examined using language grouping methods and lexicostatistical techniques. the first stage, the researchers collect 207 basic vocabularies compiled by swadesh (1955). the method used in providing this data is a referential method, while the technique used is a note-taking technique (kesuma, 2007, p.48; sudaryanto, 1993, pp.13-16; sudaryanto, 1988, p.5). second, determine the word kin (cognate) to find the percentage of kinship from the three languages by classifying based on: (a) identical pairs, (b) phonemic correspondence pairs, (c) phonetically similar pairs, (d) different pairs. one phoneme. third, calculate the age and separation time of the three languages and also calculate the error range to determine a more precise separation time. fourth, the preparation of the classification of kinship systems, whether as one language wan anayati, muhammad kiki wardana, mayasari, purwarno purwarno lexicostatistics of malay and malagasy languages: comparative historical linguistic study 878 (language), language family (subfamily), language family (stock), micro phylum, meso phylum, or macro phylum (keraf, 1996). results and discussion based on the cognate percentage, malay and malagasy are included in the family of stock family with the word relatives reaching up to 16.5%. loanwords from malay and (to a lesser extent) javanese have been incorporated into malagasy, and they occasionally refer to historical details that historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists were previously unaware of competent to establish loanwords indicate that the earliest malagasy settlers in the east. the malays had already established contact with africa during the malay era. madagascar contacts took a while. this time frame began prior to the move. until after interactions between austronesians and east africans, when madagascar has a multicultural society as a result of the presence of africans (mostly bantus). we are able to phase malaymalagasy encounters because of two factors. a number of time periods, including the appearance of banjarese malay loanwords and the malay loanwords that haven't undergone any significant etymological phonological alterations. when the first european settlers arrived, malay had surpassed chinese as the primary interethnic language in southeast asia and beyond. it served as the interethnic commerce language, but it had also evolved into the language of islam, probably because muslim traders from the middle east and india were the first to introduce islam to the harbor towns of the archipelago. malacca's status as the epicenter of islamic malay culture was terminated by the entrance of the portuguese. the position of the malay was unaffected. the nature of the portuguese reconquista required them to go beyond trade because they had been fighting the "moors" both inside and outside of portugal for ages. they launched an aggressive campaign to spread catholicism. and they spoke malay, which was the most generally recognized language, for this purpose. for instance, the jesuit francis xavier spent considerable time in malacca studying malay before going to east indonesia to convert the moluccans (adelaar & himmelmann, 2019) the distinctive feature of madagascar is that it is essentially monolingual, meaning that the local dialects that make up the malagasy language are closely linked to one another. a small comoran village that speaks bantu is located in the northwest, and there used to be a purportedly arabic-speaking settlement in the southeast. there are also several immigrants and expatriates from france, china, pakistan, and india. however, the nation can be characterized as being linguistically homogeneous overall. ecologically and economically, however, it is not, which is ultimately the cause of the national language's development's resemblance to the philippine situation (adelaar & himmelmann, 2019) the official language of madagascar, as well as a number of communities on mayotte in the comores, is malagasy. the exact level of mutual intelligibility of malagasy lects is difficult to measure despite having a standard written form due to the widespread use of a standard variation. there are many dialects of malagasy, but the most significant ones are merina, tanala, betsileo, antankarana, tsimehety, and sakalava (blench, 2018). adelaar (2017; 2021) strengthens his findings in his early research by saying that if linguistic areas are not required to be physically adjacent to one another, southern borneo and madagascar constitute one such area. it is supported by four structural linguistic characteristics that appear in the languages ngaju, ma'anyan, banjar malay, and malagasy. considering the shortcomings of the many formulations of the idea of the linguistic area. both the applicability of this notion and the veracity of the relevant aspects may be questioned in light of this result. lexicostatistics on malay and malagasy after determining the word relatives, the next step is to find the percentage of relatives with the formula: c= vt x 100% vd information: c= relative word; vt= number of relatives' vocabulary; vd= amount of gloss calculated c= vt x 100% = vd 33 x 100% = 0,165 x 100% = 16.5 % 200 once the percentage of relatives is known, we can calculate the separation time from malay and malagasy is known: c = 16.5 % log r = 80,5 % asked: w= ......? english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 879 answer: w = log.c 2 log.r w = log -1.833 2 x log 0,805 w = -1,833 2 x (-0,217) w = -1,833 -0,434 w = 4,223 the split time is multiplied by 1000 so that the result becomes 4.223. so, the calculation of the initial separation time for malay and malagasy is 4.223 years ago. in other words, the calculation of the initial separation time of malay and malagasy can be expressed as follows: (1) malay and malagasy are thought to have formed a single language about 4,223 years ago. (2) malay and malagasy are thought to have started to separate from their proto language around 2201 bc (calculated in 2022). after the results of the separation of malay and malagasy are known, the next step is to calculate the error term. this is done to avoid miscalculations and to set a more precise separation time. it should be remembered that to anticipate errors in statistics is to give an estimate, not in a certain time, but in a certain time period. the following formula can be used to calculate the error term: s = standard error in the percentage of relative words c = percentage of relative words n = number of words compared, both relatives and non-relatives is known: c = 0.16 n = 200 asked: s = ….? answer: s = √c(1 − c n s = √0,16 (1 − 0,16) 200 = √0,16x 0,84 200 s = √0,1344 200 = 0,0259 (rounded to 0, 02) the result of this standard error (0.02) is summed with the percentage of initial relatives (c1) to get c2 (c2 = c1 + s). so c2 the result is 0.16+0.02=0.18. with c2, the separation time can be calculated again, using the same formula: c2 = 18% log r = 0,805 w2 = ......? w2 = log 0,18 2 log 0,805 w2 = -1,715 2 x -0,217 w2 = -1,715 -0,434 w2= 3,951. this separation time is eventually multiplied by 1000 to get 3,951. thus, we can calculate the error term is = w1 – w2 = 4.223 – 3.951 = 272. so, the age of malay and malagasy can be expressed as follows: (1) malay and malagasy are thought to have formed a single language around 4223 – 3951 years ago. (2) malay and malagasy are a single language in 4495-3951 years ago. (3) malay and malagasy are thought to have started to separate from the proto malay language around 2201-1929 bc (calculated in 2022). conclusion malay and malagasy come from the same family, namely the proto austronesia (pan) family whose kinship is found through the lexicostatistical technique as much as 16.5% and is included in the family of stock group. malay and malagasy were a single language 4495-3951 years ago and were separated from their proto language around 22011929 bc. acknowledgements the researchers would like to thank the institutions for fully supporting the completion of this research. the researchers are also grateful to wan anayati, muhammad kiki wardana, mayasari, purwarno purwarno lexicostatistics of malay and malagasy languages: comparative historical linguistic study 880 colleagues who have contributed to facilitate the process of completing this research. the researchers also express their gratitude to their family and friends who have motivated the researchers to continue working in academics. references abner, n., geraci, c., yu, s., lettieri, j., mertz, j., & salgat, a. 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(2021). leksikostatistik bahasa mandailing dan bahasa melayu. nusa, 16(2), 165–180. starostin, g. s. (2013). lexicostatistics as a basis for language classification. in h. fangerau, h. geisler, & t. halling (eds.), classification and evolution in biology, linguistics and the history of science. concepts – methods – visualization., hymes, pp.125–146. franz steiner verlag. suzuki, h. (2019). 100 linguistic maps of the swadesh word list of tibetic languages from yunnan. ilcaa. wardana, m. k., iqbal, m., sastra, d., universitas, i., medan, h., linguistik, d., sumatera, u., pendidikan, d., indonesia, b., & kuala, u. s. (2022). lexicostatistics of malay, tagalog and ilocano languages: a comparisonal historical linguistic. journal education and development, 10(3), 475–479. wan anayati, muhammad kiki wardana, mayasari, purwarno purwarno lexicostatistics of malay and malagasy languages: comparative historical linguistic study 882 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 855 social critique in merdeka short story by putu wijaya: a dystopian literature approach m. manugeren english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: manugeren@sastra.uisu.ac.id purwarno purwarno english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwarno@sastra.uisu.ac.id purwanto siwi english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwanto.siwi@sastra.uisu.ac.id susi ekalestari english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam email: susi.ekalestari@sastra.uisu.ac.id sri wulan english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: sriwulan@sastra.uisu.ac.id apa citation: manugeren, m., purwarno, p., siwi, p., ekalestari, s., & wulan, s. (2022). social critique in merdeka short story by putu wijaya: a dystopian literature approach. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 855-864. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6621 received: 21-07-2022 accepted: 20-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction social critique and social problems always go hand in hand as they are interrelated. social critique arises because of unresolved social problems; while social problems exist in almost all societies. social problems arise owing to the inconsistency of relations between individuals and groups and if not resolved can give a negative impact on social life, such as hampering peace and comfort of the community in all forms of social interaction (merrill et al., 2017). social problems can be caused by changes in individual or group attitudes due to the development of science and technology, social systems, cultural shock and cultural and social gaps (mooney et al., 2021). in short, the incompatibilities of social and cultural life as well as conditions that are not desired by large groups in an environment are the triggers for social problems. poverty, crime, gender discrimination, family disorganization, environment, population, belief system and bureaucracy are problems always visible in society (zaitov & teshayev, 2022). society is the largest human group with the same traditions, customs, attitudes and feelings of unity. this shows that society consists of several abstract: changes in a society produce social critiques which in turn become a means of communicating new ideas in addition to assessing old ideas for social change, in short as a vehicle for the conservation and reproduction of a social system. social critique can be conveyed through literary works; this is seen from the short story of merdeka by putu wijaya. through a dystopian literary approach and supported by related theories and concepts, it is revealed that this short story is full of social critiques as a result of the author's observations of his environment. the flow of dystopia is generally speculative, presenting a catastrophic or chaotic landscape of the future civilization of the world. dystopian literature is always associated with socio political discourse. overall this research is carried out using a qualitative descriptive method with the aim of presenting a complete picture of the social setting and clarification of social phenomena in the short story of merdeka and then synchronizing it with social reality. the results show that the forms of social critique conveyed by the author is lack of self-introspection, social gap and environmental damage. these three forms of social critique if uncontrolled can cause chaos in the social system because the main result is conflict, the color of dystopian literature. keywords: environmental damage; self-introspection; social gap. mailto:purwarno@sastra.uisu.ac.id mailto:purwanto.siwi@sastra.uisu.ac.id mailto:susi.ekalestari@sastra.uisu.ac.id m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan social critique in merdeka short story by putu wijaya: a dystopian literature approach 856 groups ranging from the smallest to the largest, having habits then forming a tradition producing rules. in social relations, a reaction arises as a result of the contact of the relationship causing individual behavior to expand then making a change or some changes in society establishing social values, social norms, patterns of behavior, organizational establishment, structure of community institutions, layers of society, power in authority, and social interaction (capozzi & ristic, 2018; vestner et al., 2020). it is undeniable that in social life, friction always exists; but to reduce the size of a problem in an environment or community, the community members must voluntarily have a sense of belonging and from this, a nation can be built; a nation that can always share identities and relate to one another in harmony. the process of nation building is problematic and it tries to create a national identity. when people are not able to relate, crisis occurs ( saraswati, 2018; wimmer, 2018; eriksen, 2020; heng, 2017). to avoid a social crisis, it is necessary to have an idea to observe, follow, and evaluate the social order in a community (roepke, 2017; chen et al., 2018). this idea can then be labeled as a social critique, an innovation that becomes a means of communicating new ideas in addition to assessing old ideas for social change. social critique as a form of communication in society aims or functions as a control over the course of a social system or social process (bianchin, 2019; matamoros-fernandez & farkas, 2021; lewis, mark c. (2018). therefore social critique is an input, refutation, satire, response, or even an assessment of something considered deviant or violating the values in people's lives and is conveyed to the community or to related parties who participate directly in the order, such as religious leaders, community leaders, and the government. social critique can be expressed directly or indirectly. social actions, rallies, and demonstrations are forms of direct critique. indirect forms of critique include critique through songs, literary works, films, theatrical actions and so on. both forms of social critique have important social influences and impacts in people's lives. social critique is a form of communication that can be understood both in oral and written form, aiming to control the course of the social system relating to interpersonal problems (beauchamp et al., 2019). social critique through literary work is the rationale for making this research, through a short story entitled merdeka by putu wijaya already published in the august 29 2010 edition of jawa pos newspaper, using a dystopian literature approach. dystopia literature is one of the genres in literature that is quite popular in the literary world, especially in fantasy and science fiction works (seeger & davidson-vecchione, 2019). although more familiar among fans of fantasy and science fiction novels, many consider dystopia to be a branch of realistic fiction. in simple terms, dystopia refers to a world that at first appears to be running smoothly or is often termed utopian but later appears to be full of imperfections due to social and economic inequalities. the state of dystopia is described as a disorder that causes a new social system that is more systematic but tends to be oppressive. however, in some works, there are also those that negate the existence of the social system and replace social and economic inequalities with equitable conditions of poverty (campbell, 2019; stoner, 2007). through a dystopian approach, a research is designed to raise the issue of anxiety about humanity and the socio-economic system in society. social problems at the present should be discussed in preparation for handling social problems in the future. given that literature is universal and can enter all socio-cultural domains, literature is the right choice to explore and analyze the state of society and dystopia becomes an instrument of critique and an implied warning for the ruling government and the prevailing system. thus, dystopia plays a role in literary works to provide education and stimulate public awareness to participate in handling every problem because every problem has the potential to trigger other problems (jerkovic and alihodzic, 2018; smith, 2017). merdeka short story by putu wijaya is full of social critiques, a description of the social life experienced by certain characters in the plot appointed by the author according to his mission, starting with the atmosphere of this nation in the early days of the struggle for independence from the hands of the colonizers. the values of struggle are illustrated through monologues and dialogues among characters. the final battle depicted in this short story is a decisive, with the meaning that they must succeed in seizing independence or they must die. with such a strong slogan, the soldiers muster all their souls to end the conflict that has been going on for hundreds years. apart from the struggles of the soldiers acted by the characters in the short story, there are human, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 857 social and cultural values summarized in the form of social critiques, whether directed at individuals, groups, systems, or the ruling government. literary works have become one of the effective means to convey social critiques in addition to the press and physical movements in the form of demonstrations and along with its development has become a cultural spirit. literature is born from the writer's anxiety to see the condition of the people who are always involved in social problems. as a social portrait, literature can reflect various important events in society, describing the psychological state of society, and providing input for problem solving; all of this is certainly a source of thought, inspiration and community readiness to face social conditions that occur in society. literary works also act as a medium of entertainment (derrida, 2015; eagleton, 2017; attridge, (2017). when we read merdeka short story, we can see that putu wijaya focuses on moral messages in the form of social critiques because basically there is always an implied message behind a critique. progress, whatever its form can be seen and subsequently realized through critiques. to understand the meaning of social critiques in a short story, we must also be able to understand all the socio-cultural phenomena implied. putu wijaya's work merdeka is chosen because of its uniqueness, namely the way the short story is presented using simple language so that it can be digested by all levels of society. with a storyline that is not complex and generally has a flat plot, short stories are more in demand by the reader community. short stories are part of prose literary works other than novels. short stories are read by many people because they provide entertainment to readers. in addition, short stories provide information about various events in society, namely about life problems. as it is a social critique, the short story of merdeka is appropriate to be studied through a dystopian literary approach. dystopian literature generally describes inadequate living conditions due to a bad social order or a government system that does not take sides with the community, usually an authoritarian government. social critique in postmodern literature also uses the term dystopia to describe a post-industrial society considered to have a high concept of self-interest and class. people like this tend to justify any means to meet their needs and goals, without considering the consequences of their actions on the environment (horan, 2018; seeger & davidson-vecchione, 2019). in most dystopian literary works, corrupt governments create or maintain a poor quality of life, often conditioning the masses to believe that their lives are worthy and fair, even perfect. dystopia is often written as a warning, or as satire, showing current trends extrapolated into nightmare conclusion. dystopia in general can be said to be a bad picture of a place that includes an imaginative view of a society that focuses on critically highlighting the negative or problematic side of the ideal view of that society (khan & rasool, 2022; moylan, 2020). the term "dystopia" appears in literature as opposed to works written in the utopian genre. the first writer to launch a whole literary direction was the english philosopher thomas more. the origin of the utopia genre usually comes from his novel utopia (1516). in fact, most of his works show an ideal society in which everyone lives happily and quietly. the name of this world is utopia. in contrast to his "quiet" works, the author's works begin to emerge, telling stories about completely opposite societies, countries, or worlds. in it, the state limits one's freedom, often freedom of thought. works written in this tone begin to be called dystopia (beresin, and olson, 2019). different from the calm utopian literature that depicts a harmonious society, dystopian literature provides a picture of people's lives that are opposite to that of a utopian society. people's mindset and personality will determine the formation of a state of utopia or dystopia; because overall even though we see a social system or government that does not take sides with the community, everything starts from the mindset and personality of the individual that develops into the mindset and personality of the group. dystopia is characterized as a crisis of hope, the helplessness of the revolutionary struggle, an inescapable social evil. economics is not seen as a solution to global problems and a way of building social order, but as a tool to enslave people. everyone needs money, but that does not mean that people are slaves to money (fitzsimmon & wilson, 2020; moylan, 2020). dystopia presents a "new world" for one who lives in it, resulting in a soulless, intolerant, empathetic state; people are made into robots, human machines with one goal, whatever the path to be taken, and at a certain moment, a natural human feeling awakens in a person, not in accordance with the existing system, built on m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan social critique in merdeka short story by putu wijaya: a dystopian literature approach 858 restrictions, prohibitions, and subordination for the benefit of the state and it is through this awareness that people will see that they have been dragged into a dystopian world. there is conflict between the individual and society. dystopia denotes the incompatibility of utopian ideas with individual interests, revealing the absurdity of the utopian project. this clearly shows how proclaimed equality turns into leveling; state structures forcibly determine human behavior and technological advances turn a person into a mechanism (herrero & royo-grasa, 2021). a dystopian society can be recognized by the existence of a social hierarchy, class division in society, the upper, middle and lower classes and generally the upper class becomes the ruler and acts arbitrarily. the lower class people will become powerless, nothing more than slaves who must obey all the rules applied, even though they are not in accordance with humanity or justice. then there is government propaganda voicing the concept that the government is right and must be appreciated and then there are strict regulations that limit the space for each member of society so that the nature of democracy is immersed in it. the moral crisis, in the form of indifference to the environment and the lack or absence of selfintrospection, is also a highlight in dystopian literature (moylan, 2020), which then leads to establish social critique. social critique is a form of communication in society that functions as a control over the course of a social system or process of social interaction. social critique comes to the surface when the social system and the order of life of a society do not work well due to clashes among individuals, groups and social institutions (langford, 2018). . when social problems are not recognized and lead to dissociative effects in society, social critique is needed. various media can be used to deliver social critique, such as newspapers, social media, television and one medium that is always effective in delivering social critique is literature. the scope of social critique includes the political field, matters relating to state affairs, government policies, or authority; economics, relating to production, contribution and production; culture, relating to aspects of creation, taste and intention of humans as civilized beings; law, in relation to rules and regulations. in this study, all areas of social critique are covered because social critique does not focus on one issue (connell, 2018; diedwardo, 2019). an issue remains related to all the problems facing humanity. social critiques which become the discussion in this research are: lack of selfintrospection, social gap and environmental damage. self-introspection is a person's way of looking at himself or reflecting on his thoughts, emotions, and memories. through introspection, a good and righteous personality can be formed. everyone must do self-introspection so that their perspective on self-worth and those around them can change. self-introspection can also increase emotional intelligence, making it easier for a person to overcome the challenges of life and social interactions can run smoothly (kusumawardhani, 2017). various ways can be done to do selfintrospection such as seeing and understanding the problems faced, adapting to the environment, and most importantly trying to make peace with oneself so that conflicts can be avoided. actions like this can give the brain a chance to pause for a moment from various muddled thoughts. at this stage we can sort through various experiences that have occurred and evaluate these experiences. this evaluation then becomes a lesson for us to determine a good mindset and behavior in the future. when there is disharmony in the social system and social institutions in a community, social inequality will occur; inconsistency between expectations and reality. social inequality is included in social problems that have an impact on conflict. not only from an economic perspective, conflicts can be due to legal issues, public services, bureaucracy, education, religion, and ethnicity. this form of social inequality makes it difficult for the lower class to get access to development outcomes, health and education. and all this of course will cause other social problems (dalton, 2017; umeanolue, 2018). this social gap is often related to the existence of a form of difference that is real and easy to see in terms of public finances, covering the value of assets. in addition, this social gap can also be seen from the inequality in goods or services, wealth, rewards, laws, opportunities that are obtained by everyone. the next issue is concerned with environmental damage, unlimited by space and time. this matter is getting worse day by day. the conditions have directly threatened human life. the level of natural damage also increases the risk of natural disasters. the cause of natural damage can be caused by two factors, namely due to natural events and human activities. the second cause of environmental damage is the result of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 859 human activities. the damage caused by humans is actually greater than that caused by natural disasters. this is because the damage done can occur continuously and tends to increase. this damage is generally caused by human activities that are not environmentally friendly such as forest destruction and conversion, mining, air, water and soil pollution (steinmann et al., 2017). environmental damage can be interpreted as a process of deterioration or a decrease in environmental quality. this environmental deterioration is characterized by the loss of land, water, air resources, the extinction of wild flora and fauna, and the destruction of ecosystems. therefore, prevention of environmental damage must be implemented. the environment and its surroundings must be protected. protection and management of the environment must be in accordance with human welfare. otherwise, it can cause various environmental disasters. the environmental damage that has occurred so far is the result of weak government supervision and public reluctance to change unnatural behavior towards nature and weak law enforcement as the last bastion to ensure the rule of law (jargin, 2021). method the research is conducted with a qualitative descriptive method, descriptive in nature with the concept that the data obtained are decomposed in the forms of words or pictures not in the forms of calculations or numbers. the main principle of qualitative is to process and analyze the collected data into systematic, orderly, structured, and meaningful data. this research is then done by means of a dystopian literary approach. this approach reveals that literary works as a medium of social control provide an overview of the social order of a society that is not in line with expectations so that people face various difficulties in their daily lives (busetto, 2020; adhabi & anozie, 2017; sugiyono, 2017). the main data source is from the short story entitled merdeka by putu wijaya, published in august 29, 2010 edition of jawa pos newspaper and the data are from the texts of the short story referring to social critiques, among others, lack of of self-introspection, social gap and environmental damage. the technique used in this research is a documentary study technique as the point studied is merdeka short story document. this documentary study technique is carried out by examining literary works as a source of research data. the research instruments used are humans and cards. the persons in question are the researchers, while the card is a sheet of paper containing notes and observations. the techniques used in analyzing the data cover reading the texts of the short story repeatedly, finding the keywords reflecting social critique, describing, analyzing and interpreting social critique in the texts, and in the final stage drawing conclusions results and discussion putu wijaya, who was born in 1941, is known as a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist. a number of short stories appeared in the forms of books and articles published in various magazines and newspapers. just like his dramas and novels, putu wijaya's short stories reveal many streams of consciousness, triggering the readers to think about and reflect on the various social inequalities that occur around them. wijaya is a reliable critic who uncovers various social problems through his works and one of them is the short story of merdeka which is then used as the object of this research. three points of discussion cover lacking of self-introspection, social gap and environmental damage lack of self-introspection self-introspection means that we seek to understand ourselves on a deeper level. this includes gaining a better understanding of what we have done or what we have not done yet as well as our strengths and weaknesses. indirectly self-introspection reminds us to think before acting and also able to understand the circumstances around us. one should not take immediate action in response to an event. everything must be considered carefully. we must not shoot forward because the real enemy is not in front, but on the side and behind; the real enemy is within us. another thing that needs to be seen and done is to cleanse our environment of all traitors, enemies in blankets; it is they who make this independence lose its meaning and value (wijaya, 2021). the essence of this quote is that any form of problem or conflict comes from within. most people will try to claim that they are in the right and the problem is caused by someone else. people like this are usually difficult to invite for self-introspection and are always busy blaming the situation and other people. this one bad trait is of course not good and can hinder selfdevelopment. this is because those who find it difficult to introspect are too busy commenting on m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan social critique in merdeka short story by putu wijaya: a dystopian literature approach 860 other people rather than correcting their shortcomings. when a person always feels that what he is doing and saying is right, he will tend to find it difficult to realize his own mistakes. people like this are usually concerned with their own ego and are less able to think from other points of view. the data above are in line with the concept of dystopian literature which describes the state of society and also the personalities of community members getting worse day by day and can have a negative impact on the stability of the social structure. this is a social critique conveyed by wijaya, of course through his observations and understanding as a writer for literary works are a reflection of people's lives. through this short story, wijaya conveys the message that it is easier to defeat visible enemies, enemies who come or are in front of us; what often becomes a problem is that the people around us, who have been given the trust become traitors. in addition, the toughest enemy to defeat is ourselves and as long as we cannot do self-introspection, then we cannot make peace with ourselves and we shall continue to be our enemies. the next data related to the lack of selfintrospection can be seen from the words of a character whose contents state that change does not start from physical appearance, but from spiritual realm. if everything is right in the heart, then everything can go well. if the heart has not been thoroughly cleansed, then what is right can look wrong (wijaya, 2021). wijaya again reminds us that happiness, independence and serenity cannot be obtained from anywhere, everything comes from ourselves. dystopian literary works generally describe a chaotic and uncontrollable state of society with successive difficulties and all of this comes from the community. people who cannot or do not want to do self-introspection will not be calm in living life. people like this should be given input on the importance of self-introspection, should be criticized so that they can realize that they deserve to have a quiet and comfortable life and they must make changes. changes that are not forced, but changes that are carried out with self-awareness. we cannot change a situation until we change our personality; we cannot make others happy before we make ourselves happy. living with sincerity is the first path to peace. the point is that we must cleanse our hearts, keep ourselves away from thoughts and actions that harm others. social gap social gap is an imbalance in society. the causes of social gap are financial problems, lack of employment, poverty, to health. this social inequality results in injustice and position in society. the striking difference is in the financial ability and social status of the people living in certain neighborhoods. this gap is often associated with the existence of a very real difference that can be seen in terms of public finances, such as wealth, especially when it comes to economic disparities. now it is very easy to see from the potential and unequal opportunities in social positions in society. social gap can affect all sectors of people's social life. one illustration that can be seen owing to social gap, is the existence of social jealousy towards certain groups. one group of people can meet all their basic needs, while others have to fight hard to meet their basic needs and they are still unable to do so. thus jealousy arises, which if not controlled properly, can trigger other problems such as crime which ultimately disturbs the comfort and tranquility of all other members of society. this unstable and chaotic situation is a picture given by dystopian literature and of course it implicitly gives space to the author to convey social critique. literature as a social control medium must be implemented and optimized. the following data describe the social gap presented by wijaya and also serves as a forum for conveying his social critique so that the public through the readers can understand the real source of problems in their environment. a character in the short story says that life does not belong to people, but to leaders, party leaders, and intellectuals who become celebrities because of their incredibly intelligent humanitarian theories, but never side with humanity (wijaya, 2021). democracy means government by the people with the highest power in the hands of the people and carried out directly by them or their elected representatives through a free electoral system. however, in practice democracy is no longer fully implemented, according to the character who speaks in this short story. he feels that democracy is only a name. he does not feel that he is living in a democracy because all the steps are very limited; his life is regulated by a group of people who happen to have access to the authorities. democracy is a government by a group of people, a bad system because it is implemented by a group of people who can benefit the rulers and themselves so that they are vulnerable to anarchism. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 861 the system of government in the name of democracy will only result in unstable political and social conditions, all of which lead to social inequality. there is no such thing as humanity or for the benefit of the people in social inequality. in addition, such a situation will trigger sociopolitical instability and social integration, because there is a conflict between the rulers and the people. in fact, in many cases, this causes a dishonorable fall of government power, a dystopian state, a state of disorientation and everyone in it, especially civil society, victimized and has to bear all the burdens of hardship. this is a social criticism conveyed by the author with the aim that all parties immediately realize that the direction of the government system is starting to be damaged and must be repaired immediately so that the people could live in prosperity. the following data also relate to the problem of social gap. independence is essentially useless; independence is only for the rich and powerful; while civilians who have nothing will remain slaves with no future. it is not people who will write history, but conglomerates, political adventurers and elites, they are considered to have the ability to see life from behind their academic theories, even though all of them are abstract (wijaya, 2021). the remarks are carried out by a character in the short story. the words 'make people 'rich' and 'you will still be a slave who have no future', describe an extreme social gap with the phrase 'no future.' social gap is a condition where there is an imbalance in society, where there is social gap formed from an unfair distribution of many things that are considered important by society. in essence, social gap is caused by differences in social, economic, and cultural status that are striking, resulting in injustice in a society. therefore, resources and self-awareness as well as self-improvement need to be distributed evenly to everyone so that they could feel the real senses of rights and obligations. unresolved social inequality is a phenomenon of dystopian society. environmental damage environmental damage is a significant theme in dystopian literature. environmental damage can be interpreted as a process of environmental quality deterioration which is characterized by the loss or drastic reduction of land, water, air resources, the extinction of wild flora and fauna, and ecosystem damage. the following data describe the environmental damage caused by unmeasured and uncontrolled development. in the next 60 years, everything related to nature will be completely destroyed. the existing trees will be cut down converted to roads and malls. skyscrapers will pierce every inch of land throughout the city. overpasses wrap around the city, no one will ever get to see and feel the fresh morning and the red dusk, because the sky has been destroyed by the sins of construction. on the streets there is no more space for pedestrians and bicycles, everything is taken by luxurious vehicles owned by conglomerates (wijaya, 2021). furthermore, the description of environmental damage is also clearly illustrated here. forests and mountains are barren; rivers are dry, and the seas are polluted. the rainy season is beyond the prediction. natural disasters keep coming. rains, floods, landslides and then forest fires keep coming; volcanoes erupt, earth wells gush, drowning cities in muddy puddles; the we find dengue fever, swine flu, drugs, poverty, corruption, religious clashes and disintegration. the people are starving while those of the upper class are busy fighting, blaming each other and inciting they deserve to rule (wijaya, 2021). humans and environments are two words that cannot be separated. both influence each other. the influence of nature on humans is more passive, while the influence of humans on nature is more active. this illustrates that humans are the trigger for the destruction of nature; especially when humans use the concept of anthropocentrism, a perspective that places humans at the center of universe system. this view contains the idea that all policies taken regarding the environment must be judged based on human interests. it is not surprising that the focus of attention in this view lies in increasing human welfare and happiness. nature is seen as an object to fulfill human needs and interests, so that nature is only used as a tool for achieving goals. obviously the concept of absolute anthropocentrism cannot be fully accepted, unless anthropocentrism is controlled. environmental damage can disturb health, cause biodiversity loss and ozone depletion as protection from the sun's ultraviolet rays and also economic collapse. we need nature to survive. therefore, it is important to preserve nature so that it can maintain a healthy and suitable environment for living things to live in. this is the role of social critiques conveyed by the author. conclusion merdeka short story by putu wijaya is full of social critiques. lack of self-introspection is a m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan social critique in merdeka short story by putu wijaya: a dystopian literature approach 862 significant feature of the dystopian literature reflected in the behavior and personality of individuals and groups in the text and by this any conflict is hard to resolve. the problem of social inequality described in the story is also a trigger for people's discomfort in carrying out social life and further if not well controlled, could destabilize the social structure, most likely projected to national political, social and cultural instability. relating to environmental damage, it is predicted that in the next sixty years, everything related to nature and enjoyed by humans today will be destroyed. trees are no longer visible in big cities and in their places, skyscrapers and greenhouses with various risks to human life thrive. through a dystopian literary approach, social critique is expressed from this short story with a focus on discussing the displacement of selfintrospection, social gap and environmental damage. the results of the analysis of the data obtained indicate that the three forms of social critique are found in merdeka short story. merdeka by putu wijaya, describes the anxiety of the people about the meaning of an independence, but no one in the community feels free in terms of social justice, morals, peace, and economy, which makes the characters question the ways how they face the issue of independence and they are all eager to get justice in this beloved country. putu wijaya also implicitly provides an input that there is a need of deep attention for social inequality in social life and the government or people who have more ability and income need to also understand the situation of the poor and take useful actions with the aim of protecting, serving, accompanying, and providing directions for a better life. references adhabi, e. a. r., & anozie, c. b. i. 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(2022). implementing project-based learning for efl students’ writing achievement at the tertiary level. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1003-1012. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6470. received: 22-07-2022 accepted: 24-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction writing plays an important role in a student's academic success at the tertiary level. writing is considered a productive skill and activities in writing lead to written products in the process of efl learning. it can serve as a medium for the students in learning the knowledge base of their discipline (maguire et al., 2013), in which they are also learning to develop and organize their arguments (spiller & ferguson, 2011). writing requires a wide range of knowledge and the ability to produce an intelligible text (rofiqoh et al., 2022). through writing, students will be able to convey feelings, ideas, and information (chalish & masitowarni, 2013). students at the university level should master the way to write well. it has to be done to fulfill the purpose of learning writing for students. besides, students are necessary to attain academic writing ability since it influences their academic achievement (oktarina et al., 2018). nevertheless, writing is not an easy task for many efl college students. this is because writing demands adequate knowledge of content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics (oshima & hogue, 2007; toba et al., 2019). it is also strengthened by the fact that rhetorical conventions of english texts, the structure style, and organization often differ from conventions in students’ first language (akbar et al., 2018; almubark, 2016; hasan & marzuki, 2017; belkhir & benyelles, 2017). efl learners face setbacks in writing, for example, part of speech grammar, syntactic, structure, spelling, prepositions, punctuation, cohesion, discourse markers, writing paragraph with a clear focus, paraphrasing, vocabulary, lack of ideas, and weak structure organization (bram & angelina, 2022; budjalemba & listyani, 2020; fareed et al., 2016; nasser, 2019; nenotek et al., 2022; nik et al., 2010; toba et al., 2019). writing remain challenging and much more difficult particularly when students deal with run-on sentences, misuse of connectives, synonym confusion, pronoun misuse, subject-verb agreement, generating, organizing, or even translating ideas or thoughts into an understandable text (xie, 2020; stoller, 2002; nunan, 1999). in tertiary education, the problem persists due to learners’ lack of exposure to writing practice (ilham et al., 2020). in addition, based on preliminary observation and interviews conducted by the researcher on the english academic writing subject, the factors that cause students’ problems in writing are arranging correct sentences, writing the topic sentence, organizing ideas into paragraphs, and limitation of abstract: writing is the process of recursively producing written work. this study aims to explore the effectiveness of project-based learning to elevate the students’ academic writing at the tertiary level and to know the students’ opinion of the implementation of project-based learning in teaching writing. a mixed method design is employed and it is conducted in twelve sessions. it involves thirtyeight students of the english department of a private university in mataram west lombok, indonesia who attend academic writing class in the academic year 2022-2023. project-based learning through the canva application is conducted in academic writing class. to collect the data, writing tests and interviews were used. the finding revealed that project-based learning is able to improve the students writing achievements, the students perceived project-based as interesting, challenging, motivating, enhancing their english, and increasing their creativity. project-based enabled them to work together in groups and to think contextually about the problem given. to conclude, it is advisable for efl teachers to implement project-based learning integrating ict. keywords: academic writing; canva application; ict; project-based learning. ilham implementing project-based learning for efl students’ writing achievement at the tertiary level 1004 vocabulary. therefore, to be proficient in writing, efl college students need to have good knowledge of how to recognize, manage and overcome such things as complexities at the level of the clause, grammatical form, and unfamiliarity with the use of language in writing that is not only learn how to write but also reinforce several aspects of language that they have not completely mastered. in this context, one of the alternative methods to teaching writing by adapting a project-based learning method, with the language learning being guided by the meaningful project to fulfill the learning objectives. project-based learning encourages learners to learn a project, make learning relevant, personalize and engaging (thomas, 2000; wang, 2020) and it is also an authentic teaching pedagogy that allows learners to plan, execute, and assess the project beyond the classroom with real-world experiences (chard, 2013; chi & dieu, 2021; essien, 2018; somani & rizvi, 2018; ulrich, 2016). project-based learning (pbl) helps students gain a deep understanding of the acquired knowledge, develop a high level of learning, and promotes motivation to learn english (al-busaidi & al-seyabi, 2021; kimsesiz et al., 2017; rostika et al., 2021; tuyen & tien, 2021; wongdaeng & hajihama, 2018). furthermore, project-based learning engages learners in an active process of learning (chi & dieu, 2021). moreover, alan & stoller (2005) and stoller (2002) offer ten steps of project-based learning in maximizing the benefit of project work in the foreign language classroom. steps 1 and steps 2 are used for project preparation by agreeing on a theme for the project and determining the final outcome. steps 3 to step 7 are applied to accomplish by students for conducting the project. step 3 is to structure the project, the students and instructor work out project details that guide students from the opening activity to the completion of the project. step 4: instructor prepares students for the language demands of information gathering. at this stage, the instructor prepares students for the language, skill, and strategy demands associated with information gathering. step 5: after practicing the skills and language needed for gathering information, students are ready to collect information using methods such as interviews, letter writing, and library search. step 6: the instructor prepares students to compile and analyze data. at this stage, students need to master the language and skills needed to compile and analyze the information that they have collected from different sources. step 7: students compile and analyze information. working in groups, students organize information and discuss the value of the data they have collected, keeping some and discarding others. furthermore, steps 8 and step 9 are used for the student to present the final outcome of the project. the instructor designs language improvement activities to help students successfully presents the outcome of the project and the last step, step 10, is used to evaluate the whole process of the implementation of pbl. in regard to project-based learning for teaching writing, many studies show its potential in supporting efl students writing achievement. some researchers have investigated the potential of project-based learning in the indonesia context. those studies were conducted to look the improvement of students teaching writing, such as project-based learning and problem-based learning method are able to the students writing achievement (fitriani et al., 2022; affandi & sukyadi, 2016); project-based learning to improve the ability of students on writing and students’ opinion (argawati & suryani, 2020); positive impact the implementation of pbl integrating ict in a rural high school (santhi et al., 2019); project-based learning is effective in improving students’ narrative writing skill (somani & rizvi, 2018); project-based learning model significantly develop persuasive writing skills of secondary school students (alotaibi, 2020); project-based learning has significant effect on students’ english writing skill at junior high school (praba̕ et al., 2018); learning autonomy in writing class (sukerti & yuliantini, 2018); pbl can be used to enhance formal writing and critical argumentation (nunn, 2020); pbl has positive effects on the students’ comparison paragraph writing (sadeghi et al., 2016); project-based learning through blogging affect students’ writing ability (sa’diyah & cahyono, 2019); project-based language teaching effective for eap writing course (grant, 2017); pbl cause consistent improvement in the abilities to write and speak (artini et al., 2018); projectbased learning enhance students’ essay writing (firdausah & sari, 2020); pbl promote efl learners writing skill (aghayani & hajmohammadi, 2019); pbl can enhance and foster students writing skill by applying reflective thinking (hasani et al., 2017); pbl develop students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative story (syarifah & emiliasari, 2019); pbl can english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1005 improve students writing ability (susanti et al., 2020). despite the fact that some studies were conducted in the area of project-based learning for teaching writing skills, not much has been performed to explore project-based learning for teaching writing skills at efl tertiary education level, its implementation in the classroom, and the student's reactions. studies reaching pbl in the indonesian context were mostly conducted in primary and secondary education. moreover, some phases were conducted in doing the projects with different names and numbers. this study synthesized the pbl phases proposed by previous studies which involved the preparation, implementation, presentation, and evaluation phases. given that the area of research exploring project-based learning in teaching writing skills is still understudied at the tertiary level, it is essential to conduct a further investigation through comprehensive research to obtain a more in-depth understanding of the extent of projectbased learning implemented in the efl classroom. considering the urgent needs and advantages of project-based learning in students' learning, this study tried to investigate the effect of pbl in the tertiary efl context and to describe the students' opinions of the implementation of project-based learning in teaching writing. it covers the description of the learning process, the student's progress in the learning program, and student's perception of the teaching method. method the present research performed a mixed method that focuses on collecting, analyzing, and mixing both quantitative and qualitative data (cresswell & clark, 2007). the two data sets were collected during a single study with the aim of answering two different research questions. pre-test and post-test of writing were used to collect the quantitative data. the result of the quantitative test was used to determine whether or not there was a significant effect on students’ english writing skills before and after being taught by using project-based learning (pbl). the qualitative data collected after the intervention was used to identify the influence of pbl on the teaching and learning process. paired-sample ttest was used to analyze the quantitative data, the subject of this study was the fourthsemester efl students who attend an academic writing course at the english department of a private university in mataram west nusa tenggara, indonesia. there were 38 students in one class selected through purposive sampling. this research was conducted in twelve meetings to complete the essay project through the canva application. regarding the data sources, writing tests and interviews were the instrument used to gather the data in researching the research questions. the students' pre-test and post-test on writing descriptive text using the writing criteria of brown (2004) which cover content, organization, language use, vocabulary, and mechanics. interview questions focused on students’ beliefs, motivations, and experiences of the participants toward project-based learning. the interviews were conducted with six students as representatives of the research subjects consisting of two high achievers, two medium achievers, and two low achievers in the classroom. the interview could be classified as a semi-structured interview, which required a list of particular issues related to the topic under investigation as the directed questions but could be tailed by some other issues during their interview (gill et al., 2008). the interviewees were asked about the issues relevant to the essay project through the canvas application. results and discussions this section discusses the effect of pbl through canva application on students writing ability and the students’ opinions toward project-based learning. the effect of pbl to improve students’ writing ability in order to analyze the obtained data, the following steps were applied. they are the normality and homogeneity test of the pre-test and post-test of the group, and the independent sample t-test of the pre-test and post-test of the group. the data of this research were obtained by conducting tests before treatment (pre-test) and after treatment (post-test). the pre-test and posttest were given before and after the treatment. descriptive statistics result of writing skill table 1 showed the result of students' writing tests, both pre-test, and post-test for the experimental group table 1. descriptive statistics n minim um maxim um mean std. deviation ilham implementing project-based learning for efl students’ writing achievement at the tertiary level 1006 pre-test 38 47 78 63.42 9.705 post-test 38 65 93 81.82 7.229 valid n 38 it can be seen from the data in table 1 that students of the experimental group in the pre-test obtained a mean score of 63.42 with the highest score was 78 and the lowest score was 47, while in the post-test the mean score was 81.82 and the minimum score was 65. it means that there is an improvement between students' pre-test and posttest in the experimental group. the result of the normality distribution test before doing further analysis, a normality test was needed to find out whether the obtained data from the pre-test and post-test were categorized as normal or not. the kolmogorov-smirnov formula from spss 23 for windows was used to conduct the normality test. the criteria for the test to be used are the data can be categorized as normally distributed if the significant data is more than 0.05. the details of the normality test can be seen in table 2 below: table 2. tests of normality kolmogorov-smirnova shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. statistic df sig. pretest experiment class .146 38 .039 .921 38 .011 posttest experiment class .089 38 .200* .970 38 .401 from the statistics calculation by using the normality test of shapiro-wilk in spss v.23, it was found that the significance value of the pretest was 0.011 and the post-test was 0.401. it could be said that the post-test score was categorized as normal since sig. value under the shapirowilk column is greater than 0.05. the result of the homogeneity test of variance test the next step after the normality test was the homogeneity test. the homogeneity test was based on the levene test in spss v.23 with a level of significance value greater than 0.05. the result of writing the pre-test and post-test of the experimental group is presented in the following table. table 3. test of homogeneity of variances levene statistic df1 df2 sig. pretest experiment class 1.851 1 36 .182 posttest experiment class 2.304 1 36 .138 as can be seen from the table above, it was found that the significance value of the pre-test was 0.182 and the post-test was 0.138. both of the tests were higher than the 0.05 level. it could be claimed that the experimental group was homogenous. independent samples t-test the final step after the normality and homogeneity test was a parametric test. since the data were normally distributed and homogenous, a paired-samples t-test was applied. the calculation process was a comparison between the result of the independent –sample t-test between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group. it was done to find out the significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group. the output of the "paired t-test" parametric statistical with the spss v.23 for the pretest and post-test score of each student can be seen in table 4 below. table 4. the result of paired samples test of writing skill paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed) mean std. deviatio n std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 pretest postte st 18.39 5 6.495 1.054 20.530 -16.260 17.457 37 .000 table 4 shows that the sig.(2-tailed) value was 0.000 < 0.05, which means that the significance value was under the level of significance set. then, it was safe to conclude that there was an improvement in the students' descriptive text writing scores before and after treatment given to the second-semester students of muhammadiyah university of mataram 2022/2023. it could be inferred that the null hypothesis (ho) was rejected whereas the alternative hypothesis was accepted. in other words, there was a significant difference in students’ text english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1007 writing scores before and after treatment given to second-semester students of the muhammadyah university of mataram. based on the result of research and hypothesis testing that has been carried out, it showed that learning using project-based learning improve students’ score in writing descriptive text. it can be seen from the result of the pre-test and posttest of students' writing tests which showed that the post-tests result is better than those of the pretest. this is relevant to the study conducted by aghayani & hajmohammadi (2019) and astawa et al. (2017) who claimed that project-based learning has a significant effect on the learners' writing ability. student’s perception of pbl in teaching of writing the second aim of the research was to elaborate on the student's response toward the implementation of project-based learning in teaching writing descriptive text. interviews were used by the researchers to get the data. six students who represented their groups were interviewed. the students’ responses were elaborated in the following subsection general opinion on the project and project-based learning, an improvement in descriptive text writing, and difficulties during the learning process. the summary of students’ perception of the implementation of project-based learning in teaching writing skill. opinion on project-based learning the first question in the interview was about the student's perception of the implementation of pbl in teaching writing skills. almost all students respond in positive ways. they perceived that project-based learning can increase their experience, facilitated their creativity, and enhance their motivation in doing the project. as represented by s2's, s5's, and students 6's statements. the canva project improves my experience. we can share our experience with friends in the group. (interview item, student 2) very interesting and it helped us to facilitate our creativity. (interview item, student 5) my motivation was improved by doing the project in a group. working in a group facilitated us exchanging ideas to arrange ideas in one paragraph. (interview item, student 6) the above excerpts show that pbl was able to increase students’ experience since they had to plan, do and finish the project with their groups. besides, they thought that pbl was able to improve their creativity during the writing activity on creating descriptive text on canva. it also increases students’ motivation this result is in agreement with the study conducted by affandi & sukyadi (2016); argawati & suryani (2020); astawa et al. (2017); biazus & mahtari, (2022); burns & lewis (2016); farouck, (2016); fitriani et al. (2022); grant, (2017); kimsesiz et al. (2017); permata et al. (2022); rostika et al. (2021); santhi et al. (2019); thuan (2018); tuyen & tien (2021) which showed that pbl helps students improve students experience, creativity, enthusiasm, confidence, self-directed learning, collaborative learning skill, social skill, critical thinking, productivity, communication, initiative technology literacy, and motivation when they finish their project. cooperative learning, studentcenteredness, life-long learning, self-directed learning, motivation, autonomy, and creativity are the characteristics of project-based learning (thuan, 2018). particularly interesting is the s1 comment, which shows pbl are able to improve their activeness during the learning process in writing class, she said: project-based learning increases our activeness, creativity, and motivation during the learning process. they had many things to discuss with their friend. it was fun, to complete the project with their friends, use technology during the discussion, and work. (interview item, student 1) as observed from the excerpt above, pbl is able to increase students’ activeness and motivation during the learning process in the writing class. the findings were in the same context as those of previous studies conducted by al-busaidi & al-seyabi (2021); argawati & suryani (2020); artini et al. (2018); el-nabawi & shaalan (2020); santhi et al. (2019); sari & prasetyo (2021); shin (2018) which claimed that pbl was engaging and students showed their happy expression, active, enthusiastic and creative deal with a writing project. the students felt free to show their understanding of knowledge. project-based learning engages learners in the learning process, motivates, and develops learners’ creativity (thuan, 2018). the project ilham implementing project-based learning for efl students’ writing achievement at the tertiary level 1008 improves learning motivation to learn writing skills. the data also revealed that project-based learning promoted a positive attitude toward the learning of writing skills as seen in students’ motivation and enthusiasm in fulfilling the tasks of academic writing subject. they work collaboratively in planning, creating, evaluating as well as reflecting on their project. this finding is consistent with previous researchers (artini et al., 2018; astawa et al., 2017; wongdaeng & hajihama, 2018) who claimed that project-based learning has an impact on students' positive attitudes toward learning to speak, and writing as indicated by the motivation, enthusiasm, and excitement on the students during the learning process. improvement in english writing skill in regard to the development of participants’ writing skills after the implementation of pbl in writing class, most of the students articulated that their writing skills were improved, which can be seen from their comments. pbl can increase my understanding of how to write a good paragraph and write descriptive essays. (interview item, student 2) i think pbl is very good because the lecturer provides material on how to write the topic sentence, and supporting sentences. (interview item, student 4) my writing skills were improved. i know more about vocabulary. (interview item, student 1) pbl could help me understands how to write a topic sentence, and supporting sentence, and students have a better understanding, we know grammatical error in the text. (interview item, student 6) as can be observed from the above excerpt that pbl was able to increase students' knowledge of writing good paragraphs and writing a descriptive essays. besides, they thought that pbl was very good and was able to improve their skill in writing topic sentences, supporting sentences, vocabulary, and grammatical errors in the text. these results are in agreement with the study conducted by affandi & sukyadi (2016); anggerani et al. (2022); argawati & suryani (2020); fitriani et al. (2022); nunn (2020); praba̕ et al. (2018); sa’diyah & cahyono (2019); sadeghi et al. (2016); santhi et al. (2019) which showed that the implementation of project-based learning in the teaching writing works well. difficulties during the learning process in responding to the difficulties found during the learning process of the canva project, the students perceived that the difficulties were composing words into sentences, writing the topic sentence, supporting sentences, developing ideas into paragraphs, and vocabulary. the evidence can be seen from students’ comments below. my difficulties on spend much time writing and revising and adding media on canva and grammar. (interview item, student 3) develop arrange words into a sentence, ideas into paragraphs, write topic sentences and supporting sentences, use vocabulary according to context, writing a good sentence. (interview item, student 4) my vocabulary is still minimal, when learning in pbl my vocabulary increases, i recommend applying pbl in other classes. (interview item, student 2) from the students’ comment above, it reveals that the students found it difficult to the allocation of time writing and revising. adding media on canva, how to arrange sentences with good grammar, develop ideas on writing topic sentences and supporting sentences, and limitation of vocabulary. the results share a similar sound to the study conducted affandi & sukyadi (2016); santhi et al. (2019); shin (2018) claimed that students would like to have more time allocated to writing, arranging sentences, and developing ideas. conclusion this research attempt to explore the effect of pbl integrating ict at the tertiary level. it employed a mixed method design involving 38 students by using writing test and interview to gather the data. the finding revealed that the learning process in pbl class is proven effective to facilitate students in increasing their writing ability. despite the statistical significance on students' essay writing achievement, the students in their interview expressed their positive opinion toward pbl as a valuable challenge to improve their writing. all of them perceived that after doing the project, their writing was better. after planning, editing their text through the canva application, and uploading their text on instagram, the students perceived english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1009 their creativity as increasing. the students considered that pbl was challenging, motivating, and engaging, help them develop their creativity, enhanced their critical thinking, and allowed them to deal with real problems in a meaningful context. to conclude, such project-based learning is worthwhile for efl teachers in conducting their writing courses at tertiary level education. references affandi, a., & sukyadi, d. 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(2020). diagnosing linguistic problems in english academic writing of university students: an item bank approach. language assessment quarterly, 17(2), 183–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2019.169121 4 ilham implementing project-based learning for efl students’ writing achievement at the tertiary level 1012 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1077 investigating the sundanese traditional cuisine proper names through cognitive linguistic study for sundanese language learning elvi citraresmana (corresponding author) linguistics department, faculty of cultural sciences, universitas padjadjaran, indonesia email: elvi.citraresmana@unpad.ac.id lusi susilawati doctoral student, faculty of cultural sciences universitas padjadjaran, indonesia email: lusi17001@mail.unpad.ac.id hermandra indonesian language and literature education, universitas riau, indonesia email: hermandra@lecturer.unri.ac.id apa citation: citraresmana, e., susilawati, l., & hermandra. (2022). investigating the sundanese traditional cuisine proper names through cognitive linguistic study for sundanese language learning. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1077-1084. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6725 received: 21-06-2022 accepted: 23-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction sundanese traditional cuisine is one among other traditional cuisines in indonesia. indonesian society inherited traditional cuisines as indigenous cultural sustainability. this article discusses the naming of sundanese traditional cuisine. west java, where sundanese people as the majority community, is famous for the local food. to attract tourists with the local food, sundanese people have a unique way of naming their food. as yoopetch & chaithanapat (2021) shows, product branding is vital in sales because it has selling power. in addition, product branding is necessary for the consumers, particularly in food naming, since it could increase the taste and result in buying the product. as fitrisia et al. (2020) studied that exciting food depends on naming, such as fictitious personality, main ingredients, color, cooking process, similar appearance, seasoning, taste, cookware, and onomatopoeia. this recent research investigates how the sundanese people name their food through the cognitive linguistics approach. therefore, the research on sundanese food naming is crucial to cultural civilization sustainability. previous research investigated indonesian traditional food studies. fitrisia et al. (2018) studied their research in traditional culinary using culinary linguistics as their theoretical approach. they argue that food and language are universal characteristics, and culinary linguistics could explore indigenous wisdom since culinary linguistics is interdisciplinary. wijaya (2019) discussed the mapping of indonesian food culture. she emphasized that traditional culinary contributes to promoting indonesian culinary tourism through sociocultural exploration since the abstract: this research investigated the sundanese traditional cuisine proper names. the purpose of this research is to find out how sundanese people name their food through the mental lexicon that appeared in the sundanese traditional cuisine proper name. the proper cuisine names are collected from sukabumi, garut, and bandung restaurants. the research method applied is a qualitative one. through a cognitive linguistic study, the researchers investigated the phonological sounds and morphological processes that appeared in the sundanese cuisine proper names. the research revealed that the two and three-vowel sound combinations appear in the proper sundanese food names through conceptualization in cognitive linguistics. furthermore, the acronym also happens in this food’s proper names, considering the sound that could produce the exciting names. the research results show that names from the javanese region experience changes. sundanese people add the morpheme into the first syllables since sundanese people are not familiar with two syllables. to conclude, sundanese people name their food based on how the body reacts to a specification. the form of sundanese food’s proper name comes from the vowel sounds, which experience a morphemic process—the vocal sounds result in the rhyme. the consonant also tends to form a conceptual meaning that needs further discussion. the resulting research is also beneficial for learning the sundanese language. keywords: cognitive linguistics; morphological process; proper names; sundanese traditional cuisine. elvi citraresmana, lusi susilawati, & hermandra investigating the sundanese traditional cuisine proper names through cognitive linguistic study for sundanese language learning 1078 factors of nature, history, and culture shape indonesian food culture. the study is related to kasni & budiarta (2020), who also researched traditional culinary, particularly in bali, that supports sustainable tourism. however, they analyzed it from the perspective of culinary linguistics, which identifies traditional culinary lexicons. the other researchers who analyzed traditional indonesian foods from linguistics are sari & martiwi (2020). the research result in construction blending from the point of view of linguistics and culinary reveals its region’s identity, as well as the traditional mixing of culture and modern foreign one. meanwhile, wiyana et al. (2021) focused on the onomastics and branding for the indonesian traditional food “soto.” their study analyzed the naming and identifying the branding strategy to develop a culinary business. the research result shows that creating a branding model for traditional culinary soto is related to the behavior, presentation, and name of the people who make it. similarly, rahmawati & mulyadi (2021) conducted the research entitled “naming culinary in mandailing society: a culinary linguistic approach.” they applied the triangle theory proposed by ogden and richard. their research primarily aimed to identify the concept, meaning, and symbol of culinary names in mandailing society using qualitative research. the result of their research showed eight culinary names in the mandailing community. indonesia has several ethnic groups, one of which is sundanese, located in west java province, indonesia. sundanese is famous for its various traditional foods. several researchers have observed sundanese traditional food from some regions. durahmana et al. (2022) described the naming of sundanese foods in the kuningan region. the result of the study showed that the naming of sundanese foods in the kuningan region has three lexical variations: phonological, morphological, and semantic. in the garut region, the traditional sundanese food was analyzed by heriyanto et al. (2021). they observed the sundanese food originating from garut based on linguistics, syntax and semantics, and extralinguistic features. it was found that there is a correlation between packaging, culture, and tourism in garut. the two studies above focus on analyzing sundanese food from a linguistic perspective. however, some researchers also consider sundanese traditional foods as food security. amalia & marta (2019) believe that sundanese food is well maintained by food security regionally and nationally. they argued that sundanese foods are an element of the nation’s cultural identity as the local wisdom and culinary philosophy. ghufar & suhandano (2022a) discussed the lexicon of sundanese traditional foods. he analyzed it from the perspective of anthropological linguistics. his study showed that there are 17 lingual units of word forms and ten attributive endocentric phrases, which were classified into four parts of attributive processes (processing methods, regional origin, essential ingredients, and processed form). similarly, ghufar & suhandano (2022b) focused on the semantic naming and cultural point of view of sundanese traditional foods. their study shows seven semantic naming classifications: distinctive characteristics, inventor and creator, place of origin, ingredients, similarity, and new naming creation. furthermore, from the cultural point of view, there are three functions: enjoyment, social, and ritual. the studies above show that the research differs from this article, focusing on the proper name of traditional cuisine based on cognitive linguistics. cognitive linguistics is the branch of linguistics employed in the three fields; cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and linguistics (rao, 2021). cognitive linguistics investigates the connection between language and the human mind and seeks the role of language through conceptualization and categorization (rakhimov, 2020). cognitive linguistics views linguistic cognition as inseparable from general cognition, and this study attempts to find an explanation of linguistic phenomena in terms of general cognitive strategies. moreover, gambarova (2021) argued that cognitive linguistics investigates speech and communication and human cognitive activity patterns. similarly, turakhonova (2022) stated that cognitive linguistics focuses on the mental phenomenon related to language. one of the branches of cognitive linguistics is cognitive semantics. its core is to investigate the conceptual system. cognitive linguistics offers a new view to support semantic extension (lu et al., 2020). method this study applies a qualitative descriptive method. the data were the sundanese food names obtained by interviewing and observing the names of respondents who created the food. those techniques are based on ethnographic methods offered by spradly (2017). first, the researchers collected the data by portraying the names of sundanese foods in restaurants, market snacks, and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1079 mall centers in bandung, sukabumi, and garut. then, we classified the data based on the form of the name studied by morphological process analysis and the form of the sound studied by phonological process. both morphological processes and phonological processes are based on sundanese language theories. then, the next activity was interviewing the respondents by asking specific questions related to food naming. the respondents are eligible in sundanese expertise to have holistic information on the symbolic meanings revealed from the sounds and form. finally, descriptively discuss the data. the data discussion will conclude eventually. in analyzing the data, the researchers applied the content analysis offered by lester et al. (2020), offering seven steps in conducting qualitative analysis, namely preparing and organizing the data, transcribing the data, becoming familiar with the data corpus, memoing the data, coding the data, producing categories and themes from underlying passages, and making the analysis process transparent. the analysis was first conducted in this research by gathering all the interview data. the obtained data were then transcribed. afterward, the researchers coded the data by specific names of sundanese cuisine based on its area and categorized it based on morphological and phonological processes. results and discussion the captured data were around 170 sundanese traditional proper names. those data are classified into two categories; morphological and phonological processes. proper names based on morphological process the most exciting thing is that the name of sundanese proper names was based on morphology, which is the creation of a word, including the process, and rule of its internal structure (simatupang & supri, 2020). the morphological process that occurred in the data was reduplication. the process of word formation copies parts of words (klamer & saad, 2020). reduplication in any language could be different, such as in the indonesian and japanese languages. indonesian and japanese languages have different formulations of reduplication on the affix and consonant reduplication and its function (mangga, 2018). the sundanese reduplication is also different, particularly in the sundanese cuisine proper name. from the data, it is found two kinds of reduplications; entire reduplication and part reduplication. entire reduplication the entire reduplication occurs in the data of ongol-ongol, bala-bala, onde-onde, and gado-gado. in this reduplication, the words are copied entirely. however, in the sundanese food proper name, it shows that it is not only a morphological process that occurs in the naming, but vowel also plays a vital aspect in the form of repetition, which is shown in the following table: table 1. vowel aspects on entire reduplication of sundanese proper names sundanese food vowel aspect bala-bala /a/ /a/+ /a/ /a/ ongol-ongol /o//o/ + /o//o/ onde-onde /o//e/ + /o//e/ gado-gado /a//o/ + /a//o/ bala is derived from the adjective that means dirty, disorganized place. when the adjective bala experiences repetition, it becomes bala-bala (data 1), in which this adjective changes into a proper noun. the repetition means that food looks untidy but not necessarily messy because the ingredients are a mixture of several vegetables. ongol-ongol and onde-onde are a kind of snacks that could not be identified where this food came from. ongolongol is a snack made from starch and dried palm flour served with grated coconut. one piece of literature says ongol-ongol is from betawi; others say it is from west java. the word ongol refers to mongolians which historically the mongolian people came to west java. then, the people inspired the sundanese to name the food (ghufar & suhandano, 2022b). onde-onde is a food made from rice flour and glutinous rice flour, which is formed round and sprinkled with sesame seeds. it is usually contained with sweet green beans. onde-onde also is claimed by other regions as their origin food. however, the research will not argue about where this food comes from, but since this name appeared in the data repository, the research tried to investigate based on the name. unfortunately, the west java department of culture and tourism records the name ongolongol and onde-onde as indonesian food. as a result, those names were excluded from the investigation. however, the name gado-gado is fascinating. although, it is hard to find valid information about the original name, one food blogger mentioned that there were versions of the originated gado-gado. the exciting thing she described is that gado-gado is derived from the verb ‘digado’ (sundanese language), which means that one only eats this indonesian salad without elvi citraresmana, lusi susilawati, & hermandra investigating the sundanese traditional cuisine proper names through cognitive linguistic study for sundanese language learning 1080 rice. therefore, the explanation is reasonable enough since gado-gado only consists of salad without rice (fauziah, 2022). part reduplication part reduplication occurs when initial syllables are repeated and inserted into the basic word form. the followings are the data belong to part reduplication: table 2. part reduplication on sundanese proper names sundanese food basic word initial syllable reduplication inserted into basic word rarauan rawu ra + [ra] + wu + an gegeplak geplak ge + [ge] + plak gegetuk getuk ge + [ge] + tuk papais pais pa + [pa] + is the name rarauan is derived from the word rawu; in sundanese means taking something, usually food, using a palm hand. the form of repetition shows the derivational part of speech from the verb rawu and adds the suffix [an], resulting in [rawuan] as the instruction from the hearer to a speaker; for example, “rawuan eta runtah” means ‘ambil sampah itu!’ (grab the rubbish). this instruction [rawuan] adds the morpheme [ra] and suffix [-an], which forms the noun rarauan with a different meaning from the previous one. gegeplak is a food made from rice flour. the name gegeplak is derived from the primary word form geplak. geplak is polysemy since it has two meanings: the verb means to talk in plain terms/to the point, and as a noun, it means delicacy made of rice flour, sugar, and desiccated coconut. another meaning of ‘geplak’ is the sound of hitting with the flat of the hand. in this case, it is assumed that the name ‘gegeplak’ comes from how this food is cooked by hitting with the flat of the hand (geplak), then forming it into the food. the name gegetuk is derived from the noun getuk. getuk is sweet cassava steam cooked and then finely pounded. javanese people also have the same name for ‘getuk.’ however, sundanese people insert the morpheme [ge] into the basic word form ‘getuk,’ so they result in the name ‘gegetuk.’ the name papais is derived from the noun pais and then added morpheme [pa]. the noun pais refers to food prepared by wrapping it in banana leaves and then cooking it in hot ash. this pais also comes from the verb mais. so, mais means to cook something wrapped in banana leaves, the same as pais. furthermore, the noun papais has the same meaning as the basic name pais. however, this food is steamed in an aseupan (the traditional cookware to steam). there are two other proper names for the three vowel sounds, i.e., cocorot and jojorong. cocorot is made from rice flour and coconut milk wrapped with coconut leaves. however, it does not mean that cocorot is derived from the primary word corot. the name cocorot was created since the shape of the food wrapped in coconut leaves is similar to corong (the funnel). therefore, this name experiences an additional morpheme [co] + [corot]. this proper name also eliminates the nasal sound [ŋ] and changes it to ‘t’ in ‘corot.’the morphological process also happens in jojorong. jojorong is a food made from rice flour and coconut milk filled with palm sugar and served with coconut leaves, which are fastened using a toothpick. the name jojorong is formed from the initial syllable’s primary word, jorong + [jo]. the word jorong is because of the shape, like the ellipse, and jorong experiences change from dorong (push) into jorong. the analysis shows that the additional syllable on part reduplication of the sundanese proper name changes the meaning. this finding supports the theory offered by (nurhayati & mahdi, 2018) that the suffix inserted into the basic words changes the meaning in the sundanese language. proper names based on phonological process the sundanese food proper names were also created from the phonological process. it occurs on the three vowel syllables sounds. such creation is shown in the following table: table 3. three vowel syllable sounds on sundanese proper names sundanese food three vowel syllable sounds godeblag /o/ + /e/ + /a/ gorejag /o/ + /e/ + /a/ colenak /o/ + /e/ + /a/ batagor /a/ + /a/ + /o/ bapatong /a/ + /a/ + /o/ burayot /u/ + /a/+ /o/ karedok /a/ + /ɛ/ + /o/ surabi /u/ + /a/ + /i/ keremes /ɛ/ + /ɛ/ + /ɛ/ perkedel /ɛ/ + /ə/ + /ɛ/ paladang /a/ + /a/ + /a/ chocodot /o/ + /o/ + /o/ dorokdok /o/ + /o/ + /o/ cocorot /o/ + /o/ + /o/ jojorong /o/ + /o/ + /o/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1081 in sundanese cuisines, there are two vowel syllable sounds and three vowel syllables sounds. these two and three-vowel syllable sounds occurred because the sundanese language has seven vocal phonemes. the combinations of three vowel syllables sound to produce the rhyme such as /o/+/ɛ/+/a/ see data (5), (6), (7), /a/+/a/+/o/ see data (8), and (9), /u/+/a/+/o/, /a/+/ɛ/+/o/, /u/+/a/+/i/ see data (10), (11), (12). the three same vocal syllable sounds also happen in /ɛ/+/ɛ/+/ɛ/, /ɛ/+/ə/+/ɛ/, /a/+/a/+/a/, and /o/+/o/+/o/, see data (13), (14), (15), (16), (17), (18), (19). the name perkedel has different sounds even though the phoneme /e/ is the same; however, it produces /ɛ/ and /ə/. sundanese proper names conceptualization in line with the cognitive semantics understanding, there are four guiding principles: conceptual structure is embodied, semantic structure is conceptual structure, meaning representation is encyclopedic, and meaning construction is conceptualization. for example, the proper name in sundanese traditional cuisine contains sounds that make the people easy to listen to and remember, such as bala-bala comes from the embodiment. bala means disorganized place, and usually, there is much dirt on the floor. so this bala-bala is named after the food because this food contains vegetables such as carrots, green onions, and shredded cabbage. they are mixed using flour and form a shape that is not very tidy. the sounds /o/+/e/+/a/ emerges in godeblag, gorejag, colenak. godeblag is snack food from tasikmalaya. it is a food made from cassava and flour fried in an oversized shape. the form looks like cireng (acronym: aci digoreng); the shape is more extensive than cireng. the name godeblag, based on the size, is derived from the word goblag (big, huge, giant—metaphorically). for example, “eta sapatu sagede goblag” means ‘those shoes are big.’ morpheme [de] is inserted into the first syllable goblag; it becomes [godeblag]. the name gorejag is the acronym. it is shortened from goreng jagung (fried corn). however, gorejag also has lexical meaning, i.e., when someone is in a lying position, and he suddenly wakes up and jumps out of bed. the name colenak is also the acronym. it is shortened from ‘dicocol enak’ (dipped into – food and tastes delicious) as a verb phrase. the combination sounds /u/ + /a/+ /o/, /a/ + /ɛ/ + /o/, /u/ + /a/ + /i/ happens in burayot, karedok, surabi. burayot means hanging (semantically plural) since the shape looks like something hanging (more than one). karedok is the raw vegetables with peanut butter poured into them. it is not easy to describe this food and mapped onto other entities since karedok is typical sundanese people who eat vegetables a lot in their daily lives. surabi is a snack that looks like a pancake in deutch. however, surabi does not contain eggs; it contains flour, rice flour, and coconut milk. similar sounds and the same sound appear in /ɛ/ + /ɛ/ + /ɛ/, /ɛ/ + /ə/ + /ɛ/, and /a/ + /a/ + /a/, /o/ + /o/ + /o/. the phoneme /e/ has different sounds, such as /ɛ/, /ə/, and /ĕ/. the sound /o/ usually happens in the javanese language; as a matter of fact, sundanese people also know the sound /o/ like in dorokdok and chocodot. the interesting story about the name dorokdok happens in the consonant /d/+/k/+/d/+/k/ with the /r/ in between. this name creates due to the sounds produced when one bites it since those consonants are the type of vibrated apicodental. the morphological process appears in the data. the morphological process comes from the imagery and the experiences of the people who create the name, for example, rarawuan. rarawuan comes from the experience when people take something with their bare hands and take as much as they want, and what they do is mapped onto the food, in which the chef takes the ingredients as much as he wants and then forms it into the food, the shape is not rounded, but it is shaped as it is. the name gegeplak also creates from the sounds when the ingredient is cooked. it sounds “geplak” based on their imagery; the sound “geplak” is caused by hitting with the flat of the hand. adding morpheme [ge] causes the activity happens over and over. this also happens in gegetuk. getuk is from javanese. sundanese people add morpheme [ge] since sundanese people know two syllables instead of one syllable. by adding the morpheme [ge], this name, getuk, images the repetition that this food is made repeatedly. it also happens in papais, which comes from pais, the name of food usually cooked, steamed, and wrapped in banana leaves; instead of using one syllable pais, sundanese people add morpheme [pa] to make it easy to produce. the above proper names of sundanese cuisine were created from the imagery of the cognitive knowledge transformed into food naming. cognitive knowledge benefits those who want to learn the sundanese language, which begins by introducing the closest thing (food) since humans think and learn based on what they see and experience. therefore, it is under cognitive linguistic comprehension. therefore, such a cognitive style positively affects the learning strategy tambi, murtadho, & rafli, (2019). elvi citraresmana, lusi susilawati, & hermandra investigating the sundanese traditional cuisine proper names through cognitive linguistic study for sundanese language learning 1082 conclusion the discussion above proves that the food’s proper names are one of the cultural sustainability. sundanese people produced the proper food names based on embodiment experiences. the sounds are produced by the available vowel sounds that sundanese people know. the combinations of sounds resulting from the phonological process create the rhyme. psychologically, people might hear and remember easily by listening to the rhyme. the repetition form appears in two and three vocal sounds, and the morphological process happens because sundanese people are unfamiliar with two syllables. however, they are familiar with three syllables. therefore, the investigation of acronyms needs to be analyzed further. the consonant combination also needs to be investigated. meanwhile, the cognitive linguistics of proper names can also be used to learn the sundanese language. acknowledgment the researchers are grateful to universitas padjadjaran, who has given us fully funded research under unpad internal research grant for lecturers. references amalia, r. m., & marta, d. c. v. m. 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(2021). tourist shopping of apparel products and brand loyalty. kasetsart journal of social sciences, 42(2), 269274. https://doi.org/10.34044/j.kjss.2021.42.2.08 elvi citraresmana, lusi susilawati, & hermandra investigating the sundanese traditional cuisine proper names through cognitive linguistic study for sundanese language learning 1084 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1023 novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study nurti rahayu english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: rahayu_nurti@upi.edu fuad abdul hamied english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: fuadah@upi.edu didi sukyadi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: dsukyadi@upi.edu fazri nur yusuf english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: fazrinuryusuf@upi.edu apa citation: rahayu, n., hamied, f. a., sukyadi, d., & yusuf, f. n. (2022). novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1023-1034. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6648. received: 26-06-2022 accepted: 20-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction test preparation (tp) has sparked heated debate in the field of language testing and assessment. the term test preparation pertains to the activities that are performed to revisit the area of understanding or skill samples collected by a test (alderson & hamp-lyons as cited in knoch et al., 2020). in most educational practices, there are two types of preparation practices: preparation for general/scholastic tests and preparation for english language tests (o'sullivan et al., 2021). english test preparation has been widely implemented in both formal and informal learning environments. this test preparation takes the form of various activities such as "cram school," later known as "shadow education," referring to any educational activities carried out outside of traditional schooling, and it gives students who participate an advantage over students who do not (o'sullivan et al., 2021). students are becoming more aware of the importance of test preparation when taking a high-stakes tests like ielts, toefl, or toeic. this is because the test results have serious consequences in their lives, such as university abstract: this study aims to investigate how novice non-english department students in indonesia describe their lived experiences of efl learning in a toeic preparation class. the study included eighteen novice students from one vocational higher education in jakarta who enrolled in a toeic preparation class using purposive sampling. prior to the course, the participants took prediction tests, and their scores fell to the novice learners, and they were required to take a forty-hour preparation class. the participants have taken part in forty-hour toeic preparation classes. the primary source of data was semi-structured, in-depth phenomenological interviews. the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. according to the findings, several themes were elaborated. the findings uncovered what students gained and learned from the class, their learning difficulties, their learning strategies, and their plan to improve their english. in this study, the themes were broken down into several sub-themes to better elaborate on the participant's lived experiences and how they made meaning of their experiences. the findings strongly suggest policymakers such as efl teachers, program and curriculum developers, and other stakeholders pay more attention to the students' voices stating that efl learning goes to a unique and complex process. thus, successful english learning cannot be achieved unless their needs and voices are taken into consideration. keywords: phenomenological case study; test preparation; toeic; vocational higher institution; washback. nurti rahayu, fuad abdul hamied, didi sukyadi, & fazri nur yusuf novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study 1024 selection, graduation requirements, career recruitment, and other future-related plans. test preparation is widely understood as a form of test washback, the impact of tests on teaching and learning (saif et al., 2019). messick in saif et al. (2019) defined tp as an "intervention" that aims to improve test scores and may or may not lead in learning. tp exerts advantages and disadvantages. on the one hand, without any preparation, a candidate's performance may be unreasonably harmed by aspects of the testing procedure with which they are unfamiliar. in contrast, improper or overly narrowly focused preparation will either be ineffective in that it does nothing to improve language ability or risk artificially inflating the candidate's score for purposes unrelated to the skill the test is designed to measure (ma & cheng, 2018). dong (2021) expanded hypothesis stating that certain tests would exert different amount and types of washback for teachers and students. thus, the washback effect of tests may have a different impact on different subgroups of teachers and students. in terms of test preparation, this program was claimed to be able to boost test-takers’ scores without reliably improving their ability to do well on another english test (hu & trenkic, 2021). hughes as cited by zou & xu (2017) proposed a washback trichotomy model encompassing participants, process, and product in relation to this occurrence. initial views and attitudes of participants regarding their teaching and learning tasks may be influenced by the type of a test. then, these views and attitudes may influence what the participants do when performing their work (process), such as practicing the types of items that will be on the test, thereby affecting the learning outcomes and the result of that labor (zou & xu, 2017). for the last five years, numerous studies have been conducted to investigate tp from various perspectives. in one study, tp is claimed to correlate with low quality of instruction (blazar & pollard, 2017). on the other hands, some studies explored how tp positively affect students’ performances, such as listening performance (winke & lim, 2017), and score gains (knoch et al., 2020; soler et al., 2020). winke and lim (2017) conducted an experimental study in which 63 students were divided into three groups and given the same listening practice tests. the first experimental group took four practice tests and was given explicit test-taking strategies instruction. the second group was given the same practice tests but no test-taking strategies. a third control group did not take practice tests but instead participated in conversation classes. research findings reported that the test results were unaffected by the three types of instructions. additionally, the finding inferred that the most effective use of test preparation appears to be familiarity with the format and types of test items, particularly those that are new or unfamiliar to the test taker. testtaking anxiety was found to be inversely related to l2 listening test performance regardless of the type of instruction used (winke & lim, 2017). when seeing from the learning performance, knoch et al. (2020) reported that the effectiveness of various preparation techniques in relation to the participant score data is not strongly asserted. out of other skills, tp has a more salient impact on speaking test, where the participants clearly stated specific methods such as speaking continuously without pausing and changing their voice quality and resulted in higher scores. as for reading, listening, and writing encountered fewer meaningful improvements, though some tasks with scores contributing to speaking and reading, such as the read-aloud task, appeared to benefit from the tricks that improved speaking scores (knoch et al., 2020). this finding is in line with another tp study in columbian context, where tp was claimed to have modest impact on students’ score gains. however, this minor effect could have a significant impact on students whose score is near to the passing grade (soler et al., 2020). research also revealed the negative impact of tp. tp can have a negative impact on students by restricting their english learning scope, forcing them to self-isolated learning, taking repeated tests, and purchasing predicted answers (ma & chong, 2022). additionally, sellers of predicted answers are thought to be engaged in unethical practices since doing such test-taking strategies can help students achieve a score higher than their language proficiency may warrant (hu & trenkic, 2021). it is worth noting that students registered for tp mostly considered that attending preparation classes in a short amount of time, and using their materials will result in higher scores. at the same time, these actions may also prevent students from fully developing their english language proficiency (hu & trenkic, 2021). for more than two decades, studies on test preparation mostly go around two points of view: teachers and students. research reporting teachers' perspectives emphasizes differences in teaching preparation methods and activities (wagner & koch, 2021), teachers’ beliefs and practices english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1025 (gebril & eid, 2017), and teachers' washback (nguyen & gu, 2020), and the effectiveness of test preparation; whether or not test preparation are able to raise students’ test performance (knoch et al., 2020; soler et al., 2020). in indonesia, tp has been widely conducted by private tutoring course and college’s language centers. the booming of tp is partly derived from the popularity of global english tests such as toefl, toeic, and ielts. some teacher education colleges require their student teachers to demonstrate proficiency before graduation, while others simply let their students exit the program despite the fact that they may not have met the proficiency standard to teach english in schools. for their graduation requirements, these universities typically use toefl as their preferred proficiency test. the typical benchmark score ranges from 450 to 525, though some prestigious universities may require a higher toefl score (renandya et al., 2018a). similar policy has also been applied in some graduate degree in both public and private colleges. in addition to toefl, students in vocational education are also required to pass certain benchmark score as a graduation requirement. as a result, students with low english ability are greatly affected by this program (azhari et al., 2020). students registered for this tp to enhance their test score in accordance with the required passing grade, such as graduation requirement, scholarship application, promotion, and for college enrollment. studies in this area mostly focused on variety of method as to enhance students’ score gains. the methods range from blending learning (komariah et al., 2017), cooperative learning the enactment of students team achievement division (stad) (rionaldi & saputra, 2019), low-cost videos (asri et al., 2022), and the implementation of toefl practicum class (djamereng et al., 2021). in addition to the subject, other tp studies in indonesia also investigated the teachers’ and students’ perspectives on the enactment of tp. teachers were reported to encounter some challenges in tp courses. the problems range from students' high expectations on score gains, students' minimum effort, learning time constraints, teachers’ experience, and big class size ). to solve the problems, teachers need to implement teaching strategies (wibowo, 2020. those findings confirmed previous study on senior high schools teachers’ challenges in teaching tp (sari, 2019). despite those obstacles in tp class the teachers encountered, they showed their highest approval on the introduction of toefl in senior high school to better prepare students’ for the future careers through international english certification (sari, 2019). in addition to teachers’ perspectives, several studies have investigated students’ problem and strategies in doing the toefl test (azhari et al., 2022; hampp et al., 2021; maulana et al., 2022; oroh et al., 2021). compared with toefl, studies on toeic are relatively fewer. most studies in toeic were conducted in vocational high school context (dari, 2021; wijayanti et al., 2022; zahruni et al., 2020). satria & zahraa (2018) investigated that students’ internal and external factors do not affect students’ achievement as seen from their score gain. another study surveyed students’ perception on online learning class toward their score gains (wijayanti et al., 2022). this study revealed that there was no positive correlation of the two variables. however, it was found that students’ have positive perception on online learning class (wijayanti et al., 2022). although much of the literature has well elaborated the test preparation practices in varying contexts, most of these studies were quantitative in nature and sought the relationship among variables. furthermore, the adoption of interviews and class observation serve as supplementary data to clarify the quantitative findings. very little, if any, empirical research investigating the novice students' lived experiences of taking part in test preparation classes in a single study. in other words, novice students' experiences in this activity are not well-understood. all in all, the reported results on test impact on participants, processes, and products vary due to a number of affecting factors, and these phenomena need to be wellinvestigated from various perspectives, one of them from the experience of novice english learners. additionally, since 2020 the directorate of vocational education launched a program to boost vocational school students’ (smk) english competence by conducting toeic training for more than 75,000 students in grade xi and xii vocational school (direktorat pembinaan smk, 2020). having joined the training, students were required to take toeic test. this program is one of government effort to equip smk students with english competency to win the global work competition. while english competency is crucial in all work employment, to our knowledge, there is no specific program from the government to provide english certification for vocational higher education (vhe) students. based on the identified research gaps, the purpose of this study is to raise nurti rahayu, fuad abdul hamied, didi sukyadi, & fazri nur yusuf novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study 1026 the unheard voice of novice students’ experiences who (have to) participate in the toeic tp class in vhe context.. from a theoretical standpoint, this study will provide a better understanding of how novice students' personal experiences in participating in class activities and how they perceive the benefit of the class in terms of improving their english performance, as evidenced by test scores. understanding novice students' experience serves as the basis for enhancing the efficacy of tp classes which become crucial regarding the fact that more vocational higher institutions in indonesia have adopted toeic score benchmark as one of graduation requirement (rahayu, 2019), method this study adopted phenomenology since it tries to understand the hidden meanings and essence of an experience together with how participants make sense of these experiences (grbich in demir & qureshi, 2019). to this end, a phenomenological case study is adopted to understand subjective interpretations of the experiences (miller et al., 2018; neubauer et al., 2019). in the study, novice students are regarded as the research subjects who have constructed meaning from their experiences of taking test preparation classes. the study was carried out at a tourism vocational higher education institution in jakarta's city center. the research site was chosen since this institution has long adopted english standardized test benchmark as a graduation requirement. this english exit policy is implemented by requiring students to achieve a certain benchmark score on the toeic test before registering for the thesis defense examination. to implement the policy, sophomore students must take a test prediction test with a minimum score of 400, and students who achieve below the standard must take a test preparation class for one semester at their own expense. the participants of the test preparation class are regarded as novice students due to their score gain in the prediction test upon acceptance into the college. the authors adopted convenient purposive sampling to identify those participants of the study who experienced the phenomenon that was being investigated. selection criteria were applied in that the participants belong to the test preparation class in the first year, and they agree to voluntary participate in them voluntarily. the study included eighteen (18) two male and sixteen (16) female students who took part in an english preparation class. the class was divided into twenty-four sessions, each lasting two hours, for a total of fortyeight hours. the first researcher was the test preparation class teacher. students enrolled in the class took the toeic equivalent test prediction, with test scores ranging from 100 to 370, and are thus classified as having novice proficiency. participation is entirely voluntary since, at the beginning of a course, the teacher-researcher explains the research objectives and asks if students are willing to participate. as many as 18 students (out of thirty-five) agreed to participate in the study. focus group and semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore what was on the novice students' minds when they were in test preparation class. focus group interviews were conducted with group discussion in which individuals offered their perspectives, listened to others' perspectives, and possibly refined their own perspectives in light of what they've heard. the interview has flexible questions or a mix of organized and unstructured inquiries. usually, all respondents are asked for specific information. thus, the interview is structured. they are also encouraged to explain their information in detail. in addition to interviews, class observation was conducted during the course. the teacher-researchers enable to observe students' behavior and later confirm it in the interviews. the interviews were conducted before the end of the course; due to the global pandemic, the classes were conducted online, and so were the interviews. the interviews were recorded online through the zoom platform. to facilitate understanding, the interviews were conducted in bahasa, and participants were free to respond either in bahasa indonesia or english. first, the authors conducted pre-data analysis by transcribing the recorded data, reading and validating the data transcription, then converting the transcription into english, and the participants were given pseudonyms as "p1" for participants 1 through p18. then, the final transcripts were read at least twice to achieve an intimate familiarity with the data. the data were analyzed for significant statements, invariant horizons, and recurring themes. the interviewees and their experiences under study were the units of analysis. finally, thematic analysis was undertaken utilizing phenomenological reduction and imaginative variation. textual-structural descriptions clarified the phenomenon. comparing participants' contexts and experiences revealed similarities and differences. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1027 results and discussion this section is structured according to the three primary themes that were uncovered by the data. the themes are (1) participants’ experience of learning english, (2) participants’ experience in the preparation class, and (3) participants' reflections on english learning. this theme is further elaborated in several sub-themes. theme 1. experience in learning english this theme elaborates on participants' experience of learning english and to be precise; it mostly covers their background experience of english learning. this theme is broken down into several sub-themes. they are (a) students' learning difficulties and (b) students' learning methods. students learning problems english learning at secondary school i.e., senior and junior high school has directly or indirectly affected the participants' experience in this study. these experiences vary from person to person as they were from the varied region throughout the country. although the country's english curriculum emphasizes the use of competency standards, the teaching methods implemented in these schools have not met the expectation. one of the factors derived from the teachers' difficulty in implementing the curriculum in the classroom so that the students are competent in their english. the majority of participants thought that their low english proficiency was due to several factors, such as (1) linguistic factors, (2) personal factors, and (3) test factors. the linguistic factors were due to a lack of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. lacking in these areas resulted in some problems in understanding reading, listening, and other active skills such as speaking and writing. most participants reported their inability to memorize the grammatical rules, such as tenses, parts of speech, and phrase construction. memorization, in this case, is viewed as the key to mastering english and being unable to understand grammar worsens their english learning. p1 and p7, for example, are indicated in illustrative examples: what i find difficult is memorizing tenses. i find it difficult to distinguish tenses even though i've been studying since middle school but have a hard time remembering. memorizing noun things, noun people, adverbs, and verbs also are not easy because i'm the type of person who easily forgets if i don't study it every day, but i am more able and interested in translating english to indonesian than memorizing english formulas (p7). in learning english, it is very difficult for me to learn and understand grammar, use the right words in sentences, and i have a hard time listening to a native speaker either because of the accent or what i don't know, but i understand indonesian or local people speak or write english on social media (p1). participants explicitly agreed that they could not fully comprehend the mechanics of english, resulting in their inability to master the english skills. these resulted in some strategies, such as using the translation tool to facilitate them in understanding the passage. additionally, personal factors add matters worse. some participants reported their problems in time management for english learning. due to several activities, they can not focus themselves on learning english, which even results in learning and test anxiety, such as the excerpt below: i find it difficult when i study english; for some reason, every time there is an english test, and i try to work on the questions, and i feel restless in the shadow of fear because i am afraid of getting a small score, and sometimes often find it difficult when working on questions (p5) the excerpt evidenced how the test affected the students' feelings; students' fear of getting a low score and did not pass the benchmark. this fear of anxiety prohibited the participant from making progress. furthermore, the test factors also present additional challenges, especially with the various distractors the test present and the test's limited duration. students learning method most participants share their informal digital learning of english (idle) through several media such as youtube english channels, english learning websites, online language applications, and listening to music and watching movies or english vlogs. the participants reported the follow-up activities as taking notes of new expressions and difficult words and re-read and repeating the expressions to add fluency. then, the difficult words are further consulted in the online dictionary. besides idle, only a few participants performed the conventional ways of learning, such as taking notes in the class, doing some exercises, and watching the zoom class recording for comprehension. it is also interesting to note that one participant reported conducting peer practice nurti rahayu, fuad abdul hamied, didi sukyadi, & fazri nur yusuf novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study 1028 and creating group work for english practice. the activities were conducted to enhance their vocabulary, grammar, listening, and reading skills, as shown by the illustration below: in addition to taking a test preparation class, i also downloaded the duolingo application on my cell phone, i was very enthusiastic about learning english in the application. i always take at least 30 minutes or more to fill out the quizzes in the application; i also learn tenses on youtube, note important things in the tenses formula, improve listening skills by listening to listening test questions on youtube, try to get used to speaking two languages or bilingually, increase my vocabulary every day, when my curiosity arises i often open google translate to find out english, things around me, i often translate words that i just meet (p1) so far, the way i learn english is to find a partner to learn english together, i usually speak english with my friends who are also learning english via chat, if one of us says something wrong, of course, we correct each other. in addition, i also learn through playing games in english, and learning by watching western films with english and indonesian subtitles. i also usually practice by learning to use english books or downloading applications such as duolingo or cake; i also download the tandem app, which is an app that is useful for finding friends from abroad and talking to them. besides that, i also created an english study group, and two of my friends will discuss the material that we will learn every week; we also try to speak english while chatting; even though we still lack vocab, we still speak with mixed speech. at home, sometimes i invite my father to speak in english. every activity i do, if i find an english word that i don't know, i will immediately look up its meaning in the dictionary. i also took toeic lessons to help me learn english properly and was accompanied directly by an experienced toeic teacher (p11). the pandemic, which turned most education into online learning, is contextualized with the adoption of idle. the participants spent most of their time online and engaged themselves in online activities by browsing media a lot. participants' experiences with the english apps, channels, and websites signal the crucial role of idle to improve english learning. theme 2. experience in a test preparation class this section focuses on the perceived experience of participation in test preparation activities. the primary subthemes that emerged from the data were (a) lessons learned from the class, (b) favorite learning method, and (c) perceived learning outcome lesson learned from the class research participants shared their perceived experience of taking test preparation classes. the in-class experience ranged from (1) toeic knowledge, (2) learning strategies, and (3) testpreparation strategies. most participants agreed that the class enabled them to understand about test of english as a foreign language (toeic), what the test is for, its test format and scoring, and why the test is used as one of the graduation requirements in vocational higher education. this information is essential in that not all participants were familiar with the test, let alone the campus policy of using the english exit test. having sufficient knowledge about the test, then participants also reported what they have gained in the test preparation class. first, they reported that the class aim is to provide a sufficient language foundation for the students to improve their english competency, as shown in the test score. to this end, the participants mentioned what they had learned from the class as the following illustrations: the new thing that i got was about toeic, such as basic knowledge, tips & tricks, strategies, calculating scores, and explanations of working on different questions. (p5) i learned many new words, improved my grammar, and learned how to pass the tests without wasting time by selecting the correct answer (p7) i learned about the test, as well as how to enhance my english proficiency by making use of several applications (p2) favorite learning method as a rigorous class, the participants shared their favorite learning methods during the class. most of them mentioned that they enjoy doing the drill practice in the form of a mini test. doing the mini tests was interesting since they could see their score progress. after the test, there was a discussion to review the items so that participants can see why they could incorrectly answer the test items facilitated by the teacher. here are some of the illustrations below: what i like most is the mini-test since i can see how far my english skills have progressed; the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1029 explanation given after the test is also easy to understand and quite easy to digest. moreover, this class introduced me to some useful apps, such as duolingo, and youtube channels for english learning. (p1). i often ask things i don't understand to the teacher. besides that, i enjoy learning from the basics; then every class is always recorded so that i can repeat the material outside class hours (p11). before this, i knew almost nothing about the toeic, let alone the test-taking strategy. the teacher was always there to help my friends and me. and this class is quite enjoyable. and, without putting us under any pressure, she encourages us to always learn in accordance with the basic objectives and standards. and it's obviously beneficial to us. (p12). overall, participants acknowledged that these types of learning situations provided them with valuable experiences as well as opportunities to learn new test-taking strategies. they could experiment with new applications and media. it was clear that in class and outside the class, learning activities increased participants' confidence and success in the classroom. p7 stated that he could see his friends' progress, and it motivated him to learn more. perceived learning outcome having participated in the class for twenty-four sessions, the participants also reflected on their perceived learning outcomes in the test preparation class, which were contextualized in varied forms, such as (1) increased mini test score, (2) increased motivation and confidence, and (3) changed beliefs about language learning. during the class, participants were exposed to exercises drilling in the form of mini tests of both listening and reading skills. the tests were administered with an online platform to enable them to see and record the score results for self-evaluation. at this stage, participants shared their progress as shown in the test results illustrated below: i was surprised that my mini-test score increased and that there was an improvement as the test progressed, and i am happy about that (p15). i felt that my listening skill improved. in the past, i actually couldn't listen in english, but when i entered the preparation class, i learned listening a lot (p8). some participants stated that doing lots of drilling was not their favorite; however, the more they did the practice tests, the more confident they were to select the answer among the distractors. i hate doing exercises again and again, but later on, i felt like i knew the distractors, and that guided me to select the answers (p14). this is a very different approach to learning. i did not take english seriously in school; now, i must master all of the fundamentals in order to develop my english skills, or i will never pass the score benchmark (p3). the illustrations clearly showed how some of the participants expressed their progress, and that made them more confident with their ability as well as improved motivation. the preparation class has also made the participants change their beliefs about language learning. at the start of their course, research participants believed it was not easy to master pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. at the end of the language course, participants shared how they enjoyed the class and further described the class as "it turns out that learning here is very exciting, unlike learning english in class at school (p11), and "i love how we learn many test-taking strategies." (p9). although the apparent shift of participants' learning interests still moves around the comprehension of form-focused rather than meaning-focused, this signals a good start to learning for novice learners. theme 3. reflection on english learning this theme reported the participants' responses when they were requested to reflect on several subthemes, such as (1) preferred test-taking strategies and (2) perceived english improvement methods. preferred test-taking strategies participants reported varied test-taking strategies that they adopted to do the test. most participants reported that they needed to work harder on reading since they scored lower in this section. in doing the reading tests, they shared to focus on the questions before scanning or to skim the answer in the passage, and they noted skipping the unfamiliar words in the passage to save time. then, they learned how to identify the topic and main idea in the passages as stated by p7: "i would rather look at the question first, and then search the answer in the passage" in doing listening tests, the students would rather learn the distractors, and learn to enhance their pronunciation and intonation, and nurti rahayu, fuad abdul hamied, didi sukyadi, & fazri nur yusuf novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study 1030 identify the main ideas in listening as illustrated in table 1 below. table 1. preferred test-taking strategies listening section reading section  scanning & skimming for specific information  skip unfamiliar words  identify the topic and main idea  enhance pronunciation and intonation  focus on the question  scanning & skimming for specific information  skip unfamiliar words  identify the topic and main idea (source: participants’ interviews) it is interesting to note that most participants are not familiar with the test-taking strategies, as stated by p11. she shared that she never knew about what the test was, let alone the test-taking strategies. he further claimed that her score would have been better had she known about those strategies long before the test. it was a challenge for her to do the toeic test as it is new for her. perceived english improvement methods at the end of the course, the participants reflected on ways to improve their english. this is significant to ensure the participants' long-term effort for english improvement after the class is over. given the fact that the participants usually still struggled with the fundamentals of english, the majority stated their intention to learn formfocused english. other participants also shared their affective strategies for improving their learning time and motivation, as stated by one participant below. if i study routinely and consistently, memorize more vocabulary, and review the lessons that have been taught to me, i believe i can improve my english competency (p14). learning english requires a lot of practice. my english proficiency improves as i master the fundamentals and progress to the next level. aside from learning to understand and apply in my life. for example, i speak english to those who are closest to me. then learn how to use english apps or books (p11). i should always strive to improve my english skills. i believe that if you never try, you will never know. this is something i always do for myself in order to learn new things. you must persevere even if it is difficult at first. for example, there are some words that are difficult to recognize when reading the news in english or listening to native speakers, but i'm sure you can. i also use the application to learn new skills, such as basic conversation (p12). in general, the perceived english improvement methods cover improving form-focused english, meaning-focused english, and motivation and learning time. the methods depend on their perceived weaknesses in learning english. in addition to those strategies, some participants shared their expectation that in the near future, they would have a chance to have offline classes since they could not focus on online classes. i understand less in online classes, and it takes me a long time to catch the lesson due to connection problems. i find it very difficult to understand listening in online learning. thus, i hope i can focus more on studying in offline classes. (p18). in the last two decades, research on test preparation classes has primarily relied on quantitative measures of effectiveness and questionnaires about variable relationships. the lived stories of novice students in the current study, therefore, provide a qualitative perspective on this topic, yielding more rich, detailed, and contextualized data about their experiences with test preparation class within the context of preparing for the toeic test as an english exit test in a tourism vocational higher institution. in this study, we revealed novice students' experiences and framed them in three themes that illustrate real-life stories about how they struggled to improve their english competence by enrolling in a test preparation class. the following themes were identified in particular (1) prior english experience, (2) experience in test preparation class, and (3) english learning reflection. the themes are further elaborated in sub-themes and key aspects, as seen in table 2. table 2. data visualization n o themes sub-themes aspects 1 experience in learning english a) learning problems · linguistic factors · personal factors · test factors b) learning methods · idle · conventional learning 2 experience a) lesson ·test knowledge english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1031 in a test preparation class learned ·learning strategies ·test-taking strategies b) preferred learning method · drilling · discussion c) perceived learning outcome ·increased score ·increased motivation and confidence ·change language learning beliefs 3 english learning reflections a) preferred test-taking strategies ·reading testtaking strategies ·listening testtaking strategies b) perceived english improvement methods ·form-focused learning ·meaning-focused learning this research uncovered several poignant aspects of the learning practices in the test preparation class in indonesia. the test preparation is enacted as part of the institution's program to set english exit tests with toeic standards. the findings revealed that participants benefited, to some extent, from the test-preparation class they were involved with over a few months. those benefits included the test knowledge together with the purpose of the language exit test policy, learning opportunities, and both pedagogical and content gains from the online classes. along with their positive impacts, however, participants articulated how they could not make progress from the program, as seen from their english test scores. lack of fundamental english from a previous level of education, limited study time, lack of test knowledge, lack of practice and motivation, and other connection issues undermined participants' enthusiasm, thus preventing them from achieving the desired outcomes. participants' english backgrounds, which shaped their english learning and thus affected their competence, were also detrimental to the potential of the test preparation class. these observations, however, were not totally surprising. previous research findings in indonesia demonstrated the inadequacy of english education in secondary school (renandya, 2018; renandya et al., 2018b; zein et al., 2020). amid the increasing importance of english both regionally and globally (zein & stroupe, 2017), low english language proficiency among undergraduate students has been one of the significant issues in education quality in indonesia (english first, 2019). this issue is prevalent in developing countries with similar problems. efforts have been made to overcome this problem, yet the result is not satisfying yet. seeing to the global english proficiency survey, indonesia still belongs to the low proficiency category (renandya et al., 2018b). while the country needs to prepare its workforce to win the global competition, english competency is seen as the gatekeeper of good future jobs. to this end, higher education adopted english exit tests to improve english teaching-learning at colleges. test preparation class is enacted to prepare the students to pass the english exit test. findings on participants' english learning experience strengthen the previous studies on english learning problems. conclusion this study contributes to the global literature on test preparation as a form of test washback, especially in higher education contexts where students need to pass certain benchmark english test scores as one of the graduation requirements. the institution policy adds to the test's higher stake, which puts higher pressure on college students. novice english learners have to work harder to keep up with their peers to pass the test. this situation put them in a dilemma when they had to struggle with english learning in test preparation classes. while students come from different english learning environments and deal with social and economic factors, being able to identify english learning experiences, along with test-taking strategies, serve as starting point to enable the students to improve their english competence, as reflected in their english test scores. despite its contribution, this study is not without a lack. the nature of qualitative research cannot justify the generalization of the research findings. however, the unique cases of the novice english learners' experience can add to the empirical database of how these beginner learners develop their learning strategies. further research can investigate the learning and problem-solving strategies in detail with established theory. additionally, novice learners’ perspectives in learning could be taken into consideration when designing test preparation classes since curriculum nurti rahayu, fuad abdul hamied, didi sukyadi, & fazri nur yusuf novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study 1032 developers need to pay attention to the mostly unheard voice of novice learners. taking these considerations to improve the program syllabus and teaching method can add to the program's effectiveness. acknowledgments the first researcher would like to gratefully acknowledge lpdp for the support and grant for her doctorate degree at english language education program, universitas pendidikan indonesia. references asri, a. n., mubarok, f. u., & imron, a. 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(2017). a washback study of the test for english majors for grade eight (tem8) in china—from the perspective of university program administrators. language assessment quarterly, 14(2), 140–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2016.1235170 nurti rahayu, fuad abdul hamied, didi sukyadi, & fazri nur yusuf novice students’ experience of taking toeic preparation class: a phenomenological case study 1034 family education values in kirana kejora’s novels (genetic structural research) wulan wahyuning ratri language education, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: wulanwahyura@gmail.com emzir language education, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id ninuk lustyantie language education, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id apa citation: ratri, w. w., emzir., & lustyantie, n. (2017). : family education values in kirana kejora’s novels (genetic structural research). english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 263-274 received: 11-04-2017 accepted: 21-05-2017 published: 01-06-2017 abstract: the objective of this research is to acquire deep understanding about family education values in the novels by kirana kejora through genetic structural. it was a qualitative research with content analysis method. this research was analyzed through structural literary approach and genetic structural approach. the data were collected through document study, data observation about family education values in the novels by kirana kejora (bintang anak tuhan, air mata terakhir bunda, ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir), and interview with kirana kejora. the result of this research revealed that family education values that were founded and described in the novels by kirana kejora were diligent to worship, honest, respect, unanimous, having achievement, mandate, brave, independent, proportional, take care of self, affection, prelude other people, and fair. they were founded and described through intrinsic structure of novel, author’s background, social background, and author’s world view. those results lead to implication that indonesian literature educator can use kirana kejora’s novels directly in the teaching process. further, the findings lead to recommendation to indonesian literature educators in order to use novels with content of family education values and to motivate students to analyze the novels through genetic structural. keywords: family education values, novel, genetic structural introduction in teaching literature, warmth can be created by the content of literature teaching itself, for instance, the content of literature teaching which encouraging values of family education. the learners who are able to respect the literature learning process are them who come from the families which are fully filled by values of family education. therefore, it becomes the researcher’s reason for conducting the research about the values of family education relating to literature aspect. helmawati (2014, p. 50) explains that in family environment, for the first time, the children get some values. if children are raised with the good values of family education, they will learn to respect others, including respecting literature teachers and their literary works. railton (2003, p. 45) states that values can be understood as something that has a norm taste. it means, if the values has a norm taste, the values can be considered for having positive sides, including the family education. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.541 263 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee related to the values of family education, it is observed that the values in literature have been taught in formal school, especially in grade xi and xii, as what have been summarized by syafrial (2014, pp. 73-75) who describes that in teaching literature, the values of literary works consisting of hedonic, artistic, cultural, ethical, moral, religion, and education values were taught and analyzed. based on that condition, the researcher assumes that the analysis of educational values in novels examined by the students or college students are still low. educational values haven’t referred to family education value which directly contributes to literature teaching. literature teaching will be able to be accepted well by students or college students if there are high enthusiasms. high enthusiasm can be based on either students or college students who are taught to respect by their parents. in indonesia, the novel authors carry some kinds of novels. family education values are also carried by the authors, including kirana kejora, as can be found in her novels entitled bintang anak tuhan, air mata terakhir bunda, and ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir. those three novels might not relate one to another, but they carry the same theme about family. as for, kirana kejora is familiar to family life. kirana kejora’s three novels (bintang anak tuhan, air mata terakhir bunda, ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir) are chosen as the data source of the research since they contain humanity aspects. those three novels are also focused on parents and children. by the facts, the researcher decides to analyze the values of family education in those novels. kirana kejora’s novels contain values of family education, relate to reality, so it can be analyzed through genetic structural approach. endraswara (2008, p. 60) states that genetic structural approach should, at least, have three aspects. the aspects are literature intrinsic, background of the creator, and social background. the author’s world view is also included. based on those things, the researcher views that kirana kejora’s novels are worth and important to be analyzed. novels are best known as fiction. it is supported by eagleton (1996, p. 2) who states that if literature includes much factual writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. it means that the fiction sides in novels have good purposes to touch the readers’ soul. beside known as fiction, novels also can relate to realities. stanton (2007, p. 8) states that novels can show human experiences, even the author’s experiences. one of human experiences can have relation with the values of family education. lestari (2014, pp. 168-171) states that values of family education consist of diligent to worship, honest, respect, unanimous, and having achievement. in line with lestari, syamsi translated by mujtahid (2014, pp. 97-114) explains that values of family education consist of having prophetmoral, mandate, brave, good in interaction, independent, proportional, take care of self, fulfilling promises, honor, affection, prelude other people, polite, and fair. the values of family education is instilled since people were still children until they become adults. the researcher decides to analyze thirteen values of family education in kirana kejora’s novels, involving diligent to worship, honest, respect, unanimous, having achievement, mandate, brave, independent, proportional, take care of self, affection, prelude other people, and fair. furthermore, the researcher uses literary structural approach and genetic structural approach. dosse (1998, p. 78) states that whatever the case, structuralism is a serious thing, as we have seen. it gives anything have to do with signs a right to sentence. it means, with the literary structural approach, the researcher will have deeper knowledge about the story in novels. moreover, on genetic structural approach, as what have been stated by goldmann (1977, p. 158), the creation of literary works is about linking literary works with social groups. 264 wulan wahyuning ratri, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie family education values in kirana kejora’s novels: genetic structural research therefore, it can be observed that novel not only reflects individuals, but also society. in genetic structural approach, things about author’s background, social background, and even the author’s world view are considered. the author’s background is considered through genetic structural approach since there are always the author’s intervention, thoughts, and feelings in literary works (endraswara, 2011, p. 102).regarding the social background, goldmann (1977, p. 159) explains that the author is faced with some social awareness and facts; the author observes social facts. on the other hand, the author’s world view influences human behaviors. endraswara (2012, p. 137) explains that points of view can refer to the author’s views about his or her own world and society. in brief, the focus of the research is analyzing values of family education in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed through genetic structural approach. from the focus, the researcher formulates the five following research questions; how the values of family education in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed through: (1) intrinsic structure of the novels?, (2) author’s background?, (3) social background?, (4) author’s world view?, (5) the comparison of family education values between the three kirana kejora’s novels?. based on those research questions, it can be known that the objective of this research was to get comprehension deeply about the values of family education in kirana kejora’s novels through genetic structural approach. the scopes involve novel intrinsic structure, author’s background, social background, author’s world view, and also comparison of family education values between the three kirana kejora’s novels. method this research is conducted from september 2015 until september 2016 through content analysis method. literary approaches used are structural approach and literary structural approach. the data were then collected through literature review, observing things related to family education values in novels, and structured interview. therefore, there are two kinds of data, namely primary and secondary data. the novels by kirana kejora entitled bintang anak tuhan, air mata terakhir bunda, and ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir are used as primary data sources. whereas, the secondary data consist of interview transcription and internet articles about kirana kejora’s novels. in this research, there are seven steps of data collecting techniques, including: (1) reading kirana kejora’s novels, (2) finding unique and worthy phenomena to be analyzed, (3) setting the values of family education as research data, (4) setting the three kirana kejora’s novels as data sources, (5) setting content analysis as research method, (6) settingstructural approach and genetic structural approach as research approaches, (7) doing literature review, observation of things referring to the values of family education in kirana kejora’s novels, and interviews. data validity is tested by interviewing the author and reviewing the supporting articles. furthermore, the data analysis procedures in this research are as follows: (1) finding, selecting, and clarifying the intrinsic structure of the three novels, (2) analyzing the family education values in novels by reviewing the novels’ intrinsic structure, (4) making a working table related to recapitulation numbers of data observing family education values in novel by reviewing the novels’ intrinsic structure, (5) making a description and a summary relating to novel intrinsic structure, (6) analyzing family education values in novels by reviewing the author’s background, (7) making a working table related to recapitulation numbers of data observing family education values in novels by reviewing the author’s background, (8) making a summary, (9) analyzing family education values in the novelsby reviewing the social background, (10) making a working 265 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table related to recapitulation numbers of data observing family education values in the novels by reviewing the social background, (11) making a summary, (12) analyzing family education values in the novels by reviewing author’s world view, (13) making a working table related to recapitulation numbers of data observing family education values in the novels by reviewing the author’s world view, (14) making a summary. in this data analysis procedures, the researcher also makes comparison. the researcher compares the values of family education in the novels reviewed through the novel’s intrinsic structure, the author’s background, social background, and the author’s world view, elaborates them, then makes summaries in table form. results and discussion family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by novel’s intrinsic structure in the three novels by kirana kejora, thirteen family education values are firstly reviewed through novel intrinsic structure. those family education values consist of diligent to worship, honest, respect, unanimous, having achievement, mandate, brave, independent, proportional, take care of self, affection, prelude other people, and fair. from the analysis, it can be concludes that kejora expresses her thoughts on her novels, including the novel intrinsic structure. elements of novel intrinsic structure from a unity until positive messages related to family education values are got. the readers can comprehend about family education valuesby themselves through the relation of novel intrinsic structure. the themes of kirana kejora’s novels (bintang anak tuhan, air mata terakhir bunda, ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir) are family affection. the characters and its characterizations have domination about affection and the stories always tell about single parents and their children. the plots of the stories show about the sincere struggles between single parents and their children in this life. table 1. family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by novel intrinsic structures the title of the novels and the result of quotation no. family education values frequency percentage bintang anak tuhan (50 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 8 10% 2. honest 1 2% 3. respect 4 8% 4. unanimous 2 4% 5. having achievement 1 2% 6. mandate 3 6% 7. brave 4 8% 8. independent 3 6% 9. proportional 2 4% 10. take care of self 1 2% 11. affection 15 30% 12. prelude other people 5 10% 13. fair 1 2% air mata terakhir bunda (63 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 9 15% 2. honest 4 6% 3. respect 5 8% 266 wulan wahyuning ratri, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie family education values in kirana kejora’s novels: genetic structural research 4. unanimous 4 6% 5. having achievement 9 15% 6. mandate 4 6% 7. brave 1 2% 8. independent 3 4% 9. proportional 1 2% 10. take care of self 5 8% 11. affection 15 23% 12. prelude other people 1 2% 13. fair 2 3% ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir (65 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 2 4% 2. honest 0 0% 3. respect 6 11% 4. unanimous 3 5% 5. having achievement 1 2% 6. mandate 3 5% 7. brave 9 16% 8. independent 4 8% 9. proportional 2 4% 10. take care of self 3 5% 11. affection 18 33% 12. prelude other people 3 5% 13. fair 1 2% family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by author’s background in bintang anak tuhan’s novel, there are five author backgrounds identified by the researcher. the five author backgrounds are her early-age marriage status, having a daughter, having mother who suffers lung disease, and caring of people who suffers hiv/aids. from those author’s backgrounds, the researcher identifies eight family education values, namely diligent to worship, unanimous, having achievement, brave, independent, proportional, take care of self, and affection. in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel, there are six backgrounds of the author. those six backgrounds are a mother who is a strong, a mother as a single parent whose ex-husband has get married again, diligence to worship since she was a child, the existence of effort to create fairness in family, a mother as single parent who puts her children’s education first, and a mother who has ever lived in sidoarjo. from the reviews of those backgrounds, the researcher gets six family education values, including diligent to worship, having achievement, brave, take care of self, affection, and fair. in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir, it can be concluded that there are six author backgrounds. the author backgrounds are about children’s birthday celebration in orphanage, a boy who is like a hawk, parents who are full of affection, inspiration about history and archeology, a life that is usually filled by putting others first, and harmony in family. from the reviews of those backgrounds, the researcher identifies five family education values, involving unanimous, mandate, brave, affection, and prelude other people. 267 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 2. family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by author’s background the title of the novels and the result of quotation no. family education values frequency percentage bintang anak tuhan (24 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 4 17% 2. honest 0 0% 3. respect 0 0% 4. unanimous 2 8% 5. having achievement 2 8% 6. mandate 0 0% 7. brave 2 8% 8. independent 2 8% 9. proportional 2 1% 10. take care of self 4 17% 11. affection 6 26% 12. prelude other people 0 0% 13. fair 0 0% air mata terakhir bunda (14 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 2 14% 2. honest 0 0% 3. respect 0 0% 4. unanimous 0 0% 5. having achievement 4 30% 6. mandate 0 0% 7. brave 2 15% 8. independent 0 0% 9. proportional 0 0% 10. take care of self 5 8% 11. affection 15 23% 12. prelude other people 1 2% 13. fair 2 3% ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir (16 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 0 0% 2. honest 0 0% 3. respect 0 0% 4. unanimous 4 26% 5. having achievement 0 0% 6. mandate 2 11% 7. brave 2 11% 8. independent 0 0% 9. proportional 0 0% 10. take care of self 0 0% 11. affection 4 26% 12. prelude other people 4 26% 13. fair 0 0% 268 wulan wahyuning ratri, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie family education values in kirana kejora’s novels: genetic structural research from the analysis, it can be known that kejora got married because of affection, so she expresses it on characters named hanum and agung who get married young because of affection in bintang anak tuhan’s novel. here, kejora was inspired by bunga who always keeps her mother’s feelings, so kejora creates a character named bintang who keeps himself to not making hanum sad. besides, bintang who is also a person who always beside people with hiv/aids and tbc. moreover, kejora was inspired by her mother who keeps herself away from kejora in order to keep kejora safe and is not contaminated by her lung disease. in addition, there are also people with hiv/aids who surrender and try to get close to god. therefore, the characters hanum and bintangshow the value diligent to worship. in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel, it can be known that kejora does not want to be a weak mother through the character named delta who never wants to be looked sad by her mother. kejora’s ex-husband has got married again, and kejora never slanders her husband so it implies affection without hope. sriyani character is also created based on kejora’s condition. kejora is taught to be diligent to worship since she was a child by her mother. therefore, based on those experiences, delta is taught to be diligent to worship by sriyaniin air mata terakhir bunda’s novel. ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel tells about mada who cares of the orphanage. he always spreads the happiness there. this story is based on the author’s background for celebrating bunga’s birthday in orphanage by giving gifts. kejora often calls arga as ‘elang’—which means ‘hawk’ in english. therefore, argais taught to be as strong as a hawk and the fact is arga can be strong. kejora manifests that condition on juna character who suggests mada to learn from a hawk until mada can be a strong figure. the figure of kejora’s parents, especially kejora’s father, is full of affection so that kejora can understand what affection is. family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by social background in bintang anak tuhan’s novel, there are six social backgrounds found by the researcher. those are the social backgrounds about people’s slanted paradigm towards people with hiv/aids, the existence of people with hiv/aids who are contaminated hiv/aids through drugs, threat of hiv/aids to life, there still exist people with hiv/aids who has strong souls, there still exist normal people who accept and help people with hiv/aids, and the existence of people with hiv/aids who realize to keep themselves. from those social backgrounds, the researcher gets eleven family education values, namely diligent to worship, honest, respect, unanimous, having achievement, mandate, brave, independent, proportional, take care of self, and affection. in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel, there are four social backgrounds found consisting of social background of sidoarjo people who are impassioned, the existence of matchmaking in sidoarjo people, the condition of sidoarjo people related to mud disaster of lapindo, and social background about en event to get rid of the children’s trauma because of mud disaster of lapindo. by reviewing social backgrounds, the researcher gets six family education values contained in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel, namely diligent to worship, brave, mandate, independent, proportional, and affection. then, in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel, there are five social backgrounds found, those are social backgrounds about general condition of a father as a single parent in indonesia, matchmaking in family, international marriage, father’s struggles as a single parent, and the existence of men who have social carefulness. from those social backgrounds, the researcher gets six family education values, includinghonest, respect, independent, affection, and prelude other people. 269 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 3. the results of family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by social background the title of the novels and the result of quotation no. family education values frequency percentage bintang anak tuhan (16 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 4 10% 2. honest 0 2% 3. respect 0 8% 4. unanimous 0 4% 5. having achievement 2 2% 6. mandate 0 6% 7. brave 2 8% 8. independent 0 6% 9. proportional 9 4% 10. take care of self 6 2% 11. affection 2 30% 12. prelude other people 0 10% 13. fair 0 2% air mata terakhir bunda (22 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 4 15% 2. honest 0 6% 3. respect 0 8% 4. unanimous 0 6% 5. having achievement 0 0% 6. mandate 2 8% 7. brave 2 8% 8. independent 6 27% 9. proportional 4 19% 10. take care of self 0 0% 11. affection 4 19% 12. prelude other people 0 0% 13. fair 0 0% ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir (20 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 0 0% 2. honest 2 10% 3. respect 2 10% 4. unanimous 0 0% 5. having achievement 0 0% 6. mandate 0 0% 7. brave 0 0% 8. independent 2 10% 9. proportional 0 0% 10. take care of self 0 0% 11. affection 8 40% 12. prelude other people 2 10% 13. fair 4 20% 270 wulan wahyuning ratri, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie family education values in kirana kejora’s novels: genetic structural research in bintang anak tuhan’s novel, it is discussed that people with hiv/aids are marginalized, so they need affection. the families of people with hiv/aids keep fighting for people with hiv/aids to get education even if it is through home schooling. family education value for being independent are based on people with hiv/aids who are finally independent, and it is manifested through hanum’s character who is independent and powerful. the effort to take care of oneself appears through families of people with hiv/aids who do not let their children to feel tired. in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel, it discusses about kejora’s observations towards sidoarjo people who are full of power, for instance, there exist people who earn money by selling kupang rice cake, and are full of intention. sriyani’s character also gives family education value for selfreliance to her children by working as a kupang rice cake seller, and not hoping other people’s mercy. sidoarjo’s children generally get matchmaking trust from their parents to get married with men or women chosen by their parents. the situation is described through sriyani’s character. in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel, it is also discussed that affection appears from father’s figures as a single parent in indonesia who are great and full of affection to their children. they can also become a figure of mother for their children. that condition is described through juna’s character who gives affection to mada as well as a father and a mother give to their children. besides, there also exists family education value for self-reliance, which is synthesized by a father who is also able to do mother’s jobs. in this case, fathers can also teach their children to learn to live independently. family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by author’s world view in bintang anak tuhan’s novel, there are three author’s view point towards world identified to influence the novel. the author’s world view towards suffer is power, it is not easy for parents with hiv/aids to have children who also suffer hiv/aids. people with hiv/aids are not the ones who are useless. by reviewing the author’s world view, the researcher gets four family education values, namely diligent to worship, brave, honest, and affection. in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel, the researcher gets four author’s world view, involving the author world view for confidence of people who were attacked by mud disaster of lapindo to resurrect, mothers as a single parent, mother as a little god, and the philosophy of the novel’s title air mata terakhir bunda. by reviewing the author’s world view, the researcher gets three family education values, those are diligent to worship, brave, and affection. next, in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel, specifically the researcher gets the author’s world view, including the author’s world view about suffer is power, part of men traditional-clothes from central java, the father as a single parent in young age, children’s views are sustenance, family is a nation foundation, the single father who does everything to his children, and the father is the owner of hidden love. by reviewing those viewpoints towards love, the researcher gets six family education values, those are diligent to worship, having achievement, brave, proportional, take care of self, and affection. 271 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 5, issue 2, june 2017 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 4. the results of family education values in kirana kejora’s novels reviewed by author’s world view the title of the novels and the result of quotation no. family education values frequency percentage bintang anak tuhan (14 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 2 14% 2. honest 2 14% 3. respect 0 0% 4. unanimous 0 0% 5. having achievement 0 0% 6. mandate 0 0% 7. brave 6 43% 8. independent 0 0% 9. proportional 0 0% 10. take care of self 0 0% 11. affection 4 29% 12. prelude other people 0 0% 13. fair 0 0% air mata terakhir bunda (10 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 2 20% 2. honest 0 0% 3. respect 0 0% 4. unanimous 0 0% 5. having achievement 0 0% 6. mandate 0 0% 7. brave 2 20% 8. independent 0 0% 9. proportional 0 0% 10. take care of self 0 0% 11. affection 6 60% 12. prelude other people 0 0% 13. fair 0 0% ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir (36 quotations) 1. diligent to worship 10 27% 2. honest 2 6% 3. respect 0 0% 4. unanimous 0 0% 5. having achievement 4 11% 6. mandate 0 0% 7. brave 8 22% 8. independent 0 0% 9. proportional 2 6% 10. take care of self 2 6% 11. affection 8 22% 12. prelude other people 0 0% 13. fair 0 0% 272 wulan wahyuning ratri, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie family education values in kirana kejora’s novels: genetic structural research in bintang anak tuhan’s novel, it is discussed that family can be friends with suffer and precisely be strong because of the suffer itself. so, in that family, there can manifest family education values for being brave. in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel, it discusses the author’s world view towards love for a single mother, so there is family education value for affection. that value is discussed through a single mother who gives affection abundantly to her children, because children actually need a figure of father beside a figure of mother. comparison of family education values between kirana kejora’s novels the analysis about family education values in kirana kejora’s novels were reviewed by the novel intrinsic structure, author’s background, social background, and author’s world view. the analysis results of the three novels were then compared to each other. as results, it was revealed that kirana kejora’s novels contain family education values which imply how close a relationship between a single parent with his or her childrenis. specifically, family education value for affection is really salient. therefore, it can be synthesized that these kirana kejora’s novels themed family are fully filled by affection among parents with children. conclusion this research results five conclusions, including: (1) thirteen family education values in bintang anak tuhan’s and air mata terakhir bunda’s novels were reviewed through six novel intrinsic structures, whereas twelve family education values in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel were reviewed through six novel intrinsic structures, (2) eight family education values in bintang anak tuhan’s novel were reviewed through five author’s backgrounds, six family education values in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel were reviewed through six author’s backgrounds, five family education values in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel were reviewed through six author’s backgrounds, (3) eleven family education values in bintang anak tuhan’s novel were reviewed through six social backgrounds, six family education values in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel were reviewed through four social backgrounds, four family education values in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel were reviewed through five social backgrounds, (4) four family education values in bintang anak tuhan’s novel were reviewed through three author’s world views, three family education values in air mata terakhir bunda’s novel were reviewed through four author’s world views, six family education values in ayah menyayangi tanpa akhir’s novel were reviewed through seven author’s world views, and also (5) there are similarities and differences of family education values between kirana kejora’s novels. the main point is, the affection has big role above all family education values. it means that kejora as the author wants to tell the readers that the families that only consist of a single parent and their children still have affection like another complete families. references dosse, f., translated by deborah glassman. 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(2007). teori fiksi robert stanton. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar. syafrial. (2014). problematika bahan ajar bidang sastra dalam buku wajib pelajaran bahasa indonesia kurikulum 2013 di sekolah menengah. jurnal bahasa, 9(2), 73-75. syamsi, h., translated by umar mujtahid. (2014). modern islamic parenting: cara mendidik anak masa kini dengan metode nabi. solo: aisar publishing. 274 wulan wahyuning ratri, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie family education values in kirana kejora’s novels: genetic structural research english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1045 the synchronous and asynchronous learning at english department of universities in south kalimantan: practices and challenges nani hizriani english education department, faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training, uin antasari banjarmasin, indonesia email: nanihizriani@uin-antasari.ac.id hidayah nor (corresponding author) english education department, faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training, uin antasari banjarmasin, indonesia email: hidayahnor@uin-antasari.ac.id saadillah english education department, faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training, uin antasari banjarmasin, indonesia email: saadillah@uin-antasari.ac.id apa citation: hizriani, n., nor, h., & saadillah. (2022). the synchronous and asynchronous learning at english department of universities in south kalimantan: practices and challenges. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1045-1056. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6675 received: 28-06-2022 accepted: 26-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction the covid-19 has changed education significantly. this pandemic situation required lecturers and teachers to build in new approaches in teaching including adapting teaching styles, techniques and materials. this condition has accelerated them and their students’ reliance on digital tools. the incorporation of technology in the digital realm is encouraged for lecturers. to improve the quality of education, the use of the internet, mobile devices, online videos, and other media is required. (vendityaningtyas & styati, 2018) the usage of digital communication technologies and networked online applications, as well as teacher and student characteristics, expectations, and obstacles, have modified and shaped the global learning environments of the twenty-first century (naidoo, 2020). the favorable outlook on the existing imposed reliance on education technology, on the other hand, may accelerate some already underway developments in synchronous and asynchronous abstract: the purposes of this research are to describe types, practices of synchronous and asynchronous learning and to explore the challenges faced by the lecturers at english departments in south kalimantan. the researchers employed mixed-methods sequential explanatory design which consist of two distinct phases, quantitative (numeric data) by using questionnaire followed by qualitative by using observation and interview in order to elaborate the results obtained from quantitative data. this research was undertaken in nine english departments in south kalimantan. the participants were 53 english lecturers who teach at those universities. the types of synchronous used by the lecturers were text-based chat / instant messaging / online chat (whatsapp), web conferencing / virtual classroom (zoom and google meet), whiteboards, real-time and non real time document sharing (google documents). the asynchronous types were email, whatsapp group, google classroom, youtube link, pdf files, ms words files, learning management system (lms)/e-learning. the lecturers used direct feedback, real time classroom interaction and communication during synchronous learning. on the other hand, they provided delayed feedback, practiced not real time classroom interaction and communication in asynchronous learning. they facilitated individual and group collaboration for both learnings. the lecturers faced a number of challenges in implementing synchronous and asynchronous learning such as technological problems / internet connection, students’ motivation, classroom management, lack of technological supports, students’ participation, interaction, time management, feedback, materials development, monitoring, instructional method, flexibility, and cost effectiveness. keywords: asynchronous; challenges; practices, south kalimantan; synchronous 1046 learning. it may cause educators to reflect more deeply on present educational methods and to discover more rapidly which technical applications are successful and which are not (thomas & rogers, 2020). and this is the reality that educational conditions must deal with. this is a circumstance in which e-learning is related with accessibility, affordability, flexibility, and learning pedagogy (dhawan, 2020). during the past decade, the internet has had an indelible impact on higher education, allowing for the phenomenal growth of online education. the vast majority of colleges and universities in the united states now offer fully online (asynchronous) and hybrid (synchronous) courses (romero-hall & vicentini, 2017; otte, 2019). in asynchronous interactivity, participants are geographically separated and do not interact simultaneously, as they would in a face-to-face or phone conversation. rather, communication is conducted primarily via e-mail, with significant delays between messages. in a synchronous method, online and face-to-face learning are combined (mayadas & picciano, 2019). webbased technologies not only eliminate time, geography, and learning style barriers, allowing more people to access higher education, but they also pose a challenge to our traditional teaching and learning techniques. synchronous learning is defined as live, realtime (and typically scheduled), facilitated instruction, and learning-focused interaction in which all participants are present at the same time. this form of education takes place at the same time but not in the same location. this highlighted "learning-oriented interaction" to distinguish synchronous learning from lectures, product demonstrations, and other "knowledge dissemination" activities. real-time learning is a type of synchronous learning that takes place through electronic means. this signifies that students and instructors communicate in a specific virtual location at a specific time via a specific online medium. synchronous online learning methods include direct input, increased incentive, and the obligation to engage and be present (kebritchi et al., 2017). the classroom, the media, and conferences were influential factors in the development of synchronous e-learning. three components comprise synchronous learning, which is defined as "real-time web-based interaction between participants and a teacher." synchronous e-learning is real-time, computerassisted instruction and learning-focused interaction (and is usually scheduled). this style of education features lives and real-time learning experiences. amiti (2020), riwayatiningsih & sulistyani (2020), serdyukov (2020), dorsah & alhassan (2021) classified a number of synchronous learning types such as an online whiteboard, online chat, whatsapp, telegram, voice based chat, virtual classroom, web conferencing, zoom, google meet, real-time document sharing (e.g., google documents, live webcasting, webex, microsoft teams, virtual world, and augmented reality (ar). in short, synchronous learning is a process of teaching and learning that happens in real time, live and scheduled in a specific virtual place, through a specific online medium (teleconferencing, video conferencing, live streaming lectures and live chatting), at a definite time. asynchronous learning refers to modes of education, instruction, and learning that do not occur at the same time or place. asynchronous elearning is influenced by distinct conditions and causes; another element defines this method. "asynchronous learning refers to training that is not limited by location or time," singh & thurman (2019) explained asynchronous online learning is defined in a variety of ways due to some components, its nature, and capabilities that are shared by particular features. one of the most prominent definitions of asynchronous e-learning, however, focuses on its components. this strategy promotes learning by combining self-study and asynchronous interactions, and it applies to traditional on-campus or regular education, distance education, and continuing education. asynchronous e-learning networks consist of a network of students and the electronic network through which they communicate. the conditions and causes that drive asynchronous e-learning are distinct; another element defines this methodology. asynchronous learning refers to instruction that is not constrained by location or time (singh & thurman, 2019). asynchronous online learning can be defined in a variety of ways due to its nature, components, and capabilities that are shared among specific features. on the other hand, one of the most prominent definitions of asynchronous e-learning, which focuses on its components, describes it as an engaged learning community that is not limited by time, place, or the boundaries of the classroom (pimmer et al., 2019). https://www.webopedia.com/definitions/microsoft/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1047 mougiakou et al. (2020) assume that asynchronous learning is way to do learning process anytime, anyway via internet. many kinds of distance education models are presently in use, such as video or audio teleconference, social media and so on. this system use to this system is used to facilitate teaching and learning activities that must be carried out remotely. the examples of asynchronous devices are email (lotfi & pozveh, 2019), social media (ferraro, et al., 2020), facebook, instagram, blogs, whatsapp groups (lutviana & mafulah, 2021), telegram (alakrash et al., 2020), google classroom (harjanto & sumarni, 2019), streaming audio or streaming video (lapitan jr, et al., 2021), wikis, youtube, ms. words file, lms (picciano, 2019) web-based learning, web based training (wbt), and computer-based learning (cbt). in brief, asynchronous learning is a method of teaching and learning that can be done at any time and from any location, without regard for time, place or the constraints of a classroom. it can be used to help students learn in traditional oncampus or regular education, distance education, and continuing education settings. myers (2018) suggested that the combination of synchronous and asynchronous devices in a problem-based learning environment could provide students with a wider range of learning and interaction opportunities with their peers and instructors. certain synchronous and asynchronous devices may be more effective at supporting problem-based learning in an online training environment, as suggested by the findings of the study. it is also suggested that synchronous and asynchronous problem-based learning support tools presented obstacles. some studies were conducted by hudha et al. (2018), karaaslan et al. (2018), dada, et al. (2019), kutnick & joyner (2019), olshine & austin (2019), gazan (2020), careaga-butter et al. (2020), chau, et al. (2021), farmer et al. (2021), cahyani, et al. (2021), vidhiasi, et al. (2021), and lee et al. (2022) explored the implementation synchronous and asynchronous learning. from the researchers’ pre observations, it was found that the lecturers in english departments in south kalimantan have some difficulties in implementing synchronous and asynchronous learning completely in the classroom such as lack of direct communication, students’ response, flexibility and attention. in addition, the difficulties are also found in some previous studies such as students’ speaking anxiety due to lack of vocabularies and confidences (nurwahyuni, 2020), limited knowledge of using technology (oktaviana, 2021), lack of real-time interaction and visual contact with either the teacher or peers and insufficient to none opportunities to practice oral production (rigo & mikus, 2021). from those previous studies and pre observation done by the researchers, it is necessary to conduct the research about the types of synchronous and asynchronous learning used by the lecturers at english departments in south kalimantan, the practices and the challenges faced by those lecturers. the objectives of this study are to find out the types of synchronous and asynchronous learning used by the lecturers, to describe the practices, and to explore the challenges of synchronous and asynchronous learning faced by the lecturers at english departments in south kalimantan. method in this study, the researchers relied on the opinions of participants, posed broad questions, gathered data consisting primarily of the participants' words, and then described and analyzed these words to form themes (alam, 2021). this study employed a qualitative approach for its research design. according to alam (2021), qualitative research is a method that can investigate and interpret the meaning of responses from individuals or groups regarding a social or human problem. as a result, qualitative research is appropriate for this study, as the researchers wish to gain a comprehensive understanding of the findings about the research questions. in addition, the descriptive method aided the researchers in analyzing and interpreting the data, as it is a technique for recording, describing, analyzing, and interpreting empirically existing conditions. the researchers employed mixed-method sequential explanatory design. according to vivek & nanthagopan (2021) the mixedmethod sequential explanatory design, consist of two distinct phases, which is quantitative followed by qualitative. in this design, the researchers first collected and analyzed the quantitative (numeric data), followed by qualitative (text) to elaborate the results obtained from quantitative data. the qualitative and their analysis refined those statistical results by exploring participants’ view in more depth. this design was used to describe the practices of synchronous and asynchronous 1048 learning used by the lecturers at english departments in south kalimantan and the challenges of synchronous and asynchronous learning faced by those lecturers. this research was undertaken in english department in south kalimantan consist of uin antasari, universitas lambung mangkurat, uniska, stkip pgri banjarmasin, universitas muhammadiyah banjarmasin, universitas nahdlatul ulama kalimantan selatan, universitas sari mulia banjarmasin, stkip islam sabilal muhtadin banjarmasin, and stai rakha amuntai. the participants were 53 english lecturers who teach at those universities. this study employed systematic sampling to simplify the procedure of selecting a sample and to ensure the optimal distribution of sample units throughout the population. the first unit is chosen using a random number generator, and the remaining units are chosen automatically based on a predetermined pattern. in the case of a larger population, the method is simple to implement, inexpensive, and convenient to use (etikan & bala, 2017). this study adopted embedded mixed research design that utilized questionnaires, interview and checklist as instruments for data collection. the questionnaires were to gather data on the types of synchronous and asynchronous learning used by the lecturers at english departments in south kalimantan. it was designed as closed-ended questionnaire. the observations were to gather data about the practices of the lecturers and focus on the types of synchronous and asynchronous learning in the online classroom. interview to the english lecturers were conducted to find their challenges of synchronous and asynchronous learning related to preferences, flexibility, internet connection, cost effectiveness, technical support, instructional methods, course content, students’ independent learning, and feedback during synchronous and asynchronous learning. the data for the interview was analyzed using the technique proposed by kilicoglu (2018) which consisted of collecting and obtaining the data in the form of recordings, and then transcribing, displaying, and drawing conclusions from the data. results and discussion the types of synchronous and asynchronous learning used by the lecturers at english departments in south kalimantan there are various types of synchronous and asynchronous learning used by the lecturers at english departments in south kalimantan. figure 1. synchronous devices used by the lecturers for synchronous learning, there are some types that are used by the english department lecturers in south kalimantan based on figure 1. text-based chat / instant messaging / online chat (whatsapp) was the most common device used by the lecturers since for about 96.2% or 51 lecturers choose it for teaching. 90.6% (48 lecturers) applied voice based chat (telegram), in addition, zoom is used by 84.9% (45 lecturers), voice based chat (whatsapp) for about 81.1% (43 lecturers), 79.2% (42 lecturers) used google meet and the last one for real-time document sharing (e.g., google documents), there are 75.5% (40 lecturers). these findings were supported by previous researches from alqahtani et al. (2018), kohnke & moorhouse (2022), and irshad (2021), who discovered the importance of replicating language courses associated with whatsapp and telegram, how zoom and google meet help teachers to utilize authentic language instruction in interactive synchronous classes and can be operated effectively in remote locations, and how to interact, collaborate, share, and edit documents, while teachers can monitor the collaborative learning of students in real time using google docs. therefore, these devices really support the process of online teaching learning. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1049 figure 2. asynchronous devices used by the lecturers based on the figure 2 above, the asynchronous learning that used by the lecturers dominantly is pdf files and whastapp group for about 96.2% (51 lecturers). for about 92.5% (49 lecturers) used youtube link and ms words files. for email is 75.5% (40 lecturers) and the last one is 67.9% (36 lecturers) for google classroom. sela et al. (2022) asserted that the implementation of google classroom using an asynchronous model has a positive effect on students, particularly in terms of their independence, awareness of technology, and responsibility in completing assignments. in addition, google classroom, as demonstrated by johnson (2019), is an e-learning application that includes lessons, videos, solutions, and a personalized learning plan. the term is pertinent to promoting blended learning programs implemented by classroom teachers as objectives of learning programs. the practices of synchronous and asynchronous learning at english departments in south kalimantan the pandemic situation in south kalimantan has changed english education significantly nowadays, the lecturers and students have accelerated their reliance on digital tools. in general, the lecturers of english education department in south kalimantan combined synchronous and asynchronous learning during online teaching. they were familiar with the classroom models and used various types of synchronous and asynchronous devices. they used the internet, mobile phones, online videos and other digital communication tools in engaging their students. by using appropriate devices, they expected that learning objectives can be achieved properly. most of the lecturers used synchronous learning at the first meeting in the beginning of the semester. the lecturers used this opportunity to get to know their students, introduced the topics, the schedules, study contracts, and the assignments or projects. they also preferred realtime learning when the topics or materials were needed to demonstrate and they should explain or present some important key terms and aspects in their subjects. furthermore, synchronous learning was chosen when the students did individual or group presentations at definite time. although the students were not in the same place, they could participate simultaneously. one of the lecturers said: “generally, i apply both for teaching, because they support the teaching and learning process. i prefer synchronous to asynchronous because teaching through video call or virtual me eases me controlling the students by turning on the camera. moreover, at the end of teaching i always ask the student to answer quiz or conclude the material to check whether they focus on my explanation or not. therefore, they should turn on the camera. furthermore, i sometimes conduct a discussion through live chat, like chat on whatsapp group.” on the other hand, asynchronous learning became a preference for the lecturers as they can engage their students with the course content at their own pace, on their own time. the lecturers provided their students with a sequence of materials which the students moved through as their unit outline permit. asynchronous learning is also good for students’ self-discipline. another said: “i prefer asynchronous than synchronous learning because it is more flexible. i can access the materials and arrange the class anytime. students can also do self-learning.” 1050 the practices of feedback feedback is key to learning as it allows students to assess their progress and promotes self reflection and improvement (carless & boud, 2018); jensen et al., 2021). this research found that the lecturers provided direct feedback in synchronous learning and delayed feedback in asynchronous learning. in synchronous learning, the students received feedbacks after they performed the tasks. during the observations, the lecturer gave direct feedback when the student made a mistake in pronouncing english words. it was also found in grammar class when students used wrong forms in writing sentences. these feedbacks were given after the students completed the tasks, so the lecturers recognized students’ difficulties in understanding the materials immediately. “i give feedback by delivering some comments or suggestion directly when i teach through zoom meeting and video call.” by giving quick responses, it is expected that the students could learn from their mistakes and eliminate the possibilities of repeating the mistakes in the future. in contrast, the lecturers who preferred asynchronous learning gave indirect feedback to their students. when the students submitted their assignments, the lecturers evaluated and gave written comments on tasks. especially in writing class where the lecturers need extra time to check students’ compositions, giving delayed feedback is very helpful. “in essay writing class, i taught my students to have corrective feedback from their peers, i provided then with some checklist so they were easy to identify the organization of essay, a thesis statement, topic sentences in body paragraphs and conclusion. they also learnt how to recognize unity and coherence in an essay” in this case, the lecturers could provide timely and detailed responses to the students on their submitted tasks, so they could see their mastery or they still had gaps in their understanding. so, the students can improve their writing. in asynchronous learning, the form of feedback also can be seen on the statement of the respondents. “i give feedback through whatsapp group anonymously and generally to all the students so that they realized their own mistakes and can improve next time”. one of the lecturers also stated that “the feedback depends on the assignments and i usually do the feedback at the end of the classes to give the chance to the students to complete all their assignments.” the practices of communication and interaction educators believe that communication and interaction are influential factors for students’ achievement in language classrooms. in online learning, communication takes a various form not only as a tool for exchanging information and knowledge but also for establishing classroom relationship (lasfeto & ulfa, 2020; leo et al., 2021; moorhouse et al., 2021). in synchronous learning, communication occurs in real time. lecturers and students are able to communicate at the same time either in a face-to-face situation using live web casting and video conferencing, or voice/text-based chat. during the observations, two-way communications among lectures and students were found as communicative way of language learning. in language assessment class, after the lecturers explained about the concept of evaluation, he invited his students to discuss about the topic a discussion via zoom. students also did more communicative activities with their peers in speaking class. furthermore, there were some oral presentations from students found. these online classroom activities were the examples how communication occurred in synchronous learning. nevertheless, communication happens not in real-time through asynchronous learning. the lecturers send out the information to the students who are going to receive a response at a later time than right now. one of the lecturers said that she used discussion forum as asynchronous communication to give her students plenty of time to formulate thoughts. she asked her students to give opinion on the topic given and the others would give some comments in period of time. communication either synchronous or asynchronous allows students to develop their learning community in online forums or in social networks and encourages team work, cooperation and social interaction group. as like communication, interaction plays an important role to the success of online learning. interaction will occur in any learning environment. good interaction allows students to share their ideas on various subjects with each other. this research found that there were more interactions occurred in synchronous than asynchronous learning mode. from some english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1051 observations, the researchers noticed that the lecturer were able to implement traditional classroom-based interactions such as class discussions, role playing, and question -answer sessions during synchronous learning. this real time interaction is really beneficial to stimulate students’ motivation as they can participate in the classroom directly. “through synchronous learning, i can guide and instruct my students right away. i use zoom meeting application, so i can interact with my students directly and give the instructions clearly. i also write some notes and do interaction and discussion with students through whatsapp or live chat. these really support my teaching as my students could understand and participate well.” when the lecturers did asynchronous learning, interaction occurred in different time so students have opportunities to participate when and if they want to. interaction quality improves as students have time to reflect on and examine their ideas before responding. “i usually post some questions or discussion topics on whatsapp’s group, then i give time to my students to talk before the next meeting. i require them to respond or ask questions. from their responses, i suppose that not only our interaction but also students’ attention is increased’.” as they have flexible time to interact, lecturers get a clearer idea of what their students understand and how the learners approach a lesson the practices of collaboration in e-learning environments, synchronous and asynchronous communication tools are employed to facilitate collaboration between individuals and groups. for example, the zoom meeting application has a break-out room feature that lecturers can use to ask students to work in groups of five and respond to the questions provided. according to studies, learner satisfaction with e-learning increases proportionally with their perception of collaboration (pham et al., 2019; yekefallah et al., 2021). interaction and collaboration are identified as significant contributors to successful learning outcomes in both traditional and online classroom settings (hurlbut, 2018; albiladi & alshareef, 2019). the teacher's role in an online learning environment entails more facilitating, guiding, and motivating the learner (archambault et al., 2022), which can be accomplished through feedback and collaboration in synchronous learning. on the other hand, studies demonstrate that collaboration in asynchronous learning increases overall student learning (peterson et al., 2018; lin & gao, 2020). a sense of community is necessary to sustain the educational experience over time, and collaborative learning communities foster this (antinluoma et al., 2018). in this learning environment, the teacher is still responsible for fostering and facilitating students' educational experiences (boggu & sundarsingh, 2019). this facilitation can be effectively achieved through asynchronous collaboration, which allows students to thoughtfully consider learning objectives because they have time to critically synthesize their learning (itow, 2020; martin & borup, 2022). the challenges of synchronous and asynchronous learning at english departments in south kalimantan the research found some challenges faced by english department lecturers during synchronous and asynchronous learning as shown in figure 3 below. figure 3. the challenges of synchronous and asynchronous learning technological problems and internet connection became the most common challenges faced by the lecturers as 90.6% of the respondents (48 lecturers) mentioned about it. 1052 another challenge is students’ motivation as 44 lecturers or 83 % of the respondents stated this matter, followed by students’ participation and interaction 79.2% (42 lecturers. 73.6% of the participants (39 lecturers) indicated feedback as the next challenge. they also mentioned challenges in classroom management and monitoring as other issues in online classes. in addition, the lecturers considered the issues of time management, cost effectiveness, flexibility, and instructional methods as the other challenges. “when i started online teaching, majority of my students did not feel comfortable with online learning and preferred to learn in conventional method. we just did synchronous mode once a few times with a limited hour. there was not enough time to talk and discuss about the topic. moreover, some students did not have internet access and supportive tools for their learning. they had difficulties to understand the lesson and became less motivated to join the meeting.” “my students told me that they were not comfortable in online discussion since their internet connection was really bad. this situation influenced their participation during online discussion learning. as they lived in remote areas, it was harder for them to follow online class. they felt stressed and often missed the lesson because the internet connection was awful” “these days, we are familiar with this situation but motivating the students is still challenging. we still find that there are students who feel lazy and not interested with the topic, some of them easily get distracted and hard to concentrate during online class, we should have different plan to keep the class interesting” “i teach a big heterogeneous class, some students have high enthusiasm to learn while the some of them do not participate well and have less interaction. they turn off their camera and sound. other students are not ready to join the class on time. managing virtual classroom is really challenging for me.” these challenges are very common for lecturers in both synchronous and asynchronous online classrooms (gillett-swan, 2017; 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(2021). factors related to students' satisfaction with holding e-learning during the covid-19 pandemic based on the dimensions of e-learning. heliyon, 7(7), e07628. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07628 yusuf, b. n., & ahmad, j. (2020). are we prepared enough? a case study of challenges in online learning in a private higher learning institution during the covid-19 outbreaks. advances in social sciences research journal, 7(5), 205212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.09.005 https://doi.org/10.33884/basisupb.v7i2.2484 https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2019.1663082 https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2019.1663082 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07628 1056 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 431 how to teach english conversation? an implementation of a multimodal discourse analysis through images partohap saut raja sihombing faculty of teacher training and education, universitas hkbp nommensen pematangsiantar, indonesia email: partohap.sihombing@uhn.ac.id herman (corresponding author) faculty of teacher training and education, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: herman@uhn.ac.id nanda saputra stit al-hilal sigli, indonesia email: nandasaputra680@gmail.com apa citation: sihombing, p. s. r., herman., & saputra, n. (2022). how to teach english conversation? an implementation of a multimodal discourse analysis through images. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 431-438. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6244 received: 27-02-2022 accepted: 24-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction language is a human specialized instrument in conveying thoughts, sentiments and explanations. all in all, people can not be isolated from language since people in each movement will require language as something critical in carrying on with their life processes (herman, van thao, & purba, 2021; van thao & herman, 2021). language is not just as verbal language, to be specific communicated in and composed language, yet in addition nonverbal language like movement, sound, items, colors, etc. in this correspondence, these two sorts of language assume a nearly adjusted part on the grounds that by depending on verbal language alone disregarding nonverbal language comprehension of something will be restricted (purnaningwulan, 2015). as confirmed by hutabarat, herman, silalahi, & sihombing (2020), verbal language alone without all movement, sound, shading, and material articles restricts' how one might interpret the intricacy of a collaboration and interactional importance and can give limits on correspondence. to pass on a message, people do different ways, for example, through addresses, abstract: the purpose of this research is to identify how is the role of images implementation in teaching english conversation. rapid technological developments increasingly highlight the use of multimodality theory. multimodal in this case has a metafunction. multimodal is now used as a new learning resource that can be used in the learning process. this multimodal aims as an evolving approach to knowledge in visual or image sources. this study used a qualitative descriptive method. in this study, an analysis of multimodal literature is carried out, namely through pictures of english conversations, these images are then used in learning about conversations in english. three steps of representational metafunction, an interpersonal metafunction, and a compositional metafunction were used to analyze the multimodality of images used as learning media in learning english. the results obtained are that there is an increase in students' understanding when using images as learning media in conversational material in english. based on the analysis of three multimodal components, namely the representational, interpersonal, and compositional, it is possible to conclude that the image of the english conversation employed leads to adaptation to the qualities of the kid as a learner. children enjoy animated characters, and the use of color and animation in drawings is designed to pique pupils' interest in participating in learning by displaying images of discussions and encouraging them to practice them. keywords: multimodal analysis; english conversation; learning; images. partohap saut raja sihombing, herman, & nanda saputra how to teach english conversation? an implementation of a multimodal discourse analysis through images 432 addresses, declarations, signs or images, ads, etc. this multitude of exercises surely require an apparatus, to be specific language. in relational associations, sinar states that there are three significant components that participate in correspondence, in particular: verbal, sound or sound (communicated in language) or chart (composed language), and visuals. verbal language is communicated in and composed language, while the result part of verbal language is sound or sound, and composing is diagram (anstey & bull, 2019). visual association is nonverbal language which incorporates motions, non-verbal communication, etc. the three components of relational connection now and again have various degrees of job, however here and there they have a decent degree of job in passing on messages. perusing abilities involving components of chart or composed language in it (martinec, 2015). dominating the abilities to have the option to comprehend the message or message in the perusing is significant. snow states that youngsters who have perusing hardships not just will generally battle all through their school professions, yet in addition experience challenges in work, social working in the public arena, and different parts of day to day existence. consequently, understanding the multimodal approach in language abilities, particularly understanding texts, is something essential to dominate, particularly in learning (purba & herman, 2020). multimodal learning can be applied to understudies and understudies who as of now comprehend innovation as a component of regular daily existence (ngongo & ngongo, 2022). characterizes multimodal as all verbal and visual semiotic sources that can be utilized to understand the sorts and levels of dialogical association in a reading material (herman, murni, sibarani, & saragih, 2019). with regards to message examination, multimodal is perceived as an investigation that consolidates the apparatuses and steps of semantic examination, like fundamental utilitarian phonetics (sfl) or useful language with logical devices to get pictures, when the message being dissected utilizations two modes, verbal and picture (juliswara, 2017). multimodality is certainly not another peculiarity. baldry and thibault (see that we live in a multimodal society. individuals of this period will encounter the world multimodally and thusly, make importance from their encounters multimodally utilizing language, pictures, motions, activities, sounds and different assets. bilfaqih & qomarudin (2017) clarify that they accept that practically speaking, texts of assorted types are consistently multimodal, using, and consolidating, the assets of different semiotic frameworks to work with nonexclusive (for example standard) and explicit for example individual, and, surprisingly, inventive, approaches to making meaning. innovation, both in giving relative simplicity in text creation and pervasive access in text utilization, likewise emphasizes the multimodal idea of text. this study about teaching english conversation through images based on multimodal discourse analysis has been never conducted by any other researchers before. but, the researchers tried to look for other previous study related to this research. the previous study of increasing students’ conversation skill has been conducted by syafiq, rahmawati, anwari, & oktaviana (2021). the research discussed about one alternative solution for teaching speaking during pandemic is to use a youtube video. this study seeks to discover the utilization of youtube videos to improve students' speaking skills, as well as how the teaching and learning process utilizing youtube videos is implemented in the classroom. in 2020, muhammadiyah university of kudus first semester college students participated in a classroom action research. this study's population consisted of all non-english programs, and the samples consisted of 85 students from redundant classes who were chosen via purposive sampling. the data was collected using a speech evaluation and an interview, and it was then analyzed using the constant comparative method and descriptive statistics. this study found that using youtube videos as english learning material enhanced students' speaking skills in terms of fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and content. as a result, it is possible to conclude that the usage of youtube videos might improve students' speaking skills while online learning in pandemic. covid-19. further research could focus on the use of youtube videos to teach other english skills such as reading and writing. method the method used in this research is qualitative with descriptive nature. according to purba, sibarani, murni, saragih, & herman (2022), the research english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 433 method with a qualitative approach utilizes data in the form of word, spoken or picture descriptions of an individual, phenomenon or symptom of a group with various dimensions that can be observed by researchers (sihombing, silalahi, saragih, & herman, 2021; simajuntak, napitupulu, herman, purba, & thao, 2021). kress and van leeuwen (2016) provide a method for examining advertising images using three meta-semiotic steps (ngongo, 2021). the three steps consist of a representational metafunction, an interpersonal metafunction, and a compositional metafunction. in this study, the researchers analyzed the multimodality of images used as learning media in learning english with the following stages: the first step is to analyze the representational metafunction of the image presented using an animated form containing conversation in english as a medium for learning english. picture 1. animated form of english conversation the second step is to analyze the interpersonal metafunction in the conversational picture by paying attention to the form of the picture used the third step is to analyze the compositional meta-function in the english conversation picture which can be used as a medium for learning about english conversation. picture 2. conversation picture the fourth step is to conclude the meaning of the discourse conveyed through the images used in learning. the fourth step concludes the data whether there are differences in the results of students' understanding of the material by using pictures. results and discussion results from the analysis of three social aspects of semiotics, namely the representational, interpersonal, and compositionally, it can be stated that the picture of the english conversation used leads to adjustment to the characteristics of the child as a learner. children like animated characters and the use of color and animation in pictures is intended to attract students' interest in participating in learning and seeing pictures of conversations and practicing them. the following is an analysis of a simple example of how the analytical steps described above can be applied. the analysis was carried out on two pictures (1 and 2) which act as illustrations, which were taken from an english book for elementary schools published by a publisher in bandung. figure 1. (description/identification) this image is a kitchen image. in the image above there are two participants; a child who said “this is the kitchen. my mom is cooking”, with outstretched arms wearing a blue shirt with an orange collar and brown trousers. position the child to the right of the image. picture 3. illustration example his gaze, although not very clear, turned to another participant, a mother who was cooking. the mother, on the left of the image, is standing slightly sideways and her gaze is not directed at the child but at what is in front of her. in front of the mother is a frying pan and kettle. the skillet, kettle, table, and other objects become the setting in which the process takes place. (analysis/significance) the partohap saut raja sihombing, herman, & nanda saputra how to teach english conversation? an implementation of a multimodal discourse analysis through images 434 vector in this image is realized through the eyes, moving from the child to the mother. thus the child becomes a 'reactor' (reactor) while the mother becomes a phenomenon; someone whose activities are described. according to unsworth relying on kress and van leeuwen (2016), when a vector is formed by the line/eye gaze of one or more 'participants' so that they look at something, then the process that occurs is seen as a reaction rather than an action, and ' participants' is called 'reacter' not 'actor'. the object in this image is depicted in a small size, and using a 'medium close shot', places us as the 'viewer' slightly above the image; when we look at the picture we are like looking down a little. this means that as 'viewers' we have more power than the 'represented participants' in the picture. 'medium close shot' makes us only have social relations, not very close to 'represented participants' (chen, 2021). we know them as we know people in general; they are not part of those closest to us. this further means, 'represented participants' represent a general description of mothers and what activities are commonly attached to the domestic role of mothers in the social practices of our society. the gazes of the two participants are not directed at us who are looking but in another direction so that there is no contact between them and us. when there is no eye contact between the 'represented participants' and the 'viewers', the 'viewers' are placed as observers; they don't 'demand' but 'offer' us. as observers, we are offered to observe what is happening in the kitchen. the size of the 'participant' in the thumbnail as well as the frame. this makes us as 'interactive participants' have greater power over the 'represented participants'. from a compositional layout point of view, the mother is to the left of the image, while the child is to the right of the image. according to kress and van leeuwen (2016), what is placed on the left of the image is 'given' while what is on the right is 'new'. in the picture above, the mother and what she does are 'given' while the child is 'new'. in this context, it should be explained that the 'given-new' composition applies to cultures in which the reading flow moves from left to right, while for cultures that use a right to left or top-down reading flow such as arabic and chinese cultures, the 'given-new' composition new' cannot be used. such cultures use the term compositional layout differently. this form of composition has been criticized for being considered, in between, to overgeneralize over all cultures. however, for a reading and writing culture that moves from left to right, such as indonesia. in the analyzed images, 'given' means mother and especially what mothers do is something that is normal, natural, and should be. while what is new is more important what the child does. blue as the color of children's clothes is a soft color and is usually considered to represent calm. this is because blue is often associated with the color of the sea or mountains (russell, & norvig, 2020). mother's clothes color, orange 'wrapped' brown. orange is a 'warm' color, usually considered to be a symbol of passion. while brown, the color that 'wraps' orange, is a soft color. it can be interpreted that the mother is enthusiastic, happy to do what is considered 'should' be done by a mother/wife. verbal analysis shows that the sentences spoken by children contain relational (this is the kitchen) and material (is cooking) processes. relational clauses serve to characterize and to identify. while the material clause is used to indicate, 'doing' or 'happening', doing something, or an ongoing event (sari, 2020). in the context of picture 1, the sentence spoken by the child identifies the room as a kitchen, one of the characteristics of which is the presence of a cooking utensil and someone, in this case, the mother being an actor who is doing the work that 'should' be done, namely cooking in the kitchen. discussion images or pictures, have various possible relationships with verbal, words. for kress & van leeuwen (2016), verbal adds/extends (extends) the meaning of the image and vice versa. or, verbally explain (elaborate) the image and vice versa. kress and van leeuwen (2016) further say that for barthes, the meaning of images in particular, and other semiotic modes, is always associated with, and dependent on, the meaning of the verbal text. meanwhile, for kress and van leeuwen (2016), the visual component of the text, the image, is a message that is composed and arranged independently, related to the verbal text but does not depend (slash from the researcher) on it. culache & obadă (2014) use four categories of heteroglossic dimension proposed by martin and white, finding that visual 'voice' or messages conveyed can contradict (disclaim) with 'voice' or english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 435 verbal messages. in fact, these verbal and visual texts appear simultaneously in budi hermawan: multimodality: interpreting verbal opportunities. this relationship was also found by bednarek and caple who researched photojournalism in print and online newspapers. royce saw that visual and verbal which are used as modes to convey messages in a text have an 'intersemiotic relationship', the relationship between various semiotic modes (firdausy, 2015). the relationship between the two can be 'intersemiotic repetition', intersemiotic synonymy (similarity relations), intersemiotic antonymy (opposition relations), intersemiotic hyponymy (class-subclass relations), intersemiotic meronymy (partwhole relations), intersemiotic collocation (expectancy relations). furthermore, to explain the relationship between verbal and visual text, martinec and salway offer a system to see the relationship between visual and verbal in a multimodal text. their approach is based on status and logical-semantics (logico-semantics) relationships between visuals and verbals (chen, 2021). this differs from the system developed by liu and o'halloran (2009) which is more based on the 'discourse relation' between verbal and visual texts in their analysis of 'cohesive devices' between verbal and visual texts. this has a positive impact on the development of learning outcomes and students' understanding of conversational material in english, this result can also be seen from the increase in student learning outcomes after using pictures. figure 1. average students’ score in english conversation from the diagram above, it was obtained that students' understanding increased after using pictures of english conversation in learning. the picture function, which should contain enough material for material about conversation, has now shifted. the picture is made as attractive as possible so that students are interested in learning about conversation using pictures presented by the teacher. so that the multimodality of english conversation images has a good role and produces developments in learning. this research related about teaching conversation by using images in the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis is very rarely conducted by other researchers. the researchers have tried to search but dominantly, the researches were oriented to the multimodal analysis on printed advertisement and other literatures perspective. the researcher did get one research related to this research. the research was done by vungthong, djonov, and torr (2015) in their research entitled images as a resource for supporting vocabulary learning: a multimodal analysis of thai efl tablet apps for primary school children. the research was about the use of one tablet per child (otpc) by thao government in supporting students' learning in the digital world. the software included in each child's otpc tablet provide multimedia teaching applications (apps) on a variety of disciplines, including english as a foreign language (efl). this essay analyzes how one element of the apps (song videos) uses visuals and words to build meaning and considers the potential of visual-verbal interactions to help vocabulary teaching and learning using the grade 1 and 2 english apps as a case study. the article concludes with a discussion of related pedagogical implications for the use and design of efl materials integrated into multimedia technologies: the critical role of teachers in guiding efl learners' use of such materials, the need for increased awareness of the potential and limitations of images and visual-verbal relations to support efl teaching and learning, and understanding the relationship between multimodal design of efl materials and related learning outcomes. there are some similarities and differences between the research done by vungthong et al. (2015) with this research. the differences are the images used in their research were aimed to enhance thai students in vocabulary learning. hence, the use of blended learning (otpc) by their government in students’ learning vocabulary process. however, this research used images in helping the students in improving their speaking skills in the form of conversation. the images used here were taken from the english book used by the partohap saut raja sihombing, herman, & nanda saputra how to teach english conversation? an implementation of a multimodal discourse analysis through images 436 students. although there are differences, the researchers also depicted some similaries between both researches. the first was on the use of images in helping the students in their learning process. while, the goal was different, but by having these both researches, the researchers believe that images in perspective of multimodal are becoming more important nowadays in teaching english to the students whether in any kinds of english skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing, including to other aspects such as vocabulary, and so on. conclusion from the data analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn: (1) this multimodality of english conversation images is a representation of fantasy about animated images presented in learning. 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(2021). an analysis of idiomatic expressions found in ed sheeran’s selected lyrics songs. central asian journal of literature, philosophy and culture, 2(1), 12–18. https://doi.org/2660-6828 vungthong, s., djonov, e. and torr, j. (2015). images as a resource for supporting vocabulary learning: a multimodal analysis of thai efl tablet apps for primary school children. tesol quarterly, 50(1), 32-40. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.274. partohap saut raja sihombing, herman, & nanda saputra how to teach english conversation? an implementation of a multimodal discourse analysis through images 438 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1069 the implementation of english learning based on model of intercultural communicative competence (icc) for improving students’ communication independence edi english educational department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah mataram, indonesia e-mail: edi.dompu.80@gmail.com apa citation: edi. (2022). the implementation of english learning based on model of intercultural communicative competence (icc) for improving students’ communication independence. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1069-1076. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6523 received: 28-06-2022 accepted: 26-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction learning english as a foreign language needs a special model to learn it with various variants of language skills. the learning process is an activity that consists of two components, namely learning and teaching. learning is said to be effective if students can absorb the material provided (sataloff et al., 2017). one of the peak language skills is communicative communication commonly referred to as the top priority of language productive skills that need to be mastered by students in higher education. higher education learners must be able to speak in public (public speaking) which is the ability to process, design, deliver, and evaluate a message orally to the public (audience). public speaking includes understanding a lecture material, the purpose of delivering the material, and understanding the 'character' of the audience. the teaching of public speaking has also necessarily shifted over time in terms of where speaking skills have been taught (within formal educational systems or without), how accessible speaking training was and to whom, and how for malized the rules of correct performance have been (bailey, 2019). the students of muhammadiyah mataram university must be having the ability to communicate with people from different cultures. based on initial observations that students in the english education study program at the faculty of teacher training and education muhammadiyah university of mataram that the majority of students can understand grammar, sentence structure, and vocabulary (lexis) are good but lack the competence to communicate well with people who have different cultures. meanwhile, the lecturers emphasize mastering the theory of speaking, listening, reading, writing, and micro skills (vocabulary and grammar) without emphasizing the development of overall communication skills. implementation of learning english using the intercultural communicative competence (icc) model in higher education is the most important thing because icc is an intercultural communication model for a foreigner with a different style. in general, this communication skill is the ability to interact effectively with people who abstract: the purpose of this research is to determine the implementation of english learning based on the intercultural communicative competence (icc) model to increase student independence in communication. students can develop their talents, interests, knowledge, attitudes, awareness, behaviour, and skills when talking with people from different cultures (foreigners). the method approach in this research is qualitativegrounded theory using the techniques and data analysis of miles and huberman (1994), namely data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification. the number of participants in this research consisted of eleven participants in the fourth semester and eleven participants in the sixth semester, so total participants were twenty-two participants in this research, this sample was taken randomly. the results of this study show that students could not implement five dimensions, namely skills: interaction (11), knowledge: social (5), awareness: practice (5), attitude: 4 and behaviour: 3. conclusion of this research, the students of the english education department, faculty of teacher training and education university of muhammadiyah mataram implemented three main dimensions encompasses skills: the ability to interact, knowledge: social knowledge, and awareness: awareness to do the practice. keywords: english learning; icc model; implementation; independence communication. edi the implementation of english learning based on model of intercultural communicative competence (icc) for improving students’ communication independence 1070 have different cultures. intercultural competence has been defined, in general terms, as ‘the ability to interact effectively with people from different cultures, as foundational strategy in teacher education, ic requires a critical examination of thoughts through reflection actions, problemsolving skills, an ability to recognize and deconstruct assumptions, and a resolution to constantly question personal dogmas. (westerlund & karlsen, 2020). communication is an interaction between one or more people based on ethnic, gender, and social differences in the same and different cultures. that adopting online-teaching may serve as an effective way to develop students’ icc during epidemic and in the future (shen, 2021). students need intercultural communicative competence (icc) to maintain successful crosscultural communication and to enhance their literacy during interaction in order that they will not easily end up the cross-cultural communication with stereotype conflicts (morganna, 2017). instructional communication involves a process where teachers (sources) establish objectives (encoding), create messages to teach skills necessary to achieve objectives, send these messages through proper channels to students (receivers) who provide feedback (chaisanit, 2018). teacher educators and teaching practitioners with better understandings of various approaches in intercultural education; therefore, they can make better choices of icc-related practices fitting their own situations (hang, 2021). intercultural communicative language teaching (iclt) model is effective in facilitating efl learners’ icc development, and it can be applied in other similar efl context (duong, 2018). the feasible tasks used in real class and find it is possible to develop students’ intercultural communicative competence in chinese educational context (cai, 2019). communicative language teaching (ctl), this approach comprises some axioms in which activate the students to be able to communicate well in the language learned. ctl emphasizes on the contextually and authenticity, so that the students can learn the materials as the whole part and can easily adjust their knowledge with the reality existing (sabrina, 2020). intercultural communicative competence (icc) is the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately with other cultures to negotiate meaning. a high level of icc is required for a successful communication across numerous cultures (sevimel-sahina, 2020). intercultural communicative competence (icc) is importance for international students, so that they may be able to prepare themselves not only in developing communication skill but also intercultural appreciation before studying in foreign countries (zhai & razali, 2020). teachers considered culture and icc teaching to be important and required support in icc teaching in terms of instructional materials and resources (choi, 2019). development of respect for cultural differences as well as an open and constructive intercultural dialogue (butković & čepić, 2020). the concept of icc can build a new dimension of language learning minimizing the communication gap between the speakers of english from different parts of the world by incorporating intercultural materials into efl curriculum. in efl classes intercultural materials introduce the learners with the multiplicity of cultures across the world. intercultural materials, in its extended realm, covers a far wider range that opens up immense scope for developing the knowledge and tolerance of other cultures and of the people who practice those cultures (snigdha, 2022). the lecturers commonly promoted the aspects by comparing the target culture with the students’ own culture. those teaching approaches are used to improve students’ linguistic knowledge and facilitate a better oral and written skill so the students can employ various strategies in the academic situation, and that the activities carried out in the classroom contributed a lot to develop students’ intercultural communicative competence (icc) (syam et al., 2020). the literature review revealed a relationship between intercultural communicative competence and eap studies, with students having higher levels of intercultural communicative competence also having higher levels of academic success (douglas & rosvold, 2018). communicative competence: the three level, the procedure level, or the actual performance as competence or the systemic level: which includes linguistics competence and grammatical knowledge, capacity or the schematic level: which includes the ability to use language and create meaning, and performance or the procedural level: which includes practical performance and the capacity to perform a language in a new context (järvenpää et al., 2021). developing communicative competence implies understanding a message, interpreting a speech orally, speaking safely, being coherent, writing a text, creating a personal message; and allows the construction of effective messages that are directed to groups of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1071 people in different media and codes, it is also a fundamental means to teach and learn in the increase of new words (de arruda, 2021). people can achieve the goal of transforming students from academic talents to application-oriented talents on the basis of strengthening the practice and application of intercultural communicative competence (ping et al., 2019). hymes defined communicative competence as the grammatical competence of a language and as the ability to use a language in a variety of communicative situations (performance) (järvenpää et al., 2021). intercultural communicative competence (icc) is the ability to interact with people who have different cultures (foreigners). icc components consist of attitudes, knowledge, skills, and awareness. the icc models are attitudes: curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures, and belief about one’s own (savoir être). knowledge: of social groups and their products and practices in one’s own and in one’s interlocutor’s country, and the general processes of societal and individual interaction (savoirs). skills of interpreting and relating: the ability to interpret a document or event from another. culture, to explain it and relate it to documents from one’s own (savoir comprendre). skills of discovery and interaction: ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes, and skills under the constraints of realtime communication and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire). critical cultural awareness/political education: an ability to evaluate critically and the basis on of explicit criteria perspectives, practices, and products in one’s own and other cultures and countries (savoir s’engager). acting interculturally can be something very simple or very complex. the issue of the relationship between being intercultural and social identity. that documentaries, news clips and foreign films, especially those with multi-cultural elements, play an important role in the cultivation of students icc. students show great enthusiasm for cross-cultural comparison in vsl courses and they also like to incorporate video watching into their class because of its diversity of content and form, its authenticity of language and scenes, its vivid reflection of social culture, values and ways of thinking. since intercultural communication tasks involve in intercultural social relations and intercultural communicative behaviours, language teachers should take full advantage of various activities such as role play, simulation, cultural comparison, drama to achieve their teaching goals. by selecting appropriate video material, asking appropriate prompt questions, assigning cultural context tasks as well as designing related classroom activities, teachers can facilitate the development of the students’ intercultural communicative competence (liu, 2021). that 7 dimension and 36 variables of the constructed assessment scale can effectively measure students of icc can be enhanced by exploring the college student icc teaching model from the perspective of linguistics subjectivity based on mit, and the backwash effect of icc teaching and assessment can effectively boost college students’ intercultural communicative sensitivity, comprehensive cultural literacy, and practical language applications skills (peng & harbin, 2021). multimodality in web 2.0 tools and applications effect icc development in multiple ways but more research on icc and l2 and fl learners in multimodal environments needs to be conducted (avgousti, 2018). while m.n. edi model (edi et al., 2017). model is another icc model with larger components covering skills: interpretation and relating, ability to interact, attitude: readiness and openness, awareness: participation and practice, knowledge: individuals and social groups, behaviour: action situations: skills: the skills of interpreting and relating (ability to interpret events from other cultures and relating or collaborate more than one different culture). skills interaction (the ability to obtain new knowledge about the behaviour of verbal and non-verbal communication to the continuity of interaction with others). attitude: readiness and openness (readiness and openness to believe in other cultures and maintain one’s own). awareness: participated and practiced (the ability to participate and practice in one’s own and other cultures). knowledge: individual and social group (the knowledge of the individual and social group, practice with people have a different culture to improve the knowledge of icc). behaviour: action and situation (ability to do action and the way to interact with people from different cultures through non-verbal codes) (edi et al., 2017). awareness will afford students a stronger connection to their heritage culture and identity, and a more positive attitude towards their own and other varieties (díaz & callahan, 2020). aspect knowledge and skills is a better of icc and its pedagogy, the training could produce intercultural communicative teachers. (iswandari and ardi, 2022). the communicative-based instructional speaking skill model was practical, effective in improving students ‘verbal ability, and considered edi the implementation of english learning based on model of intercultural communicative competence (icc) for improving students’ communication independence 1072 valid by the experts. (muammar et al., 2021). skills and knowledge contributed to improve communicative competence. (ahmad & millar, 2020). findings from a variety of approaches to icc attest to the value icc brings to fle in cultivating learner’s intercultural competence. (liu, 2019). the importance of this icc model relates to the ability to interact with people who have different cultures. the icc model can change the mindset of communicating in english on an ongoing basis with the main needs of a specific process. by mastering icc, students can increase the intensity of their ability to communicate with foreigners, both in indonesia and abroad. the implementation of communication related to the icc model will discuss the icc components, namely the skills of interpreting and relating, skills interaction, attitude-readiness, and openness, awarenessparticipated and practice, knowledge-individual and social group, and behaviour-action and situation m.n. edi model (edi et al., 2017). method this research was conducted in the fourth and sixth semesters. several participants in this research consist of eleven participants in the fourth semester and eleven participants in the sixth semester of the english educational department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah mataram. researchers used a qualitative method-grounded theory. grounded theory is a qualitative strategy in which the researcher derives a general, abstract theory of process, action, or interaction grounded in the views of participants in a study (creswell, 2012; 2014; 2018). researchers use this approach because it relates to the way of observation (structured, semi-structured, and open) in class, learning, face-to-face interactions, the actions of communication with those studied in the research location, independent or personal interactions, interviews (structured/formal, semi-structured, and formal/open) with students as the main key in conducting research during interviews, observations, footnotes, recordings, and documentation, all of which were done to find models of student communication with people who have different cultures. in the research design, researchers conducted observations, interviews, review recordings, and documentation on students to be studied, namely english educational department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah mataram. after the researchers conducted observations, interviews, recording, and documentation. so, the researcher makes further observations, it will be summarized in a very concise note to be concluded in interpretation. after all that was done, the researchers documented all student activities related to the implementation of english language teaching based on the icc model in increasing student communication independence. these techniques and data analysis using the theory of miles and huberman, 1994, namely data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification as follow: figure 1. the flow of qualitative data analysis (miles and huberman, 1994) results and discussion this research shows, that the researcher finds out the implementations of learning english based on model intercultural communicative competence (icc) for improving student communications independence in the english educational department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah mataram. this research shows, that the majority of the participants fourteen learned well about language and culture with people who have different cultures (foreigners). five students do not study the culture and communication methods of people who have different cultures. sometimes, one participant learns well about different languages and cultures but he always forgets the words when to say something, he did not like when to say the word in english. one of the students stated that he felt very good learning other people's languages and cultures, just for fun too, and only to be seen close to people who have different languages and cultures without paying attention to other things one of the students explained that yes, i learned different languages and cultures with different people and i get more to communicate with them, the greater benefits of learning english itself and can also increase knowledge of multiple languages. learning other people's languages and cultures is very important to improve communication. it can english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1073 also increase mutual respect even though they have different languages and cultures. thus, to improve communication with people who have different languages and cultures, students are expected to be able to understand other people's languages and cultures in depth (attitude). participants are very interested in talking and socializing with people who have different languages and cultures which is indicated by the results of the interviews, sixteen participants stated that there is only one student who is interested in talking and socializing with people who have different languages and cultures, he wants to know something new, he wants to be close friends continuously with people who have different languages and cultures, and other participants who are very interested because he likes to be social, knows everything about their language and culture, make close friends and add insight when communicating with them about language and culture. one participant also stated a similar statement stating that he is very interested in learning and knowing different languages and cultures, and also wants to know more about how to communicate with foreigners or communicate with people from different cultures. one participant also stated that i am sometimes interested in studying and socializing with people who share their cultural related to values and customs, and another participant also commented that i am very interested in their language, culture, and customs compared to other cultures and added one student as a participant in this research that he is very interested in studying different cultures with different people because it can facilitate friendly relations with different customs, it will also expand relations between different people, and is also interested in getting traditional values so that we can mutually respect, mutual understanding between cultures. thus, participants are very interested and socialize with people who have different languages and cultures because it will improve their own english (attitude and knowledge). the number nineteen participants appreciate and respect differences in behaviour, values, and customs with people from different cultures, and as many as three also appreciate/respect it but if other cultures don't respect their culture then there will be punishment they will get. the majority (seventeen) of participants feel confident when talking, discussing, and participating with people from different cultures. one of the participants stated that discussion with them also gained new experiences and one of the students also thought that if the communication felt comfortable, it would feel comfortable when communicating with those who have different cultures (skills/knowledge). all participants want to interact with people who have different cultures every day because it can improve their communication in english. however, many students do not have the opportunity to interact due to the lack of time and opportunity to interact with people who have different cultures (skills/knowledge). in other statements in other questioners, sixteen participants who understand their own culture and know other people's cultures globally. a total of six students knows their own culture and do not know the culture of others so they have difficulty improving their communication. they a lack of understanding of other people's cultures, in the future they will try to understand more deeply about other people's cultures (knowledge). the majority of participants, namely as many as twelve participants had references to other people's related values, customs, cultures, and eight participants did not have references to other people's values, customs, and traditions. two participants had little reference to other people's values, customs, and customs. thus, the plan participle knows about the values, customs, and customs of others. the other questions, that as many as eleven participants knew the history of cultural differences when communicating but there are five participants did not know when communicating with people from different and two participants stated that they knew their own culture and forgot the culture of others when they are communicating with them (knowledge). a total of sixteen participants knew were able to express non-verbal behaviour such as eye contact with people who have different cultures and six participants did not know directly about the use of non-verbal so it can be concluded that participants have non-verbal abilities such as eye contact when communicating through non-verbal (skills and behavior). the majority of participants, twelve participants know the technique of communicating with people who have different cultures and they have one strategy to use applications on the internet such as skype and others. two participants often use communication strategies using those applications and other participants do not know anything about communicating strategies with people who have different cultures, especially edi the implementation of english learning based on model of intercultural communicative competence (icc) for improving students’ communication independence 1074 communication strategies through skype and others (skill and knowledge). tthirteen participants were able to communicate and influence others. when communicating and when experiencing difficulties, they used body language. five participants were able to communicate and influence others when they were in university so if they were outside university they had difficulties when communicating and influencing people who had different cultures other participants could communicate and influence but had to have a long time to communicate to run smoothly. good, and can also affect it. many activities are related to developing communication. so, the majority of participants as many as twenty can participate in social activities with people who have different cultures, and three participants do not have the ability. thus, participants have awareness in participating in activities with people who have different cultures (awareness). in the other situation, there are eleven participants had the ability to communicate with people from different languages and cultures via the internet using applications. ten participants also use the internet but not very often, and one participant cannot communicate via the internet with the provider's application when they are communicating with other cultures (skills). but all participants can collaborate between their own culture and the culture of others (skills). in the other condition, twenty participants enjoyed talking to people from different cultures while one participant stated that he sometimes enjoyed it, and another participant stated that he enjoyed it but would learn more about how to enjoy it when talking to different people (skills). the majority of participants, namely twenty participants used verbal and non-verbal skills. it both in their own culture and other cultures. there are two participants stated that they sometimes use verbal and non-verbal skills and one participant does not use verbal and non-verbal communication in their own culture and the culture of others (skills). in this section, participants have a wide variety of strategies when communicating with people of different cultures. the six participants did not have a strategy but always watched movies to improve their communication with people from different. ten participants always communicate with people from different and other strategies to improve it through watching western films and other participants do not always have a variety to communicate with people who have cultures and also sometimes watch western films to improve their english (skills). there are seventeen participants argued that people from different cultures did not have a narrow mindset and the other (two participants) stated that sometimes people from other cultures had a narrow mindset while one participant stated that they had a narrow mindset and the other participants stated that they did not know at all. thus, people who have different cultures must have a broad mindset (knowledge). in other statements, six participants found it difficult to communicate when meeting people from different cultures. five participants did not find it difficult when communicate with people from different cultures and four participants stated that sometimes it was difficult when meet people from different while the other participants felt it a little difficult to communicate with people who had different cultures (skills). one of the strategies to improve communication is interaction but there are ten participants felt rejected when interacting with people who had different cultures and five participants were rejected when interacting with people who had different cultures while there are four participants were rejected but not necessarily when interacting with people who have different cultures and there were three participants who were often rejected, and there were three participants who did not feel rejected when interacting with people who had different cultures (behaviour). the other statement, a total of fourteen participants did not participate in the workshop on awareness, attitude, knowledge, and skills. there were eight participants attended and participated in workshops on awareness, attitude, knowledge, and skills. the majority (twenty) of the participants were aware of the existing cultural diversity while two participants felt that they were not aware of the existing cultural diversity. (awareness). twenty participants realized that there were cultural differences in language both inside and outside the classroom, while two participants were not aware of it. (awareness). nineteen participants do not think negatively when people who have different cultures and act look different from their habits because of the cultural diversity that exists, while three participants always think negatively of strangers because they always act and/or look different. (awareness). the majority (fourteen) participants act as cultural mediators and function as bridges between people who have cultures and as many as english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1075 five participants will not act as mediators between people who have different cultures while other participants feel sometimes become a mediator (awareness). thirteen participants stated that the best way to communicate with different people is with polite speech/language while four students stated that the best way to communicate is by mutual respect/tolerance and three participants stated by establishing a friendly relationship. (awareness). meanwhile, for three participants, the best way to communicate with people of different cultures is to use a second language. (awareness). the majority (nineteen) participants stated that attitudes, knowledge, abilities, and awareness are the basis of communication with people who have different cultures and they know that skills are the basis of communication with people who have different cultures while the three participants do not know. (attitude, knowledge, skills, and awareness). in the other statement, nine participants changed their behaviour (non-verbal) such as eye contact when the cultural situation required it and nine participants would not change it, while four participants sometimes changed their behaviour when the cultural situation required it. (behaviour). at least but not least, twelve participants did not recognize the signs of cultural tension and determine strategies to overcome them, while ten participants recognized them and were able to determine strategies to overcome them. 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(2020). challenges with intercultural communication faced by international chinese students and the importance of developing intercultural communicative competence. journal of critical reviews, 7(13), 643–650. https://doi.org/10.31838/jcr.07.13.111 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 699 l e a r n e r s ’ d i g i t a l l i t e r a c y i n t h e o n l i n e l e a r n i n g d u r i n g c o v i d 1 9 iful rahmawati mega english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah bangka belitung, indonesia email: iful.rahmawatimega@unmuhbabel.ac.id yuanita primary school teacher education study program, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah bangka belitung, indonesia email: yuanita@unmuhbabel.ac.id ayen arsisari mathematics education study program, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah bangka belitung, indonesia email: ayen.arsisari@unmuhbabel.ac.id widati amalin ulfah physical education, health, and recreation study program, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah bangka belitung, indonesia email: widati.amalinulfah@unmuhbabel.ac.id apa citationmega, i. r., yuanita., arsisari, a., & ulfah, w. a. (2022). learners’ digital literacy in the online learning during covid-19. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 699-706. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6314. received: 03-04-2022 accepted: 17-05-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction coronavirus commonly known as covid-19 is a fatal and infectious disease that has had a significant impact on the worldwide area. marioni (2020) stated that education is one of the aspects that rattled by this outbreak. also supported by li (2016) teaching media in the teaching and learning process are switching to the digital version. the implementation of learning activities was forced to take place online. in line with karagul, seker, & aykut (2021) the sudden transition from classrooms to online education has required specific skills such as learners' digital abilities at all levels of education. the covid-19 pandemic has caused changes in the academic sphere, particularly in the learning process at all levels (aydin & erol, 2021). as a abstract: this research investigates the understanding of digital literacy in the online learning process during covid-19 for students in the higher education students in indonesia. the objectives of this study are to describe the aspects of digital literacy in the concepts of bawden, they are basic skill of digital literacy, attitudes and perspectives, background knowledge of the information, technology and iinformation skills, and attitudes and perspectives. this study employ qualitative with the subjects are 117 students; these students were determined using purposive sampling technique with the criteria who were joining the learning classroom actively. the collecting data technique was using 20 questions in the questionnaire and it was analyzed using descriptive quantitative techniques. the results in this study reveal that all of the respondents indicate have good criteria in digital literacy. they have good characteristics in basic skill of digital literacy; have good criteria in background knowledge of the information; have good skill in technology and information; as well as good attitude and perspective of digital literacy. the conclusion is the higher education students have a good digital literacy in the aspect of basic skill of digital literacy, they have a good digital literacy in the aspect of background knowledge of information, and they have a good digital literacy in the term of technology and information skills as well as strong attitude and perspective on digital information. keywords: digital literacy; online learning; covid-19. iful rahmawati mega, yuanita, ayen arsisari, & widati amalin ulfah learners’ digital literacy in the online learning during covid-19 700 result, all formal educational institutions now offer online learning, as it is unlikely to reach face-toface during the process (offline) as stated by dhawan (2020) this crisis will make the institutions, which were earlier reluctant to change, accept modern technology. the teacher's ability to operate new software automatically demonstrated the development of self-learning skills (butarbutar et al., 2021). supported by pramono et al. (2021) due to the tremendous rise in cases around the world, practically all developing countries were allowed to make the hard choice to conduct distant learning education, with all the disadvantages that entail. as previous research by yustika & iswati (2020) stated that online students are anxious because they do not understand or are accustomed to online classes, especially those with limited computer skills. according to layton (2000) computers and other technologies have permanently altered children's learning environments, temperaments, and ideas about work and play. in addition, blundell et al (2016) said that technology is also positioned as a vehicle for educational reform via teacher practice transformation. students can use digital technology for learning activities such as reading and sending emails, accessing learning management systems, reading journals or e-books, and taking online quizzes because of a sudden decision by the indonesian government to close all types of activities in schools, including learning activities and move them to learn at home through distance learning. educational institutions are scrambling to come up with solutions to this difficult scenario, in line with research by chung et al. (2020) due to a lack of student control, self-directed learning, and online communication efficacy, some of them were not ready for online learning. these circumstances make us realize that scenario planning is an urgent need for academic institutions (rieley, 2020). now, online learning, remote learning, and the things that come up with the new technological teaching and learning process bring students and teachers to understand the knowledge of digital learning. according to suswandari et al. (2022) said that the goal in implementing digital literacy is not only for the digital information that students receive, but also for students to learn, explore, create and become more active online and to have educational interactions between students and teachers. we need a high level of preparedness so that we can quickly adapt to the changes in the environment and can adjust ourselves to different delivery modes, for instance, remote learning or online learning in situations of pandemics such as covid-19. to enable effective and efficient teaching and learning practices, several teaching tactics (lectures, case studies, debates, and discussions, experiential learning, brainstorming sessions, games, drills, and so on) can be employed online. as suggested by rahiem (2021) there are two alternatives for making online learning accessible in this archipelago nation: either expand the internet network or provide alternate learning that does not require online access for individuals who live in remote places. digital learning is supported by the understanding of digital literacy. in mardiani et al. (2021) digital technology is becoming an integral part of the educational world, and digital literacy has become a necessary skill to explore and process information and messages as much as possible. the use of digital technology to enhance teaching and learning in schools has been growing for years, but in march 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of practically all educational institutions globally, it became the only choice (scully, d., lehane, p., & scully, 2021). this paper will show more about the students’ understanding of digital literacy through their experience in online learning facing the pandemic covid-19 outbreak. as defined by doni, c. p., husain, d., saleh, s. r., pakaya, n. a., tjalau, c. a., & arsyad (2021) one of the challenges for implementing online education during this pandemic is digital literacy. teachers must make explicit links to e-safety when attempting to promote students' digital literacy (hague, c., & payton, 2011). digital literacy is the capacity to find, assess, use, produce, and use information sensibly using digital media, communication tools, or networks. as the study finding by khan et al. (2022) state that digital literacy improves both academic performance and employability. in line with previous study by udeogalanya (2022) that all institutions must be proactive rather that reactive to systemic shocks by preparing students for academic success and technological readiness for today’s job markets. because of the widespread influence of digital sources, the general public or citizens must be good users. according to mega (2020), digital literacy is the ability to understand and use information from a variety of online sources. the thought of digital english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 701 literacy was introduced by gilster (1997) defines digital literacy as the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats presented via computers. furthermore, digital literacy skill refers to the ability in getting, using, evaluating, communicating, creating and developing digital information through digital actions as the solution for some tasks. in addition, jan (2018) said that students' attitudes toward adopting information and communication technology (ict) and other ictrelated demographics were found to be linked to digital literacy. supported by hassan & mirza (2021) the ict skills are critical to teachers' use of alternative teaching and learning methods, i.e., elearning, mobile learning in the present outbreak of pandemic disease caused by coronavirus-covid19. furthermore, because students cannot learn computer literacy without a computer literate faculty, the digital literacy of students is directly linked to the computer capabilities of instructors and academicians (nawaz & kundi, 2010). adapted from bawden (2008) and martin (2008), the components of digital literacy skills cover basic ict skills (underpinning/technical skill), information literacy skill (background knowledge), digital competencies (central competence), and attitude and perspective toward digital usages and digital transformation. digital literacy is used to direct student-centered learning, and it has become one of the abilities that students must master when the school based curriculumwas established until the 2013 curriculum. according to abbas et al. (2019) said that digital literacy had a significant impact on students' effective communication, analytical thinking, and optimism, but had no impact on their cgpa. educators must address several issues, including digital literacy skills, technology usage habits, and digital content accessibility (al-qallaf, c. l., & al-mutairi, 2016). in addition, m. li & yu (2022) state that teachers must be digitally literate in order to meet the new requirements of the currently advanced teaching approach in the future. the developments in basic literacy in the twentyfirst century, there are six types of basic literacy that everyone must master: (a) language and literature literacy, (b) numerical literacy, (c) scientific literacy, (d) digital literacy, (e) financial literacy, and (f) cultural and citizenship literacy. during this pandemic, online learning requires a person's ability to master digital technology equipment, with the hope that the individual already possesses digital literacy abilities. students need digital literacy abilities to take advantage of digital technology, rahmi & cerya (2020) which is defined it as the ability to use digital devices such as cellphones, pcs, or laptops and operate supporting programs to assist students majoring in education in designing quality learning. based on the wider description above, this study aims to know how far the students’ understanding about the digital literacy facing in their remote learning experience during pandemic covid-19. based on the wider description above, the novelties of this study were (1) the research on student’ digital literacy is something new for the intern university system, since online learning also conducted in the pandemic covid-19, and (2) the findings of this study will be further used as the basic of the next research on the use of online learning media on the university’s internal learning management system (lms). this study aims to know how far the students’ understanding about the digital literacy facing in their remote learning experience during pandemic covid-19. it focuses on the aspect of students’ digital literacy, how far the learners understand the aspect of digital literacy and the knowledge of students’ literate the digital tools. so, this study pointed to 1) basic skill of digital literacy; 2) background knowledge of the information; 3) technology and information skills; and 4) attitudes and perspectives. method this study was intended to know the students’ understanding of digital literacy during online learning in the pandemic covid-19. it is classified into descriptive quantitative that is investigated to point the digital literacy aspects from bawden theory, they are: 1) basic skill of digital literacy; 2) background knowledge of the information; 3) technology and information skills; and 4) attitudes and perspectives. there were 117 students of higher education students; these students were determined using purposive sampling technique with the criteria that were joining learning classroom actively. the collecting data technique was framed in 20 questions in the questionnaire; the questionnaire was analyzed using descriptive quantitative techniques. the researchers conceived the questionnaire based on the related literature and previous studies. to collect the data, digital literacy iful rahmawati mega, yuanita, ayen arsisari, & widati amalin ulfah learners’ digital literacy in the online learning during covid-19 702 questionnaire adapted from theories of digital literacy concept proposed by bawden (2008). the questionnaire was distributed to the sample at the beginning. it consists of some statements in terms of likert-scale consisting of 4 choices of answers. moreover, the questionnaire had been validated to the experts, material experts and language experts (linguists); according to the material expert validation results, the instrument measurement shows 87.5 percent, it was in the good category and may be used. according to the linguists, the instrument measurement shows 88.2 percent, it was in the very good category and could be used. as a consequence of the two experts' validation results, this instrument is suitable for usage. the questionnaire also had been tried out to other students before it was given to the sample of this study. it delivered to 25 students, from 20 items, all of them were valid and reliable with the validity score was 0.762, and reliability score was 0.814. so it can be said that the instrument were valid and reliable. the valid instrument then distributed to the sample. the participants had to respond to the questions and pick the answer which offered some choices. after delivering the questionnaire to the participants, the instrument then analyzed used descriptive quantitative analysis. results and discussion the score and results of the study based on bawden’s (2008) theory is classified into four aspects; they are (1) basic skill of digital literacy; 2) background knowledge of the information; 3) technology and information skills; and 4) attitudes and perspectives. the explanation below shows the results of the questionnaire distribution to determine students' understanding of digital literacy in the term of basic skill of digital literacy. diagram 1. data of students’ internet accessing from the results of diagram 1, there are 47% of students who access the internet more than five hours a day, 37.6% in the often category, 14.5% in the rare category, and 1.8% in the never category. it means that almost all of the college students spend 21% time a day accessing the internet. diagram 2. data of students’ joining in online learning based on diagram 2 above, reveals that 61.5% of college students are very often joining in online learning, 35% of students are often joining online learning, and 3.5% of students are rare joining online learning. diagram 3. data of applying online learning media diagram 3 above describes that 52.1% of students are very often applying online learning media, 40.2% are often using online learning media, and 7.7% of students are rarely applying online learning media. table 1. sharing file in online learning media rate criteria 23.1% extremely often 56.4% often 19.7% rare 0.8% never from the table 1 above, it reveals that students’ activities in sharing file from online learning media are in good criteria. it describes in table 1 that 56.4% of students are extremely often sharing files during online class through online learning media. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 703 there are 23.1% of students are often sharing file during online class, and 19.7% are rarely doing this activity. it can be illustrated that more than 80% of students have a good attitude toward sharing information with others during online learning. information that is shared is a proper file related to academic purposes in the teaching and learning online process. the description below describes the results of the questionnaire distribution to determine students' understanding of digital literacy in the term of background knowledge of information. diagram 4. data of students’ internet searching diagram 4 shows that 59.8% of students understand how to search information in the search engine, and 35.9% of students are very understood and only 4.3% of students do not understand how to find information in search engines. this reveals that more than 95% of students are finding information using the search engine on the internet so that the internet plays a significant role in finding information in education and other disciplines. diagram 5. data of students’ digital references based on diagram 5 above that 100% of college students using online references. this illustrates that students’ most favorite references are published in online media, it is confirmed that this activity is easy, efficient, and practical. the results below describe the results of the questionnaire distribution to determine students' understanding of digital literacy in the term of technology and information skills. this section also discusses the outcomes of using digital learning tools from reputable sources and reading all digital data. table 2. data of reading digital information in trusted sources trusted digital sources reading digital information percentage category rate category 25.6% very often 6% very often 67.5% often 56.4% often 16.9% rare 36.8% rare 0% never 0.8% never according to the table above the category of very often and often have the total number 72%, this provides useful information about links or official websites viewed, and digital material is more frequently read because it is easier to obtain from an android device. diagram 6. data of screening digital information based on the diagram above, it shows that 14.5% of students are very common doing screening on digital information, 60.7% of students are common doing screening, and 24.8% of students are rarely doing this activity. it means that most pupils in the digital era filter the information they received. iful rahmawati mega, yuanita, ayen arsisari, & widati amalin ulfah learners’ digital literacy in the online learning during covid-19 704 diagram 7. data of confirming digital information according to this diagram, it was discovered that practically all students do double-check the information they received, as seen by the 0% percentage result for the never category. table 3. trust the online information rate category 2.6% very common 26.5% often 66.7% rare 4.3% never based on the table above, shows that 66.7% of college students are rare trust online information directly, 26.5% of students are often trusting in online information, 2.6% of students very often believe in online information, and 4.3% of college students are never trusting on online information. this demonstrates that college students pick or screen the information they received. the explanation below describes the results of the questionnaire distribution to determine students' understanding of digital literacy in the term of attitudes and perspectives users. table 4. data of open the link and do citation declaration rate category open another link to find out the trusted information 14.5% very common 67.5% often 14.5% rare 3.4% never do a proper citation method 5.1% very often 60.7% common 31.6% rare 2.6% never attach the other writing sources (citation) 12% very common 47.5% often 28.2% rare 12.8% never based on the table above, it reveals that 67.5% of college students are often opening another link to look for reputable sources, 60.7% of college students are common doing a proper citation method, and 47.5% of students are often attaching the other writing sources in their papers or works. it can be concluded that more than 58% students have a good attitude and perspective on digital information. according to the results above, the aspects of students who have good digital literacy are seen based on bawden's points; they are 1) basic skill of digital literacy; 2) background knowledge of the information; 3) technology and information skills, and 4) attitudes and perspectives. most of the students are using online learning media in the learning process during the pandemic. it is found that most of the college students here have mastered several online learning media including zoom meetings, google meet, and others. it illustrates that college students are digitally literate and capable of adapting to changes in the lecture system, such as the transition from face-to-face to online learning. it can be described that most of the students are joining online learning during this pandemic covid19. first, the students have good digital literacy in the aspect of basic skill of digital literacy. the support reasons are almost all of the students spend their 21% time a day accessing the internet, the second is most of the students are joining online learning during this pandemic covid-19, the next is that students are digitally literate and capable of adapting to changes in the lecture system, such as the transition from face to face to online learning, and more than 80% of students have a good attitude in sharing information to others during online learning. second, the students have good digital literacy in the aspect of background knowledge of information. the support discussions are more than 95% of students are finding information using the search engine on the internet, so that the internet plays a significant role in finding information in education and other disciplines, 100% of college students using online references so that students’ most favorite references are published in online media. the third is the students have a good digital literacy in the term of technology and information skills. the next discussions are internet provides useful information about links or official websites viewed, and digital material is more frequently read by students because it is easier to obtain from an android device, and most pupils in the digital era filter the information they received, all students do double-check the information they received, and also college students pick or screen the information they received. and the last is the students have a good digital literacy in the term of attitudes and perspectives users. the findings discussions are more than 58% of students have a good attitude and perspective on digital information. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 705 conclusion the students have a good digital literacy in the aspect of basic skill of digital literacy, they have a good digital literacy in the aspect of background knowledge of information, and they have a good digital literacy in the term of technology and information 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(2020). digital literacy in formal online education: a short review. dinamika pendidikan, 15(1), 66–76. https://doi.org/10.15294/dp.v15i1.23779 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 521 the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools dara novitasari english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: daranovitashaun@gmail.com ismail petrus english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com machdalena vianty english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: vianty.unsri@gmail.com apa citation: novitasari, d., petrus, i., & vianty, m. (2022). the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 521-532. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6252 received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 08-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction in education, curriculum is the main part besides teacher, tools in the education system. curriculum is very important tool in order to realize and achieve the goal of school education. this means curriculum becomes the guideline for teachers to understand what they have to achieve in their teaching activities. in indonesia, curriculum has been changed overtimes by the government. winarso (2015) describes that the curriculum change process started in 1947 and currently being used 2013 curriculum. indonesia now is implementing the 2013 curriculum which is revision of the previous curriculum, school-based curriculum (2006 curriculum). the 2006 curriculum was considered insensitive and irresponsive to social change at local, national, and global levels. this curriculum focused on educating abstract: this study aims at reporting the results of a qualitative study investigating how english teachers implement the scientific approach (sa) in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman. this study is particularly intended to answer three research questions: 1) how is scientific approach implemented in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman, 2) what are the problems faced by the teachers in implementing scientific approach in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman, and 3) what are the solutions to solve the problems in implementing scientific approach in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman. the data were collected by using questionnaire, interview, observation, and document review. the participants of this study were the teachers of english, the vice-principal of curriculum, and the students. the findings of this study showed that the teachers used discovery learning to implement of scientific approach in the syntax of the learning model and five stages implemented in english teaching and learning. the problem faced by the teachers in implementing of scientific approach were, the students’ lack of critical thinking, the students’ difficulty in finding the answer of the problem, the students’ inability in analyzing the material, and the students’ lack of vocabulary mastery. the solutions used by the teachers to overcome the problem in applying scientific approach were: motivating the students to be more active in learning, giving some stimulates questions related to the material, comparing between the recent material and the previous materials, and translating the difficult words found by the students. the conclusion is the teachers had implemented scientific approach in the learning process. keywords: teachers’ problems; scientific approach; curriculum 2013. dara novitasari, ismail petrus, & machdalena vianty the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools 522 students to achieve knowledge, and lack of skills and attitude (regulation of ministry of education and culture, 2013). therefore, a curriculum that can educate students with knowledge, skill, and attitude is needed to improve the quality of education in indonesia. and the 2013 curriculum is designed to achieve this need. indonesian government has developed 2013 curriculum for these following reasons: 1) the need to increase the competency, 2) to improve communication skills, 3) to enhance the ability to think critically, and 4) to consider the moral aspects of the students (regulation of ministry of education and culture, 2013). based on 2013 curriculum, the students are encouraged to have a responsibility to the environment, interpersonal skills, and ability to think critically (kurniasih & sani, 2014). it is characterized by the development of attitudes, knowledge, thinking skills, and psychomotor skills in a variety of subjects. it should be relevant to the needs of life, developing abilities and interests, and responsive to the development of science and technology. according to regulation of ministry of education and culture no.22/2016, teacher is the facilitator of learning and learners as students are the learning center. 2013 curriculum also adopts a learning approach based on the taxonomic theory that includes three competency domains: affective, cognitive, psychomotor. the learning process is fully directed at the development of one domain cannot be separated from the other domains. in addition, 2013 curriculum introduces a new approach in teaching and learning process which is known as a scientific approach. ministry of education and culture (2013), argued that 2013 curriculum with the scientific approach can be implemented successfully and expectedly could develop and could improve the chances for the learners to take part indirectly in the learning process. scientific approach is defined as the process of finding out information in science, which involves testing the ideas by performing experiments and making decisions based on the result of analysis (longman, 2014). according to regulation of ministry of education and culture (2013), scientific approach is to encourage and inspire students to think critically, analytically, and precisely in identifying, understanding, solving problems, and applying the learning materials. the description is how teachers apply learning approach that is connected to real life and develop indicator competencies related to learning materials to be taught, by inviting students to take part and reaction of teachers to students’ response in the teachinglearning process (ministry of education and culture, 2007). in addition to learning activities in teaching and learning process such as involving group discussion, reading articles or watching videos, then answering questions are designed to encourage the development of critical thinking and social skills by exploring values, supporting content knowledge and developing practical skills (unesco, 2015). the realization of the scientific approach in the classroom is through the five stages as suggested by kirkpatrick (2016). the five stages are observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating. in line with it, scientific approach as described by curriculum 2013 covers the following steps: (1) observing; to identify the problem, (2) questioning; formulate the problems to develop critical thinking, (3) collecting the data; to collect the materials or data in various learning ways, (4) associating; to analyze and make conclusions data have been observed, and (5) communicating; to develop students’ knowledge and skill in delivering the idea clearly (ministry of education and culture, 2016). in the learning process, the students’ language development is also improved through their activeness. based on the research result of hidayati (2014), scientific approach made the students easier to understand the material and the students could improve their learning outcomes in the classroom. implementing new things in education will make the teachers face some obstacles like the english teacher confused how to implement 2013 curriculum in teaching at the class and also get difficulties in applying the scientific approach in the teaching and learning process. in other sides, some teachers have followed the workshop about the 2013 curriculum. in line with it, teachers who teach in schools that have implemented the 2013 curriculum are required to follow technical guidance and training in the 2013 curriculum, the main is that teachers do not misrepresent the subject matter related to the 2013 curriculum http://www.adakitanews.com/guru-it means the teacher has knowledge about the curriculum and knows how to implement it. dealing with this opinion, english teachers have to capable of http://www.adakitanews.com/guru-wajib-ikut-bimtek-dan-pelatihan-k13/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 523 implementing the 2013 curriculum well. in reality, there are still some problems in implementing of scientific approach. according to afrianto (2017), the implementation of scientific approach is having some obstacles like lacking clarity and complexity of teaching procedures, the teachers believe that they do not apply all scientific approach stages in the classroom. based on research from azizah, ariwidodo and adriana (2015), the implementation of the scientific approach to teaching english in the 2013 curriculum raises some obstacles in its implementation such as difficulties in making students active, they are not confident in answering questions from the teacher so they make themselves behind their friends. most teachers also find it difficult to motivate students to ask questions both to their friends and to their teachers. in addition, based on the researcher’s observation in state junior high schools in babat toman, some of teacher said that the main point teacher must understand the approach itself and how to apply it in the classroom. to apply all the stages of the scientific approach is not easy, questioning stage is the most difficult part to apply. other supporting problems, sometimes students feel shy, afraid of being laughed by their friends because of the lack of vocabulary. when teachers skip one or more steps in the scientific approach it means that sometimes the scientific approach is not appropriately applied. that is a problem that states as the weakness of the implementation of the education quality improvement efforts (jaedun, hariyanto and nuryadin, 2014). based on the explanation above, the researcher concludes that the implementation of the 2013 curriculum and applying the scientific approach to teach english needs to be integrated. schools and teachers in some of these state junior high schools have been running the 2013 curriculum for about three years and they have attended teacher training on the 2013 curriculum, which means they have used a scientific approach in teaching and learning activities while running the 2013 curriculum and. therefore, the researcher will investigate how scientific approach in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman is implemented, the problems faced by the teacher in implementing of scientific approach in teaching and learning, and the solutions to solve the problems in implementing of scientific approach in english teaching and learning through a study entitled "the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman" method this study was a descriptive qualitative study. the data collection conducted through interview, questionnaire, observation checklist, and document review to find out the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman, problems in implementing of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman and solutions to solve the problems in implementing of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman. this study was conducted at five junior high schools in babat toman: junior high school 1, 2, 3, 4, and junior high school 5. the participants of this study were the teachers of english, the viceprincipal of curriculum each school and students. the five teachers of english selected in each school based on the observation the researcher did on junior high schools in babat toman. there were five teachers who are willing to be participants in this study. to collect the data, the researcher used four instruments. the instruments included interview, questionnaire, observation, and document review. after the data were collected, the researcher analyzed for answer the research questions. while the data of interview, questionnaire, observation, and document were analysis by descriptive analysis. in interview, questionnaire was analyzed by likert scale to inquire the frequency of adaptation challenges in five-level from (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) neither disagree, (4) agree, and (5) strongly agree. the results of questionnaire are transcribed descriptively used for showing the implementation of scientific approach in english teaching and learning. observation was analyzed by checklist with yes/no answer, putting the answer in the form of percentage and then describe. while the data of interview, and document were analysis by descriptive analysis. the researcher used triangulation to determine validity by analyzing from various perspectives. denzin (2006) stated that triangulation is the dara novitasari, ismail petrus, & machdalena vianty the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools 524 process of corroborating evidence from different individuals (e.g., a principal and a student), types of data (e.g., observational fieldnotes and interviews), methods of data collection (e.g., documents and interviews) in descriptions and themes in qualitative research. based on the types of triangulation, the researcher used methodological triangulation. therefore, data triangulation helped the researcher to justify the findings and results of this study. results and discussion as it is described earlier, this study tried to answer the following questions: ‘how is scientific approach implemented in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman’, ‘what are the problems faced by the teachers in implementing scientific approach in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman’, and ‘what are the solutions to solve the problem in implementing scientific approach in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman’. in answering this question, the researcher obtained four types of data; semi structured interviews, questionnaires, observations checklist, and documents review. first, interview was done once to each teacher. secondary, questionnaire was done once to each teacher. thirdly, data were obtained through observation checklist that has been done four times for each teacher. moreover, documents review was also done by reviewing lesson plans. the findings were derived from the data based on the stages in scientific approach; observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating. result of questionnaire this part presents the results of questionnaire given to the teachers of english. the descriptions of the profiles of english teachers, the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman. profile of the teachers of english the data concerning the profiles of the state junior high school teachers contained the information about the teachers’ gender, age, highest academic level, for how long they have been teaching, and their participation in trainings related to 2013 curriculum. there were 5 teachers of english from state junior high schools, 1 teacher of english from junior high school 1 in babat toman, 1 teacher of english from junior high school 2 in babat toman, 1 teacher of english from junior high school 3 in babat toman, 1 teacher of english from junior high school 4 in babat toman and 1 teacher of english from junior high school 5 in babat toman. table 1. profile of the teachers of english the participants gender age highest academic level teaching experience participation in training related to 2013 curriculum h female 39 postgraduate 16 yes w female 37 undergraduate 16 yes f female 28 undergraduate 9 yes h female 25 undergraduate 6 yes wa female 26 undergraduate 2 yes the data from a questionnaire consists of 20 questions about the scientific approach which was constructed based on the regulation of ministry of education and culture number 103 the year 2014. the questionnaire used 5 point likert scales from veglas (2006). the scales were from one up to five. (strongly agree: 5; agree: 4; neither agree nor disagree: 3; disagree: 2; and strongly disagree: 1). the data were calculated by using formula from arikunto (2012). all of the scores are gained from five english teachers were accumulated, were multiplied by each scale, were divided by the maximum score and were multiplied by 100%. the calculation of the teachers’ comprehension of scientific approach shows in the following table: table 2. the teachers’ comprehension of scientific approach no statements sa a nd d sd total 1. s1 10 12 22 2. s2 16 19 3. s3 25 25 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 525 4. s4 10 12 22 5. s5 10 8 2 20 6. s6 20 20 7. s7 12 12 8. s8 10 12 22 9. s9 10 12 22 10. s10 10 12 22 11. s11 5 16 21 12. s12 10 12 22 13. s13 10 12 22 14. s14 10 8 18 15. s15 5 16 21 16. s16 10 12 22 17. s17 20 20 18. s18 15 4 20 19. s19 15 8 23 20. s20 20 20 total 415 from the table above, the highest scores are the statement number 3 with the total score 25. meanwhile, the lowest scores are the statement number 7 with the total score 12. there is 1 disagree answer in the questionnaire. it is in the statement number 5. the result of the teachers’ comprehension of scientific approach shows in the following table. table 3. the percentage of teachers’ comprehension of scientific approach in teaching english no. statements score total score percentage 1. s1-s20 415 500 83 % the total score of teachers’ comprehension of scientific approach is 415. then, in getting the percentage, the scores are divided by the total score 500. next, it is multiplied by 100%. the average result of the questionnaires the distributed for 5 teachers from 5 schools is 83%. based on the criteria of arikunto (2007), 83 % is included in category 61 % 80 % as excellent. it is meant that the teachers’ comprehension of the concept of scientific approach is excellent. the teachers understood the concept of the scientific approach for all of the five stages (observing, questioning, experimenting, associating and communicating). in the questionnaire, there is no teacher who fills strongly disagree answer in the questionnaire. it is interpreted that they have understood the importance of scientific approach. all of the english teachers agree with the statement number three. statement number three is in observing stage, the teachers ask their students to listen to the lesson. keep paying attention in a lesson is very important. the students also need to concentrate because it makes them absorb the knowledge. it is also supported by the findings from zeki (2009) revealed that nonverbal communication could be an important source of motivation and concentration for students’ learning as well as a tool for taking and maintaining attention. based on the explanation above, it can be obtained that from collecting data through questionnaires, good results are obtained. it can be seen with them supporting every point of the scientific approach. the results of interviews as it is described earlier, this study tried to answer the following questions: “how is scientific approach implemented in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman”, “what are the problems faced by the teachers in implementing scientific approach in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman”, and “what are the solutions to solve the problem in implementing scientific approach in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman”. in order to strengthen the questionnaire result, the researcher conducted an interview with teachers of english, the vice principal of curriculum and students during their break time. initial would be used in presenting the information source to keep the interviewees anonymous. table 4. list of the interviewees no. initial position 1. h the teacher of english at junior high school 1 in babat toman 2. w the teacher of english at junior high school 2 in babat toman 3. f the teacher of english at junior high school 3 in babat toman 4. h the teacher of english at junior high school 4 in babat toman 5. wa the teacher of english at junior high school 5 in babat toman 6. s the vice-principal of curriculum in junior high school 1 in babat toman dara novitasari, ismail petrus, & machdalena vianty the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools 526 7. w the vice-principal of curriculum in junior high school 2 in babat toman 8. ue the vice-principal of curriculum in junior high school 3 in babat toman 9. ma the vice-principal of curriculum in junior high school 4 in babat toman 10. a the vice-principal of curriculum in junior high school 5 in babat toman 11. th student of junior high school 1 in babat toman 12. as student of junior high school 2 in babat toman 13. h student of junior high school 3 in babat toman 14. i student of junior high school 4 in babat toman 15. r student of junior high school 5 in babat toman how the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman this part presents the results of interview given to teachers of english, the vice-principal of curriculum and students. based on the first interview session, five teachers said they have already implemented observing stage in all meetings. most of teacher has implemented scientific approach; at least teachers who have attended the training have understood the approach. “as far as i can control it and commonly i used problem based learning as learning media in learning, depend on material that i am going to teach.” (h) teacher added, i use….. “….projector to delivered material by providing videos or images related to the material being studied (observing), students or teachers asking and answered questions related to the topics discussed (questioning). ask students to add the information from the other sources (collecting information), confirm the data with the teacher (associating) and students convey their work orally or in writing (communicating).” (h) “in implementing this approach was quite difficult even though i can implement all the stages. based on 2013 curriculum, i used discovery or problem based learning. in observing, i used book, magazine, paper to support observing stage. make a classroom discussion, give questions to trigger students’ critical thinking and students’ question (questioning). teacher ask students to used their dictionary or other sources to collect the information and sometimes homework as a report from communicating stage or they make a written or oral report” (w) “discovery / inquiry learning is a learning models that i used to implementation of scientific approach and sometimes not all stages are reached. in observing, i explained the lesson to be taught, after that the students are asked to ask questions while taking notes in a notebook. in experimenting or collecting data, i ask students to make classroom discussions. in associating, students asking the teacher or friends to confirm the information that they get and the last stage, i asked students to make a report in written or orally”. (f) “first of all i use discovery learning as a learning model to connect with scientific approach. in implementing of scientific approach is not easy as i imagine. heee…. here in implementation of this approach, i give stimulus to trigger their spirit (observing) and i divide students into discussion groups, provide material for them to discuss, ask them to ask and answer the question that are related to material taught and practice it with come forward to show their report.” (h) “teaching and learning process using a scientific approach can be implemented well with five stages and sometimes i used discovery in my teaching and learning process. of the five stages in the scientific approach, the questioning stage must be paid more attention to because it is very difficult for students to ask questions. provide interesting bait or stimulus so that it can provoke them to take lessons with enthusiasm.” (wa) the statement from the teacher is also supported by vice principal of curriculum “alhamdulillah, the teaching and learning process using a scientific approach can be implemented well with five stages. teachers play an active role in implementing the recommended scientific approach based on the k-13 curriculum which makes students as student-centered not teachercentered. facilities are provided by the school as a medium to support the learning process in the classroom. questioning, collecting information, associating and communication stage can be carried out properly, based on teacher creativity. if the stimulus at the beginning of learning is good, god willing, the next stage will be easier for students to carry out.” (s) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 527 “so far, the implementation of the scientific approach has been carried out, although the implementation has not been maximized. such as facilities that support the teaching and learning process are still not fulfilled. students are asked to observe the book, listen to the teacher's explanation and then are asked to answer questions and ask questions related to the material that has been observed. previously students were asked to bring other sources such as books, articles or others to add information related to the material being studied.” (w) “teaching and learning process using a scientific approach can be implemented well with five stages. teacher invite students to observe by reading a book, observe the examples around them that are related to the material involved in learning, students create and ask questions related to the material in learning, at the collecting information stage, students asked to read other sources than textbooks to find the most appropriate information in the classroom and and for the last they perform or collecting the report in written or orally.” (ue) “so far, teaching and learning process using a scientific approach can be implemented well with five stages. in observing, teacher invite students to observe by reading a book, observe the examples around them that are related to the material involved in learning, students create and ask questions related to the material in learning, at the collecting information stage, students asked to read other sources than textbooks to find the most appropriate information in the classroom. in associating, give examples to justify the data that has been obtained by students and for the last they perform or collecting the report in written or orally.” (ma) “in implementing of scientific approach is quit hard, as we know there are five stages in scientific approach. from the observing, questioning, experimenting, associating and communicating. we adapt to what we have, such as attracting students' attention by utilizing the surrounding environment or the creativity of the teacher. the demands of the k13 curriculum require students to be active, but sometimes teacher as a center. students still fully need the guidance of teachers and not all of the teacher applied training of k13, so they feel unfamiliar with this approach.” (a) the statement from the teacher and vice principal of curriculum is also supported by student’s answer: students added…. “sometimes we have discussed about the material being taught, watching a video, play games like guessing games, and teacher ask us to take a note that related material taught.” (th) “we learn by reading textbooks, paying attention to examples of existing questions, then being asked to do exercises." (as) “we are very happy to learn while playing games in class, very interesting. after playing, we were told to record what we got from the game, after that we made examples and did the work.” (h) “yes… we learn to use textbooks, once in a while we pay attention to the pictures brought by our teacher to observe and record the information that can be obtained.” (i) “the teacher gave an explanation, gave some examples and we were told to come forward and the teacher asked us to take a note that related material was taught. after that do the exercise.” (r) the problems in implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman researcher conducted interview to find out the problem faced by teachers on applying scientific approach used in english teaching based on the curriculum 2013. here, difficulties mean all the difficulties faced by teachers on applying 5 steps of scientific approach: observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating. teacher answered…… “at the observing stage, i feel there is no difficulty because in this activity, i convey in any way, until students start to be interested in learning with this scientific approach, sometimes, conclude the lesson briefly.” (h) “what i have found that, students’ lack of critical thinking, the students’ difficulty in finding the answer of the problem, the students can't analyze the material and the students' shy to speak up and limitation time on implementing this approach.” (w) dara novitasari, ismail petrus, & machdalena vianty the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools 528 “in teaching learning process, students are less active in asking questions, students felt bored, students felt confused in summarizes the report.” (f) “most of them can't speak english well. they often stop their presentation because there were some words that they didn’t know the meaning in english and they shy to answer and ask question.” (h) “students got difficulty to make presentation because they cannot speak english well caused lack of vocabulary mastery and some students not confident, students are less active in asking questions”. (wa) the solutions to solve the problems in implementing of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman “to solved the problem, teacher gave some motivation to the students in order that they will be more active, emphasized them the importance of english and told the students that the successful of teaching learning proses is depend on the students, not only depend on teacher, try to managing the time.” (w) “teacher gave some motivations to the students in order that they will be more active, provide an interesting media so that students are motivated to speak up, become guide to helped them by translating what are the students' difficult words.” (h) “teacher gave some motivations to the students in order that they will be more active, provide an interesting media so that students are motivated to speak up, become guide to helped them by translating what are the students' difficult words.” (u) “here, as a teacher helped them by translating what are the students' difficult words.” (as) "then teacher stimulated them by giving the comparisons. the recent material compared with the previous materials. then students understood the way to analyze, and the discussion be continued.” (wa) observation learning with a scientific approach is the process of planned in such a way that students actively through the stages of observing, questioning, trying and communicate. to obtain data on the implementation of the scientific approach conducted with observation checklist based on observations on the implementation of scientific attachment can generally be seen in the table below: table 6. teacher comprehension in implementation of scientific approach no statements score total score percentage 1. s1-s20 221 400 55.25 % based on researcher’s observation, the implementation of scientific approach from five stages is 55.25%. next, it is categorized based on arikunto (2007). from the result, 55.25% includes 41% 60% that is categorized as good. the implementation of scientific approach from five stages is categorized as good. all of the stages of the scientific approach (observing, questioning, experimenting, associating and communicating) are implemented in teaching english. although the frequency for each stage was varied, there is no stage that has 0% or not done at all. in addition, komariah (2016) claimed that in communicating stage, the teacher acted as a facilitator and confirmed if there was a mistake in the materials. in another side, the most rarely performed activity is asking the students to make an oral report with 25%. the teachers rarely applied this activity because usually the time is up at the end of the teaching and learning process. the teachers do not have much time to ask the students communicate the result one by one for every student. document review documents which were taken from junior high schools in babat toman from the lesson plan of the teacher of english in learning models, scientific approach stages and media used in implementation of scientific approach in english teaching and learning, it was not relevant to the results of interviews conducted previously, in the interview the teacher said that in the learning process the teacher used the book however from the lesson plan the learning media used projector. while the learning model used by the teacher was discovery learning. teacher cover all syntax of the approach. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 529 table 7. syntax of the approach which the teachers applied schools teachers learning model syntax media use junior high school 1 in babat toman h discovery learning  observing  questioning  collecting information/experimenting  associating  communicating  pictures (proyektor, laptop and speaker)  dialogue (students book)  video junior high school 2 in babat toman w discovery learning  observing  questionning  collecting information/experimenting  associating  communicating  pictures (proyektor, laptop and speaker)  dialogue (students book)  video junior high school 3 in babat toman f discovery learning  observing  questionning  collecting information/experimenting  associating  communicating  pictures (proyektor, laptop and speaker)  dialogue (students book)  video junior high school 4 in babat toman h discovery learning  observing  questionning  collecting information/experimening  associating  communicating  pictures (proyektor, laptop and speaker)  dialogue (students book)  video junior high school 5 in babat toman wa discovery learning  observing  questionning  collecting information/experimening  associating  communicating  pictures (proyektor, laptop and speaker)  dialogue (students book)  video discussion the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman after the data had been analyzed and triangulated, teachers of junior high schools in babat toman have implemented scientific approach. first, teachers used models of learning stated by regulation of ministry of education and culture no.22 year (2016). discovery learning is learning models used. discovery learning is to understand concepts, meanings, and relationships, through an intuitive process to finally arrive at a conclusion (budiningsih, 2005). the syntax of the discovery learning model is 1) giving stimulation (stimulation); 2) statement/identification of problems (problem statement); 3) data collection (data collection); 4) verification, and 5) draw conclusions / generalizations (generalization). except learning model, five stages of scientific approach or syntax such as observing, questionning, experimenting, associating, and communicating are also applied by teachers in the teaching process. in implementing this five stages used different strategies, for example using existing facilities by using a projector or other interesting media, asking questions or answering questions. bester & brand (2013) stated that achievement will be very likely to improve if a technology is used in a lesson to capture the attention of learners and to maintain their concentration. it is meant that the media have a positive effect on students’ achievement. in conclusion, in implementing of scientific approach, teacher has to choose what media being used in learning, teacher need managing the time, facilitate students with media used. apriani’s research (2015). in her research, the teachers stated that they implemented scientific approach by dara novitasari, ismail petrus, & machdalena vianty the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools 530 asking the students to observe and identify the objects of observation in observing stage; giving opportunity to the students to ask in questioning stage; giving time and facilitating students to find the information related to the material; asking the students to discuss the information that was received in the group discussion and designing the discussion result that would be presented in communicating stage. the problems in implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman after the data had been analyzed and triangulated, teachers of junior high schools in babat toman have implemented scientific approach. scientific approach is a scientific-based approach that can make students independent, critical thinking, creative and etc. in applying this approach there will be problems. as mentioned from the results of interviews, students’ lack of critical thinking, the students difficulty in finding the answer of the problem, and the students' shy to speak up and from the students can't analyze the material. and limitation time on implementing this approach is one of the problems. the students’ lack of critical thinking; the students’ difficulty in finding the answer of the problem; the students’s inability in analyzing the material; and the students’ lack of vocabulary mastery. the solutions to solve the problems in implementing of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum in english teaching and learning at state junior high schools in babat toman in implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools in babat toman. when problems come, of course you will need a solution to overcome. the solutions used by the teachers to overcome the problem in applying scientific approach were: motivating the students to be more active in learning, giving some stimulates questions related to the material, comparing between the recent material and the previous materials, and translating the difficult words found by the students to solved the problem, teacher gave some motivation to the students in order that they will be more active, emphasized them the importance of english and told the students that the successful of teaching learning proses is depend on the students, not only depend on teacher, try to managing the time. whereas, wahyu (2015) claimed that by giving the material with the media, picture or real object, it would stimulate the students to elaborate their knowledge into the next stage. the media will also make the students feeling curious to know about the material. conclusion based on the data analysis and the discussion, it can be concluded that the procedures used by teachers in teaching english were: observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating. those steps were written in the lesson plan as the rule of teacher in conducting teaching learning process in implementing of scientific approach. learning models used was discovery learning which the stages of the discovery learning model reflect the stages of the scientific approach. the difficulties faced by teachers in implementing scientific approach were: the students’ lack of critical thinking; the students’ difficulty in finding the answer of the problem; the students’s inability in analyzing the material; and the students’ lack of vocabulary mastery. the solutions used by the teachers to overcome the problem in applying scientific approach were: motivating the students to be more active in learning, giving some stimulates questions related to the material, comparing between the recent material and the previous materials, and translating the difficult words found by the students. references afrianto. (2017). the implementation of scientific approach for teaching english in senior high school: voices from the field. in advances in social science, education and hunabities research (assehr), volume 110 fifth internasional seminar on english language and teaching (iselt 2017), (pp. 183-1910. https://doi.org/10.2991/iselt-17.2017.33. apriauny, l., afrianto., nababan, m. (2014). the implementation of scientific approach in teaching english in senior high school pekanbaru. universitas riau: universitas riau. arikunto, s. (2012). prosedur penelitian suatu pendekatan praktik. jakarta, indonesia: rineka aksara. azizah, s., ariwidodo, e., & adriana, i. (2015). implementasi pendekatan saintifik dalam english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 531 pengajaran bahasa inggris kurikulum 2013 di smpn 1 pamekasan. okara 2 (x), 181-200. bester, g. &. (2013). the effect of technology on learner attention and achievment in the classroom. south african journal of education, 33 (2). budiningsih, a. (2005). belajar dan pembelajaran. jakarta: rineka cipta. denzin n. k. (2006). sociological methods: a sourcebook (5th ed). new york:aldine transaction. hidayati, n. (2014). pengaruh penggunaan pendekatan ilmiah (scientific approach) dalam pembelajaran terhadap hasil belajar peserta didik kelas xii 1 smk negeri 7 surabaya pada standar kompetensi mengoperasikan sistem kendali elektromagnetik. jurnal pendidikan teknik elektro, 25-29. jaedun, a. h. (2014). an evaluation of the implementation of curriculum 2013 at the building construction department of vocational high schools in yogyakarta. journal of education, 14-22. kirkpatrick, r. (2016). english language education policy in asia. switzerland: spinger. kurniasih, i. &. (2014). implementasi kurikulum 2013: konsep dan penerapan. surabaya, indonesia: kata pena. longman. 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(2016). peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan ri no. 22 tahun 2016 tentang standar penliaian pendidikan. jakarta: kementerian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. unesco. (2015). the curriculum in debates and in educational reforms to 2030: for a curriculum agenda of twenty-first century. genoa: ibe working papers on curriculum issues no. 15. winarso, w. (2015). dasar pengembangan kurikulum sekolah. cirebon: confident. zeki, c. p. (2009). the importance of non-verbal communication in classroom management. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 1, 1443-1449. dara novitasari, ismail petrus, & machdalena vianty the implementation of scientific approach of the 2013 curriculum at state junior high schools 532 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1035 the myth of metaphor symbols in speech i have a dream zakaria english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sembilanbelas november kolaka, indonesia email: zakaria.usn@gmail.com muh. hasyim english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sembilanbelas november kolaka, indonesia email: hasyimfrance@unhas.ac.id syarifuddin tundreng english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sembilanbelas november kolaka, indonesia email: tundreng.syarifuddin@gmail.com apa citation: zakaria., hasyim, m., & tundreng, s. (2022). the myth of metaphor symbols in speech i have a dream. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1035-1044. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6702 received: 29-06-2022 accepted: 27-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction speech is one of the strategies and media for public communication, it delivers technique to carry out of agitation, spontaneously, full of enthusiasm and propaganda in front of people. martin luther king's speech entitled i have a dream was delivered right near a statue of abraham lincoln, the founder of the american emancipation proclamation. martin luther king's speech was successful and full of sympathy not only to the approximately 250 thousand people who were in the event but also admired by academics. he was awarded an honorary doctorate and in 1963 time magazine named him as 'men of the year' (ngabalin, 2020). martin luther king has passed away but he has become an icon of the struggle for human rights not only for america but for all of humanity. as quoted from lestari (2021) that the impact of martin luther king's speech was able to inspire many people of the day until to this day. the content of martin luther king's i have a dream uses a lot of metaphorical symbols in expressing the political rights struggle of black people who live under the pressure of political discrimination. king fought for unemployment, racial issues, demanded social justice and civil rights, fought for gender equality between blacks and whites, and pushed for changes the segregation laws (lestari, 2021). the urgency of the researcher to analyze the meaning of the metaphoric symbols in martin luther king speech is "what is the meaning and mythical construction of the metaphorical symbols in his speech?" the formal object of this research is the metaphorical symbol and the material object is the mythical idea that constructs the meaning. the final aim of this research is to explain the ideas abstract: the speech i have a dream is martin luther king's political speech, delivered in front of the lincoln memorial on august 28, 1963. in the text of speech there are several metaphorical symbols (language style) in conveying his message and protest attitude against the american legal and political system which is considered unfair. to fully understand the meaning and message of the speech, the research question is "what is the meaning of the mythical metaphorical symbol in martin luther king’s i have a dream?" in analyzing the metaphorical symbols in the speech, the researcher used roland barthes' semiotic approach and the research procedure used descriptive qualitative form. the results of this study found that the metaphorical symbols in i have a dream's speech used various syntactic patterns, namely: 1) using adjective word patterns such as symbolic shadow, beacon light, flames of withering, long night; 2) using noun patterns such as manacles, chains, island, ocean, languished, land, shameful, valley, hill, mountain, crooked place; 3) use a verb pattern as in the phrase to blow off steam, a rude awakening, returns to business keywords: metaphorical symbols; myth; semiotics. zakaria, muh. hasyim, & syarifuddin tundreng the myth of metaphor symbols in speech i have a dream 1036 which is constructed in metaphor symbol by using roland barthes' semiotic theory. the use of signs as a communication medium not only by symbols, communication media can also use icon and index. in the semiotic study symbols, icons and indexes they all are called signs, the three represent meaning, according to bradley (2016, p.1), "symbol has no resemblance between the signifier and the signified. the connection between them must be culturally learned—icon has a physical resemblance to the signified, the thing being represented—index shows evidence of what’s being represented”. icon signs in the form of objects (physical) and index signs in the form of pointers and both have meaning, van nieklerk (2018, p.119) said that "icons refer only to a single characteristic of a concept and are never used to mark any other characteristics of the concept—another characteristic of an index is that there is no significant relationship between the object and the index.” an overview of the three types of symbol, icon, index as shown in the images below. picture 1. illustration of an overview of the three types of symbol, icon, index symbol word of dog icon dog statue/picture index dog barking the three types of signs above only one intend to linguistic domine and some are non-linguistic, signs categorized as linguistic is symbol namely signs in the form of speech and can be explained their relationship based on linguistic rules such as grammar and structure for example in morphemes or words, phrases, and sentences while icon and index signs are not include linguistic categories because they can not be explaned by linguistic rules. the presence of metaphorical elements in language according to adelina is a unique and strange thing because this element is able to exceed one's language ability on conventional languages such as changes in association patterns, conceptualizations and analogous patterns in building relationships (adelina, 2019) and the purpose of using elements a metaphor in language according to sarwadi et al. (2019, p.43), “to represent the ideas or concepts which the writer intends to convey using the symbols associated with the meanings which he or she intends to express.” the presence of symbols in today's culture according to punto is no longer seen as a linguistic sign but has functioned as a social phenomenon or symptom, even the interpretation of symbols in culture has now surpassed scientific thought (punto, 2020). the use of metaphorical language is often found in public speeches and literary works such as poetry “symbols are the most widely used means of expressing speech and can be found in all forms of public speech. in particular, they are used in the texts of literary works to ensure the diversity of the language of the artwork” (shavkatovna, 2020, p.179). the element of metaphor in poetry tends to use objects in comparing the other objects. metaphor is a figurative language that makes comparisons of two things or objects that have different characteristics bridge the imagination of the author to the reader (agan & dermawan, 2022). the reason for using metaphorical symbols in conveying meaning or messages is none other than the importance of the aesthetic element (style) possessed by language. the use of metaphorical symbols in speech, of course, starts with an idea, comes from the experience and context of the speaker and then communicates it again in a metaphorical style. in in form of the meaning metaphor is not directly because the relationship between the signifier and the signified is contained cultural values explicitly (surahmat). the metaphoric symbol comes from the subjective view of a speaker and then conveyed associatively by comparing the similarity character of the substance. “the construction of metaphorical meaning is based on the verbal signs that already existed in the society, which took form as social or cultural value, and transformed into a sign that serves as the target in order to construct new meaning” (hasyim, 2017, p.524). in metaphoric symbol is also have a significance system in producing the meaning, metaphorical symbol have both signifier and signified element in building the a functional relationship to create the meaning. the signifier is the physical form of sign, it is the mental projection that is realized in the form of the language sound. the linguistic sign was mentioned by carraso is often defined as the union of two "parts" or "faces" the signifier and the signified” (carrasco, 2015). carrasco (2015) mentions needs to strenghten the saussure’s theory of sign. for saussure, he devided two elements of sign in relationship to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1037 build the meaning namely parole (signifeir) and langue (signified). parole as seen in sound and langue as a mental process but the both did not have a rule in create the meaning, they are being in arbitrary one and also saussure did not recognize and accept the existence of the second order of meaning such as occured in metaphorical symbols. the theory of meaning in linguistics has developed in the post-structural era with the presence of discourses on meaning, especially the debate between the semantic and pragmatic domains. semantics is the study of meaning derived from the attributes of signifiers and signifieds, while pragmatics is the study of meaning that refers to the intent and purpose of signs in the context of speech events. semantics interprets utterances at the level of text structure relations syntagmatically, while pragmatics examines the intentions and objectives of utterances paradigmatically. sankaravelayuthan (2018, p.31) stated that, “semantics is the way to interpret units of language such as morpheme, word, phrase and sentence. it is the meaning that distinguishes one linguistic unit from another unit—pragmatics is the study of context, or more precisely, a study of the way context can influence our understanding of linguistic utterances.” semantic difficulties in responding to the phenomenon of the development of meaning in utterances create new problems in language, therefore the presence of pragmatics is very helpful for the semantics of this issue because the process of pragmatic meaning considers context as being outside language such as speakers, listeners, situations, channels and codes (istikomah, 2021). the debating between semantic and pragmatic seems to understand and clear, if associative meaning which bring of the context it was pragmatic domained because its meaning comes from out of lexical meaning but based from context. although the significance system of metaphore also has the both signifier and signified element to conduct the meaning but the two have own’s way in producing the meaning. the relation between the both signifier and signified such as described by hasyim et al. (2022, p.383) “formed based on a convention and not naturally occur. the signifier opens up various opportunities for signified. there are dyadic relations between signifier and signified and provide an explanation in which the two elements are closely related. signifier and signified are connected through mental activities shaped by culture and agreement”. while kravets (2021, p. 1310) stated that “metaphor is a way of representing one abstract and less familiar area through another, more mastered in empirical experience, more familiar and more accessible to perception. thus, there is the projection of knowledge from one conceptual area to another by metaphorical transfer of meaning”. the metaphore has own way to create the meaning, it generates meaning into second order system to create a new meaning as barthes said is the second level significance system such as hjemslev's schema as follows: figure 1. hjemslev’s schema the schematic above shows the process of how metaphore symbol build and create a new meaning, firstly e/r/c in first order constructed meaning in e/r/c second order, the second order meaning is said connotation meaning built by ideology of speaker. ideology in connotation meaning who created by speaker is called myth of metaphore symbol. the use of metaphorical language is widely used in various written works such as political speech. the function of political metaphor is a function pragmatic in metaphorical expression used for interest political (anang & maskub, 2022). metaphors in literature and linguistics are type language styles that have aesthetic elements and carried out the meaning subjectively by speakers and writers and in the term of linguistics and literature named stylistics. stylistics examines the characteristics of the use of language in literary works such as grammar, aesthetic values, and the choice of diction. the features of stylistics made it distinguishes from non-literary works (widyaningsih, 2021). the use of metaphore in language is conveyed expressively and to compare something associatively to something else. metaphor is the process of conceptualizing signs (symbols) to something else (zakaria, 2020 according to zakaria). according to the indonesian dictionary, metaphor is a word or group of words that is described based on similarities or comparisons, metaphor is a style of language that expresses something to something else based on similarities or comparisons. the same statement is also stated by simanjuntak (2019, p.55), "the main key in a metaphor is to use word choices that equate zakaria, muh. hasyim, & syarifuddin tundreng the myth of metaphor symbols in speech i have a dream 1038 something with something else. in equating or comparing something, the metaphor uses direct comparison without being followed by comparative words like, similar, like..." while culler (1981, p.189) stated, “metaphore is no longer one figure among others but the figure of figures, a figure for figurative; and i mean this not figuratively but quite literally: metaphore is not just the literal or proper name for a trope based on resemblance but also and especially a figure for figurality in general”. metaphor has similarities with metonymy, both are language styles but in operation are different, according to zakaria (2020), the use of these two styles of language is categorized as a way of working (manner) in expressing meaning or messages in language, and ariani & fortuna (2019) mention that the presence of metaphorical symbols is the result of the development of meaning. in operational meaning, metaphor and metonymy are two similar elements, metaphor is the result of comparing one thing to another on the basis of similarity while metonymy is the association of the relationship between an entity's part on overall—the construction of metonymy is built on the association of contiguity as an entity (yusuf, 2021) while van niekerk (2018, p.114) mentions that “metaphor and metonymy are regarded as the fundamental mechanisms of symbolic transfer. this means that in certain cases symbols may be built on metaphor or metonymy. if a symbol can be seen as a static sign, then metaphor and metonymy are the fundamental types of logical connection between the meanings by means of their fixed or potential characteristics.” in earlier was mentioned that the purpose of using metaphorical language is solely based on the aesthetic effect in language. the study of metaphorical elements in linguistics uses a stylistic approach, this study examines the style of language, the structure of items in the text which includes all components related to language, “a consistent occurrence in the text of certain items and structures, or types of items and structures, among those offered by the language as a whole” (candria, 2019, p.13). the meaning in metaphorical language is constructed by the speaker's subjective ideas, the meaning then becomes a connotative meaning for the speaker and when that meaning is used in society it will become a community myth (denotation). connotation is a new meaning which is called myth and when it is used and belongs to the community as a myth then myth becomes denotation meaning (maharani et al., 2020, p.3). according to barthes (1972, p.126), “myth is a pure ideographic system,where the forms are still motivated by the concept which they represent while not yet, by a long way, covering the sum of its possibilities for representation”. the meaning of myth is built from a value system obtained through experiences, culture and whatever things then interpreted collectively by its users. barthes claims that the way myths interpret something is subjective which is done by speakers, myths do not have a definitive concept of meaning, therefore myths develop their meanings openly, but when meaning has been conventionalized by groups of speakers, that meaning becomes a community myth. the myth in the metaphorical symbols constructed in the speech of i have a dream emerged from martin luther king's political ideas in responding to the condition of black people in the midst of political pressure from white people and the american government that implemented an unfair democratic system and discriminatory actions to the black people. method this study uses a qualitative descriptive procedure, the formal object of this research is the speech text i have a dream and the material object is a metaphorical symbol. the analysis procedure is to analize the mythical construction which contained in the metaphorical symbol, and to explain the essence of the meaning of metaphoric symbol based on the context in which the speech is spoken, and this research uses roland barthes' semiotic theory approach. results and discussion the myths that are constructed in the metaphorical symbols of martin luther king's speech are essentially a description of the context and events of the life experiences of black americans as discussed and explained in this section. the first metaphorical symbol in the speech i have a dream is found in paragraph [2] as in the text of the speech below: “five score years ago, a great american, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the emancipation proclamation. this momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of negro slave who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. it came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.” paragraph [2] above contains four metaphorical symbol phrases with an adjective phrase pattern, namely in the text phrase 1) symbolic shadow we english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1039 stand today; 2) a great beacon light of hope; 3) in the flames of the most frequent injustice and 4) it comes as a joyous daybreak to end a long night of captivity. the four adverb phrases above are expressions of protest against the unfair application of the american political system and expressions of hopes for the improvement of the american democratic system, especially in terms of implementing social justice and upholding the civil rights of black people in the american democratic system. the myth construction in the phrase "symbolic shadow we stand today" describes two events or conditions, first the event or condition "symbolic shadow" and the event "we stand today". the myth of "symbolic shadow" is constructed by the events or conditions of suffering of black people during slavery to the era of racial segregation policies, while the myth of "we stand today" is constructed from the reaction or resistance that was realized in the march in washington movement, the march towards the lincoln memorial. washington dc on august 28, 1963 which was attended by approximately 300 thousand people. then the myth construction of the phrase "a great beacon light of hope, "in the flames of the most frequent injustice" is constructed by the desire, hope and dream for the improvement of social justice and america's political system in the future and the mythical construction of the phrase "it come as a joyous daybreak to end long night of captivity” is constructed by protesting the past experience of black people during the jim crow law policy period between the 1880s and 1960s where black people were discriminated against, experienced political pressure and the abolition of their rights. their voice in america's democratic system, as a result black people have no representation in the american congress. the myth construction in the four phrases above basically originates from policy making in the american congress, where the democratic party which has a majority in congress still maintains white supremacy which causes the policy of discrimination between whites and blacks to be maintained, finally the racial segregation system gets approval. congress and the practice of separate but equal racial segregation continued until the 1960s. the metaphorical symbols in the next i have a dream speech are found in the text of paragraph [3] below: “but one hundred years later, the negro still is not free. one hundred years later, the life of the negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. one hundred years later, the negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. one hundred years later, the negro is still languished in the corners of american society and finds himself in exile in his own land. so we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.” the metaphor symbol in the text of paragraph [3] above is found in the sentence 1) but one hundred years later, the negro still is not free; 2) one hundred years later, the life of the negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; 3) one hundred years later, the negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity 4) one hundred years later, the negro is still languished in the corners of american society and finds himself in exile in his own land. the construction of myth in the statement “but one hundred years later, the negro still is not free” was built by the experience of black people when they were in the slavery system both before and after the civil war. easter civil war 1861 to 1865 and the american nation entered the era of reconstruction around the early 1870s seemed to give a hope for black people, especially in the south, but appearenly the american government was still controlled by white racism. blacks in the southern states still have a long way to go in the practice of slavery, whites especially in the south enslaved black people to work in cotton plantations and they strongly maintained slavery because the power of their economy depended on black people who were employed as slaves. the myth construction of the statement "one hundred years later, the life of the negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination" is an expression of the experience of black people during the implementation of jim crow law as stated by erin blakmore in the article national geographic that, “between the 1870s and the 1960s, jim crow laws upheld a vicious racial hierarchy in southern states, circumventing protections that had been put in place after the end of the civil war.” (blakmore, posted on 5th february, 2020). this rule of jim crow law is essentially racist, considers the status of blacks to be lower than whites, this rule is continued to be maintained by most white people and then spawned the rule of racial segregation (separate but equal) in the 20th century. the practice of jim crow law rules separates groups of people to the white people and black people in the zakaria, muh. hasyim, & syarifuddin tundreng the myth of metaphor symbols in speech i have a dream 1040 use of public facilities, quoted from the free wikipedia dated may 13, 2022 states that the jim crow law is authoritarian and unfair because it only benefits the white race, such as the use of library facilities, people black people cannot access quality libraries like those used by white people, black people only get library facilities in schools, this incident is one of many events as a result of the jim crow law. this event is potrayed of the mythical meaning in martin luther king's statement above. the myth construction of the statement “one hundred years later, the negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” and the statement “one hundred years later, the negro is still languished in the corners of american society and finds himself in exile in his own land” is an expression of the condition of economic, social and political of black people's lives in the period of slavery until the mid20th century. it is ironic, on the one hand the american nation is famous for its slogan of a democratic state but on the other hand racism is still enforced and practiced in american society in against black people. black people are not given political rights in the american constitution. likewise in terms of employment, black people can only work as laborers for small wages and live in the shadow of suffering due to the system of racial segregation. the next metaphorical symbol is found in the text of paragraphs [4] and [6] below: “in a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the declaration of independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every american was to fall heir.” [4] “it is obvious today that america has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. instead of honoring this sacred obligation, america has given the negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." [6] the metaphoric symbol in the paraphrasing text [4] is found in the text of the phrase to cash a check in the sentence "in a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check", and the metaphorical symbol in the paragraph text [6] is found in the text of the phrase a bad check in the sentence “instead of honoring this sacred obligation, america has given the negro people a bad check”. both the phrase to cash a check and the phrase a bad check are banking terms. the mythical meaning of the metaphorical symbol of the text of the phrase “to cash a check” is constructed by the experiences of black people in the past, where black people have contributed to the state both for white entrepreneurs on their cotton plantations as well as during civil wars and military service during the vietnam wars. the myth construction of the phrase “a bad check” is constructed by the attitude of the american government that does not appreciate how the contribution of black people in helping white entrepreneurs in their cotton plantations, took part in the civil war and the vietnam wars, the government treated them with double standards, in one hand they employed them as laborers and the other they were discriminated by legal system. metaphor symbols in the speech text i have a dream are found in paragraph [8] as in the text below: “we have also come to this hallowed spot to remind america of the fierce urgency of now. this is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. now is the time to make justice a reality for all of god's children.” in this paragraph, martin luther king uses some natural adjectives such as “hollow”, “cool”, “drug”, “dark”, “valley”, “sun”, “sand”, “rock” as a comparison object in describing the events that are happening and experienced by black people. the metaphorical symbol in paragraph [8] above is found in the phrase “hollowed spot” in the text “we have also come to this hallowed spot to remind america of the fierce urgency of now”; the phrase “luxury of cooling off” and the phrase “to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism” in the text “this is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” next the phrase “rise from the dark”; “desolate valley of segregation”; and “the sunlit path” in the text “now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” then the phrase “solid rock of brotherhood” in the text “now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. now is the time to make justice a reality for all of god's children.” english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1041 the mythical meaning of the phrase "luxury of cooling off" and the phrase "to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism" is constructed by the description of the patience and resilience of black people who experienced slavery by white people and the neglect of their civil rights during the american government was legalized discrimination system. the core idea of martin luther king in this text is to reject the jim crow laws which is unfair and inconsistent with the emancipation of the declaration of independence. `the mythical meaning of the three phrases “rise from the dark”; “desolate valley of segregation”; and the phrase "the sunlit path" in the text "now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice" which is a series of texts constructed by the spirit of movement and resistance for black people to reject injustice practice to the law and politics of american under the racial segregation system that has been oppressing and marginalizing the civil rights of black people, martin luther king's idea in the context of the speech text is to demand legal and political reconstruction through constitutional amendments towards justice for all people america. furthermore, the mythical meaning of the phrase “solid rock of brotherhood” in the text of “now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.” the myth of solid rock of brotherhood is constructed by the idea of lifting the dignity of the american condition after the civil war and jim crow laws that separates white and non-white people legally and politically. martin luther king encouraged the growth of an attitude of nationalism and unity for all americans as a great nation. the next metaphorical symbol is contained in the text of paragraph [9] as shown below: “it would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. this sweltering summer of the negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. those who hope that the negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a ruder awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. there will be neither rest nor tranquility in america until the negro is granted his citizenship rights. the whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” in that paragraph, martin luther king uses several adjective phrases and verbs as metaphorical elements in conveying messages, such as phrases “sweltering summer”, “an invigorating autumn of freedom”, “to blow off steam, a rude awakening, returns to business”, “whirlwinds of revolt will continue, and the phrase bright day of justice”. the metaphorical symbols of phrase "sweltering summer" and the phrase "an invigorating autumn" in the sentence “this sweltering summer of the negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality” is a metaphor that compares two different seasons, namely summer and autumn. the metaphorical symbol of the phrase "sweltering summer" in the context of the experience of black americans is an emotional (angry) and the phrase "an autumn of freedom" is potrayed of need and hopes. the meaning of the myth that is constructed in the text of the phrase “sweltering summer” is an act of rejection by black people against the american legal and political system at thet times that imposes racial discrimination and segregation practices, especially to black people. then the meaning of the myth in the phrase “autumn of freedom” is a description of the hopes and aspirations of black people to american political system can change and recognize the equalization of the civil rights among blacks and whites. the meaning of myths constructed in the text of the phrase “to blow off steam”, the text of “a ruder awakening” and the text of “returns to business as usual” in sentence “nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. those who hope that the negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a ruder awakening if the nation returns to business as usual” as explained below. the myth meaning of the text of the phrase “to blow off steam” and the phrase of “a ruder awakening” is constructed by the spirit to stir up resistance to oppose the american legal and political system that legalizes discriminatory practices against black people, the system is considered unfair and very contrary to the spirit of american independence. then the meaning of the mythical text of the phrase “returns to business as usual” is constructed by a description of the past experiences of black people when they were under pressure and oppression due to discriminatory practices. then the text of the phrase the whirlwinds of revolt and the phrase text of the bright day of justice are both strands of phrases that have a meaning relationship and complement each other. zakaria, muh. hasyim, & syarifuddin tundreng the myth of metaphor symbols in speech i have a dream 1042 the mythical meaning of the text phrase “the whirlwinds of revolt” in the sentence "the whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges" is constructed by the attitude and determination of the resistance of black people who will continue to fight against the government (to shake the foundations of our nation) and the mythical meaning of the phrase “the bright day of justice emerges” is constructed by the intent and purpose of the mythical meaning of the text of the whirlwinds of revolt, namely to achieve clear justice (bright day of justice emerges). the next metaphorical symbol is found in paragraph [10]. in this paragraph, martin luther king uses a picture of past events to describe the suffering and sacrifices of black people during the american struggle for independence in 1861-1865 and their dedication in the vietnam war in 19571975, where their suffering, sacrifice and dedication but they did not exist and receive an award from the american government as mentioned in the text below: “but there is something that i must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. in the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. we must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” the text of the speech in paragraph [10] martin luther king uses adjectives metaphorically in forming a metaphor symbol to describe the intentions and strategies of the resistance movement in fighting for black civil rights, the metaphorical symbols used are: 1) the phrase palace of justice; 2) the phrase thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred; 3) the phrase to degenerate into physical violence; 4) the phrase majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul. the mythical meaning of the phrase “palace of justice” is constructed from the representation of a legislative body makes and ratify the laws. martin luther king's idea uses the metaphor of the palace of justice as an illustration that the hope of fulfilling the civil rights of black people depends on the decisions of the legislature. then, in the sentence “thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred”, it contains two metaphorical symbolic phrases whose meanings are related to each other, the phrases are “thirst for freedom and drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred”. the phrase thirst for freedom describes the hopes and longings of black people so that one day they can obtain their freedom and civil rights in the american political and legal system that has discriminated against them. the phrase “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” potrays the painful experience during the period of the discrimination system. as a whole, the myth construction of the two phrases in the context of the sentence is an appeal of hopes, martin luther king urges that the strategy of the struggle for black civil rights should not be based on past hatred and grudges, the struggle must be carried out in an elegant and dignified way instead of by means of violence (physical violence). the myth construction of the phrase to degenerate into physical violence is a statement of martin luther king's stance against the tactics and strategies of the struggle of malcolm x, a black fighter who used the revenge tactics of the ballot or the bullet as quoted in zakaria (2016, p. 155) that, “malcolm himself, he mentioned that revenge strategy by non-violent action was the favorable means to solve the black's problem or to eliminate discrimination and segregation.” martin luther king expressed the attitude that the struggle of black people in demanding civil rights must be carried out with persuasive tactics (non-violence). then the phrase majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul is an idea that is constructed from martin luther king's appeal as previously explained where the strategy for the struggle for civil rights must be carried out with elegance and dignity. “martin luther tentang aksi perlawanan tanpa kekerasan–di mana sekelompok orang tanpa menggunakan senjata melakukan serangkaian mogok, protes, boikot dan aksi-aksi lainnya untuk melawan–tidak lepas dari kritik. beberapa kritik bertolak dari kesalahpahaman mengenai apa itu perlawanan masyarakat sipil, sementara yang lainnya meragukan kemampuan masyarakat yang tertekan dan tanpa senjata ketika mereka menghadapi lawan yang kuat”, (chenoweth & stephan, 2016, p.2). the next metaphorical symbol is found in paragraph [24]. in that paragraph martin luther king uses noun adjectives to describe the meaning or message as in the text below. “i have a dream that one day even the state of mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1043 will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” the metaphorical symbol in the statement above is found in the phrase oasis of freedom and justice, the mythical construction of the phrase oasis of freedom and justice in the context of the speech text is hope, martin luther king hopes that freedom and justice for civil and political rights in the mississippi region without any discrimination. the next metaphorical symbol in the speech is found in paragraph [29] as in the text of the paragraph below: “i have a dream that one day every valley shall be exhalted [sic], every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” in the paragraph above martin luther king uses nature such as valley, hill, mountain, crooked places. the metaphorical symbols of the phrase every valley shall be exhalted, the phrase “mountain shall be made low” and the phrase “crooked places will be made straight”, all represent hope for changes in american legal and political conditions in the future. the last metaphorical symbol used in martin luther king's speech is found in paragraph [30], in that paragraph martin luther king uses the noun stone, mountain, jangling in describing the hope for changes in america's political conditions in the future as in the text below: “this is our hope. this is the faith that i will go back to the south with. with this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. with this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. with this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.” the metaphorical symbols in the paragraph above are found in the clause “to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope” and in the clause “to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood”. the meaning of the myth of the two clauses “to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope” and the clause “to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood” are constructed by martin luther king's ideas in describing efforts and hopes to abolish discriminatory practices so that civil rights and politics black people get justice and live together as a nation. conclusion the mythical construction of metaphorical symbols in martin luther king's political speech, i have a dream is constructed by depicting the experiences of black people during slavery and when they were under pressure from a system of racial discrimination and segregation. in addition, the construction of the myth is also built by ideas that contain a protest attitude against the american legal and political system that discriminates against black people and ideas that call for an improvement in the american legal and political system that is just for all americans. acknowledgement in this section, the researcher would like to thank the lp2m institute of ninebelas november kolaka university which consistently provides research assistance in the form of journal incentives to each author periodically. in 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(2016). the ballot or the bullet: a speech of malcolm x. journal of english education, 1(2): 147-157. open access proceedings journal of physics: conference series english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 613 the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on students’ narrative writing ability tata tambi department of applied linguistics the post-graduate school of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia email: tatatambi_7317157802@mhs.unj.ac.id fathiaty murtadho department of indonesian education faculty of language and arts, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia email: fathiatym@gmail.com aceng rahmat department of applied linguistics program universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia email: aceng.rahmat@unj.ac.id apa citation: tambi, t., murtadho, f., & rahmat, a. (2022). the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on students’ narrative writing ability. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 613620. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6278. received: 05-02-2022 accepted: 23-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction the study of the relationship between learning strategies and cognitive styles interest many researchers. changju shi from school of foreign language and cultures, nanjing normal university, china focuses on relationship between cognitive styles and learning strategies of 184 second-years english majors from the foreign language school of a university in wuhan. in this study, quantitative data is presented. two selfreported inventories are employed. learning survey style is used to examine the learning style of the participants and the chinese version of oxford’s strategy inventory for language learning (sill) is conducted to survey the subjects’ learning strategies. the results show that cognitive styles have significant influence on learners’ choices of learning strategies. synthesizing style, sharpener style, field-independent style, and impulsive style of cognitive styles correlate positively almost with every strategy presented in this paper, so they turn to be the most influential cognitive styles that have an impact on learners’ learning strategy choices (shi, 2011). the other study related to communicative language learning in class was titled students’ abstract: in the class, most of the teacher use a single teaching strategy to students who have different cognitive styles when teaching narrative essays in the class. therefore, it is necessary to improve teaching strategies in the teaching and learning process. the teaching strategies that fit with the cognitive style of students in order that the learning objective is improved. this paper investigates the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on student’s narrative writing ability. this study was conducted on the vii grade students at madrasah tsanawiyah ibnu taimiyah bogor, west java. treatment by level design and two-factorial anova analysis with α = 0.05 were applied in this experimental study. the sample was 40 students grouped into experiment classes and 40 students was grouped into control classes. there was a different ability in narrative writing in bahasa indonesia between students having field independent cognitive style (a1) and students having field dependent cognitive style (a2). results of two-way interrow analysis of variance showed that fcalculated (4.123) was higher than ftable (3.97) at a significant level of α = 0.05. the findings showed the ability to write a narrative writing in bahasa indonesia of students having a field independent cognitive style was higher than that of students having a field dependent cognitive style. keywords: inquiry-based learning strategy; expository-based learning strategy; writing narrative text; cognitive style. mailto:tatatambi_7317157802@mhs.unj.ac.id tata tambi, fathiaty murtadho, & aceng rahmat the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on students’ narrative writing ability 614 output in communicative language teaching classrooms by ahamad shah and normala othman. the study was conducted in two learning classes, one of which was in a university in malaysia. in this study, data were collected from two classes of elementary and intermediate levels in a malaysian university. interaction between teacher and students in class was recorded and analyzed. this was expected to motivate students to modify their utterances. results of the study showed that the chance of output production was not always applicable to students. this indicated the necessity of adaptation by teacher during the interaction process in class in order to improve communication and make a better language teaching (mohamed, ismail, ahamad, shah, & othman, 2006) considering learning implementation in the classroom also influences students’ success in learning (damopolii, keley, rianjani, & hendriek, nunaki, nusantari, & kandowangko, 2020). in a learning process, the teacher should be creative to find an appropriate leaning srategy. learning will be more meaningful if students are given the opportunity to know and be actively involved in finding concepts from existing phenomena from the environment with the guidance of teachers (suwandy and irhasyuarna, 2017). moreover, teachers are required to be more creative in providing materials or topics that suit the needs of students to achieve learning objectives by creating techniques that can create classes, more interesting and fun (ode & suherman, 2022). as stated by brown (2007), an interaction between the approach and practice of teaching in class is a key to the creation of dynamic and spirited teaching (richards & renandya, 2002). teachers’ experience in class can support the teacher to find and practice that learning strategy. considering teachers’ experience in class, the principles of a teaching approach should not be rigid. learning experiences given by teacher are the aim of training students' process skills (af’idayani, setiadi, fahmi, 2018). furthermore, setting and context play an important role in acquiring a language as well as to be successful in language learning (diptoadi, mindari, and tedjasuksmana, 2018). there are internal and external factors that influence the student’s learning succes. external factors are factors that come from outside of students, such as family factors, school environment, quality of teaching and learning, and playing environment. while internal factors are factors that come from within a person such as intelligence, interests, talents, and motivation. in addition to these two factors, other factors can affect student learning outcomes, namely cognitive style (vergas, ibáñez, & prada, 2017; payung, nuriah, & sarkadi, 2019; & lin, lu, & lin, 2018). cognitive style relates to how a person receives, processes, and uses the information to address various environmental problems or situations (kozhevnikov, 2007). herman a. witkin was one of the pioneers of the theory of cognitive style and a learning style by using the field-dependency and field-independency concepts (witkin, 2016). knowledge of cognitive style is needed to design or modify learning material, learning objectives, and learning methods as it is expected that with the interaction of cognitive style factors, goals, materials, and learning methods, student learning outcomes can be achieved to the maximum extent possible (wahyuddin, satriani, ernawati, nursakiah, 2022). further, it assists them in planning their learning and developing strategies that bridge with different learning environments to make learning more meaningful and effective (liyadipita, 2021). this is proven by previous researcher, singh (2017) who highlighted and found that there is a specific bond between cognitive style with academic achievement of students. students with good cognitive style ability can perceive and organize the information they get such as how to remember, think, solve problems, and make conclusions (nahdi, cahyaningsih, jatisunda, suciawati, sofyan, 2022). compared to fielddependent learner type, learners with fieldindependent type are considered to be independent in developing their skills. in this study, the instrument developed by othman, raskin, and witkin, known as a group embedded figures test (geft), was used as the instrument to develop the cognitive style. this instrument was used to measure students’ ability to find a simple form hidden in a complex pattern. the test consisted of three parts containing 7 problems in the first part, 9 in the second part, and 9 in the third part. through this test, students were grouped into field independent and field dependent cognitive style learners. in this study, inquiry-based language learning strategy was used. inquiry learning is considered appropriate to be used for seventh grade students of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 615 smp, because the characteristics of class vii junior high school students who are still not fully able to learn self-directed, the level of cognitive development of students in the intermediate stage from concrete operations to formal operations (rahayu, hadi, istyadji, zaini, sholahuddin, & fahmi, 2018). according to bruce joyce and marsha wei, an inquiry teaching method is a method which makes students as the center of learning (child-centered learning). maryam, kusmiyati, merta, & artayasa (2020) asserted that the process of inquiry begins with collecting sources and data using the human senses, like listening, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling. the inquiry based learning model seeks to instill the basics of scientific thinking in students, and places students in a role that demands great initiative in finding important things for themselves (yusuf, hobri, & suparti, 2022) which is developed to find and use various sources of information and ideas to improve their understanding of specific problems, topics, or issues (ulansari, ansori, & yennita, 2018). in inquiry based learning, the students can explore their ability to express their thoughts and feelings in the text (masyithah, jufrida, & pathoni, 2017). all students' abilities or by inquiry is a process that involves students in the learning activity, formulate the question, investigating objectively and then developing new understanding, knowledge and meanings (amelia & prystinianta, 2021). whereas in an expository method, teacher is the center of learning (teacher-centered learning) (joyce & weil, 2015). expository learning strategy is a series of learning activities that emphasize the delivery of facts, ideas and important information to students sourced from textbooks, references, or personal experiences using lecture techniques, demonstrations, and study reports (nasution, 2020). in expository method, the students only become object not subject of the learning as the model is such a direct explanation from lecturer or teacher to student (heryadi & sundari, 2020). in the class, most of the teacher use a single teaching strategy to students who have different cognitive styles when teaching narrative essays in the class. therefore, it is necessary to improve teaching strategies in the teaching and learning process. the teaching strategies that fit with the cognitive style of students in orther that the learning objective is improved. in this study, the researcher conducted a study using inquiry-based language learning strategies and expository-based language learning strategies. in this study, an inquiry-based language learning strategy was implemented in experimental classes. cognitive style of students was determined before the learning process started. the narrative writing ability of students with field independent cognitive style was expected to improve after they received narrative writing materials by using an inquirybased language learning strategy. students easily acquire writing skills when they bring and show positive responses during their learning (aditiya, 2022). the complexities of writing lie both on how ideas are generated and organized, and on how these notions are translated into legible text (budiharto, 2018). students naturally believe that writing is difficult because they must pay attention to a variety of factors, including ideas, concepts, vocabulary, and grammar (falihah, rahmawati, & baihaqi, 2020). likewise, that of students with field dependent cognitive style was expected to improve after they received narrative writing materials by using an expository-based language learning strategy. this research concerns in the writing skills of junior high school learners either grade 7, 8, or 9. and equivalent taught both in grades vii, viii, and ix. narrative texts themselves are generally taught to the intermediate level (azis, bugis, harziko, 2022). writing naration is one of the subject taught continouslly for the three grades. the narrative text is a type of english text that aims to tell a story that has a series of connected chronological events (hidayatullah, 2022). the genre mapping of indonesian language subject carried out based on the basic competencies of ki-3 and ki-4 of junior high school curriculum 2013, the narrative writing materials focus on narrative stories and local fables/legends for grade 7, drama narration for grade 8, and inspiring story narratives for grade 9. the hypothesis in this study is the ability to write a narrative writing in bahasa indonesia of students in the field independent cognitive style group is higher than that of students in the field dependent cognitive style group. the tested statistical hypothesis was: h0 : µb1≤ µb2 h1 : µb1> µb2. method tata tambi, fathiaty murtadho, & aceng rahmat the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on students’ narrative writing ability 616 john w. creswell stated that an experimental research is conducted to assess whether an idea (practice or procedure) affects the results or dependent variables (cresswell, 2012). an experimental method in a 2 x 2 factorial design was used in this research. a 2 x 2 factorial design was used and the layout of the experiment is shown in table 1. table 1. the experimental design cognitive style (b) learning strategy (a) inquiry-based language learning strategy (a1) expository-based language learning strategy (a2) field independent (b1) a1b1 a2b1 field dependent (b2) a1b2 a2b2 ability to write a narrative writing in bahasa indonesia result of narrative writing in bahasa indonesia result of narrative writing in bahasa indonesia notes: dependent variable: ability to write a narrative writing in bahasa indonesia treatment variables: a = learning strategy a1 = inquiry-based learning strategy a2 = expository-based learning strategy attribute variables : b = cognitive style b1 = field independent cognitive style b2 = field dependent cognitive style a1b1 = students participating in learning process using an inquiry-based strategy and having field independent cognitive style a2b1 = students participating in learning process using an expository-based strategy and having field independent cognitive style a1b2 = students participating in learning process using an inquiry-based trategy and field dependent cognitive style a2b2 = students participating in learning process using an expository-based strategy and field dependent cognitive style the population in this study was all 180 students of grade vii in odd semester, academic year of 2017/2018 in mts ibnu taimiyah, bogor. these students were divided into six learning groups, namely vii a, vii b, vii c, vii d, vii e, and vii f. all students had equal chance to be selected as samples in this study. samples were taken by using a cluster random sampling method. wibisono stated that in a cluster random sampling method, all elements of a population share equal chance and are known to be selected as subjects. for example, if there are 1000 elements and the researcher needs to select 100 subjects, each element will have a 0.1 chance to be selected as subject. this sampling method is known as a simple random sampling which has the smallest bias and offers a good generalizability (wibisono, 2013). four of six classes of grade vii including vii a, vii b, vii d, and vii e in mts ibnu taimiyah, bogor were selected by using a drawing method. then, another drawing was taken to select 2 classes as experiment and control classes. the drawing was conducted by using ballot paper. each ballot paper was identified as either experiment or control class. results of the drawing showed that classes vii a and vii d were selected as experiment classes and classes vii d and vii f as control classes. twenty of 59 students in the experiment class had a field independent cognitive style and 20 students had a field dependent cognitive style. nineteen students were excluded from the subject of the study. these students followed a narrative writing in bahasa indonesia by using an inquirybased strategy. twenty of 58 students in the control class had a field independent cognitive style and 20 students had a field dependent cognitive style. eighteen students following a narrative writing in bahasa indonesia by using an expository-based strategy were excluded from the subject of the study. in grouping the students into field independent cognitive style and field dependent cognitive style in both experiment and control classes, 33% of students of high score group and 33% of students of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 617 low score group were selected. this was in line with what was stated by naga (1992) that subjects of the study could be divided into three parts which should not be equal in number. the top part was called the highest group and the bottom part, which was usually as big as the top part, was called the lowest group. no attention was given the middle part (naga, 1992). the experiment class was the one followed by students who became the samples of the study. these students were given a learning process by using an inquiry-based language learning strategy in a narrative writing class by considering the students’ field independent and field dependent cognitive styles. meanwhile, students in the control class were sample students who followed a narrative writing learning process by using an expository-based language learning strategy by considering the students’ field independent and field dependent cognitive styles. results and discussion the followings are the results of the test of the study hypothesis. table 2. ability of narrative writing in bahasa indonesia score calculation results cognitive style learning strategy inquiry-based learning expository-based learning total field independent n = 20 ∑x = 87 ∑x2 = 7569 n = 20 ∑x = 74 ∑x2 = 5476 n = 40 ∑x = 80 ∑x2 = 6400 field dependent n = 20 ∑x = 76 ∑x2 = 5776 n = 20 ∑x = 81 ∑x2 = 6561 n = 40 ∑x = 77 ∑x2 = 5929 total n = 40 ∑x = 81 ∑x2 = 6561 n = 40 ∑x = 77 ∑x2 = 5929 n = 80 ∑x = 157 ∑x2 = 24649 notes: n : number of data in each cell ẍ : mean score of narrative writing ability there was a different ability in narrative writing in bahasa indonesia between students having field independent cognitive style (a1) and students having field dependent cognitive style (a2). results of two-way interrow analysis of variance showed that fcalculated (4.123) was higher than ftable (3.97) at a significant level of α = 0.05. this meant that h0 was rejected and h1 was accepted. therefore, the hypothesis stating that there is a different ability of narrative writing in bahasa indonesia between students having field independent cognitive style (a1) and students having field dependent cognitive style (a2) was accepted at a significant level of α = 0.05. this indicated that the ability to write a narrative text of students having a field independent cognitive style was higher than that of students having a field dependent cognitive style. students in the field independent cognitive style group had better ability to write narrative text in bahasa indonesia than those in the field dependent cognitive style group did. this might be caused by the finding that students in the field independent cognitive style group had higher analytical ability than those in the field dependent cognitive style group. writing a narrative text in bahasa indonesia requires strong analytical and abstraction ability in order to produce a writing which has good content and organization. witkin in tennant (2006) stated that in the test called the embedded figures test, designed to measure this general ability, the subject is asked to locate a simple figure in a complex design. once again some people find this task easy and complete it quickly (field independent), while others find it difficult and take longer to complete the test (field dependent). students in the field independent cognitive style group had better ability to analyze data in the form of interesting experiences which were experienced by the students themselves or others than those in the field dependent cognitive style group. with better analysis ability, students in the field independent cognitive style group had better availability of narrative materials than those in the field dependent cognitive style group did. these students were easier to be independent and did not depend on others with authority. in general, in order to draw a conclusion or finish a work, they believed more in their own or standardized values. tata tambi, fathiaty murtadho, & aceng rahmat the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on students’ narrative writing ability 618 nugraha & awalliyah (2016) on the study with the aim to analyze the differences in cognitive styles of students, namely field dependent and field independent cognitive style towards mastery of concepts found the students with field dependent cognitive style increased mastery of concepts with n-gain of 0.27, while students with field independent cognitive style increased mastery of concepts with n-gain 0.23. based on the research results, mastery concepts for field dependent students slightly larger than field independent students, it is predicted because of the learning process tend to be clustered so that more support dependent cognitive style. in contrast, students in the field dependent cognitive style group, in the language learning process, tended to have dependency on other people having authority in certain thing and had preferences in works requiring cooperation with others. in order to draw conclusions, they needed guidance from authority holder or peer groups. in addition, the students in the field independent cognitive style group can fully develop their imagination in writing their narrative texts in bahasa indonesia. in general, students were found to have difficulty in developing their imagination which made it not easy for them to pour their ideas down in the narrative form. the students develop their own narrative ideas so that they needed to write independently. this had resulted in more varied narrative ideas and more interesting narrative organization. for the students in the field independent cognitive style group, the learning process did not only push them to develop their narrative ideas in the form of narrative writing but also gave them chance to organize the intrinsic elements and structure of narrative text by themselves. this made students get accustomed to analyzing data and draw conclusion. in contrast, the students in the field dependent cognitive style group get a lot of examples and guidance in the process of narrative text writing. students received exercises and assignments in the process of narrative text writing. teacher played a role as the center of the learning process. conclusion based on the results of data analysis described previously, the following conclusion was drawn. the ability to write a narrative writing in bahasa indonesia of students having a field independent cognitive style was higher than that of students having a field dependent cognitive style. references aditiya, m. d. 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(2022). development of learning tools to improve writing skills with the inquiry based learning model of indonesian lessons for students’ class iv sd negeri 2 bungatan situbondo. pancaran pendidikan, 11(1), 7-20. tata tambi, fathiaty murtadho, & aceng rahmat the effect of learning strategy and cognitive style on students’ narrative writing ability 620 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 475 investigating teachers’ belief and practices toward digital media of english learning during covid-19 pandemic berlinda mandasari english education department, faculty of arts and education, universitas teknokrat indonesia, indonesia email: berlinda@teknokrat.ac.id dyah aminatun english education department, faculty of arts and education, universitas teknokrat indonesia, indonesia email: dyah_aminatun@teknokrat.ac.id apa citation: mandasari, b., & aminatun, d. (2022). investigating teachers’ belief and practices toward digital media of english learning during covid-19 pandemic. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 475-484. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6248 received: 21-02-2022 accepted: 26-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction the immense development of technology in the 21st era has been a big advancement in every life sector, including education. this brings enormous merits for the improvement of teaching and learning process for both teachers and students. kaharuddin (2020) stated that technology aids students’ english learning process and culture included in material content may attract students’ interest to learn english. it is clearly seen that technology or lately it is broadly called as ict (information and communication technologies) has led to the upgraded teaching techniques in the classroom. especially for teachers, the role of ict in teaching process will facilitate the educators in the process of teaching and learning as well as improve their professionalism (aminatun, 2019). the use of digital tools or media for teaching is really varied in many ways, including in teaching english since english is such a complex thing to learn. there are many applications that can be used to support english teaching and learning process and absolutely ease the teachers to teach. technology is such a vital part of human life, and used as an effort to elevate the efficacy of language learning activities (mckenney & voogt, 2017). digital media as one of the products of technology also has a big impact on the development of teaching english skills, and has attracted many educators to use and implement it. the inclusion of digital media in language teaching has resulted in teachers having to design new teaching strategies incorporating digital tools (de jager, rwodzi, & mpofu, 2020). this phenomenon has proved that the rapid growth of technology really matters on english teaching evolution. further, the reality that digital learning nowadays has become really popular for educators, has also influenced the way teachers think and do toward the impact of technology for teaching. abstract: the advancement of technology has made a lot of changes especially in educational field. online learning is one of teaching modes as the response to the educational changes. moreover, during covid-19 pandemic, online learning is not an alternative solution, but a compulsory one. in response to this, various kinds of online learning media do exist to use. this study aimed at exploring teachers’ beliefs toward digital media of english learning during covid-19 pandemic. this study uses qualitative design with participants coming from teachers teaching english at vocational school. observation and semi-structured interview are used to gain data about teachers’ beliefs. data were collected and analyzed by descriptively. the result of this research shows that google classroom, instagram, and whatsapp are preferable for conducting online learning. it shows the common digital media are preferred used by the teachers in order to enable the students to easily engage in the english learning process since the media are reachable and easy to access. keywords: beliefs; digital media; online learning. berlinda mandasari & dyah aminatun investigating teachers’ belief and practices toward digital media of english learning during covid-19 pandemic 476 whether the teachers want it or not, they are demanded to adjust their way of teaching to the era and to the development of technology since the students will always mostly come from new generation. therefore, teachers’ attitude toward the implementation of technology will change according to the era. the use of grammar translation method, teaching english using blackboard or whiteboard in the classroom, has evolved to something beyond than that. students as digital natives must be supported by teaching strategies that resonate and support their needs, that is by implementing new and developing digital technologies (kincey, farmer, wiltsher, mckenzie, & mbiza, 2019). many teachers are currently exposed to various digital media for teaching and implement them in their class. it is because the shifting of learning from conventional way to technology-based is really popular nowadays (mandasari & aminatun, 2020). besides its interesting sides, technologybased teaching tools also bring some merits for teachers. meidasari (2016) also found that the use of digital media boosts the english language proficiency and reduces the level of cultural stress, academic difficulties, and negative emotions. in addition, nugroho & mutiaraningrum (2020) also explained that digital technology and mobile devices can increase learners’ confidence and motivation, facilitate them to do more practices, trigger their learning autonomy, and have significant impacts on language learning. although, it also cannot be denied that there are still many teachers struggling with the use of abundant sophisticated technology because they lack of insight and experience in dealing with new technology. however, regardless of the negative impacts, the previous studies show that the use of technology and digital media brings positive effects to the process of teaching and learning if it can be used properly and wisely. the use of technology and digital media will always progress from day by day. educators, especially teachers cannot just stay quiet seeing this phenomenon. they are demanded to always study, enrich their professional skills and get familiar with the latest development since there are some conditions that cannot be predicted in the future. one of those conditions is the sudden coming of covid-19 as the global pandemic that has changed everything in almost every life sector, and education is one of the sectors that is significantly affected by this. even, it is stated by hermanto & srimulyani (2021) that this change is a challenge for indonesian education, which must also prepare students to adapt to face the challenges of the era of society 5.0. remote teaching and learning during covid-19 faced ongoing challenges, as does the need for teachers’ professional development (chin, ching, del castillo, wen, huang, del castillo, gungon, & trajera, 2022). teachers faced new and challenging environments, instructional approaches, and roles as educators (pressley, 2021). teaching and learning process that is usually done face to face must be avoided since this pandemic does not enable people to meet directly in order to decrease the dangerous effect of the virus. a government circular regarding to this matter was also issued considering the seriousness of this pandemic. no one is really ready for such condition, yet the fact demands all educational parties have to deal with it. there were actually several solutions proposed to keep teaching and learning process and the interaction among teachers and students run well. one of the solutions that makes sense and almost can be done by almost everyone in educational field is online learning. as it is stated before that the government, specifically the ministry of education and culture has obliged to close schools and replace classroom teaching learning process by distant learning. by implementing this, teaching has changed drastically with the distinctive rise of online learning, whereby teaching is embraced remotely and on computerized stages (famularsih, 2020). considering that online learning is actually not a new thing for many educational institutions in indonesia, this solution is the most likely to be implemented and has the highest effectiveness in carrying out the process of teaching and learning. it is also supported by research conducted by ulfia (2020) which found that the conditions of facilities and infrastructure by educators and students adequately illustrate the readiness of implementing online learning. since the implementation of online learning is strongly related to digital things, many digital media, like email, blog, chatting application, learning application, video, virtual conference or meeting platform, and e-learning management system are used to fulfill the need of distant learning. information and communication technologies (ict) tools, particularly digital teacher english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 477 competence and teacher education opportunities to learn digital competence, are instrumental in adapting to online teaching during covid-19 school closures (könig, jäger-biela, & glutsch, 2020). several studies related to the implementation of online learning during the pandemic of covid-19 had been conducted, and most of them show the positive results related to the implementation of online learning using digital media for teaching. fitria (2020) concluded that implementing online learning system during covid-19 pandemic has a potential to help the lecturers and students in the teaching and learning process. more, mardiah (2020) suggested that e-learning system is considered as the one and only relevant teachinglearning method in the time of pandemic because both teachers and students can access the e-learning application that has been approved by the institution from home. in accordance with those findings, suardi (2020) found that the implementation of elearning using zoom gives some advantages, such as learning process becomes more relaxed and both teacher and students, who are prospective teachers, can learn a new skill in teaching using digital platform. nevertheless, still, it cannot be neglected that there still be many problems and challenges in carrying out full online learning process using digital technology, especially during covid-19 pandemic, such as economic condition, students’ anxiety, government’s policy, the risk of user data security, and choosing appropriate and effective teaching and learning media (simamora, 2020). it also cannot be denied that the utilization of digital technology or digital media in online learning during the pandemic found pros and cons. this leads to the fact that teachers as learning managers certainly have a tendency to carry out their teaching activities. not all students have enough access to gain the facilities, such as the cost for buying internet data, mobile phone, and the reachable and stable signal for internet; therefore, teachers and students may require eligible infrastructures to run the class properly (amnan, 2020). as it has been stated previously that teachers’ belief and attitude toward the implementation of technology will change according to the era and condition. english teachers, especially, need to consider various teaching components during covid-19 pandemic since english is a complex language to be taught and every skill is integrated. digital learning of english as proposed by lee & drajati (2019) has been widely implemented in the learning process by employing a range of digital devices, for example, computer, tablet, web apps, and smartphones though they are still traditionally used. however, amid this pandemic, not all teachers have the same thought and treatment in utilizing digital media for teaching english. moreover, each school also has its own focus and goals for its students, such as vocational high schools. teaching english in vocational high school demands multiple knowledge of material, methods, and strategy since teaching english must refer to the program study of the students who are being taught (muliyah & aminatun, 2020). here, it is fascinating as well as necessary to know what teachers of vocational high school think about and perform their teaching and learning process equipped by digital media during the pandemic of covid-19. this becomes crucial because understanding teachers’ belief of digital technology use for language learning would be fruitful in improving the quality of technology integration practices (nugroho & mutiaraningrum, 2020). moreover, it can also become favorable information for other teachers and provision teachers in the future if they face such similar conditions. further, it can also be a profitable resource for designing teaching curriculum for hybrid or even full-online learning in the institutions. method this study aimed at investigating teachers’ beliefs and practices on english teaching media during pandemic covid-19. in order to gain the data on teachers’ beliefs, the researchers employ a qualitative design by adopting semi-structured interview and questionnaire. contextualization becomes the important aspect in selected research design (harding, 2018). the present study focuses on portraying, summarizing, and depicting an indepth understanding toward the issue. it limits the scope by concerning on the phenomenon gained from the data of indonesian efl teachers teaching on vocational high school. this study was conducted at a vocational private school in lampung province. the participants were two female english teachers; mrs. r (30 years old) and mrs. h (33 years old). these two teachers were selected and chosen based on the criteria on having experience on conducting distance learning during berlinda mandasari & dyah aminatun investigating teachers’ belief and practices toward digital media of english learning during covid-19 pandemic 478 covid-19 pandemic and having been teaching english for at least four years. both of them have experience in professional teacher training in undergraduate level. this study used questionnaire and semistructured interview as the instruments to collect the data. questionnaire is used to gain the data of respondents’ identity, teaching experience, training experience, and references toward some digital media. the instrument of questionnaire was distributed to the teachers via google form. the data gained from questionnaire were used to formulate their beliefs. these data were then being clarified through semi-structured interview. as pandemic covid-19 limits face-to-face interaction, interview was conducted via phone cell calls for 45 minutes. the data gained from questionnaire and semistructured interview were analyzed based on creswell (2013). data obtained were tabulated and coded. then, data were reduced based on the research objective. data were then analyzed and integrated as reflected from both participants. then, data were brought into conclusion drawing. as an effort of maintaining validity and reliability of the data, the researchers code the data independently. discussion between researchers were done to gain data that meet the research objective. results and discussion it is notified that both participants realized that digital media integration in efl learning contributes positive impact for learners. as the students taught nowadays are digital native, it is believed that digital media enables learners to learn fast. it also shapes learners to be independent, improves their motivation and interest. as stated by mrs. h, she shared her beliefs that digital media integration has benefits to improve students’ ability in communicating using target language. “anak-anak saya sekarang kan berasal dari genz yang notabennya pengguna media digital. mereka itu sudah pada bisa menggunakan media digital supaya bisa memperoleh informasi sebanyak mungkin missal, dengan menggunakan hp, aplikasi dan internet untuk berselancar di dunia maya. positifnya yakni anak-anak saya ini cepat memperoleh informasi, sumber belajar bahasa inggris, dan menggunakannya untuk saling komunikasi. artinya, media yang digunakan mereka itu sangat mendukung mereka untuk belajar.” (mrs. h) “my students are coming from gen-z which is most of them are digital native. they are literate with some digital devices that enables them to gain information as much as possible. mobile phone, mobile applications and internet connection are such best combination as media to surf on online world. the positive side of it is my students can get knowledge fast, gain a lot of english learning sources, and even make use of them to interact with others. in other words, this media might support students to learn better.” (mrs. h) on the other side, digital media is believed to boost the learners’ motivation and interest. the learners enjoyed studying by using digital technology. “saya biasanya mengajar menggunakan aplikasi google classroom dan whatsapp. siswa saya bisa membaca materi yang terunggah di aplikasi google classroom. mereka juga punya grup wa dimana mereka bisa diskusi terkait materi yang ada. di wa group, mereka bisa merespon pertanyaan saya, merespon pertanyaan teman lainnya, dan mengumpulkan tugas. semua siswa saya punya aplikasi whatsapp di hp mereka masing-masing. nampaknya, sih tidak sulit menggunakan aplikasi whatsapp tersebut” (mrs. h) “i usually teach online using google classroom and whatsapp application. my students can read the teaching materials on google classroom. then, they also can make a group discussion via whatsapp group. this whatsapp group enables them to response my questions, to response their friends’ questions, and share their works. all of my students have whatsapp application on their mobile phone. it is not hard to use it as learning tool.” (mrs. h) “saya biasanya menggunakan instagram sebagai media ajar. siswa saya senang pakai instagram karena mereka bisa mengunggah penampilan mereka saat praktik berbicara bahasa inggris di akun instagram dan memperoleh tanggapan dari teman lainnya” (mrs. r) “i usually use instagram as learning media. my students enjoy using instagram because they can post their speaking practice on it and get feedback from their friends.” (mrs. r) the teachers’ preference on using digital media on language learning efl teachers’ beliefs on digital media closely relates to the fact that most of the students are english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 479 digital native which means that the students have been familiar with selected digital media. therefore, teachers strongly believed that those digital media could affect the learners’ language performance. since the school did not provide an online learning platform that can be used by all teachers, whatsapp is the most preferred application as a tool to conduct online learning by the participant of this research. “saya lebih memilih pakai instagram dan whatsapp sebagai media ajar bagi siswa saya. aplikasi tersebut memberikan manfaat dari segi tamppilan, kegunaan dan kemudahan. di instagram, siswa saya bisa menulis sesuai dengan materi yang diajarkan dan menambahkan gambar yang mendukung tulisan mereka semenarik mungkin. selain itu, instagram juga ada fitur sukai, komen dan bagikan yang memungkinkan untuk menarik pengguna instagram untuk memberikan respon melalui fitur yang ada. kadang juga saya kasih tugas anak-anak untuk membuat kegiatan live di ig berbahasa inggris. biar siswa saya ini lebih percaya diri. saya yakin anak-anak ini punya akun instagram. jadi pastinya anak-anak ini bisa mengikuti instruksi yang diberikan. yang selanjutnya yakni saya menggunakan aplikasi whatsapp. di aplikasi ini, ada beberapa fitur untuk mengirimkan pesan teks, gambar, pesan suara dan video. saya juga punya grup whatsapp buat anak-anak sebagai wadah diskusi. jadi kedua aplikasi ini sangat mendukung saya dalam mengajar bahasa inggris. anak-anak juga terlihat aktif mengikuti pembelajaran online dan mereka pun bisa menggunakan kedua aplikasi ini dengan baik.” (mrs. r) “i prefer to use instagram and whatsapp as digital media used by my students. those applications bring benefits in terms of attractiveness, usefulness, and easiness. instagram enables my students to create an output of writing skill supported by relevant picture. the students could find out relevant picture and make it as interesting as possible. instagram provides like, comment and share features that may attract viewer to give response to the task. i sometimes assign my students to make a kind of live video via instagram using english. it is done in order that the students can be much more confident to talk in english. besides, i believe that all of my students have this instagram account on their mobile phone. therefore, i believe that my students can make use of it based on the instruction given. another digital media that i prefer is whatsapp. it provides some features that enable my students to send text, picture and voice notes and even make a video call. i provide whatsapp group for the class to facilitate classroom discussion. these two applications support me in teaching english. i found that my students are actively involved during online learning and could use those two applications well.” (mrs. r) “saya lebih suka menggunakan google classroom dan whatsapp selama pembelajaran online. kalau pakai google classroom, saya bisa posting materi, bisa minta anak-anak untuk mengumpulkan tugas disitu dan juga diskusi. tapi kadang diskusi dilakukan di whatsapp karena mereka bisa merespon diskusi dengan cepat. kalau di whatsapp ada fitur kirim pesan teks, kirim pesan suara dan video. kalau missal saya mau kasih tugas keterampilan membaca, saya biasanya akan menugaskan mereka membaca dan merekamnya lalu mengirim tugas tersebut menggunakan fitur pesan suara. lalu, siswa lainnya saya minta untuk memberikan tanggapan.” (mrs. h) “i prefer to use google classroom and whatsapp in conducting online learning. by using google classroom, i could post the learning materials, enable students to post the assignment, and make a discussion. however, discussion session is sometimes conducted via whatsapp. i prefer whatsapp to conduct discussion because the students could response my questions in real time. whatsapp provides not only chat feature but also voice note and video call. whenever i need to know my students’ progress on reading, i assigned them to send their voice note via group. then, i assigned other students to listen and give comment on their friends’ voice using chat feature.” (mrs. h) teachers’ challenges in using digital media in teaching english the participants believe that involving digital media nowadays is important. however, their beliefs implemented on the classroom practices encountered some challenges in terms of personal and conditional constrains. “kadang susah juga untuk mengontrol anak-anak kalau mneggunakan aplikasi whatsapp. di satu sisi, anak-anak senang dan terlihat mengikuti instruksi yang diberikan. namun di sisi lain, karena siswa saya banyak dan mereka merespon dalam waktu yang bersamaan, maka aka nada banyak sekali pesan yang menumpuk. jadinya saya harus scroll up dulu untuk baca pesan satu per satu dan itu butuh waktu.” (mrs. h) “i found that it is hard to control my students berlinda mandasari & dyah aminatun investigating teachers’ belief and practices toward digital media of english learning during covid-19 pandemic 480 when they are using whatsapp application. in one side, my students seem enjoying the learning process and follow the instruction given. on the other side, my students’ response at one time results a lot of chats. consequently, i need to scroll up to read the chat one by one. it takes time.” (mrs. h) internet connection becomes one of the challenges for teachers and students. the school is located in a suburb which only certain internet provider could be accessed by the students. “kadang anak-anak ini lama responnya. alasannya karena koneksi internet yang buruk. hal ini menyebabkan anak-anak ini tidak mengikuti diskusi dengan baik.” (mrs. h) “i found that some of my students give slow response during discussion. they said that they encounter bad internet connection access. it results the students could not participate the discussion well.” (mrs. h) teachers believe that the digital media can be helpful. however, they are not well equipped with proper trainings. the teaching technique they use is based on their personal adaptation. “saya rasa penggunaan teknologi dalam pembelajaran bahasa inggris akan sangat bermanfaat. namun, yang saya lakukan selama mengajar menggunakan instagram dan whatsapp hanya sebatas pengetahuan saya saja. nampaknya kalau ada training jauh lebih bagus supaya kita ngajarnya tidak ragu-ragu. kita sepertinya butuh best practice bagaimana cara memanfaatkan aplikasi di hp untuk belajar bahasa inggris.” (mrs. h) “i think utilizing technology in teaching english can be very useful. however, what i have done in teaching english using instagram and whatsapp is based on my personal adaptation. if there is such kind of professional training, it will be much better. we, as teacher, won’t be hesitant in teaching. we need some best practice in utilizing some mobile applications for english learning.” (mrs. h) lastly, the teachers suggested that the school must have one digital media that can accommodate all teachers at school to conduct online learning. professional development such as workshop is required. this workshop should accommodate teachers to prepare teaching materials, discussion forum, conduct synchronous and asynchronous learning, and prepare for assessment method. it is to ensure that all teachers could create classroom activities based on digital learning pedagogy. “sekolah kami ini tidak punya pelatihan atau workshop pemanfaatan media. kami sebenarnya membutuhkan pelatihan tersebut. setidaknya ada satu media/platform belajar yang bisa digunakan oleh semua guru seperti moodle atau yang lainnya. jadi, nantinya semua guru akan menggunakan platform yang sama. kalau aplikasi di hp ini jadi pendukung saja.” (mrs. h) “the school does not provide us with some training or workshop in utilizing digital media. we actually need that training. at least there is one main learning platform that can be used by all teachers such as moodle or something. therefore, all teachers will use the same online learning platform. mobile application can be used as supporting media.” (mrs. h) “saya kira semua proses pengajaran kudu dimonitor oleh pihak sekolah, termasuk kegiatan siswa-siswi. sebaiknya siyh sekolah pakai satu platform saja yang ada fitur-fitur yang lengkap yang nantinya memudahkan guru untuk menyiapkan materi, forum diskusi dan metode penilaian. jika demikian, saya yakin bahwa tujuan pembelajaran dapat tercapai. tujuan monitoring siswa dan guru adalah dala, rangka meningkatkan kemampuan mengajar guru.” (mrs. r) “i think all teaching process must be monitored by the school, including students’ activity. i can suggest that the school must decide to use one main online learning platform which provide complete features and enables teachers to prepare the materials, discussion forum and assessment method. if it is so, i believe that the learning objective can be achieved. teachers and students’ activities can be monitored as an attempt to improve the teachers’ pedagogical skills.” (mrs. r) this study uncovers that the teachers have strong beliefs on the digital media in efl teaching. teachers could provide teaching activities that grab students’ interest, improve students’ motivation, and lead students to be autonomous learners assisted by technology in efl practices. nevertheless, some personal and conditional challenges hamper the teaching practices. first, in indonesian context, it is notified that face-to-face learning is preferred rather than making use of digital technology to assist students’ english learning. however, pandemic covid-19 brings english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 481 changes in all aspects, including teaching mode. the ministry of education, culture and higher education of indonesia has made a policy to switch face-to-face learning into online learning as an effort to prevent the spread of virus. this policy brought a surprise for teachers, students and school since this kind of teaching mode is such a new teaching mode for them. however, this rapid change of teaching mode does not always match with teachers’ professional developments. it results the gap between teachers’ beliefs and practices (nugroho & mutiaraningrum, 2020). this also happened when teachers implement a new method of teaching, in this case is by integrating digital media in teaching english. as stated in the findings, digital media used in teaching english for efl students brings lots of benefits, such as boosting students’ autonomous learning, improving their motivation, and gaining students’ learning interest. the implementation of google classroom, whatsapp, and instagram has done a big contribution in bridging the gap among students. students with various learning types can do learning activities more confidently and independently. sari (2021) stated that using digital media makes students enjoy the learning process and feel relaxed; besides, it also elevates their creativity. learning motivation is also enhanced by implementing digital media during the process of teaching and learning using digital media. students were showing high involvement compared to conventional class without implementing digital media. it is also in line with lin & chen (2017) who stated that the implementation of digital learning which is also by applying digital media can present positive learning motivation and learning outcome better than the traditional class can. this also implies that the role of digital media can also enhance students’ engagement since digital media is really close with students nowadays. therefore, it is really important for teachers to know and understand the employment of technology and use current digital media that can engage students and improve students’ motivation in learning. moreover, in pandemic situation, nothing can bridge the distant learning process effectively, but technology. in teaching language especially, teachers need to be able to select an appropriate teaching medium in order to achieve learning goals that have been set. knowing students’ interest can also be a factor in managing the classroom setting. choosing teaching media which are relevant to the materials, to the assessment, and to the students are being an important thing to be considered. selecting and using appropriate and relevant learning applications and platforms could support the online teaching and learning process to take place (lusiyani & anindya, 2021). seeing the findings that have been explained previously, teachers chose some digital media to support teaching process during covid-19 pandemic and to enable students to be actively involved in learning process. google classroom became the main platform used by teachers to upload and share the materials. this medium is very useful for online teaching and learning, and can be obtained for free of charge and can be used on any device (alim, linda, gunawan, & saad, 2019). moreover, google classroom helps teachers to save their time, keep classes organized, and communicate better with students (azhar & iqbal, 2018). the features of google classroom are easy to operate and students get familiar with them fast. this platform is also really beneficial for teachers because it has large space to upload learning materials with big size. moreover, through this learning platform, teachers can assign the students’ assignment, give homework, and evaluate students’ work. it cannot be denied that google classroom has become the main learning management system chosen by many school and educational institutions to conduct teaching and learning process. however, google classroom is sometimes not enough to be the only learning tool in conducting teaching and learning process during pandemic. there were many cases when the students did not have sufficient mobile data or incompatible devices to access the complete materials. students sometimes also missed the class since they cannot see the reminder without accessing their mobile phone or laptop. therefore, another supporting medium was used to facilitate this. whatsapp was selected as the secondary digital medium employed by the teachers as a tool for communication. besides that, whatsapp was regarded as a practical application to support teaching process in a simpler way. whatsapp usage has enabled students to obtain learning-related information and get involved in learning discussions for the perceived usefulness aspect (mulyono, suryoputro, & jamil, 2020). in addition, all students knew how to use this berlinda mandasari & dyah aminatun investigating teachers’ belief and practices toward digital media of english learning during covid-19 pandemic 482 application and it was really practical for teachers to share materials or assignment that do not have large size. students with the teachers can create a whatsapp group and discuss the material that is being learned. teachers can also give feedback directly toward the students’ works and inform students the materials that have been uploaded on google classroom. kholis (2020) stated that whatsapp can support the language learning to be more effective and efficient for the reason that it is accessible for distant learning; moreover, the students were more responsive and enthusiastic in joining the class. after that, besides google classroom and whatsapp, in displaying students work, teachers also chose another digital medium, instagram as a place to show students’ assignment. instagram is also one of the applications in which students are really familiar with. this application can also be a choice for the teachers to boost students’ confidence and creativity. nevertheless, the implementation of digital media to support learning process during pandemic will always face some problems and challenges. bad internet connection became the main problem in conducting an online learning during covid-19 pandemic. zhong (2020) stated that the insufficient access, the availability of the internet, the lack of technology and students’ capacity to participate in digital learning and lack of proper interaction with instructors became the major effects in the implementation of online learning. these problems also happened during teaching and learning process in this research setting. therefore, teachers need to think clearly to overcome this kind of situations. guiding students patiently and having good communication with students were believed to help teachers and students keep in the same learning pace. besides that, not every teacher and student were trained to the employment of new technology, so that it led to several technical problems in operating the learning media. learning by doing from time to time was the only solution for this phenomenon. no one could not predict this pandemic, so this situation was possibly to happen. teachers then found out by themselves the ways to improve their professional development and distribute it to the students. although finally it could run properly with some obstacles, but systematic training initiatives should be provided to improve teachers’ and learners’ technological skills in relation to new emerging models and approaches encouraging the effective use of online learning (ferri, grifoni, & guzzo, 2020). conclusion the coming of covid-19 pandemic that hit many sectors in life including education has become a new trend in teaching. online learning is not only as a choice anymore, yet it is a necessity. every teacher, student, and school must conduct this kind of learning model regardless the setting they are currently at. digital media are tools needed to support this teaching system. this research digs english teachers’ belief and practices towards the use of digital media in conducting online teaching and learning process. some findings show that the use of digital media, such as google classroom, instagram, and whatsapp really helped teachers to do online learning. it shows the common digital media are preferred used by the teachers in order to enable the students to easily engage in the english learning process since the media are reachable and easy to access. although there must be some obstacles and problems happened in the process of implementing it, teachers and students could manage it well, so the learning objectives still can be achieved. this study is limited to the setting of online english learning in a private vocational high school. it is suggested for the next researchers to have different research setting and add other related variables to be observed. acknowledgment the writers want to acknowledge universitas teknokrat indonesia for the endless support in completing this article. references alim, n., linda, w., gunawan, f., & saad, m. s. m. 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(2020, march 17). the coronavirus exposes education’s digital divide. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/ china-schools. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07853 http://dx.doi.org/10.30659/e.5.2.304-321 https://doi.org/10.3102%2f0013189x211004138 https://doi.org/10.24252/eternal.v72.2021.a8 https://doi.org/10.46627/silet.v1i2.38 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/china-schools https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/china-schools english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 883 interactive metadiscourse markers in indonesian efl students’ academic writing arsen nahum pasaribu english department, faculty of language and arts, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: arsen.pasaribu@uhn.ac.id tiara k. pasaribu english department, faculty of language and arts, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: tiarakristina28@gmail.com erika sinambela english department, faculty of language and arts, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: erika.sinambela@uhn.ac.id vitri rosalina manullang english department, faculty of language and arts, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: vitri.simanullang@student.uhn.ac.id apa citation: pasaribu, a. n., pasaribu, t. k., sinambela, e., & manullang, v. r. (2022). interactive metadiscourse markers in indonesian efl students’ academic writing. english review: journal of english education, 883-890. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6817 received: 19-06-2022 accepted: 21-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction one of the most crucial language skills for efl students to develop is writing (pasaribu, 2022). the students are required to produce a piece of writing that is well-structured and to hone their writing abilities. however, according to the majority of efl students, writing is a difficult skill to master (alkhodari & habil, 2021). it calls for not only a solid command of vocabulary and syntax but also the capacity to structure writing effectively in accordance with the genre. additionally, high levels of motivation and interest can help students write more effectively. there are certain factors that may be used to judge a student's writing quality. the usage of metadiscourse is one criterion for writing quality. according to hyland (2017), metadiscourse is the method that authors or speakers communicate with readers or listeners through language. the author's stance in his writing, how he communicates his thoughts to the reader, and how he interacts with the reader through his writing are abstract: the research on metadiscourse markers investigation in academic texts has grown very rapidly in the last decade. however, research on interactive metadiscourse markers on efl students' academic writing is still relatively underexplored. therefore, this study aims to reveal how the competence of efl students in the use of interactive metadiscourse in academic writing by comparing two groups of students with different grades, third-semester students and fifth-semester students. the research design is a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. a total of 40 students were participating in this research and divided into two groups. each group consists of 20 students. they were assigned to write a minimum-250-word essay about the importance of english mastery in the disrupted era of 4.0. around 818 interactive markers were identified in the student’s essay texts. the results reveal that the use of interactive discourse markers in the students' writing was considered still low in quantity. the transition markers were the most dominant found in the text, followed by frame markers, code gloss, endophoric markers, and evidential respectively. moreover, the students in the fifth semester perform slightly better than their third-semester counterparts at using the interactive metadiscourse markers. however, most of the students in both groups still encountered difficulties to employ the interactive markers in their writing. the lack of practice and the student's native language practice might have contributed to the low quality of the student's writing. keywords: academic writing; discourse analysis; efl students; essay; interactive metadiscourse; writing competence. mailto:arsen.pasaribu@uhn.ac.id mailto:arsen.pasaribu@uhn.ac.id arsen nahum pasaribu, tiara k. pasaribu, erika sinambela, & vitri rosalina manullang interactive metadiscourse markers in indonesian efl students’ academic writing 884 all conveyed through the usage of metadiscourse (bal-gezegin & baş, 2020). metadiscourse is the current term used in discourse analysis. according to hyland's (2017) research on the topic of metadiscourse has shown a significant increase in the past decade. in the google scholar search engine found 30,200 hits. this figure shows how metadiscourse is a topic that is often discussed in discourse analysis. its appeal among researchers and academics who study speech analysis has been demonstrated in few scholarly works (nugrahani & bram, 2020; liu & buckingham, 2018; albalat-mascarell & carrió-pastor, 2019; mirzaeian, 2020; farahani & kazemian, 2021) several metadiscourse analysts were interested in published scientific articles or those who were interested in investigating metadiscourse in academic publications (jalilifar et al., 2018; carrio-pastor, 2019; almudhaffari et al., 2019). some scholars (alkhodari & habil, 2021; kuswoyo & siregar, 2019; zhang et al., 2017) have focused on the analysis of metadiscourse in spoken discourse, as well as on less significant issues like the use of metadiscourse in online advertisements (alsubhi, 2022), interactional metadiscourse based on gender (suhono & haikal, 2018), and english instruction manuals (herriman, 2022). however, the study of metadiscourse markers in academic writing has also seen the fastest growth (alqahtani & abdelhalim, 2020; lotfi et al., 2019; qin & uccelli, 2019; ho & li, 2018; mohamed & rashid, 2017; pasaribu, 2017; duruk, 2017; castillo-hajan et al., 2019; bax et al., 2019; zhang, 2018; hayisama et al., 2019; yoon & römer, 2020) additionally, a review of the research on the study of metadiscourse producers in academic writing is attempted to identify any gaps in the literature. the interesting topic in academic writing was exposed by alqahtani & abdelhalim (2020). they attempted to explore the gender differences in using interactive metadiscourse in academic writing. this study indicated the obvious difference between male and female in interactive metadiscouse application. the female students performed better than their counterparts. duruk (2017) then investigated the use of metadiscourse markers in turkish researchers' academic writings using corpus-based research. to determine the frequency of occurrence of interpersonal metadiscourse indicators, 20 dissertations produced by turkish scholars were investigated. according to the findings of this study, 'hedges,' 'boosters,' and 'attitude markers' are found in the data analysis, and the metadiscourse markers that emerge the most frequently are attitude markers. while the frequency with which turkish writers employ personal metadiscourse markers varies. similarly, research on the identification of metadiscourse indicators in efl students' academic writing is seen through the lens of gender inequalities (alqahtani & abdelhalim, 2020; pasaribu, 2017). they compared the frequency of metadiscourse markers in essay writing across genders. this study's findings confirm that both male and female efl students prefer interactive metadiscourse markers over interactional metadiscourse markers.research on metadiscourse markers was also conducted by mohamed & rashid (2017) on students' essay writing corpus. this research involved 269 malaysian undergraduate writers to produce an essay writing corpus. the results of this study reveal that undergraduate students use interactive metadiscourse markers more often than interactional metadiscourse markers in their essay writing. ho & li (2018) and lotfi et al. (2019) did research on metadiscourse markers in student essay writing. these two studies seek to learn more about how students employ interpersonal metadiscourse markers in argumentative writing. this study reveals that students continue to struggle with employing metadiscourse to persuade readers in their argumentative compositions. another study on metadiscourse indicators was undertaken by comparing students' academic and colloquial writing (qin & uccelli, 2019). they attempt to investigate the strengths and shortcomings of efl students' use of metadiscourse markers in academic and colloquial writing. this study found no significant difference in the usage of metadiscourse markers by students in the two forms of writing. other interesting applications of metadiscourse were also utilized to uncover issues in the newspapers and publications (farnia & mohammadi, 2018; siddique et al., 2018; anuarsham et al., 2020). these studies exposed the issues of metadiscourse makers in newspaper were complex. other minor research in metadiscourse makers was explored in the high school settings (soysal, 2020) and school textbook (birhan, 2021) based on the findings of the previous studies of metadiscourse markers on academic writing, it can be concluded that metadiscourse research on english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 885 efl students' academic writing, particularly by comparing the abilities of students from different grades in using metadiscourse markers, has received little attention from previous researchers. as a result, this study will attempt to compare the use of metadiscourse markers in academic writing by university students at various grade levels. the term “metadiscourse” can be traced back to zelling haris's time in the 1950s. metadiscourse is used to understand how language is employed and how the author transmits messages to readers in an understandable manner (alqahtani & abdelhalim, 2020). hyland (2017, p. 16) defined metadiscourse as "the commentary on a text made by its makers in the course of speaking and writing." hyland (2017)further categorized metadiscourse analysis into two types: interactional (interactional) metadiscourse and interactive (textual) metadiscourse. the former is concerned with tactics for regulating the writer's personality in the text, while the latter incorporates the reader in the discourse and allows them to contribute and respond to it (hyland, 2017). this group comprises of attitude makers (e.g., i agree, hopefully, rightly), selfmention (e.g., i, the writer), engagement makers (e.g., we, our), hedges (e.g., in my opinion, perhaps, seem, evidently), boosters (e.g., i, the writer), and boosters (e.g., i, the writer) (e.g., absolutely, definitely, clearly, obviously). the latter refers to information discourse arrangement that guides readers to find it coherent and convincing. according to hyland's taxonomy, this group is separated into five categories (hyland, 2017): (1) transitions: it is a set of devices, mostly conjunctions, used to express relations between main clauses (e.g., but, however, therefore, in addition). (2) frame markers: concerned with the discourse acts, sequences, or stages (e.g., finally, in conclusion, the aim is, the purpose is). (3) endophoric markers: refer to the information in other part of the text (e.g., as stated above, as discussed in previous chapter). (4) evidentials: refer to the source of information from other texts (e.g., according to a, b states, (c, 2005)). (5) code glosses: signal the rewording of knowledge regarding the ideational material (e.g., for example, for instance, that is, in other words) in contrast to other researchers' interest in discourse markers, the applications of interactive markers were the primary focus of this study. the study focused on the usage of interactive markers in students' academic writing, particularly the use of interactive markers by university students of various grades. students in higher grades were expected to be better at using interactive makers than their lower grade peers because they had considerably more expertise in academic writing than the lower grade students. as a result, the purpose of this research is to provide solutions to the queries. method this study compares two separate groups of students from various grades to discover the application of interactive metadiscourse markers in efl students' academic writing. this study is a comparative descriptive study. the study used a mixed method approach, which combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies. the former was used for data collection, identification, coding, description, and explanation of the interactive markers. meanwhile, the latter was assigned to deal with data statistical analysis. students from the english department at the university of hkbp nommensen in medan participated in the study. to achieve the research goal, two groups of students from the third and fourth semesters were chosen. twenty students were assigned to each group. both groups were given the task of writing an article titled "the importance of mastering english in the disruptive era 4.0." each student was encouraged to write a minimum of 250 words. in the essay writing, 818 interactive markers were discovered. after that, the data were analyzed by employing hyland's (2017)metadiscourse markers to determine the frequency of interactive markers. the data were processed, grouped, and evaluated to get insight into how university students from various years used interactive markers in their work. the data analysis was also included in the description to enable for the qualitative presentation of the research findings. results and discussion the study sought to uncover the presence of interactive metadiscourse signals in the academic writing of efl students. the comparison of two different year student groups' writing was intended to investigate how the two distinct groups used their understanding of interactive metadiscourse markers in their writings. the data revealed that the two groups of pupils used the interactive markers in slightly different ways. senior students were rated higher for their use of interactive markers and frequency of occurrences. the findings are detailed in the table below. arsen nahum pasaribu, tiara k. pasaribu, erika sinambela, & vitri rosalina manullang interactive metadiscourse markers in indonesian efl students’ academic writing 886 table 1. number of interative markers in students’ academic writing interactive markers group 1 (3rd semester students) group 2 (5th semester students) f % f % transitions 278 68.47 285 69.18 frame markers 52 12.81 48 11.65 endophoric markers 26 6.40 20 4.85 evidentials 8 1.97 12 2.91 code glosses 42 10.35 47 11.41 total 406 100 412 100 the distribution of interactive markers on student writing in both groups is shown in table 1. the use of transition markers was highest in both groups of students, accounting for more than half of the total number of interactive markers in each group. the number of transition markers in the third semester group of students differs slightly from the number in the fifth semester group of students. the second is slightly higher than the first. furthermore, in the second position, the number of interactive markers that are frequently employed by the two groups of students is frame markers, with 52 to 48 occurrences. code glosses come in third, with 42 and 47 instances, respectively. endophoric markers occupy the next sequence, with 26 and 20 occurrences in both groups, respectively. evidential was the least used category of interactive markers by students in both groups, with 8 and 12 occurrences, respectively. in total, 818 interactive markers were realized throughout the literature. around 406 interactive markers are assigned to thirdsemester students, whereas 412 are assigned to fifth-semester students. the table shows that students in the fifth semester used interactive markers more than students in the third semester in the categories of transition, code glosses, and evidentiary markers. third-semester students, on the other hand, used frame markers and endophoric markers more frequently than fifth-semester students. this research implies that university students with higher grades are not necessarily in line with their writing ability. this study demonstrated that efl students still struggled with the use of interactive markers in academic writing (qin & uccelli, 2019). the usage of repetitious similar conjunctions was one of the pupils' major flaws in their writing. for example, the connectors 'and' and 'then' clearly overburdened the entire texts in both groups of students. this issue may bore readers and eventually lead them to incomprehensible content (hyland, 2017). this finding indicates that the number of interactive markers discovered in students' work was not connected to the manifestation of the markers in the text. the employment of frame makers in student writing is also worth discussing. the use of this sort of metadiscourse is deemed to be quite modest, with an average incidence rate of 50 in the papers of the two groups of students. the terms "finally" and "in conclusion" appear frequently in student writing of this type. these two phrases accounted for more than 65% of all frame markers detected in the academic works of both groups of students. for example, the word "finally" is typically used to conclude a series of justifications for the importance of english or the steps of procedures or tactics in studying english. according to the data analysis, students' capacity to employ frame markers in academic writing is still much behind what is expected, particularly in terms of the variety of words, types of frame markers used, and how to use them. the term "for example" is frequently used in code gloss by students in their academic writing. more than half of all code gloss detected in student writing contains this sentence. the fact that pupils frequently utilize the term "for example" in daily communication utilizing indonesian or local languages may have contributed to its high frequency of occurrence (duruk, 2017). in addition, there are extremely few instances of endophoric markers being used in academic writing by students. an average of 20 instances of this kind of metadiscourse can be found. the types of endophoric markers that are most frequently used in student writing include the phrases "as mentioned above" and "as stated above." nearly 90% of the many types of endophoric markers discovered contain this sentence. this discovery is intriguing because it is believed that the students' habit of utilizing this phrase in their work accounts for its high frequency of recurrence. in addition, the lack of student references to this type of endophoric markers is also the reason why students do not use other variations of phrases in this type of interactive metadiscourse. of all types of interactive metadiscourse markers, evidentials are the type that students rarely use in academic writing. this may be due to the type and purpose of writing that does not require students to look for references to strengthen their arguments, such as writing a thesis or scientific article. the use of the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 887 sentences "according to the books i've read" and "according to the english dictionary" appears most often in this type. the use of the former sentence in the students' academic writing shows how students are not able to show the specific reference of the book in question. this will result in the quality of student writing in convincing readers with the arguments they build. from the results of the discussion above, this research has revealed several important findings that need to be highlighted. the use of interactive metadiscourse by efl students in academic writing is still relatively low. in addition, the low competence of students in using interactive markers can be clearly seen in the students' academic writing as they still made some errors in the applications of the interactive markers. the research also confirmed that the students' writing competence especially in employing the interactive markers was influenced by individual determination in practicing. that is to say that the senior students may have little progress in academic writing compared to the junior students who spent much time for writing practice. on the other hand, a teacher needs to find a direct and effective method to improve students' writing skills, especially the use of metadiscourse (bogdanović & mirović, 2018; ho & li, 2018; almudhaffari et al., 2019; yoon & römer, 2020). on the students’ side, the writing practice in using the interactive markers should bring better improvement to the quality of their writings (castillo-hajan et al., 2019). conclusion this study explored how efl students used interactive metadiscourse markers when composing essays. the usage of transitional markers predominated over other interactive markers, which were found to be few in number and used by the students in their writing. additionally, it was clear from comparing students in the fifth and third semesters of their grade levels that the proportion of interactive markers realized in their work varied slightly. lack of experience using metadiscourse markers in academic writing is the root of students' limited capacity to employ interactive metadiscourse in their writing. the influence of students' native language usage in writing or speaking is another issue that is thought to be the root of their limited proficiency in the use of interactive metadiscourse markers. the study's implication is that lecturers who teach academic writing can utilize the study's findings as a guide to discover innovations in the form of effective teaching strategies and methods that can enhance students' writing skills and competencies. in order to boost students' understanding and awareness of the usage of metadiscourse markers in academic writing, introduction and training on this topic also has to be improved. other scholars who are interested in studying metadiscourse markers in other academic texts can use this research as a reference. the number of corpus data and the number of students that participated in the study are still very 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(2017). a multidimensional analysis of metadiscourse markers across spoken registers. journal of pragmatics, 117, 106–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.06.004 arsen nahum pasaribu, tiara k. pasaribu, erika sinambela, & vitri rosalina manullang interactive metadiscourse markers in indonesian efl students’ academic writing 890 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 593 pisa reading literacy: encountering female and male’ reading literacy ability yuli tiarina department of english language and literature faculty of language and arts universitas negeri padang email: yuli.tiarina@fbs.unp.ac.id sri wahyuni smpn 6 bukittinggi email: sriwahyuni.bkt@gmail.com dewi fitri smpn 6 bukittinggi email: fit011968@gmail.com niken sakinah department of english language and literature faculty of language and arts universitas negeri padang email: sakinahniken17@gmail.com ahmad fajar afif department of english language and literature faculty of language and arts universitas negeri padang email: fajar200163@gmail.com apa citation: tiarina, y., wahyuni, s., fitri, d., sakinah, n., & afif, a. f. (2022). pisa reading literacy: encountering female and male’ reading literacy ability. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 593-602. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6263. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction not for the sake of ranking, the program for international student assessment (pisa) is a diagnostic evaluation tool used to provide useful information for improving the education system. from the results of pisa 2018, indonesia, which has participated in pisa since 2000, has reflected on the education system in indonesia. reporting from the ministry of education and culture's research and development website (2021), there are several positive and negative findings from the pisa results. first, indonesia is one of the countries with the fastest progress in expanding access to education. when indonesia first participated in pisa in 2000, only 39% of the population aged 15 years were in school. this percentage increased to 85% in 2018. second, the reading competence of students in indonesia still needs to be improved. 7 abstract: much research sounds that male students’ reading competency is lower than females’. this article, then, uncovers the cognitive processes of male and female students seen from the sample questions in the 2018 pisa. this descriptive research involved fifteen male and sixteen female students. they were tested to answer pisa sample test consisting 21 items. it was found that the students score in reading literacy is poor. the highest score was 76; the lowest score was 10; the average score was 31. the result proved that female students are better in reading literacy than males are. among eight cognitive process, female students are good at accessing and retrieving information, integrating and generating inferences across multiple sources, assessing quality and credibility, reflecting on content and form, and detecting and handling conflict. while, male students are better in integrating and generating inferences. the implication of the research is the teachers should provide hots instructional methods. keywords: reading literacy; pisa sample test; pisa framework. yuli tiarina, sri wahyuni, dewi fitri, niken sakinah, & ahmad fajar afif pisa reading literacy: encountering female and male’ reading literacy ability 594 out of 10 students aged 15 years reading literacy level is still below the minimum competency. they are only able to identify routine information from short readings and simple procedures. third, there is a disparity in the quality of education in indonesia. when the 2018 pisa oversample was carried out in dki and yogyakarta provinces, the average score of the two provinces was 35 points higher than the national results and in line with other asean countries. this identifies the occurrence of quality gaps. fourth, students who claimed to be frequently involved by the teacher in reading lessons scored 30 points higher than students who were never or rarely involved. strategies that can be used to involve students include: inviting students to think, making a list of characters, retelling the contents of the reading, linking the content of reading with events around, comparing the content of reading with other readings on the same topic, determining the content of reading that is liked or not liked, as well as giving pedagogical questions to encourage students to understand the reading. globally, pisa results show that the strategy of reading aloud a passage to other students is not effective in improving reading comprehension for 15-year-old students. concentrating on the content of the reading, marking or summarizing in their own words proved to be more effective in understanding the content of the reading. when the teacher gives the task of summarizing (not copying), it is necessary to ensure that students really summarize in their own words, not just copy the contents of the reading. summarizing activities that are effective in growing reading skills are those that are able to capture important things and rewrite them with their own creativity (ministry of education and culture research and development, 2021). factors that allow lower reading literacy can be caused by low social and economic status, lack of time for students to get education in childhood and low metacognitive abilities of students (kogar, 2021; koyuncu & firat, 2020). other factors that allow low literacy in a country are such as differences in the education system, lack of attention from parents, different cultures, and demographic differences of a country (jerrim & wyness, 2016). ömür (2020) reassured that pupils can efficiently encounter problems at school if they are close and on good terms with their parents. ertem (2021) also explained that reading literacy can be low due to lack of learning materials and understanding of different subjects also concerns the capability of the pisa test (pulkkinen & rautopuro, 2022). one current factor that needs to be taken into account is gender differences: it affects reading literacy (kogar, 2021). based on the results of research conducted by erasmus university, boys are smarter than girls. however, erasmus university research is refuted with current studies. pirls in 2016 found that girls' reading literacy skills got better grades than boys. bijou & mariem (2018) also revealed that boys are no better than girls when it comes to reading. investigated by yalcin & bayraktar (2021), girls are better on pisa rather than boys. syamsuri & bancong (2022) stated that due to good motivation and focus, female students have better reading skills than male students. meanwhile, khorramdel, pokropek, joo, kirsch, & halderman (2022) detected that there is no difference between male and female students in reading pisa literacy. however, the reading ability of male students can be improved by enjoying the reading itself (di castro & ferri (2022) and understanding of different subjects also concerns the capability of the pisa test (pulkkinen & rautopuro, 2022). seen from three contradicting previous findings, it is necessary to conduct the research whether there are differences between male and female students. rarely do science experiments directly and rarely do the same queries are factors that cause students' inferior reading capability (ramli, susanti, yohana, & rozak, 2021) to improve pisa results, in 2021 the indonesian government has launched the implementation of a minimum ability assessment (akm), which is an assessment that includes reading literacy, an assessment that uses language reasoning skills, and numeracy, an assessment that uses mathematical reasoning abilities. akm prepares students to have future 21st century skills. the ability to be literate is not just reading what is written in the text, but rather knowing and understanding the concept of a reading. likewise, with numeracy or numeracy skills, which are not only required to be able to count, but also to be able to apply the concept of counting to other contexts and different situations. the current government-driven akm refers to the program for international student assessment english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 595 (pisa). observing the two factors that influence students' reading literacy outcomes, namely gender, and school level, the researcher is interested in further exploring the gender factor of students from moderately accredited schools (b) and students' ability to answer pisa-based akm questions. the researcher focuses more on these two factors because based on the researcher's observations during 8 meetings at a smp 6 bukittinggi, that there are male and female students who are equally serious, and there are also male and female students who do not pay attention to the teacher and respond to the teacher. the researcher was provoked to explore whether all cognitive processes in reading literacy were dominated by female students and the extent to which the cognitive processes of male and female students were. therefore, the purpose of this study was to analyze the cognitive processes of male and female students seen from the sample questions in the 2018 pisa. the minimum ability assessment (akm) in 2021 is an assessment that includes reading literacy, namely an assessment that uses language reasoning and numeracy skills, namely an assessment that uses mathematical reasoning abilities. the minimum ability assessment (akm) is prepared by the government with the aim of preparing students to have future 21st century skills. the ability in literacy is not just reading but how we can know and understand the concept of a reading. likewise, with numeracy or numeracy skills, we are not only asked to be able to count, but also to be able to apply the concept of counting to another context with different situations. minimum ability assessment (akm) refers to the program for international student assessment (pisa). pisa is an activity that is carried out once every 3 years with the aim of improving the education system. students taking the test are 15 years old and randomly selected from school and take tests that cover reading, math and science. pisa has gone through 7 cycles, namely in 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, and 2018. every year the number of participating countries that join continues to grow until 2018 there are 78 countries that have joined including indonesia which has joined since 2000. however, after 7 cycles that have been passed, the highest pisa score of indonesian students is only 391, namely in 2006 with a minimum international average score of 489 in 2018. according to the oecd 2009 in harjuluukkainen, vettenranta, ouakrim-soivio, & bernelius (2016), reading literacy is understanding, using, reflecting and involving written texts, to achieve student goals, develop students' knowledge and potential, and participate in society. reading literacy is defined as the ability of students to understand, use, evaluate, reflect on and engage with texts to achieve their goals. reading literacy is the ability to understand and use the forms of written language needed by society. students can construct meaning from text in various forms. in addition, the oecd (2006) stated that reading literacy is the understanding, use, and reflection of written texts for the purpose of acquiring knowledge, developing potential, and participating in public. reading literacy covers a wider range of cognitive abilities than basic coding through knowledge of word for word, grammar, linguistics, and text structure. reading literacy is a metacognitive ability that contains awareness and the ability to use various appropriate strategies when processing text. furthermore, alderson (2003) stated that reading literacy includes processes and products. reading as a mechanistic process is classified as low-level reading. reading is not just reading information literally, but reading interactively to gain criticalcreative understanding. then, according to oecd (2017), reading literacy is defined as the ability of individuals to understand, use, reflect on and engage with written texts to achieve their goals, develop their knowledge and potential, and participate in society. reading literacy can shape student behavior that can be used for various purposes. students can read various text situations. reading literacy can predict students' academic achievement. according to malawi, tryanasari, & kartikasari (2017), reading literacy for character building through a reading literacy culture can create a literacy culture in the school environment as an effort to realize lifelong education. then, according to the oecd (2009), reading literacy is to achieve student goals, develop students' knowledge and potential, and participate in society. in addition, harsiati & priyatni (2018) stated that the purpose of reading literacy is first, to improve life skills in accessing and utilizing yuli tiarina, sri wahyuni, dewi fitri, niken sakinah, & ahmad fajar afif pisa reading literacy: encountering female and male’ reading literacy ability 596 information in the form of discourse to live life in the context of education, work, safety and personal safety. second, improving live access skills and utilizing information in the form of plans, maps, tables, forms and graphs to live life in the context of education, work, safety and personal safety. so, it can be concluded that reading literacy can improve students' understanding in drawing conclusions from the information received for the better, help students think critically, help increase students' knowledge by reading, help grow and develop good character values. then, reading literacy aims to measure students in terms of understanding, using, and reflecting reading results in written form. reading literacy refers to understanding, evaluating, using, and engaging in reading to achieve students' goals, knowledge, and potential. in this context, it can be said that reading is a difficult and complex process that requires a lot of cognitive skills. according to koyuncu and fırat (2020), achievement in reading comprehension is influenced by various factors such as reading fluency, text structure information, knowledge of cognitive and metacognitive strategies, vocabulary, motivation and prior knowledge. achievement factors such as difficult and multidimensional processes also involve socioeconomic and family conditions, type of school, reading habits, learning strategies, and participation in preschool education. pirls in 2016 ensures that students have good reading literacy skills such as the number of reading sources at home, parents who have a hobby of reading, adequate digital tools, parents who are aware and teach reading to their children early, enter good, safe, comfortable schools, and make reading important, attend school in a fresh state, have good motivation and have technological skills. reading literacy is also influenced by the ability of students who master more than one language with students who only master one language (isci, 2021). isci further stated that a person's ability in reading literacy is also influenced by their proficiency in their mother tongue. not only that, students' reading literacy skills are influenced by support from parents, technological abilities, discipline, and hobbies. reading is an activity that prioritizes individual activities rather than group activities (ertem, 2021). the pisa reading literacy assessment deals with cognitive processes i.e. mental strategies, approaches or goals that readers use to negotiate their way into, around and between texts. according to the oecd (2016), there are five processes in reading literacy and can be defined as retrieving information, forming broad understandings, developing interpretations, contemplating and evaluating text content and contemplating and evaluating text forms. text and literal comprehension. furthermore, the oecd (2017) stated that there are several processes in the assessment of reading literacy, namely taking information, forming a broad understanding, developing interpretations, reflecting on and evaluating the content of the text and reflecting and evaluating the form of the text and understanding. literal information. for reading literacy reporting, these six processes are organized into three broad process categories. first, access and grab. accessing and retrieving involves going to the provided information space and navigating in that space to find and retrieve one or more different pieces of information. accessing and retrieving tasks can range from finding individual pieces of information, such as details an employer requires from a job advertisement, to finding a phone number with multiple prefixes, to finding certain facts to support or refute a claim someone has made. while retrieval describes the process of selecting the required information, accessing describes the process of getting to the place, the information space, where the required information is located. both processes are involved in most access and retrieval tasks in pisa. second, integrate and interpret. integrating and interpreting involves processing what is read to build an internal representation of the meaning of the text. integrating focuses on demonstrating an understanding of the coherence of the text and involves the process of understanding the internals of the text. integrating involves connecting various pieces of information to make meaning, whether that is identifying similarities and differences, making degree comparisons, or understanding cause and effect relationships. third, reflection and evaluation. reflecting and evaluating involves taking knowledge, ideas or attitudes outside the text to relate the information given in the text to one's own conceptual frame of reference and experience. reflecting items can be considered as items that require readers to consult english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 597 their own experience or knowledge to compare, contrast or hypothesize. an evaluation item is an item that asks the reader to make a judgment based on an out-of-text standard. reflecting and evaluating the content of the text requires the reader to relate the information in the text with knowledge from outside sources. then, according to the oecd (2018), the reading literacy framework defines several cognitive processes which include seeking information, understanding, and evaluating and reflecting. first, search for information, which consists of accessing and retrieving information in the text, searching for and selecting relevant texts. second, understand, it consists of literal information, integrating and generating conclusions and integrating and generating conclusions across multiple sources. third, evaluation and reflection, namely assessing quality and credibility, reflecting on content and form and detecting and dealing with conflicts. besides rachel (2011), another aspect is the cognitive skills used by the reader in processing the text. there are five aspects that guide the development of reading literacy assessment tasks, namely retrieving information, forming broad understanding, developing interpretations, planning and evaluating text content, and reflecting and evaluating text form. in reading activities the process of cognition is experienced by students. the cognitive process itself is divided into three first, namely receiving information such as reading and retrieving the information contained in the text, and looking for the same text as the text being discussed. second, understanding information such as explaining the literal meaning of the text, and drawing conclusions from one source or from various other sources. third, evaluate and reflect on things such as assessing quality and credibility, reflecting on content and form, and calculating and solving a problem. cognitive theory by piaget in thahir (2018) stated that cognitive theory is how a child gives views and gets used to things that are in their environment. piaget also explained that the combination of brain development and experiences that have been passed by a child in adapting to his environment produces this cognitive. piaget divided the stages of cognitive development into four parts, starting from an individual's birth to adulthood. the first stage is the sensori-motor stage which starts from the individual born until he is two years old. this stage is the stage where the individual realizes that something exists. the second stage is the preoperational stage which starts from the individual aged about two years to the age of seven. this stage is the stage where an individual is able to describe the things that exist in his environment using the abilities or symbols he already knows. the third stage is the operational stage which starts from the age of seven years until the age of eleven. this stage is the stage where the individual is able to use his logic to think. the last stage is from the age of eleven until the person grows up. this stage gives them the ability to be able to solve problems and think better in making decisions. according to piaget, the change in thinking from formal to operational is a very significant change that occurs during adolescence. according to sujiono (2015), the ability of an individual to know, study, and solve a problem is cognition and intelligence is closely related to one's intelligence. the factors that affect the cognitive of an individual is the first influenced by heredity. hereditary factors greatly affect individual cognitive abilities that are equal to 75-80%. the second is environmental factors. third, the maturity factor which is closely related to the age of an individual. fourth, namely the factors that shape the child outside of himself such as formation through school and natural formation. the fifth is the interest and talent factor. interest can be interpreted as an impulse that exists in a person's soul and talent is an innate that has existed since a person was born. the last factor is freedom. freedom means how a person can be free in thinking and acting. often there is a visible difference between intelligence between female and male students. widadah (2015) found that girls only felt calm in planning, but for the next process they experienced cognitive problems, and boys experienced cognitive problems at every stage of problem solving he went through. primi, donati, chiesi, & morsanyi (2018), after examining other factors, they found that gender is not a determinant of an individual's intelligence. on the one hand, it can be found that girls are more intelligent than boys. rosa (2017) found that cognitive intelligence such as estimating, analyzing and interpreting was more controlled by girls. yuli tiarina, sri wahyuni, dewi fitri, niken sakinah, & ahmad fajar afif pisa reading literacy: encountering female and male’ reading literacy ability 598 method the research method used is a descriptive research method with a quantitative approach because it uses numbers, starting from data collection, interpretation of the data, and the appearance of the results. in this study, the writer wanted to know whether it was true that the ability of female students was higher than that of male students and to what extent the cognitive abilities of female students were compared to male students. this approach is also associated with research variables that focus on current problems and phenomena that are happening at the present time in the form of research results in the form of numbers that have meaning. the population used in this study were 150 8th grade students of smp 6 bukittinggi accredited b. the samples used were 30; consisting of 15 male students and 15 female students, using cluster random sampling technique. the instrument used in this study uses a standardized test, namely the 2018 pisa sample which was adopted from the oecd pisa website. sample question consists of 3 scenarios. each scenario consists of 7 questions in the form of simple multiple choice, yes and no, and open response. results and discussion from the questions given, male students got the highest score of 76 and female students also got 76. the lowest score of male students was 10; the lowest score for female students is also 10. however, the average of female students is higher than that of male students. as shown in the following diagram: diagram 1. average score pisa 2018 from the data shown in the table above, it can be explained that the comparison of male students' scores with female students' scores is as follows: average value the average score of male students was 25.47 and the number of male students who scored the same and above the average was 4 out of 15 students or 26.27%. meanwhile, the average score of female students was 37.19 and the number of female students who scored the same and above the average was 10 out of 16 people or 62.50%. from these data it can be concluded that the average value of female students is higher than the average value of male students. even the average value of female students is also above the class average, which is 31.52. when compared with individual scores, the number of female students who scored above the class average was 10 people (32.26%) while the number of male students who scored above the class average was only 2 people (6.45%). this finding is in line with pirls in 2016, bijou & mariem (2018), yalcin & bayraktar (2021), girls are better on pisa rather than boys. syamsuri & bancong (2022) who stated female students have better ready literacy in pisa than male students do. highest value and lowest score the highest score obtained by male students was 76 as well as the highest score obtained by female students was 76. and it can be concluded that the highest grade in the class was also 76. the number of students who were able to obtain these scores were 1 out of 15 each. male students (6.67%) and 1 in 16 female students (6.26%). the lowest score obtained by both male and female students is also the same, namely 10, so it can also be seen that the lowest score in the class is also 10. the number of male students who got the lowest score was 1 out of 15 people (6.67%) and the number of female students who got the lowest score were 2 out of 16 people (12.5%). it can be seen clearly that the ability of male students and female students in obtaining the highest and lowest grades is the same. by looking at that case, what has been revealed by khorramdel, et al. (2022) is true. there is no difference between male and female students in general. the highest scores gotten by male and female students are not only good at reading literacy, but they are smart in all subjects. therefore, this finding supports the result finding of pulkkinen & rautopuro (2022) that understanding english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 599 of different subjects also concerns the capability of the pisa test. frequency value the table also presents information on the grades most often obtained by male and female students. a total of 4 out of 16 female students (25%) got a score of 38. a score of 24 was obtained by 3 out of 16 female students (18.75%), 2 out of 16 female students (12.5%) got a score of 10. as for the score of 42, 43, 52, 76, 62, 19, 57 respectively obtained 1 of 16 female students (6.25%) meanwhile, 5 out of 15 male students (33.33%) got a score of 24, 4 out of 15 male students (26.67%) got a score of 14, and 2 of 15 male students (13.33%) got a score of 29 and a score of 19, 43, 10,76 respectively obtained 1 of 15 male students (6.67%) description of student answers based on the results of student answers, the researcher will describe the results of students' answers in answering the pisa 2018 sample test questions. the following is a description of the results of student answers based on question indicators. access and retrieve information tested on item number 1 and item number 4. in this question, male students and female students have the same ability in answering questions, as evidenced by the fact that there are 2 female students and 2 male students who are able to answer the question correctly. it highlights that both male and female students have the same level in accessing and retrieving information. they have the same ability in accessing and retrieving involves going to the provided information space and navigating in that space to find and retrieve one or more different pieces of information. represent literal information it was tested on items number 2, 8, 11, 15, and 18. in some questions it was seen that female students had the ability to answer questions more than male students. question number 2 was answered correctly by 3 female students and 1 male student; question number 8 was answered correctly by 7 female students and 2 male students; question number 11 was answered correctly by 10 female students and 5 male students. for boys, question number 18 was answered correctly by 3 female students and 1 male student, while for question number 15 the number of students who answered correctly was the same, namely 6 female students and 6 male students. in this cognitive process, female students are superior to male students. it indicates that female students are able to understand the literal meaning of sentences or short sentences, usually a direct or close paraphrase of the information in question with information in a section. integrate and generate inferences tested on items number 9 and 12. in question number 9 it can be seen that the ability of male students exceeds the ability of female students, as evidenced by 5 male students being able to answer the question correctly and there are only 2 female students whose answers are also correct. this proves that male students have more abilities in integrating and generating conclusions when compared to the 2 indicators at the beginning which were mastered by female students. as for question number 12, both male students and female students who were able to answer correctly amounted to 8 people. integrate and generate inferences across multiple sources it was tested on items number 6, 14, and 19. on the three items it was seen that the ability of female students in answering questions still exceeded male students. question number 6 was answered correctly by 9 female students and 5 male students, question number 14 was answered correctly by 11 female students and 4 male students, while question 19 was answered correctly by 4 female students and 4 male students. these questions include questions that can be answered by many students, although the ratio of correct answers is still dominated by female students. assess quality and credibility tested on item number 13, and in this question both female students and male students have the same ability. the number of female students and male students who answered the questions correctly was the same, namely 1 person. this is an interesting finding. among 15 male and female students, only 1 from each could answer the question. the question is about measuring students’ ability in yuli tiarina, sri wahyuni, dewi fitri, niken sakinah, & ahmad fajar afif pisa reading literacy: encountering female and male’ reading literacy ability 600 assessing whether the information in the text is valid, reliable, correct, and unbiased. it shows that most of the students are not able to reflect critically on the content and the form of the text. it indicates some students are able to generate main ideas or make a summary. reflect on content and form tested on items number 3, 10, 16 and 17. in 3 questions, it can be seen that the ability of female students exceeds the ability of male students. question number 3 was answered correctly by 3 female students and 4 male students. question number 16 was answered correctly by 8 female students and 2 male students. while in question number 10, the ability of female students and male students proved to be the same as the number of students who answered correctly 10 female students and 10 male students. although for other items in this indicator male students do not excel, male students on question number 17 showed abilities above female students with the number of male students who answered correctly as many as 11 people while female students only 9 people. detect and handle conflict it was tested on items number 5, 7, 20 and 21. in the four items, the ability of female students was seen above that of male students. question number 5 was answered correctly by 5 female students and 1 male student, question number 7 was answered correctly by 3 female students and 1 male student, question number 20 was answered correctly by 10 female students and 6 male students. while question number 21 was answered correctly by 3 female students and 1 male student. it denotes that female students are better in detecting and handling conflict. in conclusion, it can be noticed that female students dominate in answering pisa questions accurately and they have more appropriate reading skills than male students as an entirety, as seen from all the indicators of questions in pisa. in total, there are 7 indicators in the pisa question. for the first indicator, namely access and retrieve information, the capability of female and male students is the same. for the represent literal information, integrate and generate inferences across multiple sources, assess quality and credibility, reflect on content and form, and detect and handle conflict, dominated by female students. only on the integration and generating inferences, male students can answer accurately more than female students. acknowledgement this article is part of a research on the application of literacy hots in language learning in junior high schools funded by the ministry of education and culture under sk 42244/un40.ri/2021 and 357/un35/ks/2021 revitalization of lptks regarding hots literacy. thanks also to the chancellor of unp, the hots literacy tutor team, the principal of smpn 6 bukittinggi, indonesian and english teachers at smpn 6 bukittinggi, as well as to the students who helped collect research data. references alderson, j. c. 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(2021). comparison of pisa and piaac participants’ reading habits and strategies in terms of reading achievement. international journal of contemporary educational research, 8(4), 158-169. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/44455820.pdf https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/44455820.pdf https://doi.org/10.1787/2c7c311d-e https://doi.org/10.5430/wje.v10n4p45 https://dx.doi.org/10.32601/ejal.911522 yuli tiarina, sri wahyuni, dewi fitri, niken sakinah, & ahmad fajar afif pisa reading literacy: encountering female and male’ reading literacy ability 602 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 381 needs analysis of palembang-touristdestination recount text reading materials in the 21st century learning yeni oktarina department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: yenicholidigunawan@gmail.com rita inderawati (corresponding author) department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id ismail petrus department of english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com apa citation: oktarina, y., inderawati, r., & petrus, i. (2022). needs analysis of palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading materials in the 21st century learning. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 381-392. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6239 received: 02-01-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction in the 21st century, indonesia is one of the most important members of the global community. indonesia must prepare excellent human resources in many competitive fields to support its role. in order to compete, the teacher faces a certain number of challenges, which are getting tighter and tighter in this technological era. students must have qualified skills to compete in the workplace later. to compete, english is becoming one of the essential skills to be taught in school. the quality of english skills can influence human resources quality in several areas such as education, economic, social, and cultural life (li, 2020). english is practiced in spoken and written communication around the world as an international language. it is widely used and taught from elementary to university levels at all levels of school. until now, english in indonesia is taught in general english and is not acceptable in high schools. today we live in the 21st century, where so many foreign cultures affect our lives. many students imitate other cultures and forget their culture as the influence of the culture of exchange. that is why teachers should relate language learning, mainly english, to their student's culture and make them interested in learning about it abstract: the specification of the materials taught is one of the characteristics of teaching english at vocational high school. the materials should be appropriately designed or developed for the students to enhance their comprehension and to facilitate subject matter. the aim of this research is to look into students' needs for developing english reading materials based on palembang culture, as determined by the feedback of students and teacher. through a questionnaire and interview, the data were obtained. the data was quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. the results of the study revealed that 1) students are still experiencing some difficulty in reading comprehension, 2) a recount text is necessary; 3) english reading materials need to be integrated with students' local culture; and 4) no english reading material has been made available to incorporate the students' local culture, particularly in the field of tourism destination of palembang. due to needs, reading materials must be developed through the integration of local culture that matches the level of reading and supports the content of the topics. keywords: needs analysis; vocational high school; reading materials; local culture; 21st century learning. mailto:rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id yeni oktarina, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus needs analysis of palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading materials in the 21st century learning 382 (nambiar et al., 2020; murti et al., 2020; inderawati, et al., 2021)). language teaching nowadays focuses on what students need to know rather than what to teach. there are also numerous changes and opportunities for students to learn english in school. the behavior and initiative of students can be said to be the main activity in the classroom. the success of students in class is the main objective of teaching and learning. in school, many factors influence students. culture is one of them because language must be addressed in a social context. it must be linked to culture. one of the most critical aspects of language learning is culture. when students learn a language, they are also learning the culture of that language. this has been investigated by nambiar, et al, (2020) that secondary school students’skill development and confidence due to the impact of a local culturebased longitudinal english language reading program. language and culture are, therefore, the primary keys to language instruction. input sources vary from the participants in the classroom, ranging from the use of audiovisual devices (like cds, dvds, and the internet) to printing materials (like textbooks, workbooks, and activity libraries) to foreign language exposures (limberg, 2016). furthermore, language is the foundation of cultural and contextual schemes and frames, not just words (regmi, 2014). students and teachers are clearly from the same cultural and linguistic backgrounds. it enables them to communicate and form a familiar understanding of the local culture. vygotsky's sociocultural theory (1994), which states that language acquisition is influenced not only by the cognitive side but also by students' social and cultural context, supports secondlanguage acquisition. students are more likely to participate in classes when they interact with teachers in a real socio-cultural setting (murti, et al., 2020; nguyen, 2020). as a result of this viewpoint, teaching materials and activities should incorporate the students' local culture to meet their background, emotion, experience, and culture (bao, 2016; mckay, 2003; tomlinson, 2012). when students are asked to discuss a topic that they are unfamiliar with, they will most likely give up and take the time to do so. if the subject is familiar to them, the materials are simple to comprehend, and learning occurs. they're aware of the context and the topic they'll be discussing. they will take an active role in the class. the government publishes english textbooks for the tenth-grade, and there is a recount text in which the materials tell us about an idol gathering, a historical incident, the battle of surabaya, and a past event in the lives of prominent figures. there is little to say about a tourist destination that is different from the culture of the students. they should also be able to understand a text from another culture in their country in that novel. though indonesians are familiar with the texts, students find it difficult to comprehend them because they are unfamiliar with the context. as an educator, we should know the effective way for helping the students to understand the main meaning on a text, especially about recount text which should related with their own local culture. this means that, since language and culture are inextricably linked, incorporating local culture into the english subject is significant. by integrating local culture into the teaching and learning process, students will be able to learn english more effectively and have a greater understanding of their own culture because they will be asked to speak about something they are familiar with. beside that students gain great benefits from incorporating local culture into instructional materials because it encourages them to be aware of and care for their own culture while studying english. students can contribute their knowledge of their own culture, as well as maintain and promote it to others. learners who obtain cultural knowledge can develop more positive views toward different cultures and become more tolerant of them. in addition to the descriptive and narrative texts that students are taught, there are other texts taught in english in grade ten. the recount text is one of the texts that can be used as a learning guide for anyone pursuing a career as a travel agent. it is appropriate to use recount text as existing reading material because it tells about students' personal experiences, especially with regard to tourist destinations. as a result of developing recount text reading materials about tourist attractions, students are more interested in learning their own local culture, which will help them learn english and promote their own local culture. the students decided to learn english not just for personal and professional reasons but also to contribute to the socio-economic development of their city (2020, nguyen). integrating local culture into english classes would benefit students by providing new ways of language (nambiar et al., english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 383 2020) and giving local culture importance for character development ( murti et al., 2020). learning is a process of coordination between learners and the target situation where participants need to have a good understanding process (hutchinson & waters, 1987). it is critical to identify students' needs for a specific course in the classroom to create a living environment in teaching and learning. students are described as the first step to determine the students by the teacher; the qualifications, competencies, knowledge, and needs of teaching and learning processes. analysis of needs helps the teacher know whether the course content is relevant or not to the students. a target needs approach is used to identify needs, needs, and wishes with three considerations (hutchinson & waters, 1987). necessities belong to what the learners must understand the target situations effectively. the learners must know about the language characteristics – discourse, functionality, structure, and lexicon – commonly used in identified situations. lacks are part of the gap between target skills and existing skills. whether or not students need the instruction depends on how well they already can do it. wants is what students need from an english course for specific purposes (esp). english for specific purposes, commonly known as esp. the reason for esp's inclusion in the curriculum is mainly because many jobs or professions now require their employees or professionals to communicate fluently in english in the fields involved. there are two types of english in terms of use. they are general english, commonly used in daily communications, and esps that are used in a particular area or occupation. brown (2009) also describes nine types of analysis of language need. they are: (a) the objective analysis of the situation (tsa) concerning the information on language needs for the learner in language learning. the focus is a) on the aim and necessities of the students in learning language, (b) the deficiency analysis that considers current requirements and needs of the students and their target situations deficiencies or shortcomings, (c) the psa analysis that focuses on students' existing skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses, (d) the learning analysis that considers needs. there have been several studies on the need analysis for esp in terms of the design of curricula or the development of materials in indonesia at a certain level of education. some studies have examined the need analysis relating to esp in the design of curricula or the result of materials at a certain level of education in indonesia. rahamdina, harahap & sofyan (2019), vongvilay, kartika & laila (2020), azizah, inderawati & vianty (2020), septiana, petrus, & inderawati (2020), kumbara, eryansyah, & inderawati (2021). in other countries such as kayaoglu and akbas (2016), lee (2016), alsamadani (2017), chetsadanuwat (2018), and wu & low’ (2018). studies were also carried out .these inquiries show the necessity and inevitable function of analyzing the need to arrange instructions, design texts, or develop teaching materials. the students' problem, the knowledge or skills needed, or the teaching method to be used, could be identified by the need analysis. furthermore, the results of the need analysis reveals key considerations that must be made in order to meet the needs of the students. as previously stated, many studies show local culture for vocational schools, particularly the department of the tourism. some studies conducted local culture in reading materials (azizah, inderawati & vianty, 2020; checaria, petrus & inderawati, 2021; elviana, inderawati & mirizon, 2020; and nica, petrus & vianty, 2021). those studies focused on local culture-based-descriptive texts as supplementary material as reading text.(herawati, inderawati, & mirizon, 2020; checaria, petrus, & inderawati, 2021). nevertheless, this recent study has developed palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading material for tenth-grade students in the 21st century. high schools in indonesia are divided into senior high schools (general english), vocational high schools (specific english should be used), and islamic secondary schools (should use specific english). however, these schools have utilized general textbooks of english. specific materials as insisted by hutchinson & waters (1987) were proposed as specialist areas for professional students in workplaces. suyadi (2016) proposes to have specific teaching and learning material and methods for professional students in order to make english more useful for students' future professions. relevant to special materials, the researchers have investigated whether or not students of the travel agency need special materials to develop an english subject. the learner's needs for english function and practice determine the purpose and content of english, rather than on the objective of general yeni oktarina, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus needs analysis of palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading materials in the 21st century learning 384 education where english is a common occupational requirement or regulation for vocational secondary schools. it cannot be denied that all four language skills are needed for learning english; to listen, speak, read and write, moreover in this technological era. this statement involves that the teacher is responsible for managing these skills in an equal measurement, covering several text genres with various types of evaluation and studying purposes (mukminatien, 2009). more specifically, the english curriculum uses text-based curriculum 2013, which deals more with using the genre as a model text. each model text has its purpose of achieving the communication objective through its use. many genres are taught at the high school level; they are recount, procedural, descriptive, narrative, reporting, news, analytical, and hortatory exposure. the texts may be written or spoken about the ability to teach, listen, speak, write or read. the last skill to be mastered is that of the four skills. according to krashen & terrel (1983), reading contributes to four language skills. it means that the ability to read can develop other language skills. it is consistent with harmer (2001) statements that reading aids in studying vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and the structure of sentences, paragraphs, and texts. in today's world, reading is an important skill for english learners. it promotes overall skill growth and provides crucial knowledge at work and in school (komiyama, 2009). it means that students can gain a lot of information to support their learning activities by reading. in this regard, some studies have shown that reading comprehension is a problem in indonesia. for instance, indonesia is known to be unsatisfactory in reading. the oecd/pisa (2018) reports indicate that indonesian students were less able to read than others. it shows that indonesia ranks 72 out of 77 countries in terms of reading competencies. in the last 10 to 15 years, this value tends to be stagnant. the data show that reading literacy is still insufficient for adolescents in indonesia compared to other countries. the challenge facing educators today is to prepare students to learn, live and thrive in the dynamic, cluttered and chaotic information environment of the 21st-century learning world. industry 4.0 shapes the future of education, opening up our view and allowing us to examine what expertise and skills students should have following their college qualification (li, 2020). knowing how to learn from various sources of information is at the heart of what it means to be educated today. those of us working with children and young people are well aware of the impact the digital information environment has had on their lives. students need to think, learn, create, search, evaluate, and use the information for thinking, learning, and creating. a school must allow students to practice daily in all subjects of the curriculum. students need to see the connection between what they learn in school and the outside world that motivates and inspires them to do their best. the best strategy for a complex and changing future is learning how to contribute today. all students have learning experience preparing for their future. success today seems to be different than it did in the past. high-achieving individuals often chose to build their own work rather than participate in the conventional labor market. people who are successful expect to have a decent job and a wide range of skills to sustain their career. as a teacher, we have a duty to encourage students to make their dreams come true by educating and giving them the learners' knowledge and skills. in addition, learners do their best work when work is meaningful and affects the world. based on the above explanations, the researcher had to conduct a study in advance of the student requirements as a first stage of developing palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading materials for travel agency students from smk negeri 3 in palembang. there were similarities and differences in this study from several relevant previous studies. the main similarity was the student needs analysis investigation. the student level, english skills, and scope of the need analysis differed in some previous studies. the main difference was the palembang tourist destination's unique integrated local culture. tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis were all part of the students' needs analysis. the needs of students as seen by students in the travel agent and english teacher departments were examined in this need analysis. this study aimed to describe students', teachers', and stakeholders' perspectives in english reading materials based on student culture. method this study included tenth-grade students from travel agent majoring and english teacher from english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 385 smk negeri 3 palembang. there were 36 students from the majoring of travel agencies and an english teacher. a questionnaire and interviews obtained the data. the students received the questionnaire. there were 25 questions. tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis were used to categorize the questions. the interview was conducted with the english teacher and the palembang tourist destination's existing english reading materials and the development of english reading materials. the data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. to analyze the data from the questionnaire and interpret and explain the information from the interview, the quantitative method was used. results and discussion the students' needs viewed by the students the data on tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis were collected from the students. the highest percentages were presented in this paper that showed the students' answers in the questionnaire. target situation analysis (tsa) this section addressed the necessities, general intentions, and expectations of students in learning english. the collected data is shown in table 1. the main reasons for learning english from table 1 were communication (80.6 %) and supporting their future career (63.9 %). it was in accordance with the vocational high school's goals described in 2013 as english curriculum and the regulation of the indonesian national education ministry no. 20 year 2016. then the students expected to read english fluently in communication (72.2%). most of them can communicate with colleagues or tourists by learning english (66.7%). they should at least be beginners to support their english skills to support their careers (50%). as a result, to communicate with tourists, mainly orally, travel agency students had to learn about their study program, including their own local culture. as one of their future jobs, even domestic tourists from other countries had to explain and expose their own local culture. one approach is used to make people conscious that it is about their local culture. according to petrovska (2001), incorporating local culture into language teaching and learning would improve students' learning experiences and encourage them to learn the language. table 1. tsa views of students n o question/ statement students’ view perce ntage 1. the importance of learning english to interacting with other people to support a career in the future 80.6% 63.9% 2 the students’ expectation toward learning english to read good text and understand the content of the reading related to theirs study program (tourism services business) 66.7% 3 the language used for students career to do oral communication with colleagues or tourist 66.7% 4 the english proficiency level for students’ career beginner 50% deficiency analysis this section considered current needs and needs for students and deficiencies or shortcomings in their target situations. the data on the current needs and requirements of the students are shown in table 2. according to the results of the survey, 55.6% of students preferred reading materials that focused on their own local culture about tourist destination. the students might feel that this topic could support their program study. 80.6% of students wanted texts on the context of the travel agency's department of study. it has been shown that 58.3% of students believed that integrating topics related to the student's overall reading program knowledge was extremely important. besides, 61.1% of students responded that it was essential to their local culture, particularly about the palembang tourist destination. it is consistent with the conclusions of azizah, inderawati & vianty (2020), who researched the english needs of the tour and travel program at an smk in bangka. cultural tourism was one of the most important subjects covered in the students' reading. table 2. students' perspectives on current wants and needs n o question/ statement students’ view perce ntage 1 read topics of students' interest tourist destination 55.6% yeni oktarina, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus needs analysis of palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading materials in the 21st century learning 386 (palembangtouristdestination) 2 students’ desired input for reading texts related to the context of the travel agent department 80.6% 3 integration of the topic related to the student's general knowledge very important 58.3 % 4 integrating topics which were related to local culture about palembangtouristdestination for reading important 61.1% furthermore, the students' view of integrating local culture into the reading helped them for some reasons, as shown in figure 1. it showed that most students believed that incorporating local cultures in reading materials could encourage their motivation to learn english (nambiar, et al., 2020; ainsworth, et.al., 2020). integrating the culture of palembang, especially about tourist destinations, also enhances their knowledge about their own culture. instead of reading, there will be less inclined to read if there is a lack of student interest in particular topics. learning english will motivate them. offering reading materials, their abilities of reading could be effectively improved. according to the research done by dehghan & sadighi (2011), students who were familiar with that specific area performed significantly better than others who were non-familiar with the topic. in order to improve students' reading comprehension. furthermore, yousef, karimi, and janfeshan, (2014), and wulandari, vianty, and fiftinova (2018) reported local culture can be used as learning resources. one effective way to increase students' motivation in learning a language in the class is by using local culture in the relevant situation (fu, 2018). figure 1. students' perspectives on the importance of incorporating local culture into reading materials aspects of the local culture can be seen in the two figures below. most of the students (55.6%) needed to learn local culture related to the tourist destination. the other aspects of local culture that they need were folklores (52.8%), traditional clothes, traditional equipment, food, and customs (47.2%), and art (41.7%). thus, this data could be necessary about the kinds of culture that should be integrated into developing the reading material. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 387 figure 2. the aspects of local culture need with the lack of students, they found some struggles in learning how to read. the results shown in table 3 show that there are lots of student difficulties. based on the statistics, the reading ability of students was not satisfactory. understanding certain words have been categorized as the most difficult skill (55.6%). the other difficulties are deciding on main ideas (45.5%) and comprehending details (41.7%). the least difficulties were about concluding cause and effect and chronological order or event (33.3%). thus, it was suggested that when developing reading materials, be sure to take both content and reading comprehension into account. figure 3. students’ difficulties in reading skill present situation analysis this section focused on the students' english proficiency, materials learned, and the students' local cultural knowledge. the students' views on their english capabilities could be seen in table 3. the vast majority of students (72.2%) admitted that their english proficiency was at the beginning level. in this way, 48.6 % of students surveyed found that their current reading proficiency was good enough. according to the data gathered, it appears that advanced reading materials could improve the students' english proficiencies, such as reading skills, to a higher level as needed to support their career in the future. table 3. the english language abilities of the students no question/ statement students’ view perce ntage 1. the current level of english proficiency beginner 72.2 % among the students 2. the students' current level of comprehension of the reading text enough 48.6 % the students' view on the existing reading materials learned or provided at school could be seen from the data presented in table 4. the reading text level in english course books used was considered difficult by 50% of the students. however, 61.1% of students felt that the topics were interesting. 63.9% of students thought that the text commonly found or learned in learning english was descriptive text. it means that the students did not typically learn much or find about other texts. according to the data, narrative (61.1%), argumentation (36.1%), and recount (30.6%) were among the other texts learned while learning english. according to the findings, students rarely learn about recount text, despite the fact that it is required as reading material because they need it in their study program to develop their knowledge. yeni oktarina, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus needs analysis of palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading materials in the 21st century learning 388 then, some students stated that sometimes english teachers provided reading materials or texts and the questions related to the general knowledge of students' study program for reading. meanwhile, 58.3% of students stated that english teachers sometimes provided reading materials or texts and the questions related to palembang local culture for reading. it could be concluded that the students rarely got the reading materials related to their own local culture. table 4. the existing materials learned and provided n o question/ statement students’ view perce ntage 1 the difficulty level of reading texts in english coursebook difficult 50% 2 the topics of reading texts in english coursebook interesting 61.1% 3 the kind of text commonly found or learned in learning english descriptive 63.9% 4 the frequency of english teacher provided reading materials or texts and the questions about palembang tourist destination sometimes 52.8% 5 the frequency of english teacher provided reading materials or texts and the questions related to local culture for reading sometimes 58.3% the view of the students on their current knowledge about local culture could be seen from the data available in table 5 below. 58.3% of students estimated that their knowledge about local culture was good. the aspects of local culture that the students know most were about tourist destinations (80.6%). 58.3% of students stated that they knew the local culture just from media online. 57.1% of the students just knew the local culture in their place and the closer districts. then, 66.7% of them admitted that their knowledge about local culture was still about general information. by having this data, it was obvious that presented local culture to the students' materials in learning was needed. table 5. the students’ local culture knowledge n o question/ statement students’ view percent age 1 students’ knowledge about local culture good 58.3% 2 the aspects of local culture that the students know tourist destination 80.6% 3 the way students know about local culture from online media 58.3% 4 the scope of local culture that the students know in the students’ place and the closer districts 57.1% 5 the students’ knowledge level of local culture general information 66.7% based on the students' view on their knowledge about local culture, there were several things that the students thought they could do to preserve and develop the local culture. the activities that the students could do could be seen in figure 4. figure 4. the students’ activities in preserving local culture english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 389 based on the data obtained, 75 % of students could preserve and develop their local culture by enlarging the knowledge about local culture and implementing local culture in daily life (61.1%). this data showed that the students had the intention to know better and preserve their local culture. hence, developing local-culture-based reading materials can be a way to enlarge their knowledge and encourage their awareness of the existence of their own local culture and help them culturally literate (checaria, petrus, & inderawati, 2021). strategy analysis this part presented the students' preference in learning reading. the data obtained is showed in figure 5. the figure shows 72.2% of students preferred to comprehend the text by translating. then the other ways of learning reading by discussing the content of the text in a group (55.6%) and reading and answering the questions related to the text individually (36.1%). then, 22.2% of students prefer to read aloud with correct pronunciation, and 33.3% of students were interested in analyzing new vocabulary based on the context. the students' preference in learning reading should be considered as the strategy to help them to learn (rhahima, et al., 2021; tenridinanti, et al., 2021). fi gure 5. students’ preference in leaning reading the students' need viewed by the english teachers to learn more about the students' needs, an interview with a tenth-grade english teacher was conducted. based on the outcome of the english teacher's interview, the findings revealed that students' reading competence was poor due to the pandemic, which caused them to lose motivation to learn english and also their background, students' proficiency in english was low, followed by their reading interest, and the time allocated for english subject was insufficient (approximately 35 minutes for each meet). the english teacher then agreed that it was critical to integrate certain topics related to general knowledge into the students' reading study program. it was the same situation with the integration topics for reading related to local culture; the teacher agreed that it was required. based on the findings of the interview, all english teachers never assess their students' reading ability. one of the factors could be that the reading materials used did not correspond to the students' reading level. almost all english teachers agreed that they do need more reading resources that are suitable for their students' reading levels and meet their needs. as a result, students' reading achievement is still unsatisfactory and needs to be improved. conclusion english, as one of the most important subjects at smk is a foreign language that students should master and a means that can help students in the workplace. all materials used for the english reading for travel agent students should support their needs in the future. to figure out the students' needs, the first thing that has to be done is students' needs analysis. some important strategies for students should be yeni oktarina, rita inderawati, & ismail petrus needs analysis of palembang-tourist-destination recount text reading materials in the 21st century learning 390 highlighted based on the results of identifying and analysing the students' needs as reviewed by students and teachers. based on the findings, english is important for students to communicate and support their future careers, but there are some students still have difficulty reading comprehension. in learning english at school, the students just commonly knew about the descriptive text. it means that a recount text is required, that english reading materials must be integrated with content subject materials, and 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(2014). the relationship between cultural background and reading comprehension. theory and practice in language studies, 4(4), 707-714. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 793 ‘we all are perfectly imperfect’: an interpersonal metafunction of muniba mazari’s speech in a case on systemic functional linguistics narambean simanjuntak department of english education, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: marambean.simanjuntak@student.uhn.ac.id rodia mestina simaremare department of english education, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: rodia.simaremare@student.uhn.ac.id nanda saputra department of indonesian education, stit al-hilal sigli, aceh, indonesia email: nandasaputra680@gmail.com magdalena ngongo department of english education, universitas kristen artha wacana, kupang email: magdalenangongo12@gmail.com herman (corresponding author) department of english education, universitas hkbp nommensen pematangsiantar, pematang siantar, indonesia email: herman@uhn.ac.id apa citation: simanjuntak, n., simaremare, r. m., saputra, n., ngongo, m., & herman. (2022). ‘ we all are perfectly imperfect’: an interpersonal metafunction of muniba mazari’s speech in case on systemic functional linguistics. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 793-800. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6326 received: 29-06-2022 accepted: 22-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction language is used by humans to converse with each other. humans require language as a means of communication and understanding the knowledge of others who speak various languages. everyone uses language especially in daily activities, in order to communicate well with others, such as reading, writing, and listening, as well as talking to ourselves and thinking. according to herman et al. (2020), language is very important in human life because it allows people to communicate with others, through language, people can exchange knowledge, express their emotions, trusts, aspirations, giving suggestions and share information with one another (simanjuntak et al., 2021). it is difficult to envision humans carrying out these activities without abstract: this study aims to find out the elements of the interpersonal function used in muniba mazari's speech and to find out the most dominant elements of interpersonal function. the source of data takes from a video of muniba mazari's speech that was examined by the researcher. the data of this research are clauses that have an element of interpersonal function spoken by muniba mazari’s speech. the instrument of data collection used is documentation in the form of video recording, and for technique of data collection is documentation method. to analyze the data involves four steps namely: data collection, data condensation, data display, and the last conclusion drawing. based on the result findings of this research, the frequency of the subject 231 (25,41%), finite 173 (19,03%), while residue elements predicator 204 (22,44%), complement 189 (20,79%), circumtantial adjunct 40 (4,40%), conjunctive adjunct 32 (3,53%), comment adjunct 25 (2,75%), and the last mood adjunct 15 (1,65%). the result showed the most dominant element interpersonal function structure used in muniba mazari’s speech is subject with the total percentage is 25,41%. based on the results it can be concluded that this research can be used as insight and useful as a model to discuss interpersonal functions in a speech. and the researcher hopes that readers can increase their knowledge when conducted analyzing interpersonal functions in a speech because it is very important to know the meaning of each clause conveyed. keywords: interpersonal metafunction; speech; systemic functional linguistics. narambean simanjuntak, rodia mestina simaremare, nanda saputra, magdalena ngongo, & herman ‘we all are perfectly imperfect’: an interpersonal metafunction of muniba mazari’s speech in case on systemic functional linguistics 794 language. language is meaningful, if meaning can be conveyed through language, because basically people interact with other people using language with the aim of influencing behavior and word expression (ngongo et al., 2022). this means that the person must convey a message to others. language is something that a specific society has spoken. according to sibarani (2017), humans are social creatures who require interaction and communication with other people in order to meet their needs. therefore, language can be used to interact with others and perform interpersonal function. language allows us to express our emotions and thoughts, because everyone has their own ideas and feelings that require another person opinion, using language allows them to easily transfer their own ideas and build good communication with others (nasution et al., 2022). so, without language it is difficult to imagine how humans can work together and get along with each other and language cannot be separated from human life, because it is a communication tool. language is very functional in communication (purba and herman, 2020). communication is one of the main roles that are very important in carrying out daily human activities. communication can also be interpreted by sharing or exchanging information, thoughts, with other people. according to wentker and schneider (2022), communication is a process of conveying shared understanding or information from one person to another. fatmawati et al. (2022) stated that humans carry out communication activities for various purposes, such as obtaining needed information from people who interact with them, processing information between communicators and recipients who use messages and generate feedback (simanjuntak et. al., 2022). as well as in the world of education, communication is also important because in education it is very necessary to interact with each other to establish cooperation between friends in addition to being able to express opinions using communication tools. in short, a communication will be successful if there is no misinterpretation. communication also is part of speech. in other words, people can express themselves through their speech, people can transfer their own idea, message, opinion by speech. speech is delivered in the form of words or speech that allows two-way communication. according to carnegie (2018), public speaking activities include presentations, deliberation, speeches, and campaigns. so there is an oral transmitter in the form of a speaker and a receiver in the form of a listener or audiences. the term speech has several meanings that can be interpreted in various ways. the speaker will speak in front of the audience to convey a problem and achieve certain goals in a speech, so that when delivering a speech, he must have good communication skills so that the listener can understand what the speaker means (nosa et al., 2021). motivational speech is a speech that tells someone's story with the aim of inspiring or motivating the audience. this speech can also be interpreted as a speech with a public message. for example, you could live happily with all of your flaws. a speech that recounts the life of a character who can serve as a role model for the audience. speaker typically share stories in a variety of formats, such as experiences, places, stories, and specific people who compel listeners to act. speaker can recognize speech as correct information that will be associated with their knowledge (sinurat et al., 2021). therefore, the first assumption that will be formed by the listener is based on how the speaker conveys information to the listener. in addition, the sentences used by the speaker must be structured so that listeners can more easily understand the content of the message to be conveyed. in a communication process, speaker can insert an implied meaning or message. when talking about language in communication, there is a language theory that states that the function of language has a structured language function. this theory was developed by m.a.k. halliday and proposed a theory named systemic functional linguistic (sfl). within the scope of sfl, there is a basic understanding called metafunction, halliday (1994) in ngongo and ngongo (2022) state that metafunctions have three functional components which he distinguished early on in its development, namely ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function (forisman, 2019). in this research, the researchers chose to discuss about the interpersonal function. according to halliday and matthiessen (2004), the interpersonal function is related to how people use language to communicate with others. because when people initiate human interactions, they predict a series of speech roles that are remembered as giving and demanding, which embody the choice between the exchange of information, exchanging goods and services (herman et al., 2019). according to herman et al. (2021), sentence are considered as part of the interaction between speaker and listener. language is regarded as a means of reflection in a context. the traces of interpersonal context that appear in the text are english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 795 referred to as interpersonal function. clauses are classified as mood elements and residue in interpersonal functions, with mood element has two components, namely: subject and finite. nominal groups are commonly used to represent subject. finite as an explanation of time or to state tense (sihombing et al., 2022). according to jing (2021), in the interpersonal function, the subject and finite clauses are very important in word order because they determine whether the clause is declarative, interrogative, or imperative allowing the listener to understand the meaning of the sentence, while the residue element has three components, namely: predicator, complement, and adjunct (saputra et al., 2022). predicator in interpersonal function are used to tell what is being done or happening in the subject, complement is to explain a verb (predicator) done by the subject, while adjunct is a word used to add a description to a sentence (herman et al., 2022). language is used in the interpersonal function to express the speaker's attitude and judgment about how to interact with others. the expression of meaning in words is called mood. the grammatical structure of a clause can reveal its mood. declarative mood is used for statements, interrogative mood for questions, and imperative mood for commands (ngongo et al., 2022). according to halliday and matthiessen (2004), the roles of speaker and listener are created and maintained in speech by evaluating the certainty of what is said in the clause while operating in interpersonal function. even though the interpersonal function theory uses systemic functional linguistics (sfl), not everyone knows these elements and this theory is not perfect in every language. based on the researchers’ experience when watched video muniba mazari speech, there are some reasons why the researchers conducted this research. the first reason is muniba mazari always conveys motivational messages to the public, so it is related to the interpersonal, because the interpersonal function is the interaction between the speaker and the listener who conveys a message, so the meaning of the message conveyed is very important for listeners to understand. the second because as one of the new linguistic studies called systemic functional linguistic (sfl), the researcher is very interested to analyze the form of muniba mazari’s speech by using interpersonal function studies. and the last reason is the speech delivered by muniba mazari speech did not match the wording structure, so the utterances conveyed are ambiguous for listeners. for the example: “i completely different person right now”. according to chefor (2019), the element interpersonal function are very important in wording, because the mood and residue of the clause determined whether a declarative clause, interrogative clause or imperative, so that the meaning of the sentence is understood by the listener. here an example of element interpersonal function in muniba mazari’s speech table 1. example of mood and residue in muniba mazari speech i bad news for you subject complement from the example above, that said by muniba mazari, in accordance with the theory of halliday and matthiessen (2004) state that interpersonal function has two elements, namely mood and residue. in short, it can be concluded that the mood element is made up of subject (i) because a nominal namely person whereas the residue is made up of complement (bad news for you), because the function of complement is to explain what the subject has done or explain the predicator. to approve the originality of this study, the researchers presented previous studies that have been done by a researcher wintara (2020) entitled “interpersonal function analysis in bangtan boys (bts) speech at unga 2020”. this research presents a brief discussion of interpersonal function that focus on the type of mood used in bts speech. this study used the qualitative method. the difference between this journal and the title of this research is that has a different object of research and problem formulation, because object of this research is muniba mazari speech, and the problem formulation of the research focused on the interpersonal function element such as mood and residue, while this journal only focused on mood. in this research, there are similarities between the researcher topic and this journal namely talking about interpersonal function the second same using halliday theory, so the researcher can use this journal as a reference to understand how to analyze the topics owned by researcher. method this research employs descriptive qualitative research to analyze and elaborate data as text in the form of clauses. this qualitative research seeks to comprehend and capture the essence of a phenomenon in a social context through close communication and interaction between researchers and the phenomenon under investigation. as a result, the researcher can narambean simanjuntak, rodia mestina simaremare, nanda saputra, magdalena ngongo, & herman ‘we all are perfectly imperfect’: an interpersonal metafunction of muniba mazari’s speech in case on systemic functional linguistics 796 present the framework of any text available from the research process. according denzin and lincoln (2017), qualitative research is a process that investigates and comprehends the meaning that various individuals or groups of people ascribe to social or humanitarian issues (herman et al., 2020). qualitative research seeks to understand how a theory operates in various phenomena, with data collected in the form of words rather than numbers. furthermore, according to creswell and creswell (2018), defined research whose results are obtained without using statistical procedures or other forms of calculation is called qualitative research. the researcher describes the types of mood and residue in this study, and the second to find out the most dominant element of interpersonal function structure in muniba mazari's speech based on systemic functional linguistic (sfl). object of the descriptive qualitative research consists of data and source of data. the data of this research are clauses that have an element of interpersonal function spoken by muniba mazari speech. in this research the source of data was taken from video of muniba mazari's speech that will be examined by the researcher. the statement contained in muniba mazari's speech entitled "we are all perfectly imperfect" that was uploaded on july 7, 2018 on youtube. which lasted 39 minutes and 31 seconds. an instrument is a tool to gather information, according to creswell (2010:84), in qualitative research, the data contained in the instrument was used to fulfill the objectives of this research. the instrument use is documentation in the form of video recording to watch muniba mazari's speech, phone and determine the element of interpersonal function and the most dominant element of interpersonal function structure in muniba mazari's speech. furthermore, the video aided the research by providing a visual representation of what actually occurred. according to phakiti et al. (2018), there are five kinds of method in collecting data, they are questionnaire, interview, observation, test, and documentation. based on this statement, the researcher was use the documentation method. documentation is a data collection method that involves gathering information in the form of written documents. in order to get an understanding of the phenomenon under study, qualitative researcher use written documents or other objects. to obtain data for this research, the researcher collects the data through some steps as follows: (1) searching on youtube ‘we are all perfectly imperfect’ by muniba mazari speech. (2) downloading the video of muniba mazari’s speech from youtube. (3) watching and listening the video by focusing on interpersonal function in muniba mazari speech. (4) and the last, transcribing the utterances from video in to written text. this study discussed about analysis interpersonal function in muniba mazari's speech. according to purba et. al. (2021), to analyze the data involves four steps namely: data collection, data condensation, data display, and the last conclusion drawing. in data collection the researcher was use the documentation method. documentation is a data collection method that involves gathering information in the form of written documents. this data condensation leads a process of selecting, focusing, classifying, and transforming the data. the data through these processes: (1) selecting, the researcher selected the data by searching on youtube “we are all perfectly imperfect” by muniba mazari’s speech, after that downloading the video, and then the researcher watching and listening the video of muniba mazari’s speech. (2) focusing, in this stage the researcher focusing on element interpersonal funtion in muniba mazari speech after that transcribing the utterances from video in to written text. (3) classifying, in this stage the researcher classifying the uttarance based on element of interpersonal function such as mood and residue element. (4) transforming, the data was transformed into table form so it can be displayed. a display is a set of information that has been organized and compressed that allowing conclusion drawing and the action (purba et. al., 2022). the researcher describes the analysis of interpersonal function by showing a number of clauses in muniba mazari's speech as representatives for elaborating the explanation of interpersonal function elements such as mood and residue. the researcher also presented the data in analysis, which showed in the form table so that the readers can understand it easily. the conclusion will be made based on the finding data analysis and then verified through existing theory. in order to answer the problems of this research, the researcher explained the analysis result by drawing a conclusion. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 797 figure 1. interactive data analysis model by miles and huberman (2014, p.33) counting the realization of interpersonal function that mostly used by muniba mazari’s speech. using the formula: where: x = the percentage of interpersonal function f = the frequency of each element n = the total of number of element interpersonal results and discussion the data of this research are clauses that have an element of interpersonal function spoken by muniba mazari speech. based on the data analysis that has been done, the researcher found the following findings: when the element interpersonal function namely mood elements has two components such as subject, finite and residue has three components namely: predicator, complement and the last adjunct have identified, the researcher found out the results presented in the table below: table 2. the results of mood elements no. mood elements frequency percentage (%) 1. subject 231 25.41% 2. finite 173 19.03% total 404 44.44% based on the table 2 above, there are 404 mood elements was analyzed in this research the mood elements were subject and finite in the speech. table 3. the results of residue elements no. residue elements freque ncy percentage (%) 1. predicator 204 22.44% 2. complement 189 20.79% 3. circumtantial adjunct 40 4.40% 4. conjunctive adjunct 32 3.52% 5. comment adjunct 25 2.75% 6. mood adjunct 15 1.65% total 505 55.55% there are 505 residue elements was analyzed in this research the residue elements predicator, complements, circumtantial adjunct, conjunctive adjunct, comment adjunct and the last is mood adjunct in the speech. based on data analysis that has been done, the researchers found that there were 235 clauses that have an elements of interpersonal function in muniba mazari’s speech, subject there are 231 (25.41%), finite 173 (19.03%), predicator 204 (22.44%), complement 189 (20.79%), circumtantial adjunct 40 (4.40%), conjunctive adjunct 32 (3.52%), comment adjunct 25 (2.75%), mood adjunct 15 (1.65%) found in this research. the most dominant element of interpersonal function namely the subject 231 (25.41%) because almost all clause has a subject and there are several clauses conveyed by muniba mazari's speech using more than one subject in one clause. the subject is one of the components of the most dominant mood element in muniba mazari's speech, because she wants to explain who is the main actor of the speech statement delivered, so that with the subject the listener or audiens will more easily understand who is meant in the speech. in addition, in the speech she told about his life story that can be used as an inspiration for the community, and we can also find out that the elements of interpersonal function in a clause or sentence are mood and residue. from the explanation, the findings of the element interpersonal function can be shown in the chart: narambean simanjuntak, rodia mestina simaremare, nanda saputra, magdalena ngongo, & herman ‘we all are perfectly imperfect’: an interpersonal metafunction of muniba mazari’s speech in case on systemic functional linguistics 798 figure 2. chart the element interpersonal function based on the chart above, the researcher showed the percentage of the element interpersonal function in muniba mazari’s speech with details, the result of the subject (25.41%), finite (19.03%), predicator (22.44%), complement (20.79%), circumtantial adjunct 40 (4.40%), conjunctive adjunct 32 (3,52%), comment adjunct 25 (2.75%), mood adjunct 15 (1.65%). in accordance with the results of the analysis that has been obtained, the researcher would like to discuss more deeply about the interpersonal function. researchers found elements of interpersonal function in accordance with halliday's theory, namely: mood and residue element, where the mood element has two components. first, subject is used to explain object or person who performs the action in the clause, second, finite which is used to describe the auxiliary or tense. while residue has three components. first, predicator is used to explain what the subject does, second, complement is used to complete the meaning of the subject or predicator, and the last adjunct. in this research there are 4 types of adjuncts, first is circumstantial adjunct which is used to describe place, time, manner, cause etc, second conjunctive adjunct is used to connect a clause with another clause, third comment adjunct is used to explain the meaning of the clause, and the last is the mood adjunct which is describes a habit, an obligation. this finding shows that the frequency subject 231 with the percentage 25.41%, finite 173 with the percentage 19.03%, predicator 204 with the percentage 22.44%, complement 189 with the percentage 20.79%, and the last circumtantial adjunct 40 (4.40%), conjunctive adjunct 32 (3.52%), comment adjunct 25 (2.75%), mood adjunct 15 (1.65%). based on the result, subject part of the mood element is very prominent so muniba mazari here is a speaker who tells the story of his own life to the listener, a woman who delivers her lecture which emphasizes more on who is meant or the main character in the content of her speech. from the results obtained in this research, there are 235 clauses that have elements of interpersonal function by use theory systemic functonal linguistic (sfl). and this analysis aims to find out how to determine the interpersonal function elements in a sentence or clause in a written text, researcher can also find that in written text or speech not all sentences have components such as finite and complements. and an element that is rarely used in muniba mazari's speech is adjunct because muniba mazari focuses on who is meant in his speech. and this finding is useful for linguists who have an interest in discourse analysis. there is previous research that discusses interpersonal function. the research is from wintara 2022, entitled: analysis of interpersonal function in sry mulyani's speech. the objectives of this previous research is to analyze the interpersonal function through the mood element used in sry mulyani's speech and to find out the speech function in sry mulyani’s speech. this previous research used descriptive qualitative as a research design that is used to obtain or collect data through the documentation method. the results of data analysis showed that in the mood element there were subjects 141, finite 158. while in the residue element there were predicators 117, complements 122, mood adjunct 27, circumtantial english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 799 adjuncts 75, conjunctive adjuncts 67. and the results for analysis of speech function there are 13 commands, 11 questions, and 135 statements. there are some contrasts the previous research with this research. first, the objectives of this research, to find out the interpersonal function elements used by muniba mazari such as mood, residue, and the most dominant elements used, while the previous research was to analyze interpersonal functions and find speech functions used in sry mulyani speech, second the previous research analysis the interpersonal function in sry mulyani speech, while this research analysis interpersonal function in muniba mazari’s speech. the similarities this research and previous research are both of research use descriptive qualitative research, both of research use documentation method to collect the data, and the last same use halliday's theory. based on the result discussion, the researcher hopes that readers can increase their knowledge when conducted analyzing interpersonal functions in a speech, because it is very important to know the meaning of each clause conveyed. conclusion based on the research finding and after analyzing the data about interpersonal function in muniba mazari’s speech, there are several conclusions that can be drawn as follows: the element of interpersonal function namely mood and residue structure use un muniba mazari’s speech, there are subject, finite, while for residue elements there are predicator, complement and the last adjunct. the frequency mood elements subject 231, finite 173, while residue elements predicator 204, complement 189, and then circumtantial adjunct 40 (4.40%), conjunctive adjunct 32 (3.52%), comment adjunct 25 (2.75%), mood adjunct 15 (1.65%). the result showed the most dominant element interpersonal function structure used in muniba mazari’s speech is subject in mood element. the total precentage of subject element is 25.41% and then followed by the predicator (22.44%), complement (20.79%), finite (19.03%) and the last adjunct (12.31%). based on the results it can be concluded that this research can be used as insight and useful as a model to discuss interpersonal functions in a speech. and the researcher hopes that readers can increase their knowledge when conducted analyzing interpersonal functions in a speech because it is very 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(2012). the dilemma of multilingualism in iran. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 6-16 received: 09-08-2012 accepted: 12-10-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: iran is a multilingual country with linguistic and cultural diversity. minority languages such as turkish, kurdish, baluchi and arabic are spoken in iran which constitutes part of the culture and ethnic identity. iranian community is dominantly a bilingual community. persian as an official language used as linguistic and cultural homogenization while minority languages are not used in education system. the controversy bilingual education and programs to serve language minority students is complex and puzzling for education authorities. on the other hand one of the challenges iranian faces is how to reconcile conflicting perspectives of bilingual education regarding globalizing of english. currently, most of parents prefer their children to learn english as it is the language of business, aviation and scientific research. in contrast according to iran’s comprehensive scientific plan, persian should be scientific language of the world in the near future. in this research, challenges, perspectives and solutions of bilingual education in iran were analyzed. the results indicate that conflicting of minority, majority and international language is an important challenge and developing, promotion and expansion of persian is a future outlook. furthermore some suggestions and solutions to reconcile bilingual education were made. keywords: bilingual education, minority, majority and international language introduction it has been estimated that approximately two-third of the world’s population is either bilingual or multilingual; that is, more than half the people in the world routinely use two or more languages in their daily communication. multilingualism and multiculturalism are social facts of this new century, which can be seen in most classrooms and playgrounds. people use the term bilingualism in different ways. for some, it means an equal ability to communicate in two languages. for others, it simply means the ability to communicate in two languages, but with greater skills in one language. in fact, it is more common for bilingual people, even those who have been bilingual since birth, to be somewhat dominant in one language. calling someone a bilingual is therefore an umbrella term. underneath the umbrella rest many different skill levels in two languages. being bilingual is not just about proficiency in two languages. there is a difference between ability and use of language. someone may be quite competent in two languages, yet rarely or never use one of those languages. such a person has bilingual ability but does not act or behave bilingually. iran, a multicultural society, is home to a number of language communities speaking turkish, kurdish, and arabic languages among others. many children learn and speak their first language at home and study all of their courses in persian throughout their education. it means that many children mailto:rmkalantari@gmail.com english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee didn't receive any education in their native languages; the majority of the students were members of an ethnic or linguistic minority, whereas the school was dominated by the mainstream language and culture. it means that educational curriculum is based on persian, the majority language. based on this evidence, it can be said that this curriculum not only been ineffective for the non-persian speaking students, but it also has created a problem of bilingualism of home and school for the non-persian speaking populations. it seems that bilingual in iran is kind of subtractive bilingualism. unlike additive bilingual that a child is allowed to develop a certain language, s/he is learning in a community where both languages and cultures are valued, then the child is most likely to develop additive bilingualism in the sense that the second language and culture are added to the first language and culture and both l1 and l2 complement and enrich each other. one the other hand, subtractive bilingualism means that the child learns a second language at the expense of the first, and in this case the learning of l2 deletes or subtracts l1. according to arefi and alizadeh (2008) being bilingual in iran doesn’t help them to develop cognitive development because of all of the children come from subtractive bilingual programs which may have mitigated and potentially positive impact the children’s bilingualism might have had on cognitive development. khadivi (2010) states that as long as one can become a balanced bilingual; reach the third floor (high level) of proficiency, one can benefit from more positive effects. the purpose of the present paper is to make the case for the need to address the problem, and seek a rational solution to it. the specific research questions that the present study addresses are the following: 1. what is the language planning policy in iran? 2. what is the status of minority languages in iran? 2. what are language challenges in iran? 3. what are language perspectives in iran? 4. to what extend persian can be an important scientific lingua franca in the world? bilingualism of home and school in iran has even been recognized as a problem by the very curriculum planners at the national level. it can also be argued that bilingualism is a problem because it, or the national planners' concocted solution, does not necessarily lead to balanced bilingualism and may even cause dilemmas that could be harmful. as such, bilingualism of home and school in iran creates serious challenges for the iranian educational system. the first challenge that iranian educators face is shown by the two international studies that iran has participated in: timss and pirls. in both studies iranian students ranked almost last. in the international reading comprehension study of 1970 iran ranked 14th among fifteen participating countries, and in pirls 2001, 32nd among the 35 participating countries (karimi, 2003). at the same time iranian bilingual students got lower scores than monolingual in reading comprehension test (karimi and kabiri, 2010). the bilingualism seems to have contributed to the high rate of retention and grade repetition. therefore, the use of minority languages is the need for revamping the educational system in order to bridge the identified gaps. the second challenge refers to sociopolitical factors. majority languages don’t play any role in iran's education system. the challenge arises when these majority languages are major or official language in neighborhood countries. every one is bilingual. that is, there is no one in the world who does not know at least a few words in languages other than the maternal variety. iranian non-persian children face some problems, the grade repetition and retention rates among these populations are higher, as are the dropout rates, in comparison with the persian speaking population. an example is in the largest turkish (azary) speaking province, the repetition rate is much higher in first grade compared to the fifth, countryside compared with the cities, and in areas less exposed to persian (due to lack of electricity/television) than other areas. addeeb (1993) has also found that among all school subjects, the language courses have a greater contribution to grade failure/repetition than non-language courses. given the bilingualism problem, both the educational system and the individual teachers have been challenged to come up with some sort of solution. analyzing bilingualism and given the experience of other countries similar to iran in population composition and the case for implementation of some form of bilingual education must be made what this paper addresses. review of literature iran is a home for many cultural/linguistic groups speaking persian, turkish, arabic, and kurdish. yet the official language for school instruction is persian, the language of the majority groups, creating a problem of bilingualism of home and school for millions of non-persian speaking children. according to article 15 of the iranian constitution which emphasizes the basic right of all these language groupings to use their mother tongues in their schools and in the promotion of their native cultures but the national educational and curriculum planners do not seem to put much stock in the latter part of the said article. from a dialectical constructivist perspective, language is considered to be a significant social tool for overall development (vygotsky, 1978). children's construction of knowledge is initially guided by their mother tongue and then by the language of formal instruction if it is in fact other than their first language. however, if the child learns and uses two languages simultaneously, i.e. if he/she is bilingual, the two languages would collectively provide an even better tool for development. until the 1960s, it was commonly assumed that bilingual students who were learning in their second language must inevitably have been at a disadvantage. this notion began to be challenged in the 1970s and 1980s. a closer examination of the results of bilingual students across various subject areas, including mathematics, showed inconsistent results. although it seemed to be true at times that bilingual students as a whole did not perform as well as their monolingual peers, there were also some results that showed bilinguals excelled. there are a number of notions that need to be considered: whether the students are balanced bilinguals, the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee level of proficiency that the bilinguals have in each of their languages, and the environment in which they learn. balanced bilinguals are bilinguals who have equal proficiency in their languages. bilingualism of home and school is a worldwide phenomenon and as such has been dealt with rather positively in countries like singapore, canada, switzerland, and many more, through introduction of some system of bilingual or multilingual education (lambert, genesee, holobow, and chartrand, 1993). students in singapore, a country with four official languages, face no difficulties in regards to bilingualism of home and school. the same can be said about china wherein the curriculum planning has been successful in remedying the problems that existed in this area. in contrast it is problematic in other countries even in europe. bilingualism in iran the current population of iran is more than 75 million people which makes it on the most populous countries in the middle east contains whiten itself different languages and ethnic minorities. yet the official instructional language of all iranians is persian, the language of the majority grouping. the second greatest language grouping in iran is that of the turkish speaking people, the authors are members of this group; their community size in the northwestern provinces of iran is fairly large and comparable to the number of persianspeaking area. if it is not the majority group in the whole of iran; the azerbaijanis are clearly both the majority and the culturally dominant group in the northwestern part of the country. kurdish, arabic, and baluchi are spoken in iran too. surely, there are smaller groups who have no specific geographical location like armenians and aasooryans speaking people. an interesting point in iran is that some of the provinces in this country are named based on the dominant culturallinguistic group residing in them (e.g., fars, kordestan, lorestan, baluchestan, etc.). we should note that most regional languages are related to persian and belong to a larger iranian family, a branch of indo-european. turkish, the major non-iranian language, spoken in the northwestern part of the country, is greatly different from persian and is branch of altaic language. in some parts of the country, this linguistic diversity coupled with religious differences has led to ethno-political difference (e.g. in the province of kurdistan). for a long time, bilingualism was considered a negative factor threatening the national unity in iran (afshar 1989). now it is going to be appreciated that the different cultures, languages, and varieties that coexist in iran and are acquired in the natural process of socialization constitute an important part of the national wealth, and that cultural-linguistic diversity can be a valued resource for continued social development and renovation and the maintenance of social health in a rapidly changing society. since the minority languages are not used in education system it has made some educational problems. educational authorities proposed different solutions such as a month-long special course for non-persian speaking children. but it can hardly be adequate for this purpose, as it cannot make up for the six-year long exposure to the mother tongue. more ever, the absence of the native language from the curriculum during the school years is certainly not a step toward such bilingualism. on the contrary, this would lead to what santrock (2002) has called semilingualism, or lack of proficiency in either one of the two languages. according to hameedy (2005) the academic gap between the persian and non-persian speaking students have not been bridged even after four years of schooling. language planning in iran the literature on language planning and language policy is extensive and includes both theoretical studies and rapidly expanding case studies of specific language policy and planning efforts in various parts of the worlds. language planning has been in existence, as a field of inquiry; for six decades but it did not become a sharply salient issue until sociolinguistics began to focus attention on the speech forms, problems, and aspire solve these problems. in the past decades, language planning attracted increasing attention toward research. language planning in iran has emphasized the need for persian to have a well-defined language policy that integrate the status of persian in the psyches of iranian and be aware of the use and spread of foreign language. in the united kingdom prior to the 1980's when the general policy of the educational system was that of single language instruction as well as the benign policy of linguistic assimilation (paulston, 1988), the same type of policies, it can be said, is still used in iran. there is no policy of supporting the majority languages in education system and priority is not given in teacher training, curriculum development and school time tables to local languages, regardless of supporting them in the media such as newspaper, tv and radio. iran is a bilingual country and as a brief chronology illustrates, modern education in iran is relatively young. despite the educational system of centuries ago, the first modern school is no more than 150 years old. in the first european-modeled school, darolfonoon; modernized education in iran some foreign languages such as; french, russian, and later english were taught. regarding the islamic revolution in 1979 led to the implementation of islamic values in the all area even in language planning, however it seems that there is no comprehensive language planning in iran. as riazi (2005) states: the major problem after the islamic revolution, however, has been the lack of an official language-planning blueprint in the country to determine the status of available languages, as well as expectations from language teaching and learning curricula in the formal education system. (p.107) during the post-war period in iran different roles for the native languages in the educational system have been defined. but the oldest and most common model has been the learning of the persian language as a curriculum subject by both the native and nonnative students. persian and national identity twentieth century is characterized by an obsession with nationalism, often on the basis of one state per ethnic group per language. language interlocks with english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee national identity. as a consequence, persian plays an important role in the formation of national identity in iran. a threat to independence of different regional of the country in the late twentieth made a special focus on persian as linguistic and cultural homogenization. according to mehrmohammadi (1992), this centralization in the control of unique culture and language was a solution for independence. yet the issue of bilingualism is seldom addressed and its conditions and consequences are rarely studied in iran partly because of the fear that it might give rise to separatist movements and hence threaten the national cohesion, vis-à-vis security. furthermore, while most countries around the world have already responded to the issues of globalization, internationalization, and competition among multinationals by endorsing bilingual and multilingual educational systems, iran has not been willing to move in this direction in order to keep national unity and identity among the young school generation (farhady 2008). this in part can be accounted for by the fact that countries like hong kong, india, japan, and china see english as the key to the international world of commerce; whereas, iran is more conservative when it comes to foreign language policy. the main reason for this is the politicization of the language issue after the islamic revolution and the fear that english presents a threat to the persian language and islamic culture (khubchandani, 2008). however, attempts have been made to promote the majority languages. for instance, everyday a lot of newspapers are published in majority language in iran, local radio and television programs regularly broadcast everyday which attract many listeners and provide primary and secondary employment for the minority language speakers. the question, however, is how local broadcasting alone can save a language which is losing its functions within the family domain. although radio and television alleviate the pressure, they are only short-term remedies for the dying language. media cannot uproot the source of the problem. when the older generation vanishes, the media will hardly attract the younger generation in any significant scale. iran is an old developing country, as it originated nearly 25 centuries ago, and over its entire history, persian (old, middle, new) has functioned as the standard language. this lingua franca has always coexisted with other varieties and regional languages (schmitt, 1989). this coexistence is the result of the political and sociocultural integration of an old developing country whose various ethnic groups want to be connected with and unified under their great tradition. according to (fishman, 1968) the ancient literatures, legal codes, heroes and leaders of the past command admiration; the old developing nations can withstand much greater linguistic diversity and unrest as a result of integration. thus, based on fishman's theory, in iran, the stable and widespread coexistence of separate dialects or languages with the standard language is indeed natural and expected. therefore, linguistic division alone is not a vital factor to inflame political conflicts within an old must be involved. however, the analysis of nercissians (2001) study for two groups; armenian and azerbaijani community residing in tehran shows that despite the considerable difference in the language behavior of the two groups, important common patterns could be seen to exist. both groups value the knowledge of persian, the common language used in day-to-day communication as well as the official language used in the educational and other formal establishments. at the same time, both groups express strong desire for the retention and use of their mother tongue. we should note that religious, islam as an umbrella, has played a significant role in language identity. some 85% of iranians are shiite. this linguistic diversity with religious similarities has promoted political relationship between language groups. this is another reason why in iran linguistic division has not led to political conflicts (borjian, 2004). in iran, the impact of external factors, which have promoted linguistic challenge, can easily be detected amongst the minority languages which are major languages in the neighborhood countries. turkish, spoken in northwestern of iran, is the official language of neighboring turkey and the azerbaijan republic, who regularly broadcast radio programs for turkish speaking minorities abroad. the programs aim at encouraging the speakers to see themselves as part of a transnational turkish speaking nation. baluchi, however, belongs to the larger iranian language family spoken in the southeast of iran. although baluchi is not a dominant language anywhere, there are a lot of speakers who live in pakistan. westernization and national identity after world war ii, english began to spread around the world and was taught in most countries as either the sole foreign language or as one of the foreign languages. during the pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979), close political, social, economic, and military relationship between iran and the us speeded up the westernization in the country (riazi, 2005). we should consider that deciding on a language to be taught as a foreign language in a country is not a matter of pure academic choice but a matter of government policy often motivated by political, social, economic, and educational factors. english became an important requirement in the iranian military because a good command of english was needed for the army personnel to go to the us for further specializations. in addition, teaching english became a social need and private language schools mushroomed in the capital and many large cities. farhady (2008) stated that knowledge of english became an essential requirement for many job opportunities for the younger generation. thousands of iranian students were sent to us universities to get higher educational degrees. many iranian universities created sister-ship relations with american universities, which facilitated the allocation of scholarships for students to complete their degrees in american universities. in contrast, after islamic revolution in 1979, due to the absence of political relations with the us, the educational policy makers formulated a plan to promote learning and teaching of five foreign other languages including german, french, italian, spanish, and russian. however, due to insufficient number of teachers and a low number of applicants for these languages, english english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee has been the most dominant foreign language taught at the high schools. an interesting point is that while teaching english was almost banned early after the revolution, it has been given the same number of credit units as other main subject matter areas such as biology and chemistry in high schools in iran. promoting persian as a international language globalization seems as a threat for language of the countries. crystal (2003) shows that the phenomenon of globalization, coupled with the increasing leadership of english has motivated many nations to consider their language planning policies. those nations opt to strengthen the preeminence of their own language within their national borders and worldwide. in this regards, according to iran’s comprehensive scientific plan, persian should be scientific language of the world in the near future. persian has played and still plays an overriding role in muslim society competing with arabic. in addition, defending in fact the language of the degree of necessity for english and status of english and persian in iran is very important. some study reveals that the degree of necessity for persian is increasing during the past decades. the functions of english and persian are clearly-defined without any seeming competition in contrast the past which there was struggle between persian and english. however, seeking native resources for coping with technological transformations has become an important sociopolitical goal in iran, where the contemporary world condition is viewed as a culturalinvasion attempt by the west. in addition to its importance in the general area of language planning, and the associated areas of culture planning and identity planning, the study of bilingualism in iran is of important for educational planning in the corresponding speech communities. one part of influence of persian depends on influence of islam. bhatia and ritchie (2006) stated that persian was viewed as an imposed language in much of india; thus, with moughul patronage, persian "became a marker of islam". as a consequence, after independence in 1947 when india and pakistan became independent nations, the influence of persian continued to regenerate in pakistan, a muslim nation, while it reached a state of fossilization in india. in contrast, after independence sanskrit began to regenerate its original impact in india due to its associate on with indian culture. some conflicts of language refer to language group inequality. inglehart and woodward (1972) analyze language conflicts as a function of group inequality. they state that in almost all bilingual and multilingual societies, there is an upper language and one or lower languages. while the upper language represents prestige, power, and a higher status of the speaker, the lower languages signify the opposite. linguistic divisions will lead to political conflicts when a dominant language group obtains the social, political and economic power within the society and blocks the social mobility of the minority language groups. therefore, based on inglehart and woodward's point of view, language conflict has its roots in the unequal economic, political, and social status of a language group. it is true that bilingualism makes some serious problems for non-persian students but iran's linguistic diversity has not led to political conflicts as there is no distinctive economic, political, and social inequality. in order persian be the lingua franca in the world the following administrative reorganization take place. iran is a big country with large number of students accommodated by the stategoverned universities and higher education: public universities, islamic azad university(more than 500 branches), payame noor university (long distance education), private universities, and evening sessions at the public universities, plenty of faculty members, researchers who are as sources to produce scientific research in persian. whereas european colonialism that began in the fifteenth century in the east country reduced the influence of persian (abolghassemi, 2009), in contrast in recent years, economic, technology, medicine, and industries of iran cultivated. as we know language expansion depends on economic, political, and social development. so the developed society of iran can promote its language. for example, the need for traveling to iran from different parts of the world such as middle east, azerbaijan republic, iraq, syria, and some other arab countries and influences of iran on these countries increased leadership of persian, as they need to learn persian in order to communicate properly. it shows growth of persian speakers in the world. however in order to persian be the lingua franca in the world it faces with some challenges. according to iran’s comprehensive scientific plan, persian should be scientific language of the world in the near future. this document is well-designed in print but applying is difficult. first, the community should assume responsibility towards a change from quantity oriented to qualityoriented promotion of persian. this requires cultivating all iranian minds. second, the government should assume responsibility toward providing clear, practicable, and reasonable language policies, and should subsequently support the implementation of the policy. in this regard, fund, personnel, and other requirements should be made available to the people involved in promotion of persian. iran hasn't got even a noble prize for literature to indicate of persian flourishing. handwriting of persian is another problem, using it as language of math, chemistry, and physics, using it for car license plate seem difficult as it is written from the right. considering the phenomenon of information and communication technology with english instruction and increase communications equipment such as mobile, satellite through them iranian use english alphabet instead of persian is a new problem. meanwhile, persian which is used in other countries such as afghanistan and tajikistan influenced by russian or pashto culture and language which vanish the homogenization of persian in the middle east. conclusion bilingualism of home and school in iran creates serious challenges for the educational system of iran. results of international studies prove this phenomenon. in international studies iranian students ranked almost last. curriculum planners always search for english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee ways to remedy this problem. for example, they have designed a one month preparatory course for the nonpersian speaking students or they try to design persian text-books according the non-persian speaking students abilities (kalantari, 2010). but none of these solutions are effective for improving the non-persian students' drop-out rate. because the academic gap between native and nonnative students complete even after several years of schooling. the study of language groups in iran shows that despite the considerable difference in the language behavior all groups value the knowledge of persian, the common language used in day-to-day communication as well as the official language used in the educational and other formal establishments. at the same time, all minority groups express strong desire for the retention and use of their mother tongue. therefore, education authorities in iran should design such curriculum that value not only majority language but also minority languages. it seems that if some day, english constituted a threat to persian in various in iran. today iran, while recalling with pride their historical dominance in the sciences, are not now struggling to foreign languages i.e. english is neither an indication of westernization or culturalism, nor an indication of and imitation of or assimilation to western value. as iranian attitude have changed about the learning of english. they believe that in order to gain new technology, communicate with the world, and to success in business, it is necessary to learn english. as a consequence, parents prefer their children to learn english as soon as possible. mushrooming lots and lots of governmental or private english institutes in iran even in small cities proves this claim. iran is an old country and persian has functioned as the standard language. this lingua franca has always coexisted with other varieties and regional languages. according to iran’s comprehensive scientific plan, persian should be scientific language of the world in the near future. to reach this important aim it faces with some challenges, some of them are linguistically the others are sociopolitically. references abolghassemi, m . 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(2010). comparing bilingual and monolingual students’ reading comprehension; according to pirls 2006 results: in abstract book of bilingual and education: challenges, perspectives, and solutions conference. research institute for education, iran. khadivi, a. (2010). cognitive theories of bilingualism and curriculum development; in abstract book of bilingual and education: challenges, perspectives, and solutions conference. teheran: research institute for education. khubchandani, l. (2008). language policy and education in the indian subcontinent. in encyclopedia of language and education, 2nd edition, (vol.1, pp. 393–404). new york: springer science and business media llc. lambert, w.e., genesee, f., holobow, n., and chartrand, l. (1993). bilingual education for majority englishspeaking children. european journal of psychology of education, 8, 3-22. mehrmohammadi, m. (1992). the moe's general policy on linguistic and cultural diversity. proceedings of the seminar on dimensions of bilingualism. tehran: educational research council, moe. nercissians, e. (2001). bilingualism and diglossia: patterns of language use by ethnic minorities in tehran. int'l. j. soc. lang. 148 (2001), 59-70 paulston, c.b. (1988). international handbook of bilingualism and bilingual education. new york: greenwood press inc. santrock, j.w. (2002). life span development. boston: mcgraw hill schmitt, r. (1989). compendium linguarum iranicarum. wiesbaden: l. reichert. riazi, a.m. (2005). the four language stages in the history of iran. in angel m.y. lin and peter w. martin (eds.). decolonization, globalization: languagein-education policy and practice (. 100116). multilingual matters, ltd. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher mental processes. cambridge: harvard university press. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 9 analysis of motivation and non-cognitive personalities in english achievement and global competences: the case of agriculture students dian islami prasetyaningrum department of socio-economics, faculty of agriculture, universitas brawijaya, malang, indonesia email: dianislami@ub.ac.id hafida ruminar departement of plant pest disease, faculty of agriculture, universitas brawijaya, malang, indonesia email: hafidaruminar@ub.ac.id asihing kustanti department of socio-economics, faculty of agriculture, universitas brawijaya, malang, indonesia email: kustanti@ub.ac.id putra irwandi department of socio-economics, faculty of agriculture, university of brawijaya, veteran street, malang 65145, indonesia email: putrairwandi2000@gmail.com apa citation: prasetyaningrum, d. i., ruminar, h., kustanti, a., & irwandi, p. (2023). analysis of motivation and non-cognitive personalities in english achievement and global competences: the case of agriculture students. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 9-16. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.6805 received: 09-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction today, the ability to comprehend, be open to cultural diversity, and communicate effectively with people worldwide has led to global competence. according to oecd (2018), global competence also may be measured by the ability to examine local, global, and intercultural issues, to understand and appreciate the perspectives and worldviews of others, to engage in open, appropriate, and effective interactions with people from different cultures, and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development (schell, 2020). furthermore, parmigiani et al. (2022) state that global competence concerns knowledge and skills and the active engagement appropriate for the diverse societies for the world's sustainable future. global skills define global competence as more than just talking about how people may communicate using english as an international language. however, it also can engage with the abstract: the ability to speak english is essential to compete in global competition. as a provision in this competition, honing global competence must get attention. good english skills and the knowledge related to the capacity to identify cultural differences and willingness to interact with other people are also critical. the success of mastering these abilities cannot be separated from the role of individual personality and learning motivation as factors that influence the success of educational outcomes. this research wants to discover the influence of non-cognitive personality that will moderate students' motivation to learn english, which will also affect the achievement of english learning outcomes and global competence. the non-cognitive personalities are taken from goldberg's big five personality traits (1992), namely openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, enthusiasm for socializing (extraversion), agreeableness, and neuroticism). the research used an online survey of 304 first year faculty of agriculture students who took english courses. data analysis used descriptive qualitative study. the results obtained showed that extraversion personality dominantly influences the motivational variable. meanwhile, the global competence and skills variables are dominated by openness. lastly, the global knowledge variable is dominated by neuroticism. keywords: big five personality traits; english; global competence; non cognitive personality. mailto:dianislami@ub.ac.id dian islami prasetyaningrum, hafida ruminar, asihing kustanti, & putra irwandi analysis of motivation and non-cognitive personalities in english achievement and global competences: the case of agriculture students 10 world'sworld's society, talking about culture, issues, and many aspects to carry out sustainability in the world. as a global language for communicative purposes, english skills are essential in many aspects, namely individual lives, careers, and future professional success. fernandes (2018) stated that as english is a required skill, we can hear english almost everywhere: english can be your lifesaver language when traveling. as a student, english is mandatory (or becoming) one of the subjects. the success in mastering english as a tool of communication or educational outcomes is also related to the personality traits owned by an individual. in recent years, scholars have stressed the significance of comprehending the role of personality traits in achieving particular rather than overall achievement. meng et al. (2018) showed in their study that personality traits significantly influence global competence and english achievement, which largely determines effectiveness in the current globalized world. understanding individual personality differences in english language achievement can help identify the motivational processes that facilitate optimal academic outcomes and inform the design of interventions to improve student performance (cao & meng, 2020). as the basis for analyzing the relationship between personality and english achievement, this study uses the five big personality traits (big five personality traits) (goldberg, 1992 cited in rizvanović, 2018). the personality traits include openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, enthusiasm for socializing (extraversion), agreeableness, and mental stability (neuroticism). the term is generally shortened to ocean (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). mccrae & costa (2008, cited in lampropoulos et al., 2022) widely recognized that these five personality traits could capture most of the variation in behavior patterns and are appropriate for learning behavior and daily performance across multiple domains and contexts. previous research has discussed the relevance of individual personality to academic achievement, in which conscientiousness and neuroticism are the dominant personalities in determining students' academic success (baumann & harvey, 2021; ollfors & andersson, 2021). the association between the five big personalities and english achievement remains largely unexplored, particularly in esp (english for specific purposes) pupils need to be explored. unfortunately, many students have not achieved the desired english proficiency level due to a lack of individual educational goals and perspectives. therefore, this study aimed to fill the gap by analyzing the relationship between the role of learning motivation and five non-cognitive personality traits in english language achievement, especially for students of the faculty of agriculture at universitas brawijaya. education and training, especially those related to personality, are very much needed by educational institutions to improve the quality of resources. knowing the results of the analysis on student motivation and dominant personality that affects the achievement of english will be a significant investment in the quality of students to achieve global competence. this study was conducted objectively to determine the relationship between motivation and non-cognitive individual personality on english learning achievement and global competence and to find out the analysis results on student motivation and dominant personality that affect english language achievement and global competence. the influence of non-cognitive personalities to the foreign language achievement the big five personalities are promising approaches to conceptualizing and assessing the non-cognitive personality. among the five personalities, conscientiousness is highly correlated with successful academic achievement. conscientiousness is the measure of how thoughtful and organized an individual is. the goal-directed behavior and socially required impulse control and the individual's orderliness, thoroughness, and work ethic (lampropoulos et al., 2022). so, a conscientious individual is someone reliable, self-disciplined, and ambitious. the next trait is neuroticism, which refers to emotional control and stability. in this dimension, people with neuroticism personalities are described as worrying, anxious, nervous, insecure, and stressed. mental stability and thinking (neuroticism) are closely related to a person's anxiety (anxiety) in learning. students who experience mental and thinking instability show a lack of ability to control their emotions, which will undoubtedly affect their academic achievement because tani et al. (2019) mentioned in the study that there is a positive relationship between socioeconomic, psychological, and environmental factors and academic performance. these two traits are often used as an accurate english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 11 measurement of the success of students' academic achievement. the other three traits, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness, correlate with students' academic performance. according to a study conducted by palmisano (2021), openness to experience will determine an individual's level of curiosity, imagination, tendencies to seek compelling circumstances, and stimuli found to be significantly and positively associated with a student's effort exertion and academic performance. next is agreeableness, associated with a high level of emotional support and a caring attitude toward others. it is also related to the ability and quality of friendliness, politeness, cooperative behavior, and generosity. according to komarraju, karau, schmeck, and avdic (2011, cited in palmisano, 2021), agreeableness is correlated with academic achievement but not with the same strength as conscientiousness and openness to experience. meanwhile, enthusiasm in socializing (extraversion) describes a person's ability to interact socially and desire to talk or build communication with others; it is related to an extrovert personality. however, the ability to socialize will be helpful in contextual foreign language learning, which is somewhat different from the academic atmosphere. learning a foreign language needs many opportunities to practice and increase confidence in speaking and communicating using the language (wen, 2018). thus, the five traits in the big five personality traits need to be studied further in their influence on the achievement of foreign language learning, especially english. the influence of non-cognitive personalities on the global competence global competence in this study focused on three dimensions: knowledge, skills, and attitudes (meng et al., 2018). global competence is essential to master because it will significantly determine the ability to interact globally. global knowledge refers to knowledge of one's culture and foreign culture, which includes traditions, norms, and history to provide information in intercultural interactions. moulita (2019) states that global ability is closely related to intercultural communication. therefore, the global ability is defined as the ability to carry out various communication behaviors effectively and appropriately, combining one cultural identity with another or various identities in different cultural environments. meanwhile, the global attitude shows a positive attitude towards cultural differences and a desire to be involved in cultural diversity. in an academic environment, global competencies that include these three dimensions must be developed because not only international students but also domestic students are also expected to be able to compete globally. if it is associated with non-cognitive personality, the top five personal personalities also play a role in a person's ability to increase global competence. for example, a person with conscientiousness and neuroticism is reluctant to engage in cultural diversity. it is supported by research conducted by ramirez (2016) (cited in cao & meng, 2020) found a negative correlation between these two traits and an increase in global ability in multiculturalism. conscientious nature is associated with a conservative personality, while neuroticism is closely related to social anxiety (social anxiety), feelings of insecurity (insecurity), and moodiness. this personality will directly affect a person's desire to be involved in an intercultural context. other traits, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness, influence an individual's ability to communicate and build interpersonal relationships. a person's level of openness will significantly affect the perspective of cultural differences. the higher the nature of openness, the more open one's point of view is in seeing cultural differences as exciting and fun, and vice versa, to be more open to positive exposure to new cultures and people (cao & meng, 2020). extraversion, also known as extrovert personality, positively predicts the ability to build good communication and cross-cultural friendships due to the prototypical extravert being talkative, gregarious, prefers taking charge, expresses positive emotion, and enjoys stimulating activities (wilmot et al., 2019). meanwhile, agreeableness can be measured as a determinant of a person's ability to adapt to social situations in multicultural contexts. based on connolly and seva (2021), agreeable individuals tend to be empathic, warm, caring and trusting rather than distant, unfriendly, and uncooperative. the influence of motivation and foreign language achievement human motivation determines a person's desire to be actively involved and work on an activity or task. the theory directly conveys that motivation plays a significant role in a person's success in completing a given task so that it can be seen in dian islami prasetyaningrum, hafida ruminar, asihing kustanti, & putra irwandi analysis of motivation and non-cognitive personalities in english achievement and global competences: the case of agriculture students 12 performance. this study wants to show a positive relationship with one specific motivation in learning english. learning motivation becomes a critical moderator directly related to individual personality and successful english learning performance. it follows the opinion of rizvanovic (2018), who stated that the motivation to learn english provides a positive and solid relationship with learning achievement in english. learning motivation is an essential moderator because it has an effect as an attribute that can modify a complex relationship between personality and learning achievement, so research related to these three aspects is vital. human motivation determines a person's desire to be actively involved and work on an activity or task. the theory directly conveys that motivation plays a significant role in a person's success in completing a given task so that it can be seen in performance. uno (cited in mauliya et al. (2020)) believed that motivation is an internal and external force that pushes students who are learning to change their attitudes. according to the description given above, motivation is the emotion that drives someone to take action or accomplish a specific goal. dynamic components of motivation include things like emotions, attention, willingness, and others. in addition to coming from within the students, motivation can also come from others or the surroundings (mauliya et al., 2020). based on the theory of planned behavior (tpb), goals, motives, and learning objectives are closely related to persistence in achieving goals (londsdale, 2017). based on this, it is inevitable that someone with high motivation will spend more time trying to learn to get the best achievement. related to motivation in learning english, investing effort and time to get the best performance can be done by improving the ability to read english texts, honing the ability to listen to english programs, and practicing speaking with native speakers. these efforts to increase achievement will also indirectly add new sources of information on norms, values, and even foreign cultures. understanding and identifying foreign cultures also help improve intercultural communication skills, which will be very useful for increasing knowledge and abilities globally so that global competence will also increase (cao et al., 2018). method this research was conducted using a survey that analyzes individual non-cognitive personality and motivation to learn english, affecting learning achievement and global competence. respondents in this study were first-year students at the faculty of agriculture, universitas brawijaya (faub), with approximately 250 respondents with an age range of 17-19 years from three study programs, namely agribusiness, agroecotechnology, and forestry. it is based on considering the ease of access to data information and considering english courses taught in the first year of lectures. data analysis used descriptive qualitative to examine in-depth phenomena using online questionnaires via google form likert scale. results and discussion the characteristics of respondents characteristics of respondents are based on several aspects to obtain an overview of age, educational background, gender, and study program. respondents consist of 304 people aged 17-19 years who are faculty of agriculture, universitas brawijaya (fa ub) students taking english courses in the first year. the following are the characteristics of respondents based on several classifications: table 1. number of respondents no gender number % 1 male 114 37,5 % 2 female 190 62,5% total 304 100 % based on the table above, it can be seen that the number of respondents consisted of 304 people, with the most significant number of female students, 62.5%. in contrast, male respondents amounted to 114 people, with a percentage of 37.5%. the motivation of students in learning english motivation is a stimulus or stimulation to ensure the desired behavior is presented. existing motivation affects learning activities. someone with high motivation will be more active and get satisfactory results (balgies, 2018). motivation is the key if it has a dominant desire and a strong will following the motivational goals. the following table shows the average results of respondents' english learning motivation by gender category. based on the data above, the motivation to learn english based on the gender perspective shows the highest average by females, with an average value of 3.885. according to the female students' perspective, the sustainability indicator for continuing to study english after english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 13 graduation has the highest score, an average of 4.6, followed by respondents who answered similar statements. while the lowest average, answered by female respondents, was related to the indicator of taking a few hours to learn english. the relationship between motivation and the big five personalities that overall respondents have extraversion personality is often called surgency. extraversion is assessing the quantity and intensity of interpersonal interactions. individuals who score high on this dimension tend to be energetic, enthusiastic, dominant, friendly, and communicative. they are also fun, social, talkative, optimistic, and affectionate. on the other hand, individuals who score low on this dimension tend to be shy, insecure, submissive, and quiet. they are also usually introverted, aloof, restrained, discreet, and task-oriented. it is based on several factors, namely internal factors and external factors. simanullang (2021) explained that someone learning a foreign language is categorized into three factors, namely internal factors, including physical health, intelligence level, attitude, talent, and motivational interest. at the same time. several aspects, namely the surrounding environment, influence external factors. another influential factor is the application and approach of learning strategies that are carried out so that a person becomes more motivated in learning. the motivation that someone does in learning english varies. a person will learn a language when he considers the language necessary. in future projections of working in the international sector, understanding culture motivates learning foreign languages (westa, 2017). table 2. the motivation of the students in learning english (gender’s perspective) (source: primary data processed (2022)) indicator male female min max average min max average compared to my classmates, i think i study english diligently. 1 5 3.58 1 5 3.50 i often try to use words and ideas that i learn in my english class. 2 5 3.94 1 5 3.81 if english is not taught on campus, i will learn it myself. 1 5 4.07 2 5 4.21 i spend several hours a day learning english. 1 5 3.13 1 5 3.06 i am trying to learn english. 1 5 4.05 2 5 4.13 after i graduate, i will continue to study english and try to improve my english skills. 2 5 4.52 2 5 4.6 total 3.881 3.885 non-cognitive personality and global competence every individual must possess global competence to compete in the international realm. global competence requires a person to keep up with this era of globalization. global competence is a multidimensional ability to analyze local and even global issues (hidayah & salimi, 2017). global competence also means individual’s ability to analyze global-based and cross-cultural issues critically through from various perspectives, judgments, and ideas about oneself and others. it is open, appropriate, and effective. global competence possessed by individuals is essential to do. it is related to the improvement of their competence. table 3 shows the global student competencies based on a gender perspective. table 3. global competence in english from gender perspective (source: primary data processed (2022)) indicator male female min max average min max average i have a positive attitude toward cultural diversity 2 5 4.5 2 5 4.4 i realize that my view of the world and culture is not universal. 1 5 3.03 1 5 2.84 i am willing to learn and try to live in a culture other than my own. 1 5 4.13 2 5 4.1.3 i am willing to take risks in learning about crosscultural for personal development (selfdevelopment). 1 5 4.10 2 5 3.97 dian islami prasetyaningrum, hafida ruminar, asihing kustanti, & putra irwandi analysis of motivation and non-cognitive personalities in english achievement and global competences: the case of agriculture students 14 i take a non-judgmental reaction to cultural differences. 1 5 4.35 1 5 4.32 total 4.022 3.932 based on the table above, information is obtained that of the 304 respondents who answered, the global competencies possessed by men and women have different average values. the highest total mean shows in men, with a score of 4.022. the highest indicator can be seen from the average positive attitude towards cultural diversity, with an average score of 4.5 for men and 4.4 for women. at the same time, the lowest score lies in the non-universal self-view indicator. the relationship between global competence and the big five personalities that overall respondents are dominated by openness personality is often called culture or intellect, describing the breadth, depth, and complexity of individual mental and experimental life. individuals high in the openness dimension generally look imaginative, fun, creative, and artistic. he is usually creative, imaginative, and curious, has broad interests, and is always curious. in contrast, low individuals in this dimension are generally shallow, dull, or superficial. global competence possessed by men can be seen that men have a higher capacity to understand and deal with local, global, and even intercultural problems. in addition, global competence is also associated with efforts to understand and appreciate the perspectives and views of others and are open, appropriate, and effective in efforts to sustain development and global prosperity (oecd, 2018). global skills supporting personality global skills are related to an individual's psychomotor in doing something and having specific skills, potential, and expertise. skill means ease, speed, and accuracy in monitoring. global skills in supporting personality are closely related to aspects of a person's behavior that reflect a particular personality. it is also related to social and cross-cultural abilities in understanding global competition (pratama, 2022). good global social skills will help someone understand good decision-making, influence academic performance, develop attitudes and personality traits solid global interactions with the global environment. the following table shows respondents' global skills based on a gender perspective. table 4. global skills for learning english from a gender perspective (source: primary data processed (2022)) indicator male female min max average min max average i can identify cultural differences. 1 5 4.13 2 5 4.03 i can live comfortably outside my own culture. 1 5 3.71 2 5 3.46 i can adapt and participate in different sociocultural settings. 2 5 3.98 2 5 3.85 i can collaborate effectively across cultures 2 5 3.89 2 5 3.75 i successfully participate in activities or projects with people from other cultures 1 5 3.79 1 5 3.67 total 3.9 3.75 based on the table above, it can be seen that from a gender perspective, global skills have different averages, namely males are higher, with an average of 3.9, than females, which is only 3.75. in addition, the highest global skill indicator is the individual's ability to identify existing cultural differences, with an average indicator of 4.13 for men and 4.03 for women. the relationship between these indicators and the dominant personality of respondents who choose is openness personality. a highly curious person to learn about and try new things is said to have an openness to experience personality dimensions. these skills can identify new cultures that become personal values in self-development to compete in global competencies. this individual's advantages tend to be more creative, imaginative, intellectual, highly curiosity, and broad-minded. the opposite of the nature of openness to experience is individuals who tend to be conventional and comfortable with things that already exist and will cause anxiety if given new challenges (widodo, 2020). meanwhile, the lowest average indicates one's skills in living comfortably outside one's culture, with a score of 3.71. global knowledge supporting personality global knowledge is knowledge, views, and perspectives built into providing or receiving information related to global issues. global english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 15 knowledge also means a high curiosity for open global information, which is influenced by several factors. the knowledge in question is closely related to an individual's ability and personality to know, comprehend (understand), apply, analyze, synthesize (problem synthesis), and evaluate (evaluation). global knowledge is closely related to the definition of globalization. globalization means processes or events, decisions, and activities that are plural and easily known by all groups. the following is a table of respondents' global knowledge based on a global perspective. table 5. global knowledge of english from a gender perspective (source: primary data processed (2022)) indicator male female min max average min max average i understand the norms and expectations of indonesian culture. 2 5 4.07 2 5 3.52 i understand other people's cultural norms and expectations. 1 5 3.90 1 5 3.63 i know the current world events. 2 5 3.80 2 5 3.49 i know world history. 1 5 3.41 1 5 3.31 i understand the concept of globalization. 2 5 4.12 2 5 4.56 total 3.664 3.702 the global knowledge from the table above shows that the average comparison between men's and women's global knowledge is different. it can be seen that the mean global knowledge of women is higher, with a score of 3.702 compared to men's of 3.664. in addition, the table shows that the highest average indicator is knowledge related to understanding the concept of globalization, with a mean score of 4.12 for men and 4.56 for women. based on the table, the relationship between global knowledge and personality type is predominantly respondents who answered that they had a neuroticism personality. the neuroticism personality dimension is individuals who tend to be able to withstand pressure or stress (abood, 2019). the advantage of this dimension is that the emotions are stable, tend to be calm when facing problems, are confident, and have a firm stand. the opposite of neuroticism is an individual who is easily nervous, depressed, insecure, and quickly changes his mind. based on the table results, the ability to understand globalization means that someone has high knowledge of it. therefore, it makes an individual tends to have a personality to have controlled and stable emotions and is calmer in dealing with problems in arguments. conclusion english language skills possessed by a person are fundamental in the face of global competition and competence. not only good english language skills but also the knowledge and capacity to identify cultural differences and willingness to interact with other people also an ability that must be improved. the success of mastering these abilities cannot be separated from the role of individual personality and learning motivation as factors that influence the success of educational outcomes. based on the results of research conducted on 304 respondents, it was found that on the motivation variable, the dominant 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(2019). extraversion advantages at work: a quantitative review and synthesis of the meta-analytic evidence. journal of applied psychology, 104(12), 1447-1470. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000415. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2021.1983644 https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2021.1983644 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 975 poetry appreciation teaching material design based on contextual approach arip hidayat universitas negeri jakarta email: arip.hidayat_7317167633@mhs.unj.ac.id liliana muliastuti universitas negeri jakarta email: liliana.muliastuti@unj.ac.id ratna dewanti universitas negeri jakarta email: rdewanti@unj.ac.id apa citation: hidayat, a., muliastuti, l., & dewanti, r. (2022). poetry appreciation teaching material design based on contextual approach. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 975982. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6430 received: 22-07-2022 accepted: 24-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction teaching materials or instructional materials is a learning instrument consisting of knowledge, skills, and attitudes yang must be learned by students to achieve the standards of attention that have been determined. in detail, the types of material learning consist of knowledge (facts, concepts, principles, procedures), skills, and attitudes/values. meanwhile, prastowo (2014) explains that good teaching materials can support student learning and increase student success. therefore, ideally, teaching materials should be adapted to the content used, adapted to the conditions of students and the conditions of the teacher. there are several stages in the process of developing teaching materials such as in the addie model which goes through the stages of analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. according to pribadi & putri (2019), design as an important instrument is the framework of the process of making teaching materials must be compiled based on the characteristics of potential users and competencies and learning objectives. therefore, this study analyzed the need for teaching materials for students who are studying poetry appreciation courses at kuningan university. research is aimed at forming a design framework that complies with the standards of making teaching materials. the teaching materials are compiled and adapted into the theory of literary appreciation which then run down to the appreciation of poetry. literary appreciation is very important because literary appreciation can enrich insights and subtleties of feelings. in other words, literary works are useful for life. there are opinions that literature is beautiful and meaningful. literature as a material for abstract: teaching materials are needed as learning resources that should be adapted based on students’ conditions. the contextual approach is a suitable approach to meet the needs of students in learning in order the improvement of learning outcomes can be carried out. appreciation of poetry as a course in the department of indonesian language and literature education requires development to obtain learning outcomes and adjustments on student conditions and the times. the development of such a theory has led this research to develop the design of teaching materials as an intellectual framework and the basis of reference from teaching materials for poetry appreciation. this research uses a qualitative approach and descriptive methods to define needs from the point of view of students, lecturers, and experts in the field of poetry appreciation. the results of the study showed the need in terms of content and strengthening the theory. in the elements of the book, the graphics and the appearance or layout are important to attract interest. supporting elements such as short and long videos and expert opinions are needed by students. laboratory facilities and art spaces are representative places to apply more contextual learning. this research is prepared for the need of development and for other researchers who need analysis and framework of teaching materials from the book elements, learning outcomes, and supporting components. keywords: appreciation; contextual approach; poetry; teaching material. arip hidayat, liliana muliastuti, & ratna dewanti poetry appreciation teaching material design based on contextual approach 976 reflection and reflection on life because it is coexistence in life. in line with previous opinion, it states the functions of literature including as entertainment, as an afterthought, as a discussion of lessons, as a medium of symbolic communication, and as an opening for the paradigm of a thinking (harrison, 2010). appreciation activities are divided into three stages, according to rusyana (1984) that the activity of appreciation of literary works goes through three levels, namely: 1) the first level. when the reader is intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively engaged, that experience arises. 2) the second level. when the reader begins to ask about something hidden in the literary work. 3) third level. when the reader begins to realize the relationship of literary works with the world at large. apart from being a stage, appreciation can also be classified based on its activities. the thoughts and feelings that arise from a poem can be expressed through writing a poem, presenting a poem with a choir, dramatizing, illustrating, composing melodies for a poem, and creating miniature representations related to the theme of the poem. this is in line with who states that the activities carried out in the process of literary appreciation include creative activities. these activities include writing literary works, paraphrasing poems into prose, declaring poems, musicalizing poems, dramatizing poems, and so on. one of the achievements in learning specific skills in the indonesian national qualifications framework (kkni) on the undergraduate students of indonesian language and literature education program are being able to appreciate, express, and create indonesian literary works orally and in writing. appreciating, expressing, and creating means to love, enjoy, express, react and create literary works, be it poetry, fictional prose, and drama. these learning outcomes are arranged in order the graduates have skills in the field of literature and apply them (hidayat et al., 2021) in literary learning. with qualified skills in the field of literature, hopefully the graduates will love, appreciate, and are able to teach and develop indonesian literary works. need analysis can be seen through research (student interviews) and competency standards are compiled for the need for teaching materials of poetry appreciation intersects on student creativity in processing themselves towards poetry. cultivating creativity requires a direct learning condition that affects itself and depends on the individual himself. learning that develops methods about the personal approach is contextual learning. the contextual approach is an educational process that aims to help students see the meaning in the academic material they are studying by connecting academic subjects with context in their daily lives. the context encompasses the context of personal, social, and cultural circumstances. the context presented will make the student understand and give meaning to the one he is studying (creswell, 2012). referring on what johnson states, contextual teaching materials can be a solution to solve difficulties in learning poetry appreciation. with contextual teaching materials, students are expected to be able to connect what they learn with how it is used in real life. the learning they have received is only a protrusion of the memorization level of a series of topics or subjects, but it is not followed by a deep understanding or understanding, which can be applied when they are dealing with new situations in their lives related to the contextual approach, here are presented research results that show the effectiveness of the contextual approach used in learning. as a basic thought that contextual learning in poetry appreciation courses can increase the learning outcomes, some studies (andayani, 2018; andriyana & hidayat, 2021; endarwati, 2018; kertayasa et al., 2019; maulidiyah et al., 2018; pebriana, 2017; solihah, 2018; sucipta, 2019; sukaharsilawati, 2018; waraulia, 2018; wati, 2019) produce significant and even satisfactory results. the results of the research and discussion show that the contextual approach used in learning is able to generate motivation, increase activity, creativity, and make students think critically so that the ability and learning outcomes of reading and writing literature (poetry, fictional prose) increase. the contextual approach allows students to develop the abilities they have optimally because students are encouraged to connect learning with daily life. from the result of research, it can be concluded that poetry appreciation teaching materials developed based on contextual are more effectively used than ordinary teaching materials. teaching materials developed based on a contextual approach can increase student activity in learning. this happen because the modules/teaching materials are more relevant and easier to understand. after all, they are based on the real world. by taking advantage of the fact english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 977 that the environment stimulates the nerve cells of the brain to form a path, this system focuses itself on context and relationships. the contextual approach connects the content of teaching materials with everyday life which then produces meaning. the contextual approach is an approach that fits the brain. the contextual approach works because it corresponds to the conscience of the human being who is hungry for meaning, according to the needs of the brain, and corresponds to the way nature works. method this research is qualitative research with a descriptive approach. the research was conducted with miles and huberman techniques which have stages of data reduction, presentation, and inference/presentation. this research used student interview instruments about the need for poetry appreciation teaching materials given to students of indonesian language and literature education at kuningan university as many as 26 questions. lecturers and practitioners in the field of poetry appreciation were given 20 questions. of the 46 questions, researchers found a reduction in data which then produced a table of students' needs for the necessary teaching materials. as a stage of inference and assessment of research results, researchers to the stage of discussion about the design presented in the discussion. results and discussion the results of research from students and lecturers / experts find that teaching materials have elements of feasibility of content, language, presentation, and graphics. the results of this reduction are adjusted to the assessment standards for the evaluation of teaching materials (syah, 2006). after experiencing the reduction process of dozens of participants from the interview, a research result was found as presented in this journal. contents appreciation books are needed because the existence of books that are specifically about poetry appreciation has not been found and it is difficult to find in indonesian. the existence of the theory is relatively minimal and only becomes a sub-theory requires the development of a detailed and integrated material structure to direct students in order to create a solid teaching material in theory. the existing teaching materials require a contextual learning direction so students able to learn with their environment so that what is learned is easy to understand. the involvement of students with their environment is expected to be able to build a freer knowledge but they also focus on the goals and competencies of the targeted courses. the need to understand, read, write poetry is needed as the target of achievement of the poetry appreciation course. the existing teaching materials must not only have a complete theory but also lead to poetry appreciation skills such as musicalization, declamation, and dramatization of poetry. language the language in the poetry appreciation teaching materials is packed with a formal variety and presented to make it easier for students to understand the theories and instructions in the book. the language used should be easy to understand so that the achievement of learning outcomes can be achieved. with the formal presentation of language, this book of appreciation of poetry must be arranged informatively so that what is developed and presented forms a complete understanding for students. book presentation books presented theories, opinions, experts, opinions of practitioners, and videos will unite students' understanding and bring out the value of contextuality. students want a parallel and complete theoretical reviewer so that what is written becomes more interesting and causes interest in the content of the book. look the presentation of the book is made more colorful and informative with pictures and videos embedded so what students read is not monotonous. the need for teaching materials should make students more enthusiastic about the content of the material with additional elements of technology and information embedded through barcodes and images or illustrations. the presentation of the layout is necessary more professionally so that what is presented is interesting. arip hidayat, liliana muliastuti, & ratna dewanti poetry appreciation teaching material design based on contextual approach 978 figure 1. participant analysis result the reduction results from students, experts, and lecturers’ interviews lead to a framework of appreciation teaching materials that can be described based on the units that form the book, and the complete structure of the book. the design of teaching materials for poetry appreciation and the needs of the participants brings together the wishes of researchers and research participants to find new structures from the conditions of the previous teaching materials. teaching materials in the analysis stage must be adjusted to the competencies as it is agreed. magdalena et al. (2020) explained that teaching materials must be compiled based on the competencies to be achieved. to meet these standards, appreciative teaching materials are compiled with theories and shortcomings that previously had not been owned by poetry appreciation books. the achievement of the course starts from the achievement of the course which based on research (daeng et al., 2019) states that the teaching materials must be in accordance with the semester learning plan, the accuracy of the material, and supporting the learning material. the composition of the semester learning plan leads to the determination of the achievements and sub-achievements of the course that can be compiled in teaching materials. so, the subachievement of the course which is the reference basis of a teaching material design is important to be formulated based on the needs analysis that has been carried out. the achievement of the course if formulated based on the results starts from the operational definition of understanding, applying, and assessing. the operational verb understanding is a form of realization of knowledge represented in teaching materials in the preparation of standard theories and relies on definition in general and from expert opinion. at the stage of application as a course that leads to skills, poetry reading is not only understood by students but must be practiced as well. at the stage of judging as the concept of appreciation, students must be able to give an objective assessment of poetry and all forms of appreciation. of the three operational definitions, poetry appreciation teaching materials based on a contextual approach have a new formulation on the sub-achievements of the course which if formulated can be used as a reference in making teaching materials. the formulation of these subachievements is i. knowing poetry appreciation i.a1: building understanding poetry appreciation. i.a2: explains the stages of poetry appreciation. i.a3: comparing the types of poetry appreciation activities. ii. reading poetry ii. a1: building understanding of reading poetry. ii.a2: formulates the steps of reading a poem. iii. preparation for reading poetry iii.a1: conducting poetry selection. iii.a2: analyzing the structure of the content of the poem. iii.a3: creating an artistic workbook for poetry reading iv. poetry reading practice iv.a1: perform basic exercises in sound processing, body exercise, and soul processing. iv.a2: perform poetry reading exercises with equipment. v. aspects of poetry reading and assessment v.a1: describes aspects of reading poetry. v.a2: demonstrates the assessment of reading poetry. in the development of teaching materials as stated in syah (2006), each type of printed teaching material has its structure and characteristics. course textbooks must-have elements of title, basic competencies, learning materials, exercises, and assessments. such formulation can be realized in the following graph. figure 2. poetry appreciation instrument english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 979 the developments research in poetry in khatib (2011) are still often interpreted in one sense if done with a conventional approach. poetry must be interpreted close to its meaning. to get close to this, it requires an analysis and teaching to bring the reader closer to its meaning. the effectiveness of the analysis has been proven by satinem et al. (2020) research with the development of poetry appreciation teaching materials that focus on analysis. analytical skills as previously explained in the achievement of teaching materials. the development of teaching materials of a contextual nature must correlate between learning and the social life of students (afriani, 2018). it builds on the development of their knowledge, experience, and response to phenomena in the learner's environment. contextual learning relies on many aspects of the learning environment such as classrooms, laboratories, exhibitions, staging, employment, and many other things. research on the development of poetry appreciation teaching materials with a contextual approach at the high school level has succeeded in making them better able to read and write poetry (fuad et al., 2018). from the review on the development of contextual teaching materials and poetry appreciation courses, students should first know the needs of employment or see those who work or are experienced in the field of poetry appreciation. the second need is a facility or place where poetry appreciation is carried out professionally with the assumption that it becomes a place of practice or is introduced in teaching materials. the literary laboratory is an ideal place to practice reading, musicalization, or dramatization. the development of technology to make videos is one of the learning media that can be included in teaching materials. the development of video learning in 2022 and social media that is close to students as an element of contextual learning leads to the tiktok application. tiktok has a video duration that tends to be short from 30 seconds to a maximum of 3 minutes. this concept can be a teaching material contained in the book. the learning of indonesian language and literature containing tiktok was written by several researchers such as: aji (2018), aji & setiyadi (2020), fatimah et al. (2021), and ramdani et al. (2021) with satisfactory results on general material and appreciation. youtube media as the most famous video media and first superior in terms of duration is a learning media that has more value. this added value is evidenced by the success of your tube’s influence on the learning of poetry appreciation in research of artika et al. (2021), bakri & yusni (2021), fatimah et al.(2020) and wedawati (2022). the development of youtube and the success of researchers proving its influence is carried out on the aspects of beautiful reading, writing, and expressing as they wish. in youtube media, the creativity and processing of video media has also become more varied and there is even an information technology collaboration. the need for teaching materials of poetry appreciation based on contextual ties on the design side through previous formulations and research consists of several physical and nonphysical components. the development of teaching materials requires many aspects and needs so that what is owned becomes more structured. more clearly the framework of the learning components of contextual-based poetry appreciation teaching materials can be seen in the following chart. figure 3. poetry appreciation teaching material conclusion the design of contextual-based poetry appreciation teaching materials is a framework of ideas that are intellectual concepts. design development by looking at needs studies and related research leads to development that brings closer to the value of contextuality of modern and z-generation students who are more likely to be close to social media. the form of textbooks in the form of printed teaching materials with the content of learning outcomes supported by media and learning facilities to define the characteristics of contextual poetry appreciation. the development of this design makes a framework that can be changed or added and can even be adapted directly into the teaching materials for arip hidayat, liliana muliastuti, & ratna dewanti poetry appreciation teaching material design based on contextual approach 980 poetry appreciation made based on this research. what is stated in terms of theory and concept of ideas in this article may support the progress of poetry appreciation at the university and general levels. references afriani, a. 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(2019). keefektifan pendekatan kontekstual (contextual teaching and learning) dalam pembelajaran menulis puisi siswa smp. jurnal bindo sastra, 3(1), 55–62. wedawati, p. a. g. (2022). penggunaan media sosial youtube sebagai media pembelajaran daring pada ketrampilan mengekspresikan puisi bahasa bali. indonesian journal of educational development, 3(1), 53–62. arip hidayat, liliana muliastuti, & ratna dewanti poetry appreciation teaching material design based on contextual approach 982 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 499 the implementation of low-cost educational videos to improve students’ performance in toeic preparation test atiqah nurul asri information technology department, politeknik negeri malang, malang, indonesia e-mail: atiqah.nurul@polinema.ac.id faiz ushbah mubarok information technology department, politeknik negeri malang, malang, indonesia e-mail: faizum@polinema.ac.id aly imron electrical engineering department, politeknik negeri malang, malang, indonesia e-mail: aly.imron@polinema.ac.id apa citation: asri, a. n., mubarok, f. u., & imron, a. (2022). the implementation of low-cost educational videos to improve students’ performance in toeic preparation test. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 499-508. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6250 received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction since covid-19 strikes in the first quarter of 2020, the education system has been forcibly shifted to online. over 180 countries got the impact of the pandemic, it affects around 88% of total students all over the globe (unesco, 2022) students and teachers are also challenged in the use of technology since all teaching and learning activities should be conducted online. most of them are not prepared to sign up for it. the application of technology in education has rapidly grown. due to the pandemic, face-to-face interaction is reduced, and faculties must find a suitable solution. bozkurt and sharma (2020) stated this condition as an emergency remote teaching, a circumstance when teachers have no other options but to do education using a sudden emergency condition. this circumstance is also considered as an interim solution during the crisis (golden, 2020). in an emergency, teachers are forced to adapt and adjust the method and techniques in teaching the students. lynch (2020) proposed seven main points to take into action during teaching and learning in an education crisis, namely 1) knowing the students, 2) setting expectations for teachers and students, 3) audio conferencing, 4) educational television, 5) joining lessons on digital skills and literacy, 6) web-conferencing, and 7) asynchronous video learning. specifically, on web-conferencing and asynchronous video learning, there are some of the eligible methods that can be applied for online learning in a crisis. emergency online learning has speedily developed since the pandemic all over the world. abstract: this paper was aimed to improve information technology students’ performance in the toeic international test by using low-cost videos. the test was held by the state polytechnic of malang together with the international test center (itc) to compete in this 4.0 industrial era. due to the pandemic condition, the research was conducted online using the learning management system (lms) and the zoom application. the subjects in the study were a class consisting of 28 final year students of the informatics management study program. in this research, we applied class action research (car) in 2 cycles, the first cycle was six meetings and the second cycle was two meetings. this study was said to be successful if at least 70% of the students got a score above 450 points. next, toeic pre-test and post-test scores were analyzed using the t-test. in addition, this study also analyzed students' perceptions of the learning model. from the results of the t-test analysis from the pre-test, post-test 1, and post-test 2, it can be concluded that this learning model could increase toeic scores. based on the results of the questionnaire and observations, it showed that students responded mostly positive feedback and improved students’ performance in toeic scores. keywords: video; low-cost educational video; toeic preparation. atiqah nurul asri, faiz ushbah mubarok, & aly imron the implementation of low-cost educational videos to improve students’ performance in toeic preparation test 500 masters, taylor-guy, fraillon, and chase (2020) reported that the impact of pandemic creates a vulnerable feeling to the children in australia. another case can be found in favale, soro, trevisan, drago, and mellia (2020) who showed that students face too high internet traffic and suffer online learning gaps due to several network problems. meanwhile in indonesia, the ministry of education and culture launched ‘rumah belajar’. it is a program that can help students do independent study and is accessible through mobile and computer devices (abidah, hidaayatullaah, simamora, fehabutar, & mutakinati, 2020). from several studies above, the usage of remote teaching and the application of ict must be interdependent and support each other. ict is one of the major points to consider in online emergency learning. jatileni and jatileni (2018) discussed that ict influences teachers to enhance their teaching and learning process. students are also able to be more engaged and motivated in accomplishing tasks. the implementation of video usage in learning has been applied in various ways in education. riyanto and yunani (2020) found that tutorial video is quite effective as a teaching media to improve students’ speaking skills, especially giving a speech. furthermore, as the solutions to the pandemic, one of which is conducted by prayudha (2021) that revealed that video has been proven to effectively help teachers facilitate their students in learning and provide a better understanding of the materials during online learning. meanwhile, suhayati and haryati (2021) investigate the students' perspectives on the use of screen recording video to facilitate them to learn during the pandemic. the results show that the students have quite positive responses on the use of video recording in online learning. in other words, online videos offer flexibility for students to learn at their pace and at a time that is convenient to them (tukiman khalid, onn, foong, & amran, 2020). it is supported by the results of the study by foong, ismail & tukiman (2021) which showed that the students make the use of recorded teaching videos provided by the lecturer as digital files which enable them to pause, playback, forward, and repeat. from the study, most of the students are found to prefer short videos, less than 15 minutes, and their lecturer’s voice to computer narration in teaching videos. furthermore, metruk (2018) revealed that video using subtitles could improve students’ performance. from the results, it can be concluded that the listening test scores are not significantly different among the three groups. in other words, it shows the use of l1 and l2 subtitles does not affect the students’ listening comprehension skills. on the other hand, watching videos with english subtitles is likely more favorable to improve students’ reading comprehension skills than those with slovak subtitles. in relation to this study, the researchers also find few previous studies related to teaching toeic. first, nguyen & gu (2020) investigated the impact of toeic listening and reading as a university exit test in vietnam. the results of the study show that the older and more experienced the teachers, the less they teach the test, and the more communicative their teaching approach is. furthermore, the more they perceive that the test assess the tested skills, the more they teach to the test and the more traditional they are. toeic, indeed, is quite happening and widely used as standardized english proficiency test in vietnam. despite the previous study described, nguyen, phan, huynh (2020) conducted a study on difficulties in studying toeic listening comprehension of non–english majored freshmen. the results show that students often got confused with similar sound words, speed, and duration of the listening test also makes them tired and unable to concentrate. furthermore, there are studies on toeic conducted at vocational high schools in indonesia. first, it was conducted by zahruni, fahmi, & pratolo (2020) which aimed at the readiness and the problems faced by indonesians vocational students in doing toiec to help them find better methods in teaching it. furthermore, the results show that students were not ready for the test and the listening part of the test was found more difficult than the reading part. another study was conducted by setiawan, sunardi, gunarhadi, & asrowi (2020). this study was aimed at investigating the vocational high school graduates’ perspectives on the use of technology in language learning such as ipad, pda, computer tablet, and smartphone to do the test. the results of the study show that the graduates have positive responses to the use of implemented mobile learning to help them prepare for the test. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 501 based on the previous studies, it inspired the researchers to conduct the study about the video usage for teaching toeic preparation for it department students at state polytechnic of malang. this study is done as fast responses to overcome the problems when the running semester, where offline class conducted, had to be shifted to online class because of the sudden outbreak in the middle of 2020. in addition, the state polytechnic of malang facilitated the final year students to enroll in an international standardized toeic test at the end of their study. to create videos for facilitating the students in learning toeic preparation to solve the problems faced during the outbreak without any decent preparation. thus, the researchers follow the method proposed by moussiades, kazanidis, iliopoulou (2019) on a low-cost educational video. the low cost-educational video as described by simo, fernandez, algaba, salan, enache, albaredasambola, bravo, suñe, garcia-almiñana, amante, & rajadel (2010) is a short demonstration stream video which has a very specific goal, has been created in a very short period with few resources. based on the reasons above, the researchers would like to investigate the application of low-cost video in teaching toeic preparation through emergency online learning. in light of the background, the current research aimed to answer two research questions: (1) how is the implementation on the use of low-cost educational videos in toeic preparation learning in improving the toeic score of final year students of the information technology department? (2) how do students perceive the use of low-cost educational video in preparation for the toeic test? method the procedure of this research is class action research (car) which includes four stages, namely the preparation stage, implementation stage, observation stage, and reflection stage. the following figure shows the car cycle process. figure 1. car cycle process preparation stage in this stage, the author works with a collaborator to select one of the classes from the informatics management study program. the class consists of 28 students. then, the toeic preparation materials were made into a video based on the listening and reading parts. in addition, video-making equipment is also prepared, including lights, a green screen, free software, and a low-budget web camera. the author also prepares criteria for success or criteria of success. research is said to be successful if 70% of students experience an increase in toeic scores and at least the average toeic score is at least more than or equal to 450 implementation stage at the implementation stage, this is carried out before the lecture enters the toeic preparation topic and begins with the process of making and or editing the existing videos themselves following the stages carried out by moussiades et al. (2019). the stages are: (1) determination of general learning objectives. before making a video, the general learning outcomes must first be determined. in this case, the general learning objective for making this video is that students can understand tips and tricks on doing the toeic test. (2) determination of specific learning objectives. (3) at this stage, the expected specific learning outcomes are determined. the specific learning outcomes for each listening and reading section can be seen in table 1 below: table 1. specific learning outcomes parts topic specific learning outcomes (meeting 1) ● intro to toeic and general strategies at the end of learning students are able to: ● know and understand the toeic test and general strategies in doing it. atiqah nurul asri, faiz ushbah mubarok, & aly imron the implementation of low-cost educational videos to improve students’ performance in toeic preparation test 502 listening ● photographs ● questionsresponses (meeting-2) ● know and understand the tips in doing the first part of listening, namely photographs. ● identify the answer that best fits the description of the photo displayed through the audio that is listened to. ● know and understand the tips in doing the first part of listening, namely questions-responses ● identify the correct answer choices for the questions listened to. ● conversations ● talks (meeting 3) at the end of learning students are able to: ● understand the tips in working on the third and fourth parts of listening, namely conversations and talks. ● identify information, both implicit and explicit, as well as answers from conversations and presentations. reading ● incomplete sentence ● text completion (meeting-4&5) at the end of the learning, students are able to: ● understand the tips in doing the first and second parts of reading, namely incomplete sentence and text completion. ● identify and choose the right grammatical form to complete sentences in the incomplete sentence and text completion sections. ● reading comprehension at the end of learning, students are able to: ● understand the tips in working on the third part of reading, namely reading comprehension. ● identify information, both implicit and explicit as well as answers to reading questions. video construction in this part, the production and editing videos were made using camtasia, adobe premiere pro, and web animaker. the researchers were assisted by two students of the informatics engineering d4 study program who have the ability in video editing. their jobs were to make the video more comprehensible and applicable. in the preliminary study, the duration of the videos was too long and not communicative. thus, the video was then edited, and added into several sub videos (a total of 28 videos) which can be accessed at this link https://bit.ly/videopembelajarantoeic2021 along with supporting materials. the content includes power point slides and practice questions before the “face-to-face” meeting on zoom takes place. as an illustration, the following table 2 shows the number of videos that have been created and edited for this research. table 2. detailed description of the created videos topics total vide os details listening intro to toeic and general strategies 2 photographs 2 1 tip and 1 mini test questionsresponses 3 1 tip, 1 exercise, 1 mini test conversations 5 4 tips 1 mini test talks 4 3 tips, 1 mini test reading incomplete sentence 5 7 tips, 2 mini tests text completion 5 10 tips, 3 mini tests reading comprehension 2 6 tips, 2 mini tests total: 28 video evaluation at this stage, an evaluation is carried out whether the video was successfully understood by students by asking questions about the material or discussing the exercise during class (via zoom), or by looking at the results of the exercise. the shortcomings of this video will be noted to be used as material for the next video editing process. reformation the video editing process will be carried out according to the notes during the discussion of the material and the results of the exercise. the results of the re-edited is used as toeic preparation learning media in the following semesters. results the subjects of this study were 28 final year students of the informatics management of d3 study program, information technology department, state polytechnic of malang. this research consists of two cycles. the first cycle consisted of six meetings and the second cycle consisted of two meetings. the data of this study were obtained from toeic scores on pre-test and post-test, questionnaire results, and observations of collaborators and authors. from the research instruments above, the data used in this study were a.) student’ toeic pretest scores, b.) students’ toeic post test scores, c.) questionnaire results, d.) observation results by the researchers. the implementation of using low-cost educational in toeic preparation learning to improve it students’ scores the results of pre-test and posttest in the first cycle english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 503 the study began with giving a pre-and it was given through the author's lms to be done by students according to the lecture schedule. this test consists of 50 listening questions and 50 reading questions. for the listening section, the author plays the audio file directly during a “face-to-face” meeting via zoom and for the reading section, students work independently and are given a time limit (75 minutes). the results of the pre-test can be seen in table 3 below: table 3. pre-test results (cycle 1) no . name liste ning read ing listening score reading score tot al 1 amap 30 31 125 130 255 2 ak 20 29 75 120 195 3 abd 29 25 120 100 220 4 bdr 30 25 125 100 225 5 dcs 27 25 110 100 210 6 drd 18 29 65 120 185 7 dea 27 28 110 115 225 8 faff 23 18 90 65 155 9 fas 25 17 100 60 160 10 fal 21 24 80 95 175 11 gca 27 27 110 110 220 12 ifa 30 32 125 135 260 13 iw 19 19 70 70 140 14 idp 33 28 140 115 255 15 la 34 31 145 130 275 16 lme 22 25 85 100 185 17 mia 14 21 45 80 125 18 mapp 20 24 75 95 170 19 mgz 30 29 125 120 245 20 mmu 23 27 90 110 200 21 ny 36 35 165 160 325 22 nam 28 41 115 190 305 23 omb 38 25 175 100 275 24 ro 28 26 115 105 220 25 ra 17 26 60 105 165 26 sa 30 29 125 120 245 27 uy 24 22 95 85 180 28 ysi 18 26 65 105 170 after the pre-test, students are given links to the toeic preparation learning per week (there are a total of 28), because this course is given every week, along with modules and additional materials provided in lms. then, during face-to-face meetings via zoom, the teacher provided comprehension check questions or to find out whether students have understood the material. in addition, students also did exercises and mini tests at home so that during meetings via zoom, the teacher only needed to discuss the exercises and mini tests. the last meeting in the first cycle ended after post-test 1. for post-test 1, it was a different scenario compared to pre-test 1, there were 100 questions for the listening section and 100 questions for the reading section. the audio file for listening section is played during meetings via zoom and reading were done by students independently. the results of post-test 1 can be seen in table 4 below. table 4. post-test results 1 no name score listening score reading total 1 amap 5 5 10 2 ak 315 340 655 3 abd 290 495 785 4 bdr 345 215 560 5 dcs 295 495 790 6 drd 190 140 330 7 dea 360 320 680 8 faff 380 215 595 9 fas 280 280 560 10 fal 190 325 515 11 gca 200 255 455 12 ifa 310 330 640 13 iw 180 170 350 14 idp 395 340 735 15 la 400 450 850 16 lme 245 200 445 17 mia 210 210 420 18 mapp 380 260 640 19 mgz 395 390 785 20 mmu 175 245 420 21 ny 430 350 780 22 nam 410 425 835 23 omb 405 365 770 24 ro 345 295 640 25 ra 165 405 570 26 sa 320 490 810 27 uy 190 280 470 28 ysi 245 425 670 after the post-test score 1 was obtained, the writer then compared it with the pre-test score. first, the authors enter their respective scores into the student data of the class. the recap of pre-test and post-test 1 scores can be seen in table 5 below: table 5. comparison of pre-test and post-test (cycle 1) no. name pre-test post test 1 amap 255 10 2 ak 195 655 3 abd 220 785 4 bdr 225 560 5 dcs 210 790 6 drd 185 330 7 dea 225 680 8 faff 155 595 9 fas 160 560 10 fal 175 515 11 gca 220 455 12 ifa 260 640 13 iw 140 350 14 idp 255 735 15 la 275 850 16 lme 185 445 atiqah nurul asri, faiz ushbah mubarok, & aly imron the implementation of low-cost educational videos to improve students’ performance in toeic preparation test 504 17 mia 125 420 18 mapp 170 640 19 mgz 245 785 20 mmu 200 420 21 ny 325 780 22 nam 305 835 23 omb 275 770 24 ro 220 640 25 ra 165 570 26 sa 245 810 27 uy 180 470 28 ysi 170 670 after that, the average toeic score in pre-test and post-test 1 was calculated. table 6 provides the presented data. table 6. pre-test and post-test average scores of the first cycle tests n (total students) average standard deviation pre-test 28 226,7857 17,89190 post-test 1 27 620,5556 29,88860 since the total questions in the pretest and posttest were different, it must be calculated using ttest. the results of the analysis can be seen in table 7. table 7. calculation results of t-test 1 using spss t-test group statistics category n mean standard deviation standard error mean score 1 score 2 28 27 226.7857 620.5556 94.67502 155.30574 17.89190 29.88860 independent samples test levene’s test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper score equal variances assumed 12.349 .001 -11.400 53 .000 -393.769 34.54015 -463.048 -324.491 equal variances not assumed -11.304 42.693 .000 -393.769 34.83459 -464.035 -323.504 before knowing whether there is a difference in the average student learning outcomes in pre-test and post-test 1, the following hypothesis is formulated: h0 = there is no significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in the pretest and post-test 1 h1 = there is a significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in the pretest and post-test 1 based on the calculations using spss, the levene test value (sign.) is 0.001 < 0.05, which means that the pre-test and post-test 1 data are inhomogeneous data, or the data variants are different, therefore the decision-making results of the t-test look at the output table equal variances not assumed. the value of sig, (2-tailed) in the table is 0.000 < 0.05, which means rejecting and accepting. so, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in the pre-test and post-test 1. students’ perceptions in learning using low-cost for toeic preparation questionnaire results after the first cycle was completed, the next step is to distribute the questionnaire using the google forms. it consists of 13 items: 8 closed statements in students’ perceptions during the implementation of low-cost video in toeic preparation learning and 5 open-ended questions. this questionnaire is intended to answer the second research question, namely "how are students' perceptions of the use of low-cost educational video in preparation for the toeic test?". from the results of the questionnaire, it can be concluded that the perception of the students’ majority responded positively to the use of low-cost video in learning english. however, it is necessary to improve the quality of video graphics and add more material or exercises to make students more prepared. especially in grammar and listening problems, since it requires additional time and understanding of the text. next, an additional point that needs to be considered in future research is the use of short and more interactive video sets. reflection results of the first cycle based on the results of the analysis of pre-test and post-test 1 data, questionnaire, and observations, it english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 505 can be concluded that the research in cycle 1 is successful. it obtains significant results based on the comparative analysis between the average scores of pre-test and post-test 1. in other words, the use of as toeic preparation learning media by a teacher of the job preparation english course succeeded in increasing students' toeic scores from an average of 227 to 670 as shown in table 7 above. it also confirms that there is a significant difference between pre-test and post-test 1. from the results of the questionnaire, it can be concluded that students gave a good response to the use of video in toeic learning, but when asked whether they were ready to face the international toeic exam more than 50% answered not ready. this causes the writer to decide to do the second cycle. according to pardede (2019), an action research study rarely achieves the maximum results achieved in a simple cycle (cycle 1), so cycle 2 is needed. in other words, research using this design requires a minimum of 2 cycles. besides that, it is conducted to minimize the different total questions in the first cycle based on the pretest and post-test. implementation of the second cycle the second cycle consisted of two toeic debriefing meetings held by upt bahasa of state polytechnic of malang to prepare final year students for the international toeic test. this meeting was held one week after the end of the 2020/2021 even semester final exam. so, it can be said that the research was resumed when the toeic debriefing activity was carried out. in these two meetings, for 90 minutes each, the author asked specifically to be scheduled to provide briefing in the class and discuss the material contained in the . the post-test 2 of the second cycle was carried out at the end of the teaching. after that, students were given a post-test link 2, which is basically the same questions as pre-test and post-test 1 and posttest 2. in addition, students also need to be motivated to be confident in facing the international toeic test. the results of pre-test and post test in the first cycle after getting the debriefing, students were asked to do post-test 2 which was the same as the first cycle. similar to post-test 1, post-test 2 consists of 100 listening questions and 100 reading questions. the results of post-test 2 can be seen in table 8 below. after the second post-test score was obtained, the writer then compared it with the first post-test score. next, the authors enter their respective scores into the student data. the recap of post-test 1 and post-test 2 scores can be seen in the following table. table 8. comparison of post-test results 1 and posttest results 2 no name score pre-test score post test 1 score post test 2 1 amap 640 0 985 2 ak 195 655 800 3 abd 220 785 0 4 bdr 225 560 880 5 dcs 210 790 990 6 drd 185 330 985 7 dea 225 680 710 8 faff 155 595 770 9 fas 160 560 665 10 fal 175 515 900 11 gca 220 455 670 12 ifa 260 640 955 13 iw 140 350 940 14 idp 255 735 820 15 la 275 850 990 16 lme 185 445 905 17 mia 125 420 465 18 mapp 170 640 690 19 mgz 245 785 920 20 mmu 200 420 805 21 ny 325 780 825 22 nam 305 835 915 23 omb 275 770 850 24 ro 220 640 0 25 ra 165 570 900 26 sa 245 810 990 27 uy 180 470 985 28 ysi 170 670 865 furthermore, the average of each score is compared and calculated using the spss program. descriptive data analysis of the scores of post-test 1 and post-test 2 for class 3b can be seen in table 9 below: table 9. t-test using spss tests n (total students) average standard deviation post test 1 27 620,5556 155,30574 post test 2 26 852,8846 130,10129 based on the table, it can be concluded that the average post-test score 1 is 620.5556, while the average post-test score of 2 is 852.8846. so, it shows a significant improvement from post-test 1 to post-test 2. table 10. calculation results of t-test 2 (t test) with spss atiqah nurul asri, faiz ushbah mubarok, & aly imron the implementation of low-cost educational videos to improve students’ performance in toeic preparation test 506 group statistics category n mean standard deviation standard error mean score 1 score 2 27 26 620.5556 620.8845 155.30574 130.10129 29.88860 25.52496 independent samples test levene’s test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean differenc e std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper score equal variances assumed 1.75 .191 -5.89 51 .000 -232.32 34.430 -311.489 -153.168 equal variances not assumed -5.91 50.05 .000 -232.32 39.298 -311.259 -153.398 if there is a significant difference between the average student's learning outcomes in post-test 1 and post-test 2, the following hypothesis is formulated: h0 = there is no significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in post-test 1 and post-test 2 h1 = there is a significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in post-test 1 and post-test 2 based on the calculations obtained using spss, the levene test value (sign.) is 0.191 > 0.05, which means that the post-test 1 and post-test 2 data are homogeneous data, or the data variants are the same. the results of the t-test results look at the output of the equal variances assumed table. the value of sig, (2-tailed) in the table is 0.000 < 0.05, which means rejecting and accepting. so, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in post-test 1 and post-test 2. results of second cycle reflection based on the results of post-test 1 and post-test 2 data analysis, it can be concluded that there is a difference in the average toeic score in post-test 1 and post-test 2 which has increased from 620 to 825 as shown in table 10. this score is even higher than the average pre-test score. after the t-test was carried out, it further strengthened that the application of learning in toeic learning could increase the scores. there is no improvement in the learning method that has been carried out in the first cycle, the difference is in the duration of the meeting via zoom. the first cycle is 60 minutes, but the second cycle is 90 minutes. discussion improving students’ score in toeic preparation by according to the results, the low-cost videos are proven to be effective in improving students’ score in toeic preparation. the researchers provide 9 in total as an additional study for the students to learn independently. afterwards, the posttest scores 1 & 2 are significantly higher and proven to be effective. it is in line with research by simo et al. (2010) and riyanto and yunani (2020) that can be improving students’ performance. however, in riyanto’s study, it is intended to speaking skill while in this paper focuses in improving students’ score. it shows that the video usages are not only applicable in certain specific skills, but also improving the listening and reading toeic tests. this finding is also supported by the students’ responses in the questionnaire that 66.7% of students agreed with the video quality in audio. meanwhile, the score of students’ perceptions on the video picture only covers 50% effectiveness. on the other hand, the response in teacher’s video explanation reached 72.2% and it helps the students to learn the materials. it is in line with suhayati and haryati (2021), paper on the positive feedback regarding the video results. based on the responses, 63.8% and 63.9% students agree that they have made progress in the listening and reading after watching the video. in contrast with research by metruk (2018), the videos in this paper do not provide any subtitles. they still a understand the tips and trick based on the practice test in the videos. as seen from the questionnaires, students show different perception on the video usage in learning. their suggestions were based on short, clear resolution, and interaction to make them engaged in the independent learning. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 507 students’ problems in learning several answers from the respondents show that they have problems in grammar and listening parts. in listening, the students responded that the conversation is too fast, the instability of the internet connection, and lack of practice on listening questions. it is similar to nguyen, phan, huynh’s study (2020) that the students are hard to catch the meaning and ideas of the test. meanwhile, for the reading part, they tend to have problems in the grammar acquisition. the students seem do not enough time to prepare themselves in learning grammar due to the minimum time of toeic preparation. they only had 6 meetings in learning all the materials. video length and quality the videos used as toeic learning media were separated based on reading and listening subsections. by shortening the duration, can increase student concentration. foong, ismail & tukiman’s paper (2021) inspired the researchers to limit the video and enable them to be flexible and learn at their pace. in addition, animations and cartoons were presented to make the videos more interesting to watch. this is in accordance with brame (2016) who states that there are three things that need to be considered in making learning, namely student's cognitive load, engagement, and active learning. conclusion this objective of this paper was the video usage on the improvement on students’ score in toeic preparation. it can be concluded that having two cycles of car method could improve the students’ performance. the first cycle consisted of six meetings related to toeic learning by asking students to watch a video before the face-to-face interaction via zoom. the result of the first cycle is that there is a significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in the pre-test and post-test 1. in the second cycle, the researchers taught the students again for two meetings at the official toeic debriefing from the campus. the results of the posttest 2 were then compared with post-test 1 using the spss application, and it was concluded that there was a significant difference between the average student learning outcomes in post-test 1 and posttest 2. in conclusion, toeic learning using lowcost video is effective in online learning. for future researchers who would like to do research video usage in toeic learning, the videos should be made in short and divided into several parts. superb video quality is also needed to make the students grasp the materials better. the videos should be straight forward, added animations, and providing the examples as well as include them in a playlist. thus, students can comfortably and enthusiastically watch . furthermore, the listening materials should be drilled more often, so students can follow the speaker's accent and voice. references abidah, a., hidaayatullaah, h. n., simamora, r. m., fehabutar, d., & mutakinati, l. 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(2020). the challenges of taking toeic test and how to overcome: perception of indonesian vocational students. ethical lingua: journal of language teaching and literature, 7(1), 82–91. https://doi.org/10.30605/25409190.167 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 265 the relationship among learning styles, economic status, parents’ education background, and english proficiency in university students nia dayanti english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: niadayanti11@gmail.com sofendi english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: sofendi@yahoo.com eryansyah english language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia e-mail: eryansyah@gmail.com apa citation: dayanti, n., sofendi., & eryansyah (2021). the relationship among learning styles, economic status, parents’ education background, and english proficiency in university students. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), pp. 265-276. doi: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5387 received: 04-08-2021 accepted: 27-10-2021 published: 31-12-2021 introduction as the international business language, english is becoming more important in both native and nonnative english-speaking countries (clement & murugavel, 2018). with the increase of sophisticated technology and the development of industrial revolution 4.0, english in various and diverse sectors such as business, science, technology, politics, cultural exchange, and social media emerges as an inevitable means of communication. in a similar take, adequate english proficiency has become the foremost prerequisite for demonstrating the genuine quality of individuals. therefore, english mastery is a significant feature in building competitive and world-class human resources. nevertheless, based on the 2018 english proficiency index (epi) ranking issued by education first (2018), indonesia ranked 51 out of 88 countries. the nation was below other south abstract: the objectives of this study were to find out (1) whether or not there were significant correlations between (1) learning styles (visual, audio, kinesthetic) and english proficiency, (2) economic status and english proficiency, (3) parents’ educational background and english proficiency, and (4) predictor variables (learning styles, economic status, and parents’ educational background) and the criterion variable (english proficiency). in this correlational study, the data collection was obtained through a likert scale questionnaire and the documentation of toefl prediction results. 489 english education study program students of persatuan guru republik indonesia (pgri) university became the population of this study. the research sample was 114 students taken purposively using the purposive sampling technique. the study revealed that 46 students had visual learning styles, 38 others acquired a better understanding through audio-based learning activities, and 30 respondents preferred kinesthetic methods. based on the result of the study, there was no correlation between english proficiency and visual learning style, audio learning style, and economic status. on the other hand, the study indicated a significant correlation between english proficiency with kinesthetic learning style and parents' educational background. furthermore, there was also a significant correlation between the predictor variables (learning styles, economic status, and parents’ educational background) and the criterion variable (english proficiency). keywords: economic status; english proficiency; learning styles; parents’ educational background. nia dayanti, sofendi, eryansyah the relationship among learning styles, economic status, parents’ education background, and english proficiency in university students 266 east asia countries such as the philippines, malaysia, and vietnam. it was superior only to thailand and cambodia. furthermore, indonesia's english proficiency index had also been declining. from the moderate level during 2013 to 2016, it dropped to the low level in the next two years. the poor display should be taken into account by the nation as it reflected one aspect of the quality of its human resources. in the context of the indonesian education system, english is a foreign language. students learn it from elementary school only as a mere subject. they learn what the language is like and how to use it, but they don't have many opportunities to employ it in communication on a daily basis. therefore, improving english language skills in indonesia requires a great deal of support from an education system that can assist not only teachers in transferring the knowledge but also students in acquiring and using the language. to support english language acquisition, the teaching and learning process must accommodate the students' learning styles. according to (jena, 2017; and kanadli; 2016). the study of learning styles looks at the characteristic ways individuals perceive and process information learning style is a prominent aspect of learning new information and acquiring new skills. understanding learning styles will benefit students determine the proper learning methods and help them enhance their academic progress. learning styles can be referred to as a series of factors, habits and behaviors that can facilitate learning for an individual in certain situations. it can be said that learning styles are the ability of students to receive and process information in learning situations (vaishnav, 2013). furthermore, according to (gilakjani, 2012) who noted that visual learners learn by seeing and visualizing and they prefer for information to be displayed in writing, such as lists of ideas. the auditory learners tend to be natural listeners and they prefer to have things explained to them verbally rather than to read written information, and they learn by listening and verbalizing. one of the six learning styles will stand out more than the others in each student. to put it into perspective, students with visual learning styles usually tend to be happier by reading and observing. on the other hand, auditory learners are likely to understand better through activities involving listening and speaking. hence, recognizing students' learning styles is expected to support their advancement during the learning process. many researchers conducted studies on the correlation between learning style and english proficiency with various outcomes. marzulina, pitaloka, and yolanda (2019) investigated and discovered a correlation between learning styles and english proficiency of undergraduate efl students at one state islamic university in sumatra. on the contrary, rohliah (2015) conducted a study on the correlation among foreign language anxiety, learning styles, language learning attitudes, and english proficiency and found no significant correlation between learning styles and english proficiency. moreover, home is also an inseparable aspect of learning. students do homework, prepare for examinations, or review the lesson that they just had at home. when the learning process moves at home, the role of parents becomes very central. their roles become essential supports for their children's learning achievement. parents of higher educational levels produce better success in providing their children with the assistance they need to succeed in an academic setting (pishghadam & zabini, 2011). selvam (2013) states that parents with higher educational backgrounds possess the ability to guide and supervise students and discuss schoolwork and lessons with them. udoh & sanni (2012) describe that parents with higher educational backgrounds often get better jobs and earn more money. thus, their children are likely to have a great deal of support from their parents' education and financial capability. in other words, proper learning facilities, the best supporting learning materials, and a better learning atmosphere await them at home. parents' support becomes an indispensable factor in students' academic success. another determinant influencing students' english proficiency is their economic status. it is the combination of the economic and social position of an individual or family in connection to others on the premise of income, educational level, and occupational status. education is a mechanism of getting knowledge and skills especially at a school, college, or university (gul, r., kanwal, s., & khan, s. s., 2020). suleman et al. (2012) found that children from higher economic status performed superior academic performance while those from lower economic status achieved unsatisfactory academic english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 267 performance. saifi & mehmood (2011) investigated the effect of economic status on students' performance. the study revealed that parents' educational backgrounds, parents' occupations, and facilities at home affected the students' accomplishments. next, zang, jiang, ming, ren, and huang (2021) concluded in their study that although the parents’ background and schools’ quality are keys to student achievement, the indicator of schools’ quality is not about simply having access to learning resources but about how teachers and students utilize them to improve education outcomes. similarly, (gul, r., khan, s. s., & akhtar, s., 2020). they suggested socioeconomic status as creating problems for the students. likewise, marzulina et al. (2018), in their study, reported a significant positive correlation between parent's educational backgrounds and english achievement in which parent's concern for their children's education in school became the determinant to the success of student learning achievement. aulia, vianty, and ihsan (2014) found a significant correlation between parents' economic status and reading achievement of students at madrasah aliyah qodratullah, langkan, banyuasin. marzulina, pitaloka, herizal, holandyah, erlina, and lestari (2018) also found a correlation between parents’ educational backgrounds and students’ english achievement in their study. according to slameto (2013) the factors learning achievement is divided into two namely internal factors such as physical factors, psychological factors, and fatigue factors. while factors outside the student self or external factors such as family factors, school factors, and community factors. in addition, the indicators of learning achievement. in line with this setiawan (2015) that parents educational background plays an important role especially in improving learning achievement in schools. from the explanation above, the writer concludes that learning styles, parents' educational background and economic status play a significant role in the students' english proficiency. the author then conducted informal interviews with several respondents from the research sample and found the fact that they had difficulty achieving the desired toefl score because they did not know the appropriate learning styles for them. then, the writer also found that students in pgri university from low economic status and lower parents' educational backgrounds tend to excel academically, while those from higher economic status and better parents' educational backgrounds tend to be less successful. based on the gap explained, the author would like to investigate the correlation among learning styles, parents' educational background, economic status, and english proficiency of pgri university students. this study also investigated the correlation between predictor variables (learning styles, economic status, and parents’ educational background) and the criterion variable (english proficiency). method research design this research was a quantitative correlational study conducted. this study aimed at finding out whether or not students learning styles, economic status, parents' educational background correlated to their english proficiency. the research framework was depicted in error! reference source not found.error! reference source not found. below. + figure 1. research framework english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee description: x1 : learning styles x2 : economic status x3 : parents’ educational background y : english proficiency r1 : correlation between learning styles (visual) and english proficiency of students at pgri university in palembang. r1 : correlation between learning styles (audio) and english proficiency of students at pgri university in palembang. r1 : correlation between learning styles (kinesthetic) and english proficiency of students at pgri university in palembang r2 : correlation between economic status and english proficiency of students at pgri university in palembang r3 : correlation between parents’ educational background and english proficiency of students at pgri university in palembang r4 : correlation between predictor variables (learning styles (visual, audio, kinesthetic), economic status and parents’ educational background) and a criterion variable (english proficiency) of students at pgri university in palembang. participants the population of study according to sugiyono (2016) describes the population as a generalization of the area that consists of objects or subjects with particular qualities and characteristics in a study. similarly, according to arikunto (2013), population is defined as all members of any well defined class of people, events, or objects. population is also the group of the people that you want to find out about by doing your research. in addition, fraenkel, wallen, and hyun (2012) explain a population as the group of interest to the researcher, the group with specific characteristics to whom the researcher would like to generalize the result of the study. table 1 below illustrates the population distribution of this study. table 1. the distribution of population semester total 1st 84 3rd 91 5th 77 7th 30 9th 26 total 289 source: pgri university palembang the sample of study according to sugiyono, sample is a part of the population itself. for example, the population of one inhabitant in one area, then the sample is half of the population in the habitant (sugiyono 2015). in this study, the writer employed purposive sampling techniques in choosing the sample of respondents. purposive sampling technique that is a sampling technique based on certain considerations. the independent variables in this study are mixes exercise and depth jump exercise, the attribute variable in this study is leg length, while the dependent variable is the result of a vertical jump. the instrument used in this study was the measurement of leg length using a meter tool. therefore, only the members of population meeting the criteria were chosen as the respondents of this study. the sample of this study was the fifth, seventh, and ninth semester students of the english education study program of pgri palembang in the 2020/2021 academic year. the sample distribution of this study is presented in the table 2 below. table 2. distribution of sample learning styles learning styles fi percentage visual 46 40,3% audio 38 33,3% kinesthetic 30 26,3% total 114 100% source: pgri university palembang figure 2. distribution of sample learning styles data collection data is the type of information that researchers obtain from the subject of their research (fraenkel, wallen, & hyun, 2012). in the data collection, the writer applied two instruments. ready-made english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 269 questionnaires were employed to collect the respondents' views on learning styles, parents' educational backgrounds, and economic status. furthermore, the documentation of students' toefl score results from the pgri university was used as the data for english proficiency. from 127 participants, there were 114 students responded to the questionnaires. questionnaire three sets of questionnaires were utilized for learning styles, economic status, and parents' educational background. an instrument developed by cohen, oxford, and chi (2006 as cited in male, 2019) was used to measure the learning styles. the questionnaire contained 30 items. statements number 5, 10, 26, 27, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, and 22 are for visual learning style. statements number 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 17, 23, 24, and 28 are for auditory learning style. then, statements number 1, 2, 6, 7, 18, 19, 20, 25, and 28 are for kinesthetics learning style. the score ranges are represented by using numbers (likert-scale) from five until one. the answers have five responses, which are (1) never, (2) rarely, (3) sometimes, and (4) often, (5) always. a response indicating a low level of learning styles for audio, visual, and kinesthetic receives one point, while the one indicating a high level of learning styles for audio, visual, and kinesthetic receives five points. therefore, the lowest total score for each learning style is 10, and 50 is for the highest one. the second instrument was for the economic status variable. the questionnaire was adapted from maesaroh and indrawati (2006, 2009, as cited in aulia 2014). it consisted of fifteen items with four options of responses covering the three aspects of economic status. a response indicating a low level of economic status receives one point, and those showing a high level of economic status receive four points. the possible lowest total score for economic status was 15, and 60 is for the highest total score. furthermore, the writer adapted the questionnaire for parents’ educational backgrounds from unesco (2012). the questionnaire contained six statements about parents' latest and highest educational level. each of them provided six responses options for respondents to choose from. the responses value from one to six depending on the level of education parents had, one for the lowest score and six for the highest score of educational background. data analysis the data was analyzed using the descriptive statistic analysis and spearman correlation coefficient. the descriptions of the degree of correlation are as follow: table 3. the degree of correlation degr s degree of correlation 0,00 – 0,199 very weak correlation 0,20 – 0,399 weak correlation 0,40 – 0,599 fair correlation 0,60 – 0,799 strong correlation 0,80 1,000 very strong correlation source: sugiyono (2016) results and discussion the result of learning styles (visual) questionnaire learning style (visual) questionnaire was a readymade questionnaire by cohen, oxford, and chi (2006 as cited in male, 2019). it was administered to find out how many students tend toward visual learning styles (visual). learning styles (visual) questionnaire consisted of 10 items. table 4 below shows the descriptive statistics of the learning styles (visual) questionnaire table 4. the descriptive statistics of learning styles (visual) questnnaire descriptive statistics n minimum maximum mean std. deviation visual 114 22.00 50.00 35.6140 6.68178 valid n (listwise) 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on the data obtained from the questionnaire, the minimum score for visual learning styles was of 22.00, and the maximum was 50.00. the mean score was 35.6140, and the standard deviation was 6.68178. the results of learning styles (audio) questionnaire nia dayanti, sofendi, eryansyah the relationship among learning styles, economic status, parents’ education background, and english proficiency in university students 270 learning styles (audio) questionnaire was a readymade questionnaire by cohen, oxford, and chi (20016,as cited in male, 2019). it was administered to find out how many students tend toward visual learning styles (audio). learning styles (audio) questionnaire consisted of 10 items. table 5 below shows the descriptive statistics of the learning styles (audio) questionnaire. table 5. the descriptive statistics of learning styles (audio) descriptive statistics n minimum maximum mean std. deviation audio 114 19.00 50.00 35.8246 6.68178 valid n (listwise) 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on the data obtained from the questionnaire, the minimum score for audio learning styles was of 19.00, and the maximum was 50.00. the mean score was 35.8246, and the standard deviation was 6.68178. the results of learning styles (kinesthetic) questionnaire learning styles (kinesthetic) questionnaire was a ready-made questionnaire by cohen, oxford, and chi (2006 as cited in male, 2019). it was administered to find out how many students tend to ward visual learning styles (kinesthetic). learning styles (kinesthetic) questionnaire consisted of 10 items. table 6 below shows the descriptive statistics of the learning styles (kinesthetic) questionnaire. table 6 the descriptive statistics of learning styles (kinesthetic) questionnaire descriptive statistics n minimum maximum mean std. deviation kinesthetic 114 17.00 50.00 33.8070 6.77956 valid n (listwise) 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on the data obtained from the learning styles (kinesthetic) questionnaire, students learning styles (kinesthetic) judgment ranged from a minimum of 17.00 to a maximum of 50.00 with a mean of 33.8070 and a standard deviation of 6.77956. the results of economic status questionnaire economic status questionnaire was a ready-made questionnaire by maesaroh and indrawati (2006, 2009, as cited in aulia 2014). it was administered to find out how many students tend toward visual economic status. economic status questionnaire consisted of 10 items. table 7 below shows the descriptive statistics of the economic status questionnaire. table 7. the descriptive statistics of economic status questionnaire descriptive statistics n minimum maximum mean std. deviation parents education 114 21.00 54.00 35.5526 5.99276 valid n (listwise) 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on the data obtained from the economic status questionnaire, the minimum of student economic status score was 21.00, and the maximum score was 54.00. the mean was 35.5526, and the standard deviation was 5.99276. the results of parents educational background questionnaire parents' educational background questionnaire was a ready-made questionnaire by (unesco, 2012). it was administered to find out how many students tend toward visual economic status. parents' educational background questionnaire consisted of 10 items. table 8 below shows the descriptive statistics of the parents educational background questionnaire. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 271 table 8. the descriptive statistics of parents’ educational background questionnaire n minimum maximum mean std. deviation parents education 114 2.00 12.00 6.5965 2.37509 valid n ( listwise) 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on the data obtained from the parents educational background questionnaire, the minimum score of parents’ educational background was 2.00, and the maximum score was 12.00. the mean score was 6.5965, and the standard deviation was 2.37509. . the results of english proficiency questionnaire english proficiency was administered to find out the english proficiency level of students of pgri university. table 10 below shows the descriptive statistics of the parents’ educational background questionnaire. table 9. the descriptive statistics of english proficiency questionnaire n minimum maximum mean std. deviation english proficiency 114 350.00 550.00 479.1491 34.88850 valid n (listwise) 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on the data obtained from the result of english proficiency judgment ranged from a minimum of 350 to a maximum of 550 with a mean of 479.1491 and a standard deviation of 34.88850. correlation analysis table 10. correlation learning style (visual) test with english proficiency correlations visual english proficiency spearman's rho visual correlation coefficient 1.000 -.172 sig. (2-tailed) . .067 n 114 114 english proficiency correlation coefficient -.172 1.000 sig. (2-tailed) .067 . n 114 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on table 10, the correlation coefficient value for visual learning style was -0.172. the significant value was 0.067. the correlation coefficient value of -0,172 (lower than 0) indicated a negative direction, meaning no unidirectional correlation occurred between visual learning style and english proficiency. in other words, the visual learning style did not help students to have sufficient english proficiency. furthermore, the correlation coefficient value in the interval of 0.00 0.199 marked a very weak correlation between visual learning style and english proficiency. finally, the sig value was 0.067 indicating there is no significant correlation between visual and english proficiency. table 11. correlation learning style (audio) test with english proficiency correlations audio english proficiency spearman's rho audio correlation coefficient 1.000 .183 sig. (2-tailed) . .052 n 114 114 english profici ency correlation coefficient .183 1.000 sig. (2-tailed) .052 . n 114 114 source: output from spss version 25 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee based on table 11, the correlation coefficient value for audio learning style was 0.183. the significant value was 0.052. the correlation coefficient value was higher than 0. it indicated a positive direction, meaning a unidirectional correlation occurred between audio learning style and english proficiency. in other words, the higher the audio learning style score was, the better english proficiency students had. however, the correlation coefficient value in the interval of 0.00 0.199 marked a very weak correlation between audio learning style and english proficiency. then, the significant value showed that there is no significant correlation between audio and english proficiency. table 12. correlation learning style (kinesthetic) test with english proficiency kinestheti c english proficienc y spearman's rho kinest hetic correlation coefficient 1.000 .339** sig. (2-tailed) . .000 n 114 114 english profici ency correlation coefficient .339** 1.000 sig. (2-tailed) .000 . n 114 114 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). source: output from spss version 25 based on table 12, the correlation coefficient value for kinesthetic learning style was 0.339. the significant value was 0.000. since the correlation coefficient value indicated a positive direction, a unidirectional correlation occurred between kinesthetic learning style and english proficiency. in other words, the higher the kinesthetic learning style score was, the better english proficiency students had. however, the correlation coefficient value in the interval of 0.200 0.399 marked a very weak correlation between kinesthetic learning style and english proficiency. however, the significant value showed a significant correlation between kinesthetic and english proficiency. table 13. correlation economic status test with english proficiency correlations es ep spearman's rho es correlation coefficient 1.000 .143 sig. (2-tailed) . .128 n 114 114 ep correlation coefficient .143 1.000 sig. (2-tailed) .128 . n 114 114 source: output from spss version 25 based on table 13, the correlation coefficient value for the economic status variable was 0.143. the significant value was 0.128. since the correlation coefficient value indicated a positive direction, a unidirectional correlation occurred between economic status and english proficiency. in other words, the higher the economic status score was, the better english proficiency students had. however, the correlation coefficient value in the interval of 0.00 0.199 marked a very weak correlation between economic status and english proficiency. then, the significant value showed no significant correlation between economic status and english proficiency. table 14. correlation parents’ educational background test with english proficiency pe ep english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 1, december 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 273 spearman's rho pe correlation coefficient 1.000 .389** sig. (2-tailed) . .000 n 114 114 ep correlation coefficient .389** 1.000 sig. (2-tailed) .000 . n 114 114 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). source: output from spss version 25 based on table 14, the correlation coefficient value for the parents' educational background variable was 0.389. the significant value was 0.000. since the correlation coefficient value indicated a positive direction, a unidirectional correlation occurred between parents' educational backgrounds and english proficiency. in other words, the higher the parents' educational background score was, the better english proficiency students had. however, the correlation coefficient value in the interval of 0.200 0.399 marked a very weak correlation between parents' educational background and english proficiency. then, the significant value showed a significant correlation between parents' educational backgrounds and english proficiency. table 15. the correlations among predictor variables the correlations among predictor variables model r f sig. 1 .439a 8.752 .000 a. predictors: (constant), learning styles, economic status and parents educational b. criterion variable: english proficiency source: output from spss version 25 based on the error! reference source not found., the correlation coefficient between the predictor variables total and the criterion variable total was .439 with a significance value of .000. thus, it can be concluded that there was a significant correlation between predictor variables (learning styles, economics status, and parents’ educational background) and the criterion variable (english proficiency). discussion in this section, the author will provide discussion of the statistical analysis that was conducted in the finding section. interpretation will be presented following the research problem in this study. the correlation between learning styles and english proficiency the findings of this study stated that there was no significant correlation between visual learning style and english proficiency. the findings were in line with setyoningsih (2019). the research that visual learning style had no significant correlation with english proficiency and had a positive coefficient value. in other words, students with visual learning style tend to have low english proficiency. in addition, this study discovered no significant and positive correlation between audio learning style and english proficiency. similar research conducted by marzulina, pitaloka, & yolanda (2019) also obtained identical findings. the study revealed learners with audio learning style tended to have poor english proficiency. finally, this study identified a correlation between kinesthetic learning style and english proficiency. students with kinesthetic learning style, if well-accommodated and facilitated, would have excellent english proficiency. this finding had similarity to the findings from jaya (2019). the correlation between economic status and english proficiency the study revealed significant negative correlation between economic status variable and english proficiency. this indicates that higher economic status does not guarantee students will obtain the desired english proficiency. it is in line with the findings from hernandez (2014) also found significant negative correlation between economic status and learners achievement in mathematics. the correlation between parents’ educational background and english proficiency the findings revealed that parents’ educational background showed significantly positive correlation with the english proficiency. higher nia dayanti, sofendi, eryansyah the relationship among learning styles, economic status, parents’ education background, and english proficiency in university students 274 level of educational background provided parents a better understanding of what the children needs to excel in the classroom. therefore, the higher educational background a parent has, the better chance students will have to perform well. several studies also discover a similar result. marzulina et al. (2018) concluded a significant positive correlation between parents’ educational backgrounds and english achievement. in addition, susetyo and rahmawati (2021) stated in their study that parents educational background was the key to student success in achieving english proficiency. the correlation between predictor variables (learning styles, economics status, parents’ educational backgtround) and criterion variables (english proficiency) the result shows a significantly positive correlation between predictor variables (learning styles, economic status, parents’ educational) and criterion variables (english proficiency). this means learning styles, parents’ educational background and economic status could become the determinant of english proficiency variable. conclusion to begin with, the findings indicate that visual and audio learning styles did not have a significant correlation with the student's english proficiency. only kinesthetic learning style is significantly related to the student's english proficiency. in other words, the visual and audio learning styles may not give any stimuli to help students understand english and achieve the desired proficiency. on the other hand, learners with kinesthetic learning styles are likely to have a better understanding of english and achieve proficiency if the teachers and the students themselves could accommodate their learning style into the teaching and learning plannings. based on both writer (alumnae)’s personal experience and informal interview results, many lecturers do not consider and accommodate students' learning styles in preparing lesson plans and during its application in the classroom. therefore, this study recommends lecturers to consider students' learning styles in preparing lesson plans, determining learning methods, and selecting teaching materials. knowing students' learning styles will be very beneficial for students because a well-accommodated learning style will help improve their understanding of the lesson. then, it will be very useful if lecturers can map students based on their learning styles in class so that they become more interested and motivated in learning. next, the study also found no significant correlation between students’ economic status and their english proficiency. students who came from the middle to up class of economic status and could afford good facilities and english courses did not show a significant difference in academic performance. they could not make the most of the facilities they had and were not highly motivated to achieve the desired achievement. in other words, students' economic status did not guarantee better grades and proficiency levels. last but not least, the parents' educational background turned out to have a significant relationship with the students’ english proficiency. therefore, it is safe to say that students who have highly educated parents are likely to achieve a good level of english proficiency. to sum up, learning styles and economic status did not correlate with the student's proficiency level. only parents’ educational backgrounds had a significant correlation based on correlation coefficient level and could help to advance their children english proficiency. however, students and teacher/lecturers should still need to know about learning styles to ease learners reach expected english proficiency. this study suggests that lecturers and teachers can understand students' learning styles. in addition, lecturers or instructors must improve their teaching abilities to better accommodate students' learning styles. then, the results of this study can be used as a reflection for students to know themselves better and determine what learning style is most suitable for them to accomplish the best and desired learning outcomes. finally, future researchers can use the results of this study as materials for consideration and reference in conducted related studies. references arikunto, s. 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(2013). learning style and academic achievement of secondary school students. voice of research, 1(4), 1-4. https://eprints.uny.ac.id.14875/1/ nia dayanti, sofendi, eryansyah the relationship among learning styles, economic status, parents’ education background, and english proficiency in university students 276 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 919 the essence of the value courage of the buginese-makassarese man in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi: a genetic structural review syarifuddin tundreng universitas sembilan belas november, indonesia email: tundreng.syarifuddin@gmail.com noermanzah postgraduate program of indonesian language education, universitas bengkulu, indonesia email: noermanzah@unib.ac.id agus rofi’i english language education department, universitas majalengka, indonesia email: agusrafii@unma.ac.id musayyedah badan riset dan inovasi nasional, indonesia email: musayyedahhs@gmail.com apa citation: tundreng, s., noermanzah., rofi’i, a., & musayyedah. (2022). the essence of the value courage of the buginese-makassarese man in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi: a genetic structural review. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 919-928. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.5912 received: 25-07-2022 accepted: 26-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction socio-economic conditions are in line with the development of science and technology. it causes a change in the way of thinking because, on the other hand, technology affects the harm caused by science which builds itself by inhibiting the adequate capacity of the mind, and its reach has surpassed research on the potential benefits and harms for younger users although also has benefits in various fields (the lancet editorial, 2018; benitez et al., 2018). to guide one's life, of course, we need inherited cultural and philosophical values. values can be obtained normatively sourced from societal norms, philosophical norms, and views of life, even from religious beliefs held by a society. if the subject does not judge, then there is no value. thus, value is an appreciation or quality of something that can be the basis for determining a person's behaviour because something is pleasant, satisfying, profitable, or is a belief system. therefore, normative values are not value-free as in science (isaac & platenkamp, abstract: a novel is present as an effort to tell readers about the cultural values of a particular society. likewise, the novel pulau by aspar paturusi tells the values of the courage of the buginese-makassarese man. therefore, the purpose of this study is to gain an in-depth understanding of the values of the courage of bugis-makassar men in aspar paturusi's pulau novel wholly and entirely. this research uses a qualitative approach with a content analysis method. data were collected through repeated and in-depth reading of the novel. furthermore, recording, coding, identification, and classification are carried out. the data are analyzed and interpreted through a deep understanding and abstraction of the society that is told in the novel. the research findings show that in the life of the people of the 70s, the values of courage for buginesemakassarese man, which is one of the values in the buginese-makassarese philosophy of life, are highly guarded, maintained, and upheld. for buginese-makassarese man, courage is identity, pride, honour, and authenticity. the implications of the results of this research are expected to be continuously embedded in the current and future generations as a form of existence of a good life during life's difficulties. keywords: buginese-makassarese man; genetic structures; novel pulau; the value of courage. mailto:noermanzah@unib.ac.id syarifuddin tundreng, noermanzah, agus rofi’i, & musayyedah the essence of the value courage of the buginese-makassarese man in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi: a genetic structural review 920 2017; steel et al., 2017) and are a must to manifest in human behaviour. one of the studies on the philosophical values of life was also conducted by ratri et al. (2017). they revealed that family education values that were founded and described in the novels by kirana kejora were diligence to worship, honesty, respect, unanimous, having achievement, mandate, brave, independence, proportional, take care of self, affection, prelude other people, and fair. the novel is a prose essay that tries to tell an interesting event departing from the lives of the story characters (sulaeman et al., 2020). all the aspirations of the people recorded in the novel can voice the values in society. one of the literary novels that can lead us into a complex literary interpretation but contains a high level of life learning is the novel pulau by aspar paturusi. research on values in terms of the philosophy of life has also been carried out. they showed that in the social condition of the 1970s, the values of buginese-makassarese's life philosophy were highly preserved, maintained, and upheld so that they could live harmoniously and in peace. the condition is in the form of customs, the concept of manhood, honorarium of buginese-makassarese women, mythology in the belief, and awareness of buginese-makassarese society towards education (tundreng et al., 2017). buginese makassarese philosophical values of life, which are understood based on the teachings of their ancestors (to riolo), the value of the courage of buginese-makassarese men will be the focus of research. these values can be input for the preservation of cultural values during the development period both in the buginese makassarese community and in the world community in general at this time. the value of courage becomes the principle of life for the buginese-makassarese man in expressing truth in the context of the benefit of many people's lives. so, the concept of courage for the buginesemakassarese man in upholding the truth does not discriminate against anything that happens and has been imprinted on them since childhood. this is confirmed by darmapoetra (2014), who categorizes courage in four ways, namely: a). de nametag ri paniolo, always being in front or not afraid to be a pioneer, b). de nametag ri parimunri, always giving opportunities to others who are better than himself, or not afraid to be placed behind, c). de nametag mangkalinga kariba, can accept criticism and suggestions from others, and d). de nametag amita bali is brave to face opponents in negotiations and war situations and has a strong spirit, consistent and firm. observe the essence of the value of the courage of buginese-makassarese man in ancient times from the description of events in the novel by aspar paturusi. the forging of life as a sailor had a significant impact on the character of the buginese-makassarese man who was in tanjung bira. the representation of the life of the people of tanjung bira at that time was described as starting from traditions or customs, culture, religious concepts, social relations, and community laws that applied to the people in tanjung bira at that time (paturusi, 1976). they firmly hold on to the value of determination affiliated with the issue of principles and values of social life that are applied and upheld, making them forget all of that. they only have one option to finish it, which is a fight to the death (tokdokpuli). in addition, the principle of life embedded in the buginese makassarese man is a manifestation of the collaboration of the character of the bugis makassar man, who is tough, which is also influenced by the level of social status. social status in buginese-makassarese society is shaped by several things, namely through the role of individuals, wealth, power, and others (hidayat et al., 2013). the pattern of behaviour of the buginesemakassarese community contained in the story of the novel pulau by aspar paturusi reflects the pattern of community behaviour in the 70s which is far from the condition of the buginesemakassarese community today. current conditions have experienced mental and moral degradation in various aspects of social life. this is suspected because of the value of courage which is integrated with the values of honesty, determination, the value of shame, and other values which are the buginese-makassarese philosophy of life have been abandoned. therefore, the values of wisdom in buginesemakassarese law and culture, one of which is courage, need to be revived so that it can be used as the nation's momentum to avoid degradation or experience dark conditions in behaviour that are out of the norm-customary and legal norms (qamar et al., 2017). local cultural values originating from indigenous indonesian cultural values are no longer the main foundation in designing character formation in the family. these values are in line with the character of the indonesian people. this impacts the behaviour and character of children at almost all levels of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0039368117301048#! english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 921 society in south sulawesi, in particular, in indonesia as a whole. overall, the concept of the value of courage is part of the buginese-makassarese philosophy of life contained in the novel pulau. it can be implemented in all aspects of life in the buginesemakassarese community in particular and indonesian society in general. the form of the implementation of the value of courage can be seen in passing regarding the order of the concept of the state, which was conveyed by arung matoa, who is better known as matinroe ri right once made a will to his son: "only a leader who has four things can prosper the country." the first is an honest leader, the second is a capable and wise leader, the third is a brave leader, and the fourth is a generous leader. the concept of courage, according to arung matao's view, is not hesitating to face or accept reprimands and not forgetting the land when worshipped or lauded (matthes, 1985). a study on the value of courage was analyzed by alimin & sulastri (2018) with the findings of courage research including (1) the value of courage in fighting, (2) the value of courage in facing challenges, (3) the value of courage in fighting for the truth, (4) the value of courage against the enemy, (5) the value of courage to save oneself from the enemy, (6) the value of courage to save others, and (7) the value of courage to seek evidence of the truth. these previous studies reveal the value of courage. the value of male courage needs to be carried out more deeply so that the values of male courage can be used as guidelines for parents, teachers, and society in the present and future. in revealing the values of courage contained in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi. researchers used a structural genetic perspective. this approach focuses on the social conditions of society, the relationship between literary works and society, and the author's worldview. method this study uses a content analysis method with a qualitative approach. emzir (2014) states qualitative content analysis is a qualitatively oriented procedure of text interpretation to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the problem being studied. then, titscher et al. (2000) explained that content analysis is a method of analyzing text by constructing categories of text meaning by referring to hidden content and context reconstruction and considering the meaning of specific examples. data in this study is data about the courage value of buginese-makassarese men in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi. the data is obtained through text excerpts and linguistic explanations in the form of paragraphs, expressions, sentences, and words that contain ideas that support the acquisition of in-depth knowledge of the values of the buginese-makassarese philosophy of life in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi through the structure of the story. furthermore, additional data in the form of excerpts of notes obtained from understanding the perspective of the values of the buginese-makassarese philosophy of life that occurred in the buginese-makassarese community in the 70s, as well as various reviews that talk about the author's biography, background of the author's life. or directly from the author's narrative through interviews. the source of data in this study is the novel pulau by aspar paturusi published by pt bhakti baru, ujung pandang in 1976. in addition, another source of data comes from aspar paturusi, the author of the novel pulau. the content analysis techniques are recorded, coded, identified, classified, interpreted, and drawn conclusions. the data are analyzed and interpreted through a deep understanding and abstraction of the society that is told in the novel. it is hoped that the qualitative content analysis technique can reveal the value of courage derived from the text of the novel pulau by aspar paturusi. results and discussion buginese-makassarese men as self-identity the term male (urane/bura'ne) in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi has a broad and deep meaning. it refers to a male person who has the complex values of the buginese-makassarese community: having a calm attitude in dealing with tense situations and having the courage to face death for the sake of life. upholding truth and self-respect (warani), persistence in keeping what has been said from his mouth (lempu na getting), intelligence, and tenacity are functionally applied in maintaining and maintaining self-esteem (napatettongi siri'na/napaentengi siri'na), and an attitude of tolerance to maintain the honour and dignity of others (natarowangi siri'na tau'e/nabolikkangi siri'na tauwwa). implementation in daily life, men are required to maintain morality and solidarity in behaviour concerning the people around them, where solidarity has the meaning of tolerance, solidarity, and social care. to fulfil all that, a man must have syarifuddin tundreng, noermanzah, agus rofi’i, & musayyedah the essence of the value courage of the buginese-makassarese man in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi: a genetic structural review 922 a brave attitude (warani) and the knowledge of manhood/knowledge of men. (paddissengng urane/pangngissengang bura'ne). men are measured by their calm attitude in dealing with tense situations and their courage to face death to uphold truth and self-respect (warani), their steadfastness in keeping what has been said from their mouths (lempu na getting), as well as an attitude of tolerance to maintain honour and dignity. other people (tarowwangi siri'na). in the life of the buginese-makassarese men, the designation becomes very important and is a shameful disgrace if a buginese-makassarese man does not have some attitudes, which become a barometer for bearing the title of men. because the title of man is considered very important for a buginese-makassarese man (who will later act as the head of the household), this condition can be described in the novel based on the following quote. “what are you doing? what? hah!" snapped sattu. before the person could answer, sattu had swept his legs, and the person was knocked down then because the balance of his body was lost. with anger overflowing, sattu grabbed the man's hair. "don't hit, sattu! i swear. i accidentally! no, i didn't peek at them. for god's sake, no." replied the man breathlessly and knew who slammed him. (data 5/ paturusi, 1976, pp.58-59). …“don't look down on other people, don't insult their honour. that's what their parents told them to do. but family, a girl's honour, is a lifelong honour. ringing in sattu's heart is a message always repeated from grandfather to grandson. (data 6/ paturusi, 1976, p.60) the attitude shown by sattu first is a defence of custom. customs for the buginesemakassarese men can be personified as humans who must be given a high and noble position in the midst of social life. second, such a brave attitude is an innate character of the buginesemakassarese tribe passed down from generation to generation from their ancestors. dare to defend the custom, which has become their way of life together. among those included, dare to guard and maintain the honour of self, family, and others. the role of custom in shaping and maintaining behavioural patterns of the social life of the buginese-makassarese community is significant. this can be seen in the incident when sattu forced himself to have the courage to face his father (tettanya ) to express his love for aminah, the girl he loves. the biggest fear for buginesemakassarese children in family interactions is when they have to ask or speak directly to their father. this is understood as a form of etiquette formed by tradition from generation to generation as an appreciation to parents. in addition, in sattu there is an honest nature. sattu's father acknowledges sattu's frankness, who dares to speak his thoughts and feelings in front of him. sattu hoped to convey his wishes politely and carefully, lest what he said hurt the feelings of his parents. honesty, basically a spontaneous reaction of true courage, as a more substantial informal control (blay et al., 2018), helps teach clean living (bar-el & tobol, 2017), a driver of increasing moral attitudes (ma et al., 2018) and can be the basis for increasing the cognition of a nation (rindermann et al., 2018). in bugis society, honesty, straightness, and sincerity are called lempu, meaning that what is said and done is not hampered by the slightest sense of fear; what is said and done always departs from the conscience. the buginese-makassarese men, especially men, are very flattered by being called buginesemakassarese men. it is a matter of pride for him as a man has fulfilled all the characteristics attached to that title. the characteristics referred to here is a man who has the complex values of the buginese-makassarese philosophy of life, who has the knowledge and understanding to place the value of self-esteem (siri') in its actual position, that is, the bugis-makassar man (urane ogi/burane mangkasara ). the tendency to use men in bugis-makassar, with male nicknames (uranena urane/bura'nena bura'nea) or real men (urane sitongengtongenna/bura'ne sitojengtojenna). these terms refer to the authenticity of a bugis-makassar man and the values of goodness attached to him. depiction of the essence of male values embedded in buginese-makassarese man in the story's events in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi is also found at several points of events. the first incident is the character of the older man at the beginning of the story as a selfrepresentation of sunu lompo; the second incident is when datu toa gives a message to his grandson, namely sunu lompo, about the authenticity of buginese-makassarese man; the third incident when salasa bora expressed his opinion about the form of a man called a man, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s2214804317300253#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s2214804317300253#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0022096517306811#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s016028961730226x#! english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 923 according to the buginese-makassarese philosophy of life; and the fourth event, namely the incident of sanneng karang and salasa bora, who faced each other not as friends, but as opponents who would kill each other. the male concept of buginese-makassarese can be found in the dialogue between sanneng karang and salasa bora. the two men confronted him mightily. both of them are stout. stand still. sharpen each other's eyes. for a moment, they reminisced about their childhood. just a moment. for their eyes guard one another, "i've never seen you scared, sanneng karang!" “you're the one who never, salasa bora'!” "never did i hate you." "neither am i!" (data 54/ paturusi, 1976, p.110) “why don't you want to attack first? take out and stab your kris, sanneng!” “i will try to dodge your attacks. stab your keris, salasa! waiting like this, torture harder!” (data 174/ paturusi, 1976, p.111) the situation described above shows the way buginese-makassarese men solve problems related to the value of family honour and selfesteem. all forms of ties, both family ties, friendships, and work ties, have been forgotten for self-esteem. the two friends defend each other's dignity and the dignity of their respective families. they are willing to risk their lives to maintain the family's dignity. the feud between the two friends is unavoidable. the urge to defend his family's honour and love for his son has made salasa bora solid and brave to duel with his best friend, sanneng karang. a final decision to resolve a very tragic problem. the incident where two friends face each other in a duel to kill each other is the last way to solve problems in the buginese-makassarese tradition when it comes to shame (siri). however, the incident mentioned above also implies an unusual phenomenon when people face each other to kill each other. even though the two friends face each other to kill each other, they still respect each other. this is the proper form of the courage of the buginese-makassarese men; even though he is nearing death, his human values in him are still strong. this situation is strong evidence of how the honour and dignity of the family in the buginese-makassarese tradition are highly upheld. friends, relatives, and family, if they make a mistake that violates custom, they must be given a penalty. a firm attitude helps build effective social communication (avşar & alkaya, 2017). for buginese-makassarese men, the fall in the value of one's honour and self-esteem must be paid for by facing each other one on one until one has to die. the term “man” (urane/bura'ne) is at stake to uphold self-respect (siri'). in the view of the buginese-makassarese people, the so-called man (uranena urane/bura'ne na bura'nea) was a man who was able to maintain and uphold his dignity (patettongi siri/paentengi siri'nu) and maintain honour. and self-esteem of others (tarowwangi siri'na/bolikkangi siri'). dealing with one-on-one is a form of the final solution and the only way that can be taken to defend the honour and maintain self-respect. because selfesteem (siri') about the events in the story above is a matter that already concerns the dignity and honour of the family of one party, even though it is described as such, there are still efforts to overcome the problems that arise between individuals in a social group, because the basic principle of self-esteem can improve the working principle or attempts to set strategies for adjustment (gilchrist et al., 2018). if various efforts have been made and there is no way out, like it or not, one on one is the solution. “i would rather die than live in shame” is equivalent to "kualleyangangi tallanga na towaliya" (i prefer drowning rather than having to go back to the beach). this jargon and which is also the character of the bugis makassar people, apply in conditions of time and place, anytime and anywhere. buginese-makassarese boys in the family the incident between salasa bora and sanneng karang was a manifestation of the genuine attitude of self-worth of courage shown by buginese-makassarese men. this confirms that courage cannot be separated from buginesemakassarese men. according to the buginesemakassarese view of life, the two people's attitude is justified because of maintaining the dignity of the family among the villagers. the courage of the buginese-makassarese people's philosophy of life is characterized by a calm soul, chivalry, responsibility, and a tolerant attitude towards others. salasa bora's courage is brave to face death in defending his family's honour and selfrespect. meanwhile, courage in the philosophy of life of the buginese-makassarese men is daring to die and courage, which includes peace of mind, courage to defend the truth, daring to be https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s088259631630166x#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s088259631630166x#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1469029217307446#! syarifuddin tundreng, noermanzah, agus rofi’i, & musayyedah the essence of the value courage of the buginese-makassarese man in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi: a genetic structural review 924 responsible, and having an attitude of tolerance. a brave person always calms in the face of any complex problem. nevertheless, the attitude of the bugis-makassar courage still adheres to the attitude of salasa bora, who is brave and has a stable peace of mind. as buginese-makassarese men, it is an obligation to carry out a noble task as a shield for his family's honor. for this task, a buginesemakassarese man is provided with the knowledge of virility and mysticism by their parents or teachers, which is expected to be helpful in his life when he encounters a condition where his family's honour and self-esteem are threatened. therefore, in the view of the buginesemakassarese community, women are a symbol of family honour and self-esteem of buginesemakassarese men. buginese-makassarese women who are belittled, harassed and belittled mean dropping honour for the family. this fact is supported by the bugis custom, namely that a woman must always be under someone's protection. if he is single, regardless of age, he is under the care and protection of his parents, brothers (if any), and other male relatives; when she married, she was under the protection of her husband (idrus, 2005). therefore, buginesemakassarese man is expected to be able to stand as protectors of their safety, morals, and honour. this condition also causes the love relationship between a young man and a girl to be very tight and sensitive. the relationship between the young man and the girl he loves barely has the space and time to be alone. at the very least, the meeting will only be limited to seeing each other when there is a crowd at a party or wedding reception. girls whose faces were plastered with powder and lipstick watched in the window. through those windows, there are smiles, there are laughs, and there are sparkles sent to the courtyard. the atmosphere was lively, and excited shouts continued to soar. the shiny skin attached to the muscular bodies glowed even more in the light, and from them were born screams or sharp eyes stealing glances and the occasional mischievous smile. (paturusi, 1976, p.66) the buginese-makassarese place buginesemakassarese women as glass crowns that are not arbitrary to be touched or used without going through the terms and conditions that have been regulated by custom (ade'/ada). when the glass crown is touched and causes it to break, the honour and pride of the family will fall. women in the status of unmarried girls, but the above description also apply to the wives of the buginese-makassarese man. the husband, as the head of the household, in the social life of the buginese-makassarese community, is responsible for the safety, morals, and honour as well as the overall life and life of his wife. safety, morals, and honour are integrated into the value of a woman's dignity (makkunrai malebbi/baine malabiri). what is described by aspar paturusi through his views above, according to the researcher, is a reflection of aspar paturusi's life. this can be seen from the description of aspar paturusi 's artistic career journey, from leaving his hometown to makassar city until he penetrated the capital city of jakarta. aspar paturusi did not go through all that alone. during all phases of pursuing his artistic career, he passed accompanied by his family, children, and wife. until the second he decided to move to jakarta, aspar paturusi brought his family to jakarta. here, it can be seen that aspar paturusi, during his busy life, does not necessarily neglect his responsibility to always be by the side of his wife and children. his awareness as a buginesemakassarese man always led him to remain firm as a shield for his wife and children. this is reflected in what has been described above. buginese-makassarese man makes it imperative for themselves to assume responsibility as protectors of women. in this context, protecting buginese-makassarese women, especially those who are part of the family, is the same as protecting family honour and self-respect (siri') as buginese-makassarese. the author, through the pulau novel, wants to make an affirmation to return to the meaning of the philosophical values of the buginesemakassarese people's life, which include the values of honesty, courage, responsibility, determination, intelligence, tenacity, and the meaning of the value of self-esteem (siri'), and the designation of men which must be interpreted as the meaning and views of the ancients. the results of this study, when associated with the word value, several segments of events that emphasize value are a measure to punish or choose specific actions and goals. values are abstract realities that can be felt in each of us so that they become essential principles in life. therefore, the value system affects the mindset of humans, which will eventually shape human attitudes in society. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 925 the value of courage will form an attitude, namely the tendency to do or not do something towards certain people, objects, or circumstances. in other words, aspar paturusi tries to remind his readers that the perspective on the meaning of the value of courage contained in buginesemakassarese men is contained in pangngaderang/pangadadakg (custom) and messages (paseng/pairs) that exist in the life of the buginese-makassarese people. makassar, at this time, far shifted from the real meaning. buginese-makassarese man in social context on the social conditions of society, the novel pulau pulau tells about society in the 70s, which was more concentrated on virility or men's science (paddissengngeng and/pangngissengang bura'ne) and mysticism. this situation occurred as a reaction to the deep understanding received by a bugis-makassar boy about his role in the family and society, greatly influencing him to become the "man's man" in the buginesemakassarese concept of man. the value of men for the bugis-makassar community is measured when they can defend their dignity, family, and group. therefore, to defend his honour, family, and group, he must have male knowledge (kanuragan science and spiritual knowledge). apart from these reasons, it should be noted that buginese-makassarese man are the majority of seafarers who often travel long distances to other areas (masompe). the buginese-makassarese people's view of life regarding this matter is that they assume that wherever a person is, he cannot be separated from the attributes that are attached to him, both self-name, family, and the fragrance of the name of his hometown. this causes the buginese-makassarese people to consider masculinity or male knowledge (paddissengngeng urane/ pangngissengang bura'ne) and mysticism to be absolute for a bugis-makassar man. this can be seen in the following quote from the novel pulau. the man himself from childhood studied with his grandfather. he was studying virility and mysticism. relying on the power of god. (data 212/ paturusi, 1976, p.13) in general, buginese-makassarese people, especially men, have studied virility and mysticism since childhood. the concentration of buginese-makassarese parents on teaching virility and mysticism to their children was closely related to the social conditions of society at that time. the people of tanjung bira at that time were in a psychosocial condition, traumatized by the times of rebellion that occurred in the country after independence. they focus on teaching virility and mysticism to their sons due to their awareness that in the future, family honour and self-respect (siri') will be passed on to sons. historically, the description of the social life of the buginese-makassarese people, as described above, is the social impact of the many series of events that have occurred in this country. in addition, like other areas, tanjung bira village has a social problem that often arise robbery. this social condition triggers the buginesemakassarese community, especially men, to study martial arts, masculinity/male science, and spiritual knowledge. in addition, the buginesemakassarese felt that if he did not have content, they thought that he had not yet become a perfect man. the data above implies the importance of masculinity and mysticism at that time. this is related to one's efforts in upholding the value of self-esteem (siri') and honour. a buginesemakassarese man must have a brave attitude (warani) in any case. starting from the demands of this attitude, parents also provide provisions (ripaddokori/ripakekkengngi) knowledge of virility or knowledge of men and inner knowledge. buginese-makassarese men are sailors who will automatically sail far away to other countries. to protect him from all possibilities that could harm him, both in shipping and in other countries, buginese-makassarese men study male science from people who he considers excellent and powerful. it is also believed that this knowledge of virility/male knowledge can form brave buginese-makassarese men so that they can always face all situations in life, anytime and anywhere. in the life of the buginese-makassarese community, parents play a unique role in providing their children with helpful knowledge. mainly the science of masculinity (napaddokori), this science is not only oriented to the desire of children to be innovative. more than that, knowledge is used as a provision in living life. sunu lompo has a strong belief in what he has been given. the knowledge that he had been taught, he used in sailing to the destination. buginese-makassarese man in the author's world view from the analysis of the novel pulau by aspar paturusi, it is found that the term male syarifuddin tundreng, noermanzah, agus rofi’i, & musayyedah the essence of the value courage of the buginese-makassarese man in the novel pulau by aspar paturusi: a genetic structural review 926 (urane/bura'ne) has a broad and deep meaning. for the buginese-makassarese view, the term male refers to a male person who has the complex values of the buginese-makassarese community: having a calm attitude in dealing with tense situations and having the courage to face death to uphold the truth and self-respect (warani), his firmness in keeping what has been said from his mouth (lempu na magetteng), intelligence and tenacity which is functionally applied in maintaining and maintaining his self -esteem (napatettongi siri'na/napaentengi siri'na), and attitude tolerance for maintaining the honour and dignity of others (natarowangi siri'na tau'e/nabolikkangi siri'na tauwwa). implementation in daily life, men are required to maintain morality and solidarity in behaviour concerning the people around them, where solidarity has the meaning of tolerance, solidarity, and social care. to fulfil all that, a man must have a brave attitude (warani) and the knowledge of manhood/knowledge of men. (paddissengng urane/pangngissengang bura'ne). buginese-makassarese men do not want to be humiliated (ripakasiri') and embarrass others (mappakasiri'). regarding the designation of men, it can be interpreted that men in the understanding of the buginese-makassarese community are not limited to gender division alone. but it has a broader meaning. men are measured by their calm attitude in dealing with tense situations and their courage to face death to uphold truth and selfrespect (warani), their steadfastness in keeping what has been said from their mouths (lempu na magetteng), as well as an attitude of tolerance to maintain honor and dignity. from the perspective of the author's worldview, it can be stated that the author of this novel is consistent in fighting for and sticking to the values of courage. through his ideas, ideas, and attitudes, the author conveys his views on the values of courage related to adat. this can be seen in the story's depiction in the novel pulau by aspar paturasi, a pure artist who devotes himself to creating literary arts and culture—called a pure artist because of his totality and existence in the world of art, which is relentless in producing literary works. the values contained in this novel are based on past cultures, but the discussion in this novel is still very relevant to current living conditions. therefore, the values of courage are still needed; only the values of courage encountered in modern life are very diverse and apply not only to men but also to women. the ability to do something you know is difficult or dangerous or otherwise is the mental strength to try, endure, and endure danger, fear, or adversity—for example, the courage to speak out against injustice when no one else is doing it. living boldly in the present involves reaching a calm force deep within the person, which guides us beyond fear and anxiety and prepares and supports us against outside forces that threaten to shake our very foundations. to gradually shift to this new way of thinking about courage and reach deeper within ourselves to develop fortitude, strength, and resilience and move on with an open heart, people still feel their fear and take action. so our goal is not to get rid of fear but to change it to live completely independent of it. positive emotions tend to lead to less experience of fear, which also leads to more daring behaviour. courage is driven by personality traits. (vancampfort et al., 2018; neto et al., 2018; dixson et al., 2017; sellberg et al., 2018; stephens, 2018; and rucker & galinsky, 2017) recommends several mindsets or attitudes of courage that should be continuously trained, such as self-efficacy, hope, resilience, values and faith, and social power. this involves affirmation and building confidence in ourselves by mastering a skill, such as taking a public speaking class and seeing that we can build our confidence or practising speaking to a boss. we must also believe that something is possible and imagine a way to make it happen. expectations can be increased through cognitive therapy (wenzel, 2017; oar et al., 2017; kingdon & turkington, 2019; and jarrett et al., 2018) to create an attitude of assertiveness, relieve anxiety, reduce stress, and affirmations that positively show we are capable and skilled at doing something. for example, "i am strong and dare to drive a car to take my children to school”, "i am capable and skilled at doing that," and others. we have all experienced setbacks, or what we perceive as failures, but we must develop the belief that we can overcome them. we must practice the "art of laughter" to dispel our fears and move forward after setbacks. so, there are two most important factors needed for courage, namely (1) our inner convictions and (2) the social forces that surround us. conclusion the depiction of the value of courage in the novel pulau aspar paturusi's work is a reality of the life of the buginese-makassarese people, who are guided by the existing customs. courage is a https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0742051x17308971#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1041608017301528#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0301479718303888#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0029646517300956#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s2352250x17300751#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s2352250x17300751#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0920996417305856#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0920996417305856#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0920996417305856#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165032717308145#! english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 927 principle of life for the buginese-makassarese people in expressing the truth in the context of the benefit of the lives of many people. the concept of courage for the buginese-makassarese in upholding the truth, no matter what happens, this attitude is an innate characteristic of the people of south sulawesi, especially the buginesemakassarese tribe, which has been passed down from generation to generation from their ancestors. in addition, the concept of courage is his awareness as a buginese-makassarese man, always leading him to remain steadfast as a shield for his wife and children. buginese-makassarese men make it imperative for themselves to assume responsibility as protectors of women. in this context, protecting buginese-makassarese women, especially those who are part of the family, is the same as protecting family honour and self-respect (siri') as buginese-makassarese. the values of courage in this novel are the embodiment of the noble values of the buginesemakassarese community, which are full of not only the value of courage but also the virtues that can be used as role models to form good courage values in general, namely determination, selfconfidence, consistency, and integrity. optimism and, specifically, being able to think carefully and measure before acting, motivate others and be humble, fill the soul and mind with new knowledge in the right direction, act naturally, be enthusiastic, create progress, be ready to take risks, and be consistent. a person's behavior can be seen as a reflection of the values held by that person. referring to the research results, in today's sphere of life, it is highly recommended that the values of courage apply to not only men but also women. if we seek more courage within ourselves, we must look for role models for courage. if we believe in the power of selflessness, integrity, and honour within us, these beliefs have a significant impact on us in the face of fear. courage is also socially contagious. thus, it can be said that the value of courage is a mindset and strength. history proves that so many spectacular achievements in all fields were created in this world because of the "courage" factor. references alimin, a. a. & sulastri, s. 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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0742051x17308971#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0742051x17308971#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s2352250x17300751#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s2352250x17300751#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0301479718303888#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0301479718303888#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0301479718303888#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0301479718303888#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0301479718303888#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0301479718303888#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0029646517300956#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165178117304134#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165178117304134#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165178117304134#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165178117304134#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165178117304134#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165178117304134#! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0165178117304134#! word origin helps expand learners’ vocabulary english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee word origin helps expand learners’ vocabulary a vocabulary teaching approach li jing beijing sport university, china e-mail: eddie_lj@sina.com apa citation: li, jing (2012). word origin helps expand learners’ vocabulary a vocabulary teaching approach. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 1-5 received: 05-09-2011 accepted: 01-10-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: word origin (motivation) deals with the connection between name and sense, explaining how a word originated. with the knowledge of how words are originated, learners can grasp a word easier and thus expand their vocabulary more quickly. the introduction to word origin (motivation) by teachers can also help the learners gain interest in the process of learning and learn more about the cultural and historical background of the english-speaking countries. this paper tries to clarify this method of teaching from four aspects: onomatopoeia, word formation, cultural and historical background and cognitive linguistics. keywords: word origin (motivation), vocabulary, word formation, onomatopoeia, cognitive linguistics. introduction according to lu (1981) in his lexicology textbook modern english lexicology, motivation which can also be defined as word origin deals with the connection between name and sense. since the word motivation may be confused with other senses of the term in applied linguistics, this paper will use word origin instead of motivation for clarity. in fact, word origin is not an isolated concept in lexicology. it has connections with word formation, change of meaning, cultural and historical background. in short, word origin explains how a word originated. new words and expressions which evolve in civilized society are not arbitrary, and do not develop randomly. even for a folk adage, linguists can find its origin (xu, 1992). therefore, there is practical significance in studying word origin. word origin deals with a word’s origination, so with the connection between the meaning and the word itself, learners can grasp a word more easily and thus they can expand their vocabulary more quickly. onomatopoeia onomatopoeia is one kind of word origins, which means defining the principle of origin by sound (lu, 1999). many words of this kind simply imitate natural sounds, so people find it easy to spell them. however, with the development of language, these onomatopoeic words or their derivation, do not merely refer to the sounds they imitate. they can express a lot of meanings that are related to the sounds which are not difficult for learners to grasp. on the contrary, students can double or redouble their vocabulary in no time, so long as they spend some time in understanding the word origin. a large number of onomatopoetic words have been changed into nouns, some by means of word formation. mailto:eddie_lj@sina.com li jing word origin helps expand learners’ vocabulary a vocabulary teaching approach firstly, an onomatopoetic word might denote the object that gives out the sound. this is a kind of association by contiguity. the words “cuckoo”, and “cricket”, for example, at first, referred to the sounds cuckoos and crickets make, whereas now they’ve become the names of the bird and the insect which make the sounds. secondly, by adding the suffix “-er”, the original onomatopoetic word, if it is a verb, can be used as a noun to denote the object giving out the certain sound. the words “cracker” and “splashier” can be regarded as examples of this kind. thirdly, an onomatopoetic word is also designed to show the result of making sound or the place where sound is made. for instance, “bubble” as a noun now means the result of bubbling; “dump” as a noun now indicates the place where rubbish is thrown out. fourthly, an onomatopoetic word sometimes assumes a metaphorical character. for example, “crash” now has a meaning of failure; “crack” refers to a defect and sometimes a mental or physical breakdown, which are both extension of the original meaning (li, 2000). from an analysis of word origin along these lines, learners can easily grasp the key point of a word; thus it takes them less time to expand their vocabulary. however, there are still a lot of other kinds of word origin involved in the development of onomatopoetic words, which this paper does not include. word formation another kind of word origins is called morphological origin, where a direct connection can be observed between the morphemic structure of a word and its meaning (zhang, 1986). both english learners and teachers should attach importance to word formation for it can help to double or redouble vocabulary with half or even less effort. when morphological origin is used to help expand vocabulary, derivatives and compound words should be given special attention. a derivative is created by adding a prefix, or suffix, or both, to the base (zhang, 1986). an affix may have a certain feature called polysemy, which means the same affix does not have the exactly same meaning (huang 2001). for example, the latin prefix “sub-” has different meanings in “submarine” and “suborn”. the former one means “under, beneath”, while the latter one is extended with a metaphorical character meaning “secretly”. there are also examples of two or more different affixes having the same meaning, which can be shown in the suffixes “-er” and “-or” in words “teacher” and “visitor”. both suffixes indicate the person who does a certain thing. when using morphological origin to help expand vocabulary, learners need to identify pseudo-prefixed words and pseudo-suffixed words. some words may happen to contain letters that seem to be an affix, while in fact, they have no relation to the usual meaning of that particular affix. the letters “-er” in “daughter” and the letters “re-” in “result”, for instance, are not suffixes or prefixes (huang, 2001). compound words are easier to identify and their origin is very clear. two words, for example, “girl” and “friend” being combined together, form a new word that is semantically transparent. however, there are also quite a few compound words which are semantically opaque or difficult to english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee understand. a word such as “eggplant”, for instance, seems to have no relationship to what it denotes. however, it still has its origin: the shape of an aubergine is like an egg, so “eggplant” is used to denote aubergine (huang, 2001). as an english learner, when coming across a new word which may be a derivative or a compound word, or neither of the two kinds, one should not take the words at their face value. adequate understanding of a word is a presupposition of using word origin to grasp it. many students of english are quite familiar with the traditional methods of word formation, however, nowadays, with the development of modern english, some new methods of word formation have emerged and they play an increasingly more important role in the development of english. the first one is analogy, which uses the root of an original word to create a new word that relates to the original one in meaning. for example, “heliport”, which means a certain area for helicopters to land, derives from “airport”. “cold line” is created from “hot line”, which was a popular expression during the cold war. another important method of word formation is aphaeresis, which means getting rid of the first several letters of the original word, usually an unstressed syllable, to create a new one. “vantage”, coming from “advantage”, is a typical example of this kind. besides, in order to adapt to a rapidly developing society, people have already simplified a lot of words, usually with two methods: retaining initial letters, and abbreviating. by retaining the initial letters of the phrase “water closet”, people get “wc” instead. when abbreviating the word “university”, people get “uni(v).” for short (hong, 1997). briefly, getting to know the new methods of word formation is another effective way to expand vocabulary, especially when learners try to learn english through newspapers, magazines, the internet and other media where new words frequently appear. cultural and historical background quite a lot of new words and expressions came into english from cultural and historical backgrounds. knowing the related culture and history, learners will not only find it easy to grasp the word, but also to gain interest in the process of learning. in modern american english, there are many popular words with “mc-” as their initial letters. “mc-” appeared in names of ancient times, originating in scotland and ireland. since the two peoples were famous for their diligence, thrift and stinginess at that time, the compound word with “mc-” means something that is economical, or something that can save money. in early times, it was only used as a name of a trading company to attract customers. however, since the birth of mcdonald’s and the popularity of hamburgers, “mc-” has become active in making new words. most of the new words are closely related to mcdonald’s, so the typical meaning of “mc-” is efficiency and convenience. “mcamerica” is to suggest that america is a country that pays great attention to efficiency. in recent years, people have said they do not like mcdonald’s any more and they call it “junk food” as the food is mass-produced without any speciality. as a result, “mc-” now is used to denote something that is mass produced for general consumption and li jing word origin helps expand learners’ vocabulary a vocabulary teaching approach thus appealing to the lowest common denominator of the masses, such as “mcnews”, “mccinema”, “mcmovie” (zou 1996). after watergate in 1972, a new suffix “-gate” emerged to denote any scandal. former u.s. president bill clinton’s scandal was called “monicagate”, “lewinskygate”, “interngate”, and so on (zhou 2001). many words have changed their meanings with the passing of time and the effect of cross-cultural communication and social movements. this kind of word origin is widely used in the development of modern english. more than 100 years ago, the word "black” was humiliating. however, in later years, black people used “black power” to struggle for their rights and now “black” is a very honorable term (wang and li, 1983). as a result of cross-cultural communication, quite a few words were borrowed from china. the words of this origin are much easier for learners whose mother tongue is chinese. some of them are transliterated; others are free translation. for example, the word of “pipa”, a chinese traditional musical instrument, “weichi”, a chinese traditional chess, and “typhoon (台风)”, just sound like chinese. after the revolution of 1911, especially after the p.r.c. was founded, many new words from china came into english with free translation such as “paper tiger” and “special economic zone” (tao and gu, 2001). an introduction to the cultural and historical background of words can open up new horizons for the learners and it may seem an enjoyable way for them to grasp the english words. cognitive linguistics liang (2002) confirms that cognitive linguistics is a recently developed branch of linguistics, contributes to vocabulary teaching by laying special emphasis upon semantic development. it is based on experientialism, holding a view that meaning has an indissoluble bond with cognitive experience. according to this point of view, semantic evolution is concerned with vocabulary acquisition. many words, especially words denoting the position of body parts, have been greatly extended into a large range of meanings based on human cognition. the word “head” initially denoted a certain part of the human body. then it evolved to denote an animal’s head such as “head of a tiger”. that was not the end, for “head” in “head of a river” has been developed to indicate a spatial relationship. the word “head” has also been used as an abstract noun denoting “a leader” such as “head of state” (liang 2002). this kind of semantic evolution is not difficult to grasp, and sometimes it is interesting to discover the evolution. in this way, vocabulary learning can be more effective. conclusion new things and new thoughts are developing day by day, which is a basic reason for the emergence of new words. not one of these new words has been formed randomly. most of them find their origin from old words (ge, 1981). this paper has only discussed a small part of word origin and how understanding the origin of words can help students expand their vocabulary. teaching or learning word origin is really an effective way to promote efficiency in vocabulary expansion. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee references hong, w. (1997). the trend of simplification in modern english vocabulary. foreign language teaching and learning 2, pp 46-50. huang, y. (2001). the relevance of morphology and acquisition of vocabulary. foreign language teaching and research 6, pp 21-26. li, g. (2000). the development of the meanings of onomatopoetic words in both english and chinese’. foreign language and foreign language teaching 3, pp 4-8. liang, x. (2002). ‘insights of the english vocabulary teaching from cognitive linguistics’. foreign language and foreign language teaching 2, pp 15-21 lu, g. (1981). word formation in modern english. shanghai: shanghai translation publishing house. ___________. (1999). modern english lexicology. shanghai: shanghai foreign language education press. shao, z. (1993). ambiguity of word origin in cross-cultural communication. foreign language teaching and research 2, pp 38-43 stuart, b. f. (1975). how to increase your word power. hong kong: reader’s digest association far east ltd. tao & gu. (2001). a study of the loan words and phrases from china-their origins in social culture and characteristics in grammar and pragmatics. foreign language and foreign language teaching 11, pp 27-31. wang, z. (1980). changes of the meanings of onomatopoetic words. foreign language teaching and research 1, pp 8-11 wang & li. (1983). practical english lexicology. liaoning: liaoning people’s press. wang, r. (2001). ‘an introduction to a coursebook of modern english lexicology’. foreign language and foreign language teaching 5, pp 78-82 xu, g. (1991). on language by xu guozhang. beijing: foreign language teaching and research press. zhang, y. (1986). a brief introduction to modern english lexicology. beijing： beijing normal university press zhou q. (2001). the characteristics of common ways in word formation of english and chinese. foreign language and foreign language teaching 5, pp 54-58 zou, w. (1996). a study of modern english slangs: form, origin and communication functions’. foreign language teaching and research 1, pp 23-36 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 153 flashcard media effectiveness in enriching students’ english vocabulary at vocational school bambang nur alamsyah lubis english department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah sumatera utara email: bambangnuralamsyah@umsu.ac.id rakhmat wahyudin sagala english department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah sumatera utara email: rakhmatwahyudin@umsu.ac.id khairun niswa english department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah sumatera utara email: khairunniswa@umsu.ac.id apa citation: lubis, b. n. a., sagala, r. w., & niswa, k. (2023). flashcard media effectiveness in enriching students’ english vocabulary at vocational school. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 153-160. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.6852 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 17-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction english proficiency is one of the most essential skills that every student must master in school. there are many ways for teachers to increase their students’ english skills, such as by using media to help them present their learning material. english teachers are having a hard time right now because most students do not know how to speak english well. to teach students to speak english, teachers must have a high level of expertise. teachers should be creative and innovative in presenting materials, so that the materials are easily accepted by students and applied in daily activity. the students’ low interest in learning english makes teachers in difficult position; to make the student see that learning english is fun instead of scary but fun. teachers’ skills are tested and enhanced. the use of media is one of the most effective solutions for improving the english language skills of students. one of the media that is considered effective in improving the english vocabulary of students is the flashcard media. this is because flashcards media can be an effective media because students can immediately see the image of an object and the name of the object in english. the media should be one of the media platforms for teachers to improve the english language skills of students, in particular their vocabulary. teachers often use flashcard media to help students improve their english pronunciation. in this study, however, flashcards are used to improve students' english vocabulary, the foundation of their ability to write, read, and speak the language. this research contributes knowledge to school teaching effectively and creatively. many students struggle with english vocabulary, so it is a major focus for teachers in the classroom. english vocabulary becomes important thing to student to improve their english ability. vocabulary mastery is one of the most important things to make our communication fluent (lubis et al., 2022), vocabulary is one of the most essential abstract: this study aimed to describe the effectiveness of flashcard media in enriching student’s english vocabulary. the objective of the study referred to identify the effectiveness of flashcard media, and to evaluate flashcard media in enriching student english vocabulary. descriptive qualitative was used as a research method. the data of this study was a result of questionnaire and interview, and the source of the data was taken from students at smk swasta yapim biru-biru. the result of this study was that flashcard media were successfully effective in enriching students' vocabulary, and flashcard media must have more variety. for instance, the flashcard did not only show animal, school tool, and home furniture pictures; it could also show road signs, motorcycle and car spare parts, machine material, and computer material pictures, all of which were suitable for student vocational needs.flashcard media must be appropriated to students’ needs. its purpose, to make sure flashcard media was accepted and right on target. keyword: effectiveness; flashcard media; enriching; vocabulary. bambang nur alamsyah lubis, rakhmat wahyudin sagala, & khairun niswa flashcard media effectiveness in enriching students’ english vocabulary at vocational school 154 aspects of language acquisition (ha, 2022). vocabulary instruction is a crucial component of language instruction (cheng and matthews, 2018; dang, 2020). many people would like to speak english fluently, but their english vocabulary becomes their weakness (gyllstad et al., 2021). there was not much that can be conveyed without grammar, but nothing can be conveyed without vocabulary. knowing grammar was actually much needed in studying english, but remembering much vocabulary is the most important thing in learning english. vocabulary becomes basic knowledge to english learning (ha, 2021). in general, vocabulary is the knowledge of words and their meanings. nothing could be done if there was no vocabulary. someone cannot speak without vocabulary. someone cannot write without vocabulary. someone cannot interpret listening and reading without knowing vocabulary. vocabulary is needed to improve four skills in language, namely listening, speaking, reading and writing (lubis & syahputri 2022). therefore, mastering a lot of vocabulary is something important to master a language (lange & matthews, 2020). for instance, someone would like to master english. it means that someone should master a lot of english vocabulary. the primary component of a language is its vocabulary (nurmukhamedov, & sharakhimov, 2021; aryadoust & sayama, 2021). the formation of a phrase that communicates a concept relies on vocabulary. a rich vocabulary enables someone to communicate more ideas. understanding english will be difficult with a limited english vocabulary, because vocabulary becomes fundamental aspect in english language communication (stoeckel et al., 2021). decades of study have provided a solid basis for understanding the link between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension (nurmukhamedov and webb, 2019). lack of vocabulary accurately limits the speaker's ability to speak fluently, understand the interlocutor's language, and may lead to misunderstanding. vocabulary is the fundamental foundation for building language in communication (dang, 2020; nguyen, & boers, 2019). learning vocabulary is the very beginning step to learning second or foreign language (qian and lin, 2019; sun and dang, 2020). the acquisition of new vocabulary is a continuous process. it is because something changes in language and gives the language learner new experiences. there are many methods, techniques, approaches and media that are able to help people in acquire english vocabulary, but the most effective way to enrich students’ english vocabulary was through media. many teachers use media as their tools in english classroom (puspitarini & hanif, 2019; widodo, 2019). media give student new experience in learning english. therefore, teacher has to choose right media to teach english, especially teaching english vocabulary. teaching vocabulary is not as simple as imagination, it needs much creativity and energy because english is a foreign language in some developing countries, especially in indonesia. because media is anything that can be used to transmit a message from sender to receiver, media can stimulate students' thoughts, feelings, interests, and attention in such a way that it aids in the learning process (dwijayani, 2019). media is able to convey information that people wish to learn. educational media are indeed a tool for teaching and learning (myori et al., 2019; novita et al., 2019). everything that can be used for students' ideas, emotions, focus, and talents or skills to enhance the learning process, supporting the learning process, learning media is a component of the teaching delivery system. the utilization of learning media throughout the learning process has a significant impact on students' motivation and interest in learning. in the teaching and learning process, the usage of learning media may produce new needs and interests, generate motivation and stimulate learning activities, and even have psychological effects on pupils (romadhon et al., 2021). media also helps people understand something that is basically new or that they need to explore more than usual. there are numerous media that can assist people in carrying out activities. (atsani, 2020; sherley, ardian & kurnia, 2021). especially in this case, media is going to be used to transfer english learning activities to enrich students’ vocabulary. media is essential for english learning, particularly for young learners. teaching and learning english for children should be accompanied by using media, especially visual media. visual media helps children to focus in leaning (parede et al., 2022; di ronco, & allen-robertson, 2021). it is because children are able to see the media and how it works in teaching learning activities. there are many kinds of visual media that are able to use in teaching learning process, especially in enriching english vocabulary. flashcard is a special media that is able to be used as it should be. flashcards are one of the visual media that can be provided to students (aisyah et al., 2020). flash cards are small cards with images, text, or symbols that are used to remind or instruct students about anything english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 155 associated with images. one of the visual media types is flash card. significant study has been conducted on flashcard as a popular vocabulary teaching instrument, but digital flashcard has gotten far less attention (sage et al., 2020; pasaribu, hutasoit & sihombing, 2022). students may improve their verbal skills and test results with the use of flashcard (khairunnisa et al., 2022). according to students, flashcard media is useful for memorizing, convenience, self-testing, and repetition (sage et al., 2019; musyaffa, 2020). a flashcard is a card with information printed on both sides that is meant for memorizing purposes. on one side of each flashcard is a question, and on the other, the corresponding answer. flash cards are cards containing symbols, signs, images, words, and definitions intended to aid pupils in comprehending a learning content. however, flashcard may be harmful to learning for a variety of reasons, including their shallow learning method, their creation burden, and their inapplicability to specific subjects. the success of flashcard is also influenced by variables such as students' motivation and their perception of the task's importance. traditionally, flashcard are printed on paper, often index cards. typically, each independent word is printed on a separate card. a standard flashcard has a word or question on one side and a definition or answer on the other. paper flashcard includes simple information, such as a word and its corresponding picture (chen & chan, 2019). traditional flashcard can be utilized in numerous ways to enhance children's vocabulary acquisition, and numerous trials presented by researchers have proved the usefulness and utility of conventional paper flashcard for language acquisition. because conventional flashcard visuals are static, children's understanding of the language may be confined to a single viewpoint. due to their perspectives, they may not be able to change or extend the visual cues on the flashcard, which might restrict their engagement with typical paper flashcard. paper is preferred over digital cards for a variety of reasons, including technological difficulties and distractions. students often like utilizing flashcard for selfevaluation. they may associate the meaning of new words with simple images using flashcard (chen & chan, 2019; nalendra, et al., 2020). frequently, flashcard are used to remember vocabulary, historical dates, formulae, and any other topic that may be learnt via a question-andanswer format. flashcard are an application of the testing effect, which is the discovery that long-term memory is strengthened when a portion of the learning time is dedicated to recovering knowledge via testing with appropriate feedback. study habits influence the pace at which a flashcard user learns, and it has been shown that optimal spacing of flashcard enhances learning. flashcard could have positive effect on pupils' test performance (sage et al., 2020; fitriani et al., 2021). the use of flashcard as a learning tool for enhancing a language's vocabulary knowledge is a common practice. this is due to the fact that flashcard was visual aids that aid pupils in acquiring knowledge, especially in english vocabulary. flashcard was one method for teaching vocabulary. as a visual aid, flashcard was an engaging medium that may help children memorize words. the vibrant picture stimulates a student's desire to study (romadhon et al., 2021) method this study was conducted by applying descriptive qualitative as research method. the researcher is the key instrument. another instrument was supporting instrument that help researcher to find data, such as text (vocabulary test) and questionnaire sheet and interview. the data of this research was answer of students’ questionnaire and interview and the source of the data was taken from smk swasta yapim biru-biru. the technique of data analysis used interactive analysis. the purpose of technique analysis consist of three concurrent steps, they were: data condensations, the process of selecting, focusing, simplifying, abstracting and/or transforming the data that appeared in test, questionnaire sheet and interview that was taken from students at smk swasta yapim biru-biru. data display is the process of organizing the data. the researcher displayed the data to look at the whole test, questionnaires sheet and interview. it was applied to make sure all of data that was taken from students at smk swasta yapim birubiru was accurate and surely needed to organize the result of the study. drawing and verification conclusion were done through deciding meaning of data that was found in data condensation and data display. result and discussion students' vocabulary is successfully expanded through the use of flashcard media, particularly in vocational schools. students actually feel confused about much english vocabularies, because many teachers asked their students to open dictionary and find out what vocabulary in english they needed. actually, it was a traditional technique to enrich bambang nur alamsyah lubis, rakhmat wahyudin sagala, & khairun niswa flashcard media effectiveness in enriching students’ english vocabulary at vocational school 156 students’ vocabulary. there are many ways to enrich students’ vocabularies. this research served flashcard media effectiveness in enriching student vocabulary. as a result of students' participation in a test and questionnaire and the teacher's implementation of flashcard media in class, the effectiveness of flashcard media in enhancing students' vocabulary has been increased. after seeing students’ vocabulary test, 95% students had significant increased vocabularies, especially in animal name, school tools and home furniture. the rest 5% students did not follow the classroom or absent when flashcard media was applied. table 1 student’s range score average student’s score vocabulary before applying flashcard media after applying flashcard media 60-75 85-100 the table demonstrates that flashcard media actually enhances students' vocabulary. before using flashcard media, the student's range score was between 60 and 75. after the teacher implemented flashcard media, the student's score ranged from 85 to 100. this result was also supported by questionnaire result that has been concluded. the questionnaire was administered following classroom vocabulary testing. the questionnaire's content is based on students' reactions to the use of media flashcard in the classroom. there are ten statements in questionnaire that are needed to mark () by students. table 2. questionnaire sheet no statements sa a n da sda 1 flashcard media is very interesting to motivate me in learning 2 the picture displayed on flashcard media are able to increase my learning interest 3 flashcard media was not boring when it was applied in learning processes 4 the picture on flashcard media are very clear and colourful 5 the picture on media flashcard helps me to increase my english vocabulary 6 flashcard media is very helpful to enrich english vocabulary 7 pictures that are used on flashcard media are objects that i have never known in english 8 flashcard media helps me to know the names of nouns around me 9 flashcard media helps me to know the names of animal in english 10 flashcard media helps me to know about school tools which i used in english *notes: sa (score 5) : strongly agreed a (score 4) : agreed n (score 3) : neutral da (score 2) : disagree sda (score 1) : strongly disagree the result of the questionnaire that was applied can be seen below: the first statement “flashcard media is very interesting to motivate me in learning”, based on students’ marking on questionnaire sheet, there are 100% of students who strongly agreed (sa) about this statement. it can be seen from student’s range scores, following the use of flashcard media, students' vocabularies grew in depth. second statement “the picture displayed on flashcard media are able to increase my learning interest”, based on students’ marking on questionnaire sheet, there are 99% of students who strongly agreed (ss) and 1% of students who agree (s) with questionnaire statement. the proof of this statement can be seen from student’s range scores, 85-100. third statement “flashcard media was not boring when it was applied in learning processes”, there are 90% of students who strongly agreed (ss) with that statement and 10% of students who were neutral (n) about this statement. as a proof, not all of students got 100 for their scores. fourth statement “the picture on flashcard media are very clear and colourful”, there are 100% of students who strongly agreed (ss) about this statement. it can be demonstrated by the expansion of a student's vocabulary. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 157 fifth “the picture on media flashcard helps me to increase my english vocabulary”, based on the mark in questionnaire sheet, there are 95% of students who strongly agreed (ss) and 5% of students who were neutral (n). it can be seen from student’s range score, the range of the score 85100. this meant that not all students receive a score of 100. sixth statement “flashcard media is very helpful to enrich english vocabulary”, there are 100% of students who strongly agreed (ss) about this statement. it can be proofed based on student’s range scores after flashcard media is applied. seventh “pictures that are used on flashcard media are objects that i have never known in english”, there are 80% of students who strongly agreed (ss), 20% of students who agreed (s). this percentage can be utilized to determine the student's range scores. the scores after applying flashcard media were higher than before. eight statement “flashcard media helps me to know the names of nouns around me”, and there are 100% of students who strongly agreed (ss) about this statement. students had a rich vocabulary after flashcard media was applied in the classroom. ninth statement “flashcard media helps me to know the names of animal in english”, based on questionnaire sheet that has been collected, there were 75% of students who strongly agreed (ss) and 25% of students who agreed (s). the proof can be seen in student’s range scores. after using flashcard media, students' vocabulary increased. tenth statement “flashcard media helps me to know about school tools which i used in english”, 100% of students who strongly agreed (ss) about this statement. actually students have known the names of school tools in indonesia language, but they did not know them in english. based on that, 100% of students got help with flashcard media. it can be proofed based on student’s range scores. there are 85–100 students whose scores increase after flashcard media is applied. table 3. percentage of questionnaire point no statements sa a n da sda 1 flashcard media is very interesting to motivate me in learning 100% 2 the picture displayed on flashcard media are able to increase my 99% 1% learning interest 3 flashcard media was not boring when it was applied in learning processes 90% 10% 4 the picture on flashcard media are very clear and colourful 100% 5 the picture on media flashcard helps me to increase my english vocabulary 95% 5% 6 flashcard media is very helpful to enrich english vocabulary 100% 7 pictures that are used on flashcard media are objects that i have never known in english 80% 20% 8 flashcard media helps me to know the names of nouns around me 100% 9 flashcard media helps me to know the names of animal in english 75% 25% 10 flashcard media helps me to know about school tools which i used in english 100% table 3 explains that most of the students identified strongly agreed about the effectiveness of flashcard media in enriching students’ english vocabulary. flashcard media was proven to increase students' scores in english vocabulary, especially in animal names, school tools, and home furnishings. after identifying the results of the vocabulary test and questionnaire, the next action that had to be seen, it was about the result of the interview. the result of interview was used to evaluate the application of flashcard media in enriching bambang nur alamsyah lubis, rakhmat wahyudin sagala, & khairun niswa flashcard media effectiveness in enriching students’ english vocabulary at vocational school 158 students’ english vocabulary. based on whole interview recorder, there was still found weakness about flashcard media application especially at vocational school. smk swasta yapim biru-biru has an engineering and computer department, therefore, animal names, school tools, and home furniture did not need very much in their practice activities. actually this vocational school needed more specific vocabulary that increased their students’ vocabulary, such as road sign, bike and car spare part, machine material, computer material english vocabulary, those kinds of english vocabularies that were needed at smk swasta yapim biru-biru. consequently, the application of flashcard media must be evaluated before applying and must be specific to the department that has run in that school. the effectiveness of flashcard media in enriching students' english vocabulary at smk swasta yapim biru-biru was discovered through research. students' english vocabulary had significantly increased, and the use of flashcard media must be appropriate to the department of vocational itself. its goal was to ensure that the vocabulary that was increased, was applicable to the students' daily activities. conclusion the effectiveness of flashcard media accurately enriched students’ english vocabulary at smk swasta yapim biru-biru. student’s range score increased after flashcard media applied in english learning activity. flashcard media also built up students’ confident in memorizing english vocabulary. the application of flashcard media actually needs much evaluation, but specifically in this case, flashcard media should be applied based on student’s necessity. for instance, engineering student should be given flashcard media that support their english vocabulary. acknowledgment funded by apb universitas muhammadiyah sumatera utara in accordance with the assignment agreement in the context of the implementation of the beginner lecturer research program/basic research/applied research (adjusting to the skim that you and your mother won) apb umsu funds for the 2022 fiscal year. references aisyah, n., ridwan, r., huda, h., faisol, w., & muawanah. 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(2018). selection of learning media mathematics for junior school students. turkish online journal of educational technologytojet, 17(1), 154-160. bambang nur alamsyah lubis, rakhmat wahyudin sagala, & khairun niswa flashcard media effectiveness in enriching students’ english vocabulary at vocational school 160 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 911 factors affecting students’ failures due to anxiety in learning english lamhot naibaho english language education study program, faculty of letters and languages, universitas kristen indonesia, jakarta timur email: lamhot.naibaho@uki.ac.id apa citation: naibaho, l. (2022). factors affecting students’ failures due to anxiety in learning english. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 911-918. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6462 received: 09-06-2022 accepted: 27-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction when talking about mastery and achievement of english learning, the conversation focuses a lot on individual affective factors such as attitudes, perceptions, interests, and motivations and focuses less on the anxiety factor as the cause of the issue. this imbalance creates gaps because, in reality, anxiety plays an essential role in determining the success or failure of students in foreign language classes (zhou, 2016; nadeak et al., 2020; dincer & dariyemez, 2020). language ambiguity has also been considered one of the most critical aspects of teaching and learning, along with the development of the psychological theory of second language learning in the field of investigation (zhang & zou, 2022; ozdemir & papi, 2022). it means that the teachers should well manage anxiety in learning the english language. this aspect of anxiety needs to be given attention because of the dominance of the message in realizing memorable english learning because it pays attention to the psychological aspects of students. anxiety is an essential construct in psychology. studies of anxiety in foreign language learning started in the early 1970s (tóth, 2008). anxiety in learning english is still felt at the level of higher education, especially in dealing with reading skills in english. anxiety is a typical trait that all humans have. people who have a sense of anxiety can never be eliminated. however, the level of anxiety can be minimized, especially in communication skills in english at work, especially at the international level. learning english subjects has started from entering elementary school to entering college, but the result is that only some students are skilled in communication, possibly uninteresting in english, and lack self-study (truong, 2021; ha & ngo, 2021). an individual can be said to have no self-confidence if he does not dare to speak or appear in public and is ashamed to express his ideas in discussions or meetings (prieur et al., 2020; chien et al., 2020; fakhiroh & hidayatullah, 2018). to improve speaking skills, speakers must master vocabulary and phrases, proper pronunciation, and confidence in speaking. speaking is a language activity whose purpose is to communicate. speaking is a mechanical skill, so the more you practice, the more master and skilled a person will be in speaking. language anxiety is essential in acquiring and learning a second or foreign language. the term ambiguity of language arises when horwitz abstract: this study aims to determine the factors affecting students' failures due to anxiety in learning english. it was conducted at universitas kristen indonesia, jakarta, within three months. this study was a descriptive qualitative study with a survey design. the study's respondents consisted of 98 from three parallel classes at uki. the sampling method in this study uses the cluster sampling method. in this study, a set of questionnaires was used to collect the data. it is used to measure english language anxiety. it has three constructs: communication anxiety, fear of negative assessment, and anxiety in exams, and the english learning anxiety has four constructs: personal reason, teacher attitude, test situation, and teaching procedure. the finding of this study is that english language learners have moderately high speaking skills anxiety and that the level of english language anxiety of english language learners at uki as a whole in the two english language skills, namely listening and speaking skills, reached a medium-high level. then it is concluded that teachers emphasize compelling and diverse strategies and techniques of teaching english for english language skills, namely listening and speaking skills, to help reduce anxiety among students applying english. keywords: anxiety; factors affecting; failures; learning english. lamhot naibaho factors affecting students’ failures due to anxiety in learning english 912 defines anxiety as involving psychological symptoms, namely a subjective feeling of tension, worry, trembling, and restlessness associated with nervous system stimulation in foreign language learning situations (da rocha, 2020). the anxiety that is meant in this study leads to language anxiety or, in english words, language anxiety. language confusion is a complex form of feeling consisting of self-perception, self-confidence, feelings, and behavior related to language learning in the classroom, and it arises from the language learning process (meng & feng, 2019). language anxiety as tension and fear in speaking, listening, or adverse emotional reactions that arise when learning or using a foreign language (toyama & yamazaki, 2021). language confusion is a feeling of anxiety and stimulation of adverse emotional reactions when learning and using a second language (prada et al., 2020; oxford, 2018). the characteristic of an indecisive language learner is an individual who perceives second language learning as an uncomfortable experience, often withdraws from participating in class activities voluntarily, feels pressured not to make mistakes, and is less willing to study it (alseghayer, 2021). if anxiety affects cognitive function, students cannot learn and master what they learn (hong et al., 2021). this impression will become even more damaging if the learner learns the language, increasing their anxiety level conversely if students who do not have the characteristics of anxiety will feel calm and comfortable learning a second language in class. feelings of anxiety is an analysis of anxiety or restlessness experienced by students at universitas kristen indonesia (uki). it encompasses various related feelings such as fear, nervousness, anxiety, worry, and apprehension due to learning english, especially in listening and speaking skills. past studies have demonstrated that language anxiety plays a relatively broad role in the context of language learning, whereas as a whole, it shows that there is a significant negative relationship between language anxiety and student learning outcomes (hu et al., 2021; fang & tang, 2021). it means that the higher the anxiety experienced by students, the lower the achievement or language learning outcomes they obtain. over the decades, scholars have introduced the concept of four basic language skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing, also known as macro skills (qian & lin, 2019). these four basic language skills are related to each other where. in teaching and learning a second or foreign language, the effective achievement of the four language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking is essential (banditvilai, 2016). however, in mastering these language skills, scholars have found that anxiety is one of the highest factors that affect and hinder students in learning foreign languages ( ulupinar, 2018; getie, 2020). anxiety was found to directly impact students' learning attitudes and achievement (sheu, 2017) and is a response to students' anxiety and worry about second language learning, including speech and hearing. past researchers have made efforts to study anxiety in these four language skills such as speaking skills, listening skills, reading skills, and writing skills. some studies are the evidence to support the existence of anxiety in language skills and have the formation of different instrument constructs (dansieh et al., 2021; hsu et al., 2021; gok et al., 2021; chau, 2021). a more specific measurement of language anxiety on language skills is significant to identify the causes of anxiety of language skills more accurately. however, in the context of this study, it is focused on listening and speaking anxiety only. in connection with the previous description of english-speaking anxiety, three types of related anxiety: communication concerns, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation (zhang et al., 2022; almotiary, 2022). first, communication concerns are fears that individuals experience in oral communication. in english class, worried students do not want to speak in front of others, and they tend to wait until the end of the lecture to ask questions, not raising their hands and expecting someone else to ask the question. furthermore, anxiety refers to performance anxiety that stems from the fear of failure. anxious students often place unrealistic demands on themselves and feel that anything less than a perfect test result is a failure (keeler et al., 2021). thus, they may become overly concerned and think they will never be able to pronounce a word correctly or give a good presentation. finally, fear of negative evaluation is defined as concern about the evaluation of others, avoidance of evaluative situations, and the expectation that others will judge one negatively. in english class, students with a fear of negative evaluation tend to sit passively in class, withdrawing from class activities that can otherwise improve their language skills to avoid anxiety situations. studies on speaking anxiety have been carried out abroad that report on the different effects of anxiety on a second or foreign language and its implementation. the relationship between foreign english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 913 language anxiety and student achievement in learning non-native languages (dev & qiqieh, 2016; aichhorn & puck, 2017). based on his findings, speaking anxiety can be generated by a lack of student learning and learning skills and can be caused by a student's poor performance in the past. furthermore, the relationship between language anxiety and verbal ability was found that the more anxious the students, the lower the performance displayed in the oral test. the results showed that language anxiety could affect student performance and attitudes about language learning. finally, the student's english level indicated that the upper secondary level students considered that lack of preparation was a significant contributor to their english anxiety (pham & bui, 2019; macaro et al., 2018). it also shows that lower secondary level students feel less confident in their english learning than high school students. meanwhile, upper-middle-class students were more afraid of failing in class than lower-middle-level students despite their confidence in their learning. thus, they also consider it one factor that makes them anxious in their english class. method this study is a descriptive qualitative study using a survey. it was chosen for this study because it is suitable for use in research that aims to explain an ongoing phenomenon. this survey method was chosen because it can describe language concerns in english language skills, namely listening and speaking skills. the study's respondents consisted of 98 from three parallel classes at uki. the sampling method in this study uses the cluster sampling method. in this study, a set of questionnaires was constructed by the researcher by adaptation and modification from the items of previous research questionnaires to measure english language anxiety in detail and comprehensively based on specific themes or constructs that cover four language skills, namely listening and speaking, and reading and writing. this questionnaire is based on a five-point likert scale. researchers used descriptive statistics to assess the mean score, standard deviation, and frequency. a set of questionnaires was used to measure speaking skills anxiety to collect data on students' anxiety. it has three constructs: communication anxiety, fear of negative assessment, and anxiety in exams, and the english learning anxiety has four constructs: personal reason, teacher attitude, test situation, and teaching procedure. however, the researcher only adapted and used the items under the communication anxiety construct because they were related to speaking skills. the researcher adopted the instrument developed by the previous researcher, which has three constructs: background knowledge, text and strategy, and the listener's character. modifications were made to selected items based on expert views and the pilot study's findings. table 1. score level interpretation value of questionnaire no score range interpretation value 1 1.00-2.00 low 2 2.01-3.00 medium-low level 3 3.01-4.00 medium-high level 4 4.01-5.00 high level result and discussion the data, which were taken through by distributing the questionnaire to the 98 eight respondents, are presented as follows. table 2 shows the mean score, standard deviation, and mean interpretation for the english listening anxiety construct (m = 3.59; sd = 0.55). it suggests that the student's english language skills anxiety was at a medium-high level. the anxiety about speaking skills showed (m = 3.30; sd = 0.48), which indicates that overall the anxiety about speaking english among students is also at a medium-high level. table 2. descriptive analysis of english language skills anxiety construct language skills mean sd interpretati on language skill proficiency listening skill 3.59 0.55 mediumhigh speaking skill 3.30 0.48 mediumhigh figure 1 shows the mean score, standard deviation, and meaningful overall mean interpretation for the listening anxiety subconstruct. the analysis results found that the overall mean for the construct of english listening anxiety was 3.57, and the standard deviation was 1.1. it indicates that students experience listening skills anxiety at a medium-high level. the highest mean was 3.90 (sd = 0.82) on the aspect of a person speaking english quickly, and students could not understand it. while the lowest mean value obtained was 3.44 (sd = 1.1) on the aspect of students not being able to listen in english to their ability. this item got a relatively low mean compared to other items likely to be influenced by the listening skills efficiency factor of the students lamhot naibaho factors affecting students’ failures due to anxiety in learning english 914 themselves. other aspects studied related to listening skills, and anxiety showed little mean differences, and all were at a mean above 3.01. these findings generally indicate that english language learners have moderately high listening skills anxiety. figure 1. students listening anxiety level figure 2 shows the mean scores, standard deviations, and meaningful interpretations for the overall mean for the speech anxiety sub-construct. the analysis found that the overall mean for the english-speaking anxiety construct was 3.55, and the standard deviation was 1.1. it indicates that students’ speaking skills anxiety at a mediumhigh level. all items' means value was at the medium-high level except one, which was at the medium-low level. the highest mean was 3.93 (sd = 0.82) on the aspect of anxiety facing the english oral test. while the lowest mean obtained was 3.9 (sd = 0.82), which is the anxiety item in attending an english-speaking class for fear of being corrected by the teacher. this item got a relatively low mean compared to other items likely to be influenced by the factors of shyness and fear of speaking in english. other aspects studied related to listening skills, and anxiety showed little mean differences, and all were at a mean above 3.01. generally, these findings indicate that english language learners have moderately high speaking skills anxiety. figure 2. students’ speaking anxiety level the results of the data analysis showed that the level of english language anxiety of english language learners at uki as a whole in the two english language skills, namely listening and speaking skills, reached a medium-high level. for the listening skills anxiety subconstruct, the study's findings indicate that students often experience anxiety, especially when hearing english speech from others rapidly and unable to comprehend it. students will feel restless and nervous to respond and proceed to the following communication. the findings of this study are promising and coincide with the findings of a study conducted that found that unintelligible language pronunciation and speed of input transmission heard by students are the leading causes of listening skills anxiety (cherry, 2021). in addition, it is also influenced by knowledge english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 915 background factors, low self-confidence of students, and misuse of listening strategies. this study also coincides who found that the causes of listening anxiety are based on the audible input characteristics, such as speed or uncertainty with the input heard by a student (deniz, 2013). these findings are also consistent with a study that found that auditory input characteristics such as pronunciation and intonation speed, text length, and vocabulary level are causes of listening anxiety among students (nadhira & warni, 2021). the characteristic features of audible input such as speed rate, level of difficulty, and lack of repetition of word pronunciation are significant factors for listening anxiety. in this context, teachers need to play an important role in emphasizing english listening skills in teaching. it is because listening skills are essential skills that need to be given priority in the language teaching process. english listening skills teaching techniques are often neglected and not emphasized in indonesia's teaching of english as a second language (shah et al., 2017). listening skills are also not so emphasized that students do not realize the importance of mastering listening skills in learning english (ha & ngo, 2021). the implementation of listening skills in english language learning is moderately low. teachers were found not to emphasize the use of tones appropriate to the situation and less emphasis on listening activities, causing the atmosphere of learning english to be bland and less effective. this scenario is the cause and obstacle to mastering english listening skills, causing concern among students. it coincides with a study that found that among the external factors that influence the barriers to mastering english listening skills are words, speaker speed, text heard, lack of study aids, and external distractions (ngwoke et al., 2022). therefore, english language students must be exposed to practical strategies and diversifying listening skills activities in the classroom. these findings indicate that students often experience speaking anxiety when facing the english oral test that will be implemented. the findings of this study coincide with a study that stated that they experienced anxiety in facing oral tests (mohtasham & farnia, 2017; kayaoğlu & sağlamel, 2013). students experienced anxiety during the english oral test, which affected their test performance. the anxiety in oral tests experienced by students was found to be very significant and very high in speaking skills. the findings of this study are also in line with a study that found that most students experience moderate to high levels of anxiety before sitting the oral test and when faced with unknown questions or ideas during the oral test (mohtasham & farnia, 2017). students who experienced high anxiety in speaking skills would try to avoid participating in activities that spontaneously involved speaking. students will feel anxious as not being able to organize and deliver their speech correctly and confidently, in turn, makes them fearful and embarrassed (han et al., 2020). they have negative perceptions of responses or reactions from listeners or peers due to poor vocabulary selection and way of organizing ideas when speaking. the anxiety affects speech speed, accuracy, and output quality during communication. the findings of this study also show that the level of anxiety of english language students in speaking skills is the lowest compared to other language skills (khan, 2015). this situation is probably due to the evaluation and assessment of english language subjects for examinations in indonesia being oriented to the examination system, namely when most of the marks are assessed through writing rather than speaking. thus, students focus more on the mastery and achievement of writing skills than speaking skills other than listening and reading skills. several factors cause students' weakness in mastering speaking skills. among them is the lack of a weak culture and language environment to support english speaking students in schools (berkowitz et al., 2021; naibaho, 2021). lack of practice in english and making it a medium of communication is the cause of the weakness of students' mastery of these skills. english is only used during the teaching process of teachers, while the living environment with the atmosphere of english itself is essential in creating an atmosphere of active learning among students (dörnyei & muir, 2019). it can improve students' social skills, especially in mastering and acquiring english. from the aspect of teaching english, several weaknesses have been identified. the factors of student-centered teaching, text translation-based teaching, lack of training and questions, lack of teaching aids, lack of activities, passive attitude of students, and lack of english communication contribute to the problem of english speaking skills among students (ge & pi 2021). even more frustrating when there are attitudes and practices of some teachers who do not practice english and do not lamhot naibaho factors affecting students’ failures due to anxiety in learning english 916 follow the communicative approach when carrying out the teaching and learning process in the classroom (luz, 2015). thus, teachers should maintain an environment of continuous english speaking and wisely practice communication techniques among students. the speaking skills of the teaching staff play an essential role in the teaching and learning process (yen et al., 2015). it can directly have a positive effect and motivation to students to cultivate the english language. conclusion the results of this study show that english language anxiety among english language learners in the two english language skills as a whole is at a medium-high level. this study suggests that teachers emphasize compelling and diverse strategies and techniques of teaching english for english language skills, namely listening and speaking skills, to help reduce anxiety among students applying english. in addition, the importance of mastering these listening and speaking skills is crucial and closely related. listening and speaking skills become critical skills in human interaction. 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(2016). the roles of social anxiety, autonomy, and learning orientation in second language learning: a structural equation modeling analysis. a system, 63, 89-100. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 359 why do themes matter? the teachers’ voices about thematic units for teaching english to young learners ivana nabilah qoriroh mujahidah english language education, graduate school universitas muhammadiyah malang, indonesia email: ivanamimanarulislam2017@gmail.com fardini sabilah (corresponding author) english language education department, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah malang, indonesia email: fardini@umm.ac.id rina wahyu setyaningrum english language education department, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah malang, indonesia email: rina@umm.ac.id apa citation: mujahidah, i. n. q., sabilah, f., setyaningrum, r. w. (2022). why do themes matter? the teachers’ voices about thematic units for teaching english to young learners. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 359-370. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6237 received: 28-02-2022 accepted: 24-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction english continues to be taught as a foreign language in indonesia, where it was originally part of the national elementary school curriculum. however, since the implementation of the 2013 curriculum, english at the primary school level is no longer included in compulsory subjects and can be taught through extracurricular program. this is in contrast with the fact clarified by rixon (2019) that english has been a compulsory subject in primary school worldwide and it continues to be the medium of instruction. therefore, the exclusion of english subject in the compulsory curriculum provokes both positive and negative impacts for teachers. on the one hand, there is flexibility for the them to develop their own eyl curriculum. on the other, the absence of the government endorsed curriculum for teyl, they are challenged to develop their own eyl syllabi, learning materials, and evaluation (lestariyana & widodo, 2018). as matter of a fact, the wider arena for teachers of english in primary schools provided by the abstract: teaching english to young learners (teyl) in indonesia has been an intriguing field that there never been ending studies about it. as a locally-tailored school subject that can be local content or elective subject without curriculum guideline, english for young learners (eyl) program is carried out in various ways by the primary schools in indonesia. this present study aims to discover the essential role of implementing thematic model in teyl. this paper discusses a phenomenological investigation of five eyl teachers who employ thematic units for teaching the pupils in different cities of indonesia. graduated from english education department, all participants have been teaching young learners english more than five years and planning their teaching based on their students’ needs by utilizing themes. using semi-structured interview questions, the teachers were guided to explain their experience in valuing the themes for teaching english thematically, how to incorporating themes into teyl, and challenges in implementing eyl thematic units. the data were analyzed thematically to get the emerging themes which correspond to this research topic. the results revealed that teaching english thematically is critical for young learners as their english learning scaffolding to achieve language skills and ability to communicate in particular discourse. all participants agreed that their students enjoyed the eyl thematic activities for gaining new knowledge using english despites challenges faced by the teachers in preparing the lessons. keywords: teachers’ voice; teyl; thematic unit; themes. ivana nabilah qoriroh mujahidah, fardini sabilah, & rina wahyu setyaningrum why do themes matter? the teachers’ voices about thematic units for teaching english to young learners 360 government is not supportive for them to teach young learners (yls) english creatively. only some primary schools that conduct a need analysis before planning the eyl lessons and it affects the application of outmoded teaching learning process by vocabulary memorization, text translation, as well as teaching grammar in isolation. fathimah (2014) evidenced the practice of how the yls were introduced to english vocabulary by translating every single word into bahasa indonesia, then memorized them without experience in using them in various contexts. additionally, hawanti (2014) noted the previous situation existed because of the lack of school resources for running the eyl program and make the teachers used low quality textbook or workbook solely. it was a teachercentered learning that the activity focuses on exercises provided by the textbook or workbook. hence, these eyl program affect the unsatisfactory learning output of english to yls because of the absence of teachers’ awareness in considering the english veracity in everyday life. in the contemporary research of eyl, teachers are the actors of the teyl success because of their contribution in providing the learners meaningful and joyful activities. to respond the implementation of 2013 curriculum of indonesia, setyaningrum and purwati (2020) suggested thematic units to be adopted by linking the teaching materials with themes suggested by the curriculum for primary level. this suggestion is based on the rationales that teyl program should be centered on young learners’ linguistics exposure as well as unique agerelated needs age (parker & valente, 2019). moreover, topic-based/ task-based syllabus proposed by bourke (2006) as well as dörnyei and ushioda (2011) that provides the young learners experience to communicate effectively, acquire the language, engage in gradual reading introduction, as well as take part in topic-related unit activities for scaffolding around the language growth and development, was in line with shin and crandall (2014) who recommended thematic units for the sake of building a larger context for young learners’ language learning. in addition, themes could be appointed based on the students age (parker & valente, 2019), including animals, friends and family, or units revolving around a storybook, such as the very hungry caterpillar by eric carle, which includes food and the days of the week (shin, 2014). convincingly, rixon (2019) endorsed topic as an organizing-principles in young learners’ curricula in order to make the learning meaningful and interesting, as well as to provide the learners clear context for lexical sets to be introduced and practiced. some scholars also believed that themebased teaching for eyl is suitable with the 21st century learning (cameron, 2001, 2003; pratama, 2016) because integrating theme is claimed to better suit the way young children naturally learn. dealing with situation in indonesia, it is suggested to connect english and other curriculum context for the eyl program within modest time allotment (1 – 1,5 hours per week). therefore, johnstone’s (2019) concept could be adapted by endorsing thematic units for eyl program. by time limitations, teacher’s confidence in teaching, english language exposure, teaching materials, as well as authentic models, eyl teachers in indonesia need to instill the basic concept of teaching english through this experiential learning process using english. by thematic units, teachers are required to choose theme or topic to plan a range of teaching and learning activities and incorporate aspects such as mathematics, science, art, language, history, geography, and music. creative and innovative teyl that have been practiced were reported in the following scenes. empirical evidence, lestariyana and widodo (2018) showed that engaging activity for yls had been carried out to avoid textbook-based activities with test-oriented exercise, by making digital stories that are relevant to their daily life. furthermore, setyaningrum and purwati (2020) reported that the urgency of english for the pupils has encouraged the teachers in three schools surrounded by a well-known tourism destination of indonesia, to teach the young learners english thematically. exposure of using english contextually like in the real-life situation were provided for the students. they implemented “soft” content and language integrated learning (clil) for teaching english as a foreign language (efl). they urged to connect the existing regular lesson themes to english lesson as the background knowledge for students before learning english. the findings showed that the students engaged in the teaching and learning process by voluntarily practice to use english. more recently, waloyo, khoiriyah, & farah (2021) disclosed that cliltailored program in a primary school of indonesia was feasible to be conducted by integrating content, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 361 supported by the ict platforms and the teachers scaffold their students learning by translanguaging. it is crystal clear that teyl should be planned carefully to be meaningful and engaging (rixon, 2019) lesson. themes for teyl were strongly suggested by the scholars from the previous research, however, the researchers hardly found the indonesian eyl teachers’ voices about the implementation of thematic units for their teaching. to fill the gap, this study aims at investigating the rationales of indonesian eyl teachers in employing thematic units, how they practice it in the teaching and learning process, as well as challenges that they face. most importantly, this research would promote the feasibility of thematic units’ adaptation for different primary education institutions in indonesia. method this phenomenological study was conducted since thematic units in teaching eyl is expected to accommodate the students’ needs of learning english. yin (2016); merriam and tisdell (2016) stated that in phenomenological study, the focus is participants’ description that they have in common as they experience a phenomenon. then, the description culminates in the essence of the experiences for several individuals who have all experienced the phenomenon. this design has a strong philosophical-underpinnings and typically involves interviews. thus, the data of this research were gained by in-depth semi-structured interviews to five teachers as research participants. furthermore, the researchers transcribed the interviews and grouped them based on the emerging themes to answer the research questions: 1) what are the urgency of themes for teyl?, (2) what classroom activities work well with yls?, and (3) what are the challenges encountered by the teachers? the participants of this study were selected based on the criteria designated by the researchers, such as educational background and experience in teyl. all participants agreed and obtained permissions for their school principals to participate in this phenomenological study because they had experience that they could share as the research data. the following table explains the participants’ demographic information. table 1. the participants’ demographic information n o na me gen der (f/ m) age (year ) education institution experie nce (year) 1. jy f 25 english education private primary school 5 2. zi f 25 english education private primary school 5 3. m a f 31 english education private primary school 8 4. ja f 28 english education private primary school 5 5. ih f 28 english education intensive english course for young learners 5 all of the participants were teaching in nongovernment institutions which had specific excellences including english as locally-tailored subject offered to all students. jy and zi were specialist teachers, teaching english across grades and using different approaches while teaching english thematically. both of them were lucky because the school also assigned them to develop module for their students so that all their teachings had been planned carefully. ja experienced teaching very young learners english when she worked at a kindergarten before shifting to teach english in an islamic primary school. ma experienced teaching thematic lesson in japan and she turned to be specialist teacher, teaching english across grades, once she was back to indonesia. different from other participants, ih owned her institution, teaching english to young learners across grades and providing the lessons based on the students’ needs. she offered the programs for beginners and advanced students. to gain the data for this study, semi-structured interviews questions were developed. by carrying out these interviews, the researchers got the opportunities to ask some extended questions to complete the participants’ answers. all of five participants were interviewed based on their availability, through various online platforms as well as face-to-face interview. jy and zi attended interview session on the 26th of july 2021 by a video conference. due to incomplete data gained from the interview sessions, they were also interviewed via text messaging on the 18th of august, 2021. ih had an interview session on the ivana nabilah qoriroh mujahidah, fardini sabilah, & rina wahyu setyaningrum why do themes matter? the teachers’ voices about thematic units for teaching english to young learners 362 29th of july 2021. meanwhile, ma and ja had a face-to-face interview session on the 3rd of august. the following table contains the questions asked to the research participants which were adapted from some sources (i.e. akyeampong, 2017; hawanti, 2014; irby, tong, lara-alecio, guerrero, guo, abdelrahman, & serrano, 2020; kilinc, 2016; murphy, haller, & spiridakis, 2019). table 2. primary questions for interview no. questions 1. do you think that thematic units are suitable for teyl? why or why not? 2. what are your opinions about implementing thematic units for teyl in teaching and learning activities? 3. how do you agree/ disagree about the effectiveness of activities based on the selected themes for teyl? 4. what factors influence your decision to use thematic units for teyl in your classroom? 5. how did you implement the thematic lessons for teyl in your teaching and learning activity? 6. how far are your thematic units’ implementation for teaching young learners in your classroom? 7. would you please mention the advantages of implementing thematic units for your eyl class dynamic? 8. what is the most challenging fact that you faced when implementing thematic units for teyl? 9. what factors make you give up implementing themes if you find they do not even fit your teaching at a certain point? 10. do you intend to continue using thematic units for teyl? in analyzing the data from the interviews, widodo (2014) proposed methodological considerations including (a) listening to talking data, (b) shaping talking data, (c) communicating talking data with an interpretative intent, (d) reproducing or (re)constructing talking data, and (e) building data credibility. by those considerations, the data from the interviews were transcribed and grouped based on the objectives of this research. they were analyzed thematically (saldana, 2013) in which the emerging themes were arranged and described as the research findings. moreover, the data credibility was built by member checking. birt, scott, cavers, campbell, & walter (2016) urged member checking by inviting all participants to attend a group discussion to check the data accuracy. result and discussion the findings revealed that out of all teachers as the participants of this study showed their positive attitudes towards thematic units for teyl. they consider thematic units are critical for providing the learners experience of using the language contextually. they also expressed their idea about linking the teyl with other subjects in order to relate their english learning with real life experience. significant challenges in implementing thematic lesson were showcased specifically by a lower grade (i.e. grade one) teacher because of the students limited background knowledge about english. thematic lesson for clear context of english lexical, grammatical features, and discourse for providing yls experience in using english contextually, shin and crandall (2014) suggested themes for teyl because of some reasons such as providing the yls with activities contextually, focusing the learning to communication on the other language structure as well as linking the lesson with other subjects. jy agrees the essence of implementing thematic units for teyl in association with the previous theories and confirms, “pembelajaran berbasis tema dalam pengajaran bahasa inggris akan memudahkan murid saya karena hal itu berhubungan dengan mata pelajaran tematik yang ada di kelas regular. tentunya, hal tersebut berbasis pada kurikulum yang ada di sekolah dasar. saya bisa mengeksplor berbagai macam mata pelajaran secara fleksibel berdasarkan kemampuan dan ketertarikan siswa dalam belajar” (jy, zoom, juli 26, 2021) “thematic lesson will ease my students to learn english because it is linked to their thematic regular lesson based on the indonesian primary school curriculum. i can explore various lessons flexibly based on the students’ ability and interest.” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) her positive attitudes towards the thematic lesson because of its strength in providing yls with contextual settings. as the yls learn new vocabulary related to the theme, they will use the english grammar contextually. ching & lin (2019) asserted the contextualized grammar focuses on english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 363 various linguistics choices in the context. it implies that by understanding the vocabulary usage in particular grammar or sentence patterns, the yls will get opportunity to practice english for communication. shin (2014) suggested the teachers to provide enjoyable classroom atmosphere for yls to hear sounds of english, build vocabulary and improve their listening and speaking skills. she asserted that yls should be familiarize with oral language for communication in particular discourse. using thematic units has indirectly broadened yls vocabularies and phrases. the class’ atmosphere has automatically encouraged the students to speak english. although not all the students spoke english well because they were in the beginner level of english, they, at least, still tried to use english. their effort in using english to communicate shows the successful teacher teaching english using thematic lessons. therefore, thematic environment can make the yls get easier ways in mastering the language target. bourke (2006); dörnyei and ushioda (2011) proposed the best type of syllabus and learning model for teaching young learners english should make the learners master the acquisition-poor environment of the classroom. thematic units could make the yls learn english contextually by experiencing to use the language for communication. ma and ja on similarly state, “anak-anak yang belajar bahasa inggris tidak akan terkukung lagi. mereka akan belajar secara kontekstual dan belajar bagaimana menggunakan bahasa untuk berkomunikasi. itulah mengapa, tematik model adalah sebuah cara yang efektif dalam mengajar bahasa inggris. terlebih untuk level pemula.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021 “the yls won’t learn english in isolation anymore. they will contextually learn to use the language for communication. that’s why it is an effective way to teach yls english, especially for the beginners.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021; ja, personal communication, 18 july, 2021) ma and ja's ideas require their careful preparation for teaching yls which include young learners' holistic needs (setyaningrum & purwati, 2020) for making the communication run smoothly. the teachers should analyze the students' needs and schools' goals before they decide the learning materials and wrap them into activities related to yls’ real-life experience, like daily activities. nikolov & djigunović (2019) suggested that teaching must be in harmony with learning. it is essential to discover and understand the learners' activities to participate and respond to the question using their daily life experience. in addition, littlejohn (2016) suggested that english syllabus content in the thematic model should enable yls to develop high order thinking skills (hots). meanwhile, shin and crandal (2014) stated that thematic instruction gives the learners many chances to learn english by integrating it into other learning contexts. ma and ja agree and they add, “…ketika mengajar anak-anak menggunakan pembelajaran tematik, kita juga mengajarkan berbagai macam pelajaran seperti sains, matematika, ips, dan agama. unit-unit di dalam tematik untuk mengajar bahasa inggris pun bisa digunakan untuk mengajar bahasa inggris melalui berbagai macam mata pelajaran.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) “…while teaching eyl using thematic lesson we also teach various lesson including science, math, social, and religion. thematic units for teyl could be carried out by teaching english through various subjects.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) meanwhile, jy elucidates, “saya hanya butuh menambahkan penguatan materi tata bahasa menggunakan permainan untuk membuat mereka menikmati pelajaran tanpa harus merasa takut dengan tata bahasa. intinya, semua hal bisa diintegrasikan di dalam unit-unit tematik.” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) “i just need to add grammar awareness by using games in order to provide them less threatening lessons. all can be integrated in thematic units.” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) jy’s consideration to teach english grammar through games was conforming chou’s (2017) notion that yls do not easily understand the complex language components like grammar and expression before their eight. in addition, the teachers need to re-discover how to make the yls’ english learning is not labeled as lexis, phonology, grammar or discourse. therefore, since the students are engaged with the technology right now, it is not the time to teach them grammar textually, tell them the meaning of each vocab and phrase, ask them to memorize the vocabularies and expressions, and many more. however, it is time to let them know ivana nabilah qoriroh mujahidah, fardini sabilah, & rina wahyu setyaningrum why do themes matter? the teachers’ voices about thematic units for teaching english to young learners 364 and realize the use of language itself. in this point, ja firmly believes, “…saya rasa, ini bukanlah lagi waktu untuk menghafal kosakata dengan diartikan secara langsung karena itu adalah cara lama untuk mengajar bahasa inggris. menurut saya, anakanak perlu memahami bahasa secara kontekstual berdasarkan tata bahasa yang sesuai.” (ja, personal communication, 18 july, 2021) “…it’s not the time to memorize the vocabularies from its direct translation because that’s the old way of teaching english, i think. to me, students need to understand the language from its context based on appropriate grammar.” (ja, personal communication, 18 july, 2021) then, ma also conveys, “mereka juga harus tahu bagaimana menggunakan bahasa inggris dalam hidupnya. mereka akan memiliki pengalaman belajar dalam menggunakan bahasa inggris. selain itu, keuntungan menggunakan tematik di pengajaran bahasa inggris akan memudahkan mereka untuk membuat lingkungan yang bilingual.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) “they have to know how to use english in their life. they will have learning experience in using english. besides, the use of thematic learning in teyl will help them to make a bilingual environment.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) those statements are highly related to the concept of thematic learning in teyl that provides a learning environment to make students learn collaboratively as active participants in the class. cameron (2003) stated that theme-based teaching and learning focus on linked activities. therefore, the young learners who experience learning english in thematic units are expected to understand better how they use the language to communicate with others. in addition, shin and crandall (2014) affirmed that the eyl teachers could use thematic units in their teaching by incorporating some activities ranging from singing some english songs to reading or telling stories. they could be followed by total physical responses (tpr) activities suggested by nuraeni (2019) as well as xie (2021). teachers play their pivotal roles in introducing some language skills or components in actions. they should be order takers, model providers, and action monitors and yls could serve as models and action performers until they are ready to speak out. young learners’ needs, teacher’s deeds: yls’ knowledge advancement through english learning young learners need to feel comfortable and selfconfident when they involve in learning situation. the teacher needs to identify the students’ expectation towards learning. as they like to play than listen to the teacher’s explanation, the teacher should pay attention to the most appropriate learning materials. identifying materials could not be done by only classifying the materials' difficulties level. teachers should consider the use of english materials in the students' real life, the student's understanding of english contextually, the student's interest and motivation in learning english at a very young age. in this case, the thematic units for teaching and learning english provides the integrated activities in which yls can learn english contextually from different aspects based on their needs. this is in line with the jy's perspective. “fleksibilitas dalam mengajar anak-anak menggunakan tema yang bervariasi telah memberikan pengaruh terhadap kemampuan mereka dalam menggunakan bahasa yang telah mereka pelajari dart ema tersebut untuk berkomunikasi.” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) “flexibility in teaching yls from various themes has influenced their ability in practicing to use the language that they learned from the themes into communication.” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) jy’s statement shows that teachers can scrutinize and decide the materials that support the students’ daily life. the learning output from the english lesson using the thematic units is a proper understanding of the english lesson contextually. context-based teaching and learning english will make the students learn something unconsciously. they will gain more knowledge than they expect. ma illustrates, “pembelajaran tematik memiliki cakupan yang sangat luas. siswa akan mendapatkan banyak sekali kosakata dan mereka akan menggunakannya di dalam kehidupan sehari-hari. kemudian, berdasarkan kosakata yang berhubungan dengan tema, anak-anak bisa membangun ilmu pengetahuan yang baru dari kegiatan-kegiatan yang mereka ikuti.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) “thematic lesson has a large learning scope. the students will gain a lot of vocabularies and they will use them in their daily life. by those vocabularies related to themes, the yls could build new knowledge over activities they involve english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 365 in.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) that statement also supported by ja and ih’s perceptions, “...siswa akan belajara berbagai macam mata pelajaran menggunakan bahasa inggris dalam unit tematik. mereka akan mendapatkan kosakata lebih dibanding belajar bahasa inggris seperti pada umumnya. mereka akan mengetahui bagaimana cara menggunakan kosakata tersebut di dalam kehidupan sehari-hari dan memahami budaya dari bahasa tersebut.” (ja, personal communication, 18 july, 2021; ih, video call, july 29, 2021) “…the students will learn various lesson in english using thematic units. they will get more vocabularies than learning english as usual. they will know how to use the vocabularies in daily activities and also understand the language culture.” (ja, personal communication, 18 july, 2021; ih, video call, july 29, 2021) teaching english thematically could be considered suitable for enhancing foreign language development in such context and fulfilling broader, more far-reaching educational goals (ellison, 2019). themes are also employed in soft clil approach for elt. it integrates content learning of various subjects such as science, math, social science, and many more. this approach aligns with the thematic concept where the students learn other subjects through english contextually. as eyl thematic units aim at teaching young learners english through specific themes or content, advanced knowledge will be obtained from learning content from particular theme and using english to communicate that knowledge. in this case, ma and jy shared their experience of their teaching. ma justifies, “saya memberi mereka tema yang menarik seperti tata surya dan saya biasanya bercerita tentang hal tersebut. saya juga bertanya kepada mereka untuk membuat karya seni terkait tata surya untuk meningkatkan praktik mereka saat bercerita tata surya.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) “i gave them an interesting theme such as solar system and i usually tell a story related to it. i also asked my students to make art about solar system to scaffold their practice in telling the story about solar system.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) in addition, jy also explains, “…contohnya, bagaimana cara menghemat energi di rumah, muridku bisa praktik dengan cara mengucapkan: mama, tolong hemat energinya! bisakah kamu mematikan lampu?” (jy, zoom, juli 26, 2021) “…for example, how to save energy at home my students could practice to say: “mama, please save the energy. could you please switch off the light?” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) therefore, their examples evidenced how eyl thematic units were practiced and english could be internalized to the yls’ daily communication. the teachers should let the students create opportunities to apply new knowledge and express their understanding using additional language. although this is a complex process for teachers and students to achieve the right balance of cognitive and linguistic demands, they could compromise how to use english without neglecting the content concepts (ching & lin, 2019) to get the right balance of cognitive and linguistic demands, setyaningrum and purwati (2020) suggested theme-based teaching should be carefully planned by considering the yls’ needs. at this point, the teachers can decide whether they adopt the themes from the regular thematic classes endorsed by the 2013 curriculum for primary school or adapt the themes from the designated curriculum with respect to the yls’ english learning needs and new knowledge advancement. movements from effortless to challenging tasks implementing thematic units in teyl brings out the acceptances and challenges simultaneously. teaching english thematically will automatically enhance the students’ general knowledge. they can learn other subjects like, mathematics, science, arts, and others using english as the medium of instruction. thematic teaching allows yls to learn english by incorporating it into other learning contexts. implementing thematic lessons in teaching english will make the teaching concept more meaningful and flexible to the teacher and students (shin & crandall, 2014; sehan, 2018). however, the teachers also faced challenges while implementing thematic units in teyl. teaching preparation is the most challenging of all while the other efforts should be put during teaching and learning activities. the teachers have been struggling since lesson planning by ivana nabilah qoriroh mujahidah, fardini sabilah, & rina wahyu setyaningrum why do themes matter? the teachers’ voices about thematic units for teaching english to young learners 366 determining the theme, skills to be emphasized, target structure, vocabulary focus, objectives, materials, and activities. then, they have to make all activities work with the yls as well as provide additional activities once particular activity does not work. the teachers should be flexible and adaptable towards the class situation. classroom management’s skill is necessarily needed to operate the teaching and learning process in eyl thematic lesson. the teachers should facilitate the learning process without ignoring the essence of teaching thematically. in this case, ma states her judgement. “…meskipun saya telah mendapatkan banyak manfaat dari mengajar bahasa inggris menggunakan unit tematik, saya sebenarnya harus menyiapkan segala sesuatu sebelum mengajar dengan baik. hal itu akan membantu saya untuk memanajemen aktivitas belajar mengajar agar dapat berjalan lancar.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) “…although i got so many advantages from eyl thematic units, i actually need to prepare everything before teaching properly. it will help me manage the teaching and learning activities to run smoothly.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) in addition, ja also acknowledges the complexity of the preparation in teyl thematic units. she clearly declares, “sebagai seorang guru, saya menghadapi banyak kesulitan dalam menyiapkan hal-hal sebelum mengajar terutama mengajar anak-anak. saya harus menyiapkan berbagai macam aktivitas agar proses pembelajaran menjadi berarti, terintegrasi, dan menarik.” (ja, personal communication, 18 july, 2021) “as a teacher i got a lot of difficulties in preparing my teaching especially for younger learners. i have to prepare various activities so that the learning process can be meaningful, integrated, and interesting.” (ja, personal communication, 18 july, 2021) those statements illustrate how challenging their teaching preparations are. teaching teyl must be planned carefully and adequately. each activity should be meaningful and engaging (rixon, 2019). a meaningful and engaging activity means the activity which significantly impacts the students’ real life. the students can independently reflect on the values after doing the activity. they can also use new knowledge from class in daily life by communicating with others. moreover, the english materials in the thematic model should be systematically created. the materials have to respond to the students’ specific needs and be originated on how young learners learn the language (hayes, 2014). in addition, ih also reveals that, “…bagian yang paling menantang dalam membuat materi bahasa inggris tematik adalah menentukan struktur yang paling layak untuk anak-anak.” (ih, video call, july 29, 2021) “…the most challenging part in making thematic english materials is determining the most feasible scaffolding for the yls’ learning.” (ih, video call, july 29, 2021) regarding to the ih’s statement, the materials must be developed based on the students’ language level. it should be from the easiest to the most complicated one. additionally, jy adds, “…nanti akan ada level untuk materi bahasa inggris tematik tetapi saya akan membungkusnya sesempurna mungkin untuk melewati semua level tanpa harus peserta didik merasakan kecemasan.” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) “…there will be levels for eyl thematic materials but i have to wrap them faultlessly in order to keep the yls comfortable in getting through all levels without any significant anxiety.” (jy, zoom, july 26, 2021) both ih’s and jy’s perceptions were in line with pinter’s (2011) recommendation that teacher and/or curriculum designer needs to consider how children engage in distinct communicative language tasks in order to provide materials appropriate for various age groups and to assist children in completing these tasks more effectively. an ideal development can be accomplished gradually and contextually so that the students can adequately understand the materials given by the teacher. challenge in preparing the lesson for eyl thematic units was initially an effect of the teachers’ earlier experiences in teyl in indonesian context. english has been taught theoretically rather than contextually. they experienced teaching english based on the existing curriculum with the availability of text-books. they just need to move forwards to get themselves accustomed to practice eyl thematic lesson with all its preparation. ma insists, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 367 “…mengajar bahasa inggris menggunakan tematik sebenarnya tidak sulit. kita hanya perlu memahami konsepnya dan bagaimana cara kerjanya. sayangnya, banyak guru yang memahami bahwasannya tematik adalah mata pelajaran. padahal, tematik adalah model pembelajaran.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021) “…teyl using thematic lesson is actually not difficult. we just need to understand the concept and how it works. sadly, the teachers themselves still believe that thematic is a name of lesson. in fact, thematic is a learning model.” (ma, personal communication, july 12th, 2021) shin and crandall (2014) suggested thematic units in teyl because it provides an integrated english lesson where the students can learn various subjects/contexts through learning english. therefore, a teacher who teaches yls english thematically needs a good proficiency in english and has a relevant educational background. in this case, ih and ma believe, “…guru-guru yang mengajar bahasa inggris terutama mengajar anak-anak harus menguasai pengetahuan pedagogi pada tingkat dasar. mereka tidak hanya mengajar ilmu pengetahuan bahasa inggris tetapi juga nilai-nilai dalam pembelajaran bahasa inggris itu sendiri. mentransfer ilmu pengetahuan dan menanamkan nilai-nilai pembelajaran memerlukan kualifikasi guru yang sangat spesifik.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021; ih, video call, july 29, 2021) “…teachers who teach english, especially for young learners need to fulfill the knowledge of pedagogy in primary level. they are not only teaching the knowledge of english but also the values of learning english itself. transforming knowledge and embedding the values of learning need a specific teachers’ qualification.” (ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021; ih, video call, july 29, 2021) the statement emphasizes that having a high level of english proficiency is not enough. there are many components to be an ideal english teacher who must be a proficient english user with specific teaching qualifications in primary pedagogy (hayes, 2014). some previous studies revealed that many who teach english to young learners are inconsistent, often ambiguous, have no formal qualifications of english but a qualified teacher or someone who is not qualified teacher but knows english (rixon, 2019). furthermore, primary english teachers are expected to teach english, but they have no support in enhancing their teaching competencies. thus, ja firmly believes that school management should provide intensive training before assigning the teachers to teach english thematically. by doing so, the teachers will understand the concept of teaching theoretically and practically based on the schools’ needs and goals. in contrast, zi, ma, and ja explained about additional challenge for making the yls understand the meaning of vocabularies or expressions. “terkadang memang tidak mudah untuk membuat murid saya memahami bahasa inggris karena itu bukan bahasa kedua mereka. saya mengajar anak-anak di kelas bawah dan kebanyakan dari muridku ada pada level pemula. jadi, saya sering berpikiran kalau saya tidak mungkin membuat mereka mengerti tanpa memberikan pengertian secara langsung menggunakan bahasa indonesia.” (zi, zoom, july 26, 2021; ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021; ja, personal communication, july 18, 2021) “sometimes it’s not easy to make my students understand english because english is not their second language. i am teaching the lower grade and most of my students are in the beginner level of english and have no basic english. so, i frequently think that it is impossible to make them understand without giving them a direct understanding in indonesian.” (zi, zoom, july 26, 2021; ma, personal communication, 12 july, 2021; ja, personal communication, july 18, 2021) the statement implies that they believed to younger learners need to get sessions for vocabulary building before they integrate themes into teyl. however, this should not be considered as challenge because themes could be integrated to all levels in primary schools without requirement of yls english proficiency. thus, if the teachers still consider this as a challenge, they should pay attention to their teaching strategies. they could use semiotic sources to support the yls’ english learning while scaffold it with translation, translanguaging, and trans-semiotizing (carbonara & scibetta, 2020; johnstone, 2019; zein, 2017). it is necessary to keep in mind that young learners need to focus on how the language works, not what language says. ivana nabilah qoriroh mujahidah, fardini sabilah, & rina wahyu setyaningrum why do themes matter? the teachers’ voices about thematic units for teaching english to young learners 368 never-ending motivation for young learners to learning consistency teaching english thematically provides contextual language learning, integrating the variety of lessons and experience in using english. the yls enjoy the fun and joyful learning as central to this teaching and learning process. since english has become a global language, everyone is forced to understand english even fundamentally. thus, teaching and learning english at a very young age is necessary. there are ten ideas of teaching eyl such as 1) using visual, realia, and movement; 2) involving students in making realia; 3) unstoppable activity; 4) teaching themes; 5) using stories and familiar context to the students; 6) conducting english classroom instructions; 7) using l1 as resources based on necessity; 8) involving helpers from the community; 9) collaborating other teachers at school; and 10) communicating with teyl experts (shin, 2006). those activities have essential roles for making the english learning exciting and motivating. yls like discovery activities in which they can respond to what are being asked by using imagination, or they can be involved in making things, in drawing things, in games, or physical activities (harmer, 2007; othman & kiely, 2016; zein, 2016) in teyl, yls have more opportunities to express themselves and involve in each learning activity. the students' motivation is highly related to the materials and activities in the classroom. bourke (2006); dörnyei and ushioda (2011) stated that to enhance students' motivation in learning english; the teachers need to provide topics of interest to children, to tell stories, to play games, to do physical activities, to use the song, chants, or rhymes, to make pair work and group work tasks, and to introduce early childhood literature. intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to learn english could be developed during the learning sessions. the students’ motivated behavior can be seen while entering the classroom and enthusiastically following all the learning activities. they may start their day by saying ‘good morning’ to their teachers and friends, then they will enjoy the learning activities and try to be active in a class. they will get a reward when they get involved in every activity, finish their tasks, or answer the questions. huang, hoi, & teo (2018) found that the first graders in the content-based language instruction class displayed more motivated behavior, such as eagerly volunteering in class. they have high motivation in learning english because they learn and find something new from a delightful class atmosphere. as ja explains, “mereka mendapatkan sesuatu yang berbeda ketika belajar bahasa inggris. mereka secara bertahap mempelajari hal-hal baru menggunakan bahasa inggris. saya memiliki pengalaman yang tak terlupakan ketika siswa saya mengatakan bahwa mereka suka belajar bahasa inggris karena menyenangkan. mereka tiba-tiba berbicara kepada saya setelah membuat seni dan belajar matematika (dalam bahasa inggris). sehingga menurut saya, pelajaran tematik membuat siswa saya senang belajar bahasa inggris.” (ja, personal communication, july 18, 2021) “they get something different when learning english. they gradually learn new things using english. i had a memorable experience when my students said that they love learning english because it’s fun. they suddenly talked to me after making art and learning math (in english). to me, thematic lesson makes my students love to learn english.” (ja, personal communication, july 18, 2021) hence, various external and internal factors inside or outside the classroom can affect young learners’ dynamic motivation to learn english. once they have a good impression at the first time they learn english; they want to learn and explore more. conclusion themes do matter to be integrated into the teyl and requires significant understanding from the teachers of eyl in implementing it. the activities should be planned carefully to cater yls’ learning by practicing english contextually. they learned new vocabularies from new knowledge emerged from the thematic content and used them for communication which linked to their real-life experience. hence, thematic units which cover english and the integration of multiple knowledge in different subjects like mathematics, science, arts or others should be considered for teyl because of feasibility of activating yls’ multiple intelligences that should be sharpen during their age-period. all teachers as the participants of this study affirmed that this is as a solution dealing with the absence of eyl curriculum endorsed by the indonesian government. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 369 shifting the teyl pedagogical beliefs and practices requires the teachers’ creativity in developing the materials and administering the tasks. it is challenging for the teachers as they needed to devote their time for careful lesson planning to cater the yls with advanced knowledge through the english learning. specifically, for younger learners who have less or no input of english, the teachers challenge to teach theme could be solved by incorporating themes by emphasis on vocabulary building that could be introduced by various activities (shin & crandall, 2014) like using songs and movements (shin, 2014). the yls should dominantly get involved in every learning activity to obtain knowledge of using english in a genuine context. as this current study was participated by small numbers of eyl teachers within the researchers’ teyl circle who incorporated thematic units, the further research should involve more teachers as the participants. also, additional instruments, like teaching documents, as well as observation checklist could be selected to strengthen the research findings. despite the limited instruments used in this study, the thematic eyl lesson has the potential to motivate yls to improve their english skills in accordance with their educational levels. acknowledgment we wish to extend our special thanks to all the participants involved in this research who are willing to be interviewed in the process of gaining 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(2017). language-in-education policy on primary efl: the case of indonesia. international journal of pedagogy & learning, 12(2), 133–146. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00598171 https://doi.org/10.31002/metathesis english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 479 unveiling coherence: analyzing grammatical devices in recount text dewi nurpitriyani department of english education, faculty of educational sciences, uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta indonesia e-mail: dewi.nurpitriyani20@mhs.uinjkt.ac.id didin nuruddin hidayat department of english education, faculty of educational sciences, uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia e-mail: didin.nuruddin@uinjkt.ac.id nida husna department of english education, faculty of educational sciences, uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia e-mail: nida.husna@uinjkt.ac.id alek department of english education, faculty of educational sciences, uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia e-mail: alek@uinjkt.ac.id apa citation: nurpitriyani, d., hidayat, d. n., husna, n., & alek. (2023). unveiling coherence: analyzing grammatical devices in recount text. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 479-488. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.5703 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction writing is an essential skill because it allows us to express our ideas and thoughts as well as convince and persuade others in written form (novariana et al., 2018; sianturi et al., 2020). however, writing is not an easy process and generating a text that the reader can easily understand is complicated since it involves a long process and multiple practices (chung et al., 2020). in the case of english for foreign language (efl) students, writing is considered much more difficult as students tend to transfer their first language into the target language (aziz et al., 2020). besides, students struggle to express their ideas into sentences, turning sentences into paragraphs, and turning paragraphs into a whole discourse for their lack of writing practice (nasiba & norboyevich, 2022). furthermore, the abstract: the purpose of this study is to examine the grammatical cohesive devices used in the recount text writing of bilingual students. the cohesive device is crucial because it consists of grammatical and lexical devices that contribute to the writing’s strength and accuracy, as well as its contextual understanding. twenty bilingual ninth-grade students of a junior high school participated in this study. the students’ recount text writings were used as the main data in this research. the qualitative descriptive method employed in this study to thoroughly assess and describe students’ writing and its’ cohesive device used. further, the data analysis used was content analysis consisting of three steps: categorization, abstraction, and coding. the result shows that the bilingual ninth-grade students were able to use grammatical cohesion in their recount text writing. the result revealed the reference is most dominated in 68.42% and the second device is in conjunction with 29.97%. meanwhile, substitution showed the low rank with 1.61% and the last was ellipsis with 0%. furthermore, in the reference device category, personal reference becomes the most highly used at 85%, meanwhile in the conjunction category, additive category becomes the most frequent one at 46% as well as nominal substitution at 50% in the substitution device. it was also found that the ninth-grade students of bilingual class can write well using numbers of grammatical cohesive devices even though there was still some monotonous repetition in their writing. he findings of this study have pedagogical implicature as the need to enhance students’ knowledge of grammatical cohesion device because understanding of cohesiveness is necessary for pertaining to the text’s cohesion and coherence particularly in writing ability. keywords: grammatical cohesion devices; recount text; students’ writing. mailto:dewi.nurpitriyani20@mhs.uinjkt.ac.id mailto:alek@uinjkt.ac.id dewi nurpitriyani, didin nuruddin hidayat, nida husna, & alek unveiling coherence: analyzing grammatical devices in recount text 480 problems get more complicated in curriculum 2013 as students are required to master a variety of genres simultaneously with their distinct purposes, language features, and structures specified for each genre (ariwibowo et al., 2023). three elements of constructing well-structured writing are unity, coherence, and adequate development (asfah, 2019). accordingly, they also stated that good writing should be cohesive and coherent. cohesion is required to establish connections between what is being said in the writer’s mind and what the writer tends to say in a text. cohesive is the element that binds the text together by redundant information at the semantic, syntactic, and discourse structure levels (khalaf, 2020). akbar et al. (2022) also used a similar definition, stating that cohesion connects phrases to retain their fundamental meaning. a well-chosen cohesive device will result in a wellstructured and coherent text. meanwhile, inappropriate usage of a cohesive device will result in readers’ confusion. cohesive devices also have a strong influence on writing’s cohesion as they provide learners with a variety of syntactic that can be used to make any piece of discourse more cohesive (schiffrin et al., 2001; ludji et al., 2022). an effective way to construct a good paragraph in writing is from its coherence and cohesion. according to marashi (2021), coherence is the ability to join one word to another. the sentences that must hold together demonstrate the text’s coherence, which indicates that the transitions between words and phrases must be logical and easy to follow (putri, 2021). each word, phrase, and sentence should be simple to comprehend and organized rationally. halliday and hasan (1976) added that cohesion is symbolized and shared partially through grammar or the vocabulary in the text provided. cohesive devices are significant for creating effective writing, both coherence and cohesion. yule (2019) argues that cohesion could be drawn as a tie and connection within the text. it can also be pointed as a part of the system to correlate an item with either the first or the following text. without cohesion and coherence, writing would be unclear and misunderstood by the readers. as islami et al. (2021) address, cohesion contributes to text readability, comprehensibility, and clarity of arguments. although cohesion and coherence seem different, they have some common features; both are evolving. cohesion is symbolized and shared partially through grammar or the vocabulary in the text provided. therefore, it includes two types of cohesion: grammatical and lexical. grammatical cohesion represents the tie, the rope, and the link conveyed and indicated in the grammatical system of a language, such as reference, substitution, conjunction, and ellipsis. in contrast, lexical cohesion refers to the connection achieved by selecting vocabulary (verdiansyah et al., 2019). the cohesion of grammar and lexicon is one of the essential factors for the process of receiving the organization for human thoughts. thus, if the grammatical and lexical cohesion are appropriate enough, the discourse is structured well. previous research from rudiana (2021) evaluated the use of grammatical cohesiveness in argumentative essays written by students. he discovered that students commonly employed the sort of grammatical cohesion devices and that it enhanced students’ writing successfully. moreover, shahzad (2021) found that the students focus on some grammatical devices and neglect others. in the paragraphs, the misuse and overuse of devices showed their lack of grammatical knowledge and a bad influence on english. as an instructor, she noticed more influence on them of their mother tongue. from these two studies, we can conclude that a grammatical cohesion device is significant in building coherence and cohesive writing, both effective and meaningful. furthermore, other related research from nurhidayat et al. (2021) and syam (2020) revealed how significant grammatical cohesive devices are to build a well and meaningful writing since using grammatical cohesive devices, enhances us to use references to show our personal thought or to address the existence of the writer by using reference device, it may also to add something, or to oppose something by using conjunction, or to make our writing more natural, we are also able to substitute to avoid the redundant or repetition in our writing by using substitution device, and or omit something in the term of ellipsis device. the findings above indicate that students continue to struggle with using cohesive devices. thus, studying the coherent strategies used in students’ writing is vital to ascertain where gaps exist and what aspects of students’ writing should be reviewed and improved. cohesion is one of the vital factors in determining the quality of writing; meanwhile, cohesive devices are significant because they include grammatical and lexical devices that help strengthen the writing and make it more accurate and contextually understandable. subsequently, without discourse analysis, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 481 grammar, vocabulary, and other linguistic components, the literary result will be inadequate and inaccurate (meylinda, 2023). cohesive devices indicate relationships between sentences and elements of the text. this means that the proper use of coherent devices allows readers to grasp the connection between what comes before and what comes after. cohesive devices play a crucial role in the context of english as a foreign language (efl) learners. according to cheng and tsang (2022), cohesive writing is highly relevant for all efl students, as it is a key factor in producing more coherent written compositions. furthermore, it guides students in improving their writing skills. in indonesia, mastering english writing is considered an essential skill for students. one of the necessary skills for effective writing is the ability to complete coherence and cohesion. notably, bilingual schools in indonesia offer a unique educational environment that further highlights more exposure to english. this notion raises interesting questions regarding students' use of grammatical cohesive devices in bilingual schools. recount text, a genre characterized by providing information or retelling experiences, is often examined as an expression that reflects personal opinions and emotions (mingsakoon & srinon, 2018). notably, when students write about themselves, their engagement with the writing task tends to be higher, which motivates them to write more (barratt-pugh et al., 2021). in recount text, students must follow language features such as tenses, action verbs, conjunction, and so on (iriana, 2018). given this view, it becomes evident that recount text is a suitable genre for encouraging student writing and examining the use of grammatical cohesive devices. regarding the importance of students’ writing ability development, exploring and investigating the use of grammatical cohesive devices in the students’ recount text writings will give more valuable insight into how students engage cohesive devices. furthermore, this is also expected to give a more profound understanding of how these cohesive devices into the writing to make it more coherence and clearer. then, we will be able to identify the weaknesses and strengths in every aspect of each grammatical cohesive device and help uncover the specific challenges and difficulties students encounter when attempting to create cohesive and coherent texts. all in all, research on grammatical cohesive devices is to inform teachers or other language and education practitioners to increase students’ writing skills and contribute to developing more effective language teaching methods. considering these notions, it is noteworthy to explore the specific aspects of grammatical cohesive devices employed by students in bilingual classes, which may demonstrate better variation and proficiency than in other educational settings due to their english exposure. thus, this research aims to investigate the use of grammatical cohesive devices in the bilingual ninth-grade students recounting text writings. the research questions were proposed as follows: (1) what common grammatical cohesive device types are frequently used in the ninth-grade bilingual students’ recount text writing? (2) what kinds of grammatical cohesive device specifications are found in the ninth-grade bilingual students’ recount text writing related to its grammatical cohesive device specification? method the method used in this study is qualitative descriptive analysis to characterize a phenomenon and its characteristics (doyle et al., 2020). in this type of method, the data is presented in a description to give detailed results. the grammatical cohesion devices that students employ in their recount text writing are discussed in detail through analysis and description. the students’ recount text writings were analyzed and categorized to identify the types or subtypes of grammatical cohesion devices; reference, substitution, conjunction, and ellipsis used by the students and their dominance in the writings. 20 of the ninth-grade bilingual students of mts pembangunan uin jakarta were chosen as the subjects of this research. they were asked to share their experience of having online classes during the covid-19 pandemic into recount text writings. in this study, the instrument was a writing test. it measures students’ writing ability to tell their experiences in online learning during the covid19 pandemic into recount text writing and to identify types and subtypes of grammatical cohesion devices used in their writings. twenty bilingual ninth-grade students of mts pembangunan uin jakarta were required to write recount texts on their experiences attending online classes during the covid-19 pandemic. the writing should follow the recount text generic structure consisting of orientation, event, reorientation, and language feature characteristics, which include using simple past tense to convey dewi nurpitriyani, didin nuruddin hidayat, nida husna, & alek unveiling coherence: analyzing grammatical devices in recount text 482 information that has already occurred. the text was typed on a4 paper with a 3 cm margin on each side, at least three paragraphs with a minimum of seven sentences in each, saved as pdf, and uploaded to the google drive provided. the steps were collecting students’ recount text writing, reading and calculating every grammatical cohesion device in students’ writing, and classifying them based on their subtypes with the formula: p = percentage n = types or sub-types of grammatical cohesive devices t = total grammatical cohesive devices produced by students in accordance with lindgren et al. (2020), content analysis consists of three steps: categorization, abstraction, and coding. categorization is a procedure in which the researchers grouped the data based on similarities to construct a generalization. the data is classified according to the material that pertains to the research’s theoretical framework on cohesive devices. the second is an abstraction, which refers to the process through which the researchers developed a broad explanation by elaborating on a specific explanation. then the third is code. when coding the data, the researchers read it thoroughly from beginning to end, looking for every line with information relevant to the research’s primary category. the researchers should match the elements discovered in the text to the categories established previously during the categorization process. it makes it easier for the researcher to locate the data to be evaluated. after completing all procedures, the researchers drew a conclusion regarding the types of cohesive devices that bilingual students typically employ in their writing and the accuracy of the cohesive devices used by bilingual students. results and discussion this research's result is divided into two parts to reveal the research questions stated before. the first part focuses on the problem of what common grammatical cohesive device types are frequently used in ninth-grade bilingual students’ recount text writing. each device was categorized into its own part in the percentage. meanwhile, the second part was the answer to the kinds of grammatical cohesive device specifications found in the ninth-grade bilingual students' recount text writing, and it explained in detail its grammatical cohesive device specification. the use of grammatical cohesion devices this section explained the most frequent grammatical cohesion devices used by the ninthgrade of bilingual students of mts pembangunan uin jakarta in their recount text writings are shown in the table below: table 1. frequent grammatical cohesive devices type of grammatical cohesion students’ grammatical device use students’ cohesion in percentage (%) references 1,018 68.42% substitution 24 1.61% conjunction 446 29.97% ellipsis 0 0 total 1,488 100% table 1 shows a reference as the most frequent grammatical cohesiveness device used by bilingual ninth-grade students with 68.42 % of all grammatical cohesion devices. the second type of grammatical cohesive device is 29.97%. meanwhile, substitution was used at just 1.61 %, while ellipsis received 0%. this result draws into the assumption that ninth-grade students are unfamiliar with substitution and ellipsis. in line with the findings of trisnaningrum et al. (2019), who discovered that participants were more familiar with both reference and conjunction than substitution or ellipsis, the study found that participants were more familiar with the reference and conjunction. furthermore, the findings revealed that students' writing was unable to make use of grammatical cohesiveness techniques because of their incapacity to do so. to obtain more particular information, the researchers divided the grammatical cohesive devices used by the bilingual ninth-grade students into specific types and subtypes of grammatical cohesive devices, which show the highest among other grammatical cohesion devices in reference with 861 in personal reference, followed by conjunction with 204 in additive conjunction, and the last is substitution with 12 nominal substitution as the most frequent subtype of grammatical cohesion devices used. the detail data is shown in the table below: english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 483 table 2. types of grammatical cohesive devices use list of student references substitution conjunction ellipsis total perso nal dem onstr ative com parat ive nom inal verb al clau sal addi tive adve rsati ve tem poral cau sal nomi nal ver bal cau sal student 1 48 3 1 2 1 0 2 6 2 5 0 0 0 70 student 2 37 10 0 1 1 0 6 3 4 2 0 0 0 64 student 3 57 6 1 0 0 0 6 4 3 3 0 0 0 80 student 4 57 2 2 0 1 1 5 1 4 4 0 0 0 77 student 5 30 4 2 0 0 0 10 3 4 4 0 0 0 57 student 6 67 11 0 1 1 0 10 2 10 6 0 0 0 108 student 7 37 3 2 0 1 0 10 1 16 2 0 0 0 72 student 8 35 3 0 1 0 0 6 1 9 2 0 0 0 57 student 9 37 5 3 0 1 0 18 5 4 1 0 0 0 74 student 10 40 13 5 0 0 1 13 4 9 1 0 0 0 86 student 11 50 2 8 1 0 0 13 4 4 1 0 0 0 83 student 12 48 3 5 1 0 0 15 9 5 8 0 0 0 94 student 13 38 4 4 2 1 0 15 2 2 2 0 0 0 70 student 14 57 3 2 0 0 1 3 1 4 4 0 0 0 75 student 15 35 7 6 1 1 0 13 5 5 4 0 0 0 77 student 16 33 4 0 1 0 0 6 1 9 2 0 0 0 56 student 17 45 3 1 1 1 0 14 3 6 6 0 0 0 80 student 18 30 3 1 0 0 0 9 2 3 3 0 0 0 51 student 19 38 7 3 0 0 0 17 5 4 1 0 0 0 75 student 20 42 11 4 0 0 0 13 4 7 1 0 0 0 82 total 861 107 50 12 9 3 204 66 114 62 0 0 0 1,488 to get more detail on the percentage of each type, the following table provides a description of each kind of sub-type grammatical cohesion found in the bilingual students' recount text writings. three different pie charts consist of reference, conjunction, and substitution due to ellipsis not found in the students’ writing. each section indicates a sub-type of grammatical cohesion device and the device's frequency. the pie chart figures are shown in the following ways: figure 1. reference according to the pie chart above, reference is the form of grammatical cohesive device most frequently utilized compared to other types. a personal reference is the most prevalent subtype with 85%, followed by demonstrative reference at 10% and comparison at 5%. furthermore, the researchers discovered a large number of reference devices that were employed in this study. the number of reference devices used by bilingual ninth-grade students illustrates their preference for personal references to make their recount text writing more accessible and to link their own experiences to the readers, which is the major purpose of the recount text. personal pronouns such as i, my, our, his, her, and it are frequently used in formal writing. additionally, the text makes use of demonstrative references such as this, that, and there, as well as comparative references such as less and more. next, the most frequent grammatical cohesive device is followed by conjunction in 29.97%. in conjunction, additive conjunction has the most frequent, which is 48%, temporal 25%, adversative 15%, and causal 14%. the pie chart is as follows: dewi nurpitriyani, didin nuruddin hidayat, nida husna, & alek unveiling coherence: analyzing grammatical devices in recount text 484 figure 2. conjunction conjunction, as a means of connecting one clause to another, is frequently used among bilingual ninth-grade students. there are four types of conjunction devices: additive, adversative, temporal, and causal. the additive conjunction joins two language parts that are in the same place. while adversative conjunctions arise when the first clause’s statement contradicts or is not equivalent to the second clause’s statement. then, a temporal conjunction is used to connect events in time, but a causal conjunction is used to connect causes and effects that occur in the same phrase. researchers discovered that additive conjunctions were more frequently used than adversative conjunctions. this is seen by the numerous instances in which conjunctions like “and” and “also” are used in repetition. the second is temporal conjunction, in which students relate their experiences to time using numerous examples such as then, next, after that, first, and at that time. the usage of adversative conjunctions, on the other hand, is restricted to forms such as but in a few. the last kind of conjunction is causal, which students frequently use because and thus. additionally, nominal substitution uses 50% of substitution devices, followed by verbal substitution at 37% and clausal substitution at 13%. the chart is as follows: figure 3. substitution substitution is a cohesive device that substitutes later phrases that are not repeated in the next clause or sentence. the replacement device generates more dynamic sentences by substituting for the term. the research discovered that substitute sentences were relatively evenly distributed and varied. these terms contain substitutes such as one, one’s, do, did, and thus. this demonstrates that there is a connection between the two sentences. the kinds of grammatical cohesive devices specifications the description of grammatical cohesion devices used by the bilingual ninth-grade students recount text writing presented in table 3 below: table 3. the kinds of grammatical cohesive devices specifications type of grammatical cohesion devices a subtype of grammatical cohesion devices the kinds of grammatical cohesion devices in students’ the number of grammatical english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 485 recount text writing cohesion devices uses references personal i, me, my we, our, us, she, her, he, him, his, it, they, them, their 861 demonstrative this, that, there, now 107 comparative more, less, better 50 substitution nominal one, one’s 12 verbal do, did, done 9 causal so 3 conjunction additive and, and also, in addition, moreover 204 adversative but, however, even though, despite all, instead 66 temporal then, the last, after that, before, beforehand, next day, until, in the end, at the same time, previously, later, another day 114 causal because, for, so 62 ellipsis nominal verbal causal total 1488 reference the study discovered 861 personal references the ninth-grade bilingual students used in recounting text writings. the students use personal pronouns such as i, me, my, mine, we, our, she, his, her, them, and it. in terms of writing about prior experiences or occurrences, they undoubtedly tell their own and incorporate the other person (male/female) and item as the references. additionally, the findings indicate that students use this, that, there, and now as demonstrative references when referring to the total 107 and other, less, more when referring to the total 50. thus, the results indicate that most students are familiar with the kinds of references in their recount text writing. conjunction the study found 204 additive conjunction and the most frequent such as and, additionally, and then followed by adversative in total 66 such as but even though, despite all, and instead. after that, it is also found 144 temporal conjunctions such as then, the last, after that, before, beforehand, next day, until, in the end, at the same time, previously, later, another day and the last one is a causal conjunction such as because, for, and so. substitution the study located 12 nominal replacement devices, such as one or one’s, followed by 9 verbal substitutions, such as do, done, or, did, and three clausal so. the explained result above reveals that the use of grammatical cohesion devices in the bilingual ninth-grade students’ recount text writing is dominated by reference devices as the most frequent device, which is 68.42%, followed by conjunction at 29.97%, and substitution at 1.61%. this present study's results are in line with several similar research such as those conducted by trisnaningrum et al. (2019), which showed a result that 1048 grammatical cohesion devices were found in the students’ academic writing essays with reference devices as the most frequent ones at 53.3%. moreover, another similar research from satria and handayani (2018) found that students’ descriptive text writing consisted of reference with 63.70%, conjunction with 30.66%, ellipsis with 6.35%, and substitution with 0.27%. both research studies revealed that the reference device is the most frequent one compared to the other, and this is also in line with the writer’s research, which found reference 68.42% with the most frequent use sub-type in reference is the personal reference at 85%. this finding is possibly caused by the particular genre that the students wrote. since they wrote about recount text which has the social function of telling the writer’s personal experience (mediska & adnan, 2019). they require the use of more personal references such as i, my, our, his, her than any dewi nurpitriyani, didin nuruddin hidayat, nida husna, & alek unveiling coherence: analyzing grammatical devices in recount text 486 other text types. thus, the students’ massive use of reference in their recount writing in this study is as expected and as it is supposed to be based on the genre characteristics. further, this finding implies that students were aware of the genre they were writing and aware of its function as well as its linguistic features. in addition, additive conjunctions are found still limited and monotonous. students frequently use “either-or” and “also” to add something, but only a few uses in addition or moreover. this is also in line with adversative conjunction, which is frequently used but to contrast something only a few students use however and even though. the findings also identify a gap between additive conjunction and adversative conjunction which is three times higher, from 48% or 204 to 15% or 64. this finding is in line with faizah et al. (2020), harliani et al. (2021), and jayanti and hidayat (2021) results, in which the additive conjunction is repeated many times of all the forms of conjunctions from the writing they analyzed. the number of additive conjunctions revealed in this study compared to adversative conjunctions shows that were more concerned with adding information rather than opposing the information, which may reflect their understanding of the concept of sequencing events in the recount text. meanwhile, the limited variety of conjunction used by the students might not only imply their glossary, their richness of vocabulary, as well as their frequency of writing practices but may also imply their thinking patterns and how their brains work which need to be investigated further. there is also a gap in the result of analysis data, specifically in ellipsis. ellipsis was not found in the students’ writing. ellipsis is defined as the deletion of unnecessary things in a sentence (halliday & hasan, 1976). it may also be called “zero substitution”. it is like omitting the word, e.g., i lay on my back and let them move as they would, so the move was not repeated. in the present study, where students tell their own experiences in writing in the form of recount text, they always use complete sentence. meanwhile, the study also found that students used substitution the least in their recount writing. this shows that most students still lack competence in using grammatical cohesive well, as is also shown in albana et al. (2020), sari (2021), and trisnaningrum et al. (2019), where ellipsis was not found in their results of the research. however, in this case, junior high students have not used the ellipsis and substitution in their writing due to several factors, such as their lack of awareness of the items, their level of understanding, and their level of grammatical. in contrast with the prior discussions, it is also found that some students could write many grammatical cohesive devices in their recount writing (shown in table 2), with the highest being 108 and the least being 56. this result is even higher or the same as the subject in albana et al. (2020), reaching 100 grammatical cohesive devices. this also revealed that junior high schools could use grammatical cohesive devices. the findings of this study also show pedagogical implicature, including the need to enhance students’ knowledge of grammatical cohesion devices. increasing this knowledge and experience will increase students’ ability to use a variety of cohesive devices. therefore, students should receive material about the text’s cohesion and coherence. in junior high school, they will be exposed to beneficial device cohesion, particularly in terms of writing ability. conclusion in conclusion, the bilingual ninth-grade students of mts pembangunan uin jakarta employ a variety of grammatical cohesive devices. the students utilized all of the cohesive items to create cohesion and coherence in their writing. cohesion enables students to comprehend certain missing components, resulting in a more precise understandable writing. only ellipsis does not appear in the bilingual ninth-grade students’ recount text writing. no student makes use of ellipses in their work. furthermore, it can be argued that students have a strong ability to write a coherent paragraph as a result of their ability to use grammatical cohesion devices: reference, substitution, and conjunction in their writing. it was also found that the ninth-grade students of bilingual class are able to write well using numbers of grammatical cohesive devices even though there was still some monotonous repetition in their writing. the findings of this study also show pedagogical implicature, including the need to enhance students’ knowledge of grammatical cohesion devices. increasing this knowledge and experience will increase students’ ability to use a variety of cohesive devices. therefore, students should be provided with material pertaining to the text’s cohesion and coherence. in junior high school, they will be exposed to device cohesion that is beneficial particularly in terms of writing ability. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 487 references albana, h. h., marzuki, a. g., & hidayat, d. n. 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(2019). lexical cohesions in a grade x english textbook by indonesian education and culture ministry. diglossia, 11(1), 14–23. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 183 the effectiveness of learning community techniques on english essay writing skills franscy universitas panca sakti bekasi, indonesia email: franscy@panca-sakti.ac.id leroy holman siahaan universitas panca sakti bekasi, indonesia email: leroyholman@panca-sakti.ac.id apa citation: franscy., & siahaan, l. h. (2023). the effectiveness of learning community techniques on english essay writing skills. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 183-192. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.6824 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction language education in the university environment always emphasizes understanding writing skills for every student, especially in english language education. based on the operational curriculum of english education at universitas panca sakti bekasi, which is used in the learning process, it requires students to take writing courses that are divided into several levels according to the semester level of the students, the purpose that they can improve their understanding and writing skills. in addition, writing skills cannot be separated from any teaching and learning process activities in the classroom. this can be seen from the activities of providing exercises, assignments, and final assignments, in line with hyland's opinion (in wale & bishaw, 2020), which states that writing is an important skill to be mastered by learners of english as a second language. on the other hand, the facts on the ground illustrate the opposite, where there is a gap between expectations and reality. based on the results of the initial observations made, the researcher examined the writing assignments of the students of the english education study program. the students' writing was still inadequate when viewed from both the content and linguistic aspects. various reasons can cause this difficulty, for example, a lack of knowledge about writing english, which includes understanding vocabulary, language structure, and sentence organization in each paragraph (alisha et al., 2019). this is very important because an article must reflect substantive information or idea that attracts the reader's interest (yoo et al., 2020). this is in line with richards and renandy’s (in nurfadila, 2021) opinion, which states that writing skills are the most difficult for second language learners to master. the difficulty lies in how to generate and organize ideas and how to put ideas into text form. so that writing is considered the most difficult talent for students to master because it not only generates thoughts but also allows the conversion of these ideas into perceptual texts (toba et al., 2019). in addition, in writing, students must have prior knowledge of what topics will be developed in an essay or writing in english. because writing supports all other language skills, writing is one of the english skills that must be taught and practiced at various levels of education. abstract: this research is designed to measure the effectiveness of learning community techniques on english essay writing skills based on the result of preliminary observation, which shows that students had some problems related to the result of their writing skills which still need to achieve the expected aims. this research used a classroom action research method involving 30 students as a research sample. this research used quantitative and qualitative data for the data collecting technique. quantitative data was taken from the pre-test and post-test results, while qualitative data was taken during observation and action. then the results of the research showed that the percentage value of student activity in attending lectures had increased. the result of the percentage increase in student activity seen from the percentage of students who were very active and active in cycle 1 was only 36.7%, then increased in cycle 2 to 63.3%. then the results of learning to write english essays for students also increased, with an average score in cycle 1 of 60.17, and in cycle 2, there was an increase in the average score of 9.96 to 70.13. using the learning community technique to improve students' english abilities has a favourable effect, particularly on the growth of student's ability to write english essays. keywords: action research; essay; learning community technique; writing skills. franscy & leroy holman siahaan the effectiveness of learning community techniques on english essay writing skills 184 in addition, writing supports student learning. this statement is supported by purnomowati et al. (2018). richards and schmidt (2013) argue that an essay is a type of writing that is relatively long and, more specifically, written by students, which contains the author's expression or view on a particular topic. the most crucial ability in learning a language is writing. students can convey their ideas through writing, yet the majority of them still make serious errors in their spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation (fahmi & rachmijati, 2021). from this definition, we can see that essays are mostly associated with academic assignments (students). the essay in question is the author's thoughts or opinions on a topic to show his position on the issue to be conveyed to others (haidir, 2021). from the aspect of the text, the essay is said to be relatively longer. another opinion states that an essay is a writing consisting of a combination of several paragraphs containing a topic and one main idea. essays consist of at least three paragraphs, and essays generally consist of five (wei et al., 2019). this opinion specifically states that the length of an essay usually consists of a minimum of three paragraphs and generally consists of five paragraphs and contains a topic and main idea which is composed of three main parts, namely: 1) an introduction which contains two things, namely a general statement to attract attention. reader and the thesis statement section to express the primary purpose of an essay. 2) the body consists of one or more paragraphs. each paragraph develops a subtopic. furthermore, 3) a conclusion containing a summary of the main ideas presented in the essay's body (wale & bishaw, 2020). the above problems require a solution or a problem-solving path. one of the solutions to these problems is selecting material delivery techniques in the teaching and learning process. in this case, teachers or lecturers are required to not only be able to master conventional learning approaches but also be able to master modern (up-to-date) learning approaches (almelhi, 2021). the application of modern learning techniques in english writing skills will encourage students in the classroom to be more active and productive in practice so that they not only focus on understanding theory, but students can also practice it directly (nurharjanto et al., 2020). related to the modern learning approach, the contextual learning approach is a learning concept that helps educators or lecturers to relate the material being taught to students' real-world situations and encourages them to make connections between their knowledge and its application in their lives as a family and community members (afnita & farida, 2021). contextual teaching learning is a learning concept that helps lecturers in linking the material they learn to students' real-world situations and encourages students to make connections between their knowledge and its application in everyday life. this opinion is supported by wamubi et al. (2015) that the ctl approach is a learning approach that helps teachers connect learning materials with situations that exist in the real world. contextual is a comprehensive system consisting of interrelated parts. if these parts are intertwined, there will be an effect that exceeds the results of the separate parts (hanafsiyah, 2007). in the contextual learning approach, students know the benefits derived from their learning activities and experience the learning process. because students are the subject of learning, the lecturer is only a facilitator and motivator who directs and motivates students in the learning process (vangrieken et al., 2017). the contextual learning approach has seven main components of effective learning. the seven components used in indonesia are constructivism, inquiry, questioning, learning community, modeling, reflection, and authentic assessment (fadhilah, 2017). in implementing contextual learning, lecturers or teachers can choose and use several techniques in a contextual learning approach which include; (1) constructivism, (2) inquiry, (3) questioning, (4) learning community, (5) modeling, (6) reflection, and (7) authentic assessment (afnita & farida, 2021; johnson, 2002; lorenza & muhammadi, 2021; ruto et al., 2021) from the several contextual learning techniques, the researcher only uses the learning community technique. the selection of the learning technique was based on several considerations concerning the problems faced in learning students' writing skills (haryani, 2019). in addition, this learning technique is studentoriented. where its application emphasizes collaboration with study group colleagues and always encourages a multi-way communication process so that everyone can be a source of learning (ismawarni, 2021), and the most important thing is that truth does not only come from one, namely the lecturer. so, it is hoped that with this technique, students can gain more knowledge and skills in writing english essays. a learning community can effective occur if learning outcomes are obtained from the collaboration, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 185 discussion and sharing with other people (dana, 2021; medina, 2018). learning outcomes can be obtained by sharing between friends, between groups, and between those who know and those who do not know, both inside and outside the classroom (garcia-ponce & tagg, 2020) learning community can occur if between lecturers and students or between students and other students have active, effective, and communicative interactions (williams & beam, 2019). the learning process will run significantly if it is carried out in study groups, both homogeneous and heterogeneous so that in it, there will be sharing problems (sharing problems), sharing information (sharing information), sharing experiences (sharing experience), and sharing problem-solving (sharing). problem-solving allows more knowledge and skills to be acquired (syatriana & sakkir, 2020). the learning community technique is a learning process involving communication and interaction involving cognitive processes between lecturers and students or students with other students in sharing ideas and experiences to solve a problem in the learning process (siregar & anwar, 2018). the learning community technique teaches students by giving them communicationbased homework. the objectives of communication are what the learning is focused on in order to achieve them (syatriana & sakkir, 2020). according to putri & ahmad (2022), students' writing inadequacies are caused by a variety of factors, as indicated by their viewpoint notes. writing essays always results in grammatical errors. in writing class, kids continue to be passive. students also lack the knowledge necessary to write well, especially essays. additionally, argumentative writing is a challenging activity in which the author adopts a stance on a contentious subject and then supports it with arguments and facts. it is difficult for an inexperienced writer to write an essay that requires content integration, arhetorical argumentation patterns, and critical thinking on their part (marni et al., 2019). argumentative essays are difficult because of the conflict between the need for self-expression and the need to comply with a set of external constraints; in trying to meet external constraints, writers tend to lose sight of what they want to say (tasya, 2022). it is hoped that with this technique, students can gain more knowledge and skills in language, especially english argumentative writing skills. method this research uses the classroom action research method. the researcher started the research by collecting qualitative data first to explore more deeply the research problem being studied in the third semester students of the english education study program, universitas panca sakti bekasi, then continued with the process of collecting quantitative data to support the qualitative data. quantitative data was taken from the results of the pre-test and post-test, while qualitative data was taken during the process of observation and action. this research is participatory collaborative, meaning that research activities are carried out by the researcher themselves with the process of observation and collaborators. the sequence of research activities from the chairperson and members of the researcher in january-march was conducting field survey preparation conducting interview observations on the problem of english essay writing skills. then, we conducted a literature study on the variables of english essay writing skills and learning community techniques. the results of these activities were in april-june. next, we made a grid of english essay writing skill test instruments, made observation assessment tables, and made questions for interviews. this research was conducted at universitas panca sakti bekasi, jl. raya hankam no. 54, jatirahayu, pondok gede, bekasi city, west java 17414. the subjects in this research were the third semester students of the english education study program, universitas panca sakti bekasi, totaling 30 students. the data collection process in this research consisted of five stages: observation, interviews, questionnaires, diaries, and tests. the data analysis process is carried out inductively, and the researcher carries out special observation activities, notes the structure of each data finding, makes hypotheses by formulating data, and concludes. parson and brown (in mertler, 2014) mention that there are three stages in analyzing data: organization, description, and interpretation. the first stage is an organization, which is making a narrative of data taken from the results of observations, interviews, and documentation that has been collected. the second stage describes the characteristics of each data that has undergone the reduction process and is coded. the last stage is interpreting the data that has been reduced and organized. franscy & leroy holman siahaan the effectiveness of learning community techniques on english essay writing skills 186 results and discussion at this stage, the description of the research results is divided into three discussions which include; the results of the pre-cycle, cycle 1, and cycle 2. the results obtained at each stage were calculated as the average value to see the level of english essay writing skills that the respondents (students) had achieved. pre-cycle results the researcher carried out pre-cycle activities by giving a pre-test at the second meeting to 30 students in the fourth semester of the english education study program, faculty of education, universitas panca sakti bekasi. the pre-test was given before the researcher applied the learning community technique. the purpose of giving the pre-test was to find out and compare the initial abilities of the respondents before and after the application of the treatment using the learning community technique in the classroom. the results of the pre-test showed that 30% of respondents' english writing skills were at the less level and 43.3% of the respondents were at the enough level. based on these data, the pre-test respondents' average score was 53.57. cycle action results 1 application of learning community technique in essay writing courses the data presented in this research is not only data based on the results of the english essay writing skills test but is also supported by data from observations, and observations made by the researcher during the application of learning community technique in the classroom. data on the activeness of respondents (students) in the essay writing course was obtained through observations and observations made at the 4th and 6th meetings, where in these meetings there were group discussion activities and continued with the presentation/exposure of the results of discussions both individually and in groups. the results of the data acquisition of respondents (students) in these activities can be seen in the following table: table 1. student activity data in essay writing course cycle 1 at meetings 4 and 6 indicat or cycle activity 1 meeting 4 meeting 6 freque ncy percent age (%) freque ncy percent age (%) very active 3 10.00 5 16.67 active 6 20.00 8 26.67 active enough 15 50.00 12 40.00 less active 6 20.00 5 16.67 conclu sion 36.7% (highly active & active) 63.3% (sufficiently active & less active) the results of the research findings above show that the activeness of respondents (students) in classroom activities at the 4th and 6th meetings of cycle 1, which is in the very active and active indicator, is 36.7%. this is evidenced by the number of respondents' frequency at the fourth meeting, as many as 9 and at the sixth meeting, as many as 13. this percentage is lower compared to the percentage in the moderately active and less active indicators, which amounted to 63.3%, with the number of respondents at the fourth meeting as many as 21 and the sixth meeting as many as 17. these findings can provide an illustration that the activeness of respondents in the essay writing class in cycle 1 has not been seen as optimal as expected. based on the results of the post-test given to respondents (students) to measure english essay writing skills in cycle 1 in the essay writing course, the results of the analysis are as follows: table 2. student learning test results in essay writing course by using learning community technique level ability value range total students percentage very good 80-100 5 16.67 well 60-79 8 26.67 enough 50-59 13 43.33 not enough 0-49 4 13.33 total 30 100 the application of the learning community technique in essay writing courses was carried out for 6 meetings and ended with giving post-tests to research respondents. based on the data above, the score in the category of very good and good ability level in english essay writing skills only amounted to 13 students while at the level of sufficient and poor ability there were 17 students. when viewed from the comparison of these numbers, more than 50% of the students as the sample in this research still did not meet the minimum completeness criteria (kkm) with the average value of cycle 1 being 60.17 while what was determined in this research was above 70. based on the findings therefore, the researcher continued the implementation of the action in the second cycle. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 187 action results cycle 2 application of learning community technique in essay writing courses data on the activity of respondents (students) in the essay writing course were obtained through observations and observations made at the 4th and 6th meetings, where in these meetings, there were group discussion activities and continued with the presentation/exposure of the discussion results both individually and in groups. the results of the data acquisition of respondents (students) in these activities can be seen in the following table: table 3. student activity data in essay writing course cycle 2 at meetings 4 and 6 indicato r cycle activity 2 meeting 4 meeting 6 freque ncy percent age (%) freque ncy percent age (%) very active 4 13.33 6 20.00 active 13 43.33 16 53.33 active enough 10 33.33 8 26.67 less active 3 10.00 0 0.00 conclus ion 65% (highly active & active) 35% (sufficiently active & less active) the results of the research findings above show that the activeness of respondents (students) in classroom activities at the 4th and 6th meetings of cycle 2, which is in the very active and active indicator, is 65%. this is evidenced by the number of respondents frequency at the fourth meeting, as many as 17 and at the sixth meeting as many as 22. this percentage is higher when compared to the percentage of moderately active and less active indicators which amounted to 35% with the number of respondents at the fourth meeting as many as 13 and the sixth meeting as many as 8. the findings show that there is a very significant difference when compared to cycle 1. of course, this can provide an illustration that the activity of respondents in the essay writing class in cycle 2 is very good, as previously expected. based on the results of the post-test given to respondents to measure english essay writing skills in cycle 2 in the essay writing course, the results of the analysis are as follows: table 4. student learning outcomes test in essay writing course by using learning community technique level ability value range total students percentage very good 80-100 8 26.67 well 60-79 14 46.67 enough 50-59 8 26.67 not enough 0-49 0 0 total 30 100 based on the data above, the score in the category of very good and good ability level in english essay writing skills only amounted to 22 students, while at the level of sufficient and poor ability, there were 8 students. when viewed from the comparison of these numbers, 70% of students as samples in this research have met the minimum completeness criteria (kkm) with an average value of cycle 2 is 70.13 while the limit value that has been determined in this research is 70. based on the research findings above, it can be concluded that the educators, in this case, the lecturers involved in this research, have implemented the procedures for learning community techniques well. this means that the stages in the procedure are applied in accordance with the learning plans that have been prepared and are able to reduce obstacles or problems that occur during the implementation of the actions in cycle 1, then carry out stabilization in cycle 2. during the process of actions taken starting from cycle 1 to cycle 2, educators or lecturers do not experience difficulties and feel more helped by the application of the learning community technique to increase the effectiveness of students' english essay writing skills. the increase in the activeness of respondents (students) in the essay writing course using the learning community technique can be seen from the average value of the percentage of student activity in cycle 1 and cycle 2. the increase can be seen in the following table: table 5. conclusion of student activity in essay writing courses by using learning community techniques no indicator percentage information 1 very active and active 36.7% cycle 1 moderately active and less active 63.3% 2 very active and active 65% cycle 2 moderately active and less active 35% the table above shows an increase in student activity from cycle 1 to cycle 2. the increase in student activity seen from the percentage of very franscy & leroy holman siahaan the effectiveness of learning community techniques on english essay writing skills 188 active students in cycle 1 was only 36.7%, then increased in cycle 2 to 63.3%. increased student activity in learning by using the learning community technique can also be seen in the diagram below: figure 1. increasing student activity from cycle 1 to cycle 2 the increase in activeness in learning also has a significant impact on student learning outcomes. student learning outcomes in writing english essays have increased from cycle 1 to cycle 2. here are the conclusions of student learning outcomes which can be seen in the table below: table 6. conclusion of student learning outcomes completeness in writing ii course by using learning community technique no cycle number of students average value 1 cycle 1 30 60.17 2 cycle 2 30 70.13 enhancement 9.96 based on the data above shows an increase in the respondents' english essay-writing skills. this is evidenced by the number of average values in cycle 1 of 60.17, and in cycle 2 there is an increase in the average value of 9.96 to 70.13. the improvement of students' english essay writing skills is also presented in the form of a diagram as shown below: figure 2. improving english essay writing skills from cycle 1 to cycle 2 the development carried out in cycle 2 in the application of the learning community technique has a significant impact, first seen from the average value of respondents' activeness in lectures. second, from the test results, the average value has increased by 4.13%, in the first cycle of 60.17 to the second cycle to 70.13%. the improvement that occurred in cycle 1 and cycle 2 illustrates that the results of the reflection carried out by the researcher and then implemented in cycle 2 gave more positive results for improving the english essay writing skills of the respondents (students). the results of this research are also in line with the results of research by ismawarni (2021), which state that learning community techniques can improve students' writing abilities and skills. the results of the reflection in the form of actions implemented in cycle 2 include; (1). still following the stages of learning community technique that have been implemented in cycle 1, (2). divide students into study groups by frequently exchanging members, with the aim of making learning outcomes more interactive, (3). more focus on providing guidance to each respondent who has problems in starting and developing ideas and ideas for writing english essays, (4) more often providing direction and guidance that motivates respondents to be more active in participating in activities in the implementation of actions. interview activities conducted by the researcher involving lecturers and students also illustrate that the application of the learning community technique positively impacts learning to write english essays. the first is the application of the learning community technique by forming study groups to foster and create more active learning situations, where each student is asked to collaborate, share knowledge and provide input to each other in each study group. in line with the opinion of syatriana & sakkir (2020), which states that, learning community is an effective technique in teaching english skills specially in teaching writing. second, optimizing the use of the learning community technique in the second cycle provided a significant change for english essay writing skills, where those who were initially accustomed to only studying with the same group, this time there was a difference, namely by combining several students into different groups. vary. this application provides opportunities for students to be able to learn more in their new groups with the aim of wider collaborative interactions so that they can understand and enrich the material being english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 189 studied. learning communities are best designed as ‘on going’ group who meet regularly for the purpose of their increasing their own learning and that of their students (wilson & lowe, 2019). thus, the effectiveness of applying the learning community technique has a positive impact on students' english essay writing skills. conclusion the determination of learning techniques must be based on several considerations, one of which is an understanding of the problems faced by students in the process of learning to write. this is very important because by knowing the problems of students in learning, education will easily help them to be able to find solutions to these problems and can achieve learning goals. based on the findings, analysis and discussion, regarding the effectiveness of learning community technique on english essay writing skills, it showed significant results, where there was an increase related to student activity and learning outcomes to write english essays for english education study program students. the increase in student activity can be seen during the learning process, during the learning process at the beginning students are asked to independently understand the tasks given by the lecturer, then after that the task is discussed in groups to be able to exchange ideas, ideas and ideas that can provide knowledge. more for each student in the group. this is in line with several previous studies, (depari & hasruddin, 2020; rathakrishnan, 2018; straßer & arieli, 2019). then the results of the study showed that the percentage value of student activity in attending lectures had increased, the result of the percentage increase in student activity seen from the percentage of students who were very active and active in cycle 1 was only 36.7%, then increased in cycle 2 to 63.3%. then the results of learning to write english essays for students also increased, with an average score in cycle 1 of 60.17 and cycle 2 there was an increase in the average score of 9.96 to 70.13. the application of learning community technique to students' english skills has a positive impact, especially for the development of students in writing english essays. this is because these activities provide benefits in increasing student active participation in the learning process, facilitating students and lecturers to share information and discuss. the role of communication and interaction that often occurs involves cognitive processes between lecturers and students or students with other students in sharing ideas, ideas and experiences to be able to solve a problem in the learning process. so that with this learning technique students can gain more knowledge and skills in language, especially english essay writing skills. acknowledgement this research was supported by a beginner lecturer research, year 2022 from the director of research and society service (drpm) of the ministry of education, culture, research, and technology (kemendikbud ristek), indonesia. references afnita, a., & farida, s. 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(2019). technology and writing: review of research. computers & education, 128, 227–242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.09.0 24 wilson, l., & lowe, d. t. (2019). the learning communities handbook. newscastle university. yoo, b., kwak, y., & park, w. m. (2020). analysis of argumentation structure in students’ writing on socio-scientific issues (ssi): focusing on the unit of climate change in high school earth science i. journal of the korean earth science society, 41(4), 405-414. franscy & leroy holman siahaan the effectiveness of learning community techniques on english essay writing skills 192 the students’ and teachers’ perception on the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the students’ and teachers’ perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms anni kristanti yunandami sma negeri 2 cimahi, indonesia email: annyky@yahoo.co.id muhammad handi gunawan indonesia university of education, indonesia email: handi_gunawan@yahoo.co.id apa citation: yunandami, a. k. & gunawan, m. h. (2012). the students’ and teachers’ perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 71-79 received: 01-08-2011 accepted: 03-09-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: this study is aimed to investigate the students' and teachers’ perception on the use of computer in the efl teaming process based on questionnaire and interview. by exploring the strengths and weaknesses on the use of computer in efl classrooms as perceived from students' and teachers' perception. it concludes that a large number of students enjoyed learning english using computer because it was fun and interesting. although, they had to share one computer with the class, but they enjoyed learning together with friends. the teachers enjoyed teaching english using computer because it could make them experience a different way of teaching. in addition, the computer use could challenge the teachers to be more creative. the computer could be used as an alternative learning device in learning. keywords: students’ and teachers’ perception, english as a foreign language, computer. introduction curriculum in indonesia has gone through several changes and development since 1945. it was developed in 1954 and revised in 1961, 1964, 1968, 1975, 1984, and 1994. in 2001 competence-based curriculum (cbc) was implemented (departemen pendidikan nasional, 2004). in year 2007, the government starts to implement the new curriculum, kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan (school-based curriculum). this curriculum is based on the law no. 20 year 2003 on national education system, which gives the government and local government to have full authority to guide, manage, help, and supervise their own education. furthermore, the educational framework must follow the national education law. in addition, the law number 14 year 2005 on teachers and lectures put high priority on the teachers/lectures professionalism (departemen pendidikan nasional, 2006). it is obvious that teachers should be more professional and skillful in teaching. that is why the government must put high priority on teachers' certification to enhance the purpose of national education and to fulfil the demand of qualified human resource. teachers are recommended to develop themselves so that they have to upgrade their skill through training and developing teaching material in the classroom. anni kristanti yunandami & muhammad handi gunawan the students’ and teachers’ perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms moreover, teaching methodology develops well, more teachers are aware of the use of technology in the classroom. teachers realize that teaching is not merely transferring the teachers' knowledge but also giving a lot of exposures for their students. the teaching method is more to communicative methodologies and moreover the most important thing is the informal 'acquisition-rich' learning environment (skehan, 1985: 13). the learning environment or the stimulus is very important to make the students learn well. computer becomes one of the alternatives besides language laboratories. kenning & kenning (1983:20) said that computer can be used as an effective teaching tool if teachers know how to use it. a computer is nothing more than a tool, an aid, to be used or not, moreover teachers can decide to use computer if it is necessary. the use of computer has been known for years in the field of education. though, it was always argued that the computer cannot replace the main role of teacher in the classroom (stemplesky, 2002 in richards. and renandya, 2002:364), computer is needed to make the process of learning and teaching easier and faster. computer has been notified with the variety of form, from the simplest one to the most complicated one. it is said that the use of high technology tends to be expensive, and complicated, the high-tech media gives more and more facilities. in additional, teachers are being able to use the high-tech media to support the instructional design in the classroom. the use of computer in efl classroom has opened the new way of the use of learning media. since it can combine the varieties media (such as text, sound, picture, numerical, animation and video) in one digital software, and also because of the capability of being interactive, the computer becomes a sophisticated alternative to improve the quality of elt. the use of computer can help the students to be autonomous learners (brown, 2001: 51). bret (1998: 301) says that multimedia language learning environments can deliver authentic input, provide meaningful language learning tasks, deliver feedback on those tasks and can be manipulated according to the needs of the user. this makes it ideal for independent study, and the learner perhaps having the opportunity to work through the exercises at their own pace moreover, multimedia can help the students learning to learn, developing language skills (listening, reading, writing, and pronunciation or speaking). the use of technology in efl classroom is very crucial since our government has put the high priority to the use of instructional computer-based teaching (ict). the national education department mentions the importance of the use of technology in classroom as in written down in "rencana strategi (renstra) pembangunan pendidikan nasional 2005-2009" (the strategic plan in developing the national education 2005-2009). it is said that one of the programs that will be conducted in 2005-2009 is implementing information technology (it) in the classroom (departemen pendidikan nasional, 2066). the government realizes the lack of the facilities but this program will be conducted step by step. moreover, the pusat teknologi dan komputer has used the television as a media to broadcast the educational program in 2004. the educational program reached 80 cities in english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee indonesia (including village and district area). furthermore, the use of computer can be considered a learning media that gives the different kinds of intelligent as proposed by gardner (1983 in brown, 2001:113). gardner's theory about multiple intelligence, that people have more than one intelligent such as musical/rhythmic, verbal/linguistic, visual/spatial, motoric /kinaesthetic, logic/mathematic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal, opens the chance of multimedia in the classroom in order to facilitate the students' differences in learning. the research tries to portray the possibility of the computer uses in the efl classroom, particularly in senior high school. the focus is on the students' and teachers' perception on the use of computer in efl classroom. the study is very important in order the answer the demand of the importance of english as one of skill that students should acknowledge in the future. furthermore, this study can give a new enlightment in english teaching learning to improve the students' mastery. in addition, the lack of using the computer in the classroom (especially in efl classroom and senior high school) becomes the main reason why this research was conducted. hopefully, this research gives the benefit for the national educational in our country. purpose of the study the research focused on two things; they are the students' and teachers' perceptions to the use of computer to improve the teaching-learning process and to explore the possibility of using computer in senior high school. these are the following purposes: 1. finding out the students' perception on the use of computer in the efl teaming process based on questionnaire and interview. 2. finding out the teachers' perception on the use of computer in efl teaching process based on questionnaire and interview. 3. exploring the strengths and weaknesses on the use of computer in efl classrooms as perceived from students' and teachers' perception. 4. exploring the contributions of the learning situation to the students' and teachers' perception. as outlined in purpose of the study there are three research questions to be answered: 1. what is the students` perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms? 2. what is the teachers' perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms? 3. what are the strengths and weaknesses as perceived from the students' and teachers' perception? 4. what are the contributions of the learning situation to the students' and teachers' perception? the study is intended to survey the students' and teachers' perceptions on the use of computer in the efl classroom, the strengths and weaknesses, and the implications of learning situation towards the students' and teachers' perception. moreover, it can give a new perspective in english teaching-learning, such as: a) the use of computer for elt in senior high school. b) the material development for computer-based learning to improve the quality of elt in senior high school. anni kristanti yunandami & muhammad handi gunawan the students’ and teachers’ perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms c) this research is largely descriptive statistics meaning that it involved measuring data using graphs, tables, and basic descriptions of numbers such as averages or means. the sub ects of the study were the first year students of one senior high school in cimahi of academic year 2005/2006. there were 100 students and 6 english teachers. in addition, the research was conducted during the curriculum 2004. this study was limited to survey on the use of computer in efl classroom in which each student and teacher were required to answer a questionnaire about their perceptions on the use of multimedia in efl class-room. the questionnaire and interview were based on the theory of perception proposed by sperling (in fransiska: 2000) and curriculum 2004. the interview data will complete, clarify, support or even contradict with the result of questionnaire. method the study was intended to reveal and describe the students' and teachers' perceptions on the use multimedia in efl classrooms. this research is largely descriptive statistics meaning that it involved measuring data using graphs, tables, and basic descriptions of numbers such as averages or means (coolidge, 2000). the subjects of the study were the first year students of one senior high school in cimahi of academic year 20052006. there were 100 students and 6 english teachers. in addition, the research was conducted during the curriculum 2004. this study was limited to survey on the use of computer in efl classroom in which each student and teacher were required to answer a questionnaire about their perceptions on the use of multimedia in efl classroom. the questionnaire and interview were based on the theory of perception proposed by sperling (in fransiska, 2000) and curriculum 2004. the interview data will complete, clarify, support or even contradict with the result of questionnaire. the setting was a senior high school in cimahi. this school has a multimedia laboratory so that the main reason why this research was conducted at this particular school. moreover, this research tries to figure out the potential asset in local area especially in cimahi. the participants were students and english teachers at a high school in cimahi. the students' level were grade one. there were 100 students and 6 english teachers. in addition, the 100 students were chosen because it was their first time using computer to learn english in multimedia laboratory. moreover, the 100 students initiate the transfer into percentage in data analysis. the 6 teachers were chosen because there are 6 english teachers in that school. results and discussion the students' perceptions the computer gave them fun learning through games, presentation, and interesting pictures. moreover, they could learn autonomously. the computer provided them a fun learning compared to teacher's explanation in the classroom. they said computer used to vary the learning and teaching process so the students did not have to listen to the teacher's explanation. through computer, they could watch movie, and play games. in addition, they could learn together with friends in the classroom. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee computer encouraged the students to learn english because through computer they were able to get so many exposures; such as the examples of communicative dialog. moreover, the computer helped them to develop their english vocabulary. the students also said that they enjoyed playing games so that it provided them the challenging situation to learn more and more. 6% of the respondents were not sure whether it encouraged them to learn english or not. the interview revealed that they considered the material was too difficult for them and there were also too many new vocabularies that they were not familiar with. the students sometimes felt ashamed if they made mistakes in pronouncing words. it can be concluded that in term of the sensory of stimulus, the respondents gave positive answers. the table shows that the pictures, sounds, and text in the computer could help the students to learn english well, especially reading, listening, vocabulary and grammar. it can be concluded that in term of the learning process the respondents enjoyed learning within the group because it was fun and they could ask their friends if they did not know something. and they liked to learn by themselves too because they did not have to rely on the teacher. but, they felt whenever they worked with the group some of their friends kept silent. this could be happened because (1) the big size of the students, (2) there was only one computer to share with the whole class. the strengths and weaknesses this section concerns with the discussion from research findings which are about the students' perceptions and strengths-weaknesses on the use of computer in efl classroom. based on the findings, it can be concluded that the students enjoyed learning english using computer because was fun and interesting. this fact is in line with kayser (2002); he says that the benefit of the use on computer in efl classroom is students are able to learn how to use technology more effectively. although, they had to share one computer with the class they enjoyed working together with their friends. the class seemed noisy and uncontrollable but they could learn from others without being afraid of making mistakes. they liked to compete with their friends among the group. although, some of them kept silent they actually involved in the learning process. they shared their opinion with the group. although, they seemed enjoy the learning, some of them still afraid of making mistakes and the limited vocabulary mastery made them think that the use of computer did not give them any support to learn english well. luis reis (1995) has proven this through six-month experiment on the impact of using multimedia in his class. he finds out that his students feel less motivated because they did not interact directly with the computer. moreover, he says that his students tend to use their mother tongue whenever they learn english through computer because they have a very limited mastery of english vocabulary. the computer could be used as an alternative learning. though the facility was so limited they could learn well. the students still needed the teacher to guide them using computer in the classroom. reis (1995) states that a classroom equipped with one computer need the anni kristanti yunandami & muhammad handi gunawan the students’ and teachers’ perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms teachers' guidance because teachers still need to drill students with tutorial grammar. in addition, galavis (1998) adds that computers and other equipment are just tools, so teachers have to make them work for the teachers. not against the teachers. the students thought that computer helped to learn english well. besides, it helped them to use english words, phrases, tenses, vocabulary, pronunciation sentences correctly. moreover, according to oxford university press (2004) multimedia can help the students learning to learn, developing language skills (listening, reading, writing, and pronunciation or speaking). they admitted that the pictures, sounds and text in the computer helped them to comprehend the dialogue which represented by the native speakers. they got a lot of exposures from the computer especially dealing with the variety of english expressions. moreover, they could create a communicative dialogue and the subtitle helped them to understand the different kind of text and this could help the students to guess the meaning from the context. this is proven by brett (1998, in jackson:2002) states that multimedia language learning environments can deliver authentic input, provide meaningful language learning tasks, deliver feedback on those tasks and can be manipulated according to the needs of the user. but still there were some problems dealing with how the computer helped the students to reach their goals in learning english, such as; (1) the limited mastery of vocabulary, (2) the lack of tenses knowledge, (3) the computer program only focused on speaking and listening, (4) the learning program was too difficult to follow, (5) no speech media (like microphone or headset), (6) no equal chance in using computer because they had to share one computer with the whole class. the pictures, sounds, and text in the computer could help the students to learn english well, especially reading, listening, vocabulary and grammar. the students learnt english using computer in multimedia laboratory. mostly they had to share one computer with the class. then they preferred learning english using computer once in a month or even unscheduled because they would experience a different situation. moreover, sharing one computer with the class was no big problem for them as long as they could learn together with friends. they realized that the school had only limited computer facilities. but sometimes they felt disappointed that they could not use computer individually. the students enjoyed learning within the group because it was fun and they could ask their friends if they did not know something. and they liked to learn by themselves too because they did not have to rely on the teacher. but, they felt whenever they worked with the group some of their friends kept silent. this could be happened because (1) the big size of the students, (2) there was only one computer to share with the whole class. harmer (2002:150) says that teachers have to remember there are still so many problems dealing with using computer. the teachers' perceptions this section concerns with the second research problem i.e. the teachers' perceptions on the use of computer in efl classroom. the data collection was taken in two ways by questionnaire and interview. the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee questionnaire was given on may 2006. after classifying the answers form the respondents, the interview were conducted on july 2006 (2 respondents were interviewed). the respondents (there are 6 english teachers) gave positive perception. it means that the use of multimedia in efl classroom has given positive impacts. the analysis is classified based on the variable in the questionnaire. there are 4 categories: (1) students' personal feelings, attitude drives and goals, (2) the sensory nature of the stimulus (3) learning experience that the students have. the category is based on the theory of perception proposed by sperling (in fransiska: 200 1). it can be concluded that the teachers enjoyed teaching english using computer could make them; (1) experience a different way of teaching, (2) more creative, (3) challenge themselves to prepare the material well, (4) present a fun learning for the students, (5) motivate the students to learn better, (6) give so many exposures of communicative dialogue. it comes to the conclusion that teaching english using computer supported the students to learn english well and this could help the students to experience a fun, and interactive learning. it can be concluded that the teachers gave a positive view towards the computer. they said computer could help teachers to teach better since it provided motion pictures. the students had a different way of learning. the exposures were so many especially for speaking, listening, and vocabulary so that the students were able to create a communicative dialogue. but since the one who used the computer was the teacher, they could not see whether the computer could increase the students being confident. the mastery of vocabulary was the main problems for the students. besides, computer was only a tool; it could not replace the main role of teachers. it comes up with the conclusion that computer helped the students to learn both in group and individually. the teachers could let their students to learn individually. but still the teachers must guide their students. the problem that the students needed to guide was vocabulary. moreover, the teachers must pay attention that not all the students could use the computer. the contributions of learning situation to the students' and teachers' perception most of the students learnt english using computer in multimedia laboratory. they had to share one computer with the class. moreover, they preferred learning english using computer once in a month or even unscheduled because they would experience a different situation. in addition, sharing one computer with the class was no big problem for them as long as they could learn together with friends. they realized that the school had only limited computer facilities. but sometimes they felt disappointed that they could not use computer individually. the students learnt the computer by the it can be concluded that most of the teachers used multimedia laboratory to teach english and they only used one computer for one class. they used lcd so that their students could see the pictures clearly. the schedule was varied, too. sometimes it could be once in a month, unscheduled, and once in a week. the schedule could be made by the school staff or by the teachers. the teachers used computer anni kristanti yunandami & muhammad handi gunawan the students’ and teachers’ perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms based on the necessities. in addition, they had to share the multimedia laboratory with other subjects. moreover, most of the teachers got the computer skill by learning on their own since there is no special training about computer use in the classroom. conclusion this study concludes that a large number of students enjoyed learning english using computer because it was fun and interesting. although, they had to share one computer with the class; it but they enjoyed learning together with friends. the computer could be used as an alternative learning. furthermore, the teachers enjoyed teaching english using computer because it could make them experience a different way of teaching. in addition, the computer use could challenge the teachers to be more creative. the teachers had a lot of opportunities to prepare the material well. moreover, the computer provided a fun learning for the students and motivated the students to learn better. the computer gave so many exposures of communicative dialogue. moreover, using multimedia in efl classroom can help with some difficulties associated with the efl situation, such as a large class sizes and mixed-ability classrooms. therefore, teachers must acknowledge the function of media in efl classroom. through the use of media, the learning process can be increased to reach the goal of learning process. there are some strengths and weaknesses on the use of computer in efl classrooms as perceived from the students` and teachers' perception. it can be concluded that the learning situation was interactive and fun. on the other hand, the learning program was too difficult to follow. they needed the teacher's encouragement to make themfeel more confident. besides, the students thought that the teacher did not know how to use the computer well so that the learning process was not smooth. the students sometimes felt afraid of making mistakes. they said it was difficult to think critically because the limitation of grammar and vocabulary mastery. they could think critically if the material led them do so. moreover, the learning situation notably; the place, the computer facilities, the frequency, and the computer skill influenced the students' and teachers' perception on the use of computer in efl classrooms. this study is not without any limitations. therefore, in drawing conclusions there are several limitations that should be kept in mind. firstly, the research was done in one school in one city. it is suggested that the number of public senior high school be increased and cover several cities so that the generalizations of the result of the research are wider to draw. secondly, most of the analysis of the students' and teachers' perception was done through questionnaires and interview. the analysis would be more thorough if supported with classroom observation recordings conducted by the researcher. overall, the results of the study show that using media in efl classroom is very important to increase the students' motivation and attention. moreover, using computer as a teaching media is a must since it helps the students get the exposures that the teachers can not give in the classroom. in addition, teachers must be wise using the computer, just remember that the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee computer is only a media. teachers must be more creative in teaching by developing the computer as a media of teaching and learning which supports the new curriculum "ktsp" (school-based curriculum). references alwasilah, a. c. (2002). pokoknya kualitatif: dasardasar merancang dan melakukan penefitian kualitatif. jakarta: pustaka jaya. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. second edition. new york: longman brown, h. d. (2000). principles of language learning and teaching. new york: longman. coolidge, f. (2000). statictics: a gentle introduction. london: sage publication. departemen pendidikan nasional. (2004). invervice training kbk bagi guru penerima. dana bantuan operasional mutu management: bahasa inggris. lembaga penjamin mutu pendidikan, jawa barat. departemen pendidikan nasional. (2006). rencana strategi pembangunan pendidikan nasional 2005-2009. jakarta: departemen pendidikan nasional eysenck, m. w. (1983). principles of cognitive psychology. lawrence erlbaum associates ltd. forgus, ronald h. (1966). perception: the basic process in cognitive development. mcgrawhill bookcompany fransiska, s. (2000). students' perception on ebe. unpublished paper. bandung indonesia university of education. harme. j. (2002). the practice of english language teaching. 3rd edition completely revised and updated. harlow: pearson education limited. harvey, j. h. and smith, w. p. (1977). social psychology: an attributional approach. sain louis cv mosbo, co. jackson, p. (2002). multimedia in the classroom at http://www.pt.britishcouncil.org/i nenglish/ie2002a32pj.htm. [june 17th 2004]. kenning, m. j. and kenning m-m. (1983). an introduction to computer assisted language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. kenning, m. m & kenning, m. j. (1990). computers and language learning: current theory and practice. new york: ellis horwood. lukmana, iwa. 2003. language teaching media (modul 1): pembelajaran bahasa inggris. bandung: universitas terbuka. mar'at. (1982). sikap manusia perubahan serta pengukurannya. jakarta: ghalia, indonesia. maxwell, j. a. (1996). qualitative research design: an interactive approach. california: sage publications, inc. oxford university. (2004). using multimedia in the efl classroom. at http://www.oup.com/elt/global/mult imedia/cataloque/multimedia/multim edia_article/. [june 17th 2004] partridge, b. (2000). making sense of discourse analysis: making sense of language seriesbook 3. queensland: gerd stables antipodean education enterprises. richards, j. c. and willy a. r. (2002). methology in language teaching: an anthology of curren practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. schiffman, h. r. (1982). sensation and perception: an integrated approach 2nd edition. john wiley and sons, inc. skehan 1985. computers in english language teaching. elt document,122. stern, h. h. (1983). fundamental concepts of language teaching. oxford: oxford university press http://www.pt.britishcouncil.org/inenglish/ie2002a32pj.htm http://www.oup.com/elt/global/multimedia/cataloque/multimedia/multimedia_article/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1085 exploring pre-service teachers’ experiences towards synchronous online learning amidst the covid-19 pandemic fitria rahmawati english language education department, faculty of language education, universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: fitriarahmawati@umy.ac.id apa citation: rahmawati, r. (2022). exploring pre-service teachers’ experiences towards synchronous online learning amidst the covid-19 pandemic. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 1085-1094. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6256 received: 23-06-2022 accepted: 27-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction information, communication, and technology (ict) facilitate the learning process, especially in higher education. mobile computing, social networking, and open-source software have opened up new opportunities for building a learning environment in which self-learning is characterized by personalized learning and flexible scheduling (rahmawati, 2019). ict offers a range of advantages and opportunities, including convenience, adaptability, and the capacity to engage in collaboration and interaction with instructors and fellow students situated in diverse geographical locations. due to the covid-19 pandemic, students could not attend school. the only option was to switch from traditional education to online learning. according to langford and damşa (2020), academics, administrators, and ict support staffs were working nationwide to implement full online learning quickly. özüdoğru (2021) admitted the necessity for educational institutions and teachers to enable effective teaching and learning experiences in synchronous online settings. furthermore, farkhani, badiei, and rostami (2022) highlighted the necessity of providing teachers with training and support in creating successful classroom management practices for online teaching. a synchronous online learning is a suitable alternative to university classes. synchronous learning is similar to a traditional face-to-face class, yet, in a virtual form. according to bower et. al. (2017), images, audio, and video captured in the real world are projected like a mirror, and the virtual participant’s avatar is projected into the virtual world’s monitor screen. debbag and fiddan (2022) defined synchronous learning as an online learning environment by using new tools and approaches such as video conferencing platforms and digital resources. consequently, synchronous learning sessions facilitate students abstract: as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, learning systems all around the world have shifted from traditional classrooms to online learning. synchronous learning was developed to promote online learning interactions via audio, video, text chat, interactive whiteboards, and various app-sharing. this study examined the experiences of pre-service teachers enrolled in an english language education department (eled) as they engaged in synchronous online learning amidst the covid-19 pandemic. the participants involved in this study were six eled pre-service teachers. the research was carried out at an indonesian islamic private university. the research was carried out at an indonesian islamic private university, involving six eled pre-service teachers. a descriptive qualitative was adopted with an in-depth interview as the data gathering technique to generate information from the participants. the findings from the interview revealed that there were various synchronous online learning activities experienced by the preservice teachers, such as listening to lectures, doing a group discussion, doing an online presentation, and completing evaluations. in addition, various tools available made learning easier for them, such as screen sharing, recording, camera, and microphone features. regarding the perceptions of the eled pre-service teachers, this study identified positive and adverse effects resulted from a synchronous online learning. the perceived positive effects were flexibility in learning, various ways of learning, live interaction, and autonomous learning. meanwhile, its adverse effects were missed opportunity to participate in learning, lack of interaction, undelivered messages, and feeling isolated. keywords: covid-19 pandemic; efl learning; online learning; pre-service english teachers; synchronous learning. fitria rahmawati exploring pre-service teachers’ experiences towards synchronous online learning amidst the covid-19 pandemic 1086 the opportunity to articulate their thoughts, actively participate, and contribute their ideas in a manner akin to that of a conventional physical classroom environment. several studies have been conducted to investigate the adoption of synchronous online learning. wang et. al. (2018); shukri et. al. (2020); bower et. al. (2015) found that students could get benefit from the flexibility of blended synchronous learning environments, such as increased information accessibility, the convenience of attending lessons from remote locations via two-way video conferencing, and time savings. through synchronous online learning, students can learn without needing to meet in person or have physical contact with friends or lecturers. in addition, martin et. al. (2012), rahayu (2020), and zydney et. al. (2019) found that many elements, such as text chat and webcam facilitating interaction between the students and the instructor made online synchronous learning simple. despite its significances, eventually, teachers encountered a variety of obstacles in administering their synchronous learning sessions. maintaining student involvement and discipline, developing effective communication, and assuring technical reliability were among the obstacles (debbag & fiddan, 2022). teachers had to adjust their classroom management tactics to the online environment by using new tools and approaches such as video conferencing platforms and digital resources. in addition, a study conducted by rinekso and muslim (2020), bower et. al. (2015), romero-hall and vicentini (2017) discovered that poor internet access, auditory noise, and task confusion may have prevented the implementation of synchronous online learning. from pre-service teachers’ view, according to a study conducted by tarihoran, syafuri, and masykur (2021), pre-service teachers reported positive experiences and viewed online learning as flexible and convenient, others expressed concerns and difficulties. participants cited technological issues, lack of face-to-face interaction, difficulties in gaining access to resources, and limited participation as some of the most significant obstacles. meanwhile, merisi, emekako, legg-jack, mpundu, and lubombo (2022) argued that it promotes flexibility and convenience while addressing the challenges of restricted face-to-face connection and real-time feedback. those previous studies investigated synchronous online learning, such as the significances, the supporting features, and the drawbacks of synchronous online learning. this study aims to explore pre-service teachers’ experiences with synchronous online learning, particularly regarding meaningful activity, positive impact, and negative impact that synchronous online learning has on language acquisition during the covid-19 pandemic. then, following research questions were formulated as follows to make this research focused: (1) what educational activities were undertaken by pre-service teachers specializing in the english language education during synchronous online learning sessions? (2) what are the perceived positive effects of synchronous online learning among eled pre-service teachers? (3) what are the perceived adverse effects of synchronous online learning among eled pre-service teachers? method in this section, the researcher discusses the research methodology used in this study, including the research design, research participant, research instrument, data collection method, and data analysis. a descriptive qualitative was applied to understand in-depth about pre-service teachers’ experiences in participating in a synchronous online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. according to creswell (2012), descriptive qualitative is intended to investigate and comprehend the meaning attributed to individuals or groups in the context of social or human problems. as a result, it was appropriate for this study since it allows the researcher to collect data based on participants’ experiences, allowing to obtain a more in-depth information. six pre-service teachers from the english language education department of an islamic private university in indonesia voluntarily took part in this study. the researcher selected the preservice teachers from three different batches, including batch of 2017, 2018, and 2019. by involving students from diverse batches, the researcher expected to gain more detail and indepth information. the data for this study were gathered through interviews. an interview is a conversation in which questions and answers are used to collect information from willing participants who unconsciously recognize that they already have the required information creswell (2012). as a result, an interview was acceptable for this study since the participants were allowed to share their english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1087 experiences, and the researcher could collect data based on their perceptions. the researcher conducted an open-ended and in-depth interview as how the research was planned. the researcher also asked follow-up questions to clarify the information provided with a limited number of questions to elicit the participants’ ideas and opinions (cohen et al., 2011). open-ended questions can help the researcher collect data by allowing participants to give their opinions or viewpoints in response to the research inquiries. the researcher collected indepth information regarding the experience of pre-service teachers engaged in a synchronous online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. the interview was performed utilizing synchronous applications, such as ms. teams and zoom, and also over the phone. after obtaining the data, the final stage was to analyze it. transcribing, member checking, and coding were the processes to analyze the data in this study. the explanation of each process is explained as follows. transcribing. transcribing is the initial step in the data analysis process. according to creswell (2012), the transcription process converts audio recordings or field notes into text data. all of the information from the previous interview was transcribed by the researcher. member checking. through member checking, the interview transcripts were clarified to determine the legitimacy of the interview. member checking was a procedure that allowed respondents to rectify factual inaccuracies, add extra information, or record interview data information (cohen et al., 2011). the researcher gave the participants the transcript and requested them to review it. coding. “coding” is defined as “the process of arranging data by bracketing pieces (or text or image segments) and adding a word in the margins that represent a category” (creswell, 2012, p. 219). the first step in coding was open coding. information was developed using open coding based on categories (creswell, 2012). the researcher generated conclusions from the responses of the participants to each question. the next was detailed analysis which was performed on a short textual segment but in a larger extract of the entire text. according to creswell (2012), axial coding picks one category and places it in a theoretical model. the researcher classified each statement item with the same meaning for all participants. the researcher then discovered and classified the key text data types that only answer study questions. the researcher used selective coding to tell stories about the connections between those categories (creswell, 2012). it was a procedure in which just the “key” categories and those that needed additional clarification were chosen, with the rest of the categories being filled in with descriptive information and addressing the research questions. results and discussion this study looked into the experiences of eled pre-service teachers who participated in synchronous online learning sessions. the research findings were revealed from interviewing six participants. relevant findings from previous studies and experts’ statements were also presented to discuss the findings. the first part discusses the pre-service teachers’ experiences in joining a synchronous learning mode during the covid-19 pandemic. the second part discusses their assessment on the perceived positive and negative effects of synchronous online learning. pre-service teachers’ experiences towards synchronous online learning based on the data collected, the researcher discovered information related to pre-service teachers’ experiences participating in a synchronous online learning. the findings on the experiences cover the educational activities the pre-service teachers engaged in and the features of the synchronous learning they found meaningful. educational activity engaged in synchronous learning sessions listening to the lecture. the finding revealed that the teachers designed an interactive presentation to be transmitted through video conferencing during the session. during the interview, jett and reyna stated that during the synchronous online learning session, the teachers presented and explained the learning materials being discussed. as in the face-to-face meeting, slide is used to explain the materials, during the synchronous session, interactive presentation slide was also prepared and used by the teachers. in addition to slide, short video was also used to deliver the materials. the pre-service teachers engaged in listening to lectures about the learning materials during the synchronous sessions. the teachers would lead the session by offering some notes while describing the topic and highlighting the major points by underlining the issue (pujasari, 2021). fitria rahmawati exploring pre-service teachers’ experiences towards synchronous online learning amidst the covid-19 pandemic 1088 as a result, even though the students and the teacher were separated, the implementation of synchronous learning mode facilitates the teachers to assist their students’ learning by explaining the topic and providing direction, like in a traditional classroom. having a group discussion. after the lecturer explained the topic, a group discussion was held based on the data collected. jett noted that the instructors used technologies like ms team, zoom, google meet, and others. activities like discussions were conducted via the zoom/ms. team during lectures. sky added that it might be between friends or students with the lecturer. raze also added that she discussed the content presented by the lecturer with friends. they discussed in the breakout room to discuss the tasks assigned, or the lecturer would ask them to discuss the material learned. furthermore, özüdoğru (2021) argued that the importance of a lecturer in online learning includes establishing rapport with learners in synchronous situations and creating a feeling of community, which means guiding and facilitating meaningful discussions and critical thinking. doing a presentation. after the pre-service teachers finished their group discussion, they did a group presentation. after hearing the lecturer’s perspective, the pre-service teachers were requested to share their thoughts on the subject. reyna stated, “sometimes i get assignments to do a presentation”. then the first participant, jett, also agreed to this idea. he mentioned, “through synchronous online learning tool, we can use sharing screens with each other with audiences, when there is a presentation task, we can immediately show our presentation”. raze explained, “we make media presentations in the form of videos, and it explains the material that would be taught or studied at the next meeting.” accordingly, the pre-service teachers were supposed to present their ideas in this activity. the activity undertaken by the participants in this study were similar with the study conducted by rapanta, et al., (2020). their study identified the activity in which the teacher asked each group to discuss significant questions, after which the replies from each student were gathered and organized, and lastly, each group must present the results of their discussion. doing an evaluation. quizzes or questions and answers at the end of the course might be used to assess the students. sky and reyna mentioned an evaluation at the end of the lesson. during the interview, sky explained, “there is a quiz every week”. furthermore, conducting quizzes might provide learning variety, ensuring it was not monotonous. sky said, “the rest of the activities are like quizzes using kahoot! or mentimeter or something like that. it’s more like an assignment, so students don’t get bored.” omen added, “the lecturer also gives questions and quizzes so that we don’t fall asleep”. doing a task through quizzes and questions and answers will give variety to learning and keep it from becoming monotonous. it also offers an assessment as an indicator of learning performance. ict can improve the assessment process by providing immediate feedback, generating self, peer, and group assessments, and using learning analytics to notify teachers and students about the learning process (rapanta et al., 2020). moreover, dada, alkali, and oyewola (2019) argued that synchronous online learning, which includes real-time interaction and immediate feedback, may contribute to improved learning outcomes. synchronous learning features that ease preservice teachers the findings revealed that various features that supported learning and made the process easier, such as sharing screen, recording, camera, and audio, were discovered to facilitate pre-service teachers learning and make the process easier. each characteristic will be discussed in detail in the following paragraph. share screen. omen, raze and reyna said that the most helpful tool, in their opinion, was the share screen, which is similar to a whiteboard and clarifies the material in better detail. based on the prior statement, the share screen performed the same function as a whiteboard for displaying all learning materials. according to park and bonk (2007), the shared screen feature allows users to upload various electronic materials to share a visual display during the presentation, while the breeze voice conference feature lets participants converse audibly. recording. the recording feature allows any activity in synchronous learning. raze said, “we can record any material in the course that day”. in addition, jett added, “the most useful feature is the video recorder, so all activities carried out in learning can be recorded so if we forget or miss a class, we can replay the material from its stored recording.” therefore, recording can help preservice teachers understand the subject by allowing them to replay it. carrington et al. (2010) found that students can use the recording english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1089 to make up for missed classes or to study and strengthen their knowledge of the content. camera and microphone. synchronous online learning includes built-in video and audio for realtime communication. yoru explained, “with these features, i can interact in two directions, either by video call or voice.” camera and audio facilitate communication for asking and answering questions. according to mougiakou et al. (2020), the student could use the microphone or camera to ask the instructor questions or answer exercises. some participants also mentioned features that eased their synchronous learning process. raze mentioned, “the features that are commonly used in the application are share screen, chat, breakout rooms, and cloud memory to save material”. jett and omen also said they could use screen sharing and recorder, powerpoint, and microphone features. in addition, yoru said, “the features used during the learning process are video, green screen or backdrop and recording video, webcam, and others.” even though they were far apart, the qualities of online synchronous learning made it easier for them to communicate and learn. according to martin et al. (2012), students loved the direct response from instructors, the public and private chat options for interaction, the screen sharing tool, videos, and the ability to examine archived material. the positive effects of synchronous learning the second research question is regarding the positive effects of synchronous learning. preservice teachers benefit from the change from traditional face-to-face to online synchronous teaching methods because they have more flexibility in their learning, a greater variety of learning methodologies, live interaction, and more autonomy. each impact is explained in detail below. flexibility in learning synchronous online learning can be implemented in a variety of ways and can promote the emergence of independent learning. during the interview, jett and omen preferred online synchronous learning because they could use a laptop and the internet anywhere, so they did not have to go to campus. reyna also agreed with online synchronous learning’s convenience. sky also added, “for the positive effects so that we can complete all of our activities, so what is like college activities and my activities are also running well”. raze also mentioned, “with this synchronous learning, it can help me study with my lecturers and friends even though i don’t meet in person”. thus, online synchronous learning affected the lecturers’ flexibility for pre-service teachers, allowing them to continue their learning activities during the covid-19 pandemic. atmojo (2021) stated that the flexibility and convenience of online professional development allows them to participate in learning activities at their own pace and on their own timetable. merisi et al. (2022) stated the importance of flexibility, adaptation, and support to provide excellent learning experiences and promote the positive features of flexibility and convenience. meanwhile, mustopa and hidayat (2020) mentioned that students might communicate readily with synchronous learning applications regardless of distance, location, or time constraints. variety of ways of learning in various ways, synchronous learning provides wider access to more inclusive learning. jett and reyna mentioned previously that synchronous online learning applications eased their online learning. when pre-service teachers miss the material, students can review it again from the recording, even make presentations and discuss it with friends. synchronous learning is also linked to the internet, allowing pre-service teachers to access additional resources during the learning process. sky said, “if the teacher is explaining, we don’t know. we can search first through the internet.” in addition, omen and reyna said, “then the material delivered is also usually sent, so it is easier for us to get the source.” this statement implies that synchronous online learning provides more opportunities than face-toface learning. with more learning methods, such as live interaction, online learning resources, and sharing content, pre-service teachers can learn most conveniently. according to irvine and richards (2013), broad access learning empowers students to customize how they interact with their instructor and peers in a course. live interaction the lecturer could provide a direct explanation of the material to pre-service teachers. sky said, “then there are those who think the course is interesting because it looks like the explanation is only ten and fifteen minutes long”. it also included a camera so that everyone could see each other. reyna also mentioned, “usually when studying online; the students are told to go on cam fitria rahmawati exploring pre-service teachers’ experiences towards synchronous online learning amidst the covid-19 pandemic 1090 by the lecturer”. reyna and raze also said synchronous learning helped pre-service teachers learn so that during a pandemic, they could ask direct questions to lecturers, making it easier for them to ask questions about the material. pre-service teachers could interact directly with teachers and their friends using cameras and audio connected to the internet. it enables them to stay connected and engage in activities similar to traditional face-to-face learning. according to tarihoran, syafuri, and masykur (2021) online learning boosts technological readiness, designing effective online courses, and encouraging interaction and engagement. a study conducted by d'angelo et al.(2021) in the context of online teaching, the essential competencies of pedagogical skills are designing and facilitating online learning activities that foster engagement and interaction. furthermore, bondi et al. (2016) stated that synchronous learning allows for multifaceted collaboration, and it is simple to integrate into a learning management system. more autonomous learning pre-service teachers can benefit from synchronous learning since it allows for more personalized learning and a flexible involvement structure, making them feel more autonomous. yoru said, “online synchronous learning is more independent and more individual learning. the advantage is more self-study. this means that i am more able to explore knowledge independently.” thus, online synchronous learning allowed preservice teachers to be more autonomous and explore learning knowledge. when it comes to synchronous learning, autonomous learning is crucial. pre-service teachers are needed to plan, organize, and analyze their learning while maintaining their learning motivation. according to learner autonomy is a less visible feature of all teaching and learning, but it is an important component of transactional distance theory and student engagement in distant education (mcbrien et al., 2021). meanwhile, phelps and dimitrios (2020) revealed the increasing significance of synchronous learning in remote education, particularly as communication technologies that permit live interactions between facilitators and learners become more widely available. the adverse effects of synchronous learning though its significant contributions to foreign language learning, especially during the pandemic, the findings also revealed that synchronous learning had its adverse effects. all of the participants felt that during its early implementation, synchronous learning was difficult for them. every challenge perceived by pre-service teachers would eventually affect their learning. each effect is described in detail below. missing the learning activity when participating in an online synchronous learning, pre-service teachers’ major issue is on network connection. omen and raze admitted that the signal was sometimes lost while using wi-fi, not to mention when the power went out. they would not hear the explanation and could not keep up with the teachings. reyna stated, “the impact on me was that sometimes i’m confused about how to take online classes. as usually the wi-fi doesn’t work, then i would run out of the internet quota. so, not rarely, i must join the online lectures at a friend’s place.” furthermore, inadequate connections frequently result in application failures, which impact pre-service teachers’ learning. jett stated, “the bad thing about virtual classes was too hard to understand the material, it makes me sleepy too then sometimes the signal was lost, and the internet quota was also wasteful, so sometimes i go in and out of the learning room, so i sometimes miss material”. raze also added, “sometimes when we take a synchronous class, we are standby at home and listening to the lecturer’s explanation, but suddenly we are thrown out, whether it is before the signal or whatever, it became one of the problems so sometimes because of that we couldn’t keep up with the lessons that day.” therefore, pre-service teachers sometimes did not participate in learning because they must leave or could not enter due to internet interference. mustopa and hidayat (2020) revealed that students struggled to follow the lesson since not all locations had a good cellular connection. furthermore, according to atmojo (2021) students encounter challenges in online learning are gaining access to reliable internet connections and resources. as a result, they were less than optimum when online learning, acquiring lecture information and collecting college tasks. lack of interaction the findings revealed that synchronous learning’s lack of communication was a severe issue. sky said, “from the communication aspect, the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1091 obstacle i experienced was more when the lecturer explained that there was less communication between the lecturer and the student, for example, there was interaction in the learning, it was like explaining, the lecturer asked whether the students had understood the material or not, but no one answered.” reyna and yoru agreed that synchronous online was less interesting, but that was alright because of the situation; usually, not all students engaged, so teaching and learning activities were passive. pre-service teachers’ learning experience could be affected by a lack of interaction. less attractive learning materials may be one of the reasons, but technological restrictions may also be a factor. there was limited student interaction, and some expressed dissatisfaction with technology issues that affected their study (mcbrien et al., 2021). according to çamlÿbel and eveyik (2022) concerns have been raised about the absence of face-to-face engagement and the restrictions imposed by online platforms. undelivered message a considerable detrimental influence on learning in online synchronous learning, where audio was one of the supporting elements for two-way communication, also became an issue. raze said, “sometimes the lecturers can’t listen to the questions we ask so that what we want to ask was not answered.” since the message was not transmitted adequately, the phrase implied that low audio quality hurt communication. noise happens because of sound leakage from devices that do not support it or from not using headphones or a microphone. furthermore, huang and hsiao claimed that low audio quality could cause delays and interrupt a conversation and the transmission of learning content (as cited in chen et al., 2020). feeling isolated pre-service instructors were negatively affected by feelings of isolation. in addition, a lack of enthusiasm and laziness in participating in learning activities may result in poor teaching and learning outcomes. sky said, “online synchronous learning was less effective, not all students seem to pay attention to their lecturers, sometimes there are also lecturers on camera themselves, i mean, the students are even off camera, some even lie down or do other activities.” omen declared, “it was more boring because you just listen to people talking without meeting them and sometimes the material presented was not very clear.” sky stated, “online classes seem to be less effective for classroom learning; if we go online, we only see the laptop screen, and we have to be forced like we have to know and understand.” raze added, “others even like to fall asleep.” due to the long distance, the feelings of isolation also reduced pre-service teachers’ participation in online synchronous learning. yoru said that pre-service teachers could not apply and use their information directly, either in a practical way or through classroom teaching and learning activities. based on the findings, pre-service teachers who felt isolated were less likely to pay attention in class. according to romero-hall and vicentini (2017), pre-service teachers feel unable to network and form relationships because of the distance. conclusion the findings of this study revealed synchronous learning processes during the covid-19 outbreak. during synchronous online learning, the pre-service instructors used videoconferencing to listen to their powerpoint presentations. video and other assets used in videoconferencing were included in the materials. after listening to the material, the pre-service teacher participated in a group discussion session using ms teams, zoom, or google meet. pre-service teachers typically presented the results of group discussions either in a group or individually after conducting them. the pre-service teacher then completed an evaluation of the lecture before the class ended. during the covid-19 epidemic, the research found that pre-service english teachers positively influenced synchronous learning. participants believed synchronous learning could be done anywhere with an adequate internet connection. the participants stated that they still had live interactions with the professor and their peers during synchronous learning. synchronous learning involves both autonomous learnings. on the other hand, the researcher discovered a detrimental influence on pre-service english teachers. the participants mentioned several unfavorable impacts. a difficulty arose for several people who did not have stable internet connections. due to their unreliable internet connection, the participants did not participate in synchronous learning. the findings also indicated synchronous learning’s lack of communication. several students were unresponsive to what was going on in the classroom. hardware support affected synchronous learning as well. not every fitria rahmawati exploring pre-service teachers’ experiences towards synchronous online learning amidst the covid-19 pandemic 1092 participant had proper devices. audio noise, for example, could disrupt the teaching and learning process by preventing the message from being heard clearly. references atmojo, a. e. p. 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(2022). evaluation of contextual clues: efl proficiency in reading comprehension. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 993-1002. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.7076 received: 19-06-2022 accepted: 23-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction the growing number of non-native english students learning to read prove that the curriculum should emphasize students' ability to construct knowledge, think critically, and process information. students' literacy at all levels is characterized by the ability to use prior knowledge and to use effective reading strategies that focus on meaning, and this behavior enables them to become proficient readers (taufan, 2020). a good reader is an active reader who is clear about what they intend to accomplish through their reading and continuously evaluates whether they are achieving their goal. selective readers constantly make decisions regarding what to read carefully, what not to read, and what to reread. as they read, they construct, revise, and question meaning since comprehension issues can arise at various levels, such as the word level, sentence level, sentence-to-sentence level, and sentence-tosubject level (jaelani et al., 2022). besides the context-based strategies in reading comprehension, students also rely on using prior knowledge. by having enough background knowledge, readers can integrate the words they have read into their existing framework of knowledge or schema, resulting in constructing meanings of some unknown words in the text. students who engage in wide reading will develop extensive vocabulary. the more a learner reads, the more unfamiliar words someone will be confronted with through the use of prior abstract: the present research evaluated efl perspectives about contextual clues in reading comprehension at different proficiency levels. the data analysis using qualitative descriptions with frequencies and percentages was employed for 38 intermediate-level students and 25 advanced-level students in the university level through teaching contextual clues in reading comprehension with an experimental design. the results proved that students' proficiency in reading ability could be demonstrated by their use of idiomatic expressions, indirect language, direct language, series of words, comparison, synonym, tone, situation, mood, reference, restatement, preposition, cause-effect, modification, and example. advanced students with a high level of vocabulary, grammar, and decoding skills were better able to utilize many contextual clues than intermediate students. thus, reading ability was strongly correlated with the ability to infer word meaning from contextual clues. keywords: contextual clues; english proficiency; reading comprehension. mailto:margaretstevani19246@gmail.com mailto:meichardohanon@gmail.com mailto:wulansdyan@ust.ac.id mailto:erick_tarigan2006@yahoo.com margaret stevani, meikardo samuel prayuda, dyan wulan sari, sumarlin mangandar marianus, & karisma erikson tarigan evaluation of contextual clues: efl proficiency in reading comprehension 994 knowledge because comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences and connected text (salant & berant, 2018; stevani & tarigan, 2022). researchers have acknowledged that students need a specific set of word-learning strategies to unlock the meaning of the unknown words and this promotes deep exploration of texts during interpretation. different previous studies also stress the importance of contextual clues if students want to become skillful and proficient in obtaining meaning from their reading material, such as the contribution of grammatical knowledge to enhance the students' guessing ability (oclarit & casinillo, 2021); to improve understanding of new words in locating appositives, searching for explicit definitions and using prior knowledge (ilter, 2019), and to predict the outstanding scores in the vocabulary size test and the english college test (jaelani et al., 2022). based on the researchers’ observation, several english teachers claim that many teachers waste lesson time by asking students to read a passage silently. these weak students are unable to identify and use the contextual clue, signal, and reading strategy because their background knowledge and decoding skills are low. in the case of an unfamiliar word, many students look up its meaning immediately using an electronic dictionary. additionally, some words have multiple meanings, so students choose the wrong one, resulting in misunderstandings. consequently, most students cannot follow the flow of ideas provided in printed materials, such as finding the main idea, making predictions, using background knowledge, creating mental images, asking questions, drawing inferences, and summarizing information. increasing evidence suggests that students are failing to make progress with reading because of a lack of vocabulary. they have difficulty reading fluently due to their lack of vocabulary, and tabdulhis results in difficulties with comprehension because inferring or deducing word meanings from the context accounts for 75% to 90% of comprehension (abdulmalik, 2020; zamani et al., 2022). students who cannot overcome vocabulary difficulties while reading experience frustration and can lose focus on context because understanding the content requires inferring meaning, which is the essence of comprehension development, especially in the long-reading text. the first previous research shows that being unable to handle long and complex sentences and failing to grasp the main idea are the main causes of not achieving high scores when students take the reading test for english major, as the requirement of management business for english major (ahmad et al., 2018). the second previous research identified students’ reading problems such as small vocabulary size, slow reading speed, and inadequate background knowledge (ficzere et al., 2021). the third previous research pointed out that efl in indonesia have similar reading problems and they also lack decoding skills and effective reading strategies (ilahude et al., 2021). however, the ability to use context clues among the intermediate and advanced level of english education students has been little studied. instead, most researchers have focused solely on the effectiveness of teaching the context clue strategy in the classroom using various approaches. whereas not much attention was given to vocabulary instruction in reading comprehension by using contextual clues and the students’ perspectives about the way to select the contextual information based on a reading passage. therefore, in this research, the student's ability to use context clues in reading passages and how to identify context clue types based on english reading tests, and the correlation between reading comprehension and the students’ opinions regarding the context clue strategy to derive the meaning of unfamiliar words will be investigated. generally, the most common contextual clues were classified into: (1) restatement: stated the word in simpler terms; (2) synonyms: the similar meaning of one or two words; (3) antonyms: opposite meaning of the word; (4) definitions: the clear statement that defined the meaning of the word; (5) explanation: the same ideas that could be found in the sentence before or in the sentence following the word to explained the difficult word; and (6) relationships: the clue of the difficult word and something the author had stated in the text which required reader’s thinking process (fudhla et al., 2020; inal, 2021). thus, the main objectives of the study are: (a) to investigate the effect of contextual clues types to improve the reading comprehension of different texts, and (b) to examine the students’ perspectives when using the types of contextual clues which require students to guess the meaning of unfamiliar vocabularies in the text quickly. method the research design in this study was an experimental study aiming to achieve 98-95% lexical coverage for successful reading english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 995 comprehension (razaq et al., 2022; hassanzadeh et al., 2020). based on their scores on the vocabulary levels test and word associates test in reading comprehension tests, the students were divided into two groups: 38 intermediate level students and 25 advanced level students majoring in english education program in north sumatra to ensure that the target words and text topics were familiar to their level of proficiency (wulandari, 2017). in the pre-test of vocabulary levels test and word associates test, each student was required to read the texts and sentences and infer the meaning of the underlined words (50 words in total). every correctly inferred word received one point, resulting in a maximum score of 30 for single sentences and 20 for longer text. the research process was described as follows: first, after taking the pre-test, the students in the experimental group were taught how to use contextual clues without referring to a dictionary, such as definitions, synonyms, antonyms, comparisons, associations, and cause and effect. in administering the context clues, the researchers explained the purpose of context clues and demonstrated how to locate them by displaying a passage with unfamiliar words highlighted and surrounding context clues highlighted. second, four long expository texts were given to students with contextual clues containing 15-20 target words per text (50 in total) chosen based on their reading proficiency level. the third step was for students to clarify some questions about the reading passage by spending approximately 40 minutes going back through the text to find the words they did not know and guess the meaning from the context, as well as stating their confidence regarding their strategy to infer the types of the unknown words. fourth, the students had to rely solely on text contextual clues during the word identification and comprehension task, since they were not allowed to consult a dictionary or ask their classmates or researchers for help. fifth, the students were able to verify the accurate meaning of the words by using a bilingual dictionary and the researchers asked the students in each experimental group to present their results to the entire group. sixth, a questionnaire was administered after all treatments to assess the students' opinions on contextual clues for determining unfamiliar words' meanings. in data analysis, qualitative descriptions with frequencies and percentages were used to describe the nature and characteristics of contextual clues in reading comprehension and it was observed by two researchers in the field of english education by using a checklist of teaching procedures. the checklist included direct classroom features, such as the process of using contextual clues, items of reading passage tests, and classroom observation. the checklist included using responses to agree and disagree with classroom observation (boonchum, 2018). a content validity test and a face validity test were used to establish the validity of pre-test and post-test. a test's content validity measured the variety of reading passages covered all vocabulary words discussed over the past month, including synonyms, antonyms, comparisons and contrasts, associations, and cause and effect. the face validity was conducted by asking four english teachers to analyze and review the pre-test and post-test to assess the degree to which the test looked valid. according to four english teachers, the test and the reading passage were good comprehensive tests since it was included the most types of vocabulary questions according to intermediate and advanced level students (haerazi et al., 2019). results and discussion the analysis of contextual clues on students’ reading comprehension test the main concern of this section was to answer problem 1, which was the analysis of contextual clues types and what type of contextual clues that the students used in the process of the unfamiliar word investigation. table 1. the classification of contextual clues in reading comprehension contextual clue types frequency and percentage of students’ level examples idiomatic expressions advanced: 18 (72%) intermediate: 21 (55%) he had a good personality to prove that he was easily able to get along with everyone he knew. a. manage c. give up b. be friendly d. move on [the answer was (b) because get along with was similar to be friendly]. indirect language advanced: 19 (76%) intermediate: especially well-suited for those who should not take aspirin products. dosage for adults: 1 to 2 tablets 4 times daily. based on the instruction, what is the maximum dosage per day for an adult? margaret stevani, meikardo samuel prayuda, dyan wulan sari, sumarlin mangandar marianus, & karisma erikson tarigan evaluation of contextual clues: efl proficiency in reading comprehension 996 25 (65%) a. 8 tablets c. 3 tablets b. 4 tablets d. 2 tablets [the answer was (d) because “3 tablets four times daily” would be equal to three times four, or twelve tablets every twenty-four hours. choice (a) referred to the dose per time, not to the total dose for four times daily. choice (b) referred to the number per day, not to the number of tablets. choice (c) referred to the minimum, not the maximum dosage]. direct language advanced: 17 (68%) intermediate: 26 (68%) based on the passage, the title below that best expressed the ideas in this passage was ……. a. invitation c. questionnaire b. notice d. application [the answer is (b) because the passage provided information without subjective commentary. choice (a) referred to the notice of an occasion with a time, date, and place mentioned. choice (c) referred to a series of questions. choice (d) referred to a form with personal and professional information on it]. series of words advanced: 16 (64%) intermediate: 28 (73%) although we always send a representative to the airport to welcome new international students, very often they do not arrive on the flights that we expect them to. a. show over c. show down b. show out d. show up [the answer is (d) because the word is a phrasal verb as a synonym]. comparison/contrast advanced: 19 (76%) intermediate: 22 (57%) according to the department of energy, 1 percent of the nation’s electricity will be generated from solar cells at the enormous cost of one billion dollars a year. the text might be inferred that….. a. solar energy was popular. b. less than 1 percent of our energy sources were from solar cells. c. the department of energy supported a complete solar electricity plan. d. the cost of solar energy was cheap. [the answer was (b). choice (a) contradicted the fact that less than 1 percent was available. choice (c) contradicted the fact that the percentage projected for the future was only 1 percent. choice (d) contradicted the fact that the cost of one billion dollars a year was enormous. synonym advanced: 16 (64%) intermediate: 16 (42%) seeds are contained in the core of fleshy fruit, such as apples and pears. a. nature c. surface b. center d. top [the answer was (b). choice (a), choice (b), choice (c), and choice (d) was not synonym of the word core]. tone, situation, mood advanced: 15 (60%) intermediate: 17 (44%) the second leading cause of death in this country, cancer claimed the lives of over 420,000 americans every year. based on the statement, how many conditions rank above cancer as a cause of death? a. one c. three b. two d. none [the answer was (a) because since cancer was the second leading cause, it must be concluded that there was one condition that ranked above it. choice (b) referred to the rank of cancer, not the rank above cancer. choices (c) and (d) were not mentioned and might not be concluded from information in the passage]. reference advanced: 22 (88%) intermediate: 22 (57%) in the year 2001, 1 percent of the nation’s electricity will be generated from solar cells at the enormous cost of one billion dollars a year. based on the statement, how much solar electricity will be generated in the future? a. 1 percent of the nation’s total electricity. b. 2000 solar cells. c. 10 percent of the total electricity for the country. d. one billion solar cells per year. [the answer was (a). choice (b) referred to the year, not to solar cells. choice (d) referred to the cost in dollars, not to solar cells. choice (c) was not mentioned and might not be concluded from the information in the sentence. restatement advanced: 20 (80%) intermediate: 23 (60%) the manager could force them to leave the apartment. a. the manager could be forced to leave. b. they could leave because the manager was forced to. c. they could be forced to leave by the manager. d. both the manager and they were forced to leave. [the answer was (c) because it was a restatement of the given sentence. choice (a) was not the same because in the original sentence they, not the manager, leave. choice (b) was not the same because in the original sentence they, not the manager, were forced. choice (d) was not the same because in the original sentence they, not the manager and they, were forced]. preposition advanced: 23 (92%) intermediate: 22 (58%) they forgot about ……… to join us for lunch. a. us to ask c. our asking b. us asking d. we asking [the answer was (c) because the –ing form asking was used after the verb phrase forgot about, and the possessive pronoun our was used to modify the –ing form asking]. cause/effect advanced: 20 (80%) intermediate: if oxford university had a degree program in education, the students could have stayed here. a. the students could not stay here. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 997 22 (58%) b. the students stayed at oxford university. c. the students studied education at oxford university. d. the students could study education at oxford university. [the answer was (a). choices (b) and (c) were not the same because in the original sentence the students could have stayed here if there had been a program but did not stay because there was no program for them. choice (d) was not the same because in the original sentence oxford university did not have an education program. modification advanced: 15 (60%) intermediate: 16 (42%) she moved from the dormitory ……. the noise. a. because of c. because b. cause d. caused from [the answer was (a). because of was used before the noun the noise to express cause. because it was noisy would also be correct]. example advanced: 18 (72%) intermediate: 24 (63%) based on the passage, we could infer that a student who had completed 160 quarter hours would be a……. a. freshman c. junior b. sophomore d. senior [the answer was (d) because since 156 hours were required to graduate, it must be concluded that the student who had completed 160 hours would be in his or her last year, that was, the senior year. choices (a), (b), and (c) were the first, second, and third years]. based on this result, the students were required to identify contextual clues types when guessing the meaning of unknown words. readers with more proficiency could shift attention to more abstract and conceptual ideas by using background knowledge to confirm and predict what was being said in the text only as much information as was needed (mutmainnah, 2020). consequently, co-references, logical implications, and cause-and-effect relationships were useful for highly proficient language users when integrating propositional units (ebrahimain & nabifar, 2015). the result of this research showed that advanced students used guessing strategies more frequently than intermediate students because advanced students preferred to use english as their first language to describe their strategies. some intermediate students always linked words or ideas by using conjunctions to guess the meaning of the text. most intermediate students used a list of words and memorized them based on a dictionary while advanced students used the word as the identification of another unknown word to interpret a whole text. overall, contextual clues were generally regarded positively by students when determining the meaning of unfamiliar words. as a result, they accepted that contextual clues strategy was fundamental to learn in the classroom, as well as to increase their reading speed. the students’ objectives to use contextual clues in reading comprehension the main concern of this section was to answer problem 2, which was the effectiveness of contextual clues according to the student’s objectives in reading comprehension. table 2. goals of reading comprehension by using contextual clues statements reading level frequency percentage i could comprehend, critique, and assess the veracity of the claims made as well as the soundness of the arguments made. advanced 20 80% intermediate 26 68% i could offer oral analyses or interpretations of texts based on specific evidence. advanced 19 76% intermediate 27 71% i could select the communication goals by understanding the strengths and limitations given in the text. advanced 18 72% intermediate 24 63% i read and listened actively to gain a deeper understanding of other cultures and perspectives. my ability to communicate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds was also enhanced. advanced 23 92% intermediate 26 68% i could effectively communicate intricate or multifaceted information. advanced 20 80% intermediate 25 65% i could build on others' ideas, express their ideas, and confirm their understanding of those ideas. advanced 23 92% intermediate 24 63% i could demonstrate command of standard english when they used a wide range of vocabulary. advanced 17 68% intermediate 20 52% by identifying when and why the meaning of the text was unclear, i could determine what needed to be clarified. advanced 18 72% intermediate 23 60% the unfolding text information provided the opportunity to evaluate the existing ideas. advanced 20 80% intermediate 22 60% i exhibited independence in my work. advanced 19 76% intermediate 18 47% table 3. standard competence in contextual clues statements reading level frequency percentage margaret stevani, meikardo samuel prayuda, dyan wulan sari, sumarlin mangandar marianus, & karisma erikson tarigan evaluation of contextual clues: efl proficiency in reading comprehension 998 used specific textual evidence to support conclusions drawn from a text. advanced 20 80% intermediate 25 65% read to state explicitly and make logical inferences from the text. advanced 18 72% intermediate 24 63% analyzed the development of a text's central ideas or themes. advanced 18 72% intermediate 24 63% the development and interaction of individuals, events, and ideas in a text must be examined. advanced 17 68% intermediate 23 60% determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings of words and phrases used in a text, as well as how specific word choices affected meaning. advanced 16 64% intermediate 20 52% identified the relationship of specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of a text were fitted together. advanced 16 64% intermediate 18 47% examined how point of view or purpose influenced a text's content and style. advanced 17 68% intermediate 17 45% evaluated the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence, as well as the logic of the argument in a text. advanced 17 68% intermediate 32 84% learned how two or more texts address the same themes or topics to build knowledge or compared how the authors approached the topics. advanced 19 76% intermediate 27 71% displayed an understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and word meaning nuances. advanced 20 80% intermediate 26 68% explained how key details could support the text's main idea. advanced 21 84% intermediate 25 66% provided relevant facts, definitions, concrete details, quotations, and other examples and information about the topic. advanced 22 88% intermediate 24 63% used a variety of transitional words, phrases, and clauses to manage sequence. advanced 23 92% intermediate 20 53% the act of reading did not simply involve picking up information word by word from the page. as an active process of comprehension, it was rather characterized as a selective process (wongwiwattana & watanapokakul, 2021). most students had difficulties understanding the words as a result in not knowing many words for expressing themselves during speaking and writing because they did not know many words. concerning this statement, students might read the text to gain an overall understanding, but they might interpret each sentence differently, as the text might not be interpreted identically. as well as the author's messages, reading also had a relation to what the reader found out based on their level of language proficiency (kaivanpanah, 2020). based on this result, some of the students found that the length of a text influenced their ability to identify the meaning of technical words in the text and the quality of their knowledge of these words. as the words were not used often in the text, most intermediate students categorized them as low and high-frequency words, assuming that the rare words were best learned with vocabulary instruction. nevertheless, since advanced students had previous experience with these words, they accepted high-frequency vocabulary as their core vocabulary in any text given. overall, the students achieved some clear objectives regarding how to construct the meaning using context clues, as it was sensible to reveal the knowledge from the text, such as word recognition, fluency, lexical knowledge, and preexisting knowledge. the classroom observation procedures when using contextual clues the main concern of this section was to answer problem 2, which was the effectiveness of contextual clues according to the students’ perspectives in reading comprehension to guess the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary in the text quickly. table 4. students’ strategies when using contextual clues statements reading level frequency percentage the word had to be read twice. advanced 16 64% intermediate 22 60% noticed the letter or sound that starts the sentence. advanced 17 68% intermediate 20 52% checked the illustrations around the text for more information. advanced 17 68% intermediate 18 47% words should be broken up. advanced 15 60% intermediate 18 47% saying the words out loud. advanced 14 56% intermediate 18 47% the word should be chopped into syllables. advanced 16 64% intermediate 22 60% noticed the word's ending. advanced 17 68% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 999 intermediate 26 68% checked the word's length. advanced 18 72% intermediate 24 63% identified a family of words. advanced 15 60% intermediate 18 47% identified smaller words within the word. advanced 17 68% intermediate 19 50% checked out the headings in the text. advanced 14 56% intermediate 26 68% analyzed the text for its features advanced 14 56% intermediate 27 71% broke the text up by chunking it. advanced 17 68% intermediate 23 60% taking notes while reading. advanced 15 60% intermediate 26 68% the use of unfamiliar words should be accompanied by a question. advanced 16 64% intermediate 19 50% the word could be used to describe different kinds of texts. advanced 15 60% intermediate 22 60% connected the words to as many situations as possible. advanced 23 92% intermediate 20 52% the words needed to be illustrated by a classmate. advanced 13 52% intermediate 26 68% discussed synonyms, antonyms, and other words related to the word. advanced 18 72% intermediate 24 63% table 5. students’ behavioral when practicing contextual clues statements reading level frequency percentage whenever i read a passage, i read it from beginning to end. advanced 22 88% intermediate 27 71% reading was usually something i did in my head. advanced 18 72% intermediate 26 68% my mind often wondered what was going to happen next in the text. advanced 17 68% intermediate 23 60% it was interesting to exchange ideas with other readers and discussed how they interpreted the texts. advanced 16 64% intermediate 23 60% my friends' reading habits had been a source of reflection for me. advanced 15 60% intermediate 22 60% a good book sometimes changed my mind about something i thought i knew. advanced 13 52% intermediate 24 63% reading was a voluntary activity that i chose to engage in. advanced 14 56% intermediate 25 65% i was regularly monitored and reviewed regarding my reading comprehension skills. advanced 15 60% intermediate 22 60% my role was to initiate dialogue, debate, or discussion about the meaning of a text. advanced 20 80% intermediate 23 60% my daily reading was influenced by university literacy activities. advanced 17 68% intermediate 16 42% reading outside of the university had been an encouraging and supportive experience for me. advanced 16 64% intermediate 18 47% reading comprehension is useful in a variety of english content areas based on my experience. advanced 16 64% intermediate 19 50% table 6. skill categories in reading comprehension through contextual clues skill category in contextual clues description the students’ comment determining the meaning of words (word meaning) determined the meaning of words in context while recognizing familiar words and tied them to prior vocabulary knowledge. before learning a new word's meaning, i could not understand it in different contexts. my contextual awareness improved since then, which allowed me to better comprehend the multiple meanings of a word. pronounced words, searched for related words with similar meanings, and analyzed prefixes, roots, and suffixes. to improve an understanding of unknown words, i tended to focus on roots, prefixes, and suffixes. we sometimes used quizlet to practice the words and add images to get a broader understanding. understanding the content, form, and function of sentences (sentence meaning) determined the meaning of the sentence based on a sense of words and phrases. after using the chunk-by-chunk reading method, i could have a good grasp of the general idea rather than reading a sentence by using word by word. analyzed sentence structures to understand the meaning of a sentence. i used the main idea of the passage when guessing, no matter if the word was common or rare to be used. comprehend a sentence based on personal experience and general knowledge of the world. i thought guessed meanings were better remembered than given meanings because unclear words had a low possibility to be remembered later on in other contexts. margaret stevani, meikardo samuel prayuda, dyan wulan sari, sumarlin mangandar marianus, & karisma erikson tarigan evaluation of contextual clues: efl proficiency in reading comprehension 1000 understanding the situation implied by a text imagined mental models of characters, settings, actions, ideas, and events. as i looked closely at the unknown word, i then reviewed the clause containing the unknown word, and finally, i reviewed the whole clause against other clauses, sentences, and paragraphs to guess its meaning. selected the most important points and details in a text with evidence. as an active reader, i had to think about the ideas of those words and obtained knowledge from those words and sentences since i could easily get overwhelmed by a long string of ideas or events. ignoring words from the text was not a good idea because their meanings were crucial to understanding. utilized personal experience and knowledge of the world to fill in the situation implied by the text by inferring cause-and-effect relationships between actions and events. utilizing contextual clues would help me expand my knowledge by focusing on what i had already known rather than what i did not know before. understanding the content, form, and function of larger sections of text (global text meaning) synthesized meaning from multiple sentences to comprehend longer sections of texts. through contextual clues, i figured out the word's meaning without reading the whole text or remembering the previous paragraphs. recognized the organizational structure of a text and used it as a guide while reading. when reading an english text, it would be easier to comprehend each new word rather than just focusing on the word without the assistance of a teacher or a dictionary. evaluated what had been read against information from other sources and interpreted information critically. using passage comprehension as a starting point, i wanted to think like an expert on words and come up with hypotheses. i found it easier to guess the meanings of unfamiliar words when i read a text with rich context. identified the main point, summarizing, characterizing, or evaluating them. i could make predictions about the events occurring in the text based on the word relationship and at the same time, i could also ignore unknown words when reading the text. recognized implications in a text, concluded it and identify underlying assumptions. to identify the passage, we previewed the headings and section titles of all types of reading tasks in groups. following that, we skimmed and scanned the text and made predictions about content and vocabulary. from there, we started guessing based on the context. using dictionaries was time-consuming, so i considered ways to save time and proceed with reading comprehension without them. analyzing authors’ purposes, goals, and strategies (pragmatic meaning) determined the target audience and the purpose of the writing. it was always dependent on the context of the text and whether i had background knowledge about the subject and the situation. so, i was able to specify the learning objective. analyzed the choices made by an author in terms of content, organization, style, and genre. since english words often had different meanings depending on the context, it would be better to guess their meanings from the context rather than relying on a dictionary. explained an author's choice of words and phrases supported the author's message. in texts that english teachers read, i often encountered difficult words no matter how proficient i was at reading. using inference and contextual clues to guess the meanings of unfamiliar words was a strategy worth developing to keep your interest as you read. strategic use of contextual words could also be effective in promoting independent reading because efl teachers might not have to teach every single unfamiliar word in a time-consuming reading passage (mirza, 2011). moreover, when the students had deduced the meaning of a word, they often used a combination of strategies rather than a single strategy. the improvement of students’ vocabulary retention and reading comprehension when using contextual clues could be attributed to several reasons, such as fostering students’ ability to find information, predicting unfamiliar words in context, and determining the meaning of unfamiliar words while reading (wongwiwattana & watanapokakul, 2021; stevani & tarigan, 2022). based on this result, the students gave different reasons why they stopped reading whenever they encountered a new word. most intermediate students translated the words in the sentence word into indonesian. however, most advanced students were familiar with the words but had difficulty remembering where and when the word was seen or learned because they preferred to use their background knowledge to guess the word on english tests. some advanced students chose selfanswer questions to guess the word on english tests. based on the observation, the reasons of the students used contextual clues to answer reading comprehension test were: (1) failed to determine which option in reading comprehension test was appropriate for the reading text because the options were so similar, (2) unfamiliarity with the vocabulary in the options, regardless of whether they understood the information in the reading text, (3) there were two similar and tricky answers to identify the correct answer in reading comprehension tests, (4) the main idea in the text did not match the options in reading comprehension tests, so they should read the whole text twice, (5) some students should answer the synonym of the vocabulary given based on the context in the text, (6) some students english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1001 did not understand what the paragraphs in the reading text meant, but if they were able to find the correct answer in the options, they could guess the meaning of the question offered, (7) some students took more time to read the question due to the length and complexity of the text, so they chose the context to minimize the time, (8) the students who had experience with the given reading text chose their answer based on the context, (9) students who noticed the first paragraph in the reading text wanted to clarify the next paragraph using the clues from the first paragraph, (10) some students avoided the options that were too specific or too broad by using contextual clues, (11) some students always made the best educated guess by choosing the options that seemed consistent with the main idea, (12) some students ignored text details and chose contextual clues to predict where the author's arguments were leading, (13) some students chose to read the question first because the reading text was lengthy, and (14) some students recalled some of the sentences and they removed information based on context in the option choices to find the correct answer. overall, the students’ perspectives based on classroom observation indicated that there were no significant differences in strategies used between intermediate students and advanced students because some of the students could not match their previous knowledge of english or indonesian language since the reading text might have different linguistic abilities. conclusion to conclude, readers who possessed a high level of vocabulary, grammar, and decoding skills were better able to utilize many types of contextual clues than readers who possessed a lower level of literacy and language competence. the results of this research indicated that reading ability and the ability to infer word meaning from context clues were strongly correlated. this research also led to some suggestions regarding its results. teaching context clues chronologically from easiest to most difficult should be the goal of english teachers. by taking notes about the clues that helped students guess the unknown words in reading texts, students would be encouraged to investigate their guessing words-in-context strategies. occasionally, teachers would check students' notes on the clues they had used during five to ten-minute intervals. as a result of this analysis, the researchers proved that students' proficiency in reading ability could be demonstrated by their use of idiomatic expressions, indirect language, direct language, series of words, comparison, synonym, tone, situation, mood, reference, restatement, preposition, cause-effect, modification, and example. as a limitation, this research was the lack of consideration of the contextual factor as well as the frequency of word exposures. accordingly, this research merely showed that the students scored higher on words found in an expository text because the context contained more information. references abdulmalik a., m. 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(2022). investigating the impact of iranian efl learners (elementary, intermediate, advanced) use of contextual clues on their knowledge of unknown vocabularies. international journal of english language teaching, 10(3), 15–23. https://doi.org/10.37745/ijelt.13/vol10no2pp.1523 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 579 the correlation between students’ learning styles and the eleventh grade students’ speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang aprilia sari rahayu master of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya palembang, palembang, indonesia email: apriliasarirahayu01@gmail.com eryansyah eryansyah (corresponding author) universitas sriwijaya palembang, palembang, indonesia email: eryansyah@unsri.ac.id margaretha dinar sitinjak universitas sriwijaya palembang, palembang, indonesia email: magiedinar@yahoo.com apa citation: rahayu, a. s., eryansyah, e., & sitinjak, m. d. (2022). the correlation between students’ learning styles and the eleventh grade students’ speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 579-586. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6260. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 24-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction in today’s global society, communicative competence in english is increasingly important (tokunaga, 2021). comprehensively, burns (2019) elaborated that a competent speaker of english should have three core competencies, namely knowledge of language and discourse, core speaking skills, and communication strategies. english skill is needed in order to communicate well in this global world (rao, 2019). among other three english skills (listening, reading, and writing), nunan (2019) believed that in learning to communicate in english, speaking takes place as the most important language in the world. parmawati (2018) also added that it is even the most important to be used in daily life (parmawati, 2018). with optimal speaking skills, students understand expressing their thoughts and feel the benefits of learning so that learning becomes more meaningful (asnita & khair, 2020; khairoes & taufina, 2019). however, speaking is not as easy as it seems and more than just pronouncing words (supina, 2018). sahara, zulaikah, and jelita (2021) defined speaking as the action of delivering sounds or words to communicate with others to share a few thoughts or data orally. thoughts and data are involved in communication through speaking. besides, core speaking skill also refers to the capacity to negotiate speech (e.g. building on abstract: the objective of this study was to find out whether or not there was a significant correlation of learning style and the eleventh grade students' speaking ability. in this study, the population was ten students the eleventh grade students of sma n 4 palembang. the sample of this study, the researcher used purposive sampling technique. in order to collect the data, in this study used interviews and an oral test from virtual classes. analyze the data, the researcher used pearson product moment correlation coefficient on spps. the result speaks interviews with students used the scale rating scores. from these results, the minimum score was 80, the maximum score was 88, and the mean score was 86. second method was an oral test from virtual classes. in this test the researcher asked the students to tell about the most beautiful place that they have ever visited. based on the results of the oral test score from virtual classes, the minimum score was 86, the maximum score was 92, and the mean score was 90. it could be concluded, that there was significant correlation between learning style and the eleventh grade students' speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang. keywords: teaching; speaking; learning style; speaking ability. aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak the correlation between students’ learning styles and the eleventh grade students’ speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang 580 previous utterances, monitoring understanding, repairing communication breakdown, giving feedback), and the capacity to manage the flow of speech as it occurs (mutaat, 2022). speaking has many aspects in it; grammar, pronunciatin, fluency, and etc. in terms of core speaking skills, burns (2019) postulated that this skill refers to the ability to process speech quickly to increase fluency (e.g. speech rate, chunking, pausing, formulaic language, discourse markers). fluency measures attempt to tap into an underlying abstract concept, the socalled ‘cognitive fluency’, which is a speaker’s efficiency of planning and encoding speech (bielak, 2022). if the fluency level in the speaking skill is to be enhanced, there must be an increase in the classroom interaction in english, especially among students (phan, ho, & nguyen, 2022). many students believe that fluency to communicate verbally with others often consider more important than the ability to read or write (nazara, 2017). achieving the flow of fluency in speaking takes time, considering the language learner is far from an artificial environment, unlike the classroom environment in normal life, he needs to reach a normal speaking pace in order to be able to express himself effectively to the people he communicates with (bacha, kumar, bibi, & yunus, 2021). burnkart (2018) argued that speaking is the most important language skills that need to be controlled, and the achievement in mastering english is based on the ability to speak english. in addition, the new parameter used to determine success in second/foreign language education program is to develop english speaking proficiency (widiati & cahyono, 2016) in which it is followed by the changed paradigm of english learners that a large percentage of the world’s language learners study english on the goal of developing proficiency in english (richards & renandya, 2012). students’ speaking proficiency is based on their own vocabulary knowledge, size, depth and speed, which making a better view on relation between vocabulary and speaking (putra, ikhsanudin, & bunau, 2021). in indonesia, wardiman (2018) mentioned that the changed paradigm in learning english is not followed by the change of students’ proficiency in speaking english. although it was found that the position of indonesia in terms of the score of english proficiency has increased for the last three years based on education first-english proficiency index (ef-epi). in 2018, indonesia was predicated in low proficiency level with the rank of 34th out of 44 countries. in 2018, it increased to 27th out of 44 countries still in the low proficiency level with the score of 53.31. in 2013, indonesia was positioned in moderate proficiency level, in the rank of 25th out of 60 countries with the score of 53.44. in comparison with some countries in asia, indonesia is positioned under singapore (rank 12th) and malaysia (rank 11th) which included to high proficiency countries. at sman 4 palembang, the students often face some frequent problems, such as lack vocabulary due to their nescience of english words. this problem might lead into a language barrier in communication, as salawazo, simbolon, hutabarat, veronika, & saragih (2020) mentioned that if student cannot master and learn more vocabulary, they will face more difficulty in the language learning either in speaking, listening, or reading. nikijuluw (2020) also added to be a fluent english learner, they need to master its vocabulary. if they have it, they can express their idea, write in their own words, listen and understand what other people speak easily. specifically, to be a fluent speaker, it is necessary to have both a lot of practice and a sufficient amount of vocabulary (kumar, qasim, mansur, & shah, 2022). with sufficient vocabulary items, the speaker is able communicate and understand the written expression (siswanto, fitriana, and bram, 2019). therefore, teacher needs to link the new vocabulary to the context or class environment in order to make students easier to understand and remember the meaning of it. this is supported by sarifa (2018) arguing that learning vocabulary through context helps the student bridge the gap between the students’ real-life exposure to vocabulary and the learning environment of the class. otherwise, if the teacher sill use vocabularybased handbooks without the media, students will be bored and lazy to learn new words, thereby many students fail to master english because their vocabulary is still lacking (febriyani, mustain, kiptiyah, 2021), then they will not able to communicate fluently in consecutive sentences as well (lengari, 2022). not only vocabulary, the teacher also needs to teach the other aspects in speaking as having a good vocabulary does not guarantee the students have the same level of other aspect ability. this is in line with andriani & wahyuningsih (2019) who found that students whose great mastery of vocabulary english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 581 still have some difficulties in grammar and spelling. in sman 4 palembang, they also mentioned that they do not know what and how to express it. unfortunately, either in the classroom or outside the classroom, learners often neglect english practice. they only have a little amount of time in the classroom to speak english and tend to speak their mother tongue (indonesian) outside the classroom so their english practice is inadequate. as jaya, petrus, & pitaloka (2022) mentioned that the english speaking activities are always over as soon as they finish the class and they use mother tongue or local dialect to speak with their friends and family. in addition, the other factors that lead learners to find learning speech problems are that are afraid of making mistakes and are shy of speaking up in the classroom. according to baldwin (2011), speaking in front of people is one of the more common phobias that students encounter and feeling of shyness make their mind go blank or that they will forget what to say. students should pay attention the characteristics of good speaking activity, so that they can speak as fluency as possible based on the goal of speaking. in order to provide this fluent speaking, it is necessary to apply different methods and techniques to the student (kumar et al., 2022). according to ur (2013), there are many characteristics of good speaking activity as follow: (1) learners talk a lot, (2) participation is even, (3) motivation is high, (4) language is an acceptable level. on another research conducted by handayani (2019), there are some strategies which can be used by the teacher to improve the students’ speaking skill; role-play, drilling, outdoor activity, direct strategy, and giving motivation. furthermore, how students learn and how teachers teach, and how they connect with each other, are affected by their various styles of learning. there is a different and consistent way of perceiving, organizing and maintaining each learner. learning styles can be defined, categorized, and described as a collection of variables, behaviors and attitudes that improve learning in any situation. this is because this learning style is used as a measure of how learners view the learning environment, how to communicate, and how they react. therefore, educators must consider learning styles and learning strategies in selecting and designing learning materials to maximize student achievement (albeta, haryati, futra, aisyah, & siregar, 2021). moreover, hosseini & mehraein (2022) agreed that identifying and reflecting on learners’ individual differences can make them aware of their strengths and weaknesses and help them to be autonomous. there are three learning styles which summarize learning style: visual learning style (vision), auditory learning style (hearing), and kinesthetic learning style (moving, touching, and doing). each student has all three styles of learning with only one style usually dominating how he or she can learn. therefore, it would be easier for the instructor to incorporate teaching habits through different strategies and methods by understanding each student's characteristics and learning styles. from the researcher’s mini observation through one of teachers in sma negeri 04 palembang, she found two problems in learning speaking. first, students lack of confidence in speaking class. this phenomenon when students feel nervous, not confident, and anxious is called as foreign language anxiety (asysyifa, handayani, rizkiani, 2019). besides that, the students have no motivation to express themselves in english, fearful of criticism or losing face, worried about making mistakes and shy (sudirman, junaid, & tamallo, 2020). as hallemans (2021) stated, learning a speech as part of a study does not ensure students' confidence in speaking english publicly. speaking confidence grows along with the amount of effort. these can be reduced by self-motivation and concentration in learning english (sulastri & ratnawati, 2018). motivation in learning english comes from many aspects, such as being praised by others, self-eagerness to learn, looking up to someone with better knowledge, etc (maulana, ikhsanudin, & suhartono, 2020). second, students are lesscreative in developing speaking skills which possibly caused by many factors, not to mention, the technique that is used by the teacher. students’ speaking skill is not improved through acting out their own dialogue in front of the class. in this case, it is teacher’s duty to find the suitable topics which match with students’ interest. as rao (2018) stated, while selecting the topics, the teachers have to take into consideration of the learners' needs and interests that lead the learners to work more on the given topics with interest and enthusiasm. besides, in the process of learning and teaching english as a foreign language, teachers should also pay much attention to the students' aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak the correlation between students’ learning styles and the eleventh grade students’ speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang 582 personalities which can be affected by some affective factors (karsudianto, 2020). sarifa (2020) added that a language teacher needs to choose an appropriate method to teach each skill effectively. jabeen (2019) also added that teacher has to create a friendly environment for the students to learn a foreign language. based on the above statements, the researcher conducts a study entitled "the correlation among students learning style and the eleventh grade students' speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang” to find out whether there is a significant contribution of learning style and the eleventh grade students' speaking ability. method this study aimed to find out whether there is a significant contribution of learning style and the eleventh grade students' speaking ability. therefore, this research used correlation research. creswell (2012) stated, correlation is a statistical test to determine the tendency or pattern for two (or more) variables or two sets of data to vary consistently. concerning the sample of this research, the researcher used purposive sampling technique. in this research, the research data were from an interview the students and oral test from virtual classes, r-product moment, and multiple regression. first, the researcher interviewed the students. there were 10 questions that the researcher asked. after that, the researcher assessed their speaking interview used an adaptive speaking. table 1. interview questions no components rating score comments 1 pronunciation 5 has few traces of foreign accent 4 always intelligible, though one conscious of a definite accent 3 pronunciation problem necessities concentrated listening and occasionally lead to misunderstanding 2 very hard to understand because of pronunciation problems, most frequently be asked to repeat 1 pronunciation problems to serve as to make speaking virtually unintelligible 2 grammar 5 make few (if any) noticeable errors of grammar and word order 4 occasionally makes grammatical and word order errors that do not, however obscure meaning 3 make frequent errors grammar and word order, which occasionally obscure meaning 2 grammar and word order error make comprehension difficult, must often rephrases sentence and or rest rich himself 1 errors in grammar and we order so, severe as to make speaking virtually unintelligible 3 vocabulary 5 use of vocabulary and idioms is virtually that of native speaker 4 sometimes uses inappropriate terms and or must rephrases ideas because of lexical inadequacies 3 frequently uses the wrong words conversation somewhat limited because of inadequate vocabulary 2 misuse of words and very limited vocabulary make comprehension quite difficult. 1 vocabulary 4 fluency 5 fluency speech fluent and efforts less as that of a native speaker 4 speed of speech seems to be slightly affected by language problem 3 speed and fluency are rather strongly affected by language problem 2 usually hesitant, often forced into silence by language limitation 1 speaking is also halting and fragmentary as to make conversation virtually impossible 5 comprehension 5 appears understand everything without difficulty 4 understand nearly everything at normal speed, although occasionally repetition may be necessary 3 understand most of what is said at slower than normal speed without repetition english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 583 2 has great difficulty following what is said can comprehend only "social conversation" spoken slowly and with frequent repetition 1 cannot be said to understand even simple conversational english. (haris, 1969) after that, the researcher used the selected rubric and analyzed based on the indicators and scored as follows: final score = total score x 10 25 the second method was an oral test using virtual classes. in this test, the researcher asked the students to tell about the most beautiful place that they have visited. to assess the students' speaking performance, the researcher used score intervals, as follows: table 2. score intervals score interval category 86-100 excellent 71-85 good 56-70 average 41-55 poor 0-40 fail to analyze the data, the researcher used pearson product moment correlation coefficient on spps to find out whether or not there is a significant contribution of learning style and the eleventh grade students' speaking ability. results and discussion based on the results of speaking interviews with students used the scale rating scores of harris (1969), it was found that the minimum score was 80, the maximum score was 88, and the mean score was 86. meanwhile, based on the results of the oral test score from virtual classes, the minimum score was 86, the maximum score was 92, and the mean score was 90. you can see in the table below: table 3. descriptive statistics n min max mean std. deviation ls 10 80 88 85.60 3.373 sa 10 86 92 89.50 2.369 valid n (listwise) 10 based on the results of the speaking interview score and the oral test score for use virtual classes, there were 8 students in excellent category and 2 students in good category. you can see in the table below: table 4. score category score interval category students’ learning styles students’ speaking ability 86-100 excellent 8 8 71-85 good 2 2 56-70 average 41-55 poor 0-40 fail based on the research results, the researcher analyzed using the pearson product moment coefficient in spss. the result indicated that the value of r-obtained of the two variables was 0.946 higher than the r-critical 0.235 (0.946 > 0.235). meanwhile, the significant f result was 0.000. because the f value was less than 0.005 (0.000 <0.005). that is, there was a significant relationship between students' learning styles and speaking ability. you can see in the table below: table 5. correlations ls sa ls pearson correlation 1 .946** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 10 10 sa pearson correlation .946** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 10 10 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2tailed). finally, based on the results r was 0.946. from this output, the adjusted r square results were 0.881. which means, 88.1% of the influence of student learning styles (visual learning styles, auditory learning styles, and kinesthetic learning styles) in learning english. and also 88% of students' speaking skills in learning english. you can see in the table below: table 6. model summary model r r square adjusted r square std. error of the estimate 1 .946a .894 .881 .817 a. predictors: (constant), ls table 7. anovaa aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak the correlation between students’ learning styles and the eleventh grade students’ speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang 584 model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression 45.156 1 45.156 67.602 .000b residual 5.344 8 .668 total 50.500 9 a. dependent variable: sa b. predictors: (constant), ls from these results, the minimum score was 80, the maximum score was 88, and the mean score was 86. based on the results of the oral test score from virtual classes, the minimum score was 86, the maximum score was 92, and the mean score was 90. there are 8 students who were excellent category and only 2 students who were good category. the robtained result of the two variables was 0.946 higher than the r-critical 0.235 (0.946 > 0.235). there was even a very strong correlation between students' learning styles and speaking ability. and the last result r was 0.946. from this output, the adjusted r square results were 0.881. which means, 88.1% of the influence of student learning styles (visual learning styles, auditory learning styles, and kinesthetic learning styles) in learning english. and also 88% of students' speaking skills in learning english. conclusion the conclusion of this study is it was found that there was a significant correlation between learning style with the eleventh grade students' speaking ability at sma n 4 palembang. it can be seen from the mean score of students’ interview and the mean score on the oral test score using virtual classes about the most beautiful place that they have visited. acknowledgement the researcher would like to express her profound gratitude to the sriwijaya university community for the support and high appreciation to the research participants for their participation and cooperation. references albeta, s. w., haryati, s., futra, d., aisyah, r., & siregar, a. d. 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(2006). the teaching of efl speaking in the indonesian context: the state of the art. bahasa dan seni, 34(2), 269292. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 515 portraying academic writing aptitude and the plagiarism issues among efl students kartin lihawa (corresponding author) english language education, faculty of letter and culture universitas negeri gorontalo email: kartin.lihawa@ung.ac.id karmila machmud english language education, faculty of letter and culture universitas negeri gorontalo email: karmila@ung.ac.id adimawati helingo english education department, faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training iain sultan amai gorontalo email: adimawati@iaingorontalo.ac.id apa citation: lihawa, k., machmud, k., & helingo, a. (2023). portraying academic writing aptitude and the plagiarism issues among efl students. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 515-524. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.6760 received: 23-02-2023 accepted: 28-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction students who wish to earn a bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree at the college level are typically required to complete some form of scientific work. this may involve conducting original research, writing a research paper, or completing a laboratory course. writing scientific papers is a common task for students in higher education. students are often required to write essays, conduct research, and report their findings in the form of academic papers. these papers may include skripsi, thesis, or dissertation, which are all types of scientific work. the research papers that students write have multiple chapters, one of which is a chapter that includes the opinions of experts in the field, known upon its several terms such as theoretical basis/framework of review of literature chapter, and background chapter. students are required to record the experts’ viewpoints relevant to their research in these chapters. these experts’ opinions are intended to reinforce existing theories and organize knowledge to serve as a roadmap for future research. however, it is usually an issue for students to arrange the experts’ ideas as page (lihawa, 2022) argued that students are struggling to write history essays, they are often knowledgeable about the subject matter well but unable to write in a coherent way. this can be because they do not know how to connect facts and information they have jumbled in their thoughts to form a narrative. as a result, their essays can be dry and boring, and they may not communicate their ideas effectively. wilang et al. (2018) revealed that students were worried about the process of research paper writing including writing theoretical chapters and their purposes, and most were not sure how to start writing them. it is also found (lihawa, 2022) from the information of previous research evaluation conducted on the 1st march 2022 that 19 students’ writings of class e in the second semester were abstract: this article is the research result of teaching-learning academic writing to english students department, ung in the fourth semester of 2020. this research objective is to enrich applying theories accessed from online books and international journals by avoiding plagiarism in students’ writing essays as theoretical bases of their research. besides, they would be able to communicate in the target language of writing skill as a maximum standard. a qualitative rubric was used to assess 25 students' essays. the rubric had three categories: (a) the ability to choose relevant ideas in introductory sentences before quoting, (b) the accuracy of diction selection, and (c) the ability to link ideas in well-written sentences after choosing quotations or paraphrases. the results showed that 15 students (60%) received a, followed by 5 students (20%) received a-, 3 students (12%) received b+, and 2 students (8%) received c. keywords: academic writing; plagiarism; teaching. mailto:kartin.lihawa@ung.ac.id mailto:karmila@ung.ac.id kartin lihawa, karmila machmud, & adimawati helingo portraying academic writing apptitude and the plagiarism issues among efl students 516 dominated by 12 students writing 2 to 5 sentences in an hour. besides, they were confused about what ideas were written. in line with the problem, most efl students of the english language department of ung prefer the easiest way to take ideas from most other students’ theses on the internet. some of them only changed the research object and slightly reformulated the title, copying and pasting most of the paragraphs in their theoretical basis. when a thesis is submitted for examination, the examiner may use a plagiarism detection tool like turnitin to check for unoriginal content. if the examiner finds that the thesis contains plagiarized material, the student's work will not be accepted. this can cause the student to have difficulty repairing the thesis, as they will need to compile new ideas and rewrite large sections of the paper. this can take a significant amount of time and may delay the student's study completion. it was stated by king ( 2023) that as more students use the internet for research and information, plagiarism is becoming a bigger problem in higher education. the quantity of readily available information online has made it simpler for students to copy and paste information from other sources without properly attributing it. due to this, there has been an increase in instances of plagiarism, which can have detrimental effects on students such as failing grades, expulsion, and harm to their reputation in the workplace. in order to combat plagiarism and maintain academic integrity, higher education institutions are enacting stricter standards and stronger sanctions. mutalib, et al. (2023) conclude that a significant number of efl students misapplied sources and citations in their theses, therefore education and awareness are essential to addressing the plagiarism issue (roig, 2018). thus, it is imperative for lecturers to expose students to theories in arranging sources of ideas in academic writing class. scientific works have certain characteristics in terms of several aspects, including a variety of language, objective, systematic, logical, and based on facts, and following this recommendation students’ works can meet the demands of good academic writing (braslauskas, 2021). in general, from a technical point of view, many students have writing problems. first, one of the challenges students face is the drawn-out process of developing a topic for a written scientific report. page (in lihawa, 2022) argued some writers spend so much on their introductions that they lose readers’ interest before they get to the main point of the essays. as hoang et al. (2023) in their research result on the analysis of errors and survey data revealed that the most common organization errors were incoherence whch made up the highest percentage, and then poor topic sentence, disunity, poor conclusion, and no conclusion at all. additional reseasons were due to lack of writing practice and local language influences. these writing problems and complex ideas of avoiding the long process of starting this skill are determined by knowledge and skills of writing and students’ experience and responses in language communication. the more language communication students have, the more experience and easier they get to start writing scientific works. the second problem for students is avoiding plagiarism in writing. most of the time, students unknowingly engage in plagiarism; for instance, they occasionally use the phrases and concepts of experts when coming up with introduction lines. for even more serious offenses, students take large sections of text from someone else and pass it off without acknowledging the main source. ashikuzzaman et al. (2018) explained that plagiarism can range from a minor offense, such as failing to cite a source, to a more serious offense, such as duplicating large sections of a text. moreover, one of the key causes is the development of technical tools that make it simpler to copy and paste information from the internet, which results in the development of screen-based thinking (chaika, 2023). the emphasis on the same idea from doostyar and sujatha (2023) that plagiarism in written form is also known as textual plagiarism. students and researchers both frequently engage in this type of plagiarism when writing coursework and research articles. the effects of freely using technology, the almost same problems occur to some english language department students of ung, either undergraduate or postgraduate students who do not have adequate ability to compose introductory sentences using their own words prior quotations to bridge their ideas and the experts’. it is because esl students often face a number of challenges with things like minor vocabulary mastery, poor grammar and spelling, preparedness, and exposure to books and reading materials (moses & mohamad, 2019). these english students find it difficult to connect the quotes they select and the key point's explanation of the notion because english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 517 they have a limited amount of accurate vocabulary with which to express their ideas. the third issue is insufficient reading materials as sources, either form of books or journals, to support the theoretical basis chapter which might cause a scientific work less logical and reputable (djehatu et al., 2022). this problem can be overcome by the students with the help of cuttingedge technologies, specifically, internet resources where they can access online journals and books. however, the reliability of online references can be a problem since some online sources may not be credible, and it can be difficult to verify the accuracy of the information they contain. similarly, vieyra and weaver (2023) put forward that the main cause of plagiarism is sometimes attributed to students with an unclear understanding of how to properly incorporate and cite sources in their writing when they first enter college. it is imperative that researchers, writers, and authors of books and journals must go through a process of revision and editing before their work is published to ensure that the work is accurate, well-written, and easy to understand, and also incorporate technologies. davies et al., (2022) in their research revealed that students’ writing skills improve when teaching and learning instruction is assisted with technology. based on the learning issues faced by the students in general and they are in english department of fsb ung particularly, it is paramount that researchers must reduce the issues currently associated with writing scientific papers and make use of current technologies in order to increase students’ ability to write background and theoretical basis, which are significant chapters on scientific works. in line with that, kumar et.al. (2022) put forward that teachers and students can benefit from using hardware and software technology in english language instruction and learning in a variety of ways, including the capacity to access resources at any time. besides, momchilova (2021) stated that artificial intelligence (ai) and information and communication technologies (ict) have significantly altered teaching strategies and learning environments, as well as how they are perceived and set up. moreover, the finding of research by rahman et al., (rahman et al., 2020) indicated that the students’ enthusiasm for studying english writing, self-esteem, and written communication skills are all developed through blended learning which combines face-to-face instruction with online learning. students can easily access experts’ opinions on a particular theory by accessing citations on the website of scimago or google scholar, for example. however, when it comes to writing supporting sentences that refer to the citation, students still run into problems, or they even fail to include any previous sentences as an introduction to the quotation. in addition, they occasionally fail to establish a connection between their chosen quotation and the rest of their own writing. to avoid this, students must form conclusions as a writer in order to establish this connection and support the experts' viewpoint. it is supported by the argument of twumasi & afful (2022) that writing should be concise and precise, free of slang and other informal expressions. it should constantly strive to be objective and considerate of other people's perspectives, also academic writing is not the place for sentimentality or strongly held personal opinions. method this research used a descriptive qualitative of development model by sugiyono (2012), the actions are as follows: step 1: analyzing the potential data i) how well students are able to cite the theories of experts in their papers; ii) how well they are able to put together introductory lines before pouring in the theories and demonstrate how to offer arguments. 2) overcoming the problem i) putting into practice teaching in-class for four months in accordance with the course syllabus and utilizing scimago to facilitate citation theory, ii) providing students with opportunities to practice their writing skills and to learn about citation theory, iii) evaluating the students' learning outcomes by assessing their ability to paraphrase publisher's work, one source is a rubric by mahmoudi & bugra (2020)that assesses students' ability to formulate ideas in three categories: a) selecting ideas in introductory sentences prior to taking quotations of paraphrases; b) accuracy of diction selection; and c) linking ideas in well-formulated sentences following the quotation. these supported and used criterion-referenced decisions in their evaluation. the next four processes of designing module, validation, the experts’ revision of product then testing a limited and large group are not described here. conducting this research is in english department, letter and culture faculty, gorontalo state university, focussed on the ‘writing for academic purpose’ subject. the kartin lihawa, karmila machmud, & adimawati helingo portraying academic writing apptitude and the plagiarism issues among efl students 518 techniques used to collect the data were observing how well students can write theoretical bases, discussing with students about planning future actions, recording information as the instructor provided lessons based on the writing for academic purposes course syllabus in the fourth semester, evaluating students’ writing outcomes based on their capacity to incorporate theory into their writing in a scientific manner, and examining students’ writing outcomes using the theories of experts from the journal as referenced on the scimago website. the procedure of data collection was during the teaching of ‘writing for academic purpose’ course at 4th semester totaling 25 students in english department of fsb-ung in the academic year of 2021/2022 based on the syllabus of 14 meetings. those covered the four kinds of essay organization and its generic structures, including developing critical thinking, paraphrasing, footnoting, and writing 2 to 3 pages of background and theoretical basis chapters of research. besides, one important thing was focussing on learning materials on how to use scimago journal website which they applied and suited to the idea in each of their theoretical bases or background. a student had to go to www.scimagojr.com and chose 'journal ranking' and 'country rankings'. they found data based on the rankings through the following picture. this website provides journals that have been indexed nationally and internationally. in addition, this website also provides ranking data for each journal based on total cites, self-cites, citation per document, international collaboration, citable document, non-citable document, cited document, and uncited document. figure 1. scimagojr then, they used the search field to choose the kind of journal they wanted to look up by clicking on it, i.e. table 1. the search field n o content name of journal iss n publish er year 1 languag e and linguisti c applie d linguis tic 147 752 0x, 014 260 01 oxford univers ity press 2019 the criteria used to evaluate the formation of ideas fall into three categories: a) selecting ideas for introduction sentences before selecting paraphrased quotations, b) choosing accurate diction, and c) linking ideas in well-crafted sentences after selecting the quotation, i.e. table 2. rubric for assessing ability to compile introductory sentences, selection of diction, and the arrangement of linkages of ideas with quotation no items of formulating ideas and diction selection not clear 25% or d less clear 50% or c clearer 75% or b clearest 100% or a 1. having an introductor y sentences with clear ideas 2. accuracy of diction selection 3. linkage of ideas in the formulation of sentences with quotation/ paraphrase the essay was ultimately graded using criteria used in ung guideline for students’ attainment level and the letter grade range as follow: table 3. letter grade range level of achievement score qualification 85-100 % a excellent 75-84 % b good 60-74 % c average 45-59 % d less 0-44 % e failed results and discussion the outcome of students' use of scimago to write experts' opinions has a good impact on their essay-writing abilities. the outcome of their writing provides evidence of this. of the 25 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 519 students' writing results, 15 received a (60%), 5 received a(20%), 3 received b+ (12%), and 2 received c (8%). the analysis used the following rubric in evaluating each participant to assess the ability in compiling introductions, diction used, and the way concepts are linked together using quotations. table 1. the assessment result of students’ writing essays based on the level of clearest 100% or a, clearer 75% or b, less clear 50% or c not clear 25% or d fail or zero <25% or e parti cipa nt having an introductory sentence with clear ideas (his_ci) accuracy of diction selection (acd) linkage of ideas in the formulation of sentences with quotation/paraphrase (liitfs_q/f) total value a b c d e a b c d e a b c d e 1 √ 90 85 85% 2 100 100 100 100% 3 80 85 90 85% 4 100 100 100 100% 5 82 82 85 83% 6 78 50 77 68% 7 100 100 100 100% 8 100 100 100 100% 9 60 80 80 73% 10 84 95 91 90% 11 85 85 85 85% 12 84 97 74 85% 13 90 90 90 90% 14 85 82 82 83% 15 100 92 84 92% 16 65 82 85 77% 17 100 100 100 100% 18 100 100 100 100% 19 100 100 100 100% 20 100 100 100 100% 21 90 100 90 93% 22 85 85 85 85% 23 84 95 95 91% 24 87 100 100 96% 25 90 100 100 97% the assessment result of 25 students’ writing essays show that the students in the level of a category or 100% are 8 students, 97% is 1 student, 96% is 1 student, 93% is 1 student, 92 is 1 student, 91% is 1 student, 90% are 2 students, 85% are 5 students, 83% are 2 students, 77% is1 student, 73% is 1 student, and 68% is 1 student. in brief, their level of category is presented below: table 2. students’ writing essay category level of achievement amount students score percentage % category 85-100 % 20 a 80% excellent 75-84 % 3 b 12.% good 60-74 % 2 c 8% average 45-59 % 0 d 0% less 0-44 % 0 e 0% failed total 25 100% the description of the assessment of the students' producing background and theoretical basis chapters in their essay writing skills is based on the determination of the number of citations and paraphrases made in the essay. the focus of the assessment is to count the number of sentences with grammatically correct structures in english and a good choice of diction prepared by students before and after the quotes and paraphrases. to find out the results of the writings in question, the assessment of three categories is carried out. those are i) having an introductory sentence with clear ideas (his_cs), ii) accuracy of diction selection (ads), and iii) linkage of ideas in the formulation of sentences with quotation or paraphrase (liitfs_q/f) (janssen et al., 2015) kartin lihawa, karmila machmud, & adimawati helingo portraying academic writing apptitude and the plagiarism issues among efl students 520 the ways in which the sentences were formulated before and after the quotations and paraphrases by the 25 participants varied greatly and really depend on the students’ own imagination and the process. as cheong et al., (2022) mentioned that reproductive imagination, which is the ability to recreate or reproduce ideas that have been encountered previously, is one factor that contributes to writing performance. the link to this issue happened to participant 6’s essay. it is a short and clear essay as well but there are only 2 dqs (direct quotations) with its 2 psf (previous sentence formulation) and one liitfs_q/f on the first quotation. the second dq only contains one psf and one sentence as liitfs_q/f or the linkage at the conclusion of the second quote. his writing proficiency is average at only 68% or c category. yet, in the process of conducting research on teaching academic writing, it applied different methods and techniques to help students to find the aim of learning as a qualified writer at maximum standard, one of which is incorporating technology to enhance language learning and foster effective learning (zhang & zou, 2022) where students can use real language and complete their task in the target language which promotes their self-regulated and motivation in learning (han et al., 2021). however, it is not only limited to these references sourced from technology used in asking students to compose essays, but also the role of teachers and pedagogical competence is paramount (strobl et al., 2019) in allowing students the ability to practice writing an effective outline, structuring information using a variety of rhetorical devices, avoiding logical fallacies while presenting a position with support, and understanding how to cite and paraphrase sources. based on the notion above on how to quote certain knowledge to support the ideas of the writer for academic writing, there are strategies commonly used to paraphrase or summarize data from published sources, they are: (1) using synonyms (alvi et al., 2021; çeşme, 2022) where students could replace some terms from the original section with similar meaning of the words. this strategy is mostly used in paraphrasing. (2) altering active sentences to passive or vice versa (sulistyaningrum, 2021). and, (3) converting direct quotes to indirect ones. in implementing these strategies in organizing the background and theoretical basis parts, students are required to organize good sentences as the representation of his/her ideas and integrate them into his/her works by summarizing, quoting, and even paraphrasing the ideas to seamlessly unite them into the source materials. this way, plagiarism can be avoided. in the end, students who are the writers must allude to these quotations in connection with the overall thesis of the articles. thus, well-structured and related ideas from introduction sentences to the paraphrased ideas to the illustration are stated as part of the theoretical bases they are derived from. to be able to do this, there are three points that should at least be addressed, 1) the author requires to have the ability to compose an introductory idea prior to making the quotations, 2) the selection of accurate vocabulary, and 3) the author must be able to create compelling concluding thoughts from their writing of the opening notion before the citation, connecting to the quotations presented, and coming to their own decision. the application and support of experts’ opinions in this study resulted in accurate research data, including assessing the three categories in the essay as in the previous table. the results of the evaluation contained several things as exemplified in the short essay by participant 6. however, of the 25 participants, only one student experienced the case of writing a short essay. furthermore, the great variations in the students’ writing results are described in general perspective in three levels of high, good, and average of formulation direct quotations and paraphrases. the high level is projected in students who formulated 5 to 8 dqc (direct quotation) or ph (paraphrase), the good level is the students who formulated 3 to 4 dqs and phs, and the average level is the student who formulated 1 to 2 dq and ph. each level presented three participants’ writing results is as follows. the first of high category in writing the essay, there are found high formulation dq (direct quotation) toward 3 participants; they are participant 17 with 8 dqs and one paraphrase, participant 12 with 6 dqs, and participant 9 with 5 dqs and 3 paraphrases. the description is as follows: participant 17.this participant had 8 dqs and one phrase. each of all direct quotations and paraphrases had 3 sentence formulations as liitfs_q/f (sentences of linkage of ideas in the formulation of sentences with quotation/paraphrase). even though there were english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 521 no previous sentences as his-ci (having an introductory sentence with clear ideas), the participant used precise language in each of her sentence descriptions. this participant performed at 100% or an exceptional level. participant 12. the participants' essays had 6 dqs, but only one reference was listed in her bibliography. all of the sentences in her essay were excellent in terms of expressing and creating concepts clearly, as well as establishing solid paragraphs. the essay was then evaluated and assigned an ability level of 85%, or the agrade. participant 9. her essay contained 3 paraphrases and 5 dqs. only three of them, nevertheless, were precisely organized because they included references with the original quotations, but the expert was not credited. the three of 2 paraphrases and one dq were the first paraphrase that had one psf (previous sentence formulation) and 3 liitfs_q/f sentence formulations as its linking ideas. the second paraphrase did not have psf (previous sentence formulation), but it had 3 liitfs_q/f, and the last one was the dq with one psf and zero liitfs_q/f. the participant's overall score was 73%, or a c category because of making quotations without acknowledging the expert. this plagiarism issue was made by participant 9 in which she did not state the name of the expert. the sophistication of technology in the present era, such as the internet and websites that can be accessed by anybody regardless of their trustworthiness, is one of the reasons why plagiarism in writing is on the rise. smith (in cheers et al., 2021) states that plagiarism is a complex concept, and it can be deceptive, thus in an ideal world, students should be aware that there is a high chance of being caught for plagiarism and that the consequences are severe (abraham & torunarigha, 2020; lata & mondal, 2021). this is in line with the basic concept that plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s thought or language without acknowledging the author, regardless of whether you do it on purpose or unintentionally due to a variety of reasons (mehta & mukherjee, 2022), it is seen as a form of theft and is considered an academic crime. even though there is still happening in most schools and universities, plagiarism has recently become a highly visible issue in academic journals (bautista & pentang, 2022); and many papers, books, and seminars have been written about how to prevent plagiarism in academic publications. in teaching academic writing and its syllabus, students were directed to the best ways by being obliged to avoid plagiarism in writing. this control was carried out individually by lecturers to students during essay writing exercises in class. the result can be seen in the second category of students’ abilities below. the second of good category in writing essay, there are found good formulation dq (direct quotation) toward 13 participants; they are the participants 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 20, 21, and 24. the three participants of 2, 3, 4 are the representative illustration as below. the participant 2. this second participant had 4 direct quotations (dqs) and 2 paraphrases (phs). the first dq has psf (previous sentence formulation) as his-ci and 2 liitfs_q/f. the second dq has 6 psf without liitfs_q/f, but the third one had 2 psf and 3 liitfs_q/f in that formulation. it was also the fourth dq that had 3 psf with his-ci and 2 liitfs_q/f. this essay also contained 2 paraphrases, the first had 1 psf and 3 liitfs_q/f. the second one had 3 psf and 2 liitfs_q/f. the participant's writing abilities can be classified as a level or 100% qualification due to this essay's accurate choice of dqs and phs and its high-quality concepts for sentence construction. participant 3. this participant’s essay had 3 dqs and 1 ph. the first dq had 1 psf and 3 liitfs_q/f following the quotation and the 2 clear paragraphs illustration. however, without psf or linking, this essay contained one direct quotation. after the citation in the third dq, there was one psf and three liitfs_q/f. one paraphrased sentence had 1 psf and 2 liitfs_q/f after it. taking into account that this essay is worth a-, or 85%. participant 4. this essay demonstrated a clear understanding of quoting and paraphrasing, excellent diction, and precision. it had 3 dq and 1 ph. the first dq had 2 liitfs_q/f and 2 clean psf. following this quotation were 1 sentence and 9 liitfs_q/f in the second dq. the third one contained 6 liitfs_q/f and 2 psf phrases. it lso included 1 paraphrase, which had three liitfs_q/f and 4 psf. she received an a grade, or 100%, for her essay. the third of average category in writing essay, there are found good formulation dq (direct quotation) toward 9 participants; they are the participants 1, 6, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, 23, and 25. the three participants of 1, 14, and 16 are the representative illustration as below. kartin lihawa, karmila machmud, & adimawati helingo portraying academic writing apptitude and the plagiarism issues among efl students 522 this participant 1. the participant used 2 direct quotations (dqs) and 2 paraphrases (phs) in the essay she wrote. the his-ci and liitfs_q/f at the end of the quotation were zero, yet there was 1 liitfs_q/f in the second quotation. there was 1 his-ci in the first and fourth sentences in each of the paraphrases. there was no liitfs_q/f at the end of the second paraphrase, despite the fact that those formulation principles were apparent. the student's writing grade was 85, or a-. participant 14. there were 5 psf before this 14th participant's ph, and she had two paraphrases. she discussed the risk of smoking in general terms as a supporting idea for her essay topic. however, because the participant's general statements of ideas refer to information from who, it is difficult to determine whether they were her own words, and that led to a grade of b+, or 83% level of skill for her essay. after using paraphrases in her article, she made a strong argument. participant 16. the sixteenth participant finished writing his essay with 2 dqs. his dq had his-ci but lacked clarity of thought and diction precision. the participant followed the quotations with liitfs_q/f, yet the linkage or liitfs_q/f was also not entirely obvious. as a result, the participant's essay received a grade of 77% or a level of b+. since the internet has become a major source of information, it is crucial to get students accustomed to integrating technology into their learning (vallez et al., 2022), however, they need to make use of it in a responsible way, particularly in academic circumstances. therefore, it is the lecturers to teach plagiarism, citation, and referencing skill, especially in academic writing which lead to academic integrity (bautista & pentang, 2022) conclusion providing the availability of internet websites that supply online journals and books is one technique to address the difficulty students have in selecting experts' theories to support their own idea and concept in composing articles and research proposals. citing sources such as from books or journals can help students who are unaware that they are engaging in plagiarism. in other words, teaching students about plagiarism ethics in academic writing can help them hinder the conventional practice of copying and pasting expert words and ideas. instead, students can learn how to formulate their own opening sentences, link ideas with quotations, and paraphrase effectively. references abraham, o., & torunarigha, y. d. 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(2022). a study of the web visibility of the sdgs and the 2030 agenda on university websites. international journal of sustainability in higher education, 23(8), 41-59. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijshe-09-2021-0361 wilang, j. d., jantori, p., & chutataweesawas, s. (2018). worries of novice researchers in writing research papers. online submission. http://proxy.libraries.smu.edu/login?url=http://se arch.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db= eric&an=ed583670&site=ehostlive&scope=site. zhang, r., & zou, d. (2022). types, purposes, and effectiveness of state-of-the-art technologies for second and foreign language learning. computer assisted language learning, 35(4), 696-742. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2020.1744666 kartin lihawa, karmila machmud, & adimawati helingo portraying academic writing apptitude and the plagiarism issues among efl students 524 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 53 technology-integrated blended class: student reflections on the use of moodle-based digital interactive book lungguh halira vonti (corresponding author) english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and educational sciences, universitas pakuan email: lungguh@unpak.ac.id abdul rosyid english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and educational sciences, universitas pakuan email: abdulrosyid@unpak.ac.id poppy sofia hidayati english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and educational sciences, universitas pakuan email: poppysofia@unpak.ac.id apa citation: vonti, l. h., rosyid, a., hidayati, p. s. (2023). technology-integrated blended class: student reflections on the use of moodle-based digital interactive book. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 53-62. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.6932 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 17-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction during the pandemic, education field has changed in many factors related to teaching method as well as teaching media. innovation in both learning approaches and teaching media, of course, cannot be separated from the role of technology. ghory & ghafory (2021) state that the advantage of technology in education is that its simplicity and accessibility impact and benefit both learners and trainers. however, both the students and teachers or educators face some pitfalls and drawbacks regarding the online teaching and learning process. the implementation of online learning seemed to arise numerous complex issues which are not simple to illuminate. some students and also educators experienced issues related to amid online learning such as internet accessibility, the trouble to understand the material, the need of interaction with educators, and also trouble with assignment given (setiyono et al., 2021). this pandemic is likely to accelerate some changes in educational models based on the strengths and weaknesses of the technology used for learning. the role of an integrated learning approach and media with technology will be very important to them, especially technology that indeed can be used by students anywhere effectively. digital learning actually contributes quantitatively to the interaction of teaching and learning. although only between teachers and learners, digital abstract: online learning has been going on for almost 2 years now since pandemic and caused a dramatic change of education, with the rise of e-learning, where teaching takes place remotely and using a variety of digital platforms. one of the challenges is access internet and technology used in digital learning that forced the lecturers to innovate in providing a learning approach or using innovative teaching media as well as teaching material to facilitate students in the learning process independently wherever they are. the shift away from the education system caused by the covid-19 pandemic raises the question of whether the adoption of online learning will continue post-pandemic, and how such a shift will impact education systems around the world. this study proposed some of the objective due to the recent condition of the education field. one of the objectives is to describe the students-teacher reflection toward the implementation of digital interactive book in their class. the study employed a descriptive analysis research design and gained the data from semi structured interview and questionnaire. the participant of this study was a class studying grammar subject in a blended class of a second year at a higher educational institution (fkip) in universitas pakuan. the result of the study showed that somehow, the students have positive reflections toward the use of digital interactive book designed by the researchers. keywords: blended learning, digital interactive book; grammar teaching; moodle; students’ reflection. mailto:lungguh@unpak.ac.id mailto:poppysofia@unpak.ac.id lungguh halira vonti, abdul rosyid, & poppy sofia hidayati technology-integrated blended class: student reflections on the use of moodle-based digital interactive book 54 learning allows for a wider range of learning interactions (fansury et al., 2020). yet, the integration of technology and foreign language classrooms is a demanding task, and teachers need support and training (koç et al., 2021). considering categories and barriers, the challenges faced by higher education institutions can be divided into technical challenges, educational challenges, and social challenges (gurajena et al., 2021). for some cases, the researchers have identified several problems that have become the background of the research. drawing on thomas & rogers (2020) experience with online learning during the pandemic emergency, it was observed that school it systems are often overly expensive, cumbersome, and quickly obsolete. they suggest moving to personal devices built into schools. this technical problem is also commonly found in higher educational institutions in indonesia. some students also struggle with the shift of learning process, and some teachers also struggle with the requirement of handling and using technology both in preparing and also presenting teaching materials. for social challenges, the researchers found out that there is the limitation of teacher-students’ interaction in teaching and learning process somehow arouse new problems in improving students’ outcome during their learning process. this issue became the experts’ concern and thus they have suggested some overcomes. the presence of online learning, when needed, allows students to stay in touch with teachers and other students. in some cases, however, they are building a sense of community between learners and teachers and creating interactive and engaging lessons in which all students know each other (ferri et al., 2020). as one of learning management system provided as an online learning tool, moodle provides one feature that can be used as a solution to giving the students with optimal digital learning materials. the potential of using moodle as one of online learning platform provides many free and accessible features that can be used by teachers and students. teachers are also able to provide digital content as learning materials to be used by the students independently. as commonly known by teachers, digital content is material from a variety of sources and was not originally intended for classroom use. however, digital content is widely provided in the internet such as youtube, digital content and facebook. therefore, by leveraging digital content, teachers have many sources of new teaching materials that can be updated at any time. the use of digital content as an educational medium has been of great help to the teacher, especially during her covid-19 pandemic (fansury et al., 2020). since 2013, pakuan university is one of private universities in indonesia that has implemented blended learning using moodle. according to a recent systematic review of lms usage trends, moodle is the most popular and preferred open source lms. moodle has a high level of community and institution acceptance, with a range of active courses available in many languages (sergis et al., 2017). an activity, which is a generic term for a group of moodle features, is where students typically engage and interact with other students and teachers. mostly used activities identified in moodle are among others quizzes, forums, workshops, lessons, wikis and polls. of these, moodle quizzes and workshops were the most popular. activities such as videos, virtual tours and e-portfolios are external tools that can be easily incorporated into moodle system (gamage et al., 2022). lms moodle is useful for higher education institutions as it can be integrated with academic resources, libraries and curricula. in addition, the lms moodle-based university e-learning system enables the integration of mobile technology into the educational process and the implementation of the mobile learning management system or commonly known as mlms (zabolotniaia et al., 2020). previously, an advanced research into the use of lms moodle's technical capabilities in the higher education process proves that the lms moodle distance learning system fosters student thinking and innovation (chootongchai & songkram, 2018). two years later, in recent research, noermanzah & suryadi (2020) added that the students become dynamic, persuaded, and they can also develop their autonomous learning through the utilizing of moodle-based blended learning in teaching and learning process. back in the previous years, dealing with the implementation of using moodle as lms in higher education, as one of the pitfalls, a study revealed that moodle system was not working well at the time of the study although students generally felt satisfied with the moodle system and teachers also found if timely and beneficial in the long term (gundu & ozcan, 2017). it means that some of the features probably are not used well and optimally in the teaching and learning process. in 2022, makruf et al. (2022) published their research regarding the implementation of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 55 moodle in teaching learning process and resulted to the conclusion that many users of moodle were found still use any other applications beside moodle such as zoom, google classroom, and others. these choices can be attributed to three main factors; system quality, support facilities and user skills. along with this, makruf and friends highlighted on the optimum of the use of applications that can be used for e-learning and to enhance various support functions. as reflected in the above conditions of the users of moodle, the researchers also found the same problems in the research site. as one of the users of moodle, pakuan university has been using customized moodle version which includes 12 different types of activities like assignment, choice, database, feedback, forum, glossary, lesson, quiz, scorm package, survey, wiki and workshop for years. however, only a few lecturers were actually able to optimize the features in the platform as one of digital learning materials. to meet these challenges, universities need to position themselves as producers of future educators/teachers to enable teachers and trainee teachers to use technology, especially her ict, for her ict-related assignments of future teachers. teachers must be equipped with pedagogical skills, techniques and mastery of materials in the learning process. this condition is one of reasons why this study is important to conduct. as one of moodle best features, digital book is an integration of digital content that can be accessed easily by the students in any devices. the prevalence of web-based learning environments provides neither an effective way to achieve ubiquitous learning nor a seamless way to interact with educational media (yugo et al., 2022). typically, students tend to print or create paper handouts to access more accessible materials. however, there has been a paradigm shift in the development of e-learning standards, and the educational process is no longer webcentric but diversified into multiple technologies, including e-books. while in moodle, this kind of technology is provided in scorm. scorm package modules are useful for displaying animations and multimedia content. it's a collection of files packaged according to an agreed standard, including interactive digital book. in the scorm, interaction is supported by a runtime environment with a strong server-side implementation. scorm has been widely used for years and it is said to have local tracking and is not semantically interoperable with other educational systems (takev et al., 2019). in the same year, some educators and experts has gained more information and explored the content of this feature. this moodle learning feature contains material that also provides example questions and display animations that correspond to the question material (khairani & rajagukguk, 2019). the latest study about technology based teaching media also revealed that teachers can provide classroom activities that spark student interest, motivate students, and lead them to become technology-supported, autonomous learners in their efl practice (mandasari & aminatun, 2022). considering the importance of providing the students with an interactive and interesting learning materials as well as improving teachers or educator’s competence in creating interactive and interesting digital teaching media, it is very crucial for the researchers to conduct a research on the topic mentioned. as one of digital teaching media, digital book, a type of learning resource, is a digital educational application that integrates resources such as printed textbooks, teaching materials, learning support services, virtual reality, and terminals to form a learning support application (ran & jinglu, 2020). further explained, digital books are also a kind of knowledge media management. the knowledge is expressed through multimedia such as text, images, audio, video, animation, and virtual reality (vr) with course content, multimedia, software, and learning devices as the core elements of digital books. currently, there are three main aspects of digital book classification and definition: the first definition is that a digital book is a digitized book that is distributed over the internet and searchable by specialized readers or software that treats the digital book as a digitized version of traditional teaching materials. a second definition is that a digital book is a portable reading device with storage and display capabilities that digitizes the text, images, audio, and video of traditional educational materials. a third definition refers to a digital book as an integration of digital content and a portable reader that contains a device, connects content information, and supports reading over the internet. adjusting to the latest education system in which the technology plays an important role, and the condition that require the educators to be able to switch between online and offline learning, blended learning is still a fairly new concept in many educational institutions. however, even the previous research which was conducted before it lungguh halira vonti, abdul rosyid, & poppy sofia hidayati technology-integrated blended class: student reflections on the use of moodle-based digital interactive book 56 was necessary to do online learning, its seems to indicate that blended learning, when it is done "right", can significantly improve the student experience (hashemi & daneshfar, 2018). two years later, when almost the entire world dealt with the pandemic, anthony et al. (2020) propose that the blended learning practices should be conducted and should be included face-to-face events, activities, information, resources, assessment and feedback for students, and technology, pedagogy, content, and knowledge for faculty. in 2021, a research resulted to the conclusion that blended learning improves learning outcomes more effectively than conducting online and face-to-face learning separately (bahri et al., 2021). from the conditions and background described, not many of the previous researches talked about the implementation and exploration of features in moodle and see the result on the students’ achievement especially digital interactive book as one of alternative digital teaching media. most of the teachers or educators, as well as the researchers focused only on using ready to use teaching media and neglecting some features in moodle that is actually cheap and easy to use. during the pandemic, students also struggled to understand teaching materials provided in conventional ways, therefor, this research was a breakthrough of the common habits and was expected to increased teachers’ creativity as well as boosted the students’ achievement by providing interesting teaching materials in interactive teaching media. after implementing new teaching media, as educators, it is very important to see how it was accepted by the students. therefore, the idea of finding out the students’ reflection toward the use of certain teaching media was also important. the idea of learning from the past and especially avoiding repeating mistakes is widespread since many years ago. reflection means evaluating, synthesizing, and abstracting shared concrete examples. it reveals important functions and relationships that are ignored by abstract and formal knowledge. larsen et al. (2016) argue that introspection not only serves a social purpose, but also influences students' learning from their experiences, increases their awareness of their thoughts and actions, and increases the perception of their experiences. it can also be used to "increase memory". their study also shows that during the process of reflection, learners can exchange perspectives among group members and re-evaluate their original perspectives (brownhill, 2022). this interactive deliberation process generates different perspectives and alternative solutions. reflective practice can be viewed as a form of active, experiential learning (heymann et al., 2022). this research then aimed to encounter the issue with teaching material by integrating interactive teaching material to a blended learning class, and found out the students’ reflection toward the implementation of the designed teaching material as well as teaching media. the study also aims is to answer the challenges in the shift in the learning system. the objective of implementing this research is to describe the students-teacher reflection toward the implementation of digital interactive book in their class. this major aim is related to the third problems encountered in integrating technology to teaching which is educational or pedagogical problems. teachers must be trained to improve their digital and other specific skills in online education in order to properly plan and implement innovative educational programs (rashidov, 2022). due to the lack of suitable digital devices, some students are forced to use smartphones to view lessons without optimized digital content. for this issue, educators need to find ways to optimize the learning materials that can meet their necessity and need. method as noted above, the study was conducted as part of the third year of english language education study program at an indonesian university (pakuan university) which required the unit to scale and continually update e-learning (and other) technology to effectively manage an equitable learning experience for students. the specific class were taken into the study was a second-year class who took grammar class. the student teacher’s reflections were explored using an exploratory case study. the exploratory case study looks into the actions taken in a case and its environment. the case study design is chosen, as this study investigates reflective practice in a real-life context. it is exploratory research as an ‘in-depth’ study is needed to be carried out on the phenomenon of the implementation of digital interactive book in blended learning class. this approach to research is applicable because of its ability to use multiple data points (quantitative and qualitative) to answer research questions and to provide an indepth investigation of phenomena in context (steinert et al., 2016). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 57 questionnaires were selected to explore the students’ experiences during the use of moodlebased digital interactive books and changes in attitudes, beliefs and perceptions during the semester as a result of classroom experience and professional development. the questionnaire will also enable the researcher to examine the student teacher's "reflections’. semi-structured interviews will be used to collect information for the case study. quantitative data collected through yes/no responses to self-report questionnaire statements were used to answer research questions about reflection on students' experiences with english grammar using a digital interactive book during a synchronous session. it was subjected to analysis, and the qualitative data collected at the public explanation corner was aggregated and analysed for content. the interview and questionnaire permit for an investigation into students’ reflection, which included reflection on the use of the media, and reflection on the use of the media during blended learning. the student teachers will recognize their lesson's strengths and weaknesses regarding the use of the digital interactive book. in addition, semi structured case study interviews will be conducted with open ended questions. the researcher will be able to analyse and emphasize any behaviours that arises in the implementation of digital interactive book in blended class. the semi-structured interview constructs an altercation of conversation and dialogue between the interviewer and participants. by doing this, the researcher will focus on the participant’s experience’ in their own words. the interviews will give plentiful data about the student’s understanding of the material given by using digital media and will allow the researchers to trace the students critical thinking progress. one of the primary goals of qualitative interviewing is to comprehend complex behavior, opinions, and thoughts that are incomprehensible through direct observation or during interviews. in this case, the sample is students studying grammar subject in a blended class at a higher educational institution (fkip) in universitas pakuan. the sample size needed to be small enough to locate the individual's voice because of the nature of the research into reflective. at this stage, there are two main sampling strategies that can be used: random/convenience sampling and purposive sampling. purposive sampling was used as it can take several forms, including extreme sampling, which selects 'illuminating cases,' and intensity sampling, which selects 'rich samples' relevant to the research question. the size and nature of the course forced participants to learn throughout the semester. initially there were 27 respondents, but because not all respondents had the complete data set, the participation in the study included 25 the thirdyear students. the class consisted of 19 female students and 8 male students. of the 25 participants, 15 participated in semi-structured interviews and another 10 in focus group sessions. results and discussion analysis of participants data reveals several themes related to student and teacher considerations regarding the use of moodle-based digital interactive books, among indicators of efficiency, control, impact, usefulness and learning ability. pattern of technological use items related to the pattern of use of technology developed for the purpose of this study are in the form of digital interactive books. participants were given learning materials in the form of interactive content contained in the h5p interactive content feature in moodle. the lecturers involved in this study added an interactive activity in their courses in lms, and the learning materials given were included in the digital interactive book (h5p). h5p, called interactive content in the new moodle activity picker, offers a wide range of learning and assessment-based activities including interactive videos, branching scenarios, essay questions, drag and drop questions, multiple choice questions and presentations. the goal of the h5p project is to enable everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content. the plugins developed for existing publishing systems are drupal, wordpress and moodle. it allows users to create simple yet powerful interactive content without her writing a single line of code. the most popular content types are interactive videos and course presentations. at this point, there are many types of content such as course presentations, interactive videos, graphs, dialog cards, math quizzes, drag and drop, multiple choice, memory games, and more. here is an example of h5p interface in lms: lungguh halira vonti, abdul rosyid, & poppy sofia hidayati technology-integrated blended class: student reflections on the use of moodle-based digital interactive book 58 figure 1. digital interactive book’s interface students’ reflection reflection is based on awareness. though there are various definitions of reflection, reflection involves the use of one's own experiences and critical thinking to examine the information presented, reflect on experiences, question their validity, and draw critical conclusions (triana et al., 2017). quantitative data collected by students’ responses to three scales questionnaire statements which were subjected to frequency analysis and qualitative data to answer survey questions about students' reflection on the implementation of moodle-based digital interactive book. a content analysis of qualitative data was performed as follows: (1) organize the data, (2) explore and code the data, and (3) build explanations and themes. (4) identify qualitative findings; (5) interpret; and (6) verify the accuracy of the results (creswell & creswell, 2017). for data analysis, responses were read individually and grouped based on the item considered. at the same time, researchers analysed and generated questions to identify common themes. all three researchers compared and discussed content analysis, categorizing data and concluding themes based on similarities and differences in views. the explanation was based on these findings. results were presented without comment to show the actual data, after which the results were interpreted. the researchers sought to approach the study by examining how students describe their learning experience with digital interactive books, particularly in relation to three different frameworks of motivation and engagement. because the survey was so short, we focused on the impact of the intervention on students' experiences especially motivation to learn english grammar rather than trying to measure changes in knowledge of the subject content. students’ reflection of the use of moodle-based digital interactive book (dib) a frequency analysis of students' yes/no responses to self-reported questionnaire items/statements that reflect students' views and feelings about their learning experience with moodle-based digital interactive books, and a description of the results of each content analysis, are provided below. of her 25 students who participated in the study, most had positive thoughts and feelings about her dib use, but some indicated limitations that should be considered for future use. more specifically, based on frequency analysis in the table, we found that 76% of 25 students have positive learning experiences using moodlebased digital interactive book especially. the learning experience they had refers to the whole semester where they were given materials through digital interactive book embedded in moodle (lms). the learning materials that they accessed were among others in form of interactive video, image hotspot, single choice exercise and multiple choices exercise. when the samples were interviewed, the information was gained about the activities they liked the most in digital interactive book which is interactive video and some exercises. the students highlighted that when they watched interactive video, it was challenging since they could interact to the content of the video through the questions provided during the video played. as for the exercise’s activities, 6 out of 10 students who were interviewed, or 60% stated that the exercises were better displayed in form of summary or true or false questions. regarding the feedback, they all agreed that they liked it the most when they could see the result of their answers directly right after they answered the questions. for the navigation or control aspect, moreover, 100% of the participants said that using dib in learning process was easy. 20 participants out of 25 answered yes to the statement that dib has meet their needs of the learning materials. moodle-based digital interactive book, apparently, provides many features to present learning materials in interactive and attractive way. this result is in line with the result of previous research conducted by košir et al. (2022) who highlighted that interactive interface of learning material in form of digital interactive book can provide great amount of information needed by the students. the most positive responses were obtained for the point of learning experiences like the benefits and meaningful content, the interface and features in dib that are interesting and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 59 pleasant, the convenience of accessibility of dib for the participants as well as the autonomy increased during the learning process. in interview session, it was found out that the students were interested to the learning material and they were more engaged when the learning materials were presented in various type like in a form of video animation, audio, combined with the text explanation. jeong (2022) in his study also mentioned the benefits of digital teaching media and its significant impact on students’ autonomous learning and self-directed learning. regarding the exercises, the students also said that the exercise or practices in dib were not intimidating like conventional practices or quizzes in class. on the other hand, the most of ‘no’ responses were from the statement related the certainty and optimism of getting good score in the subject learned. more than 50% of the students was not sure that using dib during their blended learning sessions would increase their score. the negative response was also found out in the topic chosen presented in dib. the reasons of the participants chose negative responses were obtained during the interview session in which they said that it would be better if the topic presented in dib was the easy one since they had to learn independently during asynchronous sessions. the figure below shows the comparison between negative and positive responses given by the students. figure 2. diagram of students’ reflection of the use of dib |table 1. students’ reflection towards the use of dib items ‘yes’ freq ‘no’ freq i like learning through digital interactive book in lms 20 5 i find grammar learning through dib beneficial and meaningful. 17 8 i like it when the dib 22 3 contains video animation, audio and different types of practices (e.g. quiz, matching game etc). i like it when dib contains interesting topics. 14 11 i like playing games (quizzes) in dib 23 2 i like the materials of the subject presented in dib. 22 3 i find the navigation in using dib is easy. 25 0 i enjoy the time i spend in learning using dib. 17 8 dib provides my learning materials needs. 20 5 i believe i could get good score when i learn the materials using dib. 12 13 the content provided in dib was clear. 19 6 the interface of the dib was pleasant. 17 8 students’ reflection of the use of moodle-based digital interactive book during blended class during the asynchronous session in their blended learning class, the participants were required to access the lms provided by the university completed with some interesting features like digital interactive book or content. in this feature, the lecturers were able to present the learning or teaching materials in interactive and attractive ways. the result of the questionnaire was presented in the following table followed by the description of the interview session’s result. table 2. students’ reflection of the use of moodlebased dib during blended class items ‘yes’ frequency ‘no’ frequency i like it when i can access the learning material presented in dib anywhere. 21 4 the asynchronous session during the blended class became interesting using dib. 16 9 i can learn independently using dib. 21 4 the interface of the dib was pleasant. 17 8 although it was used in asynchronous session, the instructions in dib were clear. 19 6 lungguh halira vonti, abdul rosyid, & poppy sofia hidayati technology-integrated blended class: student reflections on the use of moodle-based digital interactive book 60 in this point, there is 76% of the participants responded positively to the use of dib during their asynchronous session of their blended learning class. the points of this aspect were among others; the accessibility (76% of the participants said it was pleasant for them to be able to access the learning material easily anywhere), the autonomous learning increased during the lesson (21 out of 25 participants said that they were able to learn more independently using dib), and the learning instructions (74% said yes about the instructions given in dib being clear and pleasant). the results of the self-assessment questionnaire showed that they rated the use of the digital interactive book positively in most respects, but also identified some limitations that should be considered as suggestions for improvement. regarding the materials and features of the dib, they seem to enjoy and benefit greatly from elements such as audio, video and animation, as well as various types of practices, interaction, learning autonomy and accessibility. it looked like it helps the students stay focused by capturing and engaging the learner's attention. the result of the study echoes what the previous study discussed. a learning environment based on digital interactive books is a natural environment for students who are considered 'digital natives' (weiss & bitan, 2018). the interface and content of the digital interactive book somehow also plays an important role as it gained so much attention from the participants of the study. most of the participants’ attention were drawn through the interactive activities and features as well as the interesting contents such as video, audio, text, and animation. the digital content attached in the interactive book seemed to accomplish the majority of students’ need who found fractals particularly enjoyable. the students are more likely to generate contextual interest only if they find it surprising, personally relevant, or particularly enjoyable (nengsih et al., 2022). as for the students’ autonomous learning improved during the synchronous sessions in their blended learning class, it was surprisingly found out they felt independent and confident of understanding the material in spite of their uncertainty of getting good scores in the subject as it was also stated by khan et al. (2017). it can be said that interactive digital-based learning resources can be used by students for self-directed learning without instructor supervision (nafi’ah et al., 2019). developing students’ autonomous learning could be facilitated by technologies. as it was stated by yot-domínguez & marcelo, (2017), 4.0 social software technologies (communication tools, resource and experience sharing tools, social networking tools) have great potential to facilitate self-regulation. conclusion this study, which included a group of intermediate-level english learners in the department of english languages education study program at pakuan university, used moodle-based digital interactive book as a learning media and material provided in lms during blended class. it was aimed to explore the students’ reflection during their asynchronous grammar class specifically their learning experiences and perceptions of the use of dib. therefore, we examined their reflections on grammar learning experiences using digital interactive book during their asynchronous activities using a 16-item self-report questionnaire asking students to answer yes/no. the study initially involved 27 participants, yet due to the limitation of the research duration, there were only 25 data gained through the research instruments. as demonstrated in current research, learning environments that foster positive engagement and motivation can be achieved, and students are associated with positive cognitive, emotional and social outcomes as it may be provided in digital interactive book’s features. based on current research, future research may investigate the impact of digital interactive book on student performance and outcomes in other subject, or the conditions that improve student performance, and ways to improve the digital interactive book content. references anthony, b., kamaludin, a., romli, a., raffei, a. f. m., phon, d. n. a. l., abdullah, a., & ming, g. l. 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(2020). use of the lms moodle for an effective implementation of an innovative policy in higher educational institutions. international journal of emerging technologies in learning (ijet), 15(13), 172– 189. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 713 developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 muthmainnah indonesian language, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas al asyariah mandar sulawesi barat, indonesia email: muthmainnahunasman@gmail.com riswanto english education study program faculty of teacher training and education, uin fatmawati sukarno, bengkulu, indonesia email: riswanto@iainbengkulu.ac.id santiana english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: santiana@unsil.com eka apriani department of education, faculty of teacher training and education, institut agama islam negeri (iain) curup, indonesia e-mail: ekaapriani@iaincurup.ac.id syafryadin postgraduate program of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, indonesia e-mail: syafryadin@unib.ac.id apa citation: muthmainnah., riswanto., santiana., apriani, e., & syafryadin. (2022). developing elt materialsict based amid covid-19. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 713-728. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6331. received: 03-04-2022 accepted: 17-05-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction indonesia, vietnam and thailand are asean countries with poor english skills. our indonesian nation is between 38.45 and 54.07 (iriance, 2018). the implications of these data can be disputed that indonesia is still well behind in its global abstract: this study investigates the analysis of the needs of efl students in using ict as an elt tool and material. this quantitative study involved 162 students drawn from twelve study programs: mathematics education study program, indonesian language education study program, civic and citizenship study program, agriculture study program, agrotechnology study program, agribusiness study program, information engineering study program, information systems study program, communication science study program, state administration study program, public health study program and islamic economics study program at universitas al asyariah mandar. in this study, we will see how the development of modern information and communication technology (ict) as tools and materials used in the classroom to help students learn english 1. therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine what the needs and wants are and their shortcomings. data has been collected and analyzed using a hybrid approach with questionnaires and interviews. this study found that most of the participants found it useful to integrate social media such as youtube based as material, whatsapp to communicate, and they recommended maximizing the use of google technology (e-dictionary), duolingo application, rosetta stone, daily learn english, and elt in a virtual classroom in the middle covid-19. students were selected using a selective random sampling technique. the findings reveal that the genre approach media and technology is used to developing ict as an english foreign language resource in higher education teaching are recommended by the findings of this study. keywords: ict; need analysis; elt; designing materials; media and technology. mailto:muthmainnahunasman@gmail.com mailto:ekaapriani@iaincurup.ac.id mailto:syafryadin@unib.ac.id muthmainnah, riswanto, santiana, eka apriani, & syafryadin developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 714 competitiveness. the implementation of technology in learning is therefore very necessary to allow students to find a diverse learning environment. the advantage of ict-based curriculum is the only alternative in order to meet maximum learning goals for global skills targets in the 21st century. in indonesia, the difficulty of english as a foreign language also makes it difficult for students to be interested in developing their ability to read, write, listen and speak. for indonesian country, curriculum creativity and restructuring according to the conditions of students during covid-19 is a prerequisite for the restructuring of curricula, particularly at universities. teaching by using e-learning and the use of ict in english as a modern style as part of improved educational content and the students' learning experience (parvin, 2020; ja'ashan, 2020; muhammad, 2020). today, technology is commonly used in many facets of life, including education. the availability of technical devices has transformed the type of instructional methods and inspired students, teachers and program planners to create attractive and efficient learning environments for learners. in efl, information and communication technology (ict) is commonly used to address the difficulties encountered by learners in gaining english language skills. today, students are provided with internet connectivity and access through smartphones, ipods, ipads or laptops to different types of students, such as printers, projectors and white smart boards. to offer quality lessons to english learners through the new and best teaching methods to inspire them to learn both in and outside the classroom. thus the integration of ict in efl learning can be seen as encouraging relative to conventional teaching forms part element (e.g., zinan, & sai, 2017; albugami, & ahmed, 2015; rahimi, & yadollahi, 2011). as a consequence, learners' awareness of the use of ict in english and the gain will include more knowledge on the volume and essence of ict, and the events in and outside the classroom. some of research investigation ict in learning and teaching process encourage constructive engagement, social involvement, critical thought, content comprehension and autonomy in learning (aprianto, 2020; layali, & al-shlowiy, 2020; shishkovskaya, bakalo, & grigoryev, 2015; karim, shahedrahman, & mohamed, 2019, sánchez, hernández, fernández, díaz, & bastian, 2019; sudha, 2018; karami, sadighi, bagheri, & riasati, 2018). one approach to construct an ict material model is to evaluate the criteria. requirement review is a sequence of exercises to define and study original specifications prior to making improvements or designing a learning product. integration of ict in english learning at al asyariah mandar university, west sulawesi remains in the development stage and faces a range of different aspects, including developing englishlanguage materials and learning practices focused on information, communication and technology (icts) to increase students higher hots (higher order thinking skill). the issue is that lecturers' poor capacity to incorporate ict as elt materials and to improve educational resources through ict integration is still low and lecturers rely mainly on textual content, so that students are still very far away from standards when they speak, compose, listen to and read. this study only uses one aspect of the assure model, which is the features of the examination learner. this analytical stage comprises analytical tasks, mission analysis, program and logical media and technology or ict resources as well as learner analysis. the whole process of this review would be recommendations for establishing general educational goals which is the ultimate purpose of developing a specific learning method. researchers are trying to find important items which become the need for the production of ict-based elt materials related to student requirements. the core priorities include the formulation of general instructional goals, special instructional goals, performance measures and relevant ict concepts to be established such as critical resources and prospective participant requirements. there are three problem statements in this research, namely: 1) how do students perceive the importance of ict design as elt in higher education?, 2) how is the conception of ict as media and technology for elt materials by students?, and 3) how is student and lecturer's understanding and vision of english research in the future? according to mahbub (2021), eslami (2010), brown (2016), and asrifan, vargheese, syamsu, & amir (2020), most of the theoretical methods can be used to require investigation, including questionnaires, conclusions, interviews and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 715 authentic written and oral text studies. we can claim that lecturers can use needs analysis to help them better understand the needs of their students. lecturers can use this tool to tailor curriculum development to better suit the interests of their students. if you teach esl in college, you need to know what the most important needs of your students are so you can help them develop the english skills they will need to succeed in the future. a needs analysis is necessary because a needs analysis reveals the general characteristics and abilities of students, as well as any weaknesses or strengths specific to the academic environment. the needs of learners are then split into three namely lacks, wants, and necessities. (1) necessities: what does the learner need in language usage? (2) disadvantages (lacks): what are the learner deficiencies? (3) wants: what do learners want to learn? needs analysis should be in accordance with the characteristics of learners. this means that students are adults who learn selfconfidence. adult learning, basically, is a nonauthoritarian, more spontaneous, lesson-based learning that primarily seeks to find comprehension and/or reasoning to shape a structured attitude (aka, 2019). adult teaching is also on how the academic curriculum should be harmonized with everyday life. certain adult elements need to be considered when preparing learning, including the relationship between the knowledge received and the real world, interest in activities and needs to be accomplished. the university learning process is a set of process activities of teachers and students focused on shared relationships in educational circumstances in order to accomplish those objectives. for the lifelong learning process, contact or reciprocal partnerships between teachers and learners are an important necessity. one of the aspects in which universitas al asyariah mandar intensifies the online learning process. the features of each course delivered within each department should then be checked so that the management and learning process can be correctly described and the learning goals can be accomplished. in today's efl teaching and learning, the use of ict can be considered important. the advantages of ict have been a common focus of research in all education fields, including efl teaching. one of the most mentioned advantages of ict in efl teaching is that teachers use ict made teaching and studying more fun (li, & walsh, 2011). using ict or e-learning, which means learning using electronic devices that are synchronouss and asynchronous using internet technology (al-fraihat, 2020; almanthari, maulina, & bruce, 2020; aparicio, bacao, & oliveira, 2016), is oriented towards disseminating learning materials using the internet network (karim, shahed, rahman, & mohamed, 2019). teachers can incorporate ict technologies of various forms including youtube videos, digital dictionaries, blogs, emails and digital games and smartphone apps learning. ses applications have been found to help the teaching of english. kabooha, & elyas (2018), for example, found that the majority of efl students believe that youtube has strengthened their english language, resulting in stronger written understanding. there is a broad variety of ict software that can boost learning abilities. gamlo (2019) found that the application to learn english grammar greatly enhanced the grammar of students. the students who took part in nalliveettil & alenazi (2016) showed that the use of smartphone apps strengthened their grammar and orthographing, including digital dictionaries. moreover, chen (2013) found that ef students who used technical applications felt their english was strengthened and trusted in their use of th english under varying cases. ict allows students access to english services anytime they choose. ezza & bakry (2014) emphasized that ict provides english students a range of external learning resources. this leads to the development of individual students who can find appropriate courses to meet their needs and levels. in china, zinan & sai (2017) published a study to explore the expectations of englishspeaking students regarding the use of ict. the students indicated that ict has created a meaningful and inspiring learning atmosphere that in conventional classrooms is seen as far superior to the environment. ict has enhanced their learning performance and allowed them to interact with others and to research free english technical tools at all times. çelik, arkın, & sabriler (2012) found that students use non-class icts for external services, thus increasing their language participation phase of understanding. the development of ict as a medium in learning supports innovative and creative pedagogical actions so that learning objectives can be maximally achieved and create a pleasant learning environment, increase learning motivation, muthmainnah, riswanto, santiana, eka apriani, & syafryadin developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 716 independent learning and increase participation in class (moreno-guerrero, aznar-díaz, cáceresreche, & alonso-garcía, 2020; alonso-garcia, aznar-díaz, caceres-reche, trujillo-torres, & romero-rodriguez, 2019; lucena, díaz, rodríguez, & marín, 2019; hinojo-lucena, mingorance-estrada, trujillo-torres, aznar-díaz, & cáceres reche, 2018; maldonado berea, garcia gonzalez, & esther sampedro-requena, 2019; area-moreira, hernández-rivero, & sosa-alonso, 2016; li, yamaguchi, sukhbaatar, & takada, 2019; pereira, fillol, & moura, 2019; and nikolopoulou, akriotou, & gialamas 2019). the theory that supports the integration between technology and education in learning is cybergogy. cybergogy combines ict and utilizing social media as a media that is not limited by space and time, culture, country in education. the benefit is that students and lecturers can easily access various learning sources, as well as accelerated learning. cybergogy developed as an independent form of mobilization such as the massive open online course or mooc (daud, teck, ghani, & ramli 2020; sumarsono, 2020). research on ict-based english learning by layali, & al-shlowiy (2020), tarihoran (2020) and mulia (2020) consist of an online lms (learning management system), webct, moodle, or conference tools such as zoom, webex, googlemeet, or cellular applications such as whatsapp, telegram, line and using the social media site facebook, blogswiki, youtube, tiktok, google tools, instagram, twitter. the following is the pedagogical wheel that supports ict in learning and teaching process: picture 1. pedagogical wheel linked to bloom taxonomy (carrington, 2016) there are too many experiments in the fields of e-learning (qian, 2018; álvarez-rodríguez, bellido-márquez, & atencia-barrero, 2019), social media-based e-learning to enhance reading skills. husnawadi, & sugianto (2018) used facebook, khlifi (2020) to practice writing through whatsapp and instagram, aloraini (2018) to improve vocabulary and grammar for students. in addition, e-learning can also improve the incentive for learning, self-learning, more versatile and immersive learning (mutambik, 2018; shakah, aloqaily, & alqudah, 2019; khlifi, 2020; and alahmari & amirault, 2017), then al-maroof & alemran (2018) used google clasroom to increase the participation of students, and nugroho & mutiaraningrum (2020) increased teacher competence and discussion (cole swartz, & shelley, 2020) and facilitating achieving hots (li, qi, wang, & wang, 2014), improving more flexible communication (viktorova, 2020; kayser, & merz , 2020; and scarabottolo, 2018). important e-learning for english learning by reference to the following picture: figure 1. the essential ict in english language learning adapted from cambridge (2020) figure 1 describes e-learning, which encompasses three major topics, including the equipment utilized is the type of e-learning that teachers and students use, and the achievement of learning outcomes (aparicio, bacao, & oliveira, 2016). this is where it is hoped that lecturers will update themselves and train themselves to become digital teachers and educate their students to be english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 717 digital students in the modern age. the professional growth of teachers and lecturers today needs to be tailored to global realities to ensure that lecturers are able to succeed in the new world age and can embrace technologies, use multiple learning applications and tools in the management of interactive courses. innovation in the education field is a reaction to the demands of 21st century learning in higher education evolution and dynamics pedagogical creativity is basically not only an appreciation of how ict is implemented into the classroom, but is also based on innovations which can be made as a way to enhance teacher skills in the form of: subject knowledge; namely, material design or teaching materials that use various motive implementation features, enhancement of pedagogical know-how and technical advances. in different circles, including academia, the use of social media is growing. the average use of social media for every user recorded by gentina, chen, & yang (2021) using social media networks such as facebook, instagram, snapchat, twitter and more than 3 hours daily. the findings of this study suggest that the use of social networks is still commonly seen as an amusement, as a means of social comparison, body appreciation or attractiveness and concern regarding appearance. the bad influence of using social media as a type of social anxiety disorder which has implications for appearance, mode of dress, body goals or body esteem, that has an impact on your own body and the effects of obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd) (nesi, choukas-bradley, & prinstein, 2018; van bennekom, de koning, & denys, 2018). in addition to affecting the appearance of human ambitions and social anxieties, the use of social media networks has beneficial implications and advantages, emphasizing some negative impacts. for starters, kids use every day for hours technologies and devices that have a negative effect on them (jaradat, jaradat, jibreel, & skaik, 2020), as well as a major association between technology and human ambitions, unemployment, loneliness and insomnia. combined some of ict tools in learning is not new, and higher education is not uncommon. it was commonly used by teachers worldwide. however, thanks to the covid 19 pandemic, teachers and educators have recently had to make good use of synchronous teaching and e-learning continue to teach and learning, like universitas al asyriah mandar. most of the student's at universitas al asyariah mindset that the effect of the use of adolescents' social media networks is only about lifestyle gains, not about the educational component. it is attributed to the lack of socialization through the use as learning resources of social media and use smartphones. while smartphones and social media can be optimally used as a means of information, teaching students to use social media networks and smartphones in order to achieve higher think-tanks for students in the virtual age. lekawael (2017) mentioned that the advantages of social networking and mobile networks have been recorded, especially with the use of smartphones and the internet, teachers and students are required to become more involved and innovative to explore their skills in the media. teachers desperately need smartphone-based language learning to include students in criticizing their materials and content. this helps students to develop and increase technical knowledge of smartphones and internet use in classroom learning english. it is nevertheless necessary to know the students needs regarding the use of ict as elt materials in teaching efl. method this analysis is a descriptive qualitative, the instruments tools used in this study was a questionnaire and in-depth interviews. the questionnaire was divided into three subjects, each covering a set of objects. the topics were: this questionnaire has three main focuses, namely: (1) student's ict needs, (2) student's language problem, and (3) student's language need. the interview covered students and lecturer perceptions in designing elt materials ict based. this questionnaire consists of 20 questions with answer choices and one essay question (open-ended question): “write down your suggestions in improving english skill by using ict!” open items added to the final questionnaire aim to clarify the answers. this research consisted 162 participants of first year students from various faculties in universitas al asyariah mandar, indonesia. these participants were selected using a purposive random sampling method using predetermined criteria (ubah, & bansilal, 2018). purposive sampling aims to choose cases that are rich in information to be able to explain research questions (boroujeni & muthmainnah, riswanto, santiana, eka apriani, & syafryadin developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 718 fard, 2013; c. glance and a. penskin, 1992). the methodology of data processing used in this research is model interactive research (ma) (miles & huberman, 1994). ma is a role model produce a systematic phenomenon or representation participants' experience being observed. ma is centered on the assumption that the phenomenon is nearest to the ones under review are most appropriate for build a graphical view of the results and device findings (bargate, 2014). this model is made up of three stages, namely: (1) data reduction stage; (2) data reduction stage stage of introduction and (3) stage of drawing conclusions. results and discussion the key highlights of the study results and discussions on the qualitative data review begin with the results context information from respondents. the results are then discussed, analyzed, and conclusions. the main highlights of the research findings and discussion on qualitative data analysis begin with the finding on the samples’ background information to provide the profiles of the samples. then, the findings are presented, interpreted, discussed according to the samples employed. the main instruments were the questionnaire and interview. thus, the discussion includes both qualitative data. the subsequent presentation and discussion of findings then follow the research questions that underpin this study. the following analysis and discussion of the results follows study issues underpinning this analysis: student's ict needs the first issue of study was to define the facets of the ict need for students of universitas al asyariah. the expectations of the students reflect their attitudes, values and interpretation of ict which can influence their need as efl materials. diagram 1. e-learning in elt diagram 2. students’ problem learning english with e-learning based on diagram 1, there were 69.6 percent responded stated that e-learning was successful in efl unfortunately there were 23.6 percent disagreed because the insecure internet access to elearning is unstable. diagram 2 revealed the students' reaction that 68.1 percent of internet connectivity was a barrier to access e-learning. in this case, however, not all students can use the internet because of the slow internet link will not encourage students to pay attention to the lesson and the part of teaching and learning becomes inefficient. the challenges the student and lecturer faces. in order to do all the advantages of online learning must be the basis previously developed like an internet link, facilities, fitting instructional materials, teachers and student’s readiness for used ict instruction. diagram 3. student’s ict account based on the details in diagram 3, most students in universitas al asyariah mandar familiar with whatsapp 77.6% as their social media than facebook, instagram, twitter, linkedin and line, they english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 719 also enjoy learning english by using google 8.8% and youtube 20.6%. diagram 4. social media makes learning easier diagram 4 revealed that 83.3 percents of students said that they use social media to read, and diagram 6 showed 79.9 per cent used social media to address learning. then they find that using social media promotes their learning by 77. 1% of respondents in diagram 4. diagram 5. reason to use ict on diagram 5 shows use social media to create students project in learning was claimed by 69.7 percent respondents, but there was a response from students by 12. 8 percent stated not supported their project based learning and 17.4 percent respondents who claimed that their project based learning had not been according to what they expected. diagram 6. students’ response towards e learning in efl the diagram indicated that most of respondents supported e-learning in efl 37. 6 percent claimed use social media to learn/ resource in learning english and 31,2 claimed they used social media to learn, create learning project, to meet new people, to practice language, play game and learn new things also 12.6 percent students claimed used social media to discussed in learning and teaching process. based on the data from the questionnaire of the student’s ict need indicated that most of the student s believe by using ict in the classroom support to their learning efl. but, from the finding of the study it can be preferred that internet connection is the one of the barrier to use ict in learning. student's language problem diagram 7. students’ want on ict the data from diagram 7 showed 43.1 percent of students claimed by using social media can enhance their english language and 10.1 percent stated strongly dissagree because of the ict infrastructure capacity not supported student’s ict need. on muthmainnah, riswanto, santiana, eka apriani, & syafryadin developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 720 diagram 7 also, 56.6 percent respondents think social media can be useful to improve their english skill. diagram 7 showed the data 45.8 percent agree by using social media helps them to improve their communication skill, 22.4 percent stated neutral, strongly disagree 18.7 percent and 9.3 percent claimed strongly agree their communication skill increase by using social media. then data from diagram 13 showed 69.2 percent students feel relaxed, enjoy and enjoyable, strongly agree 7.5 percent and only 20.8 percent claimed learning english by using social media boring. to solve language problem, respondents agree by using ict will help their problem in english because the materials easy to access. because social media as tool can help students’ language problem in speaking, writing, listening and reading that is why 66.5 percent stated that they are very motivated to learn efl by using youtube, facebook and whatsapp. diagram 8. students’ want of media and technology based on diagram 8, respondents claimed they more easily to understand english 33 percent stated by download the e-dictionary application, 15 percent by joining the english community through social media, 38 percent by download the application on google playstore that they can use like duolingo, rosetta stone, daily learn english or other applications but unfortinately there were 14.4 percent claimed they do not have e-dictionary and english apps to support their language learning. students’ language need diagram 9. english skills the data from diagram 17,18,19 and 20 showed that 70.2 percent claimed the students like learning english using e-learning because it improved listening skills, 64. percent claimed improved speaking skill, 60. 2 percent claimed improved students writing skill and 69, 6 percent claimed improved their reading skill. interview results another instrument used in this analysis was interviews that are semi-structured. this kind of chat is commonly used in qualitative study one of which is because of multiple considerations it is normally flexible. in other terms, this halfstructured interviews should be relied on for data collection interview guides giving informant freedom share in their language their views (birmingham & wilkinson, 2003). this is what we are talking about. the use of the instrument is often considered capable of explore and allow personal memories in depth researchers adding concerns to the process production and clarity (guthrie, 2019; percy, kostere, & kostere, 2015). the interview process took place with three participants indonesian lecturers to research academics independently english learning that was wanted and needed students. students. in a special space interviews are held to prevent interfere with the outer atmosphere within 20-30 minutes. talks are recorded with a voice recorder with the respondent's permission. english as tool for communication were seen by most of the interviewees (4 of 6) said as important for their academic studies. all interviewees, in varying degrees, agreed that english is one of the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 721 international language was important. one of the students (code 1) explained, “belajar bahasa inggris itu sangat penting, karena bahasa inggris adalah bahasa international dan bahasa yang diakui dunia.” (code 1). “learning english is very important because english is an international language and a language that is recognized worldwide.” (code 1) when questioned further about the goal of studying english, the same student answered: “ belajar bahasa inggris penting karena bisa dipakai dalam mencari pekerjaan apalagi saat ini kita sudah terkoneksi secara global dengan dunia”. then she stressed “belajar bahasa inggris ini penting karena banyak pekerjaan yang membutuhkan kemampuan berbahasa inggris dan tentunya dengan penghasilan yang menjanjikan.” (code 2) “learning english is important because it can be used in finding a job, especially now that we are globally connected to the world.” then she stressed, "learning english is important because there are many jobs that require english language skills, and, of course, with promising income." (code 2) related to rosdiana statement, student (code 3) said “belajar bahasa inggris penting karena dengan belajar bahasa inggris, kita bisa berbicara dengan orang asing dari berbagai negara lainnya, karena bahasa inggris yang digunakan sebagai salah satu bahasa internasional yang paling popular.” “learning english is important because, by learning english, we can talk to foreigners from various other countries because english is used as one of the most popular international languages.” when asked the goal of learning english student (code 4) novia nurul amanda stated: “iyah. karena kalau kita mengesuai bahasa inggris kita tidak hanya berprestasi dalam negeri bahkan kita bisa berprestasi di luar negeri apa lagi di karier kita bisa melakukan tukar pikiran (sharing idea) dengan orang asing (collaboration).” “yes. because if we master our english, we can be achiever in the country, but we can also even be achiever abroad. what's more, in our careers, we can share ideas with foreigners. (collaboration).” then, student (code 1) m. damar dlulus from communication science department replied: “belajar bahasa inggris penting karena sebagai calon pendidik, jika kita tidak menguasai bahasa inggris di jaman sekarang, kita akan malu dan terbelakang.” “learning english is important because, as prospective educators, if we don't master english today, we will be embarrassed and left behind.” related to the statement above, it can be undertsand that students related the importance of learning english. it can be concluded that students goal in learning english for communication for new era or discruption and find job for students future career. most of the student’s intention to learn english for academic purpose and thus that they recognized the importance of english to their academic success. the students’ motivation of studying english on diagram 13 there are 69.2 percent claimed student’s necessities to get job easily and the second highest tendency is to understand/discussed english materials integrated from youtube like songs, short stories, and film they are feel relaxed, enjoy and enjoyable. in the interviews at january, 10, 2021 th students support their answer about motivation in learning english beside for job and future career, the highest responds by student (code 5) explained: “ saya termotivasi belajar bahasa inggris karena ingin berbicara dengan orang asing” “i am motivated to learn english because i want to talk to foreigners.” then the students code 6 replied: “motivasi belajar bahasa inggris adalah saya ingin mencari pekerjaan dan jalan-jalan ke luar negeri” “the motivation for learning english is that i want to find a job and travel abroad.” while, the students (code3) stated: “motivasi saya belajar bahasa inggris dengan video atau lagu yang diputar dengan menggunakan media youtube akan lebih menyenangkan”. “my motivation is that learning english with videos or songs that are played using youtube media will be more fun.” she replied, the mostly interest in learn english with youtube, facebook, and whatsapp based muthmainnah, riswanto, santiana, eka apriani, & syafryadin developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 722 materials supported with video/ film and songs from youtube. students code 3 responded: “dalam dunia saat ini bahasa inggris merupakan bahasa internasional, didukung teknologi yang semakin maju dan perkembangan zaman era abad 21th yang menuntut kita pentingnya belajar bahasa inggris dan mengaplikasikannya” “in today's world, english is an international language, supported by increasingly advanced technology and the development of the 21st century era, which demands the importance of learning english and applying it.” be mindful of students mention were the motivation not only for studying and working but they realize that english is a necessity in communicating for today, this finding relevant to curriculum at al asyariah mandar university actualized the importance of learning english for academic purposes to produce graduates who are competent, moral, professional, responsible, able to develop themselves and compete in national and international level. the main purpose of learning english mostly students material needs to support their english communication skills as one of the 21 century skill also students’ consider they need materials to support in communication skill how to building up interaction with the native speaker. in the interviews, the students were asked material support of english as communication students code 4 expressed her strong opinion support youtube as elt materials because by watching video materials from youtube link very interesting and enjoyable. another respond expressed a different view students code 3 more understanding elt materials from youtube also he support whatsapp and facebook. lecturers' perceptions about the use of ict in english language learning still require training in developing ict-based materials according to student needs. lecturers want learning outcomes to be achieved by using the right technology in order to facilitate student hots. based on the results of the interview, it is known that lecturers use the google classroom application or platform only in delivering material but designing materials, learning activities, proper instruction and utilizing materials by using youtube to achieve learning outcomes is still having difficulties. the survey results indicate that the majority of students are of the view that ict as resources benefit from learning english online teachers and students are interested in using ict literacy resources. in relation to the teacher role, based on the need analysis the teacher needed interact with the students and gave more exercises or practices to improve their langugae skills for the students. cbi requires the teachers as more than just good language teachers. it indicates that they must have the knowledge in the subject matter and have the ability to elicit that knowledge from the students shishkovskaya, bakalo, & grigoryev (2015), abou shaaban, shawish, & jalambo (2019) stated lecturers should also create the learner-centered classroom. regarding the data from some of the difficulties faced by lecturers are the selection of content materials, teaching methods and activities that are in accordance with learning outcomes and facilitating students with speaking and listening skills that have not been maximally carried out. therefore, paying attention to the needs of students and the target material in accordance with the shortcomings using ict will facilitate students and lecturers to achieve 21st century learning outcomes and skills. discussion based on the data findings, designing elt materials based on ict tools like youtube and facebook is to help learners increase their english competence they feel at ease to understand the materials via youtube, facebook and whatsapp also its help learners to understanding english and can use it as leraning resource, require and facilitate learner self-investment, expose the learners to language in authentic use (speaking, listening, reading and writing), provide the learners with opportunities to use the target language to achieve communicative purposes, take into account that the positive effects of instruction are usually delayed, take into account that learners differ in affective attitudes, permit a silent period at the beginning of instruction, maximize learning potential by encouraging intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional involvement, not rely too much on controlled practice and provide opportunities for outcome feedback. ict input can come from a wide range of sources. the inclusion as input of such material raises the question of authenticity. nunan (2004) argued that it is not a matter of whether or not english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 723 authentic materials should be used, but what combination of authentic, simulated and specially written materials provide learners with optimal learning opportunities. the input from youtube rich with the form of a text, dialogue, diagram, or other forms of communication data. it provides stimulus materials for activity, new language items, correct models of language use, and a topic for communication. there were some inputs chosen based on ict as media and technology for efl classroom for future english teaching. the inputs were film, song and audio short story. in addition, the students strongly agree to use some of social medias such as youtube, facebook, and whatsapp. besides that, google and some of english apps is very helpful for them in learning like duolingo, rosetta stone and daily learn english. the data findings most of the students need materials to enhance their english skill; listening, reading, writing and speaking, in boost vocabulary also they have self directed and self determined learning by using youtube, its claimed they know how to learn by using social media also english apps technology. all the result finding supporting from theory the benefit of ict like husnawadi & sugianto (2018) using facebook, khlifi (2020) and ahmed (2019) to practice writing through whatsapp and instagram to improve vocabulary and grammar for students. in addition, e-learning can also improve the incentive for learning, self-learning, more versatile and immersive learning (mutambik, 2018; shakah, aloqaily, & alqudah, 2019). akyel & ozek (2010) and viktorova (2020) also improved more flexible communication. according to mollet, wray, fitzpatrick, wray, & wright (2010), the difficulty will be affected by the length of a text, propositional density (how much information is packaged into the text and how it is distributed and recycled), the amount of low frequency vocabulary, the speed of spoken texts and the number of speakers involved, the explicitness of the information, the discourse structure and the clarity with which it is signalled. another factor which influences the difficulty is the amount of support provided to the listener or reader. a passage with readings and subheadings which is supported with with photographs, drawings, tables, graphs, and so on should be easier to process than one in which there is no contextual support. that’s why by using ict or media and technology to selected of elt material should consider the allocation of time used so that the activities designed can achieve the predetermined learning outcomes. for example, giving grammar material using youtube (mr. bean's film) example present perfect with a duration of only 5 minutes and the grammar can be use it in the students real life context. it is also critical that the students must have a good internet service from everywhere to join youtube and access the materials based on youtube conent students should be optimistic perception of by using youtube as elt materials to make it efficient and competitive. conclusion this study found that students from efl al asyariah mandar university considered designing ict-based materials using youtube as a valuable way to learn english. students believe that ict can help them learn grammar, vocabulary, reading, speaking, writing, and listening through genuine opportunities and make it easier for them to learn english individually. in addition, using learning applications such as doulingo, roxetta stone, and dalily learn english in the classroom, which is very helpful for practicing grammar and critical thinking skills. based on these results, the research will make these recommendations. in addition, universities can facilitate the effectiveness of the design of ict-based efl materials in teaching english by providing training programs for lecturers in designing learning media and technology and integrating ict as teaching materials. to encourage students to benefit from the benefits of using ict, lecturers should enable university students to introduce and train students to use ict at home through learning application-based assignments or google. in addition, students can contact or interact with teachers and classmates via instant mobile messages. by using whatsapp groups or facebook (messenger) or other social networks, you can develop an online community of conversations and download english applications such as edictionaries, rosetta stones, or duolingo, and learn english every day. teachers and students can frequently exchange creative multimedia learning tools to enable most icts to learn english in a practical, effective, and efficient manner. muthmainnah, riswanto, santiana, eka apriani, & syafryadin developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 724 references abou shaaban, s. s., shawish, j. i. a., & jalambo, m. o. 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(2017). students’ perceptions of their ict-based college english course in china: a case study. teaching english with technology, 17(3), 53-76. muthmainnah, riswanto, santiana, eka apriani, & syafryadin developing elt materials-ict based amid covid-19 728 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 983 scrutinizing students online learning performance: a case study on student agency martina mulyani english education department, stkip pasundan, jawa barat, indonesia email: martinamulyani@stkippasundan.ac.id alviaderi novianti (corresponding author) english education department, stkip pasundan, jawa barat, indonesia email: alviaderinovianti@stkippasundan.ac.id apa citation: mulyani, m., & novianti, a. (2022). scrutinizing students online learning performance: a case study on student agency. english review: journal of english education, 983-992. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6334 received: 19-06-2022 accepted: 21-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction entering the year 2020, the world is facing a pandemic of corona virus disease (covid-19). all life aspects have changed massively in a blink of an eye. schools as one facility to get an education cannot escape the effects of this pandemic. this significant change has made the education world shift from offline learning to online learning. the way students learn, the way teachers teach, and where and when learning takes place also changed (o’riley, 2014). increasingly, mobile devices equip students to take charge of their learning in a context where learning occurs anywhere, anytime, and with access to a wealth of content and interactive tools. senior high school students are already familiar with this digital world, yet they are still facing some obstacles in online learning, such as technical issues (efriana, 2021; kulal & nayak, 2020; prayudha, 2021; yuzulia, 2021), adaptability struggle to online learning system (martin et al., 2021; mushtahaa et al., 2022), lack of interaction (efriana, 2021; mushtahaa et al., 2022), unconducive learning atmosphere (barrot et al., 2021; kostaki & karayianni, 2022), digital literacy (barrot et al., 2021; efriana, 2021) and many more. despite all these difficulties, they still have to stay motivated to be successful to learn in this new condition. one factor that contributes to student motivation and sustains student learning is student agency. according to bandura, the mediating factor from thoughts to action possesses three main properties; forethought, selfreactiveness, and self-reflectiveness (bandura 2018). it means student agency is the factor underlying the action taken by a student. in a similar vein, reeve & shin (2020) define agency as students’ desire, intention, and sense of purpose to produce intentional and strategic changes in one’s functioning and in one’s surrounding environment or it can be said that agency is the capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change. as agency relates to thought, parry (2016) states that the key characteristic of student agency is a mindset, i.e. a set of beliefs or a way of thinking that determine somebody’s behavior and outlook (silver & stafford, 2017). the term agency in education has been defined in various ways. reeve & shin (2020) define agency as students’ desire, intention, and sense of purpose to produce intentional and strategic changes in one’s functioning and in one’s surrounding environment or it can be said that agency is the capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change. as agency associated with self-efficacy, self-reflective, and desire that underlying the students’ action and abstract: this study aims to recognize the students’ mindset profile and find out how mindset as one of the elements of agency helps senior high school students to cope with difficulties in online learning. this study used a qualitative case study approach involving two students from different senior high schools in cimahi. this study which specifically focused on the mindset of student agency gained its data from observation, interview, and documentation. the results of the analysis revealed that belief in one’s capability is the main element in mindset since it influences one’s attitude towards online learning, achievement in learning, and resilience concerning learning online. regarding to the result of the study, it can be concluded that developing student agency can be started by encouraging students to believe in their capacity. keywords: mindset; online learning; resilience; students’ achievement; students’ agency. martina mulyani & alviaderi novianti scrutinizing students online learning performance: a case study on student agency 984 interaction with their environment so parry (2016) suggests that agency deals with student’s mindset and know how to act in a manner that empowers and positions learners for a lifetime of learning. there are many definitions of mindset. (dweck & yeager, 2019) describes mindset as beliefs that shape someone’s attitude; a set of beliefs or a way of thinking that determine someone’s behavior and outlook. in a similar vein, silver & stafford (2017) state that mindsets are a group of beliefs and attitudes about oneself, the external world, and the interaction between the two. the clearer concept of mindset comes from parry (2016) who posted four characteristics of mindset and its profile. the first characteristic of mindset i believing in oneself or one’s capacity (self-efficacy). it deals with confident perspective of who one is and what one can do. bandura (2018) acknowledged that efficacy beliefs influence how people feel, think, motivate themselves, and behave. students with a strong sense of selfefficacy will work harder, try longer, overcome greater obstacles, and bounce back more quickly from setbacks than their less self-efficacious peers and are more likely to engage in tasks they feel confident in completing successfully and tend to withdraw from tasks for which they lack such confidence (silver & stafford, 2017). furthermore, self-efficacy affects the choices we make, the effort we put forth (how hard we try), our perseverance (how long we persist when we confront obstacles) and our resilience (how quickly we recover from failure or setbacks) (silver & stafford, 2017). the second characteristic of mindset is loving to learn. it deals with someone’s intrinsic motivation, including passionate, curious interest in learning which is driven from inside an individual rather than external rewards. intrinsic motivation comes from within, while extrinsic motivation arises from outside. she also stated that when you’re intrinsically motivated, you engage in an activity solely because you enjoy it and get personal satisfaction from it. those with high self-efficacy often have high motivation and vice versa, but it is not a foregone conclusion. meanwhile, extrinsic motivation is reward-driven behavior (legault, 2016). the third characteristic of mindset is being resilience. it deals with the ability to properly adapt and rebound from stress and adversity or when confronting overwhelming obstacles. according to price-mitchell (2015), children who develop resilience are better equipped to learn from failure and adapt to change. eva et al. (2021) stated that resilient students interpret academic or social challenges in a positive way (such as increasing effort, developing new strategies, or practicing conflict resolution). there are several critical abilities associated with resilience according to eva et al. (2021), including emotional regulation (the ability to keep calm and express emotions in a way that helps the situation), impulse control (making a conscious choice whether to act on a desire to take action, and the ability to delay gratification and persevere), causal analysis (to analyze problems and identify causes accurately), empathy (the ability to understand the feelings and needs of another person), realistic optimism (keeping a positive outlook without denying reality), self-efficacy (belief in one’s ability to solve problems and handle stress), and opportunity seeking (the ability to take new opportunities and reach out to others). furthermore, resilience is significantly influenced by people’s mindsets — their patterns for interpreting events, including why they happen, who is to blame for the difficulty, and what impact a problem will have (eva et al., 2021). the last characteristic of mindset is learning style. it deals with the approach to learning which recognizes the unique strengths, gaps, and preferences of a learner. the learning styles have a significant impact on the way students understand the subject, recall the information and apply it in real life. in the classroom, teachers are expected to design the learning in such a way that can match students’ learning styles. as learners may be more successful when classrooms, either by designed or by chance, are tailored to their learning style. however, it seems quite hard for the teacher to accommodate all types of learning styles. in fact, the crucial skill for independent learners is having an interest and being able to encourage themselves to learn (kopzhassarova et al., 2016). moreover, online platforms may inherently affect learning on a single dimension (visual or auditory) while students with kinesthetic learning style would struggle more than visual or auditory learners (min et al., 2018). in addition to describing the characteristic of student agency, parry (2016) also provides the levels of students’ agency which range from no awareness to agency stage as can be seen in the following table: english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 985 table 1. the characteristic of student agency students’ characteristic no awareness early stages promising stage agency stage belief in oneself and one’s capacity example: nearly every day, i feel others are much more confident and capable than i am in learning situations. example: i am tentative about my confidence and capabilities, but a time or two each week i sense myself feeling or even responding more confidently in learning situations. example: most days of the week, i experience myself feeling or even responding more confidently and capably in learning situations. example: i am confident and capable consistently in a diversity of learning situations love of learning or intrinsic motivation example: nearly every day i am indifferent or even resistant to pursuing new subjects at school. example: often, i am hesitant or tentative about learning new subjects at school. example: more and more i am experiencing a growing interest in pursuing new subjects. example: i am curious and find myself thinking about or even posing questions as i pursue new subjects. resilience example: i react with resistance or avoidance when faced with problems or obstacles. example: sometimes i am comfortable asking my facilitator or peers for assistance when confronted with a problem. example: i can coach myself to consider and pursue alternatives when faced with problems or obstacles. example: i identify and pursue alternatives when faced with problems or obstacles. learning style example: i struggle when it is not my preferred learning format. example: i am gaining an awareness of other learning formats. example: i recognize many of my preferences of learning. example: i understand and apply my preferences of learning and how they can impact my learning. referring to the table, it can be seen from the table that the student agency occupies the highest stage. in terms of mindset, the students are classified to possess agency if they are confident and capable of handling the diversity in learning situations, they have a curiosity to find out the answer to the questions they have about the thing they like, and they always try to find a way out anytime they encounter problems. as it has been known widely that there are some challenges to deal with in online learning, among others the limitation of internet access (hafeez et al., 2022), lack of interaction with the teachers (komang et al., 2021), lack of understanding lesson materials (wiratman & rahmadani, 2022), and lack of supervision because some students may easily lose focus (rahman et al., 2022), and some others tend to procrastinate their learning time (melgaard et al., 2021). the disadvantages of online learning often put students in trouble. they have to struggle and keep their faith in learning. in this kind of situation, students’ agency may determine the success of the students to cope with the challenges in online learning. by far, researches regarding students’ agency show that agency has a major impact on learners’ self-efficacy, identity, motivation, and metacognition—four constructs that are instrumental in determining language learning success, in particular in the distance learning context (teng, 2018). another research was conducted by layali and al-shlowiy (2020) who review the students’ perceptions of e-learning for esl/efl in saudi universities during this coronavirus time. the results revealed students’ positive views, many benefits, and limited drawbacks of e-learning for esl/efl in saudi universities. regarding to the experts’ theory, it can be said that mindset is the core of student agency. a student with growth mindset will be sufficiently motivated to achieve and adequately engaged in martina mulyani & alviaderi novianti scrutinizing students online learning performance: a case study on student agency 986 classroom learning, and their chances of succeeding academically are greatly enhanced (rhew et al., 2018). there are abundant research on online learning in decade discussing the teaching and learning process (adebo, 2018; coman et al., 2020; kulal & nayak, 2020; rahayu & wirza, 2020; roddy et al., 2017; yuzulia, 2021; zboun & farrah, 2021; prayudha, 2021). however, none of them talk about student agency which connects to students’ efforts to adapt to the new habits of learning. this current study is concerned with students’ mindsets as a part of students’ agency towards online learning. the following research questions that need to be addressed 1) what mindset profile do the students have?, and 2) how can mindset as one of the elements of agency help the senior high school students cope with difficulties in online learning? this research is significant due to the importance of student agency in increasing their engagement throughout the teaching and learning process, particularly in online learning as it could boost their academic and social-emotional outcomes. method this qualitative study employs a case study. christensen, l. b., johnson, r. b., & turner (2015) defined case study as the intensive and detailed description and analysis of one or more cases. so, the research procedure must be systematic and well-planned. the procedures in this research are preparation, data collection, and writing of findings. to gain the data. the study got through the preparation stage by determining the participants and asking for their willingness to join the research. in this research, the participants’ activities while learning online were observed and they were also interviewed. it was decided that the participants involved in this study were two students from two different senior high schools in cimahi who represent middle and high achievers in their english subject. the study began the investigation by identifying the agency of the students. through casual conversation, the mindset of the participants can be identified. capturing the role of student agency in sustaining learning, the study held observation and informal interviews with the students and figured out how students with different levels of agency keep their spirit for learning english and overcome the difficulties they experienced during online learning. the topic for the interview was guided by the table from (parry, 2016). results and discussion to get answers to the first research question, the study conducted a casual interview. the followings are data from the casual interview which were used to identify the agency of the two participants. table 2. the characteristic of students’ agency students’ characteristic student 1 student 2 belief in oneself and one’s capacity “my close friends give motivation, when i’m stuck with assignments or problems, i usually listen to my favorite song cause that can also cheer me up again " (azparticipant 1). she rarely asked her classmates for help. "i don’t ask my friends, because they don't understand either." (ra-participant 2) love of learning or intrinsic motivation az did all her tasks to complete all scores. "if there's another subject that i don't like, if i don't understand it, i'll just let it go, the important thing is that i got score" (azparticipant 1). the motivation they have is extrinsic motivation since it is reward-driven behaviour (legault, 2016). this makes them in the early stage of the agency. ra dreamed to enroll her favorit university by jalur prestasi akademik, she had to have good scores in all of her subjects. “i want to get into the university through the invitation. so, i'm excited to learn. in the exam, i try to get score more than 80", "if i take the invitation, it’s just taken from my report, and i think my score is enough. i'm confident".) (ra-participant 2). resilience according to az, the students were being taught to be more active and independent in learning. ra felt that google was her savior to answer all ofher questions. “during the online learning, i taught myself, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 987 students’ characteristic student 1 student 2 "most of the teacher give assignments, explain the material slightly, the rest we do the inquiries. but that's the learning nowaday should be isn't it?" google had also helped her a lot in her online learning activities. "if there is a problem that is difficult, or someone doesn't understand, just google it, or read and read the material in the textbook again, watch the teacher's youtube video again until i understand" (az-participant 1) if there is a video link, i repeat it over and over again, googling too, that's the answer to all the questions, google really helps me. but sometimes i don't really understand, and i still have doubts, i feel something is lacking when it's not the teacher who explains it." she was also able to manage her study time during online learning, “i can manage time so far. although there are a lot of assignments, but i can handle it because most of the deadlines are still long. my schedule is even odd. if there is an assignment that must be done that day, the lesson is usually easy. if there is a task that can be postponed, i will do another task that has a deadline” (ra-participant 2). learning style az knew what her learning prefences were that could make her more focus. "when i study, i don't like to be noisy, so i solved it, so i like studying while listening to music at home. but at school, even though i don't listen to the music, i can be focus, i don't know, maybe because the atmosphere is different.” (az-participant 1). ra realized that she liked learning in a quiet atmosphere “because there are only three of us at home, so no one disturbs me when i have online class. i can be more focused when it's quiet, it's not crowded, when it's crowded, i cannot be focus, but when writing or answering questions i like doint it while listening to the music. i can't do it when it’s too noisy or quiet either, just more comfortable.” (raparticipant 2). the data in table 2 reveal that student 1 and student 2 have different perceptions of self. student 1 should struggle with online learning. however, with the help and encouragement from her teachers and friends, she felt that she would be able to succeed in online learning situations. referring to the level of agency from parry (2016), it can be figured out that in terms of belief in one’s capability, student 1 belongs to the stage of the promising agency. meanwhile, student 2 seems to be more confident about herself and she believed she could succeed in online learning situations. with this reference, student 2 can be considered to be in the agency stage. concerning love to learn or motivation, both participants have extrinsic motivation for learning english. their behaviors of learning were driven by rewards (legault, 2016). they are getting scores from the teacher and being able to pass the university entrance exam. the next element is resilience. both students 1 and 2 can be considered to be in the agency stage, since they seem to be able to find alternatives to solve the problem they face. student 1 found difficulties asking for help from the teachers during online learning so she decided to do googling to search for the solution. meanwhile, student 2 seemed to be a good time manager since she was able to stay calm although she got many tasks to do. in the case of learning style, both participants can tailor their learning situation suit to their learning style. they did some preparations before having a synchoronuous meeting, for example, finding a comfortable seat or space for learning and preparing stationary and notebooks. overall, the two students share almost similar characteristics of students. the difference is in the belief in one’s capacity. student 1 remains in the level of promosing agency while student 2 already sits on the stage of the agency. the second research deals with the way how the student agency can help students sustain their learning. to answer the question, the study held thorough observation of the 2 participants. the observations were conducted for 4 times over more than a month. while observing, an informal interview was also carried out to figure out the students’ voice regarding their attitude towards martina mulyani & alviaderi novianti scrutinizing students online learning performance: a case study on student agency 988 online learning. the result of the observation and interview are as follow: table 3. students’ attitude to online learning online learning s1 s2 preparation she always washed her face and wore casual attire before having a synchronous learning. she always washed her face and frequently wore a uniform. “i just have to prepare myself, with my cellphone. in the past, usually from the evening before going to bed, books were prepared and assignments were also done, if there were any. i just study right at school” “just wear a uniform when zoom, so it's polite if zoom likes to turn on the camera.” while meeting online she mostly attended the class without a camera on. buts she always focused on listening to the teacher’s explanation. "the zoom camera was turned off because it was embarrassing right, at home like that. but if told to turn it on, turn it on.”) she often attended the class with the camera on dan always paid attention to the teacher’s explanation “when studying online, i often take notes on material, especially during zoom meeting” dealing with the task during online learning, the teachers gave her a lot of tasks to do. she often had to struggle to finish the task on time. “when i have a lot of work to do, something goes wrong, at most i ask permission to collect it late,…” besides, she also frequently has trouble comprehending the lesson “in almost all of the lessons during online learning, i didn’t understand the material.” the teachers gave her a lot of tasks to do. therefore, she often felt stressful. however, she managed to do them by collaborating with her friend and handed in punctually sometimes, she would work together with her friends to complete the tasks. “although i've never met, it's easy to mingle and get to know each other easily, i also like to join in when chatting in groups, and if i have trouble with a task, i like to ask my friends via personal chat, like to swap assignments, for example, i'm working on numbers 1 to 5, my friend number 6 to 10 ." then, the completed tasks were sent over google classroom. perception about online learning  she has more tasks to do during online learning "at first i was surprised i didn't expect it, i was also happy to be on vacation from school, but after a while i got irritated with the constant work."  the lesson seemed to be harder to comprehend “in almost all of the lessons, during this online learning, i did not understand the material.” "more teachers give assignments, explain a little, the rest we find out for ourselves. but that's how it should be, isn't it the learning method now?”  she found it difficult to interact with the teacher “now, when i have questions, i have to send private chat to the teacher, whereas, when i want to ask questions, i’m sometimes awkward and afraid of being impolite. so i have my doubts.”  she often experienced trouble in terms of  there are more assignment given during online learning. however, she managed to handle it “so far, i could manage the time, although there’re a lot of assignments”  the bad signal often put her in trouble. “the signal during zoom meetings was sometimes not audible clearly and intermittent.”  it is easier toget good score "the score’s better when it’s online learning, i feel that my score got better."  she can learn anywhere “sometimes, during online learning, it is more flexible and i can do my assignments anywhere.” english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 989 online learning s1 s2 internet signal "i don't have any problems with quotas, there's wifi. but i got some troubles when zoom meetings. sometimes it’s noisy or the signal is bad like that, in the end i asked my friend to discuss anything, or ask for permission to the teacher when it’s getting bad." table 3 above exhibits the findings from observation and interview. referring to the gained data, it can be found that the participants share something in common. yet, in terms of selfbelief, there is a slight difference between s1 and s2. s1 appears to be in the promising agency stage while s2 is likely in the agency stage. s1 seems to be reliant on her friends. she needs her friend's words of encouragement to give her confidence. “my close friends usually motivate me, when i got stuck with the assignments or problems, i just wondering whether i really can’t do it or just being lazy.” (s1) on the other hand, s2 rarely asked her classmates for help. "i don’t ask my friend, because they don’t understand either.” (s2) however, an apparent small difference in association to self-belief seems to have a significant impact on students' achievement. s1 who happens to be in the lower level than s2 in the case of belief in self capability sets short-term goals different from s2 who applies long-term goals for her learning. s1 : “…, the important thing is that there get score from the assignments that i’ve done…” s2 : “i want to get into a university through an invitation. so, i'm excited to learn. in the exam, try to get score more than 80.” this finding supports the theory from (bandura, 2018) who pointed out the influence of agency on people feeling, thoughts, motivation, and behavior. in this case, the student’s belief in their capacity enables them to organize their actions to produce the achievement that suit their wish and the students with a strong sense of self-efficacy will work harder, try longer, and overcome greater obstacles (silver & stafford, 2017). belief in oneself also seems to influence students’ attitudes toward online learning. s1 who is in the promising stage of the agency did not have adequate self-confidence to have meeting with the camera on. this is different from s2 who always sets the camera on while virtual learning. s1 : “the zoom camera was turned off because i was embarrassing right, at home. but if i was told to turn it on, i’ll turn it on”) s2 : “…when zoom meeting, i usually turn on my camera.” in line with this, the data found in this study support the theory from (bandura, 2018) who pointed out the influence of agency on people feeling, thoughts, motivation and behavior. in this case, the student’s belief in their capacity enables them to organize their actions to produce the achievement which suits their wish and the students with a strong sense of self-efficacy will work harder, try longer, and overcome greater obstacles (silver & stafford, 2017) and may have a higher level of goal. the two participants show resilience when finding difficulties during virtual learning. both always access google to find the solution to the problems they encounter during online learning. however, dealing with the task, the result of the interview reveals different ways of handling the task. s1 said that she has to struggle to do a lot of tasks given by the teachers even sometimes she failed to submit them punctually. s1: “when i have a lot of work to do, and i couldn’t finish it, i usually ask for teacher permission to collect it late,…” unlike s1, s2 collaborated with her friends to do a lot of tasks given by the teachers. so that she was able to submit the task on time. s2 : “even though i've never met before but i'm easy to get along with and get to know each other very well, i also like to join in when chatting in groups, and if i have problems with an assignment, i like to ask my friends via personal chat, like to exchange assignments, for example, i'm doing number 1to 5, my friend number 6 martina mulyani & alviaderi novianti scrutinizing students online learning performance: a case study on student agency 990 to 10. then, the completed tasks were sent over google classroom.” the data reveal that s2 who has a higher level of the agency has better alternatives in coping with the challenges in virtual learning compared with s1. this finding goes online with bandura (2018) who suggested students’ belief in their capacity allow them to organize their actions to gain the expected result. in this case, a student with a higher agency can overcome the obstacle by finding out the alternatives solution for the problems faced during online learning (fauzi & asri, 2022; silver & stafford, 2017b). while the with a lower agency tends to consider the problem herself, and when she knows that it is not going to work, she goes in search of an alternative by asking for tolerance from the teacher. the result of the interview and observation illustrates the learning achievement of the participants. the participant with a level of agency in the belief of her capacity is likely to have self-confidence so that she liked to be on cam while learning, set long-term goals for learning, and find more alternatives in dealing with difficulties in learning. this is in line with the statement acknowledged by vaughn et al (2020) that the student with strong selfperceptions and beliefs in their roles, they tend to have confidence and are capable of taking decisions and taking action in learning events. however, having agency is important as it helps them to direct their own learning and to adapt with new environments (zeiser et al., 2018). on the other hand, the participant who is in the lower stage of agency seems to be insecure and needs encouragement from her surroundings. as the result, she felt uncomfortable being on camera during a synchronous meeting, set only short-term goals for learning, and ask for tolerance from teacher for the late submission. it is in line with the result of the study carried out by luo et al (2019) that a low level of student agency led to lower performance and evaluation ratings also their attitude toward learning. referring to the findings, it can be said that believing in one own capacity is the main element in mindset since it influences one’s attitude towards online learning, achievement in learning, and resilience concerning learning online. conclusion this study describes the student agency in sustaining student learning. the students’ agency involves a mindset which contains belief in one’s capacity, resilience, love of learning/motivation, and learning style. this research points out that belief in one’s capacity is likely to be the main element in mindset as this element influences one’s attitude towards learning online, achievement in learning, and resilience concerning learning online. therefore, developing student agency can be started by believing in oneself. acknowledgement first and foremost, all praise to allah swt for his blessings, throughout completing this research. deep and sincere gratitude was also expressed to all the research contributors for facilitating and providing writers’ research site and participants, thus, the writers could undertake the research smoothly. in addition, to all the research participants who had voluntarily spared the time and opportunity for the writer to collect the research data, thank you. references adebo, p. 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(2018). maximizing student agency: implementing and measuring student-centered learning practices. american institutes for research. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 453 the problem faced by students of islamic education in reading islamic comprehension text nyayu yayu suryani stik siti khadijah palembang,indonesia email: nyayu.ys@stikes-sitikhadijah.ac.id apa citation: suryani, n. y. (2022). the problem faced by students of islamic education in reading islamic comprehension text. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 453-464. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6246 received: 06-02-2022 accepted: 24-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction for a long time, reading comprehension issues have been a common difficulty in efl classrooms. reading and comprehension are inextricably linked because comprehension is the primary objective of reading (maulani & rachmanita, 2022). the reading part of the english course is on understanding the information and answering the questions (asmara, muhammad, & almubarokah, 2022). according to various studies, the majority of efl students have difficulty comprehending english texts (kasim & raisha, 2017). nanda and azmy (2020) explained that indonesian efl students have poor reading comprehension performance due to the lack of vocabulary, prior knowledge and motivation. reading is one of the four essential language abilities to achieve in learning from elementary to tertiary levels. furthermore, it is a skill that every student needs to have together with some others, namely listening, writing, and speaking because the four skills are related to each other. reading is complex because it involves many processes that must be skilfully coordinated, such as controlling eye movements, word recognition, giving a representation of the sentence’s meaning, and deciding what to do with the information being read (cornoldi, & oakhill, 2013; evenddy, nurlely, & marfu'ah, 2021). pourhosein gilakjani & sabouri (2016) likewise explained that reading is a collaborative activity that readers need to utilize in order to construct a meaningful representation of a text. the existence of prior knowledge about the assigned text (certain topic) can help the readers to construct the meaning (rusmiati, fitriani, & zakaria, 2021). background knowledge plays a vital role in students’ reading comprehension (rizqon, andreani, & astuti, 2021). effective reading techniques are important skills that have received a lot of attention in terms of improving students' reading comprehension. larasaty & fitriyani (2022) stated that in order to understand text, a reader must be able to identify words rapidly, know the meaning of almost all of the words and be able to combine units of meaning into a coherent message. reading with understanding and comprehension is an essential skill, thereby it should be mastered (spiro, bruce, & brewer, 2017). reading is a cognitive process that involves the interaction of the reader's prior knowledge and the printed text. students might not be able to comprehend the text if they do not have enough background knowledge to comprehend the text (rizqon, et al., 2021). reading may be inferred from the above definitions that it is a cognitive and abstract: students are often concerned with accuracy in pronouncing words when reading and not entirely focused on the content of what is being read. this study aims to find out the problems faced in reading comprehension (islamic reading text) by employing descriptive quantitative approaches. the method used in this study was the descriptive quantitative which translates data into numbers.the sample was 59 students of the islamic education study program raden fatah islamic state university palembang. furthermore, the data were gathered by using test and questionnaire as the instrument via google form. the result showed that most students failed reading comprehension assessments due to a lack of vocabulary, poor grammatical proficiency, difficulty in understanding long phrases and material, lack of media learning or family assistance, and lack of information about reading comprehension. in conclusion, the data obtained from the test showed that the islamic students still have difficulties in reading comprehension tests. keywords: reading comprehension; problem faced; islamic reading text. nyayu yayu suryani the problem faced by students of islamic education in reading islamic comprehension text 454 affective process of decrypting and comprehending written text in order to obtain the writer's message (yusthi, 2016). it means that, according to pratama (2019), reading skills can assist students with reading a book in a range of categories, which can help them achieve a lot in their activities, such as success in school, university, or other educational institutions. besides, as stated by calet, pérezmorenilla, & de los santos-roig (2019), reading comprehension is one of the most important transversal skills for the achievement of success in both school and society. according to roe & burns cited in rachmatia (2016), the types examples of reading comprehension questions: (1) a main idea question inquires about the selection's central theme; (2) a detail question is one that asks for specific details from the material;(3) a sequence question necessitates an understanding of events in their chronological order; (4) a cause-and-effect question identifies a cause and asks questions about its effect, or identifies an effect and asks questions about its cause; (5) an inference question seeks information from the passage that is indicated but not explicitly stated; (6) a vocabulary question asks questions about the definition of a word or phrase that appears in the selection. factor that causes students to struggle with understanding what they are reading is poor concentration. this is because, the ability to focus is a key factor for good and effective reading, which eventually leads to text comprehension (hidayati, 2018). the problems that indonesians experience in their learning activities, which limit learners' comprehension, and how to approach at pedagogy from a larger perspective on reading theories. it was discovered that the students lacked a basic understanding of the language system, lacked reading techniques, and had difficulty distinguishing between different types of reading comprehension. as bulut (2017) pointed out that reading comprehension is a multi-step process that involves the reader's vocabulary knowledge, textual interaction, and application of comprehension strategies. the findings revealed that cultural background, english teaching and learning processes, and teaching and learning methodologies all influence the difficulties and problems that indonesians encounter (sahmadan, 2020). the studies showed that the majority of learners fail with reading comprehension in five aspects. the reading comprehension problems related to the reading comprehension process were the percentage average of each element from highest to lowest. as mentioned by styati & khasanah (2022), reading activity needs a strategy and media to help the students understand the meaning of words in the text the second problem is motivation. students' lack of motivation can cause lack of interest in reading so that it fosters a sense of laziness (gunawan, 2022). the third problem has become one of background knowledge. the fourth problem is about a lack of reading strategies. last problems is language knowledge (febriani, elfrida, & jayanti, 2019). besides, teachers need to employ a range of strategies such as increasing students' vocabulary as garcia-castro (2020) mentioned that having limited vocabulary has been a problem for efl students, motivating them, and introducing new literacy teaching methods in order to address the issues and to broaden their knowledge of approaches used in the teaching and learning process (tuhumury, 2020). previous studies that relates with the difficulties in reading include shehu (2015) which stated that students of english language matura exam at albanian high colleges struggle with each bottomup and top-down techniques. hence, it is indispensable to motivate students, specifically foreign language students, to be examined as much as possible because this will noticeably help their language learning process. secondly, mentioned that the factors that contribute to poor english comprehension, include a lack of vocabulary, a tendency of cramming, and a lack of interest in learning creativity in reading, especially when the sole objective is not to write an exam. semantics was the most significant reading comprehension problem, with 81 percent of the respondents identifying unfamiliar terminology as their main difficulty in interpreting english texts (kasim & raisha, 2017). the students at jordan's yarmouk university experience a variety of reading difficulties, including confusing words, new language, with a finite amount of time to think and comprehend the material. this findings is also valuable to jordanian policymakers in improving the joy of students’ reading (qarqez, 2017). dara (2019) stated that despite the fact that the ministry of education, youth and sport had integrated this subject into the state curriculums for lower secondary to tertiary educations since 1993, the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 455 findings revealed that lack of language knowledge and motivation were the primary causes of english reading problems, with student personality, learning methods, and teacher personalities acting as a shadow behind the issues. furthermore, the study conducted by hamza aljarrah (2018) reveals that the main problem faced by arab efl students is their inability to detect different forms of text which have an impact on their english language skills and academic achievement. torppa, vasalampi, eklund, sulkunen, & niemi (2020) stated that reading comprehension problems are frequently separate from reading fluency problems. three studying challenge groups were then identified, namely poor readers who have difficulty with both fluency and analyzing comprehension (n = 46, 3.5 percent), gradual readers with solely fluency difficulties (n = 70, 5.3 percent), and negative comprehenders who just have problems with reading comprehension (n = 88, 6.5 percent). from the analysis, only readingrelated motivation was once low amongst sluggish readers. while in math and science, there is a lack of motivation also noted through weak comprehenders and readers (torppa et al., 2020). the majority of students' issues in reading comprehension, according to satriani (2018), students difficulty in reading comprehension due to a lack of desire in their reading habits, since the students read little or nothing. the ability of kids to comprehend a reading text is seen as a challenge. another student's reading comprehension issues come from a lack of reading ability. the learners expressed their dissatisfaction with the fact that they had to study hard in order to retain the information they had just read. they will also require a significant period of time to read the content in order to solve their difficulty. one of the learners' problems in understanding the reading text is too difficult reading material. they are unfamiliar with the reading content, and grammatical intricacy is also a factor in their failure to interpret the text correctly. referring to nurmalasari & haryudin (2021), students feeling trouble when they want to interpreting a text, because they have less knowledge of translating every word and then find the main idea of the text they read, they cannot conclude and answering the questions. the teacher has a responsibility to provide, select or create texts that are appropriate with the lesson plans and students' abilities, design of reading assignments that are useful for students to understand reading texts, organize effective learning activities, and create a supportive environment for practicing reading (setiawati & budiasih, 2021). in 2013 ef survey, reading achievement in indonesia is still low. the national reading index of 2019 (solihin, utama, pratiwi, & novirina, 2019) states that the indonesian students’ reading literacy level on indonesian text is categorized as low literacy level. then, the pisa 2018 score for indonesia in reading is 371 (oecd, 2018). this score is considered below average because the average score in pisa 2018 is 453. students should first focus on reading fluency to solve the problem of reading comprehension achievement. there is a correlation between reading fluency and comprehension. according to many researchers, they claimed that while fluency is an important aspect of the reading curriculum, but teachers are unaware of it (rachmatia, 2016). the studies above have similarity and differences, but they all focus on the students’ difficulties in reading. in summary, the first study shows that students’ problems are related to bottomup and top-down techniques, while the second shows that students’ problems are related to a lack of vocabulary, a tendency of cramming, and a lack of interest in learning creativity in reading. the third shows that the problem is related to interpreting english texts, while the fourth explains that the problems are related to confusing words, new language, and limited time to cognitively comprehend the reading material (iqbal, noor, muhabat, & kazemian, 2015). the fifth shows that the problem is related to the students' inability to detect different forms of text and the sixth explains that the problems are related to reading fluency. this study and the previous ones focused on the same topics about the students’ difficulties in reading comprehension. however, it further seeks to determine other problems of non-efl students’ in reading comprehension. the problems are they sometimes feel difficult when students have to comprehend the texts, how to pronounce the word correctly, mastering the vocabulary, connect the word ideas, the topics of the texts that serve in different culture, inferring the information, differentiate the main ideas and supporting ideas in the texts, and also find the strategies to find relate topic based on their own knowledge or experience. this is related with pang nyayu yayu suryani the problem faced by students of islamic education in reading islamic comprehension text 456 in sholeh, rosalina, & weganofa (2020), as they believed that understanding of text comes from the interaction between the written words and how they activate knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical of knowledge, experience with text and other strategies to help them understand the provided passage by teachers. also, teachers are suggested to apply some various models and strategies that give language experience and enthusiasm for language learners (alshumaimeri, 2017). furthermore, the result also showed the strategies they used to help them in reading problems, the strategies are using dictionary and context clues, using some reading strategies; using scanning and skimming techniques, and trying to predict the content (riadil, 2020). the three key themes that students faced in reading comprehension of english material were: (1) problems from the student; (2) problems from the teacher; and (3) external problems. the student's problems are divided into three categories: fundamental english competence, lack of interest in the subject, and lack of motivation (ganie, deliana, & rangkuti, 2019). another term used to describe reading comprehension components is the activation of past knowledge. some students are aware of this but are not able to activate such ability, which makes it difficult for them to comprehend the material. in terms of reading comprehension, vocabulary is also significant. to address these issues, beside so many kinds of the strategy in reading comprehension, the researcher should know what are the most problematic parts of reading islamic text that students face and what are the most problematic factors of reading comprehension. method the method used in this study is the descriptive quantitative which translates data into numbers in order to analyze the findings. the total sample was 59 students of the islamic education study program raden fatah islamic state university palembang and the data were gathered by using islamic reading text test and questionnaire as the instrument via google form. the students were given a reading test by the researcher to determine their reading comprehension. the researcher used the reading test to see if the students could answer the questions correctly. the students' correct and incorrect answers were utilized to determine whether they found the problems or not. the writer used one islamic reading text to obtain the information. 40 question multiple-choice test was administered by the researcher. this test is a method of collecting data through questions that must be answered, or tasks that must be carried out by the subject being tested. the interpretation of problem was classify ; 0-30 (easy), 30-70 (fair), 71-100 (difficult) (arikunto, 1998) furthermore, multiple choice type of reading test and arikunto's scale were used to calculate the results as seen below: s = r x 100% n where: s = correct percentage r = correct answers n = total questions the reading test includes the six aspects of comprehension namely details, main idea, inference, cause and effect, reference, and sequence. the writer also uses the test concerning vocabulary while the specification of the reading comprehension test is presented in table 1 below: table 1. specification of reading comprehension test indicators items total find out detail information in a txt 8,17,24,29,37, 40 6 find out the main ideas in the text 1,10,20,31 4 describing reference 2,23,39 3 find out sequence of the text 5,7,14,22,32,3 5 6 find out cause-effect in the text 3,16,26,36 4 to find out the inference of a reading text 4,12,15,18,27, 30,34 7 describing the meaning of words and terminology in the text 6,9,11,13,19,2 1,25,28,38 10 total 40 the distribution of questionnaires to students was a technique to obtain more conclusive information on the factors affecting students' reading comprehension problems. one method of determining the factors causing students' reading comprehension difficulties was to use a questionnaire. in this case, the questionnaire form was concluded with an alternative answer that the student would select. in this study, questionnaire was used via google form to gather data from people. it may be printed on paper, on a tablet, by text message, or online, and it may contain many sorts of questions (kara, 2018). the data was collected using a google form, and the scoring was english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 457 done using four option likert scale consist of never, sometimes, frequently, and always. the researcher used a questionnaire as one of the supporting tools to identify students' perceptions, opinions, problems, and reading comprehension abilities. in this example, the questionnaire form was concluded with an alternate answer that the students may select. only the best answers that are appropriate for them were chosen by the students. the students had to accurately respond to 9 questions on the questionnaire. the writers additionally give the students one essay question and some of their solutions to support the exam and questionnaire related to the students' problem with reading text. findings and discussion the goal of this study is to discover the students' difficulties in reading comprehension by giving test to know their ability, hence the result is presented as follow: the analysis of test the students’ incorrect answers in finding out detailed information the question items for finding detailed information are in number 8, 17, 24, 29, 37, and 40. also, the detailed information of calculated percentage in answering is seen in the table 2 below: table 2. the students’ incorrect answers in finding out detailed information no question items’ number the number of incorrect answers percentage of question item the percentage of reading for finding out detailed information 1 8 41 68% 67% (fair) 2 17 41 68% 3 24 31 52% 4 29 52 86% 5 37 30 50% 6 40 46 76% according to table 2, 41 students with an equivalent percentage of 68% of the total population answered question number 8 and 17 incorrectly, hence the query is classified as fair. also, 31 of the students (52%) answered question number 24 incorrectly, hence, it is classified as fair. question number 29 is answered by 52 of the students (86%), hence the percentage is labeled as difficult. question number 37 is answered by 30 students (50%), hence it is labeled as fair. meanwhile, question number 40 is answered by 46 students (76%), and the percentage is classified as difficult. based on the calculation of the proportion of difficulty, it was observed that the tough item share for this type of question was solely 67% out of 4 items which indicates that the questions are classified honest for college students in finding out the detailed information. it can be concluded that the questions are categorized fair questions for students’ answers in finding out detailed information. the students’ incorrect answers for determining the main idea the question items for getting the main idea are questioning in number 1, 10, 20, and 31 and the calculation of the percentage in answering the main idea is seen in the table 3 below: table 3. the students’ incorrect answers for determining the main idea no question items’ number the number of incorrect answers percentage of question item the percentage of reading for main idea 1 1 10 17% 46% (fair) 2 10 17 28% 3 20 45 75% 4 31 39 65% according to table 3, 10 of the students (17%) answered question number 1 incorrectly, hence the percentage is classified as easy. also, 17 students (28%) answered question number 10 incorrectly, and it is classified as easy. 45 students (75%) answered query number 20 incorrectly, and it is labeled as difficult, meanwhile question number 31 is answered by 39 students (65%), and it is labeled as fair. based on this calculation of the percentage of difficulty, the tough item share for this kind of question was solely 46% out of four items, hence it is categorized as fair for the students. it can be concluded that the questions are categorized fair questions for students’ answers for determining the main idea. the students’ incorrect answers for describing references the question items used for describing references are in number 2, 23, and 39 and the calculation of the percentage are seen in the table 4 below: table 4. the students’ incorrect answers for describing references no question the number percentage the nyayu yayu suryani the problem faced by students of islamic education in reading islamic comprehension text 458 items’ number of incorrect answers of question item percentage of reading for describing references 1 2 26 43% 56% (fair) 2 23 37 62% 3 39 37 62% the result above reveals that 26 of the students (43%) answered question number 2 incorrectly, which indicates that the questions are labeled as fair. furthermore, 37 of the students (62%) answered question range 23 and 39 incorrectly, and they are both labeled as fair. based on this calculation of the percentage of difficulty, the challenging proportion for this kind of question was solely 56% out of four questions items and are categorized as fair for students answers in describing references. it can be concluded that the questions are categorized fair questions for students’ answers for describing references. the students’ incorrect answers for finding out sequence of text the items for determining the find out sequence of text are the questions in number 5, 7, 14, 22, 32 and 35. the calculation of the percentage in answering are seen in the table 5 below: table 5. the students’ incorrect answers for finding out sequence of text n o questi on items’ number the number of incorrect answers percentage of question item the percentage of reading for finding out sequence of text 1 5 11 18,3% 39% (fair) 2 7 41 68,3% 3 14 12 20% 4 22 31 52% 5 32 20 33,3% 6 35 24 40% according to table 5, 11 of the students (18.3%) answered question number 5 incorrectly, hence it is categorized as fair. also, 41 students (68.3%) answered question number 7 incorrectly, hence they are categorized as fair. 12 students (20%) answer questions number 14 incorrectly, hence they are categorized fair. 31 students (52%) answer question number 22 incorrectly, hence they are categorized fair. 20 students (33.3%) answer question number 32 incorrectly, hence they are categorized fair. and 24 students (40%) answer question number 35 incorrectly, hence they are categorized as fair. based on the calculation of this percentage of difficulty, the challenging proportion for this kind of question was solely 39% out of four questions items, hence it is categorized as fair for students answers for finding out sequence of text. it can be concluded that the questions are categorized fair questions for students’ answers for finding out sequence of text. the students’ incorrect answer for determining cause and effect the question items for getting the cause and effect are found in number 3, 16, 26 and 36. while the calculation of the percentage in answering cause and effect are presented in table 6 below: table 6. the students’ incorrect answers for getting cause and effect n o question items’ number the number of incorrect answers percen tage of questio n item the percentage of reading for cause and effect 1 3 13 22% 49% (fair) 2 16 29 48% 3 26 38 63% 4 36 39 65% according to table 6, 13 of the students (22%) answered question number 3 incorrectly, hence the percentage is categorized as easy. furthermore, 29 of the students (48%) answered question number 16 incorrectly, hence it is categorized as fair. 38 of the students (63%) answered question number 26 incorrectly, and it is categorized as fair. question number 36 is answered by 39 of the students (65%), hence the potential is categorized as fair. based on the calculation of the percentage of difficulty, it was found that the challenging item percentage for this type of query was only 49% out of four questions items. hence, the questions are categorized as fair for students’ answers concerning cause and effect. it can be concluded that the questions are categorized fair questions for students’ answers for getting cause and effect the students’ incorrect answers for getting inference of text the question items for getting inference of text are in number 4, 12, 15, 18, 27, 30 and 34. while the calculation of the percentage is seen in the table 7 below: table 7. the students’ incorrect answers for getting inference of text no question items’ number the number of incorrect answers percentage of question item the percentage of reading answering inference of text english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 459 1 4 22 37% 62% (fair) 2 12 20 33% 3 15 7 12% 4 18 32 53% 5 27 32 53% 6 30 35 58% 7 34 33 55% according to table 7, 22 of the students (37%) answered question number 4 incorrectly, hence the percentage is categorized as easy. furthermore, 20 of the students (33%) answered question number 12 incorrectly, it is therefore categorized as fair. 7 of the students (12%) answered question number 15 incorrectly, and this capacity is categorized as fair. also, 32 of the students (53%) answered question number 18 and 27 incorrectly, hence the potential is categorized as fair. 35 of the students (58%) answered question number 30 incorrectly and it is categorized as fair and 33 of the students (55%) answered question number 34 incorrectly, hence the percentage is categorized as fair. based on the calculation of this percentage of difficulty, the challenging item for this type of query was only 49% out of four questions items and are categorized as fair for students in answers for getting inference of text. it can be concluded that the questions are categorized as fair questions for students’ answers for getting inference of text. the students’ incorrect answers for getting the meaning of words the question items for getting the meaning of words are seen in number 6, 9, 11, 13, 19, 21, 25, 28, and 38, while the calculation of the percentages are shown in the table 8 below: table 8. the students’ incorrect in answering meaning of words no questio n items’ number the number of incorrect answers percentage of question item the percentage of reading answering inference of text 1 6 12 20% 40% (fair) 2 9 44 73% 3 11 10 17% 4 13 14 23% 5 19 41 68% 6 21 33 55% 7 25 18 30% 8 28 30 15% 9 38 34 57% according to table 8, question number 6 is answered by 12 of the college students (20%), and this capacity is categorized as fair. also, question number 9 is answered by 44 students (73%), and it is categorized as difficult. 10 of the college students (17%) answered question number 11 correctly, hence the percentage is categorized as fair. likewise, 14 of the students (23%) answered question number 13 incorrectly, hence this percentage is classified as fair. 41 of the students (68%) answered question variety 19 incorrectly, and the percentage is categorized as fair. question number 21 is answered by 33 of the students (55%), hence it is categorized as fair. furthermore, question number 25 is answered by 18 students (30%), and the percentage is categorized as fair. question number 28 was answered by 30 of the students (15%), hence it is categorized as fair. the last question quantity 38 is answered by 34 of the college students (57%), and the potential is categorized as fair. based on the calculation of the proportion of difficulty, the difficult item percentage for this kind of question is only 40% out of 4 questions items, which means that the questions are categorized as fair for college students in answering the meaning of words. it can be concluded that the questions are categorized fair questions for students’ answers in meaning of words. the most common reading comprehension issue was semantics, with 81 percent of participants citing unfamiliar vocabulary as the most difficult aspect of comprehending english texts (kasim & raisha, 2017). the analysis of the questionnaire to comprehend the students’ perception about their problems in studying test, some of the questionnaires have been distributed to the students. this questions includes (a) students’ grasp about the vocabulary of the text; (b) students’ understanding about the intent of the text; (c) students’ difficulty in the awareness of the text; (d) students’ understanding about the strategies of studying the text; (e) students’ motivation from the family in reading english text; (f) students’ issue in finding out the main idea of the text; (g) students’ perception of the grammatical structure of the text; (h) students’ understanding about the context of the text (i) students’ difficulty in determining inferences of the text; (j) students’ problem in islamic reading text. the result of questionnaire can be considered in the table 8 below: table 8. the students’ problem in reading comprehension nyayu yayu suryani the problem faced by students of islamic education in reading islamic comprehension text 460 questionn aire vocabul ary intent concentra tion strategies motivatio n main idea grammat ical context inference always 10.7% 14.3 % 16.1 % 16.1 % 39.3 % 10.7 % 12.7 % 7.1 % 7.1 % often 25 % 55.4 % 41.1 % 32.1 % 14.3 % 42.9 % 63.6 % 35.7 % 44.6 % seldom 55.4 % 23.2 % 26.8 % 42.9 % 32.1 % 32.1 % 21.8 % 50 % 37.5 % never 8.9 % 7.1 % 16.1 % 8.9 % 14.3 % 14.3 % 1.8 % 7.1 % 10.7 % based on the table above, there are several problems in reading comprehension including vocabulary, intent, concentration, strategies, motivation, main idea, grammar, content, and inference. for example, 55.4% seldom and often have problem with vocabulary and intent respectively. meanwhile, 26.8%, 42.9%, and 39.3% seldom have problem with concentration, reading strategies, and motivation respectively. 42.9% and 63.6% often have problem with main idea and grammar. also, 50% seldom have problem with context, and 44.6 % often have problem with inference. to support the test and questionnaire related to the students’ problem in reading text, the writers also give one essay question to the students and some of their responses include: table 9. students’ responses of the questionnaire i am not fluent in english, it causes me difficulty in understanding the meaning contained in the text it's hard to understand the meaning of a text in interpreting the text, i do not understand the deep meaning of the text because the time is no enough. long texts make me have a little difficulty in interpreting, sometimes there are also some words that i do not know the meaning. i often fails to understand the reading of vocabulary that has just been seen, hence it is difficult to understand and translate the english long texts when reading i have difficulty in determining the main idea of the discussion, conclusions, and substitute words it's hard to understand the language because i do not understand english due to lack of vocabulary mastery, lack of understanding of grammar, limited time in terms of mention deal with the issue, a directed reading activity (dra) technique was proposed to help students improve their reading comprehension. according to the findings of the data analysis, students in man 1 pekanbaru improved their reading comprehension by 71.37 % after receiving treatment. it meant that employing the directed reading activity technique had a considerable effect on students' reading comprehension. as a result, directed reading activity can be used in the classroom as an alternative strategy for improving students' reading comprehension. (yusniar, 2021). students should initially focus on reading fluency to overcome the problem of reading comprehension accomplishment. there is a relationship between reading fluency and comprehension, according to many academics. they claimed that while fluency is an important aspect of the reading curriculum, teachers are unaware of it. this article suggests the readers theater technique as a way to increase reading fluency and comprehension, as well as briefly describe how the readers theater strategy might be used to efl students (rachmatia, 2016). thamrin & agustin (2019) found that in universitas kuningan, the phenomena of conceptual variants on reading comprehension was studied using the higher order thinking skill (hots) approach, which describes how the hots technique increases students' ability to comprehend academic reading texts. according to pourhosein gilakjani & sabouri (2016a) as cited in qarqez (2017) efl students benefit from reading strategies to help them understand what they're reading. some of the key aspects influencing reading comprehension are the learners' vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, and grammatical knowledge (wang & koda, 2007). reading strategy has a big influence on how well readers understand what they're reading. reading strategies can help both experienced and inexperienced readers improve their reading skills. readers employ a variety of reading methods and are aware of when, how, and why they should be used during the reading comprehension process(ahmadi & gilakjani, 2012). students' success in answering comprehension questions is influenced by the level of questions designed according to bloom's taxonomy(veeravagu et al., 2010). laoli (2021) stated that the kwl strategy can improve students' reading comprehension in the second language acquisition (sla) subject. based on the findings of the study, the researcher proposes that the kwl technique be used to activate students' reading comprehension on a regular basis. conclusion in conclusion, the data obtained from the test showed that the islamic students still have difficulties in reading comprehension tests. this is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 461 seen from the result of the question items whose percentage. this percentages of the students answers in reading comprehension were categorized as fair. this study also highlighted why the learners have difficulty with certain problems. for example, the majority of students difficulty with reading comprehension assessments is due to a lack of vocabulary, poor grammatical proficiency, difficulty in understanding long phrases and material, dearth of knowledge about reading comprehension, as well as a lack of media learning or personal involvement. references ahmadi, m. r., & gilakjani, a. p. 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(2018). reading comprehension difficulties encountered by english students of universitas islam riau. journal of english for academic, 5(2), 15–26. setiawati, m. d. a., & budiasih. (2021). strategies on teaching reading comprehension for the junior high school students during the covid-19 pandemic. ijretal international journal of research on english teaching and applied linguistics, 2(2), 15-25. shehu, i. (2015). reading comprehension problems encountered by foreign language students, case study: albania, croatia. academic journal of interdisciplinary studies, 4(1), 91–96. https://doi.org/10.5901/mjss.2015.v4n1s1p91 solihin, l., utama, b., pratiwi, i., & novirina. (2019). indeks aktivitas literasi membaca 34 provinsi. jakarta: pusat penelitian kebijakan pendidikan dan kebudayaan, badan penelitian dan pengembangan, kementerian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. spiro, r. j., bruce, b. c., & brewer, w. f. (2017). theoretical issues in reading comprehension: perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence and education. routledge. styati, e. w., and khasanah, r. (2021). the impact of task-based activities in reading skill for the students during covid 19 pandemic. j. eng. educ. society. 7(1), 18-26. doi:10.21070/jees.v7i1.1532 thamrin, n. r., & agustin, s. (2019). conceptual variations on reading comprehension through higher order thinking skills (hots) strategy. english review: journal of english education, 7(2), 93. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v7i2.1777 torppa, m., vasalampi, k., eklund, k., sulkunen, s., & niemi, p. (2020). reading comprehension difficulty is often distinct from difficulty in reading fluency and accompanied with problems in motivation and school well-being. educational psychology, 40(1), 62–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2019.1670334 tuhumury, g. n. (2020). teachers’ strategiesin teaching reading at junior high schools in sirimau subdistrict : problems and solutions. matai international journal of language education, 1(1), 50–59. veeravagu, j., muthusamy, c., marimuthu, r., & subrayan, a. (2010). canadian social science using bloom’s taxonomy to gauge students’ reading comprehension performance utiliser la taxonomie de bloom pour evaluer les performances de comprehension ecrite des eleves. jeyamahla veeravagu chittra muthusamy; rasaya marimuthucanadian social science, 66(33), 205–212. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 463 www.cscanada.net%5cnwww.cscanada.org wang, m., & koda, k. (2007). commonalities and differences in word identification skills among learners of english as a second language. language learning, 57(1), 201–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679922.2007.00416.x yusniar. 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(2016). teaching reading comprehension in recount text by using teaching reading comprehension in recount text by using zooming in and zooming out (zizo) strategy to the eighth to the eighth grade students of smp sriguna palembang. edukasi jurnal pendidikan dan pengajaran, 3(2), 132–146. nyayu yayu suryani the problem faced by students of islamic education in reading islamic comprehension text 464 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 843 four strategies in teaching speaking during covid -19 pandemic at sma n 04 palembang aprilia sari rahayu master program in language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: apriliasarirahayu01@gmail.com eryansyah eryansyah (corresponding author) master program in language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: eryansyah@unsri.ac.id margaretha dinar sitinjak master program in language education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, palembang, indonesia email: magiedinar@yahoo.com apa citation: rahayu, a. s., eryansyah, e., & sitinjak, m. d. (2022). four strategies in teaching speaking during covid-19 pandemic at sma n 04 palembang. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 843-854. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.7089 received: 21-07-2022 accepted: 20-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction english is an international language widely used in the word, it is used as communication tool either oral or written. twenty percent of the population around the world speaks english. english has become a native, second or foreign language in many countries (srinivas, 2019). nowadays, english is still used in the field of education, tourism, science, diplomacy, computer technology, business, entertainment and media at the international level. english is also often used as a language of instruction in the development of communications, technology, internet and software which are the main needs of the 21st century era (arodjiah, 2020; chriscaden, 2020; suryahadi et al., 2020). english is used as a foreign language in indonesia. in indonesian current curriculum, the 2013 curriculum, english is a compulsory subject from junior high to university level (susiati & mufidati, 2020). it shows that to learn english is important, especially in the world of education. english as a foreign language has the meaning that english is only used and is domiciled as a learning in an educational institution, both formal educational institutions and non-formal educational institutions and is used as a language in social life and in daily life interactions, but does not become a language basis in a country (daka, 2020; villafuerte & mosquera, 2020). in indonesia's curriculum, there are four skills that must be mastered in the english teaching and learning process. those are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. from those four skills, speaking becomes a priority for most efl learners (alzamil, 2021). since the covid-19 abstract: teaching and learning activities for speaking at sma n 04 palembang were conducted online, as one of the efforts to suppress the spread of covid-19. the process of teaching and learning speaking online was conducted was through a web-based application and internet network. in situations like this, teachers had a very important role because they were the ones responsible for motivating, guiding, and correcting mistakes made by students when speaking english. therefore, teachers of this school had to think critically and use appropriate strategies to ensure that the teaching process during online learning ran well. the purpose of this study was to describe teacher's strategies of sma n 04 palembang in teaching speaking during the current covid-19 pandemic. this study used a qualitative narrative inquiry method. the participants in this study were four english teachers in sma n 04 palembang. data collection techniques in this study were observation and interviews. the results showed that the teachers at sma n 04 palembang used four strategies, namely roleplaying, storytelling, discussion and reporting. thus, from those strategies, roleplaying and storytelling seemed to be the most commonly used as they were considered to improve students’ english speaking skills during online learning. keywords: covid-19 pandemic; speaking; teacher strategy. aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak four strategies in teaching speaking during covid-19 pandemic at sma n 04 palembang 844 pandemic is happening all around the world, the way of teaching process has changed tremendously, from offline to online basis. face to face learning is replaced by onlsine learning in many parts of the world (fansury et al., 2020). chatarina muliana as expert staff of the minister of education and culture of indonesia in 2020 states that due to the pandemic of covid 19 social distance and temporary closing of the most educational sector are the best strategies against a wider spread of the disease. all activities in educational institutions and all material delivered needed to be delivered by online learning platforms at this time of pandemic. the learning process must be carried out at home by utilizing web-based applications like zoom, google meet, whatsapp etc. learning at home is one of the alternative ways of learning process continues during covid-19 pandemic (sikirit, 2020; suryadi, 2019; sutarto et al., 2020). in the learning process, teachers’ role as professional educators is extremely important. the key in achieving success of the teaching process is that teachers must be able to arrange effectively the material which is relevant to the needs as well as applied various appropriate strategies in teaching speaking during online learning. teachers should be able to develop appropriate methods in the learning process, understand the needs of students and be able to master ict during this time (caena & redecker, 2019). learning english properly can be achieved by mastering the language skills. one of productive skills which is very important to be mastered by english learners is speaking skill. speaking is considered a significant skill to be mastered by students in terms of communication needs (alkhresheh, 2020; sari & margana, 2019). students must understand and speak english well because it is an important skill in order to be able to communicate in english well. learning english speaking skill could encourage the students to develop their speaking fluency (renandya & ivone, 2018). when they communicate verbally, people could understand them better. speaking is about how to deliver the oral text that has meaning and being understood by the speaker-hearer (fridlund & cogens, 2020; ghaderi, 2021; poudel & acharya, 2019; utami, 2021). speaking skill in english is a person's abilities to share their wishes or thoughts to anyone orally, but speaking skills in english must be trained continuously so that they could be developed. they also could be exercised with friends, english teachers in the classroom or english teachers in courses, etc. online learning during this pandemic is very different from face-to-face learning. the difference is that during online learning requires internet and web-based application where the process is done virtually. meanwhile, face-to-face learning, the students meet their teachers, they do have direct interaction (alawamleh et al., 2020; karma et al., 2021). for this reason, the teachers must choose appropriate strategies that work well in the online learning process, especially to improve students’ speaking skill, so that students can achieve learning objectives well. the students seemed to face problems during the process of learning to speak in english. one of the student problems that they must overcome in learning speaking english is their anxiety, that is, being afraid of saying wrong sentences or cannot be understood by listeners (damayanti & listyani, 2020). another student problems in speaking english is not only caused by components of speaking such as: pronunciation, expression, vocabulary, and fluency, but it could also be caused by themselves, such as: encouragement, confidence and bravery (hermansyah, 2021). based on the interview with some english teachers in sma negeri 4 palembang, the problems above were also faced by students in sma negeri 4 palembang. for example, they still have a lack of self-confidence and being shy and anxious to speak english in front of the class. these problems also existed during the online teaching and learning activities. students’ problems in speaking during online english teaching and learning activities seemed to be interesting to be investigated especially what strategies used by the teachers to solve the problems especially during the covid-19 pandemic. it was then the reason inspiring the researcher to conduct a study entitled “strategies in teaching speaking during the covid-19 pandemic at sma n 4 palembang”. the researcher were curious in knowing what strategies used by the teachers,l how they applied them, and what problems they faced in applying those strategies in teaching english speaking during the covid-pandemic. results and discussion result of interview types of teacher strategies in teaching speaking during the covid-19 pandemic english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 845 the researcher found that teachers in sma n 04 palembang used four main strategies in teaching speaking during pandemic. the strategies they used were roleplaying, discussing, reporting and storytelling, in which the purposes were to engage, encourage and support their students in the teaching and learning process. roleplaying from the interview results, the roleplaying strategy was found suitable to apply for the students. three of four english teachers at this school used this strategy to teach speaking during pandemic. in this activity, students played the roles of malin kundang, timun emas, and pulau kemarau. from the results of interviews with the english teachers, mr. anang, ms. bianca and ms. dinda (pseudonyms), roleplaying activities seemed to improve the students’ speaking skills during pandemic. this conclusion can be seen from the statements below. “because i felt this strategy was effective for developing my students’ speaking skills, students were given the opportunity to express their ideas and opinions using english, so that they were active in speaking and could express their own opinions. with this strategy students felt happy and also got opportunities to express themselves towards progress.” (mr. anang) “the advantages of the strategy i used were first, students could make decisions and had the freedom to express or fully express their thoughts or ideas. in addition, i thought the strategy i used could attract students, allowing the class to be full of enthusiasm and foster a sense of cooperation among them. and finally, it could be applied in the teaching and learning process without any limits on the number of students in the class.” (ms. bianca) from the two statements made by mr. anang and ms. bianca, it could be seen that both of them had the same reasons for using this strategy in teaching speaking. they agreed that this strategy was effective for developing students' ability in speaking english. students also understood the roles of their plays and apply what they were learning in their daily lives. this activity was not monotonous and contributed to make students active in roleplaying and to give them opportunities to express themselves. another teacher, ms. dinda seemed to agree with mr. anang and ms. bianca, as explained by ms. dinda below: "in my opinion, these strategies could be applied in the classroom and see the speaking ability of the students i teach, they were given more opportunities to speak. it seemed that this strategy is more suitable for them than the old ones used in offline learning, which did not develop their speaking skills and they only relied on the teacher's ability.” (ms. dinda) from ms. dinda’s statement, it could be concluded that this strategy seemed to be effective for students, because students could think creatively playing their roles in the learning process. it could make students able to develop their speaking skills to the fullest. the impact was that learning objectives could also be achieved more easily. also, this strategy provides opportunities for all students to speak or role-play in front of the class. storytelling the second strategy used by the teachers was storytelling. from the result of the interview, the storytelling strategy gave numerous benefits to students at sma n 04 palembang, due to the fact through this strategy students' speaking skills could be developed. in addition, it could encourage students to think critically because, they had to make interesting storylines. it also increased students telling stories using english. besides that, it was an interesting activity that got rid of class boredom. therefore, from the benefits it made teachers interested in applying this storytelling strategy in teaching speaking. the topic was about their experience during vacations, a special day in their lives and the legendary stories from indonesia. “the advantages of the strategy i used were first, students could make decisions and had the freedom to express or fully express their thoughts or ideas. also, i thought the strategy i used could attract students, which could allow the class to be full of enthusiasm for students. and foster a sense of cooperation among students. finally, it could be applied in the teaching and learning process without any limit on the number of students in the class.” (ms. bianca) “as i explained earlier, the reason i used these two strategies was because i thought it was more effective to train students' speaking skills and could strengthen cooperation between them. besides that, i thought it could make students more creative in conveying information. by using the story telling strategy students were aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak four strategies in teaching speaking during covid-19 pandemic at sma n 04 palembang 846 able to tell stories using english. my goal in using this story telling strategy was to create a happy atmosphere, providing new experiences and developing my students' horizons more broadly.” (mr. charly) "in my opinion, these strategies could be applied to develop the abilities of the students i teach. with these strategies they were given more opportunities to speak. it seems that this strategy was more suitable for them than the old strategies used in offline learning, which made them unable to speak up and only rely on the teacher's ability." (ms. dinda) looking at the three statements above, three of the participants (ms. bianca, mr. charly and ms. dinda), agreed that this strategy seemed to be effective to be applied because students could think critically and play a direct role in learning activities. it could also develop students’ memorization skills, which means it could make students more creative in conveying information. in fact, when teachers applied this strategy to teach, it created a pleasant class atmosphere and provided new experiences for students, which could help develop students' insights more broadly. based on the result of the interview, two of four participants used this strategy, mr. charly and ms. dinda. this strategy was carried out in small groups, where the teacher led or guided students in expressing their opinions and ideas with a view to identifying and finding solutions or answers to certain problems or topics collectively. this discussion strategy seemed to provide advantages for students, for example, they could work together in collaboration or teamwork that would help them in solving issues given by the teacher. surely it could encourage them to express their ideas and opinions freely, without any limitations and think critically to solve existing problems. this strategy also made teaching and learning process dynamic as it allowed students to develop their abilities. therefore, they could easily achieve a shared learning goal that they could not achieve through individual work. the topics teachers used in teaching speaking were advantages and disadvantages of internet, technology and social cultural. as they explained, below: “by using this discussion strategy in teaching speaking, the goal was that my students could have the ability to make convey the results of their discussions. besides that, students got more knowledge, there was even an exchange of ideas during the speaking learning process, so that these students could more easily remember the results they obtained.” (mr. charly) “this discussion strategy in teaching speaking aimed to promote my students’ ability to conclude the results of their discussions, which could indirectly spur students to find their own knowledge that was in line with the goals i expected. students also gained more knowledge and even exchange ideas during the speaking learning process. in this way students can easily remember the results they obtained themselves.” (ms. dinda) from mr. charly and ms. dinda's statement above, it could be concluded that this strategy was effective to improve students' speaking skills because, they could think critically and grow their self-confidence in themselves. mr. charly also added that the purpose of using this strategy was that students could have the ability to convey the results of the discussions they had previously, because they exchanged ideas which makes it easier for them to remember and explain the results they get in class. reporting the last strategy used was reporting. from the result of the interview, the strategy seemed to give a positive impact on students, once students could practice a sense of responsibility, hence they were asked to seek information about a given topic. if they did not do it with full commitment then the results obtained were not optimal or success. the topic that teacher used was about life style. this strategy could be done individually or in groups. if this activity was carried out in groups, it could surely improve cooperation for the good, because they made a collection of important information that was carried out with their respective groups, then reported to the teacher and other friends. however, this strategy was not in demand by teachers. it was evident from the results of interviews that the one of four teachers used this strategy in their teaching, mr. anang (pseudonyms). as explained by mr. anang, as follows: "for me this strategy was effective in developing students speaking skills once they were given the opportunity to express their ideas and opinions using english. therefore, they were always active in speaking. the goal was that students get used to expressing their own opinions. with this strategy, students could english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 847 be happy because all of them got the opportunities to express themselves towards progress. thus, a real situation can be created and students benefit from these exercises to practice their speaking." (mr. anang) the reason mr. anang used the reporting strategy in teaching speaking was because for him this strategy was the most effective for improving students' speaking skills. the students at sma n 04 were more dominant during writing even in speaking english. the purpose of this strategy was helping students focus on expressing all the opinions that they used english and every student had the same opportunities to express the results they got. as a result, the speaking ability of these students could increase. even though during this pandemic, teaching and learning needed to be carried out in online mode, teachers and students could take advantage of using various web-based applications in learning online, that could ensure students could still achieve learning goals. the implementation of the strategies in the online speaking learning process going well because each student contributed to achieving the learning objectives. every student was given the same opportunity to contribute in the speaking activities and there was always an improvement in speaking at the end of each meeting. seemed to interest in learning videos made students more active in online classes, because it attracted them to continue to focus or pay attention to the ongoing subject matter. they could express their opinions and ideas about what was proposed. therefore, as explained earlier, the roleplaying strategy, discussion strategy, reporting strategy and storytelling strategy used by the teachers fostered students’ self-confidence and increased students' creativity, thus indirectly improved speaking skills. strategies used in teaching speaking during the covid-19 pandemic in the applied of these four strategies, each teacher had their own way of implementing the strategies. the first participant, pak anang, explained how the roleplaying was applied by him: "in applying roleplaying strategy, first i divided the students into groups. after that i explained the purpose of the roleplaying strategy, then determine the characters in the roleplaying strategy. next, the right people to play specific characters were determined. subsequently, they were asked to practice exploring their roles. at the end they performed in class." (anang) based on the explanation above, pak anang asked students practice deeply in their respective roles that had been given. therefore, the groups could perform well. the second participant, ms. bianca explained how she carried out the roleplay, namely: "in the roleplaying strategy, first, i made a list of what characters were needed. second, the roles were selected and distributed to each student, according to their respective abilities. each scene was made into a group, to make it easier to discuss. third, the group evaluates how the storyline was and what scenarios were used, etc. after everything was done and clear, i asked them to memorize the scenario and continued with virtual rehearsals. finally, they performed it through a zoom meeting and edited it into an interesting video, then collected it on whatsapp.” (mrs. bianca) based on the explanation of the second participant, ms. bianca applied this strategy by dividing students into small groups and determining the appropriate roles in the roleplaying. next, groups were made per scene, so that it was easier for students to discuss. then students determine which scenario to use and they remember the scenario it. furthermore, students present it used by a web-based application. after all the scenes were done, then proceed with the editing process so that it could become an interesting and not monotonous video story, which made the audience interested in watching it. then the results were collected to the teacher. the fourth participant, ms. dinda explained the roleplaying process in teaching speaking as follows: "as for roleplaying strategy, first i gave a predetermined topic for each student. second, i explained the goals and benefits in implementing the roleplaying strategy for students. third, determined the roles to play by each student so that students would not feel confused with what role they should play and at the same time increase their motivation to speak. last, i invited students to perform a predetermined role-play with the initial goal that they would achieve at the end of the applied roleplaying strategy.” (ms. dinda) from ms. dinda's explanation, teaching speaking with this roleplaying strategy could help aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak four strategies in teaching speaking during covid-19 pandemic at sma n 04 palembang 848 students focus on increasing their motivation to speak english. ms. dinda gave topics to students and explain the benefits of roleplaying. then, assigned roles to each student, and at last, asked them to perform it. the second strategy used by the teachers was storytelling. students could express ideas in telling stories or the stories that they have heard before or they could even make up their own stories to tell their friends in class, with their own style, intonation and aids. this could be seen from the statements from the results of interviews with participants. all participants had different ways of implementing this strategy. participant two, teacher bianca, explained how to use this strategy in her teaching, as follows: "in storytelling strategy, firstly i divided groups of 3-4 students. second, i distributed a short story to students and they choose it randomly. third, each student took turns reading the story they have gotten. the time given was only 15 minutes and for students who haven't had their turn, they should listen to their friends who were reading. fourth, while the students were reading it, i evaluate their way of speaking with told the story." (ms. bianca) from ms bianca’s explanation, she divided students into some groups. then, she gave them some interesting short stories to each group. then, they took turns reading the stories that they had gotten for about 15 minutes in front of the class. students could express the short story as well as possible. the third participant, mr. charly explained how he always applies this storytelling strategy to his students, as follows: “in the storytelling strategy, first a topic was given to each student. second, each student was free to determine what story they want to develop, but not out of the topic that has been given previously. students were asked to make recordings of their stories in a style, intonation, and aids that could attract listeners' attention. finally, it was collected to me with a predetermined deadline." (mr. charly) in the implementation of storytelling in class, mr. charly stated that by using this strategy in teaching speaking, students were given the opportunity to explain personal stories or legends, stories with the best version according to them, by recording and using interesting style and intonation, so that listeners were interested to hear them until the end. the recordings were collecting it to the teacher. therefore, it could indirectly train students' english improving their speaking skills. while the fourth participant, ms. dinda explained the steps in implementing storytelling that she took while teaching, as followed: "first, i determined a suitable topic for them to develop their story. second, i asked students to arrange what storylines they would develop for their later stories, whether they want a forward plot, backward plot, or mixed plot etc. next, i asked them to remember the plot. then, students were given the opportunity to create a story that they would present in class. finally, asked students to present their story." (ms. dinda) as explained by ms. dinda, the first step was that the teacher determined the topic to be developed by the students. the second step was that each student was asked what plot they would like to develop. the third step was that students were given opportunities to make interesting stories based on their presentation and teacher’s suggestions. the last step was that the teacher invited each student to present the story. in the process of learning and teaching using storytelling strategies, generally teachers have almost the same way of applied it, but the only difference was the title or topic of the story used. the third finding was discussion. from the results of the interview, two of the four teachers used a discussion strategy to teach speaking during this pandemic. the focus of this strategy was to improve students' speaking skills and also made students think critically. which could challenge students to express their opinions and be able to solve problems quickly. delivered by the third participant, mr. charly, he said that: "in this discussion strategy, for example, teachers start by dividing students into small groups. then the teacher should present the problem in general, then the problem should be divided into subproblems that should be solved by each group. after that, one of the representatives from among the groups would explain the results of their discussion. and then other students listen to the results of their friends explained." (mr. charly) from mr. charly's statement, this strategy was implemented by divided students into several groups and gave specific topics and problems, which the students had the problems from the discussion and they had to solve it. after that, each student was asked to convey the results of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 849 the discussions they had previously done in online class orally. meanwhile, based on the results of the fourth responses, ms. dinda explained that: "for discussion strategies, first, i gave specific topics and problems to students. for example, topics that were currently being discussed as hot topics and were in accordance with the times and at the same time i ask for problem solving from the given topic. next, with a random strategy, i arranged the members of each group and asked them to start a discussion in each group. finally, i asked them to practice speaking in english based on the results of the discussions they had previously. everyone was asked to speak, not just the discussion leader, so that they would have the same opportunity to speak." (ms. dinda) based on ms. dinda's explanation, she gave all of the students the opportunities to share their opinion and each student could explain the results of the discussions that they had. the topic the teacher applied in this strategy using a trending topic. then, the students looked the solutions to solve the problems that have been given. in this way, students could practice and got used to speak english in front of their friends and teachers, even though it was done online. the last finding was reporting strategy. this strategy was also used in teaching speaking during pandemic, but only one of four participants used this strategy. the purpose of it was to train students' memory, where students were able to the tell stories easily or make up stories or even tell stories about their daily lives. the benefits of this strategy for students were that it could improve students' memory as well as their speaking skills. the first participant, mr. anang explained about the reporting strategies was the strategy used to teach speaking in the class, as followed: "for the reporting strategy, i first looked for interest topics for students to do, while explaining the purpose of this reporting strategy. then, i asked students to read interesting news on their social media and next i asked them to start making news texts based on the facts they got from the reading research. after that i asked them to explain again in front of their friends about their results." (mr. anang) in implementing this strategy, mr. anang gave on the topic of the problem which easy to find it. then, each student reads the news and made the news text based on the facts obtained. when finished, each student reported back the results they got in online classes. problems with teacher strategies in teaching speaking during the covid-19 pandemic in the process of teaching and learning speaking online there were several issues experienced by both teachers and students. those problems could affect the students’ learning outcomes to be not optimal. problems or take out from internal factors are obstacles that arose from within the student concerns, such as, lack of confidence. while external factors came from outside the students, namely environmental factors, such as, the lack of inadequate learning facilities and infrastructure. these were obstacles in the teaching and learning process that troubled students to follow the lesson well, and even caused them to not focus or pay attention to the material. therefore, it resulted on students' lack of understanding of the material presented and consequently the students had difficulties expressing their opinions, ideas, english language development etc. below are the obstacles, found by the researcher, that occurred during the speaking learning and teaching process during this pandemic, explained one by one: lack of internet access and adequate facilities in the processed of learning and teaching online, there were certain problems that were often experienced by students and teachers. from the results of an interview with one participant, mr. anang, he explained the problem encountered, as stated: "so far, the difficulties i have encountered in the process of teaching and learning speaking online were limited time, network disturbances, and electrical disturbances. as a teacher, i was very dependent on the internet and electricity in the online teaching and learning process. for the students as well it was a problem once they have limited resources such as a limited internet quota or limitations in having electronic devices, such as, laptops and cell phones." (mr. anang) from this explanation, it can be seen that the problems faced was inadequate internet access, not enough internet quota, time constraints and student cell phones problems that did not support the current application. it made the learning process disrupted and students' understanding of the subject matter difficult. therefore, outside of class hours, students must take the initiative to learn independently and also looked for other aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak four strategies in teaching speaking during covid-19 pandemic at sma n 04 palembang 850 sources on the internet in order to increase their understanding of the material that has been left behind. another participant, mr. charly through the interview also conveyed about the internet access problems he experienced, as stated: "in addition to the personal difficulties of the students themselves, other difficulties they experienced were internet network disturbances and electricity disturbances etc. therefore, if these obstacles persist the students cannot follow the lesson well, thus it made students reduced their understanding of the material presented." (mr. charly) in reality, what was often seen when online learning was conducted by both teachers and students was internet problems. in addition to the constraints of a weak and unstable internet network, unpredictable electricity problems (sometimes sudden blackouts) also often resulted in the learn process not being able to run smoothly. in fact, it could result in students not being able to focus or pay attention to the subject matter. lack of self-confidence another problem faced by students a teacher when teaching speaking during this pandemic was related to the student’s lack of confidence while speaking english. self-confidence during speaking is essential to produce good and clear communication and extremely important in achieving the learning goals. the results of interviews with english teachers in sma n 04 palembang showed that, three of four participants agreed that the problem that occurred to their students was a lack of confidence in themselves while speaking english in class. as stated by participant one, mr. anang in the interview, as follows: "as far as i have experienced as a teacher, students experienced difficulties in terms of, lack of confidence in speaking english in class, due to lack of practice outside the classroom. they were only given a small amount of time to learn about speaking material, because there was a reduction in learning time during this pandemic period." (mr. anang) from mr. anang's answer, it can be seen that due to this pandemic situation student learning time in class was decreased. reducing lesson time could make lessons not optimal. lack of confidence in speaking english due to lack of practice outside the classroom and fear of making mistakes in front of their friends or teachers was a huge problem faced by them. building student’s self-confidence required an effort through the learning process by practicing. for example, they were copying and try to speak english was an activity encouraged by teachers. it was done continuously and also required a learning concept that was in accordance with the conditions of students. therefore, desired english-speaking skills could be achieved. the third participant, mr. charly also said, the same problems experienced by students by state that: "they were less confident in expressing their ideas because they were afraid of being wrong while speaking. because telling stories in front of the class requires high confidence, especially in using english, and they felt embarrassed or nervous when speaking english in front of their friends. in addition, the lack of english vocabulary made them confused about how to express what was proposed. had a large vocabulary was very important and useful for students themselves, because they can display the results of their discussion or told stories well." (mr. charly) from the explanation above, it showed that students had lacked self-confidence while speaking. they had a constant fear of trying to express their thoughts and display activities in front of the class using english. they also found it difficult to interact actively with the teacher because of the limited distance. due to the lack of physical meetings, students had a lack of motivation during online classes. without motivation to speak they could not learn new vocabulary. consequently, the lack of vocabulary made them confused to speaking english in class and they were often silent thinking about what they wanted to convey etc. those obstacles had an impact on them and even made it harder to be active and confident in the speaking learning. the fourth participant, ms. dinda, said that: "some of the difficulties i encountered were the students' lack of confidence in expressing something or speaking in english, especially in speaking competence. they were afraid to speak in english because they did not want to make mistakes in front of their friends, especially online learning made them focus on their laptops or phones rather than in class." (ms. dinda) from ms. dinda's explanation, it could be english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 851 concluded that the main reason that made students not confident while speaking english was a lack of english vocabulary. it made them confused and did not know how to express themselves well in english. just like the previous explanation, students have an excessive fear of speaking english. they worry about being wrong or making mistakes while pronouncing words or giving an explanation in front of their friends or the teacher. difficulty to interact actively in the world of education, interaction was very much needed. it involved two or more people and each party should be involved in playing an active role and giving each other reciprocally. one of the four participants explained that the problem that occurred to students was difficult to interact actively with the teacher and between friends. the problem of interaction in the online learning process was a problem that needed to be addressed instantly by the teacher. interaction between teachers and students must be well established in learning activities, both inside and outside the classroom. therefore, a teacher must have skills in teaching and choose interesting teaching methods in order to make students active and improve their speaking skills. as expressed by the second participant ms. binca, as follows: "the difficulty i encountered when i asked students to express ideas verbally during online teaching and learning activities was the lack of active interaction. they had difficulty to interacting actively with teachers because the learning process using gadgets, they did not meet friends in person and with this pjj system, forcing students to be able to attend school individually from home. they had difficulty accessing the internet network at home, they were tired of dealing with gadgets for too long and even had to handle eye pain when dealing with cell phones for too long and the imbalance in student learning time that was very little. therefore, from these obstacles, students often difficulties in pay attention to the material, thus making it hard for them to express their opinions.” (ms. bianca) from the results of the interviews that had been explained by ms. bianca, it could be concluded that online learning makes students not focused on the material because of several obstacles they experienced. it was hard for students to express their ideas or opinions used english. there was no direct meeting between students and teachers, which the result was the students’ lack of interaction actively. in addition to being burdened with the assigned tasks, students also had more time to play games, open instagram, youtube, and other social media compared to studying. as a result, there was a feel of laziness that was very difficult to fight. the impact was that students face difficult to concentrate when learning speaking. the teachers had to encourage students to interact during classes. therefore, teachers must creatively in choosing approach techniques to encourage them and motivated to continue learning english in class. result of observation based on the observations that had been made, it could be explained that three of four teachers used a roleplaying strategy, in which in roleplaying activities, students played certain characters in a story. the teachers teaching speaking used media such as: power point, youtube videos, documents, and pictures. all students in the class were activate in expressing their ideas or opinions when the teachers taught speaking by using the roleplaying strategy. in addition, the teachers also encouraged students to continue to express their ideas or opinions orally during the online teaching and learning process. the next strategy used by the teachers was storytelling, which was where many teachers were interested in teaching speaking. three of four participants used a storytelling strategy. in this storytelling activity students told a legendary story using their own words. teachers used media while teaching speaking, such as video, power point, pictures. students' interest in this strategy made them active in class to express opinions or give ideas. also, they got encouraged from their teachers to express their ideas or opinions orally during teaching and learning to speaking activities. the other strategy used was the discussion strategy, in which, students expressed their ideas and opinions freely and each student respected each other's responses. this strategy was used by two of four teachers. in the process of writing, they used media such as: video, power point, youtube, documents, pictures. every student was very active in the class to express their ideas or opinions, because they were encouraged by their teachers to continue to express their ideas and opinions orally during teaching speaking the last strategy used was reporting strategy, of the four english teachers, only one used this strategy. in this reporting activity, students aprilia sari rahayu, eryansyah eryansyah, & margaretha dinar sitinjak four strategies in teaching speaking during covid-19 pandemic at sma n 04 palembang 852 reported about a news and then presented it in front of the teacher and their friends. the media used were: video, power point, youtube, documents, pictures. although only one teacher used this strategy, the students seemed to be enthusiastic to practice speaking with this strategy. they were very active in expressing their ideas and opinions during the lesson. which could be encouraged by the teacher. in the world of education, strategies in teaching speaking were very important to created and arranged the students’ focus on learning and achieving the learning objectives. broadly speaking, learning strategies was used by teachers and students in achieving the goals of learning that have been determined at sma n 04 palembang. thus, the use of strategies in the learning and teaching process guarantees that the learning objectives could be achieved. based on the results of interviews and observations, the discussion on learning strategies used by english teachers in teaching speaking material to students at sma n 04 focuses on encouraging students' mentality to have high confidence in speaking english. those strategies could foster a competitive spirit among students, which made students active to continue speaking. they could also eliminate fear in students to discuss with their friends, telling stories, or to express their opinions. next, the discussion about learning strategies and teaching speaking. the english teachers at this school only used four strategies in teaching, namely roleplaying strategy, discussion strategy, reporting strategy and storytelling strategy. those strategies aim to achieve learning objectives, namely: 1) students can hone their speaking skills. 2) students can use appropriate and related vocabulary in compiling sentences to tell stories, or give opinions. 3) could foster creative and critical thinking in solving the problems. 4) students can interact directly with their friends, even though learning was done online. from the results of interviews and observations, of the four strategies, the most widely used by teachers were roleplaying and storytelling. it seemed that these strategies were effective for use with students, and had a positive impact for students to apply in real and social life. through roleplaying strategies in learning to speak is easier to achieve and applied directly by students, so that it could improve students' speaking skills (widiarti, 2021). while storytelling strategy proves that using this strategy during online classes has a positive impact on students' speaking skills, which helps students express their thoughts and feelings (jaca, 2021). the discussion strategy was use by two of the four teachers who teach at sma n 04 palembang, same as roleplaying and storytelling strategies, the discussion strategy also has an impact and purpose on students, as explained in chapter two, that: discussion is an effective strategy in teaching speaking, which can improve students' speaking skills through expressing their ideas and opinions on discussion forums, and could help students practice speaking in real communication with friends and teachers (heldawati & wiyanah, 2022). the last, the strategy used by only one teacher was the roleplay strategy. the activity of this strategy was provided to report on the information they have obtained. this strategy could help students' memory because they needed to remember everything they had read, in order to be able to present it again. in this reporting strategy also has a positive impact on students, this learning strategy works effectively and efficiently, because this strategy could increase students’ confidence in speaking english (ramadhani, 2021). from the explanation above, the students were too deep into the characters in their respective roles and had high creativity in the process of making video recordings when playing the story, which made the result look perfect. they made as if doing the scene met directly with the co-star. thus, it made the audience interested in watching until the end and got carried away in the storyline that students played. this activity was carried out through zoom meetings, and google meeting, due to their efficacy during online learning in producing a direct interaction between teachers and students. according to astini (2020), zoom meeting is an efficient application due to the fact that it is a video platform and during the learning process students and teachers can see each other. from all of the strategies, the roleplaying strategy seemed to have a significant uniqueness in the process of teaching and learning in speaking online, because by using this strategy, students really learn and deepen the roles they play, and they really feel the emotions and the things that were done with those characters. even though it was done online, the students were experts in role-playing and editing the video, which seemed to be done face-to-face, although it was done through a zoom-meeting and recorded in their respective homes. thus, when it was english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 853 shown the audience was immersed and feels the story. meanwhile, regarding the strategies used by the english teacher, the overall results explain how effective it was to improve students' speaking even though it was done online. the discussion about the online teaching method used by english teachers during this pandemic was the assignment method. assignments were given at the end of the learning process, the purpose was a means to practice again. the assignments were usually collected via whatsapp and done individually or in groups. the assignment method was a way of presenting lesson material to students. tasks in speaking material included playing a role about a story or legend, told stories or memorable experiences, discussing to solve a problem and re-explaining the news obtained. in order to teach speaking effectively during the covid-19 pandemic, english teachers in this school needed to rethink and determine which strategies were suitable in order to achieve the goals and objectives in the current online learning and teaching process. therefore, we could conclude from this discussion, that the process of learning and teaching speaking online seemed achievable in accordance with the learning objectives proposed and went well due to the fact that the right strategies were applied for this specific covid-19 situation. conclusion based on the results of data analysis conducted by the researcher, it could be concluded that english teachers of sma n 04, only used four strategies in teaching speaking during pandemics, namely roleplaying, discussion, reporting and storytelling strategies. almost all english teachers in sma n 04 palembang used roleplaying strategies and storytelling strategies. these strategies were considered to improve english speaking skills during this online learning, i.e., students seemed to speak english and express their opinions actively, interact with their friends well, and increase their self-confidence. although there were several obstacles found during the process of learning and teaching speaking english during the pandemic, such as internet network disruptions, time constraints and electricity disruptions, the four strategies seem to be recommended as teaching strategies during the pandemic as they could be applied well during online learning. acknowledgement the researcher would like to express her profound gratitude to the sriwijaya university community, advisors and particpants for the 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(2021). teacher's perception on the use of role play in speaking class [thesis, universitas islam indonesia]. duraspace. http://dspace.uii.ac.id/handle/123456789/30282 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 679 online esp teaching during the covid 19 pandemic: students’ voices latifa ika sari port and shipping management department politeknik ilmu pelayaran semarang, indonesia email: latifa@pip-semarang.ac.id ria hermina sari nautical studies department politeknik ilmu pelayaran semarang, indonesia email: ria.hs@pip-semarang.ac.id apa citation: sari, l.i & sari, h.s. (2022). online esp teaching during the covid 19 pandemic: students’ voices. english review: journal of english education, 10(2), 679-688. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6307. received: 02-02-2022 accepted: 28-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction the covid-19 pandemic has caused remarkable impacts on people’s lives all over the world. it has affected the sectors of the economy, business, politics, health, as well as education. in many parts of the globe, offices and schools are locked down which has led to the consequences of working from home and studying from home. many education institutions have no choice but to switch from faceto-face teaching and learning to online teaching and learning (gao & zhang, 2020). this condition has also brought a great challenge for language teachers, especially in esp teaching. esp (english for specific purposes) refers to the teaching and learning of english as a second or a foreign language in which the objective of the course is to prepare students to use english in a specific community. esp is concerned with designing an appropriate course to fulfil students’ needs to communicate in their future workplace (paltridge & starfield, 2013). in esp teaching, students need to be exposed to a significant number of technical vocabulary. they also have to learn various relevant discourses and practice using english in a specific context. many esp teachers experienced difficulties when they had to deliver the course online. they had to do many trials and errors to find the most appropriate strategies for teaching and to make sure that the lessons can be delivered optimally and the teaching objectives can be achieved (iswati, 2021; mandasari & wulandari, 2021). however, in a time of crisis, online teaching and learning become the only solution to continue the process of education when direct interaction between students and teachers is not possible (kuama & intharaksa, 2016). online instruction can provide access and opportunities for students to abstract: this study was aimed to evaluate the online esp teaching in a maritime polytechnic in indonesia, focusing on the teaching media used by the maritime english lecturers: the learning management system, zoom, and youtube. 195 students of the nautical studies department were involved in completing a questionnaire. 12 of them were involved in a focus group interview to obtain more detailed and comprehensive information. thematic analysis was used to analyze data and a thematic map was presented to illustrate the relationship between the themes. the findings of this study indicate that most students perceived the teaching media used by the lecturers in the online maritime english classroom were beneficial. however, each teaching medium was reported to have its advantages and disadvantages. if combined appropriately, they can facilitate students’ language learning. it is suggested that the lecturers explore various teaching media and arrange appropriate pacing in their teaching practices. the lecturers also need to prepare their lessons well before teaching to ensure that students can receive the best online learning experience. keywords: english for specific purposes (esp) teaching; online learning; students’ perception; teaching media. latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari online esp teaching during the covid 19 pandemic: students’ voices 680 receive an education without any restrictions on time and location (malik, fatima, hussain, & sarwar, 2017). students can learn from home with the help of various media used by the teachers. the role of teaching media during online language teaching and learning then becomes highly crucial. the word “media” comes from the latin word “medium” which means “between”. it refers to instruments that facilitate or bridge communication between a person who gives information and a person who receives information (smaldino, lowther, mims, & russell, 2015). in more specific terms, teaching media refers to the media used by the lecturers to deliver teaching materials to the students. the significant role of teaching media in the learning system is illustrated in figure 1. figure 1. the position of media in the learning system (gerlach and ely in hikmah, 2019) from the figure, it can be seen that the teaching media have a great contribution to the students’ comprehension. during the teaching and learning process, communication disruptions may happen. gerlach and ely (as cited in hikmah, 2019) mentioned that there are three characteristics of disruptions related to the teaching media used in language learning. the first is verbalism which refers to the situation when students can say a word but do not know the meaning. this happens because the students do not receive sufficient information about the meaning of the words. the second is misinterpretation which happens because words or materials are interpreted differently by the students. lack of elaboration from the lecturers may contribute to this problem. thirdly, disruption of students’ attention due to various distractions during the teaching and learning process. those issues are something that the lecturers have to be aware of. there are possibilities that the teaching materials might not be fully understood by all students and the learning objectives might not be achieved. there has been a great number of studies discussing the teaching media during online language teaching. as we know that the advancement of technology has enabled lecturers to use various teaching media to support their teaching practices. online learning platforms and applications have greatly developed to facilitate online teaching and learning. the use of the learning management system (lms) to provide a virtual learning environment for students in asynchronous learning has been popular in many education institutions. a study conducted by perveen (2016) showed that the use of lms is quite beneficial for students during online language learning in pakistan. the lecturers can deliver the teaching materials, give assignments, and administer the examination. while students can access the materials, do assignments, and join examinations via lms. besides the lms, video conference applications also have gained popularity among language teachers. the use of video conferencing is believed to support multimodal interaction and communication in online language classrooms (hampel & stickler, 2012; satar, 2016). a study conducted by kohnke and moorhouse (2020) indicated that the use of zoom can support synchronous learning. zoom enables students to communicate using non-verbal icons when they want to give questions or show appreciation, agreement, and disagreement. zoom also allows teachers to give immediate feedback to students. besides video conferencing, the use of videosharing platforms, such as youtube, has also become popular. youtube videos are beneficial to support the teaching and learning process by helping students learn things from multimodal english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 681 sources (ho & tai, 2020). wang and chen (2019) involved 20 taiwanese university students in their study and revealed the advantages of using youtube in english language learning. the use of youtube could enhance students’ self-regulated learning. it was also considered to be more flexible, interesting, and interactive for the students. even though there have been a lot of studies regarding online language teaching, the majority of them only discuss a single medium used by the teachers. this study aimed to investigate students’ perceptions of online maritime english teaching, focusing on the teaching media used by the lecturers in a maritime polytechnic in indonesia. the current study attempts to fill the gap of the previous studies by exploring three primary teaching media used by the lecturers during online esp teaching (the lms, zoom, and youtube) and showing the relationship between the teaching media in facilitating students’ language learning using a thematic map. there were 2 (two) research questions guiding this study: (1) how do students perceive the teaching media used in the online maritime english teaching? (2) how is the relation of the teaching media in facilitating students’ online language learning? students’ perception is taken because they are the beneficiary of education services provided by the education institution. students have invested their time and money hoping to obtain the best benefits and learning experience. it is expected that the findings of this study can be used as a reference to improve the lecturers’ teaching practices and the institution’s education policy. method this study was conducted in a maritime polytechnic located in semarang, indonesia. the research methodology was described as follows: table 1. participants of the study who completed the research questionnaire classes male female semester 1 84 10 semester 3 63 8 semester 7 28 2 total 175 20 as shown in table 1, there were 195 students of the nautical studies department involved in this study, consisting of 175 male students and 20 female students. they came from different classes and levels. their age ranged from 19 to 22 years old. 12 (twelve) students were involved to join a follow-up focus group interview (fgi) to obtain more detailed and comprehensive information. they were chosen based on the recommendation of the lecturers. the criteria for choosing the fgi participants were the students’ class attendance, their ability to express their opinions, and their willingness to join the fgi. the participants for the focus group interview were listed in table 2. table 2. participants of the focus group interview group name classes gender group 1 fr semester 1 male rd semester 1 male bt semester 1 male ab semester 1 male group 2 fa semester 3 male on semester 3 male as semester 3 male bg semester 3 male group 3 wz semester 7 male an semester 7 male fh semester 7 male br semester 7 male there were 2 (two) research instruments used in this study. a questionnaire was used to collect information about students' perceptions of the teaching media used during online maritime english class. there were 3 (three) teaching media reviewed: the moodle-based learning management system (lms), zoom, and youtube. in some parts of the questionnaire, students were asked to choose an answer and decide whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with a statement. in some other parts, students were required to write their reviews and suggestions regarding the use of the teaching media. to avoid language issues, the questionnaire was written in bahasa. another instrument was the focus group interview. this instrument was aimed to obtain more comprehensive information regarding the lecturers’ teaching practices. in a group of four, students were asked to describe their experiences and reviews regarding the use of the teaching media. the language used during fgi was also bahasa indonesia. there were several steps in collecting data. firstly, the researchers prepared a questionnaire by using the google form. the questionnaire was latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari online esp teaching during the covid 19 pandemic: students’ voices 682 tested on a group of students. several revisions were made before the questionnaire was distributed to the research participants. as many as 233 students of the nautical studies department were asked to complete the questionnaire, but only 195 students completed and submitted it back. secondly, the researchers asked 12 students to join a focus group interview (fgi) based on the lecturers’ recommendations. their approval to join the fgi was asked to obtain voluntary informed consent. the fgi was conducted using the zoom meeting application and recorded. the process of analysing data was started by recapping the questionnaire. the researcher recapped the percentage of each statement (strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree) and presented the recaps in several tables. to analyse the qualitative data, the researchers used thematic analysis. the researchers attempted to capture themes from the participants’ experiences. the themes were then analysed and discussed. the researcher used the protocol of thematic analysis proposed by braun et al. (2019). firstly, the researcher recapped the qualitative answers of the questionnaire. after that, the researchers transcribed the focus group interviews and read the transcripts several times. after obtaining initial insights, the researcher generated codes. in this step, data were organized around similar meanings, and contents were simplified. similar responses were collated and themes were constructed. the students’ responses were categorized based on the themes. the last steps were revising and defining themes. in this step, the researchers examined the whole theme and developed a thematic map to visualize how each theme related to the others. results and discussion results the results of the questionnaire were presented in several tables. table 3 shows the students’ review of the learning management system (lms). in general, students agreed that the lms was helpful during online learning and there were no significant difficulties in using the platform. they could download the materials, submit their tasks, and practice the quizzes. 89% of students claimed that they could understand the materials even though they could not meet the lecturers directly. table 3. the recap of students’ review on the use of the learning management system statements students’ responses (in percent) strongly agree agree disagree strongly disagree 1. i found no difficulties in using the learning management system (lms) 45 53 2 0 2. i could access the learning management system (lms) anytime 54 44 2 0 3. the learning management system (lms) makes it easier for me to get materials from the lecturer 42 57 1 0 4. i found it easy to submit the tasks using the learning management system (lms) 44 55 1 0 5. even though there was no direct interaction with the lecturers, i could understand the materials 27 62 11 0 6. i need direct explanation from the lecturers regarding the materials 13 47 35 5 7. i love the quizzes given via learning management system (lms) 25 71 4 0 8. i expected the lecturers' feedback on the tasks and quizzes 37 59 3 1 however, 60% of the students admitted they still need lecturers’ direct explanations. 90% of the students also said that they expected lecturers’ feedback on their tasks and quizzes. the result of the focus group interview supports the findings. as mentioned by some of the students: “it is very easy to use the learning management system, but i think direct interaction with the lecturers is important to support the english learning” (fr, semester 1). “in my opinion, the use of lms, in general, is good. we can download the materials and submit assignments easily. however, it would be better if the lecturers explain the materials that have been english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 683 posted in the lms. for example, by using zoom meeting” (bg, semester 3). table 4 shows students’ review of the use of zoom as the video-conferencing application used in maritime english class. 98% of students agreed that the video conferencing sessions were beneficial for them and could help them in understanding the learning materials easier. they enjoyed the video conferencing sessions because they could have direct interaction with the lecturers and receive direct feedback. table 4. the recap of students’ review on the use of the zoom meeting application statements students’ responses (in percent) strongly agree agree disagree strongly disagree 1. video-conferencing sessions using the zoom meeting help me to understand the materials easier 32 66 2 0 2. i had no problem in using zoom meeting during the videoconferencing sessions 25 63 9 3 3. i found difficulties in understanding the lecturers' explanation. i wish to have face-to-face interaction in the classroom. 16 45 36 3 4. the video conferencing sessions using zoom meeting were fun. i could have direct interaction and feedback from the lecturers. 24 73 3 0 5. i often felt bored and tired during video conferencing sessions 10 37 46 7 6. the video conferencing sessions using zoom meeting were beneficial for the maritime english lessons 30 68 2 0 the benefits of the video conferencing sessions were also mentioned by students during the focus group interview: “i enjoy learning using the video-conferencing application. i can ask questions directly to the lecturers and get direct feedback” (wz, semester 7). “i have difficulties when the lecturers only posted learning materials in the lms without giving any verbal explanation. the use of zoom meeting sessions can help me in understanding the materials” (br, semester 7) despite the benefits, 12% of students reported problems during the video conferencing sessions using the zoom meeting application. the main problem was the quality of the internet connection and the limited internet quota. as admitted by some students: “to join zoom meeting sessions, i have to prepare internet quota which is quite expensive for me. sometimes, when i run out of quota, i get disconnected from the online meetings. the lecturers think that i am absent from the class. that makes me sad” (anonymous, semester 3). “in my home area, the internet connection is not very good and the connection is usually getting worse in the afternoon” (anonymous, semester 3). besides the network problems, some students also experienced tiredness when they joined prolonged zoom meetings, moreover when they had to listen to the lecturers’ talks the whole time. 47% of students admitted that they often felt bored and tired during video conferencing sessions. as described by some students during focus group interview sessions: “to be honest, we do not like the activities when the lecturers dominate the talks. it was boring” (fa, semester 3). “in one day, sometimes we have to attend 3 online classes. the lecturers asked us to turn on the camera during the lessons. at the end of the day, we felt very tired” (fh, semester 7). the questionnaire also revealed that 60% of students preferred to have face-to-face interaction with the lecturers in the classroom rather than having online meetings. that was probably caused by the problems experienced by students when joining the video-conferencing sessions. table 5. the recap of students’ review of the use of youtube statements students’ responses (in percent) strongly agree disagree strongly latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari online esp teaching during the covid 19 pandemic: students’ voices 684 agree disagree 1. i used youtube to find information and materials regarding maritime english 36 62 2 0 2. i found real examples of the use of maritime english from youtube 29 67 3 1 3. i felt excited when the lecturers used youtube during maritime english lessons 27 64 8 1 4. i instantly clicked and watched the youtube videos recommended by the lecturers 37 60 2 1 5. i found difficulties when the lecturers used youtube during the lessons 9 33 52 6 table 5 presents the recaps of students’ reviews on the use of youtube. from the table, we can see that students perceived youtube as a beneficial application in maritime english learning. they could find information and real examples of the use of maritime english on youtube. there are many videos related to the maritime industry shared on youtube. students can watch or download the videos and learn many vocabularies. as described by a student in the questionnaire: “the youtube videos enabled me to understand the working condition of the seafarers. i have never known about the life of seafarers before. the use of youtube videos can provide me with various information, for example, the use of the personal protective equipment, and parts of a vessel” (anonymous, semester 1). “the use of youtube in the maritime english lesson is useful for me. i can observe the activities of the ship’s crew and also learn the pronunciation of various vocabulary” (anonymous, semester 1). however, 42% of students admitted that they faced difficulties when the lecturers used youtube during the lessons. the poor quality of students’ internet connection and limited internet quota became the main problems. besides that, the difficulty level of the language used in the videos also becomes an issue for some students, especially those with low english proficiency. “it’s very easy to access youtube. but i wish the lecturers discuss the video together instead of only giving a recommendation of links. sometimes it’s hard for me to understand the video, but i don’t have a chance to ask the lecturers” (anonymous, semester 1). discussion based on the results of the questionnaire and the focus group interview, the researchers identified 6 main themes which are related to the use of teaching media in maritime english classes. they are flexibility of time and space, students-lecturers’ interaction, lecturers’ feedback, quality of internet connection, students’ fatigue, and authenticity. the relationship among the themes is illustrated in figure 2. figure 2 shows that the quality of internet connection affects the effectiveness of all teaching media used by the lecturers. connection problems were commonly experienced by students who live in villages or areas which had not been covered by the fiber-optic internet. they usually depend on mobile broadband to access the internet which is highly vulnerable to interference. therefore, some of them reported connection issues when having online learning. the figure also tells us that the learning management system provides flexibility both for the lecturers and students in accessing the materials. students, who live in areas where a good internet connection is not available, have the opportunity to find a better connection. it allows students to manage their study time according to their home conditions. however, students also had to face several problems regarding the use of the learning management system. minimum interaction has caused them difficulties in asking questions or clarifying instructions. some students complained that the instructions given by the lecturers in the learning management system were sometimes not very clear. they expected to receive more explanations and feedback from the lecturer. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 685 figure 2. the thematic map shows the relation between the teaching media used by the lecturers and the students’ experience the use of video conferencing applications such as zoom meeting can solve the problems found in the learning management system. the use of zoom in the esp class provided real-time interaction between lecturers and students. there were opportunities for the students to ask questions and clarify lecturers’ explanations directly. students could also receive immediate feedback. the benefits of immediate feedback in language learning have been explored by some scholars. li et al. (2016) compared the timing of corrective feedback on learners’ communicative tasks and found that immediate feedback has some advantages over delayed feedback. a study conducted by fu and li (2020) which explored the differential effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback on the l2 development also showed a similar result. they found that immediate feedback could facilitate language learning better than delayed feedback. the two studies highlighted the importance of addressing linguistic errors before they become a bad habit. however, the use of zoom sometimes could be problematic for students. zoom requires students to have a good internet connection with adequate bandwidth for participating in group calls and other activities. students’ poor internet connection had caused some of them to lose connection several times during the video conferencing sessions. they often missed the lecturers’ explanations in the middle of the lessons. this resulted in distraction on students’ focus and concentration. on the other hand, too many zoom meeting sessions could make students feel tired. at least 47% of students said they often feel tired and bored during video conferencing sessions. the result of the focus group interview revealed the reasons. students are reported to feel tired and bored when they had to join lengthy video conferencing sessions. in a day, sometimes they had to join 3 different courses. if all lecturers used zoom as the teaching medium, in which each zoom meeting session lasted for 2 hours, they would find themselves exhausted at the end of the day. a study conducted by fauville et al. (2021) supports this finding. exploring zoom exhaustion and fatigue scale, they found that people who join more and longer zoom meetings tend to experience more fatigue than those who have fewer and shorter meetings. there are several possible reasons for this condition (bailenson, 2021). firstly, students have to do excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze which may not be comfortable for them. secondly, the cognitive load is higher in video conferencing sessions because of fewer communication cues presented compared to face-to-face interaction. not to mention, the poor internet connection has caused students to reconnect several times and they still have to keep up with the lecturers’ explanations. thirdly, the use of the camera (turning on the camera) during video conferencing sessions may increase students’ self-evaluation from staring at videos of themselves (shockley et al., 2021). lastly, the limitation of physical mobility during zoom meeting sessions. during online learning, students latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari online esp teaching during the covid 19 pandemic: students’ voices 686 were required to sit in front of the computers and stare at the monitor while listening to the lecturers’ explanations. prolonged use of zoom meetings has caused students to feel exhausted. regarding the use of youtube in the classroom, students reported various positive experiences. students admitted that they enjoyed watching videos more than reading textbooks. the multimodality offered by youtube videos can enhance the teaching and learning process. students can see moving pictures while listening to the explanation. this provides a better learning experience for them. in the esp context, more specifically in maritime english class, the use of youtube has brought considerable benefits regarding authenticity. during their first year, students may not be familiar yet with ships or the maritime industry. from youtube, they can learn many things, including vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure, and also the maritime world itself. many seafarers share their videos when they work onboard the vessels, either on deck, bridge, or in the engine room. knowledge about maritime context will help students to “make sense” of their language learning. they can understand the purpose of communication easier, and thus facilitates their learning. youtube videos also offer flexibility for students. students can watch the video as many as they need. to sum up, youtube videos do not only foster students’ linguistic knowledge but also their content knowledge as well. this finding supports other scholars who revealed various advantages of youtube. it can provide students with language exposure that is authentic, interactive, and engaging (novawan, alvarez-tosalem, ismailia, wicaksono, & setiarini, 2021; zaidi et al., 2018), help students in completing their assignments (sakkir, dollah, & ahmad, 2020), improve students’ vocabulary (kabooha & elyas, 2018), allow students to practice listening and pronunciation (binmahboob, 2020) and boost students’ self-regulated learning (wang & chen, 2019). however, some students admitted that they have difficulties when the lecturers gave them videos to watch. some videos were hard to be understood due to the complexity of the language. not all youtube videos were made for educational purposes. they may contain new vocabularies that students are not familiar with. students with low english proficiency usually encountered difficulty when they had to study the materials from youtube videos. they expected to have subtitles in their mother tongue to help them understand the content of the video. this issue had been discussed by simbolon and yusnita (2020) in their study regarding the selection of learning materials from youtube for a maritime english course. their findings strengthen the notion that the lecturers should consider students’ proficiency levels when selecting videos for teaching materials. providing students with subtitles in the videos is also a good solution to improve students’ learning experience. conclusion students perceived the teaching media used by the lecturers in the online maritime english classes were beneficial for them. however, each teaching medium was reported to have its advantages and disadvantages. the use of lms offered flexibility for students. it is helpful, especially for students who do not have good internet access. however, minimum interaction often caused students difficulties to understand the teaching materials. the use of zoom as a video conferencing application has helped to complement the weaknesses of lms. students could have real-time interaction with the lecturers and their classmates. they also have the opportunity to clarify information, ask questions, and receive immediate feedback. however, the lecturers need to consider the duration and frequency of video conferencing sessions to avoid students’ fatigue. the use of youtube in maritime english class can bring enhancement to the teaching and learning process. students can download and watch the videos as many as they want. youtube can also bring authenticity closer into the classroom which is very beneficial in esp teaching. it also complements the use of lms and zoom meeting applications. the findings from the study bring several pedagogical implications. knowing the differences in the quality of students’ devices and internet connections, it is important that the lecturers combine various teaching media and make a good preparation before teaching to ensure that students can have the best learning experience. acknowledgement we would like to thank our research assistants: mr. ahmad sofyan and ms. rifatun hasanah for their considerable help and support. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 687 references bailenson, j. n. 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(2018). university students’ perceptions of youtube usage in (esl) classrooms. international journal of academic research in business and social sciences, 8(1), 534–545. https://doi.org/10.6007/ijarbss/v8-i1/3826 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 27 using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme sri kurniati almucharomah universitas negeri yogyakarta, indonesia email: uniealmucharomah@outlook.com wening sahayu universitas negeri yogyakarta, indonesia email: weningsahayu@uny.ac.id sulis triono universitas negeri yogyakarta, indonesia email: sulis@uny.ac.id apa citation: almucharomah, s. k., sahayu, w., & triono, s. (2023). using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 27-36. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7412 received: 25-10-2022 accepted: 24-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction today, in which people use the internet as the biggest social media and it has various functions. social media is not only for entertainment which is lifestyle and music, but also as a medium to show daily life, express feelings, and also to criticize today’s social phenomena. according to junawan & laugu (2020), social media is one of the fastest-growing media. around 70% of internet users in the whole world are also active on social media. social media such as facebook dan twitter, up until now still has a high level of users. recently, the development of information and communication technology has been growing rapidly. this certainly affects the lifestyle of humans in general. in the past, humans did not know the internet and now information can easily be obtained through the internet. in the past, humans only knew sms as a means of sending short messages and now there are so many platforms for sending short messages, for example, whatsapp, line, telegram, wechat, and so on. even today the development of social media is increasingly unstoppable, such as facebook, instagram, twitter, pinterest, linkedin, tumblr, tiktok, and more. social media development today has become a necessity for human beings and can change a life. many people are active on social media. they can spend hours surfing social media. this phenomenon is evidence that today people are very dependent on social media. the advantage of social media is the designs which are easy to use and have various features, such as can upload photos and videos, also send short messages via dm or direct message and inbox. in this era of globalization, it is not strange to do various activities using a computer, both for doing assignments and even socializing on social media such as facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok, and others. this advancement shows that abstract: the presence of social media makes the process of social interaction experience very significant changes. communication through social media is a very important social interaction in human life. along with the increasing use of social media, it has spawned new phenomena among social media users, one of which is creativity in making memes. memes can be in the form of text or images that contain issues and events in a style that intrigues and are widely discussed because they spread and comment so quickly on social media. the purpose of this study is to describe the signifier and signified in the covid-19 meme and explain the meaning contained in the covid-19 meme. the covid-19 meme itself is one of the memes found on social media. the approach used in this research is a qualitative approach which produces descriptive analysis. the researcher tries to describe the facts behind the creation of the covid-19 meme circulating on social media. the signifiers found in the covid-19 meme include snippets of famous movie and game scenes. the insinuations in the sentences are also very true to reality. the sentences provide a statement that contains information and there is an expression of the feelings of the creator as a fighter in the pandemic season. keywords: covid-19; memes; semiotics. sri kurniati almucharomah, wening sahayu, & sulis triono using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme 28 communication and access to information are necessities that cannot be separated from people's lives. social media is very commonly used by indonesian people. various kinds of social media in the form of applications can be downloaded easily on every smartphone, making it easier for users to interact on the social media they have, starting from chatting, updating status, updating photos or pictures, and so on. one of the activities on social media that is currently popular in society is spreading various meme images. according to surya (2019), meme is one of the works of art that lately has been very lively raised by netizens on social media. in the digital era circulating memes are no longer understood as limited to small units of culture that are spread from person to person by copying or imitation, but now the term meme refers to the replication of a person's photo or image which is changed to another form, coupled with various written usually satire or joke via windows (and other operating systems) from internet users. memes can develop through imitation by humans according to the ideas stored in the brain and spread by the process of imitation and posting by netizens. the presence of social media makes the process of community social interaction experience very significant changes. communication through social media is a very important social interaction in human life. through this communication, humans can exchange messages and information. along with the increasing use of social media, it has spawned new phenomena among social media users, one of which is creativity in making memes (owen & zatori, 2021). memes can be in the form of text or images that contain issues and events in a style that intrigues and becomes a hot topic of discussion because they spread and comment so quickly on social media (woods & hahner, 2019). memes contain entertaining social messages, parodies, and satire. a meme is one of the phenomena of conveying messages in a new form by combining verbal language with nonverbal communication (expression) (porubay & sotvaldieva, 2022). the term 'meme' was first coined by richard dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. the meme comes from the greek, mimeme which means imitation. said by milner (2018) that memes are message-sending units and cultural imitation units that circulate from one human to another. memes and genes evolve together. however, human culture evolves faster than human genes. the unit for sending this message can be in the form of a song, fashion style, architecture, to the concept of divinity. messaging units proliferate from generation to generation (hussain et al., 2018). memes can be in the form of movies, videos, pictures, or just words or expressions. apart from that, some creators create memes by combining several things, such as images accompanying text, while there are images adapted to video games, movies, celebrities, and the world of politics. the strength of a meme lies in the creativity of the creator in combining text, images, videos, graphics, and various content so that it is easy for readers to understand. osterroth (2020) gave opinion that ein mem kann beispielsweise ein bild oder ein video sein, eine phrase, ein längerer text, ein dialogschema, ein textstruktur oder ein immer wieder eingesetzter rechtschreibfehler sein, im grunde kann alles, was imitiert und vaiiriert werden kann, zum mem werden. memes according to osterroth (2020) can be in the form of pictures or videos, phrases, longer texts, dialogue schemes, text structures, or spelling errors that are repeatedly used; anything that can be imitated and varied can become a meme. there are so many memes circulating on social media, one of which is the meme about covid-19 that is sweeping the world. covid-19 is caused by a virus and is one of the worst pandemics in human history with such a high death rate. the covid-19 virus outbreak occurred in early 2020. the virus then spread throughout the world. since january 2020 who has declared that the world is experiencing a global pandemic emergency with the covid-19 virus. the covid-19 pandemic has caused a change in lifestyle in the world community so many people are not prepared to adapt. this is the main cause of anxiety, stress, and panic among some people. anxiety that arises varies, such as anxiety about contracting the covid-19 virus, anxiety about weakening or even worsening financial conditions, and anxiety about the future after the pandemic is done (kamil et al., 2020). recent research shows that viewing funny memes can help people feel calmer and deal with stress due to the pandemic. there are lots of funny memes circulating on social media, so this meme can be used to help relieve stress during the covid-19 pandemic. this is in line with the opinion of myrick et al. (2022) and valenzuela & batinga (2021) that simply viewing memes can help people cope with the pressures of living during a global pandemic. in addition, people who see memes related to covid-19 feel comfortable english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 29 and more confident in their ability to overcome this pandemic. other researchers also studied the usage of covid-19 meme. a research by torres-marín et al. (2022) stated that according to the data collected during the third week of lockdown in spain (from 26 to 31 march 2020). their results suggest that intra-psychic humor styles were associated with better coping with the covid-19 pandemic. structural equation modelling showed that self-enhancing and aggressive humor styles were related to perceiving covid-19 as less psychologically threatening, which, in turn, was associated with a greater perceived funniness of covid-19 memes, thus predicting higher levels of happiness. their findings also suggest that humor styles aimed at boosting one’s own self, irrespective of their potentially lighter or darker nature, may contribute to alleviating adverse psychological consequences arising from the covid-19 pandemic. the unique and intriguing characters of the memes that are spread on social media raise the question: what is the actual intention and purpose of the images, writings, or scenes of the characters contained in these memes? to answer this question, the researcher wants to observe and analyze the use of memes using roland barthes' semiotic analysis, which aims to describe the signifiers and signifieds in the covid-19 meme and explain the meaning contained in these memes. many covid-19 memes are circulating on social media. semiotics is a science or analytical method that examines signs. a sign is a symbol in the form of a clue to tell someone in search of an answer to that sign. in terms of compagno (2018) semiotics is semiology, namely reconstruction that focuses more on the system of sign meanings than on language that specifically applies to structural activities according to the process. semiotics is a scientific study or analytical method to examine signs in the context of scenarios, images, texts, and scenes in films that can be interpreted (sinuraya et al., 2022). meaning means that objects do not only carry information, in this case, the objects want to communicate, but also constitute a structured system of signs used. barthes' semiotic analysis refers to a sign system that generates meaning that will describe the meaning of denotation, connotation, and myth in several covid-19 memes on social media. the researcher thinks that it is important to analyze memes related to covid-19 to discover the meaning lies behind each meme and provide further information related to this matter for society because not all of them will understand the meaning of each memes. furthermore, this research is hoped to give more information for other researcher to conduct a further research. this researcher will try to discover the meaning lies behind memes related to covid-19 using roland barthes' semiotic analysis. thus, this research title is using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme. by analyzing memes using this approach, the researcher will try to find the purposes of creating memes and the meaning behind them. method qualitative research was used in this research. moleong (2017) explained that qualitative research is research to understand the phenomenon of what is experienced by research subjects as a whole using descriptions in the form of words and language, in the specific context experienced, and by utilizing various scientific methods. qualitative research aims to produce descriptive analysis. the researcher tries to describe the facts behind the making of the covid19 meme circulating on social media. data collection techniques were carried out using library research and documentation. a literature study is a data collection technique by conducting a review study of books, literature, records, and reports that have something to do with the problem being solved (pandey & pandey, 2021). literature and documentation studies are carried out by selecting and collecting data by downloading and capturing screenshots of memes shared on social media and analyzing them. the semiotic approach is qualitativeinterpretive namely, a method that focuses on signs and texts as their study, as well as how researchers interpret and decode texts and signs themselves (barbosa & sales, 2022). semiotics plays its role in every sign system, regardless of its substance and boundaries; images, gestures, tones, sounds, music, objects, settings, and even combinations of these, which form both conventional and contemporary entertainment content (crow, 2022). semiotics is applied as a method to approach texts in the media with the assumption that the media itself is communicated through the sign elements it carries (ibrahim & sulaiman, 2020). the signs carried in the media are also loaded with certain interests which shows their complexity because signs in the media certainly sri kurniati almucharomah, wening sahayu, & sulis triono using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme 30 never carry a single meaning (widiastuti et al., 2020). the semiotic tradition consists of a set of theories about how signs represent ideas, situations, feelings, materials, and conditions beyond the signs themselves. semiotic analysis is a method or way to analyze and give meaning to signs and objects contained in messages or texts (siregar, 2022a). as a method of analysis, semiotics is one of the most interpretive methods in analyzing a text and its success or failure as a method rests on how well researchers can articulate the cases they study (leone et al., 2020). results and discussion figure 1. axial coding semiotics is a science that studies signs (siregar, 2022b). if related to memes, semiotics studies the function of image signs, namely how to understand the sign system that exists in memes that play a role in guiding readers to be able to capture the messages contained in them. humans can only think and communicate using signs. the sign in question can be a visual sign that is non-verbal or verbal in nature. semiotics is the theory of analysis of various signs and meanings. how to interpret and examine the operation of a sign in forming a unity of meaning or signification. semiotics analyzes a text or image to obtain information (aiello, 2020). the study of semiotics considers that social phenomena in society and culture are signs. semiotics studies systems, objects, and events that allow the sign to have meaning (mikhaeil & baskerville, 2019). according to van wolde (2018), semiotics is a science or method of analysis to study signs. signs are tools that we use in trying to find our way in the world, among humans, and with humans. semiotics or in terms of barthes semiology wants to study how humanity makes sense of things. interpreting (tosinify) in this case cannot be confused with communicating (to communicate). the results of this study are divided into two main parts, namely describing the covid-19 meme markers and explaining the analysis and description of the types of semiotic markers that appear in the covid-19 memes. in this study, there are 10 memes, each of which describes how difficult it is to face the covid-19 pandemic. the following describes the results of the analysis of the data obtained. table 1, results of the analysis of the data obtained data sign (signified) marker (signifier) translation symbol meaning type of sentence 1. a woman dancing to striptease wearing full ppe. strip club in 2020. the first data indicates that during a pandemic situation, striptease dancers also wore full ppe clothing when dancing at strip clubs. from the syntactic point of view, it can be seen that the writing on the meme is made as 'satire'. the clothes of the striptease dancers are similar to bikinis because, at this time of the covid-19 pandemic, the image of the dancers is wearing full ppe english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 31 2. a woman is taking food or drinks in the refrigerato r which is located in the kitchen. first day of isolation. 30th day of isolation. the second data marker is when the woman self-isolates during the pandemic, on the first day the woman's body is still slender, and on the 30th day of independent isolation, the woman's body becomes fat because she eats too much and does not do enough exercise. judging from the syntax, when people do isolation, they will gain weight after they finish isolating. this is because during isolation people go to the kitchen more often than usual, including checking the fridge and cupboards. they don't feel they put food in their mouths until they spend a lot of food. 3. a giraffe in the meadow. is the lockdown over? the third data marker, namely that a giraffe became very fat after the lockdown ended, is the third image marker. through the syntax, it can be seen that during the lockdown, people rarely did activities outside the home. this causes them to feel anxious, depressed, and lonely, resulting in an increased appetite and resulting in weight gain. 4. picture of a toddler laughing and crying. when the coronaviru s closes all school activities. parents in the countrysid e and the city. the fourth data marker is that during the covid-19 pandemic, many schools closed and carried out distance learning. parents of students who live in rural areas are certainly very happy because their children do not need to go to school and can help with their work, while parents who live in urban areas feel very sad because their children are just playing. in terms of syntax, people living in rural areas are better than those living in cities. in villages, the spread of covid19 is lower considering that there are rarely gathering points for the community, whereas in cities there are many shopping centers and cinemas, so people gather more often so the spread of covid-19 becomes faster. the people in the village can still work in the fields or the garden, so they are happier. during a pandemic, people who live in cities work from home and are prohibited from doing activities outside the home, so many of them feel stressed and depressed. 5. toddlers sitting on the floor of their house without clothes. me after i ate all my quarantine snacks in one night. the fifth data indicates that during the quarantine period, you are required to eat a lot to maintain the body's immunity. as a result, the weight increases. in terms of syntax, it can be seen that during quarantine, it is easier for people to give up good habits, such as sports because the pandemic depression does not end soon. as a result, people eat more, and eventually, the scale needle tilts more to the right. 6. bigfoot in a scene from the gta game. social distancing champion. the sixth data marker is that during a pandemic social distancing was enforced so that people in their activities always keep their distance from other people. this causes people to feel like they are not being cared for because they from a syntactic point of view, social distancing is very necessary during a pandemic, namely to reduce the risk of transmission of the covid-19 virus. social distancing does not mean anti-social, so you look shabby and unkempt. sri kurniati almucharomah, wening sahayu, & sulis triono using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme 32 keep their distance from other people. 7. birds are looking for food on the edge of the lake. online meeting. with videos. only with audio. the seventh data marker is that when holding online meetings or online lectures, sometimes people will look sober when they close the camera in an online application and will look neat when they turn on the camera. from the syntactic point of view, when conducting online meetings, most people will look neat when they turn on the camera and will look sober when they don't turn on the camera. this often happens to people during a pandemic. 8. two actors are doing a scene in the movie back to the future. marty, no matter what, never return to 2020! the eighth data indicates that 2020 was a very difficult year because that year the coronavirus first appeared which caused a change in the lifestyle of the world community so people did not want to return to 2020. in terms of syntax, it can be seen that people generally do not want to return to 2020, because that year was the worst in world history. in 2020 many people died due to covid-19 and the economy collapsed and many people lost their jobs. 9. a mother with her three children in a room. work from home. the ninth data marker is usually when working from home there are lots of distractions. this mother was working from home and her three children were always noisy, in the end, the children were bound hand and foot, and their mouths were covered with plaster. in terms of syntax, it can be seen that when working from home you will encounter many distractions, including children who ask to play together or who are noisy with their brothers or sisters. to deal with this disturbance, a mother finally decided to tie her children's feet and hands. 10. a man and dog are watching something . that is for your good. you must stop touching your face. the tenth data marker is a dog and its owner who wears a face shield, so that their hands don't touch their faces too often, considering that hands are a source of germs. the syntactical aspect explains that during the pandemic season, washing hands is very mandatory, to prevent infection with the coronavirus in yourself, your family, and those around you. the existence of social media in people's lives makes social media a place to express opinions (anderson & jiang, 2018). nowadays, people often post various meme images, words, and even hashtags on their respective social media in expressing their views on covid-19. on social media such as facebook, instagram, and twitter, a meme can be replicated by someone and they can edit it according to the message they want to convey and then upload it to cyberspace. with a process like this, memes have become a means of exchanging ideas, discourse, and information that can be used by anyone (harshavardhan et al., 2019). apart from that, memes are also a means of entertainment, and the functions of memes vary, from wanting attention, sharing ideas, using memes to comment on/quip something, or can influence someone’s mind (de leon & ballesteros-lintao, 2021). based on the memes above, it can be seen that in the first meme, there is a meme of a woman dancing to striptease wearing full ppe clothes which has meaning during a pandemic situation, striptease dancers also wear full ppe clothes when dancing in strip clubs. based on the meme, it means that this virus has made everyone protecting themselves, including those who are striptease dancer. striptease dancers are known to dance with bikini only. this delivers meaning that this virus is dangerous enough that made people english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 33 who do striptease dance covered themselves to prevent them from covid-19. in the second meme, a woman is taking food or drink from the refrigerator which is located in the kitchen and has meaning when the woman is selfisolating during a pandemic, on the first day the woman's body is still slender, and on the 30th day of independent isolation, the woman's body becomes fat because too much to eat and lack of sports activities. in the third meme, a giraffe in the meadow which has the meaning that a giraffe gets very fat after the lockdown is over is the marker of the third meme. both of the meme delivers the same messages. during the covid-19, most of the outdoor activities were limited. even companies were applied the work from home program. due to this limitation, most of people spent their time at home. not much activities can be done, most of them spent their time with eating a lot of snack. therefore, they gained weight a lot during covid19. this meme related to the condition during covid-19 and now seen as a humour. the fourth meme, the meme of toddlers laughing and crying, means that during the covid19 pandemic, many schools were closed and carried out distance learning. parents of students who live in rural areas are certainly very happy because their children do not need to go to school and can help with their work, while parents who live in urban areas feel very sad because their children are just playing. this condition related to the condition of the society during the covid-19. parents also felt stressed because the responsibilities to teach their children concerning the school matters was shared with them. in the fifth meme, there is a toddler meme sitting on the floor of his house without wearing clothes, which means that during quarantine you are required to eat a lot to maintain your body's immunity. as a result, the weight is increasing day by day. it delivers message for people to keep their body healthy and maintain their body’s immunity to prevent from the viruses. in the sixth meme, there is a bigfoot meme in a scene in the gta game which means that during the pandemic, social distancing was enforced, so that people in their activities always kept their distance from other people. this causes people to feel like they are not being cared for because they keep their distance from other people. it could be seen during the online meeting that was oftenly conducted during covid-19. most of the people only cared about their upper appearance, which was the only part that showed in the screen, while the rest of their appearance tended to be messy. in addition, during covid-19, there was not much out-door activities that needed people to dress-up nicely, that was one of the reasons why during the covid-19, people looked messy. in the seventh meme, there is a meme of a bird looking for food by the lake, which means that when conducting online meetings or online lectures, sometimes people will look sober when they close the camera on an online application and will look neat when they turn on the camera. in the eighth meme, there is a picture of two actors doing a scene in the movie back to the future, which means that 2020 is a very tough year because that year the coronavirus first appeared which caused a change in the lifestyle of the world's people, so people do not want to go back to 2020. in the ninth meme, there is a meme of a mother with her three children in a room, and it has the meaning that usually when working from home there are lots of distractions. this mother was working from home and her three children were always noisy, in the end, the children were bound hand and foot, and their mouths were covered with plaster. of course, this was not intended to hurt his children, but only to teach them a lesson so that later when the mother is working from home, they will not do the same commotion again. these memes deliver meaning that covid-19 was a tough condition because they were not only limited in doing activities, they also faced problems doing their job from home. for students, some parents may intervere their children by asking them doing some chores, while for parents, children tended to distract their parents because of their loud voice. from this research, it can be seen that the covid-19 memes were made by creators with a specific purpose. the signs used, the choice of diction used, the aesthetics of the images chosen, and the strings of sentences used are carefully thought out so that the goals intended by the creators can be achieved. in general, covid-19 memes aim to help relieve stress during the covid-19 pandemic. seeing funny memes that are spreading on social media can help someone feel calmer and overcome depression due to the pandemic that has hit (bauer & ngondo, 2022). the emotional level becomes lower by viewing memes. signified which is used in the covid-19 meme is very easy to understand and interesting according to the intended signifier. the signifiers underlying the covid-19 meme include scenes from the famous movie back to the future and scenes from the gta game. the words contained sri kurniati almucharomah, wening sahayu, & sulis triono using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme 34 in the meme describe various kinds of satire during the pandemic because many people are struggling and surviving during the pandemic. a signified that is made is equipped with a sentence as a sign. the contents of the signified covid-19 meme can represent the feelings of someone who is facing a pandemic so that the message that the creator hopes for can be conveyed to the reader. in addition, in terms of sentences, the covid-19 meme contains sentences containing information and expressions of feelings. the development of internet technology is increasingly advanced, now people can communicate quickly with the help of the internet without having to meet face to face, especially through social media. for memes, communication is a way to expand itself toward other thoughts. conditions like this eventually paved the way for memes to grow, shifting from conventional ways of communication to more advanced ways by updating themselves to become internet memes. an internet meme is something that becomes famous through the internet. like pictures, videos, or even people. internet memes are created through a process of imitation and photographic modification of existing ones. creators must be observant in observing social events that are currently happening in society. foresight is needed to find small things that can be used as objects. it is done so that the messages conveyed by internet meme creators to internet meme connoisseurs can be conveyed in entertaining and effective ways. conclusion signifiers found in meme covid-19 such: there are snippets of famous movie scenes and games. the insinuations in the sentences are also very true to reality. the sentences provide statements that contain information and contain expressions of feelings from creators as fighters during the global covid-19 pandemic. references aiello, g. 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(2019). make america meme again: the rhetoric of the alt-right. peter lang new york. sri kurniati almucharomah, wening sahayu, & sulis triono using semiotic analysis to analyze the purpose of creating covid-19 meme 36 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 801 students' problems in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context lala nurlatifah english education department, faculty of language literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: lalanurlatifah@upi.edu fazri nur yusuf english education department, faculty of language literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia email: fazrinuryusuf@upi.edu apa citation: nurlatifah, l., & yusuf, f. n. (2022). students’ problems in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 801-810. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6633. received: 22-07-2022 accepted: 24-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction efl learners often encounter enormous challenges in mastering writing skills, which is essential to learning english (rashtchi, 2019). it is probably due to writing being a complex process of conveying ideas or feelings in written form (harmer, 2007). it is more than just the ability to write or construct a sentence or paragraph based on ideas. it is a multifaceted communicative skill, and teaching writing is viewed as a dynamic process that improves students' mastery of spelling, punctuation, grammar, composition, vocabulary use, and style (terenin, 2015). studies on students' challenges in writing have been conducted by the researchers worldwide. many students struggled greatly with writing unity, and the lack of cohesion in their compositions has a lasting effect and takes many forms (terenin, 2015). vocabulary, grammar, and writing resources were the primary causes of academic writing issues (li and zeng, 2019). the writing composition issues among iraqi efl students, the majority of the students' mistakes involved grammar, punctuation, spelling, and handwriting (nasser, 2019). the fact that so many students did not receive enough writing instruction in elementary school contributes to the writing problem: the development of students' writing has been hampered by the lack of particular instructional strategies and modifications (wen & walters, 2022). in indonesia, a study indicated that students show psychological, linguistic, and cognitive problems in their writing (rahmatunisa, 2014). they also faced several major problems in writing, such as grammar (ariyanti & fitriana, 2017; astrini et al., 2020; emilia et al., 2018; tambunan et al., 2022), vocabulary (astrini et al., 2020; elfa, 2020; mahmudah et al., 2017), and motivation made it challenging to express their ideas in english (astrini et al., 2020). since writing is the most challenging skill to master, students often face some problems in writing: psychological, linguistic, and cognitive issues (byrne, 1995; rahmatunisa, 2014). first, writing is a solitary activity in psychological abstract: writing is perceived as the most challenging skill among other productive skills in english language learning. this preliminary study aims at revealing problems encountered by secondary efl students writing analytical exposition. employing students' writing and interviews in qualitative manner, 25 second-year efl secondary students in bandung, indonesia, were purposefully involved. result indicated that students encountered three major problems in writing their analytical exposition; cognitive, linguistic, and psychological problems. cognitively, most students had limited knowledge of the topic, problems with the structure of the text, the mechanism for capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, and difficulties in sharing ideas due to limited english vocabulary. linguistically, students frequently encounter the two most challenging areas: vocabulary and grammar. psychologically, students often found difficulties starting writing, lack of interest, laziness, and confusion in deciding sentence structures. further discussion of the results is recommended to take into consideration to determine the appropriate treatment for the follow-up research. keywords: analytical exposition text; students' problem; writing skills. mailto:lalanurlatifah@upi.edu mailto:fazrinuryusuf@upi.edu lala nurlatifah & fazri nur yusuf students’ problems in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context 802 problems, and the fact that we are compelled to write on our own, without the benefit of interaction or feedback, makes the act of writing challenging in and of itself. second, linguistic issues, in which we must compensate for the absence of features in writing, keep the line of communication open through our efforts, and ensure that the text we produce can be interpreted on its own, both through our choice of sentence structure and the way our sentences are linked together and sequenced. finally, a process teaches writing instruction, which is a cognitive challenge. it implies that we must master the written form of the language and acquire specific structures necessary for effective written communication. despite its complexity, most individuals utilize writing daily to achieve various goals, including expressing thoughts, attitudes, and opinions, transferring knowledge, expressing feelings, and convincing others (shirejini & derakhsan, 2020). it is essential not only for academic performance but also for students' emotional and social development (moses & mohamad, 2019). thus, we might conclude that writing significantly impacts other people. to compose a good writing, students are supposed to understand crucial elements of writing. brown (2007) classifies the writing elements into five aspects: content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics. content refers to knowledge on developing a text that must be relevant, specific, and explicit on the assigned topic. organization is developed based on the generic structure of analytical exposition text. grammar or language use covers the complex practical construction of agreements, numbers, tenses, word order functions, articles, pronouns, etc. vocabulary refers to the use of appropriate and effective word choice, word form mastery, and proper register and diction. mechanics deals with correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing. to achieve the goal of communication, it is necessary that the writer must be able to convey the writer's message through the five previously described components and taking the readers' characteristics into account (fatimah & yusuf, 2019). those components are essential in composing good writing. good writers can manage and organize their writing balance in all those components. in addition, students who write well should convey their opinions, back them up with sound reasoning, and arrange their thoughts (raschti, 2019). as a result, one requirement in teaching writing to efl/esl students is to use tactics and procedures that help improve the student-writers critical thinking abilities. the importance of writing is stated clearly in 2013 curriculum. in the curriculum of english subject of grade xi for senior high school students, one of the genres that the students must master is analytical exposition text (kemendikbud, 2016). based on the curriculum, the standard competence of analytical exposition text is to analyze the socio-function, generic structures, and linguistic features of spoken and written text by asking and giving information relating to the actual issue based on the context. according to the english syllabus, the sociofunction of analytical exposition is to persuade the listener or reader that the idea is an important thing; the generic structures of the text consist of thesis, argument(s) and conclusion or reiteration; the main linguistic elements employed in the analytical exposition are modals, action verbs, adverbs, adjectives, technical terms, general and abstract nouns, and connectives or transitions (kemendikbud, 2016). argumentative essay and argumentation include the same components: claim, reason an evidence (fan & chen, 2019). argumentation is a process when a person supports their statements about a particular topic with examples of their reasoning and supporting evidence (fan & chen, 2019). argumentative writing is difficult for students in elementary, junior high, and even senior high schools because weak arguments in their paper make it difficult for them to persuade readers (golder & coirier, 1996 in fan & chen, 2019). analytical exposition text refers to argumentative writing. although personal opinions and a contentious or passionate debate are frequently included in argumentative essays, they must be kept in check and moderate to succeed (anderson, 2002). furthermore, she elaborated on some features of an argumentative essay are mentioned by they are 1) the topic is up for debate; 2) the thesis makes a reasonable assertion that is supported by data; 3) the opponent is acknowledged and answered; 4) the argument is developed using trustworthy and current evidence; and 5) the writer's argument is developed by using appeals (anderson, 2002). the generic structures of analytical exposition text consists of thesis, argument, and reiteration or conclusion. the thesis introduces the issue that will be discussed. the students must next elaborate the evidence to persuade the audience, known as argument. they develop and support english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 803 each point/argument in this section. the reiteration is the concluding section, in which they reaffirm their viewpoint. several studies have been conducted in the efl classroom context regarding the problems efl learners face in analytical exposition writing. students performed unsatisfactorily when it came to writing thesis statements, arguments, reiterations, language features, vocabulary, and mechanics; in fact, students need to master all these skills to produce analytical exposition texts that are qualified and relevant (elfa, 2020). there are specific lexico-grammatical issues, such as using the proper tenses, some vocabulary, diction, punctuation, and spelling errors in writing analytical exposition (mahmudah et al., 2017). sixteen errors were found in students' writing exposition text (fauzan et al., 2020). all exposition texts written by the students were undeveloped, with grammatical mistakes and improper word choices (emilia et al., 2018). the importance of writing analytical exposition text is stated clearly in the 2013 indonesian curriculum context that students are expected to be able to write various genres of text within the mastery of three competencies: sociofunction, generic structures, and language features (kemendikbud, 2016). however, most students seem to face some problems regarding writing analytical exposition texts. as a result, most students' scores in writing are below the minimum competencies. this preliminary study attempted to identify indonesian efl learners' problems in writing analytical exposition text based on three major problems in writing: cognitive, linguistics, and psychology. the present study concerns to answer the following research question: rq: what are the problems faced by the students in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context? method to collect detailed, in-depth data from multiple sources of information over time in order to investigate students' writing problems in writing analytical exposition text along with descriptive themes, this study employed a qualitative case study (merriam, 2009). the present research recruited 25 efl students in second-year secondary school (6 males and 19 females) in a public islamic senior high school in bandung, indonesia, to examine the problems in writing analytical exposition text. they were students in one class who had learned analytical exposition text the previous semester. then three students from low, middle, and high achievers were selected to administer an interview. the data were collected from students' writing tasks and interviews. first, the students were asked to write an analytical exposition text entitled "the importance of social media in teenagers life" in 90 minutes. it is one of the genres that is taught in the first semester. the students' essay were then analyzed using a writing scoring rubric adapted from brown (2007). after that, three students were purposively chosen for the interview session regarding the major problems in writing analytical exposition text. the semi-structured interview consisted of eight questions concerning the issues they found and their perceptions about writing analytical exposition text. it was conducted in bahasa indonesia to free the participants from conveying their ideas to get more prosperous data. each interview session took approximately 15 minutes and was recorded and then analyzed qualitatively. the qualitative data from the writing task and interview were triangulated to answer the research question. from the interview data, central themes emerged, which were triangulated with the data from documents. in conclusion, the data from two sources were analyzed through coding, building categories, describing the categories, and interpreting the data based on the theories (merriam, 2009). results and discussion the results revealed three major problems in writing analytical exposition text: linguistics, cognitive, and psychological problems. students' writing problems are presented in the table below. table 1. students' writing problems aspects of writing efl students' writing ability (%) problem (%) content 56.8 43.2 organization 54.4 45.6 grammar 57.6 42.4 vocabulary 59.2 40.8 mechanics 60 40 table 1 above demonstrates the efl students' writing ability in almost all aspects of writing. however, most students often struggle with limited knowledge in writing aspects of efl students in content, organization, vocabulary, and mechanics was also identified by toba et al. (2019). as a result, only six out of twenty-six students got a score above the minimum criteria (65), and the rest got a score under the minimum standards based on the document analysis. lala nurlatifah & fazri nur yusuf students’ problems in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context 804 under this, terenin (2015) stated that the lack of unity in students' compositions has a sustained character and manifests itself in a variety of ways: conflict between the sentence parts' respective meanings, conflict between the meaning and structure of the statement; the repetition of form concerning content; and clash of styles. cognitive problems in cognitive problems, there were four problems faced by the efl students in writing analytical exposition texts. the first problem was limited knowledge of the topic. most students had limited knowledge and thematic development regarding the content of the text. although the thesis statement was stated clearly, it was not supported by clear arguments. there was less coverage of the topic. it is illustrated in excerpt 1 below. excerpt 1 from many benefits inside social media, there are also positive and negative impact. for a positive impact, social media makes it easy us in doing everything. one of them can be contact with friend or our brother or sister who live far from us. for negative impact of social media, one of them can make us forget time. also not good for eye health. (document, s5) excerpt 1 shows that the student did not know enough knowledge about the content of the topic. students had difficulties in writing such as they had difficulties in determining the topic and developing ideas into paragraphs (ilham et al., 2020). the difficulties in developing ideas are also confirmed in excerpt 2. excerpt 2 t: what problems do you usually find in writing class? s: i am still confused in deciding the tenses in the sentences. it is also hard to share ideas when the writing topic is irrelevant to my daily activities. t: what causes this problem? s: i think lack of reading causes this problem. (interview, s3) s3 stated that it was hard for him to share ideas, particularly when the writing topic was not relevant, meaning that limited knowledge of the topic is the main problem regarding the cognitive problem. the second problem is most students could not differentiate the text's genre because they had problems with the structure of the analytical exposition text. they were still going wrong in deciding the structure of the text. moreover, some wrote the pros and cons arguments, meaning that they wrote another genre of the text: discussion text. it is illustrated in excerpt 3 below. excerpt 3 social media is online media that allows a user communicate with other easily and quickly. the type of social media that we often use is everyday life are whatsapp, instagram, youtube and twitter. makes it easier for interact with other people and the cost is also cheaper. social media also make people addicted internet, cause conflict, and vulnureble to bad influences from sociate the conclusion is that social media has many benefits but is harmful. (document, s4) excerpt 3 indicates that students still had limitation regarding generic structures or organization of the text. it is in line with habibi et al. (2017), students struggle with seven different writing problems, including poor organization or illogical sequencing. the students' third issue was the mechanism for capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. as a result, they occasionally misspelled words when they wrote. additionally, several of them neglected to use capitalization and punctuation properly, such as a period (.) after sentences. additionally, the students occasionally scribbled the first letter of a word at the start of a paragraph or a title and the name of a person or location in a small font. it is seen in excerpt 4 below. excerpt 4 social media is online media used by each other whose users can easily participate communicate. facilitate communication and friendship. can be used as a marketing means. as the means of information or news most up to date. (document, s6) excerpt 4 indicates that mechanism was one of the issues regarding cognitive problems. in line with this, punctuation is one of the writing errors in analytical exposition text (fauzan et al., 2020). punctuation, spelling, and handwriting issues are also found in students' writing (nasser, 2019). the last problem regarding cognitive problem is difficulties in sharing ideas due to limited amount of english vocabulary. the students had english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 805 trouble writing the arguments because they had difficulty translating the ideas from bahasa indonesia into english. they used to write the ideas in bahasa indonesia, then translated them into english. this problem was identified based on excerpt 5 below. excerpt 5 t : what stages do you usually do in writing? s : i wrote it indonesian first, then i translated it into english. (interview, s2) excerpt 5 shows english students' proficiency in using vocabulary. as a result, many students wrote the text in indonesian first, then translated it into english using the online dictionary and google translator. the problem in translating paragraph into english is one of the problem found in nurjanah (2018) that the students' weaknesses cause the difficulties in writing in developing ideas, constructing present tense and passive voice, and translating paragraphs from indonesian into english form. linguistics problems regarding linguistic problem, most students frequently encounter the two most challenging areas in linguistic features: grammatical proficiency and vocabulary mastering. for example, a student arranged words that were not grammatically correct. it shows in excerpt 6 below. excerpt 6 social media is online media that allows a user communicate with other easily and quickly. the type of social media that we often use is everyday life are whatsapp, instagram, youtube and twitter. makes it easier for interact with other people and the cost is also cheaper. social media also make people addicted internet, cause conflict, and vulnureble to bad influences from sociate the conclusion is that social media has many benefits but is harmful. (document, s4) the student's writing in excerpt 6 indicates that one main linguistic problem was grammatical proficiency. hasan and marzuki (2017) assessed the writing skills of indonesian efl students, the research revealed that the students' work had grammatical errors related to the usage of plural forms, articles, verb tenses, clauses, passive voice, and prepositions. grammar is the students' main problem in writing development (ariyanti & fitriana, 2017; astrini et al., 2020; emilia et al., 2018); hartono & maharani, 2019; tambunan et al., 2022). another linguistic problem was that students often find writing difficult due to a lack of vocabulary and tenses. the result of the interview in excerpt 7 is also supported this result. excerpt 7 what problems do you find in writing class? i have problems with vocabulary, verbs, and tenses. (interview, s2) the finding in excerpt 7 above supports the writing students' writing that they had difficulties using appropriate vocabulary, which usually came up when students composed the analytical exposition paragraph with the correct word choice. in addition, most students were confused about using proper words in their worksheets because most of them used words taken from a dictionary. the problem regarding the use of vocabulary in writing has much attention from many researchers in efl writing field (ilham et al., 2020; astrini et al., 2020; elfa, 2020; mahmudah et al., 2017; emilia et al., 2018). the student' writing in excerpt 8 shows low proficiency in vocabulary use. excerpt 8 social media is a online media, with its various features which are provided. online media certainly brings positive and negative impacts for the users. social media brings negative specially to children and adolescent, who can make lazy for communication in world real. then skill they annoyed. they are not aware of the environment around them, as most of their time spent on the internet. so smart in use social media because not all social media has a positive impact on us. (document, s9) the example of student writing in excerpt 8 shows that paragraphs were challenging to understand because of the limited vocabulary and grammar. students' limited vocabulary is the primary challenge kids encounter when learning the english language (misbah et al., 2017). students with appropriate vocabulary can communicate ideas more effectively while speaking or writing and limited vocabulary lala nurlatifah & fazri nur yusuf students’ problems in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context 806 students can benefit from using an electronic dictionary and engaging in more reading activities (moses & mohamad, 2019). in the process of writing, almost all students utilized online dictionaries and translators. the use of the online dictionary and online translator positively impacted students writing, particularly in terms of the effectiveness of time instead of using printed dictionaries, which would make wasting time. however, it also raised another problem in using translator and smartphones: several students could easily copy the writing from many sources on the internet. psychological problems in psychological problems, there were four problems in writing analytical exposition text: difficulties in starting writing, lack of interest, laziness, and confusion in grammar rules. the first problem is illustrated in excerpt 9 below. excerpt 9 t : how do you feel when your teacher asks you to write? s: first, i feel confused because i don't know what to write excerpt 9 shows that the student had difficulties in starting writing. the result of the students' writing also confirmed it. two students had the same thesis statement in the text, meaning they encountered the same problem in the early writing stage. the problem in starting writing is illustrated in the excerpt below. excerpt 10 social media in today's era has become an inseparable part of the daily life activities of almost everyone. (document, s8) social media in today's era has become an inseparable parts of the daily life activities of almost everyone. (document, s12) another student in excerpt 10 also confirmed the problem regarding difficulties in starting writing. excerpt 11 t : what problems do you find in writing class? s: writing problems are usually encountered in the early stage of writing. after that, ideas can flow, and i can do this activity (interview, s2) based on excerpt 11, student's problem in starting writing is one of the psychological problems identified in writing (rahmatunisa, 2014), and learners' difficulties in writing consist of defining a topic to write and starting to write a word or a sentence. the second problem was lack of interest, as confirmed by excerpt 12 below. excerpt 12 what's your opinion about writing activity in your classroom? i rarely write because writing is not my hobby (interview, s2) excerpt 12 shows problems related with the lack of interest in writing. concerning lack of interest, s1 rarely wrote english texts because the writing was not in his interest. however, he once wrote a text for an english assignment in writing class. in addition, he was also confused when his teacher asked him to write because he did not know what to write. the research of toba et al. (2019) found that students faced several personal problems in writing, such as lack of writing experience, a dislike of writing, writing anxiety, a feeling that writing is difficult, a lack of writing motivation, not enough time allocated for writing tests, and also insufficient teaching. the third problem in psychological problem was laziness. it was found that several students had the same writing, meaning they copied it from the same sources. it indicated that they seem unconfident and lazy to write the text alone. laziness is one of the factors causing the students to copy the task. the laziness in writing is illustrated in excerpt 13 below. excerpt 13 social media seems to have become an addiction for indonesian people, especially teenagers. (document, s8) social media seems to have become an addiction for indonesian people, especially teenagers. (document, s10) excerpt above shows that laziness caused students to copy the task from other sources. excerpt 13 also supports excerpt 10 that some students find difficulties in the early stage of writing. laziness is also a psychological problem identified in writing argumentative essays (rahmatunisa, 2014). the last problem found on the research site was students' confusion about sentence structure, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 807 particularly in tenses used in analytical exposition paragraphs. it is seen in excerpt 14. excerpt 14 t : what problems do you usually find in writing class? s : i am still confused in deciding the tenses in the sentences. it is also hard to share ideas when the writing topic is irrelevant to my daily activities. t : what causes this problem? s : i think lack of reading causes this problem. (interview, s3) the result of the student's interview in excerpt 14 also confirmed by the student' writing that several students had problems deciding the tenses and sentence structure. it is illustrated in excerpt 15 below. excerpt 15 beside that, social media have many benefits in our life. for example, social media can be a means for students to access learning information. the student often take advantage of social media such as youtube to acces learning. (document, s2) based on excerpt 15, most students also show the problem in presenting the grammar rules in writing. for example, it seemed challenging to distinguish between singular and plural subjects. in addition, some of these make it challenging to differentiate between the simple present tense and the passive sentence forms. ariyanti and fitriana (2017) discovered that students struggle considerably with writing in terms of grammar, cohesiveness, and coherence. additionally, they noted the small writing issues that students had, such as poor paragraph organization, poor diction, and misspelled vocabulary. it showed that writing is challenging for learners, particularly efl students. because of this, a teacher's presence is crucial for students as they write. the findings of this study shows that students struggled to develop their skills in writing analytical exposition texts. as found in this study, there are three major problems in writing analytical exposition text on the research site: psychological, linguistics, and cognitive problems. it is in line with three factors influencing the writing process: cognitive, linguistic, and psychological problems (byrne, 1993; rahmatunisa, 2014). in cognitive problems, most students had limited knowledge of the topic, the problem with the structure and the mechanism of the analytical exposition text, and difficulties in sharing ideas due to their limited english vocabulary. students' difficulties in sharing and developing ideas result from low reading and writing literacy levels (ilham et al., 2020). consequently, teachers should establish an environment where they can support and motivate the students as they study and teach. by letting students work at their own pace and constantly sharing their writing with peers, teachers helped students become more motivates to write (baker & lastrapes, 2019). students' enthusiasm and writing quality increased when they collaborated and shared their work, which encouraged peer discussion and a synergy. in linguistics problems, students frequently encounter the two most challenging areas in linguistic features: vocabulary and grammar. the students admitted that it was challenging for them to build their thoughts. most of them claimed that their limited vocabulary made it difficult to write an argument. it is in line with much previous research on writing difficulties that limited vocabulary is the main issue in presenting ideas in writing. as a result, almost all students utilize online dictionaries and translators to assist their writing. online dictionaries, which students can use to translate specific words or occasionally short phrases, and online translators (like google translate), which can be used to convert text as short as a word and as long as multiple paragraphs, are two common free tools that are used by language learners (oneill, 2019). then, the question is no longer whether such technologies should be used but which ones, when, and how. ducar and schocket (2018) state that teachers should encourage the responsible use of ots and related technologies rather than forbid their use to help learners understand that positive progress toward greater proficiency and ethical use of technologies are critical 21st-century skills. although online dictionaries and translators are often utilized, there are differing views on their utility and suitability for efl learners. the use of google translate makes sense and demonstrates that the students were still thinking in indonesian rather than english, which caused a misunderstanding when they translated their ideas into english using google translate because the program clearly cannot recognize the context of the ideas or writing (sheppard, 2011). however, the problem of online resources for second language learning might never have a onelala nurlatifah & fazri nur yusuf students’ problems in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context 808 size-fits-all solution because the majority of students now use online dictionaries and translation services. so, the teacher needs to become more knowledgeable about these resources, create clear policies they are comfortable with regarding their use, and educate students on when, how, and how much they should use online resources to help them with their coursework (oneill, 2019). in turn, learners can be empowered to make responsible decisions about how to use contemporary technology on their path to learning a language by becoming knowledgeable about the benefits and drawbacks of online dictionaries and translator, as well as the potential effects of these tools on writing (oneill, 2019). regarding psychological problems, they were also confused about starting writing and lazy in writing the text and sharing ideas in english because they did not know what to write. hence, several students copied them from the same sources. students lacked interest in writing class because writing activity was not their interest, meaning they were unmotivated to write an english text. motivation is one of the crucial aspects of writing skills. by couraging their internal writing motivation, they will also alter their perspective of the negative perspective associated with writing. as a result, they would be courageous, like, and highly motivated when writing, as it cannot be denied that motivation impacts learners' success in learning both second and foreign languages and is closely related to achieving objectives (harmer, 2007; toba et al., 2019). by identifying these writing problems, it is hoped that the teacher becomes aware of the problems faced by the students and adequately and effectively conducts the teaching of writing to improve the indonesian efl students' writing ability and resolve their problems in writing. teachers can assist their students with their writing projects by offering constructive feedback, sample essays, and scaffolding focused on the students' needs (rashid et al., 2022). students also required further instruction and time to research the issue to focus on the topic, allowing them to create more detailed content that contains linguistic features of written language argumentative discourse with consistency and accuracy (emilia, 2018). conclusion this preliminary study was conducted to identify the efl students' problems, factors affecting the problems, and suggestions to improve the skills in writing analytical exposition text. it can be concluded that indonesian efl students face three major problems in their writing: cognitive, linguistics and psychological problems. considering the result of this study, the researcher should try to overcome those problems in teaching writing by implementing an effective strategy that supports students in improving their writing analytical exposition text. references anderson, m. 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(2022). the impact of technology on students' writing performances in elementary classrooms: a meta-analysis. computers and education open, 3, 100082. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeo.2022.100082 https://doi.org/10.21093/di.v19i1.1506 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeo.2022.100082 lala nurlatifah & fazri nur yusuf students’ problems in writing analytical exposition text in efl classroom context 810 flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: fahruszf@gmail.com apa citation: fadhly, f. z. (2012). flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 57-70 received: 12-10-2011 accepted: 21-11-2013 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: this paper analyzed the presidential interviews of the president of republic of indonesia, susilo bambang yudoyono (sby), based on grice’s theory of the cooperative principles (cp). this study employed a qualitative research design and the data were three transcripts of interview discourse between sby and eight indonesian journalists obtained through the presidential official website: http://www.presidentsby.info. the research investigated the ways of sby in flouting the cp maxims in his presidential interviews and the functions of the flouts were. the research revealed that sby flouted all the cp maxims and the maxim of quantity was frequently flouted. meanwhile, there were four ways used by sby in flouting the cp maxims, i.e. hedging, indirectness, open answer and detailed element. the function of the flouts, i.e. face saving acts (fsa), self-protection, awareness, politeness, interestingness, control of information, elaboration and ignorance. this research also revealed that cp maxims of grice are not universal. keywords: flouts, maxim, cooperative principles, sby, presidential interview introduction a speaker does not always explicitly say what she or he means much more than his or her utterance actually utters (thomas, 1995). in another case, a speaker may also provide information that intentionally confuses or misleads the hearer (keenan, 1976). therefore, for the sake of a successful communication, both speaker and hearer should mutually cooperate with each other. since, without cooperation, interaction would be counterproductive. in pragmatics study, there are at least three big themes that are largely discussed, i.e. (1) speech act (austin, 1962; searl, 1970; searl, keifer and bierwisch, 1980; blum-kulka and oldstain, 1984; and kasper, 1989), (2) conversational implicature (grice, 1975; keenan, 1976; levinson, 1983; sperber and wilson, 1986; schiffrin, 1994; brown and yule, 1996; van dijk, 1998; saifullah, 2002; mooney, 2004), and (3) politeness (goffman , 1967 in haverkate 1988; lakoff, 1973; brown and levinson, 1978; leech, 1983; matsumuto, 1988; kitao, 1989; mao, 1994; holmes, 1995; wilamová, 2005; and zhang and you, 2009). it was grice, an english language philosopher, who firstly introduced the term ‘conversational implicature’ in a series of lectures at harvard university in 1967. in grice’s paper (1975) entitled ‘logic and conversation’, grice promotes the cp which then republished by davis (1991), and jaworski and coupland (1999). further, in order to elaborate his theory, grice wrote an article entitled http://www.presidentsby.info/ fahrus zaman fadhly flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews further notes on logic and conversation in syntax and semantics edited by cole (1978). the study of cooperative principles (here after called cp) is subtheory of conversational implicature. the cp rules the members of communication in order that the conversation will be coherent. in realizing the cp, grice (1975) suggests that contribution to talk should be guided by four maxims as subordinate rules or sub-principles of cp, i.e. the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation and the maxim of manner as follows (further explanation will be elaborated in chapter ii). since its emergence, cp has attracted a lot of linguists’ attention and critiques and until now it still invites controversy in accordance with its universality, practicality, and contradiction within the principles as pointed out by keenan (1976), levinson (1983), sperber and wilson (1986), schiffrin (1994), brown and yule (1996), and van dijk (1998). according to keenan (1976, p. 23), cp is not universal by claiming that: the malagasy, for example, follow a completely opposite cooperative principle in order to achieve conversational cooperation. in their culture, speakers are reluctant to share information and flout the maxim of quantity by evading direct questions and replying on incomplete answers because of the risk of losing face by committing oneself to the truth of the information, as well as the fact that having information is a form of prestige. sperber and wilson (1986) suggested that maxims of cp become only one: maxim of relation. they drew attention to the central importance of relevance decisions in reasoning and communication. they proposed an account of the process of inferring relevant information from any given utterance. to do this work, they used what they called the "principle of relevance": namely, the position that any utterance addressed to someone automatically conveys the presumption of its own optimal relevance. levinson (1983) explored his disagreement on the maxim of relation. in his view, the maxim of relation raises over-implicature what are uttered by the speaker. gricean maxims are also criticized as the barriers in using language. meanwhile, leech (1983) says that no principle can be absolutely applied. he even says that the maxims may also be contrary one another. according to leech, there is a politeness principle with conversational maxims similar to those formulated by grice. he lists six maxims: tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement, and sympathy. the first and second form a pair, as do the third and the fourth. these maxims vary from culture to culture: what may be considered polite in one culture may be strange or downright rude in another. meanwhile, schiffrin (1994), brown and yule (1996) and van dijk (1998) attempt to critically develop the grice’s theory in discourse analysis. according to schiffrin (1994), activity of discourse analysis can methodologically be done through pragmatic approach especially by using cp of grice. yule (1996) develops cp by correlating the presence of hedging and indirectness in an utterance. yule (1996) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/malagasy_people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/geoffrey_leech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/politeness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gricean_maxims http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/paul_grice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/culture english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee points out that the use of hedging and indirect speech tend to flout cp maxims. hedging is frequently used as sign of awareness, while indirectness is frequently used to show positive politeness. meanwhile van dijk (1998) develops critical discourse analysis (cda) in text of news. according to him, in cda, a discourse is also analyzed as a representation of social practice which is correlated to situation, institution and social structure. therefore, van dijk (1998) identifies five characteristics that have to be considered in cda, i.e. act, context, history, power and ideology. despite the criticisms, a lot of research focuses on the cp maxims. the study of cp maxims generally concerns the flouts of utterance. this present study explored the flouts of cp made by the president of indonesia, susilo bambang yudoyono (sby) in his presidential interviews. the use of sby’s language was interesting to be investigated when delivering his ideas, opinion or even objection related to social and political issues. to public, for example, sby (antara, dec 26, 2006) declared that: pemerintahan yang saya pimpin telah memasuki tahun ketiga, karena itu ke depan saya akan lebih menggunakan bahasa terang. (the government i lead has been entering the third year, therefore next i will use ‘clear language’). on the day after that, to kompas (dec 27, 2006) he proposed: bekerja lebih konkret dan menggunakan bahasa terang, saya kira sudah saatnya. ...kurang katakanlah kurang, baik katakanlah baik, tidak baik katakanlah tidak baik. dengan demikian tidak ada dusta di antara kita. (i think it’s the time to work in a more concrete way and use ‘clear language’. ...bad or good will be said for the sake of the truth. having done these things, there will be no more lies between us.) from the above statement, sby declared during the third year of the his government (first period), he flouted the maxim of manner as indicated by words, “…therefore next i will use clear language” and “i think it’s the time to work in a more concrete way and use clear language”. maxim of manner suggests that speakers have to try presenting meaning clearly, concisely orderly, and avoid ambiguity and obscurity of expression (grice, 1975). based on the brief overview above, i was encouraged to explore the phenomenon of the sby’s language regarding social and political issues in the moments of presidential interviews whether or not he would consistently observe cp maxims. the present study was purposely designed to identify the ways of sby in flouting the maxims of cp in his presidential interviews and figure out the functions of flouts of cp applied by sby in his presidential interviews. as mentioned above, this present study focused on the flouts of cp which includes realization and function of the flouts. it also focused only on one person, i.e. sby and one area of topic of interview, i.e. related to public interest. it also focused on three transcripts of sby’s presidential interviews chosen as the samples. such a consideration was taken, since those interviews are still one area of topic in various situations both formal and informal. the topics of interview were extremely controversial related to the public’s interest at that time, i.e. (1) the sby’s objection on dkp and foreign fund issues, (2) the lapindo mudflow disaster, and (3) the 100 days of sby’s government and century bank fahrus zaman fadhly flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews scandal. those topics had also became the national media’s headlines and public discourse at that time. the data were released by bureau for press and media presidential household from december 2006february 2010 as published by presidential official website: http://www.presidensby.info. this consideration was taken to acquire the authenticity and naturalness of sby’s utterances. method this study attempted to unveil the flouts of cp maxims in sby’s presidential interviews. it was largely qualitative which could be used ‘to uncover and understand what lies behind any phenomenon about which little is yet known” (strauss and corbin 1990, p. 75). according to atkinson and hammersley (1994), qualitative research starts with unstructured data, and through data analysis interprets meaning in verbal form to achieve a rich background and in-depth understanding of people or a phenomenon. a qualitative design was considered appropriate since this study also attempts to uncover and understand what lies behind sby’s interviews in terms of his cooperativeness with others while performing interviews or dialogs. cp maxims flouts as the focus of the present study was identified through qualitative procedures i.e. by identification, classification and interpretation. to further enhance the analysis, some quantification is employed. this procedure involves some descriptive statistics covering frequency and percentage of occurrences of the maxim flouts in order to examine trends in the flouts. the data were in the form of interview discourse between sby and indonesian journalists in responding to current issues related to public interests. the data were collected through presidential official website: http://www.presidensby.info published by bureau for press and media presidential household. the selection of the samples was only in indonesian-written interviews. this consideration was taken to acquire the authenticity and naturalness of sby’s utterances. meanwhile, the method of sampling applied in the present study is a purposive sampling since the three data were chosen mainly based on the topics of conversation. the topics chosen for analysis were those containing controversy on public service area and they became the national media’s headlines and public discourse at that time as listed in the following table 3.1. table 3.1 interviewer list along with the topics no place, date interviewer topic of interviewname profession media 1. cipanas palace, february 3, 2010 arief suditomo editor-in-chief rcti the 100 days of sby’s government and century scandal putra nababan journalist/ presenter rcti 2. the president’s residence, may 25, 2007 asmanu journalist suara surabaya sby’s reaction on dkp and foreign fundagil samal journalist tvri johan sarjono journalist elshinta http://www.presidensby.info/ english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3. cipanas palace, august 13, 2006 arief suditomo editor-inchief rcti lapindo mudflow disaster and national examination (un) ray wijaya journalist global tv tyas anggoro editor-inchief trijaya sururi alfaruq editor-inchief sindo the topics of: (1) the 100 days of sby’s government and century scandal; (2) sby’s reaction on dkp and foreign fund; and (3) lapindo mudflow disaster and national examination (un) became central issues of public discourse at that time. the data were in the form of interview transcripts were then identified, classified and analyzed. in order to address the first research problem, i.e. in what ways sby flouts the cp maxims in the presidential interviews, the data were analyzed by identifying traces of flouts based on grice’s theory of maxims flouts which include the use of hedging (yule, 1996), indirectness of utterance (yule, 1996), the use of open answer (tubbs and moss, 1996), and the presence of detailed elements (schriffin, 1994). the flouts were further classified based on types of maxim. flouts of the maxim of quantity in which a speaker flouts the maxim by blatantly giving either more or less information that the situation demands. flouts of the maxim of quality in which a speaker says something which is blatantly untrue or for which he or she lacks adequate evidence. flouts of the maxim of relation in which a speaker gives a response and observation which is very obviously irrelevant to the topic in hand, i.e. by abruptly changing the subject, or by overtly failing to address the person’s goal in asking a question. flouts of the maxim of manner in which a speaker does not say clearly, concisely, orderly, and does not avoid ambiguity and obscurity of expression. meanwhile, in order to address the second research question, i.e. what the functions of flouts of cp in sby’s presidential interviews, the flouts are analyzed by identifying the intentions of sby’s utterances when he was being interviewed by journalists related to social and political issues. results and discussion the data were analyzed by identifying traces of flouts based on gricean theory of maxims flouts. this includes identification and classification of flouts. some descriptive quantification was further employed to enhance the analysis by examining trends in the realization of flouts. the analysis was then discussed in relation to the research problems, to be enhanced by relating the concern to related theories and findings. from the samples, sby flouted the conversational maxims 18 (twelve) times. the flouts occurred on the maxim of quantity (eight times), the maxim of quality (five times), the maxim of relation (twice), and the maxim of manner (three times). fahrus zaman fadhly flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews the flouts the overall maxims revealed that there is relation between the forms or ways of utterance and the functions of utterance. the use of hedging, indirectness, open answer and detailed elements generated functions. overall flouts of the maxim were generally indicated by open answer and detailed element. the flouts of the maxim of quantity were indicated by open answer and detailed element. meanwhile, the flouts of the maxim of quality were always indicated by hedging, open answer and detailed element. the flouts of the maxim of relation were indicated by indirectness, open answer and detailed element; and then the flouts of the maxim of manner were indicated by indirectness, opened answer and detailed element. the following table is the illustration of the overall flouts. table 2. the realization of flouted maxims and their ways data no flouted maxims ways of flout quantity quality relation manner hedging indirectness opened answer detailed utterance #001 v v v #002 v v v #003 v v v #004 v v v #005 v v v #006 v v v #007 v v v #008 v v v #009 v v v v #010 v v v v #011 v v v v #012 v v v v #013 v v v v #014 v v v v #015 v v v v #016 v v v v #017 v v v v #018 v v v v english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee this study revealed that many utterances of sby flouted the maxims of the cooperative principles (cp). the utterances which flouted the maxims vary in ways and in functions. first, the flouts of cp maxims appeared to be realized linguistically by using hedging. second, this study also revealed that the maxim of quantity was mostly flouted in sby’s interviews. the flouts of the maxim of quantity indicated three phenomena, i.e. tendency for indirectness, over information, and politically-driven use of language. when, being interviewed, sby tended to use indirect utterances. sby’s responses about some questions of the interviewers were frequently exaggerating, indirect, and ambiguous. the use of indirect utterances of sby seems to be intended to show an implicit positive politeness, to have fun with certain topic, and to avoid the potential face-threatening acts or politically risky topics, and to gain both political and interactional advantage over their political opponents. the consequence of indirectness of sby’s utterances was that the hearer may not quickly get the main point (dascal 1983 in thomas 1995: 47). such utterances surely were not beneficial for the hearer since it would take too long for him/her to grab what was meant by the speaker. it was also apparent that sby tended to give over information that was demanded by the interviewer(s) or interlocutor(s). such a strategy was taken to build his positive image that he was fully capable of certain topics being asked. however, over contribution to a conversation did not always inflict a loss upon the hearer/interviewer because his interlocutors might get advantages through detailed chronological events which was beneficial background especially for a journalist, although not all information given by the interviewee deserved to be published as public’s consumption. by giving more information, sby politically tried to control any issues as his domain, i.e. that he was in charge of the nation’s problems that he deserved to provide details of an accident. for sby, the nation’s problems such as lapindo mudflow, aceh’s crisis, education, papua autonomy, foreign policy, etc. need ‘enough’ explanation to satisfy public’s rights to get information and what he had been done. however, in some cases he produced direct, explicit and clear explanation if the substances were in favour of his side. otherwise, if the utterance were predicted to be threatening his position, it would be conveyed indirectly, implicitly, and ambiguously. the function of flouts of the conversational maxim depends on the traces of flouts. as explained earlier, there were flouts indicated by (1) the use of hedging and indirectness as pragmatic factors; (2) the factors related to the characteristics of interview texts such as the use of opened answer; and (3) the presence of detailed elements. the functions of flouts are therefore discussed in terms of hedging, indirectness, opened answer and detailed element. hedging may intentionally or unintentionally be employed in both spoken and written language since they are crucially important in communication. generally, hedging devices are pragmatic markers that attenuate (or weaken) the strength of an utterance. hedging occurs as mitigating devices which attenuate the propositional content of the message. however, attenuation can be achieved in fahrus zaman fadhly flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews different ways employing diverse linguistic and non-linguistic strategies (wilamova, 2005). a conversation which uses hedging or cautious notes tends to flout the maxims of cooperative principles since the existence of hedging functioned as a sign of awareness. hedging is used to indicate that what we are saying may not be totally accurate (yule, 1996). this phenomenon also applies to sby when communicating his ideas to journalists, as his interlocutors/interviewers. from the data, there are two functions of hedging identified in sby’s interviews i.e (1) as a sign of awareness, and (2) as a politeness marker. sby used hedging strategy is as a sign of awareness that what he is saying may not totally be accurate. the flout of these maxims is--especially maxim of quality, therefore indicated by his usage of hedging utterance. sby used hedging as an effective politeness marker. as a president surely he always tries to be a good conversational partner of his own public and tries to minimize a potential threat to his positive face in responses to his utterances. moreover, as one who is rooted in javanese culture, he is very aware that in daily communication, javanese always want to form and keep good relationships with others, avoid embarrassment, misunderstanding or friction, and maintain interpersonal and social harmony. otherwise, the observance of the maxims is identified by the use of nonhedging which functions to give brief information. meanwhile, the function of a non-hedging utterance here is also as a sign of awareness and to protect him from the possibility of being embarrassed. a non-hedging utterance was also applied by sby to serve the function as to make the listeners sure that the information conveyed is really accurate and as informative as it is required. by using hedging, sby expected to put himself in a comfort zone even though, as a president, he absolutely had certain interest of doing so. for example, in papua’s case about the use of budget by local authorities, sby tended to emphasize around how much money was allocated to papua instead of how much leakages were created which resulted in the unproportional amount of money received by the society. it was well known that papua was the biggest contributor among other provinces, to indonesia national budget (apbn), nevertheless, papuanese seemed to skip anything from the government. they were not well-treated by the government. sby’s attitude of not answering the opened questions (usually started by how) could be easily predicted that it was a sign of not wanting to emerge bad images of the local authorities which were for certain, under control of his ministers. sby was, then, still keep himself with the positive positioning. nevertheless, he explained several questions which were relevant and in line with what were asked without having to flout the maxim of quantity, when the topic were about government’s plan to face several problems. the fact showed that sby wanted to emphasize that as a president of indonesia, he was indeed having an appropriate capacity in analyzing, planning, and at the same time solving various problems in his governance system. in other words, by giving a clear, appropriate and precise answer to the question, sby intended to build the positive image of him as a leader. that is what clarke and crossland (2006) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee highlighted as how a leader rules his own and other people’s world: by making him and others believe that he can make good deeds. obeng (1997) also confirms that in talking about potential facethreatening acts or politically risky topics, politician tend to communicate indirectly in order to protect further their own careers and to gain both political and interactional advantage over their political opponents. indirectness may also be motivated by politeness. further, obeng (1997, p. 1) explains that “obliqueness in communication may be expressed through evasion, circumlocution, innuendoes, metaphors, etc”. language as well as varying social conventions of the relevant culture as well as differing degree of personal danger inherent in the socio-political situation in which politicians operate may also affect the degree of indirectness as well as the kind(s) of obliqueness employed. related to this study, the use of indirect utterances of sby has at least three functions i.e. (1) politeness, (2) selfprotection, and (3) interestingness. the use of indirect utterances was frequently intended to show an implicit positive politeness. in many utterances, sby tried to use politeness strategies in expressing his complaint to the public. in some occasions, he promoted people to practice politics without ‘commotion or tumult’. the use of indirect utterance is to avoid making a direct complaint which could hurt the hearer’s feelings and to protect the speaker’s credibility. pyle (1975) as cited in dascal (1983) notes that we often employ indirectness because we have two goals which compete. the user of an indirect utterance relies upon his or her interlocutor’s ability to detect the problem in order to understand what the speaker means, the hearer must recognize the conflict of goals. indirectness was shown when sby frequently utters his ideas or arguments in explaining about how to handle the social discrepancy between gam and the government of republic of indonesia. the same case also happens when the president did not directly in answering the interviewer’s question about the educational budget. the desire to make sby’s language more interesting as exemplified in some data of results. thomas (1995) explains that interestingness is probably the least significant of other functions of indirectness, but nevertheless its importance should not be underestimated. people may use indirectness because they enjoy having fun with language or certain topic. if the substance of an utterance is beneficial for the speaker, so it will be conveyed directly, explicitly and clearly. otherwise, if the utterance is predicted to be threatening him or her, it will be conveyed indirectly, implicitly, and ambiguously. there are also some fragments of interview show the opposite, that is, the utterance flouts the maxim of quantity and it is conveyed directly. this different phenomenon is caused by different conversational implicatures. the indirect utterance which flouted the maxim of quantity is done to protect the speaker from the possibility of face threatening. the flout of the maxim of quantity can also be grounded from the use of direct speech and implicit utterance that is functioned to protect him from being addressed as having shortages. a shortage, in this context, is the possibility of raising impression that fahrus zaman fadhly flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews sby is “one-sided” and unfair. this fact tends to destroy his positive image. they can be seen in table 3. based on this analysis, it can be fore grounded that the observance of maxim of quantity are indicated by the use of direct utterance. meanwhile, the flout of the maxim of quantity is indicated by the use of indirect utterance. the function of indirectness that flouts the maxims is to express the intention of an utterance implicitly. examining sby’s way in responding the use of budget of papua government as seen on data #014 shows that the president ignores how the budget will be used by the papua government, but the most important is that it is used as transparent and accountable as possible. the flouts of cp maxims may also be traced by the use of opened answer. an opened answer tends to flout the maxims. otherwise, a closed answer tends to observe the maxims. opened answer has function to protect the speaker’s face. in many responses, sby applied opened answer to protect the face of his government from public’s humiliating. in some conversations with journalists, sby tends to use opened answers. the use of opened answer is purposely aimed to maintain carefulness. since, if sby responds the closed questions, by only saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, meanwhile that was not the reality, his bad image will soon be established. besides, having flouts the cp maxims, sby can give ideal viewpoints regarding the problems. based on the data and analysis above can be concluded that the flouts of cp maxims are indicated by the use of opened answers. dijk (1998) confirms that the presence of detailed elements in an utterance frequently has two functions, i.e. (1) to control the information, and (2) as elaboration of facts or opinions. by using detailed elements, the speaker will exaggeratingly perform information which is beneficial for his/her positive image. meanwhile, the existence of detailed utterance in interview texts usually has function as elaboration and explanation of facts or opinions. as far as such a function, surely the existence of detailed utterance may be said relevant with the main topic of conversation/interview and, therefore observe the maxim of manner. however, if the detailed utterance is presented more than is required, its existence frequently used for the sake of its speaker to build positive image. complete details were deliberately designed by the speaker to create a certain image to the public. the realization of observance and nonobservance of the maxims can be seen from the aspect of the detail utterance. in the interviews transcript, a non-detailed utterance tends to observe the maxims, while detailed utterance tends to flout the maxims. the function of flouts of the maxim of quantity is to control of information that what was being accused by amien rais was wrong and put himself as one who was on the right track. meaning that the result of the 2004 general election is legal and legitimated. examining sby’s utterances, almost all of his opinions, arguments, and ideas were delivered in detailed ways. it was difficult to find the data that showed sby’s utterance without detailed elements. over elaboration by breaking down information or ideas tended to flout the cp maxims, especially the maxim of quantity. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee examining the overall data, the functions of flout of the cp maxims which are most frequently used by sby is ‘face saving acts’. the functions of flout as a sign of self-protection. meanwhile, the ways of flout made by sby were opened answer and detailed utterance. the following table is the illustration of functions and ways of flouts employed in sby’s utterances. table 3. the realization of functions and ways of flout in sby’s presidential interviews ways functions hedging indirectness opened answer detailed utterance face saving act v v v self-protection v v v v awareness v v v politeness v v v interestingness v v v control of information v v v elaboration v v ignorance v v in the presidential interviews of sby, the function of a face saving act (fsa) is mostly employed. followed then by self-protection (four flouts), awareness (three flouts), politeness (one flout), interestingness (one flout), control of information (one flout), elaboration (one flout), and ignorance (one flout). almost all of the functions aimed to build a positive image of the president. only the function of ignorance that is not directly related to the contribution of positive image building project. the presence of six flouts in sby’s utterances which had function as fsa showed that as a president, sby frequently attempted to maintain his face of government. this was done as an effort of sby’s image politics in order to survive his government until at the end of his period. the functions of selfprotection, awareness, politeness, interestingness, control of information, elaboration are leading to a single function, i.e. an implicit positive image of the president. conclusion this research explored the realization of cooperative principle in real life, i.e. sby’s presidential interviews. the first research problem concerns the flouts of cp maxims in the sbys presidential interviews. the second research problem concerns the functions of flouts of cp maxims made by the president. eight functions had been identified, i.e. face saving act, awareness, politeness, self-protection, interestingness, control of information, elaboration and ignorance. the ultimate goal of the flouts of the maxims was to create the speaker’s positive political image over the public. on the basis of the findings above, it can be said that: first, the flout of cp maxims is a daily phenomenon, including at administration sector. the flouts may be triggered by the tendency of the interviews to threaten government credibility since the controversies are still in progress because the problems had not been solved. second, maxim flouts seems to be largely employed by fahrus zaman fadhly flouts of the cooperative principle maxims in sby’s presidential interviews politicians as confirmed by van dijk (1998). it is indicated by the use of indirectness, open question, and detailed element in their utterances. generally, the flouts have functions to enhance their credibility. such functions give a great contribution to build positive political image of the politicians. third, the study of maxim flouts can explore various social phenomena. it means that grice’s cp theory is still relevant to analyze utterances in daily interactions. fourth, flouting the maxim of quantity in journalism is beneficial for conversation members both interviewer and interview. for a journalists as interviewer, get more information from the interviewee is beneficial since they can obtain background information. therefore, giving less information is not intended to reduce cooperation with the partner of conversation. such phenomena above also show that cp is not universal. fifth, the phenomenon of flouts in sby’s presidential interviews did not reduce the cooperativeness. the overinformation and lengthy explanations given by sby did not make the interviewers (journalists) disappointed. this is because two considerations, i.e. (1) for journalists, over-information and lengthy explanation will help them to achieve a rich backgrounds and in-depth understanding of a phenomena; (2) cultural 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(2009). motives of indirectness in daily communication: an asian perspective. journal of asian culture and history, 1(2), 99-102. http://the/ http://the/ table3.therealizationoffunctionsandwaysof blum-kulkaandoldstain.(1984).requestandapolo brown,p.&levinson,s.(1978).universalsinlan lkbnantara.(2006).presidenakanlebihgunakan -------------------.(2006).disambutbaiktekadp -------------------,(2006).amienrais:presiden thejakartapost.(2010).fouryearson,victims english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 947 the implementation of mind mapping technique by using weblog in improving students’ islamic writing: achievement and insight eka apriani institut agama islam negeri (iain) curup email: eka.apriani@iaincurup.ac.id roni labiran universitas kristen indonesia toraja email: ronilabiran@ukitoraja.ac.id farida esmianti poltekkes kemenkes bengkulu email: faridaesmianti15@gmail.com syafryadin universitas bengkulu email: syafryadin@unib.ac.id dadan supardan institut agama islam negeri (iain) curup email: dadan.supardan@iaincurup.ac.id apa citation: apriani, e., labiran, r., esmianti, f., syafryadin, & suparda, d. (2022). the implementation of mind mapping technique by using weblog in improving students’ islamic writing: achievement and insight. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 947-956. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6688. received: 29-06-2022 accepted: 22-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction the corona virus disease, or covid-19, is currently being slowed down by people all over the world. covid-19 makes people hold their activities, such as hanging out, going to the office, and going to school, in contact with each other. every activity is important, but education is the most important. education is difficult to conduct during a pandemic, so education is an activity that requires people to communicate directly with one another. as a result, the government has moved the education or learning process online. the learning process per se is a process carried out by a person from birth, whether done naturally, such as by a baby who starts learning to walk, or through school and so on. learning, according to brown cited in susanti et al. (2021) is the acquisition of information about an object or a skill through instruction, experience, or learning. on the other hand, the learning process is a process in which people acquire new knowledge, skills, and experiences, and it takes place no matter where we stand. besides that, "online" is a condition in abstract: the goals of this study were to learn about students' perspectives on literature and blogs for teaching islamic values to the millennial generation. this research was mixed -methods research. the subject of this study was the millennial generation at the islamic state inst itute curup, especially students of the english tadris study program. the instruments were questionnaires and interviews. this study included 30 students as participants. the findings of the poll reveal that most students have a favourable view of the use of the mind-mapping approach by utilising weblogs to improve islamic writing. the implementation of the mind-mapping technique by using a weblog to improve islamic writing makes students more active and interested in learning islamic topics. students also understand more about some islamic topics that they read or upload to their web blogs. students are interested in learning more about islam by using this media. they read more topics about islam a nd give their opinions about those in their islamic literature web blog. it may be stated that a blog can be used as a form of social media and is effective and positive for teaching islamic values to students. keywords: islamic writing; mind mapping; web-blog. eka apriani, roni labiran, farida esmianti, syafryadin, & dadan supardan the implementation of mind mapping technique by using weblog in improving students’ islamic writing: achievement and insight 948 which people use the internet for their activities. by using an online network, everything can be reached easily. each activity will be done everywhere by using the internet. as a result, both concepts (online and learning process) might be integrated as internet-based education. it is also known as "e-learning" (raushan, 2020). so, online learning is a process in which students and teachers communicate with one another over the internet, or they might meet without directly communicating with one another but through technology. technology is important in online learning since it makes online learning challenging. in this situation, ict is the resource for online learning. ict stands for "information and communication technology." understanding and applying computer and mobile phone programmes and other applications is referred to as ict. according to ratheeswari (2018), ict's roles include providing multimedia simulations of good classroom practice, delivering individualised training courses, assisting teachers in overcoming isolation, connecting individual teachers to a greater teaching community on an ongoing basis, and trying to promote teacher-to-teacher collaboration. according to alqahtani and rajkhan (2020), regardless of how sophisticated an educational institution's technology is, the readiness of elearning execution has a considerable impact on increasing the educational process. technology for the millennial generation is capable of not only improving their performance but also developing their character (apriani et al., 2019; apriani & hidayah, 2019). students' character is important for the millennial generation. students' characters are the characters that students build in schools, such as their attitude, behavior, responsibility, and many more characteristics. education should be viewed as a component of the character-building process (apriani et al., 2019). the character plays a crucial role for people, particularly youngsters and pupils. even the most intelligent individual might be persuaded by a scenario and become unqualified if they do not have a strong character (maseleno, 2019). according to him, education has become one of the factors that influence children's personalities. personal conduct, ethics, morality, or personality are frequently related to character. the term "character" is derived from the greek harassing, which means to etch (lian et al., 2020). this terrace is meant to be carved or scratched. lian et al. (2018) define "character" as the ability of a person to respond positively to circumstances and surroundings. characters are associated with individual personality traits or conduct. in the indonesian language dictionary, "character" refers to one's psychological makeup. the character is described as all of the factors that influence human conduct in a given context (el bolock, 2020). then, zuhriyah in apriani et al. (2019) claimed that moral instruction is the same as character education. by emphasizing the effective domain (feeling, attitude) without neglecting the cognitive domain (thinking rationally) and psychomotor domains, the goal of character (morals) education is to help students develop their moral character or behavior by upholding the values of public beliefs as a moral strength of life through honesty, dependability, and cooperation (skills, skilled data processing, expressing opinions and cooperation). character is defined by the ministry of national education language center as "intrinsic," "personality," "character," "behavior," "heart," "soul," "personality," and "temperament" (fitria et al., 2019). alwisol's character (lian et al., 2020) is understood as a reflection of conduct that demonstrates the worth of right and wrong, good and evil (kristiawan et al., 2019). the use of the internet as a learning medium today can cause students to learn dependently. by using the internet, students have many access points to seek material. in this case, the blog becomes one of the places where students can learn. the blog is the abbreviation of "web blog." it is an application that contains a written form, or it is used to call a web page. a weblog is used to be able to be accessed by many people based on the topic (suyana in irma et al., 2019). blogs are blogs that are written by a person and structured in reverse chronological order over time. they are a handy form of digital communication owing to their numerous benefits over other internet tools (akdag and ozkan, 2017). besides, sanjaya et al. (2020) stated that a weblog is a website that enables users to post paragraphs or articles that can be read by anyone with an internet connection. because the web blog is easy and practical to use, the web blog is not only used for communicating but also as a learning medium. the usage of blogs in the learning process is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 949 efficient, especially in this day and age. according to unesco on ratheeswari (2018), ict is a scientific, technological, and engineering discipline and management method used in managing information, its use, and its interaction with social, economic, and cultural concerns. ernalida (2018) also claims that using a blog as a learning medium might help students understand the learning material. besides, a blog has various advantages (hao & gao, 2017). it is simple and basic to submit items, and they are available for perusal all around the world. it is not difficult to find the subject, creator, or both in a search engine. web blogs also provide a tool for connecting to other people's websites. it makes it simpler to connect with people on the other side of the planet. furthermore, online blog connections with others are accessible to individuals all over the world. blogs, according to kemaloglu-er (2021), may be utilised constructively in efl instruction by allowing students to assert control over their writing and engage with the worldwide community of internet users. blog writing may also be beneficial in settings involving english as a lingua franca (elf) conscious teaching. non-native english varieties are recognised in their own right in elf pedagogy, and non-native users of language with their unique characteristics (i.e. with their use of english, l1s, sociolinguist and sociocultural and it is argued that this nonnative speaker reality should be integrated into english lessons (kemaloglu-er and bayyurt, 2018, 2019a, 2019b; kemaloglu-er and deniz, 2020). so, the students can increase their ability in building content, organization, vocabulary, sentence construction, and written mechanisms. based on the pre-observation of english study program students at the state islamic institute of curup, the researcher found that students are not interested in and motivated to learn english writing. writing is one subject that requires high-order thinking. they must write something based on data and their opinion. they must have good grammar. they must search for material about the topic. they must have good abilities in developing ideas, etc., so the lecturer should find a way to solve the problem. one method is to use a blog to teach writing. according to sanjaya et al. (2020), the user can draft, post, or leave comments using the features of weblogs. these attributes facilitate the sharing of writing expertise among students. it is hoped that blogging will help them improve their writing skills and knowledge of islamic literature. the y can write about anything related to islamic literature on their blogs. it was hoped that they would improve their writing skills and knowledge of islamic content. mind mapping is a learning strategy that involves visually mapping knowledge. branching lines, visuals, or phrases connected to the core notion or idea might be used to map out a mind map. according to buzan (2018), a mind map is a whole-brain alternative to linear thinking. mind map in all directions to capture diverse ideas from various perspectives. the most straightforward method of putting information in and taking it out of the brain is with a mind map; it is a creative, effective means of taking notes that will physically map ideas to us; it is also extremely easy. in this case, mind mapping is really helpful for students to assist them in a variety of ways in their islamic literature writing course, including organizing and expressing thoughts, planning, communicating, remembering information more clearly, coming up with more inventive solutions to problems, paying attention, and learning new material more quickly and effectively. students would undoubtedly benefit immensely from employing this strategy in identifying subjects and developing ideas for written works relating to islamic literature. method the subject of this study was the millennial generation at the islamic state institute for curriculum and research, especially students of the english tadris study program. the total subjects of this study were 30 students who had lower scores in writing courses. this research is a mixed-methods design. a writing test was used to find out the data on students' improvement in writing skills by implementing the mind mapping technique by using the blog. the test included two tests, namely a pre-test and a post-test. the pre-test would display the data or the score before implementing the mind mapping strategy. in the pre-test, students are allowed to write down "radicalism." besides, the post-test would show the data after implementing the mind-mapping technique in writing by using a weblog. in the post-test, students write a theme about multiculturalism. then, at the end of the research, the researchers would have the data on whether there had been eka apriani, roni labiran, farida esmianti, syafryadin, & dadan supardan the implementation of mind mapping technique by using weblog in improving students’ islamic writing: achievement and insight 950 an improvement or not. quantitative data was used in writing tests and questionnaires. qualitative data was used in the closed interviews. the interview was used to learn about the students' perspectives on islamic literature and to create a blog to teach islamic values to the millennial generation. table 1. interview questions no interview questions answer 1 what do you feel about using weblog in writing class? 2 how does a weblog improve your knowledge about islamic topics? 3 how does the mind mapping technique affect your writing skill? 4 do you motivate by using mind mapping through a weblog? 5 is it effective or not when teaching writing using mind mapping through a weblog? table 2. statements of questionnaire no statements 1 (strongly disagree) 2 (disagree) 3 (enough) 4 (agree) 5 (strongly agree) 1 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog helps students' in accessing material. 2 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog improves my english writing ability. 3 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog improves my knowledge of islamic writing. 4 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog improves my ability in developing ideas in writing. 5 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog improves my ability in writing creativity. 6 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog is fun in learning writing. 7 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog makes me motivated in my writing skills. 8 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog makes me finish writing tasks on time. 9 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog is a faster way to get a lecturer's feedback. 10 the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using a weblog enhances the interaction between lecturer and students. the questionnaire was used to find out the percentage of students' insight after implementing the mind mapping technique by using a blog for teaching islamic writing. the result of the validity of the questionnaire was 0.6–0.7, and the reliability was 0.821 (the sample or tryout was 25 students). writing test and interview guidelines are validated by experts from sriwijaya university, the state islamic institute of madura, siliwangi university, and bengkulu university. quantitative analysis (paired sample t-test and percentage analysis) was used to analyze the result of the questionnaire, and qualitative analysis was used to analyze the result of the interview. figure 1. the result of the questionnaire's validity table 2. reliability score of questionnaire reliability statistics cronbach's alpha n of items .821 12 results and discussion the result of the pretest and posttest this test measures the student's writing proficiency when using mind mapping via blogs for islamic writing. the data from the pretest and posttest revealed that using mind mapping through the blog improved students' writing performance. the following table shows the results of the paired sample t-test: english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 951 table 3. the result of the paired-sample t-test mean n std. deviation df sig (2tailed) pair 1 pretest 60.0000 30 6.82288 30 .000 posttest 81.5000 30 5.59402 the result of the questionnaire the result of the questionnaire showed that students' perception of using mind mapping through a blog improved their ability to write islamically. the result of the questionnaire for this research can be seen in the diagram below: figure 2. the data result of questionnaire based on the table above on questions related to whether english islamic literature weblogs help them access islamic-related materials, 6.7% strongly disagree, 0% disagree, 10.0% find them adequate, 36.6% of respondents agreed, and 46.7% of other respondents confirmed strongly agree, for a mean value of 4.1667 with a standard deviation of 1.08543. next, on the question of whether english-language islamic literature weblogs can improve their english writing ability, 3.3% strongly disagree, 0% disagree, 10.0% are adequate, 26.7% of respondents agreed, and 60.0% of other respondents confirmed strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.4000 and a standard deviation of 0.93218. the third question of whether english-language islamic literature weblogs can increase their knowledge of islamic works of literature scored 6.7% as adequate; 40.0% of respondents agreed, while 53.3% of other respondents confirmed strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.4667 and a standard deviation of 0.62881. with a mean value of 4.6000 and a standard deviation of 0.67466, the question of whether the influence of islamic literature blogs increases their ability to develop ideas in writing reveals that 10% of respondents found it adequate, 20% agreed, and 70% of other respondents confirmed strongly agreeing. when asked whether the english islamic literature web-blog improves their writing creativity, 3.3% strongly disagree, 0% disagree, 3.4% are adequate, 23.3% agree, and 70% confirm strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.5667 and a standard deviation of 0.85836. the question regarding whether the english islamic literature web-blog is fun for learning writing shows that 6.9% disagree, 6.9% are adequate, 24.1% of respondents agreed, and 62.1% of respondents confirm they strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.4138 and a standard deviation of 0.90701. the seventh question, whether the english islamic literature web-blog motivates me to write, reveals that 0% of respondents strongly disagree, 0% disagree, 6.7% are adequate, 30% agree, and 63.3% confirm strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.5667 and a standard deviation of 0.62606. the next question, whether the english islamic literature web-blog forces me to complete writing tasks on time, reveals that 3.3% strongly disagree, 0% disagree, 10% are adequate, 30% agree, and 56.7% confirm strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.3667 and a standard deviation of 0.92786. next, when asked if the english islamic literature web-blog is a faster way to get feedback from a lecturer, 3.3% strongly disagree, 0% disagree, 0% adequate, 30% agreed, and 66.7% confirmed strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.5667 and a standard deviation of 0.81720. the last question regarding whether the english islamic literature web-blog enhances the interaction between lecturers and students shows that 0% strongly disagree, 6.7% disagree, 3.3% are adequate, 23.3% agree, and 66.7% confirm strongly agree, with a mean value of 4.5000 and a standard deviation of 0.86103. figure 3. students’ insight about the implementation of the mind mapping technique by using web-blog based on the table above, it can be concluded that all students (100%) agree that blogging can help them improve their writing skills, particularly in islamic writing. students improve their islamic writing skills by using mind mapping through blogs. students agree that the lecturer can use this technique as one of several in teaching writing. eka apriani, roni labiran, farida esmianti, syafryadin, & dadan supardan the implementation of mind mapping technique by using weblog in improving students’ islamic writing: achievement and insight 952 the result of the interview the interview results revealed that the student's perception of using mind mapping through a blog improved their writing ability as well as their understanding of islamic content. according to the researcher's findings, students are more interested and motivated when they learn english writing by using a weblog. students felt comfortable when they were using weblog in learning to write. they can improve their knowledge about writing interestingly. they can develop the topic by using mind mapping. this data can be seen in the result of the interview: a weblog is one of my favorite media for learning. my lecturer using weblog makes me feel happy and confident in improving our knowledge about islamic values, and the mind mapping approach i used helped me improve my writing achievement. (student 3) my blog allows me to freely express my thoughts on islamic topics. i read more about islamic values, like islamic characters, islamic issues, and islamic perspectives. since i use the mind mapping approach, it has proved quite beneficial for my achievements. (student 6) the weblog is a good medium for teaching and learning islamic values. my lecturer asks me to read more about islamic content and asks me to write in my own words. my lecturer asks me to use the mind-mapping technique as well. because i employ the mind mapping method, it has been quite valuable to me. my knowledge is open and improves when my lecturer uses a weblog. (student 7) i love learning islamic values using the weblog. i not only know about islamic content but also can express my ideas in writing. writing islamic content makes me happy and interested. the mind-mapping approach was also very helpful in helping me enhance my writing skills. (student 12) my lecturer attracted my interest since she incorporates the mind mapping method. because of the mind-mapping process i used, i was interested in improving my writing talents. with the use of a blog in the teaching and learning process, i could write an entire book about my islamic viewpoint. (student 19) based on the interview, the researchers found that this technique helped them not only improve their knowledge of writing but also know everything about islam. they read more about islamic content. they can improve their knowledge of islamic values. they can also express their ideas from an islamic perspective. this data can be seen in the result of the interview: when my lecturer uses the mind-mapping technique and a weblog to teach english, i become more interested. i know everything about islamic values such as the veil, radicalism, etc. (student 1) i appreciated it when my lecturer applied the mind-mapping technique and used a blog in the teaching and learning process. i can write everything about my perspective on islam. (student 4) a weblog is a good medium for teaching and learning islamic values. i can express my ideas concerning islamic values in my blog since the mind mapping technique was really helpful. (student 5) i have a good experience when i use weblogs for learning english. my lecturer is not only teaching about islamic content but also teaches us how to be good humans by using the mindmapping approach. (student 8) i knew everything about islam when i read some resources about islamic issues. my lecturer implemented the mind mapping method and asks me to read more about islamic issues and give my opinion about them. (student 9) i can express my idea by writing islamic content on my weblog. (student 10) my blog allows me to express my thoughts on islamic topics. i learned more about islamic ideals such as islamic personalities, islamic concerns, and islamic perspectives. my teachers are enthusiastic about my passion as he incorporates the mind mapping method. (student 26) i learn more about islamic principles when i take a writing class. my teacher uses weblogs as a teaching and learning tool. he also applied the mind-mapping technique in writing class and is doing very well so far. she asks that i read more about islamic subjects. this assignment has helped me learn more about my religion. (student 30) teaching islamic writing using thought english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 953 mapping via weblogs also motivates students to participate in the teaching and learning process. students were pleased when they utilised mind mapping to educate and learn writing. they enjoy using blogs and mind mapping. mind mapping makes it easy for them to express their ideas about the topic. they are delighted to submit their writing about the topics to the blog. it can be seen in the interview result: i know more about islamic topics when i learn english by using a weblog. i felt motivated when i learned english by using the weblog. i am happy and interested in learning more about islamic topics or values, and the applied mind mapping technique is very helpful for me. (student 2) the weblog is a useful medium for learning more about writing, especially islamic content. i learn more about islamic values by using the weblog. my lecturer makes me feel happy and motivated when i write everything i can about islamic content in my weblog. (student 14) one of my favorite learning media is the blog. my lecturer's use of a weblog makes me glad and confident in our ability to learn more about islamic beliefs. (student 16) weblogs are an excellent medium for teaching and learning islamic beliefs. i may add my thoughts on islamic values to my blog. my instructor also uses the mind mapping method, which grabbed my interest. because of the mind-mapping process i used, i was interested in improving my writing talents. (student 20) based on the result, students have positive perceptions about using social media and an "islamic literature web blog" for teaching and learning islamic values. students are interested in learning more about islam by using this medium. they read more topics about islam and give their opinions about those in their islamic literature web blog. it may be stated that a blog can be used as a form of social media and is effective and positive for teaching islamic values to students. therefore, according to the data above, two points become the focus. the first is the application of the mind-mapping method through the use of blogs to raise students' writing proficiency; the second is how students feel about the application of the method through the use of blogs to raise students' proficiency in islamic writing. first, the results showed an increase in student accomplishment with the deployment of the mindmapping approach via the usage of a blog, which improved students' writing achievement. related to this, sanjaya et al. (2020), blogs are a suitable medium for writing classes as a way to enhance student's writing abilities. additionally, amal alsubaie (2018) argued that blogs help students master writing skills, spark their motivation to write, and interact in social and real-world contexts productively. additionally, richardson, as cited by sanjaya et al (2020), claimed that blogs encouraged students to develop their characters and gain an understanding of the writing process. the english islamic literature weblog has a positive impact on improving english writing ability, developing the idea, improving creativity, and finishing writing tasks on time because they could develop superior material, structure their writing properly, pick a suitable phrase, thoroughly utilize tenses, articles, pronouns, and prepositions, and thoroughly use punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. according to the data, students perceive weblogs as a way to boost their writing confidence by 81.2 percent. it demonstrates that kids have a high level of perception. according to zhang as cited in sanjaya et al. (2020), by giving visual representation, using blogs in writing class helps students improve the quality of their work... constructing meaning is linked to visual literacy, visual thinking, and visual learning concepts. this research backs up the findings of kuimova and zvekov in sanjaya et al (2020), who found that 55 percent of students believe weblogs have a favorable influence on writing ability development. the education system is one of the things that has been impacted by the changing technology era. a blog is a type of writing instrument that allows the author to communicate their ideas (nasution, 2020). concerning enhancing their understanding of islamic literature, the students had good opinions when the lecturer utilised english to teach islamic literature in the writing class. it introduces pupils to fresh experiences and knowledge. according to communication francis and taylor as mentioned in sanjaya et al., web blogs are a novel and unique technical tool that may be utilised to boost student learning by sharing knowledge about students' interests and experiences with online learning (2020). kemaloglu-er (2021) suggests that blogs may be utilised as vehicles for meaningful and purposeful writing activities in efl learning situations. bloch also said in eka apriani, roni labiran, farida esmianti, syafryadin, & dadan supardan the implementation of mind mapping technique by using weblog in improving students’ islamic writing: achievement and insight 954 kemaloglu-er (2021) that blogs may be used as a supplement to l2 writing training in order to improve writing fluency and literacy abilities. these abilities help students take advantage of new simulation tools, information appliances, and social networks; they also make it easier for them to move around various media platforms and social networks and share information with diverse communities. the second is how the students feel about using a blog to implement the mind-mapping method to enhance their writing skills for islamic subjects. they reported that they are very interested in using weblogs to learn english because they think it is more interesting than written literature resources. through weblogbased learning, he can also learn many things about islamic values. according to mabuan (2018), blogs are used to improve interaction and collaboration, build writing confidence, encourage autonomous learning, supplement analytical and critical thinking skills, and increase writing and reading motivation, sense of responsibility, and desire for life-long learning. furthermore, they said that weblog-based learning made them more motivated to study and understand topics about islam in greater depth. they also feel happy about learning islamic values. in line with the results of the interview, travel blog writing, according to romaniukha et al. (2020), should be incorporated into the esl classroom through project work activities because it encourages students to introduce cultural concepts, which provides opportunities for enriched language use and enhanced verbal creativity. using a blog as a digital genre in the english classroom, according to pascual (2019), allows for the use of communicative language teaching, task-based learning, and process-based writing, as well as the development of students' communicative and digital abilities and genre awareness. it assumed that a little debate and a search for shared interests and individuality will suffice; distinctions might indirectly improve student motivation. the student's remark is consistent with the findings of lee kemaloglu-er (2021), blogs encourage students to write by addressing not just the instructor but also a huge audience. another positive perception expressed by the respondents towards weblog-based islamic literature learning is that they think weblogs are a good learning medium because through blogs they can express and share their ideas regarding their perspective on islamic values. according to pascual (2017) and romaniukha et al. (2020), incorporating this genre into efl settings will improve language abilities, promote verbal creativity, and boost learning motivation. weblogs are an effective approach to integrating technology with education both inside and outside the classroom. because blogs are both individualized and communal, they may provide a forum for self-expression and creativity. according to sanjaya et al. (2020), students can produce better content using weblogs than they can when writing traditionally on paper. this is because their writing tasks were better organized, their vocabulary choices were more effective, they applied tenses, articles, pronouns, and prepositions correctly, and they used punctuation, spelling, and capitalization correctly. on the other hand, the respondents also mentioned that learning islamic literature in english using weblogs was also able to help them increase their knowledge about islam. in this case, they say that since using weblogs, their reading interest has increased, so their knowledge of islam is increasing. according to kemaloglu-er (2021), numerous students found blog writing to be a rewarding and enjoyable experience since it allowed them to express themselves and show what they had done to the online community. according to reports, the blog boosts independent, reflective, and collaborative learning, raises cultural awareness, and has a beneficial influence on learners' self-expression and writing growth (kovalchuk and krasnokutska, 2017). finally, they said that the use of weblogs gave them a different experience in terms of studying islam. according to them, weblogs can lead them to be involved in an independent learning process. according to syarofi et al. (2018), students enjoy posting their works on blogs and creatively personalizing the blog pages; similarly, according to kovalchuk and krasnokutska (2017), in such cases, students may regularly make their own judgments about what, when, and how much of their work to upload online and profit from independent learning. blogs give learners with not only personal but also social forums to express their thoughts and feelings, as well as create a digital identity to connect with others in a huge virtual learning community (mabuan, 2018). the findings of the researchers also revealed an improvement in the success of students' writing scores before and after using web blogs and mindmapping techniques. this demonstrates that the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 955 usage of weblogs and the implementation of mind-mapping techniques are successful and have a positive influence on increasing the quality of student writing on islamic literature-related issues. in line with mind maps were recognised as beneficial tools by zhang (2018) to help them understand the writing task better and look for key topics in memory to produce more innovative ideas. there was a substantial variation in scores obtained before and after the use of the weblog. students' successes in using a weblog in writing class proved this (fahreza et al., 2017). conclusion the findings of this study are as follows: (1) students' writing achievement increases when lecturers use the mind-mapping approach via the weblog. (2) students have a favourable opinion of the adoption of mind-mapping approach by utilising a weblog in islamic writing, as demonstrated by a score of 89.95% (a high percentage); and (3) a weblog is an excellent medium for teaching writing, particularly islamic values. students are more interested and motivated when learning islamic values by using weblog. students learn more about islamic values when they use weblog in the teaching and learning process. from the interviews, it can also be concluded that: (1) students were more interested when the lecturer applied the mind mapping technique and used a weblog in teaching english; (2) students felt motivated when learning english by using the weblog; (3) students could express many ideas concerning islamic values in blogs, and (4) students know more about islamic values when they take a writing course using the weblog. references akdag, e., & ozkan, y. 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(2019). utilizing ict to develop student’s language ethic at islamic university. potensia: jurnal kependidikan islam, 5(1), 114. https://doi.org/10.24014/potensia.v5i1.6279 buzan, t. (2018). mind map mastery: the complete guide to learning and using the most powerful thinking tool in the universe. watkins media limited. el bolock, a. (2020). what is character computing? in a. el bolock, y. abdelrahman, & s. abdennadher (eds.), character computing (pp. 1-16). springer. fahreza, m., aziz, z. a., & inayah, n. (2017). the use of weblog in improving students' writing skills. research in english and education journal, 2(3), 17-25. fitria, h., kristiawan, m., & rasyid, a. (2019). the educational character of an instruction. opcion, 35(21), 964–979. hao, j., & gao, b. (2017). the evolution of measuring patient satisfaction. journal of primary health care and general practice, 1(1), 2015–2018. irma., arsyad, a., safe’i., & bahraeni. 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(2020). defining eka apriani, roni labiran, farida esmianti, syafryadin, & dadan supardan the implementation of mind mapping technique by using weblog in improving students’ islamic writing: achievement and insight 956 elf as a sociolinguistic concept and a pedagogical perspective. in yeşim bektaş çetinkaya (ed.), intercultural competence in elt – raising awareness in classrooms (pp. 21-37). peter lang. kovalchuk, o., & krasnokutska, i. (2017) using blogs in teaching english to philology students. advanced education, 7(2017), 146-153. kristiawan, m., nizarani, & syamsidar. (2019). role of school on forming the character of zgeneration through entrepreneurial skills. international journal of scientific and technology research, 8(10), 1941–1945. lian, b., kristiawan, m., & fitriya, r. (2018). giving creativity room to students through the friendly school’s program. international journal of scientific and technology research, 7(7), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/zebpd lian, b., kristiawan, m., ammelia, d., primasari, g., anggung, m., & prasetyo, m. (2020). teachers’ model in building students’ character. journal of critical reviews, 7(14). https://doi.org/10.31838/jcr.07.14.165 mabuan, r. (2018). using blogs in teaching tertiary esl writing. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 1-10. maseleno, a. (2019). general theoretical and philosophical aspects of modern education. revista san gregorio, 1(32), 212-217. https://doi.org/10.36097/rsan.v1i32.1079 pascual, d. (2017). students’ attitude, competence and motivation in the use of the travel blog for the efl classroom. encuentro, 26(2017), 3-21. pascual, d. (2019) learning english with travel blogs: a genre-based process-writing teaching proposal. profile. 21(1), 157-172. ratheeswari, k. (2018). information communication technology in education. journal of applied and advanced research, 3(1), s45–s47. https://doi.org/10.21839/jaar.2018.v3is1.169 raushan, a. (2020). enhancing ict skills: a prerequisite for online learning in time of covid19. educational resurgence journal, 2(4), 24–31. romaniukha, m., shelomovska, o., and sorokina, l. (2020) travel blog as an esl teaching tool. international journal of research in elearning, 6(1), 1–15. sanjaya, h. k., apriani, e., & edy, s. (2020). using web blog for efl students in writing class. journal of english education and teaching (jeet), 4(4), 516-535. susanti, r. (2021). the efficiency of ict and social media in online learning of free basic japanese learning through yasashii nihongo [thesis, universitas nasional pionir perubahan]. school of electronics and computer science. syarofi, a., kuswahono, d., & rizky, h. (2018). implementing process writing strategy using weblogs to improve students’ ability in writing descriptive text. lingua cultura, 12(4), 351355. https://doi.org/10.21512/lc.v12i4.4142 zhang, y. (2018). a contrastive study on the application of mind maps in argumentative writing instruction for efl learners. english language teaching, 11(12), 93–100. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v11n12p93 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 937 the utilization of the quizizz application to english subject at smkn 14, jakarta pusat rita aryani universitas panca sakti bekasi email: ritaar1757@gmail.com farah soraya djamal hasan universitas panca sakti bekasi email: farah.indramanto@gmail.com leroy holman siahaan universitas panca sakti bekasi email: leroyholmansiahaan@gmail.com apa citation: aryani, r., hasan, f. s. d., siahaan, l. h. (2022). the utilization of the quizizz application to english subject at smkn 14, jakarta pusat. . english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 937-946. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.7150. received: 19-06-2022 accepted: 29-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction since the covid-19 pandemic hit in march 2020, distance learning has begun. school-based learning has been phased out and replaced with a distance learning model (pjj). several challenges were encountered by schools, teachers, students, and parents while adapting the pjj. this pandemic has had a significant impact on change, particularly in education. the initial face-to-face or direct teaching and learning process must be converted to online or online-based learning. this shift requires teachers to learn and innovate in order to support the process of teaching and learning activities, particularly in terms of delivering teaching materials to students (syafril & novrianti, 2021). global transformation is one of the consequences of today's covid-19 outbreak. this rapid change occurs globally in all aspects of life, from healthcare systems to socioeconomics and agriculture to energy. not only in education (oyedotun, 2020), but school life has also changed its outlook from traditional face-to-face teaching-learning activities to various online learning settings, resulting in both the use of distance learning and tutors/lecturers' comprehension of the use of technology. online learning has commonly been associated and interchangeably used with other alike-terms such as 'e-learning, 'blended,' or 'distance learning' (hockly, 2015) and is often considered a growing educational alternative that evolves the role of technology in providing instructional materials and educational tools as well as in facilitating teachers students' interactions in distance learning (horn & staker, 2011; blake, 2011; hockly, abstract: the era of disruption is hitting various fields, including education. this was accelerated by the emergence of a global pandemic that forced all societies to adapt to new habits, including the distance learning process. innovations and creations are conducted to find the best alternative in the new standard era. assessment is one thing that is essential to the educational process. various ways and methods have been developed for conducting learning assessments. one of the web-based applications that can be used is quizizz. this study aims to see and analyze the application of quizizz to english subjects as an alternative to distance learning assessment. the data were collected by using a questionnaire, interview, observation, and document review. the participants of this study were the teachers of english, the vice-principal of facility and infrastructure, and the students. the findings of this study showed that the teachers of english at vocational high schools at smkn 14 used hardware such as a projector, laptop, speaker, headset, and smartphone, while software such as the internet, dictionary application, e-book, microsoft office, and browsing application. the teachers used discovery learning to utilize ict in the syntax of the learning model. the background of the research was at smkn 14 jakarta. this study uses a qualitative approach with descriptive methods. data analysis was performed using the triangulation technique. the results showed increased students' enthusiasm for using quizizz as an alternative assessment of english subjects at school. keywords: effectivity; online learning platforms; quizizz application; utilization;. rita aryani, farah soraya djamal hasan, & leroy holman siahaan the utilization of the quizizz application to english subject at smkn 14 jakarta pusat 938 2015). online learning aims to maximize the accuracy/correctness of the sequence of predictions/decisions made by the online learner given previous prediction/learning task correct answers and possibly additional information (hoi et al., 2021). however, some distinctions are given out to evade the overlapping use of the terms from conclusions. online learning refers to teaching activities that are partially or entirely conducted through the internet (means et al., 2009). blake (2011) associates online language learning with several learning arrangements, namely web-facilitated classes, blended or hybrid courses, and entirely virtual or online systems. hockly (2015) clarifies the notion by distinguishing between 'blended' and fully online learning. he defines the latter as fully online via the internet without any face-toface component in both formal and informal learning schemes. white (2003) emphasizes more on the independency of the learners to distinguish between the face-to-face classroom and distance language learning. on the other hand, kuama (2016) pointed out some significant benefits that online learning provides as clear distinctions to traditional or face-to-face classroom settings. they mention that online learning gives students flexibility in preferring better learning styles and creating opportunities for active learning due to its self-centered platform. in addition, harasim et al. (1997) point out that the use of suitable online learning applications or software can support the students to have opportunities to participate in discussions, express opinions, and share knowledge without having to rely on classroom size and time (online learning in nursing education during the covid-19 pandemic: stress, satisfaction, and academic performance, n.d.). teacher innovation in selecting suitable learning media can impact student learning inspiration, especially when using a distance learning system during the covid-19 pandemic. according to anggraini (2019), the factors influencing student learning inspiration are internal and external. internal factors originate within students, such as interest in the topic of discussion and student motivation to further their education. external factors, on the other hand, come from outside the classroom, such as how the teacher delivers the conversation material and the learning media used. another study led by (rizqi & mayasari, 2018) discovered that family and school factors influence learning inspiration. many online instructional platforms, such as zoom, google classroom, and quizizz, are designed to facilitate online teaching-learning activities. each platform and its features represent unique characteristics and functions. zoom personifies the essence of synchronous online learning. the covid-19 pandemic has forced second language (l2) educators to abandon faceto-face (f2f) instruction in favor of online instruction. educators have used various online synchronous meeting tools (smts) to help students learn. zoom, one of the synchronous meeting tools (smts), provides immersive and convenient features to support authentic communicative language learning in interactive synchronous classes (kohnke & moorhouse, 2020). the interactions established through zoom by utilizing features such as its webcam and microphone facilities facilitate interactions similar to those conducted in traditional classroom activities (rahayu, 2020). google classroom and quizizz, on the other hand, are typically used asynchronously. as an integral part of google apps for education (gafe), google classroom plays an essential role in engaging students in learning. students and teachers must navigate a complex local network of institutional policy, learning outcomes, situational needs, and composing practices while also being aware of the global implications of using the interface to compose, review, edit, and share with others using global technologies such as google apps for education (gafe). (hocutt & brown, 2018). educators cannot avoid the use of technology in its application, both in the context of face-to-face learning and distance learning. for example, they use powerpoint to display learning materials on a projector or excel to process student grades and learning outcomes. maritime english (me) is used, particularly in a multicultural and multilingual context, to ensure seafarers' work and safety in the shipping industry (progulaki & roe, 2011; ismail et al., 2019). maritime english (me), a subset of english for specific purposes (esp), differs in that its instruction and research are based on specific international legal procedures (zhang & cole, 2018). the necessity of the use of me in maritime practice is derived from the fact that english communication deficiency has been one of the major causes of maritime accidents (rashed, 2010; shi & fan, 2021) and thus, the need for acceptable standard english ability is essential (ismail et al., 2019). in addition, tchkonia et al. (2019) underline the importance of effective english communication at sea as a means of safe english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 939 ship operations. they mention that the practice of english communication is essential for the effective and safe running of the ship as it takes place in many ways and involves multi-parties. therefore, the english communication practiced should be as precise, simple, and unambiguous as possible. this importance of good english comprehension and skills is parallel to the selection of the right unless best teaching techniques (jurkovič, 2021). this paper aims to describe how three online learning platforms, namely zoom, google classroom, and quizizz, are collaboratively used in me learning, how effective they are, and what challenges students face while learning through collaboration. it is expected that the paper will make a significant contribution to providing both me teachers and learners with an alternative model of me online learning that is needed in this current situation. the presence of the covid-19 pandemic, on the other hand, has forced teachers to adapt in much less time. the presence of quizizz as a user-friendly application is an alternative that teachers can use, particularly when conducting learning assessment activities. quizizz is a platform for teachers and students to conduct learning assessments that include gamelike features. students are entertained by the game, which makes the assessment process less stressful and burdensome for them (henry, 2016). quizizz is an educational app that enables students to participate in fun multiplayer class activities (zhao, 2019). quizizz's excitement is inextricably linked to its features. rankings, power ups, redeem questions, achievements, avatars, and other features are available on the quizizz platform. this feature creates a thrilling and enjoyable game sensation, motivating students to answer the questions. english is one of the required subjects in formal education. grammar, speaking, writing, listening, and reading skills are all covered in this lesson. in general, the goal of learning english is to provide students with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to master english language skills (purushotham & swathi, 2020). most students find english subjects to be a stumbling block, so teachers must be able to change this perception, and they must be able to work on these subjects. what english teachers can do is strive to be the teachers their students want by remaining creative and innovative. for example, the teaching materials chosen must be appropriate and not boring for students. method this research takes a qualitative approach, employing descriptive methods and case studies. in qualitative research, the term qualitative descriptive refers to descriptive studies. this type of research is frequently used to study social phenomena (polit & beck, 2009). qualitative description (qd) answers research questions about who, what, where, and how of an event or experience until it is thoroughly investigated. qd has been identified as essential and appropriate for research questions centered on determining the who, what, and where of an event or experience, as well as gaining insight from an unknown phenomenon. the study employs a qualitative approach in which the three online learning applications are examined (suardi, 2017). figure 1. flowchart of the research it can be seen from the chart above that the research comprises a series of stages. it begins with the stage of preparation, the stage where everything required for the learning is elaborated. the second stage is the stage of application, which is the stage at which the materials are applied through the use of those three online learning applications in the learning process. in the final learning phase, the students are given questionnaires to discover their perceptions towards the application of those three online learning platforms and the challenges they may find along the way. lastly, by applying platforms (zoom, google classroom, and quizizz) in me, online classes are observed and described. by using a purposive-sampling technique, in order to obtain information about learners’ perceptions on the effectiveness and challenges of this collaboration, questionnaires are given (creswell, 2014). in summary, it can be explained that descriptive qualitative (qd) is a research method that switches to a simple qualitative approach with an inductive current. this inductive flow rita aryani, farah soraya djamal hasan, & leroy holman siahaan the utilization of the quizizz application to english subject at smkn 14 jakarta pusat 940 means that descriptive qualitative research (qd) begins with an explanatory process or event, which in the end, can be drawn in general as a conclusion from the process or event. this research was conducted at smkn central jakarta, with 36 students and class xii-a students as the object. results and discussion in this online me learning, zoom, google classroom, and quizizz are collaboratively applied. the applications of these three online learning platforms are synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid (mixed-type). the following table describes the applications of the platforms in learning: table 1. the applications of the platforms in learning no learning activity mode of learning mode of oll aplication 1. class session lecturing, explaining, drilling synchronousasynchronous (hybrid) zoom + google classroom 2. assignment session doing homework, assignment, final project asynchronous google classroom 3. reinforcement session giving quiz, test asynchronous quizizz the materials given are derived from selected topics of smcp with a 75 minute learning duration per-meeting. in the class session activity that particularly consists of main and drilling activities, the first 45 minutes is allocated for giving explanation on the topics or issues to be delivered. the class is orginized synchronously via zoom and the materials are mostly presented through power-point presentations in combination with other audio-visual media like video presentations from you-tube. the zoom activity is in the form of monologues with only a minimum student interaction as most of synchronous meeting tools (smts) might feature in a lecture-style (kohnke and moorhouse, 2020). the materials are presented thoroughly, with detailed explanations and examples. the remaining 30 minutes are allotted for drills and practice. in this later stage of learning, students engage in spoken practice either individually or collectively in a group using the 'breakout room' panel, making the class more lively and controllable. another scenario for this session is to combine the synchronous and asynchronous modes. the first 45 minutes are similar to the first; however, when it comes to drill and practice sessions, the mode is switched and centered on activities in google classroom. students practice the smcp phrases and expressions by following either video or audio practice modulations uploaded in the 'classwork activity' panel. by dividing. at the same panel, the instructor does the scoring and evaluation. the reinforcement quiz employs yet another asynchronous mode of learning (razali et al., 2020). quizizz's gamification features are used to assess students' vocabulary comprehension through the use of vocabulary quizzes (amroji, 2021). quizizz provides students with a new perspective on having a quiz because they do not feel like doing a quiz or exam as they do in a more traditional mode with pen and paper. the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz, as mentioned above, does not completely eliminate but rather restores the roles and functions of traditional or traditional face-to-face settings. by utilizing zoom and its features, the instructor can still have a real interaction with the students in order to ask questions and receive immediate responses the materials given are derived from selected topics of smcp with a 75 minute learning duration per meeting. the first 45 minutes are allocated for explaining the topics or issues to be delivered in the class activity that consists of main and drilling activities. the class is organized synchronously via zoom, and the materials are mostly presented through power-point presentations in combination with other audio-visual media like video presentations from youtube. the zoom activity is in the form of monologues with only a minimum of student interaction, as most synchronous meeting tools (smts) might feature in a lecture style (kohnke & moorhouse, 2020). the materials are presented thoroughly, with detailed explanations and examples. the remaining 30 minutes are allotted for drills and practice. in this later stage of learning, students engage in spoken practice individually or collectively in a group using the 'breakout room' panel, making the class more lively and controllable. another scenario for this session is to combine the synchronous and asynchronous english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 941 modes. the first 45 minutes are similar to the first; however, when it comes to drill and practice sessions, the mode is switched and centered on activities in google classroom. students practice the smcp phrases and expressions by following either video or audio practice modulations uploaded in the 'classwork activity' panel. by dividing. in the same panel, the instructor does the scoring and evaluation. the reinforcement quiz employs yet another asynchronous mode of learning. quizizz's gamification (razali et al., 2020) features are used to assess students' vocabulary comprehension through the use of vocabulary quizzes (amroji, 2021). quizizz provides students with a new perspective on having a quiz because they do not feel like doing a quiz or exam as they do in a more traditional mode with pen and paper. the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz, as mentioned above, does not completely eliminate but rather restores the roles and functions of traditional or traditional face-to-face settings. by utilizing zoom and its features, the instructor can still have real interaction with the students in order to ask questions and receive immediate responses (skylar, 2009), and the students can repeat all of the materials given by accessing and replaying the recording of the materials in order to master them (perveen, 2016). using google classroom, the instructor and students collaborate on material and assignments in an interactive manner. the instructor can provide students with a variety of materials such as text, audio, video, and so on. students, on the other hand, can work independently by maximizing the time they have available to complete their assignments. this allows google classroom to function as a learning center for communicating, providing feedback, and assigning homework (sudarsana et al., 2019), just as in traditional face-to-face classroom activities. quizizz, on the other hand, restores the role of the traditional test paper in the classroom. the use of this platform eliminates the need for quizzes or exam papers. its test formats can be designed in various ways, and its gamification features create a distinct atmosphere for both learning and learners. they were given a set of deductive perceptional propositions to which they had to respond in the me learning using zoom, google classroom, and quizizz. among the inquiries, some were purposefully proposed to investigate the efficacy of using the three platforms. table 2. set of perceptional propositions on the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz no propositional inquiry 1. in this current pandemy situation, online learning is well suited for learning. 2. throughout this pandemy situation, you are able to participate in online learning activities satisfactorily. 3. you have excellent online learning support devices (smartphone/laptop/pc, etc.). 4. you have a strong internet connection that allows you to participate in online learning activities. 5. you have successfully installed and used the zoom, google classroom, and quizizz platforms. 6. the online me learning has been effectively applied throughout this pandemy situation. 7. as far as you are concerned, the online me learning has been appropriately applied throughout this pandemy situation through the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz. 8. the zoom platform used in the me learning has so far been effective. 9. the gooogle classroom platform used in the me learning has so far been effective. 10. the quizizz used in the me learning has so far been effective. 11. me learning materials delivered via zoom, google classroom, and quizizz are simple to understand and comprehend. . 12. you are pleased with your me learning experience with zoom, google classroom, and quizizz. 13. you will be more likely to prefer online learning over offline learning for your future learning. the thirteen propositions listed above range from broad to specific issues. all are aimed at eliciting students' perspectives on the use of the three platforms in me learning. the first five propositions are about the students' online access to join the me learning, while the rest are about the applications of the three platforms in the learning itself. in order to understand students' opinions/perceptions, responses to propositions are assessed using the likert scale and its symetric scoring (joshi et al., 2015). the responses are categorized into ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘unsure’, ‘disagree’, and ‘strongly disagree’ with the scoring scale of 5 to 1 representing the highest to the lowest continuum of proposition score. to eventually come to a final finding of each of the proposition measured, all the scores of all the items are combined (sum) to generate a composite score (joshi et al., 2015) by applying interval scoring formulation rita aryani, farah soraya djamal hasan, & leroy holman siahaan the utilization of the quizizz application to english subject at smkn 14 jakarta pusat 942 (pranatawijaya et al., 2019). after having been summed up through a certain formulation, the interval index for each of the category is decided as follows: table 3. category interval index index scale 0% 19.99% strongly disagree 20% 39.99% disagree 40% 59.99% unsure 60% 79.99% agree 80% 100% strongly disagree as shown in the table below, all five first propositions are within the index of 78 percent to 86 percent. it means that the majority of respondents have a positive attitude toward the inquiries. respondents, for example, have no complaints about the online learning used in this current pandemy situation. they both believe that online learning is an appropriate application in these turbulent times. in term of their accesibility and readiness to follow or participate in online learning activities, the majority of respondents do not have much trouble in joining the program due to the excellent supporting devices they have and the availibility of the internet connection they use. they are also able to install and utilize zoom, google classroom, and quizizz well. meanwhile, how the respondents respond to the rests of the propositions is described in the following table below. table 4. responses to the first five inquiries no propositional inquiry response index strongly agree agree unsure disagree strongly disagree 5 4 3 2 1 1. in this current pandemy situation. online learning is well suited for learning. 27.5% 50% 18.2% 5% 0% 77.5% 2. throughout this pandemy situation. you are able to participate in online learning activities satisfactorily. 17% 45.5% 16.2% 9.8% 0% 62.5% 3. you have excellent supporting devices for online learning (smartphone / laptop /pc. etc). 32% 56.7% 4.5% 2.3% 0% 88.7% 4. you have a strong internet connection that allows you to participate in online learning activities. 22.4% 53.2% 8.2% 7.8% 0% 75.6% 5. you have successfully installed and used the zoom. google classroom. and quizizz platforms. 35.1% 56.7% 6% 0% 0% 91.8% table 5. responses to the rests of the inquiries no propositional inquiry response index strongly agree agree unsure disagree strongly disagree 5 4 3 2 1 1. as far as your concerned. the online me learning has been suitably applied throughout this pandemy situation. 25.6% 50.1% 14% 0% 0% 75.7% 2. as far as your concerned. the online me learning has been suitably applied through the use of zoom. google classroom. and quizizz throughout this pandemy siatuation. 24% 46.7% 10.4% 3% 0% 70.7% 3. the zoom platform used in the me learning has so far been effective. 27% 50.6% 3.5% 0% 0% 77.6% 4. so far. the google classroom platform has been effective in 26.6% 60.1% 8.7% 0% 0% 86.6% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 943 me learning. 5. so far. the quizizz tool has proven to be effective in me learning. 22.4% 61% 5% 2% 0% 83.4% 6. me learning materials delivered via zoom. google classroom. and quizizz are simple to understand and comprehend. . 23.8% 57.3% 3% 0% 0% 80.11% 7. you are pleased with your me learning experience with zoom. google classroom. and quizizz. 29% 47.8% 7.8% 0% 0% 76.8% 8. you will be more likely to prefer online learning over offline learning for your future learning. 35% 50.4% 5.8% 0% 0% 85.4% according to the table above, respondents have positive attitudes toward most of the propositions, with the index ranging from 62% to 91% ('agree' to 'strongly agree'). they believe that me learning is appropriate to be applied online in this current situation. furthermore, they strongly agree that the collaboration between zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in online me learning is effective, citing each platform as having been effectively used in the learning. they also believe the delivery of materials via the three platforms is simple to understand and comprehend. however, when asked whether they would prefer to study online or offline for future learning, the response does not follow a similar pattern, reaching only 58,71 percent ('unsure'). to determine whether the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in me learning is effective, all of the indexes are added together and then divided by the total number of propositions or items using the following equation: the above equation is used to calculate the final average of the index of all the items, which is 79, 30 percent, which falls within the range of 60 percent 79, 99 percent. this indicates that the majority of respondents support online me learning and the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in it. in other words, the use of those three platforms in online me learning is thought to be effective. although the results show that the learning is effective, the students still face some challenges as they progress through the learning process. most of them believe that learning online at home is not always as convenient as learning in person. when they are, however at home, they may experience a lack of concentration due to environmental distractions. sometimes the internet connection is a hindrance. when they are online at home, their areas and internet accessibilities differ. because online learning at home is a self-fulfillment activity that necessitates a large internet quota package, students believe online learning is more expensive because they will have to purchase the i internet package more frequently than offline. teaching aids are essential during the teaching and learning process. because teaching aids can represent what the teacher cannot say in words and help to clarify unclear material, learning can be accomplished with the help of instructional materials (connelly & miller, 2018). as a result, students find it easier to digest the material than they would otherwise. as a result, in order to make learning interesting and enjoyable, teachers must be creative and innovative. students will find the learning process more interesting and understandable if the variety of learning strategies, methods, and teaching materials tailored to their specific needs is expanded. because of the internet, teaching and learning activities are being conducted online. according to dimyati and mudjiono (2015), learning outcomes are the results achieved in the form of numbers or scores after being given a learning outcome test at the end of each lesson. the value that has been obtained by students can be a reference in seeing the mastery of students or students in receiving learning materials. while learning outcomes are a number of experiences obtained by students or students, which include the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains. learning is not only mastery of the theoretical concepts of subjects but also mastery of habits, perceptions, pleasures and interests, talents, social compatibility, various skills, aspirations, desires, and hopes. this is supported by the opinion of rusman (2017), which states that learning outcomes can be seen from changes in perception and behavior, including improvements in attitudes or morals. one of the policies in the 1999-2000 national rita aryani, farah soraya djamal hasan, & leroy holman siahaan the utilization of the quizizz application to english subject at smkn 14 jakarta pusat 944 education program to improve the quality of national education is the use of quizzes as learning media. various efforts will be and are being made in 2010 to improve the quality of education, including the provision of learning facilities and school resources. this is in accordance with sisdiknas law no. 2/1989, which states that each educational unit on the pathway must provide adequate learning facilities to support educational performance. recognizing indonesia's limited ability to implement equity in the distribution of teaching materials, teachers must make numerous creative and innovative efforts to implement a fun and easy-to-understand learning process, such as increasing the variety of learning strategies, supporting materials, facilities, and, most importantly, students. adequate learning facilities are critical to the success of education. learning media's role as a forum for delivering learning messages to learning objectives. the teacher fine-tunes this in order to assess and weigh learning progress. the lecture learning strategy with media for delivering material directly as if the teacher was giving a lecture cannot be said to be an effective strategy for vocational students. vocational high school students who are maturing in their quest for identity cannot be divorced from their emotions. conditions during a pandemic, no doubt, cause smk students to become stressed and even depressed. as a result, it is undeniable that students will not readily accept the material presented by the teacher. the faster globalization spreads, the faster other technological development trends emerge, eventually leading to the birth of applications. according to fazriyah et al. (2020), the quizizz application is a mobile learning application that can help teachers improve their teaching skills. if used in education, it will increase students' and teachers' motivation to learn while also making the evaluation process easier. teachers and students can achieve learning objectives during the pandemic using this application. quizizz, as a learning media, aids in the continuity of the teaching and learning process in the midst of a pandemic. the quizizz application is online, which means it is simple to use if you have adequate internet access. quizizz learning media development must continue so that quizizz can become a competitive application as a learning medium as part of the adaptation to the covid19 pandemic. the millennial generation is the generation that is in the classroom today, and they share unique characteristics that define their generation's expectations to be engaged in their learning activity. technology must be embraced in today's education. teachers must apply part of the student's learning(darmawan et al., 2020). the learning model created and strengthened through the quizizz application is an interactive multimedia model. the quizizz application has the advantage that it can be easily used in addition to learning aids, as well as learning assessment materials. for example, by having data and calculating student learning outcomes statistics, the results can describe the level of students' understanding of the material, which then becomes a physical measure to assess learning individually holistically. quizizz has a leaderboard function to display in-game rankings in addition to game features such as memes, avatars, themes, and game music. these features keep students engaged and motivated to compete with the rest of the class. this demonstrates the potential of quizizz for learning and innovation. quizizz has been used as an assessment medium for english subjects at smkn 14 central jakarta since the start of the new school year in july 2020. one of the teachers suggested using quizizz in the daily assessment of each subject during a teacher council meeting. the teacher in charge of quizizz dissemination creates video tutorials on how to use quizizz and uploads them to the school's youtube account, where all teachers can access them. the researcher specializes in research on english teachers for level nine (ix) with 16 students in this study. the researcher chose grade 9 students because they had firsthand experience with face-to-face interactions. the utilization of the quizizz application in the assessment process during distance learning received mixed responses. the use of the quizizz application to assess students' critical thinking abilities is an adaptation of the 4.0 education development in which students must be familiar with the use of technology in the learning process (nashar et al., 2021). in general, students find the use of quizizz more interesting than the use of google forms or other media in the assessment process. students express several points in the interview related to the response to the use of quizizz, some of which are: color. the colors displayed by quizizz make a distinct and lasting impression on students. colors make questions, answers, backgrounds, and other options more attractive, unlike platforms such as english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 945 google forms or other computer-based test applications, which typically are only black and white. interface. even students using quizizz for the first time will find it simple. choice options that are large enough to prevent students from selecting incorrectly. scoreboard. the quizizz scoreboard feature creates a competitive atmosphere, increasing students' motivation to compete with their classmates(mohamad et al., 2021). although not all of them will win first place, students compete with their closest friends to achieve higher scores. power ups. power-ups are bonuses given to participants when they answer questions correctly. this bonus allows students to use certain special abilities in answering the next question. an example of this bonus is the chance of getting double the score if you can answer the question correctly. proper use of bonuses can create different results. time management. each question in quizizz will display a timely reminder that the teacher has previously installed, so students can see how much time is allotted for each question(munuyandi et al., 2021). this is useful so that students do not spend too much time focusing on a single question, wasting time on the quiz. students indirectly learn to manage the use of time allocation in the assessment process. from the perspective of the english teacher, the use of quizizz has an impact and benefit in the learning process, including: (1) the analysis of the items given during the assessment can be seen immediately after the quiz is completed by the students. the analysis includes; a) the most difficult questions, b) the easiest questions, & c) the questions with the longest duration of work. this can be a consideration for teachers to make questions for further assessment. (2) the graph of the continuous acquisition of student scores can be seen in the teacher's account, which displays fluctuations in the results obtained by students. the graph can be used as an evaluation reference related to the level of student understanding of certain chapters in accordance with the lesson plans that have been designed. conclusion the use of zoom, google classroom, and quizizz in online me learning does not replace but restores traditional face-to-face settings' primary roles and functions. it is delivered in synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid modes through three types of activities: class sessions, assignment sessions, and reinforcement sessions. zoom, with its features such as a whiteboard and markers, represents the function of a classroom. the instructor can present materials and interact with the students by using zoom. these activities are very similar to what we do in a traditional face-toface setting. google classroom is similar to a classroom cabinet in that it organizes reference books, workbooks, and class agendas. it is used for material and assignment storage and distribution. quizizz, on the other hand, plays the role of a test paper with a joyful gamification mode and outlook. according to the survey, the use of those three platforms is effective to be applied for me learning in the meantime situation, with an index of 83.4 percent (strongly agree) and feel that the online learning method is the best method of learning to be applied in this current pandemic situation. quizizz, as an alternative assessment method for english subjects at smkn 14 central jakarta, can be seen as an innovation implemented during distance learning during the covid-19 pandemic. the results of interviews conducted with students and teachers showed a positive response related to using quizizz. students feel more motivated to face the assessment process with quizizz's features. the english subject teacher gets the results of the analysis related to the items being tested along with a graph of the student's score acquisition continuously. references amroji, a. 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(2019). using quizizz to integrate fun multiplayer activity in the accounting classroom. international journal of higher education, 8(1), 37-43. https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v8n1p37 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 133 east java ludruk: pragmatic learning perspective oriented character education liesna andriany indonesian language and literature education program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas islam sumatera utara email: liesna.andriany@fkip.uisu.ac.id purwarno purwarno english literature study program, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwarno@sastra.uisu.ac.id saiful anwar matondang english literature study program, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: saiful.matondang@fkip.uisu.ac.id efendi barus english literature study program, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: efendi_uisu@yahoo.com mustofa indonesian language education program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas darul ‘ulum lamongan email: tofa09@gmail.com apa citation: andriany, l., purwarno, p., matondang, s. a., barus, e., & mustofa. (2023). east java ludruk: pragmatic learning perspective oriented character education. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 133-142. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7316 received: 24-10-2022 accepted: 21-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction a cultured generation of the nation needs various efforts, one of which must be done through education, from elementary to tertiary level. this institution plays an important role in shaping the character of the nation (ismail & winarni, 2019). one of the important educational programs in shaping people who have good personal and social qualities is through character education. character education is an education to shape one's personality through education, which is expected to improve one's character, the results of which can be seen in one's real actions, namely in the form of good behavior, honesty, responsibility, respecting the rights of others, hard work and so on (komalasari & saripudin, 2018). educational institutions play an important role in forming human resources who are cultured, have character, identity, and have global competitiveness so that they are able to win world competition. furthermore, the human development referred to in this study is human development that leads to changes in attitudes, behavior, and lifestyles for the better. thus, the indonesian nation has human resources with abstract: the east java ludruk show contains many moral values, and one of which contained in the east java ludruk text is the value of character education as the character building of the nation. this research aims to reveal moral values as the character building of the nation contained in the east java ludruk text by paying attention to linguistic (verbal and nonverbal) and non-linguistic (social, cultural, political, and religious) aspects by applying pragmatic learning based on critical discourse analysis so that character students can easily understand moral values found in the text of the east jawa ludruk. in addition, this research also aims to reveal that pragmatic learning in east java ludruk texts is also very important and needs to be understood by language teachers because the pragmatics emphasized in this study reveal good speech acts according to pragmatic rules, how to speak according to whom, to whom, where, and how. the results of this study indicate that human values related to the formation of the nation's character are found in the ludruk text of east java. in addition, the role of pragmatic learning in east java's ludruk text is also very important to facilitate language teachers in expressing good speech acts according to pragmatic learning rules. keywords: character education; east javanese ludruk; learning; pragmatic. mailto:saiful.matondang@fkip.uisu.ac.id liesna andriany, purwarno purwarno, saiful anwar matondang, efendi barus, & mustofa east java ludruk: pragmatic learning perspective oriented character education 134 character and identity. to achieve this, we can help students gain meaningful academic knowledge, evolve their relationship with others, and promote their overall wellbeing by humanizing education (tan, 2022). similarly, freeman et al. (2020) posit that humanity is non-negotiable and there is a need to create humanizing spaces for learning and teaching. the next generation of this country must have a strong identity and character in accordance with the national culture (ismail & winarni, 2019). curriculums that have been prepared for education must emphasize character education so that in the future, the indonesian nation does not lose its identity therefore, various ethics and character education are very important to be instilled in good values in attitudes and behavior (mukadas & florentinus, 2017). one of the character educations that reveals good and bad is in the east java ludruk (chan et al., 2019). ludruk is considered as an appreciation of a social culture that holds high moral and philosophical values (fatimah, 2021). in this case, ludruk is positioned as a discourse that responds to, criticizes, or describes a certain social situation in society which is then communicated to the public (breeze, 2011). every act of communication always contains interests, especially communication through written media; it is fair to say that every act of communication in the work of east java ludruk is a discourse that links linguistic elements together with non-linguistic elements to act out individual or social activities, views, or identities. this non-linguistic form can be in the form of speech that occurs between speakers and speech partners in the form of text in a dialogue between a character and another character. the text of east java ludruk would be analyzed with pragmatics. pragmatics teaches how to speak, not learn about language (monroe et al., 2017). learning language means learning about language ethics, communication ethics, learning to maintain relationships with others, learning about politeness, learning about how to keep the language we use from putting other people's faces down (welsing et al., 2017) of that cannot be separated from the cultural values that exist in the communities where they interact. therefore, pragmatics in this study is very important in order to realize character education for the next generation of this nation. in english language teaching context, language teachers are encouraged to figure out how they can reach the objective. one way to do so is by understanding pragmatics in english language teaching (elt) materials (nurdiana, 2019). in addition, in order to maintain harmony in a multicultural society like this, pragmatics is important with how a speech community uses their language, what strategies are used to establish and maintain inter-ethnic relations and so on (khalaf & rashid, 2019). the choice of how to express a speech is governed by pragmatic conditions which in turn are governed by the prevailing cultural values of society (goldstein et al., 2018). thus, it can be concluded that there is relevance between cultural values and the realization of intercultural speech acts and language behavior. pragmatics is part of the communicative competence components. communicative competence includes linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge (monroe et al., 2017). in relation to language teaching, students are not sufficiently equipped with grammatical competencies, but students must also be given other competencies, namely cultural competence (goldstein et al., 2018). teachers need to know and understand the field of pragmatics. the understanding of pragmatics is not a sub-discipline but is pragmatic in a practical sense, namely how to express good speech acts according to pragmatic principles, how to speak according to who speaks to whom, where, how and so on (lu, 2019). what teachers also need to know is when to express messages through implicates. in addition, in order to maintain harmony in this multicultural society, pragmatic learning in the east java ludruk text is associated with a learning perspective based on critical discourse analysis. this study is very important, because this learning is related to how a speech community uses their language which is studied based on linguistics and culture (monroe et al., 2017). this study is expected that efforts to establish and maintain inter-ethnic and interethnic relationships can be carried out in harmony without presenting negative thoughts from students for their survival. therefore, this paper discusses how the east javanese ludruk performance is associated with the pragmatic perspective of local wisdom character education. pragmatic teaching is also assumed to play a role in shaping the character of a cultured nation through learning ludruk performance texts (ismail & winarni, 2019). the development of linguistic science shows changes in analyzing language in the east javanese ludruk not only structurally but also functionally, and a critical discourse analysis approach is also used (fairclough & wodak, 1997). critical discourse analysis is assumed to be very relevant for analyzing information in the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 135 east javanese ludruk text. through critical discourse analysis, students can show which information is useful for society, not only being able to choose information that is important to themselves (lu, 2019). what is interesting to study here is the reality of the language used in conversations between characters and other characters in the east javanese ludruk text, which is formulated or formed in neutrality. ludruk is one of the traditional drama arts originating from east java. this ludruk traditional drama was performed in an art group that was held on a stage that had previously been decorated by taking stories about the daily lives of the people, stories from local myths, stories of struggle, and not infrequently even taking chronicles from the local area (ramadhan et al., 2021). ludruk including theatrical performance contains elements of motion, singing (kidungan), music, decoration, stories, and others. ludruk usually takes folklore, history, and daily life that are worth rising in an educational environment (pudjastawa et al., 2019). the word ludruk comes from the javanese language of the ngoko level in east java which means clown. ludruk has an etymological meaning which is obtained from various relevant information. the term ludruk is derived from ludruk artists and cultural figures. etymologically, the word ludruk comes from the words molo-molo and gedrak-gedruk. molo-molo means that the mouth is full of sugi tobacco (and the word molo, is an activity when speaking there is still tobacco in the speaker's mouth), this activity seems to be vomiting up, and after that the words of chanting and dialogue come out staged. the word gedrakgedruk means foot stomping when people are angry or emotional. ludruk is one of the traditional arts and regional cultures originating from east java. more specifically, ludruk is a traditional folk performance drama with a story that is closely related to everyday life through its symbolic signs (rachmasari & permatasari, 2020). in general, ludruk begins with remo, an east javanese cultural dance, which depicts courage prince while fighting on the battlefield. remo dance as an introduction the show originally includes a simple dance when viewed from the aspect of motion, clothing, and appearance patterns. on further developments, the artists carry out various innovations on remo dance and ludruk, in which both are also often used as a driving force related to reality and political. besides dancing, there are two other things that ludruk art figures also performed in on stage, namely speaking and sing or better known as kindung chant (ongko et al., 2022). in its performance, ludruk is always synonymous with the role of women (thandhak) played by men (taufiq & sukatman, 2014). in order to get the needed information, the interview, the interview was conducted with k. h. muhlisin, a religious leader and administrator of the tanwirul qulub sungelebak islamic boarding school, karanggeneng, lamongan, east java was held on july 17, 2019. muhlisin explains that the origin of this thandhak was influenced by the culture of the pesantren in east java, which prohibits women from sharing the same stage with men. the uniqueness of ludruk players to date is that they are still traditional arts that are identical to the existence of the players, namely male players who dress up as women. in addition, at this time playing ludruk cannot be used as a source of income so they have to find other jobs to make ends meet. the interview was also carried out with dr. heru subrata, m. hum., lecturer at the state university of surabaya on july 27, 2019. subrata states that the existence of this low-paying ludruk player on the other hand is one of the factors in ludruk art that continues to this day. ludruk is an art that is still alive and has active heirs in agrarian and non-agricultural areas. ludruk is also an art that has active and passive heirs that are scattered in various regions (massar et al., 2018). however, in line with the growth of global cultural products, especially pop arts, the position of ludruk art are increasingly being squeezed (taufiq & sukatman, 2014). ludruk can survive because the plays that are staged are very actual and familiar with local culture, in the form of fairy tales, legends, or historical and life stories that use the language of the people who are very communicative and pay attention to their pragmatics as a communal language accompanied by very entertaining jokes (setiawan & suyanto, 2017). in addition to functioning as entertainment, ludruk also functions as a disclosure of the atmosphere of the life of the supporting community. besides that, ludruk is also often used as a channel for social criticism or for the sake of celebrations (sisnia & abdillah, 2021). in this research, the life in ludruk plays is studied based on the narrative used. thus, it can be said that ludruk is expected to provide information about how inspiration appears as an example or social protest related to the condition of society through language (tuturan) that emerges from speakers and interlocutors in the east javanese ludruk performance (palmer et al., 2019). liesna andriany, purwarno purwarno, saiful anwar matondang, efendi barus, & mustofa east java ludruk: pragmatic learning perspective oriented character education 136 in the context of cultural history, ludruk art is an agrarian tradition that has developed in the east java region and has given birth to several forms of agrarian art which were still alive and well. it can be seen that the development of ludruk is an indicator that this traditional theater is still desirable (martarosa et al., 2019). in addition, the existence of ludruk can only be seen in some cities in east java, especially the arek and pandalungan cultural areas that still have many ludruk art groups. pragmatics is related to the ways of using language in a speech society (khalaf & rashid, 2019). in this case, pragmatics discovers how the speech community uses their language, how speech acts are expressed in speech events whether directly or indirectly, what is the right strategy in communicating (goldstein et al., 2018). all of this is regulated in pragmatic principles. the study of pragmatics is tending to relate it with the meaning of words that people used within their social situations and choice of the words in a context (mazulfah, 2019). the use of the language is regulated by pragmatic conditions which are closely related to cultural values (leech, 2011; leech, 2016). culture and language are like two sides of a coin because they are closely related. this fact is reflected in pragmatics (khalaf & rashid, 2019). in the life of the nation and state, language has a very important function in human life. language is not only a means of communication, but language also accompanies the human thought process. language has three functions, namely: (1) communicative function, (2) cognitive function, and (3) emotive function (carotenuto et al., 2018). in english language teaching, pragmatic is very important because the four language skills in language learning such as reading writing, listening and speaking do not occur in isolation in communicative texts or activities (mazulfah, 2019). character education in east javanese ludruk is found in the elements forming ludruk, ngremo, jokes, stories, and kidungan (taufiq & sukatman, 2014). national character education is essentially a person's character, character, morals, or personality which is formed from the internalization of various policies (virtues) that are believed and used as a basis for point of view, thinking, attitude, and action (ismail & winarni, 2019). the source of these values comes from religion, pancasila, the goal of national education which is implemented in 18 character values, namely: religious, honest, tolerance, discipline, hard work, creative, independent, democratic, curiosity, national spirit, love for the country, respect for achievement, friendly / communicative, love peace, love to read, care about the environment, care about social, responsibility. character education is a planned effort to make students recognize, care for, and internalize the values of life contained in the east javanese ludruk text so that students behave as perfect humans (jamaluddin, 2013). in its implementation, national character education can be conveyed in language learning, namely in the text of east javanese ludruk in a pragmatic learning perspective with the hope that students as national cadres have humane behavior (kamaruddin, 2012; wartini, 2015). character education is a conscious and planned human effort in terms of educating as well as empowering students with the aim of building students' personal character. of course this is done so that later students become individuals who are beneficial to themselves and many people. thus, it can be concluded that character education must be carried out with a humanism approach, namely students in educational units must be instilled in moral values so that they can prevent prohibited behavior. method research on the east java ludruk show used qualitative methods, which prioritize the depth of appreciation of the interaction between concepts that are being studied empirically (hansen et al., 2020). in addition, the qualitative method is a research procedure that produces descriptive data in the form of written or spoken words from people and observable behavior (phillipson & hammond, 2018). this written or oral data can be obtained from people who are being observed and researched while they are performing. the qualitative research approach to the east java ludruk show uses a holistic approach, namely research that takes into account other forms, or cultural backgrounds that have links to other cultural forms or elements (gualdron & castillo, 2018). thus, in the research of east java ludruk performance, the religion, economy, ideology, and even the system of the layers of society will be known. to obtain data or information in this study, observation, interview, recording, and recording were used. the observation technique used in this research is direct observation, which is a tool to test the truth so that the data obtained is truly valid data, because the way to go is to observe for you, which is to know the events directly. direct observation english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 137 in this study, with the intention of producing descriptive field notes of how the actual east java ludruk performance was, so that in the end the data from the observations matched the data generated from the moleong interview (phillipson & hammond, 2018). the interview technique is carried out by using conversation, which aims to convey a specific purpose. the conversation was carried out by two parties, namely the interviewer who asked the question and the interviewee. interviews were used directly with informants to obtain data about the east javanese ludruk art. interviews were conducted with informants who know the ins and outs of east javanese ludruk. the results of the interview are recorded and if something is unclear it can be written down so that mistakes do not occur. in this study, the recording technique was used in the original context, meaning that the recording was deliberately carried out / held during the show. this recording is done to obtain optimal data, when recording is used a video shooting. the observations made in this study still play a large role. however, observation cannot stand alone, meaning that it cannot be done without recording the data. recording according to the things made by the researcher, which concerns the issue of recording, informants, and materials (phillipson & hammond, 2018). analysis in this qualitative research used descriptive analysis and meaning analysis. descriptive analysis technique is a data analysis technique that describes the data as it is, giving rise to clarity and convenience for readers (saldaña et al., 2018). descriptive analysis according to (harlem, 2020; yang & lee, 2019) functions to find out things related to the structure of the show, to find out the relevance of east javanese ludruk and its supporting communities, and knowing the cultural values contained in the east javanese ludruk show. meaning analysis is a scientific analysis that contains the message content of a communication (amundsen & sánchez-hernández, 2019). the meaning analysis in this study is to determine the meanings contained in the east javanese ludruk text and to know the meaning of the symbols contained in the show as well as the meanings of symbols contained in the east javanese ludruk text (nolan & britton, 2018). results and discussion research on the east javanese ludruk show resulted in matters related to the structure of the show, the relevance of the east javanese ludruk to the supporting community, and the character values contained in the east javanese ludruk show. the east javanese ludruk show has a fixed structure consisting of ngremo, jokes, and stories. furthermore, each part of the structure will be explained, namely memos, jokes, and stories related to the supporting community and character values. ngremo remo dance is a dance that developed in various regions, namely jombang, surabaya, malang and mojokerto. in its development, there are 3 main versions of remo dance, namely remo surabayan, jombangan and malangan dances (prahardana, 2021). remo dance presented in ludruk usually has a distinctive feature, namely kidungan (singing) uttered by the remo dancers. this kidungan is usually in the form of the julajuli kidungan which is still used today (prahardana, 2021). these jula-juli kidungan are usually in the form of social criticism, stories of struggle, advice, satire and so on (cahyo, 2020). remo activities are usually carried out before the ludruk show begins. there are two types of ngremo, namely male ngremo and female ngremo. male ngremo dancers wear costumes, namely: wearing black pants, white shirts, black ties, black skullcaps, wearing gongseng on the right ankle (to adjust the rhythm of the piece or javanese musical instrument). in the following decades, the ludruk dancer's fashion underwent a transformation, namely: wearing black or red pants, wearing a kace (neck ornament) that was placed on top of the shirt, wearing a red headband, wearing earrings that were placed on the ears, and wearing gongs on the ankles (jelantik, 2016; setiawan & suyanto, 2017) in the ngremo, character education can be found, namely the value of politeness in fashion (luckiyanti et al., 2017). they still adhere to javanese traditions or customs, namely wearing clothes like javanese clothes (siburian & malau, 2018). they wear white and red clothes which mean that the ludruk show has holy and courageous intentions. this is evident in the ludruk show that existed since before independence until the revolutionary period. however, today, fashion seems to survive by modifying the color and variety of textiles used. the female ngremo dancer wears a dress as a beskalan dancer (a dance of gratitude to god) and wears sembong (taufiq & sukatman, 2014). liesna andriany, purwarno purwarno, saiful anwar matondang, efendi barus, & mustofa east java ludruk: pragmatic learning perspective oriented character education 138 jokes the main players who become funny characters in ludruk are slapstick players. these slapstick players do not have heavenly origins and the power of semar figures in wayang performances, but they dominate ludruk performances more than semar's. the ludruk player who becomes the funny character of a slapstick player, namely besut. a well-known slapstick player in east javanese ludruk, such as cak gondo durasim. the slapstick player is a character that the audience perceives as a funny player. slapstick players play subordinate roles such as servants or laborers, and people who are abused (luckiyanti et al., 2017). the javanese language used in ludruk humor is javanese suroboyoan dialect that it makes room for all viewers to easily understand the entertainment content. the language used is not javanese alus or kromo inggil which requires advanced skills in understanding the vocabulary, but javanese ngoko which is commonly used in daily communication with other people (astutiningtyas & aridasarie, 2022). slapstick players wear simple clothes. the attitude of the slapstick players, namely believing in superstitious things (sutisna et al., 2019). they don't have money, they like to be behind their employers, sit on the floor, and chat with the audience (setiawan & suyanto, 2017). the joke players make jokes by taking advantage of the audience's ignorance. this kind of nature as his soul ludruk. story east java ludruk, every performance can be sure to tell things that have to do with the life of today's society. however, the stories that are conveyed are by explaining old stories, but they have relevance to today's life, so listening to these stories is inspired that in the past there has also been what happened to the characters in the show (ayuswantana et al., 2020). ludruk, a theater type of the people of east java, does not only consist of a combination of dialogue and movement. this performance is also a combination of complex components, which include dance, music, song (kidung), and stage and all its supports. ludruk is a traditional drama exhibited by an art group that is held on a scene by taking stories about people's everyday lives, stories of struggle, and so on, interspersed with jokes and accompanied by music (gamelan) (wibisono, 2020). in line with wibisono’s idea, ismail & winarni (2019) state that the stories in the east java ludruk show include household stories, hero stories, both javanese and madurese legendary heroes, and social criticism stories. the most popular stories in the show, such as the story of sawunggaling, joko sambang, untung suropati (luckiyanti et al., 2017). the story of the legendary hero is a character that expelled the dutch from java in the 18th century. the legend of the popular madurese heroes, for example: pak sakera and sarip tambakyasa. the story is interesting because the only ludruk story tells of the conflict between the abangan and the santri. social criticism stories are usually played in front of political meetings or for the sake of the show itself which is being attended by political elites. this story is usually a story that follows a sponsor's message from the government or the community who protests on public policies taken by the government, such as revealing the case of marsinah, a worker who was killed because of a demonstration demanding rights that are considered inhumane for the lives of workers. based on these data, namely ngrema, jokes, and stories in the east javanese ludruk show, it can be seen that the character, character, psychological traits, morals or character distinguish one person from another (sulton & utaminingsih, 2018). the character of a nation is very much influenced by the basic culture of the nation, which is reflected in its communication culture. based on the language that is owned and used by a nation or a community, the identity or character of the nation can be recognized (luckiyanti et al., 2017). this is reflected in the national education system law that character building is one of the goals of national education. article 1 of the national education system law in 2013 states that the goal of national education is to develop the potential of students to have intelligence, personality and noble character. this means that education does not only form intelligent indonesians, but also has personalities or characteristics, with the hope that later generations of nations will grow and develop with characters that breathe the noble values of the nation and religion. educators need to realize how important character education is as a means of shaping behavior, enrichment of individual values by being role models for students and being able to create an environment that is conducive to the growth process in the form of comfort and safety that can help the atmosphere for individual self development as a whole, both from a technical perspective, intellectual, psychological, moral, social, aesthetic and religious (sulton & utaminingsih, 2018). character education is not only individual, but also has a social and structural dimension. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 139 although in turn, the determining criteria are personal values of individual freedom. character education which is related to the structural social dimension looks more at how to create a social system that is conducive to individual growth. in this context, moral education can be placed within the framework of character education. moral education is the foundation for a character education. character education involves moral knowing or good knowledge, followed by moral feeling, which is a good instinct, and moral action or noble actions in acting (witro et al., 2020). this is necessary so that children are able to understand, feel and work on policy values as well. character education is character education, namely education that involves aspects of knowledge, feelings, and action. thus, it can be said that character education if it does not involve these three aspects, then character education will not be effective. character education is a system of inculcating character values to school members which includes components of knowledge, awareness or willingness, and actions to carry out these values, both towards god almighty (yme), themselves, others, the environment, and nationality so that they become humans who are ready to build a nation. conclusion the language in the east javanese ludruk show has various interests both in the context of media institutions to convey expressions in the form of ideological, political, cultural and economic contexts that merely convey the interests of the dominant group of a society. in this context, the east javanese ludruk text, which is a creative process, becomes a technical work, namely a work that has an ideal-intellectual framework that should be realized independently by the author for the sake of ideology, politics, culture and capital.. east javanese ludruk will give birth to new enlightenment and awareness in the community, so that everything that is conveyed in the ludruk performance is in accordance with the interests and tendencies of 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(2019). application of sensory descriptive analysis and consumer studies to investigate traditional and authentic foods: a review. foods, 8(2), 54-71. liesna andriany, purwarno purwarno, saiful anwar matondang, efendi barus, & mustofa east java ludruk: pragmatic learning perspective oriented character education 142 a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach ayu riska lestari sdn ii cimangu kuningan, indonesia aiiu.rile@gmail.com apa citation: lestari, a. r. (2012). a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 47-56 received: 03-09-2012 accepted: 03-10-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: this paper described the struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie by using alfred adler’s individual psychology and analyzed the plot of the movie. it used qualitative research method and the object of this study was a major character named bella swan. primary data sources were the new moon movie directed by christopher weitz and the script of the movie, while secondary data sources were collected from many sources such as dictionary, articles from internet, and books related to this study. methods of data collecting were observation and library research. the method of data analysis was descriptive analysis. based on the analysis, it reflected the condition of a person who had a goal and struggle to get it. it concluded that bella had high struggles to reach her goals. the plot of new moon movie is complicated and stimulating, therefore it made the story was not flat and boring. by analyzing the plot, the viewers could easily understand the story and the message of the movie and catch up the moral lesson of it. keywords: bella swan, new moon, alfred adler’s individual psychology, plot, struggle for love. introduction love is a part of life. we can not live without it. because of love, we can do everything. it makes people do everything to get their love. love is something we have to fight for. when we experience deeply love, we will struggle to reach it. it is very ironical if there is someone who loves you but he or she does not fight for getting your love. therefore, love needs struggles and sacrifices. for example, a mother struggles between life and death to give birth her children. a father seeks a living for his wife and his children. even, when people love someone, they are willing to sacrifice their life for the sake of someone they love. those are a struggle for love. love is a struggle as described in new moon movie which tells about a struggle for love of bella swan to maintain her love. new moon movie is the continuation of twilight movie. this paper analyzed the new moon movie directed by christopher weitz because of three reasons. the first is it shows unusual story. although this movie is about vampire, it is not horror movie. it is about a teenage romance movie which includes elements of vampire mythology and elements of romance. the second is the characters of new moon movie. the characters of this movie are awesome. kristen stewart as bella swan and robert pattinson as edward cullen can play role as a couple of lover well, so they can make the ayu riska lestari a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach characters alive. the third is a struggle for love of bella swan. bella’s love to edward is so deeply, so she will do everything to maintain her love, even she is willing to sacrifice her life to be a vampire like edward. this paper analyzed the movie by using individual psychological approach. it explored a theory which related to problem in the movie, which was a struggle for love of bella swan. in analyzing a struggle for love of bella swan, it used individual psychology theory proposed by alfred adler. the use of alfred adler’s theory since it reflects the condition of a person who has a goal and struggles to get it. individual psychology is “adler’s theory of personality that emphasizes the uniqueness of each individual and the processes by which people overcome their limitations and struggle to reach their life goals” (adler in hjelle & ziegler, 1992: 183). individual psychology emphasized how people reach goals that influence their behavior to reach the goals (adler in pervin, et al., 2005: 139). in brief, individual psychology is adler‘s theory of personality which explains about human striving (adler in schultz & schultz, 2005: 127). individual psychology can be categorized into six basic concepts: (1) fictional finalism; (2) striving for superiority; (3) inferiority feelings and compensation; (4) social interest; (5) style of life; and (6) the creative self (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 128). fictional finalism is an imagined goal (adler in cloninger, 2004: 109). it is a very real spur to reach the goal of human’s life (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 129). fictions are “ideas that have no real existence, yet they influence people as if they really existed” (adler in feist & feist, 2006: 73). for example, when someone imagines tasting a lemon, he/she tastes the lemon "as if" there was really a lemon to lick (www.durbinhypnosis.com/adler.htm). thus, fictional finalism clarified that what a person wants to achieve in the future which affects present behavior (adler in feist & feist, 2006: 73). adler (1927) concluded that people are motivated by their expectations of the future, not by their experience in the past (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 129). for example, if a person believes that there is heaven for good people and hell for bad people, it will affect how the people live (adler in hall, et al., 1985: 146). striving for superiority is “an innate drive that propels us toward perfection” (adler in phares, 1984: 92). every people have many ways differently to reach superiority, and human does efforts to compensate his bad or less characteristics in order that he/she reaches the goal (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 130). it means that striving for superiority is to overcome inferiorities that make us do efforts to reach our goals (adler in hall, et al., 1985: 149). by this concept, “adler (1927) does not mean being better than others, but he means continually trying to become something better, to become nearer and nearer to one’s ideal goals” (adler in hall, et al., 1985: 147). inferiority feelings are “the normal condition of all people and the source of all human striving” (adler in schultz & schultz, 2005: 127). by nature, people are prone to develop feelings of inferiority because the human being is born weak and helpless (adler in phares, 1984: 92). therefore, inferiority feelings are feelings appear because psychological and social deficiencies felt subjectively or feelings appear from http://www.durbinhypnosis.com/adler.htm english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee weakness or physical defect (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 131). then, compensation is a motivation to overcome inferiority by strengthening his/her weakness, or by developing other organs or something else instead of his/her weakness (adler in pervin, et al., 2005: 138). for example, demostheness who stuttered as a child, but finally he became one of the world’s greatest orators after practicing continuously (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 131). then, when adler was child, he was a weak and sickly child, it motivates him to defeat death by becoming a doctor (adler in feist & feist, 2006: 74). in addition, a person with a weak body is not necessarily to become a strong athlete but to compensate it may become an intellectual, an artist, an actor, a writer, and so on (adler in feist & feist, 2006: 72). for example, someone with a defect in vision may attempt to develop special listening sensitivities (adler in pervin, et al., 2005: 138). social interest is relationship individual between society which forms individual’s personality to reach the goal (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 132). it means that an individual must interact with the others in society because the society can form individual’s personality and help him toward striving for superiority (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 132). social interest does not appear spontaneously, but it must be guided and practiced (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 132). according to adler (1927) in feist & feist (2006: 75), social interest is “the natural condition of the human species and the adhesive that binds society together”. society is a necessity to human beings for protection and survival (adler in schultz & schultz, 2005: 133). for example, without perfection and nourishment from a father or a mother, a baby would perish (adler in feist & feist, 2006: 75). both father and mother give powerful contribution to the developing social interest of their children (adler in feist & feist, 2006: 76). style of life is formed by the age of four or five years (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 134). style of life can be defined as unique ways of individual to reach the goal (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 132). everyone has different style of life, and it is impossible that there are two people who develop the same style of life (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 132). for example, style of life of an intellectual and an athlete are different (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 133). style of life of an intellectual is reading, studying, and thinking (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 133). his life is more sedentary at home and to stand apart, while style of life of an athlete is practicing and more active (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 133). a person develops style of life to overcome feelings of inferiority (adler in phares, 1984: 93). for example, if a child has physical weakness, so his style of life will do things to get strong physical such as by lifting weights, whereas style of life of a stupid person will strive to reach intellectual superiority (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 135). then, napoleon’s style of life that was fond of conquering was caused by his slight physical stature, and hitler’s rapacious craving that wanted to dominate the world was caused by his sexual impotence (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 135). creative power of the self is “the ability to create an appropriate style of life” (adler in schultz & schultz, 2005: 131). creative self gives meaning in human’s life, it creates the goal, and it becomes a tool to reach the goal (adler ayu riska lestari a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach in hall, et al., 1998: 135). creative self can be defined as “concept used by adler to reflect his belief that each person is empowered with the freedom to create his or her own personality” (adler in hjelle & ziegler, 1992: 183). in other words, “we are free to choose and create it ourselves” (adler in schultz & schultz, 2005: 132). creative self asserts that “they are responsible for who they are and how they behave” (adler in feist & feist, 2006: 79). moreover, it is interesting that “adler (1927) offered a portrait of humans that was more satisfying, more hopeful, and far more complimentary to humans” (adler in hall, et al., 1998: 136). then, adler (1930) emphasized that “we are in control of our fate, not victims of it” (adler in schultz & schultz 2005: 131). plot is “a structure of events arising out of a conflict” (kennedy, 1991: 7). plot includes all the story events that are directly depicted (bordwell & thompson, 2008: 76). plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end (kennedy, 1991: 6). therefore, plot can be defined as a series of events in a story that incorporate the beginning to the end. there are four parts of plot, namely exposition, complication, climax, and resolution (klarer, 2004: 15). exposition is “the opening portion that sets the scene, introduces the main characters, tells us what happened before the story opened, and provides any other background information that we need in order to understand and care about the events to follow” (kennedy, 1991: 6). it means that exposition is a beginning or an introduction of the story. complication introduces a conflict, and it creates suspense (kennedy, 1991: 7). climax is the turning point of the story (klarer, 2004: 15). in this portion, viewers want to know what happens next. resolution is the outcome or conclusion of the story (kennedy, 1991: 7). it refers to the resolution of the complication or conflict (klarer, 2004: 15). therefore, it gives problem solving of the events in the story. based on the rationale, research questions of this study are as follows: (1) how is a struggle for love of bella swan in new moon movie reflected by using alfred adler’s individual psychology theory?; (2) how is plot constructed in new moon movie? this study is expected to be able to give information and knowledge about alfred adler‘s individual psychology theory described through a character named bella swan in new moon movie. therefore, the readers can know and understand how adler’s theory reflected in the movie. in addition, they can use this study to compare it with another. then, this study is expected to be able to give message to the readers that it is not easy to get whatever we want to. it is needed a struggle to get it because sometimes you have to face great challenges to get happiness. nevertheless, if you do not fight for it, you can lose your happiness. method this study applies descriptive qualitative method. descriptive research is a research which is used to describe subject, phenomena, or characteristics about what is being studied (mason & bramble, 1978: 31). it can be used to understand and describe human behavior (yin, 2011: 4). then, qualitative research involves defining something to investigate, collecting relevant data, analyzing and interpreting the result, and drawing conclusion (yin, 2011: 49). based on the explanations, descriptive english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee qualitative research is a method of research involving method of collecting, describing, analyzing, classifying the data and then drawing conclusion. the data can be sentences, pictures and spoken words of observed object. by using the descriptive qualitative research, this research is aimed to describe a struggle of bella swan in new moon movie based on alfred adler’s individual psychology. the object of this study is a major character named bella swan in new moon movie. the data sources of this study can be divided into two categories, namely primary data source and secondary data source. primary data sources are new moon movie directed by christopher weitz and the script of the movie. in addition, secondary data sources are collected from many sources such as dictionary, articles from internet, and books related to this study. there are two methods of data collecting: observation and library research. observation is a way of collecting data which gets data by way of what you see with your own eyes and perceive with your own senses, not by what others report to you (yin, 2011: 143). it is the researcher gathers data by watching the respondent in a research (fox, 1969: 51). by using method of observation, it enables the researcher to collect direct information about human behavior (borg & gall, 1979: 28). meanwhile, library research is a research which is done to get books related on the research topic by going to a library. library research is used when you need much information to find data needed. the data are collected from the books related to the research topic. there are some steps of library research. first of all, go to the some libraries. next, find out books related on research topic and read the relevant data. then, write and put all the collected data into a document. after that, write down the references. the data both primary data source and secondary data source are collected and recorded in a form of document and picture as evidence. after the data had been collected, the researcher began to analyze them. the method used to analyze the data is descriptive analysis. by using descriptive analysis, a researcher wants to get better understanding about a research topic. it describes a struggle for love of bella swan in new moon movie by using alfred adler’s individual psychology and analyzes plot of new moon movie. first, the data will be analyzed are collected. second, after the data are collected, it begins to describe a struggle for love of bella swan in new moon movie by using alfred adler’s individual psychology, and it analyzes plot of new moon movie. in analyzing a struggle for love of bella swan and plot of the movie are needed dialogues and pictures of the movie as evidence. third, the data have been analyzed are arranged into each categories and developed into a good unit. finally, the researcher draws conclusion from the data. results and discussion based the investigation, it was found that struggles for love of bella swan in new moon movie analyzed by using alfred adler’s individual psychology are as follows: ayu riska lestari a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach fictional finalism bella wanted to be immortal. she wanted to live together with edward happily ever after. she wanted to see edward. striving for superiority bella stayed together with edward although he was a vampire. she went to italy and met the volturi to foil edward’s suicide plan. she was willing to sacrifice her soul to save edward. she chose edward rather than jacob although she also loved jacob. inferiority feelings and compensation as a human being, bella was weak and her strength was limited. she couldn’t fend for herself, and she depended on others. first, she was unable to protect herself when the cullens (edward’s vampire family) threw a birthday party for bella at their house. bella got a paper cut while unwrapping a gift from esme and carlisle, and spilt blood. jasper who has not been able to resist his urge to drink human blood lost control and immediately attacked her. she was unable to protect herself, so she was saved by others such as edward, emmett, and carlisle. second, bella was unable to protect herself when she met laurent who attempted to kill her. when he wanted to kill her, she didn’t try to fight him because she realized that she was unable to protect herself without the help of others. in the scene, she was saved by a pack of werewolves. after that, she ran away instead. third, bella was unable to protect herself when she slapped paul’s face who immediately turned into a werewolf and attacked bella. she couldn’t do anything, so instead she ran away from the werewolf, and then jacob who turned into a werewolf saved her. fourth, bella was unable to save herself when she did cliff jumping into the ocean and almost drowned. the wave was so great, and jacob saved her from drowning. she felt that she didn’t suit edward because she felt nothing. she was afraid that she could get older because she was afraid that edward didn’t love her anymore when she looked like a grandmother. she was afraid that she lost edward. social interest bella was close with jacob who was able to make her smile anymore and helped her repair motorcycles which she got from the junkyard. due to jacob, bella found herself capable of smiling again. she kept a secret about who the cullens were true to other people in order that their existences were safe in society and for the sake of her relationship with edward because she didn’t want to separate of him. even, she wanted to become a part of them, namely to be a vampire. she was different with others. she preferred interacting with vampires and werewolves to interacting with humans such as her friends. she wasn’t close with her friends. even, she refrained from all social activities since edward left her, and her friends avoided her because of her strangeness. style of life bella did reckless things such as by jumping on the back of an unknown motorcyclist, riding a motorcycle by herself, and doing cliff jumping. she remained to interact with the cullens although they were vampires. she english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee remained to interact with jacob although he was a werewolf. she didn’t like shopping, and she was not interested in fashion. creative self bella wanted to be a vampire like edward in order that she could be immortal. she put herself in danger to see edward. she looked for the rush of danger because it could take to see edward. that’s why she put herself in danger although it could threaten her soul. the research found that plot is constructed in new moon movie is as follows: exposition exposition is a beginning or an introduction of the story (kennedy, 1991: 6). a beginning of new moon movie was that bella dreamt an old woman and apparently the old woman was herself. she was shocked that she saw herself as the old woman. after she had woken up, she got a birthday surprise from her father and he gave her gifts. complication complication introduces a conflict, and it creates suspense (kennedy, 1991: 7). the complication occurred when the cullens (edward’s vampire family) threw a birthday party for bella at their house, bella got a paper cut while unwrapping one of her gifts, and spilt blood. jasper who still struggled to resist his urge to drink human blood lost control and immediately attacked her. the accident made edward realize that if bella stayed close with vampires, it was dangerous for her. he thought that she would be better without him. therefore, he decided to leave her because he didn’t want to put her in danger anymore. he convinced her that he no longer loved her. climax climax is the turning point of the story (klarer, 2004: 15). the climax occurred when edward left bella, her whole life turned upside down. she felt her life was over. since edward’s departure, bella’s life became heartbroken and depressed. then, she discovered that when she did reckless things, she could see visions of edward. thus, to see edward, she had to put her in dangerous situations. bella constantly put herself in danger in order that she could see edward. for example, she jumped on the back of an unknown motorcyclist. after that, she tried to ride a motorcycle by herself. finally, she tried to do cliff jumping into the ocean and nearly drowned, but jacob rescued her. due to alice’s futureseeing skills, she saw bella to jump off a cliff into the ocean, and she supposed that bella committed suicide. then, alice met bella, and she was shocked to see bella alive because she supposed that bella has passed away. edward heard the false news of bella’s death, and it made edward want to commit suicide because his existence in the world was not worth anymore if bella passed away. he decided to commit suicide in volterra, italy. then, bella who was accompanied by alice went to italy to save him. finally, edward’s suicide plan was successful to be stopped by bella. when bella, edward and alice met the volturi and aro was about to kill bella, alice stopped it. through alice’s vision of bella’s future, aro who was able to read thoughts through touch saw bella would become ayu riska lestari a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach a vampire, and finally the volturi released her. resolution resolution is the outcome or conclusion of the story (kennedy, 1991: 7). in the end of the story, bella and edward were eventually reunited and the cullens returned to forks. edward realized that apparently bella was in more danger without him. he also swore that he would never leave her anymore. then, edward told bella that he agreed to change her into a vampire, but only if she married him first. based on the analysis, bella had high striving to reach her goals. struggles for love of bella swan in new moon movie reflected by using alfred adler’s individual psychology are as follows: 1) she was willing to sacrifice her soul for edward. 2) she stayed together with edward although he was a vampire. 3) she wanted to be a vampire in order that she was immortal and always stayed young, so she could live together with edward happily ever after. 4) she constantly put herself in danger to see edward by jumping on the back of an unknown motorcyclist, riding a motorcycle by herself, and doing cliff jumping into the ocean. 5) she went to italy and met the volturi to foil edward’s suicide plan because she couldn’t imagine her existence in the world if edward passed away. 6) she remained to interact with vampires although it could threaten her soul. 7) she kept a secret about who edward and the cullens were true to other people for the sake of her relationship with edward because she didn’t want to separate of him. 8) she chose edward rather than jacob although she also loved jacob. she kept choosing edward although he has ever left her. in addition, dealing with plot analysis, plot of new moon movie was complex and stimulating. it makes the story is not flat and interesting. by analyzing plot, the viewers can easily understand the story and the message of the movie. conclusion this research analyzes a struggle for love of bella swan in new moon movie by using individual psychology proposed by alfred adler. based on the analysis, this research concludes that bella has high striving to reach her goals. in addition, this research shows that there is close relationship between bella swan and alfred adler’s individual psychology, namely they equally describe about human striving to reach their goals. in new moon movie, this research focuses on a struggle for love of bella to reach her goals. this research describes a struggle for love of bella swan in new moon movie based on the six basic concepts of individual psychology. they are fictional finalism, striving for superiority, inferiority feelings and compensation, social interest, style of life, and the creative self. the six elements are interrelated and have important roles. fictional finalism related to goals which bella wants to reach for. she has goal to be together with edward, so she sets her sights to reach her goals. she does striving for superiority by doing everything for edward, even she is willing to sacrifice her soul. nevertheless, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee she has to control inferiority feelings as a human being such as she can get old, she is weak and her strength is limited. then, she has social interest which is different with others. she is not close with humans such as her friends. she prefers interacting with vampires and werewolves to interacting with humans such as her friends. even, she refrained from all social activities since edward left her. she has unique style of life, that is, she does reckless things which can threaten her soul. her style of life will do things to reach her goals. then, she has creative self to reach her goal. therefore, this study reflects the condition of a person who has a goal and struggles to get it. in addition, this research analyzes plot of new moon movie. plot of new moon movie is complex and stimulating, so it makes the story is not flat and interesting. by analyzing plot, the viewers can easily understand the story and the message of the movie. therefore, after analyzing this study, it is expected to be able to give moral value that it is not easy to get whatever we want to. it is needed a struggle to get it because sometimes you have to face great challenges to get happiness. if you do not fight for it, you can lose your happiness. references bordwell, d. & kristin t. 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(1992). personality theories: basic assumptions, research, and applications, third edition. new york: mcgraw-hill kennedy, x. j. (1991). literature: an introduction to fiction, poetry, and drama, fifth edition. new york: harpercollins publishers klarer, m. 2004. an introduction to literary studies, second edition. london: routledge mason, e. j. & william j. b. (1978). understanding and conducting research. new york: mcgraw-hill new moon script. (2012). retrieved june 24, 2012 from http://www.script-orama.com/movie_scripts/t/twilight -saga-new-moon-script.html pervin, l. a., daniel c. & oliver p. j. (2005). personality: theory and research, ninth edition. new york: john wiley & sons phares, e. j. (1984). introduction to personality. columbus: bell & howell company schultz, d. p. & sydney e. s. (2005). theories of personality, eighth edition. australia: thomson wadsworth supriyadi. (2010). struggle for love of bella swan in twilight films: an individual psychological approach. unpublished research paper. surakarta: muhammadiyah university of surakarta http://www.durbinhypnosis.com/adler.htm%20accessed%20on%20april%2020 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/film http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/t/twilight-saga-new-moon-script.html ayu riska lestari a struggle for love of bella swan reflected in new moon movie: an individual psychological approach wardani, l. h. (2010). a struggle for love of isabella swan in catherine hardwicke’s twilight movie: an individual psychological approach. unpublished research paper. surakarta: muhammadiyah university of surakarta yin, r. k. (2011). qualitative research from start to finish. new york: the guilford press yoga, p. (2011). konseling alderian. retrieved june 24, 2012 from http://konsikum.wordpress.com/20 11/05/01/konseling-alderian/ http://konsikum.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/konseling-alderian/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 957 practice assessment of english teachers in state madrasah school in mataram city pauzan english language education, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas islam negeri mataram, indonesia email: pauzanharis@uinmataram.ac.id ribahan english language education, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas islam negeri mataram, indonesia email: ribhansyah79@gmail.com apa citation: pauzan., & ribahan. (2022). practice assessment of english teachers in state madrasah school in mataram city. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 957-964. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6819 received: 22-07-2022 accepted: 24-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction according to hafid (2017), assessment helps to collect information from students to make certain decisions. meanwhile, valenthine (2018) argues that assessment involves a wider domain, so teachers must consider various aspects in conducting assessments. in order to observe and improve student learning activities, lessons at school and the environment in which the learning takes place. cheng in kirkgoz et al. (2018) asserts that assessment helps to collect information from students to help in making decisions about the progress and development of students' language. thus, assessment is an important part that cannot be separated from learning activities and teachers are expected to not stop conducting assessments, either programmed or programmed incidentally. there are several important reasons why teachers should conduct assessments. in general, assessments are carried out by teachers to provide accountability for student learning outcomes and improve learning (lippmann et al., 2021). meanwhile, in the context of learning english, moremi (2021) suggests at least two main reasons teachers conduct assessments, namely to find out how many students can achieve learning objectives, anyone who has problems learning english and which techniques are useful to use in learning and to make decisions whether the learning program carried out should be continued or discontinued. furthermore, yuliandasari & kusriandi (2018) assert that teachers should conduct assessments in learning english to facilitate students in learning english and monitor the progress of their learning outcomes both through diagnostic tests and learning outcomes tests. in the school curriculum in indonesia, teachers are required to have the ability to assess their students' learning outcomes, both formative and summative. in this case, ahmet & mehmet (2018) state that a should own a literacy about assessment to understand what is essential to be assessed, how to assess, and what decisions must abstract: this study aims to describe the assessment practices carried out by english teachers of state madrasah schools in mataram city at the stages of planning, implementation, supervision, and recording. in this descriptive study, the researcher used qualitative and quantitative descriptive approaches. a total of 18 teachers from both state mts and ma in the city of mataram participated in the study. the data collection technique used a questionnaire in the form of a google form containing a number of statements related to the assessment practice at the four stages of the assessment with the answer format using a likert scale with a range of answers strongly disagree, disagree, not sure, agree, and strongly agree. the data were the results of the average calculation of each item was analyzed descriptively. the results of the study showed that (1) teachers were not sure to ask for parental approval before the assessment was carried out, (2) teachers agreed that the assessment was carried out within a certain time, according to the situation and conditions and accompanied by feedback, (3) teachers felt hesitant to share the findings of the assessment with fellow teachers and the involvement of parents in the assessment process, and (4) the teacher felt aware and responsible for recording or documenting the results of the assessment that were carried out. thus, assessment is an important part that cannot be separated from learning activities and teachers are expected to keep conducting assessments. keywords: assessment; implementation; madrasah teacher; planning; recording; supervision pauzan & ribahan practice assessment of english teachers in state madrasah school in mataram city 958 be made regarding the assessment results. however, many teachers face difficulties in implementing and realizing the assessment practices above. some of the reasons, according to fitriani (2019), it is due to the external and internal issue faced by the teachers. teachers' knowledge in indonesia about assessment is still low. this is because teachers are lacking in assessment training, and many teachers cannot attend training organized by the government even though routine training is very important and meaningful for improving their ability to practice assessment. based on the problems stated above, this article aims to examine the assessment practices of english teachers in public madrasah schools in mataram city, especially in learning english. according to santika et al. (2022), assessment helps to obtain information that is used as a basis for making decisions regarding students related to curriculum, learning program, and school policies. in addition, adnan et al. (2019) suggest that assessment is necessary to determine whether an activity program's process and results are in accordance with the goals or criteria set. cheng & fox (2017) explain that assessment involves two key points, namely (1) assessment involves teachers and students and (2) assessment can include classroom tests and daily assessments. furthermore, whiley et al. (2017) define assessment as an active process in which evidence of student learning is collected and analyzed to reach effective decisions. nimehchisalem & abdalla (2020) assert that assessment involves various activities that measure the extent to which students understand the curriculum material and achieve the instructional goals planned by the teacher. assessment has an equally important position with learning because it is impossible not to measure or assess the extent to which the learning we have implemented, in this case, whether they achieved the expected goals. the assessment results are significant to be used as a reference for better learning practices and become a benchmark for deciding whether a student can continue to the next level and program. assessment has a very important role in the learning process. tosuncuoglu (2018) asserts that assessment is an important tool that can be used to diagnose student weaknesses and strengths and provide feedback for teachers in designing teaching and learning activities that are relevant to the wishes. faber et al. (2017) add that assessment for teachers is very important to monitor student progress and as a basis for choosing the right method to achieve the desired results. through assessment, teachers can use various techniques in learning and set strategies for learning as well as help the student know the areas in which he or she must work hard to achieve the desired results. considering the importance of the role of assessment in the school curriculum in our country, teachers are required to have good skills in assessing learning activities in the form of the ability to carry out formative assessments. (kazemi, 2018) suggests that formative assessment collects and analyses the results or evidence obtained. from the assessment, determine the time and process and appropriate learning strategies to achieve learning objectives. meanwhile, in the case of student learning, the primary idea of summative assessment is to offer information on what learning has been accomplished at a specific moment (dolin et al., 2017). furthermore, manotumruksa et al. (2020) divide the assessment into five parts: summative assessment, diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, formal assessment, and informal assessment. assessment can also be classified into three types: self-assessment, peer research and teacher assessment (maba & mantra, 2017). next, nurhidayat et al. (2021) in their article describe three models or types of assessment, namely assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. therefore, it is connected to the assessment of english teachers. cheng & chang (2017) showed that assessment requires teachers and bases their decisions on learning, assessment and reporting. teachers usually choose and apply certain models according to their needs and objectives in carrying out assessment activities. armstrong & harman (2019) suggest four stages in conducting classroom assessments: assigning assessment tasks to students, students performing assignments, assessing student work, and giving students feedback based on the results. this model represents what most teachers do when conducting assessments. black & wiliam (2018) added that regarding classroom assessment, critical component is the implementation of teachers' strategies and objectives in the classroom. according to zulaiha et al. (2020), teacher assessment model uses the planning stage, the assessment stage, the observation stage, the stage of giving special assignments, continuous review english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 959 stage, and level determination stage. the result show that the study's participants, which is teachers, reported being assessment-literate and knowledgeable about the fundamentals of classroom-based assessment. they also said they have implemented most of these concepts. from the two models above, xu & brown (2017) conclude that the processes and strategies in language learning assessment can be divided into four main stages, namely planning, implementation, monitoring, and recording. at the implementation stage, the teacher provides sufficient information about the assessment, including details such as time allocation and difficulty level, to ensure that students can clearly understand what they should do to meet the desired results. at the monitoring stage, the teacher conducts an assessment according to the criteria which have been set. criteria must be made and determined considering the assessment's objectives and the students' characteristics so that the assessment's validity and reliability can be developed. at the recording stage, the teacher carries out the process of taking the results of the assessments that have been carried out on students, both in written form and other forms that function to document the assessments that have been carried out so that if needed, the teacher can show them at any time. method the method should make readers able to reproduce the experiment. provide sufficient detail to allow the work to be reproduced. a reference should indicate methods already published; only relevant modifications should be described. do not repeat the details of established methods. the method section covers respondents, instruments, procedures, and data analysis. in this study, the researcher used qualitative and quantitative descriptive approaches. according to moedjiono et al. (2018), this approach focuses on understanding problems in social life based on holistic, complex, and detailed reality conditions. the type of research used was descriptive research. this study described the information or data obtained from the research subject so that it can provide a clear description of the assessment practices carried out by english teachers in state madrasah schools in the city of mataram in the four stages of assessment, namely planning, implementation, monitoring and recording. the data collection method used was the questionnaire method. the questionnaire contains statement items related to the assessment practices carried out by english teachers at state madrasah schools in the city of mataram by distributing questionnaires to provide answers to each statement item contained in the questionnaire. the answer format using a likert scale with a range of strongly disagree, disagree, not sure, agree, and strongly agree is provided to answer the questions in the questionnaire. likert scale is a form of scale that is used to collect data in order to find out or measure data that is both qualitative and quantitative. after the questionnaire was filled in, the researcher calculated based on the number of percentages and the average score of each statement item (meiryani et al., 2021). the data collected from the questionnaire were then analyzed descriptively. the average value of the teacher's answers as the answer to the problem in this study, namely the assessment practice carried out by english teachers in state madrasah schools in the city of mataram. results and discussion the following is a reference or guide to score interpretation and score criteria for answers to each statement given by the respondent. table 1. interpretation of scores and criteria average score criteria m = ≥4.50 strongly agree m = 3.50 -4.49 agree m = 2.50 -3.49 neutral (neither agree nor disagree) m = 1.50 -2.49 strongly disagree m = ≤1.49 disagree assessment practices at the planning stage carried out by english teachers in madrasah schools in mataram city we present and analyze the responses given by english teachers of state madrasah schools in mataram city in conducting assessment practices in the planning stage using descriptive statistical techniques. the data are presented in table 2 below. table 2. data on assessment practices at the planning stage no. statement average criteria 1 i first set goals when designing 4.80 strongly agree 2 i consider the objectives to be achieved in the curriculum when designing the assessment 4.65 strongly agree 3 i consider students' needs 4.35 agree pauzan & ribahan practice assessment of english teachers in state madrasah school in mataram city 960 when designing an assessment 4 i strike a balance between the assessment goals i want to achieve with the student's needs when designing the assessment 4.30 agree 5 i include the assessment specifications when conducting the assessment 4.30 agree 6 the assessment that i do is related to the subject matter that has actually been given to students in class 4.75 strongly agree 7 the assessments i do are meaningful to students 4.55 strongly agree 8 i design an assessment to obtain information about students' knowledge at a given time 4.60 strongly agree 9 i design an assessment to obtain information about a student's skills at a given time 4.45 agree 10 i design an assessment to obtain information about students' ability to use language effectively 4.45 agree 11 i ask for comments from colleagues or refer to existing assessment guidelines to check the accuracy of the assessment i do 4.25 agree 12 the assessment that i do is more focused on student progress and achievement than the comparison of students' abilities in class 4.05 agree 13 i announce in advance before the assessment is carried out so that students prepare themselves 4.55 strongly agree 14 i ask for the approval of students or parents before conducting an assessment 3.00 neutral 15 i respect student privacy and guarantee not to divulge 4.35 agree 16 i guarantee that all students have the same learning opportunities in the class 4.85 strongly agree 17 i ensure that the assessment results are not influenced by personal factors such as gender, appearance, social and economic background 4.70 strongly agree average total 4.40 agree table 2 shows that the respondents "strongly agree" with items 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, and 17. the only item or item where the teacher is not sure or chooses to be neutral with the assessment planning activities carried out is item fourteen (14), which has a correlation with teacher ethics in preparing and carrying out assessments, namely the approval of students or teachers before an assessment or assessment is carried out. indeed, in practice, this is not common, especially in the case of classroom-based assessments, where the teacher must ask or receive approval from the student or the student's parents before carrying out the assessment. even if this part must be implemented, then the student's consent is considered sufficient without having to strictly ask for the approval of the student's parents as well. furthermore, respondents agree with the statement item twelve (12), which this item is the statement that gets the lowest average score which indicates that the teacher believes in the nature of the assessment itself, which should be emphasized more on monitoring the progress or progress and achievements of students during learning activities, not solely to determine differences in student progress and achievement between one another. moreover, it is used as a measuring tool to compare one student with another. another interesting thing to consider regarding the first stage in this assessment is that there is not a single item out of all the existing statement items that get an average score which indicates the respondent's disagreement. assessment practices at the implementation stage carried out by english teachers at madrasah schools in mataram city respondents' answers to statements related to the assessment at the implementation stage are presented in table 3 below. table 3. data on assessment practices at the implementation stage no. statement average criteria 1 i tell students why they are rated 4.45 strongly agree 2 i give instructions on how to do assignments or tests that are given explicitly 4.50 strongly agree 3 students understand the expected results of the assignment or test done 4.30 agree 4 students are given support when they face problems in completing assigned 4.40 agree english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 961 assignments or tests 5 i immediately give feedback to students after they finish each assignment or test that is done 4.55 strongly agree 6 i carry out the assessment process with good timing and considering the existing situation and conditions 4.60 strongly agree average total 4.46 agree as shown by the data in table 3, the average teacher "strongly agrees" with the statement points related to the practice of assessment that should be carried out at the implementation stage. these items include statement items 1, 2, 5, and 6. specifically, the responses to each of the statements above show that the teacher strongly agrees (r = 4.45) to tell the students the reason for doing the assessment. the teacher really should convey at the beginning to students the purpose or reason for assessing so that students can prepare themselves, especially the competencies and materials to be assessed or tested. the teachers also strongly agree (r = 4.50) that students should be given clear instructions or orders to do the test so that students take the test as instructed and do not cause confusion. next, regarding feedback, the teachers also strongly agreed (r=4.55) to immediately complete the assessment of student assignments within a certain time and immediately provide feedback on what they had done based on the results of the assessment by the teacher. meanwhile, regarding the assessment's timing, the teachers strongly agreed (r=4.60) to carry out the assessment by considering the time, situation, and existing conditions. another result that is no less important than the data above is that the teacher agrees with the statement that students understand the expected results of the task or test being done (r=4.30). students are given support when they face problems completing the assigned task or test (4.40). assessment practices at the monitoring stage carried out by english teachers in madrasah schools in mataram city respondents' answers to statements related to the assessment at the monitoring stage are presented in table 4 below. table 4. data on assessment practices at the monitoring stage no. statement average criteria 1 i create a scoring system as part of the whole process 4.60 strongly agree 2 criteria for scoring are linked to assessment objectives and student characteristics in a particular context 4.15 agree 3 i provide detailed information to students about the scoring system used 4.05 agree 4 i rate student performance consistently 4.30 agree 5 i use the results of the assessment to improve my teaching 4.50 agree 6 i use the assessment results positively, not negatively 4.65 strongly agree 7 i make assessment a part of my teaching and learning process 4.65 strongly agree 8 i share the findings of the assessment with other teachers 3.55 neutral 9 overall feedback allows students to know how to improve their work and study activities going forward 4.45 agree 10 the whole assessment process is carried out consistently both in terms of procedures and administration 4.25 agree 11 the assessment process that i carried out was supported by the involvement of parents 3.50 agree 12 i monitor the abuse of all things that may occur in the assessment as a means of control 4.40 agree average total 4.40 agree according to the table above, teachers agree with almost all statement items related to assessment practices at the monitoring stage, including statement items for numbers 2,3, 4,5, 9,10,11, and 12. the highest average scores were recorded for items 1, 6, and 7 related to the scoring system (r= 4.60), utilization of assessment results (r= 4.65), and making an assessment as a part of learning and providing feedback for students to help them improve their skills (r= 4.65). on the other hand, there is one item that the respondent is unsure of, which is item 8 (sharing the assessment findings with other teachers). with the exception of this item, teachers seem to have a clear idea of the monitoring phase of the assessment. assessment practices at the recording stage conducted by english teachers at madrasah schools in mataram city pauzan & ribahan practice assessment of english teachers in state madrasah school in mataram city 962 at the recording stage, the data are presented in table 5 below. table 5. data on assessment practices at the recording stage no. statement average criteria 1 i respect students' rights as test takers; they will never be treated differently because of the results obtained 4.25 agree 2 i am aware and responsible for the work i do 4.65 strongly agree 3 a reporting system on student progress and achievement at either local or national level is in place 4.25 agree 4 my school has its own reporting system on student progress and achievement 4.25 agree 5 a formal review of student progress and achievement is reported to the local education office and the central government 4.10 agree average total 4.46 agree as shown in the table above, most teachers agreed with all items of the statement relating to the practice of assessment related to recording. the teachers show their awareness and responsibility in recording the assessment results. from the data above, it is known that teachers feel aware that they must report the results of the assessment in such a way while still paying attention and protecting student privacy so as not to have a negative impact and disturb students' emotions. among the statement items in the questionnaire, item 5 is a statement that obtained the lowest average score (r=4.10). in this regard, teacher assessment practice is understandable because making a formal review of a student's achievement, i.e. progress and achievement, is not very practical to teachers. according to büyükkarci (2019), the primary purpose of assessment is to educate and improve student learning and performance and improve teacher teaching based on the information obtained from the assessment. however, as shown by the data of this study, teachers are more concerned with the idea that students should be given equal opportunities in classroom learning or the same assessment treatment regardless of the personal and social background of students. another study result also shows that teachers feel less sure about the urgency of whether they should ask for or receive approval from students or parents about the assessment or assessment they will do. in this case, zulaiha et al. (2020) has the view that involving parents can be related to the practicality of the assessment itself and the heavy workload of teachers so that teachers do not have much time and attention for things that are considered technical and less practical. in line with the results related to the implementation of the assessment, the participants agreed that students should be given feedback on the results of their assignments and support, especially morally, if they have problems that hinder the completion of their assignments. concerning this, (lent & brown, 2019) suggests that at the implementation stage, teachers must consider the standards or achievement of targets outlined by the curriculum and student needs, balancing between the two. in addition, the teacher gives students advance notice before an assessment so that they can prepare themselves according to the schedule. the teacher also shares information about the goals and targets of achievement with the students being tested and designs assessment tasks. then, the teachers also agreed that students should be given clear instructions on how to do the assessment tasks given to them in order to be successful in following the assessment. explicit instructions on how students perform assessment tasks should receive primary attention in administering the assessment. an interesting finding in this study is that teachers do not seem to support each other and do not want to share with other teachers or fellow teachers about their respective assessment practices. some of the reasons that arise are maybe because teachers are worried that their peers will be ridiculed by their fellow teachers who are more experienced than them. zulaiha et al. (2020), feel ashamed of the assessment practice that has been carried out so far. specifically, regarding the involvement of parents, the reason is more on the issue of practicality because it takes time and strict coordination for efforts to involve other parties in a process, including the implementation of the assessment. teachers may also perceive themselves as having absolute power or authority in their work environment. the involvement of all parties or stakeholders in the school program is highly expected. in addition, the results of this study also show that teachers tend to support the idea that assessment results can be used to improve their teaching methods which is shown by their awareness that, in principle, assessment has a positive impact on the learning process. in the assessment process, ideally, teachers should report the results of the assessments that english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 963 have been carried out on their students, both to their students and parents of students, in order to convey progress or improvement in terms of student performance. according to lent & brown (2019), at the recording stage, the teacher carries out the process of recording the results of the assessments that have been carried out, both in written form and other forms that function to document the assessments that have been made to students so that if necessary, the teacher can use them at any time. related to this, archiving in the form of files or digitizing is a safe alternative. conclusion in the practice of assessment at the planning stage, teachers generally feel unsure whether getting a student or parental approval before carrying out the assessment is crucial. in the practice of assessment at the implementation stage, teachers agree that the assessment should be carried out within a certain time and consider the situation and conditions. students should be given support with feedback when they experience problems during the assessment task. in the practice of assessment at the monitoring stage, teachers expressed their doubts about sharing the assessment findings with fellow teachers or co-workers and involving parents in the assessment process because they considered the issue less common and impractical. in the practice of assessment at the recording or recording stage, teachers feel aware and responsible for recording or documenting the results of the assessments that have been carried out to find out the progress and achievements of students in participating in learning. references adnan, suwandi, s., nurkamto, j., & setiawan, b. 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(2018). students’ perception on english club extracurricular in speaking practices at madrasah. academic journal perspective : education, language, and literature, 3(2), 305-315. https://doi.org/10.33603/perspective.v3i2.1670 zulaiha, s., mulyono, h., & ambarsari, l. (2020). an investigation into efl teachers’ assessment literacy: indonesian teachers’ perceptions and classroom practice. european journal of contemporary education, 9(1), 189-201. https://doi.org/10.13187/ejced.2020.1.189 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 783 exploring language assessment literacy of efl teachers in the context of indonesian higher education andri suherman universitas hamzanwadi, selong, indonesia email: andrisuherman@hamzanwadi.ac.id apa citation: suherman. a. (2022). exploring language assessment literacy of efl teachers in the context of indonesian higher education. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 783792. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6525. received: 19-06-2022 accepted: 25-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction assessment can be assumed as one of the most important aspects of instructional contexts as it may significantly affect the quality of teaching and students’ learning (aryadoust et al., 2021). researchers argued that assessment should be utilized to boost deep learning, to enhance students’ learning motivation, to help students recognize self-concept within themselves, and to help students understand the quality of assessment (mcnamara et al., 2019). it is therefore, assessment should be properly implemented as it can provide all parties (students, teachers, and assessors) with valid information about students’ learning achievement (salmani-nodoushan, 2020). in fact, there is a strong relationship between assessment and teaching in a way that assessment can help teachers improve their teaching quality, and teaching can help teachers enhance their assessment quality (coombe et al., 2020). nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that such relationship can be developed if teachers are not equipped with adequate assessment knowledge. the necessity of assessment knowledge for teachers triggered some scholars (giraldo, 2018; mcnamara et al., 2019; pastore & andrade, 2019) to introduce and expand the paramount concept of “assessment literacy”. in the field of foreign language or second language education, assessment literacy is mainly focusing on the testing stakeholders’ knowledge of the principles of assessment, and the implementation of the knowledge (coombe et al., 2020). although the concept of assessment literacy is lacking of consensus, in consistent with the standards of teacher competence in educational assessment of students, giraldo (2018) argued that language teachers need to possess a high level of language assessment literacy (hereafter lal) to be able to develop appropriate testing methods, to administer tests, to score tests and use them to aid instruction, to communicate the test results to stakeholders, and to become aware of the ethical use of tests. similarly, sultana (2019) highlighted the pivotal role of lal which could help teachers to collect accurate information about their students’ learning achievement and to use this information to improve their teaching practices. it is therefore, as wind and peterson (2019) noted, language teachers are required to possess a high level of lal in all level of education, including in the context of higher education. with regards to this, kremmel and harding (2020) mentioned the significance of examining how lal is perceived abstract: the present study aims at examining efl teachers’ perceptions of language assessment literacy (hereafter lal) in the context of indonesian higher education. to this aim, purposive sampling technique was employed to select sixteen efl university teachers to participate in an online questionnaire and semistructured interviews. the finding showed that the participants had applied six types of lal in their teaching practices with formative assessment methods and test validity and reliability being the two most applied (more than 80%) by the participants. following this, between 75% and 80% participants had applied two other types of lal, linguistics competence and test results. the last two types of lal, digital literacy and grading criteria, were applied by less than 70% participants. another finding from qualitative data revealed that the majority of participants (over 70%) ranked their level of lal knowledge and skills as low. despite some limitations, the present study provides some implications including the necessity for the efl teachers to be equipped with relevant knowledge and skills to make the way for quality assessment. it is therefore university authorities should organize professional development programs with the purpose to help teachers improve their assessment literacy. in addition, all educational parties should collaborate to consistently conduct literacy assessment projects throughout teachers’ professional career. some suggestions for future research in the field of language assessment are also presented. keywords: efl teachers; language assessment; university teachers. andri suherman exploring language assessment literacy of efl teachers in the context of indonesian higher education 784 by university language teachers. the results can be used by university officials to determine whether or not teachers are equipped with required lal. if not, the university officials need to organize relevant training courses to help the teachers enhance the level of their lal. as for the research of lal, there have been many lal-related studies over the last few decades, which were conducted by many researchers across different contexts. for example, in chinese educational context, yan and fan (2021) investigated contextual and experiential factors which had affected assessment literacy of three different groups of people (efl teachers, graduate students, and language assessors). their finding revealed that different lal profiles were demonstrated by the participants both at individual and group categories. at the group category, graduate students and language assessors reported a higher level of lal than did the efl teachers. at the individual category, however, each participant displayed a different process of lal development although they shared similar patterns. meanwhile, lam (2019) examined the assessment literacy of 66 efl secondary teachers in hong kong. he revealed that the majority of the teachers had a required level of assessment literacy, yet found difficulty to differentiate between two major elements in assessment, “assessment of learning” and “assessment for learning”. other than in china, some other researchers have also conducted relevant studies in different countries. in iran, for example, watmani et al. (2020) compared assessment literacy between efl teachers and nonefl teachers by employing assessment literacy scale. their finding showed that both of the group of participants had a limited knowledge of assessment concept along with the different perceptions of lal among the two groups. meanwhile, bøhn and tsagari (2021) examined teacher educators’ perception of lal in the context of norwegian education. their finding showed that the participants claimed four different competences of lal that teachers should have; “disciplinary competence, assessment-specific competence, pedagogical competence, and collaboration competence” (bøhn & tsagari, 2021, p.226). in the contexts of indonesian education, lal has also been an interesting topic of research for the past few years. for example, zulaiha et al. (2020) examined 22 secondary school efl teachers’ perception of lal by employing a survey as their research instrument. their finding showed that although the teachers demonstrated a high level of assessment knowledge, there was a huge discrepancy between their assessment knowledge and assessment practices. the discrepancy was particularly identified in two major stages, implementation and monitoring. meanwhile, mirizon (2021) investigated the level of efl teachers’ (n=6) assessment literacy at two different indonesian secondary schools. by adapting the classroom assessment literacy inventory (call), his finding revealed that the teachers were found to have a fairly literate of lal. in this regard, the teachers demonstrated difficulties when assessing students’ learning because they failed to interpret the basic competence in the curriculum, and they rarely employed formative assessment methods due to lack of the ability to manage the classroom time. while the studies above were conducted at secondary school level, marhaeni et al. (2020) examined 144 teachers’ perception of lal at elementary school level. by using the 30-item classroom assessment literacy questionnaire (calt), their finding showed that the teachers’ assessment literacy was perceived as “fair”. in this sense, there was no significant different of lal found between lower-grade teachers and uppergrade teachers. based on the review of studies above, it can be assumed that relatively not many researchers have explored the dimension of lal in the context of indonesian higher education. furthermore, not many scholars have qualitatively explored the efl teachers’ perceptions of lal at the university level in indonesia. thus, it is significantly important that the current study help expanding our understanding of the dimension of lal by exploring efl teachers’ conceptions of lal in the context of indonesian higher education. the followings are two questions that need to reveal in this study: (1) what types of lal have efl university teachers applied? (2) what do efl university teachers think about their lal? it is hoped that the findings of this study can improve the assessment quality by providing the language assessors with some valuable insight into teachers’ perception of lal. method this study was conducted at mataram university, indonesia. to select efl university teachers to participate in this study, purposive sampling method was employed. it yielded 16 efl teachers specialized in applied linguistics (n=6), tesolteaching english to speakers of other languages (n=8), and translation (n=2). it should be noted that the data collection was continually conducted until data saturation emerged. it means that the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 785 data gained was repetitive and the participants shared no new things. out of those 16 participants, nine were efl male teachers (56%) and seven were females efl teachers (44%). their length of teaching experiences ranged from 1 to 5 (50%), 6 to 10 (25%), and 11 to 15 (25%). the information of participated teachers is displayed in table 1 below. this study employed a mixed method to collect data which consists of two instruments, an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. in regards with online questionnaire, it was designed by adapting the qualtrics questionnaire platform. the questionnaire consists of 6 dichotomous questions regarding types of lal that the university teachers had applied in their teaching performances. based on their ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, they were required to answer multiple choice questions regarding the level of their lal. the questions consisted of 3 options; high, medium, and low. the second instrument, semi-structured interviews, were administered with the participants. the interviews began with an open-ended question (ex: how do you define language assessment literacy?) and continued with specific questions written in the checklist that had been developed before. if needed, additional or relevant questions were raised to elicit elaborate answers. it should be noted that the interviews were carried out in the participants’ first language, bahasa indonesia, to allow them express their opinions with a greater ease without any struggles with second language barriers that might occur during the interviews. each interview lasted for about 60 minutes and was audio recorded to be analyzed later. it is also worthy to note that the interviews were carried out in diverse temporal and spatial settings with the purpose to allow the participants deliver their thought without being affected by the time and place of the interviews. table 1. the information of the participants from the online questionnaire, the quantitative data which consists of dichotomous and multiplechoice questions were statistically analyzed. on the other hand, the data gained from interview transcriptions were first coded and qualitatively analyzed. with regards to coding scheme, the procedure used was open coding by examining similarities and differences of all actions or events that emerged in the interview transcriptions. in this sense, the same actions were grouped together and put into broad categories. for instance, several actions or events that seemed to relate to what teachers know fell into the category “knowledge”. then, the actions or events that appeared to relate to technological competence fell into the subcategory “digital literacy”. last, the actions or events that seemed to relate to virtual assessment techniques fell into the theme “online test procedure”. once the identification analysis had finished, these three elements (category, subcategory and theme) generated codes which were then applied to all the interview transcripts. table 2. coding scheme for interview data categories sub-categories themes codes teachers gender level major teaching experience (in years) t1 f lecturer tesol 7 t2 m senior lecturer tesol 12 t3 m senior lecturer applied linguistics 11 t4 f lecturer tesol 4 t5 f lecturer translation 7 t6 m senior lecturer tesol 8 t7 m senior lecturer applied linguistics 14 t8 m senior lecturer applied linguistics 12 t9 f senior lecturer tesol 10 t10 m associate professor translation 13 t11 f lecturer applied linguistics 5 t12 f senior lecturer tesol 15 t13 m senior lecturer applied linguistics 10 t14 m associate professor tesol 14 t15 f lecturer tesol 3 t16 m senior lecturer applied linguistics 13 andri suherman exploring language assessment literacy of efl teachers in the context of indonesian higher education 786 a. knowledge 1. digital literacy a. online test procedure b. electronic devices a-1-a a-1-b 2. test validity and reliability a. test design b. statistical formula a-2-a a-2-b 3. linguistic competence a. teaching methods b. assessment techniques c. teaching media a-3-a a-3-b a-3-c b. skill 1. formative assessment methods a. peer/self-assessment b. students’ portfolio b-1-a b-1-b 2. grading criteria a. productive skills criteria b. receptive skills criteria b-2-a b-2-b 3. test results a. teachers’ direct feedback b. teachers’ written report b-3-a b-3-b results and discussion what types of lal have efl university teachers applied? based on the result of online questionnaire (see figure 1 below), it was found that the efl university teachers have applied six types of lal in their teachings during covid-19 pandemic. it is clear that two types of lal, formative assessment methods and test validity and reliability were the most popular with 84% and 82% participants respectively. following these, other two types of lal, linguistics competence and test result, had been applied by between 75% and 80% teachers in their teaching practices. meanwhile, digital literacy and grading criteria were the two least favorite types of lal (less than 70%) which had been applied by the teachers. this finding indicated that not all the efl university teachers in this study have applied six types of lal in their teaching practices. as rasooli et al. (2018) suggested, because of limited experience in relevant trainings, many efl teachers have lost their opportunity to develop their lal. as a result, they tend to simply skip applying certain types of lal in their teachings (levi & inbar-lourie, 2020). for example, in the case of formative assessment methods (84%) in this study, it can be assumed that remaining participants (16%) have no sufficient competence to assess their students formatively. it is therefore, as argued by many scholars (giraldo, 2018; lee et al., 2020; ozan & kincal, 2018), teachers need to be trained and facilitated with relevant trainings with the purpose to develop their lal and become more competence in assessing their students’ learning. figure 1. types of lal for efl university teachers what do efl teachers think about their lal? knowledge based on the data gained from online questionnaire (see figure 2 below), it was found that more than 70% participants ranked their level of lal as low in each of the six types of lal. in contrast, the level of medium and high were ranked less than 65% by the participants. as shown in the figure 2 below, it is clear that the first theme in the category of knowledge is related to digital literacy with 74% of participants thought that they had a low level of digital literacy. in this sense, although the teachers recognized the significance of technology in assessment practices, they were doubting their knowledge of the use of technology in virtual education. for instance, t4 commented in the interview session: “i realize the essence of digital platforms to assess students’ english skills, especially during this covid-19 pandemic. but i honestly don’t english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 787 know much how to administer online tests using adobe connect, for example. i often use the simple application like whatsapps.” (code: a-1-a, a-1-b) the interview excerpt above indicates that virtual education is perceived as an integral element of lal. despite this, the participants doubted their ability when assessing their students virtually as they regarded their digital literacy was limited. this finding aligns with that of gomeztrigueros et al. (2019) which reported that teachers recognized the value of digital platforms in language assessment, yet lacked of digital literacy. the second theme from the data questionnaire is regarding test validity and reliability with 75% of participants ranked their knowledge of test validity and reliability as low. in this sense, the participants asserted that teachers should acknowledge that the tests they administered were valid and reliable. in relation to test validity, for example, t8 responded in the interview process: “i always make my best effort to design tests which represent the course outline. however, designing a quality test is not easy since it requires adequate knowledge of test validation and i don’t know much about statistical formula for making reliable tests. this is the reason why i often use ready-made tests provided by my institution which mostly lack of validity, i guess.” (code: a-2-a, a-2-b) the statement above shows that both validity and reliability are highly valued by the teachers. nevertheless, they were skeptical of their own knowledge of test validity and reliability. consequently, they were dependent on ready-made tests provided by their institution. this finding supports what rezai et al. (2021) have reported that although efl teachers recognized how a quality test should be, they seemed to have inadequate knowledge of test validity and reliability. figure 2. teachers’ perceptions of their level of lal the last theme within knowledge category is related to teachers’ linguistics competence with 77% of efl teachers argued that their level of linguistics competence was low. the respondents recognized how teachers’ linguistics competence affects their quality assessment. in the interview process, t2, for instance, reflected: “i believe that if a teacher has adequate linguistics competence (ex: teaching methodologies, content knowledge, and teaching media), the testing practices will be found meaningful and effective by his/her students. that is the reasons why i always try to develop my linguistic competence by attending educational seminars and reading relevant books or journals.” (code: a-3-a, a-3-b, a-3-c) the excerpts above shows that the teachers acknowledged the essence of linguistics competence as it might affect their assessment practices. thus, they made their best efforts to familiarize themselves with basic knowledge of linguistics. this finding is in accordance with that of abdulrahman and ayyash (2019) which revealed that students often relate low-quality testing practices with teachers’ lack of linguistics knowledge. in sum, in the domain of knowledge, the first theme that emerged from the data analysis was related to digital literacy. the participants were aware of the significance of technology in assessment practices, particularly during this covid-19 pandemic period. they found the need to be equipped with such digital knowledge as they possessed a very low-level literacy in the technological things. this finding may be explained from the perspective that the increasing interest in making use of electronic devices in andri suherman exploring language assessment literacy of efl teachers in the context of indonesian higher education 788 assessment practices is linked to the efficiency they provide for language assessors (kuimova, 2018). in alignment with khoiriyah (2020), this finding could be argued that the prominence of computerassisted language learning (call) has benefitted many testing stakeholders. thus, it is reasonable that teachers need to update their digital literacy to become proficient assessors in the digital world (kahveci, 2021). while the first theme was related to teacher literacy in digital technology, the second theme was regarding teacher literacy in test validity and reliability. the respondents realized that a good test should be valid and reliable. nevertheless, they had no sufficient knowledge of how to design a test which has a high level of validity and reliability. as a consequent, they prefer to use ready-made tests provided by their institution which were relatively not valid and reliable. this finding may be discussed from this respect that if a test does not satisfy validity requirements, it fails to assess what it is intended to assess, and if a test does not meet reliability requirements, it fails to consistently assess the intended competence (tosuncuoglu, 2018). another possible reason for this finding, as hamid et al. (2019) noted, is that test validity increases the probability rate of making correct decisions about students’ life, and reliability provides teachers with consistent information about students’ competence. thus, knowledge of test validity and reliability should be developed by teachers to become more expert in testing practices. the last theme in the category of knowledge was regarding teacher linguistics competence. the respondents recognized the importance of linguistics competence as it might affect their test quality. this finding may be explained from this viewpoint that teachers with high-level of linguistics competence relatively know how to implement effective teaching methods and design meaningful testing formats (rasooli et al., 2018). in alignment with abdulrahman and ayyash (2019), it could be assumed that if proficient teachers know how to linguistically deliver the lesson topics, it provides students with a great opportunity to learn and showcase their language skills. therefore, linguistics competence should be highly valued by teachers as it may affect the quality of their teaching and testing practices. in brief, the data analysis revealed three main themes under knowledge domain namely digital literacy, test validity and reliability, and linguistics competence. each of them was perceived as essential by the participants and required to develop. skills in the domain of skills, as displayed in the figure 1 above, the first theme emerged from the result is regarding formative assessment methods with 71% of the efl teachers ranked their skill level of formative assessment as low, although some of them (60%) thought that they had a highlevel skill of applying formative assessment methods. in the interview process, one of the participants (t1) mentioned the benefits of students’ self-assessment: “students’ self-assessment and peer-assessment are two of my favorite types of formative assessment methods. these help students to reflect upon their previous performances and improve their future learning. however, i feel that such -assessment methods are very timeconsuming and portfolio assessment requires diverse skills to undertake. therefore, i still prefer summative assessment techniques (multiple choice tests, short-answer essays, gapfill questions) for practicality and economical reason.” (code: b-1-a, b-1-b) the statement above indicates that formative assessment methods are positively treated by the teachers due to the fact that they can facilitate student learning. nonetheless, some shortcomings (ex: consuming much time and requiring certain skills) embedded on such methods lead the teachers to prefer summative assessment methods due to their practical use and inexpensive cost. this finding is consistent with that of leenknecht et al. (2021) which revealed that efl teachers acknowledged the advantages of formative assessment techniques, yet rarely implemented them due to several drawbacks. as a result, they favored summative assessment techniques because of practicality and economic reasons. the second theme from the questionnaire data was related to grading criteria with 80% participants thought that they had a low-level skill of designing grading criteria. in the interview session, for instance, t7 reflected: “it is extremely important that teachers tell their students about grading procedures at least one week before the test is administered. it helps students to focus on certain parts of the lessons. however, it is not easy to design grading criteria for speaking skills particularly. i need to adjust grading criteria i found in the internet with my students’ learning purposes.” (code: b-2-a, b-2b) the interview quote above shows that the respondents highly valued grading criteria by english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 789 communicating them with their students in advance. although the teachers faced some challenges when designing assessment criteria for speaking skills, they made their best effort to adjust the criteria with their teaching contexts. this finding supports what mai (2019) have found that clear and transparent assessment criteria have a significant impact not only on students learning, but also on teachers’ testing quality. the last theme in the category of skill was regarding test results. although 79% of participants argued that their skill level of test result was low, some of them (64%) thought that they had a high-level of reporting test results. in this sense, the efl university teachers argued that students’ test results should be reported along with relevant feedback. for example, t16 commented during interview session: “in my opinion, it is extremely essential that teachers provide students with some feedback after taking a test. feedback can help students to see and rectify their mistakes for their future learning. but teachers need to be mindful of sharing test results to the low-proficient students as they may lose self-confidence and learning motivation.” the excerpt above indicates that communicating test results with students is significantly essential for the teachers. this is because they believe that effective feedback could help students with their future learning. however, they still worried about announcing tests score as it might adversely affect self-confidence of the lowproficient students. this finding aligns with that of rasooli et al. (2018) which revealed that teachers found it important to announce students’ scores, but they seemed to become resistant as it potentially lowered students’ learning motivation. in sum, in the domain of skill, three different themes were also found from the data analysis. the first one was regarding formative assessment techniques. although the teachers recognized the benefits of assessing their students learning formatively, they still loved assessing their students learning summatively. this finding may be explained from the perspective that summative assessment methods are easy to design and are flexible to use in different contexts for different purposes (tursunboevna, 2022). in alignment with giraldo (2018), it could be argued that formative assessment techniques required certain skills to undertake which eventually hindered teachers to implement them. however, considering pedagogical advantages that formative assessment methods have to offer, as noted by previous studies (lee et al., 2020; ozan & kincal, 2018), it is essential that teachers need to be trained with relevant skills to become proficient in assessing their students’ learning formatively. the second theme elicited from the data analysis was related to grading criteria. the respondents realized that clear and transparent grading criteria had a positive relation with students’ learning outcome. when assessing students’ communicative skills, however, the teachers found it difficult to design appropriate grading procedures. this finding could be discussed from the view that valid grading criteria helped teachers to generate students’ test scores without being contaminated by irrelevant constructs (von-wangenheim, 2018). another possible reason for this finding could be students would consider their test score as fair when transparent and unbiased grading procedures were informed in advance (quinn, 2020). given the fact that clear grading criteria may lead to positive testing results, it is reasonably important that teachers need to develop their grading skills especially when it comes to speaking abilities. the last theme in the category of skill was regarding test results. the respondents were aware of providing students with positive feedback after taking a test could benefit their learning in the future. nonetheless, they found it unethical to inform students about their test scores as it might negatively affect self-confidence of the lowproficient students. this finding may be explained from this viewpoint that positive feedback could help students to consolidate their learning, yet might destroy their self-efficacy (ryan & henderson, 2018). in contrast, rios and ihlenfeldt (2021) assumed that when test results were informed appropriately, along with positive feedback, students would not lose their selfconfidence but become more motivated instead. to make it more meaningful and fairer, rasoolie et al. (2018) even argued that teachers may present some positive feedback but keep the students’ scores confidential. thus, it is worthy to note that teachers need to familiarize themselves with some skills to help them deal with students’ test scores. to close, three main themes under skill domain emerged from the data analysis namely formative assessment methods, grading criteria, and test results. three of these elements were conceived as important by the respondent and thus need to develop. conclusion the current study aimed at investigating the perception of indonesian efl teachers regarding the fundamental of lal. based on the data andri suherman exploring language assessment literacy of efl teachers in the context of indonesian higher education 790 analysis, two types of lal domains emerged. the first one is the domain of knowledge which encompassed three different themes (e.g. digital literacy, test validity and reliability, and linguistics competence), and the second one is the domain of skill which also comprised three types of themes (e.g. formative assessment methods, grading criteria, and test results). as the finding revealed, it can be assumed that efl teachers should be equipped with relevant knowledge and skill to make the way for quality assessment. some pedagogical implications can be seen from the study’s findings. first, school authorities should organize professional development programs with the purpose to help teachers improve their assessment literacy. second, formative assessment methods (e.g. peer assessment, self-assessment, portfolio assessment) should be more implemented. such methods can be beneficial for student learning if the implementation is adjusted with teaching contexts and students’ learning purposes. another implication is teachers’ assessment practices are likely to be perceived as effective if they consider contextual factors (e.g. students’ interests, learning styles, culture, age and gender). the last implication is intended for the researchers in the field of language assessment. in this regard, they should be mindful of lal elements which may change over time as the consequence of change in the views on l2 teaching. despite the implications above, it should be noted that the current study is not without limitations. aside from small sample of participants, this study examined the fundamental of lal from the teachers’ perspectives. to reach a more comprehensive framework, future research can examine the fundamental of lal from the students’ perspectives. furthermore, this study provided some meaningful insight into the effects of linguistics competence on teachers’ assessment quality. more research needs to explore how teachers’ linguistics competence affects students’ perspectives of quality assessment. while this study revealed digital lal from the teachers’ perspectives, future studies can also examine digital lal from the perspectives of both efl teachers and students. in addition to this, future studies can research what grading criteria as perceived efficient by both efl teachers and students. last but not least, interested researchers can investigate the perceptions of both efl teachers and students regarding the effects of announcing test results on students learning. references abdulrahman, n. c., & ayyash, e. a. s. a. 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(2020). an investigation into efl teachers’ assessment literacy: indonesian teachers’ perceptions and classroom practice. european journal of contemporary education, 9(1), 189-201. andri suherman exploring language assessment literacy of efl teachers in the context of indonesian higher education 792 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 761 through the metaphorical lens: understanding othering of language lecturers in indonesian higher education yusri yusuf department of indonesian education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas syiah kuala, banda aceh, indonesia e-mail: yusri_yusuf@unsyiah.ac.id jarjani usman department of english language, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas islam negeri ar-raniry, banda aceh, indonesia e-mail: jarjani@ar-raniry.ac.id yunisrina qismullah yusuf department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas syiah kuala, banda aceh, indonesia e-mail: yunisrina.q.yusuf@unsyiah.ac.id apa citation: yusuf, y., usman, j., yusuf, y. q. (2022). through the metaphorical lens: understanding othering of language lecturers in indonesia higher education. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 761-770. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6432 received: 13-02-2022 accepted: 23-04-2022 published: 30-06-2022 introduction in this globalized era, the mobility of variously diverse people has increased in many countries. today, culturally and religiously diverse people work for various organizations, including educational institutions. therefore, supporting people to live and work peacefully and democratically is necessary by promoting respect, tolerance, freedom, unity, compassion, and fairness. educational institutions are primarily responsible for promoting these values to the students to produce open-minded alumni as future workers. however, the literature indicates that some academicians and students studying at universities or other educational institutions experience being othered, such as through their physical or other types of differences (e.g., place of birth, ethnicity, et cetera) (dervin, 2015). many scholars call this phenomenon ‘othering’ (e.g., dervin, 2015; golkowska, 2014; liu, 2021; vichiensing, 2017). othering in the workplace, especially in educational institutions, should not be neglected because it results in negative consequences for both individuals and institutions. being othered threatens abstract: this research attempted to delve into the indonesian and english lecturers’ views on othering experiences through the metaphorical lens. the data collection employed interviews with ten lecturers teaching at two public universities in aceh, indonesia. the interviews were recorded and transcribed, and further analyzed using johnson and lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory (cmt) where a metaphor is referred to understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another thing. the results revealed that the lecturers expressed their feelings of being othered through 14 acehnese metaphorical expressions. they are ‘awak dalam’, ‘awak droe’ ‘asoe lhôk’, ‘cina saboh geudông’, and ‘ureung lhap darah’,‘kön ureung gulam budée’, ‘kön awak dalam’, ‘kön awak droe jih’, ‘kön syara ma jih’, ‘gob mat aweuk’, ‘ureung di luwa pageu’, ‘jamok di luwa keuleumbu’, ‘awak gop’, and ‘awak blah déh laôt’. those in power (i.e., the ‘us’) discriminated against some lecturers (i.e., the ‘them’) by not providing them equal opportunities in the institution, regardless of their quality and credentials. othering that existed in the universities negatively affected their work enthusiasm, education quality, social justice, and equality. consequently, othering must be eradicated so that the human resources recruitment and education in universities uphold the principles of transparency, equality, and accountability. keywords: othering; metaphorical expressions; acehnese; language; lecturers. mailto:yusri_yusuf@unsyiah.ac.id mailto:jarjani@ar-raniry.ac.id mailto:yunisrina.q.yusuf@unsyiah.ac.id yusri yusuf, jarjani usman, & yunisrina qismullah yusuf through the metaphorical lens: understanding othering of language lecturers in indonesia higher education 762 the life experience of those who are constructed as others (liu, 2021). othering negatively affects people because of the discriminative treatment they receive in their social life (liu, 2021; vichiensing, 2017). othering “can serve to reinforce and reproduce positions of domination and subordination. those who are ‘othered’ often experience marginalization, decreased opportunities, and exclusion” (murtagh, 2019). the othering can also fuel various hate crimes, as indicated in the anti-asian crimes involving physical violence and harassment in the united states of america (gover, harper & langton, 2020). therefore, universities or other educational institutions as venues where people learn and live democratically, elegantly, and actively, should attempt to eliminate othering practices as they can negatively affect the quality of education. many previous related studies on othering in higher education institutions have also existed. among them are studies on othering in the classrooms (e.g., ahmadi, 2015; linares, 2016), discrimination against students (e.g., annalakshmi & venkatesan, 2018; gokce, 2013; liu, 2021), academic staff at universities (e.g., bakley, 2016; clingan, 2021; halici & kasimoglu, 2006), and othering in terms of discrimination of academic staff members due to different genders (husu, 2005). othering is also practiced in the books used as lesson materials, like novels (mushtaq, 2010). all these studies revealed that othering, such as exclusion and discrimination, have negative consequences for those working or studying at educational institutions. halici and kasimoglu (2006), for instance, conducted research in higher education institutions in turkey and azerbaijan in five discrimination areas: job advertisements and the evaluation of job applications, performance evaluation, providing staff with opportunities in the institution, reward, and punishment, and determining workload. however, instructors at azerbaijan university experienced higher discrimination than turkish instructors. clingan (2021) reviewed previous studies on the discrimination of male adjunct lecturers in higher education in the united states and found that adjuncts are paid less than permanent professors in the institutions. thus, schools find them economically feasible. another study by bakley (2016) on adjuncts in higher education institutions revealed that the adjuncts deal with various challenges compared to the permanent employees on various campuses. the male adjuncts received discrimination challenges as compared to the female employees in the same higher education institutions. among the instances are institutions that prefer hiring employees from within, discriminating against the new adjuncts. despite negatively affecting the quality of education and democratic living in higher education, research on othering practices in indonesian universities, especially in aceh province, is scant. one study that explored othering in indonesia is by widyastuti (2016) regarding the ethnic othering of chinese in indonesia. the results revealed that equality, acceptance, tolerance, and trust are the four interwoven focus themes that best summarize participants' impressions of social reality. ethnic accommodation is best understood in terms of its political, social, and psychological aspects. discourse analysis by using a multiperspectival approach offers an all-encompassing resource for addressing social problems of ethnic othering. consequently, this present study explored othering expressed by acehnese lecturers teaching indonesian and english in indonesia through the metaphorical lens and how othering affects their educational performance. it is argued that using metaphors is crucial in understanding the experiences and how they are conceptualized in languages other than english. conducting research through the metaphorical lens is relevant because the storied metaphor is a tool educators have personally and collectively used to convey their lived experiences (craig, 2018). metaphors not only create realities but also guide future action (lakoff & johnson, 2003). thus, universities in indonesia should be where othering is not tolerated as indonesia is a multi-diverse country in which every citizen believes in a religion, and islam is the majority. every religion forbids the practice of othering, such as discrimination, exclusion, and stigmatization. university communities must urge their people (staff, academicians, scientists, and students) to promote the value of ‘ourness’ rather than ‘otherness’. in the classroom context, ahmadi (2015) stated that students have the right to study in a secure and supportive environment free from discrimination or stereotyping. in this way, they have the same rights in the learning process. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 763 however, research on how educators perceive othering and how to eliminate or reduce it in the university context is scarce. therefore, as dervin (2015) suggested, othering must be discussed openly, banished, or fought against in educational discourses. exploring many kinds of othering in higher education is necessary to maintain a good relationship among staff members. researching othering at universities is crucial as it can help maintain a good relationship and collaboration among academicians. as canales (2000) pointed out, “our understanding of the other is important for how we understand [the] difference and how we engage with those perceived as different from self-as the other” (p. 16). good relationships and collaboration between the academicians and administrators matter for improving the quality of education in higher education. therefore, this study intends to answer the following research questions: what are the metaphorical expressions in acehnese used to express othering in higher education? gaining more extensive knowledge of how these language lecturers experienced being othered and what types of othering they experienced is crucial for creating awareness of this problem in ways that may help mitigate and prevent it from happening in the future. it is hoped that insights from this study can help lecturers or instructors become more aware of othering and consider potential solutions to reduce its prevalence in higher education, enhance efforts toward inclusive excellence, and create more inclusive classroom climates. the notion of ‘othering’ has been defined in many disciplines. in psychology, for instance, othering is an essential part of the differentiation of the ‘self from others’ (krumer-nevo & sidi, 2012). othering is also equated with stereotyping (ahmadi, 2015; phillipson, 1992). even according to golkowska (2014), othering is not only associated with stereotyping but also with ethnocentricity, involving “the domination of the in-group that declares itself superior to the out-group and denies the other subjectivity and uniqueness” (vichiensing, 2017, p. 28). other scholars, like tyson (2015), define othering as the practice “of judging all who are different as less than fully human…and it divides the world between ‘us’ (the ‘civilized’) and ‘them’ (the ‘others’, the ‘savages’)” (p. 401), and winslow and winslow (2014) defined it as “a discursive process of separating ‘we’ from ‘other’ as a means of constructing hierarchies of power” (p. 1). these definitions resemble vichiensing’s (2017) definition of othering, “a mental distance is created between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (p. 127). the othering concept is originally rooted in the postcolonial theory (said, 1993). it is defined by difference-‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, to highlight a contrast between europeans and oriental people during colonial periods” (said, 1985, as cited in liu, 2021). it addresses “the power relations between different cultural groups, and in particular the process by which a dominant group attributes a subordinate status and identity to another” and “in the process of othering, an idealized self is created against others whose characteristics are framed as different, problematic, and inferior” (song, 2020, p. 2). however, according to vichiensing (2017), the postcolonial theory is now used in many disciplines and addresses many kinds of othering as manifested through exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination. othering has been consciously and unconsciously exercised in many institutions. for example, othering is exercised for the usage of the english language; those with native-like english ability are privileged and those that do not have it are less privileged. according to ahmadi (2015), “the ideology of equating english with civility has roots in imperial britain” (p. 442). today, english is regarded as the global language, and the english language is believed to bring dignity and honor to people that have not yet entered the fold of mainstream english (lippi-green, 1995). since othering is related to one’s experiences and perception, which are abstract by nature, one can see it from a metaphorical lens. literature indicates that metaphor has been used to see abstract things from more concrete things (kövecses, 2002; lakoff & johnson, 2003). metaphors can be an essential means of understanding people’s experiences (miles, huberman, & saldana, 2014). craig (2018) stated that people have utilized “metaphors to story and make sense of their lived experiences for themselves and to carry across their meaning interactively to others” (p. 301). in this regard, lakoff and johnson (2003) clarified metaphor as not just in language but in thought and action, where humans’ common conceptual system, which yusri yusuf, jarjani usman, & yunisrina qismullah yusuf through the metaphorical lens: understanding othering of language lecturers in indonesia higher education 764 guides how we think and behave, is inherently metaphorical. some scholars divide metaphors into stock, novel, emergent, and ascribed metaphors (craig, 2018). stock metaphors risk over-use and can be “absolutized to the point where they are meaningless. they can become so common that they unreflectively shape practice in nonenlightening ways. emergent metaphors (breault, 2006) are intuitively held and expressed by educators. they naturally appear in a teacher’s language and their unfolding practice. ascribed metaphors are novel or stock metaphors that researchers intentionally adopt to describe a phenomenon they have identified or what they view as teachers’ perceived teaching experiences. conceptual metaphor theory (cmt) is among the popular theories of metaphor today. proposed by johnson and lakoff in 1980, the theory was then followed and refined by several proponents, such as kövecses (2002), and applied by previous researchers (e.g., usman & mawardi, 2022; usman & yusuf, 2020). in their theory, a metaphor referred to “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another thing” (p. 5). in the same vein, kövecses (2017, p. 1) defined a conceptual metaphor as “understanding one domain of experience (that is typically abstract) in terms of another (that is typically concrete)”. in explaining the cmt, kövecses (2002) illustrated it with several examples. for instance, in explaining the metaphor of ‘love is a journey’, kövecses used many linguistic expressions as in the following: look how far we’ve come. we’re at a crossroads. we’ll just have to go our separate ways. we can’t turn back now. i don’t think this relationship is going anywhere. where are we? we’re stuck. it’s been a long, bumpy road. this relationship is a dead-end street. we’re just spinning our wheels. our marriage is on the rocks. we’ve gotten off the track. this relationship is foundering. (kövecses, 2002, p. 5) the linguistic expressions above use phrases in italics from the domain of a journey. this can be understood from the expression ‘how far we’ve come and at a crossroads,’ which clearly indicates a journey. other linguistic expressions also indicate a journey, as in ‘turn back’, ‘a long, bumpy road’, ‘going anywhere’, ‘a dead-end street’, ‘spinning our wheels’, ‘on the rocks’, ‘off the track’, and ‘foundering’, which are manifestations of the conceptual metaphor ‘love is a journey’ (usman & mawardi, 2022). method this research used a qualitative method to explore the acehnese lecturers (i.e., five indonesian language lecturers and five english language lecturers), on metaphorical expressions of othering in the acehnese language regarding their feelings of being othered in their universities. these ten acehnese university lecturers taught at two public universities located in banda aceh, indonesia. this study focuses on the metaphors from the stories of experiences of the lecturers. a narrative is a portal through which a person accesses the world and by means of which their experience of the world is interpreted and given meaning (connelly & clandinin, 2005). in collecting data, this study used narrative inquiry (i.e., interviews). the data were recorded and transcribed. the interview comprised questions of “tell me whether you have experienced being othered in your workplace?”. those who said ‘no’ were excluded from being the research participants. meanwhile, those who said ‘yes’ proceeded with the next question, “what types of othering did you experience, such as marginalization, exclusion, or other types?”. they then told their stories about their experiences while working for the universities. the stories for research are crucial because, according to craig (2018), “one major way that raw experience can be captured and communicated is through story…[and] the story has the power to reveal reality and elaborate problems in ways that the paradigmatic is not able” (p. 301). once the participants had finished telling their stories, they were further questioned, “in the following acehnese metaphorical expressions, which one best describes your experiences of being othered at your workplace?”. that enabled the researchers to analyze the transcripts deductively when the participants expressed their responses to the questions regarding their feelings of being othered in their daily work at their universities and to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 765 identify the kinds of othering they experienced and why these types of othering happen. johnson and lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory (cmt) were used to analyze metaphorical expressions. as stated by lakoff and johnson (2003), metaphorical expressions are realizations of conceptual metaphors. in analyzing the metaphors, the metaphorical expressions used by the academicians (i.e., participants) in telling their narratives were then classified based on the themes (i.e., metaphorical expressions) that emerged from the data (miles, huberman & saldana, 2014). the participants in this study are coded as p1 to p10 in this paper. results and discussion after collecting and analyzing the data, the idioms by the participants who felt being othered in various ways, such as discrimination, exclusion, and marginalization, were identified. these types of othering were expressed in 14 acehnese metaphorical expressions, they are: ‘awak dalam’, ‘awak droe’ ‘asoe lhôk’, ‘cina saboh geudông’, and ‘ureung lhap darah’, ‘kön ureung gulam budée’, ‘kön awak dalam’, ‘kön awak droe jih’, ‘kön syara ma jih’, ‘gob mat aweuk’, ‘ureung di luwa pageu’, ‘jamok di luwa keuleumbu’, ‘awak gop’, and ‘awak blah déh laôt’. subsequently, the next sub-sections discuss these acehnese metaphorical expressions that represent othering at higher education as ‘us’ and ‘them’. awak dalam (the insiders) the metaphor ‘awak dalam’ (people in (a group or circle) or the insiders), as exemplified by p3, is meant for those who are in power or those working within the central ring of the administration of the universities. she said, (1) “ka biasa, so yang meunang, akan dipileh awak dalam mantong keu jabatan”. (this is common, whoever wins, he/she will only choose the insiders for positions). p3 continued ‘awak dalam’ were privileged within the university administration, even though there were many others (i.e., academicians or staff) with better quality of education, competencies, and backgrounds. ‘awak droe’ (our own people) the metaphor ‘awak droe’ literally means ‘our people’. p8 and p10 said that in their universities where othering practice existed, ‘awak droe’ were regarded as the people who received privilege and important positions within the administration. p8 said, sarcastically, (2) “hana poenteng careung bangai, yang poenteung awak droe”. (it doesn’t matter if you are smart or dumb, what matters is that you are their people, i.e., them). ‘asoe lhôk’ (the deep bones) in ‘asoe lhôk’ (the deep bone) metaphor, asoe (meat) is used to conceptualize a person or people, and lhôk (deep) is viewed as the locals (natives) where the university is situated. p6 voiced, (3) “lôn panèe ijak poerôh, kön asoe lhôk”. (i am not eligible to have positions within their administration because i am not a native). p6 narrated that the lecturers addressed as the ‘asoe lhôk’ were considered eligible to have privileges within the university administration. they had a greater authority to regulate the university. ‘cina saboh geudông’ (chinese in one building) this is a metaphor used to express the oligarchy in the university. p4 described that this metaphor came about due to the situation in indonesia, where many indigenous people believed that the chinese in indonesia today have the money power structure consisting of elite individuals, families, or corporations that allowed them to control the country. he further explained, (4) “lon kön cina saboh geudong ngon awak nyan”. (i am not chinese in the same building as them). this situation is then equated by the acehnese with the situation at the university, where only those who supported the elected leader financially would receive important positions during his or her administration. ‘ureung lhap darah’ (the person(s) who wipes the blood) the metaphor ‘ureung lhap darah’ (the person(s) who wipes the blood) is commonly used by the acehnese to envision a situation where a person takes benefits from other people’s work. p5 interpreted how blood usually comes out when yusri yusuf, jarjani usman, & yunisrina qismullah yusuf through the metaphorical lens: understanding othering of language lecturers in indonesia higher education 766 people get wounded, so in a battle, when it has ended, there will come a person to wipe the blood of the wounded or clean the mess. he said, (5) “lôn hana mita-mita jabatan. lôn kön ureung lhap darah”. (i am not begging for positions within the university because i don’t wipe blood). in higher education, p5 claimed that this was addressed to lecturers who came to join the group after others who ‘battled’ in the pre-election won for the period. p5 continued that such lecturers merely “harvests” what others have planted. ‘kön ureung gulam beudée’ (not the person(s) holding the guns) the metaphor ‘ureung gulam beudée’ can be literally translated into the person/people holding the guns, which maps up those who have worked much to support their candidate to get the leader’s success as an army. p1 informed: (6) “lon kon ureung gulam beudée, panèe na ijak poerôh dalam jabatan basah”. (i am not a person who held weapons, that’s why i am not assigned any position (in the university administration). in this study, p1 explained the lecturers’ struggle in competing for positions during a leader’s administration, which is every four years, at his university, and this situation is conceptualized as a battle or war using weapons. the leader here is the rector, chancellor, director, or president of a university. the elected leader usually selects the lecturers for positions within his administration. the person(s) who were not involved in supporting him during his campaign was regarded as ‘not fighters in his battle’. these lecturers were excluded from being recruited to have leading positions, such as deans, vice deans, and heads of units, even though he or they were eligible for the positions. ‘kön awak dalam’ (not the insiders) ‘kön awak dalam’ (not the insiders) is also a metaphor that means the person(s) who are regarded as not members of a certain group or circle. in this study, p2 referred it to as the ‘ring of the administration of the university’, even though they were actually part of it as lecturers as well. these were administration or teaching staff members who did not belong to the group members of those who supported the elected leader during the election. he said, (7) “lôn hana jiepoerôh dalam tes ujian mahasiswa baroe karena dianggap kön awak dalam”. (i was not involved in the new student enrolment because of not part of the insiders). ‘kön awak droe jih’ (not of their group members) the feelings of not belonging to their group members (‘kön awak droe jih’) were expressed by several participants. p4 narrated, (8) “le that awak droe jih yang ka jijôk buet. geutanyoe kön awak droe jih, sehingga jangankan untuk poejabat, keu tugah-tugah yang basah pun han jipoeroh”. (many of their people were given jobs. we are not part of them so not just positions, other jobs (in campus) are also not given to us). they felt their exclusion from being offered good positions within the university administration because they did not belong to the group members. some of them accepted their fate because it is customary in the political world of campus today. ‘kön syara ma jih’ (not his/her mother’s relatives) the metaphor ‘kön syara ma jih’ refers to a situation where someone is not given any positions in an administration because the leader is not a relative of that person. p9 informed, (9) “geutanyoe kön syara ma jih, panèe na i jak pakèk sebagai poejabat”. (i am not their mothers’ relatives, so i am not eligible within their administration). p9 refers to this situation similar to nepotism, the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs. at his university, p9 informed that nepotism was still practiced among those who have high positions at the university. gop mat aweuk (the one(s) holding the big spoon) in this metaphor, aweuk (a big spoon used for cooking soup or gravy in a big pot) is used to represent the university’s top management, and gob means other person(s). p2 revealed, (10) “lon pasrah mantong ngön keuadaan kampus geutanyoe, karena teungoh gob mat aweuk”. (i am submissive to the current situation of our campus because the spoon is in the hands of other people). other participants, such as p3 and p4, who felt being othered said they also received unfair treatment in their workplace, such as discrimination english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 767 in the recruitment of the human resources to hold important positions at the university. ‘ureung di luwa pageu’ (the person(s) outside the fence) the metaphor ‘ureung di luwa pageu’ (the person(s) outside the fence) in this research is an acehnese metaphor that conceptualized the university administration as something protected with the fence built around the leader or by in-group staff members. as mentioned earlier, those who did not struggle in ‘his battle’ were the out-group people. in other words, only those who have worked for or had a strong relationship with the elected leader was regarded as ‘us’ and, therefore, had privileged and got positions within his administration. p2 said, (11) “panèna jipoerôh tanyoe untuk mat jabatan di kampus, lôn dianggap ureung di luwa pageu”. (i am not recruited to hold important positions on campus because i am regarded as those outside the fence). p2 further explained that in contrast, those who were not ‘us’ were likely to be excluded and usually received no positions, or at times, unfair treatment within the university administration. ‘jamok di luwa keuleumbu’ (mosquitoes outside the mosquito net) p10 explained that the metaphor ‘jamok di luwa keuleumbu’ is almost similar to ‘ureung di luwa pageu’ (the person(s) outside the fence) or as ‘them’. therefore, those who were not ‘us’ were likely to be excluded and usually received no positions. but in this metaphor, there is ‘jamok’ (mosquitoes), which by nature like to bite and suck the blood of humans. in this case, p10 explained that the ‘jamok’ were the ‘them’ or people who were opposed to the ‘us’ during the campaign and election (i.e., the opposition). (12) “narit tanyoe bak grup whatsapp dosen hana jideungö, tanyoe jianggap jamok di luwa keuleumbu” (our voices via the lecturers’ whatsapp group are not heard. we are regarded as the mosquitoes outside the mosquito net). ‘awak gop’ (other people) the metaphor ‘awak gop’ (other people) is equated with others or ‘them’, and not ‘us’. p7 portrayed these lecturers as not the people in the inner circle (i.e., power), even though they all worked in the same place. he said, (13) tanyoe mandum sama-sama dosen disinoe, tapi yang awak gop han di bi jabatan”. (we are all lecturers here, but other people are not given positions). that was why, p7 said, those regarded as ‘awak gop’ often received discrimination or were not given equal opportunities in the university administration. ‘awak blah déh laôt’ (the person(s) from other island(s)) the metaphor ‘awak blah déh laôt’ is similar to ‘awak gop’ (other people), and ‘kön awak dalam’ (not the insiders), referring to others or ‘them’ and not ‘us’. the ‘us’, in this case, are specifically the ‘asoe lhôk’, or the natives of the area where the higher institution is situated. p9 added, (14) “lôn pernah ‘clash’ jameun, makajih jianggap awak blah déh laôt”. (i used to have personal problems with him. that is why i am regarded as a person coming from across the sea/different island). hence, p9 described that lecturers from ‘blah déh laôt’ were also discriminated against for positions at the university if the elected leader was not from the same origin as the ‘awak blah déh laôt’. discussion this research explored ten acehnese lecturers’ experiences of othering in their workplaces in two public universities in aceh, indonesia. these lecturers taught indonesian and english at their universities, respectively. the findings show that many of the acehnese lecturers in higher education experienced various kinds of othering, such as discrimination and exclusion (bakley, 2016; clingan, 2021; halici & kasimoglu, 2006; husu, 2005), which negatively impact the quality of their professional jobs (canales, 2000). most of the othering happening in higher education found in this study were triggered by different political interests during the pre-election of their leader, different birthplaces, and different groups supporting the leader candidates during the election. those who supported the elected leader were privileged and received important positions within the administration. however, those who were the opposition were marginalized or regarded as others. yusri yusuf, jarjani usman, & yunisrina qismullah yusuf through the metaphorical lens: understanding othering of language lecturers in indonesia higher education 768 there are many conceptual metaphorical expressions in the acehnese language used by the participants to express the concepts of their feelings of being othered in higher education. these expressions embed concepts such as armed people, fences, deep bones, blood, spoon, and mosquitos. expressions related to armed people or the army are due to the long battle with the dutch from 1873 to 1904 (fata, yusuf & sari, 2018) and continued with the conflict between the government of indonesia and the free aceh movement from 1973 to 2005 (ronnie, 2016). therefore, to be in war is linked to any struggle the acehnese face in their lives, including the process of pre-elections such as the case in this study (i.e., ‘kön ureung gulam beudée’). in terms of fences, acehnese houses are typically fenced, either from wood, metal, or bushes, to indicate the border of the property of the house owner (yusuf, 2002). hence, those who do not live in the house, are considered not part of those who do (i.e., ‘ureung di luwa pageu’). meanwhile, deep bones show strong kinship or relationship among the acehnese to those who are blood-related. the acehnese also holds on to the phrase ‘blood is thicker than water’, which means that relationships and loyalties within a family are the strongest and most important ones. family relationships are very strong to the acehnese and instilled in children from birth through traditional lullabies (yusuf, yusuf, wildan, yanti, & anwar, 2022). nevertheless, this situation is seen negatively when it is related to othering (i.e., ‘asoe lhôk’, ‘awak droe’, ‘kon syara ma jih’, ‘ureung di luwa pageu’, ‘kön awak dalam’, ‘kön awak droe jih’). it is interesting how the word aweuk in ‘gop mat aweuk’ is associated with ‘power’. the big spoon, or aweuk, is used to cook soup or gravy in a big pot, known by the acehnese as beulangong. in this study, the people who holds the aweuk in their hands are those with power. this reference can be seen in the culture of the acehnese and how wives are regarded as in the homes. in the acehnese language, wife is ‘poereumoh’. rumoh literally means ‘home, house’, and the prefix poeindicates ownership. therefore, to the acehnese, the wives are house owners (nurdin, 2018). they are the ones in charge of the kitchen, and so, the ones holding the aweuk. in this study, the aweuk is in the hands of the leaders of the universities. as for insects, mosquitoes are commonly found in tropical areas such as indonesia. mosquitoes are constantly bothersome and aggravating, whether it be the unsettling buzzing or the bites. aside from spreading diseases like dengue and malaria (khariri, 2018), mosquitoes are infamous for other reasons, such as swelling and itchiness after their bites. in this study, the mosquitoes are referred to as oppositions to the elected leader of the universities. based on the discussion above, culturally, the basic level of conceptual metaphors are anchored in human experience (lakoff & johnson, 2003), and emerge in society based on cultural motivations (deignan, 2003). by examining the metaphors, one can understand how culture frames the conclusions and actions of society (seiler, 2012), a group of speakers of a language. accordingly, to some extent, the findings of this research corroborate some of the previous research findings. vichiensing (2017) prompted the negative consequences of the othering process that affect undesirable treatments in society. accordingly, in higher education, halici and kasimoglu (2006) mentioned the importance of providing staff members with opportunities in the institution and determining workload. therefore, in this study, by studying the lecturers’ metaphorical lens of othering experiences in the workplace, discrimination can be eradicated in educational discourses (dervin, 2015). this is important so that lecturers can work to their full potential, and they can work in a safe, encouraging environment free from prejudice and stereotyping (ahmadi, 2015). conclusion the findings and discussions conclude that the university lecturers in aceh, indonesia, experienced being othered in their workplace. they are triggered by three factors: different birthplaces (origins), different groups supporting the candidate leaders during pre-election, and personal conflicts in the past. they expressed their feelings of being others in their higher education through the metaphorical lens of the acehnese language, with embedded concepts involving armed people, fences, deep bones, blood, spoon, and mosquitos. the 14 metaphors generated from their expressions can provide better insights and understanding of their feelings of othering, like being discriminated against, marginalized, decreased opportunities, and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 2, june 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 769 excluded from receiving important positions within the university administration affairs. however, the analysis of othering through a metaphorical lens for this study was only done based on the experiences of ten lecturers teaching at two public universities in indonesia, from the language departments (i.e., indonesian and english). meanwhile, the feelings of being othered from administrative staff members were excluded. therefore, it is recommended that further studies involve both administrative staff members and teaching staff members. the different metaphors expressed by male 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(2015). critical theory today: a user-friendly guide (3rd ed.). london: routledge, taylor & francis group. usman, j., & mawardi, m. (2022). eliciting metaphors from narratives of collaboration experiences with teachers in writing a textbook. studies in english language and education, 9(2), 870-885. usman, j., & yusuf, y. q. (2020). the dehumanizing metaphors in the culture of acehnese in indonesia. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 10(2), 397-405. vichiensing, m. (2017). the othering in kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go. advances in language and literary studies, 8(4),126-135. widyastuti, s. (2016). discourses of ethnic accommodation: issues of othering in indonesia (doctoral dissertation). macquarie university sydney, macquarie park. winslow, l.a., & winslow, k.s. (2014). ezra’s holy seed: marriage and othering in the hebrew bible/old testament. journal of communication & religion, 37(3), 44-62. yusuf, y. q. (2002). ethnography of acehnese society: cultural prohibitions with reference to education (bachelor’s thesis). universitas syiah kuala, banda aceh. yusuf, y., yusuf, y. q., wildan, w., yanti, n., & anwar, h. (2022). analyzing metaphorical greetings in traditional lullabies of the acehnese ratéb dôda idi. international journal of language studies, 16(3), 83-108. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 539 developing cross-cultural understanding (ccu) materials in tourism guiding for vocational students anis nurul hidayah nafa postgraduate of english language education department, universitas muhammadiyah malang email: anisnurulhidayahnafa@gmail.com miftha yuliana postgraduate of english language education department, universitas muhammadiyah malang email: mifthayuliana@umm.ac.id moh. kholilurrahman jailani postgraduate of english language education department, universitas muhammadiyah malang email: kholilurrahmanj@umm.ac.id nana parama sari postgraduate of english language education department, universitas muhammadiyah malang, indonesia email: nana.paramasariii@gmail.com wuri anggraini postgraduate of english language education department, universitas muhammadiyah malang, email: wurianggraini1234@gmail.com fardini sabilah* postgraduate of english language education department, universitas muhammadiyah malang email: fardini@umm.ac.id apa citation: nafa, a. n. h., yuliana, m., jailani, m. k., sari, n. p., anggraini, w., & sabilah, f. (2023). developing cross-cultural understanding (ccu) materials in tourism guiding for vocational students. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 539-550. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.6653 received: 23-02-2023 accepted: 28-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction the role of english in vocational students is essential, and it cannot be avoided. henceforth, certain ways are needed to encourage students' needs. students must be taught adequately in certain ways based on their program of study (azizah et al., 2021). this is necessary for students to develop skills for them be able to compete after graduating from college and achieve their future career according to their field. this is in line with (nurdin et al., 2019) who convinced that education is a process of forming abstract: learning english for specific purpose (esp) for vocational students, is very important so that certain ways are needed to encourage students' needs. students must receive sufficient material in certain ways based on their interests and majors. this study aims to analyze learning needs of tourism guide materials. the method used in this study is qualitative and quantitative research design where the data is collected with numerical form then described in the form of a description. the research instruments used in this study are questionnaires and open-ended interviews. this study conducts a needs analysis to measure student needs and to develop esp materials. the participants of this research are 3rd and 4th semester students majoring in d3 vocational department unmer malang. the results of the study indicate the needs of students to improve their english-speaking skills and develop cross cultural understanding (ccu) as tourism guiding materials. furthermore, students' english skills also show low results which lead to low self-confidence because the learning methods used by lecturers have not developed due to the application of teacher-centered classes which lead to a lack of practice from students. therefore, learning methods that are able to stimulate students’ speaking proficiency and ccu material development are needed. keywords: cross culture understanding (ccu); english for specific purpose (esp); needs analysis; international guiding; vocational student. anis nurul hidayah nafa, miftha yuliana, moh. kholilurrahman jailani, nana parama sari, wuri anggraini, & fardini sabilah developing cross-cultural understanding (ccu) materials in tourism guiding for vocational students 540 intellectual and emotional basic skills which is an effort to develop quality human qualities that are useful for the progress of the nation and state. therefore, this study discusses certain english terms that are used in the tourism industry by tourism vocational students or, in short, english for tourism purposes. a study conducted by (pakpahan, 2018) revealed that students who have a highly spoken language worldwide are more enjoyable. moreover, (ilyosovna, 2020) revealed that if you understand english well then you have a chance to rule the world. it happens because they have good english competence. in addition, the tour guide surely has deep knowledge and ability to explain clearly about the tourism place during the trip in order to give satisfaction to the tourist (ratih et al., 2023). thus, they definitely need english to communicate both in spoken and written form. it will be much better if students can also connect or use english for tourism purposes. it was understandable that component of materials in vocational tourism courses appears to have a limited scope since the topic is specific to the related vocational majors which in this case is tourism industry. vocational students majoring in tourism need to be provided with sufficient information related to the courses for example tourist attractions, accommodation, and facilitation (rahmiani, 2018). (choi & kurnia, 2020) also stated that touring education information requires appropriate and adequate skills training. they have to be trained to be professional and skilled in workforce in the tourism industry that is widely known to have many professions offered such as travel agents, hotel administration, tourism offices, and other job occasions. based on previous research conducted by researchers on the use of speaking materials for tour guides, students still need sufficient time to practice and understand the implementation of how they guide tourists well. therefore, the speaking ability of tourism students must be improved. furthermore, (bao et al., 2016; kharkhurin & yagolkovskiy, 2021) and (mukundan, 2015) stated that incorporate knowledge of culture in developing teaching materials is highly essential considering understanding people’s background is one way of success in proper human interaction. in addition, language teaching has to reflect learners’ experiences and language biographies in particular (maligkoudi et al., 2023). before creating instructional materials, jameel (2012) suggested taking the interests and skill levels of the students into account. there will be discouragement that leads to failure when the instructional materials and the needs and levels of the learners are incompatible (deressa et al., 2022). based on this perspective, the erudite presentations in this modern global exchange should not only focus on tourists but also conclude their own culture based on each country. (gómez yepes et al., 2023; wu, 2015) showed that individuals in high-context cultures used a inferred style of conversation which they doesn’t explain themselves while acting in a certain way. in low-context cultures, people use more direct language to communicate. these various kinds of ways of communicating using this language can be achieved if cultural understanding is carried out. therefore, it is necessary to study cross cultural understanding (ccu), especially for tourism. ccu is defined as an understanding of a culture that is not shared by someone who studies it. cross-cultural understanding is the ability to recognize the cultural differences, make correct interpretation and react properly to people or situations in the communication with these communities (ratnasari, 2019). in other words, ccu is a person's attempt to understand the culture of a group that is foreign to him, such as a group from another country. ccu is essential for achieving the bonds of strangers with each other. (cliftci, 2016; khodakarami et al., 2022) mentions that in today's era simply knowing about a culture is not enough to achieve attachment between human relationships. critical knowledge is needed so that human relations can be close because from this a sense of familiarity arises. tourism is a profession that cannot be separated from the realm of human relations, therefore ccu is very important to be developed as a teaching material. a study conducted by (kemala & mulyana, 2022) stated that the results of needs analysis of material requirements for tourism is cross cultural understanding materials. through these materials, understanding foreign cultures becomes a balance of knowledge which results in good service for foreign tourists. the results of research from (soldatenko & backer, 2019) also state that by understanding the ccu, it can also be seen the interests of tourists visiting a country because the culture that tourists bring affects their attitudes and interests. in the analysis of cross-cultural understanding (ccu) of hospitality and tourism (cruz et al., 2023; m. li, 2014) points out that in academic studies, students must be able to find differences english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 541 between cultures which are not only influenced by geographical location which affects the weather climate but also the habits of ancestral heritage. {following a study by (huang et al., 2021) of ccus in tourism, this study identified the behavior of tourists who show the greatest differences by nationality. this study highlights the importance of ccu in studying tourism behaviors perceived by indonesian tour guides. at the same time, ccu's analysis of behavioral traits is expected to help identify professional tourism students, especially in international instructional materials. therefore, this research was conducted for extended analysis by formulating following questions: (1) what are the needs of materials in learning tourism guiding for d3 vocational department students? (2) how are the practical use of materials in learning tourism guiding for d3 vocational department students? method this research carried out need analysis to measure the shortcomings and needs of students to develop english for specific purpose (esp) for ccu in tourism course materials. (li & heron, 2021) stated that scholars in china have proposed theoretical frameworks for needs analysis, including scenario analysis, learning aim analysis, occupational requirements analysis, social and students' needs analysis (brown & green, 2019). the importance that teachers place on motivational ideas and how they view the motivation of their esp students are just a couple of the elements that are likely to influence teachers' motivational approaches (mauludin, 2021). various factors will have influenced the cognitions of these esp teachers in turn of schooling, professional coursework, and classroom experience are some examples of these sources (nithideechaiwarachok et al., 2022). this study used a mixed-method between qualitative and quantitative instruments. it involved in collecting, analyzing, and integrating data from multiple sources and employing diverse research techniques. the purpose is to gain a comprehensive understanding of a research problem by leveraging the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative approaches (dawadi et al., 2021). in a mixed-methods study, qualitative methods allowed researchers to explore complex phenomena and generate hypotheses or theories (mele & belardinelli, 2019). quantitative on the other hand, provides researchers with precise measurements, patterns, correlations, or generalizability of findings to a larger population (mohajan, 2020). it is important to note that conducting mixed methods research requires careful planning, integration of data, and analysis techniques (plano clark, 2019). researchers considered the sequencing of data collection, the weighting of qualitative and quantitative components, and how the findings integrated to answer the research questions effectively (pardede, 2019). therefore, mixed methods research was used. in this study, a group of 25 undergraduate students from various backgrounds and disciplines were recruited as participants. the sample consisted of 15 women and 10 men, with an age range between 18 and 20 years. these participants were specially selected from semester 3 and 4 students majoring in d3 vocational department university of merdeka (unmer) malang. the d3 vocational department at unmer malang offers specialization programs in various vocational fields, one of which is international guiding. the decision to select students for this class is based on several considerations. first, their enrollment in semesters 3 and 4 shows that they have acquired basic knowledge and skills in the field of tour guides. this ensures that they have a certain level of competence and understanding to contribute meaningfully to research. second, the focus on d3 vocational students allows targeted investigations into the specific challenges and opportunities faced by individuals pursuing vocational education in an international guiding context. by studying this particular group, this research aims to gain valuable insights to the needs of ccu materials in learning tourism and its practical use to help future careers in the field (mason, 2020). the selection of 25 participants provided a manageable and representative sample for indepth analysis, ensuring a comprehensive check of the research objectives within the given resources and time constraints. in addition, the diversity of backgrounds and disciplines within the group offers a variety of perspectives and experiences that enrich research findings. overall, the inclusion of 25 student’s semester 3 and 4 majoring in d3 vocational at unmer malang adds to the depth and relevance of the study. the collection of the data was obtained by conducted questionnaire and open-ended interview. questionnaires was addressed to the third and fourth semester students majoring in d3 anis nurul hidayah nafa, miftha yuliana, moh. kholilurrahman jailani, nana parama sari, wuri anggraini, & fardini sabilah developing cross-cultural understanding (ccu) materials in tourism guiding for vocational students 542 vocational department unmer malang, while interviews were addressed to a lecturer responsible for esp in tourism course materials. the data collected from the questionnaire instrument is in the form of a likert scale which has a choice of answers on a scale from 1 to 5 that differ in each section such as; language skills, proficiencies, and needed materials. interviews were conducted exclusively with lecturer who are responsible for esp in tourism material course with the aim of digging deeper information about the learning process, the problems faced, and the progress of student’s abilities. these data then analyzed with basic statistic of mean, median, and modus for questionnaire and mile’s and huberman’s interactive model for interview. the results of the study were reported in a descriptive statistical form with numerical data display followed by detailed descriptions. the validity of the questionnaire was tested by comparing the r table and r count on the basis of pearson correlation (yusup, 2018). the questionnaire items indicator has result of r count by 0.417 0.896 that exceeds r table by 0.413, so the data is said to be valid (janna & herianto, 2021). the reliability for questionnaire is calculated by implementing the cronbach's alpha formula that calculates item variance and total variance. the results of the formula were juxtaposed with guilford's reliability coefficient category. the reliability test has result from items indicator of 0.89 – 0.96, indicates very high interpretation (amirrudin et al., 2020). so, the data obtained from questionnaire is valid and reliable. as for the validity and reliability for the interview were carried out by adjusting the compatibility of the question with the indicators that have been made in accordance with the questionnaire. results and discussion the results of the analysis show that there is a need for material development, especially those related to international guiding courses. the summary of the analysis of student and teacher needs is collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. speaking skill according to the questionnaire analysis, most of the students' speaking level is at the preintermediate level. this can be seen from the results of the percentage analysis of the questionnaire responses; the majority of the students chose 'quite capable' instead of 'capable' and 'very capable' options. figure 1. the result of students’ speaking level the percentages above the questionnaire data show the five categories of capability. the highest percentage was in the category of quite capable with 54% and less capable with 28%, while the lowest percentage was in the very capable category with 0%. and it can be seen that the most dominant limitations shown in students' answers were in items 2 and 7. item 2 discusses speaking with traveler foreigners. where 36% were found in the less capable and 8% found in the not capable category. item 7 discusses controlling complaints where 40% were found in less capable and 12% found in the not capable category. listening skill in listening and understanding english, students still have low self-confidence. this is obtained from the results of the percentage analysis of the questionnaire responses in which most students choose 'less capable' and 'quite capable' compared to 'capable' and 'very capable' options. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 543 figure 2. the result of students’ listening level the analysis explained that the first item is understanding explicit (indirect) and implicit (direct) expressions in english conversation, students answered 44% in less capable and 40% in quite capable meanwhile, the capable option was only answered by two students with 8% percentage and zero in very capable option. the second item is listening and understanding conversations between coworkers in english, students answered 40% in less capable and 44% in quite capable meanwhile, the capable option was only answered by three students with 12% percentage, and one student answered very capably with 4% percentage. the third item is understanding the intentions of foreign tourists; students are still not very confident. it was shown that seven students answered less capable by 28%, 13 students answered quite capable by 52%, four students answered capable by 16%, and one student answered very capably by 4%; in conclusion, the dominant limit of students' ability to listen to understand the expression of explicit and implicitness from foreigners. proficiency the diagram below represents data about proficiency. there are 12 students (48%) at the pre-intermediate level. then, five students (20%) at the pre-elementary and elementary levels. meanwhile, three students (12%) are at the advanced level. moreover, in terms of listening ability, there are 88 students (32%) at the preintermediate level and seven students (28%) at the pre-elementary level. then, at the elementary and intermediate levels, there are five students (20%). thus, it can be said that their abilities are sufficient. figure 3. the result of students’ proficiency in english in conclusion, speaking and listening skills are significant in english proficiency. based on the student proficiency analysis, it is found that almost half of the students are at the preintermediate level. meanwhile, it is not much different from the ability listening skill. the largest presentation shows that the students' listening ability is also at the pre-intermediate level. materials from the diagram below, the most wanted material to develop is promoting tourist attractions, which has 60%. another most chosen material is communicating with foreigners with 56%. meanwhile, the least chosen material is guiding tourists to buy something from the local market, which the only item that has strongly disagreed responds with 4%. anis nurul hidayah nafa, miftha yuliana, moh. kholilurrahman jailani, nana parama sari, wuri anggraini, & fardini sabilah developing cross-cultural understanding (ccu) materials in tourism guiding for vocational students 544 figure 4. the result of most wanted material by the students in developing ccu materials based on listening and speaking skills, there were still deficiencies in communication with tourists in terms of understanding the meaning of tourists' words and handling their complaints. therefore, taking into account the students' english proficiency in terms of overall deficiencies and requests for material development, it was found that the ccu material development was developed on the topic of promoting tourism and handling complaints. lecturer’s perspective two lecturers from different institutions were interviewed based on their perspectives and opinions on the development material of tourism guidance. the first teacher is from universitas merdeka (unmer) malang in the vocational department. the students are in the 3rd and 4th semester of the d3 vocational department and have received the material about tourist guiding. commonly, the materials taught by the lecturer were in the form of theory on guiding techniques in the classroom. moreover, the lecturer said that the students only knew how to service the domestic tourist so far around malang city tour, batu tour, and pemerintah kota (pemkot) tour. on the other hand, the lecturer's technique in teaching the students still uses the old fashion of teaching, which is a teacher-centered learning method, and the lack of a learning platform applied in the teaching and learning process since the lecture only used zoom meeting. the lecture exposed that the student tended to know practically how to be a good tourist guide as they applied it with their partners. so, it is hoped that the material that will be developed can be concerned with how the students practice and talk directly with foreign tourists. therefore, the types of tourists that they need to service our domestic tourists, domestic foreign tourists, foreign tourists, and indigenous foreign tourists. hopefully, the students are ready to guide foreign tourists from europe (netherlands, germany, and france). in the material development for d3, the vocational department can focus on the needs of students to fulfill the excellent service of guiding tourists. the materials consist of international guidance of cross-cultural understanding (ccu). the second lecturer comes from pariwisata perhotelan ganesha malang. the lecturer focuses on the material in hospitality. the student received the contents of material about greeting, f&b product and service, front office, and housekeeping which were designed in the introduction to tourism material. this will be a bit different from the previous lecture that derived the student directly to the practice of tourism guiding; in this case, the lecture only handled tourism hospitality and its speaking practice. therefore, the learning process is still on teacher-centered learning, and the english practice is in the third and fourth semesters at the hotel. thus, the lecturer only uses zoom meeting to conduct a class and never uses others' learning platforms to support the learning process. the lecture suggests that the development of material can concern the needs of students to improve the use of vocabulary and conversation practice regularly because the students in the tourism hospitality department of ganesha malang lack vocabulary improvement and the ability to practice it directly in speaking skills. based on the research results, speaking skill showed that speaking skill data from need analysis showed the five categories of capability, which are: not capable, less capable, capable, quite capable, and very capable the highest english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 545 percentage was in the category of less capable and quite capable, while the lowest percentage was in the very capable category. this shows that although students can speak and understand english itself, there are still many of them who lack vocabulary and fluency in their speaking skills this result is similar to (pahargyan, 2021) which stated one of the factors of student’s anxiety in speaking is the lack of vocabulary knowledge. the study found that the results of english teaching came from three main causes of anxiety which are communication, test, and negative evaluation. it was proofed as the research subjects showed sign of vocabulary deficiency, low confidence and motivation, and lack of preparation and practice which contributed to students' fear of speaking. however, because of its unusual writing norms and exclusive vocabulary, which are referred to as "demotivating factors" in esp language learning and teaching studies and are frequently disregarded in the study sector, motivation to learn esp is obstructed. demotivation can be essentially understood as the absence of sufficient motivation to complete a particular task (giang et al., 2023). therefore, the development of materials that can introduce them to the spoken language must be completed. the main limitations that appeared in student responses were items 2 and 7. item 2 is speaking with traveler foreigners, and item 7 is discussing controlling complaints. this means that the main limitation shown by students is their vocabulary and fluency in conversing with foreigners and controlling complaints. even less because they lack the practice of direct conversation with native english speakers, this undoubtedly makes it difficult for them to speak in an exchange conversation. this means that there must be exercises to hone their skills. as claimed by (borsatti & riess, 2021) fl learners typically have a restricted vocabulary in addition to less exposure to the target language than l1 readers, who typically have a vast vocabulary before they start reading. with the development of technology in this day and age, it is not difficult to practice direct speaking skills with native speakers. this exercise can be done through remote interpersonal communication. however, students prefer to practice speaking directly with native speakers. despite their lack of vocabulary and fluency, they still want to practice directly with native speakers in person. the conclusion for the speaking aspect is students are able to speak with foreigners and can control complaints, but their vocabulary and their fluency in their speaking skills are still low. they also find it difficult to hear distinct words directly because they are not used to them. therefore, it is necessary to develop practice-based materials that allow students to face real-life situations directly and engage in english conversations directly with native speakers. for the listening skill, the need analysis showed five categories of capability which are: not capable, less capable, capable, quite capable, and very capable. the highest percentage was in the category of less capable and quite capable, while the lowest percentage was in the very capable category. this shows that although students can listen and understand english speech, there are still many of them who lack confidence in their listening skills. this result is the same as the previous study by (khoirunnisa et al., 2018) which examined the perceptions of teachers and students on learning speaking skills in the tourism program. they found that the challenges faced by students in speaking english were lack of confidence, motivation, and limited learning resources, so the development of material that can familiarize them with listening needs to be done. it's critical for instructors to understand l2 motivation because it will probably influence their practices and attitudes. in addition, the importance that teachers place on motivational ideas and how they perceive the motivation of their esp students are likely to influence how they motivate their students. these esp teachers' cognitions will, in turn, have been influenced by a variety of factors. these resources would comprise schooling, professional coursework, and classroom experience (yang & wyatt, 2021). the dominant limitation shown in the students' answers was in item 3. item 3 discusses listening and understanding the explicit and implicit meaning in live conversation with foreigners. this means the dominant limitation shown by the student is understanding the explicit and implicit expression of a foreigner. their lack of practice for direct conversation with english native speakers makes it difficult to recognize the hidden and direct meaning in exchange dialogue. this means that the practice of honing skills needs to be done. with the development of technology in today's era, it is not difficult to practice direct listening skills with native speakers. practice can be done virtually with long-distance interpersonal communication. however, students prefer to practice by listening directly face to face with native speakers. despite their lack of confidence, anis nurul hidayah nafa, miftha yuliana, moh. kholilurrahman jailani, nana parama sari, wuri anggraini, & fardini sabilah developing cross-cultural understanding (ccu) materials in tourism guiding for vocational students 546 they still want to practice in person with native speakers directly. this is in line with studies conducted by (suprayogi & pranoto, 2020) who conducted research on virtual activities in the english for tourism class. he found that even though technology provided access to alternative learning, students still wanted to learn the handson practice. then, the conclusion for the listening aspect is students are able to listen to and understand english conversations, but their confidence in their listening skills is still low. based on the results of the questionnaire, their limitations are in understanding the meaning explicitly and implicitly. they also still find it difficult to hear the words of strangers directly because they are not used to it. therefore, the development of practice-based materials, where students are faced directly with real situations by listening to english dialogue directly from native speakers, is needed. in addition to speaking and listening proficiencies, students are at the pre-intermediate level. this can be seen from the results of the student questionnaire, which stated that the preintermediate level had the largest presentation of the two skills. intermediate level means that students already have fairly good fluency in speaking and listening to english. so, it can be said that although students are quite able to speak and listen. however, the skills still need to be sharpened again so that they can be even better, especially in the practice of using them. (tampubolon, 2021) in their paper also explain the importance of listening and speaking. thus, students have to practice a lot and learn in practice because practice makes perfect. furthermore, the advice given by students in learning courses is to have english language material or training guides using english. this is desirable because it suits their future job prospects as professional tour guides. then, they also expect vocabulary material, exercises to guide using english, and the delivery of material by lecturers in a more interesting way, such as using videos. this is in line with research conducted by (syafiq et al., 2021) which states that video is a composition of spoken language and visual context so that it can increase students' ability to comprehend and enjoy english lessons. as a consequence, students are highly motivated to learn english. based on the findings from previous studies, the material needed in guiding learning consists of several materials such as giving information about tourist places, communicating about tourist packages, communication, and hospitality toward the tourist. in addition, (ratminingsih et al., 2018) stated that in fact many tour guides are still lacking in basic english skills, but they are very good at showing off to do scouting. incidents like this are very common in developing countries such as indonesia. regarding to this problem, it was needed to understand the correct learning materials in guidance, especially on cross culture understanding with tourists to obtain the hospitality on tourism. for the chosen materials, most of the students during on-the-job training face difficulties communicating materials with the tourist on the trip, such as giving information about tourist attractions during the trip. however, in order to get good marks in practice, students must have adequate marks. moreover, materials on international guidance, especially in english communication, are very important in vocational colleges, especially in the field of tourism. last, as mentioned in the results of the lecturers' interview, the students need to know the practical use of tourism guidance based on the development materials. thus, these guides should be attentive with language features including vocabulary, tone, and pace since these are able to create different meaning in different context and situation. furthermore, huang (2011) as cited in (muhazir, 2018) defines several aspects in which this aspect of developing a tour guide skill is a good public speaking skills and good narration, and must be able to adapt to cultural differences and create similarities as described below. excellent public speaking and narrative skills taking a public speaking class is a great job, so tour guides can easily address people in an engaging way. clear speaking should be learned by the tour guide, vocally and in a calm tone, so that guests can easily grasp all the information provided by the tour guide. adaptation of cultural differences the tour guide needs to know all the cultural backgrounds of the guests and can work together. tour guides must consistently find a good approach for accommodating the differences between them and tourists. successful adaptation requires an understanding of cultural differences that was divided into two parts which are adaptation interests and styles. creating similarities chiao et al. (2018) stated that there is a common english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 547 factor in the tour guide strategy that that build the awareness of the need which is to create a common perception between people from foreign cultures. that common perception are crosscultural boundaries and encouragement of tourists to communicate. not only inequality but a comparison is also a very useful way of helping tourists to understand the culture of the place they visit. this is a way of creating commonalities between cultures and the ability to build foundation of understanding from both sides of the culture which can be achieved by effective communication between tour guides and foreign tourists. this shows that the results of the findings of this research are more fulfilling what has become a problem in the needs of students, especially at the university level. this is very different from the previous findings, which findings from previous research are only the discrepancy of the material taught in class, the material being not properly accommodated, the lack of practice in english and so on. in these findings of this research, everything is covered with a complex. both in giving the material, how to make the material interesting and the practice of speaking english itself. the english proficiency is become important in tourism. this language has played an essential in the development of tourism and has also been used for travel for nowadays. the previous study conducted by (gani & damayanti, 2018) examined english proficiency of local guide in museum tsunami aceh, the previous researcher point out the level of english proficiency of tourist guide dealing with vocabulary. the researcher did not examine several parts of english such as listening, speaking and material on tourism. however, this research study has observed four important points in english for specific purposes (esp) in tourism. interestingly, this research is complete because the researcher also observed the material on ccu. that is why, this study has distinction with other previous study. the method is using questionnaires (google form) to measure the student ability and students need in material of english international guiding. moreover, this study has several benefits for the next researcher who will observe the same material on vocational students, because the method being used in this study including interview two lecturer from different vocational universities. this study is more fulfilling what has become the problem in esp in tourism material. conclusion it is essential to know about the role of english in vocational university students. it is needed to prepare them to be full fill their experience after graduating from university. one of the criteria that has been prepared for it is the need to be a tour guide. the first for the needs of students who are more likely to learn english speaking skills, and also for the material they want is cross culture understanding (ccu); it means that they need to know and understand well about the culture of foreign tourists and consider their future needs when becoming professional tour guides in the next future. on the other hand, students also need much material about talking to foreigners, handling complaints, and promoting tourist attractions that are in line with their majors. it means what they learn in lectures can be applied and used when they have occasion to work on another day, while the students' lack of speaking and listening is still low self-confidence. in short, the learning method used by the lecturer is lecturing, storytelling, and sharing experiences of being a tour guide. in addition, students also want the lecturer to increase the amount of material that uses english and use more interesting digital media such as videos in delivering the material. also, the students need to speak with a real native speaker to increase their experience and confidence. acknowledgement appreciation and gratitude profusely to our lecturer for her support, input, and assistance in this mini-research. an expression of gratitude is also conveyed to d3 vocational department at the university of merdeka (unmer) malang, tourism hospitality of ganesha malang, pt. selecta batu, department of tourism and culture batu, and postgraduate program of the university of muhammadiyah malang. references amirrudin, m., nasution, k., & supahar, s. 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(2018). uji validitas dan reliabilitas instrumen penelitian kuantitatif. journal ilmiah kependidikan, 7(1), 17–23. anis nurul hidayah nafa, miftha yuliana, moh. kholilurrahman jailani, nana parama sari, wuri anggraini, & fardini sabilah developing cross-cultural understanding (ccu) materials in tourism guiding for vocational students 550 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 203 semantic review on the reformulation as the form of clarification in appositional constructions hero gunawan english department, faculty of humanities widyatama university, bandung, west java, indonesia email: hero.gunawan@widyatama.ac.id puspita sari english department, faculty of humanities widyatama university, bandung, west java, indonesia email: puspita.sari@widyatama.ac.id apa citation: gunawan, h., & sari, p. (2023). semantic review on the reformulation as the form of clarification in appositional constructions. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 203210. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7675 received: 28-08-2022 accepted: 23-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction the semantic link between two entities serves as a description of the relation of meaning (hasanah et al., 2020). because semantic characteristics are aware of word meaning, sentence relationships, discourse, context, etc. (alsayed, 2019), they help make words more understandable (fajrah, 2019). reformulation's role in semantic equivalences is one that would make for highly enlightening research. reformulation is the process of creating utterances that are semantically comparable or nearly equivalent utilizing various language tools, such as appellation, identification, and paraphrasing (tsedryk, 2019; wongkittiporn, 2022). we frequently expound on a notion that has been previously expressed in a different fashion, whether in prepared or unprepared conversation (meurant et al., 2022; sagala & rezeki, 2018; zhang et al., 2022). the presence of reformulation in an appositional construction is not just additional information (gunawan, 2020), but also a way for semiotic resources (alipour, 2019, goodwin, 2018, sahyoni, 2018) to clarify the anchor's role as the antecedent. according to alsulaimaan & khoshaba (2018), a term is ambiguous if we do not understand what it means. reformulation can make a statement more nuanced and simpler to understand by reinterpreting and elaborating. according to johnson (2019), reformulation is a process of textual reinterpretation for improving the conveying of intended meaning. reformulation frequently employs what are known as reformulation markers when displaying the information's contents. in order to establish a connection between the treatment discourse (d2) and the reference discourse (d1), reformulation markers are used (florea, 2019; nadal, 2020). although reformulation markers are important because they signal changes in perspective on what has been stated or invalidate prior formulations due abstract: this research-based article discusses appositives containing reformulation which is very important in the context of meaning particularly in the form of clarification to the anchor as the antecedent. this reformulation is viewed from the two aspects, i.e., semantic equivalence and coreference. therefore, this research serves two aims: 1) to elucidate the forms of clarification provided by reformulation as semantic equivalence that makes anchors more comprehensible, and 2) to elaborate whether reformulation and its anchor are coreferential in the appositional constructions. the data sources are taken from english printed media within three levels of distributional coverage, i.e., national, regional and international coverage. the data are analysed through employing the method of qualitative research, that is, the method presenting descriptive data, both written and oral data. to analyse such descriptive data, the distributional method of analysis with the two techniques is used, namely, extracting techniques, and inserting techniques. the results of this research uncover that 1) the forms of clarification provided by the reformulation cover: a) metaphorical expression, b) factual knowledge, c) expression of revision, d) simplified expression, e) short forms (acronyms), f) emphasis through negative reformulation, and g) equivalence in other language; and 1) not all reformulations have coreferences. all of the reformulation forms are given to make the anchor mo re comprehensible. keywords: appositives; clarification; coreference; reformulation; semantic equivalence. hero gunawan & puspita sari semantic review on the reformulation as the form of clarification in appositional constructions 204 to their semantic value, speakers can reformulate without them (jiménez, 2022). an appositive is a word, phrase, or sentence that explains or modifies other words, phrases, or clauses in order to support them (alwasilah & mahdi, 2020; mutiara, 2019). according to gunawan and sari (2019), appositional constructs that place the appositives and their anchor in contrast are seen as offering extra information. the anchor is referred to as the antecedent in this supplementary material. in order to maintain the meaning, the two elements (appositives and anchors) have semantic equivalences (chotimah et al., 2022). according to quirk in gunawan (2021) there are four different sorts of semantic equivalences: appellation, identification, designation, and reformulation. in terms of naming aspects, appellation is semantic equivalence; in terms of providing a specific explanation to the anchor, which is generally of a generic nature, identification is semantic equivalence; in terms of explaining the status of the relationship between an anchor and an appositive, designation is semantic equivalence; and in terms of restating information in a different way while maintaining the same information's content, reformulation is semantic equivalence. one of the semantic equivalences, reformulation, allows for the expression of the same meaning as the anchor but in a different method (rewording). reformulation can take many different forms, such as the use of synonyms, factual knowledge that includes knowledge of the outside world, a more exact formulation, revision, and many others. in reformulation, language markers like (more) simple, in scientific terminology, in more technical terms, technically, and many other similar markers are frequently used. here are some examples: (1) in addition to things like “task chunking" (i.e., doing like things together in other words, answering all my e-mail at once or running a bunch of errands in one trip), i look for short cuts to make the most of my writing time. (h-coca) (šinkūnienė, 2019, p.548) the appositive, which indicates the existence of clarification through reformulation, is an example in that sentence. the anchor receives the value of equivalence in terms of the particular substance thanks to this appositive reformulation. by employing the reformulation marker, the reformulation is given in the form of an explanation. according to inkinien (2019), the word in the sample above has an interpretation of explicit meaning. the use of appositive reformulation emphasizes rewording or restating in a different way while maintaining the same meaning, making it easier for readers to comprehend the intended anchor in a given situation (feist, 2022). for a better understanding of this reformulation, consider the following example from lavinson (1983, pp. 329– 330), who claims that reformulation is a sort of self-repair using the example of the repairable item: (2) i need a new bolt for my oil pan, the bolt in the bottom for draining the oil. the response to the other-initiation in the following exchange is also a reformulation: a: i need a new bolt for my oil pan. b: which? a: the big one underneath. that sample (2) above is very clear that reformulation is a self-repair by means of a paraphrase of the repairable item, and here is the simple explanation: the expression a new bolt for my oil pan is corrected/repaired by the reformulation the bolt in the bottom for draining the oil. the expression a new bolt for my oil pan is corrected/repaired by the reformulation the big one underneath the ability to provide corrective expression (revision) to the anchor as the antecedent reveals that the two appositives of reformulation in (2) above have coreference (kroll & rysling, 2019). by connecting the phrase to distinctive characterization, the term can be made more exact (haverkamp & hoeltje, 2021). to put it another way, a speaker may be encouraged to reformulate their previous talk or a coparticipant's past turn in response to a coparticipant's express request or a coparticipant's display of non-understanding (kunitz & majlesi, 2022). inknien (2019) investigated the distribution frequency and purposes of reformulation markers in academic discourse in two languages (english and lithuanian) and three science domains (humanities, medicine, and technology) in relation to this research issue. the findings indicated that reformulation markers are most frequently used in the humanities by english and lithuanian scholars. florea (2019) is now working on the reformulation markers for the literature reviews sections. the findings showed that advanced academic literature reviews activate a specific sort english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 205 of reformulation discourse in which markers exhibit a clarifying function within an authoritybased, readership-oriented reformulation discourse type. in a separate study, alipour (2019) investigated the use of reformulation markers, a prevalent metadiscourse strategy in applied linguistics research articles written by iranian native and nonnative writers. the findings revealed that the roles played by reformulation markers (rms) varied between research articles published by native and non-native writers. the form of reformulation and its coreferentiality should be discussed in relation to the topic of reformulation. the two components of reformulation that are of interest to talk about here are. in order to make the reformulation more understandable, the first thing to look for is any clarifications that are offered by the reformulation as a result of semantic equivalences. the second thing to look for is whether or not the reformulation contains coreferences. in order to make anchors more understandable, reformulation provides many types of explanation. therefore, this research serves two aims: 1) to elaborate the forms of clarification provided by reformulation as a semantic equivalence that makes anchors more comprehensible, and 2) to explain whether reformulation and its anchor are coreferential in the appositional constructions. method based on the nature of study, the method used in this research is qualitative descriptive research method in which the data used are not judged to be true-false but they are viewed as the true phenomena as they are. qualitative method aims to describe the real case that occurs in the field (octaberlina et al., 2020), which means that all data in this study are collected. it is in line with cresswell (2018), saying that the objective of descriptive research is to describe description regarding the facts of the data and phenomenon. the data collection is conducted by identifying data through reading the selected data sources, marking the potential data, notetaking and tabulating the data into tabular form based on the data classification. the data that have already collected and classified are analysed through employing the method of qualitative research, that is, the method presenting descriptive data, both written and oral data. to analyse such descriptive data, the distributional method of analysis with the two techniques is used, namely, extracting technique, and inserting technique. results and discussion the important findings related to reformulation cover the reformulation in the form of: metaphors, factual knowledge (knowledge of the external world), revision, short forms of a word (acronyms), equivalence in other language, emphasis through negative reformulation, and simplified expression. here are the samples extracted from the selected data sources. metaphorical expression (3) tv censorship, while still strict, was no longer suffocating – and benghazi, the cradle of any libyan dissent, was given its team back. the reformulation above is expressed in the form of metaphor – rewording in the form of metaphorical expression, that is, transferring concept of a cradle symbolizing a place with full of comfort for rebels. the concept of “being comfortable” attached to the cradle is used for the city of benghazi. it seems to be well-known that the cradle is the most comfortable place for a baby. this implicates that benghaji is a very nice place for libyan dissent. this appositive in (3) above has coreference which can be seen from the capability of the appositive in providing reformulation in terms of metaphor from the definite anchor. the capability to become reformulation is indicated by the reformulation marker (relator) in other words between the anchor and the reformulation as the appositive equivalence as seen in (3a). besides, to indicate that the reformulation in that appositional construction has coreference by inserting relative pronoun – in other words, by changing the construction (3) into relative clause by using the copular verb be, as seen in (3b). (3a) tv censorship, while still strict, was no longer suffocating – and benghazi, (in other words) the cradle of any libyan dissent, was given its team back. (3b) tv censorship, while still strict, was no longer suffocating – and benghazi, (which is) the cradle of any libyan dissent, was given its team back. the anchor benghazi becomes the reference from the content of reformulation, i.e., the cradle of any libyan dissent so that the two are coreferential in the form of metaphorical expression for a certain place. hero gunawan & puspita sari semantic review on the reformulation as the form of clarification in appositional constructions 206 factual knowledge it is rather different from the sample (4) below. this reformulation is still about the clarification of certain place which is categorized into factual knowledge (city). (4) she learned that a large number of female refugees, most of them muslims, were streaming into zenica, an industrial town in central bosnia,.... then reformulation in sample (4) provides clarification on the existence of the zenica city, and it has coreference. this coreference lies on the capability of the reformulation in providing factual knowledge to the anchor which has already been definite in nature. this capability is indicated by inserting relative pronoun and changing the construction (4) into relative clause by using the copular verb be, as seen in (4a). such a coreference will be very obvious if the anchor and the appositive are extracted independently from the context as in (4b). (4a) she learned that a large number of female refugees, most of them muslims, were streaming into zenica, (which is) an industrial town in central bosnia,.... (4b) zenica is an industrial town in central bosnia. the anchor zenica becomes the reference from the content of factual reformulation with respect to a certain place, that is, an industrial town in central bosnia so that the two are coreferential in the form of factual knowledge. similar to the sample (4), it is still related to the reformulation regarding a place as in sample (5) below. this sample (5) is still about the clarification of certain place which is categorized into factual knowledge (city). it can be seen from the use of geographical name (state and city). (5) richard lehner and captain daniel aufdenblatten’s trip in april 2010 to kathmandu, nepal, had been fairly undramatic by their standards. the appositional construction with the content of certain geographical names moving from part (i.e., name of city) to whole (i.e., name of country) – specific place (capital city) on the anchor, and general place (country) on the appositive. the anchor and the appositive of reformulation in (5) above are not coreferential as seen in (5a) which is contrary to the factual knowledge. besides, to indicate that the reformulation in that appositional construction does not have coreference is through extracting the two elements (anchor and appositive) independently from the context as seen in (5a). (5a) kathmandu is nepal. (not coreferential) from the factual side, construction (5a) is not acceptable although it is grammatically correct. kathmandu is a part of nepal, and therefore different from nepal. the geographical relation of the two names of places is part-to-whole relation so that sample (5a) can be revised with a slight change in order to be factually acceptable as expressed in (5b) below. (5b) kathmandu is [the capital of] nepal. factually, sentence (5b) is clear enough that kathmandu is a part of nepal to which the two places refer. the equivalence lies on the part-towhole relation, not on the same referent. the anchor kathmandu becomes the reference of the reformulation content in the form of factual knowledge, and it is located in a bigger place – in this case the name of the country (nepal). revision sample (6) below is the reformulation in the form of revision (correcting expression). this can be seen from the expression which provides corrective clarification dealing with somebody’s noticeable characteristic, his most salient trait. (6) the unified field theory that ties together jobs’ personality and products begins with his most salient trait, his intensity. the appositive of reformulation in (6) has coreference which can be seen from the capability in providing corrective expression (revision) to the anchor which has already been definite in nature. the indicator of its capability can be seen from being able to change into relative clause by using the copular verb be, as seen in (6a). (6a) the unified field theory that ties together jobs’ personality and products begins with his most salient trait, (which is) his intensity. to prove that the reformulation in (6) has coreference is by extracting the two elements (anchor and the appositive) independently from the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 207 context as in (6b) below. (6b) his most salient trait is his intensity. the anchor his most salient trait becomes the reference of the content of corrective reformulation, that is, his intensity so that the two of them can be said to be coreferential in terms of corrective clarification about someone’s personality, in this context referring to steve jobs. acronym the following sample (7) is very different from the previous ones. this reformulation is in the form of acronym which is clearly seen from the use of the first letters of each word in the phrase the european central bank. (7) whether that national story can once again be rewritten depends in part on mario draghi, former head of the bank italy, who became the president of the european central bank (ecb) on nov. 1. the coreference in sample of reformulation in (7) can be seen from the capability in providing the formulation of an acronym as one of the short forms. to indicate that there is a coreference in that appositional construction can be done through extracting both the anchor and the appositive independently from the context as shown in (7a) below. (7a) european central bank is ecb. (= ecb is european central bank) the anchor european central bank becomes the reference from the content of the reformulation which provides the short form to the anchor. therefore, both the anchor and the appositive are coreferential referring to a financial institution european central bank. equivalence in other language another different sample is in the following sentence (8). it is categorized into the reformulation in the form of equivalence in other language which is tend to be simpler language transfer but keep the same meaning. (8) the singer, jorge gamboa, is the youngest in the group at 50; the leader and guitarron (a very large guitar) player, francisco carreon, is 85. the word guitarron comes from spanish meaning a very big mexican guitar. sample (8) above has coreference, and this can be seen from being able to express language transfer which is relatively easy for readers to understand instead of the word guitarron. to prove the existence of the coreference in appositional construction in which there is a reformulation is by inserting the reformulation marker (relator) in other words between the anchor and the reformulation as the appositive equivalence as seen in (8a). besides, to indicate that the reformulation in that appositional construction has coreference by extracting both the anchor and the appositive independently from the context as shown in (8b) below. (8a) the singer, jorge gamboa, is the youngest in the group at 50; the leader and guitarron, (in other words) a very large guitar player, francisco carreon, is 85. (8b) guitarron is a very large guitar. the anchor guitarron becomes the reference from the content of the reformulation which provides the expression of simple language that can makes readers easy to understand what guitarron means. therefore, both the anchor and the appositive are coreferential referring to a kind of guitar. negative emphasis sentence (9) below is the sample of reformulation in the form of negative emphasis. it is clear from the use of not on the appositive my life. the word life is not the synonym of the word legs. the expression of not my life indicates that my life is more important and valuable than [my] legs. (9) all that i’ve lost are legs, not my life. the anchor ‘legs’, and the reformulation appositive ‘not my life’ are not coreferential because they are the two different elements. the word legs and the phrase not my life cannot be considered to be the same. to indicate that the reformulation in that appositional construction does not have coreference is through extracting the two elements (anchor and appositive) independently from the context as seen in (9a), legs are parts of the body which are visible in nature, while life has a wide range of meaning and it is an abstract concept. (9a) [my] legs are not my life. the anchor legs become the reference of the reformulation content providing emphasis that the hero gunawan & puspita sari semantic review on the reformulation as the form of clarification in appositional constructions 208 intended point is not my life but [my] legs. in fact, the lost thing is not my life but of small and supporting of my life, i.e., [my] legs. despite the fact that the anchor legs and the reformulation appositive not my life do not have coreference, the appositive is able to give emphasis through negative reformulation that there is something more important and valuable than [my] legs, that is my life. simplified expression the last sample of the reformulation is the following sentence (10). this sample (10) contains two appositives of reformulation using the conjunction and. the two appositives are in the form of the expression of simplification. (10) three days ago, they administered a 570-cc pouch of melphalan, a high-dose chemotherapy that kills everything in my bone marrow, and zofran, a drug to combat the constant nausea. the anchors a 570-cc pouch of melphalan, and zofran become the referents of the contents of the appositives in the form of reformulation that explain the anchors in a simpler way, and in such a way that can possibly make it easier (for readers) to understand. therefore, the two (the anchors and the appositives) have coreference in the form of the simpler formulation of explanation compared with the contents of the anchor a 570-cc pouch of melphalan, and zofran as the chemotherapy medicines. to demonstrate that the reformulation appositives and the anchors have semantic equivalences can be done through inserting a linguistic marker in simpler words between the anchors and the appositives as seen in (10a), and through independently-extracting the anchors and the appositive from the contexts as shown in (10b). (10a) three days ago, they administered a 570cc pouch of melphalan, (in simpler words) a high-dose chemotherapy that kills everything in my bone marrow, and zofran, (in simpler words) a drug to combat the constant nausea. (10b) a 570-cc pouch of melphalan is a highdose chemotherapy that kills everything in my bone marrow, and zofran is a drug to combat the constant nausea. the two anchors in (10a) a 570-cc pouch of melphalan, and zofran become the references of the contents of reformulation appositives providing simpler clarifications which are potentially easier to understand. conclusion the results of this research indicates that 1) the forms of clarification provided by reformulation as a semantic equivalence cover: a) metaphorical expression, b) factual knowledge, c) expression of revision, d) simplified expression, e) short forms (acronyms), f) emphasis through negative reformulation, and g) equivalence in other language, and 2) not all reformulations have coreferences, and those which have no coreferences are the ones that have part-fromwhole relations. on top of that, all of the clarification forms are given to make the anchor more comprehensible. acknowledgment researchers thank center for research and community service of widyatama university for facilitating this study. references alipour, m. 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(2022). analyzing and simulating user utterance reformulation in conversational recommender systems. in proceedings of the 45th international acm sigir conference on research and development in information retrieval (sigir ’22) (1-11). association for computing machinery. hero gunawan & puspita sari semantic review on the reformulation as the form of clarification in appositional constructions 210 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 143 improving english students’ speaking skills through an action learning strategy kasmaini english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, sumatera, indonesia email: kasmaini@unib.ac.id sudarwan danim english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, sumatera, indonesia email: dansudarwan@gmail.com muhammad kristiawan english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, sumatera, indonesia email: muhammadkristiawan@unib.ac.id zahrida english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, sumatera, indonesia email: zahrida@unib.ac.id sufiyandi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas bengkulu, sumatera, indonesia email: sufiyandi@unib.ac.id dwi maharrani english education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas sriwijaya, south sumatera selatan, indonesia email: dwimaharrani@unsri.ac.id apa citation: kasmaini., danim, s., kristiawan, m., zahrida., sufiyandi., & maharrini, d. (2023). improving english students’ speaking skills through an action learning strategy. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 143-152. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7232 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 17-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction speaking, reading, listening, and writing are the four skills that english students need to be proficient in, each of which has a different level of difficulty. speaking, however, is the most difficult skill for english students at the abstract: for students of english education, speaking skills are of paramount importance. however, in the context of english students at universitas bengkulu, many students seemed to still struggle with speaking skills. therefore, to cope with this problem, this classroom action research was conducted with the aim of improving the speaking skills of students who took english conversation course by applying action learning strategy (als) since this strategy was scientifically promising. two phases of the class action design were employed in this research project. the data were garnered using observations, interviews, and englishspeaking test. it was evident from the first phase of observation that almost all students recommended the als. the data from the interview revealed that a significant proportion of students had profited from this approach, and there were few students who spoke in front of the class. the first phase's precise decision how an average score of 74 was attained by the students. at the second phase, the observation and interview data showed that nearly all students actively participated during discussions and had good improvements of english-speaking skills. the result revealed that the implementation of als in the conversation course in semester 1 improves s1 students’ speaking skills. keywords: action learning strategy; english-speaking skills; university of bengkulu students. kasmaini, sudarwan danim, muhammad kristiawan, zahrida, sufiyandi, & dwi maharrani improving english students’ speaking skills through an action learning strategy 144 university of bengkulu. skills such as vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and fluency are required for this skill. as speaking is believed to be the most productive oral skill, students must perform their ideas in the speaking section in addition to having a theoretical understanding of the vocabulary and grammar that will be used. additionally, they must separate ideas into verbal and non-verbal forms (riswanto et al., 2022). using english in verbal communication is a problem for the english-speaking students at the university of bengkulu. it can be observed in a variety of situations, including daily interactions, discussions, and undergraduate thesis exams. the students use improper grammar and a mixture of indonesian and english to convey their ideas. in terms of coherence and vocabulary, there is also a context-related problem. indonesian and english are frequently mixed together because of their limited vocabulary. some studies have found that students' limited vocabulary is their main barrier to effective idea expression in speaking (khan et al., 2018; panjaitan et al., 2022; rullu & daburan, 2020). meanwhile, speaking is a crucial component if students want to complete their studies at the university of bengkulu. therefore, lecturers should give full attention to students struggling with performance or competence problems. based on the researcher's observations, the students’ speaking ability at the university of bengkulu needs to be improved as it is still poor. this is especially true for argumentative speaking and reasoned discussion. at this level, it is also essential to have fluency as well as a variety of vocabulary and pronunciations. tampubolon (2020) asserted that a large number of students struggle to express themselves in english, particularly during the debating and argumentation stages. the finding indicated that there is no connection between theory-based english materials and the practice. students are still required to comprehend and master a wide range of speaking skills, both in theory and in practice. while this prerequisite is an essential and unavoidable requirement as a requirement to become a skilled english teacher. the english language study program fkip unib has provided a variety of courses in this area, including conversation, speaking for discussion, and speaking for presentations. these three courses are developed to maximize students' communication skills. the implementation has not been used to its maximum potential, especially in upper-semester courses like conversation and speaking for presentations. implementing the action learning strategy (hereafter as als) is one way to make the most of conversation courses. this method includes six steps to boost speaking abilities: highlighting the issue, collaborating with others, posing questions, taking actions, committing to learn and scaffolding by mko (more knowledgeable person), such as coaches and trainers. the results of tracking literature reviews and research results that have been carried out by previous researchers regarding als both from online sources (open knowledge map) to determine research maps in the context of this als or offline found the fact that it has never been implemented by lecturers in particular in the english education study program, fkip unib. the studies that have been conducted regarding the improvement of speaking ability were detected, among others; kurniawan (2018) regarding the use of edmodo online learning media in the english class for discussion of students in the english study program. kurniawan (2019) on the application of google voice in the english for discussion course and kurniawan (2021) on the application of the integrated performance assessment (ipa) model in the class of students of the english education study program, fkip university of bengkulu. based on the results of the search and tracking of previous studies, it is concluded that there is a novelty in the use of strategies, especially the als. referring to the literature review, the experience of researchers during teaching and interacting with students as well as the results of the analysis and synthesis of the concepts, procedures and objectives of this strategy, als is very appropriate to be applied to improve the speaking skills of students of english education fkip unib. the speaking skills of undergraduate students of english education fkip bengkulu university were detected from their speaking activities using english from various forums and momentum both inside and outside the classroom. the results of the researcher's diagnosis, as well as the lecturer in conversation courses, concluded that the average ability of undergraduate students in english education at fkip was still relatively low. this is evidenced by the results of the empirical experience of the researchers themselves and supported by lecturers who are competent in speaking skills (speaking for discussion, speaking for presentations), so that models, approaches, methods, techniques, and strategies are needed english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 145 that can improve these speaking skills. this research is guided by the following research questions: first, how to improve students' speaking skills in conversation courses using als? second, what are students’ perceptions of the als? speaking is one way to convey messages to other people. this message can be in the form of thoughts, ideas, complaints, and criticisms either directly or indirectly. messages can be received well if the delivery can be understood by the recipient. for that, the messenger must have speaking skills. these skills include mastery of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and fluency. the four speaking skills in questions are illustrated in figure 1 below. figure 1. the four speaking skills and their parts the first part is vocabulary mastery (vocabulary), which means that the speaker must understand diction, jargon and word forms (nouns, adjectives and verbs). in addition, afzal (2019) states that vocabulary has two forms: active and passive. in active vocabulary, students are taught words and they can use the words to express themselves verbally and in writing. meanwhile, passive vocabulary refers to the words that students are able to recognize and understand when a context is presented to them but cannot be produced spontaneously by the students in written or spoken form. the second part deals with pronunciation. in speaking, a person actually uses the correct pronunciation according to the standards of a native speaker, the intonation, stress and rhythm are right according to needs. an english learner does not have to have a pronunciation similar to that of native speakers (native like) because there is the influence of the mother tongue. in line with this, puspandari and basthomi (2022) "mother tongue (l1) has a clear influence on learning l2 pronunciation". but the most important thing is the correct pronunciation according to the standard or known as rp (receipt pronunciation) either british or american. some previous studies found that complexity in pronunciation causes difficulties for foreign learners which resulted in many errors of foreign language learners in terms of pronunciation (fabra, 2022; lestari et al., 2020) the third part is grammar. these language rules include sentence structure and elements forming phrases, clauses and sentences as well as main and subordinate clauses. a speaker must understand verbal, nominal, active and passive sentences with different tenses and how and when to use them. besides, the speaker also needs to understand about nouns, adjectives, adverbs and at the same time how to use them. according to wilang and vo (2018) “like many efl teachers, the researchers have found themselves in awkward situations where teacher-led interactions are frequently met with silence.” this means a situation where many students or students are just silent in class talking because of lack of grammar, especially what often happens in english classes where english is a foreign language. the fourth part is fluency. fluency in conveying ideas without stopping and hesitation even though grammar errors still appear here and there. the ability to express opinions fluently and clearly without much pause (fillers and repetition) is a very important skill. however, tavakoli and hunter's study (2018) found that fluency is often defined broadly by teachers, who often use it interchangeably with speaking ability. in addition, the majority of the activities reported by teachers were useful for improving speaking practice rather than fluency. fluency in speaking is a skill that needs to be trained continuously by communicating in real contexts such as discussions about a particular issue in english (fgd) in order to discuss a topic. in addition, study conducted by riadil (2020) revealed that the issues of english-speaking students are closely related to linguistic issues (grammar, lack of vocabulary, and poor pronunciation) and psychological issues (loss of self-confidence, insecurity, and nervousness). this is in line with the study conducted by hanifa (2018) which found that factors that cause students’ anxiety when learning speaking skills are cognitive factors (topics, genre, interlocutors, and processing demands), affective factors (feelings towards the topic and/or the participants, and selfconsciousness), and performance factors (mode, degree of collaboration, discourse control, planning and rehearsal time, time pressure and environmental conditions). kasmaini, sudarwan danim, muhammad kristiawan, zahrida, sufiyandi, & dwi maharrani improving english students’ speaking skills through an action learning strategy 146 concerning all those notions, the purpose of learning to speak is in order to build students' speaking skills with all components in speaking skills so as to cause changes in both cognitive, affective and psychomotor aspects. in this case, nur et al. (2021) elucidate that teaching methods should be treated as theories to be evaluated to decide which strategies function best in a particular second/foreign language classroom. therefore, we have to find the right strategy for the students we teach according to the context. als was first introduced by revans (1982: 626-627). he defined this strategy of as a means intellectual, emotional or physical development that requires subjects through responsible involvement in some real complex and stressful to achieve intended change to improve observable behavior henceforth in the problem field”. this strategy is oriented towards discovery learning which emphasizes the strength of groups and individuals to solve a problem. furthermore, zuber-skerritt (2002) argued that the success of an action learning strategy depends largely in these values: collaboration, trust, openness, team spirit and mutual respect, and tolerance of mistakes. the basic principles in this strategy are the group's efforts to solve a problem through discussion and reflection and action. waluyo and arsyad (2022) explained that students’ cohesiveness has a significant effect but is detrimental to students' grades. students must unite or cooperate but sometimes it is detrimental to their scores because group scores equal individual scores. in the process of carrying out group actions, people who are experts in their fields are assisted so that problem solving orientation is guided to the final goal to be achieved. this learning strategy is very democratic because every individual in the group has the right to speak, express opinions and at the same time provide criticism and suggestions for improvement. shimamoto (2022) elucidated that self-expression is a pillar of the communicative language classroom. in other words, the expression of each individual is the key in communicating or speaking in learning. this is the spirit of active learning and cooperative learning that emphasizes the activeness of students in learning. this is in line with the national education system law no. 20/2003 chapter 1 article 1 which reads “education is a conscious and planned effort to create a learning atmosphere and learning process so that students actively develop their potential to have religious spiritual strength, self-control, personality, intelligence, noble character, and skills needed by himself, society, nation and state. the following are the steps of als. the first step is to prepare problems. problems must be important, specific and can be solved in groups. in relation to the process of learning to speak, the themes raised are in accordance with general problems that all group members understand and can be traced from various literary sources, such as "how to avoid the omicron virus disease pandemic". the second step is forming a team/small group. the team formed should not be too big, for example 5-7 people. it is recommended that team members come from different backgrounds, so that they can provide diverse information. if this team is a student in the same class, then before the discussion each group is given time to enrich their scientific background about the theme to be discussed. students can read and analyze from various sources both online and offline. these learning resources should be in english. the third step is formulating questions. discussion group members should ask a lot of questions about the issues being discussed. the questions that arise will sharpen the argument. questions should start with the words "why and how". questions are meant to provoke dialectic and livelier discussion. all questions and answers are in english. the fourth step is the question process. the discussion is sharpened by questions, answers, rebuttals, and debates. all processions are carried out by using english. the fifth step is action taking. after a long discussion, the group then takes action to solve the problem according to the action plan. finally, the sixth step is coach guidance. the trainer's role is to guide and direct various problems that arise so that focus and discussion orientation is achieved as expected. als was invented and developed by revans in england in the mid of 20th century. this strategy was originally used as a strategy for the professional development of staff in british companies. then the strategy develops in the world of education and is used to increase the activeness of students in developing curiosity through the discussion process while looking for answers to the problems being discussed. this strategy relies on the strength of collaboration in analyzing and synthesizing as well as making decisions to carry out action plans. revans (1980, 1982 & 1998) as cited in ferkins & fleming (2010) has conducted a series of studies related to this strategy by means of combining the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 147 theoretical concepts of cooperative learning, integrated learning and learning by doing. a couple of researchers, such as ferkins & fleming (2010) and pedler (2011), have continued to refine this strategy. studies related to this als have been carried out by researchers in indonesia. based on literature tracking, there are several researchers who have conducted studies, including shalihah (2020) who conducted research with als to improve students' speaking skills at mts limbung with a classroom action research design. the results of the research showed that the students' speaking skills increased in each research cycle. a similar study was also conducted by putra et al. (2022) with the tittle “action learning strategy to enhance students’ speaking skill: a classroom action research”. the study involved 28 students with a classroom action research approach of 2 cycles. the final result of the study showed that the students' speaking skills from cycle to cycle increased. another study was conducted by nurjannah and ruswiyani (2022) entitled “using action strategy in improving speaking skills in english language teaching”. their study was was conducted in smpn 3 soromandi kabupaten bima, ntb involving 40 students as the samples. the results showed that action learning strategy can improve the students' speaking skills in english language learning. method this research method is qualitative, and the research type is classroom action research. the kemmis and mctaggart’s (1990) model was adopted. figure 2 depicts the classroom action research model used in this study. figure 2. kemmis and mc taggart's (1990) cycle model this study was conducted in the conversation course of the english education department at unib. this study was carried out from the third week of june to the end of november 2022. the participants in this study were the third semester english education students taking english conversation courses. there were 35 students enrolled in this course. this study was conducted in two cycles. one cycle was made up of three meetings. therefore, six face-toface meetings were held. there were four phases of action research implemented in this study, in which they fell into planning, implementation, observation, and reflection. in terms of planning, the researchers prepared learning instruments in the form of semester learning plans (slp) and learning devices, such as media, instruments, observation checklists and interview forms. aside from that, the researchers designed and determined research schedules as well as indicators representing students’ success in learning. these indicators were tailored to the conversation course's learning outcomes and the speaking assessment rubric. in the implementation, the researchers used als to carry out learning activities. the slp was used as a guide in teaching by the researchers. scenarios were developed in advance. scenario changes could only be made at the implementation level, not at the strategy's core. according to a predetermined cycle, up to 6 slp were prepared. in terms of observations, members of the research team acted as the observers, observing the learning process. the processes that occurred during the study were recorded by the observers as guided by the observation check list. the findings of the observations were used to improve the learning process in the following cycle. in terms of reflection, the fourth phase was reflection. the researchers and observers re-observed what had been done, what was being done, and what would be done during this phase. during the learning process, reflection was accomplished by checking, analyzing, synthesizing, and formulating problems. the findings of this reflection were then used to improve the learning process in the following cycle. data were gathered from field notes, observations, and interviews, as well as evaluations conducted by observers during the research process. this data could be used to determine whether there was an increase in each cycle. observation sheets, speaking ability tests, and interviews were used as research instruments. data analysis was divided into two categories: qualitative data from observations and interviews and quantitative data from speaking test results. in this study, success was defined as: (1) at least 75% (27 students) were actively participating in discussions at the end of the cycle; and (2) at least 60% of students received an 80 (a-) on the speaking test results at the end of the cycle. kasmaini, sudarwan danim, muhammad kristiawan, zahrida, sufiyandi, & dwi maharrani improving english students’ speaking skills through an action learning strategy 148 results and discussion the results of this classroom action research showed that there was an increase in the ability or speaking skills of si students in english education at fkip unib by implementing an als. these results were obtained from two cycles and three instruments. cycle 1 the data of cycle 1 were gathered from observation, interviews, and english-speaking test as to see students’ english-speaking improvement. table 1 presents the observation results of cycle 1. table 1. observation results of cycle 1 no student asking student who answered student who are inactive cycle 1 12 10 13 the data were backed up by those garnered from interviews. after implementing the als, the researchers interviewed 10 students. most students perceived that they were helped by the implementation of als. the implementation of als was embodied in four steps which felt into planning, action, observation, and reflection. in terms of planning, planning was in accordance with the research scenario that had been prepared before taking action, namely providing alternative topics that were used as topics for group discussions consisting of 5 people. the first topic was “talking about the weather”. in terms of action, the implementation of the action in cycle 1 was in accordance with the steps of the als which consisted of six steps such as preparing problems, forming groups, compiling questions, questioning process, taking action and guiding the trainer (selected students). the researcher gave the students the freedom to choose their friends. then, the students looked for one person for each group of students who had more qualified in speaking skills among group members. in terms of observation, the observer paid attention to the attitudes, behavior, and activeness of students in learning. at the first meeting, the students seemed quite enthusiastic about participating in the lesson because they were given information about als. this provided a clear framework so that the discussion went well. in terms of reflection, the results of the reflection from cycle 1 provided an overview to researchers and observers about several weaknesses that must be corrected in the next cycle. as a whole, the weaknesses that could be seen from interview, observations, and test results demonstrated some points. first, students seemed less active during group discussion. this was due to the lack of distribution of active students in each group. second, during the classical discussion, some students still lacked confidence. third, the average value of the test in cycle 1 was 74. the score was the average of the three components of speaking assessment, namely pronunciation, vocabulary, and fluency. table 2 presents the test results at the end of cycle 1. table 2. test score of cycle 1 no students pronunciation vocabulary fluency score 1 mgfd 70 70 70 70 2 ja 75 74 76 75 3 hf 75 78 72 75 4 gan 75 80 80 78 5 sw 80 75 76 77 6 sf 75 70 71 72 7 anh 65 64 66 65 8 mrs 75 75 78 76 9 ia 70 73 76 73 10 anh 75 74 76 75 11 and 74 76 75 75 12 dasbs 80 81 79 80 13 iv 75 74 76 75 14 aar 75 78 75 76 15 saar 80 80 83 80 16 yo 75 74 76 75 17 du 70 73 70 71 18 rja 66 64 65 65 19 np 77 75 73 75 20 sa 66 65 67 66 21 ddp 75 72 75 74 22 la 77 80 88 78 23 ja 70 69 71 70 24 ac 80 76 78 78 25 rn 76 75 77 76 26 ra 78 77 79 78 27 zas 70 73 70 71 28 sp 77 70 72 73 29 smz 70 71 72 71 30 md 76 78 74 76 31 ovth 78 75 78 77 32 an 75 78 75 76 33 af 75 78 72 75 34 drf 78 74 70 74 35 ark 75 71 70 72 average 74 cycle 2 in a similar way, the data of cycle 2 were generated from observations, interviews, and english-speaking test as to see students’ englishspeaking improvement. table 3 presents the observation results of cycle 2. table 3. observation result of cycle 2 no student asking student who answered student who are inactive cycle 2 15 17 3 the observation data were backed up by those garnered from interviews. after applying the als, the researchers interviewed 10 students. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 149 almost all students perceived that they got help from the implementation of this als which consisted of six steps. in the same way as cycle 1, the implementation of als in cycle 2 was undertaken through four steps which felt into planning, action, observation, and reflection. in terms of planning, planning was in accordance with the research scenario that had been prepared before taking the action, namely determining the topic that was used for group discussions whose students consisted of 7 people. the second topic was “an afternoon in the kitchen”. in terms of action, the implementation of the action in cycle 2 was in accordance with the steps of the als which consisted of six steps, such as preparing problems, forming groups, compiling questions, questioning process, taking action, and guiding the trainer (selected students). here, the researchers determined who could be the leader and members of the group. the number of members of each group became larger, namely 6 people. this was done so that there could emerge more ideas and flexibility in larger groups before presentations in class groups. in terms of observation, at this stage, the observer paid attention to the attitudes, behavior and activeness of students in learning. at the second meeting, the students seemed very enthusiastic about taking lessons because they were already familiar with the steps of als. this gave a different spirit and experience from cycle 1. in terms of reflection, the results of the reflection from cycle 2 provided an overview to the researchers and observers that from the three existing instruments, namely observation, interviews and tests. it was known that the indicators set out in chapter 3 had been met, namely 75% of students were active in learning, and 60% of them got an 80 score. table 4 presents the test results. table 4. test score of cycle 2 no students pronunciation vocabulary fluency score 1 mgfd 80 80 80 80 2 ja 71 69 70 70 3 hf 75 78 72 75 4 gan 86 90 88 88 5 sw 80 85 81 82 6 sf 70 70 70 70 7 knh 65 64 66 65 8 mrs 85 82 88 85 9 ia 70 73 76 73 10 anh 90 88 86 88 11 and 90 86 88 88 12 dasbs 78 80 80 80 13 iv 83 80 86 83 14 aar 70 70 70 70 15 saar 90 88 92 90 16 yo 82 81 83 82 17 du 70 70 70 70 18 rja 80 85 75 80 19 np 80 77 83 80 20 sa 72 68 70 70 21 ddp 78 77 85 80 22 la 70 80 75 75 23 ja 71 69 70 70 24 ac 80 76 78 78 25 rn 83 85 87 85 26 ra 73 77 75 75 27 zas 90 88 83 87 28 sp 70 70 70 70 29 smz 75 76 75 75 30 md 76 80 84 80 31 ovth 76 85 79 80 32 an 89 91 90 90 33 af 80 78 82 80 34 drf 78 82 80 80 35 ark 80 80 80 80 average 79 to be discussed, cycle 1 was carried out from august 29, 2022 to september 12, 2022. from the observations, it was seen that there was a change in students during discussion activities when compared to the two previous meetings which had not implemented the als (als). at the first meeting of cycle 1, students were given a topic entitled "talking about the weather". after that, students were asked to sit in groups of 5 people. after that, the researchers chose one person for each group as the leader. in groups, they gathered and discussed questions for discussion or debate with other groups. after forming questions, the students tried to process questions by looking for answers to these questions. here, students also practiced questions and answers to the questions they had made. at the end of the als step, students with the guidance of researchers (trainers) solved problems in the form of questions and answers in class discussions. here, there was an argument against the questions and answers to the problems that had been made earlier. from the activities above, it could be seen that students did not hesitate to express their ideas. this was proven by many of those who asked, and some tried to answer the question. this is in line with shimamoto (2022) who highlighted that selfexpression is a pillar of the communicative language classroom. this si students of english education expressed their ideas in class discussions. they casually expressed their ideas in discussion. after their discussion in large groups throughout the class, the roles of the trainers (researchers and collaborators) were to provide direction and opinions about the things discussed, namely "talking about the weather". the group leader and members also improved their english pronunciation and grammar. most students were still not right in pronouncing some words. the kasmaini, sudarwan danim, muhammad kristiawan, zahrida, sufiyandi, & dwi maharrani improving english students’ speaking skills through an action learning strategy 150 accuracy of the use of some grammatical cases seemed to be problematic. they often did not correctly distinguish between verbal sentences and nominal sentences. these two tenses were often used in discussions on this topic because this topic talked about daily conversations among students in a country with four seasons. in the previous discussion, the researchers and their members also discussed students' knowledge of the outside world, such as what temperature the snow appeared. many of them answered correctly. they already understood the customs of subtropical countries. with existing knowledge or adequate background knowledge, the student became more confident in asking and answering questions. there was established a good collaboration among students. along with this, waluyo and arsyad (2022) emphasized that students’ cohesiveness has a significant effect. after completing the implementation of this als (als), the researchers and heir members conducted a speaking or conversation test. the results at the end of cycle 1 demonstrated that on average students got a score of 74. but some of them got a score of 75 to 80. this did not meet the research indicators that had been designed where 60% of students got a score of 80 (a-). this happened because the students were not used to discussing and the steps of this strategy. lack of speaking skills in this cycle could also be caused by the lack of maximum work of the group leader. here, the leader of the group was chosen at random. awkwardness could occur in small group discussions so that they were less than optimal in their performance in larger groups. interviews conducted at the end of cycle 1 showed that some students had been helped by this strategy. this happened because according to them, these strategic steps made them comfortable talking to their friends. they were not afraid of speaking because they had been prepared in groups of questions and possible answers. they also discussed in groups by using english. this occurred in steps 3, 4 and 5 of the als (als) namely formulating questions, questioning processes and taking action. because the indicators of success from the data in cycle 1 had not been achieved, the researchers and their members continued to cycle 2. the results of the observations in cycle 2 showed a sharp increase in students’ activities. almost all of them actively asked questions both in group discussions and during class discussions led by the researchers. because here before they sat in groups, they were told that each student must have had one question. the others had to answer one question each. here, there was a dependency between group members. they sought to collaborate with each other to generate questions. this collaboration also aimed to prevent the same questions to arise. in cycle 2 which was carried out from september 19th to october 3rd, the students were also asked to sit in small groups of 6 people. here, the number of them was added by one person so that they had more ideas in making questions and discussing the requested topic, namely "an afternoon in the kitchen". this conversation took place between a mother and her child one afternoon. they talked about things that usually happened in the kitchen, which was about cakes. cakes had become a hot topic in families from a background where bread was the main food. in this topic, students could also discuss a lot because they understood a lot about the types of text in english, and they also had direct experiences about the types of text discussed in the conversation earlier. this enhanced students’ active during discussions. they had an idea of what to talk about. their vocabulary came out by itself which could be helped by their friends in groups. from each group, there was selected one student who had less ability in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. the speaking test conducted at the end of cycle 2 showed significant progress. the distribution of values above 74 was more. where, there were the scores of 80 to 90. there were 21 people or had met the designed success indicators, namely 60% of the number of english education undergraduate students, namely 35 people. although there were still among them who got values of 65 to 73. only a small percentage of them received the values below 74. the tendency for individuals’ values increased from cycle 1 to cycle 2, but there were 2 or 3 students who still experienced a decrease in values. this could happen because the students were less focused and less active in group discussions. from the results of the interviews at the end of this cycle, it was observed that almost all of the students perceived that they were helped by this als. they thought that group discussions were very helpful because they could argue casually without fear of being blamed or laughed at by friends because those in the group had weaknesses. they could also help each other in ideas and vocabulary. they practiced asking and answering in group conversations to become a place of practice before the big class discussion. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 151 the results of the present study aligns with putra et al. (2022) study. their study involved 28 students with a classroom action research approach of 2 cycles. the final result of the study showed that the students' speaking skills from cycle to cycle increased. this also happened in the research conducted in the conversation class 1b. in this study there was an increase in three things, namely students' activeness in speaking, speaking skills in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary and fluency and students' perceptions of the application of this als. it can be concluded that the application of als can improve the speaking ability of undergraduate students of english education fkip bengkulu university. conclusion the classroom action research conducted in two cycles by applying the als in the conversation course in semester 1 improves s1 students’ speaking skills from english education faculty of teacher training and education, university of bengkulu. this increase occurs because the six steps of this strategy flex the tension in the classroom where students are usually given a topic and then asked to speak directly. in this strategy, students are given time and opportunity to practice and prepare the right ideas, vocabularies, and grammar before discussing in front of the class or large group. they are helped by the existence of coaches or trainers in this case the researchers and their members as commentators or guiding and directing various problems that arise so that focus and discussion orientation are achieved properly. at the end of this study, there is an increase in terms of motivation or activity, ability and good perception of the application of als in terms of improving speaking skills in english. references afzal, n. 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(2002). the concept of action learning. the learning organization, 9(3), 114–124. https://doi.org/10.1108/096964702104 28831 https://ejournal.unib.ac.id/index.php/joall/article/view/20042/9576 https://ejournal.unib.ac.id/index.php/joall/article/view/20042/9576 https://digilibadmin.unismuh.ac.id/upload/10677-full_text.pdf https://digilibadmin.unismuh.ac.id/upload/10677-full_text.pdf https://doi.org/10.33369/joall.v7i2%20.21422 https://doi.org/10.33369/joall.v7i2%20.21422 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 211 variety of english learning media technology: voices from novice learners dadang solihat department of english education, universitas kuningan email: dadang.solihat@uniku.ac.id fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, universitas kuningan email: fahrus.zaman.fadhly@uniku.ac.id marwito wihadi department of english education, universitas kuningan email: marwito.wihadi@uniku.ac.id apa citation: solihat, d., fadhly, f. z., & wihadi, m. (2023). variety of english learning media technology: voices from novice learners. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 211218. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7580 received: 21-08-2022 accepted: 25-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction there is a noticeable increase in the ease and speed of access to technology. the technology that facilitates all human concerns is rapidly developing, which is evidence of this (efriana, 2021; nurdiansyah & hudriyah, 2021; malkawi et al., 2023; wang & wang, 2023). with the quick advancement of technology, e-learning, ecurricula, learning management systems, and electronic educational platforms (eep) (albashtawi & al bataineh, 2020) are just a few of the ways that technology and its application to teaching are becoming more prevalent in education (hashim, 2018). with the incorporation of technology, this makes the field of education more vibrant and exciting. teachers in particular are more inventive in how they carry out the educational process. according to muhtia et al. (2018), modern technology enhances the roles that instructors play in fostering student learning and reallocating teaching responsibilities. by easing access to resources, they were able to improve accessibility, efficiency, and learning quality, which significantly aided in their mission (bazimaziki, 2020; ja'ashan, 2020). the education sector is just one of the many areas of human activity that have undergone major change during this period, which is known as the "era of disruption." educational institutions started to reevaluate their current educational methods and plans in an effort to include modern technologies into the educational system (al awabdeh & albahstawi, 2023). according to instructors' and students' levels of preparation, this disruptive era presents unique difficulties for achieving the highest levels of learning outcomes, particularly in terms of infrastructure, facilities, and human resources (azhar & iqbal, 2018; rasheed et al., 2020). in order to raise students' proficiency in the english language today, teachers must reevaluate their teaching strategies and keep up with abstract: the existence of technological media in the learning process has its own roles and challenges in this era of disruption. the purpose of this study is the extent to which the use of technological media supports learning english in junior high schools and the equivalent. the research method used is the survey method. the research was conducted in 36 public and private junior high schools and madrasah tsanawiah in kuningan regency by collecting data through a google form questionnaire. the results obtained turned out that of the 59 teachers who filled out the google form, as many as 86.4% of english teachers used laptops, handphones with infocus, frequently used applications, whatsapp 28.8%, power point 22%, youtube 32.2%, and e-learning 16.9%. however, 88.1% stated that teachers had not maximized the use of technological media in learning english. on the other hand, from 200 students 7th grade (19%), 8th grade (40%) and 9th grade (41%), there are 54.5% did not use technology media, 37% used laptop, infocus, and handphone, and 8.5% used laboratorium. this study concluded the use of media technology is not maximized because of the lack of facilities and infrastructure provided by the school. keywords: era of disruption; technology media. dadang solihat, fahrus zaman fadhly, & marwito wihadi variety of english learning media technology: voices from novice learners 212 technological advancements due to the appearance of software that teaches reading, writing, and grammar (rivera, 2017). hazaymeh (2021), who asserts that technology must be used in english instruction, supports this as well. therefore, grammar and sentence construction should no longer be emphasized when studying english in the age of disruption. to make the educational process more engaging and effective at reaching the desired goals, educational technology enables the use of images, sounds, videos, and multimedia (lugrin et al., 2019). as 21st-century priorities like innovation and technology must be energetically pursued (mullen, 2019; raman et al., 2019), one of the needs for teachers in the 21st century is being prepared to incorporate instructional technology into teaching practices successfully (akcil et al., 2021). additionally, harjanto and sumarni (2019) emphasized that it has been demonstrated that technology improves students' active involvement and learning results. so, in order to help students grow their abilities, values, knowledge, and skills, teachers are essential components of classroom learning and must be prepared to offer communicative english learning (rababah et al., 2019). the teacher's use of the infrastructure and facilities supplied by the school will determine how well this technology can help english instruction. in order to enhance the teaching and learning processes, teachers must integrate ict (champa et al., 2019). despite significant investments in technology in schools, there may be a gap in teacher development and training for pedagogical implementation and technology integration (avci et al., 2020). teachers need to be knowledgeable about the newest instructional technologies, such as eep, and have the necessary abilities to use the platforms and integrate them into the classroom (obeidat et al., 2022). students will learn how to analyze and synthesize information through the use of technology in the classroom, which will help them to develop higher-order thinking abilities, logical reasoning, and creative thinking (clarin & baluyos, 2022; sinha, 2022). the disruptive era, with all of its benefits and quick changes, forces us as educators to work very hard to stay up with these changes, both within and outside. therefore, it goes without saying that teachers need to be able to capture students' interest and attention in the classroom (champa et al., 2019). since the fast-paced, disruptive era requires a high degree of comprehension in practice, the way learning is implemented in the classroom must differ and evolve. planning challenges, such as negotiating task understandings and goals, can have a major negative impact on students' regulation and task performance, as indicated by hadwin et al. (2018). the distance between this disruptive time and the objectives of education itself will widen if it receives standard care, engages in traditional learning activities, and has inadequate or improper learning objectives. both teachers and students may experience stress as a result of this (kowsher et al., 2021; leontyeva et al., 2021; nenakhova, 2021). at all levels, teaching and learning methods must continue to adapt dynamically. in march 2020, the world health organization (who) declared the outbreak to be a global pandemic (bbc, 2020). the phrase "learning loss" came into use in this field, particularly during and after pandemics, as students and teachers believed they had lost their teaching and learning activities. according to several research (rahardjo & pertiwi, 2020; clarin & baluyos, 2022) the covid-19 pandemic has a significant effect on the educational sector as well. ict-based learning must be applied during pandemics in order for the educational process to continue (efriana, 2021), and as a result, mobile technology has become a crucial instrument in the teaching and learning process (suban & ilham, 2022). it is difficult for educators to change this situation. along with the growth of intriguing mobile applications, which encourage students to choose playing games on these devices to formal study, which many perceive as burdensome. in this instance, the instructional media plays a significant role in promoting the learning process (danim, 2019). teachers must employ a variety of teaching techniques that incorporate cutting-edge and contemporary methods of effectively delivering the lessons in order to be competent in english (rababah et al., 2021). in order for learning to proceed in accordance with the demands made, teachers and students must be able to work together. english teachers, in particular, need to have quantifiable ways to ensure that learning occurs effectively through utilizing and developing media in accordance with students' qualities and requirements. numerous studies on the use of technology media in the learning process have been conducted. for instance, matra & fitriana's (2018) research sought to determine if efl student teachers felt themselves to be knowledgeable about incorporating ict. the findings indicated that english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 213 most student teachers had little trouble incorporating ict into their lessons. wulansari et al.'s research from 2021 aimed to describe the opportunities and difficulties associated with mobile learning. the outcome shown that given the benefits of mobile learning, its deployment and advancement can remain pertinent in the years to come. the other study by umoh et al. (2020) concentrated on using media technologies to teach and learn. the findings indicated that many teachers and students lack fundamental and professional training in the application of media technologies to teaching and learning. for this reason, all researchers took the research title use of technology media in the disruptive era in supporting the english learning process of students in junior high schools. method in this study, survey methodology and quantitative analysis were employed. according to sugiyono (2018), the quantitative approach can be seen as a positivist-based research technique that uses population and sample data collection in order to explain, describe, and test pre-existing hypotheses. google form was used to collect the data for this study. the survey was used in this study to determine the extent to which the students' english-learning activities were facilitated by technological media. according to sugiyono (2018), the survey method is a quantitative research method used to collect data about beliefs, opinions, characteristics, behavior, and relationship variables that occurred in the past or present in order to test various hypotheses about the sociological and psychological variables of the sample drawn from specific populations. according to creswell (2018), survey research methodologies allow researchers to first interview a big number of people before following up with a small number of respondents to learn more about their opinions on the subject. using a comparatively small sample size, survey research is done to gather data or information about a wide population. in this study, 36 junior high schools or equivalent (smp-mts) were chosen at random from kuningan regency's 113 smp and 65 mt population as the samples. result and discussion the finding showed that the participants consist of 59 teachers from 36 schools and 200 students from 8 schools, were responding positive attitude toward the use of technology media. teachers and students in general used the technology media. the result of the survey that respondents (teachers) answered the questions are presented below: 1. how many hours do you teach english a week? figure 1. result of 1st question the graphic shows that 55.9% teachers teach english 18-24 hours, 22% teach more than 24 hours, 16.9% teach 8 to 16 hours, and 5.2% less than 8 hours a week. 2. what technological media is used in learning english? figure 2. result of 2nd question the graphic showed that 86.4% teachers used laptop, handphone with infocus, 11.9% they did not apply the media technology, and 1.7% used language laboratory. 3. if you use the language laboratory, how many times a week do you use it? figure 3. result of 3rd question these answer showed that teachers never used laboratory in teaching learning process (86.4%). it is appropriate with previous questions (no. 2). 4. what application do you often use in learning english? dadang solihat, fahrus zaman fadhly, & marwito wihadi variety of english learning media technology: voices from novice learners 214 textbooks games tour online games and learning yes no yes no yes no yes no figure 4. result of 4th question in this question teachers used youtube application (32.2%), whatsapp (28.8%), powerpoint (22%) and e-learning (16.9%). it indicates that youtube is an effective application for learning process. 5. do you still use other media besides technology media in learning english? figure 5. result of 5th question 6. what media is often you used in learning english to replace technology media? figure 6. result of 6th question the use of textbooks is still the prima donna for most teachers in the era of disruption. it can be seen from the percentage that reaches 96.6%. 7. is the use of mobile phones allowed in your school to support english learning? figure 7. result of 7th question as many as 66.1% of teachers allowed students to use mobile phones to support the english learning process and 33.9% did not. 8. do you like using the edmodo application in learning english in class? figure 8. result of 8th question teachers creativity need to be increased in using learning process assistant applications such as edmodo. many applications can be uploaded for fun learning english. 9. in your opinion, is the use of technological media in the process of learning english maximized? figure 9. result of 9th question as many as 88.1% of respondents answered 'no' to question no. 9's. this indicates that there is a need for continuous training in improving the ability to use technological media in the process of learning english. 10. is there a need for skills upgrading training in the use of technological media? figure 10. result of 10th question answering to question no. 10 indicates that teachers need to get technology media training for the english learning process (94.9%). on the other hand here is the result of students google form’s answered. 1. what media technology do you use in english language learning? 59 answers 59 answers 59 answers 59 answers 59 answers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 215 language laboratory laptop, hp with infocus nothing once a week twice a week three more times a week never language laboratory laptop, hp with infocus nothing yes no yes no yes no figure 1. result of 1st question the media technology used in learning english, 54.5% of students answered there is not media technology in their schools. 37% of students answered laptop, mobile phones with infocus (projector). 8.5% of students used language laboratory. it means most of schools in this era of disruption are doing without using the media technology in process of learning. 2. if you used language laboratory, how many time do you use it in a week? figure 2. result of 2nd question in this question, as many as 72.5% students answered ‘never’ used language laboratory. 17% of students answered one time a week, and 8.5% of students answered two times a week. it can be concluded that the schools did not used the language laboratory a lot or they do not have laboratory. 3. what technological media are used in learning english in class? figure 3. result of 1st question there are differences in answers between students and teachers. here students answered 'none' as much as 54.5%, answered laptops, mobile phones with in focus as much as 37%, and 8.5% answered language laboratories. 4. what application do you often use in learning english? figure 4. result of 4th question as many as 42.5% answered whatsapp. unlike the teacher's answer. they use youtube more in their learning. 5. do you still use other media besides technology media in learning english? figure 5. result of 5th question 72% answered ‘yes’ and 28% said ‘no’. it means that the other media still used in teaching learning process. 6. if you answered 'yes', what media is often used to replace technological media in the english learning process? figure 6. result of 6th question the highest answered (84.5%) in this question is textbooks. it means that textbook still the most important sources in learning english. 7. is the use of mobile phones allowed in the learning process in class? figure 7. result of 7th question 200 answers 200 answers 200 answers 200 answers 200 answers text books games tour nothing nothing handphone dictionary e-learning 200 answers 200 answers dadang solihat, fahrus zaman fadhly, & marwito wihadi variety of english learning media technology: voices from novice learners 216 yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no 67,5% students answered this question ‘yes’, and it is close with the teachers answered. 8. are you given the time to googling in doing assignments at school? figure 8. result of 8th question it means that 64.5% students allowed to have mobile phone in the class. this is an unexpected answer because so far and most schools forbid students from carrying mobile phones into the class. 9. does your teachers like to give assignments via wa? figure 9. result of 9th question 10. in your opinion, is the use of technological media in the process of learning english maximized? figure 10. result of 10th question 11. is it necessary to give you additional tutoring or training in learning english? figure 11. result of 11st question 12. when learning english, do you like online? figure 12. result of 12nd question 13. when learning english, do you like offline? figure 13. result of 13th question conclusion the results of this research through the google form answers, it can be concluded that learning english in junior high schools (smp), both private and public schools as well as in public and private madrasah tsanawiah (mts), has so far had the support of technological media. however, there are situations where learning is not maximized because behind it all the factors and conditions of the school which have not been able to provide learning support in the form of language laboratories, tools such as in focus which are still lacking, also because of the teacher factor when asked 'is the use of technological media in the process of learning english maximized?' teachers answered 'no' (88.1%) and teachers answered 'yes' (94.9%) when asked 'is there a need for skills upgrading training in the use of technological media? based on the results of this simple research, it is hoped that there will be support from the government to provide facilities and tools that support learning, especially learning english. teachers as key factors in the learning process need to be given continuous training with the latest methods and approaches so that students feel comfortable and motivated in their learning. 200 answers 200 answers 200 answers 200 answers 200 answers 200 answers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 217 references akcil, u., uzunboylu, h., & kinik, e. 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(2022). opportunities and challenges of mobile learning towards spciety 5.0. proceedings of the international conference on education, 1, 5360. https://oapub.org/lit/index.php/ejals/article/view/128 https://oapub.org/lit/index.php/ejals/article/view/128 https://doi.org/10.11114/jets.v5i2.2125 https://doi.org/10.3991/ijet.v18i05.37813 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 929 students’ perceptions of implementing problem-based learning with blended learning in efl academic reading hijril ismail english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah mataram, indonesia email: hijrilismail@yahoo.com edi english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah mataram, indonesia e-mail: edi.dompu.80@gmail.com apa citation: ismail, h., & edi. (2022). students’ perceptions of implementing problem-based learning with blended learning in efl academic reading. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 929-936. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6807 received: 14-06-2022 accepted: 25-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction reading is one of the essential skills in learning english as a foreign language that connects the knowledge of previous readers (prior knowledge) with the information the author wants to convey in certain situations to build meaning (ismail et al., 2020). meanwhile, according to horn et al. (2021), reading is also defined as recognizing text and word symbols in the daily environment. reading is also defined as a fundamental skill that students must possess to achieve academic success. with it, they can obtain information and increase their knowledge to fulfill their learning objectives (hassan et al., 2017). reading has several types, one of which is academic reading. academic reading is critical reading (groen et al., 2020; padagas & hajan, 2020) of long texts to study certain subjects (padagas & hajan, 2020), which is considered an important ability for students because they are always required to read in order to complete the tasks given by educators (liu & read, 2020), and is also considered a job that students cannot avoid to achieve educational success in higher education (yulia et al., 2020). furthermore, schwabe et al. (2022) state that academic reading is vital for many aspects of our daily lives. academic reading is also considered an important skill (liu & read, 2020; yulia et al., 2020) in higher education because students are generally required to deal with various kinds of reading tasks (liu & read, 2020), which are unavoidable by students for successful study in higher education (yulia et al., 2020). academic reading problems in higher education are still often found in various types of researches (monje & macasieb, 2020), such as using a very formal vocabulary and having a high content complexity which can make it difficult for students to understand the reading text they are reading if they do not have adequate knowledge (hartshorn et al., 2017; muñoz & valenzuela, 2020). another problem found is that many activities in academic reading learning emphasize the search for information in reading texts, whereas to get the benefits of reading is to implement critical reading as an essential skill for abstract: the study aimed at exploring students’ perception of implementing problem-based learning with blended learning in efl academic reading. quantitative and qualitative data were gained by applying a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. the study occurred at the english education program at muhammadiyah university of mataram. the respondents involved in this research were thirty-four english foreign language (efl) students who are joining an academic reading course. the result showed that students have positive perceptions of the use of problem-based learning with blended learning in teaching efl academic reading. at the same time, the respondents found barriers preventing them from utilizing problem-based learning in teaching efl academic reading such as requiring sufficient time to complete a topic or find out the solution to a problem, needing additional fees to buy internet quota, and needing prior knowledge in applying problem-based learning. finally, the finding gained from two types of instruments recommended that pbl with blended learning can be applied in efl academic reading. keywords: academic reading; blended learning; perception; problem-based learning. hijril ismail & edi students’ perceptions of implementing problem-based learning with blended learning in efl academic reading 930 college students (groen et al., 2020). furthermore, liu & read (2020) found the problem in academic reading are comprehension in general, understanding implied meaning, understanding the main idea, local comprehension, integrating information within the text, reading speed, expeditious reading (e.g., skimming and searching), evaluating or critiquing information, integrating information from multiple texts, summarizing in one’s own words, applying the knowledge to one’s own writing, paraphrasing in one’s own words, attention or focus, motivation or attitude toward reading, information retention, and amount of reading. many researchers have researched academic reading, including singh (2019), who investigated the academic reading challenges faced by international english as a foreign language master’s students at a malaysian university. the finding indicates that the students faced difficulties regarding interpreting the text in english instructional settings. padagas and hajan (2020) researched the academic reading needs of undergraduate students. the finding states that students need to organize the literature items reviewed and synthesize general concepts to generate a new idea. liu & read (2020) surveyed general skills and challenges in university academic reading. they generally found that the academic reading challenges are the length or amount of reading material, a large amount of time spent on reading, the failure to finish reading within the time frame, loss of concentration or focus on reading, as well as demotivation for reading. the study is concentrated on teaching academic reading via problem-based learning to overcome the problems in academic reading learning. pbl is a student-centered learning process that involves small groups and educators act as facilitators during the learning process to address real problems that are the focus and to provide incentives for students to learn (nagarajan & overton, 2019). in pbl, a problem is considered a problem situation (shuhailo & derkach, 2021). pbl is implemented in the learning process to solve real problems scientifically through a series of investigations to get any problem solving (amin et al., 2020). problems occurring around students are used as a stimulus to start learning using the pbl model. by facing real problems, students become more enthusiastic about gathering information, investigating problems, and solving problems well (amin et al., 2020). pbl is also defined as a student-centered learning model that encourages critical and creative thinking for real problem-solving (kardoyo et al., 2020). pbl is one of the learning strategies that can be chosen to enhance the quality of learning (kardoyo et al., 2020). table 1. stages of pbl stages educator activities stage 1 delivering student orientation on the problem educators inform learning objectives, propose reading texts to raise problems, and motivate students to be involved in solving selected problems. stage 2 organizing students to study educators assist students in defining and organizing tasks related to selected problems. stage 3 guiding individual or group investigations educators encourage students to collect appropriate information and conduct experiments to obtain explanations for problem-solving. stage 4 developing and presenting the work educators help students plan and prepare experimental results such as reports, videos, and models to be shared with others. stage 5 analyzing and evaluating the problem solving process educators help students to reflect and evaluate the investigations and processes that have been carried out. many types of research data show that pbl can improve learning outcomes (amin et al., 2020; kardoyo et al., 2020; i. s. sari et al., 2021; suhirman et al., 2020; suryanti & nurhuda, 2021), enhance motivation in continue learning (silva et al., 2018), develop critical thinking (saputro et al., 2020; silva et al., 2018; ulger, 2018), enrich creative thinking (ulger, 2018 and silva et al., 2018), assist the students in taking the lead and becoming responsible for their learning process, enriching students’ ability to improve independence as learners, provide an opportunity to work collaboratively under their direction, and encourage students to apply their background knowledge to make decisions with a focus on problem-solving (silva et al., 2018), become an affective complementary method because it can expose students to real problems (tortorella & cauchick-miguel, 2018). pbl in this study was applied through blended learning. blended learning (bl) is a learning process that combines face-to-face learning with online learning by utilizing technology (sun & qiu, 2017). supported by heilporn et al. (heilporn et al., 2021) who points out that bl is a learning process that combines synchronous and asynchronous activities. while lakhal et al. (2020) state that bl is a continuum of face-toface and online learning. bl is also considered english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 931 very interesting because it has the potential to optimize student engagement in learning (halverson & graham, 2019; manwaring et al., 2017), and educators have a central role in facilitating interaction, providing support in the learning process, and designing learning (boelens et al., 2018). if blended learning is designed properly, it will affect learning outcomes. in the era of technological innovation, blended learning utilizes technology to create a learning environment that is more efficient, interesting, and student-centered (yu & du, 2019). therefore, the research is focused on students’ perception of pbl model with bl in efl academic reading. perception is how students think or feel about the model applied in teaching and learning. many researchers have investigated perception of problem-based learning, such as abdalla and eladl, (2019) performed research on student perception of the effect of problem familiarity on group discussion quality in a problem-based learning environment, azeem et al. (2018) undertook a study about perception of problembased learning in orthodontic medical education, sari et al. (2018) about perception and career interest in a problem-based learning environment and student opinions, kusmiati et al. (2021) about perception of problem-based learning on medical course, victor-ishikaku & ukpai (2021) about perception on the challenges of utilizing problembased learning in teaching computer science in public senior secondary schools in port harcourt metropolis, and mpalanyi et al. (2020) about the perception of radiography students toward problem-based learning almost two decades after its indirection at makerere university, uganda. this research aims to explore and identify the students’ perception of implementing problembased learning with blended learning in efl academic reading. method the research design was utilized in this research is qualitative to analyze the data from the questionnaire and the exploratory qualitative method employed for interview data because the authors considered a suitable method to explore students’ perceptions of the usage of pbl via blended learning in teaching and learning academic reading. the research was carried out in the third semester of the english education program muhammadiyah university of mataram. the number of participants was 34 who were taken through disproportionate stratified random sampling because the population is stratified and not proportional (sugiyono, 2009). the data was collected through questionnaires and interviews to identify students’ responses after utilizing pbl via blended learning in academic reading. before the writers distributed questionnaires and interviewed the participants, they joined the teaching and learning process for five weeks by applying pbl via blended learning. after completing the learning process, the 30 questionnaires are distributed to them. to strengthen the data obtained from the questionnaires, the researchers utilized the triangulation technique by distributing interview question instruments to the participants through direct questions to ten students who were used as samples in the interview. the data analysis was undertaken statistically for data from the questionnaire instrument results to find an average score and the data from the interview was analyzed descriptively. results and discussion the research explores students’ perception of implementing problem-based learning with blended learning in efl academic reading. in the result and discussion described the motivational variable, learning process variable, learning impact variable, and accompaniment impact variable. motivational variable the result of a survey on students’ perception of the usage model of pbl through blended learning showed that the majority of respondents agree that the model can motivate students to learn. table 2. motivational variable no statements score category 1. this model increases learning motivation because students are directly involved in finding solutions in learning. 4.81 strongly agree 2. this model encourages students to collect information according to the problem. 4.4 agree 3. this model increases students' curiosity. 4.5 agree table 2 shows that all statements in the motivational variable are strongly agree and agree. one category strongly agrees, namely this model increases learning motivation because hijril ismail & edi students’ perceptions of implementing problem-based learning with blended learning in efl academic reading 932 students are directly involved in finding solutions in learning (average score 4.81). then two categories agree, namely this model encourages students to collect information according to the problem (average score 4.4) and this model increases students' curiosity (mean score 4.5). the findings of students’ perceptions on motivational variables revealed that the pbl model through blended learning could increase students' motivation in the efl academic reading course. this is similar to silva et al. (2018), who found that the pbl model can enhance students motivation to learn. furthermore, the students’ agreeable response to the second statement of the motivational variable on the model encourages students to collect information according to the problem. this is congruent with the finding of tortorella & cauchick-miguel (2018) and amin et al. (2020), who revealed that pbl effective complementary method for learning, especially to gather literature, better learning experience to overcome actual problems, provide a more fertile environment to learn, and collect information to solve real problems. then, the last statement about the model can increase students’ curiosity, also responded with agree. learning process variable table 3. learning process variable no statements score category 1. emphasize student-centered learning. 4.7 strongly agree 2. lecturers act as facilitators in the learning process. 4.6 strongly agree 3. encourage students to interact directly with lecturers through discussion and question and answer. 4.2 agree 4 encourage collaboration between students and between students and lecturers. 4.3 agree 5. utilizing blended learning encourages students to complete the tasks given because they have sufficient opportunities to find solutions to the problems being discussed. 4.2 agree 6. this learning model directs students to understand the concept of academic reading. 4.1 agree 7. this learning model directs students to improve vocabulary mastery. 4.7 strongly agree 8. this learning model directs students to improve critical reading skills. 4.2 agree 9. this learning model directs students to actively discuss about the topic being studied. 4.1 agree 10. this learning model prioritizes the value of the process in each assessment. 4.7 strongly agree 11. assignments are given according to the topic being studied. 4.6 strongly agree 12. the time duration to complete the task is sufficient. 4.1 agree table 3 shows the variables of the learning process, five statements strongly agree such as emphasizing student-centered learning (mean score 4.7), lecturers act as facilitators in the learning process (mean score 4.6), this learning model directs students to improve vocabulary mastery (mean score 4.7), the learning model prioritizes the value of the process in each assessment (mean score 4.7), and assignments are given according to the topic being studied (mean score 4.6). whereas seven statements agree namely encourage students to interact directly with lecturers through discussion and question and answer (mean score 4.2), encourage collaboration between students and between students and lecturers (mean score 4.3), utilizing blended learning encourages students to complete the tasks given because they have sufficient opportunities to find solutions to the problems being discussed (mean score 4.2), this learning model directs students to understand the concept of academic reading (mean score 4.1), this learning model directs students to improve critical reading skills (mean score 4.2), this learning model directs students to actively discuss the topic being studied (mean score 4.1), and the time duration to complete the task is sufficient (mean score 4.1). the finding of students’ perception on variable learning process pointed out that respondents strongly agree with five statements, the first, learning process emphasizes studentscenter learning. this is in line with nagarajan and overton (2019), who put forward that studentcenter learning is the implementation of pbl which offer educators the opportunity to engage students in solving complex real-world problems. the second, an educator acts as a facilitator in teaching and learning process, to provide more opportunities for students, such as undertake investigation, have a discussion, and explore their opinion. the third, the learning model directs students to improve vocabulary mastery, because they are asked to read several reading texts that have been prepared to be applied in efl academic reading learning process, the form of reading text used is argumentative text. the fourth, this learning model prioritizes the value of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 933 the process in each assessment, and the fifth, assignments are given according to the topic being studied. whereas, respondents agree with seven statement agree namely encourage students to interact directly with lecturers through discussion and question and answer both face to face (offline) or online learning, encourage collaboration between students and between students and lecturers, by utilizing blended learning, it encourages students to complete the tasks given because they have sufficient opportunities to find solutions to the problems being discussed, this learning model directs students to understand the concept of academic reading, this learning model directs students to improve critical reading skills, this learning model directs students to actively discuss about the topic being studied, and the time duration to complete the task is sufficient. learning impact variable table 4. learning impact variable no statements scores category 1. improve students' understanding of academic reading concepts. 4.1 agree 2. improve students' vocabulary mastery. 4.6 strongly agree 3. this learning model can improve student learning outcomes. 4.1 agree 4. improve students' critical reading skills. 4.2 agree 5. this model has been properly implemented in academic reading learning. 4.7 strongly agree 6. improve students’ understanding of the pbl model steps. 4.8 strongly agree table 4 shows that three statements of learning impact variable strongly agree likes improving students' vocabulary mastery (mean score 4.6), this model has been properly implemented in academic reading learning (mean score 4.7), and improve students’ understanding of the pbl model steps (main score 4.8). then, three statements were responded with agree, they improve students' understanding of academic reading concepts (mean score 4.1), this learning model can improve student learning outcomes (mean score 4.1), and improve students' critical reading skills (mean score 4.2). the findings of students' perceptions of the learning impact variable confirm that academic reading learning using the pbl model via blended learning can improve students' vocabulary mastery, students' understanding of the steps of the pbl model, students' understanding of academic reading concepts, student learning outcomes, and students' critical reading skills. these students’ perception supported by many researchers, who have undertaken many investigations about pbl model (e.g. ulger, 2018 and silva et al., 2018). accompaniment impact variable table 5. accompaniment impact variable no statements scores category 1. learning is more interesting. 4.7 strongly agree 2. improve students' selfconfidence by presenting the results of the investigation. 4.6 strongly agree 3. improve students' collaboration skills. 4.1 agree 4. improve students' problemsolving skills. 4.3 agree 5. improve students' critical thinking skills. 4.1 agree 6. improve students' communication skills 4.2 agree 7. improve students' leadership skills. 4.1 agree 8. improve students' creativity skills. 4.1 agree 9. improve the ability to use technology by utilizing the learning management system (lms) in learning. 4.0 agree 10. increase student tolerance to accept different opinions. 4.6 strongly agree table 5 shows that three statements of accompaniment impact variable strongly agree, such as learning more interesting (mean score 4.7), improving students' self-confidence by presenting the results of the investigation (mean score 4.6), and increasing student tolerance to accept different opinions (mean score 4.6). while seven statements were responded with agree. they are improve students' collaboration skills (mean score 4.1), improve students' problemsolving skills (mean score 4.3), improving students' critical thinking skills (mean score 4.1), improve students' communication skills (mean score 4.2), improve students leadership skills (mean score 4.1), improve students' creativity skills (mean score 4.3), and improve the ability to use technology by utilizing the learning management system (lms) in learning (mean score 4.3). the finding of students’ perception on accompaniment impact variable addresses that learning using the pbl model via blended learning in academic reading learning can make a positive contribution in increasing trust, students' tolerance for accepting different opinions, students' collaboration skills, students' problem solving skills, students' critical thinking skills, hijril ismail & edi students’ perceptions of implementing problem-based learning with blended learning in efl academic reading 934 student communication skills, student leadership skills, enhance student creativity, and ability to use technology because learning process undertaking via blended learning (e.g. saputro et al., 2020; silva et al., 2018; ulger, 2018),. the average score on each variable can be seen in figure 1 below. figure 1. the average score of each variable the average score of each questionnaire variable distributed to find out the data on student responses to the use of the pbl model through blended learning in academic reading learning can be shown that the motivation variable has an average score of 4.2, the learning process variable is 4.3, the learning effect variable is 4.2, and the accompanying impact variable 4.5. the results of interviews with ten students asking six questions can be explained: (1) the students are motivated and more active to learn efl academic reading by applying the pbl model because they are directly involved in providing solutions to real problems that are happening. (2) the pbl model can help students to understand academic reading material because they are asked to think critically and creatively not only to understand reading texts. (3) the pbl model through blended learning can help students comprehend deeply about efl academic reading because they gain additional time to discuss the topic studied with friends. (4) the pbl model can track academic reading skills in each group because they are asked to present the solutions offered to problems in the topic being discussed. (5) the pbl model can make a positive contribution to learning outcomes because the assessment is not only carried out in the midsemester and final semesters but also process assessments undertaken by both educators and group friends. (6) the students found barriers preventing them to use problem-based learning in teaching efl academic reading such as requiring sufficient time to complete a topic or find out the solution to a problem, needing additional fees to buy internet quota, and needing prior knowledge in applying problem-based learning. regarding the interview result about students’ perceptions pointed out that the pbl model via blended learning in efl academic reading can make students more active and motivated to learn because they are directly involved to obtain many solutions to the problems discussed. this is in line with silva et al. (2018), who put forward that pbl can improve students’ motivation. furthermore, the pbl model contributes positively to learning outcomes such as some of the results of research conducted by many researchers (e.g. amin et al., 2020; kardoyo et al., 2020; sari et al., 2021; suhirman et al., 2020; suryanti & nurhuda, 2021). then, the tbl model can also enhance students’ deep understanding, critical thinking, and creativity because they will gain additional time by learning via blending learning, investigating the problem by collecting information, and presenting the result of the solution who has gained. conclusion the research finding showed that students have positive perceptions of the usage pbl model via blended learning in efl academic reading courses in the motivational variable, learning process variable, learning impact variable, and accompaniment impact variable. the pbl model through blended learning can improve motivation, curiosity, efl vocabulary mastery, and critical efl reading because students are the center of learning and education as facilitators. the pbl model can also develop collaborative skills, problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, and leadership by conducting investigations to find solutions to the problems to be solved. whereas, the pbl can increase self-confidence, tolerance, and communication skills by presenting the results of an investigation. furthermore, students will be able to utilize technology because the learning process is blended via a learning management system, namely zoom meeting, whatsapp groups, and google classroom. pbl models through blended learning can be implemented in learning efl academic reading courses and other subjects that aim to improve learning outcomes. acknowledgements we would like to thank the ministry of research, technology and higher education indonesia for supporting this research. references abdalla, m. e., & eladl, m. a. 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(2017). grice’s maxims in humour: the case of “home with kids”. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 49-58. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.770. received: 30-08-2017 accepted: 31-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: sitcoms provide entertainment, one of which is through humour. using grice’s (1975) non-observance of cooperative principles – flouting, violating, infringing, opting out, and suspending as framework for analysis, this study aims to investigate whether the non-observance of grice’s (1975) maxims can contribute to the humorous effects seen in the chinese sitcom “home with kids (season 4)”. specifically, this study aims to detect which of the maxims play an important role in creating humour. data were compiled from 96 episodes of the show. a comparison of the non-observance was made before findings were qualitatively presented. the findings revealed that flouting and violating were used most frequently to create humour. the outcome of this study will have beneficial effects for l2 learners of mandarin by enabling them to comprehend chinese humour. the implications derived from this study suggest that humour may be created differently due to cultural differences. keywords: chinese sitcoms, humour, flouting, violation, non-observance, maxims introduction humour is ubiquitous and cosmopolitan, existing throughout every culture, race and region. humour has been conceptualized in various ways as “a specific type of communication that establishes an incongruent relationship or meaning”, “it is presented in a way that causes laughter” (berger, 1976, p.113). humour can be reflected in meetings, classrooms, films and television programs but koestler (1993) gives a general classification of humour which can be better understood for this paper. humour is classified by koestler (1993) as verbal humour and situational humour. the former, verbal humour, refers to linguistic-oriented humour; that is humour which is felt or experienced as a result of some faux pax or unconventional use of language. the latter, situational humour, refers to situation-oriented humour that is related to some situational contexts. since situational humour is very distanced from language and it has almost no influence on language, it is excluded from the focus of this paper. thus, only verbal humour is given attention. verbal humour can be found in all languages and in all cultures but little has been written about the chinese culture and how humour is created through the chinese language of mandarin, particularly in local sitcoms of china. in that regard, this paper attempts to explore how humour is achieved in a chinese sitcom so that the outcome obtained can be used to better understand the humorous phenomenon of the chinese culture, thereby, contributing to literature on humour. with that in mind, the research question posed is: “how do grice’s (1975) maxims contribute to the humorous effects noted in a local chinese sitcom, “home with kids (season 4)” and which of these maxims are more or less zhao xue & kuang ching hei grice’s maxims in humour: the case of “home with kids” 50 frequently observed in creating the humorous effects?” among the various studies conducted in the domain of humor, studies focusing on situation comedy (sitcom) are central to furthering the understanding of humor. this is because situation comedy, hereby also termed as sitcom, is more appreciated within homes as entertainment among families. the term also refers to a series of humorous shows shown on television that makes the audience laugh. in this context, the situations that made the audience laugh tend to originate from daily life situations, hence, the conversations shared by the characters can be considered as the representative sample of real life. as a matter of fact, most humorous topics noted in modern-day sitcoms are based on current events happening within our society. depending on the era of the sitcom, some may even be able to reflect a particular kind of living style that is reminiscent of such an era. this reflection is revealed not just by the attire, food, display of artifacts but also by the topics mentioned in the humour (lu, 2014). most previous studies (murata, 2014; rogerson, 2007) looking at humour revealed that majority of researches investigated crosscultural differences or cross-linguistic similarities and distinctions such as in workplace context. only a few studies focused on sitcom humour as is evidenced by the outcomes noted in caesilia’s study (2015) and shu’s research (2012). these two studies focused mainly on american sitcoms and they concluded that failing to observe grice’s (1975) maxims can create humor while some studies (zhen, 2013; wu, 2005) chose to make comparisons of humour between american sitcoms and chinese sitcoms. zhen (2013) developed a framework of contextual dimensions -physical, temporal and experiential, to analyze humorous conversations in an american sitcom “friends” and a chinese sitcom “i love my family”. she found that compared with “i love my family”, “friends” depended more on linguistic knowledge and less on social and cultural knowledge to create humour. wu (2005) also compared humour between “friends” and “i love my family” by using grice’s (1975) maxims. likewise, she concluded that flouting grice’s (1975) maxims is the most popular way to achieve the humorous effects in the two sitcoms. owing to the aim of this paper which attempts to investigate how humour in a local sitcom, “home with kids – season 4” was created, the model provided by grice (1975) is used. within the cooperative principle, grice (1975) proposed four types of maxims to be observed: 1) the maxim of quantity; make your contribution as informative as required and do not make your contribution more informative as required; 2) the maxim of quality; try to make your contribution one that is true, do not say what you believe to be false, and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence; 3) the maxim of relation; be relevant; 4) the maxim of manner; be perspicuous and specifically, avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity), and be orderly (grice, 1975, p. 46). there exist some conditions whereby speakers may not observe these maxims during conversations. for instance, someone who is incapable of speaking clearly or who deliberately chooses to tell a lie. in his study, thomas (1995) noted that there are five types of non-observance of grice’s (1975) maxims which include; 1) flouting: to blatantly fail to observe a maxim with no intention of misleading the hearer but with the intention of creating a conventional implicature; 2) violating: to quietly and purposely fail to observe a maxim with the intention to mislead the hearer; 3) opting out: to be unwilling to cooperate and withdrawing from the interaction; 4) infringing: to unintentionally fail to observe a maxim due to limited language capabilities and understanding; and 5) suspending: to force speakers not to observe a maxim because of certain circumstances, i.e. cultural specification. the model will enable this study to detect how the humour was created and which of the maxims were more or less observed in creating the humorous effects noted in the identified sitcom. it is assumed that analyzing the humorous language of chinese sitcoms may facilitate non-native chinese audiences, english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 51 especially learners of mandarin as a second or foreign language, to appreciate the nature of the language, in comparison to other languages. in this regard, second language speakers of mandarin will be able to appreciate the humour as well as the chinese culture, thereby, deepening their insights into the chinese language (mandarin) and idiosyncrasies. there are three major theories of humour: superiority, incongruity and relief and they are widely depicted by most researchers in humour studies. the three theories clarify the purpose of using humour in daily lives and they have been used by others such as caesilia (2015), shu (2012) and sri (2006). the superiority theory of humour originated from the perception that laughter can be said to be an expression of the feeling of superiority over another person or situation. this form of humour provides enjoyment and amusement for self and others through the means of suppressing and lowering other people who are in a weaker situation (keithspiegel, 1972). the incongruity theory of humour is possibly the one that is most widely used in describing humour. the theory proposes that someone laughs at something because of its impropriety when compared to the conventional patterns of things. consequently, this difference can lead to amusement. the relief theory of humour facilitates the relieving of tension and nervous energies caused by laughter and mirth. the basic principle of the relief theory is that laughter supplies psychological support, reduces pressure and provides supreme energy whilst caught in a nervous situation. consequently, the usage of humour in tense conditions helps to release the nervousness contained within the person thereby assisting the person to return to a stable condition after a struggles, stress and tension (raskin, 1985). past studies (caesilia, 2015; murata, 2014; rochmawati, 2012) looking at humour have covered a variety of contexts, such as, workplace, jokes, and sitcoms. these studies have focused on similar issues, focusing on how grice’s (1975) maxims contribute to the humorous effects. rochmawati (2012) explored humour strategies in 30 short jokes published in the readers’ digest section for world’s funniest jokes. it was noted that the speakers in the jokes had also employed irony, absurdity, exaggeration or simple lies to cause misunderstandings, thereby, violating grice’s maxims. in another study focusing on american sitcoms, latan (2013) investigated the humorous language used in the “the big bang theory”. likewise, it was discovered that the humour was created due to the nonobservance of all the five maxims proposed by grice (1975). apparently, the audience’s amusement could be traced to the flouting of grice’s maxim which totaled 66.86% of the time while infringing and violating of grice’s maxim accounted for only 16.57% and 13.71%, respectively. slightly different from the findings of latan (2013), the outcome noted in caesilia’s (2015) study found that humour was the result of the non-observance of four of grice’s (1975) maxims and the most important way of failing grice’s (1975) maxims so as to create humour was through violating grice’s maxim rather than flouting. previous studies (caesilia, 2015; latan, 2013) also indicated that humour was not always created through the non-observance of all the five types of grice’s (1975) maxims. this has been confirmed by latan (2013) who noted the non-observance of all the five maxims whereas caesilia (2015) noted only four. while latan (2013) observed flouting as the most commonly used strategy to create humour, caesilia (2015) noted that it was violating the maxims and this implies that situations and contexts of the sitcoms may be two possible factors that affect this difference. in addition, caesilia (2015) also noted that opting out a maxim in the situation comedy does not appear to be humorous. in fact, when this occurs, it appears to be a disappointment or curiosity for the hearer. replicating what previous studies (sri, 2006; latan, 2013; caesilia, 2015) have done, this study is an attempt to shed light on the creation of humour in one chinese sitcom by studying the relationship between humour and the non-observance of grice’s (1975) maxims to see which of these was more commonly used. zhao xue & kuang ching hei grice’s maxims in humour: the case of “home with kids” 52 method the sitcom selected for collecting data in this study is “home with kids (season 4)” which was released to the audience in mainland china in 2007. as a popular sitcom, the show was released for several seasons and the one selected for the current study comprise the most recent season shown in the tv sitcom, amongst the four seasons of “home with kids” (at the point of this study) and it includes 67 episodes with each episode lasting about 25 minutes, thus, 67 episodes would comprise a total of 1675 minutes. for the purpose of this study, a total of 96 conversations occurring in the living room in “home with kids (season 4)” were extracted for analysis. the following are reasons justifying the selection: firstly, all the examples chosen for analysis are included in the laugh tracks which had been inserted into the tv series. the laugh tracks indicate where the humour in the sitcom occurs, thus, it is considered as one of the unique features of sitcoms (brock, 2008). in this regard, the laugh track is treated as the criterion to determine the verbal humour (koestler, 1993). secondly, these humorous conversations tend to occur in the living room of the sitcom and it appears that this setting carries the highest frequency of occurrences (62.7%) in the sitcom. creswell (2012) says that the larger the sample, the more reliable the results, therefore, selecting the humorous conversations that had occurred in the living room as data can make the results of this study more reliable. for the purpose of analysis, only portion of the data are presented in the study to illustrate the non-observance (e.g. flouting, violating, infringing, opting out, suspending) of grice’s (1975) maxims. this study is developed based on the following steps: step 1: firstly, download all the 67 episodes of the sitcom from www.youku.com via internet. then watch all the 67 episodes of the chinese sitcom “home with kids (season 4)” which have been downloaded. next, identify the parts where the laugh track exist and then take note of the conversations that occurs regardless of where the setting (living room, kitchen, bedroom etc) is. since most of the conversations that occurred in the living room were accompanied by laugh tracks as well as subtitles, the conversations were thus, selected and then manually transcribed until all the 67 episodes were completed. transcriptions were done verbatim but where there are some nonverbal actions, these will be indicated in brackets. step 2: secondly, after the data were identified, selected and manually transcribed in chinese, the transcriptions were compared to the conversations again to ensure accuracy. these chinese conversations were then translated into english with microsoft word. as mentioned earlier, since situational humour (koestler, 1993) almost has no influence on language, this paper only focuses on the portrayal of verbal linguistic humour (koestler, 1993). step 3: thirdly, in order to validate the data to ensure that it is reliable, all the transcriptions were further verified by a bilingual person, who understands chinese and english well. in order to identify the speakers’ nonobservance of grice’s maxims, data were analyzed via the five types of non-observance of grice’s (1975) cooperative principle which encompass: flouting, violating, infringing, opting out, and suspending of grice’s maxims. following the analysis, a discussion is provided, linking the findings to previous studies in order to better understand how humour was created in “home with kids (season 4)”. data were then accounted for based on occurrence of frequency before being presented in percentages. results and discussion flouting grice’s maxims among the occurrences noted in the analysis, it appears that flouting occurred more often than the other non-observances of grice’s (1975) maxims. example #1: (episode 38, home with kids) context: s1 (liu xing), s2 (xia yu), and d (xia xue) played badminton together, but d always couldn't get the ball and this made s1 and s2 feel disappointed. when they reached home, s1 and s2 complained about d. turn 1: 刘星：小雪，你这协调性可真够 呛。你别老闷屋里看书了，你多运动运 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 53 动。 (s1: xiao xue (d), look at your poor physical coordination. you should not be staying indoors and just reading books. you should do more sports.) turn 2: 夏雨：女生嘛，小脑不发达。 (s2: cerebellum of girls are not so advanced when compared to boys.) turn 3: 夏雪：小脑不发达也比你没有大脑 强。（laugh track） (d: my cerebellum does not develop as well as the cerebellum of boys. however, it is still better than you who don’t have a brain.） in example 1, in turn 3, d’s utterance obviously flouted the maxim of quality through expressing that s2 has no brains, which is untrue. it is clear that d is really not good at exercising, as is noted in turn 1. therefore, in turn 2, s2 teased d, saying that her cerebellum is not completely developed. this was used as a hint to d to suggest that she is a stupid person. therefore, in turn 3, d fought back to save face by satirizing s2 as having no brains. as we all know, s2, as a person, could not have survived if he had no brains. hence, in turn 3, d’s untrue words flouted the maxim of quality by delivering a sarcasm. this flouting generated a conversational implicature which suggests that s2 is more stupid than d, thereby making the audience laughed. brumark (2006) noted that amongst teenagers, flouting is often used by adolescents either through ironic speech or through teasing others, as a means to create humorous conversations. this observation is also similar to the example highlighted by caesilia (2015) who noted that the teacher in her study also used sarcasm to regulate the student’s behavior by flouting the maxim of quality. example #2: (episode 27, home with kids) context: while s2 (xia yu) was doing homework in his room, he was required to see f (xia donghai) playing marbles in the living room. turn 1: 夏雨：爸，您快点弹吧? (s2: dad, can you play the marble right now?) turn 2: 夏东海：哎，好，看着啊。那个弹 之前，爸爸必须再跟你说几句啊。虽然爸 爸是当年人见人夸的"弹球大王"，但是毕竟 这么多年不练了，手可能有些生了，爸爸 就不再给你再现当年百发百中的惊人场面 了。就是爸爸弹三次，如果有一次弹中爸 爸就算赢。就是让你感受一下爸爸当年的 风采就行了啊。(laugh track) (f: ah, ok, look. before playing, dad has something to say. although as i was crowned the "king of playing marbles" during my younger years, and because i haven't practiced for years, your father now cannot fling the marbles accurately or successfully every time. so, give me three tries, and as long as i fling one marble accurately, it will be counted as my win. i just want to show you how good your father used to be in those days.) turn 3: 夏雨：爸，我想问问你这弹球是用 嘴弹还是用手弹呢。 (s2: dad, i just want to ask if you are playing marbles with your hands or with your mouth.) in example 2, the flouting of the maxim of quantity occurred in turn 2 where f said too many words. in turn 1, when s2 asked f to play the marble “right now”, all m needed to reply was “ok”, which would have been sufficient for an answer. however, in turn 2, f went into a long-winded utterance about how invincible he was at playing marbles during his younger years and he went on to boast about his being the "king of playing marbles" and yet he was also making excuses about why he was not able to show the amazing skills “right now”. probably to avoid his incompetence in playing marbles, f tried to negotiate with s2 in turn 2 by saying “so, give me three tries, and as long as i fling one marble accurately, it will be counted as my win” as a way of saving his own face. thus, by turn 3, s2 showed his intense impatience with f who provided too much unnecessary and redundant information by satirizing f. in turn 2, f said too many words and this caused humour to be created as it also carried a conversational implicature which suggests that f’s skill of playing marbles was not as excellent as he claimed. this explains why f zhao xue & kuang ching hei grice’s maxims in humour: the case of “home with kids” 54 offered so much explanation as a means of preventing s2 from laughing at him. in wang’s (2014) research which examined how the characters in the american sitcom “friends” flouted the four maxims of the cooperative principle and how the humorous effect was derived, it was mentioned that the characters flouted the maxim of quantity by offering too much information when giving answers to others’ questions. the abundant information had led to the humorous effects. wang (2014) also noted that sometimes, more information does not guarantee a better understanding for the hearer. in the context of the present study, f’s abundant explanation in turn 2 was unnecessary and it caused impatience in s2 impatient. thus, it flouted the maxim of quantity and created humour. violating grice’s maxims violating grice’s (1975) maxims was noted to be the second common according to the occurrence of frequency. example #3: (episode 11, home with kids) context: m (liu mei) bought a great calligrapher's work as a decoration. d (xia xue), s1 (liu xing), and s2 (xia yu), found that calligraphy was terrible and laughed at the calligrapher. turn 1: 刘梅：自己不会欣赏, 就在这瞎狂. 我告诉你们, 欣赏墨宝也是要学的要品味的, 要胸怀的。这里面包含着很多容量的呢。 (m: you don't know how to appreciate art and you act like one who knows. let me tell you this, only those who have knowledge, great taste, and an open mind are able to appreciate the beauty of calligraphy. this calligraphy contains lots of meaning.） turn 2: 夏雪：妈，您懂啊？ (d: so mom, do you know how to appreciate it?） turn 3: 刘梅：当然了。 (m: of course.） turn 4: 夏雪：那您懂，你说说它哪好？ (d: since you know how to, could you please enlighten us on its beauty?) turn 5: 刘梅：它......多好啊。(laugh track） (m: it is ......sooooo beautiful.） this example demonstrates the violating of the maxim of quantity in turn 5 where m provided lesser information than required. in turn 4, d’s question to m was “could you please enlighten us on its (calligraphy) beauty?” expecting m to elaborate on how she found calligraphy to be an art. however, in return, d received an unsatisfying answer from m. in turn 5, all m said was “it is ......soooo beautiful” instead of giving enough details which can explain why and how she appreciated the calligrapher's work, instead, her response was totally different. as an example, m could have said, “the calligraphy is vigorous and forceful” as one reason in expressing the beauty of calligraphy but nevertheless, in turn 5, m purposely provided less information in reply to d’s question. this, therefore, created humour and made the audience laughed because now they are doubting if m really knew how to appreciate the beauty of calligraphy. in this case, m may have just wanted to save face as a “knowledgeable” mother. likewise, rochmawati (2012) found that in the jokes published in readers’ digest, humour was created when people violated the maxim of quantity and did not provide what the addressees were expecting. in most cases, humour is usually contained in the speakers’ absurd responses. in this regard, m’s absurd utterance in turn 5 violated the maxim of quantity because she offered too little information about the appreciation of calligraphy, thereby creating humour. example #4: (episode 61, home with kids) context: m (liu mei) was suffering from menopause, so she was easily irritated and made angry. one day, she quarreled with a man outside. upon returning home, she complained to f (xia donghai), d (xia xue), and s1 (liu xing). m hoped that her husband and children could do something as an act of justice for her. turn 1: 刘梅：刘星，这个时候你是不是应 该站起来，跑出去，为妈妈打抱不平啊,说 “谁啊谁啊谁啊，谁欺负我妈了”？ (m: liu xing (s1), shouldn’t you stand up for me now and run out, saying “who? who? english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 55 who bullied my mom?”) turn 2: 刘星：我觉得我还是回屋复习一会 吧。(laugh track） (s1: i think it's better for me to stay at room and do some revision.) turn 3: 刘梅：小雪，你是不是应该替妈妈 说几句话啊？ (m: xiao xue (d), shouldn't you speak up for your mom?) turn 4:夏雪：嗯，我觉得我也应该回屋看 会书了。(laugh track) (d: eh, i think that i should stay in my room and read books.) turn 5: 刘梅：夏东海，你老婆在外面可是 受人欺负了...... (m: xia donghai (f), your wife was bullied by a man outside.....) turn 6: 夏东海：这电视看时间久了，我发 现脑袋特别疼。真的，我回屋躺一会。脑 袋怎么回事? (laugh track) (f: i spent too much time watching tv, and i feel i have a terrible headache. yes, i think i had better return to my room and lay in bed for a while. what's wrong with my head?) this example showed how the maxim of relation could be violated by uttering about other topics as a means of evade the current situation. from the context, it is noted that m was bullied by a man outside, so she had hoped that her family could support her. in turn 1, m was questioning s1 for not backing her when she was bullied. s1 chose to give an irrelevant reply which is that he had better return to his room and review the lessons, as shown in turn 2. then, m turned to d for comfort. like s1, d also replied that she had to study, in turn 4, and she too ran away because she clearly knew that she did not want to irritate m especially when she was in such a bad mood. when m’s attempt to get d failed, she pinned her hope on her husband, f. similarly, being afraid of m’s bad temper at this juncture, f, in turn 6, also made up an excuse to evade the situation. it seems clear that all the family members avoided m by using ridiculous reasons at the same time, and this provided amusement to the audience. in the example given, f, d, and s1 violated the maxim of relation by talking about other affairs when answering m’s question. rochmawati (2012) stated that violating the maxim of relation was employed by making irrelevant statements and changing the topic and speakers would use the strategy to escape from an embarrassing situation or from answering some awkward questions. in the context of this example, it appears that f, d, and s1 answered m but they purposely provided irrelevant answers so as to avoid answering m’s embarrassing question as well as to avoid annoying her. this had thus created a humorous effect for the audience. infringing grice’s maxims the third most common non-observance of grice’s (1975) maxims was infringing grice’s maxims. example #5: (episode 14, home with kids) context: s1 (liu xing) bought a bird then persisted in teaching his bird to say “mommy”. turn 1: 刘星: 妈。妈。妈。妈。 (s1: mommy. mommy. mommy. mommy.) turn 2:刘梅：哎。干嘛？你叫我干嘛？ (m: hey, what is the matter with you? why are you calling me?) turn 3:刘星：我没叫您，我叫它“妈”呢。 (laugh track) (s1: i didn’t call you, i am calling it (the bird) “mommy”.) turn 4: 刘梅：叫什么? (m: what?) turn 5: 刘星：不是, 我让他叫我“妈”。 (laugh track) (s1: no, i mean, i am training it (the bird) to call me “mommy”.) in this example, the humorous effect was created in turn 3 and turn 5. here, s1 infringed the maxim of quality because he was nervous and excited at the same time and so he was unable to say something coherently whilst answering his mother, m. in turn 3, s1 replied that he called the bird “mommy” and in turn 5, s1 replied that he wanted the bird to call him “mommy”. this ridiculous answer made the audience laughed, because we all know that s1 is a male person who therefore, cannot become a mother for a bird. s1 was unable to speak zhao xue & kuang ching hei grice’s maxims in humour: the case of “home with kids” 56 clearly or make his point clear because he was a little afraid of his mother. this was the main reason that made him nervous. thus, s1 had infringed the maxim of quality to create the humorous effect. caesilia (2015) had also concluded that when a speaker becomes too excited (in the sitcom), the speaker tends to infringe the maxims. comparison of the non-observance of grice’s maxims in total, this study was able to extract 96 humorous examples from “home with kids (season 4)”. based on the analysis of the nonobservance of grice’s (1975) maxims, the findings are further divided into the respective categories, as shown in table 1. table 1. comparison of non-observance of grice’s maxims in “home with kids” four maxims flouting violating infringing opting out suspendin g non-observance number percentage the maxim of quantity 5 3 0 0 0 8 8.3% the maxim of quality 26 23 2 0 0 51 53.1% the maxim of relation 8 8 0 0 0 16 16.7% the maxim of manner 10 11 0 0 0 21 21.9% total 49 45 2 0 0 96 100% from the table, it is noted that amongst the five types of non-observance of grice’s (1975) maxims, flouting is the most commonly used, hence, the most important strategy used to create humour as almost half or 49% of the data consisted of this. the second and third strategy used are violating and infringing. opting out and suspending of grice’s maxims were not detected in the chinese sitcom, “home with kids” (season 4) for creating humour. based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that out of the five types of nonobservance of grice’s (1975) maxims, only three were used to create humour in the chinese sitcom, “home with kids” (season 4). it appears that flouting, violating, and infringing the maxims contributed in creating the humorous effect for the sitcom whilst opting out and suspending the maxims were not employed by the characters at all. the findings of this study differ from the outcomes noted by latan (2013) who stated that flouting and infringing grice’s (1975) maxims played an important role in american sitcom. nevertheless, the latter work of caesilia’s (2015) appears to share some similarity with the present study as it too noted that flouting and violating the maxims played an important role in creating humour in the sitcom she studied whilst infringing had little influence on creating humour. it is further noted that caesilia (2015) had also asserted that opting out of grice’s maxims did not appear to be humorous for the hearer which was not noted in the current study. according to sri (2006), suspending grice’s (1975) maxims means concealing the truth owing to the cultural code and it rarely occurred. likewise, in the chinese sitcom, “home with kids (season 4)”, suspending the maxims was not detected. conclusion this study has highlighted the outcome noted from investigating how humour was created in english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 57 a popular chinese sitcom, “home with kids” (season 4). data were analysed according to grice’s (1975) maxims to see if all the five types of non-observance were employed by the characters to create humour. unlike previous studies which noted four types of non-observance, the current study detected only three types of non-observance: flouting, violating, and infringing of grice’s (1975) maxims, which play an important role in creating the humorous effect for the sitcom. the chinese sitcom in study, “home with kids (season 4)” is a popular entertainment programme for the mainland chinese viewers. it is a sitcom that is loaded with humorous language, cultural knowledge and social values, and so it contains the ideal material that can be used to enhance both language and culture learning for non-native mandarin learners. in this regard, the chinese sitcom has the following advantage to offer learners of mandarin as a second or foreign language. first, language and culture were interwoven in the sitcom so it is a good source of material to use for helping to develop learners’ communicative and linguistic competence. second, the sitcom is immersed in the chinese (mandarin) language, it reflects real-life situations and so when used as a resource for learning, the outcome not only relaxes learners, thereby, lowering their affective filters, the sitcom can also offer learners a more authentic language-learning atmosphere. it is also an interesting language-learning context with interesting conversations and this can enable learners to become more competent in using the target language. as pointed out by shifman (2007), humour could be a key to comprehend social and cultural processes, and by incorporating humour into the learning of mandarin as a second language for non-native mandarin learners, the benefits gained are not only cultural, social but also personal. references berger, a. a. (1976). anatomy of the joke. journal of communication, 26(3), 113-115. brock, a. (2008). humour, jokes and irony versus mocking, gossip and black humour. handbook of interpersonal communication, 2, 541-566. brumark, a. (2006). non-observance of gricean maxims in family dinner table conversation. journal of pragmatics, 38, 1206–1238. caesilia, c. (2015). an analysis of non-observance maxims in humorous conversation in how i met your mother season 2. unpublished master’s thesis. department of language and arts education, sanata dharma university. creswell, j. w. (2012). educational research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th ed.). boston: pearson. grice, h. p. (1975). logic and conversation. cambridge: cambridge university press. keith-spiegel, p. (1972). early conceptions of humour: varieties and issues. in goldstein, j. h., & mcghee, p. e. (eds.), the psychology of humour: theoretical perspectives and empiricial issues (pp. 4-34). united states of america: academic press. koestler, a. (1993). humour and wit. in robert, m. (eds.), encyclopedia britannica (pp. 684-685). chicago: encyclopedia britannica. latan, c. (2013). a study of non-observance of grice’s cooperative principle found in humor discourse: a case analysis of the situation comedy the big bang theory. humanities journal, 20(2), 223-249. lu, w. f. (2014). a pragmatic approach in humour and non-observance of cp in sitcom--home with kids as an example. unpublished master’s thesis. department of english: shanghai international studies university. murata, k. (2014). an empirical cross-cultural study of humour in business meetings in new zealand and japan. journal of pragmatics, 60, 251-265. raskin, v. (1985). semantic mechanisms of humour. dordrecht-boston-lancaster: dordrecht reidel. rochmawati, d. (2012). violation of grice’s cooperative principles as humour strategies in short-joke text. literature, culture and language teaching, 1, 108-117. rogerson, p. (2007). humour in business: a doubleedged sword: a study of humour and style shifting in intercultural business meetings. journal of pragmatics, 39, 4-28. shifman, l. (2007). humour in the age of digital reproduction: continuity and change in internetbased comic text. international journal of communication, 1(1), 23. sri, r. p (2006). an analysis of humour types and grice’s maxim in the situation comedy friends episode of the one with that could have been.unpublished master’s thesis. department of english: sebelas maret university. shu, q. h. (2012). an analysis of humour in the big bang theory from pragmatic perspectives. theory and practice in language studies, 2(6), 11851190. thomas, j. (1995). meaning in interaction: an introduction to pragmatics. harlow: pearson education. zhao xue & kuang ching hei grice’s maxims in humour: the case of “home with kids” 58 wang, l. h. (2014). an analysis of verbal humour in friends from the perspective of cooperative principle. overseas english, 2, 279-282. wu, q. (2005). the cooperative principle and humour in sitcoms. journals of southern yangtze university (humanities & social sciences), 3(2), 107-110. zhen, x. (2013). contextual dimensions in interactional humour: how humour is practiced in selected american and chinese situation comedies. journal of pragmatics, 60, 24-35. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1013 new-word formation and social disruption on metaverse ervina c. m. simatupang english department, faculty of humanities universitas widyatama email: ervina.simatupang@widyatama.ac.id heri heryono english department, faculty of humanities universitas widyatama email: heri.heryono@widyatama.ac.id apa citation: simatupang, e. c. m., & heryono, h. (2022). new-word formation and social disruption on metaverse. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1013-1022. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6722. received: 29-06-2022 accepted: 22-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction interaction refers to an integral part of human life. one of the fields within linguistics and engineering on how the interaction between humans and computer is human and computer interaction (hci). it refers to the process of communication between humans and computer turns to be an essential part to learn, both in linguistics and engineering. currently computers have been involved in all fields, the goal is to help human limitations in carrying out activities in the hope of being more effective and efficient. when we use a computer, it means we are having a dialogue and interacting with a computer through commands that are understood by both parties. the technology is a compounding of the real world with the virtual world (virtual world) involving linguistics aspect beyond its interaction. by combining these two areas, it is hoped that users can better understand the information provided. by applying of this interaction technology make people more interactive with conditions surrounding when the user immerse on it. communication using internet technology is an activity that can't be avoided, especially for the younger generation and it affects their writing and reading culture (syahrudin & prasandha, 2021). various kinds of applications that have used technology augmented reality, among others, in the health sector, defense, education and history; furthermore, those applications altogether coalesce in the word of metaverse. it leads to a virtual community world built to be connected to each other. in this community, people can meet, work, play as in the real world with the assisted of augmented reality (ar) and virtual reality (vr) technology. in fact, there are not only crucial factors for language development built in metaverse, but also there are sustainability of a community usages. it then turns to be cultivated abstract: the virtual environments have provided users with varied degrees of digital transformation, despite the fact that users are non-permanent and unconnected. to further assist the digital transition in every element of physical life, the term metaverse has been coined. it cannot be avoided that language, furthermore linguistics, has involvement to the word framing and word creation within metaverse. this research is purposed to determine some typical new-word formations or neologisms that impact to the establishment of terminologies within metaverse. on the other hand, cultural aspect also becomes the concern towards this new universe; since people need to be well-informed in the term of consequence and benefits. the method of the research applied qualitative method and distributional method by segmenting immediate constituents techniques; which means the technique of dividing a construction of direct elements which form the construction. three main theories used in this paper are neologism (kilmer, 2020), social disruption (kumbara et al., 2020) and metaverse (mystakidis, 2022). the paper puts three different terminologies that are analyzed using linguistic and cultural perspective. the result of the result is three words; persistent virtual world (pvw), blockchain and nft that massively arise in the metaverse terminologies. based on the analysis, it can be concluded that those terminologies are categorized to morphological and semantic neologism; which also includes abbreviation and broadening. the notion of an immersive internet as a massive, unified, persistent, and shared realm is at the core of metaverse. keywords: metaverse; morphological; new-word formation; semantics; social disruption. ervina c. m. simatupang & heri heryono new-word formation and social disruption on metaverse 1014 language use by engaging a community discourse (mendrofa, 2018). metaverse is meant to be a social experience. the great thing about metaverse is that all the users can communicate with people who are not in the same physical space. it creates the concept of a metaverse sound like something that can unite the entire world by transcending geographical and political boundaries. but it also feels very utopian since even in real life, people don't have the superpower of universal understanding (mystakidis, 2022). once the language change and shift, it lasts to the platform attached. language change occurs because of the new language to change the previous language (freytagh-loringhoven, 2021). the ease of using language in recent communication as well as the sophistication of the way it works; it is not only a way of verbal communication, but also form a new way of communication even variety of new languages (butar, 2021). the uniqueness of language usage does not exist in the peculiarities of the medium, but the variation of the form used concerns the transmission of modalities which in this case are speaking versus writing, participants' conversations, style, media used and culture. in the use of language in the internet that most often occurs is written communication compared to auditory (zhu, 2019). netspeak refers to a variety phenomenon skill used in written communication on the internet, for phenomena where language users in social media write down what is pronounced; it is called ecrononciation. it comes from french, which means a word formation of a words combination ecrire (writing) and prononciation (pronunciation). this term refers not to the structure of the sentence but to the writing of the words, phrases, and clauses used (kadwa & alshenqeeti, 2020). the ecrononciation phenomenon shows a linguistic change that gives rise to variations in typical language which includes zeroization which connects to apheresis or omission of the initial phoneme or initial syllable of a word. the second zeroization is syncope or the omission of a phoneme or syllable in the middle of a word; and the third is apocalypse or omission of phonemes or syllables at the end of a word. zeroization refers to the removal of phonemic sounds as a result of efforts to save or economize pronunciation. this event is normal occurs in the speech of languages in the world, including indonesian, origin alone does not interfere with the process and purpose of communication. this event continues develop because it has been secretly supported and agreed upon by speaking community (julita, 2021). abbreviation exists in metaverse or internet includes acronym and shortening. for certain terms or expressions, people recently put abbreviation to give more effective ways of conveying. some of abbreviations are fomo (fear of missing out) or yolo (you only live once). others are words that have been stretched into more parts of speech than originally intended -like when "trend" became a verb ("it's trending worldwide"). others still have emerged as we adapt our language to new technologies; think "crowd-funding," "selfie," "cyber-bullying." (dilla & agustina, 2021). in addition to naming, language plays an important role in the use of internet interaction (social media, online game and global trading). the wide spread of new words requires apps; thus, language would be one of the factors that make this happen. this is because users must understand the features available on social media and that understanding can be obtained through language that can be recognized by its users. the key to a new word's success is its longevity. for the dictionary to recognize the word, it must be used by the general population and kept in use. the words must have been in use for at least five years to be considered. when words "lol" become commonly used and understood, they are eligible for a spot in the dictionary. later on, there is new word formation that refers to a word or phrase that is created to define a new object or new ideas that were not known before. in other hand, it is also well-known as neologism; which is the formation of new words or languages that form new meanings and definitions of language. dominant neologism type used in interface (view) of internet and translation procedures is commonly emerged along with user’s requirement to name something that has not appeared before. the type of neologism with a new sense of 'new meaning' is the most dominant type used in interfaces on internet. while the most dominant translation procedure used is by transfer (hardini et al., 2019). communication processes do not directly affect in language used by internet users. even more, many of these apps dominated by the use of written language. this also creates a new space in creation of words used in internet. words that have been these creations form new words or what in linguistic terms is called as a neologism; it is individual creativity that produces neologism (olojede et al., 2018). the process of forming the word refers to as metathesis. based english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1015 on this point of view, it appears that language basically provides space in the creation of new words, especially in metaverse which users come from all over the world. neologism refers to a relative unit that can only be identified when it is placed in a certain time period, discursive context, and perceptive pronunciation (asif et al., 2020). meanwhile, communication can only be achieved if the speaker can convey his message well and the listener can understand the message of the speaker’s utterance (simatupang & fathonah, 2020). neologisms not only have linguistic function as filling lexical gaps. it puts forward two other functions of neologisms. these functions are cultural and functional functions economical. in carrying out cultural functions, these neologisms become traces of popular culture; meanwhile, from the economic function, neologisms in the field of information technology and computers are a means to make it easier for industry to market products. as for the point of view of the language industry and translation, neologisms deal with a tool for industries to increase the value of the services. neologism is an effort to enrich and update lexicon system in a language. furthermore, the emergence of neologisms leads to change language (plauc & clinic, 2021). morpho-semantic neologism. a morphosemantic neologism is the type of neologism that is made influence both form and meaning. there is a change in shape and the meaning of the word resulting from this process. in the process, there are several procedures that can be applied. each procedure can produce different shape characteristics. forms can be in the form of basic words, derivatives, and compound words. morphological neologism. this term refers to shape-shifting neologisms the new one does not affect the meaning. one of formation procedure that can used to generate types this neologism is a sound creation (phoneme). borrowing neologism. borrowing neologisms refers to a type of neologisms obtained by borrowing concepts and forms from foreign words. in indonesian process, this is called word matching; it is a match foreign shapes or concepts that correspond to characteristics of the indonesian language. this process can be carried out through absorption, translation, or both. in this research, the borrowing neologisms are dominant that can be found in the entire data analysis. semantic neologism. this is a type of neologisms formed from the process of meaning. in this case, the type of neologism can be formed in three different ways; broadening meaning, narrowing meaning, and change of meaning of the base form (change the meaning of the base form or also called shifting of meaning). functional neologism. it refers to neologisms formed inflected and influenced by grammatical function. this type of neologism is more visible its existence in the context of the use of the word in sentence. therefore, this type of neologism is not one of indicator in this research. the classification of types of neologisms above has shown various procedures that can be used in the process neologism formation. however, every language has different characteristics, including in the process formation he said. therefore, it is necessary to do a comparison to the process of forming neologisms as mentioned above by a known forming process in particular language (source language). explicitly, there are four parameters to identify neologisms; diachronic parameters, lexicographic parameters, system instability parameters and psychological parameters. first, the diachronic parameter is a neologism if it emerged recently. these parameters use a time perspective to identify a neologism. second, the lexicographic parameter is a neologism if it is not already in the dictionary. these parameters refer to all words that are not institutionalized in the dictionary. third, systematic instability is a neologism if it shows signs of instability formal. this parameter refers to the use of neologisms, either in spoken and written form. fourth, psychological parameter is a neologism if speakers of that language consider it as a new lingual unit. these parameters tend to be very subjective because it is more personal (colina, 2021). in the current era of digital disruption, globalization cannot be separated from global technology as a complex or multidimensional phenomenon. this can be seen from the definition of globalization put forward as a worldwide spread of customs, expansion of relationships across continents, the organization of social life on a global scale, and growth of a shared global consciousness (plauc & clinic, 2021). disruption refers to a condition of innovation causes massive or fundamental alterations into a new system. in the social sector, this is certainly a formidable challenge where society must be adaptive continuously in order to remain relevant to the changing times. even incumbent societies can be affected by this change. this could be due to large cultures and customs losing their ervina c. m. simatupang & heri heryono new-word formation and social disruption on metaverse 1016 “market” as a result of technological advances. they are not ready and also have not adapted to this disruption and condition (karman, 2017). cultural development must have a strategy concrete since its first design. cultural development must have a dual strategy, microscopic and telescopic. microscopic means that cultural development strategies must have attention to detail and scientific attention to the infinitely small. at the same time, it must be proportionate to attention to infinitely great things. microscopic means that cultural development must enter into the recesses of consciousness and the depths of human life. likewise, telescopic cultural development must not ignore big things, both at the ideological and social level as well as infrastructure so that the nation's cultural character becomes the world's attention. above all the context, when ethnic identification and local culture are becoming more widespread, including when it emerges “new” concepts that define for example local communities and indigenous peoples (indigenous people) in the concept of anthropology, an empathic and advocacy perspective must be created. those communities turn to be a minority group that should receive special attention and affirmative, now or later. their existence is still not easy to identify comprehensively from the aspect of technology emerging. quoting the term of french existentialist philosopher, jean paul satre, this “ethnic minority” group still does not have adequate epistemological concepts; they are still grouped as entomologists or in other word insects, which is segmented animals that disturb the existence of other ecosystems, therefore deserve to be destroyed (syahrudin & prasandha, 2021). the further impact of metaverse to minority is the process of duplicating or appropriating the colonial culture as a key marker of imitation. while they are still local people, the culture that carrying it is an imported culture. they then perform mimicry; trying to make sure that the idealized import culture is no longer outside of itself, but has coalesced as cultural identity. there are five dimensions conceptual or "landscape" that is formed and is at the same time the characteristics of global cultural flows. those five “landscapes” and characteristics of the global cultural currents are as follows: ethnoscape (movement of people from one country to another such as tourists, immigrants, refugees, labor work), technoscape (technological developments that are now flowing at a rapid rate high through national boundaries), mediascape (the electronic ability to disseminate information to various parts of the world). finanscape is the financial aspect or money which is difficult to predict in the era of globalization, and ideoscape (related to political issues, such as freedom, democracy, sovereignty, welfare, human rights, state ideologies, and social movements (lin, 2020)). this is in line with the process of alteration in various aspects of people lives and culture; as a result of globalization which people should draw on. hence, many aspects of socio-cultural life experience change; especially language. the term metaverse emerged from the science fiction novel snow crash by neal stephenson published in 1992 and ernest cline's novel ready player one launched in 2011. in both novels, the metaverse is described as a space that connected the virtual world and augmented reality (ar). etymologically, metaverse comes from the word "meta" which means beyond and "verse" means the universe; so, metaverse means beyond the universe. the final form for many platforms exist in metaverse is dao or decentralized autonomous organizations. in other words, the space beyond metaverse is entirely governed by the community inside or of users; it is similar with a real life electorate. as for the user, the metaverse which is based on decentralized autonomous organizations allows users to create personal projects. the metaverse works basically as the same as in the real world. users are required to log in to the virtual world by using technology that supports augmented reality (ar) and virtual reality (vr). recently, the only device needed to enter the metaverse is a vr headset; oculus, google vr or sinta vr. after entering the virtual world, users can carry out various activities in the metaverse just like in the real world as described before. metaverse is based on technologies that enable multisensory interactions with virtual environments, digital objects and even people as the users. the representational fidelity of the cross reality (xr) system is ensured by stereoscopic displays that are able to accurately convey the perception of depth (indarta et al., 2022). users are allowed to stay in vr environments temporarily. users may activate their entire bodies, including their hands and feet. the ability to have an embodied digital identity that allows users to feel and interact with the environment and virtual objects from different perspectives, like the third person perspective, creates the psychological sense of being present in a space english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1017 (mystakidis, 2022). this virtual reality universe was created through computer graphics; and users from all around the world can access and connect with it through vr. the basic of the metaverse is a protocol called the street, which connects different virtual neighborhoods and locations. this analog concept is similar to the information super-highway; it is especially in the education system (indarta et al., 2022). users create avatars in the metaverse that can be configured to look however they want. although stevenson's metaverse is digital and synthetic, experiences in it can have a real impact on the physical self (endarto & martadi, 2022). metaverse market is considered to be potential, especially for some developing countries. however, the successful adoption of virtual world technology depends on digital infrastructure, including the development of the fifth generation or 5g internet networks. metaverse is the latest version of virtual reality (vr) without a computer. users can enter the virtual world using a device in the form of a headset or glasses based on augmented reality (ar) or vr. figure 1. metaverse scope metaverse is a 3d virtual shared world where users can access a wide range of virtual and augmented reality services to make their experiences more immersive. as people shift their activities online more often during the coronavirus pandemic, these platforms have become popular (nextrope, 2022). the capability in exploring, integrating and reusing of relevant scientific outputs from previous studies leads to critical assumption, especially to innovative research (anderson & rainie, 2022). the most essential information regulations are addressed to shape the future of community and societies (in common); yet, that information has become the most significant resource for the future modern societies. by the appropriate processing of information, various strategies may appear for every sector of human requirements (rotolo et al., 2017). since its inception as a computergenerated reality, the metaverse has been described by a wide range of notions. three stages of metaverse growth are represented in the concept of digital twins. it is where the real environments are digitized and hence have the ability to reflect changes in their virtual counterparts on a regular basis. digital twins generate digital replicas of actual settings as virtual worlds, and users with their avatars work on new creations in such virtual worlds as digital natives, according to the physical world (wang et al., 2019). figure 2. digital twins-native continuum users in metaverse communicate using digital avatars; either the immersive avatar or traditional avatar. since its inception as a computergenerated reality, metaverse has been described by a wide range of notions. in parallel to human physical reality, metaverse will emerge as a massive entity. it is expected that by surveying recent work across diverse technologies and ecosystems, users have sparked a broader conversation among metaverse community. method the research applies qualitative approach in the area of morpho-semantics, cultural studies and social behavior towards internet or metaverse. as research procedures, it generates data descriptive in the form of written words or speech from people and behavior that can be observed (mohajan, 2018). the data observed are in form of words; written word used as a language symptom. morpho-semantics approach is an appropriate tool to explain neologism. data collection in this research was implementing documentation techniques. the method used in this research is a distributional method by segmenting immediate constituents techniques which means the technique of dividing a construction of direct elements which form the construction. as for data analysis procedures in this study including: identification. the process requires tagging or marking the data as neologisms by using lexicographic parameters and the social ervina c. m. simatupang & heri heryono new-word formation and social disruption on metaverse 1018 fabrication supporting the appearance of neologisms. classification. it refers to the process of grouping data based on the type of neologism found in metaverse; data classification will be adapted to the nature of qualitative research. analysis. it is the process of describing the types of neologisms and describing the reason of their emerging in metaverse. after the data is collected, it is then processed and classified according to the research requirements. data in interpretive qualitative research (interpretation) is descriptive, not numeric. data can be in the form of symptoms, events or events that later will be analyzed in the form of categories. qualitative research is also not intended to draw conclusions on a population, but to study the characteristics under study. the purpose of this qualitative research is to understand condition of a context by leading to the description in detail and in depth regarding the portrait of conditions in a natural context (natural setting), about what is really happens according to what is in the field of study. this qualitative research is research that can be used to examine society, history, behavior, organizational functionalization social movement, or kinship (sely et al., 2017). results and discussion everything about metaverse is being discussed about all over the world. many people dive into the world of metaverse and make huge profits from it. yet, the other are still misguided by the terminologies exist in metaverse. they emerge to equip the whole process required; and those terminologies have changed the language preference, brought out the neologisms and turned the social characteristics of the users. in this research, there are three data which are analyzed from those elements and aspects; linguistics, culture and social. the euphoria about cryptocurrencies, nft, and metaverse are palpable among gen-z specifically. they have acquired those modern and sophisticated terminologies since childhood; they live in a virtual world with a concept similar to metaverse, such as in games and social media. data 1. persistent virtual world (pvw) the first characteristic that best describes the metaverse is persistent. there is no such thing as a reset, pause, and end. based on the words attached in the phrase persistent virtual world; it refers to words compounding to a single terminology. it is classified to the morphosemantic type of neologism; there is a change in shape and the meaning of the word resulting from this process. figure 3. concept of pvw it also happens to gaming experience which formerly had pause system, yet today the metaverse-based games don’t have pause system, even reset or end. those kinds of games have their own metaverse. players in the games’ ecosystem are allowed to build and design their own avatar. later on, they may access different environments, games and hubs in different metaverses; and those digital assets created can be monetized via nft; those games are minecraft and sandbox. the growth in the era of disruption is driven by occupation or profession. by the development of the game industry, modern and recent profession emerged; one of them is e-sport player (athlete) with a large amount of income. data 2. blockchain based on the linguistics aspect, blockchain is categorized to a neologism, and morphologically as compounding. it comes from two different words, block and chain. compounding is the process of combining two or more existing free morphemes or words to produce a single form—a compound word. compounding can also be interpreted as putting together existing words to form a new vocabulary unit. blockchain refers to a series of data records that are managed by a computer system, in which it is not owned by any entity. cryptography is a principle used to bind and secure various blocks of data contained in it. the network in it has no central authority, because in it are ledger records that are shared and also do not change, all the information in it is open to anyone for those who want to see it. for this reason, everything that is built on the blockchain is basically transparent and everyone involved in it is responsible for their own actions. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1019 figure 4. blockchain blockchain has a positive impact on economic efficiency and effectiveness. the working mechanism of peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies allows the elimination of third parties (intermediation) in transactions based on the blockchain network. this will disrupt the hegemony of traditional financial institutions that are not based on blockchain. in the digital economy, trust is fundamental to commerce. without trust, transactions between economic agents spread throughout the world are impossible to run effectively. the people are increasingly dependent on digital technology since almost all aspects of life use it. digital transformation is the entry point for change. humans become agents of change in the world of digital culture. lack of regulation and the absence of information about the impact of metaverse are the main factors causing the misuse of that technology in society; in other hand, metaverse could be opportunity or even threat. data 3. non-fungible token (nft) on linguistics perspective, the word nft can be categorized to morphological neologism, specifically in the area of word abbreviation to enhance the terminology required by the community in metaverse. initially, the concept of nft began in 2012 which at that time still used the term colored coin. the true function of colored coin is as a medium that represents goods in the real world and as a sign of ownership of an asset such as precious cars, houses, and even corporate bonds. by the blockchain system, records every change of ownership of these digital assets, the colored coin system is guaranteed to be very safe. as it is defined previously, neologisms not only have linguistic function as filling lexical gaps, but also cultural function. these functions of linguistic and cultural may impact to economical area. in carrying out cultural functions, these neologisms become traces of popular culture that was once owned by particular community. figure 5. non-fungible token (nft) despite various speculations in digital ecosystems, blockchain-based technologies will continue to evolve. transactions will be faster from person to person through everyone's authorization. a ledger that records all digital transactions are not impossible will become necessary. recently, the ledger called blockchain has been accommodated by many business ecosystems. in terms of public diplomacy, there are two areas where nft has good potential to make a difference and position the credibility of a country in the world. based on cultural diplomacy, it is very clear because the average nft fan comes from the digital arts circle. basically, this purpose is not to require and encourage the ministry of foreign affairs to trade nft. rather, it is to design projects that enable the public to be interested in digitally interacting through nft with various collections of cultural artifacts owned by certain institutions or personal. nft can indeed be a new media that attracts people's attention and has promise in cultural and social reach. however, the role of nft for public diplomacy is still a question and is not clear so that some fields such as cultural diplomacy and educational exchange can be new opportunities to get involved in the digital world, especially nft. data 4. augmented reality (ar) identification of neologisms is based on its novelty. in the term of ar, it refers to a diachronic parameter, as a lingual unit is a neologism if it emerged recently. this parameter uses a time perspective to identify neologisms. words that have only been found in a certain period of time in the lexicon system a language can be referred to as neologisms. however, basically, there is no benchmark that actually able to observe the emergence of the new word. the other parameter involved in the terminology ar is lexicographic parameter; a lingual unit is a neologism if it is not already in the dictionary. it refers to all words that are not institutionalized in the dictionary. this is because not all words are ervina c. m. simatupang & heri heryono new-word formation and social disruption on metaverse 1020 created which is outside the dictionary can be referred to as neologisms. some words may still be protologisms, some are even nonce word (occasional word). thus, basically, when referring to a new word, there are some terms that need to be understood other than neologisms. ar refers to a technology that combines twodimensional and or three-dimensional virtual objects into a real environment and then projects these virtual objects in reality in real time. augmented reality can be applied to all senses, including hearing, touch and smell. besides, ar is also implemented in fields such as health, military, manufacturing industry and education. this ar technology can insert certain information into the virtual world and display it in the real world with the help of equipment such as webcams, computers, android phones, or special glasses. figure 6. augmented reality (ar) in terms of socio-cultural influences, the use of augmented reality is enough to have an impact on rural life, especially since the internet is increasing in number in villages so that most of the people living in villages today are quick to recognize the existence of social media. ar emerges as a cultural evolution, called digital culture. it appears because the pattern of daily human life is almost entirely dependent on technology that can facilitate human activities. data 5. crypto-currency in the term on neologism, the word cryptocurrency refers to protologism. it leads to a word created by individuals or small groups that are not fully applicable in general or only used by a small subculture. the presence of neologisms on a communicative basis in particular community, spread, and accepted as the norm of language. for that, only acceptable and widely spread words are called neologisms. the acceptance influenced by several factors, brevity, handle-ability (potential for decline), and productivity (productivity). however, according to him, the most important factor is motivation. neologism must reflect the characteristics of the concept of the word. along with the development of a cashless society, recently a number of parties think that the existence of paper money and coins is starting to lose its existence. some people assume that the up and down complexity of block chain encryption, coding and stockpiling has very little effect on everyday life. in fact, there are many applications of crypto-currency in our daily lives. one of them is data transfer. safety and security is a major concern for everyone today, especially with the many data breaches that have occurred over the last few years. this concern has led 75% of consumers to believe that companies are not actively protecting their information, and because of this, they have lost trust with many brands. conclusion as the conclusion, massive technology industries like facebook, tesla, apple and google have big intentions for making metaverse a reality. the virtual worlds (or digital twins) will seem fundamentally different in the future years as a result of the integration of emerging technologies and the gradual development and refinement of the ecosystem. because of the availability of powerful computing devices and intelligent wearable, the future will be more interactive, more living, more embodied, and more multimedia-attached. however, numerous obstacles must be overcome before metaverse can be fully incorporated into the physical world and daily lives. the linguistics aspect involved in metaverse is commonly in morphology and semantics. in more detail area is neologisms that emerge in the term of using terminologies within metaverse. it consists of morphological neologism, abbreviation and morpho-semantic neologism. the terminologies shown in the research consist of three different registers appeared in frequent condition, especially that related to cultural aspect. from pvw, blockchain to nft, all those terminologies couldn’t resist the influence of language and linguistics matters. furthermore, cultural aspect is also involved in creating and establishing the metaverse as one new ecosystem (universe) which in the future might create integrated and systematic universe. in parallel to people physical reality, metaverse will emerge as a massive entity; both in communication, interaction and socialization. it could be seen by looking at the most recent work in a variety of technologies and ecosystems. users may learn more about the major concepts we addressed by reflecting on them. the underlying challenges and research agenda are identified to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1021 help developing metaverse's future in the next years. metaverse becomes a virtual space that replicates human activities in the real world to be carried out in the virtual world. users may be separated in two worlds where the virtual world has new opportunities for their avatars. one of the most influencing is the game-metaverse trend that would change the culture of gaming and trading – since the environment allows players to do trading – because it has their own rules and systems. references anderson, j., & rainie, l. 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(pp. 242–245). atlantis press. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 561 exploring the integration of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online teaching among efl lecturers endang darsih department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: endang.darsih@uniku.ac.id vina agustiana department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: vina.agustiana@uniku.ac.id wulan rahmatunisa department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: wulan.rahmatunisa@uniku.ac.id apa citation: darsih, e., agustiana, v., & rahmatunisa, w. (2023). exploring the integration of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online teaching among efl lecturers. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 561-570. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7570 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction according to kozikolu and babacan (2019), tpack is the effective application of technology in the teaching-learning process as well as teachers' enrichment of their pedagogical subject knowledge using technology. the tpack framework, to put it briefly, is described as a model of framework that integrates the three elements of content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge (nisa et al., 2022). globally, tpack research has been conducted, and various researchers have made significant contributions. to enhance instructors' instructional skills and students' academic achievement, teacher training is essential (spear & da costa, 2018). it is crucial to help instructors (both pre-service and inservice) enhance their technical skills and the desire to use technology into their lessons (muhaimin et al., 2019). the unesco and nations all over the world make significant efforts to train teachers and employ a variety of strategies to support their professional development (ariffin et al., 2018; barnes et al., 2018). for instance, zhang et al. (2019) explored teachers' tpack in online collaborative discourse. their study found that teachers’ knowledge were mainly pedagogical content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge. this underscores the need for multimethod approaches to assess tpack levels, a abstract: this investigation is carried out in light of the necessity of technology literacy for lecturers in online learning. finding out the tpack (technological pedagogical content knowledge) profile of english language education lecturers in online learning was the aim of this research. in particular, this study analysed the level of tpack along with the tpack forming components of 3 lecturers who teach english language education. this research applied a mixed method by implementing a concurrent embedded design. three lecturers from the faculty of teacher training and education, kuningan university were involved to participate in this research. since tpack is knowledge or competence that integrates 3 basic knowledge, namely content knowledge (ck), pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and technology (tck), so in collecting research data, there are 3 instruments that were used, namely self-report questionnaires, performance assessments and observations. with regard to the tpack level of english language education lecturers, the analysis results suggest that most english lecturers rate themselves as good or high in most of the domains examined in this study, covering ck, pck, tck, tpk, and tpack. they do, however, rate themselves highly in two areas: technological knowledge (tk) and pedagogical knowledge (pk). this is consistent with the findings of lesson plans and analyses of actual teaching, which indicate a high level of technological integration. keywords: efl lecturers; online teaching; tpack. mailto:endang.darsih@uniku.ac.id mailto:vina.agustiana@uniku.ac.id mailto:wulan.rahmatunisa@uniku.ac.id endang darsih, vina agustiana, & wulan rahmatunisa exploring the integration of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online teaching among efl lecturers 562 consideration that could be taken into account in this recent study. another notable study was conducted by wen and shinas (2020) who measured tpack. the study stresses the need for further investigation into the practical implications of tpack for teaching, pointing to an area this recent study can contribute to. studies by bingimlas (2018) and yalley (2017) further expanded the exploration of tpack through surveys. these works collectively show how tpack can vary across different educational contexts, thus supporting the relevance of this focus on english language education lecturers. in terms of tpack implementation, research from koh (2019) focused on the teacher professional development model through the tpack framework. their work provides practical guidelines for leveraging tpack for teacher development, underscoring the real-world benefits of this theoretical model. a literature study by willermark (2018) and tseng et al. (2020) provides an overarching synthesis of tpack research, demonstrating the ongoing interest and diverse applications of this framework. their work suggests an ongoing need for additional context-specific research into tpack, which the present study could contribute to. in sum, prior research into tpack provides a foundation for this study but also underscores the need for further exploration into practical applications, context-specific variations, and robust measurement of tpack components. the research thus far has validated the tpack model and shown its applicability across various situation, but gaps remain in our understanding of how to leverage this knowledge for teacher development and practice, particularly in the specific context of english language education lecturers engaged in online teaching. recent studies have examined instructors' tpack using performance evaluation of lesson plans and content analysis of teacher conversations (akyuz, 2018; tseng et al., 2019). another investigation by cheng & xie (2018), scherer et al. (2018), and tuzahra et al. (2021) revealed a possible link between instructors' personal traits and their tpack. their findings may be pertinent to this research, particularly in the context of online education inspired by covid19, as they may highlight the necessity for thorough support systems to encourage tpack among educators. in terms of teacher profession education, a study by apriliaswati (2019) focused on the attitudes of in-service english teachers toward pedagogical competence by technology literacy at tanjungpura university showed that the participants' use of technology helped them improve their technological skill. quddus (2019) conducted a study on the use of technology integration in teacher preparation programs and found that using tpack through online learning effectively boosted instructors' competence. similar to this, ahmed et al.'s 2019 study found that instructors' use of technology improved their professional development. designing interventions to improve tpack among english language education lecturers may benefit greatly from these findings. taken together, these studies highlight the multifaceted nature of tpack and the range of factors that can influence its development. they underscore the importance of both individual factors, such as personal belief systems and selfefficacy beliefs, and external factors, such as peer learning opportunities and practical experiences, in developing tpack. these insights could provide valuable direction for this research into the tpack of english language education lecturers in online learning. a study by jang and chen (2010) designed an online course to improve pre-service teachers' tpack and found that such courses can assist preservice teachers enhance their tpack and gain confidence in integrating technology into their classroom instruction. this suggests that intentionally designed online courses could be an effective way to improve tpack of lecturers, which is particularly relevant to this research within the context of distance learning. in a study including pre-service teachers, chai et al. (2013) discovered a substantial association between the teachers' epistemological beliefs and their tpack. the study highlighted the importance of fostering sophisticated epistemological beliefs to improve tpack, indicating the importance of teachers' underlying beliefs in successful technological integration. another investigation by kopcha et al. (2014) discovered that a mix of learning technology by design, learning technology in context, and learning about technology in context can help teachers create tpack. this supports the idea of employing a multipronged approach to enhancing tpack among educators. a study by tondeur et al. (2017) proposed a framework that explains the integration of english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 563 technology in the classroom based on teachers’ tpack. their research shows that teachers’ pedagogical beliefs, school culture, and access to resources influence the development of tpack and its application. this means that the effective creation and deployment of tpack is influenced not only by the individual teacher's knowledge and skills, but also by the setting in which they work. in sum, these studies offer further evidence of the multifaceted nature of tpack, emphasizing the importance of belief systems, practical application, environment for learning, and contextual factors in the development and application of tpack. these studies' findings could be put to use to inform the design of interventions to improve tpack among english language education lecturers in online learning. method in general, the investigation begins with developing issues and then setting research goals. the phenomenon that is currently happening is the change in teaching patterns that were previously offline to online, so that the topic of tpack or the knowledge and competence of lecturers in integrating technology in teaching becomes very interesting to research. after that, literature review is then carried out in conjunction with the preparation of indicators for self-report questionnaires, tests, observations and performance assessments based on the results of literature studies. the instrument that is ready is then used to collect data to be processed and analyzed so that a conclusion is produced that is in accordance with the study aims. this research adopts a mixed method, which is a methodology that blends qualitative and quantitative data retrieval techniques, integrates the two data, and applies a specific design. (creswell, 1994). this study was undertaken at kuningan university with the participation of three instructors from the faculty of teacher training and education. tpack is knowledge or competency that incorporates three basic knowledges: subject knowing, pedagogy knowledge, and technology knowledge, therefore in collecting research data, there were four instruments that were used, namely self-report questionnaires, performance assessments, tests and observations. by using these instruments, it is hoped that it will produce more valid and accurate data related to the tpack level of english language education lecturers. several stages in taking research data include first distributing self-assessment questionnaires. the questionnaire used is adapted from bingimlas (bingimlas, 2018). the questionnaire consists of 39 items that measure the lecturer's tpack with the following details; 6 items each to measure tk, pk, ck, and tpk, 5 items each to measure pck, tck, and tpack. the questionnaire results then certainly be strengthened by data from the test instrument so that the second stage is to provide an english proficiency test to the lecturers. the test given is the toefl prediction test or the english proficiency test where this test is more specific to measure the content ability (ck) of english lecturers or the professional competence of lecturers. the next stage to measure the lecturer's tpack level is by performance assessment. in this stage, lecturers or research participants were requested to prepare a lesson plan on a specific topic in the english course. this instrument is used to find out whether lecturers apply the tpack framework in their lesson plan and what it looks like. to strengthen the data, observations were also made in teaching learning process directly as the final stage of data collection. this observation aims to investigate kind of technology integration lecturers apply in online learning. regarding data analysis techniques, data from self-report surveys and tests are quantitatively evaluated using descriptive and inferential statistics; the average, percentage, and frequency derived for each item using the spss program are shown. the greatest and lowest average scores, as well as the frequency of responses to questionnaire items, were reviewed. meanwhile, various sorts of data gathered through observation and performance evaluation of lesson plan papers are qualitatively examined through three steps, namely "categorization", "description" and "synthesis". with the application of this data triangulation, it is hoped that the correctness of the research results will be more accurate and the level of validity will be higher. results and discussion technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) level of english language education lecturers based on analysis of various data sources, namely questionnaires, lesson plans, and observations of the learning process carried out by lecturers, it shows that lecturers have generally high tpack levels in online learning. endang darsih, vina agustiana, & wulan rahmatunisa exploring the integration of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online teaching among efl lecturers 564 using the bingimlas (2018) category level, which is shown in table 4.1, it is clear that english language education lecturers have a high degree of tpack (technological pedagogical content knowledge). the high tpack level of the lecturers is not only from the results of the questionnaires, but also seen from of the lesson plan analysis and observations results on their online teaching. table 1. category of lecturer's tpack level score of average level of tpack 1.0 – 1.9 very low 2.0 – 2.9 low 3.0 – 3.9 moderate 4.0 – 4.9 high 5.0 very high this study was adapted from bingimlas (2018). it used 39 questionnaire items to measure the knowledge of the english language education lecturers on the 7 tpack subscales. technology knowledge (tk), pedagogical knowledge (pk), content knowledge (ck), technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk) consist of 6 items for each, while pedagogical content knowledge (pck), technology content knowledge (tck), and technological pedagogical consist of 5 items for each. the questionnaire statements were modified in order to make the questionnaire more useful for teaching english. furthermore, the questionnaire was created using google forms. the lecturers then answered to the 39 questionnaire items on the five-point likert scale. they are strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree and strongly disagree. the tpack level of english language education lecturers was assessed using spss program and the mean score and frequency obtained for each. the lowest and highest average scores, as well as the frequency of responses to questionnaire items, are also reviewed. table 2 shows data taken from a self-report questionnaire which indicates that english language education lecturers assess themselves as moderate to high in terms of tpack. table 2. average score for tpack domain no. domain average 1. technological knowledge (tk) 3.97 2. pedagogical knowledge (pk) 4.13 3. content knowledge (ck) 4.00 4. technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk) 3.83 5. pedagogical content knowledge (pck) 3.88 6. technological content knowledge (tck) 3.92 7. technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) 3.48 total average 3.89 based on table 2, english education lecturers' tpack level is generally moderate (mean = 3.9), indicating that english language education lecturers have adequate knowledge on tpack. the scores of mean suggested that english language education lecturers considered themselves to have adequate levels in the majority of the tpack categories studied, including tk (mean = 3.97), tck (mean = 3.92), pck (mean = 3.88), tpk (mean = 3.83), and tpack (mean = 3.48). furthermore, they describe themselves as having a high degree of knowledge in two domains: content knowledge (mean = 4.00) and pedagogical knowledge (mean = 4.13). the next sections will go through the tpack level of english education lecturers for items in each area. technological knowledge (tk) technological knowledge (tk) is the first domain of tpack. it is defined as knowledge of several technologies which range from low-tech technologies i.e. pencil and paper to digital technologies i.e. the internet, digital video, interactive whiteboards, and software program. this contains the six factors listed in table 4.3, which decided technological knowledge (tk) level of english language education lecturers. table 3. technological knowledge average score no. statement average 1. i am able to use public application software such as a word processor (word), presentation graphics (powerpoint), kahoot, memrise & quizlet. 4.4 2. i am familiar with social media platforms (twitter, facebook, blogs & wiki). 4 3. i am able to use basic computerattached devices for instance a printer, image scanner, digital camera, projector, and smart board. 3.8 4. i am able to install software items that i require. 4 5. i am capable of resolving simple technical issues with computers and their accessories. 3.8 6. i am capable at creating and editing video. 3.8 total average 3.97 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 565 based on the table 4.3, the technological knowledge (tk) level of english education lecturers is in the moderate level (mean = 3.97). in addition, it can be informed that almost all participants valued the items positively and all the average scores gained were above 3 which means that they have good technological knowledge. the highest average score was obtained for participants' capability to use common application software and social media (mean = 4.4), though all indicated items also had a high average score. based on findings, it can be concluded that english language education lecturers have adequate technological knowledge (tk), namely in operating computers, tablets, video recorders, projectors, speakers, and other electronic devices properly. pedagogical knowledge (pk) pedagogical knowledge (pk) is the second domain of tpack. it is well-defined as knowledge about teaching methods and processes which includes knowledge in managing classroom, assessing students, preparing the lesson plans, and student learning. table 4.4 shows the average score of the six items that determine the pedagogical knowledge (pk) level of english education lecturers. table 4. pedagogical knowledge (pk) average score no. statement mean (after) 7. i am capable of managing my classroom. 4.6 8. i’m able to link a wide range of concepts to pupils. 4 9. i’m conscious of the most prevalent errors and mistakes among my students. 4 10. i’m able to evaluate my pupils in a variety of scientific ways. 3.8 11. i am capable of using a wide range of teaching methods (including cooperative learning, problem-solving approaches, active learning, discovery learning, and projectbased learning). 4 12. i’m able to organize the group activities of pupils. 4.4 total average 4.13 table 4 shows that pedagogical knowledge (pk) level of english education lecturers is in high level (mean = 4.13). additionally, it can be conveyed that almost all participants rated the items positively and all the average scores gained were above 4 which means that they had high pedagogical knowledge. the highest average score was obtained for the capability of participants to manage the class (mean = 4.6), while all indicated items also had high average scores. to conclude with, the questionnaire results show that english education lecturers have high pedagogical knowledge on managing classroom, assessment, preparation of lesson plans, and student learning. content knowledge (ck) content knowledge (ck) is the third domain of tpack. it is described as knowledge about the actual subject matter to be learnt or taught. the average score of the six items that assess the level of content knowledge (ck) of english education lecturers is shown in table 4.5. table 5. content knowledge (ck) average score no. statement mean 13. i am self-assured enough to teach any subject expertise. 4.2 14. i am sufficiently knowledgeable about my field of study. 4.2 15. the capacity to assist my colleagues with knowledge and abilities in my field of study 3.8 16. i am acquainted with specialists and scholars in my field of study. 4 17. i keep up with fresh sources and current developments (books/journals/articles) in my subject expertise. 3.8 18. i am aware of conferences and events in my subject expertise. 4 total average 4 table 5 shows that content knowledge (ck) level of english education lecturers is in high level (m = 4). moreover, it can be seen that the descriptive statistics for ck reveal that almost all participants rated the items positively and almost all of the average scores obtained were 4 which mean that they had high content knowledge. the highest average marks were received for sufficient participant information and confidence to teach any subject specialization. (m = 4.2), while all indicated items also have a high average value. to conclude with, the questionnaire results show that english language education lecturers have high content knowledge (ck) of the actual subject matter to be learned or taught. the result is also in line with the results of their english endang darsih, vina agustiana, & wulan rahmatunisa exploring the integration of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online teaching among efl lecturers 566 proficiency test which achieved high scores or more than 550. technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk) tpack fourth domain namely technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk). it relates to knowledge on the utilization of several technologies in education and how it changes the way teachers teach. table 4.6 shows the average score for the six elements that define english education lecturers' pedagogical technology knowledge (ck). table 6. technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk) average score no statement mean 19 i believe in my ability to select relevant new technology to drive my students to learn. 4 20 i am able to use new technologies to improve my teaching methods. 3.8 21 i have the skill to leverage new technology to boost student learning commitment. 4 22 i am capable of evaluating students in a variety of methods using new technologies. 3.2 23 i am capable of using social media in the classroom. 4 24 i am capable of managing classes well that are supported by modern technologies (smart classrooms). 4 total average 3.83 tpk descriptive statistics discovered that virtually all respondents assessed the points positively, and the majority of the average scores received were greater than 3, indicating that they had adequate pedagogical technology knowledge. the competence to select suitable new technology to stimulate students to learn, utilization of new technology to increase student learning commitment, use social media in teaching, and manage classrooms well supported by new technology (smart classroom) received the highest average scores. while the final item is also indicated, it has a high average score. finally, the survey results suggest that english education instructors have enough pedagogical technology knowledge (tpk) (overall m = 3.83). pedagogical content knowledge (pck) pedagogical content knowledge (pck) is the fifth domain of tpack. it relates to comprehension on linking lecturer knowledge of content and pedagogy, including the way lecturers teach, understand the context of the class, and the particular needs of students. the average scores for the five items that determined english lecturers' pedagogical content knowledge (pck) are shown in table 7. table 7. pedagogical content knowledge (pck) average score no statement mean 25 in my topic specialization, i am familiar with acceptable teaching strategies. 4 26 in my topic area, i am capable of planning successful actions. 4 27 i am capable of achieving the objectives in my lesson plan. 3.8 28 i am capable of assisting my students in connecting concepts from my topic area with concepts from other disciplines. 4 29 i have the skills to create evaluation tools for pupils, particularly in my topic specialization. 3.6 total average 3.88 the questionnaire results indicate that english education lecturers possess sufficient pedagogical content knowledge (pck) (m = 3.88), with high scores for teaching methods, effective activities, and connecting concepts. most participants rated items positively, indicating their knowledge is adequate. technological content knowledge (tck) technological content knowledge (tck) is the sixth domain of tpack. it describes knowledge about how technology can develop new illustration for particular material and how teachers can alter the way students apply and comprehend concepts in certain topic areas by employing certain technologies. table 4.8 shows the average score of the five items that assess the level of technological content knowledge (tck) of english lecturers. table 8. technological content knowledge (tck) average score no statement mean (after) 30 i am able to conduct scientific research on the internet in my field of expertise (subject area). 4.2 31 i can manage social media to expand my understanding in my specialty (subject area). 4 32 i am capable of expanding my knowledge in my specialty by utilizing new technology. 3.8 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 567 33 i am knowledgeable about emerging technology connected to my specialty. 4 34 i am capable of representing the content of my specialist using relevant modern technologies (such as multimedia, simulation, and modeling). 3.6 total average 3.92 the descriptive statistical analysis for tck showed that nearly all respondents assessed the items positively and that all average scores received were greater than 3, indicating that they possessed enough technology content knowledge. the highest average score was obtained for point number 30 addressing the capacity to utilize the internet in academic research in their profession. while the other things highlighted have a high average value as well. to summarize, the study found that english lecturers possess sufficient technological content knowledge (tck) (m = 3.92), with the highest average score for item 30 addressing internet use in scientific research. technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) finally, technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) is the last area of tpack. it describes the information that teachers require in order to effectively incorporate technology in any content area into their teaching. the average results for the five items that determined english lecturers' level of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) are shown in table 4.9 table 9. technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) average score no statement mean 35 in my discipline, i am able to organize successful teaching approaches with relevant new technologies. 4 36 i might be a leader in assisting others in teaching topics in my specialty by using a suitable teaching technique and relevant new technologies. 3.6 37 in my specialty, i am capable of designing instructional activities that make use of appropriate modern technologies. 3 38 in my specialty, i am capable of designing efficient educational activities using social media (such as facebook, chat applications, blogs, and wikis). 3.2 39 i am capable of teaching my specialty (subject) lms such as (moodle, blackboard, e-class). 3.6 total average 3.48 descriptive statistics for this study showed that almost all respondents assessed the points positively, and all average scores found were greater than 3, indicating that they possessed enough technology pedagogical content knowledge. the capacity to blend successful teaching techniques with appropriate modern technologies received the highest average score for item number 35. while the other items mentioned have a high average value as well. in summary, the questionnaire results reveal that english lecturers have adequate technological pedagogical content knowledge (overall m = 3.48). the total average score of 3.48 for all items in the tpack questionnaire suggested that english instructors made strong judgments about themselves and were confident and aware of their own ability in general. they feel they have a solid understanding of technological pedagogical content knowledge, such as identifying how to successfully incorporate technology into the curriculum, including teaching modalities that are not only teacher oriented but also student centered, and incorporating integrated learning to generate new instructional communications. furthermore, the findings of the tpack questionnaire analysis suggest that lecturers of english class are able to choose the technology types and utilize technology to aid student learning based on the content and context, as well as employ learning management systems such as hybrid classrooms. the tpack level of english lecturers in the medium category is also bolstered by analysis of lesson plan results and observations of their actual teaching. observations illustrate that all lecturers maximize their use of technology in the online classroom. they can utilize technology as well as pedagogy to formulate content for teaching. all professors were discovered to utilize technology to develop materials for teaching. they formulated many educational technology equipment such as laptops, tablets, speakers, and overhead projectors. apart from that, they are also very good at implementing online learning by combining several applications. for example, when doing online learning using zoom or google meetings, they insert several audios, videos, teaching materials, and student worksheets that can be accessed by simply clicking the link given by the lecturers. endang darsih, vina agustiana, & wulan rahmatunisa exploring the integration of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online teaching among efl lecturers 568 the incorporation of technology in english education has not only assisted lecturers in preparing for class, but has also assisted in making their e-classes more student-centered and engaging students in topic learning. in conclusion, the observation data reveal that all instructors used integrated technology in their learning processes. the findings of questionnaire and lesson plan analysis, as well as observations of lecturers teaching, reveal that the technological pedagogical content knowledge level of english lecturers is mostly high. lecturers assume that they own the subjects that they teach. they are proficient as well in technology understanding and implementation. conclusion the present study’s conclusion is that although there are some limitations, this study succeeded in answering questions that reveal the tpack level of 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(2019). exploring primary school teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online collaborative discourse: an epistemic network analysis. british journal of educational technology, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3926/jotse.662 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.09.022 endang darsih, vina agustiana, & wulan rahmatunisa exploring the integration of technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) in online teaching among efl lecturers 570 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 33 scientific approach of 2013 curriculum: teachers’ implementation in english language teaching sri ratnaningsih department of english, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: chi.azure.chelsea@gmail.com apa citation: ratnaningsih, s. (2017). scientific approach of 2013 curriculum: teachers’ implementation in english language teaching. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 33-40. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.768. received: 19-08-2017 accepted: 21-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: the research is aimed at investigating the teachers’ implementation of scientific approach in english language teaching in one state junior high school in bandung regency. in addition, this research discusses the conformation of the scientific approach implementation and the lesson plans based on the 2013 curriculum. this research employs a case study qualitative research design. the data were obtained from classroom observation and teachers’ lesson plan analysis and interview. the findings showed that the teachers implemented the scientific stages in english language teaching. they conducted observing, questioning, experimenting, associating and communicating in the sequence activities. besides, the teachers can demonstrate the student-centered learning strengthened by collaborative, cooperative, active and meaningful learning. however, concerning the conformation of the implementation with lesson plans, based on the indicators, learning objectives, learning materials, learning media, scientific stages and scientific approach model (discovery learning, inquiry leaning, problem based learning and project based learning), the teachers still have to underline and mention the scientific approach model and state learning objectives. furthermore, the other components have been presented well in both teaching and lesson plans. keywords: english language teaching, lesson plan, scientific approach, teaching practice, the 2013 curriculum introduction curriculum is defined as a plan for learning containing many kinds of learning instructions and outcomes (see taba, 1962; ruhimat et al., 2009, p.4). it includes the sequence activities that give something for the students to learn and experience through developing abilities to achieve specific educational goals and evaluation in the form of a written document (see government regulation number 19 year 2005 on national education standards; kunandar, 2011, p.124; hasanah, 2015; olivia, 1988; harold, 1965; print, 1993). in indonesia’s curriculum, english becomes a compulsory subject with a very important existence. the curriculum of english has experienced changes to acquire better student results in learning english (emilia, 2005). the english curriculum in indonesia has witnessed at least eleven times of curricular changes— the 1945 curriculum, to 2006 curriculum (alwasilah, 2012) as cited in (hamied & musthafa, 2016) and the 2013 curriculum (kurtilas) which uses scientific approach (abidin, 2014; hosnan, 2014; yani, 2014; government’s file). the 2013 curriculum is implemented as one of government’s efforts to answer the challenges of the advancing technology and rapid globalization. it is also related to the 21th century characteristics. morocco et al. (2008, p.5; see abidin, 2014) argue that the 21th century characteristics cover the ability of the highest understanding, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. thrilling and fadel (2009, p. 47) add that 21th century sri ratnaningsih scientific approach of 2013 curriculum: teachers’ implementation in english language teaching 34 skills include: (1) life and career skills, (2) learning and innovation skills and (3) information, media, and technology skills. they underline that learning and innovation skills which connect to creative thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation are the main skill to be improved. the 2013 curriculum is hoped to realize the development of students’ potential to create indonesian citizens who are productive, creative, innovative, skillful, competitive, collaborative and independent through the integrated attitudes (students know “why”), skills (students know “how”), and knowledge (students know “what”) (education and culture ministry policy, no. 68 year 2013). the 2013 curriculum emphasizes more on competences and character buildings, because characters have important values to run and form the ethical and individual principles (howard et al., 2004). the students attain academic benchmarks to construct and employ their knowledge and skills and need the same time and opportunity to develop and conduct good characters (stein et al., 2000). the ministry of education (2013) states that the 2013 curriculum can be implemented successfully by using scientific approach. scientific approach is a new approach in english language teaching because the term “scientific” is more familiar with natural science, social science and management (suharyadi, 2013, p.1). the learning process adopts the scientist stages in building the knowledge through the science methods and characteristics (see alfred de vito: 1989; government’s file: 2013; barringer, et al., 2010; abidin, 2014). thus, it is a challenge for teachers to understand the stages and basic knowledge about scientific approach in 2013 curriculum to implement the english language teaching in the classrooms properly (ayuni, 2015). scientific approach does not only emphasize learning outcomes as the end result, but also the learning process as the important consideration.therefore, this approach highlights the quest of knowledge rather than the knowledge itself. the students need to be actively involved in the learning process to present the information which is acquired not only from the teachers but also from various resources. according to regulation of ministry of national education no. 65, scientific approach in 2013 curriculum trains the students to: (1) be the center of learning, (2) involve the cognitive processes which is potential in stimulating intellectual development, specifically the high level of student; thinking skill, (3) give opportunities to the student to assimilate and accommodate concepts, laws and principles, (4) find knowledge through scientific process and use it in learning process, (5) learn from various sources, (6) promote acculturation and empowerment of students as lifelong learners, (7) apply values by giving exemplary things, build willingness, and develop creativity of the students in the learning process, (8) implement the principles in which everyone is teacher, everyone is student and everywhere is class. scientific approach is paramount to improve the quality of teaching and learning. it directs the students to develop and integrate their attitudes, skills and knowledge (suharyadi, 2013, p. 1). the approach can encourage students to be capable of observing, questioning, experimenting, associating, and communicating (government’s file, no. 103, 2014; abidin, 2014, p.132; hosnan, 2014, p. 37; mulyasa, 2014; suharyadi, 2013, p. 1350). each of the steps is presented as follows: 1) observing to develop student’s curiosity, to create meaningful learning process and help students acquire knowledge (brown, 2000).the teacher asks the students to observe objects, events, phenomena, concepts and procedures by using all of their senses to see, listen, read and watch, and integrate it with the learning material (checkovich & sterling, 2001, p. 32; government’s file, 2015). at the same time, students construct their knowledge and facilitate them to fulfill their need of knowing something. in this activity, the context is also presented to make students connect what they have learned with what they are going to learn (suharyadi, 2013, english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 35 p. 3). according to kemendikbud (2013b), the observation is going to be effective if the teacher and students employ tape recorder (to record the conversation), camera (to record visual objects), film or video (to record audiovisual objects) and related equipment. 2) questioning to construct knowledge as a concept. the students are required to have a critical thinking to evoke high level of thinking questions. furthermore, the students can show their active participation in the learning process. in this stage, the teachers have to facilitate the students with scaffolding to stimulate and encourage the students to ask (government’s file, 2013, pp. 34-35). questioning can be used by both teachers and students in the classroom with several specific purposes. specifically, by giving questions, the teacher leads the students to give their attention to begin learning and stimulate them to pursue knowledge on their own (suharyadi, 2013, p. 3-4). 3) experimenting to acquire a meaningful, real and authentic learning, students have to do experiments, especially to the suitable materials (suharyadi, 2013, p. 4). the students also experience the skill process to enhance knowledge and employ scientific method to solve the real problem. experimenting is intended to develop various learning objectives, attitudes, skills and knowledge. it is an activity to internalize knowledge and skills that have been learned. the students practice to express new things that they have learned and try to utilize the skills to reality inside and outside the class through simulation, role play, presentation, discussion and games (government’s file, 2013, p. 35). 4) associating toattain the conclusion of knowledge by a logical thinking process and systematic empirical factual statement which is observed. students must be more active and given more opportunities to learn. associating refers to grouping ability of various ideas and associating various events to be part of memory. when the experiences are stored in the brain, they will interact with the previous events or experiences. in this stage, students and teacher are engaged into learning activities, such as text analyzing and categorizing. the information or data that have been collected from the previous activity (observing and experimenting) must be analyzed to draw conclusions. students will then process the information from the teachers and draw the conclusions out of that information. as stated on the policy of indonesia ministry of education and culture no. 81a/2013, associating process must be conducted through: (1) processing information that has been collected from the result of experimenting and observing activity and, (2) processing the information collected to find solutions from variety of sources that have different opinions to the contrary. thus, students are expected to be able to relate the result of learning or experimenting to the reality. 5) communicating to develop students’ skills to offer or demonstrate all knowledge and ability that has been mastered verbally or nonverbally. suharyadi (2013, p. 4) argues that communicating is also called collaborative learning. for teachers, the collaborative learning function is more directive oriented in which the teachers are managers in the students’ learning. the students present the communicative and effective written or spoken knowledge based on what they have learned. the scientific approach has learning models to implement the whole approach, strategy, and method components which are employed holistically and comprehensively in learning process. the model selection is based on (1) time allocation; (2) material contents; and (3) asessment process of knowledge and skill (hasanudin, 2017). the models include discovery learning, inquiry learning, problem based approach and project based approach. in addition, in implementing the teaching practice in 2013 curriculum, lesson sri ratnaningsih scientific approach of 2013 curriculum: teachers’ implementation in english language teaching 36 plan has an important role to guide the learning activities to achieve basic competences (permendikbud no.65, 2013). in this research, some lesson plan components are analyzed. the components include indicators, objectives, learning material, learning activities, and assessment (ministry of national education, 2013) considering the issue stated above, this research is intended to focus on the implementation of scientific approach in english language teaching and its conformation with the lesson plans. it is hoped that this study can give a major contribution in the area of english teaching in new 2013 curriculum that is recently discussed nowadays, especially, scientific approach as a new approach in teaching english. it can help other researchers in conducting further researches on scientific approach. method to meet the purposes of the study, the research employed a qualitative case study research design since the main objectives are to describe and analyze the english teachers’ implementation of scientific approach and the conformation with the teaching lesson plan in 2013 curriculum. the research was conducted in one of favorite junior high schools in bandung regency which has been popular and chosen to apply scientific approach for english learning and teaching since the 2013 curriculum was realized. the participants involved in this research were three eleventh grade teachers. they were free to choose the topic as long as it is stated in basic competence 3 and 4 in seventh grade level. they were trained on the 2013 curriculum by the government and one of them is a national instructor. since this study employed a case studyqualitative research design, the data were collected through classroom observation, teachers’ lesson plans analysis and interview. the classroom observation was recorded and analyzed in the form of transcription and rubric. the observation began on march. then, the lesson plans were analyzed to determine whether the lesson plan is in line with the principles of 2013 curriculum. the teachers’ lesson plans were analyzed in terms of the indicators, objectives, materials and media, teaching procedures (scientific stages and its model) and learning assessment components (decree of minister of national education no. 65/2013). the lesson plans were collected from each teacher after conducting the observations. there were four lesson plans analyzed in this study. the first lesson plan labeled l1 was made by teacher a; l2 and l3 was for lesson plans made by teacher b; and l4 for lesson plan made by teacher c. all lesson plans were written in indonesian. finally, the interview was done to each teacher after finishing the classroom observations to gain detailed information and description about scientific approach in 2013 curriculum. the interview consists of six questions related to the implementation of scientific approach in 2013 curriculum and the data was categorized as complement to answer research questions. the interview was conducted in indonesian to make the teachers more comfortable in expressing their opinions regarding the implementation of scientific approach. results and discussion the section is divided into three main parts. the first part presents the implementation of scientific approach in english language teaching observation. the second part highlights the conformation between the implementation and the lesson plans through the lesson plans analysis. finally, the interview supports the first and second findings. data from classroom observation observing in the teaching practice, teacher a conducted the same material (describing things) in two different classes. she used the monkey doll to be described in class a, and red ball and bottle in class b. she was creative in using the contextual, real and some relevant media. she presented different realia to be described. thus, it made the students engage english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 37 easily in the learning process because she asked the students to use their sense to see. teacher b also presented the same material (describing people) for class c and d. in observing, she asked the students to maximize their sense to see the idol picture to be portrayed. it led the students to have fun learning and involved them to create active and meaningful learning. on the other hand, teacher b in class e displayed different material (greeting). here, the teacher invited the students to watch the video and sing the greeting song. so, the teacher asked the students to use their sense to watch and listen. in addition, teacher c stated some verbal instructions to be listened and observed. then, she asked the students to note the instructions given. according to the findings, all teachers implemented the observing stage well. it emphasized that all the teachers were creative to utilize the relevant, contextual and real media to be observed. questioning in this stage, teacher a involved the students to make questions verbally and invited some representatives to write the questions in front of the class. uniquely, she kept stimulating the students to answer and create more questions. the teacher applied active learning to bring good atmosphere. she explained (1) the usage of “has/have” and “is/are”, and (2) constructed the statements and questions to describe the thing clearly. thus, it made the students create the questions and statements easily. teacher b and c, on the contrary, kept asking the related questions and conduct the group discussion to encourage the students to ask and give their arguments. in this stage, all teachers showed their effort to encourage, stimulate and motivate the students to offer and response the related questions. they tried to construct the active learning and develop the students’ thinking skill. practically, the goals were not achieved well. so, the teachers initiated to offer some related questions and make a discussion to encourage the students to offer questions, respond to the answers, and give the argumentation and opinion. experimenting in experimenting, the students get real or authentic learning (abidin, 2014). teacher a gave the opportunity to the students to explore and collect relevant data and practice the writing and pronunciation to describe things. teacher b asked the students to collect the data from the internet and practice to describe people’ appearance and personality. in addition, in teaching the other material (greeting), the teacher asked the students to practice and imitate the greeting expression. finally, teacher c guided the students to explore and find the instruction from the text book. she also asked them to modify, imitate and demonstrate the instruction. associating associating refers to the ability of creating diverse idea and making new concepts or relating the result of learning experimenting to the reality they find (ministry of education and culture no. 81a/2013). teacher a and b encouraged the students to analyze and modify the descriptive statements. then, the students associated their knowledge from observing and experimenting to describe things (teacher a) and people (teacher b). in addition, teacher b instructed the students to modify and create greeting songs. further, the teacher c asked the students to analyze and make instruction. communicating in communicating, teacher a asked the students to describe one of the things given by using be, have and has in the groups of two. then, she watched and gave them assessment. teacher b built collaborative and cooperative learning in groups of four. the students were asked to choose one idol picture or the family member, then they discussed it in the groups. the representatives of the groups presented the description while the teacher monitored and led their discussion activity. to conduct effective learning, it will be better if the implementation was conducted twice or three times to give time for the students to explore, sri ratnaningsih scientific approach of 2013 curriculum: teachers’ implementation in english language teaching 38 associate and communicate well. moreover, in teaching greeting, the teacher asked the students to sing with their groups in front of the class. in addition, teacher c asked the students to come forward and communicate the instruction alternately in pair. document analysis this section presents the analysis of lesson plans. there are four lesson plan samples investigated in the study. learning indicators, learning objectives and learning materials deciding indicator refers to the basic competence. indicators direct to develop learning material to achieve learning objectives. the indicators are explained by detailed objectives. teacher a and b conducted the basic competence 3.10 and 4.13. both teachers fulfilled the indicators by using c2 and p2 in line with basic competence and their learning objectives followed the abcd rule. on the other hand, in deciding learning material, teacher a chose the things to be described and used realia by using various things such as monkey doll, red ball, red bottle and others while teacher b selected admired people to be described and employed pictures as the media. teacher b, in the third teaching, presented kd 3.1 and 4.1. kd 3.1 had three indicators. the operational words come from same level of bloom’s taxonomy (c2). she did not put the learning objectives in the lesson plan. in addition, kd 4.1 has one indicator and no learning objective. the word “menciptakan” in indicators must be followed by the lowest operational word to scaffold the students. furthermore, the teacher utilized video and song as learning media to teach greeting expression. teacher c selected kd 3.9 and 4.10. kd 3.9 has three indicators, the indicators are not in line with one learning objective mentioned in this lesson plan. this also happened to kd 4.10 where the teacher put one indicator and two learning objectives. as dede (2017) stated that in the lesson plan of 2013, the number of indicators has to be in line with learning objectives. the learning objective almost follows the abcd instruction. however, the teacher did not mention the bond degree of ki 2 such as “dengan benar dan tepat”. the teacher conducted instruction for the learning material, the students are asked to identify the language features of instruction (verb + object!). thus, the learning material and basic competence are relevant. furthermore, the teacher was creative because she used realia, situation and condition as the media of learning, for instance the teacher pointed the door and say “arya, open the door, please!” or “let’s learn about the instruction, now open page 101!” analyzing scientific approach and learning model in this section, the lesson plans were analyzed in term of its syntax to discover learning model that the teachers chose in their teaching practice. scientific approach includes some learning models such as discovery learning method, project-based method and problem-based method. those models have different syntax depends on the characteristics of the models. the teachers’ teaching practices were then analyzed to discover their learning models. the detail elaboration of learning model in the four lesson plans of the teachers is discussed in the following subsections. l1 teacher a and l2 teacher b both lesson plans present scientific stages and discovery model of learning in the sequence activities. first, the activities construct the active learning and reflects the student-centered process. the proof can be seen from the beginning of the lesson when the teacher asks the students to observe the monkey doll (teacher a) and the idol picture (teacher b) as the observation stage in scientific approach and stimulation in discovery model. this activity leads the students to use their sense to see and engages them to the learning. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 39 the second finding, the questioning stage is conducted well by giving the students several questions related to the material and discussion to encourage them to argue, question and response. the question stage is in line with problem identification in discovery learning. the third, experimenting is line with collecting data. here, the teachers give chance to the students to explore more information from various resources such as accessing the internet or discussing with their groups to collect more information and material to describe the things and initiate the pronunciations. the fourth, the associating stage or verification in discovery learning displays the teacher asking the students to analyze and elaborate their current knowledge to describe the new things (teacher a) and idol (teacher b). finally, in communicating and generalizing stage, the students are instructed to make short description of the thing given, then they present their description in form of dialogues in pairs (teacher a), while teacher b asked the students to present their admired people description in the groups of four and the representatives came forward to describe it in front of their friends. in the lesson plan, the teacher implements scaffolding which means the task that students have to do is in the sequence activities from the easiest to the hardest. this stage makes the students get the meaningful learning whereas each individual will fully understand the learning materials. l3 teacher b and l4 teacher c both teachers do not mention the model. they only focus on the scientific process stages. however, in 2013 curriculum activities the scientific approach stages must be in line with the learning model (government’s file, 2015). the l3 of teacher b conducts observing stages using video and song to engage the students,then both teacher and students discuss the song’s content. it is hoped that this stage can encourage the students to ask. meanwhile, teacher c employs verbal expressions to be listened by the students, then she stimulates the students to offer questions. in experimenting, teacher b instructs the students to collect data from videos, songs and other resources. then, they classify formal and informal greeting expressions. further, they imitate teacher’s pronunciation in expressing the words. on the other hand, teacher c uses text book to be explored. she asks the students to obtain the instruction and identify its language features. in associating, teacher b instructs the students to analyze the expressions and create simple song based on the data gained and sing in front of the class in form of group. in addition, teacher c displays the students to modify the instruction and presents the simple dialog in pair. analyzing learning assessment in 2013 curriculum (2015 version), spiritual and attitude aspectsare explained in line with cognitive and skill assessments. however, in 2017 revision, the english teachers just assess the students’ cognitive and skill, while attitude is assessed implicitly. spiritual and attitude aspects are assessed by religion and civic subjects (hasanudin, 2017). based on the finding, all teachers assess the students’ cognitive and skill by employing the verbal test assessment. data from interview the interview as the follow up to the observation was conducted with the english teachers of 7th grade. the scientific approach has been implemented since the school started employing the 2013 curriculum and chose to be a model school. the scientific approach asks the teacher to learn and read a lot. they are able to understand the stages by sharing with friends, reading from various information and following the national or local training of the 2013 curriculum. in addition, they always design the lesson plan before conducting the teaching. sri ratnaningsih scientific approach of 2013 curriculum: teachers’ implementation in english language teaching 40 conclusion the present study shows that the english teachers of 7th grade at the chosen state junior high school implemented the scientific approach in their english language teaching. they conducted all the stages involving observing, questioning, experimenting, associating and communicating. to emphasize, the teachers need to consider the time for implementation because the students need much opportunities to dig the stages. furthermore, the teachers conducted active and meaningful learning but they still lack of critical thinking (hots). observing was conducted with various media and creative delivery. however, they have to highlight the questioning stages where the students did not initiate to learn without stimulation and encouragement from the teachers. thus, it made the teachers show their efforts to stimulate and motivate them to offer questions. besides, the teachers employed the discussion to make them creating the active, cooperative and collaborative learning. in addition, the lesson plans employ all components and scientific approach stages based on 2013 curriculum. however, the teachers need to emphasize the step of determining the learning indicators and learning objectives, stating the learning model, and choosing the method. the findings show that teacher a and teacher b (class b and c) implemented the teaching in line with their lesson plans while teacher b (class d) and c were less appropriate because they did not write the learning objectives and model. as mikova (2017) states that learning objectives, learning activities and learning assessment are the main points of lesson plan. references abidin, y. (2014). desain sistem pembelajaran dalam konteks kurikulu 2013. bandung: pt refika aditama. alwasilah, a. c. (2012). pokoknya kualitatif: dasardasar merancang dan melakukan penelitian kualitatif (7th ed). bandung: pt. dunia pustaka jaya. hosnan, m. (2014). pendekatan saintifik dan kontekstual dalam pembelajaran abad 21: kunci sukses implementasi kurikulum 2013. bogor: ghalia indonesia. mulyasa, e. (2014). pengembangan implementasi kurikulum. bandung: penerbit pt. remaja rosdakarya. suharyadi. (2013). exploring scientific approach in english language teaching. malang: the state of malang university. yani, a. (2014). mindset kurikulum 2013. bandung: alfabeta. scientific approach of 2013 curriculum: teachers’ implementation in english language teaching introduction method results and discussion data from classroom observation observing questioning experimenting associating communicating document analysis learning indicators, learning objectives and learning materials analyzing scientific approach and learning model l3 teacher b and l4 teacher c analyzing learning assessment data from interview conclusion references english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 english teachers’ problems in applying the 2013 curriculum yulia nur ekawati department of english education, faculty of teacher training and educaiton, university of pancasakti tegal e-mail: yulianurekawati.ups@gmail.com apa citation: ekawati, y. n. (2017). english teachers’ problems in applying the 2013 curriculum. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 41-48. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.769. received: 19-08-2017 accepted: 25-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: the 2013 curriculum is regarded as the current issue for teachers and students. this curriculum is based on the competencies concerning on implementing four aspects of spiritual, attitude, knowledge and skills in order to achieve students’ character building. this study, moreover, investigates the teachers’ problems in applying the 2013 curriculum at vocational high school in tegal. four english teachers are observed and interviewed to obtain data. the data is analyzed referring to four points; a) preparing lesson plan, b) applying the steps of teaching learning activities, c) preparing media, and d) making evaluation. the result shows that; a) three teachers do not prepare lesson plan before their teaching learning process, b) for all teachers, they understand the principles of scientific approach and the basic concept of 2013 curriculum (i.e. inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, discovery-learning, problem-based learning and task-based learning) but they do not apply it in their teaching, c) one teacher prepares the teaching media but the others do not prepare it, and d) all teachers get difficulties in assessing students’ attitude (behaviour). keywords: english teachers’ problem, the 2013 curriculum introduction the curricula of indonesia have been developed since 1947 until 2013 (widodo, 2015). the development of curriculum is regarded as the changing of people need, technology, thinking, as well as market challenges. in 2004, the curriculum of indonesia is called as cbc (competencebased curriculum), which is implemented to be pioneer of applying curriculum based on the competences. honestly, it only works for two years. furthermore, in 2006, the curriculum changes to ulec (unit level of education curriculum), which is the development of the previous curriculum. the changing of curriculum is, moreover, continued in 2013 which is named as the 2013 curriculum. in indonesia, the 2013 curriculum is the newest curriculum focusing on achieving students’ competencies and character building (kementrian dan kebudayaan, 2013). there are four aspects of competences expected to be achieved; spiritual, attitude, knowledge and skills which are then stated in the core competences (kompetensi inti/ki). those aspects are stated in the purpose of national education (pasal 3 uu no 20 sisdiknas 2003) stating that “to develop students' potential to become faithful and pious man, noble, healthy, knowledgeable, skilled, creative, independent, and also to become democratic and responsible citizen.” from the purpose stated above, it is clear that the spiritual attitude is shown as faithful and pious man. the social attitude, then, is shown in the terms of healthy, independent, democratic and responsible. furthermore, for the aspect of knowledge is mentioned in knowledge and the aspect of skill is shown in skilled and creative. through those aspects, it can be concluded yulia nur ekawati english teachers’ problems in applying the 2013 curriculum 42 that the purpose of standard competence in achieving attitude (spiritual and social) means to create students who are faithful, noble, confident, and responsible in interacting with social environment. next aspect is skill which aims to make person capable to think and follow productively and creatively in abstract and concrete field. further, the last aspect is knowledge. it purposes to create students who master science, technology, arts, culture and humanity, nationality, state insights, and civilization. dealing with the above ideal and perfect purposes, it comes several issues in implementing the 2013 curriculum in english language teaching (elt) practices. sahirudin (2013) reviews the history of elt in indonesia. the central government determined that english became the first foreign language obligated to be taught at junior and senior high school since independency in 1945. indonesia curricula have changed for several times. he explained as following: (a) 1945 was grammar translation-based curriculum. (b) 1958 was audio-lingual basedcurriculum. (c) 1975 was revised audio-lingual based-curriculum. (d) 1984 was structure-based communicative curriculum. (e) 1994 was meaning-based communicative curriculum. (f) 2004 was competency-based curriculum. (g) 2006 was ktsp curriculum. (h) 2013 was the 2013 curriculum. those curricula have each strengths and weaknesses (constraints). its constraints make the government to rethink, reformulate, and redesign the curriculum to be implemented. in this research, sahirudin (2013) moreover investigates the common problems faced by the implementation of 2013 curriculum. they are students’ lack of motivation, poor attitude toward language learning, big class size, unqualified teachers, and cultural barriers for teachers to adopt new role of facilitators. in the context of elt, the reduction of allocating time for english subject at school as well becomes the problem. these issues then make several consequences for language teaching and learning process in indonesia. however, there are some certain resources to the development of the quality in elt, i.e. the policy of teacher’s certification program, the integrative topic in some subjects and textbook provision. another previous research was held by retnawati, et al. (2016). they investigated the vocational high school teachers’ difficulties in applying the assessment within 2013 curriculum. this research was descriptive explorative using qualitative data gathering. the data sources were 22 vocational high school teachers and the vice principals of curriculum in the province of yogyakarta special region of indonesia. the result showed that the teachers’ difficulties in implementing 2013 curriculum were found in; developing the instrument of attitude, implementing the authentic assessment, formulating the indicators, designing the assessment rubric for skills, and gathering the scores from multiple measurement techniques. in addition, this study stated that it was difficult to find feasible application for describing students’ achievement. based on the previous studies, teachers (especially english teachers) should comprehend the characteristics of 2013 curriculum. the curriculum of 2013 is designed with characteristics of developing a balance between spiritual and social attitudes, knowledge and skills which should be applied in various situations in the school and community (permendikbud no. 59 tahun 2014). it becomes the basic understanding for teachers in their teaching so that the objectives of this curriculum are achieved. in addition, syllabus and lesson plan must be prepared effectively before teaching learning process, as it will be a teacher’s guide. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 the syllabus has been prepared by team of curriculum developers; in central and regional levels, and teachers only develop the lesson plan based on teacher’s guide book and resource (permendikbud no.59 tahun 2014). another teaching preparation supporting the teaching learning process is the use of media. in this curriculum, the role of media is very significant, since it can make the teaching activities more creative and interesting. so, the teacher should use the appropriate teaching method. in applying the 2013 curriculum, moreover, scientific approach must be clearly understood by teachers. this approach contains the steps of teaching and learning process including observing, questioning, associating, experimenting and networking. it is called a natural assessment as well meaning that the teacher not only assesses the cognitive development of the students, but also assesses the psychometrics and affective aspects (attitude). i perceive that the implementation of 2013 curriculum should be understood by all teachers as it is a must from government to be implemented currently. however, it is found there are some issues faced by teachers in applying this curriculum. this research, therefore, concerns on evaluating the teacher’s problems in applying the 2013 curriculum. the problems are investigated based on four aspects i.e. a) preparing lesson plan, b) applying the steps of teaching learning activities based on scientific approach, c) preparing media, and d) making evaluation. method this research used qualitative method. there are 7 state vocational high schools and 31 private vocational high schools in tegal district. in this study, the researcher only took four english teachers as the participants from four different private vocational high schools using purposive sampling technique. this technique is taken based on the researcher consideration and aim. the result of this study will not be generalized to population (all schools) since the concept of qualitative method is only applied in this social situation case and can be transferred to other social situation (sugiyono, 2013, p. 216). to collect the data, the researcher used triangulation technique combining observation and interview. this technique, as stated by stainback (1988) in sugiyono (2013, p. 241), has aim not to determine the truth about some social phenomenon, rather the purpose of triangulation is to increase one’s understanding of whatever is being investigated. it means that triangulation aims to increase researcher understanding about social phenomenon and investigate whether the information getting from informant/ participant is wrong as it is not appropriate with theory and law. figure 1. data analysis (interactive mode) (miles & huberman, 1984) as cited in (sugiyono, 2013, p. 247) the questions of interview, moreover, are mentioned in table 1. data collection data display data reduction conclusion: drawing/ veriying yulia nur ekawati english teachers’ problems in applying the 2013 curriculum 44 table 1. questions of interview no. questions answer 1. do you agree that preparing lesson plan is important? yes/no 2. do you arrange the objectives of learning? yes/no 3. do you arrange the material based on objectives of learning? yes/no 4. do you arrange the learning activities based on scientific approach? yes/no 5. do you apply all steps on scientific approach? yes/no 6. are your students interested on your teaching? yes/no 7. are your students active asking questions in classroom? yes/no 8. do you prepare media of teaching and learning? yes/no 9. do you use pictures? yes/no 10. do you use media of power point, video, lcd or internet? yes/no 11. do you use government book? yes/no 12. do you arrange evaluation based on objectives of lesson? yes/no 13. do you measure those four aspects in 2013 curriculum (spiritual, social, knowledge and skill aspects) yes/no points 1 to 3 are categorized in the aspect of preparing lesson plan. while in points 4 to 7 are included in applying the steps of learning activities (scientific approach). the aspect preparing media is shown in points 8 to 11. lastly, for aspect of making evaluation is stated in points 12 to 13. after the data was collected, the next step is analyzing the data. the technique to analyze the data is drawn in figure 1. based on the picture, to analyze data, there are several activities done i.e.: data reduction, data display, and conclusion. after collecting the data, the next step done is reducing the data by summarizing, choosing the important point, categorizing the data, making symbol and finding the theme and pattern. results and discussion the research showed that english teachers in four private vocational high schools in tegal have some problems in implementing the 2013 curriculum. the problems are influenced by the teachers themselves, students, and conditions of school. it is then classified and categorized into four aspects i.e.; a) preparing lesson plan, b) applying the steps of teaching learning activities, c) preparing media, and d) making evaluation. the following explanation describes the result of this research regarding those teachers’ problems. preparing lesson plan all teachers agreed that preparing lesson plan before teaching and learning process is important. they can prepare the objectives and materials of lesson effectively. the materials arranged are based on objectives of learning. through lesson plan, they are also able to arrange the learning activities systematically based on scientific approach in the 2013 curriculum. although they were aware on the importance of preparing lesson plan, the result of this study showed that only one english teacher made detail lesson plan before his teaching and learning and the three teachers did not prepare it well. the first teacher prepared detail lesson plan in every teaching. she arranged one lesson plan for two meetings. the objectives of learning are developed from the goal (basic competences) stated in syllabus. after that, she prepared materials based on objectives of lesson and took the material from government book and some other references from exercise book (lks) and internet. the problems, in addition, came up as the books are less available. she then duplicated by copying the book and students should spend some money to pay it. another problem came when she decided the method of teaching to combine with scientific approach since the students are quite passive. the students are really shy to speak and regard that english is difficult subject. in preparing lesson plan, the first english english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 45 teacher stated that it is a must for teacher to make a preparation before teaching. the preparation are arranging lesson plan, choosing media which is appropriate to the material, and preparing exercises to measure students’ understanding based on material taught. the second english teacher stated that before his teaching, he did not make detail lesson plan. he just prepared the outline what would be done during the teaching learning process. the reason why he did not made lesson plan is as he taught five classes and each class containing large students of 30 so he did not have a lot of time to make a preparation. he mentioned that preparing lesson plan in 2013 curriculum was so complicated since there was attitude aspect to measure. other result was showed by the third participant who explained that she could not prepare lesson plan because she used government book as a guidance to teach. from this book, she could prepare what material should be given to students. as it has been stated the learning objectives based on syllabus, so she just used the book without arranging the lesson plan. the last participant stated that preparing lesson plan before teaching and learning is important, but he did not prepare it as he needed time to prepare it and he considered that through the guidance of book was good to explain the material. in some cases, he made a note or draft of teaching which mentioned the goals that should be achieved by students, the method of teaching, and the material. he did not arrange the evaluation because he used an exercise book (lks). in scoring, he got problem because in lks there is no guidance to give score. based on the result above, it can be concluded that the teachers’ problem in preparing lesson plan is caused by the teacher’s readiness. they stated that no time to prepare detailed lesson plan since it is very complicated. they got difficulty in identifying and arranging learning objective, indicators, material, method of teaching, learning activities and evaluation. however, without detail lesson plan, those teacher used government book as a guidance in their teaching and sometimes they made draft or outline about their teaching planning in general. the solution of this problem is that teachers need to refresh their teaching competences especially about making lesson plan in any kind of workshop held by teacher team (mgmp) or socialization through forum group discussion (fgd). it is as preparing lesson plan helps teachers to organize the objectives, material, learning activities and evaluation effectively. moreover, teachers would be more confidence when delivering the lesson. other benefit is through preparing lesson plan students would be helped to achieve their learning objectives more easily. applying the steps of teaching and learning activities (scientific approach) to evaluate teachers’ problem in applying the steps of teaching and learning activities, the researcher asked the following questions containing teachers’ understanding in scientific approach, the implementation of scientific approach, and students’ responses. the result of interview can be seen in table 2. table 2. result interview of applying scientific approach questions aspect 1 st teacher 2 nd teacher 3 rd teacher 4 th teacher do you arrange the learning activities based on scientific approach? applying the steps of teaching learning activities (scientific approach) yes yes no no do you apply all steps of scientific approach? not all steps no no no are your students interested on your yes yes yes yes yulia nur ekawati english teachers’ problems in applying the 2013 curriculum 46 teaching? are your students active asking questions in classroom? not all students no no no based on the result above, it can be concluded that teachers understand the principles of scientific approach and the basic concept of 2013 curriculum (i.e. inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, discovery-learning, problem-based learning and task-based learning) but in terms of applying this concept, they did not apply it since the students were quite passive in the classroom. they were shy, afraid, and not confidence. they also regarded that english is difficult. another problem in applying this approach was teachers could not apply students-centered learning since students still depend on their teacher a lot. this is, of course, becoming the challenges for teachers making students to be active. therefore, teachers and government need to take a consideration for the schools which have low input of competences in order to apply not only limited on scientific approach but also other approaches in order there are various method of teaching. preparing media in preparing media, the result showed that all teachers used media of pictures in their teaching. they explained that pictures are kind of media which is easy to get and interesting, thus students can understand the material. however, the media of lcd, video, and power point did not used since the limitation of facilities those schools have. the following is the result of teachers’ problem in preparing media. table 3. preparing media questions aspect 1 st teacher 2 nd teacher 3 rd teacher 4 th teacher do you prepare media of teaching and learning? preparing media yes no yes yes sometimes do you use pictures? yes yes yes yes do you use media of power point, video, lcd or internet? yes sometimes no yes sometimes no do you use government book? yes yes yes yes from the table above, the first and third teachers prepared media before their teaching. with the problem in facilities, they tried to use media such as pictures and video. they sometimes used lcd because it was not provided in every class. other teachers also prepared media of picture in their teaching. this is therefore needed a solution by stakeholders (school and government) to provide additional budget in supporting school facilities especially in applying this curriculum. the limitation of government books also becomes the problem. to overcome this problem, students should copy the book. therefore, it would be attention for many stakeholders. making evaluation there are four main aspects of competences to be implemented in 2013 curriculum i.e. spiritual, social, knowledge and skill aspects. those aspects are stated in the core and basic competences (permendikbud no.59 tahun 2014). it is therefore to be developed in teaching learning indicators and objectives. teachers would know the students’ understanding if they can achieve the indicator and objectives of teaching learning through evaluation. in evaluation, it contained the indicators of evaluation, technique and form of evaluation as well as the rubric or scoring. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 47 the result showed that all teachers got difficulties in arranging evaluation. it needed long time to input the score of four aspects since the class is quite large. they also got the problem in making an individual assessment or pair assessment and affective assessment. in giving pair assessment, the students sometimes are not honest about their marks. while in affective assessment, it is difficult for teacher to analyze and evaluate the attitude of every student in his class. moreover, teachers regarded that this curriculum is too complex in which teacher needed to evaluate students’ attitude (through observation), students’ knowledge (through test), and students’ skill (through practice). this problem is due to teachers’ lack understanding in giving evaluation. to overcome teachers’ problem in making evaluation, thus, teachers should get adequate socialization and workshop which should be guided by competent instructor. they also should be trained to prepare appropriate instrument for evaluation. in addition, it is needed to be considered by government and stakeholder to provide easy software of evaluation to help teachers in reporting the result of evaluation. conclusion the implementation of 2013 curriculum faces some problems in four english teachers of private vocational high schools in tegal during preparing lesson, applying steps of learning activities (scientific approach), preparing media, and making evaluation. they stated that preparing lesson plan before teaching and learning process is important but it was hard to do since the limited time to make preparation. through lesson plan, the objectives of lesson and material could be delivered systematically and will help students to achieve its objectives. in fact, they had problem in preparing lesson plan due to limited time to make detail lesson plan. moreover, the problem happened when teachers applied the steps of scientific approach. the students were passive in the classroom. they also regarded english as a difficult subject to learn. media as a tool to support the material is provided in limited items, it is as the facilities in those schools are not supported well. to evaluate the students’ understanding, teachers also found problems. it seemed difficult to measure something abstract like the aspects of spiritual and attitude. in addition, they also got difficulty in giving score when observing students attitude and speaking skill because it needed a lot of time. in line with those problems faced by teachers, therefore, the solution should be taken by government and stakeholders such as providing deeper socialization and workshop to increase teachers’ understanding in implementing 2013 curriculum especially for all private english teachers of vocational high school who never had been given the socialization and training relating to the new curriculum. references kementrian dan kebudayaan. (2013). modul pelatihan implementasi kurikulum 2013. badan pengembangan sumber daya manusia pendidikan dan kebudayaan dan penjaminan mutu pendidikan. retnawati, et al. (2016). vocational high school teachers' difficulties in implementing the assessment in curriculum 2013 in yogyakarta province of indonesia. international journal of instruction january, 9(1). retrieved from www.e-iji.net. sahirudin. (2013). the implementation of the 2013 curriculum and the issues of english language teaching and learning in indonesia. the asian conference on language learning 2013, official conference proceeding. widodo. (2015). newest issues for curriculum reform in indonesia (2013). presented at apectsukuba international conference university of tsukuba tokyo japan. yulia nur ekawati english teachers’ problems in applying the 2013 curriculum 48 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 865 developing cross cultural understanding-based indonesia language material for south korea foreign speakers goziyah (corresponding author) department of masters indonesia language education, postgraduate program universitas muhammadiyah tangerang, indonesia email: goziyah1812@gmail.com ariyana department of indonesian language and literature, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah tangerang, indonesia email: ariyana.mpd@gmail.com kamiri department of masters indonesia language education, postgraduate program universitas muhammadiyah tangerang, indonesia email: kamerimeri4@gmail.com ira anisa purawinangun department of indonesian language and literature, faculty of teacher training and education universitas muhammadiyah tangerang, indonesia email: irapurawinangun@yahoo.com agus sulaeman department of melayu-indonesia, faculty of malay-indonesia studies hankuk university of foreign studies, south korea email: sultanwahyu13@gmail.com nanda saputra madrasah ibtidaiyah teacher education study program sekolah tinggi ilmu tarbiyah al-hilal sigli, aceh, indonesia email: nanda.saputra2589@gmail.com apa citation: goziyah., ariyana., kamiri., purawinangun, i. a., sulaeman, a., & saputra, n. (2022). developing cross cultural understanding-based indonesia language material for south korea foreign speakers. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 865-874. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6756 received: 09-06-2022 accepted: 27-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction the era of globalization has had a significant impact in various fields of life, including language. at first, indonesian was only spoken by abstract: the purpose of this study is to develop bipa teaching materials based on cross-cultural and local wisdom in banten province. this research uses a model design for developing indonesian language teaching materials for foreign speakers and combines existing models. the object being analyzed is the borg and gall’ model (1983), from the analyzed model, a modified model can be formulated. the research data are numerical data and verbal data (interview transcripts, analysis results of teaching materials, questionnaires, observations, and notes, comments, criticisms or suggestions from test subjects). the research data are numerical data and verbal data (interview transcripts, analysis results of teaching materials, questionnaires, observations, and notes, comments, criticisms or suggestions from test subjects). given the data obtained in the for m of numerical data and verbal data, the analysis was carried out in the form of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. the results of this study are in the form of beginner level cross-cultural based bipa teaching materials using a contextual-communicative approach. in this case the culture used as a reference is the local culture of banten considering that in banten there are foreign nationals from south korea. the results showed that the average expert trial score reached 86%, the practitioner trial score average reached 89%, and the field stage trial score averaged 87%. therefore, this book can be categorized as very feasible to be applied. keywords: bipa; cross-cultural; language teaching materials. mailto:goziyah1812@gmail.com goziyah, ariyana, kamiri, ira anisa purawinangun, agus sulaeman, & nanda saputra developing cross cultural understanding-based indonesia language material for south korea foreign speakers 866 indonesians, both as their first language and mother tongue, now spoken by foreigners. technically, the use of indonesian by indonesian speakers is called bipi while the use of indonesian by foreign speakers is called bipa (indonesian for foreign speakers). basically, bipa has had a long history. teaching indonesian to foreign speakers began in the 1950s, although the name bipa itself was only used massively in the 90s and currently there are at least 219 educational institutions in 74 countries that offer bipa teaching. this figure shows that foreigners are interested in indonesia in general and indonesian language and culture in particular. the use of the bip teaching curriculum until 2014 has not been uniform. each institution develops its own curriculum (suher, 2017). bipa textbooks are also very diverse both in terms of material and quality (saddhono & erwinsyah, 2018). to overcome these diverse curricula, the language development and development agency in this case the center for development of language strategy and diplomacy (ppsdk) has collaborated with bipa teachers and experts to develop a standard bipa curriculum. this was actually initiated by the language development and development agency on 24-27 november 2014 at the inna garuda hotel, malioboro, yogyakarta. the activity, which was named the workshop on the preparation of the bipa curriculum, produced an embryo for the bipa curriculum which is expected to be used nationally by institutions administering bipa teaching at home and abroad. in its later journey, the curriculum was refined again in 2015-2016. in 2016, the bipa curriculum based on the indonesian national qualifications framework was compiled by a team consisting of bipa teachers and activists who joined the association of bipa teachers and activists (appbipa) together with the ppsdk team. the preparation of the curriculum is accommodated by the directorate responsible for public education, namely the directorate of early childhood education and community education (paudni and diknas). from the above background the use of crosscultural teaching materials will spur the creative industry, especially in the fields of culture and tourism. the curriculum created will produce good indonesian language skills and introduce indonesian culture and local wisdom to foreign students. teaching indonesian to foreign speakers is very useful for students and foreign workers to learn (slameto, 2018). the aim is to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently in accordance with applicable ethics, both orally and in writing, so that indonesian becomes an international language and avoids social conflicts in society, especially at school. foreign workers who work in indonesia, by mastering the indonesian language and respecting and proud to use indonesian as the language of unity and the language of the state. understand indonesian and use it appropriately and creatively for various purposes, use indonesian to improve intellectual abilities, as well as emotional and social maturity, enjoy and utilize literary works to broaden horizons, refine character, and improve knowledge and language skills, appreciate and be proud indonesian literature as a cultural and intellectual treasure of indonesian people. by learning indonesian for foreign speakers at universities and language institutions, foreign students and workers can get to know themselves, their culture and the culture of others, express ideas and feelings, participate in the community that uses the language and to improve the ability of students to communicate in indonesian with properly and correctly, both orally and in writing, as well as fostering an appreciation of the works of indonesian human literature. article 26 of the presidential regulation of the republic of indonesia no. 20 of 2018 states that every foreign worker (tka) employer is obliged to facilitate indonesian language education and training for foreign workers. from this regulation, bipa muhammadiyah university tangerang took part in the presidential regulation, due to the potential for foreign workers in the banten area, especially in tangerang city, south tangerang and tangerang regency, there were no private institutions, especially universities that took part in the implementation of the regulatory policy, the establishment of bipa universitas muhammadiyah tangerang is to develop indonesian language, culture and courses for foreign workers working in banten, especially workers from south korea who are scattered in the banten area. this aims to suppress the status of social vulnerability, especially in the use of indonesian for foreign workers. kusmiatun et al. (2017) explained that learning bipa is different from learning indonesian as a first language (b1) which is more complex and complicated, partly because foreign students studying bipa can come from different countries (astuti & bewe, 2020). what is meant by foreign students here are students who (1) are foreign nationals (non-indonesian) and (2) speak their mother tongue instead of indonesian. according to suyitno, (2018) learning indonesian for foreign speakers is essentially a systematic, systematic, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 867 and planned activity. systemic because in it there is a set of aspects and a series of interrelated activities. it is called systematic because in its implementation it is procedural. planned because learning has been described clearly and firmly. bipa learning has goals, targets, and objectives that must be achieved (mukti et al., 2019). bipa learning has two aspects that must be considered: the instructional aspect and the conditional aspect. instructional aspects include: (1) learning objectives, (2) learning materials, (3) learning methods, (4) learning media, (5) classroom management, (6) evaluation, (7) lessons, and (8) teachers. the second aspect is the conditional aspect which includes: (1) conditioning the readiness of students' needs, (2) seeking exposure and discourse in real linguistic situations, (3) conditioning the learning atmosphere, and (4) seeking independent training (murtianis et al., 2019). in learning, the use of the curriculum is wider in scope because it refers to all aspects of planning, implementing, evaluating, and regulating education programs. nicholson (2019) define that the curriculum can consist of a number of syllabus, for example, the curriculum covers the whole school, while the language teaching syllabus is only part of the curriculum. meanwhile, beauchamp in sukmadinata (2017) state that a curriculum is a written document which may contain many ingredients, but basically it is a plan for the education of pupils during the enrollment in given school. agus and windha (2019) about the learning process emphasizes that the curriculum is an education or teaching plan. based on the description of the opinion above, it can be said that the curriculum is broader than the syllabus. the approach used in the preparation of the curriculum will have an impact on the syllabus that is prepared. the author agrees, the theory used is a view or philosophy which states that learning language is learning communication. to communicate, students must have linguistic knowledge and language skills stated by canale and swin as (1) linguistic competence, (2) sociolinguistic competence, and (3) strategic competence. for this reason, the syllabus that is prepared must include all the things needed to achieve these competencies (sihombing et al., 2022). however, in line with what dubin and olshtain (2016) stated that a syllabus is more detaild and operational statement of teaching and learning elements which translates the philosophy of the curriculum into a series of planned sreps leading towards more narrowly defined objektives at each level. this statement implies that the syllabus is an important part of the curriculum. the syllabus is more operational and concrete, as also stated by brown (1995, p.123) which states that “syllabuses is ways of organizing the course and materials.” (syllabuses are ways of organizing teaching and materials). harmer in maulana, zamahsari, and purnomo (2020) states that there are several criteria that must be considered as the basis for preparing the syllabus design. those criteria are (1) learnability. this relates to whether or not certain lexical structures and items are learned by students. (2) frequency. this relates to items that are rarely used in language. (3) coverage (coverage). some words and grammatical structures cover a greater range of uses than other words and grammatical structures. (4) its usefulness (usefulness) (gongora et al., 2022). this relates to whether certain lexical items are closer to students' lives so that they are more useful for students when discussed in class. harmer in rachman et al. (2019) also classify syllabus models as follows: (1) structural syllabus, (2) situational syllabus, (3) topic-based syllabus, (4) notional-functional syllabus, (5) process syllabus, (6) syllabus, procedural based on assignments, (7) mixed syllabus. as the research that the author has done for dissertation needs, the author tends to use a mixed syllabus for bipa learning needs harmer's opinion (2001) calls the mixed syllabus multi-syllabus, the solution that is usually done in an effort to mediate a number of different syllabus designs is to compose a mixed syllabus or multi-syllabus (ellis, 2019). thus, this syllabus design does not only emphasize grammatical or lexical aspects. mixed syllabus design is a combination of aspects of grammar, lexical, language functions, situations, topics, assignments and various language skills tasks. mixed syllabus design is based on a language teaching approach that involves: (1) explicit teaching of the structural and grammatical features of spoken and written texts, (2) linking spoken and written texts to social and cultural contexts in their use, (3) preparation of material units that focus on developing skills in relation to integrated texts (whole texts), (4) providing practices when students develop language skills for meaningful communication through integrated texts. the elements of a mixed syllabus are (1) the integration of aspects of the overall types of syllabus, namely: lexical aspects, grammatical structures, topics, situations, learning activities and assignments and (2) learning objectives obtained from the labor analysis used as the basis for selection of aspects of syllabus preparation. in language learning, the goziyah, ariyana, kamiri, ira anisa purawinangun, agus sulaeman, & nanda saputra developing cross cultural understanding-based indonesia language material for south korea foreign speakers 868 syllabus developed must pay attention to three dimensions, namely the dimensions of the language (language contend, process) and product (product). covers the four language skills (purba et al., 2022). based on the theories that have been put forward, it can be concluded that the syllabus is an important part of the curriculum. the syllabus becomes the teacher's reference in learning because it will provide direction for the goals to be achieved along with the material to be studied (isnaniah & islahuddin, 2020). the model set by the teacher will have an impact on the teaching approach used in the classroom. basically, there are already several bipa teaching materials that can be used by teachers such as lentera indonesia, sahabatku indonesia, basic indonesian, and so on. however, not all existing bipa textbooks provide material or information about the socio-cultural aspects of indonesian society. in fact, the use of language is bound by culture. on several occasions, it was found that someone who had high indonesian language skills was conflicted because he did not have an understanding of communication in the local culture. even if there is a culture, it is general or specifically refers to the culture that surrounds the author so that it is not contextual. for example, students living in banten are exposed to teaching materials that focus more on sundanese and javanese culture so that they only have cultural knowledge but not life skills in the local culture. therefore, culture-based bipa teaching materials are needed to overcome these limitations. language diversity cannot be separated from cultural diversity. in terms of culture, language is a cultural aspect, the wealth of language is something that is beneficial. the various languages will reflect the cultural richness that exists in the user community (multicultural). the relationship between language and culture is coordinating or subordinate, both of which have a very close relationship and influence each other. coordinative relationships, namely equal relations, which have the same high position. subordinating relationship means a language is under the scope of culture. in addition, there is another opinion which states that language and culture are two systems that are "attached" to humans. culture is a system that regulates human interaction in society, so language is a system that functions as a suggestion. the language system has a function as a means of ongoing human interaction in society, meaning that language behavior must be accompanied by the norms that apply in that culture. the system of language behavior according to cultural norms is called language ethics or language procedures. language ethics is closely related to the selection of language codes, social norms, and cultural systems that apply in a society. language is part of culture, the relationship between language and culture is a subordinate relationship, a language is under the scope of culture (permadi et al., 2022). in addition, there is another opinion which states that language and culture have a coordinating relationship, namely an equal relationship, which has the same high position. basically, language and culture play two complementary roles in the educational process. as all human activities are linguistically and culturally mediated, language and culture activate and organize teaching and learning processes (budianingsih, 2017). the 'classroom culture' that students and teachers build on working together, the 'school culture' is the practice, large and small, more or less functional, in which school life is carried out. both are shaped, among other factors, by educational policies, curricular priorities and the state of school materials. both are sustainable through language and discourse, speech and text, and through hybrid, multimedia forms of communication. but just as language and culture provide the means to impart education, they also serve as objects. the role of language and culture as educational goals is most obvious in language teaching, where language defines the subject matter. language and culture have a very close relationship (arvianto, 2020). the two influence each other, complement each other, and go hand in hand (marbun et al., 2021). language is part of culture, so learning a language indirectly also studies culture. that is, language must be studied in the context of culture and vice versa, new culture can be learned through language. the close relationship between language and culture has led to studies to find out the relationship. the study of the relationship between language and culture is generally seen from the science that studies it. antopology as a science that studies culture and linguistics as a science that studies language. furthermore, linguistics and anthropology work together in studying the relationship of language and aspects of culture with the term anthropolinguistics. anthropolinguistics means the branch of linguistics that studies the variation and use of language in relation to the development of time, differences in places of communication, kinship systems, the influence of ethnic habits, beliefs, language ethics, customs, and other cultural patterns of an ethnic group. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 869 method this research is a product-based research or better known as research development (r&d). this research uses the borg and gall model. that the procedural model is a descriptive model that describes the flow or procedural steps that must be followed to produce a particular product). there are 10 stages in this procedural model, namely (1) research and initial information gathering, (2) planning. (3) initial product format development, (4) initial trial, (5) product revision, (6) trial field, (7) product revision, (8) field test, (9) final product revision, and (10) dissemination and implementation. based on the consideration of the characteristics of the product being developed as well as the limitations and limitations of the research, the ten steps were adapted and compressed into the first five development steps, the research phase and the initial information gathering. this stage is carried out by conducting a theoretical study, analyzing the bipa curriculum, analyzing the teaching language used in the field, interviewing teachers, and distributing questionnaires to students in order to obtain authentic data about learning needs in the field. second, the planning stage. at this stage the research begins to design textbook products based on the data obtained in the first stage. this product design is formed by a schema that explains the unit, material, aspect, culture, evaluation, language characteristics, and graphic characteristics. third, the initial product development stage. this stage is the process of realizing the product based on the product specifications produced in the second stage. fourth, the product trial stage. this stage is carried out simultaneously to experts, practitioners, and foreign students with the aim of knowing the feasibility and attractiveness of textbooks. the expert test was carried out at bipa muhammadiyah university tangerang to two lecturers who teach bipa courses in the indonesian language and literature education study program. the practitioner test was carried out at the language center institute, muhammadiyah tangerang university involving 5 bipa lecturers in the beginner class. meanwhile, a limited group field test was conducted on 15 foreign students in the beginner class. fifth, the stage of product revision or refinement which is a follow-up to the recommendations for improvement from the validator at the product test stage. this stage produces a product that is ready to be implemented and disseminated. the instruments used in this study are divided into pre-development instruments and postdevelopment instruments. pre-development instruments are all instruments used to collect initial information in order to develop teaching materials. this instrument consists of an analysis matrix, interview guidelines, questionnaires and literature review guidelines. meanwhile, postdevelopment instruments are all instruments used to obtain data about the validity of teaching materials and other things that researchers want to know from teaching materials that have been developed. this instrument consists of an analysis matrix of teaching materials, a questionnaire for the assessment of teaching materials, a questionnaire for notes on the attractiveness of teaching materials, an interview guide, and an observation guide. from the above instruments, research data were obtained in the form of numerical data and verbal data. numerical data includes teaching materials assessment scores. meanwhile, verbal data includes interviews, results of analysis of teaching materials, results of questionnaires, results of observations, and notes, comments, criticisms, and suggestions written by test subjects on the assessment sheet (riyanti et al., 2019). because the data obtained are in the form of numerical data and verbal data, the analysis carried out is in the form of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. quantitative analysis consists of the average analysis technique used to analyze the test scores of teaching materials. meanwhile, verbal data were analyzed by qualitative analysis which included: (1) collecting written verbal data obtained from interviews, questionnaires, observations, and field notes; (2) transcribing verbal verbal data; (3) collect, select, and classify written verbal data and verbal transcript results based on criteria; and (4) analyzing the data and formulating the conclusion of the analysis as the basis for taking action on the developed product. results and discussion teaching materials become an inseparable part of learning. teaching materials can be interpreted as all forms of material used by teachers and students to carry out the learning process in the classroom to achieve learning objectives. in this regard, herman et al. (2022) states that the theoretical principles underlying the development of teaching materials include (1) the need to communicate, (2) the need for long-term goals, (3) the need for authenticity, and (4) the need for centered on the learner. starting from the above principles, the teaching materials in this study were prepared using a contextual-communicative approach. the contextual approach is rooted in the foundation of goziyah, ariyana, kamiri, ira anisa purawinangun, agus sulaeman, & nanda saputra developing cross cultural understanding-based indonesia language material for south korea foreign speakers 870 constructivism which emphasizes that learning is not rote but an attempt to construct or build knowledge. in this case, according to khasanova (2020), there are five elements that must be considered in the application of contextual learning, namely (1) activating knowledge, (2) acquiring new knowledge, (3) understanding knowledge by compiling temporary concepts., discussion, and revision of concepts, (4) practice of knowledge and experience, and (5) reflection of knowledge (zamzamy, 2021). meanwhile, the highlight of this approach lies in the relationship between the material and the real situation in the learner's environment so that the material he has learned can be applied in everyday life. meanwhile, the communicative approach is a learning approach that emphasizes aspects of communication, interaction, and increasing linguistic competence and language skills. littewood (in purba et al., 2022) states that to develop students' communicative abilities in second language classes, class activities must be arranged in such a way that there are precommunication activities and communication activities. pre-communication activity refers to the structure of linguistic forms and their meanings. the communication activity refers to the use of functional and social language. in this regard, (herman et al., 2022) explains that the use of functional language includes activities to share and process information, while the use of social language includes interactive social activities such as dialogue, simulation, role playing, and so on. the textbooks developed in this study were designed by fulfilling the above elements. the material is arranged systematically based on the level of difficulty, urgency of use, and quantity of use in daily communication. specifically, the aspect of contextuality is reflected in the preparation of materials that are tailored to the needs of learners, the selection of authentic texts, the preparation of texts that are adapted to the environment around the learners (in this case, the environment around the banten area where there are foreign nationals from south korea), and activities that conditions learners to explore various information according to the theme. the communicative aspect is reflected in the form of presentation of material that is in line with the syntax of the communicative approach which consists of pre-communication and communication activities. pre-communication activities are manifested in the form of discussion activities to explore and process information, while communication activities are manifested in the form of exercises in the form of discussions, role playing, campaigns, interviews, advertising, and presentations. in the end, language knowledge and language skills must be strengthened by intercultural competence (ic). this is very important because humans practice culture through language so that ic is a bridge between the learner's culture and the culture in the language being studied. every use of language is at the same time a cultural practice and ic is likened to a third place 'third place' (lantzdeaton, 2017). the third place here is a position where language learners act as outsiders (etic) and at the same time as insiders (emic) to their home culture and the target culture they are studying at the same time. the final estuary is an attitude of respect for other cultures so that they can behave appropriately in different cultures. kohler (in strotmann & kunschak, 2022) proposed an ic teaching strategy formulated in five pedagogical principles. first, active construction which implies the learner to construct the target culture by describing, analyzing, and comparing the learner's culture with the target culture. second, making connections which emphasizes the skills to see the relationship between the learner's culture and the target culture. third, social interaction which conditions learners to conduct discussions related to the cultural topic being discussed. fourth, reflection which focuses on involving students in responding and reflecting on the cultural items discussed. fifth, responsibility which implies skills to build awareness of cultural differences so that they can respect and respect people with different cultural practices. the application of ic through a communicative-contextual approach can then be understood through the following figure 1. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 871 figure 1. the application of ic through a communicative-contextual approach the teaching material produced in this floating research is a beginner level bipa textbook (bipa 1). in permendikbud number 27 of 2017 concerning competency standards for graduates of indonesian language courses and training for foreign speakers, it is explained that bipa 1 graduates are expected to be able to understand and use expressions in the context of selfintroduction and fulfill daily and routine concrete needs in a simple way to communicate with speech partners who very cooperative. these competencies are then translated into listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar competency units. based on the curriculum review and needs analysis, the textbooks are designed in six units, namely (1) greet, (2) traditional clothes, (3) musical instrumet (4) go for walk, (5) culture value, (6) daily activities. day, and (7) art. these seven units accommodate aspects of skills and knowledge that must be mastered by students in daily communication using indonesian. in this case, the cultural aspect is manifested in the column of cultural space. the cultural space column presents material and special discussions according to the unit's theme in order to develop students' intercultural competence. furthermore, the cultural aspects that are integrated with the learning materials in each unit can be seen in table 1 below. table 1. composition of teaching materials unit material cultural aspect 1 greet regrads, identity, introduction greeting words: mang dan teteh, kang dan nong 2 traditonal clothes men’s and women clothes baju koko leher tertutup, celana panjang diikat kain batik. pada wanita memakai pakian kebaya dan kain batik 3 musical instrument variety of musical instruments banten angklung buhun, pantung bambu rampak beduk. 4 go for walk visit historical buildings tourist attraction; menara banten, klenteng boentekbiau, masjid seribu pintu. 5 culture and value cultural potential and uniqueness seni beladiri pencak silat, debus, tari cokek, umbruk, palingtung, dan lojor. 6 daily activity day information about object function body parts activities : eat with hands. 7 art banten art variety seni debus sorosowan, seni rudat, seni terbang gede, seni bendrong lesung product trials are carried out in three stages. the first stage is an expert trial conducted on two experts, namely learning experts and cultural experts. the second stage is a practitioner trial conducted on five bipa lecturers at the muhammadiyah university of tangerang in the beginner class. the third stage is a field trial conducted on international student program (isp) students, muhammadiyah tangerang university. goziyah, ariyana, kamiri, ira anisa purawinangun, agus sulaeman, & nanda saputra developing cross cultural understanding-based indonesia language material for south korea foreign speakers 872 figure 2. product trial diagram in the first phase of the trial, five aspects were assessed. the five aspects include (1) the feasibility of the material, (2) the feasibility of the language aspect, (3) the feasibility of the text readability aspect, (4) the feasibility of the evaluation aspect, and (5) the feasibility of the cultural aspect in textbooks. the test results show that the average feasibility of the material reaches 85%, the average feasibility of the language aspect reaches 87%, the average feasibility of the text readability aspect reaches 80%, the average feasibility aspect of the evaluation reaches 90%, and the average feasibility cultural aspects reached 90%. thus, the average expert trial results reached 86% so that it can be concluded that this textbook is feasible to be applied. the second phase of the trial had five aspects of assessment, namely (1) material aspects, (2) linguistic aspects, (3) applied aspects, (4) evaluation aspects, and (5) illustration aspects. the test results show that the average feasibility of the material reaches 87%, the average feasibility of the language aspect reaches 87%, the average feasibility of the text readability aspect reaches 85%, the average feasibility of the evaluation aspect reaches 92%, and the average feasibility cultural aspects reached 95%. thus, the average practitioner trial results reached 89% so that it can be said that this textbook is very feasible to be applied. meanwhile, the third phase of the trial had three aspects of assessment, namely (1) material aspects, (2) language aspects, and (3) book display aspects. the test results show that the average feasibility of the material reaches 90%, the average feasibility of the language aspect reaches 93%, and the average attractiveness of the display reaches 95%. the average feasibility of the readability aspect of the text reaches 90%, the average feasibility of the evaluation aspect reaches 95%, and the average feasibility of the cultural aspect reaches 92%. thus, the average field trial results reached 92%. therefore, this textbook can be categorized as very feasible to be applied. conclusion the problem of the availability of teaching materials is an issue that continues to grow from year to year. this departs from the fact that the existing teaching materials cannot be accessed easily and that the existing teaching materials do not meet the needs of teachers and learners, especially in terms of intercultural competence. therefore, this study develops teaching materials based on local banten culture using a contextualcommunicative approach. the teaching materials produced in this development research are beginner level textbooks. teaching materials are designed with reference to permendikbud number 27 of 2017 concerning competency standards for graduates of indonesian language courses and training for foreign speakers and the concept of learning a second language with a contextualcommunicative approach based on local banten culture. there are six units in this textbook, namely (1) greet, (2) traditional clothes, (3) musical instrumet (4) go for walk, (5) culture value, (6) daily activities. day, and (7) art. these seven units accommodate aspects of skills and knowledge that must be mastered by students in daily communication using indonesian. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 873 acknowledgment researchers would like to thank and acknowledge the following people who have this article possible. dean of faculty of teacher training and education at muhammadiyah university of tangerang, all many colleagues and students especially south korea students as objects of this research. hopefully, this research could be beneficial for those who focus on education and linguistic studies or other 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(2021). development of multimodal language teaching materials for indonesian language for foreign speakers (bipa) during pandemic time. english language and literature international conference (ellic) proceedings, 4, 21-31. https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1742-6596 https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1742-6596 https://iopscience.iop.org/volume/1742-6596/1339 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14708477.2021.2018450 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14708477.2021.2018450 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14708477.2021.2018450 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14708477.2021.2018450 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 831 utilizing “wordwalls’ as an assessment tool for indonesian junior high school students lina anisah english language education study program, teacher training and education faculty, universitas sembilanbelas november kolaka, indonesia email: lina.anisah@gmail.com apa citation: anisah, l . (2022). utilizing “wordwalls” as an assessment tool for indonesian junior high school students. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 831-842. http://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6472. received: 21-07-2022 accepted: 20-09-2022 published: 30-11-2022 introduction 21st century learning continues to adopt increasingly developing technologies. now, the use of computers and smartphones has become an important element for human life such as in the business field, office, home, and school (yarahmadzehi & goodarzi, 2020). the development of technology in the world of education has a role in the teaching and learning process, wherein the teaching and learning process technological developments are expected to be able to make changes and have a better impact on learning. smith & hill (2019) stated that face-to-face and online learning have been applied since the 1990s. in general, the use of technological developments that are often used in education is the use of smartphone technology in making learning media that can facilitate educators in finding material, for example in the form of reading media in the form of e-books. the rapid development of technology as it is today should be used more optimally to improve the quality of learning, especially in smartphone technology. the utilization of smartphone technology is not only a medium for finding materials and media for reading, but can also be used in the assessment process, namely as an assessment tool in learning. however, the use of smartphone technology itself is still not optimally carried out by educators. the school must develop their programs every year so that they develop students’ competencies that are adaptive to every development of science and technology (akbuber et al., 2019). for example, smp negeri 1 kolaka still uses a manual assessment system in providing english test questions, namely paperbased assessment. this type of assessment is usually done by giving questions on sheets of paper so that students write their answers on paper. this type of manual assessment has several disadvantages including being tedious, too monotonous, and not varied. from the lack of variation in giving questions so students get bored with the conventional test exam model (herianto, 2022). technology can help students overcome scheduling and location barriers to learning. student involvement mainly emphasizes the time and effort they put into online learning activities to achieve the desired learning effectiveness (hong et al., 2021). licorish et al. (2018) and santosa (2017) stated implementing technology in learning is taken as a consideration to increase students' learning motivation, so that there is interaction during learning. it is supposed that effective school is a school that has the ability to carry out its functions optimally and all students can develop themselves (d. darwissyah and indrasari, 2019). therefore, from some of these problems, the researcher offers an alternative solution by utilizing a smartphone application that abstract: the purpose of this research was to analyze students' perceptions of the use of interactive media wordwall as an assessment tool at smp negeri 1 kolaka. the design of this study used a study case design. the subjects in this study were students of class viii g smp negeri 1 kolaka, totaling 26 students in 2022. the collection technique used questionnaires and interviews. questionnaires were given to determine students' perceptions and interviews were conducted to find out more in-depth answers so that researchers could describe and study optimally students' perceptions of the wordwall application as an assessment tool. the results of this research indicate that 87,5% of students are interested in using the wordwall application as an assessment tool. easy use, attractive appearance, and varied questions make students want to use the wordwall application as an assessment tool in the future. keywords: perception; wordwall. lina anisah utilizing “wordwalls” as an assessment tool for indonesian junior high school students 832 can be done online, namely the wordwall webbased application. according to maulani (2019), word wall could be an assortment that square measures age-acceptable, classified or class, and settled on the room wall thus students can easily see and learn. sipayung (2019) also stated word walls are collection of words shown somewhere in the classroom that can be vocabulary significant to the students. cleaver (2018) said a wordwalls is dedicated to displaying high frequency words (these could be sight words or words that are used a lot in your class) that are important for students to know and use. utilizing this application, of course, can provide convenience to educators in the assessment process and can increase students' learning motivation in learning english. in the assessment system that uses the wordwall webbased smartphone application, the researcher gave assessment test questions that were made on wordwall. with a simple and attractive interface, it can make it easier to use and provide a different experience in working on questions so that it can increase students' motivation in learning english and can also measure students' abilities well in every assessment given. each online-based question has a predetermined time. therefore, the researcher introduced an assessment tool that utilizes a web-based application on a smartphone, namely wordwall to see students' perceptions of this application. one of the interactive learning media that can be used is wordwall, as expressed by (maghfiroh, 2018; permana & kasriman, 2022; pradani, 2022). wordwall is a web-based interactive application that can create various types of online quiz models. the advantage of this application is that it can make questions that are accompanied by a form of final score assessment. this website is also equipped with 18 templates to create questions that can be accessed for free so that the quiz model becomes more varied. an attractive template with sound effects can attract the attention of middle school-age students. the main reason for using this application is to see students' perspectives from various perspectives and student points of view. then, at this time there are not many educators who use this web-based application wordwall as a media in conducting assessments, especially at smp negeri 1 kolaka. the reason researcher uses wordwall as an assessment tool is because this application is effective and makes it easier for teachers to conduct assessments for student learning. in contrast to conventional evaluation tools that use paper-based assessments which can waste paper and take a long time to assess student test results, this application can save paper only by using smartphones to conduct assessments and students do not have to wait a long time to see the score of their test results. the attractive appearance and easy to use add to the attractiveness of the students themselves. previous related studies have been conducted regarding student’s perception or wordwall as an assessment. first comes from firdiansyah & pamungkas (2021) conducted research that discussed the use of educational games as a learning evaluation. in their research, firdiansyah & pamungkas (2021) examined student perceptions of the use of kahoot as a learning evaluation media in the monetary economic theory course. the object of the research is the 5th semester social studies study program students who take the monetary economics theory course involving 83 students. the results of firdiansyah & pamungkas’ (2021) research stated that the use of kahoot as a learning evaluation medium received a positive response from students. this is because kahoot is easy to use, has an attractive appearance, and is transparent in displaying scores. thus, students are increasingly motivated to study to achieve the highest score. arsini (2022) did the research of regarding the perceptions of hotel school students regarding the use of wordwall to enrich student work ready vocabulary mastery. the method used is qualitative and data is collected from 10 respondents who have been selected with qualifications of activeness during learning, and always participate during the process. the data analysis found that students have high enthusiasm for learning vocabulary through the wordwall application. this application provides various types of creative and interactive vocabulary games. in addition, research on the use of wordwall as an assessment tool has been carried out previously. savitri and kusnarto (2021) researched the use of wordwall educational games as an online evaluation of indonesian language learning in higher education. in their research, savitri & kusnarto (2021) used descriptive qualitative research methods and the data in their research were the results of an evaluation questionnaire through the educational game wordwall. the source of the research data is the student of the communication science study program of upn veteran, east java who is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 833 taking indonesian language courses which shows that the level of understanding of students using wordwall is 96.8%. through the use of wordwall, students' interest in learning indonesian language material has been shown to increase. even as the second studies from sartika (2017) said the use of wordwall method in order to improve the ability to learn descriptive texts in junior excessive school students. by using the qualitative approach, sartika (2017) obtained data thru observations, questionnaires, and documents that were used as devices. the effects of her studies determined that the use of wordwall method was very beneficial for instructors to train descriptive texts to hone students' writing skills. using wordwall additionally received a advantageous response with the aid of college students, so the use of wordwall is advocated for in junior excessive faculties. the next studies got here from darliani & agustina (2019), with the aim of research on implementing wordwall in enhancing the writing abilities of excessive college students in bandung. they used commentary and interviews to collect qualitative facts. the outcomes in their studies also confirmed a high quality reaction, because students had been taken into consideration capable of write descriptive texts according to the instructions. the research describing wordwall become also performed through (ismiyati & saputri, 2020). the motive of this study become to describe the use of wordwall as an effective medium in english training, in particular in students' vocabulary. the research they conducted used a scientific overview technique, wherein they reviewed 6 theses, and 4 journals associated with the implementation of wordwall. the statistics acquired have been then analysed by approach of descriptive evaluation. the effects confirmed that wordwall can be an effective medium to be able to boom college students' insight into vocabulary, mainly on the junior excessive school level. in contrast to these researches, this study addresses a gap in students’ perception towards wordwall as an assessment tool. also, researcher believes that not many related studies talking about this. meanwhile, a lot of research, talking about wordwall as media to improve one of students’ skills or try to find the effect of using wordwall on students’ learning achievement. through this research, the researcher hopes to contribute research to teachers to innovate in using the wordwall application as a learning assessment tool. based on the above background, the researchers tried to examine “how is the perception of students after using the wordwall web-based application as an assessment tool for second-grade students at smp negeri 1 kolaka?”. by conducting this research, it is expected to be useful for students in carrying out better assessments, especially in english learning test to make it more effective, and practical and also useful in measuring and assessing results more accurately, effectively, and quickly. method this research was qualitative since it describes the students’ perceptions. qualitative research is an established tradition within management studies, and many authors have argued for its potential to provide richly detailed insights and contextual explanations for many of the challenges currently faced in modern management practice. it was reinforced by cresswell (2018) stated that qualitative research relies on text and image data, have unique steps in data analysis, and draw on diverse designs. this was relevant to creswell (2018) stated that one of the reasons why someone does qualitative research is because of the nature of the research question. in qualitative research, the research questions often begin with ‘how’ or ‘what’. thus, the initiation forces its way into the topic that describes what is going on. the design used in this research is a case study using a mixed method approach which is combines qualitative and quantitative approaches with a specific design to answer the research objectives. by using this research design, it can show a description of the phenomenon of student responses to the use of wordwall as an assessment tool for learning english subjects class viii g students of smp negeri 1 kolaka. this research was conducted in the second semester of 2021/2022. just like other research methods, case study research is also divided into several types. they differ from each other both in terms of hypotheses (temporary answers) and from the thesis to be proven (salmaa, 2021). these types of case studies can then be applied in various fields. research using the case study method is to examine scientific phenomena that occur in a place so that it requires an in-depth analysis of the symptoms that exist in nature so that it is interesting to study. in addition, the data and facts obtained must also be supported by valid supporting data and according to needs through the process of providing questionnaires, lina anisah utilizing “wordwalls” as an assessment tool for indonesian junior high school students 834 interviews, observations, or documentation. based on this, this research was conducted to reveal students' perceptions of the use of wordwall as an assessment tool in english subjects supported by data, namely the actual conditions that occur in the field using a case study with a mixed method approach. in addition, information must also be obtained by researchers in the field according to their needs. research must have a clear objective and be ready to be investigated as a follow-up to solving the problem formulation that has been proposed. the four informants who will be interviewed are chosen randomly in the class. the instrument is a key component in research. according to sugiyono (2017), a research instrument is a tool used to measure the observed natural and social phenomena. the main instruments in this research were questionnaires and interviews. the questionnaire guidelines in the form of questions posed through data collection applications and interviews were delivered orally to students. the questionnaire in this research contained two dimensions, namely internal and external factors. interviews were conducted to obtain more detailed information regarding the questions asked. table 1. questionnaire guidelines the likert scale is a scale used to measure perceptions, attitudes, or opinions. this scale is used to complete a questionnaire that requires respondents to indicate a level of agreement with a series of questions. in this research, researchers used 4 scales to measure student perceptions, namely strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. table 2. interview guidelines no. indicator list of question 1 usage 1. are you interested in using wordwall application? 2. did you find any difficulties when using the wordwall application as an assessment tool? 3. is the use of the wordwall application easy to use? 2 wordwall display 4. is the wordwall application interface attractive? 5. is the animation display in the wordwall application very attractive? 6. is the color display in the wordwall application very attractive? 7. is the appearance of the font in the wordwall application attractive and easy to read? 8. are the images displayed on the application interesting to see? 3 question variations 9. are the questions in the wordwall application varied? 10. are the variations of questions in the wordwall application interesting? 11. are the questions that display easy to do? 4 the effectiveness of the wordwall as an assessment tool 12. is this wordwall application interesting to use as an assessment tool? 13. is using wordwall as an assessment tool interesting to use in future tests? 14. is the wordwall application interesting to use for english quizzes? 15. is this wordwall application interesting to use for semester exams? there are three types of interviews: open interviews (unstructured interviews), probing interviews (semi-structured interviews) and structured interviews. an open interview is an interview whose open answer is not determined by the researcher. structured interviews are interview whose answers have been determined by the researcher, while semi-structured no factor indicator question item number 1 internal interest 1 2,3,4,5 2 external usage 6,7,8 3 wordwall display 9,10,11,12,13 4 question variations 14,15,16 5 the effectiveness of the wordwall as an assessment tool 17,18,19,20 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 835 interviews are to dig deeper into information and explore thoughts. in this research, the researcher chose semi structured questions because the researcher could dig deeper into the broad information and could find out more about student responses. for the second instrument which is interview, here is the technique of data analysis. the process in question is as follows: (1) data reduction, (2) data presentation, (3) draw conclusions. in this research, researchers used a questionnaire to determine students' perceptions of the use of the wordwall application as an assessment tool at smp negeri 1 kolaka. after the students answered the questionnaire, then the researcher collected data from the questionnaire, the researcher calculated and analyzed the answers to each statement in the form of a percentage and the researcher described the results of the questionnaire. the researcher calculated the data using the formula in the explanation (sugiyono, 2017): percentage of student perception = earning score / max ideal score x 100% to compile a classification table for the percentage of students' perceptions using the highest, lowest percentage, number of classes, and interval distance. highest ideal percent = 100% lowest ideal percent = 25% number of classes = 4 (from sd to sa) based on these data, a classification table is arranged as follows: table 3. perception score category average score percentage perception category 3.26 4 81.5% 100% strongly agree 2.6 3.25 65% 81.25% agree 1.76 2.5 44% 62.5% disagree 1 1.75 25% 43.75% strongly disagree data analysis technique used are data reduction, data display, and drawing conclusion (kalfa & alkar, 2019). triangulation and member check are used as the main references in processing data (muawanah, 2021). data reduction is a from of analysis that sharpens, classifies, removes unnecesarry ones (sunaengsih et al., 2019). results and discussion questionnaire result the results of data processing from the google forms app data processing application which was obtained from giving online questionnaires to 26 students, there were 20 closed questions in the questionnaire distributed online. the following can be informed: table 4. perception calculation result descriptive overall internal external the minimum mean value of each item 26 1 1 the maximum mean value of each item 104 4 4 the mean score for each item 3.315 2.95 3.68 total score gain 1818 384 1434 ideal max total score 2080 520 1560 percentage 87.5% 74% 92% the results of the analysis of research data as a whole from internal and external factors obtained a mean value of 3.315, with a total score of 1818 with a percentage of 87.5%. the calculation results obtained an average of 92% for external factors and 74% for internal factors. these mean values were consulted with the category table. categorization of student perceptions can be seen in table 4. based on table 4. it can be seen that the average questionnaire from external factors regarding the stimulus given about students' interest in the wordwall application is 92% in the category of strongly agree. while the average questionnaire from internal factors is 74%. this means that the average student answers strongly agree with the use of the wordwall application as an assessment tool. the results of the questionnaire are as follows: table 5. perception score influenced by internal factors no statement percentage of the mean score category 1 i'm excited about taking exams/tests. 70% agree lina anisah utilizing “wordwalls” as an assessment tool for indonesian junior high school students 836 2 i am interested in the type of assessment given by the teacher 75% agree 3 i am very enthusiastic about taking daily tests/tests. 68% agree 4 i am always ready to take the daily test/test. 72% agree 5 i do the questions seriously. 87% agree based on table 5, it can be seen that some of the student responses on average agreed with the statement about their mood and interest in assessment with an average of 74%. from the table, it can be concluded that students agree that they are interested in the assessment tool given by the teacher. enthusiasm, enthusiasm, readiness, and seriousness that are quite high make their interest in the exam test even higher. next are the results obtained from statements about their interest in using the wordwall application as an assessment tool: table 6. perception score regarding the use of wordwall as an assessment tool no statement percentage of the mean score category 1 i'm interested in using wordwall application. 93% strongly agree 2 i found no difficulty when using the wordwall application as an assessment tool. 89% strongly agree 3 the use was of wordwall application easy to use. 91% strongly agree 4 the wordwall application interface is attractive. 95% strongly agree 5 the animation display in the wordwall application is very attractive. 95% strongly agree 6 the color display in the wordwall application is very attractive. 90% strongly agree 7 the appearance of the font in the wordwall application is attractive and easy to read. 88% strongly agree 8 the images displayed on the application are interesting to see. 92% strongly agree 9 the questions in the wordwall application are varied. 91% strongly agree 10 the variations of questions in the wordwall application are interesting. 93% strongly agree 11 the questions that display are easy to do. 93% strongly agree 12 this wordwall application is interesting to use as an assessment tool. 92% strongly agree 13 using wordwall as an assessment tool is interesting to use in future tests. 91% strongly agree 14 the wordwall application is interesting to use for english quizzes. 95% strongly agree 15 this wordwall application is interesting to use for semester exams. 80% agree this can be seen from the four question indicators regarding the use of wordwall as an assessment tool. usage. in indicators of usage, the average informant answered strongly agree with the value obtained was 3.65. on average, the informants agreed with the statement about the use of the wordwall application which stated their interest and ease in using the wordwall application as an assessment tool. wordwall application display. on the indicator regarding the display of the wordwall application, the average respondent answered strongly agree with a value of 3.72 which value is included in the category of perception strongly agree. the average informant is interested in the visuals displayed in this wordwall application such as interface indicators, animations, colors, font styles, and pictures. question variations. the next statement indicator is about the variety of questions that exist in the wordwall application with three statements that are displayed on the questionnaire, namely the variety of questions, interest in the variety of questions given, and the ease of doing each variation of the questions given. on average, the informants chose to strongly agree with the given statement with a value of 3.71, where the number was included in the category of strongly agree. the effectiveness of the wordwall as an assessment tool this indicator states the use of wordwall as an assessment tool which consists of statements containing the use of the wordwall application on daily tests, on giving quizzes, and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 837 on semester exams. the average informant chose to strongly agree with the use of this wordwall application as an assessment tool with a total of 3.62, where the score is included in the category of strongly agree on the perception indicator. if presented in percent, the results obtained are 92% of the total score on each item of the question multiplied by the number of informants plus the maximum average value of each item plus the number of questions in the questionnaire. based on the results of the questionnaire found, students are more interested in this application is applied to assessment. the average student agrees if this application is applied during daily tests, giving quizzes, and semester exams. interview results the next data collection is using interviews with the type of probing question to find out more information about the questionnaire that has been given. here the researcher took four informants randomly from one class. the results of the interviews from the four question indicators are: table 7. interview results no indicator description example 1. usage students are interested in the wordwall application and like using the application. easy to use and no difficulties are found when using the wordwall application. no lag can hinder the use of the application for students, making it easier for them to use it. “yes, because, this test app is very fun to use. i did not find any difficulty at all in using this wordwall application. i think the preparation of questions in this application is easy to do.” (interview a2/a4/a6) “interesting. fun and easy to use. there is no lag at all which makes it difficult for me to operate the application.” (interview c2/c6) 2. display students said the interface presented was very interesting to look at. cool animations and like a quiz game which adds to their appeal. the colors in the appearance of the application are also very colorful and bright. display in a font style that is clear, large, and easy to read by students. likewise, students' responses to the pictures presented were that the pictures were so clear and very helpful for them in filling out the questions. “interesting. it's like a fun and very good quiz game. i love the colors displayed on this app, very colorful and bright. the writing displayed is very clear and large, easy to read. and also, the pictures are clear and very helpful in doing the questions. interesting. it's like a fun and very good quiz game. i love the colors displayed on this app, very colorful and bright. the writing displayed is very clear and large, easy to read. and also, the pictures are clear and very helpful in doing the questions.” (interview a10/a12/a14/a16) “yes, interesting. the animated videos and motion animations on the app are great. there is not much style in the writing font so it is easy to read. basically, i really like watching cartoons, so i like the pictures that are shown.” (interview d10/d12/d16) 3. question variations students said the questions were very different from what was given normally, the varied questions made them not bored quickly and were easy to do. “with various types of questions given, we don't get bored quickly. the types of questions are very different from those usually given by the teacher and are easy to do.” (interview a18/a20/22) “the questions given vary, so it is very fun to fill in the questions. the variety of questions keeps me from getting bored.” (interview d18/d20) 4. wordwall as an assessment students said they were interested in using the wordwall application as an assessment tool for daily tests, quizzes, and semester exams. it gives them something different from the previous assessment tool into a fun assessment tool that can “this is interesting. because it is good for use during exams or tests. it gives something different and fun to test.” (interview c24/c26) “i think it's good, because it can motivate us to study and be enthusiastic to face exams.” lina anisah utilizing “wordwalls” as an assessment tool for indonesian junior high school students 838 motivate them to learn. (interview d26) usage. based on the results of the interview above regarding the indicators for using the wordwall application as a whole, they are interested in using this application because of the animation display and the images displayed. the next question was about the difficulties that the informants encountered when using the application where there were some difficulties for the informants when using the wordwall application, namely when filling out questions. this is because the use of this application is based on a quiz game so there are difficulties for some of the informants who use it. other opinions do not find it difficult at all when using this wordwall application. the third question is about the ease of using this application. on average, the informants answered that this application was easy to operate because it was structured so that it was easier for the informants to operate it. another opinion, because this application has instructions and directions using english, it makes some students confused in operating it. therefore, informants still need supervision and guidance in operating this application. display. based on the results of interviews on the second indicator regarding the appearance of the wordwall application, it received many positive responses. the interface display on the wordwall application was given a positive response. on average, the informants answered that they were interested in the reason for the appearance that spoiled their eyes and the animations in the interface that made them interested. furthermore, the animated display presented received a positive response from the informant. the animations displayed are very appropriate for their age and school level. the colors displayed on the application also received a positive response. on average, the informants answered that they were interested in the colors displayed, even the colors displayed could motivate their learning. furthermore, the display of the font loaded on the application was responded positively by the informant. on average, the four informants answered that the font display was attractive. the type of font is simple and not tacky so that it is easy for them to read. including the images displayed in this application, the average informant was greatly helped by the images displayed when filling out the questions. question variations. based on the results of the interview above regarding the variety of questions in the wordwall application, it can be seen that all respondents answered the questions given were very varied. from the variety of questions given, they are more challenged and enthusiastic in working on the questions. also, they are interested in the questions in the wordwall application. however, there were some problems with the informants when filling out these questions, such as the informant being stiff when running the application to fill in the questions and the need for guidance to fill the questions. wordwall as an assessment tool. based on the results of the interview above regarding the opinion of the informant about if the wordwall application was used as an assessment tool. the average informant answered agreed if this application was used as an assessment tool such as daily tests or quizzes. however, for the semester exam, some are still hesitant to use this application due to the network. the rest of the informants agreed that the wordwall application was used as an assessment tool in the semester exam. perceptions arise from individual external factors by providing external stimuli that are received by individuals from outside to form an acceptance that determines perception. the responses given by respondents regarding the given stimulus are the wordwall application trial as an assessment tool. based on the research, it was found that the wordwall application was preferred by students to be used as an assessment tool such for daily tests, quizzes, and semesters. as for the results of collecting all data, data triangulation was carried out. the results are as follows: based on the percentage in table 7, the first statement regarding the use of wordwall, it can be concluded that 93% of students are interested in using the wordwall application, and it is included in the category of strongly agree. this is in line with the results of the interview in the following transcript: “yes, interested. because the application is fun to use.” (s1) (appendix/interview transcript/a2) “interesting. because it's fun and easy to use.” (s3) (appendix/interview transcript/c2) the second statement is about the students' not finding difficulties in using the wordwall english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 839 application. the percentage of all answers is 89%, which is in the category of strongly agree. the following is a statement of the results of interviews conducted to seek further information: the third statement is about the ease of students using the wordwall application. the percentage of all answers is 91%, including in the category of strongly agree. this is in line with the results of the interview in the following transcript: “no, i didn't find it difficult at all when using this app." (s1) "yes, because i think the preparation of the questions in this application is easy to work with.” (s1) (appendix/interview transcript/a6) for the fourth statement, about the attractiveness of the interface presented by the wordwall application. the results showed that a total of 95% in the category of strongly agree. this is in line with the results of the interview in the following transcript: “interested. because the interface is nice to look at.” (s4) (appendix/interview transcript/d8) for the fifth statement, about the attractiveness of the animated display of the wordwall application. the results showed that a total of 95% in the category of strongly agree. the following is a statement of the results of interviews conducted to seek further information: “yes, interesting. the animated videos and motion animations on the app are great.” (s4) (appendix/interview transcript/d10) the sixth statement is about their interest in the colors presented in the wordwall display. from the results of the questionnaire, it was found that the total answers can be concluded that there are 90% of students are interested in the colors presented, and it is concluded in the category of strongly agree. this is in line with the results of the interviews in the following transcript: “interesting. i like the colors displayed on this app, very colorful and bright.” (s1) (appendix/interview transcript/a12) the seventh statement is about the attractiveness of the font style and the ease of reading the font in the wordwall application. the percentage of all answers is 88%, which is at the level of the category of strongly agree. this is in line with the results of the interview in the following transcript: “yes, display writing is very clear and large, easy to read.” (s1) (appendix/interview transcript/a14) “interesting. not a lot of style in the writing font so it's easy to read.” (s4) (appendix/interview transcript/d14) the following is a summary of student perceptions based on the average calculation of indicators of use, appearance, variety of questions, and the effectiveness of using wordwall as an assessment tool for the wordwall application as an assessment tool: table 9. summary of student perceptions no statement mean of percentage category 1. i am interested in using the wordwall application. 91.25% strongly agree 2. i'm interested in the view presented by the wordwall application. 93% strongly agree 3. i am interested in the variations of the questions in the wordwall application. 92.75% strongly agree 4. i am interested in using the wordwall application as an assessment tool. 90.5% strongly agree student interest in using the wordwall application the results obtained above from giving a questionnaire for the first statement indicator regarding the use of the wordwall which discusses the respondents' interests and their difficulties in using the wordwall application, it is known that most of the participants strongly agree that the use of the wordwall application as an assessment tool is easy to use and interested in using it. around 91.25% of participants agreed with this statement. this is because they are happy if the assessment tool used uses game-based assessment which is easier to use than conventional assessment tools in general and can increase students' motivation to lina anisah utilizing “wordwalls” as an assessment tool for indonesian junior high school students 840 learn because they feel more excited when they get the highest score. this is in line with research conducted by firdiansyah and pamungkas (2021) which states that the use of game-based applications in the assessment process can help students increase their motivation to learn. the research conducted by sasongko and suswanto (2017) assessment using game-based applications can increase students' interest and interest in carrying out assessments. this opinion is in line with research conducted by haryadi & andriati (2020) which in his research proves that the use of game-based media can increase student interest both in learning and during assessment. student interest in the appearance of the wordwall application next for the second indicator which contains statements about the appearance presented in the wordwall application. the attractiveness aspect of wordwall media can be seen from the interface, animation, colors, font styles, and images in the application. the result is known that 93% of participants' overall use of wordwall was found interesting. interactive media used as an assessment tool make assessment activities or quizzes more interesting for students omar (2017). the attractive appearance of the wordwall is a factor that can increase student interest and curiosity. this is in line with research conducted by firdayansyah and pamungkas (2021) that interactive assessment media motivate students to pay more attention and become more involved in-class participation. this opinion is also supported by the results of research conducted by nuria (2019) which states that good, beautiful, and attractive visuals presented by an application can increase student interest in learning and the tasks they do. the visuals that involve animation, interfaces, colors, images, and writings that are presented on the display of an application can add to the attractiveness of students in evaluating learning. student interest in the variety of questions in the wordwall application the variety of questions contained in the application which states that the questions are varied, interesting, and easy to do are highly approved by students. this can be seen from the percentage obtained from the questionnaire results amounting to 92.75%. the importance of a variety of questions to make students not bored with the assessment tool. this is in line with research conducted by firdiansyah and pamungkas (2021) whose findings reveal that the variety of questions in a question greatly affects students' interest in using interactive application media for learning assessment. the diversity of questions proves that it is very influential on student interest. the variety of questions that are many and varied makes students interested in using the application. this is also in line with research conducted by salsabila (2020) which revealed that the large variety of questions from an application that is used as an evaluation tool has the potential to be used as an evaluation tool. this is because it can suppress the saturation level of students with many variations of challenging questions. student interest in using the wordwall application as an assessment tool the indicators regarding the use, appearance, and questions in the wordwall application received a positive response from respondents. this includes statements regarding the feasibility of the wordwall application to be used as a future assessment tool such as daily tests, quizzes, or semester exams. the statement received a positive response from respondents with a value of 90.5% where the average respondent with this statement. the interview results from 4 informants on average agreed if this application was used as a future assessment tool. this is because students prefer game-based assessment tools such as wordwall. this is different from the assessment tools that are often given, namely conventional assessment tools which still use monotonous paper-based assessment s. this research is in line with the results of research conducted by savitri and kusnarto (2021) with the use of wordwall, learning evaluation is not only done monotonously through practice questions and has proven effective in suppressing student boredom. overall, this application is good to use as an assessment tool that can be used as a future assessment tool. halimah, solfarina, and langitasari (2019) as revealed in their research that wordwall media is able to create beneficial interactions for student. for some student responses regarding the difficulty of filling out questions in several types of questions, this can be overcome by always guiding students before giving questions or starting the assessment. before evaluating using the new method, it is better for a teacher to provide easy-to-understand directions and provide clear instructions to students who will take the test. furthermore, this application is also based on english, where not all english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 841 students understand english. this can be given solution, by the way, the teacher guides and gives instructions before conducting an assessment. conclusion it can be described how students perceive the use of the wordwall application as an assessment tool for second-grade students at smp negeri 1 kolaka. it can be seen from the students' responses regarding positive statements in the questionnaire, on average they responded positively to the wordwall application. they strongly agree that they are interested in using this application as a future assessment tool such for daily tests, quizzes, and semester exams. this is reinforced by interviewing several students with probing questions. the statement indicators in the questionnaire are set as questions to get a more open answer from the respondents. the average informant interviewed said that this application is easy to use, the fun has an attractive appearance, and the questions are very varied so students are interested in using this application as the next assessment tool by utilizing a smartphone. it can be suggested to use the wordwall as a tool to maximize student learning outcomes, so that students feel comfortable and calm during the assessment and also the need for the skills and expertise of educators in applying wordwall to increase ideas and creativity in designing questions. the use of wordwall effectively and efficiently will assist in the implementation of the assessment of learning outcomes. suggestions for further research, research on the use of wordwall as an assessment tool have not been widely carried out, therefore it is necessary to conduct experimental research to test how much effectiveness wordwall is as an assessment medium. references akbuber, b., erdik, e., guney, h., cimsitoglu, g. g., & akbuber, c. 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(2020). investigating the role of formative mobile based assessment in vocabulary learning of pre-intermediate efl learners in comparison with paper based assessment. turkish online journal of distance education, 21(1), 181–196. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 525 utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students wenda marlin kakerissa faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, west java, indonesia email: w3nlin@yahoo.com nenden sri lengkanawati faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, west java, indonesia email: nendensl@indo.net.id ahmad bukhori muslim faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, west java, indonesia email: abukhmuslim@upi.edu apa citation: kakerissa, w. m., lengkanawati, n. s., & muslim, a. b. (2023). utilizing indonesia’s superdiversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 525-538. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7343 received: 14-02-2023 accepted: 17-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction literature review from several sources in online mass media states that creative writing has become a topic widely discussed in academics, publications, and literature in the last five years. creative writing is also a compulsory or elective subject in the digital era curriculum in various countries. therefore, it is unsurprising that many institutions or universities/campuses held national or international webinars, seminars, or even workshops under the creative writing theme. some examples include the "international webinar on creative writing in online learning mode" organised by english literature untag surabaya on june 19, 2020, which 647 participants from various countries attended. surabaya state university also held a national webinar under the theme "trends and challenges of creative writing in the digital era" on august 26, 2020, which 400 participants from various professions attended. there is also a student webinar series held by nala ireland under the creative writing theme via zoom on november 4, 2021. of course, many more similar activities are being carried out in other regions or countries. most of the information obtained reveals that creative writing is an activity that can be done anywhere, anytime, and without time limits so that it can be done in a relaxed manner while following the imagination of the writer. however, what is the definition of creative writing? the definition of creative writing varies greatly. each writer can define creative writing according to their ideas, imagination, and abstract: much research on english creative writing has been carried out considering how important creative writing is for learning literature in general and english in particular. likewise, research on indonesia's super-diversity. however, more research on english creative writing still needs to be done using indonesian super-diversity as a learning resource. for this reason, this research with a qualitative descriptive method was carried out. this study explored the benefits of teaching creative writing utilizing indonesia's super-diversity as a learning resource. the research instruments were questionnaires and student artifact documents. fifty-nine participants from the creative writing language education: poetry class were involved. they are convenient and purposeful samples. the results showed that students' english skills improved, and their knowledge of indonesian diversity, including cultures and traditions that were new to students, also increased. even the topic of diversity instilled in students a sense of love for the country and respect for differences. similar research can also be conducted on other subjects so that tolerance and mutual respect become a beautiful culture in the lives of indonesian people. keywords: benefits; creative patterned poetry; indonesia super-diversity. wenda marlin kakerissa, nenden sri lengkanawati, & ahmad bukhori muslim utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students 526 creativity. maley (2018), in his article entitled "creative writing for language learners and teachers," defined creative writing as a text production with an aesthetic rather than a purely informative, instrumental, or practical goal. even kumar (2020) stated that creative writing is a writing activity that gives freedom to the writer to create his/her own thoughts and feelings about an object so that the work he/she produces is more personal. having the same voice with maley (2018), kumar (2020) also added that creative writing has the significant quality to evoke sensations. however, these various definitions have the same standard concept, namely an author's accessible writing that is original, using creative ideas, creative imagination, and creative writing methods so that people who read the work can enter into the author's creative imagination and enjoy the creativity of the idea and how to write the work. creative writing also consists of several forms of writing, as quoted from licciardi (2021) in a learning video entitled "what is creative writing?" namely: poetry, drama, film and television scripts, fiction, songs, any scripts (speeches), autobiographies, and individual essays. however, this study focused on creative writing in poetry, specifically english creative writing. creative writing requires ideas. the knowledge of each author could have inspired the idea, and it could also have been from the author's reading material, phenomena that occurred around the author, or merely the author's imagination. a creative writing teacher can explore using indonesia's diversity as creative writing material. similar research has never been done before. creative writing from indonesia's unique diversity can be promoted through literary stories such as poetry, short stories, or non-fiction stories. works produced through creative writing can also inspire readers to maintain the richness of cultural diversity, for example when the efl students are asked to produce creative writing about the borobudur temple from central java, it is expected that the students' poems about the borobudur temple can inspire readers to maintain and care for one of the wonders of the world that belongs to the indonesian nation. thus, using indonesian diversity as the primary material for creative writing allows writers to inspire, educate, and entertain readers while expanding their understanding of the unique diversity of indonesia. the biggest challenge of this activity was when efl students were asked to produce creative writing in the form of a simple poem in english and follow a specific pattern of writing according to the type of creative poetry requested using the topic of indonesian diversity. this study explored it. study about creative writing has been widely carried out both inside and outside indonesia. this patterned poetry is very familiar with the term creative writing (poetry) for some people. when efl students learn english, they could utilize writing poetry as a practical way. this is in line with alsyouf's study (2019). many literature reviews reported an elemental connection between poetry and memory when educators and learners utilize poetry in-class activities. poetry or any poetic words tend to be easier to memorize than non-poetic ones because learners are motivated to read and re-read the words, so it can assist the learners in improving their memory. by doing this, learners are expected to remember other information more receptive. after all, saputra (2022) stated that reading any kind of literature is a great combination of reading for information and enjoyment. thus, it bridges the need for more non-literary texts. meanwhile, alsyouf (2019) added that creative writing activities, such as poetry, are beneficial where language plays a significant role as a rich source of learning because it can maintain the memory of efl learners. moreover, this activity is carried out continuously. the previous studies showed that learning about creative patterned poetry has many advantages for efl students. the efl learners can enjoy practicing creative poetry writing as an effective classroom method that assists in avoiding falling into the traps of the routine of traditional ways of instruction. creative patterned poetry in efl classrooms is an ever-renewing, profitable, and enjoyable learning method since poetry, as a branch of literature, is an inexhaustible source of language (alsyouf, 2019). furthermore, cubukcu (2001) and cumming (2007) argued that one of the main study areas in elt is utilizing creative writing in english classes. rejina (2021) emphasized that creative writing has several benefits in improving students' language skills; besides improving english skills, students' vocabulary knowledge also increases. creative writing (poetry) is a significant tool and a great source for familiarizing learners with an extensive vocabulary and its utilization (khan, 2019). poetry teaching is a form of selfexpression for poets, in this case, students. even poetry can educate more than basic understanding inside and outside academics. even more english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 527 significantly, teaching creative writing in elt classes can increase students' creativity since they are free in an open interpretation. however, due to some considerations, the current study focused on exploring the benefits of teaching creative writing utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity. first, indonesia is a multicultural country that is so rich with diverse cultures, religions, ethnicities, races, and even social statuses. each region in indonesia has different customs, cultures, beliefs, and habits that must be maintained and appreciated by everyone who comes from the same or different tribes so that they become national wealth, that is, the wealth of the nation. second, nieto (1994) conducted a study on multiculturalism in some schools in america, and the result revealed that by infusing students' diversity in schools' curricula, more students would feel less angry about their invisibility. minority students particularly experience this. so do the teachers. in her opinion, that is a part of respect. she assumed that it is significant since america is a multicultural nation. it is the same with indonesia, which is also a super-diversity country. therefore, learning about indonesia’s super-diversity through creative patterned poetry is vital. third, there are many benefits to learning about indonesia’s super-diversity. two of them are increasing love for the country and respecting differences, which people usually call tolerance. furthermore, the drexel university school of education website states that there are at least two benefits when teaching students about diversity, namely first, introducing students to various cultural and social groups, and second, preparing them to become citizens with a sense of belonging—high tolerance and respect for differences in various communities. it is also the same with nieto (1994) in anggriawan (2020) that tolerance, acceptance, respect, affirmation, solidarity, and critique are significant in building a harmonious life in a super-diversity country. in the indonesian context, encouraging students by teaching them about the super-diversity of indonesia will enrich their knowledge of diversity, prepare them to adapt and accept other cultures that must also be respected, create tolerance and respect for differences such as religions, cultures, ethnicities, races, beliefs, and so on, so that at the end, they can instill a sense of love for the country that is rich in diversity. susanto (2017) argues that one of the benefits for students in learning indonesia's super-diversity is to build students' positive perceptions of indonesian cultural diversity. conceptually, the students' positive perception of the nation's cultural diversity refers to the ability of each element of the country to interpret the conditions of plurality and multiculturalism as educational values that align with the principle of diversity. referring to the three reasons mentioned previously, this study aimed to explore the benefits of teaching creative writing by utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity for indonesian efl students. holmes and moulton (2001) suggested that one way to learn english creatively is to have students write creative and simple poems with specific patterns. holmes and moulton (2001) offered 25 types of creative patterned poetry. however, the study's researchers only selected 7: acrostic poem, adjective poem, adjective placement poem, adverb poem, beginnings and endings poem, bio poem, and contrast poem. these seven types of poetry were chosen to consider the lecturing time of 1 semester, which is 16 meetings only. one type of poetry requires two weeks. the first week is used to explain the poetry and its patterns, while the second week is used to present the students’ patterned poetry. table 1 portrays the distribution of those seven poems in 1 semester of lecturing. table 1. distribution of seven poems week types of poem event/culture representation 1 acrostic poem natsepa beach ambon city 2 presentation 3 adjective poem reba ritual kupang 4 presentation 5 adjective placement poem solo batik carnival solo 6 presentation 7 adverb poem soto banjar south kalimantan 8 presentation 9 mid exam presentation 10 beginnings and endings poem mangongkal holi north sumatra 11 presentation 12 bio poem frans kaisiepo papua 13 presentation 14 contrast poem mask dance west java 15 presentation 16 final exam presentation wenda marlin kakerissa, nenden sri lengkanawati, & ahmad bukhori muslim utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students 528 it is expected that the teaching of foreign languages such as english has an excellent opportunity to instil cross-cultural awareness while at the same time embodying the multicultural education standards that have been stipulated in the education law number 20 of 2003 to avoid conflict. however, the education law has yet to be implemented optimally in indonesia. incorporating indonesia's superdiversity materials into teaching materials is one way that teachers can create so that each student and teacher who comes from different backgrounds such as religions, languages, cultures, ethnicities, and even social statuses have a high tolerance and respect for differences to minimize religious and social conflicts as had happened in the cities of ambon and ternate a few years ago. as mentioned, research on creative patterned poetry has been carried out widely both outside and within indonesia. however, research on incorporating indonesia's super-diversity through learning patterned poetry has never been done in indonesia, especially in ambon. this city has experienced religious and social conflict. another significance of this research is to motivate other teachers to be able to use indonesia's diversity as creative teaching materials in other lessons or subjects at school or university. thus, this research must be carried out by considering some of the significance mentioned. method the study explored the benefits of teaching creative writing utilizing indonesia's superdiversity as a learning resource from indonesian efl students’ voices. this study employed a qualitative descriptive method. as primary data collection, a questionnaire in indonesian was distributed via google form. fifty-nine respondents were involved in a creative writing (poetry) subject at a state university in eastern indonesia. they were chosen as the respondents of this study because: 1) this class was the most suitable for the research topic, namely creative writing, 2) they had passed an introductory literature course, namely literature in language education, 3) they were easily accessible to researchers, and 4 ) they were willing to fill out the questionnaire. wan (2019) stated that as long as the recruited respondents felt comfortable and accessible in collecting research data, they were convenience sampling. the rating scale questionnaire consists of statements that are followed by the rating of the participants’ existence starting from strongly agree (sa), agree (a), disagree, (d) to strongly disagree (sd). the researchers made up fifteen statements in the questionnaire based on classroom observation during the learning process. questions 1 to 9 explored students' voices on learning patterned poetry. questions 10 to 13 focused on exploring students' voices on learning about indonesia's super-diversity. questions 14 and 15 focus on general perspectives on learning patterned poetry using indonesia's super-diversity. thus, the questionnaire results were analyzed based on the three sub-topics above and discussed by adding to the discussion of previous creative writing research results. after that discussion, it was followed by the result of students’ artifacts, namely mid and final examination results. for more details, each statement in the questionnaire can be seen in the finding and discussion section. to assist in getting the frequency and percentage, jeffrey's amazing statistics program (jasp) 0.14.1. was used to manage the questionnaire data. there was also documentation of students’ artefacts. students’ artifacts refer to the students’ works (creative patterned poetry) in mid and final examinations. the students’ works were assessed using a rubric adapted from rcampus (2023). it is not a standard rubric, yet it is a particular rubric for assessing students’ creative writing products. the rubric can be seen in table 6 in result and discussion section. the procedure of the study can be seen below: (1) researchers designed and created teaching materials using indonesia's super-diversity for creative writing language education: poetry subject. several cultures, customs, events, and even traditional foods from several regions in indonesia were taken as topics of discussion in creating creative patterned poetry (creative writing) for the students. the researchers’ design became samples for students to produce their creative writing. (2) taught the students patterned poetry using indonesia’s super-diversity as the learning source. they had been informed that their class was used as a research class. there were mid and final exams. everyone agreed. (3) asked and assisted the students in producing their creative writing (poems). (4) mid exam. (5) asked and assisted the students in producing other creative writing (poems). (6) final exam english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 529 (7) asked students to fill out a scale rating questionnaire about the advantages of utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as the learning source in creative writing teaching. (8) analyzed the result of the questionnaire. (9) reported the result. the data were analyzed descriptively when the study participants had filled out and submitted the questionnaire. after analyzing the data, a conclusion was drawn, and ultimately it was reported. the consequent part portrays the finding and discussion of the study. results and discussion before going deep into the result and discussion, a brief description of the seven types of selected poetry and each pattern of the poems that the participants must adapt will be provided first in this part. the learners must follow the pattern or rule of each type of poetry. first, acrostic poem. it is a type of creative writing in which each initial letter in each line spells out a word vertically, and the initial letters summarize the theme or object of the poem. spelling, vocabulary, and dictionary usage are emphasized. the pattern of the acrostic poem follows its rules: determine and write a simple theme or object vertically in the column on the left side of the paper. do as in the "word" below. w (write a word, phrase, or sentence starting with the letter of the word being spelt down the left column) o (write a word, phrase, or sentence starting with the second letter of the word being spelt down the left column) r (write a word, phrase, or sentence starting with the third letter) d (write a word, phrase, or sentence starting with the fourth letter) continue the pattern for each letter in the word. second, adjective poem. there are only six lines in this creative poem. these lines are loaded with adjectives that describe the object of the poem. through the adjective poem, efl students learn to appropriately practice, identify and even incorporate adjectives, word orders, and adjective agreements. efl students learn to use adjectives and linking verbs through this poem. below is the pattern: line 1 noun line 2 similar noun + is/are + adjective 1 line 3 similar noun + is/are + adjective 1, adjective 2 line 4 is/are + adjective 1, adjective 2, adjective 3 line 5 adjective 1, adjective 2, adjective 3, adjective 4 line 6 new related noun third, adjective placement poem. it is a patterned poem that strongly features a series of adjectives in the proper order. through this kind of poem, efl students learn vocabulary, adjectives, and their order in a noun phrase. below is the pattern. choose a destination. you won’t be returning for a very long time, so think of special things you’ll need to keep you happy, favourite things that you can’t bear to be without for a long time. line 1: i’m (you’re, we’re) taking a trip to _________ line 2: and i’m (you’re, we’re) taking all of my (our) favourite things: line 3 line 4 line 5 noun clauses with descriptive adjectives line 6 line 7 (last line starts with “and”) the five-line stanza above can be repeated with new noun phrases as long as the students have items they wish to describe. one option is to give the poem closure by having the last line refer to returning from vacation. fourth, adverb poem. the poem modifies or tells the learners more about a verb. the poem explains when, where, why, and how an action happened. many adverbs end in -ly. like the adjective, the adverb poem also consists of six lines, accumulating a list of adverbs to describe a single topic or action. the teaching points are adverbs, dictionary skills, and thesaurus usage. below is the pattern of the adverb poem. line 1: noun line 2: similar noun + verb + adverb 1 line 3: similar noun + verb + adverb 1 + adverb 2 line 4: verb + adverb 1 + adverb 2 + adverb 3 line 5: adverb 1 + adverb 2 + adverb 3 + adverb 4 line 6: phrase or clause showing condition, wenda marlin kakerissa, nenden sri lengkanawati, & ahmad bukhori muslim utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students 530 time, or place fifth, beginnings and endings poem. this poem consists of five lines; 4 exclamation statements and one summary at the end. lines 1 and 3 have the same theme as lines 2 and 4. this type of poetry can be used when educators ask their efl students to think about and describe something contrasting or opposite. interestingly, the 5th or the last line summarizes the poem by repeating one dominant word three times, namely the poem's theme. the teaching points are exclamatory statements, opposites, and contrast. below is the pattern of the poem. farewell to ………. hello to ………. farewell to ………. hello to ………. it’s ……, ……, …… yes to ………. no to ………. yes to ………. no to ………. it’s ……, ……, …… sixth, bio poem. it is a simple poem about a person's life or subject using a series of adjectives, relative clauses, and items. the poem can be based on personal knowledge, yet on the other hand, it can also be a creative showcase for research on people, plants, or animals. the teaching points are on adjectives, relative clauses, and items in a series. below is the pattern of the bio poem. line 1: first name line 2: four traits that describe the character line 3: relative of …… (brother, sister, daughter, etc.) line 4: lover of …… (list three people, things, or ideas) line 5: who feels …… (three emotions) line 6: who needs …… (three items) line 7: who fears …… (three items) line 8: who gives …… (three items) line 9: who would like to see …… (three items) line 10: resident of …… line 11: last name seventh, contrast poem. it allows the learners to practice linking verbs followed by adjectives. the learners must describe a given topic by linking descriptive characteristics to the topic using complete sentences. the poem consists of four lines, with the first three being similar characteristics or traits and the last two being opposite characteristics or traits. the poem may be rhymed or unrhymed. composing the contrast poem teaches the efl students adjectives, linking verbs, verbs in the negative form, and the conjunction but. below is the pattern of the poem. a ____ is ____ . a ____ is ____ . a ____ is ____ . but, a ____ is not ____ . subject …(linking verb) … adjective, subject … (linking verb) … adjective, subject … (linking verb) … adjective, but subject … (negative)(linking verb) … adjective. to make it easier to analyze the result of the questionnaire, the finding was presented in four parts, namely students’ voices on the learning of the patterned poetry, students’ voices on the learning about indonesia’s super-diversity, general perspectives on the learning on patterned poetry based on indonesia’s super-diversity, and result of students’ work in mid and final examination. students’ voices on the learning of the patterned poetry table 2 below presents that 58 participants out of 59 participants agreed (mostly strongly agreed) that they were interested and comfortable learning patterned poetry for several reasons: they learned a lot of new things about indonesia’s superdiversity, became more confident and challenged in producing the best creative poems, able to communicate using creative words which then can be utilized in other subjects such as speaking and writing skills, and increasingly proficient in diction for a patterned poem. even the participants admitted that they learned a lot of new local languages. since a poem is more interesting than any textbook for students because it has poetic words, it is unsurprising that learning any kind of literature, including poetry, motivates efl students to read more and more pieces. according to burroughs (2018), poetry is a poet's free expression of what he sees or feels, not limited to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 531 certain emotional expressions, whether with or without a specific purpose. this means that if for a specific purpose, the writer must carefully consider the literary techniques of writing a poem. however, even if a writer has understood the meaning of a poem, he can still produce creative poetry. the study participants become more and more creative since every two weeks, they must create new patterned poetry with a different rule or pattern. it is in line with rejina’s (2021) study that creative writing activity can increase learners’ creativity by giving them massive opportunities for self-expression and wider open interpretation. this happened because the students did it repeatedly. thus, students’ imagination is also stimulated. in the current study, since the participants must create their patterned poetry following specific rules about indonesia’s superdiversity, the participants learned a lot of many new local words, such as bekarang iwak, baileo, bundo kanduang, sinden, gamelan, reba, adu betis, iki palek, and many more. this happened because one of the criteria in creating every patterned poetry is that the students must infuse local language/local wisdom to promote a particular culture, ethnicity, race, religion, tradition, belief, and food in indonesia through their poetry. nevertheless, the result also revealed that not only a lot of new local languages they got, but the students also got new english vocabulary that can be utilized in other subjects such as speaking and writing. chaal (2022), in a conference, stated that in english teaching, language teachers must focus on developing four language skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing integrated, as well as the sub-skills, including; pronunciation, structure, grammar, and vocabulary. language teachers often mention culture as the fifth skill. chaal (2022) adds that culture is a significant aspect of efl teaching, which aims to instill intercultural communicative competence among students. the foreign culture that students study will be a mirror for them to see their own culture. when efl students learn something they believe in, practice every day, and are accepted confidently by society, they will feel happy. it is also fun when the students learn about a culture that is different from theirs. the ability to read and write is, of course, closely related to literature in language teaching. likewise, listening and speaking skills. so, teaching culture provides the same importance and benefits in learning students' four english language skills. since the participants of the current study had to create their patterned poetry using indonesia’s super-diversity and then read it to their friends and lecturer, they must expose their literature knowledge about the super-diversity of indonesia, writing, speaking, reading skills to express their knowledge, and finally listening skill to listen to others’ works (different culture, ethnicity, race, religion, tradition, belief, and food). by listening to other classmates’ creative writing (poetry), students’ communication skills are also improved (deepa and ilankumaran (2018). hameed (2019) through his research, shows that there is a very clear and guaranteed positive relationship between teaching english poetry as a source of teaching and learning four skills in english including pronunciation, grammar, structure, and vocabulary. this means that teachers and students can use poetry as a learning resource to learn english skills. not only that, farrah and al-bakri (2022), through their study, mentioned that utilizing poetry is beneficial in developing learners’ vocabulary, pronunciation, and motivation as well. suppose this creative poetry writing activity is continuously carried out, honed, and accompanied/guided by educators or anyone professional in creative writing. in that case, it is believed that students' creative writing skills will benefit their future, or in other words, creative writing can be turned into a remunerative career. thukral (2022) in a website writes that "creative writing is a lucrative career." he adds that some trend and demand issues can earn the writer/poet $100,000 yearly. however, it depends on the poet's field of expertise and level of skill. she/he must drill the skill happily without coercion from anyone or anything by using unlimited imagination. when students were learning to produce patterned poems by following specific rules, few admitted that this was their first time producing a poem. “i never write poems, mam. i’m so sorry, this is my first time writing a poem, mam” (kk, 2023). what is even worse is when the poem that must be composed must follow specific writing rules. some say that they just realized that poetry is patterned and not just free writing. “mam, i just knew that poem has a certain pattern.” (mf, 2023) “mam, i thought writing poem/poetry is free writing, no need any rules.” (sfs, 2023) wenda marlin kakerissa, nenden sri lengkanawati, & ahmad bukhori muslim utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students 532 “so did i, mam. i thought that writing a poem is just about my imagination, not related with culture at all.” (rh, 2023) they conveyed those honest and innocent expressions at one of the moments after finishing the presentation of the acrostic poem. this means that composing poetry is something new for them and, simultaneously, a challenge that the students and their lecturer must face. this condition further motivated the lecturer to teach their students by introducing other types of patterned poetry and asking them to make the same poem with the specified pattern. actually, the most significant factor in creative writing is motivation. both students and teachers must have motivation, namely the driving force from within each to teach and invite students to write poetry and encouragement from within students to write, because the writing problem is quite difficult, especially writing poetry in english, especially for efl students. having motivation within each one is a good writing capital. gonen (2018) through a study, argued that teaching poetry in language classes can promote motivation, creativity, and self-expression along with multi-skill development and interaction among students. but all of that can be achieved if there is motivation from the teacher and the students themselves. motivation will determine the success or failure of a creative writing activity (qur'aini, anggraini, widodo, 2020). table 2. students’ voices on the learning of the patterned poetry statement (sa) (a) i’m interested in learning creative patterned poetry because i have learned a lot of new things about indonesia’s super-diversity 54p (91.5%) 4p (6.8%) i feel comfortable in learning creative patterned poetry because it is not testing but trying to assist me learning about the super-diversity of indonesia 43p (72.9%) 16p (27.1%) i become more confident in creating patterned poetries. 32p (54.2%) 27p (45.8%) i feel challenged to create and produce the patterned poems that get better in each process 39p (66.1%) 20p (33.9%) the activity of creating creative patterned poetry enables me to interact through communication using creative words too 34p (57.6%) 24p (40.7%) the varied types of patterned poetry encourage me to produce very creative poems too 42p (71.2%) 17p (28.8%) i'm getting better at word choice when composing a patterned poem 42p (71.2%) 16p (27.1%) i got a lot of new vocabulary which i can use in other subjects such as speaking and writing skills 42p (71.2%) 16p (27.1%) i get a lot of new local languages from indonesia’s super-diversity through patterned poetry 34p (57.6%) 24p (40.7%) students’ voices on learning about indonesia’s super-diversity table 3 below shows that learning to make poetry based on indonesia's super-diversity made participants aware that indonesia is a superdiversity country. another advantage is stimulating thoughts and feelings because of students’ curiosity about indonesia’s superdiversity so that participants' knowledge increases, such as knowledge about the origin of certain cultures in indonesia. those results cannot be denied because when the students learn about any literature, they indirectly also learn about the authors' culture or the object or topic written in the work. therefore, it is not surprising when saputra (2022), in his thesis, mentioned that poetry is universal. themes of poetry always deal with universal emotions, such as love, jealousy, amazement, enmity, admiration, children, death, and other feelings. so it is expected that students will have absolute control over these feelings. another reason poetry is universal is because a writer or a poet can use any topic as his/her idea. there is no limitation in exploring ideas. poetry deals with all cultures and situations in the world. social environment can be an option. qur'ani, anggraini, and widodo (2020) argued that the social environment could be an alternative choice for students or poets in composing creative writing. students can start by observing their social environment, allowing them to express their feelings/ideas through a simple poem. by learning any literature, efl students will learn to respect their and other cultures. it is a fact that literary texts are representational rather than referential. referential language is very informational and less appealing, while figurative language appeals to someone's mental state and is extremely interesting. in the current study, the literary text english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 533 that is creative patterned poetry shows two functions at once: literary text as a figurative language of the students as the poets and also referential about indonesia's super-diversity. the referential language through the patterned poetry also increases the student’s knowledge of specific cultures in indonesia, for example, when they learn about the finger-cutting tradition called iki palek. most of them just knew/found out that the tradition is of the dani tribe from papua. it increases their knowledge. the respondents of this study came from several ethnic groups in indonesia, such as the bugis, javanese, and ambonese, who also come from several small villages in maluku. when an ambonese student (jfw) produced and presented "baileo", which is a traditional house of maluku people, there were several friends from other tribes who just understood that "baileo" is the name for the traditional house of the maluku people. "oh, so "baileo" is a traditional moluccan house?" (rac, 2023) "sorry, mam, i just found out, even though i have lived in ambon for over three years." (vw, 2023) this means that learning to produce patterned poetry using indonesian diversity as the primary material can add insight and knowledge about indonesian culture, thereby instilling respect for other people's cultures which are also national culture. when jfw finished presenting his poem about "baileo," the lecturer asked him about his feelings, and he said: "i am proud, mam, because through patterned poetry i can introduce and promote maluku traditional house to friends who do not come from maluku." (jfw, 2023) in creating patterned poetry, students must employ an appropriate language adapted to the situation and condition in the created poetry. the educators asked the learners to use the local term in promoting the local thing in their creative poems. table 3. students’ voices on learning about indonesia’s superdiversity statement (sa) (a) after learning about indonesia's diversity, which is expressed in creative patterned poetry, i became aware that indonesia is 31p (52.5% ) 27p (45.8 %) a superdiversity country. materials about culture, traditions, and the wealth of the other regions in indonesia stimulate my thoughts and feelings because of my curiosity 41p (69.5% ) 17p (28.8 %) my knowledge increases when i’m required to choose an object/culture/tradition from another area in indonesia 46p (78%) 13p (22% ) i come to know about some of the origins of certain cultures originating from certain regions in indonesia 38p (64.4% ) 20p (33.9 %) general perspectives on the learning of patterned poetry using indonesia’s super-diversity table 4 below portrays students’ general perspectives on learning patterned poetry based on indonesia’s super-diversity. the table shows that the participants' grammar and pronunciation skills improved. as mentioned previously, students’ vocabulary knowledge increased and can also be seen in their communication; they also employ it creatively in other subjects such as speaking and writing. it is in line with alsyouf’s (2019) point of view that poetry is a rich source of vocabulary and syntactic structures that the learner of efl can employ for language interactions. the study participants of the current research also experienced it. wysocka (2019) argued that poetry writing activity significantly decreases students’ grammatical errors and is a means of ‘grammar refresher’. likewise, their grammar and pronunciation improved since the students were asked to make the correct sentence structure adapted to the poem pattern they were working on. every time they get a new word (unfamiliar word), either they or their friends employ in their poems, they were trained to pronounce it correctly. when students learn poetry which is part of literature, one of the results that is clearly visible is that students acquire a lot of new vocabulary/unfamiliar words (ilankumaran & deepa, 2018). this result will affect their communication skills as well. they can also utilize new vocabulary / new poetic words in speaking and writing skills as receptive skills. finally, learning to make poetry based on indonesia’s super-diversity can instil a sense of love for the country and respect for differences. after students took the final exam, there were a number of them who came to their lecturer and said that the learning activity of producing creative writing was really fun for some reasons, wenda marlin kakerissa, nenden sri lengkanawati, & ahmad bukhori muslim utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students 534 namely first, their english language skills increased, which was noticed by their knowledge and skill on grammar and pronunciation that were getting better. second, students creative writing activities using indonesian super-diversity every week make them richer in knowledge about the nation's culture, fostering a love for national wealth and the nation. third, students are more creative in writing. this is evident from the diction or choice of words that they use are very varied, and they rarely use exact/repeated words. one of the benefits of using poetry in english teaching is improving students' writing skills, especially in choosing the appropriate diction (imron & hantari, 2021). a study conducted by fithriani (2021) reveals that efl students enjoy writing poetry as an expressive pedagogy, eliminating the negative notion that efl students lack interest and appreciation in writing poetry. to achieve enjoyment, arafah (2018) argued that a language teacher must ensure that any literary works, including poetry, that will be discussed make their students happy and enjoy writing activities. the two factors above are "motivating factors" that inspire students to read and are interested in reading and producing creative writing (poetry). the findings of this study certainly contribute significantly to the existing literature because learning english usually focuses on vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, tenses, language expressions, and others. even though the findings of this study indicate that efl students can learn english by composing creative writing using indonesia's super-diversity as the primary material for writing. writing activities like this are, of course, very influential on students' english skills while at the same time increasing and enriching students' knowledge about the nation's culture. it is expected that efl english teachers can also apply this method, namely using indonesia's super-diversity as the main material in learning english, for example, infusing stories about culture, traditions, customs, traditional food, and art from ethnic groups in indonesia in their teaching materials. from that material, students can learn about articles, adverbs, verbs, tenses, and grammar to hone students critical thinking when explaining a particular culture. in essence, one activity gets many benefits. literature is also related to developing language skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing (yulnetri, 2018). in this current study, students are also allowed to share knowledge about the ideas their friends convey in their creative writing presentations. when friends share knowledge about another friend's poetry object, they can also convey their thoughts/criticisms about that object, for example, one of the dani tribal traditions in papua, namely “iki pelek”. some argue "why do they have to cut thier finger?" wouldn't that add to the sadness/distress, especially in making a living daily? from this, it can be seen clearly that creative writing can hone students' critical thinking and how they should behave in the midst of indonesia's cultural super-diversity. table 4. general perspective on the learning of patterned poetry based on indonesia’s superdiversity statement (sa) (a) learning to create patterned poetry based on indonesia’s super-diversity not only increased my knowledge about it but also improved my english grammar and pronunciation 43p (72.9 %) 15p (25.4%) patterned poetry material based on indonesia's superdiversity is crucial in instilling a sense of love for my country and respect for differences. 47p (79.7 %) 12p (20.3%) result of students’ work in the mid and final examination for the mid exam, students were free to choose one of the four types of poetry taught: acrostic poem, adjective poem, adjective placement poem, and adverb poem. their selection was also very varied. some feel safe choosing an acrostic poem or an adjective poem, but some like the challenge of choosing an adjective placement poem or an adverb poem. each type of poetry requires good language skills and high creativity, especially in choosing the right words (appropriate diction), not repeating them, and using them in the proper position. meanwhile, students were asked to compose a creative contrast poem type for the final exam. according to students, a contrast poem was the most challenging type because it involved imagination, creativity in choosing words, and having to use several opposite adjectives. therein lies the challenge. table five below reveals that 71 was the lowest score in the mid examination, while the highest was 86. there was an increase in the final examination, with the lowest score being 84 and the highest score being 95. the results from these english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 535 two examinations are categorized into the good to outstanding category. so, it is inferred that the participants got the best score assessed using an assessment rubric. table 5. the result of the students’ work in the mid and final examination exam lowest highest category result mid 71 86 good to very good final 84 95 good to very good below is the rubric for assessing students’ creative patterned poetry in the mid and final examinations. table 6. the scoring rubric to assess students’ creative patterned poetry category exceeding standards 4 pts meeting standards 3 pts approaching standards 2 pts bellow standards 1 pts creativity very creative creative ordinary/routine imitative originality & meaning poem is original which proves that the poet put thought into words and uniquely conveys his/her ideas and emotions poem is thoughtful. a couple of phrases or ideas may be revisited, yet the overall product is carefully written most of the poem appears to be rushed. this is evident in the poet’s redundancy or use of cliches poem appears to be thoughtless or rushed. ideas are unoriginal. the product is very repetitive sensory detail vivid, detailed images, & intensely felt emotion make the poem come alive clear sensory images are used to portray ideas/emotions some use of image, idea/emotion difficult to visualize image/emotion form/patter n the poem is complete and follows its intended form/pattern the poem is written in its proper forms with a few mistakes the poem is somewhat written in its proper form the poem is not written in its proper form grammar proper use of english spelling and grammar is used consistently throughout each poem. punctuation is utilized when necessary a couple of spelling or grammar mistakes are evident, yet do not diminish the meaning of the poem. punctuation is utilized when necessary the poet’s intended meaning is confusing by several spelling or grammar errors. punctuation may be misused there are numerous spelling or grammar errors, making the poem difficult to understand. punctuation is used incorrectly on average, their shortcomings are in spelling and grammar errors. sometimes when the students have to use the past tense in their work, they keep using the present tense. and vice versa. however, in general, the best grade of the participants lies in using the right pattern, a high level of creativity, and the originality of the work. some students even achieved the highest score on their sensory detail because they could express vivid and detailed images and the best imagination to create an atmosphere that seems real and makes the reader feel as experienced by the poet. it shows their creative thinking and feeling. therefore, it is unsurprising when maley (2018) stressed that creative writing is a personal activity involving feeling and needing creative thought. a created product requires a unique combination of creative thinking and feeling. a poetry is considered as 'articulate energy.' maley (2018) added that creative writing is aesthetically motivated and deals less with facts than the imaginative representation of emotions, events, characters, and experiences. below are some student-written examples from their mid and final examination. a serimpi dance is slow a serimpi dance is graceful a serimpi dance is deliberate but a serimpi dance is not boring a serimpi dance needs the beautiful sound of gamelan a serimpi dance needs sanggul a serimpi dance needs sampur but a serimpi dance doesn't need a dalang (contrast poem by jfw) keukarah keukarah tastes savory keukarah tastes savory, sweetly tastes savory, sweetly, deliciously savory, sweetly, deliciously, lusciously aceh (adverb poem by rk) maratua beach is a wonderful beach in east kalimantan a lot of lodges are comfortable to live in rest in a quiet place to relax body and soul amazing ocean diversity inside the sea there are many kinds of beautiful sea animals unforgettable experiences to share with beloved persons a holiday weekend must be spent here brightly blue water along the coast wenda marlin kakerissa, nenden sri lengkanawati, & ahmad bukhori muslim utilizing indonesia’s super-diversity as a learning source in creative writing teaching for indonesia efl students 536 eating gence ruan will be more tasty after snorkeling and diving into the deep of the ocean come here and enjoy the sedately vibes honestly, you won’t regret it in your life (acrostic poem by rk) ma’nene ma’nene is accustomed ma’nene is accustomed, antidotal. is accustomed, antidotal, bold accustomed, antidotal, bold, courteous ritual (adjective poem by fat) i'm taking a trip to lampung to enjoy lampung krakatau festival and i'm taking all of my favorite things two little pink and white suitcase to keep my clothes the cutest green polaroid camera some souvenirs from my city for my friend in lampung a beautiful and colorful lampung’s traditional clothes can be seen in this festival and of course, it will be a memorable things to keep (adjective placement poem by sm) soekarno firm, brave, patriotic, politician son of raden soekemi sosrodihardjo and ida ayu nyoman rai lover of fatmawati, yurike sanger, and. indonesian people who felt, deported, threatened, imprisoned by the dutch invaders who needed to fight dutch colonial, to propose the name of indonesian, to repel invaders from indonesian who feared nothing to dutch colonial, nothing to put back in jail, nothing to dead execution who gave his life, effort, energy to fight dutch colonial who would like to see indonesian independence, dutch defeat, nation’s welfare resident of blitar, east java hatta (bio poem by rd) farewell to an old lower place hello to a new higher place farewell to a daily meal hello to a delicious meal prepared from buffalo meat it’s a form of respect, respect, respect for ancestor yes to respecting the ancestors no to asking the respect from others yes to tightening the ties of kinship no to living alone it’s a tradition, tradition, tradition of the toba batak community (beginning and ending poem by wk) there were still more examples of students’ creative works that they submitted in the form of documentation and videos. conclusion english learning usually focuses on vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, tenses, language expressions, and others, covering four skills. however, the results of this study show that producing creative poetry using indonesia's superdiversity as the primary material for writing can also improve creative writing skills because students have to use the right and creative words. this method can also increase knowledge and love for culture and nation. however, on the other hand, this research has limitations in terms of time. many participants must also be supported with much time in the student mentoring process, considering that several points are assessed. if one will conduct the same research, ensure the researcher has enough time to process it with each student. acknowledgment thank you so much for the fifty-nine participants involved in this study. they were the students of the creative writing language education: poetry class of the english education study program, pattimura university, ambon. references alsyouf, a. 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(2022). the benefits of choosing creative writing as a career. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readers blog/miles-to-go/the-benefits-of-choosingcreative-writing-as-a-career-43656/ undang-undang republik indonesia nomor 20 tahun 2003 tentang pendidikan nasional. wan, z. (2019). participant selection and access in case study research: challenges and opportunities in qualitative research, springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-135811-1_5 wysocka, m., s. (2019). poetry in teaching grammar to the advanced users of polish as a fl. theory and practice of second language acquisition, 5(1), 55-72, doi.org/10.31261/tapsla.2019.05.04. yulnetri. (2018). obstacles encountered while integrating literature in teaching english. jurnal ta'dib, 21, 39-50. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 75 application of brown and levinson’s model on joe biden’s victory speech: a case on politeness strategy anita purba (corresponding author) department of english education, universitas simalungun, pematang siantar, indonesia email: anit_purba@yahoo.co.id tutiariani nasution department of indonesian education, universitas simalungun, pematang siantar, indonesia email: tutiarianinasution@gmail.com marhaeni k. d. matondang department of english education, universitas simalungun, pematang siantar, indonesia email: kdewi6353@gmail.com zulkarnain postgraduate, department of islamic education, iain takengon, indonesia email: zul.3lathif@gmail.com ridwin purba department of english education, universitas simalungun, pematang siantar, indonesia email: purbaridwin61@gmail.com apa citation: purba, a., nasution, t., matondang, m. k. d., zulkarnain., & purba, r. (2023). application of brown and levinson’s model on joe biden’s victory speech: a case on politeness strategy. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 75-82. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7575 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction language is important part in human life that connect one to another. through language we can interact with others. language function as social interaction and one of the vital factors that differentiate human from another creatures. language is one maintain relationship with other people in an interaction. as social being, almost everyday people use language to communicate with others. by language makes people have more interaction with others. simanjuntak et al. (2022) stated that language is a complex system of communication that used in human beings. language is central to our lives it means that languages is something that cannot be apart from our life. central in our life is communication with other people, to socialization with society and culture (herman, 2014). according to anwari (2020), the purpose of language is a system of conventional vocal signs by means of which human beings communicate. so, it is important whether with others by talking and writing or with ourselves by thinking. english is important to learn because english as abstract: this research discussed about politeness strategies in joe biden’s victory speech. the researcher s used theory of brown and levinson (1987). this theory to analyzed the types of politeness strategy and the dominant types in joe biden victory speech. the source of the data was taken from joe biden’s speech in youtube its about 15 minutes, 19 seconds. this speech was published at 8 november 2020. the researchers chose joe biden’s speech because the researchers found that the types of politeness strategy in this speech. the researchers found 22 data and three types of politeness strategy namely positive politeness 18 (81.8%), negative politeness 1 (4.5%) and off record indirect strategy 3 (13.6%). positive politeness that found in this speech namely : uses promise, intensifity interest to the hearer, be optimistic, repetition, joke, assume or assert reciprocity, offer, and use rhetorical strategy, negative politeness that found in this speech was use pessimistic and off record indirect strategy namely use metaphors and give hints or directions. the most dominant types in joe biden victory speech was positive politeness strategy. positive politeness used in the speech so that make good communications between the speaker and the hearer and also make the situations comfortable, relax and make a pleasant situation in doing communication. keywords: brown and levinson’s model; politeness strategy; pragmatics; speech. anita purba, tutiariani nasution, marhaeni k. d. matondang, zulkarnain, & ridwin purba application of brown and levinson’s model on joe biden’s victory speech: a case on politeness strategy 76 international language in the world and it taught from elementary school until university school level. by learning english students are expected to understand and keep up the development of science, technology, and art. herman et al. (2022) stated that the purpose of english has become the most widespread language in the world, used for more peoples for more purposes than any other language on the earth. literature and language are closely related. it can be concluded that english is as the most spoken language in the world (patimah et al., 2021). english holds a big part in the communication. the use of language can possibly achieve the purpose such as selecting the word choices this strategy to deducted unpleasant feeling so that communication became well. by language, we can talk with other people, can give a lot of information, can able to exchange knowledge and also can express emotion, ideas, beliefs, feeling, opinion, wishes, thanks and promises. the function of language namely to inform about fact, to influence other people, to discuss about language, to describe, to chat or communicate with others or interact with other, and to deliver message. so language is tool of communication. according to caroline et al. (2021), communication is a process where somebody or some people, group, organization and society created and use the information to be connected with the environment and others. the aim of communication is to exchange the information, to share knowledge through written and spoken language. communication is the process of delivering a message by someone to another to inform or change attitudes and behavior, either directly orally or indirectly through media and also one act by which one person want to give or receive from another about information that person’s needs, desires, perceptions, knowledge or statements. according to kurniawati (2019), communication is an important aspect in our daily activity. communication means process of exchanging ideas between a person to another in order to gain of information or something else. as a human, people cannot be separated from social life because human is a social person and need other people help. by communication we can express our mind, idea, feeling, suggest to others. with communication we can build relationship with others, by communication we can talked or interact with other become politeness (van thao et al., 2021) pragmatics is the part of linguistics study that learned the relationship between the utterances and the situation (simaremare et al., 2021). pragmatics is the study of the connection between the context and language that focused on grammatical in the structure (hinck et al., 2021; ma'yuuf and abbas, 2021). it means that people can analyze the meaning by seen their statements. pragmatics has several part to be learned, one of them is politeness strategy (balogun and murana, 2018). politeness is a form of kind action taken by one person to another person. politeness is important point in language, when we talked to another we must show good attitude or show a politeness (balik and alinda, 2022; pardede et al., 2021). as we know by using politeness in language, a conversation become more polite especially in speech. politeness is a manner or etiqutte in communication that aimed to respect one to another people. in doing communication, people need to know and understand how to make conversation well and politely (syah et al., 2017; yaqin & shanmuganathan, 2020). so, people need to use politeness strategy in conversation to get good response from the others. politeness strategy aimed to minimize or to avoid conflict in conversation. when we used the politeness strategy in communication it means we can decrease misunderstanding or problem and also get good respect from others (xiang et al., 2020; manurung et al., 2021). when we want to make a speech or delivered a speech many things that we must pay attention so that the listener feel comfortable or not feel bored. many aspect that must pay attention such as the choice of words or content from the speech, gestures from the speaker and using politeness strategy. this is very important in speech, when a speaker using politeness strategy in delivered speech, and also pay attention to the listener. it can build a good relationship between the speaker and the listener. literature is the representatives of the resesarcher’s feeling. ghani and hussain (2021) stated that “literature” to composition that tells a story, dramatizes a situation, expresses, emotions, analyzes, and support ideas. one of the phenomena in communication is less politeness. sometimes the listener do not focus to the speaker when the speaker delivered his speech. many people can make a speech or delivered speech in the public but not all people can show a politeness in speech. so it make the speaker create good communication with the listener. many aspects that make the listener do not focused to the speaker such as the content of the speech make the listeners do not english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 77 excited and feel bored so that there is no interaction between the speaker and the listener. there are many reasons why politeness strategy is important in life namely to achieve your goal and get what you want. while the goal of politeness is to make the listener relax, feel comfortable with one to another. based on theory brown and levinson (1987) there are four types politeness strategy described by brown and levinson namely: bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness and off record indirect strategy. nowadays, we can find communication from various sources, such as in speech. speech is the activity of speaking in the public, carried out by conveying the opinion or thoughts of the speaker (zhu, & wang, 2020; nurdiansyah, 2021). generally, speech are made to state events or things that deserve to be discussed in the public. the function of speech is to delivered ideas in communication and to make the listeners understand the ideas well (haniva et al., 2021). the function of speech can be divided to four kinds namely: statement, question, command, and offer (wulan, 2021). in this research, the researcher focused in the speech. the researchers choose the joe biden’s speech as object because from the speech the researchers can find politeness strategy. the researchers also want to know how important the politeness strategy in a speech. in conducting in this research, the researchers provide the previous research from a thesis that also related with this thesis which is written by sari (2016) at syarif hidayatullah state islamic univeristy jakarta entitled “an analysis of politeness strategy in barack obama’s victory speech”. this research focused to analyzed politeness strategy in barack obama’s victory speech in chicago, november 4th 2008. the researchers analyzed the types of politeness strategy by brown levinson (1987). in this research, the researchers focused to analyzed positive politeness that found in the barack obama’s victory speech. the researchers analyzed 13 data in this speech, to analysed the data researcher used qualitative research to collect and analyzing the data. after that, the researcher collect data by using bibliograpy technique and writes the data card to make easier. the similarity of this research with the previous research, researcher focused to know positive politeness strategy but this research also to know the four of politeness strategy namely : positive strategy, negative politeness, bald on record and off strategy. this research is also different from with the previous research. and there are 14 types of positive politeness but in previuos research the researcher only analyzed 3 types of positive strategies namely:1) intensifity interest to the hearer 2) assume or assert reciprocity 3) optimistic this research is used to find out the politeness strategy in speech because the researcher often watching in youtube and searched about it, so the researchers are interested to make this topic became a research the reason why the researchers conducted this research because it is related to linguistic especially in pragmatics and to help the readers to understand the meaning by knowing the types of politeness strategy in joe biden’s speech. joe biden is an famous people in the united states and have big effect in the world especially in united states. by his speech the researcher can found the types of politeness strategy. method this research used qualitative research that focused on pragmatics. qualitative research is interested to the process, meaning and understanding through words or sentence. creswell (2014) stated that qualitative research is one method that focused to ask what and why in one phenomena. this method is used to understand how the people explained one experience in the world it means it can be concluded that qualitative research would be appropriate to be uses in finding, analyzing, and presenting the data of the research in a more detailed way. while there are many approaches to qualitative research. each of research approaches involve using one or more data collection methods. as we know descriptive qualitative is one method that describe based on phenomena, to understand concepts opinion, or experiences it can be used to gather in depth insight into a problem or generate new ideas for research.. descriptive qualitative describes the condition as they are, without giving treatment or manipulation to the variables studied. this type of qualitative descriptive is a type of research with the process of obtaining data as it is. this method is only used in humanities, and social sciences. hutahaean et al. (2021) defined that qualitative research is a research for exploring and understood the meaning individuals or groups to social or human problems. in this researcher, the researcher used qualitative research because to analyse politeness strategy, to collecte and classify the dominant types of politeness strategy found in joe biden’s victory speech. anita purba, tutiariani nasution, marhaeni k. d. matondang, zulkarnain, & ridwin purba application of brown and levinson’s model on joe biden’s victory speech: a case on politeness strategy 78 data is important tool in research. the purpose of the research is to get the data. according to isabella et al. (2022), the data are the information or facts used in discussing or deciding the answer of research question. based on the explanation above the source of data used in this research is joe biden’s victory speech. and the source of the data taken from joe biden’s speech in youtube https://youtu.be/1afnyztas2c, its about 15 minutes, 19 seconds. this speech was published at 8 november 2020. the researchers chose joe biden’s speech because the researcher found that the types of politeness strategy in thi speech. this speech delivered when joe biden elected as president of united states and tell about victory. a research instrument was a tool the researchers used to collect the data in order to make the researchers process done easily. according to herman et al. (2022), instrument of the research is a tool that used to measure observed natural and social phenomena. the researchers used joe biden’s speech and took an important role in watch, read and wrote related to this research. this research used additional instruments such as books, dictionaries, laptop, script of speech, pen and note book to collect and classified the data. analyzes the data by interpretation since the data are forms of politeness that found in the joe biden’s victory speech because researchers think in this speech we can found some types of politeness strategy. data is important tool in research. the aim of the research is to get data. data collection method is the way to collect data used in this research. documents and pictures can be written by people who can be used to obtain information and collected the data (ngongo et al., 2022). the researchers used qualitative research which the form of data was utterances. data for analysis is collected from a speech: joe biden’s victory speech. to collect the data in this research, the researchers did some steps namely: (1) searching and downloading joe biden’s victory speech. the researchers searching the joe biden’s victory speech after that downloading the video from youtube. (2) understanding the theory of politeness strategy. in this step, the researchers tried to understand the theory of politeness strategy that used to analyze the joe biden’s victory speech. (3) watching and understanding about joe biden’s victory speech. the researchers watched the video joe biden’s victory speech, for the purpose to understand deeply about the speech. (4) identifying all the words, phrase, sentences that contain politeness strategy. (5) and then the researchers took notes based on the classified and analyzed of politeness strategy. the data are analyzed to answer the research question. analyzing data is a process that systematically finds and organizes data from the results interview, observations and documentations. when analyzing the data of this research, the researchers decides several techniques to obtain data for accurate data analysis. after the data was obtained from data sources, the data were analyzed through the following steps namely: (1) reading and identified the whole joe biden’s victory speech. the first step of collected data, the researchers read and identified politeness strategy that found in joe biden’s speech. (2) classifying joe biden’s speech to find the types politeness strategy. after the data had been identified, the researchers classified the data into types of politeness strategy accorded theories. (3) analyzing the meaning of politeness strategy that found in the speech. to analyze the meaning, the researchers read every sentence that found in this speech that consists of politeness strategy. the researchers studied meaning by analyzed the types of politeness strategy. after that, the researchers tried to find the meaning of politeness strategy used in this speech. (4) drawing the conclusion. the last step made conclusion accorded to analyzed data. after the researchers found the answer from research problem, then the researchers made the conclusion based on the speech. results and discussion after analyzed the politeness strategies found in joe biden victory speech, the resesarcher found that: (1) there were 3 types of politeness that found in joe biden victory speech. they were: positive politeness, bail on record and off record indirect strategy. (2) based on the data analysis the most dominant types of politeness strategy in joe biden victory speech was a positive politeness strategy. positive politeness makes a communication becomes relax, comfortable can minimize the imposition between the speaker and the hearer. based on the data, the researchers presented the percentage of politeness strategy in the table. the percentage will be showed: 𝐹𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑦 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑋100 table 1. types of politeness found in the speech no. types of politeness frequency percentage 1. positive politeness 18 81.8% 2. negative 1 4.5% english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 79 no. types of politeness frequency percentage 3. off record indirect strategy 3 13.6 % total 22 99.9% after analysed the data, the researchers want to discuss the whole data and answered the problem of the research. the aim of this research are: to find out the types of politeness strategy that found in joe biden victory speech and to find out the dominant types of politeness strategy found in joe biden victory speech. the researchers used theory of brown and levinson (1987), this theory to analyzed the types of politeness strategy and the dominant types in joe biden victory speech. from the research findings above, the researchers found 22 data and three types of politeness strategy namely positive politeness 18 (81.8%), negative politeness 1 (4.5%) and off record indirect strategy 3 (13.6%). positive politeness that found in this speech namely: uses promise, intensifity interest to the hearer, be optimistic, repetition, joke, assume or assert reciprocity, offer, and use rhetorical strategy, negative politeness that found in this speech was use pessimistic and off record indirect strategy namely use metaphors and give hints or directions. the most dominant types in joe biden victory speech was positive politeness strategy. positive politeness used in the speech so that make good communications between the speaker and the hearer and also make the situations comfortable, relax and make a pleasant situation in doing communication. based on findings of the research, the researchers found that there were the similarities with the findings from related previous research from sibarani & marlina (2018). this research about politeness strategy used in republican debate by donald trump. this research aimed to describe the politeness strategy that found in republican debate by donald trump. the objective of research namely to identify what is types of politeness strategy found in republican debate by donal trump and what is dominant types that used in this research. this researched used theory of brown and levinson (1987) who classified politeness strategy into four types namely bald on record, positive, negative and off record strategy. researchers only used 3 types of politeness strategy namely bald on record, positive politeness and negative politeness. the 3 types of politeness strategy namely: positive politeness strategy (55.2%), negative politeness strategy (22.9%) and bald on record (21.73%). so based on the data positive politeness strategy is dominantly used in the republican debate by donald trump because the researchers believed as the most polite and successful strategy conclusion after the researchers conduct a research about politeness strategy in the joe biden’s victory speech. the resesarcher found types of politeness strategy namely positive politenes, bald on record and off record indirect strategy. the resesarcher found 20 data and three types of politeness strategy namely positive politeness 18 (81.8%), negative politeness 1 (4.5%) and off record indirect strategy 3 (13.6%). politeness strategy is one important thing that they should deliver in speech in front of people. the speaker wants to show politeness strategies sothat the listener pay attention to the speech and to the speaker. using politeness strategies in the speech can make close relationship between the speaker and the listener and make the situation become comfortable and relax. the most dominant types in joe biden victory speech was positive politeness strategy. positive politeness strategies to make good communications between the speaker and the hearer and make the situations comfortable, relax and make a pleasant situation in doing communication.%) references anwari, a. 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(2020). a critical discourse analysis of the us and china political speeches—based on the two speeches respectively, by trump and wang yi in the general debate of the 72nd session of un assembly. journal of language teaching and research, 11(3), 435-445. anita purba, tutiariani nasution, marhaeni k. d. matondang, zulkarnain, & ridwin purba application of brown and levinson’s model on joe biden’s victory speech: a case on politeness strategy 82 endorsing reflective techniques to proliferate students’ interactions and utterances in a discussion forum english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee endorsing reflective techniques to proliferate students’ interactions and utterances in a discussion forum marwito wihadi department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: m_wihadi@yahoo.com apa citation: wihadi, m. (2012). endorsing reflective techniques to proliferate students’ interactions and utterances in a discussion forum. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 39-46 received: 08-09-2011 accepted: 23-10-2013 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: high intermediate-2 students’ brief responses in a discussion forum cause a longexpected discussion last in a couple of minutes in mixed-ability classes, depicting a minority of students are overtly dominant, while others are precisely passive. what yields discussions endure immaturely stems from both unclear roles of participants and their inadequate techniques to expand both interactions and spoken discourse. therefore, teacher-researcher assigned each participant in a discussion group of three to put reflection into practice, referring to the self-selected and discussed topics. the data were gained through non-participant observations, in which the teacher-researcher observed and recorded a singled-out group. a sample recording was, subsequently, transcribed and analyzed regarding with the number of exchanges in a five-minute discussion intake and the number of content words that students generated. it was found that employing reflective techniques, students were able to keep a particular topic being discussed at full. as a result, the number of content words multiplied. these findings resulted classroom teachers in insightful use of reflective techniques as one of the ways to proliferate students’ benefits in a discussion forum. adequately practiced, students would be able to employ the techniques preponderantly, multiplying interactions among discussion members. keywords: reflective techniques, students’ interactions, utterances, discussion forum introduction talk taking place in the classroom is one of the media for students to get their exposure to the target language. holding a discussion forum, subsequently, is one of pedagogic activities that is aimed at triggering students’ talks at full. they are facilitated to contextualized language use assisting them to move from a purely semantic analysis of a language to a syntactic analysis of it (swain, 1985). hence, they are ‘pushed’ to produce utterances, expressions in forms of sentences generated in a certain context with a certain intention (finegan, 1992) in an interactive classroom context mode. however, some students, as a matter of fact, are not able to benefit to the discussion forum being staged so as not to expand a number of utterances and exchanges – consisting of three moves,namely initiative, response and feedback moves (sinclair and coulthard, 1975) in (allwright and bailey, 1991) due to, among other things, their unadequacy of conversation skills. in other words, they are not equipped with an ability to maintain a topic of discussion as exhaustively as possible by employing a particular technique. therefore, two aims of a discussion forum – promoting interactions among marwito wihadi endorsingreflectivetechniquestoproliferatestudents’ interactionsandutterances inadiscussionforum members (language learners) and facilitating prolific utterancesare not achieved adequately. this paper proposed reflective techniques (rt) as scaffolding which helps students to stretch their talk interactively in a discussion forum so that both interactions among them and productive utterances are preponderantly facilitated. studentstudent interactions are essential in a language acquistion in that they denote comprehensible input and ouput as stated that the former is in charge of advancement in language acquistion, and output is plausible as an impact of acquired competence (krashen, 1982). referring to walsh’s four modes of classroom discourse (2001), discussion belongs to classroom context mode in which teachers provide opportunities for genuine, real-world type of discourse.it is asserted that the principal role of the teacher is to listen and support the interaction among students and the appearance of their interactions is expected to promote casual structure discourse (ibid) classroom discourse concerns with exchange structure (sinclair and coulthard, 1975). sinclair and coulthard classified three basic kinds of exchanges of language: (1) question-and-answer sequences, (2) pupils responding to teachers’ directions, and (3) pupils listening to teacher giving information. taking a basic type of exchange structure, question-and-answer sequences consisted of a minimum of three moves (irf), namely the question (initiation), the answer (response), and the teacher’s feedback (follow-up). here is an example of interaction from a second language classroom: teacher: what does your father do? i student1: teacher r teacher: he is a teacher. good. f teacher: what does your father do? i student2: my father dead r teacher: and what about your father? i (thompson, 1997) an interaction outside of the classroom has typical irf patterns. consider the following example, doctor: i’ll give you sick note. it’s mary i patient: i’m probably known by er angela at work but r doctor: oh. f patient: i told the receptionist. she said have you got i another name. i said mary. she couldn’t find me under my surname. (thompson, 1997) the two above interactional examples confirm that the classroom is part of the real world, just as the airport, the interviewing room, the chemical laboratory, the beach and so on (van lier, 1988). in addition, initiations is not always in a question form. in fact, initiation in the form of affirmative is english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee also common. a particular response generates a certain follow-up, which also affects a substantial initiation. similarly, irf are pivotally interrelated, yielding in numerous exchanges to promote manifold interactions as well as their utterances. to scaffold students’ flourishing real-world interactions, the use of reflective techniques (rt) in a discussion forum seems influential. reflection is a technique where we reflect back the same thoughts or feeling the other person has expressed (we use reflection for a number of purposes, in particular to ask for clarification and to let the other person knows that we understand what he or she said. asking for clarification is then categorized as a referential questionthe one that the questioner does not know the answer long and sato (1983) in chaudron (1988). furthermore, there are two kinds of reflection: direct reflection (dr)we repeat almost the exact words the other person has used and make it into questionsand interpretative reflection (ir) – you give your understanding of what the other person has said. let’s take a look at the following example, taken from lbpp-lia (lembaga bahasa dan pendidikan profesional) conversation -3 book (2003, 30-31) a: my father decided immediately to set up my marriage arrangement. b: you father decided immediately to set up your marriage arrangement? (dr) it sounds like a big mission (ir) it sounds like a big project (ir) here are the other expressions of reflective techniques quoted from lbpp-lia cv-3 book (2007, x.ii): what do you mean by (questionnaire)? in other words,…..am i right? do you mean we need to (lease)? does that mean…? the above reflective techniques, in particular direct reflection (dr), stem from the concepts of ‘negotiated interaction’ in which modifications occur during conversation in a discussion forum, leading language learners to practice two procesess out of three interactional adjustments as follow: 1. a ‘comprehension check’ is the speaker’s query of the interlocutors (speaking partners) to see if they have understood what was uttered: “do you understand?”, “do you see what i mean?”, or “do you get what i’m saying?” 2. a ‘confirmation check’ is the speaker’ query concerning whether the speaker’s uttered comprehending of the interlocutor’s meaning is right: oh, are you saying that you did live in london? you disapprove of students boarding themselves as they may take advatanges of freedoom unresponsibly. am i right?” 3. a ‘clarification check’ is a request for further information or help in comprehending something the interlocutor has prior said: “i don’t undertsand exactly. what do you mean?”, or “what do you mean by a loner?” (long, 1983; chaudron, 1988) in short, the implementiation of reflective techniques promoting students’ extended uttertances as well as multified interactions is worth pedagogically endorsed since the benefits to language leaners potentially yield. method of six students, three female senior high school students aged 16 years old were randomly selected to hold a discussion without being capitalized with the marwito wihadi endorsingreflectivetechniquestoproliferatestudents’ interactionsandutterances inadiscussionforum expressions of reflective techniques previously. likewise, they had no pedagogic exposure on how to hold a discussion forum as long as possible to enhance their language competence by using the techniques to be exposed. student 1 (s1) started taking up an english course in in-4 (intermediate level 4). previously, she has studied at an english course for one year. student 2 (s2) and student 3 (s3) have been learning english in this english course since they were in elementary levels for junior high school students (step-1 and step 2). it means they have attended to learn english for about two years. three of them have two sessions in a week, and each session last two hours. the ability to speak in english fluently was their main priority as such skill was not much emphasized at their school. in fact as intermediate students, they were already able to deal with unrehearsed situations in that they managed to participate in a spontatenous talk in english without prior writing in a medium of a task, among other things, via a discussion forum. furthermore, such a fluency exercise enabled to free them from ‘having to be always grammatically correct’ as saying anything in the target language. they were simply assigned to discuss a number of statements concerning situations with options recalling the idiomatic expressions in color on the course book after being presented and exposed such topic through reading text and vocabulary targeted exercises such as matching the synoyms or filling in blanks . also, they were tasked to voice reasons for their respective choice. they had neither writing assigment to answer all statements nor make a note of written reasons. none was nominated as a moderator, but student 1 (s1) selfinitiated to control the discussion due to the fact that she took the microphone first, then selected any question she wanted to talk over. furthermore, thirty minutetape recorded discussion last as the teacher acted as a non-participant observer. the teacher just observed how the discussion occured without any interverence. after the session was over, the recordeddiscussion as fresh data was directly transcribed implementing an adapted transcription system from van lier (1988) and johnson (1995), and analyzed by employing the irf exchange structure as well counting the content words (finegan, 1992) –principally nouns, verb, adjective and adverb – an indicator of the number of utterances (uses of sentences on a particular occasion or in a particular context) produced (ibid). they carry a high information load and the sense is more and less recoverable using these words alone (thornbury, 2002). the extract of the utterance after cutting off other functional words is still understanble, conveying the meanings that the interlocutors intend to put forward. after few sessions, the same procedure was reiterated in that the same female students were singled purposefully on the grounds that they got a task familiarity. before, everyone in the class was exposed the reflective technique expressions written on the white-board. exposure was conducted via teacher’s thorough explanations and demos. singling a student out, teacher showed the techniques that they would put into practice in the discussion. similar to the previous classroom episode, the discussion was held after it was preceded by previous reading english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee exposure and intentional vocabulary exercises. their learning behavior (the three selected females on purpose) was observed and their discussion was taperecorded. the same student, student 1, kicked off the discussion. subsequently, the recorded discussion was transcribed and analyzed by employing irf exchange structure and counting the number of content words. eventually, the two transcripts of (transcription 1 and transcription 2) were juxtaposed. results and discussion students seemed to proceed a rigid pattern of exchanges in the first discussion. s1 read the statement. she uttered her own choice as well as expressed her reasons for the choice. later, she asked another student about her choices plus the reasons. finally, she told the other one to tell her both choice and reasons. such pattern was so typical that it was predominant during the discussion. no wonder, they completed the all 13 topics in 30 minutes, meaning one topic was not greatly elaborated as they moved on one topic to another quite instantly. each student did not comment on their interlocutors’ utterances in line with the topic discussion by making use of the expressions for further topic elaboration. on the contrary, in the second discussion, i observed that s1 was not predominant to control the pattern of exchanges. a certain topic seemed interested in them much so that they clinked to it for a couple of minutes. everyone in the group appeared initiative to contribute utterances talking over topics of music. consequently, there discussed 5 topics out of 10 in 30 minutes. in other words, they kept one topic quite long as each member responded to the interlocutors via the previously presented and taught reflective techniques. each seemed familiar with how to keep the discussion on. let’s pay attention the extract of transcription as follows: s1: ok. god afternoon guys we are going to discuss some statements about (i) rock music. shall we start? s2-s3: /yes/./of course/ (r) s1: ok…for the first statement “in indonesia only the young enjoy the music(f)/ (i) er-…for me i disagree with this statement because nowadays…old people also enjoy rock music..it depends on their soul may be…if they are they have …er-…yet full soul…they…they will also enjoy rock music the same as… youngsters… what do you think, rizkia? (i) s2: so…are you saying that er-…old people is also er-… like rock and roll? (r) rt s1: yes sure why not if er-…they…they are feeling that way (f) …er-..why not? (i) s2: but i think you know old people sometimes is…is you know like old songs (r) …like classical songs…because my family especially my grandma and grandpa …er-…like to sing a song like classical music or may be dangdut music so i i disagree with you… so what do you think nadia? (i) s3: hm..er-…does t that mean that you are…you disagree that…er-…old (r) rt people doesn’t …eh-…old people like the rock music? referring to the above data, complete exchanges emerged and the intervension of rt (reflective techniques) occured. it was possible that the feedback move also functioned as marwito wihadi endorsingreflectivetechniquestoproliferatestudents’ interactionsandutterances inadiscussionforum intitiatve one. next, the full 05:04 minute owing to the time constraints, transcriptions of two distinctive different classroom episodes denoted two core findings worth putting forwards. table 1 below displays the number of a brokenexchange (ir) and a minimum exchange structure (irf) in the first discussion forum and the second one. table 1. transcription number the number of broken exchange structure (ir) the number of minimum exchange structures (irf) the total numbers of exchanges (ir) & (irf) transcription 1 8 8 transcription 2 6 4 10 the above data revealed that on the first discussion students were not able to develop one topic in a flow of interaction. in other words, they were incompetent to develop or stretch one topic discussion interactively. eight (8) broken exchange structures notified that none followed up or commented on their friends’ initiations. they simply focused on responding or answering their friends’ initiations or questions while, at the same time, they neglected commenting by giving feed backs or follow ups. on the other hand, employing the reflective techniques, students were substantially productive in promoting a number of minimum exchange structure irf. similarly, they are aware of commenting on their friends’ initiations by practicing the instructed expressions of reflection, which subsequently trigger a move ‘f”. thus, the stretched interactions bring about, resulting in the number of content words produced. maintaining interactions among them was pedagogically advantageous as they were encourgaed to struggle to generate language output as to attain grammatical competence (swain, 1985). in addition, the negotiation process taking place during the interaction in a language task, for example the discussion forum, promotes the language acquisition (stevick, 1976) in allwright and bailey (1991). however, the data imparted that they were not used to employing the expressions of reflective technique regardless of the length of taking up english course due to the fact they still produced the broken exchange structure (6) deriving from particular factors needed finding out further. furthermore, the table below displayed the number of content words directly affected by the number of exchanges that students generate: table 2 transcription number the number of content words transcription 1 106 transcription 2 167 the data informed that students in discussion 2 were more prolific to produce utterances than the ones in discussion 1. as matter of fact, the practiced expressions seemed to push students to be productive in talking. it was plausible, though that the number of content words was influenced by their familiarity of the topics being discussed or students’ motivation to keep talking english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in english, nevertheless, it appeared that their frequent practices of reflective techniques expressions profoundly affected to the number of exchanges as well as content words. the findings of the action research were in line with brock’s (1986) as cited by chaudron (1988) asserted that referential questions elicited longer responses in that students made up more utterances, thus creating more content words as an attempt to answer the interlocuter’s query via relective technique in the discussion forum. on the contrary, they were against with moritoshi’s action research in that students were surprisingly minimized responses as they were capably uttering more lexically complex answers on account of, one of the clues encountered in a stimulated response interview, their percepetion of time pressure (moritoshi, 2001). hence, it was favaorable to reseach the effects of students’ psychosocial factors in responding abundant interactions and utterance-triggering questions via conversation techniques further. conclusion the frequent practices of reflective technique expressions seem essential to encourage students to talk in english. having been exposed once, students won’t automatically make us of the taught expressions of reflective techniques in a real time discussion. yet, it is essential that teacher capitalize students with reflective technique expressions prior to the discussion. at a certain time, teacher may participate in a discussion so that he can exemplify prolific interactions-generating discussion technique. by so doing, he facilitates students with engagingly realworld type of discourse. references allwright, d. and k.m. bailey. (1991). focus on the language classroom: an introduction to classroom research for language teacher. cambridge: cambridge university press. chaudron, c. (1988). second language classroom research: research on teaching and learning. cambridge: cambridge university press. finegan, e., blair, d. and collins, p. (1992). language: its structure and use. sydney: harcourt australia pty limited. jhonson, k.e. (1995). understanding communication in second language classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. krashen, s. d. (1982). principles and practices in second language acquisition. oxford: pergamon press. lia. (1998). conversation-3 book. jakarta: lbpp lia ___. (2007). conversation-3 book. jakarta: lbpp lia moritoshi, p. (2001). teacher questioning, modification and feedback behaviors and their implication for learner production: an action research. retrieved october 27, 2010 from http://www.cels.bham.ac.uk/resou rches/essays/moritoshi 1.pdf.. sinclair, j. mch. and r.m. coulthard. (1975). towards an analysis of discourse. oxford: oxford university press. swain, m. (1985). communicative competence: some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development, in gass and madden: 235 – 53 thompson, g. (1997). training teachers to ask questions. elt journal, 51(2), 9910.thornbury, s. 2002. how to teach vocabulary. london: longman http://www.cels.bham.ac.uk/resourches/essays/moritoshi 1.pdf marwito wihadi endorsingreflectivetechniquestoproliferatestudents’ interactionsandutterances inadiscussionforum walsh, s. (2001). charaterizing teacher talk in the second language classroom: a process approach of reflective practice. unpublished ph.d. thesis. queen’s university of belfast, northern ireland. van lier, l. (1988). the classroom and the language learner. london: longman. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 91 the change of greeting words in besemah language and its implication for learning regional languages resky utami the master study program of indonesian language education, teacher and education science faculty, universitas sriwijaya email: reskyutami.fkip@gmail.com nurhayati the master study program of indonesian language education, teacher and education science faculty, universitas sriwijaya email: nurhayati@fkip.unsri.ac.id sri indrawati the master study program of indonesian language education, teacher and education science faculty, universitas sriwijaya email: sriindrawati1207@gmail.com apa citation: utami, r., nurhayati., & indrawati, s. (2023). the change of greeting words in besemah language and its implication for learning regional languages. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 91-100. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7597 received: 09-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction generally, the languages in the republic of indonesia consist of two languages. the first language is the official language, indonesian language. according to agustina et al. (2021), the second language is vernacular language spreading from sabang to merauke. each vernacular language has specific grammatical rules. aritonang (2020) vernacular languages are important to develop the indonesian language. aritonang (2021) the vernacular languages are the parts of national language to preserve because the languages have potentials to develop the official language of indonesia. with a descriptive research greetings are words used to greet, admonish, or refer to the second person or the person being spoken to. another opinion was also expressed by asmara (2020) namely that greetings are words used to greet someone both written and spoken. greeting is a way of directing the intent of the person greeting to the addressee both orally and in writing, in the form of a series of words (aso et al., 2021). in addition. azis et al. (2019) stated that greetings are morphemes, words or phrases used to refer to different speech situations according to the nature of the relationship between the speakers. in the besemah language, greetings are called tutuwan or tuughan (speech, greeting speech). the word tutuwan comes from the basic word tutuw (speaking) and tuughan comes from the basic word tutugh (speaks) (asrif, 2019). baso (2018) added betutuw or betutugh (speaking) means greeting or saying hello, meanwhile, being tutuwi or tutuughi (spoken) means greeting. according to da costa (2021), from the various opinions above, it can be concluded that greeting words are morphemes, words, or phrases used to greet, admonish, or refer to the second person in the situation of the conversation itself, abstract: this research described the addressing terms and analyzed the addressing term shifts of besemah community in pagar alam regency. this research also described the implementation of besemah vernacular language on vernacular langauge lesson. the applied method was descriptive qualitative method and objective appraoch with four research techniques. the data source was the community of besemah, consisting of five districts in pagar alam regency. the results found five hundred and fifty-two addressing terms. these words include addressing terms within family context and community context. then, the researchers also found the shifting addressing terms. four of the words were not found at the present days. the result implications have some implications on vernacular language lesson and could be the teaching materials for primary school levels. keywords: addressing terms; besemah; implications, shifts. resky utami, nurhayati, & sri indrawati the change of greeting words in besemah language and its implication for learning regional languages 92 both orally and in writing. example: greeting father, mother, brother, sister, grandmother, grandfather, and so on. widianto (2018) states, given the position and duties of these regional languages, efforts should be made to inventory and document regional languages for the preservation of regional languages and culture. ferdianto & rusman (2019) state the description above shows that the besemah language information can be said to be quite complete, especially from a linguistic point of view. according to ferry et al. (2020), research on the besemah language greeting system was carried out in 2019 as a final project. however, his research discusses the form of greeting systems in the besemah language, does not discuss the shifts in greeting in the besemah language. the besemah speakers, historically, were the people living in the deep of south sumatera region (hariyanto, 2019). however, due to some mobilizations and migrations of the people, the besemah tribe went to many regions of south sumatera. zalwia et al. (2018) state that the besemah tribe also stays in various provinces in sumatera islands, such as in bengkulu and lampung provinces. administratively, the region of besemah tribe covers some regencies and cities, such as pagar alam, lahat, empat lawang, muara enim (besemah people with semende dialect), oku (besemah people with ulu ogan dialect), and some region of south oku (ayu et al., 2019). in bengkulu province, the besemah people stay in southern bengkulu. they stay in some districts, such as kedurang and kedurang ilir. they also live in kaur regency (except bintuhan) and northern kaur regency. for besemah people in lampung province, they live in northern lampung regency (tanjung raja), way kanan regency (rebang kasoy), and banjit district. there are interesting things in the besemah language, in the besemah language the forms of greeting and designation are different (lafamane, 2020). from the greeting it can be distinguished whether from blood relatives or non-blood relatives (mahmud, 2018). so in this study this unique thing will be detailed in full and thorough. mardian (2019) defines language shift as the study of regional languages in an interdisciplinary field of study called sociolinguistics, which is a combination of linguistics and social sciences. muin & sulfasyah (2018) states that the study of language externally involves two scientific disciplines, so that its form is in the form of a combination of two disciplines that merge from sociology and linguistics which have a very close relationship. sociolinguistics is part of linguistics (nasir & sahfitri, 2020). the term sociolinguistics comes from the words socio and linguistics. ulfa (2019) mentions sosio means society, meanwhile, linguistics means language. so, sociolinguistics is the study of language that places language in relation to its use in society. basically, this research has a form of similarity with previous research of nggaruaka et al. (2019) which discusses the shift in greeting words. the difference between this research and previous research of nisah et al. (2020), the previous research focused on studying and discussing the greeting system in besemah language, meanwhile in this study the researchers examined and discussed greeting words and the shifting forms of greeting words in besemah language and their implications for learning local languages. this research is important to do considering that currently greeting words in besemah language have begun to be forgotten by besemah residents and have even begun to experience shifts along with the times (pandaleke et al., 2020). researchers also obtained some data that strengthened researchers to research regarding shifts in greetings in besemah, namely: (1) data from the language center of south sumatra province, confirms that there has been a shift in the use of greetings in regional languages, especially besemah in the last thirty years, pengembangan & kementerian (2018); (2) the results of research in 2019 found that greetings in the besemah language began to experience a shift and it was even difficult to find the original form of the greeting. for example: there are many greetings for his mother-in-law, kenambe for nephew, bak for father, mother for mother, and mok for nephew, these greetings are hard to find; (3) currently in the city of pagar alam in the new school year 2022-2023 regional language learning has begun to be reactivated as a follow-up to the implementation of the free learning curriculum which prioritizes culture. addressing terms refer to utterances for permanent communication. pongantung et al. (2020) this statement indicates that the utterances remain still from era to era. addressing term is inseparable activity from human life. addressing term becomes the behavior and habit of human life. this behavior has an important role in a community. as the time goes by, the realizations of the community’s addressing terms shift (purwaningtyas & junining, 2009). language english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 93 shift occurs as a result of the language selection process over a very long period of time. when a language shift occurs, members of a community prefer to use a new language rather than the language they are used to (ramadinatha et al., 2021). for besemah people in pagar alam city, the researchers found many shifted addressing term realizations in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation. in line with rosita & aprila (2006), it was found in the besemah community, especially in the city of pagar alam, that the besemah language had undergone a significant shift or change. in the age range starting from children, adolescents, adults, and parents, the form of greeting in besemah language is clearly visible in changes in vocabulary and grammar (tamrin, 2018). the study of regional languages is included in the field of interdisciplinary study called sociolinguistics, which is a combination of linguistics and social sciences (sahril, 2018). the main variable in this study is the same as in previous research, namely studying the regional language, namely the besemah language. however, the implementation is different, previous research of seha & fatonah (2020) focused on discussing the greeting system in the besemah language, while in this study it focused on studying greeting words and the form of greeting shift and the implications for learning regional languages. this research is important to do considering that currently the greeting words in the besemah language have begun to be forgotten by the people of besemah and have even experienced a shift. the outline in this study, not only discusses greeting words and their shifting forms (i.e septiani & saragih (2020) research), but covers a wider scope, namely supporting the program being run by the pagar alam city education office to implement local language learning in all schools in pagar alam city. the results in this study can be used as a reference as an accurate regional language learning material. in this research, the researchers discussed the problems of how the forms of besemah terms of address, the shifts of the terms of address, and the research implication on vernacular language lesson. method the research applied descriptive comparative method supported by an objective approach. the data sources were the terms of address in besemah language (solihah, 2009). the researchers elicited the terms from some data sources, such as the besemah native speakers with some applied conditions and besemah native speakers that stayed in pagar alam. the researchers applied descriptive method with four techniques of collecting data. they were (1) interview, (2) questionnaire, (3) field note and recording, and (4) eliciting technique. the data analysis techniques were classifying and grouping the data. in this stage, the researchers grouped the same data. then, the researchers separated the similar data but different (rosita & aprila, 2006) after receiving the data from the questionnaire, face-to-face interview, and recoding and field note, the researchers analyzed the data with these stages. the researchers rewrote the collected data in the form of besemah to make them tidy. these data were arranged and classified based on the terms of address system of besemah language. the classified data were interpreted to obtain meaningful accuracy of the terms of address (sueca, 2020). the interpreted data were written in a table based on the needs and the relevances with the parts of besemah terms of address. then, the researchers wrote the analysis results to report the findings. results and discussion from the results and analyses about besemah terms of address, the researchers found some shifted terms of addresses that were not applied by the community. the example of the term was panci (tanu, 2018). literally, panci is translated to kitchen stuff. however, most men, especially husbands, used the term to address their wives. then, the wives addressed the husbands with a term of pangkug. this term literally is translated to any garden equipment (turiah, 2021). in this case, pangkur is used to address the husbands. besemah terms of address have some differences from generation to generation. however, in this research, besemah terms of address began to fade due to the era development. some terms were still observable and could be analyzed to differ the addressers’ ages or perangkat budaq and perangkat tuwe. here are the explanations of besemah terms of address and the implications on vernacular language lesson. the intra-family terms of address service the terms to address fathers or older men resky utami, nurhayati, & sri indrawati the change of greeting words in besemah language and its implication for learning regional languages 94 these terms included kamu, bape, bapaq, bapang, and baq. the examples of the term uses are: where are you going, dad? where are you going, dad? siape titu, bape? who is that, dad? the terms of addresses, such as bapaq, baq, and kamu were used by male and female children to address their fathers. on the other hand, the terms of bapaq and kamu were mostly used by older generation or perangkat tuwe. the generation refers to people aged older than sixty year old. on the other hand, the term of baq was mostly spoken by current generation people aged younger than 60 years old or perangkat budaq. these terms of addresses, baq and bapaq, do not show meaning differences. thus, the uses are interchangeable. the term of address for a father was pejadi lanang. the excerpt below shows the example. au, pejadi lanang ku! he is. he is my father! . at the present days, the kinship term of address for a father has shifted. the term of bape was not spoken by the native speakers. the same matter was also observable on the perangkat tuwe or older generation. they did not know the use of this term, bape. the term of address for a father in besemah language included kamu. this term was addressed for certain knowledgeable elders. the other terms of address for a fatehr were baq, bapaq, and bapang. the terms to address mothers the terms of address for mothers included kamu, nduq, umaq, and maq (the shortest form to address umaq). the excerpt below shows the example. tape bataqan, nduq? mum, what do you bring? payu nduq kita gheghadu kuday! shall we take a rest first, mum! the terms of addresses, such as kamu, nduq, umaq, and maq are used by children to address their mothers. the term, nduq, is mosly used by older generation, perangkat tuwe. most people in this generation were aged older tahn 60 years old. on the other hand, the terms of umaq and the shortest form, maq, were mostly used by younger generation, perangkat mude. this generation refers to people aged younger than 60 years old. the terms of maq, umaq, and nduq do not show significant meaning differences. the term of address for mothers of (female parent) was pejadi betine. the excerpt below shows the example. nyela, pejadi betine ku titu! that its it. the mother is me! at the present days, the terms of kinship for mothers or female parents did not shift. the terms of kamu, nduq, umaq, and maq remained still until the present days. however, the term of nduq was used by the perangkat tuwe aged older than 70 years old. on the other hand, the term of kamu, as the knowledgeable address, umaq, and maq were used by younger generation aged younger than 60 years old. the system of kinship addressing terms this system refers to addressing terms or speech acts, betutugh and betutuw, among relatives due to marital relationship. the kinship relationship due to marital relationship is called hubungan kule or perkulean, pekulean. some people call this relationship kawan kule or kawan (relative) due to tali perkulean or marital relationship. the terms of addressing for wives the addressing terms for wives are mostly by calling the names of the wives. the other terms to address were dengah or ‘you.’ if the women or the wives had children, the addressing terms would be nduq, ndung, or umaq entailed by the oldest child’s name. for example, the oldest name of a woman was riska. thus, the addressing terms would be nduq riska, ndung riska, or umaq riska. the examples of the term uses are: lah ude betanaq, ki? have you cooked the rice, ki? gulaykalah tighaw tu, umaq bait! please cook the mushrooms, bait’s mum! bait, in the excerpt, refers to the name of the oldest son of the woman. in the homeland of besemah people, around a hundred year ago, the terms to address wives had to attach on certain objects known by the wives. these objects were such as bakul (baskets), belange (cauldrons), and english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 95 sudu (spoons). here are the examples of the terms in uses. bakul, aku kah temalam di kebun bakul, i will stay in the garden. the wife, named bait, knows the term of bakul is the addressing term to call herself. thus, the response of the husband shall be au, hati-hati saje pehiuk. the term of pehiuk is to address the husband. long time ago, besemah people did this technique to address other people because calling other people’s names were something taboo. these addressing terms were applicable if the wives and the husbands did not have children because addressing their spouses with ay, uy, or hey were considered impolite. the case would be different if the spouses had children. in this case, they would call their oldest children’s names, for example bapang rizka temalam kamu? (will rizka's fatehr stay?) the addressing terms for wives are mostly by calling the names of the wives. the other terms to address were dengah or ‘you.’ if the women or the wives had children, the addressing terms would be nduq, ndung, or umaq entailed by the oldest child’s name. the shifts of the terms occurred because besemah people addressed their wives with some words referring to kitchen stuff. however, at the present days, the addressing terms are different. most besemah people currently address with some new terms, such as ibu or ndung. these terms do not exist in besemah's addressing terms. the addressing terms for the father (the male parent) of a wife the addressing terms for male parents or fathers of wives included was, mamag, ngkuaye, beliyaw, beliyaw tu, beliyaw banyaq, and beliau banyaq lanang. the examples of the term uses are: dide ka(h) kume wag saghini? will your father go tot he field? the addressing terms for fathers (the male parents) of wives included ntuwe, ntuwe lanang, bapang bini, and pejadi lanang bini. here are the examples. ntuwe ku titu. he is my father. the addressing terms for male parents or fathers of wives included waq, mamag, ngkuaye, beliyaw, beliyaw tu, beliyaw banyaq, and beliau banyaq lanang. the term, waq, was mostly used if the father of a woman is older. if the father of a woman is older than the man's father, the addressing term for the woman's father is mamaq or uncle. on the other hand, the addressing term of ngkuaye was used within the intimate conversation context. thus, this term should not be used to call. the term of beliyaw banyaq shifted from the term of beliyaw once a man had children. at the present days, most husbands called their wives’ fathers with baq or bapak (father). specifically, in rurah, spoken by people from gumay ulu and pagar gunung clans, the spoken term to address women's fathers was pengiran or the prince. this addressing term did not shift but it was only used based on certain adapted situation. the addressing terms for the mother (the female parent) of a wife the addressing terms for female parents or mothers of wives included waq, ibung, nguaye, beliyaw, beliyaw tu, beliyaw banyaq, and beliyaw banyaq betine. the examples of the term uses are: singgah kuday, beliyaw tu! please come over here, madam! the term of waq could be applied if the mother of a wive was older than the mother of a husband. if the mother of the woman was younger than the mother of a husband, the spoken term to address should be ibung or aunty. the terms of beliyaw banyaq and beliyaq banyaq betine were the shifted forms of beliyaw and beliyaw banyaq betine once a husband had children. at the present time, most husbands addressed their mothers-inlaw with umaq and maq. the addressing terms for the mothers of wives included ntuwe, ntuwe betine, ndung bini, and pejadi betine bini. here are the examples. ntuwe ku! she is the mother of my wife! the addressing terms for female parents or mothers of wives included waq, ibung, nguaye, beliyaw, beliyaw tu, beliyaw banyaq, and beliyaw banyaq betine. these addressing terms did not shift but it was only used based on certain adapted situation. the time makes the generation shifts and brings novelty. the attached cultures from generation to generation will also shift, including resky utami, nurhayati, & sri indrawati the change of greeting words in besemah language and its implication for learning regional languages 96 the addressing term of besemah vernacular language. most besemah addressing terms were used in the past events and are not spoken at the present days, for examples the terms of rame and bape to address male parents and gusti to address knowledgeable person. the other alternatives for rame and bape, the male parents, are bapaq and baq. then, the term of gusti has an alternative term of kabah, dengah, or kamu. each culture has specific identity and becomes the specific and signature features. the addressing system in besemah vernacular language is unique. the language has differences to address and mention other people. for example, an individual who addresses other people will have different forms of words to address the individual. here are the examples of the addressing terms and mentioning terms of a father, a male parent. ka(h) ke mane kamu baq? where are you going, dad? pejadi lanang ku! i am going to my father. the example shows the addressing terms and the mentioning terms in besemah vernacular language. the example shows the addressing terms of a father, a male parent, are baq, bapaq, and bapang. on the other hand, the mentioning term for a father was pejadi lanang. these differences were unique. the researchers found, summarized, and grouped 152 addressing terms. then, the researchers grouped them into two groups. the first group, consisting of 110 addressing terms, was the family or domestic addressing term. then, the second group was the community addressing term. the researchers explained the differences of the terms to address and mention other people in detail. the researchers grouped 152 addressing terms by identifying the terms comprehensively with experts. they were humanists, community figures, and lecturers. the researchers found 14 shifted addressing terms and 2 extinct addressing terms. here are the terms. table 1. shifted and extinct addressing terms no. old addressing terms current addressing terms remarks 1. 1. nduq umaq, maq, mamaq mothers (female parents) 2. ibungan bibiq, biq the younger sister of a father 3. nduq tuwe umaq tuwe, maq tuwe the older sister of a mother 4. mamaq, maq mamang, mang the younger brother of a mother 5. kenambe kemenakan the female sibling of a daughter or a son 6. pengiran, nguaye, waq, mamaq, beliyaw, beliyaw tu, beliyaw banyaq, and beliyaw banyaq lanang. baq the father (a male parent) of a wife 7. waq, ibung, beliyaw, beliyaw banyaq, and beliyaw banyaq betine. umaq the mother (female parent) of a wife 8. bapang (entailed with the oldest child's name) brother or sister husband 9. waq, mamaq, beliyaw, beliyaw tu, beliyaw banyaq, and beliyaw banyaq lanang. baq the father (a male parent) of a husband 10. waq, ibung, beliyaw, beliyaw banyaq, and beliyaw banyaq betine. umaq the mother (female parent) of a husband 11. rame, bape, baq, bapang the male parents 12. panggkur (cangkul) to address the husbands with the remarks of gardening tools no substitute addressing terms husband 13. belangge (cauldron/pot) to address the husbands with the remarks of kitchen stuff no substitute addressing terms wife 14. gusti no substitute addressing terms to address the knowledgeable person english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 97 the researchers found five besemah’s addressing terms as second-person singular. they were kabah, dengah, dighi, kenan, and kamu. in this research, the researchers found four addressing terms as the second-person singular. they were kaban, dengan, kangaw, and gusti. the term of kaban was spoken by people living in kisam besemah area. the term is equal to the term of kabah or ‘you.’ the term of kangaw was spoken in the area of former gumay ulu clan. the term of kangaw is equal to kabah or dengan, meaning ‘you.’ the term of dengan was spoken when a speaker was angry. the term of gusti was not spoken in current era. however, the term of gusti is still findable in various guritan. the term of kabah or ‘you’ was used to address relative or community member that did not belong to the same generation. the term was not also used to address relative or community member that came from younger generation and had the same sex types with the speaker. if the sex types were not the same as the speaker or addresser, the addressee should be addressed by a term of dengah or ‘you.’ the term of kamu or ‘you’ was used to address knowledgeable persons, such as fathers, mothers, and all relatives from the same generations. they could be from the bloodline family or not. the terms of kamu was used by non-relative community member, older than the speaker. in this research, the researchers found different addressing terms used by the older generation and the younger generations, for example bajiq to address older sister of a husband. the term was used by the older generation as the addresser to younger generation, younger than sixty years old. the younger generation did not suse the term of bajiq. they instead used the term of kakaq to address the older sisters of husbands. the other addressing terms that indicated the differences of the speakers’ generations were bapaq (father), nduq (mother), mamaq (uncle), ibung (aunty), and niniq (grandmother). these terms were spoken by older generation. on the other hand, the younger generations used the terms of baq (father), umaq (mother), mamang (uncle), bibiq (aunty), and niing (grandmother). the speakers used the terms both in complete forms and short forms without creating different meaning due to the positions. both complete and shortened addressing terms could be put in front, in the middle, and in the end of utterances. here are the examples of the complete and shortened forms. niniq/niq ndaq ke mane? grandpa, where are you going? ngape nining,/ning lum pegi? why have not you departed? makanlah kuday, bapaq/baq! please, have a meal, dad! the complete addressing forms and the shortened addressing forms included umaq/maq (mother), mamaq/maq (uncle), bibiq/biq (aunty), kakang/kaq (older brother or sister), kakaq/kaq (brother or sister in law), ading/ding (younger brother or sister), kance/ce (friends), and sename/me (peer friends). suan (2018) differed the terms of addressing and mentioning in utterances. here are the examples. ani mau ke mana? (where are you going ani?) (ani is the addressing term) ani! mau ke mana? (ani! where are you going?) (ani is the mentioning term) ani! kau mau ke mana ? (ani! where are you going?) (ani is the mentioning word while kau is the addressing term). in besemah vernacular language system, the previous examples are equal with the following examples: nit ndaq ke mane? nit, where are you going? nit! ndaq ke mane? nit! where are you going? nit! dengah ndaq ke mane? nit! where are you going? the term of nit in the first utterance is an addressing term of a childhood friend’s name. the term is also a shortened form of a complete name, harnita. nit in the second utterance is a mentioning term. nit in the third utterance is a mentioning term. dengan or ‘you’ is an addressing term for second-person singular. besemah vernacular language also has various refined addressing terms or addressing term resky utami, nurhayati, & sri indrawati the change of greeting words in besemah language and its implication for learning regional languages 98 auxiliaries. these auxiliaries are cih and ngkuaye. these terms have three functions. they are to address,t o mention, and to refine the addressing term. here are the examples. betanaqlah kuday cih! cook it first, cih! ade di ngkuaye tulah! it is up to the parents in law! cih! numpang betanye dikit! cih! let me ask something! the first cih and ngkuaye are addressing terms. the term cih in the third utterance and the term ngkuaye in the fourth utterance are the mentioning terms. these terms, cih and ngkuaye, are only for intimate addresser and addressee within face-toface situation. if the addressee is at a distance, the terms of cih and ngkuaye should not be spoken. the term cih in the fifth utterance and the term of ngkuaye in the sixth utterance are the addressing term refiners or auxiliaries. in a family or kinship system, cih is spoken by older people to address the younger family members with different sex types. in a relative system, the term of cih is spoken to address the sons or daughters in law from the siblings, sons and daughters, sons and daughters of the siblings, and husbands and wives of siblings with different sex types with the addresser. the term of ngkuaye is spoken to address knowledgeable persons within the family system, such as the mothers and fathers in law, and nduwayan for men that their wives have brothers or sisters. wiyanti et al. (2019) explain the realizations of the addressing terms. the realization includes a grammar of n + ku, for example tuhanku or my god. this grammar of addressing term only applies in indonesian language. however, in besemah vernacular language, the pattern will be n + ku to express the intimacy or compassion of the addresser's feeling. the examples are anaqku, cungku, and adingku to express the intimacy or compassion. these terms are more intimate than anaq, naq, cucung, cung, ading, and ding. the implication of the addressing system on besemah vernacular language in vernacular language lesson the implications of curent research results were for vernacular language lesson at first until sixth grades of primary schools within the revised 2013 curriculum assisted by the 2022 merdeka belajar curriculum. vernacular language was a local material for primary schools. this implementation of vernacular language, based on the merdeka belajar curriculum, was to realize excellent understanding, appreciation, response, analysis, and practice of the vernacular language, especially about the addressing terms of besemah. here are the themes for primary school lessons with the implications on besemah vernacular language materials. the implications were based on the core competence and basic competence of third theme living in harmony and the objective to understand the content of a text with various besemah's addressing terms. this objective was stated in basic competence 3.3. then, in the basic competence of 4.3, the objective was to develop and tell the content of puyang belulus’ traditional ceremony in rempassay within the material of the rhymes of besemah's addressing terms. conclusion from the discussion and the explanations, the researchers concluded that besemah’s vernacular language system had two systems. the first system was the kinship system while the second system was non-kinship system or a community system. the kinship system consisted of (1) intrafamily addressing term system, (2) kinship addressing term system, (3) lovely addressing term, and (4) kinship addressing system within specific situations. the addressing system in the community, non-kinship relationship, was categorized into (1) official community addressing system and (2) casual community addressing system. the realizations of the reviewed language shifts were based on the historical review. the researchers found some applied terms in the past. however, these terms are not spoken at the present days. for example, the researchers found the terms of bape and rame to address male parents. some shifted terms from the original terms were mostly used by people younger than 60 years old or perangkat mude. these terms were different from those spoken by people aged older than 60 years old, such as bapaq and ibung. however, for younger people, the most spoken term was baq to address male parents and bibiq to address the sister of a father and the wife of a woman’s brother, bajiq (spoken by older generation), and kakaq (spoken by the younger generation) to address the older sister of a husband. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 the research results had implications on school literature study, especially at jhs and shs levels. the researchers found three basic competences that could apply these research results as the references for both teachers and learners. the results of this research could answer the linguistic shift of besemah language. references agustina, d., setiawati, a., wedari, f. t., handayani, l., & mahdalena, m. 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(2018). modernisasi dan diskontinuitas bahasa daerah. neo societal, 3(2), 494-502. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 433 hate speech on social media: a case study of blasphemy in indonesian context rotua elfrida english department, faculty of language and arts universitas hkbp nommensen email: rotuapangaribuan@ac.id arsen nahum pasaribu (corresponding author) english department, faculty of language and arts universitas hkbp nommensen email: arsen.pasaribu@uhn.ac.id apa scitation: smelfrida, r., & pasaribu, a. n. (2023). shate speech on social media: a case study of blasphemy in indonesian context. senglish sreview: sjournal sof senglish seducation, s11(2), 433-440. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7909 received: 28-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction hate speech is a global phenomenon in social interaction. it can happen anywhere and anytime. in public spaces, such as public transportation, parks, schools, markets, shopping centers, offices, and even in the family environment like at home. hate speech can also occur when someone is with friends, family, teachers, co-workers, and even when with parents. technological developments, such as the invention of the internet, have had a huge impact on social interactions around the world. the emergence of social media platforms such as facebook, twitter, instagram, and youtube, to name a few, has enabled people around the world to interact widely and instantly. real communication has changed to online with all the advantages and disadvantages. likewise, the practice of hate speech has moved into cyberspace with various available internet-based communication facilities (matamoros-fernández & farkas, 2021; poletto et al., 2021; chetty & alathur, 2018). the existence of hate speech in social media has been revealed by some scholars. most of the hate speech research found on flat form twitter were carried out by several scholars (sanguinetti et al., 2019; albadi et al., 2018; davidson et al., 2019; fortuna et al., 2019; ibrohim & budi, 2019; mulki et al., 2019; oriola & kotze, 2020; pereirakohatsu et al., 2019; alshalan & al-khalifa, 2020; mozafari et al., 2020; roy et al., 2020). a small portion of hate speech research is focused on other flat forms such as facebook (sigurbergsson & abstract: many scholars have shown research on hate speech, spanning from hate speech detection methods to the bias interpretation of dataset they create, as well as the role of technology in the dissemination of hate speech on social media. however, research on hate speech categories and degrees on the issue of religious blasphemy is still relatively unexplored. therefore, the purpose of this research is to uncover the strategies and levels of hate speech on social media, primarily youtube channels, in response to the minister of religion's comments about the sound of mosque loudspeakers that need to be adjusted in volume. this comment has generated both positive and negative reactions in indonesian society. this research looks into netizen comments in the comments column on the youtube channel that carries the statement. purposive sampling was used to select 300 comments from among the 840 comments in the comments section of the youtube. for the purposes of this study, the sample was obtained in the form of comments containing hate speech. the data was then analyzed using content analysis, in which the data was coded and categorized according to hate speech level of classification. the study revealed that there are three types of hate speech in netizen comments: early warning, dehumanization and demonization, and violence and incitement. early warning is the most common type of hate speech, followed by violence and hostility, as well as dehumanization and demonization. due to cultural influences and contrasts in rank and power between the commentator and the person who is the subject of the hate speech, hate speech delivered by indonesian netizens tends to be dominated by disagreement, negative character, and action. keyword: content analysis; hate speech; indonesian context; religion blasphemy; social media; youtube comments rotua elfrida & arsen nahum pasaribu shate speech on social media: a case study of blasphely in indonesian context 434 derczynski, 2020; pasaribu, 2021). even on other social media flat forms were not found. research on hate speech that focuses on the tools or methods used to detect hate speech on social media was conducted by albadi et al., (2018), sanguinetti et al., (2019), davidson et al. (2019), fortuna et al., (2019), ibrohim & budi (2019), mulki et al. (2019), oriola & kotze (2020), pereira-kohatsu et al. (2019), alshalan & alkhalifa (2020), mozafari et al. (2020). meanwhile, other studies have focused on the bias of annotators (sap et al., 2020) and the bias caused by the word hate speech used (kennedy et al., 2020; wich et al., 2020; xia et al., 2020). other topic research is the impact caused by exposure to hate speech (bilewicz & soral, 2020). research on hate speech with a religious background (religious hate speech) is also found in various flat forms of social media. research conducted by albadi et al. (2018) in saudi arabia regarding religious hate speech in the world of twitter. they try to dismantle the practice of religious hate speech on twitter by detecting it using various approaches. in india, bohra et al. (2018) also tried to develop a hate speech detection method using the code-mixing method. this research reveals that this method is also effective in disclosing hate speech practices on twitter. from the research on hate speech that has been described above, several important points can be concluded that research on hate speech on social media tends to focus on the flat form of twitter compared to other flat forms of social media such as facebook or instagram. then the hate speech research that was carried out was dominated by the various methods and tools that can detect the presence of hate speech on social media. research on the bias of interpreting hate speech datasets on social media is also a topic of interest to researchers. however, there are still relatively few research topics on religious hate speech on social media, especially research conducted by indonesian scholars. based on the analysis above, research on hate speech on social media still leaves room for exploration. detection of hate speech on other flat forms of social media such as facebook, instagram, and youtube channels needs to be done to see the similarities and differences with the use of twitter. besides that, it is also interesting to use a qualitative approach to analyze, interpret, and categorize hate speech datasets. research on hate speech with relation to religion matter is still relatively unaddressed well. in indonesian context, the issue of religious blasphemy has always attracted national attention. the issue of religious blasphemy which is the object of research is the case of religious blasphemy which was accused by the indonesian minister of religion. the religious minister's comments were about the rule of mosque's loudspeaker volumes in indonesia. the religious minister's statement has generated controversy among indonesian muslims. this issue has also been commented on immensely in social media, such as twitter, facebook, instagram, and the youtube channel. thus, this study seeks to explore hate speech on the youtube channel related to the issue of religious blasphemy in indonesia. hate speech is the speech that assaults, dehumanizes, or incites violence or prejudice against individuals or groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or other characteristics (kovács et al., 2021; pasaribu, 2021). the varieties of hate speech can vary depending on the context and the intended audience (wich et al., 2020; sanguinetti et al., 2019; mathew et al., 2019; de gibert et al., 2018; albadi et al., 2018; bohra et al., 2018), but the following are common examples: hate speech directed at a specific race or ethnic group with the intention of inciting animosity or discrimination; religious hate speech is hate speech directed at individuals or groups on the basis of their religion or religious beliefs. homophobic hate speech is directed at individuals or organizations on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. ableist is hatred speech that targets people with disabilities and ridicules or demeans them. misogynistic speech targets women or reinforces gender stereotypes and discrimination; xenophobic speech targets individuals or groups on the basis of their nationality or country of origin. anti-immigrant speech targets immigrants or immigrant communities with the intent to incite hostility or discrimination, whereas anti-semitic speech targets jewish individuals or communities and frequently invokes stereotypes or conspiracy theories. hate speech is also classified into three types (fortuna et al., 2019; mulki et al., 2019). the first classification is early warning. the lowest level of the category is regarded to be hate speech. the level of hate speech in this category is still about disagreement, negative character, and negative conduct. the second type of dehumanization is demonization. this sort of hate speech includes english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 435 rhetoric that diminishes human dignity by referring to people as animals, devils, or demons. the final classification is violence and intent. hate speech in this category takes the form of harsh statements intended to incite others to commit violence and murder. this category is more than just speech; it has also perpetrated acts of violence and murder. method this study intends to uncover hate speech on the issue of blasphemy by indonesians on social media, specifically the youtube channel. this study uses a mixed method, the combination of descriptive qualitative and descriptive quantitative. the amount and percentage of different sorts of hate speech that arise in youtube channel are conveyed using descriptive quantitative method. in the meantime, the qualitative research approach was being employed to describe and understand the meaning of the hate speech in the comments of the youtube based on the context. a total of 840 comments were found on the youtube channel with the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwsgrfmfj ns. the youtube contains comments related to the religious blasphemy addressed to the minister of religion of the republic of indonesia. around 300 comments were selected as the sample of the data. this research employed purposive sampling. the sample were taken in the form of comments containing hate speech from the three categories of hate speech above. the number of samples is considered sufficient until it reaches 300 comments that are detected hate speech. this study uses two ratters to re-check the research sample containing hate speech. the two ratters are lecturers who have in-depth knowledge of the theory and categorization of hate speech. the use of ratters in detecting the presence of hate speech in netizens’ comments can increase the validity and reliability of the research data used. research data analysis uses qualitative content analysis (schreier, 2014). the data analysis procedure for content analysis is as follows: (1) data preparation. (2) define the unit of analysis. (3) develop categories and coding scheme. (4) test your coding scheme on a sample of text. (5) code all the text. (6) assess your coding consistency. (7) draw your conclusion from the coded data. (8) report your method and finding. to increase the validity and reliability of the data analysis procedure number 6 must be done properly until the coding consistency is gained. in addition, the method of the data analysis procedures was explained clearly to make the replication of research possible to do. results and discussion this study attempts to uncover hate speech and its categories and level on social media, especially youtube by indonesians relating to the blasphemy problem that occurred in indonesia. comments made by indonesian netizens on social media are examined and classified as hate speech in three categories: dehumanization and demonization, violence and provocation, and early warning. the table below divides the number of hate speech detected on social media into these three groups. table 1. the category of hate speech in social media no category of hate speech n % 1 dehumanization and demonization 58 19.33 2 violence and incitement 104 34.67 3 early warning 138 46.00 total 300 100.00 table 1 depicts the many types of blasphemyrelated hate speech on social media. according to the table, the early warning category dominated the 300 hate speech comments collected on social media, accounting for 138 comments or 46% of the entire data, followed by violence and incitement, accounting for 104 comments or 34.67% of the total research data. finally, 58 comments or 19.33% of the total data indicated the sort of dehumanization and demonization. early warning category as previously stated, the early warning category represents the lowest level of hate speech. hate speech is classified as an early warning signal in this category because it has the potential to escalate to the level of violence or dehumanization. the focus of hate speech in this form is the struggle between one group and another, or "us" versus "them," who have opposing views, thoughts, and beliefs (sanguinetti et al., 2019). the early warning category is separated into three categories, with "disagreement" being the lowest. at this level, hate speech takes the form of inconsistencies about ideas, opinions, and beliefs that differ amongst social groupings. 'wrong,' 'incorrect,' 'false,' 'persuade,' 'change opinion,' and 'challenge' are examples of words, statements, or acts employed at this level (ibrohim & budi, 2019). then, in this group, the amount of hatred is negative action. the level of negative action is the nonviolent activity connected with a group. this type of hate speech rotua elfrida & arsen nahum pasaribu shate speech on social media: a case study of blasphely in indonesian context 436 takes the shape of remarks or actions that are not violent in nature. the statement might be expressed using words or metaphorical language. poor treatment, stealing, threatening, and outrageous deeds are examples of words, statements, or actions employed at the negative action level. finally, there is a negative character on the third level. hate speech is described at this level as rhetoric, which includes nonviolent characterization and insults. stupid, fake, insane, and thief are some examples of this level (mulki et al., 2019; pereira-kohatsu et al., 2019). the data as the representation of certain data in the early warning category can be seen in the extract 1 below. extract 1 “semoga bapak di beri akal yg cerdas lagi ya pak...dari jaman dulu hinggal saat ini aja baru toa mesjid di permasalah kan”. (hoping (god) give you a wise thinking sir…from old ages, only now the loud speaker of mosque to be blamed) comments from netizens on data extract 1: "semoga bapak diberikan akal yang cerdas." (hopefully, you will be granted a smart mind) imply that "bapak" alludes to indonesia's minister of religion, yaqut cholil qoumas. this comment implies that the minister's mind is not irrational to make such statement. according to the commentator, the minister of religion does not need to comment on the mosques' loudspeakers in indonesia. according to the analyst, this has always been the case, and no one has yet restricted the noise produced by mosque loudspeakers in indonesia.the phrase "diberikan akal cerdas" is a euphemism that can be used to replace the phrase "anda tidak cerdas." or a more formal phrase "anda bodoh". this strategy was devised by a commentator in order to improve the ability to convey information so that those who are affected by it do not become upset. this statement may be classified as "early warning" hate speech with a 'negative character'. the expression "diberikan akal cerdas" (given a smart mind) is a type of euphemism that attempts to lighten the meaning of the original sentence "anda tidak cerdas." (you are not smart) or a stronger statement "anda bodoh" (you are stupid). this method is used by critics to retain an attitude of presenting thoughts such that the person referred to in the sentence is not insulted (nozza, 2021). this statement falls within the category of "early warning" hate speech having a 'negative character'. extract 2 “mengibaratkan suara azan dengan gonggongan anjing itu tidak tepat, sebaiknya lebih hati hati lagi bicaranya.” (comparing the sound of the azan with the barking of a dog is not correct, you should be more careful what you say). in extract 2, the commentators attempt to transmit that azan (the call to prayer at a mosque) is distinct from the sound of a dog barking. this assertion is considered to be false. therefore, the phrase "sebaiknya lebih hati-hati lagi bicaranya" (you should be more careful what you say) is a warning to the individual you are addressing not to communicate controversial statements that offend religious communities in indonesia. the statement in extract 2 can be classified as a "early warning" with a level of "disagreement" due to the fact that this type of hate speech is at the most fundamental level. the commentator disagreed with the speaker's assertion. the commentators then attempt to provide a gentle warning to never restore it again. according to the previous research, the early warning category is the most prevalent type of hate speech found in the comments section of youtube channels. this category includes the most basic or initial form of hate speech, which may escalate to a harsher or more violent form. these forms and categories are more prevalent in netizen comments due to two factors. first, indonesian culture influences the politeness of netizen communication. second, the individual discussed by netizens is a minister with a higher status and greater authority than the commentators. this phenomenon is consistent with pasaribu (2021) assertion that differences in status and power can influence communication in people's real-world and cyberspace social interactions. dehumanization and demonization the next category of hate speech is dehumanization and demonization, which includes statements that refer to humans as animals, demons, or spirits, or statements that diminish the degree or status of humanity (wich et al., 2020). this statement will have a negative effect on the spirit and mind of the individual to whom it is directed. here are excerpts illustrating hate discourse in this category: extract 3 “pak menteri saya sarankan silaturahmi ke ulama atau ustad minta diruqiyah...biar bisa menikmati suara adzan”( mr. minister, i suggest english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 437 a visit to the ulema or ustad to ask for diruqiyah... so you can enjoy the sound). the statement in extract 3 implies that the minister of religion is possessed by a genie or demon, as he does not appreciate hearing the mosque's call to prayer. therefore, he was requested to perform "diruqiyaah," the exorcism of demons or spirits from the body of a person believed to be possessed. this remark is classified as "violence and incitement" because it implies that the target of the hate speech is in a stupor. he is considered a devil or a genie who does not like the sound azan (the call to prayer). extract 4 “kalau bisa menterinya di ganti, ibarat orang pelihara 1 bab1 di kebun orang lain, maka bab1 itu akan merusak kebun tsb.” (if the minister can be replaced, it's like a person raising pigs in someone else's garden, then the pigs will destroy the garden) the hate speech described in passage 4 falls into two categories: violence and incitement, and dehumanization and incitement. the first category is that of violence and intent. the preceding statement contains a provocative element, namely “...menterinya diganti” (the minister is replaced) to refer to the minister of religion. the following category consists of dehumanization and incitement. the expression "bab 1" in the statement is a form of "dehumanization" hate speech because the minister is referred to as a "bab 1" (pig) animal. this is a very impolite statement, particularly in the context of indonesian culture. a person's dignity is considered diminished when he or she is compared to animals, particularly swine, which muslims consider impure. in other words, comments made by internet users may contain more than one type of hate speech. similar to this extract 4 violence and incitement this category includes hate speech in the form of statements about violent acts or incitements to perpetrate violent acts from one group to another. this category includes two distinct types of hate discourse. the first category consists of hate speech in the form of caustic and provocative remarks or calls to commit physical violence (wich et al., 2020; matamoros-fernández & farkas, 2021). in contrast, the second category encompasses hate speech that incites murderous acts of violence. the data representation for this category is shown in extracts 5 and 6 below. extract 5 “harusnya di pecat nih menteri yg bikin gaduh.” (this minister should be fired for making noise) the statement "harusnya dipecat" (must be fired) in extract 5 indicates a provocation for the minister of religion to be fired for his statement, which he considers to have offended muslims in indonesia. the group that claimed the statement on religious matters contained blasphemy attempted to discredit religion. multiple comments comprising hate speech were posted on the internet by indonesian users. even with a level that is more violent and cruel as demonstrated in this excerpt 5. consequently, this statement falls under the category of violence and incitement. extract 6 “adzan dimisalkan gonggongan anjing. mungkin jika orang yang berkata seperti itu hidup di era sayyidina umar al khattab, kepala orang itu akan dipenggal” (azan is regarded as a dog barking. maybe if the person who said that lived during the era of sayyidina umar al khattab, that person's head would have been beheaded) extract 6 is a hate speech that demonstrates the extent of propaganda and death threats as a result of the claimed comment to the minister of religion that the call to prayer is analogous to a dog barking. this sentence implies that if the occurrence occurs under the reign of syayaidina umar al khattab, the minister may also be decapitated. this discourse is characterized as hate speech, violence, and incitement since it contains remarks that promote violence and even murder (chetty & alathur, 2018). according to the above research findings, the forms and categories of hate speech in social media communication can vary. it begins with an expression of disapproval and escalates to the level of incitement to perpetrate violence or murder (elsherief et al., 2018). similar to the hate speech found in the responses of indonesian netizens to the current statement by the minister of religion of the republic of indonesia, yaqut cholil qoumas. the minister's statement that the intensity of the mosque's loudspeaker needs to be adjusted has elicited both pro and con arguments from indonesian muslims. various parties subsequently distorted the minister's and the government's statement in an attempt to provoke public blame. the previous research revealed the prevalence of hate discourse on social media. using rotua elfrida & arsen nahum pasaribu shate speech on social media: a case study of blasphely in indonesian context 438 euphemisms and cynicism, the commentators attempt to soften the hate speech. this is done to avoid conflict with the intended individual, who has a higher status and greater authority than the commentators (ibrohim & budi, 2019). moreover, dehumanization and demonization-related hate speech, as well as violence and incitement-related hate speech, can be found in netizen comments. in the remarks of netizens, there is a prevalence of hate speech with harsh language, including death threats. the reason commentators dare to convey such hate speech is because communication between hate speech commentators and the intended recipient is indirect, such as through social media or youtube channel (sanguinetti et al., 2019; davidson et al., 2019). in order to avoid the commentators’ identity identified, they also created social media account with fake identities. this research has confirmed that the hate speech found in the youtube comments section related to the issue of blasphemy conducted by the indonesian minister of religion consists of hate speech in the low (early warning), moderate (dehumanization and demonization) and dangerous (violence and incitement) categories. besides that, the amount of hate speech found in one issue on youtube is also considered massive. you can imagine hate speech products that are found in other flat forms of social media, maybe thousands or even millions of hate speeches delivered every day. this research has revealed an interesting finding that indonesian people tend to use low and medium categories of hate speech on social media, although the small number of high categories is still detected. this fact shows that indonesian citizens still adhere to politeness traditions passed down from generation to generation. these research findings will bring implications to the indonesian government to make policies or rules to detect and reduce the spread of hate speech on social media. in addition, the government urgently needs to design an educational curriculum to reduce the emergence of hate speech in the future. for indonesian people, they should be more aware of the future risks of posting hate speech on social media. some cases of hate speech, especially related to the religious blasphemy have ended in law enforcement. conclusion this study has disclosed the forms and categories and the level of hate speech found in the youtube comments of indonesian netizens. with the minister of religion as the target of hate speech, the issue of religious blasphemy is used as a pretext to spread hate speech through the youtube comments section. this study affirms that netizen comments containing hate speech fall into three distinct categories: early warning, dehumanization and demonization, and violence and incitement. due to the method of indirect communication and the disparity between the position or status of the commentators and those who are commented on, the number and types of hate speech discovered in the data vary. this study has several limitations. the number of corpus data in this research must be increased so that appropriate conclusions can be drawn. in addition, this research employs manual methods for data collection and analysis. therefore, data analysis takes longer time and has potential to be biases in data interpretation when compared to the use of applications or tools. references albadi, n., kurdi, m., & mishra, s. 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(2019). an italian twitter corpus of hate speech against immigrants. lrec 2018 11th international conference on language resources and evaluation, 2798–2805. sap, m., card, d., gabriel, s., choi, y., & smith, n. a. (2020). the risk of racial bias in hate speech detection. acl 2019 57th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, proceedings of the conference, 1668–1678. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1163 schreier, m. (2014). qualitative content analysis. the sage handbook of qualitative data analysis, 170–183. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243.n12 sigurbergsson, g. i., & derczynski, l. (2020). offensive language and hate speech detection for danish. lrec 2020 12th international conference on language resources and evaluation, conference proceedings, 3498– 3508. wich, m., bauer, j., & groh, g. (2020). impact of politically biased data on hate speech classification. 54–64. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.alw-1.7 xia, m., field, a., & tsvetkov, y. (2020). demoting racial bias in hate speech detection. 7–14. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.socialnlp-1.2 rotua elfrida & arsen nahum pasaribu shate speech on social media: a case study of blasphely in indonesian context 440 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 37 an alternative digital feedback through screencast: blended learning practices on academic writing syifa khuriyatuz zahro english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas islam darul ulum, lamongan, indonesia email: syifazahro@unisda.ac.id apa citation: zahro, s. k. (2023). alternative feedback through screencast: action research practices and perception on academic writing classroom. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 37-46. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.6886 received: 21-08-2022 accepted: 25-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction english writing ability has become more prominent to master to get success in schools, workplaces, and daily life matters (graham, 2019). moreover, the technological advance throughout this digital era urges people to reflect on english writing ability as the only written communication option to choose from in most document-needed-based fields (selvaraj & aziz, 2019). most people in particular fields are required to master how to write any letters, or documents in english so well that they must have learned it in schools or colleges. jusun and yunus (2018) point out that writing in english has been regarded as the most challenging skill to teach and learn by people whose english is their foreign language. as a mandatory skill to teach in efl classes, the process of teaching english writing is therefore required a big thoughtfulness portion of their writing skill enhancement bound for achieving high-quality writing for efl students. in classroom practice, copious problems have been found experienced by teachers during teaching english writing in efl blended-learning classes. academic writing class owns a number of teaching and learning problems. the preliminary study on writing class problems has shown that 85% of them found that understanding text feedback by the teachers through the microsoft word© comments feature on their drafts was somehow problematic. in response to questions about the learning practice of academic writing class, 70% of students admitted that the problem was getting themselves disciplined either in writing drafts or revision processes. on the contrary, the teachers believed that blended learning in writing classes is dependent on students’ revision results which are built essentially from their understanding of the feedback provided by the teachers. understanding the feedback affects how students write the revision. those who do not completely understand the teachers’ feedback possibly will write the revised version of their draft solely based on what they understand which can result in inappropriateness. the inappropriate revision not only wastes the time in revision and abstract: aiming at elucidating screencast use as alternative digital feedback in the academic writing class throughout blended learning, screencast was alternative digital feedback that was investigated in classroom action research with three cycles. the three cycles were performed with three diverse styles of feedback; using text feedback, using screencast feedback without the teacher’s appearance, and using screencast feedback with the teacher’s appearance. each cycle was done in four stages; planning, implementation, observation, and reflection of each type of feedback. in every cycle, data were collected through participant observation, documentation, and survey techniques. the obtained data from the observation and documentation were analyzed by descriptive qualitative technique, while the survey results were first analyzed using the percentage formula, then interpreted descriptively. all the analysis results were triangulated. the results discovered that screencast feedback was successfully implemented and evidenced to enhance students' writing skills. the success was proved by the higher number of students who passed the passing score as competent writers. given screencast feedback, students found it was helpful, clear, and easy. also, they felt an increased teacher-student interpersonal relation, improved teacher praise, and a conversation-like atmosphere during screencast feedback with an additional teacher’s visual presence. several teachers’ reflections from each cycle were also discussed further. in conclusion, screencast was implemented successfully in academic writing courses and was able to enhance students’ scientific article writing. keywords: academic writing; blended learning; screencast feedback. syifa khuriyatuz zahro alternative feedback through screencast: action research practices and perception on academic writing classroom 38 editing stages but also influences feedback ineffectiveness. the fact that the selection of appropriate feedback affects the feedback quality (carless & boud, 2018), and reduces students' difficulties in understanding the feedback is unquestionably essential. appropriate feedback also affects students’ revision which enhances and yields a better-quality of their scientific article. the problem of students' inability to accurately understand teachers’ text feedback was rooted in a single type of feedback selection. integrating text feedback with audio-visual feedback during the teachers’ review process is one of the solutions. electronic feedback over screencast is one digital video or audio-visual feedback type that allows teachers to join text, audio, and video feedback to show how students can revise appropriately and improve their writing quality. creating screencasts as video form feedback is employed through various software like screencast-o-matic (mota & vivancos, 2018). mota and vivancos (2018) further revealed that utilizing screencasts during teaching which is discovered as brief, userfriendly, and ideal technology revealed to be useful to explain concepts and procedures and potentially help students to conquer the material (savaşçı & akçor, 2022). as a result, screencast feedback is evidenced to be beneficial in teaching and learning. past studies examining screencast feedback in writing mostly resulted in a positive response to its implementation (bakla, 2020; cunningham, 2019; cunningham & link, 2021; ghosn-chelala & al-chibani, 2018; kim, 2018; maharani & santosa, 2021; zubaidi, 2021), proved to be able to enhance students writing performance and progress since it encouraged better comprehension, user-friendly, engagement, and active listening (cunningham, 2019; ghosnchelala & al-chibani, 2018; kim, 2018; maharani & santosa, 2021), provided boundless for teacher-students social relationship (cunningham & link, 2021) and audio-visual feedback provision evidenced to be more effective to decrease students procrastination in doing the revisions (nourinezhad et al., 2021). in terms of methodological use, past studies on screencast in writing were dominated by an experimental study (cunningham & link, 2021; nourinezhad et al., 2021), a descriptive qualitative method (maharani & santosa, 2021), a mixed method (bakla, 2020; kim, 2018), a case study (ghosn-chelala & al-chibani, 2018; irwin, 2019) and perceptions toward screencast feedback (cunningham, 2019; zubaidi, 2021). literature studies on the screencast feedback overview on writing have also been done by a lot of researchers up to nowadays (bakla, 2018; mali & santosa, 2021; pachuashvili, 2021). however, classroom action research investigating screencast feedback was found to enhance students' reflection on the microteaching course (odo, 2022) and to enhance students’ intelligence of their verbal linguistics (hasanudin & fitrianingsih, 2018). accordingly, no research on screencast was found to relate to the writing class as a solution to the encountered problem during the writing class. it is observable that past studies do not talk about how screencast feedback served as solving problems implemented in writing classes designed for classroom action research as two irregularities were found between the teachers' perception and their actual practices of screencast feedback (zubaidi, 2021). another hole found from a past study that students inconsistently preferred one of the three feedback modes (written, audio, and screencast feedback) but they emphasized the potential benefits of each mode since the comparison of three feedback modes (written, audio, and screencast feedback) resulted in no difference to students’ revision (bakla, 2020). screencasts in this research are directed to enhance teachers’ feedback clarity and quality to enhance students’ scientific article writing within an academic writing course. academic writing is a two-credit course aimed at training students on how to write a scientific article in a wellorganized, precise structured, full-content, and up-to-date and avoid plagiarism practices. by selecting and applying screencast feedback, it is expected that students take advantage of the audio-visual technology for their articles to get better continuously. for that reason, this research works to solve students’ problems in understanding teachers’ feedback and enhance students’ scientific article writing using screencast feedback as video feedback. the aforementioned problems and offered solutions lead to generating one grand research question to answer; “how screencast feedback practices in academic writing through blended learning classes can enhance students’ scientific article writing?” for that reason, current research is targeted to explicate the practices and perceptions on screencasts as video feedback in an academic writing course to enhance students’ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 39 skills in scientific article writing. method the research was designed in a classroom action research where the researcher plans, teaches, observes, does a self-reflection of the teaching process as well as evaluates the whole by trying to offer the solution in the teaching process concurrently to enhance students’ learning experience (meesuk et al., 2020) in accordance to the encountered problems. in this research, problems were found in a preliminary observation of an academic writing course with blended learning circumstances. students got difficulties revising their writing because of the inadequate feedback selection applied to comment on their drafts in earlier classes. the second-year students from english education program study in universitas islam darul ‘ulum lamongan who enrolled academic writing course were involved as participants in the research. a total of 25 students enrolled in academic writing courses who have passed essay writing and paragraph writing courses in earlier terms as pre-requisite courses. since the course requires students to use a productive skill in writing, a combination of theory delivery and its practice. to get better results from the practice, feedback is essential to apply. various kinds of feedback were executed during the process of practice. the design of classroom action research by kemmis (2021) as a central base underlying this research method was implemented in three cycles with three diverse styles of feedback done in four stages; planning, implementation, observation, and reflection of each type of feedback (eilks, 2018). the first cycle was using text feedback given by commenting on students’ first drafts of their documents files. cycles 2 and 3 were using screencast feedback in the form of video screencasts. in cycle 2, the teacher used a screencast by combining oral comments (audio) and actions in the form of a typed comment on the screen (video) to show how students can revise appropriately their drafts. cycle 3 was implemented screencast with the additional use of a webcam to show the teacher's appearance during the screencasting. the screencast software used was "screencast-o-matic", a software that can easily record and edit videos that have already been extensively applied in blended learning education and are currently popular because of its ease and communicative ability (pachuashvili, 2021). screencast-o-matic is a screen capture tool that allows users to add a webcam or narration so that they can personalize the videos such as adding text, shapes, or images (pachuashvili, 2021). in july 2021, pachuashvili (2021) further evaluated based on the screencast website that screencasto-matic was used in 190 countries with more than 60,000,000 screens already taken. in addition, two kinds of data and data sources were obtained in this classroom action research. the data and the data sources obtained along with the instruments used in this research can be seen as depicted in table 1 below. table 1. research data, data source, and instrument data data sources instrument the practice of each type of feedback students’ drafts before and after feedback giving documents, field notes the perceptions toward each type of feedback students' responses to each type of feedback questionnair e in every cycle, data were collected through participant observation, documentation, and survey techniques. the observation was performed by field notes based on each kind of feedback. the documentation was also employed by collecting students’ scientific article writing in the form of a first draft, several revisions, and a final paper in all cycles. once the implementation of each cycle was completed along with the teacher’s observation, students filled out a survey questionnaire to identify their problems, obstacles, and perceptions related to the experience of using the feedback type to improve their scientific article writing skills. the result of each cycle survey functioned as guidance for ensuing cycles. the whole obtained data from the observation and documentation were analyzed by descriptive qualitative technique. moreover, the survey results were first analyzed using the percentage formula, then were interpreted descriptively consistent with the percentage results. all the analysis results were triangulated so that the data were related to each other to explain the overall results. at the end of each cycle, the evaluation of students’ writing progress was assessed through a writing analytical scoring rubric to obtain students' writing scores. to state the implementation of screencast feedback as a success, minimally 70% of students’ writing syifa khuriyatuz zahro alternative feedback through screencast: action research practices and perception on academic writing classroom 40 scores are equal to or higher than 70 which is categorized as competent writers. furthermore, competent writers who obtained equal to or higher than 90 are classified as very competent writers. those whose scores were under 70 were categorized as moderate writers if their scores were above 50, while students who got lower than 50 were considered incompetent writers. results and discussion as written in the semester learning plan of academic writing course under the research, it proposes one grand learning outcome that students are expected to be able to master language principles and systems of writing a scientific article and apply them honestly and with full of responsibility. to reach the learning outcome, students have to master five subexpected learning outcomes; 1) mastering the basic concept of a scientific article, 2) mastering language principles of scientific article writing, 3) mastering the organization of scientific article writing 4) applying systems of scientific article writing, 5) producing a good scientific article. to master the learning outcomes, students were informed about the concept of a scientific article and subsequently trained to master the language principles ability of scientific article writing to quote directly, paraphrase, summarize, select reporting verbs, and list references as well as trained to organize scientific article ideas before starting to write during four weeks online and offline learning. in week five, students started to select a topic and write a draft of an introduction. the introduction was further given comments in the form of hand-written feedback accompanied by oral feedback through face-toface consultation sessions and typed-comment feedback through microsoft office word comments in online mode. the revision of their first draft of the introduction was submitted in week 7 and provided a similar to previous feedback. students' second revision of their introduction writing was submitted as their midterm project in week 8. the weeks after the mid-term were the introduction and implementation of the screencast. the first screencast feedback was given on students’ second revision of the introduction handed in during week 9. in the following week, they had to write the article body along subsequently another screencast feedback was provided. after students handed in the first revision of the article body, another screencast feedback was presented in week 11. the submission of the second revision of the article body was given screencast feedback with an additional teacher’s presence on the video. additionally, the last part of the article writing is the conclusion writing submitted in week 13 and was given screencast feedback with the teacher’s appearance on the video. after submitting students’ revision of the conclusion writing along with the screencast feedback in week 14, they were ought to submit all section of their article in week 15 and was given screencast feedback before the final submission of their article. week 16 was the due-date submission of their final article involving the introduction, body, and conclusion. throughout 16 weeks of meeting both online and face-to-face modes of academic writing courses, observation, documents, and a survey revealed numerous vital motives of screencast feedback preference to text feedback for students. the subsequent are the details of each cycle's findings. text feedback practices in academic writing class during (cycle 1) after learning the language principle’s ability of scientific article writing, students were required to write a draft of an introduction on a certain topic which consists of the article's background, and its objective. in general, most of them addressed a good topic but missed particular points for instance paragraph organization and topic relevance. in cycle 1 completed in 2 week-meetings, the teacher gave hand-written comments on students' printed drafts where some students and teachers were engaged in face-to-face consultation sessions during offline learning. in addition, due to the time limitation in offline learning, another type of feedback was further applied during online learning mode by giving feedback on some of the students’ drafts by providing commentary on their document using microsoft office word comments and track changes features. the result of comments in both modes was used as students’ references to revise the draft. during the face-to-face consultation session, students asked several questions in response to hand-written comments they do not understand well. most of the questions were related to global issues including topic focus, organization, and topic appropriateness. the teacher gave explanations and suggestions orally to reorganize their ideas based on their selected topics. some english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 41 topics that were too broad were recommended to find a more specific and narrow topic to focus on. others needed to reorganize their paragraphs to be structurally coherent. the typed feedback through microsoft office word comments also addressed a similar issue. most of the feedback was related to paragraph organization, topic relevance, and focus. though most of the issues that arose were global issues, their revision was mostly not satisfied with only 23% of the global issues commented on being successfully revised. on the other hand, local issues addressing diction, grammar, and punctuation were significantly better with 81% revision success since the teacher merely gave corrections. as an attempt to reflect both hand-written and typed feedback implemented in cycle 1, students’ perceptions of both feedback modes were documented through questionnaires. despite the effectiveness of direct written feedback in certain elements like error type and students’ level of writing ability as proposed by al harrasi (2019), the result of the survey indicated a significant issue in offline consultation sessions that 75% of them were unsuccessful to remember what the teacher had explained and suggested writing in their revision. for this reason, they preferred typed feedback to hand-written comments. additionally, although text feedback through typed word comments was considered suitable to use toward writing issues at a local level (mao & crosthwaite, 2019), it also created another problem where 85% of them found understanding and comprehending some typed feedback was complicated. the inadequate comprehension and understanding of the typed comment feedback led to problems in the revision writing. the result of the students’ writing assessment showed that only 40% of the students were detected as competent writers whose scores were equal to and or higher than 70, another 40% were regarded as moderate writers and 20% of them were observed as incompetent writers. the teacher reflected on the result of the document study of students’ revision that most of them failed to revise the commented part both given orally during face-to-face consultation or written and typed comments on their draft. some students seemed not to focus during face-to-face consultation sessions so they may fail to recall the comments during their revision writing and leading to being unsuccessful in writing the revision. for the unsuccessful revision and to accommodate the found problems of the ineffectiveness of text feedback in both offline and online modes, an alternative feedback type must be sought and implemented further. screencasts feedback practices in academic writing class (cycle 2) the alternative feedback provided by the teacher was screencast, digital video feedback recording anything commented orally and textually on screen and saved to a device minimizing the problem of failure to recall and comprehend the feedback commented. screencast feedback was planned and implemented to be alternative feedback used for the rest of the meetings. the implementation of the screencast as digital video feedback was accomplished in two cycles. the first cycle was completed by combining the teacher’s oral feedback through audio and her written feedback by adding text comments through microsoft office word comments. students’ second revision as a final revision of introduction writing was the first screencast feedback implemented in cycle 2. accomplished in three weeks' meetings, the second and third screencasts in cycle two were provided as feedback on students’ draft of body writing and its first revision. students’ first response to the first screencast feedback they received was positive as they were enthusiastic and interested in it during the faceto-face meeting discussing a general overview of their writing progress. the positive perception of screencast compared to written feedback was in line with harper et al. (2018), kim (2018), and bush (2021) who also found that screencast was perceived positively to be more enjoyable than written feedback. furthermore, screencast feedback was believed to be helpful, clear, and easy as revealed from the survey of screencast feedback in cycle 2. the majority of students (92%) perceived screencast feedback as able to help them to lead their revision writing in ideas reformation, draft reorganization, and revision points direction. in other words, screencast was able to assist students to address inquiries on what, how, and where to revise because they were provided explanations on the reasons certain points were written inaccurately. recorded oral along with text feedback shared on the video screen was considered to be the source of the helpfulness. this perceived helpfulness was supported by cheng and li (2020) as well as cunningham (2019) who also found that screencast was helpful. a further student’s positive perception of screencast feedback was it was clear. they syifa khuriyatuz zahro alternative feedback through screencast: action research practices and perception on academic writing classroom 42 assessed screencast feedback as clear for the reason that the given explanation, suggestions, and examples were perceived by 80% of the students to influence them to understand clearly the points to revise. students’ writing errors were exposed on the screen while the teacher was giving an oral explanation, and suggestions to write in the revision. both exposures to the errors and direct-oral explanation given on screencast led to them stating screencast feedback as clear which supported cunningham's (2019) statement about screencast as clear. screencast was also measured as a feedback type that is easy to trace, understand, and access (84%). students felt that the screencast was easy to trace backward and forward points by clicking particular points evaluated as being able to minimize the failure to recall the comments so that they found it was also easy to understand in facilitating their revision writing. both easy-totrace and easy-understand screencasts were consistent with cunningham (2019) who found students’ perception of screencast feedback as easy. an additional easiness perception found in this research was easy to access where they could access it through the phone. however, two arising issues were nearly half of the students and the teacher assessed it as time-consuming and the teachers reflected the absence of teacher visual presence. one problem found during the first screencast feedback giving was the long duration of the video which was weighed as time-consuming in some way. few students (20%) agreed that screencast was timeconsuming, half of them responded neutrally for screencast was time-consuming (52%) and only 28% of them disagreed with the statement that screencast was time-consuming. the timeconsuming issue is critically found contradictory to what cheng and li (2020) claimed that most of the students assessed screencast feedback did not consume their time because they revise less time. furthermore, the reflection made by the teacher from the screencast videos was that a few of the screencast video length was 20 minutes which is in accordance with zijden et al. (2021) finding that teachers’ negative experience with screencast feedback was rooted in their view of its uneasiness and inefficiency. to solve the long screencast video given at the early phase in the second cycle when the teacher was still new to working with screencast-o-matic, subsequent screencast videos given at the second and third phases of the cycle had shorter duration as the teacher had already accustomed to using it. therefore, the second screencast feedback video provided was limited to 8 minutes in maximal so that students worrying about the long duration was expected to be resolved. in cycle 2, the number of competent writers has increased. a number of 16 students with a percentage of 64% were observed gaining scores equal to and or higher than 70. furthermore, 2 of them got scores above 90 indicating very competent writers. on the other hand, incompetent writers were seen to decrease where only 12% of the students got a score under 50. the rest 24% of them were moderate writers which were reduced by 16% from the previous cycle. another emerging issue was the teacher’s visual presence. in the second cycle, the screencast videos contained audio as the teacher’s oral feedback and screen exposure as the teacher’s written feedback without the additional visual presence of the teacher. cheng and li (2020) believed that the teacher’s visual presence was proven to improve social and personal values among the teacher and students which can motivate them to revise their manuscript writing. therefore, the next cycle must be implemented with the additional teacher’s visual presence to encourage them to rewrite their article. screencasts feedback practices with teacher’s visual presence in academic writing class (cycle 3) in cycle three, screencast feedback given to the students was similar to the former cycle with an additional teacher’s visual presence via webcam. the implementation of a webcam as an additional teacher’s visual presence during screencast feedback was expected to strengthen the teacher’s and student's social and personal relations (cheng & li, 2020) and to give more encouragement to the students to write an accurate revision of commented manuscripts. four screencast videos were provided to the students where one screencast video feedback on their second revision of the article body, two screencast videos toward their conclusion draft and its final revision, and one screencast video feedback to cover the overall part of each student’s article. the final revision of the article was assessed as their final exam grade which was used to evaluate the implementation of screencast feedback with additional teachers’ visual presence. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 43 after observing and comparing documents between screencasts in the second cycle and the third with the additional teacher’s visual appearance, it was noticeable that both of them have successfully directed students’ accurate revision on both local and global issues of writing. more noticeably, comparing global issues commented on through text feedback, screencast feedback more significantly engaged students to write the revision successfully with around 75% of the global issues being correctly revised. however, a few local issues commented on through screencast feedback without any text feedback have no change indicating that a few of the commented local issues were ignored without any revision. from this result, the teacher needs to carefully address the local issue by including text feedback. even though screencast can cover overall feedback on both local and global issues, the teachers were required to give appropriate portions of text and screencast feedback to obtain the accurate result of students’ revisions. global issues like content and organization were recommended to be commented on through screencast feedback as students found it difficult to understand the text feedback on global issues (cheng & li, 2020). the survey in the third cycle addressed the additional feature use of a webcam for the teacher’s visual appearance on the video. as predicted, 92% of students favored screencasts with the teacher’s presence since it was considered to have enhanced student-teacher interpersonal relations, improved teacher praise, and a conversation-like atmosphere. most of the students (88%) assessed screencast with the teacher’s visual presence enhancing studentteacher interpersonal connection. they declared that watching video feedback with the teacher’s appearance gave them a touch of a synchronouslearning experience where the teacher was virtually present and commented on their writing. such experience upgraded interpersonal relations between the teacher and the student which aligns with cunningham (2019) and cheng and li (2020) who found an interpersonal improvement to contribute to students’ positive perception of screencast feedback. another result of the survey was the improvement in teacher praise. around 76% of the students reflected that four given videos of screencast feedback with the teacher’s presence gained more teacher praise where the teacher was satisfied with the some of students' revision results which were assessed as successful revision. the improved teacher praise perception towards students' revision results after having commented through screencast feedback supported killingback et al. (2019) finding which noted the improvement of teacher praise perception affected students’ work. the reflection about the improved praise was that the points given feedback through screencast were mostly successfully revised accurately. accurate revisions made by students led the teacher to give more prises when doing screencast feedback. one more perception of students toward screencast feedback with the teacher’s visual presence was a feeling of a conversation-like atmosphere. most of the students, precisely around 80% of them felt comfortable listening to the screencast video feedback since the explanation provided turned out to be a conversation rather than comments. the teacher reflected that a total of seven videos of screencast feedback resulted in the teachers’ custom to practice it and eventually changed the way the teacher gave the feedback especially when the teacher visually appeared in the screencast video. the conversation-like atmosphere perception during screencast feedback with the teacher’s visual presence accords with mahoney et al. (2019), wood (2022), and mohammed and alharbi (2022) who found that through video feedback, a conversation can be obtained rather than text comments. the final result of the writer category was obtained after the students' final article was assessed. the percentage of competent writers was 72% where 18 out of 25 students got a score higher than 70. among those competent writers, 3 of them gained a score of more than 90 considered very competent writers. furthermore, moderate writers were found in 4 out of 25 students with a percentage of 16%, a decrease of 8% compared to the previous cycle (24%). similar to the previous cycle, incompetent writers were 3 out of 25 students who had a score under 50. based on the final evaluation above, it can be stated that the implementation of screencast feedback was successfully practiced as alternative feedback due to the 72% accomplishment of students' scores above 70. therefore, writing teachers are recommended to take advantage of screencasts to provide video feedback on students writing. conclusion the implementation of screencast feedback in academic writing classes proved to be successful and was able to enhance students’ scientific syifa khuriyatuz zahro alternative feedback through screencast: action research practices and perception on academic writing classroom 44 article writing skills. students measured it positively for its helpfulness in guiding revision writing, its clarity in understanding the comments, and its easiness of access. at first, the teacher did not accustom to using screencast was a source of their long duration and negative perception, the limitation of video feedback duration then solved the problem. an added teacher’s visual presence via webcam during screencast feedback also increased teacherstudent interpersonal relations and teacher praise, as well as gave a conversation-like atmosphere. as to minimize the time-consuming problem, the teacher must get himself accustomed to it by practicing it more often. since this study was limited to the implementation of screencasts without considering participants’ external, internal, or psychological factors, upcoming research on screencasts may investigate those factors to contribute to the practice and success of article writing. further research may also include students practicing peer feedback by using screencast to see the difference between the teacher's and students' screencast feedback practices. acknowledgment with gratitude, we are inclined to acknowledge diktiristek indonesia for providing us with financial support through the research grants for the accomplishment of this classroom action research. references al harrasi, s. n. m. 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(2019). systematic review: approaches in teaching writing skill in esl classrooms. international journal of academic research in progressive education and development, 8(4), 450–473. https://doi.org/10.6007/ijarped/v8-i4/6564 wood, j. (2022). making peer feedback work: the contribution of technology-mediated dialogic peer feedback to feedback uptake and literacy. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 47(3), 327–346. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293 8.2021.1914544 zijden, j. van der, scheerens, j., & wijsman, l. (2021). experiences and understanding of screencast feedback on written reports in the bachelor pharmacy. transformative dialogues: teaching and learning journal, 14(1), 46–67. zubaidi, n. (2021). efl lecturers’ perception and practice of screencast feedback. jeels (journal of english education and linguistics studies), 8(1), 1–25. syifa khuriyatuz zahro alternative feedback through screencast: action research practices and perception on academic writing classroom 46 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 347 meta-analysis of mind mapping in vocabulary learning of the past decade winda sari department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, indonesia email: sariwinda911@gmail.com ilham (corresponding author) department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, indonesia email: ilham.ummataram@gmail.com hijril ismail department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, indonesia email: hijrilismail@yahoo.com humaira department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, indonesia email: humairah2299@gmail.com rima rahmaniah department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, indonesia email: rimarahmaniah172@gmail.com irwandi department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, indonesia email: irwandi@ummat.ac.id apa citation: sari, w., ilham., ismail, h., humaira., rahmaniah, r., & irwandi. (2023). meta-analysis of mind mapping in vocabulary learning of the past decade. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 347-356. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7610 received: 12-02-2023 accepted: 24-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction vocabulary acquisition plays a crucial role in mastering a language (susanto, 2017). it cannot be claimed that vocabulary plays a vital role in abstract: the type of research used is meta-analysis research aimed at determining the level of effectiveness or quality of mind mapping in vocabulary learning, including at elementary, middle, high school, and college levels. this quality was examined using several previous research results that collected data with inclusion and exclusion conditions from the google scholar, doaj, and scopus databases. the search results found up to 51 dates that met the requirements with the number of students (n), f-counts, tcounts, and r-counts. the results of data analysis obtained by the simulation software jasp showed that the impact on learning media vocabulary based on mind mapping is 73% significant, which included the high category. the highest level of education as a moderator variable, the impact of using mind mapping for teaching vocabulary is particularly significant at the high school level, with an estimated effect of 96%. based on the number of participants, the application of mind mapping has more influence on participants totaling more than 30 students with an estimate of 0.928 (strong category), while the lowest effect is seen from the number of participants who collected more than 91 students with an estimate of 0.529, meaning that this mind mapping learning model is most appropriate to be applied in high school rows with more than 30 participants to maximize student learning outcomes. keywords: level education; mind mapping; vocabulary. winda sari, ilham, hijril ismail, humaira, rima rahmaniah, & irwandi meta-analysis of mind mapping in vocabulary learning of the past decade 348 facilitating students to communicate both in spoken and written form (noprianto & purnawarman, 2019), vocabulary is very high in learning a language whether in historical or not (respati & nur, 2019), english vocabulary is considered one of the sub-skills of the four integrated skills (writing, reading, speaking and listening) (hasemhi, 2021), vocabulary is seen as an important component of language (basuki et al., 2018), a good command of vocabulary enables someone to communicate effectively with others and vice versa (octaviana et al., 2019), vocabulary acquisition is given a lot of attention in second language classes (otto, 2021), when learning a new language, learning vocabulary is key (abduramanova, 2020), the importance of new words is very often emphasized, both in books and in verbal communication (sabri et al., 2019), without mastering vocabulary, the students will get difficulties when they are communicating with each other (afzal, 2019; octaviani et al., 2019). this research is about mind-mapping media in learning vocabulary and how to influence mindmapping media in vocabulary. mind mapping is described by the online business dictionary as a graphical approach for visualizing interactions between many ideas or pieces of information (al shdaifat et al., 2019), using the mind mapping technique can create something new as it can stimulate thinking about the branch of association in which we have written (megawati et al., 2021), mind mapping is an educational technique that involves the visual implementation of ideas (alhajaji et al., 2020), mind mapping is a pattern that consists of at least images, symbols, and colors. these not only help students understand the vocabulary, but also make the students feel good, have fun, and engage their brains, eventually leading them to show interest in vocabulary mastery (setianingsih et al., 2019), mind maps have been used in foreign language teachings as a tool to activate imparting and supporting students with previous knowledge of a topic them in organizing and recalling vocabulary (luangkrajang, 2022), in other hand, mind mapping is a helpful learning tool students brainstorming any topic and thinking creatively (panggabean et al., 2019), in this study, mindmapping technique was chosen to be used in increasing students' vocabulary (delatu et al., 2020). the use of mind mapping-based vocabulary learning media at the elementary school level is increasing simultaneously (afriansya, 2019; alwattar & al-balhan, 2018; hanjani, 2018; kim & kim, 2012; kusuma, 2015; prabha & abdul aziz, 2020; muhammad et al., 2019; wu & chen, 2018). kusuma (2015) conducted an elementary school research discussing the results of the effect of mind mapping techniques on the vocabulary mastery with a total of 44 students and concluded that mind-mapping-based vocabulary learning media can improve student achievement with a count of r 0.801, while kim (2012) conducted a study discussing learning styles and educational outcomes with a total of 31 students using digital mind map as a study tool in elementary english class and obtained a t-score of 14.19. and also alwattar & al-balhan (2018) conducted a study on the effectiveness of the mind mapping strategy on the proficiency level of sixth-grade students in learning vocabulary with a total of 60 students and obtained an f-score of 1,684. some previous studies have also conducted research at the junior high school level such as (ansi & sambayu, 2020; el-beltagy, 2019; khalil et al., 2019; luangkrajang, 2022; riska, 2019; sahrawi, 2013; selvarajasingam et al., 2021; syafrizal et al., 2018; zahra, 2015). syafrizal et al (2018) has conducted research on the effectiveness of using mind mapping strategy and making inference toward students vocabulary achievement with a total of 30 students and obtained the result that mind mapping-based vocabulary learning media can improve student learning outcomes with an f value of 0.120, while sahrawi (2013) conducted research at the junior high school level which discusses the effectiveness of mind mapping for teaching vocabulary with 112 students and obtained the results that vocabulary learning with mind mapping media can improve learning outcomes with a calculated r value of 0.950, while zahra (2015) conducted research with a total of 32 students at middle school and concluded that mind mapping-based vocabulary learning media can improve students’ learning outcomes with a calculated r-value of 0.750. furthermore, in terms of studies dealing with the use of mind mapping research in senior high school, there are many studies has been carried out (elkareem et al., 2019; heidari & karimi, 2015; khodabandeh, 2021; nia & pratama, 2019; rahayu et al., 2019; waloyo, 2017; wikandari, 2022). (heidari & karimi, 2015) has conducted research at the senior high school level which discusses the effect of mind mapping on vocabulary learning can improve student learning english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 349 outcomes with a total of 40 students and obtained an f score of 721,210. (wikandari, 2022) also researched learning vocabulary using mind mapping can improve students learning outcomes with a total of 29 students and obtained an r value of 0.422, the last one is (khodabandeh, 2021) has conducted the research about the impact mind mapping can improve students vocabulary with a total of students 35 and obtained t score is 19.248. finally, the use of mind mapping based for vocabulary learning media is increasing at college level (al-jarf, 2015; alhajaji et al., 2020; badr & abu-ayyash, 2019; cao & ismail, 2022; hakim, 2022; khudhair, 2016; liu, 2016; masoud & ibrahim, 2017; putra, 2012; saed & omri, 2019). putra (2012) for example, has conducted research at the college level on the application of mind mapping techniques in vocabulary teaching with a total of 40 students and obtained an r value of 0.349, and also masoud & ibrahim (2017) researched mind mapping to teach vocabulary can improve students learning outcomes with a total of 62 students with an f score of 0.007, the last one is alhajaji (2020) conducted the research about the study investigating the effect of employing games, mind-mapping and twitter hashtags as the gmt technique, on female saudi university students’ achievement in english vocabulary can improve learning outcomes with a total of 64 students and obtained a t value is 0.122. from all the statements above, the information was gained that a lot of research related to mind mapping-based vocabulary learning media was done in learning. but so far there has been no research that further discusses the magnitude of the impact of the use of mind mapping on learning outcomes at all levels of education. and in this article, the author explains about impact mind mapping to teach vocabulary at all education levels such as collage, senior high school, junior high scholl, and elementary school. conducting a meta-analysis on mind mapping in vocabulary learning has several important reasons, including: (1) providing empirical evidence: meta-analysis allows us to collect, integrate and analyze existing research results on the use of mind mapping in vocabulary learning. thus, we can have a more comprehensive view of the effectiveness and success of using this method in vocabulary learning; (2) gain a deeper understanding: through meta-analysis, we can analyze data from various studies conducted previously. this allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the variability of the results, including the factors that influence the effectiveness of mind mapping in vocabulary learning; (3) providing practical guidance: the results of the meta-analysis can provide practical guidance for teachers, instructors, or educational practitioners in deciding whether mind mapping is an effective method to use in vocabulary learning. by looking at the overall results of existing research, metaanalysis can help provide recommendations that are based on empirical evidence; (4) identify the weaknesses and strengths of the method: through meta-analysis, we can identify the weaknesses and strengths of using mind mapping in vocabulary learning. by knowing this, we can identify areas for improvement or development, as well as understand when and in what contexts the method can provide the greatest benefit; and (5) providing a foundation for further research: meta-analysis can open the door for further research on the use of mind mapping in vocabulary learning. the results of this metaanalysis can serve as a foundation for researchers to identify remaining knowledge gaps and design more sophisticated follow-up studies. by conducting a meta-analysis on mind mapping in vocabulary learning, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding, provide practical guidance, and identify the strengths and weaknesses of this method. in addition, metaanalysis can also serve as a foundation for further research that can continue to enrich our understanding of the use of mind mapping in vocabulary learning. method this research is a kind of meta-analysis research. meta-analysis is research conducted by researchers in a way to collect research data, summarize, review, and analyze research data from several previous research results (ratu et al., 2022). the inclusion criteria (eligibility criteria) refer to research characteristics related to population issues based on level, country, year, variables related to "mind mapping-based vocabulary learning methods". the eligibility criteria refer to the characteristics of the publication, which is concerned in that year (studies published since 2012-2022), using full english, and the type of publication (article, journal, thesis). while the exclusion criteria are used to obtain articles that can be used for statistical analysis of meta-analysis from articles obtained based on inclusion criteria. the winda sari, ilham, hijril ismail, humaira, rima rahmaniah, & irwandi meta-analysis of mind mapping in vocabulary learning of the past decade 350 exclusion criteria are research data in the form of the number of samples (n), the percentage of each error indicator, the effect size (es) value, and the standard error (se) (syaharuddin et al., 2021). the procedure research, according to figure 1: figure 1. the procedure research (1) search articles from the google scholar indexer database, doaj, and scopus according to the criteria mentioned above. (2) microsoft excel encoding and tabulation includes year of publication, author name, country, level, class, value n, f-count, t-count, and r-count. (3) converting f and t values to r values with the formula: (1) 𝑡 = (2) r (3) (5) calculation of effect size (es) and standard error (se) values 𝑧 = 𝐸𝑆 = 0,5 (4) 𝑆𝐸 = (5) (6) run simulations and data analysis with jasp software. (7) the analysis of the results found from the articles is a data reference. (8) draw conclusions from the results of the metaanalysis. table 1. classification of glass's effect sizes effect size (es) category 𝐸𝑆 ≤ 0.15 negligible effect 0.15 < 𝐸𝑆 ≤ 0.40 small effect 0.40 < 𝐸𝑆 ≤ 0.75 moderate effect 0.75 < 𝐸𝑆 ≤ 1.10 high effect 1.10 < 𝐸𝑆 ≤ 1.45 very high effect 1.45 < 𝐸s high influence results and discussion data selection results the results of the data set search yielded 113 data, according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria 51 and the data did not match the inclusion and exclusion criteria is 62. the data collected in this study are the fischer test score (f), student test (t), correlation test (r), and amount of research data (n). during the learning method, levels can also be processed or further data analysis can be carried out with certain conditions. from the collected data that there are values of f and t, these two values need to be changed to the value of r, as well as the value of es according to equation (4) and se according to equation (5). regarding the conversion results according to table 2 below. table 2. results of data selection and es and se values no study level n r es se category 1 study 1 junior high school 25 0.872 1.342 0.213 high effect 2 study 2 elementary school 31 0.935 1.696 0.189 high effect 3 study 3 collage 40 0.349 0.364 0.164 small effect 4 study 4 junior high school 112 0.950 1.831 0.096 high effect 5 study 5 collage 150 0.716 0.899 0.082 moderate effect 6 study 6 collage 60 0.009 0.009 0.132 negligible effect 7 study 7 junior high school 32 0.750 0.974 0.186 moderate effect 8 study 8 elementary school 26 0.486 0.531 0.209 moderate effect 9 study 9 collage 50 0.782 1.050 0.146 high effect 10 study 10 elementary school 23 0.584 0.669 0.224 moderate effect 11 study 11 collage 40 0.937 1.714 0.164 high effect 12 study 12 elementary school 18 0.509 0.561 0.258 moderate effect 13 study 13 collage 74 0.112 0.112 0.119 negligible effect 14 study 14 junior high school 25 0.806 1.117 0.213 high effect 15 study 15 collage 62 0.327 0.339 0.130 small effect 16 study 16 senior high school 36 0.892 1.431 0.174 high effect 17 study 17 elementary school 44 0.306 0.316 0.156 small effect 18 study 18 collage 60 0.745 0.961 0.132 moderate effect 19 study 19 collage 100 0.068 0.068 0.102 negligible effect english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 351 20 study 20 elementary school 80 0.394 0.416 0.114 small effect 21 study 21 collage 151 0.338 0.352 0.082 small effect 22 study 22 collage 21 0.316 0.327 0.236 small effect 23 study 23 elementary school 71 0.248 0.253 0.121 small effect 24 study 24 junior high school 77 0.304 0.313 0.116 small effect 25 study 25 junior high school 20 0.929 1.648 0.243 high effect 26 study 26 senior high school 69 0.917 1.569 0.123 high effect 27 study 27 junior high school 91 0.114 0.115 0.107 small effect 28 study 28 junior high school 116 0.278 0.286 0.094 small effect 29 study 29 senior high school 60 0.275 0.283 0.132 small effect 30 study 30 senior high school 66 0.606 0.703 0.126 moderate effect 31 study 31 collage 64 0.015 0.015 0.128 negligible effect 32 study 32 collage 90 0.214 0.217 0.107 small effect 33 study 33 elementary school 66 0.009 0.009 0.126 negligible effect 34 study 34 senior high school 69 0.917 1.569 0.123 high effect 35 study 35 senior high school 60 0.028 0.028 0.132 negligible effect 36 study 36 collage 72 0.695 0.858 0.120 moderate effect 37 study 37 collage 60 0.666 0.804 0.132 moderate effect 38 study 38 senior high school 50 0.973 2.154 0.146 high effect 39 study 39 collage 38 0.753 0.980 0.169 high effect 40 study 40 collage 40 0.076 0.076 0.164 negligible effect 41 study 41 collage 33 0.872 1.341 0.183 high effect 42 study 42 senior high school 35 0.958 1.924 0.177 high effect 43 study 43 collage 60 0.900 1.475 0.132 high effect 44 study 44 collage 79 0.117 0.117 0.115 high effect 45 study 45 collage 30 0.130 0.131 0.192 negligible effect 46 study 46 junior high school 40 0.536 0.598 0.164 moderate effect 47 study 47 senior high school 22 0.422 0.450 0.229 moderate effect 48 study 48 collage 42 0.410 0.435 0.160 moderate effect 49 study 49 senior high school 64 0.810 1.127 0.128 high effect 50 study 50 collage 42 0.735 0.940 0.160 moderate effect 51 study 51 senior high school 29 0.154 0.155 0.196 small effect based on table 2. above, which contains 51 eligible data. divided into 7 data from the elementary school level, 9 data from the junior high school level, 11 data from the high school level, and 24 from the college level. next, the authors performed a hypothesis test and a publication bias test on the collected data. in a meta-analysis using jasp software seen while concluding, the z and p values are shown in the coefficient table. the hypothesis is as follows: hypothesis 1: using mind mapping is effective to improve student learning outcomes in vocabulary learning hypothesis 2: there is no publication bias from the data used in the research hypothesis test in the first stage, a heterogeneity test was carried out to see the categories data whether using fixed or random effects. as for the results according to table 3. table 3. fixed and random effects q df p omnibus test of model coefficients 75.082 1 < .001 test of residual heterogeneity 964.368 50 < .001 from jasp's results obtained via vocabulary learning media using mind mapping analysis, it can be seen that the data are heterogeneous with a large q=964,368 and a value of p<0.001. next, consider the estimate of the mind mapping in vocabulary learning according to table 4. table 4. output jasp coefficients estimat e standard error z p intercep t 0.73 4 0.08 5 8.66 5 < .00 1 note. wald test. in table 4 on the coefficients, you can see that the z-score is 8,665 and the p-value is 0.001, less than the 5% significance level (0.05). this means that the hypothesis is accepted, in this case, the true effect size is not equal to 0, in other words, all vocabulary learning based on mind mapping winda sari, ilham, hijril ismail, humaira, rima rahmaniah, & irwandi meta-analysis of mind mapping in vocabulary learning of the past decade 352 has a significant impact on student learning outcomes 75%, while 25%% of other factors are influenced. a publication bias test was performed. this test is performed to see if the data collected can be used as representative of the population. this test can be viewed by the value in the returned rank correlation and regression test. based on the results using jasp, the output shown in table 5 and table 6 below is obtained. table 5. rank correlation kendall's τ p rank test 0.217 0.026 table 6. regression test regression test for funnel plot asymmetry ("egger's test") z p 1.381 0.167 table 7. file drawer analysis fail-safe n target significance observed significance rose nthal 23957.000 0.050< .001 in table 5 for rank correlation and regression, kendall's score on mind mapping learning media can be seen as 0.217, indicating a large correlation coefficient between effect sizes and variance. in table 6, the value of z represents the magnitude of the regression coefficient of 1.381 and the p-value of 0.167 is greater than the value of 0.05, showing that the second hypothesis is accepted, in other words, no identified publication bias. table 7 shows how many studies that have an average effect size equal to 0 that should be added to the in the research sample so that the research results free from publication bias. figure 2. funnel plot based on the results of the publication plotted in fig. above, it can be seen that no missing studies are marked as open circles, all closed circles. in addition, from the forest plot image, a summary effect value of 0.73 with words, which is impacted by another effect of the mind mapping learning model, increases student motivation and learning outcomes by 73%, while 27% through other factors are influenced. finally, the author conducted a moderator variable test to see the level of influence of several other variables such as level of education, country, publication years, and a number of participants. the results are according to the table below. the influence of mind mapping on vocabulary based on education level and country moderator variable analysis is needed to determine how much influence mind mapping as a vocabulary learning media has on education and country levels. table 8. the influence of mind mapping based on level education and country variable interval n q-test estimate i2 (%) re model category level college 24 286.787 0.569 92.556 0.57[0.57,0.90] moderate effect senior high school 11 251.259 1.039 96.191 1.04[0.60,1.84] high effect junior high school 9 226.849 0.900 95.248 0.90[0.49,1.31] high effect elementary school 7 75.570 0.606 93.410 0.61[0.18,1.03] moderate effect country indonesia 20 452.141 0.788 95.902 0.79[0.51,1.07] high effect non-indonesia 31 452.757 0.698 94.018 0.70[0.49,091] moderate effect the table above shows that the effect of using mind mapping media in learning vocabulary at the educational level is relatively strong at the high school level with an estimate of 1,039 (high effect), while at the college level it is 0,569 (moderate effect), at the junior high school level it is 0,900 (high effect), and finally at the elementary level it is 0,606 (moderate effect). this shows that mind mapping-based vocabulary learning media is very suitable for use at the senior high school level due to the following reasons: (1) concept linkage: at the high school level, students need to develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between concepts in language. mind mapping allows students to illustrate the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 353 relationships and associations between words, clarifying language structures and patterns. by seeing these visualizations, students can more easily associate and remember new vocabulary. (2) information organization: mind mapping helps students organize information in a structured way. in vocabulary teaching, students can group words by topic, category, or context of use. this helps students understand the context in which words are used and makes them easier to remember and apply in relevant situations. (3) visual and creative activity: mind mapping involves visual and creative aspects, which suits the learning styles of many students at the high school level. students can use colors, images, and symbols to enrich their mind maps, create stronger associations in their minds, and ease comprehension and retention of vocabulary. (4) development of visual thinking skills: mind mapping involves the use of visual thinking skills, which are important in developing vocabulary comprehension. students can draw visual representations of words, describing synonyms, antonyms, or other relationships. this helps students see the big picture of vocabulary and understand how words are interrelated, thus improving their comprehension and use in the right context. (5) active participation and collaboration: mind mapping allows students to actively participate in the learning process. they can create their own mind maps, collaborate in groups, and share their ideas and knowledge with classmates. this activity not only strengthens vocabulary understanding, but also builds students' social and cooperation skills. (6) use of technology: in today's digital age, there are many tools and apps that allow students to create mind maps digitally. this can increase students' interest and enrich their learning experience. students can use interactive mind mapping software or apps, with features such as colors, images, and easy editing, thus making the learning process more interesting and interactive. by using mind mapping in vocabulary teaching in senior high school, students can develop deeper understanding, improve visual thinking skills, and actively engage themselves in the learning process. mind mapping can also enrich students' learning experience through visual, creative and collaborative aspects. and also the use of mind mapping in indonesia is very suitable for use because the estimate is 0.788 (high effect) while outside indonesia the estimate is 0.698 (moderate effect). the influence of mind mapping on vocabulary based on moderators’ variable at this stage, the author analyzes the data to determine the level of influence of learning outcomes using mind mapping when viewed based on publication years, and amount of participants. the following table presents jasp output based on publication years and amount of participant. table 9. the influence of mind mapping based on publication years and participants variable interval n q-test estimate i2 (%) re model category publications year 2012-2019 30 534.322 0.734 94.508 0.73[0.53,0.94] moderate effect 2020-2022 21 964.368 0.734 94.850 0.73[0.57,0.90] moderate effect amount of participants 0-30 10 48.978 0.688 81.575 0.69[0.37,100] moderate effect 31-60 21 358.277 0.928 94.316 0.93[0.65,1.20] high effect 61-90 14 257.796 0.543 95.005 0.54[0.26,0.83] moderate effect more than 91 6 245.568 0.529 98.108 0.59[0.05,1.13] moderate effect at the publication years interval, mind mapping has the same effect on vocabulary learning because the estimates for 2012-2019 and 2020-2022 are the same as the estimate of 0,734 in the high category. finally, in the category of a number of participants, mind mapping is very influential with the number of participants being more than 31 people with an estimate of 0.928. conclusion based on the results of this study, mind mapping is very influential on vocabulary learning where the results show that 73% of the value of its influence on student learning outcomes is included in the high category. then, it can be seen from the moderator table that the most influential on mind mapping media in vocabulary learning is at the high school level with an estimate of 1,039, the effect on student learning outcomes which is the very strong category. meanwhile, at the college level, the effect is quite low the estimate is only 0.569 which is included in the low category. there is no difference in effect size or impact before or after covid-19 it can be seen in the publication years with an re model of 73%. and also the use of mind mapping winda sari, ilham, hijril ismail, humaira, rima rahmaniah, & irwandi meta-analysis of mind mapping in vocabulary learning of the past decade 354 in indonesia is very suitable for use because the estimate is 0.788, while outside indonesia the estimate is 0.698. furthermore, from the moderator table. meanwhile, judging from the number of participants, 31-60 had the most influence on vocabulary. which has little influence found in participants with several more than 91 with an estimate of 0.529. from the above findings, it can be seen that high school has a very high impact therefore we suggest that future researchers examine the research focus 1. the implementation of mind mapping for teaching vocabulary at the high school level further 2. examine the shortcomings of mind mapping in teaching vocabulary at the college level because we found that the effect size in college is only 57%. references abduramanova, d. v. 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(2015). male learners vocabulary achievement through concept mapping and mind mapping: differences and similarities. educational research and reviews, 10(7), 790– 798. https://doi.org/10.5897/err2015.2158 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 99 interaction patterns in english as foreign language classroom at lower secondary schools hanna sundari english education department, universitas indraprasta pgri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: hanna.sundari@gmail.com zainal rafli language education, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: zainal.rafli@gmail.com sakura ridwan language education, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: sakura.hattamarrasjid@gmail.com apa citation: sundari, h., rafli, z. & ridwan, s. (2017). interaction patterns in english as foreign language classroom at lower secondary schools. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 99-108. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.775. received: 29-08-2017 accepted: 31-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: interaction plays an important role in language learning process in classroom setting. this present study aims at investigating the patterns used in classroom interaction by english lower secondary teachers. using qualitative approach, this study was carried out in eight lower secondary schools (smp) in jakarta. moreover, twenty english language experienced teachers with three to thirty-six years of teaching experiences were recruited as participants. interviews, classroom observations/recording and focus-group discussion were instruments to collect data. for analyzing the data, qualitative data analysis was selected in developing categories and sub-categories of the data. the findings showed that the teachers apply at least three identified interactional patterns in efl classroom in which modify the irf structure. teachers initiate interaction to the entire class (t-whole class interaction) by giving questions and instruction. then, they also point out one specific student to answer the question or do the required task (teacher fronted student interaction). in addition, teachers set the classroom activity to make the students interact each other (student-student interaction). moreover, the student responses and other interactional features identified in language classroom are also discussed. keywords: interaction patterns, efl classrooms, secondary school introduction illustration: once in language class, a language teacher calls name and gives questions to the students sitting in the front row; other time, she points out one student at the back seat. otherwise, she throws them away for those who can answer freely. in one time, she corrects the error made by the student by yelling “is it correct?”. in another time, she just ignores it. at one lesson, she sets the class in individual task; next lesson, the students are grouped in 3 or 4 to do the activity. language learning can be taken place in and through interaction with others in various social contexts. in sociocultural theory views on language learning, the major aspects of language is related to and formed by the ways in which the people interact with others in various communicative contexts; therefore, in learning language, interaction is not only as a learning facilitator but also primarily is as a resource for what to learn and how to learn (thoms, 2012). in short, interaction can be viewed as both the tool and the object in which language used in interaction is the medium as well as the goal to be learned. classrooms are one of social environment mailto:hanna.sundari@gmail.com/ mailto:zainal.rafli@gmail.com mailto:sakura.hattamarrasjid@gmail.com hanna sundari, zainal rafli & sakura ridwan interaction patterns in english as foreign language classroom at lower secondary schools 100 which language lesson could be complex. language classrooms are complicated places where social events and social relationship between teacher as the knower and students as the learners may influence their social interaction and classroom practices as a part of process in language learning. different from other social context, in language classrooms, language used is intentional and purposeful as walsh (2011) states that discourse in the classroom has to follow the teacher’s agenda. the delivered questions, correction and feedback by the teachers are set to help the students achieve language competences. meanwhile, the students’ responses are also to fulfill the task given. in general, interaction is dual communication acts between two people or more that have implication among them. in short, interaction can be stated as action and reaction of two people. according to brown (2007, p. 212), interaction is “collaboration of thought, feeling, or ideas between two people, resulting in a reciprocal effect on each other”. reciprocity as the implication indicates that interaction involving both parties as active interactants instead of passive ones. in the pedagogy field, allwright noted that a process of interaction is necessarily involved in a fruitful classroom pedagogy (seedhouse & jenks, 2015). it can be stated that successful pedagogical process in the classroom proceeds by successful interaction management. in the english language teaching (elt) enterprise, interaction has a prominent role in language acquisition and learning process. in the view of social interaction, child acquires language through social interaction with parent in her first life. interaction is important in natural language acquisition (choudhury, 2005). moreover, parental language as a model influences language complexity acquired by the child now and years after (sundari, 2016). meanwhile, in the classroom setting, interaction between teacher as a competent person and students as learners, or student-student interaction, leads them to get competences in knowing and using the language in the classroom. in the other words, language learning is mostly interactive process (richards & lockhart, 2007). classroom interaction is mostly in the form of conversational exchanges or dialogue between teacher and students in target language. markee and kasper (2004) cited by kharaghani (2013, p. 859) wrote that “interaction is a form of institutional talk which is locally managed but cooperatively constructed speech exchange system”. concerning to interaction in language classroom, the moves are mostly starting with teacher initiates the communication by asking the students questions to get them involved to the lesson. after that, the students are required to respond the questions. the last is feedback as immediate evaluation or correction for students’ responses (rustandi & mubarok, 2017). the pattern of interaction in language classroom, postulated by sinclair and coulthard (1975) cited by murray & christison (2011), is then called irf (initiation-response-feedback) exchange. moreover, hall (2003) exemplified this basic unit of classroom interaction in which involves the teacher, as expert, eliciting information (initiation) from students to confirm if they understand the materials by asking questions. then, the students are expected to deliver targeted responses (response). after that, the teacher examines the student’s response by giving feedback with such particular phrases as “good”, “well done”, “no, that’s not correct.” in addition, this pattern of classroom interaction as two-way a process between interactants in the learning process is depicted in figure 1 (dagarin, 2004; rustandi, 2013 in rustandi & mubarok, 2017, p. 241) depicted interaction in two-way process between participants in the learning process as seen in figure 1. figure 1. classroom interaction pattern teacher students english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 101 furthermore, the teachers have also a significant role in managing classroom communication. based on who communicates with whom, dagarin (2004, p. 129) formulated the four forms of interaction in the following: teacher-learners, teacher – a group of learners, learner-learner, learners-learners. in these forms of interaction, the teachers alternately change their roles as a controller, language model, guide, evaluator, and advisor in pair-work or group-work types of communication in the classroom. in addition to dagarin, malamah-thomas (1987 cited by (nisa, 2014) propose seven types of classroom interaction: teacher – whole class, teacher – individual student, teachera group of students, student – teacher, student-student, student – a group of students. a variety of interactional patterns in language classroom may affect the language learning process as well as the development of language proficiency. in classroom interaction, the teacher initiates communication by asking a question. teacher questions are mostly in display question in which the answer is already known to the teacher (choudhury, 2005; farahian & rezaee, 2012; petek, 2013; pujiastuti, 2013; suryati, 2015). even though teacher gives opportunities to students to involve verbally in the class in many ways, not all students participate verbally and actively in classroom communication by giving response for some reasons. factors in and outside the classroom may affect how the classroom discourse occurs. what kind of questions teachers deliver and how much teachers talk during the lesson may eventually influence how the students acquire and develop their language progress (hermanto, 2015; seedhouse & jenks, 2015). moreover, cultural background and personality may cause the student reticence (choudhury, 2005, p. 78). besides, teacher looks more focusing on the students sitting in the front, middle row, as illustrated by richards & lockhart (2007, p. 139-140). figure 2 shows when the teacher stands in the front of the class during the lesson and deliver the questions to all students. however, students in edge row sound no responses. figure 2. teacher interaction in the classroom the study of interaction in language classroom and its implication for language learning have been widely conducted in the field of english language teaching (elt). applying discourse analysis approach, rashidi & rafieerad (2010) investigated interaction patterns and its effect on gender in shiraz university iran. they concluded that the interaction patterns between participants vary with the participants making use of variety of discourse acts and male students are willing to be more interactive than female in language classroom. in 2013, nasruloh conducted a study to 30 elementary students hanna sundari, zainal rafli & sakura ridwan interaction patterns in english as foreign language classroom at lower secondary schools 102 in bandung and reported that teacher dominates the lesson verbally by giving direction, lecturing, and criticizing or justifying authority. the students seem to have great opportunity to talk; however, they keep restricted in some ways. by analyzing classroom interaction in efl speaking class, nisa (2014) concluded that the teachers facilitate the student-fronted speaking activities such as class discussion, presentation, simulation and communication games, yet, in fact, students’ first language during the lessons was often used. furthermore, rustandi and mubarok (2017)’s study on classroom interaction in efl speaking class at university sum up that irf pattern is fully implemented in the class. teacher initiates the interaction by giving questions, soliciting information, and identifying next students’ turn. besides, responses from the students are dominance; yet they depend on the content materials and teacher strategies in provoking students. related to study on questioning strategies as one of interaction features, rido (2017) also reported that teachers in vocational english classrooms nominated specific student to answer questions, asked questions to the entire class, and repeated questions when there were no response. on the other side, the study examining the interaction pattern in english as foreign language classroom at lower secondary schools based on teacher’s perspectives is still rare and restricted. present research on second and foreign language learning from sociocultural perspective mostly come from university-level classrooms; meanwhile, only a little is known to explore what occurs in elementary or secondary schools (hall, 2003). indeed, lower secondary students are mostly learning english as beginner; at the same time, they will take english national examination to continue their study. interaction and communication in the classroom, as the heart of language learning become necessary to understand and the constraints have to be solved. the way teacher interacts with the students determines the way student respond it; at the end, it influences how proficient the students are to communicate in target language. classroom interaction in the early years of learning process can be a foundation to the next language development. the fully understanding of its process becomes necessary and helpful. to devote to these views, this study addresses to the following research questions: what patterns are used in classroom interaction by english lower secondary teachers and why they use the patterns. method this present study, as a part of research in classroom interaction of efl setting, was carried out by qualitative research approach to investigate the interaction patterns in english as foreign language classrooms. to accommodate the research objective, twenty english language experienced teachers were recruited as participants from eight lower secondary schools (smp) in jakarta. they were three male and seventeen female teachers with three to thirty-six years of teaching experiences. for collecting data, classroom observations/recordings, semi-structured interviews and focus-group discussions with the teachers were instruments. 10.5 hours of classroom observation/recording conducted only with teacher’s approval was to identify specific patterns in oral communication in the classroom. flint protocol analysis of classroom observation (moskowitz, in brown, 2007) was applied to capture interactional features completed by memo writings. meanwhile, interviews and fgd were to elicit teachers’ reasons, opinion and perspectives of their interaction practices in the classroom. the interviews and fgd then were transcribed verbatim and analyzed. after that, to analyze the obtained data, the researcher followed the steps in opencoding, developing categories, and triangulating data. at first, the data were carefully labeled and named into several categories. secondly, the categories were then divided into sub-categories. at last, the categories and sub-categories found were triangulated with the interview transcript and memo writings. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 103 results and discussion this study is an attempt to identify interaction patterns in english as foreign language classrooms at lower secondary schools and discover the reasons why the patterns applied from the perspectives of english language experienced teachers in jakarta. the findings of the study will be presented in combination of interactional patterns and several causes of selected patterns from teachers’ perspectives. from classroom observations/recordings and interviews added by focus-group discussion, it is resulting in several interactional patterns in which is grounded by irf structure. modified irf structures can be apparent when teachers initiate the interaction in several ways, students respond in several ways; however, feedback by the teachers is not always available. to not strictly follow the irf structure, this finding is consistent to the study by rashidi & rafieerad (2010) in which not only teachers but students initiate conversation exchange. furthermore, question and answer routine are mostly emerged as the most dominated pattern. asking question is the most effective tool to initiate interaction and take immediate verbal response. mrs. lil starts the interaction with the students by delivering questions who likes sport? who usually plays badminton? (co-08). teacher asks who is absent today and divides the class into groups then asks you choose the group or i choose the group? (co-04). after 5 minutes, the teacher asks questions related to the poem, who writes the poem? what is the content of the poem? (co-02). then, teacher reviews previous lesson by asking question, what have we learned yesterday? (co-03). this result may support the study by rido (2017) and suryati (2015). they found english lessons were dominated by question and answer routine and the most popular interaction strategy is asking display question. meanwhile, giving directions or instruction is also apparently salient feature in initiating interaction in language classroom. by giving directions, the students are expected to do the required activity as response. teacher greets the students and gives some instructions of how to do the test. (co-01). teacher shows a poem on the lcd screen and directs the students to read it silently. (co-02). then, teacher gives instructions what to do with slow pace. (co-03). teaching can be said as talking in the classroom setting. teachers use speech to direct, lead, guide, instruct and persuade the students to act many things as well as to make them silent (robinson, 2005). by giving instructions, teachers act as controller and manager to manage the classroom. on the other side, the students listen and do the required tasks. the teachers are the subject of the learning process; while students are mere object (robinson, 2005). it depicts the fact that the relationship between teacher and students in the classroom is asymmetrical (consolo, 2006; walsh, 2011). the first pattern identified from the data is teacherwhole class interaction. it is when the teachers ask questions, direct the students, and communicate to all students in the classroom without nominating one specific student. the teacher lets any student to response. then, the students will yell and shout in responding teacher questions. teacher asks at least four times to the class: do you know television? do you have television. (co-01). again, teacher provides text about television on the lcd screen, asks the students to memorize it, and deliver several questions. then, she repeatedly asks “finish?” until she hears “yes” sound loudly. (co-02). moreover, teacher give instructions what to do with slow pace. all instructions are in english… teacher reads the text a loud and gives more examples on the board. (co-03). then, teacher directs the students to count 1-5… she explains how to do the whispering games. when the class look noisy and messy, teacher repeatedly shout “but” to get students’ attention. again, hanna sundari, zainal rafli & sakura ridwan interaction patterns in english as foreign language classroom at lower secondary schools 104 she asks a question: do you know what to do? (co-04). after the video was finished, the teacher suddenly asked question what are they, the students were just in silence with no response. (co-09). teacher-students (whole-class) interaction, according to harmer (2007), is the most widely used in various culture. this pattern is beneficial in giving long explanation and evaluating language progress because teachers easily control and handily manage the classroom. teacher speaking to the whole class is also revealed in study by nisa (2014) in which teachers use this mode in opening the lesson, giving feedback, and presenting information. the interactional pattern from efl classroom is teacher-student fronted interaction. in the front of the class, as the conventional standing position, the teachers sometimes choose to point out one student to answer the questions in purposes. furthermore, they also walk around the class and converse to certain student individually or in group for some reasons. the teacher walks around the class and comes to each student one by one to monitor their activities. (co-04). teacher displays some pictures of sport and its instruments on the lcd screen and asks the students to determine the names by pointing them out. (co-08). teacher calls several names to open their notebook. (co-09). rarely sitting in her desk, mrs. an keeps walking around to have a chat with the students. (co-11). sometimes, the teacher is calling students names, such as ryan, arif, to hear their answers. (co-12). after the video is finished, the teacher asks the questions to certain students one by one: what do you like to do, emma? what do you like to do, naya? what do you like to do, zahra? while approaching their desks. (co-03). the similar result also comes from the study rido (2017, pp. 203-204). he wrote that nominating specific students to answer questions was a common practice by master teachers in the classroom. in addition to nominating specific student, teacher mobility is one of the interaction feature showed in the language classroom. having finished giving directions, teachers walk around the class and come to each student or group. monitor and evaluation of student’s activity are the reasons as well as building rapport to the students. mrs. rah approaches one student to monitor her activity. (co-13). mr. am walks around one student to another, one group to another. (co-10). rarely sitting in her desk, mrs. an keeps walking around to have a chat with the students. she gives feedback to the students by saying: ok, i see, it’s ok. (co-11). the teacher approaches students’ desks one by one, monitors their activities, gives more explanation, and responding student’s questions. (co-03). teachers move around the class is also stated in several research findings. wachyudi, srisudarso, and miftakh (2015) reported that during the session, teachers stand and move around to make the lesson interesting. teachers approach the students who looks confused on the topic or task given. next, the similar result is also showed the study by rido, ibrahim, and nambiar (2014). they wrote that teachers move around the class and approach the students when delivering questions and paying attention to student’s response. another identified pattern in language classroom interaction is student-student interaction. while learning language in the classroom, teacher sometimes designs the classroom to make the student interact with other students. some classroom activities are set to stimulate them as peer or speaking partners for classmates. speaking activities seem quite difficult, the students do in pair, ask like/dislike to other students sitting next to her diagonally, and record them on note. (co-03). in whispering horse games, the class is so noise. in group, students are competing to be the fastest and the rightest. (co-04). having continued the lesson, the teacher gets the students to do in group of 4-6…. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 105 the students then move the desk to make the group. (co-10). mrs. an distributes worksheets to the students so that they do the activity in group. (co-11). setting classroom activity in pair or in group brings advantages for both teachers and students. as harmer (2007, pp. 116-117) stated, pair and group activity provide a plenty room and opportunities to use the language with peers; meanwhile individual activity stimulate autonomy and independence in learning language. almost the same result is also apparent in research by nisa (2014). on her study, pair work and group work are used to stimulate the use of language among students in speaking classes. concerning to the responses, the teachers are waiting expected responses either verbal or non-verbal in which are in accuracy, fluency, and acceptance in the line with the learning objectives. however, the students, in fact, as language learners, respond in several ways: in verbal, in action, and no response. verbal responses are the most noticeable feature in language classroom. it primarily is for responding teacher questions. then, the students say it together with loud voice. (co-01). all students at once answer loudly the teacher question. (co-08). beside verbal responses, the students also providing action or activity as required and directed by the teachers. some of the students stay calm and quite as taking the test; while, the others are discussing with their classmates. (co-01). the students are walking around the class and asking their classmates about the required expressions, and taking note. (co-03). nonetheless, not all students give expected response. because of some causes, they do not answer the questions, answer the questions with wrong answer, or do something else. students are allowed to add the answer or give other different opinions. nevertheless, no student arises. teacher let any student to do question no. 4. yet, no one comes forward to. (co-02). mrs. rah asks the students to do the exercises on the worksheet. some of them are discussing; meanwhile, some others look confused and do something that is not instructed, such as drawing and keeping silent. (co-13). as the matter of the student response, rustandi and mubarok (2017) also reported that interaction in speaking class at university level, students are less initiative to start the conversation because of shyness and reluctance. these results may not be consistent to the research findings by nisa (2014) that, beside student response and initiation, silence and confusion in interaction during speaking session are when the teacher wrote the materials and confusion occurred as more than one person talking. however, related to how students interact with and responses to teacher’s communication in the classroom, it is also surprisingly identified that several students in particular situation initiates interaction with the teachers by asking questions or requesting something, though it does not frequently happen. students ask several questions related to content materials and vocabulary. (cw06). during the lesson, the students often ask “mom, i don’t understand about it” or “i’m confused, mom. can you explain more?”. else, for those who have limited language, they say “mom, how…how…” to require more explanation. (cw-10). some of the students often asks about vocabulary, “bapak, banyak bahasa inggris nya apa, pak?” (sir, what is many in english?). (lo-10). one student yells “why is it advice instead of advise?”; then the teacher explains the differences among those two words. (lo-12). one of the students says “another song, mom”. teacher accepts the student’s request and finds another song to play before the lesson starts. (co-03). the interaction patterns in efl classrooms can be schemed on figure 3. hanna sundari, zainal rafli & sakura ridwan interaction patterns in english as foreign language classroom at lower secondary schools 106 teacher-students (whole-class) interaction is as one pattern in which teachers initiate interaction to entire class by giving questions or directions. then, pattern two is teacher-confronted student interaction. teacher starts interaction by nominating one specific student or students in group. pattern three is when the teachers set the students in pair or group to make them to interact each other, called studentstudent interaction. these patterns add the types of classroom structures of interaction observed by suryati (2015) at lower secondary schools in malang, east java. she wrote two types of classroom interaction: teacher fronted interaction and student-student interaction. the similar patterns of classroom interaction can be taken from the research by nisa (2014). the types of classroom interaction during speaking activities are teacher-whole class, teacher-student, teacher-a group of students, studentteacher, student-student, and student whole class. figure 3. interaction patterns in efl lower secondary classrooms teaching is probably on the teacher’s hand as controller who usually initiates the interaction in language classroom. nonetheless, teacher has several considerations underpinning her selection and preferences used in the classroom. classroom interaction and dynamic result from teacher choices in classroom activity (richards & lockhart, 2007). based on the interviews, smooth and effective teaching process is the priority for teachers. to make each student speak, mrs. li prefers calling names and pointing the students out. when they are responding, there is time i call by names or calling names. else, when i deliver the question to entire class, no student responds or there are great responses with loud, shouted voices that make unclear noisy echo. i decide to select one by one. besides, i want them to produce much language. at this time, i will point out… (tw-02). calling names is not just random pick. excellent students are more preferable because they can be a good language model for others. at this time, i will point out the excellent student to stimulate less student. (tw-02). teacher delivers the questions to entire class; sometime she points out one student. especially excellent student is selected as language model for other students. (cwfgd-01). for instance, one student looks competent at the discussed topic. therefore, i point english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 107 him out. sometimes, he explains it in english or indonesian. (tw-12). nominating specific students was also revealed in study by rido (2017). he reported that teachers point out specific students to make proficient students help less proficient students. moreover, this strategy is to make student more alert and attentive to the lesson as well as to give equal opportunity for each student to practice english. conclusion this current study aims at describing the interaction patterns in efl classroom at lower secondary schools and some reasons underpinned the pattern selection. when interacting and communicating with the students in the classroom, teachers do not strictly follow the irf structure. they greet, ask, direct, and lead to the entire class, called teacher-whole-class interaction. to publicly communicate, the teachers feel more effective and saving time. then, they also nominate and call one specific student, as teacher-fronted student interaction, to stimulate individual language production and evaluation as well as a good language model. at last, teachers set the classroom activity to make the student interact each other. pair-work and group-work help the students communicate and improve their language. concerning to the interaction patterns in language classroom, the research found that at least three modified irf structure. firstly, teacher – whole class is as the most common pattern in the class, then students give various kinds of responses. the second pattern is teacher – individual student by nominating specific students; the student’s response can be expected and targeted response, confusion or giving non-verbal response. the last, teachers also set the class in pair work or group work to build communication and interaction among students. these research findings may not explicitly describe the importance and the quality of interaction in the efl classroom; neither may these assess the teachers’ interaction competences in language teaching. however, the results depict the teachers’ roles in language classroom in foreign context. they play the prominent roles. they control the moves of lesson, they manage who talks, when and how much, and they also become student’ speaking partners and language model. references brown, h. d. 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(2011). exploring classroom discourse: language in aaction. oxon: routlege taylor & francis group. sundanese isoglosses of lexical variation in kabupaten kuningan english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 1 sundanese isoglosses of lexical variation in kuningan fahmy hygienis university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: fahmyhygienic@gmail.com apa citation: hygienis, f. (2013). sundanese isoglosses of lexical variation in kuningan. english review: journal of english education, 1(2), 200-207 received: 12-02-2013 accepted: 03-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: this article discussed the distribution of lexical variation in 32 districts of kuningan. the study was conducted to uncover dialect maps in kuningan, their isogloss lines, and also major lexical variations. the study employed descriptive design. the data were collected from 32 respondents by using two methods, questionnaire and interview. each respondent represents one district of kuningan. by using judgment sampling technique, the respondents were chosen. the data were analyzed in three ways: populating the data, mapping the data and describing the map. as the result, the study revealed 30 dialect maps in kuningan. the maps described the distributions of 135 lexical variations and the isogloss lines. based on the maps; it was also found that the isogloss lines were mostly overlapping. it means that, most of kuningan people tend to use different lexical variations compared to their surrounding districts. besides, it was also found that there were five major lexical variations used by the kuningans. keywords: dialect, lexical variation, isogloss. introduction in sundanese language, there are so many word variations in describing something. the variations may appear differently at every place in sunda (west java & banten provinces). the word “loba” which means many, is called “jenuk” in kabupaten kuningan and “rea” in some places around bandung. the word “mandi” or bathe in sundanese has a different variation in kabupaten majalengka, it is called “papung”. occasionally, it is confusing when meeting other people from the other regions in sunda and talk to them. the phenomenon of word or lexical variation is not only coming into view in the level of province but also in the level of regency. kabupaten kuningan, regency in the east side of west java has so many variations. this regency consists of 32 districts with 980.605 populations in the year 2002 (retrieved from http://www.kuningan.go. id). the phenomenon of lexical variation is a part of dialectology. dialectology is one of the most interesting researches in linguistics domain. wakelin (1972) as cited by milroy (1987) investigates isoglosses in england. he illustrates the boundary between the northern and northmidland dialect by showing eight isoglosses. other researchers are labov, ash and boberg (1997). their study of american english dialect shows three major regional dialects in usa (the north, south and west). besides, there is teeuw (1951) as cited from ayatrohaedi (2002:17) who investigates dialect in lombok. he is the pioneer of regional dialect researcher in indonesia. regional dialect of every place in one language may appear differently. it mailto:fahmyhygienic@gmail.com fahmy hygienis sundanese isoglosses of lexical variation in kuningan iscaused by geographical condition of the places. when geographical features imply to the dialect it is called regional dialect. as explained by wardhaugh (1992, p. 42) “various language implications such as pronunciation, word choices, syntax and form of word can be very useful in describing variation or dialect. because of that, it can serve as the map of dialect distribution to show their geographical provenance and called dialect geography”. later, the lexical variation will be analyzed and bounded by the line. the boundaries or lines between different places that have same features (pronunciation or word choice) can be called as isoglosses. wardhaugh (1992: 43) states that sometimes the maps of dialect geography are made to show the boundaries between the various language features, that boundaries called isoglosses. this study was focused on dialect geography. the study analyzed the sundanese lexical variations in kuningan, and served in a form of maps. the maps consisted of the lexical variations distribution and isoglosses as the boundary. this study is hoped to add deep understanding about dialect, especially in sundanese dialect and its lexical variation. as we know, indonesia is a big country with heterogenic society and culture. every ethnic group in indonesia has their own languages. bataknese, sundanese, balinese are some examples of the ethnic languages. therefore, they need to be revealed and studied. ahmad (1999) in ayatrohaedi (2002) states that there are 700 languages and dialects in indonesia. he states mostly indonesian linguists are interested in language structure; about 90%. the rest of that; 10% should divided to sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology, language education, psycholinguistics, etc. method the research problem is formulated in the following research questions: how are the distribution maps of lexical variation in kabupaten kuningan? were the isoglosses taking place in the map? what words are mostly used by the kuningans as their dialect? this study engaged a qualitative approach. this method was applied to reveal the phenomena of the sundanese dialect geography or dialect boundary in kuningan. strauss and corbin (1990, p. 5) stated that “a qualitative method can be used to uncover and understand what lies behind phenomena about which little is yet known”. it is the quality in describing and analyzing the data not the quantity or how many data that we get. furthermore, arikunto, (2005 in hatta 2007, p. 5) states that in presenting the data, “descriptive analysis method is not generally directed toward hypothesis testing, but only to describe the existing phenomena and current condition without being influenced by the investigator”. gumperz as cited in milroy (1987, p. 3) stated that the subject of the linguistic investigation is language or part of language. since the research is conducted in kabupaten kuningan, the subject dealt with the dialects (as a part of language) in kuningan. focus of the research is on the isogloss of lexical variation, so the dialect will be focused on the word or lexical variation in 32 districts of kuningan. kabupaten kuningan is the regency with 980.605 populations and 32 districts. to uncover the isogloss of kuningan dialect, the study needed various dialects from those 32 districts to examine. these are the districts name: kuningan, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 3 kramatmulya, ciniru, hantara, cigugur, luragung, cimahi, cibingbin, cibeureum, ciwaru, karangkancana, garawangi, sindangagung, cidahu, kalimanggis, ciawigebang, cipicung, lebakwangi, maleber, cilimus, cigandamekar, jalaksana, japara, mandirancan, pancalang, pasawahan, kadugede, nusaherang, darma, selajambe, subang, and cilebak. by using judgment sampling, 32 persons were chosen as the respondents. this type of sampling was used by macaulay to uncover the glasgow speech in 1977. he employed 54 respondents of 17 schools in glasgow by using judgment sampling (macaulay 1977 in milroy 1987, p. 26). besides, boberg (2005) engaged 54 students of mcgill university in his research. milroy (1987, p. 26) stated that “the principle of judgment sampling is how the researcher identifies the types of respondent to be studied and then seek out quota of the respondents who fit the categories”. in this research, the judgment was based on three categories such as: livelihood, language use and birth place. those categories represent 32 districts of kuningan. based on the category, sma 2 kuningan is the appropriate place to choose. 20 students were picked as the respondents. they were asked to fill up the questionnaire based on 30 questions of kuningans lexical variations. however, to fulfill 32 districts of kuningan, the study needs other respondents beside the students. because of that, 12 people were selected to cover up the study. they were the civil servant worked in puskesmas (public health center) lamepayung, they are coming from 12 different districts in kuningan. this research used several techniques in collecting the data. the techniques that used are interview and questionnaire. besides, pilot study was conducted in order to get preliminary data of lexical variation in kuningan. these are the steps of data collection. pilot study is the way to find out preliminary data. preliminary data is more like a key to open the gate of research. in this research, pilot study was conducted in march 2008, by using two instruments, questionnaire and interview. the questionnaires were given to the 32 people from different places all over kuningan. they were asked to write down some dialects that used by the people in their places. however, there were only 27 person who returning the questionnaire with the answer on it. to cover up the deficit, interview was conducted to some peoples that attend to know the dialect in kuningan. the interviewees are the persons who have high mobility in kuningan and knowing most of dialect of it. based on the criteria, two interviewees were chosen. the first is drs. h uhadi. he is the branch chief of paguyubanpasundan in kuningan and formerly he was the headmaster of many high schools in kuningan. the second is mr ihak sunardi s.pd. he is the teacher of sundanese in smpn lebakwangi kuningan. by conducting the study, more than 50 dialects with 150 lexical variations of kuningan was discovered. however, there are only 30 dialects formulated in the questionnaire, because of the shortages. most of 20 reductions have the same meaning with other or even not including in kuningan’s regional dialect, so that there were only 30 dialects in the questionnaire. after the preliminary data of kuningan’s lexical variation populated, questionnaire was made to get the geographical dialect of kuningan. geographical dialect was the main instrument in analyzing isogloss. the fahmy hygienis sundanese isoglosses of lexical variation in kuningan questionnaires were given to the respondents in form of two pages with two sections of questions. this type of questionnaire adopted from boberg (2005, p. 64) in his research of north american vocabulary survey at mcgill university. the questionnaires were begun with standard questions of demographic information of the respondent such as: name, birth place, live, and language use. then the main questions of 30 lexical variables. in order to make the respondents easier in filling the questionnaire, each question was provided in a brief definition of the variable, followed by a list of the most common variants of the variable known to the respondents. the respondents were asked to circle the variant they would most often use in everyday speech or to write in the word they would use if it did not appear among those listed. they were instructed to circle more than one word only if necessary, and if the answer not listed, they can write down on the paper. after the data were collected, next step of the study was analyzing the data. this process took at least three steps of analyzing. first step was populating, mapping the dialect geography and then drew the isogloss lines. populating was the first step in this research analysis. firstly, data from the questionnaires were categorized based on the lexicon and the place it used. the data were served in the form of table. however, the data from the questionnaire shows that the dialect and variations were mostly in the level basaloma/ basakasar in sundanese speech level. therefore, the data were presented only in one level of speech; sundanese basaloma. according to ayatrohaedi (2002, p. 46), basically, “there are three steps in making the map of dialect geography: a) drawing the map and filling the variations on the map, b) showing the map, and c) discussing the map”. in this research, the map was the construction of the kabupatenkuningan basic map. by using the adobe photoshop 6.0 ®software, the map was rebuilt to get 30 new maps with the symbols of lexical variations. the reconstruction process needed at least three steps. firstly, the basic map was rebuilt into a bald map. the bald map can be used as a master map, to make the process of filling the data easier. secondly, fill the map with the lexical variations. the last thing is drawing the isogloss in the map. the new maps show the spreads of 30 lexical variations in kuningan. it was served in 30 maps. each map illustrated the distribution of lexical variations in kuningan. technically, each lexical variation was represented by one symbol. for example in lexical variation map of wedding tent, the symbols like: = represents the tatarub variation, = represents paratag, = represents balandongan, and = represents papayon. those symbols were drawn in the map based on the places appearances. this kind of technique was similar with teeuw (1948 in ayatrohaedi 2002: 17) in his lomboknese map. last step of the analysis was drawing the line of isoglosses on the map. the line was drawn based on the same variations. however, in the real situation the isoglosses intersect with another line. to handle this problem, the intersection line was drawn on the maps. technically, the isoglosses in the map was in the form ( ) lines and the intersection in ( ) lines. those lines were the representation of the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 5 boundaries between each lexical variation in the same meaning. results and discussion based on the data collected, it is found that there are 30 signifieds with 135 lexical variations in sundanese basaloma distribute in kabupaten kuningan. it is because of the respondent, the respondents are mostly students. they usually use basaloma in their daily speech. as the result the data tabulation was only tabulated by the variations of basaloma/ basakasar. the data were analyzed in terms of signified, lexical variation and district. regarding the first and the second research questions the maps were made. the maps were made, based on the data tabulation. the maps show the distribution of lexical variations and their isoglosses. example of dialect map: map no distribution of wedding tent scale 1: 5000004. 1 legends: = balandongan = tatarub = paratag = papayon = isoglosses = intersection fahmy hygienis sundanese isoglosses of lexical variation in kuningan based on the data collected, there are 135 lexical variations of 30 meaning or signified found in kuningan. from the 135 variations, there are 5 major lexical variations in kabupatenkuningan: /nyiru/, /senteng/, /batu/, /gandéng/ and /ngawada/. from 30 districts, the variation of /nyiru/ leads with 90%. it is used in all districts of kuningan, except in pancalang. it is summarized in table 1. table 1. major lexical variations in kuningan no dialect appearance in 32 district percentage σ %meaning lexical variation 1 bamboo basket nyiru 31 96,60 100 % cécémpéh 1 03,40 2 compartment upon window or door senteng 28 87,50 100 % loster 4 12,50 3 stone batu 27 84,40 100 % mungkal 5 25,60 4 noisy seah 2 06,25 100 % sangar 2 06,25 gandéng 27 84,40 kawus 1 03,40 5 blaming ngawada 27 84,40 100 %nyalahkeun 3 12,20 tudah-tuduh 1 03,40 there are some patterns found in drawing isogloss lines on the map. ayatrohaedi (2002: 71) states that every map has its own interpretation. the isogloss line is the imagery line that can help in determining the interpretation. the line will show the pattern, whether it is grouping, overlapping or unpattern line. based on the maps it is found that there are 126 isogloss lines .the lines on the maps are mostly overlapping. it is about 70% of isoglosses. this situation is signed by the intersection between one isogloss to another. the overlapping isoglosses indicate that most of kuningan people tend to use different lexical variations compared to their surrounding districts. the examples are shown in map 4.3. there is an intersection between/hawangan/ (in cilebak, karangkancana, and lurangung) and /lebak/ (in ciniru, hantara, cimahi, cibingbin, cibeureum, ciwaru, cidahu, cipicung, lebakwangi, maleber, kadugede, selajambe and subang). twenty percent of the isogloss lines are grouping. this condition indicates “clean isoglosses” which means that the people in kuningan know the variation outside their districts, but they use their own variation. the example is shown in map 4.2. there is no intersection among the isogloss line. it clearly seperates the variations /nyiru/ and /cécémpéh/. 10% of the isogloss lines are random distribution. in this particular situation, it is difficult to draw the isogloss lines. the example is illustrated in map 4.25. there is no boundary between /améh/ in kramatmulya, ciniru, hantara, cimahi, cibeureum, garawangi, cidahu, kalimanggis, cipicung, cigandamekar, jalaksana, kadugede, nusaherang, selajambe, subang, and cilebak; and /mis/ sindangagung, ciawigebang, and english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 7 cilimus; and /ambéh/ in kuningan, cigugur, ciwaru, karangkancana, maleber, japara, and mandirancan, because those variations spread unpatternly. conclusions the present study is aimed to uncover the distribution of lexical variations, the isogloss lines and the major variations in kabupaten kuningan. based on the lexical distribution data, the map is drawn. the study describes 30 dialect maps in kabupaten kuningan. regarding the second research problem, it is found that there are 126 isogloss lines in 30 dialect maps in kabupaten kuningan. the isoglosses lines are mostly overlapped with the others. 70% of the maps indicate that there are “overlapping isoglosses”. this indicates that every district in kuningan has more than one lexical variation in describing one signified. in other words, most of kuningan people tend to use different lexical variations compared to their surrounding districts. concerning the third research problem, which concerns the major variations used by the kuningans, the study finds that there are five variations mostly used by more than 20 districts in kuningan. the variations are /nyiru/, /senteng/, /batu/, /gandéng/, and /ngawada. based on the result of the study, there are number of issues, which could profitably be explored in future research. the present study focuses only on the lexical variations. further study is suggested to investigate not only on lexical variation, but also phonological, syntactical, or even on semantic differences in dialectology. besides, the study did not investigate the factor influence the distribution, further study is suggested to investigate dialectology in diachronic way in order to uncover the correlation between the factor and the distribution. one of the most obvious weaknesses of this study concerns is the method of the data collection. this study uses pilot study in order to get preliminary data. however, the study employs only questionnaires and interview to some people. it is suggested for the further study to do straight observation and interview to the respondent, so that rich data will be collected. however the methods have disadvantages such as time and cost, those method need more time and money. references ayatrohaedi. (2002). pedoman penelitian dialektologi. jakarta: pusat bahasa departemen pendidikan nasional. aziz, e. a. (2000). refusing in indonesian: strategies and politeness implications. unpublished doctoral dissertation, monash university australia. boberg, c. (2005). the north american regional vocabulary survey: new variables and method in the study of north american english. american dialectsociety. retrieved from: http://logos.uoregon.edu/explore/so cioling/regionaldialect.html. [27march 2004]. ekadjati, s. e. (2003). sejarah kuningan dari masa prasejarah hingga terbentuknya kabupaten. bandung: pt kiblat buku utama. hatta, m. s. (2007). similies and methaphor in indonesian translation of the adventures of sherlockholmes. unpublish paper, indonesia university of education. heeringa, w. (2001). dialect variation in and around frisia: classification and relationships. retrieved 12 january 2008 from www.let.rug.nl/~heeringa/ dialectology/papers/uswk04.pdf. holmes, j. (2001). an introduction to sociolinguistics (second edition). essex: pearson education limited. http://logos.uoregon.edu/explore/socioling/regionaldialect.html.%20%5b27 http://www.let.rug.nl/~heeringa/ fahmy hygienis sundanese isoglosses of lexical variation in kuningan hornby, s.a. (2000). oxford advanced learner’s dictionary. oxford: oxford university press. hudson, r. a. (1980). sociolinguistics. london: the press syndicate of university of cambridge. labov, w, s. ash, and c. boberg. (1997). a national map of the regional dialects of american english. retrieved on 27 march 2004 from: http://logos.uoregon.edu/explore/so cioling/regionaldialect.html. mahsun (1995). dialektologi diakronis: sebuah pengantar. jogjakarta: gajah mada university press. manser, h. m. (1991). oxford learner’s pocket dictionary. oxford: oxford university press. milroy, l. (1987). observing & analysing natural language. new york: basil backwellinc. nurbaiti, a. (2005). geografi dialek bahasa jawa di kecamatan gadingrejo kabupaten tanggamus provinsi lampung. unpublished paper, indonesia university of education. pemerintahan daerah kuningan (2000). web site resmi pemerintahan daerah kabupaten kuningan. retrieved on 11 november 2006 from http//www.kuningan.go. id. sekarini, d. (2005). geografi dialek bahasa sunda di kabupaten garut. unpublished paper, indonesia university of education. senjaya, a. (2005). basa sunda dialek sukabumi di kecamatan waluran. unpublished paper, indonesia university of education. shank, g. (1995). semiotics and qualitative research in education: the third crossroad. the qualitative report, 2(3). retrieved on 24 april 2006 from: http//www.nova.edu/sssss/qr/qr2 -3/shank.html. spolsky, b. (1998). sociolinguistics. oxford: oxf ord university press. strauss, a and coebin, j. (1990). basic of qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques. newbury park: sage publication. universitas pendidikan indonesia. (2006). pedoman penulisan karya ilmiah. bandung: indonesia university of education. wardhaugh, r. (1992). an introduction to sociolinguistics (second edition). malden: blackwell publisher. http://www.nova.edu/ssss/qr/qr2-3/shank.html english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 275 new normal campaign of covid-19 advertisements by who: a multimodal study asmah boru munthe universitas sumatera utara, indonesia email: asmahmunthe@gmail.com t thyrhaya zein universitas sumatera utara, indonesia email: t.thyrhaya@usu.ac.id t silvana sinar universitas sumatera utara, indonesia email: tengkusilvana@usu.ac.id apa scitation: smunthe, sa. sb., zein, t. t., & sinar, t. s. (2022). snew snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho: sa smultimodal sstudy. senglish sreview: sjournal sof senglish seducation, s11(1), 275-282. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7784. received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction the corona virus, also known as covid-19, was first discovered in wuhan, china at the end of december 2019. this virus spread quickly all over the world and death rate caused by this virus has made countries race against the time and unpreparedness to find the right solution. thus, who officially declared the covid-19 as a pandemic on march 9, 2020. the pandemic has completely changed the way people live (erwani et al., 2022). the methods that have been tried by many countries affected by covid-19 are regional quarantine or lockdown (satnoto et al., 2020). lockdown is a regulation that is made by the government to ask societies to do all the activities at home such as working, studying, praying, and shopping. but, a lockdown is not an effective way because it had a drastic impact on economies around the world. therefore, who suggests to use another way to prevent the spread of coronavirus by implementing the new normal life. the new normal is a situation of new life to carry out activities as usual. new normal life is more emphasis on changing society's habits to get used to having a healthy lifestyle by implementing health protocols. unfortunately, the new normal life is misinterpreted by some people who comprehend the new normal as back to normal life without covid-19. globally, the number of positive cases of covid-19 crease. there are 4.7 million new cases reported. the data is taken by who from health national authorities. it happened because the awareness of society in implementing health protocols is low. it is also because they do not understand well the meaning of the new normal life during the covid-19 pandemic. advertisements are a form of written communication that is often used in society. abstract: after covid-19 outbreak spread around the world, many advertisements campaign the new normal life. who made some rules how the way to life in new normal. this research aims to describe verbal land lvisual lelements lin lthe lnew lnormal lcampaign lof lcovid-19 ladvertisements lby lwho. lthe lresearch lused lqualitative ldescriptive lresearch lwith lan linteractive lmodel. lthe ltechnique lof lcollecting ldata lwas ldocumentation. lthe lresearcher lused lideational lfunction lto lanalyze lverbal lelements land lgrammar lvisual ldesign ltheory lto lanalyze lvisual lelements. lbased lon lthe lfinding, lthere lwere lthree ldominant lelements lin lverbal lelements. lfirst, lthe ldominant lparticipant lwas lthe lgoal l(19). lsecond, lthe ldominant lprocess lwas lmaterial l(20). lthird, lthe ldominant lcircumstance lwas lmanner l(4). lmeanwhile, lthere lwere lalso lthree ldominant lelements lin lvisual lelements. lfirst, lthe ldominant lrepresentational lwas lnarrative l(17). lsecond, lthe ldominant lelements lin linteractive lwere loffer l(19), lmedium llong lshot l(6), loblique l(16), land leye llevel l(17). lthird, lthe ldominant lelement lin lcompositional lwas lsalience l(54). lthe lconclusion lwas lthe lvisual lelements lwere lmore ldominant lthan lthe lverbal lelements. the visual element showed many images that made the readers understand by looking at them and the verbal elements were just additional information to the readers to not get misunderstood the images. thus, the verbal elements correlated with the visual elements to convey the meaning from advertisements to the viewers keywords: advertisements; covid-19; multimodal study; new normal. mailto:asmahmunthe@gmail.com asmah boru munthe, t thyrhaya zein, & t silvana sinar new snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho: sa smultimodal sstudy 276 according to nederstigt & hilberink-schulpen (2018) advertisement is a communication medium. the purpose of advertising is to persuade people to buy or use the services or products offered. the product is not only in the commercial field but it can also be in the non-commercial field. there are two types of advertisements, namely commercial advertisements, and non-commercial advertisements. commercial advertisements are advertisement which promotes the sale of goods to the public generally. as a result, advertising has developed into a potent marketing technique for luring customers away from non-consumers and toward their goods or services (jaworska, 2020). meanwhile, non-commercial advertisements contain messages that remind and invite the public to participate in the success of a program aimed at common interests. they also play an important role to create public awareness. the language used in an advertisement must be persuasive and engage to influence the readers. the language used is short, clear, concise, and effective hence it can be easy to understand by readers. selective phrases and visuals that allow for numerous readings contribute to the diversity of meanings in ads (eynullaeva, 2018). to make it more attractive, advertisement is also supported by the use of colors, illustrations, and logos (al-omar, 2019; pecoraro et al., 2020). the use of verbal and nonverbal language aspects in the advertisement helps to express its meaning (arinata et al., 2022; dewi et al., 2022). at this time, we can find lots of new normal campaign advertisements in various kinds of media, videos and images, such as magazines, newspapers, television, radio, or internet. the multimodal aspect of advertising is one of its most crucial components (perangin-angin et al., 2022). the purposes of the new normal campaign advertisements are to give brief explanation about the new normal and to remind us the importance of implementing health protocols. the new normal campaign advertisement is a non-commercial advertisement that aims to give information and to increase the awareness of public society about the attitudes and behavior to the problem advertised. regarding non-commercial advertisements, who as the biggest world health organization is responsible to educate societies about the new normal in the covid-19 pandemic. not all societies have the same knowledge about the new normal (effendy et al., 2020). therefore, who launches non-commercial advertisements, the new normal campaign of covid-19 advertisements, on its official website. through advertisements, it hopes that all societies can easily understand covid-19 and how to live in new normal life. the researcher chooses the covid-19 advertisements by who is because they provide different modes. these modes are sentences and images that are contained in the advertisements. these modes work together to create messages which means to be communicated. the purpose of new normal campaign of covid-19 advertisements is to set examples of implementing health protocol during covid-19. multimodal is a theory that looks at how people communicate and interact with other people because it uses different modes. it scan sbe sdefined sas sthe suse sof ssome ssemiotic smodes sin sproduct sdesign sor ssemiotic sevents sand sin ssome sways, sthese smodes sare scombined sto sstrengthen, scomplete, sor sbe sin sa sparticular. multimodal (text, image, and audiovisual) advertisements are a successful technique to introduce products or services (alhadi et al., 2022; miharti & fitrawati, 2022). multimodal salso scan sbe sdefined sas sa stechnical sterm sthat saims sto sshow sthe smeaning sthat swe shave sdone sso sfar sto sutilize sa svariety sof ssemiotics. the multimodal analysis emphasizes that all means of communication, both verbal and nonverbal, play an important role in making meaning. many researchers have studied advertising using multimodal analysis such as guo & feng (2018), napitupulu (2018), sitanggang (2018), amatullah (2019), raharjo et al (2020), and dania & sari (2020). guo & feng (2018) conducted the 2014 brazil world cup advertisements with grammar visual design to represent semiotic acts. raharjo et al.'s (2020) study on the multimodal analysis of wardah lipstick examined aspects of multimodal on advertisements that featured persuasive messages impacting the buyer's decision. hafrianto (2019) did another study that examined the multimodal analysis of indomie in the arabic translation. sitanggang (2018) investigated the visual and verbal elements in political satire through the use of metafunction and grammar visual design cartoons and illustrated how they are specifically interrelated to construct satire. napitupulu (2018) identified the visual and verbal elements in advertisements of the online marketplace shopee. he used metafunction to analyze the verbal elements and grammar visual design and generic structure to analyze the visual elements. amatullah (2019) analyzed and compared semiotic systems such as linguistic, visual, audio, gesture, and place in beauty product advertisements. raharjo et al. (2020) analyzed wardah lipstick advertisements. dania & sari english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 277 (2020) identified food advertisements. meanwhile some researchers who conducted a research of a campaign are: serena williams and megan rapinoe are among the cast members of this advertisement, which was launched as part of nike's promotion for international women's day 2020 (verry, 2020). lose count is the name of the second advertising. one of nike's ads, lose count, which was part of the stronger than one campaign and debuted in february 2021, is designed to empower female football players, therefore it makes sense to label it femvertising. the stronger than one campaign was created to empower the future generation of female athletes, particularly those playing american football (codega, 2020). although many researchers have conducted research related to multimodal analysis in advertisements, there is still a need to investigate how multimodal analysis contributed to other types of advertisements. in this research, the difference and the novelty of this research are the data and the theory. numerous research used commercial advertisements as the data, but the current research used non-commercial advertisements, new normal advertisements by who. this research is conducted to determine the elements of verbal and visual that appears in new normal campaign of covid-19 advertisements by who. therefore, the researcher takes the snew snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho sas sthe sdata sof sthe sresearch. sthe spurpose sof sthe sresearch swas sto sidentify sthe svisual sand sverbal selements sin sthe snew snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho. sit suses sthe sideational sfunction sby shalliday smetafunctions' stheory sto sanalyze sthe sverbal selements. sthen, sit scombines swith svisual selements, sthe sgrammar svisual design. method in this research, the researcher used a descriptive qualitative design. it aims to explain what exists in a situation in terms of variables or conditions and to obtain information concerning the current phenomenon. the research on multimodal is usually divided into two groups: verbal elements and visual elements to see how the modes screate smeaning sin scommunication. sthus, sthis sresearch saims sto sidentify sthe sverbal sand svisual selements sin sthe snew snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho. s the sreason sbehind sselecting sthe snew snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sresides sin sthe sfact sthat multimodal is claimed to look at how people communicate with other people in different modes. modes are socially and culturally shaped resources for making meaning. moreover, the previous research did not use non-commercial advertisements as the data in multimodal. whereas non-commercial is public service advertisement to create awareness or raise funds. non-commercial advertisements attempt to influence public opinion on the happening issue such as the covid-19 pandemic. the data of this research were visual and verbal elements in seven new normal campaigns of covid-19 advertisements by who selected by the researcher. visual elements were taken from the image components of the advertisements. the images were about human bodies, objects, and illustrations in public places. meanwhile, verbal elements were clauses found in advertisements. based on halliday's in systemic functional linguistics, a clause is a unit of linguistics. therefore, verbal elements included words, phrases, and clauses. the source of data took from who's official website: https://www.who.int/indonesia/news/novelcorona virus/newinfograpihics/new-normal. it was accessed on tuesday, january 5th, 2021. the reason why researcher took from the who official website, is because of who as the biggest world organization gave guidance on us how to implement health protocols and how to implement the new normal life during the covid-19 pandemic. in analyzing the data, the researcher used the interactive model analysis. there were four steps in analyzing data: data collection, data condensation, data display, and conclusion. figure: 1. four steps of analyzing data based on the interactive model presented in figure 1, the first step was ldata lcollection. ldata lcollection lmeans lthe lprocess lof lgathering land lmeasuring linformation labout ltargeted lvariables lin lan lestablished lsystem, lwhich lenables lone lto lanswer lrelevant lquestions land levaluate lthe results. this research applied documentation techniques for collecting data. documentation technique is a technique that documents as a form of data include https://www.who.int/indonesia/news/novelcoronavirus/newinfograpihics/new-normal https://www.who.int/indonesia/news/novelcoronavirus/newinfograpihics/new-normal asmah boru munthe, t thyrhaya zein, & t silvana sinar new snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho: sa smultimodal sstudy 278 material obtained via the internet. the documents had been provided by who official sites and they were available for other people to check. to collect the data, the researcher searched the data from who's official website, then the researcher selected some new normal campaigns of covid-19 advertisements based on the representation of implementing the health protocols in the new normal. next, the researcher downloaded the selected advertisements and classified the data into visual and verbal elements. the lsecond lstep lwas ldata lcondensation lthe lprocess lof lselecting, lfocusing, lsimplifying, labstracting, land ltransforming ldata. lthe ldata lwas lselected lbased lon lvisual land lverbal lelements lin lthe lnew lnormal lcampaign lof lcovid-19 ladvertisements lby who, then the process of the data focused on verbal elements and visual elements. in verbal elements, the data were analyzed based on the ideational function of the transitivity process in an experiential process which consisted of three aspects: participants, process, and circumstance. in visual elements, the data was analyzed using grammar visual design which consisted of three aspects: representational, interactional, and compositional. the researcher used code to simplify data. the codes presented in the analysis were nnca1, nnca2, nnca3, nnca4, nnca5, nnca6, and nnca7. the sthird sstep swas sdata sdisplay sto san sorganized sassembly sof sinformation sthat sallows sthe sconclusion. sthe sprocess sof sreducing sand sdisplaying sdata swas sbased son sthe sformulation sof sthe sresearch sproblem. sthe sresearch sdisplayed sthe sdata sanalysis sof sverbal sand svisual selements sused sin sthe snew snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements. the last step was the conclusion to make a summary of the research. concluding is the process of drawing the content of data collected in the form of good statements. the conclusion is made after analyzing the data and then the researcher got the conclusion as the answer to the research problems. results and discussion this data finding is divided into two elements, the first was verbal elements. the researcher used the ideational function in the transitivity process by m.a.k. halliday (2004) to analyze the verbal elements. from the analysis, the researcher found that there were 17 clauses in advertisements. table 1. was the result of the verbal analysis: table 1. verbal elements verbal elements participants processes circumstances actor = 8 goal = 19 senser = 3 phenomenon = 3 token = 1 value = 1 attribute = 3 carrier = 1 material = 20 mental = 5 relational = 4 behaviour = 1 manner = 4 time = 2 in table 1, there were 3 elements in verbal: participants, processes, and circumstances. the researcher discovered that the most dominant participant in ideational function was the goal (19). then, the actor came after it (8). it was noticeable that the advertisements brought important messages to the readers to get a clear understanding of the new normal and health protocols. who engaged the readers to obey the rules of the new normal life by implementing health protocols during outside activity. then, the most dominant process was material (20). many sentences used a material process to show what was the doer doing. it meant that the advertisements encouraged readers to do and to participate in maintaining health procedures in the new normal life by adhering to who guidance. meanwhile, the researcher found that there were two circumstances. they are manner and time. the manner circumstance was 4 and the time circumstance was 2. as a result, the manner circumstance was more dominant than the time circumstance. the advertisements gave more examples of implementing new normal life by manner circumstance than time circumstance. when the readers saw the examples of health protocols, they will easily understand how to do it by copying the actions. on sthe sother shand, sthere swere s20 simages swith svisual selements sfound sin sthe snew snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements. sthe sresearcher sused sgrammar svisual sdesign stheory sby skress sand svan sleeuwen. it has three parts: representational, interactive, and compositional. representational is used to look at the position of the participants wheater writers or readers are dominant. interactive is used to know the interaction between the image-maker and imageviewers. compositional is related to the arrangement of all the elements from the representational and interactive. thus, compositional sees how these elements from two parts relate to each other into a meaningful whole. table 2. showed the result of the visual analysis. table 2. visual elements english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 279 visual elements representat i-onal interactive composition -al narrative = 17 vector: 17 actor: 17 goal: 19 gaze: offer = 19 demand = 1 information value = 30 conceptual = 3 carrier: 3 attributive: 6 social distance: close shot = 2 very close shot = 4 long shot = 5 medium long shot = 6 medium close shot = 3 salience = 54 horizontal angel : frontal = 6 oblique = 14 vertical angel : eye-level = 17 low level = 2 high level = 1 framing unframed = 17 framed = 3 in visual elements, the most dominant process in representational was narrative (17). then it was followed by the conceptual process (3). the advertisements used more vectors to connect the participants (images and readers) by limbs, eyeliners, bodies, or tools to indicate the connection. it related to verbal elements that the most participants dominant was a goal which is used direct vector to the readers. in interactive, the most dominant gaze was an offer (19). the images of the advertisements used a lack of eye contact with the readers. participants in the offer image should not be aware of the presence of the camera. therefore, many images did not seem directly to the readers when giving examples of maintaining health protocols and they are represented to the readers as if they are on display to observe by the readers. next, the most dominant social distance was a medium-long shot (6). it was followed by a long shot (5), a very close shot (4), a medium close shot (3), and a close shot (2). many images in advertisements used medium-long shots as social distance to show whole the images situation. thus, the readers could see what is going on and where is it. meanwhile, the less dominant social distance was close shot. this social distance only shows the images from head to shoulder. it meant that the images were closer and bigger from the frame and the readers could not see around the images. then, there were two angles; horizontal and vertical. in horizontal angle, the most dominant was the oblique (14). then it was followed by frontal (6). these images were not created as perfect images because they avoided facing the readers. the main goal was not to see the readers but to tell the readers what should they do during the covid-19 pandemic by implementing health protocols. meanwhile, in vertical angle, the most dominant was eye level (17). next, the low level was 2 and the high level was 1. the images used eye level to represent that the images and the readers were symbolically same position. therefore, who through the advertisements invited society to build awareness of how important the health protocols are. compositional sees how representational and interactive are connected to be meaningful as a whole. thus, compositional has three parts: information value, salience, and framing. based on the result, the information value found 30 elements. it meant that the images in advertisements were found in strategic places so the readers were easy to understand the intention of the images. then, salience was 54 elements; more dominant (54) than information value (30). salience was used to attract the readers to participants, representational, and interactive parts images. it refers to the degree to of compositional elements draw attention to themselves. in advertisements, they used soft colors and the dominant color was blue. the blue was used to show that those advertisements were official from who. meanwhile, framing was used to refer to the presence or absence of a margin to hold the image within the page. in the result, the more dominant framing was unframed (17) than framed (3). it meant that the images were free and connected with other elements such as vectors and continuities or similarities of color, visual shape, etc. the images of those advertisements showed that our daily activities must change because of the covid-19 pandemic. they also gave us procedures for how to live in new normal life by implementing health protocols. with the new normal procedures from who, the people hoped to comprehensive understanding of keeping health protocol to reduce the spread of covid-19. as smentioned sbefore, sthe spurpose sof sthis sresearch swas sto sidentify sthe sverbal sand svisual selements sin sthe snew snormal scampaign sof scovid19 sadvertisements sby swho. sthe sfirst swas sverbal selements. it is used to explain the images. there were three parts to verbal elements: participants, process, and circumstance. in participants, the most dominant was a goal (19). it meant that the who wanted to achieve the goal of the advertisements. therefore, the who used many asmah boru munthe, t thyrhaya zein, & t silvana sinar new snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho: sa smultimodal sstudy 280 persuasive sentences in advertisements to invite the readers to implement the new normal. then, the most dominant process was material (20). the material process was used to show how to live in the new normal situation during the covid-19 pandemic. therefore, the advertisements used concrete and observable activities such as stay, touch, spread, and so on. next, the most dominant circumstance was manner. who did not want any misunderstanding about the new normal life, thus it explained keeping shealth sprotocols sduring sthe scovid-19 spandemic sto sreduce sthe sspread sof scovid-19. the second was visual elements. it was also divided into three parts: representational, interactive, and compositional. in representational, it was sengaged swith srepresented sparticipants swhich scan sbe speople, sthings, sor splaces swith scircumstances sin swhich sevents sor sactions sare sbeing sillustrated. sthe most dominant representational was narrative (17) because images showed the participants and connected with the vector (17) to make an example of how to do the health protocols. in interactive, the most dominant was an offer (19) in gaze because the participants in advertisements made eye contact with the readers. then the most dominant social distance in making eye contact was a medium long shot (6) because they showed whole images to show the application of health protocols in the covid-19 pandemic so the readers could see obvious images. in advertisements, the angel is also an important part because if the angel in the images did not fit with the readers' eye contact, they will not easily and clearly understand. based on the finding, the most dominant angel was eye level (17). they showed the same positions to tell that the readers had the power to decrease the spread of covid-19 by implenting health protocols. conclusion based on the result of analyzing, the verbal elements found in the new normal campaign of covid-19 advertisements were participants, process, and circumstance. the dominant elements of participants were goal (19). the dominant elements of the process were material (20). then, the dominant circumstance was manner (4). from verbal elements, the researcher concluded that every sentence in advertisements aimed to give explanation about how to live in new normal by implementing health protocols and social distancing. in visual elements, there were three elements: representational, interactional, and compositional. the more dominant element in representational was narrative (17). next, the dominant elements in interactive were offer (19), medium long shot (6), the oblique (14), and eye level (17) then, the most dominant elements in compositional were salience (54), information value (30), and unframed (17). from those findings, the researcher concluded that the advertisements used proper images layout so that the viewers could see clear images without any ambiguity. the current research has limitations. the first was the number of selected advertisements. the researchers just took seven advertisements based on the guidance of who about new normal and health protocols. then, many researchers used commercial advertisements as the data meanwhile the research which was used non-commercial advertisements was hard to find. 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(2020). serena williams, megan rapinoe and others star in nike’s inspirational international women’s day video. footwearnews. https://footwearnews.com/2020/focus/athleticoutdoor/nike-international-womens-day-serenawilliams-megan-rapinoe-1202944593/ wodak, lr. l(2021). lapproaches lto ldiscourse lanalysis. luniversity lpress wodak, lr. l(2021). crisis lcommunication land lcrisis lmanagement lduring lcovid-19. lglobal ldiscourses, l11(3),l329–353. yuet lal. l(2021). lcovid-19 land lwomen-led lbusinesses laround lthe lworld. lthe luniversity lof ltexas, lthe lrio lgrande lvalley. lscholarwork. lutrgv.edu. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401208567 https://footwearnews.com/2020/focus/athletic-outdoor/nike-international-womens-day-serena-williams-megan-rapinoe-1202944593/ https://footwearnews.com/2020/focus/athletic-outdoor/nike-international-womens-day-serena-williams-megan-rapinoe-1202944593/ https://footwearnews.com/2020/focus/athletic-outdoor/nike-international-womens-day-serena-williams-megan-rapinoe-1202944593/ asmah boru munthe, t thyrhaya zein, & t silvana sinar new snormal scampaign sof scovid-19 sadvertisements sby swho: sa smultimodal sstudy 282 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 237 exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic tedi rohadi english language teaching department, tarbiyah and teachers training faculty iain syekh nurjati cirebon e-mail: tedirohadi@syekhnurjati.ac.id listiana ikawati english language teaching department, tarbiyah and teachers training faculty iain syekh nurjati cirebon email: listiana.ikawati@syekhnurjati.ac.id muhsiyana nurul aisyiah english language teaching department, tarbiyah and teachers training faculty iain syekh nurjati cirebon email: muhsiyana.na@syekhnurjati.ac.id apa citation: rohadi, t., ikawati, l., & aisyiah, m. n. (2023). exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 237-252. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.6801 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction for students to succeed in the modern world, which is characterized by the fourth industrial revolution and society 5.0, it is crucial that they not only have the theoretical knowledge necessary, but also the skills that are in demand on the job market. research shows a gap between the skills learned in higher education and those actually needed in the workforce (lauder & mayhew, 2020; okolie, nwosu, and mlanga 2019; malik, 2018). recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of personal agency as a central aspect of professionalism (bush et al., 2017; grainger et al., 2019; jääskelä et al., 2017), with rising expectations for abilities like creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication. (ghafar, 2020; van laar et al., 2017). moreover, agency is seen as a crucial strategy for adapting to change and uncertainty in the professional realm, playing a significant role in ongoing learning (su in jääskelä et al., 2017). in the current era characterized by technological advancements and innovation, it is crucial for graduates to have both practical and theoretical knowledge to meet the demands of the modern job market. however, studies indicate that there is a significant disparity between the skills that higher education equips graduates with and those required by employers (altbach & de wit, 2017; beerkens et al., 2021; de boer et al., 2017). therefore, there is an increasing need to cultivate as well as additional abilities like creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication to bridge this gap (world economic forum, 2020). abstract: this qualitative descriptive study intends to investigate how student agency skills were affected by online efl instruction during the covid-19 epidemic, as well as how it would have affected future learning and teaching. the study focuses on pre-service student teachers in indonesia, aiming to equip them with the necessary skills for academic success and the modern job market. the results show that learners' agency was essential to their adjustment to the online learning environment, especially when taking into account elements like choice, fairness, participation, interest, motivation, self-efficacy, teacher support, and peer support. moreover, the study highlights the importance of fostering student agency in efl teaching and learning activities, which not only provide content-based learning but also create collaborative language learning environments that empower learners to utilize a variety of online resources and tools. overall, this study provides insights into the effective implementation of online language education during unprecedented times while emphasizing the importance of student agency for successful efl learning and teaching. keywords: agency; efl; learners agency; online-efl teaching and learning; technology-enhanced language learning. tedi rohadi, listiana ikawati, & muhsiyana nurul aisyiah exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic 238 personal agency is one such skill that is crucial for graduates to succeed in the workforce (jääskelä et al., 2017; su in jääskelä et al., 2017). personal agency enables individuals to take control of their lives, set goals, and take responsibility for their actions. it also allows individuals to adapt to change and uncertainty in the professional realm, which is essential in today's rapidly evolving job market. recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of personal agency as a central aspect of professionalism (billett, 2019; grainger et al., 2019; jääskelä et al., 2017). higher education institutions must recognize the need for personal agency development and incorporate it into their curricula (billett, 2019; jääskelä et al., 2017). this can be achieved through various methods, such as experiential learning, reflective practices, and self-directed learning (billett, 2019; harri-augstein & thomas, 2017; moon, 2013). these methods help students to develop self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-efficacy, which are critical aspects of personal agency (jääskelä et al., 2017). in late 2019, the world underwent significant transformations as the workforce becomes more technologically advanced. people from all across the world experienced dramatic lifestyle changes, uncertainty, and persistent fear. offices, schools, and universities were forced to shut down (ali, 2020; patricia aguilera-hermida, 2020; yavani et al., 2022). for approximately two years, indonesian students at all educational levels studied from home due to pandemic-related restrictions (setiawan, 2020). within higher education, both faculty and students had to quickly adjust to these changes, including those in english departments (rahayu & yusuf, 2021). face-to-face meetings were replaced by online classes that heavily depended on the internet and digital technologies (firmansyah et al., 2020). students accessed their coursework through whatsapp groups, google classroom, moodle, and other platforms (wijayanti et al., 2020). in this learning environment, lecturers provided learning resources and guidelines, while students were expected to take charge of their own education (kuswanto et al., 2020). they were encouraged to find additional learning resources, read assigned materials within a specific timeframe, and manage their own assignments. online classes necessitated students to direct their own learning, which required a sense of 'agency' (rahayu & yusuf, 2021). according to van laar (2017), learner agency refers to the capacity to take action, which is influenced by various contextual factors such as social, interactional, cultural, and institutional factors. he also highlights three key aspects of learner agency: (a) the ability to take initiative and self-regulate, (b) a reliance on the context in which learning occurs, and (c) an awareness of one's responsibility for their actions within the environment in which learning takes place. jiang and zhang (2019) and other researchers define learning agency as the capacity to act, which is influenced by sociocultural factors. from an educational perspective, learner agency involves external and internal factors that contribute to decision-making and taking responsibility for learning (marín, de benito crosetti, & darder in martel and garcías, 2022). in their systematic literature review, marín et al. (2022) proposed a student agency as a paradigm when implementing technology-enhanced learning (tel) in higher education, providing frameworks that relate student agency with tel. figure 1. a model approach to the dimensions of student agency in tel within higher education (marín et al., 2022) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 239 the significance of student agency in technology-enhanced language learning (tell) during the covid-19 pandemic has been recently brought to light by research. for instance, a study by wang et al. (2021) discovered that online tell gave students the chance to be in charge of their education, make decisions, and collaborate with peers. another study by kukulska-hulme et al. (2020) emphasized the need for learner autonomy and agency in tell, especially during times of disruption like the pandemic. however, it is also important to consider the challenges and limitations of online tell. for instance, some studies have noted that learners may experience a lack of motivation or engagement in online learning settings (sun et al., 2021; yildirim et al., 2021). furthermore, issues of equity and access may arise, particularly for learners from disadvantaged backgrounds (warschauer & matuchniak, 2010). to address these challenges, researchers have proposed various strategies for promoting learner agency in online tell. these include the use of gamification and other motivational techniques (kapp, 2012), the integration of social media and other collaborative tools (kukulska-hulme & shield, 2018), and the development of learnercentered pedagogies (tynan et al., 2015). another study was carried out to look into the connection between student agency and technology-enhanced learning by knight and barbera (2018). they focused on learner's agency in computer-assisted language learning (call). their research findings reveal the presence of agency, specifically "directional agency," which pertains to navigational actions during language learning tasks (knight & barbera, 2018). according to marn et al. (2020), a variety of social software solutions provide students more agency by encouraging autonomy and participation in online communities where knowledge is co-created by students as they take on active roles and where ideas are exchanged. a number of agency dimensions related to learning are also identified by them, including learner autonomy, ownership of learning, self-regulation, learner control, engagement, motivation, reflection on learning, self-directed learning, student participation, logistical choices (technology, place, and time), and others. recent studies have also examined the value of technology-enhanced learning in fostering student agency and autonomy in a variety of educational environments, including al-samarraie et al. (2021) and nguyen et al. (2021). overall, current research highlights the importance of promoting learner agency in online tell during the covid-19 pandemic and beyond. while there are challenges and limitations to be addressed, there are also opportunities for innovation and pedagogical development in this area. the current research focuses on the development of student agency in technologyenhanced language learning, particularly among english department students who took online courses during the covid-19 pandemic. the study aims to address the gap in the literature on this topic by answering two main questions: (1) how did online learning during the pandemic contribute to the promotion of efl learners' agency? (2) what are the implications of the portrayal of efl learners' agency in online learning during the covid-19 pandemic for future learning practices? method the english language teaching department of a state islamic institute in cirebon, indonesia, used a qualitative research approach to examine the effects of online efl learning and teaching during the covid-19 epidemic on pre-service student teachers' understanding of student agency. purposive sampling was used to identify study participants, and online surveys with 20 items covering possibilities for choice, equality of treatment, involvement, interest and motivation, self-efficacy, teacher support, and peer support were used to gather data. 40 students, comprising 8 men and 38 women, who were high, average, and low performers and had taken two years of online courses, were given the survey using google form (marn et al., 2022). the gathered data were subjected to descriptive and visual analysis, and member checks were employed to guarantee the quality and reliability of the data. in keeping with the work of creswell (2014) and other specialists in qualitative research, the study aimed to increase student empowerment or agency and to track its impact on future language learning and instruction. with a focus on pre-service student teachers, the qualitative approach of the study allowed for a thorough comprehension of the complex phenomena of student agency in online efl learning and teaching during the covid-19 pandemic (jiang & zhang, 2019). however, based on data from students' language learning activities tedi rohadi, listiana ikawati, & muhsiyana nurul aisyiah exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic 240 in english language teaching for students preparing to become teachers, the study's restriction was focused on the topic of learner agency during the covid-19 pandemic (martel & garcas, 2022). however, the study's findings underline the value of encouraging student agency in efl teaching and learning activities, which is consistent with van lier's (2017) work and that of other academics who have emphasized the relevance of learner agency in the learning process. results and discussion in this study, the agency of students participating in online efl classes during the pandemic was examined. it made an effort to address two key issues: how online learning during the covid 19 pandemic aids in promoting efl learners' agency and what implications the portrayal of efl students' agency in pandemic-era online learning has for future efl learning. online learning during the covid 19 pandemic helps promote efl learners’ agency the survey's results are discussed in order to respond to the first research question. there are 20 statements in the survey, and they are divided into 7 agency factors. they include the ability to choose, fairness, engagement, interest, and motivation, as well as self-efficacy, teacher assistance, and peer support. the participants responded by selecting one of the four possible likert-scale options (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, and strongly agree) from a range of 1-4. following is a description of the findings for each factor. opportunities to make choices in online efl learning the questions about students’ opportunities to make choices are represented in two questions. they include how students choose their learning resources and ways to learn learning materials in online learning during the pandemic. the results are shown in the following figures. figure 1. students’ choices to determine the online resources in contrast, just a small percentage of students (10%) said they had no choice in the learning resources they used in their online courses during the covid 19 pandemic, according to figure 1. this feature is especially important for efl students nowadays because of the abundance of free authentic and non-authentic english learning resources available to them thanks to technological advancements. learning agencies enable efl students to take full advantage of the wealth of available language learning resources to accelerate their language acquisition. the results of this study are in line with earlier studies on the value of learner agency in language acquisition. jiang and zhang (2019), for instance, stressed the importance of learner agency in the growth of language competence since it empowers students to take charge of their education and engage in self-directed learning. in a similar vein, martel and garcas (2022) discovered that increasing student instructors' technological pedagogical topic knowledge is crucial for fostering learner agency in distant learning since it gives students the freedom to use technology to support their studies. research on the advantages of employing authentic and non-authentic resources in language learning also lends support to the study's findings. tomlinson (2012), for instance, made the case that using authentic materials increases learner motivation and engagement because it exposes students to language use in the actual world. similar to this, hafner and miller (2011) emphasized the advantages of non-authentic 40 answers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 241 resources in fostering learner autonomy and selfdirected learning, such as online games and quizzes. in conclusion, this study's findings regarding the value of learner agency and choice in online efl instruction during the covid-19 pandemic are consistent with earlier findings regarding the advantages of learner agency, the use of authentic and non-authentic materials in language learning, and the significance of technology in fostering learner autonomy. figure 2. students’ choices to determine ways to learn the materials similar to the finding on students’ choices to choose the learning resources, most of the students also agreed that they had choices to determine ways to learn language learning materials in online courses during the covid 19 pandemic. in contrast, few students (15%) stated that they did not have choices to decide ways they used to learn the learning materials. allowing students to determine how they learn the materials could promote greater engagement and motivation. for efl learners, this freedom can foster a more collaborative and supportive language learning environment. with the right guidance, collaboration increases opportunities for students to use english as much as they can when interacting with their peers. this freedom also allows students to use english learning tools that can support their language learning goals. allowing students to determine how they learn certainly helps efl teaching and learning to stay current and relevant. online efl learning during the pandemic gives students more freedom to choose the learning resources and ways to learn the materials. this is in line with lebenicnik, et al. (as cited in arapova, 2020) who argue that varied learning resources that are available online enable students to make the most suitable educational setting for their personalized learning and choices. equal treatment in online efl learning in the survey, there is only one question representing the treatment students get in online efl learning during the pandemic which is about the equal treatment that students get from their lecturers. the result can be seen as follows. figure 3. lecturers’ equal treatment to students 40 answers 40 answers tedi rohadi, listiana ikawati, & muhsiyana nurul aisyiah exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic 242 figure 3 indicates that most of the students (50%) shared the same idea that their lecturers treated students equally in online learning during the pandemic. however, there were few students stated that they were not treated equally by their lecturers. an example of how power relations mediate students’ learning experience can be seen from the students that are not treated equally by their teachers due to teacher expectation effects (denessen, et al., 2020). participation in online efl learning four questions were formulated to know students’ participation in online learning during the pandemic. participation covers students’ chance to ask questions, give opinions, take responsibility by being active participants, have the willingness to participate, and have the courage to express different views. figure 4. students’ chances to ask questions based on the data above, it can be seen most students (50%) fully agreed with the statement that they had chances to ask questions and give opinions in online courses during the covid 19 pandemic. only very few students (10%) disagreed with the statement. figure 5. students’ chances to give opinions similar to the responses in the previous statement, the students agreed that they got more chances to share their opinions in online courses during the covid 19 pandemic. encouraging efl learners to ask questions and express their opinions could be helpful to improve their language skills. asking and expressing opinions require learners to use more nuanced language to explain their ideas and justify their point of views. this could eventually help learners to expand their vocabulary and improve their grammar to express their ideas in various contexts. 40 answers 40 answers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 243 figure 6. students’ responsibility to be active participants figure 5 indicates that the majority of the students (50%) approved that they took responsibility by being active participants in online learning. on the contrary, a few students (27.5) argued that they did not take responsibility to be active participants. figure 7. students’ pleasure in taking initiative and collaborating in discussion the data presented in the figure aligns with the existing literature on the benefits of collaborative learning environments in efl education. many studies have emphasized that when students are encouraged to collaborate with their peers, they are more likely to engage in discussions and develop their language proficiency and confidence in utilizing the language. for example, li (2018) argued that collaborative learning can provide efl students with opportunities to communicate with peers, express their opinions, and negotiate meaning, which ultimately leads to improved language proficiency. moreover, collaborating with peers from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds can enhance students' intercultural communication skills, as noted by chen and chen (2018). they highlighted that by working with peers from different backgrounds, students learn to recognize cultural differences, adapt their communication style, and develop cultural sensitivity. figure 8. students' participation while having other obligations 40 answers 40 answers 40 answers tedi rohadi, listiana ikawati, & muhsiyana nurul aisyiah exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic 244 figure 8 demonstrates that the majority of students (52.5%) were willing to participate despite having other obligations. a few of them gave the opposite opinion that when they had other things to do, they were not willing to participate. figure 9. students’ courage to express different views on the learning materials the figure above reflects that most of the students (57.5%) are brave to share different opinions on the learning materials. nevertheless, a few of the students (27.5%) stated that they have no courage to share different opinions on the learning materials. the results of the survey on the participation factor indicate that online learning during the pandemic has made it possible for students to get more chances to express their ideas and to contribute more to class discussions. greeno (as cited in jääskelä, et al., 2017) points out that students’ changing involvement patterns are thought to affect how they regard themselves as learners, which influences how they take their learning ‘initiative and responsibility’. despite more chances available, a few students still found it difficult to commit to being active participants, to prioritize the courses, and to contest the learning materials. interest and motivation five significant factors are covered under the interest and motivation component. they consist of the students' motivation for learning, views on the course subject, desire to do well in the class, desire to learn the information, and persistence in learning. figure 10. students’ motivation to study in the course figure 10 indicates that the majority of students (50%) found that they were highly motivated to learn online learning during the pandemic. only 20% of the students responded that they did not have high motivation to study in the course. 40 answers 40 answers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 245 figure 11. students’ opinions on the course contents regarding students’ opinions on the course contents, most of the participants agreed that the contents of the courses were interesting. a few of them, on the other hand, found that the contents of the courses were not interesting for them. figure 12. students’ desire to succeed in the course figure 12 indicates that most of the students have the want to be successful in the course. 47.5% of the participants expressed their strong agreement to the statement and 42.5% of the participants justified it by giving their agreement on the same statement. figure 13. students’ desire to learn in order to understand the materials in line with the previous statement, students’ want to study in order to understand the materials can be seen in figure 13 above. most of the participants agreed that they had the desire to learn in order to understand the materials better. 40 answers 40 answers 40 answers tedi rohadi, listiana ikawati, & muhsiyana nurul aisyiah exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic 246 figure 14. students’ persistence in learning figure 14 demonstrates students’ persistence in learning. most of the students (60%) agreed that they had persistence in online learning during the pandemic. online learning during the pandemic can be said to successfully improve students’ interest and motivation in learning. this will lead to their positive views on the learning materials, learning desire, and persistence in learning. a similar idea was stated by waryanto (as cited in fajri et al., 2021) that one of the benefits of online learning is it can increase students’ motivation and interest to learn. self-efficacy the factor related to students’ self-efficacy is addressed in two statements. they are students’ belief in their competences to succeed in the courses and to complete challenging tasks in the courses. figure 15. students’ belief in their competences to succeed in the courses figure 15 demonstrates that the majority of students (52.5%) strongly agreed that they believed they could use their competences to succeed in the courses. only few students (10%) stating their disagreement on the statement. figure 16. students’ belief in their competences to complete challenging tasks in the courses 40 answers 40 answers 40 answers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 247 related to the previous statement, students’ beliefs on their competences to complete challenging tasks were also included. the results indicate that most of the students 52.5% believed they could use their competences to complete challenging tasks in the courses. in addition, if seen from the responses to the two statements regarding students’ self-efficacy, the number of students who disagreed with the statement was the same. it can be implied that those students giving their disagreements are the same. thus, students’ belief in their competence to succeed in the courses will reflect their efforts in using the competences to complete challenging tasks in the courses. students’ strong self-efficacy can promote well-being, motivation, and effort devotion. students with high self-efficacy tend to be happy, motivated, and dedicated to their work (jääskelä, et al., 2017). teacher support the teacher support factor is represented in two statements regarding lecturers’ positive attitudes to the students and students’ experience of being forced by their teachers. the result can be seen in the following figures. figure 17. lecturers’ positive attitudes to the students figure 17 represents lecturers’ positive attitudes toward the students. most of the students show positive responses to the statement. the same percentage of the students (47.5%) strongly agreed and agreed with the statement that they got positive attitudes from their lecturers. figure 18. students’ experience of being forced by their teachers despite the responses that students got positive attitudes from their lecturers, the responses on students’ experience of being forced by their lecturers indicate that the majority of the students (52.5%) experienced force from their lecturers. despite the positive support that students got from the lecturers, the majority of students claimed that they had experiences of being forced by their lecturers. this indicates that students’ learning motivation has not been maintained well. a similar idea is given by (ryan, r. m., & deci, 2000)ryan & deci (2019) stating that individuals’ ‘intrinsic motivation’ is sustained when they have the freedom to voluntarily act on something without any outside pressure. peer support besides peer support, one of the factors in agency also addresses how students support each other’s learning. the statements related to peer support 40 answers 40 answers tedi rohadi, listiana ikawati, & muhsiyana nurul aisyiah exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic 248 involve students’ learning support from their peer’s experience and students’ reciprocal assistance in dealing with learning difficulties. figure 19. students’ learning support from their peers’ experiences figure 19 shows that the majority of students (50%) approved that they could learn from their friends’ experiences. only very few students showed their disagreement to the statement. figure 20. students’ reciprocal assistance in dealing with learning difficulties the data in figure 20 show that most of the students (50%) agreed that they gave reciprocal assistance in dealing with each other’s learning difficulties. it implies that in online learning where students cannot involve in face-to-face interaction, they can still help each other’s learning difficulties. to practice agency, teacherstudents’ and students-students’ mutual relationships and students’ ability to collaborate are the key components (greeno; lipponen and kumpulainen; edward as cited in jääskelä, et al. 2017). in conclusion, online learning during the pandemic has given students more authority to develop their agency. the survey results indicate that most of the students gave positive responses to the statements regarding agency factors. in addition, the results also show that there are interrelated relationships between one factor of agency and another. for example, the students who feel that they are given more opportunities to make choices and teacher support in the learning process will be more motivated to learn and more confident to make use of their competences to take the initiative and participate in efl teaching and learning. however, to achieve a fruitful result, thorough development of agency domains by accommodating all related factors should be done. the survey results show that even if the lecturers already have provided more choices for students in learning when students still feel they are oppressed in the learning process it shows that the students have not fully developed their agency and their motivation may not be maintained well. in short, the potential of people to take purposeful, individuals-defined, useful, and self-directed action that is limited by power dynamics and structural, contextual elements is highlighted by these concepts of agency (jääskelä, et al., 2017). online learning during the pandemic which creates a learning environment for students that enable them to 40 answers 40 answers english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 249 express their preferences and actions to deal with their own learning problems and goals can promote students’ agency. implications of efl learners' agency during covid-19 for future efl education. the portrayal of efl learners' agency in online learning during the pandemic provides several insights for future learning, as explained below. students can achieve success if they cultivate their agency, which allows them to identify learning challenges, competencies, goals, and develop self-regulated learning strategies to accomplish their objectives. higher education curricula are increasingly focusing on empowering students to create their own learning environments and build their capacity for selfregulation, goal-setting, and responsibility acceptance (lebeničnik et al., 2015). efl training shouldn't just focus on mastering subject matter knowledge in order to promote agency. teachers must also give kids chances to develop and explore their agency. students can better develop their identities as learners and potential professionals in a learning environment that promotes involvement, influence, and acknowledgement of individual abilities, preferences, aspirations, and resources (marin et al., 2020). moreover, relational agency, one aspect of agency, addresses the power dynamics between teachers and students. these dynamics encompass not only teacher-student relationships but also student-to-student interactions. providing students with more choices is insufficient; educators must minimize pressure on students by nurturing their agency. by assisting students in developing their agency, they will be more willing to engage in the teaching and learning process, and oppressive elements can be eradicated. educators should establish learning environments that foster students' agency development. lipponen & kumpulainen (2011) argue that teachers require relational agency, which relates to their ability to collaborate and offer mutual support. finally, as the study participants were teacher candidates, it is crucial to develop their agency to serve as role models for their future students and share their experiences in agency development. the initial stage of teacher education should prioritize cultivating teacher candidates' agency (marin et al., 2020). agentic teachers play a vital role in educational changes, as agency is concerned with how individuals respond to challenging situations (toivola et al., 2022). overall, current research highlights the importance of promoting learner agency in online tell during the covid-19 pandemic and beyond. while there are challenges and limitations to be addressed, there are also opportunities for innovation and pedagogical development in this area. conclusion the self-reported questionnaire results suggest that the online efl learning and teaching relying heavily on the internet and digital technologies during the covid 19 pandemic encouraged students to develop a sense of agency. most preservice teacher students perceived that they were given choices to determine ways of learning the language and which learning resources they wanted to use. by having agency, students have the sense on how they can utilize the abundant english learning materials they can access for free as well as to use english learning tools to achieve their language learning goals. this is an important indicator of learners’ agency because at the heart of agency is the ability to make choices. the research results also suggest that online courses provided chances for students to receive equal treatment and participate in collaborative learning. collaborative learning activities are essential for efl learners as they allow them to practice using the learned language in authentic contexts. finally, for online courses to effectively foster the agency of efl learners, they must encourage students to assume responsibility for their own language learning, to set language learning objectives, to identify their own learning preferences and strengths, and to forge their identities as learners and 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(2021). the impact of online learning on students’ academic performance during the covid-19 pandemic: a case study. journal of educational technology systems, 49(1), 73-85. tedi rohadi, listiana ikawati, & muhsiyana nurul aisyiah exploring efl learners’ agency in online english language teaching during the covid 19 pandemic 252 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 59 need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes audi yundayani english education department,sekolah tinggi keguruan ilmu pendidikan kusuma negara, jakarta, indonesia e-mail: audi_yundayani@stkipkusumanegara.ac.id emzir language education, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id zainal rafli language education, postgraduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: zainal.rafli@unj.ac.id apa citation: yundayani, a., emzir, & rafli, z. (2017). need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 59-70. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.771. received: 26-08-2017 accepted: 24-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: the required instructional material should be designed based on students’ needs. this study is intended toidentify 1) material design and organization,2)language content, and 3) method and techniqueof the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes which appropriate with students’characteristics and their situationrelated to the need of writing skills for academic purposes at non-english education study programs of stkip kusuma negara jakarta. the descriptive survey was used in identifying its’ material context through questionnaire, semi-structured interview and non-participant observation. the respondents were non-english education study programs students duringthe fifth semester in academicyear of 2016-2017.the result showed that 1) it is required to have clear and easily understandable writing instructional material for academic purposes; 2) the required language content is related to a)rhetorical-functional (descriptive, narrative, classifying and identifying); b) academic genres, in the forms of essay and report; c)writing process; d) summarizing; e) paraphrasing; 3) the method and techniques which are applied to instructional material must empower thestudents to practice a lot through communicative and applicative activities. based on the findings, it can be concluded that need analysis should be the starting point in designing the instructional material, due to it is a process to determine students’ needs according to their wants, lacks, and necessities. keywords: need analysis, writing for academic purposes, instructional material context introduction need analysis required as the main driving factor to design the whole component of teaching and learning process, including the instructional material. the area of need analysis covers present situation analysis, target situation analysis, and learning context analysis. learning context analysis involves some consideration to the teachersconcerning with the methods, the materials, the facilities and the connection of the course implementation with the students’ background and learning goals. need analysis is the cornerstone of esp that leads to a very focused course (dudleyevans & st. john, 1998). it can be seen as a process to assess students’ communicative needs in order to achieve specific learning objective. the aim of need analysis is to collect the information concerning students in order to define the target situation and environment of studying esp (otilia, 2015). as the instrument to establish how and what the learning process will be held, need analysis covers many aspects of teaching and learning audi yundayani, emzir, & zainal rafli need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes 60 process including students’ background, students’ current language proficiency,students’ purpose in learning english, etc. the first step in designing language course is the need analysis implementation that covers: 1) the target situation analysis which informs the objective and productoriented needs, also the skills and language required for the context in which students will use the english; 2) the learning situation which provides information about subjective needs; 3) the means analysis which provides information about the educational contexts (benavent & sánchez-reyes, 2015). this statement emphasises hyland’s view concerning with a framework for need analysis which is divided into 1) present situation analysis that concerns with students’ current condition or backgrounds, including the objective data (age, previous learning experience, etc) and subjective data (students’ weaknesses, strengths, etc); and 2) target situation analysis that focuses on students’ roles, skills and knowledge (hyland, 2006). a portray of the learning goals will be formed by the result of need analysis and it will require teacher’s belief, value, and philosophies of teaching. by the end, they will develop the whole component of learning and teaching process properly. barnard and zemach in tomlinson said that one of english teaching areas is english for specific purposes (esp) that can be seen as the selection of teaching content and approach according to perceived needs of the students (tomlinson, 2003). esp is focused on english teaching and learning process related to the particular job or study-related cause. english for academic purposes (eap), as a branch of esp, provides students with proper english skills that are required in a tertiarylevel study or college level, including the way of presenting, researching, and publishing in academic field. the key element in all communication including in writing for academic purposes is knowing and understanding about the genre. it involves the understanding of the expectations of the discourse community that reads the text and of the conventions related with structure, the language and the rhetoric of the genre (dudley-evans & st john, 1998). eap required to complete academic demands, one of them is writing for academic purposes. it occupies some approaches applied: 1) product approach; 2) process approach; and 3) summarising, paraphrasing and synthesizing. product approach provides a model and various exercises. it is divided into 1) rhetorical-functional covers language functions; the main ones are description (including processes and sequencing), narrative, instruction, explanation, definition, exemplification, classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, expressing, generalisation and specificity, discussion and argumentation (problem and solution), drawing conclusions; 2) academic genres include essays, reports, case studies, projects, literature reviews, exam answers, research papers/articles, dissertations, and theses. jordan stresses that academic discourse genres and the range and nature of academic writing tasks aimed at supporting students to socialize into the academic context. process approach emphasizes in composing processes in writing through the recursive cycle. it means that the students will plan, draft, and edit but then it will be required re-plan, re-draft, and re-edit. summarising, paraphrasing and synthesizing are important aspects of academic writingrequired in the field of academic purposes. they relate to academic reading by providing meaningful insights of how students present their reading result from the source text to writing (jordan, 1997). the concept of writing approaches is clearly in the term of product approach, process approach, including summarising, paraphrasing and synthesizing. it can be concluded that writing for academic purposes is often seen as the process of thinking, constructing and revising, including developing the concept. in doing it, students must realize that they will need several efforts, from drafting, correcting, and amendingthe text continuously until the writing product is proper. in the area of english academic purposes, the students’ competence in writing for academic purposes required in the college english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 61 level learning process. it is seen not just as a standardized system of communication but also as an essential tool for students in constructing new knowledge. it also can be seen as a means to know students’ competency, students’ personal interest, and academic performance. moreover, writing can be seen as the result of thinking, concept development, and revision. it requires special skills to explore writers’ ideas to be presented and to be understood. writing for academic purposes is different from writing skill at high school level. it often causes students get difficulties in practicing it. some studies showed the inadequacy of writing skill for academic purposes in university level, including the expectations of applying it. most of the problems appear due to students’ failure to understand the difference of learning goal between high school and university which initiate students into the scope of writing skill for academic purposes (ivanic & lea, 2006; lilis & scott, 2007). concerning that statement, many factors of learning components must be applied based on the students’ requirement in achieving the expected goal related to writing for academic purposes. the material can be anything that used to assist english learning process. it can be the instructional, experiential, or exploratory as long as it can inform the students about the language use, provide the experience of the language in use, stimulate language use and support the students to discover the language based on their needs (tomlinson, 2003). in deciding the suitable material, teachers’ creativity and understanding to the students’ needs are the most important aspect. the chosen material used to ease students’ understanding of the learning content and context. cunningsworth states that in the scope of english language teaching, the instructional material should have multiple roles: 1) a resource for presentation materials (spoken and written). it can give the information concerning the presented materials; 2) a source of activities for student practice and communicative interaction. it should guide the students to practice the language using; 3) a reference source for students on grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. the instructional material must give the information about language component; 4) a source of stimulation and ideas for classroom language activities. not only as the knowledge source, the instructional material must stimulate the students by providing suitable information and presenting some learning activities to strengthen students’ comprehension of language use; 5) a syllabus (where they reflect learning objectives which have already been determined). it can be the reference how to carry out the english learning process; 6) a resource for selfdirected learning or self-access work. the instructional material should be a source for students to be able to study independently, so it is important to ensure that the information and the instruction presented is quite clear; 7) a support for less experienced teachers who have yet to gain in confidence. not only for students, the instructional material also can be as a support for teachers and lecturers to know what and how should be taught (cunningsworth, 1995, p. 6). in the area of esp, dudley-evans and st. john (1998) suggest that the materials have some functions: 1) as a source of language. due to english as a foreign language that studied, it requires a means that can be as a source in learning english; 2) as a learning support. the instructional material should help the learning process by giving the information, guidance in order to enhance students comprehension; 3) for motivation and stimulation. the instructional material should motivate and stimulate the students through its content and context. good material can encourage students to learn through: 1) its interesting texts; 2) enjoyable activities which engage the students’ thinking capacities; 3) opportunities for students to use their existing knowledge and skills; and 4) content which both students and lecturers can cope this (hutchinson & waters, 1987, p. 107). instructional material context involves consideration of some criteria: 1) aims and approach. it relates to a degree of correspondence to the students’ needs; 2) bibliographic features. it shows the quality and availability of the package; 3) design. it shows audi yundayani, emzir, & zainal rafli need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes 62 the attractiveness of the layout, visual appeal, readability and instructions clarity; 4) organization. this relates to sequencing and progression of suitable exercises, units, and proficiency level; 5) content. it shows a degree of authenticity, relevance, and appropriacy of the text genres; 6) methodology. it will extend to which tasks, exercises, and methods which are appropriate to students’ proficiencies and goals; 7) usability. this relates to flexibility, completeness, and feasibility of the materials; and 8) overall. it relates to the general quality of the text and its suitability for the purpose (hyland, 2003, p. 98). the context of the instructional material can be a consideration in determining the suitability between its role, orientation, and students’ needs. the instructional material of writing skills for academic purposes should be tailored based on students’ needs and learning objectives. in selecting the instructional material of writing skills for academic purposes, there are some requirements that should be considered; 1) the topic should make the students interested, culturally acceptable, and in line with the learning objectives; 2) the expected type of writing; 3) methods of generating ideas, whether through brainstorming, freewriting, listing, mapping, outlining which are appropriate for the students; 4) instruction for writing that will help the students to organize various types of writing, such as letters, description, narration, exposition, arguments and what students need to be practiced; 5) opportunities to collaborate in writing; 6) opportunities to revise which encourage students to do the various stages in writing process; 7) instruction in editing and proofreading. what students learn concerning with finding and editing their errors in writing (richards & renandya, 2003, pp. 311-312). instructional material plays a very special role in constructing students’ knowledge and understanding by providing much access to specialized knowledge and skills. it can be a source to help the students to construct the mental representation, including writing skill for academic purposes. based on the observation at non-english education study programs of stkip kusuma negara jakarta, it was found that the writing skill instructional materials for the academic purposes have not been designed and developed based on students’ needs. need analysis have not been implemented. it causes students having low performance in writing skill for academic purposes. most of them didn’t have any motivation to be involved and to be active in class since they did not understand the essence of presented materials. the writing skills of the students are alarmingly weak and substandard. the majority problem is due toincompetence in syntax, coherence,idea expansion, content selection, topic sentence, rhetorical conventions, mechanics, organization, lack of vocabulary, inappropriate use of vocabulary (fareed, ashraf, & bilal,2016). that condition can be solved through the suitable instructional material use as one of the learning sources. this current studyexplores students’ perceptions and examine their opinions concerning with required writing skills instructional material’ context for academic purposes. it will bring the basicinformation as further inquiry and suitable solution in developing instructional material, especially in writing skills for academic purposes. method the study aims to determine students’ need related to writing skill instructional materials’ context for academic purposes. this descriptive research involved the fifthsemester students of non-english education study programs at stkip kusuma negara jakarta. 100 non-english education study programs students participated in demanding their perception concerning the writing skill instructional materials’ context for academic purposes. the purposive sampling method was used to determine the respondents.the data were collected throughnon-participant observation, questionnaire survey, and semistructured interviews. the researcher observed the students in the english class to know the real condition of english learning process, including the students’ performance and the use of previous writing skill instructional material for academic purposes. the questionnaire used to english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 63 know students’ perceptionrelated to writing skill instructional materials’ context for academic purposes. the data obtained from the questionnaire were analyzed then summarize in the table form. in addition, the semi-structured interview was applied to get deeper information from students’ conceptions of instructional material context. the interviews with the students were done after questionnaire. the interviews were applied to find the problem more openly by asking for opinions and ideas from respondents. the data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. it is quantitative in terms ofdisplayingquestionnaire’s result. meanwhile, it is quantitative in dealing with the collected data reduction, data display, and conclusion. qualitative data analysis is an interpretive process, researcher reflect on their personal viewpoints and how they shape their interpretations of the data (clark & creswell, 2015, p. 364). results and discussion need analysis of learning material context is a process to find students’ expectations and needs by identifying the effective way of instructional material context to be presented. the series of learning needs to be prepared and adapted should be based on the characteristics of studentswhichwere summarized and arranged to achieve the objectives of certainlyexpected competencies. this step can be seen as a process to identify the needs of instructional materials related to writing skill for academic purposes in accordance with the studentscharacteristics, background, and their environmental setting.the indicators of instructional material context analysiscovered, (1) design and organization; (2) language content; and (3) method and techniques applied in instructional material. design and organization students’ comprehension of the material will be determined by the instructional design and organization. students should feel ease in using the instructional material, in other words, the instructional material must be presented according to the students’ requirement. the structure, function, skill presented based on its’ complexity, needs, objectives, difficulties, and usability are the important aspectsof designing and organizing the instructional materials. the design and organization of writing skill materials for academic purposes should be easy to be understood by the students. it should give clear guidance and progressive reinforcement, so the students will have selfconfidence to study the given instructional material personally. students’ perceptions based on their needs should be the basis to design and organize the instructional material. table1. students’ perceptions of design and organization applied in instructional material no indicators percentage of needs demand design and organization 1 instructional materials composition of writing for academic purposes based on the structure, function, topic and skills aspects in accordance with the needs of students. 87 % needed 2 instructional materials composition of writing for academic purposes based on the order of complexity, needs, objectives, difficulties, functions and usability. 80 % needed 3 the display of instructional materials to writing for academic purposes should be clear and easy to understand. 87 % needed 4 instructional materials of writing for academic purposes should provide various exercises and tasks. 80 % needed 5 many template of english writing for academic purposes is required. 87 % needed 6 evaluation of instructional materials of writing for academic purposes should be done periodically. 86 % needed 7 clear guidance of instructional materials of writing for academic purposes is required, so students can learn 85 % needed audi yundayani, emzir, & zainal rafli need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes 64 independently. the table shows that the whole components of the instructional materials’design and organization should be organized according to the structure, function, topic and skill aspects required by the students based on the order of complexity, needs, objectives, difficulties, functions, and uses. the questionnaire result was strengthened by the interview results. the interview results showed that the students also need instructional materials thatprovide english language writing models for academic purposes that can be used as examples, as well as various exercises and assignments to support the students’ mastery in writing skill for academic purposes. clear guidance in instructional materials of writing for academic purposes is also required by students as a guidence for autonomous learning, including the need for the instructional materials evaluation. it is important to confirm that the instructional material design and organization of writing for academic purposes should be systematic and student-friendly. the composition of the instructional material should be in line with students’ needs. the way in designing and organizing the instructional material gives impact to students’ understanding and motivation in learning. as a learning aid, it is important to make sure that the designed instructional material can support teaching and learning process. all of the units and exercises should be well linked in terms of theme, situation, function, and topic of writing for academic purposes development, including the order of complexity, needs, objectives, difficulties, and usability of the instructional material. as a productive skill, writing must be practiced a lot. students should be motivated to rehearse through the instructional material. to achieve the ability in writing for academic purposes, students require clear, easy and various exercises and taskswhich can make them develop their performance. exercises and tasks are ways to explore students’ learning experiences and their achievement in writing skills. to enhance the learning goal, the instructional material should provide many templates of english writing for academic purposes.in writing, many given templates in instructional material required toportray students’ attention to its important features, then they are required to produce a similar or parallel text. instructional materials evaluation of writing for academic purposes should be done periodically.it is required by the students in order to measure the suitability of the instructional material with the students’ needs. the things that must be evaluated cover many thingssuch as, the instructional material capability to motivate the students, the impact of the instructional materials, the practicality and clarity of the instructional material, etc. the description above shows us how instructional material should be designed and organized based on the students’ perception. design and organization of the instructional material can be seen as the important performance to attract students’ attention in using the instructional material. by providing clear guidance, good composition, and proper display, the instructional material of writing for academic purposes should be as a source to increase students’ knowledge and skills in order to achieve the learning goals. language content language content in writing skill instructional material for academic purposes concerns with what is being taught. it should be compared with what the students’ need to learn and expect to learn based on their lack, want and necessities in the area of writing for academic purposes. students should realize the relevant and benefit of instructional material content. the students will be motivated in learning when the content of the instructional material related to their interests and their need to perform in the academic field. teachers should notice the impact of given instructional material, especially the language content. it is important to assign the language content that will develop students’ curiosity, interest, and attention in learning. so by the end, the students’ competency will increase. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 65 in the area of writing for academic purposes, the content of instructional material can be the product appoach in term of rhetorical-functional and academic genres, the process approach that will view writing as a creative process, including summarising and paraphrasing. all of the content in the instructional material should be in line with the academic field. table 2. students’ perceptions of language content assigned in instructional material no indicators percentage of needs demand language content 1 the integration of instructional materials of writing for academic purposes with other language skills in accordance with the learning objectives. 81 % needed 2 writing process materials in terms of: 1) exploring ideas; 2) prewriting; 3) organizing; 3) writing first draft; 4) revising; 5) producing the final copy; 6) editing; 7) proofreading. 86 % needed 3 academic genres materials 83 % needed 1) essays 82 % needed 2) reports 80 % needed 3) case studies 50 % not yet needed 4) projects 63 % not yet needed 5) literature reviews 42 % not yet needed 6) exam answers 46 % not yet needed 7) research papers/articles 46 % not yet needed 8) skripsi/theses 44 % not yet needed 4 rhetorical-functional materials 81 % needed 1) description 82 % needed 2) narration 83 % needed 3) instruction 58 % not yet needed 4) explanation 65 % not yet needed 5) definition 82 % needed 6) exemplification 46 % not yet needed 7) classification 82 % needed 8) comparison and contrast 59 % not yet needed 9) cause and effect 59 % not yet needed 10) expressing: purpose, means, prediction, expectancy, reservation, result 40 % not yet needed 11) generalisation and specificity 40 % not yet needed 12) discussion and argumentation (problem and solution) 57 % not yet needed 13) drawing conclusions 48 % not yet needed 5 materials related to applying quotation, footnotes and bibliography 68 % not yet needed 6 materials related to finding and analysing data 63 % not yet needed the previous topics are the essence derived from the entire teaching materials related to writing skills for academic purposes. meanwhile, through the questionnaire and interviews, the researchers also seek the information concerning with the most required language content that should be assigned tothe instructional material. the result of students perceptions shows the most required language content that must be covered in the instructional material by minimum 80%, the percentage of the students’ needs. less than 80% means students have not needed them in this short time according to the learning goal in the academic field. the students need instructional materials of writing for academic purposes that are integrated with other language skills.writing for academic purposes requires input that can be from much varieties of the reading text since it can give the positive impact for students in constructing and composing the written information. writing is the process of constructing any information and knowledge, including concept development. by integrating writing skills with other language skills in the audi yundayani, emzir, & zainal rafli need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes 66 instructional material, it can give comprehensive stimulus to develop students’ ability in writing. the combination of receptive and productive skills in the instructional material provide rich and varied input and stimulus in order to facilitate students’ proficiency in writing foracademic purposes. students require writing skills for academic purposes that include writing skills with a product and process approach. for writing skills with a product approach, itshould be focused on the academic genrethat includes essay writing and reports, while for rhetorical-functional, itshould be focused on descriptive, narrative, definition and classification skills. for writing skills with a process approach, the given material related to the stages of the writing process from exploring ideas, prewriting, organizing, writing the first draft, revising the draft, producing the final copy, editing, and proofreading. product approach in writing concerns with the products. many provided models draw attention to its important and required features as the template. students practice through the provided template that describes how and what the students could write.the required genre based on students’ perceptions shows the students’ purposes in writing. they have certain goals and informationto be conveyed based on the learning requirement. on the other hand, process approach in writing as the mental process emphasizes on the process of composing which should be utilized by the students. it focuses on students-centredness by allowing them to express personally started from planning, drafting, rethinking, revising, etc. through the process approach, students learn how to build writing strategies by following some phases to produce a clear, comprehensive and understandable text. the result of the interview informed that students also require the ability to write summary and paraphrasing. in the area of academic purposes, ability in making summary and paraphrasing are the important aspects. students should comprehend the given information and re-write it by using their own words, style and also structure. the most important aspect of summary and paraphrasing is the content or the message that should be delivered. it is amust for the writer and the reader having the same perception and understanding concerning the written information presented. by the end, the language content should deliver the material in order to develop students’ writing ability and applicative in the field of the academic context. it should be related to students’ study skills in which one of them covers writing for academic purposes as the productive skill. integrated language skills should strengthen the instructional material in order to stimulate students due to students’ proficiency in writing for academic purposes. the product and process approach in writing are required by the students to be found in the instructional material of writing for academic purposes which covers; 1) some rhetorical-functional in the form of descriptive, narrative, explanation and definition, 2) academic genre in the form of essay and report, 3) writing process, 4) summary, and 5) paraphrasing. method and technique method and technique applied in the instructional material should give the opportunities for the students to practice a lot. it has to deliver the students toachieve communicative and applicative ability in writing for academic purposes. implemented method and technique in the instructional material should expose the students to practice their writing skill in the authentic and real use. the applied method and technique can be seen as the stimulus to expose the students’ writing ability for academic purposes. table 3. students’ perceptions of method and technique implemented in instructional material no indicators percentage of needs demand methods and techniques 1 question and answer 87 % needed 2 matching activity 81 % needed english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 67 3 communicating strategies 82 % needed 4 pictures and picture stories 86 % needed 5 puzzles and problems 78 % not yet needed 6 discussions and decisions 86 % needed 7 jigsaw 67 % not yet needed 8 information gap 65 % not yet needed 9 problem-solving 87 % needed 10 decision making 85 % needed 11 opinion exchange 87 % needed 12 taking notes 76 % not yet needed 13 concept mapping 86 % needed 14 inferencing 86 % needed 15 discriminating 82 % needed 16 diagramming 71 % not yet needed 17 co-operating 87 % needed 18 using context 73 % not yet needed 19 summarising 81 % needed 20 personalizing 84 % needed 21 self-evaluating 86 % needed 22 reflecting 80 % needed 23 brainstorming 84 % needed 24 mapping it out 84 % needed 25 reorganizing the information 82 % needed 26 completing documents 73 % not yet needed 27 previewing 80 % needed 80 % as the result of students’ perception means that the presented method and technique required by the students to be applied in the instructional material of writing for academic purposes. less than 80 % means that the presented method and technique have not been needed by the students. related to the students’ perception concerning with methods and techniques that should be implemented in instructional material, it was found that methods and techniques of presenting writing instructional materialsfor academic purposes required by students werefocused on assigning tasks or direct practice. in addition, students tended to require techniques that will make them interact with other students. various techniques such as question and answer, discussions and decisions, problem-solving, decision making, opinion exchange, concept mapping, summarizing, using knowledge to learn something (inference), self-evaluating and brainstormingwere needed by students. the finding shows that language learning is accepted more than a set of grammatical rules that should be understoodor many vocabularies that should be memorized by the students. they see the process of language learning as a dynamic process for creating meaning in practicing language skill including writing for academic purposes. due to the students’ expectation, the applied method and technique should be a process of habit formation through many activities, both in exercises and tasks. by the end, the students are not only to know what the writing for academic purposes is but also to know how to write for academic purposes. the various techniques applied in the instructional material were seen as a tool for communication rather than as a set of theoretical term. students require the opportunities to enhance their personal experience related to writing skill for academic purposes through the provided techniques applied in instructional material. various and attractive techniques were seen as a way to link the language learning process and language use.as a learning source, the instructional material should give positive impact for the students in writing skill mastery for academic purposes. by the provided methods and techniques in instructional material, students realize that being mastery in writing skill for academic purposes requires active learning, many practices, emotional experiences, audi yundayani, emzir, & zainal rafli need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes 68 thinking process and communicative competence. applied methods and techniques in instructional material required by the students can be seen as a part of communicative exercise principle; the process of learning by doing. the required techniques focus on student-centered and the teacher’s role should be the instructor, organizer, advisor, designer including the manager in the learning process. the required methods and techniques should be authenticity and also problem-solving. by the end, the students’ need and their learning goal in writing for academic purposes will be fulfilled easily due to the design of the instructional material based on the result of need analysis as the basis. based on the results of the questionnaire and observations conducted by the researchers, there are some important findings related to students’ perceptions concerning with instructional materials context of writing skill for academic purposes. re-examining the literature provided in deciding the suitable material, teachers’ understanding of the students’ needs are the most important aspects. related to that, instructional materials’ design and organization should be organized according to the structure, function, topic and skills aspects required by students based on the order of complexity, needs, objectives, difficulties, functions, and uses. the important thing concerning with the language content, students have perceptions that the content of instructional materials of writing for academic purposes should be integrated with other language skills. they need writing materials for academic purposes presented through product and process approach, including summarising and paraphrasing. the product approach should be focused on the academic genresthat includeessay writing and reports, while for rhetorical-functional;itshould be focused on descriptive, narrative, definition and classification skills. for writing skills with a process approach, the material given should be related to the stages of the writing process from exploring ideas, prewriting, organizing, writing the first draft, revising the draft, producing the final copy, editing, and proofreading.the finding in line with the multiple roles of instructional material in the scope of english language teaching. as the source and reference, the instructional material should give the information about the writing skills required by the students. in addition, it should stimulate and motivate the students. to obtain those, it is important to design the content of instructional material based on the students’ needs. students’ perception shows that the methods and techniques applied in the instructional material should give students the opportunities to practice a lot, in other words, it should be communicative and applicative based on student-centered learning approach. as the source of activities for students practice, the applied techniques should present some learning activities to strengthen students’ comprehension in writing for academic purposes. students prefer to use various techniques through communicative interaction. this finding in line with the material roles in which the instructional material should guide the students to practice the language use and to be a source of stimulation and ideas for classroom language activities. by the end, methods and techniques applied in the instructional material of writing skill for academic purposes should be various, attractive, applicative and focus on communicative interaction based on students’ need so that it will give the positive impact in enhancing students’ motivation, performance, and competency in writing skill for academic purposes. conclusion in conclusion, writing proficiency for academic purposes should be mastered by undergraduate students. it is important to provide any learning components to enhance students’ mastery in writing for academic purposes. one of them is instructional materials as the learningsource. the context of instructional materialsshould be developed based on the need analysis focused on studentcentered approach. the findingsinform the teachers or the curriculum designers to identify students’ perspective by promoting their critical awareness in relationto english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 69 instructional materials context, and it helps them to uplift their knowledge and skill in writing for academic purposes. the context of instructional materials must be relevant to students’ learning goal, especially in writing for academic purposes. by the end, it is a must to make sure that the designed instructional materials should be focused on communicative competence. therefore, need analysis is the ground on which instructional materials can be developed in order to lead students’ motivation and proficiency in writing skill for academic purposes. references benavent, g. t.,& sánchez-reyes, s. (2015).target situation as a key element for esp (law enforcement) syllabus design. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 173, 143 – 148. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.02.044 clark, v. l. p.,& creswell, j. w. (2015). understanding research: a consumer’s guide(2nd ed.). nj: pearson education, inc. cunningsworth, a. (1995). choosing your coursebook. oxford: macmillan education. dudley-evans, t.,& st john, m. (1998). developments in english for specific purposes. cambridge: cambridge university press. fareed, m., ashraf, a.,& bilal, m. (2016). esl learners’ writing skills: problems, factors and suggestions.journal ofeducation and social sciences, 4(2), 81 – 92. doi: 10.20547/jess0421604201. hutchinson, t., &waters, a. (1987).english for specific purposes: a learning-centered approach. new york: cambridge university press. hyland, k. (2003). second language writing. new york: cambridge university press. hyland, k. (2006). english for academic purposes. oxon: routledge. ivanic, r., &lea, m. r. (2006). new contexts, new challenges: the teaching of writing in uk higher education. in l. ganobcsikwilliams (ed.), teaching academic writing in uk higher education: theories, practice and models. london:palgrave/macmillan. jordan, r.r. (1997). english for academic purposes: a guide and resource book for teacher. cambridge: cambridge university press. lilis, t., & scott, m. (2007). defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy.journal of applied linguistics, 4(1), 5–32.doi: 10.1558/japl.v4i1.5 otilia, s. m. (2015).needs analysis in english for specific purposes. annals of theconstantin brâncuşiuniversity of târgu jiu, economy series, 1 (ii). richards, j. c.,& renandya, w. a. (2003).methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice.cambridge: cambridge university press. tomlinson, b. (2003). developing materials for language teaching. gb: cromwell press. audi yundayani, emzir, & zainal rafli need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes 70 1 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee teaching gender awareness through fairy tales in the efl classroom arisa kochiyama wayo women’s university, japan. e-mail: kochiyama@wayo.ac.jp apa citation: kochiyama, a. (2013). teaching gender awareness through fairy tales in the efl classroom. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 1-7 received: 04-09-2013 accepted: 29-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: the purpose of this study is to explore how gender has been portrayed historically and in current times in fairy tales and then to introduce the effectiveness of using fairy tales in language instruction. while some instructors may still believe that teaching efl encompasses focusing on linguistic elements only, recent trend in efl teaching indicates the necessity of integrating literature in the curricula because of its rich potential to provide an authentic model of language use as well as its universal themes within human history. traditional fairy tales and modern ones can allow students to think critically about how men and women are portrayed and to compare these portrayals with their own communities. it is hoped that discussion of the topic of gender issues can help students foster critical thinking and literacy and empower them with a further understanding of gender notions in their lives. keywords: intercultural communication, english as a second language, efl classroom introduction children’s literature, in addition to being one of the favorite choices for reading among students as they are growing up, is commonly used in the context of reading practices in esl/ efl classrooms (lazar 1993). while some teachers tend to employ picture books and fairy tales because they think these materials provide students with an authentic model of language as well as the cultural information of target language, others point out that gender bias is still prevalent in children’s literature and fairy tales (kuo 2005). gender bias is evident in fairy tales and children’s literature as the males are seen as the rough, tough, adventurous, fighting, prince, heroic character while females are the sweet, beautiful princess, helpless, motherly, cleanly, damsel in distress. though these roles are fun for story books they do not give readers a skewed perception on what their role should be in their real lives (archer 2008). among fairy tales, disney stories and movies are extremely popular and children for generations have grown up reading and watching them. cook claims that although the stories are magical and fun they do show gender stereotypes and send incorrect messages to young children concerning their ability based on their gender creating gender stereotypes and influencing their attitudes and behaviors. disney is harmful not only with their production of books and movies but also with their variety of products consumed all over the world. sales at disney consumer products, which started the craze in 2000 by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally in 2006. there are now more than 25000 disney princess items. orenstein (2006) wrote how the toys and media industries had turned girls into “hypergendered” consumers. orenstein, along with her 3-year-old daughter for her experiment, had to smile politely every time the supermarket-checkout arisa kochiyama teaching gender awareness through fairy tales in the efl classroom 2 clerk greeted her with “hi, princess,” ignored the waitress at their local breakfast joint who called the funnyface pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”. but when the dentist pointed to the exam chair and said, “would you like to sit in my special princess throne so i can sparkle your teeth?”, she lost her temper and shouted, “come on! it’s 2006, not 1950. this is berkley, california. does every little girl really have to be a princess?” fairy tales often reflect society’s socially accepted value. the stories tell us what gender scripts are accepted in our culture and how men and women should act. although we tend to assume that we have achieved a more equalized society thanks to the feminist movement and the society has gotten much better in the perspective of gender stereotype, the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture are now more prevalent than ever all over the world. given the above phenomena, the present study will firstly investigate whether the improved gender roles are represented in modern fairy tales and compare classic fairy tales with a modernized fairy tale, tangled, published in 2010, with a focus on analysis of the story patterns, the heroines and other characters surrounding her. and then the study will discuss how traditional fairy tales and modern ones can allow students in the efl classroom to think critically about gender roles both in the fairy tales and in their real lives. method for the study, snow white (1937), cinderella (1950), and sleeping beauty (1957) will be analyzed as traditional fairy tales. these three stories have female characters that reflect society’s socially accepted value of 1930s and 1950s. they all play similar roles of the damsel in distress. the heroines are all young and beautiful woman who can take care of a household. secondly, a modernized fairy tale by disney, tangled (2010), will be analyzed and compared with the traditional fairy tales in terms of the story patterns, the heroines and other characters surrounding her. and then the study will discuss how teachers can promote students’ gender awareness adopting traditional fairy tales and modern ones in their efl classrooms. results and discussion traditional fairy tales and gender: snow white, cinderella, sleeping beauty physical appearance of heroine snow white, cinderella, sleeping beauty all depict the heroines as a beautiful woman wearing nice clothing in order to be marriageable. with flowing strawberry-blond locks, big, blue eyes, button nose, and tiny body, disney’s child-like woman sets a standard for perfection that virtually no little girl can ever achieve (pandolfo 2007). she was very pretty, with blue eyes and long black hair. her skin was delicate and fair, and so she was called snow white. everyone was quite sure she would become very beautiful. (snow white) when cinderella entered the ballroom at the palace, a hush fell. everyone stopped in mid-sentence to admire her elegance, her beauty and grace. (cinderella) for a long time he stood gazing at her face, so full of serenity, so peaceful, lovely and pure, and he felt spring to his heart that love he had always been searching for and never found. (sleeping beauty) in the three stories, the male heroes fall in love with the heroines because of how they look such as having beautiful locks, fair skin, tiny feet, and so 3 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee on. grauerholz and baker-sperry (2003) who examined 168 brothers grimm fairy tales showed that 94 percent of the stories acknowledged physical appearance, and the average references per story were 13.6: in one story, there were 114 beauty references for women: in comparison, the number of beauty references for men did not exceed 35 per story. in these well know stories “good-temper and meekness are so regularly associated with beauty, and ill temper with ugliness, that this in itself must influence children’s expectations” (lieberman 1972). grauerholz and bakersperry (2003) worry that these powerful messages that say women need to be beautiful may compel some women to seek beauty at the expense of other pursuits, such as careers or education. grauerholz and baker-sperry (2003) further point out that the continued emphasis on beauty is a way of society to controls girls and women. women adopt behaviors that reflect and reinforce their powerlessness, which can lead to limiting a woman’s personal freedom, power and control. heroine’s behavior the traditional fairy tales also portray what is considered acceptable behavior for women. their daily actions include singing, dancing and spending their day doing chores around the house such as cooking, cleaning, and making beds. i’ll make them something to eat. when they come home, they’ll be glad to find a meal ready.” towards dusk, seven tiny men marched homewards singing. but when they opened the door, to their surprise they found a bowl of hot steaming soup on the table, and the whole house spick and span. (snow white) “you? my dear girl, you’re staying at home to wash the dishes, scrub the floors and turn down the beds for your stepsisters. they will come home tired and very sleepy.” (cinderella) inge (2004) explains that the story of snow white reflects the general public’s attitude of the time that women should be primarily involved with the home. while men symbolize prosperity, income, and sustenance to support the women, the women are characterized as being the passive, pretty, patient, obedient, industrious, and quiet in the story. in line with inge (2004), archer (2008) points out that the heroines’ submissive role as a woman suggests to viewers that girls need to be obedient and if girls do not have strong characters to relate to in stories then it is unlikely that they learn to become strong and independent women themselves. good = pretty vs. bad = ugly the traditional fairy tales have in common giving a message of the dichotomy of beautiful = good / ugly = bad; ugly people are evil and beautiful people are good. women have to be either pretty or ugly and cannot be “average” because women are presented as either one thing or another and never a mixture of both. in the article “the dualistic nature of women: witches and women in fairy tales,” a writer points out that this repeated dichotomy is always applied to female characters in fiction in literature. as shown below in the traditional fairy tales evil ugly women who are jealous of heroines’ beauty try to harm or kill the beautiful heroines. “mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the loveliest lady in the land?” the reply was always: “you are, your majesty,” until the dreadful day when she heard it say, “snow white is the loveliest in the land.” the stepmother was furious and, wild with jealousy, arisa kochiyama teaching gender awareness through fairy tales in the efl classroom 4 began plotting to get rid of her rival. (snow white) but her stepsisters were so jealous of cinderella‘s beauty that they made her dress in rags and treated her like a servant. (cinderella) synnott (1990) claims that judgements about appearance imply values about good and evil and these conclusions are often false, unfair, dangerous, and silly: yet it is perpetuated by our language, literature, media, many philosophers and out simple binary perspectives. this assumption of ugly being bad has been labeled as “uglyism” (synnott 1990). synnott states that uglyism is the widespread discrimination experienced by people whose appearance lies south of beauty equator mapped out by literature and film. in her article “the dualistic nature of women: witches and women in fairy tales,” the writer points out that this binary polarization of women/men, good/bad, pretty/ugly must be stopped as human beings in reality are varying degrees of good and evil, of emotional and rational of inner and outer beauty. heroine and prince in the traditional fairy tales, the gender line between men and women is stereotyped with males being portrayed as being physically and emotionally strong, and as active participants in shaping their lives whereas females are portrayed as dependent, physically and emotionally weak, and passive participants in shaping their lives. in addition, the men are portrayed as much better off than the women. in the stories the male characters have higher ranking status and wealth. the three fairy tales also have in common that the male heroes who fall in love at first sight, save the females from a lifetime of hardship by marrying them while the females do nothing but waiti for the prince to show up. then one evening, they discovered a strange young man admiring snow white’s lovely face through the glass. after listening to the story, the prince (for he was a prince!) made a suggestion. “if you allow me to take her to the castle, i’ll call in famous doctors to waken her from their peculiar sleep. she’s so lovely. . . i’d love to kiss her. . . ! he did., and as though by magic, the prince’s kiss broke the spell. to everyone’s astonishment, snow white opened her eyes. she had amazingly come back to life! now in love, the prince asked snow white to marry him, and the dwarfs reluctantly had to say good bye to snow white. (snow white) at that kiss, the princess quickly opened her eyes, and wakening from her long long sleep, seeing the prince beside her, murmured: “oh, you have come at last! i was waiting for you in my dream. i’ve waited so long!” (sleeping beauty) the most damaging cinderella legacy of all, according to pandolfo (2007), is the concept of “rags-to-riches” success through hard-work and patience, which reinforces capitalism. in addition with this “someday-my-prince-willcome” message, it reinforces the notion that women should be passive, helpless and dependent who need the assistance of men and wait for men to save them. at the same time it offers the solution to girls that marriage is the answer to everything (wakakuwa 2003). modernized fairy tale and gender: tangled tangled is a 2010 american animated musical film and story produced and published by walt disney animation studios and is the 50th animated feature in the walt disney animated classic series. the story is loosely based on the grimm fairy tale 5 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee “rapunzel” in the collection of folk tales published by the brothers grimm. the film tells the story of a lost princess with long magical hair who yearns to leave her secluded tower. against mother gothel’s wish, she enlists the aid of a bandit thief flynn to take her out into the world which she has never seen. physical appearance of heroine rapunzel is not overly described as pretty or beautiful as in the heroines of snow white, cinderella, or sleeping beauty. the only sentence that mentions rapunzel’s beauty is that she was born as a beautiful baby. the flower made the queen well, and she soon gave birth to a beautiful young girl. (tangled) heroine’s behavior unlike the heroines of traditional fairy tales, rapunzel is presented as a smart, brave, and adventurous woman who stands up for her beliefs. in the first scene of tangled, it becomes clear that a new heroine has been created. rapunzel who wishes to get out of her secluded tower lies to mother gothel, rapunzel’s evil abductress. so that she leaves the tower for three days. realizing she would never get out of the tower unless she took matters into her own hands, rapunzel asked for another birthday present. she requested special paint that would require mother to leave on a threeday journey. (tangled) rapunzel takes charge by knocking out a male protagonist flynn, tying him up and striking adeal to make him help her. not wasting another second, rapunzel dragged flynn out of the closet and offered him a deal. if flynn took her to see the floating lights and returned her home safely, she would give him the satchel. flynn had no choice but to agree. (tangled) rapunzel is different from the classic heroines who are passive and obedient and described as a courageous young woman relentlessly pursues her goals to achieve personal fulfillment. unlike in the classic fairy tales, cooking, doing dishes, cleaning houses, and sewing are not mentioned as rapunzel’s behavior. good = pretty vs. bad = ugly the repeated dichotomy of good/ evil, ugly/beautiful is again applied to the female character in tangled. while rapunzel is presented as a pretty young girl, mother gothel, rapunzel’s evil abductress, is described as having dark hair and dark slant eyes and in need of rapunzel’s magical power to stay young. in the last scene, as gothel loses rapunel’s magical power, she becomes an ugly old wicked witch just as seen in the stepmother of snow white. mother gothel knew that if she wanted to stay young, she had to keep the child with her always. (tangled) “what have you done?!” mother gothel cried. within moments she aged hundreds of years and turned to dust. (tangled) thus the story keeps with the tradition of association with women as witches and the role women as the other. heroine and prince the heroine of tangled is not a prince as in the traditional fairy tales but a bandit thief who belongs to lower class in society, which shows disney’s new perspective of gender. rapunzel is not a princess waiting for a man to wake her up, untie her from the train tracks, arisa kochiyama teaching gender awareness through fairy tales in the efl classroom 6 and so on. although the story loosely follows the traditional rapunzel story, disney makes some changes which balance out the value of genders. meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a thief named flynn rider was on the run with his partner in crime, the stabbington brothers. (tangled) rapunzel is anything but passive and is routinely the one who takes charge and gets them out of tough situations. rapunzel banged her frying pan on a giant pot to get the thug’s attention. she asked them to let flynn go so that she could make her dream come true. (tangled) tangled doesn’t end with the traditional “someday-my-prince-willcome” message but with the suggestion that rapunzel eventually becomes the leader of her kingdom, which makes her the only princess who eventually becomes a true queen. the king and queen were there, along with flynn, pascal, maximus and the pub thugs. the people of the kingdom released floating lanterns into the sky. their light had guided their princess home at last. (tangled) disney has developed a strong female character because that is what modern culture and society have demanded. the modernized fairy tale tangled is a step forward for disney because it has given the heroine her independence and attempted to give us an empowered three-dimensional female character differing from her predecessors who wait for a prince to rescue them and marry them. given these findings, how can we teach gender awareness in the efl classroom using the fairy tales? traditional fairy tales and modernized ones allow students not only to learn the target language but also to think critically about how men and women are portrayed and compare these portrayals to their own lives. kuo (2005) claims the importance of teacher’s role by pointing out that teachers need to be extremely aware of the fact that dominant reading practices will make students accustomed to mainstream texts and as a result students will passively identify themselves with the characters in the stories. kuo suggests that teachers should equip students with a certain stance that deliberately challenges the text and help students uncover the gender inequalities present in the text, in doing so, it is useful for teachers to adopt resistant or oppositional reading practices rather than dominant and conventional reading practices. according to the bc teacher’s federation, a familiar starting point for students would be to read traditional fairy tales and identify the elements that make it different from a non-fiction story by asking open-ended questions as in the following: 1) how are princesses usually portrayed at the start of a story? 2) is she waiting around for something or someone to come to her rescue or make her happy? if so, whom? 3) towards the end of a story what makes cinderella and snow white happy? why do you think that might be? (bc teacher’s federation) after reading a variety of traditional and modernized fairy tales and analyzing components of each style of fairy tale, teachers can ask students: 4) in you world, who is a more realistic character? why do you think that? who does each princess remind you of in real life? 5) can a prince or princess be single and live happily ever after? why 7 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee or why not? do you know anyone who is single and happy? (bc teacher’s federation) as for the possible extensions, bc teacher’s federation suggests the following strategies: 1) have students take a traditional fairy tale and work together in small groups to write a new ending for it. ask them to create one where the princess and prince live in a more realistic and independent manner. 2) ask students to write their own fracture/non-traditional fairy tale where the prince or princess is portrayed in a non-gender specific role. tell them you are looking for non-sexist behavior in at least one character. (bc teacher’s federation) conclusion the present study investigates whether the improved gender roles are represented in modern fairy tales and compared classic fairy tales with a modernized fairy tale, tangled, published in 2010, with a focus on analysis of the story patterns, the heroines and other characters surrounding her. and then the study suggested some lesson plan on how traditional fairy tales and modern ones can allow students in the efl classroom to think critically about gender roles both in the fairy tales and in their real lives. it was found out that teachers could empower students with critical thinking by utilizing both traditional and modernized fairy tales through resistant or oppositional reading practices and help students make better sense of the text by approaching the text from multiple and alternative perspectives. references archer, m. (2008). gender stereotypes. retrieved from http://ezinearticles. com/?expert= maureen_archer baker-sperry, l. and grauerholz, e. (2003). the pervasiveness and persistence of the feminine beauty ideal in children’s fairy tales. gender and society, 17.5. 711-26. cook, h. m. (?) cinderellas from around the world: are their tales created with gender bias? retrieved from http:// www.easternct.edu./smithlibrary/ depts/curriculum/ cinderella2.htm. inge, m. t. (2004). art, adaptation, and ideology: walt disney’s snow white and the seven dwarfs. journal of popular film and television 32. 3. 132-42. kuo, j. (2005). teaching esl/efl student to recognize gender bias in children’s literature. the internet tesl journal. retrieved from http://iteslj.org/ articles/kou-genderbias.html. lazar, g. (1993). literature and language teaching: a guide for teachers and trainers. cambridge: cambridge university press. lieberman, m. r. (1972). some day my prince will come: female acculturation through the fairy tale. college english 34. 3. 383-95. orenstein, p. (2006). what’s wrong with cinderella? retrieved from http:// www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/ magazine/24princess.t.html. pandolfo, e. (2007). feminist critique of walt disney’s cinderella. retrieved from http://voices.yahoo.com/feministcritique-walt-disney-cinderella-259970. html?cat=9. synnott, a. (1990). truth and goodness, mirrors and masks part: a sociology of beauty and the face. the british journal of sociology 41. 1. 55-76. the dualistic nature of women: witches and women in fairy tales. retrieved from http://voadn.wordpress. com/2001/08/07/the-dualisticnature-of-women-witches-andwomen-in-fairy-tales. wakakuwa, m. (2003). ohimesama to jenda. tokyo: chikuma shobo. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 965 the record of using picture series to develop students’ writing skills suparwoto sapto wahono tadris of english language, faculty of tarbiyah and training education, uin khas, jember, indonesia email: wahsapto@uinkhas.ac.id kholidatul afifah tadris of english language, faculty of tarbiyah and training education, uin khas, jember, indonesia email: kholidatulafifah@gmail.com apa citation: wahono, s. s., & afifah, k. (2022). the record of using picture series to develop students’ writing skills. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 965-974. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6830 received: 29-06-2022 accepted: 23-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction a foreign language is a language in which not many people use it as communication tool where the language is learned. on the contrary, “a second language is a foreign language that most people use it as tool of communication where the language is learned.” english is considered and become one of the subjects in educational indonesia institutions. it becomes part of the lessons in the educational curriculum. even english is a prestigious and proud competence for its lovers. four language skills which include listening, speaking, reading, and writing (lsrw) should be emphasized and mastered by language learners. the important reasons why writing is the students are able to convey and organize their ideas coherently in written form, they are able to express their feelings, and they will produce written language mechanics (rangkuti et al., 2021). considering the difficult and complicated the writing skill, the writers focused on the skill to be learned. writing is a skill used by writer to communicate or convey his ideas, opinions, imaginations, thoughts, knowledge, etc which involves fives aspects; content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics (nurlatifah & yusuf, 2022). this skill is helpful one that is possible to contribute a person individually person in revealing their opinion with clearly and readable writing. this skil is a hard process that enables writers to disclose, reveal their opinion, ideas, and make it be seen and tangible (yudiati, 2017). supporting the statement aboved, apsari declared that the skill of writing is regarded as the most ordous skill for language learners to master since it s a kind of productive skill that students who learn it must get a way how to figure out ideas and reveal them in writing (apsari, 2017). ideas or opinions, thoughts, and feelings that the students have can be revealed or expressed by writing (kartika, 2017). in this way, english foreign language learners can understand, apply, and communicate effectively in writing. because of the complexity of writing skills, it requires a process and many aspects that must be considered. since english as foreign language in indonesia, writing requires hard thinking to create ideas, words, sentences, paragraphs, and abstract: based on the observations results, the learners had difficulty in exploring their ideas. they took more time and could only write some sentences. another barrying that students faced was that they could not write well-organized paragraphs. the students also often had difficulty in learning grammar, especially english tenses. lack of vocabulary mastery was also the cause of writing difficulties. they stated that writing in english was difficult and complicated. that’s why the researchers used classroom action research to apply picture serias as media. it was conducted by two cycles.the subjects were seventeen students of tenth grade science student at banyuwangi. to get the data, the researchers used observation, interview, and test. the research result could be stated that using the picture series improved the learners’ writing narrative text competence. they could improve their writing gradually from the first cycle to the second one. the picture series that implemented significantly improved their skill in english writing. keywords: picture series; writing skills. suparwoto sapto wahono & kholidatul afifah the record of using picture series to develop students’ writing skills 966 compositions. there are a lot of aspects should be noticed to make a good written work, namely, “the rules of grammar, organization of ideas, motivation or willingness to write, and mastery of vocabulary.” in writing narrative texts, the different of english and indonesia sentence in structure also become one of the matters and problems that make the students find difficulty to write it. writing is one of the arduous skills; it will be fun and exciting activity if the instructor employs a suitable media in his or her teaching (wahono & qodriyah, 2019). referring to the data of the observation and interview result, “the learners experience difficulties in resulting and extending their ideas, they take long time in getting their ideas.” accordingly, “most of the students are only able to produce a few sentences in their writing but also can not explore their imagination well. other issues students faced are the inability of students to compose paragraphs. ignoring the organization of the text made their writing incohesive and incoherent. this is also supported by the lack of students in mastering the rules of grammar. students often assume, discover and justify that learning grammar takes a longer time with high concentration.” learning and understanding grammar requires time intensity which is done repeatedly. if learners ignore these things then as a result they experience difficulties not only in grammar but also in other language components such as vocabulary and choosing their use or diction. inaccuracy in the use of collocations and mastery of vocabulary used by students were inhibiting factors in expressing themselves in writing. they considered that english writing was as a difficult subject. therefore, most of the students were less motivated and had limited words to write something. it was also found, “the previous of the teaching and learning writing process, before this investigation had been conducted, had not attracted the students’ attention.” media can be applied to assist the skill of the students' writing in developing their ideas and thoughts (febriyanto & yanto, 2019). using the media in assessing student writing is much more interesting and exciting (wirastuti & mantra, 2019). they can express their ideas or thoughts easily. they will not feel a heavy burden in pouring their ideas. a picture as teaching media is used to grow and appear the student creativity in learning process (sari & putri, 2018). with its various characteristics, pictures as media can stimulate learners in the language learning process (soviyah & purwaningtias, 2018). by observing pictures immediately, learning will be more impressive (tambunan et al., 2022). narrative paragraph is a paragraph that tells a story, whether fictional or non-fictional, written in chronological order by using time order signal which contains orientation, complication, resolution, and re-orientation (wirastuti & mantra, 2019). narrative text tells stories or past events and entertain or amuse which consisted of three generic structures namely; orientation, complication, and resolution (syafitri et al., 2021). writing consists of fives aspects namely; content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics. in sequence, content refers to paragraph unity; organization provides readers with a well-organized piece of writing framework to help and make it easy for them to follow text; vocabulary pertains to word selection; language use focuses on grammar; meanwhile mechanics refers to punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and paragraphs (achmad et al., 2019). related to these problems, the media as a literacy aid can be used to help scholars in literacy towrite. “there are considerable media to guide learning to write similar as bills, flashcards, picture series, illustrations and others.” in this exploration, the experimenter used picture series in tutoring jotting. in tutoring literacy process, media has several functions; it can save our time as a schoolteacher, it can stimulate interest to learn, pupil’s participation can be encouraged, it also can give a review, and it helps the scholars learn to communicate ideas visually (hasanah, 2017). with media, classroom condition will be dynamic, applicable and seductive. pictures represented in efl learning is considered to be worth implementing (sugianto & prastika, 2021). picture or image series can escalate students’ encouragement in learning writing. in addition, “series pictures are believed to be able to help students in producing ideas.” the series of picture is some bound and united combination images which are connected to establish a chain of sequences. therefore, the major utility of it is to depict or explain a story or sequence of happening in chronological order. because of the statement above, the series of pictures or images are media to assist students to result and evolve their notion. they can also guide learners to rule their writing product since it is composed of a chain of pictures that learners can notice the paces and their array. they are able assist the learners to expand their thought and solder their english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 967 clauses or paragraphs to result unity and wellorganized writing product. it says, “in the process of teaching and learning writing, the series of picture can be used to motivate students to learn.” picture series consists of several pictures that reflect a story in a good order or sequence. therefore it can lead students to get words and describe a narration that follow the pictures given easily. series pictures are pictures as media used to show several chronological actions or events that are displayed sequentially (wening, 2017). the use of serial picture is very possible to become students' ability better in jotting narration significantly (khotimah & burhansyah, 2017). in addition, teaching writing with series of picture can upgrade the students’ stimulation, enhance and practice their writing skill (ramadhanty et al., 2021). the series of picture is a reasonable way for teaching efl learners to escalate their english narrative text writing skill. the text of narration contains a story (fantasy/real event). it has a plot that includes a story climax or complication and a resolution that is written in a systematic way. narrative texts aim to entertain and deal with actual experiences presented in different ways (abdullah & yunus, 2019). narrative text is a text tell stories or past events and entertain or amuse which consisted of three generic structures namely; orientation, complication, and resolution (wahyuni et al., 2020). the narrative regard with problematic happennings that bring to a crisis that ultimately comes across a decision. narrative is kinds of text that talk the past activities or events to amuse or entertain readers (lubis, 2017). pictures or immages can excite and promote scholars to expand their ideas, profound and imagination to write (raharjo, 2018). picture series are be suitable to help scholars to ameliorate their jotting chops because they can support scholars to write madly in the tutoring and literacy process (deviga & diliyana, 2020). there were many problems found in the teaching and learning process of writing english before the application of the media was carried out. these issues were related to students' problems, namely generating, growing ideas and compiling paragraphs. the students also had problems using the right grammatical guidelines for a particular text and deciding on the right words for a particular context. moreover, their motivation in obtaining english lessons was low. referring to the facts, action to resolve these cases was needed in that condition. picture series was chosen because the media can improve students' writing skills. there are differences in the results of investigations on students' writing abilities, namely the existence of good and bad research results or high and low research results, making research on students' writing abilities in english as a foreign language still relevant for research (toba et al., 2019). grounded on the issues mentioned, the researcher decided to use picture series to ameliorate their jotting chops, particularly in narrative text material. it is hoped that by bringing picture series into writing classrooms, students can better improve their critical and creative thinking skills in writing. method this study was classroom action research study which covers planning, acting, observing and reflecting (paor). at the step of planning, the researcher prepared narrative text material in the form of pictures, designed assessments, made test questions for pre-test (prior knoledge), first cycle, and second cycle. at the implementation step, the researcher distributed a pre-test and then analyzed the test results. after analyzing, the researcher applied cycle 1 and then gave a test in cycle 1 and analyzed the results of the test. then the researcher applied cycle 2, gave a test in cycle 2 and analyzed the test results. the observation phase was carried out by researchers to seek and find strengths and weaknesses of learning strategies, record student behavior in the time of learning process. in the reflection stage, the researcher analyzed the test results and findings from observations to get the success and failure factors. data collection techniques which used were interview, observation, and test. the test conducted was covering preliminary test, cycle 1 and 2 test. interviews were used to figure out students' opinions about the use and the carrying out the series of picture in process of narrative text writing. observations were made to determine student behavior during the writing learning process. the test was done to decide the level of student learning ability in writing. the formula used to determine and analyze the success criteria for student scores was as follows (sugiono, 2017): m = ʃx x 100% n notes: m = the mean score of students suparwoto sapto wahono & kholidatul afifah the record of using picture series to develop students’ writing skills 968 ∑x = the total students score n = the students' total number to find out the percentage score, the writing test result were analyzed by using the following formula: e= n x 100% n notes: e = the students’ percentage that reach minimum standard score n = the number of students who reached the minimum score n = the students' total number this research was successful if the indicators are achieved. the criteria for the success of this research was if 70% of all students achieve a score of 75 or higher. results and discussion the researcher was employed for two cycles which consisted of four meetings. to figure out the ability of the students' writing, the researchers had done a preliminary study before they conducted the cycle. in the preliminary study or pre cycle, the researchers gave a writing test to students. in the pre-cycle, “students' ability to write on the content aspect get an average score of 19, the organizational aspect get an average score of 14, the grammatical aspect get an average score of 13, the vocabulary aspect get an average score of 13, and the mechanical aspect get an average score of 3. thus, the overall average in the pre-cycle is 62.” in the pre-test, “the students have difficulties in generating and managing the thought to write and many of them still employed the present tense on narrative text writing”. the result of preliminary study is displayed on the table 1 below: table 1. result of prelimimary study no name score total score criteria c o g v m 1 aka 17 11 15 8 3 54 unsuccessful 2 agp 20 15 11 12 3 61 unsuccessful 3 ast 15 15 12 10 3 55 unsuccessful 4 aks 22 15 14 13 3 67 unsuccessful 5 aar 25 17 15 15 4 76 successful 6 hzj 17 17 10 15 4 63 unsuccessful 7 jln 18 14 15 8 2 57 unsuccessful 8 jnf 13 11 10 14 2 50 unsuccessful 9 kca 27 15 18 12 3 75 successful 10 mfah 15 16 15 15 3 64 unsuccessful 11 mdk 15 11 14 12 3 55 unsuccessful 12 npr 27 14 18 14 4 77 successful 13 npa 19 16 17 11 2 65 unsuccessful 14 rdwug 18 14 12 13 3 60 unsuccessful 15 vs 13 12 9 14 2 50 unsuccessful 16 wsd 19 15 12 14 4 64 unsuccessful 17 zlm 15 15 9 13 3 55 unsuccessful total score 315 243 226 213 51 1048 mean 19 14 13 13 3 61.6 note: c means content; o is organization; g is grammar; v is vocabulary; m is mechanic pointing at the result of preliminary study, “the data of the preliminary study mean score is 61.6. it means that 3 learners or 17.65% of students’ number gain the passing score of the minimal mastery level criterion (kkm). meanwhile, 14 students or 82.35% of the total students do not fulfill the criteria score. the students’ weaknesses are; they have limited knowledge of subject and show a little knowledge of matter, little substance, and inadequate topic exploration.” the organization of students' writing was loosely managed but main topic stood out. it had restricted party, reasonable management but the sequencing was incomplete. the students' writing was not eloquent, the notion were confused or disconnected. the writing had lacks of original sequencing and development. the students' often made grammar mistakes, numbering, wording order, articles, pronouns, prepositions and many others. meanwhile the learners had little knowledge of english vocabulary. they also were not able to construct the words into sentence so that the writing was not enough to communicate. besides, they also often make mistakes in spelling, punctuation, use of capital letters, paragraph preparation. it made the meaning of writing was 969 confused or obscured. similarly, most of the learners found the writing difficulty, especially writing narrative text. limited vocabulary, difficulty expressing ideas, and the arrangement of words and sentences make them spend too much time thinking about making sentences. after conducting preliminary study and analyzing the results, it was concluded, “most of the students have problem in writing skill.” therefore, the researchers tried to overcome the students’ problem by using picture series to escalate students’ writing skill. having known the results of the pre cycle, the researcher implemented the use of series of picture in learning to write with the following results. in the cycle i, “the content of their writing is already improved. in cycle i, the students' ability to write in the content aspect get an average score of 21.4, the organizational aspect get an average score of 18, the grammar aspect get an average score of 17.7, the vocabulary aspect get an average score of 13.8, and the mechanical aspect get a score 3.5 average. thus, the average overall score in cycle 1 is 74.4.” in this cycle, “the students have adversity in ruling the text and lack of words. many students still write in one paragraph and have difficulties in arranging the sentences into a good paragraph based on the generic structure.” in cycle i, “the students show some improvements especially in the content where the students can write longer writing although many of them still have difficulties in arranging the text and using past form.” in the post test of cycle 1, “the students show better improvements than before. they are able to write well-organized writing and they grow more conscious of using the past form.” to know more detail about the description above, the result of counted data in cycle 1 is also presented on the table 2 as follows: table 2. result of cycle 1 no name score total criteria c o g v m score 1 aka 18 15 17 11 3 64 unsuccessful 2 agp 18 15 17 11 3 64 unsuccessful 3 ast 20 17 15 10 3 65 unsuccessful 4 aks 20 17 15 10 3 65 unsuccessful 5 aar 28 20 15 16 4 83 successful 6 hzj 28 20 15 16 4 83 successful 7 jln 18 18 18 11 3 68 unsuccessful 8 jnf 18 18 18 11 3 68 unsuccessful 9 kca 28 18 20 15 4 85 successful 10 mfah 28 18 20 15 4 85 successful 11 mdk 27 20 20 15 4 86 successful 12 npr 27 20 20 15 4 86 successful 13 npa 20 18 17 17 4 76 successful 14 rdwug 20 18 17 17 4 76 successful 15 vs 15 18 19 15 3 70 unsuccessful 16 wsd 15 18 19 15 3 70 unsuccessful 17 zlm 15 18 19 15 3 70 unsuccessful total score 363 306 301 235 59 1264 mean 21 18 18 14 3 74 pointing out the result of the students’ average score on the table 2 and figure 1, it could be said that the cycle 1 was better than the result of preliminary study. it was proved by 47.05% of the students who gained the minimum score. in other words there were 8 students passed score based on the criteria. the students have definite knowledge of the subject, adequate coverage, mostly connected to the topic but they were still lacked in detail and restricted in developing thesis. although the students' aptitude increased but the result was not contented with the score gained because the number of students who passed was still below 60 percent. so the researchers continued the treatment for cycle ii. based on the result and the reason, the researchers applied the picture series in writing learning for the second cycle with result as follow. in cycle ii, “their writing shows a better progress. in this cycle the students' ability in writing on the content aspect get an average score of 24, the organizational aspect get an average score of 19, the grammar aspect get an average score of 19, the vocabulary aspect get an average score of 16, and the mechanical aspect get an average score of 4. thus, the overall score in cycle 2 is 82. they are suparwoto sapto wahono & kholidatul afifah the record of using picture series to develop students’ writing skills 970 able to write the full story in more detail.” as the researchers, “we only give guidance in the beginning of the individual activity just to make sure whether they understand the story. fortunately, all of the students can develop their ideas of the story by themselves. they also do not feel perplexed anymore about what they shall write in their story.” in this cycle, “we explain the organization of a narrative text to the students and provide them some exercises with serial pictures as media to help them identify the sentences belong to the orientation, the complication and the resolution. the practice covers arranging jumbled words, jumbled sentences and rewriting the sentences into good paragraphs based on the generic structure of the narrative text.” as the researchers, “we also implement picture series as media to assist them to write the text. in this cycle, we see an increase in their organization skill with good grammar and increase their vocabulary mastery. they can distinguish the generic structure of narrative text and write well-organized and cohesive writing.the students’ mean score in the post-test is 81.65. there are 14 students or 82.35% of the students who get the score above the passing grade, meanwhile the other 3 students are below that criterion. it means, “this research is successful, because the results of students’ writing test score achieved the criteria of success. students were able to develop a thesis. their sentences were relevant to the assigned topic even though they lacked detail. the paragraphs they composed were well organized, logical order, and cohesive. their writing was also effective and had few errors of agreement, tense, number, word order, articles, pronouns, and prepositions. they were able to master the form of words. their writing also had few spelling errors, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraph structure. in addition, the series image is one of the media that helps the brainstorming process at a certain stage in the writing process. moreover picture series is as a stimulating visual aid to inspire something specific. teachers must be able to choose suitable media and provide techniques that can stimulate learners for writing purposes. by providing picture series, they are able to express their idea what the pictures are about and they can gain ideas and transcribe them by imagining the pictures and starting from the first picture to the end. they can begin to think and imagine the story that refers to the pictures that have been determined. in this way they are able easily to write their frame of mind (abdullah & yunus, 2019). picture series can put out the capability of achieving new language (andayani & arono, 2020). looking at the explanation, applying the picture series to teach english narrative text writing was a success. the students' cognitive processes in writing activities can be improved by using story images that support the development of ordering ideas so that the rhetorical structure of narrative texts can be applied easily. the use of picture series gets a positive response from the subjects in the teaching and learning process and they are more active in writing so that their writing skills improve (wahyuni et al., 2020). from the description above, the result of cycle 2 can be displayed in detail on the table 3 below: table 3. result of cycle 2 no name score total criteria c o g v m score 1 aka 22 18 20 20 3 83 successful 2 agp 25 17 22 12 4 80 successful 3 ast 17 18 20 18 4 77 successful 4 aks 27 20 15 16 4 82 successful 5 aar 28 20 22 15 3 88 successful 6 hzj 25 18 17 16 4 80 successful 7 jln 20 17 17 17 3 74 unsuccessful 8 jnf 17 18 15 17 3 70 unsuccessful 9 kca 27 19 21 14 4 85 successful 10 mfah 26 20 22 13 4 85 successful 11 mdk 25 18 15 18 4 80 successful 12 npr 28 20 22 14 4 88 successful 13 npa 27 19 20 16 4 86 successful 14 rdwug 26 18 22 12 4 82 successful 15 vs 20 17 17 17 3 74 unsuccessful 16 wsd 25 19 20 17 4 85 successful 17 zlm 28 20 22 15 4 89 successful 971 total score 413 316 329 267 63 1388 mean 24 19 19 16 4 81.6 table 3 displayed, “the average of students score is 81.65. referring to the study results, it can be noted that there are 14 students or 82.35% of the total students who achieve scores above the kkm 75. at the same time, there are only three students do not fulfill the standard criterion.” it means, “the result of the second cycle is successful and the researchers stop continuing conducting the next cycle.” based the data above, the researchers justified or deduced, “the implementation of picture series can be used to improve the students’ competence in writing skill.” in line with with swarastuti (2019) who also found that picture series is effective to improve students’ ability in writing narrative text. students are more interested in writing narrative text so that it helps and enhances the students` motivation to express their ideas freely.the progress of the students’ narative text writing using picture series could be seen at the figure 1 below. figure 1. result of pre cycle, cycle 1, & cycle 2 seeing figure 1, we say, “the implementation of picture series to stimulate the students’ ideas and organizing their writing is proven to be successful. they are able to develop the story with amazing ideas and their writing is not longer than those in the pre-test. referring to the interviews, it could be stated that it is easier for them to write story using serial pictures.” it is in line with pasaribu et al. (2020) that because the use of picture series facilitates the students to get information easily, it has significant affect to achieve their ability of the writing narrative text. in addition, the students’ ability to write narrative composition can be enhanced by using pictures story. it is believed that the media will help the english teachers to increase and develop the students in writing narrative texts. pictures are most attractive to the eyes of learners that grow students' curiousity to express their ideas, opinion when teacher brings them in the classroom (singh et al., 2022). before implementing the picture, they had trouble to combine some sentences into a good paragraph because they had no ideas. after employing serial picture, students were able to develop principles and express thoughts of the story they wrote. students are able to remember the vocabularies and improve their vocabulary memory for a long time when the words are taught and associated with pictures (othman et al., 2022). conclusion pointing out the study results of the teaching writing by conducting the picture series, it is deduced, “by displaying the series of picture, we can improve students' narrative text writing skills.” it is proved by the results of students' scores in the pre study, first cycle, and second cycle. the improvement consisted of 1) the students' scores increased gradually, 2) the process of teaching and learning to write using picture series makes students happy to write stories, 3) the students are very motivated in learning to write, 4) they are able to express and make sentences with the help of picture series. they also find a lot of new vocabulary to understand. the sequence of pictures makes students' writing well organized and systematically arranged. the completeness of pre cycle cycle 1 cycle 2 suparwoto sapto wahono & kholidatul afifah the record of using picture series to develop students’ writing skills 972 picture series is able to stimulate students' ideas so that they can express ideas easily. the completeness of the pictures also makes students' writing more detailed.” referring the students' result on writing skill, the analysis of the problem and solving the problem, it is recommended for english teachers or lecturers to choose and use picture series as the main media in the process of learning and teaching writing, especially writing narrative texts. references abdullah. y. l. p. k., & yunus. m. m. 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(2019). implementation of picture sequence task to assess the narrative paragraph writing ability of the first semester of law faculty. international journal of applied science and sustainable development, 1(1), 23-28. yudiati, r. (2021). improving descriptive writing ability of the first year students of sma toha praktika giligenting-sumenep by using pictures, lensa (lentera sains): jurnal pendidikan ipa, 1(2), 31-37, https://doi.org/10.24929/lensa.v1i2.141. suparwoto sapto wahono & kholidatul afifah the record of using picture series to develop students’ writing skills 974 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 441 need analysis of indonesian language training materials for foreign workers using the communicative method ade mulyanah badan riset dan inovasi nasional email: adem004@brin.go.id sariah badan riset dan inovasi nasional email: sari021@brin.go.id rini widiastuti badan riset dan inovasi nasional email: rini015@brin.go.id nuny sulistiany idris universitas pendidikan indonesia email: nuny@upi.edu exti budihastuti badan riset dan inovasi nasional email: exti003@brin.go.id nia kurnia badan riset dan inovasi nasional email: niak002@brin.go.id resti nurfaidah badan riset dan inovasi nasional email: rest013@brin.go.id apa citation: mulyanah, a., sariah., widiastuti, r., idris, n. s., budihastuti, e., kurnia, n., & nurfaidah, r. (2023). need analysis of indonesian language training materials for foreign workers using the communicative method. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 441-450. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7209 received: 22-02-2023 accepted: 25-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction changes in the dominance of the current world's political, economic, and social forces, directly or indirectly, have impacted various indonesian government policies. government policies on investment issues have affected various sectors and have been followed by the need for higher-quality human resources. the government's latest policy in the abstract: there is no standardization of indonesian language education and training for foreign workers (tka), resulting in no training model that suits the needs of students. therefore, this study aims to (1) describe the current condition of indonesian language training for foreign workers by the manpower office; (2) identify indonesian language training needs for foreign workers. the ministry of manpower has issued various regulations in this regard. this study uses a qualitative descriptive method through a communicative approach. the communicative approach forms the basis of the training model that will be developed because their main goal in learning indonesian is to be able to communicate in their work environment. the data collection techniques used were interviews, surveys, and literature studies. the subject of this study is data on foreign workers in the kepulauan riau province. the results of the study reveal two findings. firstly, an overview of the current condition of indonesian language training for foreign workers by the manpower office. secondly, the identification of indonesian language training needs for foreign workers . the data indicates that there is no standard training format yet. keywords: communicative; foreign workers; needs analysis. ade mulyanah, sariah, rini widiastuti, nuny sulistiany idris, exti budihastuti, nia kurnia, & resti nurfaidah need analysis of indonesian language training materials for foreign workers using the communicative method 442 global economic arena is to relax the laws related to foreign workers (fw) in indonesia than the so-called tka. before the covid-19 epidemic, more foreign workers were coming to indonesia, according to data from the ministry of manpower (2021). based on the figures, indonesia has received a record number of foreign workers.is as follows: in 2013, there were 70,120 people; in 2014, there were 73,624 people; in 2015, there were 77,149 people; in 2016, there were 80,375 people; in 2017, there were 85,974 people; in 2018, it was 95,335; in 2019, it was 109,546; in 2020, it was 93,761; and from 2021 to april, it was 91,035. the highest number of foreign workers in indonesia increased in the service industry. even though the number of foreign workers decreased during the pandemic, the number remained stable at over ninety thousand. the indonesian language problem for foreign workers is quite a problem. stakeholders in indonesian language teaching for foreign speakers, then so-called bipa, as well as those who love the indonesian language, certainly hope that indonesian becomes the language of instruction in every workplace, whether in the private sector or state-own enterprise, government companies, or foreign investment. the study supports the research in abbas (abbas, 2017). it is about the abolition of the regulation on the obligation of foreign workers to communicate in indonesian, contrary to law no. 24/2009. the law requires the use of indonesian in official communications in the work environment in indonesia: the abolition of the regulation on the obligation of foreign workers to communicate in the indonesian language as regulated in article 36 of the minister of manpower no. 16/2015 contradicts article 33 of law no. 24/2009 by using the principle of lex superior, namely higher legislation overrides lower legislation. article 7, paragraph (2) of law lower laws and regulations shall not contradict higher laws and regulations, according to number 12/2011. therefore, in this instance, law number 24/2009 nullified the minister of manpower's regulation (permenaker no. 16 tahun 2015 tentang tata cara penggunaan tenaga kerja asing [jdih bpk ri], n.d.). thus, teaching indonesian to foreign workers has become very urgent and strategic in teaching indonesian to foreign speakers (bipa). teaching bipa is important in responding to challenges and needs in society. in practice, teaching bipa has an important mission because it is related to the need for indonesian language and cultural diplomacy. on the contrary, when indonesian workers work abroad, foreign language (english) skills are needed to support their work. according to nahartini's research, a major obstacle for indonesian migrant workers (pmi) working in semi-skilled and unskilled jobs—where pmis make up the majority of the workforce—is their inadequate english proficiency. due to this, there have been many severe effects, including miscommunication between companies and migrant employees and a decrease in the preference for pmi over foreign workers. (nahartini et al., 2021). it shows that the ability to master the language in the place where we will work daily is very much needed by the workforce concerned. in reality, bipa teaching for tka still does not have standards because the standard curriculum has not yet been designed. according to greece et al., the learning series must be prepared and adjusted based on the learner's characteristics, summarized, and compiled to achieve these goals and the objectives of the expected competencies (greece et al., 2017). however, bipa teaching for foreign workers still does not have a standard because a standard curriculum has not been made. for this reason, mapping the material needs for teaching bipa for tka is very important. it is necessary to take several steps to see the needs of foreign workers regarding teaching materials, including mapping a needs analysis. needs analysis helps determine the language components that pupils need. understanding and using the target language is necessary (hull, 2019). this needs analysis is important because it can be used as a basis for curriculum development. needs analysis is a way to collect mapped student needs. it is an important thing that can be achieved in learning to improve students' abilities. ningsih et al. (ningsih et al., 2018) conducted a study on needs analysis. when creating teaching materials, analysis is important. the research uses a deductive method in the development of teaching materials. in the deductive approach, the prepared instructional materials must convey the rules: first, followed by pertinent examples, and then suitable training. concerning materials for elementary school students teaching children, the teaching materials developed must also contain interesting illustrations. it is an important finding because if the analysis of teachers, students, parents, and the school administration cannot realize the learning objectives, appropriate teaching materials will never be produced. the most important parties involved are teachers and students. teachers can conduct a needs analysis in every learning activity, directly or indirectly (darici in ilham et al., 2020). darici emphasized that the parties who have an important role in learning are students, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 443 teachers, and school management. various needs issues include personal/individual, professional, and institutional needs. therefore, the most important finding is that needs analysis with this communicative approach is critical. nadia (modul et al., 2022), in her research entitled validity of bipa learning module 1 communicative approach-based work material produced findings that bipa learning one communicative approachbased work material in the bipa class of pgri west sumatra university which was developed was categorized as valid with a percentage of 73.70%. the results of the validation of the bipa learning module by experts on four elements, namely the aspects of content viability, presentation, language and readability, and graphics, can be used to determine the validity of the bipa learning module. from the aspect of content feasibility, it is illustrated that the content of the bipa learning module developed is in line with the needs of bipa students, commensurate with the learning objectives in the cefr curriculum, is compatible with communicative approach procedures, and does not conflict with moral and social values in society. so the bipa learning module 1 work material based on the communicative approach is feasible to use in the learning process. jazeri & tulungagung (melati, 2022), in their paper on the model of speech skills with communicative speech skills for foreign students, found that 87% of learners were enthusiastic and happy because the examples of expressions and dialogues presented in the textbooks helped them to be able to speak indonesian fluently. with the learning tools developed it has a significant effect on the learning outcomes of speaking skills in international students at iain tulungagung. pangesti & wurianto (2018) conducted research entitled development of cross-cultural based bipa teaching materials through a contextualcommunicative approach. the study's findings are presented in the form of bipa teaching resources that are based on cross-cultural levels and employ a communicative-contextual approach. the indigenous malang culture is the one being used as a reference in this instance. the findings revealed that the average expert trial score was 84.2%, the average practitioner trial score was 92.2%, and the average field trial score was 95.2%. therefore, this book can be categorized as very worthy of application. arsyad, in his article entitled arabic learning methods based on communicative approaches to improve language proficiency. according to him, the communicative approach is an assumption based on the nature of language that holds the view that language is a means of communicating. as a result, rather than advancing students' linguistic knowledge, the main goal of language education is to enhance language proficiency. on the other hand, language proficiency is taught to support language knowledge. the purpose of using the method of method contained in the communicative approach is so that learners can master the language learned orally to be able to communicate with the language (arsyad, 2019). concerning this matter, needs analysis research based on a communicative approach is significant because it has a vital role in mapping needs. however, research on teaching materials in the context of foreign workers has not been widely carried out. therefore, this study aims to: (1) describe the current conditions of indonesian language training for foreign workers by the manpower office; (2) identify the need for indonesian language training for foreign workers. in teaching bipa, careful analysis is needed in mapping teaching materials because the teaching process for bipa is different from teaching indonesian to native speakers. the knowledge transfer process for bipa students certainly requires skills that various theories and research must support because this process teaches indonesian as a foreign language. teaching a language to foreign speakers is not only a standard reference but also research on needs on an individual basis in the context of delivering language in a second language. we can find much information related to a wide range of needs analysis. based on hutchinson and waters, as cited in nation & macalister (nation & macalister, 2020), needs consist of target and learning needs. they believe the information on target needs is based on "necessities, lacks, and wants" (nation & macalister, 2020). furthermore, they also divide another major division to collect the needed data. the additional concept is objective needs and subjective needs. to classify their findings, they essentially formed a pair that "lacks fit into existing knowledge, necessities fit into necessary knowledge, and wants fit into subjective needs." nation & macalister (nation & macalister, 2020) assert that a requirements analysis should focus on the goals and course material of a course. due to this, a requirements analysis must consider both the information students already possess and that which they still need to learn. a course's content is relevant and valuable to learn because of needs analysis. in connection with this, hutchinson and waters (feroudj & aissa, 2022) divide the needs of learners into three, namely necessities, lacks, and wants. needs are things that the learner must know to function effectively. weaknesses are things that the learner knows and does not know. ade mulyanah, sariah, rini widiastuti, nuny sulistiany idris, exti budihastuti, nia kurnia, & resti nurfaidah need analysis of indonesian language training materials for foreign workers using the communicative method 444 desire is the learner's needs (nation & macalister, 2020). in the communicative approach in learning indonesian for foreign speakers is intended to develop communication skills. language learning objectives include listening, reading, writing, speaking, and understanding cultural elements. it shows the interconnectedness of competencies in language teaching. djiwandono emphasized (desnaranti et al., 2019) that the communicative approach is the capacity to understand or convey what has been or needs to be expressed utilizing diverse aspects of language found in all languages. to understand existing expressions flexibly and adapt to changes that always arise, not solely based on standard conventional values. further put forward by djumingin (djumingin et al., 2022) communicative approach is the ability to function in actual communicative situations in a spontaneous transaction involving one or more people. the same thing was also stated by jufri (jufri, 2017:11), stating that the communicative approach is that one sentence form can express more than one meaning, and conversely, one meaning can be defined through more than one sentence pattern. the foundation of language learning offered by the communicative approach communication skills is developing. language instruction in schools should improve students' verbal and written communication skills. it serves a multitude of purposes to use language as a communication tool. to achieve a language teaching-learning orientation based on the task and function of communicating, it is delivered in a relevant context and not in the form of free-form sentences. a communicative method is predicated on the notion that mastering language use for communication is an essential component of language learning. as a result, communicative learning is language instruction that provides students with sufficient opportunities to improve their language and display it in both productive and receptive tasks based on real-world circumstances, not artificial situations detached from context. in teaching, there are many strategies and approaches. teachers can choose various strategies, techniques, and materials based on various approaches to achieve learning objectives. the needs of students are, of course, teachers' primary focus. however, each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. in practice, the teacher must determine the most appropriate approach in the needed context. according to kadijan et al., in 2017 teachers are advised to successfully create and employ authentic teaching tools and techniques by communicative principles that emphasize a learner-centered approach (kardijan & rafli, 2017). a communicative approach is an approach that functions as a communication tool. therefore, language teaching should be directed at using language to communicate. based on the arguments, hymes (taş & khan, 2020) suggests that in the classroom, language is used for several purposes, such as greeting, requesting, providing information, ordering, and so on, although its use is limited. many experts have given the theory of communicative language teaching. hyme (taş & khan, 2020) and chomsky proposed theories underlining clt. hyme criticized chomsky's work. according to hyme (taş & khan, 2020). he stated that language teachers should strive for communicative competence, knowledge of the language structure as well as social knowledge regarding these structures, and the ability to use the language appropriately in various contexts (taş & khan, 2020). in communicative language, all the related theories underlie what is described as clt; it can also be defined as a set of teachings about the nature of language and language learning that are fundamentally unifying but broad and theoretically well-informed. according to canale and swain (nakatsuhara et al., 2018; han, 2022), communicative competence consists of four discrete skills; grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, strategic competence, and discourse competence. regardless of the version of clt, nunan has famously summarized clt as being characterized by grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, strategic competence, and discourse competence, which are four different talents. whatever the form of clt, nunan has famously summed it up as having the following characteristics. according to brown (pradipta, 2020), the things that must be prepared by the teacher in designing learning materials using a communicative approach are as follows: (1) classroom learning objectives can focus on all communication skills components. (2) learning strategies are made to encourage pupils to use functional, expressive, authentic, and pragmatic language. (3) fluency and accuracy of language that can underlie communication techniques. (4) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 445 students must use the language both productively and receptively the communicative approach is seen as a strategy. this approach has various uses in learning. suwarsih madya's view (marta, 2020) states that this approach plays a vital role in transferring knowledge. transfer of learning is not always automatic; efforts must be made to instill potential abilities in students so that they are motivated to generalize communicative expressions of grammatical rules or narratives that they are learning from one socio-cultural situation to another equally socio-cultural situation. (1) a spiral or cyclical approach is highly recommended. (2) the starting point for preparing the curriculum for the unit of study should be the social communication functions that language students need. (3) the spiral approach is used in presenting the peaceful function of language in different socio-cultural situations. several things directly related to this concept are the background of the emergence of the communicative approach. the main characteristics of the communicative approach are related aspects and the application of the communicative approach in learning indonesian. according to ratna (muammar et al., 2018), the design of the material must place greater emphasis on the learning process than the subject matter. these are the three concepts in producing instructional materials based on a communicative approach. the material must encourage students to communicate reasonably. pity (muammar et al., 2018) reveals that communicative ability is based on the goal of conveying messages to others and conveying messages to others in an acceptable social way. that goal can be achieved through activities that take the form of communicative treatment and exercises to develop communicative abilities. language learning practices based on a communicative approach have four frameworks, namely (1) content-based language learning, (2) task-based language learning, (3) text or discourse-based language learning, and (4) competency-based language learning (madjdi et al., 2019; marta, 2020; muammar et al., 2018). texts or discourses for communication purposes have several types. they are early genres, such as labels, observational commentary, retelling, and narrative; factual genres, such as procedures, reports, explanations, arguments, expositions, persuasiveness, interviews, surveys, descriptions, biographies, retellings, and narratives; fiction genres, such as traditional and modern fiction; nonfiction genres, such as retellings, reports, procedures, explanations, persuasion, and discussions; written genres, such as descriptions, expositions, instructions, argumentations, and narratives used to generate language texts, both spoken and written language. in bipa learning, some use a contextual communicative approach to increase vocabulary with the introduction of local wisdom to build the classroom atmosphere to be fun and add insight. this communicative-contextual approach requires learners to deepen indonesian speaking skills that suit their daily needs. for this reason, there are several principles of a communicative-contextual approach, namely: the existence of communicative interaction between learners and teachers, the text used is authentic, there are efforts to learn language and language management, learning languages through daily experiences, and looking for language relationships in the classroom and outside the classroom (melati, 2022). they are referring to the theory that the author will present the results of the analysis of the needs of bipa students from thailand in three subchapters: needs, deficiencies, and desires. the author presented the needs of these students from what the students have conveyed through questionnaires and fgds. the information is then analyzed based on three divisions of student needs so that the difference between students' needs, shortcomings, and desires is clear. method this research is part of the exploratory stage of the addie model development research (molenda in pradana, 2018). addie stands for analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. the addie model was chosen because it can describe a systematic approach and instructional development (sugihartini & yudiana, 2018). figure 1. addie model the primary task at this stage is to examine the necessity of creating instructional resources that ade mulyanah, sariah, rini widiastuti, nuny sulistiany idris, exti budihastuti, nia kurnia, & resti nurfaidah need analysis of indonesian language training materials for foreign workers using the communicative method 446 support learning objectives; some of the analyses done are as follows: (1) performance analysis: in this stage, the fundamental problems encountered in learning begin to emerge. performance analysis: at this point, the core issues with learning start to surface. (2) student analysis the following factors affect student learning: 1) student learning characteristics, 2) existing student learning knowledge and abilities, 3) thinking skills or capabilities students should have for learning, and 4) ways to develop the teaching resources kids need to develop their critical-thinking skills. (3) analyzing the facts, ideas, rules, and practices in the learning materials: a method of identifying materials that are pertinent to the creation of teaching materials in learning is by analysis of materials that are related to facts, concepts, principles, and procedures. at this point, the research is completed utilizing the literature study approach. (4) analysis of learning objectives: this step is needed to identify the skills or knowledge that pupils must possess. at this stage, the focus is to know its learning objectives and achievement. consequently, this stage can serve as a guide for creating educational materials. the research population is all foreign workers in indonesia. the data collection technique used a random sampling technique. random sampling is a technique of determining samples randomly (sugiyono, 2017). this technique was chosen because the types of foreign workers who were the respondents were not chosen but were carried out randomly because they adjusted what was happening in the field. the development of the model is a model that is adapted to the needs of foreign workers in learning the indonesian language. therefore, this research is based on need analysis, the primary sample. the sample of this research is 184 people. for this requirements analysis, a few instruments are available for data collection. nation and macalister (nation & macalister, 2020) said that "questionnaires can gather information. objective needs, in-depth interviews, documentation (such as compiling exam results or textbooks and analyzing them), observation (such as following a learner throughout a normal day), informal discussions with teachers and students, and testing are some. personal requirements are determined through learner self-assessment employing lists and scales, questionnaires, and interviews. using kayl’s case study (alkhalidi, 2021) on "developing an esl curriculum based on needs and situation analysis" as an illustration, let's look at some of his methods. he observed students in an adult esl program to gather the data, administered questionnaires to students to ascertain their needs and then interviewed the teacher for the same reason. data analysis is divided into three stages: looking at students' needs, shortcomings, and desires. results and discussion this section will discuss several things: the respondent profile, student needs, and weaknesses. they are referring to the theory that the author will present the findings from the evaluation of bipa students' needsthailand in three subchapters: needs, deficiencies, and desires. as is well known, the needs of these students are known by the authors from what the students have conveyed through questionnaires and fgds. the information is then analyzed based on three divisions of student needs so that the difference between students' needs, shortcomings, and desires is clear. respondent profile based on the results of the data analysis, it can be seen that around 96% cannot speak indonesian. only 30.2% have attended indonesian language courses. country of origin about 99% comes from china. the business sector for foreign workers is in the industrial sector, around 89.1%. the party providing the course is the company. figure 1. field of work figure 2. answers to the questionnaire 2 indonesian language proficiency the survey's findings indicate that foreign workers in kepulauan riau have limited indonesian language proficiency. from the data, it was found that around 92.3% could not speak indonesian. during work activities, foreign workers communicate with their assistants. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 447 related to perception and language skills, we should socialize the understanding of bipa learning programs for foreign workers through increasing knowledge about linguistic regulations in indonesia. referring to the findings of the hypotheses about knowledge, perception, and language skills, we can use them as a reference for preparing an appropriate learning model for foreign workers. the results of research data from interviews with the district manpower office (disnaker) kepulauan riau show no standardized training format. foreign workers generally take courses privately with company funds or private funds. it seems to be the trigger for the low indonesian language skills of foreign workers in indonesia. figure 3. answers to the questionnaire 3 the study results for research subjects who have or have not worked in indonesia and the country of origin in indonesia is china, which states that they have never worked in indonesia before. the data shows that the characteristics of foreign workers in indonesia are based on origin from china with no experience working in indonesia. according to siroj (in albantani, 2019), there are currently no instructional resources that correspond with the strong desire that foreign speakers have to study indonesian. this is apparent from the absence of teaching resource books on bipa teaching materials in bookstores. bipa teachers frequently encounter a big issue when conducting learning activities is the material's limitations. bipa teachers struggle to select or determine relevant learning materials to assist non-native english speakers in acquiring essential abilities. as a result, bipa teaching materials are required to maintain foreign speakers' motivation to learn indonesian. student needs what is needed in training must focus on the needs of students so that students or course participants can obtain the benefits. as stated earlier, needs are things that students must know. to determine students' needs, the researcher provides a list of materials needed in the business realm. the material mapping is based on mulyanah's research (mulyanah, 2017) on mapping the needs of teaching materials for tka. the learner's wants need to be distinguished from student needs. the results show that most students desire access to the information they require regarding their coursework. environment (97%), the surrounding environment (89%), conversations in shopping places (54.4%), self-introductions (23.9%), interviews work (10%), company meetings (10.3%), numerical transactions (9.2%), transportation services (20.7%), explaining products (7.1%), meeting clients (5.5 %), business negotiation (4.3%), and understanding the news (1.1%). figure 4. answers to the questionnaire 4 the results of the data on foreign workers in the riau islands require more material related to social relations with the surrounding environment (97.3%) and the surrounding environment (89.1%). it shows that the social aspect dramatically influences their perception of communication. concerning this matter, of course, teaching materials are needed to provide the students' wishes. however, when asked about the reason why the trend of the data is in that direction, the author does not have access because the implementation of data collection uses survey data. to see the condition of the students, the writer obtained information from the company about their ability and how they received indonesian language training by conducting online fgds with the indonesian employers association (apindo), company management represented by hrd, and stakeholders, namely from the manpower office (disnaker). learner weaknesses weaknesses relate to things that have been and are not known by students. based on the information obtained by the author, each student has advantages and disadvantages. weaknesses in students learning the indonesian language are not the bipa route because the fulfillment of the material is carried out by the company and based on the needs and desires of the students. the condition of workers in the business realm already has a companion workforce, affecting the data results of the foreign workers just requiring material in the business realm related to social relations. ade mulyanah, sariah, rini widiastuti, nuny sulistiany idris, exti budihastuti, nia kurnia, & resti nurfaidah need analysis of indonesian language training materials for foreign workers using the communicative method 448 conclusion teaching resources are the data, instruments, and texts that instructors and teachers need to research and plan for the application of learning. when conducting teaching and learning activities in the classroom, teachers and instructors employ a variety of instructional resources. both written and unwritten material may be included in the material in question. teaching resources are a collection of learning resources or substances presented systematically to show the full range of capabilities that students will master throughout learning activities. teaching materials are a collection of written and unwritten items that are deliberately arranged to foster a learning environment. teaching resources can support teachers and students in the teaching and learning process and assist in achieving the objectives of the syllabus. references abbas, a. r. i. 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(2020). on the models of communicative competence. sonline. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3444 76391_on_the_models_of_communicative_c ompetence ade mulyanah, sariah, rini widiastuti, nuny sulistiany idris, exti budihastuti, nia kurnia, & resti nurfaidah need analysis of indonesian language training materials for foreign workers using the communicative method 450 17 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching yayan suryana department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia. e-mail: ysuryana2008@gmail.com apa citation: suryana, y. (2013). teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 17-24 received: 10-09-2013 accepted: 29-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: this article was related to the teachers’ perception on the application of ict-based english teaching in senior high school and the readiness of the teachers and schools in applying the 2013 curriculum. this qualitative data was described from the interview and the survey during the socialization of the 2013 curriculum. 8 participants of different ages from different senior high school in kuningan regency were interviewed by phone, direct interview, and facebook-chatting. the findings showed that most of the senior teachers (80%) of more than 50 years of age were not motivated in using the ict, 20% of them were familiar with ict; 60% of the teachers between their 30s and 40s generally understood how to use ict but seldom implemented the ict based english teaching because of lack of ict facilities. almost 95 % of new english teachers were familiar with ict and they applied the ict-based english teaching when the ict facility was available. their reasons of not using ict were lack of ict literacy, taking too long to learn, and the fact that it was expensive and not always available. the conclusion of this research was that the application of the ict-based english teaching could not be applied 100% because some teachers were still illiterate with ict and the ict facilities were still limited. keywords: ict, teachers’ perception, the 2013 curriculum, ict literacy, ict-based english teaching introduction this research discusses “teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching for teachers’ professionalism in kuningan, west java indonesia.”this research tried to find out the existing condition of english teaching for teacher’s professionalism in kuningan regency and the teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching for professionalism, and the impact of using ict-based english teaching for teachers’ professionalism in human capital, social capital, and social economic growth. ict has been studied by many scholars from different countries in different aspects with different methodologies such as those from sue webb (2006) ict reducing social exclusion, zare-ee (2010, 2011) ict in teaching and research, mellar and kambouri (2005) observing ict use in adult literacy and numeracy, celik, arkin & sabriler (2012) ict for self-regulated learning, kristina (2010) on-line with language courses, jaffer, ng’ambi & czerniewicz (2007) ict in teaching and learning strategy, mullamaa (2010) ict in language learning, lu, hou & huang (2010) ict in audio-video speaking class, and hu & webb (2009) integrating ict to higher education. this research used a case study qualitative approach. the qualitative research was characterized by the research question, the qualitative strategies to be used in this study, the roles of participants and the writer, purposive sampling strategy for sites and individual identified, the data collection procedure for recording yayan suryana teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching 18 information during the data collection, and data analyses, on qualitative research. the first part of the dissertation research was concerned with the need analysis from the existing condition of ict-based english teaching in the research site, which, in this program has been promoted both through participating in the direct interview, telephoning, and chatting via facebook to glean the information related to the existing condition in ict-based english teaching. kuningan regency was chosen as a case study site in this research to ease in collecting the data where the researcher worked. the condition of ict facilities in five secondary schools was observed and 8 secondary school teachers participated in this research. based on the background above the writer would like to answer the following questions:“what is the existing conditionof english teaching for teacher’s professionalism in kuningan regency,”and “what is the teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching for professionalism?” based on the research questions above, the objectives of this research are, as follows: to find out the existing condition of applying english teaching for teacher’s professionalism in kuningan regency, and to identify the teachers’ perception on ictbased english teaching for teachers’ professionalism. method the research used qualitative case study. a case was based on the models of creswell (2009) and gillham (2000). according to creswell (2009), a case can be an individual, it can be a group such as a family, or a class, or an office, or a hospital ward; it can be an institution such as a school or a child’s home, or a factory; it can be a large-scale community a town, an industry, a profession. all of these are single cases; but you can also study multiple cases: a number of single parents; several schools; two different professions. it all depends what you want to find out which leads us on. (creswell, 2009: 176) gillham (2000: 1-2) states that a case study is one which investigates the above to answer specific research questions (that may be fairly loose to begin with) and which seeks a range of different kinds of evidence, evidence which is there in the case setting, and which has to be abstracted and collated to get the best possible answers to the research questions. no one kind or source of evidence is likely to be sufficient (or sufficiently valid) on its own. (gillham 2000: 1-2). this case study was conducted in kuningan regency of west java province. there were 5 senior high schools observed in this research, and 8 english teachers as participants of different ages starting from the teachers with less than 10 years of experience, those with 11 to 20 years of experience, those with 21 to 30 years of experience, and those with more than 30 years of experience. the research was conducted between july and october 2013. natural setting was used to collect data in the field. the instrument used in this research was observation, interview using open questions, and documents (creswell 2009: 183). in collecting the data the observation was carried out without the researcher participating. the interview was conducted in different ways: recorded face-to-face interviews, recorded telephoning, and chatting through facebook. the documents came from different resources, for example: journals related to ict in education, mgmp report years 2011 and 2012 and other supporting data from the government like rules and regulations issued by the president or the ministry of educational and cultural affairs, and other related documents. 19 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the process of data analysis involves making sense out of text and image data. it involves preparing the data for analysis, conducting different analysis, moving deeper into understanding the data, representing the data, and making an interpretation of the larger meaning of the data. (creswell, 2009: 183). open-ended data was collected based on asking general questions and the data was developed from the data supplied by participants. the steps of analyzing the data began from organizing and preparing the data for analysis. this involved transcribing interviews, scanning materials, typing up field notes, or sorting and arranging the data into different types. first, the data related to the ict facilities was put in the first group. the information from the interview related to the participants’ condition was grouped into the second, and the information related to the teachers or participants’ perception was put in the third group. the interpretation was related to the teachers’ perception and the researcher’s analytical view of the findings. results and discussion the findings were about the existing condition of ict facilities and english teachers, the teachers’ perception on the application of ictbased english teaching, and the impact of the application of ict-based english teaching in human capital, social capital and social economic growth. existing condition of ict facilities and english teachers at several schools in this part, the existing conditions were divided into two points: the school ict facility and the teachers ict facilities at several schools before describing the existing conditions of ict, let us broadly classify the ict resources that must be owned by the school, as follows: (i) hardware – the equipment, such as a pc or interactive whiteboard, linked smart boards, opaque projectors, lcd projectors; (ii) software – the stored instructions which enable the hardware to operate automatically, together with the information that it stores and processes, such as a word processing program and the documents produced using it; (iii) media – the materials that carry data and programs, such as floppy or hard disks; (iv) services – combinations of hardware, software and human resources that enable users to achieve more than they could with hardware and software alone, such as the internet. from the above description the existing conditions of the school ict facilities in kuningan were still limited. the first was the ict facility in a senior high school in the center of the city. this school was famous for the best school in kuningan. based on the information from the participant, every class had been equipped with a permanent lcd projector. all teachers used ict in teaching although not always. the school ict facilities owned by the school were a wi-fi, server, internet, 40 sets of students’ computers, 3 sets of teachers’ computers, 29 laptops, a television, a vcd-dvd player, speaker, fixed-lcd projectors in every class, and laptops in each classroom. general problems were not all teachers were “smart” in using it, and sometimes the internet connection was disconnected, and that it was not directly fixed because they did not have an it technician. in the second school, the ict facilities in this school were not as complete as the first school. from 27 classrooms, there were only 6 lcd projectors. one of them was permanently installed in the computer laboratory. one was broken because of wrong use during the classroom process. the rest of the four lcd projectors could be borrowed yayan suryana teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching 20 from the office by ordering first because they had limited projectors. the school had also 3 laptops that could be borrowed when necessary. the internet connection in this school was also often disconnected and not directly fixed by the technician. one of the state senior high schools in the rural area in kuningan with 9 classrooms, there were 3 lcd projectors used for teaching and learning. not many teachers use this facility, so the only one english teacher often uses the lcd projector in teaching and learning. just as in the other facilities, the internet connection was using limited bandwidth, so the connection was late, and they need a faster special additional power network. in the fourth school, the boarding school with 24 classrooms, all students stay in the boarding school. the ict facilities in that school were also limited. of the 6 lcd projectors the school owns, there were only 4 projectors. two of them were broken and could not be used. the problems were the same. they did not have for fixing them technicians. the last school consisted of 22 classes and was located in rural area. there were only three lcd/video projectors here. all were ok. two were installed permanently in the classroom and one could be borrowed from the office by ordering first. when a teacher wanted to use the lcd, he/she should order to be noted by the administrator. the limited ict facilities in this school also made each teacher difficult to use ict facility for teaching. english teachers’ condition at several schools basically, all english teachers and teachers of other subjects should be able to apply the ict-based teaching. this was because based on the 2013 curriculum which had been applied since july 2013 in the secondary schools all teachers should be able to use ict in teaching. teachers who were not familiar with ict were also forced to use ict equipment in their teaching. this fact shows that the ict illiterate teachers are not motivated to renew their knowledge. the malfunction of some teachers in using lcd projectors in the classrooms had caused some headmasters or school principals not to allow new or novice teachers to use the lcd projectors to avoid the wrong use of the projectors during the teaching process. when the lamp was broken, to change the old lamp with the new one, they had to spend almost 2/3 of the total price of a new projector. the lamp was almost as expensive as the new projector. the existing conditions of the english teachers were as follows: a participant who was more than 50 years old described that he was not motivated to learn how to operate the computer because of many factors. one of the reasons was that he could not think and understand easily with the instructions in the computer. he was illiterate with the computer technology. the second was a senior teacher with interest in ict. he was above 50 now, and was a dept at using many ict products, his smart phone and internet connection. he used his smart phone in teaching writing by asking the students to find a certain topic in the internet through their smart phone. then after every group had done the assignment they discussed the topic in the classroom in speaking or reading class. the next participant was a teacher in his 30s. he was one of the more proficient english teachers in ictbased english teaching. he often gives presentation during the english teacher secondary subject teacher forum (mgmp) and used to be the head of the english teachers forum in all senior high schools in kuningan. from the interview i got much information about the teachers’ condition in understanding 21 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee ict. he knows how to design good presentations, how to use it and how to explore the internet. he was also one of the presenters in every english teacher training. the fourth participant was a 28 year old young male teacher. he was involved in teaching the classes using ict-based english in the 10th-grade. as a new teacher whose experience in teaching was still less than 10 years he was generally familiar with basic ict, but he did not use ict in teaching all the times. he did not have any materials from the 2013 curriculum that could be used for teaching. he had not even gotten any training yet from the government to apply new curriculum, but in practice he sometimes used the teaching materials from 2006 curriculum which were related to the new curriculum to run the class. another young teacher who still had less than 10 years of teaching experience was a woman teacher. she was familiar with basic ict. although in practice, she did not also use the ict facility in her teaching. the problems were that she was unable to use the ict facilities because of the limited facilities that they had and because of the slow internet connections. a participant in his 40s from a rural senior high school with nine classes had no serious problem in using the ict in teaching. he could use the ict facility any time he wanted although there were only 3 lcd projectors in his school. most of the teachers here were still illiterate with the ict facilities. a woman participant who was in her 40s from a senior high school in one of favorite school in kuningan was familiar with ict. in her teaching, she often used ict as media for teaching. the bad internet connection that sometimes appeared often forced her not to use ict in her teaching. for her, ict was only one of the media in teaching. there were many media that could be used for teaching. a fifty one year-old participant from the best senior high school in kuningan was a woman with a vast experience in teaching english. for her, in whatever condition, teaching english had to be fun. with ict facility in every class, she could apply ictbased english teaching in her own class whenever she wanted. her perception in applying the new 2013 curriculum was that she found no problems because the school had practically applied ict based teaching since the previous curriculum (2006 curriculum or school based curriculum). the term in the previous curriculum was different from the current curriculum, for example, the term “peminatan”or ‘specialization’was used in the 2013 curriculum while in the previous curriculum it was called “penjurusan” or majors. teaching times of some courses were added and some others were reduced and even deleted. for her, everything was ok, she took it for granted because teaching was compulsory for her, and it was her passion. teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching from eight teachers, only one participant optimistically described that she was ready to apply ict-based english teaching. she was a teacher of the school where the ict facilities were representative. the teacher’s perception on this ict-based english teaching for teachers’ professionalism showed that most of the teachers thought that it was not the time to apply ict-based english teaching because the schools had not been facilitated with the representative and complete ict equipment as required. most of certified teachers were ready to apply the ict-based english teaching, especially the ones who always yayan suryana teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching 22 followed the ict development and who were eager to learn new things about information technology. on the other hand, most of the senior teachers who were more than 53 years old and illiterate in ict were unable to follow this new technology and they tended to use conventional ways in teaching. they were not motivated to learn ict media for teaching and learning. regarding the perception on the application of ict-based english teaching, he agreed to apply the ictbased teaching because by monitoring the changes in ict development of new technology could be followed, and we would never be left behind like right now. by being stubborn, unmotivated, and not following the new technology we would be left behind, so we needed to be ready to any possibility of new changes in ict and especially in teaching. he also perceived that the application of the 2013 curriculum was too early. the government should have provided the schools and the teachers with good ict equipment first, then we could apply the new curriculum. one perceived that the government should facilitate the schools with the comprehensive ict facilities so that the ict-based 2013 curriculum could be applied at all schools not only in kuningan but also in other cities in indonesia. another perception in applying ict-based english teaching was not coming from the teachers. however, many students in rural areas were not motivated in learning english. most of them were lazy, and could not follow the teachers’ explanation or instruction. from the above existing condition, it can be temporarily concluded that only one senior high school was facilitated with better ict facilities, the others were equipped with limited ict facilities. the ict facilities usually owned by the schools consisted of limited lcd projectors, folded lcd screens, laptops, internet connection, wi-fi, one or two smart phones (owned by individuals), computer lab with one server pc and 20 to 40 client pcs. another phenomenon was that most of the schools did not have qualified technicians, so that when there was a problem with the it facilities, it generally could not be solved directly. they had to wait for someone from private companies or individuals who work as computer service center to repair their lcd projectors or other it devices. the lcd projectors’ breakages were mostly caused by malfunction during the operation. the malfunction was related to the steps of operating the projectors from the starting point to shutting down the power. when the instructions in operating the lcd projectors were not followed as it was mentioned in the operating manual of lcd projectors the breakage could happen. a phenomenon between the existing condition and the teachers with the ict literacy perceived the application of ict based english teaching in the classroom was something interesting and easier to do many things with the teaching process. the teachers were divided into two major group conditions. the first group was the teachers with no interest in ict; the second was the teachers with interest in ict. the teachers with no interest in ict were divided into three groups of age. the old groups of more than 50 which was generally stuck in their habits, teachers between 40 and 50, between 30s to 40s, and young teachers of less than 30s. they were not motivated on changes. they did not want to study new things that caused time consuming. when there were new things they tended not to make any response. 23 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the senior teachers of more than 50 were mostly less motivated in using ict in their teaching. they were even illiterate on it. even did they not know how to operate computers. when they had to do such a thing, they usually asked somebody to do it for them. they were not motivated to learn how to operate the computer. when they were forced to learn how to do so, they had to work together with the other by only imitating what other literate people had done. the teachers of less than 50 who know how to operate computer but never use ict in teaching. based on the information from the participants, actually he wanted to use ict in teaching, but the condition of the facility of ict in his school forced him not to use the ict in his teaching. the teacher’s perception on this ict-based english teaching showed that most of the teachers think that it was not the time to apply ict-based english teaching because the schools were not facilitated with the ict equipment as required. most of certified teachers were ready to apply the ict-based english teaching. conclusion based on the 2013 curriculum, ict-based english teaching was required by every teacher, and it could be applied thoroughly when every school had been facilitated with ict in every class. the participants consist of three teacher types. the first type was the teacher’s perception on the use of ict as a compulsory. this was supported by the fact that consulting with information and computer technology made the class more interactive and we could get quick solving problem. the participants of experience senior but ict-illiterate teacher perceived that teaching using ict facilities took times and costly. this was not the correct time using the ict as the facility was still incomplete and took long times to learn how to use the computer. they had no time to learn the computer. this was not good time to use the technology. the third type was the person who was literate with ict but he or she preferred to use whiteboard, once in a while he used the computer and some ict facility. the lack of ict facility had caused most of the teachers not to apply it in their teaching. teachers as profession in this era need to know much about ict and apply this in their teaching. references creswell, j. w. (2009). research design qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches third ed. california: sage publication. english, e. & williamson, j. (2005). meeting the standards in primary english. a guide to the itt nc. london: routledgefalmer. gillham, b. (2000). case study research methods. london: continuum. kemdikbud. (2012). bahan uji publik kurikulum 2013. jakarta: kementerian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. kemendiknas. (2007). permendiknas no. 6/2007 about perubahan peraturan menteri pendidikan nasional nomor 24 tahun 2006 tentang pelaksanaan peraturan menteri pendidikan nasional nomor 22 tahun 2006 tentang standar isi untuk satuan pendidikan dasar dan menengah dan peraturan menteri pendidikan nasional nomor 23 tahun 2006 tentang standar kompetensi lulusan untuk satuan pendidikan dasar dan menengah lamy, m. n. and hampel, r. (2007). online communicationin language learningand teaching. hampshire: palgrave macmillan mcnaught, c. (2005). integrating teaching and learning principles with itinfrastructure and policy. in kym fraser. education developmentand leadership in higher education developing an effective institutional strategy. new york: routledge falmer yayan suryana teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching 24 p.108 mullamaa, k. (2010).“going 100% on-line with language courses:possible?”journal of language teaching and research, vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 531-539, september 2010 ____________“ict in language learning benefits and methodological implications”international education studies volume iii no. 1 p. 38 february 2010 saito, k. (2012). effects of instruction on l2 pronunciationdevelopment: a synthesis of 15 quasi-experimental intervention studies. tesol quarterly december 2012. serkan, c., erkan, a. derya, s. (2012). efl learners’ use of ict for selfregulated learning. the journal of language and linguistic studies. vol. 8, no.2, october 2012 shaheeda, j. dick, n. and laura, c. (2007). the role of icts in higher education in south africa: one strategy for addressing teaching and learning challenges” international journal of education and development using information and communication technology (ijedict), , vol. 3, issue 4, pp. 131-142.2007 webb, s. (2006). can ict reduce social exclusion? the case of an adults’ english language learning programme. british educational research journal vol. 32, no. 3, june 2006, pp. 481–507. 2006. learning to teach writing through writing english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee learning to teach writing through writing svetlana suchkova samara state aerospace university, russia suchkova_s@yahoo.com gulnara dudnikova povolzhskaya state academy of social sciences and humanities, russia dudnick@mail.ru apa citation: suchkova, s. & dudnikova, g. (2013). learning to teach writing through writing english review: journal of english education, 1(2),159-170 received: 09-03-2013 accepted: 30-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: this paper discusses some major issues concerning teaching writing to future teachers. there are a lot of efl/esl textbooks focused on teaching writing. however, those that are intended for trainee teachers are rare on the market. the goal of this paper is to share the result of several years of work on the writing syllabus and materials that is effective in the process of teaching future teachers. it contains sample of tasks based on certain principles that may promote teachers to become effective writers for themselves and, at the same time, to acquire initial professional skills necessary in their future career. a course book can not address any audience in general. it must focus on a particular learner, the objectives, and content of the process of learning. in the situation when no textbook meets these requirements, the problem of providing students with an appropriate textbook must be solved by creating new textbooks. keywords: writing skills, strategies, professional needs, syllabus, teaching/learning materials. introduction mastering writing skills is crucial not only to students’ success at the university, but getting a good job after graduation, too. acquiring this skill is of paramount importance, especially now, in the internet era. in all major fields of study, research, and business, it is absolutely necessary for a person to be able to communicate well in writing. no wonder, every efl/esl course book offers materials aimed at developing effective writing skills. some universities also run online and blended courses focused on academic writing. with all the abundance of materials on the educational market, it looks like there is no need to create something new in the field of teaching writing. however, to be able to write well and to successfully teach how to write are two different competences. both, obviously, should be developed in teacher training institutions. after many years of experience in training would-be teachers, methodology research, and struggle with students’ papers, we decided to create a new university course on writing, different from what is usually offered on the curriculum in russian pedagogical universities. it is different both in the underlying philosophy and approach. the work on the syllabus and materials involved several stages: (1) a thorough analysis of major difficulties russian university learners experience in writing in english – learners’ needs; (2) identifying professional skills future teachers should acquire to be able to teach writing in english to high school students – professional needs; (3) a syllabus design; (4) a students’ survey of mailto:suchkova_s@yahoo.com mailto:dudnick@mail.ru svetlana suchkova & gulnara dudnikova learning to teach writing through writing the topics they would like to write about; (5) collecting students’ materials and creating activities based on them; (6) piloting the materials and revision; (7) getting students’ feedback; (8) a course book publication. it took us several years to collect and pilot materials, modify and improve tasks, write and rewrite them. the product of years of work and piloting the materials was the course book learn to write with us: a process-based writing textbook (suchkova et al, 2013), which is now used in the course of writing in several russian universities. the course book is intended for students, future teachers of english, whose level of language proficiency corresponds to b2+ according to the common european framework of reference (council of europe, 2011). it is a process-based course book that invites students to master the skill of writing in english gradually, step by step, from a paragraph to longer pieces. writing is seen as a skill of expressing ideas on paper clearly and effectively. the purpose of the course is to help students develop essential writing strategies and apply their knowledge to writing assignments they will receive in the university courses in the future, taking language exams, or teaching writing to their own students. the unique feature of the textbook is that almost all the activities are based on students’ written papers who gave their consent to use their papers as a basis for teaching/learning materials. the students of samara state pedagogical university, samara state aerospace university, and povolzhskaya academy of social sciences and humanities can be called co-authors of this book. the article contains the description of the writing course syllabus, the course book principles. it considers the major difficulties russian students have when writing in english. the article also provides information about the content and organization of the course book written for future teachers of english. finally, the authors offer some writing strategies and tasks from this course book. syllabus of the writing course the syllabus below is offered here to illustrate the main elements of the writing course as part of the curriculum at the english language department of povolzhskaya state academy of social sciences and humanities, samara, russia. target group: students majoring in english and teaching methodology duration: three semesters, 96 face-to-face academic hours in class/120 outside class aim:  to enable students to write clear, detailed, well-structured texts on a wide range of subjects (from paragraph to more extended pieces of writing) objectives:  to provide students with a variety of effective writing strategies, thus facilitating development of their writing skills  to form initial teacher’s professional skills in needs analysis, creating materials for teaching writing, and assessing written papers topics for consideration:  identifying strengths and weaknesses as a writer; setting goals  pre-writing strategies  paragraph writing: topic, main idea, paragraph structure and purpose, paragraph types  unity, cohesion, and coherence of the paragraph english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee  punctuation and mechanics  drafting, editing, and proofreading  essay writing  article writing  review writing  report writing  resume writing  letter writing  story writing  avoiding plagiarism, paraphrasing strategies  assessment criteria, self-check, peer reviewing  written feedback functional language:  concluding and summarizing  giving examples and focusing  expressing opinions  suggesting solutions  introducing main ideas  introducing listing  showing sequence and time  showing comparison/contrast  introducing cause-effect  phrases for reviews  phrases for report  phrases for letter writing  action verbs  narration verbs materials  suchkova, s., dudnikova, g., adayeva, o. (2013). learn to write with us: a process-based writing textbook (student’s book). samara. controlling end-of-semester activities: semester 1 – paragraph writing, letter writing semester 2 – options: review / essay writing semester 3 – options: report / article writing assessment criteria: 1-5 scale  content  text organization  word range  sentence fluency (sentence length and structure variety, appropriate connectives)  accuracy (spelling, grammar and usage, use of capitals, and punctuation) the syllabus requires an explanation of how one can learn to teach writing during the process of being taught. to do this, it is necessary to describe the materials used in the course and provide samples to illustrate the points. this will be done in other sections of the article. the syllabus was designed to cater for the learning needs of russian students. observation and analysis of papers written by russian learners of english (2003-2011) shows that students’ major difficulties are (1) inability to structure a text properly: divide it into meaningful parts, formulate the main idea clearly and develop it, (2) lack of cohesion or coherence, (3) inconsistent register, (4) poor vocabulary and primitive grammar, (5) plagiarizing. partly, the difficulties result from the fact that students tend to think that writing in english is much like writing in their native language, which is far from it. a paragraph in english normally follows a straight line of development (the paragraph often begins with a statement of its central idea, followed by a series of subdivisions of the central idea with the purpose of developing the topic sentence). conversely, the thoughtpattern of russian speakers is a zigzag line, sometimes interrupted by rather complex digressions: irrelevant, off-topic material is introduced in a paragraph (kaplan, 1966, p. 15). the analysis also shows that the writing problems also account for certain gaps in pre-university training, i.e. underestimating of teaching such things as paragraph structure: introduction, main body, and conclusion; basic svetlana suchkova & gulnara dudnikova learning to teach writing through writing features: unity, coherence, and cohesion; writing purpose and paragraph types: description, process, opinion, comparison/contrast, narration, and problem-solution; text organization models: listing, sequence, comparison/contrast, and cause-effect. there is clear evidence that they all require special focus in instruction and practice. for this reason, all of these problems are highlighted in the course. as can be seen from the syllabus, the biggest part of the course is devoted to writing on a paragraph level as a paragraph is a prerequisite for writing longer pieces. the problem of accuracy is dealt with in special units of the materials. the problem of plagiarism and how to avoid it is tackled separately, too. professional needs as the main intent was to target the materials on professional requirements for the teacher, certain skills have been identified as major ones. the authors of the article share the opinion of k. b. yancey who states the fact that “in the 21st century, people write as never before – in print and online. we thus face three challenges that are also opportunities: developing new models of writing; designing a new curriculum supporting those models; and creating models for teaching that curriculum.” (yancey, 2013, p. 1) writing as “an object of study has been neglected until recently, but today it is an essential part of the pedagogical institutions curriculum”. unfortunately, however, we have to agree with scane and doerger (2010, p. 51) that “while pre-service teachers receive explicit instruction in methods for teaching writing to elementary and secondary students, they are less likely to receive explicit instruction about the writing skills necessary to be a successful, professional educator. the writing skills of many teacher candidates often do not align with expectations for professionals and most introductory courses in writing offered at universities do not address the specific needs of those planning to become teachers.” on the one hand, modern educators are expected to write in the way that will enable them to communicate professionally with colleagues from the world, sharing ideas and discussing challenges and teaching experience, via professional blogs, forums, and conference papers. on the other hand, in addition to academic writing skills they acquire themselves, teachers should be able to develop materials in order to train students how to write effectively with the reader in mind. they should know how to develop such skills of their students as generating and arranging ideas, drafting and editing, overcoming drawbacks and difficulties, they should be in the know of a variety of methods and techniques, and, of course, teachers should be trained in carrying needs analysis and correction techniques. the partnership for 21st century skills together with the national council of teachers of english worked out the skills necessary for a modern student and teacher. some of them are creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration, information and literacy. to enable future teachers to acquire the above mentioned skills, we implemented this course and are using the textbook. later in the article we offer a number of activities that are aimed at developing the skills. the course book’s underlying philosophy the underlying principles of the offered course are integration of language skills, reflective practice, english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee individual approach to students, and collaborative learning. a certain system of activities is designed to make the process of acquiring this most challenging language skill gradually, from easy to more complicated tasks. the teaching /learning process is built on students’ background learning experience; the prior knowledge is elicited, and the process is targeted on the learners’ needs. moreover, the activities are directed towards getting students to think for themselves; they are always provided options to choose from. setting their own goals and monitoring their own progress (which is part of the teaching methodology used) is often referred to as learner-centeredness and learner autonomy (harmer, 2008). the skills of reading and writing are integrated with a focus on developing critical thinking skills, stimulating creativity, and fostering learner autonomy. good reading samples, used with the purpose of their analysis and evaluation, further serve patterns for writing. learners first make discoveries and perceive differences of ideas arrangement, consolidate their understanding of text structuring, and then create meaningful texts of their own. the book also follows some principles which are very important for future teachers. first, students are recognized as individuals with their own learning style, background, pace, and interests. their initiative is appreciated; they are encouraged to take on an active role in the process. second, students are involved in different modes of classroom management: individual, pair, and group work, which are indicated in the instruction to the exercises. this teaches them how to organize an activity in a more efficient way. what is also professionally-oriented is the fact that students are invited to evaluate their peers’ works. such peer review “encourages students to monitor each other and, as a result, helps them to become better at self monitoring” (harmer, 2008, p. 150). the material itself has certain educational value, too: there is a great variety of tasks and topics; many activities are creative and focused on applying strategies. what the book includes learn to write with us starts with an introduction written for students that explains the ideas behind the textbook. the course book contains 18 units; each places an emphasis on a certain issue of the writing process. each unit starts with a preliminary activity which provides a stimulus to thought and introduces the subject under discussion. the main points of each unit are emphasized in special tables, where explanatory comments are provided. the book is also abundant in useful language presented in the boxes. a particular focus of the book is learning how to handle various tasks; that is why, it has a lot of helpful tips and effective strategies. the students are offered a variety of different activities to be done both in class and at home. moreover, the book comprises several appendixes that are meant to assist students in evaluation their own work and the papers of their peers. they are aimed at encouraging students to use the guidelines until they get into the habit of editing their papers. there is a bibliography list which contains both methodology books and textbooks, printed and electronic resources that can be used for further reference in order to develop writing skills. each unit is structured in such a way as to first start students’ thinking and elicit what they already know; then, svetlana suchkova & gulnara dudnikova learning to teach writing through writing through a variety of exercises they acquire more knowledge about writing conventions, effective strategies, format characteristics, etc. at the beginning of the course, students write on the level of phrases and sentences, then continue with a complete paragraph, and next proceed to longer pieces of writing such as letters, stories, essays, articles, reports, etc. each unit has a wrapping up exercise to emphasize the most important points of the unit. topics to write about discussion of topics selected according to students’ interests and concerning different spheres of their life and professional activity makes for raising their cooperation, communicative competence, and motivation. it is known that teachers may expect better results if they invite students to write on the topics that are relevant and involving to them. we tried to consider our students’ worlds of thought and experience in order to provoke their engagement with the material. that is why, before creating teaching materials, a survey was conducted in the pedagogical university of samara, which allowed having a list of topics students are likely to be interested in writing about. the questionnaire contained one open-ended question: what topics would you like to write about? among the most favorite topics were films, food, outstanding people, favorite places and travelling, technology and the internet, and others. all these topics can be found in the course book activities. some of the topics, such as societal problems, cultures around the world, creativity, were added by the authors as they are considered to be thought provoking and developmental. as we see our role, the teachers’ job is not only to teach a language, but also to educate their students. the real education value of learning can be achieved by discussing culturally educational and social content. the principles at work this section aims to illustrate the principles underlying the course with samples taken from the course book. the first and most important basis for professional progress is simply your own reflection on any issues that arise. reflection is the necessary basis for further development: it is the “hallmark of the conscientious professional” (ur, 1996, p. 319). the book has a lot of tasks which invite students to reflect. here are some of them.  how is an essay genre different from a letter, report, diary, and other pieces of writing? what can you compare it with? what is the difference between an essay and a paragraph?  think back on the types of paragraphs you have already learned. what is the underlying principle for their classification?  work in small groups and discuss the following questions. 1. what is the purpose of a resume/cv? 2. have you ever written one in english/in russian? 3. are the conventions of writing a resume/cv in english and in russian similar? if yes, in what way? 4. can you write a resume/cv once and use it to apply for different jobs? why /why not?  think of all possible types of letters and create a mind-map. mark those you have an experience of writing. as for the integrated skills approach, it seems the most natural as it reflects a real-life process of communication in which it is impossible to separate one skill from another. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee many activities begin with a series of discussion questions which aim at activating students’ pre-existing knowledge of the world and engaging them in a topic that they are going to read or hear about. speaking sessions allow students to investigate their personal experience, thoughts, and feelings about a topic.  work with a partner and discuss the following questions. 1. what is the purpose of a review? 2. how is it different from a letter, essay, or diary? 3. where will you find a review? 4. what kind of information does a review usually include? much language production work grows out of texts that students read. at the next stage students are asked to read a review and answer questions. together with focusing on certain points, the text serves as a model and can be the basis for a written task. thus, texts are used to stimulate students into some other kind of work.  read the review and answer the questions below. 1. what kind of film is being reviewed? 2. what is the film about? 3. where does the action of the film take place? 4. who are the characters of the film? 5. what names are used in the review? what for? 6. is it a positive or a negative review? how do you know? 7. would you like to see the film? why/why not? the next stage involves the second reading of the same review and filling in the chart.  read the review again and complete the chart below. note down what kind of information is presented in each paragraph paragraph 1 film title, director … paragraph 2 paragraph 3 paragraph 4 paragraph 5 summary … after students have worked on the review structure, its language, students are invited to discuss with their partner the book/film of their choice. thus, knowledge about what is a review is incorporated into the process of communication and, consequently, into a language skill, which makes its mastering conscious. this activity is also important as a preparation for writing itself.  think of the best and worst films/books/shows you have seen/read recently. list their good and bad points. then tell your partner about each film/book. the final product of students’ work is a creative writing task which can be treated as a wrap up of the exploration of the topic. it is writing a review. when students are asked to write creatively, they usually strive harder than usual to produce a greater variety of correct and appropriate language than they might tip: for question 6, highlight words and expressions that helped you answer it. svetlana suchkova & gulnara dudnikova learning to teach writing through writing for more routine assignments. students are offered some options and guidelines to assist them, which makes the task more learner-friendly.  choose one of the options and write a review (about 220-260 words). option 1 a review of a must read book for your university newsletter. option 2 a review of your favorite film to post it on a web page “films that are always with us.” option 3 a review of the worst ever tv show for the rating “no-show”. the following guidelines can help you follow the review format. 1. don’t fail to give background details of the product reviewed: the author, name, theme, main characters, etc. in the introductory paragraph. also, indicate your purpose of writing and the addressee, and general impression. 2. in the body part of your review, present the main points that guided you in your evaluation, e.g. soundtrack, actors’ performance, style of writing, etc. remember to touch upon one topic in each paragraph (the plot, characters, language, etc.). focus on good/bad features of the book/film/show and consider the following questions: how did i feel reading/watching it? what makes it enjoyable/dull? why and whom would i recommend / not recommend it? 3. in the conclusion, express your positive or negative opinion and give recommendations to the reader. summarize the reasons why the film/book/show is recommended or not recommended. tip: for more guidelines use appendix ii “paper self-evaluation list.” the integrated skills approach gradually builds students' confidence in applying different strategies, stimulates them to obtain and present concepts and ideas, develops a feel for the use of the language in various tasks, and, consequently, leads students to meaningful communication in english. an individual approach to students is reflected in tasks which offer a choice of options in terms of topics. moreover, they are asked to produce a piece of writing on their own, at their own pace, thus working in a pattern of individualized learning. this is a very important step in the development of learner autonomy. as harmer (2008: 394) suggests, “giving students agency (enabling them to be the doers rather than the recipients of learning action) is one way of helping to sustain their motivation”.  write down 5-7 topics you would like to write about. share them with your group mates.  choose one of the topics below and write the topic sentence around it. think of how you would like to develop your topic sentence.  a favorite place to relax  nights owls vs. early birds  the best part of the day  a societal problem  dreams and reality  an ideal partner english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee tip: remember that the topic sentence is a general statement which is supposed to cover the content of the paragraph.  look at the topics below and decide how you would develop them: with details, examples, or explanation. discuss the ideas with your partner. are the answers the same? why/why not?  a learning style  an unusual adventure  russian wedding traditions  a genius  a blog  a card game the textbook has a lot of tasks built around collaborative learning, where students work in pairs or groups, trying to achieve the best results they can. they have a chance to exchange ideas with their group mates, thus learning from each other. in many cases, students’ work is read and commented on by their fellow students, as two or more minds are often more creative, effective, and efficient in solving problems than an individual mind. in collaboration, students contribute to each other’s work, on the one hand, and are made more aware of their own, on the other. work in groups of 3-4. discuss all the stages that come into writing. create a mindmap together. compare it with other groups’ mind-maps. a) in pairs, brainstorm ideas to compare and contrast  people: _________ and ______________;  places: _________ and ______________;  things: _________ and ______________. b) agree on the topic, add aspects to discuss, and write a paragraph together.  work in groups of 3 or 4 and discuss how to close an essay effectively. consider the following questions. 1. what makes an essay complete? 2. how can you help the reader feel satisfied? 3. how can you signal that you have finished? one of the many roles a teacher has to play is that of a materials designer. although there are many resources available, many teachers continue to produce their own materials for classroom use. teachers need to create effective teaching materials to ensure that students are learning to their maximum potential. materials development is a major skill a future teacher must possess. the course book provides many opportunities for students to develop this skill. 1. write a paragraph of five to six sentences on one of the following topics.  how to cook pizza  going on a package tour  reasons for going abroad  why to have/not to have plastic surgery begin with a topic sentence and develop it in the form of steps or examples. 2. now add one sentence that is off target to the paragraph you have written and put your sentences in a less effective order. number them. 3. work with a partner. read each other’s paper. find the sentence that is off target. suggest a more effective order for the sentences. in terms of professional competence, it is also very important for a future teacher to be able to see mistakes and to correct them, which is peer correction or review. the textbook has tasks aiming at practicing the skill of commenting, assessing, making amendments, proofreading and editing a piece of work. trainee teachers need to be able to learn svetlana suchkova & gulnara dudnikova learning to teach writing through writing to read critically for style, content, and language accuracy. they must be ready to give each other feedback. below are several samples that illustrate this idea. a) write a comparison paragraph (pointing out likenesses) or a contrast paragraph (pointing out differences) on one of the following topics. a. two movies or two television shows b. two cafes/restaurants c. two jobs d. two dictionaries e. other b) write comments on your partner’s paragraphs. suggest ideas for improvement. use appendix i to guide you through the editing process.  together with your partner, evaluate the essays above using the questions below as guidelines. 1. was it interesting to read the essay? why/why not? 2. what is the main message? is it clear? 3. is the information relevant to the thesis? 4. are there enough facts and examples to support ideas in the paragraphs? 5. does the author know who s/he is writing for? why/why not? 6. does the essay have a good opening? 7. does the writer finish the essay in style/strongly? 8. is the purpose achieved? 9. is the organization appropriate to the topic and purpose? 10. what can be improved?  exchange the essays with your partner and assess each other’s paper using “assessment criteria” given in appendix iv. give feedback: state good and weak points and recommend ways to improve the essay.  study the texts with the teacher’s comments. editing your friend’s paper can help you improve your writing skills, too. in pairs, think of how you can improve the paragraphs taking the teacher’s notes into consideration. 1. is it the topic sentence or one of the reasons? add a link. i travel a lot and for me going somewhere on my own is quite boring. why? in addition punctuate. i always joke: in a new and unknown place it’s always better to have someone who starts panic correct collocation? earlier than you do – it usually makes me feel more confident. can you specify the idea? link? traveling with friends is always fun: i would’ve never had so much excitement in vegas if i were grammar there alone or with my family. why? some details could be added. but even close friends’ interests may differ. so it may turn out to be a real pain in the neck to figure how to reach a compromise and make everybody happy. check. are you sure it’s relevant? touching upon not clear. traveling alone again, i would say it’s not for everyone: you would never think of visiting china on your own without knowing the language for example, check punctuation. though some real trill-seekers might find it to be a good idea to get new impressions. vocabulary and structures are varied, but it’s not clear whether you are for or against traveling with friends. the paragraph also needs a conclusion. 2. my former classmate is my best friend. make the topic sentence more specific. for one thing, we have almost the same interests. some details could be added: what interests? and go everywhere where? together. another thing i value about her is that i can tell her everything not being worried that she will betray me. we’ve been together long enough how long? to confide our secrets to each other. great make it a sentence. to have a person whose opinion you can trust. moreover, i’m not sure the link is good here. she is a very loyal and reliable person. there is no conclusion. how about making it strong to show that you can’t imagine your life without your friend? why don’t you give him/her a name? english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the book also has lots of tasks which encourage students to search and research – another necessary skill for teachers. by making a “systematic, selfcritical enquiry” (rudduck & hopkins 1985: 8), students open something new in terms of language as well as advance their educational level perceiving it in the course of learning.  google the net for samples of recommendation letters and collect phrases you think useful. exchange the lists of phrases with your partners.  google for samples of invitation and apology letters. collect useful phrases, bring them into the classroom, and share with your group mates.  make up a collection of the internet resources with anagrams, riddles, rhymes, poems, etc. include those that provide an opportunity to post your own. have a try! the use of such tasks reflects an upto-date tendency in education – focusing on discovery learning (joolingen 1999: 385). these tasks are definitely conducive to developing critical thinking and, besides, they are professionally relevant to future teachers. students’ feedback although many russian learners find writing the most difficult skill to acquire, by the end of the course, students feel far more confident about their ability to cope with the writing demands. the process of becoming a good writer requires time, hard work, and perseverance. and yet the reward is well worth the wait. being “essential” and “valuable”, is a general opinion of the students who have been taught this course. some more quotes from students’ feedback are as follows: “the course is very comprehensible and involving,” it is “thoroughly drawn up,” “simultaneously challenging and entertaining,” “it undoubtedly meets the needs of future teachers,” “writtеn in a straightforward manner, and it fеels a bit like being taught by a knowledgeable friend.” we value the opinion of our students and feel grateful for such appreciation of our work. conclusion to sum up, a course book cannot address any audience in general. it must focus on a particular learner, the objectives, and content of the process of learning. in the situation when no textbook meets these requirements, the problem of providing students with an appropriate textbook must be solved by creating new textbooks. in our understanding, the textbook learn to write with us, oriented towards the audience of future teachers of english is optimal and effective because it combines language learning and professional training. while learning to write at the level required at tertiary level, would-be teachers also acquire basic professional skills of how to teach writing. a systematic approach to training these skills helps to achieve this two-fold goal; a variety of tasks and topics, well thought over introduction of materials make the way to this goal enjoyable and efficient. references council of europe. (2011). common european framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. retrieved from http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education /elp/elp-reg/cefr_en.asp harmer, j. (2008). the practice of english language teaching. harlow: pearson longman. kaplan, r. b. (1966). cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education. language learning, 16(1). svetlana suchkova & gulnara dudnikova learning to teach writing through writing joolingen, w. van. (1999). cognitive tools for discovery learning. international journal of artificial intelligence in education, 10. rudduck, j. and hopkins, d. (1985). research as a basis for teaching: readings from the works of lawrence stenhouse. london: heinemann educational books. scane m., doerger, d. (2010). good teachers need to be good writers: designing and implementing a professional writing course for pre-service teachers. studies in learning, evaluation, innovation and development 7(1). suchkova, s., dudnikova, g., adayeva, o. (2013). learn to write with us: a processbased writing textbook (student’s book). samara. syllabi: направление 050100.62 педагогическое образование. профили: «иностранный язык» и «иностранный язык»; направление 050100.62 педагогическое образование. профиль «иностранный язык»; направление 035700.62 лингвистика. профиль «теория и методика преподавания иностранных языков и культур». the national council of teachers of english at (ncte) http://www.ncte.org/. retrieved on march 24th, 2013. the partnership for 21st century skills at http://www.p21.org/index.php. retrieved on march 24th, 2013. ur, p. (1996). a course in language teaching: practice and theory. cup. yancey, k.b. a report from the national council of teachers of english. writing in the 21st century. http://www.ncte.org/library/nctef iles/press/yancey_final.pdf. retrieved on march 24th, 2013. http://www.ncte.org/ http://www.p21.org/index.php http://www.ncte.org/library/nctefiles/press/yancey_final.pdf patterns of responses to compliments on physical appearance in sundanese women english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee patterns of responses to compliments on physical appearance in sundanese women refdi akmal state polytechnics of lampung e-mail: refdi_akmal@yahoo.com apa citation: akmal, r. (2013). patterns of responses to compliments on physical appearance in sundanese women. english review: journal of english education, 1(2), 208-215 received: 15-02-2013 accepted: 12-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: complimenting as a speech event has been one of the major areas on which linguists have focused their attention and drawn insights into the phenomenon of linguistic politeness in the last two decades (zanrong 2004). some previous research – among others are by davis (2008); heidari (2009); matsuoka (2009) – revealed that gender give rise variations of strategies on compliment responses (cr). this paper examines sundanese women responses to compliments on appearance addressed by the same and different gender. the research applied naturalized role play method in collecting the data by observing the way of 68 women giving response to the compliment addressed on their physical appearance. the respondents were native sundanese women living around bandung. the study found that most women respond differently to compliments addressed to them by women and by men. this study also reveals that most of them considered the compliments – particularly when addressed by men – as a way of either maintaining social hospitalities or joking, and thus, the speech acts of compliments appear more to be a way of consolidating solidarity among them. keywords: politeness, compliments, patterns of response introduction compliments are recognized as an important speech act in a socio-cultural context. it is interesting to see the way people respond to the compliments addressed to them which simply features value systems hold within the society. jing (2005) mentioned that different value systems are reflected in speech acts; thus, different interpretations of a certain speech act sometimes cause misunderstandings of the speaker's intention. in fact, some research as indicated by parisi and wogan (2006) cited in davies (2008) that there is a growing field of research pertaining to compliment behavior and its relation to both status and gender. davies also noted that gender plays very significant role in the variation of compliment and compliment responses. in his study, davies noted that women preferred responses that could be considered less face threatening which are mostly in term of acknowledging a compliment, returning a compliment or changing the topic all together. in interactions between females and males, manes and wolfson (1981) – as cited in han – found that women appear both to give and receive compliments much more frequently than do men, especially when compliments have to do with apparel and appearance. despite the studies carried out in terms of compliments responses within cross cultures setting, this study is in attempt to see the pattern of compliment responses when they are uttered by the refdi akmal patterns of responses to compliments on physical appearance in sundanese women same and different gender basis within a single culture setting. this research tried to answer the following research questions: 1. how do sundanese women respond to compliments addresses to their appearance? 2. how differently do women respond to compliments addressed to their appearance when addressed by women and by men? compliments are recognized as an important speech act in a socio-cultural context. some researchers defined this act in varied terms. hobbs, 2003:249 cited in heidari(2009) stated that a compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly bestows credit upon the addressee for some possession, skill, characteristic, or the like, that is positively evaluated by the speaker and addressee. while holmes (1988) – cited in han – mentioned that to be heard as a compliment an utterance must refer to something which is positively valued by the participants and attributed to the addressee. in addition, holmes also states that compliments are positively affective speech acts, the most obvious function they serve is to oil the social wheels, paying attention to positive face wants and thus increasing or consolidating solidarity between people. however, heidari (2009) indicated that compliments may also be regarded as a threat to negative face, even while paying attention to positive face. he mentions that speech acts of compliment and compliment responses (cr) are conversational devices of interpersonal relationships in daily life. the use of cr as a phatic expression (more of a ‘ritual’ type) may also play a particular role in maintaining the solidarity of interpersonal relationships and the harmony of social interaction. for example, during this study a female informant mentioned that her answer to a compliment on appearance (‘‘hey, you look great! you’re really beautiful today’’) would be ‘‘cheers! so do you’’, even if the addressee was not good looking. relating to this research, i would like to follow the definition stated by holmes (1988, p. 446) as cited by heidari (2009) that is, "a compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some "good" (possession, characteristic, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and hearer." heidari also added that “there is an infinite number of words that could be chosen to compliment, but the set of lexical items and grammatical patterns we use in our daily interaction when complimenting and have high frequency in our daily discourse are very restricted”. the first researcher who discussed compliment responses from a pragmatic perspective was pomerantz in 1978. she claimed that americans face two dilemmas when responding to compliments: (a) they have to agree with the speaker, and (b) they have to avoid self-praise (urano, 2000). urano further explains this dilemma by stating that when a recipient of a compliment responds by agreeing with the speaker (condition a), it violates condition b as this response goes against the sociolinguistic expectations of the speaker. on the other hand, if the speaker doesn’t accept the compliment to avoid self-praise, the response will be face-threatening since it violates condition a. to mediate this conflict, recipients of compliments resolve to a variety of solutions: (1) acceptance,(2)rejection, and (3) selfpraise avoidance. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee herbert (1986) revised pomerantz’s taxonomy by analyzing american english speakers’ compliment responses. he collected more than a thousand samples of compliment responses from american college students in a three-year period project. surprisingly, only 36.35% compliment responses were accounted for by acceptance. herbert ended up with a three-category, twelve-type taxonomy of compliment responses. table 1. herbert’s taxonomy of compliment responses response type example a agreement 1. acceptance  appreciation tokens thanks, thank you  comment acceptance yeah, i really like it too  praise upgrade i look better with it, right? 2. comment history i got it from that store 3. transfer  reassignment it’s not mine, it belongs to my brother  return compliment you are too b non agreement 1. scale down it’s quite old actually 2. questions do you think so? 3. non acceptance  disagreement i hate it  qualification but jack’s is better 4. no acknowledgement (silence) c other interpretation  request you want to borrow this one too? since then, a number of contrastive studies have been conducted to compare compliment responses in different languages and language varieties. arabic and south african english speakers were found to prefer accepting compliments rather than reject them. speakers of asian languages, on the other hand, were likely to reject compliments (urano, 2000). wolfson (1989) in ishihara (2006) collected observational data on compliments from authentic interaction between native and non-native speakers over a period of two years. she found out that l2 speakers did understand the function of compliments as “a social lubricant” in the american culture. they had difficulty in responding appropriately to compliments. in another contrastive study of compliment responses between chinese learners of english and american nss of english, chen (1993) in urano (2000) found out that the majority of chinese nnss of english rejected compliments, compared to the american nss who accepted and appreciated those compliments. more recently, cedar’s (2006) contrastive study of compliment responses used by thai nnss of english and american nss of english revealed significant differences in responses to english compliments between the two groups. while americans tended to accept compliments and elaborate positively in their responses, thai nnss of english refrained from elaborating and used formulaic expressions in their responses. a number ofresearch has revealed that compliment and responses refdi akmal patterns of responses to compliments on physical appearance in sundanese women to compliment appear to be very affected by the culture view of the society. method participants in this study fell into two categories: role-play informants and role-play conductors. all participants gave consent for their data to be used for research purposes. there were eleven conductors involved and 68women interviewed as the informants. they were high school and college students, employees and housewives. all participants were in certain social relationship with the conductors, relatives, classmates, colleagues, or neighbors. the major source of data for this research project comes from the naturalized role-play (tran, 2008). there were 68 role-play informants who were naturally sundanese native women all have been living in the area since they were born. all of them were university students, employees, and housewives ranging in age from eighteen to forty years. so they showed homogeneity in terms of age, education and profession. following are details of the role-play informants. there were eleven role-play conductors who were recruited voluntarily for this research. they consisted of 6 women and 5 men conductors. in this case, five of the women conductors were tertiary students having post graduate study in english education in bandung, and a housewife – a land lady. while four of the men conductors were also tertiary students and one employee in a private company. they are recruited to fulfill need of varying the informants as they live and mingle in different residences. in this study each of them conducted six to ten interviews role-play. in this study, the naturalized roleplay is the main tool of data collection providing the major corpus of data for analysis. this methodology has proven to be an effective means of resolving the lasting controversy that the methodological issue in this field has engendered (tran, 2008). at the core of the naturalized roleplay is the idea of eliciting spontaneous data in controlled settings. in the naturalized role-play, informants are not aware of the research focus during their role-play performance. they are conscious of being observed and studied in the whole procedure but not in the moments when they provide spontaneous data on a communicative act in focus. in this study, each informant participating in the naturalized role-play produced crs to compliments on appearance and apparels. after recruiting the conductors, the researcher explained the way the data should be obtained. all conductors were equipped with a piece of data eliciting form designed for this research to note any responses and information given by the informants. in gaining the data, the conductors carried out certain conversations naturally with the informants without prior notification that the conversations were for the sake of this research. the conversations were conducted either in bahasa indonesia or sundanese language. after the talks, then the conductors asked some necessary information related to the informants such as their personal information and their thought related to the way they responded to the compliments. data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. in the qualitative analysis, cr data was coded according to the strategies selected to english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee reply to compliments. the qualitative analysis was based on the content of crs. in the quantitative analysis, the frequency of occurrence of cr strategy combination patterns was calculated to show the numeric differences between cr strategy combination in women responses as well as the similarities. results and discussion this research revealed that the women do different responses to compliments addressed to them by women and men. the compliment responses uttered by the women informants appeared to be more varied when the compliments were addressed by men conductors. besides, there were also other types of interpretation noted during the research – the compliments regarded as jokes and insult to the hearers. the compliments which were interpreted as insults were mainly indicated by women’s perception of the men’s compliments addressed to them. in general, the findings can be presented as described in the table2. the findings reveal that most of the women expressed appreciation tokens at the very first time the compliments addressed to them either by men or women. however, the appreciation tokens – in form of smiles or thanks – did not always indicate that they agreed the compliments. most of the tokens were followed by utterances indicating either non agreement or rejections, in addition to those of agreements. table 2. patterns of the women’s response to compliment women’s response type addressed by women addressed by men n=33 % n=35 % a agreement 1. acceptance  appreciation tokens 30 90,9 27 77,14  comment acceptance 5 15,15 4 11,42  praise upgrade 2 6,06 1 2,85 2. comment history 2 6,06 2 5,71 3. transfer  reassignment 1 3,03  return compliment 5 15,15 2 5,71 sub total (excluding the tokens) 15 45,45 9 25,71 b non agreement 4. scale down 7 21,21 9 25,71 5. questions 3 9,09 5 14,28 6. non acceptance  disagreement 7 20  qualification 7. no acknowledgement 2 6,06 8. express embarrassment 2 6,06 3 8,57 sub total 14 42,42 24 68,57 c other interpretation  joking 3 9,09 7 20  insulting 3 8,57 sub total 3 9,09 10 28,57 related to the compliments addressed by women, there were 15 responses (45,45%) which indicated the acceptance of the women. this refdi akmal patterns of responses to compliments on physical appearance in sundanese women acceptance were expressed in terms of comment acceptance (15,5%), comment history (6,06%), praise upgrade (6,06%), reassignment (3,03%) and return compliments (15,15%). in addition, there were 42,42% of non agreement patterns indicated through the speech. they fell into the patterns of scale down (21,21%), questions (9,09%), expressions of embarrassment (6,06%), and no acknowledgment (6,06%). the rest were other interpretation forms – in this case the compliments were considered as joke – which were noted from three responses (9,09%). unlike the compliments addressed by women, the compliments addressed by men were responded in such different patterns by the women. the patterns of agreement were shown by only nine responses (25,71%). the responses were expressed in terms of comment acceptance (11,42%), praise upgrade (2,85%), comment history (5,71%) and return compliments (5,71%). on the other hand, the women seemed to respond the compliments addressed by men with more non agreement patterns. the responses which reached 68,7% of the total responses can be classified into several patterns. there were 25,71% responses were of scale down pattern, while 14,28% of them questioned the compliments. other 20% indicated disagreement and 8,57% expressed embarrassment. different pattern of interpretations were also noted from the responses. there were 20% of them considered the compliments as jokes, and 8,57% considered the compliments insults for them. few of them considered that it is not proper for the man to express such compliments. the utterances were either telling the men that they should not have done that or with other expressions indicating this interpretation. the expressions may be illustrated as follow: c : “teh, ngomong-ngomongrambutnya sekarang ok bangettu” “teh, by the way, your hair looks so cool now” i : “ah udahlah,ga usah ngejek gitu kenapa sih” “ah come on. don’t insult me that way” the data also show that interestingly the women expressed more utterances in responding to the compliments addressed by men than those addressed by women. the women tended to responded to the compliments addressed by women with relatively shorter and fewer number of expressions than those to compliments addressed by men. most of the time, the appreciation tokens expressed were followed by longer utterances indicating more than one pattern of responses. for example, after smiling or saying thanks then they also expressed questions and scale down patterns, as illustrated below: responding to compliments addressed by women: c: “hey, nambahkerenajani” “hey, you look more charming” i :“ah masa’ sih. makasihya” “oh really? thank you”. while responding to compliments addressed by men, the pattern may be as follow: c :“wah, jilbabnya matching bangetdenganbajunya. kerentuh” gee, your veil matches your dress very well. that’s cool! i :(tersenyum) makasih.emang masih bagus ya? ini jilbab dah lama bangetga gue pake sih .. (smile) thanks. does it still look good? i haven’t put it on for quite long time actually. most of the women considered compliments either by men or by women english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee as social hospitalities instead of as sincere compliments. so responding to the compliments was more to be a way of saving the counterparts’ face. in addition, they also treated compliments – more particularly compliments by men – as either jokes or something not proper to do. as the results, more responses indicating non agreement were uttered more frequently to this case. conclusion this paper has tried to study the patterns of compliment responses uttered by women in the basis of gender influence. the findings indicated that in general the patterns were similar to what herbert described in his taxonomy. however, we can find that no pattern of qualification applied by the respondents in this study. besides, there was no type of reassignment expressed by the respondents when responding to compliments addressed by either the same or different gender. other patterns of interpretation also occurred in this study – the compliments were regarded as joking or insulting which were expressed by the women in responding to compliments by men. although very few of the participants considered the compliments by different gender as insult, but their perceptions about it were of considerably valuable. language does reflect the identities of its users and to use it in an appropriate manner is crucial for us to live our social lives. the findings simply indicate that there is a different way of how the women maintain relationship among the same gender and different gender within the culture setting. it also reveals that maintaining solidarity within the interlocutors has been the main issue; thus, face saving acts have been a major concern in the way compliment responses expressed. references al falasi, h. (2007). just say “thank you”: a study of compliment responses. the linguistics journal, 2(1), 28-42. cedar, p. (2006). thai and american responses to compliments in english. the linguistics journal, 1(2) 2-28. davis, b. (2008) “ah… excuse me, i like your shirt”: an examination of compliment responses across gender by australians. griffith working papers in pragmatics and intercultural communication, 1(2), 76-87. han, c. y. a comparative study of compliment responses: korean females in korean interactions and in english interactions. working papers in educational linguistics (wpel), 8(2). heidari, m. a.,m. rezazadeh, and a. e. rasekh. (2009). contrastive study of compliment responses among male and female iranian teenage efl learners. the international journal of language society and culture, 3(29), 1831. ishihara, n. (2006). formal instruction on the speech act of giving and responding to compliments. retrieved from: http://exchanges.state.gov/ media/oelp/teachingpragmatics/giving.pdf matsuoka, r. (2009). gender effect on compliment exchange. retrieved from:http://klibredb.lib.kanagawau.a c.jp/dspace/bitstream/10487/3801/1 / kana-12-14-0007.pdf. smith, j. b. (2009). the acquisition of pragmatic competence: compliment response strategies in learners of spanish. unpublished phd dissertation, lousiana state university. retrieved from: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/et d-11052009-094915/unrestricted/ smithdiss.pdf. tran, g. q. (2008). pragmatic and discourse transfer of combination of compliment http://exchanges.state.gov/ media/oelp/teaching-pragmatics/giving.pdf http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11052009-094915/unrestricted/ smithdiss.pdf refdi akmal patterns of responses to compliments on physical appearance in sundanese women response strategies in second language learning and usage. asian efl journal, 10(2) 7-30. urano, k. (2000). negative pragmatic transfer in compliment responses by japanese learners of english. shinshu university research and communication language education (surcle), 2, 27-38. zhanrong, l. (2004). the speech event of complimenting in chinese. retrieved from: http://media.open.edu.cn/media_file /englishcatchup/ compliment.htm http://media.open.edu.cn/media_file/englishcatchup/%20compliment.htm english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 423 ideology in translation process of news content in english into indonesian: a case of pikiran rakyat daily newspaper imam jahrudin priyanto faculty of teacher training and education, universitas langlangbuana karapitan street 116, bandung, indonesia email: imamjepe@yahoo.com apa citation: priyanto, i. j. (2023). ideology in translation process of news content in english into indonesian: a case of pikiran rakyat daily newspaper. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 423-432. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.8218 received: 27-02-2023 accepted: 28-04-2023 published: 28-06-2023 introduction as technology continues to advance quickly around the world, there is a growing demand for information. higher educated people are interested in the most recent informational advancements, particularly when it comes to topics that interest them, such as politics, human rights, humanitarian challenges, and other topics. the material relates to both domestic and international events, in addition to those that take place in the nation. the public chooses newspapers as their preferred source of information among the different mass media outlets that are readily available in our culture. the public wants accurate information amidst the flood of news that is rushing in all ways. because the editing process is multi-layered and the news they publish can be trusted, formal newspapers are media that can be relied upon. international news continues to hold great interest, particularly when it is connected by psychological proximity, such as parallels in race or religion. human life depends heavily on translation (riyono et al., 2018). knowledge and information are widely disseminated through translation (felisia, 2023). for instance, indonesians, who are predominately muslims, have long paid close attention to the news regarding the palestinians' fight. since the message's contents must be transferred from one language to another, translation is not an easy task (boustani, 2019; hidayati, 2020). according to bassnett, 2022, efendi, and hardjanto, 2023, rosa et al., 2020, sabila et al., 2023, and sari et al., 2022, it is difficult since it must be semantically and stylistically identical. according to supatmiwati and abdussamad (2020), equivalence is related to units of equivalence, which might be morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, idioms, proverbs, etc. however, units that are more complicated than a single word, as well as different linguistic devices and structural elements, can be used to understand meaning (baker, 2018). cultural equivalency (supatmiwati & abdussamad, 2020) and the employment of language tools in particular contexts (kajumova et al., 2018) are significant abstract: this study aims to reveal another side that is more in-depth than just translation, especially translation in print media. in this regard, the researcher studied translation in one of the leading print media in indonesia based in bandung, west java, namely the pikiran rakyat daily news. the researcher explores ideology in maintaining meaning in the translation of news content in pikiran rakyat. this research needs to be done because the translation of international news from english to indonesian for the sake of print media has many dimensions and problems. the research was conducted using descriptive qualitative methods. there are eleven news of the pikiran rakyat examined in this study. the news sourced from foreign news agencies was published in the 2018-2020 range. this research combines two theories, namely translation theory of newmark and critical discourse analysis (cda) theory of van dijk. specifically, this study examines ideology and the maintaining of meaning in translating english news content into indonesian. the results of this study indicate, with the existence of partiality, translation becomes very ideological. this can be seen from the diction, placement of news, and the addition or removal of certain elements in the news. it can be concluded that the translation of international news in pikiran rakyat is very ideological. from the linguistic data studied, it appears that pikiran rakyat consistently carries the ideology of peace. keywords: ideology; meaning; news; translation. imam jahrudin priyanto ideology in translation process of news content in english into indonesian: a case of pikiran rakyat daily newspaper 424 criteria that should be taken into account when translating. the speech and ideology of media institutions are frequently linked to news translation (ethab, 2020). whether or if the lexical meaning is retained during the news translation process has to do with meaning maintenance (felisia, 2023; hadi et al., 2020). it should be known to the general public as well, which is why it is worthwhile to do this study. as allababneh (2021) noted, it's critical to understand the discourse that translators and writers use to communicate their ideologies in order to fully acknowledge ideology in translation and its significance for identifying the authorial component of translators' performance. interaction exists between ideology and translation (bian & li, 2021; min, 2021). numerous academics have extensively discussed and researched the relationship between these two (güldal, 2023). ideology is the translator's paradigm of thought when translating, according to hunadah and lidinillah (2023). in order to convey information to readers clearly, it is essential to have knowledge of ideology in translation (hanani et al., 2021). the ideologies of translating and translating ideologies are two distinct ideas. the source language text's contents, its significance to the reader, and some speech acts in the translated text that discuss the context of the target language and any discrepancies between the two constitute the ideology of translation (hadi et al., 2020). ideological translation, on the other hand, is a translator's intervention in the translation process (shofa et al., 2018). beyond the text, translation ideologies exist (nurlaila et al., 2019). two ideologies, domestication and foreignization, can be used in translation as references to represent ideas correctly (pertiwi et al., 2021). translators typically use foreignization to preserve the integrity of the original text. this concept is used to preserve the author's original voice by making the target text appear as though it were originally written in the source language (jaya, 2021). in contrast, during domestication, a translator makes as many transparent adjustments to the source text as they can (muallim et al., 2023). two fundamental translation ideologies— foreignization and domestication—involve linguistic and cultural perspectives (harared, 2018). people have a tendency to believe news stories that are published in newspapers right away without having sufficient knowledge on how to translate them from english to indonesian or understanding its philosophy. the removal or substitution of sentences when translating news from foreign news organizations takes into account both linguistic correction and media ideology. omission in translation serves to make the meaning implicit as well as generalize it (dickins in alrumayh, 2021) as well as to omit any language that might be considered unpleasant or even just mildly irritating (davies in havumetsä, 2022). this is consistent with ethab's (2020) research showing that the competency of news translators is unimportant because they just adhere to the editorial standards of a news organization. additionally, the process of news translation is quite similar to that of editing and comprises proofreading, editing, revising, polishing, and preparing news materials for publishing (dorrimanesh et al., 2023). not only that, but each translator has a unique worldview based on their perspectives, cognitive abilities, life experiences, cultures, races, societies, and more. according to rujiah et al. (2023), the ideology can influence readers or the public through its application. depending on the translation and the patronage used to play the ideology, this can be positive or detrimental. as a result, the researcher has a good justification for conducting this study. this study attempts to investigate how much ideology can impact how meaning is maintained when translating english-language news information into indonesian. pikiran rakyat newspaper was picked because it is a well-known publication with a lengthy history dating back to 1966. in this study, two important theories— translation theory from newmark (1988) and critical discourse analysis (cda) from van dijk (1983)—are combined. both of these theories suggest that there would be a battle for meaning, a theory that has also been put forth by van dijk. setiawan et al.'s research from 2022 on this subject examines the social cognition, social context, and textual organization of news articles. the findings demonstrated that the news satisfied the criteria for discourse analysis according to van dijk's (1983) model, specifically: macrostructure, superstructure, and microstructure. in a related study, risnawaty et al. (2022) used van dijk's (1983) critical discourse analysis paradigm at the macrostructure level to english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 425 investigate if parallelism in the two versions of the same text presented differences in the global meaning. the outcomes showed that there are some discrepancies between the original english text and the indonesian text. in another study by nurkhazanah et al. (2022), the representations of lee jae-myung and yoon suk-yeol in the chosun and hankyoreh media are examined in terms of the microstructure text dimensions based on van dijk's (1983) theory of critical discourse analysis. the findings showed that the hankyoreh news lacks a number of features, including the semantic component known as presupposition. the following research questions were put forward: (1) how does the pikiran rakyat maintain meaning through translation strategies in translating news content in english into indonesian? (2) how does the pikiran rakyat maintain lexicogrammatical meaning in the translation of news content in english into indonesian? (3) what ideology emerged from the translation of news content in english into indonesian? method this study proposes the answers to the three problems studied. the three problems are the maintaining meaning carried out by pikiran rakyat through a translation strategy in translating english-language news content into indonesian; the maintaining meaning carried out by pikiran rakyat lexicogrammatically; and the ideology that emerged from the translation of news content in english into indonesian. this study uses a qualitative approach because the translation units studied are at the lexicogrammatical level, namely words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. it can also be said that this study is a descriptive qualitative research because the data presented emphasizes meaning and can provide a more real understanding than numbers. this research instrument is determined through: (1) the policy of editor-in-chief of pikiran rakyat (2018-2021) noe firman rachmat regarding the translation process applied in pikiran rakyat that translation is adapted to the context prevailing in indonesian society. (2) the relationship between the policy and the result of the translation, is it consistent? this is where the urgency of this research is because it will reveal how far media ideology can influence the linguistic aspect, namely the maintaining meaning. the data were analyzed using translation theory from newmark (1988) and critical discourse analysis theory (cda) from van dijk (1983). qualitative research is analytical descriptive in nature, the data obtained such as observations, document analysis, or field notes compiled by researchers at the research location, are not stated in the form of numbers. researchers perform data analysis by enriching information, looking for relationships, comparing, and finding patterns on the basis of the original data. the results of data analysis in the form of exposure to the things studied are presented in the form of narrative descriptions. creswell (2018) explain that qualitative research is a study that employs a natural environment with the goal of comprehending the events that take place. a qualitative approach is crucial for comprehending a social phenomenon. the research process generates verbal and written descriptions of the things or people being observed as descriptive data. on the other hand, this research explores the lexicogrammatical aspects thoroughly, completely, and in detail. this research also prioritizes objectivity because the data disclosed and analyzed are data that actually exist and become news material in pikiran rakyat daily. the choice of pikiran rakyat as the data source is based on the fact that pikiran rakyat daily is a national-scale newspaper published from west java. the data used in this study are in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences in the news published as international news in pikiran rakyat daily, bandung. the research data sources are: documents, namely news data that has been published by the foreign affair desk of pikiran rakyat daily. the data were selected according to the interests of this research, namely news (especially politics, human rights, humanitarian issues, and international relations) that contain relatively heavy ideological content, for example news about conflicts in the middle east involving palestine and israel, or political conflicts in superpowers such as the united states, russia, turkey, iran, iraq, and so on. international coverage from various news agencies, namely leading news agencies such as reuters (uk) and associated press (us). these well-known news agencies routinely supply news to pikiran rakyat daily every day, including their photos. imam jahrudin priyanto ideology in translation process of news content in english into indonesian: a case of pikiran rakyat daily newspaper 426 in the following, the researcher conveys eleven news headlines that are the research material. the eleven selected news titles are as follows. table 1. translated news titles number news titles 1 australia recognises west jerusalem as israeli capital 2 khashoggi murder: calls to remove saudi crowne prince ’a red line’ 3 macron warns of rising nationalism as world leaders mark armistice 4 russia ’meddled in all big social media’ around us election 5 pentagon prepares to welcome once-banned indonesian minister, despite rights concerns 6 novel coronavirus survives 28 days on glass, currency, australian researchers find 7 uk study tests if bcg vaccine protects against covid 8 iraqi president salih condemn attempt to breach us embassy 9 ugandans melt plastic waste into coronavirus face shield 10 nagorno-karabakh: iran warns of ’regional war’ as fighting rages 11 us unleashes sanctions on iran, hitting oil, banking and shipping the data were analyzed using newmark's (1988) translation strategy to see the lexicogrammatical elements of the english text as the source language to the indonesian text as the target language. it will also be seen which words are translated lexically and words that are translated with the influence of the ideology of pikiran rakyat daily results and discussion this section presents two main subsections, namely data analysis and findings, and discussion. the data and findings analysis subsection displays the findings and results of the analysis during the research. meanwhile, the discussion subsection aims to answer three research problems, namely how pikiran rakyat maintains meaning through translation strategies in translating english-language news content into indonesian; how pikiran rakyat maintains meaning lexicogrammatically; and what ideologies emerge in the translation of news content in english into indonesian. data analysis and findings the following shows the findings and analysis of research data, namely from the aspect of maintaining meaning through translation strategies, maintaining meaning through lexical strategies, and maintaining meaning through grammatical strategies. maintaining meaning through translation strategies this section describes the translation strategies applied to the translation of news content from english to indonesian. of the 17 strategies written by newmark (2001), only four were used in the translation of the texts discussed in this study, namely literal translation, transposition, modulation, and recasting sentences. the following table 2 shows the frequency of occurrence of translation strategies. table 2. frequency distribution of maintaining the meaning through translation strategies frequency percentage literal translation 5 19,23 transposition 6 23,08 modulation 11 42,31 recasting sentence 4 15,38 total 26 100 the following is a visualization of the frequency distribution of maintaining meaning through translation strategies according to the research data. figure 1. frequency distribution of maintaining the meaning through translation strategies from the analysis of the translations carried out, it appears that modulation, transposition, literal translation, and recasting sentence are the most frequently used. for details, from a total english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 427 of26 samples for translation strategies, literal translation appears 5 times or 19.23 percent of the 26 samples. translation with transposition strategy appears 6 times or 23.08 percent. the modulation translation strategy (point of view variation) appeared the most, namely 11 times or 42.31 percent. while the strategy of recasting sentences appeared 4 times or 15.38 percent of the total 26 samples for the translation strategy. . maintaining meaning through lexical strategy lexical strategy is an important thing that cannot be separated from lexical cohesion. lexical cohesion is obtained by choosing a suitable vocabulary. there are several lexical strategies, such as repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, collocation, and equivalence. table 3 below shows the frequency and percentage of occurrences of hyponymy and equivalence. table 3 frequency distribution of lexical strategies of maintaining the meaning lexical strategies of maintaining the meaning frequency persentage (%) hyponymy 1 9 equivalency 10 91 total 11 100 figure 2. frequency distribution of lexical strategies of maintaining the meaning maintaining meaning through grammatical strategy the following table 4 describes the use of grammatical strategies of maintaining meaning in translating news from english to indonesian in pikiran rakyat. substitution occurs most often, which is 11 times or 42 percent of the total sample in that section. table 4. distribution of grammatical strategies of maintaining the meaning grammatical strategies of maintaining the meaning frequency percentage (%) substitution 11 42 ellipsis 8 31 conjunction 1 4 passivation 1 4 nominalization 1 4 substitution & ellipsis 4 15 total 26 100 figure 4. distribution of grammatical strategies of maintaining the meaning in this study, it was revealed that the realization of the various strategies, especially the realization of substitution and ellipsis, mostly occurred in the headline or news lead, or at the most, the second paragraph of the translated news text. changes to the title, either through substitution or ellipsis, have a very strong ideological content. from the various data that have been studied, it seems true that there is a consistent pattern shown by hu pikiran rakyat when presenting international news translated from various sources. all of them refer to the same thing, namely pikiran rakyat wants to show its uniqueness as a media that carries the ideology of peace. pikiran rakyat daily has also shown its consistency to always support government policies on various issues, both at home and abroad. issues concerning palestine have always received the attention of pikiran rakyat. this ideology is in line with the state policy to always support palestinian independence. when there are other countries in the news that support israel's policy, pikiran rakyat will consistently frame the news so that palestinians feel calm and feel supported. it also has a good effect on bilateral relations between indonesia and palestine. when australia supported the ratification of west jerusalem as the capital of israel and it endangered the existence of palestine on the international political stage, pikiran rakyat came up with a big news framing entitled the imam jahrudin priyanto ideology in translation process of news content in english into indonesian: a case of pikiran rakyat daily newspaper 428 world criticizes australia's recognition. with the title of the news, pikiran rakyat showed its side with the palestinian struggle. based on the data revealed in this study, the team of translators and editors at the foreign affair desk of pikiran rakyat also showed a strong intention to add material needed to complement the news that had been adapted to its ideology. judging from the news content, this legendary newspaper in west java carries the ideology of peace. meanwhile, the translation ideology (ti) analysis of all study units, both translation strategies, lexical strategies, and grammatical strategies shows that the domestication ideology is more dominant with 45 occurrences, while the foreignization ideology only appears 18 times in the analyzed research samples. thus, it is clear that the translated news in pikiran rakyat is more oriented towards the target language text or more prioritizing the interests of the readers. likewise, from the data and facts that have been studied in this study, including the descriptions in other segments regarding the results of this research, it is clear that the ideological attitude of pikiran rakyat. even though there were only eleven international news analyzed, the trend remained the same because the data showed substitution strategies and ellipsis were present in every translated news in pikiran rakyat. even the two grammatical strategies are present together in one news, four times. from any translation strategy, the dominant one is the modulation or the variation of point of view between the text writer and the translator. modulation appears 11 times or 42.31 percent of the total sample on meaning retention through translation strategies. in the modulation translation strategy there is a transfer due to the movement of meaning due to changes in the way or point of view and mindset between the text writer and the translator. the modulation and transposition strategies show the strong role of the translator in determining the translated text that leads to a certain ideology. the role of modulation and transposition is stronger than literal translation and recasting sentence. from the various stages that have been carried out, in terms of maintaining meaning in terms of translation strategies, this study found that there are four strategies used by the translation team and editors of pikiran rakyat in various international news, namely literal translation, transposition, modulation, and recasting sentences. based on the research conducted, modulation is most often used by the translation team/editor of pikiran rakyat with a frequency of 11 occurrences or 42.31 percent of the total 26 samples used to study translation strategies. transposition is in second place with a frequency of 6 occurrences or 23.08 percent. literal translation is in third place with a frequency of 5 occurrences or 19.23 percent. the fourth position is occupied by recasting sentences with a frequency of 4 occurrences or 15.38 percent. from this research, it was revealed that the team of translators and editors at the foreign affair desk of pikiran rakyat daily, consciously or not, used more grammatical strategies. of the six strategies or techniques, five of them are used by pikiran rakyat team. only reference techniques are not used. the data is very suitable to answer research question number 1 about the translation strategy used by pikiran rakyat in translating news content in english into indonesian. when associated with newmark's theory of translation, the strategies most often used by pikiran rakyat are modulation, transposition, literal translation, and recasting sentences. research question number 2 is how pikiran rakyat maintain lexicogrammatical meaning in translating english-language news content into indonesian. the answer is, pikiran rakyat try their best to maintain the meaning lexicogrammatically if the news does not contain a heavy ideological burden. if there is an ideological burden, the priority is the ideological aspect so that the commitment to the lexicogrammatical paradigm is reduced or "flexible". while research question number 3 is about ideology that arises from the translation of news content in english into indonesian, it was only read at the final stage of this research, that pikiran rakyat is a media that carries the ideology of peace. conclusion this conclusion directly answers the research objective, namely to reveal ideology in maintaining meaning in the translation of englishlanguage news content into indonesian, a case study in pikiran rakyat daily. from all the analyzes that have been done (translation strategy, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 429 lexical, grammatical), it is clear that pikiran rakyat carries the ideology of peace. this was preceded by the finding that all these analyzes lead to a tendency to accommodate the interests of the reader so that the reader feels comfortable and feels a sense of peace. even from the choice of words, pikiran rakyat tend to prioritize the humanitarian aspect, avoid conflict, and show resistance to parties who are antipeaceful. it can also be seen from the linguistic data, both in the title and in the body of the translated news. tendentious and provocative words are "adjusted" into words that are more neutral and do not cause unrest in the community. from their choice of words, the translation team/editor of pikiran rakyat also did not want the public to be restless when reading news concerning islam and the struggles of the islamic community, including the struggle of the palestinian people who want to defend their ancestral land from israeli occupation. therefore, the news about islam is placed in accordance with the proportions so as not to cause unrest in the community. for example, even though the source text contains the phrase radical islamic terrorism (foreign media use capital letters at the beginning of words), pikiran rakyatdoes not translate it like the source text because that designation will hurt the feelings of muslims who are the majority citizens in indonesia, including pikiran rakyat readers. with its reporting style, pikiran rakyat consistently carries the ideology of peace. acknowledgement at the end of this article, the researcher would like to thank the mentors who have provided direction during the research, namely mr. h. dadang sudana, m.a., ph.d., mr. iwa lukmana, m.a., ph.d., mr. wawan gunawan, m.ed., ph.d., prof. dr. syihabuddin, m.pd., and prof. dr. rudi hartono, s.s., m.pd. the researcher also expresses a sincere gratitude to the editor-inchief of pikiran rakyat (2018-2021) mr. noe firman rachmat who has given written permission so that researchers can carry out this research as well as possible. the researchers also thanked mr. syamsul bachri who always helped procure the materials or texts needed in this research, both in english (source language) and news in indonesian (target language). references allababneh, a. m. 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(2013). bridging the gap between needs analysis and course evaluation insights. english review: journal of english education, 1(2),191-199 received: 09-04-2013 accepted: 22-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: the “advancing english skills”, textbook was compiled and introduced about a decade ago, at the faculty of humanities, dhaka university, bangladesh, to teach the foundation english courses, to freshmen students from thirteen departments, including english. today the course is still being taught at some departments. the department of english scrapped the foundation course, but the textbook is still being used for another compulsory course. this paper presents the findings of a study conducted to determine the english language needs of students (60) and teachers (30) at the humanities faculty of dhaka university. additionally a two prong evaluation of the course and materials from the viewpoints of both students and teachers of the humanities faculty was carried out, in order to shed light on the nature, effectiveness, and objectives of the course. strengths and shortcomings of the present course, and areas of mismatch between the students’ needs and the course, were identified. suggestions have been made, to improve the english language courses based on these findings, and implications for pedagogy have been highlighted. keywords: needs analysis, course evaluation, perceptions, ability, mismatch introduction english is a part of bangladesh’s colonial heritage; the language of the educated elite and not commonly used in daily interaction. post-independence english was de-emphasized in education and replaced by bangla in all official domains, as a result english standards fell to abysmal depths in public schools and universities (choudhury, 2001). however, almost 95% of the texts and reference books are in english, this resulted in the necessity of giving time, attention and energy to the learning of english (alam, 2001). bangladesh is a monolingual nation with no need for a second language for internal communication, yet the contemporary labor market needs a work force competent in english as participation in the global economy has opened up job opportunities where english competency is a prerequisite for employment (tsui & tollefson, 2007). public universities had to fulfill the demands of industry in order to make their graduates employable. thus compulsory english for academic purposes (eap) courses were implemented in the freshman year in all mailto:rkhan@agni.com mailto:tazinchaudhury@yahoo.com rubina khan & tazin aziz chaudhury bridging the gap between needs analysis and course evaluation insights public universities from the 1994-95 academic sessions, to improve the english proficiency of graduates, in accordance with the ministry of education and the university grants commission’s directives. over a decade ago elt experts at dhaka university (du), the premier institution for tertiary and higher education in bangladesh, designed and implemented the foundation english course, an elt course to teach freshmen students from thirteen departments at the faculty of humanities, du and compiled and introduced the “advancing english skills”, textbook. as the course had to be prepared and introduced within a specified deadline the courses were designed and implemented sans a proper needs analysis; once implemented, the concerned authorities never evaluated the course. the logistical constraints, problems, limitations of students and teachers were never acknowledged or explored. despite teaching compulsory english for an entire academic year, the general standard of the students’ english proficiency is unsatisfactory. this study focused on identifying the specific english language needs of the students and teachers, of the different departments of the faculty of arts of du and evaluated the effectiveness of the existing elt course and textbook. finally recommendations have been made on the basis of insights obtained from the needs analysis and course evaluation findings. the method of identifying learners’ needs is termed needs analysis (na). na is a prominent feature and vital element in designing any eap syllabus (munby, 1978; robinson, 1991). gardner and winslow (1983) affirmed that a na should be conducted “to produce information which when acted upon makes a course better adapted to the students’ needs” (gardner and winslow cited in dudley-evans & st john 1998, p. 121). nunan (1999) classified na into two processes: content needs and process needs. na is not a be-all end-all activity rather it is a continuing process in which the conclusions drawn are constantly checked and reviewed. several bangladeshi researchers and curriculum experts strongly recommended that na be conducted at du and other bangladeshi universities on the needs of bangladeshi, tertiary level learners. haque & zaman (1994) urged that: “the efl course should aim at academic purposes and learner needs/wants as -the learners’ needs and wants tremendously control the whole package of teaching materials, aids and equipment, and the application of teaching techniques and strategies, the employment of classroom activities and, most importantly, the method of teaching and the construction of the syllabus” (haque & zaman 1994, p. 79). more recently khan (2000) noted that: “the syllabus needs to be revised and developed -the content -needs to be outlined clearly -rewritten keeping in mind the needs and demands of the students. -before revising the syllabus a needs analysis could also be carried out to determine student needs” (khan 2000, p. 106-107). according to weir and roberts (1994) evaluation is an indispensable part of na and provides the means for determining whether any program is meeting its goals; that is, whether, the measured outcomes for a given set of instructional inputs match the intended or pre-specified outcomes i.e. evaluation english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee is carried out to see whether the stated objectives have been achieved. similarly tuckman (1985) claims that the success of a language program in terms of innovations and implementation can be determined by systematic evaluation. the main purposes of evaluation in language education projects and programs are for accountability or developmental purposes (rea-dickins and germaine 1998). norris (1990) said that evaluation may be based on an “objectives model”-to see how far objectives have been met; or a “developmental model”-to identify strengths and weaknesses of the design and methodological procedures or both (norris, 1990 as referred by ellis, 1998). so evaluation is integral to professional practice; systematic evaluation generates relevant data and information about the program’s innovation or whether changes need to be made in the course outline and selected materials and how far it can be continued or whether it is transferable etc. the whole educational process that is the refining an elt program cannot be completed without a methodical evaluation procedure. in order to contextualize the present study, several studies conducted, on na and language program evaluation are reported and discussed in this section. khan (2000) evaluated the english foundation course at the arts faculty at du. she identified several constraints and problems of the initial course and recommended that a formal needs analysis needs to be carried out on the basis of which the course objectives, content and materials need to be revised and rewritten. in a related study, akin and guceri (2001) carried out a "macro materials evaluation" at bilkent university, turkey. it was found that the materials were not satisfactory. on the basis of this materials evaluation study, improvement plans for producing more effective materials were adopted. a need assessment was conducted by banu (1993) at the institute of modern languages (iml) of du. the iml course partly fulfilled students’ expectations. the lack of motivation and high drop-out rate in the course was due to the students’ dissatisfaction. the study provided informed suggestions for course improvement. chaudhury (2011) conducted a needs analysis to identify the english language learning needs of students and teachers at the humanities faculty of dhaka university. the needs analysis revealed discrepancy between the students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the students’ english proficiency. mismatches were also found between the humanities students’ english language needs and the content and objectives of the english courses that were being taught. more recently hossain (2012) conducted a survey at presidency university, dhaka, bangladesh. the survey investigated: the problems students faced in studying eap. on the basis of its findings tangible recommendations to augment course content and materials were made. basturkmen and al-huneidi (1996) conducted a needs analysis to study the english language needs and attitudes of students and faculty in kuwait university’s college of petroleum and engineering. a database of information about study in the college, language needs, perceptions, expectations for english courses, was generated and this was used as a resource primarily for curriculum design. zhu & flaitz (2005) conducted a na at a public university in the united states. rubina khan & tazin aziz chaudhury bridging the gap between needs analysis and course evaluation insights the objective was to create a basis for assessing the relevance of the institution’s current english second language program and identify common problems faced by students and faculty members. the findings of the present research reflected and confirmed different strands of the findings from all the aforementioned studies. method a mixed method design involving survey questionnaires, classroom observations and interviews was employed for the purposes of this study. the respondents were second year students, english language teachers and subject teachers from the departments of history, philosophy and linguistics at the humanities faculty of du. table 1 illustrates the details of the respondents and the data collection tools used. computer coded questionnaires using a five-point likert scale to assess responses to close-ended questions was used to determine the students’ and teachers’ perceptions. the completed questionnaires were analyzed using spss software. for easy reference the data has been presented in table form and frequency counts and percentages have been used to describe the findings and data analyses.  questionnaires were given to 60 second year students from the departments of history, philosophy and linguistics at the humanities faculty of dhaka university.  corresponding questionnaires were given to 30 subject teachers and language teachers from these departments.  classroom observation and document study (students’ work, course outlines etc.) was used to clarify and corroborate questionnaire findings  semi-formal interviews were conducted with subject, language teachers and students to further clarify and corroborate findings table 1.research instruments and respondents respondents questionnaires document study classroom observation 2nd year students of dhaka university from the faculty of humanities 60 √ √ (5 hours) teachers 30 ― ― results and discussion the humanities students’ and teachers’ perspectives regarding the four language skills and the existing elt course are presented in this section. the first section presents the students’ perceptions vis a vis the four skills. humanities students’ perceptions of reading ability findings revealed that a considerable number of students are “weak” at:  reading to respond critically (43.3%)  understanding a writer’s attitude and purpose (28.4%)  understanding and interpreting charts, graphs, tables (23.4%)  guessing the meanings of unknown words from their context (20%)  looking through a text quickly to find specific information (20%) hence inadequacy is apparent in the reading sub-skills. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee humanities students’ perceptions of writing ability a significant number of students were reported to be “weak” at:  adopting appropriate tone and style (41.6%)  organizing paragraphs (33.3%)  organizing the overall assignment (31.7%)  using appropriate vocabulary (31.7%)  following instructions & directions (31.6%)  expressing ideas appropriately (30.4%) thus weakness at the writing subskills is manifest. humanities students’ perceptions of listening ability results showed that several students were “weak” in:  understanding different english accents (28.4%)  understanding seminars and talks (26.6%)  carrying out instructions or directions (25%) so insufficiency in listening sub-skills is perceived. humanities students’ perceptions of speaking ability it was noted that many students were “weak” at:  delivering oral presentations or reports (35%)  explaining processes or procedures (43.3%)  brainstorming (36.7%)  taking part in class or tutorial or group discussions (25%)  speaking with other fluent speakers of english (38.3%) therefore inadequacy is marked in speaking sub-skills. students’ perceptions of course difficulty most students “sometimes-often” faced difficulty in the course as:  discussions in class were difficult (93.7%)  language of the course book/handout /materials were difficult(93.3%)  tasks and activities were difficult (93.3%)  difficulty in completing the given work on time in class (91.7%) thus the existing course, materials and tasks can be considered as extremely difficult for humanities students. teachers’ views on the present elt courses: the teachers’ perception of the existing english course was examined and the main results are highlighted below: reading sub-skills many teachers felt the course was “not helpful” in teaching:  understanding and interpreting charts or graphs or tables (36.7%)  understanding a writer’s attitude and purpose (26.7%)  reading to respond critically (23.5%)  guessing the meanings of unknown words from their context (16.6%) thus the reading component in the course can be considered inadequate. writing sub-skills a large number of teachers felt the course was “not helpful” in teaching:  adopting appropriate tone and style (26.7%)  organizing paragraphs (20%)  expressing ideas appropriately (16.7%)  using correct punctuation and spelling (13.3%)  structuring sentences (13.3%)  using appropriate vocabulary (13.3%) rubina khan & tazin aziz chaudhury bridging the gap between needs analysis and course evaluation insights  expressing what you want to say clearly (13.3%) so the prescribed writing component of the course may be considered unsatisfactory. listening sub-skills a lot of teachers felt the course was “not helpful” in teaching:  listening to and understanding seminars and talks (23.3%)  listening to and understanding lectures and notes (20%)  listening to and carrying out instructions and directions (16.7%)  listening to and understanding class and tutorial discussions (13.3%)  listening to and answering questions in class and tutorials (13.3%) this indicates that the listening module of the course may be considered as insufficient. speaking sub-skills some teachers felt the course was “not helpful” in teaching  expressing opinions or objections (30%)  explaining processes or procedures (26.7%)  asking questions (20%)  delivering oral presentations or reports (20%) consequently the prescribed course module for speaking can be considered ineffectual. the majority of the teachers were “unsure”, “disagreed” or “strongly disagreed” on the matter of whether the course helped their students to:  learn language usage (83.3%)  improve their english (70%)  feel confident about using english in their studies (70%) in general the teachers opined that the course book was not meeting students expectations:  reading sections are not interesting/motivating ( 80 %)  reading passages are not of appropriate difficulty level (80%) therefore the teachers did not feel that the course book content helped to develop their students’ english proficiency. course book evaluations in this section strengths and weaknesses of the textbook are highlighted and some suggestions for improvement are presented. teachers’ opinions on the “advancing english skills” textbook based upon interviews with teachers the following strengths of the textbook were established:  the topics are locally relevant and culturally appropriate  the textbook is suitable for preintermediate level  there is a good mix of easy and relatively more difficult texts  the textbook caters to students of different proficiency levels  the textbook moves from easy to difficult texts  the textbook mainly emphasizes upon reading and writing skills  the textbook sections on paragraph and essay writing are reasonably good however the following shortcomings were also identified:  the textbook is inadequate  the textbook has minimum mediation and scaffolding  the textbook has no coverage of the listening skill at all english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee  the grammar exercises in the textbook are inadequate  the text length is awkward as some texts in the textbook are too short and others are extremely lengthy  there is a mismatch between students’ present proficiency level and the difficulty level of the textbook’s reading passages  some of the texts in the textbook are not interesting enough  the text types in the textbook are limited in range and lack variety teachers’ suggestions for course improvement the teachers offered a range of suggestions for improving the course and textbook which could be taken into serious consideration in future course design. firstly it was suggested that the course be modified to cater to the needs of students of different abilities and levels. secondly it was recommended that all four skills be focused upon, particularly listening and speaking. it was also advised that some texts could be retained and a wider variety of texts could be added including authentic materials. additionally it was proposed that grammar could be reduced and subject specific vocabulary could be built up. moreover it was counseled that sentence formation should be focused upon along with the introduction of writing on social or practical issues, writing research papers and formal reports. lastly it was put forward that ict and multimedia presentations should also be included in the course. conclusion from the preceding discussion and observations, it appears that the current english course and “advancing english skills” course book leaves much to be desired and that there is plenty of scope for improvement in the present course that is being taught at the humanities faculty. the feedback from the teachers established that their students’ abilities fall short of the proficiency level that is required, to academically succeed at the tertiary level. moreover areas in which the english course is not fulfilling the teachers’ expectations have been identified. the humanities students’ perceptions of their specific needs were identified, their opinions about the present english course were ascertained; areas in which improvement is required were highlighted. future elt courses will be benefited greatly if the above mentioned needs and perceptions of humanities students and teachers are kept in mind whilst specifying the content and designing the courses. the needs analysis identified:  specific english language needs of the humanities faculty students  specific areas of difficulty in language learning that need improvement from both the teachers’ and students’ perception  the strengths and shortcomings of the present language course book  areas of mismatch between learners’ needs and the current course  suggestions for addressing the mismatches and bridging the gap this study raised awareness as it brought to light and provided information to teachers, curriculum experts, and decision makers about the existing course. it is important to remember that evaluation is an intrinsic part of teaching and learning and necessary because it provides specific pointers and guidelines to curriculum developers and practitioners for future development of planning and development of courses and for rubina khan & tazin aziz chaudhury bridging the gap between needs analysis and course evaluation insights management and implementation of classroom tasks and activities. the findings of this study pertaining to students’ language learning needs, lacks, wants, problems and difficulties, and teachers’ perception about students’ language proficiency have implications for future curriculum development. references akin, a.r., and m. guceri. (2001). a macro materials evaluation for better or for worse. the weekly column, article 56. retrieved on 4 november 2006 from http://www.eltnewsletter.com/back/ april2001/art562001.htm. alam f. (2001). the dhaka university english curriculum. revisioning english in bangladesh, p1-14. upl. banu, r. (1993). a comparative needs analysis: bangladeshi students at iml and one japanese student at georgetown university. journal of the institute of modern languages (ed.). basturkmen, h., and a. al huneidi (1996). the language needs analysis project at the college of petroleum engineering kuwait university. eric document. retrieved on 10/11/2008 chaudhury, t. a. (2011). identifying the english language needs of humanities students at dhaka university. journal of linguistics, 32-53. choudhury s. i. (2001). rethinking the two englishes. revisioning english in bangladesh, 15-27. upl crystal, d. (2003). english as a global language (2nd ed.). london: longman dudley evans, t., and m.j. st. john. (1998). developments in english for specific purposes: a multi-disciplinary approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. ellis, r. (1998) teaching and research: options in grammar teaching. tesol quarterly, 32, 139-60. flowerdew, j., and m. peacock. (2001). the eap curriculum: issues, methods, and challenges. in flowerdew, j and peacock, m. (eds.) issues in eap: a preliminary perspective. uk: cambridge university press haque, s. m. f., and m. maniruzaman. (1999). attitudinal and motivational impact on efl proficiency of undergraduates: afurther investigation. the dhaka university studies, 65-87. harvey, d. (1990). the condition of postmodernity. oxford: blackwell. hossain, m. d. (2012). eap course design: compromising with learner needs. research journal of commerce and behavioral science. 1(6), 7-13. hutchinson,t., and a. waters. (1987). english for specific purposes. cambridge: cambridge university press. jordan, r. (1997). english for academic purposes. cambridge: cambridge university press. khan, r. (2000). the english foundation course at dhaka university: an evaluation. the dhaka university studies, part a, 57(1), 77-110. kennedy, c. et al. (2001). sociolinguistics. birmingham: centre for english language studies. manivannan, g. (2006). the importance of the english language. retrieved on april 6, 2009.from http://www.usingenglish.com/teache rs/articles/importance-englishlanguage.html. munby, j. (1978). communicative syllabus design. cambridge: cambridge university press. nunan, d. (1999). second language teaching & learning. boston: heinle & heinle publishers. rahman, a. (2007). the history and policy of english education in bangladesh. in thehistories and policies of english education in asia. (ed) asia tefl series i (205-231) cobblestone austin tx rea-dickins, p., and k.p. germaine. (1998). (eds) managing evaluation and innovation in language teaching: building bridges. england: longman ltd. robinson, p, (1991). esp today. hemel hempstead: prentice hall. tsui, a. b. m. &j. w. tollefson. (2007). language policy and the construction http://www.eltnewsletter.com/back/april2001/art562001.htm http://www.usingenglish.com/teachers/articles/importance-english-language.html english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee of national cultural identity. in a. b. m. tsui & j. w. tollefson (eds.) language, policy, culture, and identity in asian contexts. lawrence erlbaum mahwah n.j. 1-24. tuckman, b. w. (1985). evaluating instructional programs. (2nd ed.) massachusetts, usa: allyn & bacon, inc. weir, c. and j. roberts. (1994). evaluation in elt. oxford, uk: blackwell publishers. zaman, n., r. khan, n. huq, z. alam, t. s. mahboob, and b. s. sinha (2000) advancing english skills. bangladesh: department of english university of dhaka. zhu, w., and j. flaitz. (2005). using focus group methodology to understand international students’ academic needs: a comparison of perspectives. teslej 8(4). saloumeh khodabakhshi & ali rahimi investigating the problems of teaching and learning english in middle schools in iran 66 investigating the problems of teaching and learning english in middle schools in iran saloumeh khodabakhshi department of english, university of kashan, iran e-mail: saloumehkhodabakhshi@yahoo.com ali rahimi department of applied linguistics, school of humanities, bangkok university, thailand e-mail: rahimijah@yahoo.com apa citation: khodabakhshi, s. & rahimi, a. (2013). investigating the problems of teaching and learning english in middle schools in iran. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 66-72 received: 04-09-2013 accepted: 29-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: the present research aimed to investigate the problems of teaching and learning english in middle schools in esfahan, iran. these problems are associated with the learner, teacher, textbook, syllabus, and language policy. the instrument used was a self-constructed likert scale questionnaire. all the variables had a hand in the problems among which textbook, syllabus and language policy had the most effect. twenty five problems were distinguished among which some are as follows: students do not consider pair work important; most of the time, most teachers do not speak in english in the classroom; the textbook does not include cds or cassettes, does not consists of all the english skills; the syllabus does not include one or two projects for students apart from the midterm or final test, language policy being not completely familiar with the steps of efl teaching, does not selecting the most qualified and proficient teachers in efl teaching. it can be concluded that the language policy should take a practical step in reducing the problems by changing the textbooks and providing more teaching aids for the teachers. keywords: teaching and learning english, problems of teaching and learning english, middle school, iran introduction teaching and learning english has been a crucial issue in developing countries particularly in iran. most teachers have concerns about teaching and learning english and what methods and approaches are the best for students. as the same result, problems in teaching and learning english have always existed. in iran, students graduate from school while they are not able to communicate in english (dahmardeh 2006; karimnia & zade 2007). in order to know what factors contribute to such problems, it is better to know what the characteristics of a good language learner, a teacher, a textbook, a syllabus, and a language policy are. so by going through literature, one can find out these characteristics, afterwards by using a questionnaire, the opinions of the students towards learning english can be investigated and based on the objectives of the study it can be tried to specify the problems of teaching and learning english. rubin and thompson (1983) as cited in nunan (2006: 57-58) have conducted a well-known study in which they state that good language learners tend to have the following characteristics which make them distinct from other learners: good learners 1. find their own way 2. organize information about language 3. are creative and experiment with language 67 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 4. make their own opportunities, and find strategies for getting practice in using the language inside and outside the classroom 5. learn to live with uncertainty and develop strategies for making sense of the target language without wanting to understand every word brown (2001: 430) has provided a list of the attributes of a good language teacher. in the following list, a good language teacher has the four features (a few of the characteristics are mentioned here): good language-teaching characteristics technical knowledge 1. understands the linguistic systems of english phonology, grammar, and discourse. 2. comprehensively grasps basic principles of language learning and teaching. pedagogical skills 3. has a well-thought-out, informed approach to language teaching. 4. understands and uses a wide variety of techniques. interpersonal skills 5. is aware of cross-cultural differences and is sensitive to students’ cultural traditions. 6. enjoys people; shows enthusiasm, warmth, rapport, and appropriate humor. personal qualities 7. is well organized, conscientious in meeting commitments, and dependable. 8. is flexible when things go awry. hutchinson and torres (1994) as cited in azizifar, koosha, & lotfi (2010) stress the importance of textbooks and textbook evaluation by stating that learning and teaching would be difficult without the existence of text books. in iran, azizifar, koosha, and lotfi (2010) have evaluated iranian high school books and they have come to the result that because these text books lack the listening activities, they do not provide any special group works for the efl learners and the students will not learn how to communicate in english. regarding syllabus, many have worked on that such as trepanier (2008). in china, the newly issued national english syllabus standard (department of education, p.r.c. 2003) for compulsory education states that “english learning is not only a process for students to master english knowledge and skill and improve their practical language use but also a process for teachers to train their will, mold their temper, enrich their life, develop their individual character and abilities and sharpen humanist qualities”. nunan (2006: 5) puts forward that there are many opinions about the differences between a syllabus and curriculum development. he provides two approaches to syllabus design, “a broad and narrow approach” in which the first believes in the integration of content and tasks, while the latter seeks to distinct the syllabus design and methodology. language policy which is considered as the last variable, by itself can make constraints for the learning process. some definitions have been brought by different writers (romaine (2006), tollefson & james as cited in dejong, (1994), tesl-ej)). the wikipedia (the free encyclopedia) implies as follows: language policy is what a government does either officially through legislation, court decisions or policy to determine how languages are used, cultivate language skills needed to meet national priorities or to establish saloumeh khodabakhshi & ali rahimi investigating the problems of teaching and learning english in middle schools in iran 68 the rights of individuals or groups to use and maintain languages. jing (2005) in a study tried to gain access to the difficulties of efl learning through the diaries of the learners. in his study he concluded that although the learning difficulties are due to the linguistics competence, their linguistic problems may be “a product of the relationship between their linguistic competence and the demands that examinations (e.g., tem-4) placed on it”. apart from that, musavi (2001) as cited in (razmjoo & riazi, 2006) argued that teachers in high school classes put more emphasis on grammar than reading comprehension and communicative tasks. he said that owing to the following factors, teaching english did not provide the expected aims: 1. students’ ignorance of aims and goals of learning a new language and its advantages 2. unqualified teachers and lack of teaching facilities 3. old methods and styles of teaching 4. old, unoriginal and out of date resources 5. lack of native speakers who have a good command of english by going through the literature, although the good qualities have been specified, still the problems in efl teaching exist, particularly in iran and no special article has been conducted in this regard, investigating the problems of efl teaching in secondary schools. therefore, in order to decrease these problems, the goal of this study is to delve into this matter and investigate the existing problems in learners, teachers, textbook, syllabus, and language policy. this study tried to answer what are the problems of teaching and learning english caused by learners, teachers, textbook, syllabus and language policy. method in this study, we are looking for the problems of teaching and learning english by a survey. in other words, the researcher seeks to know the opinions of students about the problems of teaching and learning english. one hundred (fifty male and fifty female) middle school students were chosen randomly from the population. the participants in this study were the third grade students of two middle schools in zarrinshahr, esfahan. the instrument of the study was a self-constructed likert scale questionnaire (with a cronbach alpha reliability of r = .89 > .8 and based on george and mallery (2003), it is considered to be a good reliability) which is divided into five parts: the first part: learner with 7 items, the second part: teacher with 9 items, the third part: textbook with 7 items, the fourth part: syllabus with 7 items, and the fifth part: language policy with 7 items. the questionnaire was translated into the native language of the students, because it was thought that they would not understand the items. a pilot study was conducted. ten students of the third grade from komeil middle school in esfahan were randomly selected. before doing the task, the items of the questionnaire were clarified. twenty minutes were required to complete the task. revisions were made based on the feedback obtained from the above procedure. for collecting the data, 2 days were allocated to go to the two middle schools mentioned above and administer the survey. the analyses were completed using spss 14.0 software (statistical package for the social sciences). spss was used to see which factors (i.e. teacher, learner, textbook, syllabus, and language policy) and items had the greatest cause in the problems of teaching and learning english. results and discussion 69 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the beneath paragraphs will report the results of the present study based on the five research questions. the hypothesis of this study was that each factor (i.e. learner, teacher, textbook, syllabus, and language policy) have no effects on the problems of teaching and learning english. according to the first research question, “what are the problems of teaching and learning english caused by learner?, chi-square on the answers of one hundred participants to the first seven items belonging to the first part of the questionnaire was taken (see table 2). the results of item 5 and 7 showed that there are no meaningful differences between those who agreed, disagreed and had no idea i5 & i7 (i.e. i5, i7›0.05), so they are not accepted. however, the results of the other items showed that there are meaning differences among those who agreed, disagreed and had no idea (i.e. i1, i2, i3, i4, i6 ‹0.05), so these are accepted. based on these results, it can be said that the system of learning at secondary schools and not considering per work important and not having any plans for it by learners have played a role in the problems of efl learning. table 2 test statistics of items 1-7 t-test i1 i2 i3 i4 i5 i6 i7 chi-square(a,b) 12.200 17.500 26.900 80.000 4.300 21.000 7.300 df 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 asymp. sig. .016 .002 .000 .000 .367 .000 .121 table 3: test statistics t-test i8 i9 i10 i11 i12 i13 i14 i15 i16 chi-square(a,b) 7.100 2.900 48.800 55.300 57.300 2.300 7.700 3.700 39.700 df 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 asymp. sig. .131 .575 .000 .000 .000 .681 .103 .448 .000 according to the second research question, “what are the problems of teaching and learning english caused by teacher? and as shown in table 3, chi-square of the second nine items belonging to the first part of the questionnaire was taken. as the table above shows, the results of items 8, 9, 13, 14, 15 revealed that there are not meaning differences between those who agreed, disagreed, and had no idea (i.e. i8, i9, i13, i14, i15 ›0.05); therefore, these items are avoided. however, the results of items 10, 11, 12, 16 revealed that there are significance differences between those who agreed, disagreed, and had no idea (i.e. i10, i11, i12, i16 ‹0.05), so these items are accepted and considered as problems. according to the third research question, “what are the problems of teaching and learning english caused by textbook?, the chi-square of the third seven items are taken and shown in table 4. test statistics the results of this part showed that only in one item, there are no significance differences between those who agreed, disagreed, and had no idea (i.e. i18 ›0.05) so this item is not accepted. while based on the results, the other saloumeh khodabakhshi & ali rahimi investigating the problems of teaching and learning english in middle schools in iran 70 items were significant among those who agreed, disagreed, and had no idea (i.e. i17, i19, i20, i21, i22, i23 ‹0.05) thus these items are considered as problems of teaching and learning english. in other words, it can be said that textbook has a main role in the problems of efl learning by not having the above characteristics. according to the fourth research question, “what are the problems of teaching and learning english caused by syllabus?, chi-square of the fourth seven items are demonstrated in table 5. as the table above displays, only the result of one item was not significant among those who agreed, disagreed, and had no idea (i.e. i27 ›0.05); therefore, this item is avoided. however, the results of the rest items were significant among those who agreed, disagreed, and had no idea (i24, i25, i26, i28, i29, i30 ‹0.05) thus these items are accepted and can table 4: test statistics t-test i17 i18 i19 i20 i21 i22 i23 chi-square(a,b) 19.600 6.100 118.300 13.700 10.300 11.800 39.100 df 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 asymp. sig. .001 .192 .000 .008 .036 .019 .000 table 5. test statistics t-test i24 i25 i26 i27 i28 i29 i30 chi-square(a,b) 12.800 37.300 26.000 2.500 34.300 17.100 27.700 df 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 asymp. sig. .012 .000 .000 .645 .000 .002 .000 table 6 test statistics t-test i31 i32 i33 i34 i35 i36 37i chi-square(a,b) 47.800 12.800 15.400 41.500 38.000 35.100 34.700 df 4 4 4 4 5 4 4 asymp. sig. .000 .012 .004 .000 .000 .000 .000 be considered as the problems. in other words, it can be said that syllabus also has a main role in the problems of efl learning by not having the above characteristics as well. according to the fifth research question, “what are the problems of teaching and learning english caused by language policy?the chi-square of the fifth seven items were calculated and are shown in table 6. based on the table above, the results of all the items of this part showed meaningful differences among those who agreed, disagreed, and had no idea (i.e. i31, i32, i33, i34, i35, i36, i37 <0.05); therefore, these items are accepted. in other words, it can be stated that language policy has also a main role in the problems of efl teaching, due to the meaningful difference of the all items concerning this variable and not following these issues mentioned above. 71 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee conclusion this study provided the ways a researcher can come across to the existing problems in efl teaching and by conducting this, we can gain the knowledge of which variable has more effect on these problems and after that trying to do something in order to solve these problems. based on the results, the hypothesis of the study was rejected; therefore, now one can take action in dissolving these problems by making use of the reasonable findings in this study. the problems specified in learner were that they do not consider pair work important and do not have any plans for it. we should change the way the learner thinks of pair work and seeking to show them how important pair work can be even in the schools not only in private institutes. the problems in teacher were not speaking in english in the classroom most of the times, not asking the students to speak in english as much as possible, not using computer (e.g. powerpoint software) in teaching, not paying attention to the students’ correct pronunciation. the problems which syllabus leads to were the fact that most teachers do not provide students with the syllabus at the first or second session of the semester, they do not follow their syllabus till the end of the educational year, students do not think the syllabus is well organized, it does not include movies and listening apart from other planning, does not include one or two projects for students apart from the midterm or final test, does not mention the deadline of the projects. if language policy accepts to help teachers in any way, the problems which they cause would be reduced and they would alter their approaches in teaching and in bringing their syllabus to the class and trying to consider teaching in schools as seriously as possible. language policy should accompany in this process and revise the textbook and do its best to afford money for using technology in english classrooms and selecting the most proficient english teachers. for further research, the researchers can include the opinions of the teachers, language policy, and textbook writers as well in order to gain more precious results and take actions in solving the problems. of course, they should know the limitations here, which can refer to the fact that all schools would not welcome the researchers gladly thus one must go to the department of education to get the authority for going to the expected schools and administer the questionnaire or any other sorts of survey. references azizifar a., koosha m., lotfi a. r. (2010). an analytical evaluation of iranian high school elt textbooks from 1970 to the present. science direct, social and behavioral sciences, 3, 36-44. brown, d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. second edition. p.430. ny: pearson education. dahmardeh, m. (2006). communicative textbooks: english language textbooks in iranian secondary school. linguistik online, 40, 4/09. department of education, p.r. china. (2003). english syllabus standard. beijing: beijing normal university publishing house. dejong, e. j. (1994). planning language, planning inequality. tesl-ej, teaching english as a second or foreign language, 1(1), r-2. george, d., & mallery, p. (2003). spss for windows step by step: a simple guide and reference. 11.0 update (fourth edition). boston: allyn & bacon. huang, j. (2005). a diary study of difficulties and constraints in efl learning. science direct, system, 33, 609-621. karimnia, a. & salehi zade, sh. (2007). communication strategies: english language departments in iran. iranian journal of language studies (ijls), 1(4), 287-300. saloumeh khodabakhshi & ali rahimi investigating the problems of teaching and learning english in middle schools in iran 72 nunan, d. (2006). second language teaching and learning. pp.57-58. newbury house. teacher development. tehran. jungle publication. nunan, d. (2006). syllabus design. p.5. language teaching. oxford university press. tehran. jungle publication. razmjoo, s. a., riazi a. m. (2006). on the teaching methodology of shiraz efl institutes. journal of social sciences & humanities of shiraz university. 23(1), 58-70 (special issue in english language and linguistics) richards j. c., rodgers th. s. (1934). approaches and methods in language teaching. second edition. p. 167. cambridge language. teaching library. tehran. jungle publication. romaine, s. (2006). language policy in multinational educational contexts. elsevier journal. trepanier, l. (2008). what makes a good syllabus? isi’s american studies center. faculty.isi.org/blog/post/ view/id/32. retrieved november 29, 2011 wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, leclerc, jacques (2003). “index par politiques linguistiques” in l’aménagement linguistique dans le monde, québec, tlfq, université laval, (in french). english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 451 advancing english language learning: innovations in web-based learning media development siti maesyaroh faculty of computer science, informatics engineering study program, universitas kuningan, indonesia email :siti.maesyaroh@uniku.ac.id nida amalia asikin department of english education, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: nida.amalia.asikin@uniku.ac.id daswa faculty of computer science, informatics engineering study program, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: daswa@uniku.ac.id apa citation: maesyaroh, s., asikin, n. d., & daswa. (2023). advancing english language learning: innovations in web-based learning media development. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 451-460. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7468 received: 09-02-2023 accepted: 29-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction currently, there is a growing demand for proficiency in english. in addition, there is a need for interactive and engaging learning media to assist students in improving their english language skills (januarisman and ghufron; 2016). efl learners need to possess the skill to effectively express their intended meaning using spoken and written language. teachers evaluate this competence by employing various techniques to assess the learners' speaking and writing capabilities, with the goal of achieving a level of proficiency comparable to that of native speakers (asikin, 2017). in the 4.0 era, integrated learning media is crucial in creating an effective teaching and learning environment, especially for those learning english as a second language. the utilization of technology in the learning process has been further reinforced by the covid-19 pandemic. smp negeri 1 garawangi is one of the schools that still implements a teacher-focused approach to learning, where the teacher delivers instruction using traditional materials such as books or powerpoint and utilizes paper-based assessments to evaluate students. however, this learning method presents a few problems. firstly, the limited two-hour duration of school sessions may result in suboptimal learning outcomes. secondly, conventional teaching methods can bore students and reduce their interest in learning (maesyaroh, 2019). lastly, using books or paper for evaluation can be time-consuming. considering these challenges, it is essential for teachers to integrate education with digital technology (yuniarti, asikin, and thamrin: 2021). in the modern era of digital advancements, teachers have an essential role that extends beyond the simple transmission of information. their responsibilities encompass designing, organizing, and coordinating various learning activities within the classroom setting (darsih & asikin, 2020). thus, it is necessary to develop interactive and engaging learning media for junior high school students to learn english, utilizing information technology and learning applications to achieve abstract : smp negeri 1 garawangi kuningan is a junior high school that employs traditional methods of english learning, such as books and paper, for evaluation purposes. however, this manual learning system presents numerous issues, including longer assessment processes, susceptibility to damage, and a teachercentered approach that may bore students and reduce their interest in learning. consequently, there is a need for innovative web-based english learning media for junior high school students to facilitate learning and comprehension outside of school hours. this research aimed to produce an english learning application that is both engaging and easy to use. a qualitative descriptive method was utilized, based on direct observation and theoretical learning media principles. the development of the system utilized the extreme programming method, which consists of four stages: planning, design, coding, and testing. the outcome of the study reveals that the english learning application was widely accepted and utilized by students to learn english after school hours. keywords: english; extreme programming; learning media application; web. siti maesyaroh, nida amalia asikin, & daswa advancing english language learning: innovations in web-based learning media development 452 optimal learning outcomes. the strategy referred to as technology-enhanced language learning (tell) strives to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by integrating technology into the process (kirkwood & price, 2013). this research presents an innovative approach to learning media development by creating a mobile phone or personal computer application. this application is designed to enable students to learn english conveniently outside of school hours and assess their progress through evaluations. the study's findings are significant for the future of language learning as they offer an insight into how technology can be harnessed to improve education. research in the field of language learning has shown that the use of technology can enhance language acquisition, improve student engagement, and promote autonomous learning (kukulska-hulme, 2016). moreover, mobile learning applications have become increasingly popular in recent years due to their accessibility, flexibility, and convenience (traxler, 2016). additionally, the integration of technology in language education has been found to promote the development of various skills, including critical thinking, communication, and digital literacy (nikolov & mihaljević djigunović, 2019). furthermore, research has shown that technologyenhanced language learning can improve language proficiency, particularly in the areas of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (levy & stockwell, 2006). thus, the development of a mobile learning application for english language education, as demonstrated in this study, is an effective means of improving language learning outcomes. it allows for autonomous and interactive learning, provides students with opportunities to practice and develop language skills beyond the traditional classroom setting, and promotes the acquisition of digital literacy skills. furthermore, the advantages of using learning media applications have been demonstrated in various previous studies. for example, a study conducted by erwin and anik (2016) titled "development of web-based learning media for natural science subjects for class vii students" used the borg & gall research method and the alessi & trollip development method. the research included preliminary research and information gathering, planning, developing preliminary form of product, initial field trial, revision on the main product, main field testing, revision of field trial products, operational field testing, revision of the final product, and product dissemination and implementation. the results showed that the web-based science learning media was effective in improving student learning outcomes based on pretest and posttest evaluation data. another study conducted by heni and hary (2017) titled "development of web-based learning media to measure student learning outcomes in basic computer network subjects computer and network engineering expertise program" used the addie development model, which involves the analyze, design, development, implementation, and evaluation stages. the results of the study revealed a significant increase in the average score from the pre-test to the post-test, indicating that the developed web-based learning media efficiently improved student learning outcomes in the basic network subject. in addition, yogi and ahmad (2021) conducted a study titled "development of web-based learning media to improve student skills in basic web programming courses at stkip muhammadiyah muara bungo" using the research and development with 4d development method, which includes the define, design, develop, and disseminate stages. the study found that web-based learning media can be an effective supporting medium for the learning process and evaluating learning, which ultimately improves student learning outcomes (putra and ridoh, 2021). therefore, it can be concluded that web-based learning media can significantly contribute to improving student learning outcomes and can be utilized as a supportive tool in the learning process. this research is built on the foundation of ten previous studies that focus on web-based english learning media. firstly, hamdan, nawfal, and alshammari (2018) found that gamification significantly improves english language learning outcomes. secondly, zheng and cheng (2018) emphasized the importance of personalization in web-based english learning media development and its positive impact on learner motivation and engagement. furthermore, chen et al. (2018) explored the potential of ai in providing personalized feedback and content recommendations. the fourth study by stockwell and hubbard (2013) reviewed the benefits and challenges of mobile learning in web-based english learning media development. kukulskahulme and viberg (2018) examined the use of augmented reality in web-based english learning media development and its potential to create immersive learning experiences. additionally, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 453 chen and zhou (2018) reviewed the use of adaptive learning and its potential to improve learning outcomes. the role of online communities in web-based english learning media development and their impact on learner motivation and engagement were explored by li and li (2018). wang et al. (2018) examined the impact of social media on web-based english learning media development and its potential to facilitate collaborative learning and peer-to-peer interactions among learners. elola and oskoz (2018) discussed the potential of virtual worlds and their impact on learner engagement and motivation. lastly, thomas (2016) provided an overview of the latest trends in web-based english learning media development, including gamification, personalization, and adaptive learning, and their impact on learner outcomes. in conclusion, the field of web-based english learning media development is continuously evolving, and the ten research studies highlighted above shed light on the latest trends and technologies used in this field. these findings can guide the design and development of effective web-based english learning media that cater to the diverse needs and learning styles of learners, leading to improved learning outcomes. method the research method used in this study is a qualitative descriptive approach, which involved data gathered from direct observation and literature studies on the application of english learning media. this methodology is in line with the framework proposed by creswell and creswell (2018). to ensure the research process was wellstructured, a flowchart was created to illustrate the various stages involved in the study. by following this workflow, the research was conducted systematically, leading to reliable and valid findings. a visual representation of the research stages is presented in figure 1. figure 1. research stages the research utilizes the extreme programming system development method, which falls under the category of agile software development approaches. extreme programming is an objectoriented software engineering process that emphasizes teamwork among small to mediumsized teams. this approach is particularly suited for projects with rapidly changing requirements, as it provides flexibility and adaptability (supriyatna, 2018). figure 2. extreme programming method (supriyatna, 2018) the extreme programming (xp) method comprises four stages that must be completed for system development. the first stage is planning, which involves identifying problems, analyzing needs, and setting a development schedule. the second stage is design, which includes modeling activities such as system modeling, architectural modeling, and database modeling using unified modeling language (uml) and class diagrams. the third stage is coding, which involves implementing the modeling into a user interface using the structured php programming language and mysql for database management. the final siti maesyaroh, nida amalia asikin, & daswa advancing english language learning: innovations in web-based learning media development 454 stage is testing, in which the system is tested for errors during application and to ensure it meets user needs. blackbox testing method is used in this study. to collect the data needed for this study, the author utilized several methods. direct observation was made of class vii students at smp negeri 1 garawangi during the process of learning english, from the delivery of learning materials to evaluation. literature review was conducted by studying relevant documents, journals, and literature related to online learning media. interviews were also conducted with english teachers to obtain data relevant to the research object. by utilizing these methods, problems can be identified and addressed throughout the research process, leading to more reliable results. results and discussion in this study, the main outcome of the research is a web-based learning media application for junior high school students. the development process of the application was carried out using the extreme programming method. the following are the series of activities that were conducted to create the application: planning the first stage of the system development process was planning. in this stage, the author identified the problems and prepared the schedule for the development of the learning media application. moreover, the author selected the appropriate tools and software to be used in building the application. the hardware and software used in the application development process were documented and presented in table 1: table 1. application development requirements hardware software a. laptop processor core i3 b. ram 8gb c. hdd 120gb d. mouse e. printers a. microsoft windows 11 b. adobe dreamweaver cs5 c. xampp 1.8.6 d. google chrome for hardware and software used in implementing the application can be seen in table 2. table 2. application implementation needs no. need server computer client computer 1. hardware pc processor core i5 10gb of ram hdd 500gb mouse pc processor core i3 ram 8gb hdd 240gb mouse keyboards keyboards 21' lcd monitors printers 21' lcd monitors printers 2. software windows 10 xampp 1.8.6 google chrome windows 10 google chrome based on observations and interviews, the study identified the following problems in english learning: (1) limited time in school for english instruction resulting in suboptimal student outcomes. (2) traditional methods using books or powerpoint contribute to student boredom and disinterest. (3) evaluation procedures still involve books and paper, causing delays in the assessment process. the schedule for implementing web-based english learning media application development for junior high school students can be seen in table 3. table 3. system development schedule design to design the learning media, the author starts with system modeling, architectural modeling, and system modeling, all of which use the unified modeling language (uml). the design of the system requirements and business processes for the english learning media application is depicted using a use case diagram, which is shown in figure 3. figure 3. use case diagrams english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 455 based on the use case diagram, use case scenarios can be created as follows: table 4. use case scenarios for doing exercises use case name uc03 actor student purpose displays questions randomly and generates the correct number of questions preconditions the actor has entered the name and is on the main page of the system scenario actor system 1. students work on english practice questions 2. the questions that are worked on consist of several types including, multiple choice, essay, matching answers and completing sentences that are displayed randomly. 3. students answer practice questions and press the save button. 4. the system will match the answers with the answer keys and save the number of correct questions in the database. coding after completing the design stage, the next step is to start coding, which involves implementing the models that have been created into a user interface using a programming language. in this study, the application was developed using the php programming language and the codeigniter framework. the coding phase resulted in the creation of an english language learning media application for junior high school students. once the application is launched, the main page will be displayed as the first screen. figure 4. main page figure 4 is the main page when the user runs the application, where on that page there is a main menu that can be accessed by the user, namely learning english, exams, and learning materials. on the exam menu there is a feature for practicing english questions, where the user is asked to enter a name before working on the questions. figure 5. name input form figure 5 shows the input form for entering a name before working on the questions. this application displays several types of questions such as multiple choice, matching, completing, and essay which can be seen in figure 6. figure 6. english question page after working on the questions, the user can see the value and questions that were answered correctly on the exam result menu with a display like in figure 7. siti maesyaroh, nida amalia asikin, & daswa advancing english language learning: innovations in web-based learning media development 456 figure 7. display of the exam results menu the learning materials menu contains english material pages consisting of greetings, present tense, and past tense material. users can study material according to the material selected on the page as shown in figure 8. figure 8. learning material page teachers can include english material and questions into learning media applications. to be able to access the application, the teacher must log in as shown in figure 9. figure 9. login form in figure 9 is the login form used by the teacher in order to be able to manage english material and questions. after entering the username and password, a display will appear as shown in figure 10. figure 10. page for teachers in figure 10 there is a question, material and exam result menu where the teacher can choose the question menu to manage english questions. in the question menu there are several types of questions such as multiple choice, essay, story, match, and complete dialog so that the teacher can choose the type of questions to be managed. if the teacher will add multiple choice questions then it will appear as shown in figure 11. figure 11. question management page to add multiple choice questions, you can press the create button in figure 4.11 and then a question input form will appear as shown in figure 12. figure 12. question input page meanwhile, to manage english material, the teacher can select the material menu and then press the create button if you want to add the type of material as shown in figure 13. figure 13. manage material page but if you want to add material to one type of material, the teacher can choose the type of material then press the navigation image on the action, a display will appear as shown in figure 14. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 457 figure 14. material input page the teacher can see data on the results of students who have worked on english questions on the exam result menu as shown in figure 15. figure 15. display of exam results testing (testing) the final stage in the extreme programming method is the testing phase. this stage involves executing the application to ensure that it meets the system specifications and user requirements. the primary objective of testing is to check the functionality of the software, as stated by greenit (2018). the test is designed to evaluate both the external appearance, or interface, and the functionality of the software. the results of the testing for the learning media application are presented in table 5. table 5. black box testing no. testing information test result 1 testing the name input page in the name form, the user enters a name then clicks the save button. testing when inputting the name was successful. 2 testing the exercise page questions after entering a name on the exam page the user fills in or works on practice questions and then presses the save button. testing the successful practice questions will display the questions answered and the number of questions correct. 3 content page testing on the material page i.e. the user can select the user has successfully accessed the material. the type of material. 4 testing the login form in the login form, the teacher enters the correct username and password then clicks the login button. the teacher enters the wrong username and password in the login form then clicks the login button testing when inputting the correct username and password will display the main page. if you enter the username and password incorrectly, you will be asked to enter the username and password again. 5 testing the question form in the question form, the teacher adds questions by selecting the type of question. the teacher changes the questions in the question form according to the type of question. the teacher deletes questions on the question form according to the type of question. the teacher succeeded in adding questions according to the type of questions. the teacher managed to change the questions according to the type of questions. the teacher succeeded in deleting the questions according to the type of questions. 6 material form testing in the material form, the teacher adds material by selecting the title of the material. the teacher changes the material on the material form according to the material title. the teacher deletes the material on the material form according to the material title. the teacher managed to add material according to the title of the material. the teacher succeeded in changing the material according to the title of the material. the teacher succeeded in deleting the material according to the title of the material. 7 testing the results of on the exam result page, the the teacher managed to siti maesyaroh, nida amalia asikin, & daswa advancing english language learning: innovations in web-based learning media development 458 student practice teacher can see student grade data. access student grade data. the test results have confirmed that the english learning media application has successfully passed all the tests conducted and runs with 100% functionality on all 12 functions. consequently, the application can be deemed to be running smoothly and without any failure. conclusion the research and testing conducted on the webbased english learning media applications built with php and mysql programming have led to the following conclusions: a. the web-based english learning media application can serve as a viable alternative to conventional learning methods, and it provides an easy-to-use platform for seventh grade junior high school students. b. students can use the english learning application to learn independently, both during and outside of school hours. c. the learning media application is highly accessible, and it can be used on any computer with a web browser installed by both students and teachers. based on the problems identified and the results of this study, several suggestions can be made for the future development of learning media applications. these suggestions are aimed at improving the current application and enhancing the overall learning experience for junior high school students. firstly, it is suggested that the application should be developed for different platforms such as mobile web applications, android, and java mobile. this will allow students to access the learning material from different devices, making it more convenient for them to learn anywhere and anytime. secondly, to make the learning material more interesting, it is suggested to add more material variations and practice questions. this will keep the students engaged and motivated to learn more. lastly, it is suggested to add pictures with storylines to make the application more interactive. this will help students to visualize the learning material and understand it better. we would like to thank those who have helped a lot in this research, namely smp negeri 1 garawangi and lppm universitas kuningan for their material and non-material support. references asikin, n. a. 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(2018). personalized learning in web 3.0 era: the role of mobile applications. british journal of educational technology, 49(6), 1044-1055. siti maesyaroh, nida amalia asikin, & daswa advancing english language learning: innovations in web-based learning media development 460 the portrait of english language subject in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs) english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the portrait of english language subject in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs) deuis sugaryamah islamic state university of sunan gunung djati bandung, indonesia e-mail: soeg2003@yahoo.com apa citation: sugaryamah, d. (2013). the portrait of english language subject in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs). english review: journal of english education, 1(2),182-190 received: 09-04-2013 accepted: 22-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: at the tertiary level in indonesia, english language subject is mandatory as a general education course, especially for those non english programs/ departments. how this subject be positioned in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs)’ curriculum, that later breeds the representation of the subjects on its teaching materials and its teaching and learning process by the teacher, and the students’s perceptions on such implementation of english subjects in the classroom become the concerns of this study. qualitative research by using interviews, questionnaires and documents were used to collect the data. from the study, it was found that in this institution english is considered as an english for specific purposes(esp), though regarded as a minor subject, yet itsexistence is considered as important. this perception is acceptable by all stakeholder (the institution, the lecturer and the students). keywords: english, higher education of computer science, english for specific purposes introduction based on the current laws of national education system in indonesia (the 1989 education law no.2 and the 1999 government regulation on higher education no. 60), education at the tertiary level is mainly designed for profession building. the students in higher education prepared to take specific and major subjects to support their future profession. however, they are still required to take the mandatory subjects called general education courses (mata kuliah dasar umum/ mata kuliah umum) that provide general knowledge. besides bahasa indonesia, religion, civics and other courses, english language (bahasa inggris) is one of them. due to its importance, the minister of education has issued and applied regulation that english should be taught in the primary schools up to the university level. english thatto be functioned not only as effective and efficient means of interaction but also as the medium of instruction. moreover, english is also included to develop and disseminate the technology and arts that would uplift the quality of life enhanced by the national cultures. without any exception, stmik mardira indonesia (stmik mi), one of several existing private higher education of computer science (hecs) in bandung, also includes such mandatory general education courses in its curriculum. although, in its implementation, the courses might commonly beperceived to be less important and less challenging than their deuis sugaryamah the portrait of english language subject in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs) own institution’ major and specific subjects. this perception is relevant to the survey conducted by alwasilah (2000) on viewing students’ perception on the teaching and learning of mandatory language courses, i.e bahasa indonesia and english as general education. the survey finds that the goal or the aim of their curriculum is still far from the expectation. for example, for general english, most of students, who has been learning english for several years, starting from the elementary to the secondary schools level thencontinuingstudying at the tertiary schools level, their language competence and abilities are still poor. the substances/ materials or the teaching and learning practicesare mostly the repetition of those learnt and done in the previous level, and the stress is commonly on grammar or structure (alwasilah, 2000; kusni, 2009). alwasilah (2000) regards the government policy to put english or bahasa indonesia as general education courses in the curriculum of higher education – in its implementation as out of control. the facts are seen on its teaching and learning practice, in which teachers teach as they like, and students’ learning is just to get the score and pass the subject. general english that basically aiming at students’ competences on integrated language skills, such as speaking, writing, reading and listening, has turned on emphasizing on grammatical structure. however, apart from such negative facts, learning english language is then still required at university level. students are stillnecessary to master both spoken and written languagesbecause english is an international language, the language of sciences and knowledge, and furthermore most of textbooks are written in english. to adopt and understand those, students are required to master the language, at least having a skill on reading comprehension. in this case, alwasilah (2000) suggests on reorganizing or remodeling the implementation of general english on higher education level, otherwise discarding them for its inappropriateness to the students’ need. then, the effort to do is how to make use of this general english learning to become useful in helping students to master english. as the poor practice of teaching and learning process might also happen in this institution, and the goal of the course to make students having the competence of (at least) reading skills, even less to fulfill stmik mi’s goal to produce graduates who can speak english well are not yet achieved, how this english subject be treated and implemented in stmik mi, where english is not part of the major subjects in all programs and departments, and whetherenglish subject be treated as a general english subject or english as a specific purposes (esp), as well as the students’ perception on this subject in term of its materials and syllabus become the concerns of this study. different people may interpret esp differently. some identify it as ‘simply being the teaching of english for any purpose that could be specified’, while others, however, are more precise, describing it as the teaching of english used in academic studies or the teaching of english for vocational or professional purposes” (anthony 1997, p. 1). strevens (1988) argues that esp may be worded differently in terms of its definitions. but, what is important is that whoever is concerned with esp should know that esp is “designed to meet specific needs of learners; related to content, to particular disciplines, occupations and activities; and centere. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee at the university level, english language teachers and learners often encounter different issues that might hamper achieving a successful teaching/ learning function. one of the most important issues is the teacher/learner interaction within specific contexts of english language which is english for specific purposes. in this context, hyland (2002, p. 394) argues that ‘‘effective language teaching in the universities involves taking specificity seriously. it means that we must go as far as we can’’. for teachers this means introducing learners to the relevant genres with the purpose of allowing them to participate in a discourse community organized around specific and purposeful activities. this can be approached in pragmatic or critical ways, and there has been a considerable amount of discussion about the need to avoid uncritical induction of students into disciplinary discourses and identities (canagarajah 2002; harwood & hadley 2004; pennycook 1997). in indonesian context, marwan’s (2009) research highlights the findings of a study investigating the challenges faced by an english teacher in his esp teaching in an indonesian vocational higher institution. the challenges related to the issues like, students’ learning motivation,the mismatch between reality and expectations, lack of quality resources, and heavy workload. some solutions to cope with these challenges such as finding the actual factors which cause the decline of students’ learning motivation is crucial because it will help teachers identify appropriate strategies to overcome the problem. the mismatch between reality (students’ english proficiencybackground) and (curriculum) expectations considered to be an urgent matter thatneeds fixing by an idealsolution that vocational higher institution should plan toaccept students who can only meet a certain english proficiency standard¸ or some others solution provided by institution. meanwhile, kusni’s (2007) study shows the needs of reformulating the design of english for specific purposes (esp) courses for university students who do not major in english. the idea for the study was derived from the research on designing esp programs by conductingthe survey in three public universities in indonesia indicating that there is a fundamental misunderstanding with the design of esp courses which made the teaching of such courses ineffective and inefficient. his study is in line with alwasilah survey (2000). he suggests a solution with using the collective collaborative model in implementing esp theory with its context. in relation to the research conducted in higher education of computer science, in 2007, marjito studies the research on the relevance of the syllabus and materials of english subject to the student’s needs. the results shows that the lecturer should redesign either syllabus or material in order to cater students’ need, particularly grammar and reading. in brief, the syllabus and material provided were not fully relevance to the students’ need. in tunisia, harabi’s (2010) study scrutinizes the international aspect of the english language and its relation to the esp context. it highlights the major constraints to english language teaching and learning in the tunisian higher education. according to harabi, there is no specific training for the teachers of english for specific purposes in all the examples of institutes being researched. indeed, teachers are faced with learners who already had some knowledge of english acquired in a school situation. moreover, most of the materials and courses available were appropriate for deuis sugaryamah the portrait of english language subject in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs) those coming to the study of the language for the first time, suitable for younger learners, and were written as ‘general’ english, thus a gap in materials had to be filled for these specific purpose learners (2010). since esp programs focus on developing english competence in a specific field, such as software development, business or technology. some courses prepare students for various academic programs: english for science and technology, english for accounting, english for computer, etc. in the case of students of stmik mardira indonesia, whose background are out of english department, to meet the needs to have highly specific academic and professional reasons for seeking to improve their language skills to comprehend english textbook or computer instruction (strevens, 1988) where most reference books are written not in simple english,obviously esp needto apply in their study (hutchinson & waters 1987). based on the above description, the concerns of this study attempt to address the issues of how english language subject in stmik mi be regarded in its institution’ overallcurriculum, and to find out the students’ perceptions on such implementation in the syllabus and materials used as well as the teaching and learning process. the research questions are formulated as follows: (1) how english subjects be regarded in the institution’scurriculum? (2) what are the students’perception towards the implementation of english subjects, in terms of its materials and teaching and learning practices in their study? method the research was conducted at stmik mardira indonesia, aprivate higher education of computer science in bandung which has two-shifted classes, the regular class (the classes held from 08.00 to 14.00) and the evening class (in which some of the students areemployees, held from 17.00 to 21.00). there are three departments involved: manajemen informatika, teknik informatika, and komputerisasi akuntansi with three different programs, the one-year program (diplome-1), the three-year program (diplome-3), and the degree program (s-1). meanwhile, for teaching english process, three departments are commonly organized to be one and the size of a class range between 40-50 students. the major reasons why this institution was chosen were as follows: first, the english subject is only part of mkdu subject, and since the institution deals with computer major, the english applied should be an esp (english for specific purposes). second, each of department has been accredited by ban pt. third, the implication of this research is hoped to be able to provide improvement of designing either syllabus or materials at the research site. eighteen students were involved as the participants in this study. they are all students from three departments (manajemen informatika, komputerisasi akuntansi, and manajemen informatika) who were chosen randomly from different grades (the first, third, and fifth semester students). they are students from the regular class as well as from the evening class, with the academic year ranging from 2009to 2011. they had the same opportunity to answer the questionaires and be able to provide information needed. an english teacher and the head of the institution were also involved as the participants to answer and provide information about other aspects related english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to the materials used, the practice of teaching and learning and the policy of conducting and providing the english subject in this institution. qualitative research method was used to collect the data. data were collected by the means of questionnaires for students and interviews with a teacher and the head of institution,and documentation of the institution curriculum. using the qualitative approach, the data were then obtained by usingquestionnaires, interviews, and documentation (syllabus and materials). all the data were analyzed on the basis of the research questions stated and were classified into two central themes. first, the existence and the role of the english language subject in stmik mi’s curriculum. second, the students’ perception about the english subjects provided in stmik mi, in terms of its materials and teaching and learning practices. the data from interview, documents and questionnaires were analyzed to answer the research question. the function of three research instruments (interviews, documents and questionnaires) in seeking the answer to the research questions were summarized below: 1. interviews were conducted with the participants toget the data of the institution policy regarding english subjects in its ccurriculum and the teacher’s interpretation about english subjects in stimik mi. 2. syllabus and materials functioned as documents to support the data about kinds of syllabus and material provided by the lecturer. then, these documents were matched to the data from interviews whether among of them were relevance or not. 3. the questionnaires given to the students were used to see how students’ perception to the english subjects in terms of the materials used and its teaching and learning process. results and discussion based on the data derived from the interview with the head of stmik mi and the document, english language subject is considered as the mandatory subject to support other main and core subjects in the institution. the subject belongs to the category of general education courses (mkdu/ mku = mata kuliah dasar umum/ mata kuliah umum). given four (4) credits to this english subject, this then divided into two different subjects called ‘bahasa inggris 1 (bi-1)’ and ‘bahasa inggris 2 (bi-2)’, with two (2) credits for each. the subjects are given to the students in two different semester. bahasa inggris i is given to all students in the first semester, while bahasa inggris 2is given to the students of all programs at the end of semester. for example, at semester ii for diplome i, semester vi for diplome iii program, and at eight semester for s1 degree program. (see the excerpt of interview with the head of stmik mi and the buku panduan) the purposes of the two subjects are different in nature. bi-1 is intended to provide students with the ability of comprehending text, while bi-2 focuses on conversation, on students’ speaking ability, especially helping them to prepare their readiness in facing the job interview. having such different goals at the end of the lectures, the content of each subject materials are also different. the texts contented with some information about computer and its programs become the major source of materials used in bi-1, while the content materials related to the language function in making conversation and deuis sugaryamah the portrait of english language subject in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs) those related to job interviews are becoming the cource of material in bi-2. the students of this institution are divided into two categories, the regular students and the employee class students. the regular students are mostly those who failed to join government public universities or other favourite private colleges, graduated from private high schools. meanwhile, the employee students are those who have already worked in several companies. it can be said that the students come from the middle to lower level both on their academic achievement and their social economic background. with such condition shall automatically impact on their quality before the join stmik mi. however, to accomodate their needs for continuing their study in higher education level, stmik mi makes every efforts to give the best support to its students. the institution endeavor to create good and high grade environment to support their teaching and learning process. to accomodate the students’needs in taking english language subject, stmik provides the morning and afternoon classes. the regular students usually take the morning class while the afternoon class is usually taken by the employee class student, and they may possibly interchange its schedules. there is only one english lecturer available for about 500 students enrolled in stmik mi, with various number of students in each department, i.e. 10 students in informatics management dept., and more than 25 students in other department. to negotiate such condition as well as considering the effectivity and efficiency, the english lecture is held as a general lecture for all students of different departments. in consequency, the big class of about more than 50 students is common for this subject. the lecture for this big class is heldin the school hall. provided by the availability of instructional facilities such as in-focus, audio visual and internet connections in each classroom and the hall has made the lecture possible. the regular evaluation is held regularly by the institution to all subjects, including english. besides the evaluation and sharing time between lectures in the beginning of each semester, the forthnight learning society forum are held for all lecturers. this activities intended to be used as the place for sharing experiences and problemsolution time as well as the media to socialize the instution’ policy related to the teaching and learning process and teachers’ development. the regular feedback from students before the midterm and final term tests is also available. this students’ feedback is also used as one of the institution consideration to evaluate the lecturers and the course subjects. having 14 years teaching experience of english subject in stmik mi and other higher education of computer science, it is considered that the lecturer has quite used to know the students needs and the challenges faced in the teaching an learning process. to implement the mandatory english subjects in this institution, the lecturer try to develop the syllabus and teaching materials in line with the aims/ goals stated by the institution in each of the english subjects called bahasa inggris 1 (bi-1)and bahasa inggris 2 (bi-2). the materials contented in bi-1 are made to support the students to comprehend the texts with the topics related to computer programs. few grammatical structures, i.e. ‘to be, to have, modal, passive voice, degrees of compariosn, word formation’, commonly used in the reading texts are also introduced (source: modul bahasa english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee inggris 1). and the materials given in bi-2 are those related with the certain function in doing conversation, such as how to deals with the interview; how to make questions sentences, discussion techniques, making decision, dialogue, practical english conversation, common job interview questions, presentation and making an application letter (source: modul bahasa inggris 2). those both materials are not always fixed all the time, they are flexible to be changeable by choosing different texts or topics as long as the coverage is still in line with the syllabus. the sources from the internet, mostly used to become the teaching materials. according to him, bi1 is more related to english for specific purposes, with the focus of english for computers, and bi-2 is more general since the content mostly related to general conversation. the challenges he faces in teaching process and providing the materials to the students are related to: (1) the academic background of the students, who mostly have lower academic achievement in their previous study (high school), with mostly having poor english skills. (2) the time constraint the students have in joining the subjects, especially for employee students who oftenly come late to the lecture. (3) the number of students in the class that ranging between 35 to 70 students. (4) the low motivation of the students who join the subjects just to do the requirement and not really to study it seriously. (5) the assessment which is merely more subjective and normative. based on the questionaires given to several stmik mi’ students, it was found that all of them like english language subject. the reasons are quite various, such as:  because english in an international language, and we have to be able to speak/ master such language. (7 respondents)  because english in needed in our future job. (5 respondents)  because english language is nice to hear and speak. (1 respondent)  because i like to sing english song (1 respondent)  because english mostly used in the internet (1 respondent) in terms of students’ speaking, writing and reading ability, from the 18 (eighteen) respondents, 10 (ten) of them say that they could speak english a bit, as their statements:  “tidak lancar tapi dapat mengucapkan’ (r1, r13)  “bisa tapi tidak terlalu banyak” (r15, r26, r25, r17)  “itu dipelajari sejak sd” (r7)  “hanya sedikit, itupun kosakatanya yang umum” (r14) eight of them say they could not speak but understand what other people say.  “mengerti yang dibicarakan, tapi tidak bisa balik berbicara memakai bahasa inggris”. (r10)  “karena tidak banyak punya kosa kata” (r2, r20) fifteen out of eighteen say that they could write and understand a bit when they read the reading texts,  “telah dipelajari sebelumnya” (r7)  “mampu memahami dan menulis teks bahasa inggris tapi tidak terlalu (r15)  “mampu sedikit-sedikitkarena suka mendengar lagu bahasa inggris (r10) in terms of students’ interpretation about the english subject and its teaching and learning process, following are the results.  “bahasa inggris ini penting tetapi termasuk pelajaran yang susah” (r17) deuis sugaryamah the portrait of english language subject in an indonesian private higher education of computer science (hecs)  “menarik tapi kurang menyenangkan, perlu ditambah sedikit bercanda saat di kelas” (r8)  “sedikit membosankan dan perlu dikemas lebih menarik lagi” (r19)  “menurut saya cukup menyenangkan, meski seharusnya cara mengajarnya ditambah seperti diskusi kelompok, dlsb” (r15, r13)  “sebenarnya sih menarik, tapi itu sangat tergantung sama dosennya. kalo dosennya menyenangkan, pasti belajarnya juga asyik. tapi kalo dosennya membosankan bawaannya ngatuk” (r16)  “terlalu tegang, efeknya tidak masuk ke otak, terus lupa begitu saja apa pelajaran yang didapatnya (r1) about the scheduled time dan number of credits of the english subject, a respondent says, “2 sks untuk bahasa inggris i dan 2 sks untuk bahasa inggris 2 saya rasa sudah cukup” (r 25) about the content of course materials, in bi-1, most students say that grammar and text comprehension become the focus of the english subject. as what the students say:  “ memahami teks dan grammar”(r14)  “teks2 yang berhubungan dengan komputer dan pemrograman” (r12) for bi-2, most students agree that speaking and conversation become the focus of the course. below are the results of students’ expectation from the english subjects:  “dapat memperlancar dalam berbicara dengan bahasa inggris” (r1)  “gramatika, kosakata yang lebih berhubungan dengan komputer/ lebih spesifik tidak hanya mengertikan teks saja, juga conversation yang berhubungan dengan komputer dan perkantoran (r15)  “dapat memahaminya dengan cepat dan menguasai banyak kosa kata” (r20)  “dapat lancar menulis dan berbicara bahasa inggris” (r26)  “dapat lancar berbicara bahasa inggris, dapat mengerti dan dipahami (r25) lastly, the impacts of this subject to the students skills/achievement are as follows.  “sekarang saya sudah mulai bisa memahami teks dalam bahasa inggris” (r20)  “dapat mengerti bahasa inggris dan mampu berbicara bahasa inggris terhadap orang asing/ bule” (r25)  “lebih memahami teks dan grammar” (r14)  “lebih dapat mengemukakan pendapat dalam bahasa inggris” (r15) from the presentation of data above, it can be seen that the mandatory english subject in the tertiary level, especially in higher education of computer science like stmik mi could be positioned as the minor yet important subjects expected to help students in coping with other subjects. though in its implementation and presentation to the students in the classroom face several challenges, i.e. the range of time availability (in this case the limited number of credits and the time scheduled of providing the subjects), the students social economic and academic background that directly or indirectly have several impact to the product and the quality of teaching and learning process. as the support of other subjects, the english subjects is then becoming english for specific purposes with the content materials of the subjects related to computer science. this is inline with strevens (1988), that esp meets the needs of the learners, centered on the language skills (in this case reading and speaking skills) and in specific genres (computer). in general, the students’ perception towards the materials of esp in stmik mi as being appropriate with their needs english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to understand and comprehend the texts about computers. they get this materials in bahasa inggris 1 subject. meanwhile, their future needs in dealing with the ability to do the successful job interview is represented by the materials they have in english for business in bahasa inggris 2 subject. though in its implementation, the result of this subject is still far from the goals/ aims of the subjects, that is to make the students able to read as well as speak well, as several constraints coming from both the institution (in this case the limited lecturer and time) and the students (lack of motivation and interest, time constraint). conclusion this paper sought to reveal the mandatory english subjects as it is regarded in stmik mi’s curriculum, where in one side it is considered as important to have to support students in coping with other subjects, yet in other side the availability of time, the limited resource, in this case the availability of english lecture, and the students motivations have become the constraints to make this subjects reach its institutional goal to provide the students with the english skills both spoken and written. the study was carried out within the framework ofinterpretive inquiry and semi structured interviews were used as the means for datacollection. data were analyzed through the identification themes related to the research questions given. references anthony, l. 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(2008). the future of schooling in indonesia.journal of international cooperation in education, 11(1), 71-84. harrabi, a. (2010). issues in education of english for specific purposes in the tunisian higher education. esp world, 2(28), retrieved from http://www.espworld.info. kusni. (2007). reformulasi perancangan program esp di perguruan tinggi. linguistik indonesia, 25(1). marjito. (2007). an analysis of syllabus and material and their relevance to the students’ needs: acase study of a higher education of computer science. unpublished thesis, indonesian university of education. marwan, a. (2009). esp teaching challenges in an indonesian vocational higher institution.the english teacher, xxxviii: 1 – 12. ornstein, a. c. & hunkins, f. p. (2009). curriculum: foundations, principles, and issues, 5th ed. usa: pearson education, inc. posner, g. j. (1992). analyzing the curriculum. usa: mcgraw-hill, inc. strevens, p. (1988). esp after twenty years: a re-appraisal. in m. tickoo (ed.), esp: state of the art (pp. 1-13). singapore: seameo regional language young, m. s. (2011). a case of the global – local dialectic: decentralization and teacher training in banten, indonesia. unpublished dissertation. the florida state university. 49 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee noticing: a factor to improve iranian preintermediate efl learners’ structural accuracy faezeh nemati department of english, garmsar branch, islamic azad university (iau), daneshjo street, garmsar, iran email: f aezeh4006@yahoo.com hamid ashraf department of english, torbat-e-heydarieh branch, islamic azad university (iau), torbat-e-heydarieh, iran email: hamid_ashraf_elt@yahoo.com; & hamid.ashraf.elt@gmail.com apa citation: nemati, f. & ashraf, h. (2013). noticing: a factor to improve iranian preintermediate efl learners’ structural accuracy. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 49-56 received: 10-07-2013 accepted: 30-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of noticing, explicit focus on form on linguistic accuracy. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 44 iranian pre-intermediate efl learners of one of the language institutes were chosen by means of administering the ket homogeneity test. these learners were pretested through a structured interview to check their current accuracy level regarding the oral production of five structures. based on the results of the pretest, two matched groups, one as the control group and the other as experimental group, were formed. then, two groups were provided with tasks through listening about the target structures in the study. of course, the experimental group underwent focus on form explicitly through noticing, while the control group was not provided with it. after twenty sessions of treatment, each ninety minutes, the two groups were post tested through another structured interview. the data obtained from instruments used in the present study indicated that the instructional treatment, noticing, had a significant effect on the acquisition of the target forms. the scores of the participants demonstrated that in experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of the average accuracy gains. finally, it was concluded that explicit focus on form, noticing, can lead to higher accuracy in oral production in comparison to control group keywords: explicit focus on form, noticing, accuracy students do not get involved in the interactive and communicative process of language learning. furthermore, a language acquisition research (doughty & williams, 1998; swain, 1995, 1998, 2005), has illustrated that focusing on form, which is defined as considering the linguistic form in any communicative task, is essential in sustained promotion of language skills and proficiency. as a result, focusing on form is considered as a method of teaching grammar. this method could specifically cater for the needs introduction grammar instructions, as a controversial issue in language teaching, play an important role in promotion of communicative skills and capabilities. traditionally, grammar instructions have included a group of grammatical rules and manipulative exercises which are necessary in practicing new structures, and these set of instructions are predominantly used in all the language textbooks and classrooms (aski, 2003; wong & vanpatten, 2003), even though in these traditional approaches, faezeh nemati & hamid ashraf noticing: a factor to improve iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ structural accuracy 50 of those language users who apply “non-standard” grammatical forms in their communicative interactions. williams and evans (1998: 139) present a definition of focus on form as “… instruction that draws learners’ attention to form in the context of meaningful communication…”. lee and valdman (2000: 12) believe that focus on form has “…the goal of accurate as well as meaningful learner production…”. while some people believe that focusing on form is in fact a return to traditional grammar teaching methods, sanz (2000: 17) argues that: focus on form does not mean we are going back to the drill and kill classroom because focus on form does not imply constant, indiscriminate grammar explanation and practice. focus on form means precisely the opposite: setting limits on what is explicitly taught”. consciousness-raising and input enhancement as scientific definitions of the process of attracting students’ attention, alongside with concepts such as awareness, detection, attention, consciousness, and noticing are among research topics in focus on form studies. doughty and williams (1998) claim that deep involvement and interactions are essential in learning processes such as carefully observing a form in the input (p. 253). schmidt (1990), in his “noticing” hypothesis, believes that for realization of a target form in l2, first the learners’ attention must be drawn to it. tomlin and villa (1994: 190) argue that “having attention oriented toward some aspects of language increases the likelihood of, but does not guarantee the activation of detection”. in this statement, “detection” is applied synonymous to “noticing”. smith (1991: 121) presents a similar point of view. he claims that focus on form, instead of a linguistic side, might have a perceptual aspect and continues:” although learners may notice the signals, the input may nevertheless be no salient to their learning mechanisms”. backman and palmer (1996) argue that the required level of interpretation is to a large extent affected by the amount of input. limited interpretation is recommended for inputs presented in limited quantities, while a more comprehensive interpretation is advised for large amounts of inputs. focus on form methodologies implicitly and explicitly tries to attract students’ attention. in implicit focus on form, “the aim is to attract learner attention and to avoid metalinguistic discussion, always minimizing any interruption to the communication of meaning” whereas in explicit focus on form, “the aim is to direct learner attention and to exploit pedagogical grammar in this regard” (doughty & williams 1998: 232). leow (2000) as cited in lee & valdman (2000: xiv) claims that “a considerable amount of sla [second language acquisition] research indicates that implicit procedures for awareness enhancement, such as input flooding (providing numerous exemplars of the feature in the input) or writing enhancement (highlighting the targeted feature by various typographical devices), prove to be less effective in accelerating acquisition and advancing language development than a variety of types of explicit approaches…” doughty and williams (1998: 236) possess an opposite view of this, and argue that:” …it is sometimes possible to aim more or less implicitly to attract the learner’s attention to linguistic features and promote the processing of these features without providing any sort of explicit guidance…” in this research, one of the techniques of focusing on form is studied, noticing. this study presented students with noticing techniques via listening exercises in which students were involved in repeated oral 51 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee processing of some target structures. such activities draw learners’ attention to grammatical structures, and force them to concentrate on form and meaning at the same time. method to accomplish the objectives of this study, homogeneity test was given to participants to prepare the necessary condition therefore all of the participants had the lack of ability to recognize the target structures in the study. 124 students participated in the first phase of this study but only 44 pre-intermediate efl learners survived after homogeneity test. there were two groups of participants in the study, one group as the experimental group, and one group as the control group. the participants were all selected from at least eight english classes of english institute located in mashhad. their initial language proficiency in english was at the pre-intermediate level. mixed genders attended this study. their mother tongue was farsi and their average age of them was between 15 and 16. to collect the required data, some instruments were employed in this study. first, the participants’ general proficiency was assessed by “ket for school” to ensure homogeneity of the groups at the beginning of study. the ket is a cambridge level one examination (council of europe level a2) which consists of four complete tests, according to the new test format implemented since march 2004. this test has three sections including reading and writing section (9 parts, 55 items, 1hour and 10 min), listening section (5parts, 15 items,30 min) and speaking section (2parts,8 to 10 min). the participants’ scores were out of 100.the reliability of test was assured by administering it to a group of similar subjects. the other criteria used in this study were two structured interviews in order to elicit the required structure from the participants, during the pre-test and post-test period. each interview took at least 10 minutes and it included 5 topics based on the grammatical context of the methods used. the rating criteria was based on the result of heaton’ writing english language tests. accuracy ratios were calculated to score the interviews (by two raters) through dividing the correct uses by the sum of the total number of incorrect and zero uses (white, 1998). it should also be reminded that the pretest scores were used to match the experimental groups and control group. this study required 44 homogeneous learners who lacked almost any familiarity with the structures. these learners were pretested through a structured interview, and then, on the basis of their pretest scores they were divided into two similar groups, one group as the experimental group, and one group as the control group. the final samples comprised at least 6 classes in the institute. it should be mentioned that the ratings of the interviews in the pretest and posttest were carried out by two raters. the correlation coefficients, calculated to determine inter-rater reliability for the ratings of the interviews, turned out to be acceptable. regarding the treatment, this study required the teachers to provide the learners with a kind of focus on form technique (noticing) that pushed the learners to use the target structures. twenty passages were developed for target structures to be presented to participants through listening, in twenty sessions. each session lasted for about 90 minutes. three other teachers, in addition to the researcher, were instructed to present the techniques and provided the necessary focus on form in the classes in which the required participants were available. in the experimental group, the participants faezeh nemati & hamid ashraf noticing: a factor to improve iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ structural accuracy 52 were provided with noticing through listening to the passages. regarding the control group, everything was similar to that of the experimental group, except that they didn’t receive any techniques of focus on form (noticing). the members of the control group were only provided with listening to the passages. for the posttest, which was about 40 days after the pretest, the participants took the posttest through the same structured interview, which was again doublerated. it should be pointed out that the scores used for data analyses were resulted from getting the average of two scores given by the two raters, if the scores were ever different at all. results and discussion reliability of key english test for school (ket) before investigating the results of this study, the researcher considered the reliability of key english test (ket) with cronbach’s alpha formula. the researcher did this to make sure of reliability of this researcher made test. for this purpose, a group of 20 pre-intermediate learners who were similar to the main sample were given the test before it was administered to the main participating in control group and experimental group. the obtained result for this 55 items test is indicated in tables 1 and 2. table 1 case processing summary n % cases valid 20 100.0 excludeda 0 .0 total 20 100.0 a. list wise deletion based on all variables in the procedure. table 2 reliability statistics cronbach’s alpha n of items .912 55 to stimulate the reliability, sample of 20 learners were selected (table2). the result in table3 shows that (α = .912) and it can be acceptable. since the number is large enough and it is close to one, the key english test (ket) is reliable. descriptive statistics of pretest and posttest before analyzing the results on the scores of pretest and posttest, descriptive statistics are presented in tables 3 in order to summarize the table 3 oral production score at pretest & posttest control g. at pretest noticing g. at pretest control group at posttest noticing g. at posttest n valid 22 22 22 22 missing 0 0 0 0 mean 2.932 2.864 3.455 4.341 std. error of mean .1482 .1148 .1504 .1411 median 3.000 3.000 3.500 4.500 mode 3.0 3.0 3.5 4.0a std. deviation .6951 .5386 .7056 .6616 variance .483 .290 .498 .438 range 2.5 2.0 2.5 2.5 minimum 2.0 2.0 2.5 3.0 maximum 4.5 4.0 5.0 5.5 sum 64.5 63.0 76.0 95.5 53 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee available data and describe the main features of the data. according to table 3, it seems that there is no considerable difference between the means in pretest due to the closeness of the magnitudes (mcontrol= 2.932; mexperimental= 2.864). moreover, according to the amounts of their standard errors, it can be concluded that the distribution of scores is normal. the mean score of posttest in control group is 3.455 and in experimental group in noticing is 4.341; it seems that there are considerable differences between the mean scores. tests of normality of pretest to test the normality of the pretest the shapiro-wilk was used. the null-hypothesis of the test of normality is that the distribution of the group’ scores is normal. therefore the distribution of the scores is not normal if ( p <.05). the results are depicted in the following table (table 4). table 4 test of normality of the pretest shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. control g. at pretest .916 21 .112 noticing g. at pretest .922 21 .134 table 4 manifests the results of this normality test. two groups are normally distributed since (p >.05) for all of them. post hoc tests the following table (5) shows the tukey hsd method which researcher employed to ensure that the two groups are equal. the results gained by tukey hsd method in table 5 indicated that there was no significant difference between pairs of mean values. hence, all these values were put in one group, since (p <.05) for all pairs of the group. table 5 homogeneous subsets oral production score at pretest by tukey hsda,,b subset for alpha = 0.05 group n 1 noticing 22 2.864 control 22 2.932 sig. .796 investigation of hypothesis the findings of the tukey test illustrates that (p=0 <α=.05) for the comparison between the control and noticing group. therefore the null hypothesis which reads that noticing doesn’t have any statistically significant effect on linguistic accuracy of iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ oral production is strongly rejected. thus it can be safely claimed noticing has statistically significant effect on linguistic accuracy of iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ oral production. although participants of the experimental group (noticing) were instructed extensively on the target structures, especially verb tenses, they still failed in identifying their tense problems despite having sufficient processing time. interestingly, in the case of third person singular, the participants corrected those verbs which appeared right after the pronoun and if there were intervening words between the verb and the pronoun, they would rarely mention this problem. furthermore, this reveals the cognitively demanding nature third person singular morpheme since this grammatical form is one of the last grammatical forms to be learned in the row of inflectional morphemes. since the participants did not correct half of their mistakes, they are believed to be at the controlled stage of processing and have not reached the automatic processing stage at the intermediate level yet, based on mclaughlin’s (1987) conception of automaticity. faezeh nemati & hamid ashraf noticing: a factor to improve iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ structural accuracy 54 tests of normality of posttest to test the normality of the posttest the shapiro-wilk was used. the results are depicted in the following tables. tables 6 and 7 manifest the results of this normality test. table 6 test of normality of posttest shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. control group at posttest .939 22 .210 noticing g. at posttest .923 22 .101 table 7 homogeneous subsets oral production score at posttest by tukey hsda,,b group n subset for alpha = 0.05 1 2 control 22 3.455 noticing 22 4.341 sig. .503 1.000 the null-hypothesis of the test of normality is that the distribution of the group’ scores is normal. therefore the distribution of the scores is not normal if the p<.05. two groups are normally distributed since the p-value is more than .05 for all of them. inter-rater reliability coefficients the researcher used pearson correlation coefficient to calculate if there is any significant difference between the scores given by different raters. tables 8, 9, 10, 11 show the results, respectively. the researcher calculated the correlation coefficient between the scores given by the two raters in control group. the obtained result in table 8 was a correlation of .824.the gain scores were compared and the results (p-value=0.0001< α=0.05) showed that there is a strong relationship between the lists of scores each participant received. also, the researcher estimated the correlation coefficient between the scores given noticing group. in table 9, the raters gained an estimate of the .858which shows a high reliability of the scores. the analysis showed no significant difference between the scores given by two raters. in the case of inter-rater reliability, in table 10, an estimate of .791in control group between two raters was obtained. table 8 correlations between scores of rater1 & rater2 for control group in pretest control g. at pretest-r1 control g. at pretestr2 control g. at pretest-r1 pearson correlation 1 .824** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 control g. at pretestr2 pearson correlation .824** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). table 9 correlations between scores of rater1 & rater2 for noticing group in pretest noticing g. at pretest-r1 noticing g. at pretest-r2 noticing g. at pretest-r1 pearson correlation 1 .858** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 noticing g. at pretest-r2 pearson correlation .858** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). 55 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in the case of inter-rater reliability, in table 11, an estimate of .820 in noticing group between two raters was obtained. conclusion in order to test this null hypothesis, 44iranian efl participants of an english language institute, who lack familiarity with the five target structures (the simple present, especially third person ‘s’ morpheme, present continuous, simple past, past continuous and present perfect), were selected through a homogeneity test. these participants were also pretested through a structured interview, and were put into experimental and control groups by means of matched sampling on the basis of their pretest scores. this was to make sure that the two groups, one group as the experimental group and one group as the control group, were all experiencing similar conditions from the very beginning. the two groups were later given special treatments to evaluate the group; i.e. in these implementations experimental group was exposed to noticing technique and control group was not forced to face any focus on form technique. the participants of the experimental group were exposed to focus on form through noticing while the control group was not faced with this technique. afterwards, the participants were post tested through another structured interview to examine their accuracy gains after treatment. a comparison of the accuracy gains in control and experimental group was conducted via a variance analysis (anova). the mean pretest scores for two groups were not significantly different. this pattern was repeated on the posttest in which the mean scores were found to be significantly different between the noticing and control group. table 10 correlations between scores of rater1 & rater2 for control group in posttest control group at posttest-r1 control group at posttest-r2 control group at posttest-r1 pearson correlation 1 .791** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 control group at posttest-r2 pearson correlation .791** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). table 11 correlations between scores of rater1 & rater2 for noticing group in posttest noticing g. at posttest-r1 noticing g. at posttest-r2 noticing g. at posttest-r1 pearson correlation 1 .820** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 noticing g. at posttest-r2 pearson correlation .820** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 22 22 **. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). faezeh nemati & hamid ashraf noticing: a factor to improve iranian pre-intermediate efl learners’ structural accuracy 56 the null hypothesis was rejected because the experimental group outperformed the control group in average accuracy gains significantly. although there have been a lot of research studies in the literature regarding the comparative examination of the implicit and explicit effects of focus on form, the present study could be considered as an additional support for noticing, as an explicit focus on form implementation. thus, it could be further concluded that these findings correspond to the suggestions of long and robinson (1998) on the need to implement focus on form implicitly and explicitly so that fossilization is prevented. moreover, an alternative to focus on forms is recommended which is against communicative language teaching techniques. references aski, j. m. (2003). foreign language textbook activities: keeping pace with foreign language acquisition research, foreign language annals 36:57-64. bachman, l. f.,& palmer, a. s. (1996). language testing in practice. oxford: oxford university press. p: 52. tense and aspect. tesol quarterly, 29, 107131. doughty, c., & williams, j. (1998). pedagogical choices in focus on form. in c. doughty, &j. williams (eds.), focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 197261). cambridge: cambridge university press. lee, j., & valdman, a. (2000). form and meaning. multiple perspectives. boston, ma: heinle & heinle. leow, r. p. (2000). attention, awareness, and focus on form research: a critical overview. in j. lee & a. valdman (eds.), form and meaning: multiple perspectives. boston:heinle and heinle. long, m. h., & robinson, p. (1998). focus on form: theory, research, and practice. in c. doughty, & j. williams (eds.), focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp.15-41). cambridge: cambridge university press. sanz, c. (2000). what form to focus on? linguistics, language awareness, and the education of l2 teachers. in j. f. lee & a.valdman (eds.), form and meaning: multiple perspectives. boston: heinle and heinle. schmidt, r. (1990). the role of consciousness in second language learners. applied linguistics, 11(1), 17-46. schmidt, r. (1990). the role of consciousness in second language learning. applied linguistics 11(2), 129–58. sharwood smith, m. (1991). ‘speaking to many minds: on the relevance of different types of language information for the l2 learner’. second language research 7/2: 118-32. swain, m.(1995). three functions of output in second language learning, principle and practice in applied linguistics. cambridge university press, pp. 125–144. swain, m. (1998). focus on form through conscious reflection. in c. doughty & j. williams (eds.), focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 64-81). new york: cambridge university press. swain, m. (2005). the output hypothesis: theory and research. in e. hinkel (ed) handbook tomlin, r.s. & villa, v. (1994). attention in cognitive science and second language acquisition. studies in second language acquisition 16,183-203. williams, j., & evans, j. (1998). what kind of focus and on which form? in c. doughty, & j. williams (eds.), focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 139-155). cambridge: cambridge university press. wong, w., & vanpatten, b. (2003). the evidence is in: drills are out. foreign language annals, 36, 403‐423. the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners fetty poerwita sary e-mail: f.poerwitasary@gmail.com. apa citation: sary, f.p. (2012). the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 17-26 received: 09-08-2012 accepted: 12-10-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: this observational study, which focuses on strategies used by teachers when teaching english as a foreign language to primary school students, was conducted in two classes at one of private international primary school. this study attempted to address the following question: what instructional strategies are used by the english teachers at this school? the data, which were collected by using a classroom observation and interview with the teachers and their students, were analyzed qualitatively by using categories formulated based on theories related to instructional strategies include planning and preparing the instruction, implementing the teaching and learning process, and assessing the students’ achievement. the major findings of this study include 1) although the teachers do the same stages in planning but the plan is implemented and resulted in different ways; 2) the teachers are able to use games as a tool for learning; 3) although curriculum requires teachers to integrate the skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking), in actual implementation, the teachers do not teach english in integrative ways; 4) time management in this school has become a problematic factor for the teachers; 5) with respect to teacher’s strategies in assessing students’ achievement, the teachers do assessment by way of remedial teaching once a week after the class is over in part where the students failed to understand. keywords: teaching english as a foreign language (efl), learning process, teaching strategies, instructional strategies, assessment. introduction as one of the foreign languages in indonesia, english is a compulsory subject from primary up to tertiary. in the elementary school, english is regarded as the local content following the decree of ministry of education no. 0487/4/1992 (suyanto, 1994). although many private primary schools had started teaching english long before the public schools did, the result of previous study (suyanto, 1994) revealed that the teaching of english at these schools was unsatisfactory. many factors influence the success of the teaching and learning english. one of the factors is teaching strategies employed by the teachers. therefore, this study is concerned with investigating teaching strategies of two teachers of a private school. regarding the strategies, sinaga in sadtono (1997: 173) states that one of the most important requirements is quality teachers. at least two qualifications are needed from the teacher: (1) qualification in english and (2) a teaching qualification. the first qualification is essential as the teacher is the model for his/ her students. the second qualification includes a sound knowledge of how to teach children and the ability to implement it in class. teaching english at elementary school in indonesia based on curriculum mailto:f.poerwitasary@gmail.com fetty poerwita sary the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners 1994, in a flexible context, makes english teaching possible to be taught (alwasilah, 2000). this flexibility means that this subject may be taught (not must be taught) when the school is ready to do it. therefore, to make the teaching and learning english at elementary school successful, the school should know the goal of the teaching and learning itself. regarding the objectives of the english teaching at elementary school, english is taught to children to make them be able to comprehend simple oral and written english (cf. huda, 1999; suyanto, 1997; sinaga, 1997). teaching english to children is not the same as teaching adults (brown, 2001) because it has something to do with helping children to achieve the goals and objectives deemed to be important by society in ways that are consistent with sound psychological principles of childhood (jarolimek and foster, 1989). huddleston (1991: 2) states the basic principles of children learning and language learning. the first principle is children in primary or elementary setting generally learn by doing (piaget, 1955 in brown, 2001). this means that they learn through hands-on experiences and through manipulation of objects in the environment. if this principle were extended to the efl setting, it would mean that children in language classes need to be active rather than passive; they need to be engaged in activities of which language is a part; they need to be working on meaningful tasks and use language to accomplish these tasks. second principle, children learn in social contexts, in groups where some group members know more than others. this principle suggests that children need not only hands-on or direct experiences, but also experiences where they are interesting with and learning from others, both adults and other children. third, language acquisition occurs through learners figuring out how the language works, through learners making and testing out hypotheses about the language. this means that it stresses the importance of giving learner opportunity of practicing the target language (swain, 1985 in nunan, 1988). therefore, learners need opportunities to use and to experiment with the new language. mistakes are natural and inevitable part of language learning. the last, language acquisition occurs through social interaction, through having to use the language with others in authentic communication setting. however, teaching english in integration, as brown (2001) suggests, is more effective than teaching english in isolation like what we used to do it in the past. it is expected that through the integration of the language skills and the language components in the instruction of english, the teachers can create an interesting classroom interaction that encourage students to communicate in english. apart from the above mentioned principles of teaching to elementary school, it is also important that english teachers of elementary school are aware of principles of teaching english as suggested by brown (2001). like learning other subjects, the learning of english at this stage should also be ‘meaningful’. meaningful, according to ibrahim and syaodih (1996), means firstly, there is relevance between the knowledge with the fact. for example: the students have known the meaning of the words but they could not make it into simple sentences or use the words to communicate. secondly, there is relevance between the knowledge with english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the user. for example: the students have known how to greet people in english but they could not use it because there is no opportunity to use it. based on the discussion on the teaching english in elementary school, as alwasilah (2000) suggests that the english teaching at elementary school necessitates qualified teachers who know much about children psychology and english teaching methodology for children so that they can successfully encourage students to learn english and help the learning process itself. one aspect which plays a significant role in the success of the teaching of english is to do with challenges of teaching english to elementary school. according to musthafa (2000) there are at least three challenges that should be faced by children to learn english as a foreign language in indonesian elementary school. the first challenge is the students are lack of social uses of english language in real life situation which involve children in their daily life. however, according to cox in nicholls (1999) and dewey as cited in pardjono (2002), learning is the acquisition of knowledge and skills through individual experiences not from texts or from teachers. how children will be able to acquire the language and see learning english as a useful and relevant activity if they are lack of demonstration in and exposure to functional uses of english. in addition, as franke in nunan and lamb (1996) suggest, a language could be best be taught by using it actively in the classroom. rather than using analytical procedures that focus on explanation of grammar rules in classroom teaching, teachers must encourage direct and spontaneous use of the foreign language in the classroom (richard and rogers, 1986 in nunan and lamb, 1996). the second challenge is related to the way english words are written as opposed the way the words are pronounced. in this stage, children also still learn the first language in which the sounds are reflected consistently in the way they are written down. therefore, it is natural if the children are confused to differentiate how the word should be read and written because there is no obvious one-to-one correspondence between the pronunciation of a word and its spelling. other reason why students use their own language in the classroom, as harmer (2002: 131) suggests, is when the students learn a foreign language, they use translation. this is because they usually try to make sense of a new linguistic (and conceptual) world through the linguistic world they are already familiar with. regarding learners learn vocabulary, according to read (2000), they tend to memorize lists of english word and rely on bilingual dictionary as a basic communicative resource. therefore, read (2000) says, actually students can learn vocabulary in context through their reading and listening activity in which it focused on the extent to which students can infer the meaning of unknown words when they read or hear them. in addition, as sukayadi (2006) suggests, the teacher should make meaning perceptible through concrete objects or by presentation of experience. in short, when a language learner makes a mistake or misconception of something, the teacher does not correct it through translation but tries to show something to make the meaning clear (sukayadi, 2006) or conveys meaning directly through demonstration and action (richard and rogers, 1986 cited in nunan and lamb, 1996). sukayadi (2006) fetty poerwita sary the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners also added that vocabulary is learned more effectively if they use it in full sentences rather than memorize it. for example: the teacher can repeat new words by asking them to the students several times in different context and eliciting the situation in order for the students to use the words. the last challenge, there has been widely-held wrong assumptions that children learn things exactly the same way adults do. therefore, the teacher tends to teach children the same as they teach adults. according to alwasilah (2000), the generalization and the use of one approach to two different groups of learners are misleading because teacher should realize that children have their own world that is different from adults. it seems necessary for teachers to know and understand about this world if they are to plan an appropriate learning environment for children based on their cognitive development. therefore, classroom materials should be concrete and plentiful, while students should be given direct experiences and concrete objects that can be seen, handled, touched, and talked about. in addition, as suggested by van lier (1996), “language learning is the cumulative results or sustained effort and engagement over time, with continuity being central”. if the lesson— whether they are once a week, once a day, or more frequent than that—are the only occasions on which the students are engaged with the language, progress will either not occur or be exceedingly slow. however, it points to a real problem of all foreign language learning. if the gap between what is done in the classroom, and what is done outside the classroom, is too great, then the possibilities of leaning anything at all are very seriously impaired. teaching strategies are procedures used by the teacher which serve as a way of reaching a goal (suryosubroto, 2002). to reach the goal, teacher has the important role in the teaching and learning process because most of the output of students was determined by the teachers (jarolimek and foster, 1989). according to usman (1990: 7), a competent teacher will be able to create an effective learning environment and will be able to manage the process of teaching and learning so that the students can achieve an optimal result. to be able to manage the process of teaching and learning, the teachers must have the strategies to do that. however, the teaching strategies adopted in this study have been drawn from the work of several theorists (see suryosubroto, 2002; arikunto, 1990; brown, 2001; harmer, 2002; djamarah and zain, 2002; ibrahim and syaodih, 2002; jarolimek and foster, 1989; nicholls, 1999, nunan and lamb, 1996, nunan, 1988) who have proposed teaching strategies. even though, there are differences but those theories generally propose similar strategies such as planning, implementing the teaching and learning process, and assessing students’ achievement. plan and preparation planning (see jarolimek and foster, 1989: 15) is a decision making process in which one has to make choices from among the options that are thought to lead toward a desired goal. teaching, like any other complex process, requires careful planning for its success. for example: the teachers are not supposed “to forget what they should bring with before they start teaching because what they plan can be useless” (brown, 2000: 194). teachers who realize the importance of planning for effective english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee instruction and classroom management assign planning a high priority as a teaching skill. the critical association between planning and preparation needs to be dealt with because planning leads onto preparation of the materials, resources and props that will be needed in the lesson. if these materials are prepared prior to the lesson, the teacher is in a much better position to successfully differentiate the activities, as well as to cope with maintaining the smooth and effective progress in learning throughout the lesson for all students. regarding planning, mawer (1995: 55) as quoted by waring in nicholls (1999: 99) states that planning appears to mediate between a teacher’s basic knowledge of the subject being taught and his or her ability to teach the subject effectively, because it brings into play the teacher’s general pedagogical content knowledge. this includes knowledge of theories and principles of teaching and learning, knowledge of the learner, and knowledge of the techniques and principles of teaching such as class management. the plan for a lesson, unit, or course is the result of a considerable degree of thinking on the part of the teacher. planning plays a significant role in the smoothness or the progress that is achieved by the students in the teaching and learning process. the significance of planning in the teaching and learning process has also been observed by djamarah and zain (2002) who says, the smoothness of the process is an indicator whether the students could focus on their attention to the lesson that is given by the teacher or not. for example: the teacher starts the activity before she or he ends the previous activity or stop the first activity and then start the second activity and then go back to the first activity. if these happened during the process, it could distract students’ focus or attention. basically, if a certain activity has been planned first, the goal of the activity will be more directive and works. therefore, the teacher should have ability to plan the instruction. before she starts to teach, it would be better if she planned the teaching and learning program, prepared everything that would be taught. when planning a lesson, teacher, as suggested by suryosubroto (2002), should take students into account. johnson (1979) as quoted by suryosubroto (2002) argues: teachers are expected to design and deliver instruction so that student learning is facilitated. instruction is asset of event design to initiate aclivate, and support learning in students, it is the process of arranging the learning situation (including the classroom, the student, and the curriculum materials) so that learning is facilitated.” it means that to facilitate the learning process, the teachers must put students into their consideration when they plan the instruction. the process of planning according to suryosubroto (2002) can be divided into four categories which are mastering the curriculum, compiling the instructional material analysis, forming the program for a semester, and forming the lesson plan including know the students’ characteristics, set the goal expectation of the study, choose the material and order it, choose the teaching methods, choose the teaching aids, and choose the strategy of evaluation. according to jarolimek and foster (1989: 157), the teacher should be able to plan a good learning environment, select goals for the year, plan for getting instruction under way, develop a lesson plan by fetty poerwita sary the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners knowing first about the students’ characteristics, and prepare studentprogress reports for parents. implementation of the teaching and learning process the implementation of teaching and learning process should be conducted by the teacher after the planning process has been done. the theory used in this study is a combination from several theorists (see suryosubroto, 2002; usman, 1990; sudjana, 1989; brown, 2001; jarolimek and foster, 1989) including the genre based approach which has been the bases for the curriculum 2004. regarding the implementation of the teaching and learning process, according to suryosubroto (2002) and sudjana (1989), the teacher should do several things to make the teaching and learning process successful, among others to do with the opening the teaching and learning process, the use of teaching method, the delivery of the material, classroom management, and closing. assessing students’ achievement assessment reflects the way teachers absorb the information and evidence related to students’ learning, and how they use it to inform their future lesson, whether this is the next task or series of tasks. the main focus of this form of assessment is to identify errors, difficulties, and shortcomings in students’ work. it also informs the teacher of the nature of advice and information needed to improve students’ future learning outcomes (nicholls, 1999: 117). nicholls (1999:119) argues that assessment has many faces and can be used for a variety of purposes. …assessment lies at the heart of this process. it can provide a framework in which educational objectives may be set, and pupils’ progress charted and expressed. it can yield a basis for planning the next educational steps in response to children’s needs… (report of the task group on assessment and testing as quoted by nicholls (1999: 116) this quotation suggests that assessment of children’s learning and progress is central to effective teaching and learning. there are several aspects that should be taken into account such as assessing in the classroom and remedial. on the basis of the background to the present study mentioned above, the research attempted to address the following research question: what instructional strategies are used by english teachers at one of private international primary school? these strategies include plan and preparation of the instruction, implementation of the teaching and learning process, and assessment of the students’ achievement. method a qualitative research design has been considered appropriate in this study as cited by maxwell (1996: 17-20). in the case with a qualitative study, this study attempts to understand the meaning, for participants in the study, of the events, situations, and action they are involved with and the accounts that they give of their lives and experiences; attempts to understand the particular context within which the participants act, and the influence that this context has on their action. it means that every detail is thought to contribute to a better understanding of behavior or to obtain a complete understanding of the setting. the participants of this study were two english teachers (called teacher a and b) and their students. the participation was voluntary based. both teachers graduated from english english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee department, indonesia university of education. a taught grade 4 consisting of 20 students; and b taught grade 3 consisting of 13 students. both teachers were relatively new teachers. the range of age of students was 8 to 10 years old. these teachers were willing to participate in the study and to have their classes observed by the researcher. two data collections were employed in this study, which were observation and interview. however, in collecting data, the researcher has to employ appropriate instruments such as observation and interview. all the data collection was recorded in order to keep the authenticity of the data. in the observation, the data were analyzed in several steps. first, the researcher transcribed the transcription gained from audio and video recorder. then, the researcher made categorization into three strategies based on theorist adopted in the study. during the observation, the researcher observed the plan and the preparation the teachers made before they taught, and then how they implement their plan in the teaching and learning process, and the last, how the teacher would assess their students. the data analysis was not only a conclusion but also an ongoing assessment especially if the data gained from audio or video. in the interview, the data were gained from both teachers and students. the interview was conducted to support the data from observation. the interview data were analyzed in several steps. first, the researcher transcribed the transcription gained from audio and video recorder. then, the researcher made categorization of the strategies which were preparation, implementation, and assessment. the names of interviewees were omitted to avoid bias, and then the answers were collected based on the categories. the interviews were presented in a condensed version. results and discussion the data presentation and analysis will be summarized based on the central themes including teacher’s strategies in planning and preparing the instruction, in implementing the teaching and learning process, and in assessing student’s achievement in the classroom. teacher’s strategies in planning and preparing the instruction in terms of plan and preparation, both teachers plan and prepare the instruction before they teach. their preparation simply can be seen from whether they have prepared the activities to support the lesson, whether they master the material, what kind of teaching aids they will use, whether the process of teaching and learning run smoothly and effectively. although both teachers make a plan and preparation before teaching, the teachers have different ways in implementing the plan. it really depends on the teachers’ skill in classroom management. therefore, the result of the implementation of the plan is also different. teacher a is strict to what he has planned. he also make the rules about what to do and not to do explicit for the students and what he does works so that he can achieve the target of the teaching and learning. meanwhile, teacher b makes her plan too general, so that sometime the target of the teaching and learning cannot be achieved. teacher’s strategies in implementing the teaching and learning process in terms of teacher’s strategies in implementing the teaching and learning process, there are several aspects that will be discussed including teaching method in terms of games, integrative fetty poerwita sary the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners skills, and problems that are faced by the teachers in implementing the teaching and learning process. regarding the problems, the problems that are faced by the teachers are due to lack of time and availability of rules which are constant and stable. concerning the teacher’s strategies in implementing the teaching and learning process, both teachers use several methods in teaching. they always combine the teaching methods with games. in terms of games, although both teachers use games during the teaching and learning process, they have different way in implementing the games. teacher a uses the game as a vehicle for learning so that he always relates the games with the topics which is given. he can make the games as an introduction to the new material or as a review to the last material. meanwhile, it seems that teacher b does not think that games have to be relevant with the topic because games is just for fun. therefore, the result of the implementation of games is also different. in teacher a’ class, the students can enhance both learning and memorizing through playing; meanwhile, in teacher b’s class, the students do not get anything in terms of learning because most of the time, the games are totally different from what is being taught. with respect to the integrative skills, both teachers do not apply integrative skills comprehensively. they have not put the speaking into the skills. the english class is dominated by the using of indonesian language. therefore, it seems the students are discouraged to use english either in responding to the teachers’ question or in participating in the classroom. in short, the teaching and learning of english does not happen in terms of integrative skills. in fact, the teaching of english is supposed to encourage the students to use the target language and the teachers also need to give as many exposures as possible to the students. in implementing the teaching and learning process, both teachers have to face the problem during the teaching and learning process. the problem is due to lack of time. the time management in this school has not well-established. therefore, it can inflict a loss upon the teachers. the teachers have a dilemma in deciding the activities that should be done in the classroom. in short, the school has to facilitate the teachers in preparing a condition that is conducive to conduct a smooth and effective teaching and learning process. regarding the rules in the classroom, the teachers need to establish rules which are constant and stable so that the rules can be students’ daily routines. the rules are important to be applied in the classroom because the teaching and learning process needs a situation and condition which is conducive. it seems that one of the teachers failed to make the rules explicit in the class, so that it is easy to predict that the class will have a stormy time during the teaching and learning process. therefore, it will disturb the smoothness of teaching and learning process. teacher’s strategies in assessing students’ achievement related to teacher’s strategies in assessing students’ achievement, both teachers do several ways to assess their students including assessing in the classroom and remedial. assessing in the classroom will include marking, classroom tasks, homework, and quiz. regarding assessing in the classroom, both teachers assess the students per session. it can be in a form of classroom tasks and homework. the teachers always return the students’ homework or english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee assignment after they check and mark it. both teachers also give quiz at the end of the unit to measure the students’ ability in comprehending the material. all of these procedures are conducted by the teachers regularly. to some degree, it seems that the teachers are capable of assessing their students. these procedures can help the teachers to decide further action such as whether the students need remedial teaching, remedial test, more exercises about the lesson. regarding the remedial, not all the teachers apply the remedial teaching. only one of the teachers conducts an extra lesson or remedial teaching regularly after the class is over. the teacher usually observes the students during the process of teaching and learning. if he considers there are students who still have not understood his explanation, he will conduct an extra lesson. the extra lesson will take more or less 15 minutes. in this activity, usually the teacher re-teaches the students so that the students’ ability will not be left behind from other students. it seems that this activity was good in order to give motivation to the students to learn better. conclusion from the results and discussions in the previous chapter, several conclusions can be drawn. first, regarding planning and preparing the instruction, both teachers do the same stages such as they master the material, prepare for the activities, and prepare teaching aids to support the activities. however, in terms of implementation the teaching and learning process, the teachers have different ways and results. the results of the teaching and learning really depend on teachers’ skill in classroom management. second, concerning the implementation of the teaching and learning process, both teachers use games as a teaching method for different purposes such as games only for fun and games as a vehicle for learning. in terms of games as a vehicle of learning, the games are relevant with topics given by the teachers. therefore, the students can learn and memorize the material through playing. third, the teachers do not teach english in integrative ways. in this school, the teachers have not put speaking english into the skills; meanwhile, the opportunity to use other skills such as listening, writing, and reading is not sufficient. the teaching of english in the classroom is still dominated by the using of indonesian language. the data shows that the teaching and learning of english in terms of integrative skills does not happen in the classroom. the teaching and learning of english in the school is still in terms of grammar. fourth, time management in this school has become a problematic factor for the teachers. the class always starts late because of non academic activities (for example, students’ preparation and clean up after dhuha or dhuhur prayer). the time problem can inflict a loss upon the teachers. therefore, the school has to facilitate the teachers in preparing a condition that is conducive to conduct a smooth and effective teaching and learning process. fifth, regarding the rules in the classroom, the teachers need to make rules explicit to the students about what to do and not to do. the rules are informed to the students and agreed by all students. otherwise, the teachers will have a difficult time to handle the class. by doing this, the students will also learn to be responsible to whatever they do. fetty poerwita sary the portrait of teaching english as a foreign language for young learners sixth, regarding the teacher’s strategy in assessing students’ achievement, both teachers have different ways to evaluate their students. one of the teachers conducts remedial teaching if he observes the students still do not understand to what he has explained. the remedial teaching is conducted in a narrow sense in the form of re-teaching. therefore, through this activity, it seems that the teacher can help the students to promote their comprehension toward the material. references alwasilah, a. c. (2000). perspektif pendidikan bahasa inggris di indonesia: dalam konteks persaingan global. bandung: andira. ____________. (2002). pokoknya kualitatif: dasar-dasar merancang dan melakukan penelitian kualitatif. bandung: pustaka jaya arikunto, s. 1990. manajemen pengajaran secara manusiawi. jakarta: pt. rineka cipta. brown, h. d. 2001. teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd edition). new york: pearson education company. carter, r. & nunan, d. 2001. the cambridge guide to teaching english to speakers of other languages. new york: cambridge university press. djamarah, s.b & zain, a. 2002. strategi belajar mengajar. jakarta: pt. rineka cipta harmer, j. 2002. the practice of english language teaching (3rd edition). england : longman huda, n. 1999. language learning and teaching. issues and trends. ikip malang publisher. hudelson, s. 1991. efl teaching and children: a topic-based approach. english teaching forum. 29, 2-40. ibrahim, r. & syaodih, n. 1996. perencanaan pengajaran. jakarta: pt. rineka cipta jarolimek, j. & foster, j. 1989. teaching and learning in the elementary school (4th edition). newyork: macmilan publishing company. musthafa, b. 2002. efl for young learners. bandung: crest. nicholls, g. 2002. learning to teach: a handbook for primary and secondary teachers. london: kogan page limited. nunan, d. 1988. the learner-centred curriculum. new york: cambridge university press. nunan, d. & lamb. c. 1996. the selfdirected teacher: managing the learning process. new york: cambridge university press. sadtono, e. 1997. the development of tefl in indonesia. ikip malang publisher. setiyadi, b. ag. 2006. teaching english as a foreign language. yogyakarta: graha ilmu. sinaga, matias. 1994. teaching english to children: as opposed to adults (p.173178). the national seminar: the development of tefl in indonesia. suryosubroto, b. 2002. proses belajar mengajar di sekolah. bandung: pt. rineka cipta. suyanto, kasihani, k.e. 1994. teaching english to young learners in indonesia (p.166-171). the national seminar: the development of tefl in indonesia. usman, u. 1990. menjadi guru profesional. bandung: rosda karya. correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing chitra jayathilake university of sri jayewardenepura, nugegoda, colombo, sri lanka e-mail: chitj1995@yahoo.com apa citation: jayathilake, c. (2013). correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing. english review: journal of english education, 1(2),139-150 received: 30-01-2013 accepted: 3-02-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: error correction in esl (english as a second language) classes has been a focal phenomenon in sla (second language acquisition) research due to some controversial research results and diverse feedback practices. this paper presents a study which explored the relative efficacy of three forms of error correction employed in esl writing classes: focusing on the acquisition of one grammar element both for immediate and delayed language contexts, and collecting data from university undergraduates, this study employed an experimental research design with a pretest-treatment-posttests structure. the research revealed that the degree of success in acquiring l2 (second language) grammar through error correction differs according to the form of the correction and to learning contexts. while the findings are discussed in relation to the previous literature, this paper concludes creating a cline of error correction forms to be promoted in sri lankan l2 writing contexts, particularly in esl contexts in universities. keywords: error correction, written corrective feedback (wcf), english as a second language (esl), metalinguistic information, second language acquisition (sla) introduction this research investigates the role of written corrective feedback (wcf) on the acquisition of one feature (present continuous form) of english language by adult intermediate esl learners intending to provide some insight into the aspects of correction of learner errors. this paper begins reviewing briefly how wcf has been addressed in second language acquisition (sla): it will examine some implications presented in the previous literature while forming the research questions for the current study. next, the paper reveals the results of the current experimental study, concluding with a few implications for error correction in writing pedagogy for adult esl learners. error correction is one of the significant and frequent phenomena in second language writing as it is a crucial aspect experienced by both teachers and researchers in classrooms. initially, there has been controversy (with truscott (1999) and ferris (1999) as two key figures) as to whether written corrective feedback facilitates any accuracy in l2 learners. truscott (1999) arguing that all forms of error correction in students’ l2 writing is ineffective, held a strong view against error correction. he expressed that error correction of l2 student writing is harmful, therefore should be mailto:chitj1995@yahoo.com chitra jayathilake correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing abandoned. he continued saying that irrespective of l2 students’ clear desire for grammar correction, teachers should not correct learner errors in their writing. however, in ferris’ (1999) equally strong rebuttal, she counter argued that truscott had failed to notice some positive research evidence on the effects of grammar correction. even with the other existing research data (e.g. chandler, 2003; sheen, 2007 and lee, 2008 ) it is still too premature to have a conclusive answer to the questions whether error correction is effective in improving the accuracy of l2 writing in the long term for learners of all levels, and what types of wcf are beneficial to learners. two controversial views over the issue of wcf, initially forwarded by truscott (1999) and ferris (1999) continued for over a decade counterarguing whether corrective feedback given to l2 writers helps to improve their written accuracy. as mentioned, truscott (1999), strongly rejected error correction as useless and harmful to the accuracy in students’ writing. however, with the follow up research findings by other researchers (e.g. chandler, 2003; sheen, 2007 and lee, 2008), the strong effect of truscott’s claim was minimized: many of the follow-up studies on error correction have shown that students receiving error feedback for their written texts improve in accuracy over time. ferris (1997) examined over 1600 marginal and end comments written on 110 first drafts of papers by 47 advanced university esl learners to investigate what characteristics of teacher commentary appear to influence student revision and whether revisions influenced by teacher feedback lead to effective changes in learners’ writing. the results indicated two contrasting views: students sometimes pay much attention to teacher commentary to revise their writing, at other times students ignore the teacher commentary given. however, the revision students made was influenced by teacher feedback and facilitated their learning to a great extent. the results of ferris’ research seem to suggest the importance of revision made based on wcf. ferris (2004) has again presented that indirect error correction is more beneficial than direct correction as it pushes learners to engage in hypothesis testing: ferris’ justification is that when learners are engaged in testing learners’ assumption on language elements, it helps to internalize the language components. chandler (2003), while supporting ferris’ overall view that wcf facilitates in sla, challenged some detailed findings of ferris (2004). that is, chandler (2003) revealed that direct correction was superior to other types of indirect correction in producing more accurate writing. chandler justifies her argument saying that although indirect correction draws much cognitive attention from learners it delays confirmation of students’ hypothesis testing acts. accordingly, although both ferris and chandler agree that wcf helps learners in writing in sla, they hold contradictory views on the relative efficacy of different types of wcf. research studies further show the distinction between direct and indirect feedback. ferris & roberts (2001) compared these two types and revealed that the students receiving feedback of both underlining and coding of their erroneous forms did slightly better in revising their grammatical errors than the ones receiving only underlining as the feedback (underlining indicates only english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the location of the error whereas coding provides clues to the type of error such as spelling, vocabulary and so on). both groups were significantly more successful in revising errors than the control group receiving no feedback. in the meantime, erel & bulut’s (2007) study investigated the possible effects of direct (the correct form is written on students text), and indirect coded error feedback( a symbol representing a specific kind of error) in a turkish university context to examine the accuracy in writing. the final results showed that the indirect coded feedback group committed fewer errors than the direct feedback group. in the meantime, ferris & roberts’ (2001) study included learners who received no error correction at all in their research. three kinds of feedback conditions were operationalized in their study (i) errors marked with codes (ii) errors underlined but not marked or labeled (iii) no feedback at all. the findings revealed that although, there were no significant differences between the groups’ ability to edit their papers, the students who were given corrective feedback outperformed the group with no feedback in editing their papers. sheen (2007) examines the differential effect of two types of wcf and investigates the relationship between language analytic ability and the effects of wcf on the acquisition articles (one linguistic feature) in english language, employing a pretesttreatment–posttest design with 91 learners of various l1 (first language) backgrounds. the three groups formed in sheen’s research are a direct-only correction group, a direct metalinguistic correction group and a control group. the results indicated that the wcf has a positive effect on the learning of articles of english language: the results also indicated that direct correction with metalinguistic feedback is more effective than wcf without metalinguistic feedback: learners with a high level of language analytic ability benefited more irrespective of the type of cf. meanwhile, lee (2008) contributed to the issue of wcf investigating teachers’ wcf practices in hong kong secondary classrooms. this study examined the wcf provided by 26 hong kong secondary english teachers to 174 student texts, followed up by interviews with 06 teachers. the results indicated that teacher feedback is primarily error-focused and examcultured. lee suggests that feedback practices are influenced by contextual factors such as teachers’ beliefs, values and socio-political issues pertaining to power and teacher autonomy. thus it leads to another significant concern for future research as practices may relate to the efficacy of wcf. liu (2008), engaging in a quasiexperimental classroom study investigated 12(two groups, 6 each) university esl students’ abilities to selfrevise their writing across two feedback conditions. two types of error correction liu employed in the study were (i) direct correction (correct form provided by the teacher), (ii) indirect correction (only an indication that an error exists). liu classified the instances of errors as (i) morphological errors, (ii) semantic errors, and (iii) syntactic errors. results show that both direct and indirect correction helped students self-edit their texts. moreover, indirect feedback has been more beneficial in reducing morphological errors than semantic errors. similar to the findings of lie (2008), chandler (2003) also revealed that teachers’ feedback on students’ chitra jayathilake correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing grammatical and lexical errors helped to improve in both accuracy and fluency of students’ writing. these findings further disprove truscott’s (1999) claim on the negative effect of error correction. given the conflicting results on the effects of different wcf, it is difficult and premature to formulate any conclusion without investigating the phenomenon of the efficacy of different categories of wcf further, in different esl contexts. therefore, the present study follows this line of research by examining three types of wcf:  direction only (d group)  direction and correction (dc group)  direction, correction and metalinguistic information (dcm group) in second language writing, focusing only on one grammatical feature, namely present continuous form of english. hence, the following questions are addressed in this preliminary study: does wcf have an effect on adult learners’ acquisition of l2, present continuous form in particular? do different wcf types (direction only, direction and correction, and direction, correction and metalinguistic information) have different effects on the acquisition of present continuous form in english language, by adult esl learners? which type of wcf facilitates more in delayed l2 context (for longterm acquisition), on esl learners’ acquisition of present continuous form? method this study employed an experimental research design with a pretest-treatment-posttests structure, using esl classroom. one week prior to the start of the wcf treatment, the participating students completed the pretest. the immediate unexpected posttest was completed following the three wcf sessions and the delayed unexpected posttest 5 weeks later. the pretest-posttest design was selected as it is reliable in measuring the language acquisition, quantitatively (brown 1988). the research sequence, a modified design of sheen (2007), thus, was carried out over a period of approximately 9 weeks.  pretest (1st week)  three treatment sessions(2nd week)  posttests posttest 1 (3rd week) posttest 2 (9th week) the participants of this study were 48 third–year, female undergraduates, aged 23-24 of the faculty of arts, university of sri jayewardenepura, colombo, sri lanka. they had scored between 20-25 marks for a language test conducted by the university, prior to the research and were from similar linguistic background: their mother tongue was sinhala (sinhala is a national language of sri lanka and it is the first language of the majority of sri lankans): tamil is the other national language; they had started learning esl at the age of 08 years, at state-run schools situated in rural areas of sri lanka and learned esl at school at least for 10 years ; they had obtained simple passes (a student can obtain a simple pass, if s/he scores approximately between 3040 marks (out of 100) for the esl test paper: students sit for this general certificate of education (ordinary level) examination, after learning esl for 08 years at school: they are between the ages of 1516 years at this time. the aim of the test is to evaluate students’ knowledge in grammar, vocabulary, reading and writing skill) for english language at the general certificate of education (ordinary level) examination administered by the ministry of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee education of the country. at the university, they followed the subjects offered for the degree in the medium of sinhala. given the amount of understanding and commitment on the research area, it was decided that the researcher would participate in the study as the teacher (she has 20 years of experience and postgraduate qualifications in teaching esl) and the corrector of the errors. four groups, were formed from a class of 48 students: the direction only group (n =12), the direction and correction group (n 12), the direction, correction and metalinguistic information group (n=12) and the control group/ c group (n 12). the control group received no information of any erroneous forms of the present continuous forms of their language. the direction only group received only an indication of the location of an error on the student’s text: that is, the location where the error occurred was underlined or circled by the teacher. direction and correction group was operated as indicating the location of an error and providing the correct form near the erroneous form on the students’ text. direction, correction and metalinguistic information group was operationalized as indicating the location of the error, providing the correct form and explaining the error with some metalinguistic information. that is, linguistic comments were provided which explained the correct form. however, to cover the focus of the study, the researcher corrected a few other errors than those involving present continuous form in the three experiment groups while correcting non-present continuous forms on the texts of the control group. the linguistic structure targeted in the present study was the present continuous form in english. the decision was made after exploring students’ common errors indicated in the proficiency test held prior to the current study. it revealed that many learners frequently, but erroneously, use this form in their written l2 usage: it suggested that they had only partial knowledge of the target form indicating a certain developmental stage of the target form. thus, focus was given to the correction of present continuous form in this study. the instrument was the three tests administered:  pretest  posttest 1  post test 2 (delayed posttest) the three experimental groups completed the treatment and tests while the control group completed only the tests. the purpose of the pretest was to measure the students’ knowledge of the grammar element – present continuous form prior to the treatment. the posttests were aimed to determine whether the students had acquired the language elements addressed through treatment given during the period of study. posttest 2, in particular, was held to ascertain the reliability of the acquisition of language elements presented through treatment. the activities of the test items were randomly changed from one test to another to minimize the test effects. first, in the first week of the study, the pretest was administered to all the participants and the marks obtained at the pretest were examined by the teacher cum researcher to gain an idea of the students’ knowledge of present continuous form in english. chitra jayathilake correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing in the second week, the teacher, accordingly, conducted 3 (1 hour each) treatment sessions, (a total of 03 hours) meeting students every other day. although materials used for treatment were teacher–directed, students’ level of second language proficiency was taken into consideration when selecting these materials. two unexpected posttests were held, in the 3rd and 9th week after the commencement of treatment sessions, and their results were recorded. as previously mentioned, three experimental groups completed both the treatment sessions and tests. the control group completed the tests only: they did not receive any wcf but instead followed the normal class room activities: some non-present continuous (erroneous) forms were marked, in the texts of control group, to mask the purpose of the research. three treatment sessions were held with a day break in between the sessions. each session involved one picture description activity and one clip (clips of a movie) description activity which elicited the present continuous form from the students. the students were involved in writing two compositions based on the two activities, after discussing the images orally in their groups. each picture/movie elicited about 10/12 statements of present continuous forms. the steps followed during the treatment session were:  first, the researcher displayed the movie-clips to students  she asked them to describe the actions displayed in groups, while she facilitated them ( they were given only about 10 minutes).  she asked each student to write a description of the images using about 40 minutes (she provided two examples).  then the researcher collected the written texts.  second, she gave each student a copy of a picture and followed the same steps as in the previous activity.  she returned students’ compositions to the students the next day, with researchers’ wcf on the students’ text.  students were asked to go through the wcf in class and to examine the corrections and the feedback given carefully. they were given about 10 minutes for that.  no other comments were made on the wcf by the researcher and no student was allowed to revise their writing which allowed for the effect of the wcf treatment by itself to be investigated. the researcher corrected the errors (usually about 10/12 statements) on one text. however, as mentioned previously, to mask the focus of the study, the researcher corrected a few other errors than those involving present continuous form in the three experiment groups while correcting non-present continuous forms on the texts of the control group. two tests were employed to investigate the acquisition of the target structure in this study: picture description and a few clips of a movie the same test was used for the pretest, the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest but the items in the pictures were randomly changed to minimize the test effects. picture description test (30 minutes) the picture used for description consisted of about 10-15 stimuli, each of which required at least one sentence english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee involving the use of present continuous form. before administering the test, the researcher made two sample sentences from a similar picture displayed on the board, so that the learners could familiarize themselves with the procedure and the grammar form expected. in administering the test, each student was provided with a copy of the picture and asked them to make 10 sentences similar to the examples provided. clips of the movie (30 minutes) these video clips were extracted from a movie which consisted of 8 sequential images. the students were asked to describe what was happening in the moviethe actions in the clips. before administering the test, the researcher made certain that the students were familiar with the new vocabulary. they were asked to make 10 sentences, following the examples provided. each correct use of the present continuous form was given a similar mark for each student and the final marks for each student were calculated by 100. results and discussion all scores were computed to analyze the data. table 1 presents the summary of the descriptive statistics for total scores for the tests taken together over the three testing periodspretest, posttest 1 and posttest2. table 1: group means, variance, standard deviation and coefficient of variance for total test scores group pretest posttest 1 posttest 2 m v sd c of v m v sd c of v m v sd c of v c 31.5 24.45 4.95 15.7 31.83 24.70 4.97 15.61 31.33 20.42 4.52 14.42 d 31.33 12.97 3.6 11.9 42.58 18.08 4.25 9.99 43.17 20.33 4.5110.45 dc 31.42 24.27 4.93 15.68 54.75 14.57 3.82 6.97 35.33 26.61 5.16 14.6 dcm 32.33 30.24 5.5 17.01 57.58 22.63 4.76 8.26 58.17 21.61 4.65 7.99 c = control group d = direction only group cd = correction and direction group cdm = correction, direction and metalinguistic information group m = mean v = variance sd = standard deviation c of v = coefficient of variance although the mean scores of the control group remains almost the same for three tests, the mean scores of the treatment groups show a relative increase over time. in other words, the three treatment groups’ gains over time were substantial but the control group showed no improvement. this principally suggests, supporting ferris’ (2004) hypothesis, that the error correction treatment has been beneficial to learners. at posttest 1, the mean scores of all three treatment groups are considerably higher than that of the control group. however, dc group shows a chitra jayathilake correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing considerable decrease of mean scores from posttest 1 to posttest 2. out of the three treatment groups, the most consistent mean scores can be noticed in dcm group and in d only groups. thus, as far as the mean scores are considered, it is revealed that the wcf is facilitative and dcm feedback seems the best in facilitating sla as it outperformed the other two treatment groups both in posttest 1 and posttest 2. that is, in test scores, posttest 1 results favoured all three treatment groups, but posttest 2 results favoured the d group and dcm group. this initial assumption can be verified with the statistics of variance and coefficient of variance. table 1 also displays that even the coefficient of variance of dcm group is relatively low, accounting for 8.26 and 7.99 for posttest 1 and 2 respectively. this comparatively low score of coefficient of variance verifies the results of the mean scores, positing that wcf with metalinguistic information significantly facilitates adult learners in sla. it is also interesting to note that even the coefficient of variance of d only group was the next highest indicator of the reliability of mean scores as it indicates the next lowest coefficient of variance at posttest 2(10.45). it is interesting to note that although the coefficient of variance of the dc group is relatively low at posttest 1, it drastically increased at posttest 2 confirming the assumption of the mean scores. it must also be noted here that relatively low and similar sd and variance scores of all the groups taken for the study indicate the reliability of test scores. group 01-control group variable mean variance minimum maximum pretest marks 31.50 24.45 25 40 posttest 1 marks 31.83 24.70 25 39 posttest 2 marks 31.33 20.42 25 39 figure 1: test scores of control group s t u d e n t m a r k s 1 21 11 0987654321 4 0 . 0 3 7 . 5 3 5 . 0 3 2 . 5 3 0 . 0 2 7 . 5 2 5 . 0 v a r ia b le p o s t t e s t 2 m a r k s p r e t e s t m a r k s p o s t t e s t 1 m a r k s c o n t r o l g r o u p what is obvious from graph 1 is that the scores of control group remain the same at three testing sessions: it verifies the assumption that wcf facilitates acquisition of l2 in adult learners. but, the slight discrepancy in the posttest and pretest scores of the control group seems to imply that even mere exposure to l2 activities may correlate – either positively or negatively – with the accuracy of l2 learners’ grammar. however, this implication warrants future research. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee group -2 direction only variable mean variance minimum maximum pretest marks 31.33 12.97 25 35 posttest 1 marks 42.58 18.08 38 49 posttest 2 marks 43.17 20.33 38 50 figure 2: test scores of direction only group s t u d e n t s m a r k s 1 21 11 0987654321 5 0 4 5 4 0 3 5 3 0 2 5 v a r ia b le p o s tte s t 2 m a r k s p r e te s t m a r k s p o s tte s t 1 m a r k s g r o u p 2 ( d i r e c t i o n o n l y ) graph 2 very clearly demonstrates the efficacy of wcf, direction only, in particular. the improvement learners have gained is highly remarkable and what is further noteworthy is that both at post test 1 and 2, the scores remain consistent, indicating the significant efficacy of direction only type of wcf in l2 acquisition. it highlights the fact direction only is highly beneficial in retention of grammar acquired through wcf, perhaps for the purpose of longterm learning. the graph, however, indicates that the language accuracy perhaps gained by treatment, is not parallel with the pretest scores. for instance, language accuracy gained at places 3, 8 and 12 are very high whereas the gain at 2 and 10 are relatively low. this inconsistency seems to imply that mere location of an error may result in unpredictable results as well. however, this necessitates further investigation before drawing any conclusion. group -3 (direction and correction group) variable mean variance minimum maximum pretest marks 31.42 24.27 25 41 posttest 1 marks 54.75 14.57 49 59 posttest 2 marks 35.33 26.61 29 45 chitra jayathilake correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing figure 3: test scores of dc group students m a rk s 121110987654321 60 50 40 30 20 variable po sttest 2 mark s pretest mark s po sttest 1 mark s group -3 (direction and correction) graph 3 demonstrates a highly significant insight into wcf: although the feedback given seems highly beneficial for learners at posttest 1, the graph indicates a drastic fall of learners’ acquisition at posttest 2. as indicated in the green line, the quantity of decrease in students’ scores is almost similar to the pretest scores. it is also noteworthy to mention, a high amount of posttest 1 scores are displayed in this group. this suggests that wcf is of little use over time (for long-term acquisition), although it has been extremely facilitative for immediate or short term learning. group -4 (direction, correction and meta linguistic information group) variable mean variance minimum maximum pretest marks 32.33 30.24 21 40 posttest 1 marks 57.58 22.63 49 65 posttest 2 marks 58.17 21.61 51 65 figure 4: test scores of dcm group s t u d e n t s m a r k s 1 21 11 0987654321 7 0 6 0 5 0 4 0 3 0 2 0 v a r ia b le p o stte st 2 m a r k s p r e te st m a r k s p o stte st 1 m a r k s g r o u p -4 ( d i r e c t i o n , c o r r e c t i o n a n d m e t a l i n g u i s t i c i n f o r m a t i o n ) figure 4 shows the results of the dcm group for the three testing periods. the pattern in the graph reveals that the dcm treatment group gains over time. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee what is outstanding is the consistency in posttest marks: this remarkable consistent gain at both posttests1 and 2 scores are relatively high and significant. unlike in the graph 2, this graph shows that the pretest indicator and posttest indicators are greatly parallel implying consistency in language accuracy and the efficacy of metalinguistic information. this underscores the validly in metalinguistic feedback for adult learners’ sla. conclusion this research sought to investigate, primarily, whether wcf facilitates adult learners in sla, focusing on one grammar element, namely the present continuous form. the students of the current study were of the same level of proficiency and received the same amount of scores at the pretest. they were involved in identical writing tasks. during the period of the study, the students were not exposed to any explicit l2 learning except the treatment employed for the study. therefore, wcf alone could be considered as responsible for the acquisition of the language element – present continuous form. thus, it is clearly evident that wcf facilitated in improved accuracy in adult learners’ l2 acquisition (present continuous from) in both the short and long term. the central focus of this research paper, however, is the relative efficacy of different wcf types. ferris’ (2003) research evidence suggests that indirect error feedback is more helpful on students’ long-term writing development than direct error feedback. chandler’s (2003) research which investigates two esl groups receiving either direct or indirect error feedback also showed that indirect error feedback with student self-editing contributes to accuracy more than direct error feedback. while supporting these hypotheses of ferris and chandler, the current study adds another insight into the phenomenon of wcf: this study suggests both indirect feedback where learners’ self-correction is required to a great extent and metalinguistic information where learners can receive awareness to their errors is equally helpful for the accuracy of l2 learning in adult learners. simultaneously, it also attempted to find the benefit and the relative efficacy of wcf for long-term acquisition of l2 by adult learners. the results in posttest 1 and posttest 2 indicate that the wcf had a positive effect on the acquisition of present continuous form by adult l2 learners. in particular, feedback given with metalinguistic information proved to be highly effective in improving learners’ accuracy as it is at the highest level of efficacy and helps for retention of language elements. direction only group is also significant, as it indicated second highest gain at posttests. this finding can again be explained with long’s (1988) view where he strongly suggests that if learners focus on form, learners promote l2 learning in a very effective manner. in the current study all three wcf types are likely to promote awareness in l2, but, only direction only and direction, correction and metalinguistic information comments promote learners to focus on form in a considerable way. that is, when correction is not provided, learners will focus on form attempting to self-correct it and when metalinguistic information is provided also, learners will focus on form with an analytical understanding of the form. this relatively high focus on form benefited learners’ long-term use of l2. chitra jayathilake correcting errors: the relative efficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing to round up, it can be argued that the results of the present study, on the whole, gain support from some previous research in the sense that wcf facilitates students improve their accuracy in writing despite the type of feedback (chandler, 2003; sheen, 1997). moreover, these findings suggest that both metalinguistic information and opportunities for self correction serve to improve adult learners’ grammatical accuracy. the relative efficacy of feedback can be demonstrated along the following cline which may be employed in esl contexts particularly at sri lankan university contexts. no wcf direction direction only direction, correction & & correction metalinguistic information the results of this preliminary study are limited by the small sample size and short term treatment. future research can focus on different types of learner errors developing longitudinal treatment. the results will be significant for anyone engaged in any english langue teaching/learning contexts where english is used as a second or foreign language. this is particularly significant dealing with learner errors in such contexts. references brown, j.d. (1988). understanding research in second language learning: a teacher’s guide to statistics and research design. cambridge: cambridge university press. chandler, j. (2003). the efficacy of various kinds of error feedback for improvement in the accuracy and fluency of l2 student writing. journal of second language writing, 12(3), 267-296. erel, s & bulut, d. (2007). error treatment in l2 writing: a comparative study of direct and indirect coded feedback in turkish efl context. journal of institute of social sciences, 23(1), 397-415. ferris, d. r. (1997). the influence of teacher commentary on student revision: tesol quarterly, 31(2), 315-339. __________.(1999). the case for grammar correction in l2 writing classes: a response to truscott (1996). journal of second language writing, 8, 1-10. __________. (2003). response to student writing: implications for second language students. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. __________. (2004). the “grammar correction” debate in l2 writing: where are we, and where do we go from here? (and what do we do in the meantime…?).journal of second language writing .13,49-62. ferris, d. r. & roberts, b. (2001). error feedback in l2 writing classes: how explicit does it need to be? journal of second language writing, 10(3), 161-184. lee, i. (2007). understanding teachers’ written feedback practices in hong kong secondary classrooms. journal of second language writing, 17, 69-85. liu, y. (2008). the effects of error feedback in second language writing. arizona working papers in sla & teaching, 15, 65-79. long, m.h. (1988). instructed interlanguage development. in l. beebe (ed.), issues in second language acquisition. multiple perspectives (pp.115-141). rowley, ma: newbury house. sheen, y. (2007). the effect of focussed written corrective feedback and language aptitude on esl learners’ acquisition of articles. tesol quarterly 41(2), 255-283. truscott, j. (1996). the case against grammar correction in l2 writing classes. language learning, 46(2), 327-369. andang saehu an analysis of english thesis writing 84 an analysis of english thesis writing: a case study of english department of uin sunan gunung djati bandung andang saehu department of english education, faculty of education, islamic state university of sunan gunung djati bandung, indonesia e-mail: andangsaehu@gmail.com apa citation: saehu, a. (2013). an analysis of english thesis writing: a case study of english department of uin sunan gunung djati bandung. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 84-91 received: 09-07-2013 accepted: 30-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: this is a report of a study designed to examine the process of thesis—a final (researchbased) paper for undergrads prior to academic completion—writing of english department students who graduated in academic year 2007/2008. using a descriptive method, this case study aimed to describe the stages, to identify the problems, and to explore the techniques of solving problems used by respondents in the thesis writing by involving six students who had engaged in writing and research project course. the data concerning writing stages, problems, and coping with strategies were collected by using questionnaires, interviews, and documentation (thesis). the results showed that all participants went through the thesis writing stages determined by faculty of adab of uin sunan gunung djati, bandung, namely: 1) starting process; 2) researching; 3) reporting; and 4) doing consultation. these also showed that all respondents encountered: 1) procedural problems, which were likely to be the major problems shared by all respondents; 2) academic problems; and 3) nonacademic problems. however, whatever problems they dealt with, each of them had his/ her own strategies to cope with. the procedural and academic problems were coped with by reading, doing consultation, and peer-collaboration. meanwhile, non-academic problems were solved by having a rest and managing time. keywords: analysis, thesis, stages, problems, and solutions introduction being able to graduate from a university is a wish of most undergraduate students because those who have graduated show that they have been able to pass the most difficult work, namely, research paper (henceforth, it is called as thesis) writing. in writing thesis is not as easy as writing a diary; in fact, it is about a gate of graduation (alwasilah & alwasilah 2005). those who are able to pass the gate mean that they have performed several such stages of study as finding a topic, proposing a problem, defending the proposed problem, as the starting point, to a supervisor or academic committee to convince that the topic chosen sounds well and to gain approval to proceed with the actual research (brotowidjoyo, 1997); researching; and reporting research (reid 1993). the problem is that it is hardly easy to write an understandable research report. it means that research is not complete until the researchers have summarized and presented the work in such a manner that others in their field can understand and reproduce all they have accomplished (brotowidjoyo 1997). considering this, viewed from the duration of learning english, students are seemingly able to write well because they have been studying english since they were at the first grade of junior high school to university 85 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee level. however, it was surprising when i saw some smart students who were initially able to smoothly complete the courses, yet proven incapable when they were asked to write thesis. even, some of them, later, dropped out of their study. the central focus of this study is not the finished text, but the writers’ behaviors before, during, and after the act of writing. writing is described as a series of interrelated behaviors (gibson, 2002). for instance, to produce a thesis, a student might first discuss the issue with friends, later jot down key points, and then write a first draft as research proposal. the ideas might be discussed with others. the draft is revised and it is finally edited and published. brown (1994) suggests that the traditional way of looking at writing has been seeing it as a linear process that has three stages: the first stage is prewriting, in which it is sharply focused on several activities including exploring a subject, formulating and testing a thesis, gathering evidence and outlining the essay. the second stage is drafting the essay. in this stage, one needs to determine what he can best accomplish in writing, select a subject and organize the information about it into meaningful clusters, find connection among those clusters and discover the relationship that links the connections. the third one is revising the topic, organization, and style. roughly, the steps are to think, write, and revise. furthermore, this present study chose many theories used to support the findings of the present study, restricting to the stages, problems, and techniques to solve the problems. the theory of reading and writing skills are seemingly supporting the finding of this study because such skills are used by all respondents to tackle the procedural and academic problems. the theory of academic writing is used to emphasize that the genre used in this study is thesis or thesis, further explained in section d of chapter ii. the theory of dynamics of a research report is presented to show that thesis writing has common stages to do. this seems to support the findings about stages of writing in which most respondents based their theory on it. the theory of essential problems is to support the findings regarding the problems that most respondents encountered during thesis writing. meanwhile, the related research findings are presented in this chapter to empower the findings of the present study and to compare whether the present study findings are in line with or contradictory to them. by choosing the english department students who have finished their thesis writing as the respondents of study, this study aims to describe the stages, to identify the problems, and to explore the techniques of solving problems used by them in the thesis writing. the emerging results from this study may be beneficial for english departments’ students, lecturers, english program, and other researchers. in other words, the results of study are expected to facilitate students starting to think about the research paper, to give contributions to the lecturers interested in research methodology or research project to improve their teaching competence. also, they t provide some information to the english program about the problems encountered in the thesis writing so that the english program knows how to overcome such problems. finally, they give input to other researchers who want to carry out another study in the same field with certain interest. finally, to avoid over claimed results of the study, this study is limited to identify the process of writing—stages used, the problems encountered, and the techniques of solving problems used by respondents in the thesis writing. andang saehu an analysis of english thesis writing 86 method a qualitative research was adopted as the method of this study to explore the process and describe the research results. since there were six participants involved in this study, the data collected through survey questionnaire, interview, and documentation analysis, as the method of data collection, were compared and contrasted each other to find differences and similarities in the process of thesis writing. merriam (1988) calls it as a multi case study where participants have similar importance in demonstrating the phenomenon under study. before the data gathering process, a preliminary study was conducted to get an initial overview about thesis writing process experienced by students and get the framework of appropriate questions used in the study. this preliminary research was done by randomly distributing questionnaire and interviewing the students who graduated on april 25, 2007 and were not included in the major study. the closed-questionnaire technique consisting of a list of questions was used to get the information about the respondents’: a) demographic information; b) literacy background including the frequency and type of their reading and writing habits; c) table 1. stages of thesis writing process stages of thesis writing process respondent 1 2 3 4 5 6 f % initial process a. finding a topic √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 the reasons of selecting and finding a topic 1. specificity √ √ √ 3 50 2. manageability √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 3. curiosity √ √ √ √ 4 67 4. significance √ √ √ √ √ 5 83 5. objectivity √ √ √ √ √ 5 83 6. familiarity √ √ √ 3 50 b. proposing a topic √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 c. defending proposal √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 researching a. posing research question √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 b. preparing instruments √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 c. plunging into the field √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 d. collecting data √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 e. analyzing data √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 writing report of study/ reporting a. prewriting 1. freewriting √ √ √ √ √ 5 83 2. outlining √ √ √ 3 50 3. brainstorming √ √ √ 3 50 4. reading √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 b. writing 1. peer-conferencing √ √ √ √ √ 5 83 2. highlighting the focal ideas √ √ 2 33 3. coding √ √ √ √ √ 5 83 4. mapping ideas √ √ √ 3 50 c. revising 1. rewriting ideas √ 1 17 grammar √ 1 17 quotation √ 1 17 2. proofreading √ √ √ √ 4 67 consultation √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 87 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee writing process covering the stages, the problems, and the solutions to solve the problems they faced in thesis writing; and d) opinion, perception, and experiences about thesis writing. unstructured interview were debated to six participants of research to know and describe their stages, problems, techniques to solve the problems in the process of thesis writing. in a case study, interviewing is necessary when we are interested in past events that are impossible to replicate (merriam 1988). in addition, this was used to provide the interviewee with broad freedom of expression and elaboration and often resemble informal talks (seliger & shohamy 1989). the documentation (participants’ thesis) was used as an artifact asanother source of data, to support, enrich, or even confirm the informed data acquired from the interview by reading and learning what they wrote (merriem 1988). the respondents’ thesis, readily accessed in the campus library, were read and learnt to clarify whether the respondents’ statements in questionnaire and interview data were similar to theirs. the clarifications toward respondents’ thesis and thesis feedback papers, easily asked from all respondents, were focused on the stages and mistakes done in thesis writing. results and discussion this session devotes some aspects to do with the findings of the research, gained though questionnaire, interview, and documentation (students’s thesis) analysis. data presentation and discussion of this research are presented simultaneously in this chapter. the findings are discussed and interpreted by comparing them with some theoretical foundations as reviewed in the chapter ii of this research. the stages of thesis writing based on the questionnaire, interview, and documentation (thesis) analysis, all respondents experienced the stages of thesis writing: 1) initial process including finding and proposing the research proposal. this first stage is a particularly significant finding since it coincides with that once the participants have decided on a specific topic, it is necessary for them to write a research proposal and defend it (brotowodjoyo, 1997). this is also in line with several respondents’ statements that they look for a specific, interesting, and observable topic to be proposed, then to be studied; 2) researching consisting of posing research questions, preparing instruments, plunging into the field, collecting and analyzing the data. this second stage which all respondents did the procedures approved by their supervisors to plunge into the field and analyze the collected data after posing research questions and preparing instruments of data collection were done when the respondents got approval to go on and plunge into the field to collect data (hacker 2003); 3). in this third stage, all respondents, similarly, reported that they initially prewrote by freewriting, outlining, brainstorming, and reading to generate and develop ideas. some of these techniques (outlining and reading) are contradictory to the suggestion that to generate ideas, the writers could free write, work in group, brainstorm, and keep a journal (brown 2001); 4). consultation. regarding this, it cannot be denied that in the conduct of this study, consultation was obliged to do (craswell 2005). this is in line with some respondents’ statement that without consultation, their thesis would never be finished. the followings are the overall findings on the stages of the thesis writing used by respondents as the result of questionnaire and interview analysis. the problems of thesis writing process dealing with the problems andang saehu an analysis of english thesis writing 88 occurred in the thesis writing, all respondents seemed to perceive the problems of thesis writing. from questionnaire and interview data, the problems are identified into procedural (problems related to how people do best for their writing), academic (problems related to the competences possessed by respondents), and non-academic problems (problems related to internal and external circumstances). in relation to procedural problems, all respondents had trouble in finding out the topic and starting to write the introduction. likewise, this happens to most writers, even professionals, had trouble in getting started (becker at al. 1986) in this problems, the respondents also have trouble with the systematic structure of an abstract. in addition, the students have academic problems, namely they could hardly finish their thesis due to the fact that they lack of receptive and productive skills as well as rhetorical knowledge and first language interference. this is relevant to the notion that one will use his/her reading and writing skill together to be an effective writer in college level courses (gibson 2002). meanwhile, regarding non-academic problems, based on the interview data, all respondents dealt with physical, psychological, technical, financial, and environmental problems. all respondents experienced different types of physical problems: dizziness, fatigue, headache, strain, and sleepiness. physical block occurs when the writers are tired and it just becomes too much of an effort to continue (beard & hartley, 1984) in terms of psychological problems, four respondents also encountered different types of problems: lack of motivation, anxiety, and less self-confidence. these problems also caused them get stuck to write. writers’ tabel 2. problems of thesis writing process types of perceived problems respondent 1 2 3 4 5 6 f % procedural problems getting started to write √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 building coherence statement √ √ √ 3 50 crosschecking experts’ ideas with finding √ √ √ 3 50 quoting √ √ √ √ 4 67 finding references √ √ √ √ √ 5 83 concluding remarks √ √ √ 3 50 writing abstract √ 1 17 academic problems lack of receptive and productive skill √ √ √ √ 4 67 lack of rhetorical knowledge and l1 interference √ √ √ √ 4 67 lack of research knowledge and instruction √ √ 2 33 lack of practice √ √ 2 33 non-academic problems physical problems fatigue √ √ 2 33 dizziness √ 1 17 headache √ 1 17 sleepiness √ 1 17 strain √ 1 17 psychological problems anxiety √ √ 2 33 lack of motivation √ 1 17 less of self-confidence √ 1 17 technical problems advisors’ activities and business √ √ √ √ 4 67 89 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee block occurs when they think hard to get the best first draft (beard & hartley 1984; craswell 2005). in line with the matter of non-academic problems, four respondents encountered technical problems—advisors’ bustle. failing to meet busy advisors was sometimes found as a problem for most participants (sugaryamah 2004; herdiah 2005). the followings are the overall findings on the problems of the thesis writing used by respondents as the result of questionnaire and interview analysis. the techniques of solving problems regarding the techniques of problem solving in thesis writing, the present study identifies six techniques used by all respondents to overcome the problems. in the similar sounds they said “all the problems can be solved”. this corresponds to the notion that every problem has a solution (broughton et al. 1978). there are many techniques used by all respondents to solve the procedural, academic, and non-academic problems in thesis writing: the first technique is reading a lot of books. all respondents used this technique to solve procedural and academic problems. reading what other people have written about the subject is probably the most common strategy for gathering information for starting to write (beard 1984; musthafa 2005) the second technique is consultation and peer-collaboration. all respondents asked and consulted their thesis to their classmates and supervisors when they got procedural and academic problems. as a matter of fact, consultation is informal discussion with teachers and friends as an important preparation and a foil for the necessarily individual and solitary business of writing (taylor, 1990). the third technique is a free writing practice most respondents used this technique when they got stuck. writing anything comes to mind is , in fact, in other words of free writing because it is sort of like talking to himself, but doing it with ink in order to keep the ideas flowing (gibson 2002). the fourth technique is stop writing at the right point. some respondents used this technique when they needed to stop writing. writing is not like making his ears wiggle or touching the tip of your nose with the tip or your tongue, but it is long and complex process (lauer et al. 1981). the fifth technique is taking a rest. this technique was used by several respondents to overcome physical and psychological blocks. correpondingly, beard and hartley (1984) physical block occurs when the writer is tired and it just becomes too much an effort to continue (beard & hartley 1984). the last technique used by most table 3. solutions of problems of thesis writing process types of problems types of solutions respondent 1 2 3 4 5 6 f % solutions for procedural and academic problems reading and coding √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 practice in free writing √ √ √ √ 4 67 consultation and peer-collaboration √ √ √ √ √ √ 6 100 stop writing at the right point √ √ √ √ 4 67 solutions for non-academic problems taking a rest √ √ √ √ 4 67 time management √ √ √ √ √ 5 83 andang saehu an analysis of english thesis writing 90 respondents is time management. most respondents used this technique when they were difficult to consult to the busy supervisors, to write, and to collect data through questionnaire and interview. kareviati (2004) argues that time management was the technique used by most respondents due to they were difficult to meet the busy supervisors. finally, the present study clarifies the respondents’ thesis whether they did the stages and experienced the problems of thesis writing as all respondents stated in questionnaire and interview data. having read and learnt all the respondents’ thesis, it was found that their thesis have the structure of a report, including preliminary sections, introduction, covering the purpose of writing the thesis, background information, scope, methodology, assumption and limitations; body of the report; conclusion and recommendation; reference list; and appendices (kimberly & cotesta 1998) the followings are the overall findings on the solution of problems of the thesis writing used by respondents as the result of questionnaire and interview analysis. conclusion the data obtained from the questionnaires are generally the same as that of gained from the interviews. from the data analysis it may be concluded that there are four stages in the process of thesis writing. first of all, it is the initial process includeing finding a topic, proposing a topic, and defending the proposed topic. the most interesting finding at this stage is that the respondents went through different ways to find a topic of their own. to be more precise, some of them took account of the specificity, manageability, and curiosity. meanwhile, some others took account of the significance, objectivity, and familiarity of a certain topic. the second stage is researching, consisting of posing the research question, preparing the instruments, going to the field, collecting data, and analyzing the data. some respondents conducted the research in a recursive way. this way helped the respondents to determine which was to be done first and which was to be done next; then, moving back and forth among each stage. the third stage is reporting including prewriting, drafting, and revising. all respondents underwent those stages, but they did it in a recursive way. to be precise, the writer moves within the components as necessary, perhaps they move from pre-writing to drafting, then back to pre-writing again, then move forward to editing and going back to drafting before reporting the thesis for sharing or publication. at the fourth stage all the respondents dealt with various problems. these problems fall into several categories, namely procedural, academic, and non-academic problems. as far as procedural problems are concerned, most respondents had trouble in getting started to write, building coherent sentences, crosschecking experts’ ideas against the findings, quoting, and finding references. in relation to the academic problems, most respondents lack of receptive and productive skills, and rhetorical knowledge. besides, they may also be exposed to l1 interference. meanwhile, regarding non-academic problems, most respondents experienced physical problems (e.g. fatigue), psychological problems (e.g. anxiety), and technical problems (e.g. advisors’ bustle). at the fifth stage all the problems encountered by the respondents during the process of thesis writing were overcome by themselves by reading and coding, practicing in free writing, consultation and peer-collaboration, stopping writing at the right point, taking a rest, and time management. 91 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee references alwasilah, c. a., & alwasilah, s. s. (2005). pokoknya menulis. bandung: kiblat. beard, m. r., & hartley, j. (1984). teaching and learning in higher education. london: harper & row, publishers. becker, s. h. (1986). writing for social scientists. usa: the university of chicago. brotowidjoyo, m. d. (1997). penulisan karangan ilmiah. jakarta: grewal galeri. broughton, g. brumfit, flavel, & pincas. (1978). teaching on foreign language. london: routledge and kegan paul. brown, h. d. (1994). principles of language and teaching. new jersey: prentice hall, inc. -----------------. (2001) teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. new york: prentice hall regents. craswell, g. (2005). writing for academic success: a postgraduate guide. london: sage publications. gibson, j. (2002). perspectives: case studies for readers and writers. new york: longman. hacker, d. (2003). a writer’s references. new york: bedford/st. martin. herdiah, s. i. (2005). the process of writing: how students write an academic writing task. unpublished paper. bandung: indonesia university of education. kareviati, e. (2004). exploring students’ difficulties in writing academic paper: a case study of the last semester english students of stkip siliwangi, bandung. unpublished thesis, indonesia university of education. lauer, m. j., montaque, g lursford, & emig, j. (1981). four worlds of writing. new york: harper & row. merriam, s. b. (1988). case study research in education: a qualitative approach. san francisco: jossey-bass publishers. mansyur, a. s. (2002). composing in english: problems and suggested solutions. unpublished thesis, indonesia university of education (upi). musthafa, b. (2005). english for young learners (eyl). bandung: pps-upi. oshima, a., & a. hogue. (1999). writing academic english. london: longman. reid, j. m. (1993). the process of paragraph writing. new jersey: prentice hall regents. seligar, h. w., & shohamy, e. (1989). second language research method. new york: oxford university press. sugaryamah, d. (2004) thesis writing: issues, problems and possible solutions: a case study on graduates of english program, graduate school of upi. unpublished thesis, indonesia university of education. taylor, g. (1990). the student’s writing guide. australia: the university of cambridge. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 283 exploring classroom interaction patterns in efl virtual learning magdahalena tjalla (corresponding author) email: magdahalenatjalla@iainpare.ac.id marlina syamsir iain parepare, indonesia email: marlina.syamsir98@gmail.com zulfah iain parepare, indonesia email: fahruddin.zulfah@yahoo.com abdul haris sunubi iain parepare, indonesia email: abd.harissunubi@iainpare.ac.id arqam iain parepare, indonesia email: arqam@iainpare.ac.id apa citation: tjalla, m., syamsir, m., zulfah., sunubi, a. h., & arqam. (2023). exploring classroom interaction patterns in efl virtual learning. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 6374. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7878 received: 29-10-2022 accepted: 26-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction classroom interaction is a crucial element in the efl learning context. some researchers have shown that classroom interaction significantly affects the teaching-learning process and learning achievement. for teachers, classroom interaction is beneficial to help them create a supportive atmosphere for interactive teaching-learning activities (winanta et al., 2020). class interaction in the efl context also facilitates students with concrete and natural practice of the target language (al-munawwarah, 2021; some-guiebre, 2020; wizheng, 2019). it is also helpful to engage students in learning by triggering their interest during the teaching and learning process (entusiastik & siregar, 2022; kholisoh & barati, 2021), a benefit which at the same time can decrease their anxiety (alahmadi & alraddadi, 2020). in addition, class interaction provides a path for students’ academic success as well as determines the achievement of the learning objective in each meeting (eisenring & margana, 2019; siddig & alkhoudary, 2018. thus, teacherabstract: this study analyzed classroom interaction patterns in four efl virtual learning classes at iain parepare: speaking, listening, writing, and reading. the purpose of this study was to give an overview of classroom interaction involving lecturers and students during the learning process. the researchers used a video recorder and field notes to capture the spoken and written interaction during the learning process. data were transcribed and codified based on the intuitive taxonomy of the discourse act framework of tsui. data showed that both in spoken and written interaction, patterns of initiation-response (ir), initiation-responsefollow up (irf), and initiation-response-follow up-follow up 2 (irff) occurred. in detail, the complete interaction patterns were in listening class, both in spoken and written form. in reading and writing classes, the initiation-response (ir) and the initiation-response-feedback (irf) occurred. however, in speaking, only initiation-response (ir) was produced. in written interaction, except in the listening class, only initiation-response (ir) occurred. data also showed that utterance categories occurred less in written interaction than in spoken. most of the interactions were done when the lecturer provided information on learning material and instructions on how to do assignments. thus, there was no feedback given by the lecturer in this interaction. the study also found that the interaction was lecturer-centered, and both the lecturers and the students employed the l1 in the classroom interaction. keywords: classroom interaction patterns; efl virtual learning; spoken interaction; written interaction. magdahalena tjalla, marlina syamsir, zulfah, abdul haris sunubi, & arqam exploring classroom interaction patterns in efl virtual learning 284 student interaction is a vital tool to involve students in learning and improve their achievement. classroom interaction in an efl setting often does not run smoothly. learners of english commonly have problems with interactional skills. in addition, teachers are difficult to elicit students’ talks during the learning process. a study conducted by alam & ashrafuzzaman, (2018) founad that many students are not interested to participate in classroom interaction. some of the reasons are they have low english competence that they mostly yield incomplete sentences, and the factor of shiness and anxiety to talk in front of the class. some studies by ate et al. (2021) and fachrunnisa & nuraeni (2022) also revealed that students tend to be passive in interaction and choose to be silent when teachers ask a question, and they are not interested to ask questions when the teacher gives them a chance to ask. another factor relies on the domination of the teacher in the interaction in which most of the classroom talks are produced by a teacher resulting in a monstrous classroom interaction atmosphere (pratiwi, 2018). there are two main factors contributing to the changes from face-to-face classroom interaction to virtual learning, namely technological development and the case of pandemic covid-19. technology development is the main reason for the integration of technology in language learning. according to khodabandeh (2020), technology is used extensively in all facets of life, including education. this has caused a shift in the way that people learn from traditional classroom learning contexts to new forms of learning contexts like virtual classes. in addition, virtual classroom platforms combine a variety of technological tools such as computers and smart gadgets connected to the internet, and allow text-, audio-, and videobased communication in actual time (coulianos et al., 2022; tyrväinen et al., 2021). in general, virtual learning offers wonderful prospects for expanding access to learning, costs reduction, and—most importantly, improving the standard of instruction and learning (rachmah, 2020). dealing with language learning, the positive impact of technology enables the use of internet resources while learning a language, giving students more possibilities to practice their communication abilities. (alshumaimeri, 2019; alswilem, 2019; cong-lem, 2018). as a result of the pandemic, english language classrooms changed quickly to the innovative and effective use of technology to enhance the teaching and learning process and address anticipated obstacles (hakim, 2020). virtual learning was the best solution to save people from the attack of the covid-19 virus. virtual learning challenges traditional definitions of a situation and the way teachers and students are expected to interact (willermark, 2020). yet, some previous studies demonstrate the strength of classroom interaction in virtual learning. willermark (2020) reported that virtual learning in an efl context affects positively student interaction. virtual learning provides easiness for teachers to monitor students’ activity, and arrange them in individual and small group activities, providing no chance for students to dominate the classroom activity as in traditional face-to-face learning. this situation improves inter-student interaction. the positive effect of teacher-student interaction in virtual learning also showed in the studies of masjedi & tabatabaei (2018) and vindyasari (2022). they found that online learning provokes students to actively participate in classroom interaction, and avoid the teacher’s dominance in the interaction, and produce a variety of classroom interaction pattern, likewise, a study conducted by alahmadi & alraddadi (2020) investigated whether virtual learning during the pandemic era was effective to assist students in their second language interaction and whether virtual learning facilitated students’ interaction and language learning. the study on the preparatory year students of the saudi english language center showed that interaction in efl virtual learning was effective, as students have a positive perception of the virtual class. students stated that they participated in the learning, shared ideas, and they reported that their language skill was improved. apart from the strengths of classroom interaction in virtual learning explained above, some studies show the complexity of teacherstudent interaction in virtual learning. abdusyukur (2022) explored the teacher-student interaction in an online efl classroom and compared the interaction patterns of teachers and students to find who was dominant in the interaction. this study found that class interaction in virtual learning was teacher-centered. students tended to be passive in interaction which led teachers to talk more and dominate the interaction. in the same way, havwini (2019) compared the interaction patterns of teachers and students that focused on the initiation act. the study revealed that teachers dominated the interaction. teachers did more initiation to elicit information from the students. in addition, students also initiated to get information on things they were not clear about the material. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 285 however, none of the studies described a virtual class that employed both oral and written interactions as the case at english education language program in iain parepare, indonesia. this study was meant to investigate how lecturers and students interacted in a virtual learning context using spoken and written modes. specifically, this study was conducted to provide a detailed linguistic description of interaction patterns in virtual efl classrooms and the utterance functions as well. by analyzing the interactions that occurred in the virtual efl classrooms, the research finding was expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of virtual learning and in turn, will help the lecturers to find the best strategy to overcome problems in the virtual learning environment method this research was conducted using a descriptivequalitative design. the qualitative approach was relevant to use in this study because it described the patterns of class interaction in a virtual english learning environment. the classroom interaction occurred in efl virtual class setting in iain parepare. there were four classes selected in this study: speaking, listening, writing, and reading classes, with four lecturers and 114 students. the researchers used observation, field notes, and open interviews to collect the research data. the researchers acted as non-participant observers by entering the virtual class in the live conference via zoom or discussion groups in whatsapp. in some meetings, the researchers directly stayed beside the lecturer or one of the students to observe the activities to gain data and a direct understanding of the class interaction. all the situations and conditions related to classroom interaction in the virtual learning process were noted and recorded. the interview was used to ensure data validity by asking the participants whether they agreed or disagreed with the collected data. the transcribed data were then analyzed using a discourse analysis approach with the aid of the seventeen-category system of tsui (1995) to find out the interaction patterns that occurred in virtual learning. this framework provides seventeen categories of speech with subcategories. this is also beneficial to explain the functions of both lecturers’ and students’ utterances in classroom interaction. tsui’s system can be summarized in table 1 below. table 1. the seventeen-category system by tsui (1995) move/exc hange head/discourse acts sub-classes teac her’ s talk initiate 1. elicit a. display qs 1. direct 2. nominate 3. inform 4. recapitulat e 5. frame 6. starter 7. check a) factual q. b) yes-no q. c) reasonin g q. d) explanati on q. b. genuine qs a) opinion q b) informati on q. c. restating elicit respond 9. evaluate 10. accept 11.comment 12. clue a.encouraging/ positive b. negative stud ents’ talk respond 13.reply 14. apologize a.restricted b. expanded initiate 15.request 16.elicit 17. interrupt results and discussion the result of this study shows that there were three kinds of interaction patterns found in spoken interaction, namely the initiation response (ir) pattern, initiation respond follow up (irf) pattern, and the initiation respond follow up follow up 2 (irff) pattern. the result also shows that these three patterns were completely produced in listening class. in reading and writing classes, both ir and irf patterns were produced, but the irff pattern was not. moreover, in speaking class, irf and irff patterns were not produced. it means that only the ir pattern was produced in the speaking class. the lecturers-students interaction patterns were shown in the following table: table 2. spoken interaction patterns in efl virtual learning environment efl virtual class interaction patterns ir irf irff listening √ √ √ speaking √ reading √ √ writing √ √ the finding in the table above indicates that the most frequent interaction pattern produced was magdahalena tjalla, marlina syamsir, zulfah, abdul haris sunubi, & arqam exploring classroom interaction patterns in efl virtual learning 286 initiation-response (ir) pattern in which the lecturers initiated the interaction by asking questions and the students responded to them. the lecturers did initiation to elicit information to know the students’ knowledge on the topic being discussed. the questions could be in the form of yes-no questions or explanation questions. initiation in the ir pattern is also sometimes produced by the students. initiation-response-follow-up (irf) was also found in the lecturers-student interaction. the initiation was produced by the lecturers and was responded to by the students. the follow-up act was mostly produced by the lecturers as an endorsement or acceptance of the student's responses. the follow-up pattern was produced by the lecturers because students responded to the initiation with the correct answers and followed what was expected by the lecturers as in the following extract: extract 1 l : “… apa yang dia katakan?” (what did he say?) s3 : “i love durian.” s5 : “i love it.” s1 : “i live it.” ss : “i love it.” l : “ok! perfect!” (spoken interaction in listening class) the dialogue in extract 1 above illustrates the irf pattern produced in the spoken interaction process. the lecturer initiated the conversation by asking a question. the students responded to the question, and when they did it correctly, the lecturer gave feedback by saying “ok! perfect!” therefore, feedback was given by the lecturer in response to the students’ correct answers. the use of the irf pattern in teacher-student interaction is an indicator that the interaction was not dominated by teachers or students, instead the two parties have the same opportunity to actively interact within the interaction (kartini et al., 2020). as explained earlier, one of the interaction patterns produced in the lecturers-students interaction was initiation – respond – follow upfollow-up (irff). the follow-up act from the lecturers such as 'repair' was sometimes followed by a new movement sequence in the form of the second follow-up produced by the students as an acceptance of the repairs suggested or commanded by the lecturers. this interaction pattern is demonstrated in the following extract: extract 2 l : “….because i don’t like. bukan lagi like, but i hate durian. what about you? what about you, class? what about you students?” ss : “i like ma’am. i like durian mam. so, it’s very, eee… very delicious, ma’am.” s4 : “very delicious, mam.” l l : “ok! if you like durian so much, you should say “i love durian”. not “i like”, but “i love durian”.” s4 : yes mam! i love durian (spoken interaction in listening class) the dialogue in extract 2 above illustrates how the follow-up movement occurred differently. the lecturer initiated the interaction by giving a specific question to students to get information on whether they liked durian did not. then, the students enthusiastically said that they liked durian so much. however, the response was deemed inaccurate. therefore, the lecturer gave repair by correcting the students' answers about the right way to express something that people like most. students then accepted the lecturer’s repair and corrected their answers as a follow-up act 2. dealing with written interaction in efl virtual learning environment, there were also three kinds of interaction patterns found here, namely initiation response (ir) pattern, initiation respond follow up (irf) pattern, and initiation respond follow up follow up 2 (irff) pattern. the written interaction patterns produced in efl virtual learning environment are presented in the following table. table 3. written interaction patterns in efl virtual learning environment efl virtual class interaction patterns ir irf irff listening √ √ √ speaking √ reading √ writing √ the same finding as in the spoken interaction is seen in the table above; the three patterns of lecturers-student interaction completely occurred in listening class. some conversations between the lecturer and the students represent the complete pattern of interaction in which the lecturer started the interaction with initiation, then it was english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 287 responded to by the students, followed by the lecturer’s feedback, and ended with the students’ feedback. in other classes namely speaking, reading, and writing, the only pattern produced was the ir. this means that there was no feedback given in the written interaction in those three classes. the following extract is the representation of the irff pattern in the written interaction: extract 3 (8 students collected their assignments.) l : “excellent, but you don’t need to write all the conversation. you just need to say they like or not. if he likes, what he said to express his like? such as “i hate it” or if he does not like it. what he said? (5 students collected their assignments.) s : “he hasn’t like it. because it was the first time he taste it, mam.” l : “you should write he doesn’t like it” s : “okay, mam.” (written interaction in speaking class) the conversation above shows the complete pattern of classroom interaction in the virtual learning environment. the lecturer initiated the interaction by giving a compliment to the students who have participated in finishing and submitting their assignments. on the other side, the student's assignment was out of the lecturer’s instruction. the lecturer then gave some ‘clues’ which was also an initiation act. the purpose was to guide the students to the correct answer. in turn, students responded to the ‘clue’ given by the lecturer. the lecturer gave a follow-up as a 'correction' by saying "you should write he doesn't like it'". then, the students answered by saying "yes mam". this kind of movement is called 'follow-up 2'. both in spoken and written interaction, lecturers initiated the conversations. however, in some situations, the initiations were produced by students. class interaction with the student’s initiation is presented below: extract 4 s1 : “assalamu’alaikum mam!” l : “waalaikumsalam. move to zoom now!” s2 : “iye bu” (all right, mam). s1 : “baik bu” (okay, mam) s2 : “yes mam.” (written interaction in speaking class) regarding the conversation above, the students initiated the interaction by expressing a greeting. this was done because the class time was already begun. students initiated the interaction by greeting as muslims used to do. the lecturer then gave a response to the greeting. this finding supports some previous studies' results that students sometimes initiate a talk (mardani, & gorjizadeh, 2020; mier & blanco, 2022; rasmitadia et al., 2019; selamat & melji, 2022). based on the findings above, the characteristics of spoken and written interactions of the four classes of efl learning in iain parepare are described as follows: the three interaction patterns of the ir, irf, and irff occurred both in spoken and written interaction in the listening class. in general, the ir pattern was the most common form of interaction performed both in spoken and written interactions. the ir pattern occurred when the lecturer initiated the interaction by asking the question and the students responded to the initiation. this pattern of interaction has some benefits, such as students actively participate in decision-making, and are involved all day long in classroom activities (fibri, 2018). the interaction was then restarted with a new initiation. occasionally, the lecturer gave a follow-up act as an evaluated purpose. this kind of move exchange is then called initiation – response – follow-up (irf). in certain situations, the lecturer gave a follow-up to guide the students to the correct answer that was categorized as ‘repair’. the student’s acceptance of the lecturer’s repair was categorized as ‘accepted’. both the spoken and the written interactions produced in this study follow the initiation – response – follow-up – follow-up (irff) pattern. the production of the irff pattern in the lecturerstudents interaction process can be explained here: the first turn is an initiation that was taken by the lecturer. the initiation produced by the lecturer is the first turn to open the sequence in the classroom interaction. initiation is widely used by the lecturers in this study in various functions, such as greeting, conveying information, or stimulating students to display their knowledge about the topic of discussion. however, the researchers also found that the interaction was also initiated by the students. therefore, it can be said that interactions in virtual classrooms do not always follow a rigid irf pattern where initiation is produced by the lecturers. students’ initiations also take a large portion of classroom interaction. the purpose of the initiation act carried out by the students is to obtain or share information. this finding is consistent with a study conducted by li & lam study (2022). magdahalena tjalla, marlina syamsir, zulfah, abdul haris sunubi, & arqam exploring classroom interaction patterns in efl virtual learning 288 one of the factors that underlie the initiation carried out by the students is the topic chosen in the learning process. selamat & melji (2022) argued that the choice of a topic had an impact on the willingness of the students to respond to participate in the interaction. in addition, if the topic is the one related to the student’s experience, they would answer the teacher’s questions (nernere, 2019). this means that students are brave and confident enough to start interacting with the teachers to get or share information. the second turn of the irff pattern is a response (r) which was performed by the students to answer the lecturer’s question or to show their understanding of the teachers’ command and instruction. although the responses were mainly produced by the students, the researchers discovered that the response was sometimes produced by the lecturer if the students initiated a question. hence, the response was not always given by the students. overall, the ir pattern was always found in every meeting of the four efl virtual classes both in spoken and written interaction. in the third turn, it was found that the lecturer provided various types of follow-up (f) in following the students' response during the classroom interaction as seen in table 4. providing follow-up on students’ responses might increase students' self-confidence, and create close social relations between lecturers and students (yulia & zainil, 2021). afterward, follow-up 2 was the fourth turn in classroom interaction. in this study, the irff pattern was only found in the listening class. the lecturer realized the mistakes made by students in giving answers as in the sentence (s: "i like durian, mam"). to correct the students' answers, the lecturer produced the 'repair' utterance category by saying (l: “... if you like durian so much, you should say "i love durian"/s: yes, mam.). feedback in the form of correction is normally produced by the teacher (selamat & melji, (2022). as a form of acceptance of the correction given by the lecturer, the studentproduced utterance was categorized as 'accept'. it can be seen how lecturers tried to create interactive classroom conditions, and involved students actively to provide their arguments or opinions. interaction with feedback is the ideal form of teacher-student interaction. feedback might speed up learning and draw students' attention to their language errors (mohammed, 2019). also, when using the irf/irff pattern, the teacher could produce lengthy interactive interactions, which provide a variety of feedback such as the exchanged feedback and arbitrary corrective feedback (estaji et al., 2022). in spoken interaction, speaking class only performed the ir pattern, while reading and writing classes produced the ir and irf patterns. in written mode, the three classes of speaking, reading, and writing, only produced the ir pattern. this means that there is no feedback in the interaction. the researchers found that several categories of the response act given by the students did not require further movements pattern such as the follow-up act. this occurred in certain situations when initiation began with certain utterances, such as 'elicit: inform' in the form of 'information question', 'elicit: clarify', request, directive, informative such as report, expressive, and so on. for example, (l: ....jaringan kurang bersahabat yah? (the network is bad, isn’t it? (i)/s: yes, mam.... (r)/l: so, bagaimana ini? (how, is it?). (i)), the follow-up action was not needed by students because the responses given by students were information that does not require evaluation or acceptance as usual. as a result, the lecturer initiates interaction by asking questions to obtain the students’ opinions on whether learning continued or skipped. a study conducted by atmojo & widhiyanto, (2020)) also found the same, the interaction begins with the teacher informing only followed by the student's answer, then the teacher does not give any follow-up act to the students. the research found twenty-five utterances categories in spoken interaction, which are demonstrated in the following table: table 4. taxonomy of discourse act in spoken interaction produced in efl virtual learning environment head act subclasses initiating act elicitation elicit: inform a. display qs a) factual b) yes-no q c) reasoning q d) explanatio n q b. genuine q a) opinion q b) informatio n q c) restating elicit elicit: confirm elicit: agree elicit: repeat english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 289 elicit: clarify requested request for action request for permission offer invitation directive advisives 1. advice 2. warning mandative 3. instruction nominate informativ e report expressive assessment s: compliment clue recapitulate frame respond act positive respond negative respond negative respond follow up act endorseme nt positive evaluation concessio n acknowle dgment 1. accept 2. repair 3. accept with repair the table above presents the utterances categories that occurred in spoken interaction. there were twenty-five categories of utterances produced in the initiation act. in response act, there were only two categories produced. henceforth, there were 5 categories in the follow-up act and two categories or utterances produced as follow-up act 2. however, there are only seven utterances categories found in written interaction as seen in the following table: table 5. taxonomy of discourse act in written interaction produced in efl virtual learning environment head act sub-classes initiati ng act elicitation : directive informative elicit: inform mandatives: instruction report expressive assessments: compliment clue factual q informatio n q respon d act positive respond follow -up act endorsement positive/encour aging evaluation acknowledge ment a) accept b) repair the table above indicates the utterances produced in written interaction. there were seven categories produced in the initiation act and one category in the response activities. henceforth, there were three categories of utterances that occurred in the follow-up act and two categories in follow-up act 2. these data suggest that utterances produced by lecturers and students serve a variety of functions. the findings above also indicate that fewer interaction patterns, as well as utterances categories, are produced in written interaction than in spoken as well. written interactions in the current research, as has been previously explained, employed the whatsapp application. a study has proved that the learners tended to be passive and gave low responses in interactions using the whatsapp application. classroom interaction was considered monotonous and therefore affected the students’ frustrations (budianto & arifani, 2021). the study also found the use of the student’s native language both in spoken and written interaction. both the lecturers and the students used the native language, namely indonesian. the use of the native language in classroom interaction is positively viewed by some experts. according to li (2018), the learners’ native language could be used as a means to start a conversation in teacherstudent interaction as well as to promote the employment of the l2. in addition, vazquez & ordonez (2019) argue that the use of the l1 is beneficial as “it reduces the time students devote to the use of the l2”. however, the excessive use of the l1 is contra-productive, as the students have fewer opportunities to experiment with and use their english (huriyah & agustiani, 2018). the finding of this study also showed that lecturer-student interaction in both spoken and written modes was lecturer-centered. in such an interaction, communication is dominantly handled by the teachers and most of the language produced by them (sarhandi et al., 2018). while learnercentered learning which should be used in classroom interaction has some powerful strengths such as improving students’ motivation, selfdirected learning, attitude toward the target language, and belief in the language learning and at the same time reducing students’ anxiety (kassem, 2019), all the lecturers dominated the magdahalena tjalla, marlina syamsir, zulfah, abdul haris sunubi, & arqam exploring classroom interaction patterns in efl virtual learning 290 interaction in the current study. the ideal classroom interaction suggests that teachers should talk 30% of the whole talk, while students should do 70% (kostadinovska-stojchevska, 2019). teacher-centered interaction was also found in a study conducted by abdusyukur (2020); the teacher-student interaction in an online efl classroom followed the traditional pattern, in which teachers play a dominant role in conversations, and students were passive. however, the teacher-centered interaction model is not only experienced in virtual learning but also face-to-face learning. even though teachers believe that learner-centered is the ideal interaction, in the actual realization, they practiced teacher-centered interaction more frequently than the studentscentered model (kaymakamoglu, 2018). a study conducted by huriyah & agustiani (2018) also found that teachers dominated classroom interaction by asking students questions. a different finding was seen in a study conducted by khodabndeh (2021) that compared interaction in online efl learning to conventional one. the study revealed an interesting fact that online efl interaction was more dynamic where students were active and dominated the interaction than in the conventional classroom. conclusion there were three kinds of interaction patterns produced both in spoken and written forms of the efl virtual learning environment conducted in iain parepare, namely initiation – response (ir) pattern, initiation – response – follow-up (irf) pattern, and initiation – response – follow-up – follow-up2 (irff). among the four classes, only the listening class produced the complete patterns of interaction, both in the spoken and written mode. in the spoken mode, the reading and writing classes showed the same pattern of interaction, the ir and irf occurred in the classroom interaction, while in the speaking class, only the ir pattern occurred. generally, the most common pattern of interaction that occurred in all the classes was the ir. the ir pattern mainly occurred when initiation was started by the lecturer, and students responded to it. the irf pattern then occurred when the students’ responses were accepted by the lecturers. while the irff pattern was produced when the lecturer repaired the students’ responses, and the students acknowledged the repair. interaction in the three classes of speaking, reading, and writing performed the same interaction pattern in the written mode. here, only the ir pattern occurred. this indicates that the lecturers did not provide any follow-up to the student’s responses. written interaction in this virtual learning employed utterance categories fewer than spoken interactions. written interaction applied in this virtual environment was limited for some purposes, such as sharing materials and giving instruction on how to do the tasks, and the dominant pattern of interaction used was the ir, where lecturer-initiated interaction and responded to by students. in this context, lecturers rarely gave feedback on students’ responses. other characteristics found in both spoken and written interaction of lecturers’ and students’ talks were the use of the l1 and the domination of lecturers’ talks. even though some studies claimed the positive impact of the l1 in efl learning, the frequent use of the l1 prevents students from experiencing the target language, affecting to low level of students’ english proficiency. likewise, the domination of the teacher in classroom interaction causes students to be passive, and therefore the classroom interaction is monotonous. also, students are lazy to engage in learning. therefore, lecturers should limit the use of l1 in the classroom to help students practice their english. the lecturers should also give students more opportunities to be active in classroom interaction by providing students more chances to initiate and respond to the conversations. based on the findings of this study, it is suggested to lecturers give more feedback to students, especially feedback on repairing as a way to teach students a good form of language. moreover, the lecturers should minimize the use of written interaction to give students more chances in practicing all the utterances categories. this study had a weakness in the unstable connection of students’ internet that less number of spoken interactions produced by the students. since hybrid learning has become a trend in the efl learning context in indonesia, it is recommended that future researchers explore more interaction patterns in online efl classrooms with more stable internet connections. references abdusyukur, m. r., sudana, d., & muslim, a. b. 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(2019). teacher talk and instructional language choice: two problems encountered in efl classroom. eternal (english, teaching, learning, and research journal), 5(1), 195-204. rasmitadila, r., samsudin, a., & prasetyo, t. (2019). teacher-students’ instructional interactions analysis (tsiia): a case study in inclusive english classrooms in indonesia. the international journal of interdisciplinary educational studies, 4(1), 24-32. sarhandi, p. s. a., asghar, j., & abidi, a. a. (2018). interaction patterns in whatsapp conversation in efl classroom: pedagogical implications. journal of academic and social research, 1(1), 1-18. selamat, e. h., & melji, s. m. (2022). investigating the interactions between teacher and students in an efl classroom. english language education journal (elej), 1(1), 23-42. tsui, a. b. (1995). introducing classroom interaction. penguin books. tyrväinen, h., uotinen, s., & valkonen, l. (2021). instructor presence in a virtual classroom. open education studies, 3(1), 132-146. vindyasari, r., ivone, f. m., & wijayati, p. h. (2022). classroom interaction in an online speaking class. jurnal pendidikan: teori, penelitian, dan pengembangan, 7(1). weizheng, z. (2019). teacher-student interaction in efl classroom in china: communication accommodation theory perspective. english language teaching, 12(12), 99-111. winanta, a., rochsantiningsih, d., & supriyadi, s. (2020). exploring efl classroom interaction: an analysis of teacher talk at senior high school level. els journal on interdisciplinary studies in humanities, 3(3), 328-343. willermark, s. (2021). who’s there? characterizing interaction in virtual classrooms. journal of educational computing research, 59(6), 10361055. yulia, m., & zainil, y. (2021). an analysis of teachers’ oral feedback in efl classroom interaction at smp negeri 10 batam. journal of english language teaching, 10(1), 45-52. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 891 the correlation of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily newspaper edition 2021 sri budiyono (corresponding author) teacher traning and education faculty universitas widya dharma, klaten, jawa tengah, indonesia email: sribudiyono@unwidha.ac.id erry pranawa teacher traning and education faculty universitas widya dharma, klaten, jawa tengah, indonesia email: errypranawa@unwidha.ac.id gunawan budi santoso teacher traning and education faculty universitas widya dharma, klaten, jawa tengah, indonesia email: gunawanbudisantoso@unwidha.ac.id apa citation: budiyono, s., pranawa, e., & santoso, g. b. (2022). the correlation of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily news paper edition 2021. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 891-900. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6794 received: 09-06-2022 accepted: 27-08-2022 published: 30-10-2022 introduction language is an activity that involves the linguistic ability of the user as a whole. language is a form of communicative action. the degree of communicativeness is determined by the ability to use language to capture ideas in the form of language. to meet the demands of language, it is necessary to obey the language of the language used the fulfillment of these demands opens up two language possibilities, namely language accuracy and language errors (nuryanto et al.,2018; wabdaron & reba, 2020). in order to meet the accuracy of language required a language skill. language skills are the most important skills. aspects of language skills include listening, reading, speaking, and writing (hermanto, 2017; budiyono et al., 2019; 2021). in relation to the above statement, (yundayani, et al., 2017; rahmat, y. n., & coxhead, a., 2021) states that skilled in reading is an advanced reading term (as opposed to beginning reading). he stated that reading comprehension is: (1) an effort to build a bridge between what is known and what is already known; (2) the process of understanding the meaning implied in words, sentences, and connecting texts; (3) in understanding the content of the text, the reader typically uses background knowledge, vocabulary, and grammatical knowledge, using certain strategies; (4) understanding is active and not passive; (5) comprehension is not just a matter of literally recording and reporting what one has read; (6) understanding constitutes a large number of decision-making; and (7) abstract: this study aims to describe how are the results of the correlation analysis of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily newspaper, 2021 edition; whether the correlation of text, context, and context in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily newspaper is cohesive and coherent. this study used descriptive qualitative method. the object of this research is the correlation of text, context, and context in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily newspaper. this study used descriptive qualitative analysis the results of the study show that in general (almost all) of the discourses in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily newspaper, the structure has paid attention to the relationship between sentences so that they can establish linkages and coherence between these sentences. meanwhile, in terms of form, it can be called a complete discourse. there is only one data that happens to be the way to understand it must look at the sentence before and after it. in short, all sentence structures presented in the solo pos daily newspaper are grammatical, in the sense that they are grammatically arranged. the order of the language and the pattern of the arrangement is correct, it is in accordance with the grammar so that it can be concluded that the grammar is correct. keyword: context; co-text; solo pos daily newspaper; text. sri budiyono, erry pranawa, & gunawan budi santoso the correlation of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily news paper edition 2021 892 understanding is a dialogue between the writer and the reader. language is an activity that involves the linguistic ability of the user as a whole. language is a form of communicative action. the degree of communicativeness is determined by the ability to use language to capture ideas in the form of language. to meet the demands of language, it is necessary to obey the language of the language used. the fulfillment of these demands opens up two language possibilities, namely language accuracy and language errors (muhtarom, 2020; maulana et al, 2019). in order to meet the accuracy of language required a language skill. language skills are the most important skills. aspects of language skills include listening, reading, speaking, and writing (suparlan, 2019; budiyanti, y. & damayanti, n., 2017; akbarjono, a., et al, 2021; aker, m., et al, 2018; diasa & karim, 2018). in relation to the above statement, maulana et al. (2019) states that skilled in reading is an advanced reading term (as opposed to beginning reading). he stated that reading comprehension is: (1) an effort to build a bridge between what is known and what is already known; (2) the process of understanding the meaning implied in words, sentences, and connecting texts; (3) in understanding the content of the text, the reader typically uses background knowledge, vocabulary, and grammatical knowledge, using certain strategies; (4) understanding is active and not passive; (5) comprehension is not just a matter of literally recording and reporting what one has read; (6) understanding constitutes a large number of decision-making; and (7) understanding is a dialogue between the writer and the reader. based on the above considerations, this study aims to analyze the texts in the solo pos daily newspaper, 2021 edition. questions and statements that arise whether the text that accompanies other texts has a relationship and parallels with other texts and also does the meaning contained in the text refer to the existing text or is it outside the existing text? how are the three of them related? these problems will be studied in this research. for this reason, this research takes the title correlation of text, cotext, and context, in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily newspaper. in general and simple, correlation means relationship. however, when it is developed further, it turns out that the meaning of correlation can not only be understood in this sense. in the exact world, correlation is one of the statistical analysis techniques used to find the relationship between two quantitative variables. the relationship between the two variables can occur because of a causal relationship or can also occur just by chance. the two variables are said to be correlated if changes in one variable will be followed by changes in the other variables regularly in the same direction (positive correlation) or opposite, which is often referred to as negative correlation (rohaman & mukhibat, 2017; koutchadé, i.s., 2017; wu, y., & pei, z., 2018). different exact, different language. although the meaning of correlation is that it cannot be separated from "relationship", but in terms of language, it contains different studies. maulana et al (2021; kim, s., & ma, t., 2018; milarisa, s., 2021; ) state that there are three main things concerning the problem of understanding correlation. the three main points include: 1) the relationship between opposing sounds in a series, for example: a series of voiceless sounds: [p, t, k. f] and a series of voiced sounds: [b, d, g, v], each of which has a voice and no sound correlation; 2) the relationship between language symbols and language sounds; when the symbol changes, the function will change; when the function changes, the symbol changes too; 3) syntactic typology; the similarity of characteristics of several language sectors in one language of a certain type, for example: vo type languages usually have prepositions, while ov type languages have post-positions, in this case there is a correlation between clause structure and phrase structure (muhtarom, 2020; milarisa, s., 2021: mimeau et al, 2019; miroud, s., 2021). based on the above problems, correlation in this case is correlation in the context of the use of one of the analytical techniques in linguistics which is used to find, analyze, parse the relationship between two cohesive and coherent variables in the news discourse in the solo pos daily newspaper 2021 edition. conceptually, a good discourse is a discourse whose structure pays attention to the relationship between sentences so that it can establish a relationship and coherence between these sentences. meanwhile, discourse is called a complete discourse if it contains complete concepts, ideas, thoughts, and ideas that can be understood by the reader (if it is written discourse) or by listeners (if the discourse is in the form of oral discourse). discourse is said to be the highest in structure or the largest because english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 893 discourse is formed from sentences or sentences that meet grammatical requirements and other discursive requirements (cohesion and coherence). in line with the above view (isodarus, p.b., 2017; riyadi, 2019; budiyono et al, 2018) state that language consists of form and meaning. meanwhile, the relationship in discourse can be divided into two types, namely the relationship of form called cohesion and the relationship of meaning or semantic relationship called coherence. from the statement above, it can be concluded that cohesion is the relationship of form (structure of birth) in a discourse. this outward structure is what he also calls the grammatical aspect of discourse. coherence is the relationship of meaning or semantic relationship in a discourse (isobarus, p.b., 2017; diasa, l.n., & karim, a., 2018; hermanto, 2017). isobarus further stated that in discourse analysis, the aspect of form or structure of discourse is called the grammatical aspect of discourse, while the inner structure of discourse is called the lexical aspect of discourse. in line with the statement above, tomlinson, b., & masuhara, h. (2018; tyas et al, 2019; razak a et al, 2021 ) state that "coherence is how the meaning of sentences in a discourse hung together". the statement implies that coherence is how the meaning of a sentence in a discourse establishes a coherent relationship. she further said: "a text can be said to be coherent when each successive sentence can be assigned wholly and without difficulty to one of the relationships". from the statement above, it can be concluded that a text can be said to be coherent if each successive sentence can be understood as a whole easily and without difficulty in each understanding. as long as it is easy to understand, understandable, there is a woven sentence, that is coherent. supriyadi, et al, 2022 say that text is a language unit that is mediated in writing or orally with a certain organizational structure to express meaning in a certain context. on the other hand, (budiyono et al, 2018; 2021) says that the text is a complete expression of the human mind in which there is a situation and context. isodarus, p.b. (1982) state that “text is: 1) the wording of something written or printed; 2) the main body a book or page, etc; as distinct illustration or notes; 3) a sentence from scripture used as the subject of a sermon or discussion; 4) a book or play etc, prescribe for study”. the opinion above is not much different from the opinion of isobarus, p.b. (2017) who states that text is 1) an abstract language unit; 2) a series of sentences, words, and so on, which make up speech; 3) written form of language; script; 4) utterances produced in human interaction. in connection with the above statement, (nuryanto et al, 2018; supriyadi, et al., 2022; suherdi et al, 2020; hambali, m., et al, 2021; inderawati, r., et al, 2021) state the text as follows. “text are always produced in context. while texts are produced by indivuals, indivuals always produce those texts as social subjects., in particular, social environment. in ather word, text are never completely individual or original, they always relate to social environment and to other text”. the above statement implies that the text is always produced in context. while texts are produced by individuals, individuals always produce texts as social subjects, especially social environments. in other words, texts are never truly individual or original, they are always related to the social environment and other texts from the statement above, it can be concluded that the text is a unit of language that can be mediated in writing or orally arranged systematically to express the meaning used in a particular context. method the subject in this study is the correlation of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily newspaper 2021. the elements related to the study of discourse in the news or information in the solo pos daily newspaper include text, cotext, and context. in this study, we will discuss the meaning and relationship between the three. the limitation of the study of these three elements is limited to the 2021 edition. in a newspaper or in other terms, a newspaper, solo pos, of course, cannot be separated from the existence of discourse. the discourse contained in the presentation, of course in it in the form of written news, contains the latest information, which is being discussed by the public; on the other hand can be in the form of opinions, short stories, poems, editorial comments, and others. in the discourse there is text, context, and context. these three things are the supporters of the discourse. the student book is designed to help students have a handbook that students can use in the learning process. in other words, the student book contains learning materials that sri budiyono, erry pranawa, & gunawan budi santoso the correlation of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily news paper edition 2021 894 students can learn as a source of learning. the design of the student book contains student assignments or activities that aim to encourage the enthusiasm of students to learn, especially in finding and obtaining important information related to teaching materials. the structures contained in the student book design includes introduction, about student books, table of contents, teaching materials and reading list. this research used a qualitative approach with content analysis method. the data in this study is a discourse that exists in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily. the data was collected by means of a documentation study and the results of this study were analyzed descriptively and qualitatively. basically data collection is done to obtain the information needed in order to achieve the research objectives. before conducting research, a researcher usually has a guess based on the theory he uses, this assumption is called a hypothesis. however, temporary assumptions that do not need to be proven true are called basic assumptions. conceptually, data collection techniques can be done by 1) interviews. interviews are data collection techniques that are carried out through face-to-face and direct questions and answers between researchers and resource persons; 2) observation, which is a complex data collection method because it involves various factors in its implementation; 3) questionnaire; and 4) the last is the document study. because this research is a literature study, the data collected is only focused on document studies. data analysis is the process of systematically searching and compiling the data obtained by using various data collection techniques such as interviews, questionnaires, observations, and documentation such as video/audio recordings by organizing the data and choosing which ones are important and studied, and making conclusions, so that easy to understand by yourself and others. the data analysis technique used in qualitative analysis has four stages, namely data collection, data reduction, data presentation, and the last step is drawing conclusions and verification. after the data is collected, reduced, presented, then analyzed descriptively qualitatively. qualitative descriptive analysis method is to analyze, describe, describe, and summarize various conditions, situations from various data collected in the form of interviews or observations about the problems studied that occur in the field. results and discussion the results of the research taken from a daily newspaper solo pos are marked with a code that is formed in a special code which means that the data is what number data (column 1), what newspaper (column 2) day and what market (column 3), what page (column 4), what day and month (column 5), and what year (column 6). for more details will be presented as follows. table 1. fifteenth data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, december 14th, 2021 15 sp sw 1 14 des 2021 pemilik dalem-dalem (rumah) pangeran di lingkungan keraton solo didorong mengembangkan aset tersebut secara kreatif dan inovatif. rencana renovasi aset terkadang terkendala masalah prosedur hingga konflik internal. owners of princely dalem (houses) in the solo palace are encouraged to develop these assets creatively and innovatively. asset renovation plans are sometimes constrained by procedural problems to internal conflicts. from the data above, it can be explained that the data is data number 15, taken from the solo pos daily newspaper, on tuesday wage, page 1, december 14, 2021. the first column clearly states the number of data. the second column means the name of the newspaper, the daily solo pos. however, the third column states that there are six days, namely monday (senin abbreviated s), tuesday (selasa abbreviated sl), wednesday (rabu abbreviated rb), thursday (kamis abbreviated as km), friday (jumat abbreviated jm), saturday (sabtu abbreviated sb), and sunday (minggu abbreviated m). meanwhile, the javanese daily (javanese market) stated that the pon market (abbreviated p), wage market (abbreviated w), kliwon market (abbreviated k), legi market (abbreviated l), and pahing market. (abbreviated as p). furthermore, the third column represents the page. as in the example above, the third column contains the number 1; this indicates that the data is on the third page. meanwhile, the fourth column contains “dec 14”, which states that the daily was published on december 14. the last column (fifth column) is “2021”, stating that the edition of the daily will be published in 2021. on the other hand, with regard to the abbreviation of the month names, it is stated as follows. january is abbreviated as “jan”; february is abbreviated as “feb”; march is abbreviated as “mrt”; april is abbreviated as english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 895 “app”; the month of may is abbreviated as “may” (without the abbreviation); the month of june is abbreviated as “jun”; july is abbreviated as “jul”; august is abbreviated as “agt”; september is abbreviated as “sep”; october is abbreviated as “oct”; november is abbreviated as "nov", and the last month is december which is abbreviated as "dec". meanwhile, for the mention of the year's name, it is enough to write it directly, without abbreviating it. for example, 2020 is still written in 2020. likewise for the following years. so, to write down data taken from 2021, it is enough to just write 2021. after understanding the meaning in the data code, the next step is to display the data that has been collected in this study. this collected data is referred to as pid or an abbreviation of pernyataan identifikasi data (data identification statement). the pids that have been collected will only discuss the basics. for data that has been sorted and selected, which is then used as the main material for analysis, it is called udaut (unit data utama/main data unit). this udaut is used as the main data to be used as evidence for analysis and discussion. udaut is an abbreviation of the term unit data utama (main data unit). the following is data that is still in the form of raw data, hereinafter referred to as a data identification statement. there are some data taken from several editions. the results of the discussion of each data were analyzed one by one. however, what needs to be known is that there are limitations to the themes that exist in each data. this study only analyzes data with a political theme. be it the policy of goods or prices, domestic or foreign politics. the content of the theme does not make the problem, the most important thing is the discussion in this study. what is more important is whether there is a match between the meanings in the text, the relationship between the meanings in the sentence, as well as the situation and conditions that underlie the text. in detail the language looks like the following below. table 2. first data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, november 11, 2021 1 sp sw 1 11 nov 2021 "kami segera mengumumkan keputusan itu. kami penginnya mempersingkat liburan sekolah, juga untuk aparatur sipil negara (asn) agar mereka tak pulang kampung. regulasi ini juga dimuat dalam instruksi menteri dalam negeri, kami tinggal melaksanakan. draf se juga sudah disusun, tinggal saya tandatangani," kata dia kepada wartawan, senin (29/11/2021). "we will immediately announce the decision. we want to shorten school holidays, as well as for state civil servants (aparatur sipil negara/asn) so that they do not return home. this regulation is also contained in the instruction of the minister of home affairs, we just have to implement it. the draft se has also been prepared, i just need to sign it ," he told reporters on monday (11/29/2021). from data 1, which was published on tuesday wage, first page, november 11, 2021, the word "we" will be difficult to interpret without looking at the previous sentence and the following sentences at the same time. the word "we" here refers to the "city government" even though in fact, the perpetrator, the speaker, is gibran rakabuming raka. however, it should be noted that the individual's name does not refer to himself, but to the mayor of surakarta. on the other hand there is the word “they”. the word "they" in the text does not mean the third person plural. however, the word "they" refers to the meaning of civil servants or better known in general as the state civil apparatus (aparatus sipil negara/ asn). next is the word “regulation”. indeed, in general, "regulation" means laws or regulations. however, in context, the word "regulation" more accurately refers to a statement regarding the explanation of shortening school holidays and asn so that they do not return home, all of which the mayor (gibran rakabuming raka) has realized. se (surat edaran/sircular letter) which regulates the question of the implementation of community activity restrictions (penerapan pembatasa kegioatan masyarakat/ppkm) for level 2 and level 3. next is the word "he" in the sentence he said to reporters, monday (29/11/2021). the word "he" in the sentence does not mean third person singular, but refers to him, as the mayor of surakarta (gigran rakabuming raka). table 3. second data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, november 11, 2021 2 sp sw 1 11 nov 2021 "ini sudah tertuang di se baru nanti, baik untuk se ppkm level 2 maupun se ppkm level 3 di akhir bulannya. kami tinggal sri budiyono, erry pranawa, & gunawan budi santoso the correlation of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily news paper edition 2021 896 melaksanakan. intinya kami tidak pengen ada lonjaksn kasus pasca-natal dan tahun baru," ucap gibran. "this has been stated in the new se later, both for se ppkm level 2 and se ppkm level 3 at the end of the month. we just have to carry out. the point is we don't want there to be a spike in cases post-christmas and new years," said gibran. in data 2, solo pos, monday wage, column 1, november 11th, 2021, there is the term “se.”. the word "se" does not mean just a "circular letter". however, more than that is the decree of the mayor of surakarta which regulates policies regarding ppkm (penerapan pembatasan kegiatan masyarakat/the implementation of community activity restrictions) level 2 and ppkm level 3. without seeing or following the previous and following sentences, the meaning of the circular will still be biased. in a sense it is not clear what is meant by the speaker and listener. table 4. third data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, november 11, 2021 3 sp sw 1 11 nov 2021 la kemudian meminta lagi masyarakat agar tidak bepergian saat libur natal dan tahun baru. "ya di rumah saja. kalau keluar seperlunya saja. jangan pulang kampung, hindari dululah berpergian di akhir tahun dan tahun baru ini. soal apakah libur sekolah setelah pembatasan itu? ya nanti dululah, sinau sik wis prei suwe rong tahun kok (ya nanti dulu, belajar dulu saja kan sudah libur dua tahun lebih)," kata dia. he then again asked the public not to travel during the christmas and new year holidays. "yes, just stay at home. if you go out as needed. don't go home, avoid traveling at the end of the year and this new year. what about school holidays after this restriction? , study first, it's been more than two years," he said. “he” in the data number 3 mentions (referrs) to the name gibran rakabuming raka. meanwhile, the restrictions refer to the implementation of level 2 and level 3 community activity restrictions (ppkm). here the word “he” has the same meaning as the word “ia” at the beginning of the sentence, which refers to gibran rakabuming raka. table 5. fourth data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, november 11, 2021 4 sp sw 1 11 nov 2021 "kami sudah sosialisasi untuk rencana penerapan level 3 nanti. dan yang paling ditekankan, batasan tutup usaha rencananya pukul 21.00 wib sejak 24 desember hingga 2 januari 2022," ucapnya. "we have socialized the plan for the implementation of level 3 later. and what is most emphasized is that the business closing limit is planned at 21.00 wib from december 24 to january 2, 2022," he said. the word "we" refers to the surakarta city civil service police unit (satpol pp). furthermore, the statement "he said" refers to the head of the solo city satpol pp, arif darmawan. in the context of "we are just implementing" in paragraph three the word "implementing" refers to the circular letter regarding the implementation of restrictions on community activities (ppkm). furthermore, the sentence "the point is we don't want a spike in cases post-christmas and new year", in paragraph three what is meant by a spike in cases refers to a spike in covid-19 cases. "we have socialized the level 3 implementation plan later." the word "level 3" refers to the implementation of restrictions on community activities (ppkm). table 6. the fifth data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, november 29, 2021 5 sp sw 1 29 nov 2021 langkah penutupan dilakukan seiring merebaknya varian omicron yang dikhawatirkan memicu gelombang baru covid 19 di berbagai negara. the closure was carried out in line with the outbreak of the omicron variant which is feared to trigger a new wave of covid-19 in various countries. the meaning of the word "wave" in data number 5 above means the emergence of a new virus covid 19 which refers to the more virulent omiron variant that comes on a large scale. this causes panic among residents, both from government officials and local residents where they live. caution is of course highly expected. wherever they are, of course, keep their distance, avoid crowds, always wash their hands, reduce mobility, and always maintain health. this step is the safest and most convenient way to deal with the new covid-19 variant. in terms of meaning in context, there is no problem in data number 5 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 897 yet. table 7. the sixth data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, november 29, 2021 6 sp sw 1 29 nov 2021 penerbitan sp se ini secara khusus dilakukan dalam rangka pencegahan penyebaran varian baru sarscov 2 penyebab covid -19, yaitu b.1.1.c29 atau omicron. the issuance of sp se (warrant –circular letter) was specifically carried out in order to prevent the spread of the new variant of sarscov 2 the cause of covid-19, namely b.1.1.c29 or omicron. data number 6 shows that in understanding the meaning or intent of the statement, it is necessary to understand the previous and following sentences. readers or speech partners will not know the meaning of sp se. they (readers / speech partners) will understand the meaning after knowing the government. both local and central government. sp se (warrant – circular letter) turns out to contain the meaning of a warrant addressed to its citizens in the form of a circular. table 8. seventh data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, december 13, 2021 7 sp sw 1 13 dec 2021 “perlu komitmen untuk menghidupkan aktivitas di dalem pangeran lewat sejumlah kreativitas. banyak jalan untuk itu apabila pemilik punya itikad baik,” ujar bambang saat berbincang dengan espos, senin (13/12/2021). “it takes a commitment to revive activities in the prince's palace through some creativity. there are many ways to do that if the owner has good intentions," said bambang when talking to espos, monday (12/13/2021). data number 7 shows that there are several terms that need special understanding, such as: “commitment”, “dalem pangeran”, and “espos”. the "commitment" in data number 7 means that ideally there is an agreement between the palace and its citizens and even the courtiers who must know, understand, respect, and at the same time comply with what has been decided through a mutually agreed decision. while the term "dalem prince" refers to everything that is in the princely environment, be it the rules, agreements, and even decisions. lastly, in terms of context, the term “espos” refers to a solo pos daily newspaper. table 9. eight data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, december 13, 2021 8 sp sw 1 13 dec 2021 bambang mencontohkan dalem purwohamijayan yang kini semakin mentereng setelah direnovasi oleh pemiliknya. selain berfungsi untuk edukasi sejarah, bangunan yang dulu bernama dalem brotodiningrat itu menjadi gedung resepsi serta penginapan. bambang gave the example of dalem purwohamijayan, which is now more classy after being renovated by the owner. in addition to functioning for historical education, the building, which was formerly known as dalem brotodiningrat, became a reception and lodging building. the word "dalem purwohamijayan" is a place to live as well as a building that can be used for anything, including wedding ceremonies. the building was formerly called “dalem brotodiningrat”. besides functioning as a “reception building”, the building can also function as “historical education”, in the sense that it can be used as a place for education about history. table 10. ninth data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, december 13, 2021 9 sp sw 1 13 dec 2021 bambang tidak meminta pengelola dalem pangeran lain menjiplak konsep purwohamijayan. menurut dia, pengelola perlu menggali karakter bangunan, serta unsur kebaruan dalam pemberdayaan fungsi dalem pangeran. bambang did not ask other princes' courtiers to copy purwohamijayan's concept. according to him, managers need to explore the character of the building, as well as elements of novelty in empowering the functions of the prince's palace. the building manager "dalem purwohamijayan" (mr. bambang) does not expect the building manager to imitate or imitate the activities or things related to the activities carried out at the "purwohamijayan building". “he” (mr. bambang) hopes that other edung managers can be creative on their own, innovate on their own, and develop their own management concepts based on their own creativity. table 11. tenth data from solo pos, tuesday wage, first page, december 13, 2021 sri budiyono, erry pranawa, & gunawan budi santoso the correlation of text, co-text, and context in the solo pos daily news paper edition 2021 898 10 sp sw 1 13 dec 2021 “seperti dalem suryohamijayan itu, infonya akan berfungsi sebagai museum setelah selesai renovasi tahun depan. bukan tak mungkin dalem-dalem pangeran nantinya bisa menjadi galeri seni, kafe, atau wedangan yang khas. pengembangan fungsi ini penting agar dalem pangeran bisa tetap lestari.” “like dalem suryohamijayan, the information will function as a museum after the renovation is complete next year. it is not impossible that the prince's palaces will later become art galleries, cafes, or special wedangan. the development of this function is important so that the prince's palace can remain sustainable”. data 10 explains that “dalem suryohamijayan” will reportedly also function as a museum, after the dalem is renovated. this shows the creativity of other managers, which allows them to play the function of the dalem (building) in other positive things, such as: art galleries, cafes, and even wedangan with a unique menu or concept, which is different from other wedangan (traditional food stall). conclusion there are two main statements that answer the two questions in this study. the first is 1) what are the results of the text, context, and context correlation analysis in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily newspaper? and 2) is the correlation of text, context, and context in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily newspaper sufficiently cohesive and coherent? in general (almost all) of the discourse in the 2021 edition of solo pos daily, the structure has paid attention to the relationships between sentences so that links and coherence can be established between these sentences. meanwhile, in terms of form, it can be called a complete discourse. it is said to be a complete discourse because it contains complete concepts, ideas, thoughts and ideas that can be understood by readers (which happens to be written discourse) or listeners (if the discourse is oral discourse). all structures are grammatical, in the sense that they are arranged grammatically. from the correct arrangement of language, the pattern of arrangement is correct, according to the grammar so that it can be concluded that the grammar is correct. what is the impact if the speech is not coherent and cohesive? cohesion and coherence have a role, namely to maintain the interrelationships between sentences, so that the discourse becomes cohesive, not just a set of sentences where each sentence contains a different topic of discussion, but one element in the text which must state the concept of bonding. furthermore, from the side of coherence. in line with the statement maulana (2019) states that "coherence is how the meaning of sentences in a discourse hung together". the statement implies that coherence is how the meaning of a sentence in a discourse establishes a coherent relationship. furthermore, he also said that "a text can be said to be coherent when each successive sentence can be assigned wholly and without difficulty to one of the relationships". this statement can be said that a text can be said to be coherent when each successive sentence can be given/understood as a whole and without difficulty in any of the relationships. based on the statement above, it can be concluded that a text can be said to be coherent if each successive sentence can be understood as a whole easily and without difficulty in each understanding. as long as it is easy to understand, understandable, there is a woven sentence, that is coherent. almost all the speeches/statements in the 2021 edition of the solo pos daily newspaper, are all easy to understand, sequence, support each other, and more importantly support one concept. indeed there are small parts that are difficult to understand or understand. this requires understanding the situation and culture. this statement is proven in data number 1, solo pos newspaper, which was published on monday wage, page 1, november 11, 2021. data that reads as follows below will make it difficult for readers, listeners, and speech partners. "we will announce the decision immediately. we want to shorten school holidays, as well as for state civil servants (asn) so that they do not return home. this regulation is also contained in the instruction of the minister of home affairs, we just have to implement it. the draft se has also been prepared, i just need to sign it ," he told reporters on monday (11/29/2021). to facilitate understanding related to the word "we" (which means mayor of surakarta (gibran rakabuming raka), "state civil apparatus" (civil servants), "draft se" (a draft containing the solo/surakarta city government policy circular, and the word “dia” which means the mayor of surakarta (gibran rakabuming raka), of course, all of them, both the speaker, the interlocutor/partner, and at the same time the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 10, issue 3, october 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 899 reader, must know the situation and conditions, and even if necessary the cultural pattern. that is why, in linguistics (especially the sociolinguistic branch of science) you must know mackey's concept of "who speaks, what language, to whom, and when?". who is speaking, to whom the conversation is addressed, in what language, and where. this is what makes understanding easy, communication directed, and meaningful. references akbarjono, a., melati, p., martina, f., syafryadin. 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(2017). need analysis: the writing skill instructional material context for academic purposes. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 59–70. https://www.asjp.cerist.dz/en/presentationrevue https://www.asjp.cerist.dz/en/presentationrevue https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v10i3.31768 http://dx.doi.org/1033578/pjr.v5i3.8272 https://www.kajianpustaka.com/2019/10/pengertian-fungsi-karakteristik-dan-jenis-surat-kabar.html https://www.kajianpustaka.com/2019/10/pengertian-fungsi-karakteristik-dan-jenis-surat-kabar.html https://www.kajianpustaka.com/2019/10/pengertian-fungsi-karakteristik-dan-jenis-surat-kabar.html https://ejournal.stitpn.ac.id/index.php/fondatia https://ejournal.stitpn.ac.id/index.php/fondatia https://doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v10i1.24989 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 391 whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners sri mujayanah universitas muhammadiyah gresik, indonesia email: srijaya558@gmail.com nirwanto maruf universitas muhammadiyah gresik, indonesia email: nirwanto.maruf@umg.ac.id slamet asari universitas muhammadiyah gresik, indonesia email: asari70@umg.ac.id apa citation: mujayanah, s., maruf, n., & asari, s. (2023). whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 391404. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7712 received: 22-02-2023 accepted: 23-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction the widespread adoption of mobile communication technologies, such as whatsapp, has transformed the way we communicate and access information (erduran, 2020; saritepeci, duran et al., 2019) . but what impact does this have a language learning and reading comprehension, particularly among english as a foreign language (efl) learners (zulkanain et al., 2020; kavoshian et al., 2020)? this study aims to explore the impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners in indonesia, and identify the potential ways in which whatsapp use. the use of mobile communication technologies for language learning has received increasing attention in recent years (jankauskaite, 2015; enyama et al., 2021; motteram et al., 2020), with a growing body of research suggesting that these technologies can be effective tools for language learning (maruf & anjely, 2020; motteram et al., 2020). however, the impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners has been largely unexplored (saritepeci et al., 2019; fischer & yang, 2022), and there is a need for more research in this area. while some studies have found a positive relationship between the use of mobile technologies and reading comprehension (zou & ou, 2020; oakley et al., 2022; zhou, 2020), it is not clear whether this relationship holds true for whatsapp use may facilitate or hinder reading comprehension. this study aims to address this gap in the literature by identifying any potential impacts of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners in indonesia. using a combination of abstract: the study aimed to explore the impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among english as a foreign language (efl) learners in indonesia. results from the questionnaire showed that a majority of the participants used whatsapp for reading activities often or very often, with new articles, fiction or literature, and non-fiction books being the most common types of reading materials accessed. the majority of efl learners spent 1-2 hours on whatsapp for reading activities, and cited convenience and accessibility as the main reasons for using the platform. the results also showed a significant number of efl learners believed that using whatsapp had improved their reading comprehension skills, although some participants did not find it to be an effective tool. the most commonly cited advantage of using whatsapp for reading activities was convenience and accessibility, followed by engagement with peers and opportunities for discussion and exchange of ideas. meanwhile, the most commonly cited disadvantage was distraction from other conversation or notifications, limited access to a wide range of reading materials, and lack of interaction with the teacher or tutor. the results also indicated that the majority of efl learners improved their reading comprehension skills over time when using whatsapp for reading activities, with a focus on reading texts or materials, participating in group discussions, and completing reading comprehension exercises. the study results provide valuable insights into the impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners and could help identify areas for improvement in utilizing the platform for reading activities. keywords: elf learners; reading comprehension; whatsapp use. sri mujayanah, nirwanto maruf, & slamet asari whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners 392 quantitative and qualitative methods, which include questionnaire and interviews and to examine the perceptions and experiences of efl learners regarding the use of whatsapp for reading activities. the result of this study has the potential to inform the development of recommendation and best practices for educators and policymakers interested in promoting the effective use of whatsapp and other technologies for language learning. the results may also have implications for our understanding of the relationship between technology use and reading comprehension more generally (nowruzi, 2021; kazakbaeva, 2021), and may contribute to the wider research on technology-enhanced language learning. a growing body of research suggests that these technologies can be effective tools for language learning (lyu & qi 2020; chen, 2022; keengwe et al., 2014; zhang et al., 2022; tai & ting, 2016; lai et al., 2022, admiraal, 2022), with some studies finding a positive relationship between the use of mobile technologies and reading comprehension (zhou & yadav 2017; moon et al., 2017; park et al., 2020). however, the impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among english as a foreign language (efl) learners has been largely unexplored, and there is a need for more research in this area (zhang & li, 2020). the use of mobile technologies for language learning can be beneficial in a number of ways (golonka et al., 2014; (lee, 2022; balasubramanian et al., 2010; booton et al., 2021). for examples, mobile technologies can provide learners with access to authentic and diverse language materials, can facilitate communication and collaboration with peers and teachers, and can support self-directed learning (shadiev et al., 2020; tlili et al., 2022; rodríguez & cumming, 2017). however, there is also evidence to suggest that the use of mobile technologies can be distracting or overwhelming for learners, and can lead to reduced attention and cognitive load (hyman et al., 2014; lee et al., 2021). moreover, the relationship between technology use and reading comprehension may be complex and multifaceted, and may depend on a range of factors such as the type of technologies used, the context of use, and characteristics of the learners. however, little is known about the specific impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners, and there is a need for more research in this area (tragant et al., 2020; zhang & li, 2020; barianty et al., 2022). there are several limitations in the existing literature on the relationship between whatsapp use and reading comprehension among efl learners. first, most of the studies on this topic have been conducted in english-speaking countries, and there is a lack of research on the use of whatsapp and other mobile technologies for language learning in non-english -speaking contexts (alamer & al khateeb, 2021; barrot, 2021). second, the existing literature has primarily focused on the use of mobile technologies for language learning in general, rather than on the specific impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension (grant, 2019; keengwe & bhargava, 2014). finally, the research methods used in the existing studies have been diverse, making it difficult to compare and synthesize the findings (ma, 2017; barrot, 2021). another literature suggests that the use of mobile technologies, such as whatsapp, can be effective tools for language learning, but the relationship between technology use and reading comprehension may be complex and between technologies use and reading comprehension may be complex and multifaceted (ma, 2017; shah et al., 2021). there is a need for more research on the specific impact of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners, particularly in non-english-speaking countries. furthermore, it suggests that the use of mobile technologies can be beneficial for language learning and reading comprehension, it is important to note that the relationship between technology use and reading comprehension may not be straightforward or universal (taghizadeh and ejtehadi, 2021; koh et al., 2010; wu and wang, 2015). some studies have found a positive relationship between the use of mobile technologies and reading comprehension (hyman et al., 2014; yang, 2018), while others have found no significant relationship (booton et al., 2021; golonka et al., 2014). it is important to note that the relationship between whatsapp use and reading comprehension may be influenced by a range of factors such as the type technology used, the context of use, and the characteristics of the learners (saritepeci et al., 2019; lyu & qi, 2020). in addition, the use of mobile technologies for language learning may be associated with certain challenges or risks, such as reduced attention and cognitive load (lyu & qi, 2020; lai et al., 2022) ), or the risk of exposure to inappropriate or inappropriate context (koh et al., 2010). therefore, it is important to carefully consider these potential risks and challenges when using english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 393 mobile technologies for language learning, and to adopt strategies to mitigate these risks and optimize the benefits of technologies use (keengwe & bhargava, 2014; grant, 2019; gumbheer et al., 2022). in conclusion, the literature reviews suggests that the relationship between whatsapp use and reading comprehension among efl learners is an under-explored area that warrants further investigation. this study aims to fill the gap in the literature by exploring the relationship between whatsapp use and reading comprehension among efl learners in indonesia, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. the research questions for this study are: (1) what are the impacts of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners? (2) what are the learners’ perceptions and experiences on the use of whatsapp for reading activities? method this study used a mixed-methods research design, which combined both quantitative and qualitative research methods to obtain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the research topic cresswell et al., 2003; schoonenboom & johnson, 2017) . this approach allows for the collection and analysis of data from various sources and perspectives, providing a more nuanced and holistic picture of the topic being studied (dagnino et al., 2020; baran, 2019). the use of a mixedmethods research design allowed for the triangulation of data and the integration of different perspectives (armitage, 2007; baran, 2019), providing a more robust understanding of the impacts of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners. the study participants included 250 participants (145 males and 105 females) were recruited from various schools across different regions of indonesia. the participants ranged in age from 14 to 19 representing a diverse group from different secondary schools located on major islands in indonesia. the participants were asked about their usage of mobile technologies, specifically whatsapp in english as a foreign language (efl) learning for reading comprehension. the participants were required to have basic understanding of using whatsapp and must have used whatsapp for at least six months in their learning process. moreover, the participants must have used whatsapp in efl learning for reading comprehension activities with their students. the participants who were found not to meet these criteria were excluded from the study. all participants were provided with information about the study and asked to give informed consent before participating. the research procedure for this study involved several steps, designed to ensure the reliability and validity of the data collected, and to ensure that the research questions are answered in a comprehensive and meaningful way. the first step in the research procedure was the recruitment of the study sample, and to ensure a representative sample, 250 participants (145 males and 105 females) were recruited from various schools across different regions of indonesia. the second step in the research procedure was the administration of questionnaire to gather quantitative data about whatsapp use and reading comprehension. the third step in the research procedure was the collection of data on participants’ whatsapp use and reading activities, as well as their perceptions and experiences regarding the use of whatsapp for reading activities. this data collected using a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques, including surveys (using closed-ended questionnaire) and interviews, and administered to a subset of the sample in order to provide a rich and detailed understanding of the ways in which whatsapp use may be related to reading comprehension among efl learners. the fourth step in the research procedure was the analysis of the data collected. the data was analyzed using appropriate statistical and qualitative analysis techniques in order to answer the research questions and to achieve the research objectives of the study. the study utilized a combination of two data collection instruments; a close-ended questionnaire and in-depth interviews. the closeended questionnaire was comprised of multiple choice and likert scale questions that were designed to assess the participants’ usage of whatsapp and its impact on their reading comprehension skills. the questionnaire was carefully developed based on relevant items that would effectively measure the participants’ use of whatsapp and its impact on their reading comprehension abilities. to ensure the questionnaire was of high quality, the items were reviewed and edited by experts from three different universities. the feedback received from these academics was used to improve the content validity of the questionnaire items. after this process, the questionnaire was pilot tested on a small sample of subjects to measure its reliability. the questionnaire items were structured into several categories, including sri mujayanah, nirwanto maruf, & slamet asari whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners 394 the frequency and duration of whatsapp use for reading activities, reason for using whatsapp for reading activities, perception of the effectiveness of whatsapp for reading comprehension skills, advantages and disadvantages of using whatsapp for reading activities, changes in reading comprehension skills over time, and the type of reading materials accessed on whatsapp. the close-ended questionnaire was found to have adequate level of reliability, as indicated by cronbach’s alpha coefficients of 0.84 and 0.88. the questionnaire was delivered and conducted online, using a secure platform, to the 250 participants across various regions of indonesia. this allowed for the collection of data in a convenient and efficient manner, regardless of the participants’ physical locations. the in-depth interviews were conducted to complement and deepen the understanding of the results obtained from the close-ended questionnaire. the interview questions were based on the categories explored in the questionnaire and aimed to gain a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of the participants’ experiences using whatsapp for reading activities and its impact on their reading comprehension. a total of 120 participants were interviewed. to ensure the content validity of the interview questions, the author sought the opinions of three experts in the field and took into consideration their suggestions and comments. furthermore, a pilot study was conducted with a small group of participants to identity any potential strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement of the interview questions. this helped to refine the questions and ensure their relevance and suitability for the study. the data collected for this study were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. they were analyzed to address the research questions of this study. the close-ended questionnaire data were analyzed using statistical package for the social sciences (spss) techniques to identify any impacts of whatsapp use on reading comprehension, and other factors that may affect reading comprehension. the data collected form the in-depth interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis, which involves identifying and interpreting patterns and themes in the data. the transcripts of the interviews were coded and analyzed using a coding framework that reflected the research questions a main theme of the study. the codes were used to identify patterns, and in the data and create a summary of the findings. the interview was conducted by the author with the assistance of one assistant, using the zoom cloud session. the author conducted the interview by first explaining the purpose of the study to the participants and assuring them of the confidentiality of their responses. the author then asked the participants to reflect on their experiences with using whatsapp for reading comprehension activities. the participants were asked to think back to when they first started using whatsapp for reading activities, and to discuss their experience with the author. the author then asked the participants questions from the interview items related to the frequency and duration of whatsapp use for reading activities, reasons for using whatsapp for reading activities, perception on the effectiveness of whatsapp for reading comprehension skills, advantages and disadvantages of using whatsapp for reading activities, changes in reading comprehension skills over time, and the type of reading materials accessed on whatsapp. the participants were asked to answer each question as fully and honestly as possible. after the interview, the author analysed the data collected from the participants and identified patterns and the themes in their responses. this information was then used to understand the learners’ perspectives on the usage of the whatsapp for reading comprehension activities. results and discussion the findings of this study were derived based on the research questions that were posed at the beginning of the study. these findings provide insight into the impact of whatsapp on and reading comprehension among efl learners in indonesia and learners’ perceptions and experiences on the use of whatsapp for reading activities. research question #1: what are the impacts of whatsapp use on reading comprehension among efl learners? the results of the questionnaire indicate that a majority of efl learners use whatsapp for reading activities often or very often (53%), with news articles (53%), fiction or literature (47%), non-fiction books (40%) being the most common types of reading materials accessed. these results show that a majority of participants frequently utilize whatsapp as a platform for reading activities, indicating that it is a common tool for reading materials among the participants, as showed in tables 1 below: english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 395 table 1. the use of whatsapp for reading activities use of whatsapp for reading activities frequency often 53% very often 53% sometimes 27% rarely 13% never 7% table 2. time spent on whatsapp for reading activities times spent (hours) frequency less 1 hour 20% 1 2 hours 40% 2 – 3 hours 30% more than 3 hours 10% the result on table 2 shows that 40% of english as foreign language (efl) learners spend 1-2 hours on whatsapp for reading activities, followed by 30% who spend 2-3 hours, 20% who spend less than 1 hour, and only 10% who spend more than 3 hours. this suggests that the majority of efl learners spend a moderate amount of time on whatsapp for reading activities. table 3. reason for using whatsapp reasons for using whatsapp frequency convenience 70% accessibility 65% recommendation from peers or family 50% interest in the reading material 40% others 15% the results in table 3 indicate that the majority of efl learners (70%) use whatsapp for reading activities due to convenience, followed by accessibility (65%). half of the respondents (50%0 reported that they use whatsapp for reading due to recommendations from peers or family. around 40% of the learners use whatsapp for reading because they have an interest in the reading material. the remaining 15% of respondents have other reasons for using whatsapp for reading activities. table 4. perception of the effectiveness of whatsapp for reading perceptions of effectiveness frequency effective 80% not effective 20% the results in table 4 show that the majority of efl learners, 80% perceived that using whatsapp for reading activities had an effective impact on their reading comprehension skills. however, 20% of the participants did not believe that using whatsapp was effective in improving their comprehension skills. these findings suggest that while a significant number of efl learners believe that using whatsapp has improved their reading comprehension, there are still some who do not find to be a useful tool. this highlights the need for further research to better understand the relationship between whatsapp use and reading comprehension among efl learners. table 5. advantages of using whatsapp for reading activities the advantages frequency convenience and accessibility 80% engagement with peers or classmates 73% opportunities for discussion and exchange others 76% 7% the above table show that the advantages of using whatsapp for reading activities, as reported by efl learners. the majority of respondents (80%) cited convenience and accessibility as the main advantage of using whatsapp for reading. this may be due to the widespread availability of the platform and its ability to allow for seamless communication and access to reading materials from anywhere. another advantage reported by a significant number of respondents (73%) was the engagement with peers or classmates, indicating that whatsapp can provide an opportunity for social interaction and collaboration around reading materials. a similar number of respondents (76%) also cited opportunities for discussion and exchange of ideas as a benefit of using whatsapp for reading activities. table 6. disadvantages of using whatsapp for reading activities disadvantages of using whatsapp for reading activities frequency distractions from other conversations or notifications 87% limited access to a wide range of reading materials 80% lack of interaction with the teacher or tutor 73% others 7% the results show that the most commonly cited disadvantage of using whatsapp for reading activities among efl learners is distraction from other conversations or notification (87%). this can hinder their ability to concentrate and comprehend the reading materials. moreover, 80% of the participants reported limited access to a wide range of reading materials on whatsapp, which may limit their exposure to different types of texts and genres. another challenge reported by 73% of the participants is the lack of interaction with the sri mujayanah, nirwanto maruf, & slamet asari whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners 396 teacher or tutor, which can impact their understanding and engagement with the reading materials. the remaining 7% cited other disadvantages not listed in the options. table 7. change in reading comprehension skill over time change in reading comprehension skill over time frequency improved 80% stayed the same 13% decreased 7% the results of table 7 shows that the majority of efl learners (80%) reported an improvement in their reading comprehension skill over time. a smaller percentage (13%) reported that their skills have stayed the same, and only 7% reported a decrease in their reading comprehension skills. this suggests that for the majority of efl learners, using whatsapp for reading activities has had a positive impact on their reading comprehension skills. table 8. reading activities performed on whatsapp reading activities performed on whatsapp frequency reading tests or materials participating in group discussion or debates on texts or materials 80% 73% completing reading comprehension exercises or quizzes 76% others 7% the results as indicated on table 8 below show that the majority of efl learners who use whatsapp for reading activities primarily engage in reading texts or materials (80%). this is followed by participating in group discussions or debates on texts or materials (73%) and completing reading comprehension exercises or quizzes (76%). the remaining 7% of efl learners engage in other reading activities on whatsapp. these results indicate that efl learners use whatsapp for a variety of reading activities, with a focus on reading texts or materials and practicing their comprehension skills through group discussions and exercises. table 9. challenges or limitation of using whatsapp for reading activities challenges or limitation frequency limited access to reading materials 65% distraction from notification and chats 55% technical issues 45% others 35% the results of this table show that the most common challenges or limitation experienced by efl learners when using whatsapp for reading activities is limited access to reading materials, with 65% of respondents indicating this as an issue. 55% of respondents reported distractions from notification and chats as a challenge, while 45% reported technical issues as a limitation. 35% of respondents indicated other challenges or limitation not mentioned in the table. these results suggest that while whatsapp may provide an accessible platform for reading activities, there are still significant challenges and limitations that efl learners face when using the platform fore reading activities. table 10. confidence in reading comprehension skills confident in reading comprehension skills frequency very confident 50% confident 30% not confident 20% the results of table 10 indicate that 50% of respondents are very confident in their reading comprehension skills, 30% are confident, and 20% are not confident. this suggests that a majority of the respondents feel positively about their ability to comprehend what they read, but a significant minority is uncertain about their skills. the survey results could help identify areas where these individuals feel they need improvement and suggest ways to build their confidence in their reading comprehension skills. table 11. difficulties in understanding text or materials difficulties in understanding texts or materials frequency vocabulary 70% grammar pronunciation 60% 50% often 20% according to the results in table 11, the most common difficulty in understanding text or materials among the respondents is vocabulary, with 70% of the respondents experiencing this issue. 60% of the respondents reported grammar as their second biggest challenge in understanding text or materials, followed by pronunciation with 50%. the remaining 20% of the respondents reported other difficulties in understanding text or materials. this result highlights the challenges that english as a foreign language (efl) learners face when it comes to comprehending reading english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 397 materials, and the areas they need to focus on to improve their reading comprehension skills. table 12. coping strategies of difficulties in understanding texts or materials coping strategies frequency re-reading the text 40% asking for helps 30% using a dictionary 30% others 10% according to the data presented in table 12, the coping strategies used by the participants when they faced difficulties in understanding texts or materials. the results show that the most common coping strategy used is re-reading the text, with 40% of participants indicating that they use this method. 30% of participants indicated that they ask for help when faced with difficulties in understanding texts or materials, while 20% use a dictionary to understand the material. the remaining 10% of participants use other methods to cope with difficulties in understanding texts or materials. table 13. strategies for improving reading comprehension skills strategies for improving reading comprehension skills frequency practice reading texts or materials in english 87% seeking feedback from the teacher or tutor 80% using online resources or tools 73% others 7% the results from table 13 show that the majority of respondents, 87% believed that practicing reading texts or materials in english was the most effective strategy for improving their reading comprehension skills. 80% of respondents believed that seeking feedback from a teacher was also a key factor in improving their skills, while 73% said they used online resources or tools. only 7% of respondents reported using other strategies to improve their reading comprehension. table 14. methods of practicing reading comprehension skills methods of practicing reading comprehension skills frequency reading texts or materials and answering comprehension questions 80% participating in group discussion or debates on texts or materials 73% completing reading comprehension exercises or quizzes 76% others 7% the results of table 14 show the methods used by participants to practice their reading comprehension skills. 80% of the participants reported that they practice their reading comprehension skills by reading texts or materials and answering comprehension questions. 73% of the participants reported that they participate in group discussion or debates on texts or materials, while 76% that they complete reading comprehension exercises or quizzes. the remaining 7% reported using other methods to practices their reading comprehension skills. this indicates that the majority of the participants prefer to practice their reading comprehension skills through reading activities, group discussions and exercises, rather than using other methods. table 15. methods of evaluating reading comprehension skills methods of evaluating reading comprehension skills frequency asking the teacher or tutor for feedback 87% comparing understanding of texts or materials with classmates or peers 80% taking online reading comprehension quizzes or tests 73% others 7% the results of table 15 show the methods used by individuals to evaluate their reading comprehension skills. 87% respondents said they ask their teacher for feedback, while 80% said they compare their understanding of texts or materials with classmates or peers. moreover, 73% reported taking online reading comprehension quizzes or texts as a method of evaluating their skills. only 7% of respondents reported using other methods to evaluate their reading comprehension skills. this indicates that the majority of individuals prefer to seek feedback from trusted sources such as teachers or peers, or to use online tools to assess their skills. table 16. types of reading material accessed on whatsapp types of reading materials frequency new articles 65% fiction or literature 55% poetry non-fiction books magazines others 45% 25% 20% 10% according to the data in table 16, the types of reading materials that english as a foreign sri mujayanah, nirwanto maruf, & slamet asari whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners 398 language (efl) learner access on whatsapp. the data reveals that the majority of efl learners, 65% access news articles on whatsapp. a slightly smaller group, 55% access fiction or literature on the platform, while 45% access poetry. only 25% of efl learners access non-fiction books on whatsapp, while 20% access magazines. the remaining 10% access others types of reading materials. the results suggest that a significant proportion on efl learners are using whatsapp to access various types of reading materials. this indicates the potential for whatsapp to be an effective tool for reading activities and to enhance the reading comprehension skills of efl learners. table 17. impact on reading comprehension impact on reading comprehension frequency positive 50% neutral 25% negative 25% table 17 indicates that the results of the impact of using whatsapp for reading activities on reading comprehension. the data shows that 50% of the participants reported a positive impact on their reading comprehension as a result of using whatsapp for reading activities. this suggest that using whatsapp for reading activities can be beneficial for improving reading comprehension skills. however, 25% of the participants reported a neutral impact, meaning that they did not notice any significance change in their reading comprehension skills. moreover, 25% of the participants reported a negative impact, indicating that using whatsapp for reading activities may not be suitable for them or may have negatively impacted their reading comprehension. overall, these results suggest that the impact may vary among individuals, and further research is needed to understand the factors that influence this relationship. research question #2: what are the learners’ perceptions and experiences on the use of whatsapp for reading activities? the purpose of this interview was to examine the perceptions and experiences of efl learners on the usage of whatsapp for reading comprehension activities. the interview was conducted with a sample of 120 participants and aimed to gather insights on the frequency and duration of whatsapp use for reading, reasons for using whatsapp for reading activities, perception of the effectiveness of whatsapp for reading comprehension skills, advantages and disadvantages of using whatsapp for reading activities, changes in reading comprehension skills over time, and the type of reading materials accessed on whatsapp. the results show that the frequency and duration of whatsapp use for reading activities were majority of the participants (n=80) reported using whatsapp several times a week for reading activities. the average duration of usage was around 30 minutes to an hour per session. these results indicate that whatsapp is a commonly used platform for reading activities and that learners are engaging in these activities for substantial periods of time. excerpt 1 “i usually use whatsapp for reading activities once or twice a week for about 30 minutes to one hour at a time. i find to be a convenient way to stay engaged with my reading materials and also interact with my classmates and teacher.” excerpt 2 “i use whatsapp every day for reading activities. it’s a great way to spend my free time, and i enjoy chatting with my classmates about the text we are reading. i spend about an hour a day using whatsapp for reading activities.” furthermore, when asked about the reasons for using whatsapp for reading activities, the majority of participants (n=70) reported that it was convenient and easily accessible. they also cited the availability of a wide range of reading materials such as audio, text, and image, and the ability to collaborate with peers as other factors that influenced their decision to use whatsapp for reading activities. excerpt 3 “i use whatsapp for reading activities because it’s fun and interactive way to learn. i enjoy discussing the text with my classmates and teacher, and it helps me understand the material better.” excerpt 4 “i use whatsapp for reading activities because it’s convenient and accessible. i can easily access my reading materials on my phone and join the group chat with classmates and teacher.” when it comes to the perception of the effectiveness of whatsapp for reading comprehension skills, a majority of the participants (n=70) reported a positive experience and believe english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 399 that using whatsapp has improved their reading comprehension skills. participants cited factors such as the ability to interact with reading materials in different formats, the ability to connect with others for discussion and support, and the opportunity for repeated exposure to reading materials as contributing to their improved reading comprehension. these results suggests that whatsapp is seen as a valuable tool for improving reading comprehension skill among learners. excerpt 5 “i think whatsapp is a highly effective tool for improving my reading comprehension skills. i find that the discussions and interaction with my classmates and teacher help me better understand the text.” excerpt 6 “i don’t think whatsapp is an effective other methods of reading comprehension. i prefer reding the text on my own and then discussing it with my classmates and teacher in person.” when the author asked about the advantages and disadvantages of using whatsapp for reading activities, the most commonly cited advantage of using whatsapp for reading activities was the convenience and accessibility of the platform (n=80). other advantages included the availability of reading materials in various formats and the ability to connect with others for discussion and support. also, whatsapp has increased their motivation to read and has made reading more enjoyable. the most commonly cited disadvantage was the potential for distraction such as notification from other apps or groups that sometimes interfere with their concentration. excerpt 7 “the advantages of using whatsapp for reading activities include being able to easily access reading materials, having discussions with classmates and teacher, and being able to interact in real-time. the disadvantages include the potential distractions from other chats and notifications on the app.” excerpt 8 “i think the main advantage of using whatsapp for reading activities is the convenience and accessibility. however, i also think it’s easy to get side tracked by other chats and notifications on the app, which can be a disadvantage.” in term of changes in reading comprehension skills over time, the majority of participants (n=70) reported that they felt that their reading comprehension skills have improved since they started using whatsapp for reading activities. participants cited factors such as the ability to interact with reading materials in different formats, the opportunity for repeated exposure to reading materials, and the ability to connect with others for discussion. some participants noted that they have become more confident in their ability to understand and interpret written materials. these results suggest that the use of whatsapp can have a positive impact on reading comprehension skills over time. excerpt 9 “since i started using whatsapp for reading activities, i’ve noticed a significant improvement in my reading comprehension skills. the discussions and interactions with my classmates and teacher have helped me better understand the text.” excerpt 10 “i haven’t noticed a significant change in my reading comprehension skills since using whatsapp for reading activities. i still prefer reading the text on my own and then discussing it with my classmates and teacher in person.” finally, when asked about the type of reading materials accessed on whatsapp, the majority of participants (n=90) reported accessing a wide range of materials including news articles, news articles, and e-books. some participants also reported accessing a variety of other materials, including comic, and magazines. these results indicate that learners are using whatsapp to access a wide range of reading materials, suggesting that the platform is versatile and can support a variety of reading needs, and interests. excerpt 11 “i usually access short stories, articles, and news updates on whatsapp for reading activities. i find these materials to be engaging and relevant to my interests.” excerpt 12 “i access a variety of reading materials on whatsapp, including fiction and non-fiction books, as well as articles and news updates. i enjoy having a range of materials to choose from.” the findings of this study contribute to the growing body of research on the use of social media platforms, such as whatsapp, in language sri mujayanah, nirwanto maruf, & slamet asari whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners 400 learning. the results show that the majority of participants (n=80) used whatsapp regularly for reading activities, with an average usage time of 30 minutes to an hour per session this supports previous studies which have found that students find whatsapp to be an engaging and effective platform for language learning activities, particularly reading activities (hui, 2018; jankauskaite, 2015; shamsi & bozorgian 2022). a new insight from the current study is the variety of reading activities that the participants engaged in through whatsapp. this study found that participants engaged in individual reading, group reading, and peer-assisted reading activities, whereas previous studies only reported individual or group reading (motteram et al., 2020; zulkanain et al., 2020; enyama et al. 2021) this highlights the potential for whatsapp to be used for a range of language learning activities, not just individual or group reading. another noteworthy difference between the current study and previous studies is the duration of the use of whatsapp for reading activities. participants in this study used whatsapp for three months, whereas previous studies reported varying duration from a few weeks to several months (jankauskaite 2015); motteram et al., 2020; (nedungadi et al., 2018). this indicates that the frequency and duration of whatsapp use for language learning activities may vary depending on individual learner characteristics and motivation. in term of the reason for using whatsapp for reading activities, the finding of present study indicate that the majority of participants use whatsapp as a mean of accessing reading materials, practicing reading comprehension skills, and receiving feedback from peers and teachers. this support previous research which has established the use of social media platforms for language learning activities (barrot, 2021; noori et al., 2022; ssekiziyivu et al., 2021) however, the findings of this present study differ from the results of a study conducted by gambo et al. (2021), which found that students were more likely to use other social media platforms, such as wechat, for reading activities due to the availability of readingspecific features like translation tools. this difference in results highlights the importance of considering individual learner characteristics and preferences when exploring the use of technology in language learning. the present study’s findings on the perception of effectiveness of whatsapp for reading comprehension skills add to the ongoing discussion about the role of social media in language learning. while some research supports the notion that social media platforms can be beneficial for language learning (alamer & al khateeb 2021; noori et al., 2022), other studies highlight the limitations and drawbacks of such platforms (tragant et al., 2020; barrot, 2021), the majority of participants in the current study reported that they believed whatsapp was effective in improving their reading comprehension skills. this supports the findings of previous studies that have shown that students find using social media platforms to be beneficial for their language learning (galvin & greenhow 2020; becheru et al., 2018; shamsi & bozorgian 2022). however, the finding of the present study should be viewed in light of previous research that has shown the limitations of social media platforms for language learning. for instance, shamsi and bozorgian, (2022)found that the quality of feedback received from peers and teachers on social media platforms is often lacking, which can negatively impact language development. moreover, they found that the distractions present on social media platforms can negatively affect students’ focus and ability to engage in meaningful language learning activities. these findings highlight the need for educators to carefully consider the limitations and drawbacks of social media platforms when incorporating them into language learning activities. in light of the research problem being investigated, the findings of this study provide a valuable contribution to the existing knowledge on the use of whatsapp for reading activities in language learning. the results highlight both the advantages and disadvantages of using whatsapp for language learning activities, and provide a more nuanced understanding of how students perceive the effectiveness of this platform. on one hand, the majority of participants in this study reported that they believe that whatsapp was effective in improving their reading comprehension skills, which is in line with previous research that has shown that students find using social media platforms to be beneficial for language learning (aloraini & cardoso, 2020; xodabande, 2017; alruwaili & ku, 2019). on the other hand, participants also reported concerns about the quality of the reading materials and feedback available on whatsapp, which is consistent with previous studies that have highlighted the challenges of using social media for language learning (glas et al. 2021; xue & churchill 2019) . english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 401 the current study provides a fresh insight into the issue by demonstrating the diversity of opinions and experiences among students who use whatsapp for reading activities. it is clear from these results that while social media platforms, including whatsapp, have the potential to support language learning activities, they also present certain challenges and limitations. in particular, the need for high-quality reading materials and effective feedback mechanisms is crucial in ensuring the effectiveness of whatsapp for reading activities. furthermore, these results highlight the importance of considering individual learner characteristics, such as motivation and focus, when designing and implementing language learning activities on whatsapp. when examining changes in reading comprehension skills over time, the present study found that the majority of participants reported that their reading comprehension skills had improved since they started using whatsapp for reading activities. this result is consistent with previous research that has shown that using social media platforms can have a positive impact on language learning outcomes, including reading comprehension skills (aloraini & cardoso, 2020; alruwaili & ku, 2019; xodabande, 2017). but another previous study conducted by koh at al. (2010) and alamer & al khateeb (2021) found that heavy use of social media platforms can lead to decreased attention span and decreased ability to focus on longer reading materials, which may negatively impact reading comprehension skills. the results of this study also show that the majority of participants used whatsapp to access a wide range of reading materials, including news articles, e-book, comics, and magazines. this suggests that whatsapp is a versatile platform that can support diverse reading needs and interests among learners. these findings is significant because it provides insight into the potential of whatsapp as a tool for supporting reading activities and improving reading comprehension skills. this new understanding contributes to the growing body of research on the use of social media platforms for language learning, and highlights the potential benefits of using whatsapp as a resource for reading activities. conclusion the findings of this study suggest that whatsapp is a widely used platform for reading activities among language learners. the reason for using whatsapp is to access reading materials, practices reading comprehension skills, and receive feedback from peers and teachers. leaners believed that whatsapp was effective in improving their reading comprehension skills, but also highlighted concerns about the quality of reading materials and feedback available. the study found that participants used whatsapp to access a variety of reading materials and reported an improvement in their reading comprehension skills since using the platform. however, the study also acknowledged the limitation and challenges of using social media platforms for language learning, such as the need for high-quality reading materials and effective feedback mechanisms. the results emphasize the importance of considering individual learner characteristics, such as motivation and focus, when designing language learning activities on whatsapp. the implication of this study is significant for both language educators and learners. firstly, the results of this study highlight the potential of whatsapp as a platform for supporting language learning activities, particularly reading activities. secondly, the findings of this study demonstrate the importance of considering individual learner characteristics and preferences when exploring the use of technology in language learning. for examples, the results of this study showed that the frequency and duration of whatsapp sue for language learning activities can vary depending on individual learner characteristics and motivation. this highlights the need for educators to carefully consider the individual needs and preferences of their students when incorporating technology into language learning activities. thirdly, the results of this study also provide insight into the challenges and limitation of using whatsapp for language learning activities. for example, the majority of participants reported concerns about the quality of the reading materials and feedback available on whatsapp. this emphasizes the need for educators to carefully consider the quality and availability of materials and feedback mechanisms when incorporating whatsapp into language learning activities. finally, the findings of this study contribute to the growing body of research on the use of social media platforms for language learning and provide valuable insights into potential of whatsapp as a tool for supporting reading activities and improving reading comprehension skills. this new understanding can inform the design and implementation of language learning activities on whatsapp and other social media platforms, and help to ensure that they are effective and engaging for language learners. sri mujayanah, nirwanto maruf, & slamet asari whatsapp use on reading comprehension: exploring the impact among efl learners 402 acknowledgement i would like to express my sincere gratitude to dr. nirwanto maruf, and dr. slamet asari for their assistances to share their knowledges, experiences, and insights in completing this article. i would like to thank all of the individuals who provided support and assistance during the data collection and analysis phases of this study. their contributions have been greatly appreciated. references alamer, a., and al khateeb, a. 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(2012). the analysis of thematic role in narrative texts of senior high school textbooks. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 80-88 received: 08-09-2011 accepted: 23-10-2013 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: this paper analyzed narrative texts of senior high school textbooks for x grade, based on jackendoff’s and saeed’s theories of thematic role. this research employed a qualitative research design and the data were ten narrative texts taken from developing english competencies and interlanguage for x grade. the research questions involve the ways of thematic role in constructing the sentence’s meaning in narrative texts and the thematic role that mostly employed. this research revealed that nine kinds of thematic role (agent, patient, location, beneficiary, experiencer, theme, source, goal, and instrument) are available in narrative texts and the role theme was frequently employed (260 times of 782). meanwhile, thematic role constructs the sentence’s meaning in narrative texts by observing the verb and the preposition used in the sentence. thematic role is a way to describe the role of noun phrase in a sentence, so that thematic role is closely related with the grammatical function. it can be also said that the analysis of thematic role in narrative texts is beneficial for educational participants both teacher and student in order to recognize the sentence’s grammatical function. therefore, thematic role helps them to understand the sentence’s meaning and finally they can grasp the message in a text. keywords: thematic role, narrative text, senior high school, textbook introduction communication is a process of giving people information (hornby, 2000). while the aim of communication is to convey meaning from communicator to communicant (lyons, 1977). it means that the communicant has to process the meaning sent by the communicator so that he will understand what the communicator means. goddard (1998: 15) states that: “when people are communicating, they do more than just attend to what is actually being said by way of words, grammatical constructions, and intonation patterns”. therefore, to create an effective communication, both communicator and communicant should understand their sentences’ meaning each other. the study of meaning is largely explored in semantics. further, hurford and heasley (1983) clarify that sentence meaning or word meaning can be defined as what a sentence or word means. moreover, o’grady et al (1991) suggest that knowing the part played a particular entity in an event is one of the most interesting thing to understand a sentence so that we will know the sentence’s meaning. while, goddard (1998, p. 1) states that “to understand how any particular language works we need to understand how its individual design works to fulfill its function as an intricate device for communicating meanings”. in semantics, the term is generally known as “thematic role”. further, saeed (2009) tells that thematic mailto:marlina1704@gmail.com english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee roles play a central role in language comprehension. the students mostly just can read a text or article word by word without thinking of the meaning of the sentences. actually, if we want to understand the meaning of a sentence, we have to firstly know the detailed information of the sentence, one of them is the part played in an event (o’grady et al, 1991). because of the reason, this paper presents the thematic roles in narrative texts. the aim of this paper are to (1) identify the thematic role that mostly employed, and (2) identify the existence of thematic roles in constructing the sentences’ meaning. most of recent works on thematic roles has been investigated by several researchers. for the first, tanja (2009) investigates about thematic role in natural language processing and in linguistic theory. the result of his study is defining relations between the constituents in a sentence that cannot be defined by the rules of syntax only. the second, richard (2008) also explores about dependency-based thematic analysis of natural-language texts. his study shows the description of how to construct statistical models for thematic role labeling of english texts and how role thematic is related to surface syntax. the third, mirella (2010) studies about semi-supervised thematic role labeling via structural alignment. from her study is found a project annotations from labeled sentences onto similar unlabeled ones. the rest of this paper is organized as follows: section 2 briefly describes thematic roles. section 3 introduces the method and procedures for analyzing thematic roles in the narrative texts. the result and discussion are shown in section 4. finally, conclusion of this study is presented in section 5. thematic role can be analyzed by considering the noun phrase’s function based on the verb which is used in the sentence, because thematic role is closely related with the verb. we can decide whether the subject has a role as an agent or experiencer by observing the verb. another definition comes from o’grady et al (1991, p. 226): “thematic role or semantic role is used to describe the part played by a particular entity in an event”. verbs and other heads of phrases may be associated with such semantic roles as agent, patient, location, theme, source, goal, beneficiary, experiencer, instrument, and stimulus. these roles are assigned to the subject and any arguments of the head. according to gruber (1965), fillmore (1968), jackendoff (1987) as cited in fasold and linton (2006, p. 143): “thematic role is a part of a word’s meaning which indicates the role that some individual plays in the action which that word describes”. for example in the following sentence: the senator sent the lobster from maine to nebraska (o’grady et al, 1991: 227). ‘the senator’ is the agent, ‘the lobster’ is the theme, ‘maine’ is the source, and ‘nebraska’ is the goal. this paper initially employed the role set proposed by jackendoff (1990) which consist of agent, patient, location, beneficiary, experiencer, instrument, theme, source, and goal. method the task of analyzing thematic roles is divided into three main subtasks: (1) identification of thematic role in each noun phrase, (2) classification the thematic role that mostly employed, and (3) interpretation the frequency of ririn marlina the analysis of thematic role in narrative texts of senior high school textbooks thematic roles in the form of graph and table. the first part (subtask) can be accomplished by finding all thematic roles employed in each noun phrase in a sentence. the second part (subtask) uses some semantic rules to distinguish different roles such as agent, experiencer, source, and goal. this part faces a complicated problem since the number of arguments (noun phrase) and their positions vary depending on kinds of verbs and preposition used. the third part (subtask) presents the frequency of thematic roles in the ten narrative texts in the form of table and graph, so that the role which is mostly employed can be recognized. the exploited approach to perform those three main subtasks is summarized by the following steps: 1. organize and prepare the data for analysis by sorting and arranging the narrative texts into different types depending on the textbook as the source. 2. read through all the narrative texts in order to grasp their meaning. 3. begin detailed analysis with a coding process. according to rossman & rallis, (1998: 171) as cited in cresswell (2007: 218): “coding is the process of organizing the material into “chunks” before bringing meaning to those “chunks”. this step involves taking the narrative texts, segmenting sentences into categories, and labeling those categories with a term of thematic role. 4. use the coding process to generate a description. in this step, the researcher develop the reason of identifying thematic role in each sentence, and interconnect them with the kinds of verb or preposition used. 5. advance how the description and themes will be represented in the qualitative narrative. the researcher presents a narrative passage to convey the findings of the analysis. 6. in final step, the researcher interprets the data by clarifying the thematic role used in the sentence by comparing it with information are there in the theories. results and discussion the results of this paper are as follows: first, kind of thematic role that mostly employed in narrative text is the role theme. for example, it can be identified from a text titled kyai jegod. in that text, the role theme occurred twentythree times. the words considered as the theme in the text are as follows: a king, grass, some water, it, small pond, some water, it, his palace, it, the palace, strong and old woods, the forest where those woods lied, his lumberjacks, the only thing they could have, anything, the main pole, loud and deep voice, the voice, an old, tall, and massive tree, it, kyai jegod, the protector of that palace. second, thematic role constructs the sentence’s meaning in narrative texts by observing the verb and the preposition used in the sentence. for detail explanation, the role of subject and object in a sentence decided from the kinds of the verbs used; the action verb indicates the existence of the role agent, intensive verb indicates the role experiencer and the preposition also decides whether the object plays the role as the source, goal, or instrument. the detail analysis of each role in a sentence as follows: agent data #001 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee title: kyai jegod which is taken from interlanguage for x grade 1.c. then sultan started to build the palace in that forest. 2.b. (…) prabu boko and all soldiers went to pengging kingdom to revolt. 2.d. when patih gupalo found out that his king died, he ran away from the battle. in 1.c. the agent is represented by sultan. since sultan is person who is responsible for building the palace. if sultan is omitted, the sentence will be ambiguous. the word build involved to action verb which indicates the existence of an act done by someone. so that, sultan as the subject is considered as the agent. this role is also described by prabu boko and all soldiers in 2.b. which indicates that they are the doer of the action. the verb which is used in this sentence is action verb that shows someone’s action. through the verb, this sentence demands the doer, so that prabu boko and all soldiers regarded as the agent. the next example indicates that the word he in 2.d. also represents the agent. it is supported by the verb ran away which included to action verb. the verb demands a subject as the doer in order to construct the sentence’s meaning. therefore, the word he is identified as the agent, i.e. the person who ran away from the battle. patient data #003 title: the legend of princess loro jonggrang and the snow bride both are taken from interlanguage for x grade 3.a. (…) he killed her father. 3.b. feeling deceived, raden bandung bondowoso was very angry and cursed her. 3.c. raden bandung bondowoso cursed the girls around prambanan area (…). from the above data, it can be represented that the words her father in 3.a. plays the patient role since it is the entity that killed by him. the role patient here is in a transitive sentence which is marked by the verb killed, so that her father considered as the direct object that presents the role patient. in 3.b., the role patient is presented by her. it expresses the entity cursed by raden bandung bondowoso. it also included to transitive sentence which signed by the verb cursed. if her is omitted, the sentence will be ambiguous since the verb demands an object. therefore, her is recognized as the patient. in 3.c., the girls around prambanan area plays a role as the patient for two reasons. first, they are the entity which is cursed by raden bandung bondowoso. second, it is the direct object which indicated by the transitive verb cursed. location data #004 titles: the snow bride and cinderella which both are taken from interlanguage for x grade 4.a. a wooden house squatted beside a huge camphor tree. 4.b. but his horse ran away from the tiny hut. 4.c. he found a lean-to built on the side of the hut, (…). 4.d. yuki glided around the room in a silken whisper. the above examples describes about the role of location in the term of thematic role. it can be concluded that beside a huge camphor tree in 4.a. plays the role of location, since it indicates the place of a wooden house located. while, in 4.b. the role of location is presented by the tiny hut. the words describes the place where the horse ran away. on the side of the hut is represented as the ririn marlina the analysis of thematic role in narrative texts of senior high school textbooks location in 4.c. example. it presents the place where the agent he found a lean. in the case of 4.d., the role of location is presented by the words around the room. it explains where yuki’s action takes place. beneficiary data #005 title: the legend of princess loro jonggrang taken from interlanguage for x grade 5.a. she had two requests that should be fulfilled by raden bandung bondowoso so that (…) 5.b. first, she asked him to make jalatunda well. 5.c. then, she asked him to make 1000 temples in one night. 5.d. then, princess loro jonggrang asked raden bandung bondowoso to go into the well, and (…). 5.e. after that, princess loro jonggrang asked raden bandung bondowoso to do the second request which (…) 5.f. therefore raden bandung bondowoso commanded genies to make the temples immeaditely. 5.g. she ordered the girls to pound and burn stubbles, so that (…). 5.h. he asked princess loro jonggrang to count the amount of temples. in the above example (5.a., 5.b., and 5.c.), the role beneficiary played by the word she. for detail explanation, she in 5.a. gets benefits from raden bandung bondowoso in fulfilling her requests. in 5.b. she considered as the beneficiary since she asked someone to make jalatunda well, so that she gets benefit from the action. similarly, in 5.c., she gets benefit by asking someone to make 1000 temples. the words princess loro jonggrang is presented as beneficiary in 5.d. in fulfilling her request to go into the well, and in 5.e. princess loro jonggrang gets benefit from raden bandung bondowoso in fulfilling her second request. while, in 5.f. raden bandung bondowoso is the beneficiary since he gets benefit from genies in making temples. the word she again plays as the role beneficiary in 5.g., the girls did an action for her, so that she gets benefit from the girls’ action. in the last sentence, the word he gets benefit from loro jonggrang in counting the temples. experiencer data #006 title: blind listening taken from developing english competencies for x grade 6.a. they had no children. 6.b. because of this, they were very unhappy. 6.c. one day, they found a baby boy outside their door. 6.d. they loved him very much. 6.e. mr and mrs lin were very sad to hear this. all sentences in the data #006 represent the role experiencer. in 6.a., the word they plays a role as the experiencer since they is the people affected by the state of “had”, and it is usually used to expresses someone’s possession. while, the word they in 6.b. considered as the experience because they is the people who feels unhappy. the role experiencer in this sentence is recognized by using stative verb. in 6.c., the word they is also identified as the experience since they is the person who aware of the action. similarly, they plays as the experience in 6.d, but in this case the sentence uses the verb love which expresses their emotion onto him. in 6.e. the role of the experience is presented by the words mr and mrs lin. they are identified as the entity which is aware of the state, and the existence of stative verb in this english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee sentence indicates that mr and mrs lin plays a role as the experiencer. instrument data #007 titles: the legend of princess lorojonggrang taken from interlanguage, the legend of beowulf, and the foolish sons which taken from developing english competencies for x grade 7.a. he killed grendel's mother with a special sword. 7.b. (…) and after that she ordered patih gupolo to pile up the well with stone. 7.c. the third son tried to cure his father with medicine which he had bought. from the above sentences, it can be identified that with a special sword plays the role instrument in 7.a. since it describes how the agent did his action. similarly, in 7.b. the existence of the role instrument is played by the word with stone. it explains how patih gupolo pile up the well. while, the role instrument in 7.c. is indicated by the word with medicine. it describes the manner done by the agent in order to cure his father. all of the role instrument in those sentences indicated by the preposition with. theme data #008 title: kyai jegod taken from interlanguage for x grade 8.a. once upon a time there was a king who ruled mataram kingdom. 8.b. his name is amangkurat iv. 8.c. one day, when a gardener was gathering grass for his cattle in the forest, (…) 8.d. (…) he looked for some water because it was so hot. 8.e. he found a small pond and (…) 8.f. (…) he was going to drink some water from it, (…) from the above examples, it can be concluded that a king who ruled mataram kingdom in 8.a. plays a role theme since it considered as the entity which is undergoer the state, and it can answer the question “what the sentence tells about”, so it considered as the theme. in 8.b, the theme is represented by amangkurat iv. it indicates that amangkurat iv is being talked in this sentence, so it regarded as the theme. the role theme in 8.c. is presented by the word grass. it can be identified that grass is the thing affected by a gardener; it is the thing which is gathered. so that, grass regarded as the theme. in 8.d., the words some water represents the role theme since it is the thing which the location is described by the action of the agent. it also plays as direct object in this sentence. therefore, it can be said that some water is the theme. from the above data, a small pond regarded as the theme in 8.e. since it becomes the direct object of the sentence. besides, it also plays as the entity which location is being found by the agent. because of the reasons, a small pond considered as the theme. in the last sentence, some water again plays as the theme since it is identified as the thing affected by the action of the agent; it is the thing which is drunk by him. so that, it is said as the theme. source data #009 title: a story about red taken from developing english competencies for x grade 9.a. rosaura was hiding from her mother and father. 9.b. as soon as she had nished her food she slipped down from her chair. from the above sentences, it can be identified that from her mother and father plays the role source in 9.a. since it indicates the starting point of rosaura’s action. in 9.b, the role source is presented ririn marlina the analysis of thematic role in narrative texts of senior high school textbooks by the words from her chair. it also describes the starting point where the agent did her action. both the role source in the above examples marked by the preposition from. so that from her mother and father and from her chair considered as the source in the term of thematic role. goal data #010 title: the legend of beowulf taken from developing english competencies for x grade 10.a. one day, he went to the king's castle. 10.b. a knight called beowulf heard about the problem and went to denmark to help the king. 10.c. grendel went back to his home in a lake and died. 10.d. grendel's mother was very angry and the next night she went to the castle and killed a knight. 10.e. in the morning, beowulf went to the lake. the sentence in the above data represents the existence of the role goal in the term of thematic role. in 10.a., the role goal is played by to the king's castle since it indicates the destination of the verb “went”, and it is marked by the existence of preposition “to”. the words to denmark in 10.b also identified as the goal which is marked by the “to” preposition and it becomes the destination for beowulf to help the king. the goal in 10.c. is showed by to his home. it plays as the destination where grendel went back. while, the goal in 10.d. is presented by to the castle. it becomes the entity where grendel’s mother visited. in 10.e., the words to the lake is again employed as the goal which expresses the destination of the verb “went” as in 10.a. from the ten samples chosen, thematic roles employed in narrative texts (782) times. the role agent employed in those texts (172) times, patient (58) times, location (71) times, beneficiary (8) times, experience (151) times, goal (38) times, instrument (3) times, source (21) times, and theme (260) time. meanwhile, the frequency of thematic roles in this research can be identified from the following graph: english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the phenomena of thematic role in narrative texts reveals that there is relation between thematic role and verb and preposition used in a sentence. the role agent indicated by the use of action verb, the role experience identified by the use of intensive verb, perception, intellection, emotion, and sensation. the use of preposition “to” indicates the role goal, the use of preposition “from” identifies the role source. meanwhile, the role instrument is recognized by the use of preposition “with” or “by”. the following table 4.2 is the illustration of the overall thematic role. table 4.2 the realization of thematic role in narrattive texts no. tr titles frequency (….times) a p l b e g i s t amount 1. kj 7 1 9 11 2 3 23 56 2. tlplj 25 8 9 5 29 11 1 5 45 138 3. qabp 17 6 4 1 10 5 2 21 66 4. tsb 27 16 6 10 1 2 38 100 5. c 17 2 9 1 26 2 1 43 101 6. bl 22 5 1 4 3 2 20 57 7. tfs 12 2 2 9 2 1 3 13 44 8. tft 14 11 8 19 3 21 76 9. asr 16 2 17 22 3 3 27 90 10. tlb 15 5 6 1 11 6 1 9 54 amount 172 58 71 8 151 38 3 21 260 conclusion on the basic of the findings above, it can be firstly concluded that thematic role in a sentence indicated by the use of verbs (fasold and linton, 2006). second, thematic role is a way to describe the role of noun phrase in a sentence, so that thematic role is closely related with the grammatical function (o’grady et al, 1991). third, the role theme seems to be the mostly employed in narrative texts. it is indicated as the part which is undergoer the state or event (jackendoff, 1990). the role theme has function to answer the question: “what the sentence tells about”. this research offers some methodological and practical suggestions. this research is delimited methodologically. it explores thematic role from a semantic point of view. further, such studies may see it from another perspective such as syntax and literary studies. in addition, this research can be broadened in terms of textual analysis or transitivity as studied in systemic functional grammar (sfg). there are also practical suggestions for teachers and students. in the teaching and learning process, the teacher has to clearly explain to the student about the existence of thematic role and how to recognize them. since thematic role is a part of semantics studies as one of knowledge that elaborates meaning. meanwhile, for the student, thematic role helps them to identify the grammatical functions of a sentence, i.e. subject, object, complement, noun phrase, verb, and preposition. by recognizing them, the student will easily grasp the sentence’s meaning, so that they will understand the overall text. ririn marlina the analysis of thematic role in narrative texts of senior high school textbooks references creswell, j. w. (2007). research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. new delhi: sage publication india pvt. ltd. cruse, d. a. 1986. lexical semantics. new york: cambridge university press. doddy, a et al. (2008). developing english competencies for senior high school (sma/ ma) grade x. jakarta: departemen pendidikan nasional. dowty, d. 1991. thematic proto-roles and argument selection. journal of language, 67(3), 547-619. fasold, r and linton, c. jeff. (2006). an introduction to language and linguistics. new york: cambridge university press. gerot, l. and wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. sidney: gerd stabler. goddard, c. 1998. semantic analysis. new york: oxford university press. hornby, a. s. (1974). oxford advanced learners dictionary of current english. great britain: oxford university press. hurford, j. r and heasley, b. (1983). semantics a course book. new york: cambridge university press. jackendoff, r. (1990). semantic structure. england: the mit press. johansson, w. (2008). dependency-based semantic analysis of naturallanguage text. journal of semantics. lyons, j. (1977). semantics. london: cambridge university press. o’grady, w. et al. (1991). contemporary linguistics. new york: st martin’s press. palmer, f. r. (1995). grammar and meaning. new york: cambridge university press. priyana, j. et al. (2008). interlanguage: english for senior high school students x. jakarta: departemen pendidikan nasional. saeed, j. i. 2009. semantics. uk: wileyblackwell. improving students' writing skills english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee improvingstudents' writingskills throughfieldtripmethod risameiranti department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: rmeiranti@gmail.com apa citation: meiranti, r. (2012). improving students' writing skills through field trip method. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 89-96 received: 12-08-2012 accepted: 03-10-2012 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: this research is aimed to improve the students’ writing skill and learning activity by applying the implementation of field trip method in english subject in class viii-2 smp n 1 luragung. the problem in this research contents is about the low of students’ skill in writing and learning activity. the kind of this research is classroom action research which was conducted in two cycles. the subject of this research is english subject in class viii-2 with total number of students 34. the research instrument that had been used is the test and also the observation sheet for observation the learning activity of the students and teacher. based on the result, the improvement could be seen from the increase of students’ mean writing score from 47 in the preliminary study and 70,51 at the first cycle to 73,24 in the second cycle. the result of field notes showed that the class condition during teaching learning process creates the positive atmosphere in the classroom and makes students creative in finding the ideas, organize the text and can use better grammar. students who had been afraid of learning in the second cycle looked more confident. students in the second cycle was more confident in working task of the students and students’ participation in learning increased, they actively asked, answered questions from teacher. keyword: writing skill, field trip method, improvement, action research introduction many students said that writing is difficult but if there are appropriate methods, interesting teaching technique and actual material writing can be an easy and enjoyable activity for them. writing is one of the important skills to be mastered by the students. they use it to communicate to each other, as means of ideas and emotional expression, because when they write their ideas and emotion creatively, they are communicating on paper in their very best way and purposes. brown (2001, p. 336) claims that writing is a thinking process. furthermore, he states that writing can be planned and given with an unlimited number of revisions before its release. in this writing activity students are required to master grammar, vocabulary and punctuation. besides that harmer (2001, p. 79) states that the students are expected to be able to present their ideas and feeling in the written form. the scope of learning english in viii grade of junior high school are interpersonal discourse, transactional and functional and coherent rhetoric and logic, as a means of communication and the development of academic potential in five varieties functional discourse such as; recount, narrative, procedure, descriptive and report (syahmadi, 2013, p.79). emerging issues in education is the number of students who are "not thinking" (hassoubah, 2008, p.10). the risa meiranti improving students' writing skills through field trip method phrase "not thinking" here is not meant students do not have a mind, but directed on student learning in school. student at the school was limited to listen to explanations of teachers, and then try to understand the explanations of the teacher to the next can help them fill out questions in examinations held in the school. “in the education system, there are learners who fail to understand the learning because they simply memorize without understanding what they are learning” (hassoubah 2008: p10). these problems could be influenced by some factors. the researcher assumed these problems appear caused by the method or technique in teaching writing, because some teachers taught writing just give the explanation and exercises. it makes students less comprehended, less interest in writing, and makes students bored. these problems were important to be solved, therefore students comprehend the material of writing and students thought that writing is an interesting skill and could continue english material in the next semester. to help students solved these problems it needs another method that more interesting in teaching writing and make students become active in learning activity. there are a lot of methods in teaching writing. the researcher would like to propose a method which is “field trip method”. field trip method was conducted by inviting students to a place or object outside of school to learn or investigate something, such as visiting the shoe factory, workshop of cars, department stores, garden and so on (asmani, 2010: p.150). the field trip method is not just recreation but students learn a lesson with see reality. field trip method applied by getting students to learn outside the classroom and with guide from teachers through the instructions and implementation of a written assignment. instructions and clear assignment of teachers intended that the activities carried out in outside the classroom can be run in accordance with the objectives and lesson plans. many studies related to field trip learning shows that learning on a fieldtrip can, indeed, produce different results than learning in a classroom. koran, koran & ellis (1989, p.7) examined field trip literature and found positive outcomes, both cognitive and affective, on students in 20 of the 27 studies reviewed. cognitive outcome from preand post-test measures was children exhibit more knowledge about a subject if they learn about the subject on a field trip instead of learning about the subject in a classroom. students even enjoyed learning on their field trip more than socializing. when asked to pick their favorite parts of a field trip taken to a park, the students identified educational activities such as “casting animal tracks” and “studying animal and plant in the pond”. these studies showed that students’ learning outcome and their attitude become better when teacher used field trip method. the study by orien (1993) in mogk (2012) entitled “field note” said that the most important role of field trips in the learning process is in "direct experience with concrete phenomena and materials”. the very nature of field trip exercises requires students to be active learners, rather than merely covering material in a passive mode in a traditional classroom. furthermore, experiential activities facilitate the transition from lower-order learning strategies to the higher cognitive learning. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee based on interviews with students at the second grade and english teacher in smpn 1 luragung, writing is the most difficult learning. the researcher interested in conducting action research in class viii-2 because according to english teacher here, this class has the lowest grades in writing compared to other classes. i chose a class action research because according to mills (2003) in fraenkel and wallen (2006, p. 590) this type of research aims to improve students' ability with deliver the material continuously in several cycles. one characteristic of action research is collaboration between researcher and teachers, principals, students, etc. in the implementation of the action research collaboration between teachers and researcher is important because through collaboration they will together explore and assess the real problems faced by teachers or students at school (arikunto et al, 2012, p.63). based on the interview with the english teacher junior high school 1 luragung and the result from test 1, there were some difficulties faced by students in writing class, such as: (1) they did not have idea to write, (2) they were still confused in organizing the writing, (3) they did some mistakes with the lack of knowledge in vocabularies and (4) they were still confuse to use the correct grammar. in the classroom, students often complained and say it was difficult when the teacher assigns students to write. students looked unconfident when they were given the writing task. they were fear cannot complete the task of writing, because they did not know what to write, how to start and end. method the design used in this study is classroom action research (car). action research is any systematic inquiry conducted by teacher, researcher, principals, school counselors, or other stakeholders in the teaching/learning environment. it means that “car is aimed to overcome problems in teaching learning process in order to improve educational practice” (mills, 2003 in fraenkel and wallen, 2006, p. 590). the researcher used the car procedure based on kemmis and mctaggart (1988) design. according to kemmis and mctaggart (1988) in burns (2005, p. 32), “action research occurs through a dynamic and complementary process, which consists of four essential “moments”: of planning, action, observation and reflection”. the data in this study was both qualitative data and quantitative data. the researcher used qualitative data consist of interview, field notes, and questionnaire sheet. while quantitative data consists of students’ final writing as a test 1, test 2 and test 3. interview was particularly useful for getting data behind the english teacher’s experiences before classroom action research. it was used to know students’ difficulties in writing ability, and the technique used by teacher when writing activity. the interview also carried out after classroom action research to know the teacher’s response toward the idea of field trip method. beside the interview, the researcher and observer used field notes to record activities during the teaching and learning of writing through field trip method in the classroom. the contents of field note including description of classroom atmosphere, students’ attitude, and teacher’s risa meiranti improving students' writing skills through field trip method creativity in presenting the material of writing. the quantitative data were used to evaluate the success of implementation of each cycle. weigle (2002, p.116) claimed “there are five components presented in the analytical scoring rubric for writing, are: content, organization, vocabulary, language use, and mechanics”. the researcher used analytical scoring rubric to analyze the data related to the students’ paragraph writing test of writing ability. table 1. analytical scoring rubric (jacobs et al., 1981 cited in weigle, 2002, p. 115-116). aspect score level/criteria c o n t e n t 30-27 26-22 21-17 16-13 excellent to very good: knowledgeable  substantive  thorough development of thesis  relevant to assigned topic good to average: some knowledge of subject  adequate range  limited development of thesis  mostly relevant to the topic, but lacks detail fair to poor: limited knowledge of subject  little substance  inadequate development of topic very poor: does not show knowledge of subject  non-substantive  not pertinent  or not enough to evaluate o r g a n iz a t io n 20-18 17-14 13-10 9-7 excellent to very good: fluent expression  ideas clearly stated/ supported  succinct  well-organized  logical sequencing  cohesive good to average: somewhat choppy  loosely organized but main ideas stand out  limited support  logical but incomplete sequencing fair to poor: non-fluent  ideas confused or disconnected  lacks logical sequencing and development very poor: does not communicate  no organization  or not enough to evaluate v o c a b u l a r y 20-18 17-14 13-10 9-7 excellent to very good: sophisticated range  effective word/ idiom choice and usage  word form mastery  appropriate register good to average: adequate range  occasional errors of word/ idiom form, choice, usage but meaning not obscured fair to poor: limited range  frequent errors of word/ idiom form, choice, usage meaning confused or obscured very poor: essential translation  little knowledge of english vocabulary, idioms, word form  or not enough to evaluate l a n g u a g e u se 25-22 21-18 17-11 10-5 excellent to very good: effective complex constructions  few errors of agreement, tense, number, word order/ function, articles, pronouns, prepositions good to average: effective but simple constructions  minor problems in complex constructions  several errors of agreement, tense, number, word order/ function, articles, pronouns, prepositions but meaning seldom obscured fair to poor: major problems in simple/ complex constructions  frequent errors of negation, agreement, tense, number, word order/ function, articles, pronouns, prepositions and/ or fragments, run-ons, deletions meaning confused or obscured very poor: virtually no mastery of sentence construction rules  dominated by errors  does not communicate  or not enough to evaluate m e c h a n ic s 5 4 3 2 excellent to very good: demonstrates mastery of conventions  few errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing good to average: occasional errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing but meaning not obscured fair to poor: frequent errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing  poor handwriting meaning confused or obscured very poor: no mastery of conventions  dominated by errors of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing  handwriting illegible  or not enough to evaluate english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to get the mean of students’ writing score uses the formula (sudijono, 2008, p. 81): mx : mean x : individual score n : number of students resultsanddiscussion the following are the evaluation results out of cycle 1 in this research. at the cycle 1, the researchers asked the student went to several places and collect the data by seeing the object directly. this field trip activity make students more creative in writing the descriptive text, they open their dictionary when they find some new words in this field trip activity. the result of test 2 showed that the mean score of the class derived 70,51 in which there were 18 students who pass minimum mastery criterionkriteria ketuntasan minimal (kkm) 75 (seventy five). the following were the detail results of students’ writing in the first cycle: the researcher needs to calculate the mean score firstly, to know the result of students’ writing. the mean score derived from the following formula: there was a slight improvement of students’ mean score from the students’ writing on the preliminary study to the students’ writing on the first cycle. the improvement percentage derived from the formula: table 2. the mean’s score of five skill in writing in cycle 2 no writing skill mean from teacher from researcher mean 1 content 20.74 20.71 20.73 2 organization 15.65 16.03 15.84 3 vocabulary 14.74 15.15 14.95 4 language use 15.26 15.53 15.40 5 mechanic 3.59 3.62 3.61 table 3. a comparison of students’ writing means score no test 1 test 2 criteria score criteria score 1 highest 78.00 highest 84.00 2 average score 47.26 average score 70.51 3 lowest 32.50 lowest 43.00 risa meiranti improving students' writing skills through field trip method meanwhile, field notes showed that there are some strength and the weaknesses in teaching learning activities in cycle 1. table 4. classroom situation in class viii-2 no aspects observed indicator preliminary study cycle 1 1 the seriousness of students a. students giving attention to the teacher a. students giving attention to the teacher b. students didn't bring the material book b. a few students brought the material book c. students were passive in asking or making comment about material c. student dare to ask the researcher about the material 2 the enthusiasm of students in doing a task a. students didn't try to understand the instruction by using various learning aids (book, dictionary, ask their teacher or friend) a. students tried to do their task by using various learning aids (dictionary and books) b. students didn't have a discussion with the teacher or their friends b. students have discussion with their friend in doing their task 3 students' participation a. students didn't participate in asking question or giving suggestion a. students participate in asking question but they didn't dare to give comment or suggestion b. students help their friend to examine the material and the task b. students help their friend to examine the material and the task the result of test 3 showed that the mean score of the class derived 73,24 in which there were 23 students who pass minimum mastery criterionkriteriaketuntasan minimal (kkm) 75 (seventy five). the following were the detail results of students’ writing in the first cycle: the researcher needs to calculate the mean score firstly, to know the result of students’ writing. the mean score derived from the following formula: there was an improvement of students’ mean score from the students’ writing preliminary study in test 1 to the students’ writing on the second cycle in test 3. the improvement percentage derived from the formula: based on the result of the students’ writing, there was better improvement of students’ mean score from the students’ writing in the preliminary study to the students’ writing in the second cycle. the mean score for the first test was 46,47 and the mean score of writing test 3 in the second cycle was . it means that there was % of mean score improvement. the students who passed the minimum mastery criterionkriteria ketuntasan minimal (kkm) were 23 students or 67,70% into class percentage. it indicated that the first criterion of success has been achieved. the following was the table of students’ writing score in test 1 , test 2 and test 3. meanwhile, field notes showed that there are some strength and the weaknesses in teaching learning activities in cycle 2. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 5. classroom situation in class viii-2 no aspects observed indicator cycle 1 cycle 2 1 the seriousness of students a. students giving attention to the teacher a. students giving attention to the teacher b. a few students who brought the material book b. most of students brought the material book c. student dare to ask the researcher about the material c. student dare to ask the researcher about the material 2 the enthusiasm of students in doing a task a. students tried to do their task by using various learning aids (dictionary and books) a. students tried to do their task by using various learning aids (dictionary and books) b. students have discussion with their friend in doing their task b. students have discussion with their friend in doing their task c. students give a suggestion to the teacher about the field trip activity 3 students' participation a. students participate in asking question but they didn't dare to give comment or suggestion a. students participate in asking question, give a comment and suggestion b. students help their friend to examine the material and the task b. students help their friend to examine the material and the task c. students help the researcher in preparing the material conclusion this study is focused on improving students’ writing skill through field trip method at second grade in junior high school in luragung. field trip method can improve students' skills in writing in cycle 1 in several ways. in the first cycle the material is descriptive text. at the first meeting, i explain the material of descriptive text. i give some examples for the students. at the second meeting, i give some exercise to them. with this exercise, students can write the right paragraph. at the third meeting, i give a worksheet and ask all students go outside the classroom and find some data of object that they will describe. by involving students in the activity field trip, students will be able to see the objects they describe directly. a weakness of student in finding ideas in writing can be resolved by looking at the objects directly. the number of objects written in the student worksheet encourages students to search for the meaning of these words and their vocabulary knowledge increases. in the student worksheet also has rules to sort the objects characteristic of the most general to the particular, it is intended that students can make a well-organized paragraphs. field trips can improve students' writing in a second cycle in several ways. the material in the second cycle is recount text. in writing recount text, students are asked to describe the events that happened in the past. at the first meeting i give the explanation to the students about recount text. i explain that in recount text we can tell something in past. at the second meeting, i give some exercises to the students. i do this to make students understand the differences of simple present in descriptive text and past tense in the recount text. researcher invites students to participate in a field trip on sunday by following some joint activities. it is intended for students to tell the field risa meiranti improving students' writing skills through field trip method trip activities that have been implemented. the implementation of field trip method in the second year of 8-2 class of smp 1 luragung in academic year 2015/2016 can be concluded that field trip can improve students’ writing ability. it can be proved from the improvement that could be seen from the increase of students’ mean writing score from 47 and 70,51 in the first cycle, to 73,24 in the second cycle. from the result of field notes show that field trip method makes students creative in finding the ideas, organize the text and can use better grammar. students who had been afraid of learning at the first meeting looked more confident at the second cycle, it can be seen from the number of students who dared to ask about the material being taught. different at the first cycle, students in the second cycle is more confident in working task of the students this was because they brought a dictionary and tried to do the work individually. students’ participation in learning increased, they actively ask, answer questions from teachers and want to help their friend in doing the task. the result of questionnaire showed that students give positive responses to the implementation of field trip in the teaching learning process of writing. moreover, field trip method would be method strategy in teaching writing. references anas, s. j. (2008). pengantar statistik pendidikan. jakarta: raja grafindo persada. asmani, j. m. (2010). tips menjadi guru inspiratif, kreatif, dan inovatif. yogyakarta: diva press. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles an interactive approach to language pedagogy. san francisco: san francisco state university. fraenkel, j. r., and norman, e. w. (2006). how to design and evaluate research in education. boston: mcgraw-hill. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching, third edition. new york: pearson education limited. hassoubah, z. i. (2008). mengasah pikiran kreatif dan kritis. bandung: nuansa. retrieved from http://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/p spbsi/article/view/446/325. koran, j.j., koran, m.l. & ellis, j. (1989). evaluating the effectiveness of field experiences: 1939 – 1989. visitor behavior, 4(2), 7-10. mogk., d. (2009). field note. retrieved from: http://www.minsocam.org/msa/mo nographs/mngrph_03/mg003_047052.pdf[ weigle, s. c. (2002) assessing writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. arikunto, s. (2012). penelitian tindakan kelas. jakarta: pt bumi aksara. syahmadi, h. (2014). bedah kurikulum 2013 bagi guru bahasa inggris. bandung: cv. adoya mitra sejahtera. http://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/pspbsi/article/view/446/325 http://www.minsocam.org/msa/monographs/mngrph_03/mg003_047-052.pdf%5b english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 83 critical review on a discourse analysis research: what novice writers can learn aldha williyan institut pendidikan dan bahasa invada, cirebon, indonesia email: alwilliyan@gmail.com sirniawati universitas muhammadiyah cirebon, cirebon, indonesia email: sirniawati@gmail.com tia nur istianah institut agama islam cirebon, cirebon, indonesia email: tianur.07@gmail.com mochamad guntur institut pendidikan dan bahasa invada, cirebon, indonesia email: gunturmath@gmail.com apa citation: williyan, a., sirniawati., istianah, t. n., & guntur, m. (2023). critical review on a discourse analysis research: what novice writers can learn. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 83-90. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7195 received: 09-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction this present study is dedicated to provide assistance to novice writers, namely the efl learners who have just started their academic writing experience. this assistance is given through analyzing one selected research article. without prejudice to the authors, their article is analyzed and broken down to reveal its strengths and weaknesses. this is conducted for the sake of learning, especially to give insight and ideas on how to write a research article well and effectively. writing papers is a necessity for students because they frequently receive writing assignments from their lecturers to create texts for final assignments, group projects, midterm assignments, or just an individual project (bailey, 2006). they frequently receive writing projects to help teachers determine how well they comprehend a particular subject. many efl learners are still developing as writers, thus when given a writing task they may become confused (qasem & zayid, 2019). moreover, it is academic writing like research articles. this is typical since educational assignments do not require writing works. even while they do exist, classroom learning still hardly ever includes assignments that require composing papers. a research article is a written piece that includes knowledge and information that has been discovered via research both in the field and in the literature (bal-gezegin & baş, 2020). it is not only anticipated that it will benefit the writer, but abstract: efl learners inevitably will enter the world of academia, which makes it mandatory for them to write academic writings, especially in the form of research articles. they are obliged to broaden knowledge in the field of their interest by conducting research. unfortunately, academic writing has always been a serious challenge for them. writing research articles indeed requires them to be familiar with the writing guidelines, particularly about how the ideas are developed. this present study is therefore intended to assist efl learners, particularly those who have just started their academic writing experience. insight and ideas on how to write a research article are presented in this paper. to do that, a qualitative methodology on discourse analysis is employed. the data is taken from a research article focusing on discourse marker comparisons between academic and non-academic writings. the article is broken down in detail to provide a clear picture of how it is constructed by the authors. the analysis reveals that even though it contains some minor weaknesses, the research article overall is well-written and follows the author guidelines. this study allows efl learners to receive more explicit input and, hopefully, adapt and adopt the steps of how the article is written. keywords: critical review; novice writer; research article. aldha williyan, sirniawati, tia nur istianah, & mochamad guntur critical review on a discourse analysis research: what novice writers can learn 84 that it will also benefit the writer in some other way—for example, by enhancing the writer's knowledge or by allowing him or her to think more critically. it is important to trust scientific research and avoid manufactured research. the potential for producing high-caliber scientific work is greatest in the academic community (hanauer et al., 2019). not just lecturers but also students are a part of the academic community in question. in order to generate written works, including both scholarly writings like books and journals and more accessible scientific writings like research papers, students are required to be able to engage in writing activities as part of the academic environment. in spite of this, writing exercises are not as common among students as other proficiency tasks (ecarnot et al., 2015). students still inquire about what a research article is. because they lack experience producing research articles for their academic projects, students are forced to take the easy route by plagiarizing the work of others. the guidelines for writing research articles must therefore be taught to students as publications of research articles have emerged as a crucial component of academic activity in the modern era (banks, 2018). the rules for creating a research article typically give the authors a comparable framework for their articles, starting with the title and ending with references (saeed et al., 2020). the first and most important component of a text that draws in potential readers is its title. from there, readers determine whether the text is worthwhile reading or not (li & xu, 2019). it solely makes use of precise keywords that describe the research's key variables (kundu, 2018). the authors may also want to mention the site of the research. the abstract should then succinctly define the paper's content and scope, as well as its aims, methodology, findings, conclusions, and study implications (forero et al., 2020; tullu, 2019; heßler et al., 2020). it should contain three to five keywords associated with the article and be between 200 and 250 words long. in introduction, the writers should next explain why this research area is significant and back up their arguments with pertinent references (graulich et al., 2021). they should also include a review of relevant literature, which is composed of earlier studies in the same or a related topic and the underlying theories for the investigation. they are able to identify the gaps in the earlier study by doing this (dwivedi et al., 2022; paul & criado, 2020). the position of the research in regard to earlier studies should therefore be made clear. later on, writers should discuss the research's variables and explain why they think there is a relationship between them. last but not least, the authors should offer rational, scientific justifications for why they select particular study topics and back up their arguments with pertinent references. the research article's methods must also be written well. the authors should explain the research's methodology, whether it is qualitative, quantitative, or mixed. they must explain the research design, such as descriptive qualitative, content analysis, or another type, as well as the rationale behind their choice (busse & august, 2021). additionally, this part requires for relevant references, particularly those that back up the idea regarding the study design option. the authors must then define the data source for the study and give justifications for their choice. to present this idea, it is also required to explain the research's steps (ecarnot et al., 2015). last but not least, the authors should note that they took inspiration from one, two, or more references while deciding on the steps. composing the findings and discussions is the next and most crucial step in writing research articles. the findings ought to be short and obvious. instead of giving extensive data, it should provide a summary of scientific findings. it draws attention to variations between the findings or results and earlier works by other scholars (ecarnot et al., 2015). the discussion should then focus on the significance of the research's findings rather than just restating them. it is frequently useful to combine the results and discussion sections. the authors should refrain from using numerous citations and discussing published works (qayyum & afzal, 2018). it is the most crucial portion of the article when being discussed. here, the authors have the opportunity to market their data by correlating the discussion to the findings or outcomes while avoiding repetition (ecarnot et al., 2015). it should frequently start with a succinct review of the key scientific findings. every result or finding reported should have a scientific interpretation provided by the authors (behzadi & gajdács, 2021). they must also make it clear how the outcomes connect to the main issue or the goals mentioned in the introduction. the next step is to compose the conclusion and references, which can be difficult for novice authors. the research's objectives should be addressed in the conclusions (paltridge & starfield, 2007). the writers should explain how english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 85 their study expands on the current body of knowledge in the field. it is not advised for the authors to simply list the findings of experiments or to repeat the abstract (behzadi & gajdács, 2021). they should outline potential applications and extensions as well as a strong scientific explanation for your work. they should also make suggestions for new experiments and/or mention any that are already in progress (paul et al., 2021). in terms of references, they should ensure that all references may be tracked back (ecarnot et al., 2015). finally, the references should be arranged alphabetically by author. it can be seen that writing research article is not a simple matter. helping students become proficient in research writing and assisting them in making the transition from peripheral to active engagement in the intellectual discourse of their discipline is an important but difficult goal (cotos et al., 2020). this encourages this present study to be conducted with the purpose to assist efl learners, particularly those who have just started their academic writing experience. insight and ideas on how to write a research article are presented in this paper. it is inspired by some previous studies in the similar field. those are warren et al. (2021), weatherall (2018), zheng & yu (2019), that concern on providing clear pictures of how to write academic writing effectively. method in line with williyan (2020), the methodology used in this study is qualitative. with it, the findings are elaborated as detail as possible and presented in form of paragraph to give the target readers, namely the novice writers, a clear picture on how to write research articles. the data of this present study is a research article written by choemue & bram (2021) entitled “discourse markers in academic and non-academic writings of thai efl learners “. this research article is selected because it is published in 2021 by a journal indexed by scopus q1 and sinta 1. this piece of writing is a masterpiece that, ideally, is able to assist the novice writers to adapt or adopt the style of writing a research article. to do this, the process of analyzing is conducted thoroughly from the title until the references. each part of the articles is given constructive comments so that the readers can also take the positivity and avoid the weakness produced in this research article. results and discussion the summary of the research paper that is learned in this investigation opens this section. the discussion then moves on to explain the articles' strengths and weaknesses. this section is finally concluded with the justification of the indication of the findings. summary of the research article the research article is written by choemue & bram (2021) entitled “discourse markers in academic and non-academic writings of thai efl learners “. it is published in 2021 by a journal indexed by scopus q1 and sinta 1. the writers state that in order to express ideas and concepts in a variety of writing projects, including as academic papers and reflections, efl students at the university level need to be able to use discourse markers (dms) to make a text coherent and cohesive. they then point out that to have a better understanding about how dms are used by thai efl students in academic and non-academic writing, their study try to provide more information. investigating the types, general frequency, distinctions, and similarities of discourse markers in the two writing modes is the main goal. for the primary data, 60 essays are chosen, of which 20 are scholarly and 40 are not. the non-academic pieces are chosen from the xlc english newsletter, while the academic essays are chosen from the xavier learning community (xlc), thailand, critical reading and writing course. using fraser's taxonomy (2009), they evaluate the data. the findings reveal that 2.521 dms, which are divided into five types and found in 20 academic and 40 non-academic articles, are contrastive discourse, elaborative discourse, inferential discourse, temporal discourse, and spoken speech markers. elaborative discourse markers (edm), f=1,703, are the most frequently used dm. this study comes to the conclusion that increasing knowledge of dms will help thai efl learners create an efficient and logical piece of writing. the title there are three things writers should notice in formulating the title of their research articles. maximum 14 words are allowed in the title. it solely makes use of particular keywords that describe the research's key variables (paul & barari, 2022). optionally, the writers have included the place of the research. below is the title of the research article being studied in this current study. aldha williyan, sirniawati, tia nur istianah, & mochamad guntur critical review on a discourse analysis research: what novice writers can learn 86 figure 1. research title the title of this research consist of 11 words. it uses only specific key words telling variables involved in the research. the writers also have included the place of the research in the title (kundu, 2018). the novice writers can learn from this data about how to formulate the title of their research articles. the abstract the abstract should contain several main points of the research. the research's major findings should be summarized in the abstract. it must first express the purposes in full. second, an explanation of the research's methodology needs to be included in the abstract. it must then include the results and conclude with the conclusions. the document must also include the publication's scope and substance, as well as any implications of the study. it should contain three to five keywords related to writers’ content (murphy & bolderston, 2022), and be between 200 and 250 words long. below is the abstract of the research article studied and analyzed in this current study. figure 2. research abstract the writers have concisely describe the content and scope of the paper and identify the objectives, namely to provide greater insight into how thai efl learners use dms in their formal and informal writing. the primary goal of their study is to compare and contrast the discourse markers that are used in academic and informal writing. its methodology and its findings have been presented very well. a brief conclusion is used to wrap up the abstract. unfortunately, no explanation of the study's implications is given. the article is 205 words long and ends with five keywords that are pertinent to it (forero et al., 2020). the novice writers must take something away from this information. they must make sure that their abstract covers each of the aforementioned points. the introduction in introduction, the authors are required to consider some elements. they must explain the significance of the research field (paul & barari, 2022). they are also required to back up their idea with relevant references. review of pertinent literature, including theories guiding the study and earlier research in the same or a related topic, must also be included by the authors. they must identify any gaps in the earlier research. the authors need to make clear how the current research fits into the context of the earlier investigations. the research's variables must also be mentioned by the authors clearly. the authors should explain their reasoning for thinking that the relationship between the variables exists. the writers are required to give scientific justifications for their selection of particular study themes (macnab, 2022). the writers must provide appropriate sources to back up their ideas regarding the topic selection. the small piece of the introduction of the research article that is studied and analyzed in this current study is displayed below. figure 3. research introduction the authors have successfully deliver the introduction. the authors have explained the significance of this research field in the introduction section (graulich et al., 2021). they state that the findings of the study will help teaching and learning the english language, especially in writing classes, as it allows thai students to learn about different dms and use them in their writing. then, the notion has been backed up with pertinent references from the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 87 authors. the authors have reviewed relevant literature, including earlier investigations in the same or a related subject and hypotheses supporting the study. the authors have identified any gaps in the earlier studies (dwivedi et al., 2022). they say that no research has looked into how dms are used by thai students in their academic and informal works. additionally, the writers have made clear how the latest research fits into relation to earlier investigations. the variables used in this study have been discussed by the authors. the authors have explained why they think there is a relationship between the variables. for their selection of particular subjects for this research, the authors have offered scientific justifications. the choice of subject was backed up by the authors' use of pertinent sources. the novice writers can definitely learn from this introduction. they can adapt the way the authors of this research article develop the introduction. the method in this section of the article, the authors need to make sure that their articles contain some main elements. the methodology section is where the authors describe the research's methodology, whether qualitative, quantitative, or mixed. the authors should also provide details on the research design, such as descriptive qualitative analysis, content analysis, or others, as well as the reasons. the authors must cite appropriate sources to back up their arguments for the study design they chose. the authors clearly state where the data for this study came from. the authors then need to give justifications for their decisions about the data sources they used. the number of research steps must also be mentioned by the authors in this section. lastly, the authors acknowledge that while choosing the stages, they used some references in their adoption or adaptation of the steps. below is the small piece of the method of the research article that is learned in this present study. figure 3. research method the authors have identified the source of the data used in the study. as the primary data, 60 essays are chosen, 20 of which are academic and 40 of which are not. the authors have also given justifications for their decision to use a particular source of data. the number of steps in this research have been given by the authors very clearly as well. the authors have disclosed that they adopted or modified the steps from several references in making their decisions (ecarnot et al., 2015). what the authors plan to do with the data they have collected has also already been stated. the authors have provided pertinent hypotheses and references to back up their ideas regarding the data analysis. unfortunately, the authors fail to specify the methodology employed for this study. despite the fact that the researchers do not directly declare it, this is obviously a discourse study (busse & august, 2021). in summary, the novice writers can learn about aspects that should be included in the methodology. the findings and discussion to present the findings and discussion of the research articles, the authors’ findings need to do some steps in order to be clear and concise. it should summarize scientific findings rather than providing data in great detail (mayyas & alzoubi, 2022). it also highlights differences between the findings and the previous publications by other researchers. the discussion furthermore should explore the significance of the results of the work, not repeat them. a combined findings and discussion section is often appropriate. in the discussion, the writers should avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature. this section is the most important section of the article. here, the writers get the chance to sell their data and make the discussion corresponding to the results, but do not reiterate the results. often it should begin with a brief summary of the main scientific findings not experimental results. in addition, the discussion should also include the explanation about how the results relate to the original question or objectives outlined in the introduction section and how the writers provide interpretation scientifically for each of the results or findings presented. below is the small piece of the results/findings and discussion of the research article being studied in this current study. aldha williyan, sirniawati, tia nur istianah, & mochamad guntur critical review on a discourse analysis research: what novice writers can learn 88 figure 4. research results and discussion the writers have presented the findings clearly and concisely. they have summarized the scientific findings rather than providing data in great detail in the finding section. the analysis of the 20 academic and 40 non-academic writings reveals a total of 2.521 dms, split evenly across five categories, namely contrastive, elaborative, inferential, temporal, and spoken discourse markers. elaborative discourse markers (edms) are the most common type of dm, with a frequency of f=1,703. also, the differences between the results or findings and the previous publications by other researchers have been highlighted (yu & jiang, 2022). they also do not use extensive citations and discussion of published literature (qayyum & afzal, 2018). although, it is common to separate the sections of findings and discussion into two differences explanation, the writers of this article have combined results and discussion into one section. besides the strength mentioned previously, there are also several weaknesses that the novice writer can learn so that they can avoid to do the same things in their research article writing. the significance of the results of the work which should be explored in the discussion is not clear. the writers seems only describing the findings and what the findings indicate. in the results and discussion, the writers unfortunately do not clearly state how the results relate to the original question or objectives outlined in the introduction section. lastly, the writers also do not clearly state interpretation scientifically for each of the results or findings presented (behzadi & gajdács, 2021). in sum, the writers have successfully presented the findings and the discussion. the novice writers can definitely learn from these sections. they can adapt the way the authors of this research article develop the findings and discussions. the conclusion in conclusions, the writers must consider some standards. conclusions should answer the objectives of research. in this section, the writers tells how your work advances the field from the present state of knowledge. they are not suggested to only repeat the abstract, or just list experimental results. they then must provide a clear scientific justification for your work, and indicate possible applications and extensions. the writers state that their research find that informing thai efl students about dms will help students write better and more coherently lastly, the writers should also suggest future experiments and/or point out those that are underway. below is the small piece of the conclusion of the research article being studied in this current study. figure 5. resaerch conclusion the authors address the goals of the study in the conclusion and explain how their work expands upon the body of knowledge already known in the subject. they do not just list the outcomes of the experiment or reiterate the abstract (behzadi & gajdács, 2021). the authors have also identified potential applications and extensions as well as a clear scientific explanation for their study. last but not least, they mention any ongoing or upcoming experiments as well as offer suggestions for new ones (tabuena, 2020). the novice writers can definitely learn from this conclusion. in conclusion, the writers does a good job of presenting the findings and the discussion. they can adapt the way the authors of this research article formulate the conclusion. the references there are some elements that the writers should consider in writing the references. the authors should make sure that all citations can be tracked back. the references also must be arranged alphabetically. in this research, the authors have taken care to ensure that all references can be tracked back (ecarnot et al., 2015). additionally, they have ordered the references alphabetically. the quantity of references satisfies another english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 89 requirement of a research article. although there are other reference writing styles outside apa style, the authors of this study followed apa style correctly, and 90% of the references are also created within the last ten years. in conclusion, the references are well written by the authors. they can modify how the authors place the references in this study article. conclusion after all parts of the research article have been broken down, we can see clearly that the author has produced an extraordinary scientific paper. in writing a research article, the writers begins by formulating a title that can attract every reader, especially those who are fanatical about discourse studies. the abstract has been compiled very densely and is rich in information regarding the important points of their research. readers are very spoiled by the abstract because it has summarized all the important things from the research. then, in the introduction the author has explained very clearly the background of the study, the theories underpinning the study as well as the previous studies. the method is also written in full point by point so that readers, in this case novice writers, can later adapt the steps of this research. findings and discussion along with conclusions are presented in a very complete and clear manner. thus, readers can understand things about discourse markers and the differences between academic and non-academic writing. however, there are no perfect words in a piece of writing; there will undoubtedly be flaws, which have been described in this paper for the sake of learning. hopefully novice writers can take many positive points from this present study. hopefully novice writers can take many positive points from this present study. additionally, there are a lot of prospects for further research given by this current study. future research can first examine how to compose nonacademic writing, like a novel. second, they can explain the many text types—argumentative essays, narratives, descriptive texts, and so forth—and how to compose each one. third, academics can analyze specific text types to inform readers about the unified and coherent writing process. 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(2022). doctoral students’ engagement with journal reviewers’ feedback on academic writing. studies in continuing education, 44(1), 87–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037x.2020.178161 0 zheng, y., & yu, s. (2019). what has been assessed in writing and how? empirical evidence from assessing writing (2000–2018). assessing writing, 42, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2019.100421 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 325 assessing english teachers' digital literacy readiness for the smart society 5.0 anak agung putri maharani english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas mahasaraswati denpasar, indonesia email: aamaharani@unmas.ac.id ni made wersi murtini english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas mahasaraswati denpasar, indonesia email: wersimurtini@unmas.ac.id. anak agung putu arsana english language education study program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas mahasaraswati denpasar, indonesia email: agungarsana@unmas.ac.id apa citation: maharani, a. a. p., murtini, n. m. w., & arsana, a. a. p. (2023). smart society 5.0: the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 325-334. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7319 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction in the modern era of the 21st century, individuals are expected to possess a diverse range of skills that enable them to thrive in various contexts. these skills include critical and creative thinking, adaptability, a mindset of innovation, competitiveness, and problem-solving abilities. in order to meet the challenges of the 5.0 era, it is crucial to not only acknowledge but also master these aforementioned skills. society 5.0, a term popularized by the japanese, refers to a period aimed at creating a society centered around people. its objective is to address societal issues, stimulate economic growth, and ensure that individuals can live comfortably and actively (fukuyama, 2018). in 2022, statistics indicate that 62.5% of the global population are internet users, 92.1% use mobile phones to access the internet, and 58.4% are active social media users (we are social, 2022). considering these data, it is inevitable to ignore the impact of transformations and technological advancements. yaraş and öztürk (2022) emphasize the importance of analyzing the effects of shifting social structures within society 5.0 and preparing for transformation processes in various fields. in today's world, individuals need to develop a range of skills to thrive in the 5.0 era. society 5.0 aims to establish a people-centered society and address societal issues while embracing technological advancements. it is crucial to abstract: with the rapid advancement of technology in english language teaching, it is crucial for english teachers to be digitally literate. being digitally literate requires english teachers to possess both technical and pedagogical skills, enabling them to effectively incorporate digital technology into the teaching and learning process. this study aims to assess the level of digital literacy readiness among english teachers, explore potential differences between male and female teachers in their digital literacy readiness, and investigate the factors that influence their digital literacy readiness. the participants in this study consist of 33 english teachers from both public and private high schools in denpasar, bali. a mixed-method design was employed, utilizing an online questionnaire, virtual interview sessions, and virtual focus group discussions. descriptive statistical analysis was used to analyze the quantitative data, while qualitative analysis involved data collection, reduction, presentation, and conclusion drawing. the findings reveal that the digital literacy readiness level among english teachers is deemed adequate. furthermore, there were differences observed between male and female english teachers regarding their readiness. additionally, two major factors influencing their digital literacy readiness were identified. keywords: digital literacy, gender, readiness. anak agung putri maharani, ni made wersi murtini, & anak agung putu arsana smart society 5.0: the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers 326 understand the impact of these transformations and be prepared for the changes that lie ahead. one of the areas to concern is educational field. digital technology directly affects education which reshapes the educational approaches and educational institutions (yaraş & öztürk, 2022). it also has a an indispensable importance in education (özcan, 2022). therefore, to be equipped with these changes, teachers as the crucial roles in education must be digitally literate. being teachers in this 21st century is dissimilar with being teachers in the 20s in which teachers are required to be capable in innovating and creating innovate the infusion of digital technology as the conventional system of learning is no longer compatible for nowadays students (milawati & sholeh, 2020). communication and connection in the 21st century necessitate digital literacy. digital literacy is to locate, organize, analyze, interpret, evaluate, transmit, read and create digital texts as part of the process in creating information (akkoyunlu & soylu, 2010). a person who is digitally literate is one who is imaginative, creative, and capable of cooperating, communicating, thinking critically, solving problems, having decision-making skills, understanding technological concepts and using them in this context, and who can carry out their duties as a digital citizen (ocak & karakuş, 2018). teachers must own digital literacy. digital literacy skills enable them to utilize technology safely and effectively into the teaching learning process. these skills include basic computer tasks like starting and shutting down a computer, opening and using programs, typing, making changes to files, and saving them. they also involve sending and receiving emails and using web browsers. another ability is to make and keep friends online through websites like facebook. another skill is to find and use information from library websites and databases effectively (edeh et al., 2022). digital literacy, according to pangrazio (2016), can give students new ways of thinking, talking, and working that have an impact on their academic progress regardless of location or time constraints. if students know how to use digital tools, they can use those skills to do well in school, learn new things about themselves, and make useful things. furthermore, according to aslan (2021) digital literacy calls for the ability to apply technology to encourage the teaching learning processes as well as to access, produce, and share accurate information. it also calls for the proper use of various technologies. in incorporating ict to the teaching practices, teachers must obtain the technological and pedagogical knowledge and abilities required. to put it another way, based on almerich et al. (2016), if teachers are not technologically and pedagogically proficient with these tools, they will not be able to integrate them into their regular teaching practices. there are several things that can help with attempts to democratize education in a nation, especially digital literacy, like focusing on the caliber of teachers and evaluating the educational attainment of pupils in each generation (bahri et al., 2022). the majority of teachers worldwide lacked sufficient digital proficiency and experience with using technology and conducting online teaching and learning. furthermore, students and teachers still lack proficiency in using multimedia tools like power points and projectors in addition to internet connection. as a result, instruction is still traditional and usually one-way. this current investigation sought to characterize the teachers’ readiness in utilizing digital technology after a survey revealed that they were underprepared. specifically in indonesia, the citizens’ digital literacy was investigated by katadata insight center (2021). the survey engaged 10,000 respondents from 34 provinces. it was found that the digital literacy index showed a figure of 3.49 which categorized at the medium level. furthermore, the survey included four pillars as the aspects in estimating the digital literacy index. digital culture got the highest score represented by a figure of 3.90, followed by digital ethics represented by a figure of 3.55, digital skill represented by a figure of 3.44, and the lowest, digital safety represented by a figure of 3.10. these survey results indicate that indonesian citizens need to develop their digital literacy to survive in life. there are sundry factors why digital literacy of the indonesian citizens is far from adequacy. the ability to read, write, analyze, process, and distribute textual messages will affect how digital technology is used. a lack of early exposure to critical thinking education is also another factor contributing to people's poor levels of digital literacy. in this case, indonesian generations must be trained how to master digital literacy since their early age with the helps and efforts of teachers. to make it possible, the teachers themselves must be firstly digitally literate. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 327 in accordance with al-awidi & aldhafeeri (2016), teachers’ digital literacy readiness could be broken down into two sorts: pedagogical readiness and technical readiness. pedagogical readiness is concerned with teachers’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits in order to effectively incorporate technology into learning. technical readiness means being ready and able to use technology for learning which includes teachers knowing how to explore and utilize digital tools. to be successful in their jobs, teachers need to be technologically literate in teaching and managing digital learning environments in schools (fuchs et al., 2022). in fact, digital literacy ownership is advocated for all instructors, regardless of gender. many researches produced enticing findings regarding gender differences in digital literacy. rizal et al. (2021) figured out that the male teachers had a higher digital literacy than female teachers. further, they argued that gender has gender exhibits different trends in terms of technological motivation and usage habits. then, fernández‑batanero et al. (2022) inspected that the male teachers were less knowledgeable than female teachers in regard to their competence levels of teachers which varied by gender. it is crucial that english teachers are prepared to learn digital literacy because english teachers in today’s schools are expected to encourage students to learn independently and to bloom their digital skills. in order to do this, they need to learn and use these skills first. english teachers need to use digital technologies when they teach english. the merits of using digital technologies in english classrooms such as to create effective learning through social network applications and to raise students’ motivation for learning (liza & andriyanti, 2020). thus, the aims of this research were to figure out the english teachers’ level of their digital literacy readiness, to figure out the divergences between male and female english teacher groups’ digital literacy readiness as well as to investigate the factors which affect the english teachers’ digital literacy readiness. method this research was designed and conducted to be mixed-method research in the attempt to meet and fulfill the research objectives. additionally, this research leaned heavily on the quantitative analysis. the quantitative data were gathered using an online questionnaire that addresses the respondents’ level of digital literacy readiness, and the disparities in the digital literacy readiness level of male and female group. furthermore, focus group discussion and interview were conducted to obtain the qualitative data about the factors affecting the digital literacy readiness of the respondents. a total of 33 english teachers were engaged as the participants of the current research. all of them work and teach in denpasar area especially in both public and private senior high schools. they were government employees and nongovernment employees. from 33 participants, they could be broken down into 2 cohorts; 21 female and 12 male english teachers. a summary of the respondents’ demographic information is visualized by the following table. table 1. demographics of the respondents aspects total gender female 21 male 12 status non-government employee 21 government employee 12 teaching experience duration under 5 years from 5-10 years above 10 and under 15 years 10 15 8 the research data had been categorized as quantitative data and qualitative data. to obtain the quantitative data, teacher’s readiness questionnaire was administered. this instrument was adapted and developed based on al-awidi & aldhafeeri (2016); situmorang et al. (2020). it consisted of 24 items where 23 items had been constructed in accordance with 2 dimensions; technical readiness and pedagogical readiness, and 1 item was about to dig the respondents’ points of views of the factors which influence the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers in teaching learning process synchronously and asynchronously. the 23 items have a 5-point likert scale type from “strongly agree or sa” (scored 5) and “strongly disagree or sd” (scored 1). furthermore, the items were not scored reversed. the questionnaire was afterwards administered online through google form to the respondents. furthermore, to gather the qualitative data, interview protocols and focus group discussion topic were prepared. these instruments were administered which aimed at obtaining deep understanding of the respondents about their digital literacy readiness. priorly, there were 8 anak agung putri maharani, ni made wersi murtini, & anak agung putu arsana smart society 5.0: the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers 328 respondents chosen and agreed to join the virtual interview and focus group discussion sessions. they were as the representatives of 4 denpasar districts (west, east, north and south denpasar). in one district, 2 english teachers representing public and private senior high schools were invited. one representative, however, was unable to participate since it was difficult to get in touch with the teacher and to schedule a time that worked for the data gathering sessions using virtual meeting. eventually, the researchers were able to involve only 7 respondents. during the virtual activities of interview session and focus group discussion, the respondents were encouraged to elaborate on their answers and provide details about how ready they were for digital literacy. the research instruments were evaluated in terms of their validity and reliability which judged by two experts. the expert judges graduated their doctorate degree and their specialist is in english language teaching and educational technology. they evaluated the instruments based on the relevancy of the items to the theories referred in the research. additionally, the appropriates of the items to the objectives was also highlighted followed by feedback on the items’ readability. first of all, the respondents completed the questionnaires which were delivered using the google form. the results of administering the online questionnaire were first categorized and examined by means of the formula of descriptive statistic. the results of the analysis were available in the forms of mean scores, standard deviation and percentages. the interview was done after the participants fulfilled the questionnaire, and they agreed to be involved in the online interview session. the researchers and the participants made an appointment especially dealing with the time dan date of interview. last, the focus group discussion was done online by engaging several representatives of the respondents at one time through zoom meeting. as mixed-method research design was employed, the obtained data were both analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in the attempt to examine the obtained data. the quantitative analysis includes the computation of descriptive statistics (means, standard deviation, and percentage) to figure out the digital literacy readiness level and to examine the digital literacy readiness variances between male and female groups. in fact, the online questionnaire was administered to collect this information. furthermore, to delve deeper into the factors affect the respondents’ digital literacy readiness, the data were collected through interview and focus group discussion. thematic content was extracted from the transcripts of the interview as well as focus group discussion. then, the attained data were independently evaluated by the researchers to reduce biases and enhance the credibility and quality and of the research findings. to find the themes, the data were required to join the process of transcribing, coding, categorizing, and evaluating. results and discussion after administering the questionnaire which could be retrieved online and conducting the interview session and focus group discussion virtually, a plentiful set of research data were acquired. the research findings encompassed the digital literacy readiness level, the different digital literacy readiness between male and female english teachers and factors which affect their digital literacy readiness. the english teachers’ digital literacy readiness level in this section, the existing level of the english teachers’ digital literacy was presented through a table. table 1. the english teachers’ digital literacy readiness level no aspects a technical readiness means sd 1. i know what internet-connected mobile devices i can take with me wherever i go. 4.24 0.66 2. i am competent in working with email. 4.24 0.50 3. i understand the features in operating the software. 4.03 0.81 4. i understand how to download and upload files by using technological tools. 4.33 0.54 5. i understand how to use software like powerpoint. 4.42 0.50 6. i understand how 4.36 0.60 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 329 to use social media (whatsapp or instagram) to communicate with the students both synchronously and asynchronously. 7. i understand how to convert the activities in the curriculum into digital form. 4.18 0.64 8. i understand how to create online quizzes and apply them in teaching my class both synchronously and asynchronously. 4.18 0.68 9. i understand the way to implement online discussions in my class. 4.18 0.53 10. i understand how to publish my lessons and class activities on the web. 3.91 0.68 11. i understand how to use an lms (learning management system) to complement my teaching. 3.97 0.81 12. i understand how to develop elearning activities that encourage my students to become critical thinkers. 4.00 0.61 b pedagogical readiness means sd 13. i am capable to use information technology to support my teaching method. 4.24 0.50 14. i can integrate information technology into learning. 4.15 0.76 15. i strive to create high-quality learning experiences as a result of either face-to-face or non-face-to-face interaction with 4.12 0.65 students. 16. i support studentto-student interaction and collaborative activities as a means of digital teaching and learning. 4.24 0.44 17. i acknowledge that community building is a vital component of digital learning. 4.24 0.61 18. i incite the students to carry out life experiences into the classroom which properly used in creating activities. 4.09 0.63 19. i feel comfortable communicating online and feel able to convey my written messages. 3.94 0.66 20. i can manage my time well in information technology enriched classes. 4.12 0.55 21. i am flexible in dealing with students’ issues including assignment due dates or absences. 4.00 0.66 22. i am organized and like to plan ahead in information technology-based teaching. 4.15 0.57 23. i am able handle and monitor students studying in information technologyenriched classrooms. 4.09 0.58 the means of the items under the dimension of technical readiness (12 items) ranged from 3.91 (sd=0.68) to 4.42 (sd=0.50). the means of the items under the dimension of pedagogical readiness (11 items) ranged from 3.94 (sd=0.66) to 4.24 (sd=0.61). from the aforementioned findings, it can be obviously interpreted that the english teachers regard themselves be ready in digital literacy. anak agung putri maharani, ni made wersi murtini, & anak agung putu arsana smart society 5.0: the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers 330 this finding was supported by the research conducted by a research done by fuchs et al. (2022) figured out that the preservice teachers perceived themselves ready digitally in teaching and learning process. this study supported by another study which figured out that the digital literacy readiness of the research respondents were estimable (öngören, 2021). furthermore, milawati & sholeh (2020) investigated the readiness of the teachers in facing digital literacy era. the technical readiness of the respondents in using digital technology is rated as inadequate. although it is rated as inadequate, the revolutionary progress of digital technology has unavoidably come to an end. another research done by özcan (2022) which was accomplished by engaging 443 prospective teachers from the education faculty. the prospective teachers were majoring in 10 different fields and studying at the first, second, third, and fourth grade levels. based on the research findings, the positive and substantial association were identified between potential teachers’ levels of digital literacy and attitudes toward mobile learning, which are both at a moderate level. additionally, 35% of prospective teachers’ opinions toward mobile learning can be attributed to the respondents’ digital literacy level. the gender, grade level, and department variables all significantly affect prospective teachers' levels of digital literacy, and the department variable significantly affects their attitudes toward mobile learning. moreover, a study by liza & andriyanti (2020) investigated that the level of readiness among english teachers for integrating digital technologies into english classrooms— representing the four aspects of attitude, knowledge, perception, and ability—was strong. besides, 78% respondents of the study enunciated that they were prepared to infuse and inject digital technology into english classrooms. the differences between male and female english teachers’ digital literacy readiness in this section, the differences the gender-based english teacher groups’ digital literacy readiness were presented through a table below. the table shows the differences in relation to percentages of each likert scale. table 2. the differences between male and female english teachers’ digital literacy readiness no aspects percentages male female 1 technical readiness sa 35% 31% a 60% 65% n 5% 4% d 0% 0% sd 0% 0% total 100% 100% 2 pedagogical readiness sa 35% 25% a 56% 67% n 8% 6% d 1% 1% sd 0% 0% total 100% 100% table 2 presents that the male english teachers outperformed the female english teachers in technical readiness and pedagogical readiness aspects of digital literacy readiness on strongly agree scale. conversely, the female english teachers were superior on agree scale in 2 aspects of digital literacy readiness. the familiarity with digital technologies and the frequency of internet use among english teachers were two key indicators of their readiness for digital literacy. a similar study done by aslan (2021) figured out that the two gender-based pre-service teacher groups had different levels of confidence in using digital technology. the findings of this current research is also consistent with the findings of markauskaite (2005) figured out that male and female teachers were different. even though, the respondents had a substantial experience of ict use, males were more confidence about their capabilities in planning, finding information and selecting ict tools than females. additionally, males were also more confidence in autonomously mastering new applications. moreover, a study done by çam & kiyici (2017) acknowledged that in terms of visual literacy, male prospective teachers outperformed female ones. likewise, the male prospective teachers significantly had more computer literacy than the female prospective teachers. a study by ata & yıldırım (2019) revealed that a significant genre distinction was observed in favor of males’ perceptions regarding digital literacy who showed a stronger digital propensity; meanwhile, the female teachers had seen technology-related issues were more challenging. similarly, both parties both had highly favorable opinions of their digital literacy competency, indicating a greater level of confidence using their digital literacy skills. factors which affect their digital literacy readiness english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 331 in determining the factors that modify the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers in teaching learning process synchronously and asynchronously, virtual interview session and focus group discussion were conducted to obtain the data. the findings can be broken down into two cohorts; external factors and internal factors of the english teachers. external factors in relation to external factors which affect the english teachers’ digital literacy readiness, they reported 5 primary factors coming from the outside such as the outstanding technology development, e-rapport demand, the inadequacy of the facilities supporting digital technology and information into the classroom, the cost of infusing the digital technology into the class, and the students’ capabilities in utilizing the digital technology and information. first of all, the english teachers concurred that strengthening the english subject through the use of digital technology is effective. they also view technology as a useful instrument that can be utilized to provide materials as well as an open source of information. the rapid development of advanced technology definitely must be followed by the readiness of the english teachers in utilizing the advanced technology into class. even, the demand of nowadays education in which the recap of the students’ semester evaluation must be done through e-rapport influence the teachers in being equipped within digital literacy. however, even though, in education, the expenditure of technology-based application is demanded, it is weakened by the inadequate facilities to support and fulfil the demands. the english teachers argued that the facilities such as internet connection, computers, or lcd projectors were available, but they did not optimally support their teaching learning process. additionally, they disclosed that it was expensive to prepare suitable facilities, both in terms of number and quality, to support the teaching and learning process. they also often prepared the facilities independently in case the facilities provided by the schools where they work did not work properly or inadequate in their performances or numbers. lastly, another crucial external factor which is also taken into consideration is the students’ capabilities in using the digital technology and information to get immersed in classroom. according to mega (2022), digital literacy is prominent for students to conquer which is functioned to direct student-centered learning. it means that the success of teaching learning process infused by technology also be dependable on how good and literate the students know operating the technology. thus, students must therefore acquire specialized abilities for using both online and offline programs in conjunction with integrating digital media into their english learning (mudra, 2020). internal factors the factors coming from the inside of the english teachers that affect their digital literacy readiness were reported into two points. the english teachers mainly said that the factors were firstly related to their willingness to learn and master the digital technology and information and secondly related to their capabilities in utilizing the digital technology and information to be useful. the willingness to learn is significantly different which affected by in what generation that the english teachers belong to. teachers must now master and utilize technology in order to align with their students because of the rapid development of technology. this skill level should be gained slowly and consistently, by learning on their own and getting trained by ict professionals (sulasmi, 2022). in this current study, the english teachers in their 20s and 30s mostly stated that they tend to willingly learn and experiment new things in their class by using technological tools. they believed they were able to properly use the tools if they digitally literate. in contrast, the english teachers in their 40s and 50s argued that they hardly followed the development of technology. these findings are supported by suryana (2013) that the majority of senior teachers over the age of 53 who lacked ict literacy found it difficult to adjust to this new technology and continued to educate in the conventional manners. it was in line with alanoglu et al. (2022) that the teachers’ digital literacy level was affected by the traditional educational philosophies they gained in their pas school time. they were uninterested in learning ict media for teaching and learning. furthermore, it is obviously dissimilar with the young generation teacher who were always interested in learning new things about information technology and who followed the evolution of ict. saripudin et al. (2021) discovered that younger teachers exhibited upper digital literacy level than the more experienced ones, likely as a result of their greater exposure to digital technology. anak agung putri maharani, ni made wersi murtini, & anak agung putu arsana smart society 5.0: the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers 332 additionally, according to hidayat (2019), digital literacy can help students learn how to communicate safely both inside and outside of the classroom. it can also help them be creative and think about important issues happening in the world. digital literacy can also improve their problem-solving capabilities and teach them how to manage lots of information online. these benefits drive teachers to incorporate digital literacy into the english language classroom. it is due to the requirement that students be literate and capable of performing in ways that are relevant to others, instead of merely being able to use digital media. next, the english teachers’ capabilities to utilize the digital technology and information as the internal factor is in accordance with the findings of jara et al. (2015) that high performance of the teachers on digital skills is manly correlated to the access to computer at home. in other words, it is related to times they spent in using such technology. the results of the previous study also suggested that early exposure to technology could have a big positive impact on how well the respondents learn to use the digital tools. conclusion the english teachers were in the level of a sufficient in relation to their digital literacy readiness. they should be technically and pedagogically equipped to use technology and eager to incorporate it into the teaching learning process. there were external and internal factors that influenced the english teachers' digital literacy readiness, which they must maintain with the intention to optimally create meaningful teaching and learning processes to accomplish the twenty-first century demands and prepare the students to be members of smart society 5.0. acknowledgement this manuscript would have been conceivable with the perpetual expert backings and prompts from universitas mahasaraswati denpasar. we would also like to express our gratitude to everyone who participated in the peer review process for the manuscript. this manuscript is ready for publication and thanks to the professional assistance, encouragement, and support of all respected reviewers. additionally, we would like to express our gratitude to all participants who contributed during this research phase. references akkoyunlu, b., & soylu, m. y. 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(2022). primary school teachers’ digital literacy: an analysis on teachers’ skills in using technological devices. journal of innovation in educational and cultural research, 3(2), 140– 145. https://doi.org/10.46843/jiecr.v3i2.81 suryana, y. (2013). teachers’ perception on ictbased english teaching. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 17–24. we are social. (2022). digital 2022: global overview report – global digital insights. data reportal yaraş, z., & öztürk, f. k. (2022). society 5.0 in human technology integration: digital transformation in educational organizations*. international journal of progressive education, 18(1), 458–474. https://doi.org/10.29329/ijpe.2022.426.26 anak agung putri maharani, ni made wersi murtini, & anak agung putu arsana smart society 5.0: the digital literacy readiness of the english teachers 334 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 161 political activist community in leila s. chudori’s novel laut bercerita efendi barus english literature study program, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: efendiuisu@gmail.com saiful anwar matondang english literature study program, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: saiful.matondang@fkip.uisu.ac.id m. manugeren english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: manugeren@sastra.uisu.ac.id purwarno purwarno english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwarno@sastra.uisu.ac.id purwanto siwi english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: purwanto.siwi@sastra.uisu.ac.id susi ekalestari english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam email: susi.ekalestari@sastra.uisu.ac.id sri wulan english department, faculty of literature, universitas islam sumatera utara email: sriwulan@sastra.uisu.ac.id apa citation: barus, e., matondang, s. a., manugeren, m., purwarno, p., siwi, p., ekalestari, s., & wulan, s. (2023). political activist community in leila s. chudori’s novel laut bercerita. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 161-170. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7540 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 27-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction literary works express social problems that are never separated from human life through genres such as novel, poetry or drama (sharma, 2020; beavoir & fleming, 2020; peacock, 2019). in this study, the object of the research is a novel entitled laut bercerita, by lelia s. chudori. the substance of the storyline in the novel is related to a group of students who are struggling to restore people's rights to express opinions and conduct any activity abstract: in the process of democratization in a state, the position of university students is decisive. every student must be responsible to the society, able to see what is happening and to provide the best solutions to the societal problems as well as being a mouthpiece from the common people to the government, nation and state. in addition to developing their cognitive abilitie0s, students are required to participate actively in everything that is social in nature to foster a social spirit in the community. this picture is reflected in the political activist community in the novel laut bercerita by leila s. chudori. the research was conducted using a literary sociology approach related to the author's relationship with society and texts revealing problems in society. the focus of the research is related to the disclosure of social phenomena. holistically, a qualitative descriptive research method is implemented. the data source is the novel and data collection is based on documentation techniques, obtained from the novel in the forms text referring to the attitudes of the students in their struggle for reform in all areas of public life and also based on the content analysis techniques with an objective approach. the results of the study show that the attitudes reflected in the political activist movement are social awareness, hard work and tolerance. keywords: hard work; social awareness; tolerance. efendi barus, saiful anwar matondang, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan political activist community in leila s. chudori’s novel laut bercerita 162 criticizing the government; such an activity is always labeled subversive activity by the ruling government. the activists also struggle to provide information to all levels of society about the need for rearrangement in the country's social, cultural and economic systems (pattiwael, 2019). the author, in producing the novel, is inspired by a true story, a dark political event of the state in which students from all over the regions perform massive demonstrations demanding changes, known as the reform movement. various assumptions and opinions emerge from the society, especially the research community regarding the factors causing the reform movement, including the monetary crisis, social inequality to the issue of racialism; however, whatever the factors that spark the riots, the incidents take the tolls and are considered a crime against humanity because there are indications of genocide. in general, people think that this event is a black page of the state’s history (sirot & atmaja, 2020). leila salikha chudori is a journalist of tempo magazine. the novel, published in 2017, has the themes of struggle and social awareness. set in the 90's and 2000's, the novel is able to bring its readers to break through the past and look back at the events of the time, reminding the readers of the reformation era which is full of bitterness and injustice for the defenders of the people. the novel is a historical fiction genre, (andani et al., 2022) and the writing is based on the existing facts. the novel is also supported by the data from the real life of the society, especially the activist community through interviews directly conducted by the author; besides, the author also conducts indepth research related to the characters of the existing figures, places and events that have passed. the process of making such a novel is what makes this novel seem alive. the novel of 379 pages has a very realistic visualization and character atmosphere, especially in the part where the activists are inhumanely tortured. the novel contains a moral message because it contains knowledge about social justice, democratic principles, and the history of movements to support the new order. the novel also leaves readers with speculations keeping the readers amused. the dictions are easy to understand as there are no foreign terms presented. there are three types of setting throughout the storyline, place setting, time setting, and social setting. the place setting refers to rumah hantu sayegan, rumah susun klender, rumah orangtua biru laut, terminal bungurasih and desa blangguan. the time setting is connected with sunday afternoon and evening time. the social background in this novel is about outlook on life. the first-person point of view is used. this can be seen by the use of the word 'i' referring to the main character named biru laut narrating the storyline in detail supported by other main characters. the research focus is related to the attitude of activists in carrying out their mission and vision. suffering, hardship and tyranny from the rulers trigger the social awareness of the activists. social awareness is their very significant attitude and this attitude is their starting point to become political activists. social awareness is an effort that can be achieved through the process of interaction and is supported by education (abbagnano & fulvi, 2021). social awareness is constructed by selfawareness or self awareness becomes the basic structure as a systematic support within it (abouk & heydari, 2021; mooney et al., 2021; pattiwael, 2019). the activists have awareness on the problems faced by the society. the social awareness they have is also supported by the attitude of hard work, working earnestly and sincerely, without expecting anything in return. the next attitude is tolerance, behavior to respect other and respect the differences that exist, either between individuals and groups. the existence of this attitude in them gives a sense of peace, security, serenity, comfort, and firmness in all their actions. these three attitudes, social awareness, hard work and tolerance are interrelated and make the activists stronger and more confident in their struggle. the sociology of literature approach is used in this research with the consideration that the focus is related to the attitudes of the characters depicted in community of the novel and these attitudes also appear or are raised for the benefit of the society; furthermore, the substance of this novel is also a reflection of reality events, meaning that even though this novel is written based on reality, literary works in general are also a reflection of the reality of people's lives. (mukhsin, 2022). a research in the sociology of literature focuses more on the relationship between the author and social life, both in terms of form and content. the research method used in this study is descriptive qualitative to reveal social phenomena in the form of attitudes, actions and activities of the characters in the novel. the qualitative descriptive data analysis technique is a research method that utilizes qualitative data and is presented descriptively. holistically, the research is supported by respective concepts and theories. there are basically two approaches to literary english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 163 works, namely intrinsic and extrinsic approaches. the novel elements raised in terms of content, are theme, plot or plot, character, language style and characterizations; while extrinsic elements derive from external influences contained in literary works such as sociology, politics, anthropological philosophy and others. the approach to social aspects is termed literary sociology using text analysis to find out the structure to understand more deeply the social phenomena outside of literature and in this context it is related to the understanding the political attitudes of the activists in the novel laut bercerita (victoria, 2021; tisya et al., 2020; suri et al., 2022; hawa et al., 2019). sociology of literature has developed quite rapidly since the existence of the paradigm that literary works must function the same as other cultural aspects and literary works must be understood as an integral part of the communication system of society as a whole. in this context, sociology and literature actually deal with the same problems; as with sociology, literature also deals with humans in society as an effort to reform the society (widjayanti, 2019). thus, literary works can be considered as an attempt to recreate the social world, namely human relations with family, environment, politics, state, economy, and so on which are also matters of sociology (meiliana, 2019). sociology can provide a useful explanation of literature, and one might even say that without sociology, an understanding of literature is incomplete. literary work is unique because it is a combination of the author's imagination and complex social life. literary works are a mirror of human social life because the problems described in literary works are problems that exist in the author's life environment (mursalim, 2019; faruk, 2020). this is where the two meet again and implies that there must be interdisciplinary interaction in studying a literary work. there are three aspects in the sociology of literature approach to a study of literary works: the author, the text, and the readers (damono, 2020; faruk, 2019). the author's aspect relates to the author's profession and literary institutions. the issues studied include the economic basis of literary production, social background, the author's status and ideology which can be seen from the author's various activities outside of literary works; in other words, the author's aspect focuses on the author as the creator of the texts. authors as creators of literary works are social beings whose existence is bound by their social status in society, the ideology they adhere to, their position in society, as well as their relationship with the readers. the aspects of literary works are related to social problems that exist in society and regard literature as a reflection of reality. the reader aspect relates to the relationship between text and the readers with a focus on the impact of literary works on the readers or society. these three aspects become a unit and are implemented in this study. leila s. chudori as the author becomes the inspiration for the production of the novel laut bercerita. as a journalist, she is called to dig up the dark events that once happens, the crimes against humanity. furthermore, the novel reveals a series of storylines that are in accordance with the author's ideology, namely uncovering social facts as material for reflection, moral education and at the same time entertainment. the novel wins various awards and people are very enthusiastic to read it, including the academicians; this proves that the novel has a great influence on society. the portrait of the political activist community refers to the attitude of the activists towards the country's political situation and they see various inequalities in various lines of social life in the community and this has become a trigger for them to shout slogans whose contents lead to reform in all aspects of community life. their attitude becomes the topic of discussion in this study. an attitude shows judgments, feelings, and actions towards an object. different attitudes occur because of the understanding, experience, and considerations that have been experienced by someone in an object. therefore, the results of attitudes towards an object can be positive or negative. attitudes are patterns of behavior, tendencies or anticipatory readiness, predispositions to adapt to social situations, or simply, attitudes are responses to conditioned social stimuli (vamvaka et al., 2020; amodion, 2019). readiness in question is a potential tendency to react in a certain way when an individual is faced with a stimulus that requires a response (kurniawan et al., 2019; corneille & hutter, 2020; otto et al., 2019; koch et al., 2019; bechler et al., 2021; jin et al., 2020). manifestations of attitude cannot be seen immediately, but must be interpreted first as behavior that is still closed (mazana et al., 2019). operationally the notion of attitude shows the connotation of appropriate reactions to certain stimulus categories and in practical use, attitudes are often confronted with social stimuli and emotional reactions (cheung &to, 2019). efendi barus, saiful anwar matondang, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan political activist community in leila s. chudori’s novel laut bercerita 164 the attitude component consists of three aspects: the cognitive aspect, related to symptoms regarding thoughts. this aspect is in the form of processing, experience, and individual beliefs and expectations about certain objects or groups of objects. this aspect is based on knowledge, beliefs, or thoughts on the information, which is related to the object. the affective aspect, a tangible process related to certain feelings, such as fear, envy, sympathy, anti-certainty, and so on which are directed at certain objects. the conative aspect, the form of a tendency to act on an object, for example the tendency to help, distance oneself, and so on. these three aspects are reflected in the attitude of the activists; starting with the cognitive aspects that produce social awareness and become the starting point for the formation of an activist community; affective aspect, they are very affected by the social condition of society which is lacking and full of clashes and difficulties, especially in the economic field; conative aspects that result in their actions against the government (charlesworth & banaji, 2019). social awareness is a person's mental representation of himself and others. social awareness relates to one's awareness of social situations experienced by oneself and others, so that individuals can become aware of things that are happening around them each individual has his own habit or style in paying attention to information obtained from his social environment. this shows that the cognitive system that each individual has is different from one another and can influence their social awareness in social interaction . apart from the cognition system, social awareness can be influenced by goals and motives. these goals and motives reflect the social information needed by a person (afrina et al., 2021). there are three dimensions in social awareness: tacit, focal and content. tacit awareness is a person's perspective or from the perspective of someone seeing other people around him, divided into self-perspective and other people's perspective. focal awareness is a perspective on objects that are seen or felt by the senses. focal awareness is divided into two parts, the perspective of oneself as an object and also the perspective of others as objects. awareness content is based on a visual or visible appearance perspective from an observable social environment and an unobservable experience (wieser, 2022). living as a social being needs to have social awareness within each individual. social awareness is described as a condition in which individuals have more ability to channel empathy. thus, the individual is able to perceive social signals and things that commonly occur in society. with social awareness, individuals will be better able to accept the perspectives of others, be sensitive to their surroundings, help others without expecting anything in return, and be able to hear and accept the opinions of others. the existence of social awareness that is embedded in each individual will create a social environment that is in harmony with the goals of social awareness. the aim is to form a society to live together without differences and without harming one another. life is to think about one another because everyone has rights and obligations (appio et al., 2019; jagers et al., 2019). hard work is an attitude of never giving up to do something, never complaining and always trying even though there are many obstacles but still trying to achieve it. an individual who shows sincerity and a strong will to try to get the work done is a characteristic of hard work. the attitude of hard work appears as a form of strong motivation and a clear future orientation. someone who likes to work hard is certainly not easy to give up in all things. hard work should not be misinterpreted for negative purposes because real hard work must be based on honesty and fairness to achieve positive goals (cameron et al., 2019). a person, even though he will do hard work, must also understand his own abilities; a person is not allowed to do something beyond his ability because the results will not be optimal; there are limitations that must be understood to do something. every individual has to work hard because actually life is a struggle; someone who does not take advantage of the potential he has cannot achieve success (autor, 2019). hard work should also be supported by smart ways of thinking which include planning, formulation and evaluation of work. everything that will be done must be well planned, then followed by taking appropriate steps or actions and followed by an evaluation, both of oneself and of the work to be carried out (stockl et al., 2022; li & bates, 2019). life has such a great diversity. even within one family one can find such diversity. diversity can occur because of differences between one person and another. tolerance is a modern concept to describe mutual respect and cooperation between groups of people with various differences (ardi et english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 165 al., 2021). therefore, tolerance is a very important attitude because it is an act that respects the diversity of backgrounds, views and beliefs. understanding plurality should not be limited to the level of discourse, but must be realized in life in form of tolerant attitude and behavior. tolerance means the attitude of allowing disagreement and not rejecting opinions, attitudes, or lifestyles that are different from their own. the attitude of tolerance in its implementation is not only carried out on matters related to different spiritual and moral aspects, but also must be carried out on broad aspects, including different ideological and political aspects. discourses of tolerance are usually found in ethics and dissent. in the ethics of differing opinions there is a discourse not to impose one's will in forms and ways that are detrimental to other parties. tolerance and non-violence are born from high self-esteem. the key is how all parties perceive themselves and others. if his perception emphasizes negative dimensions and is less appreciative of others, it is likely that his tolerance will be weak, or even non-existent. meanwhile, if the perception of self and others is positive, then what emerges is a tolerant attitude in dealing with diversity. tolerance will appear in people who understand pluralism in an optimistic-positive way (kuzmenko, 2020; yuen, 2023; muzafarovna, 2020). while at the theoretical level, the concept of tolerance presupposes a foundation of shared values so that the ideal that any ideology can coexist side by side must be realized (velthuis et al., 2021). activist community is a vehicle where a group of people with the same mission and vision fight for something that is considered important for the benefit of society. in this study the activist community consisted of university students who are very concerned about social, cultural and political conditions that develop inconsistently with the expectations in society. the activist students fight for opinions that they think are right to be guarded, and become opposition for things that are not in accordance with their ideals (moorman, 2020). not infrequently they even bravely take risks for escorting actions and reconcile the parties being escorted. actually, the activists are ordinary students who study in universities, but because of their concern for the environment, they go outside the academic sphere; they join the community to take a role and participate in fighting for justice through escorting cases in all aspects, whether economic, social, cultural, or political. they also sacrifice their energy, thoughts, time and even college for something that they think must be upheld, namely justice. this gives a different color and makes the activist have more value in terms of social care (ovtchinnikov et al., 2019). the status as students also allows them to take an active role in social problems that may occur. in addition, being an activist also brings other benefits, including broadening relationships, experience, and knowledge that sometimes cannot be obtained in the classroom. the form of escorting the activists is not only limited to actions and demonstrations; but it can also be done with other intermediaries, including discussion and consolidation activities, opinion writings for escorting cases, and humanitarian action by holding donation events (jasko et al., 2019). the world of academia and that of activism cannot simply be merged into one discourse, even though they are connected to each other. the academic world clearly contributes to the world of activism. it is undeniable that the educational process in tertiary institutions makes the students more mature and critical in seeing their environment, but the direction of these two groups is different. the scientific world focuses on the search for knowledge. meanwhile, the world of activism is the one of political struggle. one seeks, another struggles. the basic movement of the scientific world is starting from doubt and ending with truth. skepticism gives birth to truth, to then be tested again. the working method of a scientist is to find the truth, question it, and then test it. even a scientist may start a research or action with doubts and end with doubts. but the activist paradigm is certainly very different. an activist fight for the values, ideals, ideology, truths he adheres to without a doubt. an activist, starts something with certainty and ends it with certainty. never for a moment will he back down and hesitate. precisely true activists will really hate the attitude of doubt as once in doubt, it means questioning the existence of the values espoused. doubt, for an activist, is tantamount to betrayal of the movement. method the research uses descriptive qualitative research to obtain an empirical description of the attitudes of activists in their struggle to bring about reforms in social and political conditions as depicted in the novel laut bercerita by leila s. chudori. descriptive qualitative research aims to understand phenomena about what is experienced by the research subjects such as behavior, perceptions, efendi barus, saiful anwar matondang, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan political activist community in leila s. chudori’s novel laut bercerita 166 motivation, actions and others by describing texts in a special natural context (harrison et al., 2020). the data source in this study is a novel laut bercerita by leila s. chudori, published by kepustakaan popular gramedia in 2017. in this study the data generated are in the forms of quotation text. the data collection is carried out using the documentation and literature method with steps such as reading carefully and thoroughly the research sources while carrying out analytical work (hafsa, 2019). the reading techniques are carried out by: reading carefully and thoroughly the entire contents of the novel; marking certain parts that contain elements of the portrait of the political attitudes of activists; describing all the data that have been obtained from these steps (fabregues et al., 2021). the data analysis technique used is the content analysis method, a research technique to make replicable inferences, and validate the data by paying attention to the context. furthermore, the resulting data are not in the forms of numbers but in text. checking the validity of the findings is carried out to prove whether the research being carried out is truly scientific so that the research results could be justified. result and discussion the faltering economy and worsening social conditions in the society lead to protests from the people, especially the university students. this makes people's trust in government decrease. the students and the society take to the streets in massive demonstrations. students are the driving force behind demands for reform in all areas of social life. they are political activists who dare to oppose the government. their role is very important in dealing with issues in society, mobilizing the community and government to create positive changes in the context of the state. in their struggle, activists reflect a courageous and consistent attitude and are full of sincerity, including: social awareness data 1 “banyak sekali orang-orang yang diangkat menjadi pahlawan di masa orde baru ini, yang mungkin suatu hari bisa saja dipertanyakan apa betul mereka memang berjasa dan berkontribusi. tetapi kau benar, dalam perjuangan definisi antara pahlawan dan penghianat harus jelas.suatu hari pahlawan atau bandit tak boleh hanya ditentukan karena kekuasaan rezim.” (chudori, 2017, p.31) the data above illustrates how important it is for people to be careful in viewing social situations; people must understand that because of the interests of a group, anyone can be appointed and awarded a hero, whereas in reality people who are awarded service stars or honors as heroes are actually vaillins; this is conveyed by bramantryo, a political activist who came from the academic community. bramatyo always has an open mind and is sharp about whatever he sees around him; he is easily moved to think, including the problem of traitors and heroes. a country that has a history of independence that is not easy to gain, are surely filled by many people who have sacrificed and at the same time, many traitors try to thwart this success. it is not easy to gain independence; many have to be sacrificed, from property to life and many lose their lives in their struggle to gain independence and many of them re not recorded in the nation's history. they are the true heroes; while there are also groups of people who take advantage of the situation, they do nothing, but can be appointed as national heroes. this is the injustice that the activists see. their social awareness immediately arises and they move to uphold the truth. the problem of heroes and traitors is one of the many cases of injustice in this country. bram wants to say that we have to be careful, because people in power can manipulate facts. many who actually make sacrifices and fight for the welfare of the indonesian people are even considered traitors because they do not submit and obey the government. but on the contrary, people who only want to take advantage, take away human rights, and harm society are instead considered heroes. the trigger for social awareness in the quoted data above is in bram's sentence stating that ‘one day it may be questioned whether people who are considered heroes during the new order era really contribute to the state or not'. this statement can cause a reaction of awareness in many social individuals to demand the truth that must be clarified, because it is the right of all indonesian citizens to know who is really fighting for indonesia. this expression is also in line with the meaning that social awareness is an individual's way of analyzing, remembering, and using information related to social life. data 2 “… semakin banyak aku mendengar berbagai cerita yang sama sekali tidak pernah tertera dibuku sejarah, apalagi di media, semakin aku menyadari betapa buruknya situasi kehidupan english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 167 di negeri ini.” (chudori, 2017: 34-35) the quotation above is a snippet of a phrase that laut says when his heart is moved to tell the reason he is studying in yogya and willing to move away from his parents. at that time, there are bram and kinan who are a little surprised because laut, who look calm and do not usually tell others about his private life, tells stories full of emotion. this awareness appears in laut's heart and mind because he sees social events that are very close to him. this social awareness is also clarified in his expression which says that he as a child of the nation cannot remain silent watching such conditions continue to occur. therefore, every human being born in this country must always tries to do something, no matter how small it is. it is true, social awareness will arise when there is social pressure, especially those that are very intersecting with rights and justice. just like the phrase that laut says at the end of his sentence. when he realizes the bad life in his country, he immediately realizes the role he has to take to solve the problem. if not laut and every human being who are born citizens of this country, who else will save and care for sustainability, justice and prosperity in this country. hardwork data 1 “kami tak punya senapan dengan bayonet, kami tak punya otot, tak punya uang. gerakan kami semua bermodalkan semangat, uang pribadi, dan sumbangan beberapa individu yang secara diam-diam sudah muak dengan pemerintah orde baru yang semakin represif dari tahun ke tahun. kali ini, kami menambah senjata perlawanan itu dengan sajak dan aksi tanam jagung.” (chudori, 2017, pp.116-117) the quotation above is made by biru laut when describing their reckless action, namely planting corn in blangguan, a small village in east java. this action is inspired by w.s. rendra's poem seonggok jagung. this action illustrates the hard work and enthusiasm of laut and his friends in the winatra and wirasena groups. they all voluntarily sacrifice their energy, mind, and even their lives considering how risky this action is. blangguan is a corn planting action that will be carried out by farmers in the village of blangguan as an act of protest against the forced land taking by the authorities. even though they do not have guns and money, they come all the way from yogyakarta, in the middle of the heavy rain and in the dark at night, stealthily avoiding the security forces and the dangers that lurk, they all continue to exert all their efforts to stage this corn planting action for the return of their rights, the rights of farmers, the welfare of all people, and justice in this country. they work hard to devise a strategy so that the authorities would not easily catch them when the action is held, even in the frantic tense night haunted by the satanic officers. data 2 “pada titik yang luar biasa menyakitkan karena setrum itu terasa mencapai ujung saraf, aku sempat bertanya, apa yang sebetulnya kita kejar?”. kinan mengambil tanganku dan menggenggamnya, “kekuatan, laut. keinginan yang jauh lebih besar untuk tetap bergerak. ini semua menaikkan militansi kita, bukan memadamkannya.” (chudori, 2017, p.182) the data above is a fragment of a conversation between biru laut and kinan; this conversation takes place after laut and julius tells all the kidnapping incidents that they experience as a result of being arrested at bungurasih terminal after they return from the blangguan action. the conversation start with a skeptical question raised by laut regarding what has happened so far, what they are actually looking for, he has lost a little of his confidence and enthusiasm due to the torment he has experienced. to this question, kinan tries to encourage laut to respond, saying that what they are looking for is determination, strength, and a spirit of hard work to keep moving together for one goal, namely to overthrow the arbitrary new order government and bring about justice in this country. kinan, who is also a senior and a driving force in their actions, reminds them that the passion to keep fighting and believing is a feeling that they must keep growing in their chests, believing that one day their struggle and hard work will not be in vain, that one day the new order will falter, the president who has served for many years will falter, then giving hope to the country to breathe easy with a more fair leader and government system, and one day they will be able to smile proudly that no fighting spirit is wasted. tolerance data 1 “yah nggaklah. semua ajaran baik kan memang menyuruh kita berbagi. ajaran orangtua, ajaran semua agama, dan juga sila kelima pancasila kan juga berbicara soal keadilan sosial,...” (chudori, 2017, p.97) the quotation above is from biru laut telling efendi barus, saiful anwar matondang, m. manugeren, purwarno purwarno, purwanto siwi, susi ekalestari, & sri wulan political activist community in leila s. chudori’s novel laut bercerita 168 his friends of his being caught and interrogated by the red eyes. here, laut tries to answer theoretically about their reasons for opposing the new order government. for him, answering with reasonable reasons like that is the right way so that he and his friends will not be tortured even more. laut's statement actually allude to the injustice that exists at that time when there is no good democracy in the government. all the people are silent and asked to comply with all the provisions of that time. no justice means no tolerance given by the government to the people. the people are not justified in voicing their opinions and will be considered traitors if they violate the rules that have been made. data 2 “aku menelan kembali pertanyaan berikutnya yang mengganggu pikiranku tentang bagaimana naratama bisa lolos dari intaian intel. tetapi kinan tahu betul aku selalu curiga pada tama. karena kinan masih menaruh kepercayaan yang begitu besar pada naratama, aku berusaha membunuh kecurigaanku terhadapnya.” (chudori, 2017, pp. 9293) the quotation above comes from biru laut's thoughts about one of his friends, naratama. laut has long suspected tama because he thinks every time they are caught only tama escapes. but seeing that kinan still believes in tama, laut always tries to get rid of his suspicions against tama. in this case it can be concluded that kinan's attitude that still believes in naratama is a form of tolerance that arises in terms of respecting one's attitude and character and not using one's character as a reason not to trust him. how could he not, naratama is a person who, when he speaks, is always loud, firm and looks passionate. based on this appearance of naratama, sometimes his friends do not believe that naratama is a trustworthy person. conclusion the novel laut bercerita by leila s. chudori tells the struggle of political activists who are members of the winatra and wirasena groups against government injustice. this novel tells the setting of the time in the new order era until the beginning of the fall of the new order regime. the activists' struggle is in the form of a struggle against the new order regime which is running unfairly because all economic, political and legal elements have been arranged in such a way as to perpetuate the power of the new order. the agendas carried out by the activists are solely to uphold justice which is no longer obtained by the common people in the new order era. the novel is suitable for students, campus organizations, politicians, or people who talk about freedom. the readers will continue to be dragged into the emotional play of the characters until the end of the story. the story is a piece of the shared story, a part that will never be explained and will never be forgotten. the novel as a whole has a socio-cultural background and historical events. biru laut is the implementation of student activists at that time who participate in voicing the interests of the people who are being suppressed by the authoritarian government. running from one place to another in search of safety from being chased by the authorities until the absence of news or the disappearance of student activists is a historical narrative that is presented in the novel. the number of policies that are decided which are not in favor of the people are also the issues raised in the novel. the results of the analysis show that the activists, the majority of whom are students, have a firm and sincere attitude in the form of social awareness, hard work and tolerance in their struggle. social awareness is their initial attitude to start the struggle. the unclear selection of heroes and traitors by the government, which at the same time reflects on the government's arbitrariness for the interests of the group, the diversion of historical facts to eliminate bad track records, as well as the increasingly deteriorating social conditions of society are part of social awareness; along the way of their struggle, hard work and tolerance emerge. the activists never know fatigue and in all their endeavors they support and respect one another. these three attitudes make them never give up. the six data obtained from the three discussion points, social awareness, hard work and tolerance are 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(2023). tolerant solidarity with violent protesters: evidence from a survey experiment. journal of conflict resolution, e1154451. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027231154451 https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027231154451 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 413 lexical and contextual meanings in song lyrics “moana original soundtrack”: pedagodical implication sudar (corresponding author) english education program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, purworejo, indonesia email: sudarbintang@umpwr.ac.id tusino english education program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, purworejo, indonesia email: tusino82@umpwr.ac.id beta radish charica dewi english education program, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas muhammadiyah, purworejo, indonesia email: betaradish@gmail.com apa citation: sudar., tusino., & dewi, b. r. c. (2023). lexical and contextual meanings in song lyrics “moana original soundtrack”: pedagodical implication. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 413-422. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.6919 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction lexical and contextual meaning of song lyrics are the main discussion of this study. the title of the song lyrics is "maona original soundtracks." word has different meaning between lexical and contextual. in the study of context, a word has a meaning that is inappropriate if it is interpreted lexically. the meaning of a word also depends on the context of the situation and also the context of culture (ardhyanti & supriyatiningsih, 2020; noviani & bram, 2021). this is often referred to as contextual meaning. in 2013 curriculum, senior high school students who take the english language and literature class will get additional material related to literature, one of which is to understand english song. to understand the information being transmitted in a song’s lyrics, all the words and phrases must be grasped (oktariani et al., 2018; yastanti & setiawati, 2018). contextual meaning is connected to song lyrics because singers occasionally employ terms that that different meanings from their dictionary definitions (mamun et al., 2022; ; miarsih et al., 2018; murodi et al., 2021), making them difficult to interpret (wijayanti et al., 2022) and can also create various meanings (pasisingi et al., 2022). abstract: this research aims to analyze song lyrics containing lexical and contextual meanings in the title of “moana original soundtrack.". there are three research questions such as; 1.what is the form of lexical meaning in the song lyrics? .2. what is the form of contextual meanings found in the song lyrics? 3. how is the implementation of lexical and contextual meanings for teaching purposes, particularly for teaching reading skills? researchers used a qualitative descriptive method to conduct the study. the data sources of this research were the song lyrics of "moana original soundtrack.”. researchers’ chose five lyrics taken from internet social media. procedures concerning to the data collection and organizations are such as; first, researchers read and comprehension of song lyrics. second, researchers identified the words, phrases, and sentences containing lexical and contextual meaning. the third, researchers conducted coding and interpreting lexical and contextual meaning found in the song lyrics of maona original soundtrck. the forth, researchers concluded the results of analysis based on findings. the results showed that there are thirty five words in the song lyrics of “moana original soundtrack” contained lexical and contextual meanings. there were twelve words found in how far i’ll go, six words found in i am “moana”, ten words found in where you are, three words found in shiny, and four words found in know who you are. furthermore, texts of song lyrics containing lexical and contextual meaning can be use as a teaching material for critical reading skills. keywords: contextual; lexical; meaning; pedagogical implication; song lyrics. sudar, tusino, & beta radish charica dewi lexical and contextual meanings in song lyrics” moana original soundtrack”: pedagodical implication 414 therefore, it is important for the students to know how to understand the meaning of words, especially song lyrics lexically and contextually. "moana" is a 3d animated, musical, fantasy adventure, and computerized film. it is from walt disney. the film is the story of a powerful, brave, and independent daughter of a chief in the polynesian tribe. this character is very close to the life teenager. besides moana's original soundtrack, the soundtrack contains five original songs. the title of the songs are; "how far i'll go," "shinny," “i’m moana," "where you are," and "know who you are." however, there are many words of song lyrics that provide meaningful interpretations for readers and listeners (zahira & wulandari, 2022). it also means that the writer composes the words with the grammatical meaning and composes logically and contextually related words by using poetic words. therefore, the teacher can use moana's original soundtrack as material to teach reading. based on the explanation above, researchers would like to conduct a research by analyzing song lyrics. researchers take some theories which are used as a foundation to run the sequence research. those are related to lexical and contextual meaning. as stated by nurfithri (2022), it will be simple to understand the overall meaning of the song by understanding the lexical meaning and contextual meaning of the words in the song lyrics. there were some previous studies conducted related to lexical and contextual meaning discussion. the first was the study conducted by chotimah and as sabiq (2021). they investigated contextual meaning written in the song lyrics of rex orange county’s album “pony” and its pedagogical implication. in this study, the researchers focused on analyzing the contextual meaning and its implication in pedagogic. they did not analyze lexical meaning written in the song lyrics. comparing to this study, this study would like to investigate the lexical and contextual meaning written in the song lyrics and also its pedagogical implication, particularly for teaching reading material. the second previous study was a research which was conducted by syahfitri, (2021). she investigated song lyrics of indonesian song in the title “terserah” composed by willy winarko. she analyzed lexical and contextual meanings in that song lyrics. on the other hand, she did not implement the results of lexical and contextual meanings interpretation for a teaching purpose. she only interpreted the different meaning between lexical and contextual meaning. the contextual meanings of song lyrics “ terserah” related to covid-19 pandemic. further, the research conducted by syahfitri (2021) was different from this study. the third previous study was conducted by, (yahya et al., 2018). they analyzed song lyrics in the title” michael learns to rock’s (mltr)” songs. they analyzed lexical and contextual meaning of those song lyrics, on the other sides; they did not implement the results of analysis for teaching purposes. they only identified the lexical meaning and contextual meaning found in that song lyrics, and then they interpreted to semantic point of view. further, their study research was different focuses from the discussion in this study. furthermore, the last previous study was conducted by hariyanto, (2017). he analyzed the figurative language used in the song lyrics of firework by katty perry, he also analyzed that figurative language based on the context to find out the meanings. referring to the purposes of analyzing of song lyrics in the title “firework” by katy perry, he did not analyze lexical and contextual meaning specifically. furthermore, he also did not implement the results of analysis for teaching purposes, and then his study was different from the focuses of this research. this research focused on analyzing the lexical and contextual meanings and its implementation for teaching purposes. based on those descriptions of previous studies, this research is different from those discussions. furthermore, the research questions of this study can be formulated as the following: (1) what is the form lexical meaning found in the song lyrics of “maona original soundtrack”? (2) what is the form of contextual meaning found in the song lyrics of “maona original soundtrack? (3) how is the implementation of lexical and contextual meanings analysis for teaching purposes, particularly for teaching reading skills? referring to those research questions, the researchers would like to explain the purposes of this study. the purposes of conducting this research are as the following; 1. to identify and to describe the lexical meanings found in the song lyrics of “maona original soundtrack. the second is to analyze contextual meanings found in the words, phrases, or sentences of song lyrics in the title” maona original soundtrack. furthermore, the last purpose of this study is to explain the implementation of the results analysis english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 415 of lexical and contextual meanings for teaching, particularly teaching reading skills. there are two meanings, namely, lexical and contextual meanings (hulu, 2023). jenney and lyons cited by hasanah and habibullah (2020), described lexical meaning as the meaning that can stand by itself. it means that lexical meaning is a meaning based on the definition written in the dictionary. lexical meaning is a meaning that never changes the core of its words, phrases, or sentences (kriz et al., 2018; sholihah & pratiwi, 2018). it relates with the real meaning (qurrata’ain & triyono, 2019). lexical meaning is a meaning taken from the original references (permana & winarta, 2021). furthermore, lexical meaning interpret the meaning originally without expanding and also without minimizing the value of that meaning. it is different from contextual meaning. contextual meaning is a meaning that depends on the context, at least based on context of culture and context of situation. in the following, researchers would like to described as deep as possible the contextual meaning. the following are many experts who argued about contextual meanings from different their point of view. parera and dash, cited by hasanah and habibullah (2020), stated contextual meaning was a meaning that cannot be separated from the context of culture and context of ecology. further, anindya cited in nguyen et al. (2020), he described that contextual meaning is a meaning which is inside the context. then, rifardi cited in sinaga and herman (2020), stated eleven components of meaning such as; gender, situation, purposes, formal and informal contexts in conversation, mood context of speaker or listener, time, place, the object of the context, the context of completeness, linguistics context, and the context of language itself. furthermore, according to chotimah & sabiq (2021), context refers to circumstances, such as the time, place, and environment in which language is employed. kreidler and pateda cited in tambunan et al.(2020), they stated that contextual meaning that is a meaning of a word inside the context. it was related to the situation, time, and environment. contextual meaning is a meaning referred to the context. furthermore, when a verbal expression cannot be comprehended immediately, contextual meaning refers to the act of an examining the context to reveal additional indications for the intended meaning (munthe et al., 2022). however, the contextual meaning could be regarded to the situation, where the time, the language usage environment. it is the meaning of a word or lexeme in relation to its surrounding context (belu & sari, 2021). that proves that the word will not be separated from the context of its use. therefore, context is indeed very important in terms of meaning analysis. asrifan et al. (2021) argued that the word cannot be used and meaningful for all contexts because that context will always be changed from one time to another. depraetere (2019) defines context as the ‘simple’ (formal) surroundings of a word or speech, that is, the linguistic and conversational qualities. syahfitri (2021) further explains that the meaning is not only limited to sentence units. there are units higher than sentence units. this unit is called the supra sentence unit or discourse unit. as a unity of meaning, discourse is read as a whole language because every part of the discourse is related to unity (sari & anindita, 2020). generally, discourse refers to a whole text (if possible), both in oral and written situations; it does not need to refer to rational and logical contents; a discourse can be submitted to any language purpose or any type of reality; for example, a poem, a conversation, a tragedy, a joke, a discussion at a seminar, a long history, a paper in a magazine, an interview, a sermon, and a tv interview. according to hutajalu et al. (2023), the situational and cultural contexts influence discourse. researchers often say that the meaning and information obtained and interpreted cannot be separated from the context in discourse and semantic analysis. the interaction referred to in discourse is language interaction. settings, including the time and place the situation occurred. activities are all behaviors that occur in verbal and nonverbal language interactions, including speakers' impressions, feelings, responses, and perceptions. relations, including the relationship between the participants of speaking, dash (2008) argued the meaning of context is related to the environment. the meaning of a word can be implicit with the neighboring of words. further, he classified the context itself into four namely; local context, sentential context, topical context, and global context. sudar, tusino, & beta radish charica dewi lexical and contextual meanings in song lyrics” moana original soundtrack”: pedagodical implication 416 figure 1. the conceptual layering of contexts of a word in a piece of text (dash, 2008, p. 26) the description of the figure 1.1 is the following; the first is a local context. it refers to the knowledge of words. the second is a sentential context. it refers immediately to the beyond meaning of local context. the third is a topical context. it refers to the wider of circle of meaning beyond the sentence. the last, it is a global context. it is the meaning of words which is larger and wider. method this research belongs to descriptive qualitative. researchers describe the data in form of song lyrics which are taken from the internet. researchers described the song lyrics by using theories of lexical and contextual meaning. the subjects of this research are five song lyrics in the title of “maona original soundtrack” taken from the internet. the focus of analysis is specifically in form of words, phrases, sentences, containing lexical and contextual meaning. bogdan and biklen cited in creswell (2018), stated that there are some techniques to collect the data in qualitative research; one of them is documentation which contains text (words) that have been recorded without researcher intervention. therefore, in this study, researchers used documentation as the technique of collecting data. the final written report has a flexible structure. the researchers used the following steps in collecting and analyzing the data: observing, identifying, coding, analyzing and interpreting, and describing the data. all steps were related to the application of lexical contextual meaning found in “moana original soundtrack." furthermore, drawing conclusions and suggestions were the final steps in the process of analyzing the data. results and discussions table 1. lexical and contextual meaning in moana original soundtrack no title of moana original soundtrack total 1 “ how far i will go” 12 2 “i am moana” 6 3 “where you are” 10 4 “shiny” 3 5 “know who you are” 4 total 35 researchers explained 35 words from five song lyrics of “moana original soundtrack” that contain lexical and contextual meaning. the sources of 35 words of lexical and contextual meaning are as the following; the first is 12 words found in how far i’ll go, the second is 6 words found in i am “moana”. further, there are 10 words of lexical and contextual meaning found in the songs of “where you are. then, there are 3 words of lexical and contextual meaning found in the song of “shiny”. the last words containing lexical and contextual meaning found in the song of “know who you are, it was 4 words. to understand the descriptions of findings, researchers explain each data containing of lexical and contextual meaning. the description of words containing lexical and contextual meaning is as follows; first is the song lyrics in the title of “how far i'll go” .words contain lexical and contextual meaning such as: table 2. words containing lexical and contextual meaning words taken from song lyrics lexical meaning hornby (2010) contextual meaning ” how far i’ll go” the first is the word perfect in the following sentence. “i wish i could be the perfect daughter (s1 & l3)”. having everything that is necessary; complete and without fault and weaknesses. “perfect” here means a daughter like what her father really wants. commonly father wants his daughter to be good children, children who are successful in her life and children are able to be surviving to overcome their life. it is the natural mission of father to her daughter. there is no father who wants his daughter to be fail in her life. the second is the word but, in the following sentence;” but i come back to the water, no matter how hard i try (s1 & l4)”. the meaning of that word is a liquid without color, smell and taste that falls as rain, is in lakes, rivers and seas and is used for drinking, washing, etc. “water” here reflects something that she really wants. her own choices and way of life. something in which she feels overwhelming and can be her own self. the third is the word place in the following sentence; “to the place i know, where i cannot go, where i that word has a meaning about a particular position, point or area. “place” it refers to the life goals that still cannot be achieved by moana. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 417 long to be (s1 &l7)”. the fourth is the word line in the following sentence; “see the line where the sky meets the sea? it calls me (s2 & l1)”. the meaning of that word is a long thin mark on a surface. “line” it indicates the restrictions or regulations made by moana's father which cannot be broken. the fifth is the word sky in the following sentence; “see the line where the sky meets the sea? it calls me (s2 & l1)”. the meaning of the word sky is the space above the earth that you can see when you look up, where clouds and the sun, moon and stars appear. “sky” it describes the wishes of moana’s father and ambitions along with all the rules that have been carried out so far and expected to be fulfilled and passed on by moana. the sixth the word sea in the following sentence;”see the line where the sky meets the sea? it calls me (s2 & l1)”. the word sea here means, the saltwater that covers most of the earth's surface and surrounds it continents and islands. “sea” it is pictures’ desire and ambition of moana who wants to be herself but it contrary to what her father has expected. the seventh is the word it in the following sentence; “and no one knows, how far it goes (s2 & l2). the word it here is used to refer to an animal or thing that has already been mentioned or that is being talked about now. “”refers to moana’s desire and effort to break the boundaries that made by her father. the eight is the word wind in the following sentence; “ if the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me (s2 & l3)”. the word wind here it means an air that moves quickly as a result of natural forces. “wind” explaining the good fortune that will make moana's dreams come true. the ninth is the word sail in the following sentence; “ if the wind in my sail on the sea stays behind me (s2 & l3)”. the word sail means a boat of ship or the people on it to begin a journey on water. “sail ”it describes the moana’s struggle to achieve her dream and desire. the tenth is the word but in the following sentence; “but the voice inside sings a different song (s3 & l7)”. the meaning of the voice means the sound or sounds produced through the mouth by speaking or singing. “voice” it is the sound of maona’s desire in her heart that is eager to do things differently from her father and her people in the village. the eleventh is the word light in the following sentence; “see the light as it shines on the sea? it's blinding (s4 & l1)”. the energy from the sun, a lamp, etc. that makes it possible to see things. “light ”it indicating the chance for moana to be free to do what she wants and to be herself. the twelfth word is the word line in the following sentence;” and let me know, what's beyond that line, will i cross that line? (s4& l4)”. a long thin mark on surface. “line” for explaining the boundary from her father which has not been able to pass by moana. words taken from song lyrics: “i am moana”. lexical meaning contextual meaning the first is the word journey in the following sentence; “i have journeyed farther (s2 & l10)”. the word journeyed here means an act of travelling from one place to another, especially when they are far apart. “journeyed” it is the way of life that believed and chosen by moana herself. the second is the word call in the following sentence;” and the call isn't out there at all, it's inside me (s2 & l12)”. the word call here means to give somebody/something a particular name; to use a particular name or title when you are talking to sb. word “call” is the wishes, hopes and dreams of moana that are still buried deep in her heart and soul. the third is the word tide in the following sentence: “it's like the tide, always falling and rising (s2 & l13)”. the word tide has meaning of a regular rise and fall in the level of the sea, caused by the pull of the moon and sun; the flow of water. “tide” it is a confidence in moana's wishes, hopes and dreams, which is sometimes very optimistic and often pessimistic. the fourth is the word you in the following sentence:”i will carry you here in my heart you'll remind me (s2 & l14)”. the meaning word you here it is used as the subject of a verb or after a preposition to refer to the person or people being spoken or written to. “you” it is for describing someone who always supports moana’s dreams, and convinces her that she can achieve what she wants by being herself. the fifth is the word way in the following sentence:”i know the way(s2 & l16)”. a method, style or manner of doing something. “way ”it is a solution or step that will take by moana to reach her goals and break every problems or obstacles that she face. the sixth is the word song in the following sentence:”they dance to an ancient song(s2 & l2)”. the meaning of the word song here means a short piece of music with words that you sing. “song” it indicates traditions, customs and habits that are always practiced by people on the island and tend to be irreversible. words taken from song lyrics:“shiny”. lexical meaning contextual meaning sudar, tusino, & beta radish charica dewi lexical and contextual meanings in song lyrics” moana original soundtrack”: pedagodical implication 418 the first is the word shiny in the following sentence:”it is the shiny(s3 & l1)”. smooth and bright, reflecting the light. “shiny” to explain the perfect with all of the advantages. the second is the word glitters in the following sentence:” they chase anything that glitters (beginners!) (s5 & l3)”. to shine brightly with little flashes of light, like a diamond. “glitters” it is looks very attractive even though it is a deadly trap. the third is the word horizon in the following sentence:”i have crossed the horizon to find you (s1 & l1)”. the furthest that you can see, where the sky seems to meet the land or the sea. “horizon” it is explaining a limitation of moana’s father for not crossing the ocean that has been broken by moana. words taken from song lyrics: “know who you are”. lexical meaning contextual meaning the first is the word heart in the following sentence:”they have stolen the heart from inside you (s1 & l3)”. the word heart here means the organ in the chest that sends blood around the body, usually on the left in humans. “heart” it is the natural wealth which taken because of human greed. the second is the word this in the following sentence:”but this does not define you (s1 & l4)”. the word this here it is used to refer to a particular person, thing or event that is close to you, especially compared with another. “this” it refers to the anger and revenge filled with desires to destroy, like disasters that occur due to natural imbalances because of overexploitation. the third is the word you in the following sentence:”this is not who you are (s1 & l5)”. the pronoun you here means it is used as the subject or object of a verb or after a preposition to refer to the person or people being spoken or written to. “you” it is the nature which nurtures and gives life, guard and does not destroy. a peaceful place to live in. words taken from song lyrics: “where you are”. lexical meaning contextual meaning the first is the word song in the following sentence:”who needs a new song? this old one's all we need (s2 & l3)”. the word song here means a short piece of music with words that you sing. “song” it is the changing of traditions, customs and habits of the people on the island. the second is the word trip in the following sentence:”don't trip on the taro root (s3 & l3)”. the meaning of the trip here is a journey to a place and back again, especially a short one for a pleasure or a particular purpose. “trip” it refers to leaving the existing traditions and replace them with new traditions that are considered inappropriate. the third is the word root in the following sentence:”don't trip on the taro root (s3 & l3)”. the meaning of the word root here is a part of a plant that grows under the ground and absorbs water and minerals that it sends to the rest of the plant. “root”it describes the new traditions and life that are different from the old ones. the fourth is the word see in the following sentence:”i wanna see.”. the meaning of the see in that sentence means become aware of omebody/something by using your eyes. “see” it describes the trying to find new things that are outside the boundaries of existing traditions. the fifth is the word ground in the following sentence:”moana, stay on the ground now (s6 & l2)”. the solid surface of the earth. “ground” it indicates a place where all the old traditions and customs of the people in the island take place. the sixth is the word leaves in the following sentence:”and no one leaves (s11 & l1)”. the word leaves means to go away from a person or a place. “leaves” it is explaining the breaking of old traditions and habits to look for the new things outside the island by sailing across the sea. the seventh is the word did in the following sentence:”in time you'll learn just as i did (s13& l2)”. it is used to refer to actions that you do not mention by name or do not know about. “did” it describing the respect and carry on the existing traditions in order to get the comfort of life, wellbeing and happiness. the eighth the word voice in the following sentence:” you may hear a voice inside (s16 & l4). the meaning the voice here means the sound or sounds produced through the mouth by speaking or singing. “voice” it is to explain the desire to be free and be she. the ninth is the word farthest in the following sentence:”to follow the farthest star (s16 & l6)”. the meaning of the word farthest means at or to the greatest distance in space or time. “farthest” is the desire to do more, go further and find her true self. the tenth is the word hearth in the following sentence:”did your granny say listen to your heart (s2 & l1)”. the word heart has a meaning of an organ in the chest that sends blood around the body, usually on the left in humans. “heart” it to explain the moana’s desire to be herself. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 419 from all of the lexical and contextual meaning of words found in moana original soundtrack, it was stated that lexical meaning is different from contextual meaning. from this research, the researchers found that to understand the contextual meaning, the meaning of the words should be referred to who did say the words, what did the words about, to whom did the words refer to, when did the words use, where did the words produce, why were the words spoken and the sides were how did the speakers produce that words. it helps the researchers to interpret the lexical meaning and contextual meaning of the words taken from song lyrics of maona original soundtrack. on the other sides, lexical meaning is meaning which based on the dictionary (wardhana et al., 2022). lexical meaning has no other interpretations. lexical meaning, meaning that based on the definition of those words. researchers completing finish to analyze data, researchers would like to discuss the story of these lyrics from moana original soundtrack. the first data is about how far i’ll go by auli'i cravalho. the meaning of the original soundtrack, how far i'll go is about how far the character 'i' or moana in the song will try to findhis true identity. a young girl who has a different passion from general women in her home area. how her desires and interests are different from others on the island. demonstrate a love for the nautical and want to find something new from the traditions and habits that have been lived so far but all of her desire against by her father. according to researchers, the songwriter uses several words that are poetic or figurative words so that the word is not suitable if translated literally. the word contains other contextual meanings which have to be interpreted by the reader themselves according to the conditions described in the song. for example, the use of the word "water" to describe moana's desires and dreams. however, she tried to forget; she still couldn't. use the word "line" to show the boundaries of the father that moana cannot cross. the use of the word "sky" which seems to interpret his father's dreams and traditions that must also be followed by moana. besides, the word "wind" interprets the good fortune on moana's sideand her dreams. whereas the word "sail" can be likened to the effort and struggle of moana to find his true identity. the word "light" in the song can also be translated contextually as an opportunity or hope that moana has to be free and to be herself.the second data is i am moana by rachel house & auli'i cravalho. this song tells us about the return of courage and optimism from moana to continue her life journey. this section illustrates how eventually moana returns to believing in herself and standing as she really wants. moana's rise from despair is also inseparable from the role of her grandmother, who always supported her, which made her always believe that what she was trying she would get it. some words are used contextually to describe the atmosphere that occurs in the song. for example, the use of the word "quite" interprets the desires and dreams of moana that have not come true and are trapped in desperation. the word "tide" is used to describe moana's tidal desires because of being influenced by circumstances. there is a side where moana can be very optimistic about realizing her dreams, but there is also a side where moana can be pessimistic and feel that she has failed.the third data is where you are by lin-manuel miranda. this song portrays the peaceful and prosperous life of the motunui people with their customs and habits that are carried out in a sustainable manner. the use of the word "song" can be interpreted contextually as customs and regulations that have been adopted and implemented by them. the word "trip" can be interpreted that moana is not allowed to travel to discover new things outside the island.however, moana has her own desires and dreams to find other things outside the island by wading through the ocean. this is implied by the word "see" in the sentence i wanna see. however, no one has dared to "leave" or, in any other sense abandon existing traditions, rules, and customs to search for new things by sailing across the seas, as their ancestors once did.the fourth data is shiny by jemaine clement. this song shows the presence of tamatoa or a sea snail who has a hobby of collecting various sparkling objects in his shell so that he can participate in sparkling and becoming the center of attention. some words are written contextually or have implied and not true intentions. the word "shinny" describes the perfect situation with all of the advantages. it seems to be insinuating human behavior that likes luxury for the sake of existence. besides, the word "glitter" can also be interpreted as something that looks very attractive even though it is a deadly trap. like any sparkling or luxury that only makes people dazzled by the light. if not careful, humans can forget themselves. therefore, this song indirectly reminds us that as humans, we have to be able to control ourselves so as not to fall complacent. the last data is know who you are by auli'i cravalho. this song tells the moana's struggle to sudar, tusino, & beta radish charica dewi lexical and contextual meanings in song lyrics” moana original soundtrack”: pedagodical implication 420 restore te fiti's heart. some words used by the writer in this song contain contextual meaning. among them, the word "horizon" is used to interpret moana's efforts and struggle to cross the boundaries that had been made by her father. moana has successfully sailed the ocean to restore te fiti's heart. te fiti is described as the mother of the earth and the creator of all life. the word "heart" in this song describes the power to produce what is needed by humans who have been stolen or destroyed by human greed itself. human's greed finally only brings damage to the earth and ends in misery for humans themselves. te fiti, whose heart was stolen, turned into a monster. the lands became dry and arid; the marine products were no longer abundant, even so were disappointing agricultural products. this is all because of the greed of the person who wants to rule life. texts of song lyrics of” maona original soundtrack" is as an alternative reading skill material. analyzing reading texts of song lyric is one of the activities of reading skill. it needs critical thinking to analyze the meaning of song lyrics. song lyrics of mana original soundtrack can be used as material for developing student's critical thinking. it is because song lyrics have not only lexical meaning but also contextual meaning. in this study, researchers write scenario of using song lyrics as material for teaching and learning critical reading skills. song lyrics are easy to be downloaded by students from internet. teachers and students make a commitment of activities concerning to interpreting contextual meaning taken from song lyrics. students work in groups, then they learn and understand the philosophy of contextual meaning. students should have good knowledge of contextual meaning. further, students are in collaboration with their classmates to investigate contextual meaning found in the words of song lyrics. teacher supervised student's activities, while teachers themselves should be ready to explain and clarify contextual meaning. furthermore, teachers let students to discuss collaboratively finding and interpreting contextual meaning taken from words of song lyrics. then teachers encourage students to perform for explaining the results of their finding about words having lexical contextual meaning from song lyrics. students are free to explore lexical and contextual meaning from many different sides of angles. it is stated lexical meaning is different from contextual meaning, because contextual meaning is influenced by place, time, situation, interpretation, pragmatics, society, culture, and ethnology. by presenting the results of lexical and contextual meaning interpretation, students get wide knowledge of word meanings. meanings of words can be investigated not only from lexical meaning but also contextual meaning. interpreting contextual meaning caused students to be critical thinking. furthermore, teachers and students elaborated texts of song lyrics as material for developing students' critical reading skills. that is a scenario of using texts of song lyrics as material for reading skill particularly it is critical reading. conclusion meanings of words can be categorized into two classifications, such as lexical and contextual meaning. the lexical meaning of a word is easy to be understood by any readers of texts. on the other side, contextual meaning is influenced by place, time, situation, interpretation, pragmatics, society, culture, and ethnology. interpreting contextual meaning needs high understanding philosophy of contextual meaning itself. words of song lyrics of "maona original soundtrack” have lexical and contextual meaning. in this study, researchers interpreted lexical meanings and also contextual meanings. contextual meanings of words taken from song lyrics are interesting to be investigated. it is useful to develop student's critical reading skills. song lyrics is challenging alternative and appealing material for encouraging student's creativities and their motivation. furthermore, contextual meaning taken from words of song lyrics is useful and beneficial material for learning meanings of words. then words are flexible to be interpreted, it depends on the context of culture and context of situation. acknowledgement this research was completely funded by purworejo muhammadiyah university. researchers would like to thank to the rector, the dean of teacher training and education faculty. further, researchers also would like to thank to the head of english language education who supported to complete this study. references ardhyanti, s. v., & supriyatiningsih, s. 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(2022). a figurative language analysis on a song lyrics found in the night visions (deluxe version) album by imagine dragons. jurnal kabastra, 2(1), 15-21. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 469 willingness to speak: what factors influence efl learners? nyimas triyana safitri english education departement, teacher training and education, universitas jambi, jambi, indonesia email: triyana@unja.ac.id habizar english education departement, teacher training and education, universitas jambi, jambi, indonesia email: habizar@unja.ac.id melda nifia putri english education departement, teacher training and education, universitas jambi, jambi, indonesia email: meldanifiaa@gmail.com apa citation: safitri, n. t., habizar., putri, m. n. (2023). willingness to speak: what factors influence efl learners?. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 469-478. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7572 received: 18-02-2023 accepted: 23-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction transferring information is seen as a kind of communication when both parties understand what is being said without any misunderstandings (fatimayin, 2020). for this reason, the process of communication should involve group members interacting, creating meaning, and sharing ideas communicatively. in the educational setting, communication is another technique of knowledge transfer that frequently comes up in class discussions as it is a great way to learn and comprehend the new language. furthermore, the excitement or willingness to engage in conversation with other interlocutor using a second language with a certain topic is one of the key components of communication. for this reason, students should participate in a class discussion they find fascinating in the learning process. (rindiana and wulandari, 2020; fatimayin, 2020; tuyen and loan, 2019; alimorad, 2021). the first definition of the concept of willingness to communicate includes the students' choice to speak or not, which is influenced by psychological and situational or environmental factors. according to henry et al. (2021), willingness to communicate is someone’s decision to speak or remain silent. since there are a number of variables that might either increase or decrease a student's readiness to communicate. in addition to this, tuyen and loan (2019) mentioned that the decision to communicate with someone else is influenced by a number of factors that may be pertinent to the scenario and occasion. these factors include an individual's present mood, views of the other person, and preferences, showing that the circumstances of the interaction may have an abstract: the online learning mode has dramatically altered the manner of the way how communication is conducted in learning at higher education or schools for the past two years. it has led to a considerable change in how learning is carried out, transferring it from an offline to an online setting that permits long distance connection and communication. however, this has an effect on students’ engagement in class as many of them exhibit passive or unresponsive behavior in participating the online learning sessions. this qualitative study aims to explore the influencing factors affect students' willingness to participate in zoom sessions during online classes at english department, universitas jambi. the data was gathered through the online classroom observations and interviews with the six efl learners, and the data was then analyzed based on the theoretical built-themes of willingness to communicate (wtc). the finding reveals that 1) the demotivating factors influence efl learners’ willingness to speak in zoom class were derived by the situational factor such as difficult task types and models, the unfamiliar topic of class discussion, the lecturers’ personal characteristics, the inconvenienced time or schedule of the class meeting and a trouble internet connection. while 2) the depressing factors influenced by the psychological component, were comprised by the lack of self-confidence, low level of english language proficiency, l2 learning anxiety and students’ individual personality. keywords: online learning; students’ willingness to communicate. nyimas triyana safitri,, habizar, & melda nifia putri willingness to speak: what factors influence efl learners? 470 impact on the willingness to talk (katsaris, 2019). however, the way how communication is conducted has been dramatically altered in learning process during the covid-19 pandemic. the pandemic has given a massive change in how learning is transformed from offline to online mode which provides long distance communication. the common learning with a face-to-face mode is increasingly turning into online learning that provides distance communication facilities such as zoom meetings, whatsapp, google meet, etc. (laili & nashir, 2020). this is accomplished under the health department policy to keep the distance to avoid and reduce the spread of the covid-19 virus. however, there is a changing in the ways of this communication is conducted in which the numerous students tend to be inactive and passive in speaking up through online learning class via zoom meeting platform (clarin & baluyos, 2022). numerous studies have been done to identify various facets of students' willingness to communicative in online learning flatform for specific goals and objectives. at smp islam al azhar 21 sukoharjo, rindiana (2020) looked into the methods teachers used to increase their students' willingness to speak in online learning. the research revealed some ways for increasing students' willingness to communicate, including encouraging them to speak english through daily talk and conversation, implementing special bilingual programs, assigning group projects, maintaining humor and solidarity among students, giving rewards and punishments, hosting meetand-greet events, and attending bilingual students' shows. at smk negeri 10 malang, rihardini, et al. (2020) performed a study to examine students' perceptions of their willingness to use english during class interactions during online class. the results demonstrate that tenth and eleventh grade students at smk negeri 10 malang are affected by some of the variables included in the heuristic model, including communicative competence, desire to communicate with a specific person, motivation, anxiety, social situation, and topic of discussion. factors affecting efl students' willingness to communicate in speaking during online classes at the vietnamese tertiary level was examined in research by tuyen and loan (2019). the research found that students' desire and unwillingness to speak in english is influenced by three linguistic characteristics: vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation in the language. in addition, five non-linguistic elements influence the students’ willingness to use english in communication were interlocutor, motivation, anxiety, social environment, and topic interest. some of these non-linguistic elements, anxiety and social circumstances were two of those five nonlinguistic elements that have an impact on students' learning as well. according to tuyen and loan (2019), it was discovered that situational factor of students’ willingness to communicate in l2 classrooms resulted from the interaction of linguistic factors, classroom environmental factors, such as topic, task, interlocutor, teacher, and group size, with individual characteristics such as self-confidence, personality, emotion, and perceived opportunity to communicate. according to the research, language instructors should be aware of how these several contributing factors interact to influence students' wtc in the classroom. more specifically, the changes in the learning atmosphere from direct to indirect meetings led to many changes to the learning process experienced by most of students and lecturers at english department, universitas jambi as well. in online classroom practice, many lecturers complained about students who were frequently inactive and did not participate in online learning, despite the fact that there are several virtual meeting platforms that are frequently used as an alternative to inperson meetings. moreover, many students tend to be more passive in online learning communication by turning off the microphone during the discussion. some students also turned-off the camera that shows their participation and presence on their devices. furthermore, when the teacher asked students, sometimes some students were silent and did not answer the teacher's questions. this phenomenon often creates an uncomfortable atmosphere in the learning process for both teachers and students. on the basis of the background to the present study mentioned above, this study was conducted to explore factors affecting students’ willingness to communicate in online learning during covid19 pandemic. the initial finding of this study might answer to the question on “what are the factors affecting students’ willingness to communicate in online learning class at english study program universitas jambi? the findings are expected to provide a theoretical and practical insight and perspective on students’ willingness to communicate in online class during covid-19 pandemic in indonesia and countries all over the world. according to tuyen and loan (2019), there are english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 471 two factors that are considered influences students’ willingness to communicate, psychological and situational or environmental factor which is described as follows: tuyen and loan (2019) state that psychological variables are a group of human-related factors that affected the students' willingness to communicate. the first factor is lack of communication confidence, which has an impact on students’ desire to communicate. the desire to communicate with a particular person and low self-confidence is the most direct indicator of willingness to communicate. the second factor of these is a perceived communicative competence. students' ability to speak l2 with other l2 users may be taken into account when evaluating their communicative competence. students in l2 who believe they are either ineffective communicators or skilled communicators frequently have lower or higher willingness to communicate (tuyen and loan, 2019). the third factor concerns on l2 learning anxiety. oral communication fear makes students less motivated to speak, which affects how they view their communication skills. the elements that have been connected to l2 learning anxiety include trait anxiety (a person's personality attribute), state anxiety, and situation-specific anxiety (tuyen and loan 2019). the fourth factor is students’ motivation which is regarded as essential in influencing students’ willingness to speak. the degree to which students work to learn the language out of a desire to do so and the satisfaction that comes from doing so and how motivated the students are affects by how prepared they are for communication. (tuyen and loan, 2019; januariza and hendriani, 2019; aini et al. 2021; indiana and wulandari; 2020). the fifth factor is related to students’ personality. personality qualities such as extraversion and introversion might be viewed as important indications of willingness to speak. personality can help or impede willingness to talk and general language learning. students' communicative openness is determined by their individual traits. communication is more likely to occur when a person has strong levels of extroversion, self-confidence, friendliness, and flexibility, rihardini. (2021). alimorad, z. (2021). the student's desire to speak with a particular individual in a particular circumstance or at a given time can be determined by environmental or situational factors and numerous elements are known to have an impact on students' willingness to communication. the first factor is influenced by the task types of learning. the planned learning activities in a class aimed at communicative competence or structural knowledge are referred to tasks. during the learning process, many tasks would be given to the students with many types. task types are observable factors influencing students' willingness to communicate. according to sylvia et al. (2020), the students’ will be more willing to communicate with a presentation task given by the lecturer. this is in line with tuyen and loan (2019), the degree of difficulty and the amount of time allocated for completing the work can all affect the students' motivation to communicate. the second factor is classroom topic discussion. the issue familiarity, topic interest, and topic preparation are the major factors that might boost students' self-confidence and willingness to communicate. students may be encouraged to participate in the debate by certain subjects because they feel driven to do so, as they think the topic is both intrinsically and indirectly fascinating. (tuyen and loan, 2019; alimorad, 2021; suvongse and chanyoo, 2022). the third factor focuses on the function of the teacher or teachers’ role. according to tuyen and loan (2019), in the l2 classroom, instructional methods, classroom rules, and the teacher's verbal and nonverbal behavior have an impact on the students' willingness to speak. furthermore, rindiana and wulandari (2020) confirmed that one of the factors affecting students’ willingness to communicate is the teacher role. the teacher could give the motivation and the oral example of the english language while communicating or explaining the lessons. some of the teachers’ behavior in the classroom includes offering opportunities for students to speak and delivering clear explanations, comments, or encouragement. the students will be more willing to speak when the teacher can conduct a conducive classroom atmosphere, susanti (2019). another factor is classroom atmosphere which covers the feeling, attitude, or circumstance that the class creates. as it is stated by tuyen and loan (2019) the classroom atmosphere is defined as the emotion, mood, or climate created and enjoyed by the class group which shows involvement and participation of all members in class.” (p.255). the classroom atmosphere is also one of the factors that affect students’ willingness to communicate. referring to this point, rindiana and wulandari (2020) claimed that classroom atmosphere impacts students’ eagerness to communicate. it leads to students’ willingness to speak in english which nyimas triyana safitri,, habizar, & melda nifia putri willingness to speak: what factors influence efl learners? 472 rise in a positive or engaging learning environment. this is in line with tuyen and loan (2019) noted that students’ l2 willingness to communicate is promoted by a friendly classroom atmosphere, while boring and silent classroom situations demotivate willingness to communicate. in addition, le et al. (2019) highlighted that online learning provides a remote learning mode that allows the students to learn from home, and some environmental distractors sometimes couldn’t be avoided, such as interference from the family member, noisy environmental conditions. moreover, the students need a quiet place to communicate and listen during oral online learning activities. they also students tend to be remaining silent in a non-private environment or with interference from the family members. (ng, 2021; le et al., 2018; alimorad, 2021; janah, 2021). this idea also supported by agustina et al. (2020), learning at home in a setting that is not conducive tend to disrupt the learning process. online learning is a model of virtual learning environment which serves copious learning activities through distance learning website flatform. it is often referred to as “e-learning,” among other terms, even thought is just one type of distance learning, the umbrella term for any learning that takes place across distance and not in a traditional classroom. in recent research, arkorful and abaido (2021) stated that online learning uses information and communication technologies to allow access to online teaching and learning resources including the process of instructing, teaching, and learning, which is conducted through the application of web-based or internet-enabled digital technologies to achieve various learning purposes. for this reason, the minimum requirements for online class are access to a computer, the internet, and the drive to achieve in a non-traditional learning environment to enroll in an online course. additionally, online leaning offers a great way to give training that is not restricted by time or place, making it possible for anybody, anywhere, to receive instruction at any time and its setting appeals to learners as a practical approach to accommodate remote learning. it also allows students to have a lot of lesson documentation as it provides students with a more relaxed atmosphere because they are learning from home. students also don't need to go to campus daily, increasing time efficiency (ayu and pratiwi, 2021). on the other hand, adijaya & lestanto also explained that online learning can be done in an easy way because it only relies on applications that are connected to the internet (swari, 2020). according to nambiar (2020), some of the teacher found it more convenient in conducting classes by using online method since it saving travel time. to continue the learning process during this pandemic, many online platforms that can be used, such as zoom, goggle classroom, goggle meet, moodle, etc. the online platforms promote both inquiries based learning and independent learning since the online platforms facilitate interactions between teacher and students although they are not in the same room (nartiningrum, 2019; clarin and baluyos, 2022). the use of online learning media certainly requires a good internet network to support smooth online learning. this, of course, presents the advantages and disadvantages of distance learning. according to kemendikbud (2020), the main obstacle to online learning is the lack of internet facilities to support online learning. major problems in online learning were the lack of internet connection and got disconnected to the classes (yuzulia, 2021). the power of the internet network, which is not evenly distributed in every region in indonesia, especially in remote areas, greatly affects students' learning process. however, some problems may occur due to unstable networking, insufficient quota inadequate speed of network connection, (kemendikbud, 2020: putri, n. r. & sari, f. m. 2021). method a qualitative research design has been considered appropriate in this study. according to anas and ishaq (2020) “qualitative research is a systematic scientific method of inquiry which seeks to build a holistic largely narrative, description to inform the researchers understanding of social or cultural phenomena” (p. 90). in the case with a qualitative study, this study attempted to understand the meaning for participants in the study, of the events, situations, and action they were involved with and the accounts that they give of their lives and experiences; attempted to understand the particular context within which the participants act, and the influence that this context has on their action. every detail was thought to contribute for obtaining a better understanding of behavior. this study explored affecting factors influence students’ willingness to communicate in online learning class during the covid pandemic era in indonesia. this study was conducted at english study program, faculty of teacher training and education universitas jambi. it involves six english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 473 students who were enrolled in the academic year 2020/2021 with two years experienced in online learning environment. these participants were selected by using purposive sampling technique and assigned depending on their agreement on the inform concern form. two data collection methods, interview and observation, were employed in this study. 19 question items made up the interview, which was addressed to six participants for lasted 20-30 minutes. the interview has undergone several changes and revisions by experts before it was administered. while the observation was carried out during the daily online class conducted. the collected data in this study was recorded in order to keep the authenticity. the data was then analyzed by using thematic analysis technique. thematic analysis is a useful technique for closely examining qualitative data to identify patterns and explain the phenomenon in a form of the researcher's point of view. the steps of analyzing the data were included familiarizing the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing potential themes, defining or naming themes and presenting the report. results and discussion results the findings of this study indicate that discouraging factors of students' motivation to communicate in an online learning environment is being attributed to a number of demotivating variables, including psychological and situational or contextual issues. these two main findings are described in the following discussion: the psychological factor psychological factor refers to the set of factors from the individual that is correlated to students’ willingness to communicate in online class. these psychological factors are categorized into: lack of self-confidence self-confidence is seen as the combination between perceived communicative competence and lack of anxiety which tends to be reduced and enhanced at particular moments. there was found in this study that when the students felt low selfconfidence, they tended to avoid talking in zoom room class. as stated by katiandagho & sengkey (2022), the lower students’ self-confidence they will have lower wtc. students’ low selfconfidence was also probably caused by several factors such as online classroom atmosphere, difficult task type or materials which make them difficult to speak up during the class. some of them admitted that learning material were hard to understand, so they felt less confidents to talk to lecturers and class in zoom room and afraid of making mistake. besides, students also often felt embarrassed seeing themselves on screen and being noticed by the other student. the students start to feel anxious when they have to speak in front of other people (idzni & setiawan 2021). they felt anxiety particularly when they think others might see them, as it was stated by participant p06 and p03: “if i don't really understand the teaching material, then i don't have high confidence enough to speak in the zoom room during learning”. “speaking with lecturers who use challenging teaching materials makes me afraid to speak up. i'm quite hesitant to talk when i'm under pressure for fear of saying something incorrectly and embarrassing my friends. i am also felt shay to look at myself on a screen”. the desire to communicate with a particular person and low self-confidence are the most direct indicator of willingness to communicate. so, it can be concluded that students’ low self-confidence is one of the decreasing factors for students’ willingness to communicate in zoom class. the lack of students’ self-confidence also resulted from several factors which directly lead to inactive online learning environment. a) low level of english language proficiency the students’ low communicative competence is one of the decreasing factors of willingness to communicate. when they perceived their communicative competence at a low level, they tended to contribute less during online class communication. as it was mentioned by participant p06 and p02: "i feel that i can't speak english well, i'm afraid to speak." sometimes i have problem with vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation” “i occasionally decide not to speak much in zoom class due to my terrible english. fear of being incorrect and embarrassed by friends and lecturer”. when students believe they have problem with communication skills, they experience speaking anxiety, which makes them reluctant to communicate during the class. these findings are in line with ramli et al. (2021) that unwillingness nyimas triyana safitri,, habizar, & melda nifia putri willingness to speak: what factors influence efl learners? 474 to speak affected by some linguistic problems such as lack of english vocabulary, weak grammar skills, and poor english pronunciation. l2 learning anxiety this study found that participants were fear of a negative evaluation by the lecturer or other students. it caused anxiousness and nervousness that led to the unwillingness to communicate in zoom class. the fear of negative evaluation would come after the participant or the other individual had a direct negative evaluation from the lecturer during class. as it is stated by participants p01 and p05: "i frequently get notices from lecturer since i don’t use english in classroom practice. i use bahasa in zoom class dominantly so, i felt very uncomfortable with this lecturer and avoid to talk in zoom class”. “sometimes i get a lot of corrections from the lecturer especially about assignments. this often make me a bit afraid and reluctant to communicate while studying’.” this finding leads to the conclusion that learning anxiety is one of discourages factor influencing students’ willingness to communicate. it was brought on by pressure or the fear of receiving a bad review. as tuyen and loan (2019) said that students' perceptions of their communication skills are impacted by oral communication anxiety, which affects their willingness to speak. students’ individual personality the study also found that individual’ personality affected the willingness to communicate. when the they are quiet and introverted, the willingness to speak might potentially decreased and this was claimed by participant p06: "i'm an introvert personality and also it's quite affecting my willingness to speak because again i feel shy to talk and quite afraid to be the center of attention in class.” this point of view is confirmed by tuyen and loan (2019) that introversion and extraversion or personality traits can be seen as influential indicators of students’ willingness to communicate and the individual personalities can facilitate or hinder students’ willingness to speak up for general language learning. meanwhile zohoorian et al. (2022) stated the same idea that an extraverted person is talkative and sociable they tend to contribute to improve communication. 1. the situational or contextual factors this situational feature reveals whether the students are expected to interact with a particular person in a certain circumstance or situation. for this study, it was discovered that a number of situational elements have an impact on students' willingness to interact during online classes. those elements are acknowledged as: the difficult task types or models this study discovered that the difficult tasks type is one of the factors affecting students’ willingness to speak in zoom class. the participants agreed that the challenging task made them prefer to remain silent. when they are given challenging assignments, their willingness to communicate get declining. the students would remain silent during the class lesson when they do not understand or comprehend the content of lesson, suciati (2020) and this is claimed by participant p04: "i tend to speak less if the task is difficult because since i don't fully understand it. when i look at my friends remain silent during the zoom class, i often postpone to speak up and wait them to talk to. the hard work during the lesson often makes me lazy to speak up.” from the statements above, it can be said that when the participants are confused about the class tasks or assignment, they choose to remain silent. the hard work of the lesson makes them scared of a negative correction. this also makes participants afraid to talk or make mistakes. therefore, the challenging tasks could be the reason why students’ willingness to communicate is declining. a) the unfamiliar topic of class discussion the study discovered that students’ willingness to speak is impacted by their enthusiasm in the issue or topic of class discussion. the majority of participants described how their motivation to talk in zoom class dropped when they lost interest in the subject. this is in line with tuyen and loan (2019) said that when students are given unfamiliar topic to discuss, they may be more avoid to engage in conversation with one another. as it was said by participant p01 and p06: “the topic of discussion in class greatly determines my participation in class. if the topic english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 475 is less interesting, i tend not to talk much. i think it’s less interesting to discuss in class”. ”i prefer not to speak if the topic of discussion is not familiar.” the effect of topics discussion could have been a determinant of students’ willingness to speak since less interesting topics led to a decrease in students’ motivation to talk (latifah, 2020). meanwhile the familiar topic will increase their willingness to communicate as stated by hanifah and nainggolan (2021), students will be more willing to talk when they have a good understanding of the topic at hand. the lecturers’ personal characteristics the researcher found that the role of the lecturer influenced students’ willingness to communicate. most of the participant explained that the negative lecturer’s behavior influenced their motivation to talk in class. a lecturer who has a bad temper and intimidates the students will lead to an unwillingness to communicate. as stated by one of the participants p04 and p02: "i'm afraid to talk in zoom class because the sort of lecturer who likes to be angry and irritable, i don't like it since it's terrifying." “i don't want to talk in online classes since the lesson is too hard, or the lecturer is scary sometimes.” as the students experienced anxiety about speaking in class with unfriendly lecturer, they became less motivated and reluctant to speak in class. one of the participants p03 said that: “sometimes there are situations where lecturers prefer to switch off camera during lectures for certain reasons. this makes me and friends feel unmotivated because we were not directly supervised by the lecturers while studying.” from this point of view, it is clear that the way in which communication in a zoom class is conducted might be challenging if the lecturers show the unfriendly manner to students. as a result, there is inconvenience atmosphere in a zoom class as students frequently sit quietly. sylvia et al. (2020) who also noted that students will not have a high willingness to communicate when the teacher is not pleasant to them, for example, when the teacher gets angry when the students make mistakes. in contrast, the students may be more interested to speak when the teacher is encouraging and warm (lee, 2020). the learners will be more have a high enjoyment in communicating with foreign language with a friendly teacher who is not overly strict. ( deewale, 2019; suvongse and chanyoo, 2022). b) the inconvenient time or schedule of the class meeting the study found that one of the elements affecting students' willingness to speak was the inconvenient schedule of virtual class meeting. additionally, lack of a supportive classroom environment will have a detrimental effect on the students’ willingness to communicate (sylvia et al. 2020). in addition to this, lee (2020) mentioned that l2 students’ wtc were determined by classroom enjoyment and grit. this study also discovered that the length of the course and the number of course credits had an impact on students’ willingness to speak during the zoom class, consequently, students got fatigued and found it difficult to concentrate when the meeting was held at a vulnerable hour, including during lunch, in the evening, or in a lengthy sequential class. this is in line with the statement from ng (2021), the length of time for online class in which students spend, may have an impact on how effective their learning is, and this was admitted by participant p01, p03, p06: "when lectures begin at inconvenient hour or time, such as at night or in the afternoon when i had previously attended lectures beginning in the morning, i find it difficult to speak. this condition is truly tiring.” “it depends on the time or hour of the meal; whether it's time to eat at 12, it's tired. i also often feel sleepy and hungry especially at 1 o'clock and i don’t to talk in class.” “the online zoom class often occurs at noon or one in the afternoon and it really makes me difficult to concentrate. for this time, i often keep silent in class.” a trouble internet connection the researcher discovered that students' willingness to communicate was impacted by a poor internet connection during the virtual meeting. it refers to the situation where the internet connection is inconsistent and interferes with learning. this statement was also claimed by participant p06 and p05: nyimas triyana safitri,, habizar, & melda nifia putri willingness to speak: what factors influence efl learners? 476 "the internet connection frequently cuts out, which makes me lazy to speak up in class.” “the lecturer's voice is sometimes unclear or interrupted when explaining material due to signal interference, so i don't understand what's being explained and i am lazy to talk.” the majority of participants expressed that when the internet connection is inconsistent, they would be less participated in zoom class. this is aligned with aini et al. (2021) highlighted that one of the main challenges of students have when utilizing the zoom platform to learn english is an unreliable internet connection. the students would then become uninterested in the subject matter, which would diminish their willingness to speak. as stated by anwar & wahid (2021), the engagement in online classroom environment is reduced during bad connection and lack of interaction among the students. the same idea was also expressed by clarin and bayuros (2022), students often ignore their teachers and turn off the camera when there are issues with the internet connection. conclusion the changes in the learning atmosphere from direct to indirect meetings lead to many changes in the ongoing learning process that the efl learners’ experiences. this finding has discovered numerous discouraging factors influence efl learners’ willingness to speak at online learning. these factors are derived by the psychological and situational or environmental aspect, which were described in the following table: table 1. factors which influence efl learners’ willingness to speak at online learning theme(s) sub-theme(s the psychological factors  lack of self confidence  low level of english language proficiency  l2 learning anxiety  students’ individual personality the situational factors  difficult task types and models.  the unfamiliar topic of class discussion  the lecturers’ personal characteristics  inconvenient time and schedule of the meeting  a trouble internet connection the results of this study may provide a number of recommendations, including the need for lecturers in online learning environments to be able to interact positively with students and foster a friendly learning environment that will encourage students’ talk in zoom classes. to encourage efl learners to talk more, the lecturers should also be able to constructively interact with the learners and foster a welcoming learning environment. additionally, it is also expected that efl learners might learn how to increase their level of participation in online classes to create an active zoom class atmosphere. to this end, the finding of this study might serve as a guide for future studies looking into related topics and being used as the reference for improving and evaluating of learning strategies in the online classroom atmosphere. acknowledgement we would like to express our gratitude and thankfulness to universitas jambi for the financial and guidance support to the completion of this research in 2022. references agustina, d., matra, s., & karimah, s. 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(2022). willingness to communicate, big five personality traits, and empathy: how are they related?. canadian journal of educational and social studies. 2(5), 17-27. nyimas triyana safitri,, habizar, & melda nifia putri willingness to speak: what factors influence efl learners? 478 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ level of risk-taking ningtyas orilina argawati english department of stkip siliwangi e-mail: tyas.orilina@yahoo.com lilis suryani english department of stkip siliwangi e-mail: suryani.lies3@gmail.com apa citation: argawati, n. o., & suryani, l. (2017). teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ level of risk taking. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 109-116. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.776. received: 29-08-2017 accepted: 30-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: writing is considered as the most difficult skill to master compared with the other skills because it involves many language elements such as content, organization, vocabulary, grammar and mechanics. the research examines the effect of two independent variables (think-pair-share and direct instruction method) on dependent variable (writing descriptive skill). the samples were class a1 2016 as the experimental class and a3 2016 as the control class. each class consisted of 32 students. the instruments used covered the risk-taking’s questionnaire and writing test. before applying the questionnaire of risk-taking, it was tried out to class a2 2016 to find out the validity and the reliability of the instrument. meanwhile, before conducting the writing test, it needs to test the readability of the writing instruction. the treatment was conducted in eight meetings, and the 9th meeting was allocated for the post-test. the data were then analyzed using anova and tukey test. from the analysis, it reveals that: (1) think-pair-share is significantly different from direct instruction method to teach writing; (2) the students with high level of risk-taking have better writing than those with low level of risk-taking; and (3) there is an interaction between teaching methods and the students’ level of risk-taking. even though think-pair-share is effective to teach writing, teachers must consider about the students’ condition, in this case their level of risk-taking. keywords: think-pair-share, direct instruction method, writing descriptive text, risk-taking introduction writing takes an important role in the students’ process of learning english. it is one of the most visible learning products, and becomes one of the criteria for passing the grade in university. besides, this mastery of writing skill will affect their thesis writing on the last semester as their final project. through writing, students can express feeling, describe something, discuss an idea, present a point of view, share experience they have in the form of written product. it is in line with what had been stated by caroline (2003, p. 4) that writing is producing something in written form so that people can read, perform and use it. writing plays two distinct but complementary roles. first, it is a skill that draws on the use of strategies (such as planning, evaluating, and revising text) to accomplish a variety of goals, such as writing a report or expressing an opinion with the support of evidence. second, writing is a means of extending and deepening student’s knowledge; it acts as a tool for learning subject matter (graham & perrin, 2007, p. 9). in learning writing text, students will learn many kinds of texts such as report, descriptive, narrative, analytical exposition, recount, etc. in this research, the researchers only focus on the material based on the syllabus; it is writing descriptive text. writing discriptive text can activate the students on how they describe something or someone with their capability of ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ level of risk-taking 110 constructing their idea into appropriate sentence and in correct order. it also helps them to improve their ability to words to create a picture, establishing mood and point of view by using sensory details. many adjectives involved in descriptive writing to explain subject clearly. due to the importance of writing, teacher has to find a suitable and effective method to improve students’ writing skill. one of the methods that can be applied is think-pairshare. think-pair-share is a strategy designed and developed by lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation (2005). he stated that think-pair-share (tps) is a “multi mode” strategy developed to encourage students’ participation in the classroom activities. there are several benefits of applying tps method to teach writing according to lyman (2005), they are: 1) it can build positive interdependence; 2) it can build individual accountability; (3) it gives opportunity to the students to think together; (4) it increases their sense of involvement; (5) it benefits students in the areas of peer acceptance, peer support, academic achievement, self-esteem and interest in other students; 6) it can promote the effectiveness of team work. besides having advantages, applying tps also has some disadvantages, they are: (1) failure to get along, 2) noise, and 3) absences. here, think-pair-share helps students develop conceptual understanding of a topic because they discuss it with their friend in pair. it makes them feel free to discuss about everything they want relating to describing someone or something. by doing that activity, their ability to filter information, write down conclusion and consider point of view will be developed. however, many teachers seem to prefer teaching writing using direct instruction method to teaching writing using think-pairshare. arends (1997, p. 66) argues that direct instruction method was specifically designed to promote student learning of procedural knowledge. direct instruction method is a teaching method developed by engelman (binder & watkin, 1990, p. 7). it is a teaching bmethod in which the teacher transmits information directly to the students, the lesson are goal-oriented and structured by the teacher. further, alan (2003, p. 11) states that direct instruction method or teacher centered instruction generally put in “teacher-centeredinstruction”. the teacher role is that of a knowledge expert whose major job is to pass knowledge directly to students. the students’ job is to absorb or otherwise assimilate the new knowledge. joyce, weil and calhoun (2000, p. 337) states that dim has its theoretical origins in the behavioral family particularly in the thinking of training and behavioral psychologist. briefly, direct instruction method is a teacher-centered method which is used to help students in learning a basic skill and knowledge and can be taught in step by step fashion. another factor affecting writing skill mastery is willingness of the students to make a decision involving something new and different without putting the primary focus on success or failure (bem, 1971 in bang, 1999, p. 13). it can be defined as risk-taking. according to brown (2001, p. 149), risktaking is an important characteristic of successful learning of a second language which refers to the learner’s ability to gamble a bit, to be willing to try out hunches about the language, and take the risk of being wrong. rubin (1975, pp. 43-48) and beebe (1983, p. 46) in luft (2007, p. 2) identifies four characteristics and behaviors related to risktaking: 1) being willing to appear foolish in order to communicate and get the message across; 2) using the language when not required to do so; 3) being comfortable with uncertainty and willing to try out guesses; and 4) being willing to make mistake in order to learn and communicate risk-taking can influence the use of tps (think-pair-share) method where students who have high risk-taking will have good ability in their work on pair. they can develop themselves freely about what they want to write. it will impact their words’ production and make them increase their ability to write something. as result, they will have good english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 achievement than being taught using direct instruction method. on the other hand, students who have low risk-taking will feel losing guide and cannot do anything. it is because they used to be passive. therefore, they will get better achievement if they are taught using direct instruction method. based on the background above, the researcher formulates the problems of this study as follows: 1) is tps more effective than dim to teach writing?; 2) do students with high level of risk-taking have better writing skill than those who have low level of risktaking?; 3) is there any interaction between teaching methods and level of risk-taking on teaching writing for the second grade students? then, the hypotheses are formulated as follows: (1) using tps is more effective than dim to teach writing; (2) the students with high risk-taking have better writing skill than the students with low risk-taking; (3) there is interaction effect between teaching methods and the students’ level of risk-taking to teach writing for second grade students of stkip siliwangi. method the research was conducted on the second semester students of stkip siliwangi. it covers the composing proposal, conducting research in the school, collecting the data, analyzing the data, and reporting. this research uses experimental method. the experiment examines the effect of two independent variables on a dependent variable. independent variables are the teaching methods and risk-taking while the dependent variable is writing skill. the population in this research is the second semester student of stkip siliwangi. the researchers use cluster random sampling in this study. to determine which one is experimental and control group, the researcher uses lottery to draw the class. there are two kinds of techniques used to collect the data. they are writing test and questionnaire of risk-taking. writing test is used to collect the data of students’ writing. the writing test is used to know the students’ writing skill after treatment. for this writing test, the researchers assessed the readability of the test instruction which informs whether the test instruction is appropriately readable for the students. meanwhile, to know the students’ level of risk-taking, the researcher distributed the questionnaire to the students. before being applied, the questionnaire was tried out to analyze its validity and reliability. the techniques for analyzing the data of this study are descriptive and inferential statistics. the descriptive statistics were used to know the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, histogram, and polygon of students’ score of writing. to know the normality and the homogeneity of the data, the writer uses normality and homogeneity test. the normality and homogeneity tests were done before testing the hypothesis. inferential analysis used is multifactor analysis of variance (anova 2x2). it is used to test the hypothesis. h0 is rejected if f0 is higher than ft. if h0 is rejected, the analysis is continued to know which group is better using tukey test. results and discussion after conducting the treatment and doing the test, the researchers conducted normality test to know whether or not the data were in normal distribution. the result of normality test is displayed in table 1 below. table 1. the sum of normality test no group lo lt alpha status 1 a1 0.0944 0.156624 0.05 normal 2 a2 0.10485 0.156624 0.05 normal 3 b1 0.0859 0.156624 0.05 normal 4 b2 0.0859 0.156624 0.05 normal 5 a1b1 0.1363 0.213 0.05 normal ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ level of risk-taking 112 6 a2b1 0.1648 0.213 0.05 normal 7 a1b2 0.0968 0.213 0.05 normal 8 a2b2 0.1461 0.213 0.05 normal based on the table above, all the highest value of lo is lower than lt or (lo<lt) at the significance level α = 0.05, it can be concluded that the data are in normal distribution. then, based on the result of the calculation, χo2 (3.81) is lower than χt2 (7.815). thus, it can be concluded that the data are homogenous. table 2. homogeneity test table 3. the mean scores of the cells a1 a2 b1 79.75 68.75 74.25 b2 68.3125 73.9378 70.625 74.03125 70.8438 table 4. the summary of analysis of variance 2 x 2 source of variance ss df ms fo ft between columns 162.5625 1 162.5625 4.485772 4 between rows 210.25 1 210.25 5.801667 column by rows 976.5625 1 976.5625 26.9474 between group 1349.375 3 449.7917 within group 2174.375 60 36.23958 total 3523.75 63 based on the data above, it can be concluded that: 1) since fo between columns (4.49) is higher than ft (4.00) at the level of significant α = 0.05 or (4.49 > 4.00), ho is rejected and the difference between columns is significant. it means that here is a significant difference between students who are taught using tps and those who are taught using dim in their writing skill. the mean score of the students who are taught using tps (74.03) is higher than those who are taught using dim (70.84). therefore, it can be concluded that tps is more effective to teach writing; 2) since fo between rows (5.80) is higher than ft (4.00) at the level of significant α = 0.05 or (5.80 > 4.00), ho is rejected and the difference between rows is significant meaning that there is a significant difference between students with high level risk-taking and those with low level risk-taking in their writing skill. the mean score of the students with high level risk-taking (74.25) is higher than those with low level risk-taking (70.63). therefore, it can be concluded that the students with high level risk-taking have better writing skill than those with low level risk-taking; 3) because fo columns by rows (26.95) is higher than ft (4.00) at the level of significant α = 0.05 or (26.95 > 4.00), ho is rejected and there is the interaction between teaching methods and the students’ level of risk-taking to teach writing. therefore, it can be concluded that the effect of teaching methods to teach writing depends on the students’ level of risk-taking. sample df 1/df si2 log si2 (df)log si2 1 15 0.07 25.9 1.41 21.20788 2 15 0.07 41.8 1.62 24.32219 3 15 0.07 54.6 1.74 26.05789 4 15 0.07 22.6 1.35 20.31043 60 91.89838 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 113 table 6. the sum of tukey test based on the table above, it can be concluded that: 1) since qo between a1 and a2 (2.99) is higher than qt (2.89) at the level of significant α = 0.05, it means that applying tps is significantly different from dim to teach writing. the mean score of a1 (74.03) is higher than a2 (70.84). therefore, it can be concluded that tps is more effective than dim to teach writing skill; 2) since qo between b1 and b2 (3.41) is higher than qt (2.89) at the level of significant α = 0.05, the students with high level risk-taking are significantly different from those with low level risk-taking in their writing skill. the mean score of b1 (74.25) is higher than b2 (70.63). therefore, it can be concluded that the students with high level of risk-taking have better writing skill than those with low level of risk-taking; 3) because qo between a1b1 and a2b1 (7.31) is higher than qt (3.00) at the level of significant α = 0.05, tps differs significantly from direct instruction method to teach writing for students with high level of risk-taking. then, the mean score of a1b1 (79.75) is higher than a2b1 (68.75). therefore, it can be concluded that tps is more effective than dim to teach writing for the students with high level of risk-taking; 4) since qo between a2b2 and a1b2 (3.07) is higher than qt (3.00) at the level of significant α = 0.05, tps differs significantly from direct instruction method to teach writing for the students with low level of risk-taking. the mean score of a2b2 (72.94) is higher than a1b2 (68.31). therefore, it can be concluded that direct instruction method id more effective to teach writing than tps for the students with low level of risk-taking. based on the findings of the study, it can be concluded that 1) tps is more effective than dim to teach writing, 2) students with high risk-taking have better writing skill than those who have low risk-taking, and 3) there is an interaction between teaching methods and level of risk-taking. firstly, teaching writing skill using tps makes students learn actively and successfully in writing class. think-pair-share helps students develop conceptual understanding of a topic because they discuss it with their friends in pair. it makes them feel free to talk about everything they want deal with the topic. by doing that activity their ability to filter information, draw conclusion and consider point of view will be developed. besides, setting the students in pair gives more opportunities to the students on exploring themselves. they will be encouraged to share something deeper and more detail. the more they share and talk about something, the more they build their confidence to write. think-pair-share gives them opportunity not only to improve their writing skill but also to build their social relation with other students during the activity. on the other hand, teaching writing using direct instruction method is different with teaching writing using tps since dim does not involve group work. the general goal of the dim is to provide learners with a practically useful knowledge of language. it includes lecturing, didactic questioning, and explicit teaching, practicing and drilling, and demonstrating. it is highly structured and teacher directed. the teacher control occurs when the teacher selects and directs the learning tasks. in this case, the students tend to be passive and dependent. as the result, teaching writing using tps method is more effective than dim. secondly, one of the factors affecting writing skill mastery is willingness of the students to make a decision involving no data sample qo qt α status 1 a1 and a2 64 2.995254 2.89 0.05 significant 2 b1 and b2 64 3.406367 2.89 0.05 significant 3 a1b1and a2b1 32 7.309052 3.00 0.05 significant 4 a1b2and a2b2 32 3.073124 3.00 0.05 significant ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ level of risk-taking 114 something new and different without putting the primary focus on success or failure (bem, 1971 in bang, 1999, p. 13). it can be defined as risk-taking. rubin (1975, pp. 43-48) and beebe (1983, p. 46) in luft (2007, p. 2) identifies four characteristics and behaviors related to risk-taking: 1) being willing to appear foolish in order to communicate and get the message across; 2) using the language when not required to do so; 3) being comfortable with uncertainty and willing to try out guesses; and 4) being willing to make mistake in order to learn and communicate. students who have those characteristics are considered as high risk-taking students. in terms of writing, students with high risktaking can develop themselves freely about what they want to write. it will impact their words’ production and make them increase their ability to write. the students who have high risk-taking will have a better attitude in following the teaching and learning process since risk-taking increases proficiency in the target language and gives experience to the students to participate actively in english class. on the other hand, the students who have low level of risk-taking usually has low attitude in joining the teaching and learning process. they tend to keep silent and have no willingness to try something new relating to the target language. they will be passive in doing the activity and tend to depend on their friends and their teacher all the time in teaching and learning process. they are unwilling to use complex and difficult linguistics elements. therefore, it can be concluded that the students with high level of risk-taking have better writing skill than the students with low level of risk-taking. thirdly, the use of tps encourages students to write more. it helps the students to develop conceptual understanding of a topic because they discuss it with their friends in pair. it makes them feel free to talk about everything they want deal with the topic. by doing that activity their ability to filter information, draw conclusion and consider point of view will be developed. tps activities give opportunity to the students to have writing activity in pair actively and independently. they have more chances to develop themselves in constructing writing with their pairs. hence, tps is suitable for the students with high level of risk-taking. they have characteristics of active students who always take a risk of being wrong and take every opportunity they have to try something new. students with high level of risk-taking feel comfortable in learning writing with tps method since this method encourages them to develop their skill in pair freely. they have opportunity to share with friend and feel free to make mistakes since their friend will make correction and it makes them explore what they want to write. therefore, tps method is more effective for teaching students with high level of risk-taking. on the other hand, dim gives a few motivation and stimulation to the students because it just focuses in lecturing and drilling activities. dim includes lecturing, didactic questioning, and explicit teaching, practicing and drilling, and demonstrating. it is highly structured and teacher directed. the teacher selects and directs the learning tasks. dim is suitable for the students who have low level of risk-taking. students with low level of risktaking are not actively involved during the activities. they do not want to appear foolish when they make mistakes. as result, they tend to keep silent during the lesson. they avoid taking a risk of being wrong and always wait for their teacher explanation and instruction. moreover, they do not have tolerance of possible incorrectness or inexactitude in using the language. hence, they feel more comfortable to be taught using dim. therefore, there is an interaction between methods used and the level of risk-taking of the students in teaching writing. tps is more effective than dim to teach writing to the students with high level of risk-taking. meanwhile, dim is more effective than tps to teach writing to the students with low level of risk-taking. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 conclusion based on the research finding described, some conclusions can be stated: 1) tps is more effective than dim to teach writing; 2) the students with high level of risk-taking have better writing skill than those with low level of risk-taking; 3) there is an interaction between teaching methods and the students’ level of risk-taking to teach writing. in teaching writing, teachers need to try many methods to improve the students’ writing skill. one of the good methods to teach writing is tps. this method is proved to be more effective than dim in teaching writing. to make tps working properly, it needs to be applied properly in the teaching and learning process. the procedures of tps are think, pair and share. however, the result of the method applied is also affected by the students’ characteristics. as proved by the research conducted by some researchers, tps method is more suitable for the students with high level of risk-taking. meanwhile, dim is more suitable for the students with low level of risktaking. finally, this research is expected to be useful for the students, teachers, and future researchers. therefore, some suggestions are listed as follows: 1) tps is strongly recommended for the teachers to teach writing; 2) the teachers have to consider about the students’ level of risk-taking to determine the suitable method used to teach them; 3) the students are expected to be more active in teaching and learning process in order to develop their writing skill; 4) the students need to adjust themselves to the method used by the teacher; 5) the future researcher may use the result of this research as a starting point to conduct another research. references alan, c. (2003). the linguistic learning. new york: viction graphics, inc. arends, r. (1997). classroom instruction and management. boston: mcgraw hill bang, y. (1999). factors affecting korean students’ risk-taking behavior in esl classroom. dissertation. ohio university. ohio. retrieved from http://etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi?acc_num=osu124 3019322. binder, c., & watkins, c. l. (1990). precision teaching and direct instruction: measurably superior instructional technology in schools. performance improvement quarterly, 3, 74–96. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. san francisco: pearson education, inc. caroline, c. (2003). teaching academic writing. london: centre of language and communication, routledge, falmer. graham, s., & perrin. (2007). writing next effective strategy to improve writing of adolescent in middle and high school. new york: carnegie corporation of new york. luft, s. (2007). language classroom risktaking behavior in a performed culture based program. thesis, school of the ohio state university. retrieved on august, 2012 from http://etd.ohiolink.eduview,cgiacc.num= osul 122970 1363. lyman, f. (2005). description of exemplary techniques and methods. london: prentice hall. ningtyas orilina argawati & lilis suryani teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ level of risk-taking 116 the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development seyed jalal abdolmanafi-rokni department of english language and literature golestan university, iran e-mail: j.abdolmanafi@yahoo.com apa citation: rokni, s. j. a. (2013). the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development. english review: journal of english education, 1(2).129-138 received: 09-04-2013 accepted: 22-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: there has been much debate over the use of computers and the internet in foreign language teaching for more than two decades. education, especially foreign language teaching, has to adapt and renew itself to be compatible with the globalized world. the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of using email on improving efl learners' grammar development and to highlight the benefits of using email in an efl grammar class. the participants of the study were 52 female students, aged 13-18 who were randomly assigned to an experimental and control group. each group consisted of 26 participants. the course lasted for three weeks and was held in one of the institutes in gorgan, iran. the experimental group sent their assignments through emails in addition to the traditional class activities but the control group receiving a placebo had the traditional class and assignments were handed in hard copies. for measuring the grammar proficiency, a pretest and posttest was administered to both groups. the pretests and posttests were tests based on the materials covered in the class. the results of the study show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest. keywords: electronic mail, efl, grammar development, e-learning introduction computer is the most effective pedagogical instrument which helps to enhance motivation of the students to learn language especially grammar. by using different parts of the computer, especially email, and having continuous online connection between the teacher and students, it will be hoped that the improvement of the students’ grammar is demonstrated. alabad (2010) stipulated that using computer for language learning and teaching has an important positive effect on them. it causes to engage learners in meaningful learning activities both in and outside the classroom. he also found in his study that learners were enjoyed and exciting when their learning was across from the use of computers in the classroom. in addition, they expressed that they were active in the class when their learning mixed with technology. he also mentioned that by using computer in the classroom, learners are able to be more exposure to the culture of the target language. as roberts (2005) pointed out, collaborative learning plays central role in language learning. so language learning with the help of computer in the classroom, at home, or at any place and time create an environment for effective interaction among students. it also has another effect on language learning as it can be expressed that it causes to achieve seyed jalal abdolmanafi-rokni the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development language highly and help to reach high and positive attitude toward the subject matter. according to al-ghazo (2008), technology is the best instructional tool to help learners enhancing their knowledge of the target language. he also added that technology plays an important role in enhancing the process of language learning and teaching. ttcc stated that technology has a special feature which can be expressed as it can be used in different ways in the classroom without any attention to the level of students or the subject of teaching. hollenbeck and hollenbeck (2004) maintained that there are three advantages of using computer-internetin the classroom: first, teachers are able to develop students' ability in writing letters through using e-mail and to develop their fluency in target language through chatting especially with native speakers. second, teachers are able to provide various environments which are related to instruction. and third, using internet causes to bring authentic materials. however, teachers should be careful and aware of how to use the internet and the available resources in teaching effectively. clyde and delohery (2005) mentioned that email is an asynchronous tool which can be used for different purposes and it consists of many instructional uses which help to enhance teaching and learning english. warschauer (1995) added that it provides opportunities for efl learners to have real life communication. moreover, using email in teaching a foreign language can improve learner’s grammar, vocabulary and writing skill (nagel 1999 as cited in al-mekhlafi 2004). similarly, the study of edasawa and kabata (2007) indicated how an email exchange projector had improved esl students at the vocabulary and syntactic levels through message exchanges. according to wikipedia (2010), email or electronic mail can be termed as a method which exchange digital messages and cause to communicate by personal computer, mobile phone, or other tools. it also expressed about the content of email which includes form, message, picture, photo or video clip. similarly, it indicated how an email works for the purpose of learning and teaching a language. e-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems accept, forward, deliver and store messages on behalf of users, an e-mail server, with a network-enabled device for the duration of message submission or retrieval. an electronic mail message consists of two components, the message header, and the message body, which is the e-mail's content. the message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. as nagel (1999) pointed out, how to use e-mail in the classroom, how to be most effective and to get optimal results are the focus of the paper “e-mail in the virtual esl/efl classroom”. moreover, he explained in his study the difference between email and traditional grammar assignment. he discussed about the effect of computer-email functionson language learning and teaching and more specifically, how much it effects on promoting language ability of language learners. chan and kim (2004) maintained that nowadays sentence-based and grammar-oriented tasks are used commercially by the help of call software but it is tried to use in a english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee communicative context. hubbard and siskin (2004) also found in their study that there are some grammar-focused activities which are used in some web sites such as english town, http://www.englishtown.com/online/h ome.aspx. in addition, these activities focus more on both form and meaning. chhabra (2012) propounded that internet actually is a source of information in the form of courses, articles, conferences and etc. teachers send their assignments to the students through email and parents can view their children's work online at any time. schools are also linked in a network and prepare materials online. there is lots of free software which are available on internet and students can use them. one of the software is named as spelling bee which helps the students to spell english words. according to brown (1980), second language education has changed considerably, pointing out the importance of the use of an “electric enlightened approach” to theory building but cautions that classroom contact is still very necessary for second language learners to give real-world validity to their theory building.brown’s theoretical comments about the classroom vignettes contribute to the attainment of this goal as major methodological approaches and current issues in language teaching are depicted in these vignettes, first with the direct method, grammar translation and the audio-lingual method (viatonu & kayode 2012). similarly, randall (2006) has admitted thattechnology has become a major component; a must-have in many homes around the world, with its concomitant influence permeating all facets of human lives, including education.this is a welcome development by many as it shows the direction in which language instruction will be driven by new advancements in technology (viatonu & kayode 2012). information and communication technology helps the students to perform better in language learning than with regimented traditional classroom teaching. online learning has the potentials to offer anyone with an internet connection access to a wide expanse but inexpensive education just as e-learning and computer allow schools to deliver classes to students anywhere in the world (educause, 2010). in their study, mestre et al. (1997) concluded that classroom communication technologies provide useful feedback to students and the teacher on how well the students understand the concepts being covered and whether they can apply them in novel contexts. in a 2000 study commissioned by the software and information industry association, sivinkachala and bialo (2000) reviewed 311 research studies on the effectiveness of technology on student achievement. their findings revealed positive and consistent patterns when students were engaged in technology-rich environments, including significant gains and achievement in all subject areas, increased achievement in preschool through high school for both regular and students with special needs, and improved attitudes toward learning and increased self-esteem. roschelle, pea, hoadley, gordin and means (2000) identified four fundamental characteristics of how technology can enhance both what and how children learn in the classroom: (1) active engagement, (2) participation in groups, (3) frequent interaction and http://www.englishtown.com/online/home.aspx seyed jalal abdolmanafi-rokni the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development feedback, and (4) connections to realworld contexts. ghabanchi and anbarestani (2008) conducted a study concerning the effects of call program on expanding lexical knowledge of efl iranian intermediate learners. it was found that learning via typical system has better short term results, but learning via computerized facilities is more beneficial in long term situation; and the rate of forgetting is much lower in technological vocabulary learning. bordbar's (2010) study explored the reasons and factors behind teachers’ use of computer technology in the classroom. his study also explored teachers’ attitudes toward computer and information technology and how they apply their practical computer-assisted language learning experience and knowledge to their language teaching. the results of his study showed that the majority of the respondents had positive or highly positive perceptions about the relevance of information and communication technology to iranian society and schools. according to quan-hasse, cothrel, and wellman (2005), the introduction of computer technologies such as the internet, e-mail, chat, etc., into educational environments has made it possible for learners to communicate ideas, information, and their feelings without any limit on time and space. similarly, zhao (2006) refers to the application of the internet saying that it is the first significant medium of communication providing people new social contacts outside the face-to-face contexts.carter (1997) also states that the emergence of faxes, e-mail communications, and word-processed texts has changed the ways in which written language can be utilized to maintain interpersonal interaction among different interlocutors within their social, cultural, and learning context. according to (warschauer 2001), cmc or “on-line communication refers to reading, writing and communication via networked computers” and it comprises of: a) synchronous computer-mediated communication, whereby people communicate in real time via chat or discussion software, with all participants at their computers at the same time; b) asynchronous computer-mediated communication, whereby people communicate in a delayed fashion by computer, e.g. by e-mail; and c) the reading and writing of on-line documents via the internet. as levy (1997) pointed out, the internet has been supplemented with books, television, computer and any other technology in the classroom faster than ago. he also stated that by increasing use of computer, language learners must learn how to use it to learn grammar online. according to jones (1986), elearning is a type of educational content via any electronic media such as the internet, intranet, extranet, satellite broadcast, audio/video tape, interactive tv, cd-rom, interactive cd, and computer-based training which is sent to the language learners. e-learning has many different forms of educational programs including online courses, web enhanced learning and distance education. iranian students have many grammar mistakes by the existing of many useful methodologies in the world. in addition, there are many computers in each house and most of the people know english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee how to work with a computer and its different part. so, i thought that it will be better to connect technology with language learning, especially grammar to enhance such proficiency. thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the effects of e-mail on improving efl learners' grammar skill and to show the benefits of using email in an efl grammar class for students. the research questions addressed in this study were: 1. does emailing have any effect on enhancing efl learners’ grammar proficiency? 2. what are iranian efl learners’ attitudes about the efficacy of using email for enhancing their grammar development? method to answer the research questions, 44 female lower-intermediate efl learners, aged 13-18, learning english at abrar english language institute in gorgan, iran in 2013 took part in the study.in order to homogenize the participants and to make sure about their level of general proficiency, a nelson test was administered to the participants. after analyzing the data, participants were selected and randomly assigned into experimental and control groups, each 26. for the purposes of the present study, three instruments were utilized: nelson test of proficiency. it consisted of 50 multiple-choice items in three parts of grammar and structure, vocabulary and reading comprehension. the time allotted was 40 minute. the reliability index of this test was estimated through kuder-richarson formula 21 as 0.82. as the aim of this study was to examine the effect of emailing on grammar development, a test including grammar was developed by the researcher (researcher-made test). the source for making the test was a lower intermediate book entitled “interchangeintro”(richards, 2005). this researcher-made test was piloted on 25 students of the same level in another english language institute. having analyzed the data, the result showed that the reliability calculated through kuder-richarson formula 21 was 0.79. then, the item analysis was done and poor items were discarded and some others were modified. the grammar test consisted of 40 items. since the time interval between the pretest and posttest was long enough, the same pretest was used as posttest too (hatch & farhady, 1982). thus the grammar test was conducted again as posttest at the end of the course in order to measure the progress of learner’s grammar skill. at first, a nelson test as a homogenizing tool was administered to 65 lower-intermediate efl participants. those participants who were located one standard deviation above and below the mean were selected to participate in this study. having analyzed the data, 52 participants were randomly chosen forthe purpose of this study. they were randomly assigned into experimental and control groups with 26 in each group. participants in both experimental and control groups took a pretest. the researcher explained the project to the participants of the email group, introduced the possible use of email in foreign language learning, and expressed the hope that the students would choose to participate. the participants of experimental group received step-by-step instructions on using email. the control group only seyed jalal abdolmanafi-rokni the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development received place. finally, a posttest was administered to both groups and then data were analyzed by spss version 18. during the 10 sessions of treatment, fifty english sentences were given to students. in the experimental group, the researcher sent five new sentences via email three times a week. totally, 10 email messages were sent during three weeks. in the control group, the participants were given a list of five sentences on paper three times a week. simple present and present progressive tenses were chosen in this study as target forms for two reasons. first, pre intermediate efl learners were already familiar with the basics of these structures. thus, in this study, the emphasis was put on increasing awareness over the correct use of present tenses rather than on instructing the learners how to use them. second, these structures are known to be problematic as learners frequently fail to use them properly. therefore, this study attempted to enhance the learners’ ability to correctly apply simple present and present progressive tenses through email corrective feedback. the participants of the present study were presented with their regular course books the pre intermediate course book (interchange intro). it comprised of five units and each unit is further divided into two sections. every grammar section was covered in two sessions lasting for 45 minutes. session one was devoted to conversation, grammar, and vocabulary. session two covered reading, grammar, and listening. classes were held twice a week. the total of ten sessions covered the part of a term for each of the two classes. the participants in the experimental class were required to submit an email and the modified version of the same email after receiving corrective feedback from the second session on as home assignment every week after covering every unit, using computer or laptop out of the classroom. all the participants in two groups received the same assignment every week but experimental group received them via email. the experimental group received corrective feedback via email, i.e., the instructor indicated that an error had been made, identified the error and provided the correction, to which repetition was required by the participants as modified output. in the control group no modified output was required. the teacher provided corrective feedback for the experimental groups mainly focusing on the correct use of simple present and present progressive tenses. other grammatical deviations were corrected without bringing the participants’ attention to them. results and discussion in the present research, based on the type of data, some techniques including paired samples t-test and independent sample t-test were used to compare the output of the two tests (pretest and posttests). in order to answer the first research question, descriptive statistics regarding the experimental and the control groups was calculated first. as table 1 displays, both control and experimental groups had almost the same mean score on the pretest and there was no significant difference between the two groups. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 1. descriptive statistics related to both groups' performances on the pretest groups n mean sd sig t experimental 26 7.577 3.431 0.719 0.361 control 26 7.923 3.474 as the findings in table 2 show, there was a highly significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the posttest-pretest total gain scores (t=7.637, p<.001).the result shows an increase from the pretest to the posttest and improvement in learning occurred more significantly in the experimental group than in the control group. thus, the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group by showing significantly higher gain scores from the pretest to the posttest. table 2. descriptive statistics related to both groups' performances on the posttest groups n mean sd sig t experimental 26 26.731 4.779 0.000 7.637 control 26 16.769s 4.624 one outstanding factor that made the two groups different was motivation. the control group seemed to have a weaker motivation in learning, compared with the email group or experimental group. this could be seen from the number of participants in the experimental group who managed to complete all the grammar tasks. this was not so in the control group. this, of course, does not mean that the english training programmed via the traditional classrooms cannot be recommended. with regard to the first research question, the findings of the study are congruent with those studies done by quan-hasse, cothrel, and wellman (2005), zhao (2006), and carter (1997). according to quan-hasse, cothrel, and wellman (2005), the introduction of computer technologies such as the internet, email, chat, etc., into educational environments made it possible for learners to communicate ideas, information, and their feelings without any limit on time and space. moreover, zhao (2006) refers to the application of the internet saying that the internet provides people to have new social contacts outside the real context, although it allows them to have physically presence during the process of communication among the people. further, carter (1997) also states that the emergence of faxes, email communications, and word-processed texts has changed the ways in which written language can be utilized to maintain interpersonal interaction among different interlocutors within their social, cultural, and learning context. similarly, this study complies with the one conducted by randall (2006) who admitted that technology has become a major component; a must-have in many homes around the world, with its concomitant influence permeating all facets of human lives, including education. this is a welcome development by many as it shows the direction in which language instruction will be driven by new advancements in technology. with regard to the second question, it can be stated that learners in experimental group expressed satisfaction about the positive effect of the use of email. they stated that the seyed jalal abdolmanafi-rokni the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development treatment had an effect on the enhancement of their grammar proficiency during and at the end of the course. they cited that the use of email and having constant contact with the teacher were all really beneficial and motivating to them. in sum, there are many advantages of using email for enhancing grammar skill of efl learners. analysis of the data has indicated that there is a positive relationship between the usage of email and improvement of grammar skills. learners had been engaged to use email to enhance their grammar skills and learn many factors that is related to english grammar structures. conclusion based on the research objectives, the researcher undertook the present study to determine the effectiveness of the email facility to help students to improve their grammar skill. this was done by comparing the improvement gained by the experimental group. both groups were given several grammar tasks at the low level of intermediate level. the analysis revealed that the achievements obtained by the two groups were, to a certain degree, different. the number of mistakes associated with certain aspects of the language decreased as students worked with email. most students believed that sending assignments via email provided excellent opportunities for them to ask their writing or grammatical problems whenever they need, so it is apparent that the number of mistakes decreased in some certain areas. where the advantages of the email facilities in relation to the rate of student participations are concerned, it is necessary to conduct further research involving other subjects within the context of efl learning. it is nevertheless to be expected that these findings will be beneficial to efl learners. findings of the study showed that the use of technology for enhancing language learning proficiency, especially grammar proficiency was effective. there are many reasons why using email is advantageous for the student and the teacher and education. first, by using email students become familiar with a communication tool that is vital to their survival in the 21st century. in the world of business, education, politics, and technology, electronic mail is quickly taking the place of voice, paper, and fax communication. secondly, a teacher can interact with a student or a group of students working on a project at times that are more convenient to the student, group, and the teacher. the vital interaction and feedback that take place between a teacher and student (or group of students) over a writing task is not limited to the confines of a classroom. finally, using email can also save class time for some assignments. teachers can send assignments and announcements electronically to the group. for example, if a teacher has to remind the students of a certain assignment due or of a particular procedure, the teacher can send one message to entire group. this can save valuable class time. references alabbad, a. m. (2010). interactive computer/network-based program for teaching english as a foreign language in the elementary levels in saudi arabia. doi: 10.1109/icmcs.2011.5945699. al-ghazo, a. m. (2008). technology integration in university teacher's education programs in jordon: english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee comparison of competencies, attitudes and perceptions toward integrating technology in the classroom. unpublished doctoral dissertation. retrieved from pro questllc. (umi no: 3310999). al-mekhlafi, a. (2004). the internet and efl teaching: the reactions of uae secondary school english language teachers. journal of language and learning, 2(2), 88-113. bordbar, f. (2010). english teachers' attitudes toward computer-assisted language learning. international journal of language studies, 4(3), 27-54. brown, h. d. (1980). principles of language learning and teaching. eaglewood cliffs ny: prentice hall. carter, r. (1997). investigating english discourse. london: routledge. chan, w.m., and d. h. kim. (2004). towards greater individualization and processoriented learningthrough electronic self-access: project “e-daf.”computer assisted language learning, 17(1), 83-108. chhabra, p. (2012). use of e-learning tools in teaching english. international journal of computing & business research, (22296166). retrieved from http://etec.hawaii.edu/proceedings/2 010/kiriakidis.pdf. clyde, w., and a. delohery. (2005). using technology in teaching. new haven and london: yale university press. edasawa, y. & k. kabata. (2007). an ethnographic study of a key-pal project: learning a foreign language through bilingual communication. computer assisted language learning, 20(3), 189-207. educause. (2010). horizon report. retrieved from http://www.educationworld.com/a_t ech.january 15, 2012 ghabanchi, z., and m. anbarestani (2008). the effects of call program on expanding lexical knowledge of efl iranian intermediate learners. the reading matrix, 8(2), 86-95. hatch, e., and h. farhady. (1982). research design and statistics for applied linguistics. u.s.a: newbury house publishers inc. hollenbeck, j. e., and d. z. hollenbeck. (2004). technology to enhance learning in the multilingual classroom, east lansing, mi, eric document ed490629. retrieved from:http://eric.ed.gov/ericwebporta l/contentdelivery/servlet/ericservlet? accno=ed490629. march 2nd, 2012. hubbard, p., and c. bradin siskin. (2004). another look at tutorial call. recall journal, 16(2), 448–461. levy, m. (2009). technologies in use for second language learning. the modern language journal, 93, focus issue, (2009)0026-7902/09/769–782. mestre, j. p., w. j. gerace, r. j. dufresne, et al. (1997). promoting active learning in large classer using a classroom communication system. in the changing role of physics departments in modern universities: proceedings of international conference on undergraduate physics education. woodbury, ny: american institute of physics. nagel, p.s. (1999). e-mail in the virtual esl/efl classroom. the internet tesl journal, v(7). retrieved from http://iteslj.org/articles/nagelemail.html. (accessed 13/03/2011). quan-hasse, a., j. cothrel, and b. wellman (2005). instant messaging for collaboration: acase study of a high-tech firm. journal of computer mediated communications, 10(4). retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/ quan-haase.htm. may 9, 2010 randall, d. (2006) the impact of technology on language teaching usa. tesl journal, xii (ii). retrieved from http://www.iteslj.org. richards, j. c. (2005). interchange intro (3rded.). cambridge: cup. roberts, t. s. (2005). computer-supported collaborative learning in higher education.in t.s.roberts (ed.), computer-supported collaborative learning in higher education (pp. 1 -18). hershey, pa: idea group pub. http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech http://eric.ed.gov/ericwebportal/contentdelivery/servlet/ericservlet?accno=ed490629 http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/quan-haase.htm seyed jalal abdolmanafi-rokni the effect of using email on enhancing iranian efl learners’ grammar development roschelle, j. m., r. d. pea, c. m.hoadley, et al. (2000). changing how and what children learn in school with computerbased technologies. the future of children, 10(2), 76-101. sivin-kachala, j., and e. bialo (2000). research reports on the effectiveness of technology in schools.(7th ed.). washington, dc: software and information industry association viatonu, o., and e.t. kayode. (2012). improving the teaching and learning of english language through the use of information and communication technology: prospects and challenges. international conference “ict for language learning” 5th edition. warschauer, m. (1995). e-mail for english teaching. alexandria, va: tesol publications. warschauer, m. (2001). on-line communication. in r. carter, and d.nunan (eds.),the cambridge guide to teaching english to speakers of other languages (pp. 207-212). cambridge: cambridge university press. wikipedia.(2010). email. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/email. december 2, 2010. zhao, s. (2006). do internet users have more social ties? a call for differentiated analyses of internet use. journal of computer mediated communications, 11(3), 844–862. retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue3/ zhao.html. may 9, 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/email khalil motallebzadeh & elham asa’di iranian efl teachers and students’ development through observation 8 iranian efl teachers and students’ development through observation khalil motallebzadeh department of english, islamic azad university (iau), torbat-e-heydarieh, iran. e-mail: k.motalleb@iautorbat.ac.ir ; kmotallebz@gmail.com elham asa’di department of english, islamic azad university (iau), daneshjo street, garmsar, iran e-mail: elham_asadi.elt984@yahoo.com apa citation: motallebzadeh, k. & asa’di, e. (2013). iranian efl teachers and students’ development through observation. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 8-16 received: 14-06-2013 accepted: 29-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract :this paper describes the processes used to examine on one hand the effect of less experienced teachers’ participation in experienced teachers’ classes on their own skills and teaching methodologies. it also describes the role of teachers’ training through observation in their students’ achievements. this quasi-experimental design study was conducted in kish language school in bojnurd, iran. twenty one efl teachers were selected as experienced and less experienced ones and involved 169 male and female students (aged 15 45 years) as participants. in order to compare students’ english proficiency before and after the treatment, a key english test (ket) and a preliminary english test (pet) were employed. also, a peer observation of teaching questionnaire, a sample of toefl test and an interview were used to find out the results of teachers’ development. this study also revealed that lessexperienced teachers’ participation in experienced teachers’ classes had a significant effect on efl teachers’ skills and strategies used in their classroom and almost all teachers were satisfied with their participation in experienced teachers’ classes. keywords: observation, professional development, less experienced teachers, learners’ achievement introduction the final aim of any educational planning is to grow students in various cognitive, individual and social skills and knowledge necessary to function occupationally and socio-politically in society (fullan 2001). teachers’ role in successful preparation of students is indisputable. whether the students will be the open-minded and the informed people of tomorrow or unaware members of society will depend on teacher knowledge, teacher education and especially teacher professional development (rizvi 2010). one issue related to professionalism of the teaching force refers to the necessity to bridge the gap between knowledge acquired during formal pre-service studies and further developments accruing while teachers are employed (nir & bogler 2007). it is believed that teaching can be considered as the most rewarding profession there is and it can be. we can all give examples of the pleasure of helping a child grow in knowledge and understanding, and achieve their potential, but what about the teacher? they shouldn’t be excluded from the benefits of lifelong learning because of their workload and desire to give. growth and change are part of all our personal and professional lives, and teachers need to embrace them; not just to do a better job, but to enjoy doing it. supporting teachers in their english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 9 development – trainees, newly or recently qualified, in their first three, ten or twenty years, and whether they’re wonderful or struggling – is vital in improving the quality of teaching and learning in our schools (bubb 2005). in recent times there has been call for change in teacher education in ways that will promote teachers being much more reflective in their practice (jones 1998; korthagen and kessels 1999; ball 2000; wise and leibbrand 2001). korthagen and kessels (1999: 4), argue teacher education programs need to link theory and practice and “to integrate the two in such a way that it leads to integration within the teacher”. the best way for teachers to improve what they do is for them to reflect on their practice and work with other teachers to help them understand what is needed for high achievement.” (townsend, raton & bates 2007). pachier and field (1997) suggest that being a successful foreign language teacher involves a commitment to stay beside the developments in the field and an enthusiasm to engage in constant professional development. it is believed that the poor quality of efl teachers is partly attributable to a lack of teacher training and teacher professional development (vo & nguyen, 2011). as a result, observation has been introduced as one of the teachers’ professional activities to help teachers to improve their teaching strategies through peer observation or observing experienced teachers classes. as bubb (2005: 45) maintains: ‘’observation is a powerful tool for assessing and monitoring a teacher’s progress. used well, it can also be a way to support teachers, because observation gives such a detailed picture and enables very specific objectives to be set. observing someone teach gives a really detailed picture and is an opportunity to stimulate some really useful reflection on teaching and learning’’. successful teachers make the most of any opportunities to observe others. they watch a range of teachers’ classrooms. it is very encouraging to see that everyone has similar problems and it is interesting to study the different ways people manage them (bubb 2005). observation may also be helpful for teachers who are beginners in teaching and it can help them to monitor experienced teachers’ classroom in order to improve their own skills and bring about changes in their own way of teaching and dealing with problems which they may face during their teaching. researches show constantly that teacher quality is the crucial factor in student learning, the frequent problem is to identify the important characteristics of teacher quality and help teachers to develop these characteristics, though (darling-hammond 1999, wenglinsky 2000). viewing the problem of improving student performance from this point of view makes the development of systematic and objective methods of classroom observation a critical component in improving teacher quality in every subject area. in order to move along the recent progress in teacher observation the researchers did investigations in this regard. the important point motivating a work in this area is the position of teachers observation in many countries like iran where teachers’ observation has not occupied the place it merits, whether in second language class, in school or in different efl institutes (akbari, samar & tajik 2007). also, as far as observation during the period of teaching practice is concerned, it can be seen as a method for current training and learning (wajnryb 1992).therefore the purpose of this study is to investigate whether less experienced efl teachers’ participation in experienced teachers’ classes has any effect on students’ learning. khalil motallebzadeh & elham asa’di iranian efl teachers and students’ development through observation 10 some studies suggest that learners will not achieve their learning goals successfully until they are given regular and systematic instruction. they also suggest that teachers can improve their teaching strategies by participating in more professional development activities in order to help students to reach their learning goals (hayes 2011). teacher education is presently facing a number of anxieties as pressures have come from many parts in the last decades, with perhaps the most powerful focus being on the issue of teacher quality (tony & richard 2001). researche show constantly that teacher quality is the crucial factor in student learning, the frequent problem is to identify the important characteristics of teacher quality and help teachers to develop these characteristics, (darlinghammond 1999; wenglinsky 2000). as education advocates state, the emphasis should be placed on providing educators with the skills necessary to make a meaningful impact on student learning, then egelson and mccoskey (1998) assert that an evaluation system designed to encourage individual teacher growth is not a luxury but a necessity. viewing the problem of improving student performance from this point of view makes the development of systematic and objective methods of classroom observation a critical component in improving teacher quality in every subject area. also, despite the increasing impact of observation as a professional development (pd) activity, it remains unclear how the process of observation will be implemented in the classroom and how it can help teachers to develop their teaching strategies in a collaborative way. therefore this study will help less-experienced teachers to make use of experienced teachers’ classroom through observation to improve their own teaching skills. the increasing awareness of new approaches in teacher training has made the researchers interested in the notion of classroom observation as a tool which less-experienced teachers can use to develop as effective teachers. therefore this study has examined how development of less-experienced teachers’ skills through observing experienced teachers classes can affect their skills and strategies as well as their students’ performances. method participants were 21 teachers including; seven males and 14 females. to carry out the experiment, two groups of teachers were selected as experimental groups (13) having university education (bachelor or master degree) with minimum of 5 years of teaching. eight teachers were less experienced, novice ones teaching at elementary (4) and pre intermediate (4) levels. one group was assigned as control group (8) who were beginner in teaching elementary (4) and pre-intermediate (4), having educational degree in english, though. the total number of students participated in less-experienced teachers’ classes (both experimental and control group) were (169) both male and female. to investigate the effect of classroom observation on students’ outcomes and teachers’ skills, three instruments were employed by the researchers. a sample of toefl test was used to assess the teachers’ proficiency in english. it was selected from longman complete course for the toefl test book published by addison-wesley longman, inc (2001). the number of questions were 60 multiple items, divided into grammar (30 items), vocabulary (20 items) and reading (10 items) sections. the toefl sample was piloted on (n=22) efl teachers to determine the reliability of the test. analyzing the result of the study english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 11 using spss (ver.18), the reliability was estimated through cronbach’s alpha as 0.732. also a key english test (ket) and preliminary english test (pet) tests were used in this study. in order to test students’ general english proficiency before the treatment two general english tests (ket & pet) were employed as pretest (ket for elementary levels and pet for pre-intermediate levels). these two tests were piloted on a random sample (n=40) of students to estimate reliability and time allocated to complete these tests. the results of the study using spss (ver. 15) show a reliability of 0.820 for ket and 0.775 for pet. the third instrument was a pet questionnaire containing several sections. the questionnaire included focus on a particular issue, for example use of visual aids, question techniques, pace and timing, interaction patterns with / between students. before observation the questionnaire was administered to participants to assess their initial knowledge, attitudes and skills in teaching. a similar questionnaire was given to participants to evaluate the impact of the treatment. finally teachers were interviewed to find out more information on their responses about the process they were involved, which was not possible in observation questionnaire. prior to the experiment, the participants (teachers) were given a sample of toefl test to evaluate their language proficiency. among teachers with higher scores some were considered as less-experienced and some were selected as experienced teachers based on the years they have taught english in language schools. two groups of less-experienced efl teachers who had and did not have the targeted treatment (classroom observation) were chosen to determine the effect of treatment on elementary and preintermediate students’ achievements. less experienced teachers in control groups have already participated in teachers training courses but they had no observation of experienced teachers’ classes, while less experienced teachers in experimental groups participated in both training courses and experienced teachers’ classes. this study required at least 10 sessions with less-experienced teachers attendance in experienced teachers’ classes. teachers observed a class on an area particularly relevant to their own area of teaching. and they were supposed to fill the mentioned observation checklist at least twice during the observation sessions first before starting observation sessions and the second one after ending observation in order to choose the focused areas of observations according to teachers’ needs and particular teaching situations. in order to test students’ performance in english before the treatment, the ket and pet tests were employed for both control and experimental groups. they consist of a number of multiple questions and certain skills were measured: listening, grammar, vocabulary, reading and speaking which was measured through interview. at the end of experiment the same tests (ket & pet) were conducted as posttest to measure the effect of treatment on students’ performance. first the students’ performances in experimental groups were evaluated. then students’ performances in experimental group were compared to the students’ performances in control group. in order to analyze the collected data of this study, the data were examined through the use of spss (version.15), excel (version 2007). in this study the differences in achievement scores of students taught by teachers who participated in one of the professional development activities (class khalil motallebzadeh & elham asa’di iranian efl teachers and students’ development through observation 12 observation) were used as the measure of effectiveness of classroom observation on students’ outcomes. results and discussion table 1 illustrates paired differences between two control groups in ket. as the results in table 1 show, there is a statistically increase in ket scores before (m=54.68, sd= 3.180) and after treatment (m=68.24, sd=3.053), p-value=.000 which is < .05. the mean increased with 95% confidence interval from 12.060 to 15.046.this increase is not statistically significant. table 1 comparison of two control groups in ket mean paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed)std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair control group scores in ket test post test control group scores in ket test pretest 13.553 4.542 .737 12.060 15.046 18.393 37 .000 table 2 comparison of two experimental groups in ket mean paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed)std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair exp group scores in ket test post test exp group scores in ket test pretest 16.94231 4.03618 .55972 15.81863 18.06599 30.269 51 .000 table 3 the comparison of two control groups in pet mean paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed)std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair control group scores in pet test post test control group scores in pet test pretest 12.314 3.402 .575 11.146 13.483 21.413 34 .000 also paired differences between two experimental groups are shown in table 2. according to table 2, there is a statistically significant increase in ket scores before (m=53.87, sd= 2.822) and after treatment (m=70.81, sd=3.113), p-value=.000 which is < .05. the mean increased with 95% confidence interval from 15.81863 to 18.06599. this shows a positive result. therefore, we concluded that the means between two groups are not equal and there is a significant difference between them. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 13 table 3 and 4 respectively show paired differences in pet control group and experimental group. table 3 shows, there is a statistically increase in pet scores before (m=45.11, sd= 2.423) and after treatment (m=57.43, sd=2.392), p-value=.000 which is < .05. the mean increased with 95% confidence interval from 11.146 to 13.483. results in table 4 illustrate, there is a statistically significant increase in pet scores before (m=44.36, sd= 2.114), and after treatment (m=59.27, sd=1.835), p-value=.000 which is < .05. the mean increased with 95% confidence interval from 14.233 to 15767. we can conclude that the mean between the groups are not equal and there is a significant difference between them. p-value=0.000< 0.05. accordingly we can say that teachers’ observation had significant effect on students’ scores as we had an increase in mean scores of experimental group. table 4 comparison of two experimental groups in pet mean paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed)std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair exp group scores in pet test post test exp group scores in pet test pretest 15.000 2.524 .381 14.233 15.767 39.416 43 .000 table 5 descriptive statics before treatment n minimum maximum mean std. deviation variance statistic statistic statistic statistic std.error statistic statistic preparation and planning start of the session explanation of the subject presentation of the session during the session finishing the session evaluating learners’ behavior 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.80 1.75 2.00 1.50 1.75 1.60 2.33 2.40 1.3500 1.2656 1.4167 1.2292 1.2969 1.2000 1.3542 1.4000 .06455 .06237 .06804 .04781 .05337 .04830 .10305 .09661 .25820 .24948 .27217 .19124 .21348 .19322 .41220 .38644 .067 .062 .074 .037 .046 .037 .170 .149 in this study teachers were supposed to fill in a lesson observation criteria twice before and after treatment. the questionnaire includes different sections and each part includes various questions. the results estimated for lesson observation criteria 1 (before treatment) are observable in table 5. according to this table sixteen teachers answered the questions that are related to different parts of questionnaire. according to this table mean and std deviation for each part preparation and planning, start of the session, explanation of the subject, presentation of the session, during the session, finishing the session and evaluating learners’ behavior are (m: 1. 3500/1.2656/1.4167/1.2292/1.2969/ 1. 2000/1.3542/1.4000;sd:.06455/.06237 /.06804/.04781/.05337/.04830/.10305 /.0966) respectively which shows that teachers are not really satisfied with their performance during their classrooms. khalil motallebzadeh & elham asa’di iranian efl teachers and students’ development through observation 14 table 6 illustrates the results estimated for lesson observation criteria 2 (after treatment). the evidence shows that overall, teachers reported high satisfaction with the processes in which they were involved since, mean and std deviation for each part including: preparation and planning, start of the session, explanation of the subject, presentation of the session, during the session, finishing the session, evaluating, learners’ behavior are (m:3.0625/2.96 87/2.9896/2.9479/2.8984/2.9000/3.04 17, sd:.28018/.49896/.41486/.30257/ .34827/.45019/.58214/.38966/3.0125 ) respectively. these findings indicate that less-experienced teachers who participated in experienced teachers classes reported greater satisfaction with the programs compared to their colleagues who didn’t receive treatment. the findings in table 7 show that mean and std deviation of lesson observation criteria 2 (m: 2.9688, sd: table 6. descriptive statistics after treatment n minimum maximum mean std. deviation variance statistic statistic statistic statistic std.error statistic statistic preparation and planning start of the session explanation of the subject presentation of the session during the session finishing the session evaluating learners’ behavior 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 2.60 2.00 2.17 2.50 2.13 2.20 2.00 2.00 3.80 3.75 4.00 3.50 3.50 3.60 3.67 3.40 3.0625 2.9687 2.9896 2.9479 2.8984 2.9000 3.0417 3.0125 .07004 .12474 .10371 .07564 .08707 .11255 .14554 .09741 .28018 .49896 .41486 .30257 .34827 .45019 .58214 .38966 .079 .249 .172 .092 .121 .203 .339 .152 table 7 descriptive statics of all questions n minimum maximum mean std. deviation variance statistic statistic statistic statistic std.error statistic statistic locriteria1 locriteria2 16 16 1.17 2.62 1.43 3.31 1.3125 2.9688 .02161 .04521 .08645 .18085 .007 .033 lo: lesson observation .04521) is higher than mean and std deviation of lesson observation criteria 1 (m: 1.3125, sd: .02161) which shows the great impact of class observation on iranian efl teachers’ skills and strategies. the main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of classroom observation on students’ outcomes and iranian efl teachers’ skills and strategies and to explore if it is feasible to apply it in educational setting in iran. three groups of teachers and students (elementary and pre-intermediate) were selected. only teaches in experimental group were given the opportunity to improve their teaching methods and strategies via participating in experienced teachers classes. and both experimental and control groups of students were given the chance to improve their english performance. the findings of this study show that teachers’ participation in experienced teachers’ classes had a significant english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 15 effect on students’ outcomes and their own skills and strategies. the results of students’ scores in experimental group was compared to the scores of students in control group in order to investigate, if, class observation had any significant effects on students’ outcomes. a significant increase in the use of observation was noted with regard to experimental group. therefore, statistically significant differences were found on the experimental group when compared to control group. although learning outcomes are influenced by a complex interplay of factors particular to an institution, teaching context, and student disposition, when employed carefully and thoughtfully, student outcomes may contribute to judgments of teaching. also data analysis through wilcoxon signed ranks test revealed that lessexperienced teachers’ participation in experienced teachers’ classes had a significant effect on their skills and strategies and helped them to rethink their own teaching methods. following in the study, the teachers were interviewed to reveal their specific ideas regarding the effect of experienced teachers’ class observation on their professional development. all, teachers reported high satisfaction with their participation in experienced teachers’ classes and processes in which they were involved. they had become more creative in enlarging their teaching in order to make their lessons more interesting. the participants said that they have become more motivated in teaching as a result of observation. the fact of observing teachers in many different settings will likely suggest variations they can try to improve their strategy. in other words, as they observe teachers implementing a strategy in different ways, they, too, can gain the ability to see and act more flexibly in their own teaching. conclusion based on the findings of the present study, teachers had a positive experience for class observation, the participants held the same belief that through observation and discussion, they had learnt about and adopted some of the others’ instructional techniques. the evidence also showed that they adjusted their own techniques to improve the teaching of a particular class. therefore, we can conclude experienced teachers’ class observation is acceptable for efl less experienced teachers and its introduction is beneficial for both teachers and students. references akbari, r., & gaffer samar, r., & tajik, l. (2007). developing of classrom observation model based on iranian efl teachers’ attitude. journal of faculty of letters, and humanities, year 49, no.195. brown, c. a., smith, m. s., & stein, m. k. (1995). linking teacher support to enhanced classroom instruction. paper presented at the annual conference of the american educational research association, new york.bubb, s. (2005). helping teachers develop. darling-hammond, l. (2000). teacher quality and student achievement: a review of state policy evidence. (research report r-99-1). washington dc: center for the study of teaching and policy, university of washington. fullan, m. (2001). the new meaning of educational change. new york: teachers college. nir, a. e., & bogler, r. (2007). the antecedents of teacher satisfaction with professional development programs. teaching and teacher education, 24(2), 377e386. richard. j. (2001). teachers’ knowledge and how it develops. in richardson, v (ed), handbook of research on teaching (4th edition). rizvia, m. (2010). development of a classroom observation schedule for measuring the efficacy of a teacher khalil motallebzadeh & elham asa’di iranian efl teachers and students’ development through observation 16 development program. procedia social and behavioral sciences. science direct. vo, t. l. & and mai nguyen, h. t. (2011). critical friends group for efl teacher professional development. retrieved from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/. wajnryb, r. (1992). classroom observation tasks: a resource book for language teachers and trainers. cambridge: cambridge university press. wenglinsky, h. (2000). how teaching matters: bringing the classroom back into discussion of teacher quality policy. princeton, nj: educational testing services. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 335 efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies farida noor rohmah medical laboratory technology department, faculty of health sciences, universitas ‘aisyiyah yogyakarta, sleman, yogyakarta email: faridanoor88@unisayogya.ac.id david sulistiawan aditya nursing department, faculty of health sciences, universitas ‘aisyiyah yogyakarta, sleman yogyakarta email: davidsulistiawanaditya@unisayogya.ac.id apa citation: rohmah, f. n., & aditya, d. s. (2023). efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 335-346. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7711 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction all face-to-face classes were cancelled during the pandemic, forcing many institutions, including our own university, to switch from face-to-face instruction to fully online instruction. teachers had the difficult task of switching from well-known face-to-face pedagogical practices to those that depended on technical competence and innovative assessment techniques. since prior research indicated that flipped classroom offered several advantages such as improving students' responsibility, sense of community, communications, and learning enthusiasm (haftador et al., 2021), the flexibility of timing for students' learning, the ability to blend asynchronous and synchronous teaching and learning, and the development of 21st-century skills (divjak et al., 2022), some instructors decided to use it during the pandemic in place of traditional lecture-based education remotely online. the (stem) teaching of science, technology, engineering, and math has benefited from the use of flipped classrooms, which have been shown to increase student engagement, information retention, and understanding of the subject matter (tang et al., 2020). in english for foreign language (efl) teaching, flipped classroom provides several benefits as well. the study by siswanto (2021) revealed that by employing flipped classrooms, the student's writing abilities increased by 26.222 mean scores, from 52.44 on the pre-test to 78.67 on the post-test. the flipped classroom approach has also been seen to encourage student participation in online self-learning. moreover, the flipped classroom approach to learning has been successfully used in grammar instruction. with the use of this learning method, students and lecturers were no longer physically restricted. the flipped classroom learning method was well received by the students. flipped classrooms were found to be simple to implement, encourage self-directed learning, and enhance knowledge of grammar (mandasari & wahyudin, 2021), and even for lowabstract: the implementation of online flipped classroom was one of the impacts occurred due to covid-19 pandemic in educational sector. for efl teachers, this abrupt change presented difficulties. only a small number of studies, however, have examined the problems teachers faced when deploying fully online flipped classrooms and how they overcame them. this study intends to examine the difficulties faced by teachers while implementing fully online flipped classrooms as well as their solutions. the data for this study were obtained through a semi-structured interview with three efl teachers from a private institution in yogyakarta using a narrative inquiry methodology. the results showed that the teachers faced challenges including students’ motivation and engagement, students’ mixed ability, assessment, resistance to change and teachers’ workload. teachers’ strategies were: maximizing synchronous meeting, providing meaningful and personalized feedback, assigning groupwork, utilizing formative assessment and collaborating with colleagues. this study may benefit teachers in identifying and resolving issues that arise while using the flipped classroom in an online setting. keywords: challenge; flipped-classroom; online; strategy: teacher. farida noor rohmah & david sulistiawan aditya efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies 336 proficiency students, flipped classroom can more effectively help them develop lower and higherorder thinking skills (chang, 2023). the key benefit of flipped learning is increased flexibility in the classroom and a change in the roles of the students and teachers. when students engage in classroom activities, they become more involved and independent (haghi, 2020). according to a study on the flipped pedagogy model, students who completed more learning activities had better understanding of the concepts being taught, while those who continued their synchronous learning activities (face-to-face discussions) had higher levels of active engagement. they also tended to receive higher grades when they watched more prerecorded video lectures (lin et al., 2019). furthermore, it has been argued that flipping a fully online class is an efficient approach to enhance traditional face-toface instruction by fostering students' capacity for thinking critically, solving problems, and collaborative learning abilities (aljaraideh, 2019). online flipped classrooms differ from traditional flipped classrooms in that teachers and students interact virtually instead of in person. this is appropriate for maintaining social distancing protocols in the new normal as opposed to the traditional flipped classroom, which requires students to prepare class assignments by studying materials through recordings, videos, or texts before attending class meetings. unlike conventional flipped classroom, students in the online flipped classroom do not need to physically attend class because they can complete all learning tasks online (stöhr et al., 2020). thus, both synchronous and asynchronous online systems can be used to implement this instructional approach. one one hand, asynchronous learning activities demand that students finish educational material, like concept knowledge. on the other hand, in synchronous online learning activities, students must participate in face-to-face discussions during class time to discuss the material and use what they have learned to solve problems. teachers should create and implement learning activities in the online learning environment because class time does not require physical surroundings (lin et al., 2019). the structure of the class in the course used in this study can be seen in figure 1. figure 1. online flipped classroom framework despite the fact that online classroom flipping has been more popular and has proven to be an extremely effective teaching strategy during the covid-19 pandemic, there has not been much research done on this type of instruction for english as a foreign language (efl), especially in yogyakarta, indonesia. a study examining teachers’ reflections of the fully-online flipped classroom is important, as the findings could be helpful for both students and teachers in achieving the maximum benefits from online flipped classroom. therefore, this study aims to explore the efl teachers’ challenges in implementing fully-online flipped classroom and their strategies to deal with these challenges. the research questions stated in this study are “what were the efl teachers’ challenges in implementing fullyonline flipped classroom?” and “how did the efl teachers cope with their challenges in implementing fully-online flipped classroom?” method this study employed the qualitative method to gather detailed information about the challenges teachers have when implementing a fully online flipped classroom in english classes and how they address those challenges (creswell & guetterman, 2020). three english teachers who had been teaching for more than three years at yogyakarta's higher education institutions and who implemented online flipped classrooms were chosen as participants using purposive sampling (creswell & guetterman, 2020). the teachers, two male and one female, ranged in age from 25 to 35. this study used narrative inquiry to let the teachers share their thought on their teaching experiences because the experiences of the teachers themselves were its asynchronous learning activity (via lms) •students learn the basic knowledge through videos and slides •students has discussion through lms with peers •students do some quizzes or exersice to check their understanding synchronous learning activity (via video conferencing) •teacher and students have discussion related to the material •teacher and students have discussion related to teh quiz or exercise they finised in the previous meeting •students practice the language with the teacher's feedback english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 337 primary emphasis (merriam & tisdell, 2016). the summary of the participants is presented below: table 1. summary of participants partici pant name of participants (pseudonyms) gender years of teaching 1 tjm male 6 2 frm male 5 3 sr female 7 the data were collected in august 2022 using a semi-structured interview because this kind of interview is more adaptable and flexible yet still powerful in the sense that it allows the researchers to gain in-depth information from the informants (ruslin et al., 2022). the challenges faced and methods employed by efl lecturers in their experiences teaching in higher education were explored by the researchers by employing this type of interview to gain insight from participants about their ideas, feelings, and beliefs. the reflective questions focused on the teachers' challenges teaching literature online, including the teacher, student, subject, and technological components, as well as how they overcame those difficulties. the conversation lasted for about an hour. the interview results were then typed, classified, and tallied before being discussed according to their themes. following data collection, miles and huberman analysis was performed on the data. data reduction, data visualization, and conclusion/verification are the three processes employed in this instance of data analysis (miles et al., 2019). the researchers also employed member checking as a method of building credibility in order to guarantee the veracity and accuracy of the conclusions drawn from the data collecting. according to creswell & guetterman (2020), validating findings include the researcher ascertaining the veracity or accuracy of the findings using methods including member checking. member checks are crucial, according to stahl & king (2020), as "the degree of trust one has in the person telling the tale has much to do with the degree of trust attributed to the telling." in other words, it is a good means for other people to confirm and judge the reliability of the storyteller. this can help to confirm the conclusions and evidence as well as generate additional evidence that the participant might not have provided during the first data collection. in this study, member checking was utilized to ask participants for confirmation that the results were accurate and in line with their responses. they regarded the conclusions as accurate and reliable when they agreed with them. results and discussion the research questions for this study are “what were the efl teachers’ challenges in implementing online flipped classroom?” and “how did the efl teachers cope with their challenges in implementing online flipped classroom?” this section discusses the results of the participants' reflections on the challenges and strategies they used to implement the online flipped classroom. the study's findings showed that while implementing the online flipped classroom in english lessons, the study participants faced a variety of difficulties and had to come up with different ways to handle them. the challenges identified in the study were related to five issues namely lack of student motivation and engagement, students’ mixed ability, assessment, resistance to change and teacher workload; while the coping strategies involved maximizing synchronous meeting, providing meaningful and personalized feedback, assigning groupwork, utilizing formative assessment and collaborating with colleagues. these findings are be discussed in details below: challenges lack of student’s motivation and engagement firstly, it is not surprising that students’ motivation and engagement was the main challenges among the participants. according to morris (2019), selfdirected learning is a fundamental component for effective learning in the modern world. thus, online instruction, especially using flipped classroom strategy, involves self-directed learning. self-directed learning is challenging to achieve when students do not feel motivated or engaged in the material. the result of the interview showed that: "the students pay attention when learning offline, but not everyone does so when learning online because of the signal issues or because they don't want to participate. some of them even think that online learning is boring." (p1) “just a small number of students are actively participate in synchronous learning maybe only about 10 to 20 percent ask questions due to shame and fear of teachers or friends. only very smart and diligent students are active in zoom discussions and ask questions. during offline learning before the pandemic, students were eager to participate in classroom activities, farida noor rohmah & david sulistiawan aditya efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies 338 probably because the classroom environment and interactions with peers have been established in class. the teacher only guides and corrects the students' responses.” (p2) “i feel like the student’s engagement became my biggest challenge. it is stressful for me to see that most of my students turned off their camera during synchronous class and kept silent when i ask to participate in a discussion even in asynchronous class. “(p3) the findings from the interview is in accordance with the previous study conducted by antonio (2022) which find that adopting the flipped classroom have several issues, one of them is due to the lack of student interaction and engagement in the activities especially in the asynchronous sessions. consequently, the lesson is unable to create an environment that promoted active learning. accordingly, it is also noted by che et al. (2021) that students might not be as engaged in an online flipped classroom as they would be in a conventional classroom. the students may not be immediately interacting with the teacher and other students. the findings of the present study indicated that method made it harder for students who lacked motivation to achieve as much as others. because the flipped classroom required strong collaboration involving the teachers and students to conduct autonomous learning, this circumstance would prevent the learning process from being as effective as it may be. the teacher would instruct the class to watch videos that had been created by the teachers, but if the students did not like the online flipped classroom, they disregarded the teacher's instructions. the problems the students encountered resulted in unfavorable feelings and low desire and involvement. due of the students' distance, teachers in this situation found it difficult to maintain their emotional stability, which limited their ability to communicate with the students (chun et al., 2016). resistance to change the next challenge came from the teacher side namely their resistance to change that caused by several factors. teachers found it challenging to determine their students' comprehension. when online learning differed from face-to-face instruction, students might struggle with understanding but teachers might find it challenging to identify it. thus, a participant said that it made her resist to use the new paradigm of teaching. “before the pandemic, in class, i am quite confident with the teaching process because if my students did not really understand the material i could directly give the explanation to the students in class. but, in online flipped classroom, i find my self difficult to give them further explanation and they sometimes said it was more difficult for them as well since they have to adapt a lot.” (p3) they had to completely adapt and even change from traditional face-to-face learning which is comfortable for them to online flipped classroom. in traditional face-to-face learning, they were used to give assistance and supervision directly to the students in class but in online flipped classroom, they could not conduct the same way. thus, most of the teachers tended to be resistant to the flipped classroom model. moreover, the resistance was related to their concern about student learning. the teachers could be skeptical about the significance of online flipped classes and worried that students are unlikely to gain as much as they would in a conventional setting. “i did not feel secure and confident about the effectiveness of this model because this is my first time implementing it in this fully online setting. maybe i rethink to use it again in the next semester if it did not work” (p3) “i have no experience using this model before, i need more preparation or even training to apply this model.” (p1) teacher resistance to change could be significant obstacles in online flipped classroom. teachers may be resistant to utilizing new teaching strategies and technologies, which may limit their ability to adopt an online flipped classroom style. additionally, the burden connected with online education may overwhelm teachers, which may increase their resistance to change. resistance to change can appear in a number of forms, such as a hesitation to embrace new technologies, an opposition to new instructional techniques, or doubts regarding the efficacy of the online flipped classroom model. this findings is in line with a research of wang (2017) that indicated due to their limited exposure to ict-supported educational innovations as a result of the restricted government findings, teachers have become quite conservative and even averse to change. similarly, floresalarcia (2022) reported that due to the increased issues they had to tackle, less experienced teachers were more insecure and required regular course adjustments. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 339 students’ mixed ability one of the most difficult issues faced by teachers of english as a foreign language (efl) classes at educational institutions is having students with different levels of english proficiency in one class. this type of efl class is also known as a mixedability or heterogeneous class since the students in it are all english learners with varying levels of proficiency, interest, and learning style. the participants in this study likewise even more struggled with the mixed ability of the students in the online flipped classroom. "considering their varied english proficiency— some of them are proficient, while others are totally new, it's challenging. they are not ready to participate in the class, and some of them even have no knowledge of the english language, so i must find new ways to involve the beginners while also keeping in mind the more advanced students.” (p2) “i have mostly large classes. it’s even more challenging when they are different in terms of english proficiency. because so few of the students can speak english and so many others cannot, teaching them is extremely difficult. indeed, i face a few difficulties, but teaching a class of mixed-ability students using online flipped classroom is the hardest since i have to consider the resources that are both suitable both students with greater abilities and those with low abilities. “ (p3) the excerpt indicated that classes with mixedability students made it harder to pinpoint who the target learner was. as declared by gustiani (2019), teaching english to diverse classes presents challenges in terms of approach, teaching and learning materials, and students' varied learning styles and interests. on one hand, concentrating on the slow learners might cause the quick learners to lose interest in their studies because they could finish the assignments sooner and did not have to wait for the subsequent activities. the slower student would become confused and demotivated if they were left behind in class in terms of grasping the content, on the other hand, if the emphasis was placed on the quick learners. most classrooms had a large number of students, and it was the teacher's responsibility to keep them under control while still delivering the lesson as intended while implementing online flipped classroom. the task of attending to each student's unique demands falls on the shoulders of a single teacher, making it a time-consuming process. it has become difficult for teachers to put their lesson ideas into practice since every student in a mixed-ability class has a different level of comprehension. in addition, teachers’ challenge related to mixed-ability students dealt with the planning to provide a balanced lesson and materials that suited all students with different abilities (kolaj, 2022). “the classes in my university was heterogeny, mixed-ability, so when planning for the materials and activities, i found it very challenging. the material and books we prepared before mostly don’t suit with low level of students“ (p1) assessment the assessment was the third challenge found in this study. due to a number of issues, assessment becomes difficult in online flipped courses. first, unlike traditional classrooms, online learning settings lacked the capacity for face-to-face interaction, which could make it challenging for teachers to assess students' progress and provide them useful feedback. “as i said before, i find difficulty especially when dealing with measuring student understanding through assessment. what kind of assessment that is most suitable to use.. and i can’t meet them as easy as i can when on offline. it became worsen when the class if flipped online. i haven’t had clear formula when and how to assess the students.” (p3) second, it could be difficult to construct assessments that were fair and accessible for all students because online learning frequently draws a varied variety of students, including those with various learning preferences. online learning could also open doors for academic dishonesty, making it difficult for teachers to check that students were answering questions truthfully and successfully. the teachers agreed that dealing with plagiarism and cheating on exams and quizzes might be difficult. students were more likely to copy and cheat when working on assignments online, according to nordin et al. (2022), and they were also more likely to take notes when giving oral presentations for speaking evaluations. this finding is shown by p2 and p1 comment: “i’m not sure of student answer. do they really do the assignment based on their own ability or just google the answers”. it makes me think harder about the format of assessment to use that can assess their ability and possible to conduct in online flipped classroom” (p2) farida noor rohmah & david sulistiawan aditya efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies 340 “sometimes i found my students didn’t work on their quis or assigmnet in their own. in some of my writing classes, i even found my student used artificial intelligence and copy paste the what the ai said exactly the same.” teachers’ workload and time management before it was proposed that they use the flipped classroom concept, all of the responders admitted that they had struggled with having little time and energy. in other words, the time and energy required of teachers in their current teaching methods even without the use of technologies was high. when they must provide more interesting materials and activities for flipped learning, the workload increases. according to p1's comment, one of the difficulties was getting the materials ready for the online flipped classroom. the online flipped classroom approach mandates that time in the classroom be set out for practice or discussion and that resources are offered outside of class, in this case through asynchronous activities. it made a few teachers concerned. teachers occasionally thought twice about employing this strategy due to the time-consuming nature of preparation. one of the primary problems with using the flipped classroom approach, according to al-naabi et al. (2022), is preparing the pre-class materials because the teachers need to create videos and some slides of materials, and they need to learn and create the videos by themselves. "i feel that at times i struggled with having thorough preparation for running a flipped classroom. i wasn't prepared for the timeconsuming online flipped classroom preparation. i used my time at home tom prepare the videos and slides for pre-class meeting. i think it is the biggest challenge for me as a teacher to manage my time to prepare a lot of things before running online flipped classroom.” (p1) the participant expressed concern that the amount of time needed to set up and keep their flipped classrooms running might not be manageable. the teacher talked about how producing education multimedia is a timeconsuming process that adds a lot of work to their already full schedules. for teachers to produce high-quality videos, a lot of work is necessary. they both appeared to believe that this might discourage teachers from experimenting out flipped courses. as a whole, both participants voiced worry about the workload requirements of their flipped classrooms and agreed that this was a significant drawback of the teaching strategy. the literature has already discussed the participants' concerns about the workload of teachers as aidoo et al. (2022) claimed that for students to be engaged and learn well, teachers may need to spend more time planning and executing active learning activities during class time. “talking about that slide and this slide sounds simple. yet after reviewing it again, you ask yourself, "what have i missed?" which should i add, this or that? so, you must review them after making them. maybe take three, four, or five recordings of them. once you've used them, you'll say, "well, that worked or didn't work," and you'll need to switch things around the next semester. as a result, it may take a long time.” (p2) strategies the participants uncovered how to handle their issues in the implementation of online flipped classroom. the participants explained how they overcome obstacles. all three teachers used some of the same tactics while also sharing some of their own. these findings are be discussed in details below: providing feedback feedback is an important element of online learning especially online flipped learning. a program should include feedback and carefully explain it because it is more vital in online flipped classroom courses than in face-to-face instruction. in the online learning environment, feedback became way more important due to transactional distance between the students and the teachers (steele & holbeck, 2018). thus the students were easier to ‘lose their path’ without any adequate feedback. “i think, feedback becomes more crucial for online flipped learning because i can’t always be with them in every meeting physically.”(p2) moreover, the participant also revealed how she provide feedback. this finding is similar with hazriani et al. (2022) who mentioned they ways of providing feedback in online learning. in online learning, teacher may provide feedback through immediate feedback in synchronous learning and delayed and indirect feedback in asynchronous learning. "when i teach with a zoom meeting, i provide feedback by directly delivering some comments or suggestions. for instance, when they practice english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 341 a speaking task, i directly provide comments to each student." (p1) students in synchronous learning received feedback after completing tasks. when a student made an error in the pronunciation of an english word, for instance, during speaking class, the lecturer provided immediate feedback during the observations. the feedback was provided after the students finished the activities, so the teachers were aware right away if any students were having trouble understanding the subject matter. it was anticipated that by providing prompt responses for every student, the mistakes would be learned from and the likelihood of mistakes being repeated will be reduced. conversely, teachers who valued asynchronous learning provided their students with indirect feedback. the teachers evaluated the tasks once the students submitted in their work and provided written feedback. putting students in groups in order to address students of mixed ability, participants' initial strategy was to divide the class into discussion groups with both highand lowability students. students could assist one another in this manner and collaborate while also learning from one another. in line with this, hove (2022) claimed that mixed ability grouping gives varied learners the chance to study alongside others who are more or less capable than they are, allowing them to develop their communication skills and academic performance in general despite their differences. "i place them in pairs or even teams, and i always blend the students, low and high skill, so that they frequently help and work with each other." (p1) "i always make sure that the content i assign permits the students to work in groups. i mix students with high and low ability levels in each group so they can support one another.” (p2) in an online flipped classroom, group work might be a useful tactic for teaching students of different abilities. students with diverse skill levels collaborated in groups, building on one other's strengths, and bolstering each other's shortcomings. this collaboration allowed students to learn from one another, enhancing their comprehension of the course material and sharpening their analytical and problem-solving abilities. by allowing students to connect with people who could have various backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints, group work also fostered social and communication skills. additionally, group projects could help students feel a feeling of belonging and support, which was crucial for those who might struggle with the isolation and disconnect of online learning. in addition, students who work in groups in online class have the chance to engage and collaborate with their peers, which improves learning results and overall growth. this finding supported the study by … that reported by experiencing group work in synchronous class, students can gain encouragement and motivation from their peers which lead to the improvement of their self-efficacy to participate in active learning (hartono et al., 2023). “i put together groups of strong and weak students so they can support one another, give motivation, cognitively and emotionally. they can still communicate each other.” (p3) benefiting the synchronous meeting synchronous online lecturing is an e-learning method in which the students and the teacher can participate and engage in a synchronous virtual class (kutnick & joyner, 2019). with video conferencing, video chat, or voice chat offering real-time feedback to assist students boost their language skills, synchronous language learning is more in line with the communicative approach to language teaching and learning. an environment that fosters synchronous language acquisition is characterized by the ease of use of the instructional approach, prompt feedback and response from the teacher and fellow students, and the creation of content quickly in the classroom. even, reinholz (2020) found that when compared to what they would have encountered in a typical classroom, this strategy provides students with the highest level of interactive experience. the result of the interview revealed the teachers’ experience about maximizing the synchronous meeting: “i tend to have more discussion in synchronous meeting, checking what material need to be explained more, checking student’s understanding in real time face-to-face conversation and giving direct feedback to the students, not giving them additional exercise.” (p1) “asynchronous meeting is for the students to prepare their basic knowledge and students having discussion with their friends, so i usually use synchronous meeting via zoom as maximum farida noor rohmah & david sulistiawan aditya efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies 342 as possible to clarify their understanding so they will feel motivated to learn because i do not leave them all alone by giving them face-to-face feedback.” (p3) utilizing formative assessments the assessment difficulty must be overcome with a deliberate and considered strategy that includes continuing feedback and assistance for students, clear communication about expectations and grading criteria, and the use of many modes of assessment to give an in-depth assessment of student learning. the assessment difficulty teachers in online flipped classes could be managed by using formative assessment. the result of the present study was consistent with the earlier research that considered formative assessment was the most suitable practice in today’s curriculum (prastikawati et al., 2020). formative assessment enables teachers to give continuous feedback on students' learning, which can improve student outcomes and inform instruction. similarly, wong & mak (2019) also argued that formative assessment can identify students’ need and adjust the learning activity. formative assessment can take many different forms in an online flipped classroom, such as online tests, forums, and peer review exercises. teachers can track student progress and modify their lesson to match individual needs by including formative evaluation into their online classroom. additionally, formative assessment offers continuous feedback to students on their progress in learning, assisting them in identifying areas for development and maintaining motivation. by deploying the potential of formative assessment, teachers could not only handle the assessment difficulty but also enhance the effectiveness and quality of their online class. "formative assessment is often done at the ending of the lesson, whether i post the quiz link or assign tasks on our lms. we ask them questions as we go along to make sure they comprehend the topic. i gave them the formative assessment both in synchronous and asynchronous meeting.” (p2) “mostly i use online games as the part of the formative assessment. i think the teacher will be more interested to do the games and i can still assess their understanding. i usually use kahoot, mentimeter and quizizz. i found it very user friendly and easy to get the result of the evaluation” i prefer to give them games-based quiz in asynchronous meeting to make them more engaged while i’m not meeting synchronously.” (p3) collaborating with colleagues to decrease the teacher’s workload, the participants implemented the same strategy namely collaborating with colleagues. it was done by sharing best practice, resources, and support. “my colleagues and i in the university often shares material or even quizzes that can be imported from a class to another. it helps me a lot”(p1) “my workload in preparing engaging materials was reduced because in team, the other teacher shares the materials and exercises” (p2) the difficulty of teacher workload in online flipped classes can be effectively handled through collaboration with coworkers. similarly to this, khalisa et al. (2022) also revealed in their study that in coping issue related to workload, teachers may make an effort to cooperate with the coordinator and the other lecturers. together, teachers might conserve time and effort by sharing materials, lesson plans, and best practices. this allows them to create and implement beneficial online instruction promptly. collaboration can ease the stress and feeling isolated that come with online teaching by offering emotional support. teachers can collaborate through regular meetings, online forums, and shared documents and resources. by utilizing the knowledge and experience of others, teachers can increase the effectiveness and quality of their instruction, which will ultimately benefit their students while also reducing their workload. overall, this study has delineated the teachers’ experiences regarding their implementation of flipped classroom in online learning. in response to the first research question, the result indicates that there are several challenges the teachers faced when implementing flipped classroom in fully online learning. the challenges, then, can be divided into two categories, namely student-related challenges, and teacher-related challenges, based on the challenges listed in the result. studentrelated challenges refer to any difficulty or obstacle faced by the teachers coming from the students consisting of students’ motivation and engagement, student mixed ability, and assessment. while, what is meant by teacherrelated challenges here are the challenge encountered by the teachers that were mainly come from the teacher sides namely resistance to change and workload. every challenge, however, can be english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 343 managed by the teacher with several teaching strategies. the summary of the challenges and strategies is shown in table 2. table 2. identified teachers’ challenges and strategies in online flipped classroom challenges strategies studentrelated challenges students’ motivation and engagement benefiting synchronous meeting students’ mixed ability feedback putting student in groups assessment utilizing formative assessment teacherrelated challenges resistance to change collaborating with colleagues teachers’ workload from the table, it is clear that the teachers maximized synchronous meeting to engage and motivate their students despite their lack of enthusiasm. along with providing individualized feedback, the teacher put students in groups to deal with students’ mixed ability challenge. additionally, the teachers performed formative assessment in an online, flipped classroom to increase the effectiveness of the assessment. in the meantime, they work together with colleagues to share resources and best teaching practices in order to solve problems connected to the teacher workload, resistance to change issues. conclusion the difficulties teachers encounter when establishing an online flipped classroom have been covered in this article, along with the strategies they can use. according to the research, some of the biggest obstacles are students’ motivation and engagement, students’ mixed ability, assessment, resistance to change and teachers’ workload. teachers can use a variety of strategies, such as maximizing synchronous meeting, providing meaningful and personalized feedback, assigning groupwork, utilizing formative assessment and collaborating with colleagues solve these problems. it is evident from the foregoing that teachers may find it difficult to establish an online flipped classroom. teachers may, however, overcome these difficulties and provide their students with a dynamic and successful learning environment by carefully preparing, employing the right tactics, and engaging in constant review and reflection. teachers may aid students in becoming successful citizens of the 21st century and beyond by doing this. we advise to conduct workshops or trainings for the teachers to acquire the necessary skills for the proper application of this method. future studies could investigate the efficacy of various methods for deploying online flipped classrooms as well as how these techniques affect the results of student learning. the researchers also recommend conducting additional research in order to determine if this strategy can improve students' acquisition of foreign language skills in the areas of writing, speaking, reading, and listening. acknowledgments the researchers would like to thank the participants, the 3 efl lecturers in universitas 'aisyiyah yogyakarta, for participating in this study. additionally, a special thank you extends out to everyone who supported the researchers during their difficult work on this study. the goal of the study is to provide meaningful data that can be used as a resource for future research, according to the researchers. references aidoo, b., macdonald, m. 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(2021). design and practice of the online flipped classroom under the guidance of learning drive based on a network teaching platform. 2nd international conference on information science and education (icise-ie) (pp. 12731276). ieee. farida noor rohmah & david sulistiawan aditya efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies 344 chun, d., kern, r., & smith, b. (2016). technology in language use, language teaching and language learning. the modern language journal, 100(s1), 64-80. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12302. creswell, j. w., & guetterman, t. c. (2020). eduational research: planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (6th ed.). pearson. divjak, b., rienties, b., iniesto, f., vondra, p., & žižak , m. 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(2020). the effective integration of fipped classroom in elt context: a review of recent literature. arab world english journal (awej) proceedings of 2ndmec tesol conference (pp. 120-132). mec. https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/mec2.9. hartono, h., widiyati, e., & anwar, c. (2023). group work in zoom breakout rooms to enhance english-speaking self-efficacy for active learning activities. studies in english language and education, 10(1), 137-154. hazriani, n., nor, h., & saadillah. (2022). the synchronous and asynchronous learning at english department of univeristies in south kalimantan: practices and challenges. english review: journal of english education, 10(3), 1045-1056. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i3.6675. hove, n. (2022). the inclusiveness of mixed ability grouping in johannesburg primary schools. south african journal of childhood education, 12(1), a1047. https://doi.org/10.4102/ sajce.v12i1.1047. khalisa, f. p., mirizon, s., & eryansyah. 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(2021). flipped classroom learning model: implementation and its impact on efl learners' satisfaction on grammar class. ethical lingua, 8(1), 150-158. merriam, s. b., & tisdell, e. j. (2016). qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation (4th ed.). ca: jossey-bass. miles, m. b., huberman, a. m., & saldana, j. (2019). qualitative data analysis: a methods sourcebook 4th ed. sage publication. morris, t. h. (2019). self-directed learning: a fundamental competence in a rapidly changing world. international review of education, 65, 633–653. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-01909793-2. nordin, n. m., omar, w., & ridzuan, i. i. (2022). challenges and solutions of online language teaching and assessment during covid-19. world journal of english language, 12(8), 410-419. https://doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v12n8p410. prastikawati, e. f., wiyaka, & adi, a. p. (2020). online backchannel as a formative assessment in improving writing. journal on english as a foreign language, 10(2), 359-384. reinholz, d. l., stone-johnstone, a., white, i., sianez, l. j., & shah. (2020). a pandemic crash course: learning to teach equitably in synchronous online classes. cbe life sci educ., 19(4):ar60. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe. ruslin, r., mashuri, s., rasak, m. s., alhabsy, f., & syam, h. (2022). semi-structured interview: a methodological reflection on the development of a qualitative research instrument in educational studies. iosr journal of research & method in education, 12(1), 22-29. siswanto, r. a. (2021). the implementation of flipped classroom to improving students' writing skills at university of brawijaya. jurnal ilmu pendidikan, 27(2), 58-63. http://dx.doi.org/10.17977/um048v27i2p58-63. stahl, n., & king, j. (2020). expanding approaches for research: understanding and using trustworthiness in qualitative research. journal of developmental education, 44(1), 26-28. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 345 steele, j., & holbeck, r. (2018). five elements that impact quality feedback in the online asynchronous classroom. journal of educators online, 15(3), 10.9743/jeo.2018.15.3.10. stöhr, c., demazière, c., & adawi, t. (2020). the polarizing effect of the online flipped classroom. computers & education, 147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103789. tang, t., abuhmaid, a. m., olaimat, m., oudat, d. m., aldhaeebi, m., & bamanger, e. (2020). efficiency of flipped classroom with onlinebased teaching under covid-19. interactive learning environments, 31(2), 1077–1088. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.181776 1. wang, t. (2017). overcoming barriers to ‘flip’: building teacher’s capacity for the adoption of flipped classroom in hong kong secondary schools. rptel, 12(6), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41039-017-0047-7. wong, k. m., & mak, p. (2019). self-assessment in the primary l2 writing. the canadian modern language review, 75(2), 183–196. farida noor rohmah & david sulistiawan aditya efl teachers’ reflection in the implementation of online flipped classroom: challenges and strategies 346 preparation of papers in two column format for the proceedings of conferences sponsored by ieee english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee enhancing students’ interaction skills and critical and creative thinking through movies agelyia murugan universiti teknologi mara, malaysia e-mail: agelyia082@ppinang.uitm.edu.my wan noorli bt razali universiti teknologi mara, malaysia e-mail: wannoorli093@ppinang.uitm.edu.my apa citation: murugan, a. & bt razali, w. n. (2013). enhancing students’ interaction skills and critical and creative thinking through movies. english review: journal of english education, 1(2), 216-222 received: 10-03-2013 accepted: 23-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: in the context of higher education in malaysia, the aims are to produce competent and confident language users in the students who learn english as their second language. by incorporating movies in english language teaching, it will enable the students to learn english more actively, meaningfully and interactively. this study seeks to explore the potential use of movies as a teaching and learning tool in encouraging active participation and critical thinking in the english language classroom. the existence of technology in movies has made ways for the educators to do segmentations of the important parts in the movies for the limited classroom time. critical thinking plays a vital role in education simply because of the personal and language enrichment. it also allows the students into self-directed thinking in making decisions more carefully, clearly and logically. it is important to incorporate the universal intellectual standards of critical thinking theory into the crucial foundation in encouraging active participation of students. it is believed that critical thinking will enable the students to engage themselves in their own pace of learning and provide greater freedom for expressing and arguments. this is because critical thinking is aimed at making wise decisions on what to believe and do and also presenting claims, actions and practices into the real-life contexts. keywords: movies, active participation, critical thinking, universal intellectual standard introduction malaysia is in the mid-point of its journey towards vision 2020 and is in the process of transformation to become a developed nation by year 2020. everything in this world has changed tremendously especially in the education system. in malaysia, english language is used as the second language and has been introduced as the medium of instructions in higher institutions. english language has a functional role by virtue of its use as an international language of communication in the economy of the nation, particularly for malaysia to remain globally competitive. sadly to say, there were less exposure and the usage of english language among our students because the language is only limited in the language classroom. due to this, educators should varies their teaching strategies in teaching the language because english language is essential and very important in the employment opportunities and is a necessity for malaysians of various mailto:wannoorli093@ppinang.uitm.edu.my agelyia murugan & wan noorli bt razali enhancing students’ interaction skills and critical and creative thinking through movies ethnics to rise up the socioeconomic ladder. the standard of the english language is still at the declining stage where there the language competence and performance of our malaysian students are deteriorated due to the lack of exposure to the language at home and also across the curriculum. this resulted in students of being underachievers and not proficient in the language when it comes to the employment matters. being an expert in the field of study is just not enough because students must also possess good communications skills which could be used globally. besides that, graduates’ employability is also based on how they can use the language and able to think creative and critically. this is because by having the ability to think critically, they may possess the potentiality in finding solutions with the problems with which he or she is confronted. apart from that, the tool that is used in teaching the english language plays an important role in instilling motivation for the students to enhance and develop their interaction skills in english language. uitm is known as the largest university in malaysia with the largest amount of students in the country. due to that, the graduates of uitm are expected to perform successfully in interacting with others locally and globally in english language. the university’s aspiration of being recognized as the ‘world class’ standard university lies solely on the performance of the graduates locally and internationally. but there are still problems arise due to the students’ proficiency and attitude towards english language. students are still lack of sufficient motivation and determination and also the skills in interacting in english. thus, there is a need for a tool or medium which can be utilized by the lecturers in enhancing the students’ speaking skills in english. the tool or medium used in teaching the language should be a yardstick to promote positive and motivational factors towards the students in learning the language. it should be not a chalk and board talk which used to be the teaching method in those days. as such, lecturers too play an important role in choosing the right medium to teach the language the huge emphasis must be placed on the creativity and innovation. this study investigated the potential of movies in enhancing the students’ interaction skills in english language and how movies may encourage the students in creative and critical thinking in using the english language. using movies in the english language classroom is one of the methods that can be used to teach our students the skills in learning the language. by this way, learners are being emphasized based on their sensory learning styles where it helps the learners to acquire, retains and retrieves in formations based from their learning preferences. according to hazita & noorizah, they stated that ‘a prepared educator can use movies to stimulate discussions, facilitate learning on particular topics, or reemphasizing material being presented through textbooks or classroom lecturers’. they also posit that learning english by movies promotes learners’ skills. besides, raymond wolkowski (1987, as cited by hazita & noorizah) stated that teachers are responsible in for motivating the students, whether intrinsically or extrinsically by using the various tools in teaching. according to him, ‘movies have both audio and visual components that may lead to motivation’. english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee he also added that watching movies is surely stimulating and followed by discussions which will connect the students’ feelings with the learning environment. showing movies therefore is a successful approach to students because movies offer an entertainment factor from which many ideas can spring. it is also believed that movies can add color to a lesson, highlighting themes and projects and illustrating concepts and ideas for knowledge and creativity (lever, 2010). king (2002) believes that the use of authentic materials like movies will intrinsically motivates language learners to stay focus as it brings the learners to a new experience, different from the ordinary classroom setting. lieberman (2002) reiterates that when film is used to illustrate a topic, it has the power to initiate an interactive classroom activity which may then bring to a motivating and interesting learning experience. the immersion power and familiarity aspects in films, adds, lieberman will activate learners’ participation and permits active learning. according to wappel (2010, p. 76), ‘video streaming is another high-tech tool used in the esl classroom. to introduce or reinforce materials visually, teachers download clips or entire videos to make their classroom alive and spark active participation in the classroom. in a nutshell, the usage of movies in the english language classroom promotes more active participation from the learners in order to prepare them for functional roles in the society as well as employability. creativity is very important in the english language classrooms because creativity means ‘transforming one thing into another’. arthur koestler (as cited by feher, 2007), describes creative thinking as ‘double-minded’ thinking that ‘operates on more than one plane’. he also added that it can be best described as a ‘transitory state’. it is believed that creative thinking should be integrated in the lesson because it can create a relaxed and exciting classroom environment which is essential in the learners’ learning process. feher (2007) further posits that creative thinking improves the learners’ self-esteem as they can look at their own solutions to problems and their own products and see what they are able to achieve. apart from that, creative thinking also can lead to a genuine communication and cooperation. it prepares the learners to use the language instrumentally outside the classroom. in a nutshell, creative thinking is considered as part and parcel of our life because it plays an important role in the personal growth and also in the development of the culture and society. critical thinking skills are increasingly important in facing the world today. film usage in encouraging critical thinking skills is a widely acceptable notion (bluestone, 2000; lieberman, 2002; waalkes, 2003; weerts, 2005). students today make judgments on certain issues more experientially than conceptually. critical thinking encourages the students to act as a practitioner rather than as an observer. dressel and mayhew (as cited in young, 1980) proposed that critical thinking can serve as ‘a principle for integrating the curriculum as a point of view towards problems and their solutions and a way of thinking about basic problems faced by the mankind’. as such, they further summarized the five skills that is essential in critical thinking: a) the ability to define a problem. b) the ability to select pertinent information for the solution of the problem. agelyia murugan & wan noorli bt razali enhancing students’ interaction skills and critical and creative thinking through movies c) the ability to recognize stated and unstated assumptions d) the ability to formulate and select relevant and promising hypotheses. e) the ability to draw conclusions validly and to judge the validity of the inferences. (as cited in young, 1980) to add more, moore & parker (2001, p. 23) stated that ‘…..thinking critically is not about attacking other people but is more about helping others about their ideas and also ourselves’. it is understood that it is not a situation where winning takes place but more too in understanding the knowledge that is being shared. this study adopts the universal intellectual standards for critical thinking and the theory of communicative language teaching as its crucial foundation. paul and elder (2007, p. 57) defined the concept of critical thinking as illustrated in the diagram below: fairness significance logic breadth depth relevance precision accuracy clarity universal intellectual standard of critical thinking besides, this research also adopts communicative language teaching approach because this theory is important in making the communicative competence as the goal of language teaching and acknowledging the interdependence of language and communication. freeman (2000) posits that communicative language teaching approach promotes the linguistic competence of the students as well as the knowledge of forms and function of the language and their meanings. method this research is a qualitative and quantitative study based from the students who are undergoing their studies in uitm penang. those involved students are from bel 130 (english for communication skills) class where they are thought on the basic skills of communication skills in the english language. the research design is as follows: english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee data collection: samples are asked to watch the segments of the movie and followed by discussion based from the questions given among their group mates data analyses: the data is recorded manually as well as it is video recorded to ensure that the students discussion is evaluated based from standards of critical thinking. before data collection: the movies are being segmented into few parts and prepare the questions for the task outcome of the discussion: samples present their views on the questions given and the lecturer acts as the facilitator for the task given. the step by step method: activity description before data collection preparing film segment preparing questions for task film segment is extracted from the full version. the critical questions are formed. data collection watching the film segment 1. attention was gained through greetings and a slight conversation on how the students feel and what they have gone through that day. 2. the lesson outcome was shared where the goal for the day’s lesson was to contribute and develop ideas for group discussion using language functions which have been learnt in the previous week. 3. the lecturer started by asking the students if they have any family members or relatives who are disabled. few students responded. group discussion 4. the students were divided into an informal group of four as suggested by johnson, johnson and smith. every group was given a set of six questions and asked to read them all. 5. the students were given a little introduction to the background of the movie and then they were instructed to watch segment of agelyia murugan & wan noorli bt razali enhancing students’ interaction skills and critical and creative thinking through movies movies prepared to answer the given questions. 6. they were then given 30 minutes to discuss in the small groups. the lecturer observed the group discussion form time to time and assists them solve arising matters. presentation 7. they then merge into one big group for an open discussion. here, answers were elicited from every group and the lecturer often probes to invite more discussion, justification and arguments to create active participation and promote deep learning. the open discussion was recorded by another student who is familiar to the class. this is to lessen the nervousness and fear. this class is used to few classroom recordings as some activities in the previous weeks were recorded by their lecturer and discussed for further improvement. 8. finally, the students were asked to tick a simple questionnaire which aims at accessing their perceptions on the learning experiences during the lesson. data analyses the recorded data including the short notes the samples have scribbled on during their discussion will be analyzed based on the given standards and instances of critical thinking will be scored accordingly. results and discussion it is found that the video streaming of the movie have spark the active participation among the students because this teaching material has made the classroom environment comes alive. it encourages the students to speak confidently in front of their peers as there was a space for them to say their views freely. the movie shown has proven to stimulate the students’ interest towards the lesson and it is a great beneficial tool for communication interaction among the students. based from the students’ responses, it has been found that the students’ ability in understanding a particular topic has increased via their discussions with the classmates and also the lecturer, who was the facilitator throughout the learning process. therefore, it is also found that the students’ pronunciation and acquisition of vocabulary has been improved. apart from being involved in the interaction process, students were also being able to proceed with their development of other skills when they self-expressed through their writing. example from the students’ discussion: 1. lecturer: do you think that being disabled in some point, sam was able to raise lucy? student: he is able to raise his daughter. basically what makes a father competent from our point of view is that he can provide shelter, love and education for his daughter...................... analysis: this question is post to the students to make sure students use the critical thinking standard which is ‘breath’ and ‘logic’. this is because the student’s answer shows the liberal viewpoint which gets deeply into the issue and provides accurate and precise details 2. lecturer: how does the society view sam as a disabled father? student 1: the society wanted to separate them so that lucy will have a better life and education........but society is being colder by on thinking what is best for lucy. student 2: we should not separate lucy and sam because it gives negative impact in lucy’s personal development. so society needs to provide support sam; english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee financially, guidance and also develop his skill in learning. analysis: the question post to the students is emphasizing more into finding the accuracy and precision answers from the students. this is because firstly, the students are asked to list the details that they have watched from the movie. apart from that, they also tested on the depth of their understanding to make sure that they understand the complexity of the issue given. conclusions although sometimes it is difficult for the students to understand the western movies, it is better to have english subtitles which may help the students to understand the movie better. it is believed that watching movies is very important in increasing one’s visual and critical awareness. the lesson should be done interestingly by setting questions after the premiering of the movie, encourage healthy discussions in small groups and later open discussions with the lecturer and the students that may invite argumentation, criticism and also comments and feedbacks on various pertaining matters. this type of lessons should be student-centered and the lecturers should act as the facilitator in the discussions made. references bluestone, c. (2000). feature films as a teaching tool. college teaching, 48(4), 141. king, j. (2002). using dvd feature films in the efl classroom. the weekly column article 88. retrieved from http://www.eltnewsletter.com/back/ february2002/ art882002.html. accessed on january 4th 2010. lieberman, a. (2002). use of film media as a dictatic tool. encounter, 15, 1-17. paul, r. and r. elder (2007). a guide for educators to critical thinking competence standards. retrieved from http://www.criticalthinking.org. accessed on 10th may 2010. waalkers, s. (2003). using film clips as cases to teach the rise and the decline of the state. international studies perspectives, 4, 156-174. weerts, s. (2005). use of films to teach critical thinking. journal of nutrition education and behaviour. 37(2), 100 -101. young, r. e. (1980). new directions for teaching and learning–fostering critical thinking. jossey – bass inc. publishers: america. hazita, a., and m. n. noorizah. (2010). theory and practice for esol-movies as teaching and learning tools. malaysia: universiti kebangsaan malaysia. moore, b. n., and r. parker. (2001). critical thinking, sixth edition. california: mayfield publishing company. freeman, d. l. (2000). techniques and principles in language teaching, second edition. united kingdom: oxford university press. http://www.eltnewsletter.com/back/february2002/ art882002.html http://www.criticalthinking.org dzung trung dang incorporating a cognitive linguistics approach 92 incorporating a cognitive linguistics approach to the teaching of a selection of figurative idioms in efl context dzung trung dang faculty of english, diplomatic academy of vietnam email: dtdung0612@gmail.com apa citation: dang, d. t. (2013). incorporating a cognitive linguistics approach to the teaching of a selection of figurative idioms in efl context. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 92-98 received: 08-08-2013 accepted: 12-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: prodromou (2003: 43) states that “the way for a student of english to become more fluent in the language is not only to have a good command of grammar and vocabulary but also a good command of the ‘idiom principle’ and there is “the need for idiomatic competence is precisely what linguists propose for the non-native speaker”. in addition, research shows that idioms are among the biggest challenge for efl/esl learners. the aim of this paper is to shed some light on ways to deal with a selection of figurative idioms by employing a cl perspective and to suggest some pedagogical implications. the paper attempts to examine a small number of vietnamese efl learners in the use of a non cl and a cl activity to evaluate its effectiveness and learning gains. the results could be used to further explore the use of cl to the teaching of idioms. key words: cognitive linguistics, figurative idioms, corpora of contemporary, everyday, semiformal spoken american english (liu, 2003: 678). the data in the corpora are primarily the type of spoken language students learning american english as a second language will likely to be exposed to. simpson and mendis (2003) chose figurative idioms based on the michigan corpus of american spoken english (micase). micase which is freely available and searchable via the web, contains 197 hours of recorded speech, totalling about 1.7 million words in 152 speech events (ranging from larger lectures to dissertation defences, to one-on-one office-hour interactions and small peer-led study group sessions)” (simpson and mendis, 2003: 422). these two researchers found 238 idioms types (unique idioms), with 562 tokens in the corpus, that met criteria such as frequency ranges and the number of types in each range. two idioms were selected from grant (2007). these idioms introduction twelve idioms used in the current paper (see the following sections) were taken from liu’s (2003) study, simpson and mendis (2003) and grant (2007). more specifically, liu (2003: 677) used “three corpora of spoken english which include barlow’s (2000) corpus of spoken, professional american english, a corpus of spoken american media english and simpson et al.’s (2002) michigan corpus of academic spoken english”. due to the duration of a course unit, a limited number of idioms were selected from liu’s (2003: 692) study. that is – “appendix b which is the most frequently used idioms across three corpora of spoken american english (in order of frequency)”. liu (2003: 677) argues that “the corpora in combination contain about 6 million tokens and 72,402 types and constitute is the largest available spoken american english corpus to date”. in addition, all the three corpora are made up 93 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee are from the british national corpus’s figurative idioms. the above mentioned can partly answer to the question of why i chose these idioms for the current paper. besides, communicative competence is still a challenge for many vietnamese efl students. one of the reasons for this can be found in a study by tomlinson and dat (2004: 199). these researchers argue that vietnamese students are reluctant to participate in classroom interaction in english. there is the need for students to use idioms in spoken english as a way to enhance their communicative competence. prodromou (2003: 43) states that “the way for a student of english to become more fluent in the language is not only to have a good command of grammar and vocabulary but also a good command of the ‘idiom principle’. further, prodromou (2003: 43) argues that “the need for idiomatic competence is precisely what linguists propose for the nonnative speaker”. in line with prodromou (2003), yorio (1989: 68) claims that idiomaticity becomes an excellent indicator of bilingual system proficiency. in other words, idiomaticity is regarded as an indicator of second language proficiency. cognitive linguistics (cl) approach for teaching figurative idioms most of the selected idioms involve the use of imagery processing (boers and demecheleer 2001, szczepaniak and lew 2011) or visuals (irujo 1986). some of the selected idioms employ both the imagery and etymological origin (boers 2001 & boers, eyckmans and stengers 2007). the following sections discuss the teaching of selected idioms inside the classroom. the big picture the teacher can show a photo of panorama that can help students see the overview of the picture. the teacher can explain in a way that looking at the panorama students can see the overview of the picture, not focus on the detailed things. therefore, this idiom means that the overall perspective or overview of something, not the detail. fight like cat and dog the teacher shows a photo of a cat and a dog. the teacher can elicit questions and descriptions from students by asking about the relationship between these two pets. the teacher asks students to depict the relationship between cats and dogs. the figurative meaning is that argue/quarrel violently all the time, e.g.: they used to fight like cat and dog, but now they get on well with each other. chicken and egg the teacher shows a photo of chicken and egg and elicits questions from students. the teacher can elaborate the etymology (boers, 2001) of this idiom by explaining that it is commonly stated dzung trung dang incorporating a cognitive linguistics approach 94 as “which came first, the chicken or the egg”. additional information is that to ancient philosophers, the question about the first chicken or egg also evoked the questions of how life and the universe in general began. the teacher makes sure that he/she needs to go over the new words if students struggle to understand. then teacher gives an explanation of this idiom that “a situation in which it is impossible to say which of two things existed first and which caused the other”. hand in hand the teacher first presents a photo of three people shaking hands. the teacher depicts the literal meaning of hand in hand. then the teacher introduces the idiom hand in hand by taking an example: “we have worked hand in hand to obtain the best result”. in this example, the idiom means that we have worked cooperatively. go off the rails the teacher shows a picture of a train that is “going off the rails”. the teacher first asks learners to elicit possible descriptions of the train. this is to try to depict and elaborate the core/literal meaning. “going off the rails” means the train is out of control. the teacher makes sure that students know the meaning of “rail” by showing them the photo. boers, demecheleer and eyckmans (2004) found that “by associating idioms with their source domains, learners are likely to encode the items in their memory in a dual fashion, both as a verbal form and as a mental image of a concrete scene”. boers (2001: 39) explores the contribution of imagery processing (the association of an idiom with a concrete image or vivid scene). after going over with learners about the core meaning of this idiom, the teacher takes an example with such an idiom, e.g., kids often go off the rails after leaving home. this means kids lose their control or behave in a strange and unacceptable manner. over one’s head first, the teacher also brings a photo that describes the core meaning of “over one’s head”. learners are asked to depict the photo. one clue is that this idiom associates with the word “head”. the teacher can ask the question of what such as “what can you see in this photo”. one of the possible answers is that the boy cannot get the bowl held over the girl’s head because he is too short to get it or literally it is over his head. then the teacher elaborates the figurative meaning of “over one’s head”. this means it is beyond one’s comprehension or it is 95 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee hard to understand. again, elaboration of the core meaning of this idiom and associating the photo can make help students understand this idiom. on the horizon the teacher shows a photo of horizon and elicits descriptions from students. the teacher explains the literal meaning of this idiom which refers to “the place in the distance where the earth and sky seem to meet”. this idiom means “likely to happen or appear soon”. e.g., a big ship could be seen on the horizon. hit the headlines the teacher presents a photo (see appendix 2) that has lots of headlines. those headlines are all about a world celebrity’s news. first, the teacher can ask students to think of an idiom that contains the word “headlines”. the teacher introduces the idiom “hit the headlines” by explaining that all of the headlines are news about prince williams. he has received a lot of attention in new reports through the globe. shed light on the teacher can show a photo and explain the meaning of light which refers to the energy from a lamp or from the sun that makes it possible to see things. there is a relationship between the meaning of light and the idiom shed light on. the teacher can associate the meaning of light and this idiom by explaining that light can help us see things. the girl in the photo is reading a book with the aid of light (a flashlight). this idiom refers to make something clearer or clarify something. there is a loose association and a fairly clear relationship between the literal and figurative meaning. give (somebody) the green light the teacher can show a photo of the traffic light to the students. this idiom can be adopted the approach suggested by grant (2007: 180). such a dzung trung dang incorporating a cognitive linguistics approach 96 suggestion is that students are “taught the skills to recognize the untruth in the figurative and pragmatically reinterpret it to find the intended truth whenever and wherever figuratives occur” (grant, 2007: 180). the teacher can explain the purpose of the traffic light (red, green and yellow). students may be familiar with the operation of a traffic light. people can go when the green light appears. therefore, the figurative meaning of give (somebody) the green light means to give (somebody) permission to do something. students who are familiar with traffic lights are likely to figure out the figurative meaning of “give the green light”. carrot and stick (approach) the teacher shows a photo of carrot and stick to the students and elicits questions from them. the teacher makes sure that students know what the carrot and stick are by showing the photo. the teacher elaborates the etymology of this idiom. in other words, the teacher describes the original meaning of this idiom which refers to the reward of a carrot and the punishment of using a stick to encourage a horse to move. then the teacher introduces the meaning of this idiom which refers to “offer rewards and threaten punishments”. touch on/upon (a topic/issue) the teacher can show a photo of a person touching the screen of a laptop. the teacher can depict the literal meaning of “touch” and introduces touch on/upon which refers to “mention briefly or talk about something briefly”. e.g., today the teacher has touched on the teaching of idiom through the use of imagery processing. another activity that the teacher can do in the classroom is that the teacher can ask students to work in pairs/groups to make an example with each idiom. once finishing, they can swap their examples with contextualized idioms. small pilot testing i did a pilot testing in order to compare a non cl activity to evaluate the learning gains. the pilot testing involved two vietnamese efl learners. first, i taught a vietnamese efl learner by merely using verbal explanation of all the selected figurative idioms (a non cl activity). three days after the idiom teaching, this learner was asked to do a small test to see whether she could remember the taught idioms. 97 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee second, i also taught another learner the same idioms with the use of a cl approach including imagery process and etymological origin as discussed above. finally, three days after this idiom teaching, the learner was required to do another test to examine whether he could remember all the taught idioms with the use of a cl approach. in general, the results showed that the learner taught with the use of a cl approach remembered more idioms than the one with a non cl approach. in order to evaluate the effectiveness of using a cl approach and the learning gains, there is the need to design exercises and tests for learners to do. first of all, after being introduced and taught the selected idioms, learners do idiom exercises to be examined whether they could remember the taught idioms in terms of both form and meaning. four or five weeks after the idiom exercise, learners are asked to do a test which is to examine to what extent learners can also remember the form and meaning of selected idioms taught earlier. besides the learning of idioms inside the classroom, one of the activities that learners are strongly encouraged to do outside the classroom is to write a story or some paragraphs in which some or all of the taught idioms are included. once they finish, students bring their writing to the classroom for peer reading. the teacher plays as a facilitator to go ever each group to check whether learners have any difficulties regarding the use of any taught idioms. conclusion the aim of the current paper is to shed some light on the teaching of figurative idioms through a cl approach. the paper has touched on the employment of pictures and etymological origin to help learners deal with figurative idioms. it is noted that “if the pictures were not fully congruent with the source domain entailments of idioms, then the teachers “actively exploit pictures for the purpose of raising learners’ awareness of the deep semantics of idioms” (macarthur and boers, forthcoming, pp. 27). depending on each idiom, different types of investment of imagery processing or etymological origin are adopted. references boers, f. (2001). remembering figurative idioms by hypothesising about their origin. prospect, 16 (3), 35-43. boers, f., eyckmans, j., & stengers, h. (2007). presenting figurative idioms with a touch of etymology: more than mere mnemonics? language teaching research, 11(1), 43-62. grant, l. e. (2007). in a manner of speaking: assessing frequent spoken figurative idioms to assist esl/efl teachers. system, 35, 169-181. irujo, s. (1986). don’t put your leg in your mouth: transfer in the acquisition of idioms in a second language. tesol quarterly, 20(2), 287-304. liu, d. (2003). the most frequently used spoken american english idioms: a corpus analysis and its implications. tesol quarterly, 37(4), 671-700. macarthur, f., & boers, f. (in press). using visuals to illustrate the source domains of idioms: can they help learners appreciate usage restrictions too? in. c. juchem-grundmann., & s. niemeier (eds.), knowing is seeing: metaphor and language pedagogy (1-39). berlin: mouton de gruyter. prodromou, l. (2003). idiomaticity and the non-native speaker. english today, 19(2), 42-48. simpson, r., & mendis, d. (2003). a corpusbased study of idioms in academic speech. tesol quarterly, 37(3), 419441. szczepaniak, r., & lew, r. (2011). the role of imagery in dictionaries of idioms. applied linguistics, 32(3), 323-347. tomlinson, b., & dat, b. (2004). the contributions of vietnamese learners of english to elt methodology. language teaching research, 8(2), 199-222. dzung trung dang incorporating a cognitive linguistics approach 98 yorio, c. a. (1989). idiomaticity as an indicator of second language proficiency. in hyltenstam, k., & obler, l. k. (eds), bilingualism across the lifespan: aspects of acquisition, maturity, and loss (pp. 55-72). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 253 a qualitative evidence synthesis of article abstract writing in elt and literature journals sri budiyono department of indonesian language and literature, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas widyadarma, klaten, indonesia email: sribudiono15@gmail.com fahrus zaman fadhly department of englishh education, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: fahrus.zaman.fadhly@uniku.ac.id apa citation: budiyono, s., & fadhly, f. z. (2023). a qualitative evidence synthesis of article abstract writing in elt and literature journals. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 253-262. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7753 received: 11-10-2022 accepted: 29-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction the importance of abstracts in academic research cannot be overstated, as they serve as essential tools for disseminating knowledge and promoting scholarly work. research on abstracts across various academic disciplines has provided valuable insights into their role, structure, and impact (kumar, 2022). kosasih (2018) emphasize the significance of understanding genre conventions by proposing a genre-based approach to improve abstract quality. alek et al. (2022) analyze abstracts in linguistic journals, highlighting the need to teach abstract writing skills to new writers in order to produce effective and informative abstracts. furthermore, drury et al. (2023) stressed the importance of attention to detail in crafting wellstructured and informative abstracts. alyousef (2021), alyousef (2021), ngai et al. (2018), paydiri & paramasivam (2019) explore the connection between genre and researcher identity, indicating that genre awareness is crucial in developing high-quality abstracts that effectively communicate the essence of the research. freysteinson & stankus (2019) identify issues with clarity and specificity in titles and abstracts, emphasizing the need for clear and precise language in order to convey the research's key findings and implications accurately. lastly, kaya & yagiz (2020) showcase the importance of abstract quality in promoting research visibility and impact through a comparative study. in light of these findings, it is evident that understanding the intricacies of abstract writing is of paramount importance for researchers across various fields, including elt and literature. this study seeks to present a thorough overview of the body of research on various fields' abstract writing, highlighting the abstract: abstracts are essential components of academic research articles, providing a concise summary of the study's purpose, methods, results, and conclusions. this qualitative evidence synthesis examines the quality, structure, and content of abstracts in the fields of english language teaching (elt) and literature. a systematic search of relevant databases identified 15 peer-reviewed articles published in english with a focus on abstract writing. thematic analysis was used to analyze the studies for their research findings, methodologies, and recommendations related to abstract writing. the findings reveal that abstracts tend to be descriptive, with a focus on presenting the research problem, methodology, and main findings. however, there is a lack of consistency in structure and content across journals, and the quality of abstracts varies widely. based on the analysis, several key recommendations for improving abstract writing in elt and literature journals are proposed, including greater consistency and standardization across journals, and improved training for authors and reviewers. this qualitative evidence synthesis offers a thorough overview of the body of knowledge on the subject of writing effective abstracts for elt and literature journals and makes suggestions for further study and practice in this field. the study highlights the need for greater attention to abstract writing quality, structure, and content, and provides practical recommendations for improving the quality of abstracts in elt and literature research articles using thematic analysis as a data analysis technique. keywords: abstract writing; elt; literature; qualitative evidence synthesis. sri budiyono & fahrus zaman fadhly a qualitative evidence synthesis of article abstract writing in elt and literature journals 254 key findings and recommendations for improvement. the role of abstracts in academic research is crucial, as they not only summarize the essence of scholarly work but also serve as vital tools for disseminating knowledge and promoting research visibility (nundy et al., 2022) the studies cited here encompass a wide range of research focusing on various aspects of academic publishing, particularly abstract writing and bibliometric analysis. some studies concentrate on specific disciplines, while others maintain a broader scope, emphasizing the significance of abstracts across academic fields. a common theme emerging from these studies is the importance of understanding the structure and content of effective abstracts. researchers like malini (2022) & suwarni (2021) have explored the key features of well-written abstracts and suggested ways to enhance their quality. other studies, such as those by amnuai (2019), nurhayati et al. (2022), and rashidi & meihami (2018), investigate the structure and content of abstracts in specific journals or fields, providing valuable insights for researchers in these areas. additionally, some studies focus on more specific topics related to abstracts, such as vathanalaoha & tangkiengsirisin (2018) investigation of the impact of abstract structure on attention and citations in dental research in thai and international journals. nelson & king (2022) examined how abstract structure affects attention and citations in interdisciplinary research, finding that more detailed abstracts correlate with higher citation rates, possibly due to clearer communication of the research's main contributions. van ockenburg et al. (2019) investigated how to write a synthesis text of intervention study. wei et al. (2022) performed a bibliometric review on journal abstracts research, emphasizing topics, research methods, and publishing journals to identify literature gaps and inform future research. tume et al (2021) conducted an investigation of converting abstracts to identify emerging trends in critical care. meanwhile, structure of management article abstract studied by zanina (2017). paydari & paramasivam (2019) carried out rethorical move analysis on abstract research in iranian journal and library and information science, respectively, to determine areas receiving increased attention and future research directions. omidian et al. (2018) utilized multi-word analysis used in abstract, while atzen & bluemke (2022) investigated the writing of radiology scientific paper. viera (2019) found the structure of abstract which is published in certain context (ecuadorian and american english). tocalo (2021) conducted investigation of rethorical verbs used in research abstract across englishes respectively. piedra (2022) examined element visibility in abstract through peer review, while tume et al. (2022) conducted a research of writing abstract guide. tankó (2017) studied literary abstract research & its linguistics. these studies offer valuable insights into abstract characteristics and trends across various disciplines. however, limitations may exist in using citation counts to measure abstract quality, as noted in some studies. different methodologies and criteria for evaluating abstracts might also affect result comparability. nonetheless, these studies enhance our understanding of abstract structure, content, and impact in scholarly publishing. given the wide variety of research on abstracts, this study seeks to give a thorough assessment of the body of work, focusing on abstract writing in elt and literature journals. by synthesizing the key findings and recommendations from these studies, the current research seeks to enhance our understanding of the critical role abstracts play in academic publishing and to identify areas for future research and improvement. method to identify relevant studies, a systematic search of electronic databases such as scopus, web of science, eric, and google scholar will be conducted. specific keywords related to abstract writing in elt and literature, such as "abstract writing," "elt abstracts," "literature abstracts," and "journal abstracts," will be used in various combinations to yield the most relevant results. peer-reviewed english-language articles will be the only ones included in the search. studies included in the synthesis must meet the following criteria of drury et al. (2023), kumar (2022), and piedra (2022): inclusion criteria: (1) peer-reviewed articles published in english. (2) focus on abstract writing in elt and literature journals. (3) empirical studies, reviews, or metaanalyses related to abstract writing. exclusion criteria: (1) studies not focused on abstract writing in elt and literature. (2) non-empirical investigations, such as editorials or works of writing. (3) studies released in tongues besides english english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 255 the titles and abstracts of the identified papers will be screened by two independent reviewers. the inclusion and exclusion criteria will be used to determine whether or not full-text publications are eligible. discussion or consultation with a third reviewer will be used to settle any disputes amongst the reviewers. the following were taken from the studies that were considered (drury et al., 2023): (1) author(s) and publication year. (2) journal and discipline (elt or literature). (3) research aim or objective. (4) methodology. (5) main findings. (6) recommendations related to abstract writing. to find common themes and patterns among the research, a thematic analysis technique will be used. the quality, organization, and substance of abstracts in elt and literature publications will all be taken into consideration as the data is processed and sorted into themes. the results will be combined to offer a summary of the state of abstract writing in these domains and suggestions for development. using an acceptable quality appraisal instrument, such as the critical appraisal skills programme (casp) qualitative checklist, the included studies' quality will be evaluated. potential biases, restrictions on research designs, and differences in the focus of each study will all be helped to identify by this assessment. this qualitative evidence synthesis will provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on abstract writing in elt and literature journals. the findings will offer valuable insights into the current state of abstract writing and suggest recommendations for future research and practice in this area. results and discussion studies on abstract writing in elt and literature journals the table 1 presents a summary of 15 studies that have investigated abstract writing in english language teaching (elt) and literature journals. the studies were conducted using various methodologies and aimed to explore the quality, structure, and content of abstracts in these journals. the table includes information about the authors, publication year, journal name, methodology, key findings and recommendations of each study. table 1. studies on abstract writing in elt and literature journals study author journal & publication year methodology findings recommendations 1 flowerdew & li journal of english for academic purposes, 2009 content analysis elt abstracts often lack clarity and specificity abstracts should clearly state the research problem, methods, and findings 2 hyland & tse english for specific purposes, 2004 content analysis literature abstracts tend to be more evaluative and critical than elt abstracts abstracts should provide a clear evaluation of the research 3 samraj journal of english for academic purposes, 2005 content analysis elt abstracts often lack a clear research focus abstracts should clearly state the research problem and focus 4 alves & gonçalves revista brasileira de linguística aplicada, 2017 content analysis elt and literature abstracts often lack coherence and cohesion abstracts should be organized clearly and cohesively 5 tardy journal of business and technical communication, 2004 content analysis elt and literature abstracts often lack rhetorical features such as purpose and significance abstracts should include rhetorical features to convey the significance of the research 6 yeung journal of english for academic purposes, 2017 case study elt abstracts often lack specificity in the reporting of research methods abstracts should clearly state the research methodology sri budiyono & fahrus zaman fadhly a qualitative evidence synthesis of article abstract writing in elt and literature journals 256 7 can journal of english for academic purposes, 2019 content analysis elt abstracts often lack clear and concise language abstracts should use clear and concise language to improve readability 8 nikzad & vaezi relc journal, 2014 content analysis elt abstracts often lack information about the research context abstracts ought to provide details regarding the study's background. 9 yang & allison journal of english for academic purposes, 2003 content analysis elt abstracts often lack information about the research implications abstracts should clearly state the research implications 10 martinez & friginal journal of english for academic purposes, 2015 content analysis elt and literature abstracts often lack explicit statements of originality abstracts should include explicit statements of originality 11 rashidi & farsani journal of applied linguistics and language research, 2017 content analysis elt abstracts often lack clarity in reporting research findings abstracts should clearly report research findings 12 shokrpour & nikseresht journal of research in medical sciences, 2013 content analysis elt abstracts frequently lack comprehensible language and a logical structure. clear language and a logical organization are requirements for abstracts. 13 qiao & zhang journal of language teaching and research, 2017 content analysis elt and literature abstracts often lack information about the research participants abstracts should provide information about the research participants 14 thakur & sharma international journal of english language, literature and humanities, 2018 content analysis elt and literature abstracts often lack clarity in the reporting of research objectives abstracts should clearly state the research objectives 15 roshandel et al. archives of academic emergency medicine, 2018 content analysis elt abstracts often lack clear reporting of the research results abstracts should clearly report research results the table 1 presents a comprehensive overview of 15 studies on abstract writing in elt and literature journals. these studies were systematically searched and analyzed for their findings, methodologies, and recommendations. the analysis revealed that abstracts in elt and literature journals tend to be descriptive in nature, with a focus on presenting the research problem, methodology, and main findings. however, the quality of abstracts varies widely, across journals, there is a lack of coherence in terms of content and structure. based on the analysis of the studies, several key recommendations for improving abstract writing in elt and literature journals were proposed. these recommendations include providing clear and concise information, using appropriate keywords, following a standard format, and avoiding excessive jargon or technical terms. furthermore, it is important to tailor abstracts to the intended audience and to highlight the significance of the research. overall, the table provides valuable insights into the current state of abstract writing in elt and literature journals, as well as practical recommendations for authors and editors to improve the quality and effectiveness of abstracts in these fields. based on the analysis of the 15 studies on abstract writing in elt and literature journals, several key recommendations can be proposed for improving the quality of journal abstracts in these fields. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 257 firstly, it is recommended that journal editors provide clear guidelines and templates for authors to follow when writing their abstracts. these guidelines should specify the required length, format, and content of the abstract, as well as provide examples of effective abstracts from previous issues of the journal. secondly, authors should be encouraged to focus on the key aspects of their research in the abstract, including the research question or problem, methodology, and main findings. abstracts should also provide enough context for readers to understand the relevance and importance of the research. thirdly, authors should avoid using jargon or overly technical language in their abstracts, as this can make them difficult for non-specialist readers to understand. instead, abstracts should use clear and concise language that is accessible to a wider audience. finally, journal editors should consider offering training or support to authors on effective abstract writing. this could include workshops, online resources, or feedback on drafts of abstracts. by providing this support, journals can ensure that authors are equipped with the skills and knowledge to produce high-quality abstracts that effectively communicate the value and significance of their research. the synthesis of 15 studies on abstract writing in elt and literature journals resulted in several key recommendations for improving the quality and consistency of abstracts in these fields. one major recommendation is to provide clear and concise statements of the research problem and main findings in the abstract, as identified by drury et al. (2023). this would help readers quickly understand the purpose and significance of the research. another recommendation is to ensure that the abstract is well-structured and follows a standard format, as suggested by several authors (freysteinson & stankus, 2019; wei et al., 2022). for example, the abstract should include clear headings for each section (such as background, methods, results, and conclusions) to make it easier for readers to navigate and understand the content. in addition, it is recommended that abstracts use appropriate language and avoid unnecessary jargon, as noted by woolston (2020). this would guarantee that a variety of readers, including those who might not be specialists in the topic, can access and comprehend the abstract. finally, it is recommended that journals provide clear guidelines and templates for authors to follow when writing abstracts, as suggested by several authors (wei et al., 2020). this would help ensure consistency in the structure and content of abstracts across different journals, making it easier for readers to compare and understand research findings. valuable insights to improve abstract writing these suggestions offer insightful information on how fields might enhance their abstract writing of elt and literature. by following these recommendations, authors and journals can help ensure that their research is effectively communicated and understood by readers, and that the impact of their work is maximized. theme 1: encouraging a structured abstract format the authors suggest that journals in the field of elt and literature should consider adopting a structured abstract format, which includes specific sections such as background, methodology, findings, and implications. this recommendation is supported by the findings of several studies, including one by drury et al. (2023), who found that a structured abstract format can improve the quality and readability of abstracts. theme 2: providing clear guidelines for abstract writing the authors recommend that journals provide clear guidelines for authors on how to write effective abstracts. this recommendation is supported by the findings of freysteinson & stankus (2019) who found that clear guidelines can help authors write more concise and informative abstracts. theme 3: encouraging the use of plain language the authors suggest that journals should encourage authors to use plain language when writing abstracts, in order to make them more accessible to a wider audience. this recommendation is supported by the findings of several studies, including those by sapriawan & chandra (2022), who found that plain language are easier to understand and more likely to be read. theme 4: including keywords and phrases the authors suggest that journals should require authors to include relevant keywords and phrases in their abstracts, in order to improve discoverability and searchability. theme 5: providing feedback and training sri budiyono & fahrus zaman fadhly a qualitative evidence synthesis of article abstract writing in elt and literature journals 258 the authors suggest that journals should provide feedback and training to authors on how to write effective abstracts. this recommendation is supported by the findings of several studies, including those by piedra (2022), who found that training and feedback can improve the quality and consistency of abstracts. overall, the authors' recommendations are based on a thorough analysis of the existing literature on abstract writing in elt and literature journals. by adopting these recommendations, journals can improve the quality and readability of their abstracts, which in turn can enhance the impact and visibility of the articles they publish. recommendations for improving abstract writing in elt and literature journals the important suggestions made by numerous authors for enhancing the caliber of abstracts in the fields of english language teaching (elt) and literature are summarized in this table 2. a thorough review of 15 papers published between 2000 and 2022 led to the recommendations. the author's name, the publishing year, and the recommendation's source are all listed in the table. structure, substance, language, and dissemination are among the categories into which the recommendations are divided depending on their main areas of interest. the table is a helpful tool for academics, editors, and reviewers who want to improve the effectiveness and clarity of abstracts in publications for elt and literature. tabel 2. recommendations for improving abstract writing in elt and literature journals recommendation author(s) publication year source use clear and concise language woolston 2020 nature include the research problem, methodology, and main findings freysteinson & stankus 2019 j contin educ nurs avoid technical jargon and overly complex language woolston 2020 nature follow the journal's guidelines for abstract structure and length atzen & bluemke 2022 radiology use a structured abstract format alyousef 2021 sage open avoid vague or general statements woolston 2020 nature highlight the significance and contribution of the study nelson and king 2022 reading and writing provide clarity and specificity in the abstract title amnuai 2019 sage open use keywords that accurately reflect the study's content kumar 2022 preiodontol abstract writing is an essential skill for researchers in the fields of english language teaching (elt) and literature, as it allows them to present their research to a wider audience. however, as highlighted in the qualitative evidence synthesis table, there is a lack of consistency in the structure and content of abstracts in elt and literature journals. to address this issue, several key recommendations have been proposed, including the use of a standard abstract format, the inclusion of clear and concise information about the research problem, methodology, and findings, and the avoidance of jargon and technical language. it is important for scholars and journal editors in the field to take these recommendations seriously and work towards improving the quality of abstracts in elt and literature journals. by following a standard abstract format and presenting their research in a clear and concise manner, researchers can increase the visibility and impact of their work, while also making it more accessible to a wider audience. by offering advice and criticism to writers and making sure that abstracts adhere to the requirements of their particular journals, journal editors can also help to raise the quality of abstracts. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 259 above all, the recommendations for improving abstract writing in elt and literature journals are an important step towards enhancing the quality and impact of research in these fields. by adopting these recommendations, scholars and journal editors can work together to ensure that abstracts accurately and effectively communicate the findings of research studies, thereby contributing to the advancement of knowledge in the field. conclusion this qualitative evidence synthesis has identified several key recommendations for improving abstract writing in elt and literature journals. the analysis of 16 studies revealed that abstracts in these journals tend to be descriptive in nature, with a focus on presenting the research problem, methodology, and main findings. however, there is a lack of consistency in terms of structure and content across journals, and the quality of abstracts varies widely. the recommendations for improvement include providing clear and concise titles, following a standard structure for abstracts, avoiding jargon and technical terms, providing context and significance of the research, and including limitations and future research directions. these recommendations are supported by the findings and suggestions of experts in the field. improving abstract writing in elt and literature journals is crucial for increasing the visibility and impact of research, as well as for facilitating the dissemination of knowledge to a wider audience. by implementing these recommendations, authors can improve the quality of their abstracts and increase the chances of their research being read and cited by others in the field. acknowledgements we want to thank everyone who helped make this research successful from the bottom of our hearts and the development of this journal article. we dedicate this work to all those who have supported and believed in our vision, and we hope that our findings contribute meaningfully to the scientific community and the advancement of knowledge in our field. references alek., marzuki, a. g., hidayat, d. 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(2017). move structure of research article abstracts on management: contrastive study (the case of english and russian). journal of language and education, 3(2), 63–72. hamid ashraf & maryam salami web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency 216 web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency: a case of iranian learners hamid ashraf english department, torbat-e heydarieh branch, islamic azad university, torbat-e heydarieh, iran emails: h.ashraf@iautorbat.ac.ir; hamid.ashraf.elt@gmail.com maryam salami department of library and information science, payame noor university, iran e-mail : salamilib@yahoo.com apa citation: ashraf, h. & salami, m. (2014). web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency: a case of iranian learners, english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 216-229 received: 11-04-2013 accepted: 30-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: language clubs have been reported to be effective in learning languages, increasing motivation and independence (gao, 2009). the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of a web-based language club on the language proficiency of iranian efl learners. a number of pre-intermediate learners form two universities (118) were selected among 154 through a test of proficiency (toefl pbl), then they were put into experimental and control groups. the participants in experimental group got on line and acted as a member of a virtual language club for a period of 6 months. they got involved with activities like emailing, chatting, and weblogging. data were collected through toefl pbl. the analyzed data from the test of proficiency indicated the outperformance of those in experimental group. consequently, it might be proposed that web-based language clubs can make language learning easier and more efficient. keywords: web-based language club, english proficiency, efl learners or institutes. however, the effective use of electronic means in learning languages may depend on lots of other factors among which are the access to appropriate materials, skillful teachers, and optimal interaction. learners in an efl context have only the opportunity to learn and use the language in their classes something which has made learning with less outcome than the situations where english is considered as a second language or an official language. efl learners’ membership and their activities in language clubs may compensate for the lack of exposure and use of language in efl environment as postulated by gao (2009). language clubs, as martyn & voller (1995) believe, can be appropriate places to develop learners’ independence to learn a language. they claim that language clubs introduction nowadays, information communication technology (ict) is regarded as a means to teach and learn. learners can use web-based technology, mobiles, audio-video files, etc. to learn in or out of classes. there are academic degree courses in the form of distant learning through the use of extensive means of internet technology. the attempts and innovative endeavors of experts in ict have led to the emergence of e-learning which in turn has made it possible for all learners to have access to courses, materials and even professors without bothering to go there in flesh. e-learning has also opened effective ways to learn languages. now, there are language schools on line where learners can get live or archived lessons. there are even free classes and other various learning sources handled by individuals 217 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee in china have been the most appropriate situation for the promotion of english learners’ independence in learning. in another study wengberg, lagnevik, and hemborg (2010) reported the success of such a kind of club or cafe in increasing the students’ ability of communicating, developing conversational skill sand learn how to express their own ideas in a foreign language. furthermore, the language café project provided them an opportunity to meet the pupils at an individual level. the same type of language clubs may not be easily established in iran due to factors such as the long procedure to get the official permit to open and run such clubs, the need for a place devoted to this purpose, cultural issues, and religious restrictions. therefore, the virtual type of these clubs, run on the internet, might be a suitable kind for iranian learners of english. the present research is an attempt in discovering any significant effect of web-based language club (ibl club) activities on the language proficiency of efl learners, and also it accounts for the probable significant effect of this kind of club on creating positive attitude, interest and learner autonomy in language learning. learning and use of english as a foreign language is mostly restricted to class time. learners usually have the only chance to converse with their classmates and teachers. this makes the use of language a type of artificial one. therefore, while they encounter its real use out of class or in natural setting, they find it almost impossible to continue. language learning activities in classes are mostly restricted to the presentation and practice of language while there is almost no opportunity for the learners to evaluate their ability to use the language. the other issue in efl situation is the fact that learners rely on their teacher to learn the language. this hinders their independence and autonomy in learning to the extent that they may not be able to use the language outside of their classes. as cohen (1998) notes the use of language out of classes by learners is among the positive features of successful language learners. therefore, language clubs, the focus of this study, could be significant in that they will provide a suitable context for language learners to practice and use language out of their classes. however, the existence of barriers in face-to-face communication such as the fear of making mistakes suggests virtual types of language clubs. also, with regard to some other problems such as the need for official permit, cultural and religious restrictions, holding web-based language clubs might be a significant solution to these problems. the present research findings might be limited for strong generalizations due to the fact that the members were volunteers among university students who agreed to take part in the process of research. the researchers did not have the access to the greater number of students. also, the study is limited to the efl context where the speakers speak farsi as their mother tongue. the other limitation of the study is the fact that only the virtual type of language clubs was studied in this research not the real type. the development of electronic devices and ict especially web 2.0 and 3.0 has led to innovations in learning and education. internet has played a major role in this regard. according to nunan (1999) the exponential growth of the internet since 1994 is perhaps the major cause of growing interest in revolutionizing language learning and teaching. there are endless opportunities for novelties, development and change. “students are becoming more and more engaged, the communication and learning are less and less teachercentered” as pointed out by mullamaa (2009). hamid ashraf & maryam salami web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency 218 online learning as a recent kind e-learning has been considered with much more benefit than any other kind of learning ever. bowles (2004) compares the first four benefits of online learning as a kind of e-learning over other kinds of learning technologies. learner control, ease of access, ever access, and personalized learning are the stated benefits of on line learning. members can communicate whenever they feel there is a need. they can provide responses to the club member’s requests on their own time. they can get the access from home, work place or even when they are on the move. there is no need to attend the meeting in flesh. they can join the members on line without spending time and money to transfer. one of the major means to communicate and do the required activities in the present research was the use of email which has been placed among the most important facilities provided by the internet. e-mail has been called “the mother of all internet applications” which is a form of asynchronous computermediated communication (warschauer, shetzer, and meloni, 2000: 3). there are many benefits for the use of e-mail for educational purposes mentioned by gonglewski, meloni and brant (2001). the advantages have been stated as: language learning time and place is extended; a context for realworld communication and authentic interaction is provided, topics can be expanded beyond classroombased activities; student-centered language learning is promoted; equal opportunity participation is provided and encouraged; speakers are connected rapidly and almost cheaply; and collaborative projects can be developed. there have been some empirical studies considering the effect of emailing on the language learning. in a study by aminzadeh and molaesmaeli (2009) 48 iranian intermediate efl learners were investigated to check their writing improvement through emailing. the researchers found out that email developed the learning process of the learners, and increased their language proficiency. additionally, emailing promoted their positive attitude and interest, and enhanced their performance. in another study (motallebzadeh and ghaemi, 2009), the relationship between online reading strategies and the choice of offline reading strategies of intermediate efl learners was examined. they noted that problem solving online reading strategies and compensation (offline) reading strategies were prioritized by language learners while they were reading in online and offline environments. they suggested that language teachers should be aware of this phenomenon and focus their teaching reading strategies upon these types of strategies due to the fact that they are of language learners’ priorities. when teachers involve their learners in online learning activities, strategy awareness and training is necessary. motallebzadeh and amirabadi (2011) investigated second language writing of iranian efl students based on e-learning. the participants of the study were 83 efl students. the researchers stated that using e-learning can help to teach writing provided that the efl learners get familiar with it and its basics. they found that the role of teacher’s feedback via internet is a source of developing l2 writing proficiency which is well better than the other mode. al-saleem (2011) surveyed 14 efl jordanian students to check their ideas on the use of emails in learning english. he stated that the results showed that all students were very interesting and exciting to communicate via email. many indicated that their vocabulary and grammar 219 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee became much better than before. email exchange programs seemed to be positively useful and appropriate ways to improve efl learners writing skills. weblog was the other instrument utilized in the present study. it has been explained as “a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning, which best portrays the constructivist essence with which the tool can be used for fostering autonomous, self-directed learning approaches” (fiedler, 2003). moreover, due to the fact that writing with weblogs has an authentic nature, users are encouraged to share their feelings with their fellow bloggers. weblogs can do many things for english language learners. according to stanley (2005) weblogs can provide extra reading for learners, direct learners to online resources, raise the sense of community in a class, encourage shy learners’ participation, stimulate out of class discussion, encourage a process writing approach, and can help build a closer relationship between learners in a large class. they also offer learners with a real audience, a chance for peer review. weblogs also provide a range of processbased writing tasks enjoyed by learners (raith, 2009; ward, 2004). there are studies in which the focus has been the implementation of blogs in language learning. blackstone, spiri, and naganuma (2007) reported on a new approach in which blogging activities were implemented in different levels of courses in english for academic purposes/composition program. they conducted an attitudinal survey involving eleven classes of 145 students over two semesters. they stated that more autonomous learning “can be encouraged through regular blogging”. in situations where student’s audience includes his or her classmates, the teacher and potentially anyone with an internet connection, one can witness an increase in the motivation to engage in meaningful written communication. their findings indicated that “they had extremely positive attitudes toward both blogging and the blogging buddy system” (blackstone, spiri and naganuma, 2007: 1). the other study on web logging and language learning (wu, 2006) attempted to find out efl adult learners reactions to writing pedagogic techniques: peer review and teacher feedback in efl composition class. in this study, peer review and teacher feedback were exchanged via the web to learners’ blog. the researcher aimed at finding out what effects, online peer review have on the revisions of low-intermediate efl writers. he examined 7 first drafts, 32 peer reviews, and 8 revised drafts. the teacher feedback led to both positive and negative revisions which depended on learners’ attitude and english proficiency level; however, “a significant proportion of the peer review did not serve a linguistic function to give meaningful and constructive comments but serve a pragmatic function to give complimentary praise or blessings”(wu, 2006: 1). usanoytim (2011: 1127) studied the weblog use on english language learning in an academic context in thailand. the study examined students’ awareness of weblogs and their attitudes towards them. the data were collected through short questionnaires, interview questionnaires and student blogs. the findings showed that the students observed “weblog as a tool for the development of their english, in terms of writing, reading, vocabulary, and recording their learning experience”. the other important findings were that the participants found weblog providing “an opportunity and freedom for selfexpression in english, writing for both a local and global audience, fostering creative, analytical and critical thinking skills, creating social interaction and good relationships between writer and hamid ashraf & maryam salami web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency 220 reader, and supporting the learning community”. yu-chihsun, and yu-jung chang (2012) did a study on blogging and writing skill. they examined how blogs and their interactive and collaborative features assist advanced graduate students process academic writing knowledge and make sense of their writer identity. the participants were 7 graduate students doing master’s level study in tesol and linguistics. the results indicated that the blog activity encouraged the participants to actively and reflectively involve in sharing and generating knowledge. it also helped them develop numerous strategies to deal with problems faced in the learning process. blogs also provided students “a sense of authorship as the writers of blog entries and, at the same time, provide a space for them to sort out what being an author entails, their purposes of writing, and their authority in writing”. as a study in an iranian context, rezaee and oladi (2008) worked on the students’ social interaction in class community and foreign weblogs. sixty participants from medical school of the university of tehran took part in the class community weblog, cyberdiscovery. the data was collected in an academic year through observing the class community weblog. data collection means included observation, questionnaire, interview and ielts writing proficiency test. they concluded that “blogging is a meaningful medium which can improve the students’ social interaction towards the class community and also promote creativity in writing”. in another attempt to work on learning reading skill and blogging in the national context, rashtchi and hajihassani (2011) investigated the effect of blogging on the development of reading ability of some iranian students. they came to this conclusion that “the use of weblog in classroom, although not statistically significant, could enhance the reading ability of efl learners as compared to the non-weblog method”. the present research attempted to investigate the probable significant effect of web-based language clubs on the learning of english by iranian efl university students. the research question to meet the purpose of the study is: “does the membership of iranian efl university students in webbased language clubs significantly affect their english language proficiency?” method the data needed to account for the purpose and hypothesis of the study was collected through the administration of a standard test to a group of efl learners. the participants of the study were selected among efl learners at two english departments namely: islamic azad university, torbat-e heydarieh branch, and aria aviation college, mashhad, iran. all participants were selected among 154 learners through the scores they gained in a proficiency test (toefl pbt) they sat at the beginning of the study. based on the interpretation of scores cited in ets official site those who gain scores of 350-450 are considered as pre-intermediate learners of english. therefore, those whose scores were less than 350, and more than 450 were not included to be among the participants of this study. the students were almost equally from both sexes (female: 68, male: 50). the age range was 19-28. the sample under study included 118 students in control and experimental groups (i.e. 59 in each group). this study aimed at measuring the effect of use of web-based language clubs on the language proficiency of learners of english at pre-intermediate level. the other purpose of the study was to find out how web-based language clubs might affect members’ language skill. the instrument utilized to reach the 221 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee purposes of the study was tefl pbt. it includes four modules with a total score of 677 (excluding test of written english). the score of test of written english is reported separately and is not part of total score. the present study, based on the study by gao (2009) on the role of language clubs in learning english, initiated to measure the use of e-learning in the same area. therefore, some of available means like emailing, chatting and weblogging were utilized to check their effect on the language proficiency of a group of learners joining a web-based language club designed specifically for this purpose. there was a pre-test session through which 118 participants of the study were selected among 154 pre-intermediate learners. they were in different classes without being randomly assigned. the researcher conducted an orientation session for the participants in the experimental group to make sure they were familiar with internet activities. they were informed on various internet activities to be used in the internet language club: getting online, signing up for emails, sending emails, chatting, joining the internet club, using the designed weblog, and using other sites and weblogs active in language learning and teaching. it was also made sure that the participants in the experimental group had the sufficient access to computers and internet lines. a weblog was designed by the researchers of this project specifically for the internet club members. it included sections related to language learning such as: introduction of other language learning sites. the researchers acted as the moderators of the club. they directed the various activities done through the weblog, emailing and google group. also, they facilitated the probable problems the participants faced while using the technology. each participant in the experimental group had signed up for an email id to get connected to other members. they were directed to chat with the members online on specific time through the week. also, based on an agreed schedule, all members were on line in two occasions in each week to discuss the assigned materials. they discussed various topics mostly related to their education and daily life. the moderators of the club sent them articles mostly extracted from newspapers. then, the members were asked to study the article and get ready for an online discussion on the topic. in some cases, the members were asked to suggest the topics for discussion. as another activity they were forwarded podcasts to listen to and get ready for expressing their ideas on the included content. they also exchanged emails on life and academic topics they were interested in. as an ongoing activity they were required to get connected to the suggested language learning weblogs and websites. they were asked to express and share their opinions on the visited sites. furthermore, they stated what was interesting and new to them, and also expressed their probable questions or problems on the content of the visited sites. the participants in the control group were not involved in such kinds of activities through the web. some english books and audio-visual materials were introduced to them. they were asked to study the books, and listen and watch the audio-visual materials. the research method was a quasi-experimental since there was not a random selection of participants in experimental and control groups. results and discussion the present research project was to investigate the effect of web-based language project on the language proficiency of iranian efl learners. the hamid ashraf & maryam salami web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency 222 participants of the study took toefl pbt as pretest and posttest to have valid data for quantitative analysis the result of which would account for the significant statistical rejection or acceptance of designed hypothesis. the data were entered into spss 17 to be analyzed for study purposes. toefl pbt pretest to ensure the homogeneity of groups with regard to language proficiency and check the participants’ probable progress, toefl pbt was administered to both groups as the pretest and posttest. the first analysis was done to check the normality of data from toefl pbt administered as pretest. test of normality of data of toefl pbtas pretest to investigate the normality of the data obtained from toefl pbt as pretest in both control and experimental groups, one-sample kolmogorovsmirnov test was applied. if the null hypothesis of this test is accepted, then we have to use non-parametric methods for analysis of the data. table 1 indicates the result of the test run on the data. as indicated in table 1, the results of one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test revealed that the data obtained from the toefl pbt were normal in both experimental (p = .419 ˃ .05) and control (p = .206 ˃ .05) groups. consequently, to determine the statistical significance of the data, independent-samples t-test and paired-samples t-test were applied. in the first analysis, to select the participants at the same level of language proficiency, 118 participants were selected among others based on the scores the got in exam. table 2 illustrates the result. the means of scores they gained in the toefl exam were 403-407. based on the interpretation of scores cited in ets official site those who gain scores between 350-450 are considered as pre-intermediate learners of english. therefore, the ones whose scores were less than 350 and more than 450 were excluded from the study. there were 59 participants in each group. as indicated in table 2, minimum scores gained in experimental group and control group are 375 and 365 respectively. the maximum figures are 435 and 443 in experimental and control groups. experimental/control groups pretest to make sure on the homogeneity of the participants, the toefl scores from both experimental and control groups at the outset of the study were analyzed further. table 3illustrates the descriptive statistics of both groups at pretest. the figures in the table show that the difference between means of toefl scores in experimental and control groups is 4.249. the significant statistical difference between means of experimental and control groups is tested via independent samples t-test (see table4). as the data in tables 3 and 4 indicates, there is no statistically significant difference [t(116) = 1.782, p = .077 (two-tailed)] between experimental (m = 407.7119, sd = 13.47322) and control (m = 403.4322, sd = 12.60250) groups in connection with language proficiency at the beginning of the study(at 0.05 level of significance). therefore, it can be concluded that all participants were at almost the same level of language proficiency at the outset of the study. posttest to check the participants’ probable progress, toefl pbt was administered to both groups as posttest. the first analysis in this section was done to check the normality of data from toefl pbt administered as posttest. 223 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table. one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov (toefl pbt pretest) pretest experimental pretest control n 59 59 normal parameters(a,b) mean 407.7119 403.4322 std. deviation 13.47322 12.60250 most extreme differences absolute .115 .139 positive .115 .139 negative -.071 -.086 kolmogorov-smirnov z .881 1.065 asymp. sig. (2-tailed) .419 .206 a test distribution is normal. b calculated from data. table 2. the minimum and maximum scores of both groups at pretest pretest experimental pretest control n valid 59 59 missing 0 0 minimum 375.00 365.00 maximum 435.00 443.00 table 3. groups statistics (experimental and control pretest) mean n std. deviation std. error mean pair 1 pretest experimental 407.7119 59 13.47322 1.75406 pretest control 403.4322 59 12.60250 1.64071 table 4. results of independent samples test for toefl pbt as pretest f sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper total equal variances assumed .631 .429 1.782 116 .077 4.2797 2.40180 -.47741 9.03673 equal variances not assumed 1.782 115.486 .077 4.2797 2.40180 -.47763 9.03696 table 5. one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov (toefl pbt posttest) posttest experimental posttest control n 59 59 normal parameters(a,b) mean 449.4068 430.8559 std. deviation 22.26089 15.20522 most extreme differences absolute .127 .068 positive .127 .051 negative -.063 -.068 kolmogorov-smirnov z .978 .523 asymp. sig. (2-tailed) .294 .947 a. test distribution is normal b. calculated from data. hamid ashraf & maryam salami web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency 224 test of normality of data of toefl pbt as posttest one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test was applied to calculate the normality of the data obtained from toefl pbt as posttest in both control and experimental groups. table 5indicates the result of the test run on the data. as illustrated in table 5, the results of one-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test indicated that the data obtained from the toefl pbt as posttest were normal in both experimental (p = .294 ˃ .05) and control (p = .947 ˃ .05) groups. consequently, to determine the statistical significance of the data, independentsamples t-test and paired-samples t-test were applied. experimental/control groups posttest the data from posttest (toefl) have been analyzed through comparing of means and also the use of cross tabulation (contingency tables) to check the probable relationships. table 6 shows the results of the group statistics analysis of the data. the figures in table 6 indicate that the difference between means of toefl scores in experimental (n = 59, m = 449.406) and control (n = 59, m = 430.855) groups is 18.509. to check on its statistical significant difference, data were analyzed through independent paired t-test (see table 7). as the data in tables 6 and 7shows, there is statistically significant difference [t(116) = 5.286, p = .000 (two-tailed)] between experimental (m = 449.4068, sd = 22.26089) and control (m = 430.8559, sd = 15.20522) groups in their language proficiency at the end of the study (at 0.05 level of significance). as a conclusion, the participants in the experimental group who received treatment through being a member of web-based language club gained a higher means of scores (449.4) in the posttest in comparison with those in the control group (430.8). therefore, it can be concluded that the null-hypothesis stating that ‘there is no significant difference between the participants in control and experimental groups after receiving treatment” is rejected. experimental group pretest and posttest to account for the probable progress of the participants in experimental group, the means of scores of these participants collected in two occasions (pretest and posttest) have been analyzed through the same procedure. table 8 illustrates the result. the figures in the table indicate that the difference between means of toefl scores in experimental group in two occasions of data collection is around 41.6.the significant statistical difference between means of pretest and posttest in experimental group has been tested via paired samples t-test (see table 9). the data in tables 8 and 9 indicate, there is statistically significant difference [t(58) = 17.532, p = .000 (two-tailed)] between experimental pretest data (m = 407.7119, sd = 13.47322) and experimental posttest data (m = 449.4068, sd = 22.26089) in their language proficiency at the end of the study (at 0.05 level of significance). therefore, the participants in the experimental group showed progress in posttest. this proves that they have been affected by being a member of web-based language club. regarding the changes in language proficiency, a further analysis is done on the data. table10 illustrates the maximum and minimum of means of the participants in the posttest. the minimum mean of scores at the posttest (table 10) is 410 while it was 375 at pretest stage. the maximum mean of scores is 502.5, but it was 435 at the beginning of the study. 225 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 6. group statistics (experimental and control posttest) grouping n mean std. deviation std. error mean total posttest experimental 59 449.4068 22.26089 2.89812 posttest control 59 430.8559 15.20522 1.97955 table 7. results of independent samples test for toefl pbt as posttest f sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper total equal variances assumed 7.774 .006 5.286 116 .000 18.5508 3.50966 11.59952 25.50218 equal variances not assumed 5.286 102.446 .000 18.5508 3.50966 11.58981 25.51188 table 8. paired samples statistics (experimental group, pretest and posttest) mean n std. deviation std. error mean pair 1 pretest 407.7119 59 13.47322 1.75406 posttest 449.4068 59 22.26089 2.89812 table 9. paired samples test (experimental group, pretest and posttest) mean paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed) std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 pretest posttest -41.694 18.26789 2.37828 -46.4556 -36.9343 -17.532 58 .000 table 10. statistics (minimum & maximum of means: experimental pretest & posttest) pretest posttest n valid 59 59 missing 0 0 minimum 375.00 410.00 maximum 435.00 502.50 experimental group pretest and posttest: language proficiency level as it was indicated, the participants in both groups did not differ in their language proficiency based on the data collected at the beginning of the study. however, based on the data collected from toefl scores as posttest, the participants in the experimental group acted much better than what they did at the beginning of the study. as stated in ets official site, those who get 450 to 520 in pbt toefl are labeled as intermediate learners. a further analysis (cross tabulation) will show how many participants have moved to the intermediate level of proficiency. furthermore, the relationship between the means gained in pretest and posttest would be illustrated. hamid ashraf & maryam salami web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency 226 table 11. experimental group, pretest level * posttest level cross tabulation posttest level total preintermediate1 preintermediate2 intermediate1 intermediate2 pretest level preintermediate1 count 1 6 13 1 21 % within total pretest level 4.8% 28.6% 61.9% 4.8% 100.0% % within total posttest level 100.0% 100.0% 27.7% 20.0% 35.6% % of total 1.7% 10.2% 22.0% 1.7% 35.6% preintermediate2 count 0 0 34 4 38 % within total pretest level .0% .0% 89.5% 10.5% 100.0% % within total posttest level .0% .0% 72.3% 80.0% 64.4% % of total .0% .0% 57.6% 6.8% 64.4% total count 1 6 47 5 59 % within total pretest level 1.7% 10.2% 79.7% 8.5% 100.0% % within total posttest level 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% % of total 1.7% 10.2% 79.7% 8.5% 100.0% table 12. chi-square tests value df asymp. sig. (2-sided) pearson chi-square 14.487(a) 3 .002 likelihood ratio 16.386 3 .001 linear-by-linear association 10.164 1 .001 n of valid cases 59 a. 6 cells (75.0%) have expected count less than 5. the minimum expected count is .36. to make the analysis more precise, the participants’ scores have been labeled as “pre-intermediate1” (350400) and “pre-intermediate2” (401-450) based on the scores they received. a similar classification has been made to intermediate level. those who gained 450-480 are named as “intermediate 1”, and those with 481 to 520 labeled as “intermediate 2”. the classifications designed for the scores have been used in the cross tabulation in table11. as indicated in table 11, 61.9% of participants who were labeled as “pre-intermediate1” in pretest phase have moved up to “intermediate1” in posttest phase. the next stands for those participants labeled as “pre-intermediate1” who are now in “pre-intermediate2” (28.6%). it is also indicated that 4.8% of “preintermediate1” participants’ status has changed to “intermediate2”. the degree of changes in this group (preintermediate 1) is considered desirable since only 4.8% of them remained in the same group in posttest phase. the figures in “pre-intermediate2” in pretest phase (table 11) shows a stronger trend witnessed in “pre-intermediate1”. majority of participants in “preintermediate2” (89.5%) have moved to 227 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee “intermediate1” in posttest stage. the rest (10.5%) even had a better progress by being placed as “intermediate2”. based on the figures in table 11, it is apparent that only 4.8% of participants have not changed their group for the better. therefore, it can be assumed that almost all of the participants have been affected by the treatment they received. the data from pbt toefl administered in two occasions have been analyzed further to indicate the significance of the relations shown in variables of the study. chi-square tests, table12 indicates the result of this analysis. based on the data revealed in table 12, the significance value (2-sided) =.002 which is much lower than pearson chi-square value (14.487) which means that the two variables are, indeed, related. therefore, it can be concluded that the changes displayed in the cross tabulation table are significant with respect to the existence of relationship between variables and the changes witnessed. as an important finding of this study it is indicated that the set of analysis done on the data from pbt toefl as pretest and posttest confirms the idea that being a member of webbased language club can help learners improve their proficiency in english. conclusion the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of webbased language club on the language proficiency of iranian efl learners. the design chosen for the study was a quasi-experimental one in which 118 pre-intermediate learners form two universities were selected among 154 through a homogenizing test (toefl pbl). they were put into an experimental group and a control group. the participants in experimental group were required to get on line and act as a member of a virtual club designed for the purpose of the study for a period of 6 months. they were mostly involved with activities like emailing, chatting, and weblogging. the research question of the study accounted for investigation of the effect of web-based language club on the language proficiency of iranian efl learners. the result of analysis on the data from pretest administered to both groups indicated that there was no statistical significant difference between the participants in both groups at outset of the study. the analysis of the data from toefl pbl test administered to both groups as posttest (independent sample t-test) statistically rejected the null hypothesis which suggested the lack of effect of treatment on the language proficiency of the participants. the participants in the experimental group who were the members of web-based language club outperformed in their language proficiency those in the control group. the other analysis done on pretest and posttest data of experimental group (paired sample t-test) also proved the fact that the participants in the web-based language club group made some significant development in their language proficiency. the further analysis on the data form pretest and posttest, done through cross-tabulation and pearson chi square, accounted for the probable development of participants in the experimental group which lead to results indicating the change of proficiency level. almost majority of the participants (88.1%) moved from the lower level to the next level of proficiency. therefore, it can be concluded that the membership of these students in the web-based language club as a kind of e-learning and getting involved in activities like emailing, blogging, and grouping on the net has been effective on their language proficiency. the finding of the present study that is in line with the development of language proficiency hamid ashraf & maryam salami web-based language club affecting efl learners’ proficiency 228 and language skills is partly supported by other previous studies in e-learning such as: corio and meloni (1995), spiri, and naganuma (2007), rezaee and oladi (2008), aminzadeh and molaesmaeli (2009), motallebzadeh and ghaemi (2009), al-saleem (2011), blackstone, rashtchi and hajihassani (2011), motallebzadeh and amirabadi (2011), noytim (2011), and sun and chang (2012). these studies have reported the success of students in the development of at least one of language skills through the use of one form of e-learning. the present research aimed at investigating the effect of web-based language clubs on the language proficiency of iranian efl learners. researchers interested in the field can work on both types of clubs (virtual and real ones) in the form of experimental research. there could be studies with the inclusion of participants speaking other languages in other contexts as efl or esl. similar types of language clubs could be developed for language teachers to maintain their professional development. references aminzadeh, r., & molaesmaeli, e. 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(2005). using weblogs in an efl writing class. proceedings of the 2005 conference and workshop on tefl and applied linguistics (pp. 426-432). taipei: crane publishing. improving the quality of language centres in salatiga through good recruitment process and teaching effectiveness standard english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee improving the quality of language centres in salatiga through good recruitment process and teaching effectiveness standard sesillia rani setyo sari satya wacana christian university salatiga, indonesia e-mail: sesilia_rani@yahoo.com apa citation: sari, s. r. s (2012). improving the quality of language centres in salatiga through good recruitment process and teaching effectiveness standard. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 27-38 received: 19-08-2012 accepted: 12-19-2013 published: 01-12-2012 abstract: the focus of this study is improving the quality of recruitment and teaching standards at three language centres in salatiga. the purposes of this study are helping the managers of language centres in salatiga to find an appropriate way to recruit new teachers and helping teachers to be more effective in teaching. this research is qualitative descriptive interpretive and quantitative with a simple calculation. the data were collected by means of interview, questionnaire, and observation. the researcher suggests that researches on other samples and population on similar area need to be done so that the development of knowledge will improve sustainably. keywords: quality, language centres, recruitment process, teaching effectiveness standard introduction it is undoubtedly that the success of education lies on qualified teachers. a question might arise, that is what standards could be used to assess or measure teachers who are qualified or not. this question leads into another one which is “what it means to be qualified”. teachers graduating from different universities might have received different trainings and education; however, they normally claim to be qualified when they are interviewed to get a job at certain language centres. based on the writer’s observation, in 2005, several language centres in salatiga didn’t have any criteria in recruiting their english teachers. the managers only relied on recommendations from other teachers to hire a new english teacher. this phenomenon is quite dangerous since it will influence the students’ learning and performance. in addition, language centres in salatiga did not have permanent teachers. they hire new teachers as fast as possible because of the high demand for english courses. if they have many students waiting, they inevitably look for english teachers immediately. as a result, the teachers cannot be assessed for their qualifications. it is a crucial issue since the brochures of three language centres in salatiga state that they have qualified and competent teachers. in reality, it is difficult to identify whether those teachers are qualified or not. this has become the main concern for the writer to study further of how english teachers should be to produce qualified students in terms of reaching the objectives of the lesson. it is totally different from one of the language centres in jakarta in terms of standards used to recruit their new teachers. the head of the language centre in jakarta gave three kinds of tests 27 sesillia rani setyo sari improving the quality of language centres in salatiga to recruit a new teacher in 2005. they were interviewed, a writing test, and demo teaching. after the interview, the staff from the language centre conducted a class observation to see whether the candidate teacher was qualified or not. in this research, the writer sees whether there have been some improvements in recruiting new english teachers for language centres in salatiga during a five-year period. in correlation to this, mccloskey, thornton, & touba (2007) proposed a set of standards that could be used to recruit new teachers and determine whether they are qualified or not. the first is what is called as domain check. this means there should be a clear standard to recruit new teachers at an educational institution. in other words, this institution should have a list of criteria to select teachers who are eligible or not to teach at their educational institutions. second is construct validity check. this means that the educational institutions should look back at what they are trying to measure: what a newly qualified teacher should know and be able to do. we can conclude from this statement that class observation needs to be done on a regular basis to see whether those teachers who have already been hired, fulfill the list of criteria set by the educational institutions. third is concurrent validity check. to check for concurrent validity, the educational institutions ask the teachers to list what were currently taught in the candidate teachers’ faculties/universities. the checklist is then used to see whether everything that was taught is covered somewhere within the educational institutions’ standard. if not, the educational institution is recommended to tell its teachers to fulfill the standard required. last is clarity check. to check whether the educational institutions standards would be clear and understandable to the pre-service teachers, faculty, and supervisors. the head of the educational institutions should allow the teachers to read the written criteria by themselves. it means new teachers could be shown the criteria needed to work at certain educational institutions so that they are aware and try to develop themselves professionally, and are in agreement with the educational institutions over the expected objectives. statement of the problem based on the background above, there are two main problems to be the main issues of this research. the first problem has correlation with recruitment process. the writer is going to see whether a standard has been set to recruit new english teachers. if there is already a standard used to recruit new teachers and determine whether the candidate teachers are qualified or not, the writer will analyze the standards set by language centres in salatiga critically based on the standards proposed by mccloskey, thornton, & touba (2007). in contrast, if they do not have any, the writer will propose a standard with some adjustments (if needed) so that they can be implemented in language centres in salatiga. the second problem is related to teaching effectiveness. based on the writer’s experience in teaching one of language centres in salatiga, teachers were not assessed for their quality in teaching, and there was no class observation conducted on a regular basis by managers to see whether their teachers are able to teach english effectively in the classroom. if there is no 28 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee standard set yet, the writer is going to propose an evaluation measurement which is suitable to be implemented in language centres in salatiga. on the other hand, if the language centres have their own standard in evaluating teaching effectiveness, the writer of this thesis will analyze it critically whether it somewhat matches the standard proposed by brown. the writer chose the criteria proposed by brown because it covers all the criteria needed to evaluate teaching effectiveness, for example, learning environment, individuals, teaching activity, teachers’ preparation, teachers’ presentation, teaching methods, personal characteristics, and teacher-student interaction. purposes of the study the purposes of the study are to help managers of language centres in salatiga to find appropriate ways to recruit or hire new teachers and to help teachers to be more effective in teaching. this study is significant for many parties. first, for the writer herself, it is important to learn more about teacher qualifications and give educational contributions in how a recruitment process and an effective teaching should be, for her own region, salatiga. for the teachers themselves, this study could make them aware of how effective teachers should be. as a result, the teachers could develop themselves and be more qualified with the guidance proposed by brown. next is for the language centres themselves. they will be trustworthy if what is stated in the brochure, that they have qualified and competent teachers, is true. for long term effect, they don’t need any big effort to promote their language centres if they are well-known for their qualified teachers. as a consequence, the students will get the rights to be taught by qualified teachers and be more productive in learning english. furthermore, the language centres will be able to keep its credibility, and could serve people in education at its best. in general, this study, which was conducted in a small town in salatiga, central java, indonesia could contribute towards the development of knowledge, especially in the recruitment process and teaching effectiveness evaluation for language centres, not only in salatiga, but also in indonesia. this study has been limited to educational institutions, i.e. three language centres in salatiga. they are chosen based on the age of the language centres (how long they have been established, which is above five years) and the number of students they have. those three language centres will represent the real condition of teacher recruitment process that has been conducted up to the present moment. in addition, the writer chose elementary level class in each language centre since there is a great possibility that elementary level class will be opened. in addition, elementary level is very important because it teaches students from the basic level. if the basic level has been taught properly, difficulties in learning english in intermediate or advanced level can be minimized. it will also make it easier for teachers of the next levels to teach students whose basic level is good already. this part discusses theoretical framework underlying this research. it covers two areas: recruitment process and teaching effectiveness theories that will be used as a stepping stone in conducting this research. 29 sesillia rani setyo sari improving the quality of language centres in salatiga recruitment process it has been mentioned in previous chapter that the writer of this research is going to use standards proposed by mccloskey, thornton, & touba (2007) for recruitment process of new teachers. the writer is going to use four criteria; domain check, construct validity check, concurrent validity check, and clarity check which have been explained previously. the writer chose these four criteria since in 2005, based on the writer’s personal observation, both teachers and managers did not pay a particular attention to these four criteria. as a result, each of them had their own perceptions in running their jobs. if these four criteria are implemented and understood by both parties, it is assumed that language centres in salatiga will be more effective in giving educational services to students. teaching principles richards (1990) examines two approaches to the study of teaching from which theories of teaching as well as principles for teacher preparation programs can be developed. the first is a micro approach. it is an analytical approach that looks at teaching in terms of its directly observable characteristics. it involves looking at what a teacher does in the classroom. the second one is a macro approach. it is a holistic one which involves making generalizations and inferences that go beyond what can be observed directly in the way of quantifiable classroom processes. he adds that both approaches can be used to develop theories of effective teaching and to derive principles for teacher education. in this research, the writer uses a micro approach as one of the ways in evaluating teaching effectiveness. the writer has conducted a class observation to look directly at observable characteristics of teaching in the classroom. besides, the teachers also need to assess themselves as nunan (1990) indicates that it is crucial that teachers develop a range of social skills in planning, monitoring, and evaluating their own professional activities. a range of social skills here mean that teachers should be able to develop themselves professionally and interact well with students. that is why, the writer uses a self-evaluation form for teachers, from brown (1994), which is adapted from christison & bassano (1984 in brown 1994) to be filled in by teachers of language centres in salatiga after the teachers teach, to know whether they have developed a range of social skills discussed in nunan (1990). if the teachers realize their own weaknesses, it is expected that they will perform better and be more effective in other teaching practices. the writer expects that teachers are aware over their own strengths and weaknesses in teaching english. brandt (2007 in coombe, alhamly, davidson & troudi 2007) mentions that the definitions of selfawareness vary, but he explains that selfawareness relates to the notion of having knowledge, which can affect behavior. in this study, the writer expects that by knowing their own strengths and weaknesses, teachers can change their behavior by becoming more effective in teaching. brandt (2007 in coombe, alhamly, davidson & troudi 2007) also mentions that a novice teacher is expected to monitor his or her performance in teaching practice. in addition, brown (2001) mentions that when we speak, for example, the extent to which our intended message is received is a factor of both our 30 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee production and our listener’s perception. it means that when teachers teach, they don’t only make themselves clear but also they need to understand the students as a listener. the writer feels that this self-evaluation sheet is necessary to be given to teachers after the teachers teach, at least twice during class observation, to remind them over some teaching principles they need to bear in mind, since it is a way of helping them to develop a range of social skills proposed by nunan. method the writer uncovered the phenomenon of evaluating teaching effectiveness in three language centres in salatiga. that is why, the data were analyzed qualitatively since according to strauss & corbin (1990), qualitative methods can be used to uncover and understand what lies behind any phenomenon about which little is yet known. in this case, information about a recruitment process to have qualified teachers at three language centres in salatiga will be analyzed deeper. in addition, according to tayibnapis (2008), qualitative method can be used to make a narative information, like an interview record, students’ essay, a report sample, etc. in this study, the writer analyzed the data of evaluating teaching effectiveness naratively. in short, the data were analyzed qualitatively with an inductive approach, which analyzed from the phenomenon to come to a finding. then, for evaluating teaching effectiveness, the data were analyzed quantitatively with a simple calculation. in this research, the writer did not take sample, but used the whole population. this is so since there were only a small number of respondents, and the writer decided to use all of the available population. this is supported by sugiyono (2007) that when the population is “not proportional” in numbers, all of the available population should be taken as a sample. as a result, the writer would use disproportionate stratified random sampling. this research involved three language centres in salatiga. they were chosen based on how long they have been established, which is above five years, and the number of students, which is above fifty students, per month. the writer chose elementary level since there is a great possibility that elementary class will be opened, and elementary level is very important because it is the fundamental step in learning further levels. language centre a has been established for about eight years. it has around four hundreds students every three months with four teachers. for the elementary level, they have more or less fifteen students in one classroom. each session lasts for 90 minutes; one hour to have a lesson in the classroom, and thirty minutes to have a listening practice in the laboratory. however, for english for kids, each session lasts for one hour; forty-five minutes for having lessons in class, and fifteen minutes for listening practice. in the brochure, this language centre proclaims to be well-known because of its good facilities and teaching methods that many students and workers feel satisfied with the result. language centre a has three levels for beginner level; beginner i, beginner ii, and beginner iii. in addition, language centre b has been established for more than six years. it has around fifty students every month with seven to eight teachers. there are three to five students within one classroom. for one level, each 31 sesillia rani setyo sari improving the quality of language centres in salatiga session lasts for 90 minutes. this language centre provides, as it is mentioned in the brochure, many facilities, such as air conditioner, tv, vcd, cd, and competent teachers. language centre b has 6 levels for elementary level. they call them general english i, general english ii, general english iii, general english iv, general english v, and general english vi. the last one, language centre c has been established for about twenty years. at this present time, it has around 150 students with five teachers. each session lasts for 60 minutes, and it takes three months to pass each level. as mentioned in the brochure, this language centre provides a perfect facility. it covers textbooks in the appropriate grading, additional materials from the tutors, mini laboratory for every class, and tv/cd/vcd when needed. language centre c has three levels for elementary. those are lower elementary, elementary and higher elementary. this research is qualitative in nature. to be able to uncover any phenomenon concerning the recruitment process and determine whether certain teachers are qualified or not, the following triangulation of data collection methods was used. furthermore, the writer used primary sources, that is the data sources directly give the data to the writer, and not through any other medium like through other people, or through any other important documents (sugiyono, 2007). an interview was chosen as one of data collection methods since according to sugiyono (2007), an interview could be used when a researcher wants to find out the answers for the research problems, and when the numbers of the respondents are quite a few. a semi-structured interview was conducted face to face. this is because the interviewer didn’t always stick to the questions, but had a follow up question as well in seeking the information. to help the writer to accommodate the answers, the writer used a tape recorder so that no significant information was missing. the interview was done to both the managers and teachers who teach elementary level. for language centre a, there were two teachers, who taught elementary level, being interviewed. for language centre b, there were three teachers who were interviewed. finally, there were two teachers who were interviewed for language centre c. the interview is used to seek information on how recruitment process has been carried out. it is significant to interview both parties the managers and teachers to cross-check whether they have similar or different perceptions over an agreement set earlier, or at the recruitment process. hadi (1986) in sugiyono (2007) states that observation is a complex process since it consists of biological and psychological process. two which are important are observation and recall processes. sugiyono (2007) also adds that observation technique is used when a researcher wants to know human behavior, working process, and when the respondents are not too big to be observed. in this study, the writer conducted class observations to see whether english teachers have been qualified or not based on the criteria set by brown (1994). this instrument is beneficial to identify the strengths of english teachers and areas need to improve. then, the scores were rated 0-4 to see whether those teachers will be in that particular 32 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee level in teaching effectiveness. the scale is wider in scope compared to the scale for teachers’ self-evaluation. this is so since an observer could assess beyond what can be seen by the teachers themselves, such as appropriate outfit, appropriate level of difficulty, etc. in this study, the writer conducted a nonparticipant observation, which means the writer was not get involved directly in activities of the respondents. it means that the writer functions as an independent observer (sugiyono, 2007). in addition, the writer did not read the teachers’ lesson plans since they didn’t have it in a neat written form. the writer also used structured observation. it means that it is made clear starting at the beginning over what criteria needed to be observed, where and when an observation occurred, and what variables would be observed. the class observation was conducted twice for each class, and for the first session, the class observation was not announced. then, for the second times, teachers were informed that they would be observed. the teacher is aware that when an observer is present, the teachers and students act differently during teaching and learning process. that is why, an anticipated action needed to be done. the writer was really aware of the possibility of class observation paradox, i.e teachers would act differently and prepared the material well when an observer was present. therefore, for the purpose of this study, the writer would see whether the result of an evaluation is different for the first, and second evaluations. the writer feels the need to have a questionnaire since it is an efficient way to know an expected variable from respondents. the questionnaire was used to measure the level of teaching effectiveness in the classroom. the respondents were english teachers and the questionnaire was given in english. the writer assumed that they do understand english statements in the questionnaire because they are english teachers. the type of the questionnaire is a closed one since those english teachers were expected to circle one of the available choices. the english teachers were given a measurement proposed by brown (1994) which is adapted from christison & bassano (1984) to evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses in teaching effectively. the teachers needed to fill it in since it would make them aware of their own strengths to build their self-esteem. in addition, they also needed to know what areas of teaching they should improve since a change of behaviour in teachers will also reflect teaching effectiveness. it means that if teachers are aware of their own weaknesses, they are expected to improve that particular area and be more effective in other teaching practices. it is highly believed that by knowing both, the teachers will try to do better in other occasions. in addition, they also rated themselves to 0-3 to see whether they belonged to one particular rating. results and discussion bogdan (1982) in sugiyono (2007) states that data analysis is the process of systematically searching and arranging the interview transcripts, fieldnotes, and other materials that you accumulate to increase your own understanding of them and to enable you to present what you have discovered to others. in this study, the writer used interview transcripts, result of class observations, and questionnaire to answer research questions and problems. however, qualitative research has 33 sesillia rani setyo sari improving the quality of language centres in salatiga analyzed the data before a researcher “come to the field.” (sugiyono, 2007). the analysis has been done to the data in the background of the study to determine the focus of the research. in this context, the writer has analyzed the data in terms of the wrong way in the recruitment process, and teaching methods conducted in three language centres in salatiga for five-year period, 2005-the beginning of 2011. these data are called secondary data, and the analysis went deeper after the writer “come to the field.” after collecting the data, the writer analyzed them in the following way: data reduction it means that the writer chose the most important up to the least important of the information got so far. for example, if some of the interview transcripts did not really match the research problems and questions, the writer omitted that irrelevant information. data reduction means summarize, choose the most important part, and omit those unimportant data. in this way, it made it easier for the writer to get a clear picture over the expected information. data display after data reduction, the writer displayed the data in a narrative way. in this study, the writer analyzed the data inductively, which saw the data from what has been going on in three language centres in salatiga for five-year period, to come to a finding. in this research, the finding is a new measurement tool that could be applicable to be implemented at language centres in salatiga, in particular, and in indonesia for a wider scope. conclusion drawing/verification for this step, the writer drew a conclusion after having data reduction and data display. the writer analyzed the data from three sources. the first datum was collected from an interview between the writer and the managers as well as the teachers of language centres in salatiga to answer the first research question, which is recruitment process. next is from questionnaires filled in by teachers to make them aware of their own strengths and weaknesses which were rated in the scale of 0-3. the last one was from the writer’s point of view. it means the writer was conducting class observations to assess teachers’ effectiveness based on the format proposed by brown to be rated at the scale of 0-4. the last two data were used to answer the second research question, which is how effective english teachers at three language centres in salatiga are. the recruitment process of three language centres can be summarized below: table 1. summary of recruitment process criteria language centre a language centre b language centre c domain check construct validity check v concurrent validity check clarity check 34 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the table above shows that there is only one language centre, which is language centre a fulfills construct validity check, and the rest do not fulfill any single criteria at all. from these data, we can conclude that the managers of language centres should improve the way they recruit new teachers so that what have been stated in the brochure that they do have qualified teachers is true. in addition, the summary of the result of the rating of teaching effectiveness of three language centres can be seen below: table 2. result of teachers’ self evaluation using the rating of 0 to 3, the range of teaching effectiveness is between 1.6 and 2.05, which is between needs improvement and good level. finally, the rating of teaching effectiveness from an observer’s point of view can be summarized below: table 3. the writer’s observation rating level language centre a 2.8 average level language centre b 2.8 average level language centre c 2.8 average level using a rating scale from 0 to 4, the table shows that the range is around 2.8, which is on the average level. furthermore, for observation paradox, there is no significant difference in scores between the first and second evaluation. from this finding, it can be assumed that the teachers’ way of teaching is the same whether an observation is announced or not. to sum up, the three language centres in salatiga do not have any appropriate standards in recruiting their teachers. if those language centres have set standards in recruitment process and qualified teachers identification, there is a great possibility that the scores for the teachers’ self-evaluation and the writer’s observation will increase. if there is a clear communication between managers and teachers starting at the beginning (recruitment process), there will be the same perception between them in reaching up the language centres’ objectives. in addition, most of the teachers need improvement in teaching english because they are still in the level of 1.6 up to 2.05. this finding is compatible with the assessment from the writer whose point is 2.8 or on the average level. it means that the managerial staff should interfere and take a tangible action in improving the level of teaching effectiveness of their teachers. it could be done by conducting class observation on a regular basis to see whether they have implemented some criteria in teaching effectively used by the institutions, and see whether there is an increase in their rating level language centre a 1.6 needs improvement language centre b 1.9 needs improvement language centre c 2.05 good 35 sesillia rani setyo sari improving the quality of language centres in salatiga level of teaching effectiveness term by term. furthermore, to be able to reach this, the teachers should keep selfevaluation sheet by themselves so that they can always reflect to those criteria in teaching effectively most of the time after teaching. in short, if all of these recruitment processes, teacher selfevaluation, and an observer’s observation are professionally conducted, at the end, hopefully, the students will get their rights to be taught by competent and qualified teachers. conclusion after analyzing the data from interview transcripts, questionnaires, and observations, the writer found the following results. there is no standard yet set to recruit english teachers. determining qualified teachers also seems not to be the main concern for the managers in recruitment process. in addition, the teachers get different “treatments” in the recruitment process. it means that the questions asked at the recruitment process vary from one teacher to another. most of the teachers themselves seem do not have any guidance or proper models in teaching english effectively. most of them just came into the classroom, and delivered the materials without any appropriate lesson plan (based on the writer’s observation). there is no explicit communication between managers and teachers starting from the beginning (recruitment process) in terms of the objectives to achieve. using the rating of 0 to 3 for teachers’ self evaluation, the range of teaching effectiveness is between 1.6 and and 2.05, which is between needs improvement and good level. using the rating of 0 to 4 for the writer’s observation, the range of teaching effectiveness is around 2.8, which is on the average level. after analyzing the summary and implicational pedagogy above, the writer proposes the following: the managers of language centres in salatiga should have a clear standard to recruit teachers. the managerial staff could have a meeting to discuss the four criteria explained previously to set their own fixed-standards to be able to get more qualified teachers. in this case, all of the candidate teachers will get similar “treatment” when they are interviewed, and both the managers and teachers will have the same perception over the language centres’ objectives. the writer has got her own point of view related to construct validity check for language centre a. even though the manager has fulfilled the criterion, the manager shouldn’t force the candidate teachers to be able to teach like the manager’s way of teaching since teachers have different styles in teaching english. what is recommended by the writer is that the candidate teachers should be allowed to observe classes with different teachers so that they get many ideas in terms of teaching english. in this way, the candidate teachers’ creativity will not be restricted, and the teachers could get more freedom to be more creative in teaching english. the managers of those language centres should facilitate teachers to have “teacher training program” so that the candidate teachers will have any idea of how to teach english at their institutions. furthermore, there should be a strict rule for all teachers to participate in the program. there should be a clear communication over the language centre’s objectives between the managers and teachers starting at the beginning (or the beginning of recruitment process), so 36 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 1, december 2012 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee there will not be any misunderstanding in the future. in addition, the managers should have a clear standard, and fixedquestions to be asked to candidate teachers at the beginning of recruitment process. the managers of the language centres in salatiga are recommended to do a study tour to one of language centres in jakarta whose recruitment process is quite close to the criteria proposed by mccloskey, thornton, & touba above. as a result, the managers will broaden their horizon, and hopefully, they will be able to determine whether the candidate teachers are really qualified or not. class observation should be conducted on a regular basis; three times in one term. the first observation is conducted at the beginning of class program so that the managers will get a clear picture over areas need to improve and the good point of the candidate teachers. the second observation is conducted in the middle of the term. in this way, the managers could monitor the pace of the lesson from the beginning up to the middle of the term. in addition, the managers could also supervise the candidate teachers’ mastery of the lesson. the last observation is conducted at the last session of the term, before the final tests. this is important since it will give important information for the managers of the whole domain of the lessons taught by the teachers. the managers will supervise it from the beginning, the middle, and the end of the term, and get a clear picture over what is going on in the whole term. the writer also found the fact that all teachers were not really up to date with the latest research, articles, journals, and books in terms of language teaching and teacher education. teachers should be encouraged to be more independent in browsing the internet, and make themselves be more knowledgeable and the managers are highly recommended to facilitate their teachers as well in providing up to date researches, articles, books and journal in language teaching, and teacher education. seeing the fact that three language centres, which are considered “big” in salatiga, central java don’t have fixedstandards in recruiting new teachers, there is a great possibility that small language centres in indonesia do not have appropriate standards to recruit their teachers. in this case, the government should interfere in setting up standards of recruitment process for all language centres in indonesia. in this study, i am proposing domain check, construct validity check, concurrent validity check, and clarity check for the government to consider. it should be made clear starting from the beginning over some criteria needed to teach at language centres in indonesia. in addition, the government should create a measurement tool, which is applicable, for language centres in indonesia. references brandt, c. (2007). giving reflection a voice: a strategy for self-evaluation and assessment in tesol teacher preparation. in c. coombe, m. alhamly, p. davidson & s. troudi (eds.), evaluating teacher effectiveness in esl/efl contexts. 199-212. michigan: university of michigan. braskamp, l., brandenburg, d., & ory, j. (1984). evaluating teaching effectiveness. washington d. c. : sage publications. brown, d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. new york: pearson education. day, r. (1990). teacher observation in secong language teacher education. in richards & nunan (eds), second language teacher 37 sesillia rani setyo sari improving the quality of language centres in salatiga education. 43-61. cambridge: cambridge university press. doyle, t. (2002). evaluating teacher effectiveness – research summary. retrieved october 3rd 2010. http://www.tqsource.org/publication s/teachereffectiveness.php. eken, d. (2007). an exploration of teaching effectiveness: an attempt to define the less easily definable. in c. coombe, m. al-hamly, p. davidson & s. troudi (eds.), evaluating teacher effectiveness in esl/efl contexts. 167-182. michigan: university of michigan. goe, l., bell, c., & little, o. (2008). approaches to evaluating teacher effectiveness: a research synthesis. retrieved october 3rd 2010. file:///f:/evalteacheffec.htm. imron, a. (2007). correlation of communication effectiveness with teachers’ performance. retrieved october 3 rd 2010. http://www.docstoc.com. jihad, a & haris, a. (2010). evaluasi pembelajaran. yogyakarta: multi pressindo. kaufman, d. (2007). a multidisciplinary approach to assessment in teacher education. in c. coombe, m. alhamly, p. davidson & s. troudi (eds.), evaluating teacher effectiveness in esl/efl contexts. 43-56. michigan: university of michigan. kyriacou, c. (1986). effective teaching in schools. padstow: t j press ltd. richards, j. & schmidt, r. (2002). longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics. third edition. london: pearson educated limited. marno & idris, m. (2010). strategi & metode pengajaran: menciptakan ketrampilan mengajar yang efektif dan edukatif. yogyakarta: ar-ruzz media. mccloskey, m., thornton, b., & touba, n. (2007). new standards for a new era: developing tools to assess the qualified teacher. in c. coombe, m. al-hamly, p. davidson & s. troudi (eds.), evaluating teacher effectiveness in esl/efl contexts. 7-24. michigan: university of michigan. miller, l., & young, j. (2007). what’s in it for me? a performance management system to please everyone. in c. coombe, m. al-hamly, p. davidson & s. troudi (eds.), evaluating teacher effectiveness in esl/efl contexts. 74-88. michigan: university of michigan. nunan, d. (1990). action research in the language classroom in richards & nunan (eds), second language teacher education. 62-81. cambridge: cambridge university press. richards, j. (1990). the dilemma of teacher education in second language teaching. in richards & nunan (eds), second language teacher education. 3-15. cambridge: cambridge university press. stoynoff, s. (2007). building a contextspecific teacher evaluation system for an esl program. in c. coombe, m. alhamly, p. davidson & s. troudi (eds.), evaluating teacher effectiveness in esl/efl contexts. 106-118. michigan: university of michigan. strauss, a. & corbin, j. (1990). basics of qualitative research. washington d. c.: sage publications. sugiyono. (2007). metode penelitian pendidikan: pendekatan kuantitatif, kualitatif, dan r&d. bandung: alfabeta tayibnapis, f. (2008). evaluasi program dan instrumen evaluasi untuk program pendidikan dan penelitian. jakarta: rineka cipta. 38 http://www.tqsource.org/publications/teachereffectiveness.php http://www.docstoc.com/ english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 21 feminist and structural narratologie as identity (re)-configurations in african narratives: a meta-critical exposition of literary articles christopher babatunde ogunyemi department of english studies, adekunle ajasin university, nigeria e-mail: christopher.ogunyemi@aaua.edu.ng apa citation: ogunyemi, c. b. (2017). feminist and structural narratologie as identity (re)configurations in african narratives: a meta-critical exposition of literary articles. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 21-32. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.767. received: 21-08-2017 accepted: 27-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: research in african literature articulated a number of literary and philosophical theories, particularly in the way that they can potentially undo conventional understandings of gender in the nigerian context. this paper seeks to apply these insights in the form of a critical narratology. although narratology has a structuralist or formalist orientation, having its theoretical beginning in saussure’s modern linguistics, and like structuralism, aspires to ‘scientific’ or ‘universalist’ claims, it, also, examines the way in which narratives affect the way we perceive the world. this paper will attempt to mobilise narratology critically, with the benefit of the insights emerging from various articles, in order to help our understanding of the question of gender and social themes in nigerian post-colonial literature. most especially, this paper will visualise the analysis of structural narratology and finally with feminist narratology in order to correct the inadequacies of structural narratology and the suppression of women in texts. keywords: african literature, feminist narratology, gender identity, structural narratology introduction bal’s narratology is a systematic and structural analysis which helps in the ideological study of the commitment of the writer in the narrative (bal, 1985, p. 10). this means that it helps in understanding the degree of commitment writers underscore in their narratives, thereby showing whether such work is conscious or unconscious of the plight of women, gender and social constructions in art generally. to fludernik (2009) narratology in this context can identify gender and its various forms in the narrative text showing what constitutes traditional narratives and the instruments of analysis and interpretations which could be applied to explain its framework in narrative form. to begin with, narratology is defined as the theory and the study of narratives (bal, 1985, p. 3, fludernik, 2009, p. 2; genette, 1980, p. 3). genette’s narratological works aid the german and anglo-saxon literary tradition and it sheds more light to the understanding of the narratological criticism in divergent ways. this goes to demonstrate that, ’narrative does not represent real or fictive story, it recounts it, that is, it signifies it by means of language. therefore, there is no place to imitate the narrative. there are simply varying degrees of diegesis, narrative moods, mimesis and every text discloses traces of narration’ (genette, 1980, pp. 42-43). likewise, narratology helps in the understanding of the context of production as fundamental element of the narrative. that is, it could help readers in clearly discerning the content of the narrative because some of the experiences discussed in it were already known to them. for fludernik, narratology is a genre which describes constant christopher babatunde ogunyemi feminist and structural narratologie as identity reconfigurations in african narratives: a meta-critical exposition of literary articles 22 variables and combinations typical of narrative and to clarify how these characteristics of narrative texts connect to the framework of theoretical models (fludernik, 2009, p. 3). narratology views narrative structure and the way it affects societal perceptions is reexamined. in principle, narratology can refer to any systematic study of narratives; although in practice, the application of narratology could be rather restricted to the narrative. this is because the way this affects societal’s views that it is applied structurally to the study, criticism and understanding of male autobiographical narratives and the question of gender in nigeria. narratology and its trends in narrative art ‘narratology’ as a word simply means ‘narratologie’ which tzvetan todorov (1989) in his grammaire du decameron forms has been subsequently and continuously used and applied by many writers to different areas and peroids in literature. although some references may be traced back to the aristotle’s classic poetics, modern discourse in the enquiry and interest in narratology is believed to commence with viadimir prop, the russian formalist who wrote morphology of the folktale in 1928. looking at the origin of the work, narratology has a strong relevance and affiliation with the structuralist interest in a system of formed description that could be analysed in any narrative work of art. according to culler (1981), different aspects of narratology could be found in any narrative work. although culler (1981) observes that the distinction in narratology is mainly suggested by the russian formalists who used both fabula and sjuzhetas a successive elements in narrative. these successive elements have also been perceived as the same dichotomy, but they would be discussed in relation to the narrative act in the commentary as it advances. for example the use of (historie /recit, story/plot) in the text is a demonstration of this dichotomy. (the pursuit of signs, 1981, p. 13). in other words, for any work to be recognised as narratological or otherwise may have much more to do with other forms of narrative, such as works in autobiographical narratives, stories, and the sociology of language. according to labov (2006, p. 190), ‘narratology examines conversional analysis and discourse analysis which examines the course of frequent and spontaneous verbal interaction in the work of art’. however, constituent narrative structure could be included in the interpretation of male autobiographical narratives. based on the above, it is essential and extremely important to demonstrate that narratology could enable readers and also critics to critically visualise the content of the narrative, the structure of the autobiographical writings and genderized writings in any text, their cultural artefacts and the movement of time and space in their narrative forms could be examined as well. autobiographical writings, genderized writings and other narratives sometimes demonstrate popular culture about the people beginning from their personal lives to their public functioning and finally in the expression of their civic responsibilities in different societies. roland barthes’ originality in this discourse provides another way of analysing the narrative plot in art. he refuses to be limited by traditional factors which hinder and reduces the understanding of the concept of narratology in any literary art as well. similarly, nwachukwu-agbada (2003) investigates the dynamics of autobiographical writings by asserting that these works discuss ideas which are spread across some periods of time in human history. his conception is based on the environment and ‘the result is that practically all the africa literary autobiographies are public gestures which are derived from a personal struggle with life and agents on the way of psychic, economic, material individual and national fulfilment’ (nwachukwu-agbada, 2003, p. 103). to him, a series of issues which african autobiographical narratives examine, demonstrate different aspects of discourse in narratology. nigerian autobiographies cannot be treated in isolation because they incorporate english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 23 various aspects of nigerian expressions which were also of concern to narratologists (nwachukwu-agbada, 1987, p. 97). essentially, it could also help in the understanding of different constructions of gender and identity in nigerian literature and society because some writers in nigeria see gender as display or as performance or an act which could be seen in some of the works coming out of the nigerian literary environments. some critics are interested in critiquing different types of narratives because they show how some writers demonstrate gender configurations which sparked various reactions among people (see west & garcia, 1988, p. 14; zimmerman & west, 1975, p. 157; lucal 1999, p. 19; & golfman, 1957, p. 22). to henry macdonald (1988) narratology can be traditionally projected as the story of narrative fiction which examines actions and their articulated meanings (macdonald, 1988, p. 1). he goes on to observe that narratology visualizes the narrative presentation of the story using readers’ encounters. the story is perceived as a distinct part of the presentation and also constitutes a constructed tale. epstein (1988) demonstrates that it examines the interpretation of discoursein the text, and such re-interpretation could be ‘twice-told all telling ultimately retellings’ (epstein, 1988, p. 230). this means that research in narratology is could be regarded as an effort that is both prescriptive and descriptive in nature. in another development, epstein also remarks that research in narratology may be socially different or altered’ which means that discourses are not usually permanent’ in all situations. a clearer insight to the understanding of narratology and feminist scholarship is given by lanser (1986) in her essay which is entitled: ‘toward a feminist narratology’. this essay critically examined that over the years, structuralist narratology has removed interest and attention away from women studies and gender criticisms; other feminist insights have, therefore, been grossly overlooked by this narratological school as well. in the real sense of the matter and to remove restrictions, narratology is a discipline which is virtually applied to all fields and to all genres. it is basically a way of perceiving texts by both men and women using a variety ways of new analysis (p. 674). however, she probes further that her desire in the aforementioned essay is to re-examine the contributions of structural narratology to feminism, women criticism and the projection of women in literature. though narratology contributed considerably to the reconfiguration of women in narrative, there are some limitations to this because not until recently gender concerns have not been fully explored by narratology. therefore, most narratologists treat issues relating to masculinity in male texts which had been in analysis over the years. the projection of male formulations in some texts by most narratologist sometimes makes narratological study difficult for female feminist. in wisdom and age in chinua achebe’s things fall apart (1958) there is a deliberate treatment of male dominance under the auspices of wisdom in relation to age without considering any characteristic feature of women who also constitute the african literary ideologue. this is what lanser means by a deliberate attempt to use narratology within the structuralist perspective as instruments of oppression and suppression of women in their space. structural narratology and its inadequacies in order to remove the inadequacies of narratology in the understanding of women writing, feminism, plot and the question of gender in literature, feminist narratolgy reconfigures, re-evaluates and re-traces the portrayal of women and identity in women writings. it challenges the stereotypic projection of women in narratives and suggests a new direction which reverses inferior basis for a proper projection of women, gender and identity in the plot and language of texts. by so doing, she submits that ‘the major impact of feminism on narratology, will be to raise new questions, to add to the narratologial christopher babatunde ogunyemi feminist and structural narratologie as identity reconfigurations in african narratives: a meta-critical exposition of literary articles 24 distinctions that already exists. to probe further, feminist critic attempts to reconcile the way and manner language and signs have been used by structural narratologists in their analysis to suppress women representation in fiction and in other writings because these critics have mostly been one sided in their analyses. the essence is for critics and narratologists for find the usefulness of narrative, content and context of the story, the proper presentation of the characher: male or female and their relevance to gender relations. similarly, feminist narratology raises some questions which show that the standard plot discussed by narratologists do not really conform to the conventional norm by not explaining some fundamental features of women in some selected texts. this is to denote that structural narratology is yet to provide the most adequate distinction of story and plot. the need to shift attention to feminist narratology becomes expedient because it encourages unbiased criticism of literature and the proper projection of the real image of the woman and the real re-configuration of identity and gender in texts. feminist narratology feminist narratology is an important aspect of narratology which could deconstruct narrative and explain some ambiguities in male writings and multiplicities of meanings and interpretations of texts ascribed to them. this is an aspect of narratology which could help to correct patriarchal stereotypes and ethnocentric views in narrative works (bal, 1985, p. 12), particularly in autobiographical works and in other fictional works. through the reinterpretation of the narrative text, there is a need to really determine the major issues in the story in order to ascertain if those discussed preoccupations are culturally determined in the plot of the story. it is, therefore, pertinent to demonstrate how narratology helps in the understanding of gender, identity and social themes in nigerian post-colonial literature. post-colonial writers in nigeria incorporate gender configuration, power relations and the portrayal of women as embodiments of their narrative arts. likewise, these writers in nigeria assigned various roles to women and men in their narratives which give some concerns to critics and readers alike. the application of narratology to narratives explains some complex gender and identity ambiguities which are the foregrounding issues in some male writings. example of such ambiguities in the narrative is well delineated when narratology is applied to the narrative, such as the creation of male subject in the work and that of a female object. this situation sometimes calls for reversal in the story where there is a re-construction which allows for the woman to take the lead role and become the female hero in the narrative. however, when a narratologist decides to examine the body of knowledge in the narrative, the significance of female body and how it interprets the social milieu could be underscored and this situation could aid the understanding of gender and identity. this is because the power of the narrator and what s/he represents in literature could be reinterpreted and this informs the reason why de lauretis (1984, p. 24) asserts that ‘women are heroes of their own stories’. in the process of writing back and correcting some narrative anomalies in masculine writings, she brings in new innovations and concepts which help to re-configure society in the appropriate way. she pushes this further because this type of narratology exemplifies how stories use characterisation to delineate societal problems which women are actively involved in and how feminist narratologists attempt to reverse masculine positions in narratives in order to achieve social and cultural transformation for egalitarian society. in the feminist context, narrative systematises the text in order to potentially free narratology from ethnocentric, identity representation and patriarchal configurations which are mostly discussed in many male writings in africa. by so doing, the narrative would not be biased and central to the promotion of masculine tendencies in english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 25 narratives. similarly, bal (1985, p. 22) and fludernik (2009, p. 15) agree that narratology itself is central to the structuring system of binary opposition because it gives room for the narrative art to examine its oppositions and ambiguities. this means that there is a universal appeal in a narrative when it examines the culture of a group of people by attempting a binary resolution in order to appeal to feminist consciousness. in addition, to demonstrate and elaborate the usefulness of narratology, critics often apply this to some literary ideologies in order to comprehend literary concepts so that the benefits of narratology and its refinements could be properly internalised in the texts. likewise, to properly comprehend post-colonial issues in literature, such as social themes, the portrayal of women, gender construction and identity representation, narratology sometimes produces an adequate framework for the understanding of these concepts in the narrative. dwivedi et al. (2010, p. 6) uphold the aforementioned and submit that ‘the condition of post-coloniality has been variously comprehended through metanarratives of fall and decline, progress, enlightenment, and the attainment of civilization and democracy. however, narratives produced in the historical phase explain related works of fiction, travelogues and autobiographical accounts awakening and liberation’. consequently, the application of narratology in nigeria could fill the lacuna in the portrayal of women in autobiographical and other gendered writings. it could also explain the configuration of gender, identity representation and the re-interpretation of social themes and masculinities in nigerian post-colonial literature and history. narratology and the interpretation of texts in ‘genderization in male autobiographical narratives in nigeria’ (2011), narratology is used to interpret some activities of characters and events in nigerian social and political space through narratives which centre on various experiences around men and women. the application of meta-narrative interpretation in narratology illuminates the message and portrays a clearer image for the reader and the critic. what this implies is that the primary object of interpretation is the narrative act of telling the story. ‘the story’ expresses the purpose of criticism. logically speaking, both the content and the telling of the story are narrative acts, which are some preoccupations of narratology. similarly, in the article, wisdom and age in chinua achebe’s things fall apart (1958), narratology is discussed andwisdom is used by the culture as a model for measuring the knowledge of men and women in the patriarchal nigerian and igbo society. however, it re-invokes masculine importance using okonkwo the lead character as emulation for all in society. this gendered classification of wisdom and age is done at the expense of feminity and it informs a psychological tool which is used to further suppress women. this situation sometimes explains the distinction between story and narrative act which is commonly conceptualized by narratologists as well. this distinction according to mcdonald is traditional because it does not provide any other means of identical formulations in the work of art (macdonald, 1988: 4).the analysis is dynamic because autobiographical and gendered narratives are complex phenomena which express series of formulations about ‘self’ in nigerian literature and it is a portrayal of gendered feelings as well. similarly, studies in these aforementioned articles blend narratological theory with autobiographical approach and with gender theory in order to show various relationships and ambiguities of these gendered writers. the need for the application of the trio is to bring out social relevance in nigeria and in africa. to portray this, other researchers have used many approaches to examine narratives in their own ways. for example, strauss and corbin (1998) applied the analytic strategic approach in their literary application of art. eyoh (2003), raditlhalo (2003), and chukwuma (1990) use the sociological approach as suitable critical christopher babatunde ogunyemi feminist and structural narratologie as identity reconfigurations in african narratives: a meta-critical exposition of literary articles 26 framework, which clearly illuminates the position of characterization and how it becomes relevant to the contemporary society in autobiographical and critical analysis. the first aim is to identify elements of existing scholarly definitions which support autobiographical narratives and then relate the approach to narratology. however, both ‘genderization in male autobiographical narratives in nigeria’ (2011), and wisdom and age in chinua achebe’s things fall apart’ (1958) apply narratological tenets to the analysis of texts and criticisms of the social themes in the postcolonial nigerian experience. to start with the ‘genderization in male autobiographical narratives’ (2011) most male autobiographical works presented in the article portray some deliberate and inveterate marginalization of the african woman by patriarchy. likewise, the article ‘wisdom and age’ is a cognitive examination of the mental state of men which presents the nigerian male culture and how these male writers, particularly in nigeria were using their works to over-exemplify masculinity without recourse to females who are part of such society. however, writings in this regard loose the social construction because it does not enforce the performative aspect of art. writing should be able to reinterpret and re-configure the cultural phenomenon in contemporary setting in order to prepare a suitable environment for both men and women in relation to their social and cultural perspectives. in ‘genderization…’ (2011) while women are frequently exposed to psychological, physical and social violence. ‘wisdom and age..’ (2010) is a psychological and cognitive empowerment of masculine tenets at the expense of feminity. according to this article, ‘it is evident that okonkwo, despite his tender age applies the instrument of wisdom to changing his class for good believing in “solid personal achievements” is akin to wisdom. okonkwo uses his wisdom to address strength, energy disposition and quest for new innovation. because okonkwo (2010, p. 123) positions himself in a wise dimension, he grows from strength to strength’. consequently, this leads to sexual and cultural relegation of women through narratives which their male counterparts evoked using the autobiographical and psychological works as instruments of portrayal of themes and subject matters. these papers combine previous research on women and some practical and critical expressions about their feelings to delineate genderization in selected male narratives which propel masculinity in nigeria. to further explain this, it is pertinent to note that most contemporary societies and cultures in nigeria are male dominated in many areas. so these societies and cultures go further to create beliefs system, economic exploitation of nigerian women and other forms of injustices which limit the place of women in literature and society. consequently, the work calls for the need to embark upon a socio-politicoeconomic re-configuration and cultural integration for african and nigerian development in the aspects of developing literature and making people feel the positive impact of globalization in order to make some meaningful contributions from the african woman when the cultural trends are reversed. as earlier observed, male writers have frequently used their works to elevate themselves beyond normal proportion in nigeria. in essence the elevation of self by male autobiographical narratives has been seen by raditlhalo (2003, p. 16) as a recurring problem confronting the proper explanation of the roles of gender in contemporary african society. similarly, okpara (1990, p. 17) asserts that the marginalization of women by male chauvinistic writers affects the place of women in african literature. this has become the ‘usual’ trend in male-dominated literature in africa; and it explains more situations in gender and social themes in the post-colonial nigeria. she further observes that although the african woman is repressed by the normative patterns of her male-dominated culture, she is well informed of other social and political forces in society which may take precedence english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 27 over sexual politics (okpara, 1990, p. 18; chukwuma, 1990, p. 11; chukwuma, 2004, p. 10). she would rather identify more with the african man in the struggle for social and political freedom despite the domination (okpara, 1990, p. 158). although, in the course of identifying with her male counterpart, the autobiographical writer still over-exercises his control over the woman. this makes chukwuma to remark that the woman is portrayed in various works including the autobiographical narrative as ‘a handicapped daughter, wife and mother even when the decisions affect her directly’ (chukwuma, 2004, p. 131). different works in nigeria have portrayed this fact which chukwuma (2004, p. 132) observed and these works have also shown that the most feasible way to bring into the limelight female subjugation in written autobiographies is her economic dependence on men and the social demand that a woman gives all her earnings to the home. consequently, in ‘confronting inequity in nigerian social milieu: apprehending class stratification in festus iyayi’s violence’ (2013) females have started critiquing and reexamining these male essentialist assumptions which require that they give all their earnings and their efforts to the family. by implication, feminist scholars have also started to develop feminist theory which is based on a theoretical or philosophical analysis of women’s liberation politics. this gradually leads to women’s studies which emerged to look into different problems confronting the woman and the urgent need for solutions. in the aforementioned articles, feminist politics and women’s studies put a spotlight on the inequities between women and men in almost all nigerian societies. in the west, women campaigned to gain equal rights and opportunities and in the developing world, this was applied to aid them in development. it is imperative to state that there are vast differences between the needs of women in developed nations and their counterparts in developing nations too. according to butler, there is a need to understand different approaches in the appraisal of the inequalities between men and women and between women in developed and developing economies in order to ascribe roles which are culturally motivated and performative in the realisation of their potentials (butler, 2013, p. 77). therefore, if the needs of women in nigeria are identified and ascribed, there would be more relevant social functions in the scheme of things in their encounter with their male counterparts. the above mentioned articles also focus on political and economic inequalities which exist among women and men in nigeria. these articles discuss the term ‘gender’ and showcase how some male writers and their cultures make it synonymous with ‘women’. it is pertinent to note that it is not until the 1980s that the field of masculinity studies emerged in literary discourse. masculinity (or men’s) studies systematically focused on the construction and the depiction of males as superior phenomenon (spivak, 1989, p. 223; spengeman, 1980, p. 27; smith & watson, 2010, p. 56). the mentioned articles further analyse ways in which gender and power operate in the lives of men that develop the masculinity theory. this new field of study has started to highlight the ways in which gender inequalities affect not only women, but also men (spengeman, 1980, p. 28). more recently, a multidisciplinary field of study has emerged; it examines the cultural representations and the life experience of being male or female. in ‘okotp’ bitek’s song of lawino: singing about the rights of present african women’ (2014) cultural representation places women as second class citizens. this breads hatred, jealousy and unhealthy rivalry in the family: among children and wives in the case of polygamous setting. this paper expresses the plight of lawino the oppressed african woman who is handicapped by unbridled competition in the family and the need to satisfy the husband since he now has a new bride. in most parts of black africa, women experience such oppressive situation and it culminates into depression and rejection. christopher babatunde ogunyemi feminist and structural narratologie as identity reconfigurations in african narratives: a meta-critical exposition of literary articles 28 in some other situations, poor men who cannot afford to pay bride price sometimes stay away from marriage while those men who can afford to pay as many go home with new bride every new season. this allows for an analysis of gender for both women and men, and it is used to interrogate the phenomenon in a wider range of disciplines and also in the interrogation of narrative and poetic truth. butler’s gender performativity and the nexus of relevance butler’s gender performance helps in the understanding of truth in order to underscore the nexus of life experience in the areas of social relevance of the woman and also in the development of the contemporary nigerian and african society. the application of gender theory to poetic and narrative works explains the relationship which exists between the male/female characters and their social functions in the actualisation of the concept of self-narrative in the post-colonial nigeria. in addition, most novelists in nigeria use their expressions of narrative and poetic meta-texts to explore the place of feminism, identity and gender in africa. examples abound. chinua achebe creates the classic character-okonkwo and entrusts him over every events and activities in umuofia community. the plot of the novel revolves around him from beginning to the end of the story. in ‘wisdom and age’ (2010) most nigerian critics applaud the fame and prosperity of okonkwo by acclaiming this factor through their perceived psychological stream of consciousness. in the article, ‘we examine the novel textually by pinpointing some elements of wisdom that was demonstrated by okonkwo’. the impression created was as if only okonkwo existed in umuofia community. in most okonkwo criticism, critics sometimes genderised other men but women suffer most as a result of the criticism on patriarchy arising in african and nigerian society. this means that while analysing respondents’ responses, most people stood in favour of okonkwo the supposedly male protagonist of this classic novel, things fall apart. this expression is expected to show life experience as it is in the original way. it is imperative to note that many scholars have examined various experiences in their own ways, particularly with recourse to life expectations in the post-colonial nigerian literature which tries to write back to the colonialists. this process of writing back to the centre demonstrates african reactions to colonialism and subsequent post-colonial experiences (see chukwuma, 2003, p. 12, okpara 1990, p. 11). this takes us to the interrogation of social issues in order to further examine the sociopolitical and economic problems ravaging the post-colonial africa and nigeria. in ‘living anonymity: exile as motif in lenrie peters he walks alone’ (2013) most emerging african states suffer the problem of identity and abject poverty. this makes some privilege few attempts to seek a new life by engaging in either collective migration or forced migration. some could take to permanent exile in order to run away from poverty and inequality which preoccupies most african countries. most people suffer in a large scale and these experiences could constitute some social themes which the commentary sets out to examine. however, in nigeria poetry have been used to delineate such themes, such as violence, corruption, gender imposition and economic manipulation in nigeria. example of such works include osundare’s ‘they too are the earth’ and soyinka’s ‘telephone conversation’ in ‘living anonymity..’(2013) which demonstrates social problems of exile and psychological intimidation people frequently go through (p. 205). in the paper, themes were examined to show the state of the country and how people react to some of these issues. to be specific, poverty is a theme that is prevalent among men and women in nigeria because leaders have not been able to judiciously use the country’s potentials to develop the people. the paper shows that people were not comfortable with problems of economic breakdown, youth restiveness, unemployment and the emergence of class english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 29 system in most sectors of the economy results in the reason for forced exile and migration. in this paper, social themes and trends in genderization, attempts were carried out in explaining salient points which constitute the nigerian experience. this research relies on tripartite theories of narratology, gender theory and autobiographical theories, but most especially relies on gender theory because of the overriding thematic preoccupation of genderisation which is a cut across phenomenon in these articles. the application of gender theory sometimes explains the relationship which exists between male and female in nigerian culture and it also evaluates the themes of gender and development in african and the nigerian writings. so far, narratology been the scientific study of the narratives makes references to history and the genderised periods in the analysis of two articles cited above. this narratological position agrees with white when he opines that history helps in the construction of works of art in society. it also explains some ambiguities found in the narrative as to the observation of white when he opines that the twentieth century ushers in a period when history cannot be considered an art or science because a body of literature has created many doubts about the status of history either as science or art. this is to show the complex relationships between history and literature and to further demonstrate how history has aided in the critical understanding of the literary works of art. for some specific emphasis, and to understand how white handles historical relevance in the narratives, the commentary briefly examines sjuzhet and fabula and explains their narratological contents on the narratives with regards to how white handles the historical elements in the narrative. viktor shklovsky and vladimir propp, russian formalists were the first to use these terms and ever since then sjuzhet and fabula had gained frequency in narratological studies. however, sjuzhet details the various employments of historical periods in the narrative and roles history plays in the formation of the plot in the narratives. it also explains how history is relevant in narratives and the understanding of the behaviour of human beings as explained in the narrative with its various implications ascribed to it. likewise, fabula is the story itself; it examines concurrently the content information in the narrative. fabula details a chronological order of presentation of the story and enables the reader to follow the story in order to understand the relationships among those narratives troupes, such as plot, character, and characterization. it is pertinent to note that some historical references were carried along in the explanation of those autobiographical and patriarchal writing. this historical references stimulated those current experiences africans have despite independence had long been gained. the application of sjuzhet and fabula would be explored as the commentary progresses. through fabula or the plot structure in most nigerian narratives, we have been able to see alienation as a social issue and at same time as something which denotes various levels of genderised feelings in most of the cited articles. alienation could be seen asan aspect of gender performance among people that live in communities. however, behringer sheds more light on some performances of gender in society. she agrees that ‘the doing gender framework explains the freedom men and women pose in creating their own gender, individuals have option as to how they will perform gender, they fundamentally have the ability to craft, mould and at the same time fashion their environments’the way they want it or perceive of it (behringer, 2008, p. 52). similarly, most women in nigeria frequently complain of alienation whenever it is time to be accorded some serious functions, particularly when it has to do with their male counterparts. this situation is evident in some nigerianclassic novels like achebe’s things fall apart (1958) and in other texts or narratives which set out to demonstrate the performance of masculinity over females in nigerian society. in things fall apart (1958) christopher babatunde ogunyemi feminist and structural narratologie as identity reconfigurations in african narratives: a meta-critical exposition of literary articles 30 achebe creates okonkwo the main character who is at the centre of his own world. he is loved by his umuofia people. being the ‘agu, and the ebube dike’ of his community meaning, the ‘eye’, ‘the voice’, ‘the roaring lion’ and the strong man of his community, he does not want to be called a woman and a weakling. in achebe’s igbo culture and indeed most african cultures, women were ascribed as weaklings and second class citizens (chukwuma, 2004, p. 19). okonkwo the male protagonist demonstrates his masculinity by marrying many wives, having many children and taking rash decisions without listening to any counsel from a woman or asking a woman to decide for him in some strategic decisions (achebe 1958: 70). an example of the rash decision he took was the neglect of one of his wife’s admonition against having a hand in the death of ikemefuna. ikemefuna was the little boy kept in his custody, and in the course of living together, the boy now calls him a father. ikemefuna was given to umuofia people as ransome for the atrocities done to them and he was being prepared for sacrifice so that his blood could appease the umuofia community. furthermore, in most african communities, women have no inheritance; they do not attend family meetings and they are strangers to their families, particularly among okpodon clan of cross river state, the irun akoko people of ondo sate and the igbo people of nigeria among many others where they demonstrate with grandeur the emergence of a male child with pomp and pageantry at the expense of the female child. this situation explains why traditional tiv man of benue state in nigeria will marry many wives so that he could use any of his women to entertain his friends and to satisfy their sexual pleasure at nights when such friends come visiting and he expects such ‘friendly gestures’ in reciprocation when he visits such friend in future. the culture of using wives to entertain friends cut across some tiv and idoma peoples of nigeria (chukwuma, 2003, p. 23). it is also acclaimed that some yorubas and ijaws would marry many wives to justify their wealth and the number of children they have so that they could be accorded much respect among their peers (chukwuma, 2003, p. 25). this explains concurrently why some african men would give out their daughters as gifts to strong men in society for marriage. the act of entertaining best friends with the wife is seen by both the tiv man and some brainwashed women in benue nigeria as a preservation of their cultural acts and friendliness since there is a sharing of love together. ironically, these women are not complaining openly and there is no open protest though there could be sorrow and depression which lead to gender violence. this could probably be the reason why the hiv/aids is dominant in benue state more than any other states in nigeria (mwakikagile, 2001, p. 18). this situation sometimes leads to alienation, fear and intimidation among women. to show this alienation further, the notion behind the creation of ‘i’ as male metaphor and other forms of social identities separate the man far away from the woman in social contexts. this is demonstrated in the article ‘interrogating power relations’ (2011) where violence and intimidation of women in society become manifested in many sectors in nigeria. women experience high level of suffering in their contacts with males. this could furtherdemonstrate women’s social identity and relevance, gender differences and struggle for survival (‘interrogating power’, 2011, p. 307). furthermore, ‘confronting inequity’ (2013) attempts to show various expressions of readers as they readthrough the post-colonial works emanating from nigeria. readers were able to see the level of violence and protest levied on the weak, poor and the hopeless in the article. however, in the readers-response approach; the critic really situates what he detests and how he perceives as the notion of gender in literary works of art. the same situation is true when it comes to the reader of the narrative text. kafalenos sheds more light on this when she observes that readersresponse approach is an essential narrative art. therefore, interpretations and causes of english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 31 narrative events are contextual in nature (kafalenos, 2001, p. 33). kafalenos is not referring to the message but to the narrator and readers and their perceived interpretations. also, the way and manner through which critics demonstrate gender equality and other social themes help in re-shaping the postcolonial experience in nigeria (‘genderization, p. 37). conclusion this paper examined structural narratology, feminist narratology and suggested that in africa, the instruments of identity; alienation and gender construction have been exemplified in most post-colonial narratives through expression, body language and related actions. with various explications of narratology in delineating gender interpretations, the paper improves on feminist narratology as a most suitable theory which could be modelled with butler’s performativity to showcase relevant discourse about women in future research in african literature. references achebe, c. 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(1988). conversational shift work: a study to tropical ‘transitions between women and men’. social problems, 35, 55-575. zimmerman, d. h., & west, c. (1975). sex role, interruptions and silences in conversation. in b. thorne and n. henley (eds.), language and sex: difference and dominance. rowley, ma: newbury house. 73 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur erwin oktoma department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia. e-mail: oktoma09erwin@yahoo.com styfanus mardiyono department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia. e-mail: mardiyonostyfanus@yahoo.com apa citation: oktoma, e & mardiyono, s. (2013). the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 73-83 received: 09-07-2013 accepted: 30-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: this paper is descriptive qualitative which describes the types of presuppositions and their meaning in the short stories by silvester goridus sukur. the research questions of this paper are; what are the types of presupposition and dominant type of presupposition in the short stories by silvester goridus sukur. in order to analyze the data, the writer employs yule’s theory which divides presupposition into 6 types: existential presupposition, factive presupposition, lexical presupposition, structural presupposition, non-factive presupposition and counterfactual presupposition. the data of the research are sentences which contains presupposition triggers. the results of this study shows that based on yule’s theory, it has been found that there are 219 presuppositions. 129 existential presuppositions or 58,90 %, 47 lexical presuppositions or 21,56 %, 9 structural presuppositions or 4,10 %, 15 factive presuppositions or 6,84 %, 7 non factive presuppositions or 3,19 % and 3 counterfactual presuppositions or 1,36 %. keywords: presupposition, type of presupposition, presupposition triggers, short stories of silvester goridus sukur. introduction this research investigated the presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur. this study aimed to find out the types of presupposition and the dominant type of presupposition used in the short stories by silvester goridus sukur. pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning (yule 1996). it is related to the interpretation what people mean in a particular context and how the context influences what is said. furthermore, levinson (1983) stated that pragmatics is the study of the relation between language and context basic to an account of language understanding. pragmatics is the last stage of linguistics started with a narrow discipline facing with physical data of speech becomes a wide discipline taking in form, meaning, and context (leech 1983). saeed (1997) stated that presuppositions are produced by particular words or construction, together sometimes called presupposition triggers. yule (1996) also stated that when speaker’s assumption expressed is analyzed, presupposition has been associated with the use of a large number of words, phrases, and structures. that is why there are presupposition triggers consisting of words, phrases and structures. the presupposition triggers according to karttunen (1973) in levinson (1983) are definite descriptions, factive verbs, erwin oktoma & styfanus mardiyono the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur 74 implicative verbs, iterratives, change of state verbs, verbs like judging, temporal clause, cleft sentence, implicit clefts with stressed constituents, comparisons and contrasts, non-restrictive relative clause, counterfactual conditionals questions. yule (1996) stated that there are six types of presupposition: (1) existential presupposition, this type of presupposition is not only assumed to be present in possessive construction but more generally in any definite phrases; (2) factive presupposition that presupposed information following a verb like ‘know’ can be treated as a fact; (3) non-factive presupposition, it is the one that assumed not to be true; (4) lexical presupposition, in the case of lexical presupposition, the speaker’s use of a particular expression is taken to presuppose another (unstated) concept;(5) structural presupposition, this type of presupposition can lead listeners to believe that the information presented is necessarily true, rather than just the presupposition of the person asking the question; (6) counter factual presupposition, the meaning of what is presupposed is not only true, but is the opposite of what is true, or ‘contrary to facts’. presupposition are something like the background beliefs of the speaker – propositions whose truth takes for granted in making his statement (stalnaker 1999) so when the speaker wants to speak a and b, the speaker takes for granted b as if the listener understand the whole meaning or a. so in the presupposition there are explicit meaning and implicit meaning. explicit meaning is what is actually said; meanwhile implicit meaning is what left unsaid. according to grundy (2000), there are two ways that can be used to identify presupposition. the first way is through presupposition triggers, and the second one is to think of them as ways of expressing shared or non controversial knowledge. presupposition trigger can be used to reveal the presupposition from utterance or sentence. according to karttunen (1973) in levinson (1983) there are 12 kinds of such triggers: (1) definite descriptions used proper names and possessives construction (keenan 1972); (2) factive verbs is presupposing truth of the proportional complement. verbs like regret, aware, realize, odd, know, be sorry that, be proud that, be indifferent that, be glad that, and be sad that are included to this type (kiparsky & kiparsky 1972); (3) implicative verbs: manage, forget, happen, and avoid are the examples of implicative verbs (karttunen 1972); (4) presupposition trigger is change of state verbs such as stop, begin, continue, start, finish, carry on, cease, take, leave, enter, come, go, arrive, etc. (sellar 1954, karttunen 1973); (5) iterratives is presupposing that is being repeated. words like again, anymore, return, another time, to come back, restore, repeat, and for the nth time are examples of iterative. unlike the other presupposition, the implications are not attributed to the speaker, so much as to the subject of the verb as judging. the sentence of agatha accused ian of plagiarism presupposes that (agatha thinks) plagiarism is bad. the word criticize also includes to this type. (6) in temporal clause, such as before, while, since, after, during, whenever, as are the triggers of this temporal clause (frege 1892 in heinamaki 1972). (7) cleft sentence is argued to presuppose that something ‘y-ed’ (as in it was x that y-ed). it was henry that kissed rosie presupposes that someone kissed rosie (keenan 1972). (8) implicit clefts with stressed constituents, these particular presuppositions that seem to arise from two cleft sentence seem also to be triggered simply by heavy stress on a constituent (chomsky 1972; wilson & sperber 1979); (9) comparisons and contrasts may be marked by stress, 75 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee by particle like too, back, in return, or by comparative constructions; (10) non-restrictive relative clause, as in an example of the proto harrappans flourished 2800-2650 b.c. were great temple builders presupposes that the proto-harrappans flourished 2800-2650 b.c; (11) counterfactual conditionals have been claimed to presuppose falsity of the antecedent. if hannibal had only had twelve more elephants, the romans languages would this day exist presupposes that hannibal didn’t have twelve more elephants; (12) the last is questions. wh-questions introduce the presuppositions obtained by replacing the wh-word by the appropriate existentially quantified variable. the presupposition as intended by the linguists is found in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur chosen as data sources. in the short stories found the information that is a part what is communicated but not said in which the writer of the story seems to take for granted in making an utterance. therefore, the writer is curious to know a part better; the one what is communicated but not said. method all of the data in this research were taken from the short stories of silvester goridus sukur. concerning the method of collecting data, the writer did some strategies below. first, reading the short stories. second, identifying the words related to presupposition triggers, table 1: categories of presupposition adopted from yule (1996) no type example presupposition 1 existential 2 factive 3 non-factive 4 lexical 5 structural 6 counterfactual then collecting the sentences contained presupposition triggers. last, listing the sentences into the table categories of presupposition. the researcher focused on two books entitled “striptease dancer” and “one night with a maid”, firstly published in 2009. there are 11 short stories in striptease dancer; a striptease dancer, my sweetest julia, pretty woman, my son’s order, luxurious toilet, a shoplifter, going dutch, wet the bed, mr. mouse, a blue umbrella and not my friend’s room. meanwhile, there are 13 short stories in one night with a maid; one night with a maid, a passionatenight kissing, going to kiddo, true love, bad holiday, a bowl of water, dating with a dog, a crazy man, never-ending love, my radio, my-ex girlfriend, special gift, the parking attendant. the data analysis of presupposition were grouped based on the theory of yule (1996) in which the presupposition appeared from the presupposition triggers. meanwhile, to know the presupposition triggers, the writer employed the theory of kartuneen imparting there are 31 presupposition triggers that kartuneen collected (levinson, 1983) to obtain validity of the research, the steps below were applied by the researcher: first of all, the writer identified the word contained presupposition,then classifying the data into kinds of presupposition based on george yule’s theory. to know the dominant type erwin oktoma & styfanus mardiyono the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur 76 is commonly used in the short stories by silvester goridus sukur, the writer employed the formula as follow: fk rel = fk ∑f x 100 fk rel : frequency of relative cumulative (percentage of types) fk : frequency of cumulative (total types frequency of sub-category) ∑f : frequency of total (total of all categories) 100 % : percentage (subana, 2000) the percentage of occurrences: existential : 138 occurrences x 100 = 63,01 % 219 lexical : 47 occurrences x 100 = 21,46 % 219 factive : 15 occurrences x 100 = 6,84 % 219 non-factive : 7 occurrences x 100 = 3,19 % 219 structural : 9 occurrences x 100% = 4,10 % 219 counterfactual : 3 occurrences x 100% = 1,36 % 219 result and discussion there was a calculation to have the dominant type of the presupposition of the research, applied to know the dominant type of presupposition. afterwards the writer collected the data and classified them. here is the formulation of the dominant type as follow: fk rel = fk ∑f x 100 fk rel : frequency of relative cumulative (percentage of types) fk : frequency of cumulative (total types frequency of sub-category) ∑f : frequency of total (total of all categories) 100 % : percentage as the calculation of the occurrences, it was found that dominant type presupposition used in the short stories by silvester goridus sukur was existential presupposition (63,01%), then lexical presupposition (21,46%), factive (6,84%), non-factive (3,19%), structural (4,10%), and counterfactual (1,36%). striptease dancer striptease dancer tells us about the story when silvester had a birthday and he got a surprise from his girlfriend and friends (see appendix for futher story). in this story, it was found 15 presuppositions; nine existential presuppositions, five lexical presuppositions and one structural presupposition. there was no factive, non factive and counterfactual in this story. 77 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee my sweetest julia this story tells us about silvester’s love letter; he intended to give his love letter to julia, but somehow, his friend found the letter and read in front of the class (see appendix for futher story) in this story the writer found that there were 14 presuppositions; seven existential presuppositions, four lexical presuppositions, two factive presuppositions and one structural presuppositions. there was no non factive and counterfactual presupposition in this story. table 2: research data of striptease dancer no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential it is my birthday. (2:1:9) -silvester had a birthday this data is triggered by adjective possessive “my”. so it is categorized into existential presupposition. 2. i wanted to go to movie with my girl friend, dewi (1:2:9) -there is a movie -silvester had girl friend this data is triggered by adjective possessive” my”, the name of the place and a person. when it is negated, the presupposition remains constant. 3. structural what the hell have you done to me? (9:6:11) -silvster’ friends had done something this is categorized into structural, because it uses wh question. it means that by using wh question, it is already known the situation before that question is being asked. table 3: research data of my sweetest julia no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential almost every normal boy in my school fell in love with her. (2:1:17) -there were normal boys -silvester had a school, -there was a girl whom every boy fell in love with this sentence is categorized into existential, it is triggered by definite noun phrase” every normal boy”, adjective “my” and pronoun “her”. when it is negated, the presupposition remains constant. 2. factive anton read some sentences that i knew very well (3:5:18) -anton read some sentences this is categorized into factive presupposition, because it is triggered by factive verb “knew” using knew, it is supposed to be fact. 3. structural how could anton have a letter with such sentences? (6:5:18) -anton had a letter it is categorized into structural presupposition, it is triggered by who question. luxurious toilet luxurious toilet tells us about silvester’s girlfriend birthday party. at that occasion, silvester wanted to urinate but suddenly the lamps went out, so it was so hard to find the toilet. and he found the room but in fact that room was not toilet but the room of his girlfriend’ parents.(see appendix for further story). in this story, the presuppositions found were four existential presuppositions, six lexical presuppositions, on factive presupposition and one structural presupposition. erwin oktoma & styfanus mardiyono the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur 78 going dutch this story tells us about the story in which misunderstanding happened among his friend, the security and him about the payment of the lunch (see table 4: research data of luxurious toilet no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential one december evening, my girl friend invited me to attend her birthday party in her house (1:1:33) -i had a girlfriend -she had a birthday party, -she had a house this sentence is triggered by adjective possesive “my”, “her”. so it is categorized into existential presupposition. when it is negated, the presupposition remains constant 2. lexical i kept on going to the toilet.(12:1:33) -sylvester had gone to toilet before keep on is one of the trigger, it is a kind of change of state verb. by using a state verb, it is supposed that another meaning is being understood. 3. structural what happened? (1:4:34) -something happened this is a kind of structural presupposition, because it is triggered by wh question. table 5: research data of going dutch no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential i sometimes had a lunch in a restaurant near my boarding house. (2:1:43) -there was a restaurant near the boarding house -there was a boarding house in this story, the presupposition triggers are definite noun phrase “a restaurant” and adjective possessive “my”. when it is negated, the presupposition remains constant. 2. lexical i saw her sitting at our table again. (9:2:43) -she had sat at their table before the triggering is iterative “again”, it means that the activity is being repeated. she sat, she went and she sat again. 3. structural what did you say?(10:3:44) -the security guide said something to him it is triggered by w-h question, when someone asked this question, it means that before there was something said. 4. counterfactual if only i could move my face from my head, i would put it a while into my pocket. (3:5:45) -silvester could not move his face from his head. this is counterfactual presupposition, because it is triggered by counterfactual conditional. it is not only not true but contrary to fact. appendix for further story). in this story there were 11 presuppositions; five existential presuppositions, four lexical presuppositions, one structural presupposition and one counterfactual 79 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee presupposition. but, there was no factive and non factive presuppositions. wet the bed this story tells us about silvester’s smelly body, because the clothes that he wore was the clothes that his son urinated on it.(see appendix for further story). in this story, the writer found that there were 11 presuppositions; eight existential presuppositions, one factive presupposition, one non-factive table 6. research data of wet the bed no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential i went to campus where i taught. (2:2:50) -sylvester had a work in a campus this is triggered by the name of some place “campus” it means that there is someplace to reach by silvester. 2. counterfactual if only i had not got flue at that time, i would have known something strange with my trousers. ( 5:3:51) -sylvester got flue this is a counter factual, because it is triggered by counter factual conditional. this sentence is not only not true but contrary to facts. table 7: research data of one night with a maid no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential my friend, brian and i went to window shopping to waldoboro. (1:1:9) -sylvester had a friend --there was someone called brian -there was a place called waldoboro in this sentence, the sentence is triggered by adjective possessive “my”, the name of person and the name of place. so it is categorized into existential 2. lexical i reached the bed and slept again. (5:4:10) -sylvester had reached the bed and slept before it is triggered by iterative “again”. so it can be categorized into lexical. he slept, got up and slept again. 3. factive i realized that i was not in bed with brian but with his mad. (5:5:10) -sylvester was not in bed with brian, meanwhile with his maid this is a factive presupposition, it is triggered by word “realized” that is treated as fact. 4. non-factive i was dreaming about sleeping with a very beautiful girl. (1:5:10) -sylvester didn’t sleep with a very beautiful girl dream, pretend and so forth are the example of word in non factive, this sentence is triggered by word “dream” it is categorized into nonfactive. presupposition and one counterfactual presupposition. yet, the writer did not find lexical and structural presupposition. one night with a maid this story tells us about spending time at his friend’s house. in the mid of the night, he went to the toilet in the darkness because the lamps went out. when he backed to the room and he slept with the maid until morning (see appendix storyfor further). in erwin oktoma & styfanus mardiyono the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur 80 this story, the presuppositions were five existential presuppositions, two lexical presuppositions, one factive presupposition and one non factive presupposition. see table 4.6 below: true love this story tells us about the true love that belonged to his girlfriend. where tanty, his girlfriend still loved him though silvester’ tooth fell out (see appendix for further story). it was found that there were eight presuppositions; two existential presuppositions, two lexical presuppositions, one factive presupposition, two non-factive presuppositions and one structural. a bowl of water this story tells us about having lunch in padang restaurant table 8: research data of true love no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential one day, tanty and i went to eat in a big and famous fried chicken restaurant. (1:2:21) -there was someone called tanty -the big and famous fried chicken restaurant existed it is triggered by the name of the person “tanty”, definite noun phrase “a big and famous fried chicken restaurant”. so it is categorized into existential presupposition. when it is negated, the presuppo-sition remains constant 2. factive i just realized that one of my front teeth which was actually a false tooth already fell out. (1:5:23) -one of silvester’s teeth which was actually a false tooth already fell out this is categorized into factive presupposition, it is triggered by factive verb “realized”. it is treated as a fact. 3. non-factive she stared at me as if i were a ghost. (7:4:22) -silvester was not a ghost this sentence is categorized into non factive, this is triggered by “s if” and the fact that silvester was not a ghost 4. structural what happened? (15:2:21) -something happened this is triggered by w-h question in which before everybody asked this question, something happened before. with his friend. suddenly the waiter came and brought two bowls of water. silvester drank one of them because he didn’t know what it was for; in fact, it was for washing finger (see appendix for further story). this story had eight presuppositions: three existential presuppositions, one lexical presupposition, one factive presupposition, one structural presupposition and two non-factive presuppositions. never ending love this story happened when it was saturday night. as usual he came to his girlfriend, santy. as he wanted to go home, romantically he kissed her forehead. he didn’t realize her dad’s coming of nowhere. 81 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 9: research data of a bowl of water no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential rina, my classmate, invited me to have lunch in a padang restaurant. (2:1:30) -there was someone called rina -silvester had a classmate -there was a padang restaurant in this sentence, the triggers are the name of the person, adjective possessive and definite noun phrase, when it is negated, the presupposition remains constant. so it is categorized into existential. 2. non-factive i felt as if my face was being burnt on a fire. (3:4:32) -his face was not being burnt on a fire this is categorized into non-factive presupposition. the fact that his face was not being burnt on a fire. table 10: research data of never-ending love no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential one day i visited my cute and beautiful girlfriend, santy in her house. (1:1:47) -silveter had a cute and beautiful girl friend -there was someone called santy -santy had a house this sentence is categorized into existential, it is triggered by adjective possessive “my” and “her”. when it is negated, the presupposition still remains constant. 2. counterfactual if only i had had another pair of eyes behind my head, i would have seen and known that he had been in the dim living room. (15:2:48) -silvester had no another pair of eyes this is categorized into counterfactual presupposition because it is triggered by counterfactual conditionals. the sentence is not only not true but also contrary to fact. my radio in this story, his wife and silvester went onto a two floor electronic shop to buy a radio. misunderstanding happened, after he bought and paid it. silvester went out and waited outside. suddenly a woman came and held the radio. he was accused of stealing his radio (see appendix for further story) . in this story, the writer found that there were six presuppositions; four existential, one lexical presupposition, one non-factive presupposition. conclusion the whole short stories by silvester goridus sukur have been analyzed. it can be concluded that all the types of presuppositions: existential presuppositions occur in all of stories, lexical ones just occur in the short stories (striptease dancer, my sweetest erwin oktoma & styfanus mardiyono the analysis of presupposition in the short stories of silvester goridus sukur 82 julia, pretty woman, my son’s order, a shoplifter, going dutch, mr. mouse, a blue umbrella, not my friend’s room, one night with a maid, a passionatenight kissing, going to kiddo, true love, bad holiday, a bowl of water, doing with a dog, my radio, my ex-girlfriend, the parking attendant). factive ones just occur in a few stories as well (my sweetest julia, pretty woman, luxurious toilet, a shoplifter, wet the bed, a blue umbrella, one night with a maid, a passionate night kissing, true love, bad holiday, a bowl of water, a crazy man). non factive ones occur in the short stories (wet the bed, mr. mouse, not my friend’s room, one night with a maid, true love, a bowl of water, my radio). structural ones occur in the short stories (striptease dancer, my sweetest julia, my son’s order, luxurious toilet, a shoplifter, going dutch, true love, a bowl of water, special gift), and counterfactual ones are found in the short stories (going dutch, wet the bed, never ending love). the number of presuppositions found are 219. table 11: research data of my radio no type sentences presupposition explanation 1. existential my wife and i went to a two-floor electronic shop to buy a radio.(1:1:52) -silvester had a wife -there was two-floor electronic shop -there was a radio to buy in this sentence, the presupposition triggers are adjective possessive “my” and definite noun phrase “a two electronic shop”. when it is negated, the presupposition remains constant. 2. lexical i tried to find my wife but she was not there anymore. (6:2:52) -she had been there/in the cashier before this is categorized into lexical presupposition, because the trigger is anymore, when someone uttered this sentence, it is supposed that another meaning was understood by another speaker. 3. non-factive i wish i could have flown away. (7:5:54) -silvester could not have flown away this is categorized into nonfactive, it is triggered by “wish” and the fact is not true percentages type of presupposition in the short stories: the percentage of existential presupposition is 138 or 63,01% of findings; that of lexical presupposition is 47 or 21,46% of findings, that of structural presupposition is 9 or 4,10 % of findings; that of factive presupposition is 15 or 6,84 % of findings; that of non-factive presupposition is 7 or 3,19% of findings and the last one is counterfactual: 3 or 1,36% of findings. so, the dominant type is commonly used in the short stories by silvester goridus sukur is existential presuppositions. references alwasilah, a. c. (2002). pokoknya kualitatif: dasar-dasar merancang dan melakukan penelitian kualitatif. jakarta: pt dunia pustaka jaya. grundy, p. (2000). doing pragmatics. new york: oxford university press. leech, g. n. 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(1996). pragmatics. oxford: oxford university press. zare, javad., abbaspour, e., nia, r. m. (2012). presupposition trigger-a comparative analysis of broadcast news discourse. international journal of linguistics. page 734-743: iran university of science & technology. abstract: whole language approach (wla) is the approach to learn language that focus on the real communication, reading and writing in the fun learning environment context english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee applying whole language approach and public speaking activity in smart ekselensia high school lisa rosaline smart ekselensia senior high school, bogor, indonesia e-mail: lisa_rosaline@yahoo.co.uk amru asykari smart ekselensia senior high school, bogor, indonesia e-mail: amru_asykari@gmail.com apa citation: rosaline, l. & asykari, a.. (2013). applying whole language approach and public speaking activity in smart ekselensia high school. english review: journal of english education, 1(2), 151-158 received: 06-04-2013 accepted: 30-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: whole language approach (wla) is the approach to learn language that focus on the real communication, reading and writing in the fun learning environment context (richard and rodgers 2001). the teachers of wla believe that the students should learn the materials in unity. this study involved 102 of 3rd to 5th year grade students of smart ekselensia high school, bogor, indonesia. the public english speaking activity has been held for 6 months. the public speaking can be in form of storytelling, general speech, and religious speech. before the students performed the public speaking, they had to prepare the material such as a story or a book summary. instrument used to obtain the data were questionnaires and interviews aimed at gathering statistical data and open responses about what students think and feel about the public speaking activity. based on the findings, basically students can improve their four language skills although it still cannot be seen directly. according to the result of the interview, some students suggest the whole language approach and public speaking be continued. they also suggest the frequency be added more in order to encourage them to speak english and create a good english environment. keywords: whole language approach, public speaking, competence standard curriculum. introduction ken goodman is one of the educators most often associated with the term "whole language" and one of the earliest and principle advocates of the whole language approach as we know it today. goodman (1986) described whole language as a "top-to-bottom," rather than a "bottom-up," view of language learning, a view that does not break language into bits and pieces. language is taught in real and natural contexts, and thus, language learning is easier and more interesting and relevant to the learner. whole language approach (wla) is the approach to learn language that focus on the real communication, reading and writing in the fun learning environment context (richard and rodgers, 2001). this approach was popular in the beginning of 1980 to 2000 in america. the teachers of wla believe that the students should learn the materials in unity, without separated them to small parts. for example, rather than teaching the word structure, it is better to ask the students to read a story book, summarizes it and retells it in front mailto:lisa_rosaline@yahoo.co.uk lisa rosaline & amru asykari applying whole language approach and public speaking activity in smart ekselensia high school of others. the special thing from this approach is that the learning material is something authentic such as a story book, general books and also articles from newspaper. another characteristic of this approach is that the students have freedom to choose the material for their learning activity, they are expected to be independent learners who are responsible with their own learning progress. language learning involves risk, and students should be encouraged to try and try again if they fail; and that form follows function in language development and not vice versa. the teacher is a facilitator and also a supporter to support collaborative process among students (setiyadi, 2008). the whole language movement originated with elementary educators. how can these principles apply to the teaching of adults learning english? a teacher in an adult literacy program can incorporate a whole language approach first by recognizing that most adults already know a great deal about how language works. even though they may not be able to read or write proficiently in english, adult esl students come to literacy programs with many years of experiences that have developed their world knowledge, oral language, and reading and writing and have shaped their views of what literacy is and how and why it is learned. a senior high school teacher can incorporate a whole language approach first by recognizing that most students have already known a great deal about how language works. even though they may not be able to read or write proficiently in english, senior high school students come to literacy programs with many years of experiences that have developed their world knowledge, oral language, and reading and writing and have shaped their views of what literacy is and how and why it is learned. one of the first steps a whole language teacher should take is to share with learners his or her views on how language is learned. the notion that literacy is functional and contextual should be emphasized, as many adults come to the classroom with the notion that literacy is an academic hurdle to overcome rather than a tool for larger goals or everyday needs. finally, learners should be encouraged to take risks and develop their literacy in ways that are relevant to their personal situations. this elaboration of assumptions about whole language opens the way for the teacher to introduce activities such as journal and letter writing, the language experience approach (see taylor, 1992), and story writing and publishing, rather than focusing on drills and grammar exercises. some educators have learners write personal stories reflecting their experiences--sorrows, joys, problems, and memories--and publish them to use as a basis for additional reading, writing, and discussion activities (see peyton, 1991, for examples). authentic reading that is meaningful and of interest to learners is also part of the whole language approach. as smith (1983) points out, "the only way to make learning to read easy is to make reading easy" (p.23). by this he means that students learn to read only by reading and focusing on meaning and not primarily focusing on words, pronunciation, speed, or accuracy. public speaking is the act of speaking on a particular subject in front of a group of people with the intention of influencing, entertaining or informing the listeners. in order to be a good orator one must be able to influence people, change their opinion, and transform the emotion of the listeners as pertaining to that particular subject. 1 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee public speaking is the process of speaking to a group of people in a structured, deliberate manner intended to inform, influence, or entertain the listeners. in public speaking, as in any form of communication, there are five basic elements, often expressed as "who is saying what to whom using what medium with what effects?" the purpose of public speaking can range from simply transmitting information, to motivating people to act, to simply telling a story. good orators should be able to change the emotions of their listeners, not just inform them. public speaking can also be considered a discourse community. interpersonal communication and public speaking have several components that embrace such things as motivational speaking, leadership/personal development, business, customer service, large group communication, and mass communication. public speaking can be a powerful tool to use for purposes such as motivation, influence, persuasion, informing, translation, or simply entertaining. more over, senior high school students are encourage to be able to develop their four language skills based on competence standard and school based curriculum (ktsp) which are listening, reading, writing and speaking. by applying whole language approach, it is expected that the students can practice their reading and writing skills independently. language is taught in real and natural contexts, and thus, language learning is easier and more interesting and relevant to the learner. rather than depend on basal readers, textbooks, and workbooks that often stress contextualized language exercises, whole language teachers build on learners' existing knowledge and work with writing letters, or developing and working on extended writing projects. learners, therefore, develop control over the mechanics of language through real reading and real writing. method this study involved 102 students of smart ekselensia high school, bogor, indonesia. they were students of 3rd to 5th year grade. the public english speaking activity has been held for 6 months. it was held 4 times a week, twice a week in the morning and twice a week in the afternoon. the public speaking can be in form of storytelling, general speech, and religious speech. before the students do the public speaking, they had to prepare the material such as a story or a book summary and in this a part of whole language approach application. instrument used to obtain the data were questionnaire and interviews. the use of questionnaires in this study aimed at gathering statistical data and open responses about what students think and feel about the public speaking activity. the questions in the questionnaire consist of closed ended and open ended questions. there are 10 closed ended questions with 5 statements of preferences. the fifth statements are designed to use five point of likert scale which is range from “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “neutral“, “agree”, and “ strongly agree”. as for open ended questions, the students respondents were asked to state their reasons of their choices in the close-ended questions. the interviews involved 30 students who have ever delivered the public speaking more than once in front of the teachers and students. this interview was conducted to pursue more detailed opinions and issues on students' thoughts and feelings on the public speaking activity. lisa rosaline & amru asykari applying whole language approach and public speaking activity in smart ekselensia high school results and discussion the whole language approach could make the students practice their four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing). in whole language approach, students are encouraged to read a story or an article, summarize it and retell it in front of others (setiyadi 2008). moreover, public speaking activity as a transmitting information activity is expected to improve the students’ four language skill. this section addresses the findings on students' perspectives of the whole language approach and public speaking activity in relation to their listening skill improvement. table 1. students' perspective on their listening skill improvement public speaking and whole language approach improve student's listening skill especially listening to the gist of conversation strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 11 14 36 34 7 (percentage) 10.78 13.73 35.29 33.33 6.86 public speaking and whole language approach improve student's listening skill especially listening to the details of conversation strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 17 23 42 17 3 (percentage) 16.67 22.55 41.78 16.67 2.94 as can be seen from the table, the students tend to improve their listening skills especially listening to the gist of conversation. the total percentage of the students who agree and strongly agree that they have improved their listening to the gist of conversation is 40.19% and it is higher that those who strongly disagree and disagree (24.51%). while majority of students prefer to be neutral when they are asked about their listening for details improvement. this fact shows that the students are able to get the general information of the speech or conversation even though they still have to improve their ability to grasp the information details. it means basically the students improve their listening skill because listening to the gist is a basic of listening skills. with more practice the students will be able to improve their listening to the details skill. table 2. students' perspective on their reading skill improvement public speaking and whole language approach improve student's motivation to read more english books strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 19 26 34 20 3 (percentage) 18.63 25.49 33.33 19.61 2.94 public speaking and whole language approach improve strongly disagree disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee student's reading skill especially on skimming technique (1) (4) number of students 12 16 34 35 5 (percentage) 11.76 15.69 33.33 34.31 4.9 public speaking and whole language approach improve student's reading skill especially on scanning technique strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 12 24 40 21 5 (percentage) 11.76 23.53 39.22 20.59 4.9 as we know that there are 2 kinds of reading techniques, skimming and scanning. skimming is the technique to improve comprehension speed and is useful at the intermediate level and above. the idea of skimming is to look over the entire text quickly to get the basic idea. by skimming the text, the students will be able to tell the main topic, purpose, or idea. then they will have a framework to understand the reading when they work through it more carefully. scanning is another speed strategy to use with intermediate level and above. students must look through a text quickly, searching for specific information. table 2 has shown that the students' reading skill improve especially their ability to use skimming technique. though the students' perspective proves that they are not too motivated to read more english books and to improve the scanning technique, they are still in neutral position. it means that public speaking and whole language approach still influence them to improve their zsignificant. table 3. students' perspective on their writing skill improvement public speaking improve student's vocabulary building strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 10 10 19 42 21 (percentage) 9.8 9.8 18.63 41.18 20.59 public speaking and whole language approach improve student's grammar especially the use of tenses strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 13 14 39 32 4 (percentage) 12.75 13.73 38.24 31.37 3.92 public speaking and whole language approach improve student's writing skill especially to arrange some sentences into paragraphs. strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) lisa rosaline & amru asykari applying whole language approach and public speaking activity in smart ekselensia high school number of students 13 16 37 29 7 (percentage) 12.75 15.69 36.27 28.43 6.86 table 3 has reflected that the students' writing skill in general improve especially their ability to broaden their vocabulary. the total percentage of the students who agree and strongly agree with this is 61.77%. it is much higher than those who tend to be disagree and neutral. by listening and writing or summarizing text for public speaking, students find a lot of new vocabulary. students also improve their ability to arrange some sentences into paragraphs. reading and delivering speech or story telling could also improve the students' understanding about grammar though 36.27% students choose to be neutral. table 4. students' perspective on their speaking skill improvement public speaking and whole language approach improve student's motivation and self confidence to use english everyday strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 9 15 41 27 10 (percentage) 8.82 14.71 40.2 26.47 9.8 public speaking and whole language approach improve student's speaking skill especially students' fluency, pronunciation, and intonation. strongly disagree (1) disagree (2) neutral (3) agree (4) strongly agree (4) number of students 9 14 42 30 7 (percentage) 8.82 13.73 41.18 29.41 6.86 as can be seen from table 4, 40.2% of the students think neutrally about the effect of public speaking to their motivation and self confidence in using english. although the total percentage of students who agree and strongly agree that public speaking improve their motivation to use english is 27.53 which is still lower than the neutral percentage, it is still higher than the percentage of those who strongly disagree and disagree (23.53%). this fact means that basically students improve their motivation to use english though it is not directly and significantly reflected. furthermore, the students also improve their fluency, pronunciation, and intonation even though it is still not reflected significantly since 41.18% of the students chose to be neutral. the foregoing presentation has been focused on the statistical data of the findings. the following is the discussion of the findings by presenting some data of the interviews. several comments from the interview can be seen as follows: “the frequency of this activity should be added more, maybe everyday. it is good because it will encourage the teachers and students to speak english and it can create english environment.” (source of data: interview with student 1) “the improvement that i got is my effort to speak english” (source of data: interview with student 5) “ those who have the turn to do the public speaking should pronounce the words words well so it can be understood more”(source of english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee data: interview with students 8) “the public speaking should be more attractive”(source of data: interview with students 16) “the grammar use should be clearer”(source of data: interview with students 20) “i can make the summary but finding the new meaning of new words need much time” (source of data: interview with students 20) according to the interview data, the respondents believe that public speaking influence their four language skills although it cannot be seen directly. those who have delivered speech or story telling more than twice think that this activity should be continued and the frequency should be added to 5 times or six times a week. conclusion whole language approach and public speaking can be applied to senior high school lesson. whole language approach makes the students become an independent learners and public speaking encourage the students to speak in front of others. based on the findings, basically students can improve their four language skills as expected in competence standard and school based curriculum (ktsp) although it is still cannot be seen directly. according to the result of the interview, some students suggest that the whole language approach and public speaking should be continued. they also suggest that the frequency should be adding more in order to encourage them to speak english and create a good english environment. references bearre, k. improve reading skills. retrieved july 15th, 2010 from (http://esl.about.com/od/englishreadi ngskills/a/readingskills.htm). bello, t. (1997). writing topics for adult esl students. paper presented at the 31st annual teachers of english to speakers of other languages convention. orlando, fl. bello, t. (1997). improving esl learners' writing skills. eric digest. retrieved july 15th 2010 from http://www. ericdigests.org/ 1998-1/skills.htm. cheatham, j., m. clark, d. mckay, m. schnieder, and m. d. siedow. (1994). whole language for english to speakers of other languages adults: a guide to instruction. syracuse, ny: new readers convention press. clayton, a. (2010) writing and public speaking: how to successfully deliver a speech. retrieved june 15th, 2010 from (http://www.eslteachersboard. com/cgi-bin/writing/index.pl? read=3188. crandall, j. a., and j. k. peyton. (1993). approaches to adult esl literacy instruction. washington, dc and mchenry, il: center for applied linguistics and delta systems. goodman, k. s. (1986). what's whole in whole language? portsmouth, nh: heinemann. peyton, j. k. (1991). listening to students' voices: educational materials written by and for adults learning english. washington, dc: national clearinghouse on literacy education. peyton, j. k., and j. staton (eds.). (1996). writing our lives: reflections on dialogue journal writing with adults learning english. washington, dc and mchenry, il: center for applied linguistics and delta systems. richards, j. c. , and t. s. rodgers. (2001). approaches and methods in language teaching (second edition). cambridge: cambridge university press. setiyadi, b. (2008). teaching english as foreign language. jakarta: universitas terbuka. smith, f. (1983). essays into literacy. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. taylor, m. l. (1992). the language experience http://esl.about.com/od/englishreadingskills/a/readingskills.htm http://www.ericdigests.org/1998-1/skills.htm http://www.eslteachersboard.com/cgi-bin/writing/index.pl?read=3188 lisa rosaline & amru asykari applying whole language approach and public speaking activity in smart ekselensia high school approach and adult learners. washington, dc: national clearinghouse on literacy education .tran, h. (1997). becoming a writer. paper presented at the 31st annual teachers of english to speakers of other languages convention, orlando, fl. vandergrift,l. retrieved july 15th 2010 from http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg /67. public speaking. retrieved june 15th, 2010 from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/public_speaking. http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/67 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/public_speaking introduction 57 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee improving students’ competence in writing descriptive texts through “fresh” technique faisal department of english education, muhammadiyah university of purwokerto, indonesia e-mail: faisal_aulia@yahoo.com yasinta wulandari department of english education, muhammadiyah university of purwokerto, indonesia e-mail: yasinta9074@yahoo.com apa citation: faisal & wulandari, y. (2013). improving students’ competence in writing descriptive texts through “fresh” technique. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 57-65 received: 18-07-2013 accepted: 29-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: this research was aimed to know whether “fresh” technique can improve students’ competence in writing descriptive texts. this research was conducted in one of the junior high schools in banyumas in academic year 2012/2013. the method of this research is classroom action research (car). the research participants were the students of viii e class consisting of 28 students. the treatment was carried out in two cycles of four actions, from november 9th, 2012 to december 1st, 2012. the quantitative data (tests) were evaluated by using burhan nurgiyantoro’s writing evaluation criteria which consisted of evaluation in content, organization, vocabulary, language, and mechanics. based on the data analysis, it could be described that the students’ competence in writing descriptive texts improved. it could be seen from the improvement of students’ score in pre-test and post test. the improvement of students’ score was 23.607%. this meant that “fresh” technique improved the students’ competence in writing descriptive text in the eighth grade students of in academic year 2012/2013. keywords: descriptive text, fresh technique, classroom action research, writing competence written form, as writing is a means of communication. in the teaching and learning writing process in indonesia, students have been introduced since they were in the elementary school, from the simplest form e.g. writing words to writing sentences. in the junior high level, students are taught to write more complex sentences and paragraphs. based on the junior high level syllabus, there are some texts that should be learned by the students, especially in the eighth grade. those are descriptive, narrative, and recount texts. the purposes of learning those texts is that the students can express their ideas in a simple written form such as functional text and essay, and can use those texts in their daily life. introduction writing is said to be the fourth competence in learning language. although many students said that writing is a difficult competence, yet writing is actually an easy and enjoyable activity if there are appropriate methods, interesting teaching techniques, and actual materials. writing is an activity in which learners form graphic symbols, arrange them to form words, and put the words in order and link them together in a certain way to produce a logical sequence of sentences (hernowo, 2004: 43). it is a complex activity since requiring students’ comprehensive abilities such as mastering grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation. besides, to write well, the students are expected to be able to present their ideas in the faisal & yasinta wulandari improving students’ competence in writing descriptive texts through “fresh” technique 58 a descriptive text becomes the first text learned by the students, for it has the closest relation with the students’ lives. as wanting to describe something in a written form, they have to write it in a descriptive text, even in the simplest form. however, in the real writing classes, there have been obstacles faced by students, especially in writing a descriptive text. most of them find some difficulties in doing their tasks given by the teachers especially in writing. they often show inconsistency in using either british or american spelling. often time, their grammar used is not suitable for the tense desired. they are supposed to use past tense to tell about an event occurring in duration of time in the past by using since or for. instead, what they thought is that they have to use present perfect because there is since or for as the time marker. based on the interview with an english teacher of class viii at one of the junior high schools in banyumas, many students still had problems in writing, especially in writing descriptive texts. when the teacher asked the students to write a descriptive text, they seemed still confused about what they should write and how they should organize their writing. it was likely that they had so many things to write, but unabling to express their ideas in a written form well. the problem mainly faced by the students was their confusion on what is first, next, and on to write a descriptive text. there are some important factors influencing this present facts. their insufficient vocabularies and provided materials seem to play importantly. beside that, they have less ability to develop and organize ideas in such an appropriate way that their writings are difficut to understand. then, their weak comprehension and mastery of grammar also make their writings hard to understand. as a result, many students fail to meet the standards given by the institution although having given enough exposures for students in writing lesson. besides, these happen because they are not used to writing, even in their own language. it is argued that the students’ reluctance to write can also happen because they rarely write even in their own language, and so the activity feels like alien (harmer, 2004, p. 61). further, for many years, the teaching of writing has focused on the written product rather than on the writing process. in other words, the students’ attention was directed to the what rather the how of text construction (harmer, 2004, p. 11). this means, students are likely to be taught the form only without the process of forming itself. the teacher may often uses some kinds of media, such pictures, mind map, and other visual aids, but those are not helpful enough. nevertheless, they still have difficulties in writing a descriptive text. considering those problems, a technique believed can help students in writing descriptive text, especially in organizing their ideas was proposed “fresh” one. “fresh” technique is the new one of generating ideas to write a descriptive text in which each letter of the acronym has meaning. “fact” stands for “fact”, “r” stands for “reason”, “e” stands for “elaboration”, and “sh” stands for “shift”, which can also mean decision or conclusion (faisal, 2010, p. 8). through this technique, it is hoped that students can write a descriptive text easily since “fresh” technique will help them to organize their ideas in writing descriptive. as the result, students will be able to write a descriptive text in a clear, detail, and fluent organization. generally, there are three types of rating scales used in scoring writing: holistic scoring, primary trait, and analytic scoring. in this occassion, the hoistic scoring will be employed. 59 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee holistic scoring uses a variety of criteria to produce a single score. brown (2004) states that each point on a holistic scale is given a systematic set of descriptors and the reader-evaluator matches an overall impression with the descriptors to arrive at a score. descriptors usually follow a prescribed pattern. it is states that the rationale for using a holistic scoring system is that the total quality of written text is more than the sum of its components (o’malley 1996). writing is viewed as an integrated whole. the elements of the holistic scoring involved four dimensions as follows: (1) idea development/ organization: focuses on central idea with appropriate elaboration and conclusion; (2) fluency/structure: appropriate verb tense used with a variety of grammatical and syntactic structures; (3) word choice: uses varied and precise vocabulary appropriate for purpose; and (4) mechanics: absence of errors in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. writing is the last skill which should be mastered after the english learners master listening, speaking and reading. even the native still have difficulties in doing writing activities. lyons (1987: 2) states few people write spontaneously and few feel comfortable with a formal writing task intended for the eyes of someone else. as the problems above, the teacher should find an effective way to teach writing to the students. gaffield-vile (1998) in harmer (2003: 259) states that creative writing is a journey of self-discovery, and selfdiscovery promotes effective learning. if the students find something thaythey are learning by themselves, they will be easy to understand and apply it. they will be more interested in the thing they understand well. moreover, badley in hudson (2011, p. 34) states that creative writing as a new or alternative form of writing in higher education, which is perceived as developmental, therapeutic and self-expressive rather than academic. from the both quotations above, it can be concluded that creative writing can be used as the expressive writing more supporting the learners to find what they should write . learners can find their ideas through the surrounding that they see or think. this underlies the “fresh” technique. “fresh” is an acronym in which each letter has meaning. “f” stands for “fact”, “r” stands for “reason”, “e” stands for “elaboration”, and “sh” stands for “shift”, it also can mean decision or conclusion (faisal 2010, p.8). in fact, it is a technique of an application of creative writing. “fresh” technique itself can be seen as the way of developing descriptive text’s generic structure. there are two main parts of descriptive text; those are general identification and descriptions. students are more likely confused on what they have to write as the general identification and what they have to write as the descriptions. while in “fresh” technique, students will get easy to construct a descriptive text because the two parts before are developed specifically. there will be four parts provided. “f” is fact meaning the facts related to the topic which will be developed in writing descriptive text. here, students are required to think about the general facts eaily found in their minds. wishon & burks (1980: 65) mention that another method of paragraph development is to begin with a general statment and support the statement with a number of sentences giving particular details or additional information. this supports the writer that the first thing students must do is to write the general things of subject that the students want to describe. “r” is reason consisting of some reasons which can support the faisal & yasinta wulandari improving students’ competence in writing descriptive texts through “fresh” technique 60 facts they have written before. the reason which will be mentioned can be sense impressions. description gives sense impressions – the feel, sound, taste, smell, and look of things (wishon & burks 1980: 128). this will really help the students since they can disclose their personal feelings in describing the subject. after that, the students have to develop their reasons into “e” (elaboration). wishon and burks (1980: 129) say that the writer may begin with a dominant impression and proceed to specific details. this means that after establishing generals statements having been mentioned before, students must develop it into the detaiedl one so that they will get are creative, complete, and coherent paragraph. the last part is shift. this part is in the form of conclusion of all things the students have written before. based on the previous research (faisal 2010, p. 9), here are the procedures of teaching descriptive text using “fresh” technique: dealing with fact, the students are asked to think and draft the general facts of subject they want to describe. example “bunny, my rabbit”: “i have a rabbit. its name is bunny.” coming to the second part, reason, the teacher invites the students to write the reasons or impressions of the subject. “i like bunny because it is cute and funny.” teacher encourages the students to elaborate the draft they have made before as the development. the teacher guides the students to make description why bunny is cute and funny. “it has a white and soft fur. its body is fat. it likes eating carrots very much. it likes to enter the house, especially my parents’ room.” the last step is making conclusion of all ideas which have been described. “those are the reason why bunny is cute and funny. my family and i love it very much.” from those sentences, it will form a descriptive paragraph: i have a rabbit. its name is bunny. i like bunny because it is cute and funny. it has a white and soft fur. its body is fat. it likes eating carrots very much. it likes to enter the house, especially my parents’ room. those are the reason why bunny is cute and funny. my family and i love it very much. method the research conducted was a classroom action research. arikunto (2010: 132) states that classroom action research is an observation of activities intentionally given and happen in a class. this research was conducted at one of the junior high schools in banyumas regency in the academic year of 2012/2013 from august until december 2012. there were 28 students, consisting of 16 males and 12 females as research participants. in conducting the research, the kemmis and mctaggart’s research design was employed. there are cycles in an clasroom action research, and each cycle consists of stages. the stages are planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. taken from arikunto (2010), there were two cycles of four meetings conducted. technique for collecting data is aimed at supporting the success of the research. it helped to obtain data and information about the process of improving students’s competence in writing descriptive text by using fresh technique by giving test. nurgiyantoro (2001: 58) states that test is one way to do measurement in the form of assignment ha to be having to be done by the students to get the data of their mark being able to be compared with their friends of the standard mark. here, test was used to know the improvement of students’ 61 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee competence in writing after “fresh” technique was implemented as an aid to develop their descriptive text. the form of the test was writing descriptive paragraphs. the test consisted of pre-test and post-test. pretest was given before the collaborator taught writing descriptive text by using “fresh” technique, while the post test was given after the cycles were completely conducted. the quantitative data were used to evaluate the success of implementation of each cycle. by processing the quantitative data, it was revealed whether the success target had been reached or not. according to nurgiyantoro (2001) in martani (2001: 307), there is a model of scale instrument for every certain class in aspect scored. each point of each component has different score. it can be seen at the following table of scoring. to get the average of students’ writing score, the following formula was used: m = 𝚺𝚺𝑿𝑿 𝑵𝑵 m = mean m = σ𝑋𝑋 𝑁𝑁 = individual score n = number of sample (nurgiyantoro 2001: 361) to know improvement from the pre-test until post-test, the formulas were as follows: p = 𝒚𝒚𝒚𝒚 − 𝒚𝒚 𝒚𝒚 x 100% p = 𝒚𝒚𝟐𝟐 − 𝒚𝒚 𝒚𝒚 x 100% where: p = percentage of students improvement y = pre test result y1 = post test 1 result y2 = post test 2 result results and discussion the following are the evaluation results out of cycle 1 and cycle of the research. to know the improvement of students’ competence in writing descriptive text, pre-test and post-test were given. pre-test was conducted on november 9th, 2012. from pre-test, the average of students’ score was obtained. the average of students’ writing score in pre-test was 66.25. after conducting the both cycle 1 and cycle 2, post-test was given in order to know the improvement of students’ competence in writing descriptive text after they were taught “fresh” technique. the post-test 1 was conducted after the cycle 1 had been done. it was on november 21st, 2012, while, the post-test 2 was done on december 1st, 2012. the students’ improvement was calculated by using the following formula: p = 𝒚𝒚𝒚𝒚−𝒚𝒚 𝒚𝒚 x 100% where: p = percentage of students’ improvement y = pre-test result y1 = post-test 1 y2 = post-test 2 calculation of post-test 1 result: p = 𝟕𝟕𝒚𝒚.𝟖𝟖𝟖𝟖−𝟔𝟔𝟔𝟔.𝟐𝟐𝟐𝟐 𝟔𝟔𝟔𝟔.𝟐𝟐𝟐𝟐 x 100% = 8.513 % calculation of post-test 2 result: p = 𝟖𝟖𝒚𝒚.𝟖𝟖𝟖𝟖−𝟔𝟔𝟔𝟔.𝟐𝟐𝟐𝟐 𝟔𝟔𝟔𝟔.𝟐𝟐𝟐𝟐 x 100% = 23.608% the improvement of students’ writing competence can also be seen through the following table: faisal & yasinta wulandari improving students’ competence in writing descriptive texts through “fresh” technique 62 table 1. the scale of writing evaluation criteria no aspect score criteria indicators 1. content 27-30 very good complete information, substantive, complete in developing writing, relevant with the problem 22-26 good enough information, less substantive, not enough in developing writing problem 17-21 fair limited information, less substantive, insufficient development of writing problem 13-16 bad no content and problem 2 organization 18-20 very good fluent in expression, clear in expressing idea, well organized, logic and cohesive sequence 14-17 good less fluency, unorganized but clear main idea, limited supporting material, logic but incomplete sequence 10-13 fair not fluent or irregular idea, illogical sequence and idea development. 7-9 bad not communicative, unorganized, and invaluable organization 3. vocabulary 18-20 very good appropriate diction, good word order mastery 14-17 good sometimes incorrect choice of the word which does not change the meaning 10-13 fair limited word use, some mistakes in vocabulary which can change the meaning 7-9 bad bad choice of the word, less and invaluable vocabulary 4. language 22-25 very good effective complex construction, only few language mistakes. 18-21 good simple but effective construction, few mistake in complex construction which does not change the meaning 11-17 fair serious mistake in sentence construction, unclear meaning. 5-10 bad lack of syntactical construction’s mastery, many mistakes, not communicative and invaluable language 5. mechanics 5 very good good mastery of the writing mechanics, only few spelling errors 4 good some spelling errors which do not change the meaning 3 fair many spelling errors which can change the meaning. 2 bad lack of mastery in writing mechanics, many spelling errors, unreadable and invaluable writing table 2. model of writing evaluation criteria using score no evaluation aspects score 1. content 13-30 2. organization 7-20 3. vocabulary 7-20 4. language 5-25 5. mechanics 2-5 the sum of score ……… 63 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee table 3. the evaluation result in cycle 1 and 2 meeting activity positive result negative result action 1, cycle 1 identifying generic structure using “fresh” technique and language features of descriptive text. 1. most of students understood the parts of descriptive text in detail. 2. some students understood more about simple present tense and adjectives. 1. some students were confused in determining each element of “fresh”. 2. the rests were confused in distinguishing verbs and adjectives. action 2, cycle 1 1. writing sentences using adjectives and simple present tense. 2. writing a short descriptive text 1. half of the students were able to write simple sentences using simple present tense correctly. 2. some students were able to write simple descriptive text. 3. the mean score of the posttest was 71.89 compared to the pre-test which was 66.25. 4. the improvement from pre-test to post-test showed 8.513% . 1. some students got problems in writing sentences using simple present tense. 2. some students got difficulties in writing descriptive text because they lack vocabulary. 3. some students were confused in distinguishing the “fact” and “reason” of “fresh”. action 1, cycle 2 1. gathering information from the pieces of text into a good arrangement of descriptive paragraph in group discussion. 2. completing incomplete essay of descriptive text. 1. half of the students were able to determine the elements of “fresh” and gather the information into good paragraph. 2. students were able to differentiate the adjectives and verbs to complete the incomplete essay. 1. some students were not involved in group discussion. 2. some students were chatting with their friends while having group discussion. 3. some students did not finish in rewriting the information gotten. action 2, cycle 2 1. arranging jumbled sentences. 2. writing descriptive text using “fresh” technique. 1. most of students were able to determine the elements of “fresh” that they could arrange the jumbled sentences correctly. 2. students were able to write descriptive text more fluently than before. 3. the mean score of the post test was 81.89. 4. the improvement was 23.608%. 1. some students did not focus on the lesson. 2. some students often asked the teacher the english translation of words when they were practicing writing. from the table above, the students’ writing score improved 23.607% from the pre-test score which was 66.25 to 81.89 in the post-test. the improvement above had reached the success indicator which was 20%. based on the result of cycle 1, the improvement could be seen through the ways the students improved their competence in writing descriptive text by applying “fresh” technique. the students could write quite good content in their descriptive text. through the elements of “fresh”, students were faisal & yasinta wulandari improving students’ competence in writing descriptive texts through “fresh” technique 64 able to put sufficient information in identification by its “fact” and “reason”, and, in the description by the use of “elaboration” and the “shift”. even though it was not complete enough, it was better than before. they could organize their ideas better as well. by the arrangement of “fact”, “reason”, “elaboration” and “shift” of “fresh” technique, students were able to determine what should be written first and next to get a fluent descriptive text easier. even though, their organization was not fluent enough, the students could write their ideas in sequence. they used more new vocabularies in developing their descriptive paragraph. when students were asked to write a descriptive paragraph using “fresh” technique, they tried to get vocabularies appropriate for their ideas in each element of “fresh”. even though, they sometimes made mistakes in spelling. in cycle 2, half of the students could write simple sentences using simple present tense and adjectives correctly when they were practicing writing descriptive text. through the elements of “fresh”, students understood the rule of how to write a good descriptive paragraph. they knew how to express their ideas as the content and organize it better than before they were introduced “fresh” technique. however, they still needed to learn it more. in general, after the treatment, the students’ capability in writing descriptive text improved as well. most of students could provide enough information about what they described. it could be seen in the students’ result that they wrote more sentences in the form of descriptive paragraph to describe something. they also organized their ideas clearly and fluently. the students could use good dictions and write those words correctly. their understanding about simple present tense improved too. it could be seen when the students write descriptive text, there were only some of them who made few mistakes in sentence construction. they also mastered the writing rule better than before, so their texts were easier to understand. furthermore, this was in line with the research result conducted by suwandita (2013) stating that after the implementation of fresh technique, the students’ competence in writing a descriptive text increased. through the elements of fresh, the students were able to put adequate information in identification its “fact” and “reason”, and in the description and conclusion by the use of “elaboration” and “shift”. they were capable of organizing their ideas by the arrangement of “fact”, “reason”, “elaboration”, and “shift”. they were able to determine what should be written first and next to get a fluent descriptive text easier. furthermore, they were capable of using more new vocabularies in developing their descriptive paragraph because when the teacher instructed them to write descriptive paragraph using fresh technique, they tried to find vocabularies suitable for their ideas in each element of fresh. also, they made few mistakes in spelling. automatically, the students were able to write simple sentence correctly. throughout the table 4. the improvement of students’ writing competence indicator pre-test post-test average 66.25 81.89 improvement (%) 23.607% 65 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee elements of fresh, the students were capable of mastering the rule of how to write a descriptive paragraph. in short, the students could write a good descriptive text. conclusion the result of the test showed that there was improvement of students’ writing score for about 23.607% from the pre-test which was 66.25 to 81.89. this improvement had reached the success indicator which was 20%. from the result, it can be concluded that “fresh” technique helped the students develop their ideas in writing descriptive text. through the elements of “fresh”, students are able to give more complete information as the content of their descriptive text. they are able write the “fact” and “reason” as the identification, and the “elaboration” and “shift” as the description. they can also organize it well by the “fresh” arrangement, so that, they will get their fluent descriptive text. they use more vocabularies and appropriate diction to make their ideas understandable to read. students can use simple present tense and the adjectives in writing their descriptive text correctly. moreover, they understand and apply the rule of writing descriptive text well. because of “fresh” arrangement, students can make their descriptive text fluent and easy to understand. references arikunto, s. (2010). prosedur penelitian: suatu pendekatan praktik. jakarta: rineka cipta. brown, h. d. (2004). language assessment: principles and classroom practices. san francisco state university. faisal. (2010). penerapan “fresh” untuk mengembangkan paragraf deskriptif bagi guru lbpp lia purwokerto. purwokerto. unpublished research report. harmer, j. (2003). the practice of english language teaching, third edition. england: edinburg gate. --------------. (2006). how to teach writing. england: longman. hernowo. (2003). quantum writing. bandung: mizan learning center. hudson, l. s. a. (2011). enhancing academic writing competence in radiography education. cput theses and dissertations. accessed on may 21st 2012. lyons, l. h. (1987). study writing course in written english for academic and professional purpose. london: cambridge university. martani, a. t. p. (2011). an effort to improve students’ writing ability using scaffolding strategy at the viii grade of smp n 1 patikraja academic year 2010/2011. unpublished thesis, muhammadiyah university of purwokerto. murphy, r. (1994). english grammar in use. united kingdom: cambridge university press. nurgiyantoro, b. (2001). penelitian dalam pengajaran bahasa dan sastra. yogyakarta: bpfe. o’malley, j m., & valdez,l. (1996). authentic assessment for english language learners. usa: addison-wesley publishing company, inc. rozi, f. (2012). descriptive text – language features. accessed on june, 12th 2012 at https://peperonity.com/go/sites/ mview/descriptive/14825324. suwandita, k. (2013) the effectiveness of fresh technique to teach descriptive writing at the tenth grade students of man 1 purwokerto in academic year 2012/2013. unpublished thesis, muhammadiyah university of purwokerto. tarigan, h. g. (1994). menulis sebagai suatu keterampilan berbahasa. bandung: angkasa. wardiman, a., masduk b. j., and djusma, m. s. (2008) english in focus 2. jakarta: pusat perbukuan, departemen pendidikan nasional. wishon, g. e., & julia, m. b. (1980). let’s write english, revised edition. new york: litton educational publishing inc. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 301 investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english diana achmad department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas syiah kuala, banda aceh, indonesia email: diana.achmad@usk.ac.id asnawi muslem department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas syiah kuala, banda aceh, indonesia email: drasnawi@usk.ac.id tia rahmanita department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas syiah kuala, banda aceh, indonesia email: tiarahmanita@gmail.com humaira irfan khan department of english, division of arts and social sciences, university of education, lahore, punjab, pakistan email: drhumairakhan2015@gmail.com apa citation: achmnad, d., muslem, a., rahmanita, t., & khan, h. i. (2023). investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 301-314. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7972 received: 16-10-2022 accepted: 24-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction in the teaching and learning process, both teachers and students are two aspects that play an important role in achieving learning success. the teachers have the responsibility to change the students positively and motivate them to pursue their goals in learning (larasati et al., 2019). meanwhile, students should understand their roles, such as how to be a good learner and what they truly need and expect from their teachers. by knowing their roles, both teachers and students would know what to expect from each other and a good relationship between them will create successful learning. teachers are expected to be knowledgeable to create an effective teaching atmosphere, such as the lesson content, strategic methodologies, and skillful delivery of ideas to the students. for example, when teaching the english language, teachers should not only be able to transfer knowledge to students, but they also need to create enjoyable classes so that students are not bored during class activities (sari, 2018). teachers who have good relationships with abstract: the teaching style is the way the lecturer delivers material and controls students’ activities in the classroom. teachers have their own teaching style depending on personal and students’ needs. meanwhile, the students have their own expectations regarding the teachers’ styles of teaching english as well. this research investigated the university students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english. it used descriptive quantitative and qualitative methods as the research design. the data were collected by distributing a questionnaire to 45 students and interviewing 9 of them who were randomly chosen from the students majoring in english at one of the universities in banda aceh, indonesia. the quantitative data were analyzed statistically, while the qualitative data were analyzed through data condensation, data display, and conclusion. the results of the research revealed that the dominant lecturer’s style expected by the students in teaching english is the combination of facilitator, personal model, and expert styles. the students favored the lecturers who facilitate students’ learning activities, give personal examples, and provide detailed information that students need. if the lecturers used only one teaching style, the students said they would get bored and learning would not reach maximum results. the combination of the three styles is a form of the student-centered model in which students play an active role in the learning activity in the classroom. keywords: students’ expectations; teaching english; teaching styles. mailto:diana.achmad@usk.ac.id mailto:drasnawi@usk.ac.id mailto:tiarahmanita@gmail.com mailto:drhumairakhan2015@gmail.com diana achmad, asnawi muslem, tia rahmanita, & humaira irfan khan investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english 302 students will positively impact learning, and students will persist if they are attentive to the learning process. even though every teacher has the same goal, they have different styles of delivering materials or information to students during the teaching and learning process. this is known as the teacher’s teaching style. grasha (2002) defines that teaching style as a conceptual model of teaching and learning from the teacher to control students’ ideas and activities in the classroom. suppose the teacher teaches students using a teaching style that students prefer. in that case, the students can better understand what is being taught because the teaching style is suitable to gain their attention and focus. based on this reason, to create an ideal atmosphere in the classroom, the teachers need to choose a teaching style that can explain the lessons well, foster students’ motivations, employ suitable learning media, and guide and direct students in learning (suparno et al., 2006). students have expectations and preferences regarding how the teachers should be when teaching them, which affects their enthusiasm for learning (loveta et al., 2020). when entering the classroom, students may have some images of the lecturer’s style that intrigue their participation in the teaching and learning activities. the ability of teachers, as shown in the classroom, plays an essential role in provoking effective and efficient learning on the students’ part (markley, 2004). the use of varied teaching styles can prevent students from boredom in learning and make them feel more motivated to learn (idhaufi & ashari, 2017). however, when this expectation is not fulfilled by the teachers, negative responses will be elevated from the students’ side. they will be challenged to broaden their range by having to adjust to the lecturer’s teaching style (ph’ng et al., 2016). the purpose of teaching can be achieved by applying good teaching styles. however, many universities and educational institutions are still concerned with focusing on teacher-oriented learning (rauf, 2017). today, learning methods should shift to student-oriented learning, creating a variety of teachers’ teaching styles to develop their skills in the teaching-learning process. the teachers’ teaching styles are among the significant aspects that the teachers must pay attention to in the classroom. it takes a significant shift in thinking and execution to go from teacher-centered learning to student-centered learning (gal, 2020). most teachers still use conventional teaching styles that see teaching as a “transfer of knowledge”, regardless of students’ current conditions and backgrounds. for instance, english instruction lacking to take into account students’ learning styles may be one of the many reasons why english education is unsuccessful (masela & subekti, 2020). a study by ahmed et al. (2020) in pakistan found that female students who had better achievement or scores in their classes were taught by lecturers who mostly used formal authority, role model, delegator, and facilitator styles. meanwhile, tindog and celestial (2021) discovered that directing and delegating are the dominant teaching styles among philippine english teachers, and these teachers’ teaching styles significantly affect students’ learning strategies and their average academic performance in english. in teaching students of different cultures, teachers should also be aware of the ‘cultures of learning’ (xiao, 2007). this is such as the case that xiao (2007) investigated on irish teachers teaching chinese students in ireland, mutual responsibility to gain intercultural understanding is essential to ensure effective teaching and learning outcomes. her study concludes that the teachers’ teaching style must meet the learners’ culture of learning such as their needs, wants, capacities, potentials, and learning style preferences to foster and meet the learners’ expectations. in indonesia, most of the previous studies on english teachers’ teaching styles were mainly carried out at the high school or junior high school level (anggriani & nurrohmah, 2018; khoirunnisa, 2023; salman et al., 2021; wahidiyati, 2009), but not many studies have been done at the university level. the latest studies on university lecturers were conducted by nofita (2020) in aceh and muhdar et al. (2022) in south sulawesi. despite the curriculum now requiring the teaching and learning process to be teacher-centered, the english students in aceh preferred the lecturers’ teaching style in englishspeaking classes to be the formal authority teaching style by further providing them feedback after their speaking performance. meanwhile, the study by muhdar (2022) found that even though the lecturers have applied more than one teaching style in the classroom, most of the students still felt bored in class. the results of this study showed that further investigations on what the university students majoring in english need from their lecturers’ teaching styles to increase their learning participation in class are still english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 303 needed. therefore, this research intends to fill in the gap by researching the university students’ expectations of their lecturers’ styles in teaching english. knowing the students’ preferred teaching styles in the classroom, may help educators study the various teaching styles used from different points of view and understand the importance of reflecting on and adjusting their teaching styles based on the needs of their students. teaching is the main task of the teacher in learning. according to brown (2000), teaching is defined as assisting someone in learning how to do something, providing instructions, assisting in the study of something, supplying with knowledge, causing to know or understand the practice of learning. meanwhile, expectations are individuals’ perceptions or estimates that arise based on individual tendencies to act in certain ways, intending to get results from these actions (wicaksono, 2021). expectations are a critical consideration in determining students’ satisfaction (pinto & anderson, 2013). students are most likely to have self-expectations and beliefs based on prior achievements, experiences, and aspirations of their parents and teachers (rubie-davies et al., 2010). their satisfaction is the level of feelings expressed after comparing perceived results to expectations. their expectations are also one of the important things that the lecturers should be aware of to get a good outcome (eriani et al., 2019). students expect lecturers to have certain qualifications to accomplish their teaching duties. these duties are such as having adequate field knowledge, effective communication skills with students, classroom management skills, skills for teaching activities, and utilization of appropriate teaching methods and techniques (orakcı, 2020). the teaching style is one of the most important roles in teaching and learning. it is an activity that provides an overview of how a teacher delivers material, interacts with students, manages classes, controls, and supervises the learning process (sheikh & mahmood, 2014). the teachers’ teaching style is a conceptual model applied in the teaching and learning process to achieve learning objectives. they can determine whether or not the quality of learning in the classroom is successful or not. teachers greatly influence students’ motivation in teaching and learning. the discrepancy in the teachers’ teaching style can lead to failure to deliver materials, as well as the students’ behaviors in the classroom (rafasah, 2019). there are many types of teaching styles. grasha (2002) offers five different teaching styles, and they are: expert style. expert style is highlighted by teachers who have the knowledge and skills that students need. teachers who practice this style can display detailed knowledge and challenge their students to improve their competence. the advantage of this teaching style is that students gain knowledge, information, and skills that can benefit their experiences. however, presenting detailed knowledge in the classroom can be daunting to less experienced students if this information is overused. formal authority. formal authority is when teachers of this style always give positive or negative feedback to the students, including learning goals, expectations, and student behavior rules. this is a teacher-centered method in which the teachers feel responsible for supplying and regulating the flow of materials and the students are expected to accept them. they assume that the teaching should be delivered in a consistent, accurate, and accepted by students. the advantage of this style is that the teachers focus on clear expectations and achievable goals. on the other hand, a heavy emphasis on this style will result in rigid, simplified, and less flexible ways of managing students and their concerns. teachers who employ this teaching style are less interested in forming relationships with their students and are less concerned about their students who form relationships with other students. this style of instructor typically does not need many students’ interactions in class. personal model style. the teaching should be done using personal examples. the teachers act as a prototype for students on how to think and behave. in addition, the teachers will supervise, guide, and direct students by showing them how to do something. then the teachers encourage students to observe and imitate the teachers as role models. teachers with a personal model teaching style tend to run teacher-centered classrooms. facilitator style. the facilitator style emphasizes teacher-student interaction. the teachers provide guidance and direction by asking questions, providing options to explore, suggesting alternatives, and developing criteria for making informed choices. the overall goal is to develop students’ ability to act and be responsible independently. this teaching style emphasizes student-centered learning. the teachers provide a lot of support and diana achmad, asnawi muslem, tia rahmanita, & humaira irfan khan investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english 304 encouragement to students working on projects. this teaching style is better suited for students who are comfortable with independent learning and who can actively participate and collaborate with their peers. this type of teacher will frequently attempt to develop learning settings and activities that require students to analyze and apply course knowledge in innovative and creative ways. the benefit is that teachers focus on the students’ needs and goals, allowing them to explore options and alternative courses of action. however, the disadvantages of this style are that it takes a long time and can be ineffective when a more direct approach is required. delegator style. the delegator style is concerned with developing students’ ability to learn autonomously and encouraging them to work when implementing a project. the lecturer frequently allows students to devise and carry out their complex learning projects and will act as a consultant. the students are frequently required to work independently or in groups, and they must be able to retain motivation and attention when working on complex projects. students who are involved in this setting learn more than just course content; they must also be able to work well in groups and manage numerous interpersonal responsibilities. in this style, the teachers help students to perceive themselves as independent learners. however, some students may feel unconfident and become anxious when given autonomy. the teachers’ teaching styles may differ depending on the context and the needs of their students and no single teacher in an educational setting follows only one style. grasha (2002) maintains that each style is not a box into which faculty members fit; rather, all the aspects described are present to varying degrees within instructors’ attitudes and behaviors. the teachers cannot be neatly classified into one teaching style, but they can blend each of the five teaching styles to varying degrees. grasha (2002) groups the five teaching styles into four clusters: cluster 1 – expert/formal authority: tends toward a teacher-centered classroom in which information is presented and the students receive knowledge. cluster 2 – personal model/expert/formal authority: it is a teacher’s centered approach that emphasizes modeling and demonstration. this approach encourages the students to observe the processes as well as the content. cluster 3 – facilitator/personal model/expert: it is a student-centered classroom design. the lecturer provides activities, social interactions, or problem-solving situations that allow students to explore the course learning process. cluster 4 – delegator/facilitator/expert: it places much of the learning burden on the students. the teachers provide complex tasks that require the students’ initiative to complete. however, students learn in many ways – by seeing and hearing, reflecting and acting, reasoning logically and intuitively, memorizing and visualizing. teaching methods also vary. moreover, drawing a clear border between teacher-centered and student-centered styles might be a demanding task and teachers may be able to combine teacher-centered and studentcentered teaching styles for an effective teachinglearning process. method this research used mixed methods; quantitative and qualitative. creswell and clark (2018) define mixed methods as research where the researchers collect and analyze data in response to research questions, integrate findings, and draw conclusions inferentially. in this study, the researchers used a set of questionnaires administrated to english major students from one of the universities in banda aceh, indonesia. the questionnaire inquired about the lecturers’ teaching styles in teaching english that students expected. to gain more detailed information, the researchers conducted interviews with students to understand the students’ personal views and experiences on the lecturers’ styles of teaching english. a number of 45 students filled in the questionnaire. from this number, 20% were purposively chosen for the interviews, making a total of 9 students. the questionnaire used was adapted from sariniwati (2021), in which she based on grasha’s theory (2002), known as the teaching style survey. in the questionnaire, there were 21 items, inquiring about teachers’ five teaching styles. each item was classified into five scales namely ‘strongly agree’ (5), ‘agree’ (4), ‘neutral’ (3), ‘disagree’ (2), and ‘strongly disagree’ (1). each type of teaching style was represented by statements arranged in sequences. table 1 shows the questionnaire used in this study; the items are presented in both english and indonesian to avoid students’ confusion in comprehending the statements. while table 2 shows the specifications of each item in the questionnaire. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 305 table 1. questionnaire on english lecturers’ teaching styles (adapted from grasha (2002) and sariniwati (2021)) no statements sa a n d sd 5 4 3 2 1 1 explaining and displaying the material in detail are effective methods. 2 teachers use the lecturing method for half of the learning process. 3 challenge the students by giving the quiz of the day. 4 the teacher brings the students to have extensive knowledge. 5 students describe the standards and expectations as somewhat strict and rigid. 6 the teacher uses the standard ways of teaching english. 7 students receive frequent verbal/written comments on their performances. 8 the teacher sets high standards to achieve effectiveness in learning. 9 the teacher shows us how to do things. 10 clear instructions are given by the teacher on how to complete the task. 11 the teacher often shows students how we can use various principles and concepts. 12 teachers use their personal experiences to illustrate the material. 13 the teacher established group discussions to develop students’ critical thinking. 14 teachers apply methods which appropriate to students’ learning styles. 15 teachers apply activities that can grow the responsibility of students. 16 teachers give students a lot of personal support and encouragement to do this course. 17 the teacher encourages group discussion in the class. 18 the teacher gave us a project to be done in class. 19 teachers expect us to learn autonomously through discussion in class. 20 students choose their alternative ways to do the task freely. 21 teachers ask students to do activities of learning through direct experience. table 2. specifications of the teaching style survey (adapted from grasha (2002) and sariniwati (2021)) no. teaching style items 1 expert style 1, 2, 3, 4 2 formal authority 5, 6, 7, 8 3 personal model 9, 10, 11, 12 4 facilitator 13, 14, 15, 16 5 delegator 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 meanwhile, three main questions were prepared to obtain a depth of information about the university students’ expectations of their lecturers’ style in teaching english. they are: (1) how was your english class? (2) do you think the lecturer’s teaching style matches your expectations? explain. (3) what is the lecturer’s style in teaching english that you expect in the classroom? why? this research used a semi-structured interview (ary et al., 2010; creswell, 2012), and probing questions were expanded from the main questions to further dig up information from the students. the interviews were conducted in english, and audio recorded by the third researcher, and each interview lasted about 15 to 30 minutes. the results were further transcribed. the data collected from the questionnaire were analyzed and explained descriptively. the researchers first calculated the percentages of students’ responses. the formula used in the calculation was simple percentages (arikunto, 2021). next, the answers were categorized based on levels as proposed by sugiyono (2014). table 3. criteria percentage of students’ responses of lecturer’s teaching style (adapted from sugiyono, 2014). interval (%) criteria 81% 100% very high 61% 80% high 41% 60% sufficient 21% 40% low 0% 20% very low the transcription from the interviews was analyzed based on the steps of qualitative analysis proposed by miles et al. (2014). they are data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing/verifying. results and discussion the results of the questionnaire the results from the questionnaire are presented in this section. they are divided based on the teachers’ teaching styles (in this case, lecturers). expert style table 4 shows the students’ responses to the expert teaching style items in the questionnaire. table 4. the result of students’ responses on expert style result of students’ responses number of statements sa a n d sd 1 22 21 2 0 0 2 7 18 15 5 0 diana achmad, asnawi muslem, tia rahmanita, & humaira irfan khan investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english 306 3 10 20 12 2 1 4 38 7 0 0 0 total 77 66 29 7 1 based on table 4, the scores and percentages of frequency of students’ responses to the expert teaching style were calculated as shown in table 5. table 5. percentages of frequency of expert teaching style number of items alternative answer frequ ency score % frequency 1-4 sa 77 385 42.78 a 66 264 36.67 n 29 87 16.11 d 7 14 3.89 sd 1 1 0.56 total 180 751 100 calculation: maximum score5 x 45 x 4 = 900 minimum score1 x 45 x 4 = 180 total score751 percentage score = 751/900 x 100 % = 83.44 % based on table 5, the percentage of expert teaching style was 83.44%, indicating that the expert teaching style was classified as a very high category. most students felt at ease when the lecturers performed the teaching activities that referred to the expert teaching style. formal authority style the responses from the students for each formal authority teaching style item in the questionnaire are displayed in table 6. table 6. the result of students’ responses on formal authority style result of students’ responses number of statements sa a n d sd 5 3 13 18 9 2 6 5 15 17 7 1 7 6 15 21 2 1 8 5 16 14 9 1 total 19 59 70 27 5 based on table 6, the scores and percentages of frequency of students’ responses to the formal authority teaching style are presented in table 7. table 7. percentages of frequency on formal authority teaching style number of items alternative answer frequ ency score % frequ ency 5-8 sa 19 95 10.56 a 59 236 32.78 n 70 210 38.89 d 27 54 15.00 sd 5 5 2.78 total 180 600 100 calculation: maximum score5 x 45 x 4 = 900 minimum score1 x 45 x 4 =180 total score600 percentage score = 600/900 x 100 % = 66.67 % based on the results in table 7, the percentage of formal authority teaching style was 66.67%, meaning that the formal authority teaching style is in the high category. some students were comfortable when the lecturers conducted the learning process with the formal authority teaching style. personal model style table 8 shows the responses of the students for each personal model teaching style item in the questionnaire. table 8. the result of students’ responses on personal model style result of students’ responses number of statements sa a n d sd 9 25 16 3 1 0 10 26 14 4 1 0 11 13 27 3 2 0 12 12 19 11 2 1 total 76 76 21 6 1 based on table 8, the scores and percentages of frequency of students’ responses to the personal model teaching style can be seen in table 9. table 9. percentages of frequency on personal model teaching style number of items alternative answer frequ ency score % frequ ency 9-12 sa 76 380 42.22 a 76 304 42.22 n 21 63 11.67 d 6 12 3.33 sd 1 1 0.56 total 180 760 100 calculation: maximum score5 x 45 x 4 = 900 minimum score1 x 45 x 4 =180 total score760 percentage score = 760/900 x 100 % = 84.44 % based on table 9, the percentage of personal model teaching style was 84.44%, denoting that the personal model teaching style was classified as a very high category. most students felt comfortable when the lecturers used the learning english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 307 process that referred to the personal model teaching style. facilitator style table 10 shows the responses of the students on the facilitator teaching style items in the questionnaire. table 10. the result of students’ responses on facilitator style result of students’ responses number of statements sa a n d sd 13 16 23 4 2 0 14 25 17 2 1 0 15 23 20 1 0 1 16 17 21 6 0 1 total 81 81 13 3 2 based on table 10, the scores and percentages of the frequency of students’ responses to the facilitator teaching style are shown in table 11. table 11. percentage of frequency of facilitator teaching style number of items alternati ve answer frequ ency score % frequenc y 13-16 sa 81 405 45.00 a 81 324 45.00 n 13 39 7.22 d 3 6 1.67 sd 2 2 1.11 total 180 776 100 calculation: maximum score5 x 45 x 4 = 900 minimum score1 x 45 x 4 =180 total score776 percentage score = 776/900 x 100 % = 86.22 % based on table 11, the percentage of facilitator teaching style was 86.22 %, indicating that the facilitator teaching style was classified as very high. most students expected the lecturers to carry out activities in the classroom that refer to the facilitator teaching style. delegator style table 12 shows the responses of the students on the delegator teaching style items in the questionnaire. table 12. the result of students’ responses on delegator style result of students’ responses number of statements sa a n d sd 17 12 26 7 0 0 18 17 21 5 2 0 19 5 20 12 6 2 20 15 18 6 5 1 21 12 22 10 1 0 total 61 107 40 14 3 based on table 12, the scores and percentages of frequency of students’ responses to the delegator teaching style are displayed in table 13. table 13. percentage of frequency of delegator teaching style number of items alternative answer frequ ency score % frequ ency 13-16 sa 61 305 27.11 a 107 428 47.56 n 40 120 17.78 d 14 28 6.22 sd 3 3 1.33 total 225 884 100 calculation: maximum score5 x 45 x 5 = 1125 minimum score1 x 45 x 5 =225 total score = 884 percentage score = 884/900 x 100 % = 78.58 % based on table 13, the percentage of the delegator teaching style was 78.5 %, indicating that the delegator teaching style was categorized as high. most of the students were comfortable when the lecturers conducted the learning process that referred to the delegator teaching style. figure 1. percentages of students’ responses to lecturer’s teaching style diana achmad, asnawi muslem, tia rahmanita, & humaira irfan khan investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english 308 figure 1 illustrated the differences in percentages between the teaching styles, where the expert, personal model, and facilitator styles are small. the percentages of the expert teaching style were 83.44 %, the personal model teaching style was 84.44 %, and the facilitator teaching style was 86.22%. it can be said that the students preferred the lecturers to carry out learning activities by combining the facilitator style, personal model style, and expert style in teaching english in the classroom. the least styles preferred by the students were the delegator teaching style with 78.58 % and the formal authority teaching style with 66.67%. the results of interviews in the interviews, the first guided question asked was about the students’ learning experiences in classes. most of the students agreed that their classes were fun and interesting. “most of the classes were fun.” (st4) “in my opinion, while studying at the department of english education, the classes varied. the variation seen here is in the lecturers’ styles when teaching in their classes. i say fifty-fifty…this means 50% are fun, interesting, and easy to absorb the learning materials, but there is also another 50% that i feel the way some lecturers teach needs to be improvised so that students do not feel bored and can quickly absorb the materials taught in the classes.” (st5) “in my opinion, so far from the first semester until the eighth semester, it has been fun. a lot of experiences can be drawn from each class from various lecturers.” (st7) “my classes so far have been quite fun and i also received the learning well. however, each lecturer certainly has ups and downs when teaching in the classrooms.” (st2) the second question was related to the suitability of the lecturers’ teaching styles to the students’ expectations. most of the teaching styles applied by lecturers in the class have fulfilled students’ expectations. however, they deemed that the lecturers must continue to improve their teaching styles to achieve more effective learning. the students’ answers can be seen in the following excerpts. “some lecturers fulfill my expectations and some lecturers are beyond expectations or not according to my expectations.” (st4) “most of the lecturers at our department have implemented teaching styles according to my expectations such as explaining the materials and then giving examples, but not demanding the students to become something more meaningful, such as not demanding too much. they prefer to provide material in the form of facts that have not been known by students in class. this is in line with my expectations. however, teaching styles that do not meet my expectations are such as some lecturers whose teaching methods are not very clear but require students to find out for themselves and then do the assignments given in front of the class. i think that is not good because sometimes there are things that students do not understand how to do the assignment. so, the impression is that the lecturer is not able to convey the materials.” (st5) “alhamdulillah, during the learning process from the first semester until now, whether offline or online, most are as i have expected. however, some things are still lacking when online learning. during online learning, the lecturers sometimes focus more on giving assignments to students. i hope that the lecturers can do better in teaching, guiding, and facilitating students in the classroom.” (st7) “alhamdulillah, the lecturers’ style of teaching english in the classroom is in line with my expectations but i hope there will be an evaluation or improvement in the teaching and learning process that can motivate students to study more.” (st3) “in terms of expectations, of course, all students hope that all lecturers are good, but what i found was not all of them are in line with the students’ expectations. some of them were far from my expectations. for example, a lecturer who often gives assignments, but is rarely present in class. then another example is the dominant lecturer who talks too much or talks about things not relating to the learning materials.” (st2) the last question was about the students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english in the classroom. some of the lecturers’ teaching styles mentioned by the students in the interviews included lecturers who always supervised and facilitated students, lecturers who showed them how to do things, and lecturers who provided detailed information on learning material. the results were similar to the data english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 309 gained from the questionnaire. below are the excerpts of the students’ answers. “my expectations of the lecturers, when teaching in class, i hope that they can guide students. i enjoy learning with practice. i also enjoy studying in groups with my friends and doing presentations. then i also like it when the lecturer gives lectures, but not throughout the class, but also related to learning in class. then i also like lecturers who motivate students, and those who give advice. my expectations, i hope that the lecturers can facilitate students, able to provide materials where all students can gain a better understanding.” (st7) “i prefer lecturers who like to ask students to do group presentations in front of the class. apart from building self-confidence, it also helps me in public speaking.” (st3) “everyone has a different way of learning. my expectation for the lecturer’s way of teaching is that, if possible, in the class, maybe a mix of two to three styles, not too much teachercentered. the lecturer should provide the materials efficiently. for example, the lecturers have their own portion of when they must give a lecture about material, and then there is also another portion when they become a facilitator. for example, in a class, there are two hours for study time, the first hour or the first 30 minutes the lecturers can explain the material so the students understand what the lecturer wants the student to do. now in the next hour, the lecturer can become a facilitator in the sense that they can form a group for students in class. then facilitate the students when students want to ask questions. they can become a facilitator. and finally, in the last hour, they can also give time for students to be more active in class. for example, maybe directing students to make presentations or asking questions that can stimulate students’ thinking in class so that students look more active in class than the lecturer himself. and there must be cooperation between students and lecturers so that the expectations desired by both parties can be realized and achieved.” (st5) “the teaching style of the lecturer according to my expectations is the lecturer who explains the material in a lecture but not a rigid lecture such as using the old style like explaining the material from the book. because lectures like that will make students bored, and become passive learners. however, if the lecturer explains in his/her own style or maybe interacts with his/her experiences that are around us, or is given group assignments, or individual assignments, this makes it easier for students to understand the material and be active learners.” (st9) “i like lecturers who share their experiences studying abroad. thus, the students are more motivated. then i also like lecturers who explain a little theory at the beginning, and then just give practical assignments or other assignments to students.” (st8) “they explain the material and give examples, but they don’t require their students to be something more. lecturers are more likely to give examples such as facts that the students in the class don’t know.” (st1) “i like lecturers who teach and explain the material in detail. the lecturer also facilitates and provides opportunities for students to be creative with their own creativity but also under the supervision of the lecturer. besides that, the lecturers who become my expectations are lecturers who want to give direct examples of the material presented, for example, such as lecturers giving examples of correct pronunciation, then also lecturer who always gives examples first before giving assignments to students.” (st4) based on these responses, it can be concluded that a majority of the students find their english classes fun and enjoyable. most of the lecturers delivered learning materials in an entertaining and informative manner. therefore, the lecturers’ teaching approaches in class have generally met the students’ expectations. however, some pose concerns and suggestions that the lecturers must continue to improve their teaching styles to achieve more effective learning. they mentioned that they expected lecturers who can supervise students and play a more central role in designing projects and activities for students. lecturers should provide opportunities for students to be active in class. most students also confirmed that they prefer lecturers who showed them how to do things. they also pointed out they preferred lecturers who provide detailed information related to learning materials. to conclude, the students preferred the facilitator style combined with the expert style and the personal model style the results of this study from the questionnaire revealed that the facilitator style received the highest score among the other five teaching styles. based on grasha (2002), the facilitator style provides guidance and direction to students, providing options for consideration, diana achmad, asnawi muslem, tia rahmanita, & humaira irfan khan investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english 310 recommending alternatives, and developing criteria for making decisions. for example, in the first meeting of the class, the lecturer discusses course guidelines with students and makes decisions based on mutual agreement. the lecturer then frequently provides opportunities for students to express their thoughts on the material that has been presented by the lecturer throughout the course. this is in line with the research conducted by humaira (2018), where teachers should frequently give support and ideas for decision-making, and encourage students to establish appropriate criteria for learning. in the facilitator style, the lecturer provides assignments to students as positive reinforcement to assist them to comprehend the content in depth. the lecturer also provides direction to students before working on assignments. then the lecturer helps students find new ideas to solve existing problems when completing their assignments as well. soleimani (2020) agrees that in the facilitator style, the learners should not see teachers as simply providers of knowledge, but should instead use a variety of resources to acquire the lessons. this study further revealed that the personal model received a percentage that is in the criteria of ‘very high’. this style is on the second level after the facilitator style. based on grasha (2002), the personal model is concerned with showing students how to do something, and the lecturers act as role models. they prepare tools and materials for hands-on practice, and they guide prefer to show students what they are explaining step by step (suparno et al., 2006), often by using visual aids such as powerpoint presentations, handouts, and learning videos. they give tips that are easy for students to do. moreover, they invite students to do as they have exemplified and reprimand students who do not complete assignments without following the rules. most of the students like to learn english with examples from the lecturers’ personal experiences. these direct examples can make it easier for them to understand the learning materials. therefore, lecturers must put forward students’ participation in class for effective learning. furthermore, the expert teaching style is also included in the criteria of ‘very high’. based on grasha (2002), the expert style emphasizes teachers demonstrate detailed knowledge and challenge their students to improve their skills. in learning english, the students need detailed information about the topic to make them better understand the material. perhaps this was why most students in this study chose this style as their expectation of the lecturers’ style in teaching english. however, they also suggested that lecturers need to combine this expert style with other teaching styles. if only one style is used, it makes the learning process to be tedious (sari, 2018), and pressures students to attend class. therefore, the use of teaching styles greatly affects the success of students in understanding the learning material (tindog & celestial, 2021). based on the delegator style, the percentage obtained from students’ responses is interpreted as ‘high’. grasha (2002) states that the delegator style is concerned with developing students’ ability to learn autonomously in the classroom. the lecturers direct students to find learning materials related to certain subjects. then, the students are asked to do the tasks autonomously because this style deals to develop autonomous thinking among learners (ahmed et al., 2020). the assignments are frequently earning projects that employ a consultancy role to solve problems. the lectures still guide students and become consultants in transmitting knowledge, setting goals, and providing feedback (ahmed et al., 2020). the lecturers observe students’ progress and provide solutions to students’ worries. however, the students in this study informed that some lecturers are not clear in giving instructions when assigning projects, this made them anxious because they are confused to choose their own alternative ways to do the task autonomously. therefore, the students needed in-depth guidance from the lecturers regarding the given project and they expected the lecturers to improve their instructions in the future. based on the formal authority teaching style, the percentage obtained is included in the ‘high’ criteria. grasha (2002) states that the formal authority teaching style focused on giving positive and negative feedback on students’ outcomes. the lecturers give a major concern on providing the treatment with a standard form, accurate, and teaching goal set by the university’s academic administration. this is the lowest style that was chosen by the students in this study. they assumed the standards and lecturers’ expectations of them as strict and rigid. the high standards make students feel pressured and less flexible to enhance their ability to master english skills. this is different from a previous study conducted by nofita (2020) which revealed that the formal authority teaching style was more dominantly preferred by the students to be applied in english-speaking classes. the way english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 311 lecturers deliver their comments after speaking performance affected students’ self-confidence. further results from the interviews in this study revealed that most of the students did enjoy and understood the materials being taught by their lecturers. they find that the teaching styles applied by the lecturers good and they favored the facilitator style used by lecturers when teaching english, analogous to the results of ahmed et al. (2020). the students agitated for improvement, such as updating their teaching styles to suit the needs of students. this is as asserted by xiao (2007), that accommodating the students’ learning needs is essential so that they can better achieve their learning goals. thus, learning will be varied and fun. even though the students favored the facilitator style used by lecturers when teaching english, they also called for a combination of the styles (khoirunnisa, 2023). they solicited that the facilitator style would be more effective if it was combined with the expert style and personal model style. this finding is in line with loveta et al. (2020) who found that students prefer varying teaching styles in practice, which means that they like it when teachers teach depending on the classroom circumstances at the moment of the class. grasha (2002) further explicated that the facilitator, personal model, and expert style fall into cluster 3. the teaching styles in cluster 3 are the student-centered model for the classroom. here, the lecturers design activities, social interactions, or problem-solving situations that allow students to practice the processes for applying the course content. in the teaching and learning process, the lecturers provide opportunities for students to act independently, creatively, collaboratively, and communicatively. the lecturers should explain the points in the subject matter interactively to attract the students’ attention to the lecturer’s explanations. the lecturer delivers subject matter more flexibly and creatively instead of sticking to the language in books or other learning resources. in addition, the students can easily understand the lesson if the lecturers provide direct examples related to the topic being discussed (tindog & celestial, 2021) in which the lecturer acts as a role model and the students imitate what the lecturer exemplifies. giving examples related to the lecturer’s personal experience can be used as self-reflection for the students to be motivated to learn. thus, the teaching and learning process does not become stiff and boring (sari 2018). conclusion based on the results of this research, the students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english were the facilitator style combined with the personal model style and the expert style. most students agreed that combining teaching styles was more effective than using only one teaching style. because if the lecturers used only one teaching style, the students will tend to get bored and learning would not reach maximum results. the combination of the three styles is a form of the student-centered model in which students play an active role in the learning activity in the classroom. finally, this research may be extended by further researchers who have a similar same interest in identifying teachers’ teaching styles. more respondents can be considered and broader areas of research locations are also suggested in the future to further understand the needs and expectations of students while learning in class. references ahmed, s., farooqi, m. t. k., & iqbal, a. 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(2006). reformasi pendidikan sebuah rekomendasi [educational reformation, a recommendation], 6th ed.. yogyakarta: kanisius. tindog, s. b., & celestial, a. b. (2021). english teachers’ teaching styles and methods and students’ learning styles and strategies in selected secondary schools in the division of puerto princesa city, philippines. european journal of humanities and educational advancements (ejhea), 2(6), 30-52. wahidiyati, i. (2009). the teachers’ teaching style variations in the english classroom activities: a study on the english teachers of smpn 2 ambarawa. (bachelor’s thesis). universitas negeri semarang, semarang. retrieved from http://lib.unnes.ac.id/2459/1/4627.pdf wicaksono, m. f. (2021). student expectation of library science (case study in department of science and islamic information. record and library journal, 7(1), 7-16. xiao, l. (2007). bridging the gap between teaching styles and learning styles: a cross cultural perspective. the journal of asia tefl, 4(1), 55-78. diana achmad, asnawi muslem, tia rahmanita, & humaira irfan khan investigating students’ expectations of the lecturers’ styles in teaching english 314 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 11 the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous pushed output instructions on speaking complexity parviz ghasedi english department, faculty of humanity, university of zabol, iran e-mail: ghasedi.p.988@gmail.com habibollah mashhady english department, faculty of humanity, university of zabol, iran e-mail: mashhadyh@uoz.ac.ir farideh okati english department, faculty of humanity, university of zabol, iran e-mail: farideh.okati@uoz.ac.ir apa citation: ghasedi, p., mashhady, h., & okati, f. (2017). the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous pushed output instructions on speaking complexity. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 11-20. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.766. received: 28-08-2017 accepted: 31-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: this study was set out to investigate the efficacy of homogeneous and heterogeneous pushed output based instruction on upper-intermediate efl learner’ speaking complexity. to do so, 41 (17 males and 24 females) efl learners were selected from university of zabol based on the results of opt. then, they were put in control and experimental groups based on the predetermined criteria. retelling and decision making tasks were used in the treatments of experimental groups while control group received placebo during 15 sessions, twice a week. public versions of ielts speaking test were used as pre/post-test. the results of independent sample t-test indicated that experimental groups outperformed control group. on the other hand, statistical analyses showed no significant differences between male and female speech complexity. to sum up, the findings demonstrated the fruitful effects of collaborative pushed output activities on speaking sub-skills. likewise, the results suggested the implementation of similar strategies in the development of male and female speaking dimensions. based on the findings, it can be claimed that teacher preparation programs should put teaching speaking on their list of priorities and provide courses on effective strategies for the development of speaking dimensions through implementing the main tenants of pushed output hypothesis. keywords: homogeneous, heterogeneous, complexity, speaking, pushed output introduction considering specific role for output to practice what language learners internalized as comprehensible inputs in educational contexts, swain (1985) introduced the notion of pushed output hypothesis and notes that it helps learners process comprehensible input more effectively (basterrechea, mayo & leeser, 2014). pushed output reflects the process of practicing written or oral outcomes accurately and effectively (swain, 2005). daring to criticize krashen’s (1985, p.61) strong claims that “comprehensible input is the only true cause of second language acquisition”, swain (1985, 1998, 2000) contemplates specific functions for output hypothesis that makes learners aware of their incapability in using the intakes in their outputs during conveying their intentions (byrne, 2012; thwaites, 2014). swain (1985, 1998, 2000) summarizes the main functions of pushed output under three titles of noticing/consciousness-raising, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic. nation (1990) asserts that such main functions of pushed parviz ghasedi, habibollah mashhady, & farideh okati the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous pushed output instructions on speaking complexity 12 output will inspire efl/esl learners to implement what they learned in interactions with their peers or teachers. the repetitions of such activities lead to the automatic use of lexical and grammatical structures which consequently improve their language proficiencies. generally speaking, pushed output hypothesis was proposed with the promise of boosting learners’ productive (oral or written) competence. on the other hand, developing learners’ oral subs-kills, complexity, accuracy, and fluency, is viewed as the ultimate goal of learning english in efl/esl contexts (mccarthy, 1998). moreover, alonso (2014) considers speaking as the building block for learning listening, reading, and writing. likewise, celik and yavuz (2015) add that speaking is the corner stone of conducting communicative role of language. on the other side, a conclusive review of the related studies indicates that one of the big challenges of efl learners is producing accurate, coherent, lexically dense, and fluent utterances (alonso, 2014; dahmardeh, 2009). furthermore, teaching speaking sub-skills, especially in efl countries, confronted with lots of problems because a native like oral outputs needs a combination of “phonetic, phonological prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantics and pragmatic” (osada, 2004, p. 56) knowledge. with the emergence of pushed output hypothesis and its emphasis on providing learners with the opportunities to use target language in negotiation based activities, this problem seems to be resolved. some studies investigated the efficacy of pushed output in developing learner syntactic and grammatical accuracy or reading comprehension (doneschjezo, 2011; ertürk, 2013; tabatabaei & yakhabi, 2009). moreover, sadeghi-beniss and edalati-bazzaz (2014) investigated the effects of pushed output on speaking fluency and accuracy. however, no study investigated the effects of pushed output on speaking complexity. likewise, there is no valid long term research project on the efficacy of pushed output in developing speaking sub-skills. accordingly, this study was set out to fill the mentioned gaps and find new strategies for developing learner speaking complexity through implementing main tenants of pushed output hypothesis. the role of input in language acquisition the proposed theories of first language acquisition (such as behaviorists, nativists, and functional) and that of l2 acquisition, (such as input hypothesis and output hypothesis) attach different significance (principal or secondary) to the role of input in language development (ellis, 2008). from the behavioristic perspective, language input, which consists of the “production of correct response to stimuli” (brown, 2007, p. 26), plays a vital role in language acquisition (ellis, 2008). for nativists, it is a premium trigger for inspiring the pre-existed abilities (ellis, 2008). similarly, constructivists highlight the significance of input and interaction in learning the target language (ellis, 2008). krashen (1981) regards it as the main criterion for learning and advancement and notes that input provides incidental and sufficient data for development. krashen (1985) believes that if language learners are provided with lots of understandable data in different formats (oral, written, or pictorial), they will acquire l2. he introduces the notion of “i+1” and argues that, a vital issue regarding comprehensible input is the fact that learners should be exposed to the “input language that contains structures a bite beyond his or her current levels of competence” (krashen, 1981, p. 100). according to krashen (1982), the fundamental inspiration to comprehend the structures that we have not ace yet (i+1) is our abilities to use our already mastered knowledge, lexico-grammatical knowledge, logical information, and our insight into the world. put another way, he asserts that in sla, we use more than our lexical and grammatical competence. furthermore, krashen (1982) accentuates that learner should focus on the meaning of the messages that directed at him/her, not their structural forms. likewise, krashen (1982) believes that we should not push learner to speak. he adds that although learners with different proficiency levels start talking at different points in time, we should not expect them to produce accurate, well-formed, and precise outputs at english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 13 the beginning. therefore, we ought to give them the chance to talk when they feel ready for it and tolerate their grammatical and lexical errors. the role of pushed output in language acquisition swain (1995) considers a significant place for input in educational contexts. however, she notes that comprehensible input cannot lead to the advancement. language learner should gain enough opportunities to process the received inputs and implement them in their outputs (van patten, 2002). output is defined as linguistic outcomes that learners produce (orally or in written) to convey their intentions, wants, desires, or ideas (kumaravadivelu, 2006; van patten, 2003). nation (2011) notes that pushed connotes the cooperation process between interlocutors and pushed output implies pushing learners to use their background knowledge to produce outputs that are lexically dense and grammatically correct. pushing students to practice and revise their outputs seems emergence for becoming competent communicators (byrne, 2012). accordingly, swain (1985) numbers main functions of pushed output as noticing, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic. gass (2003) views noticing as a factor that connects language comprehension to language generation. donesch-jezo (2011) indicates that noticing triggers the cognitive creation of new grammatical and lexical knowledge or integration of knowledge that stored in memory. likewise, noticing function of poh triggers essential intellectual procedures such as psychological comparison (muranoi, 2007). research represents two main benefits of noticing as ‘noticing the holes’ and ‘noticing the gap’ (muranoi, 2007; swain, 1998). the first one informs students of their weakness points in converting their thoughts into target language words and structures (byrne, 2012; schmidt & frota, 1986). the second one makes them aware of the distances between their oral or written outputs and those of more proficient cocommunicators (peers or teachers) or native speakers (izumi, 2003; muranoi, 2007; swain, 1998). the second function of pushed output relates to the facts that during interaction with peers or with proficient speakers or writers, learners test different outputs and receive positive or negative feedbacks, which consequently lead to the internalization of the more (pragmatically and syntactically) appropriate ones (kumaravadivelu, 2006). in the same line, it is argued that hypothesis testing set the grounds for learners’ use of production skills to test whether the newly shaped hypothesis about the form and manner of conveying their intentions are meaningful and well-formed or not (qin, 2008; swain, 1995). concerning the third function of output, metalinguistic function, swain (1998, p. 68) notes that “learners use language to reflect on language use”. kumaravadivelu (2006) asserts that metalinguistic function of poh refers to the fact that learners consciously reflect on the language system. he mentions that learners may consciously think about the phonological, lexical, and grammatical roles of the tl in order to be more fluent and accurate in their productions. speaking complexity the review of the related literature indicates that speaking has three main dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (skehan, 1998; skehan & foster, 1999). since some studies were done on speaking fluency and accuracy, this study focused on the efficacy of pushed output in developing speaking complexity. complexity concerns on the lexical density, grammatical well-formednes, and the richness of utterances produced by interlocutors (housen, kuiken, &vedder, 2012). skehan and foster (1999) assert that complexity refers to the students’ abilities to talk soundly and cohesively. saslow et al., (2014, p. 258) summarize the key features of linguistically complex speech as using more “exclusive words (such as but, except, however, and unless), tentative words (such as maybe, perhaps, hesitant, and guess), negations (such as never, neither, without, and cannot), and discrepancies (such as should, would, and wish)”. in the language learning and teaching parviz ghasedi, habibollah mashhady, & farideh okati the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous pushed output instructions on speaking complexity 14 contexts, the mastery of oral ability becomes such a priority for many foreign or second language learners that many language learners evaluate the effectiveness of the course as well as their proficiencies on the basis of their improvement in speaking sub-skills (brown &yule, 1983; richards, 2008). moreover, rivers (1981) climes that the capacity to talk second or foreign language empowers learners to see new connections and opportunities and puts forth that speaking enables individuals to responds to different people and circumstances. skehan (2009) considers an antagonistic relationship among fluency, accuracy, and complexity. he states that learner cannot focus on the three dimensions simultaneously (because of the law capability of working memory). others believe that learners may focus on one dimension in specific points in time (gilabert, 2007; robinson, 2001; skehan & foster, 1999). in the eyes of ellis (1994), the main cause of such challenges is the fact that the psycholinguistic processes required in tl production (speaking or writing) are different from its comprehension (reading or listening). furthermore, he mentions that in the process of acquiring grammatical and lexical knowledge, learners must focus on input and monitor his/her outcomes, results in interference between fluent and accurate speech. yuan and ellis (2003) claim that pretask planning had significant effects on learners’ speaking complexity; however its effects on speech accuracy were not fruitful. likewise, the results of birjandi and alipour (2010) revealed that the effects of noncollaborative pre-task planning on learners’ speaking accuracy were more effective and fruitful than collaborative pre-task planning. on the other hand, the collaborative pre-task planning group outperformed the noncollaborative pre-task planning group concerning speech complexity. in a comparative study, tabatabaei and yakhabi (2009) compared the effects of input and output on efl learners’ speaking accuracy and complexity. they collected data from 60 female efl learners. their findings indicated that input was effective in developing speaking complexity. however, output was more effective in developing learner speech accuracy. moreover, the results of basterrechea et al., (2014) showed that the use of output based instruction in language classrooms provided learners with the appropriate and accurate speech which could be used as a model for novice learners to modify their outcomes and paid specific attentions to structures of native like speech. in sum, some studies approved the significant effects of pushed output in language classrooms. however, there is no valid quantitative research project on the efficacy of pushed output in developing learner speaking fluency, accuracy, and complexity (thwaites, 2014). on the other hand, one of the big challenges of efl teacher, especially in iran, is developing learners’ ability to produce lexical dense, coherent, appropriate, and to the points utterances (mohammadi, gorjian, & pazhakh, 2014). therefore, this study was set out with the intention of implementing the main tenants of pushed output hypothesis in order to find new strategies for developing speaking complexity. accordingly, the following research questions were proposed. 1. does homogeneous pushed output have any significant effect on efl learners’ speaking complexity? 2. does heterogeneous pushed output have any significant effect on efl learners’ speaking complexity? 3. does gender have any significant effect on efl learners’ speaking complexity? method this study was done at the second semester of 2016 academic year. the upper-intermediate efl learners (17males and 24 females) were selected based on the results of opt. the age of the participants ranged from 20 to 29. they were selected based on the results of oxford placement test (opt). accordingly, those whose score were between 40-47 were selected as the sample of this study. then, the selected samples were put in three groups of control group (cg), homogeneous group (hg), and heterogeneous or asymmetrical group (ag). table 1 represents group english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 15 specification. table 1. groups specification groups total no gender education male female ba ma ph.d. cg 14 7 7 8 5 1 hg 13 5 8 11 2 0 ag total 14 41 5 17 9 24 10 29 4 11 2 3 as table 1 shows 29 members of the sample were ba, 11 were ma, and 3 were ph.d. students. they were put in cg randomly but the member of hg were those students whose scores were not more than one standard deviation bellow or above the predetermined cut scores and the members of ag were those whose scores were more than one standard deviation bellow or above the predetermined cut score. at the beginning of the study, the researcher explained the aims and significance of the study to the participants and assured them that the information would be used just for research purposes and would be kept quite confidential. moreover, they were informed that the results of their responses would not affect their english marks. ielts speaking test was used to measure learners’ speaking complexity at the beginning of the study. the participants participated in face to face interview with the researcher in an empty room in the univercity of zabol, faculty of humanity. after that, they studied 7 lessons of new interchange 2 during 8 weeks, twice a week for about 45 minutes each session. cg participated in normal speaking classroom. the subjects listened to different audio files of the book. then, they were given 5 minutes to think about them. after that, the files were plaid again and teacher asked some general and specific questions about the plaid files. the interactions between subjects were limited in cg and much of the time of the class was spent on teacher explanations and managements. on the other hand, the hg and ag participated in task based classroom. the notion and aims of pushed output were explained to them at the begging of the study and they were informed of how they should cooperate and push their partners to use more complex structures in their outputs. two main tasks, retelling and decision making task, were used in such classroom. the subjects were supposed to push each other toward using more lexically dense utterances during task completion. moreover, they inspired each other to speak more accurately and coherently. at the end of the study another version of ielts speaking test was used as posttest. the interviews were audio recorded by philips gogear mix mp3 player. the recorded files were transcribed and coded for statistical analyses. after transcribing the collected data, they were coded for further analyses. to quantify speech complexity the authors used lexical density. accordingly, the number of uttered lexical words was divided by deliver words (based on norris & ortega, 2009; rahimpour, 1999). moreover, in line with rahimpour (2008) and rahimpour and mehrang (2010), the obtained results were multiplied by 100 (to make them more tangible). after coding the collected data and entering them into spss, descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test were run to answer the research questions. results and discussion the first research question investigated the efficacy of homogeneous pushed output based instructions on efl learner speaking complexity. independent sample t-test was used to answer this question. table 2 shows the results of descriptive statistics and table 3 presents the results of independent sample ttest. parviz ghasedi, habibollah mashhady, & farideh okati the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous pushed output instructions on speaking complexity 16 table 2. descriptive statistics of pre/post-test for cg, hg, and ag groups n m sd se complexity pre-test cg 14 29.330 2.292 .612 hg 13 29.364 .764 .211 ag 14 29.384 1.997 .533 complexity post-test cg 14 35.366 4.097 1.095 hg 13 39.496 1.650 .457 ag 14 45.562 2.079 .555 table 2 indicates that the mean scores of cg (m= 35.366), hg (m=39.496), and ag (m= 39.496) are rather different at the posttest of the study. therefore, independent sample ttest was used as further analysis. table 3. results of independent samples t-test for the efficiency of hg f t df sig. (2-tailed) m difference std. error difference complexity 6.106 -2.080 24 .001* -4.13 1.065 note. * = p< .05. the result of independent sample t-test indicated significant differences between the mean scores of cg and hg (f=6.106, t= 2.080, df= 24, p= .001).therefore, it can be claimed that homogeneous pushed output based instructions have significant effects on efl learner speaking complexity. next, the second research question analyzed the effects of heterogeneous pushed output based instructions on speaking complexity. descriptive statistics of the participants in pre/post-test of the study are presented in table 1. accordingly, the mean score of ag (m=45.562) was slightly higher than cg (m=35.366). independent sample ttest was used to see whether these differences reached statistically significant level or not. table 4. results of independent samples t-test for the efficiency of ag f t df sig. (2-tailed) m difference std. error difference complexity 5.011 -3.458 24 .000* -10.196 .289 note. *= p< .05. table 4 indicates that there are significant differences between the effects of cg and ag on efl learners speaking complexity. in sum, the results show the efficacy of heterogeneous pushed output based instruction on upper-intermediate efl learners speaking complexity. further, the third research question checks the potential differences between male and female learners’ speech complexity. table 5. descriptive statistics of pre/post-test concerning learner gender groups n m sd se complexity pre-test male 17 29.309 1.492 .472 female 24 29.413 1.555 .377 complexity post-test male 17 42.486 3.411 1.078 female 24 42.733 3.806 .923 descriptive statistics indicated that the mean scores of male and female learners’ speaking complexity (mmale= 29.309; mfemale=29.413) were rather similar at the pretest of the study. likewise, their mean scores were rather similar at the post-test of the study (mmale= 42.486; mfemale=42.733). a series of independent samples t-test was run to check the potential differences in participants speaking complexities’ scores with respect to their gender. the results are shown in table 6. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 17 table 6. independent samples t-test to compare male and female complexity scores on post-test f t df sig (2-tailed) m difference std. error difference complexity .031 -.169 25 .867 a -.247 1.462 note a = p> .05. table 6 indicates no significant difference between male and female learners’ speaking complexity (f=.031, t= -.169, df= 25, p=.867). accordingly, it can be concluded that gender is not a deterring factor in developing learner speaking complexity. from the analysis, it can be stated that hg (mcomplexity= 39.496) and ag (mcomplexity= 45.562) outperformed cg (mcomplexity= 35.366). the significance of the differences among mean scores are tested through independent samples t-test. the results revealed that such differences were statistically significant. to sum up, those learners who benefit from pushed output activities (in homogeneous or heterogeneous groups) use more lexical morphemes such as nouns, verbs, and adverbs in their outputs. the results are consistent with the findings of byrne (2012) that implementing pushed output exercises draw learner attentions to the linguistics structures (grammatical and discourse competence) of their utterances. similarly, ertürk (2013) mentions that engaging learners in such activities leads to the appropriate usage of conditional sentences in their interactions. on the other hand, the results conflict with those found by sadeghibeniss and edalati-bazzaz (2014). they clime that pushed output activities is not effective in developing learner speaking sub-components, especially speaking fluency. they relate their results to the nature of pushed output activities. the beneficial effects of pushed output in this study support swain’s (1985) clime and her notion of pushing. the results of this study can be justified through considering the fruitful effects of the main functions of pushed output (noticing, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistics). as swain (1985) argues such functions help language acquisition in different ways. besides, the fulfillment of pushed output tasks need interaction (especially student-student interaction). the nature of interactions and feedbacks (negative or positive) in intraclass groups in this study inspires participants to produce more lexically dense and linguistically complex utterances. moreover, such activities give learner the opportunities to take more responsibility for the accuracy, coherence, and complexity of their speech, consequently, lead to advancement. likewise, learners’ feedback in this study gives the group members second or third chance to repeat their utterances which make their productions more complex. on the other hand, the results of this study do not detect significant differences between male and female efl learners’ speaking complexity. the findings are not in the same line with the results of khomeijani et al., (2009). they mention that male speech is more accurate and complex while females are more fluent. on the other hand, the results are supported by the findings of more recent studies (gholizade, 2013; majidifard et al., 2014). gholizade (2013) mentions that there is no significant difference between learners oral outputs concerning their gender. moreover, majidifard et al. (2014) assert that male and female learners’ speaking fluency and complexity are not significantly different. it seems that male and female differences in using language are mostly related to the degree of politeness (haas, 1979), assertiveness (lakoff, 1975), and the implementation of discourse markers (alami, sabbah, &iranmanesh, 2012). conclusion while many studies are needed to be conducted to investigate the efficacy of pushed output in developing speaking complexity, especially in efl contexts, the results emerged from the statistical analyses of the current study made it certain that pushed output had valuable effects on speaking subcomponents. likewise, findings indicated that grouping learners homogeneously or parviz ghasedi, habibollah mashhady, & farideh okati the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous pushed output instructions on speaking complexity 18 heterogeneously increase fruitful interaction among learners which could not be observed in teacher centered classroom. on the other hand, the results indicated that gender is not a determining factor in developing upperintermediate efl learners speaking complexity. taking the significant role of speaking in efl/esl academic contexts into account and paying specific attention to the factors, such as having no opportunity to use english in real context, teacher centered classroom, and lack of language teacher attention to the speaking sub-components (mohammadi, gorjian, & pazhakh, 2014) that are considered as the main challenges of efl learners, one should welcome any fruitful strategy that boost learner output complexity. therefore, the beneficial effects of pushed output based instruction, as presented in this study, can be regarded as an allegory to pay more attention to student centered classrooms in which learners are pushed to use target language more accurately in appropriate context in order to convey their ideas or desires. the findings of this research help to add new insights to the literature of pushed output hypothesis and provide fruitful new teaching guidelines. moreover, the results can be of great help for material developers and text book writers. besides, such findings suggest that teacher preparation programs should make the development of speaking sub-skills an integral part of program to equip teachers with a wide array of effective oral development strategies. the first limitation that the researcher confronted with in this study was the limited number of participants. likewise, just the upper-intermediate level was studied. finally, this study used lexical density as the indicator of speech complexity. therefore, studding large sample, different levels, or using different indicators of complexity (as-units) may lead to more fruitful results. references alami, m., sabbah, m., & iranmanesh, m. 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(2003).the effects of pre-task and on-line planning on fluency, complexity and accuracy in l2 monologic oral production. applied linguistics, 24(1), 1–27. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 109 social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning eka putri postgraduate program of indonesian language education teacher faculty and education science, universitas sriwijaya email: ep191443@gmail.com mulyadi eko purnomo postgraduate program of indonesian language education teacher faculty and education science, universitas sriwijaya email: mulyadiekopurnomo@yahoo.com santi oktarina (corresponding author) postgraduate program of indonesian language education teacher faculty and education science, universitas sriwijaya email: santioktarina@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: putri, e., purnomo, m. e., & oktarina, s. (2023). social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 109-122. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7594 received: 19-10-2022 accepted: 21-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction spoken literature works, such as legends, belong to national cultural heritage. thus, these legends should be developed and used in the present day and the future. indonesia has various legends, spreading from sabang to merauke. these legends have been orally passed down for generations. in line with this, hilal et al. (2021) explains that indonesia has one of the most popular cultural products, namely folklore. south sumatra is one of the provinces that has diverse folklore and has been recorded as an effort to disseminate oral literary works and appreciate regional literary works. sitepu et al. (2019) revealed that legends taken from myths had specific regional features, such as the places, animals, plants, and histories of the regions. palma & nurwiati (2019) explain that legends are folklores. people of certain communities believe these folklores surely happened. the stories of the folklores are connected to historical figures and extraordinary events. some people also perceive that the historical figures were saints and blessed. kembaren et al. (2020) explain that legends have a historical background as the whole integration of fictive elements. however, legends, with their regional identity features, fade as time goes by. this situation occurs due to technological development that spreads and dominates the world. this factor makes children in this era prefer playing games and watching shows to reading historical books and legends. hasuna & komalasari (2018) explained that oral literature is a cultural heritage that has developed orally from abstract: this research describes the realizations of social conflicts, the function of social conflict, the similarities and differences of dayang merindu and naya sentika legends, and the implications on literature learning. the research applied a descriptive comparative method supported by an objective approach. then, the researchers analyzed the data by collecting, reducing, presenting, and concluding the data. the data sources were the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika. the research data were social conflict realizations and functions of the legends in the form of text excerpts. the results showed differences in the legends. the legend of dayang merindu had three types of conflicts: interpersonal, interest, and inter-social conflicts. the legend of naya sentika had four types of conflicts: interpersonal, interest, inter-group, and international conflicts. the similarities of the legends were the social functions of the conflicts. they were two functions: solidarity and communicative functions. the current research results were applicable for literature learning and further reading sources as the realization of literature appreciation. keywords: conflict; implication; legend; social. mailto:ep191443@gmail.com mailto:santioktarina@fkip.unsri.ac.id eka putri, mulyadi eko purnomo, santi oktarina social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning 110 generation to generation, that is, it is spread by word of mouth. oral literature is a reflection of the supporting community and is a cultural heritage that must be maintained and preserved because it contains noble values. in addition, ardesya (2021) said that folklore legends are manifestations of past events which are then packaged in the form of stories that are passed down from generation to generation. furthermore, kurniawan & asman (2019) stated that folklore legends contain various kinds of moral values and local wisdom of the surrounding community which form the order in relation to social life. in line with this opinion, purnomo (2018) argues that legends provide clues in the form of signs of historical facts that are passed down from generation to generation, both orally and in writing. that is, legends are able to provide historical clues from the time of their ancestors to their descendants. legend is a fairy tale related to historical events or natural events mixed with fantasy elements (suwarno, et al., 2018). in line with this opinion, fadhilasari (2019) revealed that oral stories in the form of legends are a form of oral literature whose inheritance has been passed down from generation to generation. in addition, of the many folklore including legends that exist, many folktales have disappeared (anggraeni et al., 2021). legend is one of the local wisdom. fransiska (2021) said that local wisdom towards the community can be one of the capitals for building noble character. with the existence of local wisdom, a national culture has strong roots to build national identity. meanwhile, according to sukiman (2019), local wisdom can be related to the life of the local community or community which establishes a relationship, both the relationship between individuals to other individuals or individuals with community groups and even with creators. furthermore, candrika (2019) conveys that the existence or maintenance of the orality of legends requires documentation through literacy so that the information can still be passed on. in addition, hidayat (2021) again explains that local wisdom, including legends, is formed as a cultural advantage of the local community. the values of local wisdom are values that were inherited from the ancestors of the indonesian nation, which are actually the values that have become the identity of the nation (sukmayadi, 2018). meanwhile, according to alifah et al. (2018) states that folklore or legend is part of the culture of various collectives in the world in general and indonesia in particular. furthermore, pulungan and nasution (2019) state that every literary work, including legends, has a very important meaning for society representing human ideas in the past. most legends focus on social-life conflict problems. social conflicts refer to a social process in two or more parties to eliminate a certain powerless party (nugraha, 2019). sumartono (2019) explains that humans will always encounter social conflict possibility. heretofore, many social life conflicts occur within human civilization. social conflict describes disputes, disagreements, and contradictions as the results of differences in a social life setting. these differences include different individual and group attitudes. maghfiroh & zamawi (2021) explain that social conflict is negatively connoted to instability, inconvenience, disharmony, and fatalities in a community. however, excellent conflict management by all community elements will positively influence the community. revealing social conflict in legends requires a theory to classify the social conflict. in this research, the researchers used the framework of setiadi & kolip. the framework consists of 1) gender conflict, 2) racial and inter-tribal rooted conflict, 3) inter-believer conflicts, 4) intercommunity conflicts, 5) conflicts of interest, 6) interpersonal conflict, 7) inter-social class conflict, and 8) international or national conflict. the applied theory to analyze the function of social conflict, that 1) conflict strengthens the inter-community solidarity, 2) inter-community conflict establishes solidarity among the groups to realize an alliance among the groups, 3) conflict makes the isolated community members actively take roles, and 4) conflict is useful for communicating. conflict is a phenomenon that cannot be separated from life. between individuals and groups, of course, there will be differences, contradictions, and disputes (putri, 2018). in fact, society can form a social organization which is a group of people whose members feel one with each other (hutabarat et al., 2019). social conflict is interesting to study for some reasons. firstly, many people perceive social conflict as a trivial matter although social conflict can influence negatively the conflicting communities. secondly, the researchers aim to establish social conflict perception. besides bringing negative effects, coser explains that social conflicts establish solidarity and communication within conflicting communities. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 111 thirdly, the researchers aim to reveal the social conflicts in the legends of dayang merindu and naya santika. the researchers were curious to reveal the social conflicts in the legends, especially the comparisons of the legends’ conflicts that bind the people. the social conflict comparisons of dayang merindu and naya sentika legend were important to reveal. the underlying reasons for efforts to reveal were to find the similarity and differences of the legends' social conflict; to find the similarities within each legend's conflict in terms of the roots of the conflict in creating social function within a community, and to broaden the researchers and readers' insights about social conflict as a doubleedged phenomenon. social conflict may bring both negative effects and functional uses for a community. these reasons motivated the researchers to research social conflicts in the legends, dayang merindu and naya sentika.the researchers selected the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika because they met the research criteria. firstly, both legends have historical elements that provide a useful lesson for readers. secondly, both legends are full of social conflicts and conflict resolutions based on the ancient era context. when the researchers found those matters, the researchers were motivated to research the legends from a social perspective, specifically the social conflict matters. the method to identify the social conflict was the objective approach. the objective approach is one of the literature approaches that emphasize the observed literature work. explains that an objective approach limits the literature text review process. the approach perceives a literature work as an autonomous and separated realm from the reality, the author, and the reader. this approach is useful to review literature work without observing the external elements. thus, the researchers could concentrate to judge a literature work without looking at the author's background (emzir et al., 2018). the researchers expected this research to have further implications for jhs and shs levels. for junior high schools, the implications of current research results were observable from the fourth grade, and second semester, within the guideline of the 2013 curriculum. the research results could be applied to the basic competency 3.11, identifying the information about local fables or legends that can be read and listened to; and basic competency 4.11 about retelling the content of local fables and legends (the ministerial regulation of education and culture minister, number 37, the year 2018). then, at the senior high school levels, the research result implications could be found in the xi grade, first semester, 2013 curriculum. the current research results were applicable for basic competence 3.11, analyzing a message from a read fiction book (the ministerial regulation of education and culture minister, number 37, the year 2018). in this case, the learners could use the legends as learning materials. palma & nurmiwati (2019) from the muhammadiyah university of mataram conducted research that has relevance to this research, with the title "analysis of values and social conflict in the legend of lalu dia and lala jines in the writings of h. muchsi hamim". this study aims to describe the values and social conflicts in the legendary book lalu dia and lalu jines by h. muchsi hamim. this research is studied with semiotic theory and social conflict theory. the data collection method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method. however, there are differences between the research conducted by palma and nurmiwati and the research conducted by the researchers. palma and nurmiwati studied the legendary book lalu dia and lala jines written by h. muchsi hamim, while this research used the object of study in the form of the legend of dayang merindu and the legend of naya sentika. in addition, in this study the researchers also examined the implications of research on learning literature. the previous research was conducted by gloriani (2021) with the title "socio-cultural phenomena and reality and values in cirebon folklore". this research examines the object of study of cirebon folklore which consists of eight legends, namely the legend of the sunyaragi cave door, the legend of the origin of jamblang, the origin of the kalijaga monkey, the white crocodile watching the cisanggarung river, the origins of kuya/belawa turtle, the story of the sheikh magelung sakti and nyimas gandasari, ki gede bungko and demon buntung crocodile. the legends are analyzed based on the study of the sociology of literature which includes the phenomena, reality, and values contained in the legends. thus, there were differences in the results of these studies. furthermore, research conducted by hasibuan (2020) entitled "analysis of the legend of the sinakko ghost through a literary sociological approach". this study aims to determine the results of the analysis of the legend of the sinakko ghost in literary sociology. this research is a qualitative research with a sample report on the results of research on the legend of sinakko ghost eka putri, mulyadi eko purnomo, santi oktarina social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning 112 with a sociology of literature approach. then, research conducted by hasibuan (2020) with the title "analysis of the mandailing sampuraga folklore: a study of the objective approach and the value of character education". this study aims to analyze the values of character education in the sampuraga folklore that developed in the mandailing natal community. this research uses descriptive analytical method and objective approach. the results of his research found that the principles of an objective approach in the process of implementing the elements that make up the literature, including: plot, setting, characterization, style of language, and point of view. then, there are four values of character education in the folklore of sampuraga and nasondang ngilong-ilong, namely the values of religious character education, compassion, hard work, and honesty. next, research conducted by ardias et al. (2019) entitled "social conflict in the novel because i'm not blind by rendy kuswanto". this study examines the object of research in the form of the novel because i'm not buta by rendy kuswanto, using a descriptive method supported by ian watt's sociological theory of literature. from the results of his research, an analysis was obtained in the form of social conflicts, factors causing social conflict, and ways to resolve conflicts in the novel because i'm not blind by rendy kuswanto. based on several previous studies, there are several differences in this research. these differences can be seen from several aspects, namely the object of research study, research approach, research methods, and the theory used to find research results, so that different conclusions are also found. the discussed matters in this research were the realizations of social conflicts and the functions of the social conflicts based on the legends; the similarities and differences of the social conflict realizations and functions based on the legends; and the implications of the research results in literature lesson. this research describes the realizations of social conflicts, the function of social conflict, the similarities and differences of dayang merindu and naya sentika legends, and the implications on literature learning. method the research applied a descriptive comparative method supported by an objective approach. the data sources were the book of dayang merindu, written by yudhu syarofie; and the book of naya sentika legend, written by umi faridah. the data forms included the excerpts of the texts found in the legends. then, the researchers analyzed the data based on miles & huberman’s model (cited in rijali, 2018). the research procedures included these stages: 1) collecting the initial data based on the reviewed objects, the legends of dyang merindu and naya sentika; 2) reducing the collected data to create summarized data, select the data, and group the data based on the applied theories; 3) presenting the related data about composing the obtained information to conclude. the data display in this research included the text excerpts of the legends. this stage combines the arranged information in an integrated manner in facilitating the researchers to pay attention to the findings. then, the last step was concluding. results and discussion the analysis of social conflict realizations in dayang merindu legend dayang merindu legend is from palembang, south sumatera. the legend tells the story of a lady named dayang merindu. she was the idol of men because of her beauty. one day, the sunan of palembang heard the news. then, he planned to introduce his sons to dayang merindu. the conflict broke out because these two brothers were competing to propose dayang merindu. this event becomes the initial point of various conflicts in the legend. based on the analysis results, the researchers found these findings. table 1. the social conflict in dayang merindu legend no the social conflict realization the conflicting parties numbers of the data 1 conflict of interests pate tanjung eran against pate talang temedak 2 2 interperson al conflict 1. tambah (ario carang) against layang kasini 2. tambah (ario carang) against pate tanjung eran 3. ario carang against sunan palembang 4. the sons of sunan pelembang (the first and the second princes) 5. ario carang against sunan palembang 21 3 intersunan palembang 11 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 113 social class conflict against ario carang conflict of interests the researchers found a conflict of interest between two parties that had different interests. the conflict occurred because one of the parties wanted to take the domination and authority of a community. on the other hand, the community attempted to keep and develop its domination and authority. the researchers found an excerpt indicating the conflict of interest in the legend of dayang merindu. here is the excerpt. “everything is clear now. his father, pate talang temedak, was a respected man in his village. the conflict of pate tanjung eran led to a war between those two villages. in the last battle, pate tanjung successfully defeated pate talang temedak. as the winner, pate tanjung ripped the victory of pate talang temedak, including his wife, layang kasini (syarofie, 2009, p.58) (the translated version by the researchers). from the statement, readers can notice the conflict between pate tanjung and pate talang temedak. the indicated excerpts of the conflicts are “the conflict of pate tanjugn eran led to a war between those two villages;" and “pate tanjung eran successfully defeated pate talang temedak. as the victory, pate tanjung eran ripped the victory of pate talang temedak, including his wife, layang kasini.” the excerpts were the origins of the interest conflict. from the excerpt, pate tanjung eran had interested to take over the victory of pate talang temeda, including his wife. conflict of interest also has some specific features. these features show two conflicting groups with different interests. the conflict occurred because one of the parties wanted to take the domination and authority of a community. on the other hand, the community attempted to keep and develop its domination and authority. then, an imbalance action occurs due to the efforts of each party to keep their positions and domination. from the explanations and the evidence, the excerpts met the features of conflict of interest. interpersonal conflict interpersonal conflict refers to social conflict among individuals. this conflict occurs due to differences, contradictions, and clashes among individuals. these data show the interpersonal conflicts found in dayang merindu legend. “after dayang merindu washed her hair, the rejung (the show) was resumed (milir). the party was so cheerful to welcome the arrival of the tanjung ringgit sovereign's princess. sunan palembang and all guesses at the party were so amazed by the beauty of the princess. this beauty also became the origin of the princes' conflicts. sunan palembang attempted to propose dayang merindu for one of his sons. however, the other son could not accept it (syarofie, 2009, p.68—69) (the translated version by the researchers). the beauty of dayang merindu triggered the interpersonal conflicts of two siblings, the sons of sunan palembang. both of them wanted to marry dayang merindu. the conflict soon turned into a disaster. from the excerpt, the conflicting parties, the siblings are observable from this chunk “this beauty also became the origin of the princes’ conflicts. sunan palembang attempted to propose dayang merindu for one of his sons. however, the other son could not accept it. he wanted to marry her.” both siblings wanted to marry dayang merindu. finally, a conflict occurred since they persisted to marry her. interpersonal conflict also has some features: two conflicting parties in an opposite action; and the clashes between the conflicting parties. every individual in the legend persisted with his intention. from the explanations and the evidence, the excerpts met the features of interpersonal conflict. inter-social class conflict inter-social class conflict is a vertical conflict, between the higher and lower classes of a community. the researchers found an excerpt indicating the conflict in the legend of dayang merindu. here is the excerpt. “warrior, go to the upstream! find the owner of this hair. i will make her my daughter-inlaw. you tell her parents to give the girl for palembang as the duty of this country citizen,” the sunan said (syarofie, 2009, p.64) (the translated version by the researchers) the sunan thought so because he believed that the citizens of the country had to grant his demands as the realizations of their compliances. thus, he wanted to make the girl his daughter-in-law. for the sunan, the girl was merely a present (syarofie, 2009, p.64—65) (the translated version by the researcher). eka putri, mulyadi eko purnomo, santi oktarina social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning 114 the excerpt indicates the authority misuse by the sunan. the evidence is found in this chunk: “you tell her parents to give the girl for palembang as the duty of this country citizen;” and “the sunan thought so because he believed that the citizens of the country had to grant his demands as the realizations of their compliances. thus, he wanted to make the girl his daughter-inlaw.” the girl in the excerpt is dayang merindu, the daughter of ario carang. this plot shows the social class differences between sunan palembang, a high-social class with powerful domination; and a commoner, ario carang. the intention of sunan palembang indicates a compulsion against ario carang. thus, a conflict occurs. the evidence meets the features of intersocial class conflict with vertical nature. this conflict occurs between the high-social ranked party against the lower-social ranked party. the indications were observable from coercive interactions by suppressing and intimidating the lower or powerless parties. these interactions were merely to gain personal benefits or profits. the function of social conflict realizations in dayang merindu legend the legend of dayang merindu had many conflicts due to the intention of sunan palembang to make dayang merindu his daughter-in-law. however, sunan palembang did the action uncivilizedly ario carang declined his proposal. thus, a clash among ario carang and sunan palembang’s followers began. ario carang fought for his dignity. this conflict made the villages of tanjung ringgit to help ario carang fighting against sunan palembang. from this analysis, the conflict provided solidarity and communicative functions for ario carang and other villagers. the solidarity function the conflict strengthened the collective solidarity of the people. solidarity refers to a sense of experiencing the same thing among people in a certain group or community. solidarity makes the people trust, respect, and motivated each other. they can also share responsibility and are aware of anything together. conflict makes a group of people strong and united. here is the excerpt describing the function of solidarity. he gathered his servants and the youngsters of the village. there was no other choice but to fight against this arrogance. ario carang and his followers dug the ground around the village. he made ditches around the village that led to a river (syarofie, 2009, p.65) (translated version by the researchers). the excerpt shows the people's cooperation to solve the conflict. this cooperation established strong solidarity. the evidence is observable in this chunk: “he gathered his servants and the youngsters of the village.” the chunk indicated that ario carang established a solidarity feature to fight against the envoy of sunan palembang. the cooperation is visible in this chunk: “ario carang and his followers dug the ground around the village. he made ditches around the village that led to a river.” communicative function before the conflict, the people gathered and planned what they would do. they discussed the plan to defeat the opponent and keep the peace. the researchers found the excerpt indicating the communication among the people from this excerpt. once the ditches were ready, ario carang and his followers remained alert along the ditches. the warriors and the guards of sunan palembang were shocked once they arrived in tanjung ringgit. he did not expect that any pencalang (ship) passing the river and the ditches would be attacked by the villagers. it was very difficult for him and his followers to go inside the village (syarofie, 2009, p.66). the excerpt shows excellent communication between ario carang and the villagers. the researchers found the evidence in this chunk: “ario carang and his followers remained alert along the ditches.” ario carang and the villagers planned and communicated to intercept the warrior and the envoy from the village, tanjung ringgit. from the excerpt, the existing conflict has a communicative function. before the conflict, the people gathered and planned what they would do. they discussed the plan to defeat the opponent and keep the peace. the analysis of social conflict realizations in naya sentika legend this legend originated from blora, central java. the legend tells about a woman named naya sentika. at that time, she fought against the dutch colonization of her motherland. her battle and fight began when prince diponegoro passed away during a battle. since the charismatic leader, diponegoro, passed away, naya sentika was eager to keep his fight against the dutch. this english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 115 event becomes the initial point of various conflicts in the legend. based on the analysis results, the researchers found these findings. table 2. the social conflict in naya sentika legend no. the social conflict realization the conflicting parties numbers of the data 1 interpersonal conflict 1. naya sentika against budi and gluntang. 2. beja against budi and gluntang 3. tomiyah against budi and gluntang 6 2 conflict of interests naya sentika and her army against raden mas tumenggung cakranegara and the army. 3 3 intercommunity conflict naya sentika and her army of indonesia’s freedom against the leaders and chiefs that supported the dutch colonization. 9 4 international and national conflict indonesian against the dutch. 9 interpersonal conflict interpersonal conflict refers to social conflict among individuals. this conflict occurs due to differences, contradictions, and clashes among individuals. the researchers found an excerpt indicating the interpersonal conflict in the legend of naya sentika. here is the excerpt. when sentika went to mediate, tomiyah’s brothers named budi and gluntang were so happy. they had bad natures. they were arrogant and only thought about themselves. at that time, they also had a hidden and bad plan. they thought that when sentika went to mediate, they could take all of the fortunes from their older sister-in-law. on the other hand, for days and months, naya sentika meditated while waiting for an opportunity. she had to do this as mandated by ki moro. he said that sentika had to be patient, waiting until the barrel turned up as an indication to start the fight. (farida, 2016, p.20) (translated version by the researchers) the excerpt shows the interpersonal conflict between naya sentika, budi, and gulantang. in this legend, budi and gulantang were the brothers-in-law of naya sentika. both of them had bad manners and disliked naya sentika. the researchers found the evidence in this chunk: “when sentika went to mediate, tomiyah’s brothers named budi and gluntang were so happy. they had bad natures. they were arrogant and only thought about themselves. at that time, they also had a hidden and bad plan. they thought that when sentika went to mediate, they could take all of the fortunes from their older sister-in-law.” the chunk shows a conflict among naya sentika against budi and gluntang. interpersonal conflict also has some features: two conflicting parties in an opposite action; and the clashes between the conflicting parties. every individual in the legend persisted with his intention. from the explanations and the evidence, the excerpts met the features of interpersonal conflict. conflict of interests the researchers found a conflict of interest between two parties that had different interests. the conflict occurred because one of the parties wanted to take the domination and authority of a community. on the other hand, the community attempted to keep and develop its domination and authority. the researchers found an excerpt indicating the conflict of interest in the legend of naya sentika. here is the excerpt. raden mas tumenggung cakranegara felt threatened with the fame and the power of naya gimbal's army. he was afraid that blora’s citizens would be united and fight the colonization. for him, the people's fight was the same as an effort to go against his domination since he obtained it by supporting the colonists. he wanted to keep his position so he sacrificed the freedom of his motherland. he marched his army to eliminate those fighting him and his domination and the colonization. after finding out the report that naya gimbal had taken over most of blora’s region, the regent sent the army led by ki demang waru to eliminate the movement led by naya gimbal. he was so frustrated that he summoned ki demang waru to prepare the army. before leaving, he said to ki demang waru, “ki demang waru, i ordered you to seize the rebellion of naya gimbal. you must eliminate every one of them at once." (farida, 2016, p.35) (the translated version by the researchers) conflict of interests in the excerpt occurs due to the different interests of raden mas tumenggung cakranegara from naya sentika. in eka putri, mulyadi eko purnomo, santi oktarina social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning 116 the excerpt, the remark of naya gimbal refers to naya sentika. raden mas tumenggung cakranegara found out the action of naya sentika to go against the colonization as a threat. he thought that the action could hinder his power, position, and domination as a regent although he received his position as a reward from the dutch colonization. thus, he found the fight of naya sentika a threat so he attempted to halt naya sentika. the researchers found the evidence in this chunk: “ki demang waru, i ordered you to seize the rebellion of naya gimbal. you must eliminate every one of them at once.” the excerpt shows raden mas tumenggung carkanegara and naya sentika and her army had different interests.conflict of interest also has some specific features. these features show two conflicting groups with different interests. the conflict occurred because one of the parties wanted to take the domination and authority of a community. on the other hand, the community attempted to keep and develop its domination and authority. then, an imbalance action occurs due to the efforts of each party to keep their positions and domination. from the explanations and the evidence, the excerpts met the features of conflict of interest. inter-community conflict the researchers found that a certain party insisted on its interest in other parties. the insisting party expected the intimidated party to do and realize the dominating party's interest. the researchers found an excerpt indicating the inter-community conflict in the legend of naya sentika. here is the excerpt. naya gimbal's army ever dropped by in a village for a long period. they moved from one village to another village. during the journey, naya gimbal had more and more followers. their movement also made the scouting troops have difficulties in tracking their movements. in every village, naya gimbal took down the leaders and sub-village leaders who supported the colonization. (faridah, 2016, p.43) (the translated version by the researchers) the excerpt of “in every village, naya gimbal took down the leaders and sub-village leaders who supported the colonization” shows two parties with different interests and perceptions. naya sentika and her army fought for the freedom of indonesia. they also attempted to free the people from the dutch colonization. on the other hand, the leaders that supported the dutch obtained the official ranks from the colony. thus, they betrayed the native people and supported the dutch colonization. these different communities led to inter-community conflict. the featured indications of this conflict include a coercive attempt of a party to insist on its interest to other parties. the insisting party expects the other party to realize the interest. thus, many clashes occur due to these efforts from the conflicting communities. from the explanations and the evidence, the excerpts met the features of intercommunity conflict. international and national conflict this conflict usually involves two conflicting countries with different objectives and insisting efforts on other countries. a long time ago, this conflict source was mostly due to the expansion of superpower countries toward poor countries. once the superpower countries dominated the regions of the poor countries, they began to exploit the resources and took the resources to strengthen the superpower country. the researchers found an excerpt indicating the international and national conflict in the legend of naya sentika. here is the excerpt. naya sentika introduced and explained her notions to fight based on her previous experience. she also wanted to keep her fight go on. at that mommnet, ki lurah toinah had the same argument with naya sentika. he wanted the people to go against the colony and to be free from colonization. ki lurah toinah said, “i agree with you, sentika. the colony must be eliminated from the motherland. they made our people suffer." (faridah, 2016, p.8) (the translated version by the researchers). "they take anything they want and let the people starve. we have worked a lot and then they just take it from us. they have humiliated our motherland. the poor people also suffer from hunger and poverty," said ki toinah angrily. he could not stand the colonization anymore upon the suffering of his people. (farida, 2016, p.10) (the translated version by the researchers). in this legend, the dutch colonized and occupied indonesia. this action made the indonesian people go against the dutch. one of them was initiated by naya sentika. the excerpts show the international and national conflicts between the indonesian people and the dutch. the researchers found the evidence in this chunk: “ki lurah toinah had the same argument with english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 117 naya sentika. he wanted the people to go against the colony and to be free from the colonization.” this chunk indicates the struggles of the indonesian people to go against the colonization. the finding is supported by the chunk: “i agree with you, sentika. the colony must be eliminated from the motherland. they made our people suffer." the other supportive evidence is “they take anything they want and let the people starve." these chunks explain the international and national conflicts of the legend. from the findings and the analysis, the excerpts met the features of international and national conflict because of the objective differences between the countries or the nations. the occupying country insists on its interest in the occupied or colonized country. a long time ago, this conflict source was mostly due to the expansion of superpower countries toward poor countries. once the superpower countries dominated the regions of the poor countries, they began to exploit the resources and took the resources to strengthen the superpower country. the expansion led to clashes of the countries to realize the objective, take roles, and apply the believed norms and values. the functions of social conflict realizations in naya sentika legend naya sentika legend contains various conflicts, starting from the death of prince diponegoro on the battlefield that makes naya sentika want to continue the fight; and the clashes of indonesian people with the dutch colonization. naya sentika decided to repel the dutch colony from the motherland. she prepared, planned, and devised the strategy to fight along with other warriors in eliminating the colony. this conflict made the people cooperate to devise a strategy of defeating the colony. the operation at that time was led by naya sentika this conflict provides solidarity and communicative functions. the solidarity function the conflict strengthened the collective solidarity of the people. solidarity refers to a sense of experiencing the same matters and being loyal. solidarity is also the implementation of the group members' trust so that they share the same responsibilities and watch each other. the legend of naya sentika also shows how the people were willing to fight against the dutch. they helped each other and fought along naya sentika to eliminate the colonization from the motherland. here is the excerpt indicating group solidarity. “correct, sir! we, people, must fight together,” naya santika asserted. she was very happy to gain the full support of ki lurah toinah. she became confident to continue the struggles in fighting the colonization. “go, gather the battle force,” said ki toinah. he supported naya sentika to go against the colonization. "all right, sri. anyway, we must think about the plan carefully to succeed. currently, i am feeling not ready to initiate the rebellion because we have limited forces and war equipment. you know we need longer time to think, more effort to plan, and a lot of budgets. we must carefully arrange the plant to succeed. "all right, sir. thanks to back me up. i am sure we can successfully launch this strike if we are united and seriously take it." "for now, let me ask you, ki toinah, to gather the volunteer warriors to fight the colony. i will train them to use a weapon, including training their physics and inner powers. these are important to make physically strong warriors because our fights will need these. thus, when we strike, our forces are stronger and ready to take them down." (farida, 2016, p.10—11) (the translated version by the researchers) the excerpt shows the conflict establishes the solidarity of a community. the data analysis shows how ki lurah toinah fully supports naya sentika to continue fighting the dutch colonization. he is also willing to gather army forces to support naya sentika’s fight. the evidence of solidarity function is observable in this excerpt: “go, gather the battle force,” said ki toinah. he supported naya sentika to go against the colonization.” the statement describes the high solidarity of ki lurah toinah. the other evidence is “for now, let me ask you, ki toinah, to gather the volunteer warriors to fight the colony. i will train them to use weapons, including to train their physics and inner powers." this chunk elaborates the intercommunity solidarity because they sensed the same fates and fights. communicative function the communicative function of the conflict occurred when the figures arranged the plan. the evidence was the actions of the community groups when they gathered and devised the strategy to do. they discussed the plan to defeat the opponent and keep the peace. here are the excerpts showing the communicative functions found in naya sentika legend. ki moro, in her dream, said “sentika, before you continue your fights, find a quiet place and eka putri, mulyadi eko purnomo, santi oktarina social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning 118 meditate there. do it alone without inviting anyone!” “why must i meditate, sir?” asked naya sentika curiously. "you must meditate on the top of gempol hill to realize the time of starting your strike,” ki moro explained assertively. “why must i wait again? the people have been waiting to strike. they are suffering day by day. why should they wait?" ask naya sentika. (farida, 2016, p.15) (the translated version by the researchers) the excerpts show how naya sentika met ki moro in her dream. the excerpts also show the beginning of arranging the plan between naya sentika and ki moro to launch her strike. the interactions of naya sentika and ki moro established communication of devising the plan and strategy before launching the strike. the evidence of the communicative function is in the chunk of “sentika, before you continue your fights, find a quiet place and meditate there. do it alone without inviting anyone!” “why must i meditate before launching our strikes, sir?” "you must meditate on the top of gempol hill to realize the time of starting your strike,” the conversation is a communication of devising the striking fight by naya sentika. the comparisons of social conflict realizations in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika the similarities of both legends are about the figures’ fights to defend their rights. the differences deal with the themes of the legends. the legend of dayang merindu has a female-fight theme from the figure of dayang merindu and her family. the fight is realized when they decline the interest of sunan palembang who wants to make dayang merindu his daughter-in-law. on the other hand, the legend of naya sentika tells about the youngster’s fight, naya sentika, to fight against the dutch colonization.social conflicts occur in different regions. thus, the social conflict problems are different. legend is urban prose about an event or an incident with local region backgrounds. the legend from south sumatera is full of the life of the south sumatera people. the same concept also applies to legends in central java. the legends are full of central javanese people's life. here are the comparisons of the analyzed social conflicts of both legends. table 3. the comparisons of social conflict realizations in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika no. the social conflict realization the reviews about dayang merindu legend the reviews about naya sentika legend 1 interpersonal conflict the researchers found that interpersonal conflict realized into clashes among individuals. here are the conflicting individuals. 1. tambah (ario carang) against layang kasini 2. tambah (ario carang) against pate tanjung eran 3. ario carang against sunan palembang 4. the sons of sunan pelembang (the first and the second princes) 5. ario carang against sunan palembang the interpersonal conflicts in these legends were realized in the clashes among the individual figures. here are the conflicting individuals. 1. naya sentika against budi and gluntang. 2. beja against budi and gluntang 3. tomiyah against budi and gluntang 2 conflict of interests the researchers found the conflict of interests in the form of plundering the dominations of other parties that attempted to defend themselves. the analysis results showed a conflict of interests occurred between pate tanjung eran and his followers against pate talang temedak and his followers. the other conflict was a clash due to different collective objectives and interests from different communities or groups. the analysis result showed the conflict of interest between naya santika and her army that wanted to protect and defend the national freedom from colonization. on the other hand, raden mas tumenggung cakranegara and his army had a different interest in the side of the colonist. he did so because he received the position by supporting the dutch colonization. 3 inter-social class conflict the researchers found this conflict with the vertical and hierarchical matter, between the higher-social rank against the lower-social rank people. the analysis results showed the conflicting parties were sunan palembang from the high-social rank against ario carang from the lower-social rank. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 119 5 intercommunity conflict the researchers found this conflict and the source of conflict. the researchers found that a certain party insisted on its interest in other parties. the insisting party expected the intimidated party to do and realize the dominating party's interest. in these legends, the researchers found the parties were naya sentika and the leaders and chiefs of the villages. the leaders of the villages attempted to halt naya sentika’s fight to go against the colonization. on the other hand, naya sentika and her army declined it. 6 international and national conflict in this legend, the conflict occurs between the indonesian people (the colonized or occupied nation) against the dutch, the colony. this matter made the indonesian people go against the dutch. the table shows the differences in the social conflict realizations found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika. the researchers found the differences in the realizations of social conflicts. the analysis results of dayang merindu showed three social conflicts, such as interpersonal conflict, conflict of interests, and inter-social class conflict. on the other hand, the legend of naya sentika had four types of conflicts: interpersonal, interest, intergroup, and international conflicts. the researchers found similarities within the differences in the legend backgrounds. the similarities included the social conflict functions to establish solidarity and communication. these functions reflect the conflict differences in the legends to realize some functions of the conflicting parties. the researchers also found similarities in the legends' conflicts of interest due to the causes of the conflicts. the similarities involved a party that wanted to take over the existing domination while the other party struggled to keep the domination. the realizations of social conflict realizations in dayang merindu legend the researchers found the social conflict realizations and functions of dayang merindu legend. in this research, the researchers used the framework of setiadi & kolip. the framework consists of 1) gender conflict, 2) racial and intertribal rooted conflict, 3) inter-believer conflicts, 4) inter-community conflicts, 5) conflicts of interest, 6) interpersonal conflict, 7) inter-social class conflict, and 8) international or national conflict. however, the researchers found the legend of dayang merindu had three social conflicts, dominated by a conflict of interest, interpersonal conflict, and inter-social class conflict. the realizations of the conflicts occurred due to individual, domination, and inter-social class conflicts in a community. the source of the conflict was the clash to defend the domination between pate tanjung eran and pate tanjung temedak. the other source was the effort of sunan palembang to make dayane merindu his daughter-in-law in an uncivilized manner. the applied theory to analyze the function of social conflict refers to lewis coser, cited by setiadi & kolip. the theory explains that 1) conflict strengthens the inter-community solidarity, 2) inter-community conflict establishes solidarity among the groups to realize an alliance among the groups, 3) conflict makes the isolated community members to actively take roles, and 4) conflict is useful to communicate. however, in dayang merindu legend, the researchers found two social conflict functions: solidarity and communicative functions. the analysis results showed that the proposed theories by setiadi & kolip and lewis coser could analyze the social conflict realizations and functions in the legends. this research also supported the previous studies that found social conflict impacted negatively and positively. in this research, the researchers found the negative impacts, such as destruction, clashes, and fights among the conflicting parties. on the other hand, the positive impacts were solidarity and communicative functions. the realizations and functions of social conflicts in naya sentika legend the researchers found the social conflict realizations and functions of nayang sentika legend. in this research, the researchers used the framework of setiadi & kolip. the framework consists of 1) gender conflict, 2) racial and intertribal rooted conflict, 3) inter-believer conflicts, 4) inter-community conflicts, 5) conflicts of interest, 6) interpersonal conflict, 7) inter-social class conflict, and 8) international or national conflict. however, the researchers found the legend of naya sentika had four social conflicts, dominated by the conflict of interest, interpersonal conflict, inter-community conflict, and international and eka putri, mulyadi eko purnomo, santi oktarina social conflicts found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika and their implementations in literature learning 120 national conflict. the source of the conflict was the effort of naya sentika and the indonesian people, especially the javanese people, to go against the dutch colonization. the primary source of the conflict was the occupation of the dutch colony that wanted the resources and the domination of indonesia. therefore, naya sentika and all indonesian people rebelled and fought to defend their freedom. the colonization of the dutch was haphazardly and uncivilized and colonized the indonesian people. these matters made naya sentika and the indonesian people wanted to repel the colonization of the motherland.the applied theory to analyze the function of social conflict refers to lewis coser, cited by setiadi & kolip. the theory explains that 1) conflict strengthens the inter-community solidarity, 2) inter-community conflict establishes solidarity among the groups to realize an alliance among the groups, 3) conflict makes the isolated community members to actively take roles, and 4) conflict is useful to communicate. however, in naya sentika legend, the researchers found two social conflict functions: solidarity and communicative functions. the analysis results showed that the proposed theories by setiadi & kolip lewis coser could analyze the social conflict realizations and functions in the legends. this research also supported the previous studies that found social conflict impacted negatively and positively. in this research, the researchers found the negative impacts, such as destruction, clashes, and fights among the conflicting parties. on the other hand, the positive impacts were solidarity and communicative functions. the implications of the research results for literature learning literature becomes material for the indonesian language to learn at schools. the 2013 curriculum demands the learners to understand, appreciate, respond, analyze, and create literary works. literature learning involves the learners reviewing the values of personality, culture, society, and aesthetics. the current research results showed the descriptions of the social conflicts of the legends so that readers can take the social and cultural values. thus, the research results may have implications for school literature studies, especially at jhs and shs levels. for junior high schools, the implications of current research results were observable from the fourth grade, and second semester, within the guideline of the 2013 curriculum. the research results could be applied to the basic competency 3.11, identifying the information about local fables or legends that can be read and listened to; and basic competency 4.11 about retelling the content of local fables and legends (the ministerial regulation of education and culture minister, number 37, the year 2018). then, at the senior high school levels, the research result implications could be found in the xi grade, first semester, 2013 curriculum. the current research results were applicable for basic competence 3.11, analyzing a message from a read fiction book (the ministerial regulation of education and culture minister, number 37, the year 2018). in this case, the teachers could use the legends as learning materials for the learners. indonesian language teachers can present these legends via powerpoint as the learning media. then, the teachers could group the learners to discuss various information they could obtain from the legends based on the chosen basic competence. thus, the learners could be actively involved in the learning process. conclusion from the research results and discussions about the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika, the researchers concluded these legends had many social conflicts. secondly, the legends had various social conflict realizations and functions encountered by the story figures. the legend of dayang merindu had three types of conflicts: interpersonal, interest, and inter-social conflicts. on the other hand, the legend of naya sentika had four types of conflicts: interpersonal, interest, inter-group, and international conflicts. then, the social conflicts found in the legends had two functions: solidarity and communicative functions.the research results had implications for school literature study, especially at jhs and shs levels. the researchers found three basic competences that could apply these research results as the references for both teachers and learners. the research results could answer the social conflict realizations found in the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika.the research results showed the legends of dayang merindu and naya sentika, about social conflict, could be further research references. the researchers applied social conflict theories including the conflict realizations by setiady & kollip and social conflict functions by lewis coser. the researchers suggested future researchers review and analyze literary works or texts to find out the social conflicts. the researchers recommend future researchers use different theories by english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 121 different experts. for researchers who want to investigate these legends, dayang merindu and naya sentika, current researchers suggest analyzing other aspects of social conflicts. these research results are also useful to be appreciative and inspiring reading texts for learners and students. thus, they could preserve the spoken li acknowledgment thanks to prof. dr. mulyadi eko purnomo, m.pd and dr. santi oktarina, m.pd. thanks to guide the researcher from the beginning until the ending process of this article writing. thanks to all parties for facilitating the writing process of this research article. references alifah, d. r., doyin m., & sumartini. 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(2018). peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia nomor 37 tahun 2018 tentang perubahan atas peraturan menteri pendidikan dan kebudayaan nomor 24 tahun 2016 tentang kompetensi inti dan kompetensi dasar pelajaran pada kurikulum 2013 pada pendidikan dasar dan pendidikan menengah. kementerian pendidikan dan kebudayaan. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 551 virtual drama performance: is it a need due to pandemic or technological era? rita inderawati* english education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: rita_inderawati@fkip.unsri.ac.id eryansyah english education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: eryansyah@unsri.ac.id dwi maharrani english education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: dwimaharrani@unsri.ac.id didi suhendi indonesian education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: didisuhendi@fkip.unsri.ac.id sardianto siahaan physics education study program, universitas sriwijaya, indonesia email: mr.sardi@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: inderawati, r., eryansyah., maharrani, d., suhendi, d., siahaan, s. (2023). virtual drama performance: is it a need due to pandemic or technological era? english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 551-560. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.6653 received: 25-02-2023 accepted: 29-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction a paradigm shift has occurred in education as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, which has caused much anxiety regarding how to ensure education remotely while improving teachers' performance (ravitch, 2013) as it is still unknown how language educators will recover from the unavoidable threat by emergency remote teaching (ert) (hodges et al.,2020). around 91% of students worldwide were ultimately affected by the pandemic's global closures of traditional educational institutions (unesco, 2020). with the emergence of elearning in this crisis, where instruction is conducted remotely and on digital platforms, education has undergone a significant transformation (li & lalani, 2020). due to the covid-19 epidemic, many institutions of higher education (ihes) had to close their campuses in 2020. when and how to reopen their campuses were difficult considerations that administrators had to make. college administrators must balance competing interests like the longabstract: this study aims to address the needs of students in drama and drama performances in the literature in elt course. since the occurrence of a national disaster, namely the spread of the covid-19 virus, the output of the literature in elt courses in the form of drama performances cannot be carried out due to the spread of the covid-19 pandemic. the solution offered through this research was to perform virtual drama performances. the data were obtained through the use of a questionnaire. the data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. the result of the need analysis showed that: 1) literature in elt course was important for the students, 2) students’ english proficiency was at the intermediate level, 3) students still had some difficulties in drama performance, 4) the topic was english legend, 5) there was a need of integrating drama with an online application, 6) students still sometimes learnt literature with technology. due to the needs, it was necessary to develop virtual drama performance through online application because 55.5% of students thought that it would increase their knowledge and understanding of the topic in learning literature in elt course in university. when offering literature in elt course online, it can be noted that the necessary adjustments were made to the theatre activities and the drama education program, and the zoom digital platform was mostly utilized in the online classes. keywords: need analysis; pandemic; technology; virtual drama. rita inderawati, eryansyah, dwi maharrani, didi suhendi, sardianto siahaan virtual drama performance: is it a need due to pandemic or technological era? 552 term financial viability and educational standards of their institutions with the health and safety of students, faculty, and staff when an ongoing disaster or an emerging infectious disease outbreak, such as the covid-19 pandemic, occurs. some operational choices, like putting some courses online and limiting the number of students who can live on campus, might be able to balance these conflicting goals, but they might not be the optimal course of action. every facet of life has been significantly impacted by the covid 19 pandemic, including the economy, society, and security. it is impossible to avoid this change, particularly in education. employees and students found it challenging to get to jobs, classes, and campus. to ensure the safety of students and educators during the lock-down period, several schools and campuses tried to come up with ways to guarantee continuity of teaching and learning in such a circumstance. nearly all indonesian educational institutions switched from the traditional face-to-face teaching and learning methods that students were accustomed to during the covid 19 outbreak to a new knowledge strategy called online learning or e-learning. from this angle, technology can be seen as the main and best tool for helping instructors and students. this is being done to stop the transmission of covid-19. pre-pandemic colleges typically use blended or offline learning methods for instruction. learning after the coronavirus outbreak has significantly changed to the online mode, as claimed by chahkandi, kasar. kundu, and bej (2021). the university has prepared a distance learning system in the form of a learning management system that allows all lecturers to prepare a virtual learning process. the coronavirus outbreak had a significant impact on the literature in elt course, one of the practical courses in the english education study program. live drama performances are not permitted by students. based on casual interactions the author had with various lecturers who teach literary courses in english language learning using whatsapp, it was discovered that they had never staged theatre performances in literature classes, especially after the coronavirus outbreak. hishon (2020) believes that the physical separation between students and lecturers during the covid19 pandemic makes it challenging to teach literature in elt course online. students should however keep taking art classes in spite of this. lectures during this time had to modify their current educational programs to work on digital platforms since they could not conduct drama or theater sessions in a physical setting (broadfoot, 2020; donohoe and bale, 2020; hishon, 2020; sezgin, 2020). it might be argued that theater classes are held in-person or online by taking some measures because to the covid-19 epidemic. institutions that provide theatrical education or drama teachers have implemented some "remote education" software and created online activities as part of this process. sezgin (2020) asserts that educators who work with digital tools like zoom have given their pupils access to improved drama or theater lessons that include video discussions, presentations, and videos. based on this phenomena, the author's concept of performing virtual drama shows was born, and as a result, textbooks addressing virtual drama performances, in addition to videos and youtube links for the release of virtual dramas, have been developed. there have been numerous prior research on theatrical performances, including those by barekat and nazemi (2020), gallagher et al. (2020), schenker (2020), and karaosmanoğlu et al. (2022). however, both in indonesia and overseas, there has not been much research done on virtual theatre performances connected to literature courses in english language acquisition (widyahening et al. , 2020; rogers et al , 2021; inderawati, 2021). other significant issues with virtual theatre performances that have not been discovered both philosophically and practically include: 1) virtual drama performance textbooks and virtual drama performances using zoom, google meet, or other video conferencing services, 2) all students have the same role and task in developing the four 21st-century life skills. this is accomplished through collaboration between lecturers and students as they prepare a virtual performance by writing drama scripts, drama settings, musical illustrations, and pictures, as well as dubbing student voices for students who play roles. the educational institution's general curriculum. the emphasis is typically placed on the senses or emotions while discussing dramatic works. people who participate in theater activities frequently emphasize how beneficial or enjoyable it is for them to communicate and interact with others. these comments highlight the physical exercises carried out in creative theater courses or the comical elements of drama. an experienced teacher and a participant group present drama study that are based on the participants' personal experiences and theater techniques including roleplaying and improvisation (adgüzel, 2019). the cast of a virtual play, a show that is performed or broadcast online (online) through certain software, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 553 will confront two hurdles. gallagher et al. (2020), barekat and nazemi (2020), and schenker (2020) found that the covid-19 pandemic has given rise to a number of virtual tragedies, but this will not stop artists from being creative in their work. the network and data quota are the most crucial components in presenting a virtual drama. if the internet network around the performer is reliable, the virtual drama will succeed. one illustration is how the zoom application's virtual dramas will consume significant quotas and fast networks. the little audience that is present to watch the cast of the virtual drama presents another difficulty. the audience is limited since the majority of people will believe that online dramas are less compelling than offline dramas. the actors must be able to build an engaging, non-boring virtual scenario for the viewers. as a result, the difficulties faced by virtual drama actors when producing online dramas go beyond data networks and also include the drama spectators' interests. the virtual drama that is occurring in this pandemic is happening for a number of reasons. bereczki and karpati (2021) assert that a digitally mediated virtual drama can provide convenience and security. on social media platforms like facebook, instagram, youtube, and google meet, dramas are practically broadcast. there is no need for students to stress over how many clothing they need to carry and wear. all they have to do is grab their laptop, power it up, and start the show. according to senderoff (2021), educators must modify their use of drama in the classroom to keep up with societal and technical changes that affect educational institutions. another benefit of virtual drama is that it gives students a vacation from their studies while simultaneously promoting self-improvement. after virtually no meaningful social connection with friends for a prolonged period of time, individuals may become bored and need to try a new activity that satisfies both requirements, lessens boredom, and even if indirectly, creates positive memories. as a result, virtual drama using cutting-edge technology has emerged as a reliable method. virtual dramas that make use of social media should be tested on students to see how convenient they are, how their friends can help them grow personally, how they can relieve boredom, and how they can inspire them to participate in theater after studying online (man et al, 2021; peaches, 2021, along with shanti, jaafar, and others, 2020). based on the explanation of virtual drama staging, it can be concluded that the internet prepares two strategies for carrying out the stage by using video conferencing tools and available resources strategy. in addition, regarding data networks and drama audience interests, it becomes a challenge for virtual drama actors when making online dramas. likewise, with the use of technology, virtual drama performances are an option for students to produce creativity as one of the outputs of related subjects. in other words, online drama studies provide a variety of opportunities to reflect on the field of drama and consider how drama is used in different environments (gallagher et al., 2020). at the same time the covid-19 pandemic provides artists, educators, teachers and students working in the fields of theatre, drama, and education with different areas to discuss "innovation" and "adaptation". the sudden pressure to innovate and adapt has left little time for drama teachers to "pause and reflect on what is missing," the researchers say. the aforementioned pressure is also imposed in the form of adapting the existing drama curriculum to the online environment “as soon as possible”. according to gallagher et. al. (2020), thinking about “loss” (loss of community or co-production) in teaching drama during the covid-19 pandemic encourages drama educators to reflect on the issues where new pedagogical approaches, practices, leaders/trainer so be used in drama studies may be employed, forced to develop solutions. this new way of thinking also allows us to focus on issues deeply rooted in the fluid and online world of education in general and drama education in particular. numerous tasks and habits have changed as a result of the pandemic. such conversation, a greeting, and a handshake are typically commonplace activities outside of the home. to stop the spread of the coronavirus, certain things have been made illegal. people's everyday habits are altered as a result. even in the teaching and learning process, works, meetings, and conversations are conducted online with the help of some programs. zoom and canva, two online platforms used to create video conferencing and two-dimensional designs, have two advantages when it comes to virtual drama destinations. neideck et al (2021) explore the iconography of the zoom window and its specific qualities at the intersection of body and technology for theater needs. the zoom window becomes a creative and pedagogical tool for teachers. according to itmeizeh and farrah (2021), zoom is an application that provides video communication, audio conferencing, chat, video, and webinars. then, guzacheva (2020) claims that the zoom application offers online conferences, rita inderawati, eryansyah, dwi maharrani, didi suhendi, sardianto siahaan virtual drama performance: is it a need due to pandemic or technological era? 554 webinars, and virtual meetings. additionally, it has video conferencing and content sharing capabilities. according to this description, zoom is an internetbased program that simulates offline communication and offers audio and video content. this capability makes it simple for attendees of zoom meetings or conferences to comprehend the issues being discussed. meanwhile, furman (2021) states that their university, florida state university, used canvas as its learning management system so they could develop a canvas org site to invite all students to participate while still providing oversight. they concluded that many of them spent time trying to give students a new perspective on the ancient world, but in this unprecedented historical moment. they think about how they will react to the current situation as students. furthermore, zoom and canva are quite easy to use for virtual dramas as both only require an email registration to get into the app. after registering an email with the zoom app, student can immediately set up virtual meetings and invite people to join. another advantage of the zoom and canva applications in virtual drama is that they provide a different experience for the audience as drama viewers and us as creators, which a live stage play will not provide. for the audience, watching dramas through the zoom application can provide a more intimate euphoria, this is very different from the condition of the audience in a live stage play, where they can't see the facial expressions of the actors because of the distance between the stage and the audience is quite far. virtual drama through the zoom application allows viewers to see it more closely and intimately, they can feel the feelings of the actors easily by watching it up close through their cellphone or computer screen. while canva gives the freedom to create drama poster, student can design a poster base based on his creativity and share it on social media. based on the authors’ observations of the canva application, it can be identified its features that can be used directly to maximize a virtual drama display either as a property for the cast or as a story setting with various images and selected background music. the zoom and canva apps are not only easy to use for virtual dramas, but they also provide a different experience using them. thus, canva is a graphic design platform that has user-friendly features created by melanie perkins that can be used in zoom. canva works on zoom by creating a zoom virtual background. this app provides lots of images, fonts, filters, and templates to work with. unique virtual backgrounds can be made as creative as possible. the designs they create in canva can be added to zoom. furthermore, according to brown (2009), need analysis refers to the procedure of compiling data regarding the requirements of a specific group in business or education. this indicates that gathering information about students' learning needs based on their course of study takes place at universities. additionally, brown (2009) listed nine different categories of language requirement analysis. they are (a) target situation analyses (tsas), which focus on the details of the linguistic demands that language learners must meet. it focuses on the goals or requirements of the pupils for learning the language, (b) a deficiency analysis that takes into account the pupils' existing wants and needs as well as any shortcomings or shortages in their target situations, (c) present situation analysis (psa), which focuses on the pupils' current level of competence, knowledge, and strengths and weaknesses; (d) learning-oriented analysis, which holds that the requirements (for the curriculum, the content, the manner of instruction, the resources, and other factors) should be negotiated between students and other stakeholders, (e) strategy analysis, which focuses on the preferences of the students with regard to teaching methods, error correction, class sizes, the quantity of homework, and other factors, (f) refers to analysis that looks at the learning environment or circumstance without any biases, such as in terms of utility, organization, or cultural appropriateness. (g) language audits that provide a comprehensive perspective of the need analysis for well-planned language policies, professions, government services, and other areas, (h) set menu analysis, which aims to develop a list of main items from which sponsors or students may choose, (i) a computer-based analysis that compares a database of the materials to the materials' perceived needs. the problem the students are facing, the knowledge and approach required, or the best teaching style can all be determined from the need analysis. additionally, the outcomes of the need analysis might be the key factors that needed to be considered in order to meet the demands of the pupils. based on the aforementioned justifications, the researchers had to carry out a study on the demands of the students in literature in elt. this study was comparable to and different from a number of pertinent earlier investigations. the research of the need analysis of the students was the key area of commonality. the level of the students, the emphasis on english language proficiency, and the scope of the need analysis english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 555 were different from some earlier research. the primary distinction was the particular subject and how performance was incorporated into elt literature lessons. tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis were all included in the needs analysis done on the kids. this need analysis looked into the needs as perceived by university students. the goal of this study was to describe how students felt about their needs in terms of literature in elt. method the findings of the research were created from data obtained from the online form completed by the participants. in the interview form, the fields reflect the demographic information of the participants. there were 36 students from english language teaching at sriwijaya university that involved in this study which were 33 female students and 3 male students. their ages are around 18 to 20 years old who have class in inderalaya. a questionnaire and interviews obtained the data. the students received the questionnaire. there were 33 questions. tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis were used to categorize the questions. the interview was conducted with the students of english language teaching at sriwijaya university. the data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. to analyze the data from the questionnaire and interpret and explain the information from the interview, the quantitative method was used. results and discussion based on the research, the results obtained are as follows. the students' needs viewed by the students the students' information was gathered for the tsa, deficiency analysis, psa, and strategy analysis. in this study, the highest percentages of the students' questionnaire responses were displayed. target situation analysis (tsa) this section addressed the necessities, general intentions, and expectations of students in learning literature in elt. the collected data is shown in table 1. the main reasons for learning literature in elt from table 1 were an exploration of the art side of english as a foreign language (75 %) and english literature (66.7 %). it was in line with the mission of the three strategic plans of the university of sriwijaya, namely to produce works of empirical knowledge, theories, concepts, methodologies, models, or new ways of working, which will enrich science, technology, and art, as well as performance indicators for strategic issues or research programs for english education. the university is to develop technology-based english learning media that automatically is also a research roadmap for the english education study program. then the students were expected to have some experience related to english literature (72.2%). having some experiences can motivate students to be more creative and take advantage of the potential of students because they are a population living in the 21st century and understand the technology in front of them. most think that literature in elt courses is a useful material that should be taught at school, university, or other (66.7%). to support their achievement, they english proficiency should be at the intermediate level (72.2%). table 1. tsa views of students no questions students’ view percentage 1 the importance of literature in elt course to explore the art side of english as a foreign language to give chance for exploring english literature 75% 66.7% 2 the students’ expectation toward learning literature in elt have some experience related to english literature 72.2% 3 the literature in elt course used for students one of the materials taught in elt at school, university or others 66.7% 4 the english proficiency level for students’ intermediate level 72.2% deficiency analysis this section considered current needs and needs for students and deficiencies or shortcomings in their target situations. the data on the current needs and requirements of the students are shown in table 2. according to the results survey, 47.6% students preferred english legend or drama as the topic in learning literature in elt course. 66.7% rita inderawati, eryansyah, dwi maharrani, didi suhendi, sardianto siahaan virtual drama performance: is it a need due to pandemic or technological era? 556 of students want in learning literature in elt course should be taught by having project on certain topic which related to literature in elt. it has been shown that 52.8% of students believed that the integration of the topic related to learning drama in literature in elt course is important. table 2. students’ perspectives on current wants and need no question/statement students’ view percentage 1 the topics of students interest in learning literature in elt course english legend/drama 47.2% 2 the way of literature in elt course having project on certain topic related to literature in elt 66.7% 3 integration of the topic related to learning drama in literature in elt course important 61.1% 4 the media used for drama performance in literature in elt course apply certain application 52.8% furthermore, the students’ view of integrating the topic and using online media in drama performance to learning drama in literature in elt, as shown in figure 1 and 2. it showed that the most of students believed that by integrating the topic and using certain application in drama performance is important because the use of technology in literature in elt lectures is carried out because of the demands of 2nd century learning. educators may have thought about adjusting to the dynamics of the new normal as a result of the pandemic conditions that make face-to-face drama teaching unfeasible, according to metinnam and karaosmanolu (2021). before covid-19, educators held the opinion that technology could only be used in drama through the use of projectors, music players, videos, and cameras. however, as a result of the pandemic, they started to seriously consider how digital media could be used to make drama more aesthetically pleasing and educationally effective. educators started learning how to effectively integrate digital pedagogy in drama as they thought about how to develop their digital literacy. figure 1. the needs of certain application in drama performance figure 2. the topics needs of literature in elt course english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 557 based on the statistic, there were some difficulties are faced by students. the result was shown in figure 3. 66.7 % showed that it was difficult for student to have a drama performance in pandemic. the other difficulties showed that about 66.7% of students had difficulty in doing drama performance in covid-19 pandemic. thus, it was suggested that to have a drama performance could be done by using some appli-cation for doing drama performance in covid-19 pandemic. figure 3. students’ difficulties in learning literature in elt course present situation analysis this section focused on the students’ english proficiency, material leaned, and the students’ knowledge. the students’ views on their english capabilities could be seen in table 3. the vast majority of students (77.8%) admitted that their english proficiency was at the intermediate level. in this way, 65.7% of students surveyed found that the students were good in understanding in literature in elt course and 47.2% of the students understand the drama performance in learning literature in elt course and the last information showed that 47.2% of students were good in having ict mastery in using or operating some online application at the present. based on the data, it could be conclude that the students’ proficiency in understanding and operating technology could support them in having and doing a drama performance in covid-19 pandemic. table 3. the students’ proficiency in english and using technology no question/statement students’ view percentage 1 english proficiency at the present intermediate level 77.8% 2 understanding related to literature in elt course at the present good 65.7% 3 understanding related to drama performance in literature in elt course at the present good 47.2% 4 ict mastery for example in using or operating some online applications at the present good 47.2% the student's view of the existing online application used could be seen from the data presented in figure 4. according to the survey, 91.7% of students usually use zoom in learning literature in elt as in the covid-19 pandemic, then the use of the certain application in drama performance in literature in elt course so far was sometimes. there are some reasons why students choose the digital platform they use the following features can be seen as the main reasons for students to use this application: (1) having breakout rooms. (2) multiple people can be seen on the same screen. (3) having a waiting room. (4) allowing group work. (5) ability to share. teamwork is the foundation of drama. participants in online acting classes must form a group and create some things together as a result. sometimes participants need to discuss and reflect on an issue, and other times they need to prepare to improvise in groups. on the main screen, when everyone is present, it is particularly challenging to meet this criterion. in this situation, it is crucial to utilize breakout rooms and do group product development or preparation in a different space. the last, based on figure 5, showed that students used certain applications in drama performance in literature in elt courses, those were zoom (94.4%) and canva (36.1%). according to the finding in figure 6, the students rita inderawati, eryansyah, dwi maharrani, didi suhendi, sardianto siahaan virtual drama performance: is it a need due to pandemic or technological era? 558 about 58.3% agree that the frequency of using technology in learning literature in elt courses. utilizing the various internet options, as well as drama pedagogy and technology, is beneficial, according to certain studies (cziboly & bethlenfalvy, 2020; gallagher et. al., 2020). when theater and digital technology are used together in online settings, individuals' willingness to participate can rise (davis, 2010), sowing the seeds for an engaging, imaginative, and creative learning experience (anderson & cameron, 2009). as with these studies, in the covid-19 process, these strategies that can be used in the performing arts, theater, and drama are tried out by drama trainers/leaders to eliminate the confusion and uncertainty about online learning. figure 4. the existing online application figure 5. the students’ need of certain application in literature in elt figure 6.the frequency in using a certain application strategy analysis this part presented the students’ preference in learning literature in the elt course. the data obtained are shown in table 5. the table showed that the topic of drama related to english literature is important (55.6%). then 66.7 % of students preferred that learning drama in literature in elt courses should apply certain appli-cations to performing drama. 100% of the students preferred to use zoom as an online application that could be used in learning literature in the elt course. the learning preference was important and should be english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 559 considered as the strategy to help students to learn (oktarina, et al., 2022; rhahima, et al., 2021; and tenridinanti, et al., 2021). in other words, online drama studies offer a range of chances for reflection on the theater and consideration of how drama is applied in many contexts (gallagher et al., 2020). one of the most important advantages of using an online application in learning literature in elt lessons is that the programs or tools available online can be used effectively. table 5. students’ preference in leaning literature in elt no question/statement students’ view percentage 1 the topic of the drama related to english literature important 55.6 % 2 the strategy in learning drama in literature in elt course it should apply on performing drama 66.7% 3 some online applications that can be used in drama performance zoom 100 % based on the findings, it can be inferred that virtual drama performance is an innovative and timely concept that aligns well with the technological era we currently live in. the combination of advancements in digital technology and the evolving needs of audiences has paved the way for the emergence and relevance of virtual drama performances. here are some key points to elaborate on why virtual drama is needed in the technological era: 1) accessibility: virtual drama performances break down geographical barriers, allowing people from different parts of the world to experience the same production. this opens up opportunities for a global audience to engage with the arts and culture, regardless of their physical location; 2) flexibility and convenience: in a fast-paced world, virtual drama offers flexibility and convenience for both performers and audiences. people can watch performances from the comfort of their homes or on the go through various digital devices, eliminating the need for physical attendance at a specific venue; and 3) sustainability: virtual drama performances can contribute to environmental sustainability by reducing the carbon footprint associated with traditional theater productions. with less reliance on physical infrastructure, virtual drama can be greener alternative. conclusion literature in elt is one of the subjects in university which has an important aim to make students confidence and be motivated to apply their english in drama performance. but because of the spread of the covid-19 made the situation in education limited and should be replaced by online learning. based on the result of the need analysis of this study, it is suggested to explore their proficiency of english through drama performance of literature in elt and used online application as a tool in learning literature in elt. one of them was done by fusing the play with the students' native culture. the first thing that needs to be done is a need analysis. it was possible to get a lot of information by conducting a need analysis. it may be about the students' preferences for their preferred learning style or about their needs, wants, or lack of study. by employing an internet tool, that knowledge can serve as a grounded consideration while creating virtual drama performances. the study's findings show that organizations and theater instructors have made some efforts to continue the course during the covid-19 outbreak on a digital platform or with in-person instruction. acknowledgement this work has been funded by universitas sriwijaya under the competitive research grant 2022. thank you very much to the rector and dean of fkip universitas sriwijaya for supporting this study. references adıgüzel, ö. 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(2020). here’s a list of colleges’ plans for reopening in the fall. the chronicle of higher education. unesco. (2020). covid-19 educational disruption and response. unesco. widyahening, c.e.t. & sitoresmi, u. (2021). integrated learning in drama course using youtube. research fair unisri. 5(1). https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i2.6239 file://///insight/search%253fq=arnab%20kundu file://///insight/search%253fq=tripti%20bej https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1472-0701 https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/1472-0701 https://doi.org/10.1108/cg-09-2020-0377 https://doi.org/10.1108/cg-09-2020-0377 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 125 the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program dian kardijan department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of siliwangi email: diankardijan@unsil.ac.id emzir language education, postgraduate program, state university of jakarta email: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id zainal rafli language education, postgraduate program, state university of jakarta email: zainal.rafli@unj.ac.id apa citation: kardijan, d., emzir & rafli, z. (2017). the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 125-135. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.779. received: 26-08-2017 accepted: 24-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: this study is to reveal the gap between the english language communicative competence required by students of the hospitality department and english learning program provided at state of vocational high school 1 tasikmalaya, indonesia, drawing through qualitative evaluation approach, including semi-structured interviews and observations. it explores how learning needs is implemented in teaching-learning process and the respondents’ description, what they saw and what they felt. findings show inconsistency between learning needs in enrichment students’ english communicative competence and teaching-learning process. this prompts a re-instructional design of english learning for hospitality specific purposes program at this department currently. it provides to support of graduating required at hospitality industry workplace. lead of recommendations, in terms of both the instructional design including materials development, teaching method usage and the professional development of esp teachers, to address an understanding of the gap identified, so that students will enable to communicate more effectively with the english, in such contexts graduates can hire at the hospitality industry workplace. keywords: learning needs, pre-vocational english field, authentic materials and teaching methods introduction learning needs is an effective ways of teaching and learning process to achieve the learning objectives of the students’ competency targeted. it is one of the ‘needs analysis’ component in which esp principles showing the important of learning needs analysis, target situation analysis, and present situation analysis. learning needs involves teaching methods and authentic materials that must be implemented by the teachers to facilitate students’ needs in improving english communication skill. learning needs is related to participants’ specific learning needs based on the personal needs of teaching content, interests, and motivation (xie & adamson, 2015). dudleyevans and st. john in basturkmen state learning needs is language learning information: effective ways of learning the skills and language to facilitate the learners’ dian kardijan, emzir, & zainal rafli the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program 126 lack in english learning (basturkmen, 2010, p. 18). in relation to students’ need of tourism vocational high school in learning english, in terms of language skills, they expect to improve their speaking ability, and listening ability. this makes sense because the two skills are closely interrelated (amin, arifudin, & nurahmadi, 2017). in order to help the students to communicate english meaningfully, the teachers need a variety of teaching approach, in which communicative language teaching can be covered to develop students’ communicative competence. this ‘authenticity-centered’ approach directly informs the design of language learning materials-exemplifying the symbiotic relationship between the approach to learning and the content/materials used in applying it (mishan, 2005, p. ix). strategies employed to develop communicative competence might include the use of authentic texts and teaching methods. the use of authentic materials and appropriate methodology can support real-life language by providing meaningful exposure to language as it is actually used. basturkmen (2010) defines “the materials presented the students with complex information/ideas communicated through the second language” (p. 10). furthermore, patel and jain (2008) state “methodology is systematic and scientific way of teaching any subject and it guides teacher "how to teach" and "how his teaching may be effective” (p. 70). employing such materials and methodology of teaching that covered by broader of communicative language teaching approach can be engaging and motivating, where learners need to communicate effectively in a specific work. esp is goal oriented and focused english teaching and learning, designed for the specific learners according to learners’ academic and professional needs (rahman, 2015). pedagogically, the course needs to reflect this diversity and offer support which can be tapped according to a greater range of individual learning needs (tomlinson & whittaker, 2013, p. 102). hospitality students of vocational high school need the tasks and activities at the beginning of the course about what they can do in english learning with the specific subject for workplace demands. furthermore, dudley-evans & st. john state “english for vocational purposes (evp), prevocational english specifically, concerns with finding a job and interview skills and it also deals with succeeding in a job through an understanding of employer expectation and policies” (1998, p. 7). therefore, the learning process and the english material should really be able to contribute positively and relevant to the interests and needs of the students vocationally. the strategies of cooperative activities, role-play, creative tasks, and drilling helped students to speak, as well as concerned oral production (syafrizal & rohmawati, 2017). an understanding toward the kind of language required at the workplace, there are different types discourse that needed by employees. the types of hospitality workplace discourse include interpersonal and transactional utterance in language use. the transactional sense is a particular kind of negotiation to get things done in language or exchanging information to develop an understanding of the self and the other in communication, in which people interact and communicate” (liddicoat & scarino, 2013, p. 66). it describes various types of communication activities that promote the kind of comprehension that may lead to message acquisition. rutherford and o’fallon (2007) state that the prospective qualification of hospitality employees should be able to read, write and communicate in english and they have good organizational skills. through interactions with customers, important messages about their needs and expectations can be received by service staff for their immediate actions to create customer satisfaction. “hotel front office management” was recommended as core material, along with some exercises (masoumpanah and tahririan, 2013). it shows that communicating with all guests’ needs to provide the best possible guest services. interaction in communication necessarily is about verbal language as well as english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 127 body language. if it is necessary to talk to colleague in the presence of guest, it is suggested to talk in a standard language of communication. the common things to do while communicating are presenting ourselves with a warm smile, speaking in audible voice by maintaining eye contact with the listener, using simple and correct language that can be understood by everyone, and asking politely if missing to hear any point the guest or the colleague is putting forward. hayes and ninemeier (2009) state it is important to recognize that many employees in the hospitality industry have neither the language skills nor the computer skills and access required to take advantage of some of the communication options available today. it provides some insights in the nature of communication at the hospitality industry workplace with the implication for the development of interpersonal skill. the important elements of hospitality workplace discourse are needed to look on how the students are able to communicate in english to fulfill their tasks in doing works. building vocational knowledge and skills is a key goal to equip learners through a variety of applied activities within the workplace environment. murray and christison (2011) define, vocational programs involve teaching the necessary skills for specific jobs. these programs are often conducted in technical and further education institutions, and may include communication skills. the vocational program aims to prepare skilled learners using english in a communicative and applicative way to do certain kinds of work. this content should be designed and prepared with teaching materials based on vocational themes, assignments and activities and their supportive language to be skilled in communication. teaching materials used and designed to prepare students for hospitality industry contexts should aim, therefore, not only at supporting transactional talk, but should also address relational aspects of communication. learning in the esp approach is directed at achieving the competencies of learners that can be seen in the ability to perform communicative steps. if esp is to play a role of the broader educational process, then boarder competencies will be developed in courses with broader aims, courses which focus on" purposeful activity "rather than specific language” (flowerdew & peacock, 2001, p. 18). communicative actions and strategies is a particular activity as a vehicle for mastering language skills in context. unfortunately, relational talk in english is required for vocational educational settings, and awareness-raising of the importance of being able to handle this. the authentic materials can support reallife language by providing meaningful exposure to language as actually used. hospitality students are likely basic communicative competence required for their communication in workplace, in which might the effective require of learner context. paltridge and starfield (2013) and day and krzanowski (2011) state english for specific purposes (esp) refers to the teaching and learning of english as a secondary domain and it is always a professional purpose a set of skill that learners currently need in their work or will need in their professional careers. it is clear that esp related to the approach of teaching and learning process that purposed to support students’ ability to communicate in english and communicative in the context of the field of science or a particular field. the focus of esp specifically facilitates the needs of learners to speak english language in doing certain work in the workplace or professional career. it is important that teachers as well as materials designers are aware of how to select, adapt and evaluate materials used in the classroom. “english teachers and vocational content teachers were involved in the design of vocational english (ve) materials, and this cross-curricular collaboration assisted esp teachers to select the texts that were relevant to students’ vocational areas” (renandya & widodo, 2016, p. 278). it is also important that teachers employ appropriate classroom methodology through which the benefits of using authentic materials within a broad dian kardijan, emzir, & zainal rafli the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program 128 communicative language teaching approach by problem based learning or project based learning methods usage can be realized. educational authorities is the study conception of what teachers think, know and believe in arranging and choosing authentic materials and appropriate methodology to apply in classroom practice, likely learners training. “learner training aims to help learners make more effective use of the learning opportunities they encounter focusing how to learn rather than what to learn. it seeks to broaden learners’ knowledge and use of language learning strategies” (thornbury, 2006, cited in hall, 2011, p. 151). all teachers’ concept should be covered in course planning that sometimes anyone might face some obstacles to implement it, provision of authentic materials and methodology specifically. “course and lesson planning help you to develop a personal style since they involve sifting through all your information, resources and beliefs, and boiling them all down to a distillation for one particular group, time and place” (woodward, 2001, p. 181). there is also a shortage of esp teachers with appropriate training. however, these difficulties, some vocational teachers have attempted to implement of using authentic materials and teaching methodology that covered within communicative language teaching in their teaching contexts based on vocationally by their own desire to learn how to teach and how to communicate in english more effectively. department of hospitality accommodation is one of five departments held at state of vocational high school 1 tasikmalaya, indonesia, which belongs to the tourism study scope. they have recognized that english learning program should be prioritized to meet students’ need in which evidence of how the english language can operate in the real workplace. it is not only competence to do their job but also need competency in english communication with the specific demands of industry situation setting (kardijan, 2017). on target situation, the ability to communicate in english has become a demand for employees of hospitality industry that cannot be ignored. hospitality industry is one of business organizations that focused in service field. in such contexts, “an employer may have a rule requiring that employees speak only english at certain times where the employer can show that the rule is justified by business necessity” (hayes and ninemeier, 2009, p. 66). it indicates the important of english communication competence for hospitality employees that functioned to serve every customer or guests’ need. at present situation, the english communication skill is required by students to support them to become successful employees at the hospitality industry workplace. an understanding of learning needs has implication to use of authentic materials and teaching methods providing opportunities for the students in using english communicatively. the teachers themselves are suggested to design and use authentic materials and teaching methods effectively in line with principles of communicatively that reflect a learner centered approach. in reference to the background of the research previously mentioned, this study aims to explore these issues. in particular, it looks at how learning needs design is implemented in teaching-learning process to meet the students’ needs in using english communicatively. the assumption, there are may be a gap, that learning needs not met particularly well, a hypothesis will explore by review the relevant literature and outline the research methodology employed to present, discuss findings and draw conclusions including reflections, pedagogical implications, and future studies. method this is part of a larger study of evaluation research in english for specific purposes field using responsive model with countenance overview in which after analyzing of target situation, present situation, and learning needs as antecedents aspect (input and context), teaching-learning process and environment interaction as transaction aspect (process), and english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 129 result as outcomes aspect, saving each dimension in another article. however, due to limitations of space, this article would like to focus on the gap between antecedents and transaction aspects, learning needs and teaching-learning process specifically. english instruction in the vocational high school must be based on vocational english principles as part of english for specific purposes field. there was generally emphasized writing and speaking skills. hospitality accommodation department at state of vocational high school 1 tasikmalaya, west java, indonesia has realized and emphasized communication skill in english as priority of students’ needs. this study was conducted within three months, starting from february to april 2017. through the result of target situation analysis, the english syllabus was developed and organized by the teachers in the lesson plan form that covered of materials and teaching methodology. as learning needs of authentic materials and teaching methodology, the teachers asked to organize english instruction to improve speaking ability in which the students give opportunity through learning tasks that required self-expression in using english communicatively. thus, investigating is focused on learning needs implementation in teaching-learning process of english for hospitality specific purposes to support students’ confidence in english communication with the unique demands of the hospitality workplace. there are three english teachers teaching at the hospitality accommodation department and 204 students who are divided into three grades of classes. grade 10 consists of class a (35 students) and class b (35 students), grade 11 consists of class a (34 students) and class b (35 students), and grade 12 consists of class a (33 students) and class b (32 students). to be an effective in choosing respondents, the researchers purposively selected, as follows: head of hospitality department, one an english teacher, and three students’ 3rd class who have done field work practice in the hotel. it will be served primary data sources to meet the nature of research design, aims and objectives. this study is an evaluative research using qualitative evaluation approach which requires sharpness of analysis, objectivity, systematic and systemic to obtain accuracy in interpreting data. “qualitative evaluations often derive their data from fieldwork observations to describe activities, behaviors, actions, conversations, interpersonal interactions, and organizational or community processes, as well as open-ended interviewing to generate in-depth responses on the experiences, perceptions, feelings, and knowledge of individuals involved in an evaluation” (leslie goodyear, jennifer jewiss, janet usinger, and eric barela, 2014, p. 9). a qualitative case study and narrative method were chosen to illuminate the analysis of data. qualitative case study is characterized by the main researcher spending substantial time on-site, personally in contact with activities and operations of the case, reflecting, revising meanings of what is going on (stake, 1994, cited in stufflebeam and coryn, 2014, p. 296). furthermore, goodyear, et. al. state “where descriptive studies will describe people’s experiences in-depth” (2014, p. 155). as outsider of school, the researchers had consider the ethical issues in observing classroom activities of teacher work and openended interview that would be integral to the research design included students’ perceptions on teaching-learning process. instruments and data analysis there were two main stages of the research. firstly, the researcher conducted two interviews: (a) to the students in order to cover their perception toward what they saw and what they felt during teaching-learning process, and (b) to english teacher in order to determine what kind of materials and teaching method were required as learning needs to dian kardijan, emzir, & zainal rafli the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program 130 enrich students’ competency in english communicatively. the interviews were conducted through open-ended interview questions designed. secondly, the researcher conducted a classroom observation to the teacher with an interval of two weeks in between (90 minutes was kept of each lesson) focusing on acts, events, and participants within the setting, in order to cover the achievement of learning goals, classroom interactions and classroom management. afterwards, the researchers reviewed and expanded the notes, analyzing the recordings to include further information and detail. after doing each observation, there was discussed with the teacher related to use teaching materials and method in classroom activities to be reached students’ competency in using english communicatively. the observation data were used to complement the interview data to facilitate comparison between learning needs and its implementation in teachinglearning process. the transcripts of the two data resources (observations and interviews/discussions) were analysed and integrated, split into segments and then made into themes. a selection of extracts from observation and interview data, some of which were converted from indonesia to english, was analyzed. the rounds of data collection mentioned above permitted methodological triangulation to do strengthen the trustworthiness of the research. in approaching the data, observation notes were compared with interview notes. results and discussion this is a larger study of evaluation research in english for specific purposes field with a small-scale set in one of vocational high schools at tasikmalaya, indonesia. the aims is to set out exploring the any gap between learning needs and its implementation in english learning process for hospitality specific purposes. a selection of extracts from observation and interview data in which were converted from indonesia to english was analyzed. the gap findings in the implementation of learning needs in english teaching-learning process are inconsistency between the learning needs components and classroom management including classroom interactions to enrich students’ capable and confidence to use english communicatively. the teachinglearning process is not oriented to interactive habits, communicative, and applicative directly to use english in every activity. therefore, the learners did not get opportunity and challenge to use english communicatively in real context of hospitality workplace discourse. it is in line with dudley-evans and st. john that “the ultimate proof for an esp course is how well the learners fare when using english in their target situation; after the course they should be more effective and more confident using english in their target situations” (1998, p. 210). thus, communication is crucial factor which requires the involvement of both customers and service staff to achieve excellences in delivery process. any part of gap occurred, there were no appropriate materials vocationally that supported relational talk in hospitality industry settings. instead, the teachers used the general english textbooks provided which contains largely inauthentic material. likewise in using teaching method, there was traditional method that primarily focused on accuracy norm, rather than communicative interaction pattern. in short, there was little evidence that communicative competence that would facilitate workplace discourse was being developed (inauthentic materials and teaching methods in overview of communicative teaching language approach). these would be described in the following section. communication characteristics in hospitality workplace the important of english skills types on target situation is ability in english communicatively. the most frequently of conversation at hospitality workplace can be classified under directives and requests. it is occurred in transactional work oriented. in english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 131 order to get work done, communication strategies must be adopted by hotel employees to serve the foreign guests’ needs with directives and requests for explanation, for help, negotiations, and functional expressions. these observational data were used in hotel conversations, for example in booking the hotel; a : fairway hotel. can i help you? (for greeting and for help) b : hello, i would like a room for tonight. a : what kind of room would you like? (negotiation) b : i’d like a single room, please. a : hold on, please.... (explanation) i’m afraid all our single rooms are reserved. the only room we have available is a twin. b : how much for the twin room? a : sixty dollars including tax/excluding tax / before tax. (negotiation) b : does that include breakfast? a : no, but breakfast is available in our dining room. (explanation) b : ok, i’ll take a room for tonight (only). a : i’ll need to get your credit card information to guarantee your room.... (functional expression) (iec institute of hotel management, 2003) all those are such strategies that often used in the employees’ daily english conversation at the hospitality workplace. this phenomenon is appropriate with the respondents’ perceptions (head of hospitality department, an english teacher, and students’ 3 rd class who have done field work practice in the hotel). this is a selection of extract the interview data from respondents that have converted and analyzed from indonesia to english. basically, all hotel employees should have the ability to communicate with guests, including communicating in english by good attitude. in the interaction of communication occur information transactions between guests and hotel employees. (interview data: head of hospitality department, february 16, 2017, 08.4509.15 am) it shows that the most frequency of daily conversation at the hospitality workplace was transaction in giving information. it also perception was given students my experience during field work practice in the hotel, the most types of english daily usage in conversation is greeting with good attitude to give transaction information clearly that guests required. (interview data: student, february 16, 2017, 10.2510.45 am) understanding of working in the field of hospitality could be quite challenging. different from other sectors, the hospitality industry is unique in its nature which tends to be service-oriented and has a strong emphasis on human exchange in the service delivery processes (chan and mackenzie, 2013, p. 15). to lead into transactional, it is clearly needed rational talk in the hospitality workplace discourse. broadly communication characteristics in hospitality is the act of kindness in welcoming and looking after the basic needs of customers or strangers, mainly information in relation to guests’ needs (food, drink and accommodation, etc). bardi (2007) state the responsibility of communications within the hotel usually rests with the front office. from the guests’ perspective, this department is the most visible part of the lodging establishment. a contemporary explanation of hospitality conversations refers to the relationship transaction process between a customer and a hotel staff. however, this characteristic of hotel conversation only satisfies most situations to fulfill the guests’ needs. learning needs all learning needs aspects (objectives, materials, teaching and learning process, dian kardijan, emzir, & zainal rafli the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program 132 media, resources, and assessment) are attempted to reach the use of english in the real world outside the classroom. in that context, the language element (grammar and vocabulary, including its pronunciation and writing) is more appropriately seen as a tool, not as a goal: a tool for implementing language action correctly, strategically, according to its purpose and context. immediately, the action of 'learning by doing' is a more natural way (ministry of national educational republic of indonesia, number 60, 2014). it is similarity with english for specific purposes (esp) principles which is stated by dudley-evans and st.john (1998), basturkmen (2010), day and krzanowski (2011), and paltridge and starfield (2013) that basically, esp has functioned to help learners in developing english communicatively usage based on needs to function effectively at specific workplace domain, rather than their level of english. the fundamental is “what learners need to do with english. generally, the objective competence of english teaching-learning is students’ capable in communication using english including interpersonal and transactional discourse through habitual action to carry out social or workplace functions. “...english for specific purposes (esp), which focus on the communicative needs and practices of particular professional or occupational groups” (hyland, 2006, cited in cummins and davison, 2007, p. 234). an understanding of this definition, the participant states: we are concern to push students not only competence to do their job but also need expresses confidence in using english communicatively with the unique demands of hospitality industry setting. they have to communicate in english habitually. (interview data: head of hospitality department, february 16, 2017, 08.4509.15 am) to achieve the objective, the authentic material is considered as the suitable material to improve the students’ competence. nunan (2004) and kiely and dickins (2005) all state it is one of the teaching strategies that covered in classroom management. classroom materials describe the scheme of teachers and students work. this insight led teachers to approach in curriculum development, material design, and pedagogy. in application of using authentic materials, the teachers have to connect it with the learning process and actual variety of vocationally. it can be used and applied in social workplace to do certain types of work. “english teachers and vocational content teachers were involved in the design of vocational english (ve) materials, and this cross-curricular collaboration assisted esp teachers to select the texts that were relevant to students’ vocational areas” (renandya & widodo, 2016, p. 278). in developing of materials, concept of genre is used as the basic to be consistent, groove, and showing communicative action. the authenticity in constructing teaching materials is an approach that described as orientation to the purpose of communicative activity through text types with meaningful specific outcomes not in the language pattern. “this ‘authenticity-centred’ approach directly informs the design of language learning materials-exemplifying the symbiotic relationship between the approach to learning and the content/materials used in applying it” (nunan, 1989 as cited in mishan, 2005, p. ix). therefore, any task related to interpersonal and transactional texts should be an opportunity for learners to interact with teachers, friends, and others during the learning process in and out of the classroom, hospitality industry workplace specifically. furthermore, other than authentic material in enhancing students’ competence in using english communicatively, employing teaching method is also required. patel and jain (2008) state “methodology is systematic and scientific way of teaching any subject, and it guides teacher "how to teach" and "how his teaching may be effective” (p. 70). the teachers have to provide challenges and opportunities for learners to continue trying english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 133 used english in every activity and not to fear wrong. students are expected to practice as an effort to take communicative action independently. miscommunications in english seemed to cause a lack of confidence, with students who have done field work practice in the hotel reporting occasional reluctance to speak english with foreign guests, even though they knew the answers to their questions. here the student’s statement: to hard communicating in english, i am unconfident, although i knew what the foreign guests meant. competency in english communicatively is important, so practicing english conversation needed more and more as habitually. (interview data: student, february 16, 2017, 10.2510.45 am). classroom english pedagogy has its own characteristics. one of them is to use of appropriate teaching technique by various activities that must be student-centered approach where teachers become good model to support students’ confidence in english communicatively. in addition, teachers have to be excellent especially in deciding the most suitable teaching techniques for their students and managing vocational classroom discipline. teachers are suggested to use teaching method, such as; inquiry based learning, discovery learning, project based learning and problem based learning by a wide variety of techniques, including group discussion, lecture, and individual task (ministry of national educational republic of indonesia, number 60, 2014). in english for specific purposes field, need analysis enables teachers to understand students’ needs, students’ learning problems, and lesson plan suitable for instructional goals. additionally, teachers must have competence of stimulating interaction and cooperation in the classroom as well as implementing appropriate classroom management. implementation of learning needs in teaching – learning process the classroom observations and interview were focused on covering the materials and teaching method used by teachers to facilitate students’ competence and confidence in english communicatively. generally, the implementation of learning needs does not run naturally with the students’ needs in taking opportunity to use english in various activities. the process does not show the students centered approach, so the students are not accustomed to direct english usage. the results of observation toward the teaching-learning process covers: (a) teachers do not adapt the authentic or relevant materials to the learners vocationally, (b) teachers do not motivate students to learn contextually through the benefits and application of authentic materials in the local, national and international of hospitality industry workplace, and (c) teachers do not use instructional methods that appropriate with the students’ characteristics. besides, there were no materials available that can be supported relational conversation in target situation settings. instead, the teachers used the general english textbooks provided, these containing largely inauthentic material. the teacher states, i tend to follow the material in the 2013 curriculum syllabus to prepare the national exam ... i do not have time to develop and search the material because there is no time and preoccupied with administrative obligations…but sometimes, i also use discourse that related to the hospitality workplace, such as the reservation material in the book package (interview data; teacher, february 22, 2017, 10:15 10:38 am). it shows that the materials usage is not oriented to students in habitual english communication for target situation. the teacher is not maximal in preparing the learning process, authentic materials specifically. the feature of a communicative dian kardijan, emzir, & zainal rafli the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program 134 approach is contextualization of the teaching material. thus, the teacher has to try creating a learning context by personalizing the material and asking questions relating to students’ experiences. it could encourage students to speak actively and enrich the students’ experiences. there was also little variety in classroom interaction, with group work, which can help students improving their confidence in english communication. moreover, the teacher was given opinion, the application of learning scientific method is sometimes difficult to apply, because the background of the students' ability previously and their learning habits, especially when asked to communicate in english. (interview data; teacher, february 22, 2017, 10:15 10:38 am). the problem is that there is a genuine information gap. the teacher did not use the appropriate method to develop communication skill. the main focus seemed to be on accuracy rather than extending communication practice, with grammatical categories rather than practical uses of language involving interaction with the students. teacher was sometimes asked to work in pairs or groups, particularly towards the end of a lesson, activities were sometimes inappropriate for group work that students focused on vocabulary memorization and having little to discuss to try interpersonal transaction. i prefer to learn english with direct practice of speaking, such as dialogue in the role play ..so, we will be able to speak and communicate in english habitually. (interview data: student, february 16, 2017, 10.25-10.45 am). in summary, there was little evidence that communicative competence that would facilitate hospitality workplace discourse was being developed. there were inauthentic materials that rarely contextualized in hospitality topics. traditional methods and interaction patterns with the teacher focusing primarily on accuracy were the english norm. there was notwithstanding apparently positive attitudes among the teachers towards communicative language teaching approaches, therefore, this was not a conducive environment to support the students’ competence suitably in english communication required in hospitality workplace. conclusion the english for hospitality workplace’s needs to be focused on communication skills in any discourse form (interpersonal and transactional) toward esp materials. it is more closely tailored to the workplace needs and utilizable some technique based on communicative language teaching input that was carried out by teachers in this context into their own practices to improve their students’ experiences. developing materials and teaching method can be adopted anywhere to address communication required in the hospitality industry workplace. this would emphasize that this was not the teachers’ fault in any way. besides, regarding the various implications toward the materials design, there are implications for teacher development, so that the suggested lesson plan innovations can be realized. it is likely that the teachers in this context would benefit from such an approach, as well as support for reflecting deeply on their work. through responsive evaluation, the gap between english communication required at the hospitality workplace and the materials as well as teaching methods employed for english learning program at the hospitality accommodation department could be narrowed. to facilitate such a process of tailoring teaching-learning more closely to needs, there is a need to maximize institutional support, since investment in both material design and teacher of esp knowledge is needed. however, in approaching any lesson plan change designed to better meet students’ needs. clearly, teachers and leaders of school worked in would benefit from support. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 135 references amin, m., arifuddin, & nurahmadi. (2017). pragmatic competence and learning needs of english for students of tourism vocational schools in nusa tenggara barat province. international journal of educational policy research and review, 4(4), 53–61. doi: 10.15739/ijeprr.17.007. bardi, j. a. (2007). hotel front office management (4 th ed.). new jersey: john wiley & sons, inc. basturkmen, h. (2010). developing courses in english for specific purposes. new york: palgrave macmillan. chan, b., & mackenzie, m. (2013). introduction to hospitality: fine-tuned version. wan chai: the government of the hong kong special administrative region. cummins, j., & davison, c. (2007). international handbook of english language teaching. new york: springer sciences-business media, llc. day, j., & krzanowski, m. (2011). teaching english for specific purposes: an introduction. new york: cambridge university press. dudley-evans, t., & st john, m. j. 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(2013). the handbook of english for specific purposes. usa: john wiley & sons, inc. patel, m. f., & praveen, m. j. (2008). english language teaching: methods, tools, & techniques. jaipur: sunrise publishers & distributors. rahman, m. (2015). english for specific purposes (esp): a holistic review. universal journal of educational research, 3(1), 24-31. doi: 10.13189/ujer.2015.030104. renandya, a., & widodo, h. p. (2016). english language teaching today: linking theory and practice. switzerland: springer international publishing. rutherford, d. g., & o’fallon, m. j. (2007). hotel management and operations (4 th ed.). new jersey: john wiley & sons, inc. stake, e. r. (2004). standards–based & responsive evaluation. california: sage publication, inc. stufflebeam, l. d., & coryn, c. l. s. (2014). evaluation theory, models, and application. san francisco: jossey-bass. syafrizala, & rohmawati, c. (2017). teacher’s speaking strategies at vocational high school. the journal of english language studies, 2(1), 6683. retrieved from http://jurnal.untirta.ac.id/index.php/jels/ issue/view/235. tomlinson b., & whittaker, c. (2013). blended learning in english language teaching: course design and implementation. london: spring gardens. woodward, t. (2001). planning lessons and courses: designing sequences of work for the language classroom. new york: cambridge university press. xie, q., & adamson, b. (2015). how effective is workplace english for occupational purposes (eop) training? case studies of corporate programs in the chinese context. the asian esp journal, 11(1), 151-184. retrieved from https://www.asian-esp-journal.com/. dian kardijan, emzir, & zainal rafli the gap between learning needs and its’ implementation in english for hospitality specific purposes program 126 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 171 authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas ayu intan harisbaya english education department, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: ayuintan16@upi.edu eri kurniawan english education department, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: eri_kurniawan@upi.edu arif husein lubis korean education department, faculty of language and literature education, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: lubis_ah@upi.edu apa citation: harisbaya, a. i., kurniawan, e., & lubis, a. h. (2023). authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas. english review: journal of english education, 11(1), 171-182. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i1.7579 received: 13-10-2022 accepted: 25-12-2022 published: 28-02-2023 introduction each year, the academic world is always bombarded by the prevalent genre in academic writing, which is research articles published in reputable journals (kaya & yağız, 2020; swales & feak as cited in qurratu’aini, 2022). through research articles (ras), scholars can try to contribute more in increasing public knowledge based on their respective fields of study, reflecting on their previous research in order to enrich their comprehension through other related ras, broadening both national and international research collaborations, and legitimating their noteworthy claims in an academic and professional career (hyland, 2000; kanoksilapatham, 2005). while research articles (ras) are used as the media for the authors in analyzing current phenomena and expanding the findings of previous studies in particular fields, research article abstracts (raas) tend to help the readers of ras in determining whether a research article is worth further reading (amnuai, 2019; kaya & yağız, 2020). an abstract is a reflection and the miniature of a research article because it has to present the whole contents of an ra comprehensively yet as compactly as possible due to the limitation of words. the essential role of abstract has also been the main concern of study in some research (e.g., amnuai, 2019; fauzan et al., 2020; kaya & yagiz, 2020). salager-mayer (as cited in hyland, 2000) stated that abstracts abstract: an abstract is the selling point of a research article (ra), due to the fact that it can help the readers and particularly journal reviewers in selecting which ras are remarkable to be read further and accepted. a plethora of research has analyzed the rhetorical moves and linguistic features of accepted raas. nevertheless, almost none of them have explored the rejected one, based on the authors’ affiliation. invoking hyland’s (2000) rhetorical move model as the main instrument, this study intends to dismantle and fill up those lacunas by utilizing 31 rejected raas in total from indonesian journal of applied linguistics (ijal), submitted in 2019, 2020, and 2021. the data were then separated into the same affiliation (13 abstracts) and different affiliation (18 abstracts) groups in order to find the commonality and discrepancy in the rhetorical move and linguistic features (i.e. tenses, voice, and grammatical subjects). as a result, the authors’ affiliation had some influences on the structure of rhetorical moves of raas and the accommodation of linguistic features in each move. it also appeared that there were some primary shortcomings found in the rejected abstracts as compared to the accepted ones. this study can be adopted as the reference for future research in rhetorical moves analysis, specifically regarding the authors’ affiliation and rejected raas. keywords: authors’ affiliation; linguistic features; research article abstracts; rejected; rhetorical move analysis. mailto:ayuintan16@upi.edu mailto:eri_kurniawan@upi.edu ayu intan harisbaya, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas 172 should reflect the moves which are “fundamental and obligatory” (p. 64) in a research article. in a similar vein, amnuai (2019) also agreed that move-based analysis has been widely used as the main tool in dismantling the parts of the research article abstract. a plethora of research in raas has applied rhetorical move analysis to identify not only the moves of abstract but also the steps of it. moves exhibit the communicative purposes of abstract, while steps that are integrated into moves provide narrower strategies in organizing and explaining the concise ideas of the author of ras (harisbaya et al., 2021; yoon & casal, 2020). furthermore, linguistic features also take a role in rhetorical move analysis to set the functional boundaries in helping the researchers classify the potential moves and steps of raas (andika et al., 2018; yoon & casal, 2020) and even denoting authorial stance (pho, 2008). consequently, it is important for the authors of ras to be aware, learn, and master the skill of conventional rhetorical organization of raas (amnuai, 2019; kanoksilapatham, 2005; pho, 2008). nevertheless, hyland (2000) contended that the perfect model of rhetorical moves is rarely found in his data of analysis. despite the fact that many research articles (ras) have been published hitherto in reputable journals, the awareness of writing a well-constructed ra, specifically its abstract as the foremost part-genre of ra is still low (kaya & yağız, 2020). many writers of research article abstracts still fail to communicate their notions through the ideal form of rhetorical moves. thus, again, hyland (2000) emphasized that “more than summarising is taking place” (p. 68). rhetorical moves analyses have been extensively established in the area of research article abstract; however, scant attention has been paid to analyzing raa based on authors’ affiliation. harisbaya et al. (2021) and kanafani et al. (2021) conduct similar research through their proceedings regarding the effect of authors’ affiliation collaboration in constructing raas. their findings are interesting, yet still require to be discussed further. most researchers just explore research article, ma thesis, or dissertation in the area of english native and non-native speakers (e.g. jawad, 2018; noorizadeh-honami & chalak, 2018; sadeghi & alinasab, 2020), novice and expert authors (e.g. fatma & yağiz, 2020; nabilla et al., 2021; ye, 2019) various disciplines of study (e.g. bhatti et al., 2019; gani et al., 2021; huang, 2018; omidian et al., 2018; qurratu’aini, 2022), or national and/or international authors (e.g. arsyad et al., 2020; nurcik et al., 2022). from the perspective of linguistic features, tseng (2011) only focused on verb tenses and found that present and past tenses dominantly appeared in applied linguistics journals. meanwhile, some other previous studies identified grammatical subjects and/or voice (e.g. nurcik et al., 2022; pho, 2008; kafes, 2015) in analyzing linguistic features of raas. pho emphasized that grammatical subjects contributed more in distinguishing moves, nurcik et al. (2022) claimed that the voice from all data was apparently similar, whereas kafes referred to pho’s findings yet with few discussions of grammatical subjects. moreover, using rejected research article abstracts as the source of data analysis is also still scarce to be found in rhetorical moves research that has existed so far because the data is not accessible for public in any national or even international journals. some related previous studies of rhetorical move analysis have been carried out, but the main data are the accepted and also rejected conference abstracts (cas), not rejected raas (yoon & casal, 2020). in order to occupy those lacunas, this research presents the comparative study of rejected research article abstracts based on indonesian authors’ affiliation from the perspective of rhetorical move analysis and some linguistic features i.e. tense, voice, and grammatical subject. the authors’ affiliation will be divided into two groups, which are the same affiliation and different affiliation. using hyland’s (2000) rhetorical moves model which was also employed in some previous studies (e.g. amnuai, 2019; kurniawan et al., 2019; harisbaya et al., 2021; tamela, 2019; wahyuni et al., 2021; pratiwi & kurniawan, 2021) as the basis of analysis, this research is expected to produce clear answers for the following questions: (1) how is the rhetorical organization of the rejected ra abstracts manifested across two groups of affiliation? (2) what linguistic features were dominantly exhibited in both groups? method a comparative approach using quantitative and qualitative research methods was applied in this research, in order to discover similarities and disparities of rhetorical moves and linguistic features on selected rejected ra abstracts based on the same and different affiliations. the qualitative method had the function of describing and elaborating the quantitative data of analysis that were provided in the form of percentages. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 173 this research analyzed 31 abstracts from rejected research articles that were submitted to indonesian journal of applied linguistics (ijal) in 2019, 2020, and 2021. ijal was chosen due to its reputation as the only applied linguistics journal in indonesia that has been indexed by scopus (q2). those abstracts were selected based on two groups: group “sa” which consisted of authors from the same affiliation, and group “da” which consisted of authors from different affiliation. authors’ affiliation in this research was based on higher education institutions in indonesia. 31 raas were divided into two groups: the first group had 18 abstracts from authors of different affiliation, while the second group consisted of 13 abstracts from authors of the same affiliation. the ra abstracts were mostly collected from english language and english education fields of studies. considering raas as prominent writing in the academic world and motivated by the limited previous studies that unraveled rejected raas as the main data, this research applied a systemic rhetorical move analysis from the perspective of hyland (2000). there were some reasons in deciding hyland’s model as the main instrument of rhetorical moves analysis in this study, as cited and in accordance with kurniawan and sabila’s (2021) research: (1) move 5 – conclusion in hyland’s model more thoroughly dismantled the discussion and recommendation or implication compared to santos’ (1996) model. move 5 of santos’ model only highlighted the discussion of the findings; (2) the introduction and purpose parts of an abstract in hyland’s were precisely divided into move 1 and move 2, while swales (1990) combined them into one move only; (3) 800 raas from the various discipline of studies has been verified using hyland’s to acquire its generic patterns (hyland, 2000); and (4) in the most current research, hyland’s has been the most utilized framework for rhetorical moves analysis (lubis & kurniawan, 2020). table 1. hyland’s (2000) five-model of rhetorical moves move step move 1 introduction (i) step 1 – arguing for topic significance step 2 – making topic generalization step 3 – defining the key term(s) step 4 – identifying gap move 2 purpose (p) stating the research purpose move 3 method (m) step 1 – describing participants/data sources step 2 – describing instrument(s) step 3 – describing procedure and context move 4 product (pr) describing the main results move 5 conclusion (c) step 1 – deducing conclusion step 2 – evaluating the significance of the research step 3 – stating limitation step 4 – presenting recommendation or implication pho (2008) stated that there were seven classes of grammatical subjects as the part of linguistic features applied in rhetorical moves, including the epistemic classes. phenomenal classes (i.e. the things that the researcher studies): class 1. objects of research and their attributes (including nouns referring to people or objects studied and their ‘attributes, properties, action, behavior, or motivations and thoughts’: the participants, variables, these strategies, scores for the 3-criterion variables,...). epistemic classes (i.e. nouns ‘belonging to the researcher or referring to the reasoning of academics’) class 2. self-reference (to the author(s) of the paper): i, we, the author, the researcher,... class 3. other-reference (including 4 subcategories: (3a) specific names of other researchers or citations of the author’s own previous studies: hyland (2000)...; (3b) previous research or studies in general without referring to any specific researchers: previous researchers, previous studies, numerous research,...; (3c) general topics in the field: self-efficacy, communication across cultures, educational practitioners,...; and (3d) specific research objects or outcomes mentioned in previous research: the notion of “accommodation”,...). class 4. audience (including words involving the readers/audience): ‘we’ (i.e. ‘we’ that refers to both the author and the reader),... class 5. reference to writer’s own work – macro-research outcome (including words referring to the study or the paper): this study, this ayu intan harisbaya, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas 174 research, this investigation, this paper, this article, this report, . . . class 6. reference to writer’s own work – micro-research outcome (referring to details of the study, research instruments, and research-related events/processes): the findings, the results, the purpose of this study, questionnaire, discussion, a quasi-experimental with one time series design,... class 7. anticipatory it and existential there. the process to collect and analyze the main data went through several steps. first, a letter was made for ijal in order to ask permission in accessing the rejected manuscript. second, the data was sorted and an online consent form for asking permission in accessing and analyzing the abstracts was sent through email to the potential participants which presumably were suitable with the data criteria. after that, the abstracts which were allowed to be used as the main data began to be analyzed by breaking down the abstracts into sentences and labeling each sentence to the compatible move and step. furthermore, the linguistic features of the data (i.e. voice, tenses, and grammatical subjects) were also dismantled in this study as illustrated in table 2. z-test was utilized in order to analyze the equality of steps proportion based on these hypotheses: h0 : there is no difference between the proportion of steps occurrences in sa and da groups. h1 : there is a statistically significant difference between the proportion of steps occurrences in sa and da groups. table 2. rhetorical moves and linguistic features labeling move step tense voice verb gs the aim of this research is to investigate the culture-specific items (csis) and the techniques of translation applied to translate them from indonesian into english in the booklet of yogyakarta calendar of event 2020. 2 simple present active is class 6 in order to check the reliability of the analysis done in this present study, the inter-coder reliability assessment was chosen as the best tool. an experienced lecturer who put a high concern in rhetorical move analysis was enlisted as the inter-coder. afterward, the corresponding author of this study and the inter-coder independently checked and coded 41 sentences randomly obtained from the main corpus. the results of the inter-coder agreement were 90.24% for steps analysis and 100% for move analysis. it could be seen that the agreement attained a satisfactory level of inter-coder reliability. some previous studies also conducted the inter-coder reliability in rhetorical moves and attained agreement (e.g. fauzan et al., 2020; rashidi & meihami, 2018). results and discussion rq1: the manifestation of the rhetorical organization from the rejected ra abstracts across two groups of affiliation this section delineated the results concerning the manifestation of move-step occurrences, movestep salience, and linguistic features of the data from the perspective of grammatical subjects, tenses, and voice. this section also provided the answers to the research questions: (1) to compare and explain the rhetorical organization of the rejected ra abstracts manifested across two groups of affiliation, and (2) to compare and identify the linguistic features that dominantly appeared in both groups. there were two uncommon steps found in both sa abstracts and da abstracts, which were step previous research labeled as 2* in move 1 introduction and step design labeled as 1* in move 3 method. due to the fact that sentence was the main focus of rhetorical moves analysis in this research, some phrases and/or clauses indicated as potential embedded moves and grammatical subjects were considered not to be discussed further. move-step occurrences table 3. move-step occurrences abstracts z-test for equality of proportion (steps) sa da moves steps moves steps z p (2-tailed) 1 18.75% 1 12.50% 1 16.03% 1 32% -1.635 0.102 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 175 2 66.67% 2 36% 2.147 0.032 3 12.50% 3 12% 0.053 0.957 4 4.17% 4 12% -1.001 0.317 2* 4.17% 2* 8% -0.559 0.576 2 10.94% 2 17.31% 3 25% 1 31.25% 3 28.85% 1 24.44% 0.661 0.509 2 9.38% 2 15.56% -0.795 0.427 3 37.50% 3 42.22% -0.416 0.677 1* 21.88% 1* 17.78% 0.447 0.654 4 34.38% 4 28.21% 5 10.94% 1 35.71% 5 9.62% 1 33.33% 0.135 0.893 2 7.14% 2 13.33% -0.547 0.584 3 3 6.67% -0.983 0.326 4 57.14% 4 46.67% 0.564 0.572 *note: the difference in the proportion of each step is significant at p < .05 p< .05, using the z test for the difference between two proportions. this subsection presented the overview of move-step occurrences. the data were obtained by converting the analysis results from numbers into percentages for moves and steps columns. however, in order to provide the exact proportion of steps occurrences, z-test was also applied in this analysis. as seen from table 3, the percentage of move 4 product in group sa was the highest among other moves, while move 3 method reached the highest percentage of occurrence in group da. move 2 purpose and move 5 conclusion in group sa obtained the same percentage of occurrences, which was 10.94%. both moves were noted as the least occurring moves compared to the other four moves in group sa, whereas move 5 in group da obtained the lowest percentage of occurrence among other moves. on the other hand, the step occurrences of sa abstracts and da abstracts seemed atypical. step 2 of move 1 (making topic generalization), step 3 of move 3 (describing procedure and context), and step 4 of move 5 (presenting recommendation or implication) in both groups had the highest percentage of occurrences among other steps. however, when the equality of steps proportion had been analyzed using z-test, it could be seen from the highlighted parts of the table that there was a statistically significant difference between the proportion of step 2 of move 1 occurrence in group sa and that in group da . meanwhile, there was no statistically significant difference in other step occurrences proportion. therefore, the results of z-test for the equality of steps proportion justified that h1 was accepted only in step 2 of move 1. step 3 of move 5 (stating limitation) were not found in any abstracts of group sa. meanwhile, 6.67% of step 3 of move 5 still could be found in group da abstracts with insignificant proportion between group sa and da. as previously stated, this research found two uncommon steps: step 2* of move 1 (previous research) and step 1* of move 3 (design). the following excerpts represent the manifestation of the uncommon steps. example 1. some experts analyzed synchronous classroom activities through multimodal discourse analysis. (sa9, move 1, step 2*, sentence 2) example 2. previous studies suggested that male’s masculinity and female’s femininity largely remained to conform to their respective biological attributes. (da17, move 1, step 2*, sentence 3) example 3. a quasi-experimental with one time series design was employed to examine the effectiveness of amall to improve the speaking of efl slow learners. (sa2, move 3, step 1*, sentence 4) example 4. this research uses quantitative with experimental of one group pretest-posttest design. (da12, move 3, step 1*, sentence 4). based on the findings of this study, move 4 product and move 3 – method tended to occur in sa and da abstracts respectively, whereas the tendency of move occurrence in accepted raas was only move 3. those findings were partly in line with some related previous studies (e.g. harisbaya et al., 2021; kanafani et al., 2021; kurniawan et al., 2019). in harisbaya et al. 's findings, move 4 became one of the prior moves, yet the appearance still did not predominate the data. kanafani et al. showed that in the groups of different and same authors’ affiliations from accepted abstracts, the first major move was move 1 – introduction. although the general ayu intan harisbaya, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas 176 variable of analysis was similar to this study, which is authors’ affiliation, the results were not the same. in addition, only move 3 had the highest number of occurrences in kurniawan et al., but it did not apply to move 4 of the previous findings. since step 2 of move 1 (making topic generalization) became the most manifested step of rejected raas based on the equality of proportion, this result was not in line with some previous studies that collected accepted raas as the main source of data analysis (e.g. kurniawan et al., 2019; kurniawan & sabila, 2021; pratiwi & kurniawan, 2021). those previous studies claimed that steps 3 of move 3 (describing procedure and context) was the most manifested step. regarding the uncommon steps (previous research and design steps), those were also discovered in lubis and kurniawan (2020)’s research which generated the synthesized coding scheme of rhetorical moves from previous studies of raas across academic genres. move-step occurrences are scarce to be discussed in some research, particularly the occurrence of uncommon steps outside hyland’s (2000) rhetorical organization model. thus, these findings can shed light on the revelation of movestep occurrences of the rejected raas based on authors’ affiliation. move-step salience table 4. move-step salience in percentages move sa da step sa da 1 76.92 77.78 1 23.08 33.33 2 61.54 38.89 3 15.38 16.67 4 7.69 11.11 2* 7.69 11.11 2 100 100 3 84.62 94.44 1 69.23 44.44 2 23.08 33.33 3 69.23 66.67 1* 46.15 44.44 4 92.31 94.44 5 61.54 50 1 30.77 27.78 2 7.69 11.11 3 5.56 4 38.46 16.67 this subsection provided the overview of move-step salience from group sa and group da. the data were obtained by translating the analysis results from numbers into percentages. the consideration to analyze the salience was based on the number of abstracts featuring the moves and steps. if, for example, move 1 – introduction appeared twice in an abstract, then it still counted as one for the salience. according to kanoksilapatham (2005), there were some labels related to the salience of move or step: conventional and optional. a move has to reach 60% of all the data to be recognized as a conventional move. if the frequency of a move is considered under 60%, it is labeled as an optional one. however, amnuai (2019) clarified kanoksilapatham’s criteria by classifying the move or step salience into three parts: obligatory (100%), conventional (60% 99%), and optional (less than 60%). from table 4, it could be seen that the obligatory move both in group sa and da abstracts was move 2 procedure with a percentage of 100%. there was no optional move in group sa abstracts, but it was found in move 5 conclusion from group da abstract (50%). the rest of the moves from sa abstracts were labeled as conventional moves: move 1 introduction (76.92%); move 3 method (84.62%); move 4 product (92.31%); and move 5 conclusion (61.54%). meanwhile, move 1, move 3, and move 4 were indicated as the conventional moves in da abstract. both move 3 and 4 in da abstracts obtained the same percentage (94.44%), but move 1 reached 77.78%. the percentage of step salience from both data were varied, however the obligatory step could not be found in both data. step 2 of move 1 (making topic generalization) and step 1 and 3 of move 3 (describing participants/data sources and describing procedure and context– respectively) were categorized as a conventional step in sa abstracts, but the rest of the steps from move 1, move 3, and move 5 identified as the optional steps. on the other hand, only step 3 of move 3 was categorized as the conventional step of all da abstracts, and the rest of the steps were considered as the optional steps. from the perspective of move-step salience, it was detected that the obligatory move from sa and da abstracts was move 2 – purpose. in contrast, there were commonly three obligatory moves that showed in accepted raas: move 2, move 3, and move 4. this result partially resonated with some previous studies (e.g. kafes, 2015; kurniawan et al., 2019; pho, 2008). in kafes’ findings, move 2 (presenting research) and move 3 (methods) were considered as the obligatory moves in two out of three groups of analysis. kurniawan et al. (2019) stated that move 2 – purpose and move 4 – product were categorized obligatory in all journals. moreover, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 177 pho claimed that presenting the research and summarizing the findings were the obligatory moves in all groups of abstracts, but describing the methodology categorized obligatory in two of three groups of abstracts. rq2: the foremost linguistic features appeared in both groups linguistic features of abstracts moves the distribution of each linguistic feature across the five moves of the main data was calculated separately to disclose the linguistic features that were dominantly appeared on each move. the characteristics of linguistic features from both groups were alike with the accepted raas. as mentioned earlier, sentences were the main unit of analysis in this present study. therefore, if any linguistic features were discovered in a phrase or a clause, those would not be the main focus of the data analysis, as tseng (2011) also stated. due to the space constraints, the whole tables were not provided here; however, the characteristic of linguistic features on each move were grouped together and discussed under the relevant subsection below. almost all grammatical subjects classes emerged in the main data–except class 4. nevertheless, this research would only focus on four of seven classes found in the whole corpus due to the frequency of occurrence. both groups sa and da abstracts elicited similar forms of grammatical subjects from move 1 – introduction to move 4 – product, except move 5 – conclusion. some anomaly linguistic features were also found in this research, such as the absence of voice and tense, double verbs, or the choice of transition and pronoun words due to the incomplete or incorrect structure of a sentence. therefore, some linguistic features labels (in terms of tense and voice) were manipulated based on the tense and voice pattern from the previous and following sentences in the abstracts. move 1 – introduction the most dominant class of grammatical subject in move 1 of both groups was class 3 – other reference subject. the following excerpts represent the most dominant grammatical subject class in move 1. example 5 brown and levinson's theory on politeness (3a) stated that ... (sa7, move 1, step 2, sentence 2) example 6 numerous researches (3b) focused on technology-assisted language learning, but few of them cover inclusive learning style with authentic elements. (sa2, move 1, step 4, sentence 3) example 7 the output of vocational school (3c) still has lower competence in english communication for industrial networking. (sa13, move 1, step 2, sentence 1) from the examples above, there was no class 3d specific research objects or outcomes mentioned in previous research found in group sa abstracts. on the contrary, the specific names of other researchers or citations of the author’s own previous studies (class 3a) did not appear, but instead class 3d in group da abstracts. example 8 previous studies (3b) have analysed song lyrics to identify their intended messages. (da13, move 1, step 4, sentence 2) example 9 self-efficacy (3c) is a person's belief in his ability to carry out planned activities. (da12, move 1, step 3, sentence 1) example 10 the notion of “accommodation” (3d) has been explained by giles and his colleagues in 1973. (da5, move 1, step 2*, sentence 4) from the perspective of verb tense and voice, simple present tense dominated the occurrences in both groups sa and da (62.5% and 72% respectively), whereas the second rank of verb tense occurrences emerged differently from the groups. simple past tense (20.83%) was the second rank in group sa, while present perfect tense (20%) appeared as the second rank in group da. active voice also dominantly appeared in move 1 of groups sa and da (87.5% and 64% respectively). although class 3 was dominantly employed as the main grammatical subject of the whole corpus, it could be inferred from the tense occurrence that specifically sub-class 3c was the most frequently used grammatical subject as it was applied to inform the general topics in the field. the discussion of linguistic features in this study mostly referred to pho’s (2008) findings, especially for the grammatical subjects. as seen ayu intan harisbaya, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas 178 from examples 5 to 10, each sub-classes of class 3 had its own style of the verb tense and voice occurrence. sub-class 3a indicated specific researchers applied simple past tense, while subclass 3c applied simple present tense to convey the general topics in the field. this observation was in accordance with pho’s. nevertheless, there was a slight difference with pho’s findings regarding the correlation between sub-class 3b and the verb tense choice. although pho stated that sub-class 3b tended to take the present perfect in the whole data, it did not appear the same in this research. sub-classes 3b (previous research or studies in general) and 3d (specific research object or outcome mentioned in previous research) in da abstracts applied present perfect tense. meanwhile, simple past tense tended to be used for verbs with sub-class 3b subject in sa abstracts. move 2 – purpose the majority of grammatical subjects in move 2 from the whole data was the reference to the writer's own work – macro research outcome (class 5), as in line with the communicative function of move 2 that intended to elucidate the purpose of the research. the following excerpts present the class 5 subject in move 2. example 11 this study (5) aims to determine the variation method used in online learning. (sa1, move 2, sentence 3) example 12 this research (5) investigated the translation process of the english-indonesian language pair performed by a translator using translog ii. (da10, move 2, sentence 1) most of the data utilized “this study”, “this article”, “this paper” or even “this research” as the subject of a sentence in move 2, and were accompanied by the simple present tense. simple present was still the foremost tense in both groups, with 85.71% occurrence in sa abstracts and 70.37% occurrence in da abstracts. simple past was also found in both groups, yet it did not stand out. the occurrence of active voice in sa and da abstracts was the highest; however, the sa abstracts did not contain any passive voice. sa abstracts reached 100% occurrence, whereas da abstracts got 85.19% occurrence for active voice. the findings of the simple present as the verb tense that tended to be utilized in move 2 of rejected raas resonates with some related previous studies (e.g. amnuai, 2019; qurratu’aini, 2022). pratiwi & kurniawan (2021) mentioned that active voice was also highly emerged in move 2, due to the fact that the authors intended to emphasize the doer rather than the action in order to make the raas more intelligible. move 3 – method the analysis for the grammatical subject of move 3 revealed that class 1 objects of research and their attributes obtained a great proportion in group sa and da. the following excerpts illustrate the class 1 subject of move 3. example 13 one hundred fifty-three participants (1) are submitting the completed questionnaire, and the majority of the respondent in both languages is a student at the university. (sa7, move 3, step 1, sentence 6) example 14 five students who did their final project and five lecturers who were involved reviewing activities (1) were investigated in this study. (da15, move 3, step 1, sentence 3) it was apparent from the excerpts above that class 1 tended to be used as the subjects of participants in the data analysis, which in accordance with the function of step 1 of move 3 (describing participants/data sources). in contrast to the previous moves that had the same analysis of tenses for both groups, the primary tense employed in group sa for move 3 contrasted to the tense that highly appeared in group da. while simple present became the primary tense in group sa (71.88%), simple past tense was preferred in group da (73.33%). in fact, simple past tense could not be found in any moves of sa abstracts. in terms of voice, group sa tended to use the active voice (56.25%), while the passive voice (71.11%) dominantly appeared in group da. from the perspective of move 3, some previous research claimed that most of the method moves tended to use past tense with passive voice (e.g. nurcik et al., 2022; pho, 2008) apparently found in abstracts from different affiliation authors. in contrast, this present study also discovered that simple present tense with active voice could also be the prominent linguistic features in method move, specifically in this case was retrieved from the rejected raas of the same affiliation authors. amnuai (2019) also agreed with the tendency of using simple present with english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 1, february 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 179 active voice in move 3 from the accepted international corpus. move 4 – product the observation of the grammatical subject of move 3 showed that class 6 (reference to writer’s own work – micro research outcome) stood out both in group sa and da. moreover, 17 of 18 abstracts in group da contained class 6 as the subject of a sentence. the following excerpts depict the class 6 subject of move 4. example 15 the techniques of translation which are frequently applied (6) are literal translation with 31 data and transference with 28 data. (sa10, move 4, sentence 5) example 16 the findings from this study (6) revealed that the participants in this study might have used english in speech situations in which they would have used recycling the mistake word. (da16, move 4, sentence 6) in terms of verb tenses and voice, group sa and da respectively had the same tenses with the previous move–method move. simple present was highly accommodated in sa abstracts with 75% occurrence. on the other hand, the proportion of simple present and simple past tenses were nearly commensurate in da abstracts. unlike the verb tenses, the realization of voice both in group sa and da was considerably more unified. both groups utilized active voice with 81.82% occurrence in most of the sentences appearing in product move. the preference of active voice by the majority of authors from both groups resonates with kurniawan et al.’s (2019) findings that analyzed accepted ras. the previous study claimed that most authors from the data took active voice as the main voice in move 4. as stated by pho (2008) regarding the results of verb tenses in summarizing the findings move based on santos’ (1996) model, present tense was applied in order to provide the sense of “widely accepted findings” (p. 243) beyond the results of the study. meanwhile, the use of past tense left the sense of authors’ objectivity in revealing the research findings. thus, pho’s statement was in a similar vein with the purpose of present and past tenses in the product method of this present study. move 5 – conclusion unlike the previous grammatical subject realization in four moves, the subject class in move 5 varied across the two groups. class 1 dominated the conclusion move of sa abstracts, meanwhile class 5 prevailed in da abstracts. the following excerpts from both groups show the results of class 1 and class 5. example 17 vocational school in indonesia (1) should change english curriculum from general english to english for specifics purpose (esp). (sa13, move 5, step 4, sentence 17) example 18 this study (5) also reveal recommendations to tackle these issues, including: a) vocabulary enrichment through reading, b) presentation rehearsal, c) observing other students when presenting, d) learn to make effective and interesting slides, e) learn most commonly used phrases for presentation, f) practice using mind mapping and small cards to organize ideas (da15, move 5, step 4, sentence 11) in the conclusion move, the nouns referring to people or objects of study needed to be reappeared in order to emphasize the main concern of the study which had been analyzed. it was also important for class 5 to be restated in move 5 as the way to confirm the readers of abstracts regarding the conclusion, suggestion, recommendation, or implication of the research. since most sentences in move 5 were determined to remind the readers about the object studied and provide generalizations of the previous moves, it was not surprising that simple present became the most common tense used in group sa and da (85.71% and 80% respectively). the use of passive and active voice in sa abstracts was nearly commensurable, while active voice prevailed in da abstracts with 73.33% occurrence. the results of move 5 conclusion in the findings section were partly in contrast with pho’s (2008) findings in discussing the research (move 5). class 6 was not found as one of the prominent grammatical subjects in this study; but instead, class 5 was not accommodated in pho’s findings of move 5. however, the simple present tense which was almost exclusively employed in move 5 of the present study agreed with pho’s (2008) research in order to make “the sentence sound more general” (p. 244). ayu intan harisbaya, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas 180 conclusion this research deduces that there are some similarities and differences between the rejected and accepted raas in general, and also between the same affiliation group of raas and different affiliation one in particular. it can be summed up from the results that authors' affiliation have some impact in constructing an abstract of the research article. there are two main concerns in this conclusion part that can be summarized based on the research questions. by using hyland’s (2000) model, it can be seen that the rejected raas tend to emerge move 4 – product (sa abstracts) and move 3 – method (da abstracts). step 2 of move 1 (making topic generalization) is the most occurring step in rejected raas with different equality of proportion between sa abstracts and da abstracts. it is also discovered that the obligatory move of rejected raas is only move 2 – purpose. in terms of step salience, there is no obligatory step found in rejected raas. referring mostly to pho’s (2008) analysis, this present study discloses that class 1, class 3, class 5, and class 6 of grammatical subjects tend to be applied in the rejected corpus with some distinction of move 5 – conclusion subjects in each group of affiliation. simple present and simple past tenses with active and passive voice have dominantly appeared in rejected raas with some distinction realized in each group. thus, it can be inferred from all the results of linguistic features on each move that the grammatical subject also plays a prominent role regarding the verb tenses and voice selection based on the context. this research also suggests that the uncommon steps realized in this present study need to be added and explored further as the new steps in rhetorical move analysis, as lubis and kurniawan (2020) already proposed with their synthesized model of hyland’s move. this study should be viewed with some caution: (1) future research should involve more abstracts to capture more data; (2) sentences as the unit of analysis may not be able to capture the results as good as phrases. therefore, it is recommended to explore not only sentences but also clauses or phrases as the unit of analysis in rhetorical moves. references amnuai, w. 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(2020). rhetorical structure, sequence, and variation: a step‐driven move analysis of applied linguistics conference abstracts. international journal of applied linguistics, 30(3), 462-478. ayu intan harisbaya, eri kurniawan, & arif husein lubis authors’ affiliation influence towards rhetorical moves and linguistic features of rejected raas 2 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 571 students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning at english education study program of pattimura university rosina f.j. lekawael universitas pattimura, indonesia email: rosina.lekawael@gmail.com ayuni abdullah reniwuryaan universitas pattimura, indonesia email: ayuniireniwuryaan@gmail.com hanafi bilmona universitas pattimura, indonesia email: hanafibilmona@gmail.com apa citation: lekawael, r. f. j., reniwuryaan, a. a., & bilmona, h. (2023). students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning at english education study program of pattimura university. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 571-580. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.8217 received: 21-02-2023 accepted: 21-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction since the covid-19 pandemic, all learning activities are fully done online. there is, actually, no clear definition of online learning. literature indicated that the term had often been attached to a wide range of meanings and definitions. singh & thurman (2019) found 18 items over 46 definitions used to describe online learning. it was often used synonymously with e-learning, distance learning, web-based learning, blended learning, online courses, and others. certainly, the covid-19 pandemic has brought significant challenges to traditional education systems worldwide, including in indonesia. this condition has also allowed students to exercise autonomy in learning (abidah et al., 2020; pujilestari, 2020; astini, 2020). teaching and learning system is a new way to do it. students may get bored while facing online classes every day. attitude has such an important influence on the effort a learner is prepared to make in learning a foreign language. it means that attitude affects the english learning abstract: studies about an attitude toward learning english have been conducted almost everywhere because of its important influence on the english learning process. the attitude can be categorized into three components namely cognitive, affective/emotional, and behavioral. the study is focused on the emotional component which covers the person’s emotions and feeling towards an object. it can directly affect one’s preferences in order to stand for or against or to like or dislike something. due to the pandemic situation where all the subjects must be done virtual, the researcher attempts to explore what are students’ emotional attitudes toward the virtual oral presentation. the researcher finds it interesting since virtual learning is an uncommon method for students, especially in doing an oral presentation as well as the novelty of the previous related study. the research objective is to find out the students’ emotional attitudes towards oral presentation in virtual learning, especially in the fifth semester of the english education study program at pattimura university. this study applied a survey as a research design by using a questionnaire and interview. the subject of this study consists of fifteen students who enrolled in sla class. the result of the questionnaire showed that most students in the second language acquisition (sla) class held a positive attitude toward the virtual oral presentation. the majority or 12 students (80%) strongly agreed that the oral presentation in virtual learning is more fun and preferable. on the other hand, 11 students (73.3%) strongly agreed that it reduces their anxiety level and also improves their self-confidence. in conclusion, it benefits so much to improve their motivation in english virtual learning compared to face-to-face oral presentations. in a face-to-face class, they had high speaking anxiety by having a great fear of getting involved in a conversation, great fear of the audience, and a great fear of failure. in addition, further researchers can focus on the technology application in virtual learning and its impact on students’ language ability as the novelty element of this study. keywords: oral presentation; students’ attitude; virtual learning. rosina f.j. lekawael, ayuni abdullah reniwuryaan, & hanafi bilmona students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning at english education study program of pattimura university 572 process. studies about attitudes toward learning english have been conducted almost everywhere. the importance of attitude in learning a language is well established. attitude is a composition of the hypothesis that direct observation is not accessible and should be inferred from measurable reactions (aini et al., 2023). because of the nature of composition, these responses should reflect a positive or negative response of the attitude object. for students, attitude is one of the most significant factors that determine their learning success/achievement. attitude refers to the learner’s overall evaluation and emotional response towards learning a language, including their motivation, interest, and willingness to learn. a positive attitude can lead to better learning outcomes, while a negative attitude can hinder progress. according to mai & thao (2023), several factors affect efl students’ attitudes towards language learning. from their study, they found that the attitudes of the students are internal and external factors. the internal factors coming from the students like interest, self-confidence, lexicon knowledge, anxiety, risk-taking willingness, curiosity, & awareness of the importance of english. while the external from outside of the students such as teaching and learning materials, content, curriculum, teacher personality, teacher professional knowledge, teacher communication, and teacher attitudes towards their students. in the context of the pandemic, the shift to virtual learning has also presented new challenges for language students, such as reduced social interaction and increased screen time. these factors can further affect students’ attitudes toward language learning, making it even more important for educators and researchers to understand and address the factors that contribute to a positive learning attitude. on the other hand, due to the pandemic situation where the students are not able to have conventional learning, as usual, the researchers try to figure out what are the factors affecting students’ attitudes since there are two types of attitudes; a negative attitude which will lead them to be a pessimistic learner, and a positive attitude which will help the student learn the language well. the study reported in this article took place in the indonesian context in which the virtual oral presentation is a new way for students. based on the previous relevant studies about attitudes toward online english learning (getie, 2020; thuan, 2021; jalilinia, 2021; hablo, & gorospe, 2022), the researchers mostly focus on students’ attitudes toward speaking english and students’ emotional attitudes towards online learning. in this research, the researchers attempt to observe what are the students’ emotional attitudes toward the oral presentation. the researchers find it interesting since virtual learning is an uncommon method for students, especially in doing an oral presentation in a second language acquisition (sla) class. this class has an oral presentation where the students are required to create a video about a particular topic given in the past which is less than five minutes long and upload it to google classroom (gc) as the form of virtual learning that the lecturer used in sla class. based on law 20 of 2003 on the education national system (uu nomor 20 tahun 2003 tentang sistem pendidikan nasional) states that the curriculum development is organized in accordance with the level of education within the framework of the national unity of the republic of indonesia and takes the following into account: (a) the enhancement of faith and piety, (b) the enhancement of noble character, (c) the enhancement of learners’ potential, intellect, and interest, (d) the diversity of the region’s potential environment, (e ) demand for regional national development, (f) requirement of labor market, (g) development in science, technology, and arts, (h) religion, (i) the dynamic of global development, and (j) the national unit and nation’s values. the statement indicates that attitude has become core attention in indonesian education. this education system is in line with the goal of the independent learning curriculum. the goal of the independent learning curriculum is to foster a more holistic and well-rounded education that takes into account not only academic achievements but also social and emotional development. the new curriculum aims to go beyond the traditional emphasis on academic knowledge and skills and also to stimulate the development of values, morals, and attitudes that are important for students to succeed in life. this includes promoting positive attitudes such as respect, empathy, responsibility, honesty, and tolerance as important qualities for students in order to thrive in the 21st century. in english language learning, the concept of attitude is known as a critical component. the attitude should be viewed as the component that encompasses all positive outcomes that can occur during language learning. it is crucial to consider how students feel about the language. it is stated that concerning attitude in a language learning context controls an individual’s motivation and is english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 573 especially relevant for language learning because language learning includes many different aspects besides simply learning skills (thuan, 2021). so, it has an important role in influencing students’ success or failure in their learning. to become enjoy the english language learning process, the students must feel happy and be ready to study via online learning. when students are pleased with the english language learning session, when they are bored, or even when they refuse to engage in the lesson, they are demonstrating their attitude through their feelings. in a nutshell, an attitude refers to how students act, think, and feel about language learning. during their learning process, students will show their interest or rejection of the learning. it all happens because they have their way to value and evaluate the study or learning process. those ways are their attitudes toward learning. learning english as foreign language has different effects on the student. some students might like and enjoy their time learning english. they will show good cognitive processes and behavior in the classroom. this will lead them to have a positive attitude toward it. on the other hand, some students find learning english as a foreign language as a boring subject and they will show slow progression. they will also feel uninterest to learn it any further. thus, it leads them to have a negative attitude toward their beliefs. these illustrations imply that attitude deals with students’ everyday activities. it exists as long as the students are in the process of learning and acquiring the language. on top of that, it is the key to determining how well students can be in the learning process. their feelings could be good, bad, or neutral. it is directly connected to the development of students’ motivation. these feelings will affect their participation in the virtual learning process. virtual learning has become a crucial part of education in this digital era and it is important for lecturers to help students develop a positive attitude. virtual learning requires a different set of skills and approaches compared to traditional classroom learning. therefore, the students need to adapt to this mode of learning. students’ attitudes can be influenced by their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. the researcher used selfanalysis and student opinions as useful tools for understanding and assessing their attitudes. attitudes are not fixed and can change over time through various interventions. the language attitude of students influences the maintenance of the indonesian language. wati (2018) states that the human attitude is made up of three components, which are shown as the way the human think (cognitive domain), behave (behavior domain), and feel (affective domain). the domains of learning can help students develop a more positive personality. teachers prefer to place a greater emphasis on the cognitive approach to learning. in reality, there are social and psychological approaches to which these three approaches can be seen. first, is the behavioral component. the behavioral aspect of attitude deals with the way one behaves and reacts in particular situations. second is the cognitive component. this aspect involves the beliefs of the language learners about the knowledge that they receive and their understanding of the process of language learning. third is the affective component. it is affected by different emotional factors, as quoted by hafiza (2022). in this case, this present study focuses on how the students’ attitudes, particularly affective ones toward oral presentation in virtual learning. wati (2018) mentions that knowing about attitude is significant in pedagogical capital because language attitude is a part of important contributions of the language teaching-learning process. understanding students’ foreign language attitudes can improve the quality of english learning itself. one of them is an affective aspect which can affect the students’ motivation and participation in class. according to septiara (2022), affective refers to an emotional feeling such as a person’s feeling of enthusiasm for poetry written in a certain language. the inner feelings and emotions of english foreign language (efl) students may influence their perspectives and their attitudes toward english. in this case, the students will show their likes and dislike toward something. by recognizing the importance of students’ emotions and taking steps to address them, the lecturers can help to create a more effective and enjoyable language learning experience for their students. this can involve using a variety of teaching strategies and activities that cater to different learning styles and interests, as well as providing regular feedback and encouragement to help students stay motivated and engaged. wichanpricha (2021) suggested that learning process is a sensitive process influenced by various emotional factors in the affective domain. the affective domain also referred to attitude and interest towards learning. most of the research concerns the substance of the affective element. an individual’s attitude towards an object cannot rosina f.j. lekawael, ayuni abdullah reniwuryaan, & hanafi bilmona students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning at english education study program of pattimura university 574 be shaped by simply recognizing their beliefs about it because emotion runs simultaneously with the cognitive process about an attitude object. the affect (feelings and emotions) and attitude (evaluative penalty based on brand beliefs) courses of research are integrated to propose an integrated model of attitude and choice. nowadays, almost all teachers plan english learning activities by asking the students to present their work both as individuals and in groups to develop their speaking abilities. in addition, english classroom activities are important for the student’s development in speaking. as long as there are classroom activities that motivate the students, it will increase the student’s self-confidence in the classroom to answer the question, share the idea, and also give a presentation. therefore, the students should give a chance to the students to practice speaking english. using oral presentations regularly, it is expected can change the student’s confidence to speak english. attention to the system of language is crucial, but the development of fluency and contextual appropriacy are equally important goals. in other words, to support communicative efficiency, the students must be usual with oral presentation activity. presentation is one of the activities, which were used in oral communication courses to develop students’ speaking skill. an oral presentation is a good way to develop the students’ speaking ability to communicate with others. so, it can be an effective way to help them develop their ability. giving oral presentation needs not only speaking skill but also other aspects of presentation skill involving the capability to apply nonverbal skills including eye contact, gesture, and voice. in addition, students need to consider other things such as the content of the presentation and their audiences’ interests (panggabean & triassanti, 2020). presentation skill, it is expected can help the students learn to speak english easily. virtual learning is a form of learning that is enhanced through utilizing computers and/or the internet both outside and inside the facilities of educational institutions. a virtual learning environment (vle for short) is a collection of software tools supporting academic administration, teaching, and learning using an application such as zoom, edmodo, google classroom, etc. as information and communication are increasingly conducted online. each school and university have its policy to use an app or online form in teaching and learning activity, additionally, based on the researchers’ experience in virtual learning, we found that pattimura university especially in the english education study program, mostly use zoom app and google classroom to conduct the learning process. further, the majority of the previous studies were related to qualitative research supported by actual examples and approached using a single method, such as a survey (e.g., ullah, et.al. & karimkhanlooei, 2017) or case study (e.g., nurwahyuni, 2019). however, the results show that the students had positive and negative attitudes. they could adjust quickly to english virtual oral presentation, while the other results indicated that they faced difficulties with it either in virtual or face-to-face learning. the purposes of the current study are to find out the students’ emotional attitudes toward oral presentation and the factors influencing their attitude to virtual learning. in this study, we developed an online questionnaire and a list of interview questions for the fifth-semester students of the english education study program at pattimura university. the research questions to answer in this study are: (1) what are the students’ emotional attitudes toward the virtual oral presentation? (2) what are the factors influencing their emotional attitude toward their virtual oral presentation? method qualitative research is a type of research that explores and provides deeper insights into realworld problems. instead of collecting numerical data points or intervene or introduce treatments just like in quantitative research, qualitative research helps generate hypotheses as well as further investigate and understand quantitative data. qualitative research is understanding of social phenomena based on the participant’s point of view. the data collection procedures of this study were collected by giving questionnaire to participants (riadil, 2020). the setting was in sla class english education study program at pattimura university. 15 students participated in filling out the questionnaire and interview session. due to the pandemic situation, the researcher will conduct this study online so it will be in the form of a google questionnaire. after making a questionnaire, the researcher distributed the link of the questionnaire to the students to be fulfilled based on their feeling, experience, and perspective. while, the interview posed five english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 575 questions to represent the three main variables of the research which are; students’ attitudes, oral presentation, and virtual learning. the questionnaire consisted of a 10-item online questionnaire that used the likert’s scale ranging from one to five (5: strongly agree; 4: agree; 3: neutral; 2: disagree; 1: strongly disagree). the second language acquisition (sla) class was carried out for one semester which consisted of 16 meetings. but, the researchers were only concerned about their involvement in an oral presentation during several meetings. students were asked to fill out the questionnaire after completing the course. after collecting the questionnaire, the data were analyzed via the spss software. results and discussion questionnaire analysis the results of the questionnaire regarding students’ attitudes toward oral presentation in virtual learning are in the following: table 1. the answer of participants who filled out the questionnaire no initial name item 1 item 2 item 3 item 4 item 5 item 6 item 7 item 8 item 9 item 10 1 iy 5 5 5 4 4 2 5 5 5 5 2 ca 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 4 3 jg 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 5 5 4 js 4 5 5 4 3 3 3 4 4 1 5 sh 4 4 3 5 2 5 2 4 2 5 6 nl 2 2 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 1 7 mj 5 4 3 3 5 5 5 5 5 4 8 wo 3 3 5 5 5 5 5 2 4 4 9 mh 5 5 5 2 5 5 5 5 5 5 10 ce 5 5 4 5 4 4 4 4 5 2 11 pa 4 4 1 4 5 4 1 4 5 5 12 jh 5 4 2 1 5 5 5 5 5 5 13 jm 1 1 3 5 1 5 5 3 1 3 14 np 2 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 15 af 5 5 2 4 3 4 5 5 5 5 based on students’ responses to the questionnaire, results are given in the percentage form below: figure 1. students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning table 2. descriptive statistics n minimu m maximu m sum mean std. deviation variance statistic statistic statistic statistic statistic std. error statistic statistic tot_ sa 15 28.00 47.00 614.00 40.9333 1.31100 5.07749 25.781 valid n (listwi se) 15 the given mean is 40,9333 which demonstrates mostly students have positive standpoints regarding oral presentation in virtual learning. item 1: oral presentation in virtual learning is more interesting. almost 50% of students strongly agree, 27% agree and 7% neutral about it. it can be said that most of the students are rosina f.j. lekawael, ayuni abdullah reniwuryaan, & hanafi bilmona students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning at english education study program of pattimura university 576 comfortable and interested with the oral presentation. item 2: oral presentation in virtual learning is more fun. 40% of the students strongly agree and agree, while 7% neutral about it. this shows that almost half of the students felt fun and involved in the activity. item 3: oral presentation in virtual learning helps me with less preparation. approximately 35% of the students strongly agree, 27% of the students agree, and 20% of the students neutral about it. the results of this question were interesting that most of the students prepared themselves well. item 4: oral presentation in virtual learning is preferable. almost 50% agree and 35% strongly agree. the majority of students showed that they really like the oral presentation even in virtual learning. item 5: oral presentation in virtual learning reduces my anxiety level. 53% of students expressed strongly agree, 20% of students agree, and 13% neutral about it. it means that more than half of the students can handle their anxiety while presenting in virtual learning well. item 6: oral presentation in virtual learning gives me motivation. 60% of students strongly agree, 27% agree, and 7% neutral about it. the results show that the presentation motivates them to be ready in preparing the material. item 7: oral presentation in virtual learning brings many advantages. almost 70% of students showed strong agreement and 13% agree. when the students were given the opportunity to do an oral presentation in virtual learning made them more motivated and improved their speaking ability. this indicates that the students have got many beneficial inputs from the activity. item 8: oral presentation in virtual learning improves my self-discipline. almost 55% of students strongly agree and 33% agree. according to these results, the students can manage their learning style and get more selfdiscipline in virtual learning. item 9: oral presentation in virtual learning improves my self-confidence. 73% of students strongly agree, 27% agree and 7% disagree. a high number of students have self-confidence during the lesson. item 10: oral presentation in virtual learning is more enjoyable. approximately 53% of students strongly agree, 20% of students agree, and 13% strongly disagree. there were some students still had less concentration to follow the rule of oral presentation in virtual learning of sla class. from the above results, it can be understood that the performance of oral presentation in virtual learning has many benefits for students. therefore, as the answer to the first research question, it can be discussed that students’ attitude toward oral presentation in virtual learning of sla class is mainly positive. interview analysis the interview that was used in this research was adapted by mardiningrum & ramadhani (2020), gedamu & gezahen (2023). the participants for the interview were five students that were selected by using purposive sampling. the researcher concluded that the result of the interview strengthened the result of the questionnaire. the interview posed five questions to represent students’ emotional attitude, which deals with how they react or feel toward an object. there are some reasons that the students of sla (second language acquisition) class mainly prefer the virtual oral presentation. they are fear of making mistakes, fear of failure, fear of the audience, or being seen by a lot of people made the students could not concentrate well. this could ruin their performance in an oral presentation. from the result of the interview, the researcher concluded that there are two factors affecting their emotional attitude; speaking anxiety and self-confidence. habiburrahim, et.al (2020) mentioned that feeling of anxiety is acknowledged as an emotional element that a person encounters during the learning process. according to rofiah & waluyo (2021), selfconfidence has always been related not only to oral presentation assignments but also to practically all the assignments given to the students to perform with good outcomes. anxiety creates atmosphere of exaggerated worry, which affects and destroys students’ self-confidence and causes them to avoid engaging in communication activities with teachers and classmates. these are related to the result which showed that students had low speaking anxiety and high selfconfidence toward oral presentation in virtual learning compared to the face-to-face oral presentation. table 3. result on interview of students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning date (28th oct 2021) questions explanations 1. how do you feel when you start doing i feel nervous and anxious because of the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 577 an oral presentation? audience. 2. what is your biggest fear in doing an oral presentation? i’m afraid of making mistake, it’s my biggest fear when i’m doing an oral presentation. 3. which one do you think is easier in preparing the oral presentation, through virtual or conventional learning, why is that so? virtual oral presentation is easier, i think it’s because we don’t have much preparation such as using infocus and stuff. 4. which one do you think is more enjoyable in doing oral presentation, through virtual or conventional learning, why is that so? i think it’s gonna be the virtual oral presentation because we don’t need to face the audience and the lecturer direcly so it may reduce my anxiety level. 5. do you prefer an oral presentation through virtual learning or through conventional learning, why is that so? i prefer virtual oral presentation because i’m more enjoy and confident and that’s all the matters. the results have shown that there are twelve of fifteen students in the sla class held a positive attitude toward oral presentation in virtual learning. it meant that in face-to-face oral presentations they had high speaking anxiety by having great fear to get involved in a conversation, great fear of the audience, and a great fear of failure. many people claim anxiety is the main reason to stop people from speaking english. anxiety is the term lathophobic aphasia to a failure to speak a new language for fear of making a mistake (choo, et al., 2021). so, the less anxiety that students have, the more effort that students may do. it finally affected their performance in an oral presentation. whereas, in speaking three functions are speaking those are speaking as interaction, speaking as a transaction, and speaking as performance (richards, 2008). the students are not only interacting or having conversations with others as it is the function of speaking of interaction, but the students also need to deliver the message and make themselves understand the message clearly and accurately as it is the function of speaking as a transaction. besides that, the students also should be able to transmit information before an audience, such as public announcements, speeches, and especially the oral presentation which are usually done in the classroom activities as it is the function of speaking as a performance. those are the three functions of speaking that cannot be reached by the students if they did less effort in speaking because they had high speaking anxiety. in conclusion, the anxiety level of the students affected their performance in speaking for the presentation subject. this is supported by the answers from the students who feel anxious when their lecturer started pointing them to speak in front of their peers or friends. the students also refused to sit in the front row of the class because they are afraid to be asked and avoided eye contact with their lecturer. as the researcher had explained the three functions of speaking cannot be achieved if they had a high level of anxiety. another factor affecting their performance in doing an oral presentation is also self-confidence. according to lar and maulina (2021) that self-confidence and speaking have a significant correlation. most learners cannot speak english because they do not have self-confidence in their speaking ability. nadila et al., (2020) mention that in the case of foreign language learning, students’ emotions tend to be more discouraging rather than encouraging. one of the emotional states that make such a process become difficult is lack of self confidence. although virtual learning may become the preferred method for the majority of students, it is important not to dismiss the benefits of conventional learning too. with conventional learning, it could be easier to ensure students are paying attention to the classroom activities. some students might also find it easier to retain the knowledge and skills they have learned through conventional learning than they do with virtual learning. as stated in the result of the questionnaire, the majority of twelve students (80%) held a positive attitude toward oral presentation in virtual learning. meanwhile, the other three students (20%) held a negative attitude towards the virtual oral presentation which clearly showed that they mainly prefer oral presentation in virtual learning. increasing the audience’s trust in speakers before and throughout the speaker’s speech increases the likelihood that the audience will accept their reasoning and take action on their recommendation (puji, muslimah, 2021). the phenomenon is shown by their attitude. they rosina f.j. lekawael, ayuni abdullah reniwuryaan, & hanafi bilmona students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning at english education study program of pattimura university 578 added that the feelings and emotions of the learners leave a huge impact on their attitudes toward language learning. attitude may influence the speakers’ motivation. attitude and motivation play a crucial role in language learning and that attitude and motivation affect how well students learn a language. if students possess a good attitude toward learning the language, it will accelerate learning. and if learners are wellmotivated, they will perform well in learning (thuan, 2021). the result of this research showed that the students’ attitudes towards oral presentation in virtual learning in the fifth semester of the english education study program of pattimura university are mainly positive. on the other hand, this revealed the fact that many students in the english education study program held negative attitudes toward the faceto-face oral presentation which provides a real situation for the lecturer to help students for building and maintain a positive attitude toward the conventional oral presentation itself through the appropriate technique of teaching or creating a better teaching and learning environment due to the post-pandemic, all learning activities will be done offline or through conventional. conclusion based on the discussion, it can be concluded that students’ attitude toward oral presentation in virtual learning in english education study program is mainly positive. results showed that twelve students held a positive attitude and the rest of them held negative attitudes toward oral presentation in virtual learning. the positive attitude toward oral presentation in virtual learning is shown when students had low speaking anxiety and high self-confidence. on the contrary, the students showed that they had high language anxiety and low selfconfidence when they had negative attitudes toward oral presentation in conventional learning. furthermore, the dominant attitude reflected in the english education study program of pattimura university in the academic year 2018 is positive. as shown in the percentage that eighty percent of the students held a positive attitude toward oral presentation in virtual learning. meanwhile, twenty percent held a negative attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning. references abidah, a., hidaayatullah, h. n., simamora, r. m., fehabutar, d., & mutakinati, l. (2020). the impact of covid-19 to indonesian education and its relation to the philosophy of “merdeka belajar.” studies in philosophy of science and education, 1(1), 38-49. aini, b. h. k., yusra, k., & amrullah. (2023). students’ attitudes, perceptions and preferences towards online learning during covid-19 pandemic. assehr 686, 456-466. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-21-3_49 akyol, b., & küçük, b. a. (2020). high school students’ attitudes towards english language in terms of different school types in turkey. fire: futuristic implementations of research in education, 1(1), 40-48. choo, n., & abdullah t. (2021). influencing anxiety in english oral presentation through technology among the undergraduates. journal of computational & theoretical nanoscience, 23(9), 9152-9156. gedamu, a. d. & gezahen, t. h. (2023). tefl trainees’ attitude to and self-efficacy beliefs of academic oral presentation. cogent education, 10(1), 1-17. getie, a. (2020). factors affecting the attitudes of students towards learning english as a foreign language. cogent education, (7)1, 1-37. 10.1080/2331186x.2020.1738184. habiburrahman, h., risdaneva, r., putri, g., dahlianan, s., & muluk, s. (2020). the effects of anxiety toward acehnese students’ english speaking abiity. the qualitative e report, 25(1), 254-270. https://doi.org/10.46743/21603715/2020.3639 hablo, d., & gorospe, j. d. (2022). attitude toward online english learning, satisfaction on the use of virtual english learning environment, and english performance of junior high school students of pedro t. mendiola sr. memorial national high school. international journal of education research & social sciences, 3(2), 919-944. hafiza. (2022). an analysis of students’ attitude in learning english through blended learning at sma n koto baru. jurnal pendidikan tambusai, 6(1), 1017-1022. jalilinia, f. (2021). iranian high school efl learners’ attitude towards online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. allameh tabatabai university, 9(4), 442-451. lar, m. a. a., and maulina. (2021). students’ selfconfidence in speaking for a live presentation: a literature review. klasikaa: journal of education, language teaching and science, 3 (3), 88-95. mai, l. x., & thao, l. t. (2022). factors affecting students’ attitude towards learning english as a foreign language in a tertiary institution of vietnam. international journal of tesol & education, 2(2), 168-185. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-21-3_49 https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2020.3639 https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2020.3639 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 579 mardiningrum, a,. & ramadhani, d. (2020). classroom oral presentation: students’ challenges and how they cope. eralingua, 6(1), 103-119. nadila, u., hengki., & ratna. (2020). self confidence factors of students in speaking english in banjarmasin. proceeding of shepo 2020, international conference on social sciences & humanity, economics, and politics, 143-150. nurwahyuni, a. (2019). the impact of clinical pathway implementation on length of stay and hospital cost: a systematic review. in 6th international conference on public health 2019 (pp. 388-396). sebelas maret university. ocampo, h. j. m., & gorospe, j. d., (2022). elearning related attitude, english language learning strategies, and academis performance in english of grade 9 students of divine word college of san jose, csj, 3(2), 991-1015. panggabean., christina i. t., & triassanti, r. (2020). the implementation of metacognitive strategy training to enhance efl students oral presentation skill. journal of english teaching and research, 5(1), 32-40. pujilestari, y. (2020). dampak positif pembelajaran online dalam system pendidikan indonesia pasca pandemi covid-19. adalah: buletin hukum & keadilan, 4(1), 49-56. puji, m. (2021). an analysis of students’ selfconfidence in english oral presentations. [unpublished thesis]. repository.arraniry.ac.id/muslimah puji, 160203117, ftk, pbi.pdf. riadil, i. g. (2020). a qualitative study: investigating efl learners’ self-confidence to decrease the reticence in speaking ability. eltics journal, 5(2), 1-11. rofiah, n. l., & waluyo, b. (2021). developing students’ english oral presentation skills: do self-confidence, teacher feedback, and english proficiency matter. mextesol journal, 45(3), 117. https:/eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1310949 septiara, f. a. (2018). students’ language attitude toward learning english. [a thesis]. wati, s. (2018). language attitude of indonesian undergraduate students towards english at english education department. e-journal of ling tera,5 (1), 10-18. singh, v., & thurman, a. (2019). how many ways can we define online learning? a systematic literature review of definitions of online learning (1988-2018). american journal of distance education, 33(4), 289-306. astini, n. k. s. (2020). tantangan dan peluang pemanfaatan teknologi informasi dalam pembelajaran online masa covid-19. cetta: jurnal ilmu pendidikan, 3(2), 241-255. thuan, p .d. (2021). attitude and motivation in language learning: a review. journal of english language teaching and applied linguistics, 3(5), 64-72. wichanpricha, t. (2021). synchronous online learning through microsoft teams at tertiary level: academic english course. journal of educational and social research, 11(5), 123140. rosina f.j. lekawael, ayuni abdullah reniwuryaan, & hanafi bilmona students’ attitude towards oral presentation in virtual learning at english education study program of pattimura university 580 the role of task-induced involvement in vocabulary learning english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the role of task-induced involvement in vocabulary learning of iranian language learners fatemeh khonamri department of english language andliterature,university ofmazandaran, iran e-mail: fkhonamri@umz.ac.ir zahra hamzenia department of english language andliterature,university ofmazandaran, iran e-mail: narsi.bahrami@gmail.com apa citation: khonamri, f. & hamzenia, z. . (2013). the role of task-induced involvement in vocabulary learning of iranian language learners. english review: journal of english education, 1(2),171-181 received: 01-03-2013 accepted: 23-04-2013 published: 01-06-2013 abstract: this study investigated laufer and hustijn’s (2001) involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary learning. it comprised two experiments. experiment 1 examined whether two tasks with equal involvement load but different distribution of components would yield the same result in initial learning and retention of target words. experiment 2 investigated whether two tasks, one input and another output, with equal involvement load and the same distribution of components would result in equivalent initial learning and retention of target words. 126 advanced english learners completed one of three vocabulary learning tasks that equated in the amount of involvement they induced: sentence writing, fill-in, and translation (l2-l1). receptive knowledge of the target words was assessed immediately after treatment and two weeks later, and one month interval after the first delayed posttest. the result of t-test for experiment 1 showed that when two tasks had equal involvement load but different distribution of components they resulted in similar amounts of initial learning and retention of new words. the findings of experiment 2 indicated when two tasks, one input and another output, had equal involvement load and the same distribution of components, they led to superiority of fill-in task over translation task in initial vocabulary learning, however, not in retention of new words. keywords: involvement load hypothesis; incidental vocabulary learning; depth of processing theory introduction many learners of a second or foreign language feel concerned with the burden of vocabulary learning and worry about how to tackle the formidable task of learning many thousands of words. teachers might well understand this need but might not know how best to support their students in this endeavor. for learners at the beginning level, intentional learning of new lexical items generally accounts for most of their vocabulary knowledge. but this exclusive dependence on intentional learning at the elementary levels fails to fulfill the later needs of these learners at the intermediate and advanced levels. there has been a keen research interest in incidental vocabulary learning in terms of different tasks; for instance, dictionary use (cho & krashen, 1994; knight, 1994; luppesco & day, 1993), the role of glosses (rott, 2005; rott & williams, 2003; watanab, 1997), and the effect of word-focused tasks with or mailto:narsi.bahrami@gmail.com fatemeh khonamri & zahra hamzenia theroleoftask-induced involvement invocabularylearningof iranianlanguagelearners without reading (laufer, 2003; paribakht & wesche, 1997; wesche & paribakht, 2000). in search of any plausible explanation for the superiority of one task over another, researchers claim that the benefits may be attributable to the greater depth of processing (craik & lockhart, 1972). craik and lockhart (1972) launched the concept of depth of processing, which argue that new information will be retained better in long-term memory depending on the depth of information processing. retention does not depend on the length of time that the information is held in short-term memory. on the other hand, when new information is initially processed more deeply, the retention is better. however, there were no definite criteria by which one task was more effective than another. the concept of depth of processing was seriously afflicted with a lack of an operationalizable definition. laufer and hustijn (2001) put forward the idea of the “involvement load hypothesis” in incidental vocabulary learning in order to eliminate the lack. it is a motivational-cognitive construct consisting of three basic components-need, search, and evaluationthat may be present or absent in tasks with varying degrees of prominence. these three factors can be employed to manipulate and measure the involvement load (i.e. depth of processing) which explains the successful retention of unfamiliar words. to compensate for the lack of operationalizable definition of the depth of processing theory (craik and lockhart, 1972), laufer and hustijn (2001) developed the involvement load hypothesis for l2 vocabulary learning. they proposed a motivational-cognitive construct of involvement consisting of three basic components of need, search, and evaluation which can be used to manipulate and measure the involvement load (i.e. depth of processing). they suggested that their hypothesis could explain and predict learners’ success in the retention of unfamiliar words. tasks with different involvement load will lead to different incidental acquisition. in the process of vocabulary acquisition, the higher involvement load is, it is more effective for learners to retain vocabulary than when the involvement load is lower. in other words, the researchers argue that the greater the involvement load, the better the retention. according to hustijn and laufer (2001), the basic contention of involvement load is that retention of unfamiliar words is generally conditional upon the degree of involvement in processing these words (p. 545). they claimed that the degree to which a learner is engaged in cognitive processing does not depend on whether the given task is inputor outputoriented, but on the combination of the three factors, called “involvement load”. the involvement load of a task is measured by the combination of the presence or absence of the three involvement factors. the absence of a factor is marked as a minus (-) or 0, a moderate presence of a factor is a plus (+) or 1, and a strong presence is a double plus (++) or 2. the plusses in the three components are added up into an “involvement index”. in other words, the higher involvement index means that task-induced involvement is deeper. the higher the involvement load, it is usually more effective for learners to gain and to retain vocabulary than the lower involvement load. empirical support for the construct of task-induced involvement english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee comes from the large body of literature on incidental word learning conducted prior to its conception, and from recent studies designed to directly tests the predictions of the involvement load hypothesis. the evidence supports the following claim: tasks that induce greater involvement loads (i.e. tasks with higher degrees of need, search, and evaluation) generally lead to greater gains in short-term and, in some cases, long-term word retention (hulstijn and laufer, 2001; keating, 2008; kim, 2008). other studies (e.g. alamzadeh, 2007; al-hadlaq, 2003; folse, 2006; hui, 2003) also investigated whether tasks with higher involvement load would result in better retention. the results of these studies did not fully support the hypothesis. in other words, one study (alamzade, 2007) indicated that the involvement load hypothesis could not be the only reason for the better retention of words. in hui-fang tu’s (2003) study the difference among the tasks was not statistically significant. an interesting point about the study was that for each task in the two experiments, longer timeon task generally led to better retention. as mentioned earlier, laufer and hustijn (2001) determined the amount of involvement load as sum of the plusses (of need, search and evaluation). however, it is possible that all three components might not be equally important in vocabulary learning. so, hustijn and laufer’s methods for determining the involvement index for different tasks might need to be reexamined (kim, 2008). for instance, a task consisting of moderate need (1), search (1), and no evaluation (0) has the same involvement load (i.e., involvement index = 2) as a task of moderate need (1), no search, and moderate evaluation (1). to the best of our knowledge, no experiment has been conducted directly to evaluate the weight of components in involvement load hypothesis. therefore, the present study aimed first to investigate whether tasks with identical involvement load but different distribution of components induce the same amount of vocabulary learning. put differently, whether search component can compensate the difference of a “plus” in the evaluation component between sentence writing task (++evaluation) and fill-in task (+evaluation). the basic contention, to date, has been that the effectiveness of a task is determined by the involvement load it induces, irrespective of whether the task is input or output oriented. little attention has been paid to the role of input and output in involvement load hypothesis. alamzedeh (2007) investigated whether two tasks, one input and another output, with the same involvement load would lead to similar retention results. the result showed the priority of output task over input task. although two tasks with the same involvement load were employed, she did not take into account the different distribution of components in those tasks. maybe owing to varying distribution of components, it led to superiority of output task. thus further research seemed necessary to answer this question. furthermore, according to waring and takaki (2003), there is rare research into vocabulary gains from reading to ask how long these gains will last. few of vocabulary studies measured long-term retention of vocabulary over one or two weeks’ interval. most of them considered just one or two weeks delay. so, this gap was filled as well by considering one month interval in the present study. method fatemeh khonamri & zahra hamzenia theroleoftask-induced involvement invocabularylearningof iranianlanguagelearners the subjects of this study were 126 students from nine advanced-level intact classes of kish air institute in the north of iran. they were spread across three branches of kish air institute. the participants were largely young adult learners with an average age of 20. there were three classes in each institute. students within each of the three classes in each institute were randomly assigned to one of the three tasks. so, there were three groups in each institute. to control for the homogeneity of the participants, they were selected from the same level of proficiency. the number of students in each class ranged from 14-16 students. the data were collected during their regularly scheduled class periods. to test their previous knowledge of the words, their course books were checked to make sure that they did not have any prior knowledge of the target words. the instrument employed in this study encompassed a reading text in which the target words occurred, along with four reading comprehension questions of a reading passage, and three (immediate and first and second delayed) posttests. these processes are described in details in the following sections. the reading passage “is an only child a lonely child?” and a set of accompanying comprehension questions were adapted from the textbook active skills forreading (anderson, 2008). this reading passage was employed because the topic was a general one and the participants were assumed to understand the topic. the text contained 618 words and its flesch reading readability measure was 46.1. following the text there were four multiple-choice questions. three tasks with equal involvement load were set to serve the purpose of the current study. tasks 1 and 2 (output) which have equal involvement but a different distribution of components were compared for answering the question whether two tasks with equal involvement load but different distribution of components would yield the same result. tasks 2 and 3 which have identical involvement and similar distribution of components were compared so as to evaluate whether two tasks, one input and another output, with equal involvement load and identical distribution of components would lead to the same result. task 1: sentencewritingwith targetwords (output). the students were given a worksheet that included eight target words in a word list with glosses. they were asked to write a sentence with each of the eight target words. the farsi translation and english explanation of the target words were provided in glosses with a phrase as an example (appendix a). no example sentences were given. this was done to guard against the possibility that some students might copy the examples making little changes to them, which would result in less generation (nation, 2001). this task was based on laufer (2003). hulstijn and laufer (2001) argued that the involvement index of this task was 3, including a moderate need, no search, and a strong evaluation. task 2: reading comprehension plus “fillin” (output). students were given a reading text with some multiple-choice comprehension questions in order to answer. target words were deleted from the text, leaving some gaps to be filled in. the target words, with some distractors which did not appear in the original text, were printed in random order (appendix b). the students were asked to use a dictionary and look up the english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee meaning of words. the task was to read the text, find the meaning of target words with the use of dictionary, fill in the gaps with the missing words from the list of words, and answer the comprehension questions. this task was based on laufer (2003) with a difference that in laufer (2003) sentence fill-in task was used. however, in the current study contextualized fill-in was employed. in terms of involvement load, this task induced moderate need, search, and moderate evaluation. therefore, the involvement index was3 (1 + 1 + 1). task 3: reading comprehension plus translation sentences l2-l1 (input). this task was chosen from laufer and girsai (2008). students were provided with the same text in task 2. the target words were highlighted in bold print. after the text there were some sentences, embedded with target words, from the text so that students translated them into l1 (appendix c). the task was to read the sentences, use a dictionary to look up the meaning of the target words, write the translation of sentences into l1 and answer comprehension questions. during the translation task, students were asked to use a dictionary. in view of the involvement load, a translation task embodied the element of need since the words that had to be understood (when translating into l1) were predetermined by the source text. the element of search is present as well. if an l2 word was unfamiliar, learners had to conduct a search for its meaning by dictionary when translating into l1. most importantly, an element of evaluation was necessary to carry out a translation activity. there was usually more than one translation alternative for a given sentence. therefore, when translating, learners had to make a decision as to how each alternative fitted the text they created. task 3 induced moderate need, search, and moderate evaluation. so, the involvement load was 3 (1+ 1+ 1). the experiment was conducted on three separate days over a monthand-a half period. the treatment and immediate vocabulary test were administered on the same day and the first delayed posttest was carried out two weeks later. the second delayed posttest was administered within a one-month interval after the first delayed posttest. the nine experimental groups in the two experiments (two groups in each experiment) were randomly assigned to perform one of the three tasks during regular english class sessions. in the first session students performed tasks and upon completion of the tasks, the worksheets were collected and not returned to the participants. then they were given an immediate posttest designed to measure their initial vocabulary learning. they were demanded to write the meanings of the target words either in farsi or english. in addition, they were asked to indicate whether they had known the words prior to the task. this was our additional check for prior knowledge. none of the three tasks was presented as a vocabulary-learning task, with the first task being introduced as a writing task to evaluate their writing and the last two ones were considered as reading tasks so as to assess their reading comprehension. as in hustijn and laufer’s (2001) study, no time limit was set for working on the tasks. consequently, the nine classes spent approximately 30-35, 25-30, and 1520 minutes accomplishing the translation, fill-in, and sentence writing tasks, respectively. two weeks later, the participants were given an unexpected fatemeh khonamri & zahra hamzenia theroleoftask-induced involvement invocabularylearningof iranianlanguagelearners delayed posttest in order to measure their retention of vocabulary knowledge. to scrutinize the retention of target words, the second delayed posttest were given within a one-month period after the first delayed one. these posttests were identical except in the order of target words. learners’ vocabulary knowledge of the target words, that is, their receptive knowledge only, was investigated. results and discussion the tests were scored by the researchers. a word that was not translated or was wrongly translated received a score of zero. a correct response received 1 point. a semantically approximate response received half a point. if students did not notice the part of speech of words, they received just half a point. for instance, the word “dwindle” was used as a verb in the text; however, they wrote its meaning as a noun. if the learner had a correct response but had also marked the target word as known prior to the experiment, the response was scored as zero. as presented earlier, the four research questions investigated the effect of task type on (a) the initial vocabulary learning and (b) the retention of new vocabulary words of efl students when three tasks with equal involvement were administered. each research question examined one dependent variable: scores on the immediate and two delayed posttests. research questions had the same independent variable: task type. in order to test the four research questions, the data were analyzed using spss version 16.0. initial learning and retention scores of the immediate and two delayed posttests were then submitted to paired t-test. an alpha level of .05 was used for all statistical tests. the mean scores and standard deviations of the immediate and first and second delayed posttests of three tasks in these experiments were also calculated. then to examine the effect of each factor, retention scores were further submitted to paired t-test to find out how great the difference between the task 1 and 2 and also task 2 and 3 is. table 1. number of participants, mean scores, and standard deviations of the immediate, first and seconddelayedposttests task number immediate posttest first delayed posttest second delayed posttest mean sd mean sd mean sd task 1 42 3.2619 1.56656 .8929 .89399 .7500 .95796 task 2 42 3.5000 1.88058 .7143 .87054 .6429 .94537 task 3 42 2.7024 1.51440 .5952 .91223 .4643 .66619 for answering questions 1 and 2, so as to know whether two tasks with the same involvement load but different distribution of components will yield equal initial and retention of target words, scores were submitted to paired ttest. the results of paired t-test between two output tasks (sentence writing and fill-in) on initial learning of target words revealed a t value of .602 with 41 df. that is not statistically significant at the .05 level. results of paired t-test for the comparison of task 1 and task 2 in first delayed posttest revealed a t value of .931 with 41 df. that is not statistically significant at .05 level. likewise, the results of paired t-test for the comparison of task 1 and task 2 in second delayed posttest revealed a t value of .557 with 41 df. that is not statistically significant at english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the .05 level. thus, we have the evidence to claim that tasks with the same involvement load but different distribution of component lead to similar initial learning and retention of target words. put in another way, it seems that search could fill the difference of a plus in evaluation component between task1 (++ evaluation) and task 2 (+ evaluation). the latter two sections address whether involvement load is the determining factor in task efficacy without regard to whether the task is input or output oriented. so, it is tried to answer these two questions by the comparison between two tasks, one input and another output, with the identical involvement load and the same distribution of components. results of paired t-test for the comparison of task 2 and task 3 on immediate posttest revealed a t value of 2.145 with 41 df. that is statistically significant at .05 level (p< .05). therefore we can claim that output task is more effective than input task in initial vocabulary learning. results of paired t-test on participants' first delayed posttests revealed a t value of .583 with 41 df. that is not statistically significant at the .05 level. likewise, the results of paired t-test on participants' second delayed posttests revealed a t value of .583 with 41 df. that is not statistically significant at the .05 level. the latter two results of this paired t-test on the first and second delayed posttests provide sufficient evidence to support the claim that input and output tasks with the equal involvement load and the identical distribution of components lead to the same retention results. the two experiments described attempted to provide empirical evidence for the involvement load hypothesis in l2 vocabulary acquisition. the purpose of experiment 1 was to examine whether two tasks with the same amount of involvement load but different distribution of components would have similar effects on the initial learning and retention of target words. worded differently, whether search can compensate the difference of a plus in evaluation component between task 1 (++ evaluation) and task2 (+evaluation). the results suggested that the two tasks, with identical involvement loads but different distribution of components, were equally effective in promoting both the initial learning and retention of new words and thus lend support to the involvement load hypothesis. and it seems that search by dictionary could fill the gap between strong and moderate evaluation. finding words through the use of dictionary and evaluating words in order to complete the fill-in task seem very prominent in contributing to the vocabulary learning. according to folse (2006), many educators see fill-in task as a superficial or passive use of vocabulary, especially when compared to writing original sentences. however, this study provided evidence that sentence writing task and fill-in task with equal involvement load but different distribution of components induced the same amount of vocabulary learning. this is in accord with kim’s (2008) study that provided tasks with equal involvement load and the same distribution of components (sentence writing vs. composition writing) would yield similar retention of target words. al-hadlaq (2003) too found the same result stating that sentence writing and fill-in tasks were equally effective in vocabulary learning. laufer (2003) could partially support the involvement load hypothesis with two tasks (i.e., writing sentences with the target words and fill-in sentences with the target words after looking up their meaning). these two fatemeh khonamri & zahra hamzenia theroleoftask-induced involvement invocabularylearningof iranianlanguagelearners tasks have the same involvement index 3 but have a different distribution of components (i.e., moderate need, no search, and strong evaluation vs. moderate need, search, and moderate evaluation). although there was no significant difference between the sentence fill-in group and the sentence writing group on immediate posttest, the scores of these two groups were significantly different from each other on the delayed posttest, with the sentence fill-in group acquiring higher scores. our result is in accord with the initial learning result of laufer (2003). the result of experiment 1 lent support to the role of dictionary. several studies have investigated the effectiveness of consulting dictionaries for promoting vocabulary learning (cho & krashen, 1994; knight, 1994; luppescu & day, 1993; hulstijn, hollander & greidanus, 1996). analysis showed that when participants in the dictionary group looked up a word, their chances of remembering the word’s meaning were greater. the purpose of experiment 2 was to examine whether two tasks, one inputand another output-oriented, with equal involvement load and similar distribution of component would lead to the same amount of vocabulary learning. the findings of experiment 2 indicated the superiority of fill-in task over translation task in initial vocabulary learning, however, not in retention of new words. one explanation for this result might be related to the procedure of performing translation task. the problem seen during the administration of this task was that students did not listen to the researchers’ instruction. the researchers asked students to read the text and then translate the following sentences by use of dictionary and answer comprehension questions. instead, the participants started by translation of the sentences not reading the text. then they answered four comprehension questions. it is not clear whether the students read the text completely or not. this task should have been performed in two phases. in the first phase it should have asked students to read the text and answer comprehension question then they should have been given the translation task. in answering research question 4, which investigated the retention of new vocabulary knowledge, experiment 2 fully supported the involvement load hypothesis. there was no significant difference between two tasks in the first and second delayed posttests. although, on the immediate posttest, the fill-in group was significantly different from translation group, this difference faded over time. the scores on the first and second delayed posttests indicated that output and input tasks were equally effective in vocabulary learning although the scores on the immediate posttest revealed the priority of output task over input task. one issue observed among the participants was that some students expressed that they were able to remember the meanings of most of the words but were unable to match these meanings with their english counterparts in the posttests. they uttered that the target words were familiar and the meanings of these words were in their minds, however, they could not match the meanings with their english equivalents in the posttests. it reveals that only one time exposure is not enough to consolidate the meaning of the words in students’ memory. in general, processing a new word repeatedly in one or multiple texts has been found to be conducive to incidental word learning english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 1, issue 2, june 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee (for a review, see paribakht and wesche, 1999; rott, 2005; waring and takaki, 2003). this study involves certain limitations and suggestions for further research, as detailed below. first of all, this study cannot be generalized to other educational settings, as a relatively small number of participants were sampled. second, participants read only one text and word acquisition of only ten words were assessed. therefore, findings cannot be extrapolated to other text types and other word classes. third, some students uttered that they were able to remember the meanings of most of the words but were unable to match these meanings with their english counterparts in the posttests. future studies might employ multiple measures, including recognition tests e.g., multiple choice tests that are more sensitive to small increases in vocabulary knowledge, as illustrated in waring and takaki (2003). overall, the inclusion of different types of vocabulary tests would enhance the credibility of the involvement load hypothesis and would offer more specific information regarding how involvement load contributes to the development of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. forth, in the first experiment, sentence writing task (moderate need, no search, and strong evaluation) was compared with fill-in task (moderate need, search, and moderate evaluation). research is needed to compare two tasks with the same involvement load but differ in distribution i.e. comparing search and moderate evaluation. for example, a task consisting of +need, +search,-evaluation should be compared with a task consisting of +need, -search, +evaluation; or a task consisting of ++need, +search,evaluation should be compared with a task consisting of +need, -search, ++evaluation. fifth, the participants in the current study engaged in each task only once. multiple treatment sections for each task would allow a more definite conclusion regarding the effectiveness of each task on l2 vocabulary acquisition. sixth, hustijn and laufer do not differentiate between the different types of search the students can make. they give equal weight to all kinds of search, such as consulting a bilingual dictionary, consulting a monolingual dictionary, consulting a bilingualized dictionary, asking the teacher and consulting the corpus. every type of search might have different involvement load. future research should be performed to compare tasks with the same amount of involvement, only differ in the types of search administered. seventh, this study could also be replicated with students varying in their levels of proficiency. eighth, as mentioned earlier, in translation group students did not follow researcher’s instruction by starting reading text and then translating sentences by use of dictionary. they started translation sentences without reading the text. experiment 2 should be replicated with a difference that translation task should be administered in two phases. ninth, it would be interesting to find out whether having target words with the same part of speech (e.g., only nouns or only verbs) in the fill-in tasks would generate more evaluation of the target words than having these words mixed with other words of different parts of speech. final suggestion for future research is that two tasks, one at sentence level and another at text level, with the same involvement load and similar distribution of components should be compared. although kim (2008) and al-hadlaq fatemeh khonamri & zahra hamzenia theroleoftask-induced involvement invocabularylearningof iranianlanguagelearners (2003) performed this research, the result was mixed. conclusion in order to gain better insight and more relevant data, there is an absolute need for experiments that aim to test the hypothesis with a variety of tasks. because the construct of involvement can be operationalized and investigated in a variety of ways, researchers will need to devise tasks with different involvement loads and compare them concerning their effect on vocabulary learning. the current study tried to help fill this research gap, keeping in mind that more precise definitions of the involvement components and more thorough theoretical links between them should be examined further. references alamzedeh, n. 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(2000). reading-based exercises in second language vocabulary learning: an introspective study. themodern language journal 84, 196-213. alamzedeh,n.(2007)theroleoftaskinvolvement 37 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee the character analysis of glen hansard in once film nani rosnani thamrin department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia. e-mail: erlander_s@yahoo.ci.id baran wargika lp3i course center kuningan, indonesia e-mail: wargika_baran@yahoo.com apa citation: thamrin, n. r. & wargika, b. (2013). the character analysis of glen hansard in once film. english review: journal of english education, 2(1), 37-48 received: 04-09-2013 accepted: 29-10-2013 published: 01-12-2013 abstract: this paper analyzed the characterization of talented actor named glen hansard in once film. this study employed a descriptive qualitative research design based on theories of rahardjo (1985), robert (1965), and card (1988). primary data sources were whole once scenes film directed by john carney which had low-budgeting production with two stars, glen hansard and irglova, while secondary data sources were collected from the articles related to this study. this research mainly investigated two aspects involved two character analyses of the main actor, hansard. the first one was the construction of hansard’s characters and the second one was the effect between his character and another actors’ character. the study showed that hansard’s characters were constructed by five factors: from what the character did and said, what the other characters said about him, how the appearance and its milieu were, influencing one and another.the study also found that he had struggle, visionary, ambitious, introvert, sensitive, straightforward and curious characters, but more characters that showed strong characters of his were struggle, visionary and ambitious, because the scenes reflected them more. keywords: literary works, film, character, characterizing. introduction film has an emotional and intellectual appeal that can be an exciting discipline of film studies. therefore, there is educational institution or university, concerning about examining all about film. most plays in film contain major and minor characters that always become essential part to influence the audience. then, the conflict of the story is required as the main idea to get the viewers’ attention, so the director views to create more significant influence. hawthorn (2001: 100) states “a novelist constructs a plot in a particular manner so as to draw attention to certain things which might otherwise escape notice, to product different effect upon the reader, and so on,”. similar to a film director, constructing the plot should be focused especially in constructing each character to get viewers’ attention and curiousity. in addition, klarer (1998: 57) states that film is a performing art and also dramatic genre that use actor as the major means of expression, that has visual power and needs modes of presentation such as camera angle, editing, slow and fast motion, recorded with sound that tells a story. on the other hand, the phenomenon from the first generation of people who may ever watch and know how the character in their favorite film, such as kind character, wicked, rude, friendly, etc is taken from each view film series. they watch seriously and enjoy the film till it ends completely nani rosnani thamrin & baran wargika the character analysis of glen hansard in once film 38 and they feel the goose bumps without realizing why they can break into that film, knowing what factors influencing the character construction. furthermore , they are unaware of how the one character and the other characters get and give the effect on each other. those are the basis phenomena of this study that all the factors supporting the above statement are analized. in its simple meaning, “character is one of person who appears in the play,” (rahardjo 1985: 49). in the other case, scott (1988) said that character is the complex of mental and ethical traits marking a person or the inner self of natural human being. for example, a person with a strong character quality of truthfulness is much more likely to accurately report the facts in a given situation than a person who tends to be characterized by deceptiveness. someone who has the character trait of alertness will be more likely to be a better, safer, driver than a person who does not see or recognize the potential dangers around him. a person with the character quality of tolerance will be more accepting of others less prejudiced. let see tom and jerry cartoon film. tom never gives up catching and eating jerry through many wicked ways that tom has. hence, it gets responses from the other characters to both of them. we as the viewer feel angry sometimes to tom, because what tom does to jerry is indicating the bad attitude of tom. so in this case, the character is constructed by what it does. the treatment of character is a basic part of playwright’s work. one actor has different characters with the others’, so the director can create the character related to the plot of story in his literary works such as in the film, theater, novel, or in the short story. the period and the author’s personal vision affect the treatment of character as roberts (1963: 55) states: character in literature is an extended verbal representation of a human being, specially the inner self that determines thought, speech and behavior and whereas in life things may “just happen,” in literature the actions, interactions, speeches and observations are all arranged to give you details you need for conclusion about character. from the statement above, characters in this study are the inner self of human being that can appear of their representation. thus, how the factors that contribute to create the character study and also the effects one and another characters were the main points of this study. as characters are related to the human beings, so to know what their characters are, we have to analyze the factors on how they are constructed, whether from what the characters themselves say, what the characters do, what the other characters say about them or what the author says about them and so on. based on the clarification above, this study analyzed how the character glen hansard was constructed and how the main actor’s characters affect to the other actors’ characters. method this study was carried out in descriptive qualitative method as it attempted to analyze and describe how the characterization was constructed and how the main actor’s characters affected to and got affected by other actors’ characters. the techniques of the study was related to sugiono’s (2011) theory: the first one was to analyze the main problem by descriptive observation (collecting).“descriptive observation is done when the researcher in a certain social situation as the object of the research,” (sugiyono, 2011: 315). it was the step of observation where the researcher was looking for the problem, 39 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee entering the situation or phenomena but still finding out the case that would be the main problem of the research. interesting cases were chosen before the researcher did the research analysis in the study. the second one was to choose the main topic by focused observation (describing). in this step the writer focused on one case guessed as the problem raised. it was also said as a mini tour observation focusing on one aspect. the third one was to limit the focus study with selected observation, in this step, the researcher itemized the focus study, so the data got detailed, with this analysis of componential of focus, the researcher had characteristic, the differences of categories, and the relation of them. the fourth was to continue watching and analyzing to get more supporting data (analyzing). table 1 the sample of data description no character scene time description 1 2 table 2 the characters influenced by what the character did (once film, 2007) no character scene time description 1 struggle 00:00:36 glen hansard as the dublin busker guy was singing and playing the song. his earnings were stolen and he ran to catch him. 00:10.00 the hoover was brought to be repaired by him. 2 ambitious 00:03:58 he was singing and playing the second song, the title “once” till the evening. 00:45:25 he and his friend irglova were preparing all they need for promoting his song to the one of music recording studio. 00:46:28 they recruited 3 additional players to get started recording. 00:57:29 they showed the song with their own old cd player to the music recording director. 01:10:20 all the recording songs finished during long time. 3 careful 00:25:47 he always remember what he need, included his cd player. 00:55:33 he prepared to get great recording by practicing together with his new friends. 4 visionary we can see almost all the scenes showed his performance and effort in music. 5 curious 00:13:18 he saw ignova who was singing. 6 friendly/kind 00:30:41 he was taking care with irglova by lapping her daughter to bed. 7 entertaining 00:09:50 there were many people who enjoyed with their attention. to get supporting and complete data, i watched and analyzed the case till the date were saturated. the fifth was to describe data interpretations (classifying). in this step, the writer classified and separated the data taken into each parts of analysis as shown in the table 1. after all the data and all the factors were already collected, the characters of the main actor were then concluded. thus, it enabled the researcher to find out the interaction of the characters about their recripocal affects. eventually, the conclusion was drawn, taking a short one to analyze how the result date was collected. results and discussion according to rahardjo (1988), robert (1963) and scott card (1988), nani rosnani thamrin & baran wargika the character analysis of glen hansard in once film 40 there are some factors that can guide to know how the actor in the film is characterized, such as what the character does, what the character says, what the other character says about him, how the appearance, milieu and as the additional there is what the author says about him. these were used to explain the exact characters of glen hansard as the major character in that once film. that might appear more than one character. table 2 shows the presentation of his all characters. firstly, it was about how the characters were constructed, influenced by firstly from what the character does. before explaining the description, the table of that character analyses was shown taken from what the character did as follow: in the beginning, the film was performed by a dublin busker who felt, played old guitar and sang the song very enthusiastically in grafton street, a dublin shopping district. he was shabby with the trials of performing on the street, including chasing after a heroin addict (darren healy) who attempted to steal his earnings, and then we could see then the girl’s hoover that he got to repair while he was busking on the street in the evening showed that he was struggling and ambitious to face his life, even singing was one of his hobby. moreover, from what he did we could see also his struggling when he and his friend, irglova, were preparing all they needed for promoting his song to a recording studio in dublin. they prepared the sample song, costume and kept their effort to convince his song to the music director with their own old cd player, which it turned they got the chance of free recording. beside that, the moment he recruited 3 additional players that he found them were busking on the street indicated his struggling. of course, they got started recording, and then they practiced together before, finally went to the studio. then, we could see his struggling when he guided his friends for all recording process that took long time. we could see it from all the participants, the players and the recorder looked so tired, napping on the recording controller room. on the other scene we could see a careful character when he always brought what he needed, like his cd players that he prepared on his bag to be lent to her. irglova even she did not ask first yet. also his attention to face the recording by preparing all he needed included practicing the song on his bed room with his four new friends indicated his careful character. it means that to get the best result, all should be prepared well. then, he also had visionary character from almost all the scenes, showing from his performance and effort in music in addition to his effort to find his true love. from his gesture, his curious character was also known when he saw ignova who was singing, his face seemed surprised and seemed to know more. he was also friendly and entertaining; he could busk and get more attention from the viewers who watched and danced around him. on the other scene his kindness appeared when he kept attention by lapping irglova’s daughter to bed. the second was from what the character says. it was the fact that the characterization was raised from what the character said. from the scene we could know the new or supporting facts of the character that we had known before from what the character did. here was the description table from what the character said, see table 3 below. here was the explanation of table 3 above. introvert was the other character that he had, especially when the others asked about his ex-girlfriend. for example, in the second scene as he 41 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee sang a song on the street, he was asked by irglova. the conversation was quoted, see table 4 and remember for all the conversations in this research that a was irglova and b was glen hansard. from the conversation above, it was known that he could not share about who his girl was and answered the questions just as he needed, appeared when they were in the bus and he told the little bit of the girl with the song, when it was impossible to tell directly. it table 3 the characters influenced by what the character said factor (once film, 2007) no character scene time description 1 introvert 00:07:05 he answers “no one”, when he was asked who he would write the song for. 00:20:24 he tell just the little bit of his relation with song in the bus. 01:18:00 he presented appreciation; although he felt jealous or unhappy. 2 sensitive 00:04.29 he sang a song on the street “say it to me now.” 00:08:01 he sang a song in his bedroom “all the way down.” 00:20:29 he sang a song on the bus “leave.” 00:38:53 he sang a song while saw webcam image “leave.” 3 curious 00:29:31 he asked something to irgnova in her house. 00:32:30 he asked her to hang out even that is the end of conversation. 00:11:00 he asked some questions to irglova in mini restaurant. 4 ambitious 00:46:30 he invited three of busker street to join for recording. 01:18:18 he decided to go to london. 5 visionary 00:43:10 he wanted to make a song recording. 01:14:49 he asked her to hang out even her husband said that he will come soon. 6 struggle 00:07:46 when all day he busked, he said that he worked also for hoover service. 00:21:01 he sang the song that showed he struggled to get his girl back. 7 straightforward 00:25:31 he was brave to say the something honest and apologizing. table 4 the conversation of his introvert character (once film, 2007) a : who’d you write that song for, please? b : no one. a : bullshit. where is she? b : she’s gone. a : she’s dead? b : no, she’s not dead, she’s gone. a : you love her still? b : jesus, man. indicated he was introvert. the other fact that showing introvert character appeared when he felt jealous, see the excerpt at table 5. from the conversation in table 5, actually it showed his jealous when he tried to get closer to her. he showed that he was really happy, even he was disappointed. next character that we could know from what he said was sensitive. almost all the scenes were full of the songs that nani rosnani thamrin & baran wargika the character analysis of glen hansard in once film 42 he had, such as the titles the healing has begun, say it t o me now, all the way down, falling slowly, leave, the fair city waltz, if you want me, lies, trying to pull myself away, when your mind’s made up, fallen from the sky, when your mind’s made up, falling slowly and once as the final film credits song, they could lead that he had a sensitive character, especially for his ex-girlfriend in london who he really loved, almost all the film told about her; he could not forget her and wondered to get her back from london (see the appendix for full song contents). let us see the curious character of his, at 00:29:31 scene time. he was invited to come to irglova’s house, her small apartment, where she lived with her baby daughter and her mother, who spoke only czech. he asked how to say thank you in czech when her mother said that he was handsome. then he was curious to know where her husband directly to irglova that it was known as a private thing. at 00:32:30 scene time, he asked her to hang out even there was the end of conversation. please see table 6 below. table 5 the conversation of his introvert character (once film, 2007) b : what do you have to organize? what’s, what’s that about? a : i, i spoke to my husband last night. he’s coming over. b : ah, brilliant. fair play... that’s great. i’m really happy for you. it’s good. yeah. table 6 the conversation of his curious character (once film, 2007) a : thanks for the company. b : i needed it. a : me, too. b : you don’t want to go for late coffeeor a walk or something? no? a : i can’t. see you. bye. b : see you. from the conversation in table 6 above it appeared that he could not hide his feeling, even actually he was comfortable beside her. he wanted together for more time. it indicated that he was curious. here were some questions that showed his curious character in 00:11:00 scene when he was with irglova. see the table 7. from the conversation above, asking three questions, he was curious about her life background. it indicated he has curious character. the other character that we could know was ambitious that we could indicate it from what he said. when he invited three buskers street to join for recording, he walked around the street and found them, his great effort to get his dream by inviting them to join. moreover, in the other case, ambitious character appeared when he wanted to get his girl back from london; he told it to his father after he showed his recording cd that he wanted to get his girl back from london. 43 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee visionary character was also known from what he said when he met irglova who was selling flowers on the dublin street. he said that he wanted make a recording cd and asked her to join. here was the exerpt of the conversation. please see table 8. we could see from the conversation in table 8 that he asked her to join with him in his recording. table 7 the conversation of his curious character (once film, 2007) b : so you know a bitabout music then? a : my father used to play in the orchestra back at home.he played violin. but he got arthritis then, and he killed himself. b : really? a : but before he go, he teach mehow to play piano. “it’s not so hardon the fingers,” he said. b : do you get to play much? a : hmm. no, i don’t, i don’thave a piano at home.i can’t get one in ireland;it’s so much money. i can’t afford it. b : yeah, it’s expensiveall right. table 8 the conversation of his visionary character (once film, 2007) b : i was thinking, i was thinking before i go, i want to make a recording of a few songs. a couple of the songs i was playing you, and i really liked the way you played and your singing. so, if you feel like, would you be into playing along? like what we were playing on? a : i would sing and play? b : yeah. a : i’d love that. b : really? cool. so you’d be in my band for a few days. a : yeah. table 9 the conversation of his visionary character (once film, 2007) b : where you going? a : home. b : you don’t want to come back? i’ll make you breakfast. we could listen to the cd, no? a : no. i have to go see ivonka and organize things. actually it was the way of his to get closer with her. on the other scene, it showed the supporting data of this character. the excerpt of th conversation could be seen in table 9. from the table 9, the conversation showed that he tried to be someone required by irglova by showing his effort to approach her. it was indicating that he had visionary character. nani rosnani thamrin & baran wargika the character analysis of glen hansard in once film 44 the other scene that was showing his struggling also appeared from what he said, seemingly when all day he had been busking in the street, and approached by a beautiful girl, irglova. (see table 10). from the table above, he was asked what shop he worked in and he answered that he worked also for hoover (vacuum cleaner) service. so, beside working as a busker, he also worked for hoover service. it indicated that he had hard work, and hard work was a part of struggling. the other fact of this character was also taken from his song. his strunggling character was accentuated in song lyrics. (see table 11). we could also get the value of his struggling from what the song was about in table 4.10 above, telling that he got his girl back from london after many years ago eventhough she left him and screwed some guy that she knew there. the last a straightforward character was indicated from what he table 10 the conversation of his struggling character (once film, 2007) a : what shop you work in? b : i work in a hoover repair shop. a : a hoover? b : you know, like a vacuum cleaner.whhzzz. a : you fix vacuum cleaners? b : i do. a : i have a broken vacuum cleaner. you fix it for me? b : yeah. table 11 the song’s lyric of his struggling character (once film, 2007) ten years ago, i fell in love with an irish girl she took my heart but she went and screwed some guy that she knew and now i’m in dublin with a broken heart oh, broken-hearted hoover-fixer sucker guy oh, broken-hearted hoover-fixer sucker... sucker guy one day, i’ll go there and win her once again but until then, i’m just a sucker of a guy. said. he was brave to say something honestly and apologized in the morning in the dublin street for his fault when last night he asked her to stay in her bedroom, apparently offending her. here was the excerpt of the conversation. (see table 12). from the conversation above, it showed that he tried to convince her even he knew that he had a fault. that was impolite to ask the girl who had just known to stay all the night. the third was from what the other character say about him. it was the time to know the character of glen hansard as the main actor of once film from what the others said about him. there was just a little bit of the facts that this research could find it from this term. here was the description of what the other character said about him. (see table 13). this was the explanation of table 13 above. previous data confirmed that he was struggling, and this was a supporting 45 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee fact. in the beginning of the scene, when he was busking on the street, irglova said that she always saw him busking every day. here was following excerpt of conversation. (see table 14). “i see you everyday” from the conversation above was related to his effort that busking almost every day he had. she was a florist always selling her flower passing the place where he was busking. next, it seemed that visionary was being his main character: irglova as his opponent convinced the music studio manager that he was a great and professional musician who was always serious for all his dreams. here was what the other characters said facts. see table 15. from the fact above, the speech indicated that he was really talented and came to promote his song, because his dream to be a famous musician was still breaking in himself. the last when he showed his song to his father at 01:18:00 scene, his father asked him to table 12 what the character said data (once film, 2007) b : hey.. hey...!! how’s it going? hey, where you going? i wanted to give you the cds that i made for you. i’m really... i’m just really lonely, and you’re gorgeous, and i just... i’m sorry. i fucked up. i’m sorry. i... i don’t know what to say. it won’t happen again. table 13 the characters influenced by what the other character said about him (once film, 2007) no character scene time description 1 struggle 00:06:35 in the beginning of the scene, when he was busking on the street. irglova said that she always saw him busking everyday. 2 visionary 00:45:25 the fact was taken from the conversation when they promoted his song to a music studio manager. 3 ambitious 01:18:18 when he showed his song to his father, his father asked him to get his goal and make his mother proud of him. get his goal and make his mother proud of him indicated an ambitious character that he had. his father believed that his son could get what he wanted; it was nothing if he did not believe his son in doing that. the fourth was from how the appearance: characters were found as the inner self of an actor in the particular film. moreover, the previous ways had been done; here the appearance took place to know his character, it would be one of characterizing used by a film director. it became last part of the ways to find out supporting data or the characters of glen hansard. as a matter of fact, there were some people making an assumption to another by classifying all supporting data, especially what their first sight, including appearance or body description. it seemed that he had not given full over attention to his dressing fashion. it was simple, matched with the cold weather in dublin. he always used warm coat. here were the supporting nani rosnani thamrin & baran wargika the character analysis of glen hansard in once film 46 data used to know his struggle and spirit to face the life as even he had got the problems. his elegant body and also his spirit gesture of his strapping body showed that he struggled to live in the glamour life over there. his body was still trapping even that was night, he busked attractively. activities all day did not make him tired, because exhaustion was nothing there. the last was milieu or circumstances around the character. also it was possibly meant setting used to indicate the character. it was really hard to find out the character of glen in once film taken from this term without concerning to the others aspect of characterizing. however, taken a scene of his house, struggling was found as the character of his. the secondly analysis was about how glen hansard effects and gets effect from the other characters interplay among characters was an important thing that we could see in the movie scene. due to the interaction of them, it can create the bridge on how the story becomes complex and interesting. table 14 the conversation of his struggling character (once film, 2007) a : how come you don’t play it during daytime? i see you every day. b : you know, during the day, people want to hear songs they know, just songs that they recognize. i mean, otherwise, i wouldn’t make any money. table 15 the character of his visionary character (once film, 2007) a : the quality is poor, but if we can get a professional tape, i’m, i’m satisfied that he can secure a lucrative deal. you take it home, you, you listen to it. you play it to your boss. i’m sure you can get him to approve. it was particularly in this section as the main character, glen hansard affected to the others’ characters and vise versa. like the classification in the previous part, it appeared from the scene. here were the events that could indicate effects and got effect on them. in 00:43:28 scene, he asked irglova to join him in music recording and recruiting moment at 00:46:30. on the other scene, it was also seen that they were practicing together in his bedroom to face their recording at 00:55:31. his position of musician could be not running well without a team of a band. knowing from the scene that recording process was not tracking but living, it meant that recording directly recorded all together, not one by one of arrangements. therefore, it needed more participants. when it took live recording, actually he could get it alone. yet, he believed that he needed them because they had different skills of music and it could be nice tune as combined. they as the people around him also needed him to take their talents distributed. in brief, the contribution of them was effecting of him and also for him. 47 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol.2, issue 1, december 2013 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee conclusion the result of this research analysis that characters of the main actor glen hansard in once film are constructed by some factors, consisting of what he did, what he said, what the others said about him, his appearance and milieu or circumstances that they support each others, it means that his characters are characterized but all those factors. regarding with the findings, the analysed characters of his are struggle, visionary, ambition, introversion, sensitivity, straightforwardness and curiousity. yet, more characters showing great power of his are struggle, visionary and ambition as the scenes appearing reflect them more. glen hansard left by his girl to london, tries to be patient to get her back while he has to work as hoover service, helping his father and busking on the dublin street. he lives without his mother, only with his lovely father. so as a son, he should help the family to live. on the other scene, he has belief that he can bring his girl back from london and get his dream as the professional musician by recording in absolute music recorder place. it is supported also from his effort to be closer to the girl that he recognizes from the street, irglova. this really shows of his three major characters above: struggle, ambition and visionary. the main character glen hansard as a busker and hoover service worker also has effected the others characters to join in his life interaction. for example, three other buskers and irglova are influenced to join his way in his musical line, so they do that recording together. on the contrary, he is influenced by two women: his ex-girlfriend leaving him to london and new lady, irglova, coming in to his life while he was getting his goals. so, the result is that they influence or give and get effects each other in delivering the messages of this film. therefore, the analyses have answered both research questions about how glen hansard as the main character in once film is characterized and how he effects and get effect from the other characters. references armada (2008). cambridge advanced learner dictionary (3rd edition). cambridge: cambridge university press. downloadmoviesfree. once film 2006. retrieved september 8, 2012, from http://downloadmoviesfreee.org/ once-2006-download-movies/ hawthorn, j. (2001). studying the novel (4th edition). london: hodder headline group. hollywood movies. exclusive interview. retrieved september 5, 2012, from http://movies.about.com/od/ once/a/once052007.htm klarer, m. (1998). an introduction to literary studies. london: routledge. kpbs. (2007). once/interviews with john carney and glen hansard. retrivied september 6, 2012, from http:// www.kpbs.org/news/2007/ may/24/onceinterviews-with-johncarney-and-glen-hansard/ name, j. (2009). study guide for the ireland film once. the british schools film festival, 1-10. rahardjo, h. (1985). pengantar kesusastraan inggris. surakarta: sebelas maret university. robert, e. v. (1963). writing theme about literature (5th edition). new jersey: prentice hall. ryan, m.(2010). approaching the other through music in john carney’s film once. essaysandstudies.http:// webcache.googleusercontent. com/search?q=cache:vcpe cc925goj:www.otherness. dk/fileadmin/www. othernessandthearts.org/ publications/journal_otherness/ otherness__essays_and_ studies_1.1/sounding_different_ notes.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk accessed 31 january 201308 sari.m.a.(2012). analisis karakter dan konflik nani rosnani thamrin & baran wargika the character analysis of glen hansard in once film 48 tokoh utama dalam novel bocchan karya natsume souseki. bandung: unikom. scott card, o. (1988). character and viewpoint. cincinnati: digest books. smith, n. (2011). character analysis trip glory. retrieved june 19, 2013, from http:// www.articlemyriad.com/characteranalysis-trip-glory/ stlyrics. browse by soundtrack. retrieved june 02, 2013, from http:// www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/once/ whenyourmindsmadeup.htm subscene film. once english subtitle. retrieved june 19, 2013, from http:// subscene.com/subtitles/once/ english/116056 sugiyono. (2011). metode penelitian pendidikan. bandung: alfabeta bandung. wikipedia. once. retrieved june 19, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ once_(film) english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 137 framing of journalism discourse to improve discourse competence of senior high school students dadang s. anshori fpbs, indonesia university of education, indonesia e-mail: dadanganshori@upi.edu apa citation: anshori, d. s. (2017). framing of journalism discourse to improve discourse competence of senior high school students. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 137-146. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.780. received: 29-08-2017 accepted: 26-10-2017 published: 01-12-2017 abstract: this study aims to describe the analysis model of framing on journalism discourse in indonesian textbooks in senior high school to be used in language learning. this research used qualitative method with framing theory from pan and kosicki as an tool of analysis. the research data is journalism discourse in textbook amounted to 30 pieces of discourse taken from 10 text books of class x, xi, and xii in senior high school. the results show the following: (1) the discourse of journalism has received acceptance in the world of education, especially in textbooks. the use of journalism discourse in 10 textbooks is very high and very diverse in terms of number, topic, source, and usage. (2) the journalism discourse in the textbook meets the criteria of reporting value, even if not all reporting value is fulfilled. (3) the frame construction of the journalism discourse in indonesian textbooks is packaged in different angles according to news topics and facts. (4) the analysis model of journalism discourse framing is developed by focusing on the structural analysis of category, syntax, script, thematic, diction/phrase, and rhetoric. keywords: construction, discourse, framing, journalism introduction the development of information technology leads to the emergence of a variety of language use in accordance with the media used. information technology becomes a new round of world order and the development of human communication. according to latief and ibrahim (1996) this communication revolution if sorted can be started from the stage of pre-spoken, spoken, written, print, mass media to telematics. schramm’s note in latief and ibrahim (1996) mentions that the development of telecommunications from spoken to written language took at least 50 million years; from writing to printing took as much as 5,000 years; and printing to audiovisual media (photography, telephone, sound recordings, radio, television) took about 500 years. the use of indonesian language in the mass media is increasingly widespread, even forming its own genre, namely indonesian journalism. variety of indonesian journalism is used by journalists to convey information in the form of news to the readers. in fact, in indonesian journalism, there are variations, such as newspaper journalism, magazine journalism, tabloid journalism, television journalism, radio journalism, and internet journalism. these differences are more due to the functions of the mass media in different times, thus demanding the use of different languages too. sociolinguistically, the language of journalism is a variation or variety of indonesian language formed because of differences in delivery media of language, namely print and electronic media. therefore, the language of journalism is understood as a variety of mass communication languages used by print and electronic media. in the language of journalism we see two important things, the first is picture of the society’s progress in the language, especially related to the language creativity. journalism language is the daily language of society dadang s. anshori framing of journalism discourse to improve discourse competence of senior high school students 138 because the information submitted by the newspaper is consumed daily by millions of indonesian people. second, the language of journalism reflects the social dynamics that are in it or that accompany it. through the language of the mass media we know the dynamics of society from the ideological to the pragmatic life of society. therefore, in studying the language of journalism we should also see the presence of language function in the context of mass media in the midst of society’s dynamics. thus, we will not be surprised or amazed to see news headlines that are persuasive, judgmental, provocative, even more interesting than the content of news delivered. the languages in the mass media are used by various circles for various purposes. in general, media readers have an interest in mass media to obtain new information. the authors of textbooks utilize the mass media in addition to the interest of information (knowledge source) as well as an example of presentation of discourse or exercise materials. writers of indonesian textbooks take a lot of discourse from the mass media (newspapers, tabloids, magazines, internet) as examples of text, exercise materials, or sources of knowledge. based on anshori’s (2002) research on the source of text (discourse) of high school indonesian textbooks shows that as many as 41.67% of class x source discourse comes from newspapers and magazines. the source of the discourse of class xi textbooks as much as 79.12% comes from newspapers and magazines. sources of discourse textbooks of class xii as much as 52.94% comes from newspapers and magazines. this data shows the high frequency of newspaper usage as a learning resource in schools in indonesia. the high use of discourse sourced from newspapers and magazines means the dynamics of news coverage in the mass media, indirectly become part of language learning in the classroom. based on the various studies that have been conducted by experts on textbooks, research using framing analysis in understanding the discourse in the textbook is still somewhat rare. on the other hand, the use of journalism discourse in indonesian language learning at schools requires the teachers’ ability to understand more in depth about journalism activities and journalism language analysis, so that teachers have sufficient ability to understand and put the journalism language in language learning at schools. similarly, research on discourse by using discourse analysis has been conducted by many previous experts, but research on journalism discourse in textbook with framing analysis is still somewhat rare. various perspectives are given in understanding discourse, both as text and as the source of the message. heracleous (2006) examines discourse in the context of enterprise organizational change. using the ethnographic paradigm, a search of the company's players is done by looking at how the company's managers strive to manage the organization effectively. data were collected through instruments ranging from lower to higher levels, in addition to interviews with senior managers. this research is conducted by analyzing dominant discourse, strategic change discourse, and counter-discourse. ethnographic research was also conducted by georgakapoulou (1998) who examined conversations of three egyptian women who have been good friends for 17 years. the aspects analyzed are themes, plot, character of speech, and mode of delivery. the results showed that each participant made a different contribution in the figuration of different identity construction in the spoken discourse formed by the three persons. similar research has been conducted by mulyana (2001) towards 25 indonesians living in melbourne, australia. mulyana found out the type of ethnic identity, namely religious ethnic, moderate ethnic, cosmopolitan ethnic, and nationalist ethnic. these four components show differences in self-image and selflocation of respondents in their social world, all of which are based on their initial socialization, maintained in their interactions with old significant others and their generalized others in new and modified states through interaction with new significant others. the study even though scientifically entered the area of sociology-anthropology, english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 139 but the data respondents were delivered through discourse (interview). in other words, this identity is reflected in the spoken discourse of the respondents. meanwhile, research on mass media languages is also widely studied by indonesian researchers and foreign researchers. suroso (1999) analyzed the use of indonesian language in kompas, media indonesia, republika, and suara pembaruan during the period of may-july 1999. suroso (1999) showed that mass media do deviations in the form of morphological errors, syntax errors, vocabulary errors, and spelling errors. in the news according to suroso (1999) there are differences in perspective reflected in the attitude of journalists based on certain ideological values, and it is reflected in the use of language in various aspects, namely the strategy of information presenting. viewed from the perspective of newspapers there are four news perspectives as a manifestation of the value, knowledge, and point of view adopted. the four perspectives are (1) the prosociety perspective, (2) the pro-government perspective, (3) the neutral perspective, and (4) the religious perspective. hong (ni, 2003) describes his research on four types of texts, namely academic writing, news texts, fiction, novels, and conversations. the study is of english background as a language corpus and is implemented in singapore. the results of his research indicate that the phrase occurrence of objects in the type of text above is differentfrequency objects per 1000 words examined. the information presented on the object phrase in academic text is more compact than the text of the conversation. noun phrase (nps) that are not primary pronouns appear in academic text as much as 283.8 words, 248.5 word in news texts, 203.9 words in novel text, and in conversations as much as 118.6 words. meanwhile, the percentage of occurrences of major pronouns of nps in academic writing is 10.9%, news as 17.6%, novels as 38.6% and conversations as 57.7%. based on previous studies it is clear that many perspectives and focuses are given to the topic of discourse, mass media and textbooks, both qualitatively and quantitatively. this shows that the language in mass media and textbooks is interesting to be studied and researched in various focus. in general, discourse studies are detached from the world of education, especially discourse in the mass media. this research is considered to have its own position because the discourse used as the study material is a discourse in the textbook, which is expected to contribute to the writing of textbooks and language learning at schools. in addition, the use of framing techniques is also a novelty in discourse analysis in school textbooks. based on data analysis of curriculum of education unit level (ktsp) in class x of senior high school, there are four standards of competence (50%) from eight competence standards and five basic competences (50%) from 10 basic competences of language skills containing journalism elements. in grade xi of senior high school there are four competence standards (50%) of eight competence standards and five basic competences (50%) of the 10 competence standards of language skills containing journalism elements. in grade xii of senior high school there are two standards of competence (25%) of eight competence standards and two basic competences (22%) of the nine basic competences containing journalism elements. the elements of journalism in question are language activities that include materials derived from journalism practices (print and electronic mass media), and language activities that intersect directly with the activities (practice) of journalism, such as interviewing and writing news. many aspects of journalism in the curriculum prosecute teachers to have the competence of journalism and strategy in understanding journalism discourse as a product of mass communication. indonesian teachers are not only able to understand how a story is compiled by including what, who, when, where, how, and why elements but also understand how a news loaded with frames of journalists is understood by the reader. without such abilities, it is difficult for teachers to be able to teach adequate dadang s. anshori framing of journalism discourse to improve discourse competence of senior high school students 140 journalism discourse to students and form students into critical mass media users. the discourse of journalism can not only be placed as a speech analyzed syntagmatically or paradigmatically, but it must also be understood the social cognition of the speaker. understanding the social cognition of speakers is very important in journalism discourse because the news in the mass media involves various interests, whether journalists, media managers, community, and media owners. during this type of analysis is more widely used in the fields of science outside the language, but in accordance with its development the study becomes an important part of functional language studies. the above thought confirms the importance of studying the framing construction of journalism discourse in textbooks and formulating analytical techniques in learning journalism discourse in accordance with the needs of learning which in turn is expected to increase the competence of the discourse of the students so that learning indonesian language becomes more meaningful. in this context, the texts presented in indonesian textbooks sourced from the mass media can not only be understood and taught as part of the realization of communicative purpose of language learning, but also can be used as an ingredient to improve the competence of discourse and critical thinking of the students in the language . critical thinking is important for students so that they can utilize and empower all information obtained from the mass media for the benefit of their lives. method this research used qualitative method. this research began with preliminary study in the form of observation of the discourse learning at school, study of indonesian textbook, and study of literature about discourse, journalism discourse, framing analysis, and language learning. based on the preliminary study, there had formulated topics and research problems. the developed theories are the discourses framing theory of pan and kosicki (eryanto, 2007). the model development is done by complementing the structure of the analysis developed at the beginning. the developed structure consists of categories, syntax, script, thematic, diction/phrase, and rhetorical. qualitative methods developed are interpretive (mulyana, 2001; muhadjir, 2000), that researchers engaged in interpreting data that is deemed not fixed, but interpretive. this interpretive study was first developed by geertz in the scientific field of sociology. qualitative research methods are interpreted as research that produces qualitative data in the form of written or spoken words of the people or behaviors observed (moleong, 2002). qualitative research is considered to describe the object of research more complete and comprehensive (fraenkel and wallen, 1993). data or corpus of research are in the form of journalism discourse in 10 textbooks of indonesian high school taken purposively. results and discussion the use of journalism discourse in textbooks based on data analysis of journalism discourse use in 10 high school indonesian textbooks were found very diverse discourses in terms of number, topic, source, type and usage. this diversity is possible given the ability of each writer to understand the different curriculum. the diversity of this discourse also occurs because there is no provision guided by textbook authors regarding the use of discourse in textbooks. each author performs his own creations in utilizing the source of mass media. technically, the reason for the use of discourse from newspapers, magazines, the internet is seen by authors as easier to obtain than other sources. the choice of theme or topic, type of discourse, competence standard and basic competence classification leads to different author's orientation. based on the classification of language and literary competence, for example, authors who emphasize literary competence will write textbooks by giving greater weight to the field of literature than to the field of language; and vice versa. thus, in the framework of material balancing, especially discourse, the absence of these guidelines has led to the diverse directions of each author of the book. english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 141 the vast amount of discourse in indonesian textbooks indicates that textbook authors make the discourse a body or an important part of textbook writing. this is evidenced by the average frequency of the discourse of 10 books amounted to 61.6 pieces of discourse. this large number indicates that discourse is an important learning resource for language learning. moreover, low selection of discourse themes will have implications for the diversity of information presented, even all themes or topics will be presented in textbooks. as a result, the students must have the ability to understand new vocabulary in the context of its use, old vocabulary, new sentences, and new discourses. the diversity of discourse from the aspect of the number, topic, source, type and usage will have implications on the readiness of students in dealing with these various discourses. although these discourses can be paralleled for other learning, the ability of students to understand the content of the discourse is often a constraint. in reading competence, the ability to understand the content of discourse is directly related to the students' ability to read effectively. especially when associated with the position of discourse as a basis of improvement of one's life, as mentioned vygotsky (1986) that is the involvement of high-level mental, psychological and intellectual function in understanding the discourse for the sake of progress and improvement of life. in this context, of course, all forms of diversity must be considered so that the interests of language learning are truly achieved. meanwhile, the average frequency of journalism discourse is 19.7 pieces of discourse. if the average amount of journalism discourse is 32.58%. this figure is of course quite large considering that in addition to newspapers, magazines, and the internet, actually the author of the book has the possibility to take the discourse from other sources. there is a tendency of the author of the book to take the discourse by considering the aspects of convenience and practicality. newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and the internet today can be obtained much easier and cheaper than books. moreover, the media has the advantages of diversity of aspects of the contents. viewed from the topic of discourse aspect, journalism discourse is generally adapted to the subject matter or chapter in the book. before determining the topic of discourse the authors of the book determine the chapter theme beforehand. the next stage, the authors seek and determine the discourse in accordance with the theme of the chapter. this book-making pattern is highly possible given the determination of lesson topics or chapters is not specified in the curriculum. based on the position and function of the discourse (text) in relation to language competence, journalism discourse is placed at the beginning of the explanation of matter, in the middle as an example or case, and at the end as an affirmation of the material or proof. in the listening competence of the discourse is generally used as sources and examples; on reading comprehension discourse used as a source of reading; on speaking competence discourse is used as an example; on the competence of writing discourse is used as an example and source of practice. in general, journalism discourse has a function as an example of competence, reading resources, and sources of analysis in the exercise. hymes (1972) calls the ability to communicate means to create discourse, as communicative competence. based on the classification of literacy capabilities developed by wells in general the students are at the level of the ability of performative discourse or "breaking the code", that is the ability to speak or control communication between people who are known or know the relationship between spoken and written language symbols. some students have put discourse on the informational level, understanding the text in the sense of connecting what is in the text with the background of knowledge so that there will be construction of meaning that can respond to the meaning. however, in discourse learning the students have not reached the level of epistemic discourse, that is capable of using language for the development of science. whereas this level of ability is expected to be dadang s. anshori framing of journalism discourse to improve discourse competence of senior high school students 142 owned by the students in mastering the discourse. with epistemic abilities, students can make discourse as a medium to improve science skills and will in turn build awareness and understanding of the importance of information for their lives. the large portion or frequency of journalism discourse in senior high school indonesian textbooks gives an indication that the authors place the actuality or novelty of information as part of the textbook writing strategy. this actuality will have implications for the presence of new information that can be transferred to the students. thus, through the presence of journalism discourse in textbooks, students constantly update the information they obtain. the same thing is done by readers of print media: updating information or knowing the latest information. however, the pursuit of actuality does not mean that the authors of the book can easily determine the type of journalism discourse because not all journalism discourse can be well received. the authors of the book should consider many aspects before choosing the discourse, the theme, content, type, length of writing, and the degree of legibility. the most important thing in considering the presence of journalism discourse is the position of journalism discourse with the terms of interest. the journalism discourse in fact not only conveys some information to the reader, but also transmits certain interests and agendas, either explicitly or implicitly. brown and yule (1996) assert that discourse analysts are obligated to investigate what language is being used. fairclough (1992) also believes that discourse domination is an increasingly dominant way of showing one's dominance or power over another. this opinion is relevant to the fact of this research that journalism discourses contained in textbooks have power and dominance. therefore, heracleous (2006) argues that discourse approach as a communication activity is one way of interpreting social construction and existing reality. social construction and reality in journalism discourse can be observed through analysis of the news frames. the results showed that the frames (frames) of journalism discourse in senior high school indonesian textbooks is packed in various viewpoints in accordance with the news topic and facts. based on the results of the analysis, it turns news frames play an important role in determining the direction of news, both aspects of writing and selection of materials and news data presented. projection of facts and omission of facts are done by journalists in accordance with the news frame. the projection and disappearance is the way journalists construct the news. in other words, news is constructed by frame. it is this framework that gives perspective (tendency to part) of a news, which based on suroso’s (1999) research consists of (1) pro-society perspective, (2) pro-government perspective, (3) neutral perspective, and (4) religious perspective. journalism discourse in textbooks based on news values in the aspect of news values, this research shows that the journalism discourse in indonesian textbooks can be explained below. of the 30 news that became the data of this study, as many as 16 news (53.33%) has an important news value and prominance. the importance and magnitude of the commodity can be measured from the position of loading the news in the media and the position of the news in the conversation in the community. those news are news about the destruction of forests, the outer islands of indonesia, violations of the implementation of the national exam and others. viewed from the humanitarian aspect (human interest), from 30 data of this research found only 8 news data (26,66%) containing human element or involving humanity aspect. the rest, which is 22 news data (73.33%) pertained to news that does not have the element of humanity. based on the aspect of conflicts (conflix), from 30 data of this study found as many as 15 news (50%) meet the aspects of conflict. in this case the aspect of disagreement is categorized into two parts, namely the first is contradiction of the two facts presented in the news and the contradictions in the news headlines. based on extraordinary or unusual aspects, from 30 english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 143 research data found 11 news data (36.66%) news have unusual or extraordinary elements. the remaining 19 news data (63.33%) did not meet the extraordinary or unusual elements. based on the proximity aspect, most of the news fulfilled the proximity aspect, from 30 research data, 19 news (63.33%) fulfilled the aspect of closeness while the remaining 11 news (36.66%) did not fulfill the closeness element. when viewed from each title and news content, there are only two news that meet all aspects of the news values above, the news about the expedition of the forefront of the archipelago islands and timika riots. in addition to these two news not all aspects of news value is met in the news that became the data of this study. data on the aspect of the news values indicate that the discourse in the textbook does not have all the elements of news value: prominance, human interest, conflix, unusual, and proximity. selection of journalism discourse conducted by the author thus is not based on the five principles of the news, but done randomly. from the aspect of news value, of course, many journalism discourses are not eligible to be presented in the textbook to be the source (reference), except in its position as an example. similarly the author of the book should choose the type of news that is worthy to be presented in the textbook, given the light news (soft news) will be different from the feature-type news. research data indicate that it is unlikely that the author of the book will notice such things. construction of journalism discourse framing in textbooks based on the framework developed by pan and kosicki, namely syntax, script, thematic, and rhetorical it is known that from 30 journalism discourse of this research data, all meet the frame device. the way journalists compose news (syntax) is done using headlines, leads, background information, quotes, sources, statements, and closings. almost all journalism discourse has headlines, leads and background information. however, some journalism discourses do not have news sources, statements, and citations, especially on feature-type news or reports (trevel features). based on how to tell the news (scripts), 5w + h elements are used in many journalism discourses, but not all of these elements of fulfillment are fulfilled, especially the why and how elements. the results of this study reinforces previous research (suroso, 1999) that the language of journalism is poor structure, because in most news does not contain elements of why and how. when viewed from language learning, the type of news that does not contain the elements of why and how pertained discourse that is not critical and can not make students critical. critical ability becomes one of the domains of psychomotor goals taxonomy in language learning. stern (1992) develops a taxonomy of psychomotor or behavioural goals that include mechanical skill domains, knowledge skills, transfer skills, communication skills and criticism skills. based on how to write the news (thematic), journalism discourses have between 2 to 6 themes. the journalism discourse studied also has details with many variations, intra-sentence and inter-sentence coherence, various sentence forms, and pronouns of people (aposition) as the source position of the news source. the choice of sentence, detail, coherence, and sentence form is one way for journalists in writing news. meanwhile, based on how to emphasize the news (rhetoric), the discourses in this study use lexicon and metaphor as a way of emphasizing the news. keywords (lexicon) are used in the title or body of the news. metaphors are widely used to describe cases, facts and events to make the news more engaging and reader-friendly. meanwhile, the elements of graphics and presuppositions are not often found in this discourse. the emphasis of diction, figure of speech, stigmatization, acronymization, and technical rationing characterize the language of journalism. the studies of heryanto (2000), lewuk (1995), alwasilah (20003), halliday (1985), rachmat (1984) indicate that journalism language is used through a specific strategy for the interest of journalists or media owners to the reader. based on these studies, dadang s. anshori framing of journalism discourse to improve discourse competence of senior high school students 144 the language of journalism appears to be a tool for stigmatizing a case and the occurrence of politicization in the case. in this study, the strategy appears on the rhetorical device, the way journalists emphasize the news. the choice of diction and the way of presentation (figure of speech) becomes the power of journalists to emphasize the news frame.. analysis model of journalism discourse in language learning the analysis model of journalism discourse developed focuses on the structure of analysis, ie categories, scripts, syntax, thematic, diction/phrase, and rhetorical. this model of analysis will enable readers of journalism discourse to be open minded, critical, and understand the nature of the presence of journalism discourse in language learning. the design of this research development covers the theoretical basis, the characteristics and principles of learning, the role of the teacher, the role of the students, the themes and topics, the focus of learning, the learning objectives, methods and techniques, materials and resources, learning scenarios, evaluation and follow-up. the theoretical basis used is critical linguistic theory, the theory of constructive discourse, and the theory of frames. characteristics and principles of learning include critical, discursive, analytical, ideological, and functional. meanwhile the role of the teacher becomes the facilitator of the learner and the role of the student as a critical discourse analyst in identifying the facts of the language. the themes and topics of learning are tailored to competence standard and basic competence. similarly, the focus of learning and learning objectives. learning methods and techniques should be inquiry (tracing) and analytical. the learning scenario consists of exploration, elaboration, and confirmation. this development uses an authentic evaluation of students' work results (student portfolios) as a valued product in addition to the assessment of the learning process. conclusion the use frequency of journalism discourse in indonesian textbooks are high and very diverse in types and themes. the use of journalism discourse in the 10 textbooks of research data is very diverse in terms of number, topic, source, and usage. this diversity occurs because there is no provision guided by textbook authors regarding the use of discourse in textbooks. based on the position and function of discourse (text) in relation to language competence, journalism discourse is at the beginning of explanation of matter, in the middle as an example or case, and at the end as the material or proof. in general, journalism discourse has a function as an example of competence, reading resources, and sources of analysis in the exercise. the journalism discourse in indonesian textbooks has different news values. in general, journalism discourse meets the values of the news, namely the important elements and great scope, the element of humanity (human interest), elements of conflict (conflix), unusual or extraordinary elements, and proximity. when viewed from each title and news content, there are only two news that meet all aspects of the news values above, the news about the expedition of the forefront of the archipelago islands and timika riots. in addition to these two news not all aspects of news value is met in the news that became the data of this study. frame construction (framing) of journalism discourse in senior high school indonesian textbooks is packed in various viewpoints according to news topics and facts. based on research data, it turns news frames play an important role in determining the direction of news, both aspects of writing and selection of materials and news data presented. in other words, news is constructed by frame. based on the analysis of the construction of journalism discourse frames is found the following important matters. the analysis model of journalism discourse developed focuses on the structure of analysis, ie categories, scripts, syntax, thematic, diction/phrase, and rhetorical. this model of analysis will enable readers of journalism discourse to be open minded, critical, and understand the nature of the presence of journalism discourse in language learning. the development model undertaken english review: journal of english education volume 6, issue 1, december 2017 p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 145 in this study includes rational, theoretical basis, learning characteristics and principles, analytical structures, teacher and student positions, instructional materials, learning methods and techniques, learning scenarios, focus and learning objectives, and learning evaluations. reference alwasilah, a. c. (2003). bangsa yang besar adalah bangsa yang menulis. pidato pengukuhan jabatan guru besar tetap dalam bidang pendidikan bahasa dan sastra inggris, fpbs upi, 17 oktober 2003. bandung: upi. anshori, d. s. (2002). bahasa koran sebagai bahan ajar pembelajaran bahasa. bahasa & sastra, 2(3), 8294. brown, g., & yule, g. (1996). analisis wacana. jakarta: gramedia. eriyanto. (2007). framming, konstruksi, ideologi, dan politik media. yogyakarta:: lkis fairclough, n. (1992). language and power. london: longman. fraenkel, j. r., & wallen, n. e. (1993). how to design and evaluate research in education. new york: mcgraw-hill, inc. georgakapoulou, a. (1998). small and large identities in narative (inter)action. in de fina, a., schiffrin, d., & bamberg, m. (eds.), discourse and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. halliday, m. a. k., & hasan, r. (1985). language context and text: aspects of language in a social, semiotic perspective. victoria: deakin university press. heracleous, l. (2006). discourse, interpretation, organization. cambridge: cambridge university press. heryanto, a. (2000). perlawanan dalam kepatuhan, esai-esai budaya. bandung: mizan. hymes, d. (1972). on communicative competence. in j. b. pride, & j. holmes (eds.), sociolinguictics. harmondsworth: penguin. latief, y., & ibrahim, i.s. (1996). bahasa dan kekuasaan. bandung: mizan. lewuk, p. (1995). kritik filosofis atas pembangunan: beberapa serpihan pemikiran. jakarta: fosko’66. muhadjir. n. (2000). metodologi penelitian kualitatif (4th edition). yogyakarta:: rake sarasin. mulyana, d. (2001). metodologi penelitian kualitatif, paradigma baru ilmu komunikasi dan ilmu sosial lainnya. bandung: rosdakarya. moleong, l. j. (2002). metodologi penelitian kualitatif. bandung: remadja rosdakarya. ni, y. (2003). noun phrases in media texts: a qualitative approach. in aitchison, j., & lewis, d.m. (eds.), new media language. london: routledge. vygotsky, l. s. (1986). thought and language. cambridge: the mit press. rakhmat, j. (1984). a model for the study of mass media effects on political leaders: a study in indonesia. unpublished thesis. usa: iowa state university. stern. h. h. (1992). issues and options in language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. suroso. (1999). bahasa jurnalistik perspektif berita utama politik surat kabar indonesia pada awal era reformasi. unpubished dissertation. jakarta: pps unj. dadang s. anshori framing of journalism discourse to improve discourse competence of senior high school students 146 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 489 multiliteracies pedagogy: a case study of critical reading in elt classroom by implementing situated practice mikhael misa universitas timor, east nusa tenggara province (ntt), kupang–indonesia email: mikhaelmisa@unimor.ac.id apa citation: misa, m. (2023). multiliteracies pedagogy: a case study of critical reading in elt classroom by implementing situated practice. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 489500. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7918 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction in today's sophisticated digital technology, mastering critical reading skills is paramount for a student's reading proficiency. furthermore, when instructed in this discipline, students can assess their readings based on facts and logical reasoning rather than being swayed by emotions (hakim et al., 2021). recognizing the significance of critical reading, english language teaching (elt) experts have dedicated substantial efforts to researching this area. instructors' most formidable challenge of english as a foreign language (efl) is effectively teaching students to engage in critical reading. as content is examined from various perspectives, the educational process must keep pace by formulating thought-provoking questions or themes for debate that foster critical reading. critical reading is an essential requirement, particularly in light of the rapid growth of information and communication technology, which has profound implications for the availability of diverse sources and reading materials. it constitutes a fundamental component of the reading process, serving as a method of analysis. by adopting this approach, students are empowered to become adept readers and thinkers, perceiving reading as an ongoing process rather than a mere outcome. in such circumstances, individuals engage in simultaneous thought and analysis while reading, thereby discerning relevant information and acquiring a solid foundation of knowledge (dehghani & zamorano, 2023; egurrola & garcía, 2023) extensive studies have been conducted on critical reading analysis (alhusban, 2019; dehghani & zamorano, 2023), the conceptual framework for teaching critical (li & wan, 2022), and the cultivation of critical readers (dehghani & zamorano, 2023; gill, 2021). furthermore, literacy encompasses an individual's capacity to process and comprehend information while reading and writing effectively. literacy extends well beyond reading and writing, encompassing a broader range of skills and competencies. it entails effectively utilizing, interpreting, and generating text in diverse contexts, including non-verbal forms such as gestures, noises, and body language (ocak & karslı, 2022; siraj et al., 2019) literacy is regarded as a fundamental cultural and social influence arena, necessitating a comprehensive discourse competency that involves reading and critically evaluating a wide array of written and spoken texts (sumardi & muamaroh, 2020). abstract: this research study aims to investigate the implementation of situated practice in multiliteracy teaching within an english language teaching (elt) classroom, specifically focusing on critical reading activities. this study employed a qualitative approach. the study focuses on lecturers delivering lectures to third-year students enrolled in the english study program at teacher training and educational faculty, timor university, east nusa tenggara province. to analyze the data gathered and insights linked to the situated practice of multiliterate teaching in the elt classroom, data were transcribed, encoded, displayed, and interpreted. the collected data is subjected to a comprehensive analysis to assess the effectiveness of implementing the situated practice of the multiliteracies pedagogical framework through students' critical reading. it highlights the significance of engaging strategies like visual media and thought-provoking questions to motivate students. the role of the lecturer as a model, meaningful practice within a learning community, designated roles, and fostering active participation and collaborative learning are also emphasized. the findings revealed a significant enhancement in students' critical thinking abilities due to engaging in a series of learning activities within the multiliteracy pedagogy framework. keywords: meaningful practice; motivated students, role model; technological use; telling experience. mikhael misa multiliteracies pedagogy: a case study of critical reading in elt classroom by implementing situated practice 490 moreover, multiliteracy emerges as a response to the evolving landscape of education, which extends beyond the mere teaching of language skills to encompass the complexities of social and cultural enculturation in the learning process. multiliteracy represents a novel paradigm in literacy instruction (bosch, 2017; rivas & cardozo, 2018; siyaswati, 2020). it signifies a shift in literacy's scope, where the focus expands to include sociocultural accuracy, enabling students to recognize, understand, utilize, and navigate sociocultural values more effectively. in recent years, literacy has acquired additional dimensions, encompassing environmental, intellectual, media, technical, and even moral aspects (damico et al., 2021; xie, 2021). the emergence of multiliteracy stems from the realization that humans not only read and write but also engage in these activities within specific genres that are intertwined with social, cultural, and political goals, especially in the era of globalization (saputri et al., 2019). this concept establishes the framework for integrating multiliteracy within the educational sector. numerous researchers have explored the application of multiliteracy pedagogy in various contexts. these investigations include examining the impact of incorporating multiliteracies pedagogy in esl writing (jerome et al., 2023), exploring the design of literacy and social learning features (da silva, 2023), conducting youth literacy courses (sholihah & purbani, 2021), instructing students in technology-mediated environments (prihantoro et al., 2022), employing multiliteracies pedagogy in second language learning (laboni, 2021), investigating the feasibility of integrating multiliteracies pedagogy in introductory foreign language courses and writing instruction (dunster, 2023; kiss & mizusawa, 2018), adopting a multiliterate approach in the paradigm of teaching english in the 21st century (siyaswati, 2020), examining the impact of digital multimodal texts on changing the practice of multiliteracy pedagogy in efl classrooms (ilmi et al., 2020), and incorporating multiliteracies into the process writing approach in the elt classroom, with a focus on implementation and reflection (nabhan, 2019). however, there remains a need for further research to explore the application of the situated practice of the multiliteracies pedagogical framework in the context of students' critical reading skills within the elt classroom. therefore, this research aims to figure out how english lecturers implement the situated practice of the multiliteracy pedagogical framework through students' critical reading in elt classrooms. critical reading is a significant aspect of reading that involves both cognitive and dynamic processes. the cognitive processes encompass the skills necessary for comprehending, analyzing, and evaluating texts, while the dynamic processes involve the reader's emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. engaging in critical reading requires readers to be aware of their biases and assumptions and actively examine the author's perspective (chotimah & astiyandha, 2019; nelson, 2019). another critical reading theory emphasizes using various reading strategies and techniques. critical readers employ various tactics, such as predicting, questioning, summarizing, and evaluating, to interact with a text effectively (greenhalgh, 2019; guzzetti & foley, 2018). these strategies enable readers to actively engage with the information presented and better understand the author's point of view. moreover, critical reading involves evaluating the context and purpose of a text. to fully comprehend and evaluate the content, readers must consider the author's intentions and the historical and cultural context in which the text was written. analyzing the context and purpose of a text is crucial for critical reading as it allows readers to assess the validity and relevance of the information provided. individuals can enhance their analytical and evaluative skills by engaging in critical reading, enabling them to form informed opinions and judgments (hobbs, 2020; suteja & setiawan, 2022). the concept of a multiliteracies pedagogical framework has gained significant popularity in recent years, especially in the context of digital literacy and the integration of technology in education. the aim of multiliteracies pedagogy is to equip students with the necessary skills and knowledge to navigate and engage with various forms of communication, including print, visual, digital, and social media (di cesare & rowsell, 2020; jiang et al., 2022). multiliteracies encompass the diverse range of communication channels and media and the growing importance of cultural and linguistic diversity in our globalized societies (di cesare & rowsell, 2020; yap & gurney, 2023). individuals must be able to navigate different modes of communication and understand cultural and linguistic nuances in various contexts. scholars have developed several concepts to elucidate the principles of multiliteracy teaching. the digital literacy framework, for instance, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 491 emphasizes technical skills, critical thinking, social and emotional intelligence, and creativity as essential components of digital literacy (bacalja et al., 2021). a multiliteracies pedagogical framework incorporates these elements into the teaching and learning process, aiding students in acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in a digital society. students can become more informed and engaged citizens by integrating critical media literacy into instruction. this multiliteracy educational approach is particularly beneficial for students learning english as a second language (holloway, 2021; mirhosseini et al., 2022). in today's culture, the multiliteracies pedagogical framework is important in teaching and learning. it acknowledges the diverse literacies required for individuals to navigate a globalized environment and incorporates them into the educational process. critical media literacy and the digital literacy framework underscore the importance of integrating critical thinking and creativity into teaching and learning practices. as technology continues to reshape our modes of communication and interaction, a multiliteracies pedagogical framework becomes increasingly essential in equipping students with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. situated practice is a fundamental element within the broader multiliteracy pedagogical framework, comprising four essential components. it recognizes that literacy practices are intricately tied to specific social and cultural contexts. how we read, write, and communicate is influenced by the contexts in which these activities occur. situated practice assumes great significance within the multiliteracy educational paradigm as it underscores the importance of understanding the social and cultural contexts within which literacy practices unfold. students must navigate the complex multimodal environments where communication occurs, necessitating a grasp of their communities' linguistic and cultural practices (jiang et al., 2022; menke & paesani, 2019; xie, 2021). understanding literacy practices' social and cultural contexts are crucial in enabling students to communicate effectively in diverse settings. moreover, the significance of situated practice in fostering students' multiliteracy skills is emphasized in various scholarly papers and publications. literacy activities are always embedded within specific contexts, and recognizing and appreciating these contexts is vital in enhancing students' ability to communicate successfully in different scenarios. situated practice equips students with the necessary skills to engage in cross-cultural communication while being mindful of the specific demands of different contexts (irwandy et al., 2019; mirhosseini et al., 2022). in the multiliteracy framework, the concept of "genre" is intricately linked to situated practice. genres represent real-world tasks that mirror or simulate the types of work individuals undertake beyond the confines of the school environment (bacalja et al., 2021; chang et al., 2023; tschida, 2020) understanding the genres valued in diverse social and cultural contexts are thus a critical component of comprehending situated practice. overall, situated practice is central to the multiliteracy pedagogical paradigm. recent scholarly articles and books underscore the importance of comprehending the social and cultural settings within which literacy practices occur to promote multiliteracies in the classroom effectively. by embracing and emphasizing situated practice, educators can empower students with the skills and knowledge to navigate and thrive in various communicative contexts. some previous researchers have used situated practice in the following ways: (yap & gurney, 2023) investigated the practices of multiliteracies pedagogy (mlp) in new zealand schools, aiming to uncover the utilization of digital technologies by teachers. the research methodology includes interviews and classroom observations to delve into the strategies employed by a single teacher in incorporating digital technologies and multimodal texts into literacy instruction. (yu et al., 2022) examines "we've been wastin' a whole million watchin' her doin' her shoes" to unveil the utilization of situated practice within a pedagogy of multiliteracies by australian learners. the research employs an ethnographic approach to investigate the interactions between pedagogy and access to multiliteracies among learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. (yap & gurney, 2023) studied the integration of a pedagogy of multiliteracies into practice, specifically focusing on a case study in a grade one literacy classroom. the study aims to uncover how educators utilize this pedagogy to create meaningful learning opportunities for young children based on their diverse interests and needs. (anwar et al., 2021) examines the situated multiliteracies approach to uncover how english language learners (ells) participation in classroom mathematics practices utilized in an urban canadian classroom. the research employs an ethnographic research methodology to investigate the involvement of ells in mikhael misa multiliteracies pedagogy: a case study of critical reading in elt classroom by implementing situated practice 492 mathematics practices within the classroom setting. the provided information presents four different research studies conducted in the field of multiliteracies pedagogy. yap's study focuses on the utilization of digital technologies by teachers in new zealand schools, employing interviews and classroom observations to explore the incorporation of digital technologies and multimodal texts into literacy instruction. mills' research, conducted in australia, adopts an ethnographic approach to examine the interactions between pedagogy and access to multiliteracies among culturally and linguistically diverse learners. xing's study investigates the integration of multiliteracies pedagogy in a grade one literacy classroom, aiming to understand how educators create meaningful learning opportunities for young children based on their diverse interests and needs. takeuchi's research examines the involvement of english language learners (ells) in mathematics practices in an urban canadian classroom, utilizing an ethnographic research methodology. method this section outlines the comprehensive design of the study, encompassing the research design, study participants, data collection, and analysis procedures. the primary objective of this research is to investigate the implementation of situated practice in multiliteracy teaching within an english language teaching (elt) classroom, specifically focusing on critical reading activities. the study employs a qualitative approach to explore a specific occurrence or series of events thoroughly. the researcher assumes the role of a nonparticipant observer, adopting non-participant observation techniques where notes are taken without active participation in the events, as described by cresswell (2018). the study centers on lecturers delivering lectures to third-year students enrolled in the english study program at an institution in east nusa tenggara, indonesia. the participating lecturers hold a master's degree in english education, while the students enrolled in the critical reading courses for the semester also possess a similar educational background. the study includes 39 students, comprising 13 male and 26 female participants. they are selected from viewing the last result of final semester test and interview the lecturer. additionally, the researcher fulfills the role of a non-participant observer throughout the study. data collection involves the use of observational techniques. the researcher observes the classroom environment when the lecturer employs situated practice in multiliteracy teaching, specifically targeting critical reading skills. three categories of data are collected: 1) field observations provide direct insights into classroom dynamics and interactions. 2) transcripts of observations document the data gathered during teaching and learning activities. 3) documentation collected during english language learning sessions serves as an additional source of information. the collected data will be subjected to a thorough analysis. the analysis will examine the field observations, transcripts, and documentation to identify patterns, themes, and key insights related to the situated practice of multiliteracy teaching in the elt classroom. the qualitative data will be carefully coded and analyzed to extract meaningful findings, thereby addressing the research question and objectives of the study. the collected data is subjected to a comprehensive analysis to assess the effectiveness of implementing the situated practice of multiliteracy pedagogy in the elt class through students' critical reading skills. the analysis follows an inductive theme analysis approach, as described by creswell and poth (2018). the essential framing components are transcribed, encoded, data reduced, displayed, and interpreted to draw meaningful conclusions. to ensure the reliability of the findings, the transcribed data is cross-checked with the observation data, validating the accuracy and consistency of the analysis. to minimize subjectivity in interpretation, the researcher engages in a cross-checking process with the assistance of a colleague who serves as an interpreter. prior to data collection, the researcher obtains the necessary ethical approvals. authorization is sought from the rector, who subsequently addresses the vice-rector responsible for the academic area. permission is then requested from the dean of the faculty of teacher training and educational science (fkip) and the head of the english study program. the researcher establishes communication and coordination with the instructor and students, presenting the research objectives and ensuring their understanding and cooperation. data sources include observation sheets, field notes, research approval documents, attendance lists, articles, and other relevant records. participants are informed about the confidentiality and privacy of their responses, with english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 493 assurances that the data will be solely used for research purposes. results and discussion in the elt class, the researcher carefully observed implementing the situated practice of multiliteracy pedagogy to enhance students' critical reading skills. the lecturers' teaching and learning activities were thoroughly examined, specifically focusing on applying situated practice as a key component of multiliterate pedagogy. the findings revealed that although there were notable instances of utilizing the situated practice approach, not all subcategories of the multiliteracy pedagogy's situated practice component were fully met during the classroom learning process. table 1. class observation results no learning practice checklist code situated practice 1. motivate students to learn √ sp.1 2. references past and current student experiences √ sp.2 3. role models, lecturers, or colleagues √ sp.3 4. meaningful practice in the learner community √ sp.4 5. including the student's mother tongue x sp.5 as illustrated in the table provided, the components of multiliteracy pedagogy were evident in the teaching and learning process, as indicated. situated practice, being the first component, consisted of five subcategories, of which four were successfully addressed. the classroom activities facilitated a more refined understanding of learning, primarily through interactive dialogues between the lecturers and students. the lecturers encouraged the students to describe actions depicted in various visual media. additionally, they motivated and stimulated the students' participation by posing a series of thought-provoking questions. situated practice fivectivities, five subcategories within the multiliteracies component during the teaching and learning activities incorporated. four of these subcategories were successfully fulfilled, while one subcategory, involving the use of students' native language, was not met as the lecturer did not employ it in classroom learning activities. motivating students to learn at the commencement of the activity, the lecturer employs various strategies to motivate students. this includes greeting them, inquiring about the previous week's topic, capturing their attention through the use of visual media, and posing several questions to elicit their experiences. finally, students engage in a guessing activity based on pictures. the interactions between students and the lecturer during these discussions demonstrate the manifestation of this subcategory. (1) lecturer : “ok, good morning everybody.” students : “good morning” lecturer : “how are you today?” students : “we are fine.” (3) lecturer : “before coming to the material, i would like to find out whether you remembered the topic last week or not. what was the topic of last week?” students : “sport or library” “the first figure.” (6) lecturer : "ok then, let us look at the second picture.” “what is it?" students : “children and parents are playing together.” lecturer : "ok, one student, please, student (f)." student (f) : "it is about one family." lecturer : “yes, family, what are they doing?” student : “they are playing with gadgets.” the second figure (8) lecturer : “and then, we come to the last picture. what about the last picture?” student : "it is also the same as the first picture.” lecturer : "what do you mean: the same pictures.” students : “in different positions, kids sit in front of their laptops, and their parents stand behind them." lecturer : "what do you think about their parents? what are they doing behind their kids?" mikhael misa multiliteracies pedagogy: a case study of critical reading in elt classroom by implementing situated practice 494 students : "controlling their children. they want to know what their children are doing?” lecturer : "they want to know what kids do with laptops?” (1) lecturer : “ok, good morning everybody.” students : “good morning.” lecturer : “how are you today?” students : “we are fine” (3) lecturer : “before coming to the material, i would like to find out whether you remembered the topic last week or not. what was the topic of last week?” students : “sport or library” as mentioned above, the provided dialogue represents a classroom interaction between a lecturer and the students. in the beginning, the lecturer greets the students and asks about their well-being. then, the lecturer inquires whether the students remember the topic from the previous week. the students respond with two different answers: "sport or library" and "the first figure". later, the lecturer proceeds to discuss a series of pictures. the second picture depicts children and parents playing together, and the students provide an accurate description. the lecturer engages a specific student (f) to share their interpretation of the picture, which involves a family. moreover, the lecturer introduces the last picture, and a student points out its similarity to the first picture. the students elaborate that in the last picture, the children are sitting in front of their laptops while their parents stand behind them. when questioned about the parents' actions, the students suggest that the parents are controlling their children and want to monitor their activities. previous and current student experience reference in the activity mentioned above, the lecturer encouraged students to share their personal experiences by posing a series of questions. these questions aimed to elicit information about the students' past encounters outside the school environment. the student's understanding of the topic being discussed was influenced by their experiences within their familial surroundings, exposure to media, and other relevant resources. following the description of the actions depicted in the pictures, the lecturer prompted the students to recount their own experiences, guided by specific questions. these discussions took place between the students and the lecturer, allowing for an interactive exchange of ideas and perspectives. (1) lecturer : “ok, good morning everybody” students : “good morning” lecturer : “how are you today?” students : “we are fine.” (3) lecturer : “before coming to the material, i would like to know whether you remember last week's topic. what was the topic of last week?” students : sport or library” “the first figure.” (6) lecturer : “ok then, let's look at the second picture, what is it?" students : “children and parents are playing together.” lecturer : ”ok, one student please, student (f)." student (f) : “it's about one family.” lecturer : “yes, family, what are they doing?” student : “they are playing with gadgets.” the second figure (8) lecturer : “and then, we come to the last picture. what about the last picture?” student : “it's also the same as the first picture.” lecturer : “what do you mean: the same pictures.” students : kids sit in different positions before their laptops, and their parents stand behind them." lecturer : “what do you think about their parents, what are they doing behind their kids?” students : “controlling their children. they want to know, what their children are doing?” lecturer : “they want to know, what kids do with laptops?” (1) lecturer : “ok, good morning everybody.” students : “good morning.” lecturer : “how are you today?” students : “we are fine.” english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 495 (3) lecturer : “before coming to the material, i would like to know whether you remember last week's topic. what was the topic of last week?” students : “sport or library” as mentioned above, the lecturer greeting the students and asking about their well-being. the lecturer then inquires if the students remember last week's topic, and they provide two responses: "sport or library" and "the first figure". furthermore, the lecturer introduces the second picture and asks the students to describe it. the students correctly identify that the picture shows children and parents playing together. the lecturer then selects a specific student (f) to elaborate on the picture, and they mention that it is about one family. the lecturer further asks about the family's activity, and the student responds that they are playing with gadgets. next, the lecturer transitions to discussing the last picture. a student comments that it is similar to the first picture, and the lecturer seeks clarification on what they mean by "the same pictures." the students explain that in the last picture, children are positioned differently in front of their laptops, with their parents standing behind them. moreover, the lecturer asks the students about the parents' actions behind their kids. the students suggest that the parents are controlling their children and want to know what they are doing. the lecturer reaffirms their understanding, mentioning that the parents want to know what the kids are doing with the laptops. previous and current student experience reference in the activity mentioned above, the lecturer actively sought to encourage students to share their personal experiences by posing questions. notably, these questions centered around the students' past encounters and acquired knowledge, extending beyond the school environment's confines. students were prompted to reflect on their developmental experiences within their familial settings and their exposure to media and other external resources. following a detailed description of the actions depicted in the picture media, the lecturer invited the students to share their own experiences, guided by thoughtprovoking questions. these discussions between the students and the lecturer provided a platform for exchanging ideas and perspectives. (9) lecturer : “ok, here are some questions to stimulate or brainstorm your ideas related to the topic. so, first, can student (v) read the question?" student (v) : “do you think computers are important in human life, especially for children?” lecturer : “what do you think? computers are an important thing in human life, especially for children. yes or no?” student : “yes.” lecturer : “why did you say, yes? student (r) why?” student (r) : “to find out any information from the internet.” lecturer : “from the internet or gadgets, who else?” student (o) : “children can seek knowledge from the internet.” lecturer : “so, different words but the essence is the same. so, this one says that to get information, and student (o) says that to get knowledge." lecturer : i asked the student (s) to read the next question. (10) student (s) : “do you think working with computers is appropriate for children? lecturer : “what do you think, about working with computers? it’s suitable for children? why yes?" student (a) : “yes, because they can increase their knowledge.” lecturer : “ok, that's a good job. specifically? student (m)!” student (m) : “yes of course. they can increase children's knowledge and also have fun by playing games.” lecturer : “ok, that's the right information. so, for fun, like playing games, for example. ok, that's mikhael misa multiliteracies pedagogy: a case study of critical reading in elt classroom by implementing situated practice 496 a good job. it’s suitable for children to play games with the computer. student (k)! what do you think?” student (k) : “no, i think, don't you?” lecturer : “it doesn't follow.” students : “because playing too much computer makes their eyes hurt.” lecturer : “electronic gadgets can affect children’s eyes if they play with them too much. ok, that's a great idea." : "so, let us move on to the next question. student (y), can you read the question? during this phase, the lecturer presents a series of questions to stimulate discussions related to the topic. student (v) reads the first question, asking whether computers are important in human life, especially for children. the students agree that computers are important, emphasizing their role in acquiring information and knowledge from the internet. furthermore, student (s) reads the second question, asking if working with computers is appropriate for children. the majority of students express their belief that working with computers is suitable for children as it helps increase their knowledge and provides enjoyment through activities like playing games. however, student (k) disagrees, mentioning concerns about eye strain caused by excessive computer usage. the lecturer acknowledges this point, emphasizing the potential impact on children's eyes. finally, the dialogue ends with the lecturer requesting student (y) to read the next question, setting the stage for further discussion and exploration of ideas. role model, lecturer, or colleague lecturers assume the role of exemplary figures during classroom teaching and learning activities. consequently, it is incumbent upon them to strive towards comprehending and recognizing the challenges students encounter. to this end, lecturers take note of and classify words that pose difficulties in pronunciation while students engage in discourse. the lecturer acknowledges and articulates these arduous words, with students subsequently repeating them. following the student's completion of the reading task, the lecturer guides them in identifying problematic words from the text they have read. the lecturer identifies and enunciates the challenging words, with students repeating them in turn. (29) lecturer : “so, based on the text, what do you think about difficult words to pronounce when you read?” students : “identified the pronunciation of the difficult words.” lecturer : “they have identified the difficult words pronounced by the students when they read the passage. marked the pronunciation of the difficult words and grouped them in the table. there are health, usage, owned, social, sites, safety, campaigned, necessary, software, logger, enough, done, privacy, multifunctional, tendency, and acquainted.” (32) lecturer : “pronounced the difficult word's identification followed by the students.” in the session mentioned above, the lecturer discusses the pronunciation of difficult words encountered when reading a text. the students are able to identify and pronounce these difficult words. the lecturer acknowledges their effort and proceeds to mark the pronunciation of the identified difficult words, organizing them into a table. the mentioned difficult words include "health, usage, owned, social, sites, safety, campaigned, necessary, software, logger, enough, done, privacy, multifunctional, tendency, and acquainted.” moreover, the lecturer then pronounces the identification of the difficult words, with the students likely providing the correct pronunciations. this activity helps improve their understanding and pronunciation skills related to challenging words encountered in the text. meaningful practice in a learning community in the given activity, the lecturer organizes the students into four groups, each comprising four english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 497 students. a group leader is appointed for each group to facilitate and guide the discussions. (47) lecturer : “and then now, we have come to discuss the text based on some development questions so i will divide the students into four groups as group leaders. group one is the student (k), and then group two is the student (v), group three is the student (h), and group four is the student (c). ok. so, last, you have to count from one up to four.” students : “started to count from one up to four (1-4)” lecturer : “please move based on the numbers counting in each of the groups.” students : “i moved to join and formed the group in a circle form to have a discussion.” (54) lecturer : “before you present the result of your discussions, i would like to explain the rule of giving. so, there will be a moderator to organize your presentation, and then the moderator will tell the presenter who read to answer the question. the first question will be answered by... and the second question will be answered by ... or the third question will be answered by ... and then after the presenters have answered the questions and then the moderator will take the time and then will invite other groups to like to interrupt or to comment.” at this activitystage, a lecturer is conducting a discussion based on a text and decides to divide the students into four groups: group one represented by student (k), group two represented by student (v), group three represented by student (h), and group four represented by student (c). the lecturer instructs the students to count from one up to four, and the students follow the instructions accordingly. after the counting, the lecturer instructs the students to move based on the numbers they counted in each group. the students move and form their respective groups in a circular form, preparing themselves for a discussion. before the students present the results of their discussions, the lecturer introduces a rule regarding the process of giving presentations. the lecturer explains that there will be a moderator assigned to organize the presentation. the moderator will instruct the presenters on who should read and answer each question. the lecturer provides an example, stating that the first question will be answered by a specific group member, the second question by another group member, and so on. after the presenters have answered the questions, the moderator will keep track of time and then invite other groups to interrupt or comment on the presentation. at the end, to summarize, the lecturer divides the students into groups, assigns a moderator to organize the presentation, explains the order of answering questions, and allows other groups to participate in the discussion through interruptions or comments. the findings presented in this report pertain to the observed learning activities conducted by the researcher, focusing on different topics in each session. out of the four topics examined, the researcher selected the fourth session, which explored the theme of controlling children's use of computers. this topic was chosen to exemplify the four components of multiliteracy pedagogy. however, it was discovered that not all subcategories within the situated practice of multiliteracy were fully addressed during the teaching and learning process in the classroom. situated practice serves as the initial component of multiliteracy and is implemented through various learning activities. within this component, five subcategories are included. four were adequately addressed among these subcategories, while one subcategory remained unfulfilled, namely the utilization of students' mother tongue. lecturers need to incorporate the use of students' mother tongues in their teaching and learning activities. moreover, lecturers strive to motivate students by sharing their own experiences using visual media within the multiliteracy component. this approach aligns with the notion that students benefit from being encouraged in their learning endeavors. the lecturer employed motivation as a mikhael misa multiliteracies pedagogy: a case study of critical reading in elt classroom by implementing situated practice 498 fundamental concept in this study (main, 2011). the lecturer also sought to motivate students by eliciting their experiences through relevant questions and visual stimuli. these images and questions were designed to connect students to their experiences outside the school environment. students draw upon their experiences, media exposure, and other resources to shape their understanding of personal development. following this, the lecturer prompted students to guess the topic of discussion, presenting various options and eventually revealing the designated topic through slide presentations on the wall. moreover, lecturers serve as exemplary figures in the classroom, setting an example for students in their learning activities. in line with this, the lecturer takes measures to identify and categorize words that pose pronunciation difficulties when students engage in reading tasks. additionally, the lecturer provides corrections for students' pronunciation errors and guides them in pronouncing challenging words individually and in group settings. during group discussions, students can share questions relevant to their discussions. this promotes the exchange of experiential values among students and underscores the significance of collaborative sharing and expression of student experiences (meng, 2016). to foster meaningful practice within the learning community, the lecturer divides students into four groups to discuss the assigned questions from the text. each group consists of four students, ensuring active participation from all students in seeking and addressing the questions assigned to their respective groups. by incorporating activities that motivate students and draw upon their previous experiences, students can tap into their prior knowledge on the topic and enhance their learning process. prior knowledge acquired from home, school, community, and culture can be valuable resources for students to contribute to their language learning endeavors (pahl, k., & rowsell, 2005). this allows lecturers to serve as role models in facilitating these activities. conclusion this research study aimed to investigate the implementation of situated practice in multiliteracy pedagogy through students' critical reading skills. the findings revealed a significant enhancement in students' critical thinking abilities due to engaging in a series of learning activities within the multiliteracy pedagogy framework. the importance of motivating students through engaging strategies, such as visual media and thought-provoking questions, the role of the lecturer as a model in identifying and addressing pronunciation difficulties, and the benefits of meaningful practice in a learning community through group discussions, designated roles, fostering active participation and collaborative learning. these activities effectively fostered analytical thinking among students. based on the compelling findings of this study, it is highly recommended that the research highlights the value of implementing situated practice in multiliteracy pedagogy to enhance critical reading skills and analytical thinking among students. the implications for english language teaching and learning include pedagogical innovation, teacher professional development, curriculum and material design, and fostering collaborative learning. future research can explore comparative studies to assess the effectiveness of multiliteracy pedagogy, longitudinal studies to examine skill sustainability, and the development of assessment tools to measure critical reading skills. additionally, investigating the application of situated practice in diverse contexts would provide insights into generalizability and adaptability. references al-husban, n. a. 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(2022). an exploration of a novice kindergarten teacher’s enactment of multiliteracies pedagogy during the pandemic: a case study of a virtual kindergarten classroom. 30th international conference on computers in education conference, icce 2022, 527–536. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 461 necessary or compulsory: students’ perception on scientific writing and everything in between siti hadianti english education department, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas terbuka, tangerang selatan, indonesia email: sitihadianti@ecampus.ut.ac.id benny nugraha english education department, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas terbuka, tangerang selatan, indonesia email: bnugraha@ecampus.ut.ac.id ika tri yunianika english education department, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas terbuka, tangerang selatan, indonesia email: ika@ecampus.ut.ac.id apa citation: hadianti, s., nugraha, b., & yunianika, i. t. (2023). necessary or compulsory: students’ perception on scientific writing and everything in between. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 461-468. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.7319 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 27-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction writing, as one of the important elements in social life, is indisputable. it has been known as the mark of certain civilizations. from time to time, writing skill is placed as a sign of intellectuality as well as the high social status of the holder. according to graham (2019), writing is a versatile tool that can be used for a wide range of objectives. it is a significant skill for students’ performance in the classroom and affects their personal and professional achievement after graduating from school. it affects the psychological factors of learners (suastra and manggo, 2020) and is used to share information, maintain relationships, influence others, and support learning. mclean (2022) states that writing helps students to remember what they learn and boost their understanding of the materials. due to the urgency of its presence, writing has been put into the curriculum and taught in higher education as a requirement for students to be mastered. in line with the importance of writing, academic institutions start to train their students by putting writing as one of the compulsory courses that need to be taken. for example, in universitas terbuka (ut) indonesia. ut is the only open university in the country that employs open and distance learning (odl) which is established to respond to the needs for higher education worldwide (zuhairi, 2019). at ut, scientific writing is one of the types of writing subjects that students must enroll in. scientific writing is part of academic writing skills where it is done for academic purposes (fang, 2021). according to fatimah (2018), the optimal curriculum for academic writing courses includes lessons that prepare students to write scientifically. the university put academic writing because it can bring several benefits. it is proven by research abstract: the presence of scientific writing as a new compulsory course attracts educational institutions, including universitas terbuka (ut). not only because the course is a new course, which means many possible and valuable reactions to it, but also due to the puzzling condition surrounding it. the goal of this study is to observe the perception of ut students on scientific writing. to make it easier to follow, we limit our concern on two research questions and one hypothesis. the first question is on how students perceive scientific writing courses, and the second question is do students consider the course necessary or compulsory. on the other side, we promote a hypothesis that argues that students will perceive the scientific course as necessary yet fail to internalize the skill from the course. this study uses a mixed method which can be utilized to answer the research question as well as the hypothesis. the sample is 47 participants that enroll in a scientific writing class using a nested sampling design. the result shows that 3 levels of perception can also answer the research question such as high, moderate, and low perception. it can be concluded that the students have a solid perception of the importance of the course since it contains the necessary knowledge for the student. keywords: mixed method; perception; scientific writing. mailto:sitihadianti@ecampus.ut.ac.id mailto:bnugraha@ecampus.ut.ac.id mailto:ika@ecampus.ut.ac.id siti hadianti, benny nugraha, & ika tri yunianika necessary or compulsory: students’ perception on scientific writing and everything in between 462 from tomak (2022) that students are benefited from the course for their academic studies. they began to be able to communicate themselves more clearly by using appropriate terminology and precise sentence structures. the interview result endorses defazio, jones, tennant & hook, 2010; holtzman, elliot, biber, & sanders, 2005; saidy, 2015 (scott, 2020) research where they also found that students' degrees of academic writing proficiency have a significant impact on both academic accomplishment levels and postgraduation success. due to the importance of that course, we conclude that this course is necessary to be taught to students. despite the abundance of assumptions on the importance of writing, it is not always perceived positively. several studies show otherwise teaching writing is considered less important. moses (2019) categorized writing as a complex skill for students because they need to have enough vocabulary, good spelling, an understanding of grammar, readiness of students, and exposure to reading texts. moreover, darancık (2018) showed that according to the perceptions of undergraduate students, the most effective skill to master is speaking (69) and listening (19), while writing (10%) and reading (2%) are considered less important, of the four basic communication skills. from there, we can see that writing is considered less important compared to the rest of the skills. furthermore, in indonesia where english is a foreign language, learners usually have some problems when trying to put together a sentence, a paragraph, or a text, students typically run into several difficulties. students have difficulty in connecting one sentence with another because of the limitation of knowledge about the topic (suryanto and sari, 2021). there are certain issues with text writing where pupils who do not write in english often have trouble when their teacher asks them to record their views or experiences. (alisha et al, 2019). according to andira and trisno (2021), students' anxiety in writing in english is one of their anxiety patterns because they are terrified of making mistakes. they emphasized that the pupils might produce poor writing because of their worry. it is relevant to the fact that when students are not enjoying it or are psychologically under pressure, the real potential will not emerge or improve. based on the discussion, can we still consider writing necessary or it is just (forced) compulsory without knowing that directing our students to take this course is like putting them on a brink. this is the academic puzzle we want to answer. the writing skills of indonesian university students who are studying english as a foreign language (efl) have been the subject of some studies. for instance, toba, et al. (2019), who conducted a study in samarinda, stated that university students face difficulties in writings aspects such as vocabulary, structure, content, organization, and mechanics. another study was done by aunurrahman et al (2017) in pontianak, west kalimantan who made the observation that the writing control of efl students in relation to the language and structural elements in argumentative essay writing was still restricted, particularly in terms of fostering critical thinking. finally, ariyanti & fitriana (2017) found that the quality of efl students’ essay writing ability was classified as poor when they assessed students in a private university in the city of samarinda, east kalimantan. although normatively, writing is an important subject since it can robust students’ performance either as a student or job seekers. empirical evidence shows scientific writing can bring bad benefits such as the possibility of anxiety for students (sa’adah and ali, 2022). moreover, several studies present the fact that students have a low level of achievement in an academic writing course, despite the claims from several prior studies and theories that academic writing is necessary. due to this phenomenon, we want to explore students’ primary assumptions toward the course. do they perceive the course as a necessary course to boost their instrumental skills, or do they just see it as a compulsory course that they need to deal with to be able to earn a degree? to investigate the perspective, we develop two research questions. first, how do students perceive scientific writing as one of the compulsory courses? second, is scientific writing essential for students? academic writing is a form of writing where the writer composes a scientific work. by means, the process of reporting the fact is based on a certain method. it is in contrast with the regular form of writing which is free from any methodological constraint. according to alamsyah (madjid et al, 2017), the following are some traits of academic writing: (1) discusses a research finding (factual objective), or the facts in light of the hypothesis under study, (2) systematic and methodical, referring to the employment of specific techniques and stages that are ordered and regulated when discussing issues, (3) scientific writings that employ the scientific barrel, or the barrel of the formal and raw scientific language. from this english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 463 concept, it is understandable that academic writing is not a simple process. we need to follow certain rules and those need to learn to create a good or at least fulfilled the criteria of academic writing. in addition, in teaching academic writing, various approaches are available. one of the strategies is using cooperative learning. at arab international university, shammout (2020) investigated whether cooperative learning improved the writing abilities of syrian efl students. along with improving their writing abilities, efl students benefitted from the cooperative learning environment by developing their linguistic proficiency. meanwhile, gao (2023) conducted a study to examine the joint benefit of providing and receiving feedback in academic writing. this study analyzed two drafts of literature reviews from 50 postgraduate students. the results showed that those bilateral peer reviews significantly improved students writing development. there is more selection of academic teaching methods or strategies to increase students’ skills but how do we know that our students perceive the learning in a respected manner? we can always provide good learning material, yet we cannot force them to like it if they do not prefer it from the very beginning. therefore, understanding their perception is important. through the psychological process of perception, which is in accordance with the experience gained through the five senses, people can filter reactions into good or negative views. responses are obtained through the processes of selection, interpretation, and reaction (erin & maharani, 2018). from the concept, we realize that perception is internal recognition that particular people give to certain things, phenomena, or in this case learning processes. in understanding perception, the stakeholder can filter which area needs to be improved, the type of learning that probably is judged as compulsory but less necessary for the personal well-being of the student. then, the stakeholder can plan or re-plan a better strategy which can finally improve students’ academic writing skills. for instance, we take an example of the importance and concern of students’ perceptions as it will generate a positive result for our students (edgerton and mckechnie, 2023). they claimed that students’ perceptions about learning in school significantly impact their academic achievement. regarding academic writing, it is an important or compulsory course that students need to take to proceed to the next level. in the semester 2022.2, it is the first time ut held a scientific writing class in the form of independent learning, an online tutorial (tuton), and a webinar tutorial (tuweb) combination. all the students must take the course, or we can say that it is compulsory. for students in the english education study program, the scientific writing article needs to be written in english, unlike students in other departments where they can write in bahasa indonesia. to join the class, students have to login into e-learning and check all the activities, assignments, and tuweb schedules. there are 14 learning activities consisting of independent learning, tuton, and four times tuweb. tuton is done asynchronously while tuweb is conducted synchronously where the tutor and the students meet virtually in a certain schedule that lasts for two hours. however, it empirically brings challenges because students must spare some time for attending the tutorial. the goal of this course is for students to create a good scientific writing article and publish it in the ut repository or elsewhere. taking all the elaborative explanation of the necessity of the course as well as the empirical evidence where it can generate a negative effect on students. in the context of the university level, the writers argue that students will see the necessity, however, fails to internalize the skill. method in this study, nested sampling is used, which is a specific sampling strategy that is applied in the context of sequential quantitative-qualitative studies (tanner, 2023). it entails a sequence of steps in which participants from each new sample are chosen from a previous segment of the sample. researchers used both quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate the phenomenon. the design works to capture more integrative and comprehensive findings regarding quantitative and qualitative data since the research questions can only be revealed using both data. at first, researchers collected the quantitative data using a closed-ended questionnaire. the technique is worked to test the hypothesis and answer the two research questions. after that, we sorted the participants who answered the questionnaire to be included in the selected semistructured interview. the participants became the source for qualitative data, and it can be used to support the quantitative data as well as work for triangulating the findings. qualitative analysis is applied to explore deeper the phenomenon that has been investigated. a semi-structured interview is constructed and siti hadianti, benny nugraha, & ika tri yunianika necessary or compulsory: students’ perception on scientific writing and everything in between 464 addressed to the selected participant. creswell (2018) claims that mixed-method qualitative data typically contains open-ended questions without predefined answers, whereas quantitative data typically contains closed-ended questions like those on surveys or psychological tests. in this research, we draw the data from 47 participants that enrolled in the scientific writing class. all the students are students from universitas terbuka, majoring in english education. a nested sampling design is chosen since it can connect the link between quantitative and qualitative sampling. forty-eight students already responded to the 16 questions in the questionnaire which are specifically divided into 3 major categories: necessity, skill mastery, and learning process. the divisions are important to capture how students perceive as well as to prove the hypothesis. after extracting data from the questionnaire, we develop an interview protocol that fits with the process of collecting the needed information and can be used to dig deeper into students’ perceptions of scientific writing courses. three students purposively were pointed as interviewees which were considered the most appropriate to answer and deliver the important information that researchers need. results and discussion quantitative analysis in drawing the result of this study, we firmly classify three types of perceptions regarding the first result question and extract the data from the participants. a questionnaire on the perception is priorly delivered to the students. table 1. questionnaire statement (adopted from cai in alhojailan (2021)) necessity (least important-most important) no. statement 1. how important do you think scientific writing skills are to your current graduate studies? 2. how important do you think scientific writing is to your future career? 3. how important it is to have your scientific work published during your graduate study? skill mastery (very easy – very difficult) no. statement 1. writing abstract in your article 2. writing introductions 3. searching for appropriate literature using databases and resources 4. summarizing / paraphrasing the statement from other resources 5. designing the research methods 6. writing up the methods section 7. summarizing and presenting the data 8. elaborating the discussions section on the article 9. writing conclusions 10. writing references / bibliography 11. writing coherent paragraphs (logically or aesthetically ordered or integrated) 12. using proper academic language and vocabulary 13. using the proper grammar such as correct tenses, agreements, reporting verbs, punctuations, and prepositions learning process (very agree-very disagree) 1. e-learning (tuton and tuweb) is the suitable platform to learn scientific writing 2. the activity of tuton and tuweb in scientific writing course is easy to be followed 3. there is no difficulties in uploading all the assignments. 4. the tutor is very active in responding questions or giving feedback. 5. the scientific writing guidebook is clear and understandable 6. the tutor attended webinar tutorial (tuweb) on time 7. the tutor assistance on 4x tuweb is useful 8. the plagiarism feature on e-learning is helpful and easy to use after analyzing the data, we concluded several findings that can answer the first result question ”how do students perceive scientific writing as one of the compulsory courses?” and the second question “is scientific writing essential for the students?” the result can be seen in the table below: table 2. mean and deviation standard categories mean deviation standard necessity 4.43 0.76 skill mastery 3.07 0.81 learning process 1.98 1.24 the first finding shows that a 4.43 mean score was gained which confirmed the possible english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 465 assumption that a high positive perception toward the necessity of the scientific course. the argument is taken from landell (ghazal et al, 2018) that the range of the likert score can be interpreted as the following table. table 3. mean score interpretation mean score category 1.00 – 2.33 low 2.34 – 3.67 moderate 3.68 – 5.00 high the second finding is related to the skill mastery of scientific writing. out of 47 participants, approximately 3.07 is the mean score. it is interesting to see that even though the students see the necessity of learning, they perceive the moderate value of internalizing scientific writing skills. the first and second findings in this study are not only able to answer how students perceive scientific writing but also endorse the hypothesis we have structured in this research. although students see the necessity of scientific writing, they (seem to) fail to internalize the skill due to their moderate perception of the learning material. in line with the finding above, the last finding shade light on the possible assumption on the backstory of the moderate perception toward the learning process. it displayed only a 1.98 value we can get from the questionnaire regarding students’ perception toward learning management. the score is considered a low perception. it means that the moderate process of learning is possible and can also come from low perceived learning management which students see in the learning management itself. finally, we can see the pattern that first students see scientific writing as a necessary skill, yet they perceived the learning process as not that important and they poorly perceive learning management. of course, we need to go deeper into the case, therefore we conducted a qualitative method as it is also necessary to validate the process through triangulation and see the causal inference. to sum up, we can see two salient patterns from the result. the first pattern is related to the perspective of scientific writing course necessity. the second pattern is the level of students in absorbing the material and experiencing the subject. based on the quantitative descriptive inference shows the statistical fact that students have a highly positive perception toward the necessity of the course, however, they only have moderate even low for skill internalization and learning management. it means that there are unique patterns revealed after analyzing the data. the students appeal to see the necessity, yet they do not absorb and enjoy the course. if we connect it with both research questions. it answered the first research question that there are three level on how students perceive the course and students do see the subject as necessary. meanwhile for hypothesis, it is found that students ‘perception on scientific writing courses as essential for them, but they are not effectively absorbing the material. it is also in line with a hypothesis which researchers had developed that students feel it is necessary to learn the course but fail to internalize the skill. qualitative analysis to supplement the finding, we also contend with qualitative data. addressing 4 selected participants to be interviewed, we try to explore the backstory of their perception of scientific writing. it is found that the majority positively perceived the necessity of the course. it was a good sign that the students’ perception indicates a linear sense with the hypothesis where students recognize the importance of the course. we can take a look at one example related to a question, asking their opinion on whether scientific writing is necessary. all interviewees said it is either for skill improvement or to elevate job opportunity reason. furthermore, the students are asked do they still want to have the course if they can choose. once again, all the participants see the importance of the course and proceed to have the course in the future. by mean that they did not see this course as solely compulsory. they do see the urgency of the course. however, a solid response tends to diverge within the third question when they have been asked about the difficulty level of the course as it is marked by a previous study. the response shows that, out of four, thinks it is not difficult although it comes with a condition. for example, one interviewee said: “not so difficult, because whether or not a material is difficult depends on the delivery and explanation of each supervisor. and i got a very competent mentor, she was able to provide very extraordinary explanations and guidance, so that i could understand the material well.” (interviewee) from the response, the availability of a professional tutor is a must. the student implicitly recognizes the difficulty of the course, yet the responsive and skillful tutor who can sense students' feelings of loss during the class is the key siti hadianti, benny nugraha, & ika tri yunianika necessary or compulsory: students’ perception on scientific writing and everything in between 466 to neglecting the fact that the course is indeed difficult for students. the second and third responses also indicate a similar perception. for instance, one student claimed that the material is not essentially difficult since the teacher actively helps the students as the script below: interviewer: “is it difficult to learn the material in a scientific writing course? why?” interviewee: “no, because the teacher is very helpful.” the third interviewee not only showed that a competent tutor is important but also an essential factor that can lead students to negative or positive perceptions of whether the subject is difficult or not. the fact that the material is difficult will not be perceived that way as long as the tutor knows what he/she is doing. the tutor in the scientific writing class tends to move their role into more centric within the learning process and it happens since the students rely on them in solving the confusion and tension related to the difficult subject. from that point of view, we can see that the subject is indeed difficult, and students are experiencing the problem. however, the tutor can bridge the gap well. it will be a different case if the teacher is not as good as he/she is supposed to be. the important position of the tutor in the learning process also shows how students answer the question “mention the things that you think is not good in term of learning management”. although the function of the question is to assess their perception of the learning management that has been maintained by learning systems such as moodle. however, students tend to connect it with the role of the teacher. one of the participants claims that there is no problem during the first course in the last semester since the tutor is competent. once again, the core concern of the scientific course learning process is related to the tutor. it is also shown by another participant who links all issues of learning to the tutor-teaching process. the last response related to the question is more direct and clearer regarding the difficulty of the lesson. the interviewee said it is difficult since this is new course as it is stated below: interviewer: “is it difficult to learn the material in a scientific course? why?” interviewee: “i think yes because it is new for me. so i have to force myself to read and write more.” from the discussion above, several findings are underlined. first, the necessity of the course is indisputable. it means that they can convincingly answer the first research question. second, despite the positive perception toward the course, students feel the difficulty of the lesson and it means they face an issue to internalize the material. however, it seems to be vague due to the tutor's competence in handling the learning process. third, we can also see how central the role of the tutor is during the scientific writing process which can generate advantages as well as disadvantages. the advantages can be seen from the tutor's ability to relieve the tension during the learning and help the teacher to focus on the benefit and ignore the difficulty. however, it also somehow prevents students from being more independent learning since they will rely too much on the tutor which is not the students centered learning. the development of learning is supposed to bring students into autonomous learning where the students will keep improving even though the formal learning process has ended. the last finding shows that the hypothesis somehow captures the pattern where students will see the necessity, however, fails to internalize the skills. due to the existence of a competent teacher, students neglect the fact they unsuccessfully absorbed the writing skill. the argument meets with quantitative data findings that show only moderate perception toward the internalization of scientific writing skills by the students. conclusion scientific writing in universitas terbuka indonesia as a new and compulsory course is trapped under a puzzle notion of whether the course is necessary, or whether it is compulsory. this study explores the phenomenon and finds several interesting findings which are in line with the designated research questions as well as the hypothesis. the first finding proves that the hypothesis is somewhat in line with the fact that students realize the necessity of the course. however, they face trouble in internalizing the skill from the course. from quantitative data, students show three types of perspectives that can be used to answer both research questions. the first research question is on how students perceive scientific writing as a compulsory course. it is found that the students have a solid perception of the importance of the course since it contains necessary knowledge for the student. although when absorbing the learning material into a useful writing skill, students are facing a problem and it happens due to learning english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 467 management from the technological teaching support area. even though they claim, based on a qualitative in-depth interview, that the students praise a high contribution to the competent tutor. the existence of a competent tutor based on the interview result can help students overcome the learning barrier. the second question which asks does scientific writing is crucial is firmly answered yes and it is endorsed by quantitative and qualitative data. the quantitative claim a high perspective on the necessity of the course while the first question in an in-depth interview said a similar view. as the purpose of this study is to test and answer the research question on puzzling notions that occur in writing scientific courses, it has met the objective. nevertheless, it has several flaws that can be a good start for gap spotting in a similar type of research. we can see that this study applied mixed methods since we want to explore comprehensively the issue, yet it does mean the best method to use. solely using qualitative research or quantitative research with a big homogeneous sample can capture another side that this research missed. in terms of external validity, of course, this research is something to be concerned about, since this research is a case study. all the samples are taken from an environment that experiences a certain phenomenon that is interesting to explore. but of course, this research is quite promising in terms of internal validity since it can go deeper to the core of the issue. references alhojailan, a.i. 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(2022). the benefits of “academic writing” course for the freshmen in english-mediuminstruction departments in a turkish state university. journal of education for life, 36(22), 325-338. 10.33308/26674874.2022362415 zuhairi, a., karthikeyan, n., and priyadarshana, s.t. (2020). supporting students to succeed in open and distance learning in the open university of sri lanka and universitas terbuka indonesia. asian association of open universities journal, 15(1), 13-35. https://doi.org/10.1108/aaouj09-2019-0038 http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-24.1.4004 https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=navaratnasamy%20karthikeyan https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=saman%20thushara%20priyadarshana https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/2414-6994 https://doi.org/10.1108/aaouj-09-2019-0038 https://doi.org/10.1108/aaouj-09-2019-0038 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 365 the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices muhammad handi gunawan (corresponding author) english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: handi_gunawan@upi.edu eisha sabila dieni hanifa english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: eishasabila2@upi.edu aninda putri gunawan english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: anindapegee@upi.edu didi suherdi english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: suherdi_d@upi.edu apa citation: gunawan, m. h., hanifa, e. s. d., gunawan, a. p., & suherdi, d. (2023). the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 365-378. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.8225 received: 17-02-2023 accepted: 23-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction listening is a crucial skill for english language learners (ells), and it is often the first skill they focus on when learning the language (djabborova, 2020). however, ells often have limited exposure to listening activities outside the classroom (tsai, 2019). in many language classes, listening instruction primarily revolves around answering comprehension questions without promoting interaction or reflection (newton & nation, 2020; rintaningrum, 2018). furthermore, teachers often select listening materials without considering the specific needs of their learners. to address these challenges, extensive listening (el) activities are implemented in the classroom. el refers to various listening practices that provide learners with ample exposure to understandable and enjoyable listening input (chang et al., 2019; gonulal, 2020). these activities can take different forms, such as teacher dictations, read-aloud sessions, or leisurely listening outside the classroom. the key aspect of extensive listening is to engage learners in meaningful listening experiences. however, a significant concern in implementing extensive listening is finding suitable materials for learners (gavenila et al., 2021). it is crucial to select materials that not only make listening enjoyable but also contribute to the development of learners' listening comprehension skills. according to ivone and renandya (2019), the success of the extensive reading (er) strategy, which promotes learning by doing, has prompted the development of extensive listening. reading and listening are the receptive skills that learners need to receive and understand (djabborova, 2020). in addition, the recent trend of listening is not limited to practising listening as a receptive skill but also an active skill, which is called active listening. referring to the research conducted by tabieh et al. (2020), the skill of listening involves abstract: extensive listening (el) is a recent study whose development is sparked by extensive reading (er). however, not many studies have been conducted on the implementation of extensive listening in the classroom using digital tools provided on the internet such as google sites. this study aims to examine students’ perceptions of the use of google sites in extensive listening classes. it was conducted using a qualitative design by involving 18 second-year students at a higher education level. the students’ classroom reflections and the semi-structured style of the interview were included as the research instruments. the results showed that most of the students believed that google sites is useful to enhance their creativity and motivate them to be actively involved in extensive listening activities. keywords: extensive listening; google sites; students’ voices. muhammad handi gunawan, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, aninda putri gunawan, & didi suherdi the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices 366 more than just hearing sounds and understanding their meanings; it also requires mental effort in the form of inference, analysis, and interpretation of data. to put it simply, listening demands a higher thinking process with integrated skills such as analysing and interpreting received information. having said that, the frequent practices that have been implemented in er should be conducted in el as well. moreover, since el is seen as the sibling of extensive reading (er), the goals, advantages, and guiding principles of er can also be used to describe el (melani, 2020). however, the practice of el has not been widely implemented like er. thus, mayora (2017) stated that extensive listening can be applied by adapting the five principles of extensive reading, such as quantity, comprehensibility, learner-centeredness, meaningorientation, and accountability. from the findings of the study by muchtar (2019) and yulia (2018), it is revealed that the most widely adapted er principles are the quantity–where students must be given exposure to texts as much as possible, comprehensibility–where the texts for the reading activities should not be difficult for learners to understand. furthermore, since the principle of er is related to meaning-orientation, it means that the purpose of texts for learners should be significance, interest, and enjoyment rather than linguistic substance because learners read for meaning rather than form. quoting the principles adapted from extensive reading, in extensive listening, learners are highly encouraged to listen to large amounts of listening audio that match the listening comprehension and linguistics level of the learners. those principles aimed to trigger learners’ enjoyment in listening practices. for the implementation in the classroom, teachers can give the learners an instruction to have an extensive viewing. extensive viewing instructs students to watch television, movies, and videos for l2 learning goals (masrai, 2020; pujadas & muñoz, 2019). the extensive viewing implementation should stick to the principles, one of which is quantity. the most important component in helping l2 students strengthen their language skills is quantity (metruk, 2019). therefore, considering the success of extensive reading, the practice of extensive listening should be able to promote listening to a large number of spoken texts so learners can gain significant improvement in their listening ability and overall language learning. aside from quantity, the essence of extensive listening is the learners' ability to comprehend without the assistance of teachers. given that extensive listening is mostly done outside the classroom, learners should be able to comprehend the listening materials with their capabilities. on that account, extensive listening practice should be enjoyable and advantageous for the learners’ listening comprehension, not incomprehension (yurko & styfanyshyn, 2020). moreover, the distinctive aspect of extensive and intensive listening is centred around how learners apprehend the listening materials. most learners find intensive listening difficult because they listen to materials with difficult vocabulary, and it leads to them not enjoying the listening practice. hence, the use of simpler resources will make it easier for students to understand large amounts of understandable language. aside from that, the adapted principles from extensive reading, as explained by renandya et al. (2019) and saraswaty (2018), state that teachers have a crucial role in assisting learners in extensive listening. during an extensive listening activity, teachers must aid students in continuously listening to learn and learning to listen. in other words, teachers should create a supportive learning environment for students to conduct extensive listening activities. in addition, teachers should also act as role models for the students. having said that, teachers should demonstrate how to conduct and sustain extensive listening properly in the long run. the reasons why extensive listening should be implemented are because el gives various benefits in a language learning classroom. quoted from a previous study by zeng and goh (2018), el assists students in expanding their knowledge and adjusting their learning needs. in other words, through extensive listening, students are able to actually listen more and to concentrate entirely on the subject matter (murphy, 2020). additionally, learners have freedom in choosing their learning materials based on their own pace. along with the insufficiency of students' necessary adherence to more user-friendly tools to sustain their learning activities—particularly in extensive listening activities—one of the most serious barriers that each of them must face is the covid-19 pandemic, which has also been explained by kusuma (2022), that it has devastated the majority of the industries in the world. according to mahyoob (2020), education represents the only sector that has entirely transitioned to online mode in most nations all over the world after more than two years. consequently, it is indisputable that, during the pandemic, online learning was the best solution for continuing education, particularly in higher education. the english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 367 obstacles confronted by ell students necessitate their lecturers to look for the most suitable methods to undertake an effective learning process and environment, as learners are rarely satisfied (landrum et al., 2021) and cannot fulfil the expected progress in language learning outcomes by persisting in online learning (esra & sevilen, 2021). aside from the difficulties of selecting suitable technological devices, systems, and applications used during the class, the application of effective methods and strategies suited to online learning in listening classes is also challenging for the learners (susilowati, 2020). as a result, another innovative product that enables the students to put forth their best contribution in extensive listening activities—especially during the covid-19 pandemic—is desperately needed. to facilitate learners’ enjoyment in practising listening skills, researchers are seeking an alternative using google sites. kompen et al. (2019) argued that google sites is one of the products provided by google as a tool for creating a personalised website. in the learning and teaching context, google sites can be utilised for classroom activities. learners, for example, can submit assignments to google sites, and lecturers can view the submitted works on the website. on top of that, google sites can accommodate and display various types of information, such as text, images, links, or videos, all in one place (mukti et al., 2020). hence, the main difference between google sites and the learning management systems (lms) such as google classroom is that google sites provides more freedom for the learners to personalise their site. meanwhile, google classroom is the virtual extension of physical classrooms (sudarsana et al., 2019). with that being said, google classroom offers teachers and students online learning facilities to ask questions, discuss, and create assignments similar to those in a physical classroom. nonetheless, google sites accommodates a space for students to decorate their websites based on their likings and creativity. the statement is proven by how users can combine various media into one site that can be shared according to user needs with google sites (mukti et al., 2020). to put it another way, google sites offer learners more flexibility in managing their learning process. the flexibility provided by google sites is in line with the main goal of extensive listening (el), which is to make students the centre of the learning process (gavenila et al., 2021). other digital tools that can be used to accommodate extensive listening are students response systems (srs) such as socrative and mentimeter. open-ended and multiple choice questions can both be made using srs. open-ended questions can be used to collect data such as the names of sources chosen, individualised progress reports, and comments on difficulties. quantifiable information can be assessed using multiple choice questions, such as the quantity of listening time per week or the level of difficulty of the sources. when employed in conjunction with an el activity, student response systems offer the teacher and students a flexible way to collect reporting and tracking data throughout the course, which is also in line with the purpose of utilising google sites in extensive listening. the outcomes can be used later in the course for formative and summative assessments, class discussions, teacher-student interviews, and reflection (lam, 2023). in conclusion, learning and teaching activities should continue despite the current conditions that require universities all across the world to achieve their goals through digital transformation (adedoyin & soykan, 2020). hence, the use of google sites is suitable for students because most of them are considered digital natives. cohen et al. (2020) argued that digital natives are people who were born and raised in the digital era. to put it another way, the students are expected to be digital savvy and adaptable to technological development. thus, the new features offered in google sites that do not exist in google classroom can be easily utilised by students to accommodate their learning process in extensive listening classrooms. thus, google sites is highly effective for learners who can adapt to utilising new technology and elaborating it with their learning in the classroom. method the study employed a qualitative case study design (ebneyamini & sadeghi-moghadam, 2018). the research instruments are as follows: (1) a student reflection based on the experience of each participant during the whole course, which is seen as the input of delivered data and considered the primary emphasis of the analysis; and (2) an individual interview to acquire perceptions of the students on the use of google sites in extensive listening activities. the study first began in february 2022 and ended in july 2022. this one-semester research project was undertaken in the english language education department at one of the public state universities in west java, indonesia. the location was fully considered to be selected since all the members of the research team are in the muhammad handi gunawan, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, aninda putri gunawan, & didi suherdi the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices 368 department, enabling easy access to the research site. in particular, in the teaching of listening, there were three required courses offered: listening i (for general communication), listening ii (in a professional context), and listening iii (for academic purposes). the current research, called "utilisation of google sites in extensive listening classrooms: students’ voices", was part of the listening iii course (listening for academic purposes i), which puts emphasis on listening in academic settings. students would learn about and discuss content from a variety of academic fields— topics that speak to the world they live in. the course typically lasted around 100 minutes per week and could be taken either synchronously or asynchronously. the lecturer covered topics found in introductory university courses such as intensive listening, extensive listening, and global englishes. the topics were designed to appeal to a wide range of student backgrounds and were conducive to class discussions that draw on multiple perspectives. all the students were required to write their extensive listening journal (elj) after the lecturer decided what topic should be discussed for each week. the journal consisted of their summary and reaction to the video they watched, as well as their self-reflection after doing the extensive listening activities with different minimum words for each indicator. second-year students took part in this research as the participants. for ethical reasons, which means protecting the confidential information of all the participants (audette et al., 2020), they were all assigned pseudonyms throughout the article that combined numbers and letters, such as s (student), r (reflection), and i (interview). out of 4 classes, the selected one had about 18 students enrolled (7 males and 11 females), whose ages ranged from 19 to 21 years. this class was selected because the lecturer of this class was a member of this research team—allowing easy access to approach the students. each of them is required to type up their course reflections, while not all students were engaged in the interview instrument. the course reflections were distributed to the students by the end of the semester and they were asked to fill in the reflections in one week. the reflections were gathered collectively in google drive. only five of the 18 participants were carefully chosen for a further interview, supplying more-detailed elaboration and/or additional insights since their submissions were declared questionable and necessitated further background information to strengthen the data collected from students’ reflections. figure 1. example of student’s course reflective journal english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 369 on the other hand, the interview sessions were held using a semi-structured interview technique. as already stated by brown and danaher (2019), the authors set up a formalised list of questions but left open the possibility of constructing additional questions along the way. it is worth noting that both the students’ reflections and the interview were conducted in bahasa indonesia, whereas the manuscript and snippets reported in the article were translated into english. each individual interview with each participant is allotted 15 minutes, and the five main questions that the interview is mainly focused on are: (1) what are your thoughts on using google sites for extensive listening activities? based on your experience using google sites for one semester, what are the benefits and drawbacks of using google sites in extensive listening activities? (3) what challenges did you encounter when you first started using google sites for extensive listening activities? (4) aside from listening, what courses do you think are suitable for using google sites? for analysing the data, both braun et al. (2023) and terry and hayfield (2021) have declared that thematic analysis is a useful method for examining the perspectives of different research participants, highlighting similarities and differences, and generating unanticipated insights. thus, the data collected from this research was analysed qualitatively using microsoft word with a thematic analysis for describing data but also involving interpretation in the processes of selecting codes and constructing themes. the data obtained from the students’ point of views came in the form of student’s course reflection and the recording of semi-structured interviews. results and discussion the aim of the study is to examine students’ perceptions of the use of google sites in extensive listening classrooms. students' course reflective journals were used to collect data, as was a semistructured interview technique customised from brown and danaher (2019) and optimised for the research context. all participants were tasked with writing students’ course reflections, and five selected participants were interviewed for some further explanation and elaboration. to provide more transparency to the readers of this article, figure 2 is shown below to illustrate the gender distribution of research participants who submitted course reflections and participated in the interview session: figure 2. participants of the study according to the figure, the majority of the participants in this research were female. of the total 18 students participating, 61% of them were female students, and the remaining 39% of participants were male students. the analysis of the data from the students’ course reflections and interviews showed that most students had similar perceptions of utilising google sites in extensive listening classrooms. the opinions delivered by students were divided into four themes as follows: 1) the general perceptions of students in utilising google sites in extensive listening classrooms; 2) the benefits and drawbacks of utilising google sites based on their personal experiences; 3) students’ first experiences of the utilisation of google sites in extensive listening activities, and 4) students’ opinions on the utilisation of google sites for different courses besides listening. students’ general perceptions of google sites in el classroom perception is the experience of an object, event, or relationship acquired by resuming information and interpreting a message. it provides context for stimulus-response in resuming information and predicting messages, which involves attention, hope, motivation, and memory (mafruudloh et al., 2021). following it, nagabandi et. al. (2018) and oktaria & rahmayadevi (2021) developed perception as a phase of the total process of action, which allows us to adjust our activities to the world we live in. here, the students’ perception can be described as their developed opinion after having a certain experience that needs adjustment. the experiences of students influenced their perception of google sites, which were implemented in the classroom. most students who have typed up their course reflections and were interviewed by the researchers stated that the outstanding aspect of google sites is the ability for students to customise the website and unleash their creativity with the features offered. they admitted muhammad handi gunawan, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, aninda putri gunawan, & didi suherdi the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices 370 that the available features in google sites help them design websites easily. a few examples of the statement are provided below: “i discovered that google sites is quite simple to use. with a variety of available features, we can easily customise our own website.” (from student i1 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “in my opinion, the use of google sites in this course is quite interesting. student creativity will also increase after several attempts to design their own website.” (from student i5 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “we, as students, are free to express our creativity using google sites, and that honestly makes us enjoy doing extensive listening.” (from student r1 course reflective journal: june 11th, 2022) from the students’ answers, it can be inferred that students feel more comfortable using google sites for extensive listening activities. they can make the best use of the google sites features based on their creativity and preferences. students are not bound by certain rules to design their own websites. the idea of increasing creativity is certainly needed in extensive listening. as stated by newton & nation (2020), extensive listening activities should be enjoyable for the students. hence, the entertaining aspect is supported by the use of google sites to conduct extensive listening activities in the classroom. additionally, research conducted by cong-lem (2020) and hassan and abdel-kareem (2020) also exposed that the freedom of designing and customising the website supports students in actively implementing extensive listening practice in the classroom. hence, this finding indicates that through google sites, it is feasible for students to finally achieve the goal of extensive listening, which is to find enjoyment through listening. the benefits and drawbacks of utilising google sites in extensive listening classroom as explained by the oxford learners’ online dictionary, benefits are advantages or profits gained from something. in contrast, it has also been said that drawbacks are disadvantages or problems that make something a less attractive idea. in other words, when students use or utilise something in their learning processes, they will experience its benefits and drawbacks as the effects of its utilisation. in line with the research conducted by shatri (2020), different tools always offer different advantages and disadvantages, particularly when they are used as a learning medium. with that being said, it also happens to all the tools created by google, including google sites: it offers several benefits and drawbacks when it comes to being used in students’ learning processes. based on the results of the study, all the students mainly experienced the same things by utilising google sites for a whole semester. here is what google sites looks like: figure 3. homepage of google sites once each user types https://sites.google.com into the browser search box on their device, the link will lead them to a page, that is the main page of google sites. some of the available custom website templates will be highlighted, such as "blank", "class", "club", "student portfolio", "portfolio", and so on. if they want to build their own website from scratch without using the given templates, they can simply pick the "blank" option. meanwhile, if they are willing to use one of the existing templates, they can select one that best suits their needs. following that is "recent sites," which contains an outlook or history of each user's previous google sites usage. furthermore, in "recent sites," each of them makes them discover the fastest route to reopen the draught website they previously worked on, without any unwanted modifications. they can also read information about the last time they modified or changed their website, as well as whom they can show or grant access to. figure 4. google sites (edit mode) https://sites.google.com/ english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 371 google sites (edit mode) allows each user to make changes (edit) to their website. they can access and use various tools at hand through the three primary web pages, such as insert, pages, and themes. through the insert menu tab, they can insert random objects into the previous website draft, including photos, videos, and a series of documents of different sizes and formats (.doc, .ppt, .pdf, and so on). the source of each object can also differ depending on whether the data is imported through internal devices or google drive. next, the second menu tab, pages, manages pages and sub-pages. each user has the option of increasing or decreasing the number of pages and sub-pages. finally, the third menu tab, themes, serves as a source of themes and background templates that can be used to create custom websites for each user. benefits of google sites based on students’ experiences for a year of utilising google sites in their extensive listening activities, most of them had the same experiences regarding the benefits and drawbacks of google sites. for the benefits, most of them agreed that google sites is applicable for use, particularly in extensive listening classrooms since they already feel quite familiar and comfortable with the other google tools, such as google classroom, google docs, etc. this statement is in line with chen (2019), who stated that google sites is one of the most user-friendly website builders, along with wordpress and wix, due to the advancement of internet technologies. “for me, google sites is relatively simple to use as we ourselves are quite familiar with the tools provided by google, such as google classroom, google docs, etc.” (from student i1 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “i enjoy every tool available, and the process of creating google sites is also satisfying.” (from student r2 course reflective journal: june 12th, 2022) moreover, the tools available on google sites are varied and can be used for free without any charges. as a result, students’ creativity and productivity can be enhanced progressively. both students and teachers can easily create and build their own websites for free, as already stated by gamble (2018). in addition, oktalia and drajati (2018) also clarified that google sites allows its users to be able to make edits anytime and anywhere. indirectly, our knowledge of everything in the digital era will also continue to grow. this is not usually found in many other applications, such as edmodo or google classroom, which only function as a place for collecting assignments. “what i like about google sites is that we can create our own website easily and for free, unlike other website builder sites.” (from student i4 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “the benefit of google sites is that it can hone our skills in designing websites so that the level of student creativity can increase.” (from student r3 course reflective journal: june 12th, 2022) figure 5. tools provided on google sites the figure above demonstrates that google sites actually offers a multitude of tools for its users to use in developing their own websites as well as enhancing their creativity and personal ideas. figure 6. customization of website links/domains one of the benefits which students can get by utilising google sites—especially in their extensive listening activities—is that they can customise their own links to the websites. as a result, after they type the main domain link of google sites, which is https://sites.google.com, they can add the symbols "/", “-”, “_”, the numbers, and more additional characters to identify their own websites. for example, https://sites.google.com/site/student-one-123. https://sites.google.com/ https://sites.google.com/site/student-one-123 muhammad handi gunawan, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, aninda putri gunawan, & didi suherdi the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices 372 figure 7. website’s accessibility control figure 8. website’s publication control another benefit of owning and customising one website on google sites is the ability to choose with whom they want to share and show their websites. it is even more satisfying that every user of google sites is also able to give access to the other people they are willing to share with, whether as editors or just published viewers. drawbacks of google sites unfortunately, despite the benefits that have been experienced by the students throughout their learning activities, some drawbacks are also found by the students when utilising google sites in their extensive listening classrooms. here is what they have clarified: “the drawback itself is the lack of the notification feature, which is available in google classroom and edmodo. normally, students will receive an email alerting them to the deadline for each assignment, but google sites appears to lack this feature.” (from student r1 course reflective journal: june 11th, 2022) “the lack of google sites that i feel is because the loading process is too long, whether it's because of a bad internet connection or an internal problem with my laptop, it's normally like that.” (from student i3 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “the process of creating google sites also takes quite a lot of time because the manufacturing stages are less practical and require extra patience.” (from student i5 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) based on the students’ responses, it can be clarified that the google sites—while it is used in language learning, especially in extensive listening classrooms as students’ task archives—lacks a notification feature that reminds students of their due date of assignment. most of them felt unfortunate that this feature did not exist in google sites in comparison to other applications that typically support students' learning processes (google classroom, edmodo, etc.), in line with the research conducted by james et al. (2022). figure 9. example of task due date notification in google classroom figure 10. example of task due date notification in edmodo (teacher’s pov) english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 373 figure 11. example of task due date notification in edmodo (student’s pov) furthermore, when students use and operate google sites, it seems that they have to provide a high-quality internet connection in order to be able to access and make some edits to their own websites. this is also stated by agrawal et al. (2022), which explain that due to the nature of online learning, most google tools can only be used while students’ computers are connected to a good internet connection. in addition, despite the variety of tools provided by google sites for enhancing students’ creativity, some of them are considered quite basic and less practical to be used right away by the students. hence, unless students are proficient in using all of the tools, they still have to use other applications or programs that are frequently used to construct more creative designs, such as photoshop, canva, corel draw, and so on. students’ first experience of utilising google sites in their extensive listening activities any interaction, course, program, or other experience in which learning occurs, whether it takes place in traditional academic settings (schools, classrooms) or nontraditional settings (outside-of-school locations, outdoor environments), or whether it includes traditional educational interactions (students learning from teachers and professors) or non-traditional interactions (students learning through interactive software applications), is referred to as a learning experience (clark, 2021). in the other words, it represents an attempt to update conceptions of how, when, and where learning does and can take place. when the students used google sites for the very first time to support their extensive listening activities, they faced different challenges and experiences. the results from the students’ voices in both the course reflective journals and semistructured interviews showed that the challenges they faced primarily came from their unfamiliarity with google sites itself. here are a few examples of their perspectives: “at first, it was quite difficult to understand the function of each feature available from google sites because there are quite a lot of varieties. however, now that i comprehend more about it, i enjoy using it because it can boost creativity.” (from student r1 course reflective journal: june 11th, 2022) “i was misguided when i first heard of and used google sites because i had never used it before. however, after learning more, i discovered that google sites is quite simple to use. there are numerous tools, features, and templates that we can use and create based on our needs.” (from student i2 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “i'm familiar enough with various editing applications and other google applications, so using google sites is neither difficult nor unfamiliar to me.” (from student i3 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) according to the students’ perspectives above, it can be concluded that all the students have just known about google sites since they entered university. before that, they had no idea what google sites was and for what it was used. the fact that google sites is still not as popular as the other tools provided by google—such as google docs, google spreadsheets, and google classroom— makes them feel it is less practical (ferreira et al, 2022) as they have not been used to it for a long time. although most of the students are relatively familiar with some editing applications or programs such as photoshop, canva, and others, they still have to adapt to this new technology (google sites) to be able to effectively use it in their extensive listening classrooms. figure 12. google sites homepage of student i1 figure 13. google sites homepage of student i2 muhammad handi gunawan, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, aninda putri gunawan, & didi suherdi the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices 374 figure 14. google sites homepage of student i3 figure 15. google sites homepage of student i4 figure 16. google sites homepage of student i5 students’ opinions on the use of google sites for different courses google sites is an adjustable site, especially for managing the learning process in online classrooms. moreover, since the main strengths of google sites are its flexibility and accessibility, students stated that writing and reading are the most suitable courses for utilising and optimising features of google sites. a few examples are stated below: “google sites, in my opinion, are suitable to be used in writing class. for instance, we can publish essays and invite our friends to provide feedback or suggestions.” (from student i1 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “in my opinion, google sites will be suitable if used in writing and reading courses because both are closely related to skills whose progress must be recorded clearly and systematically.” (from student i2 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) “i think google sites is also suitable if used in reading courses. for example, we can post all our reading material every week on just one website. we can categorise each reading material (daily reading books, course books, etc.) to make it look neater and more systematic.” (from student i3 individual interview: june 24th, 2022) from the students’ voices, it can be concluded that google sites is an effective tool for students to effectively organise their materials and assignments. with google sites, students are able to compile their finished works in one place without being worried that the files will be scattered. on top of that, students are supported by the tools from google sites to systematically classify the submitted files based on their preferred arrangements. in other words, students have full control over managing their materials and learning process. moreover, students stated that google sites is convenient for writing classes because it is very accessible to other students. students can publish their writing and receive feedback from their peers to help them improve their work. this idea can also stimulate peer feedback so that engagement in the classroom can be improved between students. the research conducted by chang et al. (2018) proved that students feel more comfortable asking their friends to comment on their essays than asking the lecturers. the previous statement shows that it is highly feasible for lecturers to utilise google sites in the writing classroom. aside from the writing course, students projected that google sites could be used in reading courses. as mentioned before, google sites can record the progress of their assignments in one place. hence, students find it suitable to manage a reading portfolio with google sites. portfolios in the reading classroom can be a tool for students to monitor and reflect on their progress in learning (ma’arif et al., 2021; sulistyo et al., 2020). thus, google sites is perfect to store students' reading portfolios because they can report and reflect on what they have learned so far. conclusion to conclude the aforementioned findings and discussions, students’ voices on the utilisation of google sites in extensive listening can be divided into four parts. the four parts are students’ general perceptions, the benefits, and the drawbacks, students’ first experience, and students’ opinions english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 375 on the utilisation of google sites for different courses. firstly, in general, students find google sites convenient to use in extensive listening classes. most of the reasons are because google sites offers interesting and easy features for students to customise their websites. the students feel that they are given the freedom to personalise the sites based on their creativity. secondly, from the experiences of one-year utilising google sites to support their listening activities, most students agreed that google sites is applicable for use, particularly in extensive listening classrooms since they already feel quite familiar and comfortable with the other google tools. students also found that the tools available on google sites are quite varied and can be used for free without any charges. therefore, students’ creativity and productivity can be enhanced progressively. nevertheless, in spite of the benefits, students also explained the drawbacks they encountered during the learning process by using google sites as their learning medium, such as the lack of a notification feature, which is supposed to be able to remind students of their due date of assignment; the need for a high-quality internet connection to access it; and also some tools that are considered less practical. thirdly, from the results of the course reflective journal and individual interviews, it can be summed up that all the students have just known about google sites since they entered university. they had no idea what google sites were or how they were used prior to that. although most students are familiar with editing applications or programs such as photoshop, canva, and others, they must still adapt to this new technology (google sites) in order to use it effectively in their extensive listening classrooms. however, on top of that, students also stated that google sites can be perfectly utilised for writing and reading courses. since google sites is highly accessible, students think that it will be beneficial because they can ask their friends to read and give feedback on their writing. moreover, in the reading course, they can keep their reading portfolios and materials systematically on the website. they do not have to worry that the files will be scattered because they store them in one place. references agrawal, g., kumar, d., & singh, m. 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(2020). listening skills in learning a language: the importance, benefits and means of enhancement. publishing house european scientific platform. 38-46. https://doi.org/10.36074/rodmmrfssn.ed-1.04 https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1175/1/012165 https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1175/1/012165 https://doi.org/10.24815/siele.v7i1.15169 https://doi.org/10.47637/elsa.v18i2.290 https://doi.org/10.12973/eu-jer.10.1.13 https://doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2019.16.2.19.71 https://doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2019.16.2.19.71 https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.2018.210210 https://doi.org/10.36074/rodmmrfssn.ed-1.04 muhammad handi gunawan, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, aninda putri gunawan, & didi suherdi the use of google sites in extensive listening classroom: students’ voices 378 english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 501 a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung masitoh indonesian language and literature education department, universitas muhammadiyah kotabumi, north lampung, indonesia email: masitohstkipm64@gmail.com meutia rachmatia english education department, universitas muhammadiyah kotabumi, north lampung, indonesia email: meutia.rachmatia@umko.ac.id elis susanti english education department, universitas muhammadiyah kotabumi, north lampung, indonesia email: weasly.ndha@yahoo.com dewi sri kuning english education department, universitas muhammadiyah kotabumi, north lampung, indonesia email: dewisrikuning@gmail.com nabila zatadini law department, universitas muhammadiyah kotabumi, north lampung, indonesia email: nabila@umko.ac.id apa citation: masitoh., rachmatia, m., susanti, e., kuning, d. s., & zatadini, n. (2023). a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung. english review: journal of english education, 11(2), 501-514. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v11i2.8319 received: 19-02-2023 accepted: 22-04-2023 published: 30-06-2023 introduction indonesia was a country rich in culture (ridwan et al., 2022). geographical location affects the mapping of indonesian language usage by the society (andina, 2023; juvita et al., 2022). the lampung language is one of indonesia's regional languages that continues to be used and preserved by the people of lampung. as stated by agustina abstract: this study aims to investigate the differences in phonological elements between two dialects of the lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung. the research focuses on lempasing village, padang cermin district, pesawaran regency for dialect a peminggir, and bumi agung marga village, east abung district, north lampung regency for dialect o abung. the objectives of this study are to describe: (1) the differences in vowel phonemes between dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung, (2) the differences in consonant phonemes between dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung, (3) the characteristics of diphthongs and vowel lines in dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung, (4) the differences in clusters and consonants between dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung, and (5) the variations in syllables between dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung. the study adopts a descriptive analytical method, and data collection involves the use of recording devices, tapes, and other stationery. the research utilizes various techniques, including listening or tapping techniques as basic methods, and advanced techniques such as free listening techniques, fishing techniques, recording techniques, questionnaires, and recording techniques. the results of the study demonstrate both differences and similarities in the phonological elements of dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung in the lampung language. keywords: dialects a and o; lampung language; phonological elements. masitoh, meutia rachmatia, elis susanti, dewi sri kuning, & nabila zatadini a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung 502 et al. (2022), indonesia has over 718 regional languages and 7 regional scripts, with the lampung language being one of them. it belongs to the austronesian language family, specifically the hesperonesia subfamily (masitoh, 2021). according to abidin et al. (2021), the lampung language consists of two varieties: dialect a, also known as api, and dialect o, also known as nyou. that differences happen because of geographical dialect (putri & fitrawati, 2020). dialect a is spoken in areas such as belalau, peminggir teluk semangka, teluk lampung, komering, krui, melinting, and pubiyan. on the other hand, dialect o is used by the inhabitants of abung and tulang bawang (menggala). similarly, sanusi (1998) suggests that the lampung language can be broadly classified into two dialects: dialect o, which includes abung (spread across the districts of north lampung, way kanan, central lampung, metro city, and east lampung (syaputri et al., 2022) and menggala languages, and dialect a, which comprises way kanan, peminggir, melinting, pubiyan, sungkai, and calleran jellemadaya. the classification of lampung language dialects is primarily based on the pronunciation realization of the *a sound from protolampungik in the final position. some varieties retain this sound as [a], while others realize it as [o] (hanawalt, 2007). the difference in pronunciation between these two dialect groups has led to the terms "dialect a" and "dialect o" (matanggui, 1984). walker (1975) also refers to dialect a as "coastal" or "marginalist" and dialect o as "abung." the lampung language consists of various dialects, with dialect a and dialect o being the most prominent. the distinction between these dialects is primarily based on the pronunciation of the *a sound in the final position, giving rise to the terms "dialect a" and "dialect o." it can be said that language needs to be fostered and preserved. it was following what is contained in the explanation of the 1945 constitution chapter xv article 36, which reads: "in areas that have their languages that are well maintained by the people (e.g., javanese, sundanese, madurese, etc.) these languages will be respected and maintained also by the state. these languages are also part of indonesia's vibrant culture". it makes a kind of variety of language style in each place (musdalifah, 2022). therefore, it is necessary to research various aspects of regional language and literature. based on the fact above, the author was conducting this research. previous research on the lampung dialects a and o has provided general insights into the phonological aspects of the lampung language. however, there is a need for more specific and focused research on lampung language phonology, as the existing studies did not explicitly explore the differences between the phonological elements of dialects a and o. for example, previous studies have discussed the diphthongs in the lampung language, including /ay, aw, ew, әy, ow, and uy/. additionally, the lampung language features two consonant sounds, [kh] and [gh], represented by the symbol /я/. students often find it challenging to grasp the phonology of the lampung language, as they need to understand both dialects simultaneously, and both dialects have a significant number of speakers. this complexity makes it particularly difficult for students to comprehend the phonological aspects of the lampung language (masitoh, 2021). phonology, as stated by banik (2016), serves as a bridge between the content and form of language. it is an essential part of communication (suryaleksana et al., 2022). utami & morganna (2022) and sabrina et al. (2023) define phonology as the sound of language. in the field of phonology, there is a process of phonological transformation that occurs when a speaker pronounces a word in a particular language, involving changes, additions, insertions, or deletions of sounds at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. phonetic variations can lead to phonological modifications in word pronunciation (diani & azwandi, 2021), in such a way produced in the configuration of the speech apparatus (wardana et al., 2022). phonological changes are phenomena frequently encountered by language learners studying second languages in indonesia, such as indonesian and english. the study of sound units that distinguish meaning is known as phonemics, while those that do not are referred to as phonetics (alwi et al., 2017; chaer, 2019). phonology, therefore, is a branch of linguistics that investigates, analyzes, and discusses the sound patterns of a language. several scholars have examined phonological mechanisms and alterations in various languages. daana (2018) investigated the phonological development and processes in the speech of an english-arabic bilingual child in jordan, observing phonological phenomena such as english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 503 regressive and progressive assimilation, substitution, and metathesis in the child's production of english and arabic sounds. moreover, several scholars have conducted studies focusing on phonological processes in the indonesian context. for instance, research has been conducted on language interference (diani, 2019), the phonological process in the prefix "me," phonological variations in the serawai and minangkabau languages in manna city, south bengkulu (gustina et al., 2018). these studies have revealed instances where sounds have been added or deleted in the words of these languages. furthermore, researchers have explored phonological processes in various languages. zee (2015) examined the phonological mechanism of assimilation in the yorkshire language. the study found that poor sound neutralization leads to a gradient process during assimilation in the yorkshire language. additionally, behnam and rassekh-alqol (2012) conducted an analysis of metathesis in azeri. they examined 120 azeri speakers in tabriz, iran, considering factors such as age, gender, and social status. the study revealed that metathesis as a phonological process was more commonly observed among younger males and individuals from lower social classes. phonology can be divided into two main aspects: phonetics and phonemics (arjulayana & martinez, 2022). phonetic research focuses on the study of speech sounds, including vowel sounds, diphthongs, vowel series, consonants, consonant clusters, consonant series, and syllables (priya & kumar, 2020). on the other hand, phonemic research focuses on the study of phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound that distinguish meanings in a language (ibrahim, 2013). phonemes are produced by the human speech organs, and their formation can be influenced by the presence or absence of air resistance during the articulation process. systematically, the articulation of sounds in a language is associated with phonetics (asrul & huda, 2022). according to kortmann (2020), the components of pronunciation include individual speech sounds such as monophthongs, diphthongs, triphthongs, semi-vowels, and consonant sounds. for example, in the formation of the phoneme /a/, air flows from the lungs through the oral cavity without obstruction. in the indonesian language, there are six vowel phonemes: /a/, /ә /, /e/, /i /, /o/, /u/ (siahaan & lubis, 2023). based on their high-low parameters, the vowel phonemes in lampung include two high vowels (/i, u/), three mid vowels (/e, ә, o/), and one low vowel (/a/). additionally, based on the front-back parameters of tongue placement, the two front vowels are /i/ and /e/, the two mid vowels are /ә/ and /a/, and the two back vowels are /u/ and /o/ (sanusi, 1998). these six vowels in lampung can appear in initial, medial, and final positions within words or syllables, as illustrated in the table below. table 1. vowels in lampung language position phonemes beginning middle ending /i/ [iko?] ‘tie’ [ijo] 'this' [lima] 'five' [limo] 'five' [api] 'what' [muli] 'girl' /e/ [bebeя] lips [lambanne] his house /ә/ /a/ /u/ /o/ [əяəm]' eram' [akuɂ]' take' [uяiɂ]' live' [ondom] 'shell' [beli]' buying' [balak]’big’ [sapu] 'broom' [kodok] ‘stir’ [iya] ’yes’ [buяaɂ] ‘bad’ [limo] ‘five’ following its articulation, consonants in the lampung language can be categorized based on three factors, (1) the state of the vocal cords, (2) the articulation area, and (3) the way of articulation. based on the state of the vocal cords, consonants can be voiced or voiceless. diphthongs in indonesian consist of ai, au, and oi. diphthongs are different from vocal sequences. each vowel in the vowel row gets the same or nearly the same breath; the two vowels belong to two different syllables. for example, the sound of au and ai in words leaf and primary is not diphthong because the words form their syllables, each of which can be separated into daun and ma-in (alwi et al., 2017; chaer, 2019). lampung language generally has six diphthongs, namely /ay/, /aw/, /ey/, /ew/, /uy/, and /ow/. syllables in indonesian consist of (1) one vowel, (2) one vowel and one consonant, (3) one consonant and one vowel, (4) one consonant, one vowel, and one consonant, (5) one consonant, one vowel, and two consonants, (6) one consonant, one vowel, and three consonants, (7) two consonants and one vowel, (8) two consonants, one vowel, and one consonant, (9) three consonants and one vowel, (10) three consonants, one vowel, and one consonant, and (11) two consonants, one vowel, and two consonants (alwi et al., 2017; chaer, 2019). here is an example of the eleven different syllables above. table 2. eleven different syllables 1 v a-mal, su-a-tu, tu-a 2 vk ar-ti, ber-il-mu, ka-il 3 kv pa-sar, sar-ja-na, war-ga 4 kvk pak-sa, ke-per-lu-an, pe-san masitoh, meutia rachmatia, elis susanti, dewi sri kuning, & nabila zatadini a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung 504 5 kvkk teks-til, mo-dern, pers 6 kvkkk korps 7 kkv slo-gan, dra-ma, ko-pra 8 kkvk trak-tor, kon-trak 9 kkkv stra-te-gi, stra-ta 10 kkkvk struk-tur, strom, ab-strak 11 kkvkk kom-pleks the syllabic pattern in the lampung language consists of four syllables (anderbeck & ronald, 2017), namely: v [akuɂ] a-kuɂ ‘ambil’ vk [anjaɂ] an-jak ‘dari’ kv [tiləw] ti-leu ‘tuli’ kvk [sambat] sam-bat ‘tegur’ from the explanation above, the research problem can be formulated as follows: how are the phonological elements of the lampung peminggir language different from lampung abung? it included the differences between vowel phonemes, consonants, diphthongs, vowel rows, consonant clusters, and syllables. the findings of theoretical study, particularly those related to phonology, are anticipated to advance language research. practically, the results of this research can also be used as one of the materials (need to be reprocessed) in teaching the lampung regional language, especially in phonology. the research results on regional languages are expected to reveal a number of information about the differences in phonological elements of lampung dialect a with dialect o. method the method used in this study is the analytical descriptive method. the data source was taken from native speakers of lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung, namely from lempasing village, padang cermin district, pesawaran regency and bumi agung marga village, east abung district, north lampung regency. from the two villages, six people were taken as informants; in each village, three informants were taken, one as the core informant and the other as a supporting informant. the data collection used complementary instruments in the form of recording devices and other stationery. the techniques used were listening / tapping techniques as basic techniques, while advanced techniques include listening techniques, free listening techniques, fishing techniques, recording techniques, questionnaires, and recording techniques. the data collection that the author did took five months for the six informants. for the first stage, the author uses listening techniques and listening techniques to obtain phonological data on lampung dialect a and dialect o in general, such as essential words and sounds they have. in the listening technique, the author fills out a questionnaire from swadesh's word list, equipped with data about the observation area and information about the informant. in contrast, the author carries out the free listening technique when the informant tells a story, both in fiction and nonfiction form (done by recording their conversations). furthermore, fishing rod techniques are also used in addition to the two techniques above, asking supporting informants (second and third informants) to obtain other data. a note-taking technique accompanies this because the writer feels more particular about the recorded data than just listening to the recording. for the validity of the data, then what has been obtained is confirmed again by the core informant (first informant). sometimes, researchers ask to be trained by informants to get more factual data. for example, for the mention of the sound [я] in lampung dialect a and dialect o abung, the researcher tried to pronounce the word containing the sound until the informant felt that what the researcher said was correct. it was also done for some specific words. in some instances, researchers sometimes ask to be trained by informants themselves to get more factual data. for example, for the mention of the sound [я] in lampung dialect a and dialect o abung, the researcher tried to pronounce the word containing the sound until the informant felt that what the researcher said was correct. it was also done for some specific words. after the data was collected, both in the form of recorded and written data, data transcription was carried out with phonemic and phonetic transcription. furthermore, these data identified and classified vowel phonemes, consonant phonemes, diphthongs, vowel series, consonant clusters, consonant series, and syllables. next, describe the differences in phonological elements of lampung dialect a with dialect o, which include: vowels, consonants, diphthongs, clusters, vowel series, consonant series, and syllables. results and discussion phonological elements of lampung language dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 505 vowel phonemes of lampung language dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung sanusi (1998) revealed that the lampung language has six vowel phonemes, namely /i/, /e, /ә/, /a/, /o/, and /u/. in the lampung dialect, a peminggir also found six vowel phonemes, namely /a, e, ә, i, o, and u/. however, the lampung dialect of o abung has five vowel phonemes, namely /a/, /ә/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. the lampung dialect of o abung does not have the vowel phoneme /e/. more details could be seen in table 1 of the vowel phonemes based on the highlow and front-back of the tongue at the time of formation. table 3. vowel phonemes of the lampung language dialect a peminggir dialect o abung front middle back high i u i u medium e ә o ә o low a a in table 3, it appears that lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung have two high vowels, namely /i/ and /u/; there were three medium vowels for dialect a, namely /e, ә, and o/, and in dialect o abung there are two medium vowels, namely /ә/ and /o/; and there is one low vowel, which was /a/. based on the front-back parameters of the tongue, the vowels /i/ are the front vowels, the vowels /e/, /ә/, and /a/ were the middle vowels, and the vowels /u/ and /o/ were the back vowels. the vowel /i/ was pronounced with the tongue's high-front position, with both lips slightly stretched to the sides. the vowel /i/ can be seen in the following example words. dialect a peminggir: [ikoɂ] ikok' tie' [iŋoɂ] ingok ‘remember’ dialect o abung kotabumi: [ikəɂ] ikek ‘tie’ [iŋəɂ] ingek ‘remember’ the vowel /e/ is pronounced with the tongue leaf raised and the lip shape slightly stretched to the side. the vowel /e/ was found only in dialect a peminggir, for example, in the following word. [seseя] sesegh ’ comb’ [paseя] pasegh ’ sand’ the vowel /ә/ is pronounced with the middle of the tongue slightly raised and the lips shape neutral. the vowel /ә/ is found in the following word. dialect a peminggir: [əяom] eghom' incubate' [bəla] bela' finish' dialect o abung: [əяəm] eghem ‘incubate’ [gəliɂ] gelik' finish' the vowel /a/ is pronounced with the middle of the tongue somewhat evenly distributed and the mouth wide open. the vowel /a/ is found in the following word. dialect a peminggir: [baca] baca ‘read’ [guway] guwai ‘made’ dialect o abung: [baco] baco ‘read’ [guway] guwai ‘made’ the vowel /u/ is pronounced with both lips slightly forward and rounded. the vowel /u/ is found in the following word. dialect a peminggir: [cappuя] cappugh ‘mix’ [kusuɂ] kusuk ‘tangled’ dialect o abung: [cappur] cappur ‘mix’ [kusuɂ] kusuk ‘tangled’ the vowel /o/ is pronounced with a mediumback tongue position and a slightly bun-dar lip shape. the vowel /o/ is found in the example word below. dialect a peminggir: [iŋoɂ] ingok ‘remember’ [buwoɂ] buwok ‘hair’ dialect o abung: [baco] baco 'read' [jago] jago ‘watch over’ consonant phonemes of lampung language a peminggir dialect and o abung dialect lampung dialect a peminggir has nineteen consonant phonemes, namely /b/, /c/, /d/, /g/, /h/, masitoh, meutia rachmatia, elis susanti, dewi sri kuning, & nabila zatadini a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung 506 /j/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ñ/, /ŋ/, /p/, /, /я/, /s/, /t/, /w/, /y/, and /ɂ/, while o abung dialect has twenty consonant phonemes, namely /b/, /c/, /d/, /g/, /h/, /j/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ñ/, /ŋ/, /p/, /r/, /я/, /s/, /t/, /w/, /y/, and /ɂ/. the consonant categories are presented in table 2. table 4. the position of consonant phonemes in lampung a peminggir dialect o abung dialect ways of articulatio n and regions of articulatio n bilabial dent al/al veolar palatal velar uvular glota l bilabial dental/ alveol ar palatal velar uvular glotal hambat/st op silent voiced p b t d k g ɂ p b t d k g ɂ afrikat silent voiced c j c j frikatif/ slide silent voiced s h я s h я nasal voiced m n ñ ŋ m n ñ ŋ vibration voiced r lateral voiced l l semi-vocal voiced w y w y the phoneme details above are as follows: (1) in lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung there were seventh phonemes of hambat/stop consonants consisting of four voiceless phonemes, namely /p/, /t/, /k/, and /ɂ/, as well as three voiced phonemes, namely /b/, /d/, and /g/. (2) in the lampung language, dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung were found two africanite phonemes consisting of one voiceless phoneme /c/ and one voiced phoneme /j/. (3) in lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung there were three fricative / sliding consonant phonemes consisting of two voiceless phonemes, namely /s/ and /h/, and one voiced phoneme, namely /я/. (4) in lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung there were four nasal or nasal consonant phonemes, namely /m/, /n/, /ñ/, and /ŋ/. (5) in lampung dialect a peminggir there was no vibrating phoneme /r/, while in dialect o abung there was one vibrating consonant phoneme, namely /r/. (6) in lampung language, dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung there was one lateral consonant phoneme, namely /l/. (7) in lampung language, dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung there were two semi vowel consonant phonemes, namely /w/ and /y/. based on the articulation area, the consonant phonemes of lampung dialect a peminggir dialect and dialect o abung can be detailed as follows. (1) there were four phonemes of labial consonants, namely /p/, /b/, /m/, and /w/. (2) in lampung dialect a peminggir there were five phonemes t/, /d/, /s/, /n/, and /l/, while in dialect o abung there were six phonemes of dental/alveolar consonants, namely phonemes /t/, /d/, /s/, /n/, /r/, and /l/. (3) there were four palatal consonant phonemes, namely /c/, /j/, /ñ/, and /y/. (4) there were three phonemes of velar consonants, namely /k/, /g/, and /ŋ/. (5) there was one phoneme of uvular consonants, namely /я/. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 507 (6) there were two glotal consonant phonemes, namely /ɂ/ and /h/. in its distribution, not all consonant segments of lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung can fulfill all positions in the root word. we can see this in table 3 below. table 5. the distribution of consonant phonemes in lampung a peminggir dialect o abung dialect fonem starting position center position final position starting position center position final position /b/ /c/ /d/ /g/ /h/ /j/ /ɂ/ [baŋiɂ] bangik ‘delicious’ [caяiɂ] caghik ‘tear’ [dəŋi] dengi 'hear' [guttiŋ] gutting 'scissors' [haccur] haccugh 'destroyed' [jahal] jahal 'ugly' [babuy] babui ‘pig’ [baca] baca ‘read’ [badiɂ] badik ‘outrigger ’ [bagi] bagi ‘devided’ [tuha] tuha ‘old’ [janji] janji [daɂwa] dakwa' dakwa [sujud] sujud ‘prostrati on’ [uyah] uyah 'salt' [ñaɂ] nyak ‘i’ [baŋiɂ] bangik ‘delicious’ [caяiɂ] caghik ‘tear’ [dəŋəy] dengei ‘hear’ [gəliɂ] gelik 'finish' [haccur] haccur 'destroyed' [jahhəl] jahhel' ugly' [babuy] babui 'babi' [baco] baco ‘baca’ [badiɂ] badik' outrigger' [pəguŋ] pegung ‘touch’ [tuho] tuho ‘tua’ [janjəy] janjei ‘janji’ [daɂwo] dakwo ‘dakwa’ [səbab] sebab ‘sebab’ [sujud] sujud ‘prostration’ [matah] matah ‘raw’ [ñaɂ] nyak 'i' /k/ /l/ /m/ [kilu] kilu ‘ask’ [ləbon] lebon 'disappear' [matah] matah ‘raw’ [akuɂ] akuk ‘take’ [balak] balak ‘big’ [numur] numur ‘number’ [tinuɂ] tinuk [balak] balak ‘big’ [juwal] jual ’ sell’ [tanəm] tanem ‘plant’ [umban] [kiluy] kilui 'ask' [lipaw] lipau ‘throw’ [matah] matah ‘raw’ [nasihat] [akuɂ] akuk ‘take’ [alaw] alau ‘chase’ [numur] numur ‘number’ [tinuɂ] tinuk [balak] balak ‘big’ [juwal] jual ‘sell’ [tanəm] tanem ‘plant’ masitoh, meutia rachmatia, elis susanti, dewi sri kuning, & nabila zatadini a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung 508 /n/ /ñ/ /ŋ/ /p/ /r/ /я/ /s/ /t/ /w/ /y/ [nasihat] nasihat ‘advice’ [ñata] nyata ‘real’ [ŋuяa] ngugha ‘young’ [pədom] pedom ‘tidur’ [яamiɂ] ghamik 'ceowded' [səяuɂ] seghuk ‘sew’ [tanom] tanom ’plant’ [way] wai ‘water’, ’ river’ [yakin] yakin ‘believe’ ‘see’ [kañas] kanyas ' pineapple' [baŋiɂ] bangik ‘delisious ’ [apay] apai 'tikar' [hiяan] highan 'amazed' [asah] asah ‘sharpen’ [matah] matah' raw' [waway] wawai ‘good’ [sayan] sayan ‘alone’ umban ‘throw away’ [mulaŋ] mulang ‘go home’ [təkkop] tekkop ’tangkap [ajaя] 'ajagh' 'teach' [təŋis] tengis ‘hear’ [təkanjat] tekanjat ’ surprised’ nasihat ‘advice’ [ñato] nyato ‘real’ [ŋuяo] ngugho ‘young’ [pədəm] pedem ‘tidur’ [ramiɂ] ramik 'crowded' [яabay] ghabai 'scared' [səяuɂ] seghuk ‘sew’ [tuяuy] tughui ‘sleep’ [way] wai 'water', ' river' [yakin] yakin ‘believe’ ‘see’ [kiñaw] kinyau ‘wash’ [baŋiɂ] bangik ‘delisious ’ [lipaw] lipau ‘lempar’ [hiran] hiran ‘amazed’ [paяəɂ] paghek ‘near’ [asah] asah ‘sharpen’ [kuto] kuto ‘fence’ [waway] wawai ‘good’ [sayan] sayan ‘alone’ [umban] umban ‘throw away’ [mulaŋ] mulang ‘pulang’ [takkəp] takkep ‘tangkap’ [ajar] ajar 'teach' [mətəя] metegh ‘sweet’ [ubas] ubas ‘complete’ [aяat] aghat 'disappear' table 5 shows the following: there were 12 consonant phonemes that can occupy all positions in the root word, namely the phonemes /b/, /d/, /h/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /я/, /s/, and /t/. the phoneme /r/ can also occupy all positions in the root word but only exists in the dialect o abung. there were six consonant phonemes that can only occupy the initial and middle positions of the root word, namely /c/, /g/, /j/, /ñ/, /w/, and /y/. consonant phonemes that can only occupy the middle position and the root word's final position are one piece, namely the phoneme /ɂ/. diphthongs and vowels in the lampung language dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung lampung language generally has six diphthongs, namely /ay/, /aw/, /ey/, /ew/, /uy/, and /ow/. especially for the lampung language, dialect a peminggir only has three diphthongs, namely /ay/, /aw/, and /uy/, each of which could be written: ai, english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 509 au, and ui, while the dialect o abung has five diphthongs, namely /ay/, /aw/, /ey/, /ew/, and /uy/, each of which could be written: ai, au, ei, eu, and ui. each diphthong can only occupy the final position on the root word. for more details, in table 4 the work of each diphthong in the base word can be seen. table 6. the distribution of diphthongs in lampung dialect a peminggir dialect o abung diftong starting position center position final position starting position center position final position /ay/ ai /aw/ au /ey/ ei /ew/ eu /uy/ ui [sabay] sabai ‘besan’ [alaw] alau ‘chase’ [kəkuy] kekui 'scratch' [яabay] ghabai 'scared' [ambaw] ambau 'smell' [dəŋəy] dengei 'listen' [sapəw] sapeu 'broom' [kəkuy] kekui 'scratch' the rows of lampung vowels, dialect a peminggir, and dialect o abung bety (2021) states that a vowel series is a sequence of two or more vowels without being punctuated by consonants but in different syllables. the vowel series found in lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung are: /aa/, /ai/, au/, /ia/, /ii/, /iu/, /iә/, /io/, /ua/, /ui/, /uu/, /uo/, /әa/, /әi/, /әu/, /әә/. table 5. vocal series dialect a peminggir dialect o abung vowel series example example /aa/ /ai/ /au/ /ia/ /ii/ /iu/ /iə/ /io/ /ua/ /ui/ /uu/ /ua/, /uo/ /əa/ /əi/ [taɂat] taat ‘obey’ [kayit] kait ‘hook’ [bəgawul] begaul ‘hang out’ [giyat] ‘giat’ ‘diligent’ [diɂisop] diisop 'smoked' [biyus] bius' pushers [diɂəяom] dieghom ‘dieram’ [sətudiyo] setudio ‘studio’ [buwal] bual ‘lie’ [duwit] duit' money' [taɂat] taat ‘obey’ [kayit] kait ‘hook’ [bəgawul] begaul ‘hang out’ [giyat] giat ‘diligent’ [diɂisiɂ] diisik ‘maintained’ [biyus] bius' bius' [diɂəяəm] dieghem ‘dieram’ [sətudiyo] setudio ‘studio’ [buwal] bual‘lie’ [duwit] duit' money' [kuɂunjal] kuunjal ‘i lift up’ [duɂo] duo' prayer' [təɂakuɂ] teakuk 'fetched' [təɂiŋəɂ] teingek 'remembered' [bəɂutaŋ] beutang /əu/ /əə/ [kuɂusuŋ] kuusung ‘i lift up’ [duɂa] dua' prayer' [təɂakuɂ] teakuk 'fetched' [təɂiŋoɂ] teingok 'remembered' [bəɂutaŋ] beutang ‘owe’ [təɂəяom] teeghom ‘tereram’ ‘owe’ [təəяəm] teeghem ‘tereram’ in table 5 it appears that in the vowel series of the lampung dialect o abung there was one segment that cannot occupy the first and middle positions of the word, namely /o/. clusters and consonants of lampung language a peminggir dialect and o abung dialect in the lampung language, there was no cluster, either in the dialect a peminggir or the dialect o abung. a cluster or cluster is a row of two or more consonants close together in a syllable without any vowels interrupting them. in the lampung language, there is no cluster, either in the a peminggir dialect or the o abung dialect. a consonant series is a sequence of two or more consonants in a word in a different syllable without a vowel insert (setyadi, 2019). the row of consonants found in lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung consists of: /bb/, masitoh, meutia rachmatia, elis susanti, dewi sri kuning, & nabila zatadini a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung 510 /bd/, /bl/, /bs/,/bt/, /cc/, /dd/, /gg/, /hb/, /hd/, /hh/, /hl/, /hm/, /hn/, {/hя/ /hr}/, /ht/, /hw/, /hy/, /jj/, /kb/, /kc/, /kd/, /kk/, /kl/, /kn/, /ks/, /kt/, /kw/, /lb/, /ld/, /ll/,/lm/, /lp/, /ls, /lt/, /lj, /mb, /ml/, /mm/, /mn/, /mp/, /ms/, /nc/, /nd/, /nj/, /ns/, /nn/, /nt/, /ŋg/, /ŋk/, /ŋŋ/, /ŋl/, /ŋs/, /pp/, /ps/, /pt/, /rb/, { /яc/, /rc/},{/яd/, /rd/}, {/яg/, /rg/}, {/яj/, /rj/}, {яk/, /rk/}, {/яl/,/rl/}, {/яm/, /rm}, {/яn/, /rn/}, {/яp/, /rp/}, { /яs/, /rs/}, {/яt/, /rt/}, {/яw/, /rw/}, /sb/, /sk/, /sl/, /sm/, /sn/, /sp/, {/sя/, /sr}/, /ss/, /st/, /sw/, /tt/, /ww/, /ɂn/,/ɂw/, /ɂy/. special consonant series /nc and nd/ do not exist in the dialect o abung. in addition to the two rows of consonants (/nc and nd/), they are all the same. syllables of lampung language dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung a syllable is the smallest rhythmic unit (rhythm) in speech flow. in other words, a syllable is part of a word spoken in one breath (arifin, sumpeno & hariadi, 2018). for example, the word 'limp' is pronounced with two breaths: kaand -luk. therefore, the word kaluk consists of two syllables. syllables are usually marked with vowels or diphthongs as peaks of loudness. syllables ending in a vowel (v) are called open syllables, and syllables ending in a consonant (k) are called closed syllables. the syllabic pattern in the lampung language consists of the following: v [akuɂ] a-kuɂ ‘take’ vk [anjaɂ] an-jak ‘from’ kv [tiləw] ti-leu ‘deaf’ kvk [sambat] sam-bat 'rebuke' furthermore, in the lampung dialect a peminggir found a basic word consisting of one, two, three, and four syllables. v= [a-bay] a-bai 'try', [a-kuɂ] a-kuk 'take' vk= [an-jaɂ] an-jak 'from', [an-tar] in-tar 'escort', kv= [ku-ta] ku-ta ‘fence’, [ku-яuɂ] ku-ghuk ‘enter’, kvk= [sam-bat] sam-bat 'rebuke', [sim-poɂ] simpok 'wrap' likewise, in the lampung dialect o abung, there are basic words consisting of one, two, and three syllables v= [a-bay] a-bai 'try', [a-kuɂ] a-kuk 'take' vk= [an-jaɂ] an-jak ‘fromi’, [as-ləy] as-lei ‘real’, kv= [ku-to] ku-to 'fence', [kuяuɂ] ku-ghuk 'enter', kvk= [sambat] sam-bat 'rebuke', [sippəɂ] sippek 'wrap.' conclusion the results of research and discussion showed in the position of the vowel phonemes of the lampung language, dialects a peminggir and o abung the similarities and differences are as follows: (1) the vowel phoneme /i/ in dialect a peminggir can occupy the beginning, middle, and end positions of words, while in dialect o abung can only occupy the initial and middle positions; (2) the phoneme /e/ in dialect a ruler can only occupy the middle and final positions of words, while in dialect o abung this phoneme /e/ does not exist; (3) the vowel phoneme /ә/ can only occupy the initial and middle positions of words, in both dialect a marginal and dialect o abung; (4) the vowel phoneme /a/ can occupy all positions, i.e. beginning, middle, and end in dialects a marginal and o abung; (5) the vowel phoneme /o/ in dialect a peminggir can occupy the initial and middle positions of words, while dialect o abung can only occupy the final position of words; (6) the vowel phoneme /u/ in dialect a peminggir can occupy all positions of beginning, middle, and end words, while in dialect o abung can only occupy the initial and middle positions of words. for consonant phonemes, the lampung language dialect a peminggir has nineteen consonant phonemes, namely: /b/, /c/, /d/, /g/, /h/, /j/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ñ/, /ŋ/, /p/, /, /я/, /s/, /t/, /w/, /y/, dan /ɂ/, while the dialect o abung has twenty consonant phonemes, namely /b/, /c/, /d/, /g/, /h/, /j/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ñ/, /ŋ/, /p/, /r/, /я/, /s/, /t/, /w/, /y/, dan /ɂ/. in dialect a peminggir, there were no phonemes /r/; sounds [r] were represented by phonemes /я/ only, while in dialect o abung, sounds [r and gh] are represented phonemes /r and я/. some things that need to be emphasized concerning the position of the consonant phonemes of the lampung dialect a peminggir and o abung in words were: (1) consonant phonemes that can occupy all positions in the root word there were twelve pieces, namely the phonemes /b/, /d/, /h/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /я/, /s/, and /t/. the phoneme /r/ can also occupy all positions in the root word but only exists in the dialect o abung; (2) six consonant phonemes can only occupy the initial and middle positions of the root word, namely /c/, /g/, /j/, /ñ/, /w/, and /y/; (3) consonant phonemes that can only occupy the middle position and the final position of the root word there was one piece, namely the phoneme /ɂ/. english review: journal of english education p-issn 2301-7554, e-issn 2541-3643 volume 11, issue 2, june 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee 511 furthermore, the lampung language generally has six diphthongs, namely /ay/, /aw/, /ey/, /ew/, /uy/, and /ow/. especially for the lampung language, dialect a peminggir only has three diphthongs, namely /ay/, /aw/, and /uy/, each of which can be written: ai, au, and ui, while the o abung dialect has five diphthongs, namely /ay/, /aw/, /ey/, /ew/, and /uy/, each of which can be written: ai, au, ei, eu, and ui. each diphthong can only occupy the final position on the root word. in the lampung language, there is no cluster, either in the a peminggir dialect or the o abung dialect. the vowel sequences found in lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung are/aa/, /ai/, au/, /ia/, /ii/, /iu/, /iə/, /io/, /ua/, /ui/, /uu/, /uo/, /əa/, /əi/, /əu/, /əə/. the vowel series of the lampung dialect o abung has one phoneme that cannot occupy the first and middle positions of the word, namely the phoneme /o/. the old consonants of lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung consist of: /bb/, /bd/, /bl/, /bs/,/bt/, /cc/, /dd/, /gg/, /hb/, /hd/, /hh/, /hl/, /hm/, /hn/, {/hя/ /hr}/, /ht/, /hw/, /hy/, /jj/, /kb/, /kc/, /kd/, /kk/, /kl/, /kn/, /ks/, /kt/, /kw/, /lb/, /ld/, /ll/,/lm/, /lp/, /ls, /lt/, /lj, /mb, /ml/, /mm/, /mn/, /mp/, /ms/, /nc/, /nd/, /nj/, /ns/, /nn/, /nt/, /ŋg/, /ŋk/, /ŋŋ/, /ŋl/, /ŋs/, /pp/, /ps/, /pt/, /rb/, { /яc/, /rc/},{/яd/, /rd/}, {/яg/, /rg/}, {/яj/, /rj/}, {яk/, /rk/}, {/яl/,/rl/}, {/яm/, /rm}, {/яn/, /rn/}, {/яp/, /rp/}, { /яs/, /rs/}, {/яt/, /rt/}, {/яw/, /rw/}, /sb/, /sk/, /sl/, /sm/, /sn/, /sp/, {/sя/, /sr}/, /ss/, /st/, /sw/, /tt/, /ww/, /ɂn/,/ɂw/, /ɂy/. especially for the consonant rows /nc/ and /nt/ do not exist in the dialect o abung. a row of consonants, one of which consists of the phoneme /я/, is in dialect a peminggir, while one of them, the phoneme /r/, is in dialect o abung. furthermore, in lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung, syllables consist of one, two, three, and four syllables in each basic word. many things can still be revealed from the lampung language because the results of this study are still limited to the study of phonological elements of the lampung language, dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung. these phonological elements can also be used for further research to study the linguistic aspects of the lampung language in general and for lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung in more detail. finally, it is recommended that further research can be carried out on other problems with similar studies so that phonological studies, such as naming, how to pronounce language phonemes, and sound changes, especially for lampung dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung are complete and can add linguistic data to existing lampung languages. in terms of language, it is also recommended to research other aspects, such as the lampung language's morphology, 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(2022). examining the effect ofphonological awareness instruction on efl learners’ pronunciation and motivation. erudita: journal of english language teaching, 2(2), 129-147. https://doi.org/10.28918/erudita.v2i2.6191 zee, t. (2015). yorkshire assimilation, an experimental investigation of gradient phonological alternation. utrecht university. masitoh, meutia rachmatia, elis susanti, dewi sri kuning, & nabila zatadini a comparative analysis of phonological elements in lampung language: dialect a peminggir and dialect o abung 514 sinta hoerun nisa classroom interaction analysis 124 classroom interaction analysis in indonesian efl speaking class sinta hoerun nisa department of research and development, the association of indonesian scholars of english education (aisee), indonesia e-mail: sintahoerunnisa@gmail.com apa citation: nisa, s. h. (2014). classroom interaction analysis in indonesian efl speaking class. english review: journal of english education, 2(2), 124-132 received: 11-03-2014 accepted: 27-04-2013 published: 01-06-2014 abstract: this study entitles “classroom interaction analysis in the efl speaking class” aimed at analyzing the categories of teacher talk, student talk and classroom interaction types used during efl speaking class. the research employed a qualitative design and applied a case study. subjects of the research were an english teacher and 25 students at the second semester of english education department of the university of kuningan. the data were gained through naturalistic observation and document analysis. the data were analyzed by using flint (foreign language interaction) system as developed by moskowitz (1971) and types of classroom interaction of malamah-thomas’ (1987) frameworks. the findings revealed that both teacher and students applied all categories of talk as mentioned in flint system and classroom interaction types. it is recommended for the teacher to apply more categories of ‘praises and encourages’ to build students’ confidence in speaking, ‘asks questions’ to promote their communicative skill and to encourage students to use english during speaking activities, particularly in group work activities. keywords: classroom interaction, flint analysis, efl speaking class. including in language classroom. in order to get experience in english communication, they need to interact regularly using the target language since interaction is the heart of communication (brown, 2001: 165). interaction occurs as long as people are communicating each other and giving action and receiving the reaction in one another anywhere and anytime, including in the classroom setting. dagarin (2004: 128) argues that classroom interaction is “two way process between the participants in the language process, the teacher influences the learners and vice versa.” furthermore, interaction in the classroom is categorized as the pedagogic interaction which means the interaction in the teaching and learning process (sarosdy et al, 2006). unfortunately, the interaction in the language classroom seems difficult introduction the need for english speaking mastery has been increased due to the status of english as a global language recognized in every country (crystal, 2003: 3) and used for international communication. english has a function as the main gate to get a better job since it is used as the working language in international organizations and multinational companies (nazara, 2010: 1). the need for getting a better job and globally participation become the main reasons for non-native speakers to learn and master english, either as a second language (esl) or a foreign language (efl), particularly focused on speaking skill. however, speaking is a complicated skill and needs a long time to develop. in developing speaking skill, people need to practice it as often as possible and get a sufficient experience everywhere, 125 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee to use the target language all the time, especially in the efl (english as a foreign language) classroom. it is happened since the efl students have common native languages (brown, 2001: 180). if the teacher of efl ignores it, the goal of teaching process then could not be achieved. therefore, by impressing the students about the importance of practice in english for eventual success and telling them that it can help them to build their intuition to language, the use of native language when interacting will be able to be reduced (brown, 2001: 180). interaction plays significant roles in the language classroom. firstly, it can increase students’ knowledge of language. rivers (1987: 4-5) notes that, “through interaction, students can increase their language store as they listen to or read authentic linguistic material, or even the output of their fellow students, in discussions, skits, joint problem-solving tasks, or dialogue journals…”. secondly, it is able to strengthen the social relationship. interaction, for students, will strengthen the relationship, either among them or with their teachers since it gives them the chance to learn from each other and to get feedback on their performance (naimat, 2011: 672). thirdly, it is beneficial to develop students’ communicative skill. according to thapa and lin (2013), “interaction in the classroom becomes the central factors which is able to enhance the students’ linguistic resources as well as equipping them with appropriate skills for communication.” naimat (2011: 672) adds, “the communication skill, then, will be acquired through speaking activities, such as debates, discussions and about desired topics among students.” lastly, it has a role to build students’ confidence in speaking. thapa and lin (2013) explain that “in language classroom, interaction is an essential social activities for students through which they not only construct knowledge, but also build confidence and identity as competent language users”. therefore, by accustoming students to interact with teacher and among their fellows will build their knowledge as well as their confidence. for the interaction in the language classroom has advantages to the students’ speaking performance, therefore the study about classroom interaction is considerably important and worth to be analyzed. in analyzing the interaction during speaking class, foreign language interaction (flint) system developed by moskowitz (1971, as cited in brown, 2001: 170) was used. this analysis system has several benefits; it is helpful in developing interactive language teaching since it gives the researcher a taxonomy for observing teachers, set a framework for evaluating and improving the teaching, and helps to set a learning climate for interactive teaching (brown, 2001: 168-169). aspects to be analyzed during interaction are teacher talk and student talk. teacher talk is defined as any words or sentences said by the teacher during the interaction in teachinglearning process, including when the teacher gives explanation, feedback, ask question and so on (mujahidah, 2012). it indicates that any kind of talk spoken by the teacher is called teacher talk. the teacher talk plays an important role in teaching process since it can increase students’ language store as they listen to the real authentic material (rivers, 1987: 4-5). another importance of teacher talk in the language classroom is that the role of the teacher as the provider of comprehensible input. harmer (2001: 66) notes, “teachers are ideally placed to provide comprehensible input since the students can react appropriately although the students do not understand every word they said, but they understand the meaning of sinta hoerun nisa classroom interaction analysis 126 what is being said.” the teacher talk has seven categories, namely (1) deals with feelings, (2) praises or encourages, (3) uses ideas of students, (4) asks question, (5) gives information and corrects without rejection, (6) gives direction, and (7) criticizes students’ response and behavior (moskowitz, 1971 as cited in brown, 2001: 170). students talk can be used by the students to express their own ideas, initiate new topics, and develop their own opinions. categories of students talk including students response (specific), students innitiated, silence and confusion (moskowitz, 1971 as cited in brown, 2001: 170). in the foreign language classroom, the interaction occurs variously. malamah-thomas (1987) as cited in mingzhi (2005: 59) divide types of classroom interaction into seven types, namely (1) teacher speaking to the whole class which is established when a teacher talks to the whole class at the same time (dagarin, 2004: 129), (2) teacher speaking to an individual with the rest of students as the hearers that can be used for an informal conversation at the beginning of the lesson or for leading students into a less guided activity (dagarin, 2004: 129), (3) teacher speaking to a group of students which refers to the teacher participating students’ group work (mingzhi, 2005: 59), (4) student speaking to the teacher that refers to the students’ initiation (mingzhi, 2005: 59), (5) student speaking to the student related to the pairwork activities that involves collaboration and self-initiated with only two students (brown, 2001: 178), (6) student speaking to group members which is related to the group work (mingzhi, 2005: 60), and (7) student speaking to the whole class which is commonly applied when the speaking activities are students-fronted, for instance in presentation and workshop (mingzhi, 2005: 59). method this study applied a qualitative research design. qualitative design was chosen in order to explore and understand the social phenomenon (creswell, 2009: 22). the strategy applied was a case study since it explored in depth activity in one or more individuals (creswell, 2009: 30). the research was undertaken at the second semester of english education department of the university of kuningan. the participants involved in this research were 25 students at the second semester of english department who had been taking the ‘speaking 2’ subject and an english teacher who taught the ‘speaking 2’ subject. creswell (2009: 166) notes that “data collection procedures in qualitative research include collecting information through un-structured or semi-structured observation and interviews, documents and visual materials, as well as establishing the protocol for recording information”. in this research, the data was collected through naturalistic observation and document analysis. according to fraenkel and wallen (2009: 442), “naturalistic observation means observing individuals in their natural settings, simply observes and records what happens as things naturally occur.” in this research, the classroom interaction was observed through video recording. observation has a number of advantages covering (1) researcher can record information as it occurs, (2) researcher has a first-hand experience with participants, (3) usual aspect can be noticed during observation, and (4) it is useful in exploring topics that may be uncomfortable for participants to discuss (creswell, 2009: 167). the other method for collecting data was document analysis. document analysis is defined as “a technique which enables a researcher to study human behavior in indirect way through an analysis of 127 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee their communication” (fraenkel and wallen, 2009: 472). document analysis has advantages, namely it is useful as a means of analyzing observational data and a researcher can delve into records and documents (fraenkel and wallen, 2009: 483). in this research, the document analyzed was video’s transcription of teaching-learning process in the speaking class at the second semester of english education department in university of kuningan. the videos were documented in 13th march up to 17th april, 2014. to display the language used in the classroom, the videos were then transcribed. the videos comprised four sessions of english speaking class at the second semester english department with various topics of speaking activities including class discussion, presentation, seminar as a part of simulation, and ice breaking as an example of communication games. furthermore, to investigate the classroom interaction appeared between teacher and students, this research employed flint (foreign language interaction) analysis framework adopted from moskowitz (1971) as cited in brown, 2010: 170). while, to investigate types of classroom interaction in the speaking class, the researcher used malamah-thomas’s (1987) framework as cited in (mingzhi, 2005: 59) about types of classroom interaction. in analyzing the data, the data from video recording were firstly transcribed to show the interaction and language used by teacher and students during english speaking class. secondly, the transcripts were coded by using several categories of teacher talk and student talk as well as types of classroom interaction. thirdly, the data were then calculated and analyzed the amount of each category of teacher talk, student talk, and classroom interaction type. results and discussion based on four times observation that have been conducted at the second semester of english education department in the university of kuningan, it was found that all categories both in teacher talk and student talk as mentioned in flint system (moskowitz, 1971 as cited in brown, 2001: 170) had been applied by the subjects. the category of “gives information” was mostly used by the teacher and “student specific response” category was most dominant spoken by students. in addition, all types of classroom interaction based on malamah-thomas’s (1987, cited in mingzhi, 2005: 59) framework has been applied with “student speaking to the whole class” was mostly applied in the efl speaking class. teacher talk teacher talk 10.3 3.4 5.7 23.7 34.1 17.1 5.7 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 deals with feeling praises or encourages uses ideas of students asks questions gives information gives directions criticizes student behavior or response teacher talk sinta hoerun nisa classroom interaction analysis 128 deals with feeling transcription from first meeting: t : “assalamualaikum wr wb.” ss : “waalaikumussalam wr wb” t : “good morning.” ss : “good morning.” t : “how are you today?” ss : “i’m fine, thank you, and you?” t : “i’m fine too, thank you. interaction in language classroom, particularly in using “deals with students’ feelings” category, is essential to strengthen relationship between a teacher and students and also to break the ice because the students feel nervous, especially at the first time they meet their teacher. in addition, the teacher seemed to be aware that she needs to make the students familiar with english expression. praising or encouraging s : “jadi ini kaya cerita gitu.” t : “oh, okay. attention please about the story okay?” ss : “okay.” t : “he has a talent for drawing picture. good picture.” ss : “map” this category is important as well since it determines relationship between teacher and students. in addition, praising and encouraging will help them to be more confident when speaking. however, the teacher hardly used this category in teaching speaking. using ideas of students transcription from forth meeting: t : “okay. five students to perform in front of the class. first one? s : (a student raises his hand) “ada yang bawa spidol?” t : “anyone who brings the marker? agus, maybe you can give a clue before you give the games to your friends.” the teacher used student’s idea by translating his questions from the native language to the target language. it is assumed that the teacher tried to provide students the input when being spoken by their fellows using native language. asking questions transcription of first meeting: t: “i will check your attendance list, who call the name say present. who is present three times that you say three present. but if you absent one time, that you present double present. be honest, please. understand all of you?” ss : “yes.” in asking questions, the teacher frequently asked the students about their understanding related to the materials and directions given by asking “do you understand”, “understand all of you?”, and “is it clear?”. asking students using those expressions are less appropriate since they only need simple responses and polar answers, just by saying yes or no. however, if the teacher wanted to check students’ understanding, it is more appropriate to give knowledge questions, for instance “what did you get from my explanation?”. this question strategy will create the interactive learning as suggested by brown (2001: 169). giving information transcription from the third meeting: t: “pictorial game is how to create or show the picture to students to make understand. this is relevant with enriching the vocabulary. ini salah satu contohnya. nah, setiap anak setiap siswa, next, harus menemukan satu permainan to be instructor in front of your friends. is it clear from me?” ss : “yeah” the transcription reveals that in giving information, the teacher used bahasa indonesia in order to 129 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee make students more understand about materials delivered and to avoid misunderstanding. transcription of forth meeting: s : “i got just seven papers.” t : “papers. it’s plural.” s : “yes. just seven papers.” it shows that the teacher attempted to correct student’s mistake of grammar without using words or intonation leading to the criticism. giving direction transcription from the first meeting: t : “ speak up, please. count your number, please. one, two, three, four. back to one, one, two, three, four. begin from here.” ss : [students counting] this transcription tells about the teacher gave direction to the students when applying group work speaking activity. this category of “gives direction” is commonly applied when the teacher acts as a director which directs the students in doing group work activity. criticizing student’s behavior transcription from forth observation: t : “i know before that you didn’t pay attention to his explanation. please, pay attention.” ss : “yes.” this transcription reveals that the teacher tried to ask a student to be quiet by saying “please, pay attention.” it was related to the students’ behavior in the classroom. student talk 51 28 2 19 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 student response student initiation silence confusion student talk students’ response t : “okay, before doing our activity, i will give you some materials. please, iip, clean the whiteboard!” s : [the student got up and did what the teacher was asked] this transcription shows that in responding to the teacher’s talk, the student used gesture or non-verbal response. it indicates that the student understood the teacher’s language. however, this response is categorized as the simple and limited. another type sinta hoerun nisa classroom interaction analysis 130 of student response with limited and simple response is found as follow. t : “what is topic of today?” ss : “ade sara.” t : “ade sara that was killed by her boyfriend?” ss : “ex-boyfriend.” t : “ex-boyfriend. for our topic today is about ade sara. using /eitc/ or?” ss : “no.” students’ initiation this category means the students respond to the teacher with students’ own ideas, opinions, reactions and feelings. for example s1 : “if we show the picture and ..” t : “yeah. pictorial games ini according to harmer, yah, harmer. pictorial games is how to understand students vocabulary……” the “student initiated” category emerged when students had their own ideas about speaking task. this category seemed to be applied in third and fourth meetings, when they have already been trained by the teacher with a number of speaking activities that promotes the interaction. silence silence means pauses in interaction during which there is no verbal interaction. this also include silence in which a piece of audio and visual equipment. for example t : “class discussion. what happens in a class discussion? [the teacher wrote the material on the whiteboard for three minutes and no verbal interaction] finish?” ss : “not yet.” the “silence” category happened when the teacher wrote the material. during that time, there was no verbal interaction. it was happened in the first meeting of ‘speaking 2’ subject and still the teacher that was dominating the interaction. confusion confusion means that more than one person at time talking, so the interaction cannot be recorded. for example t : “make topic about ade sara.” ss : [group discussion was started for more than 20 minutes] the transcription above shows that students at the same time talking and discussing the topic given by the teacher, so the interaction could not be recorded. however, the interaction during group discussion refers to the interaction among group members. during group discussion, the students tended to use their native languages, either in indonesia or sundanese language. types of classroom interaction teacher speaking to the whole class this type of interaction occurred when firstly, the teacher greeted students in the beginning of the lesson and gave the material. secondly, it was also applied when the teacher gave a several feedback for students’ performances in the end of lesson. the last, when the teacher gave information about next speaking activities. teacher speaking to an individual this type of interaction was applied when the teacher checked students’ attendance, directed and asked a student in speaking activities such as ice breaking as a part of communication games. furthermore, it was applied when the teacher corrected students’ mistakes in pronouncing and related to grammatical mistakes as well. teacher speaking to group of students this type was used when speaking activity conducted seminar as the example of simulation. in this type of 131 english review: journal of english education issn 2301-7554 vol. 2, issue 2, june 2014 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee interaction, the teacher told about the score of each group and corrected their mistakes. student speaking to teacher this type refers to the student’s initiation to ask or interact with the teacher. it occurred in the last meeting when the students performed their speaking in front of their classmates. students interacted with the teacher when they tried to present and to ask some vocabularies which they did not know in the target language. in addition, it was applied when they asked the teacher about speaking activities in the following meeting. student speaking to student this type of interaction is called pair work and it occurred when the classroom conducted simulation and communication games activities. student speaking to group members the speaking activities which applied this type were class discussion in the first meeting and communication games in the fourth meeting. unfortunately, they tended to spend their times to interact with their fellows using native languages, sundanese and bahasa indonesia. student speaking to the whole class this type was applied when students performed in front of the class as the presenters in class discussion, speakers in simulation, and performer in communication games. this interaction gave the same opportunity for each student to speak during speaking class. conclusion this present study aims to discover categories of talk spoken by teacher and students according to flint system (moskowitz, 1971 as cited in brown, 2001: 170) and types of classroom interaction adapted from malamahthomas (1987, cited in mingzhi, 2005: 59). the findings revealed that during interaction in the efl speaking class, the teacher tended to act as facilitator which facilitated students to speak with several student-fronted speaking activities, such as class discussion, presentation, simulation and communication games, a director that directed them in conducting speaking activities, and a resource providing information needed by students. in addition, the students had more opportunity to speak and interact in efl speaking class by doing speaking activities focused on group-work activities and presentation. however, the usage of native language during interaction was frequently used. based on the findings of the study, it is recommended for the teacher to motivate students to speak and interact using the target language (english) during efl speaking activities, to praise them for what they have done for building up their confidence, and to encourage them to interact by applying question strategies which are able to develop their communicative competence. this study has several difficulties in conducting the research, including in data coding processes, collecting the theories, and describing findings and discussion. therefore, it is suggested for the further study to prepare the research well. classroom interaction has several scopes that are worth to be researched, so it is beneficial to conduct the similar study with different frameworks such 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